“If you’re going to make a gesture, make it.” — John Wayne

John_Wayne - red river

For his birthday:

One of my favorite quotes about acting comes from John Wayne. It’s included in Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors:

Peter Bogdanovich: Your gestures in pictures are often daring — large — and show the kind of freedom and lack of inhibition you have. Did you get that from Ford, or did you always have that?

John Wayne: No, I think that’s the first lesson you learn in a high school play — that if you’re going to make a gesture, make it.

“If you’re going to make a gesture, make it.”

If you think that’s easy, try it yourself. I dare you.

So much bad phony acting comes from half-hearted gestures, cliched gestures, or sketched-in unfinished gestures. Audiences see the phoniness from miles and miles away.

Stanley Crouch, in his essay about a John Ford/John Wayne box-set talks about an unforgettable gesture made by John Wayne in a horrifying moment in the film:

When Wayne, as Ethan, comes upon the black smoke and the orange flame of the burning house left by the Comanches, his face is one of absolute terror, panic, and rage. At the top of a hill, Wayne flings out his right arm to free his rifle from the long, colorful buckskin sleeve in which it has been sheathed. The force of that flung arm is one of the most explosive gestures in all of cinema, and also among the most impotent: No one down there is alive, and Ethan knows it. He is, at that moment, like the man in Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death who so impressed Hemingway because his choice was to draw a sword when faced with the irreversible horror of encroaching doom.

David Thomson wrote of John Wayne in his The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

He moved the way singers sing, with huge confidence and daring.

Wayne was so good physically, so … eloquent … physically … that he’s the kind of actor where you remember him from how he moved, from the gestures he made. I have my favorites. The fight scene in Red River. The aforementioned gesture with the rifle in The Searchers. His stunning first appearance in Stagecoach where his body/facial express/emotion/adrenaline course off the screen in one continuous wave (captured by John Ford’s very quick push-in to Wayne’s face – so quick that the image blurs out for a second.)

He makes an electric impression of vitality, breath, readiness, just standing there.

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But there’s one moment I’d like to discuss and that’s from The Angel and the Badman (1947). It’s a sweet movie about an outlaw, Quirt Evans (Wayne), with people on his trail, wanting to kill him or arrest him. He who holes up with a Quaker family (shades of Witness). Naturally, there is a beautiful Quaker daughter (Gail Russell), and the two fall in love … but she’s an angel and he’s a badman, and what are the star-crossed lovers to do? Will he give up his gun? Will he be able to resist the siren call of vengeance? There are scenes of action (a thrilling chase through Monument Valley), shoot-outs, and a hilarious group fight scene in a saloon (“Hey, Quirt, how ya doin’?” says his friend in the middle of the fight, before getting punched out of the frame) but it’s really a romance. John Wayne is wonderful in romantic material. He’s so open with that part of himself.

angel-and-the-badman

There’s a scene where he is recovering from an injury in the Quaker house. It’s night. He’s upstairs talking to the Quaker girl, and there’s some flirtatious banter going on that also has about it a sense of their philosophical differences. They discuss things. She’s forthright. He’s not used to that in women. She just comes right out and says stuff. He likes her. A lot. Outside though, darker forces gather. He is being tracked by a U.S. Marshal as well as a group of outlaws, looking to take him down. He hears the sounds of hooves approaching. The Quaker family has taken his bullets, and there isn’t time to retrieve them.

Wayne, clutching his useless gun, rushes down the stairs.

Director James Edward Grant places the camera at the back of the room in the downstairs area, facing the front door. So here’s the moment, which is more a one-man ballet/symphony of movement than anything else:

John Wayne comes barreling down the stairs, glances around in a panic, sees the situation, makes a decision, and launches to his left to grab his hat off the wall. Then, in two successive swoops, he swipes his hat at the first lantern to put it out, and then the second lantern. The lamps are far apart, so this requires him to fling his body around. The gesture is magnificent, and all of a piece. Once the lights are out, he grabs a chair, swings it around, and sits on it, facing the front door, ready for who is about to enter. All done with no cuts.

That is what Wayne was talking about when he said “if you’re going to make a gesture, make it.”

That’s what it looks like. In the gesture there is everything: there are about 5 objectives, interspersed with moments for improvisational thought. This is how people actually behave in the middle of a crisis, although perhaps they are not as graceful as Wayne. But you have to problem-solve in the moment. You don’t always know what to do next since in reality you have no “blocking”. You’re making it up as you go. Quirt Evans, grabbing his hat to get those lights because he doesn’t have time to methodically turn out each one, is making it up as he goes.

Because John Wayne is a graceful actor, these gestures flow, one to the other, in a beautiful ballet of motivated movement.

Down the stairs.
Glance around – too much light – too much light –
See hat. Get idea. Grab Hat.
Put out that first light – SWOOSH.
Put out that second light – SWOOSH.
Grab chair, swing it around, plop his ass down.
Ready.

It’s a glorious pantomime.

The entire movie is on Youtube and the sequence in question starts at 29:10

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Guess who’s back. Back again. Shady’s back. Tell a friend.

Pete Davidson and Eminem, the progression:

December 6, 2020:

March 28, 2021:

May 22, 2022:

This past Saturday, Pete Davidson did his third Eminem sketch on SNL, this time a joke about Lorne Michaels wanting to “do a music video” with him. Lorne is all sad-face-emoji because Pete hasn’t included him in these projects. Lorne has written a rap song, and he wants Pete to do it. Pete feels bad: Lorne has done so much for his career, how could he have “forgotten about Lorne?” So they “do a music video” together, a song that sounds suspiciously like “Forgot About Dre”. (The lyrics are a fun little history of SNL, and the stars Lorne Michaels has brought into this world. It’s telling that more men are shouted out than women. This is my only complaint.)

Suddenly, the video is interrupted by Eminem himself, standing on the sidelines, telling Pete to “stop” doing these “parody” videos of his songs because they’re “stupid.” It’s obvious Eminem’s spot was filmed in a separate location from Pete’s – but still, it’s funny, and a callback to the first of Pete Davidson’s Eminem videos, “Stu” (a spin on “Stan”), where Eminem shows up on the television at the end, opening a Christmas gift while wearing a Run DMC Christmas sweater. (lol)

When “Stu” aired, in December of 2020, Eminem had literally not been seen for almost an entire year. Remember 2020. Remember the chaos. Suddenly celebrities were even more ubiquitous, and yet in a different context: chatting from their homes, going live on Instagram, the whole 2020-pandemic thing. We were all in this together. (Well, except for the morons who refused to take any of it seriously. Fuck those people.) But nothing from Eminem. Total silence. Crickets. LOUD crickets. You almost wanted to call up the Detroit police and request a wellness check. Proof of life, at LEAST. The man literally had not been SEEN. There were indications that he was, indeed, alive, but he himself had not been seen. (I wrote about this progression back in December 2020.) Rumors swirled that he was holed up making an album. He had just come out with an album in January 2020 – wild timing – and the long silence indicated he must be working on something. The first time his face was seen in almost a year was in that Pete Davidson “Stan” sketch. There he was, on TV! Proof of life! Just two weeks later, he dropped the second album of 2020, part 2 of his Alfred Hitchcock inspired project. It was in retrospect that it all made sense: it was like the SNL spot acted as an advance warning bell that something, indeed, was coming. It was brilliant timing, so brilliant that I am sure it was deliberate. Who needs a PR rep, who needs teasers, when you can show up in an SNL spot – and get everyone talking about you just two weeks before you drop an album? Pete Davidson’s spot did the work for Eminem.

In March of last year, Pete Davidson did his second Eminem spot, lampooning NFTs, via a tribute to Eminem’s famous “Without Me” video. Eminem did, eventually, address these spots in an interview with Zane Lowe. He thought they were funny, and he also complimented Davidson’s “flow”. Which … is amazing. Eminem is very calculated in what he acknowledges, and how he speaks about other artists. And he is also notoriously thin-skinned. But he got what Davidson was doing, and understood the affection underlying these parodies.

Once is random, twice is a pattern.

