LOST - Subliminal Messages

Looking forward to the Fourth Season Premiere of Lost this evening, last night I rewatched the final episode of Season Three, "Through the Looking Glass." Unlike most Lost episodes - which feature flashbacks - this episode made use of flash-forwards, and in one of those flash-forwards I spotted something interesting. Jack (Matthew Fox) is on an airplane reading a newspaper. He sees an obituary of someone he knows. (We only catch a glimpse of the newspaper page, but you can see it clearly in the frame-grab, above.)

On the same page as the obituary (which we don’t see) is part of a headline, "Residents speak ... proposed coastal ...," and above the headline is a picture of a woman standing at a podium. The image goes by so fast it could be easily read as "President speaks ..." - which is how I did read it at first glance - and the woman at the podium could be read as Hillary Clinton!

I don’t see this as an endorsement. Rather, I believe the Lost creators were playfully trying to predict the future as they think it's going to pan out, and to do so in such a way that they will have "plausible deniability."

* * *

Is Big Media biased in favor of Hillary? That’s what we keep hearing. But consider this. When Ted and Caroline Kennedy endorsed Senator Obama, the story was all over the news. By contrast, when environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - arguably the most progressive of the living Kennedys - endorsed Hillary, Big Media hardly mentioned it. I wouldn’t even have known about the RFK, Jr. endorsement, if I hadn’t read his op-ed piece (co-authored by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Kerry Kennedy) in the Los Angeles Times.

No problemo, officer. I’m sure I was speeding! By the way, nice headlights!

No, your eyes don’t deceive you. That’s Jayne Mansfield handing out the summons, circa 1962, apparently in promotion of something called Charles Brown’s Court Corps.

Want some more of that? (Do I have to ask?) Then go straight to the source, the U.S. Library of Congress! Check out their query page here and search your ass off!

Yes, I did use pretty much the same gag at my own website here. So sue me!

Move On Over, Edna Mae!

Don’t get me wrong. Charlie Sellon was no Edna Mae Oliver. His Betsy Trotwood in the 1931 Broadway production of David Copperfield helped sink that ill-fated production like a stone. But when it came to waving a shotgun, old Charlie took second place to no one, not even old Edna Mae.

Sellon’s scattergun histrionics are on near-constant display in Will Rogers’ last film, In Old Kentucky (1935). The real draws are Rogers himself, pretty funny most of the time, even in blackface, and some serious tapping from Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, although we do have to put up with Robinson being called “boy” on several occasions.*

Sellon’s greatest moment, for which he receives virtually zero credit, came a year earlier in It’s A Gift as the cantankerous (of course) Mr. Muckle, the blind man who nearly destroys W. C. Fields’ grocery store in search of a bag of kumquats.

*In Old Kentucky is available in a four-disc set, The Will Rogers Collection: Volume 1, which also includes John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend, also pretty funny, most of the time, but painfully marred by the presence of Stepin Fetchit, whom I do not like, regardless of what anyone says.

Poster Comparison No. 3

The "teaser" poster for Cloverfield (bottom), following in the footsteps of The Day After Tomorrow (top), suggests that Ms. Liberty is now the unofficial poster girl for apocalyptic sci-fi.

Cloverfield Lover Castigates Critics

Reviewers who have written about Cloverfield fall largely into two categories: (1) those who appreciate the horror and sci-fi genres and who are more than willing to applaud when a genuinely innovative and entertaining genre film comes along; and (2) those who would never be caught dead praising a "giant monster movie" and can think of nothing better to write than that the film "exploits 9/11 imagery." Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats has a response to the latter group:

