Scanners

Are You An Extra In Your Own Life?

Jim Emerson

That’s Dennis, “the second guy from the right, in the blue checked bathrobe.”

Do not file this post in the self-help section. (For one thing, there isn’t one.) A while ago, I published a frame-grab from David Mamet’s “House of Games,” in which I can be glimpsed as an extra. That got me to thinking about other people I know who have appeared (however briefly or peripherally) as extras, and how (or if) such experiences have affected their lives and/or their relationships to the movies.

Portrait of Dad (Dennis Cozzalio), by daughter (2007). Now you recognize him.

So, I asked Dennis Cozzalio, of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, to send me a grab of his own appearance in 1978’s “Animal House,” aka “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” (See, we were both in movies with “House” in the title.) I’m publishing it here, along with an image of Dennis today — well, OK, it’s a recent drawing of him by his daughter that I happen to think is fantastic (so much so that I printed it out and stuck it on my own fridge, even thought I’ve never actually met Dennis or his daughter. Is that weird?).

Now, if there’s a fleeting, Bogdanovichian “piece of time” in which you figure, please do send the following to me (at the “e-mail jim” link above):

1) A frame grab, identifying yourself in the picture.

2) A (brief) description of the scene (like, one sentence).

3) A (brief) anecdote, if you have one, about your experience during the shooting of the scene.

4) A recent photo of you, so we can all witness the ravages of time — something the movies are made to document.

Or, if you want to post something on your own blog, please send me a link. Think of this as a blog-a-thon with no deadline.

An anecdote from Dennis:

I met my best friend (known in the [SLIFR] comments columns here as Blaaagh) on the Eugene, Oregon set of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” in the autumn of 1977. I had actually seen him and another actor several months earlier performing a scene from “Of Mice and Men” at a state Thespian conference. I guess the performance really impressed me because several months later, in the dingy, stale-beer-smelling basement of the Sigma Nu house on 13th Avenue that served as the interior of the Delta house, I spied Blaaagh sitting and waiting, as we extras tended to do, to be called for the next shot and remembered his shining moment as George. In a very atypically brazen moment for this shy boy, I introduced myself, told him I remembered his performance, and I think this shocked him just enough to inspire him to have a conversation with me. We kept bumping into each other that week (pretty hard not to on that cramped set), and by the weekend we were off to see our first movies together– “Star Wars,” followed by a midnight double feature of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Jabberwocky.” (See what that journal is good for?) We survived “Jabberwocky” and remain as bestest as best friends could be to this day.

Clowns and Nazis, Take 4

Jim Emerson

Der Funnyman und der Führer.

It’s the hottest thing in contemporary cinema — after superhero movies and pirate movies, that is! I refer, of course, to movies about clowns in Nazi concentration camps! Who doesn’t adore that genre? Let’s see, there’s Jerry Lewis’s infamous, unreleased “The Day the Clown Cried” (wince), Robin Williams in “Jakob the Liar” (cringe), and Robert Benigni’s cuddly and zany, Oscar-winning “Life is Beautiful” (projectile vomit). Holocaust hilarity ensues! Now The Guardian reports, in an item with a fantastic headline (“Schrader to direct death camp clown tale” — sounds like a great name for a Northwest band) that Paul Schrader will direct Jeff Goldblum in an adaptation of Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk’s novel “Adam Resurrected,” about a clown who entertains Jews on their way to the gas chambers. Actually, Schrader (writer of “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” director of “American Gigolo,” “Mishima,” and “Light Sleeper,” among many others) may have exactly the right sensibility for this project because he has virtually no sense of humor. In this case, that would likely be an asset.

A notorious 1989 Spy magazine article about Lewis’s legally locked-up death-camp slapstick project quoted Harry Shearer, one of the few who has actually seen a cut of “The Day the Clown Cried”:

With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. “Oh My God!”—that’s all you can say.The original writers, according to a Wikipedia entry, will never allow the film to be released “in part due to changes in the script made by Lewis which made the clown more sympathetic and Emmett Kelly-like.” (You can read the script yourself here.) Well, it could have been worse. Lewis could have made the character more Robin Williams-like or Roberto Benigni-like….

