Everyone’s a critic

For the Love of Movies:
The Story of American Film Criticism
Written and directed by Gerald Peary. Produced by Amy Geller. Original Score by Bobby B. Keyes. Narrated by Patricia Clarkson. 80 minutes, released in 2009.

Order from The Official Website

A columnist for The Boston Phoenix, Gerald Peary’s work has also been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and most of the major film magazines for the past twenty years. I’m assuming he wrote and directed For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism to pay tribute to his colleagues and profession. Tracking its evolution from the movies’ silent era to the present, from the printed word to the internet, from writers of dubious distinction to brilliance, he’s breezed through a great deal of history in just eighty minutes. One wishes it were longer.

    Plenty of print journalists are interviewed: Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Stanley Kauffmann, J. Hoberman, Owen Gleiberman, Elvis Mitchell, A.O. Scott, John Powers, and a vibrant Roger Ebert before his recent illness. Worldly scribes with no shortage of stories, they seem elated to be there. Prefaced with the grim news that many have lost their jobs to websites and recession, For the Love of Movies finds itself positioned — awkwardly, I think — between an old and new guard. Michael Wilmington and Rex Reed bemoan the changes and obstacles now facing print journalists; Karina Longworth explains how they’ve transformed from monolithic arbiters of taste into blog mediators and den mothers. “What I say is just the start of a conversation,” she says of her online reviews and the comments left by her readers. “Critics don’t have any authority anymore.”

    This is the first major shake-up to hit the field since Sarris popularized the auteur theory and Pauline Kael argued with him every step of the way. The two came to prominence as the vanguard of a generation of critics who blasted the naiveté and parochialism of the old guard as typified by Bosley Crowther. That tumultuous epoch is poised at the center of Peary’s film. “Pauline and Andy and I looked at movies in a kind of amoral way,” Richard Schickel recalls, though Schickel was never noted as part of the famed Kael-Sarris battle except perhaps in his own mind. Other critics were part of that public debate, notably Dwight MacDonald, who is not mentioned in the film. Nor is John Simon whose contempt for everyone else’s opinion and relentless self-promotion placed him squarely among the best-known film critics of the 1960s and ‘70s. The film doesn’t mention them, but Peary may not have intended to make a comprehensive account in the first place. William Wolf, Judith Crist, Gene Shallit, Hollis Alpert, Archer Winston and Peter (“smart! hip! sexy!”) Travers, some of the most recognizable names ever associated with movie ad pullquotes, are absent as well.

    What Peary does have is an assortment of erudite critics recounting their influences and career highpoints along with reflections on the accomplishments of others and theories on where it’s all headed — a goldmine of cinephile banter. When broaching the subject of the internet, however, For the Love of Movies feels curiously dated. Peary interviews Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News about online journalism in clips which, based on his topical references to Armageddon (1998) and Fight Club (1999), could be ten years old.

    Recently, the internet’s been abuzz with reports of the death of film criticism. Like cicada swarms, it’s an ugly state of affairs that rises from dormancy every seven or ten years to rile up the natives. Some critics have written intelligently of this non-event (re: David Bordwell’s “Film criticism: Always declining, never quite falling”), others have opted to take the screaming mimi approach (re: “More (whingy) songs about film critics and paying work, and a dirty little secret” by Glenn Kenny). This time, it all came crashing down around the release of Peary’s film, which was shortchanged by critics eager to denounce rumors of collapse rather than examine his picture properly. Few recognize the twisted irony: one sure way for film criticism to die is if critics devote more time to speculating about its death rather than writing honest-to-goodness quality film criticism.

Thanks to Nelhydrea Paupér

Everyone’s a critic (unedited)

The UNEDITED VERSION:



For the Love of Movies:
The Story of American Film Criticism
Written and directed by Gerald Peary. Produced by Amy Geller. Original Score by Bobby B. Keyes. Narrated by Patricia Clarkson. 80 minutes, released in 2009.

