Oscar babble pt 1: Run, fatboy, run

This year’s Oscars are scheduled for Sunday, March 7, my birthday. I’ll be turning fifty-two that day, and the show would’ve been a nice present for the occasion. After decades of dismissing Oscar for what should be obvious reasons, I got swept up four or five years ago. Alone and open for anything that night, I found myself glued to things not seen before: the Barbara Walters special, the Red Carpet intro and the ceremony itself, all the way to the end. After Best Picture is announced and accepted, a pall resembling a hangover takes over — the host is spent, the sets seem threadbare — making those last few minutes as disappointing and fatigued as New Year’s morning.

    The evening’s become a tradition I’ve found myself looking forward to — until now. The Academy has added five nominees for Best Picture to the preexisting five, guaranteed to extend the telecast an unwelcome thirty minutes at least. This, we’re told, necessitates the services of two hosts: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. Rather than explore all the reasons why or how these are mistakes, let me cut to the chase: I don’t like Alec Baldwin.

    Nor do I suspect he’s high on anyone’s list of must-see actors. Have you ever rushed out on opening weekend to a movie because he’s in it? I doubt Alec sells many tickets, whereas people — a lot of people — will plunk down ten bucks to see anything, no matter how dire, with Steve Martin.

    Outside of his tailor-made and shrewdly brief bit in Glengarry Glen Ross (shrewd, because they don’t dare put him in the same frame with Al Pacino; is he Hyde to Pacino’s Jekyll?), Alec has floated in and out of secondary parts, supporting roles, and as The Shadow, something of a super hero done at a time when super heroes were hot… except The Shadow. They say he’s the star of television’s 30 Rock. He could very well be brilliant, but primetime TV isn’t my bag.

    To these eyes, he’s not a good actor. Other than Glengarry, he’s always had the look or given the impression of a man acting. He approaches roles as if maneuvering an obstacle course, of a man pretending, of a thug reaching in vain for sophistication.

    In recent years Alec’s piled on the pounds, appearing ill and bloated. He carries a rehearsed swagger aping Sinatra, if only he possessed an iota of Sinatra’s talent, bravura or standing. Without those things, Alec doesn’t wear Old Blue Eyes’ arrogance so well. An apparent drunk (doesn’t alcoholism gallop through that family?), Mr. Baldwin could be Old Bloodshot Eyes.

    I won’t get into the publicized (promoted?) dark side of Alec’s failed marriage to Kim Basinger and his damaging relationship with his daughter. He wrote a tacky ‘tell-all’ book about proper parenting (!), this after calling daughter Ireland (whose age he isn’t sure of) a “thoughtless little pig” during a self-pitying, screaming rant on her telephone answering machine. I haven’t the credentials or education to remark professionally here, but his public berating of Kim and the attack on Ireland reveals, at the very least, a man with twisted issues spitting on the gift of fatherhood. He displayed no sense of humility throughout his subsequent book tour, opting for the laughable position of ‘victim.’ Alec Baldwin is the kind of man who’d make a normally forgiving father-in-law employ connections well versed in the fitting of cement overshoes and firsthand knowledge of the East River’s deepest recesses. Or, at the very least, a good, hearty beating.

More Oscar babble to come!

Photographs of Jesus

Photographs of Jesus, a seven-minute film by Laurie Hill. Via Inisfree.

Book reviews: Of stage and screen

Screen World Volume 60: 2008
By Barry Monush. John Willis, editor emeritus. 458 pages, illustrated, hardcover 8"x9", ISBN #1423473701. Published by Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, $49.99. Available from Applause Books; also available from Amazon.

Theatre World Volume 65: 2008—2009
By Ben Hodges. John Willis, editor emeritus. 482 pages, illustrated, hardcover 8"x9", ISBN #1423473698. Published by Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, $49.99. Available from Applause Books; also available from Amazon.

There’s something to be said for tradition, and Screen World, now in its sixtieth year, and Theatre World, in its sixty-fifth, bear this out. They’re also a reminder that I spend way too much time on the computer and not nearly enough curled up with a good book.

    They were conceived over half a century ago by John Willis. Born in 1916, an avid theatregoer (according to legend, he would’ve made the Guinness Book had he kept his ticket stubs) most likely faced with a dearth of reference material outside of the copies of Playbill handed out at individual performances, he created a comprehensive annual to chronicle a season’s Broadway, off-Broadway and regional theatre. Profusely illustrated with performance photos, cast and crew listings, play dates and venues, Theatre World debuted in 1945 (coinciding with the inception of the Theatre World Awards) and remains the definitive source for information and the ongoing history of live theatre in America. In 1949, he followed with Screen World, an endeavor to do the same for film.

