"I spit on metaphysics, sir"

I hate to shill for any upcoming product, but the release of an extraordinary set of DVDs of a sf classic does have me excited. For years, people have been talking about a possible multi-disc set of the various versions of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and it's finally going to happen. Several editions of the edition itself will be available, with this as the most elaborate:

Accompanying some versions of the DVD is the documentary Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner. A trailer for it, as well as four clips from the film, is available here.

Blade Runner is a seminal film, despite its being dated already as sf (if LA turns into a city with a polyglot language, it will be based on Spanish, not Japanese). The look, the feel of the film is film noir placed in the future (something the Philip K. Dick novel it was based on totally lacked.) This shot from the movie shows an iconic part of noir imagery, Venetian blinds, the shadows of which reveal that the characters are not as free as they might imagine.

And besides, any movie that has Edward James Olmos utter the line that is this entry's title has to be cool.

Ch-ch-changes

These are what make purists reach for their one-volume edition of LOTR to throw at the screen.  This is my take on the most important ones that JWB (Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens) made.

• Changes that strengthen the movie.  The excision of Tom Bombadil leads the list, since I have always had a problem with the versifying . . . just what is he, anyway, besides a creature based on a Dutch doll the Tolkien children had, and a means of linking the more childlike world of The Hobbit with the darker tone of LOTR?  Unfortunately, though, no Tom means no Barrow Wight.
• Some will take this as heresy, but the elimination of the Scouring of the Shire never bothered me that much.  People complain of an overlong denouement as it is. 
• Elves at Helm's Deep.  The JWB commentary track for TT is hilarious on this point, as each of the writers blames the other for this plot shift.  I have no problem with it, since without it, it appears the Elves are bugging out of Middle Earth, when in the books, much is made of the Elves of Lorien and Rivendell fighting in the North--if you read the Appendices.  You have to show events in movies, not just talk about them, a maxim that leads to the magnificent montage of the lighting of the beacons between Minas Tirith and Edoras.
• Thus also the Paths of the Dead.  Tolkien tells how frightened all of the characters are traveling through these caves, but you can't have actors telling each other how scared they are on the screen.  And anyway, Pete had to get some zombies in this movie.  The hill of skulls, though, was a bit much.
• However, the use of the Army of the Dead as a kind of green scrubbing bubbles to clean up Minas Tirith after the Rohirrim and Gondorians had displayed real heroism of the kind Tolkien loved was a major weakness.
• The exorcism of Theoden by Gandalf.  Again, making concrete what is implicit in the text.  Grima complains that Gandalf still has his staff, but all he does with it in the book is to cause some distant thunder.  Theoden then acts like he's taken a particularly large dose of Geritol, but he doesn't undergo the rejuvenation process depicted in the movie.  (Theoden's cinematic character arc--"I'm not a good leader either"-- is also confusing and unnecessary.)
• Super Arwen.  Her importance in the novels was only realized until Tolkien got to the end, so  JWB were forced to come up with a strong woman before Eowyn made her appearance.  Arwen playing Glorfindel's role in FOTR is no big deal, and fan pressure actually stopped JWB from committing real mischief in implementing their plan of AAHD (Arwen at Helms Deep), some of which was filmed, but not included.
• Gimli as comic relief.  No problems for me: I think JWB were always on guard against the Holy Grail syndrome--that an epic can become a parody of itself.  Humor helps prevent that--but the dwarf-tossing jokes could have been tossed themselves.
• What they got wrong.  All the changes to characters that had to do with a character arc.  Aragorn--too afraid to be king?  In the books, he does doubt that he can make the right decisions after Merry and Pippin are abducted and Frodo goes with Sam; no need for all the added hand-wringing angst about inheriting Isildur's weakness, as well as the sigh just after he is crowned.  Frodo too is wimpified; in the book he tells the assembled Ringwraiths to go back to Mordor at the Fords of the Bruinen, for instance.

The most grievous wound is to Faramir.  Once the confrontation with Shelob was replaced as the ending of Frodo's storyline in TT, then Faramir had to become a danger--Faramir, who for many readers is a special character.  The Ithilien Rangers become bullies too, working over Gollum like a band of rogue cops with a junkie.   As Filmamir, Faramir becomes the whiny younger son, who has to prove to Daddy that he's strong too.  This leads to the unbelievable moment where Filmamir changes his mind and lets Frodo go on to Mordor after Frodo's offering the Ring to a Nazgul!  I've tried to figure out JWB's justification for Filmamir's change of mind, and I'm still lost.  At least Faramir becomes himself in the last film, where much of his and Denethor's dialogue comes right out of the book.

But still, all in all, the good in these movies far outweighs the bad, and for anyone who thinks that Jackson's adaptation was so terrible, then just remember the names Ralph Bakshii and Rankin & Bass, and think of Glenn Yarborough warbling, "Frodo, of the Nine Fingers..." and then remember that JWB's cinematic version of the Field of Cormallen ("Praise them with great praise" in the novel) is an actual improvement on the text: "My friends--you kneel to no one."  Sniff.  ("You want my hankie, doc?")

Farewell to the Master

Ingmar Bergman, who investigated like no other artist the agony that silence can bring, is finally silent. But his films will still be eloquent.

