David
11-04-2005, 02:17 AM
Random, scattered movie thoughts . . . I am keeping a bunch of my thoughts in a journal for my book some day. I was going to do a book of aphorisms & moral maxims, but now I think I'll just do a book of random movie thoughts.
I love the neo-Artaudian Peckinpah in "Wild Bunch." I consider him neo-Artaudian because his violence -- a critique of enlightenment -- is in a way also a critique of literature & theater -- of phony placement & stage space & various other conventions of "realism." But whereas Artaud used shock to reveal elemental personality & reject values that he felt were corrupting art, Peckinpah just expresses his cynicism by opening the arteries in distorted time. Artaud is primitivist; Peckinpah is nihilist. Peckinpah doesn't believe art is corrupt; he believes everything is corrupt. To me, Peckinpah's theme is "Men are nothing." And so his violence & his style vacillate weirdly between horrific & almost absurdly amusing. "The Wild Bunch" is cinematic catabolism.
_______
Golan/Globus:
When I think of them, I think of the Israeli musical film "Kazablan."
o/~ Get off my back! Kaa-zaaa-BLAAAAAAANNNN!! o/~
or holding the baby up just after his bris:
o/~ This little boy/Will be a great maaa-aaaan!! o/~
_______
The reasons I hate the "Lord of the Rings" movies are many, but primary among them is the screenwriting. It's all fustian from top to bottom -- even the "jokes" among elves, or the cutesy asides from wizard to hobbit. I generally don't care how close or how distant an adaptation is to its literary source, but in this case the adaptation is far too literal-minded & it destroys the movie (along with Peter Jackson's endless string of directorial bad ideas derived from a million other contemporary movie sources). There's also something else rank at work here: the attempt to mix the ancient, exalted style of national epic with pop flavors & bubblegum thinking. I can't really adequately explain my hatred for it, although I can throw around a few measly reasons. I just don't think there's so much as a drop of magic or wonder or vision or subtlety -- or even an amusing cadenza -- anywhere in it. The entire ten hours of it (or whatever) has basically become my definition of 'ponderous to the last pore.'
_______
Best movies of the last 20 years/only one per director:
Hana to Alice (Shunji Iwai
The Profession of Arms (Ermanno Olmi)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Francesco Rosi)
Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh)
L.627 (Bertrand Tavernier)
Manhattan Murder Mystery (Woody Allen)
Dodgeball (Rawson Thurber)
High Season (Clare Peploe)
Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson)
Casino (Martin Scorsese)
Best in Show (Christopher Guest)
Big Fish (Tim Burton)
Casualties of War (Brian De Palma)
Hope & Glory (John Boorman)
Roxanne (Fred Schepisi)
Blue Sky (Tony Richardson)
My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan)
_______
Imagine putting Ann Savage from "Detour" into the role of Cora in "Postman Always Rings Twice." Would that have worked?
_______
I love the dance Judy Garland & Buddy Ebsen do in "Broadway Melody of 1938" & the song Ginger Rogers sings in Pig Latin in -- I think? -- "Gold Diggers of 1933." These movies were put out by MGM & Warner, & had great casts: actors like Dick Powell (one of the high points of '30s movies for me), Alice Brady, Joan Blondell (how can anyone not like Joan Blondell?), Eleanor Powell, Una Merkel, Sophie Tucker & Frank Morgan.
_______
What are some good subjects for Christopher Guest & his crew to embrace next?
City/local politics (ever see those hearings & meetings they broadcast on local cable?)?
Little League?
Diet gurus?
_______
There's something called the Fox Western channel (?) on my digital cable lineup. You can see things like "Johnny Guitar" followed by "Whirlwind" or "The Naked Spur." It also shows a lot of "Gunsmoke," "Bonanza" & so forth. They show a lot of the Bud Boetticher westerns with Randolph Scott, but I haven't seen "The Tall T" yet. The only thing I ever see on the Mystery Channel is "Fatal Attraction." It seems to be playing round the clock.
_______
"Rebel Without a Cause" is one of Ray's weakest, but I get a kick out of seeing anyone push Jim Backus on his . . . backus.
I wonder whether Mr. & Mrs. (Ward & June) Cleaver took their boys to the drive-in to see "Rebel Without a Cause," & if so, what their reaction was.
_______
Do you ever get in the mood for a whole afternoon of soap-operaish pre-1965 movies? Some of the stuff from John O'Hara novels is great: "From the Terrace" with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward & Myrna Loy; "Ten North Frederick" with Gary Cooper; & "A Rage to Live" with Suzanne Pleshette. A lot of people even like "Butterfield 8." But Sirk was really the master of this beautiful goop. If you liked "Picnic," you might like other William Inge adaptations, like "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," "Come Back, Little Sheba," "Splendor in the Grass" & "All Fall Down."
