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Nicole Kidman: David Thomson’s plaything

Jim Emerson

David Thomson, or “David Thomson”? Critic or stalker?

David Thomson is often described as a “film critic,” but film criticism is not quite what he does. Nor is he a journalist or a biographer or a historian by any traditional definition of those terms. Thomson is a cinephile, a fantasist and an autobiographer, who writes about movies — and the characters in them, and the people who make them — as his possessions, imagined aspects of himself.

In the introduction to his best-known book, the idiosyncratic and provocative “A Biographical Dictionary of Film,” he admits that, in writing about movies, he is unavoidably writing about himself — and, indeed, the book might be better titled “An Autobiographical Dictionary of Film.” All film criticism (and all writing, fiction or “non-fiction”) is to some degree autobiographical, and Thomson has been more aggressive and up-front about his obsessions with his fantasy-objects, from Warren Beatty to Nicole Kidman, than most. But I’m not sure his treatment, or imaginative possession (sexual and otherwise), of his not-at-all-obscure objects of desire is any less tabloid-creepy because it is presented as critical nonfiction rather than as gossip or on some fanatical fan blog, except that Thomson’s writing is better.

Last week, Kidman’s reps said Thomson had misrepresented himself in the one telephone interview he did with Kidman for his ostensible biography, being sold under the title “Nicole Kidman.” From The Daily Mail:

According to the star’s publicist Wendy Day: “Nicole has never met David Thomson. She has only spoken to him briefly on the phone about her acting processes and various films.

“He’s a well-respected film writer and she accepted the interview only because she was under the impression he was writing a series of film essays.”

So, if Thomson is going to write about movie-fed fantasies, and he’s decided to focus his on Nicole Kidman, what are his ethical responsibilities when it comes to soliticiting her unknowing cooperation in his enterprise? A review in the New York Times, which calls the ostensible biography “a weird and unseemly mash note,” offers several quotes from the book, including:“I should own up straightaway that, yes, I like Nicole Kidman very much. I suspect she is as fragrant as spring, as ripe as summer, as sad as autumn and as coldly possessed as winter…. That’s why I’m writing this book, I think, to honor desire.”

“Just as I take the breakup with Cruise as the liberating and altering experience in Kidman’s life, so we have to see that Tom was changed, too.”

“I dare say she wakes up some nights screaming because she felt it [aging, losing her looks] was about to happen. (Not that I can be there to witness it — or stop imagining it.)��?

Thomson also speculates about what might have happened on the set of “Eyes Wide Shut,” in this excerpt from the book published in the Sunday Times of London:

Yes, But Is It Art? Part 237

Jim Emerson

View image Another view of Death. From Dreyer’s “Vampyr” (1932)

Welcome back to Post-Bergman & Antonioni Art Film week (or two weeks) at Scanners — and just about every other movie blog and film section out there! The term “art film” used to disgust me as a designation that’s simultaneously crude and precious, but it’s really just another sales pitch. Try booking what exhibitors matter-of-factly call an “art house” for a few years, as I did, and you learn the pure commercial exploitation value of promoting “art.” It’s just another niche-marketing approach, like selling horror pictures or porno. It also happens to be art, but in the marketplace that’s almost beside the point. Except that it is the selling point. Like any promotional campaign, the “art movie” sell involves convincing your potential audience that they will be stimulated by the picture, and that they will want to be among the exclusive “first” to see it because it will make them seem cooler and ahead of the (pop-)cultural curve in conversations with their friends and co-workers.

Coming at the subject from a more critical/academic angle, Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity has a response to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s NYT Bergman piece that relates to Rosenbaum’s comments in answer to Roger Ebert’s criticisms regarding the comparisons of Bergman to Carl Theodor Dreyer, even though Campbell’s comment (quoted below) was posted before Roger’s. Got that? Anyway, this is good stuff:

The question of form’s importance really enters into whether or not Bergman’s aesthetics are great, rich, profound, and if so, if they are such only insofar as they are “functional.” To keep up the (perhaps shopworn) comparison: Dreyer was a storyteller, a narrative filmmaker, obviously. And no “more” cinematic than Bergman. But he was also, as I see it, more invested in the way his films felt, the way they impressed themselves on a viewer, than he was on letting his films breathe or go down unexpected sorts of paths. (It isn’t so much innovation of film form/language as it is potentialy in film affect/reception.)

