The original inglorious bastard

In the midst of this blogospheric firestorm revolving around Inglourious Basterds, one relatively mild concession we can all make is that, for one reason or another, the movie (like all of Tarantino's work) certainly inspires people to watch other movies. One old favorite I found myself attracted to after seeing it was The Dirty Dozen, which, despite the confident comparisons made by dozens of reviewers I've read, barely resembles Inglourious Basterds at all. Perhaps the difference can best be summed up as the difference between Lee Marvin and Brad Pitt, the two films' biggest American stars.

By pure coincidence, the day I re-watched The Dirty Dozen was the 22nd anniversary of Marvin's death. To me, Marvin has always been one of the most utterly masculine movie stars to ever grace the screen. He had the face of a Great Dane who's been kicked around by an abusive owner, with a rusty, dragging voice. When he smiled - which wasn't often - he invariably looked devious. Even when he was young, he looked old, and even when he was clean-shaven, he seemed to have the aura of a beard about his face, commanding attention and respect. Yet he was charming, powerful, and - yes - sexy.

Pretty boys like Pitt simply disappear into the scenery when they share the screen with such a dynamo (the exception being the magnificent Burt Lancaster, who was, to use a horrible cliche, far more than just a pretty face). Marvin supposedly couldn't stand the scene in The Dirty Dozen where he purposely provokes Clint Walker's character, Posey, into attacking him with a bayonet, only to wrest it out of his hands and knock Walker flat on his ass. It was too phoney, Marvin said, and, had it been another man in the scene with Walker instead of him, he would have been right. Walker was quite possibly the manliest-looking actor in Hollywood, then or now, but Marvin makes him look like a school yard pansy.

It's something of a small miracle that someone like Lee Marvin was allowed to become a fully fledged movie star in an industry that rarely allows people with his ugly mug, bad attitude, and general sourness from ever rising above the level of "that guy" character actor. The only other movie star I can think of in the same vein is Humphrey Bogart, but he at least had the benefit of playing, for the most part, romantic leads. Marvin was too tough for romance, too cool, and too tough for Hollywood - which is, no doubt, why America loved him so much.

Now, the near-masterpiece of a crime thriller Point Blank has been remade into a limp Mel Gibson vehicle, and Spielberg's pseudo-epic Saving Private Ryan has far eclipsed any exposure that The Big Red One ever had. Film students, having taken their prescribed dosage of John Ford with The Searchers, Stagecoach, and The Grapes of Wrath, move on with their curricula without every looking at The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Hell in the Pacific is all but forgotten. Worse yet, in a sad twist of irony, many young people of my generation were first exposed to Lee Marvin through a line of dialogue in Reservoir Dogs.

What is it about this sign that disturbs you, Marnie?

It’s amazing to me that some fellow Jews who were so indignant about Sophie’s Choice (by which I mean the Styron novel — arguably his best — and not the hollow Pakula movie) can give Tarantino a free ride on this one, presumably under the theory that this boy should be allowed to enjoy every last drop of his all-American fun, even at the expense of real-life Holocaust victims. As far as I’m concerned, whatever Tarantino’s actual or imagined politics might be, he’s become the cinematic equivalent of Sarah Palin, death-panel fantasies and all" -- J. Rosenbaum

Few writers these days bother to think things through when they get fired up on the web, which is why it's always better to wait to post until one's had time to cool down. For example, I deleted the first five paragraphs of this post after being up half the night ranting away. Certain things make me see red, and one of them is phrases like "even at the expense of real-life Holocaust victims." Just how, Mr. Rosenbaum, is a movie like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS at the "expense" of holocaust victims, unless of course you mean the Weinsteins? And what the hell is a death-panel fantasy? I probably have one myself, somewhere...Freud says I do anyway, and he's Jewish so musk know. And what does Rosenbaum mean by "giving Tarantino a free ride"? Is it up to Jewish critical consensus to set the fare? And does that mean one must be Jewish to write a Jewish character? Does it really, as Woody Guthrie once sang, take a worried man to sing a worried song? I'm worried now, but I wont be worried long.

I bring up the film MARNIE in relation to this big brouhaha and the above poster, because I know certain signifiers bring up painful memories in people, regardless of connection or conceptional intent. In Hitchcock's film, Marnie (Tippi Hedren) freaks out over the color red, which Connery then uses to try and get to the root of her hysteria via all his crotch pocket Freud. I'd vote that this is the movie to compare BASTERDS too, not SCHINDLER'S LIST, because in the latter film, Spielberg uses red only once, to show a single girl's coat (left)as she's led to her death, a powerful statement in the Stanley Kramer tradition. QT on the other hand, uses red like Connery in MARNIE, like a finger in a wound, poking, poking! Hithcock's obsessions were understood by him and all synchronized to his cinema, while Spielberg is unconscious of his own desires and how they manifest in icky ways. I can imagine Freud looming over Spielberg on the couch, the way Mark looms over Marnie: "So...What's your fetishistic obsession with burying children in outhouses and crushed cars, getting them drunk and touching them with glowing fingers? Do you understand, Mr. Spielberg, that somewhere a child is being beaten AT ZIS VERY MOMENT?!"

Being aware of things that predispose unconscious bias is the mark of a good writer Imagine Marnie as a NY Times film critic, being assigned a film like DEEP RED, for example, or hating any movie she sees in a red velvet theater like the Ziegfeld. But if Marnie realizes that Sean Connery is deliberately using red for the sole purpose of getting to the root of her hysteria, then what was once automated toreador commie flag waving for the American bull becomes therapeutic, or at the very least, modernist.

Let's not forget that the USA is hardly a "clean" country when it comes to genocide. What makes us able to adopt moral postures is that when we were shipping Native Americans in packed cattle cars down to camps in the southern swamps to die en masse of starvation and fever, there were no AP news photographers, no UN observers and no CNN. No pictures = no guilt. No REAL guilt as in, let's give Manhattan back to the Native Americans with our apologies and all move out into a well-lit refugee camp to do penance. Basically, the USA is one of the few empires that "did genocide right," as in all the way through to the end, with no horrific documentary footage of the slaughter to be played at trials, and the victim race being a people who do not breed well in captivity.

I think of WAG THE DOG here in the idea of "one picture of one bomb dropping through an air-shaft, America bought that war." America will buy anything if it has a good image or key phrase that triggers our "this time it's personal" response. Ultimately this is what Quentin is addressing in his film: the way wars are fought and won by images, propaganda, troop gossip, the hearts and minds of those at home watching newsreels. What was it that got so many usually well-spoken Jewish Americans ready to nuke Palestine on 9/11? Just a picture of Arab kids on a street corner cheering. One picture and America bought that war.

