What's the lowdown on Slumdog?

That's precisely what a number of folks are attempting to ascertain in light of the accolades this British/US film (shot in the underbelly of India) is receiving. It very well might take the grand prize at this year's Academy Award ceremony, although the uproar from Indian intelligentsia (whose criticisms of the film range from "it's poverty porn" to "it's too fantastical to be taken seriously") has been notable. Director Danny Boyle has also come under scrutiny due to the meager compensation his crew offered to the Mumbai waif actors -- handpicked from genuine slums and dramatically trained to emote with a a deftly composed mixture of psychological realism and more traditional child-like wide-eyed wonder (their performances were, for me, the highlight of the film). Some have also made the argument that as a western movie (albeit one strongly influenced by eastern traditions, especially Bollywood) it lapses into global condescension and Hollywood cliché far too often.

From a theoretical vantage point it's hard for a US citizen like me who's never been anywhere aside from Latin America to argue or even attempt to revise the Indian perspectives, although both sides of the debate have voiced cogent readings. But it's within the narrative itself -- and not the social aura surrounding it, or even any events that may have occurred during the production that may implication institutional third-world exploitation -- that I think we find the most troubling issues, and this wouldn't change (at least not for me) even if the film had been made by a completely Indian cast and crew and forged in the vulcan smithery of Bollywood itself (I admittedly haven't read the source material, though I'd like to, and I don't know how many of these issues exist in the original text, entitled Q & A).

The "slumming," if we can call it that, may or may not border on exploitative depending on your view. One could argue that films are nearly always exploitative in their representation, so I tire of these simplistic arguments. But within Slumdog Millionaire's primary storytelling gimmick the hardships of poverty are what redeem the protagonist and allow him to obtain his fortune (quite literally, due to the random queries he's asked on the quiz show). Worse, because he is a "slumdog" (western nomenclature not in the original text), all of Mumbai watches on as he's perched in the inquisition throne, projecting their hopes of success and deliverance onto him. The film thusly becomes a social mobility parable where figurative and abstract "riches" (bits of arbitrary information, sheer honesty, compassion, courageousness) undergo a kind of transubstantiation and produce or even become literal riches. But the symbolism sours when, at the film's end, the poor remain poor. The rich remain rich. The Muslim remain Muslim and the Hindu remain Hindu, and they remain at each other's throats. The brutal caste system remains. The protagonist's trajectory has not been heroic or socially relevant: he is a contrivance, and the film's sidesteps the questionable economic overtones in the film's finale by, of course, centering on the love story. Thus, we have a social mobility parable with no moral -- the "slumdog" aspects are incidental, only to widen the divide between the main character and his love (imagine what kind of an exercise WALL-E would have become if the ending had excised all references to the ecological subtext and merely featured Wall-e and Eve's reconciliation. Director Andrew Stanton has attempted to gloss over his film's environmentalism in interviews, but the artwork itself thankfully tells a very different and much more complexly rewarding story).

I'm reminded a bit in my explanation above by Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, a similar yarn albeit with far more advanced satire. The argument of that book, aside from the very obvious if farcical call for empathy that it turns into with children's editions, at a basic level was speaking to the universality of human nature and the odd but unalterably unfair fashion in which we are "born into" class systems by luck, randomness, or cosmic crap-shooting (studies have shown that socio-economic background is the single most crucial factor in deciding a child's career path, at least here in the states). But Slumdog's protagonist is a pauper who becomes a prince sans a ready-to-swap double -- and his climb is because of his very pauperism, rather than because of his superior humanism or intelligence (his knowledge of the quiz answers are entirely incidental, albeit branded on the brain). This is not a novel concept but the film seems to be convinced that this alone is heroic, when the protagonist's wealth in the end helps no one aside from himself and his hard-won bride (is this different in the novel?). This is where the exploitation becomes a bit much to bear -- we've watched the very real suffering of children and adolescents so that they can flaccidly dance us through the credits. There's an uncomfortable disconnect between the film's verisimilitude, it's Hollywood structure, and it's vapid message.

I would be willing to accept that perhaps some of my opinion is due to my ignorance of Indian culture, although judging from the criticism the film has endured in that country it's doubtful. As an east-west global united art-front, Slumdog Millionaire is a bit of a "Shamdog Millionaire".

Poster Comparison No. 5 - How to Market a Stoner Film

Have your character – or characters – surrounded by clouds or smoke, completely divorced from any kind of earthbound reality.

Your characters – or at least one of your characters (Anna Faris in Smiley Face, James Franco in Pineapple Express) – should display a goofy euphoric grin.

Remember, stoners do not dress well. Faded blue jeans and sneakers are preferable attire.

Be sure to come up with a cute coy catch phrase that lets the public know your film is about smoking and getting high. Something like, “High. How are you?” (Smiley Face), or “Put this in your pipe and smoke it.” (Pineapple Express).

"Bromance" is generally a subtext in the successful stoner film, so make sure your main characters are male. Smiley Face was one of the funniest stoner comedies ever made, but nobody went to see it ‘cause it starred a girl.

Poster Comparison No. 4

How close are these two images? When I first glimpsed the poster for Friday the 13th (2009) at a bus stop, I thought it WAS a poster for The Dark Knight.

