To pass the time

I will leave Jon's personal query as to the present state of his evening aural personality aside for now. I have appreciated his broad attempts to fill in the gaping void as I have lifted little in terms of that as of late. Though I did watch part of the greatest holiday film of the current generation earlier today and, by some truly mindboggling twists it was paired against the most recent iteration of The Alamo. You know the one, where Randy Quaid plays a truly earnest (perhaps mildly deranged) Sam Houston and Jason Patrick a potently enfeebled Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark need not fear for his place as the best screen Bowie) and, of course, BB Thornton plays an unblustery Davy Crockett.
I say "mindboggling" here for entirely personal reasons. Years back, when I lived for a while in Houston TX, among the best things that I could wrangle an appreciation for (besides the brief discovery of HeatherChurch, but that is something singular and for a moment all its own) was the fact that I lived across the street from a very good icehouse and near to the Houston Angelika. Needless to say, I drank many a bucket of Lone Star and also went to a good number of films by myself. A habit I cultivated while living there and one I nourished through a return to Terre Haute for a year and then gave full vent to when I came to New York/Long Island. Among the first places I went by myself was to the NY Angelika - I can't remember the film I saw (the last film I saw there was "Tillsammans", but that was years ago with the Sambo), it was almost simply the going that was important. Living along the north shore of LI, my attentions turned to the Huntington Cinema Arts Center. It was there that I saw the brilliant Small Faces, the overlooked Jude and cemented my appreciation for Godard by way of his skitteringly unctuous Contempt and the perfectly agonizing Weekend. Brilliant evenings were filled by reclaimed prints of Touch of Evil and Plein Soleil while numbers of experimental documentaries and short films were happily waded through to find the odd gem. Why mention all of this - nostalgia I guess; I don't do it anymore. I seldom go to the movies at all anymore actually - alone or coupled. When I do go I suppose there is a firing of conditioned, if atrophied, lobes and a certain psychic salivating that still clings to and massages most all the images that I witness - and I, for one, enjoy the previews. All of which finally brings us back to the start here. Spring 2004, I went to a viewing of Kill Bill vol2 and, scenes of eye-plucking aside, among the moments of interest were back-to-back previews of the films mentioned at the start above. In my mind's eye they somehow merged to make (far too easy here) Bad Santa Anna. Of course, if that were the title of at least one of them, it might have made more money at the box-office. But never mind all of that. The point of this was to offer something to fill the time until the work of things can pick up here. As some know, I have posed a literary task for myself elsewhere and as my partner here is to shoulder it with me, we will be shifting the action scenes to these fertile - if largely empty - fields. But I have other tasks to complete before that can be addressed. Consequently, till then we have this:

A YouTube ranking of the 250 greatest wrestlers of the 70s 80s & 90s. Enjoy.

-fp

Time Out Of Mind

Perhaps it was that exposure to Roger during my holiday, what the reason, I have noticed a drastic shift in my nocturnal music listening; Freddie Hubbard and the Decemberists have given way to Tegan and Sara, Yo La Tengo and Mana. This poppish predilection is most alien and leaves me baffled. The a.m. remains devoted to NPR/BBC and time in my truck is usually occupied with classical fare.

Cashback

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=cashback+movie&hl=en&emb=0&aq=2&oq=cashb#

I have since imagined what thematic distortions would be possibile from 18 minute distillations.

The Damned

Son, Never Mind Them Brakes.
- Jerry Reed

2007 saw Ryan Adams drift into the mainstream with his Easy Tiger album, an accomplishment linked more to its author's sudden sobriety than any actual achievement; that said, it did prove to be Adams' quickest selling album. The album appeared to lack loose drifting contours of his previous efforts (well, some of them) and appeared to have been both overproduced and calibrated by record execs.

Any portents this may have generated were dispelled this summer when Ryan released his Follow The Lights ep which is a remarkable achievement and then, now, we have Cardinology.

I fly like paper, get high like planes, if you stop me at the border, I got visas in my name. --MIA

This latest album strikes the immediate listener as loud, an echo Jeff Tweedy's reincarnation as guitar hero: all we need is the Mamba and Scientology. I can't say I loathe the album, but i fear it will settle into the lower ranks of the oeuvre, alongside Rock and Roll and 29 as evidence of just how prolific this young man has proved: sober or not.

Necros

Wwe watched New York, New York last night and i was left indifferent. Contrast this with my dead-tired amazement Friday night viewing Persepolis before the debate. I had feared the same sort of childhood memoir which I loathe in all forms, but this refreshingly transgressive, befanged, if you will.

Enough chatter about the dead!

Towering, simply Towering - or one man can eat 50 eggs

It is no longer news that Paul Newman has died. There is little that I could add here that I am sure has not already appeared in the cycle of things - folks better prepared to knock out his filmography and pay homage to his legacy have already been at it. Let me say only this, I read once that Steve McQueen, the great Steve McQueen who was able to cover over just how uninteresting and wooden Yul Brynner was in the fantastic "Magnificent Seven", threatened to muck up the whole thing if Newman's name appeared above his on the billboards advertising the "Towering Inferno" - he knew. From Fast Eddie Felson to John Rooney and all the rest beside, Newman was, and played nothing less than, a real cool hand. So long as it is him we consider, all the rest of us are always and forever only shaking over here boss.
-fp

Model Behavior

Ten days or so ago my wife and I viewed an unfortunate film, one where the second scene displayed an inchoate Richard Burton placed upon an Alpine slope and looking eternally lost in proximity to modern objects: a parachute and a field radio. My wife quickly noted, "My god, how drunk is he?"

