Rating Game Redux (33): Nothing But the Truth

Our local paper's Rating Game wanted the truth on Best Documentaries. Not happening, with only three allowed on the list. But here--with all due apologies to Robert Flaherty, Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, and even that Big & Tall Man gadfly, Michael Moore--is a good start. In cinema veritas!

Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976)
Kentucky coal miners strike in 1973, and Barbara Kopple marches right along, through double-dealings, drive-by shootings, homespun egos and hard-won (partial) victories. Talk about your bitter Americans.

The “Up” Series (1964-present)
Michael Apted has followed a group of English boys and girls from age seven onward (49 Up in 2005) in an epic series that explores personal and social change—and continuity.

Gates of Heaven (1980)
Errol Morris’ first documentary, an exploration of pets, pet cemeteries, the American Dream, and endless tangents, as Morris aims his camera at his subjects and lets them take over. A slyly manipulative “anti-documentary” in which the periphery becomes the story.

The Home Viewer (6): The Cruellest Month

T.S. Eliot's old-timey spelling notwithstanding, our local paper thought I should do a little something on spring--which in the baleful Midwest we haven't really experienced yet--mostly bursts of fitful sunshine followed by straight winds. But I decided to consider it a Silly Season, and tunefully wedged my way into the narrow margin springtime seems determined to maintain this year.

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As we turn–at last!–toward spring, stuck in my head is a relentlessly joyful tune written back in the 1920s by Harry (“I’m Lookin’ Over a Four-Leaf Clover”) Woods entitled, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.” The lyrics are famous for repeatedly entreating the “sleepyhead” to “get up” and “cheer up,” and commanding that we “live, love, laugh and be happy.” So we better get to it.

Live

Federico Fellini saw life as an epic dream, a memory recovered so passionately it melts the boundaries between past and present, reality and imagination. Amarcord (1973) (literally, “I remember”) looks back on the director’s childhood with equal parts affection and irony. In his hands, even the rising fascist culture of 1930s Italy becomes part of his small town’s circus procession of love, rage, longing, mischief, departure, and renewal, with a peacock in the snow, a fever-inducing encounter with first lust, a giant animated Mussolini head–and the airborne puffballs of spring. Amarcord climbs the tree of life and, like mad Uncle Teo, shouts its demands for more.

In Richard Linklater’s lucid dreaming grab-bag, Waking Life (2001), a multitude of philosophical observations/rants are delivered by a host of rotoscope-animated thinkers, freakout-artists, slackers, and crazies–dreamers all. As Speed Levitch observes, “Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each others’ presence.” OK, maybe a bit clichéd and/or overblown. But as the dreamer (played by Wiley Wiggins, whose name alone evokes Wonderland) falls awake into further dreams, he gives himself the chance to live many lives, sometimes merely by listening to his fellow dreamers.

To truly live, then, one life may not be enough. But each, as we see in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring (2003), has its trials. This South Korean film by Ki-duk Kim, set in a monastery floating on a lake, follows the seasons as it explores the Buddhist injunction to show infinite compassion while striving for detachment. Beautifully filmed, hushed in contemplation, it gazes at lives that, like stones tossed in the water, spread inevitable ripples.

Love

In honor of spring, let’s agree that love is revival. One of my favorite comic versions of this is Born Yesterday (1950), in which a racketeer (Broderick Crawford) gets more than he bargains for when he insists his moll, “Billie” (Judy Holliday), receive an education. Enter William Holden as the Henry Higgens-esque tutor, who gives Billie the chance to exercise the independence she already had: Just watch the scene in which she beats Crawford in a game of gin. Smartest dumb blond in movie history.

Love is also rejuvenation. Four years after Al Jolson bawled the talkies into existence (Edison’s 1895 Kinetophone notwithstanding), Charlie Chaplin made a “silent” film (with music and sound effects), City Lights (1931), marking the final appearance of the Little Tramp. Not only is this movie unashamedly sentimental, it reminds us of the beauty of silent films and the universal appeal of the Tramp. At forty-two, Chaplin seems as fresh and eager as he did back in 1914, in Kid’s Auto Race, ready to dazzle with his nimble frame and surprising attention to the small gesture. City Lights keeps the promise that the cinema so often breaks: that seeing a movie can be like an openhearted return to youth.

Laugh

Knowing what’s funny is one slippery fish to grasp. There is, of course, a simple rule: If it makes you laugh every time, it’s funny. For me, that includes The Producers (1968) and every 1930s Marx Brothers movie–but I’ll settle for Monkey Business (1931). I’d also like to add an Honorable Mention: The Imposters (1998), in which Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt, more than willing to be ridiculous, combine Max Bialystock with Groucho to produce a farce that either of their anarchic, over-acting predecessors would be proud of. Filled with verbal sleight-of-hand and giddy disregard for life and limb (and propriety), these movies place no demands on higher brain functions–but plenty on your stamina.

Be Happy

Some movies, such as A Hard Day’s Night (1964), make being happy look easy. It’s obvious how much fun Paul, John, George and Ringo are having: You can see it on their faces. And there’s more than a little Marx Brothers in their one-liners and blithely awful puns.

