Well, nothing I can say could possibly
excuse my unprecedented tardiness in turning in my answers to Miss Brodie’s
Movie Quiz, which only posted on March 8, a skosh over four months ago. (I did
use the word “inexcusably,” didn’t I?) But just know that this year has been
fraught with enough perils that even a harsh glance and perhaps even the sting
of a ruler across the knuckles would seem comforting in comparison, and it is
those perils I blame for my distraction and general foot-dragging. I have come
through, however, and hope that in light of the upcoming summer quiz (and there
will be an upcoming summer quiz, students), you shan’t resent my godforsaken
dilly-dallying too much.
So without further delay, here are my
answers, sincerely submitted, with the reminder that the asterisk (*) indicates
a question that has shown up in a previous quiz from somewhere in the almost
nine-year history of these things. Nine years… I least I didn’t drag my feet that long! Here we go!
**************************************************************
1) The
classic movie moment everyone loves except me is:
The diner scene from Five Easy Pieces in which the alienated and entitled poor little
rich kid played by Jack Nicholson boldly sticks it to The Man… in the personage
of a wage-earning waitress who certainly has a lot more in common with The
Oppressed than he does. When the actress who played that waitress, Lorna
Thayer, died in 2005 I wrote about her and that scene in particular:
“The waitress plays by
the rules of the restaurant in refusing Nicholson’s order because if she
doesn’t, she’s likely to lose her low-paying job and have to hit the pavement
in search of another one that might not even be as good as the one she’s got.
Rafelson and Eastman’s point might have gone down a little smoother had
Nicholson demanded to see the manager and taken out his self-righteous
frustration on him. But would our sainted antihero have had the balls to stand
up to a man, perhaps one far bigger of frame and weight than him, in a similar
situation? We never find out, because it’s easier and funnier to let Nicholson
have his way with someone who’s sassy enough to spar with him a little but who
won’t fight back when he loses his cool over a piece of toast.”
It’s a scene, like many others that become
“classics,” which is pitched to the choir, but it began to sour for me as soon
as I stopped laughing and thought about it from the point of view of anyone
other than the boorish asshole at the eye of the movie’s hurricane of
self-regard. Separated from that storm, the whole movie feels like a long whine
muffled by a mouthful of silver spoons, that diner scene becoming a perfect
microcosm of its pretensions.
2) Favorite line of
dialogue from a film noir
I’m quite sure there are lines that are more emblematic of the qualities
of film noir, but one that always tickles me in its hard-boiled, matter-of-fact
gruffness comes in The Blue Dahlia. Alan Ladd sits down at a bar with
Howard Da Silva and William Bendix, and Bendix orders bourbon, straight, with a
bourbon chaser. Ladd asks the bartender for the same, and Da Silva underlines
the order: “Two separate glasses. Get it?” To which the bartender replies
without missing a beat, “Why wouldn’t I get it?”
3) Second
favorite Hal Ashby film
Well,
since the number one has been very recently claimed by The Landlord (1970), a movie I deeply regret not having seen about
20 years ago so that I could have had 20 more years to appreciate how great it
is, I will claim Shampoo (1975) for the
number-two slot. Shampoo is a movie I
first saw when I was still a bit too young to really understand how good it
was, how incisive was its personally-infused political perspective. Ashby’s
edges as a filmmaker seemed to be simultaneously ragged and diffuse, but these two
movies together reveal not only a probing satirical sensibility (aided by
brilliant writing from Bill Gunn and Robert Towne & Warren Beatty,
respectively), but also a distinct regard for the humanity radiating through his
films from all different, conflicting angles and philosophies, a penchant which
ties Ashby, in time and in theme, to simpaticos like Robert Altman and Michael
Ritchie. (I also have a real soft spot for Eight
Million Ways to Die.)
4) Describe the moment
when you first realized movies were directed as opposed to simply
pieced together anonymously.*
I’m
sure that when I answered this question before, sometime back in the
Pleistocene Era, I had a much different answer, one related, I’m sure, to some
great moment in cinema history which, when I first encountered it as a green
little movie buff, made my head spin with awe and ecstasy—“My God! This movie
didn’t just happen… Someone made it
happen!” (If I had the inclination to
look my original answer up, by God, I’m sure I could prove I’m right. But I
don’t.) And the true moment is much less revelatory and dramatic than any such
intellectual dawning anyway.