What do you think about Clowns and Nazis? Has anybody made it work? If so, how? Is it a good idea to play the Holocaust for sentimental humor, as opposed to, say, satirical humor — as in Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not To Be” — made while the war was still raging, and the outcome uncertain, in 1942? (Now that was a gutsy movie.

Comments & updates

Jim Emerson

In case you hadn’t noticed: Comments are working, and some good discussions have been started — annotations to particular Opening Shots and (especially stimulating) various reactions to my diatribes against the Slate writer who bashed “The Searchers” for his own anti-intellectual, anti-“film geek” reasons that have little or nothing to do with the movie. (And will somebody please respond to Kevin’s questions about the character of Debbie?) I’ve set it up so that the newest comments are at the top bottom — like the blog itself (or an e-mail thread). Let me know how that works for you.

I’ve got LOTS of Opening Shots contributions backed up, but not to worry: I plan to work through them for as long as it takes. Some people have written asking if it’s too late to submit something. Hell, no! It will never be too late. Even if everybody else stops sending them in, I’m going to continue indefinitely. This is an inexhaustible subject; I can’t imagine I’ll ever run out of opening shots to think about, write about, and savor.

Poll: Andrew Sarris and Your Greatest Films of All Time

Jim Emerson

In his column about the revival of Max Ophuls’ “The Earrings of Madame de…,” the dean of American film critics, Andrew Sarris, proclaims Ophüls’ masterwork the greatest film of all time — edging out, as the headline puts it, “Welles, Renoir, Ford, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Buñuel, Mizoguchi.” [Please note: Dave Kehr points out that there is no umlaut in “Ophuls” — although that’s how it was (mis-)spelled in Sarris’s NY Observer piece.]

Writes Sarris:

If you’ve never seen this masterpiece, now is your chance—and even if you have, a second or third viewing is strongly recommended. If you don’t choose to take my word for the film’s sublimity, then heed the sagacious words of Dave Kehr instead: “Should the day ever come when movies are granted the same respect as the other arts, ‘The Earrings of Madame de …’ will instantly be recognized as one of the most beautiful things ever created by human hands.”

“Perfection,” proclaimed the late Pauline Kael, in one of her more perceptive pronouncements. And David Thomson delivers an eloquent encomium to Ophüls with a remarkably expansive entry in his much-honored “The New Biographical History of Film.”

Curiously, I’ve had a much harder time convincing my students in film class of the “greatness” of Ophüls and “Madame de…”. It may partly be a generation gap, and partly the youthful suspicion of romanticism in some of its less cynical guises. Then again, even among my contemporaries, I have become notorious over the years for my ecstatic—to the point of orgasmic—addiction to camera movement as an expression of the tyranny of time in the drama of human life. This predilection on my part may be something I picked up from the unified-visual-field theories of the late André Bazin.On a personal note: My favorite Ophuls (among the greatest films of all time in my book) is “Letter From an Unknown Woman” (though “Madame de…” is indeed surely one of the most exquisite things that has ever appeared on the planet; I treasure my laserdisc “print” and hope it will be on Region 1 DVD soon — along with all the other great Ophuls films that are already available in Region 2). I’d agree with Sarris on the Renoir (“Rules of the Game”), Ford (“The Searchers”), Hitchcock (“Vertigo”), Murnau (“Sunrise”) and, depending on what day of the week it is, the Welles (“The Magnificent Ambersons”). (On my 2002 Sight & Sound international critics’ poll ballot I chose both “Kane” and “Ambersons” in my top 10.) I wouldn’t have a Chaplin on my list, but “Modern Times” is tops in my book.

Though it’s only a matter of degree, my favorite Buñuel is probably “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” or “That Obscure Object of Desire” or “The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz” or “Nazarin” or “Simon of the Desert” or “The Exterminating Angel” or… — OK, I have way too many favorite Buñuels. And my favorite Mizoguchi would not be “Ugetsu,” which I’d put below “Sansho Dayu” and “The Life of Oharu.” I love Keaton’s “Our Hospitality,” “Sherlock, Jr.,” and “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” even more than “The General” — though I could probably make a case for ten Keatons as the greatest films of all time.

But if you had to choose from Sarris’s top ten, which would you consider The Greatest Film of All Time?

