Musicians on Film

Musicians on Film #20: Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #19: Miles Davis in Rolf de Heer's Dingo (1991)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #18: Iggy Pop in John Waters' Cry-Baby (1990)

American movies, 1970-1979

from John Huston's Fat City (1972)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972)

I'm really stretching it by calling this an American movie (British director, British cast, shot in England), but Hitchcock had been an American citizen for about 30 years when he directed it.

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #17: Joe Strummer in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972)

They couldn't all be winners, pt. 1

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #16: Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Midnight (1986)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #15: The Ramones in Allan Arkush's Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)

A bad week for my acting heroes

David Carradine, most likely, hanged himself with a belt in a Bangkok hotel. I hope he was terminally ill or something and not just suicidally depressed, but that's a pretty fierce and interesting manner and location of death.

A publicist has revealed this week that the great Peter Falk has Alzheimer's and severe dementia. He no longer has any memory of working on "Columbo." That sucks.

American movies, 1970-1979

from John Boorman's Deliverance (1972)

Beauty, repetition, drone, composition, landscape, movement, meditation

"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." -- Mark Twain
(My mother re-introduced me to this quote this weekend, and it stuck in my head after watching The Limits of Control this afternoon.)

With the exception of thoughtful people (who also happen to be good writers) like J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Glenn Kenny, the majority of American film critics have taken a collective dump on Jim Jarmusch's latest movie, the beautiful The Limits of Control. I see it as a stylistic advancement after the enjoyable but relatively complacent Coffee and Cigarettes and Broken Flowers in the same way Dead Man and Ghost Dog expanded his repertoire after the comfort zone stall of Night on Earth. Whether you like it or not is not really the issue. You got your thang. I got my thang. You might have excellent reasons to dislike it. However, I'm dismayed at the almost unanimous groupthink negative reaction by the mainstream press. I wish I was surprised by most of it (though I was surprised by Roger Ebert, usually a Jarmusch fan, giving it one-half of a star -- the beauty of the composition alone should have raised it a little higher than that, even if he did dislike it). Newspapers are slowly and painfully dying, and film critics have been among the first to go. They're being axed right and left, and it's no coincidence that most of the good ones lost their jobs first. If they want to keep their jobs, it behooves them to pander to the corporations that either own both the newspapers and the Hollywood movie studios or depend on each other for symbiotic advertising money. Maybe the movie would have received fair reviews if it had been released in the fall. Mainstream film critics have unquestioningly swallowed the mass psychosis that requires us all to pretend it is our patriotic duty to desire giant, expensive, incoherent blockbusters in the summer months, even, and especially, if we avoid these products during the rest of the year. Lower your standards, smarty-pants. It's too hot for anything with artistic value. Ejaculate over Star Trek and Wolverine. It doesn't matter that either one will look like nobody directed it and a toddler edited it. Fuck it, man! It's the summer! The Limits of Control is more your late-fall kind of experience. (An aside. Look at almost any blockbuster from the 1980s. These are, for the most part, well-made entertainments. Look at a blockbuster now. They're shockingly poorly made, and nobody seems to give a fuck! Why? Even Christopher Nolan, a guy who knows how to make a movie, made the two most incoherent, poorly edited Batman movies ever and got praised to the heavens for it. Come on, even mindless fun entertainment should be made with care, heart, and soul. The sense of fun and play that used to exist in the Big Movie Event is gone and we're all pretending otherwise. Maybe I'm just out of touch because I don't want to waste valuable precious ever-dwindling lifetime hours on empty, no-fun imitations of fun. To be fair, I do waste a lot of fucking time on Facebook, so what the hell do I know?)
Let's boil down the criticism to its consensus: This movie is self-indulgent.
A proposal: Let's eliminate the word "self-indulgent" from the language. The uses of it are selfish and condescending. When a person says this to you, especially after you've professed admiration for whatever it is you're discussing, this person has obviously been born without the not-being-an-asshole part of his/her brain. Here's what this word means when used in this context: "Because I didn't like it, obviously the person who created it was only making it for her/himself and no one else." Do you see how shitty that is to say to someone? He/she is telling you that your opinion is not worth a goddamn thing, which is a terrible thing to say to a person. If one other person in the world likes it besides the creator(s), then it ceases to be self-indulgent. Because we all, everyone of us, matter. That's why you can discount my opinion in the previous paragraph if you like Star Trek or The Dark Knight. But please consider it, even for a second or two. Anyway, I'm getting off the track. The Limits of Control is self-indulgent only in the sense that all good and great art starts that way. If a creator can't indulge her/himself first, then how can he/she indulge anyone else? We communicate best with other people when we're being totally and completely ourselves. When we're not hiding our mannerisms, weaknesses, repetitions, humor, enthusiasm, plagiarisms, insecurities, goodness, etc. The road to connecting with others is paved with self-indulgence.
Anyway, I have a few petty reservations about The Limits of Control, but mostly I forgot about other bullshit and accepted it on its terms. I had a great experience watching it. Maybe you won't. Why do I think my opinion matters so much that I need a public forum for it? I still don't know. Maybe because I'm terrible at explaining what I like orally, and because I feel deep, hot rage when something I like gets dismissed in a tossed-off, casual, or smug manner. Anyway, bring on the rappin' grannies. Is that your final answer? You're fired. I wish I knew how to quit you. Get 'er done. Et cetera. Happy summer blockbustering and TIVOing to you and yours.

