Lenny Bruce Without Tears

So many people know Lenny Bruce only through his reputation as St. Lenny, the martyr of free speech, the victim of his own drug habit as well as of moralistic prosecuting attorneys, that it’s easy to lose sight of one of the most important things about him: he was a very funny guy. Copping a feel from the zeitgeist at exactly the moment when the Eisenhower 50s turned into the swinging Kennedy 60s, Bruce found his voice after more than a decade floundering in strip clubs and promoting ill-conceived movie projects. Suddenly his almost childlike fascination with the world – a world in which the maneuverings of presidents and popes seemed as fanciful as that revealed on “The Late, Late Show” (the used car ads as well as the old movies).
Suddenly Lenny was swinging on the mike, creating elaborate bits in which high-placed religious figures and mythic heroes like the Lone Ranger opened up to reveal their human side, their petty neuroses and their secret desires. Listen to Lenny’s album with classic sketches like “Religions, Inc.”, “Thank You Masked Man”, or “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties” and you’ll find a gifted comedian, a hipster showman just on the cusp of genius, happily riffing on his own imagination and allowing the audience to come along for the ride.
And then on October 3, 1961, everything changed. Lenny got busted for obscenity in San Francisco. While the complaint mentioned several portions of his act, the most damaging part of it was a ten letter word, a reference to a sexual practice described in court as “related to homosexuals” but now so common a part of contemporary parlance that you can hear it on tv sitcoms or read about it in government reports.
The arrest, the first of many, changed Lenny. He made bail in time for his 1 a.m. performance, where he closed with a line that would come to define the rest of his career. “I’m sorry if I’m not very funny tonight” he apologized to the audience, “but I’m not a comedian, I’m Lenny Bruce.”
After that moment, Lenny’s performances changed from nightclub shtick to a more personal combination of soul-baring and free association. At his best, as with the Curran Theatre and Carnegie Hall concerts (both available on cd), he was funnier than ever, but more inclined toward improvising meditations on his legal problems than to deliver the popular routines from his records. (Later, of course, he would become obsessed with is legal problems and his live appearances became rambling arguments about legal minutiae. )
(Bruce’s troubles with the law are given an excellent interpretation through the perspective of subsequent obscenity cases in the recent book “The Trials of Lenny Bruce”, which also includes a CD with pertinent excerpts from his act.)
Fred Baker’s Lenny Bruce Without Tears, just released on DVD by First Run Features, isn’t the most thorough account of Bruce’s life, but for Bruce aficionados it shows the comedian at a rare moment in his career, making the rounds of tv shows designed to validate a hip audience, playing the showbiz game but pushing the boundaries and reveling in his new status as “obscene”. (Baker, a friend of the comedian, was the director of the underground hit Events and a veteran of tv jazz performances. He made his tribute to Bruce hoping to sell it to PBS.) Taken largely from Bruce’s appearances on television, it offers a slightly sanitized view of the comedian, clearly enjoying his new notoriety but recognizing that the “Sick comic” label is a way of getting attention but is not without its drawbacks. Bruce fans won’t want to miss this though they won’t be able to help noticing that it stows only one side of the comedian as he tempers his act for the sake of reaching a wider audience, talking about “how I became obscene” but safely avoiding the blunt honesties that made him a legend as well as a felon.
That said, Lenny Bruce Without Tears pays tribute to Lenny’s short and tumultuous life, but it’s best appreciated by those who already know the man and his work. It’s respectful and maybe even a touch too reverent, but it’s no substitute for the real, raw thing. It’s worth a look, but`check out a few of Bruce’s recordings first and get a taste of the real thing.

By way of introduction (a few months late)...

