I think this film has some serious tonal problems – although it might work for somebody. I’ve read raves. I’ve read “this is the best of the year so far”, etc. I am not trying to say those people are wrong. But the tone of this did not work for me.
My review of Lemon is now up on Rogerebert.com.
Graceland at sunset, 2013, on Elvis’ birthday. Taken by yours truly.
Where Were You When Elvis Died?
by Lester Bangs
The Village Voice, 29 August 1977
Where were you when Elvis died? What were you doing and what did it give you an excuse to do with the rest of your day? That’s what we’ll be talking about in the future when we remember this grand occasion. Like Pearl Harbor or JFK’s assassination, it boiled down to individual reminiscences, which is perhaps as it should be, because in spite of his greatness, etc., etc., Elvis had left us each alone as he was; I mean, he wasn’t exactly a Man of the People anymore, if you get my drift. If you don’t I will drift even further, away from Elvis into contemplation of why all our public heroes seem to reinforce our own solitude.
The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience. Those who indulge in it will ultimately reap the scorn of those they’ve dumped on, whether they live forever like Andy Paleface Warhol or die fashionably early like Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday. The two things that distinguish those deaths from Elvis’s (he and they having drug habits vaguely in common) were that all of them died on the outside looking in and none of them took their audience for granted. Which is why it’s just a little bit harder for me to see Elvis as a tragic figure; I see him as being more like the Pentagon, a giant armored institution nobody knows anything about except that its power is legendary.
Obviously we all liked Elvis better than the Pentagon, but look at what a paltry statement that is. In the end, Elvis’s scorn for his fans as manifested in “new” albums full of previously released material and one new song to make sure all us suckers would buy it was mirrored in the scorn we all secretly or not so secretly felt for a man who came closer to godhood than Carlos Castaneda until military conscription tamed and revealed him for the dumb lackey he always was in the first place. And ever since, for almost two decades now, we’ve been waiting for him to get wild again, fools that we are, and he probably knew better than any of us in his heart of hearts that it was never gonna happen again, his heart of hearts so obviously not being our collective heart of hearts, he being so obviously just some poor dumb Southern boy with a Big Daddy manager to screen the world for him and filter out anything which might erode his status as big strapping baby bringing home the bucks, and finally being sort of perversely celebrated at least by rock critics for his utter contempt for whoever cared about him.
And Elvis was perverse; only a true pervert could put out something like “Having Fun with Elvis On Stage”, that album released three or so years back which consisted entirely of between-song onstage patter so redundant it would make both Willy Burroughs and Gert Stein blush. Elvis was into marketing boredom when Andy Warhol was still doing shoe ads, but Elvis’s sin was his failure to realize that his fans were not perverse – they loved him without qualification, no matter what he dumped on them they loyally lapped it up, and that’s why I feel a hell of a lot sorrier for all those poor jerks than for Elvis himself. I mean, who’s left they can stand all night in the rain for? Nobody, and the true tragedy is the tragedy of an entire generation which refuses to give up its adolescence even as it feels its menopausal paunch begin to blossom and its hair recede over the horizon – along with Elvis and everything else they once thought they believed in. Will they care in five years what he’s been doing for the last twenty?
Sure, Elvis’s death is a relatively minor ironic variant on the future-shock mazurka, and perhaps the most significant thing about Elvis’s exit is that the entire history of the seventies has been retreads and brutal demystification; three of Elvis’s ex-bodyguards recently got together with this hacker from the New York Post and whipped up a book which dosed us with all the dirt we’d yearned for for so long. Elvis was the last of our sacred cows to be publicly mutilated; everybody knows Keith Richard likes his junk, but when Elvis went onstage in a stupor nobody breathed a hint of “Quaalude….” In a way, this was both good and bad, good because Elvis wasn’t encouraging other people to think it was cool to be a walking Physicians’ Desk Reference, bad because Elvis stood for that Nixonian Secrecy-as-Virtue which was passed off as the essence of Americanism for a few years there. In a sense he could be seen not only as a phenomenon that exploded in the fifties to help shape the psychic jailbreak of the sixties but ultimately as a perfect cultural expression of what the Nixon years were all about. Not that he prospered more then, but that his passion for the privacy of potentates allowed him to get away with almost literal murder, certainly with the symbolic rape of his fans, meaning that we might all do better to think about waving good-bye with one upraised finger.