I was about seven or eight years old, and I was
thumbing my way through an issue of Life
magazine, when I came across a splashy, two-page color advert for The Green Berets. I was instantly
attracted to it—at that age I coveted any sort of big ad like this, because to
me, a nascent collector of movie ads culled from the Portland, OR and San
Francisco newspapers, this was almost as good as finding a full-sized one-sheet
folded up between the photo-centric stories of astronauts and Vietnam and the
generation gap that were typically found in Life.
As I scoured the credits at the bottom of the ad, I noticed that the star of
the movie, John Wayne, was also credited as the director. How is such a thing
possible, my eight-year-old mind wondered, that the guy who is in the movie,
who probably has more screen time than anyone else in it, could also be the guy
running around behind the scenes, telling people what to do while the scenes
were being shot? Logistically, it just didn’t seem possible—directors were the
guys who sat in chairs and yelled “Cut!” from off screen when the scene was
finished shooting. How could John Wayne do that if he was also in the movie?! As I thought about that
apparent rift in common sense I started noticing that The Green Berets was hardly the only instance of an actor directing
himself – I had, after all, at least heard of Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles
by this point. (I would later also find out that The Green Berets wasn’t even Wayne’s first stint shouting orders
through a megaphone.)
From there it was only a matter of time before
I understood the level of preparation it would require, assisted by an army of
qualified craftspeople, in order to allow a director to step into the action
himself, to realize a vision of the movie that had to have been conceived well
in advance of the shoot, and that it wasn’t just one person pulling all the
strings. When I finally saw The Green
Berets I was impressed by its bigness (the local drive-in trumpeted on the
marquee that “THE BIG ONE IS HERE!”), perhaps even more so because I had a
little clearer idea of what it took to get it on the screen in the first place,
and that somehow a director’s responsibilities could extend even so far as to
gauging (again, with the input of trusted colleagues) his own performance in
the film he’s making. Heady stuff this, which still wasn’t enough to prepare me
for Paradise Alley and a decade’s
worth of Rocky sequels.
5) Favorite
film book
The
go-to answer for this question, ever since the fall of 1977, has been Pauline
Kael’s Reeling, which I
bought in its Warner mass paperback edition in the fall of 1977, the first of
at least four editions of this book I’ve owned, replacements being made
necessary by my wearing out of the cheap glue binding through excessive
page-turning. But I
also think Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy is an excellent
piece of reportage, mapping out in detail all the echoing voices reverberating
around a doomed project (and inside the head of its director) and how the fate
of any film in the marketplace can come to seem like its own little apocalypse.
6) Diana
Sands or Vonetta McGee?
I find
it very hard to argue with the work or the visage of the late Vonetta
McGee—anyone who can claim Shaft in
Africa, Blacula, To Sleep with Anger, Thomasine and Bushrod, Repo Man and Detroit 9000 on their resume, all while
looking so fine and being so graceful and fiery on film, deserves a slot on the
list of the most transfixing movie actresses ever. But Diana Sands belongs on that list too. Like McGee, who passed away
at age 65 from cardiac arrest, Sands died at far too young an age. She was only
39 when she succumbed to leiomyosarcoma,
and it’s probably because she was more active on stage than in films that she
is less well known, especially to connoisseurs of Blaxploitation cinema, than
is McGee. Her first big film was opposite Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and in 1964 she famously won the role
of Doris in The Owl and the Pussycat
on Broadway opposite Alan Alda, in a pioneering instance of colorblind casting.
But it took almost another decade for her to grab another memorable role on
film, in Hal Ashby’s The Landlord
(1970), where she was electrifying, sensual and poignant, often all at once, as
a married tenement resident who falls into a relationship with Beau Bridges,
the privileged (white) owner of her building. She also elevated everyone’s game
in the Blaxploitation classic Willie
Dynamite (1974) and was poised to
take on the lead in Claudine (1974)
before she became too ill to work. She was prickly and teasing and sharp, and
effortlessly sexy in roles not necessarily fashioned to highlight the
possibilities of her alluring presence. Even though she never had a prolific
film career Diana Sands still gets my vote here-- for everything she was in her
most memorable film roles, for everything simmering just beneath the surface in
them that was never quite loosed, and even for the promises she left
unfulfilled.
