Your Gal Ain't Doodley-Squat: Mystery Train (3-10-08)
Keep Your Whiskey Quiet: Mystery Train (2-25-08)
16 coaches of raunchy decadence and earthy heartache, featuring Jimmy Liggins, Little Richard, Ruth Brown, Nellie Lutcher, Sonny Thompson, Louis Prima, Ronnie Self, and many more....
Viewing Diary, Entry 3: January 2008
I spent a woeful amount of time this past month catching up on Battlestar Galactica, but I squeezed in a few features here and there among all that space opera. I'm back to work for the OA this month, getting ready for our next DVD in June, so I'm watching or re-watching quite a few southern films, though not as many as you'll see in the coming months.
Oasis (2002), dir. Lee Chang-dong I'd call POV shots from the perspective of a woman who is suffering from cerebral palsy pretty damn brave. I took two years working up the nerve to see this film, but you shouldn't hesitate.
Trans (1998), dir. Julian Goldberger Wonderful. Almost a road movie. A beautiful riff on the fluid thoughts
and feelings of an adolescent adrift. There's no sense of pursuit, only
escape.
The Three
Faces of Eve (1957), dir. Nunally Johnson No wonder the successful
screenwriter failed to make his mark as a director. Shooting this film
in
Cinemascope was akin to drawing stick figures on the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel. The shot/reverse shots were laughably rote, and time
hasn't been kind to the premise.
92 in the Shade (1975), dir.
Thomas McGuane Peter Fonda drifts along in Warren Oates' furious wake, bobbing
in a
sea of questionable motivation and laid-back suspense like a
fishing line on a hot day.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950), dir. John Huston Like most of Huston's films: A little baggy, if you ask me. Riffifi eats it for breakfast.
Two or Three Things I Know About
Her (1967), dir. Jean-Luc Godard Not fun. In fact, tedious. Impassioned,
maybe, but ideas are more perishable than emotions and leave only the stale ghosts of feeling when they fall away.
Sunshine (2007), dir. Danny Boyle Message to hot-shit American directors: Make more movies. Explore. Put yourself out there. Be more like Danny Boyle. Or even Michael Winterbottom.
Tekkon Kinkreet (2006), dir. Michael Arias Exuberantly architectural. Anyone looking for narrative comprehension need go elsewhere and sate themselves with less daring fare.
Pom Poko (1994), dir. Isao Takahata I hear-tell that Miyazaki has pretty firm
creative control of his films, and I think it's safe to assume Isao has something of the same power over his productions. So every bit of the weirdness can be
placed squarely in his lap, but that still doesn't explain how the
Disney corporation got ahold of an eco-friendly fairy tale about
raccoons with magic inflatable scrotums.
Broken Blossoms (1919), dir. DW Griffith Lillian Gish. Yellowface. Aesthetic contrition. Good stuff.
Quick Feet, Soft Hands (Rough Cut) (2008), dir. Paul Harrill Less immediate and approachable than Gina, An Actress, Age 29, but the casual execution and lingering impact of Harrill's second project seems to mark him the Alice Munro of dramatic shorts.
Cloverfield (2008), dir. Matt Reeves SPOILER ALERT: The typical irrational decisions expected out of people in a horror film, except this time flimsily justified on the half-baked basis of a core human value. That this value is held in utter disdain by the filmmakers only hits you when everyone dies anyway.
Marketa Lazarová (1967), dir. Frantisek Vlácil More eery first-person than any film short of The Lady in the Lake. As Glenn Kenny notes, one searing composition after another, all united by a truly compelling narrative. This isn't slow-assed arthouse cinema, but high-pitched historical drama.
The Red Shoes (1948), dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger I've been fitting as many Powell and Pressburger films into the last few months as possible, and I'm inclined to agree with prevailing opinion: This is their unassailable masterpiece.
Great World of Sound (2007), dir. Craig Zobel Understands joblessness. Understands creative hunger. Understands how we con ourselves and how we con each other. Understands, but never condones.
Stella Dallas (1925), dir. Henry King Unparalleled weepie. Belle Bennett's
gloriously uncouth social dis-graces and subtle performance bring
contrapuntal notes of restraint to all the high drama. Devastating.
Tol'able David (1921), dir. Henry King Like a Keaton flick at half-speed, slow enough for the tears to well up.
The Axe in the Attic (2008), dir. Lucia Small and Ed Pincus Like Katrina, I'm still wringing this one out of my head.
Black Natchez (1967), dir. Ed Pincus No mean feat tracking this one down, a proto-Harlan County USA set during the unrelentingly tense fallout of a Civil Rights assassination in Natchez. Like Kopple's frustrating examination of a divisive coal miner's strike, teaches us how organization can become a contradiction in terms. Along with Pincus' Diaries, a DVD is reportedly in the works.
Okaasan (1952), dir Mikio Naruse Speaking of weepies, try understanding the world after this bitter and somehow still beautiful film.
Bangiku (1954), dir. Mikio Naruse Points directly to the emergence of Imamura in a way I never quite imagined and that is obscured by the common narrative of the Japanese "New Wave."
Jump & Grunt: Mystery Train (1-28-08)
Back after an enforced hiatus (l o n g story), Mystery Train returns with two stellar tracks by the great Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who got his nickname when an overzealous hair-straightener left him bald as a scalded pig, and probably every bit as ornery. Hop on for these awesome cuts, but stick around for songs by the Daps, Roscoe Gordon, Dinah Washington, Gene Vincent, the Todd Rhodes Orchestra, Julia Lee, Tiny Bradshaw, Ronnie Hawkins, Laura Lee Perkins, and many more.
Tallulah-Lura-Lural
I just can't help posting pics of the great Tallulah Bankhead, and the kind folks at the aptly-named If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger... have fed my obsession in grand style with this wonderful series.
Irving Rapper from Movie Talk: Who Said What About Whom in the Movies, first quoted here:
The greatest performance I have ever seen was given by Tallulah Bankhead in the test she made for Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Karl Freund photographed the test. He cried. She was that woman! She had promised not to drink; she could not keep her promise. Jack Warner said 'Errol Flynn is enough.' It cost a fortune to do an Errol Flynn picture because he was always drunk. And thanks to Errol Flynn, Tallulah lost the part.