My impression of Bergman is that he was always going for effects, conclusions. To put it very crudely, because I can’t find a more articulate or eloquent way of stating it, when I’m moved by Bergman–unsettled, saddened, uplifted–I feel like this movement is the calculation of form, that the form did what it was “supposed” to do. This isn’t a sin, but neither is it the pinnacle of film art as I experience it and choose to think it. Whereas in Dreyer, I am constantly challenged, shot-to-shot sometimes, by the frictions and (im)balances and of shots, pictorial compositions, cuts, camera movements, etc. I don’t feel like Dreyer is leading me to conclusions at all; there’s a richness and a weirdness to shot combinations or spatial articulations that just doesn’t exist in most of what I’ve seen in Bergman. It’s not that Bergman is blind to form–clearly he cares about at least some major aspects of what he’s doing, formally and aesthetically–but rather, a formal argument for or against his work should hinge on what he’s doing with the form, and how & why.

I look forward to reading David Bordwell’s thoughts on all this, which I hope will appear in the near future!

P.S. They did.

The Bourne Upchuck

Jim Emerson

View image Does this movie make you dizzy?

Continuing our discussion about the nauseating properties of hand-held, quick-cut, whip-pan, rack-focus camerawork, David Bordwell sends along this account of an unlucky filmgoer who saw “The Bourne Ultimatum” in IMAX:

We went to see “BU” on the IMAX in San Francisco. Near the end, when Webb is having the flashback to when he is forced to show his commitment to the project, the lady next to me spontaneously unleashes a huge amount of vomit all over my leg and all over the floor in front of her! I have never experienced anything like it in my life!

Now all the action sequences, the nauseating use of moving cameras, and the relentless score were enough to make anyone dizzy, but to throw up?

This, as DB observes, is truly a “Technicolor yawn.”

Avatar and Oscar again raise thequestion: What is cinematography? (Part 1)

Jim Emerson

Imagine the headline: “Up” Wins Oscar for Best Cinematography. That’s essentially what happened Sunday night, but the movie was “Avatar.” “Up” won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. “Avatar” won for Best Visual Effects and Best Cinematography. Realistically, “Up” and “Avatar” should have also have competed in a new category — something like Best Computer-Assisted Animation. It’s past time to acknowledge the difference between cinematography — the photographic process that involves capturing light through a lens — and animation or green screen work that involves compositing digital images in a computer. Both can be extraordinarily impressive. Let’s just agree to call them by their right names.

Screwballs and grace notes

Jim Emerson

View image John Krasinski and George Clooney: Which one’s the Ralph Bellamy?

My review of “Leatherheads” is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. (Also: “Shelter.”) Here’s an excerpt:

The script is less than effervescent, but Clooney and his cast are game. Although “Leatherheads” probably has fewer dull moments than your average NFL contest, sometimes you wonder if the clock is still ticking or if somebody’s called a timeout. A scene will end and, just as you’re moving on to the next one, you may find yourself wondering: Why was that there?

Yet there’s always something interesting to notice: a face, a throwaway visual joke, the way the winter rain on a window contributes to the tone of a scene, or the sight of the muscular 1920s Chicago skyline in the distance behind the ballfield.

Even before the opening credits montage is over, Clooney demonstrates the fleetness of his comedic footwork — getting a better laugh from a cow and a ball than you’d have any right to hope for. He knows how to compose a shot (the retro short-focus camerawork by Newton Thomas Sigel immediately puts you in a classic Hollywood frame of mind) and how to cut comedy so that it doesn’t cramp the actors’ style.

Best of all are the picture’s abundant grace notes. Clooney’s a team player, and his generosity toward his collaborators, as an actor and a director, shines throughout the movie….

Gimme them old-time furrin pictures

Jim Emerson

View image You can’t really like this “Seven Samurai” movie, can you? It’s old and Japanese!

Here are questions cinephiles and critics still hear all the time: “Why do you like old movies and foreign movies so much? What about new movies? Aren’t you just being elitist to say you like movies that are in black and white or have subtitles? Movies are supposed to be fun!” The implicit assumption is that “old movies” are outmoded movies and that new movies (with the latest technologies, unrestricted by old codes regarding sex, violence, drugs and other content) are inclined to be more liberated or superior. Oh, and that “fun” cannot be inspired by anything made before one was born. Not that there’s anything inherently inferior about recent, English-language movies, either, but what’s wrong with a kiss, boy? (Yes, I quote ol’ Monty Python a lot.)

