Melancholia

The woman on the moon is being forced to the earth

she's brought with her, cheese curds in her breasts

her milky breasts dripping tears of her temper --

Gentle Ophelia, she of crazy hormones.

Why not end a world with a cosmic bang

why not go down with a stymied prince

a secret assassination first, R and G, the stab

through the arras, you, he, and a whole world, boom.

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Burglary

Tingling inside the entry hall, left of the foyer stairs

where guests have glanced in worry, hot, up at her shrine.

She's not here and this is a strange, after-hours tour

any room to be cooked by flashlight, meat smells in the air.

What was that song heard coming, coming in, about gone love?

Booties forensic with quietude and task

padding up to the second floor, toes outstretching like beast noses

toward one room and crack of the next for discriminate sniff

so when it comes to choice, one follows the wits, the point of it all

as if it were a jungle night, one can't be heard,

to her mumbled voice on tape by a bedside jug

garbling her text, her very own whisper that it's all okay, he's here

the country, it's in good hands, watch:  the last act's simple comedy --

and the world goes wet, spit pearls like the ones at her neck

making it a new day in the dark, turning it upside down.

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I Am Who

Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.  

Charlotte Rampling as Charlotte Rampling.

Two films:  The Look and My Week With Marilyn.  These movies will get unequal public attention, yet they deal with very similar issues.  How does a public person, one known for physical beauty, form an art despite the beauty?  

I'd argue that Michelle Williams does, just as she inhabits the character of Marilyn, who died trying.  

Marilyn owned the screen, and if memoirs are right, had the personal chops to fill a room and dig holes in the psyche of those favored and cursed around her.  Monroe played, most successfully and often, comedic roles -- yet she yearned to be a serious actress consonant with the 'method' age in which she worked.  We might watch Bus Stop or The Misfits, but we remember Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year Itch.

Williams has the moves down.  The glances, the gallery-pleasing photo moves, the reclining postures, the depressive panics.  Women befriend or mother her.  She stuns or bewilders men.  Sometimes Marilyn's conditions are right, and a project completes.  This is the film world well-handling the real world of the film world. 

Charlotte Rampling, in The Look, isn't playing herself.  She is herself.  








This is documentary.  It's about her as an actress, and it does intersperse cuts from movies in which she's acted.  

She talks about acting, and in one interesting scene, she and her son, who's directing the actual film we're watching, engage in a stare-down, phrase-response acting exercise, wherein they repeat a random line back and forth and form a dramatic moment between one another.  At points, they 'blink' and move to another line conjured up by the context and continue on.  Fascinating.  

Yet she declares that such exercise bores her.  By contrast, we see her interacting -- for real -- with men and women whose artistic projects she shared -- novelist, photographer, poet, artist -- and with confidantes and friends.  Even, occasionally, random strangers.

Rampling, almost always in her film persona, plays the neurotic, the distant, the stern, the corrupt, the determined, the strong, the disarranged, the sinister, the seductive.  Some like it cold.  In The Look, we do see her British-French humor come out among close relationships.  Whatever the mood, she makes clear -- explains in the serious parts of her conversations -- that there's a 'space' that must be found, forged, secured, around her wherein an authenticity can emerge for whatever acting or photographic moment she's in.

Marilyn Monroe couldn't be Charlotte Rampling because she was Marilyn Monroe.  This may sound self-evidently silly, but the point is this:  beauty alone, what draws people -- a myriad people through the accident of a lens -- needs character.  Michelle Williams has done much to show she has the character to play a Marilyn who wanted it.  

Charlotte Rampling rejects a friend's remark that she's 'grounded'.  Though she doesn't say so, she may have preferred being called 'centered'.  One can't help seeing her intelligence and maturity, a kind of depth that an icon like Monroe might seek but find no easier to handle than a wet bar of soap.

An American like me might pause to ask:  is Monroe us?

The Long Goodbye

Maybe you're 30 and it's America's 70s and you've got a place above Franklin in Hollywood and the place is next to a roomful of New Age girls practicing naked yoga.

