Snow Day

The Outlaw ( Howard Hughes)I have probably seen fewer westerns than any other type of genre film. If this vanity piece was the first western one ever saw, one wouldn't be in a great hurry to see another. Hughes' inflated ego floated through Hollywood for several years. Clamor and outrage surrounded this movie, with its unequivocal "suggestive" music cues and bizarre camera angles ( courtesy of Kane camera man Gregg Toland)that drew the viewer's eye
to the generous bosom of Jane Russell. When Hughes isn't steaming up the room with Ms Russell, he's telling a version of the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Pat's best friend Doc Holiday is cleverly played by Walter Huston. This isn't a dull film but the absence of la Russell only emphasizes Hughes' sub- Ed Wood directorial prowess.

Master and Commander ( Peter Weir)Peter Weir hit America with Witness, a sound variation of his theme of cultures colliding. He made one more picture that was on a par with his Australian films, Fearless, the tale of a man who has no business being alive ( he's survived an airliner crash)that has affinities with Phillipe Mora. Master and Commander is a precis' of the work of the popular nautical storyteller Patrick O'Brian. Weir depicts the archetypal homosocial milieu, the life of the sea, but plausibly keeps everything on a friendly basis. It's still enough to wring a tear from even the phlegmatic likes of me. Russell Crowe gives us another 3D portrait, his best after John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Paul Bettany offsets Captain Aubrey's genuine piety as the ship's doctor, an amateur naturalist whose idea of heaven is the Galapagos Islands. It's no The Last Wave or Gallipoli but a worthy film. I'm sorry I missed it in the theatres.

Dance With A Stranger ( Mike Newell)Nightclub hostess and retired prostitute Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in England. Scenarist Shelagh Delaney presents the events leading to Ellis' execution as the impossible triangle of the lady, aspiring race car driver David Blakeley and unrequited lover/ protector Desmond Cussen. Blakeley is besotted
with Ellis and even breaks off an engagement to "the kind of girl my mother wants me to marry". But this is England in 1954. The kind of slumming popular among the toffs was still several years away. Ellis is played by Miranda Richardson as a collection of tics,twitches and tantrums. She conveys so much through shrieks and cries that she's almost the female Nick Nolte. I've spoilt the movie already but I hope my description of Richardson's acting drives you to find this movie and watch it anyway. There were at least two other very good British true crime films during the late 80s - early 90s, Peter Medak's
The Krays and Let Him Have It. The latter was most people's first look at Christopher Eccleston.

When it snows, I watch movies.

Some Favorites of 2008

( A film or book or record's inclusion doesn't necessarily indicate that it was published or released in 2008.)

Wild Nights - Joyce Carol Oates. JCO imagines the last days of James, Poe, Hemingway, Dickinson and Twain.
The Sluts - Dennis Cooper - The latest by the man the gay lit establishment loves to hate. This assemblage of sex worker critiques is marbled with some of the darkest comedy imaginable.
The Secret History - Donna Tartt - My weakness for school stories isn't limited to tales of boarding school buggery. Can anyone tell me why this book reminded me so often of John Fowles' The Magus?
My Lives - Edmund White - White throws pretense to the four winds and gives us the book lurking beneath his famous autobiograhical quartet.

Let The Right One In
Margot at the Wedding
The Host
In Bruges
Fear(s) of the Dark
Midnight Meat Train
The X Files: I Want To Believe
The Dark Knight Returns
My Winnipeg
Savage Grace
Mother of Tears
Newcastle

Live music:
The National / Modest Mouse / REM Columbia,Md.
The Duke Spirit Baltimore, Md.
Melissa Etheridge D.C.

I played the hell out of Enigma Love Sensuality Devotion, Morrissey/ Smiths in toto, Cassndra Wilson's Miles Davis album, Kevin Ayers Joy of a Toy, Bryan Ferry Dylanesque, Van Dyke Parks Tokyo Rose, Richard and Linda Thompson / Best of and John Cale The Island Years.

