Some Came Running

The Current Cinema, 5/25/2018

For RogerEbert.com: The Misandrists, In Darkness, and Feral. Feral was the movie that actually inspired me to say out loud "Why am I doing this?" about halfway through. The feeling did pass.

For The New York Times, the involving Who We Are Now, the indelible Les Parents Terribles, and the ineffable Future World (pictured left). 

 

Cut your throat in your sleep

I

The journalist-turned-screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has, either in spite or because of his standing as something of a self-important clod, made several significant contributions to the lexicon of show business. I was reminded recently of his late ‘80s citation of his former agent, the diminuitive and feisty Michael Ovitz. Ovitz, according to Eszterhas, responded to Eszterhas’ announcement that he was leaving Ovitz and his agency CAA by telling Eszterhas that he, Ovitz, had “foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day” who would “blow [Eszterhas’] brains out.” Such colorful language. Hollywood, like so many other fields of endeavor, is full of emotionally disturbed people who often fancy themselves tough guys.

What brought the denied-by-Ovitz Ovitz pronouncement to mind was a piece that appeared on New York magazine’s Vulture website nearly two weeks ago, by one Brian McGreevy, entitled “Don’t Call Lena Dunham ‘Brave.’” I need not go into the larger substance of the piece here; I’m not a television critic and I’ve already (I think) expressed my opinions on the use of the word “brave” as applied to performers, artists, what have you. What struck me was what came after McGreevy’s largely sensible exhortation that Lena Dunham’s public persona does not necessarily line up with Lena Dunham’s function as a creator or artist. “Lena Dunham is not weak,” McGreevy warns the reader. “Lena Dunham will cut your throat in your sleep.”

“She will do no such thing,” I laughed. I laughed even more because prior to his fulminations in this vein (and there are a lot of them), McGreevy included a clause reading “as a producer.” What has McGreevy produced? According to his bio below the piece, he has executive-produced a Netflix series based on a book he has written.

I know that David Foster Wallace once made mild fun of Susan Faludi for referring to a porn movie set as an “ecology,” but reading McGreevy’s piece I myself found myself contemplating a cultural ecology in which an individual with precisely one producing credit to his name feels sufficiently confident to swing an inflated rhetorical dick around like he’s Mace Neufeld or something (I’ve actually met Mace Neufeld and I doubt he’d stoop to anything so vulgar, or unnecessary). A cultural ecology in which the Internet arm of a major publication will pay probably-not-that-good money for the inflated rhetorical dick swinging. And most of all, a cultural ecology in which consumers are expected to be pleased to be told that Lena Dunham will cut their throats in their sleep.

“[A]ll art is a product of shameless opportunism that deserves to be applauded,” McGreevy continues. “[Dunham] is a woman who has risen through a masculine power hierarchy to become one of the most important culture-makers of the 21st century without compromising her artistic identity, and is fucking a rock star, this is more or less as baller as it gets.”

The unfortunate adolescent quality of McGreevy’s language aside, we are, once again, quite a long way from the ethos of our old friend Andrei Tarkovsky, who once wrote: “Ultimately artists work at their profession not for the sake of telling someone about something but as an assertion of their will to serve people. I am staggered by artists who assume that they freely create themselves, that it is actually possible to do so; for it is the lot of the artist to accept that he is created by his time and the people amongst whom he lives. As Pasternak put it:

“Keep awake, keep awake, artist,

Do not give in to sleep…

You are eternity’s hostage

And prisoner of time.

“And I’m convinced that if an artist succeeds in doing something, he does so nly because that is what people need—even if they are not aware of it at the time. And so it’s always the audience who win, who gain something, while the artist loses, and has to pay out.”

II

Call me crazy, but I see a pretty straight line connecting a skepticism toward the “difficult” in art and “We Saw Your Boobs,” a production number I’ll admit to having missed during its initial broadcast, and still haven’t caught up with. Hostile, ugly, sexist: these are the words that The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson uses to describe Oscar host Seth MacFarlane’s schtick as host of the ceremonies. I have to admit my reaction to some of the outrage (not Davidson's, I hasten to add), in part, is to say, in my imagination, and now here, to a certain breed of multi-disciplinary pop-culture enthusiast, well, you picked your poison, now you can choke on it. It’s all well and good to make “fun,” “irreverence,” “FUBU” or any number of related qualities the rocks upon which you build the church of your aesthetic, or your worldview. But you might want to remember the precise parameters of the choices you made on the occasion that they bite you on the ass. Not to mix metaphors or anything.

