Armond Hammer

Armond White of the NY Press is a pretty polarizing figure, I suppose, except that I don’t really know of anyone who’d defend him overly beyond the basic “he can write, too bad that’s what he writes” defense that I hear bandied about a lot. I do know that he was pretty amazing for a stretch back there in the late 90s into the early 00s – vital, principled. Who slags Spike Lee in favor of Stephen Spielberg? Who finds good in Norbit and Michael Bay? I’ve been curious about him forever. Whenever I meet a colleague from NY, I ask about White – is he insane, is he reasonable, is he ravening, is he urbane? And what I hear consistently is that he’s kind, gracious even in person, but clearly has an agenda that he’s wearing to the bone…

Here's the thing: I like critics with agendas.

I don’t understand the idea of objectivity as applied to our kind of writing – what is an objective critic but a complete asshole instead of a principled one? But I was embarrassed as hell reading White’s review of Greenberg which is essentially an extended diatribe against J. Hoberman for apparently posting an old White review in which White – if he’s not suggesting Baumbach be retroactively aborted – is at least dancing around the idea. More, it betrays a personal vendetta against the late Georgia Brown that should, ethically, excuse White from reviewing Baumbach pictures along with a pathological paranoia that used to be amusing.

There’s talk now of “banning” White from future screenings while his own publication posted a poll on their website for readers to vote for “worst” White review. Both abhorrent ideas, both only another salvo in the extended slide into obsolescence for film criticism in the United States - and both examples that White's pathological paranoia has a basis in some self-fulfilling reality. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this relationship between movie studios and critics forged in the 1920s had a moment in the 60s-80s where it flourished as a forum for real conversation and is now reverting back to the incestual give-and-take of producer-and-publicist. It’s a slide facilitated by idiots like Richard Schickel that defend their indifference aboard their respective Titanics as they disappear, and good riddance, into the inky murk.

I got in a good bit of hot water a while back when I suggested in an interview that we at Film Freak Central have trouble getting into screenings and access to the bulk of interviews in which we might be interested. The gist of which being that White is kind of sort of essentially saying the same thing while introducing race and class into it - so really, how upset should I be about his Greenberg diatribe? More, a publicist has come out (Leslie Dart?) to say that it was she alone who made the decision to "ban" White from an early screening of Baumbach's flick which raises again the tired specter of what happens when publicists make these kinds of decisions to preempt bad reviews of their product. Frankly, when George Lucas took us off his screening list, we just kind of took it without much uproar. What I'm saying is that it happens all the time. After I slagged Peter Hedges' Katie Holmes flick much to Hedges' irritation, I was told directly by those publicists that I had been blacklisted from future interviews from that studio... I wish I was still frustrated by that kind of thing instead of resigned.

Whatever the case, the irony is that White is the only critic we’re talking about anymore for any reason surrounding film criticism, for good or bad. I think he’s a loon… but I’m thinking about him. That’s a real shitty place to be.

... in my giddyup

It speaks somehow to what I suspect is an interesting sea change in my life here as, in revisiting a few of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, I’m finding that I like them now in a way that I didn’t used to before. It’s not that I knew that I was more respecting a picture like Rear Window for instance, than liking it, it’s that now, freed of feeling like I had to respond to it in a certain way, I discovered that I responded to it like a motherfucker. Curious about that, I popped in his remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much to discover, to my delight, that a film I’d always sort of disdained was, in fact, tight as the proverbial kettle drum and, more, with a few years under my belt, emotionally affecting as well. My fave Hitch is still 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt, Hitch’s first truly “American” film, his only collaboration with Thornton Wilder, and starring faves Joe Cotten and Theresa Wright – but I’m coming around to the idea that what I’d always considered to be “light” late pictures in the Master’s oeuvre are not so easily dismissed. No wonder Truffaut sounds like a fawning sycophant in that interview he did with him.

Lists being what they are, I’d still like to offer up my top ten Hitchs:

Shadow of a Doubt
Vertigo
The Birds
Marnie
Strangers on a Train
Notorious
Rear Window
Psycho
Rebecca
The Lady Vanishes

Oh dear – that leaves off a great many, doesn’t it? Frenzy and North by Northwest and The Wrong Man and I Confess and The Lodger… where do they fit?

It’s also led to a couple of other skylarks nagging at the back of my head – like what, exactly, the term “Hitchcockian” means outside of specific context?

And which is the Hitch you hate the most to love? Me? Family Plot.

I’m doing a series upcoming at a local library system of “Forgotten Classics” – we’ll be showing, as Saturday Afternoon matinees, Ace in the Hole, Seven Men From Now, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Late Show, and Being John Malkovich. Better title might have been “Classics in the Rearview”. Next month, I’ll be doing a Marlene Dietrich series with the Denver Public Library.

Will be doing minor coverage of the Denver Film Festival in the next couple of weeks and catching, I hope, at last a screening of The Wrestler – the last real film I’m interested in seeing this year.

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Brief thoughts on a Sabbath night:

I don’t really understand – and don’t really like, and certainly don’t respect – anyone who doesn’t think that No Country For Old Men is a great film. I feel badly for people who don’t like Tarantino; worse for people who don’t seem to understand Malick or Nagisa or Kim Ki-Duk; but I’m sympathetic that there are opposing viewpoints, y’know. See – the basis for this critical debasement is the dangerous idea that there are no absolutes in the liberal arts. It’s what’s made it all such a fucking mess, it’s arguably what’s caused Nathan Lee over at the NY Post and David Ansen at Newsweek to lose their positions (everyone else is next save St. Ebert) recently, this democratization of opinion. Everyone has one. Like an asshole. Get it? The irony of it is that you make any kind of consideration a matter of “well, everyone’s entitled to their opinion” and suddenly nobody needs yours.

By making this thing of ours accessible to a wide, wider, widest audience; my colleagues have politicked themselves out of a job and, before long, out of an entire frickin’ profession. I met David Ansen once – we sat on a panel together at the Vail Film Festival talking about, primarily, the state of modern film criticism (Godfrey Cheshire moderated – he having lost his job a long time ago) – and he struck me as a smart, moral, well-versed critic: a film-lover who’d given a good deal of thought to what was happening at newspapers and magazines. Now, about two years later, he’s taken a buyout offered him and from what I understand, will close out the end of the year before another major outlet, his, closes for good to film criticism.

So the thesis is this: that allowing for people to disagree about the quality of No Country For Old Men is symptomatic of why there’s a dearth of good criticism in the United States. I remember in this Milton seminar I had back in the day that someone piped up that they didn’t think that Milton was very good and, y’know, I have this to say to that. Shut the fuck up. You’re allowed not to like Milton, you’re not allowed to opine that Milton was inept and, more to the point, no one’s asking. At a certain level, with certain films, it’s not about good or bad, it has to be about how and why. You can hate Hitchcock – you can’t say that he didn’t make his handful of masterpieces.

Criticism without knowledge is a zero sum game. Everyone’s an asshole who does it.

There are absolutes in the liberal arts. There are things that are absolutely black and white. Find your place of gray within that or find yourself keeping company with that idiot couple behind you in the theater that wishes the Coens’ had given Chigurgh a backstory.

Lots of frustrations otherwise in the trenches these days – difficult anniversaries and just when I’m getting back in the saddle for the first time in what feels like a couple of years, the whole clan comes down with some kind of flu that sends my two-year-old to the emergency room for an IV. Missing a lot of screenings as a consequence; here’s hoping karma hangs on a pendulum.

Working now on a series with the Denver Public Library on classic westerns and a series with Gilpin County on dystopias (I’ll finally get to lecture on Planet of the Apes; timely for the passing of Heston); hoping to get a major writing project off the ground as well covering the films of Val Lewton. Gearing up for a career retrospective of a favorite director ‘round these parts as his latest film is poised to hit the home video shelves (it never made it here theatrically) – and still waiting on a few of the big arthouse pics to have their cup of coffee in the Mile High City. The only solace to me being out of the game this season so far is that this season traditionally sucks; all the more so for backwaters like this one in a time for the profession when I don’t actually know but one or two of my colleagues anymore when I get out to screenings. Who knew that seven years makes you a senior critic?