The worry that we will somehow "forget" about the holocaust if we dare even compare it for a moment to a media event stems from a misunderstanding of how powerful film is in our unconscious. The footage shot in the liberated camps during the fall of the Reich is what ensures the Holocaust happened and will continue to have happened. Failing to understand this will also make INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS wearing on the nerves, and will make Spielberg's artificial sweeteners feel like a nice cozy escape womb.

But it is just those nerves which need to be worn so ruthlessly. The mission of the artist is not to flatter bourgeoisie "intelligence" but to find the spot they don't want to be poked and then poke there until they scream and threaten to take your grant away. This is what art should be, a ripping open of a wound festering from repression, a wound created by NOT talking about the elephant in the room, a denial of the need to talk racist or act sexist, or issue threats, or humiliations, or commit the heinous act of smoking in the office, which is why MAD MEN is such a breath of fresh air, so to speak. Though I am sure there is a Rosenbaum somewhere, who is worried that kids are going to watch that show and start harassing their secretaries again like it's all good fun.

Rather than as a war film, BASTERDS should be met as a meditation on artifice, cinema and power. The main scenes people don't like in the film generally revolve around women: the protracted tavern scene with the movie star fending off drunken Germans playing a drinking game, the projectionist dealing with the amorous German movie star; these are the uncomfortable, long scenes and the point is that real life under occupation involves ALWAYS living this way, there is no cathartic respite, no "now we're safe" moment. It's so easy to reduce years of trauma to a few signifyin' sound bytes in a cushioned place like NYC, where terrorist bombs aren't a BIG problem anymore. When our big buildings fall, it's the catastrophe of the century and we demand answers and that heads roll and that all the nations gather around and mourn with us at how unfair the world is. When we explode buildings in your country, on the other hand, it's just "collateral damage" and you have no right to get snooty.

We weren't prepared for Quentin's sensitivity to the constant annoyances endured by attractive women saddled with unwanted male attention, being forced into positions where you can't say no by uniformed conquerors. We'd have been prepared for this film if it said it was by Neil La Bute or David Mamet, because BASTERDS is just as much about sexism as it is about antisemitism; to paraphrase an old Nirvana song, it's Francis Farmer having her revenge on Seattle. It is a movie that makes you uncomfortable and frustrated on purpose and, like the Coen's best work, the mise en scene indicates the absence of a "perfect" narrator and becomes a kind of self-reflexive surrealist poetry. Tarantino even includes a small clip from Hitchcock's SABOTAGE (left) to let you know he's intentionally trashing proper catharsis, intentionally doing what Hitchcock regretted more than any other directorial decision in his career, blowing up the boy on the bus.

How Tarantino earns his stripes is via the upsetting the enthroned patriarchal "liberal"-- how dare some film geek expose our lack of familiarity with the origins and meanings of the medium which we profess to be experts on!?!?! The only competition Tarantino has in his use of silent movie psychology, pre-pre-code old testament vengeance and amniotic incestuousness, is Guy Maddin and Lars Von Trier, so it's interesting the ANTICHRIST is so linked with BASTERDS as far as knee-jerk hatred in the current press zeitgeist. The old guard critics are too busy manning the canon to realize their complicity in the banality of cinema as it exists today, how they are responsible for the the way "art" films bend and kowtow to the limited range of the bourgeoisie, banning all mentions of emperors and new clothes. Knowing as they do almost nothing about early cinema (silent movies are BORING, yo!) the average critic of today seems to have forgotten that the social mores they take as a given were fobbed onto them by a raving anti-semite named Joe Breen. When Tarantino or Von Trier come at them with ideas from the old testament of cinema, the bourgeoisie get indignant. Ultimately BASTERDS is the best film about Old Testament vengeance since DOGVILLE. If you don't like to see Jews with guns, don't go to the movies, or Israel for that matter, where hot chicks in fatigues and machine guns aboundeth!

Akin to patriotism, indignant moral outrage is the last refuge of a scoundrel, someone desperate to hide their true scared, shattered, splintered self behind a false persona of "completeness." For example, IRREVERSIBLE. If you saw the film and now have traumatic associations with seeing Monica Belucci from behind in a red stairwell (above), then your opinion on all future movies with red stairwells and Monica Belluci together in them is suspect, unless, of course you are aware of this traumatic association and account for it in your writing. If you've ever been to therapy you know that if the therapist makes you mad, whatever they said is probably the truth, therefore, by extension, if a film causes riots and outrage, it's probably telling the truth. Freud, for example, got really mad when Jung tried to expand on the unconscious' role beyond Freud's view of it as a kind basement storage for repressed memories and desires. So the man who once braved a booing, jeering audience to deliver the controversial theory of infantile sexuality, boos and jeers the next guy's theory. Similarly, Rosenbaum once a champion of free expression, gets really mad when Tarantino dares tamper with the boilerplate saga of "his" people. There's no "except" in freedom of speech, man, even if you talk about Jews in WW2. When we say, "we humans" as writers, are we supposed to exclude Jews (if we're not Jewish)? Velcome to zee slipperiest slope of zem all!

Anima & Animus - Revenge of the Giant Face

The amount of discussion generated by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds demonstrates, if nothing else, that whether you like the film, hate it, or harbor mixed feelings about it, what Tarantino has created is some kind of movie.

Unless you have been living in the proverbial cave - and I don't mean Plato's - you should know by now that Basterds is not, nor was it ever meant to be, an accurate historical representation of World War II. (Much less, the Holocaust!) It is a mythologization of history. Nothing new about that. Entire movie genres have been based on the mythologization of history - notably, the Western. Wars have been mythologized since the days of Homer. (See Troy, loosely based on Homer's The Iliad, and co-starring two of Inglorious Basterd's leading performers, Diane Kruger - as the mythic Helen of Troy - and Brad Pitt. And yes, they are both remarkably better in Tarantino's film.) The title of Inglourious Basterds' Chapter 1, "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France," tells the audience exactly what kind of film they are going to see.

I wanted to talk about what is probably the film's most memorable image, the ghostly black and white close-up of Mélanie Laurent as the French-Jewish heroine, Shosanna, projected amidst the smoke and flames of the film's climactic chapter, "Revenge of the Giant Face."

It invokes - consciously, no doubt - two of the most memorable anima and animus images in cinema: Brigitte Helm as the robotic "False Maria" (top) at the moment she is finally engulfed by flames in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), and Frank Morgan as "The Great and Powerful Oz" (bottom) terrifying Dorothy and her friends in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Oz's giant face is also, as it happens, a projected image, a creation of smoke and mirrors.

An anima or animus is another kind of projection. Whether god, goddess, vampire, witch, mermaid, faery, beast, devil, golem, or other paranormal entity, our animi give form to aspects of the human psyche that are larger than life, transcendent, the stuff of legend.