I got the news of Elvis’s death while drinking beer with a friend and fellow music journalist on his fire escape on 21st Street in Chelsea. Chelsea is a good neighborhood; in spite of the fact that the insane woman who lives upstairs keeps him awake all night every night with her rants at no one, my friend stays there because he likes the sense of community within diversity in that neighborhood: old-time card-carrying Communists live in his building alongside people of every persuasion popularly lumped as “ethnic.” When we heard about Elvis we knew a wake was in order, so I went out to the deli for a case of beer. As I left the building I passed some Latin guys hanging out by the front door. “Heard the news? Elvis is dead!” I told them. They looked at me with contemptuous indifference. So What. Maybe if I had told them Donna Summer was dead I might have gotten a reaction; I do recall walking in this neighborhood wearing a T-shirt that said “Disco Sucks” with a vast unamused muttering in my wake, which only goes to show that not for everyone was Elvis the still-reigning King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, in fact not for everyone is rock ‘n’ roll the still-reigning music. By now, each citizen has found his own little obsessive corner to blast his brain in: as the sixties were supremely narcissistic, solipsism’s what the seventies have been about, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the world of “pop” music. And Elvis may have been the greatest solipsist of all.
I asked for two six-packs at the deli and told the guy behind the counter the news. He looked fifty years old, greying, big belly, life still in his eyes, and he said: “Shit, that’s too bad. I guess our only hope now is if the Beatles get back together.”
Fifty years old.
I told him I thought that would be the biggest anticlimax in history and that the best thing the Stones could do now would be to break up and spare us all further embarrassments.
He laughed, and gave me directions to a meat market down the street. There I asked the counterman the same question I had been asking everyone. He was in his fifties too, and he said, “You know what? I don’t care that bastard’s dead. I took my wife to see him in Vegas in ’73, we paid fourteen dollars a ticket, and he came out and sang for twenty minutes. Then he fell down. Then he stood up and sang a couple more songs, then he fell down again. Finally he said, ‘well, shit, I might as well sing sitting as standing.’ So he squatted on the stage and asked the band what song they wanted to do next, but before they could answer he was complaining about the lights. ‘They’re too bright,’ he says. ‘They hurt my eyes. Put ’em out or I don’t sing a note.’ So they do. So me and my wife are sitting in total blackness listening to this guy sing songs we knew and loved, and I ain’t just talking about his old goddam songs, but he totally butchered all of ’em. Fuck him. I’m not saying I’m glad he’s dead, but I know one thing: I got taken when I went to see Elvis Presley.”
I got taken too the one time I saw Elvis, but in a totally different way. It was the autumn of 1971, and two tickets to an Elvis show turned up at the offices of Creem magazine, where I was then employed. It was decided that those staff members who had never had the privilege of witnessing Elvis should get the tickets, which was how me and art director Charlie Auringer ended up in nearly the front row of the biggest arena in Detroit. Earlier Charlie had said, “Do you realize how much we could get if we sold these fucking things?” I didn’t, but how precious they were became totally clear the instant Elvis sauntered onto the stage. He was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ’65, never even came close.
There was Elvis, dressed up in this ridiculous white suit which looked like some studded Arthurian castle, and he was too fat, and the buckle on his belt was as big as your head except that your head is not made of solid gold, and any lesser man would have been the spittin’ image of a Neil Diamond damfool in such a getup, but on Elvis it fit. What didn’t? No matter how lousy his records ever got, no matter how intently he pursued mediocrity, there was still some hint, some flash left over from the days when…well, I wasn’t there, so I won’t presume to comment. But I will say this: Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting “popular arts” and “America” in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.
I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates. That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many. And this after a decade and a half of crappy records, of making a point of not trying.
If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.
I am so happy to sing the praises for Film Comment‘s TCM Diary of an acting career that has been ignored, dismissed, scorned, from the jump.
I’ve written about Elvis’ acting a lot here on my site, but rarely anywhere else, at least not an outlet like this – so I’m grateful that Film Comment heard my unconventional (to say the least) pitch and said, “Yes.”
I’m not big on commemorating death-dates. I prefer the birth dates. But August 16th is the 40th anniversary of Elvis’ death at the age of 42. Been working on a big essay about him scheduled to go up next week at an undisclosed outlet. I pitched it, and they took it, bless them.
It’s been Elvis 24/7 around here for 2 weeks. Buried in research and viewing. So much fun. But exhausting.
For Hope, too. I mean, look at this tableau.
