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DENNIS SUBMITS TO PROFESSOR CHIPPING'S GRUELING FILM QUIZ INTERROGATION
And now, for the first time in three quizzes at least, I've finally made the time to submit my own responses to last week's little exercise. So without further ado, with your extreme indulgence, here are my answers to Professor Arthur Chipping's Maddeningly Detailed, Purposefully Vague, Fitfully Out-of-Focus Back to School Movie Quiz!
1) What is
the biggest issue for you in the digital vs. film debate?
Others who have submitted
their answers to this quiz have already said it, but it bears repeating:
digital production and DCP is
the reality of 21st-century cinema. There’s no getting around it. And frankly,
I don’t have an issue with shooting films digitally—why would I when the result
can be as stunning as what David Fincher did with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? The real test for me is, can I,
with prior knowledge that what I’m watching was captured digitally, be
convinced, or rather seduced, into forgetting that bit of information, or at
least allowing it to become inconsequential to the way I visually process the
movie? If digital can render images that are film-like in their richness, that
don’t betray the skipping and skating during camera movement and the other
artifacts that tend to expose the tinny video image as rather weak tea in
comparison to the richness of film, then what’s really to complain about? (I
remember being completely floored when I first learned, after having seen it
twice, that Robert Altman shot the visually warm and resplendent A Prairie Home Companion digitally, even
though I knew he’d gone that route for his previous movie, The Company, as well.)
Even DCP presentations at
the multiplex have proven to be successful— if most paying audiences don’t
already out-and-out prefer digital projections over 35mm, they are certainly
accepting of them (those that bother to attempt to discern the difference, that
is). Truth be told, DCP does look
pretty nice, although many of us miss not only the depth and warmth of a 35mm
image but also the sense of it as being touched by human hands, or
human-constructed contraptions like mechanical projection systems. Some of us
even (slightly) fetishize the wear and tear that results from such touching, a
reminder that growing up watching projected 35mm, wherever we watched it, there
was rarely, if ever, such a thing as a pristine presentation, a fact which
rarely, if ever, interfered with our ability to become submersed into the
inviting fathoms of a wonderful movie. (Ironically, a high-profile New York
Film Festival screening of Brian De Palma’s new movie Passion, shot on 35mm but sent to the festival digitally, fell
victim to a nightmare scenario involving corrupted digital code in the file package
containing the movie.)
Appreciating the evidence
of grindhouse wear and tear isn’t antithetical to the motives of film
restoration and preservation, however, and this is where digital tools are, to
this point in our history, less reliable. Digital has been a real boon to the
process of restoration of great and less-great works of cinema for a couple of
decades now. But as a medium of preservation its sustainability is still
clouded by lot of issues, some of which probably haven’t yet reared their ones
and zeroes.
The real problem, as I see it, is that by limiting, or phasing out altogether the production of 35mm prints for distribution the source for further efforts to restore and preserve film are being cut off. We can digitally restore, say, The Phenix City Story now, but if the original negative isn't cared for and new prints from that original are not struck, then any further copies of the movie that are made will be just that—photocopies from a copy, not the original source, and surely subtle image degradation, or alteration, will be the result.
The real problem, as I see it, is that by limiting, or phasing out altogether the production of 35mm prints for distribution the source for further efforts to restore and preserve film are being cut off. We can digitally restore, say, The Phenix City Story now, but if the original negative isn't cared for and new prints from that original are not struck, then any further copies of the movie that are made will be just that—photocopies from a copy, not the original source, and surely subtle image degradation, or alteration, will be the result.
But the most immediately
dire implications of ceasing 35mm print production are for the small,
independent theaters—theaters like the New Beverly Cinema, of course, but also for
small-town institutions like my hometown theater, The Alger, and countless other theaters in
the United States and around the world that cannot afford the steep cost of
installing digital equipment. If the supply of 35mm prints of the sort of
multiplex fare that these theaters must show in order to keep their doors open
(to say nothing of the more eclectic dips into the well of cinema history that
are the bread and butter of revival theaters) is no longer available, the only option left to the
owners of these establishments is to close those doors forever. It’s possible
that in a generation or so kids who grow up in areas like the one where I grew up
won’t have any idea what a movie theater even is, unless the buildings are
still standing, empty or taken over by a church or a flea market, as yet
another testament to the way things used to be. And revival cinema will become
a dream as well, one that we will try to restore by programming our own double
features from DVDs and Blu-rays on our home theater systems, while the memory
of the real thing fades like images on an unstable celluloid print, or a
perfect digital file invaded by a virus.
