Some Came Running

Walter Bernstein, 1919-2021

Zero Mostel in The Front (Bernstein and Ritt, 1976) 

I never met Walter Bernstein, the legendary screenwriter who died last night at the age of 101 —and while his passing is of course an occasion for mourning, good for him to reaching that age — but at times, with mutual friends, I could sense his presence. Those people I knew who did know Bernstein, and brought him up in conversation, carried his wisdom and humor with them, it seemed. It made me glad he was still around.

He was credited on a lot of films and not credited on a lot of films, and putting them all together you see a lot of classics, some reliable genre pictures, and some wild cards. That’s almost invariably how it is, or how it was, for a gigging screenwriter in Hollywood, particularly in the post-World-War-II days. It’s probably no coincidence, though, that some of his best-known films were made with two directors with whom he had definite affinities of background and upbringing. There’s Fail-Safe, adapted from Eugene Burdick’s novel, directed by Sidney Lumet, another New Yorker, Jewish, tough-minded, craftsman, left-leaning, on the boisterous side at times. Fail-Safe was one of his — their — most po-faced films, but if you were alive in the time it was made you may remember it had reason to be. Sometimes as a kid I’d catch the last half-hour on television — Henry Fonda’s monologue, the description of the shriek of the melting phone, the freeze-frames of New York City that end the film — and I’d have nightmares the whole rest of the week. Bernstein had worked with Lumet several years before, on 1959’s That Kind of Woman, which had a provocative sub-theme of the kept woman, and seems to have been a Paramount attempt to beef up leading man Tab Hunter’s dramatic cred. It didn’t quite work, but it’s, as they say, interesting.

The other director was Martin Ritt, with whom Bernstein worked on three pictures, all of them worth revisiting. 1961’s Paris Blues, from Harold Flender’s novel, about American expat jazz musicians in the title burg, was meant to have the protagonists each engage in interracial romance with American tourists. As costar Sidney Poitier recounted, United Artists “chickened out” and so Paul Newman woos Joanne Woodward and Poitier gets involved with Diahann Caroll. For all that, and the fact that the movie is still sometimes dismissed as a trifle, Paris Blues has some meat on its bones. Particularly in the scenes in which Poitier’s character explains to Carroll’s why he doesn’t ever want to go back to America. (I should note here that Bernstein is one of four credited writers on the picture; the others are Irene Kamp, Jack Sher, and Lulia Rosenfeld.) One is reminded of Miles Davis’ subsequent autobiography, in which he speaks of his joy (it’s one of the few purely joyous parts of the book) of being able to walk with and hold hands and kiss Juliette Greco out in the open while living in the City of Lights. Paris Blues also gets the music, which few Hollywood pictures of the time did. Newman’s character, and his musical ambition, likely informed Scorsese and De Niro’s conception of Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York.

The Molly Maguires, from 1970, is one of the most uncompromised politically-themed pictures to come out of Hollywood, and proof that you can (could) make an undiluted statement within that context. Bernstein, a crackerjack researcher, based his story around late 19^th century labor agitation in the mines of Pennsylvania — most of whose workers were Irish immigrants. The opening scene is one of the great fake-outs in movies; what you take to be mine work is actually mine sabotage. A full 27 years before There Will Be Blood, it’s fifteen minutes before the first word of dialogue is spoken. The relationship between Sean Connery’s ringleader and Richard Harris’s undercover investigator is a lot more full-blooded, realistic, and galvanizing than the capital-labor cartoons Bertolucci would sketch with De Niro and Depardieu in 1900 seven years later.

Then there’s 1976’s The Front, a beautifully distilled piece of dramatic writing filmed with resolute dispatch and passion by Ritt. It’s the story of Bernstein’s life, or a significant portion of it, as told through someone else’s life. Woody Allen, using his nebbish persona in a more heimishe fashion than he had before or has since, plays Howard Prince, a regular guy who just happens to know a television writer who’s out of work because what we still call “the blacklist.” He finds money, a bit of fame, and ultimately, his conscience and his voice, working as a “front” for his friend, and then other writers. It’s a parable that’s also a bit of history, and its humor draws on a razor-sharp irony without being wholly dependent on it — it’s also a terribly tender movie. And Zero Mostel, a blacklist victim in real life, is heartbreaking as a doubly-washed-up performer who befriends Howard.