What they got right

Peter Jackson and his team--that phrase should be understood throughout what follows, but from the documentaries that accompanied the various DVD editions of The Lord of the Rings, it's clear that the ultimate decision-making power for most areas of production rested with Jackson. Plans were not developed, concepts not pursued, models not made into reality, unless they were "approved by Peter."

(And I write from the point of view of a thorough-going, unadulterated fan of the novels. I read the works when they were initially--and unethically--published as paperbacks by Ace in America, and have read most of everything else by Tolkien published since then, multiple times, including the twelve volumes of The History of Middle Earth, although I have yet to get to the two volumes of drafts of The Hobbit. Once someone told me that she never got into Tolkien. I replied that I never got out of him.)

• Production design and realization. The key to the success of the movies. If they had got the look of Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age wrong, it would have ruined everything else. The wisest decision they made was to base the designs on the visions of the two best artists working on Tolkien today, Alan Lee and John Howe. And then they brought them to New Zealand, so their designs could be organically placed within the various New Zealand landscapes selected. From Hobbiton to the beacons of Gondor to the Grey Havens, from Frodo's clothes to Eomer's armor to the Orcs' weaponry--everything looks right. And down to the smallest detail--as Miranda Otto said when she picked up the cup that she was supposed to offer to Aragorn in Edoras, "It's heavy!" No need to act like it is.
• Casting. After numerous reviewings, I can't think of a single casting decision or performance I have a problem with. (I do have a problem with some of the lines they have to say--more on that later.) Some work so well--Ian McKellan as Gandalf, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, and Elijah Wood as Frodo--that I can't envision anyone else in the parts. I'm especially glad that McKellan's career achievements were finally recognized. I remember when the execrable Alec Baldwin Shadow came out in 1994 thinking, "Here's one of the greatest actors in the world appearing this piece of sh*t." Now if he appears in a piece of sh*t, it's because he wants to, not because he has to.
• Music. These movies needed a big, late Romantic score, with a variety of echoes of other kinds of music, and plenty of motifs and "tunes," all of which Howard Shore provided. Not only have I bought the soundtrack albums when they came out, I've been picking up the complete recordings, which contain all the musical cues in the works, and run around three hours each. From Dwarvish chants to the forlorn gallantry of Gondor, Shore gets close enough to the essence of what he is portraying (the two personalities of Gollum, for example) to be very effective.
• Direction. This might seem a given, but in all the arguments raging over the film, I think Jackson's skill as a director got lost. I realized this the last time I watched his remake of King Kong. Since I wasn't so heavily invested in it, I was able to watch more objectively the way he put a scene together, such as the offering of Naomi Watts to Kong: the camera angles, camera movements, editing, perspective, combination of music and action, the overall vision. When I watched the end of The Fellowship of the Ring recently, I freshly noticed all the touches: the slow motion as Aragorn approaches the Uruk-hai; the cut to regular speed with the first sword slash; the camera on a trolley as the Uruks run to Boromir; the use of silence as Lurtz shoots Boromir; the performances he gets out of Mortensen and Sean Bean. Jackson has learned the lessons of the masters well.

One more to go: the changes.

Some early "music videos"

Hopscotching around YouTube, I stumbled across some early Stevie Winwood performances (I don't know precisely when he became "Steve"--sometime during Traffic, I suppose). The first is a quaint promotional video for the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin," which was the first time most of us in America became acquainted with Winwood's voice--one of the best in rock history. I thought this was merely lip-synching of the single, but it is not the single version, since the band does not echo Winwood's cry to perform the title action. The second stanza is different too. (It's quaint to me because it's set in a department store; that was some British PR staffer's idea of being original.) And Stevie looks like he's about 15 and just got up.



The next is from Winwood's next group, Traffic--"Paper Sun" from their first album. Here the PR genius decided to have the group wandering through a museum as the long version of the song plays. What I also learned from other Winwood videos is something I had forgotten: Winwood might be a better guitar player than he is an organist. He held his own against Clapton when they were in Blind Faith.



Actually, this search started because I learned another artist who performed at the Concert for George had died, Jim Capaldi, Traffic's drummer. Rest in peace.

"Even the smallest person can change the course of [movie] history"

Thus (almost) says Galadriel to Frodo in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring: a non-Tolkienian line, but movies have never shied away from being explicit. Before I plunge into Kristin Thompson's The Frodo Franchise, I thought I'd set down my thoughts on Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which is, I think, on the whole, brilliantly successful.

Now I never got into the pissing matches on the Net before, while, and after these movies were released; it just wasn't worth it. Minds were often made up before the movies were even seen--it's like the person on Amazon.com who gave the latest Harry Potter book one star before it was published. I found that time, as it usually does, brought clearer reflection. Some points became more obvious; some weaknesses more apparent. But these movies became awfully useful to me in writing classes, as I used them as a method of showing how to provide examples to support a thesis--even their Appendices--and while doing so, engendered further thoughts on the motives behind the production.

The main point to remember--and one that the Harry Potter motives have reinforced for me--is that Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens decided to make a successful movie. To do that, they had to draw in as an audience people who had never read Tolkien. The latest Potter movies show that their makers are relying more and more on the audience's having read the books. To recoup the staggering costs of production, Jackson and his team had to engage a mass audience, not just the fans--who would probably come to the movie anyway.