Tennessee Williams & Richard Brooks give you a taste of soap with the Southern hysteria whoop-fests, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" & "Sweet Bird of Youth" (the latter with Geraldine Page's finest performance).
_______
Some of the best scenes of burning people at the stake are in Dreyer films. Bergman has a good one, too, in "The Seventh Seal." Doesn't Ken Russell have a few -- like in "The Conqueror Worm" or "The Devils"?
_______
Did any commercial filmmaker ever create better slummy escapism on $79.95 a film than Edgar G. Ulmer? I had had enough of the Gulf stories a few weeks ago, & was in the mood for a little trip to Ulmerland, so I watched "The Man From Planet X." As I hoped & expected, I fell in love with this little piece of cubic zirconia, with its matte paintings of Scottish seacoast villages that look as if they were borrowed from the local high school's production of 'Brigadoon' & its outer-space alien face mask from the Halloween aisle at Target. (Whenever an auto is driven onto the soundstage, it's always from the left, & it always backs out the way it came.) When I watch Ulmer movies, I wish somebody had given him more money to make them, but no matter how low budget, he always succeeds in creating an entertaining piece of work, & I happily turn myself over to it for its hour & ten minutes. Plus he obviously knows how to pace & where to put the camera.
Favorite line (the young couple see lightning in the distance, & she starts counting seconds to gauge the distance of the storm): "Hmm. . . no thunder. Well, static electricity maybe." "At this time of year?"
Another thing is those actors he uses. They're rotten by serious measures, but they're perfect for what they're needed to do; & they're also a refreshing change because I get kind of sick from time to time of staring at the same Big Name Stars or Instantly Recognizable Character Actors in every old movie I see. It's nice to spend some time with different faces & voices in Ulmerland.
_______
Did "Intolerance" influence Yeats? "The Second Coming" was written in 1919, & contains some passages & images that remind me of the Griffith film: the blood-dimmed tide, the rocking cradle, the references to various world revolutions, the desert sand, vast images, &c.
_______
Who is this amazing kid -- Paul Francis -- in the 1994 BBC series "Martin Chuzzlewit"? In the space of a five-hour series featuring actors like Scofield, this red-headed little runt steals every scene he's in. The IMDb has practically no information about him. Another Web site says he was in an episode of something called "Just William," I guess a sort of British "Saved By the Bell."
_______
What can you say about symbolism in Soviet revolutionary cinema? It's pervasive, to say the least. When each little proletarian is born, clouds tower above the farm fields, the zephyr blows, & the workhorses snort & paw at the dirt.
_______
Lumet's "Twelve Angry Men" strikes me as the last word in dramatic phoniness. In that final scene, when all those mouthpieces filed past the coat rack, one by one in perfect step, I thought my old junior high drama teacher was directing.
_______
I was watching a little bit of a TV movie, filled with TV performers -- the same ones you see over & over on the same cable channels. They go from "Baywatch" to these movies & then back to "Baywatch" -- you know the sort.
It's all so phony. The good-looking blonde trophy wife is talking to her secret lover, & she says, "I want to forget the past year, except that it brought us together. You have shown me trust, tenderness." And then the two "buddy" detectives, investigating the husband's murder, talk to the housekeeper. She's Asian, so she doesn't look them in the face once during their questioning. She arranges flowers on the table behind the settee, propping them & repropping them.
Flashback next: the husband is on the phone, threatening the boyfriend, & the housekeeper walks by during a four-second phone call, overhearing all.
AAAGGHHH. Are these things written deliberately to be cheap & transparent & utterly phony? i.e., are the writers super-talented bunco artists or just incompetents who think they're doing a good job?
I've been thinking a lot lately about why some things in movies seem real to me -- at least from the heightened perspective of aesthetic plausibility -- & other things are so patently phony that they practically repulse me.
I was watching the Marx Brothers cavort in "A Night in Casablanca" before seeing several minutes of this Lifetime garbage, & later wondered why the former was real & the latter was so artificial on every level. I don't mean "real" in an obvious way like duplicating my empirical experiences; it's more than that, or it's something entirely different. All I can come up with is that there is a sort of joy that comes through in the expression of talent, & that joy infects viewers & they go with it & let it create its own reality. On the other hand, maybe the Marx Brothers *are* more plausible on any level than the cardboard cutouts in vacuous TV movies, who offer nothing to believe in, including the joy of creating formalized experience.