2) Without
more than one minute’s consideration, name three great faces from the movies
Claudia Cardinale
Shelley Duvall
Cary Grant
3) The
movie you think could be interesting if remade as a movie musical
I don’t know how likely it would be that the end product would
be any good, but I’d kinda like to see a
big, splashy musical version of Brewster McCloud with songs by Marc
Shaiman, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
4) The
last movie you saw theatrically/on DVD, Blu-ray, streaming
In the theater: William
Friedkin’s perverse, completely wired and amorally entertaining adaptation of
Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe (2012), a bizarre tale of murder and Texas family
values which gave me new and/or renewed respect for Matthew McConaughey, Thomas
Haden Church, Gina Gershon, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, to say nothing of the
Colonel’s original recipe. The renewed respect extends to Friedkin, in whom I’d
long lost interest—Bug was good, but
I mostly credited Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon for that, and having recently
seen Rampage, a tone-deaf act of
desperate, stylistic banality in which the director actually resorts to
shooting his serial killer villain writhing and smeared with blood on the altar
of a Catholic church, complete with overdubbed Mercedes McCambridge-esque
growling on the soundtrack, I’d written Friedkin off as irrelevant. I couldn’t
be happier to have been proved wrong.
DVD: The same day I saw Killer Joe I also caught up with Bernie (2012), Richard Linklater’s true-crime comedy
centered around Jack Black’s wonderfully shielded, empathetic performance as a
mortician well loved by the small town he adopts who, despite questions of his
sexuality and other ways in which he stands out from the local redneck population,
retains local sympathy after he’s driven to murder a local harridan, played by
Shirley Maclaine. (The movie also features McConaughey as a disbelieving and
clever district attorney who prosecutes Black). These two pictures
inadvertently made for an unlikely double feature which spoke to an unusually
condescension-free portrait of Texas crime, punishment and societal norms— but
talk about two tonally different worlds.
DVR: Breakfast for Two (1937),
a delightful, lesser-known screwball comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as an
heiress who latches on to millionaire playboy Herbert Marshall and decides to
win his heart by subjecting his ocean liner business to a not-so-hostile
takeover. Slight and nondescript by Leonard Maltin standards (67 minutes, **½),
this is a wonderful movie, filled with the pleasures of good actors enjoying
the chance to speak funny lines in posh settings. Eric Blore is especially good
as Marshall’s butler, who, naturally, becomes Stanwyck’s confidant.
At work: Pitch Perfect (2012). Not a surprise in it in terms of plot, but if this hilarious, whip-sharp comedy proves anything it’s that the getting there is all the fun. Best of show: Anna Kendrick (of course), size-12 comedienne Rebel Wilson (Bridesmaids) who defuses bitchy insults by insisting her twiggy a cappella sisters refer to her as Fat Amy (and who seems blissfully unaware of the standard line on what passes for American beauty), Brittany Snow as the node-plagued Chloe, resembling Nancy Allen with red locks, John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks trading wry observations as commentators on the collegiate a cappella competitions, and not one but two projectile vomiting scenes to rival The Witches of Eastwick for grotesquery and sheer comic impudence. The nifty script, which puts Glee in its place and then some, is by Kay Cannon (30 Rock, New Girl).
5) Favorite
movie about work
It’s a pretty broad field from which to choose, and if I’m going
to forego exhaustive research and rely strictly on the top of my balding head,
I’ll offer a tie between Only Angels Have Wings (1939; Howard
Hawks) and The Right Stuff (Philip
Kaufman; 1983). Let the rain of choices which I completely forgot about begin
falling on said balding head. And in the time since I originally answered this
question I managed to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb;
2011), which deserves to be on my short list as well.
6) The
movie you loved as a child that did not hold up when seen through adult eyes
I spent the summer of 1977 as enraptured by Star Wars as anyone else
I knew, though not, as it turned out, as much as some I would come to know. But
35 years of catching up to all the movies that influenced it and refining my
taste in the kind of shameless entertainments this movie exemplifies, not to
mention being overexposed to the point of madness to whole Star Wars phenomenon, made me realize, when I saw it again in 1997
and every time after, just how rickety George Lucas’s vision, not to mention
the movie itself, really is. It took a real director and real screenwriters to
help make a blissful movie out of Lucas’s stitched-together universe (The Empire Strikes Back) and expose the creaky limitations of the "original."
But if Star Wars is either too sacred a target, or too big an elephant to pass for a fair one, then I’ll say Gordon Hessler’s Cry of the Banshee (1970), which I loved unapologetically as a kid, but which only seemed like a shoddy imitation of The Witchfinder General when I saw it a couple of years ago.
