All Bout Money...

Shot on video and doomed with drab titles, STATE PROPERTY 1 (2002) & STATE PROPERTY 2 (2005) are actually very interesting little works in the BATTLE OF ALGIERS vein of faux-verite. With their focus on overlapping dialogue and street economics instead of the usual pumped up meaningless sex and violence (though there is that too) and a canonical knowledge of the genre (beyond mere Scarface remake quoting) they bring to mind Howard Hawks and the nouvelle vauge, I kids thee not. These little gems are worth dusting off as evidence of a semi-invisible African American new wave that reputable film journals ignore outright, just on the basis of the trashy company it keeps. (I think Godard would like them).

It's no secret that many a record mogul has been made through drug deals and one might presume the same of the Roc-a-Fella crew, especially since they're so casually willing to share the details of running a mob. Beanie Sigel stars as the head of the ABM (All 'bout Money), which is concerned primarily with getting their pockets deepened to "Jacque Cousteau" levels as they take over and unify ala Al Capone in the rumrunning era, and that's it. With no real morality or voice of sanity to counter-act the casual drug-related violence, the gang's focus on capitalistic gains over anything else is downright refreshing. It's about gettin' paper, not spendin' it. The only problem is, once they get too big, little up and comers be startin' trouble, such as kidnapping Beans' old lady.

With their Hawksian group dynamics (overlapping dialogue and playful pecking order jostling )and in Sigel's riveting anti-hero presence (he moves and is built like a pit bull, the PROPERTY movies are quietly far ahead of their brethren in the low budget gangsta race. You can tell these guys really do hang out together all the time, such is the natural ease of their group interaction and that alone makes it endlessly fascinating. The cast includes: Memphis Bleek, Jay-Z, Omillio Sparks, Freeway, and Damon Dash. First-time feature film (he cut his teeth on Roc-a-Fella rap videos, of course) director Abdul Malik Abbott skips the bling montages and hand-wringing sermons as if on instinct. Hawks would approve. Don't forget Hawks shot the original SCARFACE with active participation of real mobsters, including George Raft, and arranged a private screening for Al Capone; and what did the producers do? Tacked on a prologue denouncing gangsters and an ending where Tony snivels his way to the gallows! Luckily Abbotts' producers are in the damned gang. PROPS 2 is directed by Dash himself, and he carries the gritty flava while adding some cool Guy Ritchie-style flourishes. It's a sequel like Bride of Frankenstein is a sequel - faster and funnier, with the same talents now one film more experienced.

STATE PROPERTY 2 is in some ways even better, with Beans now incarcerated, working to keep his renegade ABM Crime Syndicate on the map through in-joint deals and visits from his lieutenants (in hilarious code, explained in subtitles). Damon Dash co-stars as a Harlem-born hustler whose "Umbrella network" is unmatched in cash-flow and manpower, dubbing his crew "cake-aholics." He later partners up with Loco, a flashy Miami playboy about to be released from prison and looking to take over the streets of Philly with a letter of wreck from Beans... it all turns out to be an elaborate scheme thunk up by some back alley playa hata, but whom? Along with Beans and Dash this one co-stars Victor N.O.R.E. Santiago, Young Chris & Young Neef, Omillio Sparks, Oschino and celebrity cameos including Mariah Carey!

The Remarkable Mr. Herzog

Werner Herzog (above right) with favorite star Klaus Kinski during the shooting of Fitzcarraldo (1982). [Or perhaps it is Cobra Verde. See comment below.] Janet Maslin’s very funny review of Herzog’s book, Conquest of the Useless, Reflections From the Making of ‘Fitzcarraldo,’ can be read here.

Conversation with Chabrol

In 1976, Claude Chabrol made a special appearance at the Los Angeles Film Exposition (FILMEX). A friend tipped me off that he was staying at the Century Plaza Hotel, and that if I hung out in the lobby I was likely to run into him there.

The tip paid off. I met Chabrol in the lobby, and found him to be an extremely sociable man, very happy to talk about his own films and others'.

We spent some time talking about Fritz Lang, one of Chabrol's idols. One of Chabrol's favorite films was Lang's two-part Indian Epic (The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb), a film that Chabrol thought had been unfairly dismissed by critics who could only write about the alleged stupidity of the story while completely overlooking what made the film great, the intelligence of its visuals.

Chabrol had directed the metaphysical fantasy, Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, with Lang in mind. He said that if the film turned out okay, he planned to dedicate it to Lang. The end result did please Chabrol, and he dedicated the film accordingly.

I mentioned that one of my favorite Chabrol films was La Rupture, starring Chabrol's former spouse, Stéphane Audran (below). Chabrol's response? "J'adore La Rupture!"



The Claude Chabrol Blogathon continues here.

La Décade Prodigieuse - Ten Days’ Wonder (Claude Chabrol 1971)

Why Ten Days’ Wonder? I certainly wouldn’t call it one of Chabrol’s masterpieces. That’s a description I’d reserve for Les Bonnes Femmes, Le Boucher, Á Double Tour, La Rupture, The Cry of the Owl, Story of Women, La Cérémonie, or any one of a half dozen others.

No, the reason I chose Ten Days’ Wonder for the Claude Chabrol Blogathon is because it’s fun. Fun to watch. Fun to write about.

