Digging through the shelves last night I put together quite
a little program for myself. Since I wasn’t able to see the recent theatrical
rerelease, I pulled out my Blu-ray of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and
combined it with Sidney Gilliat’s Green for Danger (1946), making for an
impromptu Trevor Howard double feature (which wasn't my intention, no disrespect to Howard intended).
If you haven’t seen it, I can’t
recommend Green for Danger highly enough. It’s a sly wink in the direction of
the conventions of murder mystery fiction, Alastair Sim sending up with gusto
the notion of the omniscient investigator who manipulates witnesses and
suspects alike and who seems to be entirely on top of the situation, except
when he isn’t. To make things even more interesting, the movie is set in a
wartime hospital in the English countryside, German V-1 bombs dropping all
around while Sim’s Inspector Cockrill tries to figure out why a postman
entering the operating theater after being injured by a V-1 ended up dead, which
one of the surgical staff (among them, Howard, Leo Genn, Sally Gray, Rosamund
John, Judy Campbell and the wonderful Megs Jenkins) did him in, and who is next
on the killer’s list. I've seen this over and over again since I discovered it for myself about eight years ago, and even though I know whodunit, the fun of finding out sustains me every time.
Green for Danger went over extremely well as the second feature following The Third Man and its wholly different sort of murder mystery. There’s just no denying how
breathtaking and entertaining this movie is, or how thoroughly the presence of
Orson Welles affects the film, as Harry Lime of course, who gets perhaps the greatest extended
introduction in the history of cinema, but also as a director in his own right. Welles
claims he had nothing directly to do with Carol Reed’s conjuring of an eerily seductive
nocturnal Vienna through which Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) and Harry’s lover,
Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) pursue the not-quite-believable story of Lime’s
accidental death and the vaporous trail of murder and corruption left by his
ghost. But certainly the influence of Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai can be felt through just about every
frame of this gorgeous, chilling picture, which only seems to get stronger as
both it and Reed’s critical standing seem to recede further into movie history.
(Spoiler alert: This time around I was shocked by how hard I was hit by the fate of poor Sergeant Paine. Paine, played by Bernard Lee, is the underling of Howard's cynical, brusque but patiently efficient Major Calloway, a stand-up fellow and apparently the only one in Vienna with any genuine appreciation for Martins' talent as a writer of pulp westerns. I went to sleep last night wondering why seeing him face down under the streets of Vienna felt like such a punch in the gut.)
My only complaint: I like “Harry Lime’s Theme” as much as
the next guy, but at the risk of being labeled a heretic at the altar of
classic cinema, I don’t much care for what Anton Karas’ indigenously styled zither
score does, or doesn’t do, for The Third Man. I’ve always found it both
heavy-handed and dramatically ineffective, and it often seems to exist on an
entirely different plane from the action of the images and the story. I think using
Karas’ strings was a bold choice and an interesting experiment, but I don’t
think it’s much of a success, and it’s a tribute to what Reed and Graham Greene
and cinematographer Robert Krasker and film editor Oswald Hafenrichter and the
movie’s stars all brought to the table that even over Karas’ incessant
strumming the movie works masterfully to hold the audience in its spell. Karas
drops out entirely once the movie hits the sewers, and The Third Man becomes
even more taut and suspenseful for the music’s absence. It made me wonder what
the movie would have been like with no conventional score at all.
Okay, heresy registered. You may now commence telling me how
I don’t know my zither from a hole in the ground.
A long time ago, sometime around 1912, a director by the
name of D.W. Griffith packed up his filmmaking wares and took his crew,
including favored cinematographer Billy Bitzer and star Mae Marsh, across the
water to a relatively mysterious island off the Southern California coast to
shoot a short film.
The project, Man’s
Genesis, subtitled A Psychological
Comedy Founded upon the Darwinian Theory of the Evolution of Man (Is that
Woody Allen I hear whimpering with envy?), isn’t one for which Griffith is well
remembered, in the hearts of either academics or those given to silent-era
nostalgia. (One comment on IMDb suggests that no one would ever mistake
Griffith’s simple tale of a landmark of human development—man discovers his
ability to craft and use tools in order to achieve a specific goal-- for “a
serious work of speculative anthropology” and wonders “what the director and
his players actually believed they were doing.”) But even if Man’s Genesis comes up short in the
science department, and maybe even the cinema department, it is nevertheless
notable for being the first Hollywood movie ever shot on the shores of Santa
Catalina Island, a location that would become a popular destination for movie
companies for the next hundred years or so.
During the silent era other more notable titles were filmed
either partially or entirely on the island, including Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female (1919) and The Ten Commandments (1923), Fred
Niblo’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
(1925), Old Ironsides (1926) starring
Charles Farrell and Wallace Beery, The
Black Pirate (1926) starring Douglas Fairbanks, and the earliest filmed
version of Treasure Island (1918).
But perhaps most important to a popular and prevailing
legend of the island’s history is the 1925 production of The Vanishing American, based upon a Zane Grey story of the history
of Native Americans and their struggle for acceptance after having their land
stolen from them by settlers and the United States government. The movie,
starring Richard Dix and Noah Beery, is frequently commemorated and mentioned
at various historical sites and outposts visible throughout Avalon, the
island’s main harbor town, for its unique contribution to the island’s
population, that of the 400 or so North American bison that can be found there.
The animals were shipped to the island to provide
verisimilitude for the outdoor production and then, once that production
wrapped, were left on the island to roam free; this is the official history.
But Jeannine Pedersen, curator of the Catalina Island Museum, tells of a
curious discovery. She got a look at The
Vanishing American recently and wrote that “in watching the film it appears
that it was not filmed on Catalina Island,” a revelation that must have come as
a bit of a shock. She speculates that perhaps the Catalina Island bison footage
was replaced with other footage shot on the mainland, and outside the influence
of alien transport this seems the most likely scenario. According to Pedersen
the bison have been roaming the hills of Catalina since December 1924, around
about the same time The Vanishing
American would have been filmed. (It was released in October 1925.)
Many movies, significant and otherwise, were shot on the
shores of this lovely island getaway during the last decade of the silent era.
But as the talkies approached, there was still no place where one could
actually go to see a movie on
Catalina Island. Enter chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, who bought
controlling interest of the island in 1919. Wrigley, who would also eventually
establish a spring training facility for his Chicago Cubs on Catalina Island
where the Catalina Country Club is now situated, built a dance hall on a site in
Avalon that had been originally cleared for the planned construction of the
Hotel St. Catherine. That hotel was eventually realized, but in nearby Descanso
Canyon instead, leaving room to build
Wrigley’s Sugarloaf Casino, which served not only as a ballroom and
gathering place for island residents and visitors but also as the town’s first
high school, until the population outgrew the school’s capacity. And in 1928
the original Sugarloaf Casino itself was razed in order to make room for a
newer, bigger, even more spectacular building, one that would fill the need for
celluloid dreams on the shores of Avalon.