I like to counter this narcissistic question with another proposition: “Think of the new music you’ve heard that’s been issued over the last year. Is more of it “better” than what’s been made over the last 100 years? Would it be “elitist” to say that it’s more likely you’ll find more favorites from the last 99 years than from the last one? Even in purely statistical terms, it just makes sense.

Let’s say I’m an even 50 years old. Well, movies themselves have only been around for about 100 years, so I would not be surprised to find that I had at least as many favorites that were made before I was born (1957) as I do that were made since the advent of my existence. Now let’s assume that I am turning 30 in 2007. If I say I’m really interested in movies, then it shouldn’t seem the least bit unlikely that I’ve seen more great movies made between 1900 and 1977 than I have between 1977 and now. Especially since so many of them are so easy to see — whether on basic cable (Turner Classic Movies) or DVD.

I know, I know — there are people who don’t like musical styles of the past, either. They don’t like punk or rockabilly or bebop or big band swing or Western swing or blues or Romanticism or Baroque music. And that’s their taste, and they’re entitled to it. But, if they haven’t been sufficiently exposed to these styles, that doesn’t mean those tastes are terribly well-rounded tastes. (This is where we could argue about whether some “opinions” carry more weight than others in a debate.) We don’t have to like everything, we just need to have enough knowledge and experience to know what it is we don’t like.

The question itself seems understandable, if misguided, at first hearing. Until you consider it for about three seconds. And then you see how insulting it really is, because another underlying assumption is: “You can’t really like that stuff, can you?”

As Sammy Davis, Jr., one wrote: Yes, I can. (Whether Frank Sinatra says it’s OK or not.)

Is Beyonce a greater singer because she’s relatively new and young and recorded with the latest technology? Are Aretha Franklin and Edith Piaf and Dinah Washington and Patsy Cline and Martha Reeves and Susannah McCorkle and Billie Holliday and Astrud Gilberto automatically not as good because they recorded a lot of their best stuff earlier — and some of it was not in English? It just depends on what you like, not on when it was new.

So, why do cinephiles and critics like old movies, and movies from other lands, so much? Maybe for the same reason oenophiles like vintage wines so much: They’ve stood up over time, and different regions have different styles and distinctive flavors. And maybe because it’s part of the definition: Anybody who doesn’t consider movies made more than 10 or 20 or 30 years ago has no business calling him/herself a critic or cinephile any more than somebody who dismisses the traditional cuisines of the world could be considered a gourmet. (I’ve been watching “Top Chef,” you see…)

On ballooning and weenie-wagging in these troubled economic times…

Jim Emerson

Is there supposed to be a connection here?

1) Frank Rich, New York Times, “In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad” (October 24, 2009):

There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.

2) Ken Simmons, The Onion, “In This Economy, It Would Be Crazy To Run Out And Expose Yourself To Your Son’s Soccer Team” (October 27, 2009):

Los Dias de Los Muertos: Thoughts on the dead & undead

Jim Emerson

Just a few pieces from my Days of the Dead art collection that make me very happy. That’s Catrina on the right. Meanwhile, in the rear center, the Virgin of Soledad is calming the “orrendas visiones” of Doña Micaelita Dominguez on Nov. 2, 1897.

“The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery.” — Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, 1976

I’m sure Paz intended that statement as a tribute to the defiant spirit of the people of Mexico.

Seven years ago, my dear friend Julia Sweeney and I were in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the Days of the Dead (Los Dias de Los Muertos), October 31-November 2, the holiday that has had the most personal meaning for me ever since I found out about it. Discovering that there was a three-day holiday — the biggest and most festive of the year, surpassing Christmas even in a now mostly Catholic nation — in which people build altars to remember and celebrate their dead, decorate graves with marigolds and stay up all night drinking and partying in cemeteries, where kids eat sugar skulls and “demons” are invited to join families in dancing and feasting… what a revelation!

View image Señor Deadline sneaks up behind me and fractures my bleeding skull with a golden hammer while I’m seated at my desk.

For somebody who was raised in a culture where death was rarely acknowledged with anything but whispers in hospitals or screams in movie theaters, the Mexican embrace of death with a three-day fiesta seemed to me to move beyond denial to something much richer and healthier. No, I don’t believe the souls of the departed dwell in the Land of the Dead and return to visit their loved ones for three days a year — but I sure think it’s a fantastic idea.