7) Most
egregious gap in your viewing of films made in the past 10 years
I’m
going to pick one oversight, unintended or deliberate, from every year since
2003. I still have not seen…
The
Best of Youth (2003; Marco Tullio Giordana-- I’ve had the DVD for nine years)
Notre
Musique (2004; Jean-Luc Godard)
Wolf
Creek (2005; Greg MacLean)
The
DaVinci Code (2006; Ron Howard)
La Vie
en rose (2007; Olivier Dahan)
Che (2008;
Steven Soderbergh)
The
White Ribbon (2009; Michael Haneke)
Ondine (2010;
Neil Jordan)
The
Hangover Part II (2011; Todd Phillips)
This is
Not a Film (2012; Jafar Panahi)
8) Favorite
line of dialogue from a comedy
Like
all of these questions relating to favorite lines, for me this one seems
entirely dependent on when the question is asked. Next week I’m sure I’d answer
differently. But right now… A couple of weeks ago I introduced my daughter
Emma, age 13, to the glories of Blazing Saddles, and the movie went
over just about as well as I could have hoped. All the high points got
a big response, of course (the campfire, Mongo comes to town, “The Ballad of
Rock Ridge”), and many still sailed over
her head (that's okay). But I think her biggest laughs might have come from
Cole Porter on the railroad line, Alex Karras ("Ohh! Mongo
straight!"), Bart's provocation of the KKK ("Where all the white
women at?!") and the inimitable incoherence of Gov. Le Petomane
("These things are defective.")
As for me, I must have seen this movie 25 times now
since that first fateful encounter in 1974, and though I still find the movie
incredibly funny throughout, it seems that every time I see it something different
hits my funny bone and causes it to vibrate out of control. This time it was
the aforementioned governor, as embodied by Mel Brooks himself (channeling his
inner Groucho Marx, of course). His reprimand to Hedley Lamarr, accidentally
delivered to Bart and then self-interrupted, only to be delivered to Lamarr a
second time, interruption duplicated, is one for the ages-- “Have you gone berserk?! Can’t you see that
that man is a ni—Oh. Excuse me. Wrong guy. No offense. (Grabs Lamarr) “Have you
gone berserk?! Can’t you see that that man is a ni--?”
But
this time it was Le Petomane's acceptance of a very special honor that slayed
me and sent me into a giggle fit that lasted long after the end of the scene.
LAMARR: “Just one more
bill for you to sign, sir.”
LE PETOMANE: “What the
hell is this?”
LAMARR: “This is the
bill that will convert the state hospital for the insane into the William J. Le
Petomane Memorial Gambling Casino for the Insane.”
LE PETOMANE: “Gentlemen,
this—(Slips out of chair) this bill will be a giant step forward in the
treatment… of the insane gambler!”
Blazing Saddles,
the
gift that just keeps on giving.
9) Second
favorite Lloyd Bacon film
It’s gotta be Ever
Since Eve (1937), a charming, second-tier screwball comedy with Marion
Davies as a woman who dowdies herself down to get her bosses to give her
secretarial abilities priority over her sex appeal. Robert Montgomery is on
board as a lay-about writer who hires her, figuring her pinned-up style won’t
distract him from his work, and then falls for her when he gets a glimpse of
how she really looks. Will romance keep the book from getting finished on time?
It’s up to Old Maid-Style Marion to make sure love doesn’t trip up a lucrative
deadline!
Number-one Bacon? Kill the Umpire,
with William Bendix and a script by Frank Tashlin!
10) Richard
Burton or Roger Livesey?
I’ve lived with Burton for much longer—Liz and Dick
even showed up on an episode of The Lucy
Show, for crying out loud, when I was a kid—but I was never as impressed by
Burton’s acting as I felt I was supposed to be, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf excepted, of course. (I’m hardly a Burton
completest either—I only saw The Spy Who
Came in from the Cold about two years ago, and I still have yet to see Villain, which I’ve heard good things
about.)
