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Soderbergh redux (Wednesday, 29 May, 2002) The interview book is one of the better entries in the Mississippi series. Like several of the others, it forms something of an unofficial biography, and the reader follows Soderbergh's career from sex, lies .. to Traffic, with all the ups and downs, and with numerous odd facts introduced (such as that Soderbergh was once obsessed with his teeth, and had work done on them after his first flush of success). Soderbergh is one of those directors such as Scorsese, Schrader, Mangold, and Kubrick, who are actually interesting to listen to talk about movies and filmmaking, so the book, edited by Anthony Kaufman, ends up as an intensive, self-correcting seminar on movie making. Sadly, the book also has the expected typos as well (Kodak is spelled Kodack), and a reference to a text of Soderbergh's that was published in Projections 4 which I can't find. However, the book did alert me to the fact that Soderbergh directed a couple of Fallen Angels episodes that I need to look up. I rented the original Solaris the other day to see what Soderbergh might make of it. I thought I'd seen it before, but hadn't. I wonder how many people actually have seen it. It's beautiful to look at but boring. You know how people always say that good science fiction is always about something else? This movie isn't even really about science fiction. Instead, it's Tarkovsky working out his guilt about his first marriage. It just happens to be set in a space station. Otherwise it has nothing to do with the source book. However, I can see what Soderbergh might see in it. Most of his movies are about a character from someone's past returning to haunt them and disrupt their lives, and that's what happens in the source book as well as in the Tarkovsky version, though it is an hallucination. Soderbergh will probably return to the novel, and expand the sci-fi angle. But I am also guessing that he will make it a science fiction movie not the way 2001: A Space Odyssey is a science fiction movie, but the way Alphaville is a "science fiction" movie. We neglect to remember how important Godard is to Soderbergh, and one of the good things about the interview book is that it reminds us of that fact. Rear views (Tuesday, 28 May, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 27 May, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 20 May, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 13 May, 2002) The Meaning of "meaning" (Tuesday, 7 May, 2002) On the surface, Thomas's book is the most "ethereal" of the volumes in the series so far, in that she is discussing a subject that could comprise volumes: how does a movie "mean," how is the theme of a film conveyed to the viewer? To that end, Thomas focuses on a panoply of works and directors that will be familiar to long time consultants of auteur criticism: Party Girl, Sirk, Ford, Hitchcock. Basically, the book is about close readings. As she says in the intro, "such accounts invite those to whom they are offered to revisit the films and see for themselves, enriching their own experiences with new depth and bringing significant details to their attention in fresh and productive ways, while ultimately encouraging such viewers to make up their own minds as to how true to their own experiences of the film the readings may be." Thomas explores how space is used in films; how characters within the frame are defined by how they move through the space created by the filmmakers. Thomas also discusses another fascinating film, Mandingo, with barely a reference to the fact that at the time of its release it was regarded as a terrible film; I should say quickly, that I view her reticence on this matter a good thing. Thomas draws upon some excellent predecessors, such as the late Andrew Britton (who wrote at length about Mandingo in Movie), and V. F. Perkins, who discusses Preminger frequently in Film as Film. In that she started out there some 10 or more years ago, Thomas is a rather recent addition to the Movie-CineACTION! group that includes Ian Cameron, Perkins, and Robin Wood, among numerous others. Indeed, the fact that both Perkins and Thomas find that Preminger offers a good quarry for examples of how a film's visuals enhance or contradict the main line of the narrative makes the reader wonder why Preminger is not held in higher esteem by the critical community. Her close analysis of Advise and Consent makes you realize that psychological insight is the hallmark of a great critic. At one point in the film, the Henry Fonda character visits an old friend who has been implicated as a communist during Fonda's senate hearing. As the scene begins, the friend's two kids are fighting. The scene comes across rather as rather clumsy, upon first viewing, but Thomas manages to place the scene (on pages 81-82) within the context of a constant battle in the film between appearance and reality, the disharmony of his family life and his bullying response to it consistent with the response to the inability to communicate throughout the film. Another source of inspiration for Thomas is sociologist Erving Goffman, whose books The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Frame Analysis prove fruitful in her chapter on melodramas. Goffman's work on small town life proves fertile ground for film criticism, perhaps moreso than all the French obscurantists who dominated film writing in the '70s. That chapter itself could make a whole book. Also, it must be said that Thomas is one of the first writers I've read who uses the phrase "exception that proves the rule" correctly. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 6 May, 2002) Splendor in the Grass (Wednesday, 24 April, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 22 April, 2002) Who is Jerry? (Friday, 19 April, 2002) But who is Jerry? Linson provides only a few clues. He was a studio chief somewhere from two to four years before the start of the book; he has a son; and he once had a feud with Mike Ovitz. Jerry evokes memories of the Wise Hack, the figure in some of Gore Vidal's essays on Hollywood who was the embodiment of the industry's middlebrow philosophy ("Shit has its own integrity"). Vidal's most recent biographer says that the Wise Hack was MGM screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass, but Vidal himself once wrote this diarist that TWH was really a different screenwriter, Harry Essex, who died in 1997, who did several cult horror films in the '50s, among other things. Linson's clues are paltry, and it is possible that "Jerry" doesn't really exist, that he is a Deep Throat style composite of several people Linson has known. Though Linson knows Jerry Weintraub, it couldn't be him, because Linson wouldn't be unpolitic enough to call "Jerry" by his real name. The best way to find a clue to the identity of "Jerry" is to go back to Linson's previous book, A Pound of Flesh, published by Grove in 1993. There, Linson talks about his experiences at Paramount and Warner Bros. and cites a handful of executives, among them Frank Mancuso, Sid Ganis, Ned Tanen, Barry London, (Gary?) Lucchesi, Don Simpson (now dead), Jerry Bruckheimer, and David Kirkpatrick. On page 120, Linson has a dire anecdote about Kirkpatrick, who evinces behavior similar to the kind credited to "Jerry" in the new book. In any case, What Just Happened? is very funny and very well written (I sort of hope that Linson hasn't used a ghost writer). The book is insightful, and in ways horrifying, and he cuts no quarter with the various executives he deals with, though he is fair. The book dust jacket advertises various "weird" stories, such as Dustin Hoffman's obsession with ankle hair, but in fact those stories turn out not to be weird at all in context. Instead, Linson tells practical, helpful tales about dealing with people such as Bob Harper, who was head of marketing at Fox and who had more power, and a more secure position, than almost anyone else Linson encountered. I'm only perplexed by Linson's obsession with David Mamet. Like everyone else in Hollywood, Linson kisses Mamet's ass, praising the already egoistic writer, and even tilting his new book after something (common) that Mamet says. Well, it's Hollywood, and nobody's perfect. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 15 April, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 8 April, 2002) Richard Sylbert (Sunday, 7 March, 2002) Sylbert was one of the key contributors to the Renaissance that was '70s Hollywood. But thanks to the Variety review, I was surprised to learn that Sylbert was 73 years old. Thus his career as a production designer covered the whole second half of the 20th century, and ranged from Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd to Dick Tracy. A disciple of the great William Cameron Menzies, Sylbert made the decor and look of his films one of the bedrock characters that defined the meaning of the movie. In his early years he was mostly associated with the psychologically realistic Kazan and the gritty TV-bred Lumet and Frankenheimer, but with the transition to Mike Nichols, for whom he did six films, and Polanski, for whom he did both Rosemary's BabyChinatown, Sylbert helped to define the concrete Hollywood "classicism" that was the hallmark of the best '70s films. As usual, Warren Beatty is there too, secretly guiding the course of film since Bonnie and Clyde. Beatty has had as much impact on the tenor of films since 1968 as Robert Redford has via Sundance. Beatty acting on Sylbert's sets in Splendor in the Grass and later relied on the production designer for several of his own movies. The most unusual blip in Sylbert's career was when he served as production V.P. at Paramount, where Looking for Mr. Goodbar was one of his more influential charges. Sylbert is marbled all through Peter Biskind's history of '70s cinema, Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, a book that is going to be quoted increasingly as more and more of its subjects die off. Biskind told Variety that Sylbert could "boil down a script into one or two visual metaphors that express the essence of the movie, and then use them to structure the film's look." Sylbert's astuteness not only saved a lot of films from being misdirected by drugged out neophytes, but re-defined and re-directed a whole movement of filmmakers. Down on Citizen Kane (Tuesday, 2 April, 2002) Sunset on Wilder (Friday, 25 March, 2002) As befitting his position as an unemployed éminence grise, numerous books came out about him in the twilight of his life, including Lally's workmanlike bio, Ed Sikov's masterly account of his life and themes, and Cameron Crowe's gushing "Hitchcock-Truffaut" turn. But one of the most interesting books on the director, which had the good marketing sense to appear just in the wake of Wilder's death, may prove to be Sam Stagg's Close-up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream, from St Martin's Press (420 pages, $24.95, ISBN 0.312.27453.X). Staggs is a writer who works for a living. In his previous book about All About Eve, he actually tracked down the obscure, real life actress on whom Eve was based. Here, he uncovers various relatives and observers of the Brackett-Wilder team who offer new insights to the marvelous union that produced so many great movies. He also explores something that has been bugging me since seeing references to it in Sikov's book: the fact that Wilder often used a third writing collaborator, whose work goes unheralded by critics. In Sunset Boulevard it's a guy named D. M. Marshman, Jr., who is tentatively credited in Stagg's book with plotting the movie (Wilder and Brackett being stumped in getting beyond the initial premise). I think that this is one of the ugly secrets of Hollywood: that big name director-screenwriters have more collaborators than is generally know. Often they are friends; usually they are secretaries who do the real typing, formatting the script into the traditional layout, and probably even adding things such as action notations and descriptions of characters. "Writing," I imagine, is a loosely defined term in Hollywood. It's clear from Stagg's book that Wilder did the pacing and dictating, and Brackett did the typing and polishing. Reading the book, I kept wondering, What new is there to say about Wilder and his life and films? What unpredictable argument could anyone come up with about this revered figure? Just