I. P. Freely Goes to the Movies

NPR recently interviewed the creator of runpee.com, a website that tells you when you can dash out of a movie to go to the bathroom and return without missing anything important. Their slogan: "Helping your bladder enjoy going to the movies as much as you do."

Clichés or Archetypes? Trash or Transcendence?

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) - Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka gives Missi Pyle, James Fox, David Kelly, Freddie Highmore, et al. the guided tour.

One man’s cliché is another man’s archetype. Tim Burton’s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, like most of Burton’s work, is filled with clever ideas, but they are predominantly visual ideas, the kind of ideas one might see in the work of Frank Tashlin, Alfred Hitchcock, or Chuck Jones. In my last post, a tribute to Christopher Lee, I praised Burton’s film for a plot idea, the creation of a backstory for eccentric chocolate manufacturer Willy Wonka (Depp) involving a stern dentist father (Lee) who wouldn’t let young Wonka eat candy. I was immediately flamed by a commenter who considered the idea stupid, pointless, and “utterly unnecessary.”

I’ll concede the daddy idea is a simple one, simple enough for even children (one of the film’s target audiences) to understand. But I also believe Wonka’s “daddy issues,” clichéd as they might seem, work on the level of archetype, the level from which most narrative works derive their power. (Hamlet, Oedipus, anyone?) Ideas are only that – ideas – abstract vessels into which artists (actors, directors, designers) pour the wine of their personal expression. Daddy issues are, in fact, common in Burton’s movies – see, for example, Edward Scissorhands or Big Fish (the latter scripted by John August, who also adapted Charlie) – and they move us in Charlie due to the genuine emotional investment of Burton, Depp, and Lee in the underlying archetype.

A Children's Hell

From an even more archetypal point of view, Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory is a children's version of Hell in which sinners are first tempted, and then grotesquely punished for yielding to temptation. If the chocolate factory is Hell, then Willy Wonka is the Prince of Hell, aka Lucifer, aka Satan, and the diminutive Oompa Loompas are his demon servants. In Dante’s Inferno, sinners were buried up to their necks in shit. One doesn’t have to be a confirmed Freudian to see the parallel to gluttonous Augustus Gloop being drowned in a river of chocolate (above).

Instead of being tempted, little Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore) acts as Wonka’s Redeemer, teaching him the value of familial love which Wonka had previously rejected. Most significantly, Charlie mediates the reconciliation between Wonka, i.e., the Fallen Angel Lucifer, with his dad, who in this reading of the film would obviously be God the Father.

A delicious, if somewhat subversive, Christian parable. What more could one want from a kiddie movie?

The Great Roles of Christopher Lee’s Maturity

How can anyone not marvel that two of Gothic Cinema’s greatest performers, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, were born on the same day? Christopher Lee was born on May 27, 1922. Price was born 11 years earlier on May 27, 1911.

Today, Christopher Lee is 87. He has been an outstanding character lead since the 1950s. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he played some of his greatest roles in the 2000s. Here are three of them.

Flay in GORMENGHAST (Andy Wilson, 2000) - This superb four-part BBC miniseries (still available on DVD) is based on the first two books of the Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast is not a fantasy in the usual sense. Its world is not inhabited by wizards, dragons, elves, or other magical beings. However, Gormenghast is a fantasy in the sense that it takes place in a world that never existed, an earthly realm with a history, culture, and encrusted set of rituals all its own. Its principal literary antecedents are Shakespeare, Dickens, and Franz Kafka.

Flay, played by Lee, is one of the Lord of this grotesque realm’s most loyal retainers, described in the book as a man of very few words, tall, skeleton-like, and stiff. Not too stiff, however, to prevent him from participating in a climactic duel (perhaps the last time viewers were privileged to witness Lee’s excellent swordsmanship). He is a superficially frightening personage who turns out to be one of the story’s heroes. According to Lee, Flay was "one of the biggest challenges I have ever had. Flay does not talk like ordinary people, he does not come out with grammatical sentences. He just says things like 'you, here, no.' It is not easy to get over what I mean, when I have got very little opportunity to say many words. I have to get this brutal, at times savage and unforgiving, but also very gentle and loyal figure across. It is a huge test." And ultimately, one of Lee’s most moving roles.

Lee, an ardent fan of fantasy and occult literature, was the only member of the Gormenghast cast to have known author Peake personally: "I used to meet him at the old Harrod's Library when it still existed . . . . He was a charming, delightful man, very quiet, reserved with beautiful blue eyes, good-looking, very gentle – obviously an extraordinary man. He invented a world and a language and almost a race of his own."

Saruman in LORD OF THE RINGS (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003) - The wizard Saruman, aka Saruman the White, is the principal human villain in Jackson’s film trilogy based, as if you already didn’t know, on three books by J.R.R. Tolkien. (The other main villains are monsters, a giant spider, a flaming eye, and suchlike.) The role is a fantastic display of Lee’s vocal authority and physical presence - particularly in the first film of the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he faces down the good wizard Gandalf played by Sir Ian McKellan. Lee’s part was unfortunately cut out of the third film, The Return of the King – or at least its Oscar-winning theatrical version. All the more reason to immerse yourself in the extended 4-hour DVD versions of these films in which Lee appears throughout. Did I mention that Lee also met Tolkien once?

Dr. Wilbur Wonka in CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Tim Burton, 2005) - What better tribute to Lee, one of the finest character actors of his generation, than to play the father of Johnny Depp, one of the finest character actors of the current generation? Tim Burton’s film, unlike the earlier Gene Wilder version of this Roald Dahl tale, creates a backstory for eccentric candymaker Willy Wonka (Depp). He had a strict dentist father (Lee) who wouldn’t let him eat sweets! This sets us up for one of the most moving sequences in Lee’s career, a reconciliation scene in which two very repressed characters are finally allowed to express their love for one another.

Happy Birthday, Christopher!

Josef Von Sternberg's Super-Masochist Sublimation Power!

Reading Joseph Aisenberg's excellent piece (below) I'm compelled to offer my understanding of the great Von Sternberg's stylistic obsessiveness, especially since it's something I understand and share. (This began as a reply post, but it got sooo long). Please read Aisenberg's discussion of THE SCARLET EMPRESS below if you haven't yet, so that my discussion of obsession will have some grounding.

If you know Marlene's history you know she liked to sleep with a lot of different people, and broke the hearts of adoring males (and females) all the time when they realized they would never "own" her totally, and so if you want to keep a girl like that, you have to learn to share (which her husband well knew, as he archived all her various love letters for her), and that's where masochism and sublimation comes in. Imagine being JVS and you're basically living at Marlene's estate, painting a picture out on the lawn and here comes Gary Cooper's car and you know that you wont be sleeping with Marlene all weekend, and will just have to wait til she gets bored of Cooper, who is taller and younger than you, etc. Do you throw your canvas to the ground and have a fit? Get a gun and run around the estate like the thuggish gamekeeper in Rules of the Game? Neither one will get you anywhere but in jail or laughed at. The artist Von Sternberg on the other hand lives for that moment, converting the emotional energy via artistic sublimation, Sternberg's painting merely becomes darker and more twisted... better, in short.

For a normal person such a thing can be unbearable, but an artist that can use that energy--sublimate and harness it into art--might even find it addictive. Luis Bunuel is another of cinema's great masochists, and their link is forged by covering the same material in their last great films: The Devil is a Woman and That Obscure Object of Desire.

