Some Came Running

Dropping The Ball With Olivia De Havilland

In the late summer of 2004, I had the great honor of being invited to interview Olivia De Havilland for Premiere. We spent a little over an hour and a half in a suite at The Pierre in Manhattan, and out discussion ranged over a large number of points in her career and life, not including her musical number in Thank Your Lucky Stars or her strained relations with her sister, Joan Fontaine. And of course Gone With The Wind came up. I no longer have a transcript of the interview, but I do have the finished article. I structured the piece so that my questions were not included (I rather enjoy this anachronistic practice, particularly when more and more these days when I read interviews with performers and directors the questions are longer, more tortured, and more self-important than the answers), and so, Miss De Havilland's thoughts about the movie appear as below, in the article under a subhead of the film's title. 

The movie has universal appeal for not only individuals but for whole nations. I got letters from every country in the worlds. All countries have experienced war and defeat. And survival. They can identify with that film for, I think, that reason. Whole populations know what it’s like to flee. And then of course individuals, their lives go through great crises and events and disappointments and worse than that.

The film was beautifully cast. It’s a most remarkable job of casting. Vivien, especially. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Clark was perfect, perfect. Prissy [Butterfly McQueen] was perfect. All of the others.

It was an immense responsibility for the different actors. Especially for Clark. Because he had to match in the film the readers’ impression, image, of Rhett Butler. And his career was at stake. And, well—he matched the image, didn’t he?

I just loved the character of Melanie. And had wonderful help, both from George Cukor and from [director] Victor Fleming in developing the character. She was such a loving person. Of course, to play a loving person well, you become loving. And you become happy. I think loving people are happy people. Scarlett did not have that happiness. She had other emotions, but I don’t think she had happiness. Melanie did. So she was a beloved character and one that blessed me during those six months of playing her. 

As I mentioned, I don't have the transcript so I can't tell you what my question was, but I still do recall, vividly, how disarmed and surprised I was when she began talking about the film from the perspective of countries/populations experiencing war and defeat. And I thought, in all honesty, that her perspective was interesting and legitimate, and it helped me look in the movie in a new way, because for a very long time I considered it a movie about how awesome plantations were, and as awesome as they looked in the film, designed as they were by the great William Cameron Menzies, I took some exception to that view. 

And of course Gone With The Wind is about more than how awesome plantations were, and it is about what De Havilland was talking about, and I was happy to, when I brought up the film, let her take the conversational reins. I declined to interject, "But racism!"

One the one hand, this arguably makes me a bad journalist. On the other hand, why should I, in the context of an interview meant to constitute a career retrospective, hold De Havilland responsible, or answerable, for what was/is in fact a systemic concern? I mean, quite a few of the people responsible for adapting Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-Prize-winning (yes it did!) novel to the screen were not un-progressive in their politics, at least for their time. David O. Selznick might have been a garden-variety Yankee racist in his everyday life but he did not advocate slavery. George Cukor was a gay man. The racial politics of both the film itself and the people who made it are delved into in revelatory detail in a 1999 Atlantic article by Leonard J. Leff that I recommend highly. 

"I, for one, have no desire to produce any anti-Negro film," Leff quotes Selznick, in a memo to screenwriter Sidney Howard. I have no doubt that Selznick was sincere. But, not to be a kind of socio/psychotherapist, that statement also underscores how poorly Selznick understood whatever racism he himself harbored. Because there's no doubt that Gone With The Wind is a racist film. It doesn't merely put forth "unfortunate racial attitudes" (and what a very caucasian phrase that is), racism is in its DNA. It is not a difficult point to understand. Try a thought experiment: were you to undertake a remake of Gone With The Wind that would expunge the material of its racist content, how would you go about doing it? Well, easy, right: first thing you'd do is take it out of the antebellum South. Oh wait. 

 As Claudia Rankine points out in a recent New York Times Magazine essay, "Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system." It is quite explicitly on display throughout Gone With The Wind, in ways, as Leff's article demonstrates, that its filmmakers were somehow completely unaware of. But to acknowledge that it's a racist film makes many, many people uncomfortable. Which one could take as an indication of the way racism is so deeply ingrained in the white American character. I allow that people can have a meaningful relationship with Gone With The Wind either in spite of or without acknowledging its racism. But to use weasel phrases like "unfortunate racial attitudes" instead of "racism" is pure nonsense. 

I bring all this up, of course, because my friend Lou Lumenick recently turned some heads with his brief essay in the New York Post suggesting that Gone With The Wind ought not enjoy pop culture pantheon privilege. Reading the piece now, it looks quite a bit milder than its many detractors are making it out to be; in the time-tested tradition of Salon think pieces, it asks why "we" continue to embrace GWTW while deploring the Confederate flag. And then it says "maybe" the movie's best off relegated to museums rather than regular theaters for its 75th anniversary. And for that "maybe" Lou gets called a Nazi! Whoa!

