Oscar wild

When Nicole Kidman was announced to present an Oscar (with Daniel Craig), I thought nothing of it…until spotting the red dress. I ran for my eyeglasses. She really is magnificent.


I’ve had the hots for Beyonce ever since her “Crazy in Love” video. Here she’s with Jennifer Hudson, singing tunes from Dreamgirls. I haven’t seen the film, but a few people have described it as a story about Motown records during the late 1950s and early 60s. I hate to disillusion the revisionists out there, but Motown music of that era was certainly not the kind of atonal caterwauling — beginning with and staying fixed on the crescendo — these two were screeching out last night.


Gwyneth Paltrow has lovely hair…but her head doesn’t move!


Hey, Forest, you’ve got the world by the balls. Any chance you can bring your angst down a notch?


Helen Mirren presents Phillip Seymour Hoffman with the ‘Best Eccentric of the Evening’ award. Now go back under your rock, Phil.


Was it my imagination or did Maggie Gyllenhaal look like she was going to pucker herself into another dimension?


Nice caps, dude.


I’ve hated political correctness since Day Fucking One. Last night, Ellen DeGeneres apologized for not calling Penelope Cruz “Mexican.” Yet Tom Hanks insinuated writers were alcoholics. Well…there may be some truth to that…


Best line of the evening: “Valium works” — William Monahan.


It must be love: I still want to bang Catherine Deneuve…preferably without Ken Watanabe in the room.


Reese has worked with some brilliant cinematographers in her movies, because I never noticed that golf ball chin of hers until last night.


Adios, munchkin. Your fifteen minutes are up.


These two nearly chilled me to the bone. We know Tom’s a nut, but this Lansing character is straight out of Stepford.

Watermelon Man

Melvin Van Peebles, circa 1971

How To Eat Your Watermelon In White Company (and Enjoy It) is a feature-length documentary on Melvin Van Peebles. Over the past 18 months it has had a successful run on the film-festival circuit. Now it’s about to make its television premiere on the IFC channel on Feb. 15 at 9 pm E.T.

Flickhead wasn’t sent an advanced screener for review, so we’ll have to make due with these words sent in by director Joe Angio: “If I learned anything over the eight years I spent with Melvin shooting this film, it’s that you can’t rely on ‘traditional’ avenues to spread the word. So much like Melvin did when he made Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song 35 years ago, we’re appealing directly to the community to help raise awareness of this remarkable man and his work. If you want more information, please visit our website (www.mvpmovie.com) which contains rare music and videos (including some outtakes from the film that have to be seen to be believed!), along with original essays and articles, photos and much more.”

Film Synopsis:

Melvin Van Peebles created a new style of African-American filmmaking in 1971, when on a shoestring budget he made Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a violent action picture about a sex-show stud on the run from the police that below the surface served as a call for revolution in the black community.

But Sweet Sweetback was hardly Van Peebles' first or only bold achievement in the arts. After brief careers piloting cable cars in San Francisco and flying fighter planes in the Korean war, Van Peebles moved to Paris, where he wrote five novels, became a regular contributor to an anarchist journal, and directed his first feature film, The Story of a Three-Day Pass. On the strength of its critical acclaim, Van Peebles returned to America and made his first (and only) major studio film, Watermelon Man, which helped him gather the money and connections it took to make Sweet Sweetback. (He also launched a recording career, making literate but streetwise albums that paved the way for rap and hip-hop in the early '70s.) After Sweetback's critical and commercial success, Van Peebles staged a series of hit Broadway plays including Don't Play Us Cheap and Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. In the 1980s, Van Peebles switched careers and became a successful Wall Street options trader, and watched his son Mario Van Peebles become a star. (Mario would also go on to make a film about his dad's adventures making Sweet Sweetback, entitled Baadasssss!)

How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) is a documentary made with Van Peebles' participation that looks back at his multi-faceted career and the brilliant, uncompromising man behind it all. The film includes interviews with a number of Van Peebles' colleagues and admirers, including Spike Lee, Gil Scott-Heron, Gordon Parks, and Elvis Mitchell.

Related links:

How To Eat Your Watermelon… Home Page

View the trailer

IFC Movie Page

How To Eat Your Watermelon…Myspace Profile

Always love the one that hurts you

For this Valentine’s Day, Lucas over at 100 Films has initiated The Lovesick Blog-A-Thon. Unfortunately caught in the middle of several other commitments, I was unable to compose anything new for this event. In an effort to stay in the spirit, I offer the following “rerun” of a Flickhead review posted last year:

Originally distributed in the United States by Cinema V, a dubbed version of Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away once made inroads throughout suburbia, while the major cities had it in Italian with subtitles, under the full, weighty title Swept Away…by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974). Although heavy with dialog, its indiscreet examination of class conflict and brazen sexual domination were enough to lure the masses undoubtedly anticipating freewheeling Euro-erotic thrills. Add the exotic island locale in the sunny Mediterranean with two tanned, attractive leads frolicking on the beach, and the picture appears as a premeditated surrender to commercialism, with knee-jerk politics as bait for the director’s supporters.

