Best of Don

Bring me the head of Kevin Costner

2010-03-08T12:18:00.000-08:00

It’s only the 20th of February, and I have already seen the worst film of the year. It is called Revenge, and that is precisely what the moviegoing public should wreck upon its director, Tony Scott; its star, Kevin Costner; writers Jim Harrison and Jeffrey Fiskin; executive producer Kevin Costner; (the same one) and the entire management board of Columbia Pictures. Every one of them should be clapped in manacles and marched down Hollywood Boulevard to a public strangling, to be carried out by outraged moviegoers wielding celluloid nooses made from copies of this wretched film. These are desperate measures, I know, but we live in desperate times.

Revenge is dull, gratuitously violent, moronically written, woodenly acted, and directed like a bad condom commercial. To save you the trouble of seeing it, here is a short summary of the proceedings, transcribed from my notes over a big glass of Metaxa:

Closeups of retiring Navy pilot Kevin (Tom Cruse grown up) are inserted into footage left over from Top Gun. Retirement party. Manly tears and manly emotion. Is everybody in the navy an idiot, or is it the script? Kevin's off to Mexico to visit his pal the Mafioso.

Mexico. He meets a beautiful woman on the road. Could it be... why, yes, it's Mr. Mafioso's wife. (Right.) Kevin meets the feller, and hey, it's Tony Quinn playing a guacamole Don Corleone. Audience orientation dialogue. Boy, his wife's cute. Tony’s not, though; he throws his dog into the pool.

Tony and the Mrs. are not happy. She wants kids, he doesn't. "We've talked about this a hundred times," he says, which explains how they just happen to be talking about it when the camera's there.

A dinner. Dull conversation. Boy, Mexican politicians are sure corrupt. Dumb, too. So are their wives. What is this all in aid of? Tony blows out some brains while Kevin and the Mrs. stare into each other's eyes in the library. Why are half the closeups out of focus?

They meet at the beach next day. His dog does tricks. He tries to make her lemonade. They fondle the limes. Is this going to be the dumbest seduction scene in cinematic history? Nope. A Party. Kevin is leaving. The Mrs. meets him in the coatroom. Here they go! Just like Sonny Corleone in The Godfather!

They're in love. They arrange to meet, but the Don eavesdrops. Trouble's a-brewin'. They drive to Kevin's cabin. Heavy music. (This is how Tony Scott conveys passion.) At the cabin, they roll around and exchange banalities. Whoops! The Don and his thugs bust in and Kick Ass. She's sold to a bordello, he's left in a ditch to die. He's found by a noble peasant and nursed back to health while the Mrs. undergoes the foulest degradation possible, with only Kevin's navy dog-tag to give her strength.

Healthy and handsome again, Kevin sets out to find the Mrs. and kick some ass himself. In a country of 80 million, he by coincidence runs into—and kills—the two thugs who beat him up. He finds the Don, confronts him, and what, he lets him live? Damn, he does!

He finds the Mrs. in a convent. She's in a coma, but she wakes up for him. "I love you," she says. She dies, and his dog-tag falls to the floor. Kevin is sad. He sniffles. Process shot of the convent and a mountain in the background.

The End. Credits. "Hands up", I yelled out as the theatre lights came up, "all those of you who came to see a Kevin Costner movie and were savagely disappointed." And as if they had all been one person, the audience drew down its trousers and mooned the screen.

--Published in Between the Lines, 1990

Samuel Fuller

2010-02-17T10:54:00.001-08:00

Writer-producer-director Samuel Fuller, who died last October at the age of 86, has been something of a paradoxical cinematic figure for the last 30 years. While revered by film professionals, and a profound influence on contemporary filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Wim Wenders, years of forced inactivity have cost him his audience. Nobody out there knows who he is any more.

Starting tonight, Cinematheque Ontario will take a crack at redressing that situation, presenting a complete retrospective of Fuller’s writer-director work, Pulp Fictions: The Films of Samuel Fuller. Twenty-two features will be screened, virtually any one of which will feel like a good bottle of bourbon smashed over your head.

Fuller was undoubtedly American cinema’s greatest master of what might be called the two-fisted school of writing and directing. His movies have Army-tough titles like Fixed Bayonets and Pickup on South Street, and are populated by hard-boiled criminals and hard-bitten dames, soldiers and prostitutes, cocky journalists and crazies. Stories appear to have been ripped straight from the pages of yesterday’s dime-store novels; dialogue is notable mostly for it’s utility and economy of means. (A sample from Underworld USA: “It was a pretty tough break you had, being born in prison and your mother dying there.”)

But let us not confuse two-fisted with ham-handed: if this is moviemaking reduced to its most basic terms, Fuller gives it the virtues a good pulp novelist would. A Fuller project starts with a bang, moves along at a good clip, has a sound emotional structure, snappy dialogue and ferocious attitude. All of the above are brought to the screen with a visual chutzpah that recalls Orson Welles on PCP. All in all, it takes you places you cinematically never dreamed existed—what Quentin Tarantino and Jean-Luc Goddard played at, Samuel Fuller actually was.

This is not to say that after a steady viewer diet of recent Hollywood filmmaking, his cinematic universe doesn’t take some getting used to. For example, 1957’s China Gate might seem to the Fuller neophyte to have been made by a crazy person. A hard-boiled romance-adventure set in 1954 Vietnam, China Gate begins with the disconcerting words: “this movie is dedicated to France.” Shot with such visual economy that the studio had to insert fake closeups into the location footage with an optical printer, China Gate features Angie Dickenson as an alcoholic half-Chinese prostitute leading a multi-lateral group of commandos to destroy a cache of weapons somewhere in North Vietnam—weapons guarded by a Vietnamese chieftain portrayed by Lee Van Cleef.

Fuller claimed cinema was “like a battlefield.... Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion!” A collateral benefit is that his battlefields sometimes feel like domestic melodrama. (Imagine John Wayne casting Maureen O’Hara as his romantic lead in The Green Berets and you’ll have a ghost of an idea what China Gate feels like.) And as in a battlefield, narrative feels confused, elliptical, sometimes nonexistent. A Fuller story jumps all over the place and often the only continuity left to a viewer is an emotional one. Two questions constantly force themselves upon you as you watch: First, what on earth is going on here? Second, why am I enjoying it so much? After a while, you stop asking the first question.

It’s a wise course of action to take if you plan to watch a lot of the man’s work. A lot of potentially unsettling things await the unwary, like the almost absurd cold-war cant of many of his 50’s movies, or the alarming tendency of a lot of his films to briefly turn into musicals for no particular reason. (Sometimes both happen at once—In China Gate, Nat King Cole, not long after crooning the title song, says he’s fighting in Indochina because there are “still a lot of live commies around.”) Romance doesn’t develop between characters so much as it simply occurs, without explanation, excuse, or credibility.

Reading the reviews of 30 and 40 years ago you get a sense that critics more happy in the company of directors like Elia Kazan and Stanley Kramer found this kind of thing all very embarrassing. Seen today though, it arouses awe more than anything else (you move beyond wincing about five minutes into your first film); it seems wonderful that in an age of such false sophistication as the 50’s that anybody would be so brazen—Holden Caufield would have gone nuts over this stuff.

He would have been particularly fond of 1963’s Shock Corridor, Fuller’s history of postwar America from the point of view of an outsider pushed to the screaming point. Here an egomaniacal reporter gets himself committed to an insane asylum in order to solve a murder; once there he slowly goes crazy himself. The extremely high-temperature melodrama sometimes camouflages Shock Corridor’s seriousness of purpose: Fuller makes it clear that what has made the inmates insane in the first place is post-war America. Shock Corridor skates along the edge of hysteria for most of it’s running time, and once falls gloriously off the edge into what must be the single most surreal episode of anti-racist filmmaking ever to appear in an American movie.

1964’s The Naked Kiss is virtually all over the edge, as if Blue Velvet had arrived on the scene 20 years early. Something amazing happens in it just about every 90 seconds: Absurd bursts of fantasy, handicapped children breaking into song; from one moment to the next you have no idea where the director is going—it’s as if the screen has been hard-wired directly to his id. Naked Kiss is Fuller’s most gloriously out-of-control exercise, and it pretty well killed his career.

One can’t help but see parallels between Fuller and another director whose Hollywood career ended at about the same time, fellow melodramatist Douglas Sirk (although Fuller is Sirk only by way of the Army stockade). Both had trouble finding critical support because of the perceived cheeziness and lowbrow appeal of their work. Yet to dismiss Fuller’s cinema as mere pulp fiction is like dismissing Douglas Sirk’s melodramas as big-screen soaps: superficially accurate but profoundly untrue.

Fuller and Sirk actually share many of the same virtues: the—sometimes shocking—emotional immediacy of their direction (and if you think it’s easy, have a look at what happens when Steven Spielberg tries it); the beauty of their images; the propulsiveness of their storytelling and the simple, almost insane watchability of everything that they put up on the screen. Their movies are designed to overpower audiences: Sirk with a tug at the heart, Fuller with a sock in the kisser.

You go with the tools you’ve got, I guess. Fuller is revered by film people for his great cinematic eye but even more for his authenticity; his courage to utterly and uncompromisingly be his crazed self when he makes a film. As an employable filmmaker this probably cost him the last thirty years of his working life. But they are also the qualities which makes virtually everything he has ever shot compulsively viewable for those of us on the other side of the movie screen: He gives us everything there is up front and holds nothing back. We love Samuel Fuller because he wears his guts on his sleeve.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998

Ring-a-Ding-Ding

2010-02-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

For me, it all started at about 3:00 am on February 9th, 2008.

At that moment I woke up coughing so ferociously that I ended up injuring a whole set of muscles in my chest. Over the next 10 days, I had every classic flu-like symptom you can name, with one particularly obnoxious addition: a persistent, irritating ringing in my ears. The flu-like symptoms gradually packed up and moved on. The ringing, unfortunately, moved in to stay. At the walk-in clinic up my street, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was pretty bite-down-on-this-bullet about my situation: “At your age, it's probably tinnitus,” he said, pausing gravely after giving the ringing its clinical name, “and that can be a real pain in the ass. You'll just have to get used to it.” The ear, nose and throat guy I ran into sometime later confirmed this standard medical advice: “You've got the kind of tinnitus that either goes away or doesn't,” he said.

Depending on whose figures you read, anywhere from seventeen to thirty percent of humanity has tinnitus in some form, the majority of them being older people. This at first seemed an outrageous figure to me, since I'd almost never heard anybody talk about it. But now that it's happened to me, it seems that everybody my age has a tinnitus story. Whenever I complain about it, the response invariably is “Oh, I've had tinnitus for years”, or “I know somebody who's got it.” It's like the elephant in the doctor's waiting-room: Either we're dealing with a scourge that has cowed a large part of the older population into silence, or we're looking at a condition where its denial is simply a part of being able to lead a normal life---like the schizophrenia sufferer who's learned to ignore the FBI agents following him everywhere.

Tinnitus is a perceived sound without any external source; a phantom perception like the “phantom limb” sometimes felt by people who've had amputations. Tinnitus most often comes in tandem either with the hearing loss you can expect when you age, or---paradoxically---an oversensitivity to noise called hyperacusis. In the less aged, it's usually the result of long-term exposure to loud noise---a phenomenon the Hearing Loss Association of America may some day dub Ozzy Osborne syndrome. Whatever its efficient cause, it's a product of the nervous system: Bits of the nerve pathways normally associated with hearing fire off phantom signals which your brain interprets as sound.