For those of you loyal observers out there (Hi, mom!) who are wondering just what this is all about, I've decided to make some changes to this blog. First of all, I've decided to make it more personal and subjective, less of a series of links to other articles and more of an account of my own impressions on the cultural landscape. This is not to say that it will be an intimate diary, a confessional, a cry for help or a collection of pictures of my cats. There are other places for that sort of thing, and in all honesty, I am too private (some would even say secretive) a person to comfortably reveal much of myself. Also, I tend to side with Fran Leibowitz' statement that "spilling your guts is as attractive as it sounds."
(In the interest of full disclosure, my mother doesn't actually read this blog.)
I’ve been writing about movies (and occasionally other things) for almost twenty-five years, teaching film studies for a little over fifteen years and for a variety of reasons have come to a point where I am no longer interested in practicing the kind of publicity/gossip/dollar-watching that passes as critical commentary in most places these days. I’d rather just make my observations in this informal capacity and make them available to anyone who passes by.
So while I’m dropping the pretense that this is anything other than a reflection of my own interests (unless anyone else wants to contribute), it will still be primarily about movies, books, music and the arts - or any other items from the world of ideas that seem worth noting.
What else does this mean? More frequent posts, more reviews and a more consistent presence...once I get a few technical issues worked out.
A few other things:
Why the Amazon links? Well, why not? I assume that if you’re interested in reading about a particular subject – say, the DVD of L’Age d’Or, you’ve probably had the idea of buying a copy cross your mind anyway, so why not hit one of the links I provide and let Jeff Bezos throw a few pennies in my direction? The idea that this blog could be self-sufficient – in theory – amuses me, but I promise not to abuse it.
Perhaps you stumbled across this blog through a search or you saw my reference to it in the signature line of an e-mail. If you are actually out there looking at this (and I’m by no means certain that a single soul on this planet has ever read a word on this page), send me a comment. If you’re a blogger, let me know and I’ll post a link to your site over on the left.

Straight Shooting
Orson Welles reportedly said that The Outlaw Josey Wales would have been recognised as a great film "if the director's name wasn't Eastwood". It's hard to believe that nearly thirty years and a few dozen great films later, there are still commentators would roll their eyes at the idea that Clint Eastwood is a filmmaker to be taken seriously. Fortunately, this group obviously doesn't include his peers; The Director's Guild gave him a well-deserved recognition as Best Director for Million Dollar Baby a few days ago. If you haven't seen Eastwood's latest film yet, do so immediately. But prepare to be left shaken by a film that makes even the bleak atmosphere of Mystic River seem like a day at the beach.
Eastwood is one of the last masters of a classical mise-en-scene, a director who doesn't put a single thing into a shot unless he means it. His films are lean and exact, and while he's not above reaching for a shpwy effect, he's not likely to draw attention to it; no flashy 360-degree turns or MTV editing here. He's also good at getting his actors to underplay, finding meaning in their pauses and silent moments rather than reaching for emotional crescendos: Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman and Eastwood himself have rarely been as good as they are in Million Dollar Baby.
And that's all that I really need to say about it. I'm not much of a fan of the current need to shout about "spoilers", but I'll reverse my position and simply state that Million Dollar Baby is a devestating, heartbreakingly poignant story about human beings pushed to emotional and ethical limits. If you haven't seen it, do so - but be prepared.
Then read Amy Taubin's interview with the director over at the "Film Comment" site.

They had faces then....
The good folks at Milestone Film and Video have just announced their plans to release Beyond the Rocks, a 1922 film, long believed to be lost and starring Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson at the height of their respective careers. The announcement isn't on Milestone's site yet, but should be soon.... Go on and take a look at their other fine selections anyway...

Realism is the new experimentalism....
Digital video may have created a monster (or a few hundred, plus the whole gamut of robots, dinosaurs, hobbits and super-heroes) but it's given new aesthetic life to the "redemption of physical reality" theorised by Andre Bazin and others.
CTheory offers an interesting perspective from Nicholas Rombes...

An earlier but still interesting piece on Bazin as part of Sight and Sound's "Innovators" series appears here...

Lots of miscellaneous cultural news coming in from every direction...
Don Quixote turns 400!
Terry Jones turns political,
and Picasso and Warhol fight for title of King of the Art World... (You can read about it here in the New York Times - until they archive it away - or check out the rankings here.)

