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TIFF 2007: Cronenberg’s knockout punch

Jim Emerson

Armin Mueller-Stahl at the head of the table, head of the family

You are going to hear a lot about this, so I may as well begin with it: There’s a fight scene in David Cronenberg’s Russian mob thriller “Eastern Promises” that is sure to go down as a raw, brutal and pulse-pounding landmark in the history of fight scenes. It takes place in one room, with no props except for a couple knives. People in the audience at the Toronto screening I attended were flinching and gasping as if they were being punched in the face. Which, of course, is the idea. If a fight scene doesn’t make you feel like you’re part of it, so that it quickens your heartbeat and your breathing, then it’s a failure. And Cronenberg’s makes you realize how many movie fights are flops — and how really hard it is to kill or immobilize a human being with your arms, legs, feet and hands.

Literally and figuratively, “Eastern Promises” has balls.

And in this sense, it reminds me of both the excruciatingly protracted struggle between Paul Newman and the Russian agent in “Torn Curtain,” and the knock-down, drag-out fist-fest between Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s “They Live!

Lamppost-spined Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts.

Directed in a bold, graphic style similar to that of his previous film, “A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises” is shockingly gorgeous, for all the ugliness it portrays. The film is set in London, and the colors are dark and heavy: gray skies, slick black streets, brandy, absinthe, venous blood. A hospital midwife (Naomi Watts) finds a patient’s diary that gets her involved with Russian gangsters — in particular, a shrewd and ambitious chauffeur played by “History of Violence” star Viggo Mortensen, looking sharper and more angular and cooly abstract than ever. (Watch the way he props himself against a lamppost so that they become extensions of each other. How does he do that?)

It begins like a Cronenbergian horror movie, and becomes… a Cronenberg gangster movie — an elemental struggle between good and evil, life and death, east and west, blood and money, trust and betrayal, commerce and morality, mind and body. Remember, that’s “elemental,” not “simplistic.” There are… complications.

More when the movie opens.

NOTE: Watts’ proud, abrasive, vodka-swilling Russian uncle is played by the great Polish director, Jerzy Skolimowski (“Deep End,” “The Shout,” “Moonlighting”).

Reports of Skip’s death have been somewhat exaggerated

Jim Emerson

View image: Enzo is still with us.

It was widely reported that Moose, the 15-year-old Jack Russell Terrier who played the title role in “My Dog Skip,” and who played Eddie on the long-running TV sitcom “Frazier,” passed away at the ripe old age of 105 in dog years. (He would have been 16 — or 112 — December 24, according to IMDb.) While we mourn the passing of Moose, we should point out that he played Old Skip in the movie, while his son Enzo played Skip for most of the film. (Actually, there were reportedly six dogs who performed as Skip in various capacities.)

Likewise, Enzo replaced Moose on “Frazier” after eight years on the show, which ran from 1993 to 2004. But while dogs may be good enough actors to play the same role (like, say, Dick York and Dick Sargent), we should remember that they are not interchangeable. They are individuals. I know this. I live with two of them, and Frances and Edith are very distinct personalities.

I used to live in Los Angeles and work in and around the movie industry, where I encountered hundreds of celebrities in situations ranging from the casual (say, at the drugstore) to the professional (on a set, in a meeting, or for an interview). But my favorite movie star sighting ever came at the Overlooked Film Festival in 2004, where a man and his dog exited an elevator in the Illini Student Union Building — and I immediately recognized the dog as Skip. (It was Enzo — a surprise guest at a matinee screening of “My Dog Skip.”) Of course, I took a picture.

Moose is dead. Long live Enzo.

Eyeless in Monument Valley

Jim Emerson

“What an asshole.”

I don’t read Slate much anymore since David Edelstein, a real film critic, departed for New York Magazine, and the once-sentient Christopher Hitchens ceased being capable of writing about anything but his own old opinions, circa 2002 and 2003. (Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Hitchens has become stuck in time — and inside his own head, and nothing beyond what he has previously stated or believed can be processed, mainly because he doesn’t seem to think it possible that anything else, like reality, could possibly matter.) A reader reminds me again of why I’m less inclined to visit Slate these days, sending me (with a warning) an inexcusably stupid essay by Stephen Metcalf, of the site’s aptly named “dilettante” column, about a classic John Ford Western, called The Worst Best Movie: Why on earth did ‘The Searchers’ get canonized?”

Clive James, meet Stephen Metcalf.