Unfortunately, it's usually irritating sound as well: sufferers have reported it as a clanging, hissing, roaring, or whooshing; like breaking glass, clicking, shrieking, banging, or owls hooting; as a ringing, buzzing, chirping or sizzling; or the sound of rushing water and chain saws. So far nobody's complained of it sounding like Britney Spears covering Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, but it'll probably happen sometime.

It's a very private affliction: Most people won't notice anything wrong with you, at least partly because when you're with other people, the problem's not as bad---you're distracted, and talking seems to drive your private noise into the background as well. (In fact, if you're a complete party animal, tinnitus is probably no big deal for you---most of your day you're either completely distracted, or unconscious.)

Tinnitus intrudes when you most want quiet and repose; when you're alone, with your Self. You have no peace, no solitude, nowhere to simply withdraw---there's always this obnoxious reminder of everything that's bad about the world constantly buzzing in your head. What's particularly maddening is that since this interior noise is most effectively suppressed when you're in the presence of others, it soon begins to feel like you exist only for others. At its worst, tinnitus robs you of your sense of self.

Whatever else you may say about Google, it does allow you to achieve a state of futility in research far more quickly than you ever used to be able to. For the most part, the web offers little scholarly information for people who want to do something about an illness. You're given unparalleled access to people offering quack cures, prayers, and exhortations to Nietzsche-like acts of will. But you're given no theory; no method. Nothing to do.

That's why the phrase 'Tinnitus Retraining Therapy' caught my eye when I was trolling through Google Scholar for something worthwhile to read about tinnitus---it sounded like work, and that sounded good. The reference turned out to be a Cambridge University Press title: Tinnitus Retraining Therapy: Implementing the Neurophysiological Model by Pawel Jastreboff of the Emory School of Medicine and Jonathan Hazell of University College, London. What I was able to read of it on Google Books introduced me to a thoroughly scholarly analysis of the my problem, whose chief virtue was that it gave me something to do; a disciplined hand in my own recovery. (Publishers worried about the access Google Books gives online readers to their product can also breathe a sigh of relief---I ended up buying the book.)

The gist of the authors' argument runs something as follows: There are a lot of people out there with tinnitus, but only about a quarter of them find it troubling enough to go and see a doctor about---the rest experience it but don't suffer from it. What are they doing right?

What their brains have done right is to habituate themselves to the phantom sounds: their limbic systems (that section of the brain responsible for emotions) have learned to be unperturbed by the dissonance, in turn allowing their autonomic nervous systems to place the tinnitus on a sort of Do Not Call list of neurological signals that can be ignored. People with brains thus habituated can call up their tinnitus sounds if they concentrate, but the signals themselves no longer intrude on everyday life. Their tinnitus has become, in effect, background noise.

How do you get from something as irritating as seagulls screeching on your balcony and as persistent as an automated telephone bill-collector, to background noise? Ideally, what you want to do to make a nerve impulse less offensive to your limbic system is simply turn the volume down. Unfortunately, that option isn't available.

But you can turn the background noise up. In my case, I bought a $20 MP3 player, transferred a file of wide-frequency white noise onto it, set it on “repeat”, and listened to it throughout the day through a pair of ear-bud headphones. The volume is set just below the level that would cover up the tinnitus completely: You want it to be there still---after all, you're trying to get accustomed to it, not pretend that it doesn't exist.

And it's not much more complicated than that. The process of habituation can take months, but the relief is almost instant---however the retraining process proceeds, the background noise you're now carrying about with you certainly helps you get through your day.

So, in a sense, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was right---I am just going to have to get used to it. But I've acquired a tool that at the very least makes my days a lot easier to endure. Results at the moment are still up in the air---every day still seems a new adventure---but a good attitude helps. Like the chain-gang captain said to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, “you have to get your mind right.”

-Published in Zoomer Magazine, Winter 2008

Michelangelo Antonioni

2009-10-27T18:02:00.000-07:00

In an era where movies about ocean-liner catastrophes make hundreds of millions of dollars at Christmas, how shall we make a case for an art-film writer-director whose chief claim to fame was being a middle-class soul in anguish? It may be hard to remember now, but thirty-five years ago Michelangelo Antonioni may well have been the most acclaimed filmmaker in the world. It is a spirit that Cinematheque Ontario is clearly out to rekindle in their exhaustive retrospective, Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni.

In a career spanning 16 feature films—he is 85 years of age but apparently at work on another movie—Antonioni’s critical reputation rests for the most part on three he made between 1960 and 1962: L’Avventura, La Notte [The Night], and L’Eclisse [The Eclipse]. These are the movies where he succeeded most completely in the two chores he set for his cinema: to chronicle the breakdown of modern emotional life, and to do so in a way uniquely cinematic and firmly under the control of the director on the set.

From a three-decade remove he looks to have been more successful in the second chore than the first. The critique of modern life running through Antonioni’s work can be summed up in a single phrase: “it won’t work”. The archetypal Antonioni film resembles soap opera for intellectuals who have been unlucky in love: it is full of love affairs that go nowhere and marriages that run on for no reason; people so emotionally delicate that a loud conversation might make them explode, and people so emotionally dead that the explosion probably wouldn’t wake them.

People in Antonioni movies don’t do normal, sensible things—like call the police when they find dead bodies in the park, or refrain from attempting impossible love affairs. They seem beyond rational self-control, as if life to them is just a movie they’re watching, where they are powerless to affect the plot and changing channels is not an option. Antonioni’s characters—and by extension, his idea of most participants in modern life—are quite simply unequipped to properly handle matters of any moral consequence. We merely go through the motions of a moral life, unaware of what we do and unhappy about it.

Introducing his classic L’Avventura to the public at Cannes in 1960, Antonioni was quite explicit about this, speaking of the “heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help, they create problems without offering us any possible solutions.”

Thus the main characters in L’Avventura are a man and a woman who become romantically entangled while searching for a missing person: his lover—and her best friend. “It can’t be right. It’s absurd,” cries Claudia. “Good,” Sandro replies. “It’s better if it’s absurd. It means there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Virtually all of Antonioni’s characters are similarly ill-equipped for surviving modern life, if not so similarly forthright about it: In Blow Up, a London fashion photographer whose life is as glossy and as emotionally substantial as a photographic negative is paralyzed with inertia when he realizes he has photographed a murder. L’Eclisse is an apocalyptic version of A Man and a Woman where a couple enters a relationship both know is doomed. In La Notte, a burned-out writer tries to convince himself that he still loves his wife—but his wife knows better.

(You get the feeling that if Antonioni had directed Casablanca, Bogart would have had an adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman, suffered massive guilt, and then walked into the Atlantic ocean while Paul Henreid and Claude Rains got drunk at Major Strasser’s headquarters. What’s frightening is that it would probably have worked.)

Antonioni’s is a depressing attitude (and not even a particularly original one, reaching back to Neizsche and possibly even to St. Benidict) yet one so beautifully presented that it is utterly convincing—at least while the theatre lights are down. No other director hitches his philosophical wagon so completely to the image he puts on screen, and no other director gets as much benefit from it. A lot of Antonioni’s films look perfect because they look perfect.

It’s that look that stays with you, and it’s intended that way. The images, not the actors, carry the emotional load: what characters do is less important than the spaces the director puts between them. To a viewer raised on the orthodox Hollywood style (i.e., all of us) Antonioni’s camerawork looks self-consciously artsy, almost self-parodying. Yet, look at a still from any of his films, and you know exactly what’s up between his characters.

This is the most elemental communication cinema is capable of and it’s Antonioni’s bread-and-butter. He wants to use film the way we use English; not as a medium for the expression of an idea, (we don’t think up an idea and then express it in language) but with the medium as the idea. The man talks with his camera—what’s up there on the screen is exactly what he’s saying, not describable in terms any more basic than the images. You look, and you understand. (You may have trouble explaining to somebody else what you have understood, but that comes with the territory.)

What he talks about with that camera, in a word, is isolation. His frames are full of empty space, inhumanely and architecturally divided. Streets and public spaces always seem to be empty; his characters alone in the world, isolated for closer observation. People cling unhappily together for comfort against the isolation, fearful of solitude yet unable to handle intimacy. You get the feeling that Antonioni’s ideal film set would be a desert, populated by two people who are afraid to look at one another.

Sooner or later, though, enough alienation is enough. Two decades ago, critic Pauline Kael wrote that she wished Antonioni would, just once, use his talent frivolously—perhaps in a trashy mystery or something.

He came close in 1975’s The Passenger. Here, Jack Nicolson inhabits what for another director would be an action movie scenario: a journalist, sick of his life, trades identities with a dead man he fortuitously resembles. The dead man unfortunately turns out to have been an arms dealer, and dangerous people soon come calling. Things proceed at a very leisurely pace (this is a movie that you can transcribe in longhand as you watch) towards an enigmatic conclusion that makes you wish Antonioni would go even further and do a movie with Bruce Willis—Die Hard: An Outline of Identity.

That not likely being in the cards, we are left with a canon of unmatched seriousness, best taken in moderate doses. At his best (which is often) Antonioni has made films that are beautiful, intellectually challenging, and—provided you are a delicate liberal—emotionally engaging. If they are old news they are at least true news; beautiful artifacts produced by the best eye for cinematic composition since Orson Welles.

How will the hard-nosed 90’s respond? Antonioni might note that all the problems he speaks of are still with us—perhaps even more acutely than ever. On the other hand, easy transcendence seems to be a way of life for us now. If Antonioni were to show up for a press conference in front of CITY-TV tomorrow, the Speaker’s Corner crowd would probably grab him by the shoulders, give him a gentle shake and say, “hey, just get over it, buddy!”

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998

Pietro Germi

2009-10-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

In all the standard cinematic reference books, one looks in vain for the name of Pietro Germi. A popular and renowned filmmaker in Italy during his lifetime, he achieved international fame during the 60’s, winning an Oscar for Divorce, Italian Style and the Cannes Palm d’Or for The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. Yet after his death in 1975 Germi seems to have vanished from the collective memory of international cinema—passed over especially by those of us whose business it is to remember.

How can a filmmaker who made so many memorable movies have been so easily forgotten? Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso and The Legend of 1900, recently hazarded an explanation: “Germi’s offense was that he made films that the public at large wanted to see. An Auteur was somebody who devoted himself to a single theme right from the start and stuck with it to the end. A director who moved around, changed, and then went back to a previous theme or genre wasn’t considered ‘deep’.”

Germi was dubbed “the great carpenter” by Fellini, a co-screenwriter of several of his movies from the early 50’s, and the tool-belt fits: Germi’s movies are splendid works of craftsmanship—structurally taut, visually striking, and possessing a splendid sense of time and (especially) place. His cine-carpentry produced distinctive films in a variety of genres—the neo-realism of The Way of Hope; In the Name of the Law, a western with debts divided equally between John Ford and Sicily; the detective story (The Facts of Murder), and the series of dazzling social satires with which he closed out his career (Seduced and Abandoned et al.)

Yet even a brilliant carpenter can raise a sense of unease in the heart of the Auteur taxonomist, partly because he resists integration into the grand scheme of authorship by which so many critics understand cinema. Critics like their great filmmakers to be artistically obsessed—all else is mere craftsmanship.

Such a critic’s plight is not an unsympathetic one. Confronted as a series, Germi’s is not an integral body of work; you don’t get much help understanding the artistic merit of a particular film by looking at any of the other movies he made. After a while, they start to look like the product not so much of a distinct artistic sensibility, as they do of a particular psychological profile—many seem to be the work of a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.