But if Star Wars is either too sacred a target, or too big an elephant to pass for a fair one, then I’ll say Gordon Hessler’s Cry of the Banshee (1970), which I loved unapologetically as a kid, but which only seemed like a shoddy imitation of The Witchfinder General when I saw it a couple of years ago.
7) Favorite
“road” movie
The obvious choice is Two-Lane
Blacktop, but something in me wants to say Electra Glide in Blue (1973;
James William Guercio), which has some of what Hellman captured about riding on
the road, but also a serious amount of what it means to sit beside it, walk on
it and feel it beneath your feet, look at it closely and, of course, be
installed on it as yet another flawed monument to American history. I think I
would also have to make some room here for Emperor
of the North Pole, if we can loosen our definition of a road ever so slightly.
8) Does
Clint Eastwood’s appearance at the Republican National Convention change
or confirm your perspective on him as a
filmmaker/movie icon? Is that appearance relevant to his legacy as a filmmaker?
Not a
whit. As has already been noted here, you can argue with the politics of John
Wayne or Sean Penn all day long, and the only thing that should matter
regarding their screen legacy is what’s on the screen. If those politics are
part of what’s on screen, and they often are, so be it. Fair game. This has
certainly been the case off and on in Eastwood’s career as well. The
unfortunate chair incident speaks to his ability to hold forth or articulate
concepts extemporaneously, not to what his movie legacy means or to his ability
to direct a movie and express either the material in the screenplay, his
actors’ performances or his take on these elements. Eastwood remains a great,
imperfect screen icon, just like every other great, imperfect screen icon from
D.W. Griffith on up.
9) Longest-lasting
movie or movie-related obsession
I’ve had countless movie fixations
over the long and winding course of growing up and turning into the stunted
human being that I now am, but my most enduring, indelible one was actually born of television. I have been obsessed, since I was six years old, with Julie Newmar as Catwoman. She came to me in a dream one night in 1966, after her first appearance on the Batman TV series, and the
world changed…
1 10) Favorite
artifact of movie exploitation
Weirdest: The owner of my hometown
movie theater once gave me a piece of yellow linoleum he received as a
promotional item from Universal that was purportedly a piece of the Yellow
Brick Road in The Wiz (1978).
Favorite: I can’t really count my
souvenir crew jacket from the Animal
House shoot as an artifact of exploitation, and I’ve been curiously
unsentimental in holding on to any keepsakes I might have obtained down through
the years that were movie related, so I’m gonna go back to my hometown movie
theater and the book that the owner gave me way back when, a copy of the Encyclopedia of Exploitation:10,001 Show-selling Ideas (1946) by Bill Hendricks and Howard Waugh. This was a volume
written for exhibitors in the pre-television era which catalogued all sorts of
gimmicks and promotional ideas for packaging and presenting movies to the
public at the box-office level. Most of these ideas were probably on their way
out by the early ‘50s, but the book remains a fascinating artifact for thumbing
through.
And I really should mention the awesome red-and-white 3D glasses Nonie and I snagged when we went to see Katy Perry: Part of Me. I think they really bring out the candy-colored pop star in me quite vividly.
11) Have
you ever fallen asleep in a movie theater? If so, when and why?
Oh, yes. Each and every year at the TCM Classic Film Festival
I’ve found myself subject to the inopportune snooze— I have sleep apnea
problems, and at age 52 I also don’t have the natural stamina for sitting
through six movies in one day that I used to access easily during the heyday of
my college movie-going years. But I’ve only been embarrassed by conking out
mid-movie once (that I can recall)—a few years ago, after a day of work and
studying that started at around 4:00 a.m., I drove to a midnight screening of
Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s The House That
Screamed (1971), a favorite of mine growing up that I hadn't seen since I was
probably 14 years old. I made it about halfway through the picture before losing
consciousness, only to be awakened by someone who had to cross almost the
entire (mostly empty) auditorium to nudge me and get me to shut up my god-awful
snoring. He was very cool about it, I was utterly horrified, and I made sure I
was the last one to leave the theater once the show was over.
12) Favorite
performance by an athlete in a movie
I recognize that I could be being
influenced by his recent death, but it’s hard to think of another performance by a former athlete that I’ve enjoyed
as thoroughly as Alex Karras’s big-hearted Mongo in Blazing Saddles. Runner-up would probably be Bob Uecker in Major League (“Just a bit outside!”), a
performance that continues to this day every summer wherever Milwaukee Brewers
baseball can be heard.