But in a much shorter span of time Roger Livesey has bewitched me as an
integral element in the meticulously woven worldview of Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger. The only non-Archers picture I know Livesey from is Basil
Dearden’s delightful The League of
Gentlemen, and though it seems impossible he was only in three films for
Powell and Pressburger, when those three films are as spotlessly magnificent as
I Know Where I’m Going!, The Life and
Death of Colonel Blimp and Stairway
to Heaven (a.k.a. A Matter of Life
and Death), notions of quantity become meaningless. I treasure Livesey’s
rich, imperious, energetic, caustic and romantic performances in all four
movies, and I look forward to a life of making myself much more familiar with
everything else this fine actor had to offer in his long career.
11) Is
there a movie you staunchly refuse to consider seeing? If so, why?
Since I first started toying with the notion that
there might be movies out there that I would never want to see, there have been
several solid candidates for my own answer to this question. Back in the mid
‘70s there were two in particular that I would have guessed might never need
airing on in the confines of my mind, and now, as I settle comfortably into my
‘50s I’ve seen them both. One, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), was every bit as nightmarish as I imagined it might be, and
probably worse-- at 15 I couldn’t possibly have conceived of some of the
horrors Pasolini staged for his politically explosive adaptation of De Sade.
But even if I regret eventually seeing some of those horrors, which Pasolini
expertly staged with such ambiguous detachment, I don’t regret seeing the
film—in fact, I own it—and I certainly believe it to be a work worthy of
serious consideration.
The other movie, Snuff
(1976), cultivated an air of ghastly transgression that was rooted entirely in
cynical exploitation, and even when its main claim to notoriety was debunked the
picture remained a sort of “Have You Seen It?” mile marker for a certain stripe
of traveler along the path leading toward grindhouse completism. Snuff began life several years before it
was actually released as The Slaughter, a low-budget horror
cheapie shot in Argentina and “inspired” by the Manson killings which, at the
time of the film's shooting, were only about a year past. The Slaughter sat on the shelf for
several years until it was purchased by producer Allan Shackelton, who decided that the
cherry on top of Michael and Roberta Findlay’s shitty cult murder movie would
be a ready-made, controversial (and utterly nonsensical) new ending in which a
pretty young crew member, ostensibly on the shoot of The Slaughter, is allegedly disemboweled on screen for real. Though
the movie went a long way on the wretched fumes of this promotion, few who
actually saw it came out believing they’d witnessed a real killing.
Even so, Snuff retained the odor of rotted,
forbidden flesh for decades, igniting suspicions of the existence of real snuff films that have
never been proven. I recently saw the movie (it’s slated for an October 21
Blu-ray release through Blue Underground), and it’s an inept sham in its
entirety, including the 75 gruelingly dull minutes leading up to its notorious,
tacked-on climax. It’s no measure of disappointment to say that if the 37 years
of increasingly extreme gore in American and European films, mainstream and
outlaw, have taught us anything, it’s how to see through the phony geek show that
concludes Snuff. What’s hardest to
accept is that even in 1976 anyone could have believed this staged slaughter
was in any way authentic. Those most outraged at the movie’s appearance in the
marketplace probably took Shackelton’s carnival barker braggadocio at face
value—“The bloodiest thing that ever happened IN FRONT OF a camera! Made in
South America, WHERE LIFE IS CHEAP!”—without actually having seen the movie for
themselves, and Shackelton himself apparently paid groups of people to picket
screenings. I suppose desensitized grindhouse denizens, having paid to see a
fake murder passed off as the “real thing” and then being forced to sit through
something as enervating as Snuff to
get to the payoff might, to paraphrase Fox Mulder, ultimately want to believe,
for whatever reason. But thankfully, the only thing Snuff finally lives up to is the rank stench of its own cynicism.
When the answers to this quiz initially began
posting several months ago, several people mentioned that A Serbian Film would be their go-to response, and I have no argument with that choice. I have read a morsel or
two about the movie, enough to given me a sense that it’s not a place where I
need to let my mind wander, and thankfully I have been given only just a suggestion of what happens in it—as yet
no nightmares have been inspired by the involuntary elaboration of my
imagination on horrors reported in any great detail.