Then again, happiness can be a life-and-death battle–but that doesn’t mean you can’t sing and dance. Consider Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (2002), a documentary that celebrates the relationship between music and the struggle to destroy apartheid in South Africa. Whether in mourning or joy, tragedy or victory, the comrades unite in their song of “amandla” (power), their bodies rising and falling–and rising again, like their lives, faces upturned in melodic defiance and joy.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) depicts the struggle for freedom as a middle-class nightmare, perfectly capturing (thanks to Will Smith’s portrayal of Chris Gardner) the anxiety of poverty and the burden of the American dream–and a triumph that is not only financial. All in all, an idea that, even misspelled, Gardner asserts is worth pursuing.

Rating Game Redux (31): Sad, Sadder, Saddest

In considering the "saddest songs" for our local paper's "Rating Game" this week, I must confess I fell back on what is for me overly familiar ground. So if you can stand another mention of Springsteen, read on. If not, cry if you want to.

“Stardust”

Hoagy Carmichael’s elegy to lost love–dreaming in vain, wandering in the night with nothing but memories. Could it get any worse? Well, yes:

“Dreams to Remember”

Otis Redding sees his love with another, walks away and cries; still, he refuses to give up, even though, like Hoagy, he has nothing but dreams. Now we’re at the depths, am I right? Almost:

“I Wish I Were Blind”

Bruce Springsteen also sees his girl with someone else, and figures, “though this world is filled / With the grace and beauty of God’s hand / Oh I wish I were blind / When I see you with your man.” Like sad old Hopkins tells us, “No worst, there is none.”

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Oh, yeah: This is the saddest of them all. I forgot all about it; but this elfish chanteuse on Toobio or whateverthehellitis sure didn't. Watch and grin; listen and weep.

Touch of Evil: Charlton Heston, 1924-2008

I may not be saying it first, but I'll still say it: Get your hands off him, you damned dirty apes. I don't care how vigorously he courted the Right, nor how effectively he became a whipping boy of the Left. When I see him in my head, he is not holding high a long-bore hunting rifle but a Technicolor Decalogue, final warning to sinners in the hands of an angry God. And more: his whip held high, the chariots plummeting. And in a quieter mood, an Omega Man watching Woodstock over and over--or most of all, the clenched-jaw cynics, munching on Soylent Green or cursing on the beach, goddamming us all to hell--Moses once more at the end, seeing creation and concluding it is not all that good.

And these images last because, as an adult, I saw on video the strange statue Orson Welles had carved back in 1958, the Mexican Heston, stooping beneath low border-town apartment-dive ceilings like John Wayne in The Quiet Man, both of them out of their elements, and transformed. He was exactly what Touch of Evil needed: a slab of marble among all those sweaty double-crossers, with his wife, Janet Leigh, packed into her foundation garments--un-dress rehearsal for Anthony Perkins just a little down that black and white road. And Heston plugged along, wading in the oily water, a practical Ahab after the Great White Orson, the double-est crosser of them all. That single late glimpse of Charlton Heston clears up everything between us, and allows us at last to set down that shootin iron and lift a toast to Apocalypse, whether pillar of fire or busted-up Statue of Liberty, car-bomb or plague-psychos. Now those are moments you're going to have to pry from my cold, dead--ah, you get it.

Rating Game Redux (30): Trippy

This week our local paper asked contributors to hit the road with "Best Road Trip Movies." As usual, a huge category, but only three picks allowed. So many miles to go before we sleep.

The Straight Story (1999)
The real David Lynch takes it on the road with the inimitable Richard Farnsworth as they explore the breadth of human kindness from the seat of a tractor.

Broken Flowers (2005)
Bill Murray does his dead-on Buster Keaton impression in Jim Jarmusch’s lopsided comedy, a little trip–with dangerous curves–down romantic memory lane.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake discover the crossroads where comedy and tragedy meet in Preston Sturges’ messy masterpiece, part Hollywood satire, part social critique, part sentimental journey.

Rating Game Redux (29): This Aint No Disco

More music listing for our local paper: Best '70s Songs. Mostly off-center picks. I suppose I could've just stayed with Motown--or been honest enough to reveal my Art Rock leanings and picked ELP, Yes, Tull. Then again, there's always "Smoke on the Water"--as long as you don't pay attention to the lyrics. Anyway--for what it's worth--here you go:

“Theme from Shaft” (1971) Isaac Hayes
The Stax Records sound elevated to sainthood—and one of the few endlessly repeated singles that has never passed into cliché.

“Thunder Road” (1975) Bruce Springsteen
I suppose “Born to Run” should be the pick, but this surprisingly melodic rocker perfectly captures Springsteen’s mid-decade effort to give rocknroll a future.

“Psycho Killer” (1977) Talking Heads
Whipping up a fitting anthem for The Little Decade That Couldn’t, Byrne and Co. hand the club kids exactly what they deserve; like the man says, “I hate people when they’re not polite.”

Rating Game Redux (28): I Don't Even Want to Hear It

A non-movie category this week for our local paper: worst lyrics. None of the panelists seemed to be responding, so our editor sent out a second email request for submissions. Gallant as I am, I tossed together the following. As the Cramps put it, "bad music for bad people."

