EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—To close out this more-active-than-usual week here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second, I offer you all a video and and a graphic for the day.
***
The video above is a so-funny-it-hurts satire, via the Upright Citizens Brigade, of the ignorance and incompetence of the global-energy company BP in the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one that weeks ago surpassed the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster to become the worst in U.S. history, causing massive environmental damage and overturning untold numbers of lives. It is a terrible, outrage-inducing situation, and I hope the right people—as even our own president said on television—get their asses kicked for allowing such a thing to happen in the first place. But who says one can't have a good, cleansing laugh at the expense of the people at fault? As Sheriff Ed Tom Bell says in No Country for Old Men (2007), "I laugh myself sometimes. Not a whole lot else you can do."
So laugh. Enjoy. Just don't forget the grave tragedies the oil spill has caused.
***
On a far lighter note: Who would have thought the Internet Movie Database's list of the top 250 movies of all time, as voted by the site's users, could be turned into...a subway map?
A Frenchman named David Honnorat took IMDb's Top 250 as of June 19th, 2009, and decided to configure it as a subway map with various subway lines signifying the different genres the films span.
So, according to this map, for example: In order to get from The Seven Samurai (1954) to The Departed (2006), you'd have to transfer at The Godfather: Part II (1974). What about getting from Nosferatu (Murnau's 1922 original, of course) to There Will Be Blood(2007)? Gotta transfer at King Kong (the one and only 1933 version)! (Considering the way There Will Be Blood ends, that seems oddly appropriate.) The possibilities, as you can see, are just about endless. Even better, the color-coded map is quite nice to look at.
When a good friend of mine sent me a link to this at work, I was immediately taken by it; I'm passing this one with the certainty that you all will be, as well. I tip my lost beret to you, M. Honnorat! (Here's a link, by the way, to the site from which this graphic is taken.)
***
And with that, I take leave of this blog for the weekend. It's been a pretty interesting week both in my own life and in My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. Let's come back here on Monday and do it again.
In the meantime, have a lovely weekend!
And why don't you keep a still frame in mind while you're enjoying yourselves? As a tribute to Jia Zhang-ke, the great Chinese filmmaker who will soon awarded a Leopard of Honor at the upcoming Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, here's a shot from my favorite film of his, Still Life (2006):
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—When it comes to Brian De Palma's 1978 film The Fury—which was the big notable DVD discovery of this past weekend that I hinted at here, and also the source of one of the two screengrabs in this post (the other, if you didn't know/couldn't guess, was from Die Hard 2)—most people seem to remember its finale: a perverse, orgasmic tribute to the apocalyptic ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 Zabriskie Point, except with a human body exploding from numerous camera angles instead of a piece of architecture.
But for me, this here is the most memorable sequence of this wondrous work:
In it, the telekinetic Gillian (Amy Irving), with the help of a nurse named Hester (Carrie Snodgress), escapes from Paragon, an institute ostensibly devoted to helping people like Gillian, but which harbors people with devious, exploitative intentions of their own. Hester, by the way, is helping ex-CIA agent Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) find his telekinetic son Robin (Andrew Stevens), declared dead by the U.S. government but in fact very much alive at the hands of the villainous Childress (John Cassavetes). Oh, and Hester and Peter are carrying on a love affair.
As far as backstory goes, I think that's all you need to at least halfway appreciate the brilliance of this particular sequence, as De Palma directs it.
The first thing you'll probably notice is the fact that the majority of this scene is in slow motion. Simple enough. But then, listen to the non-diegetic music that initially underscores the moment of Gillian's escape: John Williams's score literally seems to take flight the moment she breaks free from her captivity...
...and Richard H. Kline's slow-motion cinematography draws out this moment of (tenuous) triumph.
But then, cut to a shot of two policemen driving in Gillian's direction...
...and the music suddenly darkens—and soon, so does the chain of events.
Peter, hiding out in a taxicab...
...shoots the driver of the car in question...
...but it's not enough to stop the car from colliding into, and killing, Hester.
De Palma doesn't shy away from showing the senseless brutality of her death; most importantly, though, he doesn't shy away from showing both Peter's and Gillian's devastated reactions.
The horror is especially potent in Gillian's case: She has struggled to keep her telekinetic powers from going out of control, and yet, in a moment like this, her best efforts may not even matter. Gillian still seems to attract danger and death wherever she goes, whether her telekinetic ability is the direct cause of it or not.
By infusing the moment with such weight, De Palma adds another layer of emotional complexity to the moment Peter rescues Gillian from the clutches of another officer by shooting him three times in the chest.
And in this context, boy, you sure can feel each shot as if they were hitting your own chest!
It's this bold mixture of serious moral weight and operatic grandeur that lifts this sequence from merely impressive to utterly sublime. But this isn't an isolated moment of genius; The Fury is chock full of them, in a film that spans a broad range of genres—from action scenes and suspense setpieces to scenes of intimate familial drama and throwaway comedy—and a wide variety of emotions while somehow managing to avoid incoherence. (Bong Joon-ho could sure learn a lot from De Palma in that regard.) De Palma—more so than in his previous film Carrie(1976)—creates a world in the film, but not just a visual one: He practically evokes a whole emotional universe, one keyed intensely into the broiling anxieties of its telekinetic pubescent characters, Gillian and Robin.
The Fury is on DVD. If you haven't seen it yet, get to it. Now! You're missing out on delirious, boundary-pushing cinema at or very near its highest form. Yes, I truly think it's that awesome.
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Last night, Detroit Tigers baseball pitcher Armando Galarraga took the mound about a week after that by-now infamous perfect game made imperfect by a bad umpire call. The controversy over the incident has died down considerably since that Wednesday night, so what I'm about to say may be considered past its sell-by date at this point. No matter; I'm saying it anyway.
