In The Company Of Glenn

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...

DVD wish list/Q&A thread...

James Mason and Barbara Rush discuss a quite crucial theological point in Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, available in good foreign-region editions, but no domestic yet...

The post below has turned into a back-and-forth about upcoming DVDs, wished-for DVDs, and seemingly un-findable DVDs. The (fabulous) Self-Styled Siren had a query on the harrowing 1956 Bigger Than Life, which as of now can only be enjoyed by those with a foreign-region disc player (lucky us). Bill wants to check out Michael Reeves much-sought-after The Sorcerers—and boy, so do I. But I missed the boat on that foreign-region disc, which is now out-of-print and commanding pretty unaffordable prices on Amazon.com.

The Siren's query on Life put in mind another fascinating mental-illness themed '50s film—Minnelli's 1955 The Cobweb, in which the choice of a pattern of drapes throws an exclusive psychiatric clinic (presided over by Richard Widmark) into disarray. I know that Warner Home Video head George Feltenstein is a Minnelli maven, so I can only hope it's in the works.

In any case, I wanted to designate this space to wish, inquire, and otherwise yack about discs we want...

Monday Evening Palate Cleanser

It vexes me. I am terribly vexed.

Why, on this mild Monday evening, do the words of Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus echo through my head?

That's a rhetorical question. I know exactly why. That answer's multi-faceted. Part of my vexation stems from encountering, in this here blogosphere, a putative paean to a particularly distinguished work of cinema, which praises the particular work at the expense of practically every other movie the director of that work ever did, trotting out heavyweight quotes the better to swat at...David Denby, who recently had the temerity to cite said director's "refinement." What such score-settling has to do with the work at hand is, naturally, beyond me. But the score-settler seems to believe he's achieved the ambition of that character in Gass' "In The Heart of The Heart of The Country," which I guess is nice for him, not so nice for those turning to him for some wit or perception. And in thinking about all this, I further think, "Dude, you really want to get into it like this?" "It" being the week, after a weekend of examining some of the other discontents readily available in the film-appraisal corner of our world. And I answer, "No, I do not."

So instead, here's a stately and august image from Anthony Mann's strange and fascinating 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire—the same story as Gladiator, sorta, with Christopher Plummer as Commodus—a film that seems to luxuriate in a stately slowness; it's more a film about the contemplation of action than action itself. And the imagery, created by Mann once again in tandem with cinematographer Robert Krasker (they also worked together on El Cid) is always breathtaking.

Here, in the opening scene, Alec Guinness' gloomy Marcus Aurelius congratulates James Mason's Timonedes on correctly predicting the sunrise. He's not joking.

The new disc of the film (from Miriam, which also put out the excellent recent DVD of El Cid) looks incredible thus far; it streets next Tuesday. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to luxuriate in it a bit before the next sunrise.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: Special Tom O'Neil VS. Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Edition: 'Sunrise'

I don't need to do research on why Sunrise is so highly regarded. I know that point of view and happen to disagree with it strongly. Isn't that permitted? Of course not. Groupthink is ruthlessly enforced in the film realm. That's what I mean when I refer to "Oscar Nazis"...

—Tom O'Neil, The Envelope/Gold Derby, April 16, 2008

2: Film Credits/ 4: Restoration Notes, by David Pierce (2003)/ 6: "A Song of Two Humans": F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, by R. Dixon Smith (2004)/ 10:The American Debut, by Lotte H. Eisner (1944)/ 24: A False Dawn, by Robin Wood (1998)/ 35: City/Country, by Lucy Fischer (1996)/ 40: DVD credits

—Table of Contents, booklet, Eureka!/Masters of Cinema DVD, Sunrise, 1927, F.W. Murnau

Poe.

One of my very favorite websites has posted two staggering images of the great-grandfather of fantastic cinema (well, he is that, among a lot of other things) here. What a tale they tell...

'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.