Been thinking a lot on two topics lately in the quiet hours: the best instrumental scores; and the best movie posters in terms of provocation, implication, and/or artistry…

A couple of picks for score just in the last decade or so? Clint Mansell gets a couple of nods for his work with Darren Aronofsky: The Fountain and Requiem for a Dream (with Kronos Quartet). I love Alexandre Desplat’s work on Birth, Jonny Greenwood’s on There Will Be Blood, Jon Brion’s on Punch-Drunk Love. My fave all time? David Shire’s piano rags on The Conversation. Yours?

Also – been haunted of late by this poster for the first of Lynch's two late-Hitchcock identity shrines:

Talk back.

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So – fighting a flu that’s had me tits up for about six full days now. Get your flu shot. My productivity took one right in the pants.

Got in trouble a little with the local publicists this week over our posting of an I’m Not There review before its limited (?) release on the 21^st. A quick check revealed that the embargo I was breaking had already been broken by Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Ebert’s website, Time, The New York Observer, Movie City News, the Brussats, Rich Cline and so on – making me wonder, specifically, what the fucking point of it all is and what was being threatened exactly. I half expect to receive a screener of it in the next day or two, making me wonder even more fervently who’s penalizing whom and for what.

In other news, the Denver International Film Festival is running this week and we’re not covering it. It’s not pique, it’s sort of a general lack of interest. The kind of lack of interest that’ll kick me in the balls if the DIFF ever gets stuff I’m really interested in down the road, but with the centerpiece guest being Norman Jewison (Norman Jewison) well, I just couldn’t bring myself to manufacture ten capsules – especially with deadlines looming left and right on our new Annual. Opening night is The Savages; closing is, gulp, Robin Williams’ August Fire. In between? Juno I think, Jason Reitman’s newest. Good luck to the DIFF and all – hope we hook up again somewhere down the road.

No hiding the fact that 2007 is shaping up in my mind as a watershed year in pictures. Still a few more, There Will Be Blood high amongst them, before it’s all in the can – but I’m chuffed, man, it’s been great.

RIP Norman Mailer.

Did anyone see Lions for Lambs or Bee Movie or, better yet, Martian Child?

Watched Being John Malkovich again for the first time since seeing it multiple times in the theater and, man, it’s fucking amazing. I’d forgotten more than I’d remembered. Kaufman is like this amazing alien intelligence. Good festivals could be made of his stuff; Ashley Judd’s, and Wes Anderson’s too. It’s given me an idea of a new book of critical essays. Think I’ll run it by Bill.

Anyone have a lead on the theatrical cut of Blood Simple on DVD?

Been watching a lot of Disney classics lately what with a four-year-old needing “good night shows” and all and have come to the conclusion that most of them are psychotic when they’re not just garden-variety homicidal – they are almost to a one not useful in any significant way in dealing with conflict, preaching the idea that the best way to deflate The Shadow is to stick it with a knife. Tie in the racism and general misogyny and marvel no longer that Michael Bay’s flicks make bazillions. To suggest that there’s not a tie-in here to what we consent to as a society with what’s wrong with us as a society is blinkered and moronic. I hate Cinderella with its cat/mouse filler and I despise Peter Pan with its “they’re not as smart as us, but they’re cunning” – but I do like The Fox and the Hound and The Jungle Book for their social intelligence and native nihilism. I love the second Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Toy Story and of course Ratatouille - can’t wait to screen The Iron Giant for them. Brad Bird’s a fucking genius.

Reading Proust nowadays – along with Lee Server’s biography of Ava Gardner. Weird how it jibes.

Looking forward in a sick-to-my stomach way to I Am Legend - missed, to my dismay, a screening of The Mist. One of the last long-form stories I’ve liked from Stephen King. The ending, I remember, is especially bleak. King at his best for me captured a sort of winsome melancholy – like that story “The Reach” that’s all about remembrances of things past – and of course “The Last Rung on the Ladder” and “The Woman in the Room”.

Here’s a lunchtime quiz: best Stephen King stories not yet translated to film.

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Somebody talk to me about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in socio-political context because I think I just saw its millennial doppelganger in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Fresh from a nice chat about Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return at Beaver Creek’s beautiful Vilar Center, I’m dying to see his new one, Banishment, based on a writing by William Saroyan and premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The trailer looks like more of the same which is, of course, not a bad thing at all. Heard today, too, that Burn After Reading, the new Coen Bros. spy flick starring Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Malkovich has started production.

Owen Wilson tries to kill himself? That’s some bad juju there. Now Steve Coogan and Courtney Love are in the fray – the latter accusing the former of getting Wilson into some heavy shit. Whatever happened, it reminded me a lot of The Royal Tenenbaums and, from there, The Darjeeling Express - when brother Luke’s character shaves his hair and opens his wrists to the tune of the late Elliot Smith’s “Needle in the Hay”. The singer, incidentally, dead by auto-inflicted steak knife to the chest.

(Another odd non-synchronicity, some guy working at the University of Colorado’s student center slit a student’s throat out of nowhere and then started stabbing himself in his chest until police tasered him. It’s the goddamnest thing.)

Saw Rob Zombie’s Halloween tonight. Um. . . it’s more interesting in the context of an emerging auteur’s work? Let’s go with that.

Got a last second gig to host a screening of The Third Man on Saturday, projected from a 16mm source, at Denver’s Starz Filmcenter as part of their “Tattered Cover Film Series”. Admission is free, but it’s always a sellout so get there early if you’re coming. That afternoon, at 1:00pm, screening Bonnie & Clyde as part of Gilpin County’s “American New Wave” series. Admission? Also free.

Finished the first seasons of “Rome” and “Dexter” and the last season of “Deadwood” – two are great, one sucks. Here’s a hint: Showtime series are uniformly awful. Imagine if “Dexter” had been written by David Milch instead.

In other news, Elias Merhige has a new film out. A short film that you can watch for free here:

http://www.dinofcelestialbirds.com/. Just found out that his Begotten is out of print. Shame, that.

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I dunno. Ebb and flows.

Busy time coming up. A new film series starting in the Vail Valley: one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Most of the notoriety comes from the ski resort, but the last three years or so a fledgling film festival has started up on its slopes that’s actually fairly impressive. Celebs like resorts – festivals like money – movie people like monied people: it all works out. The series is four films: Chungking Express, The Return, 3-Iron, and Pan’s Labyrinth. New American New Wave series starting up as well: five Saturdays. We’ll be doing Bonnie & Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Conversation, The Last Detail and The Stunt Man – as well as a cinematography series that will include pics like Hud and Days of Being Wild. It’s good because I like the work – and good, too, because I need the money.

Working on a couple of big projects – a few interesting assignments, a few that are just frustrating as fuck – and looking around at a few of my friends and peers who are going back to school, going out for drinks, going off on a lark. Checking that watch and wondering if it’s too soon for a mid-life crisis. How old was I ever going to get, anyway?

Amid a few screening duties (including Walter Hill’s still-delightful The Warriors – anyone here for an all-out revival of Hill’s works? Post-Sunshine, I was really hankering for a director’s cut of his Supernova) got a chance to watch Jack Hill’s Spider Baby, released in that annus mirabilis, 1968. Things really fucking flew apart that year in the United States, you know, bad enough that Richard stinking Nixon actually quoted Yeats in one of his speeches. He was talking about hippies, I think (most probably Abbie Hoffman in particular), but it’s gotta’ be bad for Mr. Bad Faith to assume the role as the proverbial falconer. 1968 in the movies has generational horror flicks like Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead – and the ultimate freak-out in 2001: A Space Odyssey – too many to mention, really. The Wild Bunch is in there, right? Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider. . . and Altamont and Bobby Kennedy and My Lai and The Family. In a lot of ways, America is still suffering the hangover of that year. 1968.

