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Altman: Life beyond the frame

Jim Emerson

“Nashville” 25th reunion. (photo by Jim Emerson)

When the doctor says you’re through

Keep a’goin!

Why, he’s a human just like you —

Keep a’goin!

— Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) in “Nashville”

View image 24 of your favorite stars.

Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld

so I can sigh eternally

— Kurt Cobain, “Pennyroyal Tea”

It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers

who said that they were through with dealing

every time you gave them shelter

— Leonard Cohen, opening lyrics for “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”

View image “Nashville” 25th reunion. Note gigantic Oscar at right; Altman got his own, regular-sized one six years later. (photo by Jim Emerson)

“However, the cortex, which is dwarfed in most species by other brain areas, makes up a whopping 80 percent of the human brain. Compared with other animals, our huge cortex also has many more regions specialized for particular functions, such as associating words with objects or forming relationships and reflecting on them. The cortex is what makes us human.”

— John J. Ratley, M.D., “A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain”

I’m not sure what, if anything, meaningfully connects these fragments to the passing of Robert Altman — or his films, as alive now as they ever were — but they were all things I encountered during a day spent thinking about Altman and, to my surprise, not wanting to speak out loud about him to anyone. I talked to my mother on the phone. She asked hesitantly, “Have you heard any news today?” “Yeah,” I said, and changed the subject. What can I say that isn’t trivial? (Rhetorical question, please.)

In this state of grief, nothing I’m writing or thinking about Altman is adequate, or even makes much sense, in large part because a whole moviegoing lifetime of engagement with his movies (beginning at age 15) has so profoundly shaped who I am and how I experience the world. Like hundreds, thousands (millions?) of cinephiles and cinephiliacs, I found life (and, paradoxically, shelter) in Robert Altman’s movies. “Nashville” is my church, to which I return again and again for joy, insight, inspiration and sustenance. (I haven’t written about it for years, but I also know that I’m almost never not writing about “Nashville.”)

To this day, I am in some deep but irrational sense convinced that the characters in “Nashville” (even though I know they’re played by 24 of my very favorite stars!) continue to exist outside the parameters of the movie itself. I’ve met and interviewed, for example, Ned Beatty, but there’s Ned Beatty the actor and then there’s Delbert Reese, who is someone else entirely. Delbert exists, imaginatively independent of the great actor (one of my all-time favorites) who inhabited him in “Nashville.” (This is most unlike the other most-influential movie in my life, Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” made just the year before “Nashville,” which is as “closed” a film as “Nashville” is “open.” “Chinatown” ends so definitively that, “Two Jakes” aside, any life beyond the final frame is unthinkable.)

Right now I just want to share another fantastic memory: In 2000, I heard there was going to be a 25th anniversary reunion screening of “Nashville” at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. I’d moved back to Seattle by this time, but I bought tickets the moment they became available (for five bucks apiece) and went to LA for the event: My favorite movie, in a pristine print, in one of the finest movie theaters in the world, with most of those 24 favorite stars in attendance. It was… transplendent (as a Shelley Duvall character once said). I’ll post an update with IDs later, but for now, see if you can identify the people onstage (taken with a now-primitive, but still beloved, Canon Digital Elph)

Pauline Kael’s famous, ebullient review of “Nashville” here reminds us how exciting and innovative the movie was in 1975.

Principal population of “Nashville” after the jump:

The Re-forgotten Lost Devil Girls Trailer of Ed Wood!

Jim Emerson

Now, for the penultimate time! Ten years in the development vault! Dripping wet from the subcutaneous epidural labs! Writer-Producer-Director-Hyphenate Andre Perkowski and Terminal Pictures Presents the previously unclaimed, unfulfilled trailer for Edward D. Wood Jr.’s “The Devil Girls”!!! You’ll thrill to their prevailing sex urges for lust, dementia and forbidden entertainment!

Tina Fey is a genius

Jim Emerson

I defy you to tell the difference between her character and the Governor of Alaska, who has been busy lowering expectations all week. The main difference, of course, is that Fey is still in front of TV cameras, while Palin can no longer be found. Anywhere.

And the most brilliant stroke: Palin herself provided much of the material. She writes her own comedy and all Fey has to do is perform it the way Palin does. Fey isn’t doing a caricature (like Dana Carvey’s George HW Bush), but is giving a performance of uncanny accuracy (closer to, say, Helen Mirren in “The Queen“).