    Now in his nineties, Mr. Willis stepped down as their official overseer, but left behind a set of guidelines their current editors have wisely resumed without interruption. Taking on the responsibilities of Theatre World, Ben Hodges is co-editor of The Commercial Theatre Institute Guide to Producing Plays and Musicals and editor of The Play That Changed My Life, Forbidden Acts, and Outplays; on Screen World, Barry Manush is the author of The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors and Everybody’s Talkin’: The Top Films of 1965-1969. With the exception of handsome selections of full color photos (perhaps a prohibitive extravagance in the past), the new Theatre World and Screen World are as brimming and thought provoking as ever.

    I believe there’s a small army of cine- and theatre-philes who, like myself, spent countless hours holed up in public libraries pouring over these tight, hardcover volumes. I may have been twelve- or thirteen-years-old when I first discovered them lining a shelf in the reference section. You savored the crisp black-and-white photos, combed through the small print paragraphs (a signature motif still in use), some concerning films I thought I’d never get a chance to see, from plays seemingly out of reach. The books became a bridge to culture, an acknowledgement of art and craft, an academic exercise conducted in the most elementary terms. Simply put, they fired the imagination.

    As they record an evolution, each edition of Screen World shows the crossroads facing the medium while it remodels itself for new generations. “It is doubtful,” Barry Monush writes in his preface, “that, as the years go by, much enduring affection will be held for many of the titles that filled the higher slots on the box office list, as it seems to be the function of too many movies these days to serve as nothing more than cotton candy, providing something colorful to fill you up for an evening, only to leave you wanting more when you come to the realization that substance has its virtues too.”

    DVD and video on-demand have reshaped distribution and exhibition practices, with movie theatres now multi-screen arcades catering not so much to the consumer as to corporate power. It isn’t a case of good films not being made anymore; it’s just that they’ve become harder to see. “There were gems to be had throughout the year,” Mr. Monush writes, “even if you had to go looking for them, which seems to be the norm these days, judging from the modern era’s undependable and haphazard motion picture distribution patterns. You either catch certain titles during their limited runs in the major markets or you don’t catch them on movie screens at all. It makes for a lot of repetition of the same titles on the majority of theatre marquees, leaving only the most avid of movie followers aware of the existence of some worthy product.”

    Despite all of this, the movies continue to weave their spell. (For the record, Mr. Monush has high regard for Gus Van Sant’s Milk, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, the kinds of movies that make most studio heads nervous.) Over the decades I’ve met budding academics who’ve waved the banner of Godard, proclaiming Cinema Is Dead, only to find them years later hunkered down in front of something like a Cameron Diaz comedy with a fixed gleam in their eye. Film is a narcotic, one we’ll never tire of.

    It’s also more accessible than theatre (at least Broadway) for most people, just as its probably been the subject of more books and articles — an anomaly since live performance predates movies by a few millennia. In his introduction to Theatre World, Ben Hodges glances at last season’s riches rising above the omnipresent fiscal crisis: “Broadway seemed strangely immune to the 2008-2009 economic recession which provided its New York backdrop… But the true impact of the worst recession since the Great Depression will not be completely known until perhaps the 2009-2010 season or beyond and in any case well after the printing of this book.”

    As some movies turn into cotton candy, it’s refreshing to see some of their adventurous actors seeking refuge on stage. No longer in traveling distance of Manhattan, having let my weekender subscription to the New York Times lapse, Theatre World tipped me off to what I’d been missing: Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons in Impressionism, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis in God of Carnage, Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush in Exit the King, Angela Lansbury and Rupert Everett in Blithe Spirit, Annette Bening as Margot Channing (!) in All About Eve: enough to make one homesick.

    The season is broken down into separate sections for Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off Broadway and professional regional companies, with additional chapters for awards, the longest running shows, obituaries and an index. There are lengthy roundups provided by Mr. Hodges, Nicole Estvanik Taylor, and Shay Gines, who touches on the unfortunate movement to change the term ‘off-off Broadway’ to ‘indie theatre,’ thanks to the trendy ‘indie film’ and ‘indie music’ labels. Not even the darkest recesses of live performance, it seems, are safe from homogenization.

