In The Company Of Glenn

The greatest films never made

Eddie Constantine in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville

I learn from Richard Brody's new book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, that prior to settling on Alphaville with him, Godard wanted American expat tough-guy portrayer Eddie Constantine to play the lead role in an adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.

The mind fairly boggles at the notion: Jean-Luc Godard's I Am Legend, starring Eddie Constantine.

What are your favorite unrealized movies, in the mode of this, or, say, David Lean's Nostromo? There are hundreds out there, for sure...

On a side note, it's pretty droll how Lou Reed has turned into such an Eddie Constantine lookalike in recent years, no?

Cannes Countdown: The Competition (updated)

Being a subjective, not entirely well-informed, and hopefully not pre-judging bunch of observations on the pictures in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival, May 14-25...

'Three Monkeys,' directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

"I figured it would appeal to you...formalists," a friend said with only mild sarcasm when explaining why he was colder than the rest of his dinner companions after Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates screened in Cannes back in 2006. Well, yes and no. Turkish actor/director Ceylan's work has been compared to that of Antonioni and Tarkovsky, but while I don't think he ever reaches those filmmakers' highs, his perspective on romantic anomie has some new flavors that are well worth sampling. Ceylan's also got a pleasingly mordant sense of humor, on display in a very messed-up adulterous sex scene at Climates' center. The title's three monkeys, as can be inferred from the film's minimal website, are the ones not sensing any evil. As this is Ceylan's followup to Climates, us formalists are very much looking forward to it.

A new episode in the saga of 'Porn to Mainstream'...

This morning's Variety brings official news about a project I've been hearing about for almost a year: The Girlfriend Experience, a digital pic to be directed by Stephen Soderbergh from a script by my buds Brian Koppelman and David Levien. The film will explore a relatively recent twist in the world's oldest profession, wherein the encounter sometimes referred to as a "trick" provides not merely sex, but a simulacurum of a perfect romantic relationship.

Now some have argued that this very idea is inimical to the whole client/prostitute thingie, that the whole point of such a transaction is to achieve the wham-bam or happy ending with as little fuss as possible; on the other hand...

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Michael Fleming's report notes, "Rather than go for star power, Soderbergh may set an adult film actress to play the lead role." No names have gone public yet, but among those I understand are on a wish list is an adult starlet who recently cited Catherine Breillat as a hero of hers. (They're starting to make 'em different these days—one of this starlet's contemporaries likes to drop Descartes during interviews.) If that works out, the set of Girlfriend Experience ought to be one of the more interesting ones of the fall, and the never-ending-saga of the porn-to-mainstream performer will have an intriguing new chapter...

A spot of color

Damn, I've been running a lot of black-and-white screen caps lately. People are gonna start to think this is a blog about old movies or something.

To remedy, here's Dean Martin in an iconic (some would say seminal) image from Vincente Minnelli's great 1958 Some Came Running, to remind you that the long-awaited domestic DVD version of this influential picture streets on May 13, from your friends at Warner Home Video.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Letter From An Unknown Woman'

What, exactly, is melodrama? That question came up as I read the Self-Styled Siren's provocative post "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs: A Brief Defense of Melodrama," which itself was inspired a bit by the recent cinema blogosphere fulminations and such on behalf of Murnau's Sunrise.

Sunrise, like a lot of the other melodramas of its period, plays it straight. It's not crude, but it is about creating a galvanic effect. The genre has its stealth uses, of course, as the exquisitely ironic work of Douglas Sirk has shown.

And then there's Max Ophuls.

Alternate readings in film, #1

So I was at the gym this afternoon and on one of its many boxes was TNT, which was showing James Cameron's crude, crass, and in several respects rather diverting 1995 True Lies, and it struck me that, up until the film's final minutes, it could be viewed as a rousing account of Art Malik's existential triumphs over his own receding hairline.

This is what it's like, in case you were wondering, to be a perpetually balding man.

