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?

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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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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Ten Things I Don't Like

 *

                                                                                     **

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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The Age Of

Pinter Stoppard Mamet Albee Schaffer and Schaffer Gray and Gray Wilson Kushner Hare and Guare.

Obsessed with film as we are, no doubt that literature's still alive and it's in its plays, its moves and words.

(photograph: Dave Cornish)

Credit This One

Here's one:  Adrien Brody.

In The Pianist, he's Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jew in Nazi-ruled Poland, a man socially restricted and marginalized, his family sent off to their death in camps, he himself for years hidden in Warsaw. 

No film can handle the reality of such powerlessness and brutality.  This film, by Roman Polanski, himself a boy in Warsaw then, suggests the accidentalness, the luck, involved.  The world around is being destroyed.  It's Brody's sensitivity and quiet that holds his sanity in place.  

And it's his music (not to be blithe about the mega-death of that war) that suggests some kind of transformative value to it all.

We're still working that out.  Hence, the actual Szpilman performing for years afterward.  Hence, Polanski with his deeply ironic cinema.  Hence, the much younger Brody channeling that experience for us.

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Any Women Reading This?

 

Why America doesn't put Mike Leigh on its shoulders and carry him from city to city handing out official keys to important rooms puzzles me on a daily basis.

Yes, he's a Brit, not a Yank, but he's one of the finest film directors in the world.

Do I overstate here?  No.

This guy finds what's distinctive in our routines.  Why what's common isn't.

So, women.  If you haven't seen Happy-Go-Lucky, do it today.  

Well, rent it or queue it today.

Life getting to you?  Watch this film.

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Artistic Visions

Film Directors

'Indie' Style -- Late 20th Century Americans

Alpha Selection

P.T. Anderson (Punch Drunk Love)

Abel Ferrara (The Addiction)

Todd Haines (Safe)

Whit Stillman (The Last Days Of Disco)

Formative Forces

Film Directors

Last Third 20th Century -- The American Connection

1) Stanley Kubrick

2) Roman Polanski

3) Woody Allen

4) Mike Nichols

5) John Cassavetes

6) James Ivory

7) Martin Scorsese

8) Robert Altman

9) Francis Ford Coppola

10) Sidney Lumet


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Playwright One

David Mamet holds too tight a rein

David Mamet provides no easy outs

David Mamet toughens everything he touches

David Mamet makes women male

David Mamet finds no man strong enough

All, for him, make mission, the moral edge

They fail most often, for David Mamet

David Mamet brings to me the fear 

Residing anxious in me 

That all is a straw in the wind


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Inglourious Basterds

The characters are not simply 'types' or 'archetypes' which we may subliminally take note of (i.e. innocent daughter, villainous official, fugitive) as we engage with the plot, slotting this story into expectations formed from earlier, similar films.

Nor is the story itself a re-setting of a prior, famous tale, 'updating' or 'refreshing' deep themes (i.e. King Lear re-done as Kurosawa's Ran).

IB isn't a simple story of revenge based on cruel treatment -- that would require a realism not attempted or claimed.  We don't have characters real enough to feel human toward.  The audience response is expected somehow else, commonly-stocked and easily-bought.

The movie is meant to be comically violent.  This is burlesque -- vulgarizing for laughs (or 'laffs') something otherwise possibly having worthy edges.  This handling lowers values, bringing the significant -- including monstrous enemies -- down to a low level. 

Yes, there is satisfaction to be gotten out of watching Hitler's face machine-gunned into a goo-that-was.  We still reverberate from the 20th Century, continue to ask for psychological remedy.  But this is lowest-common-denominator yuks.  Sardonic:  as bestial or more than the beast being overcome.

Perhaps I do a disservice to 12-year-old boys, but the film aims at an audience level of their (quarter-)sophistication.

Nota bene:  This is not to validate self-righteous snobbery.  We all have 'guilty pleasures', and someone liking IB might do so simply for the presence of Brad Pitt, or for the fact that the scenes are called 'chapters', or for the reason that one saw it the night of getting a better job.

But that's not aesthetic judgment, whether an effort makes or fails its artistic attempt, and has attempted enough.

Artistry is more than conforming to professional production standards, and has no direct relation to profit.

And artists, however self-expressive, have a responsibility -- to themselves, at least -- beyond just spewing-up their stomach and liking what they heave because it smells like them.

Art's an activity worthy of being done, serious even in its play.  If the motivation lies elsewhere, if it's held up short of that, stop.  Don't go further.

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Bright Star

Rarely are there reviews here, and this is not one.

Being an honorary 'Hollywood guy' my entire life, each 'awards season' I feel much like a black sheep.

Oscar, even an enlarged one with double the movie nominees, Oscar still fails the test of taste.

Abby Cornish and Paul Schneider have received some minor award notice for their acting, and the Academy is throwing them a bone by mentioning the costumes -- convincing ones -- of this film.

Jane Campion, so 'indie' in the world of megadollar film production, is one of those undernoticed directors who actually yield -- let me discharge this word once, and let it echo in our ears -- art.

The richness of this film's sound and images honors the richness of Keats' poetry.

And whereas relationships, nowadays the province of sentimentalized, tooth-bleached status-dating yuppies, or alternatively, infibulated tatterdemalion punks and skanks -- whereas those current relationships seldom register unless stinking of money or rough-and-tumble orgasm,  this film honors the mutual attraction of its principals with simple, but deep tenderness.  Another word worthy of echo in this context -- love.

The world of all true art is the world of self-conscious imagination.  When we live there, in imagination, we find larger space even in the trivial.  Greatness seems to fill a small world.  Much of the Campion film deals with 'everyday' Hampstead, seen as then a world of bluebells and reeds, of needlework capable of duplicating forms of nature, of amateur neighbor voices charming a room with their chorus, of bedchambers made into 'butterfly farms'.

Of such things, our world, by extension, too.  Likely more often than we admit, more than we give serious notice to for more than a flicker -- as though its fleetingness makes it less than real.  What's imagined inhabits our world.  So that we can inhabit it.  Doing that, our lives have meaning.  

They do.

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Paper Or Plastic?

. . . and B says, I think it was a woman, this retail checker, 6 feet tall, with white gloves, an inch-thick of make-up, and a broad smear of deep red lipstick.

. . . and I say, Sounds like a John Waters movie -- was there 50s 'quippy' rock 'n' roll in the background?

. . . and B says, nodding, There should be.

. . . and I go on to say, You're telling me it was a woman who wanted to appear like a man wanting to appear like a woman?

. . . and she nods, with something of a genuinely-bemused smile.

. . . Heavy! I think, for some reason dipping into the vocabulary of 1969.


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Stacheless In Seattle

That scene in Whit Stillman's Barcelona where the naval lieutenant Fred, the jingoistic East-Coast Establishmentarian, the yuppified 'ugly American', ponders whether an upper lip is more effectively shaven with the grain of mustache or against it.

After 15 years, the answer: doubly.

First, with the grain. Then, against it.


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