When I first heard yesterday that Henry Gibsonhad died of cancer, I felt like I was alone in my mourning. But a day later, the film blogs have paid him due respect. And it being a slow news day, I’m devoting today’s Bloggery to this great character actor, despite the morbidity of having more than one obit/tribute roundup in one week.
I’m quite happy to see that many people appreciated the actor’s talent, though it makes me sad that he wasn’t given more and better work in his later years. Sure, he was still prolific in his TV and film appearances, but isn’t it a shame his role in Wedding Crashersis his most memorable of the past decade?
I remember the first time I saw and heard him in one of my now-favorite films Nashville. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy I primarily knew from Laugh-Inand Joe Dante films. Maybe it was because I thought he resembled Teller of Penn & Teller, and so in spite of the villainous turns, I typically saw him as a sweet, cute, relatively silent and somewhat dopey-looking character actor. Also, his parts were usually pretty small.
In Nashville, though, he’s a central figure, one who feels far more real than any characters I’d seen him play before. Not that there’s anything wrong with his sillier roles. Check out this villain from an episode of Wonder Womanfor why I truly love him. But the guy obviously had range, and I wish we could have seen more from him.
Check out some more memories of Gibson from other film blogs after the jump: …Read more
Garrison Keillor’s sleepy-voiced radio monologues from the A Prairie Home Companion radio show might be the only way you know the native Minnesotan, but he’s also an author of more than 17 books. He’s published numerous short stories and poems since being published in the New Yorker in 1970, he hosts A Writer’s Almanac daily on NPR stations around the country, and posts regularly to his blog on the Prairie Home website. He’s also a daily columnist at Salon.com, which makes you wonder how he finds time for the rest of his life.
But despite all the books he’s written, Keillor hasn’t had anything made into a movie. Robert Altman directed a fictional feature film version of A Prairie Home Companion, but to a Keillor fan it came off as more of a parody of the radio show than anything else. So where are the movies? Here’s a guide to the five Keillor books I’d really like to see on the big screen.
This week, thanks to The Rocker, we can add another fictional band to the long list of music groups created solely for the movies. They’re called Vesuvius, and they’re an ‘80s hair band with a hit song titled “Promised Land.” As part of the film’s marketing, the track was offered as a free download for play on Rock Band (see the clip above). But if you ask me, the wrong tune was used in the promotion. Another song from the soundtrack, also credited to Vesuvius, is called “Pompeii Nights,” and it’s definitely the better of the two.
I’m not surprised, though. While most people favor the songs of Spinal Tap, a once-fictional band that has become popular enough to evolve into a “semi-fictional” performing act, I’ve preferred such gems as “The Whites of Their Eyes” by PEZ® People, from The Big Picture. Also co-written by This is Spinal Tap’s Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, and sung by McKean, this song is apparently so underrated that I can’t even find an audio sample, let along a YouTube clip of the fake band’s music video, which was directed by fictional filmmaker Lydia Johnson (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
Fortunately, for the benefit of this list, the rest of these under-appreciated tracks have a few fellow fans.
The Hollywood duplex in which Elliot Gould’s Phillip Marlowe lived in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is for sale––and with its balconies, tower elevator, hilltop view and undeniable cinephile cred, its asking price of $875,000 looks unbelievably attractive to those of us jaded by New York’s impossible real estate market. You can watch a virtual tour of the property in its current state, set to what I can only assume is the soundtrack lifted from a masterpiece of new age erotica, here. For comparison, I’ve embedded the opening scene of The Long Goodbye above.
Yesterday, in response to David Gordon Green’s talent being (presumably) wasted on Pineapple Express, I brought you my picks for the 5 worst directorial sellouts of all time (or, as I should have titled it, 5 Worst Attempts at Mainstream Success). And now, as promised, are my picks for the best, because occasionally a great filmmaker can take a seemingly sellout gig and deliver a masterpiece.
(tie) The Godfather(1972) and The Godfather Part II(1974) - Everyone should know that Francis Ford Coppola didn’t want to make the first Godfather film. He wanted to make smaller movies, such as The Conversation, which he was able to make at Paramount only because he directed The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. I prefer the film he wanted to make, but there is no denying his first two Godfather films were worth Coppola’s time and, more importantly, ours. …Read more
They’re calling it an exclusive, which we’re sure won’t be accurate for long, but for the time being the Times Online has the first full review of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom. Again, this seems like a case of a filmmaker winning by vaulting over an extremely low-set bar, but as far as three-star reviews go, this one’s damn near hyperbolic. Unless we’re just talking about everyone in the same sentence as Robert Altman these days? Here’s the nut graph:
Yet despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people’s lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons. Altmanesque would be stretching the compliment too far, but Filth and Wisdom shows Madonna has real potential as a film director.