In May of 1929, under Wrigley’s supervision and direction,
the Catalina Casino, designed by architects Sumner Spaulding and Walter Weber, was finished. The first completely circular
building of its time, the Casino, at an equivalent height of 12 stories, was
and is an Art Deco and Mediterranean Revival masterpiece consisting of three
levels—a museum dedicated to the island’s art and history which occupies the
lower level, a massive 20,000-square foot ballroom on the upper floor, and on
the central, ground-level floor, a beautiful movie theater capable of seating 1,154
people.
The Casino building dominated the landscape of Avalon,
easily visible on approach to the island by boat and from just about anywhere
else in the downtown Avalon area, and the theater inside it more than lived up
to the grandiose expectations the exterior set for it. But the Avalon Theater
was not only spacious, ornate and gorgeous to behold, instantly the hot spot on
the island for locals and visitors. It was also the very first movie theater
ever to be designed with acoustics tailored for the advent of sound motion
pictures, and as such was a favorite showcase for filmmakers like DeMille and
movie studio bigwigs like Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn in which to
premiere their new films. There had literally never been anything like it in
the history of the movies.
The one thing the Catalina Casino is not and never has been,
however, is… a casino, at least as the term is currently understood. The
building’s name was given based on the meaning of the word in the original
Italian language, which simply connotes “a gathering place,” so it’s unlikely
there were ever any visitors decked out in top hats, tails and evening gowns
who arrived at its doors in 1929 expecting an evening of gaming and perhaps
slightly more decadent, alcoholically enhanced fun.
Not so in 2015, however, at least occasionally. Despite
clear declarations in just about any literature you can obtain about the
building, either online or on the island, pertaining to its function and
purpose, there are still island revelers who sidle up to the dark wood doors of
the entryway on a weekend evening, in their beachwear finery of tank tops,
sunglasses and flip-flops, and are disappointed when the employee at the
entrance informs them that, no, there are no slot machines or black jack tables
waiting inside. The look on the faces of the couple who approached the Catalina
Casino just ahead of me, my wife and my daughters last Saturday night after
being informed of this fact—well, think of a child who’d just been told that
there was no Santa Claus, or of a slightly older child who’d just been told
that, no, Santa Claus would not be dealing poker for them after all and that
they would have to make the half-mile walk back into town to the karaoke bar
for any real action.
The Casino building itself stands as majestic and beautiful
now as it ever did, perhaps even more so, its cavernous movie auditorium and
lush ballroom interiors having been recently restored to their original
glories. It’s a place that has always called to me whenever I look at pictures
of Avalon Harbor, and it certainly did upon my one previous visit to Catalina
Island around 21 years ago. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to set foot
inside of it during that trip. But when my family and I ventured the short boat
ride across the sea to get there last weekend, I was determined to make a movie
at the Avalon Theater the crown jewel of our brief visit.
We started our walk from the downtown district Saturday
night just a little early, acting on a tip from one of the guides on the zip
line adventure I went on earlier in the day (That’s another story!) that on
Friday and Saturday nights the movie is preceded by an hour-long concert
performed by one of the only musicians, on the island or anywhere, with the
ability to play the theater’s massive pipe organ. So we made sure to get there
in plenty of time for the musical prelude. Arriving just before 6:30 pm, and after
listening to the employee at the door explain the meaning of the word “casino”
to the disappointed folks ahead of us, we handed over our tickets and went
inside, heads immediately tilting upward to take in the beautiful walnut wood
paneling that enriches the ambiance of the theater’s lobby.
But it’s the auditorium itself which is designed, as all
great movie palaces are, to take your breath away, and that it did. We entered
through the center doors and began the walk toward our seats gazing upward, as
everyone surely does, at the beautiful Art Deco murals created by artist John Gabriel Beckman that grace the domed walls, including a figure surfing
dual waves (presumably off the Catalina coast) on the stage curtain and a
reproduction of Botticelli’s Venus residing
on the apex of the proscenium arch just above the screen.
My first thought was that, with its lack of curtained walls
or any of the familiar trappings of an acoustically designed space that we’ve
become used to seeing in modern theaters, the Avalon may look beautiful, but
the sound coming from the movie, much less the organ, is probably going to reverberate
like a nightmare in an echo chamber.
Wrong. According to the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy,
because the theater was the first to be constructed with an ear toward the
oncoming sound era of motion picture production, great care was taken to make
sure that not only was the sound optimal inside the huge auditorium, but also
that the theater and the ballroom be exceedingly insulated from each other so
that moviegoers were not distracted by the sound of the band or the potential
3,000 dancers that could be in the ballroom above.
In fact, the acoustics
provided by the circular domed ceiling have been studied by acoustical
designers from all over the country because of the high quality transference
made possible by the auditorium’s design. The conservancy claims that a speaker
on the theater stage can speak in a normal voice without a microphone and can
be clearly heard by everyone seated inside, and after experimenting a bit with
this before the organ concert began I can attest that it seems to be true. Yet
when the performance was under way on stage, any talking by audience members
didn’t seem to be loud enough to distract from that performance, unless the
rude chattering was taking place directly next to me (which it was,
occasionally).
And speaking of the pre-show entertainment, let’s just say
that arriving early was one of the best ideas we had all weekend. The giant
Page pipe organ, one of only two currently in operation in the United States,
may have seen better days, but it’s still magnificent to behold and even more
magnificent to hear, its massive gathering of sound gliding along the curves of
the auditorium and enveloping the listener in a way that has effectively been
lost to modern moviegoing audiences. The Avalon’s Page has been in operation
since the theater opened. Though the theater was designed for the exhibition of
sound movies, the era of talkies was yet to get full in swing by May of 1929,
so this wondrous instrument was used frequently as accompaniment for the silent
pictures that would still play there.
But Catalina Island historians, and the
residents who are still around to remember firsthand, also loved the organ for
the special concerts given before the screening of movies, or sometimes in a
separate program during those comparatively lazy island afternoons. (These free
afternoon concerts were an Avalon Theater tradition that, except for a break
during World War II, extended well into the 1950s.) Much care and refurbishment
of the organ has taken place in the years since, including a major overhaul
done to coincide with the theater’s 50th anniversary in 1979, and it
still feels and sounds like an instrument that enjoys the benefits of a lot of
TLC, to say nothing of the tender talents of those who play it.
The name of the man at the keys of the Page before the movie
last Saturday night was never made available, either in advertising or at the
theater that night, and it’s a notch against me for not pursuing the
information. But my zip line tour guide assured me earlier in the day that he
was the only one on the island with the ability to coax the sort of music out
of it that it was meant to create, and when we finally saw him at the bench,
his informal, friendly manner did nothing to diminish the grandeur of his
playing. Whether cruising through a medley built around “Blue Moon,” summoning
the mystery and romance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” or
cranking out a jaunty melody that made me feel like I’d suddenly been
transported inside the world’s largest mock-up of the insides of David Lynch’s
radiator, the man’s performance was nothing less than mesmerizing.