The Golden Age of Cinemania is Now

Jim Emerson

View image I like to watch and learn.

Alas, Manohla Dargis wasn’t fond, as I was, of Eric Rohmer’s “Romance of Astrée and Céladon,” Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Orphanage” or Ira Sachs’ “Married Life” — all of which (and more, as usual) are being repeated after their Toronto showings at the New York Film Festival.

But in her overview of the NYFF, she reminds us of the importance of film festivals — and the word-of-mouth generated on the web — to the viability of world cinema in the US market:

[The NYFF’s] willingness to go beyond its comfort and perhaps even its geographic zone feels especially urgent now because it won’t be long before the old art-house faithful start slipping away like Antonioni and Bergman. Cinemania is alive and well on the Internet, notably in blogs, where young movie nuts rant and rave and help cultivate one another’s cinematic interests. This is heartening, but film — especially the kind that distinguishes this year’s edition of the New York Film Festival — needs more than passion. It needs an audience, a paying public. If we don’t cultivate a new generation of movie lovers who get excited at the very idea of a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, we may as well hold a memorial service for foreign-language-film theatrical distribution right now.All too true. When I was in college, programming the student film series, local art-house exhibitors understood that showing foreign and specialized films (even older Hollywood movies)to students on campus for a buck-and-a-half per double bill on Friday and Saturday nights wasn’t a form of competition or a threat to their ticket sales. It was a way of building an audience for them. Today, that kind of evangelism is happening right here, on the World Wide Internets. (That was the goal of the recent “Top Foreign-Language Films Poll — to spread the word, get people started..)

I was relieved, and gratified, that so many cinephiles younger than me still cared about Bergman and Antonioni, and still had so much to say (and even more they were willing to discover) about them when they died. I wonder, in fact, if perhaps the giants (or dinosaurs) like Bergman and Antonioni matter more to people in their 20s, 30s than they still do to people of their own, or my, or Jonathan Rosenbaum’s generation.

Which (by free association) reminds me of this essay by Rick Perlstein (“What’s the Matter with College?”) in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture — and those hip baby-boomer parents — take care of the problem.I’m one of those people who never wanted to stop going to college. Make that “never wanted to stop taking classes” — because, even though it took me a while to consciously realize it, the day I stop learning (or wanting to, anyway) is the day I’m dead. I submit that the greatest classroom the world has ever known is now (literally) at your fingertips. My class schedule isn’t temporally or geographically definable, but it’s virtually round ’round the clock, just about wherever I am. How about you?

Sweeney Floyd: The Demon Barber of Mayberry

Jim Emerson

(tip: Paul Hansen)

Beware of all jokes requiring punch lines

Jim Emerson

U.S. Senate apologizes for slavery and segregation: http://bit.ly/G46Cu. Bob Byrd breaks down on Senate floor. “Too soon. Too soon.”

I think that’s a funny joke. Normally, I find set-up/punch-line jokes the lowest form of humor (far below puns and slapstick in their paucity of imagination), and I regard them warily, not unlike the way Thoreau viewed “all enterprises that require new clothes.” But I cracked up when I saw this tweet from Robert A. George. To find it funny, I guess you’d have to know that Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) is very, very old, and that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth. But in the ad hominem ’00s, many people would first look at the identity of the joke teller before deciding if it was humorous.

Robert A. George, eh? Wait a minute — he’s a conservative and a libertarian! He’s black! He’s a naturalized American citizen, born in Trinidad (and Tobago)! He’s a Catholic! He’s a blogger, a Twitterer, a Facebooker, a New York Post columnist, a stand-up comedian, a comic-book geek! Soooooo, of course he’s going to make that joke about Bob Byrd, right?!?!

Opening Shots: ‘Quills’

Jim Emerson

From Jeff Levin, Rochester, NY:

I’ve never seen an opening tighter or more ingeniously structured than the one for Philip Kaufman’s “Quills.” It’s an opening that flips from dreamy to nightmarish and completely changes the nature of what you think you’re initially observing, all the while quickly and efficiently familiarizing viewers with the persona of the of the protagonist.

