Bubblegum Aesthetics

Guardians of Hope

2011-07-16T23:07:00.004-04:00

Hello! Where were we?

Breaking radio silence (it's been a busy year) to urge you all to check out a new book, The Guardian Class: How a Couple Battle Buddies Challenged Washington's Elite, by Dr. Jonathan Heavey. I will be very upfront about this-- Jon is family, so let that affect your reading of my recommendation as it will. But he writes about a vitally important subject that should not get lost amidst the political and economic debates now engulfing us, particularly when it comes to any future role the country will play in Iraq or Afghanistan. I linked to an earlier piece Jon wrote about Hope MD and its work; this is not only a story about trying to bring care and hope to people caught in the ravages of war, but also the tale of how some intelligent, dedicated, and deeply humane people maintained their own humanity and humor and tried to affect genuine change for communities who might otherwise struggle to be heard.

Notes On Blogging Aesthetics XXV

2011-07-11T02:29:00.009-04:00

I actually think about like an MC with 16 bars, mostly because I really believe the the thing should sound good...There's a beat you have in your head, and you don't want your sentences to be off. And then on top of that you have to try to actually say something. My point isn't that it always works. It doesn't. But that's what you're trying to do.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, talking about compression, form and the New York Times op-ed page (and by extension, blogging).

For the Love of Film (Noir): Arcades Projects

2011-02-19T03:04:00.024-05:00

On his peregrinations the man of the crowd lands at a late hour in a department store where there are still many customers. He moves about like someone who knows his way around the place...If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur, which is how the flâneur sees the street, the department store is the form of the intérieur's decay. The bazaar is the last hangout of the flâneur. If in the beginning the street had become an intérieur for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city...The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd.
--Walter Benjamin

"I see it all. It's like a movie in my head that play and plays.
It isn't just the bad things I remember. It's the whole damn show."
--Buddy, rationalizing his past, "Waiting for the Girls Upstairs" (Follies)

In the spring of 1953, as Hollywood reeled from another round of HUAC hearings, HUAC opponent and American expatriate John Huston was shooting his latest film, Beat the Devil, in Europe. The film is a parody of the noir traditions that Huston helped bring into being with his adaptation of The Maltese Falcon a decade earlier: once again, Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre were part of the entourage, but so were Robert Morley, Jennifer Jones (and her husband, David O. Selznick), and a 22-year old friend of the family, Stephen Sondheim. He worked as a clapper boy on the production, and played “chess without a board” with his hero, Bogart; Sondheim biographer Meryle Secrest recounts their games:

Sondheim said, “I’d come down to breakfast and Bogart would say, ‘All right, pawn to king’s four,’ and I’d say, ‘Pawn to king’s four, all right.’ Then he’d say ‘Knight to bishop’s three…’ By about the fifth move I’d be thinking, Wait a minute, knight’s on the fifth square. No, no! Knight’s on the fourth square. No, I moved the bishop…” (Secrest 93).

Sondheim also won a lot of money in poker games with Selznick (Secrest 93). He enjoyed himself thoroughly on the shoot, taking films of the proceedings with a 16mm camera, although he admitted in a letter to friends that filmmaking seemed to consist primarily of waiting around expectantly for the right moment to happen (Secrest 93).

Within a decade of his adventures with Bogart and Huston, Sondheim would be marked as one of Broadway's brightest new talents, but he was also a cinephile, as musicologist Steve Swayne would later note in his book How Sondheim Found His Sound:

Sondheim clearly loved film. His early attempt at a novel, Bequest, is a cross between the events of [the Linda Darnell film] Hangover Square and the result, by his own account, of watching “too many Bette Davis movies.” Sondheim remembered which day his mother married former Paramount Films executive Ed Leshin because it coincided with the day All About Eve opened at the Roxy. And his comments to [biographer Meryle] Secrest about Margaret Sullavan movies are almost comic in their fawning adoration, even though most of her films were made before Sondheim reached his teenage years. Sondheim was not only a Broadway baby; he was also a cinemaniac (166).

One film he saw as a teenager, the aforementioned Hangover Square (1945), so moved him that he wrote a letter to the film’s composer, famed Citizen Kane composer Bernard Hermann, and got a response back (Secrest 56-57).

For Sondheim, a budding composer and protégé of Oscar Hammerstein and Milton Babbitt, this was a thrill. It was, in fact, noir that most intrigued Sondheim (Swayne 166) (ironically, as his biographer Meryle Secrest notes, the one genre he had no interest in was the movie musical) (Secrest 100). But his immediate, post-Beat the Devil experience would expose him to a different genre: screwball comedy. In the summer of 1953, he worked as a screenwriter on the television series Topper, an adaptation of the 1937 film about a ghostly couple that haunts the titular character. Sondheim spent five months in Hollywood, where he cranked out eleven Topper scripts, even as he continued to compose music; at one point, he even contemplated a musical version of Vincente Minnelli's wartime melodrama The Clock, convincing a friend to sneak a script off the MGM lot so he could copy and study it (this idea came to nothing) (Secrest 97).

While Sondheim worked on his ghostly scripts, MGM released one of those movie musicals Sondheim would've ignored: The Band Wagon is the "backstage musical" to end all backstage musicals, a rococo masterpiece of color, movement and wicked satire that stands as the best of director Vincente Minnelli's many outstanding contributions to the Freed Unit. Minnelli is joined by an almost absurdly talented group of co-workers: writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, choreographer Michael Kidd (fresh off his success on Broadway with Guys and Dolls), composers Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, and the on-screen talents of Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray and Jack Buchanan, among many others. The film is the musical comedy equivalent of the mirrors-within-mirrors fun-house at the end of The Lady From Shanghai: Astaire deconstructs his own aging star persona as hoofer Tony Hunter; Jack Buchanan channels Orson Welles and Jose Ferrar as Jeffrey Cordova, the director determined to transform a once-simple show about a children's writer-turned-pulp-author into "the modern day version of Faust"; and Oscar Levant brings his usual dried bleakness to the party as a loving composer husband with an eye for chorus girls. Even Minnelli's mise-en-scene isn't safe from the show's constant intertextual playfulness, its wish to bend reality into something fantastic: at least twice, movie posters and marquees appear advertising The Proud Land, the film that producer Jonathan Shields shelves in the climax of Minnelli's The Bad And The Beautiful.

But rather than using this fun-house as a space of violence or madness, the demands of a 1953 MGM musical comedy read the narrative's often-dark emotional turns as bright, funny, parodic and infinitely danceable. The show is full of all kinds of brilliant numbers, from the casual walking dance of "By Myself" to the insanely commodified joy of "Shine on Your Shoes," to the hilariously psychotic "Triplets" to the lyrical yearning of "Dancing in the Dark" (a pas de deux that wears its considerable heat and tension as lightly as a summer suit).

Above all, there's the brilliant "Girl Hunt Ballet," where the film's narrative gives way to a dream space that metaphorizes the characters' darkest fears and desires through a parody of noir. It's no less true because it happens "in-character," and on-stage.

The deep blue curtain opens to a black screen, which is covered with oversized reproductions of mock pulp magazine covers: “Stab Me Sugar,” “Dames Kill Me” and "Girl Hunt” are just some of the titles. An unseen tommy gun blasts open the black screen, and it gives way to a bluish-purple stage done up to look like an abandoned urban street corner. The lights from the “building” windows define the shapes of their skyscrapers, which make geometric, L-shaped patterns against the dark blue sky.

Astaire enters from stage right, dressed in a white suit and fedora, with blue shirt and white tie (an outfit that echoes the one he wears in 1945’s Yolanda and the Thief, also an older Minnelli film, another of his self-references). As he begins his narration, framed in a medium shot, he lights a cigarette, thrusting his arms back so the cuffs of his blue shirt are visible, fedora cocked at an angle. He saunters past a very flat street lamp as a mournful jazz trumpet plays. It is a striking image, as if the playboy schemers of Astaire’s earlier films had suddenly taken on an existential loneliness.

He begins to narrate his story, in a neo-Chandler patois: “My name is Rod Riley…The rats and the killers were in their holes. I hate killers…” Rod has barely lit his cigarette when Cyd Charisse’s “Blonde” slides onstage from the right. The camera tracks to follow her, until she is in the frame, next to Rod, whom she grabs in desperation. Framed in a medium shot, he pokes a cigarette between her lips, and her shoulders shrug. She takes a puff and falls into Rod’s arms. This existential loner isn’t having it: he spins her back out, as the camera dollies back to a long shot to capture the movement. A tracking shot follows their dance, until their heads swivel right, and a cut reveals a thug, in brown trench coat and fedora, menacing his way through the fog in a long shot. The thug’s wide frame moves to the foreground, where he picks up a bottle and a hankie. In this pastiche, however, elegance will always trump machismo, so it’s only logical that the next cut returns the viewer to Rod and the Blonde, twirling in dance. Her canary yellow trench coat obscures Rod’s lower left side like a Surrealist tarp in a Man Ray photo, and all we can see is his left leg and arm. Dancing in front of a deep blue shop backdrop, Rod rolls the Blonde off his front, and she lies vertically on the ground.

For me it is one of the most sublime sequences in American cinema. Its quivering mise-en-scene (Kidd's sensuality dovetailing beautifully with Minnelli's) makes its Mickey Spillane storyline balance right on the edge of parody without ever quite falling over; it's funny, but it's also genuinely dangerous, and immensely sexy-- it invites a camp reading but never lets its audience slip into the distanced, smug cynicism that camp too often engenders; and because the number cares so much about its style and movement, it forces us to care, and stay involved. It takes every emotion or mood from every previous number in the film and blends them into something funny and extremely charged: when Cyd Charisse opens her green trenchcoat to reveal a sequined red dress, and wraps herself around Astaire's dapper white suit, every cinematic and critical code is suddenly short-circuited, and I, for one, don't know whether to laugh or gasp.

"She was bad," Astaire says in his noirish voiceover. ""She was bad. She was dangerous. I wouldn't trust her any farther than I could throw her. But she was my kind of woman." Ironic, sincere, funny, smart, and sensual all at once, "The Girl Hunt Ballet" is not just a model of dancing or filmmaking, but a model for critical writing, a mixture of rhetorical modes that allows each element to speak while blending them all into a new language that feels both social and personal, esoteric and public at the same time. It offered a new model for the combination of song, dance, mood and character in American musicals, and back in New York, a younger generation of composers, directors, writers and choreographers would be working out a similar revolution of their own.

While Astaire twirled Charisse on-screen, Sondheim returned to New York, failed to get his first musical, Saturday Night, off the ground, then, in 1955, bumped into playwright Arthur Laurents at a party. Laurents told him that he, Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein were collaborating on a modern musical updating of Romeo and Juliet. Band Wagon writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who’d worked with Robbins and Bernstein on the groundbreaking On The Town, were originally approached to write the book, but turned it down. Sondheim casually asked who was writing the lyrics.

The resulting show, West Side Story, was a landmark, and put Sondheim’s career in high gear. Robbins’ choreography echoed the playful, casually erotic dances Michael Kidd staged in the “Girl Hunt” subway station, but turned the idea of gang wars into something darker, more searching and romantic, dance as both desperation and utopic dream ballet (a tension nicely matched by Leonard Bernstein’s score, whose brassy authority and intensely cinematic shifts in tone and tempo echoed his earlier score for Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront). This was not camp playfulness, but something Serious. Sondheim would follow it by writing the lyrics to the dark family musical Gyspy, then would compose full scores for his first two shows-- the playful A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and the flop Anyone Can Whistle, which starred two actresses very familiar with noir-- Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick.

By 1971, West Side Story’s producer, Harold Prince, had become a director-producer, and Stephen Sondheim’s chief collaborator. In Band Wagon-speak, Sondheim was the Oscar Levant to Prince’s Jack Buchanan: the former a slightly dour, perfectionist composer, the latter an ambitious, outgoing showman able to take Sondheim’s fragments and ideas and synthesize them into something much grander (in fact, one could argue that the Kander-Ebb show Cabaret, which Prince originally directed on Broadway, is the darkly Faustian musical of which Jeffrey Cordova so manically dreamed). “I’ll never do a show that some people won’t walk out on,” Prince once proudly declared.

Prince had already shown his acumen by taking playwright George Furth’s one-act plays about marriage and suggesting Sondheim set them to music: the first Prince-Sondheim show, Company (1970).

Company had no warring gangs, gangster molls or femme fatales (although Elaine Stritch came damn close); but in many ways it suggests how much the dark emotions and unstable relationships of those 40s noirs shaped Sondheim's imagination. It tells the story of Bobby, the chronically single, charming friend whose increasingly brittle witticisms make him the perfect "company" for his harried, married friends, while also acting as the mask he wears to keep from ever finding perfect company of his own. As theater historian Ethan Mordden noted in his history of 70s Broadway, One More Kiss, the title's pun also extends to the stylized self-awareness of the show's performers (or "company") and the increasingly corporatized nature of post-war, post-sixties American love (love-as-business-transaction: a very noir notion). Note the lyrics Beth Howland sings above, how quickly the mood of screwball can give way to noir imagery ("I telephoned my analyst about it and he said to/see him Monday, but by Monday I'll be floating in the Hudson with/the other garbage--") which takes us uneasily (if hilariously) back into the wedding preparations.

Company's score--which Sondheim would later describe, ambivalently, as "Brechtian"--shows a wide-ranging talent that touches on ballads ("Being Alive," "Someone Is Waiting"), dance numbers ("Side by Side by Side"), satires and pastiches (like the girl-group number "You Could Drive A Person Crazy"), character-driven humor pieces ("The Little Things You Do Together," "Barcelona"), and songs whose melodic and lyrical invention defies categorization (I guess you could call "The Ladies Who Lunch" a 12 o'clock number, but it's a deeply ironic and fatalistic one, while "Sorry-Grateful" almost feels like an anti-ballad in its honesty). Like Bobby, Sondheim stands both within and outside the show, deconstructing a whole history of theatrical convention while still providing the emotional connections and aching depth those conventions were designed to convey. There's an intense pleasure in craft (you know you're hearing a master at the top of his game when he manages to lyricize a yawn in "Barcelona"), but never at the expense of character or feeling.

Sondheim's work was brilliantly matched by Harold Prince's: Sondheim would be his richest collaborator, the one that set off his imagination in casting and staging, and he controlled the stage as if it were a movie set, using movable scenery, scrims, and lights to "cross-cut" from one space and time to another. Designer Boris Aronson's set was a glittering urban landcape of steel, glass and moving parts, as if the "Girl Hunt" backdrops (and their violence) were transferred into a screwball narrative.

And all this work for a show Sondheim didn't even really want to do, that he agreed to only because he'd secured a promise from Prince that the impresario would produce and direct the show closest to Sondheim's heart, the long-gestating mystery musical The Girls Upstairs.

In 1965, Sondheim and writer James Goldman cooked up an idea for a murder mystery musical, set at a Ziegfeld Follies reunion, called The Girls Upstairs. In his authoritative history of the composer, Sondheim and Co., Craig Zadan recounts the show’s genesis:

“The original impulse for The Girls Upstairs was something that was much more melodramatic and more foolish,” James Goldman explains. “We began with people who were much older. It got rewritten a lot and I had incorporated something I was always very taken with—a device Chekhov used for the curtain, at the end of the third act of Uncle Vanya, where people are driven by anguish to the point where someone fires a gun and misses….There wasn’t any real murder in our show” (135).

Sondheim continues, “The murder mystery plot was a ‘who’ll-do-it’ rather than a ‘whodunnit’” (Zadan 136).

Prince hated the idea. Imagine it as a real-life version of that scene in The Band Wagon when the Martins are pitching their idea for the pulp writer musical: Tony Hunter loves it, they love it, Tony’s rolling on the couch...And Jeffrey Cordova says it should be Faust.

Prince read it, thought it “was about two men who took out two girls who were in the dressing room upstairs, and it was a personal story and they were four people self-pitying and, as far as I was concerned, pitying themselves sufficiently that I didn’t have to involve myself in their problems” (Zadan 119). Prince was Sondheim’s close friend, but Sondheim wasn’t sure, in the mid-sixties at least, that Prince was the right director for the show, anyway; he took it to producer David Merrick, who also didn’t love it (Zadan 114), but held the option on it for a year. The show was not produced. Sondheim and Goldman wrote an eerie fanstasy musical, Evening Primrose (based on a John Collier story), for the ABC TV show Stage 67; Goldman would win an Oscar for writing The Lion In Winter in 1968. For two years, The Girls Upstairs went through different drafts, producers and directors. Reading a new draft, which he still hated, Prince wrote Sondheim and Goldman a 3,000-word letter detailing his concerns, which got no response. Finally, in 1969, as they worked on Company, the latest producer for The Girls Upstairs dropped the show, and Prince stepped into the breach, suggesting they drop the explicit murder angle and make the show more metaphorical; in Prince’s words

Metaphoric rubble becomes visual rubble. A theatre is being torn down. On its stage a party in celebration of that. The celebrants for whom the theatre represents youth, dreams lost, a golden time, are to be orphaned….Is the theatre torn down? Will it be torn down tomorrow? Or was it torn down yesterday? Keep it ambiguous, a setting for the sort of introspection that reunions precipitate, a mood in which to lose sight of the present, to look back on the past (Ilsen 180).

Novelist and critic Ethan Mordden picks up on the thread: “It’s a dream: a reunion of the shadows and echoes of the old show biz that once defined America. No one human is inside the building, yet something is there, saying goodbye” (34). The solution, it seemed, was ghosts.

Not the ghosts of Topper, though, but something less cheery, and less certain; Prince’s inspiration was a 1960 Life magazine photo of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of the demolished Roxy Theatre, dressed in formal gown, her arms outstretched (Chapin 7-8), as if she’s still playing Norma Desmond. Dressed all in black-and-white, with pale makeup, and floating in and out of lighting that made them appear nearly see-through, the ghosts in Prince’s The Girls Upstairs production would be old Follies girls, song-and-dance performers, and, most importantly, the ghosts of the four protagonists, those two couples Prince so despised in the original draft. Ted Chapin, at the time a twenty-year old gofer on the show (he’d go on to become president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization) notes, “Characters and their ghosts could exist side by side, and conversations could take place that were part present and part past. Ghosts could act out what the present-day characters are remembering, sometimes accurately, sometimes not” (Chapin 8). The show was retitled Follies.

Several years ago, at an academic conference, some of us sat at dinner and talked about which moments in film, theater or pop music history we wished we could've lived through. Many desires were expressed: sitting at the Ed Sullivan Theater, watching the Beatles in '64; being at the first screening of The Jazz Singer in 1927; seeing Gone With The Wind in '39 orBringing Up Baby in '38; catching the Stones, Miles Davis, Prince, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington at various points in their careers.

For me, it was easy: I wanted to be at the Winter Garden Theater on April 4, 1971, for the opening night of Follies (being at the 1945 opening of Carousel was a close second).

It was not an easy production. Theater critic Frank Rich relays the conventional wisdom about the show:

More than three decades after its premiere, Follies remains the most elusive of landmark Broadway musicals...It is a show for which the word “problematic” could have been coined. Its theatricality is lavish but its mood is downbeat. Its storytelling plays tricks with time that are poetic to its fans but disorienting gimmickry to less sympathetic onlookers. The principal characters are narcissistic, unpleasant, and prone to onstage nervous breakdowns...In each rendition, Follies draws new adherents, but also new detractors. Is it really a great musical, or merely the greatest of all cult musicals, the most fabulous of all self-indulgent failures? Or might it still be unfinished, awaiting the perfect script revision, the radical new staging no one has yet thought of? Could one stroke of luck finally make the whole elaborate edifice fall into place as triumphantly as the Follies scenery descends in the fabled “Loveland” sequence? (Chapin xi).

In his exhaustive history of the show’s production, Everything Was Possible, Chapin relates the various backstage trials: the power struggles between Prince and his co-director and choreographer, Michael Bennett (who hated the book and longed to bring in Neil Simon to punch it up with some one-liners); Sondheim’s procrastination (on the first day, much of the score, which would eventually comprise 22 numbers, had yet to be written (only six songs remained from the original The Girls Upstairs), and STILL TO BE WRITTEN notations dotted the actors’ scripts; the uncertain mixture of the cast, which included young dancers and chorus members, old Broadway hands like Ethel Shutta, established stage stars like Dorothy Collins and film stars like Gene Nelson and Alexis Smith who’d done hardly any musical theater at all; book writer James Goldman’s standoffish nature when asked to make revisions; Boris Aronson’s set design, a combination of moving platforms, metallic walkways, and blasted rubble that brilliantly embodied Prince’s metaphorical needs but was hell to dance on; and Prince’s constant anxiety, about the then-outrageous cost of the show ($800,000), the plethora of changes to the book, the score and the choreography, and the mixed response to the show in Boston previews.

It was precisely the “Loveland” sequence Rich refers to above that so fascinated filmmaker Alain Resnais. In How Sondheim Found His Sound, Steve Swayne suggests strong affinities between Sondheim’s work and that of the French New Wave that both valorized and criticized Vincente Minnelli: a fascination with noir and other “disreputable” genres; a desire to rework the “grammar” of film/theatre in order to explore a culture and politics that older examples had elided or ignored; a belief that auteurs (be they directors or composers) could use popular forms for personal expression; and, most importantly, a constant playing with time and space and, by extension, a wish to tell stories while simultaneously providing critical perspective on those stories (Swayne 174-177). Even setting aside some of the banalities of Swayne’s analysis (and the unfair description of Rogers and Hammerstein’s groundbreaking shows as “conventional”), this is a potentially rich link, one enhanced by Sondheim’s referencing, in interviews, of the New Wave and Marguerite Duras as influences (Swayne 179). “Sondheim nevertheless adopted a postmodern sensibility for the musical of the late twentieth century,” Swayne posits (180), and he does so in Follies through his use of what were called “pastiche numbers.” Like The Band Wagon, Follies utilizes old forms in a new context, but does so for far more critical purposes, and a comparison of the two is instructive.

Follies is an integrated musical, but it feels like a disintegrated one, both honoring the Rodgers & Hammerstein tradition out of which Sondheim directly arose, and also doing Oedipal violence to it. Much like the Follies ghosts and their contemporary counterparts, who “argue with their past selves in an electrifying moment of time-space discontinuity” (Swayne 178), so, too, do Sondheim’s pastiche numbers both honor and critique their predecessors. Jonathan Tunick, Sondheim’s orchestrator for Follies (and all of his shows through 1981’s Merrily We Roll Along), once described orchestrating as “a way of enhancing a song—using the deviled-egg metaphor—by taking it, mashing it up, adding some ingredients, mixing it, and putting it back together again” (Zadan 154).

Sondheim's songs and Tunick's orchestrations found their visual parallel in Boris Aronson's metaphorical set designs; the show nominally takes place at an abandoned and about-to-be-demolished theater, where an old Follies revue is having one last reunion, but as the show shuttles from 1971 back through memories to the the 1930s, the real landscape is that of the characters' hearts and minds. Speaking to Frank Rich (in The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, co-authored with Lisa Aronson), Aronson remembered, “When Hal told me that the show takes place on an empty stage, that was immediately worth a million to me,” Aronson said. “then when he said that the theatre is in a stage of being demolished, I was delighted, because that was Cubism….If it had just been another backstage show, with the back of scenery showing and all, I wouldn’t have touched it. But an empty stage is a goldmine—a concept that really fascinates me.” (232). He continued:

Memories arrive in bits and pieces—they’re evocative—strung together into chains, colored by the imagination. I used these leftovers, these remnants, very purposefully. If you see a statue and a hand is missing, or the nose is broken, it leaves so much more to the imagination than if it were complete. This very [fragmentation] creates a positive-negative relationship between the missing pieces and the elements that remain. The audience helps all evening in re-creating the past, because we only suggest it (232).

Tunick further described the specific sound of Follies as “not a re-creation of, but a glorfication of, every Broadway pit band that ever played…and it’s not what the pit band actually sounded like, it’s what you thought the pit band sounded like” (Zadan 155). He is describing here, not only his own work as an orchestrator, but Sondheim’s desire to play with the song form, and that form’s tendency, outside of its originary moment, to feel nostalgic: Craig Zadan notes that “Sondheim says he intended to imitate the styles of the great songwriters of the times, and affectionately comment on them as well” (147), and quickly notes how the show’s opening number, “Beautiful Girls,” pastiches Irving Berlin, while its most famous, “Losing My Mind,” imitates George Gershwin (147). In one song, “Could I Leave You?,” sung by an outraged Phyllis (Alexis Smith) to her philandering husband Ben (John McMartin), Sondheim even tips his hat to his old mentor Oscar Hammerstein, quoting The King & I: “Putting thoughts of you aside/In the South of France,/Would I think of suicide?/Darling, shall we dance?” Where, in the earlier show, that invitation was sincere, and marked Anna’s finally connecting to the titular King, in Follies it is the clearest sign of the married couple’s estrangement. It is also the title of a famous Astaire-Rogers film (with music by George and Ira Gershwin), allowing Sondheim, with a single swoop, to suggest how these seemingly disparate musical traditions (of revue comedy and musical film, integrated musical play and postmodern concept musical) dance along the same through line of tradition.

