Merry Xmas, and Stop Smiling!

Not as contradictory as it sounds. I do wish you a Merry Christmas, gleefully, sincerely, quickly, and somewhat exhaustedly, after all the baking I did last night and all the essay-writing (seriously!) I'm having to do this morning, in advance of my annual professional party. (At least writing this paper has involved sustained attention to two delicious movies.)

Speaking of delicious movies, and in the spirit of gift-giving, the best cinematic stocking-stuffer of the year is absolutely the elegant and richly outfitted Charles Burnett Collection from Milestone Video, centered around the seminal and at-long-last-available Killer of Sheep. As you probably know, after 30 years in a limbo of non-exhibition, the 30-year-old Killer finally bowed on commercial screens in the late spring. I was wowed by the movie in August, when it arrived to Chicago's Music Box Theatre and have been even more deeply wowed after two further revisits. After some hemming and hawing, I have elected not to include the movie in my upcoming Top Ten List and year-end awards, since I experienced all those #1 spots for Army of Shadows last year to be something of a cop-out. But, still pending There Will Be Blood, Persepolis and eight other (read: less auspicious) theatrical releases, Killer of Sheep does look to me like the movie of the year. My ongoing friendly relations with Stop Smiling Magazine allowed me to publish this online review, which I hope you'll enjoy...on or after today's joyeux noël. More from me before year's end!

Still Not Smiling

My kindest benefactors on the web, over at Stop Smiling Magazine, have given me yet another forum to sing the praises of a stunning DVD, this time for When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's 4-hour documentary on the flooding of New Orleans and its nearly apocalyptic aftermath for so many residents of that city. Levees actually expands as a nearly 6-hour film on the DVD, and once you've gotten started, you really shouldn't stop; the exclusive 105 minutes of previously trimmed material is actually some of Lee's best, correcting for some of the main feature's tendency to muffle its critique of Mayor Ray Nagin. The whole work, whatever its flaws or self-imposed limitations, is prodigious, detailed, expansive, and important in a way that precious few films in 2006 were, and despite appearing on HBO, it's certainly making an active end-run for my Top Ten List.

Meanwhile, speaking of lists, and of earlier benefactors, my comrades over at Cinemarati, a terrific consortium of web-based critics to which I belonged from 2002-2005, has commenced their annual counting-down of the year's best movies. So far, we have gotten the party started with Nathaniel's eloquent summary of the virtues of Volver (which I'd imagined would place a little higher); at #19, Michael Dequina is dazzled by Dreamgirls; and at #18, my old college chum Lynn Lee directs our attention to A Scanner Darkly, a nervy midyear offering that deserved a better shot than the major, Car-prone and penguin-happy critics' groups afforded it. Cinemarati has a wide-ranging membership of amateur and professional critics with enormously different tastes, so expect an interesting list, and forage around the rest of the blog and the individual members' sites while you're at it.

Todd and Me, Sittin' in a Tree, W-A-I-T-I-N-G

In fashion, as we know, you're either In or you're Out. Book publishing, however, appears to follow different rules. I can't tell if the anthology The Cinema of Todd Haynes, edited by James Morrison, is Out or Not. The original publication date from Wallflower Press in the UK was scheduled for last spring, with a joint publication from Columbia University Press, which later announced a June release. Then, both dates were moved to December. However, the Wallflower page indicates that the book has been out in the UK since September, and the unillustrated Amazon page says it's been available for purchase in the U.S. since November. But I haven't seen it anywhere, and nor has the editor.

Why do I care so much? Because I'm in it! Chapter 8, y'all. So, when the book eventually does come to a bookstore near you, give it some love! And don't begrudge a blogging academic who's geeked to see his name in print, particularly in connection to the work of a Living Genius, and who is therefore shamelessly hawking the wares. (It would help, of course, if the wares would appear, so that they might be hawked.)

Meanwhile, tomorrow's a big day for movie-going: I'll finally be hitting up Dreamgirls at midday and Children of Men in the afternoon. Comments and Globe predix soon to follow. I expect I'll also hunker down with When the Levees Broke over the weekend, and I've got a group date to go see Letters from Iwo Jima on Tuesday. Once those verdicts have rolled in, I'll just be waiting on this and this and especially this before my Top 10 list and all the other Best of 2007 features pop up on the main site. When that eventually happens, don't expect more than a nod apiece, if even that, for Our Brand Is Crisis, an intriguing documentary with a great subject that nonetheless holds back too far from the issues and events at its core, or for The Painted Veil, which is less precious and dainty than it might have been but still omits any fresh insights or directorial signatures, resulting in a movie with casual appeal but zero urgency.