Indeed this essay was to be about Richard Burton, both his hair and his unholy glaze which cement his performance in Where Eagles Dare. Instead, I must shift emphasis upon Joanthan Lethem's essay Art of Darkness which was featured in last Sunday's NYT Op-Ed section. The essay grapples with the notion that the film The Dark Knight was symbolic of the nation's need for president Bush to protect us from darkened others, and in the case of the sub-prime market, from ourselves as well. Filtering my reading of the essay through the morning's memory of Eagle Eye, another cineplex warning concerning geopolitics and paranoia, I admit to being impressed by Lethem's characterization of Dark Knight as "a morbid incoherence...chaotic form its ultimate content."

Elsewhere Lethem notes, "The Joker's paradox, of course, is the same as that of 9/11 and its long aftermath: audacious transgression ought to call out of us an equal and adamant passion for love of truth and freedom, yet the fear he inspires instead drives us deep into passivity and silence."

This passivity and silence were being plucked again last night in Oxford, MS. I remain at a loss as how the frayed appeal of blocky nationalism and a consumer culture under constant ravaging by ennui and economic famine has managed so uniformly the lemur's stroll into the sunset.

Perhaps my answer lies within another of Lethem's observations. "No wonder we crave an entertainment like "The Dark Knight" where every topic we're unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion."

Oh, Jesus

The loquacity of Joel's grappling with the Rambo franchise and its latest installment pushed my hand and I put down Season 5 of The Wire and instead rented Rambo so that my wife and I could sit and alternate between being bored and baffled for 80 minutes last night.

Why, dammit?

As noted, the film achieves an overkill with viscera being blasted onto the camera's lens, but with this nod to veracity, why are the mercenaries depicted walking in a cluster -- through the world's most densely sown fields of landmines? Is it possible that Christians - when bound and neglected (or fed to swine) in serial rain for a fortnight - can then sprint upon being freed from their tethers? As the opening sequence reveals, the Burmese military have been accused of using chemical agents again dissident populations. So -- what happened to, even, oh I don't know, a conventionally armed air force; perhaps it was their day off. My wife noted it was likely Sunday: praise Jesus.

Let us all be Loaded up and Truckin'

When this little less-than-sober charade of erudition began there was discussion about much, only the barest minimum of which - no more than a scaffolding really - ever made it on to the electronic vellum here. Recently, it was once again brought up (again, not here) that there was never a charter as such laid down for the FoSF. Despite the vagaries of this space, most of what has been of interest has in some way been concerned with notions of hotel-cinema. What is meant by the idea, what truths does such lay bare and how might it be even defined. As to the last there was discussion of what drove nails through planks; is it driven by actors (Kurt Russel, Willem Dafoe, Bruce Campbell, et al) is it directors and their visions' (Fuller, Stallone - fits in both categories obviously - Milius) or is it, as I might stress, situational? These are issues that will continue to be rounded out, even if in the discourse of things, but with that said I have to lay hold to a bard for this board. If there ever was a man who sang the soundtrack of hotel-cinema it was the gifted guitarist Jerry Reed. God speed Snowman.

Stop or Myanmar will shoot! or You don't bring a bible to a gun-fight

Ring around the rosie - pocket full of posies. And to hell with Snopes. In the last days something historical happened - a black man formally accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States. In the days (not many) before that Russia (I hesitate here, in such a meager place, to be as bold as to name directly either Putin or Medveded) ran roughshod over much of the paltry country - only recognizable because of the resources (piped across or otherwise) and the fanciful support given in the War on Terror - of Georgia. If you made it through that torturous sentence I tip my cap for it was not rhizomic but it was from the side of things. There is a bitterness here and I admit that I am not entirely sure of its source so I will beg the indulgence of any and all that happen across here - it is likely to be a long and bumpy ride. For all the history that was made that night, and the history that was made the next morning (also appropriately acknowledged on all sides), let us not talk of change; let us offer our honor to the many more than 90% of the globe for whom it does not matter whether their taxes are cut or maintained or gathered at the end of a governmental form, a machete, a cudgel, a kalashnikov, or a NATO sanctioned weapon. Let us leave aside the sour local moments for now and turn to the test at hand. John Rambo, a man who walks alone, his only companion is death. The character of Rambo is hardly new, Sylvester Stallone has seen him through four iterations of the character(and there might be a fifth?) and there is much here. Stallone has worn himself broad, and we will leave aside the issue of HGH (ab)use, and it works. What, you figure a minimum of 56 yrs old for Rambo (Sly is a wealthy 61/62) and the verisimilitude is there. With that pauper's coin purse taken care of there are other matters to be taken hold of.

Who would have thought, lo those many years ago that we could lay hold of so much of the country's issues by way of John Rambo when the first movie came out in 1982? Aiming for some measure of brevity, let us bother ourselves here with no more than the fact that for all the appropriate ennui that was coughed up in that first film Sylvester's Rambo was guilty of a disproportionate response. Yes, it was a decidedly untoward action when Brian Dennehy's sheriff treated him poorly, but he DESTROYED the town in response. In the second, he was tasked with the most obvious fantasy of a Vietnam Vet - the bringing home of someone held for upwards of 20 yrs. - of course he also takes the argument, very physically, to a handful of the busy-bee bureaucrats who got in his way in the first place, what with not letting him win in the first go-round. In the third, doing a favor for his old commander Col Trautman, he was made a tool of the Afghan mujaheddin, complete with the playing of a round of buakashi. And it is here, after completing his mission that he returns, apparently worn from it all, to the only place he now feels comfortable - the Southeast Asian bush where Rambo IV takes place.