I imagine Bernstein must have been gratified, at the end of his script, to have Howard say to a HUAC panel something Bernstein himself was not able to say: “Go fuck yourselves.” I leave this for last because I wanted to lead off with something other than “blacklisted screenwriter,” because Bernstein was a whole lot more than that. But he was also that, and his 1996 book about that period, Inside Out, A Memoir of the Blacklist, proved that he was not only a great writer of drama but a terrific prose scribe. The two aren’t always mutually exclusive. The book is an immediate grabber. Not even twenty pages in, and Bernstein’s given you fascinating thumbnail sketches of Ben Hecht, Robert Rossen, Robert Parrish and James Dean, and fuller portraits of Ritt and Elia Kazan. Here’s a paragraph from the early part of the book: “The cold war was starting, and with it the blacklist, but it was not affecting me and, secure in wish fulfillment, I did not really believe it would. Winston Churchill had made his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. The Hollywood Ten were summoned before the House committee, but the committee members seemed only stupid; I understood their bigotry but not their power. Who, really, could be on their side? I also knew the Communist Party was no menace. After all, I belonged to it. The charge that we wanted to overthrow the government by force and violence was ludicrous. Nothing I had ever done or intended or even thought was designed for that. No one I knew in the Party even dreamed of it. Our meetings might have been less boring if they had. I took for granted that I could be both.” And the rest is just as good.

My friends who are also friends of Walter are Jay Cocks and Howard Rodman, Jr., two screenwriters who belong, with Bernstein, in the club of wonderful prose writers. (Check out Howard’s visionary novel The Great Eastern, and Jay’s moving and evocative tribute to Huey “Piano” Smith in the Greil Marcus anthology Stranded.) Whenever either man spoke of Walter in my presence, their eyes lit up in a particular way. I also had the honor, in 2019, of sharing a meal — at Harry’s Bar in Venice, yet — with Walter’s son Jake, an investigative journalist whose passion for social justice and socially pertinent writing were no doubt inspired by his father’s example. His book Secrecy World, about the Panama Papers and the various tendrils emanating from it, inspired Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat. I extend my condolences to them all, and to all who were touched by Walter and his work. And I wish I’d have met him; I’d have asked him about the movies I cite above, and also about Semi-Tough, the hilarious football picture he wrote for Michael Ritchie. And, had I gotten comfortable enough, I might have queried: “So. The Betsy. What was up with that?”

I've Got A 4K Player And I'm Gonna Use It: A Probably One-Time-Only Consumer Guide

“Real talk:” Like so many of you, I had looked forward to the PlayStation 5 for several months prior to its late fall release, and upon its late fall release, I followed a Twitter account that kept track of the stores that had it in stock (where it would stay in stock for nanosecond), I kept open tabs at Target, Best Buy, B&H, and the Sony store, and then made it a point not to “drive myself mad” by refreshing those pages constantly. Concurrent to these efforts, I began looking into 4K Ultra Blu-rays, excited (well, mildly excited) about experiencing this not-entirely-new high-definition format.

Another thing that happened in late fall is that our household took delivery of a credenza to hold our television display and electronics playback equipment. A really beautiful piece of furniture; all credit goes to My Lovely Wife Claire who commissioned it. Migrating some electronics from the mediocre-man-cave-ready vertical unit that had been mine since before getting married, it occurred to me that my setup was moderately absurd. Of course I had my beloved OPPO machine, ostensibly an all-region player that was locked on Region B for reasons I needn’t go into here. This was , alas, starting to turn obsolescent because certain labels were making Blu-rays whose bitrate went beyond what the OPPO could actually handle. This concern could be handled with a firmware update — were OPPO still a going concern that provided firmware updates for its hardware, which it’s not. In 2019 I got a super-cheap LG all-region player that was so small as to be practically portable. I think for the purpose of bringing it to this house upstate that we and some friends were renting for the Thanksgiving holiday. So that played the high-bitrate Region Bs (the first was the Eureka/Masters of Cinema Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, a handsome item indeed; and more often than not the discs from Powerhouse/Indicator have that maxed-out bitrate, even the Fu Manchu titles you’d think wouldn’t’ have enough inherent information to support such a thing, ar ar ar). And it functioned as a proper region-free player all around. So why keep the OPPO? Sentimental value, perhaps (God I’m an idiot) but also it functioned as a Super Audio CD Player, which neither the LG nor the PS4 did. Nor, I understood, would the PS5. Yes, it would play 4K Ultra discs but the CD option was one and it was plain.

Now as we know, during the 2020 holiday season, and indeed this holds of today, a PS5 was almost impossible to get. So as I refreshed my Walmart and Target and Sony tabs, and looked at the beautiful new credenza and thought that despite its capaciousness its look could benefit if every nook and cranny wasn’t supporting equipment, and I faced the fact that I had not actually attached a VIDEO GAME CONTROLLER to the PS4 in eleven years. So why was I buying a PS5, or rather, not buying a PS5 but driving myself semi-nuts waiting to buy a PS5?  