13) Second
favorite Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie
I’m not as well-versed in Fassbinder as I am
in the films of his German New Wave brethren Herzog and Wenders, so the field is fairly narrow. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul would probably
take top honors, followed by the outrageous absurdist comedy Satan’s
Brew (1976), anchored, such as it is, by the loose cannon fireworks of
Kurt Raab as a maniacal poet who tries to raise some cash when a book deal goes
south by manipulating the people around him who all seem strangely obsessed by
him and his narcissistic, erratic antics.
14) Favorite film of 1931
As
deeply entrenched in my blood as James Whale’s Frankenstein and Tod Browning’s Dracula are, I don’t see how I could
pick anything but Fritz Lang’s M.
15) Second
favorite Raoul Walsh movie
Top
honors go to White Heat (1949), but
turn back the clock 10 years and you’ll find my second-favorite (and only
second by a hair), The Roaring Twenties (1939). Cagney and Walsh go real good
together.
16) Favorite
film of 1951
I’ll
pick Ace
in the Hole, at the same time acknowledging
how much more difficult the choice between Billy Wilder’s brutal social drama
and John Huston’s magnificent The African
Queen was than I ever imagined it would be.
17) Second
favorite Wong Kar-wai movie
Top cheongsam in this category goes to In the Mood for Love. But as much as I
swoon over 2046 there’s something
about the raw emotional turbulence of My Blueberry Nights (2007) and Norah Jones’s piercing, unaffected
presence, along with the movie’s seductive visuals and fearless leaps of
flushed, often ill-advised romanticism that other filmmakers might have deemed
too foolish to consider, that really sends me.
18) Favorite
film of 1971
At this
moment in time (ask me again 36 seconds from now), it’s a dead heat between two
movies that couldn’t be more different: Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry and Elaine
May’s A New Leaf.
19) Second
favorite Henri-Georges Clouzot movie
There’s no excuse for it, but I’ve only ever seen a crappy VHS
(public domain?) of The Wages of Fear,
so honestly I don’t feel like I’ve ever really
seen it (and I missed a recent opportunity to see the reportedly beautiful
restoration courtesy of Rialto and the New Beverly Cinema). The New Beverly
also provided the best chance I’ve ever had to see Diabolique (1955), which
has to count as my second favorite. First place: Le Corbeau (1943).
20) Favorite
film of 1991
I’m
allowing the semantics of “favorite” versus “best” to slimly justify my
waffling. Therefore I submit an ever-rotating roster of three titles that will
forever jostle for pole position in my 1991 lineup (in alphabetical order): Naked
Lunch (David Cronenberg), Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow) and The
Rapture (Michael Tolkin). So sue me.
21) Second
favorite John Sturges movie
It’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) without question, although I have
a much softer spot than is probably warranted for Joe Kidd, Ice Station Zebra and McQ.
I’m also dying to finally catch up with Sturges’ 1953 noir Jeopardy starring Barbara Stanwyck, who
I’ve come to realize over the past seven or eight years can do absolutely no
wrong.
22) Favorite
celebrity biopic
So many
of these movies follow, predictably, inevitably, the same sort of
rags-to-riches-to-humbled twilight of life/career arc that after a while I
begin to think that when it comes to true-life drama there really are only
about one or two stories when it comes to dramatizing the life of an actual
person. Of course there are also exceptions, usually surrounding exceptional
lives—My Left Foot comes to mind. But
there’s only one biopic I can think whose own brilliant light is fueled by its
subject’s enduring mediocrity, a movie which shirks the familiar triumph and
tragedy template in favor of delightful side roads into personal obsession (including
the odd fetish), creative inspiration and ingenuity hindered but never undone
by an absence of discernible talent, and the most unlikely creative partnership
and friendship at its true heart. It’s Ed Wood (1994), of course, directed
with his own brand of personal obsession by Tim Burton from an unusually
perceptive and razor-sharp screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.