when I thought that there couldn't be one, Staggs does it. He argues that Wilder was at his height with Brackett, and that his subsequent collaborator I. A. L. Diamond contributed to Wilder's increasing coarseness and ruination. I leave it to the reader to pursue this fascinating, unexpected argument in Staggs's book. Nevertheless, Wilder remains the last of the great Hollywood filmmakers, both by making memorable movies with iconic moments, and by pushing the industry to shed its hidebound, lazy, conformist attitudes and be better than it was. For greedy viewers such as me, I hope that the darkness of Wilder's death will be relieved by the light of an acceleration in the releasing of his films on DVD, particularly those Paramount classics, and especially the scripts he wrote but that were filmed by Mitchell Leisen and Ernst Lubitsch. Right now, only 12 Wilder-directed films are on DVD, and one of those is a pan and scan version of The Front Page. Let's hope that situation changes soon. Movie maker (Thursday, 28 March, 2002) I remember clearly the day I first caught sight of an issue. It was number 19, the Elia Kazan issue. I was in Rich Cigar store, in Portland, Oregon, and, as a new college student emerging from a Cone of Silence against detailed information, I had just discovered the idea that specialized magazine might be available to the public. On that same fall day in 1973, I bought an issue of Curtis Hanson's Cinema dedicated to Preston Sturges, and an issue of Sight and Sound. But Movie was the revelation. I also devoured the various books that editor Ian Cameron published in conjunction with the magazine—but maddeningly never found any other issues before number 19. (Why doesn't Taschen publish old runs of short lived film mags the way he does fetish magazines?) Just as today Video Watchdog is one of the best film magazines because the writers really know what they are talking about, in its day Movie was the best film magazine. Today, it lives on in ghostly form in the shape of CineACTION!, which carries on the tradition of textual analysis. Well, the reader may imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a copy of Movie # 36 in a store recently. With Vincent Price on the cover, the issue surveys the careers of Depardieu and DeNiro, Price's horror career, point of view in movies, films by Ophuls, an a contemplation on masculinity in '90s film, all by writers such as Deborah Thomas, Douglas Pye, Perkins, Walker, and Leon Hunt. What this "current" issue, copyrighted 2000, also told me was that there was a website for Cameron Books and an e-mail address to reach Cameron (I wrote him but he never responded). Still it's good to know that the last of the auteurist dinosaurs are still out there, working. Trench warfare (Wednesday, 27 March, 2002) The advance screening for critics, with a radio-tie-in crowd of the usual freeloading screening rats (see diaries passim), was held out at the Clackamas Town Center cinemas, which is like saying it was held in Dogpatch (Clackamas is the Vatican of Tonya Harding worshippers). I was sitting in the middle of a row, next to Kim Morgan of the Oregonian and David Walker of the Willamette Week. When the movie was over the crowd rose en masse, as usual, and made for the exits like pack animals. The people in front of me were moving and obscuring the screen. As a responsible movie reviewer I like to read the credits and experience the entire movie, so I stood up to see over their heads. That's when I felt a harsh tug on my coat, severe enough to leave burn marks on my shoulders. I turned around and a man two rows back was saying harshly, "Hey, can you sit down so I can see?" To do so would prevent me from seeing the screen and I am suppose to be there. This guy could have moved over two seats and stood or sat, and I couldn't. I turned back to the movie and ignored him. Which was hard. I stood there reading the credits until the crowd cleared out, and then sat down on an arm rest. But this wasn't good enough for this man. He called out to me from his seat, "Thanks a lot, pal. That's real nice." But still he wasn't done. The man turned out to be a tall, thin, angular-face guy (as Howard Stern might have asked, "Why the long face?") with a bald head-top and white tufts of hair on the side. "You're a real nice guy, asshole," he said. I replied, calmly, "You could have moved to the side." He practically screamed, "You could have sat down." He was accompanied by a much, much younger Asian female, who piped in, "That was so rude." This man was obviously one of those angry guys who goes around spoiling for a fight to honor his woman, a common occurrence in Clackamas County, which is the capital of road rage. Worse, this fellow acted as if he had never been to a movie theater before. And still he wasn't done. At the door, he lingered, holding it open for the three of us as we exited into the lobby. He was still spewing. I put my hand on the door because I thought he might like to try and slam it, and indeed I felt pressure as he tried to close it on me. I said "Thanks" ("ironically"), and the man said, "Anything for you. You're special." This man kept following us, so I walked up the publicist representing the studio and told him that this guy was harassing me and disrupting the screening, then went to the restroom. After that I don't know what happened. Is there a cinematic equivalent to road rage? To frustrated, angry moviegoers experience row rage? Did the movie itself, with its harsh, cynical comedy, evoke anger in this person? Or was he trying to impress a new girlfriend? Whatever his motivation, the experience simply reaffirmed my decades-long disenchantment with the theatrical experience of movie watching. Later in the evening, I re-viewed Dead Calm on DVD with a good friend and had a much better time than I would have in a public theater. Update: P April, 2002Went to a screening of The Sweetest Thing at the Lloyd Cinemas and to my horror this time sat right behind the bald person. I informed the screening manager and he was more than happy to throw the guy out if he caused trouble. However, I also observed that this person is yet another screening rat, one of about 50 Gresham, Oregon, unemployeds