"Critics who want filmmakers to treat 9/11 and the events that have followed it with kid gloves should be ashamed of themselves for calling for a form of censorship masquerading as ‘sensitivity.’ If Cloverfield is merely ‘exploitive’ then President Bush’s State of the Union speeches must be downright pornographic. How can a society possibly begin to heal itself, much less understand what it’s suffering from, if filmmakers and artists are berated for confronting it head on unless it’s done ‘respectfully’ according to some vague standards outlined by a bunch of film critics? Since most critics have refused to treat horror and science fiction films with any kind of respect for decades, they’re naturally more than willing to attack them when a filmmaker decides to use horrific elements in an artistic or creative way to explore current events. In other words, its okay to make a film with 9/11 imagery that’s laden with social commentary if - and only if - it isn’t a horror or science fiction film, which are by their very nature exploitive according to most critics. I would argue that the film critics who propose that kind of narrow view are just carrying water for the current administration and frankly, I find that much more destructive to our democracy then a well-done giant monster movie that features collapsing buildings and terrified citizens running from an unknown threat."

GreenCine Daily has gathered more links here.

Don’t Repeat That Joke – It May Be Copyrighted!

A group of comedians, including Jay Leno, just settled a lawsuit with "author and comedy teacher" Judy Brown who quoted some of their humor without authorization in books like Joke Soup and The Funny Pages. "I thought it was important to make it clear that jokes are protected like any other art form," Leno said.

The Los Angeles Times has the details here.

Devastating

Heath Ledger found dead at age 28.

Too soon . . .

Oscar-Bait 101: The WaRomancEpic

All genres are equal, but in the eyes of Hollywood, some genres are more equal than others. This becomes particularly apparent during awards season. (This year’s Academy Award nominations have just been announced here.) Hollywood loves its biopics and its big-budget musicals, but if you really want to make sure your film gets those nominations, your safest bet is the WaRomancEpic.

What is a WaRomancEpic? It is any big-budget romance set against the background of some kind of war. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) could be cited as the first example and model for all subsequent WaRomancEpics, except - to Griffith’s credit - he was more genuinely interested in the Civil War and issues related to it than in his young lovers. The mark of a true WaRomancEpic is that it foregrounds the romance elements. The war serves mainly as background to the lovers’ tribulations and - occasionally - as a plot device to separate them. 2007's prime example is, of course, Atonement (above) featuring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy as the young lovers and WWII as the War. Here are some more examples:

Gone With the Wind (1939). War - Civil. Lovers - Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.

Doctor Zhivago (1965). War - Russian Revolution. Lovers - Julie Christie and Omar Sharif.

The English Patient (1996). War - WWII. Lovers - Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Cold Mountain (2003). War - Civil. Lovers - Nicole Kidman and Jude Law.

Get the idea?

Farewell, Suzanne Pleshette (1937-2008)

Actress. Comedienne. Talk show personality. And in The Birds (above, screenplay by Evan Hunter), perhaps the most fully realized of Alfred Hitchcock's dark-haired girls.

GreenCine Daily has links to to the BBC obituary and other tributes here.

Plainview as Nosferatu: "I Drink it Up!"

John Ford taught us to regard every Western as an allegorical comment on America. And most of them are in some way. But Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is so abstract, primal, and fundamentally ambiguous that it lends itself to any number of readings. Which is maybe why cinebloggers can’t stop writing about it. If it doesn't work for you as a Western, try looking at it as a horror film.

Certainly, the film’s central character, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), is a monster. He rises from the dark earth that surrounds him when we first see him like Murnau’s Nosferatu (above). And his obsessive thirst for oil is like a vampire’s thirst for blood. This is even reflected in the title change from book to film - Upton Sinclair’s Oil! becomes Anderson’s Blood. The film conflates all liquids. Oil is the blood of the earth which becomes the metaphorical milkshake that Plainview describes in the film’s climactic scene — "I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!" — while making appropriate sucking sounds. Larry Cohen previously drew an analogy between vampires and capitalists in his Return to Salem's Lot.