That protagonist would be a one Marquis De Sade, brilliantly played in the movie by Geoffrey Rush in an Oscar-nominated role. Starting with a black screen, you hear him announce that he has a “naughty��? tale to tell, one “guaranteed to stimulate the senses.��? He then begins by announcing that the tale is about an aristocrat named Mademoiselle Renare, as soft music begins to play and the visage of a dreamy looking young woman appears on the screen. You then see an erotic expression come over her face as the Marquis describes how her sexual proclivities “ran the gamut from winsome to bestial.��?

But suddenly, you see a man’s hand come into the picture … then two hands … then the man himself, a brute wearing a hooded mask. The Marquis continues, “Until one day … Mademoiselle found herself at the mercy of a man every bit as perverse as she. A man whose skill at the art of pain exceeded ever her own.��? The man then begins tying her hands as she pleads for mercy. Looking up at a window, she suddenly notices a figure looking down at the proceedings and it’s … the Marquis himself. It’s at this point that you realize that you’re not seeing a story acted out — you’re seeing what inspired it in the first place: mass executions during the French Revolution.

Star-struck: Movie criticism or astrology?

Jim Emerson

View image Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars…

“One of the most genuinely confounding films to come along in years… This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of no reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators’ whims. Hence, the film is likely to inspire even more heavy thinking on the part of cultural theorists than ‘The Matrix’ did.”

* * *

“A lot of fluorescent, 7-Eleven-tinted images flash by, any of which could easily be removed or re-arranged without significantly disrupting the film’s continuity, because it has none. If you can determine the spatial relationship between Speed’s Mach 5 (or Mach 6) and any other race car for more than a few consecutive seconds, then good for you. As on the TV series, the pictures don’t seem to move so much as repeat — movement with no momentum.”

* * *

“‘Speed Racer’ is not a feature film in any conventional sense… Whatever information that passes from your retinas to your brain during ‘Speed Racer’ is conveyed through optical design and not so much through more traditional devices such as dialogue, narrative, performance or characterization.”

* * *

“Alas, this radicalization of film language, while certainly impressive to behold, yields heretofore un-dreamed of levels of narrative incoherence, but hey, not every experiment succeeds.”

* * *

“One of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci’s ‘1900.’”

* * *

“”Speed Racer” is a manufactured widget, a packaged commodity that capitalizes on an anthropomorphized cartoon of Capitalist Evil in order to sell itself and its ancillary products.”

* * *

Three of the above quotations are taken from a three-star review of “Speed Racer.” The other three are from a one-and-a-half-star review. Can you tell which is which? Perhaps the tone gives something away, but the descriptions of the movie, what it does and how it works, are strikingly similar. Clearly both of these critics saw the same movie, although one found the experience less daring, less exhilarating, than the other.

A-C-T-I-N-G

Jim Emerson

View image John Candy as Steve Roman as Juan Cortez — now that spells good acting.

Ever since December, when Kristin Thompson posted this (“Good Actors Spell Good Acting”) on the blog she shares with her husband and co-author David Bordwell, I’ve been meaning to link to it. This is my favorite kind of article, leading you fluidly from one intriguing idea to another — and you never quite know where it’s going to take you. Not only does it begin with an account of how bits of movie dialogue (from “Rio Bravo,” “His Girl Friday”) have entered her life, and the lives of her friends and colleagues, but it then segues into a great quotation from Steve Roman on SCTV (playing Juan Cortez, the first Puerto Rican Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in the dramatic television series, “There’s Justice for Everybody”) : “It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.” And, from there, to this:

Almost invariably we use this line when we come across one of those films that receive highly positive reviews largely because of one great performance. You know the kind: Charlize Theron in “Monster,” Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball,” Hillary Swank in “Boys Don’t Cry,” and more recently Forest Whitaker in “The Last King of Scotland” and Helen Mirren in “The Queen.”

Usually I avoid such films, because the reviews tend to plant the idea that they are primarily actors’ vehicles. I enjoy good acting as much as the next person, but I want the rest of the film to be interesting as well.

Are there any film classics that are truly great solely for the acting? It’s hard to think of any. Maybe “The Gold Rush,” which is stylistically fairly pedestrian but which is redeemed by Chaplin’s inspired performance. Maybe “Duck Soup,” also quite undistinguished for much of anything other than the Marx Brothers cutting loose without being saddled with the sort of plots involving young, singing lovers that MGM would soon foist upon them. Maybe a few others. Usually, though, we tend not to think of a performance, however dazzling, as adding up to a great film.