    Both volumes are beautifully printed on coated stock, with excellent photo reproduction. The design is in keeping with past editions, the ‘crammed’ layout working to full effect. After a few pages of either book, they become living, breathing entities, letting us know our passions are shared and hardly misspent.

Double headers

A Walk on the Moon, 1999 (real people)


An Education, 2009 (Photoshop automatons)

Sporting Wood

Natalie Wood in Penelope via It Is Not Safe Here

Coming soon...

Agnès Varda’s The Beaches Of Agnès (2008) is due on R1 DVD from The Cinema Guild on 3/2/10. To pre-order, click here.

Linx & shorts

Poster via Wrong Side of the Art

“And here we need to stress one quite remarkable thing: an American film has begun (in the famously developing city of Phoenix — a miracle of new urban life) in which the hopes and desires of two mature people are overshadowed by lack of money and social freedom. Look at a hundred other films from the ‘50s and you will not find the same cramped air. As a rule, the rooms are larger and brighter than they would be in reality, waiting to be filled by the hopes and energies of the era. Most films of the ‘50s are secret ads for the American way of life. Psycho is a warning about its lies and limits.” David Thomson has his detractors — are they jealous? — but he’s one of the very few working writers I’ll happily devote time to. His new book, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder captures, in less than 165 pages, the essence of the picture and the times in which it was made. (In quiet surroundings, you could joyfully devour it in one afternoon.) Here he’s talking about Sam and Marion, each in their thirties, him doling out alimony while cleaning up his father’s debts, she a potential hooker with a ticking biological clock. That two such honest, horny, down-and-out characters were portrayed minutes before the age of Camelot demonstrates the script’s wisdom, while the film was instrumental in redirecting the cinema.

Ripped to the tits: From Nelhydrea Paupér at the National Affairs Desk: “Actor Elmore ‘Rip’ Torn was arrested Friday night for allegedly breaking into a Main Street bank intoxicated, armed with a loaded revolver.” More sordid details @ The Register Citizen.

“VHS tapes have a long history of amazing covers. Entire books have been written about them and movies were even banned in the UK based just off the imagery on the covers alone (called Video Nasties).” Color me clueless; the 80s sucked. However, if you’re deluded enough to believe there were such a thing as the halcyon days of VHS; if you remember Gorgon Video as a major player; if you think clamshell packages were The Shit, then get your crazy self a copy of 2009’s fairly decent horror flick, The House of the Devil in the retro exclusive VHS edition. Old Skool cinephiles take note: the movie costars Mary Woronov.

“Today was the day, back in 1999, that the world was deprived of Lili St. Cyr, when she died of heart failure at the age of 80. Her life at the end was quiet — just her and some cats in a modest Hollywood apartment — but during the 1950s she burned up burlesque houses from coast to coast as the most famous, beautiful, and artful exotic dancer in America.” A remembrance of stripperdom’s crème de la crème @ Pulp International.

“Of course, it’s hard now for many young film lovers to imagine, but there really was a time when there was no Internet Movie Database or Wikipedia. The movie reference books available were either incomplete or prohibitively expensive. Just looking up an actor’s filmography could mean a trip downtown to the library.” Stephen Whitty takes trip down memory lane (East Coast edition) sure to bore Gens X, Y and Zee via the New Jersey Star Ledger, where he also extols the virtues of my beloved Siren.

“I’m always a suspicious Sid when it comes to new technologies, especially since I understand all too well the post-modern industrial concept of “planned obsolescence” (Apple’s silent motto), which is why cassette tapes I have from the 70’s play and sound fine but some of my compact discs from the 90’s are unplayable. That’s why I have a nice turntable and LP collection. I sometimes prefer the analog over the digital. I like to collect VHS tapes and laserdiscs still, particularly out of print movies and miscellania that will never make it to DVD (Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row and Grampa’s Sci-Fi Movies trailer collection comes to mind). So I was skeptical of the Blu-ray versus HD DVD war, content with my tapes and DVD’s. But I needed to see for myself and so the first Blu-ray film I ever watched was Baraka and was duly blown away by the image depth and clarity. I’m still unsure how much detail is too much, but with a visual landscape poem like Baraka, nothing is too much.” Weighing the pros and cons, from Tati to Bond, @ Technicolor Dreams.

Footman’s eyes, they cross

Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah: A New Biography by Tim Footman.
272 pages, illustrated paperback (9" x 6"), $19.95. Chrome Dreams Publishers. ISBN #978-1842404720.

