168. The Examined Life, or "Little Did He Know"

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) in Stranger Than Fiction (2006) is an IRS auditor who realizes he is a character in an unfinished novel. He hears a voice, and it frightens him, and then infuriates. He tries to talk back, and gets only silence. He bargains with the voice, or argues or cajoles; he demands and implores. Nothing. Then he seeks it out, encountering the dead ends of self-help and pharmacology before making his way to literature, to someone who understands words. Close, but the more he explores his situation, the fewer his choices, as the lit prof, Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), eliminates all the kinds of stories Crick is not in. Only by accident does Crick discover his creator, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson); this is the normal, haphazard, dismaying, flabbergasting process of realizing that one is a creation.

From kindergarten to baccalaureate I attended Catholic schools, and have thus received more or less systematic instruction on how to build a Rube Goldberg consciousness machine. Looking back, I am grateful I was given a language to attempt to describe it to myself--but nothing prepared me for the moment when the Voice started talking, at first scaring the crap out of me, as if It were a ghost, right at my shoulder, spooky as it started telling me, in a startlingly matter-of-fact tone, that I was not simply a Subject, only myself, but an Object, "belonging" in some way to Another. At first I thought it was my mother or father--and they sufficed for a while, if not as the literal Makers they were, but as doers, building the house in secret every night as I slept, having the world ready when I woke up.

But the more I moved around, the more complicated the world got. There were all kinds of new streets and buildings, trees and fireplugs, birds and billboards to put together as I moved away from the house, all of it rising up just around each corner, busy as I approached, and done just as I kept arriving--until one day I began to feel the tremor that marks the world's making, a slight tremble as I stepped on each new square foot of it.

So maybe I was not the only Thing being created--no; no "maybes" about it. And I consoled myself with the necessary adolescent idea that I was the One, that "life is what you make of it." An error, but again, a necessary one, for without pride, one is left in dismay, since freedom without pride demands accountability; and, like Milton's Satan,* I wanted to assert, "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." I wanted to be free to reign as I wished--but also to nurse wounds and lay blame.

In other words, free not to be a creation. But try as I might, nothing helped, not even literature--no, I have to take that back. Prof. Hilbert reminds us that by reading stories, stories can be told (and I direct you to the note at the end of this for a glimpse into the saving power of lit-trit-chore); besides, it's in the professor's office that Crick sees his author on TV. Still, when Hilbert reads Eiffel's book, he is willing to sacrifice Crick for the beautiful death his author has planned for him. And so even art lets one down; after all, it too is a creation that wants to be itself.

All I had, then, was me and what I knew. But--and I hesitate here, because it may be Pride speaking. Oh, what the--hmm; I'll leave that to Milton. Anyway, I have a thought: In knowing that he is a creation, Crick gains the right to have a conversation with the Creator. I will not say more about what happens to Crick; but Stranger Than Fiction keeps building in my head, like the ever-made world itself, and offers the possibility that addressing the idea of being created is the beginning of life, of freedom that allows one to be more than a monumental, defeated general enduring "the burning Marl," approaching with "uneasy steps" others like me, the mere waking guards of Self.

No, the more I know I am created, the more I can create. Will Ferrell, with his fittingly blank look and completely understandable near-constant flinch, fills me with all the pity and hope I need. You see, I too have been making hash-marks on my own Domesday Book, counting which steps lead to tragedy ("death," as Prof. Hilbert observes) and which to comedy ("getting hitched"--and there for Harold waits Maggie Gyllenhaal's Ana Pascal, a baker of delicious cookies), as I try to keep up a conversation with my Author, not (when I am minding myself) to make any deals, just to keep open the lines of communication. Like Harold, I may know little, but two things are of particular solace: once you start talking, the Author considers the merits of not only justice but mercy, and thus options remain open; and (if I may indulge in an in-joke for those of us who have seen the movie) I am not a Golem.

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*A professor at the college where I work, her intellect keen and heart generous--thank you, Gina--has just started a weekly Paradise Lost discussion group. It's students and faculty and staff waxing theological, philosophical, and aesthetical--is that last one possible? We've met once, and it was good, and I think it's going to get better, as we continue trying to justify the ways of Milton to each other.

167. Rating Game Redux 6: Not Funny Ha-Ha

I'm not sure if they're going to be published--I just sent them off for consideration--but here's the latest Three Best list for our local newspaper.

Best Dramatic Performances by a Comedian

Jim Carrey, Man on the Moon (1999)
As Andy Kaufman, Carrey eerily channels the private life of someone who was all over the place on TV, but so heavily disguised that no one really knew him. But Carrey allows us to try.

Adam Sandler, Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Sandler's emotionally constipated Barry Egan all but implodes under the weight of his own past failures and present fears--until he finds the strength to accept freedom.

Jack Benny, To Be or Not to Be (1942)
Before Mel Brooks and "Springtime for Hitler," Benny, in Ernst Lubitsch's anti-Nazi comedy, uses his profound deadpan--at once clueless and conniving, understated and self-indulgent--to expose the duplicity necessary both to terrorize and to overcome terror.

166. Coming to America

Nothing personal, but I think this will be the last Japanese movie I'll watch for a while--although my damnably enticing description of Kurosawa's Ikiru, the screening of which my wife missed, has made her want to see it, so I may return to Japan one of these days soon.

But I'm glad to feel harried by such a small matter; it's nothing compared to the pressures in Giants and Toys/Kyojin to Gangu (1958), directed by Yasuzo Masumura--a prolific filmmaker (the Internet Movie Database lists sixty-five directing credits) I stumbled onto--I think I was looking for a Kobayashi film, and wandered just far enough to slip-and-slide down Masumura's pre-Pop-Art anti-big-business diatribe, with its caramel-company spokesmodel, Kyoko (Hitomi Nozoe), a nut with rotten teeth who looks like a monkey. And I am not being impolite, merely quoting other characters' ver batim descriptions and opinions. But I'm glad to say they're right: Until she succumbs to the power of persuasion herself, transformed by her agent into a stuck-up celeb with an enviable smile and a distant demeanor--snubbing the caramel marketers who had "created" her--Kyoko runs around sticking out her tongue--the sybaritic photographer is especially interested in the fact that she can touch her nose with it--and crossing her eyes and jittering and jumping like, well, a monkey. And her teeth are indeed terrible, and her pets are obscenely tumid bullfrog tadpoles, and her family is crowded into a near-hovel, and they all screech and smack at each other, while pop stars and marketers and delirious dance numbers yell and caper in our faces. This is one tiring movie.

