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)

Patti Smith on Jeanne Moreau

I don’t normally recycle material from other blogs, but Patti Smith got me thinking about the kind of guttural film criticism I’d like to read more of. Before we get to that, however, some backstory on the subject, Tony Richardson’s 1966 film, Mademoiselle starring Jeanne Moreau.

    According to Brian J. Dillard at All Movie: “In 1951, French writer Jean Genet presented a screenplay called Les Rêves Interdits/L'Autre Versant du Rêve to actress Anouk Aimée as a wedding gift. He then proceeded to sell the rights three times without telling her. Eventually the script was reworked by Marguerite Duras and filmed by British director Tony Richardson as Mademoiselle, with Jeanne Moreau in the title role. In its final form, Mademoiselle tells the story of a repressed schoolteacher who visits a veritable plague of deliberate ‘accidents’ on the people of her rural French village. She sets fires, poisons animals, and causes floods — all in a fit of thwarted passion for an immigrant woodcutter. Though Marlon Brando was originally set to play the role of the Italian craftsman, the part went to Ettore Manni when the production schedule shifted. Umberto Orsini plays Antonio, the woodcutter’s forlorn son, whom Mademoiselle maliciously humiliates out of perverse desire for his father. A notoriously difficult shoot, Mademoiselle was filmed consecutively with The Sailor From Gibraltar, another collaboration between Richardson, Moreau, and Duras. As for Genet, he despised the casting of Moreau; nevertheless, she would go on to star in Querelle, another adaptation of the author's work.”



    Which brings us to Patti Smith, the one-time ‘poet of punk’ whose recitation of “G-L-O-R-I-A” ricocheted between my ears for longer than I care to remember. In a 1977 issue of High Times magazine, she offered the following on Moreau and Mademoiselle, excerpts of which were recently posted on the excellent blog, Old Hollywood:

    “Jeanne Moreau is really something. There’s this scene where she’s like a chaste schoolteacher superficially, but inside she’s like a barbed wire fence on fire. There’s like this burly Italian Burt Lancaster who walks through the fields with a big gold St. Christopher medal on his chest and his shirt open, and he’s reeking of the wine fields, and he’s got a chain saw because he’s a lumberjack — and there’s all this tension because you know they’re gonna do it and when they do, they don’t let you down.

    “Whey they fuck it’s so heavy. It’s out in the field. He rips off her dress and she’s like an instant animal. He makes crawl through the field barking like a dog and she’s got this chiffon dress on, which he rips to shreds.

    “She’s so great. To me, the way she conquers a guy… I’m really studying Jeanne Moreau. If I turn out like Jeanne Moreau when I grow up I couldn’t ask for anything more. She’s so self-contained. She could start a forest fire. She came to my concert in France. I was so honored I didn’t even talk to her.

    “I’d like Jeanne Moreau to cut me down to size, ‘cuz in the process of being cut down to size by her I’d really start to grow. She’s great. Anna Magnani was great. Piaf was great. They were so much emotion. Like Janis Joplin — she had so much too — but Jeanne Moreau, she’s got brains. It’s like she’s got an intellect in her movement.

    “Then she sold this guy down the river. Like they fucked for two days in thunder and lightning, and the sky was just totally opening up, the fields were on fire, the whole world was going berserk — and they were just fucking right through it all. There was racial strife and poverty and people killing each other and everything was in flames, and they were still fucking.

    “And then he says at the end — he’s so stupid — he’s in love with her so he’s trying to be nice, but he fucks up and says, ‘I’ll be leavin’ tomorrow.’ He’s an Italian and he’s not accepted in this French village. He’s so stupid. You don’t tell a woman you’re leaving her after you fuck her for two days. If you are, you split fast, ‘cuz else you’re gonna die.

    “So she runs off and walks into town all fucked up, like she’s a chaste schoolteacher with a bun and everything. She’s like Jeanne Moreau, she’s like a lioness and she comes in with her chiffon dress all blood and filth and she’s like real satisfied and they see her and the women all get hysterical. She’s like the symbol of purity, their Madonna, Marianne Faithfull, and they can’t believe she’s been so defiled. ‘Was it the Italian? Was it, was it?’ She looks at them and she goes ‘Oui.’ She says oui so great it’s like ‘yeah’ — in fact I coulda sworn she said ‘yeah.’

    “They killed the guy with sledge hammers, pitchforks and stuff, but that’s another story. Thing was, after she sold him up the river, she was just exhausted from being fucked so great in the rain and lightning.”