I've gone on about Sondheim's work, and Aronson's set design, and the history of his collaborations with Prince, because I think it's in these visual and sonic reworkings of form and history (theatrical, American, and more) that the truly noir aspects of Follies are expressed. Crime has a long relationship with Broadway: The Threepenny Opera, "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," Guys and Dolls, Chicago, City of Angels, Sweeny Todd. But some of its darkest, deepest, and most "noirish" of shows are those which ignore the explicit narrative tropes of noir in favor of its desperate fatalist tone. Carousel, certainly, is one of these shows, and a profound influence on Sondheim's work; Follies is another. In his thoughtful essay this week on Paul Schrader, Greg Ferrara wrestles with Schrader's constantly shifting definitions of noir, and concludes (in a wonderfully succinct line) "For film noir, tone is the genre."

Precisely, and it is this tone that has survived numerous re-stagings of Follies since that 1971 production. That original Broadway show is the holy grail of my imagined shows, the version I was not alive to see, and there's a strong sense-- from histories, anecdotes, scores, pictures, and even the blurry video clips I'm posting (bootlegged out by dedicated fans, and all the more powerful for their ghostliness)--that if you didn't see that show, you didn't see the show. Between 1971 and 2002, there were six productions on Broadway, in L.A., at Lincoln Center and in the West End; two concert readings; and numerous regional productions. Some tried to re-capture the opulent decadence of the Prince-Aronson vision, others went for a more stripped-down aesthetic, but nearly all of them maintained that sense of creeping darkness, of a dream of love (and the pop cultural myths that shaped them) unraveling.

In his otherwise dismissive (and, it should be noted, badly written) pan of the show in The New York Times, theater critic Clive Barnes made an intriguing distinction between the “flavors” of Sondheim’s score: “nostalgic and cinematic.” The “nostalgic” songs were the pastiche numbers like “Broadway Baby” (numbers which, he claims, “trade on camp”) while the “cinematic” song were, presumably (Barnes never specifies) the book numbers, like “Losing My Mind.” In a description typical of Barnes’ skim-the-surface flippancy, he calls the cinematic numbers “a mixture of this and that." In a paper that has boasted more notable critics at this position—Brooks Atkinson, Frank Rich, and Ben Brantley among them—Barnes comes off like the Bosley Crowther of the bunch, generally deaf to style and quick to praise socially oriented trends, and more notable for the position he held than what he brought to it. One can only imagine what Pauline Kael would’ve made of him. But just because he does nothing with these evocative terms doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.

One way Sondheim and Prince were able to enhance the "cinematic" qualities of the show was through canny casting, mixing theater and film stars who often had at least loose associations with noir narratives. Alexis Smith, who played the Follies-girl-turned-society-matron Phyllis, had starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in the 1945 crime thriller Conflict; Gene Nelson, who played the hapless salesman Buddy (who has maintained a crush on Phyllis for 30 years) starred in the 50s B thriller The Way Out; John McMartin, Buddy's best friend/rival who grows up to become a powerful politician (and the husband of Phyllis), would take his patrician charm to film three years later in the conspiracy thriller All The President's Men. Best of all, there was Yvonne De Carlo, who appeared in Brute Force and Criss Cross, and who belts out the show's best-known song (and the one most densely cinematic in its references):

This iconic number was actually a quick rewrite, when De Carlo's initial number, “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” was bombing in Boston previews; Sondheim wrote her a whole new number, one inspired, in part, by the career of noir icon Joan Crawford, and in part by a line cut from Goldman’s book: “Been called a pinko/Commie tool,/Got through it stinko/By my pool” (Goldman and Sondheim 57). It is a song that details the up-and-down life of a Hollywood star from the 1930s to the early 1970s, and by extension, becomes a look at the history of both the cinema and the stage musical, and everything they had grown to encompass from Minnelli’s long-gone days of staging revues: “First you’re another/sloe-eyed vamp,/Then someone’s mother,/Then you’re camp,/Then you career from career to career” (Sondheim and Goldman 57-59). Sondheim was quick to emphasize that such pastiches and explorations were not meant to be parodic: “I was looking at the past with affection, respect and delight. In no way am I pointing out how silly the songs were because I don’t think they’re silly. What they are is innocent” (Ilson 189).

"Innocence" is played with in "Who's That Woman?," a seeming throw-away number that only peripherally relates to the main characters or the narrative proper, but which explodes the spacial and temporal dimensions of the stage, and becomes the show's single best visual/musical embodiment of its themes of aging, loss and the tricks of memory. Sometimes called the "mirror" number, it begins as a childish, embarrassed dance by the former Follies girls, gamely trying to remember the lyrics and dance steps (which, thirty years later, they couldn't pull off even if they remembered them). As the song goes, the dancers and singers gain confidence and start having fun-- and suddenly, the stage rises behind them, and their "ghost selves" appear, young and fit and in perfect rhythm, pounding the steps out in their tap shoes. The "actual" characters can't see them (they never can, although the ghosts can see them), but the audience can, and this particular "fun-house mirror" is far more devastating than that in The Band Wagon; like The Lady From Shaghai, this is a space of murder and betrayal, but it is memory that is both the killer and the victim.

The story and the "Who's That Woman?" number suggest how Sondheim, in Follies, wasn’t just imitating song styles: he was playing chess without a board, rewriting material as the book changed, moving songs from performer to performer (“Losing My Mind” was originally written for Alexis Smith, then shifted to Dorothy Collins towards the end of rehearsal), and substituting one song for another, all the while using the show to checkmate certain theatrical traditions.

If the songs were innocent in and of themselves, within Prince’s “rubble show,” they took on an allegorical meaning. Sondheim again: “Follies represented a state of mind of America between the two World Wars. Up until 1945 America was the good guy…now the dream has collapsed, everything has turned to rubble underfoot and that’s what the show is about” (Chapin 315). That's an oversimplifcation, but one which speaks to the period out of which Follies arose, the same one that spurred the neo-noirs (like Chinatown) that Greg mentions in his Schrader piece. It’s that collapsing state of genre and mind that drew in the aforementioned Resnais, who asked Sondheim to compose the music for his film, Stavisky, after seeing Follies:

I remembered in particular one scene in Follies that has always remained with me: a scene that begins in gaiety and high spirits, with John McMartin in white tuxedo and top hat singing and dancing, a scene full of joy and hope, when all of the sudden the music deteriorates, the lighting turns funereal, the girls collapse and dissolve, and he, McMartin, can no longer remember the words or music. It’s devastating, a scene I’ve never forgotten. The worm in the apple, death in the midst of light (Swayne 184).

(The score for Resnais' film, incidentally, is included on the second disc of Follies In Concert, a 1985 attempt to record the full score of the show (the original Broadway cast album had a truncated score). Some of Stavisky echoes Follies, and some of it sounds like sketches for Sondheim’s next show, A Little Night Music, but, without any lyrical accompaniment, much of the soundtrack sounds, oddly, less like “Stephen Sondheim” (or even Bernard Hermann) than Ennio Morricone).

This scene Resnais remembers is the climax of the “Loveland” sequence. For 90 minutes, the stage has been stark, a sea of black with pools of light illuminating the rubble; as the tensions of the reunion build and the resentments of thirty years come out, everyone slips into madness, and the stage transforms (through constumes, scrims, props and curtains) into a fantastic 30s Follies space, where the four principals act out their fears and desires through the form of the Follies. The look is 30s musical vaudeville, but the emotions are pure noir, a tension between form, content and audience expectation that builds across the sequence to a devastating finale. Phyllis does a brassy number called "Lucy and Jessie" in a sexy red dress, in a style that wouldn't have been out of place in Love Me Or Leave Me; Buddy sings a comedic slapstick number called "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues," about his infidelities and fears of being alone; Dorothy Collins, playing Buddy's wife Sally, sings "Losing My Mind"; and it all ends with Ben's "Live, Laugh, Love." If West Side Story brought a realism and violence to its dance numbers, its rumbles and dream ballets were still clearly in the Agnes DeMille/Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition established by Oklahoma’s “Laurie Makes Up Her Mind” or Carousel’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The Follies “Loveland” sequence is something else: a phantasmagoria of light and dance and color that blurs the established line between “book” and “pastiche” numbers that earlier songs in the show had clearly defined. As Resnais’ comments above suggest, it’s a very Astaire-like number, at least at the start, one whose lyrical banalities (“Some like to be the champs/At saving postage stamps,/Me, I like to live/Me, I like to to laugh,/Me, I like to love”) seem like a parody of “moon/June” revue rhymes, until one realizes they are the very clichés that Ben uses to wall himself off from life. Ben’s memories and fantasies—what happened, and what never did—have completely collapsed and blurred into one another, a blurring Sondheim and Tunick capture musically by weaving quotations from earlier numbers and even other shows into the orchestrations.

It’s ironic, then, that various commentators have different memories of how John McMartin’s number played: Resnais recalls funereal lighting, girls collapsing and dissolving, while Ethan Mordden observes, “Most Follies buffs recall a kick line of robots at this point, but I remember a few of the dancers glaring at [McMartin’s character] Ben” (39).

Of course, Follies—the original, 1971, $800,000 production of Follies, with its dense intertextual resonance coming not only from Sondheim’s music, but Prince’s astute casting of the famous, sort-of-famous, and never-quite-made-it—exists only in memory and the archives, since no film was done of the original show (beyond the blurry bootleg clips in this post), as is more common today. Born almost exactly two years after Follies opened on April 4, 1971, I am forced to “reconstruct” the show through photographs, the published book by Goldman and Sondheim, written histories, critical analyses, and a much-maligned original cast album that butchered the score—truncating several numbers and dropping others outright—in order to fit it onto a single disc. Here is a question that feels relevant for this post (designed as part of a blogathon to raise funds for film preservation, designed to rescue those film that, per Benjamin's phrasing, are abandoned in the crowd)-- what would it be like to have the original Follies on VHS, then DVD, forever? If, as Barnes suggests (without perhaps really understanding what he's suggesting), Follies has a "cinematic logic" to it, how does that affect our ability to write about it, and remember it (or perform an act of 'memory' through its souvenirs)? Or is there something about the show, and its constant plays with theatricality and memory, that make being there an essential part of true understanding?

Follies opening scene: as music plays (in a phrase reminiscent of Walter Benjamin, the show’s book describes it “like thunder from a long time ago”) the curtain rises on a stage that’s nearly empty, save for one extremely tall Follies girl. She is one of the ghosts, and as the prologue music begins, she starts to glide slowly across the stage. We’re at a party, emotionally conflicted, caught between glamour and doom. As various waiters and other party personnel begin to join the Follies girl on the stage, other Follies ghosts—musicians and dancers and singers, “they are singing something jazzy, but moving in slow motion, mouths opening and closing soundlessly," the book tells us—join the original ghost on stage. No one notices them, but they see everything. Then Sally runs in, and the room changes. As she chatters nervously—“Oh Lord, don’t tell me I’m the first”—one of the Follies ghosts breaks away from the line to look at her, because she is Sally’s ghost, and this is what she will look like in 30 years. James Goldman's book continues, “And suddenly, the slow strange music swells, strikes an expectant chord, and cuts to bright, light-hearted pastiche tunes of the twenties and thirties as..."

The ambiguity of that ellipsis-- it's open-endedness, like a note or memory that refuses to resolve-- is one reason I’ve gone on with this description at some length; it gives a sense of poetics of the piece, how Goldman’s text intersects with Sondheim’s score and Prince and Bennett’s and Aronson's staging to create that sense of the time-space discontinuity that Resnais is so fascinated by, and to suggest how the show plays with, not just its characters’ memories, but the whole idea of memory itself, past and present offered simultaneously on a darkened stage. Another passage from Goldman’s book highlights the show’s indebtedness to filmic techniques for achieving this end:

Throughout, the show moves rather like a film. All of the scaffolding platforms move forward and back, so that at one moment the stage is huge and empty and the next, closed in and intimate. And since no portion of the set holds anything specific, the action flows and drifts through space and time. Scenes shift as easily as cuts on film, and the material is free to be now here, now there, or, on occasion, different places all at once.

MGM, in fact, optioned Follies for a film adaptation in 1972, but nothing ever came of it; by 1969, when Sondheim and Prince finally agreed to collaborate on the show, MGM was auctioning off its props and costumes, shutting down production on many of its sound stages, and much of its talent had long since departed (Freed himself would die in early 1973). Instead, the studio pursued a more self-reflective version of the nostalgia film, That’s Entertainment!, a compendium of great MGM musical clips that shows the 1973 Fred Astaire walking past the sleek deco train model that brought Tony Hunter to a studio-bound New York at The Band Wagon's start. The train had rusted by then, and Astaire noted in an interview that the carpet had frayed. According to Ted Chapin, Sondheim and Prince thought they could see the influence of Follies in the film: like those former showgirls walking around the rubble of their own dream factory, there's a fascinating tension in That's Entertainment! between a nostalgia for a lost past, and an acknowledgment that this past was built on tinsel, light and myth.

Sondheim, theater producer Andre Bishop, Ted Chapin and record producer Thomas Z. Shepherd attempted their own act of nostalgic reconstruction in 1985, when Shepard’s company, RCA Victor Red Seal, conspired to record the whole score as a live concert event, with Mandy Patinkin as Buddy, George Hearn as Ben, Barbara Cook as Sally and Lee Remick as Phyllis (with a variety of stage and revue stars—Carol Burnett, Elaine Stritch, and even Betty Comden and Adolph Green--performing the pastiche numbers). It wasn't the "original" Follies with that resonant 1971 cast; like a betrayal in a noir movie, that version had fallen victim to business differences between Harold Prince and CBS Records; angry about royalties on a different album, Prince took the album (over Sondheim's pleading) to Capitol Records, who cut the score in half and recorded it under less than optimal conditions. Shepherd-- who'd produced many of Sondheim's cast albums and had a deserved reputation as one of the best producers in the business-- seemed like the ideal figure for bringing that originary moment (or something like it) back and grabbing it for posterity.

Much of Follies In Concert--Stritch’s deadpan “Broadway Baby,” Burnett’s sly and suggestive “I’m Still Here,” and George Hearn’s towering performance throughout—is superb. Even Comden and Green show up in minor roles. But this version, too, fell victim to the Follies curse; aside from the way in which the new casting of the four principals loses the original’s important intertextual balance of stage and film stars, the larger problem is that a handful of numbers, such as “Bolero D’Amour,” still go missing, as does the interweaving of the pastiche numbers (“Broadway Baby,” “Rain on the Roof,” and “Ah, Paree!”) that gave that section’s ending such an intense kick in 1971 (a kick one can still feel by reading Goldman's published book). A tacked-on happy ending undercuts the pathos and impact of the show, and the entire production is shot through with an air of "finally!" triumphalism that's certainly understandable, but counter to the show's myth deconstruction. In fact, the whole concert format—with its truncated book, air of un-ironic nostalgia and the audience’s desire to show their adulation—is perhaps not the best method for performing Follies, the darkest and most ambivalent of modern musicals. In a further irony (one both frustrating and theoretically delicious) the accompanying CD booklet contains numerous printing errors—including out-of-order pages and whole sections of the liner notes accidentally deleted—that make even the remembrance of the restaging of a show about the difficulty of remembrance incomplete. It's like Robert Mitchum's line from Out of the Past--we want to see the show, but all we can see is the frame (of history, memory, desire for a show that can never be again).

But this noble failure fits both the Follies legends and anecdotes about the show-- that it is constantly rewriting itself, becoming again and again, just as its doomed characters wish to, but never quite achieving perfection--and the show's ambivalent message about the dangers of looking back. In its play of nostalgia and anti-nostalgia-- its remembrances of the past, and its absolute insistence (in both formal daring and narrative openness) on facing the future-- Follies honors a noir heritage and also works as an ideal text for thinking about artistic preservation. It seems Follies is to be the Arcades Project of contemporary musical theater, one whose very appeal lies in it being always slightly unfinished and out-of-reach.

This post is a part of the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon and Fundraiser for the Film Noir Foundation to help preserve our film heritage. The Blogathon is hosted by Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren. Please make your donation by clicking on the button below. Thank you.

Shadow and Light

2011-02-13T02:21:00.009-05:00

Last year, two of the web's best film bloggers, Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn "Ferdy" Ferdinand, organized a "For The Love of Film" blogathon, in order to raise funds in support of the National Film Preservation Foundation. This is an amazingly important cause for anyone concerned about film history and the literal stuff of movies; as Greg Ferrara noted last year in an ad for the blogathon, "Over 80 percent of all films made between 1894 and 1930 are lost forever." The yeoman's work done by Siren and Ferdy paid off-- they were able to raise $30,000 in support of the foundation, and as an added bonus, readers were treated to posts about early cinema from the superb bloggers who wrote in support of the drive.

Ferdy and Siren (ably supported again by Mr. Ferrara and his tireless video/banner promotional work) are back with another blogathon that launches Monday: "For The Love of Film (Noir)" runs from February 14 through February 21, in order to help raise funds for the Film Noir Foundation. This group works to discover and restore lost or forgotten films from one of the most influential (and sheerly enjoyable) genres in film history. Or as their own self-description puts it:

The Film Noir Foundation is a non-profit public benefit corporation created as an educational resource regarding the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film noir as an original American cinematic movement. It is our mission to find and preserve films in danger of being lost or irreparably damaged, and to ensure that high quality prints of these classic films remain in circulation for theatrical exhibition to future generations.

As a film professor, I feel an instinctive urge to support any group with preservation as part of their mission statement; that FNF leader Eddie Muller's group is specifically geared towards one of my favorite kinds of film just makes it all the more important to me. As a budding young cinephile, my imagination was shaped by the Humphrey Bogart of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon; when I went to college and started taking film classes, it was often noir images that resonated deeply: Jane Greer walking in and out of shadows in Out of the Past; Bacall tossing a sexy glance sideways in The Big Sleep; Rutger Hauer bent over in the rain in Blade Runner and Jean-Paul Belmondo rubbing his lips together in Breathless (maybe the most seminal film experience of my life). And those are just the films we know, a handful of those that have remained popular or influential enough to stay preserved in the public eye. One of things that's exciting about FNF's work is the possibility of finding "new" treasures that haven't yet been canonized, new movies that will spark our imaginations and make us see this rich and complex genre in a new light. The film that the blogathon's funds will help restore-- The Sound of Fury aka Come and Get Me-- is one of those films, at least for me; I had not heard of it, but Siren's description-- "The Sound of Fury tells the same story as Lang’s celebrated 1936 Fury. Directed by Cy Endfield, who was fated to be blacklisted later on, The Sound of Fury stars Lloyd Bridges in as good a role as that fine actor ever got to play"--certainly whets my appetite.

Unfortunately, time doesn't permit me to contribute more than this post to Ferdy and Siren's crucial blogathon, but I urge others to read, contribute posts of their own (directions for doing so can be found here), and most of all, contribute to the Film Noir Foundation, which you can do by clicking on this link. As I noted above, Greg has been making some spiffy linking buttons, and as soon as I figure out how to get mine posted on the sidebar with the same link, I will get it up there, as well. Contribute early and often, and don't forget to read all week, as Greg, Bill, Leonard Maltin, Edward Copeland, Kim Morgan, Glenn Kenny, and many others offer posts that will wrap around you like a cloud of cigarette smoke, as stylish, rich and alluring as the films themselves.

UPDATE (11/13): Thanks to Marilyn Ferdinand and Greg Ferrara, who both offered helpful instructions, the "donate" button is up in the sidebar. Just click on the blogathon image and it will take you to the donations page for the foundation.

John Barry, R.I.P.

2011-01-31T04:00:00.003-05:00

Via Kimberly Lindbergs, I just learned the famed British composer died of a heart attack at the age of 77.

He won Oscars for his scores for Born Free, The Lion In Winter, Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves, but it is his gorgeously moody and atmospheric scoring of the James Bond series that will probably be his most lasting legacy. A contemporary of the Beatles and a habitue of a London nightclub scene dominated by the gangster Kray brothers, Barry brought to bear upon the 007 films a jazzy youthfulness and sense of dangerous sonic glamour that immediately elevated the (initially) low-budget series into something elegant, strange and sophisticated; Sean Connery may have "moved like a jungle cat," according to Bond producer Harry Saltzman, but he wouldn't have registered as nearly the same sort of bad-ass without Barry's persistent bass-lines and growling guitar providing the soundtrack for such choreography.

But Barry's Bond work wasn't just about masculine cool and tight action: while it was his Oscar-winning scores that sometimes displayed a more sentimental side, his Bond work was also capable of a startling tenderness, never more so than in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a suite from which can be heard above. It's certainly gained in reputation over the last forty years, but OHMSS got a mixed commercial response in 1969, not only because of the shift from Connery to George Lazenby, but because its differently stretched narrative, amber-glow cinematography and very human heart offered a striking change in the way the series had balanced character, plot and spectacle to that point (it's one of my favorites in the whole series). At the center of these shifts-- both pushing boundaries and holding it all together--is Barry's rich, fuzzed-up score, full of pulsing rhythm lines, plaintive horns, thick (but not treacly) string sections and a gentle spaciousness that reflects the film's desire to let its characters breath a bit between the action set-pieces. "No matter how ridiculous the action on the screen" Barry said in a 1987 interview with Starlog magazine, "always make it sound like a million bucks." R.I.P., John Barry.

Auld Lang Syne

2011-01-01T18:06:00.005-05:00

Hope your New Year is as lovely, moving and poetic (but a lot happier!) as this scene from my favorite Chaplin film, The Gold Rush.

Blake Edwards, R.I.P.

2010-12-19T22:20:00.002-05:00

When Jack Lemmon died nine years ago, and there were numerous (and well-deserved) tributes all over the media, I did what I often do in such situations-- I went to the video store to rent those films of his that I hadn't seen. I rented three or four Lemmon movies, but I only remember watching one: Days of Wine and Roses. I popped it in on a warm Sunday morning in Florida, and was close to shaking when I took it out a couple of hours later. After watching that, I did not want to see any Jack Lemmon films for a long time.

That might sound like an insult, but it's really not: Days of Wine and Roses might contain the finest performance of Lemmon's exemplary career, and my aversion to him after seeing it is precisely because of how brilliantly it uses his established persona and considerable charm for deeply, deeply harrowing ends. Lemmon deserves a lot of credit for his courage in this film, but even more, the film's aesthetic brilliance is a testament to its director, Blake Edwards, who died this week at 88, and whose mastery of slick, state-of-the-sixties mise-en-scene makes the movie a masterpiece I never want to see again.

Every time I've seen Roses discussed, words like "harrowing" or "shattering" are generally used to describe it. I am one with Self-Styled Siren, who writes

The first is Days of Wine and Roses, a movie that belongs to that category of film that’s so harrowing it’s hard to analyze....The other films either plunk you down in media boozus, or show alcoholism as something that’s triggered, essentially, by a run of bad luck. Days of Wine and Roses, with a skilled purveyor of slapstick at the helm, has the nerve to start when the drinking is still fun and the drunks are still charming--and not just because they’re the intensely lovable Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick--and then take them to where all smiles stop together. The Siren isn’t sure when or if she’ll watch it again, ever, because then she’d have to watch Lemmon smashing the greenhouse, or trying to persuade a breastfeeding Remick to have a drink with him. Frankly, just the opening bars of the credits kill her.

I can actually go Siren one better-- I was house-sitting one summer when I found a Sinatra CD in the house-owner's collection. I took it off the shelf, and just seeing the title of Henry Mancini's title song listed was enough to literally send shivers down my spine. I put the CD back on the shelf, and vowed not to look in its direction for the duration of my stay.

Edwards would later admit in an interview that his own struggles with alcohol had contributed to Roses' look and tone, and it shows: I know of no American motion picture that captures all the tiny, lovable, passive-aggressive and very sad details of an addicted life so well. The need to impress and charm; the way booze can be a seductive tool, or a literal prop (as Aaron Sorkin put it on The West Wing, drinking is not just about the drink, but the way a glass can feel in your hand, the way light bouncing off it becomes a fetish); the inability to understand how you come across when you're under the influence (and how disturbing those moments of self-awareness can be when they poke through the fog); the sudden swerves in emotion and tone (watch that scene early on when Lemmon comes home to Remick's apartment with a grocery bag full of bottles, and note how imperceptibly Edwards shifts us from comedy to Expressionist horror and back again, as if it's the most normal thing in the world). Edwards nails all of these thematic and emotional bits very well, but they work because they rest within in a visual space that's only one of two steps away from the bright cheeriness of a then-typical rom-com. That slow descent into terror that Siren notes only works because of how brilliantly it derives from upon our other cinematic fetishes and addictions: happy couples, office comedies, the glittering chrome-and-glass apartments of the modern family. Leaving Las Vegas and The Lost Weekend both contain brilliant central performances (and I like both of those movies very much), but whether because of a kind of romanticizing of the doomed hero or the Production Code of the period, they both feel pulled back a bit; Roses goes all the way in its ruthless denouement, finding a way to take the mannerisms that both star and director were known for and using that intense stylization to make something hauntingly real.

But then, even in his comedies, there was always an air of doom and desperation in a Blake Edwards movie, the laughs as much a release of anxiety as pleasure. Operation Mad Ball, the comedy he co-wrote for director Richard Quine, is a forerunner to films like M.A.S.H. in its blackly comic depiction of military bureaucracy run amok. While it is nominally about army private Jack Lemmon trying to woo superior officer Kathryn Grant by setting up an illegal, off-base party for nurses and enlisted men, any boy-meets-girl sentiment is quickly subsumed by the detailed (and very funny) planning of the party itself, and the revenge plots against officious enemies that spin in and out of it. It's a preference for elaborate design over emotional content that perhaps makes the film a self-reflection on Edwards' love of the meticulously staged slapstick joke. Operation Petticoat, directed by Edwards the following year, frames its primary narrative with patriotic shots of loving families meeting their Navy husbands dockside, but the heart of the film is the cynical fixer played by Tony Curtis (in his best comedic performance) who transforms World War II into one very lucrative cash opportunity (the role was a more polished version of a character type Edwards and Curtis had also explored in the previous year's A Perfect Furlough). Cary Grant is the perfect foil for Curtis' machinations, because while his position requires him to be 'outraged,' Grant's wry, dry style suggests he's really a co-conspirator at heart.