Viewing Diary, Entry 2: December 2007
Lots of movies this month, though not as many as if season four of The Wire hadn't eaten up a lotta my time. I'd comment at length if I thought I had anything to add, but I'll only say that I found it strained at moments, particularly when hammering home the reverberations between societal strata that make the show so interesting in the first place. Still, the best thing on television short of "Trick my Truck."
Linda Linda Linda (2005), dir. Nobuhiro Yamashita Easily my favorite movie of the month. Not as candy-coated as you'd expect, and surprising at every other turn as well. Low-key naturalism rules the day, but the snatches of pop you hear throughout pay off.
PS: Du-na Bae has one of the most mystifying faces I've ever laid eyes on....
No Country For Old Men (2007), dir. Ethan Coen When Tommy Lee wakes up, he's smirking, which is every bit the problem. I simply part ways with this film.
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), dir. Frank Tashlin Realityville met Cartoonworld years before Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. A perfect feature for a Sunday afternoon matinee. And oh yeah: Va va va voom. 
Man's Castle (1933), dir. Frank Borzage In this fascinating and remarkably political Pre-Code talkie, my current favorite director returns to the silent pattern of Street Angel and Seventh Heaven
like a penitent to the altar. Some day a Frank Borzage boxed set will
reveal one of the best-kept secrets of classic Hollywood to the
non-dork world.
West Bank Story (2006), dir. Ari Sandel "I feel disgusting / Oh, so disgusting. / I feel easy and cheap and laaaaaame."
Election (2005), dir. Johnny To
Not quite the revelation I'd been led to expect, but a good Hong Kong
actioner with enough intrigue and insight into the political process to
render null half of Robert Redford's career. As modern crime trilogies
go, I prefer Pusher.
In the Pit (2006), dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo Despite a grating soundtrack, this film gets by on sheer faith in its endlessly watchable subjects.
Several Friends (1969) & The Horse (1973), dir. Charles Burnett A crying, god-awful shame. Several Friends is laid-back proof that Killer of Sheep was no fluke, and The Horse hints at lyrical heights that only remained beyond his reach for lack of a decent stepladder.
The Ten (2007), dir. David Wain How can such a prescriptive plot device result in a film so aimless and leaden? Hardly Wet Hot American Summer II. Too agreeably offensive. A tad boring, even. But speckled with funny.
A Matter of Life & Death, or Stairway to Heaven (1946), dir. Michael Powell & Emeric
Pressburger
On third viewing, this film has lost a lot of its magic. I prefer
other work by the duo, but this one's first ten or so minutes jerks
tears like nobody's business.
Local Color (1977), dir. Mark Rappaport Extraordinarily fast-paced for such a statically staged film. I'm amazed it's so obscure, what with all the juicy incest....
Shotgun Stories (2007), dir. Jeff Nichols I've said my piece below.
Redacted (2007), dir. Brian De Palma
I wrote a short review that was cut for space, but the
only part I can find worth saving is this: "The veteran filmmaker
excels at constructing little hermetic
snow-globes of suspense, but more agenda-driven pictures fall flat
under the weight of his simple world view. Redacted struggles
under such over-determined and self-righteous direction, which consigns
characters to that storied martial hell on a bitterly fast track. If you
see a redneck in the first act, he's bound to hoot and holler and do
something horrible by the last."
Baby Face (1933), dir. Alfred E. Green
Thomas Doherty files this under movies about "predatory trollops [who]
went horizontal for upward mobility," and the scenario plays out just
like that. Babs is already tuff as nails in her first big role.
Police Beat (2006), dir. Robinson Devor Funny and searing emotional dissection, with a hint of "Cops" for good measure. I kept thinking of Portnoy's Complaint, for some reason. Tune in next week for "Mr. Ed" meets "Rescue 911!"
Newsies (1992), dir. Kenny Ortega "Children's agit-musical? Greenlight it." I loved this film as a kid. I was a union man even back then, having witnessed my father on the picket line. I can find no reasonable explanation for Robert Duvall's involvement, but Batman sure can bust a move.
The Taste of Tea (2004), dir. Katsuhito Ishii A magical realist offshoot from the current crop of Japanese surrealists. Ideas and talent and capacity for sudden beauty to spare....
Black Book (2006), dir. Paul Verhoeven Slick and provocative. Are we meant to believe that Nazi loot funded Israel so literally? "Based on True Events" seems a perverse epigraph to an otherwise interesting film....
Cocaine Angel (2006), dir. Michael Tully Scuzzed-out and effective filmmaking, but lulled by a mastubatory lead and half-finished script. Skillfully captures the smoky airlessness of dark rooms and withdrawal.
Christmas in July (1940), dir. Preston Sturges
My girlfriend now counts Sturges among her favorites. Anyone who sees
a real kinship between him and the Coen brothers couldn't scratch the
surface off an M&M. There's a difference between dramatic irony
and cool disdain.
Seven Men From Now (1956), dir. Budd Boetticher Holy testosterone! I could feel my beard growing. What rocks did they chisel actors like Randolph Scott out of?
The Untouchables (1987), dir. Brian De Palma Mamet scripts. Morricone scores. Armani drapes. Sean Connery hrrumphs. De Palma directs. (And focuses on form rather than politics.) I watched this movie on television as a child, and I still find it a breathtaking example of what we lost when we abandoned the old studio system. How was Zanuck not in charge of production?
(BTW: I saw this on satellite while visiting my family. The picture was cropped to fit old sets but then stretched to fit my parents' newfangled widescreen. How I managed to still enjoy it is beyond me....)
The Bastard Sons of Terrence Malick
There's
plenty to admire in Jeff Nichols' debut feature, Shotgun Stories.
I grew up in southeast Arkansas
and often wondered why nobody ever set a movie in a world I could
recognize. Now, somebody has tried. And bless his indomitable
heart.
Critics have fallen all over themselves to praise the story of a deadly feud
between two sets of half-brothers, and you only have to look to see why.