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Rob Lowe, Snow White, “Proud Mary” & the Oscars

Jim Emerson

Lowe does Snow — live!

Oh, and so much more. Here’s the ideal warm-up for Sunday’s Academy Awards festivities: the infamous Allan Carr-produced 1989 Oscar opening number that also features Army Archerd, Merv Griffin, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Vincent Price and Coral Browne, Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin, Dorothy Lamour, Alice Faye, Lily Tomlin, and more stars than there are east of Hobart! (Just look at the celebs in the audience trying to conceal their mortification as Snow White touches and bleats to them.) I was just pining for this the other day, and once again YouTube has delivered! This, truly, is the vision of the man behind “Grease,” “Grease 2,” “Can’t Stop the Music” and “Where the Boys are ’84” — all of which he made before the Academy hired him to produce the Oscarcast. No matter what happens Sunday, you can bet it won’t top this, although somehow this mega-production-number almost seems quaint and naive by today’s standards. Almost.

I had forgotten the new “Proud Mary” lyrics they wrote for Rob to sing to Snow (whose voice is more Billie Burke than Adriana Caselotti, if you ask me):

Now you made it big in the movies

Came to Hollywood, learned to play the game

You became a star

Miss Animated Mama

Earned yourself a place in the Walk of Fame

Klieg lights keep on burnin’

Cameras keep on turnin’

Rollin’, rollin’

Keep the cameras rollin’!

They just don’t write ’em like that anymore…

What I wouldn’t give for Ellen Degeneres to begin the show as Snow White and bring on Rob Lowe for a reprise…

(Thanks to Chris for passing this along.)

Lunch With David

Jim Emerson

Hot Blogger and Hot Button colunist David Poland has posted his third, breezy “Lunch With David” vlog over at iKlipz and I think it’s the funniest one yet. This week’s topic: Secrets in Hollywood — who tells ’em and whether they really want anybody to keep ’em. The premise is simple, kind of like an UnCabaret routine (or Johnny LaRue’s Street Beef): one person, one camera, one table. David sits down and tells you whatever’s on his mind about goings on in The Biz, at the box office or behind the scenes. He’s a funny guy (and knows just how to play to the camera for comic effect). David describes the newly launched iKlipz as a kind of MySpace for movie people — in particular, folks who want to distribute their films and videos on the web. So, I went ahead and joined up. (It’s free.) Wanna be my friend? 😉

Z is for zed

Jim Emerson

View image 1. The title of the film and the name of the writer and director. Michael Nyman’s chugging strings and pounding piano build tension and suspense on the soundtrack.

View image 2. Opening shot: The mystery begins. Two children pull a dalmatian (black-and-white spotted dog) toward the ZOO. A guard mans his station, to keep people out or to keep animals in or to direct traffic or for some other reason or reasons. The dog strongly resists being pulled toward the ZOO.

Consider this a kind of expanded “Opening Shots” entry — from the titles sequence of Peter Greenaway’s “A Zed and Two Noughts” (1985), one of the director’s taxonomy films — in a category with “The Falls” (92 mini-bios of people whose names begin with F-A-L-L), “The Draughtsman’s Contract” (twelve architectural drawings), “The Belly of an Architect” (nine months), “Drowning by Numbers” (1-100) — about the ordering and classification of things, including images.

View image 3. A tiger, a striped cat, in a cage with bars, stripes. The feline paces back and forth. On the floor is the head of another black-and-white animal, a zebra, that perhaps provides food for the tiger.

View image 4. Closer view of the above.

There’s a story: Twin brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce (played by identical twins Brian and Eric Deacon) are shattered when both their wives are killed in a collision with a pregnant swan outside the London Zoo. They become obsessed with death and decay, making time-lapse photographic studies of decomposition, beginning with an apple and continuing through the alphabet to a zebra… and then beyond. They both become sexually involved with Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol), the only survivor of the accident, who has lost one leg because of it. The other is later removed for the sake of symmetry.

View image 5. A hand with a counter. Someone appears to be sitting outside the tiger’s cage, counting the number of times it paces from one side of the cell to the other.

View image 6. Wider view of the man with the counter. He is taking notes. There are black-and-white circles of light and shadow within the squares of the cell and the bars.