Also published on the Internet around two weeks ago, on the website Buzzfeed, was something I guess is referred to as a listicle, entitled “What’s The Deal With Jazz?” in which the author, Amy Rose Spiegel, expressed her immense disdain for the musical form in digital rebus style. She takes immaculate care to only lampoon the white, and rather hackish (per conventional wisdom), practitioners of the form, until the very end, in which she allows “But really, the worst part of despising jazz is when people say ‘No, no, you just haven’t heard the good stuff! Blah blah blah Miles Davis Charles Mingus blah blah blerg.’ Actually, I have. I have, and I hate it.”

Now all this is arguably ignorant, arguably hateful, arguably racist. It excited a fair amount of disapprobation in my circle on Twitter, where it became clear that some of the people complaining about it were friendly with the piece’s “editor,” to whom I myself expressed some displeasure, and she in turn expressed displeasure that I was making it “personal.” Call me crazy, again, but I can’t see too much of a way not to respond “personally” to such a piece. Plenty of people in the “conversation” allowed that, well, Buzzfeed DOES do great things, but that this wasn’t one of them, and that it was regrettable. I see it completely the opposite way. I see “What’s The Deal With Jazz?” as absolutely emblematic of Buzzfeed and all it stands for, just as I see the charming piece called “Django Unattained: How Al Sharpton Ruined A Cool Collector’s Item” as absolutely emblematic of the site Film School Rejects. I know I’m possibly coming off like Susan Sontag yammering about how a million Mozarts could not cancel out the fact that the white race is the cancer of civilization. I’m aware of the good that is out there. But let’s face it: Robert Fure, Amy Rose Spiegel, and tens of thousands of others are eager to bulldoze it, and the Jeff Jarvises of the world are happy to let them do it, if only because it will prove their theories about the Internet to be correct.

In 1998 a couple of writer friends, who I’ll call K and L,  made me the gift of a personal introduction to a man I’ll call D, whose work as a journalist and an artist I had long admired. Our first dinner was at a steakhouse on Tenth Avenue, after which we went to see P.J. Harvey at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Great show, you shoulda been there. Anyway, during the course of the dinner conversation, K was talking about how he had recently seen the movie Belly, a kind of hip-hop gangster movie starring DMX and Nas and directed by Hype Williams. K described his discomfort with the movie and some of its depictions, but was having trouble articulating that discomfort. D, a person of exceptional perspicacity and directness, and someone who had been something of a professional mentor to K in the past, cut to the chase.

“Did you find it morally objectionable?”

K thought this over for a bit. It was clear that he did not want to seem prim. It was also clear that trying to bullshit D wouldn’t do.

“Yes,’ he said. “Yes, I found it morally objectionable.”

D smiled and cut into his steak and said, “Well then you should say: ‘I found it morally objectionable.’”

Dear Kent Osborne,

40 IS a bitch. Man, don’t I know it! I think it was Martin Amis who said—and I’m paraphrasing here—that turning 40 is the most fucked up thing ever for a guy, because it means, for all intents and purposes, that the first half of your life is over, and like, what have you got to show for it, right? You are never going to get that first half back, it’s all downhill from here, you’ve stopped growing, physically, and you’re actually starting to putrefy. You’re on your way to death. Things start going away, right away. In this film about you, Uncle Kent, you start having some problems with your sight—you’ve got to look at certain stuff on paper first farther away, then nearer to you, in order to read. Wow, I’m relatively lucky—I didn’t start getting eye issues when I turned 40, and I still don’t have ‘em, but man, beyond that…well, I gotta admit I was a little surprised and shaken at how much the story told about you in the film Uncle Kent had in common with what I was going through when I turned that age.