But, oh yeah, Spider Baby is hilarious. An opening murder-by-shears is appropriately nauseating (though not overly gory by any stretch) and Lon Chaney’s sad performance as a caretaker of a family of inbred misfits recalls of all things, certain feelings elicited by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Inspired? Not quite. But definitely worth a look.

Saw The Invasion tonight and it’s just fucking bloody awful. Dumb as dirt and proselytizing, too – with every line of dialogue written by Kang and Kodos.

Saw Superbad last week and it’s not bad – mostly because I like Michael Cera.

Anyone here bite the pride bullet and go to Stardust?
Anyone here read the pieces on Antonioni and Bergman by Scorsese and Allen?

“John from Cincinnati” just got the hook – though what I’m really interested in is Alan Ball’s new Vampire series. I have hope, but frankly after “Six Feet Under”, the premise feels a little redundant. I have faith that he’ll surprise me. It’s good to have faith in something.

Here’s my lunchtime poll: best pod movie?

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I finished up an interesting Shakespeare on Film series with the Douglas County Library System – ending with Michael Almereyda’s just fantastic Hamlet (it’s fucking amazing - re-orders the universe in a way), and Orson Welles’ savage MacBeth - and am looking forward to talking Pan’s Labyrinth and, among others, Birth and Days of Being Wild for a couple of new series at the end of this month. Gilpin County has been good enough to green light an “American New Wave” series for me in September – I’m hoping to program The Conversation, Bonnie & Clyde, The Parallax View, The Last Detail, and so on. Good times. Mostly I remember the paranoia. It occurs to me that a whole, interesting series could be built around just versions of “MacBeth”: from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood all the way through to the Polanski and Welles versions and then that funny one with James Le Gros, Christopher Walken, and Maura Tierney. After the upcoming The Invasion, you could do one with versions of the pod story as well. Truly a tale for all times.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be doing Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American – the film that I’m starting to think is better than Noyce’s other film from that year, Rabbit-Proof Fence. At the time of the latter’s release, I remember calling it “critic-proof fence” to the consternation of the picture’s publicist. What a jackass I am.

A couple of Bergman events planned for the mothersite – and a eulogy proper planned for airing in this blog, penned by one of our fine writers – but for now, RIP, by the way. I’ve mentioned it before around here but we got the name of our daughter from his The Seventh Seal: thus are we bound to art. I’m reminded, too, of a great Coleridge quote:

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all ?

I never thought Bergman necessarily deserved any of his reputations: great artiste; insufferable bore; airless intellectual – but there are certainly a handful of films of his that I think about not infrequently. I consider it to be a great honor to have spoken about Persona a few months ago. I’m looking forward to writing it up in the near future.

Just finished a particularly long project that’s taken a lot out of me but, simultaneously, given me a tremendous amount of insight into an American icon I had heretofore taken for granted – and am engaged in another mega-project that I hope will segue into a few personal projects. A couple of interviews simmering: too soon to talk lest we jinx them – I’m feeling a new energy around these parts and hope that it doesn’t flag before a few more tent-posts are planted into the ground.

Saw a giant standee for the new Robert Zemeckis Beowulf that made me fairly hard, I have to admit. Especially its script by Neil Gaiman. . . okay, especially the Frazetta-like profile of Angelina Jolie. I guess there’s a new teaser for The Dark Knight floating around and am happy to report that a second viewing of Harry Potter 5 is as good as the first. I suspect the same won’t be true of any subsequent screenings of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.

Currently reading J. Hoberman’s exceptional The Dream Life. Currently listening to Gram Rabbit’s “Music to Start a Cult To”. Francis Coppola admits that he wanted to do Godfather IV with an ailing Mario Puzo in the same week that I discovered that the new director’s cut of The Outsiders is possibly his last true masterpiece – and weep at the revelation that Ray Harryhausen has praised colorization using the “we wanted to shoot it in color in the first place”. Fuck all over that. Have given up on “John from Cincinnati” apparently just at the moment that it started to get good – thank goodness for On Demand – and is it just me or has “Big Love” turned “Carnivale”?

Weird few weeks, guys – seismic upheavals on the personal front though nothing fatal, I think – but it’s all left me feeling exhausted, a little delirious in that head rush when drinking sort of way, and present in a way that I haven’t been in months. Let’s hope it lasts.

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In the middle of writing up To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep and what comes across my proverbial desk than this image (WILD THINGS). Oh man. Pants tighter? You bet.

When Lauren Bacall says “Hey. . . I think I’m sitting on somebody’s cigarette” during Have Not’s drive-by shootout sequence – the combination of elements (the film on my television, the image on my computer, the joy of writing on good film and anticipating new ones) speaks long and loud about the absolute, un-distilled joy of going to the movies. God bless Faulkner. He didn’t do it alone and, really, didn’t do shit in Hollywood, but these collaborations with Bogie, Bacall, and Howard Hawks are for the ages.

Finished up a seminar series at the Denver Public Library last night with the beloved Bagdad Café; a film that I’ve never liked and liked less upon each subsequent viewing. Not easy to speak on a film one doesn’t like in the company of folks who love it. Next series in the planning stages and looking extremely promising: the finalists, from which the library panel will choose five, are: L’Atalante, The Sweet Smell of Success, Hud, Miller’s Crossing, Birth, Days of Being Wild, The Seventh Seal, Shadow of a Doubt and Out of the Past. Can anyone guess the theme? I suggested Children of Men early on in the process, as well, but I’d be pleased talking any of the titles.

Anyone read Christopher Doyle’s diary of the Happy Together shoot? Brilliant, stuff.

Didn’t get a screening of Die Hard 4: Die Harderer, but will catch it as a civilian. Wouldn’t miss it for the world, the first flick counts as one of my favorites from my halcyon teen years: John McTiernan really hit a couple of those bastards out of the park, didn’t he? And the third flick is underestimated.

Ratatouille is awesome.

Nancy Drew is still haunting me.

Negotiating a post-modernism series in a different library system – some proposed titles include The Stunt Man, Adaptation., and Tristram Shandy. Later in the summer will find me talking Pan’s Labyrinth in Beaver Creek and Hero in Douglas County.

A few weeks late, but an official shout out to Ousmane Sembene – the voice of an entire fucking continent, a novelist by devotion who turned to film because it could reach a broader audience. I reviewed Moolaade for our last Annual, and it’s a masterpiece, but so are the other films in his too-brief filmography. Next up after the Bogie/Bacalls for me are a pair of lesser Bette Davis flicks, Forbidden Planet (which I may be talking as part of a Shakespeare-on-film quartet down south); and a couple of things by Henry Rollins including an interview I conducted with the man a couple of weeks ago. That list of things to do before I die keeps getting shorter.

Musing, if time permits, a brief retrospective of the films of Jacques Becker and, I’d love to do it, a similar one on Kenji Mizoguchi starting with Sansho the Bailiff. Of course there’s roughly thirty pounds of DVDs staring at me with their hollow, Cyclops eyes, needing some serious attention before I go off on any skylarks.

Currently listening to Francis Cabrel – especially a song called “Bonne Nouvelle”. Extra points for figuring out how and why I tracked down this dude. He’s a legend in France, I guess, shame on me for only just now discovering him for myself. Also giving heavy play to the Children of Men soundtrack and Clint Mansell’s score for The Fountain.

This thing with the Germans and Tom Cruise - this not letting Cruise film in the country because he's a member of a cult - is everyone just being polite in not mentioning the irony of Germany of all countries offering a blanket, discriminatory condemnation of a religion with which they don't agree? I especially like the son of the proposed Cruise character coming out and predicting that the film they're sabotaging will inevitably be "kitsch."

Any early thoughts on the new David Milch series?

Late, again, but "The Sopranos" series finale? I loved it.

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Therebutfor…

I was born in the United States in a little town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains called “Golden” after the carrot that coaxed it into existence, I guess, way back when. There’s a sign that stretches over the main street of the downtown still that welcomes visitors. I grew up, for all intents and purposes, in Norman Rockwell’s America, Western-style: I shined shoes at the barber shop on the corner that was owned, and operated as it so happens, by the mayor of Golden at that time (Frank, was his name), and with the nickels I was paid, mostly to refrain from shining shoes, I suspect, I would go across the street to the 5 and 10 to buy Silly Putty and comic books. I didn’t speak a word of English until I was five or so, but it didn’t matter, and in truth, I don’t really remember not speaking English – but I do remember getting teased in Kindergarten, mercilessly.

