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Queen Victoria in hot pants?

Jim Emerson

As far as I can tell, this is not Pauline Kael.

“The hot-pants Queen Victoria of American film criticism, Pauline Kael has now paid the debt of nature, providing the obituarians with the opportunity to finally top off their 35-year outpouring of ardor and awe. Never before has a film critic’s living reputation sent so many scrambling for encomiums, and never has a film critic’s passing left so many media mouths so verklempt. Don’t expect it to ever happen again: Kael reigned supreme as film culture’s fiery, maenadic Mrs. Grundy—what will she say?—during that culture’s most fecund and dynamic day, which has long gone the way of film clubs, the Monthly Film Bulletin, Luis Buñuel, and the Bleecker Street Cinema.”

— Michael Atkinson, Village Voice, September 10, 2001 (link to full “obit”)

Letter in response to the above:

GENDER DEFENDER

Michael Atkinson is certainly entitled to hate Pauline Kael’s work. But what in the world did the late film critic, who died on September 3 at the age of 82, do to deserve such a gleefully hateful ”obituary” ”As the Lights Go Down,” September 18? The late New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wasn’t subjected to this sort of slander in his Voice eulogy. Then again, Canby was a man–and it’s the fact that Kael was a woman that evidently sticks in Atkinson’s craw. How else to explain his descriptions of her as a ”maenadic Mrs. Grundy,” a ”high priestess,” ”the wolverine bitch,” a ”hot-pants Queen Victoria,” and ”a miniature tigress with gray hair and barbed tongue.” Or Atkinson’s ridiculous contention that Kael’s ”relentless eminence” was, in part, a result of her gender. Does he honestly think that Kael became celebrated because she was a woman? Does anyone?

Manohla Dargis

Los Angeles, California

Michael Atkinson replies: I don’t ”gleefully hate” Kael or her writing, but the national brown-nosing performed upon her at the perpetual expense of much wiser critics has been absurd. Canby never garnered such overripe praise, and saying so doesn’t imply he deserved to. As for Kael’s sex, guess what: The American media got off on her doughty-dame public profile, as her unprecedented (for a film critic) eulogization demonstrated. Pick a knee-jerk gender fight if you want, but her writing still isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be.

Revulsion

Jim Emerson

Screeeeech! The “jewel”-encrusted Sidekick doesn’t help.

Edward Copeland asks: Do certain performers affect you like the sound of nails on a chalkboard? He lists Danny Huston, Kevin Costner, Kate Capshaw and Kim Cattrall among his most shudder-worthy. Some have charisma on the screen, and some don’t. Or, at least, some of us are mystified by what others see in them (I could never understand the whole Ronald Reagan-as-president thing; he always seemed to me like a minor audioanimatronic attraction at Disneyland: Doddering Moments With Mr. Reagan, the Non-Communicator).

For me, it really is an involuntary, visceral response. I’m not sure I can adequately explain my instinctive revulsion for the following (in some cases the reaction has developed over time, like an allergy, as if I’ve built up antibodies against them), but here they are, in no particular order:

Tom Cruise. Incapable of convincingly expressing any emotion beyond grim determination. Unless it’s intensely focused ambition.

Adam Sandler. Pauly Shore, but with a more limited range. Always looks as though he’s going to start laughing at how funny he thinks he is. (Yes, I make an exception for “Punch Drunk Love,” but I still would rather have been watching someone else. And that one had Mary Lynn Rajskub. She saves America every week on “24,” and she saved Sandler’s behind in this movie.)

Robin Williams. Not well-cast in human roles. (See all of the above.)

Cuba Gooding, Jr. His career after he won an Oscar for “Jerry Maguire” has made it almost impossible to sit through any of the good stuff he did before then. Tried to watch “Boyz N the Hood” recently? It’s so preachy and sanctimonious it almost looks like a Matty Rich film now, but in fairness that’s probably more John Singleton’s fault than Gooding’s alone.

That blonde heiress with the dead-trout eyes who’s famous for her night-vision porno video and being in the tabloids a lot. Perfect example of “horrisma.” She’s like Ann Coulter in drag. Or not in drag. I’m not really sure which. But both have all the appeal of impetigo.

Chris Rock. The comedy version of Tom Cruise. Always trying way too hard to convince you… of something.

Sandra Bullock. Like watching a coconut on a stick.

Mel Gibson. “Braveheart” finally did it for me (and that was a whole five years before “What Women Want”). He enjoyed torturing himself way, way too much. Just as there is Young Elvis and Fat Elvis, there’s Young Mel (pre-“Lethal Weapon 2”) and Creepy Mel (“Air America” forward). Watching “The Road Warrior,” it’s hard to comprehend what later became of that cool guy who once played Mad Max.