Maybe you've got a 'Madison' sent to you from Mexico to pay for your expenses and to buy off your friendship and you wear a thin tie and black suit and smoke too much.

Maybe there's a mysterious, classy blonde heavily put-upon by her washed-up novelist drunkard husband and they have a doberman who dislikes your face, but the blonde cooks you chicken kiev and begs your help.

Maybe the cops distrust you and the mob does, too, and you lose your cat even though you go out at 3 a.m. to buy special food for it.

Maybe you've got access to the Malibu Colony and a classic car to drive to the border.

Maybe you've got the moral grit to 'resolve all issues' and the sun is on you and maybe it is a Hollywood ending to an episode that sums up your life.

Maybe that's what it's all about.

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Style-Blind

A teacher once said that satire can't just wallow in its subject; it needs to follow it with a keen, but quietly judgmental eye.  

Over the past 30 years, America's puritanical heritage has resurfaced in its politics, and much of that can be attributed to fear that what we see in P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights was 'real', that it represents what was a 'mainstream deviance that corrupted our children'.  Even people who 'experimented' may wrongly believe that this movie shows 'what it was like'.

Actually, Anderson gets wonderfully comic performances out of these actors, some of whom have become fixtures, either as major names or solid supports.  They all play deluded people of average talent and intelligence, maybe a bit less, who focus on their American Dream which -- given the Southern California milieu -- means using the lens of a porno industry camera.

You don't watch Boogie Nights for sex or for music, though both suffuse the movie . . . uh . . . top to bottom.  You watch it to find the true nature of your pity.  How much human outreach do you have?  How would you -- if this were real -- how would you counsel any of these people?  You gladden when the ones who don't sink from their actions don't sink.

Most of the movie is simply fun, despite the awareness that  those dumb-headed actions happening recklessly at the edge of one behavioral cliff or another presage downfall.  For some of the characters, disaster comes.  For others, life plods on in very common ways.  

It's not real, but as you watch, you see how it could have been real.

Watching and seeing are retrospective skills.  That's what art is for.

Living is for mistakes.

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The Parts And What They Make Up

After almost 30 years, the magic of this still holds. 

Peter Weir is one of the few directors who has managed to allow-in, for his audiences, a sense that the world isn't flat, that our apprehension of it as a scientific object or manipulable set of economic relationships -- that understanding -- isn't the prime or only way of taking-in the world.

His The Mosquito Coast, his Picnic At Hanging Rock, his The Last Wave, surround eccentricity, weirdness, or mythic spirituality.  The Year Of Living Dangerously, which might be a love story alone, or an earnest socio-political pitch set in Sukarno's Indonesia, gains immensely from the character Billie Kwan, Linda Hunt's smashing 'trouser' role.

Billie is the puppeteer, the clever arranger of his part of Jakarta, maneuvering foreign journalists and embassy people, as he may try, to effectuate success for a -- depicted here -- sympathetic Sukarno walking a thin line between Communist insurrection and military repression.

The film is not just a liberal plea, worthy though that is.  Sacrifice shows itself, several people risking real personal jeopardy and giving themselves over to doing the right thing while surrounded by corruption and cynicism.  

The clip above, while (still!) hotly romantic, represents a moment not simply of sexual assignation, but of moral choice -- Jill (Sigourney Weaver) is betraying and committing at the same time.  In accepting what she gives, Guy (Mel Gibson) is now placed at a moment of choice himself. 

They're not conscious of it, but they have been taught Billie's idealism and they do not fail him.

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Art Means Work. Yes, Work.

This should open your eyes and interest you.  

What to those of us who are 'just plain folks', who believe in 'democratic arts', who may recognize that being called a 'philistine' is a slur, but simply show our social equality in return (Back at ya!) -- what to us appears as an elitist enterprise, ballet, really produces more sweat in a day than a lifetime of backyard barbecues and lawn-mowings.

This clip doesn't show it all:  the blisters and infected corns, the slipped discs, the exhaustion, the struggle just to be able to get a chance to suffer that way!  The schooling, the disciplined adolescence, the foregone 'outside' life, the forced 'early retirement' at 30 or -- if you're truly strong -- 40.  