In each film a rich nobleman who can basically "have anything he wants" falls for a low class prostitute who proceeds to manipulate the hell out of him, taking his money and giving him blue balls in return, time and time again, for years. Marlene in DEVIL IS A WOMAN knows exactly how to keep this nobleman interested, by not just holding out sex from him but also flaunting her trysts with other men. Nothing engulfs a man in the hell of jealousy like watching a beautiful woman reject you in favor of someone far beneath your standing, though perhaps taller and more virile (though its better if they're toothless old wretches, for full knife-twisting agony).

From a psycho-analytic standpoint it's the controlling superego, which has been driving you mad with its unyielding imperatives, finally finding its nadir and so letting you alone for awhile. The superego relaxes because it simply cannot top the disgrace you are currently feeling. The needle's hit the top on the "less than" Geiger counter and so, in a sense, you are free. A similar thing occurs when someone is naturally a worrier, all the time fearing some accident or attack, and then BAM! their house is on fire or they get in a huge collision and suddenly they're calm, they're in the zone, their worries have vanished because they've found a home.

It is in this sense especially that people with enormous power and responsibility, such as film directors, find themselves drawn to the freedom of submitting to masochistic domination (the most regular clients at bondage dungeons tend to be high level executives, according to my shady sources). When it boils right down to it, nothing calms the agitated mind more than watching its worst fears finally come true, over and over again, from the safety and comfort of a velvet cage, which recalls the sickly thrill of awaiting a childhood spanking.

Back in the sexually uninhibited days of Weimar-era era Berlin these things were all the rage, and Sternberg and Dietrich participated. This kind of kinky stuff had to be doubly sublimated to get into Hollywood movies, but its concepts fit in perfectly with the "submission" to the code and the way such an iron rule opened the door for passive-aggressive attacks on its dreary morality. Nothing makes vice sweeter than its prohibition! Add this to the very nature of cinema viewing (voyeurism) itself, and viola! Art.

Falling in love again

Recently I re-watched Josef Von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) and found myself again surprised by the sickly gushy tasteless humor of the piece; had forgotten most of the film’s plot as well, despite having seen it twice before. In a way, this is really symptomatic of my experience with all the Sternberg/Dietrich films I’ve seen—Blonde Venus (1932), Morocco (1930), The Devil is a Woman (1935)—with the exception of their first effort together, The Blue Angel (1930), in which Dietrich’s sardonic trashy performance was, memorably, not quite matched by Emil Jannings, who didn’t strike me as being half passionate enough as the stuffed shirt who ruins himself for the sake of Lola Lola. By comparison to the other films The Blue Angel seems a relatively straightforward, sensible piece of craftsmanship; the Dietrich of this movie is slightly slumped and has clearly visible cellulite, nothing like the well posed, brilliantly lit, self-mocking glamorized mannequin she became in Hollywood. The rest of the films of their partnership are all jumbled in my head, a hot-house blur of gilding, shadows and projectile couture. With each movie Sternberg seems to have absorbed himself more and more in the process of filling up as much space around Dietrich with foofy junk as he could. Their movies' silly melodramatic plots, good girls forced to go bad who pay dearly for it in the process, are engulfed and transcended by the extraordinarily relentless business of the mise en scene. The Scarlet Empress, allegedly the story of how Russian Empress Catherine The Great got to be great, is so immersed in giant chunky sets (huge thick doorways that go up out of frame and require ten court lackeys to push them open); stares with so many grotesque gargoylize gew-gaws; Dietrich is smothered in so many furs and feathers, caught behind so many veils, set like a great jewel among so many glimmering, gleaming, tinkly objects that just about any other actress lacking her humor and toughness would have been buried alive beneath the garishness never to be seen again. She strides through The Scarlet Empress with a kind of whimsical blitheness, reaching the other side of its great set pieces still triumphantly herself, beneath all the hats, gowns, and even those drawn on eyebrows. The plot, which tells how young Catherine was sold in an arranged marriage to a grotesque grinning mentally deficient Russian nobleman who hates her (played with memorable queasiness by Sam Jaffe), mostly seems to be a way of dramatizing what Sternberg thought of Dietrich’s looks, an epic farce about her star essence. This is why what stands out in memory are the muffs and gloves, the ringlets of Dietrich's hair or Dietrich entombed in a ludicrous puffy white dress being pushed on a swing hysterically by numerous attendants, and on and on. The biggest criticism of the film is that it takes nearly an hour or so for Dietrich to shrug off the horrible wide-eyed innocent girl routine that really grates on the nerves; at last she seduces a soldier so she can produce the requisite male heir, establishes herself at court and turns into the smirking, knowing Dietrich persona that makes any movie worth watching. Dietrich’s acting is rather like her singing—it’s not really very good, but it is great. In one moment that makes the whole film worth seeing, Dietrich's rival for her husband's affections threatens her with death when her protector, the matronly Empress who bought her to make babies with her weird son, dies. Dietrich says nothing, merely looks the rival up and down with an ironically appraising smile and exits the room with incredulous humor. Surely the meaning of gestures like these, which Dietrich exudes with artful lightness, are what fueled Sternberg's fascinating cinematic overkill and gave his films the overripeness that made them such originals.

Yet something more than mere camp is going on in a movie like The Scarlet Empress, though I’m not really sure what. I think maybe it has something to do with the tension between how Dietrich comes across and the very private erotic inferno Sternberg erected around her image. It’s as if every shot were the first teasing picture in a pornographic series, the image of a lace garter pulled taut against a creamy thigh meant to enhance the audience’s supposed desire to touch that flesh. The funny thing is that Sternberg’s carefully dressed and lit arrangements have a kind of hysteria to them, an emphatic denial, that now comes across like homosexual humor (the way a movie like Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill does). As I said, I think this is because there is such a clear and obvious difference between the Dietrich the audience sees and enjoys and the one Sternberg tried to put on the screen, hence his finding it necessary to make every element of her surroundings externalize what he thought of as Dietrich’s true inner qualities. The effect is slightly embarrassing, disturbing, and hypnotic all at once. At one point in The Scarlet Empress Dietrich is shown sleeping behind some sort of mesh that drapes down from her bed’s canopy. Sternberg cuts very close so that the black reticulate design of the mesh creates a huge grid coming between the audience and Dietrich’s bright soft face—you always feel like you’re going to have to shove things aside to get at the woman, as well as the story—which can never be fully pinned down. Dietrich's character loves and betrays, loves by betraying, which is echoed in the hellish lushness of Sternberg's movie’s artistic design. Or put another way Dietrich is a failed attempt on Sternberg’s part to create Galatea not out of stone but another woman. What he’s trying to do is turn his woman into stone so she’ll be eternally his, only the plots keep shattering the attempts dramatizing the paranoia. The woman the audience sees, though, is a very different type altogether. Not a fallen tart goddess, but a practical down to brown earth gal. Dietrich herself seems to hover casually outside her part, ironically playing it up; seems to be eternally cocking one of her thin painted eyebrows, as if to say, “Are you sure Josef? Really?” One can almost feel her shrug carelessly as she gives in to his dumb ornate little demands, wrapping her body in sheer fabric and saying, “All right sugar, you’re wish is my command.”

I can’t think of any other film director who gives quite the kind of weird satisfaction of bejeweled tastelessness that one gets from a Sternberg/Dietrich film. Orson Welles doesn’t really seem in the same league. Though a film like Citizen Kane had incredibly busy theatrical sets, they seemed to be meant to dramatically underscore the situations in at least a partially rational way, despite their excess, while it strikes me that Sternberg was really just trying to junktify Dietrich’s space. One director who is rather in the same realm, I think, is Ken Russell. In films like The Devils, perhaps especially Women in Love, he seems to have slugged off the cliché story-lines of Sternberg and totally liberated the decadent hysteria which had just about burst the seams of The Scarlet Empress; indeed, the characters seem to be covered in the debris of Sternberg’s obsessive sensual aesthetic mania (surely too this has something to do with all equine imagery that gallops wickedly through out the entire film). Both Russell and Sternberg make you cringe and admire simultaneously. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but there is something so fascinating that I keep having to go back to these movies to taste their funky flavor again and again.