So I went to B&H (the website, dummy), did a little research, and lo and behold, found a Sony UBP-X800E 4K player, modified for all-region playback. As America’s favorite club kid Stefon would say, this player has everything. Up-to-date all-region playback at the push of a button. 4K Ultra of course. A variety of media server options. Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube access built in. AND it plays back Super Audio CDs. God is good. I packed up the PS4, controller, and the dozen games I had and shipped them to a favorite nephew (not so much for his entertainment as for that of his four kids [Jesus!]), put away the LG for Future Use While Traveling Maybe, and brought the OPPO to the electronics graveyard. And began to gorge on 4K physical media. The below capsules chronicle my earliest explorations. Future physical media Consumer Guides, if they happen at all (I mean, I assume they will, but their frequency is particularly open to question these days) will incorporate 4K discs and of course identify themselves. 4Ks are region-free by definition, by the way. Fun. For the purposes of this exercise I’ve given separate grades for movies and image.

EQUIPMENT: Sony UBP-X800E 4K Ultra BR player,  Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver, bitchin’ speakers, a really nice credenza.

The Beastmaster (Vinegar Syndrome)

Some of this looks incredibly close to what you might have seen in a theater, had you been lucky enough to see this in a theater back in 1982. Remember, despite this being “schlock,” it was lit and shot by John Alcott. He’s good. 10 minutes in and the action shots are incredible in texture and dimensionality of image. The whole thing is lots of fun. Side note: Amazing that talents like Don Coscarelli, who have a genuine feel for pulp (and ability to transpose it to film) have to make their movies guerilla style while Marvel/Disney hands franchise after franchise to fake humanist comedians with near-zero visual sense looking for a big payday. What a world.  Movie: A Image: A+

 

Beverly Hills Cop (Paramount)

Coming to America (Paramount)

Up until now I’ve never seen either of these ostensible classics in full. Not because I boycotted — I think Eddie Murphy is funny, and I like John Landis movies more than a person of my moral caliber really ought — but just because I never got around to them. As Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” played under the opening credits of Beverly Hills Cop, though, I got a bit of an idea why. Miss me with this Glenn Frey shit, dude. Especially with his white bread stylings playing over a montage of poor persons of color, as we prepare to meet the legendary Axel Foley. The movie is relatively smooth sailing after that, though. Based on multiple glimpses of individual scenes on cable, I expected Cop to be an over-lit day mare. Instead it looks like a picture shot by Bruce Surtees, which it is. Yay! Not a bad movie, but it’s no 48 Hrs. “The super cop story…was working” bit, with Murphy in his underrated quiet mode, is particularly hilarious. As for Coming to America: Hey! The production designer Richard MacDonald did all those Losey movies too. Whoa. As for the rest of the movie, it generally toggles between Comic Genius Operating On All Cylinders and Look Ma, No Story Editor! The image quality is really great. It’s almost palpable how badly the Waldorf needs a thorough sandblasting in 1998.

Beverly Hills Cop: Movie: B- Image: A+

Coming to America: Movie: B Picture: A+

The Big Lebowski (Universal)

I always considered the Blu-ray better than watchable. It’s only when doing an A/B comparison of BR and 4K that you can understand why it’s relatively poor representation of the movie. On its own, the BR looks bright, clean, smooth, somewhat digitized but not too creamy. The 4K is like the windshield has been squeegeed — better detail, less digital brightness in the interiors, a more  subtly varied color palette, revealing the BR as WAY TOO creamy. 4K is definitely the way to go here.

Movie and Image:  A+

 Blade (Warner)

Here’s another one I’ve never seen before. I like the image. One thing 4K brings to the table is really great blacks, and you can sure bet on them here. Ar ar ar. Back in the day, one video nightmare was deep reds on a black field, but check out the opening titles here, they really work. Unfortunately the movie is kind of goofy, I found. Snipes manages to ham it up while maintaining a stone face, and all the martial arts moves are corny. I’ll see what Del Toro got up to with Blade II, but I’m not encouraged. Also this movie dispenses with Traci Lords too quickly. Phooey.

Movie: B-  Image: A

Collateral (Paramount)

Pretty remarkable looking. The L.A.-by-night-in-high-def look, a postmodern noir idea for sure, is a gas. I didn’t really like it the first time I saw it, and I had to sit through a whole bunch of SHITTY SHOT-ON-DIGITAL MOVIES to really appreciate it. (Don’t ask me to list them. I saw a lot of them at Sundance I think.) The bleary semi-softness is the key —  it’s like the colors are still wet, and if you wiped your hand over the screen they’d come off on your palm. Mann and cinematographers Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron use this quality for some startling effects, including the silvery near-monochrome of the Metro Rail finale. More digital Mann on 4K, please. The movie’s solid, filled with bravura sequences and little funny touches that only happen in Mann World, like when Barry Shabaka Henry’s character saying “You ain’t shit when you’re playin’ next to Miles Davis” when just minutes before he was miming playing to the ACTUAL RECORDING of Davis’s “Spanish Key.” And Cruise is great, and more likable here as a sociopathic assassin than he is in a movie considered below.