There’s something emotional about digging down to write about him. There always has been. Whatever it is that my obsession for this man taps into … it goes very deep.
It has something to do with joy.
“In a time lacking in truth and certainty, filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.” — Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan was poetry editor of The New Yorker for years, so she was responsible, at the time, for setting the standard for the poetry selected. This was for better or worse. Her influence was seen by many as outsized. Her idea of what poetry was, what it should sound like, became the standard. Elizabeth Bishop joked in her letters to Robert Lowell about how she was writing this or that poem to pass Bogan’s standards, because she needed the money.
Bogan’s own poetry is not sentimental. She couldn’t afford it. She had many nervous breakdowns through her life, yet still managed to be productive as hell (not a small feat). You get the sense in her work that she couldn’t afford to dwell on her feelings. Her interest was in carving out the extraneous elements of things like fear of death, womanhood, nightmares, pain – and seeing what was left on the table. Bogan was glad that the 19th century, with its accepted assumptions and lies, was over. She was glad there was such a thing as psychoanalysis, and she was glad to see things progress. In 1951, she wrote that it was good to open up “fresh sources of moral, as well as of aesthetic courage”, and she felt poetry could handle “subconscious and irrational processes”. She loved Rilke and Yeats.
It’s well worth it to read the following piece about Louise Bogan’s prose, including her 1923 essay “The Springs of Poetry,” included in full at the link.
Any writer will probably recognize her words on procrastination and avoidance: one will do ANYTHING to avoid sitting down to write.
She was born in 1897 and died in 1970. Her parents were Irish, but she was born in Maine. She married, had a child, went to Boston University.
“Women” is perhaps her best-known poem. She looks at other women and wishes she had less “wilderness” in her. Wilderness meaning: madness, chaos, griefs, confusion. Someone said they admired my intensity recently, and it was a very sweet comment, but my response was: I’m not sure such intensity is actually healthy or good or helpful, although it honestly is just the way I am built. But it is nothing to be romantic about. It is actually quite terrible (or it can be).
It reminds me a bit of an exchange from Men in Black that I love and reference often, especially in current mood-of-the-times when platitudes (“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” “If you love something set it free …” “Everything happens for a reason.”) are used so indiscriminately that it starts to seem callous, to those of us who don’t bounce back from things with dispatch. These people who say such things seem to want to SKIP OVER the pain part. Anyway, here’s the Men in Black exchange:
Jay: “You know what they say. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Kay: “Try it.”
In Louise Bogan’s “Women” I feel her separateness from her gender, from certain types of experience. It’s brutal and critical (reminiscent of Rebecca West’s famous observation that while men are “lunatics”, women are “idiots,” and by that she meant women had a tendency to wrap themselves up in personal concerns – even activist women like the suffragette groups she started out with: What’s all this talk about sex and husbands not doing housework? What about economic and political and social injustice? Women trained by society to be small and personal when they should be big and political.) Despite Bogan’s brutal eye, I also feel a bit of wistfulness in the poem. She may seem to be saying, “God, your life is so dull”, but after a time, one gets a little sick of “excitement”, you get worn out, and a little “dullness” might be welcome.
Only maybe by that point you are no longer capable of it.
WOMEN
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead.
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.
They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.
They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.
They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.
They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.
Louise Bogan, letter, May 1, 1938:
[I was born] ten years before Auden, Isherwood, and L. MacNeice, and about two thousand years after Sappho.
William Rose Benet:
Her poetry is, and always has been, intensely personal. She has inherited the Celtic magic of language, but has blended it somehow with the tartness of New England.
Thomas Lask, The New York Times:
[Bogan] took a median position between the New Criticism at one end and sociological (or Marxian) criticism at the other. She refused to identify the poet with the historical processes of his age…On the other hand, she was not willing to strip the work down to its formal elements only, as if the poet was a disembodied muse living in no fixed time or place and without those idiosyncrasies that made him what he was and no other. There is also little poking around in myth or in depth psychology… [Her] manner was so quiet, her style so unemphatic that they sometimes obscured the force of her judgments…She could be wrong and she could be disappointing in her pieces, which is to say that she was mortal. An exquisite and scrupulous craftsman with a leaning to order, she had a natural tendency to respond to formal workmanship.
Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:
Though Bogan is usually categorized as a metaphysical poet, influenced by John Donne, T.S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom, her poetry actually was haunted by William Butler Yeats’s powerful work, with overtones also of Emily Dickinson.