The second point is related. When Bob Shaye at New Line gave Jackson the green light to make three movies, certain structural problems became evident. The team had to rewrite their two-movie screenplay. The first two books end on a cliff-hanging event, and I think Jackson did not want to alienate those members of the audience who might not even have realized that two movies followed The Fellowship. Thus each movie has a rounded ending--the last movie's being too rounded for some.

The third point is again related. How do you make a successful Hollywood movie (even in New Zealand)? Learn how to write a screenplay from a master: in this case, Jackson and Walsh attended a scriptwriting seminar given by the modern guru of the art, Robert McKee, author of Story, who is so famous he was portrayed by Brian Cox in Adaptation. All modern screenwriting manuals emphasize a character "arc," that characters change over the course of a movie (or three). Thus some characters in the novels with immutable personalities become more plastic in the movies, usually weaker (in some aspect) before they can become strong.

More to come...

Dear Readers

I'm like many other bloggers in that once I learned that I could find out who's reading my blog, I did. Since I usually only write about subjects that a) interest me and b) seem to me worth having a thought or two about, I know my numbers will never be high. Nevertheless, it's fun to see that one person has searched for "cork+soaker+pynchon" on Google and landed here. Or "no Caine on the Brazos," which is interesting since it's an intentional pun (and not that good a one), combining the spelling of Michael Caine's last name with the title of a song the Band and Bob Dylan did on the Basement Tapes. Or "hanging+clause," since it's a mistake on my part--it should be "hanging cause."

One reader I learned about initially shook me up a little. Right after I wrote about Albert Brooks,* and titled the entry after his latest movie, someone from Iran read my blog. Synchronicity? Yes, since it was one of those navbar searches ("next blog") that led him/her here. Still...

*One movie I forgot to mention in that entry was a movie Brooks acted in, Steven Soderbergh's excellent adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, Out of Sight. In it, Brooks plays a thoroughly repellent Wall Street insider who has been sent to prison for fraud. Here the whininess that underlies much of his comic persona is dialed up--and he still manages to be funny.

Random Notes

• That was the title of my favorite section in Rolling Stone in the days of Ralph J. Gleason and Hunter Thompson and Ben Fong-Torres and John Mendelsohn and Lester Bangs, so I'll happily steal it for here.
• My mind has finally recovered from the after-effects of finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The emotion was akin to the come-down after a sugar-high, or the sadness a child feels on Christmas afternoon, knowing that that state of ultimate expectation that Christmas excites will not return for another year. Did the novel meet the hype? Mostly yes, although Rowling almost swamped the novel with again more exposition about a mythology that she invented. At least by the middle of The Return of the King, for example, you don't find out that the fellowship maybe should have gone out and discovered Sauron's technicolor dreamcoat.
• Criterion keeps making excellent choices in the movies it is selecting for its editions. In October, these will include Godard's Breathless and a personal favorite I've written about before, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Not to mention Robinson Crusoe on Mars in September (big guilty pleasure).
• More reviews are appearing of Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, and it looks better and better each time I look over the inclusions: films by Fred Zinneman, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, and John Sturges, with commentary tracks for each film, including one by James Ellroy for Crime Wave: all this for about $4 a film.
• The Frodo Franchise, a book on Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings by Kristin Thompson, an academic film critic who actually writes readable, interesting English prose worth reading, has been released early, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

We bring you the man responsible for all this

In a few hours, I, like millions of other readers around the world, will be plunged into the final adventure featuring Harry Potter. So I thought it only fair to present this YouTube clip of the writer indirectly responsible for the success of J.K. Rowling and virtually all of modern fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien. In this interview from 1968, Tolkien explains some of the backstory of the various races in his entire mythology (and listen to the way he pronounces "meyethology").



In his memoirs, Kingsley Amis remarks that Tolkien was the worst lecturer on the Oxford English faculty (and C. S. Lewis the best), in terms of elocution and audience understanding. This clip reveals some of that. Many of the comments to it declare that his speech is incomprehensible, and the uploader has seen fit to append a translation of the remarks (although it gets "demiurgic" wrong, calling it "emerging").

I think it's nice that he at least got to see a little of the money his tales would earn before he died--even as a tenured professor in England, he'd had to grade exams during his vacations to supplement his income (no National Health then). Orwell, on the other hand, died before his works took off, and from what I've read, his wife, whom he married on his deathbed, drank up all the money.

Oh, well. Ave, Tollers, and Vale, Harry.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head?

Who says you can't dance to Led Zeppelin?



(The title refers to a unique dance step some 2:40 into the video.)

Goodness, Gracious, Great . . .

While watching a Billy Wilder documentary that accompanied Ace in the Hole, I was reminded that Wilder and Charles Brackett had done the screenplay for Howard Hawks's screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Since that was in my stack of DVDs-to-be-watched, I pulled it out and had a wonderful couple of hours watching a movie in which an English professor gets to be the romantic lead--and played by Gary Cooper, no less.