I love the neo-Artaudian Peckinpah in "Wild Bunch." I consider him neo-Artaudian because his violence -- a critique of enlightenment -- is in a way also a critique of literature & theater -- of phony placement & stage space & various other conventions of "realism." But whereas Artaud used shock to reveal elemental personality & reject values that he felt were corrupting art, Peckinpah just expresses his cynicism by opening the arteries in distorted time. Artaud is primitivist; Peckinpah is nihilist. Peckinpah doesn't believe art is corrupt; he believes everything is corrupt. To me, Peckinpah's theme is "Men are nothing." And so his violence & his style vacillate weirdly between horrific & almost absurdly amusing. "The Wild Bunch" is cinematic catabolism.
_______
Golan/Globus:
When I think of them, I think of the Israeli musical film "Kazablan."
o/~ Get off my back! Kaa-zaaa-BLAAAAAAANNNN!! o/~
or holding the baby up just after his bris:
o/~ This little boy/Will be a great maaa-aaaan!! o/~
_______
The reasons I hate the "Lord of the Rings" movies are many, but primary among them is the screenwriting. It's all fustian from top to bottom -- even the "jokes" among elves, or the cutesy asides from wizard to hobbit. I generally don't care how close or how distant an adaptation is to its literary source, but in this case the adaptation is far too literal-minded & it destroys the movie (along with Peter Jackson's endless string of directorial bad ideas derived from a million other contemporary movie sources). There's also something else rank at work here: the attempt to mix the ancient, exalted style of national epic with pop flavors & bubblegum thinking. I can't really adequately explain my hatred for it, although I can throw around a few measly reasons. I just don't think there's so much as a drop of magic or wonder or vision or subtlety -- or even an amusing cadenza -- anywhere in it. The entire ten hours of it (or whatever) has basically become my definition of 'ponderous to the last pore.'
_______
Best movies of the last 20 years/only one per director:
Hana to Alice (Shunji Iwai
The Profession of Arms (Ermanno Olmi)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Francesco Rosi)
Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh)
L.627 (Bertrand Tavernier)
Manhattan Murder Mystery (Woody Allen)
Dodgeball (Rawson Thurber)
High Season (Clare Peploe)
Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson)
Casino (Martin Scorsese)
Best in Show (Christopher Guest)
Big Fish (Tim Burton)
Casualties of War (Brian De Palma)
Hope & Glory (John Boorman)
Roxanne (Fred Schepisi)
Blue Sky (Tony Richardson)
My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan)
_______
Imagine putting Ann Savage from "Detour" into the role of Cora in "Postman Always Rings Twice." Would that have worked?
_______
I love the dance Judy Garland & Buddy Ebsen do in "Broadway Melody of 1938" & the song Ginger Rogers sings in Pig Latin in -- I think? -- "Gold Diggers of 1933." These movies were put out by MGM & Warner, & had great casts: actors like Dick Powell (one of the high points of '30s movies for me), Alice Brady, Joan Blondell (how can anyone not like Joan Blondell?), Eleanor Powell, Una Merkel, Sophie Tucker & Frank Morgan.
_______
What are some good subjects for Christopher Guest & his crew to embrace next?
City/local politics (ever see those hearings & meetings they broadcast on local cable?)?
Little League?
Diet gurus?
_______
There's something called the Fox Western channel (?) on my digital cable lineup. You can see things like "Johnny Guitar" followed by "Whirlwind" or "The Naked Spur." It also shows a lot of "Gunsmoke," "Bonanza" & so forth. They show a lot of the Bud Boetticher westerns with Randolph Scott, but I haven't seen "The Tall T" yet. The only thing I ever see on the Mystery Channel is "Fatal Attraction." It seems to be playing round the clock.
_______
"Rebel Without a Cause" is one of Ray's weakest, but I get a kick out of seeing anyone push Jim Backus on his . . . backus.
I wonder whether Mr. & Mrs. (Ward & June) Cleaver took their boys to the drive-in to see "Rebel Without a Cause," & if so, what their reaction was.
_______
Do you ever get in the mood for a whole afternoon of soap-operaish pre-1965 movies? Some of the stuff from John O'Hara novels is great: "From the Terrace" with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward & Myrna Loy; "Ten North Frederick" with Gary Cooper; & "A Rage to Live" with Suzanne Pleshette. A lot of people even like "Butterfield 8." But Sirk was really the master of this beautiful goop. If you liked "Picnic," you might like other William Inge adaptations, like "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," "Come Back, Little Sheba," "Splendor in the Grass" & "All Fall Down."