There is therefore no benevolent artistic place to pigeonhole the films that don’t connect with you; you tend to write them off, rather than think them through more carefully as you might the work of a capital-A Auteur. Robert Bresson’s weakest film can still ride the credibility of the rest of his catalogue. Pietro Germi’s weakest films have to stand on their own.

Consider The Railroad Man—a 1958 entry in the strange and hard-to-adapt-to genre of the Italian political weepie. An amalgam of neo-realism, bitter libertarian politics, and industrial-strength Hollywood-style soap, The Railroad Man is a popular entertainment seemingly designed to drive proletarian Italian family men to tears. (Enough tears were elicited to make it one of the most popular films in Italy the year of its release.)

A man commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. The unfortunate engineer who was in control at the time—Germi cast himself in the leading role—is demoted for his negligence. His union doesn’t support him, and during a subsequent labor dispute, the engineer briefly becomes a strikebreaker. For this, he suffers terrible guilt and his life falls apart. As seen today by a North American, there’s little for a modern viewer to fasten onto; the tension between Hollywood-style melodrama and Italian slice-of-life begins to feel anachronistic and the film becomes a curious time capsule; neo-realism brought to the level of television.

By all accounts a solitary and difficult man to deal with (off the set he would often respond only to notes pushed under his door), Germi made films that feel like the work of an outsider. He displayed a great sympathy for the worker thrown out of a job; the man forced by poverty into crime; and above all for people whose lives are made absurd by their country’s even more absurd laws and codes of honor. His comedies were bitter and satirical; his dramas pessimistic. Billy Wilder said that he found in Germi a kindred spirit; probably because the work of both filmmakers points to a universe largely broken beyond repair.

His style was deliberately out of step with the international Italian cinema of the time; he was unsympathetic to Visconti (to whom Germi’s melodramas are often unfavorably contrasted) and downright hostile to Antonioni (for whom the feeling was apparently mutual). Yet if his yoking of popular Hollywood forms to local cultural realities was largely a device to please his audience, the combination also produced some unique artifacts of international cinema.

For example, In the Name of the Law, Germi’s third film, is an out-and-out western set in contemporary (1948) Sicily: A new magistrate comes to an isolated town and finds it’s local government corrupt, and the local aristocracy in cahoots with the Mafia to keep the citizens unemployed and powerless. In the classic western tradition, the lone man cleans up the town. But the film’s charm comes mostly from its confounding of our expectations: this is a western where there is no concept of a frontier and where strapping on the guns is not an option for the law-and-order man. It is both Hollywood and Sicily; perhaps the only real Italian western ever made.

Made a year later, The Way of Hope follows a dirt-poor group of Sicilian miners as they make their Grapes-of-Wrath way to France. It is a singular film—not least for its combining the ethical urgency of neo-realism (Rossilini called it “being on the side of those who suffer”) with a sense of visual composition that would find a home in Battleship Potemkin, and a Hollywood sentimentalism worthy of Spielberg at his ickiest. The Way of Hope is both brutally frank about the misery to the Sicilian poor—the best hope of a Sicilian is to escape to France—yet it ends with what in cinematic terms amounts to a miracle. Hollywood wins out over neo-realism in the end: the good guys must win, even if they really couldn’t.

Best of all is The Facts of Murder, dubbed by Variety magazine on it’s 1959 release as “the first successful crime picture ever made in Italy”. This is faint praise: Hollywood-tough and Italian-characterful, The Facts of Murder is as good as any detective movie ever made, and better than most. If it’s cinematic cabinet-making, it’s great cinematic cabinet making—you wish the man had turned out more of them.

The list could probably go on. The collection currently being presented includes just over half of the films Germi directed and makes a respectable case for the carpenter as worthy subject for a retrospective—although not without a certain irony. Taken as individual films, a gratifying number of Germi’s works stand the tests of both time and watchability. But as a body of work, they are collectively just obscure enough for the man who made them to be lost between the frames.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2000

Marcello Mastroianni

2009-10-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

It is rare for a cinema-society to stage an actor retrospective, but Marcello Mastroianni was a rare actor. He was pretty, prolific, and profound, and starting tonight Cinematheque Ontario presents 22 Mastroianni titles selected by Anna Maria Tatò, his companion of 22 years. It is a presentation that goes a long way towards illuminating Mastroianni’s particular genius: the actor emerges cinematically triumphant while portraying every imaginable human failing.

Is Mastroianni the most important actor in the history of cinema? He has certainly left the most attractive legacy. More believable than Bogart; more attractive than Brando, he has bequeathed to us the truest cinematic icon of the 20th century’s closing half: the ineffective male in all his many varieties.

No other star has been so attractive exhibiting doe-eyed inadequacy, although Cary Grant was occasionally allowed to came close. Mastroianni’s stock in trade is being overpowered and overmatched, whether as the intellectual labour organizer out of his depth in The Organizer; as Sophia Loren’s hopelessly outclassed ex-lover in Marriage, Italian Style, or in Dark Eyes, as a wastrel at the end of his life who has abandoned romance for simple inertia. What emerges from his work as a whole is Mastroianni’s closely-observed three ages of Man: as perplexed by the world, by women, and ultimately by himself.

Mastroianni is most famous in North America for two collaborations with Federico Fellini from the beginning of the 60’s: La Dolce Vita, and 8 1/2. 40 years later, both movies provide a startlingly up-to-date portrait of the man of today—or at least the way the man-of-today feels about himself. Mastroianni gives us men to whom things happen, who have lost the power to meaningfully initiate action. In 8 1/2 he is Fellini’s self-portrait: a burned-out filmmaker no longer in charge of his life or his creativity, who desires nothing more than to stay upright in hope that somehow, clarity will reassert itself.

It does not—although Fellini is more optimistic about the consequences at the close of 8 1/2 than by the denouement of La Dolce Vita, where the battle against disorientation is deemed hopeless. There, one character sums up the struggle: “We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art; in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside time, detached.” Unfortunately, they succeed. All that’s left to do is give up on life altogether.

As intractable (if ultimately more bemusing) a struggle is the Mastroianni Man’s tortured association with women—call him the reluctant ladykiller. If he seems bewildered by women, women are certainly not bewildered by him: Matinee-idol good looks, a voice so beautiful as to make the dubbing of foreign-language films seem a crime, a sense of worldliness held in check as if by memories of pain.... What’s to resist? The Mastroianni Man can have any woman he wants—except, as it turns out, the one he loves.

Take Visconti’s White Nights—a superior weepie from the director of such light classics as The Damned and Death in Venice. This is soap-opera for guys, with Mastroianni suffering in the Jane Wyman role: Boy, out wandering the evening streets, rescues girl being harassed by bikers. He’s interested in her, but she’s preoccupied. We learn that she’s carrying a torch for Mr. Wrong—a tall, tough and handsome guy who had to go on the lam from the law but who promised to meet her on a bridge over the local canal at ten o’clock some night in the indefinite future. Every evening, she goes there. So does our boy, who gradually sways her towards himself. Then, the very night she finally falls for Mastroianni, who should show up and whisk her away? No, it’s too terrible to even contemplate....

What is surprising is how easily the second-billed Mastroianni dominates the movie, even though he’s in the passive, secondary role. Showing a kidnapper’s ability to get his captives emotionally on side, he effortlessly co-opts us into his suffering.

It is a skill he relies on, nowhere more effectively than in Il Bell’Antonio, another good, healthy measure of industrial-strength suds. (Confounded by the Catholic guilt attending every good Italian boyhood, Antonio can perform sexually only with women he doesn’t like. With the woman he loves, he is impotent. In a society that demands children, he must therefore renounce love.) Yet, with an alchemist’s expertise, Mastroianni turns this purplest of melodramas into the purest white satin.

There is technique to his alchemy as well as truth. The technique is simply the actor’s knowing exactly how to make himself look cinematically good. When he’s on, he doesn’t simply look good, he looks perfect. He is the only possible subject in the frame, and he draws your eye, no matter who’s around him. (This is an extremely useful ability in a movie like Fellini’s Ginger and Fred, where an actor could any time be upstaged by a group of singing and dancing midgets.) Your sympathy is his, and he will make you care even when you shouldn’t.

It’s an ability he found even more useful in his later career. Actors, unlike directors, must grow old, and with age it seems the Mastroianni Man gives up the fight against bewilderment. The wolf, having worn sheep’s clothing for so long, decides he likes the life, and settles in to the role of the philanderer aging gracefully. “Let me tell you a story” he says to a stranger in a restaurant in Dark Eyes. And he tells us of the time where he almost experienced the great love of his life but that somehow it slipped from his grasp.

He has a great storytelling face, and the director returns to it again and again, the face now providing the counterpoint to the matinee-idol’s skill. Suddenly we notice the truth in that face, especially at the climax of his story, when it displays a sudden self-awareness that, for reasons he still can’t fully grasp, our narrator has just lost everything of real value to him. It is the semi-perplexed look of a man realizing that he has had the best moment of his life, but he has mostly missed it. It is a look of amusement and regret, of mastery lost and not to be regained, a look of farewell.

It is the truth in that look, more than anything else, that connects him to us. It sums up a character’s life, and it sums up Marcello Mastroianni’s career. His screen life documented for us the passing of credible cinematic manliness. His face on the screen is a snapshot of ourselves.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1999

The day Napster died

2009-10-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

To those of us for whom Napster offered a welcome glimpse of the bright future of the distribution of recorded music, all the record-company high-fives the other day over their appeals-court judgment against Napster look like a Jurassic convention of brontasauri celebrating the death of the first mammal. They may not have noticed how few of the critters scuttling around at their feet share their enthusiasm. Most of us are now looking about for a more robust warm-blooded creature to take care of us.

Personally, Napster brought me a lot of joy, and whenever I talked to anybody else about it they’d come alive: Their enthusiasm for the service was exceeded only by their enthusiasm for the music they’d discovered. It was as if recorded music had suddenly become meaningful again.

Discovery is the key word. The complaint voiced by the record companies about Napster is that it undercuts the mass purchase of popular product, which they see as their own turf: They’ve created the demand for Britney and Christina; now they worry that they’ll move only 5 million albums instead of 10.

This doesn’t square with the experience of anybody I know. Generally, we’ve used Napster to explore, educate ourselves and chase down obscurities—areas either badly served by the record companies, or not served at all. Napster gives you access to music at the speed of intellect; I can recall more than once a quick download settling a musical argument.

I never actually bothered to downloaded an album. Napster traffics in individual songs, so downloading an album requires a lot of work. This inclines you evaluate as you go along, and ditch more than you listen to. Thus, one unintended result of Napster’s ascendance is the destruction of the myth of the long-playing album as the ideal medium of delivery.

And surprisingly, I kept very little of what I downloaded. Record companies rend their garments about lost sales, but I doubt I would have bought most of the music I downloaded and saved anyway. Before Napster, I wouldn’t have known a lot of it existed.

No, the real threat Napster poses to the record companies is in the knowledge that its easy sampling provides. Napster is radio-on-demand with an accessible catalog. In the record companies’ ideal world, knowledge about the products they sell may only be purchased with the product itself—to hear something once you must own it. The ugly little record-company secret Napster has exposed is that if you are able to find out what you really want and liked, you consume less of what they have to offer you.

