In The Company Of Glenn

'Mumblecore' and the indie-rock analogy

I went to the "Generation DIY" panel discussion at New York's Soho Apple Store last night. Hosted by the great Eugene Hernandez of Indiewire, it featured director Joe Swanberg and actress Greta Gerwig, of LOL and the just-premiered-in-NY Hannah Takes The Stairs; blogger, Premiere reviewer, bon vivant, close personal friend and Fish Kill Flea co-director Aaron Hillis (who's also added DVD entrepreneur to his gallery of hats—I'll get to that); writer/director Aaron Katz, whose Dance Party U.S.A. and Quiet City are among the best pictures to come out of the so-called "Mumblecore" scene; and Matt Dentler, a producer of the South by Southwest arts festival, which has premiered a good number of films by members of this not-quite-movement, which has recently been the subject of pieces in The Village Voice and The New York Times.

It was a lively, informative panel, and during the Q&A portion Andrew Grant (the blogger behind Filmbrain and the founder of Benten Films, the DVD label he's co-running with Mr. Hillis, whose inaguaral release, a well-done disc of Swanberg's LOL, streets next Tuesday, and by the way, do you think this post could use more hyperlinks?) asked the panel what they made of a recent, perplexing blog post by Anthony Kaufman which stated that "[i]f these films are hyped, they may be doomed" because the hype might attract people who really liked Superbad and will hence be disappointed in the low production values of the average "Mumblecore" film, or something. Okay, I'm oversimplifying—"[D]o these films stand a chance in the real theatrical marketplace?" he asks.

A literary image.

Hugh put one foot on the parapet and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself as quickly as possible. —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, which opens with a different citation from Volcano, inspired me to go back to Lowry's book, which I haven't looked into since my teens. (For some reason I developed a Lowry obsession at a peculiarly young age—well before I was old enough to drink! I fondly recall reading Douglas Day's excellent biography of the author in hardcover...) I suppose I'm also interested in prepping for the forthcoming Criterion DVD of John Huston's film adaptation of the book, which I am obligated to admit I've never seen. But having just been knocked out by Albert Finney in Sidney Lumet's very strong new picture Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, I am, among other things, much looking forward to seeing Finney in the complex, tragic role of Lowry's alcoholic Consul.

The section of the book from which the above quote comes features the musings of the Consul's stepbrother Hugh, who's just left the newspaper for which he works. (He goes on quite a bit about journalists and journalism: "[E]ven when there are no wars think of the damage they do..." and so on. For a minute I thought I was reading a better-written version of Instapundit or something.)

One thing I'm not expecting to get from the film is the feel of the book's beautiful, sometimes knotty, prose. I got stick from a commenter just today for a sentence construction that was potentially confusing but not strictly, um, wrong by my sights—okay, okay, I imagine a copy editor would have flagged it—but took some comfort in the memory of this Lowry sentence: "Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age."

Let sleeping 'Dogs' lie

A soon to be rapist contemplates his future victim in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, 1971.

A few fellow cinephiles are telling me that writer/director Rod Lurie deserves some kind of smackdown for some characterizations he made of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, by way of justifying his (Lurie's) upcoming remake of the film. Said characterizations appeared in a report from Coming Soon.net, and appear off-the-cuff enough that what one might call a smackdown would maybe be overkill. There's a lively—perhaps too lively—discussion of Lurie's assertion that Susan George smiles during her rape over at Jeffrey Wells' place, complete with screen grabs and smile-or-grimace speculations. Jeffrey Wells' place is hosting a lively—perhaps too lively—discussion of Lurie's assertion that Susan George smiles during her rape, complete with screen grabs and smile-or-grimace speculations. (Try that sentence, tk.) There's a "she was asking for it" quote from one of Peckinpah's more blustery interviews. (And boy, if there was ever a filmmaker who should never have done interviews...) There's some stuff funny enough to make me wish I wrote it. ("Rod Lurie is the perfect guy to remake this. I'm sure he'll work the same kind of magic that Neil LaBute did on The Wicker Man.")