But since I have only given but a cursory thought to
that movie, I’ll submit as my final answer to this question the movie that I
decided, after some internal debate upon its release in 2002, and again in 2010
when the opportunity again arose to see it theatrically, to skip
altogether—Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible.
But I almost didn’t skip it. In fact, I had been feeling a strange
obligation to finally face up to this movie:
“I told myself that yes, if… several of my
trusted friends… held the movie in such high regard, perhaps it was time for me
to live up to my cinephile duty and finally see it. After all, I saw Antichrist last week, another
notorious act of Euro-provocation that filled me with dread going into the
auditorium but which turned out to be horrifically beautiful. If I can take Antichrist, well, then… And who
is to say that Irreversible wouldn’t turn out to be a similar surprise?
I was kind of happy that I had finally found the courage to face up to this
film, which seemed to hang over my experience as a filmgoer, as a film critic,
with something of a ghostly, insistent quality. I mean, I am a curious person by nature. But is
curiosity enough where a film like Irreversible
is concerned?
It is times like these when I am most grateful for friends who… aren’t afraid
to step away from what the movie geeks are up to and ask a simple question or
two. A friend of mine got word that I was considering going to see the movie
this coming Friday night and when I confirmed the information she said, simply,
“Why?” As in, “Why would you want to put yourself through something like that?”
I was momentarily taken aback because this person is herself a movie geek who
always seems up for whatever comes down the pipe film-wise, a fearless, but not
(as it turned out) indiscriminate moviegoer. I remember coming up with answers
for her like, “Well, it’s time, I guess,” or “I feel like I should see it,” but
as the words came out they didn’t sound very convincing even to me. The
skeptical look never left my friend’s face. And I started to think about
exactly why I felt I should see
it. I already knew what I’d be in for. What about those original reasons for
staying away, which always seemed so rooted in clear observation and separate
from the rush of excitement surrounding the savvy technique of a filmmaker who
may have mastered the art of manipulating and pummeling an audience for the
simple reason that he wants to and knows how to get away with it, were suddenly
unsatisfactory?”
If you’re interested in how I attempted to answer
that question for myself, you can read the entire piece here. If not, then it will be enough for you to know that
for me Irreversible is, like A Serbian Film, is a sight better left
unseen.
12) Favorite
filmmaker collaboration
This is
another one of those posers the answer to which might conceivably change from
week to week, and throughout cinema history there are certainly plenty of
combinations to choose from. But right now I’d have to pick Peter Cushing and director Terence Fisher, for The Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of
Dracula, Revenge of Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Mummy, The
Brides of Dracula, Sword of Sherwood Forest, The Gorgon, Island of Terror,
Frankenstein Created Woman, Island of the Burning Damned, Frankenstein and the
Monster from Hell and, of course, their masterpiece, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. (I could just as easily submit
“Terence Fisher and Hammer,” or “Peter Cushing and Hammer,” or “Peter Cushing
and Christopher Lee,” or “Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Terence Fisher”
for an answer to this question too.)
13) Most recently viewed
movie on DVD/Blu-ray/theatrical?
Theatrical: Before
Midnight (2013; Richard Linklater)
Blu-ray: Side
Effects (2013; Steven Soderbergh)
DVD: Phantom of the Paradise (1974; Brian De Palma)
Streaming: Hell House (2001; George Ratliff)
At work: Burn After Reading (2008; Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)
14) Favorite line of
dialogue from a horror movie
Speaking
of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, I
recently had a chance to take my daughter Emma to see it on a double bill with Revenge of Frankenstein at the storied
Egyptian Theater in Hollywood in celebration of Peter Cushing centenary year.
It was her third or fourth go-round with the movie (we’ve watched it again
together on DVD since that
screening), and she particularly relishes Cushing’s shift into purely
calculated, arrogant evil in this movie, no more so than in the scene soon
after he moves into the boarding house operated by Anna (Veronica Carlson) and
is subjected to a boorish, moralistic exchange between three or four of the
house’s educated, stuffed-shirt residents. Cushing listens as they begin
recounting rumors of a certain Dr. Frankenstein who, in concert with another
doctor currently residing in a local asylum, apparently carried on an
outrageous, blasphemous series of experiments aimed at reanimating the dead.