At one point I made my way up to the front row of seats
directly behind so that I could better see how it was than one person could
wring so much out of such a complicated construct. I sat and listened there for
at least two tunes, when suddenly, in between numbers, he turned to acknowledge
the audience’s applause, saw me sitting there and said “Hello.” In breach of
all acceptable audience protocol, I jumped up and took advantage of the
opportunity to tell him how much I was enjoying the performance. And then I
asked him, seemingly out of nowhere, if he’d ever seen the Vincent Price
classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes, hurriedly
including, lest my inquiry seem dangerously random, that the movie opens with
Phibes at another majestic pipe organ, playing an otherworldly and terrifying
arrangement of Mendelssohn’s “War March of the Priests,” and that I was hoping,
by some happy chance, he knew how to play it. (Yes, I made… a request.)
To my surprise, his face lit up. “I love that movie!” he
replied. “And that music!” For a
brief moment I held out hope that I might actually get to hear him peel off Dr.
Phibes’ greatest hit in this awesome venue. But it was not meant to be. He said
he’d always wanted to learn it but has yet to take the plunge. “But I love that movie!” he offered, before
thanking me for my interest and returning to the Page for his grand finale.
After that, it hardly mattered what movie was playing, which
was fortunate because the main feature was Terminator:
Genisys, a picture my kids had a loudly professed desire not to see. (They might have actually
rather have seen D. W. Griffith’s Man’s
Genesis instead!) But what could we do? We were on an island, the ultimate
captive audience to the only show in town, and we let the high of the Page pipe
organ performance carry us through the latest thoroughly unnecessary
installment in this apparently unkillable franchise. The movie’s alternate
universe/time travel narrative becomes so abstractly convoluted that it loses
all urgency, not a good development for an ostensibly high-octane summer
blockbuster. But I didn’t much care. I spent much of the movie’s two-hour
running time amusing myself by noticing how much the slab of beef cast to
replace Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese reminded me of Chico Marx after a summer
workout regimen at World’s Gym.
Soon it was over, the world had once again (for the time
being) been saved, and by the time we hit the pathway along the harbor on our
way back to our hotel I’d almost forgotten the movie entirely. But somewhere I
could still hear the distant chimes and mellifluous waves of chords building to
monumental crescendos and then subsiding inside my head and I thought, what a
wonderful way to end a family vacation on Catalina Island, a place where so
much movie history was born and continues to flourish. I looked at my wife and
the faces of my kids as they bopped down past the moored boats toward the
bustling nightlife of Avalon and I could see that they undoubtedly would have agreed.
And then I remembered, as I would frequently that night
before I went to sleep, that tonight I met a master of the Page pipe organ at
the Avalon Theater who turned out to be a Dr. Phibes geek. Top that, Walley
World.
My daughters and I spent the weekend in the beautiful, still
somewhat quaint small town of Auburn, California, helping to lay to rest and
celebrate the life of my dear aunt Mary Pascuzzi, my fraternal grandmother’s
sister, who was the centered matriarch of her own family and a stabilizing
force for all of us in her extended family as well. She and my grandmother were big fans of classic-era American movies and enthusiastically encouraged my
interest, just one reason why they’re both dear in my heart and memory.
And being Italian, they both had more than a casual interest in The Godfather when it came out in 1972.
I remember my aunt Mary talking to me about having seen it and wondering, me at
the ripe old age of 12, if I’d had a chance to go yet. She knew of the
campaigning I did to get my parents to assent to my seeing it—I even tried to
get my sympathetic grandmother involved—but they would not agree. So I had to
settle for my aunt’s accounts of the movie itself and, of course, all the
things it made her think of, growing up Italian in small-town America. Once I
eventually saw the movie a couple years later I loved it, of course. But maybe
not quite as much as I did the feeling of anticipation that my aunt stoked in me with
her stories of Coppola’s movie and, by extension, Mary’s life.
The day after my aunt was interred in a beautiful outdoor
mausoleum in Roseville, California, next to her beloved husband Pete, we headed
back home to Southern California. That was the day Alex Rocco died.
Rocco was a character actor whose street-tough good looks
were familiar to anyone who watched movies and TV in the late ‘60s and early
‘70s-- he would later win an Emmy for his comic performance as the slick
Hollywood agent Al Floss in the short-lived TV series The Famous Teddy Z. But for most moviegoers he will be
remembered—my Aunt Mary certainly would have remembered him—as Moe Greene, the
Vegas mobster impresario loosely based on Bugsy Siegel who gets on Michael
Corleone’s bad side in The Godfather.
The target of an unwelcome Corleone family buyout, Michael
objects to Greene knocking his brother Fredo around in public, but Greene
pushes back. “You goddamn guineas really make me laugh,” Greene snorts. “I do you a favor and take
Freddie in when you're having a bad time, and now you're gonna try and push me
out!” Greene’s defiance, which we know will likely get him killed, is heady and
nerve-wracking, and Rocco puts the arrogant spin of a lifetime on it. It’s no
wonder that for 40-some years after Rocco claimed people would always ask him
to repeat lines like “I made my bones while you were going out with
cheerleaders!” and the immortal “You don’t buy me out, I buy you out!” And
he always complied, with good cheer. Rocco knew how good Moe Greene had been to
him, and he certainly wasn’t above giving some of that back.
As it happened, Rocco knew the mobster life all too well. A
member of the Winter Hill Gang in Boston’s Somerville district, which had ties
to the infamous Whitey Bulger, Rocco, under his given name, Alex Petricone, was
criminally charged with making bets in 1959, and in 1961 was arrested along
with Winter Hill Gang leader James “Buddy” McLean for the murder of Charlestown
crime figure Bernard McLaughlin. (Petricone was the alleged getaway driver,
McLean the alleged killer.) One month would pass before a grand jury would
decide that the evidence against them was insufficient for an indictment. And
after serving time for an earlier arrest over a public brawl in a Somerville
diner, Petricone decided enough was enough and decided to head out of town. He
told a Boston Globe reporter in 1989,
“I had to get out of the Boston
area, so I flipped a coin and said, ‘Heads Miami, tails California.’ I was in
my mid-20s and came out here with no training. Acting wasn’t even in my mind.”
California won
the toss, so Petricone headed west, where he ended up in an acting class with
Leonard Nimoy, who advised him to lose the Boston accent, and where he decided
that “Petricone” might be a bit much for the casting directors around town. He
settled on the only slightly less ethnic-sounding “Rocco” after seeing it
emblazoned on the side of a passing bread truck and shortly after landed his
first acting job in 1965’s Motorpsycho
for Russ Meyer-- a character actor’s legend, to say nothing of a legendary
character actor, was born.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Three the Hard Way.
Detroit 9000. The Outside Man. Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. Hearts of the
West. The Stunt Man. Cannonball Run II. The Entity. Lady in White. Those are just some of the movies Rocco
did in his 50-year career—not all of them great, some of them less than good,
but all certainly enriched thanks to his presence and his talent. He also did
miles and miles of TV work in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and late in his career found a
home in the voiceover studio, doing memorable vocal characterizations for A Bug’s Life, Pinky and the Brain, Family
Guy and, of course, The Simpsons.