Tennessee Williams & Richard Brooks give you a taste of soap with the Southern hysteria whoop-fests, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" & "Sweet Bird of Youth" (the latter with Geraldine Page's finest performance).
_______
Some of the best scenes of burning people at the stake are in Dreyer films. Bergman has a good one, too, in "The Seventh Seal." Doesn't Ken Russell have a few -- like in "The Conqueror Worm" or "The Devils"?
_______
Did any commercial filmmaker ever create better slummy escapism on $79.95 a film than Edgar G. Ulmer? I had had enough of the Gulf stories a few weeks ago, & was in the mood for a little trip to Ulmerland, so I watched "The Man From Planet X." As I hoped & expected, I fell in love with this little piece of cubic zirconia, with its matte paintings of Scottish seacoast villages that look as if they were borrowed from the local high school's production of 'Brigadoon' & its outer-space alien face mask from the Halloween aisle at Target. (Whenever an auto is driven onto the soundstage, it's always from the left, & it always backs out the way it came.) When I watch Ulmer movies, I wish somebody had given him more money to make them, but no matter how low budget, he always succeeds in creating an entertaining piece of work, & I happily turn myself over to it for its hour & ten minutes. Plus he obviously knows how to pace & where to put the camera.
Favorite line (the young couple see lightning in the distance, & she starts counting seconds to gauge the distance of the storm): "Hmm. . . no thunder. Well, static electricity maybe." "At this time of year?"
Another thing is those actors he uses. They're rotten by serious measures, but they're perfect for what they're needed to do; & they're also a refreshing change because I get kind of sick from time to time of staring at the same Big Name Stars or Instantly Recognizable Character Actors in every old movie I see. It's nice to spend some time with different faces & voices in Ulmerland.
_______
Did "Intolerance" influence Yeats? "The Second Coming" was written in 1919, & contains some passages & images that remind me of the Griffith film: the blood-dimmed tide, the rocking cradle, the references to various world revolutions, the desert sand, vast images, &c.
_______
Who is this amazing kid -- Paul Francis -- in the 1994 BBC series "Martin Chuzzlewit"? In the space of a five-hour series featuring actors like Scofield, this red-headed little runt steals every scene he's in. The IMDb has practically no information about him. Another Web site says he was in an episode of something called "Just William," I guess a sort of British "Saved By the Bell."
_______
What can you say about symbolism in Soviet revolutionary cinema? It's pervasive, to say the least. When each little proletarian is born, clouds tower above the farm fields, the zephyr blows, & the workhorses snort & paw at the dirt.
_______
Lumet's "Twelve Angry Men" strikes me as the last word in dramatic phoniness. In that final scene, when all those mouthpieces filed past the coat rack, one by one in perfect step, I thought my old junior high drama teacher was directing.
_______
I was watching a little bit of a TV movie, filled with TV performers -- the same ones you see over & over on the same cable channels. They go from "Baywatch" to these movies & then back to "Baywatch" -- you know the sort.
It's all so phony. The good-looking blonde trophy wife is talking to her secret lover, & she says, "I want to forget the past year, except that it brought us together. You have shown me trust, tenderness." And then the two "buddy" detectives, investigating the husband's murder, talk to the housekeeper. She's Asian, so she doesn't look them in the face once during their questioning. She arranges flowers on the table behind the settee, propping them & repropping them.
Flashback next: the husband is on the phone, threatening the boyfriend, & the housekeeper walks by during a four-second phone call, overhearing all.
AAAGGHHH. Are these things written deliberately to be cheap & transparent & utterly phony? i.e., are the writers super-talented bunco artists or just incompetents who think they're doing a good job?
I've been thinking a lot lately about why some things in movies seem real to me -- at least from the heightened perspective of aesthetic plausibility -- & other things are so patently phony that they practically repulse me.
I was watching the Marx Brothers cavort in "A Night in Casablanca" before seeing several minutes of this Lifetime garbage, & later wondered why the former was real & the latter was so artificial on every level. I don't mean "real" in an obvious way like duplicating my empirical experiences; it's more than that, or it's something entirely different. All I can come up with is that there is a sort of joy that comes through in the expression of talent, & that joy infects viewers & they go with it & let it create its own reality. On the other hand, maybe the Marx Brothers *are* more plausible on any level than the cardboard cutouts in vacuous TV movies, who offer nothing to believe in, including the joy of creating formalized experience.