I actually don't agree entirely with Lou. And I've long pondered the fact that in some corners Gone With The Wind gets the conventional-wisdom cultural pass that Birth Of A Nation doesn't, merely on the unstated grounds that GWTW's racism is arguably less virulent/more "benign" than Nation's. How virulent does your racism have to be before you recognize it as racism, I wonder? Because, you know,  Hattie McDaniels' Mammie turned out to be the best friend Scarlett ever really had, even if Scarlett was too Scarletty to know it. As if Mammie had any choice in the matter of her association with Scarlett. "Unfortunate," you betcha. 

So one may well be befuddles by the fact that cultural attitudes with respect to Gone With The Wind haven't caught up with those on Nation, but the answer to the question it brings up should be blindingly obvious: The ostensible Post-Racial Society is a contrivance. 

And I wasn't going to make Olivia De Havilland my poster child for that. Premiere wasn't The New Inquiry. As for the current Wind concern, I'm not really with what people think Lou said. I think it should be shown everywhere that people want to see it.  I think the secretive, stubborn self-censorship that Disney executes on its objectionable content of past years is craven and shameful and I much prefer Warners' practice of putting an informative disclaimer at the front of the content in question. That said, there has to be a cast of mind in which one can admire Gone With The Wind's portrayals of suffering, and of goodness, and of petulance, and of perseverance, while acknowledging, with eyes wide open, that the engine on which its story runs is at least partially powered by a particular kind of hatred. 

Cameron Crowe, Victim Of Auteurism

Don't try this at home: Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, and Philip Morris, Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch, 1946

Last evening, near the end of Film Twitter’s “We Need To Talk About Cameron” quasi-telethon, the critic Tina Hassannia registered some disapprobation thusly:

“ALOHA reviews are all framed in the auteurist framework, which inherently treats the white, male director as an artist worthy of discussion.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think of the movie, at the end of the day what’s important is: what’s going on with Cameron Crowe?”

“Now imagine trying to have a similar conversation about any mediocre, messy, or outright bad movie by a director who isn’t white or male.”

“When was the last time that happened?"

I have no trouble imagining having the “similar conversations” posited by Hassania, as I’ve had them, in the pre-Twitter days. “What’s going on with Spike Lee?” was a big question around the time of Girl 6, and again with She Hate Me; “What’s going on with Jane Campion?” was a big question for some with Holy Smoke (not for me—I loved it) and more so with In The Cut (yeah, that was bad).  The political sensitivities of young critics these days are so finely tuned that it’s hard to know sometimes whether a protest is part of an attempt to create a new critical paradigm centered around diversity, or just some kind of high-functioning troll activity (if I understand Hassannia’s subsequent Twitter updates correctly, Spike Lee doesn’t really count). But as we’re framing within the auteurist framework, and so much of the most interesting and provocative criticism happening today at least carries the implication that auteur-based criticism has somehow ruined almost everything, it’s worth noting that—judging from appearances, at least—a lot of Cameron Crowe’s current troubles stem from auteurism, or a misapprehension of auteurism.

Not that I’ve seen Aloha, or am in a particular hurry to. I began worrying about Cameron Crowe, like so many others, upon seeing Elizabethtown, in Toronto in 2005. Actually, not to get all inside baseball, but I had been worried about Crowe even before cameras started rolling on that picture. I knew that Crowe had written the script, an ambitious comedy-drama, with Leonardo DiCaprio in mind, and that DiCaprio was now determined to do only Serious Movies with Serious Directors such as Martin Scorsese, which left Crowe without a bankable leading man. And so it went. Anyway, I was at Toronto for the premiere of Elizabethtown, and Crowe personally returned to the scene of his Almost Famous triumph to deliver a quasi-apology at the beginning of the press screening of his new film, which was indeed, alas, Elizabethtown. I felt bad after seeing it. My thoughts were these: One, that Crowe was maybe the best-intentioned and most big-hearted of American directors (maybe I should have been thinking “of white male American directors,” but I wasn’t, I cannot tell a lie). Two, that because his kind of picture is so difficult to get produced nowadays, prior commercial triumphs or not (and let us not forget that between Almost Famous and Elizabethtown, there was Vanilla Sky), Crowe apparently feels compelled to cram EVERYTHING HE KNOW AND FEELS INTO EACH AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL FILM HE MAKES. The directors Crowe frequently cites as models and mentors, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, working within the studio system (Lubitsch was even, at one point, a studio executive), had the advantage of being able to produce with some consistency; if they couldn’t do something they wanted on Project X, they might be able to get it done on Project Y. They didn’t have the nagging consciousness of each individual film maybe being their last.