It’s not that Plainview sees other human beings as his victims. He sees them as rival vampires competing for the same limited supply of precious fluid. There can be no mercy or fellowship among such monsters. The film ends in the vampire’s moldering castle — in this case, the real-life mansion of oilman Edward Doheny — where Plainview confronts his personal Van Helsing, holyman Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). Usually in confrontations of this kind (see, e.g., Hammer’s vampire films, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula) it is the Man of God who wields the phallic symbols of power, the crucifix and wooden stake. In Anderson’s film, vampire Plainview wields the phallic weapon, a wooden bowling pin.

So this is one of those horror films where the monster survives. Think of the end of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula where the vampire (Frank Langella) is carried away by the breeze leaving the Man of God (Laurence Olivier) behind, shaking his fist impotently at the empty air.

Out Hud - 2008 New Year

I thought now that the smoke's cleared it would be a good time to share my new years movie moment. I was home, too ill to make it to the barn dance, and decided to finally watch HUD (it being a sort of oil fields and Texas movie marathon, in honor of NO COUNTRY and THERE WILL BE BLOOD) - the 1963 black and white character study about a hedonistic son (Paul Newman) of a scrupulously moral old rancher (Melvyn Douglas, amazing and all but unrecognizable).

Aside from some smoldering going on between Hud and Patricia Neal as the hired housekeeper, the main thrust of the plot settles on a possible outbreak of hoof and mouth disease amongst the old man's cattle. Hud votes to keep the outbreak quiet and quick sell off the stock, so as to not lose $$. The old man calls a government vet (Whit Bissell) to come out and quarantine the herd.

In the end all the animals have to be shot, and normally I'd not mention that as to not spoil the show, but the context is everything in this case: I live right on 12th and 2nd ave in the East Village in New York City. Any weekend night is an opportunity for the mesomorphic louts of NYU to get their drink on and shout at the moon like ornery owlhoots on their way home to their dorms after a late night of failin' to score. For new years eve? Those dumbass boys are pissing and vomiting on every corner, hootin' and raisin' quite the ruckus out my 5th floor street-side window.

It's moments like this that make me sure God exists, and that He or She is not without a sense of humor. HUD managed to play out so that, right at the stroke of midnight (in real life time), the cowboys opened fire on the thousands of cattle, all herded together into an about to be bulldozed over pen-pit. It's a grueling, intense scene but the joy was in hearing the guns and moo-cried of the cattle mixing in perfectly with the whooping and hollerin' of the yahoos out my window. Happy New year! Bam! Moo! Bam! Woo-Hoo! Boom! Yeah! boom! Woo Hoo! Noisemakers and guns and mooing intermingling in a joyous mix that made me wonder if it wasn't some Nostradamus-style prediction about 2008 being the year we reinstate the draft.

I share this anecdote for many reasons: the most important though is not to state my imagined Waldo Lydecker-style superiority to those NYU cretins--I may have been just as obnoxious at their age, and certainly drunker--but rather to show how set and setting can really enhance viewing a film.

Another example would be watching AMERICAN BEAUTY as you debate telling your wife you're having an affair with one of your students--ah the resonance! As if the film and your life are reflecting each other in the mirror, or then watching LAST TANGO IN PARIS with that same student, lying on the wooden floor of your rented studio after a tryst. Then, when she leaves you for a younger man, you watch HUSBANDS AND WIVES and cry hysterically all alone with a bottle of cheap whiskey. Get the picture? Life and art go together - feel the poetry and beauty all around you... it's happening and HUD is there.

Lewton/Tourneur - The Lennon & McCartney of Cinema

Orpheus Descending - Kim Hunter (left) in The Seventh Victim

Hunter’s screen sister, Bettie Page-coiffed Jean Brooks (center), intimidated by Greenwich Village Satanists

Bright Lights After Dark tips its hat to the Val Lewton Blogathon hosted here, and encourages its readers to check out the documentary, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, screening tonight and tomorrow on TCM.

Just as John Lennon’s acid cynicism was tempered by the melodic sweetness of Paul McCartney, so the melancholic morbidity of producer/writer Val Lewton was tempered by the subtle spirituality of director Jacques Tourneur. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Seventh Victim (1943), the first film in the RKO horror cycle that was written and produced by Lewton without Tourneur as director.