23) Name a
good script idea which was let down either by the director or circumstances of production
This is
a tough one, largely because it’s often very difficult for those of us with
only what we see on the screen, often with no access to the original script
from which to judge the decisions of the director or evaluate the circumstances
under which the movie came to finally be, to discern where a movie may have
gone wrong. But taking my best guess, a recent encounter with the notorious,
much maligned Problem Child (1990) revealed that, despite the hand-wringing
over its irresponsible, allegedly offensive comic attitude toward Kids Behaving
Badly that swirled around the movie when it was released, the movie has at its
core a potent, potentially hilarious idea: it’s a sort of cross between The Omen and Badlands in which Damien proves too much of a malignant jokester
for even the serial killer to whom he attaches himself through a creepy pen-pal
relationship. Of course it would take a director with a flair for black comedy
and satire to happily accentuate the charred heart of the nasty,
take-no-prisoners screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. (There
are those names again!) Unfortunately, despite game work by John Ritter as the
put-upon adopted father of the titular pain in the ass and Michael Richards as
the perverted Bow Tie Killer, and even the weirdly creepy turn by the Problem
Child himself, Michael Oliver (whose apparently dubbed performance just adds to
the inadvertent chills), the movie was guided from the director’s chair by
Dennis Dugan, who brings to the project the same sort of tone-deaf, generic
approach that has marked the majority of his contributions of cinema as Adam
Sandler’s go-to auteur. The idea behind Problem
Child is a perfectly nifty one that could have yielded lots of creepy
laughs, but you never get the sense that Dugan has the faintest idea how to
bring out the genuine perversity of the concept—he tries to make a marginally
rude, feel-good comedy out of what is at heart a truly transgressive notion
that flies in the face of just about every audience-friendly idea of family
values. The result is a weak blend of slapstick and sentiment that has no real
venom, nor even a bite sharp enough to pierce the skin. Something tells me that
the Noel Black who made Pretty Poison
in 1968 might have had a grand old time with Alexander and Karaszewski’s script.
2 24) Heaven’s
Gate-- yes or no?
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A couple of months ago, when it was announced
that Criterion would be issuing a splashy two-disc Blu-ray highlighting Michael
Cimino’s cut of Heaven’s Gate (but
not, significantly, including the documentary that was made from Steven Bach’s Final Cut about the beleaguered
production of the film, which highlights Cimino’s particular brand of
directorial megalomania and would provide valuable perspective on the context in which the film was made and released), it became clear that for many it was time to start the ball rolling on the re-evaluation
of this infamous epic. Did it really warrant its bad reputation, or was it a
masterpiece that had been misconstrued and misunderstood by all but a few
discerning critics and audience members? The reaction I could follow, mainly on
Facebook, but also in the press, was split pretty evenly between those who
supported the initial negative reaction and those who were clamoring to have
the movie’s greatness finally recognized. The conversations typically got
heated, and they will again when the movie is finally released by Criterion
next month. The thread with which I got (briefly) involved was no different.
One particularly vociferous Heaven’s Gate
supporter, in a thread that I read but did not immediately contribute to,
wondered why there was an audience for a similar big-scale epic, Dances with Wolves, but little or no
popular regard for what was obviously Cimino’s far greater, more heartfelt
achievement:
“I honestly don't see why it should have been obvious that Heaven’s Gate’s story wouldn't have the same appeal to audiences as that of Dances with Wolves. Costner's film asks
its audience to mourn the loss of a Native-American community wiped out by the
forces of imperialism, while Cimino's asks its audience to mourn the loss of an
immigrant community wiped out by the forces of corporate capitalism. Why should
it have been so obvious that the former story would appeal to audiences whereas
the latter would not?”
It was at this point that I stopped lurking and
started writing. The gist of my point
was that the difference, as far as I could see it, between that of Costner's
approach (and his supposed clairvoyance vis-Ã -vis his
audience) and Cimino's is that Costner, for whatever misgivings I have about
his movie-- and they number almost as many as the ones I have about Cimino's--
was at least attempting to tell a story rather than just inflate a fairly
blunt, obvious statement about genocide into a work of absurd gigantism that
is, from long scene to long scene, dramatically inert. At the very least, this
is not a charge that can be leveled against Dances
with Wolves, or Star Trek: The Motion
Picture, or Annie, or The
Adventures of Pluto Nash (all examples that had been brought up earlier as
examples of bloated, out-of-control American moviemaking), regardless of their
relative level of success, or lack thereof. As much as it may seem to be
squarely in the corner of the people, the great unwashed, multilingual masses, Heaven’s Gate plays like a movie that
tries to make art out of the act of turning its back on its audience, as if
attempting to meet the challenge of responding to Cimino’s great artistic
reaching would naturally be reward enough. I've just seen the long director’s
cut that will be available on the Criterion disc fresh, and again, after three
opportunities over the years to re-evaluate it apart from the attendant
controversy and perhaps see more of what its defenders see in it, my own
feeling remains that Heaven’s Gate might
be one of the most indifferently rendered works about mass slaughter ever made.
If Cimino was gazing into his navel to this degree while making this movie and
seeing a potential audience staring back at him, he was probably even more
delusional than can be imagined.
So, in a word, no— Heaven’s Gate remains to these eyes a flaccid work of self-aggrandizement on the part of its director in which the attempt at period verisimilitude drowns out every instinct for storytelling Cimino might have once had. It’s a grave marker not only for United Artists but the death rattle for a great period of indulgent, studio-financed personal filmmaking, weary and dead behind the eyes (like Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken), self-important instead of sublime, cacophonous, dusty and ultimately empty.