That consciousness is part of the artistic and intellectual DNA of at least two generations of “personal filmmakers.” Which Lubitsch and Wilder, both directors icons of critics and creators of the Possessory Credit School, were in fact not. One of the features of what we call "Auteurism," or "auteurism," as we know it, and so on, is how damned confused it is. The politique des auteurs as articulated by Bazin and Truffaut is a different kettle of fish from auteurism as articulated by Andrew Sarris. And while Sarris was in fact pretty careful about differentiating between illuminating evidence of a director’s personal signature and avowing that the director or “auteur” is the creative be-all and end-all of every artistically worthwhile film made, he might as well not bothered given the crude way such notions are bandied about on an almost daily basis. In any event, one thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that the “personal touches” that distinguish Lubitsch and Wilder films from more routine Hollywood fare of its time is that these touches were by-products of a process that Crowe either doesn’t have access to or doesn’t want. Reading Charles Brackett’s recently published diaries, one is struck by how often Brackett virtually roles his eyes at Wilder’s insistence on narrative coherence—“Billy’s terrifying neurosis that everything isn’t crystal clear to the audience” is how he puts it at one point. Contrast this “neurotic” precision with the loose baggy monsters Crowe has to fight tooth and nail to get made at all, and then has to cut by thirty minutes or however long. The self-consciousness of the contemporary “personal touch”—even when adapting an intriguing Spanish-language horror/sci-fi romance, Crowe was madly compelled to transform it into My Empathetic Tortured Biopic Of My Old Boss Jann Wenner—can be laid, I think, pretty squarely at the feet of slavish devotion to misunderstood auteurism. Combined, paradoxically enough, with the production-on-my-own-terms ethos of the early French New Wave. All of which seems to have left Crowe in a pretty, and seemingly inextricable, pickle. At least when Lee and Campion went off the rails, they did so trying to accomplish something a little different from their prior fare. One reason I’m not in a hurry to see Aloha is because the accounts of the movie have me thinking dog-returning-to-its-own-vomit. 

A professional film critic™ answers your "American Sniper" questions

Dear Professional Film Critic,

does the movie American Sniper really “glorify a killer?”

Well, gosh, you put it that way, it sounds pretty terrible. But some outlets and individuals are using that term to frame the movie, so…

Anyway, here’s the thing. American Sniper does take the war in Iraq at face value, as in it was a war and that the United States was within its right to wage it and all that. And, you know, in a war, the body waging it sends soldiers, and one thing soldiers do, one of the main things soldiers do, some would argue, is kill. Killing is something every soldier is trained to do, I think. You know, I bet even the nice chaplain played by Leon Ames in Battleground is probably trained to kill. I doubt that he’s encouraged to kill, but he probably knows how to do it, and can if necessary. What the hell do I know about the military, I was 13 when they ended the draft and too old to enlist by the time people (none that I knew, though) would tell you it was the patriotic thing to do. Although come to think of it the Army might have made a better career than the one I’m enjoying now. But enough about me. In any event, given that Special Forces operative Chris Kyle, the subject of the movie, was trained and employed as a very specific kind of soldier, one who pretty much did nothing BUT kill, and because he did a pretty good job of it, by both the official record and his own accounting (which many have taken issue with, although the official record is apparently acknowledged as solid), and since the movie doesn’t really take issue with the notion that Kyle was what is generally referred to as a “war hero,” then yes, I guess the movie CAN be seen as “glorifying” a “killer.” But there’d have to be a lot of, what are they these days in sports records?...asterisk?...next to “killer” if you’re gonna go that route. I mean it’s not like he did all this killing in Iraq and then came home to face charges. It was all, like, state-sanctioned killing. Seems a little unfair to get all up in his face for that, no? 

Dear Professional Film Critic,

what’s the deal with the robot baby in the movie?

Did that bother you? I mean, I kind of noticed it when I looked specifically for it and yeah it was a little goofy but I don’t know. Frankly I’m a little bugged when real newborns get explicit exposure in movies. In the battle between verisimilitude and lobster-red naked infants squirming uncomfortably before cameras and lights I’m something of a conscientious objector. Although the tradition does go back quite a ways: I was surprised, watching King Vidor’s 1928 classic The Crowd again recently, to see that the birth of its hero John is handled with not just a real live baby in full view of the camera but a real live baby in full view of the camera if you know what I’m saying etc. In any event, word from the film’s screenwriter is that the movie’s first live baby showed up with fever, the second was a no-show, and that’s when director Clint Eastwood called in the prop department. Eastwood’s a real git-er-done kind of director. Here he explains that it was Don Siegel who taught him this, so complain to Don Siegel, you philistine: “Don knew exactly which shots to shoot. But he wasn’t rigid. He could add or change a shot at the last minute. I’ve worked with directors who are completely pole-axed if you suggest a change in a scene. I bumped my head while we were shooting In The Line Of Fire. To hide the bruise, I asked Wolfgang Petersen whether I could enter a shot from the right rather than the left. Wolfgang had a lot of trouble reorganizing the scene, because he’d imagined it all from the one angle. A detail had changed and it threw him off balance. This was never the case with Don. Sergio would have taken time to think and probably have said OK, but Don wouldn’t have blinked an eyelid. He believed that there were no rules, or if there were rules, they were made to be broken.” That’s from a piece by Eastwood in the invaluable collection Projections 4 ½ (in association with Positif). You should check it out. I trust I don’t have to explain to you who “Sergio” is.