I remember, too, being teased for not knowing the difference in pronouns – there’s no such thing in Chinese, right? – and I recall my classmates in the affluent upper-middle class neighborhood where I went to school, commenting that I looked like a Jap and why didn’t I go back to where I came from. First grade or so, it’s hard to look at that sort of thing philosophically. I don’t suggest that things were worse where I came from; in fact, I suggest that things were better. This is long about 1979.

When first reports started coming in about the shooting at VTech last week, one of the early reports on MSNBC proclaimed that the shooter was a Chinese national. Later, when it was revealed that the guy was South Korean, nobody bothered to make a correction. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

I stuttered – and badly – all through my early childhood. It led to a lot of time alone, unable to communicate, watching movies and television and reading the bookshelf of collector’s editions that my parents bought at some garage sale at some point somewhere along the line. In sixth grade, as part of commencement at my elementary school, a story that I’d written about my time in school was chosen to be read, by me, in front of the entire student body. My grandfather flew in from Taiwan to watch me deliver it – it was one of maybe three times that I saw him in his lifetime. I remember that he used to play cards with me. I think it was Crazy 8s.

The next day – hour – week – I stopped stuttering. I make a good portion of my living speaking now; I make the rest of it writing.

I think I stuttered because I had anxiety about my ability to communicate. I think that I didn’t end up a lot like Cho first, obviously, because I’m not insane – but also because I was able to make friends through soccer until I could make them through my ability to communicate. It’s tempting to say that everything happens for a reason because if you’re not dead, then it’s possible to justify everything. I want to paraphrase something from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, that every living being on this planet is a badass evolutionary killing machine.

Without forgiving a thing that Cho did, let me say that I was heavily in the therebutforthe camp for a while and it was sobering. Stephen King wrote something for the EW website about this mess – the suggestion buried in there seems to be that Cho happened because Cho didn’t have any talent.

I think that’s, all irony aside, really fucking fascinating. I think that it’s dead on.

David Halberstam died today. He was a helluva journalist and a damned graceful writer. His The Best and the Brightest is essential and mad-influential. His books on baseball ain’t bad, either. This is what he said last year at a conference about government criticism of journalists covering Iraq:

"The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn't salute or play the game, and then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around, and they've used up their credibility."

At the risk of too much solipsism, I substitute “war” for “film industry” and I think back on the reams of hate mail our review of Episode II generated at the time. Sometimes it’s better to be right than popular. The sad thing about film criticism in the United States is that in just a couple of decades of pinheads trying to make it as democratic a medium as film itself, it’s just about destroyed any chance there might be for actual film critics to make a living anymore. If any chucklehead with the ability to turn a cheerfully smug phrase can get a position at a major daily, why bother with the ones that make people angry? More, why hire your own when you can download wire? There are already only something like a dozen papers left in the United States that have homegrown book reviews – give it time and there’ll be five working film “critics” left making a traditional living in all of this great land of ours.

I can feel that stutter starting up again.

The Trench

So with my review for David Lynch’s astonishingly unpleasant Inland Empire lodged in my craw like a fetid chicken bone (hey, it’s a masterpiece) – I open the Times today to find that Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84. Funny, I thought to myself, he already seemed a lot older than that when I saw him on some television show a couple of years ago. Truth is, I hadn’t read any of Vonnegut’s newer novels (I gave up on Timequake after about thirty pages), but his essay a few years ago on war and religion and politics and addiction and general madness (it’s called “Cold Turkey” and it’s required) reminded me of the quicksilver of his erudition when aimed at subjects close to my heart.

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.”

My first exposure to Vonnegut wasn’t through Slaughterhouse 5 as it is for many – but rather Breakfast of Champions, in junior high. For a thirteen-year-old, it’s pretty much life changing. Like figuring out when the protag in London’s “To Build a Fire” doesn’t actually, that there is such a thing as irony and unhappy endings in art and life. It causes a moment of cultural clarity; an existential displacement wherein, suddenly, things lumped into “pastime” and “entertainment” can actually hold lessons for life looming in the shadows of all that positive affirmation. A lot of people point at movies and say that they don’t want to go see something they see everyday on the news – that they go to movies to “escape”. But in saying that, as in so many similar statements, I have a lot of doubts that these people watch the news at all.

But Breakfast of Champions, yeah, and from there it was Cat’s Cradle and the end of the world – and then Slaughterhouse 5 and the Americans (!) raining liquid fire on a civilian population that included Vonnegut and a few other POWs from the Battle of the Bulge – and of course aliens and time travel because what other explanation, or surcease, could there be from that kind of madness? I learned a lot about writing from Vonnegut – not that I write like, or as well, or with as much wit and insight – but what I did learn was that it was all right to be angry with the status quo and with the happy acceptance of it, even when all evidence seems to point to Abyss. I’m not up to writing a proper eulogy of someone like Vonnegut – but the irony is that Vonnegut makes me want to do it anyway.

“How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into Religion I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.”

With the collapse of Grindhouse at the Almighty Box Office and the Weinsteins’ quick assertion that the audience is too stupid for it and that they will split it into two films for possible re-release in order to recoup their costs, Vonnegut comes to mind again as a guy who resists the very madness represented by the ABO. That we care at all is a function of bean counters and publicists. That it has begun to inform opinions of quality is frightening in the sense that anything can still be frightening that is so much part of the vulgate. Incidentally or not, I had a letter this week asking me to reconsider Blades of Glory.

G'night, Billy Pilgrim.

Went to a screening this week of Hot Fuzz and was gratified by the amount of gore in it. It’s surprising and extremely well done.

Of the seven or so major releases this weekend, the only one I screened (due to illness, availability, and so on) was Perfect Stranger and that at a last minute event designed to retard the number of reviews for it. I’ll do it on the radio, but I doubt that I have the energy to write about it with other, more worthy pictures, waiting to be reviewed. Writer’s block is blazing as well. As it is, I’m doing this little piece with a 101 fever that I’ve been nursing like cinder Otik for five days now. The flick is vaguely racist and certainly misogynistic, but then, you knew that.

Watched Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a little horror picture that’s been making some waves lately on the Internet. It’s diverting, I’ll give it that.

Doing a presentation of Rabbit Proof Fence tomorrow and then, on Saturday, of North by Northwest. One is critic-proof, the other is misanthropic: discuss.

Question of the moment: why did Grindhouse crash and burn in the popular conversation and what’s the fate of Tarantino’s creative freedom from this point forward as a result of it? For my part I should have said in the review for what it’s worth that I had more fun watching Grindhouse as part of a packed screening audience than any film since the first Jackass.

Also: best Vonnegut film adaptation? and best non-official (as in non-Vonnegut, Vonnegut) Vonnegut film? And, of course, best Vonnegut not yet-adapted and/or dream director/Vonnegut piece. . . say. . . Alfonso Cuaron and Cat’s Cradle?

Mortal Thoughts in the Trench

March 22, 2007

This weekend’s update delayed, I’m afraid, as Bill, our fearless leader, was rushed to emergency surgery tonight. I’m assured that the procedure went well and that he’s improving steadily. Our thoughts are with him and his family at this time.

It’s a shame that mortal thoughts seem at times the only ones that turn our eyes from the nominal prize – and it’s a stern reminder of how temporary all of this is no matter our attempts at legacy through these letters. I’m sure Bill’s going to be back in the saddle soon – until then, the inmates are running the asylum.

You can find my reviews of Reign Over Me and TMNT here. I reviewed Shooter, too, though the final form didn’t find its way online before Bill was stricken. Highlights from it, such as they are, include me calling it the redneck Bourne Identity and generally appalling in every way except that it seems to have its heart in the right place. It’s a film from the far left that proposes the same tactics as the far right – I suggest that it’s a shame that subtlety and intelligent discourse just doesn’t carry the same weight as all those dead patriots. Interesting as an exercise in re-calibrating one’s moral compass – interesting, too, as a companion piece to 300.

