The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind

from The Sun and Her Stars: "Salka chose instead to adorn her house with people... There was a feeling of abundance here, but the extravagance was emotional rather than material..."

A valuable and graceful book that rescues Salka Viertel from being mostly famous as a minor character in Greta Garbo's life. Rifkind firmly establishes Viertel's unique place in history as someone who singlehandedly comforted a generation of European emigrees who made their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s to escape fascism and the murdering Nazis. The grace and richness of Rifkind's use of secondary sources is astounding, as she uses the words (from correspondence and memoirs, novels and films) of the dozens of distinguished writers, artists, actors who found a home in her home, to richly animate the life of the mind her house became for this embattled homeless group. Irwin Shaw, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Arnold Schoenberg, Billy Wilder are but a few.

For just one example, the following from the novel Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood, about his character Friedrich Bergmann, based on Salka Viertel's husband Bertholdt: "The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave." Or the title of this review, which Rifkind uses to describe Viertel's last view of Berlin when she left:  "Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too," from a poem by Rilke, another Viertel acquaintance.

Rifkind, with verve, density and grace, makes what could have been an exercise in esoteric filmography into a gripping cultural history of a singular woman and her courage in a terrible time. Highest recommendation!

"See the black souls of the Jews fly away" p 131

Salka's son Peter's novel The Canyon. always mud, heavy and brown, that was the water's brother.

director Rouben Mamoulian, who used a metronome to time Garbo's movements in Queen Christina ("I have been memorizing the room")

The Parking Lot Movie

Great movie. A bunch of disgruntled grad students, skate-boarders and malcontents administ The Corner Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia. A marxist critique of the American service economy, as well as a juvenile attack on the fraternity system. Essential.

The King is Alive

Fascinating "version" of Shakespeare, suggested to me by a friend when I trumpeted that Throne of Blood by Kurosawa was the best non-Shakespeare Shakespeare play I'd ever seen. A group of tourists on a safari bus in Africa decide to stage a version of King Lear as they wait for rescue. Relationships break down, adultery and violence rages, all against a bleak Saharan backdrop and "narrated" by an elderly African man who watches the tourists disintegrate and comments on them. Jennifer Jason Leigh appears, among others.

Part of the Dogme 95 avant-garde filmmaking movement, whose rules known as the Vow of of Chastity are:

1. Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.
3. The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (that is to say that the film takes place here and now).
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.

Trailer is here.

Lauren Bacall singing "Sob Sister" in The Big Sleep

Click here to watch the clip on YouTube.

What a film! Wonderfully sharp writing (Faulkner kicked in on the screenplay), Bogart and Bacall hitting all the high notes. Interesting commentary with dvd on how the film was held a year and a half for the war to end so the studio could rush all its war pictures out before it ended. Also, some of Bacall's scenes were reshot, and extra ones with her added, on the advice of her agent, who was trying to help her recover from her bad reviews in The Confidential Agent, her previous film. And they took her veil off her, which is aesthetically pleasing!

If... (1968, Lindsey Anderson, director)

A strange 1968 film starring Malcolm McDowell as a junior at a deeply traditional English public school. A grower, for sure, starts out sleepily, moves through a three-act, dramatic construction that grows more surreal and violent.

McDowell is exceptionally cast.

The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa

My son and I saw THE HIDDEN FORTRESS at AFI Silver yesterday afternoon, what a masterpiece! The 21-year old Misa Uehara as the Princess was particuarly astounding, more than holding her own next to the redoubtable Toshiro Mifune as the General, and Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as the two peasants reluctantly accompanying the Princess across ... See Moreenemy territory. They are equal parts Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, the grave-diggers from Hamlet, and reputedly George Lucas's models for C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars. A stunner.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

So... no review yet, Seana? OK i get it -- this brilliant book speaks for itself, it's the story i most wish i'd written by the writer i most wish i were. first experience of it was a vinyl LP (yes i'm old) recorded book from the library -- first 2 chapters, read by kvjr. himself. (the other 2formative lps were spoken chapters of walden and george carlin's am/fm.) read the book soon thereafter and over & over since, and thanks to it i am perpetually (like billy pilgrim) unstuck in time, and convinced (like the tralfamordians) that life's just a bowl of cherries, i.e. a collection of vividly tasted moments, occurring simultaneously & ever accessible in the 'here and now.') point is... thank you, kvjr, and thanks sean for bringing him to mind.