who haunt these advance screenings and seem to spend all their time listening to the radio for free tickets and scoping out the ads in local papers. They have been torturing the local publicity people for decades, and it makes sense that this irritable person is one of them. I learned that he is one of the rats, because the King Rat, a troll like creature who roams the auditoria before screenings allowing the Greshamites to whom he has given tickets to kiss his ring, as if he were in charge of the screening, came up to the man, who paid the appropriate fealty to him. The only characteristic that distinguishes this guy from the other rats is that he apparently actually wants to stay through the credits; the others run out as soon as the movie seems over. Nevertheless, at The Sweetest Thing, he and his companion, like Jeffrey Wells, bailed early. Update: P April, 2002Go to an advance screening of Enigma at the Hollywood, and the man is there, yet again, along with Troll and the other usual rats. As my friend and I walked into the auditorium, she said that it was awfully cold in the room. The bald man, wearing a wide-striped shirt from the '70s, who happened to be standing in the aisle at the time, looked at her and opened his arms wide as if to hug her, saying, "I'm here!" It was the weirdest thing , given that he was a stranger, and his Asian wife-girlfriend was sitting a few seats in from this gross, intrusive display. I stared at him coldly, though there was no sense of recognition in his dulled face, and my friend fled the room to escape his harassment. We found seats on the other side of the room, but later noticed that during the pre-screening festivities that the man won a free CD, his name being called out in a drawing. Thus, like their rodential counterparts, the Rats always triumph. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 25 March, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 18 March, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 11 March, 2002) Monday night live (Tuesday, 5 March, 2002) Last night I saw Dan Aykroyd. What the heck was he doing in Portland,
Oregon, I wondered? But at first I didn't notice him. A group of men, mostly dressed in black, were moving through the store exuding power and tension. A balding and rather aggressive young nerd, coming across as a little crazed, if not crazy, was following in their wake. It was obvious that they were famous, but who were they? The nerd kept talking to a bodyguard type in a black suit about telling "Mr. Allen" something. Then I finally recognized Aykroyd. As he passed by me, I saw that he was wearing a little brown Trailblazers cap, and suddenly realized that the "Mr. Allen" the nerd was trying to reach was Paul Allen, owner of the local basketball team and fabled Hendrix fan. Aykroyd proved to be a lot taller than you think he might be (though not as tall as Allen); also he's a lot louder than you think. But famous people come to Portland all the time. I heard that William Hurt was in town recently. And Friedkin's The Hunted has been in production here off and on of late. On the other hand, stars rarely come here to actually promote their movies. They are announced, and publicists set up interviews, and then the next thing you know the star has "the flu" and is not coming to Portland after all. But some do show up. Todd Field came to promote Ruby in Paradise, but he's from here (he also took my picture, and later mailed it to me). One star who made a big deal about promoting one of his films here was Eric Stoltz. A publicist later told me that when she later got the bill for the room he stayed in she found that he had made a series of calls, all to people with the same last name. He was looking for someone. But who? Had he contrived the paid trip to Portland solely to hunt for this person? As with Aykroyd's brief visit here, we will never know. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 4 March, 2002) Out of the Past (Sunday, 3 March, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 25 February, 2002) Oscar wiles (Friday, 22 February, 2002) Though I often enter Oscar pools, I always lose. I overthink; let reason or affection hobble me; and forget certain odds-making factors, such as that actors make up the majority voting block, so that their sentimentality, loyalty to their own, fickleness, and self-hatred rule the outcome. One is reminded of this by Bona's previous book, that indispensable reference work Inside Oscar written with Mason Wiley, itself revised at least once. There you find all the political machinations, the bad behavior, and the bizarre 1978 acceptance speech by Laurence Olivier printed in full, a bit of prose unmatched in actorly vagueness and high flown emotion until the whole of John Turturo's Illuminata came along years later. At 435 pages, Oscar 2 is one third the size of its predecessor, yet covers only six years, which means that the text is rich in alternating morbid and amusing detail. Taking each year in order, Bona summarizes the films and the issues surrounding them, walks us through the Oscar ceremony minute by minute, annotated with pre- , concurrent, and post-ceremony commentary, and summarizes the aftermath of the evening. All this detail has two consequences. Each chapter is in reality a concise and witty history of that year. And each chapter becomes a novella in its own right, the race to the Oscar a suspense story filled with feuds, hopes, realignments, surprises, and, in most cases, unhappy endings. Bona also has a knack for the barbed observation and the withering quote. Take the first chapter, 1995, the year of Braveheart (a chapter entitled, "Suppose they gave Best Picture to a movie nobody cared about?"). Noting that Emma Thompson won best screenplay for Sense and Sensibility in a context of Jane Austen mania, Bona notes that "At year's end, People magazine selected Jane Austen as 'One of the 25 Most Intriguing People of 1995.' The British authoress found herself in the company of Hootie and the Blowfish, Louis Farrakhan, 'Babe' and the Unabomber." He quotes special award recipient Chuck Jones's amusing pre-ceremony crack to Roger Ebert, "You don't have to deserve something in order to enjoy it," and