To begin with, it co-stars Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles. How cool is that? Perkins and Welles had already co-appeared in three films, including Is Paris Burning? (René Clément), Catch 22 (Mike Nichols), and – most memorably of all – in Welles’ The Trial (which is a masterpiece). They played well off each other. There was a palpable emotional tension between them, not unlike the tension between Falstaff and Prince Hal in Welles’ Chimes at Midnight.

Ten Days’ Wonder is a film that deliberately reminds the viewer of the past screen performances of its stars: Welles, with his putty nose, as a power-obsessed patriarch like the characters he played in Citizen Kane, Mr. Arkadin, and The Immortal Story; Perkins as a tortured son like the characters he played in Desire Under the Elms, Fear Strikes Out, Psycho, and The Trial. Chabrol wants his audience to see Welles as the archetypal Father, Perkins as the archetypal Son.

Which brings me to another reason why I love this crazy film. I have always been fascinated by the role of myth and archetype in filmmaking. In Ten Days’ Wonder, Chabrol and his co-scenarist Eugene Archer (an American auteurist who had been a mentor to Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovich) took a typical Ellery Queen detective novel and intentionally overlaid its story with as much mythic and archetypal resonance as possible.

There are four principal characters. Welles is Theo Van Horn, an Arkadin-like multi-millionaire who has created a world of his own, a country estate where everyone who lives or visits there must dress as though they were living in 1925. Perkins is Charles Van Horn, Theo’s adopted son. Marlene Jobert is Helene, Charles’s beautiful young stepmother, and the wonderful Michel Picolli plays Paul, the Ellery Queen detective figure, a former teacher of Charles, whom Charles asks to help investigate whether Charles has committed certain criminal acts while blacked out. Just as Oedipus investigates himself – but more on this anon.

Both the Old and New Testaments are evoked. The Old Testament’s archetypal son, Adam, is recalled in a shot where the adulterous Charles and Helene lie as naked as Adam and Eve in their own private Eden.

The New Testament’s archetypal Son of Man is evoked in a shot of Charles splayed on an iron fence in a pose that deliberately recalls the Crucifixion. (I can picture a certain type of reviewer clutching her head at the “pretentiousness” of it all.) Welles’ Theo Van Horn stands in for Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament who is father to Adam and Eve. The name Theo is Greek for God, and Theo's surname Van Horn suggests the horns of another Old Testament patriarch, Michelangelo’s Moses. Which is more than appropriate for this particular film, because Charles happens to be a Michelangelo-like sculptor who sculpts a statue of Theo as Zeus, Greek mythology's Father God. Zeus was also known as Jove, who was Jehovah’s precursor. In a further reference to Moses, the convoluted plot of Ten Days’ Wonder requires Charles to violate each of the Ten Commandments.

The relationship of Theo, Helene, and Charles also deliberately recalls the Greek myth of King Theseus, who corresponds to Theo, his young wife Phaedra, who corresponds to Helene, and Theseus’s son by another woman, Hippolytus, who corresponds to Charles. Suspecting Phaedra and Hippolytus of adultery, King Theseus called on the god Poseidon to destroy Hippolytus. (Perkins had already played a similar role in a modern version of Phaedra directed 9 years earlier by Jules Dassin.) The fact that Charles is having an affair with his mother – albeit his stepmother – additionally invokes the myth of Oedipus.

The icing on this rich “slice of cake” (as Hitchcock would call it) is Chabrol’s visual style. The faux-1925 setting allows the costume designers and set decorators to have a field day, with the emphasis on Chabrol’s favorite color, ice blue. The opening of the film, in which Charles awakes from a drug-induced blackout, is a tour-de-force of skewed camera angles and superimposed writhing sea creatures, recalling Kane’s rubber octopus and setting us up for the later Poseidon references. A spectacular crane shot at a railway station prompted a reviewer for the Village Voice to suggest that parts of the film had been directed by Welles himself. When I was lucky enough to meet Chabrol – a great guy – I asked him about this, and he responded, “Who do they think I am, Norman Foster?” *

* Norman Foster was the Welles stooge solely credited for the direction of Journey Into Fear.

Loving Michael

One of our writers, Prof. Stephane Dunn, sent in this personal tribute to dazzling, wounded, now dead Michael Jackson. We loved his artistry and his mysterious and powerful presence in the culture and lament his passing with her. - GM

Loving Michael
By Stephane Dunn

The calls came fast — Michael Jackson was dead. The words flashed across the screen in typical pop news form — sensational and impersonal. I muted the television and stopped taking calls. It was not hot, shocking news to me. It was heartbreaking.

I want you back

Michael was my first crush. There were the posters on my wall and the journal entries about meeting and marrying him and protecting him from all that might wound him.

Abc, 123

As a little girl, my cousins and I lip synched, kicked, and spun, trying to follow the studded bell bottoms of Michael and his brothers. In secret I wrote him letters by the dozens and sat in my room, daydreaming of our fairytale love story.

Just call my name and I'll be there

Later, I "shook my body to the ground" and grew into adolescence as Michael, the wide-eyed cutie with the magical voice, eased out of the Afro on his way to the jheri curl and a solo career.

Keep on, don't Stop 'till you get enough

I moved beyond posters on the walls and accepted that he was a star flung too far for me to marry — though I hung on to the prayer that at least we'd meet. He was still my Michael and I stood applauding telling him to go on with his bad self as he moon-walked onto MTV and further into pop performance history.

