A blog about movies and TV shows for the discerning, snarky viewer
Watching the smearing of Barack Obama online has been edifying, and now we have a list of the five most stupid Obama smears of this campaign. Enjoy, if that’s the right word.
The Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco on Friday (Aug. 22) night taught important lessons: Never invite 5 million people to a party. Ecological festivals means biodegradable cups for $11 glasses of zinfandel. It also means one parked electric car everyone will marvel at, as if it was the display model in a Soviet department store. Don’t bring anything you have to carry, because you will be in the biggest mob you have ever seen in your life. Don’t pee, or else bring a urine container with you. Or bring something to read while standing in a half-hour Portapotty line. Do not wear stylish shoes. Bring clumsy ugly hiking boots. You will get blisters hiking across those many, many acres. When the crowd breaks, you’ll be hiking over rough country to get out of the park. Five million people will tread on your toes. Some will do this because they are baked. Most will do this because they are text-messaging and walking at the same time. If you’re Radiohead, watch out for sudden peak-hour power failures. Have your tour bus primed and ready so you can get out alive, while first diverting the crowd with a tape loop. Your cellphone may flip out due to the massive, carcinogenic electronic bubble over the Polo Field. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A RENDEZVOUS IF YOU GET SPLIT UP FROM YOUR PARTY. Or else be a dejected, raving figure standing at a drizzly, lonesome intersection at night, wandering deeper into the avenues than you’ve ever wanted to be in your life.
So much of film criticism in 2008 is the blind leading the lame, so the loss of the long-retired but not forgotten Manny Farber is just one more bad indicator, as they say in the financial world. Got to meet the man once; he was hard of hearing and it was a noisy room, but I wanted to tell him that I too was a fan of rotund actor Eugene Pallette (visible on one Bay Area screen tonight (Aug. 21): the Stanford Theatre’s revival of The Bride Came C.O.D.), and that I bet Farber didn’t know Pallette had been a professional jockey once. He didn’t!
Jonathan Rosenbaum will be writing up this great man’s obit. J. Hoberman already has; what I’d add is that Farber’s vocation as a fine artist dictated the way he wrote about cinema. In his best work (just reprinted last year but still found in libraries and used bookstores), he boiled down the sound and fury of the movies to crafty bits of word-jazz. Which is the way we remember movies, anyway.
Farber’s praise was not for the “brilliant performance” or the “harrowing drama” but for the empty space in the frame, the shape of an actor’s head, the brilliant punnish putdown; in one instance, describing that French actress with the famous pout as “Jeanne Morose.”
Here’s some Farber phraseology, picked out of my nearby copy of Negative Space: Preston Sturges’ regular Pat Moran, with one of the great Brooklyn voices, “as if its owner had just been smashed in the Adam’s apple by Joe Louis.” Two Rode Together, a John Ford film with a bit of a cult: “The movie’s mentally retarded quality comes from the discordancy and quality of the parts: it’s not only that they don’t go together, they’re crazy to start with.” [that’s Henry Poole Is Here in one sentence, by the way] …”It’s incredible, the amount of leeway that is allowed. If a prop man locates a bench from an antique store next to a tree in a just-set-up campsite, the scene stays in, though the film for the proceeding five minutes has been insisting on formidable wilderness.”
For anyone who was sorry to see the bad townie girl with the thick glasses die in Strangers on a Train: “One of the best studio actresses (Laura Elliott: a sullen, sexy small-town flirt with ordinary, nonstudio glamour) gives a few early sections extraordinary reality. …Hitchcock has always been a switch-hitter, doubling a good actor with a bad one, usually having the latter triumph. It takes real perversity murdering off Elliott and settling for Ruth Roman, a rock lady in Grecian drapery …” (Slightly unfair, since Roman was all Warner Brothers had its stables to match the Ingrid Bergman type; unfortunately, Roman was merely shaped like Hitchcock’s longtime crush. Moreover, those shots of Union Station and some of the neo-classical buildings on the Mall suggest Hitchcock was trying to make Roman a marbly Roman matron.)
And, to finish off, Farber’s assault on a film considered unassailable: “Item: David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is almost a comedy of overdesign, misshapen with spectaclelike obtrusions: the camera frozen about 10 feet in front of a speeding cyclist, which, though it catches nice immediate details of his face, primarily shows him fronted onscreen for minutes as a huge gargoylish figure. The camels, by far the most exciting shapes in the movie, photograph too large in the ‘cineramic’ desert views. An actor walking off into fading twilight becomes the small papery figure of an illustrational painting; Jack Hawkins’ General Allenby, so overweighted with British army beef, suggests a toy version of Buckingham Palace guard. While the other technicians are walloping away, the actors, stuck like thumbtacks into a maplike event, are allowed—and then only for a fraction of the time—to contribute a declamatory, school-pageant bit of acting.”
Here’s to the great man …
Days of Delon
It’s been a good summer for Alain Delon; first came a five-film set from Lionsgate (reviewed here), followed by Le Choc as part of Lionsgate’s Catherine Deneuve set (read review). The latest reissue comes from Koch-Lorber.