Rewind in Peace

I see there's another trio of celebrity deaths. Eartha Kitt really was blackballed like Losey, Lardner, Faulk, Robertson, Kirsty McColl, Geer, Trumbo and so many sadly more. LBJ had more and deeper Hollywood connections than those pikers Bill and Hilary. I'd like to remind my reader(s) that Sir Harold Pinter was taken to visit Quentin Crisp back in the days when he, QC, kept company with hooligans and rough trade. Pinter describes this visit in the memorial Stately Homo and says it was the genesis of his first play, The Room.
The headline that saddened me most was the announcement that, for all intents and purposes, VHS was officially dead. The awkward poorly designed winner of the VHS vs. Betamax scuffle was now only a memory. Perhaps in ten years VHS collectors will pop up like eight-track tape aficionados. There's a boutique market for vinyl records, so who knows? I'm pouting over VHS not only because I own so goddamn many films-on-tape but because my most intense phase of movie viewing and film scribbling centered primarily around VHS. Home Vision, tape predecessor to the overrated Criterion Collection, had the best looking copies of Alphaville, Spirits of the Dead, L'Enfants du Paradis, Kwaidan, Peeping Tom, L'Avventura, Rules of the Game, Shock Corridor and more. The room seemed to expand when I manipulated the frame-by-frame advance button.
David Cronenberg was urging me to find out how long they waited to cut from the actor to the exploding head in Scanners. Hal Hartley assured me that it was quite all right to stare at Adrienne Shelly putting on her glasses to look at Martin Donovan, disappearing in the back of a police car in Trust. Even Polanski could look back to 1965 and that eerie flat in Repulsion.
Brian Eno was right. Tape is a plastic medium. Even prerecorded tape.
Now the obsolete DVDs are piling up, tidy and flat and crammed with "extras."

I creep over to the turntable on its stand and cue up the soundtrack of Absolute Beginners and hiss at the Luddite in the mirror.

Art Victim

Last week I went on vacation. Vacation, that sacred time of the American worker when sometimes, for a drunken instant, the place of return is forgotten. I didn't go to Key West or Portland or London for my vacation. I chose Baltimore,where it rained as much as it does in Portland for an entire week.
Instead of prowling the streets as is my wont when I visit Charm City, I went Christmas shopping at various downmarket locales ( no Saks thank you)and visited the Baltimore Museum of Art, home of the fabled Cone Sisters collection ( possibly the biggest private collection of Matisse, Picasso, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists extant). The BMA was literally my downfall.
The current exhibit by Franz West is called To Build a House You Start with the Roof. A 25ft sculpture The Ego and the Id was created especially for the BMA show. This looping construction features seats or porches for the viewer to use for rest or for a new angle of this multicolored giant Slinky. I perched at different points on Ego and Id and, deciding I wanted to investigate the rest of the show, stepped off the rim of the two foot high platform and fell to the floor.

My mother always told me to put out my hands palms-out when I fell so's not to mar my face. My face won't stand much more damage, it's true, but neither will my operant left arm, which I knocked the bejesus out of. Since Thursday I've been wearing a brace on my left hand and avoiding strenuous use, like typing. At the emergency room I was told to avoid excessive use of my arm, which means I don't go back to work for a few more days.
Now that I'm back home perhaps the weather will improve.

p.s. The Franz West show is really a lot of fun especially for lounge lizards and sedentary types. I've never seen an interactive exhibition where the interaction consisted of sitting and gazing. Any ambulance chasers out there who have their search engines set on keywords like victim and injury please don't bother me.

Critics of the Future

This is for the artist Everett Swinson of Norfolk,Va, who died in 1998 after several years fighting AIDS and continuing to make art and do community work until he literally could not move. Norfolk is like a very small galaxy with a mass of overlapping solar systems. When I lived there I spun in the peripheral orbit of a few of these systems, one being the Younger Artists Gang. Everett was one of the youngest and most accomplished. He had a sense of publicity that's necessary sometimes to get one's work noticed by the non-artistic world, the press, the evening news.
Every spring at the annual Ghent Arts Festival he was highly visible, doing some type of process or performance piece that usually necessitated his moving among the crowd. This guaranteed him a few seconds and sometimes even interview time on WAVY-TV and the other local stations. After Ghent moved out of the park at Stockley Gardens and went to Norfolk's Rouse monstrosity Waterside, Everett and some comrades organized an alternative arts event in Stockley Gardens, a protest against the glitzy new downtown Ghent Arts Festival.
Everett stood at one end of the park, near the entrance, holding a ream of multicolored paper. He disposed of it a sheet at a time, a fixed grin on his face. Halfway through the piece, a trio of tweenage boys arrived and paused on their skateboards.
" Shit man what's this?"
" I dunno, what's he doing?"
" We're gonna be late dude."
" Wait a second. I want to see .."
"See what, Jimmy?"
" This is weird man."
" Yeah it's weird."
" Come on you faggots. Let's get the hell out of here."
Later that evening I ran into Everett in a bar and complimented him on the success of the festival, showing him all the free Hare Krishna literature, including dietary advice, I'd
picked up. " Did you hear those kids?"
"You mean the ones who got scared and left?" He laughed. " The critics of the future."