Reaching out to touch a stranger

The lighter his skin got, the more that nose changed, the more I worried about him. But still the voice, the feet, and something of that little boy of long ago remained in the eyes. The awards, the glove, the sparkling sock, and the imitators came and went and the stories grew.

Just call my name and I'll be there

Weird, bizarre, The King of Pop branded child molester, masked freak, wanna-be-white recluse, bad father. And he retreated even, from that beloved stage that had so long been home and went further in search, I believe, of a wonder-world fit for the child the spotlight and fame had stolen him from too early. And there he was — the barred topic, the disgraced has-been pop star, fallen prey to the world's amnesia.

You've got a friend in me

They will say, are saying, he was a musical genius, a pop icon. They will catalog his "bizarre behavior," trot long anonymous fans across the television screen, show images of flower tributes against the backdrop of his pale face and "Michael Jackson 1958-2009." They will debate the sequence of his death, calculate his emotional state, review his achievements and cultural importance, and surmise on the future of his children.

I've been a victim of a selfish kind of love

None of it will mean much to me — not the images, the talk, and debates. I'll be mourning my Michael, my first crush, the boy with James Brown and Jackie Wilson in his feet, the man with the sweetness and the haunted soul in his voice . . .

Oh I never can say good-bye . . .

Chabrol is in the Air (6/21-30) 10 Days' Wonder

In case you're asleep at your desk (like me) I should tell you there's a whole Chabrolian hooplah going on over at the amazing Flickhead!

I've always liked Chabrol's weird blend of class hostility and Hitchcock, lesbian inter-fighting, sexual conflict and bourgeoisie blasting, but never quite "loved" it; hence I have no valuable opinion to interject (aww), but I'm looking forward to digging into the pieces from those who do, and enhancing my appreciation of his subtleties. Flick's site especially has some very lovingly reconstructed "photoplay" versions of key scenes (Such as in LA CEREMONIE) wherein the class resentment is subtly illuminated.

Klueless Kael

The upcoming release of Alain Resnais's classic Last Year at Marienbad on Blu-ray DVD reminds us that Marienbad was one of the many formally ambitious films released in the 1960s that popular critic Pauline Kael simply didn't "get." Blind to its visual beauties, indifferent to its innovative stylistic strategies, she dismissed Resnais's masterwork as pretentious drivel.

She also didn't "get" Antonioni's Blow-up.

And she didn't "get" Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In short, Kael didn't "get" the '60s.

Kael began the decade by pissing on the auteur theory (a theory she later embraced in practice, if not in name, by championing such '70s auteurs as Altman, De Palma, and Spielberg). She ended the decade with a book-length monograph, Raising Kane, based on the ridiculous premise that the primary source of Citizen Kane's lasting greatness was the talent of screenwriter-for-hire, Herman J. Mankiewicz.

It's not difficult to understand Kael's appeal. She was a lively writer, and some of her insights were on the mark. (Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.) In opposition to gender stereotypes, she liked films that were sexual or violent or some combination thereof. She made it OK for New Yorker-reading intellectual wannabes to like "popcorn movies" so long as they didn't take such "trash" seriously.

America has had a long tradition of populist anti-intellectualism, and Kael was very much a part of that tradition, arguably one of its finest flowers. Her entire career was based on the false dichotomy between popular entertainment and art. She never seemed to realize that one could like both, or how frequently the two categories overlapped.

My Dinner with Andre again...Again!

The post before last made me unearth these notes I once wrote after first seeing the film. Maybe they'll add a little something here.

Although from a stylistic perspective the movie is rather ugly and washed out looking, with horrible bland cutaways and uncomfortably amateurish reaction shots (curious for a veteran director like Louis Malle), My Dinner with Andre has something really exciting going for it that most movies never even attempt, conversation. It’s like one of those energetic discussions you might have with a friend where the two of you feel like you could solve all the world’s problems by sheer banter alone.

This movie, for once, allows a viewer to see characters go about as deeply as dialogue can take them into a pair of admittedly circumscribed philosophies. It gets to places that grander or more “cinematic” pictures like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Tarkovski’s Andrei Rublev threatened to visit but spent too much time being beautifully composed ever to arrive at. The closest I’ve seen to this elsewhere is in Woody Allen, but he’s too much of a farceur, too much of a comic genius, to land an audience in this one scene for the length of an entire picture. All talking all the time is not usually the movie way. Meaning, generally, is distributed between whatever deft economic shadings the performers can manage to load what little they have to say with, and the style—the settings, lighting, the rhythm of the cutting, fluid or jerky camera movements, and the music score, which is often leaned on to direct viewers to the appropriate emotional undercurrents in a scene. Dinner, therefore, goes right to the heart of the question of cinematic aesthetics, totally violates them, and succeeds quite well for a couple reasons. Firstly, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory are just terrific. Shawn’s baldish, sweet elfin plainness was something I never got tired of looking at. Even when the dialogue became deadly serious the wry humorous expressions playing on his round intelligent face helped to lighten the situation, which really didn’t seem as serious to me as the characters seemed to find it. Coming out of their very believably intellectualized mouths I never once felt cheated by all the endless book talk, which in, say, Woody Allen’s films, sometimes has an air of glamorization and gilding, since his performers are so often stars. That’s what’s good about the film.