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #14: Stiv Bators in John Waters' Polyester (1981)

Right on!

"You are all my guests. That's how I feel. Not the other way around. I am the best filmmaker in the world." -- Lars Von Trier, during a press conference at the currently ongoing Cannes Film Festival to a bunch of pompous film critics who attacked his latest film Antichrist and asked him to "justify" its existence. I'm sure they will take him at his word, not catching his sense of humor (they never do -- see their responses to the Dogme Manifesto, which they seemed to think was as serious as the Ten Commandments), and attack him some more for declaring himself the best in the world. They won't attack themselves for demanding that an artist justify something he made. Ask a fireman to justify putting out a fire, you stupid clods. I will never understand the vitriolic hatred for Von Trier and the gullible swallowing of his poker-faced provocations by the majority of film critics, journalists, and film buffs. I can see why his movies are divisive, but I don't understand where his critics' anger and hate and self-serving outrage come from. Why does he make people so mad? Because he believes in what he's doing? Because he's supposedly "sadistic"? (I think that's a lot of bullshit.) Because he's more formally inventive than most people making movies right now? I don't know. It baffles me.

American movies, 1970-1979

from Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising (1972)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #13: David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #12: A Monkee gets wet in Bob Rafelson's Head (1968)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Alan J. Pakula's Klute (1971)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #11: Levon Helm in Michael Apted's Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #10: Jimmie Dale Gilmore in Joel & Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Elaine May's A New Leaf (1971)

"Air! You can't even see it, so why talk about it?"

from Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde (1941)

Merde

Denis Lavant as Merde, and two of that character's inspirations, Opale and Godzilla

From the top:
Leos Carax's Merde from the anthology film Tokyo! (2008)
Jean Renoir's Le testament du Docteur Cordelier aka The Doctor's Horrible Experiment (1959)
Ishiro Honda's Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #9: Jimmy Cliff in Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971)
I'm stretching the rules a bit. A British film made by an American director.

Batalla en el cielo

from Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven (2005)

"Probably those same dudes"

from Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Moartea domnului Lazarescu

from Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #8: Howard Devoto in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (2002)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

R.I.P. Lou Perryman

Character actor Lou Perryman was murdered in his home in Austin, Texas on Wednesday night by a mentally ill man who had stopped taking his meds. His murder appears to be a random act in a string of tragic, unfortunate circumstances involving the mentally ill man. The 67-year-old Perryman was a great actor who should have been a lot more famous. I saw him at a Q&A for Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown last year, and he came across as a big-hearted curmudgeon with a potty mouth. I immediately liked him, and I wished I were his drinking buddy. He appeared on some episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger and was later quoted as saying, "Chuck Norris is a pussy! I'd flush that cocksucker down the toilet!" The world goes on without Lou Perryman. Matthew McConaughey is a multi-millionaire.

Recommended roles
The Whole Shootin' Match (1978)
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Poltergeist (1982)
Last Night at the Alamo (1983)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
Boys Don't Cry (1999)

W as in war, A as in Alamo, L as in Lenin, S as in science fiction, C as in crime, and H as in Hell

from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The American Soldier (1970)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #7: Hoagy Carmichael in Howard Hawks' To Have Or Have Not (1944)

American movies, 1970-1979

from William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971)

"You've got the mind of a pig." "It's a pig's world."

from George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935)

...my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn't sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That's how I began to hate you.

from Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963)

Beauty salon by day, bordello by night

from Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #6: Isaac Hayes in John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (1971)

2008: The Year in Review, 2015 Edition

I learned a valuable lesson by embarking on the challenge of writing about every movie I saw in the theater in one year: Never do this again. Here's a quick wrap-up, including my two favorite movies of 2008. Expect my 2009 list sometime in 2042.

Two Asian directors left their continent, cinematically speaking, for the first time. China-born, Hong Kong-raised Wong Kar-Wai made his first U.S. film, My Blueberry Nights, and China-born, Taiwan-raised Hou Hsiao-Hsien made his first French film, The Flight of the Red Balloon. Most critics and Kar-Wai fans decided that My Blueberry Nights was a failure. I partially and reluctantly have to agree, but I would append the word "interesting" before the word "failure" and I would also add that a great director's misfires have more to offer than a crap-peddler's successes. Kar-Wai's inaccurate grasp of American culture and speech hobbles his movie while simultaneously making it more interesting. Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz straddle (and sometimes fall on the wrong side of) a line between honesty and hysterical over-performance while Norah Jones in the lead is curiously inert and uncharismatic. Chan Marshall (Cat Power) steals the movie with her five-minute cameo, making me wish Kar-Wai had put her in the lead instead if he was so intent on casting a musician with no acting experience. Still, this is one of the most appealing non-successes I've seen, and some of it was great.
Hsiao-Hsien's loose interpretation of Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon, The Flight of the Red Balloon, was one of my two favorite movies of the year. Why? I don't know how to explain it with any justice. The movie just flows and exists, finding its own visual and aural rhythms and forms that couldn't exist in any other medium. It looks effortless, but it's the kind of effortlessness that comes from years of work. The film is tight and focused but loosely plotted and free from superfluity and indulgence. My words are useless because it's the kind of movie that's meant to be seen. Some movies aren't, unfortunately. They think they're a book on tape or a televised play or a video game or a postcard or an ad for hemorrhoid cream.

