"What number is it, Chip?" ... "7A"

Folksinger John Stewart, formerly of the Kingston Trio, is dead. He's best known for this very fine song:






You can find Stewart's own version here.

Beware of "perilous stunts" and "fancy alcoholic drinks".

Today I became Jack Valenti's Worst Nightmare. I took a group of pre-teenagers to an R-rated movie (Sweeney Todd, which is, by the way, just as good the second time around).

Meanwhile, for those of you who think the MPAA isn't tough enough, The Guardian offers this helpful selection of highlights from various " parental guidance" websites..

The 666 Trio

"When there's no more room in Hell..."

The esteemed Robin Wood, whose writings on horror films in the 1970s remain the definitive critical work on that genre, has written a brief but typically incisive look at Diary of the Dead, the fifth installment in George Romero's trilogy-that-grew for the latest issue of Film Comment. I haven't seen the film, which was generally well received on the festival circuit last year, so I'll let Wood's analysis speak for itself.
The film is due to open in the U.S. on February 15th.

Outwitting the Curse of GMRX

A very good common-sense piece by A. O. Scott in the NYT about why people need to learn how to ignore the ratings.

The sun never sets: George Macdonald Fraser (1926-2008)

George Macdonald Fraser, whose twelve volumes of "The Flashman Papers" are among the most entertaining works of fiction of the last forty years, has died. In addition to creating (or rather, reshaping from a minor literary role in the Victorian classic "Tom Brown's Schooldays") the rascally Harry Flashman, Fraser wrote the screenplays for Richard Lester's "Three Musketeers" films.
Information on Fraser's life can be found here, plus a sample of his work here.

A cautionary tale...

Did you ever notice how the cautionary mental hygiene films and the exploitation films of the 1960s have in common?

Can we make a quick edit?

Spent the New Year's Eve/Day catching up with two movies, one of which definitely earns a slot on a revised Best of 2007 list. The other was Juno, which is destined to fill the slot in your life left empty by this.
But Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is something else altogether, a gruesome and witty horror film that just happens to be a musical. But not just any musical. Go see it.

...and then there were none

...which has nothing much to do with this post, does it?

I admit that I am living a few centuries in the past in my reading habits. The best thing I read all year (late getting around to it, I admit) was a little volume called "The Iliad" involving a lot of ill-tempered people sulking and going into battle and finding out that the Gods are even more sullen and bad-tempered than they are...
But of the slightly more than 100 books I read in 2007, around 20 were actually published within the last 14 or 15 months or so - rather than recited from memory or etched into stone tablets or shouted out at dirty mobs in the Globe.
The best, in the order I read them and not in order of preference:

"Popeye: "I Yam What I Yam" ' by E.C. Segar (the first volume in Fantagraphics reprint of the original comic strips..)
"Mere Anarchy" by Woody Allen
"Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar" by Dori Hadar
"Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock’n’roll’s last stand in Hollywood" by Domenic Priore
"Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl" by Steven Bach
"At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches" by Susan Sontag
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling
"Things I’ve Said, But Probably Shouldn’t Have" by Bruce Dern with Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane
"The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett

Also of note:
"Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" by Neal Gabler
"I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon" by Crystal Zevon
"Spook Country" by William Gibson
"Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector" by Mick Brown
"The Book of David" by David Steinberg
"Diaries 1969 – 1979: The Python Years" by Michael Palin
"Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life" by Steve Martin

... powers of ten

The lists keep coming. I admit that, being Extremely Old and Irrelevant, I don't keep track of new releases in music as much as I did back in the days when I was a Highly Desired Demographic with Flammable Money. But I was a bit perturbed last year at around this time to discover that all of the new recordings I had liked most in 2006 were by people who first stepped up to a microphone at least 30 and in some cases almost 60 years earlier. My favorite new recordings this year were not entirely as biased by old age, but I'm sure you'll still see a few signs of Creeping Historicism on the list.
In no particular order, with appropriate video links....:

Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible"
Bryan Ferry - "Dylanesque"
Jarvis Cocker - "Jarvis" (Bonus track here)
Amy Winehouse - "Back to Black"
Bruce Springsteen - "Magic"
Radiohead - "In Rainbows"
Bob Dylan "Modern Times"
Neil Young "Live at Massey Hall 1971"

And my favorite song of the year:



Coming up next: books of the year...