But first, a refresher:
One of the few vivid memories I have of first grade is of crying a lot in the classroom: Whenever I made a mistake in class, I almost always shed tears in droves. To this day, I can't really pinpoint why this was the case; in general, I was slow to develop compared to others in my age group, so perhaps that was just an extreme manifestation of my immaturity. But while I've obviously become far less of a special case in that regard—these days, when I make mistakes and feel the sting of it, I simply grumble obscenities under my breath, out of earshot—I sometimes still feel that same fear of making the big mistake, of being wrong in a big way. Such a fear that can be irrationally paralyzing at times, hobbling even my ability to come to a quick decision, leading me instead to agonize over even as trivial a decision as whether I should go ahead and buy something or not.
I was reminded of this last week in wading through the fallout from umpire Jim Joyce's botched first-base call to rob Galarraga of a perfect game last Wednesday night. After the moment happened, people on Twitter and Facebook immediately lit up, with many not only bashing Joyce for his epic blunder (and applauding Galarraga for his sportsmanship), but also calling for Major League Baseball to overturn the bad call and to even consider finally bringing instant replay into the mix.
I admit, I initially partook in the pilings-on; amidst all the electricity generated by the outrage, how could you not? And while, in hindsight, I accept MLB Commissioner Bud Selig's decision to keep the call as it was—you overturn this one call, and you'd have to overturn all sorts of other faulty calls made in the past and other ones that will surely be made in the future—I still stand by my belief the league could stand to at least consider getting with the times and bringing instant replay on board.
(Photo credit: Paul Sancya/AP)
As for Jim Joyce, though...well, once the hysteria over the botch subsided, I tried to put myself in his shoes the moment he made that big mistake. History was being made that night at Comerica Park, and Joyce surely knew it, deep in his gut. He was watching it unfold in front of his eyes; he had better than a front-row seat to the action. Up until that fateful call, this pitcher Galarraga had retired 26 Cleveland Indians hitters in a row, walking none; now here comes potential Out No. 27 in Jason Donald. So Donald hits a ground ball to Tigers first-baseman Miguel Cabrera, and he flips it to Galarraga, who has hustled over to first base and is now covering the bag...
...and what was going through Joyce's head the moment he called Donald safe at first, even though video replays irrefutably showed that Galarraga had indeed covered the base before Donald stepped on it? Obviously, I can't be entirely sure, being that I'm not a big-league umpire and all...but maybe, in his desire to be sure he absolutely made the right call in the moment, that fear of getting it wrong led him to indeed get it wrong in a big way. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words.
I've been there, my friends—not on that big a scale, perhaps, but still, I know that momentary fear quite well. How many times, for instance, have you looked at a test question and got an inkling that you knew the correct answer, but then decided to go with another answer because doubts about your first instinct held you back? And how many times has it turned out that your first instinct was indeed correct? I, for one, have allowed this to happen countless times, and have a strong feeling it will happen again, somehow.
I try my best, but I know I am not perfect. And umpire uniform or no umpire uniform, neither is Jim Joyce.
All of this is my way of saying: Yeah, Jim, you screwed up. Big time. But...well, I suppose I can't say I understand, but I think I have enough experience in somewhat similar situations to be able to empathize.
As far as I'm concerned, there are no goats in all of this, really—only human beings. And human beings ended up handling this situation with laudable compassion. Jim Joyce fessed up to his error and made known his deep regret over it, and a day later, Galarraga embraced Joyce even after the major officiating error.
(Photo credit: Paul Sancya/AP)
I don't know about you all, and maybe I'm making too much out of this...but I see people acting kindly to one another in this manner—even when you might expect at least one of them not to do so, for understandable reasons—and it reminds me of why, despite all sorts of historical evidence telling me I should possibly think otherwise, I refuse to embrace misanthropy as a way of viewing the world.
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Taking a page from the playbook of the often intriguing, and at times poetically elusive, film blog Vinyl is Heavy(Ryland, I hope you don't mind!)...
Such thrilling destruction. (Wait, there are people being blown to bits?)
Another Godard film on the big screen, another revelation!
Can you believe that it's been 50 years since Godard's Breathless—with the help of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, both froma year earlier—ushered in the trailblazing French New Wave movement and, with the full force of gusty winds of restless innovation, more or less changed the way we look at movies? For the occasion, Rialto Pictures has released a new 35mm restoration of the film, playing through Thursday at New York's Film Forum. I went to see it there on Saturday...and not only is it as exhilarating an experience as it ever was, but in some ways I think I can honestly say that I felt like I was seeing it afresh.
Sure, having seen the film twice before on DVD, I was already well acquainted with its jump cuts, its Tradition of Quality-subverting documentary style of Raoul Coutard's cinematography, its obsession with American genres, its daringly distended second-act hotel-room seduction, and its cool and playful tone. All of that was as familiar to me as, say, a mural I couldn't help but stare at for hours on end.
What really struck me about Breathless this time around, however, is just how appropriate its title really is, in more ways than one.
In French, the title is À bout de souffle, which is perhaps more accurately translated as "out of breath." On a literal level, this translation makes sense considering the ennui that eventually befalls its protagonist, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo); by the end, as he realizes his American lover Patricia (Jean Seberg) has betrayed him, he verbally expresses fatigue, as if he has finally come to the end of his rope in keeping up his lifestyle of bedding girls and stealing cars.