Seen today, the original Italian version digitally restored and remastered on DVD from Koch Lorber—retaining all of the beautiful pastel colors of paradise that I vividly remember from years ago—the contrasting drama often feels forced and without a hint of subtlety. Yet the themes that it harps on—the clash of Catholicism and Communism in Italy, the gulf separating the poor from the rich, the liberals from conservatives—seem especially relevant now in America as the political right has effectively polarized its people by economics, class and an unyielding, chip-on-the-shoulder variation on Christianity.

The wealthy and eternally argumentative northern Italian Raffaella (Mariangela Melato) is vacationing on a yacht manned by a handful of low-income Sicilians. Among them, Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a communist who’s stung by Raffaella’s steady stream of insults. As she demands to go to an island cove in rough waters at dusk, Gennarino takes her in a small lifeboat. But the motor conks out, they begin to drift, and after a few days find themselves alone on a desert isle.

As she hasn’t stopped complaining through the entire ordeal (and blames the misadventure on Gennarino’s incompetence), he reaches the end of his tether, tells her to ‘fuck off’ and fend for herself. As he dives for lobsters for dinner, she’s helpless in the rough and unable to forage for food. Raffaella offers to pay for the lobster, but Gennarino tells her it’s not for sale. If she wants to eat, she must work. As time passes and she gradually and grudgingly acquiesces, they realize that they’re eventually going to have sex. But if she wants that, he demands that she fall in love with him first.

Sniping witticisms turn to profanity and curses; derogatory hand and finger gestures become slaps, punches and kicks. Wertmüller’s films often point to the shift and distortion of old world traditions, usually in the midst of war: Love and Anarchy (1973), Seven Beauties (1975), and The Nymph (1996) are set either in the late 1930’s or early 1940’s. Swept Away takes place some thirty years after World War II, its characters the idle rich and working poor presumably born shortly before or during the war. In the ‘now’ of 1974, they’re in their thirties and forties with Raffaella and Gennarino driven by the anger fueled by years of unrest, people with radically opposing views of social injustice.

Melato and Giannini

The class conflict between the north, the south and Sicily is Wertmüller’s battleground, where the roots, values and snobbery of an inherently proud culture have slipped. Her characters are trapped in different forms of slavery, connected by class concerns and the power of the dollar: he to serving the affluent, she to being served. They’re physically and symbolically adrift somewhere in the Mediterranean, detached from their accepted positions in life, left to examine who and what they are, playacting the type of people who Wertmüller imagines they’d prefer to be. For Raffaella, something of an epiphany occurs on the island; for Gennarino, a cold, sobering reality happens shortly after.

When it first came out, the film was simultaneously lauded and criticized for what many perceived to be brutal misogyny, but the roles Melato and Giannini play have less to do with sex than caricature. Raffaella’s bitchy feline and Gennarino’s simian grunt are political cartoons encapsulating the caste charade performed globally every day by the haves and have-nots. When she invites Gennarino to sodomize her, Raffaela (and Wertmüller) slyly offers the proletariat equal time, a chance to get even for centuries of metaphoric ass fucking. That Gennarino is initially baffled by the proposal signifies how blindsided the working class has become while toiling in the shadow of the bourgeoisie.

After thirty-plus years, does Swept Away hold up? The film is constructed at such a fever pitch, with characters who are essentially timeless, that its numerous flaws become secondary. Wertmüller used four cinematographers, among them Ennio Guarnieri (who previously worked with Pasolini and De Sica), as well as the undervalued musical composer Piero Piccioni, and crafted a look, feel and flavor that exists solely within these frames. One cannot deny the presence of superficial aspects, nor, on the other hand, the film’s bravura. With the paradox set in Paradise Lost, Swept Away continues to command the senses, even if the mind is occasionally tempted to move on to other, seemingly more important, things.

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Cantaloupe Island

Herbie Hancock (piano), Pat Metheny (guitar), Dave Holland (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums)

It’s boring, but is it art?