The past year has been similarly lacking in Eminem sightings, except for the MADNESS of the Super Bowl performance, a great culmination/cultural validation for him and for everyone on that stage (and for 50Cent, UNDER the stage).

So that’s how it goes, as Eminem approaches his 50th birthday (which is insane). There are months of radio silence, with nary a blurry picture taken of him in line at Starbucks. No fan-uploaded pics of him seen out and about. How is this possible? Does he really never leave his house?

This extended period of silence has gotten the fans gossiping again. He must be working on something. All he does is work. He never goes on vacation, he barely leaves Detroit (as far as we know). What ELSE is he doing BUT working on an album? Fans read the tea leaves, analyzing random people’s Instagram posts looking for clues, etc. They say stuff like, “His last album came out on the third week of the month, so I am sure his new album will drop on the third week of THIS month. Mark my words.” The third week of the month comes and goes.It doesn’t stop the rumor mill. I’m trying to think of another famous person whose career looks like this. Taylor Swift, maybe? She’s more “out there” in the public eye, though. She is actually SEEN in the WORLD in between projects. Kanye, maybe, although he comes with all this other weird drama. Nobody else is just not seen ever, and nobody else drops an album with no advance warning, and then barely tours, before subsiding into silence and obscurity again. It’s weird.

So this past Saturday came “Forgot About Lorne” on SNL. And there was Eminem in it, alive and well.

The fans exploded. Something’s coming, something’s coming. It can’t just be a random fun thing, Eminem appearing in an SNL sketch. It has to mean something ELSE.

Two days later, via Instagram, Eminem and Eminem’s manager Paul Rosenberg dropped a snippet of a song Eminem wrote – with CeeLo Green (!!!) – which will be included in the soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis movie.

All of the rumors had been about a new album. Nobody guessed that Eminem would be attached to the Elvis movie. From the beginning, Eminem has been compared to Elvis, mostly because of the racial implications of a white man “doing black music”. And becoming a huge star with it. Eminem has acknowledged Elvis multiple times in his songs – and has also “portrayed” him three times (maybe more?) in various music videos. Eminem always acknowledges uncomfortable truths. He doesn’t just acknowledge them. He embodies them. He just stands there and he makes everyone uncomfortable. He is aware of what Elvis means in certain sections of American culture. He knows the early history of rock ‘n roll. He knows who Rosetta Tharpe is (a clip of him talking about Chuck Berry and Rosetta Tharpe – and all of the issues surrounding the rise of Elvis – as well as his own rise – is included on Royce da 5’9’s last album, which came out last year. Hearing Eminem talk knowledgeably about Rosetta Tharpe … I almost fainted.) You can’t ignore these things, you have to deal with them.

And what better way to DEAL with it than by writing a new song to be included on the soundtrack for an Elvis biopic? It feels meant to be, pre-destined, perfect.

The song is called “The King and I” – a title reverberating with fascinating associations.

Elvis just premiered at Cannes. I haven’t seen it yet. I am dreading it, I also can’t wait.

But at the moment, what I really can’t wait for is to hear “The King and I” in its entirety. And I love CeeLo Green! Off the top of my head, these two men have not collaborated before.

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R.I.P. Cathal Coughlan

I just learned the sad news of Cathal Coughlan’s death. A formative figure in the Irish post-punk music scene. The Irish Times has an obituary. Coughlan was only 61. Quite young.

My brother Brendan was a huge fan of Coughlan’s band Fatima Mansions (named after a notorious Dublin housing project) and wrote two excellent pieces about them, the first one about the album Viva Dead Ponies.

50 Best Albums, #28. The Fatima Mansions, Viva Dead Ponies

And then this fascinating piece about the intersection of David Bowie, the Walker Brothers, and Fatima Mansions:

Bowie, Fatima Mansions & Walker Brothers: 3 Versions of Nite Flights: Original/2 Copies

I love to share my brother’s writing. Everything he writes is a tribute:

“Cathal Coughlan’s voice is an ungodly mix of rasp and velvet, brass and whisper. Nothing can be taken at face value. Almost relentlessly desperate and depressing lyrically, the music counteracts those valleys with almost maniacal heights of release.”

RIP Cathal Coughlan.

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R.I.P. Roger Angell

One of the masters of American prose. Not just in sportswriting – although he is, as they say, “the one to beat” in that arena as well – but period. His writing glides and flows. It’s elegant, it can be poetic, but never flowery. Reading his writing is a soothing experience. He leads you through it, gently. His sentences glide, everything is fluid, nothing jars or jolts. He was a master. His focus was, of course, baseball. The poet laureate of baseball writing. As Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s (played by Brad Pitt), says in Moneyball, “It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” Yes. It is hard. Impossible even. Roger Angell knew that. He was romantic about baseball. But his romanticism was just a mirror: he reflected what was already there, the James-Earl-Jones-monologue-in-Field-of-Dreams emotions around baseball … and found a way to put it into language, elegant graceful beautiful language. He was always so much FUN to read. I love good sportswriters, and everyone brings something different to the table. But nobody brings what Angell brings, because writers like him don’t come along all that often. Your only choice is to sit back and enjoy how he does what he does.

I’ve written a ton about Roger Angell, back from the days when I did a “daily book excerpt”: I went book to book to book in my shelves, every damn day, and posted an excerpt from each one, most of the time with copious commentary by yours truly. What can I say. Those were the Bad Years. I have a collection of Angell’s writing, Once More Around the Park, and devoted a week or so to these pieces, and writing about them here.

I consider “Distance” – his profile of feared fastballer Bob Gibson – to be a high watermark of “celebrity” profiles – and not just sports celeb profiles – but profiles, period. Gibson was a notoriously difficult man to know – and everyone was so afraid of his fastball they held him in awe (and dread). Angell was fascinated by the fastball – so he went and spent some time with Gibson post-retirement, trying to understand him. It’s such a beautiful piece of writing and psychologizing as well as analysis of what it was that made Gibson so untouchable (unhittable) as a pitcher. I recommend seeking that one out in particular, although all of his pieces are lovely.

Roger Angell lived to be 101. He wrote up until the end. It was a good life. I will miss him. Every writer should be familiar with his work – whether or not you’re a sports fan. His writing is so perfect it stands as a (daunting) inspiration to strive to be better at your own craft. You might as well learn from the best.

Here’s an excerpt from one of Angell’s many stand-alone pieces on baseball. He did write some newsy stories, round-ups of series, etc. (his piece on Carlton Fisk’s famous homer – and the game and the series it was a part of – swells my heart with the beauty of the writing and the generational trauma it represents). Sometimes, though, he focused in one aspect of the game. He did deeply researched pieces on catchers and pitchers. He kept coming back to pitchers. These guys are DIFFERENT. What is it like to BE them?

This excerpt is from a 1976 essay called “On the Ball” about fastball pitchers.

The smiling pitcher begins not only with the advantage of holding his fate in his own hands, or hand, but with the knowledge that every advantage of physics and psychology seems to be on his side. A great number of surprising and unpleasant things can be done to the ball as it is delivered from the grasp of a two-hundred-pound optimist, and the first of these is simply to transform it into a projectile. Most pitchers seem hesitant to say so, but if you press them a little they will admit that the prime ingredient in their intense personal struggle with the batter is probably fear. A few pitchers in the majors have thrived without a real fastball – junk men like Eddie Lopat and Mike Cuellar, superior control artists like Bobby Shantz and Randy Jones, knuckleballers like Hoyt Wilhelm and Charlie Hough – but almost everyone else has had to hump up and throw at least an occasional no-nonsense hard one, which crosses the plate at eighty-fie miles per hour or better, and thus causes the batter to – well, to *think* a little. The fastball sets up all the other pitches in the hurler’s repertoire – the curve, the slider, the sinker, and so on – but its other purpose is to intimidate. Great fastballers like Bob Gibson, Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax, and Nolan Ryan have always run up high strikeout figures because their money pitch was almost untouchable, but their deeper measures of success – twenty-victory seasons and low earned-run average – were due to the fact that none of the hitter they faced, not even the best of them, was immune to the thought of what a 90-mph missile could do to a man if it struck him. They had been ever so slightly distracted, and distraction is bad for hitting. The intention of the pitcher has almost nothing to do with this; very few pitchers are delivered with intent to maim. The bad dream, however, will not go away. Walter Johnson, the greatest fireballer of them all, had almost absolute control, but he is said to have worried constantly about what might happen if one of his pitches got away from him. Good hitters know all this and resolutely don’t think about it (a good hitter is a man who can keep his back foot firmly planted in the box even while the rest of him is pulling back or bailing out on an inside fastball), but even these icy customers are less settled in their minds than they would like to be, just because the man out there on the mound is hiding that cannon behind his hip. Hitters, of course, do not call this fear. They call it “respect.”