Only in this first-ever theatrical encounter with Breathless, though, did I truly feel the sheer freedom of Godard's seemingly improvisatory style—as jazz-like as Martial Solal's score—and understand how intricately that freedom corresponds with that of its characters. The film may be celebrated these days for its game-changing cinematic innovations, but those jump cuts and frequent digressions don't exist in the film simply for their own sake. In Breathless, the technique is put to genuinely expressive ends, encoding Michel's high-flying amoral lifestyle into the film's DNA while maintaining a palpable distance from the character. And when, thanks to Patricia, Michel finally sees the end in store for him, the film likewise finally slows down, with Godard's use of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto infusing his moment of realization with a powerfully mournful feeling I don't think I've ever experienced with its ending before.
For me, what excites me most about Breathless beyond its still-startling technical innovations and its exultant celebration/deconstruction of American crime-genre conventions is how all of it advances a particular worldview, one of genuine intellectual and emotional curiosity about what makes his pair of young characters tick. This film is one cool cat...but, like the best American genre films, it frequently goes beyond its surface coolness to penetrate the essences of its two main characters: one seemingly without a care in the world except, perhaps, what he grasps in the movies (thus his lip-touching mannerisms and his self-conscious emulations of Humphrey Bogart); the other more worldly and concerned with her own future. In its own jazzed-up way, it's a character study—and while that certainly isn't the only way to approach this eternally fresh and endlessly fascinating classic, I submit that it's on that level that Breathless will endure the most. Certainly for another 50 years.
***
I saw a couple of other films in the theater this weekend, both of them worthy and interesting efforts.
For its first two acts, Vincenzo Natali's Splice(2009) works intriguingly as a domestic drama with chilling sci-fi elements, focusing as it does on Elsa and Clive, a scientist couple (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) who secretly decide to go forward with an experiment to blend human and animal DNA to create a new organism. Or is it merely scientific curiosity that drives Elsa? The script, by Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, drops tantalizing hints that Elsa has come from a troubled childhood, and that her memories of that childhood may be driving an unspoken desire to give birth to a child of her own, however bastardized. Potent questions of bioethics also haunt a good deal of Splice: how far this couple should go in its experimentation, or whether they already went too far in even conceiving of such an experiment. So far, so ambitious and intelligent.
And then comes its third act—and your reaction to what transpires in its last half hour or so will depend almost entirely on one's willingness to accept its increasingly outlandish twists at face value, or whether to laugh in disbelief and dismiss it all as "near-campy bullshit," as a friend of mine did. Or can it be possible to do both, like I did? I wouldn't dream of spoiling any of those surprises for you; all I'll say, though, is that, to my mind, none of what happens in its third act comes out of nowhere. It all arises organically from themes and plot points in the film; it's just skewed in a more outrageous tenor than what has come before. The fact that I admittedly laughed at some of its outrageousness doesn't necessarily mean I found it difficult to take seriously.
Splice may not totally cohere in the end, but it's still worth seeing for the questions it raises, some brilliantly freaky imagery and a pair of fine lead performances that lend emotional gravity to the film even at its most over-the-top.
***
The other film I saw theatrically this weekend was Daddy Longlegs (2009), a low-budget independent film from New York filmmaking brothers Josh & Benny Safdie. Based on their experiences growing up with their own father, the film focuses on Lenny (Ronald Bronstein), a free-spirited 34-year-old divorcée as he tries to bond with his two sons (Sage and Frey Ranaldo) during the two weeks he has them away from his wife.
Lenny is one hell of an interesting case. From taking a random trip with his kids to upstate New York with a woman, and her boyfriend, he barely knows; to drugging his kids when he is forced to work a late shift as a movie-theater projectionist, with near-disastrous results; to getting himself thrown into the slammer when he's caught tagging during a late night out on the town with a couple of male buddies: Here is a man who acts like he is a slave to his child-like, self-centered and stubborn whims. That child-like quality, though, paradoxically makes the character, for all the problematic behavior he displays in the film, strangely magnetic. As Bronstein plays him, he exudes a strangely charming openness to life, a sense of genuine wonder amidst the grungy environment in which he lives (skillfully captured in 16mm by Brett Jutkiewicz and Josh Safdie); at its best, the film itself exudes a similarly warm feeling, sometimes whimsically zeroing in on side characters—a homeless beggar here, a Chinese-restaurant owner there—unimportant to the story but simply there to provide lively textures to Lenny's world that even Lenny himself is too self-absorbed to perceive.
It's this tension between delving into Lenny's head and stepping outside of it to offer us a sense of perspective that gives Daddy Longlegs its most fascinating quality; unlike Greenberg, Noah Baumbach's similarly discomfiting study of an adult fuck-up, the Safdies feel no need to stick so steadfastly outside their main character's point-of-view; they even going so far as to throw in a dream sequence featuring Lenny getting sucked dry by a giant mosquito. But when Daddy Longlegs finally does spend a sustained period of time outside of Lenny's vantage point in the film's concluding 15 minutes, the effect is quietly devastating: We begin to see him from the two sons' perspective after those two weeks with their father have passed into history, and suddenly he doesn't seem quite so likably loopy anymore, just abrasively so.
This oddly warm and wise movie looks to possibly be nearing its run at the IFC Center, but it may still be available on demand even after it leaves the theater. If you like to be as adventurous in your movie-watching as Lenny is in his life-living—without the adverse consequences—check this one out, by all means.
***
Thus, another weekend of movie-watching comes to an end—and a pretty fruitful one, all in all. I haven't even gotten around to my big DVD discovery of the weekend! What is it, you may be wondering? You'll just have to check in here later in the week and find out, won'tcha?
See, I have my eyes of keeping all of you coming back for more...
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—If any of you don't have any big movie plans in the works tonight...how about taking about 18 minutes of your time to watch my just-completed video—in two parts on YouTube—summing up my recent trip to Los Angeles?