At its core is a bitter scorn for Japan's voracious market economy, catching up with America's while outdoing it in salary-man (and -woman) double-dirt-dealing. The rival execs are either old classmates or new lovers, but none of that matters as they vie for the right to turn every Japanese mouth into Kyoko's, sugar-ravaged and ragged. Not to fixate on her damaged dentals, but the poor things do jump out at you, imprinting like--OK, like a bite--along the entire length of the film. As the competition intensifies and the stakes go up (and all over caramel, a paltry thing, as everyone agrees--but cuts throats nonetheless), and the bonds of friendship, loyalty, and love snap over and over, like the ad exec's faulty cigarette lighter--a recurring motif, his repeated nerve-wracking attempts to strike a flame superimposed on various montages of caramel being manufactured, markets established, competitors crushed--Kyoko's gap-toothed grin, carried around by her spindly frame, looms larger and larger, until it's nothing but crooked smiles all around.

Sometimes I think I'm being, well, culturally myopic in my reaction to Japanese films that deal with "Western" topics: They can seem bizarre re-imaginings of familiar conventions, unintentional kitsch made quaint by "foreignness." After all, in 1956 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit had already outlined the dilemmas of American Upward Mobility; and its more ghoulish side was already considered in The Sweet Smell of Success, along with the marketing of personality in A Face in the Crowd, both in 1957; by 1958, Hollywood was only three years away from Billy Wilder's hysteria-tinged conflation of Cold War brinksmanship and Coca-Cola diplomacy, One, Two, Three.

But Giants and Toys is more than American culture recycled, with goofy dubbing and maybe Godzilla off in the distance--although the awkward, garish faults of American pop culture seem particularly embarrassing when viewed through a Japanese lens, so to speak. Kyoko becomes emblematic of a deep discomfort Masumura wants his Japanese audience to feel, since those who manipulate her--and then of course are manipulated by her--eventually have more to say about post-War Japan than they do America, even though the latter is always in the background or on the tips of their Kyoko-length tongues; but in the end it is specifically Japanese caramel everyone's tasting, as bitter as the crow anyone has to eat in, say, Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) or David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)--except in Giants and Toys they bring it on themselves; it is not a legacy of the American occupation/re-culturalization, but a bitter decision made by young men and women who grow old quickly, hunched over their desks--literally clutching their ulcers--and demeaning themselves for market-share. The final shot of the ad exec, forced to wear the spacesuit Kyoko disdains, walking down the crowded Tokyo street to hawk caramels, is heartless in its insistence that the New Japan may be suffering from rot, but it keeps chewing, no matter how much face is lost.

165. After the Fall

Seijun Suzuki is exhausting; he refuses to look on Creation and say "It is good." Maybe that's because he comes to it, as we all do, so late in the day, long after the quiet promise of dawn--you know about that, don't you? How day is to follow dawn, and so on, until they are well-measured and long, balanced by steady revolutions of sun and moon? That promise? Well, here we are now, the indulged languor gone, the hunger having peaked about mid-morning, and all promises broken by lunchtime to fill our bellies with meat, years of it.

Suzuki sees this state of affairs pretty clearly, despite the fact that--ah; because?—he didn't have two yen to rub together. So the one he did have he fired in his modest melting pot, and poured into his audience's ears, like Claudius with his brother Hamlet, a teaspoon of lava from the scarier part of "the deep heart’s core." This poison, though, wakes you up--OK, with a yelp and a groan; but you nonetheless have no doubt you’ve been poisoned; and here's another analogy: You're Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A. watching your death-clock, until you're out of time and you drop so fast that no one can break your fall.

The odd thing is, in a Suzuki movie his characters--and his audience--in a queasy kind of way have some fun on the way down. In Gate of Flesh we see post-War Japan through a scowl, with the Americans drunk and consuming everything in sight, then hanging in tatters from Tokyo's charred walls like movie posters, mocking with the promise of happy endings. And Suzuki's band of prostitutes will have nothing to do with broken vows; they create their own world, with its own code, like Plato's cave, in which the worst one wins. But despite the nausea of the world turned upside-down, Suzuki gives us color and even a kind of humor, albeit rough as the torture-punishments the prostitutes inflict upon one another for falling in love--evidenced, of course, by doing it for free--but still with a crooked grin that ripples just below or along the movie's surface, a sly Suzuki tickle, setting us up for the punchline, but not without warning. Pie-eyed and feckless, the girls and their adopted tough guy, at least for a while, sing and joke, rough-house and tease--until, of course, the day goes on, and the bright primary colors they wear turn cheap, smearing easily and dripping like blood from a pulp-fiction dagger.

When I was young the whiff of a grindhouse* movie was both enticing and troubling, like something delicious burning. I knew the print version already--E.C. comics, certain Charles Addams cartoons, the Cold Warriors of '50s science fiction, Roughnecks all--and consumed regular doses of cinematic big bugs and tipsy saucers; but true grindhouse often--and thankfully--eluded my sight, except for some unexpected arrivals, such as Mark of the Devil when I was in eighth grade, and I think a bit young to spend any length of time with Udo Kier. I remember audience members were given "barf bags," and I felt a little sick just holding the damn thing. Such tender sensibilities; but still, I was eager to pry open the rusty downtown film cans of exploitation cinema, and "hoped" I could one day see Color Me Blood Red and Carnival of Blood and Blood Feast—a pattern emerges, like a seeping stain. And stupid me, I eventually got my wish, and still do. Gate of Flesh reminds me that the line between a "nudie-cutie" and a "roughie" is as mushy as the corpus callosum, and while it also may be as important, it too is better off untouched. In the end, Suzuki's instructions make sense only if you want to dismantle stuff; this can be a good thing, especially with bombs and tyrannies. But it's nerve-wracking, and one should rest a long time between attempts.

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*I'm not going to say anything about the upcoming Tarantino/Rodriguez movie; I'm sure it will have its moments. (I will be forever grateful that Kill Bill introduced me to the music of The 5.6.7.8's.) And who am I to sneer at affectionate parody? I loved the Blues Brothers, and they ripped off the Real Deals at least as much as Tarantino and Co. Still, I did know most of the original versions before I bought Briefcase Full of Blues. Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S., anyone?

164. The Friday Club Begins (Again)

When I was an undergraduate, a group of us would gather, pooling our money and going down to the State Store--residents of the Keystone State will understand--to buy various refreshing beverages, which we would drink until they were all gone. That was about it, and that was the Friday Club.

Thirty years later, and I am afraid I'm not as thirsty as I used to be. So here's a new Friday Club: Every Friday, I will determine a lineup of seven movies. You must watch them in order, one a day, after dark. Screen incoming calls--or ignore them altogether. You should also be seated, and shoeless; you may wear socks or some sort of comfy footie--or best of all, do like the professionals and go barefoot--and of course, feel free to Bring Your Own. You probably need Netflix--and a decent rental plan; at least four-at-a-time--as well as an iron commitment to watch each movie. As I have insisted for a long time, Home Living and Entertainment is hard work.