Dear Professional Film Critic,

does the movie view/portray the Iraqi people as irredeemable savages?

This is kind of a tough one. I would say “no,” but I will admit that the movie frames Iraq within severely straitened circumstances, circumstances specific to the condition and the mission of its lead character, the aforementioned Chris Kyle, an American sniper. The title of the movie, we may recall, is “American Sniper,” not “American Ambassador” or “Civilian Outreach Guy.” Inasmuch as there even was such a thing as civil or civic society in Iraq after we were greeted as liberators there (and again, for reasons explained above, I myself cannot claim any direct experience with respect to any of this, thank God), from what accounts I’ve read it was pretty, um, fraught, and the U.S. Special Forces weren’t really sent to places that weren’t particularly fraught. And so on. Not to drag Boyhood into this, but remember the second stepdad in Boyhood, Jim, before he’s the stepdad and he’s just a student of Patricia Arquette’s and he seems kind of not an asshole and he’s telling the story about one of his tours in Iraq and the differences between the approaches of different squadrons when entering Iraqi territories and interacting with civilians? Right, well, that’s a whole movie right there. And the experience of a special forces operative, I think—and this goes back to the first question—has to do with touching down and securing areas wherein and from which you are only supposed to kill. Notice I’m not saying “kill bad guys.” I’m not here to make judgments. But, no, it’s true—the movie doesn’t feature many Iraqi nice guys or even recognizably regular Iraqis. There’s one who’s particularly holy-shit-inducing in his malevolence, and is pitted against a very fearful native of the country who has cooperated with the Americans. These depictions, to my eye, are conceptualized toward conveying the mind-melting hell of violent conflict that is the everyday working world for the title character, rather than a programmatic attempt to get the audience hissing at an entire race of people as villains. The perspective is, I admit, narrow, but as someone who likes the film, I want to believe it’s necessarily so. A friend who disagrees is reminded of Alan Dershowitz’s heinous 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed piece titled “’Civilian Casualty? That’s A Gray Area.” 

Olio

"Pirate Song." Composed by Tim Hodgkinson. Performed by Tim Hodgkinson (piano) and Dagmar Krause (voice), on the album Hopes And Fears, by Art Bears, 1978

"Laugh At Me." Composed by Sonny Bono. Performed by Mott The Hoople, on their eponymous album, 1969. 

"If love is truly going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence."—Lester Bangs, "Where Were You When Elvis Died," Village Voice, August 29 1977

The blog post in which I last trotted out that Bangs quote. 

"By moral in the context of art I mean a style which executes the deeper social and psychological function of form, as opposed to a particular aspect of vanity called taste. Pop sensibility, pop consciousness, pop sentimentality have been invaluable in clarifying the provincialism and nostalgia that actually permeate a culture that has come to pride itself on sophistication."—SIdney Tillim, "Figurative Art 1969: Aspects and Prospects," as cited by Robert Christgau here. 

The essay by Matt Zoller Seitz that made all these things come to mind. 

Oh, forget it...

From "Marnin Rosenberg in: Bad Luck With Women," by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman.

Although I have given up Twitter for Lent, I see from checking up on it for maintenance purposes that my handle has been being invoked there with some frequency of late. Certain individuals seem to be of the opinion that were I currently active in the social media format, I would have some amusing/coruscating/righteous material to contribute w/r/t some news that has been spreading across the cinematic cyberverse, about how the Criterion Collection is going to issue a DVD edition of Lena Dunham's second film Tiny Furniture, but IS NOT going to issue a DVD edition of Abbas Kiarostami's splendid latest film Certified Copy, allegedly because (and this, I should point out most emphatically, is not a confirmed fact but merely a rumor and not in the least anything resembling an official pronouncement) Criterion head Peter Becker supposedly considers the latter "lesser Kiarostami." Well. As much as I hate to disappoint my public, I am not only not going to break my Lenten vow and go on Twitter and deride the decision (this has in fact been the only Lenten resolution I have been able to keep...damn you, damn you to hell, M&Ms!), but I do not in fact have anything derisive to say about the decision, which has not been definitively announced in any case. The deal between IFC and Criterion meant that a Criterion Tiny Furniture was always a possibility; by the same token, it did not mean that a Criterion Certified Copy was a given. If one comes out and not the other, it represents neither the death of Criterion and cinephilia as object and ideal, nor does it represent the triumph of youth and fucking inside metal piping over cinecrophilia, or whatever; it represents nothing more than two discrete business decisions, neither of which is going to bring about anything like a cataclysm.