“American Pie”
Pseudo-Dylan mishmash I was sick of sometime in late 1971—but at least you can dance to the Madonna version.

“Horse with No Name”
Well, maybe in the desert "there ain’t no one for to give you no pain" because there ain’t no radio for to hear this song.

“I Write the Songs”
That, Mr. Manilow, was your first mistake.

Rating Game Redux (27): Animated Response

When our local paper asked for a list of "best animated films," I knew what they wanted: feature-length fare, classics and watershed moments. But what sprang to mind were the little critters, seven-minute bouts of wabbit trouble--and mouse trouble, and billy goat, and Martian. Mustache fiends. Cats who hates people. Cats who look and sound suspiciously like Abbott and Costello. Cats who thuffer thucotash. And their prey, mice and birds, falsely innocent, with startling upper-body strength. Ah, we could go on and on, could we not? Sniffles and Wolfy and Daffy (that mad, impetuous boy) and Foghorn. But you gotta be a flippin' magician t'keep a kid's attention more than five--or seven minutes--these days, so I will bow to the following three prestidigitators, stretching animation* with Sam Clampett molecular hoodoo, many frames per second.

Pinocchio (1940)

The son rejects then rescues the father in a Magic Realist wish-fulfillment chiaroscuro cartoon-dream, in which nightmare and sentiment seamlessly combine, with music.

Spirited Away (2001)

Not since Lewis Carroll has anyone better understood the fears and hopes of childhood than Hayao Miyazaki, whose beautiful film creates a Wonderland that, like Carroll’s, invents its own mythology—and knows how to keep a secret, sometimes even from the viewer.

Street of Crocodiles (1986)

The Brothers Quay’s sublimely disquieting stop-action masterpiece of impenetrable gloom and compulsive attention to movement—even the dust on their hybridized found-objects/subjects seems infused with febrile life—capturing the alternate-reality essence of animation, both captivating and delirious.

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*Except for the Brothers Quay, whose animations usually run under twenty minutes or so. But for those of you unfamiliar with their work, I promise they will be the longest twenty minutes (in a good way) you'll ever spend.

The Home Viewer (5): Go, Erin, Go!

So, to introduce this month's Humble Viewer version of the monthly column I write for our local paper--which will be online after this Thursday, so why do I bother posting it here? Ah, vanity, vanity--anyway, in trying to be cute, I searched an "Irish Proverbs" site to find something appropriate to get us started, and found this: In winter the milk goes to the cow's horns. Say, kids! Submit your own impenetrable sayings! Here's the column, on movies about Ireland or Irish people.

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St. Patrick’s Day as we celebrate it in the U.S. may have as little to do with Ireland as corned beef and cabbage, but such fabrications and confusions still make a fine feast, whether at the table or in the movies. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats is supposed to have said of someone, “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” So, when one accuses the Irish of whimsical melancholy—or vice versa—they have only themselves to blame—and perhaps the film world as well, mightily fond of Ireland and its people, whether just as they are or as we (or the Irish themselves) would like them to be.

Emerald Isle, Lucky Charm

Few Hollywood filmmakers understood the reality-fantasy of Ireland better than John Ford in The Quiet Man (1952). He took his favorite leading man, John Wayne, and the most durable leading lady he could find, Maureen O’Hara, and plunked them down on the Old Sod to brawl their way toward marital bliss. Watching Wayne shoulder beneath those cottages’ low ceilings, exasperated and withdrawn—before exploding for fifteen minutes at a time, whether at O’Hara or her brother (Victor McLaglen)—I’m reminded how well he worked with Ford—and the Ford “family” (Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond, McLaglen)—especially in this film, which re-imagines Ireland without “The Troubles,” and offers perfect peace between Catholics and Protestants. Even the IRA seems genial.

Such light spirits persist in Irish films: The Snapper (1993) paves the way for the recent Juno with its tale of twenty-year-old Tina Kellegher (Sharon Curley), who becomes pregnant and decides to keep the baby. Much of the film’s focus is on her curmudgeonly “Da,” Dessie (Colm Meaney), whose clueless bluster and one-liners lead to a gradual acceptance of his role as Modern Grandfather. Once (2006) is also set in Dublin—and set to music, as the nameless “Guy” and “Girl” form a compelling, magical duo, their lives expressed as song; to be sure, an Irish ideal.

Irish Troubles

Unfortunately, it isn’t all merry eccentrics and lilting melodies. From the Blight to the Famine, from Home Rule to the Easter Rising, from outright war with England to civil war among themselves, Ireland has had its share of “The Troubles.” Many great films have risen to accept the challenges of this tragedy; a few stand out:

In the Name of the Father (1993) Daniel Day-Lewis proves once more his ability to deeply affect an audience—here, as Gerry Conlon, who in 1974 was wrongfully accused with three others of an IRA bombing. The film pours outrage and sorrow on the errors and malice of a system so intent on laying blame and righting wrongs that all it accomplishes is radicalizing the innocent.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) Ken Loach’s bitter history lesson. 1919 brings revolution, with civil war quick on its heels. The film eventually becomes a classic brother-against-brother story, brutal and heartbreaking.