Here's the list. The intent is to begin the viewing week on Monday--if you start on Friday, you might be tempted to watch more than one a day over the weekend, and we simply cannot have any of that. So this is a "Friday Club" only in the sense that I'm bossing you around on Friday so that you'll hop to your Queue to get the movies in your hands beginning Monday evening. These are movies on my own Queue, so they are films/DVDs I either haven't seen or haven't seen in a while. So I'm as excited as you are.* You are excited, aren't you?

Monday: Giants and Toys (1958)
Corporate marketing wars, Japanese-style. Lately I have been watching mostly Japanese movies; I may take a break after this one--although Sword of Doom (1966) calls menacingly. Still, this buttoned-down version of Pacific Rim ruthlessness might tide me over.

Tuesday: Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Once again, a movie I know little about, thank goodness. I saw the trailer, and like keeping an eye on Will Ferrell. He always seems ready to do something unpleasant; this makes his comedy especially uneasy. Besides, he reminds me of a guy I knew in graduate school, funny and unpredictable, with often-unreadable eyes. Nothing like an unintentional echo of one's past to keep a movie interesting.

Wednesday: High School Terrors
Another compilation of "instructional films"; it seems some of these were intended for G.I.s. This kind of thing is easy to laugh at, like Ed Wood--and Mystery Science Theater does a world-class job of doing just that; the cinematic equivalent of James Lileks' site--all children of the National Lampoon magazine of the '70s. But once I get beyond mockery and camp-foolery, I find these distressed goods alternately resonant and depressing, in a second-hand way.

Thursday: Tideland (2005)
I think I remember reading--in Film Comment?--that this Terry Gilliam film, released just around the time of his pass at the Brothers Grimm, is the better of two dicey movies. And it's supposed to be dark, dark, dark. But it's a good idea to give Gilliam the benefit of the doubt; after all, too few "mainstream" filmmakers regularly work at Circe's loom, if I may wax Classical. I think every once in a while a movie should turn the viewers into swine, just as a reminder.

Friday: Forbidden Games (1954)
Rene Clement's pet cemetery movie, one that I must admit I will visit dutifully--it's one of those canonical movies, so it's supposed to be good for you--but I am optimistic it will live up to its reputation. I'm interested in the film's depiction of children. Everyone complains that movies don't do justice to their hometowns or occupations; me, I'm always embarrassed and angered by the damage done to childhood. Here's hoping.

Saturday Borat (2006)
My wife has requested we watch every movie nominated this year for an Academy Award. Given the fact that this includes Click (Best Achievement in Makeup), this may be a case of careful what you wish for. I am eager, though, to see Borat. As my smart friend Gene pointed out decades ago--watching SCTV's surreal parodies of the Soviet Union, particularly its take on anti-Uzbeck sentiments--the odder corners (if I may appear insensitive) of Eastern Europe remain the only "minorities" one is allowed to mock. As usual, Gene was decades ahead of his time. So I'm looking forward to seeing "what fits into Mother Russia," post-Millennium style.

Sunday Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
I've been meaning to watch this Jim Jarmusch exercise in Total Indy Laid-Back-ness; it seems a perfect Sunday evening Quiet Time, even if some of the filmed conversations might grow strident--what will Iggy Pop and Tom Waits get up to? But one can only hope that, plotless and semi-improvised (I think), it will ease us back toward the work week with a minimum of fuss.

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I will admit, though, that this is primarily your week in movies. Me, I might read a book. This does not, of course, relieve you of your viewing responsibilities.

163. Tender Mercy

I am not turning Japanese, but I am having great difficulty turning away from Japanese cinema. However, before we move on to, for instance, Casino Royale and Daniel Craig's version of the bully-boy Bond, there's Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru/To Live (1952). Kurosawa always frightens me a little: He is capable of almost excessive tenderness (although the longer I live, the less I think there can be too much of that particular indulgence) pinioned beneath the bald-faced truth of suffering, and the grunting weight of those who inflict it as though they were simply breathing, flat and regular. And I do not mean to reduce Kurosawa's movies to purposeless dichotomy. He knows that mercy begins in suffering--and then he does something about it. Sometimes, he increases the suffering, as in High and Low (1963) and Ran (1985), and sometimes the suffering rises like a wind beneath sails, and moves everything in victory, as in Akahige/Red Beard (1965) and Yojimbo (1961).

In any case, danger abounds in Kurosawa, not the least when he turns a jaundiced eye toward the willfully weak, as in Ikiru. In its narrated opening, we are asked to frown at the bureaucrat with stomach cancer, Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura, constantly pained, like the snake-bitten Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) in The Missing (2003), always half-hunched, grimacing, making an effort just to look you in the eye). We are told Watanabe has wasted his life, he is already dead, and so on. It seems almost cruel--until we move from his desk to the extended montage in which a group of local women are sent from department to department within the impenetrable bureaucracy, thwarted in their attempt to have a fetid cistern filled and made into a park. It is a compelling piece of work, inexorable in its circuit and return to Watanabe's desk, where he still sits, greasy and staring, silent and still. He may not be the villain, but he'll do.

Kurosawa, though, will not forget that pain also has its circuit, as it moves--at least in Ikiru--from fear to mercy to victory. As Watanabe confronts his death, he first locks himself even more deeply inside; there's a perfect scene, after he discovers he has cancer, in which he inches along a city street, surrounded by others, passing a construction site, within which flashes of light burst--all in complete silence. And then he steps into the street, is almost hit by a truck, and the noise of the world drops on him like lightning, loud and paralyzing. At that moment, his interior world, which is all he seems to have--and which has failed him--begins to slide off his frame. He does at first turn to the past--which, like everything inside him, lets him down, as he considers his wife's death and small but lasting errors with his son. And then he resolves to live in the moment, and we get the middle section of the movie, in which he tries to, not live, but live it up, drinking and nightclubbing. But this, too, is bitter in his mouth--literally: as he says of the sake he pours down, it "is like paying myself back with poison for the way I lived all these years." And then he latches onto a young and bright-eyed fellow-worker, Toyo (Miki Odagiri), cute as a kitten but desperate to escape the bureaucracy. He spends a week--and plenty of yen--with her, clinging to her until his grasp frightens her. As he explains his attraction to Toyo, "Once when I was a child, I almost drowned. It's just like that feeling. Darkness everywhere, and nothing for me to hold onto, no matter how hard I try. There's just you." He wants her to show him what to do. All she has is her new job, in a factory that makes windup bunnies. At first she disdains it, insisting she's just like him, simply going to work, eating, sleeping. But then she confesses that when she's in the bunny factory it is as though she is "holding every baby in Japan." Cute stuff, but more: Watanabe's eyes widen, and he realizes what he must do.

His pain becomes fear, his fear leads him to seek escape--but where? After all, he carries his doom with him, in his gut. So fear becomes a dead end (so to speak), and he has to return the way he came, and find--not mercy, but a way to give mercy. As in Akhige, Kurosawa places his sufferer in the face of suffering, and provides an opportunity to live. Watanabe goes back to his office--at "Human Relations," of course--and dedicates himself to that park, to one small real thing in the real world.