Both posters employ dark blue backgrounds to set off a darker blue figure centered in the foreground. Both figures are wearing masks. The fiery bat used to emphasize Batman in The Dark Knight poster is echoed by the moonlight shining through the clouds used to emphasize the figure of serial killer, Jason, in Friday the 13th. The skyscrapers above Batman, bending toward the top center of the Dark Knight poster are echoed by the trees above Jason, bending toward the top center of the Friday the 13th poster. The titles of the two films are placed at the bottoms of the posters. (Nothing unusual about that.) At the top of The Dark Knight poster are the words, "WELCOME TO A WORLD WITHOUT RULES." At the top of the Friday the 13th poster are the words, "WELCOME TO CRYSTAL LAKE." Hmmm.

Other than their poster images, what do the two films have in common? Very little actually. Batman is a hero, albeit a multidimensional one with some dark aspects. Jason, the villain of Friday the 13th, is a one-dimensional psychotic killing machine. The Dark Knight's setting is urban. Friday the 13th's setting is rural.

So why should Friday the 13th promote itself with an image virtually stolen from The Dark Knight? Could it be that the producers of Friday the 13th, well aware of The Dark Knight's phenomenal success, wanted to attract some of The Dark Knight's massive audience through unconscious association? I think you already know the answer to that one.

The Hotter Younger Sister Thing - Part One: Diana Lyn in MIRACLE AT MORGAN'S CREEK

What is it that makes the hotter, smarter younger sister so much more sophisticated, precocious, intelligent and adorable than the older lead in movies? Maybe it's because she's free of the normalizing effect of mature sexuality. The younger girl compensates for her lack of sexuality by satirizing it, exaggerating her girlish longing in the style of the soaps her older sister watches, posing in adult fashions she's gleaned from the magazines. She doesn't need to mind the rules of the code; she's still a nymph at play who could hurl herself into the arms of the hero without worry he would abuse her trust, at least that was how it was until the 1980s when Satanic panic, daycare scandals and America's Most Wanted relegated all precocious childhood behavior, and any and all older man-younger girl friendships--no matter how platonic--to the bin marked "incestuous evil."

Of course the Humbert Humberts are out there, but not every guy is so misguided that he mistakes any sign of affection as a sexual come-on. I'm no angel, but I know how to cultivate and help rather than hurt, yet society labels me a monster... a fiend. But one day I will build a race of Atomic Supermen and... wait, what? Oh yeah, anyway to celebrate the beauty and quick wit of the little sisters of cinema, I present "The Hotter Younger Sister Thing" - my follow-up to 2007-8's series, Great Dads of the 70's.

DIANA LYNN AS EMMY KOCKENLOCKER in MIRACLE Of MORGAN'S CREEK (1944, dir. Preston Sturges)

Preston Sturges always seemed to do better with his minor characters than his leads, who were often moronic guys in the grasp of more intelligent forces. In Miracle, we have perhaps the most shrill of leading couples -- the overplaying schnook Eddie Bracken and the brassy, moralistic to a fault Betty Hutton. Luckily William Demarest is in the picture as Betty's two-fisted loudmouth papa, and Diana Lyn her canny, witty extraordinarily cool little sister, Emmy. A real pal to the much more dimwitted Hutton, the thin and demure Diana schemes, plans, plays barrel house boogie-woogie on Christmas Eve and regularly jumps on papa's back to keep him from slugging Bracken.

This would all be kind of tragic in anyone else's hands but Demarest's, who in one scene actually shoves his younger daughter so hard she falls back onto the porch steps. In a movie made today, poor Emmy would have broken a collar bone, been rushed to the hospital, and child custody services would have thrown dad into the slammer. Instead she just shrugs it off and jumps back into the fray.

What's interesting too is the lack of moody underscoring that this guy is an abusive dad (if this was made today there'd be ominous music cues every time he glowered) Before he makes up for all his anger management problems with a heartbreaking scene of support for a distraught Hutton, Demarest fumes and shouts and bullies his daughters, neither of whom bat an eyelash or take any of it seriously, except to worry he'll hurt Bracken, who breaks just like a little girl (as opposed to Lyn, who is unbreakable).

Notice how Demarest complains about Diana's piano playing, but never tells her to stop. He doesn't expect his gruffness to be taken seriously either. He overreacts to non-issues but when the shit hits the fan, he reacts like a champ, and his younger daughter is his perfect foil all the way -- aiding abetting, infuriating. Love and irritation go hand in hand in this real dysfunctional family, where each element finds its own brave niche to thrive in while dealing with the insanity of the other members. Forced to raise two daughters without a mom in the house, Demarest does it the only way he knows how, as a blustery cop, and The amazing Diana Lyn rides him like a law-breaking anarchist every step of the way. The dads of today who try to be "friends" with their kids should take a lesson from Demarest, and the Wrestler for that matter, and learn to enjoy expressing their familial love via dramatically staged combat. Sometimes they need a shoulder to cry on, but some times they also need an ogre to scream at. The dad who can play the ogre when needed, but still have a light heart--in short he enjoys his "ogre" role rather than succumb to ogreish temperament--he sir, is a man for me.

The Video That Explains Exactly What’s Wrong With ‘Benjamin Button’

Many thanks to Jim Emerson for posting this. (He says he found it at the Daily Dish.)

Too good not to share.

The Lodger x 2

In 1944, John Brahm directed his suspensful period noir, The Lodger, starring the wonderfully silken-voiced Laird Cregar (above left) as a mysterious rooming house guest who may or may not be Jack the Ripper.