How Arnold Won the West : Pumping Irony

In the summer of 2003, the world witnessed an unprecedented media spectacle when fading movie superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for Governor of California. The announcement – like everything else about the campaign – was aimed not at the electorate of California, where an obscure law allowing the recall of a previous election was being manipulated by a wealthy Republican congressman to overturn the results of Governor Gray Davis’ re-election, but at the entire world; suitably, it took place on “The Tonight Show”, whose host, Jay Leno, would later appear at Arnold’s victory party.
Schwarzenegger’s campaign was a made-for-tv event and the media cameras turned their heads and drooled in response. Alex Cooke’s documentary “How Arnold Won the West”, which comes out on video on January 25th, is a part of that Pavlovian reaction, even as it tries to maintain a tongue-clicking disapproval of the absurdities of the recall. Shot with that eye-rolling “you won’t believe what those Americans are up to now” tone that only British journalists can master, the film documents a bizarre interlude in American politics but only hints at its real meaning.
The recall was an open door to marginal candidates and anyone who could come up with the necessary fee was an authentic candidate, - including some who campaigned solely to point out the ludicrousness of the election. The 135 recognized candidates became part of the show – in fact they even had their own show, a quickly devised competition on the Game Show Network – and while Cooke seems to look down at the spectacle, her film gives far more time to publicity seekers like former child star Gary Coleman and porno actress Mary Carey than to Arianna Huffington or Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamente, the challengers who posed a legitimate threat to Schwarzenegger’s ambitions. Though the film derides the media circus, it can’t help standing in the sidelines and gawking.
And who could? Part of the genius of Schwarzenegger’s success was that he and his handlers clearly knew how ridiculous the spectacle was, even while pretending to keep a straight face. Even the media efforts to ridicule the movie star’s past was hijacked by the campaign, who seized upon making puns using the titles of his own films before the headline writers got a chance..(The obvious title for the entire election?: “Total Recall”)
Though many would like to look at Schwarzenegger’s election as the kind of aberration that could only happen in California, “How Arnold Won the West” raises two issues that will be of increasing importance in politics over the next few years, neither of which speak well of the future of democracy. The first is the tendency to use political clout or plain old buying power to overturn election results, whether through the long quest to find some reason to impeach President Clinton, the play of an almost unknown law to unseat Gray Davis (if Cooke’s film has a villain, it’s clearly the smarmy Darrell Issa, the congressman who financed the recall motion to further his own career, only to have his plan hijacked by the Terminator) or the ever-growing battles over how votes are counted and delivered. The second is that argument over the media “packaging” of politics, a favorite for pundits ever since Nixon sweated his way to defeat in 1960, is over and the answer isn’t a pretty one. The secret of Schwarzenegger’s success lies within the circus it generated. He knew it all along and kept stirring it up even while pretending to stay above it. While reporters and other candidates remained stirring about in the dirt of ordinary political concerns, Arnold looked high over their heads, directly into the tv cameras, and dominated the moment. He deflected debates, ignored questions, and skillfully turned potential scandals into talking points, all the while giving a pretty good performance as a man too busy campaigning to address his critics. It was a campaign designed to stir emotions and ignore issues. As we continue in a political climate where a presidential administration can dismiss its critics as “reality based”, don’t think that the lessons of Schwarzenegger’s success are being ignored.

Another day, another censorship squabble
Last weekend innocent television audiences in England were subjected to a live broadcast of ... an opera! (Gasp!) But not just any opera. It was Jerry Springer: The Opera, a musical version of the once controversial and now merely desperate talk show. Though the performance drew only slightly more viewers than the average televised opera, the BBC received thousands of complaints, mostly of the organised click-here-to-wail-and-moan variety. How offended were right-thinking Britons by the programme, which featured, among other things, a liberal use of the F-word and a Jesus impersonator? Well, since most of them sent their complaints before the program aired, it's hard to say. But the estimable Timothy Garton Ash - not a likely Springer guest - offers a common-sense endorsement of sorts and says that a society needs to be shocked every once in a while. Read it here.

The Mystery of Luis Bunuel
Dead for two decades, still missing

I'm sure that many people have been in a Bunuelian mood lately due to the welcome DVD releases last month of Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or. To add to the surreal mood, this story from the Guardian adds a twist that the master himself could have created.

Susan Sontag

"Because this country's so anti-intellectual, I want to be perverse and say proudly 'I'm an intellectual'. There are these words that everyone professes to be superior to. One word is 'intellectual' and the other is 'feminist'. Because these words are not fashionable, I want to say 'Yes, I'm an intellectual. I'm a feminist.' I don't want to be superior to those categories."

As you probably already know, Susan Sontag, one of the most significant intellectual figures of the last fifty years, died this week. Tributes are appearing in many places, such as Christopher Hitchen's in Slate and this 2001 interview in Salon. The New York Times has a special section, including links to many reviews, interviews and articles they've published over the years, though there's no guarantee as to how long it will be available. Of special interest, if you haven't read them before, are her misunderstood essay on cinephilia, "http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/books/booksspecial/sontag-cinema.html?ex=1104469200&en=1228ced8d1fa3403&ei=5070", and a brilliant look at last spring's torture stories, "Regarding the Torture of Others".

I was fortunate enough to interview Sontag about twenty years ago when she came to town for a reading as the guest of a local literary group. The publicist went out of her way to make arrangements for me - even calling one of the local daily papers and getting them to accept my story when Sontag told her that she would only do interviews for the area's major publications. (I was writing for a small, unknown weekly at the time.) There was always the threat of cancellation, and when I arrived at the hotel I overheard some of the staff talking about how irritable Sontag had been when she arrived. An earlier interview with a reporter who was clearly unfamiliar with Sontag's work had evidently went badly. But when I got to her room, she proved to be gracious, friendly and generous with her time and her opinions. In fact, the final interview is still one of my favorites from my not-so-spectacular career as a free-lance semi-journalist.