makes you esteem Patricia Arquette even more when he quotes her Governors Ball aperçu after she has removed her shoes, "My dogs are killing me. Why can't Manolo Blahnik team up with Birkenstock?" Well, it was funny when I first read it. Bona has an unending fund of synonyms for authorship, so that quoted reviewers "felt" or "raged" instead of simply "said" or "writes." Bona also has an amusing vendetta against New York and then New Yorker David Denby, who is never quoted without a mention of the reviewer's pretentiousness. Also, Bona does me the personal favor of saying "interestingly" instead of misusing "ironically" like everyone else (though he does say "hearkens back" instead of "harks back"). Towards the end of the book, the otherwise impeccably edited volume begins to emit typos. Thus, just after "[sic]"ing Gladiator screenwriter David Franzoni on page 325, Bona himself has two typos in a row (one on page 330). Nevertheless, Inside Oscar 2 is great fun. I doubt if the book will help me win this year's pool, but it certainly eases the pain of dealing with the Oscars. Dan Auiler on Billy Wilder (Wednesday, 20 February, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 18 February, 2002) Cimino real (Tuesday, 12 February, 2002) What's the occasion for this sudden emergence from obscurity? It seems that Cimino has published a novel in France called Big Jane and is looking for an American publisher. At the same time he is trying to get together an adaptation of Malraux's Man's Fate. Garbarino's article is at first reminiscent of a similar exposé of an even more reclusive Terrence Malick a few years ago in the same magazine, but Griffin's article soon proves to be the one that gets Cimino's goat. One doubts whether the opinionated and rather short sighted director will sit for another interview with anyone soon. The Vanity Fair article has the added value, however, of photographs. A gallery of images charts Cimino going from a Jon Lovitz lookalike to a waxen Peter Weller separated-at-birth twin. In France, Cimino is the recipient of the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres prize; here he is the guy who supposedly toppled United Artists , thanks to the frighteningly high budget of Heaven's Gate, which ended up costing $44 million dollars—the same cost, by the way, of that summer's successful Bond film (Cimino hasn't made a movie since the little seen The Sunchaser with Woody Harrelson). He has also been rumored to be a pre-op transsexual, though the first time I heard that rumor was in the VF story, and I have been told some strange rumors over the years, by everyone from lower level studio employees to Kenneth Anger. Cimino claims only to have fasted, which changed the sculpture of his face to its now feminized Michael Jackson contours, and he denies being a plastic surgery aficionado, like his pal Mickey Rourke. He does admit, however, to wearing women's blue jeans. While both writers seem unwilling to "forgive" Cimino for Heaven's Gate, the director himself is unbowed, especially given that critics in Britain and France esteem the film. In fact, Robin Wood has written sensitively about both Heaven's Gate and the later, almost equally controversial Year of the Dragon. But Griffin's story, buttressed by VF's photos and additional quotes, is definitely the read of the week. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 11 February, 2002) Doctor Who (Tuesday, 5 February, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 4 February, 2002) In defense of actors (Saturday, 2 February, 2002) Vindication redux (Friday, 1 February, 2002) Allen's curse (Tuesday, 29 January, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 28 January, 2002) Tim on Julia (Tuesday, 22 January, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 21 January, 2002) Globes trotting (Sunday, 20 January, 2002) But a Beautiful Mind? Please. Russell Crowe is starting to look like John Goodman. I like barrel chested men, but not when the barrel is used to wash elephants. And Russell Crowe really needs to get over that glowering irritability thing he's doing. Jennifer Connolly won? She's pretty and has big tits but she's a boring actress. Still, I predict that the film will sweep the Oscars—and that Memento will be snubbed. I thought Will Smith would win, because he's black, and Ali has Parkinsons, and all the critics like Will Smith in the role. Nobody can believe that I liked Gosford Park. It's like a really good movie based on Clue. Mr Mustard did it in the study with a mallet. Over all, the ceremony was more boring than last year, when Liz Taylor was going crazy. Also, I am sick of Spielberg. Did you see all those shots of him smugly sitting there, looking as if he were saying that he had a major part in Harrison Ford's success.? And I am sick of Spielberg and Tom Hanks "instructing" us on WW2. There were so many World War 2 movies last year, but the only one anyone liked was the one with Kenneth Branagh, because everyone was dressed like Nazis and looked hot. And why Sting on Lynch? Sting stands for everything Lynch hates: "caring pop tunes, the rain forest. Sting always wins. Still, his song was the best of that lot . Those types of songs are always bad. More later." Resolutions, schmezolutions (Tuesday, 15 January, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 14 January, 2002) Club house (Sunday, 13 January, 2002) The first thing that happens, thanks to the opening offer, is that you get four or five DVDs for about a dollar each, plus shipping. So I loaded up on the Tarantino films I didn't have. The fun begins when you first receive the newsletter. There you see that basically you are buying newish DVDs for retail and postage, until you buy your minimum and start to save a little bit. The good thing about the catalog-newsletter is that there are lots of movies available that you might forget about (I picked up Thunder Road on the last go around). Unfortunately, the taste of the Club is strictly mainstream. I haven't yet seen any Criterion or Kino discs, although the club does offer the odd Anchor Bay disc. In the real world, who would join such a club when access to the internet provides massive savings on pre-orders and other