And quite frankly, I'm getting a little sick of all this dog-piling on Lena Dunham. Yeah, I've given her some shit in the past, and I may well do same at some point in the future, but I feel reasonably confident in every case that it's something that she's said or done that's prompted my irritation, not the very fact that she exists. Yeah, she's the daughter of affluent artist parents, WE KNOW THAT. What the fuck are we gonna do, ban everybody with a privileged background from participating in the arts, or in criticism for that matter? In that case, so long, James Merrill, WIlliam S. Burroughs, Harry Mathews, Greil Marcus even, not to mention the Beastie Boys, etcetera, etcetera, just to mention people who come to the top of my head immediately. And to extend to the coeval, are we just gonna honor poor aspiring artists on account of their no-doubt-superior integrity? Get used to reading a lot of Karl "King" Wenclas, then. I've given it a shot, and you know what? His shit is BORING, not to mention badly "crafted." Yes, I know that I myself coined the term "cinema of unexamined privilege," but that's exactly what I meant—the cinema. I meant that I thought one of Tiny Furniture's larger flaws was its disingenuousness about the actual reality of its lead character Aura's situation; the fact that she really did not NEED to even take the job that she eventually walks away from. It seemed evasive in a way that, say, even something people might consider similar, like Woody Allen's Manhattan, did/does not. In that latter film the circumstances were better laid-out, if not completely explicitly addressed; the characters all had cherry media/academic jobs that allowed them to isolate and create their own neurotic fairy tales; their was nothing in the scenario that obliged the characters to even feel the slightest compulsion to examine their privilege. I'm over-explaining myself into a corner here, but you get the idea. 

And in any event, and I kind of feel like a total dink pointing this out, whatever you might think of Tiny Furniture, the fact is it didn't fucking make itself; Dunham went out and wrote it and directed it and acted in it; she didn't lie back and have her minions and eunuchs put the thing together. Yeah, she got a lot of help from family and friends but so does EVERYBODY who makes a low-budget independent film these days. Even Academy-Award-Winning-DIrector Steven Soderbergh asked people for favors with regards to locations for The Girlfriend Experience (none of the Vegas stuff would have happened had he not made those Oceans movies). As far as I know, well-off as she may be, Dunham didn't finance the film herself (only idiots do that, oops, sorry Tom Ford), and the fact that the film has helped her find likely better-than-gainful employment via deals with Scott Rudin and Judd Apatow and so on, actually represents a return on her investment of labor. She's a rich kid, yeah, but she did the work. I would advise others who seek to emulate her success to do likewise.

By the way, My Lovely Wife, when I was discussing all this with her, said, "You understand that it takes a lot of nerve for you to go all Zen about this and start telling people to 'grow up' at this reasonably early stage of your maturity." To which I responded, "Well, yeah, that's why I wanna use those panels from the Drew Friedman cartoon. Because of the stupid grandiosity of the gesture, and the fact that people never listen to you when you say that anyway, so what's the fucking point?" Exactly!

Effin mad aincha

One of the interesting things about writing for a larger, more mainstream audience, as I have been doing, and quite happily at that, for MSN Movies, is the feedback you get, and the ways some people track you down in order to provide that feedback. As, for instance, the complaint of one "Sauncie" concerning my negative notice on The Tourist, in a post on this blog that has no relation to The Tourist. Another dissatisfied customer contacted me via my Facebook account. This individual wrote, in part, "...your review seemed extremely arrogant, self-assuming, full of big words to try and impress people who have no clue as to what you are talking about. Your veiled insults to the fun Pirates movies was extremely irritating. One thing that I think all critics forget is that they are watching MOVIES. Things that are NOT real but made for entertainment purposes. You may not like the story, and that is your right, of course, but could you maybe dare to condescend to the little people and word it to where people can understand it easier and not want to throw darts at a picture of your face? Chronicles of Narnia are fun adventure movies....why take them so seriously. Relax, stop trying to impress people and let yourself be taken away. By the way, the Pirates movies were fantastically done. The last one may have had too much of a story but hey, it was easy to let yourself get into.......IF you let yourself. Take care."

The review in question was of the new (and lousy) Narnia movie with the seafaring stuff, but as you'll note, my correspondent was more irritated by my incredibly offhand (albeit admittedly sarcastic) and brief mention of the Pirates of the Cari-whatsis film franchise therein. I was somewhat reminded of back in the early '90s, during my brief but glorious sojourn as the Sci-Fi/Fantasy columnist for TV Guide, and I was writing something about the then kinda inchoate Cartoon Network debuting a new series, and I said something along the lines of "Just in case you've had your fill of Huckleberry Hound reruns on the Cartoon Network," which elicited this pained three-page letter from a minister (I forget which denomination) out in the Midwest taking me to task for disparaging this beloved, humane, wonderful cartoon character who never did anybody any harm. I always found that a little...well, quizzical. And whenever that story springs to mind, I remember when voice artist Daws Butler passed away in 1988, and the New York Daily News ran an obit of him, and they didn't have a picture of him on file, so they ran a drawing of the beloved, humane, etc. character Huckleberry Hound, only the layout didn't provide room for a very long caption, so the caption read "H.Hound." Which, when it comes to mind, never doesn't crack me up. 