Long, loving shots of raw earth alternate with concentrated and subtle
character development. Sudden violence punctuates meticulously composed
tableaux. Patient long takes sometimes pay off in a big way.
At one difficult moment in the narrative, Nichols' lens captures the faint
glint of a spider's web aloft on the evening breeze in the golden sunset.
Such shots can knock you flat on your ass.
But Nichols' debut film, like that of his accomplished producer David Gordon
Green, is clearly hampered by an unfinished aesthetic. By choosing to
emulate the lyrical masterpieces of the auteurist giant Terrence Malick, Nichols
has his sights set on an unforgiving style. At best, every moment feels
singularly brave and revelatory. At worst, bravery takes on the veneer of
foolishness.
Mystery Train (12-17-07): Ike Turner, RIP
From Deep Blues, by Robert Palmer:
One March afternoon in 1951, a Delta highway patrolman spotted a flagrantly overloaded sedan wallowing up Highway 61 toward Memphis. Seven black teenagers were crammed inside, and a string bass, three saxophones, a guitar and amplifier, and a set of drums were partly crammed in with them and partly lashed to the vehicle’s roof. The patrolman pulled out onto the highway and turned on his siren, and as the sedan shuddered to an ungainly halt on the shoulder, several pieces of the equipment, including the guitar amp [!], tumbled off the roof and onto the ground.
Eighteen-year-old Ike Turner, the ringleader of the group, was a Clarksdale native and something of a personality around town. He worked as a disc jockey for Clarksdale’s WROX, spinning records by nationally popular local performers, and he played piano with Delta bluesmen like Robert Nighthawk. His band, the Kings of Rhythm, was a popular local attraction. The group played jumping dance music, including versions of the latest r&b hits, and were popular with some white teenagers as well as younger blacks. The handsome, pencil-moustached Turner was already a charmer. He explained to the patrolman that he and his band were on their way to Memphis to make their first record. This was their big chance! Only a cop with a heart of stone would have denied them their shot at the big time, and before long they were back on the road, having tied their gear to the top of the car more securely.
That busted guitar amp gave birth to the fuzzed-out sound that many identify as rock and roll. And so this episode of Mystery Train is dedicated to the memory of a mover and a shaker.
Featuring Ike Turner, Bonnie Turner, Tina Turner, JW Walker, Clayton Love, Jackie Brenston, Dale Hawkins, Babs Gonzales, Nellie Lutcher, Big Maybelle, Jimmy Rushing, and many more.
Mystery Train (12-10-07): That's Alright, This is a Hoarse Number
Featuring Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, the Shufflers, Big Joe Turner, the Phantom, Lula Reed, Ronnie Self, Sonny Burgess, the Five Scamps, Annie Laurie, Willie Mabon, Joe Clay, Bo Diddley, and many, many more.
::DOWNLOAD MYSTERY TRAIN (12-10-07)::
Let's Make A Film About the Damn Rain
Quickly rising to the top of my bedside stack, Joris Ivens' The Camera & I presents a sometimes wonky but always fascinating portrait of the early days of documentary. Situated somewhere between the Russians & Flaherty, Ivens had a major impact on the art from his very first film experiment: a meticulous account of the daily operations of an Amsterdam bridge. His second film in the documentary mode, "Rain"--later canonized by Erik Barnouw in his seminal history of the genre--was at the time dubbed a "cine-poem," a descriptor that neatly characterizes the heady seriousness of the times.
H E R E ' s an excerpt from the book, followed by a link to the short film:
My
next film started from a far more trivial motive. While on location for Breakers
we needed the sun, instead we got rain--those long days of rain that you have
in Holland. The
idea--let's make a film about the damn rain--came quite naturally.
Although
this idea arose almost as a joke, when I returned to Amsterdam I talked it over with Mannus
Franken, who sketched an outline. We discussed and revised the outline many
times until it became a film for both of us. Unfortunately, Mannus Franken
lived in Paris, so the shooting in Amsterdam was done by me
alone. Franken however, came to Amsterdam
for a short time to assist in the editing.
In making such a film of atmosphere, I found that you couldn't stick to the script and that the script should not get too detailed. In this case, the rain itself dictated its own literature and guided the camera into secret wet paths we had never dreamed of when we outlined the film. It was an unexpectedly difficult subject to tackle. Many artistic problems were actually technical problems and vice versa. Film experience in photographing rain was extremely limited because a normal cameraman stops filming when it begins to rain. When “Rain” was finished and shown in Paris the French critics called it a cine-poem, and its structure is actually more that of a poem than the prose of "The Bridge." Its object is to show the changing face of a city, Amsterdam, during a shower.
Music That Sounds Like Whiskey Smells
The Mystery Train hauls sixteen coaches of raunchy decadence and earthy heartache, and Blind Derek Jenkins unpacks that musical load every Monday, 6-8 pm, on KXUA 88.3.
Featuring Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Chuck Willis, Hank Ballard & The Midnighters, Helen Humes, Wynonie Harris, the Johnny Burnette Trio, Ruth Brown, the Liggins Brothers, the Collins Kids, Big Joe Turner, Chuck Berry, Esquerita, Bo Diddley, Roy Milton & His Solid Senders, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Burgess, Louis Jordan, Tiny Bradshaw, Willie Mabon, Faye Adams, Bill Doggett, Roddy Jackson, the Johnny Otis Orchestra, Cab Calloway, Big Mama Thornton, Bull Moose Jackson, Shirley & Lee, Louis Prima, Red Prysock, Camille Howard, The Coasters, Ronnie Self, Don & Dewey, Nellie Lutcher, Sreaming Jay Hawkins, Wanda Jackson, Little Joe & the Thrillers, Wild Jimmy Spruill, Roscoe Gordon, Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps, Huey "Piano" Smith, & every artist who came down with the rockin' pnemonia & the boogie woogie flu in the salad days of steady back beats & driving rhythms.
I've been piloting this engine for a few years now & have just now got enough lead outta my ass to start podcasting. Enjoy.
::: Download Mystery Train (12-3-07) :::
Playlist after the jump...
Viewing Diary, Entry 1
Maybe I'll start a viewing diary to keep track of my weekly intake.* I'll come back to the ones that stick.** This is as much for me as for you, so expect any insights to be cryptic at best. Ratings system?