Joy House; one disc; Koch-Lorber; $24.98
This rococo 1964 thriller shows what the French New Wave was up against: a wide-screen black-and-white movie that, aside from cinematographer Henri Decaë’s silvery light, might as well have been directed by Robert Aldrich trying to shock the living daylights out of you. It’s René Clément’s chic adaptation of a pulp novel by Day Keene (whose other big credit is penning the source novel for Elvis’ The Trouble With Girls). Most of it takes place in a Villefranche-sur-Mer villa, as bursting with bric-a-brac as a Goodwill. The glacial yet acrobatic Alain Delon plays Marc, a Parisian drifter who slept with the wrong married woman back in New York. Some Yankee plug-uglies are looking for him, and he hides out in a church rescue mission in the Riviera. There he’s hired as a chauffeur by a rich and devious widow (Lola Albright), who is using her poor-relations cousin (Jane Fonda) as live-in maid and cook. Caroming between the two ladies—both clearly have hidden agendas—the fugitive discovers that there’s another man on the premises, artfully hidden from the police. The alternate title, Les Félins, suggests how Marc is batted around as a play-toy between the cougar and the sex kitten; if we don’t get the picture, there’s plenty of symbolic use of a pet cat, which might have influenced some of the sinister kitty-wielding in Blofeld’s scenes in the Bond movies. The film is as swank as can be, with a Plexiglas-lidded Rolls-Royce as seduction chamber. Though the action is mostly devoid of suspense, Fonda looks scrumptious, and composer Lalo Schifrin goes absolutely nutzoid on the soundtrack. Be sure to play the French subtitled version because the English version is badly dubbed. (By Richard von Busack)
Henry Poole Is Here
(PG; 100 min.) Squishy drama that compacts three terrible genres: the terminal-illness movie, the leap-of-faith movie and the “lost boy” indie movie about a man in pursuit of his inner child. (Luke Wilson, in the title role, has been pursuing that self-same inner child longer and in more movies than the Coyote sought the Road Runner.) His Poole, diagnosed with a fatal but vague disease, has decided to finish himself off with vodka and donuts in a tract house, but then his pesky neighbor Esperanza (Adriana Barraza) discerns a stain on the stucco of Henry’s new house that resembles the bleeding image of Our Savior. It becomes a shrine. Despite much evidence of its miraculous power, the film insists on Henry’s grounds for skepticism, although the film doesn’t give actual skeptics an inch. A cross-cast George Lopez isn’t so bad as the local padre; he looks tough enough. Eric Schmidt’s widescreen photography and the frozen-in-1975 L.A. suburb of La Mirada arouse some interest, as the girl next door with a mute daughter, Radha Mitchell is wasted. This Catholicism-without-the-thorns New Age schmaltz fest will have its partisans. But avoid it, and especially avoid those partisans. (Plays through Silicon Valley.) (RvB) (Pictured are Wilson and Radha Mitchell discussing Wilson’s inner child; photo by Saeed Adyani)
(This probably isn’t coming to a theater near you, but just in case)
Bottle Shock
(PG-13; 110 min.) Helicopter shots of Napa, Glen Ellen and parts of Sonoma County are the highlights of this fictionalized comedy about the 1976 French blind tasting that established California wine as an international force. The feuding father-and-son team of Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) and his hippiesh son Bo (Chris Pine in a Kurt Cobain wig) punch the hell out of each other in a makeshift boxing ring. Freddy Rodriguez of Six Feet Under is the best chum who is learning to become a winemaker on his own. Meanwhile, an intern from UC-Davis named Sam (Rachael Taylor) causes romantic confusion. To the film’s credit, there are some knowing references to the coming money storm that would all but drive the funk out of wine country—a montage in which a group of shade-tree vintners are startled to realize that someone would pay them for tastings. A huge improvement over Randall Miller’s last film, Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, it still serves up a relentless snarl of cliches—it’s amazing that Miller spared himself and us the line “We will sell no wine before its time.” The restaging of a famous scene from It Happened One Night epitomizes the general shamelessness. (The scene is a further irritant if you remember how easy it was to hitchhike in Northern California in the mid-1970s.) Alan Rickman, as the British wine merchant who starts the kerfluffle, does a great deal with his air of sarcastic melancholy, and he gives this film a boost whenever he appears.
You, hopefully. The more times you’ve pored over the coming attractions for The Watchmen (bundled on The Dark Knight), the funnier this will seem.
Since Lucasfilm requested the pulling of Harry “Ain’t It Cool” Knowles’ review from the famous geek website, Knowles’ long wail of outrage isn’t going to be up until Friday. So good thing that HollywoodNewsroom.com posted it, then. For the time being, the text is up here, but they can’t embargo the gist of the thing which is: “Oh my god, is it bad!” The myriad disappointment awaiting fanboys apparently includes, gulp, a baby Hutt.
Whoa!Thanks, Gawker.com!
Here’s proof of this shocking revelation! Rory Gibson, weekend editor of the Courier-Post, a newspaper in a place called Brisbane (not the real Brisbane in San Mateo County, but one they claim to have in the antipodes). Anyway, this so-called Gibson claims he fell asleep during The Dark Knight. He’s not the real film reviewer at this Australian newspaper, since that reviewer was calling for an Oscar for the late Heath Ledger just like all sensible critics do everywhere, but Yahoo picked the story up as Batman’s Worst Review, and, may I say, Shock! Horror! Outrage! Here’s the horrific proof. As soon as there’s any break from consensus, we’re all doomed. PS: The Courier-Post also syndicated the Wall Street Journal’s stupid editorial about how Batman is really Bush, and so now that idiocy is currently being wrapped around whatever kind of fish they have in Australia, as well as lining the cages of strange foreign birds.