bargains? Naive people, like myself, I suppose (when I was a kid, I loved the Columbia record club). And perhaps those remaining middle Americans who don't have access to the WWW. In any case, Columbia House is the subject of an ongoing investigation here, and I will occasionally bring the reader up to date on the club's flaws and virtues in the best tradition of Consumer Reports. The other side of The Matrix (Friday, 11 January, 2002) Audience reaction at the screening I saw seemed mixed, though not enough to keep it from being a modest, if only temporary, hit. My problems with the film begin with its embracing of the same incoherence as its progenitor. In the end, it's an impossible tale, and isn't presented with much zest. What Crowe seems to have got out of the project is an opportunity to explore "the other half," the cool kids whom he keeps returning to in his films. As you recall, Lester Bangs makes a big distinction in Almost Famous between the cool and the uncool (one prospective title of that movie). Here he delves deeper into what he takes to be the life of the Cool, their ease with money and women and toys, and then takes a terrible revenge by disfiguring that Vanity of Vanities, star Cruise. I am still hoping that Crowe will settle back into the area he knows better, poignant love relations, and that he will be inspired to remake The Apartment with Tom Hanks, Renée Zellweger, and Alec Baldwin. Spidey's web (Thursday, 10 January, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 7 January, 2002) Read, read, watch, watch (Friday, 4 January, 2002) Or you can not read him at all and just see movies. That's the conundrum for movie buffs. You can read a little bit and see a lot of movies, or you can read a lot and see fewer movies. Or you can see a lot of movies and give up reading completely. At a certain point I suppose you have to make a commitment to the art or the criticism. I remember the excitement with which Klawans was "discovered" in the late '80s. In fact, I think the first thing I read by him was an essay on the death of poetry in the Nation. Everyone in my various circles (we still read, then) was talking about Klawans and that article. The next thing I remember is that he had mysteriously become the movie reviewer for the Nation, and brought the same wide awake charm to that beat as he did to poetry. Unlike many reviewers, Klawans doesn't seem to feel compelled to see everything. Yet his taste is eclectic. He will push I am Cuba, and eXistenZ, and surprise you with a pan of Lone Star. But what is perhaps most remarkable about the book is the fact that it exists at all. For many years, the only reviewer whose weekly writings found their way into periodic collections was Pauline Kael, who thoughout most of her adult life enjoyed frequent instant memorialization. With her, the service backfired, however. Reading her in huge chunks rather than weekly doses rendered her an anthology of quirks and prejudices. But Kael was one of the only reviewers our corporate media masters allowed us to have in permanent format. Repressive tolerance, I think it is called. In recent years there have been collections of British reviewer Jonathan Romney, Kael clone Terrence Rafferty, intermittent writer Phillip Lopate, and a few others. But I imagine that they don't sell well, and pose a problem for publishers when it turns out that certain movie writers are not as universally popular as they assumed (though I think a collection of Anthony Lane would be popular). By the way, am I the only reader irritated by reviews that strive for gimmicks. I recall one reviewer in my home town who occasionally dug out the hoary old "imagine what the pitch meeting among the executives for this movie must have been like," replete with awful dialogue. Klawans has a weakness for hauling out his "spiritual advisor, Rabbi Simcha Feffeferman. I can take this kind of novelty with Joe Bob Briggs or Libby Gelman-Waxner, but I want a regular reviewer just to give it to me straight. The only poignancy I experience with the return of Klawans to the pages of the Nation is that he bumps off the masthead my drinking buddy Tim Appelo. Appelo, formerly of the Oregonian and now based in Seattle, did some of the best work of his career for the Nation during Klawans's hiatus. It would be a shame to have that voice stilled, even while one welcomes Klawans back to the fold. Vindication (Thursday, 3 January, 2002) At one point Stewart writes, "The fallout from the [Anderson's parents'] divorce also may have contributed to the primacy of secondary family both in Anderson's movies and his social life. After graduating from college, the fledgling director shared a house in Houston and then in Los Angeles with the Wilson brothers, a long-running fraternal alliance that has expanded to include Bottle Rocket co-star Musgrave, the Wilsons' brother Andrew and Anderson's brother Eric. The Royal Tenenbaums takes its name from another close friend in the Anderson-Wilson fraternity, Brian Tenenbaum. 'He has three sisters and a really strong family, and there are a lot of them in New York City," Anderson said. 'None of [my characters] are based on them, but their strength appealed to me. And I just like the name.'" [The full story can be found here.] Having finally caught up with The Royal Tenenbaums, the one movie of the holiday season that I really wanted to see, I can now state that the film may lack the cloistered, autumnal hominess of Rushmore, but what it loses in close-system entanglements it makes up for in scope. There are surprisingly personal links between this and earlier Anderson-Wilson films, according to Stewart. In fact, Royal Tenenbaums offers up variations of Andersonian themes: the film divided into DVD-ready chapters introduced by non-cinematic transitions, a dazed protagonist, unrequited love, a play righting offspring, a gathering that hosts a reconciliation, a father-son chasm breached, and a manipulative lout who reforms. But it is also important to note what is new about the film: that the reformed manipulator is an adult, Royal this time, not Max Fisher. Anderson is in danger of having his films devolve into a series of stills. For the most part Anderson likes to plant his camera