But outside of
Moe Greene, if I were to have ever had the opportunity to ask Alex Rocco to
repeat one of his best lines from a movie, it might be this one: “Are you insane?!” That’s the quite sincere query
Rocco’s San Francisco D.A. puts to detectives James Caan and Alan Arkin,
recounting a recent botched investigation and pursuit near the beginning of
Richard Rush’s hysterical, and hysterically funny, Freebie and the Bean (1974). (The strangulated inflection Rocco
puts on the phrase, and particularly on “insane?!”
is apoplectic perfection.)
There are plenty
of great stunts in the picture, of course, but nothing
in Freebie and the Bean is as chokingly funny as Caan and Arkin pitching
the movie’s central plot mechanism—a proposal to protect a local crime boss
from an impending hit just long enough so they can get the evidence to arrest
him themselves—to Rocco’s brilliantly discombobulated D.A. These two are their
own multi-car pile-up, walking all over each other, finishing each other’s
sentences, stutter-starting and stopping mid-sentence as they try to weasel the
D.A. and avoid yet another in what one suspects is a long line of shout-downs.
And Rocco’s stunned demeanor as he witnesses and tries to reason with these two
is a master class in the genius of the straight-man—one Rocco eye-roll here is
worth pages of dialogue ranted by countless angry superior officers in countless inferior buddy cop movies ever since.
It’s been a long, sad week, and
I’m afraid the remembering of what we’ll be missing, in my family and in the
vast audience for great American character actors, is going to last a lot
longer than that. Addio, zia
Maria. Addio, Alex Rocco. Restate in
pace e dolcezza.
(Thanks to Brian
Marquard, whose obituary for Alex Rocco appeared Tuesday, July 21, in the Boston Globe. )
Early on in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest
half-narcotized attempt to dramatically grapple with a philosophically tinged
moral crisis, a fellow academic tells Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), “I loved
your essay on situational ethics.” Abe, being a newly appointed
professor/radical free thinker to the philosophy department of a picturesque
Rhode Island college and himself awash in career disillusionment and an
existential dilemma involving writer’s block, smiles and nods appreciatively
and noncommittally.
However, the audience may consider the Big Theme bell well
and truly rung. Allen, who would never be so satisfied with a single easy
proclamation of achievement, pads the first half of the movie with apparently
awe-inspired compliments from fellow professors, administrators and students
directed toward Abe’s prodigious intellect—his reputation doth well precede him,
and he knows it. And you can bet that every classroom scene will be occasion to
name-drop the heavy hitters-- Kant! Heidegger! Dickinson!-- in order to properly
season the ground for the harvest of deep-dish themes and the big plot twist to
come. (There is occasional unintentional comedy, however-- the way Phoenix
wraps his lips around “Simone de Beauvoir,” you’d think he was one of his own wide-eyed,
marble-mouthed students.)
This being a Woody Allen movie, Abe is also, despite his
alcoholism, impotence and a general indifference to his well-heeled
surroundings, quite the ladies’ man. He not only catches the eye of the
campus’s resident nymphomaniac, a fellow hard-drinking, unhappily married
chemistry teacher named Rita (Parker Posey, who flits in and out of the movie
with such tippled, oddball grace and comic timing that you wish the
movie were about her), but also that of Jill (Emma Stone), one of Abe’s
students.
Jill, an under-imagined character who gets little chance to
illuminate Allen’s universe the way Stone did in his widely dismissed Magic in the Moonlight, is
intellectually curious and independent. Abe compliments her latest essay by
saying that her ideas were freshest and most stimulating when in disagreement
with his. But Allen can’t find much room in his dramatic strategy for her to
display that intellectual independence within the constraints of the plot—she’s
too busy being fascinated by this obviously troubled, yet strangely magnetic
genius. (“He’s so self-destructive, but he’s so brilliant,” she coos,
rationalizing her infatuation after witnessing Abe’s drunken spin with Russian
roulette, which in every world but this one would have resulted in him being
ousted from this picturesque academic posting.) Jill also plays the piano-- good
for lending the movie a further air of Bach-sweetened cul-cha-- and she has an easily dominated boyfriend whom she dumps
in order to pursue her unlikely relationship with the prof, again, this being a
Woody Allen movie.
Points to Allen for indicating early on that this particular
May-December romance is a dead end, even though Jill batting her lashes at Abe
is not the instance of situational ethics the director is concerned with here. For
its first half Irrational Man spins
its wheels within the hermetically sealed world of academia, and within the
even more hermetically sealed world of romantic entanglements vis-Ã -vis the
cinema of Woody Allen. But a seemingly random development kicks off the second
act’s hard right turn, which sets up the question Allen is really (sort of)
interested in: Is it possible to positively rationalize the commission of a
seemingly irredeemable act? And if you got away with it, would you really be
getting away with it?
So what happens next? By the time the worm turns, you may
welcome the development for the sprinkle of action it provides amidst a sea of
talk. Or you may not care quite as much as Allen thinks you should. For all of
his attraction to the signposts of genre, Allen seems to look down upon using
his filmmaking to encourage the audience to respond to the situations he
concocts as anything other than diagrammed insects pinned and wriggling under
glass. He films decisive moments of activity from the same placid distance as
he observes the clucking and chattering of an academics mixer, almost as if Allen
having posed his philosophical queries is quite enough, thank you. It’s this
apparent directorial indifference, the high-minded shuffling aside of some of
the low places his scenarios end up taking us, and the undeniable pace at which
he continues to crank them out, which suggests that for Allen storytelling in
movies may be less a calling than a compulsion.
Only Posey manages to hint at a (screwed-up) life off-screen.
She seems to be operating gloriously independent of the director’s puppet
strings here, and she lights the movie up in the same way that Maureen
Stapleton did Interiors, without
having to function as the movie’s symbolic life force. The way Rita/Posey
impatiently blows off Allen’s clunky attempt to update her, and the audience,
on the developing plot (“I don’t have time for a crazy story right now. But
I’ll see you soon, okay?”) makes her the audience’s truest representative, as
well as the character most worth caring about. If only Allen had the time.
I must admit, an understanding of the praises and honors
awarded to Woody Allen during this most recent renaissance of interest in his
career, starting with Vicky Cristina
Barcelona (2008), on to the stillborn You
Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), the occasionally charming but
unsatisfying Midnight In Paris
(2011), the maddening To Rome with Love
(2012) and up through this latest dud, largely escapes me. And I may never
forgive him for Whatever Works (2009),
as terminal a comedy as he has ever made, or Blue Jasmine (2013), which convinced me Allen had completely lost
touch with the day-to-day details of how the world and society actually
functions. All of those movies have their defenders (well, maybe not You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger), with
three Oscars sprinkled among those titles, if that matters, for two of his
actresses and for the writer Allen himself. And I have no doubt each one of
those previously mentioned are precisely the films Allen intended to make. So
what do I know?