A better question might be: “Why on earth did Stephen Metcalf think he was capable of writing anything worth reading about ‘The Searchers’?” Here’s how Metcalf begins:

“The Searchers,” John Ford’s epic 1956 Western, is a film geek’s paradise: It is preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring. Impossible to enjoy, and yet not as obviously medicinal as, say, “The Spirit of the Beehive,” “The Searchers” segregates the initiated from the uninitiated; and so it is widely considered, by the initiated, at least, to be among the four or five best movies of all time. At his maiden screening, a young Cahiers du Cinema critic named Jean-Luc Godard wept, later adding, “How can I hate John Wayne … and yet love him tenderly … in the last reel of ‘The Searchers’?” Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader routinely name “The Searchers” as one of their favorite films…Yes indeed, those qualities Metcalf describes sure do make the movie sound like a “film geek’s paradise,” don’t they? I mean, where is the film geek who does not just crrraaave the spasmodic, the unfunny, the sodden and the boring? Surely, those attributes constitute the very essence of what we — and Godard and Scorsese and Schrader and countless other crix ‘n’ geeks — value in “The Searchers.”

By this point in Metcalf’s embarrassingly self-revealing scalping (three giveaway words that neutralize the stance of anyone pretending to offer critical insight: “impossible to enjoy”), I found myself thinking not so much of John Wayne or John Ford or Jean-Luc Godard, but of Joey Nichols, the boorish friend of Alvy Singer’s father in “Annie Hall,” who thought he was so clever to stick nickels on his forehead and his cufflinks as a gimmick to help people remember his name. And my response to Metcalf suddenly formed itself in the words of young Alvy: “What an asshole.”

And what a dilettante. Is it worth responding to an ad hominem attack on a movie by someone who has no idea what he’s looking at? Probably not. But earlier today I got a (quite good) Opening Shots submission from someone who began by writing: “Originally I wanted to propose an older film to impress the crowd that demands such esotericness from cinephiles…”

Since when are “old movies” — especially all those Hollywood pictures that millions went to see each week — considered “esoteric”? What is the difference between an “old movie” and a “new movie” when they both unspool in the immediate present, at 24 frames per second, the way they always have and always will? A movie is always happening right now as you watch it (a film prof of mine used to call this the “eternal present tense”). There’s nothing “esoteric” (or, as Metcalf would have it, “medicinal”) about it — unless, of course, you’re simply determined to make it so with a blinkered hankering for the new, or a knee-jerk anti-intellectualism (very trendy now) that insists anything valued by smart or talented or passionate people must be beneath one’s dignity to appreciate or enjoy.

More on “The Searchers” (and Metcalf’s mindless potshots) later. But as for Stephen Metcalf’s critical aptitude, here’s another apt phrase: Damn him and the horse (or ass) he rode in on. May he (continue to) wander forever between the winds…

(Thanks to Casey Tourangeau… I think.)

UPDATE (07/07/06): This post is continued here.

The Abode of Chaos: Where we live

Jim Emerson

Thierry Ehrmann: “‘In your resistance,’ I tell them, ‘you are contributing to this work. This work is encapsulating you, absorbing you.'”

It’s a place, it’s a sculpture, it’s an installation, it’s a performance piece, it’s a movie, it’s a house, it’s a home. It’s La Demeure du Chaos, the Abode of Chaos, outside the French town of Lyon. This headline in The Australian caught my eye: “Town outraged over chaos house”:

Crashed aircraft, fire-blackened walls, a swimming pool of blood and portraits of Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden adorn a sprawling “shrine to chaos” which is at the centre of a dispute in a village on the outskirts of Lyon in France. […]

Thierry Ehrmann, 44, the owner and creator, was fined E200,000 ($A336,000) for failing to seek planning permission to turn his 17th-century coaching inn and its grounds in the village of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or into a theatre of war. The appeal judges annulled a lower court order to have the site, developed by 45 European artists, restored to its original state.

Ehrmann’s celebration of the apocalypse, inspired by his experiences in the Middle East and by the events of September 11, 2001, has enraged residents who are offended by its charred walls, twisted metal, burnt-out cars and battlefield debris. A mock oil platform sits on one roof amid camouflage netting. The garden includes a sculpture recreating the remains of the World Trade Centre. […]

Corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other

Jim Emerson

At home, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) has a business line and a personal line. You should know that because the FBI does, and so do his bosses at Archer Daniels Midland (“Supermarket To The World”™). Mark is pretty good at compartmentalizing his life, but the lines are about to get crossed a little bit.

Mark lives with his wife and kids in Decatur, IL, but he’s been all over the world with ADM and he’s proud of what they do, especially with corn. They make all kinds of stuff out of plain old corn, from high fructose corn syrup to lysine to ethanol — all of which, you might say, are fuel additives, designed to juice up production of… whatever.

Celebrating ADM’s miraculous line of alchemical products, Mark excitedly notes: “Corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other!” Vivid image, that. Kind of suggests Mark’s chronic logorrhoea, the stream of partially digested thoughts that swirls around inside his head and occasionally gushes from his mouth. When he gets going his internal monologue (in voiceover) actually talks right over his lips and his tongue. He doesn’t interrupt himself; his mouth and his brain just keep spilling over each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if Damon’s Mark Whitacre had a cousin named Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo.