There also a character named Venus de Milo (Frances Barber, with two arms) and a mysterious, black-clad character called Van Hoyten (Joss Ackland). The film is narrated by the great voice of BBC nature documentaries, David Attenborough.

View image 7. Repetition/continuation of shot #4. Followed by repetition/continuation of #5, close-up of hand with counter, clicking to a symmetrical 676.

View image 8. Repetition/continuation of shot #6. The sounds of a crash and a scream are heard. The man, hearing the sounds, looks up. Glances at the camera?

That’s the skeletal outline. “ZOO” is about ways of processing grief and facing the reality of death, and about photography as a means of recording and preserving the processes of change and decay. It’s also extremely funny (emphasis on “extreme,” in every way), full of visual and verbal puns and puzzles. And it’s a study in mortification (again, in all senses of that word). It is also ravishingly beautiful, in a striking and painterly fashion (photographed by Greenaway’s frequent collaborator, Sacha Vierney, 1919 – 2001). Greenaway’s most recent film, “Nightwatching” (which I unfortunately missed in Toronto), is a deconstruction of Rembrandt’s famous painting, “The Night Watch,” and the murder mystery behind it.

View image 9. The accident. Stripes. Tiger. Woman’s head. White Mercury. Pair of wings. Pair of headlight circles. “Z” for ZOO in background. License plate: 26 (letters in alphabet), B/W (black and white)… Patters upon patterns upon patterns…

At right: The opening of “A Zed & Two Noughts,” by the numbers Some shots are separated by blackouts with film credits on them. A shot or two is left out of the sequence, for the sake of asymmetry…

LAFCA: There Will Be… more 2007 critics awards

Jim Emerson

Dillon Freasier (great!) and Daniel Day Lewis (… BIG!) in “There Will Be Blood.”

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (my former homies) have announced their collective choices for best achievements of 2007 and… well, for now, I’ll just say that I doubt most of them would even be on my short list of runners-up for this year. (I haven’t seen “Sweeney Todd” or “Diving Bell and the Butterfly” yet, though.) I’m glad that some honorees are getting recognition: Milestone Films, Sarah Polley, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (from “Once”: music as dialog/acting), Jack Fisk (to whom I will always be grateful for, among other things, the prom in “Carrie,” the house in “Days of Heaven,” and pulling the lever in “Eraserhead” — yes, that was him), “Persepolis” and “Ratatouille” (tied for best animated feature), Vlad Ivanov (for negotiating the trickiest of roles) and a few others. But I know how misleading these group-ballot things can be. LAFCA’s list does leave the impression that they felt “Blood” (and, perhaps, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) tower the rest of the year’s releases. I wonder if that’s really the overwhelming majority opinion, or if it’s another case of second- or third-choice consensus carrying the day. Too many of these seem like Academy-style picks to me (Most Noticeable Acting, Most Obvious/Intrusive Score, etc.). More about that later on in the month…

UPDATE (12/10/07): LAFCA member Robert Koelher writes to Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere:

“I’ve cited to both Anne Thompson and David Poland the various fictions they’ve written about re. LAFCA’s awards, namely that our pick for ‘TWBB’ had to do with going against National Board of Review (Anne) or the Academy (David). And now you say we were generally flying the contrarian flag. […]

“By a wide margin, LAFCA felt… that ‘There Will Be Blood’ was the best American film of the year. That’s all. No chess work, no calculations, no triangulation — nothing but a matter of taste based on seeing more movies over the year than anybody else.

“And Jeff, the group judgement was based — with perhaps no exceptions, since there was simply no time for most or all of us to view it more than once — on a single viewing of ‘TWBB.’ It’s a great movie on the first viewing.”

[NOTE: In my post I did not surmise that LAFCA was intentionally striking any groupthink contrarian pose. I know from experience that it doesn’t really work that way — and, besides, LAFCA is the first crix group to vote, so what’s to react against? But I wondered about the margin of victory, a legitimate question regarding the results of any balloting or committee decision-making procedure — including the Oscars. Koehler’s letter helps clarify that. I’m glad to know I disagree with some genuine majority sentiments rather than some statistical flukes. I disagreed with some choices when I was a member of the group, too — and I don’t know anyone who didn’t, from time to time. It’s a group of critics, you know….]