In that regard, Napster at it’s best worked like a well-stocked universally-accessible public library. (The underlying principle is exactly the same: A single purchased copy held in trust for multiple users—Napster’s crime was merely one of being more efficient and effective at carrying it out.) It gave you access to a huge catalog of music—on a good night, seemingly the entire history of recorded music. As with any good catalog, you often end up making aesthetic connections you might not have thought of before. Using Napster was the first time I’d ever been able to see music as an intellectual resource.

Ultimately, Napster reminded me how much I love music—not the music the record companies want to sell me—but recorded music as a vibrant, cultural phenomenon. It also showed me how little of it I actually need to own. It’s the social element of discovery that comes with sharing, which is a world away from buying and possessing.

So, the record industry has burned down the library of Alexandra. What now? Personally, I intend to boycott: I’m never going to buy a compact disk again. (This is incidentally no loss to the record companies—compact disks have always been such an outrageous rip-off that I hardly ever bought them anyway.) But now I’m going to violate copyright whenever I can. I’ve bought myself a CD burner and I’m going to use it any chance I get. I will of course share everything I have with everybody I know.

But mostly, I will look for and support any online service that aims to provide the kind of service Napster has provided. I have seen the future when musical life is not entirely under the thumbs of a few corporate types fighting for their gold-plated bathtub fixtures. It’s worth fighting for.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001

Max Ophuls

2009-09-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

No director made films more beautifully than Max Ophuls, and no other filmmaker seems to have suffered as much in critical esteem for it. To his critics, an Ophuls film is like a Viennese banquet built around a box of take-out éclairs: all virtuoso tracking shots and thrilling long takes, trying desperately to cover up the lack of any substantial literary meat-and-potatoes.

It certainly is easy to be distracted by the beauty of the presentation and miss the profundity at the center of Ophuls’ work, but there is a critic at the heart of the confectioner and a bitter pill at the center of every Ophuls truffle. He made some of the most beautiful social critiques ever filmed, and if it seems perverse of him to pretty up his cultural criticism, it’s probably wise to remember the observation of social philosopher Mary Poppins: a spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down.

A German by birth, a Frenchman by choice, and multinational by necessity, from 1930 to 1955 Ophuls made movies in Germany, Italy, Austria, Holland, Hollywood, and France. His favorite setting for a movie was turn-of-the-century Vienna, but it could as well have been anywhere the wealthy or powerful man prowled. His favorite subject was the woman unhappily and unproductively in love with one of the prowlers.

For this his work was often deemed inconsequential. A remark by film scholar Roy Armes is typical of this school of thought: “Max Ophuls was a man of wide cultural interests and had a deep respect for literature, yet the characteristic of his subject matter is its triviality. It is not by chance that his last film in the USA was from a Ladies’ Home Journal story, for Ophuls’ subject matter is the beautiful but unhappy woman.”

Beautiful but unhappy women do figure prominently in the Ophuls canon: In Liebelei, a Viennese musician’s daughter falls in love with a soldier who becomes a victim of a military code that forces him to fight a duel; La Signora di Tutti chronicles the life of an actress destroyed by her relationship with an older man in love with her; Joan Fontane in Letter from an Unknown Woman carries a torch for a dissolute musician (Vienna, again) until the day she dies; in The Earrings of Madame de... a woman dies of a broken heart; the list goes on and on. (There’s even a hint in From Mayerling to Sarajevo that the real tragedy of the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife was not that World War One followed as a result, but that a love affair had been cut short.)

Yet it’s tough to see the Ophuls woman unhappily in love as trivial. Take, for example, Caught. Caught (a word that could serve as the title of most of his films) finds Ophuls in 1948 Hollywood doing film noir, which turns out to be a very happy combination: The in-your-face cynicism of the genre brings the social critic into the open; the director’s feverish camerawork raises the emotional temperature to delirious levels.

Caught is sort of a wife’s-eye-view Citizen Kane: Proletarian Leonora Ames models mink coats in a department store and dreams of one day marrying a millionaire. Through circumstances too strange and delightful to go into here, she gets her wish, only to realize that her husband is a vicious control-freak bent on destroying all those around him. (Critic David Thompson claims that Howard Hughes actually gave Robert Ryan advice on how to portray his sociopathic multimillionaire.)

Ultimately, Leonora leaves her husband and her mink-coat lifestyle behind, and finds fulfillment working as a pediatrician’s assistant in a poor neighborhood. (Women in this movie achieve happiness only when their lives find expression through their labor.) Far from feeling frivolous, there are times when Caught feels like it might have been directed by Chairman Mao—that is, if the Great Helmsman could have learned to use a dolly.

Lola Montes (1955) is rather a more baroque matter. Based on the life of a real character who counted among her lovers Franz Liszt and the king of Bavaria, Lola Montes was to be Ophuls’ last film, and an apotheosis of his favorite themes. It was also shockingly modern—a film about filmmaking, a biography about biographies and a statement that we are all mere actors in the theater of our lives.

A circus ringmaster steps into the spotlight and cracks his whip. “Ladies and Gentlemen” he shouts. “The most sensational act of the century! Spectacle! Romance! Action! A creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty with the eyes of an angel! Ravaged hearts! Squandered fortunes! A sarabande of lovers! An authentic revolution! Passion and glory! Triumph and perdition! Ladies and gentlemen, Lola Montes—in the flesh!” Curtains part and over the next 110 minutes, we see more or less all of the above, some of it performed on a tightrope and a trapeze. (Lola’s version of what happened: “I simply do as I please.”)

The movie’s formal conceit is so riveting that when it’s all over it’s hard to remember whether anything important went on in its subject’s life. And as with many reinventions of cinema, it’s hard not to find a little sympathy for the complaint of Stuart Klawans, who in Film Follies points out the gap between Lola’s philosophical content and lavishness of its presentation: “The true scandal of Lola Montes is that Ophuls had sneaked something no bigger than a garden folly into a production of World’s Fair Proportions.”

But, critical fashions change. What 40 years ago would have been the defect of self-indulgency is now the virtue self-referentiality. Today, Lola Montes is one of the indispensable works of world cinema precisely because it’s a visit to that world’s fair. If Lola Montes had been the only film he’d ever made, his critics would be right: Max Ophuls would be the Claudia Schiffer of filmmakers, content wildly outstripped by looks.

As it is, Lola Montes merely caps a body of work where spectacle and opulence and cinematic bravura are always held in check by a great sadness about the fleeting nature of love and happiness in the modern world. “Who am I?” the director asks at the opening of La Ronde. “The author? The narrator...? I am you—I am the personification of your desire to know everything. People always know only one side of reality because they see only one side of things. But I see every aspect. I see from every side....”

Ophuls’ career of seeing from every side was, at 25 years, tragically too short: The chronicler of broken hearts died of heart disease at 54. François Truffaut wrote in his 1957 Cahiers du Cinema obituary: “For some of us, Max Ophuls was the best French filmmaker, along with Jean Renoir. Our loss is immense, the loss of a Balzacian artist who was an advocate of his heroines, an accomplice of women, our bedside filmmaker.”

Published in the Globe and Mail, 1999

Battle Royale

2009-07-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

So, you thought your schooldays were tough? We have had cinematic portraits of adults vs. schoolkids before -- Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and Lindsay Anderson’s If… come to mind -- but there has never been a indictment of school-age life quite like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. In addition to it being the bloodiest of dramas and blackest of satires, Battle Royale is perhaps the most passionate and crazed cinematic declaration of solidarity with a younger generation ever presented on a movie screen.

As wildly popular with young audiences as it was threatening to parliamentarians when released in Japan a year ago, Battle Royale plays a limited run this weekend at Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario. Since it has so far frightened off every North American distributor, it is likely to be confined to the film society/cinematheque circuit for a while longer. But as so often happens, its suppression will likely both add to its cachet and affirm its political stance.

Battle Royale is a fever-pitched exercise in the theory that reality itself is so close to absurdity that you need twist your picture of it only slightly to send it over the edge into nightmarish satire. In this picture, a class of 42 grade-nine students is kidnapped by state authorities, shipped to a deserted island, and thrown into a for-keeps game of Survivor where they must kill each other until there is only one of them left. If more than one student is still alive after three days, every survivor will be killed. Any resemblance between this process and everyday life for a young person in Japan is absolutely intended.

Battle Royale ever-so-slightly stretches the rules of the already tortuous Japanese educational game so that student life now explicitly becomes a matter of life and death. Life on the island is a school day with weapons; where the intercom recites the morning’s body count to the strains of Strauss’s Radetzky March, and an audiovisual presentation is a videotape of a chirpy young Japanese hostess explaining the island’s deadly rules as if she were explaining a game of twister to a band of summer campers.

The schoolyard bully now finds himself in his dream environment, petty schoolgirl’s arguments are settled with guns, and small groups of frightened students huddle together to survive until they’re brutally reminded that the rules of the game rule out any attempts at solidarity. Some respond with denial (“If I survive, I’ll go to a good school” one fantasizes), but more often the response is nihilism. “What’s wrong with killing?” one student argues. “Everybody’s got their reasons!”

This is not exactly an attitude designed to make educators and parliamentarians feel comfortable, and in general, Battle Royale displays a level of cultural self-examination that would be impossible in an American film -- the closest thing to it in recent American cinema is probably Larry Clark’s Bully. Both films are portraits of the near hopelessness of teen life, but in place of Clarks’ unconditional surrender to despair, Battle Royale concludes that defiance in the face of evil is a viable attitude, and that rebellion -- even if hopeless -- is the only sane act for a young person.

It’s probably simply the raw bloody enthusiasm with which the director makes his point that has disturbed officialdom. The 70 year-old Fukasaku made his name in Yakuza pictures thirty years ago, and Battle Royale is presented with an energy that makes John Woo feel like Antonioni, and an operatic passion that would make Martin Scorsese blush. It skates about the edge of exploitation and feels just slightly immoral. But it is also the new milennium’s first great teen movie: It kicks you in the stomach, but it points to a way of survival.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001

Hana Bi

2009-07-08T14:21:00.000-07:00

Takeshi Kitano, who is virtually unknown in North America, is Japan’s biggest media personality. Since 1973 he has parlayed a career in standup comedy into seven current TV shows, half-a-dozen regular newspaper columns and 55 books. From 1990 to 1995 he was chosen “favorite TV celebrity” in a nationwide poll, and in 1994 picked (by the same people, presumably) as the man the electorate would most like to see as Prime Minister.

Not surprisingly, he has moved into movies as well. Starting in 1989 with Violent Cop—a film that makes Dirty Harry look like Frasier—he has gone on to direct (and for the most part, star in) seven films. Two of them get a wide North American release this month, thus making us privileged in a way Japanese cinemagoers were not: we get to start with his finest and most mature work.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Takeshi makes gangster movies. He also makes cop movies, and he makes movies where it’s sometimes hard to tell the virtues of one from the virtues of the other. They are films about the honourable life and a good death, and how for cop or yakuza one is usually a part of the other. In Fireworks he’s the cop—although by now such details are probably decided at the script stage by the flip of a coin.

He’s a cop for whom guilt seems the primary driving emotion as well. Yoshitaka Nishi is a man in the midst of losing everything that gives his life meaning: his daughter has just died; his wife is dying of cancer; one of his partners has been killed and another crippled in a bungled stakeout; his job in jeopardy and he’s in hock up to his eyeballs to the yakuza. Nishi’s reaction is novel: he decides to rob a bank so he and his wife can enjoy one last vacation together.