Get off your mustang, Sally: Piss Factory by Patti Smith

Pithy quips

Above: Korean poster for Sunshine Cleaning

Three million years ago and eons before texting, the New York Times TV listings were known for their allegedly witty two- or three-word movie descriptions. I don’t know if the Times is still doing it, but occasionally my Netflix friends will receive similarly sketchy and smarmy witticisms from this keypad late at night if I’m feeling giddy or bored. How this warrants a blog entry is anyone’s guess, but read on:

World’s Greatest Dad (2009): “If something so hip, so irreverent keeps telling you it’s so hip, so irreverent, can it then be either hip or irreverent?”

10 to Midnight (1983): “Everyone’s naked except Charles Bronson. There’s even a nude serial killer!”

Youth Without Youth (2007): “With all the personnel involved, didn’t anyone have the nerve to inform Coppola his movie was unnecessarily confusing and incredibly boring?”

The Last House on the Left (1972): “It’s actually worse than I remember it. Nothing works.”

Sexo con amor (Sex with Love, 2003): “It’s like the inside of my head on film.”

Lemming (2005): “Half of this is excellent. The other half reminds me that I no longer have patience for ambiguous French thrillers.”

Clean Slate (1994): “This is where Memento got its amnesia plot!”

For Alexandre Bustillo’s À l'intérieur (Inside, 2007), my Netflix friend and I began a brief dialog:
    Him: “A unexpected surprise considering how tepid and tired this genre’s become. Check it out.”
    Me: “Does the doctor know you stopped taking your meds?”
    Him: “Don’t get ‘Hostel’ with me.”

Orphan (2009): “Totally fucked up but quite compelling. When the little girl gets dressed up for daddy, I nearly fell off my chair!”

Another dialog opened up between a friend and I over I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009):
    Me: “It makes Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist look like Citizen Kane, but Hayden Panettiere’s a frikkin’ knockout. Great ass, great thighs.”
    Him: “Did you actually think I put this on the queue for any other reason?”
    Me: “Of course not. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a movie where no one died?”
    Him: “You’ve been at the rum candy again.”

Above: Monika Malacova in Hostel: Part II, click to enlarge.

Hostel: Part II (2007): “I gotta admit, not only did I think this was pretty funny, but the bloodbath scene gave me a woody.”

Extremities (1986): “Alternately preposterous and compelling!”

30 Days of Night (2007): “The cinematic equivalent of Chinese take-out.”

Prime Cut (1972): “The quintessential 70s movie. Almost worth four stars. And it’s got Gregory (Plan 9) Walcott as ‘Weenie!’”

Sunshine Cleaning (2008): “It’s official — ‘Indie’ is its own genre.”

Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (1968): “There’s only one thing worse than bad goofy Jerry Lewis or bad maudlin Jerry Lewis, and that’s bad boring Jerry Lewis.”

The Love Guru (2008): “Expecting the worst, seeing the worst is not as bad as you’d expect.”

10,000 B.C. (2008): “So ‘mammothly’ bad that I actually had to kill myself while watching it. I’m writing this from the Great Beyond.”

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009): “Woof.”

Upon seeing Roger Ebert’s four-and-one-half star rating for the Jodie Foster movie, The Brave One (2007):
    Me: “It’s official — Ebert’s an asshole.”
    My Netflix friend: “How many reviews did it take?”

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007): “Now you finally know someone who’s seen it!”

A brief exchange over All That Jazz (1979):
    Me: “All I remember about this movie is, a) it took forever for him to die, and b) I couldn’t wait for him to die.”
    My Netflix friend: “Yes, and he died to three entire musical dance numbers.”

Yella (2007): “Does Herk Harvey get a percentage of the gross?”

The Curse of the Fly (1966): “How original, a ‘Fly’ flick with no fly. Did Don Sharp ever make a good movie?”

Appaloosa (2008) “Laid back to a fault.”

In Bruges (2008): “High drama for the dribble generation.”

The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004): “For most of this I sat shaking my head, thinking ‘Oh no, that’s me!’”

Eagle Eye (2008): “Alternate title, Hal 9000 — the Forbin Project.”

More crosstalk between my friend and I on The Mist (2007):
    Me: “The dimestore material clearly didn’t warrant the Greek Tragedy ending. That and a whole lot of unbelievable dialog ruined a fairly decent premise.”
    Him: “The ending didn’t work for me, either. Appeared forced and ineffectual.”
    Me: “I may write something about it on the blog — director Frank Darabont gave a pretentious, self-congratulatory interview on the DVD that shouldn’t be ignored.”

The Dark Knight (2008): “Chop off the last 45 minutes and you might have something here.”

Sharky’s Machine (1981): “Unsane! Absolutely Unsane!”