But it's what Lurie says about the putative smile that nails down just how...well, just how he doesn't really get Straw Dogs. Or, to be kinder about it, how he will not see what Peckinpah is putting on screen, and projecting his own idea of what the story should be upon it. Which, of course, he will materially accomplish with his remake. "You can be certain she's not going to be smiling in the rape in my film," he says, showing, first off, that he doesn't understand the scene, and secondly, that the idea that an individual can be complicit in his/her own violation is completely beyond the pale to him.

Nun greater

Guesses?
UPDATE: Yes, it was too easy. Remember, everybody, his great The Milky Way gets its U.S. DVD tomorrow. My writeup on it will be on the website proper then, too.

Quote of the day

And it's early!

"We have no findings to suggest anyone famous was involved with the accident." —A Berlin police spokesperson, on a mishap that occured on the set of Valkyrie, or whatever the hell they're calling it, injuring 11 persons, one seriously. But really, no need for any concern or human sympathy—none of them is famous.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Merrill's Marauders'

Padded with stock footage, diluted with studio-dictated second-unit material, and saddled with a whack-ass, flag-waving ending, the 1962 Merrill’s Marauder’s is one of director Samuel Fuller’s more compromised films. Still, it’s got a relentless forward push and more than a few moments of pure Fuller force. After making six fine pictures (which were then distributed by Fox and later Columbia) through his own production entity Globe Enterprises—including such greats as Forty Guns, Run of the Arrow, China Gate and The Crimson Kimono —Fuller threw in with Warner Brothers in the hopes of making his long-gestating World War II epic The Big Red One, based on his own experiences. Jack Warner assigned him this picture as a “dry run” for One. Drawing on the true story of a 3000-soldier volunteer force led by brigadier general Frank Merrill and assigned to retake Burma after the allies’ expulsion from that country in 1942, it recounts the brutal campaign that ended with the taking of the Japanese airfield at Myitkina. Of the 1300 men still surviving at that point, a few over 600 were left standing.

Jeff Chandler, who plays Merrill, is one of those late ‘50s-early-‘60s leading men that a lot of latterday moviehounds, myself included, don’t really “get;” but he’s fine here as the stalwart, pip-smoking commander who has to keep pressing his men on long past the point where they seem to have no fight or even life left in them. (This was his last film; he died after disc herniation surgery in June, 1961.) Ty Hardin does a passable Jeffrey Hunter as the lieutenant for whom Merrill is something of a father figure. That’s him in the picture, surveying the wreckage, human and otherwise, in the aftermath of a decisive battle at a railway yard in Shaduzup.

Art Film Pissing Contest (Updated)

I didn't comment on Jonathan Rosenbaum's New York Times op-ed "Scenes From An Overrated Career" for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that I came to it a little late. Second, just reading the headline made my stomach sink. I got a mental picture of a meeting of the Times' op-ed staff, and some callow dickwad saying, "Hey, you know how everyone's saying how great Ingmar Bergman was? Why don't we run a piece saying that he sucked?" and heads bobbing wildly in agreement. Jeez. The guy's not even in his grave yet by then, probably. But you know these Times types—they all like to think they're Rick James, bitch, right after hitting Charlie Murphy in the forehead. "That was—'Coooold Blooded'!! Ha!" In other words, I was repelled by precisely the kind of forced, fake-ass "contrarianism" that animates the 85% worthless e-mag Slate.

A Times op-ed staffer pitches an anti-Bergman piece.