The sheer physicality of it.

The mental grit needed for it.

Nils Tavernier's film of a decade ago, Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, honors the institution it views.

It should also raise the question:  How much guts do I have -- how much have I given?

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Ms. Wasikowska. Ms. Bronte. Ms. Eyre

Hard work week at the end of which I found this reward.

Texture.

Yes, Romantic sentiment between socially vulnerable young woman and a Byronic older man.

Yes, 'Gothic' secrets, 1830s English country conservatism, heath, rain, snow.

Yes, a mute servant class, a knowing but powerless housekeeper.

Yes, many sins, some revealed, some merely suggested.

Candle fire.  Hearth fire.  Room fire.  Estate fire.

But we're not merely interested in the discharge of formulas, are we?

The film is a real one.

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But With A Little S** In It

Love the brashness of Preston Sturges's mid-Century 'screwball' characters.  In this clip from Sullivan's Travels (1941), Joel McCrea, a film director, is on a mission.  It shows a long-standing literary/artistic clash.  Witness Philip Sidney's An Apology For Poetry (1595):

Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth -- to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight.

Director Sully wants to teach, but his studio guardians insist on the delight, and he reluctantly gives some leeway.  The film follows his earnest, yet naive, attempts at what he sees as a kind of social realism -- until he accidentally falls victim to problems he barely, only idealistically, understood.  

By the film's end, he's learned something about what's to be taught and how people laboring under social miseries take their art.

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With Jeanne Moreau As 'Christine'

We get a lot of that, the logging debris, splinter chips, hillsides looking like a bad shave, bark-shred torn away like venison mauled-off by a bear.

Walking the moss that's grown seasons high up, now in low shadows of treelings cracked haphazardly and interlocked, we follow the path of mammals.

Last night I watched John Frankenheimer's film, the one about the train burglarizing Modern art from Paris into Germany,

The mania of a colonel steeled to steal.  He's High-Cultured, sure, a man with an eye and a purpose.

But he's a Nazi and uses the ways of The Reich to fetch the paintings home to him, chafed between their 'decadence' and excellence.

The Allies are near.  The Resistance has its work cut out, and as in all the post-War winning views, heroic French leave lives, in existential black-and-white.

Burt Lancaster, here a Frenchman, diverts the art train's path for a full screen-hour, finally chuffs up a hill, and with his bum leg slips and staggers and ultimately rolls to loosen the lugs on the railroad ties and knock out their quoins, derailing, when soon it comes, the engine and its first car.

The end takes place, in this case, by the wooded hill abutting the railway line, the way to Deutschland.

This end brings death to hostages and 'Krauts', this ends in boxes of Degas, scattered-about Seurat, piled-up Picasso, contents of the Jeu de Paume atumble amidst the timber-trash of broken ties, 

Art ambiguously crated-up from sight, inert and quiet, beautiful inside, ready for the next appreciator's ego, ready for the next dare and swaggering excuse.

Ends always come.

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Another Year, Another Quiet Mike Leigh Triumph

No murder.  No sinking ships.  No wise-ass teens.

No Legions, no small-town-joe-makes-good.

No court of law.  No con.  No 'bad-lieutenant' cops.

No talking dogs. No blackmail, and no hooker scenes.

 

No corporate conspiracy.  No royal court.  No 'hood'.

No war.  No aliens.  No capers.  No 'black-ops'.

No poor-class gal to get the handsome lead.

No 'magic' world of shallow, feel-good 'myth'.

No rape shock. No coming-of-age in a 'simpler' time.

No cowboys, no pop music.  No selling-out for greed.

No mystery to solve of someone's quirky death.

No vampires, zombies, cannibals.  No crime.

With humans, we know the fragility of bliss.

Simply, cinematically, we aren't prepared for this. 

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Go Figure

Dead people.

You can't live with 'em.

You can't live without 'em.

