Some Came Running

Lost angels

At the Cannes Film Festival of 2008, the closing night film was Wim Wenders' Palermo Shooting, a pictorially extravagant botch that had most critics, including the group that I had dinner with after the screening, gasping with appalled derision. I had a hard time joining in the laughter. Not because I'm a better person than any of my colleagues. And certainly not because I hold Wenders as anything like sacred. I have no problem hooting at the ghastly, numb-skulled Don't Come Knockin', or standing up for an underappreciated (albeit slightly schmaltzy) valentine such as Land of Plenty. 

What saddened me about Palermo Shooting was that it was such a thoroughly transparent effort to recapture what Wenders achieved with what, I venture to guess, will always be his greatest film, 1987's Wings of Desire. And watching Wings today, you get the feeling that its own particular magic was effortless. Of course that can't be the case. If Wenders and co-scenarist Peter Handke weren't self-consciously swinging for the fences when they concocted the picture's scenario—gloomy angels hovering over a mostly black-and-white Berlin, one of them unhappy with his ethereal state and eager to return to the physical world, and this divided city with all its present cares and past sorrows—well, they were certainly up to something ambitious. But the film that Wenders shot and edited unwinds with what seems to be the greatest of ease; its beauty, poetry, and spiritual purity are qualities the viewer intuits right away, and they never let up. Even the film's occasional missteps—the overdrawn paean to heterosexual love that constitutes its coda, for instance—seem somehow blessed. Wenders dedicates the picture to two then-recently departed angels, Truffaut and Tarkovsky. Unlike Von Trier's recent Tarkovsky dedication, Wenders' note doesn't elicit laughter or hisses, but seems absolutely apt and moving. And I remember how the film was so inspiring to other artists—to Tony Kushner of course (he wrote about its influence on his Angels In America for Premiere in 1996), and to the great Caetano Veloso, whose song "Os Outros Romanticos" has these lines: "Anjos sobre Berlin/'O mundo desde o fim'/E no entato era un SIM/E foi e era e é será sim" ("Angels over Berlin/'The world since the end'/And all the while it was a YES/It has been, it was, it is, and will be yes"). It really seemed to capture lightning not over water but in a bottle. And Palermo Shooting, in every particular, showed such strain, as if Wenders was now just running around carrying his bottle, no real storm in sight.

I never count an artist out; by the same token, I look at Wings and I see something like an irreproducible result. The upcoming DVD from Criterion, from which the above screen grab of Nick Cave was taken (he, like Peter Falk, plays himself here; how's that for unique/inspired casting?) is a beauty and is out on November 3, as is the Blu-ray.

Department of "What you say?"

Another bombshell I missed over the weekend: the revelation of an unusual affinity I have with, yup, Nikki FInke. On Saturday she averred that David Cronenberg's "enigmatic adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Crash" is one of her "favorite motion pictures." 

Wow. I would say that makes two of us, but every now and then I'm happy to learn that there's another soul out there, and another, and another, who refers to the Cronenberg film as "the real Crash." I remember when it first came out, I did an interview with Cronenberg for Premiere that largely focused on how thoroughly hated/misunderstood the picture was, turning off even some of the director's most loyal followers. 

The revelation is interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is that given how FInke gives the impression that she pretty much hates everything, it's always bracing to find out what she likes. The fact that this admission is placed at the head of what's essentially an advertisement for herself makes it even more delicious. BTW, the woman above is Deborah Kara Unger, in the film's very disarming opening scene. Just so you know.

Image of the day

Michel Piccoli, Capri, and the Mediterranean Sea in Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963

The impulse behind posting this image does not, for once, reside in this blog's obsession with Godard and Godardiana. As it happens, I was up at the headquarters of the Criterion Collection yesterday, researching an article about high-definition video for a Big Legitimate Print Magazine (I'll tell you more about it as it progresses), and among other things, I got a taste of this film in its pre-downconverted-to-standard-definition Hi-Def master, and was knocked out not just by the beauty of the movie itself but the beauty of how Criterion brought it to video. This is one of the titles that may be part of Criterion's first foray into the Blu-ray world, and I hope it is—as gorgeous as the SD disc is, the Blu-ray will be better, and breathtaking.

In the meanwhile, the white of Piccoli's cigarette in the scene prior to this one makes a good reference point by which to calibrate your monitor.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Make Way For Tomorrow" ("Place aux Jeunes")"

First, the bad news: as the above screen capture testifies, the image is soft. Sometimes softer than this. Acceptable, but soft, most likely from the source. Also, the French subtitles are not removable.

So. That's the bad news. And, on the other hand, this is an entirely watchable DVD of one of the most underseen classics of golden age American cinema, a movie that is as unusual today as it was on its 1937 debut, arguably the most perfect jewel in the auteur crown of the great Leo McCarey. Not to mention one of the most emotionally devastating films you are likely to see, ever. I'll admit that shortly after the playful moment recorded in the screen cap above—in which soon-to-separate couple Barkley "Pa" Cooper (Victor Moore) and Lucy "Ma" Cooper (Beulah Bondi) make to kiss, but demur because, it seems, of the camera's gaze—I started bawling like a baby and didn't stop until the end title some fifteen minutes later. And I've already seen the picture a couple of times.