But there’s something a little confused in the conception of this dinner. Wally is a playwright who’s not having any of his stuffed produced at the moment; his live-in girlfriend has been working to make ends meet, which may be a cause of some tension between them but is never explored since all of this is ticked off in a lazy voiceover as he makes his way toward the restaurant for supper with his Friend Andre. He rounds this audio exposition down by bringing us up to snuff on where things stand between he and his dinner companion, Andre, who had been out of the country for awhile and whom he has been avoiding because of the man’s overbearing pomposity. This set up strikes me as a little surprising since the conversation that ensues between them is probably the kind that only two very good friends could have. Between men who resented one another this sort of thing would likely have ended up as a blood bath, gotten side tracked into an acrimonious form of oneupsmanship. I guess it was set up this way so that viewers would know right from the start the two men were coming at things from differing perspectives on life.

The first twenty minutes or so struck me as a bit dull. Andre pontificates at great length about all the various soul journeys he’s taken, to Poland, to Tibet; goes on about his freakish hallucinations and weltshmerz, caused by the total deadness of modern civilized life. In one peculiar annecdote he tells Wally that he once, to regain a fresh perspective on life, went to a weekend retreat where he was ritualistically stripped and buried alive to get a jump start on his inevitable mortality, with fabulous results (which reminded of the ludicrous Psyche games in John Fowles’s early novel The Magus). After narrating all this, amusingly, he then reports going right back to being a bourgeois husband and father who complains about the commonplace ailments of aging—so much for that expensive weekend.

The way Andre continuously congratulates himself on his own daring and depth is a little nauseating; no wonder Shawn had hoped to avoid this dinner. How can you possibly respect someone who in middle age still goes in and out of art fads, adoring a novel one year, the next dismissing it as fascistic? Needless to say, he’s the sort of character who talks about “modern urban anomie” and “future shock”; he's a threat to bring up nuclear annihilation at least once in any conversation no matter what the context. His prognosis of the modern condition, aside from being oddly dated in its terminology, is not too darn chipper. According to him all of civilization’s inhabitants are mere dreaming prisoners who require a violent form of shock therapy to wake up. But wake up to what? I wondered. This isn’t the question Shawn asks him though. Instead he takes this vague premise pretty much for granted, that everyone actually is asleep at the wheel of existence, but thinks what they need is to be shown the good plain old quotidian treasures of the day to day. For him, this is where theater comes in. To be honest this was the point from the start, but the two have such a circumloquacious way of talking about things that it only began to harden in my understanding what the stakes of the conversation were at this point.
Shawn seems to think that theater can and should simply wake people up to the world around them again, not unlike, say, a full length film about a couple of friends who have dinner and shoot the shit for two hours. But I kept thinking as they talked, change what? And how? These questions are never asked. Instead the two argue about the possibility of performing the procedure through art at all, something they both apparently take on faith as necessary; it’s only in their aesthetic approaches the two differ.

They go on about the difficulties and horrors of modern existence as if they were two insects who had been squashed on the windshield of history’s speeding car. But what in their personal lives has made them so shattered? For a lot of viewers, I suspect, the two of them will seem to have it pretty good. I kept wanting them to mention one or two specific things they would like to be different in the world, theater, anything, but I just got the feeling these two characters had accepted the amorphously awful state of human existence without bothering to define what the matter was because, secretly, it was sort of self-flattering to look at things in this way. I.E. they know the score while most of us poor dopes are just dupes and suckers. It’s a kind of ennobling cynicism that converts the wonderfully absurd activity of dressing up in costumes and prancing around on a stage into a near religious mission, important in some glowing mystical way that only intuitive enlightened souls can pick up on. I wanted Shawn to finally wave Andre away with some frivolous quip, or say his assessments were “just crap”. Instead he takes it all so earnestly it’s a little embarrassing, at least as far as his lines go—his facial expressions suggest a pleasant ironic imp hiding under the surface that I clung to throughout.

Although the two indulge in a great deal of discussion about what’s wrong with the general state of life/the theater, they keep everything in such general ideal terms they never actually talk about the technicalities of theater. Ideas are great, but they require specificity and mediation. I wanted them to give us a clue or two about how they intended to achieve what they wanted to at the level of actual work, or if they, mostly Andre, even felt it valid to try. Despite real tints of humor in the movie, neither character ever speaks up for comedy or lightness. No wonder they seem so bloodless and destroyed. Their quixotic hopes and dreams are never made even charming, just absurd or weak and pathetic. I suspect that you’re supposed to hover outside them to some degree though. That’s probably why the movie has been set in a fancy restaurant where waiters occasionally break into the chat, which drives home to the viewer how cushy and protected these shattered souls actually are. The characters seemed to have been completely neutered by their neuroses, like characters from an Antonioni movie, only Dinner uses naturalistic performances and tons of talk instead of chic stilted compositions. Yet even twenty or so years after its release the concept of this movie is still pretty novel, and rather pleasurable. I’ll refrain from making a positive pun out of the movie title.

The Worst Father in Film History

I can't think of any others with a more sweeping sense of corruption. His perversity is simply authoritative. And yet, he's probably the most memorable father in film history, as well.... Credit must be given to Towne, Polanski, and first and foremost to Huston for designing such an epically horrific character.

Then again, there's always Gerard Depardieu in "My Father the Hero"...