The Gumbinator - Robot Rumpus (Art Clokey 1956)

Long before Terminators 1, 2, 3, and 4, a revolt of the machines was successfully quelled by the Great Green Hope otherwise known as Gumby, aided by his four-legged comrade-in-arms, Pokey. Robot Rumpus is one of the earliest and best of the Gumby stop motion shorts directed for television by Art Clokey in his 1950s heyday. It was, in fact, the second Gumby short produced by Clokey, and the first one to be broadcast (on NBC’s Howdy Doody Show).

Robot Rumpus introduces us to two of Gumby’s many worlds: the suburban home world where Gumby lives with his parents, Gumba and Gumbo, and the land of toys that is the source of most of his adventures. (In the suburban home world, Gumby and his parents appear human-scaled, while in the toy world, Gumby and Pokey are no bigger than the toys.) Like most of the early Gumby shorts, Robot Rumpus is sweetly innocent without being syrupy or overly sentimental. The visual gags are plentiful and inventive, with the action occasionally taking place on several planes. I am particularly charmed by the renegade robot who proclaims his existential identity by painting his name, ROBOT, on the side of the Gumby family’s house.

Gumby was created by Clokey while studying at the University of Southern California film school, a favorite pupil/disciple of montage theorist Slavko Vorkapich. For those interested in learning more about Clokey, his proto-hippie lifestyle (he was an associate of Timothy Leary and Alan Watts), and his various claymation creations, I highly recommend the featurette, Gumby Dharma, which has been broadcast on the Independent Film Channel.

My One Horse Town Libido is an Abandoned Minature Golf Course

It's a point that many viewers miss, though it's difficult to blame them: Robert Altman's 3 Women is really "about" California, and quite distinctly so -- it doesn't belong to its contentual municipality in the sense that, say, Nashville does. And it's not about the psycho-sprawl urban California of Los Angeles or the spittle, cardboard and tinsel California of Hollywood or the plugged culture retro-future sophistry California of San Francisco. It's about the other California, by which one means the smattering of middle-of-nowhere cities always on the brink of suburbia these days, and always reminding us of somewhere else. The dusty, mid-western-like cock-and-bull towns that flank the interstate 5 with ranches and groves. The shattered-shell-and-hanging-kayak-wind-chime Mediterranean beach villas that dot the coastal region from Monterey to Santa Barbara. And, of course, the boilingly barren, frenziedly phallic desert settlements that circle the parched Mojave and Joshua Tree territories.

Of these three ecosystems of the damned -- and I can express this sincere contempt unabashedly, having been raised in one -- the final is closest to the backdrop of 3 Women; two of the major characters in the film are employed in a geriatric therapy facility offering hot mineral baths and the like (a common offering in high desert vicinities that have the advantage of a sulphur spring natural resource). And at one point Shelly Duvall's "Millie" bitches about having moved her ex-roommate "all the way to Riverside". Judging from the terrain and the flickering fata morgana of despondency, I would place the affair in one of the glorified truck stops that populate the 15 freeway past Barstow. On family trips to Vegas my parents would typically lurch up the pearblossom path in an effort to take the city (and its eternal traffic) by surprise; while shielding my eyes from a dirt storm en route to a Texaco men's room I often recognized more of the Land of Enchantment in the Native totems and O'Keefe-like arid eroticism than the Golden State.

There's a fair enough reason for this: California is defined by its industry rather than by its shamanic geography, which is as confusing as it is convenient. Admittedly the tourist-trapping books and postcards have always made it out to be a mixed bag of metro and mountainous, work and play...but the planate, dehydrated corners have few champions compared to the bushy, fertile valleys (Steinbeck anyone?). The one exception might be Death Valley which, like the sombre and partially lost work of art that climaxes in its vulcan entrails, is in a class all itself.

The females of Altman's dreamscape, as with most who doom themselves to a hyperthermic existence, inhabit their lifeless abode with the seeming effortlessness of a triad of tortoises. They know when to avoid the sun and when to bask; they know the watering holes and the sandtraps; they know that they, like the ubiquitous mood murals that the silent saloon-and-apartment-complex owner Willie (Janice Rule) perpetually paints, are as obstinately unified with their environment as a lunar eclipse, or an abrupt, crepuscular temperature shift. The phrase Poetic Survivalism comes to mind, though it suggests that they are consciously artful. On the contrary, it takes an outsider to recognize any beauty here; to them it's simply living, as automatic as photosynthesis.


Even Willie's graphic, grotesquely ornate pieces seem utilitarian rather than aesthetic -- she uses them to add a splash of curiosity to smooth pool bottoms and the sandy patio surfaces. Like the women, the murals are silently clashing with, while enhancing and epitomizing, the milieu: In short, they're harbingers of life cycles -- and depictions of those life cycles' stages -- rather than inanimate objects to be admired or seduced. Pinky (Sissy Spacek) compliments Willie on her work in one scene, and receives a vapid, vaguely cursed stare in return. How dare she appreciate an activity as common as ingesting nutrition or expelling waste?

Notably, the one crack in the film's kilned glaze is that the men -- the yin to the feminine yang, who seem less practical and more pleasure-driven -- are conspicuously marginalized, probably due to their underwritten characters. Robert Fortier's Edgar, the objective correlative for Millie's (and then, after post-rebirth, Pinky's) vertiginous self-denial, is a very probably a rib at Warren Beatty (if so, it's impotently hilarious), but he tethers the action to an era where cowboys were still mocked. You watch him shoot at targets and tell knee-slappers in the abandoned wild west theme park of his waning libido while man-handling Spacek's stagnantly nubile torso: he's the only ironic archetype in sight, even if his self-designed hell undulates with hyper-authenticity (I grew up in the town where William S Hart died, and ramshackle film sets from abandoned western productions were everywhere -- whether they had been preserved as landmarks or surreal reminders of the superficial fecundity of dry valley claim-staking I could not say). Were the movie made today -- and it could very easily still be, as these sepulcher backlots haven't changed a bit -- Edgar might be better limned as a sluggishly heat-stroked Don Van Vliet-type: Duvall would reach between his legs and pull away a handful of sawdust. He'd stare at her stolidly, as if to say that it isn't any use disliking tomatoes where you can't get any fresh.



I can't help but feel that comparing 3 Women to other cinematic identity crises is somewhat façile. The titular triumvirate do suckle on each other's confidences, or whatever alternative to confidence they possess, but the women confuse themselves with the terrain more than one another (Pinky's name, after all, was always Mildred...towards the middle of the film she simply finds a new way to hate her nomenclature). The pronouns float in the ghostly 35mm reeds like a face-down, motel Ophelia -- the you's and I's and they's all melt, bubbling and streaking down the sidewalk, browning in the sun and landing in one of Bodhi Wind's paint canisters. Altman provides the canvas (as he usually does) and the women etch themselves as a trompe l'oeil against the clay, shale, and mud of the California wasteland.