We'll start with some catching up from November....
The Ties That Bind (1985), dir. Su Friedrich: Fascinating, but hasn’t aged well. I programmed it as part of a “Family Portrait” series for my local film group. I’ll definitely see more.
Beginning Pieces: Pictures of Sara, 2-4 (1986), dir. Alfred Guzzetti: Pretty much the reason for that series. The only film I could get my grubby palms on through ILL, a beautiful and slight profile of wittle Sara Guzzetti. Wonderfully frank and raw, unabashed in the paternal love that oozes from every frame. Seeing more of his films is pretty much my mission.
Backyard (1984), dir.
Ross McElwee: His first real film and still the best introduction to a catalog
that will change your life.
Late Night Talks with
My Mother (2001), dir. Jan Nemec: Fish-eyed rubbish.
Team Picture (2006),
dir. Kentucker Audley: Funny and singular. I found Dave alternately infuriating
and likable, Dave's roommate comic and sad and less of a cipher than his obstinate buddy. They have something of a
Maverick-Goose thing going, sans homoeroticism.
Titicut Follies
(1967), dir. Frederick Wiseman: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest needn’t have been
made. Haunting.
Hindle Wakes (1927), dir. Maurice Elvey: Watch out world, here comes Fanny! This movie paved the way for Reba McEntire's "Is There Life Out There?".
51 Birch Street (2005), dir. Doug Block: A heartbreaking head-fake.
Kamikaze Girls (2004), dir. Tetsuya Nakashima: Rock-oco!
The Ballad of Narayama
(1984), dir. Shohei Imamura. Still
mulling this one over. Lyrical,
libidinal, scatological. In short,
classic Imamura. Maybe even the classic. At least as good as The Insect Woman.
Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America (2007), dir. Marco Williams: Injustice, starring dreadlocks!
The Wind (1928), dir
King Vidor: Lillian Gish is 5'51/2'' of pure genius. On par with anything made
in '27-'29, including Sunrise,
The Docks of New York, and Seventh Heaven. Would make a great double bill with
Woman in the Dunes.
The Hole Story
(2006), dir. Alex Koresky: The frightful apotheosis of personal filmmaking.
Watch me lose my shit!
Perfume (2006), dir. Tom Twyker: Sexiest corpses ever. Hotties left over for giant muck-orgy! The book was prolly better.
Altered States (1980), dir. Ken Russell: Utterly fantastic, in every sense of the term. Still, better and less ridiculous than Network. Give me sacrilegious monkey suits over monkey-suited sanctimony any day....
A Day in the Country
(1936), dir. Jean Renoir: Water-as-character! Film-as-painting! Renoir-as-dirty
old man!
Gerry (2003), dir.
Gus Van Sant: Part of the reason I hate Van Sant is that he's unwilling to
fully commit to his "experiments." This time he opts out with an
incredibly facile and predictable ending.
You're no Beckett and you're certainly no Bela Tarr, Mr. Van Sant.
B T W: Is that a wig?
High School (1968),
dir. Frederick Wiseman: The very first verite
musical! At one point, Wiseman holds a shot of a young
lady’s behind for a few too many uncomfortable ticks.
Porco Rosso
(1992), dir. Hayao Miyazaki: Only Angels
Have Wings meets Open City meets
“Porky in Wackyland.”
Le Balloon Rouge
(1956), dir. Albert Lamorisse: Absolutely gorgeous. And not one pop culture reference!
White Mane (1953),
dir. Albert Lamorisse: Another gem. James Agee translated/wrote the original American voice-over in his usual
unfaithful style, and I can’t wait to track it down….
The Whole Shootin’
Match (1979), dir. Eagle Pennell: Laconic whimsy before a backdrop of alcoholism
and poverty? Yes.
The Darjeeling Limited (2007), dir. Wes Anderson: Youwannaknowwhat? This movie was genius at 65 minutes. That's feature-length, people!
A L S O: Naked Natalie Portman might be, but Hotel Chevalier is du-umb.
B U T: A dubbed Stalag 17 when he could/should
be watching Le grande illusione was a
nice touch.
Paprika (2006),
dir. Satoshi Kon: I want to have a crazy dream-parade with a kickass
soundtrack! Mediational Field!
Sparrows (1926), dir. William Beaudine: “Little Orphan Annie” meets Night of the Hunter.... The swamp as evil creeping organism.... Swallow me whole, swamp-entity!
On A Tightrope (2007), dir. Petr Lom: Um, gorgeous. Recalls Etre et avoir. Perfect combination of open-ended interviewing and verite observation. And beautifully still camera work!
* Among my bright ideas, this one's pretty innocuous. But given that freelancing on top of the day job and other extra-curriculars stretches me thin, I've found that any bright idea has an unpredictable shelf life. In other words, this might be the last entry in my viewing diary. It could just as easily be the first of many.
** I resist the blurb format, so let’s just call these sketched (or half-baked) initial reactions so as to keep my brittle sense of critical integrity intact.
Bourgeoisie on Parade
While skimming the website of the 26th annual Pordenone Silent Film Festival, I came across a tantalizing screening of Jean Vigo's hysterical travelogue, À propos de Nice. Accompanied by Michael Nyman. Live.
Fucking fancy-pants Italians.
Jean Vigo’s reputation as a prodigy of the cinema rests on less than 200 minutes of film. His first venture, a silent documentary 25 minutes long, was À propos de Nice, and in it one can see immediately the energy and aptitude of this great talent. But À propos de Nice is far more than a biographical curio; it is one of the last films to come out of the fertile era of the French avant-garde and it remains one of the best examples to illustrate the blending of formal and social impulses in that epoch.
Confined to Nice on account of the tuberculosis both he and his wife were to die of, Vigo worked for a small company as assistant cameraman. When his father-in-law presented the young couple with a gift of $250, Jean promptly bought his own Debrie camera. In Paris in the summer of 1929 he haunted the ciné-club showings at the Vieux Colombier and at the Studio des Ursulines. There he met Boris Kaufman, a Russian émigré, brother of Dziga Vertov. Kaufman, already an established cameraman in the kino-eye tradition, was enthusiastic about Vigo’s plan to make a film on the city of Nice. During the autumn of 1929 Kaufman and his wife labored over a script with the Vigos. From his work Jean began to save ends of film with which to load the Debrie and by year’s end the filming was underway.