Hsiao-Hsien let Juliette Binoche, his lead, create her own character. Mike Leigh uses this technique on all his films. He gathers together a group of actors he wants to work with, workshops with them for several weeks while the actors create their own characters, goes away and writes a script based on the actors' creations, and regroups to rehearse and film. Mike Leigh has never made a bad film, or even a passable one. Most are great, a few are merely very good. I avoided his work for several years because I was under the mistaken impression he was a maker of bloodless Masterpiece Theatre British dramas. I was so, so wrong about that, but I've spent the last several years catching up. His latest, Happy-Go-Lucky, is my favorite movie of 2008. The reviews have been mostly positive, but also frustrating in their stupid lockstep groupthink publicist's cliches. The film is repeatedly referred to as a departure for the "miserablist" Leigh. Seriously, at least 18 reviews I read or scanned called him a "miserablist." This is a bit like calling someone "religious" because they were spotted walking past a church. Though Leigh's previous two films were mostly dark family dramas, all of his films combine comedy and drama in varying amounts, and even his darkest films are filled with great humor. Never mind the misconception that Happy-Go-Lucky is some sort of happy, fluffy feelgood motivational speech because the lead character is relentlessly optimistic and has a silly sense of humor. She's also a realist who lives in the present instead of a fantasy land and honestly reacts to what is happening right in front of her in the most open and positive way she can. The film also contains the most hate-filled, nihilistic character in a Leigh film since David Thewlis' performance in Naked, and a sober appraisal of the pains, ills and difficulties of living. Most reviewers conveniently leave everyone besides Sally Hawkins' character out of their evaluation, which is odd considering that Leigh is deeply interested in every single human being in his films, even those who are on-screen for less than a minute. Equally stupidly, the film's few negative reviewers seem incensed at the idea of a happy, positive character and patronizingly question her sanity and mental capacity while acting like their street cred would be destroyed if they liked the movie, even though a critic doesn't have any street cred anyway. Whatever, dudes. It may not float your boat, but I always leave Leigh's films rejuvenated and moved. Like the Mekons say, it's hard to be human again, but Leigh's films always remind me that I'm here and I'm alive.
Another great experience: a retrospective of short experimental films by the recently deceased Bruce Conner. He started making films in the 1960s as a part of the hippie counterculture movement, but he quickly grew disenchanted with the flower power bullshit and sanctimony and found closer kindred spirits in the music of Devo, Talking Heads, and Brian Eno. Besides his small-town Kansas upbringing and Nebraska college education, I have an affinity for his wickedly paranoid sense of humor. His films are joyful, frightening, and exciting collages of film history, music, naked women, advertising, nuclear apocalypse, devolution, nature, the artificial world, art, and entertainment. My favorites include Cosmic Ray -- a totally fucking exciting melding of his collage technique with Ray Charles' "What'd I Say," Report -- his meditation on JFK's assassination as emotional event and media spectacle that does in 13 minutes what Oliver Stone couldn't even locate in three hours, Mongoloid -- his Devo tribute, and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and Valse Triste -- creepy yet oddly comforting looks back at his rural Midwestern childhood. A former personal assistant presented Conner's films, and she said something about him that I've never heard from other artists. In his final years, Conner refused to let his films be shown and nixed all offers of DVD release. He even cancelled a screening put together by his close friend Dennis Hopper. Unlike most artists, who love the idea that their art will continue to find an audience long after they've kicked the bucket, Conner was furious about his own failing health and couldn't stand the idea that his work would outlive him. I admire that perspective, even though I'm glad his family and co-workers didn't honor his wish to destroy his work.





























The rest (new stuff and revival/film society screenings):
John Huston's Key Largo (1948) was an entertaining and atmospheric noir with a reliably iconic performance by Humphrey Bogart.
Jay and Mark Duplass' Baghead continued the "mumblecore" tradition of presenting narcissistic twentysomething (actually thirtysomething) inarticulate dicks talking about nothing in particular, but they added a layer of self-critique and cleverly cross-pollinated it with the horror film. Their satire of film festivals and audience Q&A sessions was really funny, but the whole thing is pretty slight and I would have to fight my urge of smothering Greta Gerwig with a pillow if I ever met her in person.
Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is one of my favorite horror films and beautiful to look at. Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is almost as good.
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's 6ixtynin9 (1999) is a ridiculously exciting dark crime comedy of misunderstandings that rivals Tarantino at his best, but wisely drops the diminishing returns of forced pop culture referentiality that mars Tarantino's otherwise enjoyable work.
Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water (1962) is a taut little gem of claustrophobic dread. Why do I like to feel claustrophobic dread?

Whew. I did it.