Yes, my friends, I've finally finished putting this video—of which I offered a brief recent preview here—together...and I had a lot of fun doing so, I must say. I hope some of that sense of fun has found its way into the finished product; also, I hope I'll have as much fun when I finally get around to makingthatshortfilm I've been kicking around in my head.
Other than those few words, I think I'll let the video speak for itself. Check it out below:
Our Town begins with life and ends with death. So, in its extravagantly fantastical way, does Matthew Barney's five-film Cremaster cycle, at least if seen in numerical order and in a single sitting. That, my friends, is the way I finally saw this much-discussed work of modern art over at the IFC Center on Friday just before diving into Grover's Corners. Quite a contrast, I must say!
It was about a decade ago when The New York Times published a feature story calling Barney "the most important artist of his generation." Oh, how popular opinion can change over 10 years! These days, it seems among a majority of people I read/follow on Twitter that Barney is taken far less seriously than he apparently used to be. (For instance, one of my Twitter friends called the Cremaster films "pretty...pretty vacant.") Having never seen a single frame of his film work before settling in on Friday morning for a full day of Cremaster-ing—the IFC Center has been presenting all five films in three separate admissions; its run will end Thursday, June 10—I approached the cycle the way I usually approach artworks that inspire sharply divided opinions: with utmost curiosity. Where would I stand on the "Matthew Barney: artist or fraud" discussion?
So where do I stand, now that I have seen the Cremaster cycle in its entirety? Well...I think I understand where the detractors are coming from, but, in spite of some reservations, overall I am impressed by the fearless extravagance of visual imagination on display and by the staggering scale of the whole.
I think the best way to approach the Cremaster films is to take them as spectacles of the mind, feverish looks into one artist's personal obsessions. What obsesses Matthew Barney? To put it somewhat crudely: sex and death.
The cycle begins with a birth. Cremaster 1(1996) could possibly be described as a 40-minute Busby Berkeley song-and-dance number that is simultaneously about the creative process leading up to said song-and-dance number, cutting as it does between chorus girls performing for an empty football stadium (in this case, Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho) and two Goodyear blimps overhead featuring hostesses guarding two women hidden under a table, one in each blimp. These two women, sporting little more than lingerie, poke holes in the white tablecloths above them in order to get at grapes on the surface. The fact that the tables feature sculptures of female reproductive systems suggests what Barney is trying to metaphorically depict: the beginnings of a musical number gradually being willed into creative being. The white décor of the blimps, furthermore, are designed in a manner that reminds one of the awakening of the passengers of the Nostromo in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), another famous allegory of birth and sexuality.
Later installments likewise feature such powerfully sexual imagery: vaginal penetration early on in Cremaster 2(1999), a satyr grinding through sticky white mud underground in Cremaster 4 (1995, the first in the series to be shot), and so on. But, if the beginnings of life obsess Barney, so does an awareness of life's end, evidenced obliquely in Cremaster 2—with its inclusion of notorious serial killer Gary Gilmore as a character, for one thing—and seen most explicitly in Cremaster 5 (1997), which features a dubbed Ursula Andress singing an aria in an empty opera house in Budapest and apparently dwelling on the end of a love affair.
The pièce de résistance of the cycle is surely Cremaster 3 (2002, the last to be filmed). At just a little more than three hours, it is easily the longest of the series, but it has the epic scale to back up its length. There's a narrative of sorts to this one: it essentially details one man's attempts to scale both the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But that one-line plot summary doesn't even begin to describe the density of this installment: its mythological atmosphere, its engagement with popular iconography, its visual fascination with destruction and reconstruction. Though less cosmic than Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Cremaster 3 tells a similar tale of man attempting to rise above his own limitations; in this case, though, Barney's hero achieves a much more mundane victory: male potency. Fitting, of course, that these films derive their name from that of a muscle that raises the testicles when sexually aroused; in its own high-minded way, the Cremaster films are all explorations of machismo, whether expressed as sex fantasies, violence or feverish grand opera.
Whether that is a worthy subject for exploration, especially in the course of a five-film, seven-hour cycle, is, of course, up to the viewer to determine for his- or herself. Maybe it's just the subject matter that puts some people off; a male artist's obsession with his own manhood may be considered less worthy of serious analysis by those who demand that art engage with the wider world outside of an artist's purview to be worth anything (though I would submit that Nos. 2 and 3—the highlights of the cycle, for my money—do indeed gesture toward a world outside of Barney's manly mindset). Or maybe some are thrown off by the art-installation feel of some of the films in the cycle.
I won't lie and say that I was gripped by every single minute of the Cremaster cycle. For every moment of awe-inspiring cinematic inspiration, there are as many moments where the initial fascination of an idea soon gives way to the tedium of seeing that idea play out in slooooow motion. Nos. 4 and 5 are most egregious in that regard, though maybe that had to do with fatigue setting in after sitting through the Brobdingnagian No. 3. It's possible that, in the earliest installments filmed—Nos. 4, 1 and 5, in that order—Barney still considered himself a visual artist first and filmmaker second; those early films play more like lifeless art-museum tableaux than motion pictures. Only by Cremaster 3 did Barney finally master a palpable sense of cinematic rhythm and storytelling, which is why, in spite of its three-hour length, it ultimately feels far more eventful than, say, the inert 55 minutes of Cremaster 5.
But hey, what was it that Rossini said about Wagner's operas? That he "has great moments but dull quarter hours"? So it is with Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle. Longueurs and all, once you get to the end of Cremaster 5 and grasp the life-and-death arc Barney has imposed on this set of films, the whole of the Cremaster cycle adds up to more than the sum of its parts. And ultimately I think it's worth trying to take in all the films in order, in one sitting. By the end, you've witnessed and, most importantly, felt in your gut something approaching an entire artistic life in miniature.