Louise Bogan:
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
Brett C. Millier:
One of the finest lyric poets America has produced…The fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending.
Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
In 1919, Louise Bogan moved to New York, eventually becoming the poetry editor of The New Yorker; she, too, strongly advocated poetry in traditional meter and rhyme, but her polished poems explore terrors and griefs that elude strict control.
Marianne Moore:
Louise Bogan’s art is compactness compacted. Emotion with her, as she has said of certain fiction is ‘itself form, the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.’ She uses a kind of forged rhetoric that nevertheless seems inevitable.
Richard Eberhart, The New York Times:
Louise Bogan’s poems adhere to the center of English with a dark lyrical force. What she has to say is important. How she says it is pleasing. She is a compulsive poet first, a stylist second. When compulsion and style meet, we have a strong, inimitable Bogan poem.
Louise Bogan, “The Springs of Poetry” (1923) – read in full here:
Sometimes the poet does not entirely succeed in diverting his energies. He expresses himself, determined to take a holiday from any emotion at all, being certain that to hear, see, smell and touch, merely, is enough. His hand has become chilled, from being held too long against the ground to feel how it is cold; his mind flinches at cutting down once again into the dark with the knife of irony or analysis.
So he writes a poem at third, fourth, or fifth hand, bred out of some delicate fantastic ruse of the brain. Even at its best a poem cannot come straight out of the heart, but must break away in some oblique fashion from the body of sorrow or joy, — be the mask, not the incredible face, — yet the synthetic poem can never be more than a veil dropped before a void. It may sound, to change the images, in ears uninitiate to the festival, but never to those, who, having once heard, can recognize again the maenad cry.
Brett C. Millier:
The difficulties and instabilities of her childhood produced in Bogan a preoccupation with betrayal and a distrust of others, a highly romantic nature, and a preference for the arrangements of art over grim, workaday reality.
Paul Ramsey, Iowa Review:
Louise Bogan is a great lyric poet. To say that some of her lyrics will last as long as English is spoken is to say too little. For since value inheres in eternity, the worth of her poems is not finally to be measured by the length of enduring. To have written ‘Song for the Last Act,’ ‘Old Countryside,’ ‘Men Loved Wholly beyond Wisdom,’ … and some dozens of other poems of very nearly comparable excellence is to have wrought one of the high achievements of the human spirit, and to deserve our celebration and our love.
Louise Bogan, journal entry:
The month, the time of day; children are coming indoors from roads bordered by orchards heavy with apples, into rooms with looped-back curtains, and old mirrors. Among the dahlias and asters of the lots gardens, their mothers pull the dried clothes from the line, reaching their arms above their heads so that their cotton dresses under the shawl thrown about their shoulders are pulled tightly upward from the thin apron string binding their waists. The wind rattles the lattice over the wellhead; the house smells of freshly baked bread. It is already dark; the month goes on; the apples will be gathered tomorrow.
The age when one looks at the date on pennies, watches people’s eyes and mouths, believes that something marvelous may go on in a shuttered house.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Bogan praised the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke for qualities displayed by her own verse–the patience and power of looking and the ability to carry through a single poetic concept informed by passion. She also admired the lyric poetry of W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden. Though her poems are terse and unadjectival, they are oftne visionary. This is so whether they work with personal experience, always distilled, or with traditional myth (“Medusa” and “Cassandra”). “Women” bitterly pretends to specify the qualities women do not have, but indicates those they posses. Bogan works with a chisel rather than a brush, priding herself on spareness of line and on avoiding sentimentality, while making room for grief.
Louise Bogan, journal entry:
The early darkness in September comes as the most blessed relief in the year. Pale green celery tops sprout out of bags in the delivery boys’ carts and a mottled light falls over the shady side of the street, reflected from the windows in high buildings. Early morning in September.
Louise Bogan, “The Springs of Poetry” (1923):
The poem is always a last resort.
Brett C. Millier:
Her poems are by no means dogmatically feminist; Bogan held a deep distrust for all ideological commitment. In fact, she has been castigated somewhat unfairly by contemporary feminists.
Review in Books:
[Bogan] has achieved a mastery of form rare in the realm of modern poetry. There is creative architecture in even the slightest of her lyrics. Miss Bogan works not as a landscape painter (while her visual imagery is exact, it does not depend on color alone), nor yet as a musician—-although in many of her poems, the auditory imagery is superior to the visual: the ear listens, even as the eye sees. Her art is that of a sculpture.