Watch the rest of the story yourself, all told in flashback, after Watanabe's death. His wake really works, as his acceptance--of both death and the job that needs doing--is itself awakened. And how lucky he is, with something to do, something he can actually lay his hands on--and in the twisted bowels of city government, no less, where one would expect to find nothing but its own kind of cancer. Watanabe, though, bringing his disease with him, can smell out corruption, and knows how to lower his sweaty brow and carve away the stink. Again, watch what he finds, and what Kurosawa gives us. It is tender in many ways, like love and like a wound, bright and waiting for the right hands.

162. Going My Way of the Samurai

No apologies for the childish title: I'm writing about Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro (2000), in which he directs himself--as "Beat" Takeshi--from his own script; and he edits himself, as well. Literally. Figuratively, though, Kitano does nothing of the sort, instead letting himself go, or leaving well enough alone, or something. His movies can be, to put it mildly, prone to outbursts. On the other hand, he can show amazing restraint: In Kikujiro, he gets as close to a "children's movie" as I've seen from him--and I won't check for Kitano films I haven't watched; for all I know, he's directed Pokemon episodes. But what I do know is that every time I see one of his movies he provides a new challenge--no, old ones: I keep thinking of Buster Keaton, especially the performances, blank-slated and waiting for life to write on him--which it does, like lightning across desert sand, heat-fusing the moment in muscled squiggles. This can be pretty unnerving in Kitano's action/crime films, in which he takes all kinds of time, until you can't tell whether he's building suspense or has, in some fit of audacity, simply left the building, the camera still running. During such stretches, I sometimes half-expect a member of the crew to wander on-frame, as oblivious as the characters that there's a movie going on; then ka-POW! Takeshi flash-edits something outlandishly awful at lightspeed. Again, it is as if he is re-claiming silent comedy, its skitters and ricochets as well as its slow burns and deadpans, all for his own purposes. The resulting almost-illusion is that Takeshi is always making masterpieces, in which everything he's capable of is enlisted in the effort, the only chance he'll get to show you what he can do.

Kikujiro follows this pattern to satisfying heights of beauty and strangeness and even a kind of joy--the kind you get from being free. I watched it with two of my children (13 and 16), and we laughed and gaped, cried--well, I did--and awww'd. It's a road picture, with menace and merriment, surreal appearances and open stretches of waiting terrain. To quote Groucho, "Pardon me while I have a Strange Interlude," but this movie gives me pause--in a good way, I think. Kikujiro puts me in mind of Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973) and The Wizard of Oz, Chaplin's The Kid (1921) and David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999), but especially Alice's adventures, both in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. "Beat" Takeshi plays a stone-faced gangster taking a kid from one city to another to see his mother. The plot is episodic and haphazard, sometimes serene in its simplicity, sometimes anxiety-inducing in its relentlessness. The little boy, like Alice, is knocked around and belittled, spoiled and ignored, stolen from and rewarded. The plot details do not matter; what keeps the movie afloat is the steady camera and steady looks Kitano demands and gives. And, like the Alice books, it never entirely abandons its abused child, but always manages at the last second to provide an Eat-Me or Drink-Me, a kind shoulder to lean on, a little squeeze of the hand. Or it asks the child to be leaned on, to see how little the grownups actually know--and how little that matters, since, whether there is any or no control left, something else, some dim-witted but kind-hearted White Knight, is bound to come along, who sees the child "safe to the end of the wood." And the child needs to learn how not to be afraid, because, well, you just never know.

Writing about Kitano, I have been given a very Kitano-esque experience: Slowly at first, imperceptibly, I have found myself suddenly realizing how deeply I admire his films. Like his adoring Japanese audience, I have known him as the tough guy, Dirty Harry with a Yakuza-tattoo, a Death Wish in a noodle-house. And then he pulls the same stuff with a little kid in tow, and shows us how those worlds fit together--and, despite all that bullying and those sudden drops and sickening thuds, Kitano takes care of the child, stoops down and puts on a show to keep away childhood's tears. It's as though Keaton--who never seemed to take much to children in his films--and Chaplin--who of course always wanted to be one--decided to adopt. Perhaps not the best of ideas, but the audience has a good time watching, and the kid seems to manage just fine. In the end, maybe it's because they all become kids--as with Kikujiro's long idyll in the woods, in which the child, his all-but-immobile ward, an itinerant hippie-artist, and a Mutt-and-Jeff motorcycle-gang duo stick leaves and branches in their hair, smear themselves with mud, and play-act, with no grownups watching, not even the audience--if they have been wise enough to stay with the movie long enough--who all but disappear, to allow such indulgence and let Kitano play.

161. Another Way of the Samurai

Nicely done and so forth to Forest Whitaker for his recent Oscar in a real Godzilla role--Idi Amin, twice as ugly (and startling) as any life larger than life--staring us down with the liveliest lazy eye in cinema. But I'd rather we see him first blindfolded, playing a crying game, his accent so British it confused those of us who noticed him earlier in The Color of Money (1987) and Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), let alone as Charlie Parker in Bird (1988).

Or better yet: Calm all the way down, just the way Jim Jarmusch likes 'em, a stolid lump of steady death and gentle, middle-distance reflection in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). I watched it for the second time last week, mostly because I was getting ready to see some Japanese movies--I've since viewed the previously blogged Harakiri, plus Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), and soon something or other by Seijun Suzuki--who brings me back to Ghost Dog. Now, as I've just read, the Internet Movie Database does point out Jarmush's hommage to Suzuki, but movie-geek pride makes me assert I noticed it myself a few years ago on my first viewing of Jarmusch's film, seeing Ghost Dog shoot a guy up a sink drain, a gimmick right out of Branded to Kill (1967), Suzuki's koo-koo hitman shout-em-up (in black and white; it seems Suzuki was being punished for going nuts with the color in earlier films--oh, the palette-risks of '60s international cinema; but that's OK: his spinout take on "No. 3 Killer's" moody/full-tilt spree shows up swell in chiaroscuro).

Ghost Dog, however, is more than a collection of in-jokes and tributes--although it works pretty well as such, a post-mod almost-comedy, cutouts of lots of things, including Jarmusch's own work. Whitaker makes sure, though, that much more happens--and all almost on the inside of his character, his slo-mo rap punctuated by an unblinking gaze and a purposeful lurch. It is an irresistible performance, more mesmerism, like De Niro's Jake LaMotta, but turned down from 11 to ultra-shadowed 1. And Jarmusch knows what he has in Whitaker, refining the film's narrative to recitation, as Ghost Dog reads from Yamamoto Tsunetomo's seventeenth-century book of the philosophy of fatality, Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai. These interludes are not interludes at all, but emerge as central revelations and crises, resolutions and expositions. Whitaker reads them with a deliberate calm, the passions suppressed, so that all is left is the moment immediately preceding action, and then "the way of the samurai," in which "it is best to dash in headlong."