It's a simple story really, and you can find write-ups of it (however poor) just about anywhere on the 'net. Again, for the sake of brevity, always topical, Stallone's still muscled - if not rippling and looking like nothing so much as if he should be saving on car insurance - Rambo finds himself caught in the mix of missionaries and (evil, evil) mayhem in Myanmar/Burma - which, as he so adroitly grumbles to the head missionary attempting to hire him and his boat to go "up river," is "a war-zone." Much was made of the fact that the movie actually opens with real footage of the political mess (to put it lightly) and even carnage (somehow still doesn't do it justice) that has been going on in Myanmar since long before the West generally paid much attention. Though, aside from an oddly positive review from the New York Time's generally persnickety A.O. Scott, most other concerns have been on the hyper-violence of the (frankly well-hemmed) 90+ minute film. And it is indeed bloody, many of the scenes of violence (there seems an almost adolescent and fetishistic concern with beheading, decapitation, the blowing up of heads, etc), were they to appear in the sketchbooks of a quiet teenager in a high school art class would, in today's climate, likely land the school on alert and the student in some sort of supervised suspension. In fact, it apparently has even broken the record for being the most violent film ever shot - a record it claimed from Rambo III - with an average of 3.2 kills per minute. But to reduce the movie to that alone is to miss the potency of the thing - and frankly, there is much evidence (and little of it new) that Stallone had little need of revving up the violence machine to make the Myanmar authorities seem like bad guys. The character of John Rambo has entered into the cultural lexicon of the United States, whether it be the simple-minded idea of "going Rambo" or the confused expressions of conflicted feelings that the nation still carries from our poorly thought-out and mishandled involvement in Vietnam. Put simply, Rambo has become a powerful figure of tropic mimesis for American culture - one that allows the ambivalence of our political culture to draw itself out in a pitiful shadow on the walls of Plato's cave to consider what it sees - not in a mirror, but in the fuzzy contours of a back lit Leviathan both puzzled and awkwardly sure of itself. He has become an ur-figure who stands in for America in both his grizzled countenance and his willingness to engage in brutality to achieve an end that seems better than current situations, at least in the short-term. He is, not just this to be sure, but that sentiment in the country that saw it as not only justifiable but right to attack Afghanistan after 9/11. The violence is part of that, and given the context of the current film, it would be hard to avoid. I could imagine, frankly, that if the movie had been less violent that Stallone might have been accused of making light of a serious and real situation for his own benefit - and those who accuse him of being exploitative because of his use of real footage at the film's opening seems, in a world of less than subtle simulacra, its own pious canard. As is the complaint that it takes a pretty little white girl to get John Rambo's attention - for everything else he is, he is still an American and nothing gets an American going like a white woman's purity imperiled.

What I have not seen much of is a willingness to take the movie on for what it is. Rambo is placed not simply in a geographic crux of shitty geopolitics as a single character, again he serves as a tropic figure of American sentiment (if not sense) regarding both concern for the plight of others as well as the well-heeled perception that sometimes you must meet the baddies on their own level. Is it because he is not a billionaire playboy industrialist by day that he is not better regarded? No doubt he is as morally ambivalent in action as America is and he sometimes makes mistakes but, to paraphrase Scott here, Stallone is willing (and in this I think he might be alone among American film makers today) to present his character with a surprising lack of irony. And let us be honest about this, the painful inter mixture of missionary and mercenary in the movie is likely more to the point about what often occurs than most bits we have seen in the media - cinematic or otherwise. Wealthy (white) volunteerism is both a psychological balm for the members of Wallerstein's core while also being (if we wanted to be kind we would add "unwittingly") a central part of a 21st century imperial policy of maintaining periphery dependence on said core - a new narrative dependent on faith-based organizations and various other NGOs. The other side of this coin is the role of those other non-governmental actors who are coming to play an increased role in social and foreign relations politicking, only these guys carry guns. Can we even pretend that mercenaries are not important in 21st century global affairs? They are currently being used to supplement "coalition" forces in Iraq and provide governmental security in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Without them, even the increased troop numbers of the Iraq "surge" would be no where near enough forces to deal with the situation on the ground.

One more turn with the violence - yes, the particular brand doled out by Rambo is decidedly hands-on and robust in its visceral execution but is it not time to disengage with the myth of cleanliness and the trust we place in our aimed "smart weapons"? The technical virtuosity required in making such machines as well as the precise manner in which we tell ourselves we use them are integral parts in our own narrative of cultural and political superiority, and by way of that our moral superiority. And yet, no matter the technology, any such tool requires, at the very least, human intelligence to plot its coordinates and whatnot and how often has that been found wanting? And now the possibilities of such weapons have become patently frightening on a positively Orwellian scale. I have little truck with those who raise the most meager of oppositions to the stylized presentations of these concerns only to excuse it because, and I quote, it "abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm." Violence is, or at least it should be, a caustic and costly option; here again, Rambo (both the film and the character) is at least passingly honest concerning such.

Oh yeah, one more thing, John Rambo knows who and what he is and let us make one thing absolutely and fundamentally clear, book, magazine, spatula, or whatnot he would kick Jason Bourne's ass.

Rhizome Reasoning

Dirk Nowitzki is not a Nazi.

Steve Kerr's father was killed by terrorists.