Edwards would create the television series Peter Gunn, and then return to the big screen for his best tale of dreamers, schemers and the way that romantic dreams rub against harsh realities. Breakfast at Tiffany's transforms major characters from Truman Capote's novel, has a very racist character played by Mickey Rooney, and as Siren once pointed out, isn't that nice to Patricia Neal's character. Despite that (and that's a lot to despite), it is a superb and very sad romantic comedy, and in some ways its loose ends and problematic pieces enhance its power: this is less the late-fifties, love-conquers-all story suggested by the swelling chorus on "Moon River" than that song's sad, minor-key opening, full of loneliness and a longing that can't really be fulfilled (but that we can fool ourselves into believing will be by that ending in the alley). Do I sound cynical? I don't mean to-- I love this movie with all my heart, and I fall under the sway of that rain-swept scene as much as anyone. With that trench-coat Audrey Hepburn is wearing, and the way that George Peppard grabs her in the alley, who wouldn't? The movie would inspire a pop song, a funny Seinfeld parody, and many homages on Gossip Girl (a program whose aesthetic owes a lot to Edwards' blend of camp, sentiment and cynicism), but none of them would ever capture its sense of wistful longing. Tiffany's looks as good as any romance from 1961, and Edwards uses his expertise in crafting that look to simultaneously extend those pleasures and question their limits.

That makes it the dry run for Roses, a film that I feel both a fierce desire to write about and that I find it almost impossible to write about, since its power for me is so overwhelming. I vaguely knew what it was about when I started watching it all those years ago, but put all that at the back of my head as I watched Jack Lemmon's Joe Clay unfold on screen like a cousin to Lemmon's characters in The Apartment or Mr. Roberts. Roses was released in late 1962, around the same time as that other great film about a functional alcoholic, Dr. No; Joe Clay probably thinks he's as smooth as James Bond, but even as he charms Lee Remick (and make no mistake, he is charming early on), something seems slightly off-- the desperation of his wooing, his anger when little bits of his corporate party-planning don't work out, that yelling in the apartment corridor I mentioned earlier. Even for a high-strung Lemmon character, Joe has a short fuse. Remick's Kirsten, too, is very sweet and cute, but has a naif-like quality that doesn't seem quite real-- she seems to live inside the encyclopedias she is reading to advance her education, and is less a person than a storybook character. The first really chilling moment comes when Joe convinces Kirsten (a non-drinker) to try that Brandy Alexander at the restaurant, and it's chilling precisely because it's played so casually-- how different is this from the Lemmon or Curtis schemers we've seen in other Edwards films? As we move from the office buildings to the high-rise apartment and then into the grip of alcoholism, the film becomes a visual compendium of downward mobility: the homes become shoddier, the clothes and faces ragged. Edwards has embodied the fears around addiction, and his increasing use of oblique angles and tight close-ups makes the slickness of his style all the more devastating: we know there's sensual escape out there, but we're in the grip of the frame (and that desire for escape is also part of the disease).

Following Days of Wine and Roses, Edwards pulled back, as if working to convince us that the abyss he just took us towards could be washed away in a blur of color, glamour, and brilliantly brittle verbal wit. There would be great movies (A Shot in the Dark, Victor/Victoria), mediocrities (his two collaborations with Bruce Willis, Sunset and Blind Date), and movies that are best forgotten (like City Heat or the non-Sellers Panther films); they'd all play in one way or another on that laughing-to-keep-from-screaming anxiety that was his trademark, but none of them would ever return to the power of Tiffany's or Roses. Still, an ability to blend style and slapstick wit is nothing to dismiss: right towards the end, when he staged his honorary Oscar speech as a funny stunt, he could still dazzle, and remind us of how closely the need to entertain was intertwined with the risk of an emotional crash. R.I.P., Blake Edwards.

Season's Greetings

2010-12-09T23:23:00.005-05:00

So, I have Gilmore Girls on last Thursday, and as the show ends the ABCFamily Network transitions into their treacly "25 Days of Christmas" programming. In this case, it's something called "A Flintstones Christmas." Now, I was a pretty big Flintstones fan as a kid, but looking at it for five minutes makes me wonder why: was the sixties animation of the original show as uninspired, ugly and lachrymose as this later (70s? 80s?) feature? I look away from the screen to work, but have it on in the background. I look up awhile later, and see that somehow Fred has stepped in for Santa Claus, and must deliver the toys to all the world's good (prehistoric) children. But, lo! Something (a busted sleigh rail? A drunken reindeer?) requires Fred to go back to the North Pole to re-tool. While he's there, he starts chatting with a peppy, possibly chemically altered Mrs. Claus.

Here's where it gets interesting: Fred walks through the toy shop, he spots a toy train set, the little engine running along the circular track. His face lights up: "Hey! I used to play with one of those as a child!" And it's Fred's reverie about playing trains with his father that sets my mind reeling. All I can think is: 1) If you live in a society that has invented the combustion engine; and 2) If that society is so advanced that such a fantastic device has become popular enough to be transformed into a children's toy; then 3) Why the hell do you still drive in cars that run through your feet???

What can I say? I blame the cold. But clearly, this proves one other thing: ABCFamily has the power to drive you completely insane. Run away! Run away!

Hope you are all having a safe and happy winter/holiday season. Things have been very busy here this year, but I hope to take up blogging with a bit greater regularity in the new year. Until then, I wish you all a happy end to 2010, and a lovely start to 2011!

Notes On Blogging Aesthetics XXIV

2010-11-22T21:46:00.005-05:00

Very occasionally ideas come to me in a moment of blinding creative inspiration, but far more usually they tend to seep into my consciousness very gradually, in a sort of artistic osmosis. Often ideas come about as a result of something I’ve seen and liked or been fascinated with. An image or a concept might sit in my head for years until eventually it meets another notion lurking in there somewhere and between them they form a complete idea.
--Willie Williams, U2 Set Designer, writing in his current online tour diary

Jagged Edges

2010-09-26T00:00:00.015-04:00

I couldn't have been older than thirteen-- any younger and I wouldn't have known who he was, any older and I would've felt guilty doing what I did. That sounds like the opening to a dark romance, and in a way it was, except my heartthrob was a writer I'd never met, and I was making my parents come on the date.

We were in Chicago on a family trip, and I was obsessed with tracking down any and all Harlan Ellison books I could find. You couldn't find a lot of them in Kalamazoo-- the rare appearance of something like Shatterday in the local bookstore was an event met with a whoop and a ravenous grab off the shelf. Otherwise, one had to special-order them through the stores, or from book catalogs, which was how I got the short story collections Stalking The Nightmare and Ellison Wonderland, and his brilliant collection of columns and essays, An Edge In My Voice. But surely a big city like Chicago-- which seemed, to my adolescent eye, to have bookstores on every corner-- surely, this city would sate my desires, surely they would be prominently placing Ellison at the fronts of their stores, in a big display marked by a cardboard cutout of Ellison's scowling visage (preferably with a pipe between his lips). Surely.

It was not to be-- the Windy City was a letdown, as I dragged my poor parents from store to store, and inquired about whether or not they carried Ellison's books (in a voice that no doubt shifted from a tone of Dickensian-street-urchin-begging to a fierce growl with each reply of the store clerks: "Sorry, no"). Or maybe I was the letdown-- who was this thirteen year-old dervish who was perfectly willing to spend everyone's time on such a pursuit? What was it about those books that made them such grails, that led to quests that subordinated everyone's lives to my own? I was like Ray Milland in The Last Weekend, obsessive need shining from my eyes. Simply put--one year earlier, Harlan Ellison changed my life.

My gateway drug was a 1985 issue of Starlog that contained an interview with Ellison. I was twelve years old when it appeared in the mailbox. Ellison was a creative consultant and writer on the new Twilight Zone series that was starting that fall, and right away the article grabbed my eye. In what I would come to learn was a typical rite of passage for many Ellisonians, what caught my attention was his ability to piss me off. He hated recent Spielberg movies; he dissed Back To The Future and Gremlins (or maybe Goonies-- I don't have the issue right in front of me); he suggested a lot of contemporary science fiction and television was garbage, and he did it in a fan bible that often valorized and promoted the very filmmakers and writers and pop culture objects he was slamming. Well, I never! How dare he? There was a photo a younger Ellison on-stage at a convention, but the shoddy printing made him look like a little kid standing in a snowstorm. Which, as I was soon to find out, was how he'd make me feel.

Once Harlan Ellison is under your skin, he stays there. He may have infuriated me in ways I could not yet articulate or fully understand, but I kept reading, intrigued by this funny, opinionated guy. And he was funny-- references and metaphors and profanities flew out of his mouth in such density that it's a wonder the interviewer kept up. The next time I was at our local bookstore, I searched for his name on the shelves, and found the aforementioned Shatterday (I still have it, its white cover sporting a brilliant painting of Ellison in a slick suit, looking shocked as the phone receiver in his hand turns into a deadly serpent). A little while later, the new Twilight Zone debuted, and while I hated the first story in the pilot (a heavy-handed story about nuclear annihilation), I loved Alan Brennart's skillful adaptation of "Shatterday," a tale about a man who means to call his mother, accidentally calls his own number instead-- and hears himself answer on the other end (I will spoil nothing else-- rent the episode on DVD and watch Bruce Willis give a heartbreaking performance as that man). I was hooked, and Harlan Ellison became not so much a writer as a way of life.

I mean no disrespect to Ellison's staggering gifts when I say that discovering his work just as adolescence hit was perfect timing-- for a nerdy tween with all kinds of social adjustment issues (and increasingly bad acne), Ellison's ability to call bullshit and distill rage and confusion was a godsend, a life preserver to cling to in difficult emotional times. As my Starlog and Marvel comics subscriptions suggested, I was already someone who found escape and meaning in fantasy stories. But Ellison was different. Yes, he used the tropes of fantasy, horror and speculative fiction as well as anyone ever has. But this was not about escape, but about illuminating the world around me, and finding the courage to face what I was feeling and deal with it. That could cause its own problems, of course-- wanting to replicate the honesty and bravery of Ellison's prose in my day-to-day life sometimes meant that I just ended up alienating people even further-- but in a moment when everything and everyone seemed to be spinning and turning upside down around me on a daily basis (I've always thought the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers were the perfect metaphors for this stage of my life), Ellison's rock-solid example stood out, guided, and secured.

Strangely, perhaps, as someone who loved fantastic tales, it was almost always Ellison's non-speculative work that most grabbed me. I loved the introductions to his books as much as the tales they told. I was thrilled when a collection of his work would contain an essay amidst the brilliant fiction (such as "The 3 Most Important Things In Life," from which I learned the term "movie crawl," and that "At Disney, nobody fucks with The Mouse"). I also learned a lot from An Edge In My Voice, a collection of columns he wrote for Starlog, The LA Weekly, and other outlets (for which he won the Silver Pen for Journalism from International PEN). And I devoured Spider Kiss, his 1961 novel about the early days of rock. Ellison's was a voice that didn't so much transcend genre as overwhelm it, devour it, and spit it out as something unrecognizable and beautifully new. Of his speculative work, the story that will always live with me is "Jefty Is Five," which uses the conceit of a never-aging boy to explore issues of time, maturity and the imagination, to devastating effect. If John Cheever and Ray Bradbury collaborated on a story, it might turn out something like "Jefty," but even they never would've generated the same emotions Ellison does in just a few pages. I get a bit choked up just remembering the story; I haven't read it in at least twenty years, but I will never forget its climax, or the clear-eyed way Ellison drags us like teary-eyed babies to its logical conclusion. It's a gut-punch of a tale, all the more powerful for its slow build, for how well Ellison deploys bright humor and his eye for everyday detail in order to express the fragility of a childhood day.

As I got older, and my social awkwardness either faded or at least seemed less awkward around the other high school kids, my interest in Ellison lessened. It never entirely went away-- seeing an Ellison book on the shelf was still an event (in an ironic restaging of that long-ago book crawl, I remember my friend Chad and I splitting a stack of Ellison books we found in a Chicago second-hand store), and I was always interested when I saw his byline on magazine covers or television. But there was something about his anger and absolute certainty that felt less accessible to me as time passed. Was the world really that black-and-white? Were our choices always that stark, their moral dimensions always so absolute? I told myself that in moving away from Ellison, I was actually paying tribute to what I felt he'd taught me-- the need to stay true to yourself in the face of others, to say "no," even if you were saying no to one of the writers who'd taught you that very thing.

Many years later, I was watching the Mystery Science Theater version of Mitchell; when Crow and Servo responded to the image of a short, surly-looking guy being booked at the police desk by exclaiming, "Hey, Harlan Ellison's been arrested again!," I laughed. A couple of summers ago, I found out he had a webpage, where fans and friends gathered to talk about his work and life, and where he himself would stop in to answer questions, make announcements, and offer views on whatever was on his mind at that moment. I posted a couple of times, once to tell him how much his work meant to me, once to mention a website that played "Old Time Radio" shows (a passion of mine that I knew he shared). He never responded, but that was okay-- I hadn't expected him to, and I mostly just wanted to say "thanks" in what little way I could, for all the things his work had taught me, and all the ways it had sustained me in difficult times.

There's a passage in one of his book introductions where Ellison talks about being on a radio show; a woman calls in and tells a heartbreaking story of pain and depression, and Ellison writes that, in that moment, all he wanted to do was tell that woman, "You are not alone!" I think of that passage a lot when life is stressing me out, and I think of it sometimes when I teach or write-- that one of the best things we can do is to tell people who might otherwise feel isolated or out-of-place that there are others like them, that they will find community, that it's okay to swim against powerful emotional or intellectual tides. I thought of it again when I read that Harlan Ellison may be dying, and that he's almost certainly written his last book. Because of that news, he's been on my mind in a way that he hasn't for twenty years, and I just want to tell this man I've never met (but somehow feel like I know as intimately as anyone, such is the power of his writing), you are not alone. And thank you-- for the humor, the insight, the rage, and for all the ways your work has pissed me off over the years. To paraphrase the Gunter Eich quote you're so fond of, you have been sand rather than oil in the machinery of my life-- but somehow, I know I run better because of it.

Discography

2010-06-20T04:23:00.002-04:00

If you're the kind of person for whom pop music isn't just background noise or an occasional hobby but an all-consuming passion, Phonogram: Rue Britannia is sure to set your discophilia reeling with pleasure. If you have a particular love of post-'77 British pop, then the book's effortless magpie of visual and verbal references to bands like Oasis, Blur and Pulp should set off long-buried synapses of sonic memory like a needle hitting vinyl. And if you (like me) are the kind of person who might comb its witty and informative post-story "Glossary" to see what the authors say about favorite bands (and to quietly assemble lists of future I-tunes purchases in your head), then forget it, you're finished, dead, you're gone-- Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's gorgeous graphic novel is a must. Put down that Primal Scream seven-inch and get to your local comic shop immediately.

Originally published by Image as a six-issue, black-and-white miniseries in 2006 (with a follow-up miniseries"sequel"--actually individual stories set in the same magical universe--released last year), Phonogram opens with quick glances at a set of signifiers-- reflecting dark-rimmed glasses, just-so haircut, leather jacket, and the all-important lighter-'n'-cigarettes--whose fetish qualities are enhanced by their capture in individual, unconnected frames. This is our lovable anti-hero David Kohl (in his own self-description, "Toxic and male. Utterly noxious. Totally perfect") getting ready for the evening, and these early panels immediately keys into the ways pop music can both deconstruct our identities as commodified consumers (we are what we wear), and rarify those same impulses (we are, simultaneously & gloriously, both stand-out individual and blissed-out member of a community).

More than most pop fans, though, David's literal being is determined by his taste-- he is a "phonomancer," able to analyze the qualities of singles and albums in order to unleash their actual, otherworldly magical qualities. In this netherworld running parallel to "our" 2006 London, phonomancers are "made" through certain aspects (i.e., genres or periods) of popular music, and David's is Britpop. Only something is happening to the Goddess Britannia, and it's starting to mess with David's memories. He flips on the stereo, starts singing along to Echobelly's "Great Things," and freezes-- when the hell did he ever love Echobelly? He starts to remember events in subtly different ways, and is haunted by his increasing inability (as Roland Barthes might put it) to make his tastes and his ideas match. This is deadly for a phonomancer, and David is further spooked by a confrontation with The Goddess (presumably of all music, although its left wonderfully ambiguous just how far her powers spread) at a nightclub, where he's put under her hex. Over the final five issues, David must determine what's happening to his aspect, before the musical fates disappear his essence forever.

That's the basic outline of the series' narrative, and it's a wonderful riff on the power of musical fandom to determine who we are, and the complex critical categories we construct to detail those personae. For anyone who grew up devouring musical magazines, obsessively checkmarking lists of albums and bands, getting in heated arguments about pop music's meaning in dorm rooms, or writing things like "the power of musical fandom to determine who we are, and the complex critical categories we construct to detail those personae," there will be more than a few shudders of recognition in these pages. McKelvie's beautfully minimalist black-and-white pages capture the tight mod fashions of his subjects while leaving enough breathing room for the reader to add his or her own memories to the mix. Gillen's prose doesn't overwhelm those images, alternating between a terse, compact phrasing (often coming in captions or short word balloons) that functions like cynical captions, and longer passages of Romantic longing (as in a fabulous four-page interior monologue in issue #2-- on pop, religion, nostalgia and community--whose sensual verbosity could function even without McKelvie's art, and whose pitch-perfect mixture of satire and regret is worth your $14.99 alone).

It's also very funny-- David's own coming-to-grips with his flaws and feelings is played for both pathos and laughs, and there's a lovely, eccentric supporting cast (including the social-climbing second-in-command of David's coven, his nobbish sidekick Kid-With-Knife, and an old, unreconstructed punk phonomancer who feels like what Greil Marcus or Simon Reynolds might have become if they couldn't write). I also loved Britannia herself--all bitchy mod entitlement--and her po-faced attendants, who quickly slug anyone who dismisses the Kinks.

In the end, though, it's the reader who is the most important "character" in the book, and I've gone on a bit about fandom here because it is that mix (in all senses of the word) of text and reader that is crucial to the book's success. If you've never heard any Britpop (or have a real antipathy for the genre), Phonogram still works as a straight-ahead comedy/adventure/coming-of-age story. But as the original issue covers reproduced here suggest, you'll get a lot more out of it if you get the jokes and references, and figuring out what to do with those passions and memories is the creators' challenge as much as David Kohl's. There's a clear love for both Britannia and its phonomancer in these pages-- David is very much in the tradition of the irony-fueled Martin Amis ne'r do wells that Blur claimed inspired their seminal record Parklife (See? I told you these references were inevitable). But there's also a suspicion of those same qualities--David's coven leader rejects his call to save Britannia by mentioning "Britannia was a pretty, petty little sixties goddess. She was a paraochial, xenophobic bitch."

The split that resolves this tension, according to the authors, is between "retromancers"-- trapped in nostalgia, "that mass of pseudo-patriotic bollocks"--and phonomancing as a forward-thinking movement; indeed, to move here means not just dancing at a club (a constantly recurring image) but shifting your whole identity through pop magic. Or, in both discophilic and writerly terms, remixing it.

Phonogram is deliberately vague about how its magic works, and the few times we do see an explicit referencing of its ways (as in Britannia's temple, or the aging punk photomancer, or David writing out and scratching out a list of new musical aspects to choose that includes "radical poptimism"), the supernatural tends to be played for laughs. It's far more powerful to make the magic fleeting, keep it as a metaphor for taste and history and style, because that mixture of the clear and the muddy (or what we might call the lyric and the timbre) better captures what it feels like for the perfect pop single to wash over you, as something you feel rather than explicitly articulate. There have been many times in this post when I've accidentally typed "writer" instead of "reader," and I think that's McKelvie and Gillen's great magic trick: in the more active use spaces of pop music, DJing, comics and blogging, the reader is invited to be both creator and receiver of meaning, to remix and simulate the groove of the song on the comic book page and in his head. As we read, our pleasure becomes blurred.

Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: Recent Downloads, Replays and Musical Obsessions

2010-06-16T19:34:00.014-04:00

Preaching Practices

2010-06-12T16:52:00.003-04:00

Peter Ames Carlin's recent biography of Paul McCartney is compulsively readable, a gracefully written blend of cultural history, biography and occasional music criticism that carries us to some familiar pop landmarks with style. I want to happily recommend it, but still have some qualms about the familiarity of those landmarks that Carlin visits-- not so much the details of McCartney's life or the Beatles' achievements, but the cliched nature of the frameworks into which those details are often rammed.

Earlier in the day, I was listening to McCartney's 1974 solo album Venus and Mars (one of the gifts of Carlin's book is the desire it creates to go back and rediscover those Wings albums one might have previously dismissed). It might not rank with the highs of its immediate predecessor, Band On the Run (although as "You Gave Me The Answer," "Listen To What The Man Said" and the alluring title track all confirm, it's a solid piece of mid-seventies pop), but what's really striking about Venus and Mars is the seamless flow from one song to another, how a bass line from one song carries over into the next, or a harmony at the top of the record is echoed by one in the middle. Despite the scene-setting of "Venus and Mars" and "Rock Show" at the top of the record, it's not a concept album-- there's no carried through narrative or even the hint of one (a la the opening and reprise/closing of Sgt. Pepper), but working off the details of arrangement and timbre creates a coherence based less on lyrics or themes than on intuitions and snatches of remembered melody (this style of crafting a floating, called-back-to musical "personality" across a disc, which McCartney has used throughout his solo career, is explicitly acknowledged in the title of his most recent solo piece, 2007's Memory Almost Full).

Over at Yellow Dog, Jeff Rice describes a way of working-- through the rhetoric of collecting-- that might tease out McCartney's ongoing methodology. Writing of Liz Rohan's recent piece in Composition Studies, he notes her interest in photographic detail:

The detail is not meant to undercover an argument or perform a deconstruction or a representation/idea but rather to further a type of thought motivated by pleasure (punctum, jouissance, third meaning) not captured by denotative or connotative meanings.

The collection has long served writing purposes. Benjamin’s Arcades, Harry Smith’s unfinished Anthology project (a massive folk music collection), Sirc’s Virtual Urbanism, and so on. To collect is to conduct research. It is to, as Latour notes, gather. In the age of new media, gathering, collecting, and aggregating have become like-minded rhetorical gestures. The Web has exemplified this point to an extreme: Google News, RSS feeds, Facebook Top News/Most Recent News status feeds, and so on. Most of the Web is a collection.

What cannot be lost in this collecting, though, is the detail. The moment that pricks. The moment that sparks some kind of reaction. Rohan points to the Credit/No Credit markings on a school assignment in 1984. In each temporal photograph I showcased, I pointed to some detail (like my father’s unexplained apron in 1965).

This was the project of The Rhetoric of Cool (cool functioning as a detail that motivates a collection of 1963 moments). It is also a project of my obsession with craft beer, an obsession marked by a collection: visits to places, bottles, photographs, ratings, blog posts, etc. I don’t need to remind anyone that most writing pedagogy ignores the logic of the collection in favor of the logic of the single stated thesis statement. In the world of thesis statements, research is treated as a projection outward from that statement (confirmation favored over exploration). And as many times as I’ve given the lecture to fellow teachers regarding a pedagogy of the collection (the collection, which, in turn, produces the claim or position; not the other way around), I seldom see shifts in practice.

Another mode of collecting is less visual than sonic-- that of the record collector who seeks out both popular hits and obscure rarities by artists (or within genres) that he admires and perhaps wants to master. Some of the best passages in Carlin's book document McCartney's obsessive teenaged tracking down of early rock and R&B recordings (often in the company of friend John Lennon), and his fierce desire to both learn those songs and use them as a creative springboard towards his own nascent songwriting. More importantly, Carlin skillfully reads this as a moment of Barthesian punctum, what Rice calls above "The moment that pricks. The moment that sparks some kind of reaction": following his mother's death from breast cancer in late 1956, McCartney's early exposure to rock-n-roll in 1957 (coincidentally, also the year Barthes' Mythologies is published) becomes both escape and expression, as he hears the energy and rawness of the new music as a way of transforming his inexpressible grief into something literally electric.