I think Julia was still more or less Catholic (her background) when we were in Mexico — although I’ll never forget her exclaiming, in reference to how the Mixtecs skillfully adapted their pagan gods and beliefs to accommodate, and escape the wrath of, the Spanish missionaries: “Wow, they just took Roman Catholicism and ran with it!” (Viva la Virgin of Guadalupe!)

View image O, happy reunion!

Fifteen months (and one cardiomyopic heart-stoppage on my part) later, we would be in Guangzhou, China, where I accompanied Julia as she adopted her daughter Mulan. While we were in the People’s Republic, we learned that Mulan’s birthday had been November 2, 1999 — All Souls’ Day, the very time we had been on the other side of the world, in Oaxaca, celebrating the Days of the Dead. (Cue Theramin music here.) Neither of us, I think, is inclined to attribute such a delightful and miraculous synchronicity to any Divine Influence or Plan — indeed, we revel in the wonder of such an occurrence all the more because it is so spectacularly fortuitous. (Hi Mu: I’m so glad I was with your mom when you were adopted in China!)

I was introduced to the Days of the Dead through a little import shop on “The Ave” in Seattle’s University District, La Tienda Imports, where as a Junior in high school I discovered a wonderful white coffin with my name on it (“Jaime”). You pull the string at the foot of the coffin and Jaime’s skeletal head pops up through the hole on top of the coffin. This little handcrafted item has been with me for more than 30 years now. In 1976 I saw the extant footage of Sergei Eisenstein’s “Que Viva Mexico” at the Second Seattle International Film Festival at the Moore-Egyptian Theatre, and fell in love with the holiday.

A year or two later I would try a mind-altering substance for the first time (courtesy of “The Dude,” later immortalized in “The Big Lebowski”) deep in the bowels of this same theater on the opening night of that edition of the festival, and then get lost trying to work my way through the “catacombs” to the surface for the midnight premiere of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” still the goriest, funniest, and my favorite of all “undead” movies (I was a little too young for “Night of the Living Dead” when it was first released). John Huston’s underappreciated-masterpiece adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” also begins with Days of the Dead imagery, in Cuernavaca (and the credits sequence is one of the most eerie and delightful I’ve ever seen).

So, I’ve been reflecting on what it is, exactly that scares us so much about the “undead” (in the sense of Romero’s “Living Dead” and other zombie-spawn)? Well, first of all, they’re ugly, smelly, and have a ravenous appetite for human flesh, of course. But a dead body is a dead body — an inert object (see poem by William Carlos Williams at the end of this post). The terrifying thing about the living dead is that they’re dead but they won’t stay that way. It’s not their death that horrifies us, it’s their life — their refusal to play by the rules of the natural world. The living dead are very much like the “pod people” of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” only they have a harder time “passing.” (They still go to the mall, though, in “Dawn of the Dead” — because it was “once an important place in their lives.”)

The Rest is Noise

Jim Emerson

View image A resonant title.

“I am not interested in writing about music as a horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out in front.”

— Alex Ross, December 2004

I’ve just finished reading New Yorker music critic’s Alex Ross’s mind-bogglingly ambitious critical history of modern “classical” music, “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.” It’s 1) a biting, passionate, ironical survey of political, religious and aesthetic fashions and dogmas (from Richard Strauss to Stalin to Boulez); 2) a serial biography, and 3) an illuminating analysis of individual compositions and musical influences. And I’m absolutely dazzled by it. With incisive humor, Ross chronicles various circular debates (historical, personal, nationalistic, musical) concerning whether, at one time or another, a particular work or a composer or a clique was, let’s see, too elitist, too commercial, too bourgeois, too fussy, too fascist, too socialist, too florid, too ascetic, too anal, too free, too beholden to state or other interests, too abstruse, too grandiose, too formal, too casual, too programmatic, too old-fashioned, too melodic, too atonal, etc., etc., etc.

And this was just over last century, when, say, Stravinsky and Shostakovich were hailed and condemned as all of the above — respectively, sequentially, cyclically, and/or simultaneously.