Movie A- Image: A+

Crash (Arrow)

This is also a U.S. Criterion Blu-ray, with a superb picture and some excellent extras, including a perceptive Jessica Kiang essay and a Cronenberg commentary from the first DVD release a long time ago. The rather more elaborate Arrow release is the same Peter Suschitzky-supervised and Cronenberg approved transfer. Only in 4K, its native resolution. So what’s the difference? Well the Arrow audio is a little louder as the default. It’s a visually fascinating film, from the very beginning: the travelling shot into the airplane hangar where Deborah Kara Unger’s character is having her assignation looks like it’s in black-and-white until the camera rises and there’s a red-striped plane in the frame. Watching the Criterion version, you will certainly not feel deprived. But a 4K transfer in actual 4K is its own reward, and this edition has that. It also has a 1971 short film by J.G. Ballard himself, two excellent latter-day shorts from Cronenberg, and a whole book of essays and interviews. It’s a lot and the movie warrants it. So much so that if you can swing it, you ought to own both versions. But if you have a 4K player, this one should be a priority. And I understand the dearth of art films on 4K is for a reason — most investors in the hardware tend to be mavens of blockbuster and/or genre stuff, which is certainly reflected in the nature of most of the titles considered here.

Movie and Image: A+

Daughters of Darkness (Blue Underground)

Speaking of genre stuff, this moody, slinky 1971 film from the very (delightfully) odd Harry Kümel is art-film adjacent (the lead is a fabulously swanning Delphine Seyrig) is an erotic horror jewel for the whole family. The BR was good, but this has a definite boost in clarity — scenes bathed in a particular color (the lavender in the opening train lovemaking sequence for instance) — are not overwhelmed by that color. Makes me drool at the prospect of 4K Bava, frankly. And again, what a faboo movie. How can you not love a picture whose script features the phrase “sinister deserted caravanserai?”  

Movie and image: A+

Dawn of the Dead (Second Sight)

A supreme masterpiece gets a supreme home video treatment. Three discs with three cuts of the 1978 Romero film, and CDs of the various soundtracks too, and a book of essays and interviews.  The cuts are Romero’s U.S. theatrical, the “extended cut” (not a director’s cut but a longer version that played at Cannes and was trimmed by the director for release),and co-producer Dario Argento’s European cut (called Zombi, which is why Lucio Fulci’s film was in some markets called Zombi 2, or II, or what have you), which is shorter than the U.S. theatrical. My preferred cut is Argento’s, largely because it has the most Goblin music. But also because it’s fleet and grisly without losing any of the points Romero was making. The extended cut feels more like a “sequel” to Night of the Living Dead, because it’s score is completely library music, like the score of Night was. It’s the power of suggestive association so to speak. It’s also filled with bits, some of which don’t work all that well (for instance, the attempted hijacking of the chopper at the beginning). The theatrical cut mixes library and Goblin music and is the one you and I grew up with (I was still under 20 when it came out, totally counts). I watched all three over the course of a couple of weeks and didn’t feel at all put out or dutiful, that must say something. The new restoration is gorgeous, really puts across the thoughtfulness Romero put into this color film. Scorsese tells a story of trying to rent a print of Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann way back in the day and finding out it was in Romero’s temporary possession. You can see that movie’s influence in the opening TV studio scenes if you look carefully enough. Anyway. Essential.

Movie and image: A+

Flash Gordon (Arrow)

This mops up the floor with the Universal BR in terms of color value and detail. And the BR could not be called bad by any means. But it’s over 8 years old. Going back to the movie, which I sometimes had a rather dismissive attitude towards, I was delighted to see how much loving Méliès tribute it contains, among other things. And that, for all the Camp and faux-Camp elements it contains, director Mike Hedges keeps a pretty straight, if you’ll pardon the expression, face while staging and shooting some of the suspense set pieces, like Barin and Flash facing off in the hollow-stump ritual thingie. As other reviewers have mentioned, the magnificent detail shows off some visible matte lines, but visible matte lines ain’t no crime. Movie A- image A+ 

Gremlins (Warner)

A real improvement from the Blu-ray, right off the bat. On the earlier edition, in the opening scenes, the flushness in Hoyt Axton’s face, for instance, had something of a dupey look. The 4K smooths things out, gives the image a real boost in the “film look” department. Less of a “telecine” quality, let’s say. It’s lower key but still vivid and color, with skin tones more realistic. Movie: A Image: A+