Next (2007): “My two-star rating applies to Jessica Biel’s fleshy beauty alone. This movie sucks... and it makes absolutely no sense.”

My friend and I on Speed Racer (2008):
    Me: “Virtually unwatchable.”
    Him: “I couldn’t make it through the trailer.”

The Mirror Crack’d (1980): “Too much cocaine in the editing room. They forgot to reveal Geraldine Chaplin’s killer... and this in an Agatha Christie thing where exposing the killer is the high point!”

Crash (2005): “The funniest script since Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor!”

Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002): “This is the only movie I know of where, for the ‘hot’ lead actress, they hired someone with a botched plastic surgery job.”

The Skull (1965): “As empty-headed as that title implies.”

The documentary The God Who Wasn’t There (2005) prompted this discussion between your gentile host and his Jewish friend:
    Him: “It’d make a perfect double bill with The Mind Benders.”
    Me: “You Christ killers are all the same.”
    Him: “You know that isn’t true because He never existed.”
    Me: “Of course He existed. Why else would I have screamed out his name fifty times during that prostate biopsy I got last week?”
    Him: “Are you certain it wasn’t my name you screamed out?”
    Me: “That’s true. In all the excitement, I think I did scream out, ‘You fucking asshole!’”
    Him: “I’m afraid it was your fucking asshole.”
    Me: “Go chase after Edward G. Robinson and his golden calf…”
    Him: “Jesus walks into a motel and says to the clerk, ‘Can you put me up for the night?’ So the clerk nails him to the wall.”
    Me: “You’re forgiven. Jesus loves you.”
    Him: “More than you do?”
    Me: “I just want to fuck you.”
    Him: “I’ve got two tickets for San Francisco. I’ll pick up the ring on Friday.”
    Me: “What? No premarital whoopie? For a Jew, you’re being terribly Catholic about all this.”

More may follow in the future…

Her repartee was meaner than a gun

A Rose is a Rose
By Poe

Jezebel...from Israel...
Who never read a book
Charmed the literati
And a smile was all it took...
I was laughing with Picasso
When she first entered the room
But Gershwin, Tristan Tzara
And Man Ray saw her too
There was never any doubt
All would try to take her home
But she refused their every move
Preferred to be alone
And a rose...a rose is a rose
Zelda had a breakdown
Fitzgerald hit the bar
His hand was broken, words were spoken
Didn't get too far
Hemmingway was smoother
More debonair and fun
But he would say her repartee
Was meaner than a gun
And a rose...
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Said my good friend Gertrude Stein
She knows that I go to the ol' Deux Magots
And I drink Pernod through the night
Jezebel...from Israel...
Who never read a book
She charmed the literati
And a smile was all it took
Before her Joyce will babble
And Pound has gone insane
Eliot is paralyzed by
Thoughts of April rain
When she refused Lenin
He vowed to start a war
Stravinsky beat The Rite of Spring
Right there on the floor
And a rose...a rose is a rose
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Said my good friend Gertrude Stein
She knows that I go to the ol' Deux Magots
And I drink Pernod through the night
And then one night she's missing
A riot soon began
No one could stand the thought of Jezzie with another man
I raced down winding streets
I broke into her house
You'll never guess who Jezebel
Was kissing on the couch...
A rose...a rose is a rose...
Hi Jezzie. Hi there Gertrude
Am I interrupting something?
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose...

Cinema paradiso, or: To daze in La vallée

Leonor Varela and Joshua Jackson in Americano

They called me a dreamer and introvert as far back as I can remember. I’ve never felt glued to the here and now, so they were probably right. Rainbows were chased, but banality won out. Maybe it was the lack of dough, or hatred for poverty. I’ve eaten from the trash and quickly scurried back to suburban comfort. Living outside polite society garners few useful connections, few sofas to sleep on, at least none in houses without rodents. I was an animal when it worked against me the most. My poorly planned excursions to Shangri-La always became psychic conundrums out of a Hesse novel.

    Which brings us to paradise, or the concept of it. The real thing could never survive reality. Bills pile up, people fuck us over, the dog dies, heart attacks and cancer slow us down, eat us up and do us in.

“You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder.
You know it’s going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you get older.
And in the end you’ll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand,
Just another sad old man,
All alone and dying of cancer.”

— Roger Waters

“Dogs”

    I’m sensitive to movies about paradise. From the James Hilton novel, Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) offers a socialist utopia of nice weather and hospitable Asians, where burly Thomas Mitchell sheds his hetero veneer to pursue prissy Edward Everett Horton (as ‘Lovey’), while Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt beam on, just pleased as punch to be there. Mark Robson managed to screw up the outwardly foolproof The Little Hut (1957), Ava Gardner in a grass skirt no less, shipwrecked on an island with both her husband and her boyfriend. Two middling versions of The Blue Lagoon are mentioned only for the chilly jailbait eroticism of Jean Simmons (1949) and Brooke Shields (1980).