(The quote at the top of this entry is from that afternoon. The paper that originally printed it has been out of business for over fifteen years, so I could probably reprint it if I wanted. Perhaps I'll add some more excerpts later.)

Godard speaks...Spongebob squeaks

The New York Times features a brief interview with Jean-Luc Godard about his new film Notre Musique.

I'll be posting a review soon, but in the meantime, here's one of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.

Don't let a word of this slip out to the advertising business!
Amazon.com has launched a something called Amazon Theatre, with the assistance of director Tony Scott (though if you look at the list of filmmakers, it may that the whole thing is just a way for Scott to get his kids out of the house....). Apprently, they've come up with a novel idea of using short films to sell things. Isn't that clever?

This just in... Special Sunday Times edition:

A long time ago my Sunday morning ritual was the same as that of many others: spending hours going over the New York Times. Then I moved to a different neighborhood and when I asked about changing my subscription, the good folks at the NYT acted like I was crazy. "You don't think we deliver there, do you?" "Besides", they pointed out, "you can subscribe to our on-line edition." Well, yes, but I can also read it for free. Yeah, I know it's not quite the same as having the real, 17-pound thing on the table but it still brings us news like this:

Pee-Wee strikes back!! (...and while you're at it, check out Pee-Wee's own website...)

DVD killed the straight-to-video star...
Will Dolph Lundgren have to return to his real love, the theatre?

The Polar Express: The Last Temptation of Santa?
Near the end of The Polar Express, when the film is starting to get dangerously close to the sentimentality and false nostalgia that inevitably enters even the best Christmastime movies, the young hero finally sees Santa Claus. (Yes, when he gets to the North Pole he meets Santa Claus; if you are shocked by this or consider it a "spoiler", deal with it.) Having already made much of the need to "believe", director Robert Zemeckis seems to be pushing the religious allusions a bit heavily by making a glowing bearded Santa who almost resembles Max Von Sydow's Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. As the hero looks up in awe, the screen turned white...What the hey? An animated Christmas dropping a nod to The Last Temptation of Christ?
As it turned out, the film really had broken, not from the mystical force of Santa's appearance but from an overloaded platter in the projection booth. That amazingly coincidental interruption aside, The Polar Express is a fast-moving and frequently amazing film, perhaps the most ambitious CGI feature to date. I was skeptical that Chris Van Allsburg's slim book (32 pages, half of which are illustrations) could be turned into a feature-length film without a lot of unnecessary dead weight added but Zemeckis major invention, turning the train voyage into a series of action-filled setpieces, makes sense. The quasi-realistic style, is a little unsettling at first, but corresponds to the rich texture of Van Allsburgs' own excellent artwork and eventually gives the characters more human-like dimensions than usual for an animated film. Another addition, a hobo who dispatches advice from above the train, is equally well-placed.
So despite getting a bit carried away with Christmas nostalgia (Why does this holiday make filmmakers think that the entire world is a suburban village landscaped by Norman Rockwell? And what is it about Christmas that makes the hero of almost every seasonal movie or tv special worry that he's celebrating it incorrectly?) The Polar Express is an impressive visual adventure, modeled,like many other fantasies, on a theme park ride but also giving the non-stop ride a sense of spiritual meaning. (There are many moments that recall the consderably slower but no less loaded ride of a floating feather in an earlier Zemeckis film...)
Fans of Van Allburg's book will be relieved: The Polar Express complements its source beautifully, (and considerably more gracefully than an earlier Van Allsburg adaptation Jumanji)but won't displace it on the shelves of childrens literature. But if there are any producers out there holding on to options on Goodnight Moon or Pat the Bunny, don't expect to be so lucky.

Weekend roundup: Borges, Pullman, Rivette, Antonioni

"The root of the matter...is that theocracies don't know how to read, and democracies do." Philip Pullman writes about The War on Words (will it ever end?) in the Guardian. It's an extract from the current issue of Index on Censorship.

The latest issue of Rouge is online with articles about Hitchcock, Antonioni, Rivette, Bob Dylan and the other John Hughes.

David Foster Wallace reviews a new biography of Borges, and doesn't like the idea of using speculation about an author's personal life to interpret his works. Or maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, he also wants you to see that he's persuaded the New York Times to allow footnotes.

Duck! Cover! Rinse! Repeat!
Conelrad, comic strips and Henry James...