I skipped something like twenty press screenings of Pride for many reasons. Let’s see if you can help me articulate them.

While watching Nicholas Roeg’s fascinating Performance, I was reminded of his exceptional Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Which then posed the question of which are the best, most erotic, sex scenes in all of moviedom? I received a couple of letters asking if the sex scene in Factory Girl between Sienna Miller and Hayden Christensen was real: something I really thought about because it was prosaic enough to just possibly be real – I challenge anyone to get just one rock off watching non-professionals have sex (see Tommy & Pammy, or Paris & that poor bastard). Anyway – my nominations would begin with the love scene from Don’t Look Now - maybe the ménage a trios from The Hunger?

As to the previous post’s thread about it sucking to go to the movies nowadays. . . yeah, it well and surely does. Not putting a gravestone on it, just saying that I’ll see Jeff’s twenty bucks and raise it another fifty for babysitting and a ticket for the wife. The frickin’ Globe had a common pit, though, right? So it’s not like other people being hell is a new thing – it’s just that I think there’s weight to the idea that the older one gets, the less shit one’s willing to eat. There’s still no sub for seeing a film projected – there’s actually a different physiological, much less philosophical, reaction to the same images projected vs. broadcast – but, man, it gets hard sometimes with the seat kickers, text messagers, and narrators. Solution? Don’t got none. One thing’s true for me regarding my home theater, though, is that I spend a lot of time marveling at the technology and less time just watching the goddamn movie.

Did speaking gigs with the dreadful The Sum of Us and the surprisingly wonderful Yesterday; both part of the Douglas County Foreign Film series. Did the latter with my friend Tom Delapa, curator of the Denver Art Museum’s film program, the first program we’ve collaborated on since way back when Madstone Theaters was still a viable corporation. Bleh – long story there if anyone cares to hear it one day. Also finished up a series that included titles like Blowup and Aguirre: The Wrath of God - and am prepping a media satire series including Face in the Crowd and His Girl Friday.

Coming up: a series in July of Shakespeare on film that will include, if all goes to plan, Welles’ MacBeth and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet. Would love to do Stacy Title’s “Hamlet”, Let the Devil Wear Black someday – anyone here seen it?

Anyway – get well soon, Bill, we’ll leave the light on for you.

The Trench

Fresh from a screening of Norbit.

You know what I think? I think that Indiana Jones 4 (release date now set for May 22, 2008) finally coming to fruition isn’t a result of David Koepp finally coming up with something good enough for Spielberg/Lucas/Ford to agree on but rather the result of age and the leaden aggregate of encroaching dementia intersecting in this perfect storm of complementary senility. It’s the plateau on the line graph where the blue line of functioning grey matter junctures with the red line of filthy lucre. How about Indiana Jones and the Money Tree. I want to be proven wrong – which of course makes me the stupid one.

There was a Hannibal Rising screening in Denver and I wasn’t invited to it. There was a time that I would’ve been stung by this instead of grateful.

It does clarify something though in regards to how studios are starting to feel about critics. After 2006 which set some kind of record for the number of films that went unscreened – 2007 starts with “exclusive” screenings that filter out guys like me who just write for a website and talk on a radio show (combined audience: about 4 million). We also have two books in print. It makes me wonder what the criteria is, now, for being “official” enough to merit an invite to this jewel in MGM’s February crown. So is it more hubris to think that it’s personal or that it’s not?

Into Season 4 of “Six Feet Under” and it just rocks. Reminds me that I did an interview with Lili Taylor a couple of years ago that never was transcribed.

Did speaking engagements in conjunction with screenings of Streetcar Named Desire, Baby Doll, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the Denver Public Library’s Tennessee Williams film series. As part of the overarching program of The South, also did a seminar on early Black film (James Whale’s Show Boat, Song of the South and Edge of the City). Coming up: Suddenly Last Summer and Night of the Iguana. Lamentably, no Boom!.

Best time? Seventh Seal at another library. This Friday will see me doing 3-Iron, this Saturday will see with Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood - then Breathless, Blow Up, and Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Also doing the Russell Crowe The Sum of Us. Busy couple of weeks.

The Seventh Seal, besides being the best Bergman film (Persona a close second), is also where the wife and I got the name for our daughter.

Sitting in the audience with a bunch of yahoos doubled over at the spectacle of Eddie Murphy fucking himself while Thandie Newton (how many Oscar winners/nominees are in this thing?) and Cuba Gooding Jr., further debase themselves. Something you wouldn’t have thought possible after so close an association with Pauls Haggis and Hogan, respectively. Norbit is like a Madea picture. It’s so hateful towards Asians that most of tonight’s audience didn’t know a joke was intended. Murphy plays a chink in this one, too, by the by – how wonderful that he’s resurrected his career.

I hope someone shoves his Oscar up his ass in a couple of weeks.

Watched, @ home, Trust the Man and The Last Kiss - I had to take an hour-long shower after. I wished I had a brillo pad and Lysol. I wished, irrationally, geekily, that a Monty Python foot would take care of either Zach Braff or Paul Haggis or Julianne Moore’s asshole auteur husband or, in a concession towards economy, just me. Anyone have an idea of what to call this genre of overwritten, smug, skeezy, adult contemporary pap?

(the punchline, of course, is that our daughter is named "Augustos Bloch")

Finished Dan Simmons’ The Terror today. It’s astonishing. Immediately ordered his Ilium and Olympos from Half.com. I sort of knew Simmons about ten years ago when he and I frequented the same little bookstore of horrors in Arvada. I still have a nicely-engraved Song of Kali from that period – who knew that a pristine copy of it would fetch a pretty penny now – at the time, all I knew was a neat story that Harlan Ellison told at the writing seminar I took from him about discovering Simmons at a different writing seminar that he taught and that this Simmons guy, who liked to name his short stories after lines from Eliot, was a guy that I liked a lot. I hope and fear that they make The Terror into an HBO mini-series one day. If you have a quicksilver couple of days: pick it up.

Currently reading a Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams to augment my upcoming speaking engagements: Currently listening to The Good, The Bad, and the Queen’s first album, Shawn Colvin’s dazzling cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”, and a lot of Emily Haines.

Watched Babel again to make sure that I didn’t miss something the first time.

Glad we didn’t do a Bottom Ten list because it was due before I had seen Trust the Man and The Last Kiss.

Bart Freundlich - that’s that bastard’s name.

The Trench

- Ah, an air pocket.

- Did the introduction/discussion mambo with Dark City twice, with The Truman Show and Memento as well – the three films all about God/Creation issues: Father/son stuff at the end of our last millennium. Seems fitting that this fin de siecles in our cultural history would be about existential fear and trembling. Still didn’t prepare us for 9/11 and its accompanying influx of nihilism and chest-pounding. The King Kong remake, consummated atop Art Deco’s phallic pinnacle, couldn’t have happened at a different time.

- It raises the rhetorical question re: Pleasantville (also a 1998 film) of whether the Don Knotts television repairman is God in the unknown watchmaker sense.

- The new series at the Denver Public Library is called “Black & White” and I’ve chosen five films that I think each demonstrate a certain ambiguous quality; a place between genres that defies easy categorization and analysis. We began with Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) – a film that is in many ways the precursor to Vertigo in its feminine iconography and, more, in its investment in the bestial husband’s emotional point-of-view. Most films like this (and like Vertigo) are about the girl after all. Doing the Cocteau caused me to finally track down his production diary, published contemporaneously. It’s a great read – echoes of The Jaws Log.

- Speaking of Spielberg, began the Gilpin County Library’s Spielberg series this Saturday (DPL shows every Tuesday @ 6:30pm; Gilpin shows every Saturday @ 1:00pm) with the blueprint pic Duel (1971). It’s arguable that every film after Duel was a remake of Duel just as every film after E.T., at least for a decade or so (and including Schindler’s List, is a remake at least in part of E.T..

