This is the year that print film criticism went on life support, online film critics drafted sober eulogies and the rest of the world yawned distractedly while poised over the plug. Into the ill-attended open grave my colleague Lauren Wissot just tossed a meditation on film culture titled, “The Movie-Going Public.”
I dig it because it dares to take filmgoers as seriously as it does cinema itself. Further, it manages, mostly by way of example, to pee all over the very notion of a professional film critic. I use don’t use the term “pee” lightly but with great care, thinking of readers like Anonymous, who responded to Lauren’s post with, “You’re not an elitist. But you are crass, vulgar and unprofessional… Manny Farber is rolling in his grave.” I want Anonymous, if he or she is reading this, to imagine Mr. Farber howling in pain from the beyond at my using such a crude bathroom word as “pee” in reference to the profession he devoted his life to. But another dead 20th Century critic is probably grinning in his grave. James Agee: “I suspect I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating,
or illuminating.” (Props to Ryland Walker Knight.) …Read more
I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.
Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Above: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Murder Case starring John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
Television was always for suckers, but there was a time when we were all suckers, happily. Hef remembers. He was born in 1953, though his wear and tear and rock quarry voice initially made me guess 1945. His roommate and best buddy, Kid, is the same age but looks ten years younger. He remembers when TV was good and true, too. They are both living in the quiet afterlife that follows (if one survives) decades of dope and jail time. Plenty of time to conjure up the good-and-true era via the DVD player. The boys generally go for crime and punishment: Perry Mason, Daniel Boone, Annie Oakley, Superman, The Fugitive. What stands out in my eyes: Even the mediocre shows had a scintillating cinematic quality. The basic dynamism and construction Perry Mason is indistinguishable from its big screen counterparts–the serialized movie adventures of Mr. Moto, Roy Rogers, Charlie Chan and Sherlock Holmes. Those gems we watch on dollar store double feature discs with labels like “Saturday Matinee.” (Holmes and Watson show up in both their black-and-white big screen incarnations and their later color British television guises.)
John Cassavetes appears, like a comet, in his “Brilliant but Cancelled” beatnik detective show Johnny Staccato. And there he is again, as a desperate fugitive in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His gaze and the edge in his whispered threats to the young woman he’s holding hostage are XXX-rated. Indeed, this guy was too brilliant, too keen to realities that 50’s television could only sample in small doses, to be anything but cancelled. Another genius, Robert Altman, turns up as director of a heartstopping, hilarious Hitchcock episode in which we bite our nails over whether Joseph Cotten will escape the office he’s accidentally locked himself in– the same office where’s he’s just killed a woman. It’s Shadow of a Doubt crashing into Psycho. …Read more
My version of The Godfather would open with a voice in the darkness saying, “I don’t believe in America. The American Dream is a once-beguiling fairy tale; show’s over, y’all.” But The Dream is still real to many people, and the violence that powerful private interests have done to it in the last century pains them like a kidney punch.
Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson was one of the wounded, and so is Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Darkside), the far more straight-laced director of the entertaining documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. They share a proprietary sense of outrage over abuses of power they’ve witnessed in their times. For them, America’s Nixons, Enrons and Bush-Cheneys have desecrated the church, the front lawn. For all their passionate trouble-making, there’s no denying that Gibney and the late Thompson, two white males who came up through America’s hallowed institutions (Thompson through the U.S. Air Force; Gibney through Yale), are insiders.
When I went to interview Gibney about Gonzo, I remembered the film’s procession of leathery right-wingers and elites, former Thompson nemeses, who have warm, friendly things to say about “Dr. Gonzo” now that he’s dead, now that his caricature as a gun-toting drughead has endured beyond his politics. I wondered if, in the end, being inside got the hole dug any better than chucking rocks from outside.
Every time a DVD player breaks, we have a panic. How to watch the stack of movies I, Hef and Kid scavenge several times a week from the Mid-Manhattan and Brooklyn Central libraries? Without our movies, what have we got? A bunch of homeless guys with no more than a bag of clothes, some food stamps and dollar store toiletries each between us. There’s only so much shit-talking and communal daydreaming (typically about which beautiful celebrity we would treat to multiple orgasms) one can do in the downtime, the hours between 5pm and lights out. And we can’t bring women in here. And we keep forgetting to buy a cheap chess board. And the streets of East New York are no place to find non-lethal distraction. Gunfights every night.
I downplay my advantage, my notebook. The fellas don’t know I’m a writer, nor that I have no criminal or substance abuse history. Nobody pries. It’s understood that we’re all here because we fucked up in one way or another. But it’s the DVD player that helps me sort of love these guys. What comes out of that machine is real to them. And when it isn’t real, it gets ejected and tossed aside. That’s how I live, too. My film critic and filmmaker friends who tell me that movies can’t cut, kill or save lives… man, listen.
Later today, we’ll be debuting a new column from Lauren Wissot, whose work you might have also read at The House Next Door, and/or The Reeler. Lauren, who will be tackling (no pun intended) sexual themes in indie and classic cinema every Wednesday, will begin with a revisionist take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. We wanted to call her column “Art Films To Jerk Off To,” but in the end that might be too limiting––after all, who’s to say what qualifies as art?
So please join us in welcoming Lauren and Steven. We’re also looking for additional part-time columnists, so if you have a topic or a genre that you’re dying to explore in bloggy form week in and week out, do send Karina an email.
Steven Boone has published an a-ma-zing interview with film critic Armond White. There’s almost too much good stuff here; at one point, White deflates Boone’s theory that digital video has allowed filmmaking to transition from “aristocratic medium…to one where poor people make films.” White says: “Poor people don’t make films. They’ve got other things to do.” Also, check out Boone’s companion piece at The House Next Door: Ten Armond White Quotes That Shook The World.
“What if this guy got you pregnant? Basically an over aged hippy who ended up with a woman far, far hotter than he could ever have hoped for.” Dennis Kucinich as Seth Rogen’s character from Knocked Up, and other 2008 Presidential Candidates as 2007 Movie Characters.
David Hudson has the first round of competition titles for the Berlin Film Festival. Included: Errol Morris’ S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, and my favorite English-language film of the year thus far, There Will Be Blood.
Kate Coe has found a new twist in the Theresa Duncan vs. Scientology story: Apparently, sometime Scientologist Beck told an Italian newspaper that he was starring in Duncan’s Alice in Wonderland-inspired film, years before he told Vanity Fair that he had never even talked to Duncan about being in the project. The VF article theorizes that Beck’s withdrawl from the project led it to fall apart, which led Duncan to the depression that led to her suicide.
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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Just a brief note to introduce you to a couple of new SpoutBlog contributors. You may have already noticed that 
Steven Boone has published 