So, in a word, no— Heaven’s Gate remains to these eyes a flaccid work of self-aggrandizement on the part of its director in which the attempt at period verisimilitude drowns out every instinct for storytelling Cimino might have once had. It’s a grave marker not only for United Artists but the death rattle for a great period of indulgent, studio-financed personal filmmaking, weary and dead behind the eyes (like Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken), self-important instead of sublime, cacophonous, dusty and ultimately empty.
25) Favorite
pairing of movie sex symbols
I’m
going to cheat ever so slightly and divide this into two categories: the
“modern” era and the “classic” era. Again, no exhaustive research done here,
just seat-of-the-pants type stuff, and my butt seat tells me that the modern
column would have to be headed up by a pair already mentioned by several
participants, George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight (1999), who conquer old-school movie star chemistry in
a way that I really don’t think could have been reasonably anticipated. Clooney
has more or less ruled the roost as an American movie star sex symbol ever
since this movie came out with his undeniable good looks and consistent
willingness to color outside the lines of his charmed persona by taking on
unusual project after unusual project. But Lopez, who showed so much
promise here and who owned the screen right alongside Clooney, made ever more
uninteresting choices in subsequent screen appearances until she seemed to
lose interest in acting altogether in favor of her growing status as an
auto-tuned pop music diva. Too bad—she was even sexy in Gigli.
As for the classic division, while there are plenty of pairings to choose
from, one in particular really defined for me the possibilities of romantic
eroticism within the old Hollywood system, creating heat that is still
undeniable nearly 70 years later. The push and pull between the anger,
attraction, disgust, confusion and lust that powers the charge between T.R.
Devlin, government agent, and Alicia Huberman, daughter of an infamous Nazi
sympathizer, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious
(1946) has, to my mind, never been matched for sheer head-spinning
intensity. The two, better known as Cary
Grant and Ingrid Bergman,
defined the ambiguous relationship between manipulator and romantic pawn as one
of the most perversely pleasurable in the history of movies, the tension
between them as palpable as the breath the two of them seem so short of when
they finally let down their guard. This providential coupling is the one that
made me wake up to the reality, at just the right age even, that there was a
lot more going on in some great old American movies that I had ever suspected
or allowed myself to believe. Thanks to Grant and Bergman, Notorious fulfills the delightful, sinister ambiguity of its title,
and then some.
26) One
word that you could say which would instantly evoke images and memories of your
favorite movie. (Naming the movie is optional—might be more fun to see if we
can guess what it is from the word itself)
Haven.
27)
Name one moment which to you demarcates a
significant change, for better or worse, on the landscape of the movies over
the last 20 years.
For
better and worse, the emergence of Quentin Tarantino, both as a pop innovator
and masterfully impudent storyteller (better) and a Pied Piper (worse) to
countless filmmakers in his wake who have rushed to hurl themselves off every
creative cliff in sight in a desperate attempt to emulate the superficial
elements of the director’s style. That magpie devotion, strangely, never seems
to result in a duplication of the crazy richness that has been, as of October
2012 anyway and despite his myriad influences, a hallmark of Tarantino’s
derivative yet defiantly original work.
28)
Favorite Pre-Code talkie
Without hesitation, Ernest Lubitsch’s Trouble In Paradise (1932), with Roy
Del Ruth’s Taxi (1932) and Alfred E.
Green’s Baby Face (1933) in a dead
heat for second place.
29) Oldest film in your personal collection (Thanks,
Peter Nellhaus)
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Probably
Buster Keaton’s The General (1926),
though the Kino DVD that I own also includes The Play House (1921) and Cops
(1922), so I suppose those might technically be the oldest.
30) Longest
film in your personal collection. (Thanks, Brian Darr)
Bernardo
Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976; 245
minutes). But if we’re counting movies originally made for (Italian) television
that did get a theatrical release, then I’d have to say Marco Tuillo Giordana’s
The Best of Youth (2003; 366
minutes)
31) Have
your movie collection habits changed in the past 10 years? If so, how?
I
do a lot more browsing than buying now,
and when I do buy I tend to stay away from new releases—though I do have my
sights set on Dark Shadows (2012), in
case anyone is taking notes on Christmas gift ideas. I simply don’t feel the compulsion
to pick up every movie that piques my interest—and this new asceticism fits well
with the vast, cavernous emptiness of my wallet. Streaming plays into this browsing habit quite
nicely too—I can kill the equivalent of a movie’s running time just paging
through Vudu or Netflix trying to decide on something to watch and, as Bluto
once so wisely opined, it don’t cost nothin’. Depending on the movie I pick, browsing can be
a far more rewarding experience too. And despite the random nature of what
appears and disappears from Netflix Streaming availability, I also like the
fact that I have this vast library—much of which is admittedly junk I’d never
consider watching—at a remote’s distance without the clutter of all those damn
disc boxes. All that said, when the movie is right—Johnny Guitar, A New Leaf, Ed Wood and the pick of the litter from
the Olive, Criterion and Warner Archives libraries-- pride of ownership can be
a powerful thing, and that’s probably a desire that will never fully go away.