Odd Man Out (1947) Carol Reed directs James Mason (as Johnny McQueen) in this fable-like tale of a Belfast Nationalist on the run. More “Ulysses in Nighttown” than action flick, Reed’s quasi-surreal epic leads McQueen in almost total silence through a world whose shadows are as menacing as the politics that drive him.

In America

Over the past two centuries, the Irish story has been also an immigrant’s story. Movies such as In America (2002) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) have interpreted the decision to travel “into the West” as struggle, reconciliation, and sometimes triumph. But once in America, and generations pass, the climb seems steeper, the terrain less certain. In The Last Hurrah (1958), John Ford follows the Irish to the political arena, in which party machines, mass media, and entrenched corruption pit themselves against Ford’s typical hero: unassuming, optimistic, tenacious. Spencer Tracy gives one of his rough-tooled/fine-tuned performances as the mayor (based on real-life Boston Mayor James Burley).

Even harsher battles are fought on the streets of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone (2007), which begins like a particularly engrossing Law and Order episode, but, under Ben’s direction and with its remarkable cast—especially his brother Casey and Amy Ryan—the film explores guilt and innocence, sin and salvation, with fierceness and rueful acceptance.

Roaches and Rabbits

In America, the earliest “Gangs of New York” hurtled at each other with fanciful names—Roach Guards, Ducky Boys, Dead Rabbits—and Martin Scorsese’s 2002 picture attempts to capture those bloody collisions as an immigrant tale of rejection and assimilation, followed by oblivion. It was Yeats, once more, who writes of Byzantium that it is “no country for old men”—and the gangster Irish America is no exception: the young themselves may not survive the bludgeoning. Scorsese continues his interrogation in The Departed (2006), a cell phone-infested, bullet-ridden proving-ground. Nicholson’s Frank Costello asks a man, “How's your mother?” and the fellow replies, “I'm afraid she's on her way out”; without missing a beat Frank replies, “We all are. Act accordingly.”

In the end, though, it seems that even in their murkiest incarnations, the Irish never lose an otherworldly sensibility—at least in the cinema. With Miller’s Crossing (1990), the Coen brothers situate their Irish, Jewish, Italian and what-all gangsters in an alternate 1930s universe of snappy comebacks (“Where’d you get the fat lip?” “Old war wound. Acts up around morons.”) and wind-blown hats, where “Danny Boy” becomes a Tommy gun ballad of casual havoc and cool under fire—in short, a movie in which everything that can go wrong, does—citing a law that, not coincidentally, appears to be named after one “Murphy,” assumedly an individual of Irish descent.

Rating Game Redux (26): Novel Movie Ideas

Our local paper asked for "Best Movies Based on Novels." The following three came to mind pretty quickly. I'll follow this with an addendum.

The Lord of the Rings (2001-03)

Despite plot changes and deletions, Peter Jackson exuberantly devotes ten-plus hours to J.R.R. Tolkein’s never-can-be-filmed work—and pleases just about everybody, even those who find the books a bit creaky.

In Cold Blood (1967)

If Capote’s work is a “nonfiction novel,” then Richard Brooks’ film is a fictionalized documentary. And thanks to Conrad Hall’s dust-bowl-noir cinematography and Quincy Jones’ exclamatory music—and most of all, Scott Wilson’s and Robert Blake’s Dick and Perry—the movie gazes into the abyss with lidless courage.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

The first postmodern novel (which just happened to be written in the late eighteenth century), Tristram Shandy’s fractal-ized narrative becomes a Russian nesting doll of a movie-within-a-movie—without restraints. As funny a deconstruction of an already-deconstructed book as it is of filmmaking—and the egos necessary to make a movie about a man who cannot stop referencing himself.

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More great novels-to-movies. The rule for me here is that the movie should (a) refelct the "spirit" of its source and/or (b) re-imagine the novel. After all, if I want just the novel--all its plot, characters and details--there's always, you know, the novel.

Wise Blood
A Clockwork Orange
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep (Bogart version)
Naked Lunch
Dracula (Coppola's version, Lugosi's performance)
The Age of Innocence
Ragtime
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel's and Kaufman's versions)

A decidedly partial list--in both senses of the term. Feel free to add your own.

Oscar the Grouch

As much as I admire No Country for Old Men--perhaps the best (American?) movie since Raging Bull--and even as I write, "It describes evil perfectly," I wonder how much we needed it--and all right, maybe we do, if only to notice evil's bland advance, a cheap crook with a gimmick--two, if you count the flipping coin--who ruins everything for the rest of us. But like those kids at the end, we'll take the cash and grin in complicity, bare-chested in the giving, while the Bad Man rolls "further up the road." And something else, maybe more: I admit my eyes filled with tears as Ed Tom Bell/Tommy Lee Jones (and has Jones finally separated himself from his character by the merest slanting line?) tells his dream about his father in the mountain pass:

It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past ... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.*

I'm not sure which ached more, the thought of that fiery horn or the waking up. Any of you out there an orphan, father gone, can bawl along with me, in this "world more full of weeping than we can understand." And I thank the Coens for a good cry, and for reminding us--OK, reminding me--that much is taken, and much remains--and more will go. Jeez, even the last roaring moments of The Shining make me sad now, Father Jack losing himself, love turned upside-down "in all that dark and all that cold."