It may not change your own life or worldview the way Our Town might, but at its best, it still plays as a tantalizing epic fever dream. I, for one, am glad I got to experience it, and would certainly urge anyone interested to see it if it plays near your area. (Keep your eyes out for it, because Barney says he isn't releasing this on DVD...although a selection of Cremaster 3was released on DVD, for some reason.)
In the meantime, see if this trailer tantalizes you:
***
Though the Cremaster cycle may not abound in what one would normally think of as "humanity," no matter: I made up for it not only in Our Town, but in the next couple of days as I hung out with a bunch of local and New York friends, one of whom I had not seen since college. I find it gratifying to work in that kind of social time along with my art-consumption time; life can't be all about movies! (Or can it...?)
I also "met" with someone on Sunday evening in a far less pleasant way: by hitting his car.
This wasn't a major accident, by any means. I was wearing my Bluetooth handset and was carrying on a conversation with a friend, and as I was pulling out of a street parking spot, I heard a car right behind me beep as he passed me by. Then I heard the sound of a collision. Turns out, I scraped the rear right wheel of the male driver's car and thereby created a dent in my own front bumper. Despite the minimal damage—there was more of it on my car than on his, as far as I could tell—the other party called the police and we ended up having to wait for about an hour before a policewomen (a relaxed and friendly one, thankfully) showed up.
Getting into an accident is never pleasant, of course, however major or minor. But this incident is merely a continuation of a string of misadventures behind the wheel that I've gotten myself into over the years. Running through a red light while half-asleep; getting pulled over for "improper emerging from a driveway"; getting my car towed during a snowstorm in New Brunswick while I was in New York; hitting a car and then driving away when I didn't see anyone pull over: oh, I've gotten myself into some real serious shit on the roads, and I still am at a loss to figure out why. Am I a far worse driver than I think? Am I in denial about how careless and accident-prone I apparently am? Despite my problematic record, I always thought I was one of the better drivers out there (my father speeds far more than I do, seriously); maybe I'm just not.
It's almost enough to get to consider just not driving altogether. Good luck, though, getting around in New Jersey without a car!
If I needed yet another reason to move to New York somewhere...well, there you go.
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—My friends, I hope you all had a nice, relaxing Memorial Day weekend, while of course remembering all of our fallen soldiers while doing so.
Me, I had to work Sunday and Monday—an "occupational hazard" of working at least partly for The Wall Street Journal's international editions, and in the journalism industry in general—but, after nearly three years of doing so, I'm used to it. But my Friday and Saturday—and to a lesser extent, Sunday—were interesting enough that I figured I'd devote a couple of posts to it.
Buckle up, folks, because I'm about to go all over the place in the next couple of days or so!
***
First: as a cinephile, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the passing of actor/filmmaker Dennis Hopper, who died on Saturday at the age of 74 after a long bout with prostate cancer. If any Hollywood artist can legitimately be considered "legendary," Hopper is most certainly one, with a large, distinctive, richly varied body of work that evinces the kind of restlessness and iconoclasm that demands to be treasured and applauded. You certainly never knew what to expect from Hopper film by film, performance by performance—but whatever he did, he did it with utmost sincerity and commitment, even to failed ends (as with his troubled 1971 film The Last Movie).
I don't claim to have seen every performance and directorial effort of his, but while his Frank Booth in Blue Velvet(1986) is a tour de force of twisted terror; and his hippie photojournalist in Apocalypse Now(1979), from which the screengrab above derives, is vividly whacked-out—among many other memorable pieces of acting, for sure—I'll go ahead and point to his performance in that modern action masterpiece Speed(1994) as a terrific example of the kind of imagination and conviction he could bring to his work. Howard Payne, the antagonist who puts a bomb on a Los Angeles bus that spurs much of the high-intensity action in the film, would probably seem like a standard-issue action-movie villain if you were just reading his lines on a page; Hopper, however, dares to turn screenwriter Graham Yost's lines into something very close to an inspired portrait of a deeply disturbed middle-aged man with a perverse love of bombs and a demented sense of entitlement. He truly makes the role his own—and isn't that one quality that distinguishes great actors from merely serviceable ones?
Just witness the way he turns a soliloquy about the beauty of a bomb into something that sounds genuinely spontaneous and horrifyingly funny (see from 0:37 onward):
Forget John McCain; here was a true maverick. May he rest in peace.
Here's a lengthy video tribute to him, from (who else?) Matt Zoller Seitz over at Moving Image Source (you can see a written introduction to this video here):
***
We may remember Dennis Hopper more strongly now in death, but what a remarkable life he lived! Unless you believe in reincarnation or resurrection, death is death; what's left is life and how you've lived it.
(Photo taken by Carol Rosegg)
That, of course, is one of the major themes underpinning Our Town, Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about daily life, love, death and the eternal in an unremarkable small American town. I finally—finally—caught up with this classic Friday evening at New York's Barrow Street Theatre, where director David Cromer's acclaimed off-Broadway production has been playing. Believe the hype, folks; this production is as amazing as you have heard. Breathtakingly intimate—helped considerably by the theater's tight, small performance space—and soulfully performed, the production fully brings Wilder's formally daring and profoundly moving text to vivid life.
Our Town isn't what you'd consider an "uplifting" drama, to say the least. Its final act takes place in a metaphysical afterlife where deceased characters reflect on their own individual lives and on the nature of existence: how people live, how they choose to live, and how they choose to remember their lives. And it ends on a note that reminds us of humanity's insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Wilder isn't presenting a comforting perspective here, and its overarching metatheatrical conceit—a Stage Manager presides over the play as a God-like figure, offering thematic counterpoint to the scenes enacted by the cast and occasionally interacting with actors and audience members—only adds to the discomfort.