It’s A Wonderful Life (Paramount)

I was half expecting a cream-colored digital nightmare. This is not that…but it’s not ideal either. Not by a long shot. The ice sledding scene has this shine to it that’s a weird contrast to the very subdued sepia-adjacent look of the pharmacy scene that follows.  Most will find this acceptable. And that’s kind of exactly what it is — acceptable. A perfectly pleasant image for people. The way the picture will freeze when a shot holds on a sign, for the Bailey Savings and Loan for instance, is annoying for me, because why do you need to use that kind of compression for a 4K rendering anyway? But perhaps not annoying for thee, family gathered around the home theater boisterously having popcorn or what have you. The DVD that comes with the 4K disc is a colorized version, which is low key tasteful and completely inapposite.  

Movie: A Image: B-

The New York Ripper (Blue Underground)

Zombi (Blue Underground)

House by the Cemetery (Blue Underground)

Lucio Fulci concocted some of the ugliest movies ever made — aesthetically, spiritually, epistemically, you name the category, Fulci is ugly in that category. And it’s true that one can hit these marks while not meeting Benayoun’s bar for “authentic sadistic cinema.” But Fulci’s work does also meet that bar, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Fulci’s oeuvre is authentic sadistic cinema, and hence cinema sadists must reckon with it. So here we are. The meticulous folk of Blue Underground has 4K-ed three Fulci films so far and I thought I’d watch them in reverse order of repellence. Yep, I started with 1982’s The New York  Ripper. Misogynist, quasi-pornographic, anti-sex, racist farrago of gore and grotesqueries, brimming with authentic Manhattan locations of the sleazy and not sleazy kind. I first watched it on a VHS tape, panned and scanned and with an image quality that seemed like it had been telecined from a print that had spent several months submerged in the East River itself. It was appalling. The 2019 restoration, on the highest res home format ever…is stunning, and even yields some beautiful imagery, in the same way that space can be negative. It is actually impressive how much “ick” this movie packs into nearly every second.  Not a single character save for the slob coroner is allowed a shred of dignity. 1979’s Zombi, by contrast and despite its extreme gore, is slightly less “objectionable” because it plays like what it is, a can-you-top-this genre exercise.

1981’s House by the Cemetery is pretty brisk and sometimes genuinely  atmospheric but also revels in “cheepnis” (both the budgetary and aesthetic varieties; they’re not always mutually exclusive). “It begins with a big gross out but it more restrained moving forward,” I wrote in my early note, but actually, no. It’s hella gross. And damn that is one creepy looking child actor (Giovanni Frezza), or “Italian Terror Moppet” as per Armando Munoz. More than the other two in noticeability, the House restoration has that TEAL color temperature that makes some mavens crazy. In this case it’s entirely appropriate to the content, I’d say. So okay, Blue Underground. Bring on City of the Living Dead.  

The New York Ripper: Movie: D- Image: A+

Zombi: Movie: B Image A+

The House by the Cemetery: Movie: B Image A+ 

Prince of Darkness (Shout Factory)

They Live (Shout Factory)

Two Carpenters from the late 80s, both winners in their way, and both different. Written by Carpenter under the pen name Martin Quatermass, Prince of Darkness definitely bows to the adventures of Nigel Keane’s cranky prof — unknown evil slime in a church, whatta concept. This gives you higher detail and blacker blacks than the BR. And because 4K gives you blacker blacks, this might throw of viewers into thinking certain whites are less white, as in the white on black opening credits here. BUT check out the nun’s habit  in an early scene in the actual movie and you’ll see the true whites are indeed excellent. The lighting feels subtler, and creepier. 1988’s subtle-as-a-flying-mallet societal parable They Live is always a kick. The overall  look is very B movie but a lot of the cinematic grammar is art film. The cityscapes are in very patient shots, logically constructed, with a nearly Antonioniesque detachment. And yes, the Piper/Keith fight scene lasts well beyond five minutes. Cool double bill and excellent 4K values.

Prince of Darkness: Movie and image: A

They Live: Movie: A+ Image: A 

Rad (Vinegar Syndrome)

Hal Needham completists got one step closer to heaven with this spectacular presentation of his 1986 BMX biking epic. The storyline’s corny, albeit in a nice Rocky way, the actor playing the teen hero tries to split the difference between Scott Baio and Ralph Macchio and often threatens to fall into the Baio abyss. But Lori Laughlin’s in it too! The biking stuff is great though — what we ‘philes like to call “pure cinema.” The 4K picture is remarkably crisp and vivid, particularly in the outdoor stunt scenes, which I guess kind of figures. But the improved detail doesn’t flatter the florid skin tones of veterans Ray Walston and Jack Weston, Hollywood vets in unsympathetic support roles. Ye Olde Talia Shire support role, however, is sympathetic, and she looks fine.