“If you see only one version of Forrest Gump this year…”

Jim Emerson

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump – watch more funny videos

(tip: Daily Dish)

Be the first on your block to bust the latest blockbuster

Jim Emerson

Hey, remember the year they released “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”? Where were you when the movie of “Sex and the City” came out? Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a 63-page spread about the former HBO show the week before the feature film came out? Oh, and what about the big “Chronicles of Narnia” sequel? It was such a hot property they made everybody go through security — with metal detectors and everything. What if someone had made a shaky-cam bootleg of it 36 hours before it opened to the masses? Whoa!

Then, just a couple weeks ago, people lined up for days to catch the first midnight showings of “The Dark Knight.” Oh, maybe that was last week. Once upon a time these things seemed like kind of a big deal, and now they all seem so three months ago.

Charles Has a Licking Problem

Jim Emerson

Frances and Edith have idiosyncratic licking problems, too. (Frances obsessively licks a hot spot on her foot and Edith obsessively licks Frances’s face.) DISCLAIMER FROM DREWTOOTHPASTE (author of video): “The licking is not a serious medical problem. Charles is under regular veterinary care, and was not harmed during the making of the video. He is just a weird dog.” In other words, Charles does not do this all the time. Evidently he is stimulated by the sight of something (tasty treats?) outside the frame.

World’s most Kafkaesque airportno longer located in Dallas-Fort Worth

Jim Emerson

It has taken off, making an unscheduled arrival in Prague as its final destination.

All world flights continue to make unnecessary layovers in Dallas-Fort Worth anyway. No departures reported.

Chloe loves Los Angeles

Jim Emerson

Los Angeles. It’s not just a very spread-out geographical area in lower California. It’s not merely an attitude or an array of styles. It is a language with words and names for things.

(tip: Dan Ireland)

Dreamgirls and Soul Man

Jim Emerson

Eddie Murphy and back-up singers in a soul revue from “Dreamgirls.”

Atlantic, Stax/Volt, Motown… Those are three (four?) of my favorite record labels — and two of ’em are in the news now. Of course, Bill Condon’s film of the 1981 musical “Dreamgirls” is loosely based on a slice of Motown history involving Diana Ross and the Supremes. (The slick diva lead singer is named Deena. Subtle.) “Dreamgirls” is playing roadshow engagements in LA, NY and SF — and opens around the rest of the country on Christmas.

But on a far more significantly note: Last week, music mogul Ahmet Ertegun, founder of the great soul/jazz/pop/rock label Atlantic, died at age 83. Ertegun, along with several others whose names on LP jackets I came to associate with great music (his brother Neshui, Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin…), made Atlantic into one of the greatest recording imprimaturs in American history. (In no small part thanks to its partnership with Memphis-based Stax and Volt.)

Today, the Atlantic/Stax/Volt legacy is in the hands of the brilliant archival label, Rhino, which recently released a terrific box set: “What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967-77)” from the vaults of Atlantic, Atco and Warner Bros. Records (which includes stuff from Curtom, Cotillion, Reprise… — labels are as fascinating to me as movie studios, and some have equally distinctive house styles). An earlier indispensable Rhino collection — “Beg, Scream & Shout! The Big Ol’ Box of ’60s Soul” — has a lot of the Stax/Volt material, and comes in a replica carrying case for 7″ 45 rpm singles. And I’m thrilled and relieved to see that the 203-track, 8-disc “Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974” (which I originally had on LP, then repurchased on CD in the 1980s) is still in print — along with many of the original albums.

The best appreciation of Ertegun and Atlantic that I’ve read is from That Little Round-Headed Boy, who even includes a convenient 45 adapter for use on 33 1/3 rpm long-playing turntables! (Bur remember: For best results observe the R.I.A.A. high frequency roll-off characteristic with a 500 cycle crossover.) Not only that, TLRHB adds his own list of favorite Atlantic sides. (And, yes, I’ve always had a soft spot for Clarence Carter’s “Patches,” too… and I fervently believe that Aretha Frankin’s “Until You Come Back to Me” is to Atlantic what the Temptations’ “My Girl” and Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” are to Motown/Tamla — single-slices of heaven on Earth.)

This is a mono posting and may be played on stereo equipment.

No God for Anton Chigurh?

Jim Emerson

Is this man a nonbeliever?