Harrison Ford. Once he had a sense of humor about himself — on screen, at least. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t made a decent movie (“Clear and Present Danger”) in 13 years. He’s great in “The Conversation,” though.

Katie Holmes. Zombified. Why do I even know who she is?

Shaved vagina girl. Has she made any movies or is she just on the Internets?

Lindsay Lohan. From Mean Girl to Lucky Girl (cast with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin in an Altman movie). Now it’s over. She’s the Alicia Silverstone of tomorrow, but without the comic timing. Ten years ago, John Waters might have been able to salvage her career. Now it’s too late. (OK, I’m sorry: That Alicia Silverstone crack was too mean — to Alicia Silverstone.)

Jim Carrey. See Chris Rock, above.

Natalie Portman. It’s as though she aspires to be forgettable, like generic “citrus”-flavored Pixy Stix. For some reason she reminds me of Veruca Salt on Xanax and I want her to swell up into a big blueberry. But I feel that way about nearly everyone who appeared in the “Star Wars” prequels.

More comments at Copeland’s place.

The Huckabees Harangues

Jim Emerson

Why is this stuff coming out now? Coincidence?

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has the best coverage anywhere of the whole “I (Heart) Huckabees” on-set “maelstrom” (as proprietor Dennis Cozzalio calls it), including the now-infamous YouTube clips of the battles between Lily Tomlin and writer-director David O. Russell. There’s also an excerpt from the Playboy interview with George Clooney discussing various meltdowns during the shooting of “Three Kings,” and an appearance by Tomlin and co-star Dustin Hoffman on “Good Morning America,” promoting “Huckabees.” Plus, there’s a fantastic string of comments that you won’t find anywhere else.

Dennis wonders:

Can working with a volcanic director actually be good for the creative process? If not, why (besides the money) would actors and crew members tolerate such behavior? Is this kind of threatening, off-the-rails, abusive behavior somehow actionable? And if not, why would anyone want to work with Russell again? “Huckabees” may be brilliant, it may be a mess, but one could hardly call it complacent—it’s in there scrapping for slivers of enlightenment and understanding right along with the people who made it and the audiences who choose to see it and run with it, and perhaps some of this striving, searching, reckless clashing of tones and spirits that are vital to the movie can be directly traced to this kind of passion, however misplaced it might seem. These are the questions. I have no answers.Over at The Hot Blog, David Poland cites a few excerpts from Sharon Waxman’s 2004 New York Times set-visit piece on the turmoil of “Huckabees” (“The Nudist Buddhist Borderline-Abusive Love-In”). Here’s another piece from that story that sets the scene for one of the clips:

Blurb-a-thon 2007

Jim Emerson

View image The funniest scene in the funniest movie of the year. I think.

Instead of a “ten best list,” Armond White makes an annual “Better Than List” which, in principle, I’m all against — simply because of the formula: He uses a few adjectives and a “greater than” symbol to bash selected movie titles with selected other ones, like Daniel Plainview bludgeoning someone with a heavy object.

Then again, any “ten best list” (or “top ten list” or “favorites list”) represents a preference for some movies over some other movies, seen by somebody under certain circumstances during a period of time. And, to not-quite-paraphrase Jean Renoir, “Everybody makes his own rules.”

So, perhaps White is really just doing what (I hope) any list-maker does: Making a claim for his/her own critical taste and values, while recommending some movies. That he assumes the attitude of a bully over the approach of a critic or movie lover is, perhaps, not so important. (Quote: “‘No Country for Old Men’ > better than ‘There Will Be Blood,’ ‘Zodiac.’ The Coen brothers hauntingly mythologize Americana, while P.T. Anderson and David Fincher make it morbid, sadistic and self-congratulatory.” Is there an inverse relationship between “morbid, sadistic and self-congratulatory” and “hauntingly mythological” — Americana-wise, I mean?)

But look: Now I’m using other top ten lists to bash White’s. Is there no getting around this? I fell ill (think of the scene with the old lady on the street in “The Orphanage”) just as I was about to annotate my own 2007 list, after submitting various rankings to critics’ polls at MSN Movies, indieWIRE and the Village Voice/LA Weekly poll, each of which had slightly different rules, categories and deadlines. (Then I posted a list in video form in late December). Consequently, I missed reading a lot of other peoples’ lists (though The House Next Door and David Hudson at GreenCine, and the folks at Movie City News have put together invaluable lists of lists — and/or lists of links — that have helped me in my efforts to catch up, because, as I am fond of repeating, I actually learn from browsing these things).