Steinbeck envisioned the Salinas Valley as Eden -- a fair comparison, given the fertility. We might then liken the decadence of Los Angeles to a dazzling Necker Cube: one eye perceives paradise, and the other damnation. But the eastern desert -- as with much of the other California -- is the dim limbo, the mirage-like Abraham's Bosom where nothing is familiar or alien and a host-hierarchy of invisible principalities guard the semi-permeable gates to Jericho. It's no wonder Gram Parsons yearned to have voracious flames lick off his skin while the buzzards and hoot owls and cacti spitefully looked on. And Millie, Pinky, Willie -- they're like the rest of us. Everyone here is a twin and a triplet and an only child waiting to be reborn, waiting to be judged, waiting to judge the others from atop a fierce Mount Sinai made out of old, punctured tires.

Pre-Code VCR ALERT: RIPTIDE!

If you got TCM and a TIVO you'll want to snap out of your carbohydrate stupor and get ready to record dozens and several of rarely seen or screened pre-code stuff coming up starting tomorrow (Sunday).

Here's a list of why you need to see RIPTIDE (1934):

1. Norma Shearer at her sexy prime in a very very revealing insect outfit.
2. Robert Montgomery is actually good as Shearer's souse playboy "buddy."
3. The presence of Herbert Marshall as the bitter cuckold husband with children waiting at home and the aforementioned insect costume make this resemble a lithium-high version of BLONDE VENUS.
4. Directed by Edmund Goulding, it's got great catty dialogue.

It's at 4AM tonight, or (4AM tomorrow morning if you want to be right all the time) on TCM.

Then starting at 5AM on the 18th, a mess of Frank Capra pre-codes: SWEEPINGS, FLIGHT, LADIES OF LEISURE, RAIN OR SHINE, THE DIRGIBLE, PLATINUM BLONDE (Which they show all the time)... Frank Capra pre-code may not mean much, but still...

THEN, that night at 8 PM - three great Myrna Loy films, including her first foray with William Powell: PENTHOUSE, followed by WHEN LADIES MEET and the highly over the top Umm-Gawa-style antics of TOO HOT TO HANDLE. keep scrolling your preview channel, because that's just the beginning. For pre-code fans, consider me the guy with the maniacal look running into the Anchorage saloon and shouting "GOLD!"

When Women Had Waists - Part 3

Wallace Wood ’s cover illustration for the pre-Comics Code Strange Worlds (above) appears to be modeled on the face and form of Anita Ekberg (below).

[Thanks to the legendary Bhob Stewart for posting the Wood cover at his Potrzebie site.]

Moments of Xtreme Method

Maybe this has happened to you: you're watching a film, dum de dum, suddenly... METHOD! Where did it come from and where does it go when it's gone? Let's take three examples that jump immediately to mind:

1. Robert De Niro in BLOODY MAMA (1970).

Roger Corman is noted for giving a lot of future stars their first breaks, thanks to his "just get it done under budget and you can do whatever the hell you want" approach. Here he lets method paragons like Bruce Dern, Shelly Winters and a very young Robert De Niro go completely nutso as Ma Barker and her bloody brood. While the brood keeps a low profile at an Ozark lakefront hideout, De Niro's scrawny junky spies a beautiful girl bathing off aways, he's led more or less by the wafts of opium and desire to come right after her. While she tries to find out what he wants, De Niro--with the scariest yet funniest "cracked out grin" you'll ever see--just playfully paws at her and keeps trying to say something, but... what? I don't want to bring you down with the violent outcome, but let's just say De Niro breaks out of his "bit part" cocoon here and shows the world its first tiny glimpse hideously gorgeous method butterfly that would rocket to the forefront of his craft with MEAN STREETS and TAXI DRIVER in the next few years.

2. Elia Kazan in CITY FOR CONQUEST
While Jimmy Cagney and Ann Sheridan tussle over the fate of the kid brother with the violin, Elia Kazan creeps in from the wings, takes a quick look around, and quietly steals the picture as a Jewish outcast turned mobster who helps Cagney and Co. out by taking some crooked gamblers out to the docks for a little "shooting." The scene of him in the back seat with his gun in the ribs of his prey, babbling on with a mix of canny patter and borderline hysterical bravado casts a shadow that even Cagney has to work to measure up to in the rest of the film. Brilliant stuff, yet Kazan's only screen appearance before settling in as paragon of Method film making.

P.S. I dig Kazan and to hell with the politics. You can bitch all you want about Kazan "naming names" but unless you've been the victim of a witch hunt and quietly stood the test yourself, you don't really have the right to judge, now do you?

(NOTE: Eight more paragraphs of ranting on topic of witch hunts, hysteria and communism deleted by editor)

3. Dean and Baker in GIANT? Hmmm I already wrote about them on Acidemic. hmmmmm.

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch 2009)

The Daily Beast's Scott Horton reports that a judge in Spain decided today that an investigation of Bush officials involved in torture policy will go forward and can lead to prosecution.

In a ruling in Madrid today, Judge Baltasar Garzón has announced that an inquiry into the Bush administration’s torture policymakers now will proceed to a formal criminal investigation.

-- Via The Daily Beast (May 13, 2009).


In one of those peculiar coincidences that Carl Jung liked to call “synchronicities,” Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, The Limits of Control, shows a Dick Cheney-like American (Bill Murray), who resides in a heavily guarded compound, about to receive his just deserts at the hands of a laconic professional known only as Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé, below). Where is the compound located? In Spain.

The Limits of Control is, among other things, a Spanish travelogue film – in much the same way that Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona was a Spanish travelogue film. After a couple hours in the theater we feel as if we have spent a brief vacation in a foreign country. The Limits of Control’s backgrounds of landscape and architecture, beautifully photographed by Christopher Doyle (2046), are more than just backgrounds – they are part of the film’s raison d’etre.

In the foreground, we watch Lone Man as he tours Spain encountering various contacts (Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael García Bernal, Youki Kudoh, and others) who give him the pieces of the puzzle he needs in order to complete his assignment. The killer-on-a-mission is a recurring trope in some of the more abstract film noirs (Point Blank, Blast of Silence), but writer-director Jarmusch takes it to a point of even further abstraction. There is a ritualistic quality to the Lone Man’s encounters. Each begins with the contact, whoever he or she might be, asking, “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” not really expecting an answer. Match boxes are exchanged. The contacts speak volubly on various topics – art, music, science, hallucination – while Lone Man says almost nothing. For longtime Jarmusch fans, there’s a deadpan humor inherent in these repetitions.

Between contacts, Lone Man visits a Madrid museum. He stands in a room filled with cubist paintings of violins. At a café, his next contact speaks to him of violins and other wooden instruments, and the memories engrained in the wood. Later, the Lone Man stands in a room filled with paintings of nude women. He returns to his hotel room to find a beautiful woman in his bed (Paz de la Huerta) who throughout the film wears nothing but a pair of glasses and – sometimes – a transparent raincoat.

We are not meant to take all this as literal reality. When Lone Man finally meets Bill Murray’s Cheney-like American, the American ticks off a list of each of the topics discussed at Lone Man’s previous encounters: “This art, music, science, hallucination [etc.] has polluted your mind!”

The title, The Limits of Control, while seeming to refer to the self-control of the hired killer, ultimately refers to the arrogance of the American, a very powerful man, who for all of his power, cannot escape his final reckoning.

Come Back To The Five And Dime Sandra Bernhard, Sandra Bernhard

Once upon a time a strange sassy red head with a big nose and giant lips cropped up as a pathetic obsessed fan in Martin Scorcese’s heavy-handed satire The King of Comedy and stole the show. Although she had been doing stand up in various places before and after, most people really only first got to experience Bernhard's unique talent there, and in her numerous appearances on the David Letterman show in the eighties; during the course of being interviewed she would, usually, sardonically drop the names of fabulous celebrities and bust out in ridiculous pop tunes. With her angry eyes and huge vicious mouth, she could almost be the personification of Gore Vidal’s camp androgynous self-proclaimed icon-goddess Myra Breckinridge.