Well, I know that I could barely contain my disregard for
most of those movies, yet the one Woody Allen movie I’ve enjoyed without
reservation since Manhattan Murder
Mystery (1993), the undeniably gossamer but quite charming Magic in the Moonlight (2014), is one that admirers of his recent
Oscar-winning films have found beneath contempt. Whether that says more about
Allen or me is entirely in the eye of the beholder. And I admit that given the
presence of Stone, I was hoping she might be working a little muse magic on the
director such that their second collaboration might be as engaging in its way
as their first one was.
Alas, Irrational Man
is one from the “position paper” pile in Woody Allen’s box of ideas, and it
plays about as dry and pro forma as one would expect from a director who has
become as skittish about the illuminating, beyond-the-thesis marginalia of
human relationships, to say nothing of the sticky mess of homicide, as Allen
has. The venerated writer-director wonders in his ostensibly dramatic framework
if a morally reprehensible act could ever be justifiable. I found myself
wondering in turn, if Woody Allen asks such a question in a movie which itself
feels as though it were made in a vacuum, will it make a sound if no one is
there when it flops?
$3.00 admission all day, every day! $1.50 on Sundays and
Tuesdays! Free parking! $1 hot dogs that are actually safe to eat, and tasty!
Digital projection! Good popcorn! Family-friendly environs! Do you have a discount
theater in your neighborhood? If so, count yourself very lucky indeed. Where I
live, in Glendale, CA, USA, I’m within cycling distance of at least three
overpriced, technically underwhelming “luxury” cinemas which charge
outrageously high admission fees for the “privilege” of posh seating (there’s
usually a heavily padded recliner involved) and even in-your-seat service
which, so far as I’ve seen, equals and sometimes even beats the shining beacon
of a cell phone light or a loud conversation between movie pals as a
distraction from the picture on the screen. But I only have to pedal a little
ways further (truth be told, I usually drive) to avail myself of the second-run
pleasures of two little ramshackle discount multiplexes that offer all the bargains
listed above, and probably a couple others I have yet to sniff out.
The Academy Theater in Pasadena, owned and operated by the
Regency Cinemas chain, is a hastily renovated movie palace that still looks a
bit rundown on entry to its once-ornate lobby. (It was originally the Fox
Theater, designed by the same gentleman who created the plans for Pasadena’s
other movie palace, the Rialto, and became in the Academy in the late ‘50s.)
Inside, the auditoriums are laid out as though the architect’s main tool was a
chainsaw, but the Academy is still a great place to catch up on any big,
popular, or would-be popular mainstream Hollywood fare mired in the purgatory
between first-run theatrical engagements and the promised land of Blu-ray,
streaming and digital downloads.
And though the Academy is geographically closer to where I
live, I tend to gravitate toward the Valley Plaza 6 in North Hollywood,
Regency’s real success story in bargain movie multiplex culture. The Valley
Plaza 6 is no great shakes in the architecture department either. Once owned by
the United Artists chain, it’s a pretty typical ‘70s-‘80s cracker-box
complex—two auditoriums built to hold around 500 customers, the other four
around 150, with little to no amenities of style or presentation, all function,
no form. With the advent of new and even bigger multiplexes featuring
stadium-style auditoriums and reserved seating, this old school Cineplex looked
to be on the way out. But several years ago Regency refashioned it as a
discount house and now the place flourishes as a reasonable alternative to $15
first-run ticket prices.
In many ways, the success of the Valley Plaza 6 and other
theaters like it mirror the mini resurgence that drive-in theaters, in Southern
California and elsewhere around the country, have enjoyed over the past 10
years. Once thought of as a fleapits attracting exactly the sorts of audiences
(young, rude, possibly criminally oriented) that would keep the general
populace tucked safely away in front of their 60-inch screens at home, drive-in
movie theaters are now, against all odds, primarily family-friendly locations,
emphasizing affordable entertainment options for parents and children who want
a fun moviegoing experience without having to take out a loan to pay for it.
Similarly, you used to be able to count on a show outside
the Valley Plaza 6, located on the border of North Hollywood and Panorama City
in the San Fernando Valley, where street racers and other young toughs would
loiter after dark in the theater’s vast parking lot, spinning 360s in their
tricked-out rides and unnerving moviegoers headed back their own
far-more-modest vehicles. But these days, the Valley Plaza 6 has been co-opted
by audiences who wouldn’t look out of place at the drive-in—parents and excited
children, alongside young couples looking for an affordable night out, everyone
having a good time undoubtedly fueled by the buzz that only buying a $3 ticket
to see an (almost) new movie can provide. (Those prices are cheaper than
drive-in admissions even!)
And I used to think of second-run houses as places where the
discounted admission was code for a trade-off that almost always included
seeing a beat-up print that had been abused by indifferent or incompetent
projectionists on its journey to the end of the theatrical road. But no more.
The presentation at the Valley Plaza 6 has benefited greatly from the presence
of 35mm’s mortal enemy, digital projection. When the Valley Plaza 6 was running
film, the projection was always highly variable in quality and one could never
count on whether or not the movie would even be shown in the correct aspect
ratio. (Scope prints were routinely masked down to 1.85:1 in the smaller
auditoriums.) But now, also like drive-ins, the Valley Plaza 6 offers
projection that is comparable, and sometimes even better, than some of the
higher-priced options around town—a few weeks ago I saw Spy at a renovated first-run multiplex with fancy recliner chairs
and reserved seating and was horrified to discover the digital presentation of
the feature looked no different than the flimsy, washed-out video quality of
the pre-show “content.” For $13 a ticket!
Programming at the Valley Plaza 6 is hit and miss, as it is
in first-run houses, but especially so if you tend to keep up with new releases
and arthouse fare at other venues. However, it’s always a good idea of keep an
eye on the schedule (I get e-mail alerts every week), because sometimes the
stars they do align and room is made for something other than crappy comedies
(I’m looking at you, Paul Blart: Mall Cop
2) or CGI animation. This past weekend my daughter and I found ourselves at
the Valley Plaza 6 for a do-it-yourself double bill of the recent Poltergeist remake and Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland, neither of which exactly
set the box office on fire and both of which made their way out of first-run
theaters with relative haste, and we had a great time.
A quick look at the schedule for the upcoming weekend at
the Valley Plaza 6 reveals that both Poltergeist
and Tomorrowland (and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2) will continue
their runs, along with the addition of Ted
2, Pitch Perfect 2 and the Reese Witherspoon-Sofia Vergara chase comedy Hot Pursuit. Meanwhile over at the Academy Theater in Pasadena, if you’re among those who wish they could have
caught (or were afraid to catch) Insidious
Chapter 3, Entourage or Cameron Crowe’s much-maligned Aloha upon their initial releases, well, here’s your chance, and at
prices that won’t make you feel utterly cheated, should the movies themselves
turn out to be as bad as their reputations. If you live in another part of the
country and have a discount house near you, there’s probably a similar roster
of programming available this weekend as well, so take heart. As admission
prices continue to rise, it’s nice to know there are options for economically
minded audiences who choose to read the fine print of the newspaper listings (Newspaper?