Order from The Official Website

Approximately halfway through For the Love of Movies (2009), Gerald Peary’s documentary about American film critics and criticism, we hear the old chestnut about Bosley Crowther and his departure from the New York Times. He’d been reviewing movies there for a quarter of a century, “a good liberal and a good Democrat” as Molly Haskell remembers him in regard to his anti-McCarthyism and support for the right causes. But he was sadly adrift when it came to the unorthodox directions the cinema had taken during the 1960s. The axe fell with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Disturbed by its choreographed violence and playful attitudinizing, he attacked it in the Times:

“[The film’s] blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and [Warren] Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap.”

    While over at The New Yorker, one of their new writers, Pauline Kael had a firm handle on its radical values. Her famous (and quite lengthy) review helped to bury not just Mr. Crowther, but also an entire generation’s outmoded approach to viewing and critiquing, at the same time making her a formidable presence and the picture a hit:

“Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate… The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours — not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. Yet any movie that is contemporary in feeling is likely to go further than other movies — go too far for some tastes — and Bonnie and Clyde divides audiences, as The Manchurian Candidate did, and it is being jumped on almost as hard.”

    Jump ahead forty-two years to 2009, Peary resting his eye on Harry Knowles, the online movie critic who is read, we’re told, “by two and a half million people every day” on the website Ain’t It Cool News. In less than eloquent terms, Knowles outlines a similar rift currently percolating ‘neath his radar. “When you have a film like Fight Club, there’s a straight divisional shift in terms of generation,” he says with pokerfaced arrogance. “The older film critics thought that it was nonsensical that you need violent conflict to become a man. This new generation saw the movie as an experience.” On film director Michael Bay and Armageddon, Knowles subscribes to the sweeping generalization that “old guard critics despise” the director, whereas “to a younger generation of film critics, it’s not nonsensical editing. They can see where he’s going.”

    Crusty old geezer that I am, I’d like to think I can comprehend Armageddon’s mise-en-scène, just as I’m not entirely feebleminded when it comes to Fight Club. More to the point, this is an example of history repeating. But unlike the upheaval instigated by Kael and Andrew Sarris and their coterie forty years ago, when intellectualism became, for lack of a better word, trendy and decimated a simplistic old guard, today’s switch in critical values lends itself to anarchy. The critics of the 1960s endeavored to teach and enlighten; Knowles professes ageism, privatization and poor grammar. While it’s true that, once upon a time, ‘anyone’ could be a film critic — newspapers and magazines didn’t ask to see your diploma but they were selective about what they printed — today’s internet is a free for all, where everyone can be a critic with a click of the mouse.

Gerald Peary

    Subtitled “The Story of American Film Criticism,” For the Love of Movies positions Kael and Sarris at its center. The stuff of legend, their juicy public rivalry unraveled over thirty years, a tale that could easily fill the entire eighty minutes of this movie. Which brings us to one problem that may be unavoidable and unsolvable: For the Love of Movies is too short. By tracing the history of film criticism back to its roots and all the way up to current conditions, Peary shortchanges the contributions of several excellent writers. I assume his intentions had less to do with literary profiling than with a sincere desire to honor his peers and profession. A weekly columnist for the Boston Phoenix since 1996, Peary has had articles published in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and most of the major film magazines for over twenty years.

    He may feel anchored to Kael and Sarris — they’re certainly at the heart of why film criticism flourished from the mid 1960s through the ‘70s — but the significance of their predecessors is undervalued by the film. Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber and James Agee are acknowledged in interviews with Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann and Richard Schickel, but their creative and beautiful prose (especially Agee’s) deserve far more time than is allotted here.

    Watching it, I wondered if there’s a market for a comprehensive, multi-part documentary on film criticism, the kind of extended format Ken Burns used for the Civil War and baseball. It’s doubtful, especially considering that the number of employed newspaper and magazine critics continues to drop at an alarming rate. Peary prefaces For the Love of Movies with the grim news that twenty-eight of his colleagues had lost their jobs when he made the film, a figure that has easily doubled since its release. (As I write this, Todd McCarthy has just been let go from Variety after thirty-one years.)