This kind of idea could make a really hideous American comedy-drama—in fact it probably already has—but here it emerges as a story of love and death told with simplicity, elegance, heart and—oddly—humour. This is a very funny movie, especially taking into account the genuine gravity of the proceedings just described. As a director, Takeshi seems to draw on his roots in standup comedy, although as an actor one takes his past as a comic on faith—his face is so impassively stony that you worry a smile might tear it in half. Yet his inscrutability is the key to his filmmaking.

Takeshi makes the simplest movies in the world, and his secret would be well learned by a lot of American filmmakers. What it consists of, quite simply, is the courage to do almost nothing; of having faith in the audience to read into the movie what you need them to. He often gets points across with static images of peoples faces; just turning the camera on and leaving it there for longer than you expect. There’s something very Japanese about this—holding a simple medium shot of an actor and pulling the audience in, instead of pushing the actor out at them with a close-up. A lot of Fireworks is the Triumph of the Impassive Reaction Shot.

What emerges from such a method is paradoxical: everything onscreen (even the quite graphic violence) is restrained and held in, and yet the finished product puts you through the emotional wringer—Fireworks is more moving than just about anything currently in front of a Canadian movie audience. Whether a North American director could get away with it is another matter. It would be nice of someone worked up the courage to try.

-Published in The Globe and Mail, 1998

Shohei Imamura: An Introduction to Anthropology

2009-06-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

When Japanese writer-director Shohei Imamura was announced as the co-winner of the Palm D’Or at the 1997 Cannes film festival, a lot of people in the audience—the TV audience at least—probably thought “who?” North American knowledge of Japanese film generally begins and ends with Akira Kurosawa (not least because so many of his films have been remade by western filmmakers—Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven; Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars, and so on). Imamura, even though three of his last four movies have won major prizes at Cannes, remains unknown—virtually none of his films have enjoyed even a reasonably-sized North American release.

That is about to change. “Pigs, Pimps and Pornographers”, a complete retrospective of Imamura’s pre-1997 theatrical features, begins an 11-city tour tonight at Cinematheque Ontario. Cinematheque is also concurrently launching the first English-language book of essays by and about the director, called, simply, “Shohei Imamura”.

The man is worth the hoopla: Imamura surely belongs in the pantheon of the world’s leading filmmakers—he is certainly the greatest one that nobody seems to have heard of. Over four decades, Imamura has produced a consistently excellent body of work peppered with half-a-dozen masterpieces; his persistent absence from the art-house repertory is a crime. It’s an omission on the order of magnitude of ignoring Fellini—and I’m not certain that the comparison doesn’t favour Imamura.

After taking in a few of his movies—one doesn’t so much watch as be taken hostage by them—it is possible to scrape up some sympathy for a distributor. They are a tough sell: they are in a language that is not only foreign but utterly foreign, they deal with a culture with few connecting points to our own, and the occidental neophyte may simply have trouble keeping track of Asian faces. (Following the action sometimes requires heroic attention: the ensemble of characters in Eijanaika makes Ben-Hur feel like My Dinner With Andre). Most obviously though, they are movies about people or groups of people who, frankly, just ain’t very nice—or as Imamura puts it: “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure”.

In the right combination, both turn out to be pretty interesting places. The idea seems to be that the best way to get at the heart of a society is to sniff around at the edges, so Imamura movies tend to be peopled with hideous husbands and murderous wives, prostitutes, radiation victims, and people on the outer reaches of civil society with no desire to get to the inside. “You’re old-fashioned,” declares a character in The Pornographers. “We all want to be animals. No one wants to be human; we want to be free but society won’t let us.”

There is a hint through all of Imamura’s work that we aren’t really all that much more than animals—albeit animals with the gift of consciousness—and he seems to delight in showing us how little progress we’ve made as a society, or even as a species. Life’s chief preoccupation is simply getting by, and “food and sex are life’s only pleasures” according to another character in The Pornographers.

Food, sex, and what people do to get by are certainly Imamura’s chief preoccupations. The simple struggle for food is the centre of community existence in The Ballad of Narayama, the story of a village in northern Japan where in a tough year children get tossed into snowbanks or sold, and the aged are hauled up to the local mountaintop to die. In The Insect Woman, a woman struggling to escape a Narayama-like rural existence moves to Tokyo and finds her calling as the boss of a call-girl service. In Intentions of Murder, a housewife struggles against a violent, unfaithful husband, his mistress, her spiteful in-laws and a burglar who first rapes her and then falls obsessively in love with her. (She wins.) In The Pornographers, a little man is driven mad by his life in the porn business. In Black Rain, Hiroshima survivors muddle through a class system where social standing is now based on health rather than wealth. It’s all just getting by.

All this leads to a paradox: There may not be a single noble act on any character’s part in the entire Imamura canon—morally it’s all on about the level of home movies of Stalin wrestling alligators—yet they are the most elevating movies imaginable. How does he pull that one off? There is of course the awful possibility that he’s simply right and our pleasure is simply the joy of self-recognition.

I prefer to think he’s got making movies down right. Imamura makes films like an anthropologist raised on Aristotle’s Poetics: even though there isn’t a hint of tragedy in his work—sometimes it feels like there’s nobody behind the camera—he gets from his characters what Aristotle demanded of tragedy. They arouse pity and fear in you: pity for creatures at the edge of human existence; fear that you aren’t so very different from them. You feel a great intimacy with that which was until recently strange, and you are moved by it. His characters take a rough journey and it’s we who are left feeling a basic humanity as a result.

This is not to ignore all the other miscellaneous delights of Imamura’s films: The marvelous 60’s feel to the gorgeous black-and-white widescreen photography of the early movies; their deadpan wallowing in the unacceptable; their irrepressible humour even at what seems the end of the world (parts of Black Rain, a movie about Hiroshima, suggest what Fellini’s Amarcord might have looked like if the bomb had been dropped on Italy) and their farcical delight in depravity (by comparison to The Pornographers, Boogie Nights is an exercise in wholesomeness and good taste.) They are a complex experience, as life is: profound, exciting, moving, funny and ultimately, exhausting.

Mostly exhausting. Shohei Imamura is one of cinema’s greatest artists for perhaps the simplest reason in the world: he gives you everything. His films are complete—the whole story of life in every package. They fill you up and you leave the theatre suffused with gratitude for this vision of a civilization heretofore a mystery to you. Indeed, the best subtitle I can think of for this series is “everything I ever needed to know about Japan, I learned from Shohei Imamura”.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

Funny Girl after 9/11

2008-02-14T20:03:00.000-08:00

1968’s Funny Girl, a restored version of which opens in Canada this weekend, may very well be the last bearable movie musical Hollywood ever made. Refugees from Mariah Carrey’s Glitter who find their way in front of a screen playing Funny Girl may well have some trouble comprehending exactly where they’ve landed. But kids will understand this artifact immediately: it’s just like The Little Mermaid, except that it’s done with real people and there’s a hydrogen bomb disguised as a woman at the center of things.

The movie musical was dying of anachronism right about the time Funny Girl was released---if there had been multiplexes at the time, it might just have shared a roof somewhere with Jean-Luc Goddard’s Week-End. Nominally a musical biography of vaudeville and radio star Fanny Brice, Funny Girl survived because it was Barbara Streisand’s Hollywood coming-out. The film made her a superstar and she returns the favor in kind: she is in virtually every scene and her charisma pours out of every frame.

The result, periodically, is emotionally overpowering. Everything in the film’s structure leads us on to a trio of overwhelming moments; each a musical number, all sung by Streisand alone: People, Don’t Rain on My Parade, and My Man. Nothing else in the movie comes close to matching these set-pieces, and in retrospect the rest of the film sometimes feels like an elaborate set-up.

Dramatically this puts a lot of performers in the shade---whatever isn’t within the emotional arc of Streisand’s character ends up superfluous. There are a couple of musical numbers that cry out to be shortened, and as her ultimately good-for-nothing husband Nick Arnstein, Omar Sharif is often left twisting in the wind. He is well-oiled and efficient as a handsome physical presence for Streisand to make eyes at, but ineffective as an emotional presence for her to react to. Unfortunately, Sharif reminds you that a lot of Funny Girl is A Star is Born without James Mason.

Fortunately, at that stage of her career, all-Barbara, all-the-time was just about enough. Funny Girl is a very simple movie---almost like a Dogme 95 presentation by contrast to some current musical entertainments. William Wyler’s direction is understated and motivated by a simple principle: Put somebody magnetic in front of a camera and let her do her thing.

If Funny Girl has become something of a dinosaur wandering through the theaters, it is of value for more than the cinematic paleontologist or the Streisand cultist. The visual medium in the television age has so compellingly become a vehicle for the delivery of real-world horror, that viewers seem no longer able to make the intellectual and emotional leap required to accept people bursting into song on a screen in front of them. The musical survives in the theater and in the animated cartoon---spaces where you park your visions of the real world at the door. But the movie musical is viable only in that psychic space we leave open for nostalgia.

Funny Girl is solid entertainment which at its most rarefied moments is pin-you-to-your-seat exhilarating. (A 26 year-old Barbra Streisand, lit by a single light and singing My Man on a Panavision screen, is more cinematically potent than Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing a jumbo jet apart with his bare hands.)

But it is the movie of the moment because it delivers you to an era before the World Trade Center even existed; a place where you still believed people would break into song on a movie screen just to get something off their chests. A 33 year-old movie musical like Funny Girl is more than just a nostalgic link to a better time. It offers us a glimpse of a more innocent vision of ourselves.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001

Kiefer Sutherland in 2002

2008-02-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

He’s not the archetypal Canadian actor; but he may well be the archetypal Canadian actor in Hollywood: More competent than many of the performers who surround him, he remains something of an outsider. For reasons obscure to everyone but perhaps himself, real stardom steadfastly refuses to attach itself to Kiefer Sutherland.

By the early 90’s, his brat-pack days over, Sutherland seemed to be inching towards a consistent film persona. Among the Charlie Sheens and Chris O’Donnells crashing in anachronistic flames about him, he alone looked comfortable with a saber in his hand and a horse between his legs in The Three Musketeers. In the otherwise forgettable The Cowboy Way he carved out a respectable portrait of a modern Western Man; a dignified, denim presence next to whom co-star Woody Harrelson seemed a refugee from Hee Haw.

You got the sense that if he had been born 40 years earlier Sutherland might have had a good career as a western star. His most effective character type is reminiscent of a Joel McCrea or a diminutive Gary Cooper---the reluctant, laconic, self-effacing man of action. Taking on that kind of cinematic persona cannot be a calculated act in contemporary Hollywood---in a place where actors prefer to be seen as gods, nobody writes leading characters like that any more. No, he does it because it’s genuine.

Hollywood has thus not been kind to him recently. The quiet, self-effacing leading man has been cast as: a drooling child-killer in Eye For an Eye; a racist cracker and clansman in A Time to Kill; a demented Peter Lorre imitator in Dark City; a snarling, corrupt lawman in Picking up the Pieces; a psychotic child psychiatrist in Freeway; a porn director in The Last Days of Frankie the Fly…. For a long time now there’s been a sense of him punching the clock and producing a body of work designed for the compulsive video renter but not many others.

From there it doesn’t seem a major career jump to a television series, but 24 will likely prove to be the best thing that’s happened to him in years. The show is slick, professional and compulsively presented, but most important, Sutherland plays a character that suits him. His Jack Bauer in 24 is professional and understated; a man in a world of duplicity and espionage struggling to reconcile his job with his desire to be a competent family man.

The sense you get looking at Kiefer Sutherland as he makes his actor’s way through the world feels awfully similar. When script and role allow, he too is very good at the charade that is his profession. But most of all, he simply seems to be someone trying to lead a normal life. As both actor and man he seems to echo Joel McCrea’s words in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country: “I just want to be able to enter my house justified.”