- Next week: Frankenheimer’s Seconds at the DPL and Spielberg’s Jaws at Gilpin.

- Rest of the respective runs: M, Eyes Without a Face and The Innocents - and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and War of the Worlds.

- Went to a screening of French cartoon Renaissance and wanted to pound a nail into my forehead.

- The Cinema Club series at the DPL this month feature supplementary films to the evening series: Repulsion, Night of the Living Dead, and Bride of Frankenstein.

- Next week also finds me at the finale of Douglas County’s Sci-Fi Film Series: the freshly-minted director’s print of Blade Runner. I don’t think it’s the re-touched version promised by Scott earlier this year, but isn’t there yet another shined up release set for the street? In any case, I’m excited at the chance to finally talk Blade Runner - the film about whose production I may know the most about thanks to the remarkable Future Noir book.

- Learned this week that my mother-in-law has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease which, in antidote to the stress and time debt of recent weeks, has provided a good healthy dose of perspective on the troubles of the world. All a hill a beans, or sentiments to that effect.

- That cold splash of mortality makes me feel more able to contextualize the irritations of people making cell phone calls and text messages from the seat next to me – kicking me in the back, eating a bucket of fried chicken, bringing their children to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 7 and so on. It also makes me aware, simultaneously, that there are roughly a billion people on this blue Earth that deserve more to die.

- Here’s how the radio show works (there are now more than 10 million subscribers to Sirius Satellite Radio – how many of them listen to the Bill Press show on Friday mornings, I don’t know) I wake up at 6:15am my time, drink a little tea to lube the pipes, get the call at about 6:35am from the producer of the show and chat about what we’re going to chat about, sit on hold for about a minute, and then we’re live and off the cuff. This week, Press made a comment that he thought The Queen was about the Foley scandal in Congress – and I said something like between The Queen and Little Children, we might be heading towards a full-blown description. Hey, it was early.

- Reviews of both The Queen and Little Children, by the way, are on their way along with write-ups, sooner or on video, of Beowulf, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Hidden Blade, Dogwalker, Keeping Mum, that new Julie Walters picture, and American Hardcore.

- Working through the first season of “Rome” and the complete “Jack of All Trades” series.

- Man of the Year is a big, giant pile of moose shit: call it “Good Morning, Beltway” and call it a day. In a lot of ways it’s just like Zaillian’s All the King’s Men. I was interested to read, by the way, Zaillian saying that he felt as though he’d been hit by a truck: referring to the critical and popular rejection of his picture. Really, though, can this have been a complete surprise?

- Go rent Lucky McKee’s The Woods, by the way.

- As the letters these last four weeks have been uniformly, perversely positive (including a very nice note from Neil Labute), gonna’ forego the Reader Mail this time around.

- With Del Toro’s ravishing-looking Pan’s Labyrinth (Bill raves about it from TIFF) that I’m dying to see, and with this last week finding me before the failure of Renaissance and the timelessness of Beauty and the Beast, the first question I want to throw out there is “Films that Best Evoke a Fairy Tale or Dream Quality?”

- And related to that (and the work of Alekan on Beauty and the Beast and James Wong Howe on Seconds), the best black-and-white cinematographers or, even better, single works.

- Finally, related to The Woods and, soon, John Gulager's Feast: the best direct-to-video films?

The Trench

- Did an introduction/screening as the sub for NPR’s Howie Movshovitz at the monthly Tattered Cover Film Series at Denver’s Starz Filmcenter tonight for King Vidor’s almost-socialist Our Daily Bread. It comes midway through a particularly strenuous time for me as I do about four speaking engagements a week for four consecutive weeks – a schedule that, in addition to all the stresses these presentations entail – impinges on my ability to do the day-to-day of screening/writing and, so, increases my stress in those areas, too. Bitch, bitch, bitch. It’s still not turning a large crank, I understand, but it being what I do – it leaves a mark.

- People like Jeffrey Lyons hiring interns to watch films on his behalf suddenly becomes understandable if not any less appalling.

- Tom Cruise apologizes to Brooke Shields this week. I’m sure he means it. The Church of Scientology reveals that it was prepared to back Tom Cruise’s production company should no other studio step in. I’m sure it meant it, too.

- I love King Vidor – the most underestimated director of that period, I think, and unfairly ranked behind John Ford and Howard Hawks for the kinds of movies they did. His autobiography is a must-read – as is the interview conducted with him by George Stevens Jr. Our Daily Bread is a stirring work, the last two reels devoted to an interesting homage to the bio-automatism of Eisenstein, with a score by Alfred Newman so rousing that Zanuck resurrected it just a year later for his Les Miserables. The real find of the picture is Karen Morley as the everyman wife Mary. She started her career as the moll in Scarface - and ended it a victim of HUAC with a failed lieutenant-gubenatorial run in New York as a member of the Labor Party.

- The story behind the making of the film (including a chance encounter between Vidor and the star of his The Crowd which led with a lifelong obsession for the director with the actor’s fate) holds rich parallels with the film itself.

- Joseph Stefano has passed away – the writer of Psycho and co-creator of “The Outer Limits”.

- Did a two-and-a-half hour lecture on four 1970s Gene Hackman films: The French Connection, The Conversation, Night Moves, and Superman. Notable exclusions include I Never Sang for my Father and Scarecrow - the drive was, generally, that all of the decade of the ‘70s could be distilled through Hackman films and, more, that the Donner Superman, while being very much a product of the darkness of that decade, predicted the cinematic wonderland of the eighties. Hackman’s father issues in life reflected the loss of security in traditional institutions in the seventies. He’s not the only one, but he’s central to the zeitgeist of that era. No wonder his turn as the father in The Royal Tenenbaums feels like full-circle.

- Saw screenings of Hollywoodland and The Science of Sleep this week as well as sneaking in a late show of Neil Labute’s The Wicker Man. I wondered why the new film from Labute was being released without so much as a proper critic’s preview, it was answered by the picture itself that isn’t dumb enough to please a certain demographic and not quite smart enough to please the cultists and purists. What’s left are a lot of fond memories of the brilliantly disconcerting original film and of Labute’s own scabrous early work.

- Hollywoodland is dreadful, deadening period hoohaw and if Ben Affleck is perfect as George Reeves, it’s because Ben Affleck is this generation’s George Reeves.

- The Science of Sleep is fitfully engaging but mostly puerile and scattershot while mainly a reminder that a Charlie Kaufman movie without Charlie Kaufman is just exactly what it sounds like.

- Intro’d Tampopo and a little Argentine flick called Bolivia for the Vail Symposium, as well. Can I say that I now officially hate Tampopo? Bolivia is a sad snapshot of Argentina right before the collapse of their economy in 2001 – the same collapse that has made it nigh impossible for all the promising voices rising at the start of the millennium from that industry to helm follow-up projects. In of itself, not so much, but as a product of a time and place it can start an interesting conversation.

- Continue the DPL documentary series this coming Tuesday with the hard-to-watch Brother’s Keeper, then the following Tuesday with Bright Leaves. This coming Friday will find me in Gilpin County with Peter Weir’s Fearless while the next two Wednesdays I’m back in Vail with first Delicatessen, then Big Night.

- The suggestion that Spielberg might be collaborating with Zhang Yimou on an adaptation of Journey to the West is something that makes me want to weep, spontaneously, with joy. Debunked by Spielberg this week, just the idea that this work could become a major film is something that makes me weak in the knees.

- Teaching The Conversation for the first time since I brought a 35mm print of it to show at a long-ago Denver International Film Festival was something like a dream for me. Showing it on DVD with a clips presentation. . . man oh man. David Shire’s amazing piano score for the film (coupled with a brief discussion down below) raises the question of the best scores in film. Not the best from a musical standpoint, necessarily (I’m not a music critic, after all), but the best in terms of how it jibes with the film that holds it. Quick thoughts are the Goblin score for Suspiria, the Philip Glass for Candyman, Ennio Morricone’s work with Sergio Leone, and John Williams’ trio of rousing variations on Holst’s “Planets”: Jaws, Star Wars,, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A few of this week’s letters:

Hello

I have just read your review on last years film Dreamer. I think, along with many others, that calling a horse 'great glue' is extremley offensive. A lot of people work hard to stop healthy horses going to the knackery, and saying something like that would really hurt them. I really hope it was just a horrible atempt at a joke.