This is only a test: In one of those how-did-I-end-up-at-this-site moments, I ran across Conelrad, a great tribute to the wonderful world of nuclear hysteria and the Emergency Broadcast System. You could spend hours here. Check out the sound clips and the revelation of Mia Farrow's past as a "Duck and Cover" child.

Meanwhile, if you can get over the annoyance of its name, something called Indy Magazine has prepared a special issue on comics and politics. I'll forgive the (tr)indy name as long as they continue to publish stuff like this:

Art Spiegelman on his Towers !

an interview with Jules Feiffer !

Henry James on Honore Daumier !

The Incredibles:Living up to its name...
With all of the disgust and loathing dredged up by this week's political events, I forgot about reviewing The Incredibles. The memory of Monday night's screening had been almost completely wiped out by Tuesday night's disaster. Which is a shame, since The Incredibles is a witty, imaginative film. It's not as gag-loaded as Shrek or Shark Tale, as ready to wink at the audience for getting it. It's not sentimental like Monsters, Inc. And all of these things work to its advantage, even though at times the reworked evil-villain-with-jungle-island-hideout plot of its final actlooked so familiar that I though someone must have stolen storyboards for Thunderbirds. In spite of it all, The Incredibles makes a relatively familiar idea (superheroes who live mundane lives) actually work as both an action movie and a character piece.
It certainly helps that it's the work of a single writer and director, Brad Bird (who also directed The Iron Giant). While the Dreamworks animated features often seem like the work of a committee - and a committee that's more concerned poking the audience in the ribs while slipping in as much product placement as possible, The Incredibles, like Bird's previous feature, sticks to a strong narrative path, filmed in a style that toys with an ersatz nostalgic style (50s/60s suburbia) without deriding it. Yes, it's colorful and fun to watch, but the heart of the premise - that a superhero forced into retirement simply loves his job saving the world too much to ever really give it up -is brought to life more by Bird's writing and the fine vocal performances of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter and Samuel L. Jackson. Sure, it's stunning (this is a Pixar film, after all, ) but it's also smart and believable.
The Incredibles isn't a masterpiece on the level of the Toy Story films, but it's a strong piece of animated work from a filmmaker with a distinctive voice. I won't go so far as to say that it offers an escape from the ghastly political news - or even suggest that we need a hero in this ugly time. See it for its own merits and let your judgment remain unsullied by the current political state.

Finally, a movie so good
...that you'll want to throw it away!

Why are is at least a small portion of the film industry so determined to convince its customers that movies are disposable? Yes, most movies are just that, subject to Sturgeon's Law, but now we have a company that takes the idea of a disposable movie literally. In fact, they're not just disposable - they're recylable!
In the next few weeks, a Christmas drama called Noel, directed by Chazz Palminteri and featuring Susan Sarandon and Penelope Cruz, will open for a theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles. On November 28th, it will be aired on Turner Network Television.
But starting November 17th, you can pick up a DVD of Noel from Amazon - exclusively- for only $4.99. Here's the catch. The film is being released in a format called Flexplay (previously tested on a handful of Disney and Miramax titles as EZ-D)which offers, according to the packaging "total convenience!". Which means that even though the film is, according to the package, "sure to become a holiday classic", they're also pretty sure you won't be thinking too much about it later. 48 hours after you unwrap the disc, a red circle in the center will turn black, telling you that the disc has "expired".
This is not the first time that the film industry has played around with the idea of movies that self-destruct - and I doubt that it will be any more successful than previous attempts - but it seems more blatant and misguided than most. If movies are no more than an impulse item, purchased at the same cost as a rental and easily discarded, then they should be placing these in supermarkets, not exclusively at Amazon. And why would Disney, of all companies - a company which was forced kicking and screaming into the home video market but has probably benefited from it more than anyone - be marketing time-sensitive copies of movies like Freaky Friday and Pirates of the Caribbean at the same time that they've made point-of-purchase the most lively part of the distribution chain?
Okay, I'm probably carrying on needlessly. Flexplay will probably go onto the technological scrapheap within a year. It's a stupid, bad idea. But why do dumb ideas like this keep coming back?

Cinema Scope is finally online.!

Arguably the most ambitious if not the best film magazine in North America, the Canadian Cinema Scope finally has a website. Go there immediately.

Thanks to the also irreplacable GreenCine Daily for bringing this to my attention.
Now if someone would convince CineAction to get in on the action.....

Keaton: Finding the joke in reality

The Times Literary Supplement offers Muriel Zagha's review of a new biography of Buster Keaton, though it looks like there's not a scheduled US publication date yet.
(But look below: Tom Dardis' excellent biography and Keaton's own autobiography are still available and well worth your attention...)