Available from Chrome Dreams.

I was born like this, I had no choice.
I was born with the gift of a golden voice,
and twenty-seven angels from the great beyond,
they tied me to this table right here in the tower of song.

— Leonard Cohen
“The Tower of Song”

Several years ago I met someone who loved the song “Suzanne” but added, “Noel Harrison was so underrated.” You never hear Noel’s name these days; you rarely heard it back when he was almost famous. She played “Suzanne” from Noel’s 1967 album Collage, and my ears registered a neutered catastrophe. I played the composer’s version, to which my friend responded, “Why is this man trying to sing?”

    Whether Leonard Cohen may or may not be gifted with a golden voice depends on one’s ear and willingness to reach beyond the flat notes and monotone delivery. For a period some thought he could be ‘the new Dylan’ when such a figurehead seemed necessary. Dylan vanished from the public eye as the Sixties raged, only to reemerge after a two or three year hiatus as a country bumpkin who made impromptu appearances at other people’s concerts. (“Do you think Dylan will show up?” became the spectator’s mantra.) He left a void, making music and Pop Awareness hungry for a spokesperson, a wit, a painter of words. Someone like Leonard Cohen.

    And for a moment he appeared up for the task, or at least his agent saw an available slot for their fresh client. It’s this rise and his sleepy prominence that makes Cohen’s back story interesting, and it’s the hook that can persuade one through Leonard Cohen — Hallelujah, the new biography by Tim Footman. The author of band biographies on Blink 182, Limp Bizkit and Radiohead, Footman is also the former managing editor of the Guinness Book of World Records. At the outset he registers two Leonard Cohens, one born in 1934 to “respected pillars of Montreal’s Jewish middle class” (a living arrangement complete with servants, sailing beyond most understandings of middle class); and this other, outlined in a shade of purple the author uses too often to camouflage his wavering acumen:

“But Leonard Cohen, the Leonard Cohen we know; the Pope of Mope; the Bedsit Bard; the sometime Buckskin Boy; the composer of music that allegedly makes you want to slash your wrists; the Jewish Buddhist; the philanderer; the drinker; the smoker; the occasional opium fiend; the man who talks to Greek daisies; the poet; the novelist; the raconteur; the unlikely gun fetishist; the bad monk; the worse singer; the potential permanent advisor to the Minister of Tourism of the People’s Republic of Trinidad that never happened; the guy who wrote that song in Shrek; he only came into existence in 1949, when he a) discovered the life and works of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, b) bought his first guitar, for $12 from a Montreal pawn shop, and c) attended his first concert, by the blues musician Josh White. It was then that the Cohen combination, intellectual and sexual, brooding bohemian and unlikely babe magnet, poet and rock star, began to coalesce.”

    Neither a scholarly tome nor a hack job, Hallelujah is crammed with dates and events and a few consciously hip critical asides that have the weight of a Ryan Seacrest monolog. And the influence of the Guinness Book is evident. As a journalist, Footman is easily readable and his enthusiasm apparent; considering Cohen’s pedigree, however, the artist is certainly worthy of a biography that’s less hurried, more introspective.

    And proofread: the author refers to Cohen’s novels The Favorite Game as “The Beautiful Game” and Beautiful Losers as “Beautiful Strangers.” He’d have us believe that, some six years before recording his first album, Cohen found fame and fortune as a poet (!); the early collections The Spice-Box of Earth and Flowers for Hitler are hailed as “bestsellers” without mentioning their undoubtedly limited print runs or sales figures. Citing other critics’ reactions to Cohen’s work, employing recycled quotes from his subject, Footman breezes through a life and career surely more interesting, if not conflicting, than he seems willing to detail.

    “As he powers through his eighth decade,” the author writes, “new generations are waking up to the peculiar charm of that deep, growly miaow; an acclimation of a special kind.” Cohen has recently recorded and toured, and there was a cacophonous ‘dedication’ concert helmed by Rufus Wainwright which somehow received the old man’s stamp of approval. I doubt the music buying public under thirty are swayed by his “deep, growly miaow,” (deep, growly miaow?!? Ouch!!) but I could be wrong. They may, in fact, find Hallelujah a splendid read, tight, economic and without that nagging aesthetic substance that makes Cohen’s work so intriguing.

