Musings on movies and a weekly update of our film class discussions involving Jacques Tourneur and Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger from Facets Multimedia in Chicago.
As my wife and I were watching Letterman the other night, and doing so for the first time in a long while (due to Colbert being on vacation), the above segment with Tracy Morgan came on. I was delighted! I kept shaking my head and saying, pleased, "This is so random!" (Watch it and you'll see what I mean). Aimee looked at me with the "duh"look that I have become quite accustomed to. It made me realize how much I say that word, how much I take delight in it. Is there anything that I prize more in the world than sheer randomness? Love, relationships, but in terms of dealing with the world? Randomness wins every time.
Of course the beauty of the above is also in it's pure meta-ness. Tracy Morgan (who plays a character named Tracy Jordan, here is playing a character of, well, himself, or at least perception of himself). It is very smart comedy.
The best Christmas movie not on DVD and maybe to me, the best Christmas movie.
Directed by the extremely underrated Mitchell Leisen (Midnight) and written by Preston Sturges, Remember the Night stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. She is a shoplifter, him the DA who through a series of deftly handled contrivances has to take her home to his family for the holidays.
The film is showing twice tonight on TCM and you owe it to yourself to dvr it.
This was the last film that Sturges exclusively wrote before turning director, mainly because he was none to happy with how Leisen cut his script (though he felt quite differently about how he handled the earlier Easy Living). Sturges script deftly handles the pathos of the story with an emotional toughness that makes the love of the couple all the more real, all the more tender. The scene at Niagara Falls is built not on the love they have but how vulnerable that love is. Combine this with some family scenes that are almost Renoirian in their mixed emotions and you have one special holiday film.
For some reason, I decided to slip in Act of Violence in the DVD player. I had watched it when it was put out on DVD a while back and was impressed with it, but much more so when watching it again.
Zimmeman is one of those directors, like Robert Wise, who is not accorded much love by auteurists. Sure there is High Noon, but Nun's Story? But look at Wise, would you rather remember him for Sound of Music or Born to Kill? Both these works, to me at least, reveal a much more vital artist than one would expect.
The story is by Collier Young, Ida Lupino's husband and partner, and when you look at the story it isn't surprising. Like the films he made with Lupino (The Bigamist), this is a topical story told with genre infused zeal.
What makes the film interesting is the way that Young and Zimmeman twist the audience identification midway through. Imagine Cape Fear if you started rooting for Mitchum midway through (actually...)
What Act of Violence does is show the phantom that is behind the tract home in post war America.
The vets are proud of the fact that none of their families know what happened during the war, but here we see that as Faulkner so beautifully put it, "The past isn't over, in fact, it's not even the past."
We are very lucky to have podcasting. And, for that matter, we are very lucky to be able to listen to KCRW. I really enjoy every show that I have heard, whether it is Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment or DnA: Design and Architecture. Just a wealth of stuff. Well, this archival broadcast with DFW was put on the podcast site but not re-aired due to special programming.
This is special programming.
Silverblatt is an astute host and reader, who tends to bring out ideas in his guests that you can tell they didn't think they would be articulating when they wake up in the morning.
What DFW has to say in this 1996 interview is very prescient to the first years of the millenium.
As we get deeper into winter in the midwest of the Americas and night tends to come, oh, about three hours after dawn, and the economy continues it's "trajectory" and Christmas is well Christmas, I like to listen to the Mississippi Sheiks.
It has been awhile since I have done some movie recommendations based on what s coming up on cable and thought I needed something special to do it again. Well, this is one I have been looking forward to for quite sometime.
I originally was going to show Model Shop over ten years ago when I did my first class at Facets, a course called Strangers in a Strange Land: Foreign Directors Discover America. Even then I had a hard time finding a usable copy. Well it is making it's TCM widescreen debut tomorrow night and my appetite has only been wetted by seeing clips in Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself.
I always have enjoyed the unique perspective that foreign directors bring to the American soil, whether it is Murnau in Sunrise or Kitano in Brother. I will make some allowances here: The dialogue is, from everything I have heard so far, lousy. Some of the acting is a little stilted, to say the least (this seems to be a problem in a lot of foreign made US films: Discuss.) Gary Lockwood stars, in a part that Demy originally wanted to cast Harrison Ford, along with Anouk Aimee playing Lola from Demy's film of the same name (there is also a little in joke regarding Demy's Bay of Angels, but I'll let you discover that).
Everything that I have seen in terms of it's locale and time, as a very specific look at Venice and LA in the late Sixties shows it to be a quite special movie. I have my fingers crossed that this is the restored print that the American Cinematheque offered up awhile back. Also, excellent Spirit OST if your tastes run to psch-rock.