Debunking a movie myth: the straight, ahem, poop on 'L'Age d'Or'

"What is that Roger Kimball going on about now???": Lya Lys in Bunuel and Dali's L'Age d'Or, 1930

I'm sure many of you are wondering what I myself make of this whole thing with the Yale art student who was claiming to have impregnated herself multiple times and then induced multiple abortions/miscarriages and documented them for her senior project. Actually, I'm sure none of you are wondering that, but bear with me. What I think is, of course, pretty much what most non-insane people think, which is "Yeeuch." (Strangely, whenever the topic comes up, two songs go through my head—"Artists Only" by Talking Heads [particularly the part when David Byrne shrieks "I don't have to PROVE—that I am creative!"] and, of course, "Who Are Parents?" by the Shaggs.) In any case, in the course of following varied commentaries about the whole mishegas, I came across a peculiar slander against a great film. And now I'm blogging to set the record straight, because that's just what I do...

Happy belated birthday, Shirley Temple!

Shirley Temple, seen above with Henry Fonda in John Ford's Fort Apache, turned 80 yesterday, and apparently is suffering a broken arm.

I'm sure I'm not the only film lover out there wishing her comfort...and remembering her fascinating career with some gratitude. Dave Kehr's review of a recent Fox DVD box of three films she made before her short-lived "mature" period is a fitting, and respectful, tribute. I think about Temple and, aside from my admiration for her talent...other things blow me away. She worked with Ford. With Dwan. With Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. 80 isn't that old for being a living link to that era of moviemaking. Quite a life, quite a talent.

White noise

My friend (well, he was my friend, and then he does this) Aaron Aradillas points me to New York Press critic Armond White's latest "everybody in the world sucks but me" screed, "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies," which he kicks off by flexing his disdain for the "opinionated throng" of internet critics who emulate the "Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition." That's a great start, given that only a person who has read either Farber, or Lindsay, but by no means both, could possibly conceive of yoking the two together in this way.

Cannes you feel it?

These days things, as they say, are tough all over. Particularly in the media world. And the Cannes Film Festival is, and ever shall be, one of the most expensive gigs in all of journalism, even if you do it on the cheap. So I'm pretty damn fortunate (and grateful) to be going this year. But last week, just as I was finalizing plans, Todd McCarthy of Variety filed a disquieting article headlined "Few U.S. Pics Set For Cannes Festival." It looked as if, aside from a big red carpet premiere for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Crack Pipe, I mean, Skull, which apparently is gonna have its worldwide preem 20 minutes after the Cannes event, the only big U.S. movies on the Croisette were gonna be Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut and...Kung Fu Panda. No Soderbergh Che epic. No new Woody Allen mit de lesbian love scene between Scarlett Johannsen and Penelope Cruz. This gave me paws. New films from the Dardennes and Jia Zhangke and Phillippe Garrel are all well and good—hell, who am I kidding, they're BETTER than all well and good, they're what I live for—but I believe there is also some expectation that I bring home a little Hollywood glitz. And the lineup McCarthy posited wasn't gonna quite cut it in that department.

But, you know, one night you go to bed, and you wake up the next morning, and what do you find? Yes, you find that Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary by at least 10 points and that Jeffrey Wells is now on suicide watch. No, I mean, what else do you find? Why, you find the official announcement of the Cannes lineup, and you find that yes—YES!—it does include Soderbergh's two-part Che epic, here in one four-hour-part entitled Che (just like the Fleischer film, only without the exclamation point)! And that Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona will be playing out of competition...and if there's anything that can compel me to sit through yet another Woody Allen "serious" film, it's the promise of...well, I'm not gonna mention it again, it's too undignified. And that Clint Eastwood's latest, Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, is in and it is in the competition. That makes only two U.S. films in competition—the other being the aforementioned Charlie Kaufman directorial debut, which of course you know I'm dying to see. But still...