The Man without a Past
So, here is my inaugural blog-gout, sent spraying into an abyss already crowded with free-falling voices, yowling and yelping (in too often incomplete sentences and reckless and subliterate opinionation) for a readership that may not, probably won’t, often shouldn’t, come. Several years too late, I come yelping myself into the void because whereas I was for over a decade a diligent weekly writer for a single publication (The Village Voice), and already enjoyed a regular forum and was paid for it, too, now I am, octopus-like, writing in scores of different venues and forms, and suddenly see the helpfulness of a blog to help me pull it all together, and to coordinate the tendrils not only in terms of craft but also concept and exposure. Suddenly, I’m all over the map, writing for up to a dozen publications semi-regularly (in various cities and countries), writing and publishing several books (and kinds of books) at once, and venturing further than I already have into the mysterious bowels of television and feature writing. Zero for Conduct, then, will be my home base, for all intents and purposes.
So much for exposition; here’s the state of my head in regards to cinema, right now. I’m equally stunned by Edward Yang’s death and Werner Herzog’s autumnal triumph in semi-wide release. I’m a recent convert to Helmut Kautner, and away from Dusan Makavejev. 1408 is a lusciously anxious dream film the Surrealists would’ve lunched on; Ratatouille is nearly as rich in heebie-jeebies (the absence of laughter may’ve had something to do with the visions of scuttling vermin, surely igniting an ancient dread in our tribal brain). Stranger than Fiction, Missing Victor Pellerin and Isolation, all caught up with on DVD, were several times more humdingery than I’d been led to believe. The new Criterion box of Teshigahara will, I hope, awaken American cinephiles to the tempestuous-yet-analytical gloriousness of Pitfall (1962), unreleased here but surely that year’s greatest directorial debut (which inches out, arguably, Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, also newly Criterionized).
Out of the 14 films I saw in covering the Boston French Film Festival for The Boston Phoenix, only one authentically dazzled me in my shorts, and I say that in full acknowledgment that the film in question – Bruce Cauvin’s Hotel Harabati – belongs to a burgeoning French subgenre of metaphoric-anxiety thrillers (think Lemming, Cache, La Moustache) that to me begins to fulfill the discomfiting potential of Euro-cinema that has gone largely wasted since the death of Luis Bunuel. So I am predisposed towards its upsetting mysteries, and toward Laurent Lucas, modern cinema’s Joseph K. Contemporary French film otherwise on the whole – and that includes Bruno Dumont’s Flandres – I cannot make much claim for. I’ve seen Isidore Isou’s Lettrist underground classic Venom and Eternity (1950), and thought it horrid – if not in fact a savage send-up of art-movement narcissism. Who can say? La Vie en Rose is such an accomplished biopic in its way that I never want to hear Edith Piaf again. (A Gallic restorative may be in order – Renoir’s The Elusive Corporal again, perhaps, recently DVD’d in that giftable Lionsgate box.) Tony Rayns might be right about Kim Ki-duk, vis a vis The Bow and Time. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has as much punch and existential cause as any fifth-film-in-a-series; meaning, I’d rather see Blondie on a Budget. Rewatching The Fallen Idol recently, this most overlooked of the Team Reed-Korda films seems to me to loom over The Third Man, and therefore, most films of its generation. Having no need to see Transformers or Live Free or Die Hard or Evening, I shall instead visit a Pagnolian dockside cafe in my dreams.
Brobdingnagian!
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Great to have some unfettered Atkinson on line!
But why are you so mean to "Blondie on a Budget"?
I'll take Frank Strayer any day over the anono brit hack who made the new Harry Potter.
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Skol! But Dave, Blondie on a Budget was clearly the nadir of the first dozen Blondie films, however it may've attained speed and grace without help of a mainframe. I say this knowing my wife and daughter, having already attended the HP screening with me, plan on seeing the film again twice each this coming week. I'm lost in the desert, I cannot find my way...
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Welcome to the, uh, blogosphere, Michael! It's great to have you.