If Ariel Sharon were still sentient, it is possible that he would favor the sonic stylings and collages of DangerMouse.

sum' er fare

The old Appalachian jest, as appropriated by the band Wilco, is likely appropriate here. Valuations have been held as they regard the notion of Chomsky's liberal warrior and "Iron Man" (though how much was saved by the studio as they did not have to provide the full backstory to Tony Stark as the past and public history of Robert Downey offered such up on a platter for them?) the blank story of the merged Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde as relates the latest Ed Norton (no curbing of black men necessary - there is a pasty Englishman to take the place) has been ignored, and the water chumming work of "The Dark Knight" still has something to offer and we shall at some point address it to be sure. But if we are to ask, if we are to question, if we are to ponder and wonder as we wonder about the new season of both that prison break show and Jack Bauer we wonder what might be made of Jason Stratham and the new "Death Race" 2008. There are collapsed narratives here and I might suggest that in many ways it is more honest and forthright than "Seabiscuit" and likely moreso than "Fourth of July." We shall soon see.

Voting With A Visa

One week ago I rented Be Kind, Rewind, being enchanted by the idea of classic film beiung "Sweded" and Jack Black channeling Jessica Tandy. It turned out that the film sucked ass, the best bits were in the trailer and the rest was a mess. It did inspire some thoughts on why Wild and Woolly is now a foundation in my life. Crumbling somewhere between the poles of Hip and Wonky, I don't know what I would do without that place. In recent weeks I have had enlightening conversations about Dario Argento (of whom I knew very little) and Andrei Tarkovsky (which I a good deal about) and especially under the elastic embrace of the FOSF the outer arcs of genre remain well represented.

A Question to ponder

It seems there is now a concensus that the latest movie by Mike Myers, The Love Guru, is atrocious; and even those who would like to leave some rope for the man who provided so much of the comedic universe in the last 20 years (how distressing to realize that!) have been able to manage only faint and shifting praise. The concerns of and for the film have been such that even the Religion Blog of the Dallas Morning News insisted that the "movie may be more offensive to fans of humor than Hindus." But the point here is not to continue on the wagon - I have not seen the film and likely will not, though I did find Mr. Myers' recent interview on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross to be strangely affecting in its sincerity - rather, it is to consider something raised at the beginning of the review of the movie by Slate.com's Dana Stevens. She begins her review with a broad theorem of film appreciation and estimation: There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good (though, strangely, not the reverse) - (italics mine). It is that last piece I would like to consider. Is it not possible for a movie to be so good it is bad? Something to consider, particularly in light of the recent release of the AFI's "America's 10 Greatest Films in 10 Classic Genres". I have thoughts on it but will pause for now and leave it to the floor.

The Outlaw Seldom Pales

It would seem that I am being chided out of the cocoon of tepid engagement by my cohort's quick comment on the previous post. I have long harbored an almost untoward appreciation of The Outlaw Josey Wales, called a revisionist Western movie at a (the) popular open source site for all things. It's easy enough to call up the trailer for the movie - a trailer that marks the movie as "an all-time classic Western," Wales being a man who lived by his gun and by his word. But that thin description does little to actually lay out what was the tend and trend of the film. It begins with a raid on the Missouri farm of a peaceful Josey Wales by Kansas irregular "Red Legs". His wife and son are killed, and after burying (and weeping for) them, he digs his pistols out of the still smoldering ashes of his home. With some practice he makes himself into a tempered crack gun wrangler and joins with a handful of Missouri irregulars to pursue his revenge - not because he cared so much for either sides' political concerns. There is much to be gleaned from the film in this regard. I considered, wondered, given the title of this venture what might be Mr. Foote's concerns with a film like this - with this side of the civil war. The descriptions of the Civil War are so often portrayed as North and South, with the buttered footnote of General Lee so meagerly tortured in his decisions and choice to head the Confederate forces being a fulcrum that allows both sides some measure of honor - it becomes a measure of keeping the Union or standing for the right of States, but either way there is a political legitimacy to the thing. But is it not the fringes of the thing where it is all so better seen if not understood. I say it in this way because there were indeed large issues involved in the War - and almost none of them (at least not to start) were slavery or not slavery. There is little merit in mentioning that slavery was not non-existent in the North, and with some past gentle chiding I can recall a text from my childhood with a KY publishing imprint that referred to the war as a conflict "between the states" rather than the "Civil War" - and if you stumble over the semantic differences there perhaps I might also mention that it was also from family that I first heard the expression "the war of Northern aggression." My kin are of that conflicted border state of Kentucky and though I be near to 40 and it is some 140 years since its end my maternal grandparents were both birthed within three decades of its close. There be stories to tell of Squire - as he was called, for the land he owned - but that is for another time. What Eastwood's "Outlaw" pokes towards is the fact that for all the talk of Shiloh or Gettysburg, on the margins the fray was just that, a fray - an ugly splice that tells us that brutal, ignorant, men with pistols backed their way into a peace that was just as frayed. There are segments where we can make for a localized recognition of one another - just as in the movie and Josey's pact with Ten Bears - to be sure; however, even as the smallest bit settles a segment, there are others that are left undone. We are reminded of the divides that remain by such happenstances as the eversohappy Republican southern strategy. Are there enough pistols for all of us? We might need them, after all it seems as if Grendel's mother is looking to be the next Dirty Harry. This is weak

Zohan

This can only be understood viewed in tandem with Munich, followed by a panel discussion including Alan Dershowitz, John Zorn and Jordan Farmar.