Happy Father's Day, and just remember that there's nothing better than a villainous paterfamilias to make one appreciate their own flawed daddies.

My Dinner with André and the Meaning of Life (well, sort of)

[My Dinner with André comes out on DVD from the Criterion Collection on Tuesday]

Watching My Dinner with André for the first time at age 15 was my introduction not only to Wallace Shawn (as an intellectual, anyhow...I had seen his homunculus wryly lurking like a Cheshire Cat in the periphery of Woody Allen's Manhattan) and André Gregory (who remains a bit of a mystery) but to Louis Malle as well, and it's telling how that first impression stayed with me. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I read Malle behind the camera of that film not as a raw documentarian or an invisible photographer but a serious-minded pilgrim with protean interests -- a suspicion later confirmed through viewings of Murmur of the Heart, Lacombe Lucien, and Phantom India. My Dinner with André, however, remains a unique filmic shrine in his oeuvre, a masterful tribute to the Woolfe-ian talk talk talk, eat eat eat of the avant-garde diaspora with an intensely hospitable concentration on its subject matter. The movie is, finally, an exploration of seething alienation amidst both neon lights (urban) and moonlit trances (pastoral), but this painful under-layer is swaddled in a remarkably effective perpendicular storytelling format that emphasizes intimacy and physical proximity (both to the camera and to other human beings). The fetidness wafting from the kitchen in the posh restaurant is that of death, and not just the slaughtering of quail morsels. Closeness is fleeting. The damning schism of individuality is forever.

Revisiting the film for a write-up at Slant Magazine I was astounded at the plethora of subtle contrivances -- Wally's pedestrian voice-over and adenoidal retorts, the "lucid" resolution in which nothing is resolved, and the rather laughable manner in which André is coaxed into relaying his virtual life story at the dinner table. It seems, in retrospect, less like a bona-fide art film and more like a project by mainstream filmmakers with an abstract grasp of what an art film should look and feel like (which is odd, given the track records of those involved). But this tension in the piece's approach appears so happily ignorant of its awkwardness that we take it as a necessary, organic shortcoming: How else could a two-hour conversation be successfully translated to the screen and still feel like a self-contained fiction? The solution was to make the structure so overbearingly dramatic and so ostentatiously theatrical (you can almost hear the curtain falling after each "act" ends) that it would provide a kind of foothold for the audience's journey through the nebulous content.

And it mostly works, primarily because Wallace Shawn's self-named character manages somehow to sound interpretively didactic without actually providing us much of a useful mechanism for understanding the banter in retrospect. More startling than the effect of watching My Dinner with André is that of remembering My Dinner with André in the hours and days and even years that follow. You might be awakened abruptly at 3:00am one sultry pre-dawn morning and half-expect to find yourself resurrected from an early symbolic grave and surrounded by neo-druids. Or you might be wandering the streets of the post-Giuliani New York as a disenchanted tourist and stare through the window of a downtown eatery to lock eyes with a wizened, scowling waiter who seems to view customers as a constant challenge to his stateliness. Or you might be simply sipping coffee one morning with the wife, the paper in your lap (well, CNN online via iPhone works, too), the whimsically-monikered dachshund at your heels, and be overwhelmed with a vague sadness...not precisely an unrequited longing or a damaged heart depression but a melancholy realization that there probably isn't much more to it all than this, not even if you were to doff your pajamas and streak like a fleshy, incendiary comet towards the conservative coast.



Which brings me to the quiet epiphany I experienced while re-viewing the film properly, after having replayed it from memory in dribbles and snippets for the better part of a decade. My Dinner with André, rather than being a film about aesthetics or logic or a Nietzsche-like dialog with the Apolline dueling the Dionysian, is a calm tragedy about the lugubrious magic of middle-age. Of course, artists are perpetually obsessed with failure, and senescent ones usually make for the most interesting characters (young artists just come off as typily snotty on screen). But in My Dinner with André the frustration and feelings of self-betrayal are more than just a natural byproduct of the artistic existence, they rather seem more potent and haunting than the art piece itself. The art, or attempts at art, are like the subordinate droppings of a distorted self-image. What both characters in the film fail to recognize (but what the audience acknowledges along with the movie’s performers) is that middle-age is about cultivating one’s self as an art piece, whether corybantic or subdued, with a poisonous bushel of disappointment at the core. My Dinner with André makes this concrete for us: yes, Wallace Shawn’s plays are stunning (especially The Fever), but do they compare to his performance here, where he becomes both antithesis and synthesis, and the only thing in the film we have to root for?

Early on in the story, Shawn narrates some gossip from a friend who supposedly saw André slouched over a lamppost in the evening, crying his eyes out over something he saw in Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. It’s a painterly image, all the more powerful for evoking specific bits of visual scenery with words alone, but it also feels like the clever inverse of an allusion Woody Allen might make. Allen celebrates Bergman (even if comically) while Wally and André mourn him, but this has less to do with the funerealness of the Swedish director himself than with the fact that Wally and André mourn everything. The doors of their perception have been cleansed, and the infinity they avert their eyes before is the continuum of decay emanating from the center of the slowly actualizing human corpse. But when all is said and done, I’m with Wally and his electric blanket: after all, corpses get cold.