Her first book, written in the late eighties, was amusingly entitled Confessions of a Pretty Lady, on the back cover of which Madonna was quoted as saying, “This book saved my life.” Though the book doesn’t really live up to the wit of this ogress parody Diva, its title points the way into Bernhard’s funky sensibility, her weird fake/real send up and celebration of egocentricity run amok, which, in ’88, she turned into the fine show Without You I’m nothing. Part standup, part performance art, Bernhard rigged up her comedy routines skewering American values and pop culture around ludicrous versions of various songs, which she belted out with great robust awfulness. It’s wonderfully funny stuff, though from the evidence of the recording made of it the show still lacked the special whacked out texture it attained when she and director John Boskovich, in 1989, reconceived the material and filmed it on location in Los Angeles. What they produced is a hilarious oddball mixture, drag-camp blended with savage satire.

Bernhard, in the film, plays herself as a kind of monster, a wannabe star musician who has returned to her roots in California after an emotional catastrophe so as to reground herself. This she does by giving an all black audience the gift of her terrible singing and many outlandish self-involved anecdotes. Tastelessly, in the first number, she dresses in a puffy faux-African costume with a grotesquely huge head dress while singing about how tough her life has been as a black whore named Peaches, to the audience’s bewilderment and disgust. During her enthusiastic performance, exuding total self-absorption, the audience frowns, rolls its eyes, becomes annoyed and looks at one another with utter disbelief; toward the end of the film they stop paying attention all together; when, for her show’s finale, Bernhard does a mortifying dance to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” wearing nothing but pasties and a g-string with a print of the US flag covering her muff, everyone bails, except for a glamorous black woman who has been appearing intermittently over the course of the movie, between numbers: carefully, lovingly, she leaves a message in lipstick on one of the tables reading, “FUCK Sandra Bernhard”. Just about every time Bernhard can squeeze it in, she manages to refer to her “fabulous smash hit one-woman show”. Sincerity and fame curdle so completely in Bernhard’s mouth that by its end, the film has revealed an almost naked nihilism, yet it’s thoroughly exhilarating; when the credits roll, you’re still laughing wanting more, more, more!

The movie opens with a hypnotic funny/repellent prologue of Bernhard’s gargantuan vanity. Avant-gardely, over a black screen, we hear metronomic ticking; an old white man dressed from the seventeenth century, powdered wig and all, is shown playing Bach on a forte piano. As the camera pans left, across the piano’s body, it transforms into a gleaming grand being played by an elegant black female pianist—whatever anti-white-patriarchal point this is meant to make, it's hilarious. Then comes a cut to Bernhard in a robe, seated before a dressing room mirror carefully snipping split ends off her hair. She looks at herself, turns to the side and, just as we think she might finally do or say something, takes a drink from her coffee cup. Bernhard’s stylized timing of this little action for some reason makes me laugh every time I see it. At last she looks at the camera and starts to speak about herself. “I have one of those…hard to believe faces.” She says. “It’s sensual; it’s sexual…at times it’s just downright hard to believe…I wish you were here right now so you could see how truly beautiful I am.” Bernhard’s one of those women whose assertiveness is so wonderfully aggressive and challenging she creates her own new category of sexy by sheer wit and will. She makes making fun of glamour and hotness more bracing, sexual and perverse then probably any other performer.

During the film Bernhard manages to show us every side of her nature, man, woman, straight, gay, black, Jewish and, in one memorable number about the “romance” of Christmas, a gentile girl named Buffy or Babe. When she flicks her eyelashes we laugh. When she mouths the words “Love you” with smarmy intensity we laugh. When she says, “I’d like all my options open, what girl doesn’t?” we laugh. When, dressed as Diana Ross from the Supremes days, she says, “Mister, you look like hell” we laugh and we cringe. The same thing happens as she raises her fist in victory after singing “Me & Mrs. Jones” and shouts, “The sisters are doing it for themselves!”—Thereby turning lesbianic feminism into phony celebrity cant.

Because the audience has been audaciously directed to despise Bernhard, undermining her comedic effectiveness, an acrid tone of sickening self-indulgence and mortification comes to dominate the picture. On the other hand, she does things with such silly elaborateness they turn into eternal pleasures. In the inspired and classic sequence mentioned above, where she performs “Me & Mrs. Jones”, she is dressed in a red satin number with long dragon-lady fingernails. Here she seems to be funning the manner of a great dame of American Jazz like Ella Fitzgerald. The patter she spews before the song is some of the funniest in the movie as she “gets to know the audience a little better right now” by asking about how many Capricorns and Virgos are out there and chastising them for their natures, not paying attention to her. As she begins to sing she says “thank you,” to the audience who, believe me, aren’t applauding. In another number she discusses a fantasy she always had about becoming an executive secretary in San Francisco, which is made up of all the products she’s read about in fashion magazines; it’s played out against a pastiche of Burt Bacharach and ends with several go-go dancers whirling themselves around her seated in an easy chair singing, “This house has become a home…Wow!” In one piece she sings a lovely little Hank Williams tune and almost does a good job with it too, until, near the end, she breaks into cheesy jazz scat and the big barn set behind her opens to reveal fabulous Broadway lit up inside. Before singing this song Bernhard elegiacally intones a routine about buying a kitschy Native American rug from Andy Warhol’s estate sale, whose sentimental value is seriously mistaken by her for genuine feelings of loss and longing. She uses camp here for a kind of conscious satire you don’t generally see, since the impulse toward that sort of gunk is usually unacknowledged nostalgia. Indeed, in later years, Bernhard has occasionally tumbled off the thread-sharp line she walks and seemed to be selling the very things she was sending up. The documentary-ish bits between the numbers are all funny and give Bernhard’s persona something of a story arc. And it really looks terrific too, has bold bright reds, blues and gold tints that make its long lean star look truly bigger than life. Perhaps one criticism is that some of the targets of her humor have fallen into the past. Who still remembers Ishtar or how much annoying buzz there was surrounding Jodie Foster’s Oscared performance in The Accused? I doubt many people these days will recall that Bernhard and Madonna had been friends for awhile in the eighties and had a terrible falling out. Hence the rude, but well edited parodies of a stripper-like material girl called “Shashonna” who dances between Bernhard’s sets.

Now that celebrity culture has grown into an even worse problem than it was in 1990 I wish Bernhard could have gotten a bigger audience for what she was doing. That way she would have more opportunities now to slaughter and slay our country’s bologna values, which I for one would love. She’s been working the whole time though, appearing in films, most famously on Roseanne, and doing more live shows (you can get your hands on some of that stuff if you go to her website, where I saw she has been doing twentieth anniversary recreations of Without You I’m Nothing) No one really does this kind of thing besides her…and that saddens me. Of course Sarah Silverman is wonderful and her Jesus is Magic was terrific, but it doesn’t really develop a single theme with the same kind of artistry as Bernhard’s film did, though Silverman, on a joke by joke basis, is even darker, nastier and more challenging than Bernhard. so there’s hope of more great monster women to come…Thank you.

Speaking of Critic Soul Windows.... Whither MANDINGO?

The 1970s remains, in my experience at any rate, the pinnacle for mainstream liberal understanding of slavery and the African American experience. As a child I remember being blown completely out of my skull by THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITMAN (1974) which the network showed with only one commercial break. The TV mini-series ROOTS which came in 1977, created an even bigger splash. It had such a huge impact on my neighborhood (Lansdale, PA, nearly all white) that every discussion between adults and children included it. The scene where Kunta Kinte is whipped until he identifies himself instead as "Toby" created a rippling trauma through this country that made people into liberals almost over night if they weren't already (at least, as I say, in my Northern state). "I had no idea" was the common cry... no idea things were that horrible, or could be that horrible anywhere, ever.