That’s a good point to keep in mind during Oscar season, when “best acting” is often confused with “most acting.” The performances that win awards tend to have as much to do with the roles as they do the actors. Sure, the player has to deliver, but give a decent actor a juicy character (and a sympathetic director) and you’re talking Oscar bait. If just about anyone had played Jennifer Hudson’s mistreated chunky diva in “Dreamgirls,” an emotive-showpiece part if there ever was one, and had not gotten an Oscar nomination, that alone would have made the film a miserable failure. Fortunately for the investors, Hudson was able to do what she was hired to do. (Twenty years ago on Broadway, it was another Jennifer H. — Holliday — who became a star playing the same role and singing the same showstopper song.) Robert Altman liked to say that casting was the most important part of making a movie, but nobody would say that his movies are interesting just for the performances. It’s how he captures and presents them that matters just as much.

Say goodbye to this spot

Jim Emerson

This Sierra Mist commercial featuring Kathy Griffin (“It’s Pat,” “Pulp Fiction,” “My Life on the D-List”) and Michael Ian Black (“Ed,” “The Baxter,” “Stella”) ran on Thursday night’s edition of “The Daily Show,” which featured a brilliant report about the foiled British bomb plot involving the use of liquid explosives aboard airliners. Correspondent John Oliver on the sudden ban on carrying liquids aboard passenger jets: “I’m afraid these terrorists have struck at what we in the West hold most dear: our beverages. They resent our wide array of fluid refreshment options. We live in the most easily quenched part of the world and they hate that…. Unfortunately, the men arrested were British citizens, which means the form of government here in Britian must not be democracy, for as you know, democracy is the only known antidote to extremism… It means regime change, Jon. America must topple the British government.”

The premise of the ad is that airport security guard Griffin detains Black and pretends her wand is beeping when she passes it over his bottle of Sierra Mist. Don’t expect to see this spot in heavy rotation much longer….

Impressions Based on the Hype for the Movie Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

Jim Emerson

This is the first of two posts about the movie “Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.” In this one, I talk about the impressions I got from the movie’s press coverage, advertising, reviews and word-of-mouth, and why they put me off the film. In the second part I’ll write about my response to the movie when I finally, reluctantly, went to see it… (Part II: “Precious Based on the Movie Female Trouble by John Waters”)

I put it off as long as I could. For months I tried not to read about it, but I knew it had won a bunch of awards at Sundance back in January, 2009, when it was called “Push.” That, in itself, is enough to make me want to avoid it. The Sundance Film Festival is notorious for hailing a certain type of dilettantish formula movie — the feel-bad/feel-good story of degradation and redemption, set in a colorful, semi-exotic subculture — and the picture eventually known as “Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire” sure seemed to fit the profile. There’s nothing I hate more than a voyeuristic lesson-movie that goes slumming and then presents itself as an inspirational triumph of the spirit. By the time Oprah (Winfrey, that is — promoter of bogus New Age twaddle like “The Secret”) and Tyler Perry (maker of amateurish chitlin’ circuit teleplays) signed on, with great fanfare, as “presenters” I was beginning to think (as I used to tell my newspaper editors about movies I was fairly or unfairly predisposed to despise) that nobody had enough money to pay me to see this thing.

Retrofitting Star Trek: The Original Series

Jim Emerson

Here you go: An episode from the original “Star Trek” TV series (“Space Seed,” 1967) directed in the flashy, shaky-cam style of the 2009 movie!

(tip: Ali Arikan)

… and, on the other hand, there’s this:

Haven Hamilton lives!

Jim Emerson

But I am deeply saddened to report that the great Henry Gibson has died. “Laugh-In” (“A Poem… by Henry Gibson”), “The Long Goodbye,” “Nashville,” “Mullet” (a short), “Magnolia”… he has always been an inspiration to me.

I am in Boulder with my friend Julia Sweeney for a CWA-related athenaeum, talking to students about comedy, critical thinking, death… and any and all other subjects, depending on where the conversations lead. I’ll be back this weekend and plan to write more about Henry Gibson then. R.I.P.