(Image © 2005 Wallflower Press)

Still Remembering Robert Altman

Stop Smiling Magazine continues to be unaccountably generous to me, this time by inviting me to contribute a short piece in memoriam of Robert Altman. The invitation was perfectly suited to the man we mourn: rather than review a whole movie or anatomize a major set-piece, the editors asked me to reflect on a stray moment or detail in one of Altman's movies that made a lasting impression on me. I couldn't help but talk about Shelley Duvall's skirts in 3 Women, which keep snagging in her car door when she drives. Another respondent writes about 3 Women's peculiar genesis in a dream of Altman's, and two other writers celebrate McCabe & Mrs. Miller (as well one might!) and A Wedding (which I've never seen). If this isn't enough Altman for you, and it shouldn't be, click back to the full-length interview with Altman that Stop Smiling published five issues back. And then go watch one of his movies. And then watch another one. And then go talk over someone while they're still finishing their sentence. (And then remind yourself that the glorious praises of Ronee Blakley and Lily Tomlin will doubtless be sung by all of the mockingbirds gathered together at next month's Supporting Actress Sunday roundtable for 1975. It's never the wrong time to venture back into Nashville.)

(Image © 1977 Lions Gate Films/20th Century Fox Film Corp., and reproduced from DVDBeaver's review of the sensational DVD)

Bitter "Sweetie" Is Still a Beauty

Is the image at left an unconsoling one of a slender sapling utterly constrained by its barren environment of weary, eroded concrete and cropped, disembodied (non)caretaking? Or is it a hopeful, even a cheerfully irreverent portrait of the wee tree's dogged insistence on itself: a living implausibility in a world defined for better and for worse by cracked asymmetries, where every plash of color is a sensual delight and maybe even a spiritual victory—good news for the tree, surely, but also for whomever this is, gardening (if that's the right word) against all sartorial odds in her lavender skirt, her striped black stockings, her navy blue shoes, and some suggestion of a burgundy sleeve?

I have culled this emblematically vibrant and paradoxical frame from Sweetie, director Jane Campion's first and personal favorite of her six features. It says everything about my constant, giddy awe before this admittedly inconsistent but underratedly brilliant director that a movie this brave and astonishing—a confident, eccentric debut to put even Blood Simple to shame—still takes a Bronze Medal in my own inner Olympics to her gorgeously brazen apex of modern literary adaptations and to the best movie ever made.

Still, Sweetie is an absolute corker, genuinely unnerving and reliably hilarious, and also a movie that was practically invented for the Pause button, since each and every frame has been so wittily, punctiliously composed. Campion's estranging perspectives, her appetites for the alien bloodstreams inside domestic bodies and spaces, and her affinity for mannered performers and unlikely faces make her an especially glorious heir of photographers like Diane Arbus—although, much more than certain audacious but addled "imaginative portraits" I could name, Sweetie's exaggerated visual ideas and its proclivity for psychic binarisms writ garishly large actually dictate the look, rhythm, and structure of the film at all levels, instead of jittering inside an implausibly but increasingly commercial narrative structure.

For more of my enthusiasm about Sweetie—encompassing not just the film but the delicious and exquisitely detailed new DVD package from Criterion—I invite you over toward the website of Stop Smiling Magazine, which has generously farmed out another plum reviewing gig to me. Let this stand as partial proof that I am still writing somewhere even as I neglect this poor blog—which perhaps sees, in that trapped and stunted sapling, a pitiable image of its current condition. And by all means, rent or buy the DVD. I can attest first-hand that if you've only seen the catastrophically cropped and miserably color-timed VHS, you haven't really seen the film. Sweetie might unnerve, frustrate, or agitate you—indeed, it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't at times feel goaded and tested by this piece—but unlike virtually any movie that has opened on any American screen this year, it bespeaks a major artistic talent and it demands a complex critical reckoning. (Come back to the 5 & Dime, Janey C, Janey C!)

(Images © 1989 New South Wales Film Corporation, reproduced from DVDBeaver's glowing review of the DVD and from the Criterion Collection.)

Cover Boy

Debuting on newsstands right about now is the new issue of Stop Smiling, the magazine where you'll find my cover-story interview with the phenomenal Scottish film director Lynne Ramsay. Some of my favorite tidbits from the conversation are missing from this transcript—not least the discovery that we love many of the same films, including Safe and A Woman Under the Influence—but I still hope that you'll enjoy the conversation and follow up on her films, including the three dazzling shorts (Gasman, in particular) available on the Ratcatcher DVD. After a week of very high spirits for British cinema, Ramsay's a great rental choice!