-Published in Flare, 2002

Obituary: Arnold Schwarzenegger 1984---2001

2008-02-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

It is with deep regret that we announce the passing of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as a major movie star. He succumbed after a lengthy and apparently congenital illness that also killed many close relatives. Schwarzenegger was predeceased by his fraternal twin Sylvester Stallone, cousin Chuck Norris and nephew Jean-Claude Van Damme. (His cousin Steven Seagal is still in a coma but apparently reviving.)

Arnold will be sadly missed and lovingly remembered by his agent.

The most immediate symptom of his impending career-failure was the decision of Warner Bros. to release Collateral Damage in October, thus abandoning any pretense of it being a potential big-money earner for them. At the peak of his health, Schwarzenegger dominated the traditional blockbuster month of June like a colossus, when often no rival studio would dare release a movie against him. Observers have since noted ominously that he hasn’t had a lead role in a summer blockbuster since 1996.

Long-term cause of death was likely Hollywood’s tendency of late to star real actors in big-ticket action movies (see: Face Off, The Matrix, Mission Impossible et al); the passing from fashion of the Mr. Olympia physique and the emergence of the Brad Pitt look; and viewers noticing that as a 50+ survivor of bypass surgery Schwarzenegger lacked credibility as an action hero. Some journals have floated the unkind theory that later in his career people were finally able to understand his dialogue, which hastened his decline. (This has yet to be confirmed in a peer-reviewed publication.)

A consensus appears to be emerging that it was simply bound to happen sooner or later: The birth of his career as a superstar was largely a biological accident; a tendency at beginning of the 80’s for filmmakers to cast kickboxers and athletes as action stars. Being an abnormality, this cinematic plague tends to be self-limiting: it comes in cycles, builds momentum and then kills off its food supply---in this case audiences composed of cement-headed grunts and people losing date-movie coin-tosses.

Beginning in 1970’s Hercules Goes Bananas (as ‘Arnold Strong’), Schwarzenegger’s career moved in fits and false starts until career physician James Cameron’s epochal decision to cast him as a machine in 1984’s The Terminator. Finding the persona most within his reach launched him into superstardom, where for many years he was Hollywood’s highest-paid performer, whose movie budgets regularly set records.

Yet, rumors of cinematic ill-health had been spreading for several years and the broadening of his taste in roles has hurt his appeal, once stated succinctly by the late Jay Scott: “He can do nothing. Therefore he can do anything.” Cinematic infibrilation is planned to attempt a career restart (Terminator 3) but the absence of Dr. Cameron from the project will limit its effectiveness. Resuscitation seems unlikely.

Funeral arrangements are by Planet Hollywood. Pallbearers will be Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Chow Yun-Fat, Sigourney Weaver, Keanau Reeves and Nicolas Cage. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the 2002 Governor’s Campaign of the Republican Party of California.

-Published in Flare, 2001

The Weekly Scoop 2005 year-end quiz!

2008-02-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

In 2005:

1. Paris Hilton was attacked and clawed by her pet monkey while shopping for
a) A Diane Medak Silk Detail Halter
b) Pet food
c) A Mercedes 450SE
d) A bullwhip

2. David and Victoria Beckham
a) Erased David’s face from the official Real Madrid Soccer team photo
b) Erased Victoria’s face from the Wikipedia photograph of the Spice Girls
c) Erased son Brooklyn’s face from all copies of his school album
d) Erased Victoria’s boob job from the public record with a lawsuit

3. Scientists discovered that beer might prevent
a) Heart attacks
b) Cancer
c) Depression
d) Erections

4. Tennis Bunny Anna Kournikova had a computer virus named after her, called
a) The 30-Love Virus
b) The I Love You Virus
c) The Anna Kournikova Virus
d) The No-Talent Big Hooters Virus

5. At The Cannes Film Festival, Britney Spears announced that
a) She was going to star in a sequel to Crossroads
b) She was suing Indiana singer Steve Wallace for copyright infringement
c) She was set to produce a movie about car racing
d) She was set to throw up from morning sickness

6. Shipping Magnate Paris Latsis said he’d jilted Paris Hilton because
a) He wanted kids; Hilton didn’t
b) He saw the Paris Hilton sex tape and called it off
c) His Mom saw the Paris Hilton sex tape and called it off
d) The whole world saw the Paris Hilton sex tape and called it off

7. Lucie Cave’s World's Stupidest Celebrities quoted Christina Aguilera as saying
a) “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”
b) “I owe a lot to my parents—especially my mother and father”
c) “Weasels ripped my flesh”
d) “So, where's the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”

8. Renee Zellweger’s May-September husband Kenny Chesney claimed that the split from her
a) Was like being hit by a truck
b) Was like kidney stones
c) Was like losing his TV set
d) Was like having to listen to a stack of Clint Black CD’s

9. Russell Crowe was arrested for throwing a telephone at
a) A waitress at New York’s Bar 89
b) His ex-agent Jennings Lang
c) A clerk at New York’s Mercer Hotel
d) “…that skinny fag Keanu Reeves”

10. Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria asked Jennifer Aniston to forgive her for wearing a t-shirt that read
a) “Team Angelina”
b) “I’ll have your baby, Brad”
c) “I never liked Friends, either”
d) “I fucked Brad Pitt and all he gave me was this lousy t-shirt”

11. Which of the following is not a line from Madonna’s Confessions on a Dancefloor
a) “Sticks and stones will break my bones”
b) “Life's gonna drop you down like a limb from a tree”
c) “I like New York/ Other places make me feel like a dork”
d) “I’m their savior/ That’s what they call me/ So Lauren Bacall me”

12. In his infamous Today Show appearance, Tom Cruise told host Matt Lauer
a) “I see dead people”
b) “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”
c) “Billions of neutrinos are passing through your body right now”
d) “Why do you think they call it dope?”

13. Who said “sleeping with Angelina Jolie is like fucking the couch”
a) Val Kilmer
b) Billy Bob Thornton
c) Jon Voight
d) Jennifer Anniston

14. Winner of the 2005 Razzie award for worst screen actor was:
a) Ben Afflick
b) Ben Stiller
c) Ben Gazzara
d) George W. Bush

15. The infamous Colin Farrell sex tape is alleged to show
a) Farrell having his way with model Nicole Narain
b) Farrell having his way with model Carolyn Murphy
c) Farrell having his way with Paris Hilton
d) Oliver Stone having his way with Farrell’s performance on the set of Alexander

15. Jude Law publicly apologized to girlfriend Sienna Miller for
a) Having an affair with one of his costars from Alfie
b) Having an affair with one of his children’s nannies
c) Forgetting their anniversary
d) His performance as Errol Flynn in The Aviator

16. Mel Gibson announced he was writing and directing a new film entitled
a) Passion 2: Electric Boogaloo
b) The Ten Commandments
c) Appocalypto
d) Mad Max: End Times

17. When a groupie complained publicly about the quality of Owen Wilson’s
performance in bed, Wilson replied
a) “that’s what I get for buying my prescriptions over the internet”
b) “It was even worse from my end”
c) “There are lots of paths to the waterfall”
d) “Sic transit gloria mundi”

18. British tabloid The Sun was successfully sued by Cameron Diaz for falsely claiming that
a) She was snorting coke with both hands and a dory bailer on the set of In Her Shoes
b) She was carrying on an affair with a television producer
c) She’d had a botched breast augmentation
d) She’s been so whacked out on pills shooting Gangs of New York that they’d had to dub her voice

19. Commenting on Tom Cruise’s 2005 misadventures, screen legend Lauren Bacall said
a) “I wish he’s grow up”
b) “Bogie could have mopped the floor with him”
c) “What else would you expect from somebody from that lunatic religion?”
d) “When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise”

20. Jennifer Connelly told Esquire magazine that during sex she also likes to
a) Talk on the telephone
b) Read a book
c) Shop online
d) All of the above

Correct Answers: 1a; 2c; 3b; 4c; 5c; 6c; 7d; 8c; 9c; 10b; 11d; 12b; 13b; 14d; 15a 16c; 17c; 18b; 19d; 20d.

-Published in The Weekly Scoop, 2006

The Passion of the Peckinpah

2008-02-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

No director made movies more passionately than Sam Peckinpah, and aside from Orson Welles, no great filmmaker suffered more at the hands of the studios for whom he plied his trade. Between 1961 and 1983 he made 14 feature films, many of which didn’t make it intact to their first release. He’s usually thought of as a ‘lost’ artist; robbed of half his career by alcohol, personal demons and studio hacks. Yet as Cinematheque Ontario’s retrospective Bring me the Films of Sam Peckinpah makes clear, he gave us everything he had, and everything he had was enough.

The zeitgeist has been much kinder to Peckinpah recently than he ever was to himself: In the last few years, the studios have re-released virtually all of his movies to the DVD catalog; more importantly, they’ve repaired most of the damage they’d done to them as well. With the upcoming release of a restored Cross of Iron, every one of Peckinpah’s most important movies will be available to the viewing public, more or less the way he’d intended us to see them.

At his peak, he was generous with his genius: Between 1969 and 1973 Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner, The Getaway, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Let’s put that in perspective: in the same amount of time it will have taken the producers of the James Bond franchise to bring Casino Royale to market this fall, Sam Peckinpah made six extraordinary films. How could we have been that lucky without noticing it at the time?

Watching them as a group today is an overwhelmingly nostalgic experience: The passion Peckinpah had for both the western and the idea of the west leaps through the screen from his heart directly to yours. You’re emotionally held hostage with no hope of being ransomed, because you’re being kidnapped by a kind of filmmaking that’s gone forever. So it’s very easy to develop a tendency to look back at Peckinpah’s westerns the way Peckinpah looked back at the fin-de-siecle west. When you contemplate the Jerry Bruckheimers and the Michael Bays currently cranking out films in the action-adventure genre, you may find yourself suddenly identifying with Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch: Surveying the motley posse he’s been saddled with to bring the Bunch in, he spits out: “We’re after men—and by God, I wish I was with them!”

For better or (occasionally) worse, seeking out some men is Peckinpah’s blood-and-butter. And unlike, say, Howard Hawks, he’s not concerned so much with what a man does when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, but rather where a man can go if he simply wants to be a man. For Peckinpah, manliness is more of a place on a map than a state of mind. If, like Joel McCrae in Ride the High Country, all you want is to enter your house justified, where do you build your home?

The answer to most Peckinpah men is somewhere within hailing distance of Mexico: All of Peckinpah’s most effective films feature Mexico as a background motif; a source of inspiration and moral compass. Peckinpah’s men are outsiders; refugees from authority and compromise; gun-toting Holden Caulfields laid low by middle age; and they’re people for whom Mexico represents the only remaining frontier worthy of the name; the only place that’s both untrammeled and has in it the kind of people with whom you’d want to share a bottle of whiskey. It’s where the Wild Bunch finds both paradise and death, and it’s where Billy the Kid refuses to run and is killed for it. Major Dundee’s Major Dundee goes there and nearly becomes Heart of Darkness’s Colonel Kurtz; and it’s the place Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw are getting away to in The Getaway. (Virtually every movie of Peckinpah’s could probably be called The Getaway.)

When escape to Mexico is not an option, you get something like Straw Dogs. Infamously described by The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as “the first American film that’s a fascist work of art,” 35 years later Straw Dogs looks more like the Paul Verhoeven version of Home Alone—a potentially defensible thesis about a reasonable man’s capacity for violence, done in by screenwriting straight out of Basic Instinct.