Jim Emerson at Scanners has called for a “Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon” today. Other than send my system’s spell check into a tizzy, it’s intended as a forum to shed light either on our guilty or guilt-free pleasures (pictures that few others are able to appreciate in the proper spirit), or whatever pretentious or simple-minded beast everyone else seems to think is great (but we know isn’t). To wit:

In thirty years of writing on the movies, only a handful of films have been difficult for me to write something, anything, about. Last November I was sent a DVD screener of Theo Angelopoulos’s The Weeping Meadow, and was so horrifyingly bored that I felt that all film in general was no longer worth writing about. It sapped me to the core. Surely this was art, no? Surely others — those academics who sit around counting frames with a stopwatch, perhaps? — who saw it and wrote about it would proclaim it as a fine work. But, to me, it felt so familiar…hadn’t I seen all these images before, over and over, years ago? Hadn’t this sort of thing been done to death already...and better, by Antonioni and Dreyer? Whatever. I was unable to finish my review, but the manuscript below — representing some eight weeks of joyless toil — has been sitting around waiting for me to guide it to its end. Out with it already! I can’t even reread it…and I’m certain what follows is just as pretentious as the film itself.

The first film in a projected trilogy about Greek living and culture throughout the twentieth century, Theo Angelopoulos’s The Weeping Meadow (2004) spans thirty years, from the Greco-Turkish War through World War II and the beginning of the Greek Civil war. Meticulous in its visual detail and obviously heartfelt, it strives to convey the pain and suffering of the displaced masses searching for stability, a place to call home amid the shifting bureaucracy and exploding bombs.

Admittedly indebted to Homer and The Odyssey, Angelopoulos thrives in the ‘quest’ genre: Landscape in the Mist (1988), Eternity and a Day (1998), and the quasi-autobiographical Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)—that last one featuring Harvey Keitel as a filmmaker tracking down the cradle of cinema to a remote corner of Greece—trace displaced spirits weathering their own individual odysseys. But they’re also situated at a distance from the viewer, and rarely earn the compassion Angelopoulos clearly desires. So dour and obsessive, it’s difficult to muster any empathy as their dreams and realities fall to hardship.

In what is perhaps his most linear narrative to date, The Weeping Meadow follows a young woman (played by Alexandra Aidini) and her lover (Nikos Poursadinis) from a nomadic childhood to a turbulent midlife, forever wandering, hunted by her first husband (the young man’s father and her foster father), incarcerated, flooded out of shantytowns, his leaving for work in America, the deaths of their sons in the battlefield, the ongoing travails of a glorified soap opera.

Despite the attention given to time and place and event, Angelopoulos is less concerned with constructing coherent drama than in orchestrating a series of calculated, painterly scenes imagined through jaundiced nostalgia. Just figuring out when or where any given scene is supposed to be set requires a guidebook.

In the tradition of the medieval classics, it’s poetic in the best and worst sense of that word. It strives to recreate pain and suffering, and revels in depictions of primeval travel—relentlessly slow, meditative images of boats rowing from one side of the screen to the other, impeccably staged and framed, often from a single camera and with a minimum of cuts. If there were any humor in this film, any at all, these ponderous passages could evolve into a running gag.

Not content to simply recount a compelling chapter in history or perhaps wary of his shortcomings as a storyteller, Angelopoulos freely segues from narrative to allegory with scant success. The precise blocking of actors and camera, the triumphant combination of lighting, set design and aperture to evoke a sepia-toned memory, the performers expertly locked in bemusement: all these things deserve far more than the hammering negativity of a woefully naïve scenario.

During an isolated instance when Aidini steps into the frame smiling, the sight is absurdly incongruous. Why she’s smiling is never explained, for the film has no patience for joy or happiness, nor does it realize humor or irony in the face of adversity, otherwise pivotal elements in the narrative form. Far worse, however, is the blundering use of that smile as a bridge to more tragedy. In the hands of Bergman or Polanski these things could be used to scrutinize a character’s persona, but not here. It’s difficult to sympathize when the woman loses her sons: Angelopoulos has done nothing to establish their bond or show their growth. His inept handing of chronology and personality has robbed them of relevance.

Author’s note: That’s as far as I could go. Flush this review down the toilet. I’m finished.

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Kryptonite

Barebones about
Hollywoodland (2006)

The committee that wrote the script decided to embellish the scenario with hokey, useless “back stories” (the bane of post-1970s commercial American film). A lot of people have criticized the casting, but, to these eyes, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with anyone in the film — not even Benifer. The film’s just not terribly committed to its own subject...they drag in two subplots that have nothing to do with anything (one, involving Adrian Brody’s son, is aching to be poignant but is merely irritating)...a lot of contemporary Hollywood hacks are apparently very concerned about appeasing (imagined?) fringe factions of the audience and employ such tactical digressions...or perhaps they’re all-too aware that the George Reeves story in and of itself couldn’t extend beyond a 47-minute running time.

Technically, there were three or four scenes in which the dialogue was unintelligible. With all the technology at their disposal, I’m surprised Universal let these scenes go without post-dubbing. Also, whatever film school grad “directed” the thing allowed the lighting to go to extremes: too many moods are signaled and underlined by the cosmetics of the image. When you sit there noticing this kind of shit, you know it’s not working.