But Our Town, for all its bleakness and sadness, ends up being cathartic rather than merely tragic. As with any great work of art, it's the clarity and beauty with which Wilder expresses his point of view that makes it genuinely exhilarating as much as it is "depressing."
I don't think I've ever had as consistently electrifying and deeply affecting a theatrical experience as on Friday night. Go see it, if you haven't. Who knows? It may well be one of those life-changers.
Side note: With his focus on a theatrical figure and its equally ambitious exploration of life and death, I have to imagine that Charlie Kaufman had Our Town at least partially in mind when he conceived of Synecdoche, New York. Has anyone else made such a connection in considering Kaufman's great magnum opus?
***
Coming in Part II: I sat through Matthew Barney's entire Cremaster cycle at IFC Center and lived to tell you all about it—right before Our Town! Plus, a less-than-positive Sunday evening. It has something to do with my car. Yes, again.
(This is my contribution to the John Williams Blog-a-thon hosted by Ali Arikan and Matt Zoller Seitz over at the blog Edward Copeland on Film.)
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—For me, when it came to film music, John Williams's was the first that made me aware of the music as music, whether in concert with the film or not.
Of course, when you're pulverized by the kinds of overwhelming brass fanfares of Williams's famous themes for the StarWars films, the Indiana Jones films, and Jurassic Park (1993), among others, it's perhaps difficult not to take notice. But none of those films were my introduction to the man's film music. For me, it was his more delicate work for Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial(1982) that first perked up my ears not only to his music, but to film music in general. From the spooky opening ondes-martenot moans underneath the opening credits to the full-orchestral surge of unabashed sentimentality in its final frames, Williams's music for that film fascinated me almost as much as the film itself moved me as a young kid, with little more than a passing interest in movies, on the verge of teen-hood. (Also, I grew up listening to classical music, so I was probably primed to respond enthusiastically to the kind of grand orchestral sound Williams frequently employed in his scores.)
Older and wiser now (ostensibly), I'm more aware of the composers behind the music in movies, and there are probably a few others I might name either alongside Williams or maybe even above him in stature: Jerry Goldsmith; Bernard Herrmann; Nino Rota; hell, even Carl Stalling, who scored many of those Warner Bros. cartoons. But John Williams is the one who opened the door to a personal awareness of music in the movies—helped in no small measure by the amount of exposure to him I had whenever I watched him conduct the Boston Pops on PBS back in the day.
For that, I salute him.
I will defer further commentary on John Williams's art to others participating in this blog-a-thon; those others would probably have deeper insights into the intricacies of his genius than I do. The blog-a-thon's two hosts already have a fine inaugural post up at Edward Copeland on Film about the subtleties of his approach to scoring George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, a post which a) actually makes me somewhat interested in finally getting around to seeing Episodes II and III, and b) emphasizes that, for all the bombast Williams may be known for as a film composer based on some of his famous themes, the real measure of his brilliance is how selflessly and imaginatively he adopts his approach to the film he's scoring. You may remember the rousing, endlessly catchy music in Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark(1981) or E.T., but that doesn't make his relatively hands-off approach to, say, Presumed Innocent(1990), Saving Private Ryan (1998), or Munich (2005), among many others, any less impressive.
Sure, great film music deserves to be heard on its own...but I would argue that the full measure of a film score's brilliance can only really be gained in concert with the film it's accompanying. On both counts, John Williams, for lack of a better word, scored high more often than not.
***
In the meantime: I recently got an earful of John Williams when I visited Universal Studios Hollywood during my trip to Los Angeles—Jaws this, E.T. that, and Jurassic Park all over. I'm still working on that video summing up my trip out there, but here's a preview that fits quite nicely with this John Williams blog-a-thon.
Hope this all makes you hungry for my eventual vacation-video main course:
As with much of this last season of the FOX television series 24, I watched only about one-third of Monday night's two-hour series finale, the last third. But as the series ended with Jack Bauer once again faced an uncertain future, literally dissolving from our view as ever-loyal Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) ordered the satellite overheard shut down, I found myself feeling an unexpected emotion: regret upon realization that there would be no more Jack Bauer Power Hours to speak of (at least until that much-discussed big-screen movie materializes).
I honestly didn't think I'd feel anything of the sort as the series—which, after relatively sagging ratings this season, finally and unceremoniously got hit by the cancellation axe—wound down to its final ticks of the clock. Again, I had only watched bits and pieces of this final season, finding myself increasingly indifferent to this latest big-scale terrorist threat—which seemed no different from big-scale terrorist threats of seasons past—and to Jack's inevitably failed attempts to stave off the human beast inside of him. It had all been done before, and this time, not even the New York setting (which, most of the time, barely looked like New York) could bring any inherent freshness to the rote plotting.
But, as the final seconds ticked away...well, while I am glad that the series is finally over, I can't help but think fondly as a whole over the many, many hours of entertainment the show has provided year/day-in, year/day-out. Until the next big zeitgeist-tapping high-octane action series comes along, 24—as morally problematic and silly as it often was—will always have a place in my trigger-happy heart.
No surprise, really, that Jack was not going to go out on a wholly positive note; that would not have been true to the nature of the series as a whole. Over the course of its eight seasons, 24 fashioned a modern-Sisyphus myth about a hero who was always called upon to save his country from disaster, and who kept on going in spite of all the political and personal weight he kept accumulating each season. So of course the series began to repeat itself as it dragged on; for all the political commentary that many critics have read into it, the basic appeal of 24, really, was to see just how deep into the moral and physical muck Jack was willing to go, time and time again, in order to get the dirty but necessary job done.