Please don't try to offend people, and have some more respect for horses. They have lived on this planet for a long time and lived and died as they need to, rather than being trucked to knackerys to have their legs chopped off as they are still alive, shot in the head, then have their neck and head sliced up.

I don't like jokes about that torture.

Regards,
Mollie.

(RE: Your review of Equilibrium)

Before you bash a movie, make sure you understand it.All emotion is not banned with the drug. It is clearly stated that the "highs and lows" are destroyed. So there can still be jealousy, pride, and the other things you mentioned, in moderation.Also, Taye Diggs' character is not on the drug, which is why he shows so much anger and pride.And what scenes were taken from the Matrix?

John Daly

What would happen if I understood Equilibrium and still didn’t like it? Maybe you could also explain the parts about the puppy.

As to what’s been taken from The Matrix, I guess nothing except for the costumes, the general look, and the bullet time.

Just who is it you’re angry with or about? Either that or you've got some sort of difficulty with life because I just read your review of Finding Forrester (better late than never as they say) and you come across in your writing like you know it all. You remind me of those two clowns who used to review films on television and then one of them died. Either way, you're no better than those two clowns in terms of your review accept for the fact that you're extremely obnoxious. You must be from Britain or New York, but your writing seems pompous enough to warrant a Briton.Just thought you should know how much you stink. –Jimbo

Hazarding a guess: aside from the looks you get spending your time defending stuff like Finding Forrester, I’m thinking that what you’re angry about has something to do with being named “Jimbo” that or believing, maybe rightfully, that literate people who dislike Dead Poets Society knock-offs are most likely foreigners.

P.S.
- Just got a press release from publicity, by the way, that Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left is being remade. Here’s the release:

A remake of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 horror classic that established Wes Craven as a filmmaker, is being developed at Rogue Pictures for production in early 2007. Mr. Craven and longtime producing partner Marianne Maddalena will produce the new version with the original film’s producer, Sean S. Cunningham. Rogue co-presidents Andrew Karpen and Andrew Rona made the announcement today.

Rogue will hold worldwide rights to the remake, for which a director is being sought. The new film will hew closely to the plot of the earlier version, which tracked the fate of a group of murderers as vengeful parents of the victims mete out punishment to fit the crimes.Another of Mr. Craven’s early works, The Hills Have Eyes, was recently remade; Mr. Craven co-produced the remake with Ms. Maddalena and Peter Locke. That film became a boxoffice hit earlier this year; a sequel, written by Mr. Craven and his son Jonathan, is in production for release by Fox Atomic in March. Martin Weisz is directing the sequel, which is again produced by Mr. Craven, Ms. Maddalena, and Mr. Locke.

Mr. Karpen and Mr. Rona said, “We’re excited about working with this talented team of filmmakers to create a new take on this seminal movie that will scare the wits out of a whole new generation of filmgoers.”

Rogue Pictures (www.roguepictures.com) is devoted to producing and distributing high-quality suspense, action, thriller, comedy, and urban entertainment with mainstream appeal and franchise potential.

Hot Off the Presses - 9/3/06

Bad communication on my part resulted in me stampeding over Bill's post, there - apologies - let me underscore:

The Book is here, at Amazon. Although the best option shipping-wise for Canadian customers - know that we get a bigger bite on sales from Lulu. In either case, though, your support is much appreciated. Look for a wider roll-out as time goes on.

The Trench

- So you stumble out of the wilderness, several days’ worth of growth on your chin, wearing a stink of something gone over, and sporting a real bad attitude with weasels in your eyes – and you find yourself in a (imagine it) conversation with some prickhole named who cares what his name is who does something or another involving cheesing knobs and chugging cocks at studio junkets for something I’ve never heard of with “Hollywood” in its title, before a screening of Will Ferrel’s sure-to-be-awful (but actually excellent, believe it or not) Talledega Nights - and what would you do?

- Background, first, I stumbled bad at the finish line – pulled up lame like a tricked up thoroughbred and only managed to complete about half of what I intended to complete for the book and that in a crazed, glazed fashion. Consolation for me, for what it’s worth, is that it might show up some day in some form less embarrassing than the permanence offered by a bound edition.

- But this alien, he gives me ropey strings of credentials, lists off all the press conferences he’s attended in five minutes flat, tells me he’s a shrink, that he was Stephen Bochco’s assistant although he seems not to understand that Michael Mann had nothing to do with “Hill Street Blues” (“he ghost wrote a lot of episodes” this creep backpedals, touching me on the shoulder in an unsuccessful attempt at mind control), that he broke his back falling out of a window, that he’s a Film Critic of some standing in the Broadcast Journalist Society or something (I checked, he is, but so is Susan Granger and the Cliffords).

- He also wants me to know that he liked Michael Mann’s “version” of Miami Vice. Sometimes I feign confusion, sometimes I’m just confused.

- I say “Wow. You’re everything.” And, puppy-hurt, he pulls out a business card that, I kid you not, is creased from wear and has “Broadcast Journalist Association” written on it as if an affiliation to some assclown parade its members know about is akin to weight.

- I say “Look man, I don’t give a shit what your credentials are – put that sorry shit away, I can print a “President of New Guinea” business card and it means the same thing – if you want me to think that you have a valid opinion, why not offer one?” I say “Look man, the film is extant, the reaction to it is personal – you poll everyone in here, everyone in here will see a different picture – you call yourself a critic, your responsibility is to ask big questions of yourself.”

- He says “I just like to be entertained.”
- I say “What entertains you?”
- “Good writing.”
- “What’s good writing?”
- “It’s good characters”
- “What are good characters?”
- “It’s just what I like”
- “Why do you like what you like?”

- Then he repeats me to me almost word for word about the personal reaction jig and then accuses me of dancing around the issue – I’m sure this burst capillary in my right eye is his fault. I say “That thing of yours; that gift for taking what I say and saying it back to me as if it were your idea and meaning it – that’s a brain tumor that yes-men and other toads have.” and then I say, “If you don’t have anything more interesting to say than that you were entertained, then you’re exactly the function and form of a publicist. I’m not saying that they don’t have a hard job, understand, in fact without irony I can offer that I have no idea how they do what they do with the people, on both sides, that they have to deal with – but they’re publicists, see, whose job it is being gladhanding sycophants and I wonder while knowing the answer why you’re doing their job for them for free under the guise of being a film critic.”

- “I find it to be, let me be honest here, morally and artistically repugnant.”

- “Well” he says “I didn’t think I was going to get psychoanalyzed here.”

- And I say “Buddy, I could give a poop about you. It’s your kind that offends me. And don’t flatter yourself, we crack open that coconut and moths fly out.”

- Did the screening/discussion mambo with His Girl Friday a couple of weeks ago and was reminded that this is one tough little cookie. Suicide, murder, capital punishment, and corruption up and down the beltway and the fourth estate. It’s funny, sure, but the humor is painful. Grant’s never better than as the world’s biggest asshole whose ex-wife remarks half-in-seriousness that charm always came naturally to him because granddaddy was a snake. Hawks’ macho worldview of tough-talking dames and effeminate men (or vice-versa), gets both sides of the coin here in poor Ralph Bellamy.

- They started shooting on the day that Poland was invaded by Germany.

- At issue in the film, the use of the word “pickaninny” by one of the press pool. I argue that it’s in there for shock value, that tsking over how backwards the Greatest Generation was is doing this sharp-hewn, modern film a deep disservice. At some point, being patronizing cunts actually makes us the burlier bigot.

- Did the same mambo with Keep the River On Your Right, that morally suspect documentary about artist Tobias Schneebaum, forced by virgin brother/sister filmmakers to confront his dark past in the bush. Ultimately about identity and the need to assimilate into a culture that’ll have you – the discussion raised a few dark issues for me about this infernal little project. Lucky for everyone involved that Schneebaum saw it as redemptive at the end rather than second degree kidnapping for the purposes of making a festival darling.