Eventually, Ghost Dog does just that, dispatching Mafiosi with classic cool, methodical and measured--but, again, headlong, part Spaghetti Western, part Wild Bunch--without, though, any Morricone madness or Peckinpah trajectories. For Ghost Dog, it is sturm without the drang, an inevitable front that builds with the certainty of barometric pressure. He has set himself on a Way that leads him to dire loss, but without panic. As he recites, "every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the way of the samurai." And he saves the girl--like Val Kilmer's Spartan (another code hero for another hard-bitten day)--and protects his friend, but he does so already dead--so should we move toward Jarmusch's other soft-sculpture genre-bender, Dead Man (1995), to understand the curve of the last turning in the road? Again, as Ghost Dog recites, "Even if one's head were to be suddenly cut off, he should be able to do one more action with certainty."

This is the context in which the movie's obligatory climactic slaughter unfolds. Ghost Dog "becomes like a revengeful ghost and shows great determination." In the end, it is easy to see the movie as simply another exercise in literary affection (and no, I did not write "affec-ta-tion"); but Whitaker puts his broad hands on Ghost Dog and holds him up, and hooks his big arms around the hitman's waist, and maintains forward motion, beautiful and sad, as life always seems to end up in a Jarmusch movie. His characters often fall upon the Romantic thorns of life, post-Millennium-style--you know, after all those revolutions and World Wars--moving like Shelley's leaves along the West Wind, but slowly; so, doing "one more action," Whitaker becomes the ghost in the hoodie, the last somnambulistic king of dreamland, his Picasso face turning this way and that, the two at once.

160. The Way of the Samurai

I'm lucky that I'm not always thinking of Masaki Kobayashi--because if I were, I'd be always either impatient to see his next movie or angry and sad that he has been dead for a decade and will not be making any more. It's the same reason I try not to think of Stanley Kubrick. Both seem filled with beauty and coldness, sorrow and dismissal, curiosity and resignation--all pinning me beneath the weight of an insistent, ravishing (if I may seriously use that word) formalism that makes me watch almost too closely. These are Stendhal Syndrome artists for sure, maestri of mesmerism, forcing me every time into false cinematic chastity, just so I can allow them to show me the movies for the first time.

I'll calm down now.

I saw Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964) many years ago--when, I can't say; lately I've wanted everything to happen in childhood and adolescence--and who's to say I didn't first see it on PBS in the '70s, when Janus Films offered us the glistening cream scooped off cinema's surface--sorry; once again, I'll calm down now--and gave me my first taste of Japanese cinematic fabulism? I never thought of it as a "directed" movie; Kwaidan simply seemed spun out, like thread from the wheel, falling into my hands with unavoidable grace. And then, thank Netflix, I followed that thread, and it led me to The Human Condition (1959-61), Kobayashi's trilogy of the War, nine-plus hours of hope-turned-horror-turned-resignation, a true epic of morality hammered like a sword turned against the self.

Which leads me to Harakiri (1962), which I watched last night, almost twice, a film as sharp as that sword, and as strong--and so, of course, dangerous. And I kept thinking of Kubrick, especially The Shining (1980)--and not just because of the films' soundtracks, unsettlingly similar, both scraping at a golden veneer, methodically stripping away the illusion of measure--oh, I give up; I'll never calm down--until, like the bamboo sword with which Motome (Akira Ishihama) must commit seppuku, the films draw irrefutable blood--either in black rivulets or red rivers, pouring along the blade or down the corridor.

It is there, at the moment when the blood spills, that Kobayashi and Kubrick seem most alike. They both have kept watch over our transgressions, and lean forward with a careful light in a meticulous frame that displays the essential virtues of human hopes and the inevitable sin of human denial. When Hanshiro Tsugumo* considers his hope--that those in power would realize, now at the end of his tale, that "the suspicious mind conjures its own demons," and would repent, just a little, just enough that he could go to the Other World and tell Motome of their regret--he lowers his head in understanding that no remorse is forthcoming, that the "facade of the Samurai code" is as unbreakable as it is shameful, and that all he has left is his rage and his swords. Together, they explode, terrible and swift, and doomed. Only the moviegoer is left to pass along the truth, as the Great House is set aright and the false code sustained. Hanshiro, driven by that code but unprotected by its facade, stands alone. He is magnificent, like Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) in Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957)--and equally ineffectual, as he makes a personal gesture in a public arena where the game was fixed before it began.

Despite such a bitter end, what draws me to Harakiri is its insistence that we can take a secret with us, the truth of the individual soul, desperate in enemy territory, but unwavering. It is tragic heroism drawn inward to a private space, tender and loving--watch the master Samurai cuddle and coo at his grandson, and wipe his fevered brow--"good deeds in a naughty world"--while the gangsters who run things tidy up as if the good were never there, and no one will ever know. But the good know--and Kobayashi allows us to watch them.

---

Played like nuanced thunderclaps by Tatsuya Nakadai--still acting, according to the Internet Movie Database. Watch him in Kagemusha (1980), The Sword of Doom (1966), Sanjuro (1962), Yojimbo (1961), Seven Samurai (1954)--and, of course, Kwaidan and The Human Condition.

159. The Long Haul

I done a bad bad thing last night: started Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), but couldn't bring myself to finish it. I tried, I really did. But--as I confessed in my Altman in memoriam last November, "As the '70s circus rolled on, I found myself missing his bulls'-eyes [such as Nashville], instead lingering on the ones that sometimes seemed like feature-length outtakes fiercely proud that no one was watching ... ." I went on to observe, "The Altman I held was one slippery fish, either too big to hold on to or too ugly to handle. I didn't always love his movies, but I did always want to see them," concluding that "after a while, it seemed I didn't need Nashville and company." Ahem. For once I wasn't lying, not even to me.

Of course, I feel bad about leaving Nashville so soon, giving it only thirty minutes or so; but, as my wife announced, "If it's going to go on like this for another two hours, I'm leaving." So maybe a part of me was trying to please a fellow viewer--but no; I cannot keep living an Altman-esque lie: It wasn't my wife, or the hour, or the relative humidity. It was the movie, just too annoying, an exercise in the incidental and the underwhelming, with a blaring condescension toward all those twanging hicks.

And despite the fact that I'm sure I missed plenty, that last crack tells me something more important than any clear, critical response I can muster: I simply waited too long to see it. Back in 1975, when I was a freshman in college, I probably would've loved every moment. I'm the guy who saw Buffalo Bill and the Indians twice, a movie that critiques American history and identity as subtly as a Robert Crumb cartoon explores sexuality. But that's no insult: I still love Crumb, too--but even more so in 1975, I might argue, if only because such loud wet razzberries sprayed over the blinking face of that idiot America were so damn satisfying back then. My literary heroes were Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Breakfast of Champions) and Hunter S. Thompson (pick yer favorite Fear and/or Loathing); and Harlan Ellison made all kinds of sense simply because he edited SF anthologies with the words "dangerous" and "visions" in their titles; and National Lampoon magazine's and Saturday Night Live's nastiest swipes seemed not only hilarious but perfectly reasonable. I was a card-carrying member, all right--and I admit I still am, sort of; but ... What? Why couldn't I finish Nashville last night?