(But the brothers made it up to us Oscar night, with an image in their acceptance speech that made me laugh out loud: Ethan, eleven years old, down at the airport, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, Joel shooting their first movie: Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go.)

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*Thanks, IMDb; I'll trust the accuracy of your quote.

Home-Made Film Festivals (5): Scorsese Without Tommyguns

Below: The last of the "home-made film festivals" from a THIRD site I'd tried to maintain. So, although I may want it not, I will waste not. (I'd like to continue these, but my other blog constantly calls.)

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We tend to associate Martin Scorsese with crime films, but he has made a number of compelling movies that, while they avoid the Goodfellas crew, still explore his recurring themes of lost love, over-reaching ambition, and even the trials of the spiritual quest.





The Age of Innocence (1993)

Based on Edith Wharton's novel, this film's social infighting is almost as ruthless as the business-as-usual mayhem of his wiseguys, as Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is forced to repress his love for the disgraced-by-divorce Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), amid the "useless beauty" of late-nineteenth-century New York.

The King of Comedy (1983)

Along with After Hours (1985), a pitch-perfect dark comedy. Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin ("often misspelled and mispronounced") is as hilarious as he is scary, while Jerry Lewis delivers his iciest performance since Buddy Love. And let's not forget Sandra Bernhard's voracious stalker-fan. Together, the three handle this tale of fifteen-minute fame like dynamite-jugglers, at once precise and reckless.

Kundun (1997)

A meditative-ecstatic biopic of the young Dalai Lama, as beautiful as it is heartbreaking, a genuinely transcendent movie that painstakingly builds then sweeps away its sand-painted mandalas, infinite sanctity and human impermanence finally reconciled.

Rating Game Redux (25): I Heart These 3

Just in time for that most romantic day of the year--that's right, February 12, the birthday of not only Abraham Lincoln but Cotton Mather, Lorne Greene, and Forrest Tucker--yet another "top" three list submitted to our local paper. A quick Tom Waits quote: "Life is a path lit only by / The light of those you've loved."

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Lost in Translation (2003)

John Keats gets it right:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

For an audio version, check out the Trembling Blue Stars’ song, “The Ghost of an Unkissed Kiss.”

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Despite its aggressively UN-romantic title, Fassbinder’s remake of two Douglas Sirk movies quietly submerges us into the ecstasy and agony of romance, as a late-middle-aged German woman and her younger Arab boyfriend face race and class antagonisms—and their own weaknesses—in their struggle to hold on to each other.

“The May-Erwin Kiss” (1896)

Eighteen seconds of kissing, at the dawn of projected motion pictures. “An osculatory performance” that has been repeated thousands of times, but you can see it here first.

Rating Game Redux (24): I've Seen All Good Logos

Here's another list I submitted to our local paper that has nothing to do with film--and I think I'll stop apologizing. No one's reading, anyway--and that is not a plea for attention, but feel free. Besides, it was fun writing about "Best Band Logos."

Yes

Roger Dean, who also illustrated most of the band’s albums, designed a flowing, chunky, yin-yang-y lower-case logo that perfectly captured the bright-speck-in-a-big-universe vibe of the quintessential ‘70s art-rock band.

The Who

The target, perfect for a bull’s-eye band dead-on stuttering about their generation, part mod, part rocker—with that arrow shooting straight up, big and bouncy. And the simple lettering, evocative of The Beatles’ formal font, as if something were being passed along, from one magic bus to another.

The Cramps

Drippy monster-letters evoke The Cramps’ late-night blue-glow punkabilly jitters. No more disco, no more pogo, just the thump and gurgle of “bad music for bad people.”

Home-Made Film Festivals (4): Kurosawa Without Swords

Filing under the Redundant Department of Redundancy, I'm simply continuing to empty a non-active website I started late last year. I've written about all of the following before, but someone's gotta satisfy my search for order ("the compulsion to repeat," as The Good Doktor Freud put it)--and in true OCD-fashion, that someone is me.

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As influential as his samurai/historical epics may be, Akira Kurosawa mastered other genres, from noir to fantasy to social drama. But throughout his films he continued a conversation between Stoic acceptance and mystic transcendence of things as they are, resulting in films that look with sympathy on human weakness without ignoring the price we pay.

High and Low (1963)
While this sustains more than enough tension for any kidnapped child story, its focus is on personal loss and public responsibility, as well as class divides, as kidnappers mistake a chauffeur's son for his industrialist employer's boy, and the rich man has to gamble everything as he weighs the cost of doing the right thing.

Ikiru (1952)
Kanji Watanabe, a bureaucrat (played by Takashi Shimura with excruciating blankness/despair), learns he is dying of stomach cancer and feels he has wasted his life. Constantly pained, Watanabe follows a circuit, from fear to mercy to death to victory, that not only rescues him from hopelessness but ennobles those around him. A heroic triumph expressed in small gestures.

Red Beard (1965)
While there is an air of the samurai to this film--it stars Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa's John Wayne, so to speak—it's actually a story of healing as well as honorable service, as the gruff doctor, nicknamed "Red Beard," urges his high-born intern to bow low to the poor he tends to. An "epic" of the transformative power of compassion.