Or the stuff of story. Shosanna does not enter Inglourious Basterds' story as an anima. She doesn't become a true anima until the story's final chapter, either at the moment she puts on the makeup and red dress of an avenging angel (scored to Bowie & Moroder's "Putting Out the Fire With Gasoline" from Paul Schrader's Cat People, another story about animi), or later, when she is "reborn" as the Oz-like Giant Face.

The moment is comparable to those moments in Greek myth when a hero or heroine dies and is reborn as a constellation, something eternal. In Kill Bill, Tarantino aimed at the mythic level (invoking it, for example, in the "Superman speech"). In Inglorious Basterds, even more than Kill Bill, I think he achieves it.

Since everyone else seems to be talking about it...

...and I mean *everybody*...

Jonathan Rosenbaum posted a rather damning blog entry on his website regarding QT's "IB" that was subsequently picked up and scoffed at by a smattering of online critics. Rosenbaum responded to the hubbub over his equating "IB" with Holocaust denial in a postscript, reprinted here:

Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I’ll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. (He was speaking about Pasolini’s "Salo," but I think one can also say that anything that makes Nazism unreal is wrong.) For me, "Inglourious Basterds" makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention — by which I mean a reality derived only from other movies — it loses its historical reality.


First, let me address another issue, namely that Rosenbaum has also challenged the blogosphere to cogently argue in Tarantino's defense -- what, precisely, is this film contributing to our culture? Does the director have mature assertions to make regarding WWII, or Jewish identity, or the "Final Solution"? Does it even have much to say about film?

My sense is that the answers to all three questions respectively are "nothing," "no," and "no". The first two should be obvious enough, with Tarantino's trash-fixation; for all the intellectualizing about "wish" or "fantasy" fulfillment the movie can hardly be viewed as historical scholarship in any sense of the phrase (not that it aspires to, and not that this should be considered a shortcoming). The last rejection is likely to incite debate, but too often Tarantino seems to be alluding and emulating without care or purpose; his enthusiasm for arcane genre is inspiring, but what of this leaks into his directorial voice feels like the irritating echolalia of a kid who just saw "La Jetée" or "Duck, You Sucker" for the first time and won't shut up about it (the opening credit sequence to "Jackie Brown" with its eye-rollingly smug "Graduate" visual quote comes to mind). If only the retro-Universal logo at the start of "IB" signified something beyond a callow desire to mimic such arbitrary and facile ornamentation (he doesn't just want to make a film *inspired* by Spaghetti Westerns or Kung Fu...he wants to force his audience into a masturbatory time machine so he can participate in these modes quite literally, even as he mashes up disparate genres with filmic ADD).

But, that's not what we're here to discuss. Can the film be justly called "Holocaust denial"? Insofar as Rosenbaum qualifies the term to describe an object that wedges a distance of understanding between the viewer and the event, I would have to admit that yes, it can and does. The question that remains, however, is whether or not this precludes the film's candidacy for success or excellency or aesthetic merit, as Rosenbaum suggests.

The notion of filmic -- or perhaps better put, narrative -- morality is a difficult one to discuss, even more so today where it seems as though the most widely praised filmmakers are cynics, inventing microcosms that suggest more hope for the nefarious (or at least ethically ambiguous) than for the innocent or steadfastly compassionate, which have come to be depicted as sharply naive. We've gone beyond simply cheering the bad guy in his tainted struggle, knowing that he'd either get his or be redeemed in the end. The casting of the chief antagonist of "Chinatown" turned out to be remarkably prescient, as it's now the director/writer who's often the "villain," being cheered on for his/her sadism without -- and this is a key departure -- any notable repercussions in the text of the film (how can there be?). This has also been followed by, to my thinking, a shift in film criticism, away from discussion of characters and themes and more to aesthetic subtexts and subtle relationships between form and content; it's not that we're no longer talking about what films seem to be saying, it's simply that they seem to be speaking to us in tongues half the time.

The point being, can a film be "wrong," to use Barthes' terminology -- morally unjustifiable -- and still be a good movie? My elementary argument in this late hour would be something along the lines of "why not?". And I'm not referring to the easy divide between a film's visceral detail and its "story" (ie, the way that a depicted killing can be ethically dubious but rendered beautifully through mise-en-scene, cinematography, etc), but rather to the difference between the nature of expression (cinematic eloquence, perhaps?) and the nature of what is being expressed. This is a much more complex dichotomy to read into "IB," particularly because even if read as Holocaust revisionism it seems to be cutting corners in all sorts of places -- it only achieves truly mind-bending bowdlerization in the fiery finale, content instead to use the threat of Holocaust throughout as a tension-increasing agent (and it is used, I must say, remarkably -- Tarantino had my attention, at least, for the entire duration of his flick).

Those who are dismissing and/or embracing this as a propaganda film akin to Riefenstahl's are on the right track. The ending is a grand set-piece of wish-fulfillment, to be sure, but not for Jews -- for young cinephiles who not only wish that actual wars could resolve themselves climactically like the conflicts in pictures, but films about actual wars as well. When I exited the theater after seeing "IB," my first reaction was directed squarely at the denouement: Hadn't Tarantino just re-organized WWII the way that the Revolutionary War and the 100 Years War have been in the past, inventing a kind of tall tale? Is gunning down Hitler in a burning theater any more a sin than conjuring a fraudulent romance between Pocahontas and John Smith (I'm looking at you, Terence Malick!)? The answer depends, of course, on whether or not we have a social commitment to uphold the veracity of certain events above others (we do), and whether or not that responsibility implicates artists (I'm not so sure that it does, though clichés like "dramatic license" are sticking in my throat).

Tarantino's meta-stance may occlude a few less-perspicacious detractors, because he can always claim he's revising Holocaust literature rather than the real thing, and the film itself illustrates this protectively (it's a grand, day-old stew of tropes and simulacrums). But ultimately the tenor of the movie's reception is reliant on an audience's thirst for disengagement -- which is why some critics and bloggers are claiming that older viewers just "aren't getting it". You've got to be hip to not only what Tarantino does but also ne'er-do-well's like Lars Von Trier (he also gets a thrashing on Rosenbaum's blog, by the way), whose films are often so unnecessarily menacing and discomfiting they seem like endurance tests. I've written about the so-called "point" of "Dogville" before -- it has something to say about primitive psychology and the need for feudal protection, I think -- but even if my interpretation were deemed valid and somewhat authoritative I'm not sure I'd agree with it as functional commentary. And yet the film is disturbingly poetic, and probably one of only a few masterpieces from the 00s. Why?