Perfection.

RIP.

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Review: The Valet (2022)

I reviewed this comedy – a remake of a 2006 French comedy – for Ebert.

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Excerpts from Sonata for Jukebox, by Geoffrey O’Brien

Here’s a strange coincidence.

Earlier this year, I read – more like drank up, imbibed, devoured – Geoffrey O’Brien’s “autobiography of his ears” Sonata for Jukebox. In Sonata for Jukebox, an intriguing and hypnotic book, filled with prose that flows like poetry (O’Brien is also a poet), O’Brien tells the story of his own life – as well as his parents’ lives, his brothers’ lives, even his grandparents’ lives – through the “jukebox”, through the music that marked them, marked time, informed and impacted them … the “playlists” that call up memories, and not just specific memories, but evocations of entire eras, all of the sense memories that make up childhood, an early ’60s adolescence, a coming-of-age in the mid-late ’60s … and thoughts on music, in general, its purpose, its impact. The book is about the act of hearing itself, the act of listening. It’s about silence, too. It is a truly remarkable book. There are chapters devoted to specific figures (Burt Bacharach, The Beatles, The Beach Boys), but the majority is devoted to the mish-mash of sounds, the playlists/mix-tapes of childhood (not literal playlists, just the things that were present in the air around him), and how music began to infiltrate his consciousness, solidifying. His father was a deejay, his mother an actress, and his brothers were music fanatics, who played in jazz bands. He grew up on Broadway musicals. The Beatles launched him into himself as an independent entity, making his own decisions and choices. There are chapters made up of “playlists”, his attempts to call up, say, the mood and tenor of teenage taste in 1961, or the “playlist” of the time the family lived in an apartment off Central Park West, the various tracks that call up moments, people, experiences. All of this is fascinating – the subject matter riveting – his way of thinking unique and personal – Proustian in approach – but it’s the WRITING that, ultimately, is the real hook.

The book, published in 2004, came on my radar because someone on Instagram – Andrew Chan, whom I trust, with whom I have a lot in common (we both love Elizabeth Bishop: it says a lot) – mentioned “Geoffrey O’Brien’s chapter on the Beatles” as a high watermark of music writing. I immediately bought the book. And started it that day. And did not put it down until I was finished. It was so breathtaking, and I knew I was reading it too fast – it is a book to savor – but I couldn’t stop. I will read it again. It very quickly became one of my favorite books of music writing.

Again, I discovered this book – written almost 20 years ago – just this year. I feel bad I didn’t know about it before, but I am grateful I know about it now.

Cut to: April of this year. A month after I finished Sonata for Jukebox. I am in the recording studio in New York, having just finished my voiceover narration for my upcoming video-essay on Raging Bull, to be included in Criterion’s release of Raging Bull (in 4K), due out this July. I am talking with the producer of my essay, and I asked her about other special features that will be included, along with mine. She told me about the commentary tracks, about my pal Glenn Kenny’s booklet essay (very glad to hear he was writing the essay, since his book Made Men – on the making of Goodfellas – AND his book Robert De Niro: Academy of an Actor – are such important entries in the “Books About Martin Scorsese” sub-genre) – and then she said, “And there will be another video-essay too, written by Geoffrey O’Brien, about Scorsese’s cinematic techniques.” Excuse me? I literally just discover this genius, and now our video-essays will appear side by side (so to speak) on the same release? I was blown away by the coincidental timing.

Thank you, Andrew Chan, for mentioning Sonata for Jukebox – and the Beatles chapter is a miracle to behold. One of the things I love so much about the book is how – through song choices and song-driven memories – O’Brien evokes a time in which I did not live, the pre-Beatles time, the post-Beatles time, the rise of Dylan, the ’60s decade turning sour and violent, chaos reigning – the whole Boomer experience – it all feels as real as if I lived it myself. This is the power of music: it is a time-traveler. And it’s the power of O’Brien’s ability to translate it to others, to generations that came after.

He’s a little bit hard to excerpt, since every single sentence is resonant with depths and echoes and unknowable mysteries … His writing really is overwhelming that way. But these are some of the sequences I flagged.

p.2
Listening to music, which can be the very embodiment of public life (whether at Woodstock or marching down Fifth Avenue on the Fourth of July), is finally the most inward of acts–so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive. It is necessary to proceed by analogy, by fable, by parody; by memoir that takes the form of fiction or fiction that takes the form of memoir. After all these procedures the unbreachable mysteriousness of music remains intact.

p. 12-13, “The Return of Burt Bacharach”
Irony quickly becomes a dead issue. Finally you are left alone with your ears; either you get pleasure from listening to Martin Denny or the Hollyridge Strings, or you don’t. The only variations are on the order of how much pleasure, to be repeated how many times. Irony meets its double: flat-out banality. The alienated contemplation of schmaltz merges with the unrepentant enjoyment of it. Or else it doesn’t quite merge, as the mind clings to a detachment in which unironic enjoyment is almost successfully simulated. You get the pleasurable abandon of sincerity with none of the heartbreak.

p. 14, “The Return of Burt Bacharach”
The shock of coming up against music that truly sounds like nothing ever heard before–whether the encounter is with a Caruso 78 of “Santa Lucia”, or the Basie band broadcasting live from the Famous Door, or the flip side of the new Zombies single–involves the apprehension, or the invention, of an unsuspected reality, an emotional shade not defined until then, the revelation (tenuous or overpowering) of a possible future. If music promised anything less than entry into a new world, how account for its hold on the many for whom it can stand in, if need be, for a belief system or a way of life? Every first hearing that is remembered constitutes a creation myth. What is created is a self irrevocably transformed by a particular piece of music, a particular phrase, a particular catch in the throat.

p. 16, “The Return of Burt Bacharach”
The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia–when was the past so hauntingly accessible?–but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there.

p. 27, “The Return of Burt Bacharach”
Bacharach lent himself to austere treatments because what counted in his music was fundamentally austere. The hard core of that music had always been curiously at odds with his image as diffident artistocrat given to breeding race horses, or strolling along that pristine stretch of Southern Californian beachfront that one imagined as his natural habitat. The period colorings, the mythology that would make him a walking advertisement for The Good Life, seemed finally irrelevant. The real Bacharach–the Bacharach one could not, finally, actually hear except obliquely and by implication–was Out There, totally gone into form. He was a maker of patterns whose stark durable structures could give continuing pleasure without having to be about something, as if to confirm Stravinsky’s dictum that “music itself does not signify anything.”

p. 29, “House Music”
Everything has to begin somewhere, but that somewhere is always the tangled middle.

p. 38, “House Music”
The stitching together of the fragments takes place in the midst of a present that never stops. Hard to find time to sort out the past while caught up in a circus full of noisy and imposing attractions.

p. 48, “House Music”
In the melancholy of minor-key melodies like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” or “Oranges and Lemons” or “Greensleeves” can be heard, as through a half-opened door, intimations of a boy-soprano universe of lovely grief. It is a universal folk music that dares to propose unhappy endings not only for individual lives but for life itself. In its unearthly prettiness it is sadder than Teresa Brewer nursing a broken heart or Vic Damone having a lonely time on Saturday night. This is a sorrow that no big band flourish, with its brassy cheer, can quite put right: the sorrow that is our native condition, the one that advertised remedies can’t reach. It will come back, even after everybody else is dead, to clarify what the world finally is. The sweetness–the keening frequencies that will return in “Scarlet Ribbons” and “In the Pines” and “The Springhill Mining Disaster”–camouflages a message of doom.