Originally planned as a variant of the city symphony, broken into its three movements (sea, land, and sky) À propos de Nice was destined to vibrate with more political energy than did Berlin, Rien que les heures, Manhatta, or any of the other examples of this type.
Nyman's one of my favorite composers, and I've often thought that his propulsive, intricate scores would make great additions to any number of silent films. Listen to "Time Lapse," from A Zed & Two Noughts, and imagine a silver body trudging up an empty gray-scale street (Street Angel?). Apparently, Nyman's done this for several avant-garde shorts (including Ballet mécanique and Manhatta), as well as a couple features (Berlin: Symphony of a City and Man with a Movie Camera).
A L S O :
Read more about Vigo's short, fruitful life here.
N O T I C E :
The festival also screened a couple rare René Clair films. Show-offs.
A Crash Course in Swinglish
Among the many treasures unearthed by David W. McCain during his search for Teddy Grace was an obscure little one-reeler churned out by Warner Bros in 1937. At the height of their popularity, Mal Hallett and His Orchestra filmed this thick slice of cheese, shot through with half-baked couplets and board-stiff pedagogical banter. It earns the red faced groaners by offering the only surviving footage of Teddy Grace at work, even if the song selection is a bit white bread. (Note also Hallett’s seemingly extraneous arm-swinging, a triumph of Big Band-era showmanship.)
I’ve edited out the individual performances in higher-quality versions here and here.
A L S O :
BUY The Oxford American Music Issue 2007, featuring Roy Blount on yodeling, William Bowers on Mayo Thompson, Michael Powell on Fred Neil, John Jeremiah Sullivan on the Roches, Sean Wilentz on Blonde on Blonde, Sven Birkets on rocking out, and much more .
Oxford American: Teddy Grace
Compensating for a lack of natural range with a buoyant yodel, she sang not quite like a bird—more like a bird
in flight and low to the ground, lilting and dipping and unpredictable,
guided by an exhilarating force or chased along by unseen troubles. Cut
loose from any bodily anchor, resonant and spectral, her agonizing
shallows and abrupt swells haunted any listener fortunate enough to
stumble upon a loose 78 for almost half a century. Something not just
in the words but in her phrasing signaled a worried mind, hinted at a
racially specific point of reference. She sounded black. She might well
have been black.
What's That in the Sky?
In 1939, Russell “Buster” Keaton wrote Joseph Agnelli, his contact at the Bell Syndicate, to inform him that he’d just struck a deal with the editor of his local paper. The Daily Corinthian of Corinth, MS would carry Flyin’ Jenny, Keaton’s strip about a gutsy aviatrix, for a whopping sixty cents a week. Their previous correspondence, as it appears in the definitive collection of his published work, The Aviation Art of Russell Keaton, had been weekly and enthusiastic. Jenny was selling fast and at good rates to papers all over the country, riding a wave of continued public interest in Amelia Earheart and events like the Women’s Transcontinental Air Race, but this news meant that Keaton himself would get to see his new strip in print.
Nowhere to Run
Given that we've passed the better half of the
last decade directing our paranoia outward, it's only natural that some
residual sickness would make its way back to American shores. Rational
fears beget ever more irrational anxieties, reasonable concerns blossom into
ever more intimate bugbears: terror cells and extraordinary renditions, dirty
bombs and data-mining. After spending so much time reading into dark
spaces, who can blame us for scaring up any amount of wickedness when we finally
glimpse our own shadows?
Excerpts: The Lateness of the Age
Clement
heard Goat's cry floating out of the forest, saying "Jamie Lockhart is the
bandit of the woods! And the bandit of the woods is Jamie Lockhart!"
"Now
there must be a choice made,” he said. He walked away into the forest and
placed the stones in a little circle around him and sat unheeded in the pine
grove.
"What exactly is this now?" he said, for he too was concerned with the
identity of a man, and had to speak, if only to the stones. "What is the place
and time? Here are all possible trees in a forest, and they grow as tall and as
great and as close to one another as they could ever grow in the world. Upon
each limb is a singing bird, and across this floor, slowly and softly and
forever moving into profile, is always a beast, one of a procession, weighted
low with his burning coat, looking from the yellow eye set in his head."
He stayed and looked at the place where he was until he knew it by heart, and
could even see the changes of the seasons come over it like four clouds: Spring
and the clear and separate leaves mounting to the top of the sky, the black
flames of cedars, the young trees shining like the lanterns, the magnolias
softly ignited; Summer and the vines falling down over the darkest caves, red
and green, changing to the purple of grapes and the Autumn descending in a
golden curtain; then in the nakedness of the Winter wood the buffalo on his
sinking trail, pawing the ice till his forelock hangs in the spring, and the
deer following behind to the salty places to transfix his tender head. And that
was the way the years went by.
The Lord Is Good To Me
This beautiful backdrop is just one of many the many "composited pans" pieced together by Hans Bacher over at Animation Treasures. I loved this Johnny Appleseed short as a child. Bacher goes into some detail about his process in his post on Bambi, as well as the conditions that made such a process necessary. Lots of great browsing....
Claiming George Herriman
In its later years, when
the strip was at its most surreal and expressive, the trees of Krazy Kat’s Coconino County grew out of pots. They had always been
tall and branchless and monolithic, rising sometimes the height of your average
Sunday comics page. But how their newly crowded roots managed to defy gravity
and keep them upright is anyone’s guess. Still, they towered over the inhabitants, shooting out of frames into
the Time between. They were most often
domestic, placed next to one or another character’s homes, but occasionally
they sprung up independent in the wilds of the southwestern landscape,
alongside the occasional totem-like rock formation. Krazy Kat skipped in their shadows, Ignatz
peered from behind their trunks with brick in hand, Offissa Pup glared from a
distance—cosmic play before a backdrop famously in flux, presided over by these
rootless wonders.