I have been alerted that the rapidshare link that I have for the above album has been password protected, which has not always been the case. So, apologies all around and let me instead direct you to a website that has all of the said discs:
A couple of caveats. If, in these trying economic times you have the means and can actually find the boxset, do so. Dust to Digital has put together not just a great collection of music, but a great aesthetic experience. Everything from the box, the liners, to the small piece of cotton they include with it is just a complete perspective on a lost world.
The second is simply look around the El Diablo site, there are many, many riches to be had and they really know their music.
Excellent look at the process behind coming up with the Obama logo, clickable above, including some excellent videos on what didn't make the cut and the work that goes into branding an ideology. Good stuff.
This past week I have had the circumstantial opportunity to view three things that are all related to the same one: How we take in and interact with our environment. First there was The Case of the Grinning Cat, mentioned below, then later in the same day my wife and I took in an exhibit at the Viaduct Theater, called The Exquisite City:
A variety of Chicago artist s were given the city as their template and asked to create their own version of it. As with any exhibit of this type, your mileage will vary, some of the work is thoughtful and considered and some slipshod, and a couple of pieces rise above both. One of the first pieces is a small to scale city block, designed for the size of an ant, with lights, signs, buildings and streets. You look at it the same way you look at the Bean in Grant Park, to place yourself in an urban environment that has become strange in it's reflection:
But what matters to me about all of this is the focus.
Man on Wire derives much of it's pleasure from a similar feeling. Toward the end of the film Petit, the man who walked between the buildings, talks about how the press in America kept asking him why he did it. "Why?" He exclaims, "There is no why. I did it because it was beautiful." And he is right. the idea of taking something that inhuman and massive and making it human, part of one urbanite's dreams and magic.
9/11 is never mentioned and it is not needed. What Petit did was his own form of terrorism if you will, if you see it as imposing his ideology on a a place and time larger than himself. All three of these views are personal ones, they are ways of taking the objective, the cold, and making them human, showing how the rationalism that we impose on objects, people, life, is just a thin veneer, an ideology that lets us excuse the most horrific behaviour, waiting for someone to wire walk across it.
The Case of the Grinning Cat is about a lot of things: the millenium, art happenings, 9/11, demonstrations, French elections, graffiti, history, socialism, surrealism, the metro...but to me it is mainly about the use of sidewalks.
Like the cat, this is a piece of tiny art, shot on video, with a concentration o the everyday, and people's faces and everyday actions, that makes it a direct response to that other piece of everyday art: The Cat.
The movie did make me think this: Would there be a better director to tackle Thomas Pynchon? Maybe co-direct with the Farrelly Bros. and have Jerry Lewis star.
As Mr. Pynchon said, "There are conspiracies and anti-conspiacies" and Marker's movies are about both.
As the millennium turned and Marker noticed the cartoonish graffiti appearing around Paris, he decided to make a movie with the grinning cat as a jumping off point to consider all of the above but really it can be boiled down to people and how people react to those things that are just without their grasp.
One of the first things we see in the movie is an internet coordinated happening, people turning up corralled by email and texting to walk in a public space and open and close their umbrellas every ten seconds and, eventually, to quietly sing a song.
This is contrasted later with the anti-war and simply "anti" demonstrations that occurred after 9/11 and after certain designs were made where it seemed like powers that be were not listening to anyone in particular.
Which of the two above, the art happening or the protest, did more good?
I don't know if there is a clear cut winner, but Marker wants us to consider the power and secretive tissue of the former.
Marker's movies hit you with about 7 ideas per minute: theoretical, visual, abstract, concrete, but all of them are tied to a root feeling and need to communicate that take sit out of the clouds and back down to the sidewalks, to the cat.
There are three points in the movie that I will consider, random almost in that you could consider many others. In the first Marker is taping some classical performers on the metro. A man starts to walk in front of his camera, notices him, smiles into the camera and steps back. There are no other directors who welcome the subjects gaze as much as Marker.
The second, the year "2002" is graphically dancing across the floor to signal the ushering in of a new year. After a few moments we see children delightedly playing across the graphic, stepping all over 2002.
In the third, Marker is filming a demonstration by some Islamic Women. Marker positions himself not among the demonstrators, or even as a "pedestrian" watching, but among the journalists covering the event. What was human before suddenly becomes distorted and odd, it is no longer about connection but about true "demonstration." It is real because there are cameras there not because of what is happening in front of them.
The cat is one of the things that we cold have lost over the past eight years: our sense of eccentricity, our grin, our human-ness.
It should be said that the movie is dedicated to actor/suicide George Sanders. All the more reason to love it.