The future isn't what it used to be

During the last fortyeight hours i have watched two popular movies from the Eighties that both fall under the soiled umbrella of noir. Angel Heart is probably the only Alan parker movie i genuinely like. On what looks like a modestish budget he creates a visually plausible Fifties America and a graphically clean hell. Mickey Rourke was once a fairly cute actor. Robert DeNiro was once able to play comedy in lower case. Charlotte Rampling excites as always in a small but integral role. CAUTION SPOILERS AHEAD. iF YOU CARE ABOUT SURPRISE DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. Angel Heart is a demonic variant on the basic concept of Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock and Derek Marlowe's A Dandy in Aspic with the difference that Rourke's hapless PI doesn't know that Mr. Cyphere ( DeNiro)has sent him in search of himself. Amgel Heart wears very well. I'd not have thought Parker capable of a film as modest and well realized as this.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, on the other hand, is a Big Deal, almost a white elephant, rereleased and rereleased innumerable times. ( The version I watched was sans voiceover. I didn't even notice its absence.)I don't usually care about the plausibility or consistency of scifi science but there's a basic error about the Replicants that must be addressed. They are not androids or robots. They are genetically engineered short action flesh and blood work machines,in other words, slaves. I think audiences were so dazzled by BR's justly celebrated rainy nighttown dystopic design of the future that they didn't listen to Fancher's script very closely.
I can't help wondering if BR would be a textbook movie if it had been shot on the early Eighties equivalent of an old Twilight Zone episode's budget so ehat we paid more attention to the words and less to the imagery. Ridley Scott is not a scifi or horror director, although he's helmed one classic in each genre. He's a hack of distinction who loses interest in a film somewhere between the last shot and the editing process. Alien, that derivative funhouse of a movie, holds together as a tale of the old dark starship and the nastiest monster yet imagined because of its superior acting ensemble and daring design. BR looks a bit rushed and hokey in comparison. Scott gets good work from his actors. Harrison Ford, that block of wood, is actually exciting in a way he would never be again. Sean Young, Darryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer as the angry trio of replicants are among the finest gang of misfits in movies.
So why doesn't it work any better?
In 1982 moviegoers were still turning up stoned out of their minds. Easily dazzled by the cheesiest eye candy, they were swept off their feet by Scott's superior set design and dank seamless vision of a sinus torturing future. Blade Runner will endure but it's an elaborate facade with a lot of insufficiently explored philosophical themes behind it. Give me Alien any day. Scary as hell with no axe to grind.

RBFF Last Day

God help me. I should stay away from the flea market section of the Festival tent.
I don't buy T shirts or that sort of bric a brac. No. I buy Hollywood - From Vietnam to Watergate by Robin Wood.
I saw two more films, the popular French thriller Tell No One which actually deserves the adjective Hitchcockian. To tell more would be spoiling it for you, dear reader(s).

The Lebanese Under The Bombs was more involving. Filmed ten days after the ceasefire ( Israeli bombing attacks continued)of the Thirty-three Days War. A frantic woman hires a reluctant cabbie to drive her to south Lebanon in search of her children. They meet repeated obstacles especially bombed out bridges. It's grim to think how much of this film's script was dictated by the ravaged landscape. The ending is bittersweet but totally bleak. I had just finished complaining that the selection had become too timid and almost PBS-ish on one of those surveys. Guess I spoke too soon.