p. 70, “Wyoming Valley’s Most Famous Band”
It’s as much of a past as I have, except of course that I don’t have it. I make it up by imagining connections between fragments. The fragments are small and irregularly shaped. Whole lifetimes could fit into the spaces between them–spaces in which my ancestors blur with other people’s ancestors, with the people in the newspaper photographs and the people who weren’t even photographed, with the unreal people in books and movies, and with the people imagined altogether. A remote past that is entirely imagined (the Gay Nineties, men in top hats with walrus mustaches, Thomas Edison inventing phonography) blends bit by bit with the primordially recollected: the interior of a Trailways bus, the small of soap from a country “notions” shop, the topography of a lakeside resort visited once only, the tone and rhythm (but not the exact words) of the repartee of bingo players on Saturday night. The inhabitants of that world have become figures in the dream of the past that in weak moments I might mistake for History. The retrievable sensations of the long hot bus ride from Scranton to Nanticoke is a transit between imaginary cities. Only music travels unchanged between those worlds, as if it were immune to such distinctions.

p. 76, “Early Experiences of a Radio Announcer”
Music is like having an extra room.

p. 81, “Early Experiences of a Radio Announcer”
So few manage to avoid being trapped. The real achievement of the greatest individuals is that they were able to escape the rounds of boredom that everyone else is forced to put up with. The genuine heroes–the ones who managed some kind of personal freedom–had to invent their own world.

p. 111, “Back to the Country”
That contrarian impulse to travel against time’s current–to gravitate toward the noise and detritus filtered out by the culture of Dynagroove–was crucial to what became, after a lot of listening to a lot of old records, the early ’60s folk revival. The road to the future lay in the past, among forebears so forgotten that they had become alien, so alien that they could almost be invented. Early listeners agreed that the Smith anthology’s initial effect was of uncanny strangeness. It seemed a repository of “lost, archaic, savage sounds” or, in the words of filmmaker Bruce Conner, “a confrontation with another culture…like field recordings from the Amazon, or Africa, but it’s here in the United States!” “Who is singing?” Greil Marcus asked. “Who are these people?”

p. 118, “Back to the Country”
Later, after the triumph of Pop around 1965, there would be relief for the young fans in realizing that they did not finally have to become coal miners or tenant farmers.

p. 119, “Back to the Country”
Copies, parodies, reversals, deliberate distortions, whatever was required to tone down, jazz up, smooth out, mess around, or make over: this had been the process of American music, of American entertainment, for so long before anyone took note that the recorded history could never be about anything but mixes, hybrids, crossovers. Pure strains could be imagined but not really experienced, since the moment they hit the air they became part of the fusion.

p. 121, “Back to the Country”
Long familiarity with the industrial cycles of pop permits us to observe the rough being made smooth while calmly anticipating the moment when there will be novelty value in making the smooth rough again. Blues goes lounge, lounge goes industrial noise, industrial noise prepares to merge, perhaps, with Gregorian chant. Our new tradition, however designated–fusion, crossover, sampling, mix–amounts to hardly more than a drastically speeded-up version of the way things have always happened. If a band in Madagascar plays the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought the Law” on traditional instruments or a London-based bhangra group fuses Punjabi folk music and James Brown grooves or an even newer group mixes all of the above in brief unrecognizable fragments, the process hardly differs from, say, an obscure Alabaman band of the 1920s lending Hawaiian inflections to a revamped English ballad whose original subject, somewhere back in the Middle Ages, was the blood libel of Jewish ritual murder.

p. 123, “Back to the Country”
What we heard on the Smith anthology was how people sounded before they knew how they sounded, in the same way that the first movies briefly caught the demeanor of people who had never seen anyone on film. The vocal styles had not been corrected by reference to recorded music or adapted to the microphone. All that was about to change irrevocably, as singers learned how the voice could be something separate from its body.

p. 139, “Top Forty”
America fostered oversized hilariousness, huge grotesqueness. It was all a laugh. The commercials on television and radio were funny; big-breasted blondes were funny; cops and private eyes were funny; Indians in war bonnets were funny; husbands were funny, mothers-in-law funnier; and teenagers, with their hairstyles and lingo and hysterical tears were funny up until the moment when puberty revealed that the moans and lonely teardrops were a manifestation of genuine suffering rather than episodes of a stylized cartoon. “It looks like raindrops falling from my eyes”: until one day you wake to find that Dee Clark is not joking.

p. 139, “Top Forty”
The teenager is the one who loses his sense of humor. Listening with desperate concentration to the same song over and over–radio won’t do anymore; he has to have his own record player so he can hear what he needs when he needs it–he initiates a practice that will be extended into the rest of life. The haunting melody takes up residence inside him. What he hears in it doesn’t change. The past is here made prisoner, except it isn’t even the past anymore. There is just this blind wall of song, the permanent night into which he wants to stare. The teenager, technologist of obsession, learns how to manipulate his own feelings with the proper ordering of playlists. He builds his nostalgia around himself, having no idea of how much time he is going to spend there.

p. 142, “Top Forty”
Now their resistance has melted sufficiently to respond to a sequence of ballads: Dell Shannon’s “Runaway,” if only for its shrieking organ and the yodeling upper reaches of Shannon’s singing; the plaintive hermeticism of the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” spiraling toward an even higher pitch that translates the very idea of weeping into eerie abstraction; Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity”; Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now”; “Strange Feeling” by the physically corpulent vocally ethereal Billy Stewart, with its hovering chorus of women and the singer’s transmutation of “feeling” into “fee-fa-fee-fa-fee-ee-ling”; the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof” to help them feel the weather around them, the air of cities blowing through even suburban windows; Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” a song sung at the brink of the end of things, when “the land is dark and the moon is the only light we’ll see,” a song to hold a few things together in the midst of some ultimate foundering; followed (logically enough) by Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World,” if only because the evening is not complete without that angrily self-centered vision of the whole universe tumbling into oblivion because her love affair fell through.

p. 147, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
The Beatles had come, as if on occult summons, to drive away darkness and embody public desire on a scale not previously imagined.

p. 148, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
And what was the product? Four young men who seemed more alive than their handlers and more knowing than their fans; aware of their own capacity to please more or less everybody, yet apparently savoring among themselves a joke too rich for the general public; professional in so unobtrusive a fashion that it looked like inspired amateurism. The songs had no preambles or buildups: the opening phrase–“Well, she was just seventeen” or “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you”–was a plunge into movement, a celebration of its own anthemic impetus.

p. 149, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
The near-riots that accompanied the Beatles’ arrival in New York, bringing about something like martial law in the vicinity of the Warwick Hotel, were an epic demonstration of nascent female desire. The spectacle was not tender but warlike. The oscillation between glassy-eyed entrancement and emotional explosion, the screams that were like chants and the bouts of weeping that were like acts of aggression, the aura of impending upheaval that promised the breaking down of doors and the shattering of glass: this was love that could tear apart its object.
Idols who needed to be protected under armed guard from their own worshippers acquired even greater fascination, especially when they carried themselves with such cool comic grace. To become involved with the Beatles, even as a fan among millions of others, carried with it the possibility of meddling with ferocious energies. Spectatorship here became participation. There were no longer to be any bystanders, only sharers.

p. 149, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
I emerged from A Hard Days Night as from a conversion experience. Having walked into the theatre as a solitary observer with more or less random musical tastes–West Side Story, The Rite of Spring, The Fred Astaire Story, Talking Dustbowl, Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s, the soundtrack of Black Orpheus and El Cid–I came out as a member of a generation, sharing a common repertoire with a sea of contemporaries, strangers who seemed suddenly like family.

p. 150, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
Listening to Beatles records turned out to be an excellent cure for too much thinking. It was even better that the sense of refreshment was shared by so many others; the world became, with very little effort, a more companionable place. Effortlessness–the effortlessness of, say, the Beatles leaping around a meadow with goofy freedom in A Hard Day’s Night–began to seem a fundamental value.