Exposed Negatives

Joel is poised to return Stateside, just as the Euro Cup kicks off and co-host Switzerland takes one in the gut from the Czechs. John Lukacs is known for myriad conceptual platforms, not the least of which is that populism is the greatest threat to civilization. Somehow, the idea of that demarcation rears its head when discussing Thin Blue Lines, to echo Joel's citation of Errol Morris, or a more vertical metric of aptitude -- that some how We/Them needs to be registered via these spatial models. Somehow, regardless, it is a pause for joy when the Bohemians strike a blow against the august centers of power (or cuckoo clocks). (see CZ-USA 2006 World Cup)

Yet, I wrestle with cinema. Joel assayed from abroad the moment when Senator Obama became the THE candidate. The Feral Doctor's subjecting such to print was what struck me. Somehow I find the significance of this time continued by other means in the Guardian interview where Clint Eastwood told Spike Lee to "shut his face" in lieu of Lee's expressed concern about the absence of black soldiers in Eastwood's Band of Brothers. All of this will be moot when my planned vision for the Ping-pong Diplomacy ensures biopic immortality: Woody Harrelson as Chairman Mao and Samuel L. Jackson as Richard Nixon

Theory in Aix

In one sublime day I visited Cezanne´s refuge - the vantage point from where he painted his numerous views, sightings, sides, dimensions, atonalities of Mt St-Victoire - and watched "Bubba Hotep" in subtitles - apparently for all their love of these sorts of things (the French love of Jerry Lewis has been too often dwelt upon to merit further notice here but they did also award both Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone honorifics) they missed the subtlety of the King´s love of peanut-butter and banana sandwiches as that was translated/transculturated as simply "hamburger". How is one to address the vicissitudes of a subject as fecund and round with hope as Hotel Cinema after such a commingling? There is much brewing, though I am unsure if I will have the opportunity to address this further at present, perhaps even before I return to New York, but I will ponder it further as I am now here in the land of Bergman and Max von Sydow. Till then, tillsammans
fp

Blazing Saddles

And yet we have viewed a rasher of films and we are still turkeyed as to whether to postulate theoretical per response.

Feral Joel is in France.

Hotel Cinema and other notions

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. - JLG

It is interesting to consider Godard's assertion here in light of the new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, by Errol Morris. I have yet to see the film though I have (being here in NYC and all) either heard or read all about the flick in various interviews. I admit, that I found his counter-intuitive idea that the events of Abu Ghraib actually facilitated the re-election of Herr Mission Accomplished so counter-intuitive that I was forced to consider it for a bit. In short, it goes something like this: the appearance of the infamous photos (google them - I'm not going to put any up here) actually allowed Bush (and his administration) to say that it was not his/the policy but just a few "bad apples" that were gumming-up the works. Beyond that, the whole basis of Morris's film is an implicit challenge to photography that within the frame there is always truth for it leaves out what is outside of it. Not least it extracts the photographer him/herself as a god's eye view is posited - an authority that is impossible to question and barely able to categorize as it is so often taken to simply "be." But in the context of a prison there is also the frame that resides outside the frame to consider - who is free to act with honesty, free to act towards truth in the context of the panopticon where all is monitored but so little is actually watched? But let us return to that other notion of Godard's, that the tracking shot is a moral act.

I might as well do it now, I am a fan, a lover, a devotee of the celluloid - but I do not believe that I can be counted as a cine-phile. Not least because I simply do not avail myself of or to enough film nowadays to be considered such. But it is the tracking shot that first brought me to the side of Jean Luc, and it is the tracking shot that Morris has used in the brutal revelation of arrogance if not the truth. Call me pedestrian, but I can do nothing but swim in the opening shot of JLG's "Contempt" - a languid tracking of Bridget Bardot's physical beauty with assurances to an insecure star by an insecure husband that she is perfection itself and is loved beyond measure - loved tragically - added to the film only because Godard argued with his producers about the lack of B.B.'s skin - then at the height of her powers. Though it is one of the most written about scenes in all of film that, for all the ink that has been spilled over it, still to me offers the most telling description of a what the flattened post-War life has to offer - the 10 minute tracking shot of the unrelenting traffic jam in "Weekend" details and offers more in its torturous length - its lack of anything else and in that nothing else, everything. Morris has achieved something of the same with his lingering camera, unremitting in its gaze daring, damning a man like Robert McNamara to a geometric brilliance lacking in all imagination or understanding. I would like to do more but the "Magnificent Seven" is on.
-fp

La Chinoise

A tracking shot is a moral act- JLG

More Godard

Such is the ambition of my Monday. We viewed Shark vs. Eagle last night and I was left uncomfortable. The scars of seeing Speed Racer and Iron Man in the same week are espoecially tender and I shan't ponder the implications of either nor the terrible sum together.

What About Lee Marvin!

All during the director's heyday, The father of John Hughes worked with my dad. Desperate to find some measure of contact with his weirdo offspring, Larry Faith would unleash anecdotes at every turn about how Hughes was contrary to the Hollywood form, how true he was to the heartland and how his success hadn't changed him. Thinking back now upon those visages of the Chicago suburbs, the angst, the hormones and all those white people -- I can't begin to relate, nor do I wish to return and, thusly, I find the popular films of John Hughes to be quite outside of Joel's definition of hotel cinema.

Our Fate

Freud, Reich and Nabokov didn't care for music, but what did Lenin think of cinema? Ken Kalfus tried to knit some threads but the question hovers.


I have rather appreciated Joel's essays as well as his attempts at torque concerning what doesn't belong in the canon.




Perhaps there is a genre, auteur or actor that Feral Calliente would propose as an upcoming anchor, a lodestar for our blinded privateer?