MANDINGO (1975) because it is so sexualized--with an ad campaign selling miscegenation as a sizzling topic--has gotten a bad rap, and Robin Wood writes about it in his excellent essay. The title, the "Gothic hothouse" chamber drama setting, the made for TV-ish bland handsomeness of some of the players -- all coagulates to create a sense of historical safety that is repeatedly undermined, but only if you actually watch the film instead of making a knee-jerk liberal dismissal out of hand.

Walking away, stunned and forever scarred from this film, I finally understood--on a visceral level that I doubt shall ever leave me--the impetus abolitionists felt in risking everything on a Civil War rather than merely let the south secede. The horrors depicted here--all the more ghastly for the matter of fact way in which they are performed--are beyond endurable; each is bearable in its time but they compile in the brain until if you have a heart at all it's not just broken but pulverized. You can label MANDINGO a "litany of racial misconduct" since it does seem to run through a checklist of the most depraved of antebellum practices--but you'd be missing the point. A lifetime is long, and if the film feels like it's squeezing these indignities in, it certainly makes us feel the collective weight of a lifetime of such abuse. ROOTS kept audiences hooked night after night because there was always the promise of resistance and escape... there's even a cute and supportive non-racist white couple who help the Kunta Kinte lineage to freedom. MANDINGO, as Wood points out, plays more like a Shakeseperean or Jacobian tragedy, in which everyone is trapped to play out roles which sicken them to the core, but which they are unable to escape, and at the end the stage is awash in blood and death, as inevitable as the end of MACBETH or HAMLET.

It's also a fascinating yardstick to hold up to our so called "enlightened liberal pundits" (Maltin gives it, infamously, a BOMB rating -- mentioning it should be of interest only to the "s&m crowd"). It's for the S&M crowd the way SCHINDLER'S LIST or PLATOON are... the three have a lot in common actually since they are some of the few movies that those who suffered the horrors depicted have looked at and said finally! Wood mentions that MANDINGO was a huge hit with black audiences and won an NAACP award. Meanwhile whites stayed away in droves, scared by the mixing of not just races but sex with slavery, socially condoned ritualistic torture providing a shattering "other cheek" to the blissful blindness of GONE WITH THE WIND.

White liberal critics pan this movie sight unseen. The name is enough, and the kinky image of Susan George straddling "some big black buck" ala some interracial Harlequin romance cover (see the above for the original "Gone with the Wind" parody poster). Many critics note that it plays up to "Brown Sugar"/Jungle Fever, but that's mainly for the trailers and posters, like the DVD cover above. Once you are in the theater or watching it at home, MANDINGO shows a whole different thing entirely; yes the black body is celebrated and there's steamy sex drives on display, but there's also tenderness and the realization that trying to believe that slaves are "soulless and no better than beasts of burden" doesn't actually work and in fact only dehumanizes the whites who practice it, and with this bait and switch MANDINGO exposes the true horrors of slavery--CLOCKWORK ORANGE-style, we're trapped by the "salt'n'peppa" prurience into seeing it but what we get is much more than we imagined, far more depraved and heartbreaking. I can't condemn the sexy posters if it gets unsuspecting white folk like myself into the theater, since if they knew what was really in store--the slow hammering away at the dehumanizing ideology of antebellum south--they'd stay away in droves. If viewers of MANDINGO have a soul at all they must inevitably emerge from the film moved, broken and sickened to the core. There is no other response. Hardly, to that end, something I'd watch again.

But while SCHINDLER and PLATOON were and are honored, MANDINGO hides in the back of the video store with the smut... a "forbidden" nugget (which is, admittedly, a sensible selling point and why I netflixed it in the first place). In fact it is only a "potboiler" the way PLATOON is THE GREEN BERETS. In fact, like PLATOON, it's a horror movie, straight-up and the most disturbing I've seen in some time. A sexually brutalized victim in even the most over-the-top torture porn horror movie may die or escape generally, but usually isn't condemned to live through their torture and imprisonment continually for generations. The most horrifying element of the film is that the horrors are not treated any differently than any other aspect of life at the plantation. In some hands this might turn the horrific scenes banal, but in MANDINGO it is the reverse: everything, no matter how sweet and beautifully-lighted, is tainted with sad, unending horror.

Rather than comparisons to GONE WITH THE WIND or ROOTS what MANDINGO reminds me of most is the original pre-code DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE with Frederic March's vile abuse of Miriam Hopkins' well-meaning trollop. Just as Hammond, the semi-sensitive son of slave master James Mason, gets his forbidden "favorite" slave girl to open up and be nurturing to him, only to slam her away later as "just another n---ger," so in HYDE the ultimate horror, the one that's so traumatic because it shows true sadism - the "letting them think they're going to be all right only to slam down the door on their fingers" bullying scenario of torture porn like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or FUNNY GAMES. (neither of which I've seen, and ff you haven't seen the 1933 March HYDE, be warned, these scenes with Hopkins were deleted for decades from TV prints).

We've all got a tendency to rose-tint the past, which is why MANDINGO should be required viewing in any Social Sciences course. Not just African Americans, but white women and even white sons are exploited and demeaned in the antebellum system, something very real and--presumably--hardly exaggerated at all for the film. Even today such horrors exist for Arab and African women in some fundamentalist Muslim and Christian (Mormon) societies... Watching MANDINGO in the clear light of an Obama-as-president new dawn we should all be able to find the strength to see it free from it's "bad rep" and let the full weight of its dehumanizing horror wash over us. No matter how far ahead we get in progressive thinking, we need to always remember that the past is not miles behind us, safely out of sight: it's always biting at our heels and breathing down our necks, waving a pamphlet or burning effigy. MANDINGO catches us up like fly paper, forcing us to look deep into the foul mouth of base humanity.

(P.S. I couldn't find the Wood piece online for a link, but it's worth seeking out in his excellent book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film.) Also, there's a very good piece in "The Film Journal" on Mandingo and it's undeserved critical reception by Robert Kesser.

Window to the (Critic's) Soul

Film Criticism 101: Why You Should Recycle the Promo Packet


To be sure, there are many distinct methods of film criticism that might be employed with equal, and mutually exclusive, success. There are purely empirical critiques, there are essays that draw from the writer's personal convictions and travails, there are academic dissections of scholarly concepts such as theme, form, content, etc. And then there are, yes, theses that derive their conclusions entirely from juxtaposing a work of art with its influences. A large part of composing consistently winning prose on movies is knowing when to utilize each of these rhetorical techniques and others in order to "say" something new or interesting -- not only necessarily about the work in question, but about what the work might signify in a greater socio-political, moral, and/or aesthetic context.

All of which is basically to say that film criticism is not a cookie cutter art, and the practitioners who have attempted to work from "formulas" (Dwight McDonald comes to mind) typically wind up unwinding their very narrow-mindedness by finding a masterpiece that in no way fits the pre-designed rubric, or a bomb that by all counts should have been a massive achievement. Indeed, criticism often involves whittling down square pegs to fit round holes; negating certain elements of a plot and creatively coaxing out subtexts in order to align the film with an idea or an assessment. Such notions often exist only in the mind of the critic (we're all fantasists, let's be honest) and need not be universally recognizable so long as -- and this is the crux, the cardinal objective to ring a day-glo yellow rosy 'round -- the product (the review) is both readable and sensible. In other words, critics can do whatever they want so long as they produce legitimate art in the process (though the value of that art might be very well endlessly debated or up for interpretation as "art").