And this of course in turn reminds me of the great bit in the 1946 Disney animated short "Donald's Double Trouble," in which the ever-irascible Donald Duck finds himself once again alienated from the lovely Daisy. On the street Donald happens upon a doppelganger, one who talks like Ronald Colman even, and persuades him to pose as Donald and make nice with Daisy. You can see where this is going. When the doppelganger gets a load of Daisy, he figures he's a cinch to tap that, particularly if he lays down the swanky smarm, which he correctly figures she's not accustomed to from the other guy. "We'll paint the town vermillion!" he promises her, and squires her to a nearby fair. Donald tails them, and keeps an obsessive record of all the PDAs he observes. It's all very Raging Bull. Near the, erm, climax, the doppelganger proposes to take Daisy through the fair's Tunnel of Love. The enraged, desperate Donald scribbles a note, which he passes surreptitiously to his would-be destroyer:

Who knew that Donald, in the privacy of his interiority, referred to his own self as "Don?" Fascinating.

Incidentally, the argument raised by the objector to my dismissal of the Pirates of the Whozis movies—"Things that are NOT real but made for entertainment purposes"—is echoed in a much more full-of-big-words-to-try-and-impress-people fashion in a recent Die Filmkrant post by Adrian Martin. 

At top: Hatfield and the North, a vault recording title of whom provides the name for this post. Their music is highly enjoyable to let yourself get into...IF you let yourself. No, really. 

Blu movies

Believe it or not—and I know you want to believe it, really I do—I'm not too often prone to professional jealousy. My dislikes and resentments, and I admit, they are many, generally stem from who people are and what they do, what they stand for and what they don't, rather than any position they hold relative to my own. On the occasions when I do feel a pang of "I can't believe they gave him/her that job"-ness, I try to keep it to myself. But I have to admit I felt a bit of a twinge when I read earlier in the week that Michael Atkinson was taking the position of DVD reviewer at Movieline. 

Now Michael's been reviewing DVDs for the IFC Independent Eye website for a while, I know. Hell, I even made fun of one of his DVD reviews there a couple of weeks ago. And while he and I have had our tussles on the internet (Jesus God almighty, is there anyone I haven't had a tussle with on the internet?), when all is said and done I consider Michael a fine fellow and a distinctive writer. A little blustery at times, for sure, but you know, he owns his bluster, much as I own my...raging dickheadedness? No, it shouldn't be that. It's something. But I'm not sure. But anyway. The point is that it really caused me no pain to learn that Movieline now wants to pay the guy to compose prose poems on Marlon Brando's jawline as said jawline is rendered in a leading home theater format. No, this was the sentence in the announcement that irritated me: "Michael will provide excellent reconnaissance from the DVD/Blu-ray front several times per week." 

Blu-ray? Really? Goddamnit, I didn't write the book on Blu-ray (now that I think of it, that might not be such a bad idea), but I did write the Popular Mechanics article on it (the entirety of which appears to no longer be online, but here's the first page), and I made only one mistake in it, mixing up Super Technirama with VistaVision, which given the technical similarities of the format, could have happened to anybody!!!! Also: I started my career at a magazine named Video Review. Editing the Test Reports. You know, the ones with the luminance numbers and the signal-to-noise ratios and the goddamn footcandles/footlamberts. I've forgotten more about this technology than most of these schmucks who yammer on about this and that but probably couldn't set a goddamn clock on a  VCR back in the day to save their life ever even learned. I was IN JAPAN to see the very first demonstrations of the MPEG video compression format that wound up MAKING DVD AND BLU-RAY EVEN POSSIBLE! ("This will never work," I said at the time, so crappy did the results look back then.)

Back when I was running the Home Guide at Premiere, I rather developed a horror of DVD reviews that functioned as de facto late critiques of contemporary pictures. My perspective was, well, the film critics have had their say, and if you're reviewing the disc version of the movie, then review that. (Although I recall that when Christopher Kelly was writing most of the reviews for the section, his perspectives could yield some interestingly counterintuitive results; a positive notice for The Other Sister, for instance.) Now obviously it's a whole other kettle of fish when you're dealing with classic or repertory fare on disc. Dave Kehr, who's completely The Man in this department, is invariably brilliant when discussing both the films in question themselves, and also how they've fared in the transit from celluloid to the digital domain. This issue is, I think, particularly crucial when you're discussing Blu-ray. I don't mean to sound rude or anything (well, maybe I do), but with rare exceptions I've got to say that unless you are Dave Kehr, I really don't give a shit what you think of any given movie on Blu-ray. I just want to know how it looks and why it looks the way it does. (See DVD Beaver...and even they can get it wrong, as they did here, a review that needs updating since the recent correctly remastered version.) The rest I can figure out myself. Whether Michael Atkinson's gonna talk about that in his Blu-ray writeups remains to be seen—I haven't seen him tackle a title in that format yet from his Movieline perch. But I wish him all good fortune in the gig in any event. 