In the context of the films he surrounded it with (the gentle Ballad of Cable Hogue on one side; the genial Junior Bonner on the other), Straw Dogs is a bizarre artifact; Peckinpah besieged by his own demons with no frontier to escape to. It also marked an intrusion of the modern into his work—as if he’d finally looked around and noticed Nixon and Vietnam—and he was never entirely able to shake it off.

Thus, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is as much about America in 1973 as it is about New Mexico in 1881. Mutilated beyond credibility in its first release, the 2005 restoration allows it re-entry into the pantheon of Peckinpah’s’s greatest achievements; as the valedictory to the western he was never allowed to deliver in person. An even better and less sentimental distillation of all of Peckinpah’s themes than The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett is a melancholy farewell to the west and the western, both for the director and for cinema itself. Nobody makes westerns any more at least partly because in 1973 Peckinpah saw to it that there’d be nothing left for them to say.

But where is a director to build his home when he’s just made the last western that would ever need to be made? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is the sight of a filmmaker tearing his guts out coming to grips with the answer. Apocalyptic, obnoxious, and sometimes downright campy, Alfredo Garcia is the great Peckinpah Burnout Movie. In it he pushes every cinematic thesis he’s ever developed past the point of credulity—seemingly over the edge of the earth. Goddard tacked the words “Fin du Film; Fin du Cinema” to the end of his Weekend in 1967, and they’re words that surely could have closed Alfredo Garcia as well—in blood-red letters.

No other substantial filmmaker—except perhaps fellow cinematic wild-man Samuel Fuller—ever wore his guts so unashamedly on his sleeve or made so career-destroying a movie. It’s hard to tell at that stage whether it was a matter of spiritual authenticity or temporary insanity. One thing is certain: For Peckinpah, getting his vision onscreen didn’t just matter, it was a matter of life and death. And ultimately, with a few more indifferent movies—and a lot of help from whiskey—the struggle killed him.

But we should resist the urge to see Sam Peckinpah as a martyr. Film critic David Thompson saw Peckinpah’s screen work as a metaphor for its author’s sufferings in Hollywood, but the truth is exactly the other way around: The studios did him in just as surely as the ranchers did in Pat Garrett, but Peckinpah used his suffering at their hands to perfect the myth he put on screen.

He wouldn’t have had it any other way: For us his life represents the last of a line of men stretching from Ride the High Country’s Steve Judd through Pat Garrett to The Wild Bunch’s Deke Thornton. Sam Peckinpah was our last Western hero.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2005

Solaris

2008-02-11T10:54:00.000-08:00

If you’ve seen one of the commercials for Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, you’ll notice that it’s being pushed as a date movie; a romance. It’s a bit of a risky strategy for 20th Century Fox, because, while it is a movie about love, it may tell some happy couples a lot more than they really want to know. Solaris is both science-fiction and love story: It’s about strange places in outer space, but mostly it’s about the strange space that love occupies in human lives.

A downsizing of the mammoth 1972 Russian film classic, Solaris features a narrative that would look at home on an episode of Star Trek: a troubled psychiatrist whose wife committed suicide years before is sent to investigate the strange goings-on on a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. When he arrives he finds the crew either dead, or apparently crazy. When he awakes after his first night’s sleep there, he discovers the source of the troubles: the planet itself appears to have the power to conjure up the object of your dreams and obsessions, or at least a seemingly perfect copy of it. And since he’s been obsessed with his dead wife, guess who he wakes up beside?

What follows is light on narrative and heavy on implication. The main issue we are forced to come to grips with is, how much of our love for another is based on the reality that is that person, and how much is based on our imagination of what that other person is? And if the greater part of that person who we love is really our own artifice, what does that mean for that other person? Solaris pushes that issue by giving us a conscious, self-identified woman who has been created entirely from the memories of her husband, a person who has to construct herself as she goes along out of fragments of unfamiliar memories. Her struggle is the centerpiece of the movie, and it’s as profound a character as Hollywood has given us in decades.

Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, Solaris feels a bit like what 2001 A Space Odyssey might have felt like if Brian Eno had been in charge of the music. It doesn’t give us everything; we have to fill in a good deal of the picture ourselves, which is just one of the complements Soderbergh pays his audience. But like our psychiatrist orbiting that planet, what we emerge from the theater with will depend a lot on what we bring in ourselves.

If Solaris is going to be tricky sell to some audiences, it’s still a triumph for its creator. What Ron Howard is to studio executives, Steven Soderbergh is to us: he’s the closest thing we’ve got to lead-pipe reliable. Soderbergh is America’s most consistently interesting working director: In 13 years he’s produced 10 first-rate movies, which is a feat most directors won’t achieve in a lifetime. (And he doesn’t turn 40 for another year.) If he keeps it up, there’s no way he’s not one of the greatest filmmakers in history. D’you always wish you’d been there when Howard Hawks was at his peak in the 1930’s and 40’s? Well, we’re there right now.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, 2002

Six Degrees of Detoxification

2008-02-04T16:41:00.000-08:00

Kate Moss’s recent coke-fueled misadventures remind us of the truth that lies in the drug-addiction model of fame. All celebrities should be treated as addicts: The more celebrated they are, the more acute their addiction is; the less they actually do to earn their status, the more addictive their behavior.

So it should be no surprise that the rehab clinic is almost a vacation destination for the high-visibility luminary, or that there are far more drug- and alcohol-recovery clinics in North America than there are Wal-Marts. So, together with some of the big names in rehab, here are a few of the big names who’ve been in rehab.

Clinic The Meadows
Where? Wickenburg, Az.
Alumni Elle MacPherson, Kate Moss
Claim to Fame Recent admission of Kate Moss has set the bar for costly celeb treatment; reported cost to Moss of $4000/day is more than 10 times the price at the Betty Ford

Clinic Promises
Where? Malibu, Ca.
Alumni Charlie Sheen, Christian Slater, Diana Ross, Winona Rider, Ben Affleck, Matthew Perry, Kelly Osbourne, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame Very high-end; younger Hollywood clientele; half of Mötley Crüe has passed through its doors

Clinic Impact Treatment Center
Where? Pasadena, Ca.
Alumni James Caan, Heidi Fleiss, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame Has reputation for taking on Promises Clinic’s underachievers

Clinic Wavelengths International
Where? Malibu Ca.
Alumni Courtney Love, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame A mere step along the road for its two most famous patients

Clinic Betty Ford Center
Where? Rancho Mirage, Ca.
Alumni Elizabeth Taylor, Bobby Brown, Stevie Nicks, Mary Tyler Moore, Anna Nicole Smith, Ozzy Osbourne, Lisa Minnelli, Johnny Cash, Kelsey Grammer, many, many others
Claim to Fame Mother of all celebrity detox centers; name provides cachet that you’re serious about treatment; if you’re a star, you’ll likely run into a lot of your friends

Clinic Exodus
Where? Marina del Ray, Ca.
Alumni James Caan, Kurt Cobain, Robert Downey Jr., Courtney Love
Claim to Fame Name ominously appropriate for Robert Downey Jr., who escaped four days into his stint there in July 1996

Clinic Hazelden
Where? Minnesota, plus three other states
Alumni Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithful, Chris Farley, Liza Minnelli, Melanie Griffith, Matthew Perry, Bobby Brown, Nathalie Cole, Calvin Klein
Claim to Fame Has the forthrightness to claim a success rate of only 54%; that is, almost half of their patients are re-toxed within a year.

Clinic Las Encinas Hospital
Where? Pasadena, Ca.
Alumni Kelly Osbourne, Jack Osbourne
Claim to Fame See Alumni, above

Clinic Silver Hill Hospital
Where? New Canaan, Ct.
Alumni Liza Minnelli, Nick Nolte, Mariah Carey, Greg Allman, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Diana Ross
Claim to Fame Musician’s addiction center of choice, although perhaps the only detox center in America not visited by Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil

Clinic “Unknown Detox Facility”
Where? Pick your state or country
Alumni Vince Neil, Drew Barrymore, David Bowie, Courtney Love, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Moss, Betty Ford, Eminem, Domino Harvey, many, many others
Claim to Fame Hey, it might have been one of us

-Published in The Weekly Scoop, November 2005

Revenge of the Lucas

2008-02-04T16:11:00.000-08:00

Context is everything. So into what kind of space are we going to situate Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith? Well, how about personal space: The last time I really enjoyed myself at a Star Wars movie---the last time I knew I was seeing something really special... was 28 years ago. And my girlfriend of the time now has children considerably older than we were when we saw the original together.

I should really call them up and see what they think. Because I have a feeling that when you were born is going to have a lot to do with how you feel about Episode 3. If you are a child of the age of Nintendo, ‘special edition’ DVD’s and the Sony Playstation, you’ll probably feel somewhere close to home. If you’re a child of the Age of Movies, well, you’ll probably be relieved that the whole panjandrum is finally coming to an end.

The Playstation connection is the defining one. All three movies in the second series of Star Wars have felt like video games that played themselves. There were points in Episode 2 and about a half-an-hour here in Episode 3 where the script shakes itself awake, you get some genuine emotion, and you feel like you’re watching a real movie. But for the most part these episodes are inhuman---their real home is to machines bouncing off other machines. Personality is virtually nonexistent. Now, personality is something you bring to a video game, but it’s something you hope a movie will bring to you. Personality in script and character is what brings excitement to your big---and here generic---special-effects events, but the feeling you get here is that all the clutter and big effects are there to keep the actors from drowning.

Over the three decades he’s been tinkering with his cinematic toys at the Skywalker Ranch, writer-director George Lucas has lost the ability to credibly put human beings onscreen. His direction of actors here, to say nothing of the lines he gives them, is as futile as directing tombstones in a cemetery. How can you botch a scene where a girl tells a boy she’s pregnant? They do.

So there are no thrills. There’s lots of business; there’s lots of actor boilerplate, but there’s no excitement. This was supposed to be the big climactic movie in this series; the one where all the dots are finally connected. And they are. But mostly it’s connect-the-dots.

There’s a movie coming out later in the season called Stealth, and it’s about a computerized military fighter-plane that starts to think that’s its an genuine warrior. Analogously, I think George Lucas is actually a spaceship that has convinced itself that it’s a movie writer-director. Star Wars has been around for almost three decades and it’s changed Hollywood. If you go and see this movie, you’ll see a half-a-dozen trailers for similarly mechanical blockbusters that will rule theaters this summer. I think what’s happened is that the success of Star Wars has purged most of the humans from the industry. The clones have won.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, June 2005

The Tom Cruise Movie Prediction Engine

2008-02-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

Chris Rock put his finger on something at last spring’s Oscars: “You want a successful movie?” he asked. “Get yourself some stars.” But he’s only half right—star power means more to movie producers than movie fans these days: A star guarantees that a film will find an audience, but not that the audience will find a good film.

Take the biggest star of ‘em all—Tom Cruise. His work’s been up and down more than Jenna Jameson on a stripper’s pole. But be of good cheer: the following little survey will help you predict whether Tom’s next movie will be an act of genius, or a gobbler. Add up the numbers and see!