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Welcome to Blogoslavia, Michael. Thanks for boosting the inexplicably low profile of Stranger than Fiction and reminding readers of the untimely passing of Edward Yang. I know it's not polite to snipe at another movie-party guest, but Dave, Dave, whom I love and whose words I live by, much as I think Harry Potter V is a disgrace to the franchise, its director David Yates is hardly an anono Brit hack. Admittedly he comes from TV, but he directed The Girl in the Cafe and the excellent miniseries The Way We Live Now and has rapport with actors though his eye is the opposite of cinematic.
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Hey Michael...the Village Voice misses you. Great to have you hear, it has been a weekly chore trying to find your articles across the web and this site will be much read.
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Thanks, man. Sorry to hear about the extra labor. As for the paper, I tend to think it's missing itself these days, but I wouldn't be the one to say -- I can't read it, not even for Jim H. The city needs a rival weekly, a hard-core-logo barn-burner for New Yorkers that's not concerned about the literacy capabilities of readers in Texas or Broward County...
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MA---couldn't agree more about the Voice, you were the last writer I'd pick up the miserable rag to read, going all the way back to Sarris' Psycho review. Will ck your blog often. Best wishes from Athens, OH.
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What have you been seeing of Kautner's? His two American films are terrific, worthy of comparison to the films Sirk was making at Universal at the same time. I haven't seen any of his German films, although I know there's an English-subtitled German DVD of "Unter den Brucken."
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I covered a show of the German Kautners at Harvard Film Archives; I saw Romance in a Minor Key (1943), Great Freedom No. 7 (1944), Under the Bridges (1945), and In Those Days (1947), all of them stupefyingly wise and lovely films that would've made an auteur god out of any Hollywood studio staffer. Of course, that he managed this within the Nazi system -- the only German films from that era I've ever seen, beside propaganda -- makes them more remarkable. The DVD you mention is the 1945 film, and though it's the silliest of the four, it's still disarming and memorable. My Boston Phoenix piece is linked on my sidebar.
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Michael: Welcome! Your virtual feet now being wet, I look forward to having a regular stop where your writing can be enjoyed, debated and, of course, linked to.
And I don't know from HARRY POTTER (or the inner recesses of the BLONDIE series, for that matter), but I will say that you could do a whole lot worse than taking a chance on LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. My friend D.K. Holm describes the physical shenanigans in it as being in the tradition of Keatonesque physical comedy, and I think he's on to something. Certainly, if we can draw the line from Keaton to Jackie Chan, then I think it can definitely be extended to the framing, editing and audacity of the stunt work in this movie, which had me laughing harder than just about any traditionally defined comedy I've seen all year.
Again, great to have you as a part of the online film community-- yes, the blogosphere!
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Thanks, Dennis.
As for LFoDH, maybe, except wasn't the entire thrust of Keaton and Chan involved in their physical stuntwork, the gasp-producing realness of what they were photographed doing? From the trailers, LFoDH is 110% digital mayhem. Getting sleepy...
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Yes, that's certainly true, and LFoDH definitely has its share of CGI (my reaction to which is most often the same as yours-- it's the on-screen equivalent of a dose of Sominex). And although no one would ever assume it's really Bruce Willis in peril, it seems that there's more than the usual amount of real physical staging going on here, and when the CGI comes it's usually been set up by a lot of good stuff that is definitely happening in the "real" world. Not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but speaking as someone who tired of this type of stunt-actular blockbuster a long time ago, it's a lot of fun.
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Welcome! Can't wait for the anti-imperialist dudgeon.
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Michael, I'm a long-time admirer of your writing, which I was first turned on to by the Ghosts in the Machine collection. Good luck with the blog; I look forward to keeping up with it.
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This is truly excellent news. Welcome!
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Thanks, Matt!
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Thanks for allowing us a forum to keep track of all your writings. And thanks again for the great essay for the Woman Is the Future of Man DVD.
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The Blondie movies are heaven.
Was that Carrie Rickey posting up there?
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David! Ah, the splendid gray heaven of 40s formula. Yes, that was Carrie.
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