right across the street from a facade and photograph whoever walks in front of it. In this, he adopts the classicism of Coppola, whose own Godfather aesthetic harked back to the silent era. Anderson's cinematic "lists" such as the resumé of Margot's lovers threatens to devolve into a series of stills. However. there is a startling zoom in a scene where Royal seeks out his two grandsons. It's an interesting moment that really breaks up the feeling of wry, stagy deadpan still frame views. I'm probably making it sound as if I didn't like the film. On the contrary, I was deeply moved by it, especially the last 20 minutes. Overall, the film does something unusual, which is to portray a family, a blend of the Mitfords and Salinger's Glass family, that the members are trying to escape while the outsiders are trying to enter. Stale Kael (Wednesday, 2 January, 2002) I'm talking about Tom Carson in the January Esquire. Carson is a Ron Rosenbaumish writer I've liked since his days at the Village Voice, but I had no idea that he was even temporarily a Kaelite, as he reveals in his obit. ''No way around it, folks; that evil old bat is the reason I do what I do…every hiccup from Pauline Kael's typewriter was pretty much holy writ to me." But finally Carson saw the light, and now notes that beginning with the '80s Kael became a ''vain, self-deluding would-be power broker…writing about ever-more-vapid films in the same hyperbolic, souped-up tone, contriving momentousness by fiat.'' Carson's dual occasion for pondering Kael is not just her death, but the release of Robert Altman's Gosford Park. Kael was instrumental in touting Altman's career, and Carson finds that Kael terribly overrated films such as Nashville. Carson gets Altman and Kael right, and he doesn't have much use for Gosford Park, though I sort of enjoyed it, probably because it didn't feel much like an Altman movie.
Her "talk" was held in a former dance hall. Kael declined to come with a prepared lecture or talk, as was (and is) customary at these events; instead Kael preferred to take questions from the audience. Instead, The audience, perhaps 500 people, were on the edge of their folding chairs, and laughed uproariously at her canned jokes. Her favorite put-down was along the lines of, "After five minutes I was looking at my watch." This elicited howls. It was also a patented Kaelism, highlighted by Renata Adler in her brilliant demolition job. What came across clearly was that at that age Kael had little patience for art, preferring, she said, the Ritz Brothers. Kael was also evasive, and knew her audience. When asked about the then fanatically popular The Gods Must be Crazy, Kael averred, or dodged the issue, claiming that she would address the film in a future issue of the New Yorker. She never did. But she obviously did not like it, or saw through its pieties to its obvious crudities. I remember very little else of her discourse. Afterwards there was a reception at the art museum next door. Kael proved to be surprisingly short, about four foot twelve. The ring of about eight people gathered around her asked the usual questions: "What did you think of…" At the time, her nemesis Andrew Sarris had been absent from the Village Voice for several months, which I viewed as a disaster because his latest reviews had been masterpieces. I decided to ask her what was going in. I said, "Can I ask a question about Andrew Sarris?" A movie nerd near by went, "Oh ho ho ho ho," as if I had broken some taboo. Kael didn't care. I asked what the hell happened to him, and she said that he was sick with some undisclosed disease, and only recently returned to screenings.
Happy New Year (Tuesday, 1 January, 2002) Over time, I would like to develop a film aesthetic based on Charles's unique, clarifying view of psychology. In distorting brevity, I can say that Charles has developed what he calls a self schema that defines the difference between successful and faulty decision making. In Charles's view, we have several identities, such as our work identity, our family identity, our leisure time identity, and so on. The more interconnected these identities are in making up our self schema, the more enriched our self-schema happens to be and better decision making processes derive from the balance and integration of these identities. Less communication among the identities, and fewer identities, makes for an impoverished self schema. It occurred to me when reading the book the first time that the same can be said for movies. The best movies have enriched self schemas; the bad ones impoverished self schemas. in masterpieces such as The Godfather, the various "identities" of the film—crime drama, family drama, acting turn, directorial career boost, cinematographical breakthrough—flow freely among each other. An impoverished film doesn't work. It's at odds with itself, its component parts don't "listen" to each other. I'm not talking about what happens on the set, although that obviously has an impact on the success of a film. I'm referring to how the large scale parts of a film relate to each other as it plays. Of course, this approach posits that films have a "self" in the first place, something not solely related to the directorial "I." My thinking on the matter is sketchy so far. I must re-read the book, and re-absorb its views, and try to remember the exciting ideas I had while reading it the first time and discussing the book with Charles. More details about the volume can be found at Quorum Books. Welcome to the Cinemonkey home page Cinemonkey is dedicated to film, literature, and the media ... but then, what else is there? This web site is a continuation of Cinemonkey : A Serious Film Journal, the short lived magazine that burned brightly if briefly in the late '70s. Edited by D K Holm and Carl Bennett, and designed by Bennett, Cinemonkeywas auteurist in orientation and muckraking in tone. So is this web site. We invite you to peruse the opinions of our reviewers, and respond to them in our film chat forum, where you can discuss auxiliary elements such as Sid Falco's media reviews, and our "Directors Project," which will expand with time to include a critical ranking of filmmakers who have made their debut since 1971.