According to Carlin, this wedding of early rock and dark shadows is, for McCartney, the wound that never heals. Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran will be the music McCartney circles back to following a variety of personal and professional traumas: the break-up of the Beatles (where the lo-fi aesthetic of early rock produces McCartney's blend of blues jam and acoustic openness), mid-80s career slumps (which are followed by a covers album of 50s rock released-- intitially, at least--only in the Soviet Union) and most dramatically the death, also from breast cancer, of wife Linda in 1998 (when a destroyed McCartney, unable to contemplate his own songs, records a series of blistering 50s songs called Run Devil Run). McCartney's endless discipline at the guitar and piano, along with his remarkable talent, allowed him to absorb the details of these songs so well (Carlin notes that McCartney has near-perfect muscle memory for playing these early songs, even if he'd only heard them once), and to slowly rough his own style (with Lennon, and then on his own) out of it-- as Jeff says, "the collection, which, in turn, produces the claim or position; not the other way around." The passages on the Lennon-McCartney collaboration constantly note both its improvisatory nature (done on the fly while on tour, or quickly around a home piano, or jammed out in the studio) and its reliance less on thesis ("this is the song from a to b") than a collage aesthetic: Lennon almost immediately finding the dark counterpoint to McCartney's optimism when the latter sang "I have to admit, it's getting better all the time" by firing back, "It can't get much worse"; McCartney blending John's lyrical fragment with his own to create "A Day In The Life" (then coming up with the great orchestral ending to the piece) and John returning the favor two years later by offering up a slice of lyric and harmony ("Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time") to complement Paul's melody on "Don't Let Me Down." This back-and-forth dialogue of brilliant bits (what John himself would playfully call "skywriting by word of mouth") fueled the Beatles, and reached its apogee in literal collaging: it was McCartney, whose interest in avant-garde musicians like John Cage led to numerous tape experiments in the mid-sixties, who came up with the surreal back-and-forwards tape loops on "Tomorrow Never Knows," after which Lennon would apply what his partner told him to the dissonant sonic spaces of The White Album's "Revolution No. 9." It may be the brilliance of the whole song (or concept album) that the Beatles are often discussed through, but it's arguably the tiniest details of the songs-- a harmony here, a lyric there, and guitar breaks everywhere-- that makes the music actually resonate in the memory. And for McCartney, following those details and using them to write his own pleasure became as natural as breathing.

This weave off the detail that McCartney captures so easily in song is something Carlin is very good at capturing in his prose-- you might say it's the most "McCartneyesque" insight in the book, as Carlin moves (often in a single paragraph) from a Liverpool stadium to Paul's father Jim playing at a piano in 1947, as easily as one of Paul's bass-lines shifts from rhythm to melody and back again. And as with a McCartney song, while the results are occasionally banal ("Community is a beautiful thing, and also extraordinarily complex to maintain when visions and ideals come into conflict"-- well, yes), they are at other times striking (as when Carlin slips a brief review of the 2005 album Chaos and Control in the Backyard into a longer passage on the dissolution of McCartney's marriage to Heather Mills) and sometimes downright revealing, as with the moving tales of Mary McCartney's death, or the three-page anecdote that opens Chapter Six and finds McCartney and Lennon quietly facing off in front a dressing room mirror in 1962, each man's emotions and responses seeming to predict their up-and-down friendship over the next eighteen years (when Carlin circles back to a related anecdote at the end of the chapter, involving the two men, McCartney's soon-to-be girlfriend Jane Asher, and a really off-color joke, the narrative flavor is so rich you can't wait to see what happens next).

But as Jeff notes in his Yellow Dog post, what matters isn't just what you're collecting (styles, notes, biographical data), but what you do with it: "A pile of documents is only as useful as the details discovered, the details which form patterns and connections (showing the obvious and the novel) and thus generate some form of writing." And while individual passages of Paul McCartney: A Life are often breathtakingly fun, there are many moments when Carlin falls prey to what might be termed High Lennonism.

Reaching its peak in 1988 (with the brouhaha over Albert Goldman's error-filled "tell-all" bio of John Lennon, and David Wolper's equally problematic but far more worshipful film Imagine: John Lennon), its a church of Beatles criticism whose high priests seem insistent to the point of pathology about projecting John Lennon as the Beatles' chief creative figure, political visionary and (in Carlin's apt phrasing) "secular saint." It seems understandable in the wake of the Beatles break-up (as with all great former partnerships-- Camus/Sartre and Truffaut/Godard come to mind immediately--fans are forced to recognize a false binary and choose one or the other), and certainly gained emotional resonance in the decade after Lennon's murder; in the two decades since-- after Beatles reissues, endless books, George's successful solo albums in the late 80s and tragic death from cancer in 2001, and McCartney's various projects and tours (Ringo doesn't play a role here; Ringo is always Switzerland in these critical battles)--Lennonism has receded a bit and the story of the band/post-band has regained more human proportions and balances of its protagonists' flaws.

Which is why, for all of its great points, Carlin's book occasionally feels like an arriere garde, devoting 183 of its 340 pages to a fast-paced but ultimately conventional reading of the Beatles' rise-and-fall, and being sure to play Lennon's "rapier wit" off his partner's insecurities and supposed "ruthlessness." The Carlin snark is strongest (and at its least original or insightful) on the subject of each man's star persona. While he takes care to detail Paul's mid-sixties excursions into high art, experimental cinema and avant-garde music, and how this inflected the Beatles' recordings (material dealt with at greater length and with more historical context in Barry Miles' hagiographic Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now), he can't help but frame these triumphs as a Lennon tragedy: "Paul's burgeoning confidence was, in John's eyes, part of what was killing [John]." He mocks Paul's perfectionism--"Paul also aggravated the always impatient John by doing endless retakes on his own lead vocals, then kept the engineers occupied for hours as he labored painstakingly on his bass part for 'Lovely Rita'"-- without noting that one of those engineers, Geoff Emerick, wrote in his memoir that such perfectionism was something he admired in McCartney (Carlin quotes the book elsewhere, while politely ignoring the passages where Emerick refers to the sainted Lennon as a bullying thug who simply wouldn't put the same kind of work in as his bandmate, but would gladly complain about the results). But the really grating stuff is Carlin's coverage of the Beatles' American tours, where McCartney's cheery professionalism and endless press backslapping is read as a pathology against Lennon's more "authentic" refusal to engage with such frippery: in one depressing anecdote, Lennon responds to a young woman who shows up at his hotel room and declares "I'm Donald O'Connor's daughter!" by immediately spitting out "I was just hearin' on the radio about your dad's being dead," causing the woman to run out in tears (to clarify, the "Make 'Em Laugh" star wasn't actually dead), then responding to Paul's criticisms with "I'm fuckin' sick of everyone comin' in, I'm the lord mayor of this, I'm the daughter of that-- I don't give a fuck! I'm John Lennon!"

Well, sure. And it's easy to hear Paul's response ("We've got to behave, or where gonna lose all this!") in the smarmy tones of a desperate PR man. Generations of rock fans (me included) have grown up on the myths of outsider authenticity presented to us by Rolling Stone, Spin and Pitchfork, to the point where (as Barthes reminded us in Mythologies), they become naturalized as "real": as Lennon himself sang on Plastic Ono Band, "As soon as you're born, they make you feel small/By givin' you no time instead of it all." Poor dear-- is there anything harder than being a pop star? It takes a true outsider to the outsider myth to, as Lennon himself might have put it, call bullshit:

There's no putdown in the critic's arsenal more dismissive, or easy, than "bubblegum." To zap a performer with this particular insult is to brand him as a fake, a manufactured morsel aimed directly at the gullet of the least hip consumer. The artist is judged by his fanbase, and most six-year-olds are distinctly lacking in street cred.

Bubblegum offends the myth of Rock as an oppositional, "outsider" cultural force. To its detractors, bubblegum is read as an "insider" music, although in truth much bubblegum music came out on small independent labels, as opposed to the edgier sounds of the accepted underground. The major labels did a great job of selling their product as packaged rebellion, and the late sixties fanzines concurred. It was only when they overplayed their hand ("The Man Can't Bust Our Music," the "Boston Sound" debacle, overpromoting Moby Grape) that the pseudo-hipsters rejected these hairy offerings.

Rock criticism, born of and beholden to the sixties, stumbles badly when confronted with music produced outside of its short set of registered myths. Session singers? Studio musicians? That's not rock and roll! Except for Motown. And Stax. And the Beach Boys and portions of the Byrds' career. And, retroactively, disco. And Dusty in Memphis. And Richard Davis' sublime bass work on Astral Weeks.

We think it's time to retire this folkie stab at a false authenticity. We're not immune to the allure of the Romantic Artist, nor have we traded our Townes Van Zandt collections for BSB memorabilia. But this myth of the Self Contained Band (beginning with the Beatles) and its offspring, Anarchist Gangs (Clash, Mekons), Artist Collectives (Can, the Band at Big Pink), Populist Unions (Bruce & the E-Street Band, Fugazi) breeds in the ripe compost of abandoned lefty utopias. It's no measure of the music.

Or to put it another way, one might flip the script and read John's dismissiveness of the fans as upper-middle-class, rude boy entitlement, and Paul's almost desperate embrace of them as reflective of his both his working-class background and the sense of loss bred by his mother's passing-- also reductive, but at least different. But to do so would mean noting John's posher background, just as a more balanced account of Paul's sillier Wings records or early 80s solo records might also note the mid-seventies black hole Lennon's music falls into (anyone who wants to dismiss Wings as sheer Muzak must first listen to the entireity of Lennon's 1973 Mind Games without tearing their ears off). But in this account, as in so many, we easily move from Imagine to Double Fantasy without even a stop at Some Time In New York City.

Which is fine-- I can't emphasize enough that Carlin has a lot of good anecdotes throughout the book (and in many ways, McCartney's less savory aspects make the glow of his music all the more remarkable). My complaint is less with Carlin than with the ways in which narratives about pop stars-- particularly well-known ones-- so often fall into cliches that have less to do with the detail and more with that insistence upon a previously-known thesis that Jeff so laments in his Yellow Dog post. It seems even thoughtful and sympathetic writers like Carlin can't seem to escape the dominant practices. Robert Ray rightly calls it "path dependency", and notes how easy it is for any self-proclaimed "radical" style to transform into hardened ideology:

The field now gathers around these terms, certainly useful, but beaten to death. How did film studies, once the freshest, most daring wing of the humanities, settle into this rut? The answer is what economic historians call path dependence, an idea developed as a way of explaining why the free market's invisible hand does not always choose the best products. Beta and Macintosh lose to inferior alternatives, while a clumsy arrangement of keyboard symbols (known as QWERTY, for the first six letters on a typewriter's upper-left) becomes an international standard. Although an initial choice often occurs for reasons whose triviality eventually becomes evident (momentary production convenience, fleeting cost advantages), that decision establishes a path dependence almost impossible to break. Superior keyboard layouts have repeatedly been designed, but with so many typists in the world using QWERTY, they haven't a chance.

In the end, John Lennon is done an ironic disservice by his high priests-- no one was more self-critical and withering of pop mythology than he (a long passage in the biography Lennon documents John's dismay at how long his friends were mourning Elvis Presley's death: "Be here now" was John's advice, which naturally had its meaning exactly reversed by Oasis 20 years later). And while Carlin constantly returns to the other dark shadow McCartney's supposedly labored under for 40 years-- that of his ex-partner-- it might be more honest and self-reflexive to say that it is not Lennon, but the shadow of Lennonism-- its odd mixture of nostalgia, politics, and pop--that he's facing. No question that, as Carlin says, there's a bit of Narcissus in McCartney, as there is in any pop star, "too in love with his own youthful reflection to recognize how unappealing his mature face has become." But couldn't we say the same thing about cultural criticism, and its inability to look at the myths of the sixties, and finally say (hello) goodbye to all that?

Damages

2010-04-16T18:47:00.003-04:00

My brother-in-law has a good piece up at the Huffington Post that I want to call to your attention. It's a shameless plug, I know, but it's for a good cause, and it's a nicely written article. Go, please, and read.

A Sucker Born Every Minute

2010-04-08T19:07:00.003-04:00

Glenn Beck has a rare moment of self-awareness, and reminds us that the legacy of Elia Kazan is still very much alive.

In other news-- yes, I'm still here. A busy semester and a lot of travel and family time have been happily eating up my time-- I love you all, but I feel no guilt when I say that life should always trump blog. But I do have a bunch of posts talking to me from the back of my head, and I hope to get to some of them soon. Hope everyone is having a lovely spring!

Well...That Happened

2010-03-08T02:32:00.009-05:00

Why didn't they just let Neil Patrick Harris host the whole thing?

After the always-awkward opening meet-and-greets on the red carpet (so much more fun on E! than ABC, because at least the former is completely invested in the interviews-- I suspect Ryan Seacrest and his fellow hosts don't even know there is a ceremony going on inside), the 82nd annual Academy Awards opened with a delightfully risque number from the former Doogie Howser, one whose energy and sense of go-for-broke fun would prove to be sadly lacking over the course of the next four (!) hours. Perhaps relieved that he was bailing from the Titanic early, Harris gave his all to lines about "dropping the soap" and other Hollywood activities, selling the childish, inappropriate cheese with gusto, and ending with a big "see you, suckers!" grin on his face. There was no way that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were going to top that.

But they could have tried. On paper, Martin and Baldwin seemed like ideal hosts-- funny, charming, stars of stage, screen and television (thus drawing together the three media spaces Oscar must simultaneously play to in a way that last year's ceremony so disastrously didn't), egotistical enough to hold the audience but gracious enough to know when to let the winners shine. But from the moment they hit the stage, started telling obvious jokes about their careers, and engaged in an endless stream of Villanch-level humor about the ten Best Picture nominees, I just wanted them off my television. Glenn Kenny astutely noted in his live-blog that Martin seemed more comfortable flying solo, and I would add that either host probably would've done a fine job on their own. But somehow, the hoped-for Hope-and-Crosby dynamic of pairing them never really came off. Baldwin seemed nervous, constantly glancing towards Martin as if afraid to step on the laugh lines. "Don't worry, Alex!," I kept wanting to say. "There aren't any!"

In the end, the nervousness of the hosts and the awkwardness of their chemistry could've been worked out or papered over, if the writing and planning of the show wasn't so poor. Whether it was the obviousness of the jokes, their ham-fisted mean-spiritedness (no problem with mean-spiritedness, especially on a show as self-serious as the Oscars, but please be clever about it), the strained connections to the films (hey, did you know that James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were married once?? And she gave him a picnic basket with a timer?? HAR!!), or the weird self-involved nostalgia (The Cooler! The Jerk! Wayne's World!), the flat-footedness of Martin and Baldwin's opening bit set the tone for the rest of the evening, and seemed to enervate the audience. Seriously, I don't know if I've ever seen a more bored group at a big awards show. It's probably always more exciting for the nominees and winners, but there's usually at least the appearance of excitement and investment by the other audience members (most of whom are actors, after all). This time--bupkis.

But can you blame them? The follow-up to that anvilicious opening act was a series of demographically-driven presenters who either a) had no real reason to be presenting awards (the omnipresent awards ceremony junkie Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Lopez); b) seemed to miss the tone of a good awards show (I like you, Ryan Reynolds, but you're introducing The Blind Side, not addressing the UN); or c) reeked of unearned superiority (really, Kristen Stewart? Really?). And I haven't even mentioned Miley Cyrus yet. Tina Fey and Steve Carrell were great (and probably would've been better hosts-- again and again, the Academy forgets that this is primarily a TV show, and works well when hosted by people invested in that medium). Robert Downey, Jr. was a hoot (and as my friend Ro mentioned, looking quite the Bogdanovich impersonator), Ben Stiller was funny, and Zoe Saldana was immensely graceful and carried herself with far more class than the show's hosts (although having her enter to "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" was deeply creepy). But those were some of the rare bright spots in a show that seemed desperate to milk the energy and humor of the Golden Globes and the tween appeal of the MTV Music Awards, but couldn't quite commit to any of it. The result was a four-hour (!!) cinematic purgatory, a neither/nor mish-mash that probably failed to drive the ratings the way the producers hoped, but also didn't appeal to movie geeks like me who watch the show because we enjoy its pomp and silliness and investment in the movies.

Speaking of which...It says a lot about the layers of awfulness that one had to constantly peel away that I haven't even mentioned the films themselves yet. And that's this crap-fest's greatest failure-- that its half-assery framed some fairly decent nominees and winners. Kathyrn Bigelow is one of the most interesting directors in Hollywood (no, Barbra and whatever genius decided to play her off to-- I am not making this up-- "I Am Woman," not one of the best "woman directors," simply one of the best, period), and The Hurt Locker is a gripping film: she deserved a great ceremony that would enhance the celebration, and so did the movie. So did Christoph Waltz, so brilliant as the insidiously charming Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds, and equally charming in his poetic acceptance speech. So did Jeff Bridges, who's been nothing but good for forty years in big films and small, and was finally rewarded for it. Michael Giacchino deservedly won for his moving score for Up, and the lyrical nature of both that score and his lovely speech suggests he could've taught the producers something about grace, wit and pacing. And while I have not and probably will not watch The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock was moving and lovely in her speech, and her flair for comedy at the end (referring to herself as "Meryl Streep's lover") suggests she'll avoid the Julia Roberts curse of post-award self-seriousness.

Yes, Clooney looked a little out of sorts and there were far too many cuts to Meryl Streep (who had the good taste to appear mortified by all the attention). Sandy Powell seemed uncertain if she wanted to use her speech to promote fashion or herself (not that she couldn't have done both at once, just that she did neither very well), and Elinor Burkett's shove of Roger Ross Williams away from the microphone during the Best Documentary Short was frankly just astonishing. Mo'Nique's speech was a model for the disingenuous stars of tomorrow, and made me even less anxious to catch up with Precious. And I didn't need to hear about James Cameron's "vision thing" every time his technicians picked up another award (although it was no duller than the "New Zealand on Parade" repetitiousness of the Lord Of The Rings a few years ago). But for the most part the nominees seemed pretty gracious, the winners either articulate or harmlessly dull. They all seemed a lot more engaged with what the movies meant to them than the ceremony's producers and presenters did.

That was most apparent in the ceremony's treatment of Hollywood history. Last year I went on and on about my anger regarding the shabby treatment of the "In Memoriam" section of the awards. That was better this year-- I could've done without the split-screen of clips, which made it hard to concentrate on what we were seeing, and I definitely could've done without somnambulant crooner James Taylor butchering "In My Life" over them. But at least they avoided the swooping camera shots of last year, which seemed designed to show off the room more than the movies or their deceased makers.

No, this year, the real travesty was in the honorary awards. I like John Hughes a lot, and was not at all offended that they gave him a segment-- it was sweet, and fun to see the clips, and well-handled by his aging stars, and it gave Jon Cryer a break from Charlie Sheen. But somewhere in the show, I think they could've cut out one or three interpretive dances and a few of the hoarier jokes to make room for Lauren Bacall, Gordon Willis and Roger Corman. Corman is probably the most important developer of directorial talent in the post-studio age, Gordon Willis is the most gifted cinematographer alive, and Bacall is simply Bacall. Are you telling me on a show as invested in campiness, star glamour, and clip shows as this one that they couldn't have made room for scenes from The Godfather or The Purple Rose of Cairo, a few one-liners from Corman, and an elegant wave to the audience from Slim Browning? They shoved these luminaries into a separate show on a separate day weeks before the "real" ceremony, and the two minutes of it they let us see between Martin/Baldwin har-hars was the most enjoyable part of the whole four-hour (!!!) ceremony. The Academy likes to tell us again and again that they are not just about awards, that they also engage in preservation, education and encouragement of new filmmakers. That's all true, and very honorable, but why not highlight that some more at the one public event everyone does know about? No offense to the great Meryl Streep and the charming Sandra Bullock, but one sultry glower from Bacall is worth a thousand of your tearful cries or wacky pratfalls.

Then again, what do I know? I spent the ceremony chatting and snarking about the goings-on with friends on Facebook, while simultaneously e-mailing with my parents about it (with occasional breaks for Chinese food and increasingly necessary beer). After the awards, I checked the illustrious Mr. Kenny's live-blog updates (linked above) and saw we'd laughed or cringed at many of the same moments. I found a wealth of great Facebook status updates about it from friends and students when I checked those pages, and I look forward to catching up with more media coverage in the coming days. In other words, I'm one of those multi-tasking Gen X movie nerds that the Academy presumably wants to capture in their viewership, and so are many of my friends. And yet so many of us were left cold by what we saw, our enthusiasm slowly drooping over the night. What the Academy seems to be increasingly forgetting is that the "new new thing" (to borrow Michael Lewis's phrase) of blogging and other multi-media platforms (and their often-attendant ironic poses) doesn't foreclose the pleasures of history and style, the need to link the razzle of James Cameron to the dazzle of film's rich past. These things can and do exist symbiotically, and it can only benefit each of them to be fed by the other.

One of the sweeter moments of the show was the tribute to lead actors and actresses that stood in for reading the nominations, as it also did last year. Like last year's, it went on too long, and one could also ask why it is always only the stars that get this smoochy treatment (does no one have nice things to say about writers? Directors? Cinematographers?). Still, despite the slight air of "...and someday, you'll do this for me!" self-aggrandizement, there was something lovely and sincere and often wonderfully anecdotal in what the performers had to say about the nominees. It was a glimpse of the real amidst the fake smiles, bad jokes and strained self-righteousness and sentimentality of the rest of the evening. And far from dissipating the otherworldly glamour of the moment, it brought it into sharp relief, and reminded me, at least, of the enchantment that lies at the heart of movies, and should lie at the heart of the awards designed to celebrate them.

UPDATE (3/8, 1 P.M.): Roger Ebert has a funny Twitter feed about the proceedings, and Greg Ferrara offers a heartfelt defense of Sandra Bullock, and what it means to be a working actor.

Oscar Predictions

2010-03-07T14:22:00.004-05:00

Going out on a limb for you, dear reader...

1) Ten films will be nominated for Best Picture.

2) One of those ten will win the award.

3) "One billion people around the world!!" will watch the ceremony. Even if that benchmark isn't reached, the producers and announcers will still say that "one billion people around the world!!" tuned in.

4) Montage!

5) During the "In Memoriam" section of the show, some folks will receive more applause than others. You stay classy, Hollywood.

6) I will be fine with point #5, as long as they let us see the clips of those who've passed. Last year's swooping cinematography, with its implied statement, "let's make the Oscars look like the Tonys, because theater is inherently better than cinema," won't fly this year.

7) Someone will make a "controversial" statement at the podium about their pet issue, which will set off the obligatory kabuki of support/condemnation from various points on the political spectrum.

8) The hosts will be smart and funny, and then castigated a year later when the new host is announced: "(Fill-in-the-blank) is so much more appropriate than DaveJonWhoopiSteveAlecChris!" This roundelay will finally end when the host position is given to Jay Leno, who will never let it go.

9) Montage!

10) We will all laugh at the shallowness of the Oscars, their silly fashions, their overwrought sense of cultural superiority, their sentimentality, their overhyped winners...At least until next year, when the filmmakers we like are nominated, and suddenly the Oscars are the most important marker of quality ever.

Oh, and I suspect The Hurt Locker is going to take it.

The Evolution Of A Superhero In Five Easy Steps

2010-02-28T02:09:00.006-05:00

Armored Vehicles

2010-02-17T04:42:00.007-05:00

I don't know how I missed this, but ace comics critic Douglas Wolk recently engaged in a lengthy, fascinating interview with comics blogger Tom Spurgeon over at The Comics Reporter, talking about the state of the medium, the health of the modern superhero, and the brilliance of Matt Fraction's ongoing run on The Invincible Iron Man. Embedded within the Spurgeon-Wolk piece is an equally fascinating back-and-forth between Fraction and one of his heroes, Denny O'Neil: the two men have a grand time talking about the armored hero they've both written, how the editor-writer-artist relationship has changed in the last forty years, and what the future holds for the funnybook. It's worth reading the two pieces back-to-back, as Spurgeon-Wolk and Fraction-O'Neil are coming at some of the same issues from either side of the reader-writer divide. But the commonalities of the two articles suggest that it's not so much a divide anymore as a fascinating dynamic of creation and reception, the disparate pieces coming together like one of Tony Stark's sleek, powerful inventions.

Preserving The Past

2010-02-13T17:28:00.007-05:00

"For The Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon" begins tomorrow and runs through Feb. 21, and it's the best Valentine's Day event a cinephile could ask for. Co-hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren to benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation, this blogathon will raise both funds and awareness for a crucially important body of cinematic work, and for the Foundation whose efforts are so central to maintaining it. As noted in the ad embedded below (made by the excellent Greg Ferrara, who has been doing wonderful work promoting the event), "Over 80 percent of all films made between 1894 and 1930 are lost forever."

This is tragic, not only for cinephiles, but for anyone interested in history and culture. In my blacklist class yesterday, we talked about the ways in which film offers a window on the uncertainties of the past, thinking about that quality of embalming memory noted by Andre Bazin as part of cinema's ontology: if nothing else, movies can preserve the beliefs and desires and means of representation of a certain moment, in all its glory, strangeness and contradiction. But of course, it can only do that if the films themeselves are preserved.

As someone who writes and teaches so often about the movies from the first half of the 20th century, I am deeply thankful for the work the NFPF does to protect this heritage, from restorations to community projects to DVD releases (coincidentally, much of tomorrow afternoon's CINE 110 screening will be taken up with selections from their excellent "Treasures from the American Film Archives" boxes, which I can't recommend highly enough). I am gobsmacked and grateful for the herculean efforts of Siren and Ferdy in organizing this fantastic event. And as a confirmed film nerd, I am very much looking forward to seeing what some of the best writers in the film blogosphere have to say about those films over the next seven days.

Please go to Ferdy's and Siren's sites for more information. Please browse the Foundation's website through the link above. You can become a fan of the blogathon on Facebook, too. And if you can give money or just the time to read the excellent posts coming in the week ahead, please do so-- this is our shared history, and renewing our connection with it is the best way to look ahead to the art form's future.

