"Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot"

My review of Batman Begins can be found here, though the link will probably only work for the next week or so...

Pre-montage scribbles

Though he's best known - and deservingly so - for splitting cinematic hairs as the leading theorist of montage-based cinema, Sergei Eisenstein was also an enthusiastic artist and cartoonist, as this new website launched by the Daniel Langlois Foundation demonstrates. It's a very flashy display of cartoon-filled notebooks kept by young Sergei as a teenager, long before he ever dreamed of dialectical materialism and the montage of attractions.

We're at a place called Vertigo...
There is a moment that many rock performers have reached, the perilous point just after they have been named The Big New Thing . For many, the next step is a disastrous one, the stage where they Believe Everything That Is Written About Them, and the list of BNTs who crashed on its rocks is a long one. In fact, it’s not even necessary to fall for your own press releases; Simply having the public think that you do is sufficient.
The members of U2 have, almost miraculously, avoided such a disaster, though there was a time (somewhere around Rattle and Hum and through the early 90s) when it looked otherwise. Their response to the tightrope-walk set up by their own success has been to stay hungry, to continue producing new and original music of the caliber of 2000’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” or last year’s “How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”. Is there another act old enough to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but still functioning as a significant contemporary act rather than cruising through tours on the strength of their greatest hits? A few – Springsteen, Prince - but there aren’t too many other names from the early 80s hat haven’t already walked the slow crawl from MTV to VH1 and on to “classic rock” oblivion.
Having said that, I’m sure there are plenty of cynical folks who resent U2’s success and find it easy to denigrate Bono’s image as a globe-hopping do-gooder. Needless to say, the new book “Bono, in conversation with Michka Assayas” is not going to appeal to them. For fans and those interested in the singer’s increasingly significant role as a diplomat, this lengthy interview provides many answers as to how the band has survived for so long as well as well as to the sincerity of his work for debt relief in Africa. Assayas, a French journalist, knew the band in their early days but had just renewed his acquaintance with them after a long absence when he decided to approach Bono with the idea of collaborating on a book.
The project must have grown in ways that Assayas didn’t expect. It’s not the “life story” of the singer, despite the claims of the jacket, nor is it particularly strong on celebrity gossip or sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll anecdotes, yet neither of those absences prevent the book from being an intelligent and illuminating portrait of a thoughtful and innovative artist.
What seems to take Assayas by surprise, and what ultimately comes through as the book’s strongest theme, is the sincerity and the informed nature of Bono’s commitment to African relief. By the final chapters, when every conversation seems to somehow lead into Africa, the interviewer seems just a little frustrated and tries to poke holes in Bono’s idealism, but the singer usually manages to provide commonsense answers to every one of Assayas’ doubts. Make fun of him, call him “St. Bono” if you will, but the man has done his homework and isn’t just signing on to a celebrity-cause-of-the-day. What ultimately surfaces from Assayas’ book is the portrait of a serious and sensible man who has achieved fame as a rock star but has used the privileges his musical career has provided to ask hard questions about the economic realities of the world.
If you’re already U2 fan, Assayas’ book is a useful guide to understanding some of the directions that the band follows. If you’re not necessarily interested in U2, you should at least take a look at some of the relief projects Bono has sponsored and see if they’re deserving of your support.
Check out DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa)
And
The One campaign..

Salman Rushdie on atheism.

Here's a short and simple note on the "intelligent design" controversy from Salman Rushdie, someone who know his share about facing down the forces of fundamentalism.....

Loving the Alien: The Very High Notes of Klaus Nomi

The first time I saw Klaus Nomi perform was in the 1981 punk/new wave concert anthology Urgh! A Music War where his unusual collage of styles – electronic space opera with a touch of Cabaret ( I remember being reminded of some of the Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine as well)– stood out even among the self-consciously trend setting New Wavers. That one brief appearance wasn’t enough to make it clear if Nomi was a put-on or a genuine avant-garde crossover, but a great new documentary The Nomi Song (now in theatres and coming to DVD on June 14th) makes an indisputable case for the latter. Andrew Horn’s excellent account of Nomi’s brief career (he died of AIDS in 1983) on the fringe of art/pop tells the story of a lonely, slightly eccentric young German man with a distinctive falsetto voice and a love for opera who came to New York, fell in with the punk crowd and grew into an unusual and unclassifiable performer of highly theatrical operatic techno-pop. Of course, the pop music industry rests on its ability to pigeonhole performers, so Nomi remained a minor figure for most of his brief life, his widest public exposure being a guest slot as back-up singer for David Bowie on “Saturday Night Live”. With personal recollections from his band members and friends and a generous assortment of musical performances, The Nomi Song suggests that his work deserves reassessment, but also offers a strong look at the art-meets-punk cultural landscape of the early 80s.