All this is also by way of guiding you to this week's topics, questions, and exercises at The Auteurs' Notebook, which contains a chat with Warner Home Video's Vice President of mastering Ned Price, about the gorgeous new Blu-ray of Doctor Zhivago (not depicted above, in case you were wondering) and the upcoming digital rethink of Citizen Kane, and a bit more. All very wonky and technical...just the way I like it when we're talking film preservation and Blu-ray and stuff.

You must be joking. Oh man you must be joking.

A friend, who I adore dearly but whose e-mails I've come to dread, precisely because of circumstances such as this, directs me to the announcement that the suave and debonair (just look at those socks!) Eric Kohn will be assuming the position of lead film critic at indieWIRE. Well, congratulations and good luck to him, is pretty much all I have to say. Or would have had to say, had my friend not directed me to this particular passage in indieWIRE majordomo Eugene Hernandez's celebratory interview with Kohn:

Older critics than me tirelessly claim that today you have to network and fraternize to make a living in entertainment media, at the expense of serious critical thought. To me, that complaint sounds like an expression of personal insecurity. Of course, critics have to wade the waters of the industry with caution, but that’s part of the job; I’m not perfect, but I’m not a tool, either. If there’s a reason for me to voice my opinion about a movie, for better or worse, it’ll usually happen.

Reflections on a new year

So I'm in the eating area of my in-laws' kitchen, sitting at the table before this damnable machine and thinking about why I'm dreading going home. It's not as if I don't love my home, or how My Lovely Wife and I (mostly My Lovely Wife) have turned it into a welcoming, warm, workable environment. It's more that being out here has allowed me the space to wind down, look around, appreciate what I've got, shudder in horror at the varied ways in which I've squandered or taken for granted those things over the past year, and try to concoct ways of NOT doing that in the future. The thing about home is that it's where all my bad habits are, habits of mind and habits of action. 

I think about the ways I go through days, what I get right, what I get wrong. The ways I keep myself informed and the ways I wind myself up. How often the two are kind of inextricably linked to each other. I think about how angry I am, or can be, and how destructive that anger can be...and also how constructive, in its way, how it's fed in to other creative projects over the past year, and even to some polemics. I want to deploy my energies into constructive, creative outlets, but I know that more often than not my anger feeds my sloth, which feeds my insolence, which feeds into a compulsion to shoot from the hip, or whatever you want to call it. I know that it's right to be outraged by the rewarding of mediocrity, and by mediocrity itself, but I also know that railing against it in the ways that are most obvious—the ways I'm most prone to turning to—gets very little done, finally. I look at the New Year and I wish I had a formula to instantaneously make everything make sense, and I know that no such thing exists. But I raise my head and look at these people I love, who have given me so much, and I feel kind of unworthy of them, and wish I could snap my fingers and conjure a better self to be sitting here. Not possible, I know. And what is possible seems...well, seems like it's gonna take a lot of time. Wonder if I ought to take up transcendental meditation. David Lynch sure is a convincing proselytizer for it. Works for Clint Eastwood, too. One thing I understand from hearing them talk about it is that focus, finally, is all. And we're all, to some extent, in a business, a culture, that thrives on distraction.

Also, I'd like to lose sixty pounds or so.

Ah, well. The amazing breakfast Claire's been working on since last night (which will not help me lose sixty pounds) is almost ready. Later we'll be visiting the folks next door, who, as a family activity, watched The Girlfriend Experience on Thanksgiving night (really!), and apparently the head of that household has a lot of questions for me. I'm gonna wear the blazer I wore in that picture over to the house, because why not?

Happy New Year, all!

Young and dumb versus old and in the way

I began writing professionally about 25 years ago. As was befitting to someone with no degree and little practical training, I started as a rock critic. And I was a man on a mission. I wanted to share my enthusiasms with the world. My first piece for the then still-fabled-as-a-"writer's paper" The Village Voice was about the first solo album by the great singer and songwriter Peter Blegvad, a work I rather optimistically deemed "The Great Lost Pop LP Of 1983." (Some might recall that Thriller was a rather big record in 1983.) And so for a couple of years I went my merry way, extolling the virtues of Tom Verlaine, They Might Be Giants, Robert Wyatt, The Golden Palominos, none of whom went on to conquer the charts as a result of my exertions (except, to a certain extent, They Might Be Giants, I guess, and yes, that is odd). I don't think I published a negative review in the Voice until Doug Simmons sent me to cover a Tears For Fears show at Radio City Music Hall. (I don't know why Doug thought they'd be up my alley; maybe on account that they'd dedicated one of the tunes on their album to Wyatt.) The twee-anguished synth rockers actually brought out that fucking chimp from the "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" video when they did that song. I slagged them, titling my review "Schlock Therapy," and so began honing my alternate critical identity as a snarkster.