Movie: B+ Image: A+

Shutter Island (Warner)

4K here offers a conventional but gratifying boost. The image is a little darker, more noir; in some scenes it actually looks like the color grading itself has been slightly tweaked. Works like a charm or, given the movie’s grim bearing, a curse.

Movie and image: A+

Spider Man Into The Multiverse Spiderverse (Sony)

Like the female date in the Ultra Downy TV ad, this looks amazing. A feast of color and shade.  Also it actually feels like some kind of fucking comic book, which no live action comic book movie has come within swinging distance of since Raimi was doing the Spider Man movies.

Movie and image: A+

Suspiria (Synapse)

Looking at the Synapse BR from 2017 it’s hard to imagine it looking any more vivid from the first two minutes on. But yeah, there we go. The colors are just as insanely vivid, but there’s an added stability and solidity that make them more seductive. I remember the very first days of DVD when I wrote about them for Premiere and talked about all the compression anomalies that could come up. Like in The Exorcist, one of the very early releases on DVD: the approaching lights of the subway train were less than convincing, kind of pixelated. And here, 25 years and two format upgrades later and every taxi headlight in that rainy airport waiting area is perfect.  Early into the format the anomalies were all but unavoidable, but as the tech advanced when you saw this sort of thing it more often than not was a sign of sloppiness or cutting corners. The current technology is clearly fabulous but I’m sure there are ways of screwing it up. The people who made this disc absolutely didn’t screw it up; they applied it to its limits and made an amazing disc.  

Movie and image: A+

Tenet (Warner)

Pretty good picture! It’s not THAT hard to follow, you just have to pay attention. And I got the dialogue just fine, except for the parts I wasn’t meant to. A little po-faced, but to those who bitched that it lacks the joie de vivre of a Bond movie, have you seen a Bond movie recently? Least John David Washington isn’t playing a guilt-ridden self-torturing alcoholic. I thought the Branagh character was miscast (just because my familiarity with Branagh doing good acting with accents has been leaning toward mild contempt) and not terrifically written but overall? A romp! And beautifully shot. And the disc looks (and sounds) remarkable.

Movie: A- Image: A+

Top Gun (Paramount)

I don’t want to sound like a weepy old bolshy but this war mongering advertisement for the military-industrial complex is still a horrible movie about horrible people doing horrible things, and it rubs your face in that fact every minute. The critic Esther Zuckerman called The Wolf of Wall Street “a Douchebag’s Handbook;” well, this was the 1985 Young Republican’s Handbook and it’s still in play, and it’s responsible for a lot more material damage.  Sure, it is fast-moving and “exhilaratingly” outlandish in its action. And Tom Cruise’s performance is superb; you really just want to strangle him in the first ten minutes. (Poor Kelly McGillis, playing a character who actually wants to sleep with this sociopath.). Anyway, the 4K is a mild but noticeably boost on the BR. And looks amazing.

Movie: Too gross to grade. Image: A+

Total Recall (Lionsgate)

As Robert Harris has pointed out this is a pretty janky-looking movie to begin with. Possibly by design, given the prerogatives of the frequently perverse director. I mean, consider the idea of Mars in this movie being the supposed real world, but looking like a papier mâché futuristic Coney Island of the mind. It’s funny. And honestly I kind of love how it looks, it’s total B-movie shit. Also: “Get your ass to Mars” is one of my favorite lines of movie dialogue ever, the movie delights in fantastic gratuitous touches like THE DEATH OF JONNY CAB, the bar-cum-sex club The Last Resort is the R-rated Mos Eisely Cantina, etc., etc. I dunno, I think it’s just all kind of irresistible.  

Movie and Image: A

The Wizard of Oz (Warner)

The boost is slight but real. Watching the 4K version I really started noticing how technically wonky it is, if you care about that sort of thing. This movie has more “bad cuts” than Goodfellas! Look at what happens when she leaves the house and steps into Munchkinland, her arm positioning is all over the place! But it’s The Wizard of Oz. So.

Movie and Image: A+

Newly Released Audio recordings I enjoyed in 2020

In more or less the order I heard them. 

Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Orchestra: Ancestral Echoes: The Covina Sessions 1976 (Dark Tree)

Tapscott was an inspired pianist and a staggering composer and bandleader. It's both amazing and not at all amazing that he's not better known, but if you yearn for 100-proof spiritual jazz this will be your bag. 