The supernatural is a living presence in Tourneur's Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943), the three films that preceded The Seventh Victim in the cycle. Tourneur participated in the preparation of The Seventh Victim, but when RKO, impressed by Cat People’s success, promoted Tourneur to "better things," Lewton had to find a new director. He chose Mark Robson, the young editor of the previous three films.

Robson did a superb job channeling Lewton’s vision (closely supervised, of course, by Lewton himself). Although he went on to direct an additional 32 films, including four more for Lewton, The Seventh Victim remains the high point of Robson’s career. The Seventh Victim shares a number of virtues with its predecessors: the subtle acting, the shadowy mise-en-scène, a sensitive female protagonist played in this instance by Kim Hunter (A Streetcar Named Desire) making her screen debut and, most importantly, a treatment of horror that is suggestive rather than overt – Lewton’s trademark.

Where The Seventh Victim differs significantly from the Lewton/Tourneur collaborations is in its utter absence of the supernatural or anything suggestive of a spiritual reality behind physical appearances. This is most apparent in the film’s treatment of its villains, a Satanic cult, presented as a group of pathetically deluded tea drinkers, rather than an organization with genuine mystical powers. The Seventh Victim’s cultists are capable of hiring thugs to carry out their dirty work when needed, and they can force a member to kill him or herself. But convincing a member to commit suicide is accomplished through psychological means - mainly peer pressure - rather than incantations or magical spells. (The sudden appearance of a cult member behind a shower curtain as Ms. Hunter is taking a shower prefigures Hitchcock’s Psycho.)

The Seventh Victim is an unusually morbid film, far more preoccupied with death than Cat People, et al. Indeed, it opens with the following quotation from John Donne: "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday." When someone dies in The Seventh Victim, it is presented as something final – there is no implication that the deceased has moved on to a better (or worse) world. Another aspect of The Seventh Victim that distinguishes it from the rest of the Lewton cycle is its recurring lesbian overtones. Cat People had one memorable quasi-lesbian moment where an oddly dressed woman with a foreign accent approaches Simone Simon and addresses her as "My sister." The Seventh Victim is filled with comparable moments, which many have suggested are accounted for by Lewton’s having grown up with a flamboyantly lesbian aunt, actress Alla Nazimova.

Lewton, like horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, had the conflicted heart of one who was obsessed with the supernatural, but could not accept it on any rational level. It’s amazing to realize this dark, almost nihilistic film - one of the first and most definitive of film noirs - was released in the middle of World War II, when most of Hollywood was churning out support-our-troops, keep-the-homefires-burning type entertainments. It remains Val Lewton’s most personal work.

For more on Lewton, The Seventh Victim, and Tourneur, see my previous posts: The Lewton-Friedkin-Kubrick Connection, and Tourneur’s The Fearmakers.

Orson Welles: The Great Lover

In this excerpt from Brett Thompson's not unworthy 1996 doco, The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the late Maila Nurmi recounts her romance with the one of cinema's great (if grossly over-examined) figures.

Remembering Maila Nurmi (1921-2008)

Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira - actress, comedienne, artist, and horror hostess - was one of the most interesting and extraordinary persons I have ever met.

MAILA KNEW EVERYBODY

The first thing she asked me was, "Are you a genius?" adding, "I only associate with geniuses." Taken aback, I realized that if I wanted to keep talking to her, I had no choice but to answer yes. She then asked me what I did, arts-wise. I told her I took photographs. "Who is your favorite photographer?" she inquired. "Man Ray," I said. "Oh yes," she responded, "I modeled for him."

Her lovers included Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, and James Dean. (I’m not 100% sure she slept with Dean, but they were certainly very close.) She was brought to Hollywood in the late ‘40s under contract to Howard Hawks. She did not sleep with Hawks, which is most likely why she does not appear in any of Hawks’s films.