New York Times review of The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968:
Now that we can see the sweep of forty-five years work in this collection of over a hundred poems, we can judge what a feat of character it has been…[Her diction] stems from the severest lyrical tradition in English…[Her language is] as supple as it is accurate, dealing with things in their own tones.”
Sheila, don’t worry about how your classmate makes the birdfeeder. You got this.
I look at myself here and see the Bold Rebel who will quit Girl Scouts the following year due to total indifference towards crafts. I see the Bold Rebel who then joined Little League, before there was even a “girls’ league.” I played with the boys, the only girl not only on the team but in the League. Listen, I grew up pre-Title IX. What the hell else was I supposed to do? Suffer it out in Girl Scouts making cupcakes and duffel bags and hating every second of it?
Said classmate by the way was a classic Queen Bee and I was still (somewhat) under her sway when this photo was taken. The big rebellion would come the following year. I remember a group of us having a conference about it, a fraught with tension 9-year-old conference. She used to make us tie her shoes. I mean, she went far beyond bossy. She was a tyrant-Pharaoh. So we all huddled together, coming up with a plan of active resistance: “Okay, next time she asks me to tie her shoes, I’m going to say no. But you have to say no too when she asks you.” We understood the importance of a united front.
I remember just where we were when I made my first refusal: on the curving street in the neighborhood where I grew up. A bunch of us were walking together, and suddenly Queen Bee stopped, stuck out her foot and said to me, “Could you tie my shoe?”
I said the immortal words, “Tie it yourself.”
There was a dangerous silence. We all just stood there, waiting to see what horrible thing would happen. Nothing horrible happened. The “friendship” was never the same after that.
And then I quit Girl Scouts.
The line “That bad, huh” – said in the bathroom by a guy at the urinal, after watching a weeping Tom Sizemore pour the coffee into the trough and then throw the cup out – has had me laughing out loud all morning.
Plus James … singing the song he sang with Maddie and Donna … I feel like I didn’t breathe the entire time.
The conga line through the insurance office. I went back and watched it again just to watch Dougie’s face. I highly recommend doing that.
Boxing is a theme. I don’t know what it means, but boxing is everywhere.
Big Ed! His haircut! I was hoping he would show up.
That credits sequence. My God.
This episode was superb.
This is an incredible movie. Here is my review at Ebert.
1. I can’t believe it’s a directorial debut.
2. It’s so beautiful to look at I can’t stop thinking about it.
3. It made me cry.
4. It made me look at my familiar surroundings with fresh eyes.
Please see it. With all the conversations about empty tentpole summer blockbusters, and pointless reboots, along comes a film that is original, thoughtful, unique, quiet in its approach … and it needs to be supported. Financially. Numbers matter.
Also, now I must visit Columbus, Indiana.
Six Figures Getting Sick (1966; d. David Lynch)
Natalie reminded me of this short film from David Lynch when we were discussing all of the vomit on Twin Peaks: The Return. I went back and watched it – it’s on YouTube – and it’s … hilarious? He definitely has some obsession with what comes OUT of us.
The Hero (2017; d. Brett Haley)
Sam Elliott has always been good and always a welcome presence. He is sometimes too easily type-cast. The voice! The stache! The old-school Western cowboy gangliness! But BOY is he having a time right now. He’s old. And he’s doing some REALLY interesting stuff. If you haven’t seen Grandma with Lily Tomlin (very good), he’s in only one scene but he nearly takes away the whole thing. He OBLITERATES the mood set up in the film, and it takes a while for the film to even recover. And that’s exactly right, that’s exactly what the scene was designed to do. I can’t recommend that film enough. In The Hero, director Brett Haley uses all of Elliott’s strengths, as well as using audience identification with his persona. He plays a voiceover actor, who once upon a time starred in a famous Western, a Western still fondly remembered. That was decades ago. Now he smokes weed and tries to connect with his estranged daughter and … drifts. Not much happens. And it’s not operatically self-important (like “Oh, ‘lo, how a great man has fallen”) … it’s quiet. A character study.
Blue Velvet (1986; d. David Lynch)
It had been a long time since I’ve seen it. It’s good to re-visit. I saw it in its first release in the movie theatre. Will never forget it. I’ll leave to to David Foster Wallace to really describe what that experience was like for him, how it released him, opened him up. It was an extremely upsetting film, and it’s seared into my brain, as I know it is for many. Also: DEAN STOCKWELL.