When I heard a Lodger remake was planned for the 2000s, and that it would star Alfred Molina (above right), my first thought was - Not a bad idea. Who better to step into Cregar's sinister-but-fey shoes than the equally gifted Molina? They even look somewhat similar.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the role played by Molina in the current Lodger remake is not that of the title character, but the detective investigating him (the role played by George Sanders in the Brahm version).

Even worse, where Brahm's version was set in foggy 19th Century London, allowing the German-born director to fully indulge his considerable talent for atmosphere (see still, immediately below),

the 2009 remake, directed by David Ondaatje, is set in contemporary West Los Angeles, and, judging by the still below (with Simon Baker and Hope Davis), has about as much genuine atmosphere as a crime show shot by a TV hack. Yucch!


CINEHISTORICAL NOTE: Although Brahm's version is, to my mind, the best version of The Lodger, it was not the first. That honor belongs to a 1927 British silent film directed by a young fella named Hitchcock (whatever happened to him?) and starring Ivor Novello in the title role. Fans of the 2001 Robert Altman film Gosford Park (in which Ivor Novello was a character) will recall that Novello also produced and starred in a 1932 sound remake of The Lodger that flopped.

Not unlike, I suspect, the 2009 version.

Dieu Bless Cahiers

Although the film was completely ignored by the Academy, the Golden Globes, and most U.S. American year-end lists, I am delighted to see that Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield was selected by the venerable French film magazine, Cahiers du Cinema, as one of the 10 Best Films of 2008.

For the record, the Academy’s nominations for the Best Picture of 2008 are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (yawn), Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire. I daresay Cloverfield – with its carefully and cleverly limited point of view – was more formally interesting than any of them.

Seems like we still have to contend with the same genre prejudices (A monster film? No way!) that have plagued American film critics and the organizations that reflect their attitudes since Year One. God Bless the French.

Other notable Oscar snubs: Synecdoche, New York and Vicky Cristina Barcelona for Best Original Screenplay. Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino) for Best Actor. Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) for Best Actress.

[Thanks to Cinematical for the Cahiers heads-up.]

Obama Channels Astaire

Obama’s Inaugural Address was memorable. Obama’s speeches generally are. But the line I hear quoted from it most often comes not from the Bible, Abraham Lincoln, or our Founding Fathers, but from ... Fred Astaire. You know the one I’m talking about:

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."

It’s a paraphase, almost a verbatim quote, of a lyric from the song "Pick Yourself Up" sung by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in the 1936 RKO musical, Swing Time (above).

Does Obama identify with Astaire? There are the ears, of course, and the general slimness of physique. Most important, there is the incomparable grace of Astaire, the grace aspired to by a moviegoing generation who hoped, like Astaire, to transcend through that grace the Great Depression, economic and psychological, that surrounded them.

Which makes Obama’s (surely conscious) homage to Astaire particularly apt. We all know we are going through something like a second Great Depression. And in our hearts we hope to get through it the way our grandparents eventually did – with the help of role models like Astaire, or in the present case, a President who apparently seeks to channel the physical and spiritual grace of an Astaire. Transcendence is wherever you find it.

In the meantime, here are the lyrics (written by Dorothy Fields to the music of Jerome Kern) that Obama paraphrased, as good a summation of his message as any:

Nothing’s impossible I have found,
For when my chin is on the ground,
I pick myself up,
Dust myself off,
Start all over again.

The Incredibly Strange Ray Dennis Steckler (1938-2009)

Bright Lights After Dark pauses to remember Ray Dennis Steckler, denizen of Hollywood and Las Vegas, a truly independent filmmaker who was anathema to the studios, but who nonetheless managed to produce, direct, and often star in a series of mostly self-financed and self-distributed horror/noir/comedy/rock ‘n roll films with titles like Wild Guitar, The Thrill Killers, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher.

His film career began auspiciously enough with a credit as Director of Photography on Timothy Carey’s The World’s Greatest Sinner. His best known film was The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1963), directed by Steckler at the age of 24, and promoted as "The World’s First Monster Musical." In the clip above, we see Steckler, acting under the name"Cash Flagg," as a hypnotically controlled assassin murdering a showgirl played by his beautiful and leggy wife, Carolyn Brandt. The murder is followed by a remarkable dream sequence featuring Steckler (doing ballet leaps), Brandt (with her face painted red), and a bevy of chorus girls.

According to ReSearch’s Incredibly Strange Films, an indispensable reference book whose title is an homage to Steckler, Zombies was shot on a budget of $15,000 for lab costs, $6,000 for editing, $5,000 for cast, $5,000 for crew, $1,000 for score, and $6,000 for rentals. László Kovács (Easy Rider) and Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deer Hunter) were the cinematographers.

Roughly two dozen feature films later, Steckler’s last completed project, according to Wikipedia, was Incredibly Strange Creatures: One More Time, a sequel to Zombies shot on Digital 8 video at a cost of $3,800. This was a guy who loved films and filmmaking.

Check out his "Girls Only" MySpace page.