Counting to 10

I was recently asked by a local web publication to contribute a top ten list of my favorite films of the year and while I am always reluctant about these things, I complied. I was given specific instructions that it had to contain exactly ten items, no more, no less, and that they all had to be 2007 releases. I've bent the rule here to add two more titles, one of which I hadn't seen at the time I made the list. Here it is, with a few annotations.

Best of 2007
(roughly in order of preference, though once you get past the first 3 or 4, it gets blurry)

1. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)
2. Across the Universe (Julie Taymor)
3. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen)
4. Sicko (Michael Moore)
Everything else, in no logical order:
3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold)
The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz)
Romance and Cigarettes (John Turturro)
Hairspray (Adam Shankman)
Once (John Carney)
Zodiac (David Fincher)
The Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright)
The Landlord (Adam McKay)

Not a very good year in all, but far above the norm for musicals and westerns - and in the case of No. 1, both.
After much thought, I finally decided that I couldn't quite justify adding "Redacted" or "Helvetica" to the list. The former stays off because it's ultimately muddled, the latter because I suspect my fondness for it has more to do with my own font obsession that with the film itself.
Still haven't seen at least a few films that I'm told have a shot at a top ten list ("Sweeney Todd", "The Assassination of Jesse James", "Persepolis", the Joe Strummer documentary), but you have to draw the line somewhere...

Best DVD release: "Popeye the Sailor Volume One: 1933 - 1938" (Warner Home Video)

(I'll add a list of music and books later....)

In a Safe Place

The 2007 National Film Registry list has been announced by the Library of Congress:

• Back to the Future (1985)
• Bullitt (1968)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
• Dances With Wolves (1990)
• Days of Heaven (1978)
• Glimpse of the Garden (1957)
• Grand Hotel (1932)
• The House I Live In (1945)
• In a Lonely Place (1950)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
• Mighty Like a Moose (1926)
• The Naked City (1948)
• Now, Voyager (1942)
• Oklahoma! (1955)
• Our Day (1938)
• Peege (1972)
• The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928)
• The Strong Man (1926)
• Three Little Pigs (1933)
• Tol’able David (1921)
• Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71)
• 12 Angry Men (1957)
• The Women (1939)
• Wuthering Heights (1939)

You can find the complete press release here, and a list of all of their previous selections since 1989 here.

This is my happening...

...and it freaks me out.
For no particular reason, I found myself thinking of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" this morning. "BVD", as it's affectionately known to its fans, is one of those movies that hooks me every time, and now - in light of the more recent events in the life of Phil Spector - even seems creepily prescient. Roger Ebert may have a lot to answer for (I date the decline if film discussion and the rise of the blockbuster/Box-Office mentality from the day he and Gene Siskel turned criticism into the modern equivalent of the Roman coliseum, but that's another subject for another day) but he'll always have a special place in movie history for this melo-comedic gem. I've never met him - well, that's not exactly true, since I shared an elevator with him at the Rihga Royal in New York once. I regret not having thanked him for scenes like this:

The Birth of the Cool

...made in Japan? James Bowman, writing in The American, suggests that the kind of cool detachment we associate with Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade found its strongest cinematic depiction in the post-war films of Akira Kurosawa.

Theology, authority and bears

There have been a lot of articles about Philip Pullman in the last few weeks, due - obviously - to the release of The Golden Compass. And of course the rather silly objections calling on a boycott of the film because it might actually encourage children to read the books. This interview from "moreintelligentlife" is one of the best I've seen in a while.
My own feelings about the film are that despite the obvious elisions and compression in turning a complex book into a movie - and a movie intended to become a money-earning franchise, no less - , it's a visually stunning and exciting companion-piece to Pullman's extraordinary books, and if it does well enough to a) introduce new readers to His Dark Materials and b)get the next two films made I'll be very happy indeed.

You can watch the first five minutes and other clips from the film here.

Birdie Num Num

Thanks to Scopitones.com and Bedazzled for digging up this early short film directed by Robert Altman somewhere around 1964 or '65. Released as a Scopitone for the Herb Albert track "Bittersweet Samba", it's also known as The Party, and has quite a few points in common with the great Blake Edwards film of the same name.