    Fresh from the countercultural ‘60s, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Gégauff shrewdly charted the individual’s evolution en route to paradise in La vallée (1972). They recognized the distractions sidetracking humanity from spiritual growth: pride, greed, vanity… all the seven deadly sins. And Schroeder wisely kept the golden place off camera, out of reach, an enigma.

Above: Yo, dude! WTF?!?

Leonardo in The Beach, definitely click to enlarge

    Nearly thirty years later, Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000) was based on a novel by Alex Garland that I’ve never read. It was one of a handful of post-Titanic efforts to turn Leonardo Di Caprio into a far bigger star than has ever happened. It’s a fascinating film, but far from a good one. Set in Thailand, The Beach follows Leonardo’s trek from dirty youth hostels and sleazy cyber cafes to a rumored Shangri-La on a faraway isle. When he gets there, however, half the place is a pot farm protected by trigger-happy guards. The other half, we’re told, is ‘paradise.’ Travel brochure beautiful, lush and exotic, it’s blighted by a commune of Gen-X drifters who’ve dragged all their dirty baggage along with them.

    Not that the film seems to notice. Compared with the placid free-thinkers of La vallée, Boyle’s are a chest-thumping lot more in keeping with Survivor. Less dreamland than 24-hour tailgate party, where anxious neanderthals are wont to high-five over every trivial accomplishment, The Beach blindly subscribes to the contemporary societal vogues one would ostensibly be fleeing from. When Leonardo briefly leaves for provisions on the mainland, his flowery narration expresses dismay over the culture shock; but other than cars, neon lights and cable-TV, there’s little to separate downtown Bangkok from his reality show Eden.

    At which point we should be clicking the widget below for proper musical accompaniment (excuse the short, noisy intro):

Free music - Naturale

“Naturale” by Debi Nova from Americano

    Right now there may be a primitive tribe thriving somewhere on berries and love, blissfully unaware of mortgage foreclosures, HDTVs and texting. But in my situation, thanks to age and, I hope, wisdom, paradise has become equal parts environment and outlook. I’d like to include Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996) here, but the foundation of that intoxicating scenario — artistes, poets and poseurs grooving on Liv Tyler’s sexual awakening in Tuscany — is built on the fat bank accounts and real estate holdings of its landed gentry. An idealist lacking such vast resources, I’d like to believe one can achieve utopia on five dollars a day… or less.

    Knowing my penchant for El Dorado and dark, lusty women, a friend recommended Kevin Noland’s Americano (2005). Shot in Spain on high def video, mostly hand-held — presumably to look ‘real’; but if your vision’s this jittery, better check into a hospital — some footage evidently done on the fly during the Pamplona bull run, it follows a trio of backpacking American students played by Timm Sharp, Ruthanna Hopper (daughter of Dennis Hopper and Daria [Zabriskie Point] Halprin) and Joshua Jackson. The latter’s character, Chris, is a dreamer going the Hemingway route, right down to the neckerchief and neatly trimmed beard. Drunk, realizing his limitations with absinthe and carousing, Chris visits the Hemingway statue at the Plaza de Toros. With a tap of his fist, he finds it ironically fitting that Papa’s sculpted head is hollow.

    With Sharp and Hopper’s relationship slowly inching toward oblivion (he’s needy, she’s not), Noland introduces a feisty young local woman, Adela, to seduce Chris. Played by Leonor Varela, she’s initially overbearing, nearly to caricature when describing the passions of bullfighting and native traditions, or rousing the inebriated Americans’ palates for a hearty dinner of bull testicles and tongue. It becomes apparent that Adela, aggressive but resplendently feminine, possesses the Mediterranean strain of macho sorely missing from Chris’s dubious façade.

    Receiving mixed signals from users at IMDb and Netflix, Americano avoids a linear scenario for Chris’s ascent to utopia. A fantasy figure, Adela shows him peace and heaven within the day-to-day world of Pamplona, its touristy exoticism faded by quiet neighborhoods with their tranquil residents. Where the young lovers’ physical release eases the mind and directs the senses, making a graying dreamer like myself believe again in the power of warm glowing passion, the truest paradise of all.

    

Above left, Leonor Varela; right, Dennis Hopper (who has a brief part as a saloon owner), Joshua Jackson and Ruthanna Hopper in Americano (click images to enlarge)

Americano (official site)

Influence and Controversy: The Making of Performance

Part One

Part Two

Part Three