Image © 2006 Stop Smiling Magazine, and reproduced from their website.

A Trip to Mt. Olympus

A few posts ago, I alluded to a project that kept me busy through much of last week. Here's the scoop: I spent an hour and a half of last Thursday morning interviewing Lynne Ramsay, whom I consider the most interesting young filmmaker working in the English language, and whose Morvern Callar is still my favorite film of this decade, give or take Russian Ark. (The Scene Stealer is also on record as a big fan.)

Ramsay was an absolute delight to talk to, remarkably humble and accessible for someone who, at least for me, inspires such total awe. I had a great time asking her about her experiences in film school, her working method with her brilliant cinematographer, her three impeccable short films (all of them available on the Criterion DVD of her first feature, Ratcatcher), and her pair of upcoming projects, both of which sound like bold new choices for a director who seemingly can't put a foot wrong.

All of this was sublime enough for me without the cosmically ordained moment when I asked her about the last occasion when a movie really blew her out of the water, and she described watching Ingmar Bergman's Persona, deep in the Australian bush, in a tent she was sharing with Jane Campion. Most of you will understand immediately why I experienced this confession as pure delirium, verging on phone sex, but if you're confused, click here and take note of #1 and #5.

The interview will appear in the May '06 issue of Stop Smiling Magazine, for whom my next assignment will be a review of the forthcoming 7-disc set of Tennessee Williams adaptations. What I ever did to or for Stop Smiling to prompt all this kindness, I will never know.

The Week in Movies: Home Theater Version

A quick run-through of movies I screened at home and in my classes for the first time last week, many of which involved Cary Grant, since I was preparing a review for Stop Smiling of the new Cary Grant 5-disc Box Set that bowed last month. Assigned to watch 10 hours of Cary: life's tough, huh?

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Anna and the King of Siam (1946; dir. John Cromwell) - Hollywood's first version of the tale that would later be musicalized as Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King and I. This Anna aims for a somewhat ambitious median between gentle farce and a typical Dream Factory version of liberalism abroad, but I can't say I really bought it. It helps to have Irene Dunne starring as Anna, but even aside from their impolitic casting as Southeast Asians, Rex Harrison is typically precious as the King and Linda Darnell vamps blandly as a star of the harem, whose reversal of fortune isn't much worth crying over. Gale Sondergaard, who plunged much more memorably into wild Orientalisms in William Wyler's The Letter, scored a supporting Oscar nomination as the King's "wise" and "dignified" wife, but—like photographer Arthur Miller, fourth-billed star Lee J. Cobb, and writers Sally Benson (Meet Me in St. Louis) and Talbot Jennings (Northwest Passage)—she's shown herself to much better advantage elsewhere. Yes, you make allowances for the political climates of earlier eras, but this particular drama of cross-cultural empathy just doesn't work when such crude, myopic forms of narrative and imagination are being evinced. C–

Butterflies on a Scaffold (Mariposas en el andamio) (1995; dirs. Luis Felipe Bernaza and Margaret Gilpin) - An interesting and culturally distinct companion piece to Jennie Livingston's better-known Paris Is Burning, this documentary about drag culture in modern-day Cuba is extremely likely to challenge outside perceptions of this island in particular, and of life as lived under hegemonic states more generally. We meet more than a dozen performers in a drag revue that is regularly produced as lunchtime entertainment in—get this—the cafeteria of a virtually all-female construction crew building new tenements in an especially depressed area of Havana. How does a queen assemble a fabulous outfit amidst utter poverty? Is there a way of recuperating drag as compatible with Castro's Revolutionary ethic? These questions are raised in lively ways, though the film's approach to drag itself is much less interesting (it appears to match one-to-one in everyone's mind, including the filmmakers', as synonymous with male homosexuality), and the technical modesty curtails some of the film's revelatory potential. Also unexplored is the mind-boggling uniformity of the drag personae, in marked contrast to Paris Is Burning's rampant diversity of fabricated/"real" façades. Still, a memorable trip, and a legitimate provocation. B

His Girl Friday (1940; dir. Howard Hawks) - Y'all already know I love this, but who could resist another visit? Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy's commentary on the new DVD is reasonably involving, but nowhere near as illuminating as simply diving back into the movie itself, which is so dense with humor, irony, and detail that it simply never exhausts itself. Watching Rosalind Russell march into the newspaper office in the first scene, dismiss the love-advice columnist with a hilarious and barely-heard murmur, and strut right into ex-husband Cary Grant's office is like watching the rebirth of love as an elevated form of wit. Grant himself is an absolute dream, giving his own work in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story an impossible run for his own money as the best male performance in a screwball comedy. The supporting cast outclasses even the gallery of rascals and wiseacres in Sullivan's Travels, and the mile-a-minute punchlines hit home every single time. The photography is exquisite, capturing the bustle of the profession without losing sight of the central and shifting bond between Russell and Grant—and then taking major tonal detours in scenes like the death-row interview, without ever seeming incongruous. Not a minor miracle, but a major one, and still the Big Dipper in one of American cinema's most celestial traditions. A+