    You could blame it on the poor economy or the twisting evolution of cultural values, or both. Today it’s not the same world as it was when Sarris first popularized the auteur approach of the French; when new pictures by Antonioni, Bergman, Kurosawa, Buñuel and Truffaut were arriving regularly; when reevaluations of Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock and Welles demanded their older films be seen anew with fresh eyes; when Penn, Cassavetes, Altman, Scorsese, De Palma and Coppola pioneered the New American Cinema. When all of it was in glorious 35mm, the specter of home video looming far off in the future, when the small, lifeless eye of television was dismissed by purists. Since closed, the so-called art houses and revival theatres were multiplying in cities, college towns and suburban hamlets, cinemaphilia growing into a genuine community event. Heady times, when a film critic could become something of a superstar in any one of the dozens of papers, periodicals and fanzines flooding a hungry market. When a Ken Burns-length mini-series about criticism could not only get made, but be watched.

    The war of words between Kael and Sarris placed their followers in separate camps, the Sarrisites and the Paulettes. (She initially dismissed the auteur theory as “silly, dangerous and anti-art,” but later reversed her position and became one of its chief proponents.) Peary interviews Richard Schickel about the rivalry, who clumsily inserts himself into the fray: “Pauline and Andy and I,” he says earnestly, “looked at movies in a kind of amoral way. We [my underline] were just movie people.” Truth be told, Schickel’s critical authority at the time was nominal at best. Better known as an historian, he’d authored books about studios and genres, star biographies, and documentaries on film history for television. During the Kael-Sarris skirmish, Schickel was the movie critic at Life and Time, no hotbeds of cerebral discourse. Peary could have seized the opportunity, but diplomacy won out and Schickel’s “Pauline and Andy and I” fantasy goes unchallenged. Playing it perhaps too safe, For the Love of Movies sidesteps the very controversies that can make the world surrounding film criticism so intoxicating.

    If anyone hovered near Kael and Sarris, it would’ve been either Dwight MacDonald or John Simon. A silver-tongued devil who constantly raised the ire of his readers, Simon was famously distracted by any given actor’s physical appearance. He once reviewed a Barbra Streisand movie from the point of her nose: “[it] cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning.” Peary’s failure to mention MacDonald and Simon is a shortsighted blunder compounded by the absence of William Wolf, Judith Crist, Archer Winston and Peter (“smart, hip, sexy!”) Travers, some of the most prominent names ever associated with movie ad pullquotes.

    These omissions can be maddening if you’re passionate about this stuff. What saves Peary’s picture depends on how much of that passion you bring to it. I doubt that anyone who’s deeply into film would find For the Love of Movies anything less than engrossing. It taps into cinemaphilia, an addiction that surely includes stargazing, which isn’t limited to gawking at the people who make movies. Critics often transcend the traditional definitions of celebrity; some have, as the saying goes, faces made for radio. But they can be our heroes or our villains, through prose that’s apt to touch us intimately and dramatically. Like skillful politicians or crafty salespeople, they have the power to guide and change the minds of the fiercely opinionated.

    I don’t know what footage of Kael was available to use. She died in 2001, and is remembered here respectfully but coolly by Sarris, Richard Corliss and John Powers; the clips of her interviewed or holding court on television talk shows and the brief passage of her work read by Patricia Clarkson underline the haughty superciliousness which too often colored public opinion of her. Elvis Mitchell remembers mailing samples of his work to Kael when he was a student, and the lengthy, handwritten reply she sent in return. The ambiguity here makes it difficult to determine whether he received it with gratitude or took umbrage at her editorial suggestions.

    Sarris lends himself freely to Peary’s camera, and it’s a pleasure to go with him down memory lane. His humble demeanor and reluctance of the internet distances Sarris from the new guard, who would do well to study this brilliant essayist. The appearance of Stanley Kauffmann was an unexpected and welcome surprise, and he, too, is in no shortage of anecdotes. Of the other interviewees, Owen Gleiberman is energetic; Michael Wilmington appears forlorn; John Powers looks delighted to be there; J. Hoberman doesn’t get enough screen time; and Molly Haskell, as striking and tantalizing and hard as a diamond, could never be on the screen long enough, for my money. Roger Ebert is interviewed before illness struck, when his vitality and enthusiasm were unmatched. Clips of him with Gene Siskel during their very first television programs are a hoot: slow, soft spoken and quite hairy, the post-hippie pair look like stand-ins for Brewer & Shipley. Those scant few minutes made me realize how much I miss Gene Siskel.