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Whore house

By most of the accounts that I’ve read, Darryl F. Zanuck had an honest respect for the art of storytelling, one that could escalate to passion in the blink of an eye. Sam Fuller spoke of the conferences he had at the 20th Century Fox offices, where he and Zanuck would end up playacting the scenario Sam was trying to sell, the two of them running around the desk like kids in a schoolyard. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall…

One of the first studio heads to recognize the limits imposed by the soundstage, Zanuck took an active interest in location filming by the mid-1940s. MGM, Paramount, RKO, Universal and Warners were content to stay indoors (albeit temporarily), but Fox’s The House on 92nd Street (1945) transported a hyperbolic situation about Nazis, the F.B.I. and atomic secrets to the streets and buildings of Manhattan, and the city quickly became a formidable presence which continues to attract film crews to this day.

I’ve no idea just how many location pictures Fox released between that and The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), but its San Francisco locales had already served as a colorful backdrop for Warners’ Dark Passage (1947) — the picture where Bogart, fresh from the shower, searches Lauren Bacall’s apartment for “a towel big enough to cover my embarrassment.” (Some lines never stop ringing in one’s ears.)

Based on Dana Lyon’s novel The Frightened Child, The House on Telegraph Hill begins with a device similar to one found in Cornell Woolrich’s novel I Married a Dead Man (both books were published in 1948): a desperate woman trades identities with someone who’s just died. In Woolrich, the character is pregnant and fleeing a checkered past. I haven’t read Lyon’s book, but in the film she’s a Polish refugee from a German concentration camp, her family dead and her sense of purpose tarnished.

After convincing the authorities that she’s the other woman, she lands in San Francisco, heir to a fortune and parent to a young boy who hasn’t seen his real mother since he was an infant. After marrying the man who’s been looking after the kid and overseeing the family estate, she builds a new life. But paranoia sets in: is the nanny a threat? Does the husband want to kill her? Is the house haunted by the dead woman’s deceased benefactor?

Although the film is directed by Robert Wise, there’s no evidence of singular voice or artistic vision. He’d just completed his tenure at RKO under Orson Welles and Val Lewton, and had yet to make his mark with “important” pictures in the vein of Executive Suite (1954) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). Far more relevant, however, Elick Moll and Frank Partos adapted the screenplay, and it’s worth noting that a year later they’d write the scenario for Night Without Sleep (1952), lifting liberally (and without permission) from Woolrich’s Black Angel in the process. Likewise, the year before The House on Telegraph Hill, Paramount released No Man of Her Own (1950), an authorized adaptation of I Married a Dead Man, and it’s no stretch to believe that Moll, Partos and Fox were “inspired” by the identity switch gimmick.

The quintessential pulp mystery writer of the noir era and no stranger to Hollywood, there were no fewer than fourteen films made from Woolrich’s novels during the 1940s alone. Other than his penchant for convenient chance setups, he stressed suspense over plausibility. Under the right conditions, Deadline at Dawn, Black Alibi and Phantom Lady can seem like masterworks of form that easily transcend the relatively tame films made from them. Alfred Hitchcock recognized the potential: Rear Window (1954) is based on a Woolrich short story.

Hitchcock figures prominently in The House on Telegraph Hill as well. There are faint echoes of the edgy marriage and mixed nationalities of Claude Rains and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946) between House stars Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese. But the house of the title calls to mind Manderlay in Rebecca (1940), with governess Margaret (Fay Baker) a Mrs. Danvers with blond hair. (That the picture forgoes the implication of her sexual connection with Basehart is among its numerous shortcomings.) The quiet threat Cary Grant imposes over Joan Fontaine in Suspicion (1941) is aped mawkishly when Basehart harasses Cortese to breakdown, with a nightcap of poisoned orange juice in lieu of Hitch’s glowing glass of milk.

Never quite a leading man, Basehart was a blunt, generic, freckled all-American in the Van Johnson mold, though imbued with an anxiety that suggests depravity or deception. After a string of forgettable b pictures, Basehart found work in Europe, did La Strada (1954) and Il Bidone (1955) for Fellini, played Ishmael in Huston’s Moby Dick (1956), then settled into television during the 1960s with the lead on ABC’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968).

Born in Milan and making no effort to conceal her accent from American audiences, Valentina Cortese worked her way up in Italy from supporting parts to lead roles (Luigi Zampa’s A Yank in Rome and Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città libera, both in 1946) until signed by Fox after the war. She was sly and seductive as the ethnic anchor reminding Richard Conte of his roots in Jules Dassin’s excellent Thieves’ Highway (1949), but otherwise appeared in fluff along the lines of Malaya (1949) and Shadow of the Eagle (1950). She then commuted between Europe and America, held the séance in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965), played a Hollywood costume designer named Countess Bozo in Robert Aldrich’s outrageous The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), and nearly forty more years of thankless roles in pictures far beneath her extraordinary talent and good looks.

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