- Same again, lecture format this time, with three films from 1961: Splendor in the Grass, The Hustler, and The Misfits. Two hours of me talking about waterfalls. It’s a wonder anyone comes to this shit at all. Next month: Gene Hackman flicks from the 1970s.

- Gave a speech about the state of modern film criticism to the Cherry Creek Rotary Club – Cherry Creek, by the by, is the richest area in metropolitan Denver. I think John Elway has a house there. First time I’d ever been to a Rotary Club meeting. It’s not like anything that I could have expected and more news from here might be coming in the next few weeks.

- During the late-night screening of The Descent - a thoughtful, frightening little English horror flick – the local publicists put on a show by decorating the hall leading into the theater like a cave mouth. Interiors dark and cold with a soundtrack of squeals and howls making this the world’s most misguided post-prom party – but admirable for the effort. Not so hot were the people who like to talk through horror movies as a nervous reaction, for the idiot checking her cell phone every few minutes, and for the baby crying every few minutes. At least it wasn’t out of focus for the first two reels like this morning’s screening of The Illusionist.

- Is there something wrong with me, by the way, that the worst part of every screening experience for me now is the fear that I might overhear someone else’s post-film post-mortem?

- Working on the Dr. Who Season One set of last year’s resurrection of the Time Lord. Preliminary verdict? Sucks. We’ll see what working it out through a few thousands words turns up.

- Putting the screen capture on hiatus to let my computer cool down. Here, instead, more lovely reader mail.

subject: PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS

Walter,

If you are going to take the cynical low road of film
criticism and excoriate director Scott Derrickson (The
Exorcism of Emily Rose) by calling him names (an ice
cream-suited revival-tent preacher, idiot, full of
shit, creepy guy with a weak chin, etc...) then you
really ought to at least GET YOUR FUCKING FACTS
STRAIGHT before doing it.

Derrickson doesn't "modestly cop to reading over
two-thousand books on demonic possession" on the
director's commentary. Listen to it again, dickwad,
he clearly says he read over TWO DOZEN books, not TWO
THOUSAND. You were only off by 1,975 books.

For fucks sake, when you THOUGHT you heard two
thousand, are you really such a cynical asshole that
you didn't question the lunacy of that number and
rewind once to see if maybe, just maybe, you heard it
wrong? If you have any integrity at all, you'll at
least fix that part in your review.

And what fundamentalist Christian or Catholic priest
pissed on your puppy when you were seven? I'm no fan
of religion myself, and I agree that the film was not
as balanced as the film makers seemed to think it was,
but it was a hell of a lot more open-minded than you
were in your review. In fact, it's not really a
review at all, it's a case study in anti-religious
zealotry.

Griffin W.

Actually, Griff, I was off by 1,976 books if you’re right, and, what the hell, I’m giving that one to you because I’m not nearly depressed enough to pull that disc from out from under my nice cool drink to listen to the commentary track.

Am I an anti-religious zealot? The religious zealots seem to think so.

Just having certain enemies says a lot of good things about you a person so, thanks. My prescription for you is that you say “twenty Dario Argentos from the early-mid seventies” for what ails you. Go with Jeebus.

subject: WHO ARE YOU?

I think the planet you came from is calling you home! I have read terrible reviews and you come close to having the worst. You must be friends with Tipper Gore. I know that this film is not for everyone. I am not defending the topic, but it's clear that you have not sat and watched someone you love die in the manner that Harry Stien would have. Yes I know what you would say to that, it's just cowardly. Walter the man has passed already, if the movie is not for you, don't watch it. There has been much talk of the moving performance of Eric Roberts, and the movie had a wonderful mixture of cast members. Grow up, get a new hobby, maybe be a volunteer for aids patients who have no family. SB

Well, Susan, if the mother ship ever comes for me, I’ll be ready. I did actually watch my father die a couple of years ago – what that has to do with a piece of ass-candy starring Eric Roberts, I’ll never know. Real charity, apropos of nothing, doesn’t advertise itself on Lifetime. I think you meant to send this letter to Oprah, though, so all’s forgiven again. What movie, by the way, are you writing about?

subject: Response to an Old Review

Mr. Chaw,

I stumbled upon your film review of the 2003 movie The Other Side of Heaven and just wanted to say to you that you might want to know a little bit about a religion before you go bashing it... you only sound like an idiot when you criticize a church you obviously no nothing about. In your review you
call the mormon church, (really named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) basically a church full of close minded, naive morons. To me you seemed the moron because you babble a bunch of b.s. and uneducated opinions of a truly christian organization. Next time you criticize a faith of millions worldwide you might study up a bit on their actual beliefs, and not go on aobut the common misunderstandings and rumors thought to be the "true mormon religion" by so many uneducated dolts. If you would like to
respond, please do.

J. Ricks

Dear Mormon wacko,

Surely you don't think that I'm in the minority voice here, do you? I mean, let's be serious, you have some dangerous, half-illiterate, proudly-professed-to-be uneducated dude setting up a cult in Utah with tales of Lamanites and sheets of metal buried in New York, and Moroni/Nephi/Christ parading around the maize in rains of light, right?

Tell me about how black people get lighter-skinned when they get closer to Mormon. . . tell me about the secret names your women get that their husbands whisper to them to allow them access to your lonesome heaven. Scientology ain't got nothing on you guys, man.

Tell me who Nephi was? Tell me how an angel became first the Holy Ghost and then the Lord Christ in Joe Smith's seminal vision from 1821 or 1822 or 1823. Then tell me how it comes that mortals have the authority to meddle so calamitously with your inviolate holy scripture.

But you're right, all I have to go on is a read of your silly "Golden Bible" (except for the parts ripped off the King James Bible's Book of Isaiah: those parts are pretty bitchin') given me about twenty years ago by a couple of nice young, dead-eyed men in white shirts and black ties; the equally silly A PEARL OF GREAT PRICE; Roberts' STUDIES OF THE BOOK OF MORMON; a read of Martha Becks' LEAVING THE SAINTS; of Simon Southern's LOSING A LOST TRIBE; a read of Jon Krakauer's UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN' and, best, a few of Michael Quinn's hilariously spot-on refutations of your religion's basic tentpoles. You're dead on correct to notice that I'm not of the true faith.

I’m thinking, here, J. Ricks, that you’re peeved because Big Brutha has instructed you not to read anti-Mormon texts and, whoops, here’s one masquerading as a review of your favorite movie.

(I also enjoy HBO's "Big Love" series, proving that bad religion can make good entertainment instead of pieces of irresponsible, unfiltered shit like The Other Side of Heaven.)

I'm not willing to investigate Mormonism further, sad to confess, and if the best you've got for me is that I'm a moron, not you, well - I'm rubber and you're glue. I didn’t name any of my prophets “Moroni” after all. Sounds a little like a retarded pasta. Looking back, it seems like I was making the point that this film treats the non-believers in its audience like morons for not believing. If you feel as though that somehow translates into Mormons being morons, well, who'm I to argue so fine a point?

Let's agree to disagree, jm ricks, because you're not converting me and I'm not converting you.

I would however part by recommending that you educate yourself in defiance of your church leaders because, and I promise you this, no legitimate god wants actual sheep in his flock.

- Parting thought: I screened/discussed Brazil during this period, too, only to find that I didn’t like it anymore. I still like the Ministry of Information Retrieval bits, but the rest of it finally struck me as it’s struck Gilliam’s critics for years: busy to no end, confused, abrasive to no end – on and on. I see why it’s a cult film – as a giant “fuck you” to paperwork, it really enthralled the college-bound youth of me yesteryear – but the movie (the 144 min director’s cut) is laborious. Turns out I only still like three Gilliam flicks: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Twelve Monkeys, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Now, granted, I haven’t seen Baron Munchausen in about ten years. . .

- Question of the hour: films that you loved at one time that you can’t bear to watch now.