    Most of them share why and how they became critics (blind luck for some, a life’s dream for others), and the movies which affected them personally (Diabolique for Haskell, Two Thousand Maniacs! for Mitchell). Peary tiptoes near and around the internet. It’s a monster that’ll determine the future of film criticism while it supplants print media. Karina Longworth brings up an intriguing point about her online film reviews: “What I say is just the start of a conversation,” referring to the comments left by readers. Some are learned, some not; some are anonymous, others are posted by internet hotshots with followings. She realizes that “critics don’t have authority anymore at all,” a fact that can sting any wordsmith prideful of their craft.

Gene Palma redux

Images copyright © Robin Victor Farbman. Used with permission

In an earlier review of the film Hero at Large (Flickhead: 8.27.08), I mentioned the appearance of “street drummer Gene Palma — he of the slick, black-dyed hair and heavily-blushed cheeks.” (You remember: “Now going back thirty years to Chick Webb!” in Taxi Driver.) It triggered a tiny flurry of reminiscences, and now these stunning portraits taken in the mid-1970s by Robin Victor Farbman. Click the images to enlarge.

Trapped in Writer’s Block, Part Deux

“The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that’s rare – for me, at least, because I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking – which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it – over and over, again and again – or else you’ll be evicted, and that gets old. So it’s a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish… So maybe there’s hope. Or maybe I’m going mad…”
- Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

Reminded to me by X - Public Image

I'm smitten

Beyoncé and Lady Gaga tantalizing me with Video Phone. It's customary for too many of us to deride music that's new because it's new, but, fuck it, I'd rather watch and listen to this thirty or forty times than weather an earful of Bob Dylan's recent Christmas album. So sue me. (Hat tip: Puppooska.)

Trapped in writer's block

It isn't pretty.

Bourbon

Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, gloriously tan and undoubtedly tanked, weathering The Night of the Iguana via FuckYeahAvaGardner. Do click to enlarge.

Oscar, Oscar, Oscar…

My initial trepidation over Alec Baldwin and the newly minted position of ‘co-host’ was assuaged early on. He worked well with Steve Martin, albeit in limited capacity. This doesn’t alter my opinion that Mr. Baldwin is not a real movie star, but merely a poseur. (Have you ever bought a ticket to see a movie on the grounds that he’s in it?) With that said, here are some observations on Sunday’s Oscars, which hit a few low points, including a display of tackiness unmatched in recent memory:

“I’d like to thank the Academy for showing it can be about the performance and not the politics,” said Mo’Nique while restraining her emotions (did I detect the anger of the privileged?) in her acceptance speech as Best Supporting Actress for Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. After which, she immediately sailed into a political nod to Hattie McDaniel for trailblazing. As for the title of that movie, do we really need to say all those words that follow ‘Precious,’ or can we call it simply Precious? Does this Sapphire receive royalties with every drop of her name?

While we’re on the subject of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, which I’ll continue to refer to as Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire until I get clearance from my legal department who insist it be referred to as Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire so as not to disrespect Sapphire, the author of the novel Push, because once I start disrespecting a sistah, it’s all over… where was I? Oh yeah: what’s up with this Gabourey Sidibe? Half the time I couldn’t even see her eyes. Could her cheeks get any bigger? That creeped me out. In the (near?) future when they start hacking off her body parts for diabetes, will insurance foot the bill, or would the obesity behind the diabetes rank as self-inflicted? Personally, I think it should be her out-of-pocket expense. No reason my premiums should go up because she’s into being a ‘BBBW.’

Two tributes worthy of my ire: 1) The memorial to John Hughes, a filmmaker who made ‘good’ films only to those who saw them at ‘a certain age.’ I was old enough to recognize them as drek when they came out, an opinion I’m certainly not going to alter especially after time has eroded them into piles of muck. (By the bye, that’s Molly Ringwald above.)