What’s that?) or click on the theater’s Web site and take advantage.
Vive le $3 ticket! Vive le
$1 hot dog! Vive le discount movie
house, wherever it may be, whatever form it may take!
****************************************
(Critical aside: The Poltergeistremake is certainly unnecessary, but even so it stands up well against the 1982 original, which I’ve never held in very high regard. The new version is clearly much more grounded in PG-13-scaled horror, as opposed to the Hooper/Spielberg film, which as I rediscovered in watching it again last night, is more a Spielbergian light show than a haunted house movie, the entire cast directed to stare into the strobes displaying the director’s patented Gaping Maw of Awe as if the movie were a supernatural wrinkle onClose Encounters of the Third Kind,which maybe it is. The remake trades in the original’s very charming loosey-goosey family dynamic for one imbued with a more stressful 2015-ready economic uncertainty, but it doesn’t really pay off. Where the new version shines is in its casting. As good as Craig T. Nelson is, Sam Rockwell’s is the more interesting paternal performance, and the paranormal tag team of Jane Adams and Jared Harris represent a significant upgrade over Beatrice Straight and Zelda Rubenstein. However, as good as she is, Rosemarie DeWitt can’t touch JoBeth Williams, without whom the 1982 would have no reason to exist. Both movies are ultimately underwhelming, but the newPoltergeistis much better than Rotten Tomatoes would have you believe, and my daughter and I enjoyed its many effective scares.
That goes double forTomorrowland, a movie marketed as a kids’ adventure tale (and none too ably marketed, I guess) which, in the tradition of the most serious and socially engaged science fiction literature and films, has some deadly serious things to say about our pop culture’s romance/infatuation/obsession with all things dystopian. Critic David Edelstein rightly called it “a major pop-culture statement with all sorts of implications, both vital and nutty,” locating the “nutty” part somewhere near director Bird’s assertion of “imagination over knowledge.” Bird suggests that recognition of problems like global warming, which might well lead to the sort of post-apocalyptic fate movies and television shows and young-adult literature are so in love with, shouldn’t be allowed to overwhelm our need to band together and create solutions to preserve our future. I couldn’t quite make the leap toward accepting that Bird’s movie believes that those most vocal about impending disaster are dampening the creative spirits of those most likely to find a way to right our listing global ship. But even if that’s the feeling you take from it, at least it’s a position that can be argued and examined in the aftermath of the exhilarating storytelling buzz the movie leaves you with. Bird's ability to conjure access to both the grandeur of classic sci-fi and the swift grace and sharp wit of his animated features is at a peak in Tomorrowland. Critical aside concluded.)
Better late than never, right? That one rarely worked on my
teachers in high school, and almost never at the university level. But it’s all
I’ve got, so I’m trotting it out in the hopes that my loyal readership will
just look the other way. Whichever way you look, these are the answers I’ve
got, my responses to the fiery inquiry at the heart of Ms. Elizabeth Halsey’s Rotten Apple, Hot for (Bad) Teacher Summer Movie
Quiz! Have at ‘em, and don’t grade me too harshly! It's still summer, right?
1)Name a line from a movie that
should've become a catch phrase but didn't
“Well, you can do what you want to us, but
we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of
America! Gentlemen!”
2) Your second favorite William Wellman film
With this question I find myself echoing the refrain
of several folks who have undertaken this quiz: It appears I am woefully
undernourished when it comes to William Wellman. I’ve only seen eight of the 83
directorial credits listed on his IMDb page. I wish The Boob (1926) were one of them so I could claim it as my second
favorite, something I would consider doing on the basis of the title alone. But
I’m all about integrity here, so I’ll stick to the ones I know. Nothing Sacred is the clear favorite in
my book. And as much as I like Night
Nurse (1931), The Public Enemy
(1931) and Wings (1927), I award second place to The Ox-Bow Incident (1946), a marvel
of tension and the dense interpersonal politics of conscience clocking in at a
lean 75 minutes. (Take that, Quentin Tarantino.) The one Wellman I haven’t yet seen
that I am most keen to? I’ll say Westward
the Women (1951), though now it might really be The Boob.
3) Viggo Mortensen or Javier Bardem?
Bardem delivered one for the ages as Anton Chigurh
in No Country for Old Men and he was
almost as good in John Malkovich’s The
Dancer Upstairs, but his supporting
turns in Skyfall , The Counselor and Vicky Christina Barcelona were pitched at the level of the movies
themselves-- overkill, druggy camp,
low-gear sexy, respectively, and all less than inspired. Mortenson, on the
other hand, has not only the eye candy credit in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but also weird and/or searing turns in
pictures like The Indian Runner,
Carlito’s Way, The Prophecy, A Perfect Murder and Gus Van Sant’s Psycho retool. (IMDb also says he
starred as Jimmy Kowalski in a TV movie remake of Vanishing Point—whaaa????!) But Mortenson gets my vote on the
strength of lead performances in his two movies for David Cronenberg—A History of Violence and Eastern Promises—plus The Road and one especially close to my
heart, Hidalgo. And I’m very keen to
see him in Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja.
4) Favorite first line from a movie
There are a lot of really good examples in the comments section of the original quiz post (like Weigard’s
example from Billy Wilder’s One Two Three).
But for me, no opening line in any movie so succinctly encapsulates, given the
context, the shadows within the story to come quite so perfectly as the one
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola crafted to open their 1972 classic:
“I believe in America.”
5) The most disappointing/superfluous “director’s cut” or otherwise extended
edition of a movie you’ve seen? *
I’m really not much of one for keeping up with
altered versions of beloved or otherwise familiar movies—I have a hard-enough
time just keeping pace with everything I’d like to see, current releases as
well as past classics, to find time to sit around comparing the theatrical cut
against the director’s cut or the unrated extended version or whatever the marketing
department happens to choose to call it. And I’m also not interested in having
my memories of the original film jumbled with other versions, which may have
excised (and sometimes for quite justifiable reasons) elements or scenes that I
love or remember well, particularly if it’s a movie I’ve seen several times in
its release form. All of which means the “special edition” of Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1980) is probably the one I’m most familiar with and the one that strikes me
as the most egregious example of what can happen when a director (with or
without the studio’s insistence) begins to second-guess himself. Spielberg’s
decision to let us see the inside of the mothership, after crafting a sense of
mystery and emphasizing the elements of communication between humans and an
unknown alien species over the entire film, is clearly meant to augment the awe
generated by the original cut, but it only deflates that mystery, justifying
all by itself the famous show-biz edict to leave ‘em wanting more. The “special
edition” is actually three minutes shorter
than the theatrical cut, which means that other scenes inside the film were
also tightened, replaced or excised altogether. I can’t even trust my recall of
what’s in what version anymore, thanks to the proliferation of this “special
edition” in the ‘80s. But some of my favorite moments of Spielberg doodling in
the margins—I’m thinking mostly of the scenes involving Roy Neary and his
family—have been spoiled by the presence of overwrought additional scenes
(Neary’s son screaming “Crybaby! Crybaby!” at his dad) that I wish weren’t
cluttering up my memory bank.