Oh, yes, and I also posted the 2007 Exploding Head Awards as a kind of top-ten alternative. (Let me add that I have enjoyed no 2007 overview more than Dennis Cozzalio’s at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.)

Now, just to wrap up this whole 2007 wrap-up thing, I’m going to recommend some movies and (in munchable blurbs of 150 words or less — I hope) give you some idea of what I liked about them, without the intention of over-selling them. If I’ve written more extensively about them, I’ll link their titles to a more detailed review or posting.

Opening Shots: ‘Kiss Me Deadly’

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Slapping flesh and heavy breathing.

From Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun:

When reading the request for greatest opening shots, the first film that popped into my head was immediate and almost too easy — “Kiss Me Deadly.��?

And then I reflected more.

There are so many masterful opening shots, some I find works of genius or some I simply love. But the more I thought about it, the more I drifted back to where my mind always manages to drift back to — stark, hard-boiled cruelty, paranoia, insanity and psycho sexual angst — so there it was again, “Kiss Me Deadly.��?

But for good reason. Robert Aldrich’s masterful noir hits you with a hysterical bang that sets its frenzied tone with such balls-out experimental élan; you can’t believe the film was released in 1955:

Before any credit sequence, the film begins with a pair of naked feet running down the middle of a highway in the black of the night.

On acting, authenticity and Robert De Niro

Jim Emerson

Just started Tom McCarthy’s novel, “Remainder,” in which the first-person narrator is recovering from some kind of mysterious brain injury (which may just be consciousness itself). He and his friend Greg go to see Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” — just as the characters played by Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro in “Mean Streets” go to see John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Then comes this page-and-a-half passage that I found enthralling:

The other thing that struck me as we watched the film was how perfect De Niro was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between. I commented on this to Greg as we walked back to mine.

“But the character’s a loser,” Greg said. “And he messes everything up for all the other characters.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I answered. “He’s natural when he does things. Not artificial, like me. He’s flaccid. I’m plastic.”

“He’s the plastic one, I think you’ll find,” said Greg, “being stamped onto a piece of film and that. I mean you’ve got the bit above your eye, but…”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. I’d had a small amount of plastic surgery on a scar above my right eye. “I mean that he’s relaxed, malleable. He flows into his movements, even the most basic ones. Opening fridge doors, lighting cigarettes. He doesn’t have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand.”

“You mean he’s cool. All film stars are cool,” said Greg. “That’s what films do to them.”

“It’s not about being cool,” I told him. “It’s about just being. De Niro was just being; I can never do that now.”

Greg stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me. “Do you think you could before? Do you think I can? Do you think anyone outside of films lights cigarettes or opens fridge doors like that? Think about it: the lighter doesn’t spark the first time you flip it, the first wisp of smoke gets in your eye and makes you wince; the fridge door catches and then rattles, milk slops over. It happens to everyone. It’s universal: everything fucks up! You’re not unusual. You know what you are?”

“No,” I said. “What?”

“You’re just more usual than everyone else.”

Ten Best: Ethics, politics and tokenism in critical list-making

Jim Emerson

When the editors of Publishers Weekly came out with their lists of the best books of 2009, they divided them into several categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Mystery, Lifestyle (?), Comics, Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, and so on. Out of 50,000 eligible titles, they chose 100 best and topped it off with a “Top 10.” The problem: Although women writers were represented in the other lists, none were among the authors of the Top 10.

“We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration….” explained PW’s Louisa Ermelino. “We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.”

Headline in the UK Guardian: “Fury after women writers excluded from ‘books of the year’.”

From a “Sexism Watch” item on the blog “Women and Hollywood”:

Rock Hudson + Bea Arthur: I have nothing more to say…

Jim Emerson

Two gay icons in a network TV musical number celebrating illicit drug use. The “Anything Goes” of the 1970s. Have times changed, do you think?

(Than kyew to Dina Martina.)

Is this Halloween costume racist?

Jim Emerson

This “Illegal Alien” costume has been pulled from a number of stores because, in the words of one immigration rights activist, it is “distasteful, mean-spirited, and ignorant of social stigmas and current debate on immigration reform.” I don’t know what its designers and manufacturers intended, but I can see how it could be viewed that way.

