In The Company Of Glenn

This is a thing I've never known before...

...it's called Easy Living.

Sorry. I've been holed up all day, watching Blu-Ray discs for May's High-Definition DVD Consumer Guide, and this is the best I've got.

And by "best I've got," I mean the facile linking of a classic Mitchell Leisen film, scripted by Preston Sturges and starring Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold, to one of the most lumpen dumbfuck (and incidentally, when I say "dumbfuck" I really mean, um, "dumbfuck"—seriously, these yoyos made Deep Purple look like the Arditti String Quartet) hair-rock combos of the early 1970s, to wit:

Like I said. Best I've got. The Leisen film is one of Universal's latest four (the other three are Leisen's Brackett-and-Wilder-scripted Midnight, She Done Him Wrong, and Wilder's directorial debut The Major and the Minor) in its one-time "Studio Classics," now "Cinema Classics" editions, and it looks great, and you should get it.

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...

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...

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...

'Sunrise' semester, and/or, Dave Kehr, King of the Hipsters

"Hope Glenn Kenny gets a hold of this," Keith Uhlich writes over at The House Next Door's Links For The Day, apropos Oscar-watch-dude Tom O'Neil's, shall we say, contrarian perspective on F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. Apparently O'Neil can't get on the bus with certain "Oscar Nazis" (there's a phrase that ought not be dwelt upon, not to mention even ever uttered) who "insist that we should fight for Sunrise to get its due and reverse the common misconception that the lowly Wings was the first best picture winner," because, by O'Neil's light, Sunrise is "paper thin, hilariously schmaltzy" and its "three primary characters are cartoonish clichés and their performances 3-inch slices of honeyed ham."

Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien in Murnau's Sunrise

Now I'm flattered that Keith thinks I'm the go-to guy when an ignorant, vulgar, hubristic critic is in need of an evisceration. But I'm afraid I can't help him here, because, truth to tell, I think O'Neil's kind of got a point.

'Blast of Silence': Psychotronic noir

I can't think about Allan Baron's 1961 Blast of Silence without thinking of Cleveland, even though not a frame of the film takes place or was shot there. But the film's hitman anti-hero, "Baby Boy" Frankie Bono (played with note-perfect inarticulate inexpressiveness by Baron himself), is, as Lionel Stander's narrator notes, "out of Cleveland," and this bit of info was sufficient to compel a small coterie of film freaks from that burg to even-more-fanatically embrace a film they would have loved anyway.

On the religious diversity of Ernest Borgnine.

Has any American actor other than the great Ernest Borgnine portrayed both a breakaway Hittite and a full-fledged just-plain-Amish dude in film? I don't think so.

Here he is, getting between Jeff East and city gal Susan Buckner, as sinister Hittite Isaiah Schmidt in Wes Craven's 1981 Deadly Blessing. It's not widely known that two decades and change prior to that, he played Amish farmer Stadt in Richard Fleischer's 1957 Violent Saturday. A picture—which I warn you, contains a plot spoiler—is below the fold.

Friday afternoon palate cleanser, with a sneak preview of an all-new quiz!!

All right, kids, break it up. Kyle Smith, or somebody who says he's Kyle Smith, wants all y'all to stop piling up on him, get jobs, and move on. Well, I'm moving on. But to what? A friend has convinced me to work up an annotated filmography of Steve Erickson's movie-mad novel Zeroville...and that's gonna take a while. My Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report is for, well, Monday morning...and it is of a five-disc set that I'm not quite finished with. Another project in the works was suggested back in January by one "Tony Verizon," commenting on my "Antonioni or Thunderbirds?" quiz. "You could do a nice series on 'Dragnet or Bresson?'"

Agreed. Only it's harder than you might think. And right now I've only got DVDs of Dragnet '67, the color series, which I have to desaturate if I'm gonna contrast it to a B&W Bresson image. Still. The concept holds promise. This duo of screen grabs is probably too easy, but it gives a little of the overall flavor we should achieve....

I:

II:

Like I said, promising. And now back to that five-disc set...