The Big Sick (2017; d. Michael Showalter)
I thought it was just wonderful. Clearly a very personal story. It shows a demographic we haven’t seen in American cinema, at least not in this way. In this way, it’s a very important film. It’s also funny and tender and real with wonderful performances all around.
Wizard of Lies (2017; d Barry Levinson)
Robert De Niro as Bernie Madoff. I thought it was fantastic. Great acting.
The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 1, Episode 10
I need to re-read the book. I’m not remembering a lot of this. I have spoken before about how they have opened up the narration, moving it away from Offred’s point of view, showing events she is not privy to. I understand the attempt. I think it weakens the story. But the whole thing has been fascinating to watch.
The Keepers (2017; d. Ryan White)
What an incredible documentary. Nominated for an Emmy. I’m so happy. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor. All 6 episodes are streaming on Netflix. Beautifully constructed. Holds its cards close to its chest. But the old-lady Nancy Drews who have taken on this investigation? I love them so much. True heroes.
Casting JonBenet (2017; d. Kitty Green)
I’m just not sure what I feel about this. Mainly because I can’t figure out – in watching it – what the attempt is, what the director is going for. And so I can’t really judge whether it succeeds or fails in that respect. There were interesting aspects to it. But it felt exploitive and I’m not sure why.
The Road (2009; d. John Hillcoat)
I agree with Roger Ebert’s review. If you’ve read the book, then something is missing in presenting it visually. What is missing is THE thing that makes that book so harrowing. Cinema is a visual medium, blah blah … but the visuals here are superb. Amazing world-creation. But the ESSENCE isn’t there, because the ESSENCE is NOT visual and can’t be shown visually. It’s Cormac McCarthy’s WORDS that are the essence.
Austin Found (2017; d. Will Raee)
Reviewed for Ebert. Has some good things – Craig Robinson – but it doesn’t really work.
The Outsiders (1983; d. Francis Ford Coppola)
I just re-read the book after having a conversation about it with my sister (she teaches it every year to her middle schoolers). I don’t think I’ve read it since I was 15 or something, although I remember it vividly. Stay gold, Ponyboy! Dally! Sodapop! Darry! Two-Bits! The pure homoeroticism of it. The operatic emotionalism of it. And DAMMIT if that book doesn’t hold up. And DAMMIT I freakin’ cried when Darry hugged Ponyboy at the hospital. You got me, Hinton! You wrote this book when you were 15! I hate you!! So after I re-read the book, I watched the movie. Again, I haven’t seen it probably since it first came out. It is shot so gorgeously by Coppola: he understands the epic quality of the story (to teenagers), and that the strong intense emotions had to be felt in the visuals. I mean look at this.
Stunning! And then there’s Pony and Johnny stand against a pink sunset and Pony quotes Robert Frost, and their silhouettes are black against the pink and it’s all so overblown and romantic that you’d think you were watching a Douglas Sirk movie. The FORM fits the CONTENT. He does not condescend to the core audience, which were teenage girls and gay boys. He gives them what they want, and then some. Coppola at his very auteurist best. Okay, maybe “Rumble Fish” is his auteurist best, but this is pretty close.
The Wave (2008; d. Dennis Gansel)
There’s an American version of this story which I saw a million years ago, I think even when I was a teenager and it played on television. It haunted me, an image of Fascist propaganda and how it works and how it took over a high school because a teacher wanted to teach the students a lesson. His experiment worked better than he could have hoped and he watches in horror at the results. This German version is interesting. It was streaming on Netflix. Because it’s a German film, there are some interesting connections made that wasn’t there in the American, where the vibe is like Sinclair Lewis’ sarcastically titled book It Can’t Happen Here. Well, the Germans KNOW it can happen. The struggle the teacher faces with his students is their complacency: “We already went through that. It’s over. It couldn’t ever happen again.”
Twin Peaks: The Return, episodes 8 – 12
I continue to be in heaven that this thing even exists. And that it’s unfolding as it is. It’s major. I can’t get my mind around it yet because I’m too in it, but even when it’s frustrating … I LOVE it. I LOVE it beCAUSE it’s frustrating. Stop giving me exactly what I need, culture. Start challenging me. Start making me work. Start making me think. It’s just been a great experience and as Natalie said in the comments section … I’m already feeling anxious about it being over. I’ve been so into it. I’ve NEEDED it. I think we all have.