Somewhere or other (I think it was in a book of sayings about getting older that was given to me when I turned forty--the title, I believe, was When You Consider the Alternative ... , and featured a cemetery on the cover)--someone said, "Life is a continual process of becoming tired." Is it that simple? Again, as my wife, an elementary-school teacher, explained, "I hear this kind of thing all day at work [overlapping talk punctuated by shouts and mutters]; I don't want it in a movie." Oh, the geezerdom of it all! We were both becoming tired--and does that mean, Best Beloveds, that we are simply, properly alive? Is it fitting and just to be annoyed by a Robert Altman movie?

I'm afraid so. But even as I pressed the EJECT button I promised I would one day return to Nashville, if only to see what else Shelley Duvall was going to wear--I searched online (without success) to share an image of her, frighteningly thin (Keith Carradine's character observes, "You stay on that diet, honey, and it's gonna kill you."), with short shorts and gigantic platform shoes, Olive Oyl's body and Astro Boy's feet. And Henry Gibson was great, as always, and I know there's a Really Big Show to look forward to. But last night, Nashville felt like Howard Hawks without a plot, and while Altman's rakish take on the midpoint of that fullt-tilt gonzo decade may be pitch-perfect, I was too, um, alive to handle such a high and strident tone. Maybe some Saturday morning; that time of day on that day of the week has always been bright and alert for me--cartoon time, of course, perhaps the best venue for Nashville's Dixie calliope cavalcade.

158. Departed

For years now I have kept in my head a memory of an editorial in Famous Monsters of Filmland in which Forrest J. Ackerman, writing to parents, insists his magazine is not the source of its child-readers' anxieties, that the actual blame for nervous tykes goes, of course, to the real world of the early 1960s, a duck-and-cover nightmare that tops any fright the rubber-masked creepy-crawlers of Horrorwood could ever stir up. I don't know where this editorial appears--if it does at all; still, I have an image of it in my head, the text accompanied by, naturally, a patented grainy FM black-and-white photo of a mushroom cloud, wide as Mr. Sardonicus' grin, dingy as a gravedigger's gloves.

Faithful readers of this site will attest to my penchant for discussing the delicious thrill of cinematic scares, the typical Boomer caress over the pulp surface of memories of Saturday matinees gone by, the--I will admit--self-indulgent gushing over low-budget Gothicism, from Tinglers to Saucer-Men, from Basil Wolverton to Frank Frazetta. And I will also admit this can grow a bit silly--and yet: since starting this paragraph I wandered over to Wikipedia to check up on various of these dark corners--E.C. Comics, Creepy and Eerie magazines--and five minutes in their company was enough to soften my disdain, even to retrieve my fond admiration.

What is going on here? In part, it is simply my heart--"dark and drifting, and unsatisfied" (to misappropriate a Springsteen line)--trying to lay it all out; but in arranging everything there in front of me I linger, and recall, and won't let go, until I have once again written myself into reconciliation with the solitary pleasures of a monster-ridden life.

Which brings me back to Forry Ackerman and the (imagined?) editorial. I was watching Moonlight Mile (2002), in which a young man (Jake Gyllenhaal), his fiancee newly murdered--while he continues to live with his would-have-been-future in-laws (Susan Sarandon and Dustin Hoffman)--must cope with their shared loss--and the secret he keeps: that he had broken off the engagement days before her murder. As Joe wears his early-'70s mourning suit and slips half-consciously into his father-in-law's determination for them still to go into the commercial real estate business together ("and Son" already added to the sign), he does his best to hide away and take care of Ben and his writer wife, Jojo. But his self is forced into uneasy sleep and he struggles to fall in love with a local woman (Ellen Pompeo), whose own fiance is MIA in Vietnam. On the surface it is an indie soaper, but Joe's short-of-breath posture and frozen smile brought me up short: I knew that feeling, the only one required to keep it together, while my own dearly departed, still alive back there in the mid-'60s, as real as Forry Ackerman's mushroom cloud--realer, right there in my house--haunted me more every year, until I began to see myself as a lonely boy about to become a lonely man. Now there's something to be afraid of.

And as I stumbled, peering in the dimness of adolescence in 1971, I think I may have looked a little like Joe, realizing I was surrendering to others' pain and loss--my mother sicker every year, my father finding less and less work, our almost-middle-class life balanced at the edge of what looked to be a long, ugly drop. So watching Moonlight Mile I was able to hear that clock-in-cotton muffled heartbeat under the floorboards, the guilt unwarranted, but the deed still done, the Joycean dead haunting every muscle as I tried to make one simple lifting motion--but man it was heavy, if I may sound like the early '70s.

At the end, as Joe and Jojo look up at the camera, I could hardly look back, at last happy for them (and for me), the car for one and her typewriter for the other at last moving, getting somewhere, going home; and even though broken things persist--the daughter was shot in a "family restaurant" across the street from her father's business, and the window remains boarded up (until at the end Ben plunks a fifty on the counter, 90 cents for the ice-cream cone and the change for a new window)--and the promises of the past can become threats--Ben's office is on one of those Main Streets that commercial real estate developers like him killed in the '80s--you can still turn away every once in a while, and look up and smile. As Jojo tells Joe, "You find your home, and it may not be what you thought--you know; color's off, style's wrong ... but there it is anyway and to hell with you if you can't take a joke." Movies keep wanting us to "learn about loss," as DeNiro's Max Cady intones, his voice gritty as a dustcloud, but Moonlight Mile bestows the blessing of learning how to lose and come out of it alive, in one home or another.

157. "I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss ... "

So, for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been blind and said: "Speak the truth before God. We know this fellow is a sinner."
"Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know, the man replied. "All I know is this: Once I was blind and now I can see."

--John IX: 24-26

156. Hollywoodtown

(I haven't read fifteen words in a row about Hollywoodland (2006), so I once again permit myself to indulge, in titular humility, my blissful ignorance.)

Something about Hollywoodland kept my attention--more: Made me lean toward it, eager to allow it to move like a Philip Marlowe stroll down those mean streets, not only to dead ends but dead men themselves, "heavier than broken hearts," as Marlowe cracks wise somewhere in The Big Sleep. While lowlife private dick Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) looks closer and closer at the bad things--and gazes off into the middle distance where worse ones lurk--and as George Reeves (Ben Affleck), weighted down by his Superman costume, strums his blue guitar and bids adios before accepting a final naked kiss--punctuated by a splatter-pattern, over and over--I moved even closer to the slowly familiar world director Allen Coulter was making.

