In The Company Of Glenn

Say hello to the bad guy? Not that simple.

Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007

Henry Fonda, My Darling Clementine, John Ford, 1946

Yes—I am suggesting, with the assistance of images from the films in question themselves, that with Blood, Anderson is creating an American myth in negative. But I think that's just one thing he's doing.

Flash bulbs in Scorsese.

So I was dipping into Raging Bull for some screen grabs for a completely unrelated post (which I'm still working on—can you guess what yet-to-be-released film it's mainly about?) and I...well, I won't say noticed, but I will say I was struck anew by the flashbulb horror, and its most blatant re-emergence. Here goes...

Palate cleanser...(updated) (and updated again...)

All things considered, we need one...

Mr. Guilty

As Tony Curtis used to say near the end of every episode of the very memorable syndicated series Hollywood Babylon, "Gotta minute?"

Hollywood bashing: Narrative versus reality

Conservatives all over the blogosphere and beyond are gloating over the miserable box-office returns for Brian DePalma's Iraq-war-themed picture Redacted, which grossed all of about 25 grand on its opening weekend.

"Messy Aliveness"

That's what Richard Kelly's Southland Tales has, according to Fernando F. Croce at Cinepassion. Picking up the ball that Manohla Dargis couldn't quite get past the line of scrimmage in her own Times review of Southland, Croce contrasts the Kelly film with No Country For Old Men and, while admitting Men is a "stupendously crafted exercise, unquestionably," and going on to say that "one hopes [it is] the beginning of a whole new phase in the Coens [sic] ouevre," he finally admits that Country "feels dead" to him, while the execrable, puling, adolescent Southland Tales "feels alive."

A Ghost And A Dream: Notes on the final quarter of 'No Country For Old Men'

Although it puts a crimp in the elegance I aspire to in this post, I have to begin thusly: WARNING—SPOILERS AHEAD.
And welcome, linkers from the official No Country website. Enjoy, and look around—there may be more here you'll like. There's another post going even deeper into the motel scene here.

No Country For Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007

I: By way of a preface

Godard: […] Any great modern film which is successful is so because of a misunderstanding. Audiences like Psycho because they think Hitchcock is telling them a story. Vertigo baffles them for the same reason.

Cahiers: So freedom has moved from the cinema to the Serie Noire. Do you remember The Glass Key? The end?

Godard: Not very clearly. I’d like to re-read it.

Cahiers: In the end a woman who was hardly featured in the story suddenly recounts a dream.

Godard: The Americans are marvelous like that.

Cahiers: In the dream, there is a glass key. Just that, and the novel is called The Glass Key. And the book ends with this dream. If one did something like that in the cinema, people would say it was a provocation. This sort of reaction is typical of a public which has a cinematographic pseudo-culture but nevertheless indulges in terrorist tactics.
—“Let’s Talk About Pierrot,” an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema 171, October 1965, from Godard on Godard, translated and edited by Tom Milne

II: Beyond The Glass Key

At Cannes in May, where I saw Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country For Old Men for the first time, I called the film’s final scene, which corresponds very closely to the final passage of the Cormac McCarthy novel from which the film was adapted, the “Glass Key ending.” It seemed apt for reasons beyond the fact that both works end with the recounting of a dream. There was also the fact of the Coen Brothers’ sort-of adaptation of the Hammett novel (mashed up with Hammett’s Red Harvest) and the occasions Hammett’s work provided for the Coens to mix pulp with cinematic poetry…to go for effects that reach beyond telling a story, you could say. On a recent episode of Charlie Rose, discussing why they made a movie of McCarthy’s novel (although they spent a long time developing James Dickey’s To the White Sea, and admittedly borrowed liberally from Hammett for Miller's Crossing, No Country is the first official literary adaptation realized by the filmmakers), Joel Coen noted that the book was “pulpier” than anything they’d read by McCarthy before…”and then, it wasn’t.”

A Thanksgiving Trinity (updated)

In memory of New York TV station WWOR's long-ago practice of running these pictures every Thanksgiving Day, providing a family's cinephile something to fight with its football fans about...

Kong, King Kong, Cooper, Schoedsack, O'Brien, 1933...

...his frankly inexplicable offspring, Son of Kong, Cooper, Schoedsack, O'Brien, 1933...

...the beatific Mister Joseph Young, Mighty Joe Young, Schoedsack and O'Brien, 1949...

Update: a good commenter, below, deplores his inability to embed. I'll embed for him, and for Cinetrix, and for all of you:

Enjoy the nostalgia...

Def!

For those of you have been following my travails in the home-entertainment hardware realm on this blog, you may now gaze upon the first professional fruits of my labors in this realm: the inaugural Hi-Def Consumer Guide, wherein I rate various and sundry discs in the HD and Blu-Ray formats, is on the proper website now. My pick hits this month are Black Book and Ratatouille, but as they say in blogland, read the whole thing. Please, I mean.

Then and Now #3: Special Animation Fallacy Edition

Peter Sallis, The Third Secret, Charles Crichton, 1964

Peter Sallis, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Nick Park and Steve Box, 2005