p. 151, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
Many came to feel that the Beatles enjoyed some kind of privileged wisdom–the evidence was their capacity to extend their impossible string of successes while continuing to find new styles, new techniques, new personalities–but what exactly might it consist of? The songs were bulletins, necessarily cryptic, always surprising, from within that hermetic dome at the center of the world, the seat of cultural power.

p. 154, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
If one could imagine an alternate future in which Paul played piano for local weddings and dances, George drove a bus like his old man, and Ringo perhaps fell into the life of crime his teenage gang exploits seemed to portend, it was inconceivable that John could have settled into any of the choices he was being offered in his youth. None of them ever did much except prepare themselves to be the Beatles.

p. 157, “Seven Fat Years”, aka The Beatles chapter
Sometimes it’s necessary to wait twenty years to be able to hear it again, the formal beauty that begins as far back as “Ask Me Why” and “There’s a Place” and is sustained for years without ever settling into formula. Nothing really explains how or why musicians who spent years jamming on “Be Bop a Lula” and “Long Tall Sally” turned to writing songs like “Not a Second Time” and “If I Fell” and “Things We Said Today,” so altogether different in structure and harmony. Before the addition of the sitars and tape loops and symphony orchestras, before the lyrical turn toward eggmen and floating downstream, Lennon and McCartney (and, on occasion, Harrison) were already making musical objects of such elegant simplicity, such unhectoring emotional force, that if they had quit after Help! (their last “conventional” album) the work would still endure.

p. 161, “Along the Great Divide”
The history of rock and roll is the great melodrama and the great celebration; nostalgia for an irrecoverable past dissolves in the promise of perpetual rebirth as new styles and new superstars emerge on cue. It is a story with no real beginning or end, that starts when you happen to tune in–or in this case when a generation of teenagers happened to tune in–and ends, presumably, when you’ve lost the desire to keep listening.

p. 164, “Along the Great Divide”
Could I have tuned in every sound that was entering the world at the same moment that I was entering it, I would have heard all at once what it has taken the better part of a lifetime to begin to catch up with.

p. 171, “Along the Great Divide”
Except for those involved, no one was apt to think about the music at all except as scattered pockets of indigenous noise. Not many foresaw the imminence of the moment when a bit of genuinely strange back-country swamp-trance invocation like Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love”–

Tombstone hand and a graveyard mind
Just 22 and I don’t mind dyin’–

would be transformed from the Other into the Main Thing.

p. 183, “Central Park West (Side A)”
It is here that the impending changes will come upon us. Was it we who were napping? So swiftly and stealthily does the decade work its transformations that it is already nearly over before any of us realizes the scale of what we have been living through: it wasn’t just us, it was happening everywhere.

p. 183, “Central Park West (Side A)”
The plenitude of the past was not intended for us, but (lucky accidental inheritors) we can appropriate pieces of it.

p. 187, “Central Park West (Side A)”
The art of living consists of tricking life into honoring its evasive promises.

p. 191, “Central Park West (Side A)”
If the talk reverts constantly to records it’s because the records keep flowing in. There’s always a pile of new ones next to the cabinet or stacked up by the piano. They are the noise the world is making right now. It’s like an advance warning system.

p. 198, “Central Park West (Side A)”
The new art is simplicity itself. It’s beyond words; you’ve got to develop a sixth sense for what makes things click. It’s Zen! Get that baroque junk out of the way: that grammar and filigree of bebop fussiness. Too much detail, nobody cares. That’s what killed the big bands, too many notes, too many horns. Make it simpler than you know how, and it’s still not simple enough. Listen to “Farmer John” again. They like it crude like that. A single hook makes the world yours. Can you believe what “yeah, yeah, yeah” did for the Beatles? Pete Townsend stuttering on “My Generation”: that’s all it took. Mistakes make the world yours! The singer comes in at the wrong bar of the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie” and it sounds like deliberate artistry.

p. 202, “Central Park West (Side B)”
The song is the place where perfection stays. Outside the song is where it evaporates. Because the moment is already going; it’s gone. I can’t really remember what it was like, only that it was a shared space one degree removed from this world, and that we both knew it. I want to continue to be there. A song can help because, when used as intended, songs suspend time. If necessary they rewire time to make what didn’t happen happen.

p. 205, “Central Park West (Side B)”
Some records have to be played more than once. “She’s Not There” marks a new era. New eras begin frequently these days, sometimes two or three times a week. Ever since the summer of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” there hasn’t been time to look back.

p. 206, “Central Park West (Side B)”
Steve Cropper, the guitarist of Booker T. and the MGs, says in an interview that he drove off the road the first time he heard “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. It sounded that different. Dylan certainly gives everybody enough to talk about: hours and hours on the implications of every phrase. He’s proposing a new listening experience, to which the words nail the listener’s thoughts even as they form, derail them by punning on the listener’s own hidden intentions, the ones he hasn’t expressed even to himself. If you’re not in the mood it can be like being sucker punched by a peculiarly unreliable kind of wise guy.

p. 216, “Central Park West (Side B)”
Pieces are thrown out like cards in a fast-moving game whose rules are reconfigured at each hand: the new Godard, the new Lichtenstein, the new Realist, the new Beatles single, the new Tom Wolfe article, the new Ginsberg poem, the new Sam Fuller movie, the topless bathing suit, the solarized publicity photo, the Green Beret who said “I QUIT!” on the cover of Ramparts, the newest and even more absurd-looking long-haired band to hit the Village club circuit–is it the Barbarians, the Mojo Men? It’s not so much what things are as what they border on.

p. 228, “Central Park West (Side B)”
There they remain, those people who were us. A person lets the songs enter him and mark him. How can he foresee a moment when he will try to forget some of those songs?

p. 233, “The Lonely Sea” aka The Beach Boys chapter
The Beatles, of course, belonged to everyone; that was their peculiarity. The Beach Boys by contrast suggested a more rarefied indulgence. To enter their domain fully involved an initiation. Not that they were hidden: they were rather, at the outset, the very emblem of obviousness. Our journey consisted of finding, in the heart of that obviousness, what was most secret.

p. 236, “The Lonely Sea” aka The Beach Boys chapter
I didn’t fully register the Beach Boys the first time around, any more than one fully registers one’s youth the first time around.

p. 240, “The Lonely Sea” aka The Beach Boys chapter
Smiley Smile was the token that made it imperative (by affirming that yes, the oddness was real, you hadn’t merely imagined it) to go back and listen to the rest of the Beach Boys catalogue as if for the first time, starting with Pet Sounds and moving all the way back to “The Lonely Sea,” that piece of primitive profundity in which the very young Mike Love assumed an absurd juvenile basso, like a junior high kid doing King Lear, thereby disguising as prank a true summons from the deeps. There had always been more than there seemed to be. Listen to Pet Sounds again–is this the twelfth time, or the twentieth, this week?–and then, with your head full of those solemn melting harmonies, go back to “This Car of Mine” and “Custom Machine” and “No Go Showboat” to hear what you hadn’t noticed before.

p. 241, “The Lonely Sea” aka The Beach Boys chapter
This archaeology of Brian Wilson provided the strange sensation that at the very time that everyone was moving forward, into new identities, new decibel ranges, new scales of Dionysiac self-abandonment, a hidden truth was to be found in what had already been tossed aside, the pop hits of five years ago. Perhaps the secret instructions were: Don’t follow the noise, follow the trail of hidden silences.

p. 245, “The Lonely Sea” aka The Beach Boys chapter
The blending of the voices of the Beach Boys floated through those spaces like the emanation of a dematerialized pipe organ. The space between the voices, the space between the notes: there was a bottomless theme for meditation. We imagined Brian Wilson as the orchestrator of ether, the architect of intervals. He could move and work in an environment that to most outsiders seemed nothing but empty air.