2) The tribute to horror movies was compiled by a myopic pup. Yes, they squeezed in Lugosi, Karloff and Nosferatu, but quickly and out of obligation. Otherwise, horror apparently began with Psycho, took a fourteen-year sabbatical, then kicked up again with Jaws and The Exorcist. To the individuals who concocted this tribute, and to the folks who think it was fair and accurate, I say: “Fuck you.”

OK, so after Kathryn Bigelow gives her acceptance speech for Best Director — and I don’t believe it wasn’t deserved, whereas its Oscar winning script by Mark Boal felt like an extended episode of Adam 12 set in Iraq with a bomb squad instead of cops — she goes off the stage with Babs Streisand, and the orchestra starts playing — did I really hear this? — Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”. Is it just me, or would that have been tacky and condescending thirty or forty years ago when people knew what that song was? So I sat there and realized that nothing’s changed; that it’s still 1963; men with wooden heads still run everything, Kathryn notwithstanding; that evolution has never occurred. Which makes things very convenient for me, because if all of that is true, then this blog may not even exist — it’s kinda like the time/space continuum thing, the primary objective stuff in Star Trek — allowing me to sign off because, after the orchestra breaks into a rousing rendition of “I Am Woman”, I really have nothing more to add. Nothing. My brain is fried.

Song for Sharon

On this day in the year of our lawd nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, your humble narrator was born. For the occasion, I dug up the following blog entry which was first posted back when I hit the seemingly callow age of forty-eight. Enjoy. Oh, and, Sharon: you can still call me any time. — Flickhead

Sharon Stone and I slept together. Or at least I think we did. It was a very long time ago. Forty-eight years ago, to be precise, in the maternity ward of a hospital in Pennsylvania where the two of us had been born just hours apart…or a day or two. Some of Sharon’s bios offer contrary dates. Most say March 10, some place her at the 8th, others go as early as the 6th. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say she and I will be celebrating our birthdays sometime this week. But not in the same room. I’m sure Sharon would want that little fact quite clear.

    I would never have given Sharon a second thought had it not been for Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990). It was then when I recognized the familiar face, the manner, that seductive, calculated smile. Had she enchanted me when we were newborn bed buddies? Did those icy-yet-inviting blue eyes put the whammy on me while I lay there innocently sucking my thumb in the next crib?

    Imagine Sharon in a crib as Daddy’s Little Girl. Bad girl! You need to be spanked…!

Basic

    The eyes are flirtatious and hostile. The promise of a wild time in the sack shielded by an impenetrable wall built on that dysfunctional beast indigenous to the ‘90s, ‘attitude.’ And then there’s the mystery of the scar on her neck, which one day may yield too much information than I’d care to know.

    She had her fifteen minutes in the early ‘90s. Before Total Recall there were forgettable movies, TV shows, a lot of junk. After the Verhoeven picture, there was still the looming threat of a career in mediocrity: fifth billed in He Said, She Said (placing her a degree away from Kevin Bacon), John Frankenheimer’s Year of the Gun, the bizarre cable staple Scissors, the intriguing Diary of a Hitman — all in 1991! — and Where Sleeping Dogs Lie (1992).

    Then came Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992). Kismet. I was certain that I’d been hexed. How else to explain my fascination with this clanging monstrosity of a murder mystery action flick? Sharon smoking. Sharon crossing and uncrossing her long, tan legs. Sharon messing with Michael’s head. Sharon giving head. Sharon snorting coke. Sharon grinding with Roxy. Sharon’s aerobic intercourse workout. Michael going down on Sharon. Sharon for breakfast…for lunch…for dinner!

    There followed a run of magazine covers, fashion shoots, cocktail parties, social events, red carpets, the whole bag, all leading up to…Sliver (1993). This is a prime example of the comet burning itself out in a moment’s notice. The picture made one-third of its total U.S. gross on opening weekend alone. People went sweating from Basic Instinct but were sobered by a mess of a thriller, and word-of-mouth pulverized it from there. Part Robert Evans, part Ira Levin, part Joe Eszterhas, all of it crying out for the guidance of Roman Polanski but entrusted to Phillip Noyce, who failed to fathom the dark satire of media addiction and voyeurism. There’s still a great movie waiting to be made here, starring…Jessica Alba?