Because, like "IB" (not a masterpiece, but still very good), it epitomizes what (at least some) people who are in-tune to the culture of today expect to reap from it; not the seeds of change any more, or any comforting observations about cosmic equilibrium, but masochistic mirror-manifestations of the self-referential and tangential nightmares we've become (to be slightly alarmist). One gets the distinct impression that Von Trier (certainly) and Tarantino (maybe) are mocking us from the projection booth ("Young Americans"?), making the on-screen explorations of their barbed idolatry even more potent. We don't even write books or make films about events or socio-political concepts anymore; in spite of their protean content, they're mostly about other, older books and films (or in the case of "Dogville," experimental Teutonic dramas). What's even more disturbing is that books about books and films about films -- even as they tackle their true subjects ever-so-superficially -- are often intensely satisfying and emotionally resonant.

I often doubt my generation's ability to properly fathom crises like the Holocaust -- but Tarantino seems to be saying that we don't really have to. Wasn't the Holocaust just a movie, anyway? An excruciatingly palpable, mass-murdering movie?

Happy Birthday, Robert Richardson

Is Robert Richardson (born August 27, 1955) the greatest cinematographer working today?

Consider the difference between Oliver Stone's JFK and Nixon, both of which were photographed by Richardson, and Stone's W., shot by someone else. The two former films have a gravitas and visual complexity, compared to which W. seems light-weight and disposable, notwithstanding Josh Brolin's solid performance in the title role. Or should we just blame W. himself?

It was Stone who gave Richardson his first important job as Director of Photography on Salvador (1982). Richardson became, arguably, Stone's most important collaborator, the cinematographer of Platoon (1986), Wall Street (1987), Talk Radio (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), The Doors (1991), JFK (1991 - for which Richardson won the Best Cinematography Oscar), Heaven & Earth (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994 - their most "experimental" film), Nixon (1995), and the neo-noir U Turn (1997). When we think of these films, Richardson's striking images are what we remember.

In 1995, Richardson photographed his first film for Martin Scorsese, Casino, a gorgeous movie. The Scorsese collaboration continued with Bringing Out the Dead (1999), The Aviator (2004 - for which Richardson won another Academy Award), and the upcoming Shutter Island.

Richardson also photographed two documentaries by the groundbreaking Errol Morris: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997) a truly avant-garde-looking film, and Standard Operating Procedure (2008), ostensibly about the prisoner abuses of Abu Gharib, but even more concerned with the nature of photography itself.

Quentin Tarantino - who knows a good thing when he sees it - hired Richardson to photograph his epic Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) and 2 (2004). Kill Bill, Vol. 1's showdown in the snow between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu is one of the most beautiful sequences in either man's filmography. Inglourious Basterds (2009) is their latest collaboration. Its deeply saturated colors recall the 1940s Technicolor masterpieces (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes) photographed by Jack Cardiff for Emeric Pressburger & Michael Powell.

The close-up of Mélanie Laurent (above) as Inglorious Basterds' French-Jewish heroine is a testament to the photographer's art, the restricted but rich color palette of red, white, and black that sets off the actress's flesh tones and her back-lit blonde hair, the classical highlighting of the actress's eyes beneath her veil. Happy Birthday, Mr. Richardson, and may you continue to create images we cannot forget.

Riefenstahl meets Maddin

Of all the real-life German film personalities referred to in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the most notorious – apart from Goebbels himself – is Leni Riefenstahl. Most viewers know Riefenstahl, if they know her at all, as the director of the infamous Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, or the classic sports documentary, Olympia. Inglourious Basterds reminds us that Riefenstahl was not only a director, but one of Germany’s most popular movie stars, who acted and performed her own stunts in “mountain films” like 1929’s The White Hell of Piz Palu.

In her remarkable directing debut, The Blue Light (1932 – excerpted above top*), Riefenstahl plays Junta, a child of nature, rejected by the people of her village, who guards a mysterious blue light hidden in a mountain cave. The imagery, as you can see for yourself, is astounding, a true testament to Fraulein Riefenstahl’s visual talents. For those of us not enthralled by Nazi propaganda or Olympic sports, it is easily her most intriguing film.

The Blue Light and other mountain films of the late ‘20s/early ‘30s inspired Canadian independent filmmaker, Guy Maddin, to make Careful (1992, above bottom), which combines the imagery of the mountain genre with a pastiche of the oddly beautiful two-strip Technicolor process one sees in early ‘30s sound films like Mystery of the Wax Museum (Curtiz) and The King of Jazz. Maddin, though far less well-known than Tarantino, is every bit the film nerd that Quentin is. He even persuaded the 90-year-old Riefenstahl to appear in a proposed feature to be called The Dykemaster’s Daughter. Regrettably, Maddin’s producers balked at his projected budget, and the movie was never made.

* I apologize for the way this trailer – or whatever it is – has been cropped. Pathfinder’s DVD version of The Blue Light provides the correct 1.33 aspect ratio.

Welcome Back, Rod Taylor

One of the many incidental pleasures of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the reappearance after far too long an absence of the wonderful Rod Taylor.

Taylor, who was born on January 11, 1930 in Sidney, Australia, has worked with some of cinema’s greatest auteurs – with George Stevens in Giant, playing memorable leads for George Pal in The Time Machine (1960 version), for Alfred Hitchcock in The Birds (above), for John Ford and Jack Cardiff in Young Cassidy, and giving the best performance in the otherwise indifferently-acted Zabriskie Point directed by Michelangelo “volumes in space” Antonioni.

Taylor came out of retirement to play Sir Winston Churchill in Tarantino’s highly personalized take on World War II (as much about the cinema as it is about the War). According to the Miami Herald, Taylor “watched dozens of DVDs to get Churchill's voice, complete with lisp, and the hunched body language.” Tarantino is, of course, a huge Taylor fan: “He particularly loves Dark of the Sun [Jack Cardiff, 1968].”

Taylor as Churchill appears in one scene only of Inglourious Basterds, saying very little, but dominating the scene with his presence as only a true star can.

Misleading Cover Art, Part 2 - The Dumb Waiter

Neither of the two versions of the promo art for John Huston's The Dead presented by Erich Kuersten, below, are *quite* as misleading as the cover art for the VHS version of The Dumb Waiter, a 1987 half-hour television film directed by Robert Altman based on the one-act play of the same title by the late Harold Pinter.

The Dumb Waiter's cover art shows the telefilm's two stars, John Travolta and Tom Conti, dressed as waiters and acting goofy. Anyone who saw this cover would expect a lowbrow slapstick comedy in the mode of Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin's The Disorderly Orderly or Steve Martin's The Jerk. Anyone who actually watched this would discover something more akin to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

To begin with, the play's two characters are not white-jacketed waiters. They are hoods, specifically hitmen, sitting in a basement awaiting orders from a mysterious boss. The "dumb waiter" of the title does not refer to a person, but to a device that my Webster's Dictionary defines as "a small elevator used for conveying food and dishes from one story of a building to another." In both play and film, it is the means by which the two hoods receive written orders from their unseen master. The orders become increasingly absurd and/or disturbing. Ultimately, Hood A (Travolta) is ordered to kill Hood B (Conti).