Snow Patrol

2010-02-10T00:29:00.005-05:00

"The snow is fallin' down/On our midwestern town..." Well, that's what the otherwise fantastic Fountains of Wayne should've sung. And it certainly describes things here in Cineville, where a day-long weather blitz has shrouded us in piles and piles of drift, and the sky's been transformed into a permanent snow globe. And you know what? That's OK. In fact, even a springtime partisan like myself, grumbling as he has to tromp carefully across the ice (and wincing at the way the slush-piles muck up his boots) felt humbled by how beautiful it all looked this evening. Coming out of tonight's class screening, seeing the black, empty branches of the trees spill like ink against the dark gray of the sky, and watching everything in front of me fill up with dots and dots of white, well....It was pretty cool. And very, very pretty. I give this good feeling about a week, but it's nice while it lasts.

More blogging again soon-- the first week of school is always its own snowstorm of busy, but I'm very psyched at how classes look thus far (I'm teaching What is Cinema? (our intro course), Comics and Animation, and a course on Hollywood and the Blacklist). Stay warm, be safe, and remember-- that sure sign of impending warmth is only a few weeks away.

Snowberlin

2010-02-07T18:07:00.009-05:00

3-In-1: "Heroes"

2010-02-07T00:22:00.000-05:00

I recently finished Marc Spitz's new biography of David Bowie. The book itself, which I hope to blog more about soon, is something of a mixed bag, but its great gift is to cause readers to go back and re-discover the music; I've been listening to everything from Hunky Dory to Outside to Let's Dance to Lodger with renewed appreciation for Bowie's talents. On this cold and snowy weekend (at least for those of us in the north), it felt like a good time to rub up against Bowie's avant-rock heat, and especially to return to my favorite song of his, " 'Heroes'."

Recorded as the title track from his 1977 collaboration with producers Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, and featuring the stunningly layered guitar work of Robert Fripp, " 'Heroes' " (the quotation marks around the word were a deliberate irony on Bowie's part) tells the tale of a young man and woman in love, but separated by the Wall on either side of a divided Berlin. "Heroes" was recorded in West Berlin (it's usually marked as part of Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy" along with Low and Lodger, although that's a stylistic gathering and a nod to Eno's involvement, rather than an accurate geographic marker-- only "Heroes" was actually recorded in the city). Escaping a Los Angeles existence that had produced brilliant music on Station to Station, but had also been soaked in drugs, mysticism and paranoia, Bowie decamped to Europe with Eno, Visconti and Iggy Pop to clean out his system and find renewed aesthetic inspiration. For my money, this period is his most creatively fruitful-- Eno's taste for offbeat arrangements, improvisation and experimentation blended brilliantly with Bowie's gift for melodicism, conceptual imagination and theatricality. While Eno and Bowie would separately go on to make good and great music up to the present day, it's arguable that neither man would ever again find such a sympathetic collaborator.

Naturally, the best place to go after recording your masterpiece in the heart of the 1970s European avant-garde is...The Bing Crosby Christmas Special! Then again, what's more surreal than a video framed by Uncle Bing's words of wisdom?

By 1981, Bowie was a hero himself to many of the New Wave, post-punk and neo-glam rock bands that followed in his wake. He would write and record with one of those bands, Queen, on "Under Pressure," and then pay tribute to their late lead singer, Freddie Mercury, in 1992 (a performance that also marked a reunion with Spiders from Mars co-conspirator Mick Ronson, who died just a few months later) :

Ten years later, after Tin Machine and further Eno collaborations and tours with Nine Inch Nails, Bowie would perform the song on a tour of smaller theaters and arenas. There's no Ziggy Stardust here, no Brechtian performance artist and no Glass Spider stage pyrotechnics; there's just a 55-year old soul singer confident in his legend and comfortable in his skin. I love the stripped-down, funkier arrangement here, the way he walks out (tie undone) like a post-modern Sinatra, and uses a Lou Reed-like growl to slowly build the song into something overwhelming and transcendent:

Trailer Time: Greed Could Be Good

2010-02-06T03:08:00.002-05:00

Self-Styled Siren recently asked her readers about cool and uncool movies and stars-- who or what do we love, even at the risk of public shame? A related question is, what counts as a good movie-- or a bad one? It's a question I like to explore with my Cinema 101/110 students every semester by contrasting two films that are generally put into either category: Citizen Kane and Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, for instance, or Rules of the Game and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Responses to these films might be shaped by perceived technical competence or lack thereof, box office popularity or cult status, critical acclaim or disdain, canonization or disavowal-- all those elements that shape questions of taste. But the question remains-- when we think of movies we love or hate, is there something inherently "good" or "bad" about them for us, that no amount of attempted rescuing or dismissal can ever quite eliminate?

All of this brings me to Wall Street, a film whose critical reputation seems to yo-yo depending on which moment in time one discovers it. Following on the heels of director Oliver Stone's Platoon, Wall Street did pretty well at the box office, won an Oscar for Michael Douglas, and got decent reviews. But my memory is that it was seen as a bit of a letdown for Stone after the cultural impact of Platoon-- critics also noted the simplistic Oedipal conflicts, the melodramatic tone, and the woodenness of Daryl Hannah. "Greed is good" entered into the lexicon (even if it did so stripped of the irony found in the scene where it's spoken), but the film's hyper-timely plot (it came out the winter after the stock market crash of 1987) and unapologetically broad tonal strokes meant that it got a bit lost in the rush of Stone's other Vietnam films (Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth, arguably JFK), his psychedelically violent fantasias (The Doors, Natural Born Killers), and his historical epics (Nixon, Alexander). It's become a cable staple, and a reference point for real-world discussions of economic irresponsibility, but as Stone's own profile has dimmed over the last decade, it didn't seem like it was talked about as much as a movie anymore.

Which is a shame, because I think it might be his most interesting film--it's the only one of his that gives me any pleasure. I love it, in fact, for all the reasons noted above as markers of critical disdain: its shamelessly operatic structure, its cartoonishly blunt look at father-son relationships (which is present in Platoon, too, and far more obnoxious there), its garish fetishizing of cars and homes and over-sized cell phones. Even Daryl Hannah's pointlessly arch line readings (I'll forever be haunted by the way she reads "I'd say Gordon is one of the most astute collectors out there" like a community theater Cruella DeVille) work, because they're framed by a world where everything is over-the-top, and everyone is straining to craft a larger-than-life public image. "Greed is good" is not only Gordon's motto-- it's the film's, whose beautiful people, energetic mobile framing and neon mise-en-scene mock and invert the easy moralisms of its screenplay (cinematographer Robert Richardson is Stone's Bud Fox, getting the sheen the director needs to make his larger points). "I never judged a man by the size of his wallet!," a very good Martin Sheen screams to his son Charlie, and we nod at his sage proletarian posturing; but you can almost imagine Oliver Stone giggling behind his viewfinder, thinking of another way for his camera to lust after Gordon Gekko's striped shirts and Cuban cigars.

Wall Street is the one time Stone gives in to his considerable talent for melodrama; he certainly doesn't put his desire for a political cinema aside (check out that title, after all), but it's forced to filter through rich blues and oranges and yellows that soak through his lens like red wine falling on Gordon's shag white carpet (see? It's so powerful it even makes you write like Edward Bulwer-Lytton-- and that's not an entirely bad thing). And best of all, he seems to have a sense of humor about it, and not the bleak, tries-so-hard-to-be-funny-that-it-begs-the-question humor of Natural Born Killers. Yes, there are the Big Serious Speeches and the showdown at the end in the rainy park (and Charlie Sheen's furrowed brow and constant grimacing are enough to make you forget that he would soon be hilarious in Major League, which was just two years away). But Stone must have caught a bug of gleeful enthusiasm from Michael Douglas, because every time Gordon Gekko is on the screen, the movie threatens to become high comedy (and you really wish it would). Douglas tears into the part with relish, nailing every line (it was a well-deserved Oscar), and his energy is what makes a lot of the film. But I also like the strange campiness of Sheen and Hannah simultaneously making pasta and closing business deals while opera plays in the background; or John C. McGinley's sly creepiness bouncing off of Hal Holbrook's dignified calm; or the line-readings of Terrence Stamp, whose deadpan masks an impishness that occasionally squeezes out; or the sheer perversity of casting James Spader as a lawyer struggling with his ethics. There's something big and lush and marvelously decadent about Wall Street, and I wish Stone had followed that impulse and tried to become Douglas Sirk, instead of working so hard to become a social commentator.

Twenty-three years later, Stone has finally offered a sequel, perhaps realizing that the recent financial meltdown offered him both creative opportunity and possible commercial salvation. The teaser trailer for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is at the top of the post. I'm not sure it works, although I love the metallic gray of the 20th-Century Fox logo, and the lovely grace note of the 1987 big cell phone (a good sign that the funny might still be hiding in Stone somewhere). Douglas looks old and haggard in the early shots, sleek and game in the later, even if I miss the Pat Riley grease of his 1987 hair. Shia LaBouef is both smart box office and an upgrade over Charlie Sheen (with his hunched shoulders, darting eyes and pliable face, it's somehow easier for me to imagine him as an ethically challenged corporate raider-- his body screams "hungry"). And the quick cuts to various signifiers of wealth (planes and penthouses and shiny skyscrapers) is certainly alluring.

It may be a case of too little, too late, and there is a depressingly nostalgic, "late in the Rocky series" vibe about some of the moments it shows: it could either be brilliant or embarrassing. But Stone has never been afraid to walk that line between "good" and "bad" movie-- it's that tension of styles and tones that made the original Wall Street work, and it's why Gordon Gekko is Stone's most compelling creation: because he disavows nothing. After more than a decade of mixed success, Stone must feel a bit like Gordon Gekko-- out for one more score that will bring him back. Which I guess makes me a wary Bud Fox-- I know it might be bad for me, but I can't help but be curious about his latest raid.

What Is Cool?

2010-02-05T11:08:00.004-05:00

That's the question Self-Styled Siren is posing in a roundabout way, by querying her readers about what movies or film icons they consider uncool-- but love, anyway. It's a great topic, explored with the Siren's usual grace and wit, and it leads to one of the best comments threads I've read in a long time, one that will have you filling your Netflix queue with every new post.

What's undoubtedly cool is Dennis Cozzalio's annual Best of 2009 Movie Overview. I'd still like to do one of my own, one of these days, and I'm heartened by Dennis' very true observation: "If the Oscars can wait until February to announce their honorees, then why can’t I?" Yes. And it was worth the wait, as it always is-- Dennis' wide-ranging, staggeringly detailed, beautifully written summary of the best and worst of the year just passed is required reading. On what other post would Seth Rogen, Brad Pitt, Mike Tyson (who makes the best and worst lists) and the Food, Inc. guys all jostle for space?

Sheep Trick

2010-02-04T16:17:00.004-05:00

In a WORLD.... where senatorial candidates face each other in primaries...only Carly Fiorina has the courage to go into Michael Bay territory with her attack ads.

I especially like the sheep falling off the pedestal at the beginning. It's like the perfect mixture of action epic and local used car lot ad.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan).

Getting Kreativ

2010-02-04T02:13:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, both the illustrious Dennis Cozzalio and the engaging Greg Ferrara were kind enough to nominate me for something called the "Kreativ Blogger" award, designed to recognize voices that you think offer something creative (and creatively spelled!) in the blogosphere. It was very nice of both men to recognize me (Dennis even said some wonderfully embarrassing things about my blogging that false modesty prevents me from mentioning here), and I promptly rewarded their kindness by not blogging for a month and failing to pass the award along to seven more bloggers (per the instructions). That's just how a Kreativ Blogger rolls, yo.

Actually, it was because I was taking some time off from blogging in January, and because I wasn't sure how to fulfill one of the central requirements of the award: saying something interesting about myself. But I'm getting ahead of the game a bit, so perhaps I should explain.

Here are the KB Award rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.

Thank you, Dennis and Greg! You are both men of obvious good taste. More seriously, you are both good blog pals, and I'm very grateful for your company.

2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.

See above.

3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.

See the links above, and please spend time perusing their excellent blogs! I know you won't regret it.

4.Name 7 Things about yourself that people might find interesting.

Ah, so here's the crux of the problem. So, let's come back to this after I've mentioned the remaining rules.

5. Nominate 7 Kreative Bloggers.

Well, I'm always coming to these parties late, so chances are all of these folks have been chosen by other bloggers already. But I will name:

-- Brendan Riley, captain of the Digital Sextant;
-- Blogger, bon vivant and TCM guest programmer Self-Styled Siren;
-- That Little Round-Headed Boy, even if he does seem to be taking an extended hiatus from the pitching mound at the moment;
-- Kimberly Lindbergs at the swingin' nightclub known as Cinebeats;
-- Academic and cinephiliac omnivore Paul Johnson, at Expressive Esoterica;
--Edward Copeland, whose return to blogging is the best New Year's gift a lover of smart film criticism could ask for;
--Ed Howard, whose blog Only The Cinema is a model of breadth and depth, and radiates with a passionately poetic love of movies.

6. Post Links to the 7 blogs you nominate.

Done and done (and done five times more).

7. Leave a comment on each on the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.

Will do.

So, the question remains-- how, in the words of Toby Keith, do I "talk about MEEEEE"? In a sense, this blog is always a memoir, even if in a slightly displaced way (it's like when someone asked Pauline Kael when she was going to write an autobiography, and she replied, "I think I already have"-- it's all in the way you look at other things). While I've sometimes talked more directly about teaching, or travel, or family, for the most part I feel more comfortable addressing objects of pop culture and letting the personal seep through, slink around, reflect off of the movies, comics, political figures, or pop songs under discussion. Actually saying, "this is me" is a bit disconcerting (and also a little alluring-- I suspect there is an exhibitionist quality inside every blogger I suspect).

But is it interesting (or, to bring it back the award, kreative)? Well, you be the judge*:

1) I was once hit by a car in college. There, violence is a grabber, right? It was late on a weekday night. I was coming back from studying at the student union, and going to get coffee at a nearby living-learning center that had a javahouse in its basement. I started to cross the campus street, a wide thoroughfare that, in my mind's eye, I now see in a chiaroscuro of pitch-black shadow and blue wash. There was a long line of cars slowly moving up the road towards the performing arts center, and given the darkness and the long row of vehicles, I misjudged how fast they'd move. WHAM! Everything moved in slow motion, the heat from the front of the engine pushed against my leg, and I was knocked to the ground. I was fine-- more shaken up than anything, given that the car was moving, at most, about a mile-per-hour. The driver was very nice, getting out of the car to check on me (I'm sure he thought I was crazy as my embarrassment caused me to quickly mumble, "I'm fine, I'm fine," and scurry away). For months after, the screech of car brakes, even a mile or two away, sent shivers up my spine. But the most lasting consequence was musical: that long line of cars was heading towards an Indigo Girls concert, which forever burned an aversion to didactic folkie music into my brain.

2) I had the good fortune to interview blues singer Koko Taylor in college for the Indiana Daily Student (which I think has now shortened its official name to the IDS). I remember my friend J.J., who played in a blues band, was jealous: "You're interviewing Koko Taylor?!?" It was really just timing: she was coming to Bloomington that summer, and the reduced staff during the office in those hot months meant I got the gig. She and I talked about her career in Chicago, "Hound Dog," and her love of Elvis Presley's voice. I only wish I'd known more about her then, so I could've asked better questions (but I thank her for being such a good sport as I "ummed" my way through our phone call). I felt really sad last year when I heard of her death: I only talked to her for maybe fifteen minutes over the phone, but her kindness and wry sense of humor really came through, and I still think of that summer when I see her CDs in record shops.

3) I played "King Rat" in our fifth-grade musical production of The Pied Piper, and could still sing you some of my lyrics, if you asked nicely. "Today I rule these rats!/Tomorrow, I'll rule this town!/For I am the king of the rats!" And yet, Sondheim never called...

4) Last bit of celebrity name-dropping: I got a special thrill when Jonathan Demme gave me the thumbs-up last fall. Demme came to Oberlin last semester, to do a joint lecture with his friend (and Oberlin alum) James McBride (the novelist and screenwriter who worked on Spike Lee's The Miracle at St. Anna). Two of his children go to school here, and he was kind enough to do a table reading with Oberlin cinema and theater students of his current screenplay-in-progress, as well as participate in an "Inside the Actor's Studio"-style talk/Q&A with McBride. And let me tell you-- he could not have been nicer. Seriously, every Oscar-winning movie legend should be as warm, funny and down-to-earth as Demme was that weekend. He had great anecdotes about working on his movies, he talked about the politics of cinema in a generous, un-self-righteous way, and he displayed a cinephile's true geeky passion when they showed a clip from John Carpenter's The Thing (McBride and Demme decided they wanted to bring clips of films that inspired them-- I think The Thing was one of McBride's choices): the look of pure joy on Demme's face, and the whoop he gave out when the clip was done ("that was cool!," he exclaimed after Kurt Russell took a blow-torch to the monster) was, as Chris Farley might have said on SNL, really awesome. What I mostly remember was how he took every opportunity to turn the spotlight away from him and on to others: McBride, the students, the folks in the audience. He showed such a generosity and curiosity about everyone around him that it was easy to see how his own work-- which I've loved for years-- was an extension of his personality.

So, the Q&A is breaking up and Demme's saying hello to folks who approach him. In my official Oberlin capacity as a teacher, I don't want to completely geek out, but c'mon-- how many times am I going to meet Jonathan Demme? So, I tentatively approach him, put out my hand (which he shakes), and thank him for coming, and for the great table read the previous afternoon. He smiles and nods, and then I say, "I don't mean to completely geek out, but I wanted to tell you-- my girlfriend and I drove across a lot of the country this past summer, and a lot of that ride was spent listening to the Rachel Getting Married soundtrack." His eyes light up and he smiles and gives me the thumbs-up. "Alright!," he says. Yep, totally worth geeking out.

5) In high school, I sang in a vocal jazz group. I do a mean scat, daddio.

Yep-- exactly like that.

6) Babies sometimes intersect with movies. I was born on a military base in New Jersey, as my dad finished up his stint in the army. One day, late in my mom's pregnancy, some friends asked her if she wanted to go with them into Manhattan. She demurred, saying she felt tired and didn't know if she really wanted to make the trip. When she next saw those friends, they excitedly told her that they'd "seen a movie filming outside the Plaza Hotel. And Robert Redford was there, and Barbra Streisand!..."

Of course, it was the filming of the final scene of The Way We Were, one of my mom's favorite movies, and a scene she knows by heart. I think of that story whenever I teach the film.

7. My favorite comic book character is Spider-Man. I can't imagine a single reason why I'd identify with a nerdy guy who makes corny jokes while battling bad guys. It's a mystery, really...

*Some of this also appeared on a Facebook note/quiz I was tagged in last year. I know it's supposed to all be brand-new, but I only have so many anecdotes about myself, alas. Hope this doesn't violate the spirit of the award.

Image Is Everything

2010-02-03T08:18:00.009-05:00

Portrait of the ad man in 2010...

...Portrait of the ad man in 1988.

The second season of thirtysomething arrived in the mail the other day. I was too young to appreciate the show when it debuted in 1987 (I was fourteen, and found it self-indulgent and whiny, even as I devoured other totems of boomer culture, like Beatles reissues and Rolling Stone), but now that I'm the same age as the Steadmans, I find its depictions of the suburban quotidian and the compromises of youth-on-the-verge-of-middle-age fascinating. Sometimes, you have to be in just the right moment for something to hit you, a lesson that all of the series' confused characters learn again and again on their varied, stumbling paths towards a kind of grace.

It helps that creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick brought a keenly cinematic sensibility to the program that allowed them to play with the square space of the '80s television in off-beat ways; along with Michael Mann's Crime Story, Garry Shandling's It's Gary Shandling's Show and Glenn Gordon Caron's Moonlighting, thirtysomething was one of a handful of prime-time television programs in the 1980s determined to make an aesthetic virtue out of self-consciousness (Pee-Wee Herman and David Letterman were working the same groove on the daytime and late night ends). Zwick and Herskovitz's film pastiches, dream sequences, interweaving of musical numbers and constant intertextuality can feel a bit heavy-handed two decades later (and no doubt did at the time), and not all of it works; but it's never boring, often witty, and more often than not an effective way to connect us with the characters' tangled emotions. Even better were their subtle plays with space: the mise-en-scene of the Steadman house, with all its family responsibilites, often feels cramped compared to the brightly-lit glass enclosures of the "boys will be boys" advertising office, a sensation enhanced by the framing of the former in tight medium- and close-up shots, and the framing of the latter in spacious long shot. thirtysomething was often mocked for its earnest self-examination, but the layered visuals and experimental sequences twist the straightforward dialogue and naturalistic (and uniformly excellent) performances into something more ironic and ambiguous: the characters might be painfully self-involved, but the show is watching them with a distant-yet-sympathetic eye.

I thoroughly enjoyed thirtysomething's first season when it finally hit DVD last fall, after being in television limbo for far too long (honestly, if multiple seasons of Too Close For Comfort could be released on DVD, this seminal program should not have had to wait almost twenty years after its cancellation to see the light of day). Season two's premiere doesn't quite feel up to par with the episodes in the earlier box-- it writes the characters in a shorthand that feels barely sketched in, and relies too much on a sweet-but-slight flashback to the house's 1940s tenants for its strained emotional payoff (the second season debuted after a contentious writers' strike in 1988, and this first episode feels rushed to meet the marketplace). But I have faith it will get better as it goes, especially since I know the wonderfully Mephistophelean advertising executive Miles Drentell is right around the corner. Drentell is Michael Steadman's id, what he both fears and longs to be at different moments, and it's not hard to see how Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner would blend Drentell and Steadman into Don Draper all those years later, creating the fierce alpha male with the wounded soul.

In the meantime, I'll enjoy the tiny details of the show-- the plays of light and shadow, the grace notes of an actor's glace or gesture, and the wonderfully cluttered bric-a-brac of the office desks and bedside tables. Those are the little things that we too often rush by on our way to 'meaning,' but that thirtysomething reminds us are the keys to unlocking the strange, wonderful mysteries of the everyday.

Last Night A Mash-Up Saved My Life

2010-02-02T18:19:00.002-05:00

DJ Earworm's mash-up of the "Top 25 Pop Songs of 2009," a reminder of how a smart DJ invites us to forego divisions and become musical omnivores.

(h/t to my friend Kevin, who posted the link on his Facebook page. Thanks, Kevin!).

Quick Notes

2010-02-02T17:14:00.006-05:00

After a glorious six weeks down south, I'm back in Snowberlin, where the frost is on the ground and the white flakes are flying through the air; it seems like a good moment to cocoon, put on the Feelies and give some attention to my long-neglected blog. School starts up again next week, so I don't know how frequently I'll post, but I'd like to take a moment to call your attention to other folks in the blogosphere, who are both more industrious than I, and offering a lot of great reads:

--Everyone's favorite stuffed bull is back with his annual "Fun Fifty" overview of the funnest comics from the previous year. As always, be prepared to guard your wallet-- Bully makes everything he mentions sound like a must-have. But even if you're allergic to four-colored fun, Bully's witty voice and generous sensibility make him an essential read.

--Glenn Kenny is mourning his lack of an Oscar nomination today, but he's working through it by offering fascinating insights on the late Eric Rohmer, the pitfalls of press junkets, a keen appreciation of the crucial new Rossellini box set, and a counter-intuitive defense of Ishtar. As my friend John West would say-- go, read.

--Speaking of the sublime Mr. West, he's back to blogging after a winter break/end-of-semester hiatus, and he's tackling everything from the Dollhouse finale to the I-pad to the relationship of the long-form drama to the half-hour sitcom. As always, John writes in a voice that's curious, open, humorous and righteous without being self-righteous. Go, read.

--Yeah, Up got two Oscar nominations today, one for Best Picture and one for Best Animated Feature. Wanna make something of it?? Then go over to Cinema Styles, where Greg Ferrara unleashes his fury on the cult of Pixar and starts an interesting dialogue in the comments section. The fact that Greg is wrong (so, so wrong) about Up and Ratatouille doesn't change the smart, funny and usefully provocative nature of his argument. And stick around his site and check out great posts on Inglorious Basterds v. The Hurt Locker, 1941, and the brilliance of Bunny Lake Is Missing's opening credits (he is so, so right about those).

--Bill R. has been on a tear this week, offering wonderful screen-grabs of two very different Andersons, a nice remembrance of J.D. Salinger, a strange anecdote about work, and a fascinating look at one of my favorite films, A Face In The Crowd. And all this from a guy who's always apologizing that he doesn't blog enough.

Eric Rohmer, R.I.P.

2010-01-11T17:45:00.001-05:00

Glenn Kenny has more.

Holy Moley!

2009-12-28T16:40:00.004-05:00

(h/t EW).

What better way to ring out the old and clang in the new than with a touch of Robin? It's my belated Christmas gift to you all, and a pleasant reminder of when comic book translations were sophisticated enough to poke fun at themselves.

In case you hadn't noticed, this blog is mostly going quiet until the new year, but I will see you all in January, and wish everyone a safe and happy 2010.

Jennifer Jones. R.I.P.

2009-12-18T13:19:00.003-05:00

My friend Dave alerted me this morning to the passing of Jennifer Jones, the Oscar-winning actress who starred in some of the most interesting melodramas of the 1940s. As the obituary notes, she almost became more famous for her relationship with producer David Selznick than for her acting, which is a shame: she is remarkably good in the strange, sad Portrait of Jennie, anchoring Selznick's surreal and evocative mystery tale about the ravages of time and bringing real feeling to its delicately anachronistic tone and impressionistic camera framings. And she's never anything less than affecting in Since You Went Away, especially in that extraordinary moment shown in the montage above, as she chases after the train carrying a gawky Robert Walker, and then is framed by shafts of light in the station, weeping.

For more, I urge you to turn to The Siren, whose gorgeous remembrance says everything that needs to be said, and does so in a typically stylish way.