Does this movie co-star Cruise’s current spouse/girlfriend? [-1]
Does he get physically or emotionally abused? [+2]
Does he deliver more than 1/4 of his dialog in a foreign language? [+1]
Does he put on a foreign accent while speaking English? [-1]
Is he cast against any obviously superior actors? [-2]
Was his part offered to anyone else first? [+1]
Can this movie be interpreted as having Scientological themes? [-1]
Does he play a merely supporting role? [+1]
Is it a supporting role in the Friends movie? [-1]
Is the director more respected or influential than he is? [+1]
Does he wear that silly grin of his on the poster? [-1]
Does he play the bad guy? [+1]
Did he produce the movie? [-2]
Is he 21 years old or younger? [Trick question]
Has the director slagged him as being impossible to work with? [-1]
Has the director praised him for being a treat to work with? [-1]
Does he take his shirt off? [-1]
Does he have sex with a woman? [+1]
Does he have sex with a man? [+2]
Does he have sex with Jake Gyllenhall while Katie Holmes watches? [+4]
Is this movie directed by any of the following: Rob Reiner, Ron Howard, Cameron Crowe, Kevin Smith, Tony Scott? [-1]
Is this movie directed by any of the following: Paul Verhoeven, Lars Von Trier, Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polansky, David Cronenberg? [+1]

Scores:
+7 or above Either a great movie or great guilty pleasure; either way you win
+3 — +6 Pleasant surprise; will possibly bring Oscar nomination
0 — +2 Iffy, but possibly watchable depending on director
-1 — -2 Typical, but fans my tolerate; still better than driving home
-3 — -6 Even fans better advised to choose a Mickey Rourke film instead
-7 or below Battlefield Earth territory; wear impermeable garments to screening

-Published in The Weekly Scoop, Oct. 2005

Current Vegas Lines on the 2007 Oscars

2008-02-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

Odds that the broadcast will wrap up on schedule (150-1)
Odds that Ellen DeGeneres will make a sly reference to the fact that she’s the first openly gay personality to host the Oscars: Right off the top (2-1); Never (3-1); During a commercial break (8-5); The first time the cameras start to linger on Tom Cruise (5-1)
Deceased star likely to get most applause when the obituary reel is shown: Robert Altman (3-1); Peter Boyle (5-1); Jack Warden (10-1); Glenn Ford (15-1); Jack Palance (2-1); Don Knotts (30-1)
Odds that the Best Foreign Film winner will say something critical about US foreign policy (3-1)
Odds that the Best Foreign Film winner will say something complimentary about Hollywood movies (50-1)
Odds the most long-winded speech will come from: Eddie Murphy (20-1); Martin Scorsese (10-1); Peter O’Toole (6-1); Jennifer Hudson (20-1); Academy President Sid Ganis (Even)
Most likely political statement made by a winner from the stage: Global warming is an issue that the world must address (3-1); The post-colonial exploitation of Africa by the rich must cease; I don’t know how I’m going to link my movie to the slaughter in Iraq, but I’m gonna do it anyway (8-5); We should stop insulting the public’s intelligence with this crass promotional gimmick disguised as an awards show (75-1)
Most likely embarrassing unscripted moment: An inebriated Nick Nolte will lose his place in his teleprompted remarks and fail to extricate himself (6-1); A flop-sweating Billy Bob Thornton will remind the audience that it still isn’t too late to catch The Astronaut Farmer at the multiplex next door (10-1); Ryan O’Neil will rush the stage with a fireplace poker (4-1)
Most likely embarrassing scripted moment: Host Ellen DeGeneres will jump up and down and claim to be in love with Katie Holmes (9-1); Jennifer Aniston will attempt to kiss Cate Blanchett to publicize her upcoming appearance on Dirt (6-5); Special guest presenter Al Gore will attempt to read his lines (7-2)
Most unlikely nominated winner: Will Smith (25-1); Rinko Kikuchi (20-1); Judi Dench (15-1); Mark Wahlberg (40-1)
The elephant in the room that a minor presenter will finally mention: Dreamgirls, a universally well-received but largely black project, wasn’t nominated for Best Picture (2-1) Isn’t it time we stopped awarding an Oscar for “best animated feature”? (15-1) We should have given Scorsese his Director Oscar for Goodfellas so we wouldn’t have to pretend a dog like The Departed is pure gold (3-2); This is the lamest bunch of nominees since The Greatest Show on Earth won Best Picture in 1952 (10-1)
Odds that Liza Minnelli, freshly divorced from David Gest, will now try and punch out Russell Crowe when ushers attempt to move him into her seat: (20-1)
Odds that Academy voters will be able to tell Dreamgirls’ three nominated songs apart (7-2)
Most likely sentimental winner: Eddie Murphy (8-1); Alan Arkin (5-1) Martin Scorsese (2-1) Peter O’Toole (Even)
Actor least likely to be trusted to present an award: Rip Torn (10-1) Mel Gibson (15-1) Mickey Rourke (35-1) Lindsay Lohan (50-1) Courtney Love (85-1)
Sascha Baron Cohen is most likely to show up in character as: Borat (8-5) Ali G. (5-1) Gay race-car driver Jean Girard (9-4) Peter O’Toole (8-1)
Odds that Xenu will arise through a volcano in the Kodak Theater parking lot, spirit Tom Cruise and John Travolta away in a DC-8-shaped rocket ship, and bring history as we know it to an end (14-1)

-Published in the Globe and Mail, March 2007

The Kitchen Fraternity

2008-02-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

Having played the singles scene for a few years now, I like to think I’ve got my priorities down pretty solidly. So when a matchmaking friend wants to introduce me to somebody, before we even get to the usual suspects---personality, intelligence, politics, looks and stuff like that---I’ve really got only one question: Does she like to cook?

Is her vision of the ideal interior design a kitchen that’s twice the size of the living room? Does she browse through kitchen-supply stores and impulse-buy sauté pans? Does she think a Nobel Prize for Julia Child isn’t a dumb idea? Does she look forward to early retirement so she can spend more time hanging around the stove? These are all things I can identify with.

In fact, if I ever took out a personal ad, my description of myself would probably read: “I like to hang around the kitchen.” A kitchen is the most civil place to start a relationship: an unpretentious, low-pressure space devoted to mutual tasks and common ambitions. Leave the living room to the poseurs---virtually all of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had have taken place within 5 feet of a working stove. (Besides, I always figured that if you both know your way around a kitchen, all that multiple orgasm stuff would take care of itself.)

Strangely, some callous and unthinking living-room types find this attitude bewildering. I can sympathize: People with a pathological distaste for a stove might be rubbed the wrong way by a person who thinks that everything should be in the same room as it. My ideal living space would be a 900 sq. ft high-ceilinged studio where you can see the stove from anywhere in the place. Except maybe the bathroom---I don’t want to be a fanatic about this.

Being taken for a fanatic is a risk you run when you’re passionate about cooking. If you’re a woman, you also risk being confused for someone unhappily obsessed with eating---one of the chocolate-is-better-than-sex types. But let’s keep our heads screwed on here: Food is not more exciting than sex---although good food is definitely more exhilarating than lousy sex. (Or, as a woman friend of mine described a merely fair-to-middlin’ sexual escapade: “it wasn’t food, but it wasn’t bad.”)

I’m sustained by the faith that there is a fraternity of people out there who understand. They are people that know that sometimes, even though you’re worn out from a day’s work, you just have to go to another store because the leeks in this one aren’t perfect. They are people who go to restaurants for the inspiration more than the food---because they can generally do better at home and spend more on the wine. They are people who head straight for the cookbook section in the used bookstore, in hopes that there’s a reasonably priced copy of Escoffier that they can buy and give away because they’ve already got one.

Above all, they know the terrible paradox of eating alone: you always eat well, but you may also be wasting an episode of genius on yourself. To search for someone from this fraternity is not just matching obsessions. Assigning a high priority to making brilliant food is a sign of intelligence, spirit, and civility. It’s also just good sense: how can you crawl into bed with someone you’ve never cooked with?

But I suppose I shouldn’t paint too rosy a picture for myself of what at bottom may be a shared fixation after all. I had a girlfriend once---we made great food together but somehow things didn’t work out. On the other hand, we still eat together regularly, chop vegetables mutually, and get strange looks from friends when we both get excited over the combined flavor of a 1987 BC Muscat and hazelnut ice cream.

We still belong to the fraternity. It’s a relationship that’s worth savoring.

-Published in Flare, 2004

Are they Worth it Part 3: Beppi Crosariol's “Wine Butler” in the Globe and Mail

2008-02-04T11:08:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you find the Globe and Mail too depressing a read to buy the newsprint edition, yet you still start your day with the online version, you may have caught a glimpse of a new feature currently being promoted in the left-hand sidebar to the front page. It's called the 'Wine Butler', and it's being pushed as a sort of consumer treasury of Globe wine writer Beppi Crosariol's collected sniffs and gulps from years past, gathered together in a searchable database. As such, it represents the Globe's first tentative foray into the kind of online data treasury currently occupied by heavy enological hitters like Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker, both of whom have pay sites promising unlimited access to their private notes to give you a leg up on fellow wine-fanciers competing for the good stuff at your local wine retailer. Unfortunately, if early shakedown runs are anything to go by, it's pretty clear that if this wine butler actually was a flesh and blood creature at your service, you'd have handed him his walking papers by now.

I suppose we could have seen it coming: such a project must be really attractive to a critic with ten years worth of tasting notes that have been publicly viewed just once, and have since faded from view like the tannins in a big Aussie Cabernet. Here's a chance for the man to turn his knowledge into searchable cyber-wisdom; his life-experience into a database. How could anyone resist?

The trouble is, as a useful consumer tool the Wine Butler's a bust; worse yet, as a means of putting Crosariol's wine-writing on display (a sort of 'Beppi's Greatest Hits') it's so flawed as to prove a mere annoyance to anybody seeking either a glimpse of his personality or a whiff of his intelligence. As a database, it doesn't give you the information you want; and as a sampler of wine writing, it's an exercise in frustration to browse.

Even the most cursory search---either by wine type or by wine name---reveals that the database is woefully short on useful data. To take just one example, Wine Butler lists no Bordeaux between $15 and $25, which is preposterous: Even in B.C. Liquor Stores there are a dozen examples available; at the LCBO even more. Or, a search for a Burgundy priced between $15 and $25 missed several in current release, and instead listed two which were not available any more---one of which was incorrectly priced to boot. And when you do squeeze out a hit searching by type, as often as not you are steered to an older review of a vintage that was never available except at a small circle of LCBO Vintages stores for two days in 2005.

As a guide to wines that actually are out there, Wine Butler falls down even more badly. As a thought experiment, I tried typing in the names of all the bottles in the last couple of cases I hauled home from the LCBO, with nary a hit. (The no-shows included: Domaine de la Solitude; Tommasi anything; Clos du Bois anything; Mouton anything; Kenwood Pinot Noir; Domaine Monoertuis; Chateau Gaillat; Chanson Bourgogne; Chateau Saint Auriol Corbieres; Marchand Fixin; Drouhin Morey St Denis; and Chateau du Pavillon. As far as I know, they're all still out there on LCBO shelves.)

As well, Wine Butler offers up promises to the nose that just aren't followed up on the palate; what on the surface appear to be user-friendly and useful little touches but turn out empty---like the little “match with food” toggle, which requires even more raw data to be effective. (Find me the best $25 Bordeaux to go with a chicken pie? Why not something genuinely useful, like overcooked squash?)

All in all, at this stage of its evolution, Wine Butler is pretty much a corked bottle: There is potential for a site like this---it's always useful to have access to any accumulated wisdom; but the potential it holds out to the reader is as a library. The Globe is courting horselaughs by parading it in front of the public as a tool.

-EAT Wineblog, Sept. 2007