I had a lot of fun in those days, but I was frustrated, too, in that way that young men and women of particular enthusiasms can be frustrated. With all the great music out there that I was trying to bring to light, why did mass taste suck so bad? Why weren't music fans beating a path to Peter Blegvad's door? I decided the reason was lack of coverage. At a panel at the 1985 New Music Seminar, I laid out a "J'accuse" to Bob Guccione, Jr. of Spin, on account of the fact that he wasn't putting the likes of Blegvad on any of Spin's covers. Jon Pareles, then of Musician and The New York Times, was not unmoved by my impassioned gibberish, but he was also kind of amused. "I used to carry a big torch for that kind of dreck when I first started writing," he told me. (I knew that—I had read his against-all-odds defense of Peter Hammill's solo oeuvre in The Voice.) He assured me that I would get over it.

And so I did, up to a point. I learned that critic's weren't marketers, for one thing, and couldn't function as such. I also learned that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot that one could do about mass taste, particularly if you didn't really share it. The best you could do was write honestly, champion stuff you loved/believed in, and hope that you'd attract the attention of like-minded individuals with which you could conduct at least some kind of virtual give-and-take. 

Of course this was not the only approach a critic could take. A critic could also just say "fuck it," and, to show that he or she was not entirely alienated from the zeitgeist, embrace popular taste. It didn't hurt that the '80s and '90s were ripe with highbrow theorizers putting together substantial toolboxes for just such a product. In popular music criticism, the invention of this not-quite-but-might-as-well-be straw man called "rockism" (which holds, among other things, that admiration for such artists as listed above is a particularly pernicious form of elitism) achieved the aim of letting practitioners of such writing believe that they "mattered" again.It is the anti-rockist, pro-mass taste arm of popular music criticism that enables a thumbsucker in The New York Times, for instance, to refer to the eldest Jonas Brother as "the brooding auteur" of the group. Nice work if you can get it. 

What I'm getting at, in my roundabout way, is why I can't quite join Roger Ebert and Jeffrey Wells when they lament the paucity of young people seeing and/or enthusing over Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Ebert's August 6 post has the portent-filled title "The gathering Dark Age," while Well's more, shall we say, straight-from-the-gut rumination is called "Eloi." Both combine a frustration with their inability to shape mass taste with a disdain—more measured and mournful in Ebert's reflection, more fear-and-loathing filled in Wells'—for these kids today, with their loud hair and long music. 

I grant you—as the Rolling Stones once sang, things are different today. I saw In The Loop a couple of weeks ago and thought it was just splendid—hilarious, kind of chilling, boasting a script of magnificent structure and content. 

And coming out of the theater, I thought, "You know, in the '70s, there's a good chance this would have been a major studio film, something like Network or The Hospital, featuring major movie stars in pretty much all the roles. It would have gotten nationwide distribution and marketing support and been up for a lot of awards. Now it's an import from an indie and it's gonna play maybe 50 theaters top nationwide before it goes to DVD, pay-per-view and cable."

What would The Hurt Locker's place be in the '70s movie landscape? That's a tougher question. I suspect, to be quite honest, that it might have ended up as one of those tough, under-the-radar B pictures of a not-quite-one-thing and not-quite-the-other ilk, sorta like Rolling Thunder. I'm not quite sure.

And I'm also not quite sure just why Ebert and Wells feel that the film's middling profile among the 17-and-under crowd says such dire things about the lack of intellectual curiosity among contemporary teens. If I recall specific scenes and individuals of my own adolescence accurately—say, the long-haired kids who mocked me for carrying around books of Buñuel scripts before repairing to behind the football field to smoke dope while listening to Deep Purple's Made In Japan on a portable 8-track player—I can conclude that intellectual curiosity wasn't all that much in vogue back in the day, either. Add to that the fact that The Hurt Locker was never aggressively marketed to a youth demographic anyway and you finally don't really have too much to complain about.

Unless, that is, you just like complaining, wallowing in your own impotence, and concluding that said impotence is actually tied in with the soon-coming demise of Western Civilization itself. Ebert and Wells' posts come hot on the heels of a controversial bunch of pronouncements by walking smirk Bill Maher, who has assembled not-unconvincing pieces of evidence to support his assertion that America is a "stupid" country. Here's the thing, though—America might be a stupid country, but so's every other damn country in the world. Paris Match's cover last week was of Sharon Stone flashing her tits—how fucking smart is that? 

I'm not arguing for a quiet acceptance of the status quo, nor, for that matter, for an anti-rockist analog one can apply to film criticism, wherein post-Derrida-theory can be distorted in order to posit that G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra is actually Teh Awesome. What I'm saying is, a man's gotta know his limitations, and the limitations of his discipline...and then do all that he can nevertheless.(That goes for a woman, too. But I didn't want to spoil the Magnum Force evocation.) Tearing one's hair out and venting about how stupid everyone else is may have some short term therapeutic effect, but doesn't get much done. The kids of today didn't invent dumb. They inherited it.