Great American Humorists No. 2 – Robert Benchley

Robert Charles Benchley (1889-1945) was a drama critic and writer of humorous essays, most memorably for The New Yorker, before he fell into performing after reading one of his pieces, The Treasurer’s Report, as part of a theatrical revue put together by his friends at The Algonquin Round Table.

The Treasurer’s Report was filmed in 1928, one of the very earliest sound films, which led to a series of short subjects like the one above written by and starring Benchley that lasted well into the 1940s. In the meantime, Benchley appeared as a comic supporting actor in features such as Dancing Lady (with Joan Crawford), China Seas (with Clark Gable), Foreign Correspondent (Hitchcock), and I Married a Witch (Rene Clair), and played the lead, so to speak, in Walt Disney’s The Reluctant Dragon, playing a man (himself actually) touring the Disney animation studios.

That Inferior Feeling (1940, above) is one of Benchley’s best short subjects, encapsulating as it does, his perpetual feeling of embarrassment, and his difficulties in dealing with those pesky creatures known as “other people.” Benchley’s profound sense of guilt – even when he hasn’t done anything – is not too far removed from Franz Kafka’s.

[The first post in this series - before I knew it was a series - was a tribute to Mike Nichols and Elaine May.]

10 (or More) Film Books That Made Me What I Am Today

Speaking of books – having been invited by Movieman to contribute to his Reading the Movies meme, I submit a list of the 10-plus film-related books that had the greatest impact on me.

1. William K. Everson, The American Movie - Everson was not a critic; he was a film historian, a dying breed, and one of the best. Everson seemed to have watched every film made from the silent era to the day he was writing. At a time when movie-related publishing was dominated by books with titles like The Films of [insert star’s name here], Everson’s wonderfully photo-illustrated and long-out-of-print decade-by-decade survey of American filmmaking was probably the first intelligent book on the movies I ever read.

2. Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film - Although I had been reading magazines like Famous of Monsters of Filmland, Fantastic Monsters, and Castle of Frankenstein since the age of 13, Clarens’ book was my first hardback introduction to serious genre-based criticism.


3. Hitchcock/Truffaut - Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock is lavishly illustrated with frames from Hitch’s films, including shot by shot breakdowns of entire sequences. Hitch was a director who believed in "pure filmmaking" and could speak articulately about it – instead of just regaling the reader with amusing anecdotes (although Hitch was great at that, too). I read this one over and over.

4. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings - I first encountered this book in a library, and it led me to read many other books by the same author. Durgnat, with his highly distinctive, not to say eccentric, style, emphasized the aspects of filmmaking that still interest me most, among other things, how the purely formal elements of a film - composition, camera movement, montage - evoke feelings in the viewer. He also excelled at psycho/sociological analysis. See, for example, his brilliant take on This Island Earth.

5. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films - After watching all the Hitchcock films I could, and reading Hitch’s own take on them, Wood took me to the next level – subtext! Wood is one of the finest and most insightful non-fiction prose stylists I have read on any subject. His seminal work on Hitchcock, one of the first book-length auteurist studies written in English, was followed by monographs on Bergman, Hawks, Chabrol, and Penn, among others, and essay collections like the aptly titled Personal Views. (In the world of Wood, criticism is frequently inseparable from autobiography.) No writer on this list has influenced me more profoundly.

6. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 - Andrew Sarris is the man who brought Cahiers du Cinema style auteurism to the United States, and The American Cinema is the book that lays down his creed. Sarris’s book is often illuminating, sometimes infuriating, but more important than any of that, The American Cinema introduced me and a generation of film buffs to dozens of great directors and hundreds of great films.

7. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By - I may not agree with Brownlow’s thesis (that’s it’s been all downhill since the coming of sound) but his book, a lengthy combination of research and oral history, remains the definitive introduction to the silent film era.

8. Ian Cameron (Editor), Movie Reader -This is a collection of articles from Movie, the greatest English-language auteurist film magazine ever published, and it includes pieces written between 1962 and 1965 by Raymond Durgnat, Robin Wood, Ian Cameron, V.F. Perkins, and Charles Barr, among others. A highly recommended collection, if you can find it. If you can’t, try looking for back issues of the magazine itself.

9. David Thomson, Suspects - Suspects is film criticism disguised as fiction, or maybe it’s fiction disguised as film criticism. In either case, Thomson’s series of imaginative sketches based on characters who appeared in film noir - interrelating them as part of a master narrative - was an eye-opener for me with respect to my appreciation of the genre. Equally literary, and appearing at about the same time as Suspects was Barry Gifford’s The Devil Thumbs a Ride (later republished as Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir). Thomson and Gifford were both significantly more expansive in their view of noir than prior writers on the subject. They included films like Citizen Kane, Cat People, and It’s a Wonderful Life, women’s melodramas like Mildred Pierce and No Man of Her Own, as well as more recent films like Blue Velvet. Together, you can find no better introduction to Noirworld than these two books.

10. BFI Film Classics - The British Film Institute’s series of monographs on individual films, some by established film writers, others by writers known for their work in other areas, was a brilliant idea. Two of my favorites in the series are Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, and Camille Paglia on The Birds. There are many more worth your while. BFI Film Classics and its companion series, BFI Modern Classics, can be considered a single ongoing work-in-progress, an exceptionally literate encylopedia of the greatest films ever made. (Click on photo below to enlarge.)

Bright Lights Hits Hardcover!