The Sopranos, Season 1 – 5
Yes. A re-watch. I haven’t watched the series since it was appointment-TV in its original airing. My roommate and I cleared our schedules for Sunday night. It’s an amazingly consistent series. Honestly, not too many bumps in the road. The biggest bump is “Christopher,” and that’s one episode. A total anomaly. But the great episodes (“Pine Barrens,” especially) are just as great as they seemed on first viewing. Re-watching I’m actually amazed that people were pissed about the ending. To me, the ending – its ambiguity, its quick and ambivalent blackout, its sense that the 4 characters at that table have compromised themselves so totally that they are completely lost (or, that’s the sense I got) – is there in the pilot. The show was not about its plot. It was about its MOOD, and its ethical and moral contemplations. A man struggling with his conscience. A man struggling to CREATE a conscience. I don’t pity Tony Soprano. I think he’s a monster. It is Gandolfini’s GENIUS that makes it not only tolerable to spend time in his company, but … morally edifying? At the risk of sounding like a Victorian spinster? Tony Soprano – and Carmela especially, in his entourage – make me think about things, question complicity, morality, etc. It’s very tough stuff. The boobs and guns and gangsters are totally peripheral to those main concerns.
Birthright: A War Story (2017; d. Civia Tamarkin)
Reviewed for Ebert. Abortion documentary. Eh. It’s okay.
The Girl Without Hands (2017; d. Sébastien Laudenbach)
Reviewed for Ebert. Such stunning animation. Beautiful film.
To the Bone (2017; d. Marti Noxon)
Reviewed for Ebert. I didn’t really care for a lot of it, although Keanu Reeves is in it, and that’s always a good thing.
Shane (1953; d. George Stevens)
Mitchell was here with me and we watched Shane. Neither of us had seen it in a long time. We had some amazing conversations about it, which maybe I’ll discuss here eventually when I have time. Our conversations had to do with masculinity, the tropes thereof, Stevens’ commentary on it. For example, Stevens doesn’t put music underneath the big fight scene in the bar: it unfolds in all its stupid pointless brutality with nothing “pumping it up”. And so the fight instead of heroic looks gross. Men being stupid. Men being gross and territorial. Big BORES. Which is part of the point of the movie: these men sniff out something “different” in “Shane” and want it gone. What do they smell? Is he not … masculine enough? But boy he’s quick with his guns. Men have clumped up and behave in the most limited and conventional way possible and Shane does not play by those rules. And they want it GONE. (It’s Billy-Buddy-ish.) Everyone picks up on the different-ness of Shane. The kid. The wife. (Jean Arthur in her final role.) The husband. (Van Heflin). All three have a crush on Shane. Shane is sexually ambiguous. He is filmed that way. He is completely mysterious, a projection screen for others. It’s a great entry in the queer canon. The next film Mitchell and I watched together is the film below, and we realized that the two would make a PERFECT double bill.
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016; d. Richard Linklater)
God, I loved this movie. Reviewed for Ebert. Mitchell had never seen it. I own it. It was 900 degrees outside and my study is air-conditioned. It was a perfect day. And again, the film has a lot to say about masculinity, although Linklater doesn’t find it as gross or unappealing as Stevens does. Linklater is gentler. BUT. BUT. During the fight at the disco bar, Mitchell noticed immediately that the song Linklater had playing underneath was Donna Summers’ “Bad Girls.” COME ON. We were ROARING. I think Mitchell’s favorite line might have been, “This shirt makes me fuckin’ sad.” We also guffawed at the line: “From disco snatch to country poon!” I HIGHLY recommend watching Shane and Everybody Wants Some!! back to back.
Supernatural Season 3, Episode 4 “Sin City” (2007; d. Charles Beeson)
In preparation for my next re-cap! The show goes all Western-Tombstone-Virginia City. Major Briggs from Twin Peaks and Scully’s dad from X-Files (Don S. Davis) shows up as the big-wig in the town. Pretty small role. The episode has a lot of problems, mood, tone, plot … but the center scene – Dean and the demon – is extraordinarily written and performed (and filmed). Two actors in a confined space having to create this thing together, this scene. Many dips and sways and swerves. It’s gorgeous.
The Incredible Jessica James (2017; d. Jim Strouse)
Really enjoyed this. Reviewed for Ebert.