Paula

2009-12-14T19:17:00.002-05:00

Hazy Shades Of Winter

2009-12-13T02:25:00.001-05:00

Brendan did a cool post looking back at "The first sentence blogged each month this year," crafting what he calls a "bird's eye view" of 2009. I decided to steal it, and see what was on my mind at each point. Imposing this kind of structure on a year's worth of posts is a fun Surrealist exercise that generates surprising repetitions (I seem to have written about sports and pop music a number of times, and done a lot of linking); collaged together, they might make up an Exquisite Corpse of introductions with no follow-up, a perpetual peering around the corner without ever seeing what is entirely there.

Without further ado...

January: Close your eyes long enough, and you could almost believe that Q-Tip's "Getttin' Up" was a time machine taking you back to 1993.

February: Classes start tomorrow, today has been a flurry of preparation, and I therefore missed the entireity of this year's Super Bowl.

March: There's an interesting piece in today's New York Times about the genesis of the latest U2 record, No Line On The Horizon, which comes out Tuesday, but has been available for free streaming at the band's MySpace page for the last week or so.

April: Eric Boehlert has an interesting post on the Franken-Coleman imbroglio that's churning along up in Minnesota, and the piece suggests larger questions about how media memes do (and don't) get created.

May: The beguiling, sometimes twisted charm of actor Peter Gallagher, compressed into ten minutes.

June: Wow, and I thought I hated Jay Leno.

July: All of my posts in July were images without text, and this was the first one:

August: Over at the essential "Comics Should Be Good!" site, Brian Cronin is cataloging what he calls "The Top 70 Most Iconic Marvel Panels", in honor of that company's 70th anniversary (I take issue with the company's decision to declare themselves 70 years old-- founded as "Timely Comics" in 1939, the company wasn't officially called "Marvel" until 1961--but that's a debate for another day, and doesn't undercut the coolness of Cronin's tribute).

September:

This...

..is what...

...the first week...

...of classes...

...always...

...feels like!

October: By now, you've probably heard that Browns receiver Braylon Edwards has been accused of attacking a man outside a Cleveland club late Sunday night, after another Browns loss.

November: Penn and Teller once wrote an article for Premiere where they revealed one of their favorite movie-going habits: cheering in theaters whenever a character onscreen spoke the film's title (they noted this worked especially well in films like Wall Street).

December: IMDb tells me that today is the shared birthday of two comic giants: Woody Allen (who is 74), and Richard Pryor (who would have been 69).

Flickers

2009-12-12T17:09:00.004-05:00

John Wayne and the post-showdown smoke, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962).

Making A List, Checking It Twice

2009-12-04T18:00:00.007-05:00

Christmas Time is here, time for love and cheer, and another of Dennis Cozzalio's amazing movie quizzes! This year, Dennis has chosen (like a true Angeleno) to make those of us in cold-weather places dream of island paradises, with the PROFESSOR RUSSELL JOHNSON'S "MY ANCESTORS CAME OVER ON THE MINNOW" THANKSGIVING/CHRISTMAS MOVIE QUIZ. Like one of the Professor's whozzits, it's chock full of complex, gee-whiz gadgetry and know-how (and fifty movable pieces!). But unlike those devices, it will actually work, and take us from the Moreau-like hell of being trapped with Bob Denver to something far more blissfully cinephiliac. So let's dive right in, shall we?

(As always, feel free to play along in the comments section, or to cut-and-paste-and-answer at your own blog-- and if you do the cut-and-paste route, please be sure to link back and provide credit to Dennis).

1) Second-favorite Coen Brothers movie.

In order to answer this question, one would properly have to have a first-favorite Coen Brothers movie, yes?

Before the blog police come down on me (and let me say that the Coens have a fervent and very vocal fan-base that makes them the art-house equivalent of Edward and Bella)-- I like the Coens. Really. I do. But for every film of theirs I love, like Fargo or Blood Simple (and underrated gems like The Man Who Wasn't There or The Hudsucker Proxy) they offer up a film so mind-wrenchingly awful that I'd rather spend time with Edward and Bella than see it again (I'm looking at you, shitty remake of The Ladykillers).

This means I can't worship them with the same depth and wit and grace and passion that blog pals like Glenn or Bill do-- and I feel lucky that I don't have to, since these folks write about the Bros.' movies with such skill that reading their reviews is far more enjoyable to me, on occasion, than seeing the films they are discussing.

But while I love the Coen films I love in pretty equal measure, if one film stands a few hairs above the others, it's probably Miller's Crossing. It's on this film, for me, that the Brothers' technical skill and love of genre pastiche collides with a story so heartfelt and funny and sad that the beautiful images take on an extraordinary, vibrating, hallucinatory depth- in every sense of the word, they stun.

2) Movie seen only on home format that you would pay to see on the biggest movie screen possible? (Question submitted by Peter Nellhaus)

The first film that popped into my head was 2001, but then I remembered I saw that film projected on a giant sheet in a friend's backyard a couple of 4th of Julys ago: it was not a "proper" big-screen theater showing, but in many ways the weather and the company and the way the sheet fluttered in the wind (to say nothing of how the stars from the night blended with the stars of the movie) made it much more magical than any 70-mm air-conditioned projection could have been.

So, instead I will mention a film that's long obsessed me, but that I've only ever seen on various home video formats and television broadcasts: Gone With The Wind. I'm not sure it's "good" in any logical, traditional sense of aesthetics: its haphazard movement from the sublime to the ridiculous to moments beyond category means it's always been impossible for me to get a full grip on (maybe that's why I love it, in addition to the fact the really interesting "movie" is what happens in its production). I wrote about that a little here, and I wonder if seeing it on a big screen would clarify things a bit. In any case, it would make Gable & Leigh look even more spectacular than they do at home.

3) Japan or France? (Question submitted by Bob Westal)
In what sense, Charlie?

4) Favorite moment/line from a western.

John Wayne striding, as only he can, through the cattle on his way to kill Montgomery Clift, Red River

5) Of all the arts the movies draw upon to become what they are, which is the most important, or the one you value most?

So many good choices-- I suppose I gravitated to cinema because of special effects (Star Wars was my first film, when I was four), and stay because of directors and actors. Movie stars are still one of my favorite ways of thinking about and organizing cinema history (I once spent a blissful summer catching up with most of the Cary Grant films I hadn't seen).

But if I could shift the question a bit, I think the way we receive cinema (a slightly different but related way of thinking about how they "become what they are") is closest to the way we hear pop music. It's ephemeral, and toggles between plot (lyric) and style or form (timbre) in terms of what catches our eye or ear. And while we can talk about notes or words or shots in detail, the experience of the song or movie is sometimes harder to get into words. As the Shirelles put it, "Is this a lasting treasure/Or just a moment's pleasure"?

To get my students thinking about editing this fall, I had them do an exercise in making a mix tape (or mix CD-- which itself suggests differences between the analog and the digital that cinema is also imbricated within). I told them that the perhaps abstract concepts of editing had their twin in the process of list-making and juxtaposition that we'd all done at one point or another with music. How do you flow or crash from one song to another? Are your lines organized around ideas, instrumentation or voice? As Godard asked, when and why do you start a shot (song) and when and why do you end it?

And our writing about this process of making and receiving can similarly pop. For me, it crafts a duet between writer and text that comes at the reader as a series of riffs and improvisations, or imaginative choreography between ideas and texts: at once analytic, conversational, quotational, romantic, angry, searching and witty. If it works, the concept will eventually give way to the groove.

6) Most misunderstood movie of the 2000s (The Naughties?).
Why did everyone gang up on poor Wes Anderson over The Life Aquatic? It might not feel as fully-shaped as Rushmore or Bottle Rocket, but I liked it a lot more than The Royal Tennenbaums (a film I also love, just not to the same degree), and found the father-son dynamic between Bill Murray and Owen Wilson much more affecting than the more archly played relationships between Gene Hackman and his children in the earlier film. For some reason, too many people want to apply a frankly specious "reality thesis" to Anderson's work (as if verite minimalism is the sole criteria of cinematic goodness), and just as many trust-fund Marxists take an odd pleasure in mocking Anderson's class pre-occupations (because it ain't cinema if folks aren't wearin' work-boots, ya know).

But all kinds of brilliant filmmakers from Disney to Hitchcock to Jacques Tati have read cinematic space as a playground to be explored and perfectly timed out, and The Life Aquatic's critics missed how the underwater ships and reflecting mirrors, the schematic diagrams and childishly scrawled notes are deployed to reveal and connect, rather than hide and spirit away. The most revealing thing about the lengthy interview Anderson conducts with Peter Bogdanovich on the DVD of They All Laughed is that Anderson did it at all; thinking about his work in the context of a love for Bogdanovich's best movie clues us in to just how much Anderson learned from that film's mixture of delicate fantasy and harsh reality, and how the former can act as an exuberant gateway to the latter.

7) Name a filmmaker/actor/actress/film you once unashamedly loved who has fallen furthest in your esteem.

There are a lot, actually, so I'll just choose the one I saw most recently, in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: You owe me, John Turturro. And give Spike Lee a call-- your career just doesn't feel the same without his guidance.

8) Herbert Lom or Patrick Magee?

Sigh. And once again, my lack of love for (and knowledge about) horror films trips me up. Afraid I will have to pass.

9) Which is your least favorite David Lynch film (Submitted by Tony Dayoub)

Lost Highway. I haven't seen it since a rainy-night screening in Chicago (was it really raining? It's David Lynch, it must have been raining) twelve years ago, but I didn't like it at the time, liked it even less upon reflection several days and weeks later, and have had no desire to see it since.

10) Gordon Willis or Conrad Hall? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)

Willis, no question. Hall was brilliant, but I'm convinced that '70s American cinema simply wouldn't have happened in the same way without everyone's favorite "Prince of Darkness" there to make it look as strange and scary and beautiful and funny as he did. And anyone who can paint The Godfather at one end of the decade and Manhattan at the other (with All The President's Men and Annie Hall in-between) owns this question.

11) Second favorite Don Siegel movie.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers-- it's a close call, but I give Dirty Harry the slight edge as my favorite. I also very much like what I've seen (although I've never seen all of it) of The Shootist.

12) Last movie you saw on DVD/Blu-ray? In theaters?

On DVD, the lovely romantic drama Medicine for Melancholy, whose partially black-and-white images and indie rock soundtrack frame an offbeat, jazzy (in the sense of feeling improvised) San Francisco; in theaters, Julie & Julia, which tells you how long it's been since I went to the movies (then again, with New Moon in its record-breaking third week at my single-screen local palace, can you really blame me?).

13) Which DVD in your private collection screams hardest to be replaced by a Blu-ray? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)

Probably something animated-- I was teaching Pinocchio this week, and thought of the luscious screen grabs Glenn posted back in March, and I really wished I could project that sucker on a big screen for my students. I've grabbed one of his grabs for illustration, and hope he doesn't mind:

But since I don't have a blu-ray player these dreams are all, to pardon the pun, a bit academic to me.

14) Eddie Deezen or Christopher Mintz-Plasse?

Grease is one of the seminal films of my childhood, and I adore Deezen in the underrated I Wanna Hold Your Hand; but Mintz-Plasse is so good in Superbad, taking his very Deezen-ish stereotype of a character and imbuing it with geniune charm: McLovin' is not a put-upon outcast the way he might be in other films-- he genuinely believes he's a bad-ass, and all evidence to the contrary won't stop him from making the scene. It's a wonderful spin on the type that Mintz-Plasse nails, and it happily drains the film of treacly sentimentality. This is a geek with a future.

15) Actor/actress who you feel automatically elevates whatever project they are in, or whom you would watch in virtually anything.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Stanley Tucci are tied here. Tucci is the actor Kevin Spacey thinks he is, and Day-Lewis is the reason I cringe when people mock the idea of seeing Nine. It's Daniel Day-Lewis singing, people! It can't be that bad, right?

16) Fight Club -- yes or no?

A tentative yes-- I thought the film was very funny when I first saw it (which surprised me-- the oh-so-serious, hand-wringing reviews when it was first released didn't clue me in to the satire), but it didn't hold up well under scrutiny when my class chose it as their final film last year. I'd still rather watch it again than sit through Zodiac twice, though-- I miss the Fincher who could still tap his genre-loving, Anger-tweaking trashy side, and I still think The Game is one of his best movies.

17) Teresa Wright or Olivia De Havilland?

Both spectacularly good, but like Errol Flynn, I must go with Maid Marion. Could anyone else have given such grace and depth and quietly dark spirit to Gone With The Wind's Melanie?

18) Favorite moment/line from a film noir.

Kirk Douglas, all oily charm, makes a fake-friendly gesture to Robert Mitchum: "Cigarette?," he offers; Mitchum is all cool control in response, barely raising the illustrative butt in his hand: "Smoking," he replies (Out Of The Past).

19) Best (or worst) death scene involving an obvious dummy substituting for a human or any other unsuccessful special effect(s)—see the wonderful blog Destructible Man for inspiration.

An obvious dummy substituting for a human? Robin Williams must die in one of his films, right?

20) What's the least you've spent on a film and still regretted it? (Submitted by Lucas McNelly)

I saw Highlander 2 for free when I was 18, because the friend of a friend worked at the theater and snuck us in. I still haven't forgiven that theater employee for doing that to us, and it makes me wonder if letting us in wasn't some elaborate prank designed to make us hate movies in general.

21) Van Johnson or Van Heflin?

In the battle of the beefy men with the broad foreheads, I have to give the edge to Johnson, because of my love of comedies and because he's so good in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

22) Favorite Alan Rudolph film.

I like to imagine a mash-up where Dorothy Parker falls into a love triangle with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson, and the three of them move to 1920s Paris.

23) Name a documentary that you believe more people should see.

I imagine this question is meant to highlight obscure or forgotten docs, but the Up films aren't that at all. They're simply the most gripping and funny and moving documentary films I've ever seen-- as witty as Lubitsch, as generous as Renoir, and as suspenseful as Hitchcock. Political cinema at its very human best.

24) In deference to this quiz’s professor, name a favorite film which revolves around someone becoming stranded.

25) Is there a moment when your knowledge of film, or lack thereof, caused you an unusual degree of embarrassment and/or humiliation? If so, please share.

Oh, sure-- I've been caught out a few times in class, when students ask about a film I barely know. But those are what we call "teaching moments," and while they're very, very embarrassing, they also open up to really interesting discussions sometimes.

26) Ann Sheridan or Geraldine Fitzgerald? (Submitted by Larry Aydlette)

The Oomph Girl looks great in a uniform and behind the dashboard of a truck, and I have to give her the edge simply because of her role in this funny (and possibly apocryphal) anecdote from David Niven's Bring On The Empty Horses:

That night at La Maze Bogie was confronted by a large man with a flushed face wearing an open-neck shirt turned down outside his jacket.

I was sitting in a corner with the "Oomph Girl," Ann Sheridan. Bogie with Mayo was a few tables away. We couldn't hear the confrontation, but we could see that the scene was developing along traditional lines. The large man was bending over their table and poking Bogie in the chest with a forefinger, Bogie was smiling insults, Mayo was rising like a ruffled hen turkey from her seat, and waiters were circling warily around, taking up action stations to isolate or eliminate the impending conflict.

Suddenly all hell broke loose. Bogie threw a full glass of scotch into his aggressor's eyes, and at the same moment Mayo hit the man on the head with a shoe. I caught a momentary glimpse of flinty-eyed characters rising purposefully from the table whence the large man had come and of a large phalanx of waiters converging on the battle area. Cries of rage and alarm rose on all sides, and the air became thick with flying bottles, plates, glasses, left hooks and food.

"Quick," screamed the Oomph Girl. "Under the table."

This was a suggestion with which I was only too happy to comply, but for some technical reason, it was impossible to get beneath our own table, so we threw ourselves to the floor and crawled on hands and knees to a larger sanctuary a few yards away.

We had not been installed there for more than a few seconds before Bogie came padding in on all fours; he was laughing like hell.

"What's going on up there?" I asked.

"Everything's OK," he chortled. "Mayo's handling it....I wish I'd brought a fork, though-- I might be able to jab the bastard in the leg."

27) Do you or any of your family members physically resemble movie actors or other notable figures in the film world? If so, who?

Well, I've been compared to both Eric Stoltz and Ron Howard a lot (although I thankfully still have my hair).

28) Is there a movie you have purposely avoided seeing? If so, why?

I find it hard to watch films about mental illness, so not even my admiration for Samuel Fuller can overcome my reluctance to watch Shock Corridor; the truly disgusting pre-release stills have always caused me to avoid Gummo (even thinking of the title makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit); and even though it's heading into a record-breaking third week on my small-town palace's single screen, the obnoxious gothy tweens my partner and I encountered roaming around the Crocker Park multiplexes on opening weekend have turned New Moon into my own cinephiliac garlic (does garlic effect the sparkly vamps in that film, or is that another part of the mythology that doesn't fit its abstinence fairy tale?).

29) Movie with the most palpable or otherwise effective wintry atmosphere or ambience.

Citizen Kane's snowy flashback and much of Dr. Zhivago (my favorite Lean film) fit this criteria. But for some reason my mind went to the wet, cold, snowy and frighteningly electrified landscapes of The Ice Storm, and how well they capture the interiority of the characters wandering through them.

30) Gerrit Graham or Jeffrey Jones?

Jones-- anyone who can come out of Howard The Duck not only unscathed, but with his reputation actually enhanced is OK in my book.

31) The best cinematic antidote to a cultural stereotype (sexual, political, regional, whatever).

The Up films do this pretty beautifully (and touch on all those categories you've mentioned), but since I've already talked about them upstairs, I'll mention two very different views of the American South, one cinematic and one televisual. To Kill A Mockingbird's movie adaptation loses some of the gentle contradictions present in the first-person voice of the novel, but its keen sense of place, its quietly unfolding, anecdotal everydayness, and that central performance by Gregory Peck all work to offer a richer portrait of the region than American cinema sometimes provides.

25 years later, the television show Frank's Place (still criminally unavailable on DVD, a tragedy in a time when the format offers multiple seasons of Too Close For Comfort, but once available in its entirety on YouTube) offered a complex, searching and very funny look at intra-race relations in New Orleans, touching on everything from black and white, to black and black, to rich and poor, to the differences between Creole and Cajun cuisine. A brilliant, too-shortly-lived show that was one of the best things television did in the 1980s.

32) Second favorite John Wayne movie.

Probably The Searchers or Stagecoach (my favorite is Red River), but I have a real affection for his war pictures-- good, bad and very mediocre-- so on another day, I'd have to give the nod to In Harm's Way or the richly varied emotional tones of They Were Expendable.

33) Favorite movie car chase.

There's Bullitt, of course, and any number of Bonds (the best of which might be in The Spy Who Loves Me). The French Connection, The Italian Job, and What's Up, Doc? are all outstanding. And while I'm tempted to ask if anything is better than Mitchell (as those brilliant robots on MST3K put it, "It's easy to tail someone when they use their turn signal"), the earnest part of me has to give the nod to that spectacular horse-and-truck-and-car chase that climaxes Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The way Indiana Jones' face shifts back and forth between determined concentration and devious glee captures Spielberg's delight in staging the sequence, a delight that's fully extended to the audience.

34) In the spirit of His Girl Friday, propose a gender-switched remake of a classic or not-so-classic film. (Submitted by Patrick Robbins)

I have no idea what it would look or feel like, but what about Casablanca?

35) Barbara Rhoades or Barbara Feldon?
Number 99, Number 99....

36) Favorite Andre De Toth movie.
Er, if I promise to rent a bunch of DVDs, can I get back to you on this one? De Toth is one of those crucial filmmakers I really need to catch up with someday.

37) If you could take one filmmaker's entire body of work and erase it from all time and memory, as if it had never happened, whose oeuvre would it be? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)

Farewell, Darren Aronofsky.

38) Name a film you actively hated when you first encountered it, only to see it again later in life and fall in love with it.

I don't know if there's ever been a film I've actively hated at first, then later liked or loved-- that happens with people for me, but usually not with films (when it comes to movies, to paraphrase Mr. Darcy, "my good opinion, once lost, is lost forever"). But there are several I've been confused by, or lukewarm about, that I've later fallen in love with (sometimes first dates are deceiving).

Most prominent for me in this group is Rules of the Game. I first tried to watch it on a small library TV, with a bad VHS print that had hard-to-read, white-on-B&W subtitles. That's not the best format or place to first encounter Renoir's classic, but I think the larger problem was that I was 18 (maybe 19-- it was my freshman year of college), and Rules of the Game, with its witty double entendres, deep focus (in all senses) and moral ambiguity is not a film that you're going to get when you're 18, at least not in its fullest sense. I didn't get it at all, didn't even get through it, actually, as I turned off the TV midway through.

I tried to watch it again a few years later, this time at home in a cold winter apartment in Chicago. I was older and the print was better, but while I could appreciate its technical skill, its status as a masterpiece still eluded me. It was not until a few years after that, when I saw the Criterion laserdisc and knew more about Renoir, that it all snapped into place.

The beauty of the laserdisc, with its lovely extras, certainly helped, and so did being better primed for Renoir via the French New Wave (Truffaut's great gift to his idol is that he helps young phillistines like me better appreciate him after we see Jules and Jim). But the biggest difference is time-- Rules of the Game makes more sense after your heart has been broken, after you've come to realize that you don't know everything, and the world is far more contradictory than you believe on the barricades of 19. Where once Renoir's refusal to judge felt like a cop-out, now it feels like the most beautiful act of grace in all of cinema.

39) Max Ophuls or Marcel Ophuls? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)

Max by a very long tracking shot. There's no political subject Marcel could choose that would ever equal the look of Joan Fontaine in the snow in Letter To An Unknown Woman, or the way Peter Ustinov's voice breaks slightly in his circus speech at the end of Lola Montes.

40) In which club would you most want an active membership, the Delta Tau Chi fraternity, the Cutters or the Warriors? And which member would you most resemble, either physically or in personality?

Delta Tau Chi would probably be more fun, but they won't have the grace or warmth or heart of the Cutters (ironically, I went to college in Bloomington). I've never seen The Warriors (shameful, I know!), but I'm a lover, not a fighter. Physically, I resemble none of them, actually, but I'm willing to smash a beer can on my head if you like.

41) Your favorite movie cliché.

I have a real fondness for the old newspaper-headline montages that dotted 30s and 40s American films (and that Coppola resurrected so well for the first Godfather). It makes me sad to think that the collapse of so many papers means that soon those scenes will appear not only archaic, but opaque to future generations.

42) Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen? (Submitted by Bob Westal)

Stanley Donen's brief soft-shoe at the Oscars a few years ago is one of my favorite awards moments (and a breath of fresh air for a ceremony that increasingly veers from the self-righteously pretentious to the not-even-the-fun-kind-of-camp campy) (and somehow, Slumdog Millionaire fits both those categories!). But while Charade and Singin' In The Rain and Funny Face are all aces, Minnelli's just in my pantheon of all-time favorite directors. His fluency across genres, his attention to detail, his strength with actors, that intoxicating mix of knowing sophistication and touching naivete-- it's simply unbeatable when evaluating the MGM house style in the 50s and 60s.

And "The Girl Hunt" is my desert-island sequence of supreme sublimity.

43) Favorite Christmas-themed horror movie or sequence.

There's nothing scarier than the trailer for Jingle All The Way.

44) Favorite moment of self- or selfless sacrifice in a movie.

Barry Lyndon is Kubrick's most heartfelt and human film, and I've always thought its climax-- as Barry fires his dueling pistol into the ground, sealing his downfall--was a fascinating moment of existential responsibility mixed with hubris. Ryan O'Neal plays it beautifully.

45) If you were the cinematic Spanish Inquisition, which movie cult (or cult movie) would you decimate? (Submitted by Bob Westal)

Well, I made fun of the Coens' cult right in the first question, so I'll avoid that one this time (besides, it would mean killing too many people I like). But I'd be OK with never hearing about The Lord of The Rings again. Zodiac, too.

46) Caroline Munro or Veronica Carlson?

I mentioned that car chase in The Spy Who Loved Me a few questions back, and Murno's wink to Roger Moore is one of the sequence's campy high points.

47) Favorite eye-patch wearing director. (Submitted by Patty Cozzalio)

If eye-patch wearing directors no longer existed, only Nicholas Ray gives the impression that he could re-invent them, or would want to.

48) Favorite ambiguous movie ending. (Original somewhat ambiguous submission---“Something about ambiguous movie endings!”-- by Jim Emerson, who may have some inspiration of his own to offer you.)

I think Jim covered most of them with his wonderful post, so I'll throw in the end of Nashville, the end of Before Sunset, and the end of nearly everything Godard did between Breathless and Weekend.

49) In giving thanks for the movies this year, what are you most thankful for?

I'm still catching up on 2009 movies, but I'm most thankful for three non-film, film-related places and groups: The Cedar Lee in Cleveland Heights, a lovely independent theater whose multiple screens, great coffee and excellent taste in foreign and independent film has provided my partner and I with many wonderful movie moments together over the last year; the smart, funny, and deeply curious students at Oberlin who I am lucky to teach three times a week, who've constantly noticed new things in films I thought I already knew well, and have taught me so much as we've looked at them together; and the movie blogosphere, for its friendships, insights, and for writing so well that it's allowed me to learn about movies I might otherwise never see.

50) George Kennedy or Alan North? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)

Alan North could never convince me to eat 50 eggs in a row, but Kennedy is a natural-born world shaker.