On the other hand, this particular costume (unlike some others that have been removed from shelves) doesn’t single out any particular ethnicity. As someone who is unabashedly pro-immigrant rights, I can also see it as a scathing satirical comment on the mindset of those who view immigrants as non-human. When I saw a photo of this costume, my first thought was of this summer’s science-fiction hit “District 9” (and 1988’s “Alien Nation”), which used extra-terrestrials as a metaphor for the treatment of illegal aliens and the ghettoization of black South Africans under apartheid. Roger Ebert wrote:

Paranoid Park: A Beaver State of mind

Jim Emerson

View image Under the bridge.

My review of “Paranoid Park” is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here’s an excerpt:

Many films use scrambled chronology just to make the story seem more interesting than it really is. That’s not what happens in “Paranoid Park.” The story, told as Alex pencils entries into a lined notebook, is an elliptical record of how he processes the terrible thing that happened one night in the neighborhood of Paranoid Park. The narrative moves in arcs and curves, like the skateboarders who float and glide around in dreamy 8mm slow-motion, as Alex circles the truth in his writing, promising himself, “I’ll get it all on paper eventually.”

Prepping for Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure

Jim Emerson

View image From the official “Standard Operating Procedure” web site, which mirrors the film’s mosaic-like treatment of its raw material.

“…the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our photographs but in ourselves…”

— Errol Morris, paraphrasing Shakespeare, in a footnote to an October 4, 2007, New York Times Zoom column about a pair of Roger Fenton Crimean War photos

* * * *

Errol Morris’s new film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” is not about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It is about the photographs themselves, and what went on in and around them, before, during and after they were taken. Perhaps the most baffling question surrounding them is why they were taken at all.

The film reflects Morris’s desire to make another “investigative film” in the vein of “The Thin Blue Line.” “I think of the film as a nonfiction horror movie,” he says in a Q&A on the official web site. The imagery is designed to take the viewer into the moment the photographs were taken, as well as to evoke the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of Abu Ghraib.”

Chris Rock: Blacks more electable than retarded

Jim Emerson

My problem with Chris Rock (who belongs with Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia in the category of Comics I Don’t Think are Funny) is that he too often fails to base his shtick on accurate or meaningful observations. It’s just dumb shtick, and he’ll say anything (no matter how pointless) to get a laugh. It’s all about his hacky delivery rhythms — Catskills via Brooklyn. What he says hardly matters as long as he sounds like he’s being funny. He could be speaking Ancient Greek and he hits you so hard you’d still know exactly where you’re supposed to laugh, whether it’s funny or not.

Take the following, from his “SNL” appearance to promote his already-vanished movie, “I Think I Love My Wife.” Most of his jokes are older than John McCain (and in the ’80s these same jokes were told about Reagan and in the ’90s about Bob Dole). His stuff about Giuliani being good in a crisis is fine, but the pit bull analogy is stretched to the point of desperation.

Then Rock sets up the race for the Democratic nomination: “Everybody’s saying the same thing: Hillary or Obama? A black man or a white woman? It’s so hard to make up my mind! Like it’s a suffering contest. And even if it was, how can you compare the suffering of a white woman to the suffering of a black man?” I don’t know, Chris. How can you? And who’s making the comparison? Well, Rock is: “I mean, white women burned their bras. Black men were burned alive!” Lame set-up, phony-outrageous non-sequitur punchline. That’s Rock in a nutshell. (This might have been funny, in a Colbert-esque way, if Rock had been in character as Nat X. Does Rock know the difference? If not, what’s the point? Is anybody saying Hillary is more oppressed than Obama? It might have worked if Rock had cited an example that he could riff on.)

The line about nobody hating white women as much as white women do is pretty good. Women are certainly Hillary’s main problem. And the crack about how blacks would elect Halle Berry for half a term was kind of clever, but the audience was still laughing at the idea that black voters would elect OJ.

I’d love to know what would happen if someone else — say, Joseph Biden or Hillary or Obama — were to toss off this line: “Is America ready for a black president? I say: Why not? We just had a retarded one!” Hey, folks: What the hell — even black politicians are better than retarded ones, right? I wish I could say that Rock is an articulate comedian. Or an insightful one. Or a funny one. But I don’t think he is. Does anyone want to explain if/why they think this monologue is funny?

Is reality off-limits in American political reporting?

Jim Emerson

A great, cut-through-the-crap piece by NYU journalism associate professor Jay Rosen at PressThink asks why reality has been declared off-limits in American political journalism. Rosen zeroes in on one key line in David Barstow’s fair and balanced New York Times piece on the Tea Party movement, “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right”: “It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.”

If tyranny is impending, Rosen asks, why isn’t that a story? Is it enough to report that somebody is making serious allegations? Or might it be the duty of the press to report whether any evidence can be found to substantiate those allegations?

It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can. […]