Which brings us to George
Herriman, a man whose own ambiguous roots made their way into his great comic
strip in one way or another over its years of development from a last minute
gag to one of America’s
defining works of art. Thomas Aloysius
Dorgan (the famous sports cartoonist, “T.A.D.”), a fellow employee in William
Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire, used to call him “the Greek,” but only for
a lack of any real knowledge of his close friend’s heritage. Modern commentators are equally
perplexed. We know that Herriman lived
in New Orleans until the age of ten, when his
parents skipped town on the newly constructed Southern Pacific Railroad, riding
all the way to the end of the line and settling in California, where he would live for most of
the rest of his life. But the reasons
for this move are subject to much debate.
According to Bill
Blackbeard, in his introduction to Krazy
and Ignatz: The Complete Full Page Comic Strips 1931-32, the Herrimans were
first-generation Greek immigrants that fled turn-of-the-century segregation
laws, afraid that “hyper-racist” southerners might identify their dark European
complexion as black. However, Patrick
McDonnell, editor of Krazy Kat:
The Comic Art of George Herriman, finds evidence that those southerners
would have been right. Herriman’s birth
certificate lists him as “colored,” and hints at French ancestry on both his
mother and father’s sides. The Herrimans
were likely Creole, with a mixture of descent that could’ve included French,
Spanish, and West Indian blood, and probably a little of each.
But the circumstantial
evidence alone was enough for Ishmael Reed to dedicate a book to George
Herriman the African-American, and for Ralph Ellison and Stanley Crouch to
concur, as jazz lovers familiar with New Orleanean polyethnicity. And Herriman indeed displayed some of the characteristics of "passing": his skin was dark; He was cagey about his background; He always wore a hat to cover his kinky hair,
and in almost no photos does he appear without one.
And then there are the
textual clues in the strip itself. The seeming preoccupation with identity and
constant subversion of the same (Cat Hearts Mouse, Dog Hearts Cat, etc.). Krazy’s blackness and indeterminate gender. Ignatz’s whiteness and the inevitability of
his brick. The peculiarly creole mixture of dialects. And the ancient Egyptian love story about a
royal cat who fell for a servant mouse that Herriman offered as the origin. In
his famous essay on the strip, Gilbert Seldes (with prescient insight, since he
could not have known of Herriman’s race) called this Krazy’s “racial memory.”
So Herriman was a black
man who passed as white, a southern transplant who made the Southwest his
spiritual home. And though affected by
these aspects of his identity, he tended to tower above them. To read the strip
as “African-American” or “southern” is reductive, like reading Kafka as
“Jewish” or “Czechoslovakian.” Krazy Kat was not about identification,
but essence: the existential instability wrought by Ignatz’s stubborn
materiality and his war on Krazy’s lyrical humanism; the social medicine doled
out by Offissa Pup that never quite holds Ignatz’s brick at bay.
When Herriman pictured his trees as
saplings, often in large pots with plenty of room for growth, there’s little
indication of the giants they would become.
Where The Truth Lies
Dave Kehr's excellent review of the new Martin and Lewis boxed set is as good an excuse as any to admit that I read and very much enjoyed Dean & Me (A Love Story). Either Lewis had one hell of a ghost writer or he's a memoirist on par with Groucho: casually funny, (somewhat) dishy, and faux-humble to a tee. Bound to be a bald-faced hagiography, the book ends up revealing as much about the aged man-child as his beloved crooner. I'm happy to innocently soak it all up when the experience brings me this close to understanding just how perfect and perfectly doomed their alchemical partnership really was....
And on another note, my once-removed anecdote about Mr. Lewis: While we were putting the OA DVD together, I sent the intrepid Mike Powell after an appearance by the Treniers on Martin and Lewis' Colgate Comedy Hour . The OA is a non-profit and couldn't pay for any clips, so we were hoping for a "donation." Worth a shot, but Mike later received this message from the man himself (he missed the call!):
So what you're saying is you're just another poverty-stricken group of people trying to do something interesting. I have a great deal of respect for young people and their projects. We received $1000 PER MINUTE for our clips; if that falls within your abilities, call me.
You have got to love that!
Posthumous
No Cannes Do
It ain't Cannes, but I'll be guest-blogging the Little Rock Film Festival for the Arkansas Times over the weekend.... Stop by.
EXCERPTS: Renoir in Pogo-Land
Fox Films welcomed me with open arms. I was particularly pleased by the friendliness of John Ford, being an enthusiastic admirer of his. work. He took me aside in the studios and said to me in French: 'Dear Jean, don't ever forget what I'm going to tell you. Actors are crap.' Of course he only meant bad actors.
I was quick to realize that what Fox expected of me was not that I should bring in my own methods but that I would adopt those of Hollywood. I argued endlessly with Darryl Zanuck, the big chief, that if all he wanted was the sort of film he was in the habit of making he should not apply to me. Hollywoodwas bursting with talent. Why should he ask me to take the place of someone who would automatically supply him with the kind of merchandise he was used to? In that field I should be nothing but an imitator, whereas in my own field I might come up with something new.
Oxford American: The Whole Bright Mess
Twenty-four frames per second might seem out of pace with the South, but we boast more than our fair share of film lovers. We just go about it a different way—less systematic but just as passionate, casual but engaged. It's more a tendency than an obsession, a custom we picked up on muggy Sunday afternoons and Saturday nights when there was nothing much else going on. At times, our love for film resembles our approach to religion: habitual and steady but prone to zealous revival. Even the modestly literal and somewhat antiquated name we choose for ourselves has a certain regional flavor. We are moviegoers, plain and simple.
Distant cousins of the cosmopolitan cinephile and the French cineaste, we have our own forebears. James Agee, a man famous for his writing and his films, was most famous for the way he loved movies, for being one of the first eloquent men to take films so personally in public. The path-breaking feminist film critic, Molly Haskell, was born in North Carolina and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Jonathan Rosenbaum somehow prepped for a career as America’s foremost advocate of foreign film at his grandfather’s small chain of movie theaters in rural Alabama. And one of our favorite novelists put forward moviegoing as a fleeting remedy for the suffocating everydayness of contemporary existence. Never mind his bleaker conclusions about the practice. Binx Bolling was onto something.