The Dumb Waiter, the film version, was one of several theatrical adaptations that Altman directed during his 1980s exile from mainstream Hollywood (along with the better-known Secret Honor, Streamers, and Come Back to the Five-and-Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean). For those not interested in Pinter's dark absurdism or Altman's mise-en-scene, The Dumb Waiter's primary interest lies in the way it foreshadows a number of future projects. Travolta would play a hitman again, this time teamed with Samuel L. Jackson, in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), and it would resurrect his career. The situation of two hitmen awaiting orders from their boss, culminating in the boss's order to have one hitman kill the other, would reappear in the 2008 black comedy, In Bruges.

Say a prayer for THE DEAD already...

With Halloween just around the corner, and Lionsgate releasing THE DEAD (like Bogart going to Casablanca for the waters), I thought I'd present this little mock-up of my own design, in case the hungry zombie movie munching hordes clamoring at a movie called THE DEAD need more misleading encouragement. See Filmbo's Chick Magnet for where I originally both heard it was coming out and that the reason may have less to do with art and more to do with a "sellable title."

I guess it's to their credit that the DVD people decided to mislead the public into thinking that THE DEAD is a comforting Christmas movie starring Anjelica Huston as a middle-aged spinster who gets a second chance when an Xmas miracle brings her together with a lonely old bachelor rose peddler, probably with enough homespun malarkey thrown in to make even late-period John Ford wince, aye.

Of course Huston's adaptation suffers the same problems as his UNDER THE VOLCANO, namely a willingness to overload the polish and period detail, keep faithful to the events of the story, and hope the epiphany-inducing apocalyptic frisson will magically appear. The end result is a fascinating but airless look at a dysfunctional family of Irish drunks and singers and the like, with a great little ending wherein we hear the reading of the last paragraphs of the story (from Dubliners, aye! So ye have not read yer auld homework after all) over the dead drifting snow in the Dublin streets. At least so I remember from my old murky VHS dupe. I look forward to seeing how jaundiced full frame memory and correct screen aspect ratio future collide.

The Shallow World of District 9

Even within the notoriously cheese-ridden genre of science fiction, few films can rival the alien visitation picture in terms of how much suspicion they arouse. Rare is the film that deals intelligently, meaningfully, and creatively with man's first contact with extra-terrestrial life, and nearly every film that tackles the subject winds up as either an overblown summer blockbuster or an embarrassing B-movie. Not that there's anything wrong with blockbusters and B-movies per se – the former can be as good as any other kind of genre film if the script is smart, and the latter tend to have a charm that often overshadows their obvious technical flaws. In this regard, Neill Blomkamp's alien adventure District 9 is one of the most unusual entries in the first contact sub-genre in quite some time: it manages to seamlessly combine the negative attributes of both, retain few of the redeeming qualities of either, and so thoroughly convince critics and audiences that it's a breath of fresh air that it makes back its entire budget and more during its opening week.

As with any film of its kind, commenting on District 9 necessitates a fairly detailed description of its setting and backstory - “for in science fiction,” as Isaac Asimov put it, “more than any other branch of literature, background's the thing.” In 1982, a massive spaceship with over a million starving aliens on board arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa. They were brought down to the ground, cared for, and partially integrated into human society, but, after a series of crime waves and riots and so forth, all the aliens – called “prawns” in the film, a racial slur mocking their arthropod-like appearance – were corralled into the titular slum. By the time the “present day” narrative comes along (set only a year or two in the future), race relations, so to speak, have become so tense and virulent, and the alien population so large and unruly, that all the aliens are being forcefully relocated to yet another area, District 10, a concentration camp far outside the city.

Districts 9 and 10, of course, are references to South Africa's real life District 6 (in Cape Town), where thousands of South African blacks were forced from their homes and relocated under the apartheid regime. This racial allegory isn't exactly subtle, but, during the film's first twenty minutes or so, it seems quite brilliant. Formatted as a documentary about Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a barely competent bureaucrat who is charged with leading the eviction campaign in District 9, the early scenes introducing the alien slum are jarring and pungent with black humor. The Afrikaners treat the “prawns” with a disturbing combination of fear, disgust, and patronization, finding their difficulties understanding legal paperwork equally amusing as the popcorn-like sound their offspring make when burned alive in their egg sacs by flamethrower tanks. It's clear to the viewer right from the outset that the aliens are intelligent, emotional beings, and their presentation as hideous, bipedal insects comes across as sick and appropriate, as if Blomkamp is saying “this is what a community of oppressed and impoverished black people looks like to a white supremacist.”

I use cautious phrases like “comes across” and “seems” to describe the film's satirical elements because, after the main points of conflict are set in motion, it quickly becomes apparent that the emperor is naked. Later plot developments and pathetic potty humor betray the film's true colors, and whatever points Blomkamp earns for taking apartheid supporters to task are negated by his treatment of the film's Nigerian characters, who are presented without any sense of irony as gun-running pimps and would-be cannibals. Among the film's antagonists is a wheelchair-bound warlord of sorts – a landlocked pirate captain, more or less – who runs the underworld in District 9, buying weapons from the aliens in exchange for cat food (the aliens, it seems, become easily addicted to canned cat food) and secretly devouring the flesh of aliens he murders in hopes that he will become an alien himself and, therefore, be able to wield their DNA-sensitive technology. When Wikus grows an alien arm after exposure to alien fuel liquid (which inexplicably triggers a werewolf-like genetic transformation), the Nigerians hunt him down so their boss can feast on his flesh.

Unfortunately, it's not just the Nigerians who want to chop Wikus up and use his body to operate weaponry, and it's just as unfortunate for the audience as it is for Wikus. The company Wikus works for, Multinational United (MNU, a rather generic name for a weapons manufacturer), also wants the poor fellow's unique genetic material so they can bio-engineer soldiers capable of using alien technology. Without delving into the specifics, Wikus teams up with an alien named Christopher Johnson (who is trying to restart the long-broken spaceship and claims to be able to fix Wikus's DNA problem) and takes on MNU, the Nigerians, and everyone else with guns blazing. Thus, what starts out as a socially conscious satire of South African race relations degenerates into a standard, thick-headed action movie, complete with ludicrous explosions and extended vehicle chases. Even Wikus, who enters the story as a clueless, fascist buffoon, emerges as a typical reluctant badass action hero, able to suspend his own morality and lack of military training when a killing spree is in order.