Here’s an angle I hadn’t thought of. This e-mail actually came to Scanners, but with the writer’s permission I also published it at RogerEbert.com. First the letter, then my response:

From Brad Smissen, Murrieta, CA:

Re: “No Country for Old Men”: I’m a bit surprised that nobody has really touched on Chigurh’s theology or lack thereof. In the book McCarthy makes clear that Chigurh is a non-believer. This is huge. I believe it’s McCarthy’s intention to say that Chigurh’s atheism carved him into a Darwinian creature with a powerful survivalist function. That’s the thing, Chigurh isn’t meant as some reaper figure at all. He’s an atheist/survivalist, plain and simple. It’s not an accident that Chigurh is able to give himself first rate medical care after his leg gets shot up. Nor is McCarthy alluding to some military/medical background. Chigurh has equipped himself to live, he means to live above everything else.

“No Country for Old Men” towers over 2007

Jim Emerson

View image A shadow in the light from a doorway.

It wasn’t even close. In the MSN Movies 2007 Top 10 Poll, Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men” scored 106 points out of a possible 120 — the only film to rank on all ten of the contributing critics’ best-of-the-year lists. It was #1 or #2 on nine of the ten, and #4 on the other one.

Some of you may have gotten the impression that I think rather highly of “No Country for Old Men,” so I was pleased to be asked by editor Dave McCoy to write a little blurb about it summarizing my appreciation. It goes like this:

Shot by shot, cut by cut, sequence by sequence, no movie this year (or any other year) was more grippingly, cinematically exhilarating than “No Country for Old Men.” Joel and Ethan Coen’s first literary adaptation (from Cormac McCarthy’s novel), crackles with an intensity that sharpens and stimulates your senses and reminds you of how little most other films do with the essential expressive properties of the medium: light, color, sound, movement, language. Movies are as much about the orchestration as the composition, and the Coens have orchestrated and composed a masterpiece — one that embodies what most movies only describe.

A Western, a crime picture, a chase thriller, a ghost story (though not in the supernatural sense), “No Country” is the story of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a man chasing a dream ($2 million in drug money he’s found in a satchel); Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a messenger of death who’s tracking down Moss for the money; and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who’s trailing both of them. Tension builds as the film progresses, even as the violence recedes. This isn’t a movie about murder; it’s about the awareness of inevitable death that stalks us all.

Check out our individual lists here. My Scanners list (with blurbs on all my favorites) will be somewhat different…

Product placement: The lives of ‘The Sopranos’

Jim Emerson

An extended family moment: Blanca, Hector, AJ.

Never send a business reporter to do a critic’s job.

I’m sometimes amused by the naïveté of my critical and academic colleagues when it comes to the business realities of how movies are made, and why they turn out the way they do. They tend to view movies as a purely creative medium, and dismiss the influences of marketing and commerce on the “end product.” But, on the other hand, whenever I read reports about “the biz,” I’m equally amazed at how they approach movies as if they were factory-tooled widgets, nothing more than the products of corporate and marketing deals and decisions. The truth is, of course, that most movies are creative compromises, the results of a vast and complex set of inter-related artistic, commercial and economic judgments.

You’d never know that from Jon Fine’s series of posts at his Business Week Fine On Media blog about so-called “product placement” in this season’s episodes of “The Sopranos.” Fine thinks the proliferating brand-name mentions are “suck-uppy” and rates them on a “one-to-ten scale of egregiousness” — although, he reports, “‘The Sopranos,’ a show I like very much, does not do product placement in the fee-for-sense. Nor does HBO, although at times they’ve played footsie with the idea.”

Fine doesn’t acknowledge that there may be a number of creative reasons why real products and brand names are used on the show — aside from the usual deals that allow nearly all movies and TV shows to keep their budgets down by gaining access to free consumer goods, from cars to soft drinks, that are used on screen. “The Sopranos” happens to be about people for whom bling means just about everything, despite all their talk about maintaining old-fashioned “family values” (you know, like omerta). It’s a show about people in a strictly hierarchical social structure (organized crime, the mob, La Cosa Nostra)who pursue crass, vulgar, conspicuous consumption as a signal to others that they’re advancing their station in life. Their lives are all about “product placement.”

The White Explication

Jim Emerson

I know, we shouldn’t give him any more attention, but the elusiveness of his language (it’s not quite English, but what is it?) is fascinating. Try to pin down meaning, or responsibility, and they just slip away…

Armond White, review of “Mr. Jealousy,” June 3, 1998:

I won’t comment on [Noah] Baumbach’s deliberate, onscreen references to his former film-reviewer mother except to note how her colleagues now shamelessly bestow reviews as belated nursery presents. To others, “Mr. Jealousy” might suggest retroactive abortion.

Armond White, referring to the comment above in a non-review of “Greenberg,” March 17, 2010:

The last line is not Oscar Wilde but it’s also not a death warrant; its impact is in your inference. It clearly points out the clubhouse aspect of Baumbach’s raves, then contrasts natal congratulations with their demurral. No more than that. The abortion quip is easily understood unless your goal is to besmirch another critic and wage a personal attack.