A slightly better quality copy can be found here.

The Color of Money

Whether you call it a 10 minute commercial in the form of a tribute to Hitchcock, or a 10 minute tribute to Hitchcock in the form of a commercial for a Spanish wine company, this new short film by Martin Scorsese is a lightweight but amusing parody, not only of Hitchcock but of Scorsese himself. It's amusing if insubstantial, but redeemed by the final shot.

And while we're on the subject of world-class filmmakers selling upscale wares,here's
Wong Kar-Wai launching a new perfume from Dior (with Eva Green as Cinderella), a competing scent from Lancome (with Clive Owen) and a High Definition TV for Phillips, all released earlier this year. The Phillips spot is easily the best, a garishly colored Science-fiction/detective mini-epic with a nod to Godard's "Alphaville".
(Warning: The Dior and Phillips sites are both very slow-loading and pop-up heavy, so be prepared to wait a while...)
Busy guy, that WKW. In addition to the above and My Blueberry Nights (which is his first English language feature, now scheduled to hit US screens next February) he also directed Brad Pitt in an ad for a Japanese cell phone company - but it seems to have been eradicated from the internet completely!

Meanwhile, here's a PSA that I don't recall ever seeing before..

And as long as we're diving into the Youtube advertising pool, here's a blast from the past, Baz Luhrmann's Chanel ad with Nicole Kidman, from a few years back. Hard to believe that this is the only thing he's made since Moulin Rouge.

In memoriam: Norman Mailer

Check here for the NYT's large collection of articles by and about this great American writer

Words are pouring out like endless rain into a paper cup

The following was written not as a formal review but as a letter to a friend discussing Julie Taymor's Across the Universe. Rather than try to prod it into a more formal piece of criticism, I'm putting it up here as is...