It doesn't help matters much that Blomkamp abandons his documentary format less than halfway through to make room for the conventional bullet-spraying, and it helps even less that he shifts emphasis from the atmosphere onto the plot. A science fiction fan can easily overlook a Swiss cheese plot structure when the world it takes place in is immersive enough, but District 9 places its ridiculous story front and center, with the underused and admittedly impressive atmosphere waving at us from off in the distance like a crying fiancée on a departing passenger ship.

Why, exactly, does MNU, a private corporation, have total military and police jurisdiction over District 9? Why do they conduct secret experiments on abducted aliens when they could simply ask the aliens how their technology works? Conversely, why don't the aliens give the humans access to their technology so they'll be allowed to go home? Why don't the aliens simply use their weapons to overthrow the humans – or, at the very least, kill the Nigerians and take all their cat food? Why doesn't MNU arrest and deport the Nigerian slumlord? Why do the humans even want the alien weaponry in the first place, when, judging by what is seen in the film, it is only marginally more effective than ordinary firearms? Since both humans and aliens can understand the other's languages, why hasn't anyone bothered to investigate how or why the aliens are on earth in the first place? Why hasn't Johannesburg been flooded with scientists trying to study the aliens? Why hasn't an alien disease wiped out humanity, or vice versa?

Even though it's a loose adaptation of his short film Alive in Joburg, District 9 is equally indebted Blomkamp's most popular work: Landfall, a short film in three parts based on the Halo video game series. Blomkamp was, in fact, originally slated to direct a feature length Halo film, and District 9 came about when that project fell through. If the bland characters, uninspired prop design, and disregard for human life are any indication, Blomkamp was still trying to get Halo out of his system when he wrote and directed this. It's a rather fitting kinship, really, considering that, like Halo, nearly everything in District 9 – good or bad – is shamelessly ripped off from other works of science fiction and fantasy (to name a few obvious examples, the insect transformation from Cronenberg's The Fly, the aliens-as-ethnics premise from Alien Nation, and the mechanical suit from Aliens).

District 9 has been praised up and down for its ability to hide its independent, relatively low-budget status so well, but budget constraints and studio approval have never been the real obstacles in the way of good science fiction cinema. Even with 75 million dollars and an international release from 20th Century Fox, Roland Emmerich still couldn't turn Independence Day into something watchable, yet Roger Corman managed to overcome shoestring budgets and insanely short shooting schedules to produce and direct two minor classics in a single year, 1957's Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of This Earth (which originally played together on a double bill). Hollywood-quality special effects and extended action sequences are indeed impressive for an independent film, but they mean little when they amount to nothing more than what they do in a run-of-the-mill studio release.

It all comes down to a lack of talent – or, to be a bit nicer, a lack of developed talent. Blomkamp's background is in 3D animation, and that is, not surprisingly, where District 9 excels, but his feature length debut as director and screenwriter can only charitably be described as amateur. Hopefully, the massive success of District 9 will encourage him to challenge himself artistically, but after 112 minutes of hamfisted action and hypocritical racism (not to mention endless recycling of the same bag of tricks he used in his short films), I remain pessimistic. Independent cinema is filled with blossoming auteurs, so it doesn't seem too unlikely that it probably has a handful of blossoming hacks, as well.

Cosmic Kharma in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Check out the latest issue of Film Comment, containing an excellent, though regrettably short, piece by Richard Combs praising the formal achievement of Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967).

"About time," says I. Though film historians occasionally cite The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre as an effective genre piece – it is almost a summation of every gangster film made up to that point! – few cinephiles (with the rare exception of writers like Gary Morris) talk about St. Valentine’s accomplishment on the level of pure filmmaking. Combs refreshingly compares the film to Alain Resnais’s Private Fears in Public Places (2006), both films taking place in artificial studio-enclosed worlds gently caressed by falling snow.

St. Valentine’s was the only film ever directed by Corman with the full resources of a major film studio (20th Century Fox) at his disposal. Apart from the film’s mise-en-scène, its brilliant use of crane shots, camera movement and widescreen composition within a studio-created setting, I have always treasured The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre for Corman’s usage (not discussed by Combs) of what I call "cause-and-effect montage." A simple example of cause-and-effect montage would be a shot of a gun firing (Shot A) followed by a shot of someone falling down dead (Shot B). The fact that Shot B is perceived by the viewer as the effect of Shot A results in a smooth, almost seamless, cut, the filmic equivalent of a sentence in the active voice ("A killed B"). Reverse the order of the shots (a shot of someone falling down followed by a shot of a smoking gun) and you have a filmic sentence in the passive voice ("B was killed by A").

In The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Corman takes the concept of cause-and-effect montage about as far as any filmmaker has ever carried it. Roughly an hour and a quarter into the film, we see a shot of the film’s protagonist, Al Capone (Jason Robards), on the telephone, giving the order to kill his rival, George "Bugs" Moran (Ralph Meeker).

This is the first shot in a 45-minute sequence of shots that follow causatively, one after the other - like falling dominoes – from Capone’s order to the film’s final image, a shot of the real Al Capone’s grave. Almost every shot in the sequence is the result, one way or another, of what preceded it. In narrative terms, Capone’s command leads to not only the massacre of the title (a remarkable montage sequence in itself) but, eventually, to the violent deaths of every one of the gunmen who took part in the massacre, which in turns leads to a public outcry, the final result of which is Capone’s own imprisonment and death.

Corman also relies on camera movement to link many of the shots in this 45-minute tour de force – a slow track, e.g., from left to right, in one shot will be linked to the next shot by a matched camera movement in the same direction and at the same speed. It’s a trick Corman might have learned from watching early Resnais (Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad). A cosmically omniscient narrator (Paul Frees) ticking off the time and circumstances of each participant’s demise contributes further to the film’s sense of kharmic fatalism. Or justice - if you prefer.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is a continuation and outgrowth of Corman’s Poe series starring Vincent Price in at least three significant ways: (1) a self-contained studio world, (2) a florid lead performance, (3) an obsession with death - often connected with the color red.

Add to that one of the finest ensembles of character actors ever gathered together in one film – a rogues’ gallery of familiar faces like Robards, Ralph Meeker, Frank Silvera, Joseph Campanella, Richard Bakalyan, John Agar, Joe Turkel, Alex d’Arcy, Leo Gordon, and Harold J. Stone, among many others, intermingling with up-and-comers from the Corman stock company like Jack Nicholson (one line, uncredited) and Bruce Dern – and you have a true landmark in the history of the gangster genre.

Apatow and Agnostic Comedy

I recently screened Judd Apatow's Funny People (the latest in a long list of theatrical releases that the blogosphere has loved to "ehhh" about) with a group of friends, and quite notably after having had the beneficial pleasure of Joe Aisenberg's Bromance piece for Bright Lights. I came out of the movie not entirely satisfied but feeling as though that was part of Apatow's industrial thrust (and feeling somewhat let-down by this meta-assessment as well, but we could go on like this forever). Either way, I've been considering how the schism between the guy-love of Funny People -- which pivots on a downright bitch/butch relationship between the fictional comedic titan played by Adam Sandler and the deli-employed stand-up hopeful Seth Rogan plays -- and the gushy bondage/penile badinage of The Hangover is a nearly instructive example of the difference between (attempted) art and (attempted) commerce, and the dangers of both.