The Home Viewer (4): Love Is Strange

(Here's the latest piece I've done for our local paper.)

As Valentine’s Day approaches, the Home Viewer trusts you to find your own favorite cinematic love, whether it be Titanic or Gone With the Wind, a mere Ghost or a Pretty Woman. As for me, I’ll wander down meaner streets to the lonely places, where the Valentines are blue, and the love is mad, blind, or lost—and sometimes found.

Mad Love

--Or, as the French put it, amour fou, plunging into icy Freudian waters, searching in dim dreams for pleasures without any principles. There’s Mad Love (1935) itself, in which director Karl Freund (cinematographer for Browning/Lugosi’s Dracula) makes a pact with that little devil Peter Lorre, and together they paint an expressionist portrait of a brilliant surgeon deformed by his needs. Mad Love has two strange bedfellows: Gun Crazy (1949) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in which impotency is cured at gunpoint while passion mingles with shame. All three accept fatal excess as the everyday, and let its mad lovers misbehave all the way.

Blind Love

If not mad, does love go blind? Tom Waits sings that “the only kind of love is stone blind love,” and the only way to find your love is to close your eyes. Which can be dangerous. Consider all those film noir fall guys, from Fred MacMurray’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity (1944) to William Hurt’s poleaxed lawyer in Body Heat (1981)—actually more or less a remake of Double Indemnity. But it isn’t just the femmes who are fatale: Charles Boyer keeps Ingrid Bergman guessing with near-fatal results in Gaslight (1944), and Jimmy Stewart has in the end only himself to blame for getting so dizzy over Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958). Ah, the ache of (I’ll quote Waits again) that “blind and broken heart that sleeps beneath [your] lapel.”

Blind love, though, can be a remarkable thing, unconditional, infinitely compassionate, redemptive. Akira Kurosawa's Akahige/Red Beard (1965) gives us the great gift of Dr. Niide (Toshiro Mifune), a doctor in a charity clinic whose deep humility and good will—and humor—is untainted by false pride or false humility. He simply moves forward, implacable and self-effacing, healing as though he has no other choice and shining a light on everyone he meets so they can see clearly their failings, strengths, and needs—including the need to stand with him in love to accomplish whatever job awaits.

Lost (and Found) Love

So far, it’s been mostly risks and falls. And you must admit there’s something inevitable about the losses of love. As Cagney famously barks out in Boy Meets Girl (1938), it’s the Only Story: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl!” Wes Anderson applies his typical pretzel logic to this formula in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), as everyone confronts their loves, mad, blind and what-all, sometimes reckless, sometimes calculating, sometimes even suicidal. But, like Royal Tenenbaum himself (Gene Hackman having the time of his life)—his character loving everyone almost as much as he loves himself—these dedicated eccentrics find their lost loves only when they finally do love others as much as themselves, and devise ways to save each other from lovelessness. It appears, then, that Royal’s gravestone doesn’t lie as it announces he “Died Tragically Rescuing His Family From The Remains Of A Destroyed Sinking Battleship.” That’s as good a metaphor for love as any.

And as the ship sinks, drastic measures sometimes must be taken to save the innocent. Sling Blade’s (1996) Karl (Billy Bob Thornton) has lost almost all love, but still manages to give what he has to young Frank (Lucas Black), “nervous” and lonesome, hanging onto his mother even as she slips from him. And while Karl may be lost in the horrors of his childhood, it is hard to deny that the final blade he slings, like Michael with his flaming sword, frees Frank and his mother and helps them all find at least partial peace.

Well, the biggest risk we could take this time around as Humble Viewers is Sally Potter's Yes (2004), which cannot be described without its sounding more than a little silly. The movie is set in present-day England, but everyone speaks in rhyme. (I kid you not.) It is in part about a passionate love affair between an unhappily married woman, "She" (Joan Allen), and an expatriate from Beirut, "He" (Simon Akbarian). And although Yes is about a great many other things—I will not detail them here, lest you disbelieve or storm off—it returns, with ecstatic affirmation, to love, particularly in its insistence that to love we must surrender to the other, and treasure the new home because it is the home of the one we love, who lives in ours now—and they become one home.

I should give the final word to “The Cleaner,” the movie’s wise housekeeper, who insists,

... everything you do or say
Is there, forever. It leaves evidence.
In fact it's really only common sense;
There's no such thing as nothing, not at all.
It may be really very, very small
But it's still there. In fact I think I'd guess
That 'no' does not exist. There's only "yes."

Yes almost breaks your heart, but at the last moment opens it instead. Near the end of the film, “She” makes a video, looking in the camera to ask God if He can forgive her for not believing in Him. I might be wrong, but I think God answers with, as The Cleaner asserts, the only response possible. A small word, but it’s the key to finding what was once lost.

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(Note: I know this should be about home viewing, but I’d like to mention the best off-center/dead-on love story I’ve seen in a long time: Juno, the tale of “fertile Myrtle” “the cautionary whale” whose shenanigans—“one doodle that can't be un-did”—make us love her for exactly what she is.)