What do Terrence Malick and Steely Dan have in common? Part 1

• Let's start with the most obvious correlation, other than perhaps the fact that both artists are likely to appeal to folks like me who strongly identify with the technical experimentation and pervasive undercurrent of disillusionment that characterizes most mid-70's masterworks. Which is that both Terry and Steely (Donald Fagan/Walter Becker) -- working on their own or with a collective of professionals -- are utter masters of craft, individuals who are self-proclaimed students of their respective modes of expression (as well as others) and steeped in both the language of tradition and innovation. True, Malick never performed a cinematic tip of the hat analogous to the Dan's covering "East St. Louis Toodle-oo," but there are plenty of buried allusions to silent, classic, and (what would have been fairly) recent filmic tropes (the flying circus unexpectedly landing in Days of Heaven is like something out of a gentler Renoir, or Claude Berri, or maybe Pagnol). Malick and the Dan approach their films/albums or scenes/songs as puzzles to be solved, then fragmented again, and presented, ever richer, to the public. The angular chord changes of "Black Cow" and the odd imagery of The Thin Red Line are both mind-bogglingly complex and intuitive: the mark of both expertise and long, grueling, deliberate production. We cannot blame either for their 20-year hiati.

• Both careers have also had clear enough trajectories. They had student efforts (You Gotta Walk it Like You Talk it and Lanton Mills), a fast maturation period (Badlands and Can't Buy A Thrill) and delivered bonafide masterpieces on their full-length sophomore efforts. The difference is that the Dan continued and unleashed a virtually unchallenged string of gems whereas Malick left his gestation after Days of Heaven up to the imagination of the public. I hesitate to claim that Malick may have the upperhand here in the sense that we feel the Dan growing more cynical by the album, not only towards the music industry but towards the human race in general, until Everything Must Go is so misanthropic that it doesn't seem to care whether we listen to it or not. Malick may have spared his ego the scarring experience of failure and abuse by dropping out of the film scene, and I'm also fairly certain he was never hit by a car while a newbie engineer was erasing his favorite track off the new album (Becker's experience from Gaucho, for those who might be lost). Still, I would not characterize either of their approaches as humanistic or even human -- but where the Dan spits venom Malick seems more humbly fascinated.
  

• Both artists methodically shape their objects in layers, leaving nothing to happenstance. A Malick script with copious dialog is just as likely to wind up wordless after months of post-production tinkering and ADR. A Steely Dan record with 13 tracks in the can is just as likely to be released with 9, several of which might have been hollowed and digitally re-constructed, with guitar solos patched from earlier sessions, etc. Malick and Fagan/Becker tend to work furtively and independently, aside from the efforts of a crew who's prime objective is to realize his/their vision with the least amount of essence-loss possible (producer Gary Katz, editor Billy Weber, etc). The length of time they spend on their art -- and their clear devotion to perfection -- means that some dismiss the end result as too glossy, too smooth, or too calculated. Indeed, there isn't much spontaneity, even in Badlands (with all its gorgeous, muted violence) or Countdown to Ecstasy (where the guitar and keyb solos seem to have been manneredly pre-written). But some would argue that the hyperkinetic, spontaneous style of a Godard or a Sun Ra lends itself to predictability just as often, if not more, than the draconianaly scripted. Both Malick and Dan recognize the spiritual alchemy of captured and controlled energy -- their works seldom climax, but they seldom fall apart.

• They mostly allow others to take center stage as meets the eye/ear -- Martin Sheen or Néstor Almendros or Larry Carlton or Elliot Randall -- and yet even these instrumental wizards strike us as pawns on the director's chessboard. Our tendency is to praise the performance that Malick coaxed from Colin Farrell or Richard Gere rather than the actor, just as we marvel at how delectably placed a Rick Derringer improvisation is in "Third World Man". It's not that the director(s) hasn't/haven't allowed any hint of the individual personality of his/their players, as is the case with Bresson. Malick marvelously allows Sissy Spacek, Sam Sheperd, and Q'orianka Kilcher to be as they are, probably with more magnanimous freedom than is often bestowed in the movies. Similarly, the Dan allowed safe havens for (after the post-Pretzel Logic breakup of the band proper) the studio geniuses of Jeff Pocaro, pre-Doobies Michael McDonald, and Larry McCracken, individuals who would have surely languished, band-less, in the session-snub days of pre-punk had it not been for the open arms of ABC/MCA (and the revolving door of Joni Mitchell's backing group/potential sex objects). But each director also knew how to use these individual personalities to best meet his own/their own goals with expediency. The pieces seem singular and alive, but the glue and the backdrop are academic and all-encompassing: Malick and the Dan visually/aurally pin their painstakingly preserved dragonflies to an audaciously auteur felt tapestry.

• A simpler point, but both artists have used bleeding edge technology/methods in a disastrous manner befitting modern myth. The mad restructuring and over-dubbing of Days of Heaven is well-known, as is the fact that shooting took place primarily during "Magic Hour" -- which, as Malick himself later pointed out, is a bit of a misnomer given that it only lasts about 20 minutes. The Dan have also been perpetually plagued by technical ambition. The story behind their shamanic mixing of Katy Lied is like a studio fairy-tale -- the new DBX anti-noise mechanisms (and a strange incident with a very humid control room) wrecked what could have been the most artfully assembled album of all time, up to that point. The horns of "Doctor Wu" and "Throw Back the Little Ones," as well as an expertly orbiting piano/guitar solo in "Bad Sneakers" -- perhaps the only remaining remnants of this original plan -- appear to be haloed in dying sun.