Soon Cushing can take no more. After blithely challenging their medical
credentials , and without raising his eyebrow by a hair or his voice even a
fraction of a decibel, he turns to the men, who have to this point seen only
his back, and offers this to the most vocal of them:
“Had man not been given to invention and
experiment, then tonight, sir, you would have eaten your dinner in a cave. You
would've strewn the bones about the floor then wiped your fingers on a coat of
animal skin. In fact, your lapels do look a bit greasy. Good night.”
He
blinded them… with science!
15) Second
favorite Oliver Stone film
To my mind director Oliver Stone, and
the very notion of “an Oliver Stone Film,” peaked in 1995 with Nixon, in which the director, not unlike
Robert Altman in Secret Honor, found
an unlikely measure of sympathy for the Wit from Whittier by dissecting and
projecting onto Nixon’s very public paranoia, using Stone’s well-known
multimedia-oriented style to explore the ways in which the beleaguered
president might imagine he appears to the world around him.
But it’s the director’s own film
maudit, Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut, to which I give honorable mention status. Alexander Revisited is an expansion upon
Stone’s reviled original theatrical cut, another spectacular examination of a
troubled figure on the world stage, this one seeking to extend its boundaries
rather than shrink away from it altogether, and the way Stone reshuffles the original
film’s structure enriches its meaning and deepens the entire experience for the
audience.
(Click
here to read my 2011 interview with Stone on Alexander, Nixon and a few other things.)
And if
I was giving out third place votes (which I suppose I am), I’d hand it over to Savages, which finds the director
revitalized and operating in a strange, lurid vibe befitting the subject of
Laguna Beach pot dealers warring with a expansion-minded Mexican cartel— it’s
an action movie that is in a very specific way completely Stoned.
16) Eva
Mendes or Raquel Welch?
Would
that all unsolvable, real world dilemmas were like this one.
17) Favorite religious
satire
If we’re talking features, then I’d
probably have to side with Life of Brian,
probably the best and punchiest dissection of the divisive elements of religious
dogma ever made. (Those who decried it as an act of blasphemy or a spitball
hawked in the direction of faith saw a different movie than the one the Pythons
made.) But if we can also mention religious satire contained within a feature, then one of my
favorite moments (and maybe this one is
blasphemous) is the great Panavision shot in MASH of the dinner party honoring the Painless Pole’s upcoming
suicide. Our lovable dentist, emotionally sidelined by a bout of impotence, projects
guilt (or failure, I suppose) by association when he assumes the position of
the son of God and recasts the surgeons and staff of the 4077th,
most of whom have hardly attempted to hide their contempt for the religious
hypocrisy embodied by Frank Burns, as doting apostles in an completely
non-divine association with practical human compassion. It’s a bitterly funny
appropriation of religious iconography in service of distinctly secular ends which
ends up perfectly encapsulating the movie’s perspective on its own angels of
mercy.
18) Best
Internet movie argument? (question
contributed by Tom Block)
The back and forth Bill Ryan and I had back in the
waning days of summer 2009 on Inglorious Basterds. We both loved the movie, so it was hardly a Point/Counterpoint type of tussle (“Bill, you ignorant slut!”). But
it pulled in an awful lot of satellite conversation, most all of it respectful,
some of it highfalutin, and some high-ranking officials in the world of Film
Criticism even got involved after a while. It’s the kind of blog-oriented
exchange that seems to have been diluted in the age of Facebook, where one
doesn’t have to wait for one’s comment to be moderated, and I miss the sort of immense satisfaction that I think
Bill and I both derived from having undertaken it.
19) Most pointless Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block)
I would have to say that a recent exchange on Carrie Rickey’s
Facebook page in regard to whether or not MASH
qualified as an anti-Vietnam movie comes about as close to pointless a scuffle
as I’ve engaged in in quite some time. But I would also nominate any argument submitted
by any fan that hasn’t let the fact that he/she hasn’t actually seen the movie
in question get in the way of his/her irrational passions.