This group deserves your support and encouragement.
Film Aid International is an organization which helps people around the world by using movies, first by presenting educational films to help people deal with health issues and other concerns, secondly by providing film screenings to entertain the millions of people currently living in refugee camps and recovering from the effects of war, poverty, starvation and disease. Sounds like a simple idea? Yes, and a brilliant one.
On July 3rd Turner Classic Movies will use their annual screening of The Wizard of Oz to draw attention to their work of Film Aid International, with the organization’s founder Caroline Baron introducing two showings of the film. This is a great opportunity to draw attention to their work and to remind the audience for this much-loved film of the power of cinema to make the world a better place. Don’t miss it. And in the meantime, check out their website and consider making a donation.
(The website also features a link to a Sarah MacLachlan video called "World on Fire". Even if you're not a fan of MacLachlan, this short piece makes a powerful comment on charity by comparing the budgets of charitable organizations like Film Aid to the production costs of a typical music video.)

As far as I can tell there are no nice round-numbered anniversaries at play here, and the man's still living, so evidently the editors of Bookforum decided to pay tribute to America's best living reclusive author just for the hell of it. (The print issue feature of cover photograph of Professor Irwin Corey, of course. )
The whole thing is well worth your time, but the real highlight, and the centerpiece of the whole issue, is Gerald Howard's account of the publishing history of "Gravity's Rainbow", written from the perspective of a professional editor. There's much to enjoy here, though not in the way of gossip or candid photos.
But is Pynchon really all that reclusive? I sometimes suspect that the Salingeresque reputation is exaggerated: Just because you don't show up on "Entertainment Tonight" doesn't make you a hermit. Given recent reports - there were even rumors of a book tour to promote "Mason & Dixon' - I'd like to think that Pynchon has developed a sense of humor about his so-called reclusiveness after all these years. If he ever decides to drop his vow of no-publicity, I hope he bypasses the usual talk shows and makes his first public appearance on "The Simpsons".

List-o-mania!

If anyone's interested, you can find my review of The Longest Yard here.(They use frames, so you'll have to look around for it...)
My interview with documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles won't be hitting print until next Friday, but due to a misunderstanding of some sort, it's already online here and here.
Meanwhile, lists of the "greatest films of all time" have made a sudden resurgence.I suppose it was about time. It's been ten years since the American Film Institute released their all too predictable list of the "100 Greatest American Films", so Time Magazine's Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel have stepped in with their choices here. I respect both Corliss and Schickel, but, as they more or less admit, list-making is just a parlor game.
The New York Times, not to be outdone, has come up with their own list, only ten times as long, here.
Yes, I could quibble about the fact that their list of 100 titles doesn't duplicate my hypothetical list of 100 titles, but that, as Corliss and Schickel argue, is part of the appeal. So all I can really say is that if you're the sort of person who enjoys this kind of thing, then this is the kind of thing you will enjoy.

A great disturbance in the Force...

No, I haven't seen Revenge of the Sith yet, though I imagine that I'll get around to it eventually. (Actually, I haven't seen Attack of the Clones either; I tried watching it on tv about a year ago but found it unbearable.) But in keeping with the spirit of every other media source, here are a few Star Wars items online worth the wasting a minute or two:

First, there's Store Wars. Yes, I know there's really nothing here that wasn't done over twenty-five years ago by Hardware Wars, but I laughed anyway. Especially at the organic version of R2-D2.
(Hardware Wars isn't online, but you can see an excerpt here.)

Meanwhile, the folks at MoveOn have created a fairly good Star Wars parody of their own to challenge the current Senate showdown.

And then there's the new collection of Star Wars toys at Burger King. Check out the demos at their website, especially the spitting Jabba the Hutt, the wind-up Han Solo and - this one really shouldn't be missed - the Princess Leia Image Viewer.