Perhaps it doesn't really matter, then, that (in this writer's opinion, at least) the series peaked creatively in its second season and afterwards remained content to play out hit-or-miss variations on its usual themes and scenarios. (Its Emmy-winning fifth season was, I suppose, the best of those variations, though I still think its seventh is sorely underrated, if perhaps less immediately memorable that previos years.) The series' repetitive form was, really, just following Jack Bauer's Sisyphean function. Fitting, then, that its series finale ending up feeling less like a culmination and more like a standard cliffhanging season finale. For Jack, the perils will never end; whatever light he finds at the end of his tunnels will always be temporary at best.
There's plenty more to say about 24, but to do that, I will turn it over to film critic Aaron Aradillas and critic/filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz, both of whom collaborated to produce this thorough, and thoroughly excellent, five-part video-essay series on the show.
The following takes place...right now:
I don't see much to quibble with in these videos; 24 was never consistent in its political commentary, but that didn't make its politics any less interesting to parse, and the writers certainly didn't allow politics to overwhelm the suspense and the emotions. The series may ultimately end up being considered more a relic of our time than a masterpiece for all time, but at its best it was still a fascinating, thrilling, surprisingly soulful and sometimes genuinely troubling ride.
I, for one, will miss it dearly. Over and out...
P.S. By the way, anyone waiting for me to say anything about that other series finale that aired this past Sunday night will have to wait for a long, long while. I haven't watched a single full episode of Lost, and, unlike MSNBC.com film critic Alonso Duralde, I didn't dare tune in without having seen the rest of the series. I will say, though, that, having heard bits and pieces of what transpired in it, and wading through the wildly mixed opinions on it, I do find myself intrigued enough to seriously consider giving the series a spin on DVD in the future. If only I had time to invest even in TV series on DVD these days; I'm barely making any progress on that Twin Peaksbox set I blind-bought last year, for instance...
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—By the time this is posted, the last two hours ever of the TV series 24 will have aired. I have a bit more to say about the series as a whole, but I figured I'd wait 'til it was all over before offering an appreciation/eulogy of sorts for a show that, this finale made me realize, I may miss more than I was expecting after basically tuning in and out this season. Jack Bauer, you will be missed...at least, until that oft-discussed big-screen movie of yours comes along.
In the meantime...how about a musical discovery for the week?
When, a few weeks before I traveled to Los Angeles, I asked some of my Facebook/Twitter friends if they had any suggestions for music to get me in a California mood, The Beach Boys was one of the first artists mentioned. Though I had heard most of their big hits on the radio many times before, I had never listened to any of their complete albums—not even their seminal 1966 Pet Sounds! So I listened to a bunch of them before going off to Southern California.
Early Beach Boys albums like Surfin' USA(1963), Little Deuce Coupe(1963) and All Summer Long(1964), among others, exulted in a sense of innocence in their embrace of the (for lack of a better adjective) sunnier aspects of SoCal culture: surfing, girls, fast cars, and the like. These early albums were also fairly straightforward pop affairs, with some great singles—"Surfin' Safari," "Surfin' USA," "Fun, Fun, Fun," "I Get Around," and many more—surrounded by a lot of filler (even occasional tracks of Beach Boys members goofing around in a studio). But then, from The Beach Boys Today!(1965) onward, Brian Wilson & co. began to refine their sound and experiment with different recording techniques, peaking with Pet Sounds, their most stylistically and thematically ambitious record to date.
The album—which was greeted with less enthusiasm as far as album sales go than their previous records, but which has come to be considered the group's masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest albums of all time—still holds up quite handsomely even today. But that certainly wasn't the end of The Beach Boys. Even through the difficult times that followed—with Brian Wilson's ambitious Smile project, among other factors, causing rifts among band members—the group still put out albums, even if they lacked the same pathbreaking frisson of Pet Sounds.
Wild Honeydates from that post-Pet Sounds period (1967); in it, Brian Wilson has become less of a driving creative force (it's his first album since Surfin' USA in which he wasn't the sole producer), allowing his brother Carl to emerge as a kind of white soul brother in tracks like "Darlin'," "How She Boogalooed It" and an unexpected remake of Stevie Wonder's "I Was Made to Love Her." It's really, really slight, with 11 brief cuts spanning all of about 24 minutes. The whole thing frankly feels like a bit of a throwaway—but what an infectious throwaway it is! Ramshackle-sounding compared to the more technically immaculate Pet Sounds,yet endlessly charming especially in its integration of R&B elements, Wild Honey is an endlessly catchy blast of The Beach Boys' usual all-American innocence, which must have sounded defiantly retro amid the tumultuous '60s. But an understanding of the historical period surrounding this album isn't necessary for an appreciation of its relatively modest yet unforgettable splendors. (And could its slightness be deliberate? Maybe there's a reason the album ends with an a cappella "Poof!")
On a more personal note: While in Los Angeles, I had a bunch of Beach Boys tunes playing on an endless loop in my head. A couple of them came from Pet Sounds ("Wouldn't It Be Nice," "God Only Knows"); "Surfin' Safari" was fairly prominent as well. Five or six of those tunes, though, came from Wild Honey.
Really. It's a blast. It will make you, yeah, smile.
Here's a clip of The Beach Boys performing "Darlin'" live in 1974, to give you an idea:
(Wild Honey, by the way, is currently available coupled with the group's Smiley Smile—an album that is also a kind of dumping ground of material from those initial aborted Smile sessions—released the same year. Smiley Smile is a decent-enough album in its own right—and hey, it features their big hit "Good Vibrations"...never a bad thing, in my view.)