p. 276, “The Year of Overthrowal”
Nine hundred cultists die in the jungle, drinking their poison Kool-Aid after killing the U.S. Congressman who had come to investigate them. The news of it emerges like a new song, like a new kind of song. We thought we were living in our familiar world–whichever that might be–and really we were living in Jonestown. Some people always knew that. It shouldn’t have been so hard to figure out, what with the paranoid theorists running in and out of the copy shop with their urgent letters about secret lists and flying saucers and electrodes implanted by the CIA, or the emissaries from the Children of God making multiple copies of joky newsletters about the need for members to turn their children into holy prostitutes. Or the guys in the ski masks, or the hunger strikers in the German prison, or the Italian Fascists who blew up the train station in Bologna. Or the Munich Olympics, or the Greensboro massacre. These people who aren’t kidding, and who aren’t singing either.

p. 281, “The Year of Overthrowal”
I’m startled back from a reverie of continual forward movement by the emergence of the new young, who grew up while I wasn’t looking in that direction, and who have come to signal an irrevocable transition. They have evolved into their versions of the movies my friends and I watched back in high school. To seal a process of defamiliarizing that is already well underway, they will reinvent our past. They appropriate the songs from our private jukebox, and remix them to bring out different sound values, different emotions. What we once did to the ’40s they’re doing to the ’60s. They make Burt Bacharach strange the way we made Glenn Miller strange. They will tell us what it meant, as if our having been there must necessarily cloud our perception. To realize that in some sense they’re right begins to instill a new detachment. The years are gone and they don’t belong to us anymore, not any of them.

p. 293, “Ambient Night at Roots Lounge”
What more could humans hope to produce than a noise loud and deep enough to blow a hole into the nexus where space and time lock into each other? Tibetan deep-voice chanting–in which the impossibly low note resonates at the precise frequency that generates a simultaneous higher note, allowing the singer to harmonize with himself to the accompaniment of jingling hand-bells and crashing cymbals–destroys the universe without leaving any visible damage.

p. 297, “Ambient Night at Roots Lounge”
Imagine a planet where no one remembers how to make any of the sounds in the archive, any more than they know how to build a pyramid. This will be a few decades or centuries down the line, after the factories close and the index of specifications becomes garbled due to faulty transmission. Doesn’t anyone around here know how to make the parade play again? We lost the batteries. We forgot how to fix it. The depot shut. They mislaid the flow charts…In the world after the catastrophe, you and your fellow survivors would stare like helpless natives at the scattered inert machines, the mute disks, not knowing how to make them go. Perhaps you would continue to trade them as sacred objects to which disjointed legends were attached, fragmentary recollections of the sounds they had emitted before they were silenced. Only then–the machines no longer operable, the instruments and lyrics and chord changes a memory of a memory–would it become necessary to invent music again.

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I’ve got mail

I came outside on my way to the grocery store and saw a manila envelope lying on the front stoop. Addressed to me. The return address label was pre-printed (a New York address), but my name was written out longhand. Curious, I opened it. There was a little white envelope inside, with my name – first and last – scrawled across it in cursive. Even more curious, I opened it and read the short note. It was about my video-essay for the Criterion release of Raging Bull. I was confused: Raging Bull won’t come out until July, so I wondered what random person could have seen it already. I thought, “Huh – maybe it’s from someone from Criterion? Like the video editor?” I squinted at the signature.

Then, I noticed the letterhead. And then I had to sit down.

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O’Malley cousin alert: Play ball!

Yes, I know we are everywhere and it’s hard to keep up, but my awesome cousin Emma – whom I have written about on this site, way back when she was a Tween! – is in the upcoming League of Their Own series on Amazon Prime. In the promo pic, she’s the one on the far left, and as she pointed out on her Instagram: “Leave it to me to be looking in a different direction than everyone else.” The O’Malley independence. I can’t wait and I’m super proud.

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April 2022 Viewing Diary

When I first got the Raging Bull gig, I began a re-watch of all the Scorsese-De Niro movies – at least the ones clustered around that period. I grew up on these films. These movies were huge to me as a young and hungry actor: I didn’t “watch” De Niro so much as I “studied” him. My friends shared this experience. I was reminiscing with David about it, and he said, “De Niro was EVERYTHING.” Yup. He was the Best: and he was worthy of study. It’s a strange feeling: these movies are like well-grooved highways in my spirit and psyche: I know them so well, I know every breath, every pause, every transition … they’ve already been picked over by yours truly. And yet, they never get old. So I immersed myself in Raging Bull,Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, King of Comedy … and then re-watched Goodfellas, Casino, The Irishman … all of them. Then I would loop back to Raging Bull, just to keep my eye on the ball. It was a very engrossing couple of months. You clear the deck for an assignment like this. And it’s hard to just DROP IT when you pass in your first draft. So I didn’t drop it. I decided to do a chronological re-watch of De Niro’s entire filmography. I am still doing it now. I’m going to watch the clunkers too, because even the clunkers have things to teach us. It’s all been strangely emotional, since – again – his performances were like the Holy Grail to us in college, where we would pick him apart, and analyze his hand gestures, or a pause he took – I know all of these films so damn well. I think the first Scorsese movie I actually saw in a movie theatre – in its first run – was either Last Temptation of Christ or Goodfellas. Anyway. It’s fun to walk down this memory lane and remind myself – not that I need reminding – just how special he is. How WEIRD. He’s weird, people. Don’t get it twisted. There’s no other career like his, and that’s not just because he’s a great actor. I have a theory about him and it’s hard to say it without sounding like I’m making some kind of judgment. But I’m not. I’ve met De Niro a couple of times at Actors Studio events, non-gala affairs in other words, with a chummy atmosphere (although I’ve met him at the NYFCC awards nights a couple of times too). He is just like what everyone says: shy and quiet. Not standoffish. Just quiet. Not the center of attention. It’s like he’s an accountant who wandered into an Oscars party. (There’s a reason that he’s so good at playing schlubby civil-servant-types – in his later years. That “vibe” is very close to him.) Behind closed doors, and among friends, I am sure he is many other things – of course – but he’s not a good enough liar to “put on” a public face. Watch an interview with him. It’s like pulling teeth. He’s cautious. He’s also just plain old shy. He doesn’t like to seem like he thinks he’s important. He underplays. He undersells. He’s awkward. It’s honest awkwardness. Endearing. So my theory is: De Niro, as a person, does not have a strong or dominating personality. Al Pacino DOES have a very strong personality (just by contrast). And so: because De Niro’s general personality is not all that strong, he has less in the way when he goes about his transformations. And his transformations wildly swing both ways: he can be reserved and quiet, he can be raging and manic, he can also be an extrovert. It’s FASCINATING especially to watch him play extroverts – because you know that that is not his natural personality (in fact, it’s the opposite). But watch him play an extrovert and you would totally think that that was his natural personality. He’s EERIE. But my theory is: he has less in the way, he has less natural tendencies than other people – although things like anger are obviously at close range always – and so he is much more able to slip into the shoes of someone else, no problem. Research helps give him “permission” to be someone else (he talks about this a lot – having to “earn the right” to play someone. This speaks to his empathy.

It’s like every movie he makes he looks at as a biopic, even if he’s not playing a real person). You don’t think of movie stars having “blah” personalities. In fact, it almost never happens. But it’s happened with him. I think it’s the key to his magic. There’s more to say about all of this. He is the FREEST of actors because his ego is nonexistent and he also has no desire to “express himself”. None. He’s up to something else. He is a shy awkward quiet man and so he has more SPACE in him than other people do – and in that space is creativity. He can BE more people than other actors can be. He has nothing to hold onto in THIS world, and so he can fully engage in the fictional world. He has left no hand-holds behind him in the “real” world so he can find his way back. He doesn’t need them. He’s perfectly fine. He has made three movies a year since the early 70s. People who get irritated at his output – how he’s ruining his legacy or whatever, by appearing in (and producing) dumb movies … don’t really understand him. It’s not that he doesn’t care about his legacy. Of course he does. But he cares MORE about working. About opening up the crack in a character, squeezing through the crack, and discovering all that SPACE on the other side of reality, way more space than he has (or needs) in the “real” world.

So. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past two months.