Rating Game Redux (23): A Short Stretch

Back to movies for our local paper; this time, Best Prison Movies. Once again I offer minority opinions, allowing my fellow panelists to laud The Shawshank Redemption, Birdman of Alcatraz, Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17, and even The Longest Yard. I hope they all make someone's cut.

One I should've mentioned: Jacques Becker's Le Trou/The Hole (1960). Perhaps the best prison escape film, lean and direct, claustrophobic and dismaying--just like prison.

Brute Force (1947)
A relentless parable about fascism and the politics of terror starring Burt Lancaster, with Hume Cronyn as the sadistic guard who both manipulates the warden and tortures the prisoners while wearing the same glassy-eyed smirk.

The Hill (1965)
Somewhere between Goldfinger and Thunderball, Sean Connery delivers a perfectly controlled performance in Sidney Lumet’s sand-blasted tale of a WWII British military prison camp in Libya, where the prisoners are made repeatedly to climb a hill. Yes, it’s Sisyphus in khaki, an absurdist’s view of power and nonconformity.

Hart’s War (2002)
Stalag 17 meets Mississippi Burning, with Bruce Willis channeling William Holden and Colin Farrell as the innocent forced to confront a delirious space where racism, justice, and duty clash. The result is at once noble and unsettling.

Rating Game Redux (22): Am I Blue?

My latest list contribution to our local paper. This one's so slight it's almost not there. But still, here:

Best Songs With a Color in the Title

I’ll take the easy way out and give myself the “blues”:

“Blue Velvet”
Sappy, spooky—and beautiful in its own way. Besides, no other song makes me think simultaneously of David Lynch and Bobby Vinton.

“Crystal Blue Persuasion”
Tommy James and the Shondells go mellow, and produce their most pleasantly melodic hit.

“Almost Blue”
Pure cool jazz from Elvis Costello, who once more proves he can write any kind of music he pleases. After “My Funny Valentine,” perhaps Chet Baker’s greatest cover.

Home-Made Film Festivals (3): Tom Cruise, Master Thespian

Despite his public persona, Tom Cruise has often managed to mark up his celebrity with enough nicks and outright gouges to help us forget the automatic smile and relentless charm, and see a sharper, rougher shape, surrendering to the role--and to the good directors who have helped him in these efforts.




The Color of Money (1986)
It’s important to realize this was released the same year as Top Gun. Martin Scorsese anticipates Cruise’s emerging image--and dismantles it, as he sets him against Paul Newman, in a changing of the guard that is as heartless as it is exciting. An early sign (his role in Legend/1985 notwithstanding) that Cruise was more than willing to both nurture and abandon his Cruise-ness.

Magnolia (1999)
Paul Thomas Anderson gives him the ultimate anti-Cruise role: Frank T.J. Mackey, self-help guru for ex-frat boys, profane, heartless, and cocky (pun intended), who falls apart as thoroughly as Cruise’s own status as Mr. Right.

War of the Worlds (2005)
A fitting end to this festival, in which absent dad Ray Ferrier needs to reassert his value to those around him. Ray is always on the verge of collapse, as war-damaged as Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and all but useless until he faces the limits of grinning away one’s problems. This is the second time (after Minority Report/2002) that Steven Spielberg hammers like a swordsmith on Cruise, producing dangerously honed edges.

This Bird Can Fly: Suzanne Pleshette, 1937-1970

I was sixteen or so when The Bob Newhart Show started its run, and Suzanne Pleshette could not have happened at a better time in my life--although she did confuse me, and more than a little: I liked the show, but really liked her, and I wasn't sure why. She seemed the opposite of everything I thought I needed: a bit too able to see through her husband's weaknesses, above most of his stammering objections, almost cool in her appraisal of his worth. Me, I craved all the forgiving I could glom my clammy little hands onto, and a blind eye to all my faults, and unquestioning admiration--but Emily Hartley would have provided very little of that. Besides, she was twenty years my senior.

--And was that it? Was she simply the quintessential Older Woman? There was the throaty voice, those big beautiful eyes, that self-assured set to her frame. But I think it was more than post-adolescent leering--or misbegotten mooning. Or at least not simply that. She was a promise somehow, that when I finally grew up the rest of the way I might run into someone who'd look right at me, and if she smiled it would not be a courtesy but a fact. I'm lucky that Someone came along, and she has kept that promise--for twenty-six years and counting--but I'm also happy that Emily shook me up just enough to wake me up just a little, and help me see more clearly what I should--well, see more clearly.

Besides, once I made the connection to Annie Hayworth in The Birds (1963) I realized Pleshette had been taking me to task practically all my life, almost smiling, head cocked, cigarette (oh, poor Suzanne) resting in her hand, the weary world her intimate companion and constant challenge, as much relished as endured, like anything worth wanting.

The Home Viewer (3): The Four Corners of the Earth

(Here's the latest monthly column I've written for the Galesburg Register-Mail. Note that I have taken on the humble task of capturing all of world cinema in 1000 words or so. Where would I be if I didn't know everything? In a pickle, that's where. Of global proportions.)

On January 26, Knox College will hold its International Fair; I’d like to take this opportunity to celebrate the promise that, no matter the corner where we start, if we travel as curious and generous explorers, we may end up as friends.