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—I am currently working on a video summing up some of the highlights of my trip to Los Angeles. I'm not in a mad dash to finish it—trying to find time to complete it while handling my daily Wall Street Journal duties obviously makes it difficult to churn out a video as quickly as I might like—but I think it's come along nicely; so far, I've covered a little more than half of what I did over there. Once I'm done with it, of course, I'll post it up and link you all to it.
In the meantime...once again, I find myself with a boatload of movies I've seen yet have not written about here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. So, while people are either exulting or cursing the final two-and-a-half hours of "Lost"—which I have seen not a single episode of—here are a few short takes on some of the stuff I've seen recently.
I think film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum is right when he suggested at his website a couple months ago that the real subject of Atom Egoyan's latest film, an American remake of a 2003 French film starring Emmanuelle Béart, isn't its titular escort played by Amanda Seyfried—Chloe is conceived more as a sensual-then-threatening presence than a fully fleshed-out character—but on Catherine Stewart, the character played by Julianne Moore, a middle-aged woman who suddenly finds herself thrust into a midlife crisis as she become suspicious of her husband's (Liam Neeson) fidelity. Moore's achingly soulful and beautifully detailed performance is the real star of the show here, to the point that it doesn't bother me all that much that the second half of the film veers dangerously close to campy Fatal Attraction-ish territory. Besides, I don't think it ever quite gets to that level—Egoyan's filmmaking is too measured and intelligent, and his empathy for Catherine's emotional confusion too deep, to be easily laughed at however risible some of the later plot twists become. It's no masterpiece—its ending in particular feels a bit too rushed to be as resonant as it clearly wants to be—but it's more intriguing and affecting than you'd expect.
This two-part TV miniseries by the famous (and famously prolific) German director—an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye's influential novel Simulacron-3—was first broadcast in Germany in 1973 and maybe screened only once in the U.S. until last month, when it played a widely publicized week-long run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That's where I saw the film—at least, after waiting on a rush line for an hour and hoping and praying I wasn't too far back in the line to be turned away. Boy, am I so glad I was not! What an endlessly inventive and intellectually stimulating film this is: the kind of great science fiction that momentarily makes you wonder about the world around you—what's real, what's a simulacrum, and the like—while not shortchanging visual and human interest.
Perhaps even more fascinating than what Fassbinder puts up on the screen are the influences one can sense in sci-fi films that both preceded and followed World on a Wire: Alphaville(1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), Blade Runner(1982), Total Recall(1990), The Matrix(1999). But could Wong Kar-Wai, of all directors, have picked up something from Fassbinder too? The proliferation of mirror-reflection shots in World on a Wire, to my mind, greatly recall similar ones in Wong's In the Mood for Love(2001) and 2046 (2005). Fassbinder's sensibility, of course, is far cooler than Wong's superheated romanticism—but maybe they're not so far apart after all: At the conclusion of this majestic sci-fi epic, love wins out in the end, in its own way.
(World on a Wire is not yet available on Region 1 DVD, but it is available from the U.K. on Region 2 DVD, if you're equipped with a region-free DVD player.)
It is commonly accepted wisdom by now that French director Jean Renoir was by nature a humanist; Boudu Saved From Drowning—which I saw for the first time, in a less-than-stellar but serviceable print, during Brooklyn Academy of Music's extensive Renoir retrospective—complicates that popular critical wisdom just a bit, so slashing is its attack on societal class divisions. Here, Mr. Lestingois (Charles Granval)—a bookseller who is cheating on his wife (Marcelle Hainia) with the maid (Sévérine Lerczinska)—rescues the extraordinarily rude and unkempt Boudu (Michel Simon) after Boudu attempts to drown himself (in a fit of despair after losing his dog), and he wins acclaim as a good Samaritan for his act of charity. Turns out, though, that Boudu isn't particularly thrilled about being rescued, and he—not intentionally, perhaps, but as a result of his own nature—proceeds to wreak havoc on the already tenuous harmony of his well-meaning host family in anarchic and hilariously wrong ways. Though Renoir doesn't stoop to painting the members of the Lestingois household in broad, stick-figure strokes—that kind of deck-stacking wasn't Renoir's way—it's Michel Simon's uproarious gruffness and the character's utter refusal to conform to middle-class standards of decency that gives the film its potent subversive charge.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Boudu Saved From Drowning is that Renoir dares to suggest that even a resolutely lower-class tramp like Boudu has a certain amount of dignity; all those critics who go out of their way to praise films like Precious that turn poverty into some kind of undignified horror show—could probably stand to rewatch this masterpiece as a refresher.
Despite the Audience Award it won at Tribeca Film Festival last year, City Island'sthe alleged charms were lost on me early on with the film's first family-around-the-dining-table scene—a terrible piece of writing that suggested writer-director Raymond De Felitta didn't know how to announce that the Rizzo clan was so majestically dysfunctional unless that dysfunction was dialed all the way past the point of any recognizable human behavior. The film only gets more graceless from there; I didn't expect any movie in the dysfunctional-family-comedy sweepstakes to actually make me think back fondly on Little Miss Sunshine, but that 2006 faux-indie Sundance sensation is a marvel of exquisite subtlety and nuance by comparison, with quirks you could accept and characters you could halfway believe compared to the wearying sitcom antics of City Island.
On the bright side, City Island—a real seaport community in New York—does look like a lovely place to visit; credit cinematographer Vanja Cernjul for some attractive pictorial lensing. And Andy Garcia, playing the patriarch who harbors secret dreams of being an actor, does have one brilliant moment worth witnessing: the scene in which he goes on his first audition and ends up blowing both the judges and himself away with his improvisation. If you can somehow find a way to watch that scene and skip the rest, you'll have seen all you need to see from this dud.