Then, my fevered imagination tells me (and please, anyone with inside dope on how the piece came to be should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, which I suppose I must be), on being unable to find anybody to say that Bergman actually sucked, the Times dickwad settles for the genteel scepticism of Jonathan Rosenbaum. [UPDATE: Jonathan Rosenbaum very graciously and gamely responds, with a real account fo the piece's evolution and more, in the comments section. I'm keeping the paranoid ravings in the post for their putative entertainment value. Thanks, Jonathan.] This brings me to reason three. (P.S. I know that my explanations for why I didn't write about the piece in the first place are delaying my explanation for why I'm writing about it now. Please bear with me.) I hold Rosenbaum in very high esteem, and the Times op-ed was—as George Clooney once said of Tarkovsky's Solaris, I'm always amused to recall—not his best work. A lot of Rosenbaum's critical "debunking" here goes consists of defining what Bergman was not—e.g., not an avant-gardist and/or formal innovator on the level of Godard or Resnais. He brings up what he sees as Bergman's "perpetual retreat from the modern world," a variant of the "solipsist" position on Bergman which kind of begs the question as to exactly which world, say, the characters in Scenes from a Marriage inhabit. But these are supportable positions; I just don't happen to share them. The stuff about the blond, blue-eyed cast members, however, practically screams "Holy shit! I'm under by 200 words!" The snipes at Bergman-chic are about as critically substantive and useful as, say, making fun of a Pedro Costa fan for his taste in t-shirts. The evocation of "relevance" is tiresome. And finally, there's the "hard fact"—unverified, as it happens—that "Mr. Bergman isn't being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson - two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman's heyday."

Even if that's true—so what? One might recall in the late '80s Godard, for example, pretty much dropped off the map of critical and commercial consciousness in North America—his great 1990 Nouvelle Vague never got a proper release here. Actual critical assessment and the noting of critical fashion are two different things, as Rosenbaum ought to be the first to know. Also, if nobody cares about Bergman anymore, why call him overrated?

But all this is not why, finally, this piece winds up being one of those things out of which no good can come.

Max Roach, 1924-2007

Present at The Birth of the Cool. Co-founder, with Clifford Brown, of one of the great (and far too short-lived) hard bop quintets. Collaborator with Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Abbey Lincoln, Cecil Taylor. Until illness took him out of the game a few years back, a constantly inventive and combative force. Who always made his drums sing.

Also one intensely charismatic motherfucker, if you'll pardon the phrase. There he is in Otto Preminger's 1954 Carmen Jones, soloing in the intro to "Beat Out Dat Rhythm On The Drums." One wonders why he didn't do more movie work—the likely answer is that he didn't want to and couldn't be talked into it. (Cosby—who else?— talked him into acting on a few episodes of his Huxtable sitcom, though.)

Think I'll give Brilliant Corners a listen today. The three geniuses Monk, Rollins and Roach together, joined by Ernie Henry, Oscar Pettiford, Clark Terry and Paul Chambers, none of them exactly pikers themselves. Among other things, it contains some of the most peculiarly catchy of "modern jazz" tunes. Also, they don't try to play it too darn fast...

The Only One

So my lovely wife was watching North by Northwest last night—she's like that—and I was passing through the living room during the scene pictured above, and, and my wife said, "He really is an amzing comic actor, isn't he?"

"Well sure," I said. "He's Cary Grant."

And then it hit me. Well, yes. Of course. He is/was Cary Grant. The people who whine about the dweebiness of the male leads in this summer's romantic comedies and cry "Where is this generation's Cary Grant?"—the answer to their question is very simple. It's got nothing to do with whether they make 'em like they used to anymore or not. It's got everything to do with Cary Grant's singularity. No generation is going to produce another to call its own. So you're never going to get "yours." Except he is yours. You just have to watch the movies. (Except maybe The Pride and the Passion.)

I understand that insisting on a player's historical uniqueness is very philosophically reactionary of me, but that's just too bad.

A friendly reminder

Alain Resnais' "Remarkable...Extraordinary!" (that's my story, as per the front cover of the packaging, and I'm sticking to it) Private Fears in Public Places, based on Alan Ayckbourn's play, came out on DVD last week to little fanfare. Consider this fanfare. This is a picture of great wit, emotion, imagination—very playful imagination—and finally, magic. I'm not even asking you to buy it—just watch, however you can.