BLACKLISTED

The original Vampira Show premiered on Los Angeles’s KABC in 1954, and it made her an instant celebrity. She got into a dispute with the network over who owned the rights to the Vampira character, which resulted (according to her) in her being blacklisted. Maila's big media career was essentially over - hardly a year after it began. (She did go on to play small parts in films by Albert Zugsmith, Bert I. Gordon, and - most famously - in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space.)

Knowing she was a friend of Orson Welles’s, I asked Maila whether she believed Welles’s post-Citizen Kane problems were due to the studios, or to his own purportedly "self-destructive" tendencies. She responded without hesitation that it was the studios. Welles, too, was essentially blacklisted – for daring to criticize William Randolph Hearst.

VAMPIRA MEETS CARL JUNG

I once loaned Maila a copy of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. In particular, I wanted her to read the chapter on the "anima," Jung’s term for female archetypes - witches, goddesses, vampires, saints, etc. - that are actually fantasy projections of the inner male psyche, i.e., of the male’s unacknowledged feminine aspects. (When a woman does it, the projection is known as an "animus.") After returning the book Maila declared, "I am an anima."

I have written about Maila previously here and here.

Daniel Day Lewis... the New Dark God of Actors

If you're as hung up on the mythic greatness of THERE WILL BE BLOOD as I am (if you haven't seen it, may I advise you do so?) then you're probably thinking about revisiting his earlier films. The first stop would be GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002), the Martin Scorsese-directed epic in which Lewis plays Bill the Butcher, the obvious forerunner to his Dunkleschlechte Amerikanischer Vater in BLOOD.

With GANGS, Lewis set a very high bar for playing deeply, resonantly mythic, believably larger-than-life characters. No actor since Brando in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE had so powerfully mixed charisma and humor with ambivalence and evil. The sad question is: whose fault is it there aren't more characters like this around? Is it the writers, or the squeamish stars?

I tried to watch GANGS last night, and couldn't get very deep; it kind of sucks. I blame the decision to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the reason. I'm sure Leo's participation got the funds flowing, but it also created the need to appeal to as wide a global demographic as possible (in order to recoup the film's astronomical budget). The dull "nice guy seeking revenge" plot and the pointless love interest with Cameron Diaz are the result--no doubt--of endless rewrites and compromises with the suits. It's sad to contemplate Marty--who once created new standards for cinematic greatness with tough little films about New York--merely striving to carry an "epic" to a coherent conclusion.

Working with a major star is clearly not a good idea: Leo can't have his image tarnished, and so his character is--like the same one he'd play in THE AVIATOR and THE DEPARTED--completely stainless. Even when doused in blood or punching someone's teeth clean out, Leo has to feign being "tortured" by the moral conundrum he's in. And Marty doesn't let a cliche go unturned to prove--as if in some juvenile court--that Leo's character is a "good boy." When Leo and his pal run into a burning building to loot some jewelry, we see that Leo chooses to save his friend rather than grab a big bundle of watches and necklaces. It's the sort of detail that's utterly superfluous except as a balm to the ulcers of Leo's handlers who desperately don't want their boy to ever fall into a character that's morally complex. (I'm no Leo hater; I think he's a very good actor, but lately he's just Tom Cruise with a better knack for accents.)

Granted, certain scenes in GANGS are superb: generally the ones that feature Lewis instead of Leo, such as the opening fight. As for the rest, it's lively but it's also quite phony. Everyone is either smudged with city grit to the point of OLIVER-hood, or else shiny clean, as if they've just stepped out of the Halloween store. There's so much to see and do it's like you're weaving your way through some disorganized open casting call, looking vainly for the exit.