32) Wackiest,
most unlikely “directed by” credit you can name
The
credit that inspired this question just has to be the all-time wackiest, and
although it’s already been mentioned here by one discerning cineaste it remains
the only answer I could possibly offer: Can’t
Stop the Music (1980) directed by Nancy Walker.
33) Best
documentary you’ve seen in 2012 (made in 2012 or any other year)
There are so many I’ve missed this year so far
that I desperately want to see, including The
Imposter and Hellbound, and
Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In
just opened today, which I hope I don’t let slip by. Documentaries are among my
favorite kinds of movies, actually, but this year I really haven’t seen that
many. Among the best I have seen in 2012 are On the Bowery (1957), Final
Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), Searching for Sugar Man (2012) and Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011), with Machete Maidens Unleashed (2011) and Katy Perry: Part of Me (2012) up there for sheer fun. But easily
the best documentary I’ve seen all year is How to Die In Oregon (2011). Peter Richardson's film is devastating in the
most productive of ways. It does not enrage in the way of a great muckraking
documentary in the Alex Gibney vein, but instead emerges as an artful and
supremely even-tempered act of empathy in telling the story of several people
who have decided to act on Oregon's Death with Dignity law, and one woman,
prompted by her husband's awful collapse from brain cancer, who tries to get
the law on the 2008 ballot in Washington State. One of the many remarkable
things about Richardson's approach is how it avoids the very intrusiveness and
air of exploitation it seems to openly flirt with at the beginning (we see a
man ingesting the Seconal-based concoction that will put him out of his misery
and into a terminal coma). The movie's concern is with how individuals come to
define dignity in the face of inevitable suffering and death; it settles on the
story of Cody Curtis, a Portland woman diagnosed with liver cancer, whose
portrait here is itself sensitive and dignified, without sacrificing gravity,
understanding or even humor. There are tears of sorrow and rage to be shed
while watching How to Die In Oregon,
but the most important and overriding sense the movie leaves you with is a
strange sort of exhilarated awe in contemplation of the respect for the sort of
individual choice afforded these people that is documented here. That respect
extends to and is demonstrated by the filmmaker, who leaves breathing room for
dissent from his obvious position but also for the complexity of the
ramifications of such profound decisions in the final months, weeks, days,
hours and seconds of a disintegrating life, leading up to the moment when one
is legally allowed to take action in order to drift away from unbearable
suffering that will only get worse.
34) What’s
your favorite “(this star) was almost cast in (this movie)” anecdote?
According
to the Web site NotStarring.com,
Gus Van Sant—the one who directed Finding
Forrester, not the one who directed Gerry
and Paranoid Park-- was being
seriously considered to direct Twilight:
Breaking Dawn, Part1. I still doubt I would have been much interested in
seeing the movie, but I might have at least thought twice about it. That’s a
good rumor. But my favorites are the ones surrounding the what-might-have-been
casting of National Lampoon’s Animal
House. Of course everyone knows that Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Dan
Aykroyd were all considered for roles in the film (as Otter, Boon and D-Day,
respectively) before cooler heads prevailed in an attempt to prevent Animal House as being perceived as “the Saturday Night Live movie.” The Web site
also reports one bit of potential casting that I’ve never heard before—that if
plans to land John Belushi as Bluto fell through, the role would have gone to
Meat Loaf. (Imagine the universe we’d all be living in now if that had come to
pass.) But it is fun to consider
perhaps the most well-known bit of what-if casting from the Faber College
campus—Jack Webb and Kim Novak as Dean and Mrs. Vernon
Wormer. And I hear tell that before Mary Louise Weller took the part, Nancy
Allen was this close to essaying the role of Mandy Pepperidge, which would have
driven this 17-year-old extra to untold levels of distraction on the set. A Bizarro-world
Animal House is a hoot to contemplate,
but I’m more than happy with Belushi, John Vernon and Verna Bloom. Carrie-era Nancy Allen as Gregg
Marmalard’s reticent, rubber-gloved log flogger, though—that’s an alternative upgrade
I wish I did have to live with.