Brandon Seabrook with  Gerard Cleaver and Cooper-Moore: Exultations (Astral Spirits)

Guitarist Seabrook's prior outing was called Convulsionaries and the change of backing players suggests a change of mood/mode (Cooper-Moore is an often ebullient player). Still pretty galvanic.

Bill Laswell: Against Empire (Method of Defiance)

This falls on the more anodyne end of the Laswell spectrum but it still sticks to the ribs. Members of its all-star cast include Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, and Jerry Marotta, but given Laswell's enthusiasm for aural montage I don't believe they all convened together in an approximation of a Rudy Van Gelder session. 

Henry Kaiser: Problems Are Only Opportunities In Dress Clothes (Fractal)

Some typically bracing HK soloing on a record that his label offered as a free add-on to shoppers at varied forward-looking retailers, as a way to spur business. 

Tisziji Muñoz: Drop Dead (MRI)

The healer (and Paul Schaffer's favorite free musician) gets a little brutal. 

Not Two…but twenty (Not Two)

The excellent European label chronicles the products of a live fest celebrating its 20th anniversary

Milford Graves and Don Pullen: The Complete Yale Concert, 1966 (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

As cosmic as its artist teaming suggests.

Ivar Grydeland and Henry Kaiser: In the Arctic Dreamtime (Rune Gramofon)

Chilled genius.

Sam Rivers Trio: Ricochet (No Business)

Fronting a trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul supporting, Rivers plays a variety of instruments over the course of one long improvised set. This is a musician who resets your expectations every time you hear him.

Threadbare: Silver Dollar (No Business)

An energetic trio juggling practices from the trad, the free and the fusion. 

Ikue Mori, Phew, YoshimiO: I.P.Y. (Tzadik)

You know their names. Their concept of space music is exhilarating.

Terje Rypdal: Conspiracy (ECM)

A surprisingly ripping quartet date from the always stimulating guitar god.

Code Girl: Artlessly Falling (Firehouse 12)

Mary Halvorson stretches electric guitar language with a tone both crystal-clear and elastic. With the band Code Girl she stretches the art song. On this perfect album she brings on Robert Wyatt to sing a few of the tunes. Moving and magnificent.

Harvey Gold: It’s Messy Vol. 1 (Smog Veil)

An Electric Love Supreme  (Cuneiform)

Henry Kaiser and Vinny Golia are the lead voices for the most part; Wayne Peet brings some Larry Young to the concept; drummer John Hanrahan shakes some action; and Watt from Pedro on bass is both in the pocket and around the world. 

The Underflow (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

Horn and electronics men Mats Gustafson and Rob Mazurek meet David Grubbs for something they all clearly found exhilarating: while the voices are recognizable, the pieces are rather different from what I'm accustomed to hearing from them.

Thumbscrew: The Anthony Braxton Project (Cuneiform)

The trio of Mary Halvorson, Mark Furmanek and Tomas Fujiwara pay tribute to a teacher, mentor, and collaborator and provide an iteration of his music both tidy and labyrinthine.

Schnellertollermeier: 5 (Cuneiform)

Imagine Polyrock without the keyboards and vocals, then think more austere. That's KIND of what this is like, but not quite. But if that description made you curious, you ought to check this out

Ray Russell: Fluid Architecture (Cuneiform)

On the fusion end of the Russell spectrum, and pretty great. 

Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley: Being Astral and All Registers/Power of Two (Discus)

There have been a couple of Taylor/Oxley recordings issued recently, and this is my favorite. But all of them are worth having. 

What keeps authors awake at night

Writing a book and having it published by a prominent house is a generally pleasant experience, to put it mildly. Having your book get a warm reception from reviewers and readers, which my book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas mostly has, is also nice. Selling well is…well I don’t want to repeat myself. My first Author’s Statement comes in January and since my editor has already told me that the book “exceeded expectations” I’m looking forward to good news, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The downside of this multi-level experience is knowing where you screwed up and temporarily having limited means to do anything about it. A few errors made it into the first printings of Made Men; they all ought to be fixed by now, as we go into (I think) a third printing. But having made them  in the first place stings, especially when I think of the people involved in the movie, who’ll be reading, and who’ll spot them, and whose confidence in me as a chronicler of their work will be at least slightly undermined. (And yes, I do appreciate how they let down the lay reader as well.)

How do these things happen? Actually, it’s too easy. Mostly through a combination of simple human  error coupled with over-confidence. And what you come up with after you’ve read something over and over again, and are kind of semi-automatically going back to the text for what you think is a thorough tidying up, when in fact what you’re actually doing is a robotic (as in mechanical, not as in laser-focused) pantomime of proof-reading. Your eyes see, but you don’t think through what you’re seeing. An error that’s been in place for some time starts to register as “right’ just because you’ve scanned it so many times and come to accept it as a reality.