Despite all that, every second Daniel Day Lewis is on screen is a revelation. He takes the force and venom of RAGING BULL and doubles the dose. Tall, feral, supremely confident and menacing, he's the charismatic presence of the movie. The only other actor who seems to have figured out how to enjoy himself in this chaotic faux-squalor is Jim Broadbent as a corrupt politician. His scenes with Lewis at Tammany Hall have a grounding magnetism that helps anchor the rest of the film,

So if you want more prime Lewis but can't abide by the phoniness of Leo, may I suggest instead going in a completely opposite direction? Check AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993), set approx. 20 years after the events in GANGS (and farther uptown). Lewis is the mirror opposite of his BLOOD and GANGS characters as nice guy lawyer Newland Archer, who gives up crazy love for a place at the trough of eternal wealth. Don't judge him; you'll probably do the same some day if you haven't already, you morally complex rat bastard!

Go here to read more on the greatness of the Lewis Persona. And here for more on the lameness of the lately Leo persona.

Giant Monster Smackdown

Screw Aliens vs. Predator. My all-time favorite monster smackdown is Mothra vs. Godzilla aka Godzilla vs. the Thing (Ishiro Honda, 1964). Who knew that a clever female with the ability to spin* could defeat an ancient reptilian?

Something to keep in mind if the winners of the upcoming presidential primaries turn out to be Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

* In Mothra's case, we are talking about the ability to spin silk.

Who do you trust more, Harry Cohn’s ass,* or Matthew Yglesias’ bladder?

Re There Will Be Blood, from Matthew Yglesias:

This is totally awesome. Don't listen to the haters. I realized maybe fifteen minutes into the movie that a sort of had to pee and there were over two hours left and I didn't mind at all because the movie's so utterly great. Daniel Day-Lewis is great. He goes over the top, then picks the top up and puts it on a higher shelf somewhere. Or something. The use of the dissonant score is stunning. The other performances are good. Even the bizarre ending, in context, works for me. Best film of 2007, hands down, if it counts as a 2007 film. [Matt’s italics, totally]

*Columbia Pictures legend Harry Cohn famously judged a picture’s quality by the effect it had on his fanny—stable fanny, good picture; unstable fanny, bad picture.

TOP TEN TOP TENS of 2007

You can't get away from the plethora of top ten lists out there: every year the web grows and so does the opinions. Instead of showing you mine, I've assembled, for your uncertain pleasure, the best top ten lists in film and/or DVD-Video. Here they are in random order:

J. Hoberman, etc. at THE VILLAGE VOICE:
I learned to read and write from the VOICE, and their top tens are always snotty and against the grain. You have to love Hoberman for putting I'M NOT THERE and SOUTHLAND TALES right up at the top, they love Bob Dylan and hate popular opinion even more than I do, maybe.

Kim Morgan at SUNSET GUN: As illuminating and sharp as a broken shard of vanity mirror stabbing you in the desert at high noon, Capt. Morgan nails it once again, delivering concise and trenchant capsules for her favorites, including the sexually/spiritually galvanizing BLACK SNAKE MOAN! Are she and I the only ones who remember that this came out in 2007 and is one of the best films of all time?

Scott Tobias, etc. at THE ONION AV CLUB: The Onion always put out a sweet top ten. I love this opener for Sweeney Todd which comes in at # 7: "In a year dominated by darkness, murder and perversity... it seems fitting... that the movie with the highest body count and blackest sensibility would be a musical."

Joseph A. Ziemba at BLEEDING SKULL: This Ziemba is quite a character: after invoking W.C. Fields he delivers the top ten trashy VHS discoveries of the year. Number 1 on the list is something you and I will hopefully never have to watch, HOLLYWOOD MEATCLEAVER MASSACRE; but how does one not love a descriptive blurb which begins ""When applied with steady calculation, "incomprehensible" becomes not just a word, but an heavenly entity..."

Christophr Borelli at the TOLEDO BLADE - Short, crisp, to the point. He mixes the edgy and rare (SUMMERCAMP) with the popcorny (DIE HARD) and crowns I'M NOT THERE as number one. Unpretentious but intellectually engaged... from Toledo, no less!