"I don't know that I've seen anything this year that I've liked nearly as much as "Across the universe", but, as I mentioned earlier, I was originally skeptical. First of all, the trailer raised comparisons with Milos Forman's misguided 1979 version of "Hair", a movie that was either 10 years too late or 25 years too early. (There are a few similarities in the storylines - and it's not unrealistic to think that Taymor is probably familiar with a production or too)..
Secondly, when you think of some of the awful liberties that have been taken with the Beatles catalogue over the years, by literalists who think that they have to make a live-action version of "Yellow Submarine" (as in the Bee Gees "Sgt. pepper" and a very shortlived mid-70s Broadway disaster of the same name) or, even worse, reduce the songs to cliched background jingles for lots of kids in bad wigs and exaggerated fringe-y hippie clothes flashing peace signs and carrying on like a group of street mimes on laughing gas (see Milos Forman's "Hair"....)
I should add that there was also a 3rd thing that made be a little doubtful; I heard parts of the soundtrack and was put off by the working-class accents ("Close yer eyes and I'll kiss yer, tomorrow I'll miss yer"), the desperate, plaintive opening of "I Want to Hold Your Hand", the chamber-like arrangements - all things which turned out to work much more effectively in the film than I would ever have guessed.
With those serious doubts (slightly lessened by having watched "Frida" a few week ago . I still haven't seen "Titus", but it's been on my order list with the library for months...) I have to admit that I was won over by the film almost instantly, from the introduction of parallel narrative lines during "It Won't be long now". By the time of "All My Loving" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came around, it was clear that the film wasn't just a nostalgic trip through the Beatles repertoire and that the songs were going to be placed with the context of the characters, accents, plaintiveness and all.
Which is one of the first really original things about Taymor's approach. While the film is obviously very stunning visually, it's NOT just a string a music videos or, even more importantly, a series of isolated episodes designed to illustrate the songs (see again the Bee Gees movie, "All This And World War Two" etc...). . You have to buy into the characters' lives first - their accents, high school crushes, family issues, etc... . The songs - and this is especially tricky, given their familiarity and frequent ventures into surrealism - have to make the movies emotional points work too or else they'll stop the story dead still...
Which is not to say that the film isn't also about the Beatles or ignores the fact that just about every song in it has its own substantial legacy - artistically, culturally, historically. But one of the most brilliant things that Taymor does is to consider all of those factors as a kind of collective unconscious, a shared backstory that the audience has with the characters. I cringed at first when I realized that the characters all had names derived from Beatles' songs (Max, Lucy, Prudence, Sadie, etc..) thinking that this would be another example of the dead literal-mindedness of the BeeGees film (Of course, "Yellow Submarine" does a little of the same thing with puns, etc...but gets away with it ), but because Taymor understands or assumes our familiarity, she doesn't have to be so bone-crushingly obvious. In fact, she doesn't even actually have to include "Sexy Sadie" or "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" or "She Came In through the Bathroom Window" for the audience to register those songs.
Let me digress for a minute: Several years ago there was an absolutely awful movie based on "The Mod Squad", arguably one of the worst movies of the last 10 or 15 years. At the end of the film, when the heroes are sitting around without much to do, one of the cops walks up to them and says "What do you guys think you are, some kind of "Mod Squad"?" It's a weird cultural reference point, because the cop and the audience know what the characters themselves don't; In a sense, they're the only people in the universe that have never heard of "The Mod Squad".
You might think that "Across the Universe" might have that same kind of problem. how do you put your characters into some kind of archetypal "1960s" world in which they've never heard of the Beatles or those songs? But you don't get that sense of absence in the film. Rather, it's a kind of alternate 1960s in which the recognizable songs become a kind of ethereal vapor running through their lives and through the universe itself. It doesn't matter that we have "Let It Be" being song in 1964 or 65, 5 years before it was written. The film operates in a realm where memory reconstructs history.
Which brings me to a final clever thing that the film does really well. Yes, it's about the "1960s" with all the pertaining cultural baggage that entails. But it references the key points of the period - civil rights, Vietnam, the Columbia uprising, the Weathermen,etc. - in a very clever way that avoids banality and nostalgia or the kind of superficiality that many accuse "Forest Gump" of using in its approach to history. Taymor does a very shrewd thing in relying on the viewers interest/boredom/awareness/ in that era by making it alive yet almost secondary to the characters and their lives. Thus, we have these familiar events but played on a different scale. A Hendrix figure who is obviously not Hendrix, referencing the idea of Hendrix without resorting to a banal roman-a-clef approach. The Bono figure, who is Tim Leary and Ken Kesey and yet not really either of them. The famous "Let It Be" rooftop concert, used in a completely new context, yet not really having to carry any of the historical weight of the actual event... (No band breaking apart, no Yoko), This too is a refreshing approach to the history, a sense not of name-checking the events and names of the period but of trying to address the emotional issue of what it was like to live through such things.
Funny that you should mention favoring the "Come Together" and "I Want You" sequences, arguably the most surreal in the film. I think my reaction was a little different. And despite the appearances of Joe Cocker, Eddie Izzard and Bono, I don't think the film gives the sense of dropping-in-famous-guest-stars-to-keep-the-audience-busy (a la "Tommy" or "Sgt. Pepper"). I think I was more drawn in by the principals and their stories, the way their lives were never shoved aside by the spectacle or the music. That's why in the middle of all of the more fantastic elements it's still a nice surprise when Prudence reappears, Sadie resolves her problems or Lucy turns up across the rooftop at the end. The movie gets to the heart of how music (and especially this music) and emotion and intense cultural events change the way people think and behave.
Yes, I'm rambling on pretentiously, but this film grabbed me straight in the heart in a big way, not just once but probably with about every other song. I react emotionally to musicals (and children's movies) but this was more than the usual response, which can probably be defined as how-can-anything-be-so-perfect? (as Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds getting together or Pinocchio coming back to life)? There's that too, of course, but I think that what "Across the Universe" touches is that magical and elusive sense of possibility that is so well defined by the Beatles' music and their cultural significance. yes, it's easy to dismiss "All You Need Is Love" as a corny statement, but when you hear those odd harmonies and irregular time signatures and daft counterpoints, it's just as easy to wish that it was some sort of organized movement because , damned if you're not ready to sign up. "Nothing's gonna change my world"? Hardly.

Okay. I'm all pontificated out."

Hard-boiled

James Ellroy on Dashiell Hammett.

Wim Wenders on Sam Fuller.