Ten Things I Don't Like

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                                                                                     **

1)  People walking and conversing on cell phones as if the person were actually 'there'

2)  Living off the same adolescent 'oldie' music for 20 . . . or 30 . . . or 40 . . . years

3)  Being monitored on the job in order to 'document' the 'quality' of my work

4)  Power tools on quiet mornings

5)  How -- almost anywhere, certainly in politics -- cheap words drive out the worthy ones

6)  Film titles with any of the following words: 'chocolate', 'deadly', 'hell', 'kill', or 'wedding'

7)  The violence inborn in humans that is exercised for just about any excuse

8)  Customer service being redefined as irrelevant, pre-recorded phone options -- or -- pages of FAQ

9)  Full-body tattoos executed by a needle-man who thinks cartoons are 'high art'

10)  Having to pretend I'm having fun

* Great country, very good cast,  bad idea

** One good player, vastly overrated director, worse idea

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Knowing The Reward All Along

John Cassavetes, director and actor, has a screen face whose eyes don't seem to smile even when he himself chooses to.

Yet his life reads a story of a artist dedicated to conveying the interconnectedness of human beings, heart to heart.

Connecting is impure, precipitous, and rare.  And the only real quest.

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Points East

The mythic power of film is larger than even those who claim it to be large fully understand.   

Try stumbling onto a film, like this one, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (. . .Of Shangri-La), at age 16, a movie buff never having seen or heard of the film and only distantly aware of the term 'Shangri-La'.

The story follows a man jostled by a war-torn world and seeking a peaceful one. 

It finds him.  He loses it.  He fights to get it back. 

The archetype around which I've seen my life playing.

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Crikey

Sociopathologically speaking, in Badlands,

Martin Sheen and Spacek ('underage') go on a rampage, killing at random and making the Dakotas a place of crazy Eden.

When he's finally stopped, he places a cluster of rocks to mark the spot:  Here is where you caught us.  They might have shot him there and built a dolmen instead of a mound of stones.

All the Druid stuff I know fits in a thimble.

The extent to which monuments of stone, of brick, of glass, of steel, the reinforced concrete and electrical systems of the tall places in order to elevate a visitant up there

-- the pains we go through, the politics of design, the revenue requests, the generational teaching of technique, not to leave out the brute physicality of shifting a ton of dead weight,

all our temples, mosques, and churches, revolving restaurants high above metropolis, business parks and three-deck malls and bars --

articulates a reason, goes to explain why we're here, what's it all about, alfie.

Here is where you caught us.

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Hiking Up And Out

The Idealist: Of course we can

The Pessimist: Why bother

The Cynic: I told you so

To Tell A White Truth

One of the following is true:

1) I've killed five men.

2) The priesthood rejected me on the grounds that I'm not Catholic.

3) Lifetime Channel has slotted a show for me as 'The Lovelorn Guru'.
 

4) I wear a size 10 shoe.

5) After she ducked away from a premier, Michelle Pfeiffer -- this was in the 90s -- Michelle arrived shamefaced and needful, wet from having walked a distance in a rain, came to my hotel room, and I let her in.

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Serially, Folks

Celebrity impression elements I've tried to work on and 'do':

1) Brando reciting Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' in Apocalypse Now -- or simply 'doing' Brando as Kurtz.

2) Olivier's gesture of open-mouthed wonderment -- or his 'eye-roll' at having to face a life-shattering truth.

3) Kingsley's changes in pitch and dynamics -- or nervously-stuttering laugh during a quick conversational response.

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A Place In The Sun

Those who love this movie often point to this scene and the lingering close-ups of beautiful actors.  

I love this scene for another reason.  The film is based on Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and we do indeed get oppressive class structure, a pathetic marriage, a universe where human effort inevitably gets trumped by malevolent circumstance, punctuated by a scene wherein Raymond Burr demonstrates a murder by smashing an oar to bits inside a courtroom.

I love this particular scene for the musical theme, and incidentally for the lovers (Liz and Monty) caught up first in dance and then on the verandah, orchestra still within earshot.

The plans, the passion.  

Despite the utter improbability of any social acceptance, they race at doom.

That moment motivates.

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