Of course, much of the comedy lies in listening to the normally laconic Cooper deliver the professor's sesquipedalian verbiage in his clipped bursts; much of the rest lies in the gulf between the slang that Cooper's character is trying to nail down and his own vocabulary, as well as that of the other seven dwarfs--I mean, professors. (The resemblance of its plot to that of Snow White is intentional; "Heidy Ho!" says Barbara Stanwyck as she greets the professors). Some of this humor must have flown in under the censors' radar, as Cooper explains the slang etymology of "Sugarpuss" O'Shea's first name as referring to her face, while those with more lecherous minds muse upon a more venereal location.

What was surprising--and also delightful--about the movie was its cinematography by Gregg Toland. He employs his deep-focus technique very effectively, such as in the still above, with Cooper and Stanwyck in the foreground, three professors in varying degrees in the middle distance, and one sneaking down the stairs in the background--all clearly in focus. The scene in which Coooper first mentions his attraction to Stanwyck is even more striking: Cooper confesses this attraction just as he is about to throw her out, that he particularly noticed her the previous day when she was standing in the window and the light hit her hair. Stanwyck moves back a few feet until she is framed by the window, and poof! it glows. No CGI, just a knowledge of light, lenses, and film, and how to combine them.

Wilder said that after he wrote the script, he hung around the set to watch Hawks direct the film, a kind of "working vacation." Wilder admitted that he became a director to have ultimate control over his scripts, and told the anecdote about Charles Boyer and the cockroach again ("If he won't talk to the cockroach, the sonovabitch won't talk to anybody!"). But he also said that he became a director because that's where the fun in movie-making is. Writing, he tells the interviewer, is, "to quote Winston Churchill, 'blood, sweat, and tears.'"

Amen, Billy.

Five down, two to go

A few thoughts after seeing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

• These movies are being made for people who have seen the books: little exposition or backstory is given, and what is offered is spoken by the younger actors, who do not have the clearest enunciation in the world. And even if you have read the book, you'll be digging around in your memory for names of characters, spells, and objects. Important flashbacks flash by. One character who will become enormously important later is hardly introduced at all; you suddenly realize, "Oh, she's the one who's going to become Harry's love interest."
• This series is really being carried by an group of excellent British adult actors: Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, Ralph Fiennes as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Emma Thompson as Professor Trelawney (the last two almost cameos), Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, plus series newcomers Imelda Staunton and Helena Bonham Carter (who adds a nice dollop of mad sex appeal to the mix), as well as Brendan Gleeson (oops! he's Irish) and David Thewlis. I left the best for last: Alan Rickman as Snape, whose line readings are striking and unforgettable. In his performance, diction becomes a weapon.
• The set designers once again deserve a large portion of credit for making disbelief more easily suspendable.
• The special effects are fine, but really just an extension of concepts that have been around since the 1930s. What comes out of a wand? Out of a ray-gun? Glowing stuff. The results are just less laughable now.
• I still found myself moved at the end. One of the main messages of the Harry Potter books is the same one as Tolkien said was contained in The Lord of the Rings: "the ennoblement of the humble."

Now to see if the last book will make the last two movies worth watching.

You knew this would be coming

The Eddie Cochrane video was not quite a set-up, but I had to include this YouTube clip of the band who made "Summertime Blues" their own, especially after they were shown performing it in Woodstock, complete with guitar acrobatics caught in freeze-frame. ("Blue Cheer?" "Quiet, or you'll be taking a trip to Michael Vick's home for retired bears.") Daltrey used to introduce this song as "The only one we do that was written by someone else, so you know it has to be good," forgetting about Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues."

The Woodstock version of that song was the one they did with Moon, which they usually performed right after whatever version of Tommy they were doing live. They would start the song off almost in mid-beat, the whole band together, like a wave of sound hitting a beach. This version begins more like Cochrane's, with the beat slowly filled in on guitar. The notes to the clip say that this performance was a 1989 rehearsal version of the song, with the larger band that the group toured with after getting rid of Kenny Jones. Townshend is in his David Carradine-as-Caine-with-a-beard phase, and although he's surrounded by walls of transparent plastic to shield his hearing, he still shows the lead guitar player who's in charge by signalling the key change during the lead guitar break.



In the Cochrane version, the bass player looks supremely bored, probably because he's not very good. I like this live version by the Who because of the relative clarity of the sound; Entwhistle's bass is shorn of the fuzz overtones that accompany the normal Who version. And nobody--well, maybe Bill Wyman on "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown"--looked so cool doing a bass run. John, why didn't you leave that cocaine alone?

Ace [in the] Hole?

One director I find myself enjoying more and more as I grow older is Billy Wilder--not only for his dialogue, but for his candor in discussing his works, such as Cameron Crowe caught in Conversations with Wilder, and in the interviews he did on film with Volker Schlondorff in Billy Wilder Speaks. And now finally Criterion--who else?--has released its edition of one of the few Wilder flops in the 1950s, Ace in the Hole.

It's not hard to see why it bombed. Its hero is a reporter, played by Kirk Douglas, who prolongs the length of time a cave-in victim must spend trapped so as to build his own reputation back up. The victim's wife is a tramp, immediately signaled by Jan Sterling's hair being bleached to the same shade as Barbara Stanwyck's in Double Indemnity. And for the most part, the public is portrayed as gullible yobs, eager to vicariously participate in a story, uncaring after it's over, and preyed upon by scavengers of every size and shape. The few good people include the victim's parents, and the newspaper publisher who initially hires Douglas--he's portrayed in the still above, with the crucifix over his shoulder, while Kirk somehow defeats the laws of time and channels his son Michael.