Richard Corliss at TIME. Yes they're only slightly better than the NY Times as far as bourgeois back-patting, but Corliss & Co. have assembled not just ten but 50 Top Ten Lists, and aside from whatever softball mainstream tripe they feel obligated to pitch their battered contingents, there's bound to be something under the radar that they champion and thus save from obscurity. That's good work, there, old boys!

Sean Axemaker at MSN for best DVDs of 2007. Did Sean really put PASSION OF THE CHRIST: DEFINITIVE EDTION at number nine? ONLY number nine? Either way, that's mighty Xian, especially since I'm convinced he may have actually watched all 15 hours of BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (at #2). That makes him the real thing. I'm gonna need a mighty wind to even break through the packaging on that one.

Erich Kuersten at ACIDEMIC: With his eye clearly cast into the mystic, shabby shaman-turned-film critic Erich Kuersten (aka ME) rounds up the ten DVD must haves for all those who would explore the dark side of their natures and/or rock out. THE HOLY MOUNTAIN stands tall at number one and it just gets weirder from there.

Craig Phillips at GREENCINE: He's got THE HOST, RESCUE DAWN and PAPRIKA along with the usual suspects. You can tell he aint shillin' - this guy loves these movies and has probably seen most of them more than once... that's my kind of writer! Plus who doesn't love Greencine?

Glen Abel at DVD SPIN DOCTOR. A Self-described "bleary-eyed LA entertainment writer, Glen Abel's list remembers to include BECKET (referencing a great Peter O'Toole commentary track) and the 40th anniversary JUNGLE BOOK (the Disney one, with Phil "That's What I Like About the South" Harris as Baloo the Bear). Hmm, if this man is wrong, I don't want to be right!

Cary Grant! So totally gorgeous! And so totally NOT GAY!

Benjamin Schwarz, literary editor of the Atlantic, apropos of just about nothing at all, as far as I can determine, bursts into joyous praise of Cary Grant here. Well, I like Cary as much as the next galoot, but I can’t help noticing that Bennie, in all his enthusiasm, passes over a few things, LIKE THE FACT THAT CARY WAS GAY. Even so manly an author as Tom Wolfe couldn’t help but be impressed by Cary’s wardrobe: “all worsteds, broadcloths and silks, all rich and underplayed, like a viola ensemble.”*

Schwarz correctly notes that My Favorite Wife** was Cary’s breakthrough pic, “seemingly from nowhere the Cary Grant persona gloriously appeared, fully formed.” But he doesn’t note that Cary hated working on the flick, distrusting director Leo McCarey’s improvisatory approach, and fought to be taken off the picture! As I explained here! (Carefully cribbing from Marc Eliot’s excellent 2005 bio of Cary.)

*Yeah, Tom, exactly like a frickin’ viola ensemble! Exactly!

**OK, not so much. As Erich points out, Cary's breakthrough pic was The Awful Truth, which I totally knew. This is what happens when I crack a forty before 10 AM. Stupid! Stupid!

2007: A Look Back in the Old Texas Rearview Cinema

I am heralding 2007 as the year American cinema re-embraced Texas-sized ambiguity and best you do the same. Everyone's got a good thing to say about old NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and hell, I do too. But what's it got to say about us? The canny Coens have yet again turned to their profitable roots of widescreen empty vistas contrasted with cramped interiors full of wood paneling and old craggy faces with bright blue eyes. Guns and deceit and ruthlessness! Outlaws and quirky humor and a vanishing point-plot! And number two, the close proximity of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, which not all of us have seen but all of us would like to. Burning oil is in the wind, we can smell the change a-comin' and our cinema, as always, is the first to fall over and play dead, like a coal miner's canary (if I may mix fossil fuel metaphors).