The Ballad of Cheyenne Silver

In January of 1998, I set out from New York to Las Vegas to meet up with three other colleagues to work on an article for Premiere about the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, said awards being the putative, especially as far as the AVN itself was concerned, Oscars of porn. The writer of the piece was the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, with whom I had enjoyed a generally positive and indeed collegial working relationship as the line editor on the piece entitled “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” which had appeared in the October 1996 issue of Premiere and again in slightly different form in Dave’s much acclaimed essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. It was during the editing process of the former piece wherein Dave had expressed an interest in doing something about porn in general, and something about the AVN awards in particular, and we had had a few conversations about it. In the summer of ’97 Dave was approached by Spin to do a piece, and he mentioned the AVN idea, but also stipulated that he’d made a vow not to do any magazine work for a period of time, and didn’t want certain people to believe him a “douche bag” for going back on his word on this; hence, he would not do the piece under his own name. Shortly thereafter he felt a little bad about pitching to Spin an article that he had developed with an editor for Premiere, and gave me a call; we agreed on the not-using-his-real-name stipulation (it was only when he handed in the manuscript of the piece that I discovered he was going to use a dual pseudonym and write in the first person plural) and we also offered him roughly half of what Spin would have coughed up for the piece.

I’m not going to go into the sad tale of what happened after Dave handed in the manuscript that he had titled “Big Red Son,” as that’s another story. (The piece, in a final form that differs from both Dave's original manuscript and the bowdlerized version that appeared [under the title "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment'] in the September 1998 issue of Premiere, can be found in the collection Consider The Lobster.) I only bring up this minutea because, well, one reads a lot of guff in which people speculate about how David Foster Wallace might be this or that or some other thing that he is completely not. Hence, I cite these peculiar negotiations to point up what a staggeringly stand-up guy Wallace is...and how he makes his equally stand-up agent kind of miserable.

But Dave doesn’t really figure in this particular sad tale too much, as he really needed some rest after the 1998 AVN Awards ceremony had wound up. Our table, all the way in the back of one of the big ballrooms of Caesar’s Palace, featured myself (left), who had been feeding Dave, for research purposes, porn that Premiere and I had purchased straight from the fleapits of 8th Ave. all summer (his Midwest residence at the time had very little comfortable access to adult entertainment); my friend Evan Wright (left again),
who at the time was an editor at Hustler magazine (I was trying to get his work into Premiere, and of course fans of great reporting now know that Evan was able to make quite a name for himself without my intervention); and Nathaniel Welch (guess) , who our photo editor had assigned to shoot the event. It was a happy coincidence that Nat and Evan were in fact old pals and had driven out to Vegas from L.A. together. All day and into the ceremony itself we had a nice kinda Musketeers vibe going, captured by Dave in his subsequent essay in the form of somewhat more curdled banter, courtesy of adult industry “guides and docents” Richard “Dick” Filth and Harold Hecuba, the fictionalized personae Dave had created to represent pretty much Evan and myself, just as his dual pseudonyms Willem deGroot and Matt Rundlet stood in for him.

Free (from) porn!(Twice updated)

Well. The website proper has just gone live with my sobering account of several porn stars who have tried to/have gone/are trying to/ go mainstream via their porn notoriety. The peg being Ms. J. Jonah Jameson, or, rather, Jenna Jameson, in the in-theaters-one-week-only something-fest Zombie Strippers.

I wonder. Have I ever told you guys about my one career-counseling moment with a woman who would, alas, soon become a porn star? I was thinking about it this evening and so many of my memories played like prose I'd already written that I was a little scared. The story involves a then-topless-dancer who would later go under the nom du porn Cheyenne Silver, future controversial-book-writer Evan Wright, photog Nathaniel Welch, porn actor/gun carrier T.T. Boy...and there's a cameo appearance by novelist David Foster Wallace. Stop me if you heard this one before.

But if you haven't, I'll be happy to lay it on you all...

UPDATE: Apparently I have not related this tale previously. Well. I've got a few errands to run, after which I'll get right to it. Expect something this afternoon, Eastern time. I think you'll find it worth the wait...

UPDATE THE SECOND: See the post above, lyrically titled "The Ballad of Cheyenne SIlver," for the whole sad story...