1900 (1976; d. Bernardo Bertolucci)

My God, this movie is gorgeously shot, and my God, this movie is a bore. I first saw this movie on VHS tape back in high school, and the dazzling beauty of so many of these shots left a mark. Bertolucci’s camera roves and floats and moves, a living entity. De Niro and Dominique Sanda are so gorgeous together it almost hurts to look at them. The whole Socialist aspect of 1900 – which was the main point – is so heavy-handed the movie feels like a re-education camp. Sterling Hayden, whom I love … but here, he has to be one note – and the contrast between the weak elites and the muscular macho peasants … the women standing on the hay wagons, waving red banners … I don’t know, man. It all seems a little bit silly and naive. I’m cynical. And I’m happy to be so. I don’t believe in Utopia on Earth. In fact, I’m afraid of anyone who claims they know the secret to creating a Utopia on Earth. Utopia for one person is Tyranny for another. Nope. HOWEVER. Every single shot is a work of art.

The Bubble (2022; d. Judd Apatow)

I reviewed Judd Apatow’s meta-latest for Ebert.

Babi Yar. Context. (2022; d. Sergei Loznitsa)

I’d been wanting to see this and finally caught it at the Film Forum. It’s crushing. I went to a matinee and walking back out into the late afternoon sun was jarring. The Babi Yar atrocity is haunting enough to even read about … but to see all this footage … The Nazis documented everything. They were PROUD of what they were doing. Otherwise, why record every second of it? It’s an absolutely horrifying film, made up entirely of existing footage, with no narration, or talking heads … it’s “found footage” for real. Very difficult to watch. Very important.

The Dropout (2022; d. Michael Showalter, Francesca Gregorini, Erica Watson)

Amanda Seyfried, yo! I’ve always liked her – since Mean Girls – and this is her best, and I’m so psyched. She’s a dead ringer for that looney-tunes-bitch, and her mimicry of that VOICE is uncanny. But what’s better than the surface trappings is her exploration of the void underneath all that, the drive, the mania, the … sheer weirdness of this woman. I really liked the series and I’m super impressed with Seyfried’s performance. Good for her. OH, and I am pleased to say she had a number of really good mirror moments (one of my obsessions).

The Last Tycoon (1976; d. Elia Kazan)

Mainly fascinating because of the Kazan-De Niro collaboration – and so I’m just happy that that occurred, even though the movie is a very strange one. Such a great cast. Dana Andrews! Theresa Russell! Anjelica Huston in a small part.

Aline (2022; d. Valérie Lemercier)

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I reviewed Aline for Ebert.

True Confessions (1981; d. Ulu Grosbard)

Written by Joan Didion and John Griffin Dunne! With Charles Durning. De Niro and Duvall as brothers doesn’t make much sense visually but it’s so satisfying as an audience member to watch these two great actors together. They could have swapped parts too. Both of them are versatile enough it would work either way. De Niro’s transformations are subtle, unlike, say, Meryl Streep’s. He’s as much transformed in something like this as he is in The Untouchables. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Subtle transformations are the hardest. They don’t win Oscars. What wins Oscars are the BIG transformations (like his Oscar for Awakenings). This goes back to what I was saying at the outset. De Niro has less “in the way” to dispatch, in terms of his own natural personality – gestures, voice, behavior. He’s a quiet solemn shy man. So he basically has more space to play around in when he goes to create a character. He doesn’t HAVE to put on a big show of accents and hair and gestures in order to “make us forget” that he is De Niro. Because …. who IS De Niro? An awkward shy man. lol He just has way more freedom than other people do because he has less invested in a specific persona or even personality.

New York New York (1977; d. Martin Scorsese)

This one is not stream-able. And I don’t own it. You can’t find it anywhere. So, fuck it, I resorted to unsavory practices in order to keep my re-watch intact chronologically. There is no reason for this movie to be three hours long. HOWEVER, with people like Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro – in every single scene – I don’t see any reason to complain. It’s a gold mine. It’s fascinating to watch this because here De Niro plays an extrovert, a chatterbox – that opening scene where he moves from woman to woman, with these crazy come-on lines, trying to pick someone up – and it’s so natural, you would think that that’s who De Niro really is. And who knows, maybe it IS. That’s what I’m SAYING. We just don’t KNOW. Minnelli is heartbreaking and wonderful in this. It’s beautifully shot. This was 1977. Everyone was doing so much coke. Everything was about to get really ugly and really bad for Scorsese, who almost died. Robert De Niro “brought him back to life” by insisting they finally make Raging Bull. There were a lot of bloated over-long movies in the late 70s. Cocaine was a factor.

The Deer Hunter (1978; d. Michael Cimino)

One of the great Vietnam movies, but the more I watch it – I’ve probably seen it 10 times – the more surreal it seems. It’s different than other Vietnam movies. It’s a very strange movie. I love it for its strangeness. It’s “opener” is half the movie: the lead up to the wedding and then the wedding. Then smash-cut to Vietnam and Russian roulette. It’s not realistic: Cimino doesn’t lead you from Pennsylvania to Vietnam. He tosses you in. Russian roulette is the Symbol to end all symbols. I guess once it gets into you – once you submit to its chanciness and riskiness – real life can’t compete. (I always forget, somehow, that when Christopher Walken stumbles into the Russian roulette room back in Saigon – De Niro is already there. So … although everyone remembers Walken’s submission to the Russian roulette sub-culture, it’s important to remember that De Niro feels it too. He’s IN THAT ROOM, willingly.) Such great acting and it makes you wonder how on earth they pulled it off. It doesn’t look staged. It feels as horrifying as it must have felt to live it.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984; d. Sergio Leone)

Everyone knows what was done to this movie by the crum-bums at the Studio/distribution level, hacked it up for the American release. Americans saw the shortened version. The “butchered” version. I knew about this, even back then, because of Roger Ebert’s piece about it. When the full version was finally made available, he wrote about that too.

Falling In Love (1984; d. Ulu Grosbard)

I can look at this realistically and see everything that’s wrong with it. I think what was interesting to the team was to create a love story where everyone in it is a normal person, without eccentricities. To put Love into the most everyday context possible. (Well. Both characters are clearly loaded, so there’s THAT.) It’s hard to get “invested” in these two getting together because … what are they falling in love with? Who ARE they? What’s the bond? WHERE IS THE BOND? The sheer number of coincidences that have to take place in order for them to keep running into each other is also a problem. However: I first saw this in college – on VHS tape. What is interesting to a young actor is to watch these two actors listen and talk. (The most basic definition of acting is “listening and talking”. If you can’t do THAT, find another profession.) De Niro and Streep knew that the script was thin, that they were not required to create big characters here, that all they needed to do was “listen and talk”. It’s a master class in listening and talking. Actors: you can learn from this movie. Watch them. Their dialogue is irrelevant and neither of these boring characters ever say anything worth listening to. It’s not about that. Watch the actors: watch how they listen and talk. There’s also a scene where Streep talks with her dad, and as she talks with him, she takes an orange out of a bowl, rolls it between her hands, and then begins to peel it. All as she talks. I’m 18, 19 years old, watching this – and I had no idea what she was saying, and I didn’t care: I was RIVETED by the orange behavior. THAT’S how you use “business”. “Business” is almost as important as “listening and talking”. I learned so much from watching that scene. Reality isn’t about your emotional truth. If all you have is emotional truth, then you don’t have all that much. If you feel lost, if you feel stuck, if you feel like you have nothing to hold onto in a scene, pick up a nearby orange, and start doing to the orange what you would do to it in normal life – and POOF, the scene – and you – come alive. Trust me. I can’t tell you how many times I “created” orange-peeling business (or something like) just to ground a scene in reality. This is one of the first times De Niro played a schlubby suburban type and he’s very good at it. Hard to picture Pacino as a schlubby suburban type. This is not either/or – I’m not saying one is bad and one is good. It’s so frustrating that I even have to say this. This is compare and contrast, old-school. I’m using Pacino as an example to highlight De Niro’s unique qualities. Human beings are not interchangeable. Both are great actors, but in very different ways.

Brazil (1985; d. Terry Gilliam)

I saw this in the movie theatre, at the Jane Pickens in Newport (where I just went to see The General, and interview Dana Stevens about her Buster Keaton book). I have to admit this movie doesn’t quite delight me like it did on first viewing, but still, it’s a fun one. I still remember back then how weird it seemed – how exciting – that De Niro would do a cameo, where he would be funny and broad, where he wasn’t the center. We, as college kids, were like, “Oh wait … that’s allowed?? You can DO that? That’s so cool!!”