20) Charles McGraw or
Robert Ryan?
I always perk up when I see McGraw pop
up in movies like T-Men, Border Incident,
Blood on the Moon, Armored Car Robbery, The Narrow Margin and one of my
favorites, Joe Dakota. But Robert
Ryan is in a class by himself. Every one of the performances of his that I’ve
seen feels lived in and informed by his experience (and often his troubles)
like few other actors I can reference. I recently saw The Professionals again and marveled at what fascination there was
in just looking at this guy on screen and thinking only about his face and how
it reflected (and interpreted) what he was thinking about in regard to
everything else that was going on. I said that Ryan’s performances felt
lived-in; I also feel like I’m living
in him whenever I see that craggy, weary-eyed visage, in good movies and
bad.
21) Favorite line of
dialogue from a western
Courtesy of writer N.B. Stone, director
Sam Peckinpah and actor Joel McCrea as Steve Judd: “All I want is to enter my
house justified.”
22) Second favorite Roy Del Ruth film
Number
one is the inimitable Taxi! (1932)
with Jimmy Cagney and a heartbreakingly beautiful Loretta Young, so number two
has to be Born to Dance (1936). A quick shuffle through IMDb reveals that
I really haven’t seen that many of Del Ruth’s movies, but no matter how many I
have under my belt I just can’t pick The
Alligator People…
23) Relatively
unknown film or filmmaker you’d most eagerly proselytize for
He’s
a friend of mine, but even if that weren’t true, Nicholas McCarthy still
made The Pact (2012), which is
precisely the sort of measured, atmosphere-rich, yet still plenty demented
horror film I wish more horror directors were interested in making. On evidence
of The Pact and hints about his
upcoming movie, Home, McCarthy seems more
interested in approaching the genre as an auteur, generating his own ideas and expressing his
perspective on humanity through beloved forms, rather than simply gobbling up
work refrying tried-and-true (and sometimes not-so-true) “classics.” It’s a
tougher row to hoe, but the potential rewards for the horror genre, its
traditions and its audience, not to mention McCarthy himself, might be far
greater, and I think it’s going to be exciting watching this filmmaker reap the
harvest.
24) Ewan
McGregor or Gerard Butler?
So
far Butler hasn’t proven himself (to me, at least) as anything but a walking,
talking Jack Link. The only time I’ve noticed him and not been annoyed is in Guy
Ritchie’s surprisingly okay RocknRolla, unless,
of course, you want to count his appearance in Tomorrow Never Dies as “Leading Seaman, HMS Devonshire”—but then
again, I didn’t notice him in that movie. (Michelle Yeoh distracted me.)
McGregor, on the other hand, is a capable actor with a charming screen
presence, as well as a fella who makes my wife swoon (I’m just relieved she
swoons over someone who resembles me as much as McGregor clearly does). He also
has a huge penis (again, the resemblance is uncanny), and he also once played a
baritone horn in a movie called Brassed
Off—I used to play the trumpet, but let’s not get caught up in horn
splitting.
Ewan McGregor is the clear choice
here.
25) Is
there such a thing as a perfect movie?
I
don’t really think so—that quote on the header of this blog pretty much puts
this question in perspective for me. But I do love the feeling that happens
every once in a while, while a movie is spinning before my eyes and working its
magic, when it seems like the possibility exists, and that can happen even when
the imperfections of a movie couldn’t be more apparent. I actually prefer the
pursuit of perfection to perfection anyway, whatever that might be and however
that might manifest itself— it’s in the striving, the heights soared, the
inevitable descent back toward earth and the occasional crash-and-burn where
the real glories of the movies reside.
26) Favorite
movie location you’ve most recently had the occasion to actually visit *
I saw Car Wash about four times at my hometown drive-in back in the summer
of 1977, in the days before I left that hometown and headed off to college, and
it was that movie probably more than any other that fueled my imagination of
what Los Angeles was going to be like once I moved here. (And I always knew
that I would move here.) I’ve seen the movie countless times since, but when I
caught it at the New Beverly a couple of years ago I was able to determine from
the beautiful print they showed that the movie was shot on the corner of 6th
Street and Rampart, at the outskirts of the downtown district, a location that
I had driven past many times without realizing exactly where I was. I decided
that the next day I would make a pilgrimage to the spot where so many of my
first impressions of Los Angeles in the ‘70s were formed, and when I got there
this is what I saw.