Imagined Films: Woody and Richard

2009-12-01T15:59:00.005-05:00

(clips NSFW)

IMDb tells me that today is the shared birthday of two comic giants: Woody Allen (who is 74), and Richard Pryor (who would have been 69). This got me wondering-- what would it have been like to see these two men collaborate on a film?

It seems counter-intuitive, at first, to pair the brilliantly foul-mouthed physical genius and the neurotic anti-intellectual intellectual. But for all their differences of style and background, and for all the different paths their respective careers took, they have enough in common to suggest that a collaboration in some alternative universe might have been possible. Both were stand-ups whose humor derived from the observational, from the surreal spins one could find on everyday occurrences like psychiatrist's appointments or the weather. Their work often delighted in the personification of objects like books, stuffed bears, laundry lists, cars and crack pipes-- these things would start talking and moving, chasing our heroes down in physical and emotional ways, and suggesting that the humorous and the horrific were siamese twins rather than polar opposites. Early Woody films delight in a kind of Sennett-esque slapstick that doesn't seem far removed from the way Pryor transforms his body into wind or jungle animals in his stand-up routines. Both often used their films and stand-up routines to explore their sexual hang-ups, their fears of intimacy and the pressures of fame. And of course, both were verbally dazzling, transforming words into tennis balls that they could bounce off the walls of their obsessions.

A Pryor-Allen collaboration could have helped both men. The spellbinding gifts Pryor displays in Richard Pryor In Concert and Live On The Sunset Strip were only intermittently deployed in his narrative features; for every Lady Sings The Blues, there was a Superman III; for every Blue Collar, there was The Toy; for every Silver Streak, there was Another You. It would've been cool to see Richard Pryor in a romantic comedy like Manhattan, a seriocomic pastiche like Zelig (think of how much fun he could've had blending into those newsreels!) or giving weight and depth to an exploration of fame like Stardust Memories. What kind of fantasy film, a la The Purple Rose of Cairo, could Allen and Pryor have crafted together?

But the benefits would've gone Allen's way, too. Freed from the need to cast himself in his films, he could've stretched himself even further, not so much generically (an area where he's often been a risk-taker), but emotionally and thematically: would Pryor's presence have kept Allen from falling into the mid-90s rut of "fame sucks, relationships suck, popular culture is dying" that marred films like Celebrity and Mighty Aprhodite? Would a movie like Alice have felt a bit less precious and claustrophobically self-involved? Would it have spared us Shadows and Fog? If Allen could've provided Pryor with much-deserved dramatic showcases, could Pryor have reminded Allen that comedy is not the lesser art, that being "smart" in films doesn't mean abandoning your slapstick and verbal gifts?

Even My Dog's Gone Commercial!

2009-11-30T23:52:00.005-05:00

What's the link between this:

And this?:

Ken Levine explains all here, reminding us that even "a little love" needs a little Don Draper from time to time.

(Incidentally, it's the CBS execs' rejection of the great Vince Guaraldi score that shocks me every time I read about it, and I've known that story for years. Can you imagine Charlie Brown without a little jazz on the soundtrack?).

Notes On Blogging Aesthetics XXIII

2009-11-19T15:39:00.005-05:00

People respond to these images in different ways. And the beauty of them is that you can make of them what you will. They are simple and tell you nothing. And yet the closer you look, the more you wonder: who lives here? What did they do today? How ere they feeling when they took this shot? And what does it look like now?
-- Andrew Sullivan, from the forward to The View From Your Window

SLIFR Is Five, SLIFR Is Always Five!

2009-11-18T14:24:00.010-05:00

In the spirit of Dennis's post...

Today, that fantastic film blog, Sergio Leone and the Infinite Fly Rule, turns five! If you're not reading it already (wait, why aren't you?), head over and peruse both Dennis' fantastic posts and the well-deserved praise and birthday wishes he's gathered. Dennis is one of the nicest people I've met in the film blogosphere, and I am both happy and very grateful he's stuck around this long to illuminate us (in all senses) with his insights.

As I read through today's birthday celebration, wherein the number five kept understandably popping up, I suddenly flashed on the Harlan Ellison story "Jefty Is Five," which contains the line, "Jefty is five, Jefty is always five" (bear with me, this is going somewhere). Ellison being Ellison, this line becomes the basis for a dark, tragic (and quite brilliant) short story about the loss of childhood wonder that inevitably occurs as one gets older.

I couldn't figure out (aside from the play on numbers) why this story flashed in my head reading Dennis' post, since Dennis' sensibility is so different than Harlan Ellison's. But it struck me that in many ways, Dennis is that story's titular character, if he'd managed to maintain his enthusiasms, geeky passions (and I hope it's clear by now that I mean that as a compliment) and true love for his favorite popular culture. In Ellison's tale, Jefty's encounter with an adolescent gang leaves him physically and emotionally bruised, and ready to conform; Dennis, as several folks point out in today's birthday wishes, is fearless in his love of the Dodgers, Speed Racer and other strange objects that the rest of us might choose to dismiss. And he writes about them with such grace and good humor that he belies Ellison's thesis-- it is possible to grow up and be a father, husband and professional while maintaining that youthful sense of movies, sports and the wider world as an immense and magnificent playground. Dennis' gift is to be our guide around those grounds, to enthusiastically point out their wonders, and to catch us up in his excitement. Thank you for that, Dennis, and happy anniversary!

Siren Songs

2009-11-10T16:17:00.006-05:00

After a weekend Indian summer, fall has returned with a vengeance here in Cineville, leaving your dashing narrator all woozy again (I swear, if I get one more &$%$#* cold, I'm going to go all Angelus on this place), and thus unable to blog about the backlog of movies (Royal Flash, Revolutionary Road), comics (Spider-Man!) and events (Jonathan Demme at Oberlin!) that have been dancing through his head for a couple of weeks now,.

But I would be remiss if I didn't at least take a moment to point you in the direction of the world's greatest film blogger, that sultry chanteuse know as Self-Styled Siren, who has two great posts up that delienate a well-deserved rise in her media profile. The first reveals both the line-up of films she's co-chosen for TCM's upcoming "Shadows of Russia" series (in Siren's words, "focusing on the many views of Russia and communism to be found in American movies") and her real name (which I could not possibly spoil here). The second intertwines two of my sweet spots-- anecdotes and that big, baggy, fascinating beast called Gone With The Wind--and also offers a set of great links.

No one sings like the Siren sings, so let her voice lure you over to her place. On a cold and wet November day, there are worse things to do than get lost in the spell of cinephilia that she casts.

Melancholy Bliss

2009-11-06T03:38:00.003-05:00

For the soundtrack to an ebullient, modishly Technicolor pop musical, Help! opens with a sequence of songs that are remarkably ambivalent, if not downright moody. The title song is famous for the way it juxtaposes its bright guitars and Wall of Sound harmonies with John Lennon's autobiographical, claustrophobic lyrics: "When I was younger, so much younger than today...." But really, the whole first side plays with this tension between pop bliss and emotional uncertainty, as either the music or the lyrics constantly call into question the state of mind of 1965's biggest band in the world.

The recent re-release of the Beatles catalog, all spiffed up and digitally remastered, has caused me to dive back in these last two weeks, listening to the new CD versions of records that defined by high school years to a huge degree (I heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand" my freshman year, and immediately fell in love). It's been an intensely pleasurable experience, and the remasters sound great (I've heard five so far-- Help!, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper, A Hard Day's Night and Revolver, and only Night has been a disappointment-- fantastic songs, but a spottier sound with the stereo remastering). Listening to the albums is also a reminder that, for all their later breakthroughs and studio experimentation, the Beatles may never have been better-- smarter, tighter, more in sync with one another-- than in 1965, when Help! and Rubber Soul offered the world state-of-the-art rock and folk-pop, respectively, and when the band explored with wit and subtlety the themes of romance, individualism and community that they'd feel the need to make more explicit in the years that followed.

"Help!" is followed by "The Night Before," Paul McCartney's response to his partner's initial musical call: McCartney sets aside the Byrdsy guitar pop of the first song for a bluesy, organ-driven number whose R&B phrasing acts as a reminder of the mod culture that surrounded the Beatles in mid-sixties London. It also acts an ongoing rebuke to McCartney's confident vocals: he's cool and confident Paul, the clipped phrasing barely penning in the energy of his high-pitched growls, as if Little Richard was roped to a cool jazz trio; but this cool confidence is slowly undermined by the lyric, as the foreplay of the opening lines ("We said our goodbyes, the night before/Love was in your eyes, the night before") stands revealed as the desperate pitch of a ditched partner, rather than a smug expression of triumph ("Now today I find, you have changed your mind/Treat me like you did the night before"). It's a song that's enhanced by the clearer sonic spaces the remastering creates: you can better hear George and John's deadpan harmonies (here functioning less as the ballast, a la "Help!" and more like an ironic, "Ha ha!" Liverpudlian chorus), and the organ that grooves throughout. It feels like you're in the darkened studio with them, and can sing the smoke from Ringo's cigarette:

"The Night Before" is also a song that uses McCartney's wide vocal range to great effect, as the higher end used in the verses expresses an increasing anxiety that borders on screaming, while the lower end anchors the bridges, where the narrator tries to regain his cool and stay calm. If the protagonist of "Help!" sees love as his final salvation ("I do appreciate your bein' round..."), the cad of "The Night Before" is finding that love may not, in fact, be all you need.

"Help!" and "The Night Before" function as a very cool, one-two opening punch, displaying two fantastic songwriters, at the height of their powers, having an ironic conversation about the nature of love. McCartney's jazzy number is answered by John's shift from the electric to the acoustic: the gorgeously rueful "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away," whose folky guitars and unobtrusive flute section frame what might be Lennon's best-ever vocal. In his definitive book, The Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewisohn notes Lennon's hatred of his singing voice, his constant request to producer George Martin to "do something with it!" That vocal anxiety might be the single best example of Lennon's crushing insecurities: "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" shows off a voice any other pop singer would kill for-- the screaming rock edge that Lennon brought to songs like "Twist and Shout" is forced into a softer, lower range here, and the effect increases the richness of Lennon's timbre. Even as the lyric expresses regret, the expressiveness of Lennon's voice brings out the bitterness and irony ("Gather 'round, all you clowns/Let me hear you say...") of the song's protagonist-- this is the character of "The Night Before" in the weeks after, sitting with mates at the pub and trying to rationalize his loss.

The lovely insistence of "Away"'s guitars (their chord repetitions and prominence in the mix are the steady counterpoint to the singer's mood swings) and the jaunty interplay of flutes and drums at the end cast the song into an emotionally ambiguous space in the same manner that twining of grooving organ and short guitar licks did for "The Night Before." That ambiguity is resolved by "I Need You," George Harrison's first self-written song on a Beatles record, whose opening chords blend the organ from song two with the acoustic guitars from song three as a kind of sonic detente that matches the the tune's relatively more conciliatory lyric: as a later pop song would ask, why can't we friends? George is not, in 1965, anywhere near as sophisticated a songwriter as Lennon and McCartney, but the simpler musical and lyrical palette is just what is needed here-- after the tossing and turning of the first three tracks, George's open pleading ("Please remember how I feel about you/I could never really live without you/So come on back to me, I'm lonely can't you see?/I need you") clears the emotional and sonic air (a testament to the sequencing savvy of George Martin and the band).

Paul's "Another Girl" is the first attempt to stake a more confident ground, the boy on the rebound. We hear Paul's voice ("For I have got--") singing acapella for the first five notes, so excited to be hitting the town that he's not even gonna wait for the band. When the band kicks in with nice rockabilly groove, its chunky rhythms create a sound like a train engine carrying our hero towards his new relationship. It's an engine powered by bravado ("I don't wanna say that I've been/Unhappy with you/But as from today, well I've got/Somebody that's new"), but the clipped ends of the lyrics hint at that bravado's falseness-- he's almost begging the question ("She's sweeter than all the girls, and/I've met quite a few..."), throwing the new girl in the old girl's face ("And so I'm telling you, this time you'd better stop") in a manner that suggests he wouldn't mind if the old girl still liked him a bit. But the train has left the station, and the rockabilly insistence of Ringo's drums is carrying him into the future whether he likes it or not.

The next song is a more successful attempt at Confidence Regained, the sonic and emotional completion of the previous song's idea just as "The Night Before" was to "Help!," and "I Need You" was for "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away." But count on John Lennon to make things complex: the bravado finally comes through in a tale of emotional teasing.

"You're Going To Lose That Girl" is the official title of the next song, but Lennon's raw, nasally vocal growls it as "You're Gonna Lose That Girl"-- what's grammar worth in a bullying put-down, anyway? And when I say growl, I mean growl-- you can almost see the lower lip jutting out in a sneer, the animal saliva barely missing the microphone. The first four tracks were first-person narratives about loss, need and desire; suddenly, it feels like the camera has flipped POV, and we're seeing these sensitive sad sacks from the exterior position of a man on the make ("If you don't take her out tonight/She's going to change her mind/And I will take her out tonight/And I will treat her kind").

It might be gross, except the whole thing is too damn danceable; the Beatles never forgot the importance of a great groove (it's what makes "Lady Madonna"'s tale of prostitution so poppy) and how those grooves could be deployed ironically-- are we really going to get mad at a guy when his increasing dares and come-ons are linked to the joyful poly-rhythms of Ringo's brushes and tom-toms? Even the backing chorus ends up as Mr. Bully's gang-- there's a real joy to the way that they toss in asides like "Watch what you do, YEAH!" You can hear the rough draft of the kinds of ironic line alternations--"'Cause I will treat her right/And then you'll be the lonely one/(You're not the only one...)"-- that they'd use to great effect on later songs like "Getting Better" and "Hello Goodbye." The whole thing concludes in a blending of voice, guitar and drums that musically resolves on a high note that's quite different than the previous five songs.

It can't last, of course-- this is a musical prism where every song has to bounce off another. "Ticket To Ride" brings what would have been, in a pre-CD era, "side one" to an appropriately ambivalent close. Musically and lyrically, it draws together all the threads of the previous six tracks, and it's a song where every member of the band makes crucial contributions. It's primarily Lennon's lyric, and his lead vocal slides across words ("I thinnk I'm goonna be sa-a-a-d/I think it's toodaaaay, YEAH!") as easily as the Beatles will ski down the mountainsides of Switzerland when this song plays in the Help! movie; Paul's propulsive bass-lines shadow Ringo's drums, as Starr smacks out a rhythm that McCartney himself devised; and John and George's intertwined guitars create maps of sound, John's rhythm guitar slashing beneath the melody like lines in a Jackson Pollock painting while George's lead creates intricate pointillist patterns on top of and in-between his partner's broader strokes. It's the most sonically blissful song on the whole record, the single best display of how finely the Beatles had tuned their model of vocally harmonious guitar rock only three years into their recording career. And it's the album's best example of how they were functioning as one perfect pop mind in this period, everyone knowing exactly how to balance out the others.

And so, of course, all this musical wizardry and togetherness works towards a revelation of loneliness and loss-- the second half of the verse I quoted above ends, "The girl that's drivin' me mad/Is goin' away...." In seven songs, we've moved from the idea of love as a counterweight to self-involvement ("Help me get my feet back on the ground") to love as a rejection and cold dismissal ("She's got a ticket to ride/And she don't care"). The support the singer wanted has become suffocation for his partner ("She said that livin' with me/Was bringin' her down/That she would never be free/When I was around"), and not even his rationalizations ("I don't know why she's ridin' so high/She oughta think twice, she oughta do right by me...") can save him this time: where he saw floating away as a trap in song one, his lover understands it as freedom in song seven.

But here's the thing about songs: as Stephen Sondheim once said in an interview, you can be as lyrically clever as you want, but you always have to remember that someone has to sing the damn thing. And while Lennon's lyric is a brilliant study of loss and bitterness, its real "meaning" lies less in the words than in how they're sung. Or more precisely, how they're played, in all senses of the word. Lennon opens with an intentionally draggy timbre, like a man who's just woken up to find his lover packing her things-- words feel slurred, pulled upon, as if Lennon is using them for the first time. One could easily imagine the kind of quiet, rueful vocal we got in "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away," except the band-- now fully electric once more-- won't let him fall into that kind of solipsism.

The repeated guitar figure that opens the song and recurs throughout starts slowly-- expressing a kind of tentativeness-- but quickly picks up speed and brightness, pushed along by that wonderfully off-kilter drum roll, and Lennon's vocal is soon pushed in the same way. The second the chorus kicks in, Paul is there to help his friend stand upright; it's literally vocal support, of course, but it's a sort of emotional support, as well. When John reaches the bridge and goes into the "she oughta think right" rationalization I mentioned above, Paul doubles Lennon's vocal line and fills it in with high-pitched harmonies that lift the song into a different emotional register, like a pal supporting his friend (even if that friend is completely wrong, because sometimes that's what friends do). It's where lyric meets performance, and tension is resolved in the joy of four men playing together. Two years later, Ringo sang of how he "got by with a little help from his friends," but "Ticket To Ride" already mapped out that space in a very rich way: if love isn't all you need, maybe the perfect pop single is.

Joy, sadness, loneliness, desperation, come-ons, break-ups, and getting up the next day: after the rich sonic and emotional territory the first side maps out (it's a song suite without ever having to pretentiously call itself that), the second side has a lot to live up to, and so the Beatles do precisely the right thing: they let Ringo deflate everyone's expectations. His loose, funny and utterly goofy cover of Buck Owens' "Act Naturally" might lack the utopian surrealism of "Yellow Submarine" or the sing-along fun of "With A Little Help From My Friends," but it's my favorite Ringo vocal ever; what McCartney once referred to as Ringo's three-note range is well-suited to the country & western setting-- it's closer to yodeling than anything else, and its limitations embody the lyric's tale of a fool who stumbles through love and life. If Owens' tale of a constant loser at love seems of a piece with the previous songs, the galloping rhythms of the band (and their clear joy at supporting their drummer) feel more like a rebuke: "Lighten up, people," they seem to be saying (ironically, this song, which matches the mood of the movie Help! more than any of the album's other tracks, never appears in the film). The walking bass line and cymbal-driven drum part keep anything from getting too sad or sticky, and George gets just the right twang into the guitar.

That twang gives way to reverb in "It's Only Love," a sonic transmogrification that transitions us back to LennonLand. "I get high when I see you go by," he sings in delicate voice, a lovely line that's not really matched by anything else in the song. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have its moments-- if the lyric seems like a pale sequel to "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" (the guy who's trying for reconciliation instead of sitting wounded in the coffeehouse), the jangly guitar and finger cymbals keep things grooving and nicely unsettled; it's a nice sonic match to the narrator's inability to decide what he finally wants. "It's only love and that is all/Why should I feel the way I do?/It's only love, and that is all/but it's so hard loving you." Again, John's timbre elevates the song, giving a more ironic edge-- the narrator's back and forth eventually feels less serious and more comical (at one point, John rolls the "B" on the word "bright," and can't quite recover in time to hide his chuckle). His protagonist never does figure out what to do: the decision is made for him by the format of the 60s pop single, as his 1:56 eventually runs out, and his final "it's so hard loving you" ends up as "loving yooooouuu" like he's being sucked into Ed Wood's theramin.

"I Like You Too Much" acts as George's response song, as his protagonist explicates his co-dependent relationship: "Though you've gone away this morning/You'll be back again tonight/Telling me there'll be no next time/If I don't just don't treat you right/You'll never leave me and you know it's true/'cause you like me too much and I like you." The lyric gets increasingly silly as the lover delineates the nature of his love, but it's really notable for the jauntiness of Paul's electric piano, whose dancing, almost laughing phrasing both predicts and mocks the lyric's strange tale of love. McCartney's electric piano is one of the few highlight of "Tell Me What You See," a Lennon-McCartney co-vocal that feels less like a song and more like a sketch-- the lyrics are throwaway, almost non-existent, but the performance is pleasantly jazzy, particularly at the 1:49 mark, when Paul's piano bumps against Ringo's big bass drum.

The best moment on side two is the next one: "I've Just Seen A Face" is so casual in its country-folk performance that it's easy to overlook just how much work goes into appearing so effortless. The lyrics forgo the emotional complexities and contradictions of so many of Help!'s other songs-- this is the most open and purely romantic song on the record-- but their emotional simplicity is belied by the complexity of their craftsmanship. There are four verses, and each opens with two lines that rhyme with one another ("I've just seen a face/I can't forget the time or place"), followed by two lines where the rhyme is internal ("That we just met, she's just the girl for me/And I want all the world to see we've met"), the "met" at the end of the line cutting it off with a hard "t" sound, and capturing the way that the first blush of love can cause us to run on and oscillate between elegance and inarticulateness. When we get to the chorus, it's only two lines-- the title is built into the opening verse, after all-- but it, too, uses stresses to great effect: the shorter first line of the chorus lands against the longer second line as an embodiment of what the lines, together, are getting at: "Falling, yes I am falling/And she keeps calling me back again." On "again," like a rubber ball bouncing against a hard surface, the narrator is back on his feet and speeding towards verse two, barely pausing for breath. Amidst these wide-eyed declarations of love at first sight, he'll occassionally toss in an "Mmm-mmm-mmm" or a "la di da"-- the genius of McCartney is that he knows these asides have no meaning in the real world, but a great deal of meaning in the world of the pop song, whose expressivity often relies on its inarticulation.

Then, in my favorite moment on the entire album, McCartney's double-tracked vocal catches itself-- at the 1:51 mark, the normal "Falling, yes I am falling" is replaced with a variation, "Whoa, Falling, yes, I am falling..." It might seem like a small moment-- the addition of a single word-- but when you hear him sing it, as if his body's just been pulled back up by a parachute, or he's figured out how to fly just before hitting the ground, well...I'm hard-pressed to think of cooler, funnier, sweeter moments on a Beatles record. Asides can mean as much as anything in the world the album is creating. But having caught himself-- having, only for a second, stopped his forward progression-- the narrator can no longer continue his declarations, and the song ends.

"I've Just Seen A Face" is practically McCartney solo (one of the reasons it translates so well to his current live performances), and so is the next song, "Scrambled Eggs." The famous story about "Scrambled Eggs" is that it came to McCartney in a dream, fully formed. Luckily, he remembered it when he woke up, jotted it down, and started singing to people-- he was so wigged out by the way it came to him that he was certain he was just recycling someone else's song. But no one recognized it, and no one claimed it, so "Scrambled Eggs" went into the studio. When he played it for George Martin, it was thought that an electrified Beatles recording might kill the song's delicacy, so a string quartet was proposed, to accompany a solo Paul on acoustic guitar. This was becoming something quite formal, adult and lovely, so Paul's initial lyric-- "Scrambled Eggs/Oh, my baby, how I love your legs..." would probably have to be changed. And thus, "Yesterday" was born.

"Yesterday" would become the most covered song in the Beatles catalog, and Lennon-- who had nothing to do with it-- would later tell wry stories of bands in restaurants playing the tune when he walked in. It would establish McCartney's reputation as a balladeer even more than his earlier cover of "'Till There Was You," and that reputation would make him an easy target for some of less open-minded, more obnoxiously rockist critics that would bloom at magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy (as if afraid that liking a ballad might castrate them, they'd snidely refer to these kinds of songs as "Paulie" numbers) (it almost makes you wonder if McCartney should have kept the original, more ribald dummy lyrics). It's certainly true that "Yesterday" broadened the Beatles' audience, catching the ear of many older people who'd dismissed their more electric work.

But such is the reputation of the song-- good and bad-- that its qualities as a piece of music have almost been obscured. Which is a shame, because it's a lovely number, fully deserving of its success. Martin's strings on later songs like "She's Leaving Home" could feel a little treacly, and McCartney's sentimental streak wasn't always as balanced by his keen sense of irony once the Beatles broke up; but here, the quartet is unobtrusive, subtle, their vibrato shadowing McCartney's own, rather than overwhelming it. There's a nervous tension to the way the strings of the guitar are plucked at the beginning, expressing both the protagonist's confusion and, perhaps, McCartney's own sense of tentatively stepping into a new musical world. The digital remastering is revelatory-- you could always hear the quartet, of course, but now you can really hear it, and when they enter about 30 seconds in, it feels less like Lawrence Welk than the Kronos Quartet-- pretty but strange, supportive and slightly seasick at the same time. In other words, perfectly in tune with both McCartney's vocal (which has a harder, more expressive accent on it than one might expect for a ballad) and the lyric's own searching and disjunction. When Paul sings, at the 58-second mark, "Now I long, for yesterday...", the subtle double-tracking of his voice makes the lyric less about nostalgia than escaping into a floating dream-space. We are, in other words, back where we started at the beginning of the album-- the protagonist may be singing in a more "adult" musical place than on "Help!," but it's no less difficult or emotionally conflicted.

As with the end of side one, the only answer is to return to the group, and joy of play. It might seem odd to end such a personal, expressive masterwork with another cover, but it's a masterstroke: the quivering strings of "Yesterday" suddenly give way to smirking guitar licks of "Dizzy Miss Lizzy," quickly followed by John's playful "woo!" and yelping "Oww!" This is party pop-- simple, straightforward, and catchy as hell. The guitar repeats a simple seven-note figure with only slight variation; the straight-ahead drumming intersects in an almost mechanical way with the workman-like bass, and only John's fevered vocal offers any real sense of progression, as the protagonist works up a sweat while working through his obsession. The song comes to a halting conclusion, as if the band were a wind-up toy and had just completed its turn.