A few changes to my network may make it possible for me to post more often - okay, I don't believe it either, but humor me, okay?. Anyway, you can find my recent reviews of Days of Being Wild and Mondovino here at Playback, but you'll have to look around for them. I'll have a few more links to some other recent pieces soon.

We love Ted!
A shameless plug:
Hey, I don't care what Jane Fonda or the folks at the WWE say about him; Ted Turner is on our permanent list of all-time media good guys. Oh, I know he can say crazy things and threaten to apply crayons to every old movie in his library, but he just does that because he likes the way it makes your face turn all purple. In his heart of hearts, Billionaire Ted is a genuine hero. Why? Because no matter what else he may have done in his life, he brought us Turner Classic Movies, the classiest act on cable.
While the once-praised "American Movie Classics" has become so unwatchable that it's not even worth bothering to check its listing, TCM sticks to its artistic guns and exceeds expectations time and time again.
The evidence:
Tomorrow's five-film tribute to Jean Renoir;
A four part "Star of the Month" feast of Orson Welles films in May, including screenings not only of the obvious Kane and Touch of Evil, but also of The Immortal Story, Mr. Arkadin, F For Fake and Othello;
and a Cinco de Mayo salute to Luis Bunuel featuring Los Olvidados, Nazarin, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert.

"Do you know anything about a guy going around playing the harmonica? He's someone you'd remember. Instead of talking, he plays. And when he better play, he talks..."

I don't know about you, but my Sergio Leone obsession hasn't brought me anything but a stack of Ennio Morricone albums and a wish that I could find a nice long duster. Lucky Christopher Frayling got a knighthood for his... The Independent talks to the man who wrote the definitive book of Spaghetti Westerns.

Rescuing Ryan

In the early 70s, Ryan Larkin's animated short films like "Walking" and "Street Musique" were heralded as small masterpieces of personal expression, lively free-style displays of movement and color that gave the impression of an impressionist's sketches brought to life. Thirty years later, Larkin's successes have largely been forgotten and he's been reduced to living on hand-outs. In this year's Academy Award winning Ryan, Chris Landreth uses a very different style - imagine an animated version of Cronenberg's Naked Lunch - to tell the chilling story of Larkin's fall from grace. The Guardian tracks the animator down and suggests that Ryan may have been just the boost his dormant career needed.

(Ryan was viewable online earlier this year but seems to have disappeared. If anyone knows where to find it, let me know...)

"If... my films are in contradiction with the age I live in, it's perhaps in the sympathy I have for anybody who must struggle to enter a world from which he's been excluded."
Though he's been dead for more than two decades, Francois Truffaut's films are as fresh as anything you'll see released in theatres this year. Gilbert Adair offers a brief assessment in the Guardian.

Capsules: Facing/Faking Reality with Herzog and Nessie
Call it the aftershock of The Blair Witch Project if you like (not that anyone's thought much about that film lately): With Incident at Loch Ness director Zak Penn (a screenwriter on such big-budget projects as X-Men 2 and Elektra) turns the Blair Witch aesthetic into a witty commentary on self-referential filmmaking, Though it flirts with self-indulgence, Incident is redeemed by the fact that the man at the helm of the film-within-a-film crew is Werner Herzog, no stranger to grand projects and artistic ordeals. Herzog plays himself – engagingly, as always – venturing to Scotland to make a film about the susceptibility that allows people to create myths like the Loch Ness Monster. As Herzog talks about the will to believe in the nknown, the film also investigates a more familiar form of mythmaking: When the crew begins to notice strange things in the water, Herzog’s immediate suspicion is that it’s the work of Penn, trying to make the project more commercial. . Echoing the brilliant Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Penn’s film plays on film-set emotions and Herzog’s reputation as an eccentric and driven visionary, bogging down only at the end when his shaggy-dog story of a film crew reaches the point of its payoff. And even then Herzog’s warm presence adds much,to the film’s credibility, lending a streak of authentically romantic vision to what might otherwise have been a colossal in-joke.
(Incidentally, Burden of Dreams will be released in May in a shiny new DVD edition from Criterion!)
And speaking of mockumentaries (is that what we were doing?), the long-delayed Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch, finally seeing the light of day thanks to anticipation of the Broadway opening of Spamalot, is a mixed blessing at best. Though there are amusing new interviews with Bonnie Raitt, Steve Martin, Conan O’Brien and others, the film is essentially a remake/re-edit of the classic All You Need is Cash, making liberal use of the earlier footage but not really doing much to expand the original Beatles parody in any noticeable way. If you’ve never seen All You Need is Cash, you’ll probably take a more generous view.