The LAFCA 2007 awards:

PICTURE: “There Will Be Blood”

RUNNER-UP: “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood”

RUNNER-UP: Julian Schnabel, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis, “There Will Be Blood”

RUNNER-UP: Frank Langella, “Starting Out in the Evening”

ACTRESS: Marion Cotillard, “La Vie en rose”

RUNNER-UP: Anamaria Marinca, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Vlad Ivanov, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”

RUNNER-UP: Hal Holbrook, “Into the Wild”

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Ryan, “Gone Baby Gone” and “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”

RUNNER-UP: Cate Blanchett, “I’m Not There”

Favorite movies of 2009 movie: The commentary track

Jim Emerson

The first time I made a year-end list for Scanners, I did it by suggesting double-bills of 2006 films with older films (much like what contributors to The Auteurs did this year). In 2007, I made my first year-end movie, inspired by “L’Eclisse,” as a tribute to the late Michelangelo Antonioni and a commentary on the WGA strike that was happening at the time. Last year, the concept was based on a shot of Hannah Schygulla, Goddess of Cinema, waking up, looking into the camera (in Fatih Akin’s “The Edge of Heaven”) and dreaming fragments of the films on my list.

This year, I’m not quite sure how it came together (see opening title), but I took my cue from my favorite movie of the year, the Coens’ “A Serious Man.” I knew I didn’t want to adhere to any rigid countdown hierarchy this time, but to let the movies converse with themselves through images. I chose the word “conversation” knowing there would be no dialog except at the very beginning and the very end, with the Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” (recurring element in “A Serious Man”) in between. That gave me approximately 2 minutes and 58 seconds for the montage….

I miss Robert Altman so much it hurts

Jim Emerson

I’ve been reading Mitchell Zuckoff’s “Robert Altman: The Oral Biography” before going to sleep each night, and it’s reminding me of how much he influenced my life — from the life-changing epiphany of “Nashville” in 1975 to the first time I met him in 1977 to the countless hours I’ve spent living with (and in) his films, writing about them, talking about them with people who knew him and knew his movies…

Reading this, from Julian Fellowes (Oscar-winning screenwriter for “Gosford Park”), made me feel the loss acutely once again — and kept me awake, wandering down memory-trails, for hours:

The standard thing in Hollywood is to direct the camera with a movement on the scene. The dog goes down the walk and the camera follows the dog, and it leads to the body. With Bob, the dog goes one way and the camera goes the other. He creates this illusion in the mind of the spectator that they are directing the camera. It becomes an autonomous being that is moving around the room. Because you are the viewer, you take responsibility for the image. You are given the impression that you are exploring this film.

“You take responsibility for the image.” Was there ever a director who offered his audience so much freedom, trust, responsibility (and everything that word implies)?

Of course, Altman’s camera did sometimes “follow the dog,” but more often than not both the dog and the frame would continue moving, allowing new elements to enter and exit so that you were fully aware of the world that extended beyond the edges of the frame. The frame wasn’t just a proscenium, but a permeable membrane through which life continually ebbed and flowed…

The lost comedy stylings of Palin & McCain

Jim Emerson

A comedy thought experiment: You’ve gotta admit, they make it look so easy. Too easy. But they were doing television sketch comedy before SNL and Mad TV and Fox News rediscovered them. Now, as they’re being further exposed to audiences of all persuasions, more and more people are saying: “They were so funny, I may previously have forgotten to laugh!” No longer! We’re in comedy mode!

UPDATE: She’s so quick, I can’t even keep up with her anymore. Now she’s given us new material on her preferred news sources and the Supreme Court! She’s got a million of ’em — and she’ll be here all month! Probably.

Compare and contrast with another famous TV comedy sketch after the jump….

Opening Shots: ‘Femme Fatale’

Jim Emerson

From Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule:

Brian De Palma’s exceedingly stimulating and sensational consideration of femme fatale iconography and the possibility of redemption within it begins with one of the director’s customarily brilliant, multilayered opening shots.