You can check out some of Madonna’s, um, potential, in the clip above. I have no idea what the announcer is saying (and yet us know if you do), but you can make out a bit of Filth and Wisdom behind it. Meanwhile, if you were Guy Ritchie––and had run your once-promising (I mean, some of you like Snatch, right?) career into the ground by first remaking a socialist/misogynist classic with your pop star wife in the lead, then by allowing said pop star wife to infuse your next generic gangster picture with Kabbalah bullshit––how many reviews like this would you stick around for?
UPDATE: You can watch a more complete, foreign voice-over-free clip at indieWIRE. And this one has strippers! Also, I added a question mark to the headline of this post, because after watching the new clip, I think Filth and Wisdom’s Altman cred is truly up for debate.
Your blogger’s gotta plow through some stuff this morning. While she’s gone, watch the first ten minutes of Robert Altman’s California Split, embedded above, and/or the wedding scene from Little Murders, embedded below. Yes, when Karina is stressed out, she procrastinates by turning to YouTube to satisfy her obsession with late-70s Elliott Gould. Is that a problem?
Over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Flyball Rule, Dennis Cozzalio has offered the film blog world a 28-question “summer midterm.” As he puts it, “We know that the last thing you really want to do in the summer is to be sitting indoors taking a test. But wouldn’t you rather be doing this than seeing Transformers? I thought so. Now get to work!”
I’m not good with long quizzes, so for this week’s installment of The Micro Five, I’ve picked five questions to answer in short essay form. See my answers below, and be sure to check out Dennis’ post to read the 70+ (!) responses. This is pass/fail, right?
1. Describe a famous location from a movie that you have visited (Bodega Bay, California, where the action in The Birds took place, for example). Was it anything like the way it was in the film? Why or why not?
When I was 17, I was briefly employed as a hostess at Dupar’s, a been-there-forever diner in Studio City, CA that was used as a location for Boogie Nights. Dupar’s is the setting of that post-disco scene where Burt Reynolds explains his directorial vision to budding porn star Dirk Diggler. I haven’t read the Boogie Nights script, but I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime-Studio City resident Paul Thomas Anderson had written Dupar’s in by name–it’s a perfectly preserved monument to the Valley’s mid-70s glory, and I’m sure it required minimal set dressing. In my brief time there, I didn’t ID any porn stars (unless Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa have gone X-rated? They were in there a lot), but it was a fairly sleezy place. We were ordered to lie about our failing grade from the health department, and I actually quit after three weeks due to very low-level sexual harassment from my manager: one day he told me I’d “look good in a potato sack,” and in my teenage feminist brain, that was, like, cause for a lawsuit.
2. Best movie about baseball
Um, does Mysterious Skin count? I think it should. A little league coach’s molestation of two members of his team is the pivotal event that sets off the narrative. One of these boys, damaged by the abuse to the point of obsession, goes on to get a job at the field where he used to play and use his workplace as a venue for sexual encounters. I guess it’s no Major League, but it was one of my favorite films of 2005.
3. Favorite Katharine Hepburn performance
It’s got to be Bringing up Baby. I’m sure everyone says that, but how can you not get all googly over the performance that defines screwball? But Baby’s not my favorite Hepburn film; that would be Holiday, which is more of Cary Grant’s show, don’t you think? I don’t know–maybe I just don’t like to see her play the wallflower. Regardless, check out the funny Holiday clip reel above, set to “Spunky” by The Eels.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Vlimos Zsigmond following a screening of Robert Altman’s film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I had wanted to see this film for quite some time and seeing it at a festival with the cinematographer was a rare and wonderful gift. As I listened to the Q&A after the film, I could see why directors like Robert Altman’s, Woody Allen, and Steven Spielberg wanted to work with this man. He was patient, good natured, and a consummate artist. Zsigmond has been the cinematographer on such films as Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate,Melinda and Melinda and more recently, The Black Dahlia. Listen as he discusses his experience watching McCabe again, what it was like to work with Robert Altman, and the cinematographers and films that inspire him as an artist.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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