The Asian Corner

Asian filmmakers appreciate the visual potential of cinema; from hyper-realized song-and-dance frenzies to austerely beautiful tableaux, from gun-fu standoffs to epic widescreen, one can almost forget the mundane elements of plot in surrender to aesthetics.

But the stories assert themselves amid the visual splendor. In Raise the Red Lantern (China, 1991), Zhang Yimou explores the walled-in palace of an old man who takes a fourth wife (the stunning Gong Li), who unwillingly enters the squabbles and maneuverings of the wives, trapped just as she is but determined to recreate the worst elements of the world outside. A red lantern is raised outside the quarters of the wife whom the lord will visit, and it becomes as much of a warning and curse as a sign of favor. Yimou’s camera looks down on the house as the seasons pass and invites us into secrets no one should have to keep.

One of the simplest stylists, Yasujiro Ozu is also one of the most profound. Tokyo Story’s (Japan, 1953) plot is barely there: Aged parents visit their children in the city, are patiently endured, then return home, where the wife dies and there is a funeral. But with these simple notes Ozu composes a remarkable symphony, contemplative and heartrending, in which love, loss and reconciliation find full voice.

Bridging all kinds of gaps, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Japan, 1961) may dedicate itself to the beautiful compositions we expect from Japanese films, but in the foreground is his Samurai bodyguard (Toshiro Mifune), the original “man with no name” who strolls into a town populated almost exclusively by bad guys and plays one against the other, all for a “fistful of dollars” (well, yen) until he is the “last man standing.” Kurosawa gleefully borrows from hardboiled crime novels and Westerns—and, lucky for moviegoers, turnabout is fair play, from Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis.

The European Corner

Like Ozu, Vittoria De Sica focused on the everyday, with epic results. The Bicycle Thief (Italy, 1949) has never lost its potency. In postwar Italy, a father stakes his family’s future on his bicycle, necessary for his job (ironically, posting Hollywood movie posters around town). The bicycle is immediately stolen, and the man and his young son embark on a city-wide search that manages to capture every facet of both their relationship and the larger world through which they roam, one as opposed to their success as any government bureaucracy.

As World War II faded, European cinema looked inward, particularly the French New Wave. Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (France, 1959) follows his alter-ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), as he wanders from his distant parents into the streets, petty crime, a juvenile detention center—and then famously to a beach, where, suspended between land and water, he turns and stares into the camera all his solemn sadness and hidden dreams. Truffaut would make four more Doinel films, but this one remains as the truest expression of a young artist on the run and left behind.

Speaking of running, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Germany 1998) propels his heroine like a time-traveling bullet through a Berlin only an Xbox could’ve built. As Lola tries to save her bagman boyfriend from the mob, Tykwer tosses her, most of the city, and us like zero-gee pinballs, until it all ends in tragedy. Or does it? The movie ramps up again, and again, offering alternate-universe recreations of her run, and the power of narrative literally to make and break—and re-make.

The African Corner

Despite its own rich cinematic history, particularly since the mid-1960s, modern Africa is most often seen through Western eyes, from Out of Africa (1985) to Blood Diamond (2006); even an African film like The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) can’t get started until it practically bonks a Bushman on the head with a Coke bottle. One of the best films to reflect this dualistic/“filtered” view is Battle of Algiers (Algeria/Italy, 1966), which alternates between the French citizens/colonizers and the Algerian revolutionaries/terrorists. Presented in an unapologetic documentary style, the film explores the shared violence that sullies the colonial legacy.

Also facing an “African problem,” but with great compassion and beauty, even humor, is Moolaade (Senegal, 2004), directed by Ousmane Sembene. The title means “protection” or “sanctuary,” which a woman gives to four village girls who are about to undergo female circumcision. The film, though, is more than an exposé of a social concern; it interrogates the past, anticipates the future—with mingled hope and apprehension—and celebrates the undaunted courage of everyday people.

The American Corner

For a US film, I was tempted to discuss anything by Martin Scorsese, but the fervid hopes, wild humor, and dark despair one could say marks much of “American” cinema is captured perfectly in the Brazilian film City of God (2002). Imagine Goodfellas in a favela—or better yet, forget the Hollywood comparisons and brace yourself for a fiercely original and appallingly honest observation of life in its last extremes.

Which leads me to the States. If I will not indulge my Scorsese fixation, where can we go for some real deep-fried, quick-talkin', old-fashioned American mischief? I’m torn between two audacities: Spike Lee and the Coen brothers. For some reason Do the Right Thing (1989) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) seem to foot the same bill. Both are filled with music and dangerous curves, overblown egos and “startlements”—while bouncing along quite different American roads. Taken together, they lay out town and country with sly honesty and bittersweet affection.

Eventually, all roads lead—well, to all roads, as in Babel (2006), Alejandro Iñárritu’s continent-hopping exploration of the ties that bind. And they pain us, intertwining just about everything we worry about today—relationships, poverty, terrorism, loyalty, the search for home and safety, the fear of lost connections. Babel provides an opportunity to feel the sharpness of the four corners of the Earth and to remember what we all share.