And none of this is meant as an insult or critique: The Beatles are smart enough to realize that after the emotional roller-coaster of the previous thirteen songs (and their varied musical textures), sometimes all its audience wants is a bit of release. The Larry Williams original has a broader, denser R&B production, with piano, organ and horns. It's very cool-- and sounds a lot like Little Richard jamming with Ray Charles--but there's something charming about the more exhausted version the Beatles play here, because it might not be just their audience that wants that sense of release. Chronologically, it might make more sense to place "Lizzy," a style of songwriting that feels very different from everything else on the record, earlier on the disc-- it's easy to imagine an album like Meet The Beatles! opening with it. But jamming it at the end-- just before the audience might flip the record back over or hit play again on the CD-- is a reminder of the night of bliss that comes before the morning of regret that "Help!" represents, a reminder that melancholy and bliss can live side by side. And that, in the face of shifting emotions and shifting musical landscapes, sometimes the coolest, smartest thing the world's biggest band can do is make us twist and shout.

The Title Above The Name

2009-11-05T19:41:00.007-05:00

Penn and Teller once wrote an article for Premiere where they revealed one of their favorite movie-going habits: cheering in theaters whenever a character onscreen spoke the film's title (they noted this worked especially well in films like Wall Street).

Over at videogum, they've put together a video that exploits this question to the hilt. It's very funny, but the fascinating thing is how hypnotic it becomes; the line between narrative, audience and marketing becomes blurred, and a surreal space somewhere between David Ogilvy and Andre Breton is made visible.

(h/t to the Twitter feed of comics writer extraordinaire Kevin Church).

Notes On Blogging Aesthetics XXII

2009-10-10T23:01:00.004-04:00

The only way to do philosophy is to do everything twice.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

I Think This Is What They Call A Hail Mary Pass

2009-10-08T15:36:00.006-04:00

A recent poll shows 61% support for a public option in health care reform, which tracks with other polls over the last month that indicate growing support for Obama's efforts (a surprising turn after the supposedly "definitive" town hall brouhahas in August). One poll suggests Obama's own numbers have moved from 50% to 56%. Even Bob Dole has come out in favor of health care reform.

With their "Waterloo" quickly slipping away, what's a right-wing media mouthpiece to do? Connect everything to Roman Polanski, of course!

That's right! Various Hollywood folks who've signed those ridiculous petitions in support of the director have given, according to Politico, "$34,000 to Obama's presidential campaign and the Democratic Party." Causality! X does Y, therefore X=Y! As that great philosopher Homer Simpson once said, "It all fits! It all fits!"

Except when it doesn't. The key to the above passage is phrasing, that all-important "and" between "Obama's presidential campaign" and "the Democratic Party." Eric Boehlert parses the numbers and the (forgive the misuse of the term) 'logic' of Politico's argument. He finds that none of this really adds up, even on the basic numeric level: the Politico piece highlights Harvey Weinstein (because, you know, scoring off anti-Semitism while attacking Obama is what Politico might call a "twofer") as
"the most generous Democratic donor of the vocal pro-Polanski contingent," and indeed, his $28,500 is impressive...except none of that went directly to the Obama campaign. In fact, of the $34,000 trumpeted in the headline (an amount that, as Boehlert notes, is .002% of the $750 million the Obama campaign raised last year), only $15,000-- less than half-- went to the Obama campaign. So even if you buy into the numerous fallacies in Politico's logic (i.e., Hollywood supports Polanski [except when it doesn't]; Hollywood supports Obama [except when it doesn't]; therefore Obama supports Polanski), they can't even really marshall the evidence they claim to have to support their cause. That kind of mathematical brilliance really explains the GOP's grasp of polling on health care, though.

Still, I'm sure that Politico bigwig Roger Simon will find a way to make this great news for John McCain.

A Tale Of Two Football Players

2009-10-06T19:45:00.006-04:00

By now, you've probably heard that Browns receiver Braylon Edwards has been accused of attacking a man outside a Cleveland club late Sunday night, after another Browns loss. Because, in part, Edwards is a Cleveland celebrity, and in part because the alleged attackee is close friends with LeBron James, it has been all over the local media. Now, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has said the league may investigate the incident (a police complaint was finally filed by alleged victim Edward Givens on Monday).

Here's a quote from the PD article about the league's code of conduct:

Meanwhile, the NFL investigation could result in discipline if Edwards is judged to have violated the league's strict personal conduct policy.

"We are looking into it as we would any such incident," said Greg Aiello, NFL spokesman, in an e-mail.

Commissioner Roger Goodell has been vigilant in disciplining players for casting the league in a bad light.

The personal conduct policy explicitly states: "It is not enough simply to avoid being found guilty of a crime. Instead, as an employee of the NFL or a member club, you are held to a higher standard and expected to conduct yourself in a way that is responsible, promotes the values upon which the league is based, and is lawful."

I am, of course, a Browns fan. But if Edwards is indeed guilty of behaving like an ass, I don't really have a problem with some kind of disciplinary action.

But I can't help but notice that the alleged incident-- and all the resultant coverage-- follows a Sunday night game where Ben Roethlisberger was allowed to lead his Pittsburgh Steelers to victory against the San Diego Chargers. If you only get your sports news from ESPN, you might not have heard, but "Big Ben" currently faces a civil suit accusing him of rape. He also faces recent allegations that he harassed employees at a Nevada club (all of this on top of his earlier motorcycle madness). Goodell made a pro forma statement when the rape charges broke in late July, saying the league would "look into it," but it seems to have disappeared down the memory hole in time for one of the league's premiere teams to start their season, and their star player to take the field (especially when those Sunday night NBC dollars are on the line).

Roethlisberger's defenders have repeatedly said that the accusations differ because they come in civil suit, not a criminal case. But if we're really supposed to believe that self-righteous code of conduct quoted above (the one Goodell has used to suspend numerous players in the last two years without any criminal charges brought against them), that legal difference is completely irrelevant.

Surely, a rape accusation is not something that "promotes the values upon which the league is based," is it? Why the quick rush to judge on Braylon, and not Big Ben? Or does violence against club owners rate higher with the Commish than violence aginst women?

"You Think You Can Steal The Emperor's Clothes That Way?"

2009-09-30T22:54:00.004-04:00

Ouch! Democratic Representative Alan Grayson rips Republicans and their media sycophants a new one here:

My First WaPo Editorial

2009-09-29T20:19:00.004-04:00

So, it turns out that the Washington Post is having a contest to find a new pundit for its editorial page. Yes, you read that correctly.

Here's the description Yglesias pulls from the ad for "America's Next Great Pundit" (which I think they should've called "So You Think You Can Bleat"):

Here’s your chance to put your opinions to the test — and win the opportunity to write a weekly column and a launching pad for your opinionating career!

Start making your case.
Use the entry form to send us a short opinion essay (400 words or less) pegged to a topic in the news and an additional paragraph (100 words or less) on yourself and why you should win. Entries will be judged on the basis of style, intelligence and freshness of argument, but not on whether Post editors agree or disagree with your point of view. Entry deadline: Oct. 21, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Kudos for the groovy, just-in-time-for-the-'80s computer graphic, and the nice use of bold on the word heard. But I am sure I can be as thoughtful as Charles Krauthammer or William Kristol, so here is the entry I'm submitting:

So like, right now for example. The Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, "What about the strain on our resources?" Well it's like when I had this garden party for my father's birthday, right? I put R.S.V.P. 'cause it was a sit-down dinner. But some people came that like did not R.S.V.P. I was like totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, and squish in extra place settings. But by the end of the day it was, like, the more the merrier. And so if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. Thank you very much.

I can't wait to debate Cokie and George on ABC this Sunday!

Chosen Ones

2009-09-28T18:51:00.000-04:00

If you were trying to convince a Joss Whedon virgin of the writer-producer-director's televisual genius, you could do a lot worse than this list of the "25 Best Whedonverse Episodes" assembled by EW. I could quibble with the ordering-- as good as it is, I suspect Firefly's "Our Mrs. Reynolds" benefits more from its Mad Men connection than its own inherent quality--but there wasn't one episode listed that I could disagree with, and that's a rarity when it comes to the intense passions cult shows like Whedon's tend to inspire. Every show is represented (even Dr. Horrible!), and reading through the list made me want to break out the DVD sets again, which is really what these kinds of exercises should, in the end, inspire.

Oh, and their number one choice? It wouldn't be mine-- I'd go with their #2-- but it's certainly a brilliant episode, and a reminder that Whedon's greatest contribution to television is remembering that the scariest demons we face are also the most human.

Bossa Nirvana

2009-09-28T17:02:00.000-04:00

I watched the rather hit-and-miss adaptation of John Grogan's charming memoir Marley & Me last weekend, and while there were some strange choices made throughout (starting with the casting of Owen Wilson, who I like but who feels a bit too somnambulant for the role), one thing I did enjoy was the movie's use of pop music. In telling the story of a Gen X couple's progression from courtship to large family, the film deploys some clever remakes of alternative pop hits to suggest both the giddiness of that shift and also how disorienting it can be-- your new self is layered onto your old self, without the old self entirely fading away.

That notion of the cover-song-as-lost-identity is best captured in the above cover of Nirvana's "Lithium," here performed by Chicago alt-folk artist Bruce Lash. Its bossa nova groove, reminiscent of Nouvelle Vague, is mellow in a way that enhances the song's lethargy and instability, rather than flattening it out; it takes the gorgeous, fragile melody that's buried in the original and releases it, reminding us that beauty and anxiety are always doing a tentative dance in Cobain's work.

Checkpoints

2009-09-28T02:00:00.003-04:00

Oh, in case you were wondering (and I'd be hurt if you weren't)-- blogging has been light lately for a bunch of reasons. Most recently, I've been laid low with the flu (and temporary, utterly wrong-- and completely predictable, given my hypochondriac tendencies--worries that it was something worse). School always ramps up much faster than I think it will. Facebook tempts me more often these days, with its pithy little status updates that require much less effort than a blog post. And finally, I'm running blogs for each of my classes this semester (which are great, by the way-- I'm learning a lot from my students), so a lot of my blog energy is being re-channeled into other spaces.

Also-- I created a blog cloud, down in the corner there, deciding that after a couple of years (!!) of doing this, it might be useful to have tags on posts. So I went back and re-tagged everything, and now have to remind myself to tag new posts. It was an interesting experience, coming up with categories for entries that were often written much more in a mode of moving across categories, written to weave together points that might initially seem quite disparate. And it was interesting to see which categories ballooned like Rush Limbaugh at an OxyContin convention, to realize just how many times I mentioned Joss Whedon, or Obama, or The OC. And I guess after that sort of look back, I just wanted to blog a little less, feeling a bit burnt out and worrying about redundancy. But I enjoy this too much (and like staring at clouds, imagining their shapes to come) to stop doing it entirely. So please forgive me if posting is a bit less frequent than it was at this point last year-- I'm still here, I'm still reading you all, and I promise to check in from time to time.

Mixed Tapes

2009-09-28T01:02:00.007-04:00

Imagine a movie is like a mix tape, infinitely reworkable, and we're able to rewind and reconfigure scenes with the push of a pause or play button (I actually just did this exercise with my students, so I have the pop of cinema on the brain). What would you cut, and what would you save? How would you re-mix the colors and tones, the dialogue and the music, so the flash of flare that brushes against a rear car window could cast our lovers in an even prettier amber glow?

These were the questions I kept thinking about watching Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, the 2008 indy-rom that veers between enchanting and interminable. There were so many things I enjoyed about the movie-- the lead performances by Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, the texture of a midnight New York as seen through the eyes of precocious teens, a soundtrack that included Band Of Horses, The Submarines and Vampire Weekend--that it made me even more frustrated by those elements (like Peter Sollet's schizo directing and an occasionally overly twee script) that didn't flow. Sollet also directed the 2003 Sundance favorite Raising Victor Vargas, another film that felt caught between a love of gifted actors and a tiresome desire to squeeze them into misshapen narratives that feel soaked in an obsession with a mythical "authenticity" (one very nice scene in Playlist, set in a music studio, has its charms extinguished by a lengthy exchange about life and meaning whose adolescent meandering wouldn't have passed muster with Angela Chase).

There's a clear joy of performance generated between the actors in Playlist, and I kept wishing Sollet (working from a screenplay by Lorene Scafaria that in turn was adapted from a novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan) would let them cut loose a bit more, to follow what often feel like improvised bits. There are some lovely moments of observation, as when Nora's drunken friend Caroline (a charming Ari Graynor, wasted in an extraneous and grating subplot) can't quite unlock a car door, and a crowd gathers on the sidewalk to cheer her on. Cera is especially good in those scenes, as they allow his emo mumbling to have a real purpose-- he's voicing his thoughts as he's working them out, then using his comments as a jokey cover for his insecurities. I really enjoyed the scene that followed, too, as Nick and Norah discuss pop music, and the conversation awkwardly veers from geeky enthusiasm about bands to sudden questions about past lovers, to awkward silences and failed attempts to re-start the chit-chat. There's a delicate, verite quality to those moments, and the movie is at its best when it emphasizes the connections between love and pop, and how the latter (often painfully) shapes our notions about the former.

It makes you want to cut the songs about the goofy best friend and the jealous ex-girlfriend, and to tweak and re-order the songs about the gay bandmates (which are sweet even as the totter on the edge of stereotype, and deserve to be fleshed out a bit more). There's a great cinematic mix tape hidden in the hiss and the stop-and-start structure of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist; it just needs a clever DJ to release its fairy-tale vision of New York, and make it dance.

Snakes On A Plain Dealer

2009-09-23T23:32:00.003-04:00

You can always count on a Cleveland sports section to offer the best mixed metaphors:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A minute ago, manager Eric Wedge and his brave little band of Indians were putting together a surprising August in the face of a fire sale that is still smoldering.

Today, they have an anaconda of a 10-game losing streak wrapped around their neck and are going down for the third time in the Amazon River like one of those old Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom shows.

The Plain Dealer denied that their new editor is Yogi Berra.

Sorkinalia: Character Counts

2009-09-16T19:07:00.003-04:00

Michael Douglas predicts Glenn Beck.

Baggin' It

2009-09-15T21:27:00.004-04:00

Mad Men

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

The editing and the play with voice-over in the first minute of this segment is brilliant. But goodness-- what would Christopher Hitchens say?

Patrick Swayze, R.I.P. (Updated)

2009-09-14T20:53:00.010-04:00

EW is reporting that the Dirty Dancing star died of pancreatic cancer at 57.

(UPDATE: 9/15, 12:11 A.M.)

The thing about Patrick Swayze is that he had that kind-hearted, open face. His broad forehead and bright eyes always seemed matched to the smile of a southern gentleman. It's the kind of appearance that could lead one to be cast in a lot of "bland doofus" roles (which, indeed, he was) or cause an actor to be stereotyped as a himbo (a persona he winningly mocked on Saturday Night Live). Swayze's best roles were those where he could give himself over to that almost naive big-heartedness, while suggesting a slightly darker, more searching sensibility underneath the bright facade.

He was born in Texas, to an engineer father and a mother whose dance studio provided him with his earliest lessons. After training at the Joffrey Ballet school, he got his professional start as a dancer for Disney, before appearing on Broadway in Grease. Small roles in shows like M*A*S*H and a few TV movies led to him being cast in a small part in The Outsiders, and larger roles in Red Dawn and the TV miniseries North and South.

But it was Dirty Dancing that finally made him a star, at the relatively old age (for Hollywood) of 35. He carries that age with him as a bulwark against the film's potential silliness, allowing his experience and size and dancer's grace to suggest a slightly darker past for his character that the film is only briefly willing to admit. And make no mistake-- in the wrong hands, this sweet, unstable mixture of teen romance and 50s social problem film could've been a disaster. But everyone in the cast, from relative newcomer Jennifer Grey to musical veterans Jerry Orbach and Kelly Bishop, gives themselves over to the material whole-heartedly, and really works to sell the melodrama. The part of Johnny Castle-- his name a literal embodiment of the movie's fairy tale structure--allowed Swayze to blend the rough-yet-romantic persona he'd developed in films and television with his dance training, and the result was what might be called chaste sensuality. When Johnny dances he exhibits a raw physicality, but the kindness in his eyes and his stammering, inarticulate expressions of love balance it out, allowing Swayze to be onscreen what he played in his very first Disney stage show: Prince Charming. It was the manner in which Swayze (in tandem with a very good, wonderfully awkward Grey) symbolized a certain romantic ideal that would make Dirty Dancing a Gen X touchstone.

Is the movie hokey? Sure, especially in the absurd final number, where a supposedly "spontaneous" uprising of dancers in the Catskills dining room writhes and spins to Kenny Ortega's super-stylized choreography. If one was truly obsessed with 'realism,' such a scene would be rejected out of hand; but musicals have always relied on leaps of faith (in Swayze's case, quite literally, as his body jumps across the screen), and I think it takes a certain kind of courage as a performer to allow yourself the open-faced vulnerability Swayze shows in the final number. I mean it as no slam on his acting when I say that the creasing of his forehead and the darting hopefulness of his eyes conveys as much in these scenes as any of his line readings.

Swayze would display that vulnerability once more in Ghost, a very flawed and very dated romance, but one which simply wouldn't work at all if Swayze didn't tackle his character's disembodiment with gusto (it's all in the eyes, which look at Demi Moore with such passion that they transform her into what she never was again-- a credible object of cinematic affection). But most of his post-Dirty Dancing career would be a cinematic mixed bag: the camp pleasures of Road House couldn't quite make up for the wretched trucker thriller Black Dog, the well-intentioned but underwhelming City of Joy, or the sentiment-meets-guns awkwardness of Father Hood. He was very funny on Saturday Night Live, stretched in Donnie Darko (which I've still never seen) and made a recent attempt at a comeback in the dark cop show The Beast. But much of his post-Baby career would rarely take advantage of his quiet charm, his innate sweetness on screen (you really do wonder why no one thought to cast him in an Evening Shade-like, set-in-the-South sitcom), and that ability he'd displayed (that very cinephilic ability) to move.

The one movie that seems to pick up on the Johnny Castle thread and take it somewhere else is Kathryn Bigelow's deeply underrated surf-and-crime fantasia, Point Break. The film is a brilliant action movie, but also works as both a metacommentary on the genre (how one stages a crime-- complete with costumes and choreography-- being akin to how one stages a shot), and a hauntingly beautiful, water-drenched dreamscape. Maybe Swayze needed more fantasy-driven spaces--60s dance-halls and romantic after-lifes and surfer communes beneath the crashing waves-- in order for his down-to-earth charm to be more apparent. The two leads are a fascinating study in contrasts. Keanu Reeves is the strait-laced FBI agent who needs to loosen up, but Reeves has such an ethereal, otherworldly persona that he seems much more in tune with the rhythm of the water than any of his cast mates (that's not an insult-- that quality works really well in the film); Swayze is the koan-driven surfing guru, but Swayze's presence is so much earthier than his co-stars, a feeling enhanced by the long hair and scruffy beard that partially cover that angelic face. The surfing allows Swayze to move within a different kind of choreography, more controlled but no less sensual or alluring.

Covering his key asset with long hair and a beard is a nice signal of Bodhi's underlying nefariousness, and Swayze makes a pretty charming villain. But even in this role, that open-heartedness slips through like a surfer through a curl. In fact, Dirty Dancing and Point Break have very similar narrative structures: a working-class bad boy meets up with a bourgeois kid intrigued by this seemingly seamy new underworld, and the bad boy seduces and initiates the naif into the group (the homosocial bonding is very strong in the film). In the end, the naif stands up for the bad boy against the father figure that wants him arrested/thrown out; but where Dirty Dancing ends in stylized triumph, Point Break's crime narrative demands a darker closure. Bodhi sacrifices himself to the ocean, but Swayze's open-hearted performing style dovetails with Bigelow's compulsive aestheticizing, making those final images of Bodhi consumed by the waves something rich and gray and sublime: like Swayze's character they seem both open and dark, foreboding and appealing all at once.

R.I.P., Patrick Swayze.

You're A Good Man...

2009-09-13T18:26:00.006-04:00

He's back! The elusive blogger known as That Little Round-Headed Boy has returned from a lengthy sabbatical, and it's lovely to hear his critical voice again. Right now, Good Ol' Charlie Brown is contributing to the ongoing Brian De Palma blog-a-thon that Tony Dayhoub is sponsoring, as well as offering a well-deserved tribute to Gordon Willis; he even finds time to throw in a quote from You've Got Mail, thus reminding us that a good cinephile is an omnivorous cinephile. Who knows when the Boy will be shipped off to summer camp again, or laid up in the hospital with long-term, football-kicking-related back injuries? I suggest hustling over to his site as soon as you can, because a voice like this is worth experiencing, even for brief moments in time.

Larry Gelbart, R.I.P.

2009-09-12T18:32:00.013-04:00

Larry Gelbart, the writer and producer who adapted M*A*S*H for television, and guided it through its first four, funniest seasons, died from cancer Friday at the age of 81.

In addition to his work on M*A*S*H-- and pause for a moment to think about how successful a career you had to have had in order to "add on" to something as important as that show--Gelbart also co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Tootsie, was co-librettist on Stephen Sondheim's first musical, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and was part of a celebrated writing staff for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows that included Neil Simon and Carl Reiner (Gelbart would later collaborate with the latter on the George Burns comedy, Oh, God).

But it's probably M*A*S*H for which he will be best-remembered. Gelbart had the unenviable task of translating to TV a film that was not only a huge commercial success, but a politically sharp cult favorite. The dark humor and innovative visual style of Ring Lardner, Jr.'s script and Robert Altman's direction were not qualities seen in a lot American television comedy up to 1972 (All In the Family probably comes the closest, but its deliberately flat, video-taped mise-en-scene didn't go in for Altmanian zooms, cuts and overlapping voices). In the wrong hands, M*A*S*H could've been a disaster, but somehow, Gelbart and his writing staff found a way to maintain the visual style within the small, then-square confines of a TV screen, and more importantly, transformed the movie's voice while subtly altering it. They kept the gonzo humor of the movie, and its cynical view on war, politics and the military, but also recognized that the go-for-broke cruelty (if cruelty with a point) that the movie used to its advantage in a two-hour space simply couldn't sustain itself over the course of a multi-season show. The characters would have to develop, and become more three-dimensional.

To that end, they cast actors with remarkable range (and gave them a degree of freedom in the collaboration-- encouraging them to write and direct as well as toss around story ideas-- that wasn't always common in the 1970s), filled in characters' backstories, and let the surrealism of certain images or narrative threads-- such as Klinger's desperate attempts at cross-dressing himself out of the military-- stand in for more extended speechifying. They also solicited stories and technical advice from doctors and nurses who served in Korea, and many M*A*S*H writers have said that what wound up on screen was often a toned-down version of some of the tales they were told (in this regard, I always think of my grandfather, whose politics were very much to the right of the program, but who loved it, anyway. He had served as a surgeon in a M*A*S*H unit in Korea, and while he never said this, I sometimes wonder if he saw a bit of his own experience, however exaggerated, in the hi-jinks on the screen).

Most importantly, they refused to reduce the characters to either heroes or villains, making them neither perfect nor evil. Hawkeye was at once a witty conscience and a sexist jerk, a talented surgeon and a self-righteous, alcoholic egotist. Margaret was a stuck-up scold, but also a dedicated nurse. Henry was an absent-minded goofball, but also a fierce defender of the men and women under his command. That blend of genres and self-aware roundedness of character is a legacy that lives on in shows as diverse as Gilmore Girls, Hill Street Blues, The West Wing (Sorkin has always cited M*A*S*H as a big influence) The Office, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. That dash of humanism-- crucially balanced by the slapstick, anarchic spirit Gelbart learned under Caesar-- was the secret of M*A*S*H's success, and the balancing act seemed to mostly be Gelbart's: when he left, the show slowly slid into a more cloyingly sincere moralism, as the characters became more and more "likable" until there was no conflict left in them off which to spark drama. The later years of M*A*S*H are certainly enjoyable, but they never again captured the mix that Gelbart helped facilitate.

Like I said above, it was a long and spectacular career, and I haven't even said much about his Tony-winning musical, City of Angels, or Tootsie, a film I adore. But Bob Westal covers that film beautifully in his piece at "Forward To Yesterday," and TV writer Ken Levine-- who worked with Gelbart on M*A*S*H-- has posted several times about his friend and mentor. Meanwhile, it seems appropriate to let Gelbart himself have the last word:

Firing Line

2009-09-12T16:36:00.004-04:00

So, all Joe Thomas has done since he came to Cleveland in 2007 is play hard, make the Pro Bowl two years in a row, work through injuries, and anchor a resurgent offensive line, something the Browns hadn't had in a decade. To say nothing of his charitable work in the community, his quiet demeanor, and the humble way he represents himself on and off the field. And what does he get in return?

An anonymous, passive-aggressive, debatable slam in his local paper.

There's nothing wrong with Adrian Peterson-- he's a spectacular player, and the Vikings are lucky to have him. But I really question the point of this article, which gives space to the venting of an ex-employee, two years after the fact, who doesn't even have the character to go on the record with his bitterness.

But I guess if the Plain Dealer wants to be the sports equivalent of Politico, that's its business. You stay classy, Mary Kay Cabot!

Saturday Music Break: House Music

2009-09-12T00:54:00.005-04:00

Crowded House perform acoustic versions of three songs from Temple of Low Men, 1988.

Just Sayin'...

2009-09-10T02:45:00.003-04:00

If anyone has a spare $230 lying around, and wants to purchase this in mono format for me on Amazon, I would certainly not complain.