Still fairly real

    The fall was swift and assured: career suicide with Intersection (1994) — second-billed to Richard Gere in a Canadian production?!? Ouch!; guns and fast cars in The Specialist (1994), playing second-fiddle to Stallone (not even a steamy shower scene could bring in business); Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), an interesting satire on Westerns, Sharon quite fetching in buckskin, but likewise without an audience.

    A telling vindication of time taking its toll, when Verhoeven was casting Showgirls (1995), Sharon tested for the older dancer. She lost out to Gina Gershon and the sex kitten days drew to an end. I’m fascinated by an Elizabeth Berkley / Sharon Stone Showgirls: they could almost be sisters…or trailer park mother and daughter.

    The critics and Academy noticed her in Scorsese’s Casino (1995; no Oscar, but a Golden Globe), though she was better in Peter Chelsom’s The Mighty (1998), a quiet, overlooked gem. She was miscast in the Simone Signoret role in an unnecessary rehash of Diabolique (1996) — a picture that managed to make Isabelle Adjani appear dowdy; and she was semi vacant in Barry Levinson’s Sphere (1998). Two earnest attempts at social drama — Bruce Beresford’s Last Dance (1996) and Sidney Lumet’s remake of Cassavetes’s Gloria (1999) — played to empty seats.

    Which meant that Sharon had become a star who couldn’t sell tickets. And now that her ‘day’ is over and she’s inching up on fifty, the roles and opportunities seem strange, outmoded, even a little reaching. There’s a Basic Instinct 2 in the pipeline — Catherine Tramell in London directed by Michael Caton-Jones, a guaranteed train wreck — and we’ve been informed that she’s naked in several scenes. At this point in time, is that something we really want or need to see? Other than the rock-solid softball-size breast implants, she’s in fairly good shape from the neck down. But her face has seemingly frozen, the mouth and eyes apparently flattened (along with all that early, earthy rambunctious character) by Botox. The wrinkle-free, ironed skin was lampooned in Catwoman (2004), when her evil cosmetics magnate cultivated an epidermis as hard as a diamond. I’m among the few who appreciated the erotic stupidity of that goofy venture, to say nothing of Halle Berry looking fabulous in leather. (For the record, Halle played ‘Sharon Stone’ in the live action Flintstones movie.)

Reborn

    So happy birthday, my dear. You’re getting older. I’m getting older. You still look glamorous even though you no longer resemble yourself. Time, gravity, and a diminutive bank account has shaped me into a pale, doughy schlub with thinning, graying hair. You continue to attract handsome millionaires; I make Paul Giamatti look like Brad Pitt. Will your eyes ever search mine again, the way they did in that maternity ward, your deep, innocent gaze so longing and free? Whether we really were side by side never truly mattered. It’s the thought that counts.


All my love forever,

Flickhead

Start the Revolution Without Me

We won’t be getting the Oscars tonight because our cable company Cablevision and ABC/Disney are too busy having a pissing war to show it. ABC has been off the air here as of midnight this morning, unlikely to be back in time for Oscar.

    This is what this country has become with the laissez faire Republican/conservative/teabag/douchebag Ayn Randers having control of it for 8 years and now screaming socialism at every sensible suggestion. Business firsters. All the corporate leaders in this country have turned into a bunch of Marie Antoinettes. Remember that scene in Being John Malkovich with all the little Malkoviches all over the place? It’s just like that. Put all the corporate presidents, VPs and CEOs into a room together and they’d all sit there in their testosterone-drenched suits with Marie Antoinette heads chattering away “free enterprise... free enterprise... free enterprise.” Causing me to wonder — is Marie’s head still hanging on that pike? Or did they have to remove it to make room for all the other heads?

— Nelhydrea Paupér

Sommer time

Exquisite Elke Sommer via Retrodoll. Click to enlarge.

Nick Ray x 2

Nick Ray with Natalie Wood and James Dean and (much, much later) Dennis Hopper via The Selvedge Yard. Click to enlarge.