Read Part 2 over at The POWERSTRIP.

20 Actor Meme

For the Actress Meme I chose the theme of actresses I fell in love with, and the movies I fell in love with them in. For actors it's men I admire in the sort of older brother I never had way. I like them tough, but not that tough, not tough to the point of camp, like jocks but tough to the point of being brave enough to be their whole self, feminine side and all, and yes, that includes John Wayne. Tough enough to hold their liquor and never let go of it, or facsimile thereof, and yes, that includes Dick Burton. They exhibit none of the self-righteous narcissism (Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, Andy Garcia), spastic insecurity (Jerry Lewis, Chris Tucker) or neutered blandness (Fred MacMurray, Greg Kinnear) of my least favorites.

The other type on this list are guys who I just adore because they are total freaks, and yes, that means Peter Lorre. These guys may not get the girl or destroy the world like they'd like, but in the end, isn't it better to have a spectacular death scene than a happy ever after?

Obviously these in no particular order, except in a sitting them around the dinner table sense, i.e. aesthetically. In addition to listing the films in which I most fell in love with them I've supplied a favorite quote from one of the movies. If you know which movie each quote is from then I love you like I love the rain, and the autumn leaves, and pills.

1. Cary Grant - His Girl Friday, Only Angels Have Wings
"I don't care if there's a million dead!"
2. Vin Diesel - Fast and the Furious, XXX
"What'd you put in that tuna?"
3. Peter Lorre -The Face Behind the Mask, M
“People who look at me, they see a mask – artificial. But the face behind the mask — it’s mutated, hideous, a horrible nightmare out of which I can never awake!”
4. Humphrey Bogart -- The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not
"Or a Ben Hur 1860 with a duplicated line on page 16?"
5. Bela Lugosi - -The Raven, Dracula
"I tear torture out of myself by torturing you!"
6. John Wayne - Rio Bravo, El Dorado
"Want another beer? You kind of wasted some of that last one."
7. Lee Marvin - Cat Ballou, The Wild One
"Sir, if I could just have a nip to steady my hands"
8. Javier Bardem - Dance with the Devil, Live Flesh
"You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? That's from Batman"
9. Robert Duvall - Apocalypse Now, The Apostle
"Outstanding, Get you a case of beer for that one."
10. Marlon Brando - Streetcar Named Desire, Last Tango in Paris
"You have to go into the ass of death, into the womb of fear..."
11. Rutger Hauer - Bladerunner, Nighthawks
"I've done some... questionable things."
12. Christopher Walken - King of New York, Wild Side
"It's because you're peachy... because you're fucky."
13. Josh Brolin - Planet Terror, American Gangster
"No more dead bodies for daddy tonight."
14. Jason Robards - Long Day's Journey into Night, Ballad of Cable Hogue
"I want you to succeed so bad, I'm gonna to do everything in my power to make you fail."
15. Orson Welles - Touch of Evil, MacBeth
"Ah, it's either the candy or the hooch... wish I could say it was your chili I was gettin' fat on, Varla."
16. William Powell -- The Thin Man, My Man Godfrey
"That's not true, he never came anywhere near my tabloids."
17. Jon Voight -- Runaway Train, Coming Home
"Come on! I got nothin' left to live for!"
18.Richard Burton -- Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Night of the Iguana
"You're either a stud or a houseboy so which is it?'
19. Paul Robeson - The Emperor Jones, Showboat
"Look here white man, there's little stealing like you does, and there's big stealing like I does."
20. Daniel Day Lewis - There Will Be Blood, Gangs of New York
"Now that's a wound."
RUNNERS UP: Montgomery Clift, Robert Mitchum, Dean Stockwell, Mickey Rourke, Warren Oates, Paul Newman, Boris Karloff, John Barrymore, Dennis Hopper, Larry Fishburne, Harvey Keitel, James Coburn, Sean Connery, Akim Tamiroff, Roger Livesey, Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable, Roy Scheider, Gene Hackman, Nick Nolte, Jean Paul Belmondo, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Kenneth Tobey, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Peter Sellers, Anton Walbrook, Kris Kristofferson, Max Von Sydow, Clark Gable, Rod La Roque, Richard Widmark, Laird Cregar, Chester Morris, Charles Laughton

Happy-Go-Naked

Attention all independent cinemas: here’s a ready-made double-feature. Two films from British auteur Mike Leigh joined to form the portmanteau mirror image “Happy-Go-Naked”. While admitting patrons into the screening room, pass out the following program notes (with or without the complementary image above):

There is a wormhole of symmetry between the underbellies of Naked and Happy Go Lucky. As evidence we point to the swollen, purple pockets of film containing Johnny/Poppy and Louise/Scott. Is there any real difference between viewing the world as essentially good or essentially evil? Both perspectives take much courage and many liberties, as well as enabling the seer to assume a lofty, predatory station. Johnny preys on the weak; Poppy on the cynical. Johnny beats, he berates, he maniacally pontificates – Leigh and Thewlis might have imagined him as a gritty, realistic diatribe against Thatcher but in the 21st century he seems more like a hypereal antidote to the conservative narrative. Poppy beams, she prances, she plays the pedagogue quite well – but does she acknowledge an existence beyond the one that her construction-paper-arts-and-crafts pupils create? These are two films about solipsist teachers – teachers of men, of children, of drivers – who are too overwhelmed with the world around them to act normal. Johnny’s festering mind rejects the love of Louise just as Poppy’s doughy compassion pushes away Scott’s fevered paralysis, only to embrace a prêt-a-port romance. These movies are the opposite wings of the same swan-diving, spontaneously-combusting butterfly – and beware the larvae. Mike Leigh is a social observer, yes, but he’s also a dramatist, and a shrewd one.