I Paid My Dues: Good Times... No Bread, Chapter 2
My early worldiness paid off because I got a job in a pool room, cleaning up and racking balls. I stayed there for a month not touching my initial money but adding, due to my hustling ability. One night, Jimmy Lunceford came in to play a dance and I went. I stood in front of the band all evening and Mr. Lunceford must have taken pity on me because he asked me how would I like to go to Atlantic City on the band bus. Naturally, this elated me so I ran to the boarding house and collected my things and was back and ready before the valet even finished packing. Mr. Lunceford asked me questions about myself and although the rest of the troupe was asleep, we talked all the way to Atlantic City. He had a special boarding house where he and a white road manager stayed and also secured me a room there. I guess I shocked him when I told him I was able to pay my own three dollars a night rent, but he just smiled and told me to get some sleep.
Continue reading "I Paid My Dues: Good Times... No Bread, Chapter 2" »
I Paid My Dues: Good Times... No Bread, Chapter 1
After finally getting my hands on Babs Gonzales' fabled memoir of the Bop days, I Paid My Dues, I've resolved to post the whole thing online, a chapter at a time. His grammar is a tad haywire, and he makes a habit of inexplicable "quotation marks," but I've done my best to make this easy for all of us by correcting on the fly and removing extraneous punctuation.
If you're unfamiliar with Babs, he's kind of like an authentic Harry the Hipster. He recorded the first version of "Oo-Pa-Pa-Da" and rubbed shoulders with the best of the best, but faded into cultish obscurity as soon as Bop was absorbed into late-era R&B and early Rock & Roll.
Until the copyright-police shut me down (I surrender), I'll post a chapter a week over the next five months or so.....
Chapter 1
I came from a ghetto type section of Newark called the Third Ward. My recollections of my early years are of people in lines to obtain stamps for clothing, food and anything else one needed in everyday life. My two brothers and I were spared the agony of standing in these lines tike other kids. Even though we had no father, my mother rented two floors above a liquor store. On one floor we lived and on the other she installed four prostitutes. At the age of nine I was very wise to life but very careful not to let my Mother know it. I ran errands for the whores and every Saturday night my mother would have a social. A typical gathering at one of these parties would be nice married church ladies out to party with the gamblers and pimps. The police of the beat would drop by to collect their take, plus food and drink and usually take a black woman upstairs for sex. There would be a table for crap shooting and one for Blackjack and for Georgia Skin. From 9 pm to 2 am, my brothers and I would cut these games (taking a fourth of the pot) for the house. She would engage piano players from New York and it is with pride that I can say I heard Art Tatum, long before was acclaimed as a genius, at a lot of our parties.
Continue reading "I Paid My Dues: Good Times... No Bread, Chapter 1" »
I Know Who Killed Desmond Taylor
Pardon me for indulging my inner-sleazehound, but Bruce Long is an awe-inpiring academic sleuth. The minutely-annotated issue 50 of "Taylorology" is a great place to start:
The "bumping off" of a famous person like William Desmond Taylor is the sort of oyster that any detective delights to open, so you can just bet the family jewels that I was pretty much elated when my "Chief," the late Thomas Lee Woolwine, District Attorney of Los Angeles County, called me into his private office on the morning of February 3rd, 1922, and assigned me to represent his office in the investigation of this greatest of all murder mysteries.
And, almost from the very first hour of my investigations, I have KNOWN who committed this murder. Yet, at the present time, the evidence is so limited that were the guilty person to come forward and confess the murder, "he" would have to produce corroborative testimony before "his" confession could be accepted. "He" would be compelled to substantiate "his" confession by other credible testimony in order to prove "his" guilt and secure "his" own conviction!
And that includes even Edward F. Sands--the one person who practically every investigator in Los Angeles believes was the slayer.
With this knowledge locked in my heart for the past eight years, my position has forced me to carry on a nation-wide investigation, reaching from the Pacific to the Atlantic seaboard, from the race tracks of Agua Caliente, to the frozen depths of the Alaskan goldfields, knowing full well that each new clue would lead me just where I expected it to lead--nowhere.
Body Language
In photos taken off set, Chaney has the battered look of a boxer. He is not conventionally good looking. There is little in his expression to hint at the delicacy and pathos he brought to his best roles. Much about him is contradictory. His athletic prowess was astounding, but he died in his forties of lung cancer.
The usual explanation for his wildly expressive acting style was the fact that his parents were deaf mutes. Growing up in a world of silence gave him an uncanny gift for gesture.
Probably simplistic, but definitely intriguing. In Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, & the Body, Lennard Davis makes the rather wimpy claim that all readers (as a category, but more specifically as silent agents interfacing with written text) are technically "deaf." I suppose you could extend that analogy to moviegoers in the silent era, if not for books like Rick Altman's Silent Film Sound. (The whole text-as-aurally-challenged idea isn't the wimpiest moment in Davis' otherwise intriguing book. At one point, he perplexingly and apologetically cops to never actually wanting to be deaf.)
On a related note, my favorite cinematic experience of last year would have to be catching The Alloy Orchestra accompanying The Phantom of the Opera at IndieMemphis. Turnout was frustratingly low for most of the festival, but a large crowd showed up to spy Chaney in all his hand-tinted glory. My girlfriend and I were suitably bowled-over, but she had one really interesting (and minor) gripe: the score filtered through the theater speakers, a detail that snuffed a bit of the grandeur and novelty of a live ensemble.
Springtime for Hitters
Forget about the shamelessly repackaged DVD of The Natural. Kino's set to release a fascinating collection of early baseball films in April. Aah, Spring! Make sure to check out the clips. Babe Ruth had a face made for black and white--a nice round head, all childlike eyes and large black nostrils, thin mouth and beefy jowls.
The Same Mistakes, Only Sooner
While investigating MGM's go-to scriptress, Anita Loos, I came across this quote about the anti-Southern Belle, Ms. Tallulah Bankhead: "Tallulah never bored anyone, and I consider that humanitarianism of a very high order indeed."
I think it's safe to say that Loos was equally philanthropic. Thalberg brought her in when Scott Fitzgerald wasn't good enough.