The real fault of the picture is its ending--it doesn't know whether it wants to be Double Indemnity (lovers clash); Stalag 17 (antihero not as selfish as he appears to be); or Sunset Boulevard (what you sow, you reap). And it takes too long. Maybe it was because Wilder was between his strongest writing partners, Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond. But it has its moments: more visually composed shots than one usually associates with Wilder (including Douglas's face lit from underneath in the cave that turns him into a troll), and the usual Wilder touch in the dialogue:

Sterling (to Douglas): I've met some hard-boiled ones. But you're twenty minutes!

Summer Nights

According to what I've gleaned while teaching Homer, the phrase "dog days" refers to the appearance of the Dog Star, Sirius, during the month of August--something which many people know. But why is Sirius baleful? Its dominance of the heavens signified the most dangerous period of time for the plague: the rats get frisky and the fleas are jumpin' and the cotton is...oh, that's another allusion. At any rate, when Achilles races after Hector near the climax to the Iliad, his newly forged armor shining in the rays of the sun, he is compared, in a somewhat brief epic simile, to the fateful and dangerous Sirius.

I'm sure that was on Eddie Cochrane's mind when he penned his most famous song, "Summertime Blues." Here's a video from YouTube of Eddie, at the height of Fifties cool, doing that song. (The volume is extremely low on the recording.)



(I love the way he breaks up more and more when the backup singer delivers the punch lines.)

One more summer allusion--a song I very vaguely remember from the Sixties was titled "Summer Nights." All I could remember that it was sung by a British female singer and had a prominent harpsichord--as well as a few words from the bridge's lyrics: "there's a little cafe..." I thought the singer might be Linda Hopkins, but it was, as Google told me, the much throatier Marianne Faithfull. And thanks to iTunes, I found it was much better than I remembered, which, unfortunately, is not always the case. That vibrato contralto...

How's by You?

I had been planning to do a little piece on Timothy Carey anyway, but the mood I've been in lately is perfectly summed up in this still of Carey in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, in which Carey plays one of the three French soldiers (along with Ralph Meeker and Joe Turkel) shot for their unit's refusal to fight during a battle in WWI.

I first noticed Carey in One-Eyed Jacks, a Western initially directed by Kubrick, but then directed by its star, Marlon Brando, after a falling-out between the two. Carey plays a thoroughly odious piece of work whom Brando kills after Carey attacks a girl. His character seems just intelligent enough to be evil.

In Paths of Glory, Carey is more pitiable than hateful, but in his other work for Kubrick, he plays Nikki Arane, a racist member of the gang of robbers in The Killing. This wasn't the only time Carey worked for an A-list director; he was also in John Cassevetes's Minnie and Moskowitz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Carey also did a lot of television work; he appeared in a couple of episodes of Columbo as the proprietor of a greasy spoon--typecasting, if you ask me.

Carey has been dubbed a "Method character actor," and Quentin Tarantino dedicated Reservoir Dogs to him. Carey also worked for years, a la Orson Welles, on his own auteur project, The World's Greatest Sinner, in which he plays an insurance salesman who...ah, it's too ridiculous to summarize.

I was thinking about Carey because one of his films, Crime Wave, is being released as part of Warner Bros. fourth volume of Film Noir classics. And if you need any more proof of Carey's, ah, unique qualities, just check out his publicity still on IMDB.

Looking for Good Comedy in the Modern World

A couple of recent comments by my blogging friends have led me to think about the work of an actor/writer/director whose comic films I generally love--although a couple of his more recent works have not been up to his standards, plus he is just slightly more productive than Terence Malick. The first comment was by Muffy St. Bernard in our discussion about "The Up Series" below. She talked about reality TV and its hunger for ever-more "interesting" subjects. The other comment was thinkulous's entry about the evolutionary drive for humans to develop "big brains."

The name that immediately came to mind was Albert Brooks, and since 56 Up will probably be released before his next auteur effort, I figured I'd better write about him now, while we're both still alive, instead of waiting for his next film to come out.

Brooks's first directorial effort was Real Life (1979), a riff on the attempt by PBS to produce the first serious "reality" series, An American Family (1973). Brooks and a film crew set out to record a year in the life of a family. "And it's real!" as he yells at the end. This movie revealed how closely Brooks mined the border between the comedic and the discomforting: that what is humorous, if dialed up a notch, becomes disquieting, unsettling and embarassing.

A Modern Romance (1981) was Brooks's second movie as director, and I find it characteristically alternately hilarious and painful to watch--often in the same scene. Brooks's character is chronically jealous, which leads to some hilarious situations that teeter along the edge of, and by the end of the movie fall into, pathology. It's funny, but since we like his character, we don't want to watch him cause his romance to implode. The movie has a hilarious scene in which Brooks, whose character is a movie editor, works with the late Bruno Kirby on adding foley effects to a cheesy sf movie starring George Kennedy. I use it in my movie classes to illustrate how some foley effects are added to a movie, and besides doing that, it always gets some good laughs.