One of the Made Men reviewers on Amazon slammed me for two errors that they found early in the book: my misidentifying The King of Comedy as a 1984 film when in fact it was released in 1982, and my placing “Smooth Criminal” on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album as opposed to his Bad album, on which it actually appears, and whose title track was made into a video by Martin Scorsese from a Richard Price story and script. This was a bit of a “gotcha” moment for me, in the privacy of my imagination at least, because it tipped me off that the reviewer was basing his slam on the bound uncorrected galley proofs, which are announced in a circle on the front cover as uncorrected galley proofs for a reason — they’re not corrected. So this guy had definitely not made an “Authorized Amazon Purchase,” phooey [author mimes spitting at the floor]. Because for the final version, the release year of King of Comedy was changed to the correct one. Except, uh-oh, the Thriller error remained intact.

Later on in the book, writing about movies with pop song soundtracks, I compare Mean Streets and American Graffiti and glibly state “While both acknowledged as classics today, neither Mean Streets nor American Graffiti were box-office blockbusters.” While Graffiti was a little slow out of the gate — it became what used to be called a “sleeper hit,” something that the subsequent mutations of the film exhibition industry made a practical near-impossibility — it of course was a box-office blockbuster, the third highest-grossing film of the year. You like to think that you check every factual assertion you make, but you don’t. That’s why fact-checkers were invented. But fact-checkers are thin on the ground these days. I’m not making excuses. The point is, the “facts” you don’t check, because you think you know, will bite you on the ass every time. 

People like to bat around that F. Scott Fitzgerald observation (did he even really say this? I’m not so certain anymore, and who can really state with certainty that he did?) that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” As it happens, then, maybe having a “first-rate intelligence” has more in common with being an idiot than was heretofore believed. Because, you know, here I am, writing about Scorsese’s video for “Bad,” writing about Joe Pesci’s appearance in the Michael Jackson film Moonwalker, which is largely tied in with Bad, and I’m nevertheless identifying “Smooth Criminal” as having appeared on Thriller. And later on, there I am talking about how American Graffiti was sufficiently popular to inspire the sitcom Happy Days, and then I state it wasn’t a box-office blockbuster.

These goofs have been fixed, but it’s embarrassing to have them in a first edition, and those are not the only ones. At one point I cite the girl-group The Ronettes when I mean the girl-group The Crystals. I misspell “Bufalino” as “Buffalino.” For a little while after the book went into hardcover all I could see were the errors, and I started to hate the book. I had to pull myself back to something I told myself after I submitted the manuscript, which was that absolute perfection was an unlikely outcome. I still would have liked to come a lot closer to that than I did with the first printing.

Oh, and there’s another side to this: what did not make it in. I recently got an e-mail from a reader who was rather perturbed that I did not cite the obvious antecedent to Goodfellas’ “meet the gang” Steadicam shot, that is, a similar characters-address-the-camera bit in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni. The thing is, I had. In my manuscript of the book’s fourth chapter, a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie (a favorite with some readers, a source of “I already know what happens in the movie” complaint for some others), I wrote this:

Liotta’s voiceover accompanies an elaborate tracking shot.  The inspiration here is the opening (post credits) shot of Federico Fellini’s 1953 I Vitelloni, which moves across a boardwalk restaurant and introduces three of its main characters, in less than a minute. But Scorsese goes bigger than Fellini, giving us 10 characters in less time,  in a Steadicam shot that goes on for a little more than 60 seconds.

In the finished book, the passage goes “Liotta’s voice accompanies an involved Steadicam shot. There’s an overtly theatrical feel somehow…” etc. That sentence about the theatrical feel kicks off a new paragraph in the manuscript featuring the citation of the Fellini film. I’ve gone over the notes and drafts and PDFs of various versions and I still can’t suss out how the passage got dropped. It should be restored some time in the future.

What have we learned here? As I embark on a new book, I’ve made some new rules for myself that I’m not going to mention here because that sort of revelations tends to solicit reactions such as “you mean you DIDN’T do [X]?” and or solicit suggestions as to what I ought to do, which I think should be confined to my immediate circle of project collaborators, no offense. Mainly I have a new appreciation of something I thought I already knew, which has to do with how you can never be too careful, and what you owe to the reader. I have been told many times over by readers how much they enjoyed the book and how much they got out of it, so I know to some extent in the larger scheme of things they haven’t been let down. But I also know that I can’t snicker at another author writing that Max von Sydow played the role of Death in The Seventh Seal as vigorously as I once might have.