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'm at the tail end of a Steven Soderbergh jones. I recently finished a time consuming review of the Criterion Traffic, which was a delight to see over and over, with and without commentaries, and also finished a new book from Mississippi, Steven Soderbergh: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 171 pages, $18, ISBN 1.57806.429.5). Now I find myself in eager anticipation of both Full Frontal and Solaris.
lerted by a mention in Jeffrey Wells's indispensable column, I dashed to the Esquire magazine web site to read an 
ere's what the Cinemonkey and Film at Eleven team has to say about some recent DVD releases at the DVDJournal.com: this week it's D. K. Holm on the excellent set 
e sure to read our correspondent Poly Phemos's interesting take on Ron Mann's 
hat's the question that immediately strikes the reader of producer Art Linson's new book, What Just Happened? Bitter Tales from the Hollywood Front Line (Bloomsbury, 181 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1.58234.240.7). The book takes the conceit that recently Linson (The Untouchables) ran into a former studio chief he knows and, though at first recoiling from the man to avoid the infection of failure, he ends up in a series of salutary and soul-searching discussions about Linson's recent career, specifically his deal at Fox, where he produced The Edge, Great Expectations, Pushing Tin, Fight Club, and a film called Sunset Strip. While conducting this lengthy symposium, they meet at various eateries around Los Angeles, and Jerry is rather relentless in his mocking of Linson's artistic ambitious and takes undue pleasure in his failures. Jerry, long out of the business, feeds like a vampire off Linson's spilled blood.
ost in the flurry of recent obits for Billy Wilder, Milton Berle, and Dudley Moore (now that Beyond the Fringe is down by two, like the Beatles, I guess I'll never be able to write the definitive group bio of the influential English comedy group), was the fact that Richard Sylbert also passed away.
ne of the most joyous occasions for a serious film student is when a new issue of Movie comes out. If you haven't heard of this magazine, well, that's because there haven't been all that many issues, perhaps 37 in 40 years. Its small quantities belie its influence, which is significant. One of the few British auteurist magazine when it first appeared in the early '60s, at a time when mainstream cinema criticism was strangled by the old Sight and Sound, Movie managed to maintain that identity later as those all around it lost their heads to semiology, Jacques Lacan, and other pseudo-intellectual fads, while still able editorially to explore other aspects of cinema besides strict auteurism. The magazine, spawned by a bunch of aspiring Oxbridge academics, introduced an ungodly number of film writers to the world, among them Robin Wood, Michael Walker, Charles Barr, Raymond Durgnat (who also dominated Films & Filming), V. F. Perkins (author of perhaps the clearest enunciation of true textual analysis of film in his book Film as Film), and the late Andrew Britton, to mention only a few.
or my sins in past lives, I work during the day in a bookstore. It's a big, world famous bookstore, and a lot of famous people come into it. I've seen Kenneth Branagh sneaking outside to consume yet another cigarette. I've seen Benicio Del Toro talking on his cellular 'phone about a TV series, with Del Toro laughing over the idea with the friend standing next to him (he bought a copy of the Traffic screenplay). I saw Nick Broomfield researching the life of Courtney Love. I've seen a woman tearfully thank an incredibly tall Patty Davis for her parental memoir. I saw the comic actor son of two comedians look up the dress of a store clerk on a latter (and not knowing that she also happened to freelance movie reviews to a local paper).
eaders may recall my speculation from earlier down this page about Vanilla Sky being director Cameron Crowe's "revenge" against the cool guys at school. Well, vindication of sorts for my view is offered in the published screenplay. In the introduction to the just published Vanilla Sky (Faber and Faber, $14, 149 pages, ISBN 0.57121.511.4), Crowe notes that the main character played by Tom Cruise was based on someone he knew in high school. "The name of the main character, a privileged New York ladies' man, was based on someone I'd known in school. David Aames. The real David Aames, whose name wasn't exactly David Aames, was more than a person. He was a brand name for a life we all wanted. He was never called by his first name, it was always 'David Aames.'" Crowe sounds a little more compassionate toward his main character in the intro than the character comes across in the rather cold movie. But that just points up another interesting character trait of the filmmaker. In Almost Famous he presents his younger self as an iconoclastic writer who writes the "brutal truth" about a rising band. But the articles by the real Crowe from the Rolling Stone included on the DVD version of the movie are uncritical, even puff-like, in their complexion. There are no true villains in most of Crowe's films (Jerry Maguire has a couple of minor ones). Vanilla Sky could have been Amberson like in its chronicle of the downfall of a prig, but perhaps Crowe isn't angry enough to do that kind of movie.
ameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky proves to be the writer-director's revenge on the Cool in school. Well, he had to get something out of a project more or less brought to him, as the entertainment media says, by Tom Cruise. I didn't get much out of it, and in fact fell asleep in the third quarter. But then, I had seen the original, mostly replicated in this version, and knew what was going on.