Defending Your Life is my favorite of Brooks's work. The central conceit--that the afterlife is like one huge, perfect time-share vacation spot where you await your assignment to your next life--is ingenious and affords an opportunity for satire on all sorts of levels. It's here that the "big brains" come in. Brooks's life on earth is defended by Rip Torn, who plays a more evolved creature who uses more of his brain--47%, vs. 3-5% by humans. We humans are thus called "little brains." In one scene, Brooks's character is eating a heaping plate of delicious food--none of which will make him heavy, or fill him up. Torn's character has a plate with a small amount of what appears to be burnt corned-beef hash.

Brooks: What are you eating?
Torn: You wouldn't like this.
Brooks: What is it? What does it taste like?
Torn: You're curious, aren't you? Good, I like that about you. You wanna try it?
Brooks: Yeah. (Reaches over and takes a forkful.) Looks so weird. (Puts it in his mouth and immediately spits it out in disgust).
Torn: (Laughs).
Brooks: Oh, my God.
Torn: A little like horseshit, huh?
Brooks: (Nods, with his napkin shoved over his mouth and audibly gulping with distaste).
Torn: As you get smarter, you begin to manipulate your senses. This tastes much different to me than it does to you.
Brooks: Eeeew. This is what smart people eat?

Brooks's comedy is overt and sly at the same time. There's the gag, that smart people's food tastes horrible, and then there's the subtext--that smart people like terrible things. Later, Brooks goes to a comedy club called "The Bomb Shelter." There, a smart comedian is making jokes about little brains, most of which are unfunny. When he asks Brooks, "How did you die?" Brooks answers, "On stage--like you." The audience laughs. Exactly how smart are these people?

Brooks manages to thrust in another almost unbearably painful scene, during which he has to watch himself as a small child witness an argument between his parents. Most of the scenes replayed from his previous life have been funny: this knocks the breath out of you.

Brooks's next two films, Mother and The Muse, each have their moments, but are generally disappointing. His latest movie, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, was generally panned, but I thought it was a return to much of his previous form. A joke on outsourcing requires the audience to pay attention to what is happening in the background of a scene, on two different occasions. Similarly, the main joke behind the comedy concert that Brooks gives contains several different layers, and takes time for the audience's realization of these layers to develop. This is the least unsettling of Brooks's movies, perhaps because of the potential for explosive adverse reaction if it became too unsettling.

Albert Brooks's comedy takes patience, intelligence, and sensitivity to understand, and ususally provokes some thought afterwards. To think that he and Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler owe the same TV show their first big breaks.

"And it's real!"

Added later: What makes those lines I quoted from Defending Your Life charactertistically Brooksian is Torn's character saying, "You're curious, aren't you? Good, I like that about you." It adds nothing to the joke per se, and it seems to make Torn into a nice guy, until we realize that he's (a) looking for anything that will buttress his defense of this loser, and (b) he's a condescending prat.

Mick Travis and the Deadly Quadrangle

I suppose this is as good a time as any to finally get around to watching Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968). I'm getting near the end of the "Up Series" of documentaries, in which at least three of the boys attended schools much like the public school depicted in Anderson's film. And in another ten (?) days, the final volume of the most celebrated series of novels about British public schools ever written, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will be released.

The first thought that occurs to my mind is that I don't have enough "real-world" evidence to go on about British public schools ("public" here meaning upper-class and exclusive) to make a considered judgment, even though I've been absorbing British culture all my life. How realistic is the depiction of public schools meant to be in If....? Was corporal punishment by other students still allowed in the late Sixties? (I know the young Eric Blair and other Etonians were rejecting it in the early Twenties.) Was OTC mandatory in the late Sixties, as depicted here? The precise nature of reality is important because so much of If.... is a fantasy, and that fantasy is never clearly demarcated.

If.... is the story of three public-school sixth-formers who rebel against their school finally by shooting and blowing up their classmates, masters, and their families. Of course, the shadow of Columbine looms over such a depiction. And issues from that tragedy span reality and fiction: bullying, ostracism, labeling. The ending of the movie, almost everyone seems to agree, is a fantasy (one of the mothers, for instance, grabs a rifle and starts shooting at the rebels). Right here I'd like to make some sententious declaration, but I remember what happened to another maxim-giver at the hands of a college student ("Thou, wretched, rash, intruding fool...").

To J. K. Rowlings's credit, she does show the evils of prejudice (in this case ethnic) and of bullying as well at Hogwarts, but there are still the worship of sport (quidditch is like rugby) and the rivalries among the various houses. Harry Potter, like Mick Travis, is pretty much the outsider (again, often forced to be), and a rebel, but for a good cause.

The first time we see Mick, he is called Guy Fawkes for his hat and the scarf hiding the moustache he grew over the summer.

It's the first time audiences saw those eyes up close, those eyes that could be so faun-like, yet a centimeter wider, become a gargoyle's, and with a little liner, are those of a--well, use your gulliver and supply your own Nadsat phrase.

"La, la , la, la, life goes on"

A lot of what I'm doing lately is so immense (such as reading a three-volume, 1200-page novel written in fragmentary modernist mode) that I don't want to talk about it until I have gotten farther along. One longer viewing experience I can comment upon and recommend highly is Michael Apted's "Up Series," a seven-movie series of documentaries. Few documentaries have been constructed around an individual's chronological life as it is lived: this one does it with a group of people.