Which leads us to our main lesson today. A film by Argentine Carlos Sorín entitled "The Window" is now making the domestic art-house rounds. Your humble blogger reviewed a screener of this film for the esteemed Slant Magazine and found it a most rare, most gentle opus. He awarded the film with 3.5 out of 4 stars and loaded his write-up with copious examples of what might be called interpretative zeal, in the hopes that others might seek out "The Window" and understand Latin American cinema as something more than what the director of "Hellboy" does in his spare time.

But what I didn't do (I'm dropping the third person shtick because, hey, I'm not The Siren), readers, was read the promotional packet that accompanied the dvd of the film. So imagine my shock when reviews of "The Window" began pouring in to Rotten Tomatoes and IFC, and nearly every single one noted a connection to Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" (a Swedish classic I admit I'm less than enamored with). Furthermore, fathom my surprise that most reviews noted the film's undeniable opulence but claimed that it fell short due to what seems to be a perceived dearth of existential sophistication. Some have even accused Sorín of insidiously espousing nihilism (the cad!) -- if this is true, then my arrhythmic Atheist heart must have been subconsciously recognizing this and beating in time to the images. Indeed, if this is the case then "The Window" may be one of the ultimate examples of "numinous" cinema for anti-transcendentalists.

I have no issue with individuals disliking the movie. In fact, many reviews have been positive -- including an excellent write-up by Aaron Hillis in the Village Voice. What I find most unprofessional and indeed rather puerile is the manner in which Sorín's proclaimed Bergmanic influence is being used as a veritable yardstick against which "The Window" must be judged. Despite having similar subject matter (well, they're both about a senescent scholar surveying his life), the two films are quite disjunct in tone, aural/visual effect, and -- near as I can tell -- aesthetic objective. But of course this hardly matters, since Sorín has damned himself with his unfortunate Director's Statement.

The once magisterial Andrew Sarris even goes so far as to quote the Director's Statement in his review. He then writes:

"Unfortunately, Mr. Sorín’s protagonist is much closer to the end, and much more infirm than Mr. Bergman’s. Whereas the old man in The Window is almost completely bedridden and attached to an IV, the old man in Wild Strawberries still drives everywhere at the wheel of his own car. Also, the Sjöström character has a much more active dream life than Mr. Larreta’s character. And, of course, there is much more talk of God in Mr. Bergman’s world than in Mr. Sorín’s.... Still, The Window is not without a certain visual spell that makes it a first-rate artistic achievement. So see it, but be sure to order a DVD of Wild Strawberries, if only to confirm why The Window has struck me as something of a disappointment despite its undeniably greater realism than Wild Strawberries."

If our good friend and most venerable instructor Andrew finds "The Window" to be "a first-rate artistic achievement," why in God's name is Sorín lambasted for not having made "Wild Strawberries"? Or, rather, why is it assumed that Bergman achieved his filmic goals better than Sorín due to an "active dream life" and "talk of God"? Sarris even admits towards the top of his odd blurb that "In one respect, and in one respect only, do I find The Window at all comparable to Wild Strawberries..." So then why is that earlier art-house staple noted as many times as the film being written up? Here's the problem: Sarris has criticized the Director's Statement, and not the movie -- a very dubious posture indeed.

This seems to be a widespread mistake. Maria Garcia notes that "[Sorín's] claim that this movie bears any resemblance to Wild Strawberries is frankly disingenuous." And one of the film's detractor's -- Keith Uhlich writing in New York Time Out -- notes that "...the strongest passage is the old man’s defiant sojourn into the nearby fields, a sequence as evocative as any from one of Sorin’s stated, and superior, inspirations: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries." This scene -- admittedly a remarkable excerpt -- has perhaps struck critics as Bergman-like due to the protagonist's isolation, and the manner in which the director manages to hold our attention without dialog or action. Still, taking a noted inspiration for granted and affixing it as the foundation for one's review, as Sarris has done, is akin to attempting a critical conversation with a tagline from a lobby card.

The unfortunate reality is that the state of contemporary film may be so dismal that critics are adopting the prismatic perspective of their obsolete elders in order to stay sane -- there is simply precious little to "say" about the movies these days. I am reminded of the quite dusty method of literary interpretation stating that readers should first decipher what an author was attempting to achieve with a particular piece and then form an opinion on how expertly that goal was reached. I am rather distressed and discouraged to discover that the notion of authorial intent has not been entirely banished from critical discourse -- it's a 19th century romantic concept that appears remarkably silly in 21st century Bohemia.

The role of the critic, it seems to me, should not be to didactically engage artists with respect to their "goals" -- after all, the best and most erudite of intentions does not make a great film (were that it were so, producers would sleep far easier). I am furthermore far more intrigued by cinema that obfuscates, rather than illuminates, its "goals," because such a stance forces the audience to intellectually participate in the viewing. And this does not even touch upon the very alive concept of "pointless" art for art's sake -- indeed, the faintest whisper of authorial intent would likely have Oscar Wilde spouting bon mots from the grave. The role of the critic, then, is to tease out and expose some significance that he or she alone recognizes. In other words, we should approach art as independent artists who seek instructive and piquant conversation, and not as librarians who insist that the act of movie-going involves a judicious either/or. As if one must make a definitive selection between Carlos Sorín and Ingmar Bergman before the building is locked up at 5pm.

Not that I am saying I am a perfect critic (ha!); I have, indeed, succumbed to this very same temptation. Clearly I am nothing but a nascent film buff and a fledgling writer with much homework in my midst, and I am proud, and humbled, to be even remotely following in the footsteps of a theoretical genius such as Andrew Sarris. But, if Sarris had recycled the promo material rather than taking it at face value, he might have screened "The Window" with a fresher perspective, and might have then recognized the film's prowess in a more lucid and less diluted fashion. Where others have seen connections to Bergman, I have observed a movie with clear and rather unique ties to Latin American short fiction -- Borges, Rulfo, Garcia Marquez most poignantly (and not simply for the reasons one would anticipate, ie the obvious use of magical realism). Does this make one review "better" than another? Well, I will say honestly that I am pleased to have noted influences on the film that perhaps even its maker was unaware of having interpolated, rather than snottily doting on highly irrelevant sources of inspiration that will only serve to confuse the potential audience of "The Window".

If we want films to improve, we must ultimately lead by example. The critical cookie cutters -- the promo material connections, the Andre Bazin frame-works, the most obvious points of interpretive entry -- must be hurled into the flames and melted down for future smithing. We can, after all, be just as formulaic as the Hollywood box office mechanism we love to vilify.


Read more about "The Window" at IFC's Round-up

Celebrating 40 Years of Anne Heche

All stars are subject to fits of madness, and if you date a daytime TV talkshow host for long enough, who knows what kind of depths of self-confessional martyrdom you can reach? Anne Heche has come a long way, from sizzling rising star to cutting edge public profile gay couple member to childhood sex trauma victim/survivor with tell-all books and so forth. I refuse to judge any of it as bad--more power to her for saying things that need to be said--but I fear it hurt her box office career (alienating the Red states, for example, which is fun and right, but hardly profitable)--what I want to celebrate this month (she hits the big 4.0 on the 25th and man do I know how that goes) is Anne Heche's marvelous screen career. The pictures may get small around her, but whatever she does is always worth seeing; she has just enough Norma Desmond to balance out the sass.