Culling the Heard and Scene

A little bit of fluff that might be of interest here, the film critic for Time Out New York, David Fear, has a piece in/on MSNMovies has piece today on what 10 movies he would drop out of the "classics" category. I agree with some of what he say, disagree with other judgments, but it did put me in the mind of what movies I might similarly cull. For the exercise, let us rely on the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American films. For my part I would begin with #71 Forrest Gump, stupid perseverance can see us through indeed. #75 Dances With Wolves might not be far behind, the story of one soul-ful white man who understood, merde.

Trending to the moronic, or Caring about whose ass it is and why it is farting

Well, I finally turned some brief attention to the Mike Judge, Luke Wilson cult-favorite Idiocracy. There were some instances and scenes which brought on a chuckle or two and there is no doubt that it was specifically designed to tug/pull at current - though frankly mild, or at least not pronounced enough for many to really be pressed into any sort of action - generalized cultural concerns. Indeed, on/in another forum I have already been drawn into some discussion concerning both the film and the concerns it ostensibly raises/addresses. Let me say this, now that I have actually watched the film (as opposed to so much else that I am prone to pontificating about with little experience), while I will admit to chuckling at parts/places/scenes and it is certainly an example (if not a particularly good one) of "hotel cinema" that I might not turn off while traveling and alone in my room with a bottle of whiskey, it is, simply put, a sloppy piece of filmmaking. One that relies on poorly thought-through cultural assumptions that themselves rest on fears first articulated by "elites" in the 19th century as they were confronted by ever-growing populations of poorly educated, unwashed masses in industrial centers who were often prone to crude/radical political demonstrations against the established powers given their entrenched predicaments. Born out of the economic condescension that came from David Ricardo's "Iron Law of Wages" that (in brief) was built on/influenced by the earlier work of Malthus and argued that given the pressures of population the wages of the working class will forever be at just the level needed to avoid starvation and little else. Over the course of the 19th century, this supposedly "objective" conclusion of "social science" fairly smoothly morphed into a notion that it was unnecessary to offer assistance to the poor because if "they" are poor it is only because they are too stupid to realize that it is their profligate reproductive nature that keeps them trapped in that "iron law." Hence, it becomes an issue of the stupidity of a particular economic class rather than the fact that industrial capitalism is as dependent on a pool of variably employed and unemployed workers at the bottom as it is reliant on the investment of capital at the top to push growth. Frankly, those out and about (and some of them are friends of mine) who have complained and opined about the fact that a humorously important film was nearly scuttled and likely sabotaged by its own parent studio are no different from those in the broad religious community who insist that the fact that productions like the "Left Behind" series are seldom given any real play in the "mainstream" media is proof of an anti-Christian bias in American culture/society. It is a "boutique" film that is pointed at a narrow segment of the cultural economics of the US. And it is the same one that boasts of MBAs, feels better about their golf habit because of Tiger Wood's success, and complains about the commodification of the lifeworld while leafing through Pottery Barn catalogs all with more than a little touch of smug self-satisfaction that they alone are right. Let us return to the question of the treatment of the movie at the hands of 20th Century Fox: the most common thesis seems to be that the studio was at best uncomfortable with the cynically anti-corporate message of the movie, and at worst, given the portrayal of Fox News, it was simply hamstrung by News Corporation which owns both enterprises, and was likely directed by the very hand of that dastardly Aussie Rupert Murdoch. The NYTs made a higher-brow/intellectual argument that 20CF might well not have wanted to be associated with a film that rested on the dubious, elitist and potentially racist, junk-science theory of dysgenics. I might add another, perhaps the deciders at 20CF realized that it was a poor movie and the only way to recoup their (admittedly fairly meager investment) was to build the "cult" buzz and let it make its way on the DVD market. Or, even more likely, it's just not a very good movie.