I use these terms rather loosely, and according to quite debatable definitions ("art" is, in my opinion, little more than a sticker bearing a bold, "Sign Here!" arrow anyhow), but the false dichotomy will hopefully serve as a rough illustration. Todd "Old School" Phillips is, in my view, one of the most bafflingly successful filmmakers in Hollywood -- he even manages to consistently sterilize the very funny Will Farrell with puerile, high concept gags -- and an adequate poster child for all that's gone wrong with the post-Nat Lampoon, frat-house style humor. The Hangover, too, is basically a transplant of the worst of frat sensibilities -- the pussy whipped eunach, the fringey stoner, the noble slut -- with a meretriciously Vegas setting that only manages to win laughs from an able, inherently comedic cast. I think I laughed out loud twice.

But here's the rub -- I didn't laugh out loud during Funny People, either. Apatow would probably be gratified by this information, since he's posturing his latest directorial effort as a "serious" experiment. And, to his credit, the film was far more acidic an experience than that of the The Hangover's hit-making essay at gut-busting -- as Adam Sandler's self-awareness climbs we realize that we're essentially spending two+ hours in intimate contact with an utter cad, and only a marginally funny one. This has all been said before, of course, and most bloggers agree that Funny People loses focus in its misshapen third act, a marathon of awkward relationship friction that casts an uncomfortable shadow on what we grow to understand has been 90 minutes of set-up for a rather bitter, confusing anti-love story. But what grabbed my attention through most of this content wasn't the staunch defiance of the three-act, hour-and-a-half comedy structure or even the weirdly Freudian casting of Apatow's wife as Adam Sandler's lost love (we watch him preparing to perform cunnilingus on her in one scene, in fact) but the fact that this is the last thing I would have anticipated from the Apatow of The Ben Stiller Show or The Critic or The Larry Sanders Show (Freaks and Geeks showed a bit of dramatic maturation, true, but even that wasn't quite as wincingly self-doubtful).

Apatow is one of the most gifted comedians out there -- not just funny, but able to tap into the zeitgeist in a manner that infuriates network execs and wins his projects lasting cult fame (Apatow-helmed productions usually make up with fan sites what they lack in ratings). But as with Preston Sturges' John Sullivan, one can feel his restless perspective towards his own artistry; in particular, his scripts for Larry Sanders were some of the show's most skeptical, and for a program built around industry skepticism that distinction demands attention. Even his hilariously spot-on Jay Leno impression seems fitfully full of self-loathing (the characterization works, of course, because it's a complex we love to project on to the former Tonight Show host).

When Apatow moved into film directing, it was a promising transition; The 40 Year Old Virgin was little more than a one-note vehicle for Steve Carrell, but the skewed sense of nobility and reluctance to allow actors to go too far over the top ensured its uniqueness aside films like the irksome remake of Starsky and Hutch. Knocked Up was even better and remains, I think, Apatow's best film (either as writer, director, or producer) due to its remarkable male candor and pithy use of a cozily-smogged Los Angeles as a metaphor for prolonged infancy (Louden Wainwright's bullseye soundtrack also helped more than anyone could have hoped). But even Knocked Up seemed, in retrospect, rather indulgent; whether based on fact or not, there was something all too confessional about the prospective progeny angst, and while comedy can resonate beautifully when "real," being emotionally "real" never seemed like Apatow's metier. He's much better at tweaking the tone of pitchblack surrealist sketches, such as a memorable Ben Stiller Show scene involving a cannibalistic restaurateur.

Funny People, as Ed Howard astutely points out, is the first time where the gap between Apatow's ambition and his ability seems too noticeable to amicably dismiss -- I mean, lop off the final hour of the film and try to write a serious drama around it and there'd be next to nothing of substance to work with. But what's even more unsettling is that all of his once cutting punchlines are being muted and softened by nervous glances and hiccups in his characters' self-esteem; it's almost as though he's working out a lack of occupational confidence through his cast. Seth Rogan waves away nearly every joke he pulls off in this film -- many of which are quite funny, but rendered harmless through the constant disclaimering gesticulations. And I feel as though this, too, is part of Apatow's plan, to show the pain of the workaday comedian and the struggle required to achieve a professional zenith that winds up being an existential bust anyway. But you can't help but feel that Apatow's subtly condescending to his protagonists, making us choose between a dead-beat gag writer who *should* be successful and *could* be if he were somewhat less of a man-child, and a rich prick whose prickishness and egocentricism only sharpens after what should have been a sobering brush with death. Apatow was far funnier than Seth Rogan at that age. And one can only expect that he's less of an asshole as he approaches Adam Sandlers'. So what gives?

If Funny People is Apatow's "O Brother Where Art Thou," then he's emerged from labor camp movie night not with an epiphany about the significance of broad entertainment but with serious doubts about the attainability of "true" comedy through human interaction -- comedic agnosticism, we might call it. Apatow's films contain the same stereotypes as Phillips', albeit less of them and with less predictable results; he's more interested in rendering stock comedy situations as believably as he can manage (the dying rich curmudgeon, the "gotcha!" pregnancy, the gawkishly chaste action figure collector), which unfortunately still isn't all that easy to swallow. Hopefully he realizes that his last film was doomed to fail on some level: you can't make a dramatic film by writing a comedy and sucking all the funny out of it. The fact that I still enjoyed Funny People despite all this is proof that somewhere in there Apatow remains tuned into what we're thinking and feeling, and able to convert those fears, obsessions, and memories into a fusillade of giggles.

Everybody Love the Little Donkey

In 1976, producer Dino de Laurentiis was asked why he had the audacity to remake King Kong. He replied, “Everybody love the big monkey.”

Dino had a point. There are few kinds of stories with more universal appeal than stories that feature animal protagonists. That may be why actress Tilda Swinton chose Robert Bresson’s 1966 film, Au hasard Balthazar, as one of the classic movies to be screened during her current mobile movie theater tour to bring the “experience of cinema” to Scottish villages and towns.

Au hasard Balthazar was shot in French, but very little of the film’s meaning is communicated through dialogue. The central character of the film is Balthazar the donkey who, of course, never speaks. However, almost all the events of the film are seen through his eyes, i.e., Bresson intercuts what is happening with reaction shots of the soulful donkey, and the audience feels what the donkey is feeling (or, more accurately, what it thinks the donkey ought to be feeling in the context of the story). The film is thus a textbook demonstration of the Hitchcockian Kuleshov effect, and surprisingly, profoundly moving.