Of course the car wash is no longer
there, but the neighborhood and the block is warmly recognizable nonetheless.
It may sound silly, but there was a strange sort of comfort in sensing that even
in a city which seems as transient and indifferent to its own geographical and
architectural history as this one often does, some 30 years later the spirit of
this raggedy, anarchic comedy should still be able to be detected in the city
as it really is day to day. It may not be my most recent visit to a favorite
movie location, but it is one of the only times I’ve actually sought out a spot
simply on the basis of having seen it in a movie, and it was well worth the
trip.
27) Second
favorite Delmer Daves film
I like 3:10 to Yuma (1957) a bit better than Broken Arrow (1950)—maybe it’s Frankie Laine that gives the movie its edge. So the showdown between the slyly
manipulative Glenn Ford and the earnest, stubborn Van Heflin will be my second
choice, because my favorite Delmer Daves movie is The Last Wagon (1956), starring Richard Widmark, Nick Adams, Susan
Kohner, Felicia Farr and Nick Adams.
28) Name
the one DVD commentary you wish you could hear that, for whatever reason,
doesn't actually exist
I
still would love to hear Jesus (son of Joseph and Mary, not the guy played by
John Turturro) get behind a microphone and let us know exactly what He thinks about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. But for
seconds, if He hasn’t just decided to evaporate the recording studio or somehow otherwise
induced Armageddon, I’d throw on K. Ryan Jones’ Fall from Grace, an entirely enraging documentary about Fred Phelps
and the Westboro Baptist troglodytia, and then we’d find out for sure just who
God hates.
29) Gloria
Grahame or Marie Windsor?
I
revere Marie Windsor’s appeal as a premier hard-nosed broad plenty, but I
really think only the power of Barbara Stanwyck would be enough to make me
choose against Gloria Grahame in this category. If you haven’t seen it,
I refer you to her desperately moving monologue as a young woman awaiting the
return from battle of her boyfriend who inadvertently inspires the central
scheme of military deception in Ronald Neame’s The Man Who Never Was if you really need further proof as to
how thrilling she could be on screen.
30) Name a
filmmaker who never really lived up to the potential suggested by their early
acclaim or success
Every
new Paul Thomas Anderson movie must apparently be received or
anticipated as if it’s a prefab masterpiece—There
Will Be Blood and even more so The
Master both seem like statues rather than movies, monuments to a vogue of
self-seriousness that threatens to make me lose interest in Anderson’s career
altogether. (I think Anderson’s hero, Robert Altman, would have been bored to
tears by The Master.) Even though
they are far from perfect, I bemoan the absence of the unruly, anarchic humor
and buzzing hearts that power movies like Boogie
Nights, Magnolia and Punch-drunk
Love, to say nothing of the unassuming personal template of a movie like Hard Eight.
31) Is
there a movie-based disagreement serious enough that it might cause you to
reevaluate the basis of a romantic relationship or a friendship? *
Again,
having survived the arguments my wife and I had over Robert Altman in the
earliest days of our dating lives, I don’t really think I can say that a
disagreement over any one movie, or any work of art, would or should be enough
to cause a rift that serious in any relationship. We might sometimes wish that
our points of view on these matters ran a little more parallel these days, like
they used to, but there’s nothing like a little history to make divergences
like these seem a little less important. That said, I’m very grateful to the
tag team of Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke for coming through
yet again with the third chapter in their apparently blessed narrative
experiment, Before Midnight, which is
as close to a fiction version of the Apted Up
series as we’ll ever likely see. Because if I’d come out of that theater
last night any less enthralled than I genuinely was, it would have been
couch-sleeping time for me, I’m quite
sure. And, oh, yeah, it’s probably worth restating here again, as I put my
final period on this stack of tardy homework, that Ewan McGregor is a hell of
an actor and darned good-looking too. Okay, I think we’re good.
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