My happenis

I’m in a Last Tango state of mind. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the film for thirty-eight years. Right now I could use a fix. I’ve been listening to that deliciously sleazy, distinctively ‘70s Gato Barbieri sax music while looking over these photos. (All of them enlarge when clicked.) I should be writing a book review on an entirely different subject, but the book bores me and the distracting Last Tango sax music keeps swirling around in my head. The faded color in these shots is taking me back to an oppressive, muted pastel place where Maria Schneider dresses like Superfly.

    Was there ever a film better suited for a damp and drizzling afternoon? I was in my teens when I first saw it, and had no clue about burnout or depression or life at the end of one’s tether. I went for the sex scenes, but Brando somehow managed to fuck her with his pants on. It was showing in the one movie theater on San Juan’s main drag in Puerto Rico, and I think it played in that place for over a year. About fifteen years after that, when I was in my thirties, I saw it again and felt that Brando and Bertolucci (who made the picture in their fifties) hit me to the core, Last Tango reflecting so much of who and what I’d become. Then, fifteen years after that, me in my late forties, the film seemed… empty. An hour into it and I heard myself saying, “Haven’t they gotten over this shit yet?” I can only wonder how it’d play for me today.

    “In Last Tango in Paris,” Brando wrote in his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, “I played a recently widowed American named Paul who has a quirky, anonymous affair with a French girl name Jeanne, played by Maria Schneider. The director was Bernardo Bertolucci, an extremely sensitive and talented man although, unlike Kazan, he wasn’t trained as an actor and didn’t address himself to the development of characters. This simply happens or it doesn’t, though Bernardo did do something unusual on the picture. Usually actors have to conform to the writer’s story and take on the characteristics he creates, but in Last Tango Bernardo tailored the story to his actors. He wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me. Because he didn’t speak much English and knew nothing about American slang, he had me write virtually all my scenes and dialogue, and we communicated in French and sign language.”

Brando with Bertolucci (top) and Vittorio Storaro (above)

    “Last Tango in Paris received a lot of praise,” Brando continued, “though I always thought it was excessive. Pauline Kael in particular praised it highly, but I think her review revealed more about her than about the movie. She is the best reviewer I know, but I think she became too subjectively involved in the story and critiqued the film from her own unique set of values and biases. Her review was flattering, but I don’t think the picture was as good as she said it was. To this day I can’t say what Last Tango in Paris was about. While we were making it, I don’t think Bernardo knew either, though after it was released, he was quoted as saying that it was meant to explore whether two people could have an anonymous relationship, and then sustain it after its anonymity was breached and affected by the outside world. But he didn’t say this when we were making the picture. It was about many things, I suppose, and maybe someday I’ll know what they are.”

Buy Last Tango from Amazon

Buy Songs My Mother Taught Me from Amazon

Éric Rohmer: 1920—2010

In one of the movies’ great transcendent moments, Bernard Verley (above) recognizes his foolish behavior in L'amour l'après-midi (Chloe in the Afternoon, 1972). It was the last of the contes moraux, the six moral tales conceived by Éric Rohmer, who left us this January 11 at the age of 89. I’ve known married men who’ve referenced Verley’s epiphany while devoting serious consideration to cheating on their wives. Yes, Éric Rohmer has saved marriages.

    Arriving after some twelve years’ worth of short films and barely-released features, the contes moraux helped to establish Rohmer as an art house favorite in America in the 1960s and 70s. Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s, 1969) and Le genou de Claire (Claire’s Knee, 1970) had long, healthy runs. Furthermore, they epitomized Rohmer’s formula, which had a lot to do with sex, intellectualism, politics, lust and desire, power games and role play, boredom and scheming. And lovely, slender young women.

    All of it was fashioned in a deceptively simple style, making you take notice on the occasions when he hit bull’s eye: Le genou de Claire, L'amour l'après-midi, Le rayon vert (in America as Summer, 1986), Conte d'hiver (A Winter’s Tale, 1992), and Conte d'automne (Autumn Tale, 1998) are exquisite, with Marie Rivière (a longtime member of Rohmer’s stock company) painfully poignant in Le rayon vert. She, like several other of his actors, brought forth the human comedy and drama of scripts laced with an acerbic wit and keen understanding of female-male relationships. The endless chit chat in his films could drive some people crazy, but it was generally a ruse, a way for characters to avoid being honest with themselves, a pet theme that made Rohmer’s work so unique.


Above: Rohmer’s analysis of Haydée Politoff’s physique in La collectionneuse (1967)