The Tao of Poverty Row

In the rush to "clean up" the images of classic cinema, to remove every speck and splice digitally, etc., are we not also losing something? What about the blurry, hazy artifact-ridden images of yesterday, the streaky bad-tracking VHS blurs and statics? Was there really no "point" to that "accidental" art you spent so much time looking at but never "seeing"? Before CGI there was something called imagination...

I recently watched a DVD I'd made of TOMORROW WE LIVE, a very obscure PRC film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer from 1942. It stars Ricardo Cortez as a literally insane gangster called the Ghost out in some very abstract minimalist version of Nevada, based abstractly on Lucky Luciano or Bugsy Siegal. The Ghost runs a threadbare nightclub from his checkered office, and when he gets a load of sexy Jean Parker he flips out, busting some playa moves and spouting some cool hand luke philosophy. Her old man (PRC veteran old man character actor, Emmett Lynn) runs a diner and rents out sheds for presumably illegal wartime spare tires; he slaps her when she comes home from college and accuses him of lying about the tires. No one seems certain what "tone" to play their scenes in, and so a mood swinging sense of insanity pervades. They call Cortez "the Ghost" because he has a bullet in the brain from the second time the mugs tried to kill him, which explains his insanity and why he has only a few years left to live... and love! The warring gang muscling up against the Ghost's piece of the action are cowboys and towards the end they beat up the Ghost and torch his "nightclub." The true love of Jean Parker (right)
is not the Ghost--though she is drawn to his confidence and aggression--but her ex-Chemistry teacher turned military guy on his way overseas, Lt. Bob Lord (William Marshall). He's dull, but not that dull. And even pops has a girl of sorts, the waitress Melba (Rose Ann Stevens). It all ends with a long display of military vehicles parading across the vast empty flats.

Ulmer's brilliant use of actors and minimalist sets here is even better than in DETOUR. Cortez is transcendental, embodying all that is good about Poverty Row cinema. The hallucinatory blocking and camera movements are straight out of German silents, in the Ulmer tradition! The Weimar effect further coalesces via Brecht, that genius who knew how to use the very bankruptcy of your production as an asset. A grasp of this aesthetic helps make these PRC films transmutable into art -- the right set of eyes adjusting to the terrible quality of the prints. Darkness and light assume comic book flatness; long shots blur into meaningless white noise and close ups seem painted with streaks of horizontal gray light, all just springboards to jump loose from the confines of narrative, to see the blurry blobs of black and white as abstract expressionism, the way a caveman might look at the twigs on the ground by the fire to foresee the future, or kids might perform Scorsese's CASINO as a play in their garage in order to swindle sips of cocktails from their drunken parents on a Saturday night.
PRC's fellow Poverty Row residents, Monogram Pictures, influenced Godard enough that he dedicated BREATHLESS too them, and I am sure the prints he saw were similarly in tatters. Many of them were probably circulating Paris film clubs without subtitles, adding to the abstract appeal. The French, man, they get it. They invented the getting of it.

Consider the top picture of this post. It's from a scene in TOMORROW where people are walking around outside, doing something. What they are doing is impossible to tell, but the screen is a brillaint composition of white and dark squares, a gray market VHS Mondrian, ditto the checkered wallpaper in the second shot (below) which shows the results of a fire in the Ghost's office. The smoke bleeds the whole right half of the frame a pure white, like the film is being forgotten by Jim Carrey in ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, or bleached by some experimental filmmaker like Stan Brakhage. Note too the vertical reflection at left, which indicates that these checkered walls are in fact shower curtains, or some other sort of wondrously flea-bitten 1940's sound stage free-hanging wallpaper.

A great movie to see in this vein as well was TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. The way Hooper uses the hallways of the house to create a far right vertical rectangle in the blocking of the shots, for example, would be clear as day in the blurry pan and scan VHS dupe. In the DVD, where is that Kubrickian monolith motif I saw before? Was it just the acid? UNDER THE VOLCANO is another example - Albert Finney as a dipsomaniac British consul in Mexico, his wife played by Jacquelin Bisset inexplicably wants to return to him; Finney's sober brother, Hugh, puts the moves on her. This was all very droll and cathartic in the eyes wide open R. Bud Dwyer acid blurr VHS dupe from a very old rental days of the early 1990s. When Finney made his weird faces, you would just be able to see this fuzzy white line hovering over an abyss of black in his mouth, like a thin ray of kamikaze Thanatos cathode toothpaste. We'd all get drunk and call each other "cchHuuugh" the way Finney said "Hugh" and it was all very mirthful. Now, 20 years after, watching the swanky Criterion edition, I'm wonderng what the fuss was about. Huston is clearly white elaphanting a termite book, like doing a Merchant Ivory remake of TAXI DRIVER.

Is it me or the movie that has changed? I've cleaned up a lot too in the last decade, but I'm not as clean as the Criterion transfer of UNDER THE VOLCANO. So in this case I would argue that no, it's not me who has changed; it's the film.