Brando the Oblique

It's interesting how many references I have bumped into in the last couple of days for Sturges' Sullivan's Travels and - even before the last post - it has all put me in mind of Agee's sublime pieces on cinema. I knew of Agee as an undergrad, and directly confronted his famous work with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Praise Famous Men while a graduate student studying European history and stepping out of field to take a seminar on the American novelist Faulkner. Evans's photographs are justifiably famous; women aged beyond their years by the sharecropping life, their faces a canvas of rivulets - sometimes cupping a child in their arms whose bright and broad unlined foreheads seemed to, nonetheless, carry a gloamy recognition of what was to be their future, one that often mixed the sticky sap of cotton with dust from the local coal mine. The men, similarly aged and stoop-shouldered but possessed of wide hands that bespoke of a lifetime's strength still witheringly powerful enough to crush limestone in their palms. As striking as his photographs are though, it was Agee's accompanying prose that breathed life into their stark, almost binary-invoking, ropey muscled frames. It was only later that I learned of Agee's work as a film critic and I immediately fell into his own muscular but reasoned and finely-tuned work on cinema (more the result of the breadth of his supple - if sotted - mind than his own turn as a screenwriter I would hazard to guess). All that said, and as worthwhile as it all is, I have also been thinking about Marlon Brando since his mention in one of the first posts here. Honestly, how difficult is it to grandly declaim oneself a fan of the man - particularly now that he is dead and his less flattering courtroom appearances in defense of his eccentric family are no longer something to be grappled with - he was, after all, larger [in almost every way] than everyone else. Given his immensity, there is so much that hangs about his image like a fog that there are things for almost anyone to glom onto should they wish and so many of his roles have become, in various pitches, iconic - the angry muscularity of Stanley Kowalski, the muddled strength of Terry Malloy, the stoic and generously pragmatic Don Corleone, the burger-warped and still (even if slightly comically) gravitas-laden Col. Kurtz, or even the giddily kitshy turn as Jor-el father of Superman. Even the more awkward choices have a certain brick solidity to them, even if they come more from the backstory that Brando himself brought to them like those in "The Freshman," (the underappreciated) "Don Juan DeMarco," and the infamously bad "The Island of Doctor Moreau" where according to legend, director John Frankenheimer is reported to have come to Brando and said that he wished he could think of, or offer, a role that would once again engage or interest the actor. In most retellings, Brando is said to have replied simply "you can't" as he dismissed him. His legendary torpor has been said to spread across much if not all that he did - as powerful an actor as he was, there are ways in which he avoided - or at least didn't want to retrod paths already taken - things that pushed him beyond a certain layer of method processes; his two most powerful roles (at least often presumed to be in some quarters) Stanley Kowalski and Paul in Last Tango in Paris were ones that Brando himself said he found difficult and/or even frightening and in the latter representative of an exercise he did not care to undertake again. There are ways that he was unmatched as an actor, so the typical "reading" of him goes, in detailing and revealing the socially intimate. A personal favorite of such does come in Tango but is not the famous butter dish scene, rather it comes earlier where we see the middle-aged Paul - complete with the substantial beginnings of the middle spread for which Brando would soon become just as famous - laying on the floor of the apartment used for the two protagonists' liasons and in mid-exposition fluidly rolls himself back and over and springs to his feet with a lightly-worn athleticism that is surprising in one so large and apparently languid; all leonine and predator, the casual-ness of the exercise belying how difficult such a move is. In that one flip of brusque acrobatics Brando captured the inequality and threat of violence that lays just beneath the surface of most intimacies, the fact that all relations are negotiations of power, and seldom occur between honest equals. But, for all this, that same typical reading generally suggests that he was uncomfortable with, perhaps even incapable of expressing the universal. The same critic's obit referenced above noted, upon the release of Apocalypse Now - Redux, that in Coppola's desire for Brando to improvise "lofty ruminations on the meaning of Good and Evil . . . you can see Brando scraping the bottom of his own banality." Even if I might disagree I need not posit my defense on a different reading of his petulant approach to the role of the good Colonel. There is another which demonstrates Brando's facility with larger themes, even if accidentally; a piece of hotel cinema in fact and the only movie that Brando himself directed: One-Eyed Jacks. Here, with his trusted screen-mate Karl Malden, Brando explored the themes that have been a constant in the construction of an American narrative. Perhaps it was the self-inflicted and presumed granduer of the movie, the tagline for its 1961 release was "The motion picture that starts its own tradition of greatness" after all, but seldom is it even discussed as part of Brando's oeuvre. At notice of his death just short of 4 years ago, I can't remember a single reference to the work (or any of his 3 westerns really) in an obituary/consideration of his cinematic history. Perhaps his own dissatisfaction with the film in the end, the studio had reshot the ending to more clearly make Karl Malden's character - Dad Longworth (to Brando's Kid Rio) - a villian, and stories of his profligate tendencies as a director - shooting/wasting millions of feet of expensive VistaVision film stock - have coupled to leave the film behind despite its modest success among both filmgoers and critics. Whatever the reason for it being overlooked - I would argue that it is here that Brando most completely addressed issues of identity and boundaries and even environment that always dwelt in his work. The most typical "reading" of the film is as an adult morality tale closely tracking a variant of the Oedipal story as (ham-handedly) indicated in the familial-familiar names of the two principle characters played by the two long-time stage and screen friends and colleagues. In brief, the movie seems centered on the relationship between the two partners, Dad and Kid, who find themselves pursued by Mexican authorities after robbing a bank. Pinned down on an alkaline ridge, the only option of the two bandits is to have one ride off alone to fetch fresh horses and return for the other - Brando's Kid contrives to insure that Malden's Dad is the one to go, leaving him to face-down/hold-off the Mexican posse. Once Dad has managed the new mounts he looks briefly off towards where he left the Kid behind and rather than return facing near-certain capture, if not death, he makes the snap decision to head off with all the stolen gold himself. The captured Kid then spends the remainder of the movie looking to find his revenge on the man who betrayed him - Dad, however, has since become a straight-laced sheriff in a coastal California town where he is a respected member of the community (which knows nothing of his past) and has married a prominent Mexican widow whose beautiful young daughter he likely would also like to possess. Upon Kid Rio's arrival, he finds his personal demand for revenge blunted, not by Dad's transformation which Kid dismisses by saying "to these people you are a one-eyed jack, but I've seen the other side" (hence the title!), but his own ambivalence and conflicting desire to marry the stepdaughter and kill the stepfather. With the necessary adustments, the film is said to follow the classic pattern of the Oedipal myth. No doubt this reading to the piece is furthered by Brando's own disgust at the reshot ending which made it a more typical hero/villian tale as it changed the intent that he argued he was pushing for - that no one was inherently evil but that it was always a negotiation of the individual in response to his environment as he both responds to and is molded by the situation. But, there is much more in the movie and it is a negotiation of the entirety of the American psyche and perception of its own identity. What I see in the film is American identity as rugged and exceptional individuals, the wellsprings of which came from the vitality of the frontier, coming to painful grips with the closing of that very frontier as it comes crashing against the limits of the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, it references the fact that the West was never quite the blank slate that is so often the quiet presumption that gives lie to the telling of the great American narrative. While native Americans might not make much of an appearance in the film (perhaps odd given Brando's later political interests) the continual thread of a Mexican presence, and one that is often more refined and civilized than the brutish gringos, does bring the issue of boundaries and borders, not so much geographical as psychic, onto center stage bringing into sharp relief one of the many conspicuous silences that does indeed lay at the heart of the (anglo) American experience. Brando's Kid Rio is Fredrick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis wherein the experiences of the frontier forged an America distinct from its limned European roots and created a pragmatic freedom that in turn brought its own specific idea of civilization that was more violent, more individualistic, more distrustful of authority, less artistic, less scientific, and more dependent on local, situation-specific, organizations formed locally as opposed to the centralized authority of European states. Turner first delivered his provacative and almost immediately popular thesis in 1893. Though it offered a striking argument for the difference between the flabby Old World and the quickly emerging United States based on a rugged self-reliant vitality that contrasted forcefully with the decadent palaces and ill squalor of Europe's crowded urban centers, it also sounded a distressing note for the future as the census report of 1890 had officially noted the "closing" of the frontier as it was now significantly broken-up and settled. The Exceptionalism that had defined the American experience was now significantly compromised if not simply gone. For some, including Theodore Roosevelt, this was not an ending but a new beginning that signaled that the US should continue a westward expansion into the Pacific itself. But for Turner, it meant that the country must now turn to firmly securing the nation's Republic into the bedrock of that vital experience for now it would be the legacy of the Frontier rather than the engagement with it that would mark the next century. But even in this there is recognition that the primary locus of American identity is forced into re-negotiation with itself, it was a period that likely must first wrestle with the fact that the horse, and even the six-gun, was increasingly a remnant of the past as electric and steam-powered America chuffed into the 20th century. John Wayne's final movie, The Shootist, also addresses many of these themes, on a smaller and more obvious scale as the near to elderly John Book, riddled with cancer (as Wayne himself was) and aware that not only his life but his "time" is coming to an end, arranges to go out in a final gun-fight with three other "shootists" of notorious repute - one of whom appropriately arrives at the pre-arranged saloon in a "horseless carriage." Not insignificantly, Wayne's Book survives the show-down, dispatching all three in order, only to be shot down (in the back, no personal honor without the frontier) by the cowardly bartender. Though when the idolizing young son of the woman who owned the boarding house that Book was staying at picked up the fallen man's pistol and killed the bartender and then threw the pistol away as he realized what he had done, the old man shook his head in approval, a nod that indicated he was aware that the time for men like him was past. With Brando's One-Eyed Jacks the project is not made quite so intimate, nor is it so neatly and discreetly summed up as one age passing to another. Though the experience of America is read through one man it is left a messy and confused narrative where competing and incompatible threads tangle and crash against one another. In the California town where the real drama and climax play out, the frontier is literally brought to a close by the equally rugged and beautiful and dangerous Pacific coastline; the crashing waves on the beach demonstrating not only a charged immediacy, but the short, repeated, almost frightend shots of the immense ocean itself, stretching out beyond the horizon, indicated an immensity that dwarfed the frontier itself. Where is one to go now, reinvention is necessary - and a realization of not only the importance of myth but the fact that all is always predicated on such. Brando couldn't do the large, the universal? Bah.