35) Program
three nights of double bills at a revival theater that might best illuminate
your love of the movies
This
is one of those dream assignments that sounds like so much fun, but when it
comes down to actually picking the titles it’s a hell of a lot more of a challenge that it seems, not only in
putting together good movies that complement each other thematically and as an
experience (easier said than done, which is just one reason why Michael Torgan should be considered a local
treasure), but also just deciding on what to toss out once you’ve come up with
30 or 40 good ideas. I actually got to do this once— two summers ago, for my 50th
birthday, Michael asked me to come up with a double feature that the New
Beverly Cinema would show on my birthday. It was the most perfect blend of
torture and bliss trying to come up with the right combination, and after a
couple of weeks of deliberation I decided on pairing up You Only Live Twice (1967), my favorite Bond film by far, and one I’d
never seen on the big screen, with Ken Russell’s marvelous Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the third entry in the Harry Palmer
series starring Michael Caine. It was such a thrill to get to choose the movies
in the first place that actually seeing them really did feel almost too good to
be true. But it took forever to whittle the choice down to one double bill.
So now I have to submit three, and I already feel like two weeks has gone by since I started writing this answer. But I’ll be quick about it, I promise. Here we go. How about:
So now I have to submit three, and I already feel like two weeks has gone by since I started writing this answer. But I’ll be quick about it, I promise. Here we go. How about:
Night #2: Murder, He Says (1945; George Marshall) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974;
Tobe Hooper)
Night #3: Speed Racer (2008; Lana and Andy Wachowski) and Vanishing Point (1971; Richard T.
Sarafian)
Damn,
is my film festival over already? Here’s eight other double features I’d
love to sit through if given a chance.
36) You
have been granted permission to invite any three people, alive or dead, to your house to watch the Oscars. Who are they?
For
reasons that are hopefully obvious, I’d invite Pauline Kael, Robert
Altman and Barbra Stanwyck. The perspectives and wit of all three would make
for a memorable party, and if the show got too dull (and what are the odds of
that?) I can easily imagine passing an evening listening to the stories they’d
be able to tell, about the Oscars, for a few minutes perhaps, but preferably anything
and everything else.
37) Favorite Mr. Chips.
(Careful...)
At
the risk of alienating a faculty member, I have to admit that I’ve seen neither
the 1939 Sam Wood version nor the 1969 Herbert Ross version, so I am reduced to
taking the coward’s way out. My answer: Fritos. Ahoy!
EXTRA CREDIT: What's the most profound moment you have had in a movie theatre? (Thanks to Matthew David Wilder)
EXTRA CREDIT: What's the most profound moment you have had in a movie theatre? (Thanks to Matthew David Wilder)
Oddly, I’m having some
difficulty locating a single moment that was “the most profound” moment I’ve
had in a movie theater, and it’s only partially because I suspect I’m a pretty
superficial person in a lot of ways. But in mulling this question over I keep
coming back to one incident, so whether it fits the criteria or not I’m going
with it. It came during a typically odd double feature at the local movie
theater when I was probably about nine years old. Hewing closely to the philosophy
expounded in the Encyclopedia of Exploitation
(see question #10), my local movie impresario routinely put together double
features that were the antithesis of the sort of thoughtful couplings we’ve been
exploring in question #35. In fact, the
idea was quite the opposite: program two dissimilar features—the more
dissimilar the better— a tactic which would ostensibly appeal to a cross
section of men and women, adults and kids. If you can’t get one group with the
first movie, they might bite on the second one.
Naturally, this
resulted in a lot of completely schizo nights at the movies, and the one I went
to when I was nine years old was a prime example: McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force (1965; Edward Montagne) and Mayerling (1968;Terence Young). My
buddies and I had to sit through both movies because my mom didn’t want to come
pick us all up until the show was completely over, (This despite the fact that Mayerling had been slapped with the
mysterious new “M” rating.) We laffed through McHale’s Navy, of course, but as it began to unfurl Mayerling seemed like perhaps the most boring movie ever made. Until one scene,
that is. I remember next to nothing about the plot, or the real events that
inspired it. All I knew then, and all I remember
now, is a scene in which Catherine Deneuve takes her clothes off, stands at attention
and, with hands cupped around the front part of her ample breasts, leaving
plenty still visible , and matter-of-factly purrs at Omar Sharif. (I think it was
Omar Sharif anyway—who the hell cares, really?) The sight of Deneuve naked on
the big screen was just about more erotic input than my buddies and I could
bear, and I have to say our blue jeans seemed just a little bit too tight for a
good 15 minutes after the actress toweled off and put her dress back on. We
were stunned, and it was all we could talk about well into the school week,
this unexpected dive into pre-pubescent ecstasy.
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