It began as a 1964 documentary about a group of seven-year-old British children selected for differences in social class, geographic location, and gender. One boy grew up on a Dales farm, three boys went to a exclusive prep school, three girls are friends at an East London school, two boys are from a children's home, two boys from a Liverpool suburb--the backgrounds and personalities are nicely varied. Most of the program consists of interviews with the children, but the narrator does come in at the end and announces the Jesuits' maxim: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

This bothered me--not because the Jesuits didn't say it (they did) and not because it isn't true (q.v. James Joyce). But I thought the series, which returns to this group of young Britons (and even that fact changes fairly quickly) at intervals of seven years, would show more the accuracy of Wordsworth's statement in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality": "The child is the father to the man." In other words, we'd see how much of a personality, a character, was present already in childhood and would remain in adulthood. Character is destiny--or would we learn differently?

But as the series wears on, as the filmmakers return to the same group every seven years, I learn that both points are true. What has been ground into these children as thoroughly as their gender roles are their positions in a class-demarcated society. Also, a lot of the adult is present in the child. But those are the generalizations. The heart of the series--and I'm up to 35 Up now--are the individuals. Some people's lives change abruptly--divorce, an unexpected child--some stay the same. I don't want to get into many specifics because, like fiction, one of the joys of "reading" these lives is to see what happens.

But life is not fiction in that it doesn't have an Aristotlean plot. Austen, Dickens, and other novelists often end their fictions with a marriage--but for many people, that's only the beginning. What is the shape of a life as it is lived? Its weight? And in this sense the "Up Series" resembles U.S.A.

The word that keeps returning to me in attempting to describe this series is deep. It is deeply moving at times, deeply human, and deeply humanistic. One story in particular is almost ineffably sad. I'm holding my breath, so to speak, for the last two installments.

What cold little hands...

One more Bjorling clip--I have to, because this one always makes my jaw drop and my eyes water. It's from Act 1 of Puccini's La Boheme, "Che gelida manina," and in this case, I do know what it means--it's the title of this post. Rodolfo, having met Mimi, is now beginning, in that quaint Victorian sense, to make love to her.

This recording comes from 1938, which means it was recorded on 78 rpm records. They have done a superb job of cleaning it up, but still--the power of Bjorling's voice is almost frightening. I used to think Pav was supreme in this aria--but he can't hold a candle to Bjorling. What was it like to hear him live? Soaring. Searing.

Rocking the Dikes

I wanted to put a song here that was the complete opposite of my last post's subject, so I was listening to a YouTube clip of the Who singing "Long Live Rock," where Pete Townshend is so drunk that he almost falls into Keith Moon's drum kit, and Moon laughs his ass off, when I noticed a clip from the same British show--The Old Grey Whistle Test--of a favorite song I had completely forgotten about for decades: "Sylvia" by the Dutch group Focus.

It's coupled with their only U.S. hit, "Hocus Pocus," which features the vocal--what to call them--acrobatics? pyrotechnics? inanities? of Thijs van Leer: let's say "unique vocal stylings." Jan Akkerman, the guitar player, was always more interesting to me.

"The sweet power of music"

In a famous passage in E. M. Forster's Howards End, the Schlegel sisters attend a concert that includes Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Forster describes Helen's reaction to its third movement as a vision of goblins marching across the world. Thus Forster proves that it is almost impossible to write about music in words or images that can bridge the gap between the spirits hearing the same piece.

In Merchant of Venice, Jessica tells Lorenzo, "I am never merry when I hear sweet music," and he answers, "The reason is your spirits are attentive." Much of this interchange was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, itself a gorgeous work. All this is prelude to a piece I found wandering through the slim pickings of classical fare available on You Tube. I normally would not draw anyone's attention to a recording that is played over a static picture, but the music is so beautiful, and the voices so unforgettable, that I had to. It's Jussi Bjorling, the immortal Swedish tenor, and Robert Merrill, baritone, singing the duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers.



I have no idea what they are singing about, nor do I want to know. I want to bask in Bjorling's effortless purity of tone and Merrill's perfect blending with and support of Bjorling. I just want that stream of melody, that "concord of sweet sounds," as Lorenzo calls it, to reach inside me and touch that within me that is immortal. One response to this video on YouTube was, "It's because of stuff like this that I bother trying to stay alive."

Lorenzo says of the music of the spheres:

Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

When listening to this recording, I think I, at least, come pretty close.

P.S. I came across this comment to another video of Bjorling: "The beauty of Jussi Bjorling's voice is the clarity and his annunciation." Well, the word should be "enunciation," but in this case, it's a felix lapsis, a happy slip. The word becomes fleshed by the artist's voice.

Punks

Sitting here with actinic afterimages smoldering in my retinas, miniscule grains of spent gunpowder lining my air passages down to my lungs, and mosquito bites pebbling my thighs and biceps and forehead, I consider the primitive device I used in another vain attempt to discourage those summer pests--the humble punk, which also doubles as a fireworks igniter, and whose pleasant, slightly rancid odor always evokes memories of past summers in me.