Lenny Bruce: Take Two

Filmmaker Fred Baker takes exception to my recent review of his film Lenny Bruce Without Tears. I may have more to say about this later, but for now I'll let his remarks stand on their own:

"Gotta say this to you man!......

I think your 7 Deadly Arts review of "Lenny Bruce Without Tears" fairly bogus in its carping about "it's not the real Lenny--the heavy Lenny" or whatever it is you're actually not saying in the review as to what is "heavier" about Lenny than depicted in my film--or whatever you think so many of his enthusiasts (your readers) think his "depth" was that they will miss seeing in my film!..That's pretty personally relative, isn't it? You know it's a film man--it's not a collage of phonograph recordings & still photographs you can listen to or look at while listening--that period was not yet a videotaping era, his club work and concerts were not on film, unfortunately.

But what I did do & faithfully tried and succeeded doing--a lot more than you seem aware of or, at least willing to give me or the film credit for--was to give it's viewers every fucking piece of live footage ever done that I could find on our very funny very persecuted friend. Of course his were guarded performances on TV-but they were his live working performances man--and brilliantly funny in their mimicry and social awareness of all of the shams going down. Ferreting out every inch of his arrest footage, courtroom footage, police photographed death footage, all unearthed in this film and this was the film to find all that. It/I made interviews with heavyweight thinking people of that era (Hentoff, Garbus, Muggeridge, Tynan) who saw into his persecution and his inate comedic genius much deeper and politically meaningful than what I think you think--but can't seem able to express in words, nor can anyone else I might say--was "heavy" about Lenny. Because what he sp[oke of was personal and each one of us felt his weight albeit can't express what that is.
I hope you are not saying, oh heaven forfend--that for you "the real Lenny" are the (tee hee)"smutty" words that he could not use on TV, or chose not to use in or outside courthouses?

I certainly hope that's not where you're at in your somewhat shallow, carping review of my film? I think you can do better than that."

Time Captured! Love Lost!

Okay, give me a moment to boast. After more false starts than I can remember, I recently finished reading Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” and am now recovering from a post-reading madeleine-induced literary hangover. Coincidentally, on the same day I finished reading the final pages of “Time Regained”, I ran across this article in “Slate” about troubles facing the recent Penguin translation. (Incidentally, I read the 1981 revised translation.)
But while following the adventures of the obsessed Marcel and his high society friends, I’ve let a few other reviews fall by the wayside. I’ll try to get most of them placed in this spot over the next few days, starting with this:

Like many people, my knowledge of the story of Abelard and Heloise was limited, brief - and largely incorrect: Gifted medieval teacher falls in love with student; Angry family members force them to separate and punish the teacher by castrating him. She goes into a convent, he to a monastery. End of story.
The details, as revealed by James Burge in “Heloise & Abelard: a new biography” are much more complicated and compelling than the shorthand version that simply places the pair on the list of Western cultures Great Doomed Love Affairs. Abelard was a prodigious philosopher and, according to Burge, the most famous man of his time (at least within the world of French religious philosophy). Heloise, his star pupil, was nearly his equal. And despite the scandal and misfortune, Abelard continued to have a prosperous career, at least until his own egotism brought him into disfavor with better-placed figures within the church. Despite the relatively sparse information available about them, their intense love affair and later efforts to reconcile their indignation over personal tragedy with the demands of religious life upholds the story’s reputation. In Burge’s account, one gets a sense not only of historical perspective but of a personal drama reconstructed from a respectful distance but passionate nonetheless.
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the story is that after years of separation (Abelard appears to have forced Heloise into convent life after their marriage, even before being assaulted by her relatives) the pair actually ended up living and working together. But rather than reaching a peaceful and happy ending to their story, Burge’s account reveals a recognizably modern sense of frustration in the couple’s history. Abelard comes off as a bit of a self-righteous prig, while the ever-faithful Heloise, rising to prominence within the cloistered life, seems almost desperately looking for some confirmation that their romance was the most meaningful experience of their lives. Alas, it was never to come. Burge’s book gives us a new perspective on the oft-told story, giving us a version that is neither romantic nor tragic (although it contains traces of both) but unexpectedly modern, a story about a displaced and unattainable desire.

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...