The affinities started hitting me pretty early on, as I watched you hunching over your work easel, doing that animation stuff—you apparently work as an animator, whereas I work as a writer, they’re both kinda solitary occupations. And then there was how you live by yourself, and how you drink a lot, and how you smoke a lot of pot, and how you hang out a lot with your cat. See, here’s you, with your cat.

And here’s me, a long time ago, back in my 40s, with my cat.

And my stupid fanboy Akira t-shirt. And my double chin. And my nose hair. Sorry about that. Gosh, how embarrassing.

Now I was never that much of a pot person—until this one period where I got so anxiety-ridden and insomniac that I started smoking it very intently…but I’m getting ahead of myself here—but I definitely had this routine back then of working and drinking and just sort of wallowing in loneliness. And you’re clearly not taking very good care of yourself in other respects. “Check” on that, for me, when I was your age, too. You live in L.A. , so you have a car, and you’re letting that go to shit; I haven’t owned a car in a while (an advantage of a certain mode of urban living, I’d say), but I dare say if I had, well, what’s happening to your car would have happened to mine.

And there’s even more, and here’s where it gets kinda weird!

Aw shucks, & some "#inadequatemovies"

See below...

Like any modern media semi-professional worth his salt nowadays, I am active certain other "social" media. I wouldn't touch Foursquare with whatever it is they're touching it with nowadays, but who knows if I'll ever try Mindsquat or Formspring or whatever that ask-me-questions scheme is—depends on how far I wanna go with my anything-for-a-laugh ethos. Oh, and my available time, too. Any how, I've fixed it so that my blog posts feed directly into my Facebook news stream, or again, whatever, and just a little while ago, apropos my Scott Pilgrim notice, one of my FB friends said one of the nicest things anybody's ever, at least as far as my film writing is concerned. That is: "I appreciate that although you have and continue to share your prejudices and pet peeves, obliquely or otherwise, in your writing, you seem to approach every film with an open mind. The fact that you're a little difficult to peg regarding what you'll like makes your opinion seem both earned and genuine, rather than the result of a collection of predispositions and intellectual/social posturing."

I'm blushing. 

Also, as I've mentioned in a comment, I have, once again, returned to Twitter, this time for good, such as it is. Not to make trouble (and not that I can help that) but out of a perceived need to be "part of the conversation," as I think they say in that hilariously dinky New York Times TV ad. Being Twitter, it's still Twitter, but sometimes fun things happen there. Just the other day, my virtual pal The Futurist! sucked me into a fun meme, "#inadequatemovies." I recognized the idea right away; it's an only slight variant of the old New York Magazine Competition theme of "near-miss nomers," collected in the great book Thanks For The Giant Sea Tortoise in the chapter "From Poland, With Love". (Some of my favorites from that include Man and Batman, The Agony and the Fun, One Of The Greatest Stories Ever Told, and Good Ole Gatsby. One nobody gets anymore: Nicholas and Alexander's.) Many of my own contributions were responses to his, which included Vague References About Eve, Misunderstanding on the Bounty, Baseball Pennants Of Our Fathers (this, for instance, inspired my own Instant Messages From Iwo Jima) and Willie Wonka And The Breath MInt Factory. Gregory Hess, the proprietor of a good blog whose name I like a lot, Blue Collar Film Scholar, tickled me with I Corresponded With A Zombie and The Man Who Scolded Liberty Valance, among others. As for myself, the other day I had a lot of bus-waiting and sitting-around-waiting-for-my-iPod-to-be-pronounced-dead-at-the-Mac-Support-Store to do, so I was just reeling the things off. Here are some I though were pretty good: L'annee derniere a Secaucus; Fan Fiction; Boudu Relieved From Cramping; The Mild Imprecation of the Cat People; The Seventh Inconvenienced Party; Aggravated Assault, My Sweet; Force of Mediocrity; Kiss of Lingering Illness; The Battle of the Slight Protuberance; Chantal Akerman's Ma and Pa Kettle at Home; Abbott and Costello Meet The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit; Varnish Your Wagon; Hercules and the Musty World; and, speaking of making trouble, My Dinner With Eric Kohn.

I do feel my personal best was Pat Garrett and Governer Lew Wallace. BTW, my Twitter handle is ExtAngel if you're interested.