Despite what you've heard, publishing is not dead. (You can't be on life support and still be considered dead, can you?)

But seriously, our good news, as a glance at the pic at left will tell you, is that the first "Bright Lights book" will soon be available: Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran (London: Anthem Press, 2009). There was an institutionally priced hardcover issued in March, but the ultra-affordable and shockingly handsome trade paperback is now available for pre-order via Amazon for a mere $18.45, discounted from the list price of $27.95. Release date: July 1, 2009.

Amortized over 370 pages and umpteen-thousand words, $18.45 is a pretty good deal. Especially considering the veritable tidal wave of high-quality verbiage to be found inside, courtesy of Bresson, Truffaut, Fellini, Kiarostami, Caveh Zahedi, Allie Light, Allan Dwan, Melvin and Mario van Peebles, Clint Eastwood, Barbara Kopple, Sirk, Otto Muehl, Robert Wise, Mania Akbari, Michael Haneke, the Brothers Quay — you know, the gang. Some of these interviews appeared in the online Bright Lights, others in the way-gone print edition; still others are brand new. If you need additional inspiration, be aware that the Bresson interview is one of his best, an in-depth discussion that's appeared piecemeal before but here, for the first time, complete and giving quite a picture of ol' Bob. And the Truffaut is his last substantive interview, conducted a mere four months before his untimely death. And that's just for starters!

Jeanine Basinger calls Action! "a practical Ph.D. in what it takes to put a personal vision up on screen, both then and now," and Dave Kehr of the New York Times chimes in that I and my "distinguished collaborators are expert interviewers, deftly guiding conversations from tiny but illuminating details of practice to the highest and brightest flights of interpretation." The book features some of BL's most beloved scribes, including Jerry Kutner, Bert Cardullo, Andrew Grossman, Damon Smith, Dorna Khazeni, Damien Love, Karin Badt, Tony Macklin, and yours truly. Oh, and Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote the foreword!

If you like the idea of featuring this book prominently at whatever locale you now find yourself — hovel, gutter, psych ward — please consider pre-ordering it through Amazon. Get one for yourself and all your many friends. You can pre-order it through this link and we'll get a small percentage of the take:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843313294?ie=UTF8&tag=briligfiljou-20.

For additional details (like the Table of Contents complete with snappy epigraphs), check out our "Action!" page: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/action.

With thanks for helping me buy that new lederhosen I've been eyeing.

Gary

PS Due to the ever-shifting sands of blogworld, I'll be bugging you with a repost of this announcement about every week or so, until I get those lederhosen!

TERROR TRAIN!

A little bit Sub-genius founder Bob Dobbs (sans pipe) crossed with Joan Crawford and a little bit freaky as hell, this demon was sighted last night during an otherwise routine screening of Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951). Has anyone noticed this uncanny vision before? Is it just a trick of the blinds and dissolve? I was so scared I near about had to pause and snap this photo of the screen for your agape amusement.

Jon Voight - Evolution of an Actor

From Left-Wing Radical --

In The Revolutionary (Paul Williams, 1970).

With Jane Fonda in Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978).

-- to Right-Wing Crank

As George Washington, with Kelsey Grammer as George S. Patton in An American Carol (David Zucker, 2008)

Via Wikipedia: On June 8th, 2009 at a Congressional fundraiser Voight said he was "embarrassed" by President Obama, referred to the Obama administration as "the oppression" and said that Obama was a "false prophet" who would bring about the downfall of the nation.

Very Clever, Those Armenians

Back in the day—way, way back in the day, in 1960—I first saw It Happened One Night, at age 15 on a 17-inch TV. When the walls of Jericho finally fell, I wondered to myself “Well, since they know how to make good movies, why aren’t they all like this?”

Forty-nine years later, I’m still wondering. Pencil moustaches and plucked eyebrows never looked so good as when Clark and Claudette made their trek from Miami to New York, a journey almost as epic as Huck and Jim’s down the Mississippi, and a lot more stylish. If this be Capra-corn, make mine a double and hold the Noel Coward.

Afterwords
If you don’t get the headline, see the damn picture.

B. Kite on O. Welles

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the films of Orson Welles (and not just Citizen Kane) should immediately check out American: Exhibits from the C.F. Kane Museum, described at The Auteurs’ Notebook, where it is temporarily posted, as “a six-part video investigation into the work of Orson Welles by B. Kite.”

Kite’s technique – deconstructing and recombining images and sounds from Welles’ films while a narrator comments on them – is reminiscent of what Jean-Luc Godard did in his multi-part Histoire(s) du Cinema. But Kite does it better! His video poem/essay reminds me why I love Welles so much in the first place.

Thanks to D. Cairns for the link.

Poster Comparison No. 7

Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times has some interesting observations to make concerning the Drag Me to Hell poster (top). As he notes, the actress’s wide open mouth seems to express orgasmic ecstasy rather than the horror of being dragged down to hell: “If this is a horror film where she's supposed to be scared, why is it that she also appears sexually aroused?”

I was reminded of the poster for Wes Craven’s 1981 horror turkey, Deadly Blessing (bottom), in which a pre-stardom Sharon Stone also expresses inappropriate ecstasy while being caressed by demonic hands.

It’s no news to anyone that sex sells – whether appropriate or not.

The Sharon Stone poster image was based on an actual shot from the film. Maybe the only memorable shot in the film.