In an interview published in the indispensable Action!, Bresson explains the film’s plotline:

“[I]n a donkey’s life, we see the same stages as in a man’s—a childhood of tender caresses; adult years spent in work, for both man and donkey; a little later during this work period, the blossoming of talent and even genius; and finally, the stage of mysticism that precedes death.”

While Balthazar’s story may suggest in some ways the passion of the Christ – the donkey is a kind of saint taking on the sins of a fallen world – it is also in many ways everybody’s story. Human and animal. On the one hand, what happens to Balthazar is paralleled by what happens to his young mistress, Marie, played by the beautiful Anne Wiazemsky. (Shots of Wiazemsky with her arms around Balthazar’s neck look like something out of a Renaissance religious painting.) On the other, we see Balthazar’s bond with the rest of the animal world in a remarkable sequence taking place in a traveling circus to which he is temporarily sold. Shots of Balthazar are intercut with shots of the other animals in their circus cages, growling, roaring, trumpeting – an animal symposium whose topic is the cruelty of earthly existence.

Bresson hated acting in the theatrical sense of the word, preferring to cast his films with non-actors whom he referred to as “models.” Balthazar the donkey was, paradoxically, the most expressive of Bresson’s models. Perfect and gentle. Like the film itself.

Film Buff of the Month - Tilda Swinton

Like Herzog’s opera-loving Fitzcarraldo dragging a 320-ton steamship through the jungles of Peru, Oscar-winning film buff/actress Tilda Swinton and a few followers are now driving - and occasionally dragging - a mobile movie theater across the Highlands of Scotland as part of a quest to bring the "experience of cinema" to Scotland’s smaller villages and towns. In Tilda’s own words:

"We’re going to be doing something very romantic and passionate here. Because we love this place, its mackerel skies in November and its marmalade bracken, we are going to pull a 37 tonne cinema on wheels across it, from its crashing Atlantic waves to the dolphins of the Moray Firth. We’ll get hot and sweaty, or drenched with rain, and bitten by midges, and we might get blisters on our fingers and toes, but we’ll show flickering, splendid dream movies as we go, in a cockeyed caravan, like clowns or dafties, or kids."

Not just any movies, you understand, but classics like Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, Minnelli's Brigadoon, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, movies that people rarely see in any format other than DVD or television broadcast - assuming they see them at all.

So hats off to Tilda, co-conspirator Mark Cousins, and their dedicated crew. We wish them our best.

[Via The Huffington Post.]

Bright Lights 65 now live

Issue 65 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now live.

From the Editor

"Project Bright Lights"

Articles

Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy
"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity." — Vladimir Nabokov
By Joseph Aisenberg

The "Bong" Goodbye: On Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
Will Thomas Pynchon's lightest, brightest novel put him in the Hollywood spotlight?
By John Carvill

On the Incomprehensibility of Timely Films Past Their Time: Or, A Signing Fool Watches The Singing Fool
"Not frustration of a desire of the subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance becomes for the subject." — Lacan
By Kevin L. Ferguson

All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick's Lolita
"Kubrick's 1961 film is really the first 1970s movie."
By Erich Kuersten

Ghidorah Attacks! Modern Narrative's Three-Headed Monster
"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
By Quimby Melton

Art Thou Troubled? Musicals May Calm Thee
But don't forget DVD opera
By D. J. M. Saunders

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City
"Noir films with non-urban settings exploded the idea that escape into a safer or healthier world was possible, showing how temptation and violence can attack anyone, anywhere."
By Imogen Sara Smith

Actors

John Barrymore: Sweet Prince of Irony
"Isn't it extraordinary that the most popular character ever written should apparently be defeated by life instead of transcending it?" — John Barrymore on Hamlet
By Dan Callahan

Steve McQueen: Fifty Years of the King of Cool
"Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else. It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed."
By Christopher Sandford

Directors

The Miracle Worker: An Interview with Arthur Penn
"If the system is inimical to you, then you do whatever you can to alter your relationship to the system."
By Damien Love

Columns

Bright Sights: Bardelys the Magnificent, Monte Cristo, Cleopatra, In the Realm of the Senses, Au Bonheur des Dames, Daisies, The Saragossa Manuscript
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
By Gordon Thomas

Little Stabs of Queer Happiness (and Horror): Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old School Cinema
"A seemingly average person continually surprises and unsettles us by doing something strange and following it up with something even more spectacularly strange."
By Gary Morris

Movies

Atom Egoyan's Adoration: A Return to Form(s)?
"In classic Egoyan style, the humor is always also terrifying . . ."
By David L. Pike

Jesus Fucking Christ: Lars von Trier's Antichrist
The scandal-plagued release of Lars von Trier's latest film inspired the author, American expat in Copenhagen, to take a deeper look at the film in a Danish context.
By Jack Stevenson

Women Larger Than Life: Program Notes 2: King Vidor's Beyond the Forest and Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion
They're not fifty feet tall, but they might as well be
By Roger McNiven

Dark Harvest: Robert Kenner's Food, Inc.
"It's not a tomato, it's the idea of a tomato."
By Lee Weston Sabo

Sleep Stalking: Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights with Anna
"Just like you wanted, grandma. I'm seeing a woman."
By Ian Johnston

"True Glamour Never Fades": Michael Sucsy's Grey Gardens (HBO)
"We aren't ready . . . come on in."
By Robert Ecksel

Claude Autant-Lara's The Red Inn (L'Auberge Rouge), By André Bazin
Translated and with an introduction by Bert Cardullo

Astaire Reborn! Jane Powell Gives Fred a Lift in A Royal Wedding
"I hope he knew how much the world loved him."
By Alan Vanneman

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974): The Ultimate NYC Film
"What is this New York-ness?"
By Robert Castle

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009): Inflating Pelham
"To be a star, or thought of as a star, was not enough."
By Robert Castle

Loucheness Unchecked! Universal's Pre-Code Hollywood Collection
"I'm Through!"
By Erich Kuersten

Pixar's Up: The Japanese Connection
"It's just a little less Disney."
By Lee Weston Sabo

An Atheist's Guide to Wise Blood: The Doctrine of the Auto-Redemptionist
"It's almost as if The Misfit himself were behind the camera . . ."
By Jon Lanthier

Festivals

No Transcendence: Cannes Film Festival 2009
"It's becoming more and more rare that a fresh, original film gets into the Cannes competition." — Frederic Boyer
By Karin Luisa Badt

Books

A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler, by Victoria Sturtevant
By Matthew Kennedy

World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (And Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volumes 1 and 2, by Charles Zigman
By Colin Fleming

Michael Winterbottom, by Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams
By Damon Smith