Based on what I see amongst the budding countercultural leaders at Pratt, I predict that one day the gleaners and I will be returning to VHS tapes and players, abandoning the digital format and relishing the blurry streaks and garbled sound of old VHS tapes. Until then, only grant-getting capital A artists like Stan Brakhage can decompose film and have it be art. When nature does it, it's just outmoded media formatting and decomposing nitrates. Oh ghost of Edgar G., forgive us our dread of the decay which so wants to set us free.

2 or 3 Things You Need to Know About Made in USA (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)

DISCLAIMER - I saw this film once more than 30 years ago, so my memories of it are not exactly crystal clear.

The film is minor ‘60s Godard - which means it is automatically more interesting than most Godard from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, or 2000s.

The film is Godard’s fourth effort in widescreen and color, following A Woman is a Woman, Contempt, and Pierrot le Fou, and, like those films, it was photographed by Raoul Coutard - which means it is absolutely gorgeous to look at. You will see a lot of bright primary colors, particularly the color red.

The narrative is incoherent - even more so than The Big Sleep, one of its acknowledged inspirations. But at least it has a narrative.

Anna Karina (above, right) plays the main character, a Marlowe-like private investigator. Sometimes she wears a trenchcoat. The Danish-born Karina, often referred to as Godard’s "muse," was one of the great stars of the 1960s. She also did fine work for Luchino Visconti on The Stranger and for George Cukor on Justine - two films I’d like to see out on DVD.

Godard experiments with camera movement and cutting in ways that call attention to themselves. This is a good thing.

The film is presently playing in New York. Maybe there will be a DVD release soon. I highly recommend it.

Pushing My "Button," or, the Unbearable Lightness of American Relevance

The verdict is more or less in on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (from what I can glean: good movie with great performances/cinematography/etc but a bit slow, pointless and déjà-vu-y vis-a-vis Eric Roth's screenplay), which has been picked clean by the canon of critics lucky enough to be considered the "jury" on such matters (and even the ones who aren't). Indeed, I saw the film (like probably a number of other people) on New Year's Day, hoping to score some vague, lofty symbolism on the issue of time, the inevitability of aging, etc. Seeing as how one can only stomach the grandiose human epic genre once or twice a year I figured the start of 2009 was a decent enough excuse to indulge. Unfortunately -- and this was a tough assessment, as I thought the film was far from worthless and I had so prepared myself for another subtle, yet complexly flawed masterpiece from David Fincher that I would have happily sat through Panic Room-grade hi jinks -- Button failed to cast much of a spell on me, save for a few scenes with Tilda Swinton that vaporized as sweetly (and swiftly) as bon-bons on the tongue.

In any case, the first of the two primary issues I had with the film -- and the blame for both falls squarely with writer Eric Roth -- has been cited in practically every review I've thus far read, so it's pointless to continue the critical echolalia. However, to be more specific about my own grief: the thematic, structural, and worst of all characterizational connections with Forrest Gump were highly problematic. Like Gump, Benjamin Button is a cipher of a man, spouting optimism despite being socially isolated due to a physical/physiological condition. And somehow we're supposed to understand his situation and mindset as analogous to (or emblematic of) The Impossible-to-Define-and-Yet-Overwhelming-Definitive American Quality. (Or even American Dream, if you wish -- I entertain the thought that, mirroring Button, American society was borne out of sophisticated but stodgy Founding Fathers only to gradually devolve into political infantilism. But, the Founding Fathers were probably just as immature as we are now, perhaps just more skilled at obscuring their sophomoric side -- clear enough to anyone who had to read Franklin's autobiography in high school -- and social commentary seems to be the furthest thing from the film's mind, despite having been adapted from a short Fitzgerald satire.)

American events bristle and pop all around Benjamin Button as he lives a life in reverse -- what significance is offered for the taking in that juxtaposition, however, is not always clear. And don't get me started on Button's African American foster mother of sorts, whose tautological platitudes are even more irritating than those of Gump's mommy ("You never know what's comin' for ya" basically = "Life is like a box of chocolates"...did they -- ie, he -- think we wouldn't notice?). It almost brought me to tears when I read that Charlie Kaufman wrote a discarded draft of Button -- now THAT would have been a complexly flawed masterpiece!

But it's the framing device, set in a hospital room again the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina, that I find most offensive. Clearly Katrina is meant as a metaphor on multiple levels -- my fellow Slant Mag writer Nick Schager rightly calls it "a tacky symbol of the unpredictable, unchangeable future" -- and it produces an apt "teetering-at-the-end-of-world-by-flood" tension that evokes far more expert examples of Magical Realism (Cien Años de Soledad, for one). And yet -- Katrina was a genuine catastrophe, not a fictive one. The repercussions on many southern cities were severe, and exacerbated further by the federal government's en ritard to action. Some hospitals additionally made the controversial decision to euthanize bed-ridden patients in Katrina's wake, rather than risk watching them drown. In short -- it's too soon to manipulate such a cataclysmic event for the purpose of better-structuring a hollow love-story -- especially one being partially narrated by the internal monologue of a bed-ridden, hospital-bound New Orleans native.