I thought about the lowly punk because John Dos Passos mentions it in the first volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel; according to him, young women walking out on a summer's night at the beginning of the twentieth century would place one in their hair to ward off mosquitoes. I found that fascinating--the same device used over one hundred years later, for much the same purpose. It is a unifying object, linking centuries together, and in my own life, linking decades. (The word "punk" with this denotation derives, it is supposed, from a Native American word, first applied to spongy growths on oaks used for tinder.)

A lot more about U.S.A. to come, but just this thought inspired by a summer night with fireworks: words are cement, glue, link, tinder, explosive--all at once.

Through the Eyes of a Child

No, not the Moody Blues--but the events of The Fallen Idol--a 1948 collaboration between writer Graham Greene and director Carol Greene. Their later work together included the iconic The Third Man, but this movie is almost as good, and covers some of the same themes, including perceptions, loyalty between friends, and when that loyalty has to be sacrificed.

A seven-year-old boy is friends with a butler, who is having a clandestine romance with a younger woman. Almost all the events of the movie are seen through this boy's eyes, and it is up to us to interpret what is happening--and what the boy thinks is happening. (As David Lodge points out in an essay accompanying the film, Greene probably picked up this twist from Henry James's novel What Maisie Knew.) The boy is played with remarkable skill by Bobby Henrey, and the butler is nicely underplayed by Ralph Richardson. The set--a five-level replication of a foreign embassy in London--allows Reed all kinds of shots showing the boy as an observer, and his judicious use of Dutch angles (those askew, out-of-plumb shots) is more effective, I think, than his flamboyant use of them in The Third Man.

The still shows the wealth of acting talent that Reed worked with--Jack Hawkins, Richardson, Bernard Lee, Henrey, and Denis O'Dea. Criterion's remastering is characteristically meticulous: during Henrey's nightmarish odyssey through London streets, each cobblestone, each brick, shines with reflected light. It's almost a rehearsal for Holly Martins's vertiguous chase of Harry Lime through Vienna's fitfully illuminated streets. Supposedly, Greene liked this movie even better than The Third Man, and I can see why.

Japan Confidential

A popular singer and an artist, staying at a resort, have their pictures taken together on the balcony of the singer's room and are accused of engaging in a torrid affair by a scandal sheet. They sue the rag. "Ripped from today's headlines"? No--it's the plot of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 movie, Scandal.

This sort of story, of course, was going on in the U.S. too, particularly with Confidential magazine, lawsuits against it eventually putting it out of business. It's fascinating to see it happening in Japan as well. In fact, they did not even have an equivalent for the word "scandal": they use the English word. The entire movie is about the influence of the West on Japan, after five years of Occupation.

Takashi Shimura (to the right in the still) plays the alcoholic lawyer who approaches the artist (played by a young-looking Toshiro Mifune) to sue the magazine, Amour (its title is another example of Western inroads). He has a daughter who is suffering from T.B., and the prelude to the climax of the movie occurs at Christmas, when Mifune brings a fully decorated Christmas tree for the daughter on the back of his motorcycle (when the neighborhood kids ask him who he is, he replies, "Santa Krausis!") When Shimura comes home drunk that night, his daughter is being serenaded by the singer (with Mifune on organ) performing "Silent Night." He runs out to a tavern, Mifune following, where a band is playing "Buttons and Bows," and later on, the entire tavern joins together in a drunken chorus of "Auld Lang Syne." Is all this Westernization good or bad? As far as the possibility of "scandal" goes, yes. Does this mean the same for Christmas and New Year's?

Four months later, Rashomon debuted, and Japanese cinema became widely known in the Western world. Mifune and Kurosawa would go on to one of the greatest collaborations in the history of cinema (Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, High and Low, Yojimbo, Red Beard), but this early movie shows that the influence of the West, while inspiring in its cinematic aspect, also brought dangers to Japan for which they had no words to express.

A Semi-Janeite

Needing fiction in another vein after chewing on Pynchon and before climbing Dos Passos, I just finished Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, which I wanted to like more than I did. It has most of Austen's virtues: the poeticizing of everyday emotions; the ironic eye for the missed communication, the misinterpreted glance; the sure control of point-of-view and free indirect discourse, letting the reader use her intelligence to discern the truth; and as an added bonus, an awareness of global events beyond the English village that is her usual territory. In this case, it is the British Navy, which Austen was intimately familiar with, as far as possible for a woman of her time, since her brother eventually became an admiral.

It's a short novel, but even so, the climax does seem delayed, and when it finally comes, the curtain falls even more quickly after it than in her other novels. We know her main characters will get together: it's the how that is of infinite interest in Austen. I enjoy Austen most when her characters realize each other's love because they are acting unselfishly or disinterestedly, such as happens in Emma. Anne Elliott in Persuasion is so perfect, acts so rightly almost all of the time, that no real suspense builds over whether she and Captain Wentworth will get together. Perhaps Austen's health affected her writing. Still, I think her art would have expanded had she lived; some people bemoan Mozart's early death, but I think Austen was the more grievous loss.

I am not a full "Janeite," as her followers call themselves, and I do not read all her books annually, as, supposedly, E. M. Forster and Angus Wilson did. But I hate when she is called a "miniaturist" who worked in a constricted field with a limited cast of characters--employing "a fine brush on ivory." Her field was the human heart, which is infinite in its depths and heights--or at least to each of us it is.