The Drag Me to Hell image doesn’t look like anything in the movie. Alison Lohman's character never enjoys her torments. However, her wide open mouth does reflect director Sam Raimi’s fixation on oral penetration. (See Jeannette Catsoulis’s review here.)

I’ll bet you the creators of the Drag Me to Hell poster also remembered Deadly Blessing.

DRAG ME TO HELL / STUCK – Women in Trouble

The first is a supernatural horror film. The second is a horror story without any trace of the supernatural. Otherwise, they are remarkably similar. Both apply the horror film’s fundamental “return of the repressed” formula to the current economic malaise. Both films feature pretty but not-so-sympathetic heroines whose independence as career women is visually defined in part by the cars they drive. The principal threat to the heroines in both films is either a homeless person or a person about to be homeless.

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009) stars Alison Lohman (Big Fish) as Christine, a loan officer at a bank being considered for a promotion to assistant manager. Her boss (David Paymer) advises her that if she really wants that promotion, she needs to show that she can make “tough decisions.”

Christine’s first tough decision is to deny an elderly gypsy woman a third extension on her mortgage, effectively rendering the woman homeless. In order to ensure our identification with Christine and her decision, director Raimi makes the old woman as disgusting as possible, with a clouded-over eye, withered brown fingernails, and jagged dentures that are practically dripping with bodily fluids. Not to mention a bad attitude.

That night, in a parking garage, Christine is attacked by the old woman (above, surprisingly strong) in her car. Christine manages to fend her off, but not before the old woman steals an item of Christine’s clothing, a button, and places a curse on it, “Soon, it will be you who comes begging to me.”

At this point, the story turns into a gorier more blackly comic retread of Jacques Tourneur’s classic Curse of the Demon (1958) with the protagonist trying to get rid of the cursed item (in Demon, it was a piece of parchment) before being carried off to his or her doom by a Creature From Hell.

Throughout all of this, Raimi attempts to walk a fine line between horror and comedy, and between making his protagonist sympathetic enough to care about, but not so sympathetic that the audience can’t relish the various punishments inflicted upon her. Raimi’s Evil Dead II, his best horror film to date, was simultaneously scary and funny, but in Drag Me to Hell, the director’s comic attitude undercuts the horror (see, for example, the sudden appearance of a staring eyeball in a slice of cake), and the end result is neither funny enough nor frightening enough. Worse, there is a pronounced misogynistic streak that runs through the entire film, not only in the characterization of the old woman – who resembles the “swallow your soul” ghoul-woman from Evil Dead II – but also in the characterization of Christine herself. What is this hate-love thing going on here and in the Spiderman series between Raimi and actresses who look like (or are) Kirsten Dunst?

The film is at its best when it places the audience in uncomfortable moral positions. (See Raimi’s earlier A Simple Plan.) Would you be willing to murder a cute little kitten, if by so doing you could save yourself from being torn apart by a hideous demon? When Christine hesitates to pass on the cursed button to an unscrupulous rival for the position she covets, we actually start to like her and hope that she might be saved.

Stuck (Stuart Gordon, 2007) stars Mena Suvari (American Beauty) as Brandi, a cornrow-coiffed attendant at a nursing home who is also, as it happens, being considered for a promotion. We first meet her showing compassion and patience as she cleans up an old man’s mess.

However, on the way home from a long night of partying, Brandi’s car collides with a homeless man (Stephen Rea) who gets stuck headfirst in her windshield – halfway in, halfway out – apparently bleeding to death. Like Raimi’s film, Stuck places the audience in situations where difficult moral choices have to be made and asks, in effect, if you would behave any better. Brandi chooses to drive her car home and lock man-and-car inside her garage until things sort themselves out. She comes to believe that it’s all his fault. When the man in the windshield takes longer to die than she expected, she invites her thug of a boyfriend over to expedite matters.

Where Stuck differs most significantly from Drag Me to Hell (aside from the absence of the supernatural) is in its attitude toward the economically unfortunate. While Drag Me to Hell has some sensitivity to class issues (Christine is looked down upon by her boyfriend’s well-off parents because she grew up on a farm), it compromises any critique of the heroine - or the dysfunctional system that employs her - by making the old gypsy woman a one-dimensional monster. In Stuck, on the other hand, Tom Bardo (Rea), the man in the windshield, becomes just as much a protagonist as Brandi. (In Tibetan Buddhism, the word “Bardo” means an “in-between” or “transitional” state, an appropriate name for a character who has just lost his job and his home, and is halfway between life and death, halfway in and halfway out of the car’s windshield.)

Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea are both excellent in their roles. We root for Brandi as we root for any character on screen, no matter how immoral, who attempts to solve a problem. As Brandi and Tom become mortal enemies, and Tom grows ever more resourceful simply trying to survive, our sympathies naturally shift toward him. Unlike Raimi, director Gordon never loses control of the tone of his film. The black humor is not antagonistic toward the horror but is inseparable from it.

Neither filmmaker, Sam Raimi or Stuart Gordon, can be accused of plagiarizing the other. The story of Drag Me to Hell is something Raimi and his brother Ivan reportedly dreamt up years ago. The screenplay of Stuck, adapted by John Strysik from a story by Gordon, is based on a real incident that occurred in Texas in 2001. If the stories have so much in common, it is most likely because shared social circumstances produce similar nightmares.