Or was that re-making? Where had I seen this before? Of course, one noir's bound to look like another--and that's OK; originality is not as welcome as we'd like to insist it is, at least not when we're at the movies, where the succession of images must at once surprise and fulfill; can I refer to it as "the familiar reborn"? It's Chaplin always wearing the baggy pants and skittering around corners and peering just so at some everyday injustice before taking decisive action; but each time he does so he must work subtle changes to the routine, both satisfying our need for comfort through repetition [1] as well as re-animating our interest. So Hollywoodland's mere devotion to noir wasn't exactly the source of my latest bout of cinema deja vu. No, a melody I already knew was being covered here, and the more I listened to the tune--with just enough vibrato and a hint of down-the-corridor echo to the horns--the clearer it grew.

Of course, the song was straight out of Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), with certain added touches here and there that Hollywoodland provided for its own arrangement. I must admit to being a bit slow on the uptake, because the moment of clarity occurred for me late in the picture. Simo (and isn't that as silly a name as Nicholson's "Gittes"?) has been, in a satisfying, duly-noted noir manner, beaten both physically and psychically, driven down by chains to the face (not quite a knife to the nostril, but still too close for both detectives' comfort) and by the tawdry details of the case; and the weary acceptance of his complicity in the mess he has stirred up saps him into sleep, rest for the weary at last--and then the phone rings, and he winces and touches the chain-marks, and slogs on. This also happens to Gittes, ready to put his watery mystery aside, his pajamas cool and his bed inviting--but sleep is out of the question, because venality and loss never rest, so why should the yeggs who trail after?

Hollywoodland is full of such points of contact, from its ripe colors to its mournful soundtrack, from its twisted sexuality to the deep but distant sound one makes when falling into conspiracy's well. But it adds something Chinatown considers only with the most jaundiced of eyes: parenthood. For Polanski's movie, parents and their children are the cause of the problem; in Hollywoodland, they emerge as the solution. Here, the detective matters as much as the dead man; and while we are shown Reeves in extensive and varied flashbacks and what-ifs that compose one of the film's two poles, the pull of the other grows stronger, until the focus of the film becomes Simo and his child. Simo is divorced, with a Leave-It-to-Beaver son who burns up his Superman costume--on the living room sofa, no less--in mute protest over the death of his hero [2]. Simo is as puzzled by this as he is over Reeves' death; and as the movie goes on, trying to solve the second mystery solves the first.

Reeves is also a son, his ghost haunted by his mother [3], still alive and determined to enshrine her superhero--without affection, it seems, and without mourning. Reeves is cut loose from all bonds, both personal and professional; and to expose us to the pain of this unmooring, Affleck gives the performance of his career in a role he seemed meant to play: an affable cipher who knows it, and knows he can fight it for only so long [4]. Reeves gets sadder and sadder, our washed-up double, the Sad Sack/Clark Kent we suspect we might be, once the wrong cards are dealt.

Our sympathy for Reeves is interestingly filtered through Simo's growing attraction--at first to the moolah, then to the point of honor it represents for him, finally to something more, as Simo, down there at the bottom of the shamus barrel, digs deep for a truth that will make him seem real, to his son and himself. Chinatown may be closer to noir's unhappy heart, cynicism masking the loss, hysteria driving the denouement. But in Coulter's picture the losses are a given, and the dead man tells enough tales into Simo's ear that the detective is able to pry himself free of the mystery and leave it unsolved. Throughout the picture we get different views of Reeves' death. The trite facts do not change, but sometimes it's one murderer, sometimes another. Finally, though, Simo can stand in front of Reeves' house one more time and see it as "simple" suicide, and reconcile with himself for having been so much like Reeves' mother at the start, so that he eventually can become something his son needs.

The film's last shot is of Simo approaching his son--but there is no embrace, no swell of violins letting us know everything will turn out. It seems enough that this strange noir narrows the focus at the end just enough to let Reeves be, and to make a step toward something else. Before Simo visits the house that last time, he watches a test reel of Reeves proving to his would-be pro-wrestling backers that he can hack it. It is a grainy, jumpy whisper of another '50s tale of loss, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and as Reeves poses and rolls in his yard, his attitude game but his face betraying a grimace (earlier, he had been injured in a car accident), we can tell that nothing's left. With a final broad stroke of the true noir brush, Simo becomes Reeves' only friend, almost an alter-ego. Or perhaps they both realize they have been Clark Kent all along, driving one to oblivion and the other to reconciliation.


I will not push too hard for the Simo-as-Clark-Kent version; just let me point to the only truly significant moment in the Kill Bill movies, when Bill describes Kent as the imposter, noting that the other superheroes start out as puny Peter Parkers but become super, while Superman's true self is the hero, with Kent merely endured so that Superman can be himself. It is as close as Tarantino gets to a moral concept, one that implies the price you pay for long journeys: You can as easily become an exile as an explorer. In Hollywoodland, both Reeves and Simo pass through this Purgatory of identity; and, sentimental dope that I am, I refuse to leave either of them entirely in the flames. The movie ends with a long, drawn-out sigh--and I think that was me, keeping my fingers crossed that at least one of them gets a chance to wash up and go home. Reeves' girlfriend, Toni Mannix (her real name; noir may be less fictional than we think), [5] tells him, "Nobody ever asks to happy later," but it seems that Simo, at least, is willing to wait.

---

[1] As our best fiend, Freud, puts it, the urge toward order is simply a manifestation of "the compulsion to repeat."

[2] When his show was cancelled, Reeves also burns his Superman outfit--in the backyard bar-b-que--but with relief.

[3] After a fall while filming an episode of his TV series, Reeves jokes, "I'd like to thank the Academy and the good folks of Galesburg, Illinois, without whom all this would not have been possible." Once again, our fair town is immortalized in the movies--more than you'd think, if you do at all. According to Wikipedia, Reeves' mother was born in Galesburg, although George grew up in Woolstock, Iowa. In the film, his mother arrives by train, presumably from Galesburg. The details of her whereabouts at the time are not clear for me, but all I care about is that Hollywoodland joins that Honor Roll of Movies That Mention Galesburg, the Shining Rail-Gem of the Midwest.

[4] There's another story here in the easy conflation of Affleck and Reeves, producing a kind of brother-son faced with his own tabloid-typecasting, able to reveal himself only as Superman, "a strange visitor from another world," and no kidding. Again, Affleck's performance is a sad and beautiful thing, as he uses Reeves to show us what's been done to him.

[5] And before I forget, Mannix is played with always-true tones by that beautiful person, Diane Lane.

155. Rating Game Redux 5: Love's Labours Recycled

I am a terrible terrible person, a lazy lazy man. There; repeating things twice not only makes them so, but makes them go away. So now I can (a) follow up on the previous musical posting while (b) foisting off stuff I've already done for my local paper and wife, in that order, if I may be discreet.