Trouble on the double D

To hear him tell it, writer-producer-director Rick Jacobson lost his patience with cold corporate types, the ones in charge of Hollywood wheeling and dealing. They weren’t interested in his kind of picture. After directing sundry episodes of Baywatch, Xena: Warrior Princess and a few action movies that likely went straight to cable, Jacobson envisioned something new, something different, something original. But without support from Tinsel Town, he had to strike out on his own and be true to his vision.

    And what exactly was that? An adaptation of Proust? Kafka? Homer? Well, no, we’re talking Bitch Slap (2009), approximately one hundred minutes of pole dancers in push-up bras housing eye-popping breast implants, engaged in a barrage of bone-crunching combat and balls-to-the-walls action. There’s an interview on the DVD where Jacobson would have us believe the market for this stuff had dried up, a very flimsy excuse to explain why he and his poker buddies needed to go independent. My guess is the suits in Hollywood recognized a stunted talent when they saw one and told him to take a hike.

    Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by way of Quentin Tarantino only without the wit, Bitch Slap unfolds like a seizure extended to tortuous lengths. Set mostly in the desert, the story ping pongs from present to past and back again, its dyslexic time-tripping making a valiant attempt to convey some kind of plot that has to do with back stabbing and shady business deals. To be honest, I was lost — or faded into a waking coma — within fifteen minutes. The dialog has nothing to do with reality, but merely a series of flabby one-liners that may have seemed funny on paper. “It’s not like I felt any less sexually objectified as a waitress or a congressional page,” says one dollbabe. “The women’s movement will hoist my skirt for all eternity!” cries another.

    For one hundred minutes.

    The end credits are chockablock with references to the digital crews who Made It All Possible, and the picture is rife with the kind of CGI effects that once made director Michael Ninn’s work so arresting. (Ninn’s Sex [1994], Latex [1995] and Shock [1996] are milestones in hardcore, pictures with a sense of purpose beyond the hump-and-grind.) Jacobson sadly lacks Ninn’s aesthetic; he squanders the enthusiasm of his cast and the technical proficiency of his crew for a product diseased with attention deficit disorder. Which is too bad, because, in the right hands, the hands of someone who actually has vision (and stability), Bitch Slap could’ve been a blast.

Available from Amazon

Hold it, kitty kat

Mia Farrow and Roman Polanski, photographed by Bob Willoughby. Via Twenty Hours. Click to enlarge.

Gene Palma Revisited (again!)

In a review of the film Hero at Large (Flickhead: 8.27.08), I mentioned the appearance of “street drummer Gene Palma — he of the slick, black-dyed hair and heavily-blushed cheeks.” (You remember: “Now going back thirty years to Chick Webb!” in Taxi Driver.) It triggered a tiny flurry of reminiscences, and prompted photographer Bobby Fisher to send this portrait of Gene he took back in 1986. Endless thanks, Bobby! (If anyone knows what happened to Gene, drop me a line.)

UPDATE!



3.3.10: Thanks to Mr. Fisher for sending the above portrait.

For more samples of Mr. Fisher’s work, go to his website or check out his gallery at Bernstein&Andriulli.

Adjust your Interocitor

At the center of this brainy bunch, Faith Domergue appears ready to test the mettle of her Metalutian admirers while filming This Island Earth (1955). That’s Lance Fuller she’s giving the eye to, while Jeff Morrow pines away on the upper right. I don’t know who the other guys are, but I’m sure there’s someone out there who can fill me in. Via Pour 15 Minutes d’amour. Click to enlarge. If you honestly need to know what an Interocitor is, go here.

Kim Morgan toon

Illustration copyright © Scott Brothers. Click to enlarge.

This is how journalist and Gran Torino driver Kim Morgan appears to illustrator and all-around cool blogger Scott Brothers. While an excellent piece of work, I can’t say that I agree with the ‘perkiness’ (for lack of a better term) of Scott’s vision. Kim has one of the few blogs I read thoroughly (she knows how to edit, a true rarity) but her overall deportment leans towards a distressed goddess out of a Bukowski story. With all respect to Mr. Brothers — and please don’t get all ‘temperamental artist’ on me and stuff yourself down the incinerator over this unsolicited criticism, because I really do like it — the rendering could use a little less Reese Witherspoon and a lot more Gloria Graham.