I came across some inspiring remarks Ross made at a 2004 symposium called “Shifting Ears: A Symposium on the Present State and Future of Classical Music Criticism” (see John Fleming’s article in the St. Petersburg Times here). People tend to think of modern classical music as a rarified, elitist realm and movies as a popular industry/art form. But the perceptions are relative: There are big marquee names, big studios (labels, distributors), and major league international venues/festivals in classical music just as there are in movies. And there are academic, niche, or “experimental” circles in both worlds. Ross and John Davidson of Newsday proposed some ways of approaching music that, I think, work just as well for movies. Among Ross’s estimable propositions:

# “We’re all fighters in a strange guerrilla war in which the object is not to defeat an enemy but to win a place at the table. This doesn’t mean you give up objectivity and become a PR agent for the business. It means, instead, that you write with more urgency, more immediacy. The writing itself becomes crucial. Language is our secret weapon.”

# “Classical music has an actual audience and a potential audience. I try to write with both fanatical and unconverted readers in mind. The trick is in finding a language that intrigues both.”

# “Nothing is more off-putting than the critic who puts down one kind of music in order to praise another. There is no need to mention Britney Spears until such time as Ms. Spears writes her first piano quintet.” [This reminds me of Robert Altman’s late-life conviction that he and the studios who once hired him were no longer in the same business, and that neither was interested in making the kinds of movies the other was interested in.]

# “If the big orchestra is playing the same repertory ad nauseam, I don’t have to complain ad nauseam. Instead, I can seek out youth orchestras, new-music ensembles, chamber groups playing in inner-city schools. Critics can take the lead…”

# “There is nothing shameful in unchecked enthusiasm. If I walk out dancing on air, I say it in the review, even if my colleagues smirk.”

“The Rest is Noise,” without necessarily intending to do anything so specific, also provides a welcome perspective on year-end critical/historical summaries, polls, and the illusions of meaning we sometimes try to impose upon them, without much real evidence beyond our own hunches. (That — and not commonplace snarkiness (!) — is what I was attempting to convey with my loopy, switchback sentences in the post below, about the results of the Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll. What direct cause-effect meanings can be teased out of any snapshot consensus, whether it’s a popular election or a secret ballot by committee?)

Ross has posted a paragraph from Marcel Proust on his blog (“The man who saw everything”) that I’m tempted to quote in full because it’s so hilarious in this regard. Instead, I’ll just quote most of it. Ross introduces it as a comment “on the politics of style in twentieth-century music [and] the limits of a teleological interpretation of music history” — but, you know, it could just as well be about movies:

Directorama: Ozu, Ford & Kurosawa (and Ichikawa?)

Jim Emerson

View image In movie heaven.

This may be my favorite strip so far in Peet Gelderblom’s comic “Directorama,” which is being serialized at The House Next Door. In case you haven’t been following it, and you should (see Webcomics Nation for the whole series), it’s described as a weekly chronicle of “the afterlife of a pantheon of legendary directors.

Their mission: To inspire the film-makers carrying the torch back on Earth.” After hearing today that Japanese director Kon Ichikawa (“Fires on the Plain,” “The Burmese Harp,” “An Actor’s Revenge”) had died today at age 92, I imagined him standing just outside these frames…

From Alexander Jacoby’s essay on Ichikawa at senses of cinema”

Of the few Japanese directors who command an international reputation, Kon Ichikawa remains perhaps the least known and the least well understood…. While Ichikawa’s work lacks the obvious integrity of Ozu’s, Mizoguchi’s or Kurosawa’s, its outward variety belies an overall unity, revealed as one probes (in Tom Milne’s phrase) “beneath the skin.”

“We want information!” The Arrival of The Prisoner

Jim Emerson

Here’s just what you’ve been craving: Twelve minutes and 19 seconds of stopping, starting, slowing down and gabbing (I mean, breathless commentary) over the one-minute, 47-second title sequence that introduces each episode of the cult-classic 1967-68 British science-fiction / spy TV series, “The Prisoner,” starring Patrick McGoohan.

I was possessed by the need to do this — just for myself — while (re-)watching the entire series again on DVD and becoming mesmerized by repeat viewings of the opening. It sucked me in every time. I hadn’t seen the show since it aired — on PBS? — in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and this time I was endlessly fascinated and delighted by the sheer sixties-ness of it all — the camera set-ups, optical gimmicks (zooms galore) and cutting techniques that epitomized the era.

Do you want more information about “The Prisoner”…?