Under the black of the producers credits, familiar voices are heard. It’s Fred MacMurray. Fade up on a shot of an extreme close-up of a TV. It’s MacMurray, 525 broadcast lines blown up to big-screen size, in “Double Indemnity”. But a close examination of the image reveals a splash of color — something else is visible here, contrasting with the black-and-white images of Billy Wilder’s film. It’s a reflected image of a half-naked woman stretched out perpendicular across the TV screen. She is watching “Double Indemnity”, and we see her watching the movie in her reflection off the glass TV screen. “Double Indemnity” continues to play out, crosscutting between MacMurray and the original femme fatale, Barbara Stanwyck (as Phyllis Dietrichson).

The image of the young woman becomes clear, yet remains slightly ghostly, as the image in Wilder’s film darkens. MacMurray moves to close a window, when a shot rings out. Stanwyck has betrayed him with a bullet, and the title credit “Femme Fatale” pops on screen at the same time, as the ethereal image of the woman, reclining on her side, dispassionately watching the movie, lingers. (The title credit “A Film by Brian De Palma��? was earlier synchronized with Stanwyck’s first appearance on the TV.) Now De Palma’s camera begins to pull back. We see the cabinet of the TV, and we can now also observe that there are French subtitles superimposed on Wilder’s film. The image of the woman reflected in the TV seems even clearer now, as we continue to pull back, seeing her much more clearly in the flesh, gray tendrils rising from the cigarette she’s smoking while watching the TV. At this point there is double layering of the woman’s image, the reflection and the person being reflected, over the image of Stanwyck, who has taken a dominant position over her wounded lover as she confesses her machinations against him.

Hollywood: Just shut it down

Jim Emerson

View image “My advice to Hollywood is to shut down….”

MSN Movies received this despairing e-mail regarding my “Open Letter to Hollywood” piece. I’m not sure what to say, but I thought I’d share it as the cri de coeur of one disillusioned man, and a reminder of the chasm that has always existed between art and commerce in Tinseltown — but a canyon that is occasionally bridged:

I was recently at a bar north of Boston, and discovered that the bartender was attending Emerson College, studying film production. He was interested in pursuing a career as a DP and eventually a director, and I asked him what kind of films he viewed in his program, mentioning such names as Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Kubrick, the old great studio system directors such as Hawks, Huston, Cukor, etc. He said that he almost never watched such films, at least not as part of a class, and had only marginal curiosity about their work. He was far more interested in the technical [side] of film and the marketing aspects of the industry. He stated he understood the reputation of all of those people (although he had never heard of George Cukor), but his professors didn’t stress much film history, and he didn’t believe that this old work had much bearing on the reality of the industry today.

I look upon the mainstream films made in the current atmosphere and wonder how many have even a remote chance of standing the test of time. I’ve sat through dozens of viewings of films like “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Quiet Man,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “Network,” and none of these films have lost their freshness. “Titanic,” for a while the biggest movie ever, is now ten years old. Does anyone have any interest in it at all anymore, a decade down the line? “Casablanca” is 65 years old. How many Hollywood films made in the last ten years will still generate interest in the years 2062 to 2072?

The film industry as it exists today is no different than any other major corporate enterprise. Corporate enterprises are by nature conservative; their goals are to limit risk exposure and do whatever is the easiest thing within a given business structure. They want to sell you things they know you’ll buy because you’ve bought them already, so the conglomerates that own the studios will keep churning out sequels, franchises, and copycat product until you stop buying, and then they’ll go on to the next thing and bleed that to death.

All trails lead to ‘The Searchers’

Jim Emerson

Ethan Edwards, John Wayne and the ghost of Harry Carey.

I had a favorite lit professor in college, Larry Frank, who said that all of literature could be seen through the looking glass of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” He made a persuasive case, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen and Emily Bronte. In a beautiful piece about John Ford’s “The Searchers” in the Sunday New York Times, A.O. Scott makes similar connections to Ford’s masterpiece, and particularly the opening and closing shots through the doorway looking out into Monument Valley (where John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is definitely one of the monuments, solid as a weather-chiseled rock formation but destined to wander forever between the winds — perhaps because he’s too large, too wild, and too peripatetic to be contained within the walls of civilization and family):

Ernest Hemingway once said that all of American literature could be traced back to one book, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” and something similar might be said of American cinema and “The Searchers.” It has become one of those movies that you see, in part, through the movies that came after it and that show traces of its influence. “Apocalypse Now,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” “Kill Bill,” “Brokeback Mountain”: those were the titles that flickered in my consciousness in the final seconds of a recent screening in Cannes of Ford’s masterwork, all because, at crucial moments, they seem to pay homage to that single, signature shot.Scott is a “word guy” — that is, he came to reviewing films from reviewing books. But he gets movies, unlike the abominable Clive James (proponent of the “movies are just the story” theory in last week’s NYT Review of Books).