6) What is the movie you feel was most enhanced by a variant version? *
Even though what the meaning of a director’s cut really is remains pretty fluid in the age of digital video, especially when it comes to reconstructing a film based
on the notes of an artist who is no longer among the living, I can say that
both Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(1974) and Once Upon a Time in America
(1985) are both movies which have benefited from the home video-inspired
retooling of their bowdlerized theatrical cuts. Sergio Leone’s movie is
available in a newly reconstructed four-hour version, which I haven’t seen but which reportedly is magnificent and as
close to Leone’s original vision of his final film as we’re likely to ever see.
And the history of Peckinpah’s movie and the endless tinkering and reshuffling
that it has been subject to is a fascinating story unto itself, as witnessed by
Paul Seydor’s recent book The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film.
But I also hold in very high regard Oliver
Stone’s Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut. And
even though I realize that I’m probably more in love with the theatrical cut,
the extended version of 1941, which
doesn’t move as swiftly as the choppier version originally released in 1979, at
least has one classic sequence left out of the shorter version—Christmas tree
salesman Hollis “Holly” Wood (Slim Pickens) being set upon by kidnap-minded Japanese
sailors who are all somehow disguised as seasonal pines.
7) Eve Arden or Una Merkel?
For Mildred
Pierce alone (oh, and Stage Door, and
Cover Girl, and That Uncertain Feeling), but also for so much more (and I would
even include in that bounty her stint on the ‘60s sitcom The Mothers-in-Law), it’s all about Eve. Though I do love Una too.
Una, Arden? Arden, Una? What a choice…
8) What was the last DVD/Blu-ray/streaming film you saw? The last theatrical
screening?
Blu-ray:Maps
to the Stars,bywhich I was pretty much floored. Who knew that
Cronenberg’s clinical cool would be such a perversely apt match with Bruce
Wagner’s turned-to-11 bile-infused Hollywood satire? And a publicity shot of
Julianne Moore in this role should be forever placed in Webster’s next to the
word “fearless.”
Streaming:Django
Unchained, which I was surprised to discover didn’t have much impact a
couple of years removed from its release. (I’d only seen it once theatrically
before seeing it again this week.) When it was over, my wife remarked, “Well,
that seemed kinda silly,” and reflecting on the movie’s various excesses and
the vague sense of being a little too big for its britches-- the movie begs for
the crispness that the late Sally Menke
always brought to even the director’s talkiest pieces—I had to agree. There
are plenty of things to like, still—Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson among
them-- but the movie doesn’t have even close to the formal or textual audacity
of Inglourious Basterds and it trots
when a good, sturdy gallop would better suit the moment. And I’m still puzzling
over QT winning the screenplay Oscar for this— the structure seems lumpier than
usual, and there’s not a single exchange of dialogue here that’s in the same
league as the least of the many memorable confrontations in Inglourious Basterds
Theatrical: The
Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle’s supremely empathetic, defiantly
non-exploitative documentary about the Angulo brothers, a group of siblings
brought up in a Lower East Side Manhattan apartment completely shut off from
the outside world, whose vision of the way the world works (and, as it turns
out, their inspiration for striking out on the own outside the walls of that
apartment) is derived entirely from the movies.
9) Second favorite Michael Mann film
My favorite has to be The Insider, so I’ll bestow honorable mention status upon The Last of the Mohicans (1992). It
strikes me that these two are the ones that stand furthest apart (excepting
maybe The Keep) from what I’ve come
to think of as the Michael Mann Existential Hero Formula. So does my high
regard for his Miami Vice feature automatically
classify it as a guilty pleasure, even though I feel no guilt at all about
enjoying it?
10) Name a favorite director’s most egregious misstep
I
don’t know if they could be called Brian De Palma’s most egregious missteps—I
might reserve that label for the potentially career-killing trifecta of The Black Dahlia, Redacted and Passion—but it seems to me that the
one-two punch of Scarface (1983) and Body Double (1985) might qualify on some level. De
Palma followed a career and style-defining run of films, from Sisters (1973) through Blow Out (1981) with the overscaled,
sloppy excess of Scarface (from an
Oliver Stone screenplay), which was the focus of an intense battle between
filmmaker, studio and the MPAA, who originally saddled the movie with an “X”
rating, presumably for violence. (The movie also hit high-water marks for
swearing—IMDb cites uses the word “fuck” in Scarface,
including its derivatives, at 226, for an average of 1.32 “fucks” per minute—and
the vacuuming-up of a certain powdered narcotic.)
De
Palma took the rating battle personally—in interviews he railed against what he
saw as the MPAA’s overly stern tsk-tsking of his movie, and vowed that if they
wanted a “X,” next time he’d give ‘em one. The presumable result of the
director’s outrage, Body Double,
found him being self-conscious about his own body of work for the first time,
making “a De Palma movie” instead of one from the charred and blackened heart.
(I wrote about the movie at length here.
From
here on out there would be masterworks (Casualties
of War, Carlito’s Way, Femme Fatale), top-drawer Hollywood work for hire (The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible)
and bizarre misfires (Wise Guys, The
Bonfire of the Vanities) along the way. But I look at the Scarface/Body Double combo as the point
when De Palma, a master of cinematic control, began to sense a shift in the
Hollywood paradigm within which he’d functioned as an independent voice for a
decade and responded not with focus or even rage, but with a sort of infantile
contempt unbecoming such a master manipulator of image and sound.
11) Alain Delon or Marcello Mastroianni?
Delon’s better looking, and he shared the screen with Claudia
Cardinale in The Leopard, but
Mastroianni has the Fellini connection, and he shared the screen with Claudia
Cardinale in 8½. Advantage: Marcello!
12) Jean-Luc Godard famously stated that “all you need for a movie is a girl
and a gun.” Name one other essential element that you’d add to the mix.
Snarky
answer: A whole bunch of unexposed film.
Serious
answer: A good reason to make one.
13) Favorite one-sheet that you own, or just your favorite one-sheet (please
provide a link to an image if you can)
This one hung in my rooms for years, throughout
college and beyond.
I also like this variation.
14) Catherine Spaak or Daniela Giordano?
I first encountered the undeniably lovely Daniela
Giordano in Mario Bava’s satisfyingly strange sex comedyFour
Times That Night, but I can recall ever seeing her elsewhere only in the
1970 spaghetti western Have a Nice
Funeral, My Friend! Sartana Will Pay! But Catherine Spaak started off on a
high note in 1962, with Dino Risi’s Il
Sorpasso among her first efforts. In addition to lots of Italian sex
comedies, she also has Dario Argento’s Cat
O’ Nine Tails, Antonio Margheriti’s (say it like Eli Roth) Take a Hard Ride, Damaniano Damiani’s A Complicated Girl and, of course, her
tag-team comedy with Claudia Cardinale, Certo, certissimo, anzi...
probabile,
a.k.a. Diary of a Telephone Operator.