A sexy, devouring firebrand onscreen, Heche often looks too skinny and insane* in her cover shoots and magazine spreads, where she can't vibrate, but becomes pinned down, like a butterfly on a board. Onscreen is where she's meant to be, a relentlessly moving spirit, the closest thing our cinema has to a sprite, a pixie, or an elf; not quite physical. If she stopped vibrating, she'd disappear. She's sexy, sure, but it's a sexiness that comes with uncompromising intellect and feral cunning, a bisexual energy that transcends sex, like Garbo pretending to be Jean Harlow (in a good way, not like TWO-FACED WOMAN).

In the pictures above you can see that she's aces at being in pictures with someone else; she's a natural presence whose whole demeanor changes to reflect those around her, onscreen or off. In psychology class we call that "mirroring" -- a tactic which includes "antithetical mirroring" wherein you assume a complimentary opposite to the person (if they cross their legs, you might uncross them at the same time, etc.) It's the opposite of what someone like Nicole Kidman does, which is why they're so perfect together in BIRTH, or the opposite of what Christopher Walken does, which is why they're so perfect together in WILD SIDE.

VOLCANO: I recently caught this on FoxM and you could say it "re-ignited" my passion for Anne Heche. She's such a cute little firebrand here, hopping around in and out of Humvee backseats as she points out fault lines and sewer tunnels to Tommy Lee Jones. The whole movie is one long frenzied 9/11-predicting flash of smoke and fire trucks, and she surfs through it like a champ, even covered in soot and dust. She cracks that crooked smile and all the urban apocalypse and hellfire seems to vanish in the haze.

BIRTH: While rich debutante Nicole Kidman swoons over the memory of her late husband, and the possibility that some little shrimp of a kid from Brooklyn is his reincarnation, Anne just watches from the wings, alternately trying to steal the kid as a matter of course, and later... well, I won't spoil it, but you should see this amazing film if you haven't already. It's more Kubrick than EYES WIDE SHUT.

More on WILD SIDE to come. We've got a long way until the 25th, and I'm going to be writing about her constantly, relentlessly, trying to prompt lightning rod controversy and rabid responses. She's not always perfect, sometimes needy and bandwagon-jumpy (see above "Jennifer Aniston hair day" photo), but she's got guts. And as Sgt. Emery once said...

* Her book's called CALL ME CRAZY, dealing with her mental illness among other things. I'm planning to get it at the Strand today, presuming they have it, and why the hell wouldn't they?

Bright Lights at Facebook

We're now on Facebook, like everyone else: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Portland-OR/Bright-Lights-Film-Journal/83196391204

Bright Lights 64 now live

Bright Lights Film Journal 64 now live at brightlightsfilm.com.

from the editor

Funny ha-ha or funny weird?

features foyer

Tex Avery: Arch-Radicalizer of the Hollywood Cartoon — "Avery's pics confirm an always-lingering suspicion that the many radical plays with movie syntax and the numerous distancing techniques employed in '60s live-action films, of 'New Wave Cinema' extraction, were, in fact, first invented, and used for purely comic effect, in animated cartoons."

Retro Virus: Did AIDS perform Nensha? — "Be aware: there are forces at work here of which we have no knowledge." — Queen Elizabeth 2

Fifteen Years of French Cinema: By André Bazin — "If French cinema was no longer down in the dumps, so the reasoning went, its palette should duly adorn itself with all the colors of the intellectual rainbow. And this is exactly what happened."

articles antechamber

"Monsieur Hulot and Time": By André Bazin — "In their blend of social satire, wry charm, imaginative physical gags, and ingenious aural as well as visual devices, Jacques Tati's movies have not been surpassed by those of any other postwar cinematic comic — French or otherwise."

Busby Berkeley's Hollywood Hotel: Bring on the dancing girls! Oh, wait! There aren't any! — Thank God for the Benny Goodman Quartet

Let's Dance? Must We? Fred Astaire Collides with Betty Hutton — Ouch!

The Complete A of Altruism: In Which the Selfish Gene Explains Everything — Except whether to laugh or cry

Between Nudist Morality and Freudian Realism! Denuding Fleshly Hypocrisies, Cinematic and Otherwise — "Nude on the Moon's exploitation is as innocent as the Good Christo-Nudist's reclaiming of a pre-figleafed (albeit non-recreational) Eden."

recent cinema roundabout

"Just Another Man": On James Toback's Tyson — "Toback, to his credit, and despite the empathy he feels toward his subject, doesn't pull his punches."

avant-garde atelier

Opposition Compositions: Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film 1947-1986 on DVD — "Avant garde filmmaking has been defined almost entirely in opposition to the Hollywood mainstream."

film festival flying buttress

Screening Hong Kong: The 33rd Hong Kong International Film Festival — One of the world's largest cinema events is also one of the most ambitious

The View from Here: Middle Eastern Cinema at the 49th Thessaloniki International Film Festival — "What happens when the gaze is returned?"

bright sights

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Hobson's Choice, Murnau, Divorce Iranian Style/Runaway, Poil de Carotte, Celia — An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

horror haven

The Child Is Father to the Child: On the Friday the 13th Series — "You can depend on Jason."

the empty guest room

Ida Lupino: Demon Mother Night — "[H]er favorite expression of strained intensity would be less quickly relieved by a merciful death than by Ex-Lax." — James Agee, 1943

James Mason: Odd Man Out — Mason was "equally at home playing small, brooding anti-heroes, camping it up in a toga, or doing a nice line in late career self-parody."

The Goddess in Her Element: Ruan Lingyu in Shanghai — "This is an actress who shows excitement down to the curl of her fingers, and whose face reveals every kind of mercurial change."

Lee Tracy: "A Manic, Scalding Passion for Success" — "With his impish grin, twinkling eyes, and boyish blond hair, he looks like Tom Sawyer crossed with a Tammany Hall fixer."

the palace of program notes

Women Larger Than Life: Program Notes 1: Allan Dwan's Woman They Almost Lynched (1953)/Slightly Scarlet (1956) — "Within the confines of the action genres, Dwan is, like Jean Renoir, a classical humanist."

interrogation alcove

"Strong, Righteous, and Rustic": An Interview with Joel McCrea — "I told Hitchcock, 'I do miss my horse.'"

Impressions of an Auteur, Tehran Today: Talking with Iranian Director Khosrow Sinai — "This situation requires the filmmakers to be more creative in handling their mostly simple stories, which sometimes are so simple as to seem very modern and minimalistic."

Return of the Obsessed: James Toback Steps into the Ring Again with Tyson — "And then he said, 'It's like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is, I'm the subject.'"

pre-code parapet

Desperation and Divinity: "Help us, Mae!" — Hazy thoughts on the transition from real sex to digital hallucinations

Wild Boys and Midnight Maries: Social Realism and Pre-Code in Forbidden Hollywood (Vol. 3) — "We can't help but roll our eyes at a woman who would rather wear holes in her shoes looking for a 'good honest job' than roll around in money and mink."

little stabs

Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror): Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old-School Cinema — "As soon as my health is in jeopardy, everybody shows up to lick my ass!"

hiding in the stacks

Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave, by Derek Hill

Douglas Fairbanks, by Jeffrey Vance

Fred Astaire, by Joseph Epstein

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, by Richard Brody

You'll Like this Film Because You're in It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol, by Michel Gondry.

Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited, by Molly Haskell

Jack Hill: The Exploitation and Blaxpoitation Master, Film by Film, by Calum Waddell

Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years, by Cari Beauchamp

Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy, ed. Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad

Hollywood's Ancient Worlds, by Jeffrey Richards, and Movie Photos, by Alex Bailey

ALSO: We're now tweeting at twitter.com/blfj.