Only Angels Have Wings (1939; dir. Howard Hawks) - By contrast, I found Hawks and Grant's previous collaboration to be a strangely gratuitous affair. All the earmarks of a Howard Hawks movie are there—the intimate, inbred society of male co-workers, the estimable women arriving in their midst, the blend of spectacular action with energetic dialogue—but it all registered with me as too overt, like a subpar director chasing Hawks' own tropes and technique. Based on a short story from Hawks' own pen, the movie also has an almost embarrassingly juvenile and quite repetitive awe for aviation as virile sport, not unlike Faulkner's attempts in novels like Pylon to associate himself with the august rituals of flight. Jean Arthur is typically engaging in an underwritten part, while Grant is her opposite on both counts: weirdly uningratiating, even taking into account that the character is supposed to be a tough nut to crack, and saddled with far too many motivations and backstories. A mature Bogart would have sailed through it, but Grant strains and cracks. For my money, the best way to save the film would be to hand it to Josef von Sternberg, who would loll with less embarrassment in the silly, exoticized locale, take a healthier ironic distance from the skyward exploits and male-male bathos, and show the audience a redolent good time. But, alas, this is the movie we got: passable, dotted with tiny glories (many of them care of antique star Richard Barthelmess and rising goddess Rita Hayworth), but still not worth anyone's time capsule. C+

Penny Serenade (1941; dir. George Stevens) - Lots of Grant fans who champion Only Angels Have Wings would probably shrug off Penny Serenade, which looks suspiciously like the kind of sentimental drama to which Oscar's inexplicable black sheep finally sell out in order to secure a long-postponed nomination. Penny Serenade accomplished just this for Grant, but it's no I Am Sam, and in the hands of director George Stevens (Alice Adams, The More the Merrier), it emerges as a credible melodrama. Grant co-stars with his Awful Truth flame Irene Dunne, and while the film is on shaky legs throughout their acquaintance and early marriage, climaxing in a rather risible earthquake in Japan—a rather stentorian metaphor for miscarriage, even by Hollywood standards—the adoption drama which follows is rather nicely played and paced. Dunne and Grant aren't doing career-best work, but they're still quite good, and they act with an ease and synchronicity unique to actors well-known to each other, able to save several scenes from their weepiest possible pitfalls. The arrival of costars Edgar Buchanan and Beulah Bondi also accomplishes a lot for the movie, and the screenplay doesn't take all the turns you expect. Even the obligatory climaxes, like Grant's impromptu oratory in a lawyer's office, are credibly written and staged. Maybe I'll return to Penny Serenade someday and reconsider my current admiration for it; it's certainly not lacking in hoary devices. But for now, I'm squarely on its side. B

The Talk of the Town (1942; dir. George Stevens) - Swiping a structure from His Girl Friday (civic crisis juxtaposed to romantic roundelay), a female lead from Only Angels Have Wings (Jean Arthur), and a director from Penny Serenade (George Stevens), this Best Picture-nominated comedy from 1942 plays like more of a greatest-hits pastiche from Grant's peak years than a perfectly integrated object unto itself. Grant stretches a little to play convicted arsonist and murderer Leopold Dilg, who is actually a small-town political dissident standing on the wrong side of powerful industrialists. It's a difficult character to know what to do with, and both the actor and the movie hold him somewhat in abeyance while generously ceding the movie to Jean Arthur, perkily hiding Grant from the law, and to Ronald Colman, an esteemed legal theorist who doesn't know he's befriending a fugitive. The trouble is, neither of these characters fully congeals, either, and the film's thematic arc about the nature of jurisprudence feels a little outsized to the momentary pleasures of deft actors keeping a light, fragile birdie in the air. Fun, but best taken as a pleasant sorbet after richer, more flavorful movies. B–

New on DVD

I recently signed off as a Cinemarati critic, but as they say, when one door closes, another opens. Stop Smiling Magazine just published my short review of Image Entertainment's DVD of Derek Jarman's The Last of England, a film I love almost as much as Andrei Rublev. There may or may not be more opportunities to write for SS (prospects look reasonably good), but it's already a treat to sing the praises of such a great and often-overlooked film.