Dual (2022; d. Riley Stearns)

This was a little disappointing. I reviewed for Ebert.

Angel Heart (1987; d. Alan Parker)

My friend David and I went to go see this at the Showcase Cinema in Warwick, RI, and then went out to Bickfords in Cranston and talked about it until 2 in the morning. A legendary night in our friendship. We were so turned ON by it, and Mickey Rourke … MICKEY ROURKE. We were so steeped in 1970s movies, and our idols were Boomers. Pacino. De Niro. Pesci. Streep. But here was someone new … older than us, and still a Boomer, yes, but a young Boomer, closer to us in age. He felt much more like he was OURS. (Same with River Phoenix, although he was on the other end of the age spectrum.) If you grow up, like we did, immersed in the recent past – the way Gen X kids were – then a so-called “peer” coming along, who rivaled your idols, was THRILLING. We were absolutely blown away. And, again, like with Brazil, it was so thrilling to us that De Niro was showing up in movies, playing small roles, and obviously having a blast. These are not subtle performances. His range seemed to get even bigger.

The Untouchables (1987; d. Brian de Palma)

Saw this one in the theatre. Also at the Showcase, with a huge group of college friends. I remember Mitchell saying, “That train scene was clearly taken from Battleship Potemkin” which .. blew my mind, since I hadn’t seen Battleship Potemkin and also had never heard of it. I remember very clearly all of us falling in love with Andy Garcia. Murmuring amongst ourselves: “Who is THAT?” Star quality. Instantly apparent.

Jackknife (1989; d. David Hugh Jones)

I saw this one in the theatre. I am going to keep saying that. This was when I first really sat up and took notice of Ed Harris. I had seen Sweet Dreams and The Right Stuff, and so I knew who he was, but this one blew me away. Again, in the context of a young girl obsessed with acting, obsessed with studying it … Harris here is outstanding. It was way further out than Sweet Dreams or The Right Stuff. I fell in love with this movie, and it’s been years since I’ve seen it. It was so much fun re-discovering it! It’s streaming on Amazon, but the quality is really poor. This film is in need of a restoration. I bought a copy of it, because I fear it will be lost to me otherwise. If it stops streaming, then it might as well have never existed, and I can’t stand that. Physical media is important. This is the kind of movie “they” don’t make anymore. A character study. A three-way character study. Kathy Baker, De Niro and Ed Harris … you basically just get to know these three people over the course of the film. If I’m not mistaken it was a play. De Niro here is extroverted – again – and funny – but all of that is there as a survival technique and a “cover”. The romance with Kathy Baker is so INTERESTING. It’s middle-aged tentative love. Two people who have been hurt by life, damaged – irrevocably in some cases. But all is not lost. You can love someone with what has been left behind after all the damage done to you. And Harris is just heartbreaking. I love this movie. And this is why I’ve done a chronological re-watch. I need these movies in my life again.

We’re No Angels (1989; d. Neil Jordan)

I saw this one in the theatre. It’s funnier now than it seemed to me then. The funniest parts of it, for me, is the shared behavior of Penn and De Niro as they try – clumsily – to keep up their act. The murmuring nonsensical Latin, the hunched-over praying postures, the sudden looks of total PANIC at some Catholic ritual they’re supposed to participate in … Some of De Niro’s transitions made me laugh out loud. The sudden flashes of panic, of horror, mixed with a constant low-level grumpiness … No one is grumpier than a grumpy De Niro. John C. Reilly! Had no idea at the time that he would rise to the level he would, thanks to Boogie Nights. He’s very touching here.

Stanley & Iris (1990; d. Martin Ritt)

Saw this one in the theatre. Another gem. I haven’t seen this one in years. When people talk about De Niro ruining his legacy, blah blah blah, they discount performances like this one. Or the one in Jackknife. Or even Falling in Love. He’s not making a big SHOW of his transformations. He’s not trying to impress you. He’s not “in it” for that reason. And so … people who love being blown away are sometimes only blown away by the most showy and obvious display of transformational power. Like I said before, it’s the subtle transformations that are the hardest. Here, he makes Stanley make sense. He does not condescend. The way he eventually makes his case to Iris – basically; “You and I are bound to be together. It’s going to happen. Can’t we get past some of these things that are between us?” – it’s such a real-guy way of dealing with romance. It’s not some intense idealized thing, or some tear-streaked “STELLAAAAA” howl of passion. Which I’m sure De Niro could do as well, although … love stories like that aren’t really his thing. Again, like Jackknife, like Falling in Love, the main pleasure here is watching these two actors work together. It’s lovely.

Stanleyville (2022; d. Maxwell McCabe-Lokos)

I reviewed for Ebert.

Awakenings (1990; d. Penny Marshall)

Saw this in the theatre. It wrecked me. It still wrecks me. This was a time when it was seen as pretty wild that Robin Williams could play a shy awkward man. The most extroverted and expressive and manic-paced comics could believably be this human-phobic nerdy guy. It was a real revelation! Penny Marshall knows how to work on the emotions, it is true, but the story has so much inherent drama and pathos that all you really have to do is show up and the story works on you. The great Ruth Nelson – from the Group Theatre back in the 1930s – plays De Niro’s mother!

Shattered Glass (2003; d. Billy Ray)

A favorite. Allison and I watched it. It took us three hours because we had to keep pausing to discuss, and to look things up. We love Steve Zahn so much.

WeCrashed (2022; d. Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, Cory Finley, Tinge Krishnan, Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini)

Allison and I binge-watched this. I thought it was really good and really interesting. I’m not a Jared Leto fan, normally, but I think he does some really good work here, as does Anne Hathaway (although she was inconsistent with her vocal choices. Sometimes “the voice” was there, sometimes it wasn’t). I have read a couple articles criticizing the series for being “too soft” on these two wack-jobs. Well, the purpose of the series wasn’t to paint them as villains. The purpose of the series was to explore the weird intense bond they shared and how that bond – two narcissists pumping each other up – helped create this monster company. They were like one being, who together were dangerous and power-hungry and awful … but … what was going on between them behind closed doors? Who ARE these two people? That’s far more interesting than painting them as villains and then focusing mostly on the workers who were screwed by them. It’s more interesting AND it’s more dramatic. You felt the cost, you definitely felt the cost, but it’s the reality distortion field of the relationship that’s most fascinating. OR, it was most fascinating to the creators of the series. They aren’t “giving them a pass”. There are plenty of articles out there that tell the story of WeWork and don’t “give them a pass”. There’s a documentary about We Work that doesn’t “give them a pass”. Ugh. Cultural critics who want everything to be presented in a black and white morally-correct way are such a bore. They want art to be binary and boring and clear to read. I thought it was so interesting to watch how wrapped up in each other these two really were – and how awful they both were to their employees, even as they blathered on about “raising the world’s consciousness” through …….. renting office space? GIMME A BREAK.

Anais in Love (2022; d. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet)

I reviewed for Ebert.

Guilty by Suspicion (1991; d. Irwin Winkler)

I saw this one in the theatre! Patricia Wettig, riding high on thirtysomething fame, and her Emmy. It’s a very good depiction of the HUAC activities, as well as the Blacklist era. The role doesn’t require much transformation on the part of De Niro. I respect him for not prioritizing huge physical transformations. That’s not what acting is about for him. If it’s required, then he does it. If it’s not required, he doesn’t do it. The transformation is not physical: it happens at a deeper more cellular level. What’s interesting here is to watch him be a man who’s really behind, who’s slow to catch on, who’s surprised at every turn, surprised and hurt, by what is happening. He’s confused, he’s desperate, he’s baffled, he’s scared. This requires openness and lack of self-consciousness. He just has to be open to the disaster unfolding all around him. He has to feel it happening. He has to feel his own helplessness to stop it. This film should be much better known.

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Review: All My Puny Sorrows (2022)

I reviewed for Ebert.

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