Visit the Official Web Kazakhstan (and America)

Jim Emerson

View image

Jagshemash! If you are confused about the difference between the fictional Kazakhstan, homeland of Borat Sagdiyev, as portrayed in “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” and the former Soviet Socialist Republic in Central Asia, why not visit the Official Web Site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan? Here you will find a FAQ (Truth About Kazakhstan) and other helpful resources, from which you will learn that potassium is not even listed among Kazakhstan’s major exports:

Kazakhstan possesses 30 per cent of the world’s proven resources of chromium, 25 per cent of manganese, 19 per cent of lead, 13 per cent of zinc, 10 per cent of copper and 10 per cent of iron. Kazakhstan also possesses about 20 per cent of the world’s uranium resources, with plans to become among the world’s top producers, and contains Central Asia’s largest recoverable coal reserves.Also, if you like America but are confused by the portrayal of the fictional one in “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” you can visit the Official America Web Site and learn about the land of Premier George Walter Bush, where you will discover that “Mainstream Media Reports Inaccurate.” Also, there is this from Imperial Leader Bush: “We have a plan for victory in Iraq…. And I know the people of Montana can count on Conrad Burns to make sure our troops have all that is necessary to do the jobs I’ve asked them to do.” This is the difference between the fiction America and the real one, if you can’t tell. Conrad Burns from Big Sky Country will finally make sure our troops get what they need to do the job Bush has asked told them to do in Iraq! (And wasn’t he the dad on “Diff’rent Strokes,” too? Amazing fellow!)

Short film blog-a-thon

Jim Emerson

All week I’ve been meaning to link (and contribute) to the ‘Short Film Week’ Blog-a-thon co-hosted by Only the Cinema and Culture Snob (December 2 – 8). But I’m still recovering from the Pacific Northwest storm and flooding (long story) earlier in the week. There are many things I’d like to write about, but I probably won’t get to them until after the blog-a-thon is technically over. (For now, maybe I can recycle my Close-Up Blog-a-thon short movie [above] and my piece on the opening credits sequence for ‘Dexter’, which is a perfect little short on its own — not unlike Martin Scorsese’s “The Big Shave,” in certain provocative respects.)

View image Martin Scorsese’s “The Big Shave” (1967).

But the archive of articles will remain — and there’s some great stuff, including Matt Zoller Seitz on Chuck Jones’ classic Looney Tune, “What’s Opera, Doc?”; Joe Bowman at Fin de cinema on 20 breakthrough music videos (hey, they can be incredibly expressive and accomplished works); Jeffrey Hill at Liverputty on the Disney science film “Our Friend the Atom” (1957) [as a kid, I was fascinated by Frank Capra’s Bell Telephone film, “Hemo the Magnificent” (1957), about hemoglobin]; and more than I can even begin to mention. It’s a trove you’ll have fun digging through…

Opening Shots: Watchmen

Jim Emerson

In some editions, the opening shot begins on the cover of “Watchmen”: A black oval on a field of yellow with a drop of red liquid splashed on it. (“Bean juice?” “Human bean juice.”) The first “shot” proper (comic book, not movie — though the filmmakers find their own take on it) begins with the smiley in a sea of blood.

The “camera” pulls back from directly above the button. Carried by the flow, the smiley falls into the gutter as the blood pours down a drain. As the camera recedes further we see a man is washing away the stain with a hose. A pair of boots belonging to another, red-headed man carrying a “The End Is Near” sign wade right through the blood puddle and tracks red footprints down the sidewalk. From several stories up, we see a large delivery truck with a triangle on top. This will mean something, but we don’t know it yet.

For now, the triangle that most draws our attention are the converging lines of windows down the side of the building that has come into view on the right. The lines point directly to the splash of red.

(Click to enlarge frames below…)