And Because It is My Heart
"More than 1940's Native Son, which Ellison praised, the publication of Wright's 12 Million Black Voices in 1941 hit him with the force of dynamite. A documentary hymn to black America, it unleashed a torrent of powerful emotion in Ellison. To Wright in the year of its release, he confessed bitterness and rage in a letter of searing frankness: 'I know those emotions . . . which tear the insides to be free and memories which must be kept underground, caged by rigid discipline lest they destroy, but which yet are precious to me because they are mine and I am proud of that which is myself.'"
It's an extraordinary statement, dipping low, rising into a Whitmanesque crescendo, bursting with many of the themes Ellison would pour into his essays and fiction. (It's almost a prophecy of Invisible Man.) Discipline was a key concept for Ellison, referring both to the techniques imposed by the artist, who must master and shape his materials, and to the carefully modulated repertoire of attitudes Ellison saw in black life. These different psychological registers—ironic, forbearing, indifferent, mocking, contemptuous—formed a protective bulwark against political and social oppression. "
I'm not sure I'd call it a slip up, but in his rather nice review of Ellison's new biography, Matthew Price misses the reference to my favorite of Stephen Crane's short poems:
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter—bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
"Because it is bitter,
"And because it is my heart."
Golden Parachutes
What makes the legend richer is that Dash Snow could very easily have lived a different kind of life, been a different kind of artist. Snow’s maternal grandmother is a De Menil, which is to say art-world royalty, the closest thing to the Medicis in the United States. His mother made headlines a few years ago for charging what was then the highest rent ever asked on a house in the Hamptons: $750,000 a season. And his brother, Maxwell Snow, is a budding member of New York society who has dated Mary-Kate Olsen. But Snow has concocted something else for himself. He has been living as hard as a person can—in and out of jail, doing drugs, running from the police—for a decade. He’s unschooled, self-taught. And in much the same way that Andy Warhol used the life force of young artists and assorted beautiful people to keep himself inspired, sharing his own talents and imprimatur in return, McGinley and Colen have adopted Snow as the mascot of their message.
I gotta object. I'll admit to finding Dash Snow's life and art mildly interesting, but I will not accept that it is possible for him to live "as hard as a person can." I have a friend among the filthy rich. He claims to have lived as a professional gambler for a short time. That is impossible. Something like the difference between jumping from a plane with a parachute strapped to your back and leaping off the Golden Gate with your fingers crossed.
Peg Leg Sam Jackson? That's hard life.
An Epic Minute, A Minute Epic
In yet another illuminating post, David Bordwell breaks down what might as well be called the Iñárritu phenomenon: densely intertwined narratives and ridiculously elliptical structures. I especially like the section on hyperrefined technique, in which he shows how filmmaking can be reduced to a game of adjustment, like bowling. To get the desired effect, move this way or that, combine the right marks. Put together a schematic and all that’s left to do is chunk the ball down the lane.
Nonetheless, Bordwell skirts an issue that I find fascinating:
We know how to read criss-crossers now, and so directors can push the boundaries on several fronts–more intricate plotting, portentous themes, spatial distance (critics called Babel an “epic”).
I haven’t seen Babel, but I did sit through Amorres Perros (battling a naïve faith in all arthouse-approved foreign cinema) and 21 Grams (battling a naïve fascination with the then-promising career of Benicio Del Toro), both of which bored me in various ways that (I think) had nothing to do with structure. But the picture of Babel that I’ve assembled from various reviews and plot summaries isn’t exactly epic. Or it isn’t epic in my former understanding of the word. When we talk about an epic in poetry, we’re talking about a poem containing very specific things: invocations, catalogues, extended simile, a hero, a quest. (No one would mistake The Waste Land for an epic, though Babel and its ilk seem to have more in common (formally) with that poem than The Illiad.) When the term “epic” started being applied to the novel, critics seemed to have something more to do with temporality in mind. Scope, yes, but also time (often literally). This is the medium playing to its strengths. The novel communicates time better than poetry, and its more “expansive” manifestations put that on display. Long story short: time became mixed up into how we defined “epic,” but the term obviously needs even more watering down.
Now, the cinema has done “epic” before. But nothing in Lawrence of Arabia is peculiarly cinematic; it’s a literary epic, a film more about historical moments than breadth of locale. A cinematic epic would play to film’s strengths over other mediums, and film does space and time better. (And if I say that, I suppose I have to admit that Robbe-Grillet’s novels were cinematic epics, in that they are vast in the spatial sense and shrink or expand time in a cinematic fashion.) The most immediately striking thing about “the cut” is physical and/or temporal displacement. This has been true from Griffith to Iñárritu, at any distance and any length of film…. So why not exploit it... "epic"-ally? Film can move around the world in a split second, and if those seconds turned into a jumbled-up minute, who could deny that we’d have the makings of an epic on our hands? The longest minute ever. Get Clooney involved and it's Oscar-bait.
OBIT
Adrienne Shelley has died. For me, she'll always be young and refusing to apologize.
UPDATE: It just keeps getting worse.
EXCERPTS: A Simple, Physical Thing
The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to speak as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.
"It hasn’t been an easy job," he said, his glasses glinting soberly around the stage.
"We’ve had a lot of problems here, and quite frankly I’d more or less resigned myself not to expect too much. Well, listen. Maybe this sounds corny, but something happened up here tonight. Sitting out there tonight I suddenly knew, deep down, that you were all putting your hearts into your work for the first time." He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the pocket of his shirt to show what a simple, physical thing the heart was; then he made the same hand into a fist, which he shook slowly and wordlessly in a long dramatic pause, closing one eye and allowing his moist lower lip to curl out in a grimace of triumph and pride. "Do that again tomorrow night," he said, "and we’ll have one hell of a show."
They could have wept with relief. Instead, trembling, they cheered and laughed and shook hands and kissed one another, and somebody went out for a case of beer and they all sang songs around the auditorium piano until the time came to agree, unanimously, that they’d better knock it off and get a good night’s sleep.
I love how it conveys both the smallness and the largeness of community theater. The actors are a faceless group, the production immaterial. They react to things together. They tremble and hol