The most recent Ratings Game list is "Best Love Songs." As usual, one may be the loneliest number, but three remains the toughest; still, here it is:

"My Funny Valentine"
A breathless ode to passion in the light of human imperfection (first sung on screen by Judy Garland to Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms/1939), this song asserts everyone can love and be loved. It always "makes me smile in my heart," especially Chet Baker's cover, although Elvis Costello risks a go and almost succeeds.

"Stardust"
On the other hand, what to sing when love fades? Hoagy Carmichael claims the melody came to him all at once, like a gift, while he was walking down a street in Bloomington, Indiana. There’s actually a plaque at the site--and well there should be. Wikipedia reports over 1800 recordings, and Mitchell Parish's lyrics guarantee that this "memory of love’s refrain" will continue as long as lovers continue to part. The definitive cover is impossible to name, although Nat "King" Cole may win by default; still, I'm partial to Willie Nelson's minimalist take.

"I Put a Spell on You"
As good as The Police's "Every Breath You Take" and Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" may be in capturing obsession's wide-eyed grimace, this tune, definitively covered by the unhinged Screamin' Jay Hawkins as a voodoo-blues creep-out, nails love's worst impulses like a coffin lid: "I don’t care if you don't want me, I'm yours anyhow." Yikes.

Honorable Mentions: "All You Need Is Love," "Blue Moon," "September Song," "Love and Happiness," "A Kiss to Build a Dream On," "Brown-Eyed Girl," "Besame Mucho," "All Is Full of Love," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"

And on a personal note: Every year I put together a Valentine's CD for my wife--although now that she has an iPod, is such a cumbersome method of transmittal obsolete? I hope not: It's too much fun finding silly cover art.*

This year it's Two for the Road; and here's the playlist:

Give The Girl A Kiss/Bruce Springsteen
Sea Cruise/Rico
We're Going to Be Friends/The White Stripes
Sea Of Love/Phil Phillips & The Twilights
Reet Petite (The Sweetest Girl In Town)/Jackie Wilson
Why/David Byrne
Vision Of Love/Explorers
Secret Love/Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban
All Of Me/Willie Nelson
Linger In My Arms A Little Longer, Baby/Peggy Lee
Touch Of Loving/Bobby Sykes
Pennies from Heaven/Louis Prima
Breathe/The Silent League
Tango/坂本龍一 (that's all I can tell you)
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes/The Platters
Girl From Ipanema/Stan Getz
Au Fond Du Temple Saint/David Byrne
Sweet Love On My Mind/Jimmy & Johnny
Sweet Nothin's/Brenda Lee
Fleeting Smile/Roger Eno
Here, There And Everywhere/The Beatles
My One And Only Love/Chet Baker
The Best Is Yet To Come/Nancy Wilson
Take Me Home/Crystal Gayle
Two for the Road/Bruce Springsteen

Aw; now ain't that cute.

So forgive me my lack of industry; let's just live in the love, my funny valentines. Besides, "There's nothing you can do that can't be done."

And last but never least: Happy Birthday, dear Mimi. Happy Birthday to--who? You. (Beeg kees, leettle kees, leettle kees, leettle hug, beeg hug, beeg kees.)

---

*Both images in this posting come from James Lileks' site; I provide a link to it from this blog. So thanx and a tippo to my favorite boomer web-attic, with deconstructions. (Sometimes, late at night, when the matchbooks are all ironed and the Bubble-Duds folded neatly away, I swear I can still hear the distant calling of Meat! Meat! Meat!)

154. Just Play

I'll admit it: Film is not merely a gazing game. Sometimes I hear things, a tune I can't get out of my head--but in a good way, a beloved melody--OK, "unchained"; and any key I want it in, it sustains.

Better yet, listen to this:

I would sit, seven years old in 1964, in my rocking chair--that's right, Boomers, like JFK, just gone; and what's left? Meet the Beatles, spinning over and over, that perfect A side--"I Want To Hold Your Hand," "I Saw Her Standing There," "This Boy," "It Won't Be Long," "All I've Got to Do," "All My Loving"--then flipside--"Don't Bother Me," "Little Child," "Till There Was You," "Hold Me Tight," "I Wanna Be Your Man," "Not a Second Time"--and I'd deejay the album, talking fast between tracks--then be The Beatles themselves (Paul, mostly, obviously)--my hair pushed down on my forehead, almost mop-topped, my eyes straining up to catch a glimpse of it--singing every song, alone in the corner of the living room with the record player, sotto voce joy deep in my heart.

How much fun was it to be a Beatle? We thought we knew, until they really showed us, almost right away, in A Hard Day's Night, released the same year as that first "official" Beatles album. I don't recall if I saw the movie in 1964, but of course have run into it a number of times over the years; and the older I get the more sentimental my smile at their beaming faces, flushed with being The Beatles, glad simply to be there. John winking at us like Bugs Bunny, whatever script and structure just something for him to fiddle with and happily confound, his nose stuck against the Coke bottle--get it!--and Ringo telling the reporter he's neither mod nor rocker but mocker--get it!--and George observing Ringo's pile of fan mail--"He's got a large family"--get it!--and Paul insisting that his grandfather is clean, and we get it--or we'd like to. It's The Beatles, though, who really do, all of it, and we're happy simply to watch them getting it. I saw it again a week or so ago, and sometimes had to look away, foolish and misty-eyed; getting soft. John and George gone, two of all things that must pass; but for a few minutes there Richard Lester followed them around as they sported in his movie, real mixers, in black and white, the way I picture Penny Lane and the last light slanting along Abbey Road.

And can I bear one of these days to watch Let It Be, filmed just six years after we'd met The Beatles and already down that long and winding road? Today, six years doesn't seem like much, but the Beatles came when I was seven and went was I was thirteen--and that is a long time, if I may indulge in gross understatement. From genuine little kid to the first year of high school--from toting around my Johnny Seven gun, posing with my cousin Ed in front of the flag in our front yard--and sent home early from school (like every other little kid in America) to find my mother crying in front of the TV over what happened in Dallas, November suddenly cold all over that day--to one last afternoon in eighth grade when I pulled out my toy soldiers to play Army and found myself suddenly bored, and knew there was no turning back; Gomer Pyle couldn't fool me anymore, just because he was the only jarhead in the whole damn country who never had to ship out. We were all tuned in by 1970, whether we knew it or not.

So I'll let myself strain a little under the weight of A Hard Day's Night's hand-held, long-gone spree. I sang those songs the whole time first go around, then started again--after having tossed them out for a few years, in college; and looking back, I wonder how desolate something must've been for me to have had enough of them. But they wouldn't go away; they were too surprised by joy--and maybe self-aware and even almost already jaded, but still ready to chuck it all for a giggle in a joint surging with girls--and John exults, "Please sir, sir, can I have one to surge me sir, please sir?" and he has only sixteen years left, so why not? Plenty of hard days to go around from 1964 to 1970 (and so on), and everyone deserves a dash and a romp before the house lights go up.