In addition to the vista-building and vista-tearing down of OLD MEN, Texas is represented in both of the GRINDHOUSE movies: PLANET TERROR and DEATH-PROOF. What we've got here is the big empty (and deep focus opportunities) of Texas and its Mexican border as a ground zero of post-modern indie marketing/mass appeal. We're always interested to see what's happening on the genre border between the western and urban film noir, between black comedy and pure horror, between character drivin' mythic archetpye-reworkin' and sudden lashings of the ultra-violent. Even if the marketers couldn't figure out how to create a GRINDHOUSE zeitgeist (and maybe it just wasn't possible), the very existence of the films has created a po-mo ripple in time unseen since the bullets of the very first MATRIX, almost a decade ago.

Where Rodriguez and Tarantino failed (Can you see them as the grown-up editions of the two babies seen at the fade-out of GIANT?), the crafty Coens have succeeded... they've crossed-over yet again on the FARGO bridge of indie-flagstoniness: and even now, on the verge of a new year, NYC's Union Square Cinema regularly sells out many a NO COUNTRY showing. What does this mean for 2008? Well, of course it will mean more of the same... more of the same. It means once again the "art" of the indie has found a format with which to wed itself to the box office, AKA, backwards into the deep attic, the old film noir moral ambiguity to the rescue. Well, maybe not the rescue... but at least the R.I.P.

What it means is though the masses are still not ready for an American Godard (the pre-68 Godard being Tarantino and the post-68 being LIONS FOR LAMBS/REDACTED), we may be ready for an American Claude Chabrol, since he is the French Hitchcock. In fact and do se do, we can trace the Coens in a nice little circle from BLOOD SIMPLE all the way back to BLOOD SIMPLE 2: LESS SIMPLER. And we like to have something to trace, rather than having to watch someone else paint from scratch. Tarantino splatters us some post-pop art so we can interpret any which way, but the Coens give us what we really want for Christmas: Sudoku.

The Coens love circles... who doesn't? In NO COUNTRY, locks come flying off in all directions leaving beautiful round holes in which to have light issue, peeping tom doors of perception through which one is able to read at least one thing: a circle! The hula hoops in HUDSUCKER, the hair cream tins in BROTHER; the hubcaps in MAN WHO WASN'T THERE... What do they mean? Exactly! Take ZODIAC, the amazing police procedural that disappears into the same plot void which drowned the old LEBOWSKI, Again, all you're left with in the end is the shuddering realization that "Hurdy Gurdy Man" is the scariest song ever written. And then in the other corner, you've got Tommy Lee Jones playing more or less the same character in both NO COUNTRY and IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, that is to say, the leather face of America as it looks off from the Medusa-eye view of the circular zodiac watch screen and crumbles to dust. There's no easy answers, not no more.

That's the modern art response--that slap of humble realization, it's finally back. I, for one, am ecstatic... in theory and from a safe, ironic distance. We leave the theaters shaken now, not elated. We go to get our mortality handed to us on a platter and since we've been starving for something not over-chewed by someone else, we don't even notice if it's too bland. It doesn't matter, what matters is the nutrients.

This is the inevitable come-down of too many years of MGM-a-go-go escapism, of block buster buzz, aka "the empty carbs." The cinema of 2007 was a cinema in transition, the slow rising from the couch and now the uncertainty as to what next. The movies are now no longer a place to escape, but to "wake up" and smell the burning oil. We realize with some shame we've been wading far too long in the kiddie pool and it's time at last to take a lap above the deep end... even if it means no more free towels. The 2007 cinema year ends with the same feeling of epiphany and mute horror that comes from waking up from a drunken black-out.

And so I say, Cheers and happy new year to the Coens and Fincher and Tarantino and Rodriguez! It hurts now, but it will feel better later, when we're all growed up and once again the cinema will be there to reflect, refract and otherwise lead by imitation. And cheers to Josh Brolin! His super cool moustache and blazing eyes are the doorway back into 70s of tomorrow. And long may this new ambiguity reign, Texas-style! Click here to read a less cleaned-up and more Texas-specific version of this 2007 cinema toast..and Happy New Year!