Granted, you could say the same thing about many other movies -- Titanic, for one, although that event had nowhere near the same impact, and that film, in all its cheapness, does pay its respects to the dead in its own way. Pauline Kael slapped Swimming to Cambodia on the wrist for a similar faux pas. Or how about the grand-daddy of bad taste: The Day the Clown Cried, the unseen Jerry Lewis vehicle that supposedly turns the holocaust into a B-class melodrama weepy? Not having seen it, it's hard to say how despicable such a scenario would be, although I for one would applaud the integration of more camp value in films, books, et al regarding the unthinkable atrocities of our time (ie, the Holocaust, 9-11, etc) if only because camp is a seldom-used yet highly effective method of grieving, and we've just about exhausted ourselves on haughty, sanctimonious (not to mention treacly) paeans to the various victims/heroes of those tragedies. It's remarkably telling, however, that the first non-Spike Lee film I see that features Hurricane Katrina has marginalized it to the duty of a matte painting. 9-11 is the tragic hero myth of our age. Katrina was...just a bunch of rain that got mishandled by the feds. But they apologized, right?

At the end of Benjamin Button, Katrina's waters flood a basement full of artifacts, including the backwards-moving clock that acts as a prop in another framing device for Button's narrative (the script is a hall of mirrors, though the illusions are strictly low-rent fun-house). It's a powerful scene on the surface; you can just feel the significance swell the screen as the camera dollies towards the clock's face. The problem is, as with the protagonist towards his god-forsaken plight, we're not quite sure what to feel, or where to direct our attention. I personally felt pulled towards the water itself -- towards what it would have been doing to others in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, etc -- but we're pushed by the filmmakers towards the enigma at the center of the story, which just seems sideshow odd this late in the game. Button could have been a symbol for so much more than star-crossed love -- for basically anything socio-political or philosophical or epistemological you name -- but the clarity isn't there for any interpretations the audience conjures to stick (he's like a stainless steel cipher -- just try to pin anything on him and you'll see). The movie wants to be a statement about life -- American life specifically, I think -- but it winds up succumbing to the short-sighted, prettifying mythology we've inherited from Hollywood.

The AGE OF CONSENT and STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (Aka A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH) on region 1 dvd

Remember a couple years ago when C. Jerry Kutner was singing the praises of Powell's AGE of CONSENT right here in Bright Lights After Dark?

Both the films on this "set" should have long ago received the deluxe Criterion treatment ala Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and Tales of Hoffman and Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Peeping Tom. I don't know what spooked Criterion off the Powell scent, but I'm glad, these Sony "Collector's Choice" director series are a-okay! Let Criterion keep releasing every last thing Kurosawa ever sneezed at. The ghost of Toshiro Mifune is laughin' at them now! Criterion, Sony stole your big British thunda!

And yo, Mirren got phat back in CONSENT! She's in her film debut and pleasantly "ripe" and already good enough as an actress that if you ask her to play a pouty uber-earthy seductive urchin (DR. NO's Ursula Andress as drawn by R. Crumb) she can deliver more than the goods. She can be a character richly shadowed with complexly crosshatched emotions AND sexy like some little beach strumpet. She's got that same salty sexuality here as she does in THE COOK, THE THIEF, THE WIFE & HER LOVER, which is to say, she's sexy enough to knock your front teeth out and not in that stupid late night cinemax way, but in the "real" way, of really having sex with real people in real time. Ripe, that's the word. And the art James Mason creates onscreen is actually good... you know, as opposed to the incompetent scrawls from Michel Piccoli in Jacque Rivette's similar but vastly inferior (and overpraised) LE BELLE NOISEUSE, which I hate beyond words, even if it does have my sweet Lady Jane Birkin in it. Mason's art has a flowery, hippy-ish looseness. It's joyous! And yet not corny. Is there any better way to describe the bulk of Powell's film work?

And what makes the film double interesting is it openly promotes the relationship between Mason's older bearded artist and Mirren's underage beachcomber! And as Kutner so aptly puts it in his Feb 2007 entry:

Age of Consent was conceived as the antithesis to Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) which also - not coincidentally - starred Mason. Where in Lolita the relationship between an older man and a young girl is a source of tragedy for everyone concerned, in Age of Consent, the relationship is mutually healing.

Why is Mason able to get with tha gamin here and not in LOLITA? It's art, baby. The painter will always get the girl because he can sublimate, he doesn't "need" her, he just needs inspiration, which she provides just by "being." It's joyful waching Mason, who has suffered and hissed through his teeth as countless villains, drug addicts and resentful lovers, to here be simply a happy go lucky Aussie painter who by the end of the film is surrounded by pop art explosions of his own devising, and has "gotten his groove back." Thank god there's at least one vividly rendered artist in cinema whose not either a pretentious ass or a jackbooted martyr. Piccoli's tortured hack would still be brooding over which brush to use by the time Mason's on his 54th painting.

On the down side, there is some annoying comic releif with some gambling addict townie who Mason lets crash with him, and a terribly shrill old woman occasionally steals, drinks gin and beats people with a cane. These characters suffer from being much too broadly etched (Pressburger probably would have prevented this had he been on hand) but damn it, that's what "chapter skip" is for.
We will know who the tru critics are if they remember to include this earlybird special in their "Best DVDs of 2009" lists next December. My list is already done. Don't even bother releasing anything else! I love you, Sony, you big beautiful faceless corporation!

Recommendation for a Happy New Year

Read David Thomson's "Have You Seen ...?" and try to watch every one of the 1000 films talked about therein.