Accounts

there is a debt threading James Agee to Joel McRea. It is a question of integrity. I am going to watch Jean Arthur this evening harboring handgun panacea to the idiocracy.

Just Now

We watched The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. Cinema has impact upon. Praising we famous men, gather your Walter Benjamin and Rock Hudson, allow the superlatives to cover us like untimely goo.

If this blog is going to work it needs an oblique tension.

What Happened To My Rocker?

I viewed Major Dundee last night and applauded this pathos-rife epic of the cavalry chasing down no good indigenous folks. The crackling casts sports Charlton Heston and Richard Harris in the leads with some spectacular supporting performances from Warren Oates, James Coburn and Slim Pickens.



I saw Forbidden Kingdom last week and I still can't marshall the temerity to discuss it.

Coburn stated in the accompanying documentary that Peckenpah was unapproachable genius -- for three hours a day. The thirst can temper many visages of the homo sapien.

Gorillas Giving Suck

Richard Harris is a force, a hulking presence which command comparison to Brando. One can fathom the departed Inacandenza rhapsodizing The Sporting Life with wee Hal and Mario using arcs of refractive inversion and the defining directness of statics, all the while while flourishing in his praise of the "great Ape" as Harris is referred to by Miss Roberts late in the film.

I have drawn allusions to both David Eggers and David Foster Wallace in my initial pair of efforts. I still suck but not near as bad as Baby Mama which I viewed this evening at work. I doubt a ten minute sketch on SNL could have appeared as forced and vacant as the forgotten effort. Being forced to endure five minutes of eye contact with Steve Martin (which is alleged to be funny reflection of the new age wonky which is Whole Foods) is infinitely preferable. Echoing Jeremiah Wright, its not deficient but different.

Speak To Me of Zyklon Humor

It is but rivulets of space which color our curves in this slide across the polished floor. Stockinged feet and echoes of the Misty Monster: these remain our precepts. My bent shall concern film here: both the high art of celluloid and what shall be defined and explored as hotel cinema.

I have watched two films from Lindsay Anderson in the past five days. If. . . with Malcolm McDowell and The Sporting Life starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts. Both attempt to meld the priggish and the brutal with a surfeit of male shower scenes.

And to begin - definitions please

Main Entry: ba·nan·i·ty
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural ba·nan·i·ties
Other Spellings: (arc.) bananaty
Date: Aug 24, 1999
1 : something comically and/or slightly (un)common: laughably uncommonly commonplace. 2 : the quality or state of being minorly askew in the general order of things, or untoward in a lesser manner; e.g. the stumble of a rich man on the street.
3: labyrinthian structures, the confronting of which results in a chuckling resignation to the state of things.