For all that, and those awesome glasses, advantage Catherine!
15) Director who most readily makes you think “Whatever happened to…?”
The name that immediately pops to the top of my brain
is Bill Forsyth. After a string of wonderful comedy/dramas in the ‘80s,
including That Sinking Feeling, Gregory’s
Girl, Local Hero, Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping,
he made the largely ignored Burt Reynolds comedy Breaking In in 1989, followed it with the almost universally
reviled Being Human (1994) starring
Robin Williams, took another five years to come up with a sequel to one of his
breakthrough films, Gregory’s Two Girls
(1999) and has not been heard from on screen since. He won a lifetime
achievement award from the Scottish branch of the British Film Institute in
2009, for which occasion he made a short film:
A quote on his IMDb page may provide a clue as to
his diminished output over the past 15 years:
“And so the passion ultimately fizzles out because of the
limitations of the goal; because movies are really not that important. At the
very end of the day you're sitting with an audience of four or five hundred
people and all they want is to be entertained. You see we're dealing with a
medium which really only wants to involve itself in the superficial manipulation
of emotions.”
Be all that as it may, based on Local Hero alone, I’m sorry there aren’t twice as many Bill Forsyth
films as there are.
Here's a good piece on Forsyth from the New York Times.
16) Now that some time has passed… The Interview, yes or no?
Speaking as someone who hated Pineapple Express
and had only marginally more tolerance for This
Is the End, I thought The Interview
was terrific, and it’s not even the weirdest James Franco comedy I’ve liked.
(That award goes to Your Highness.)
17) Second favorite Alberto Cavalcanti film
If Went
the Day Well? (1942) is my favorite (and it is), then second place must go
to his nifty noir They Made Me a Fugitive
(1947) starring Trevor Howard and the indescribably luscious Sally Gray. I
disqualified Dead of Night (1945)
because Cavalcanti was one of four directors on that omnibus film, but it’s
still damn good.
18) Though both displayed strong documentary influence in their early films,
Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog have focused heavily on the documentary form late
in their filmmaking careers. If he had lived, what kind of films do you think
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, their partner in the German New Wave of the ‘70s,
would be making now?
With Berlin
Alexanderplatz as exhibit #1 in evidence, I’d like to think he’d have a
home at HBO or Showtime or one of those joints making the sort of long-form TV
that has everyone glued to their iPads these days.
19) Name a DVD you’ve replaced with a Blu-ray. Name another that you decided
not to replace.
I happily replaced my MGM Midnite Movies double bill
of The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Countess Dracula (1971) with Synapse
Video’s lush, feature-packed Blu-rays and will never look back. Synapse also
put out gorgeous Blu-ray transfers of Twins
of Evil (1971), Vampire Circus
(1972) and Hands of the Ripper
(1971), all of which grace my bookshelf and which make my house the place to be in Glendale if you have
an itch for some early ‘70s Hammer!
And I don’t see any point in upgrading my Jackass:
The Movie, Jackass 2 and Jackass 3-D collection to Blu-ray. Picture quality
is not the raison d’etre here, and
those shiny Blu-ray discs will just get smudged with all manner of debris anyway.
20) Don Rickles or Rodney Dangerfield?
Who do you think, dummy? The Man with the X-Ray Eyes!
Casino! Kelly’s Heroes! Toy Story! Run Silent, Run Deep! Beach
Blanket Bingo! CPO Sharkey! Come
on! Advantage: Mr. Warmth!
21) Director who you wish would hurry up and make another film
The answer to this one and to #15 seem as though
they might be interchangeable, but I don’t necessarily think so. Bill Forsyth
may have discovered that the creative fire that kept him going 30 years ago is
too difficult to light now. So what we’d get if Bill Forsyth churned out
another movie might be (would most likely be) more on the uninspired order of Being Human than another uniquely
entrancing creation like Local Hero
or Comfort and Joy or Gregory’s Girl.
It might be cheating a bit to say Hou Hsiao-hsien,
since The Assassin has already
screened at Cannes and it's just a couple of months away from hitting the States.
So I’ll say Walter Hill, whose recent Bullet
to the Head proved he’s still got the chops. He just needs a stronger
screenplay.
22) Second favorite Michael Bay film
The
great American satire Pain & Gain
gets my top spot here, so the runner-up award for Michael Bay’s second-best
film is Bad Boys II, which is
a movie that has a lot of junk in it—it’s two and a half hours long. How could
it not?—but is still a lot of fun, especially when everybody starts flinging
fast-moving cars at each other. Missing the second-place cut by a hair is Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
23) Name a movie that, for whatever reason, you think of as your own
National
Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) for the obvious reasons. For perhaps less
obvious ones, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord
(1974) and Boris Ingster’s Stranger on
the Third Floor (1940), which I saw on the second half of a late-night Sinister Cinema double feature back in
the early ‘70s. It made me feel like I’d discovered a movie no else knew about.
Which wasn’t true, of course, but it still made me love the movie even more
than I would have already. (I call up the great opening title music in my head
whenever life doesn’t seem quite dramatic or urgent enough…)
24) Your favorite movie AI (however loosely you care to
define the term)
Right now it’s a toss-up…
25) Your favorite existing DVD commentary track *
I will put in one very decisive vote for the commentary track featuring
Steven Soderbergh and Lem Dobbs on the DVD for The Limey. There’s a time and place for friendly back and forth,
and then there’s a time for a screenwriter to confront his director about
choices made that he disagrees with. This commentary track is the time for the
latter.
And
I will also make room to urge you to listen to Richard Harland Smith’s
informative and enlightening track on Kino’s recent Blu-ray remastering of the
1940 Poverty Row production The Devil Bat. The movie itself is unlikely to impress anyone who doesn’t
already have a taste for horror marginalia or a fond memory of watching it on
late-night TV as a kid, but Smith, a more-than-worthy host and raconteur, will
open up this Bela Lugosi sort-of classic to you like no one else could. (Above: Richard hanging out with one of his many acolytes.)
26) The double bill you’d program on the last night of your own revival
theater
There
are so many combos floating around in my head, some of which wouldn’t be quite
right for the last night of a presumably beloved cinema. But I think a movie
that stretches back to the silent era and points a poison pen toward the heart
of Hollywood, combined with a movie that revels in the form of epic Hollywood
(and international moviemaking) as well as the audacious use of those forms to
unexpected ends, which itself concludes with the burning of a big, beautiful movie house,
would seem to fit the requirements of the evening.
May
I suggest Sunset Boulevardand Inglourious Basterds?
27) Catherine Deneuve or Claudia Cardinale?
Well, unlike Alain Delon, Marcello Mastroianni or
Catherine Spaak, as far as I know Catherine Deneueve never made a
picture with Claudia Cardinale, so…. Like there was ever a contest here!
Advantage: Claudia!