I quote (without permission, thus far) a comment by my old and deep friend Steve Hayes, a mentor, nay, magister!, whom I am lucky enough to have held on to all these years, a comment spurning me to complete this hapless posting of a cover image of my beloved Schlacthaus Funf, which Steve and I probably read for the first time within a year or two of each of at Gonzaga High School. Yes, a terribly special book, a memorable book which I too have re-read over the years without any real need, since whole paragraphs seem to spring to memory whenever I wish, untrue about almost every other novel I have read in my life, a life which will be most notable for Number Of Novels Consumed, if nothing else.

First and foremost, the prose style is beautifully simple and profound, one reason it was such a controversial smash when it was published (1969), as it finds avid fallow soil in the adolescent mind. The simple declarative (but no less allusive) sentences are still rigidly effective after so many years. After a fervent teen following in the 1970s, it has been widely banned and contested as suitable reading material for high school students, ever since, the way they bury a book in Amurica.

The number of Germans burned to a crisp in the fire-bombing of Dresden may very well be closer to 25,000 than to the 132,000 that Vonnegut claims, and this may be of import to the burnt-bean-counters of miliary logistics, but Vonnegut's moral and aesthetic claim that this ruined the subsequent imaginary life of his poor hero Billy Pilgrim is without challenge, vide PTSD ruining the lives of hundreds of war veterans in the past 20 years who witnessed far less numerical slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second and foremore, it is an anti-war novel about a war -- WWII -- still roundly acclaimed as "the last good war." And a good 'un it undoubtedly is in the prism of history, the systematic defeat of a global menace. But Vonnegut sticks to his man's eyes -- Billy Pilgrim's -- a fragile set of eyes to begin with, that crumple in the very first instance of hands-on warfare. And Vonnegut is more concerned with the larger lens of the years that follow Billy Pilgrim's brief, utterly naive service in the very last months of the Second World War, as Billy returns to America and collapses slowly and inutterably over the 25 years that follow.

For me, at least now when the assurance of science fiction printed literature has abided a great deal (who cares now that you can buy the game and BE THE SHIT, right?), the science fiction sections of the novel are not as moving as they once were, but they certainly provide a counterpoint, and it's important to remember the vital emergence of science fiction in American literature in the 1950s and 1960s (Slaughterhouse Five lost out to no less than Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (another shatteringly good "sci fi" title) in 1970 for both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, no small shit for us pointy-headed sci fi fans at the time).

It seems to do that rare thing in penetrating a harsh shared space between realistic fiction and "speculative fiction," where the jump to speculative is a result of something real, is a psychological adjustment, and makes more sense than just the pure fantasy realm.

There, Steve: it's what I got, at the moment. But I hear you, and adore it much the same as you did, and do.

Also snuck in the surprisingly good 1973 film of same right after I read this -- Ame liked it too -- it had this gooey early 1970s film technique to it that was jes right.

Drunken Angel, 1948 film by Akira Kurosawa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdyVxVvTVXo

Inglourious Basterds

I'm no enormous Tarantino fan -- the train started and stopped at Pulp Fiction for me -- but I thought this was a tremendous movie, mostly for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Waltz, who managed to in three languages to be the most menacing, attractive, complex antagonist I think I've seen in film in years. If he hadn't been a Nazi, I would think he would have been nominated for Best Actor.

The three languages thing, for me, was a big deal. Sure, Brad Pitt's a cutie, and I understand he studied for months with a serious Ozark Mountains dialogue coach so he could sound so convincingly Carolina as he did -- but come on! Waltz sounded menancing and competent and human and believable in THREE ROMANCE LANGUAGES -- I'm quite sure he didn't need an "accent" coach in any of them.

The Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed

Pure pleasure. From the director of The Third Man. Monumental score, creepy little touches everywhere, exquisite casting, and a happy ending.

Ralph Richardson is heartbreaking as the butler, earnest, witty, caring, and love-lost. The boy, played by Bobby Henrey, is wondrous. The tightly-plotted mystery can't help but bring to mind Hitchcock.

Throne of Blood by Akira Kurosawa

The reason this film trumps all other Shakespeare adaptions to cinema is simple: it doesn't care a whit for the original, cerebral, figurative and image-laden language. It carves all the meat off the bone of the plot, and uses music, atmosphere, stark melodramatic performances, and visual imagery instead.

Some of the sounds -- the wind howling up and down Mount Fuji, where the film was located, the whinnying of the battle-mad horses, the solid percussion of the actors' bare feet running in measured syncopated blocking, the whistle and impact of arrows -- take on the force of characters themselves.

Yamada's Lady Asaji is bone-chilling. Her face barely moves, her pale white makeup is passive, and she has eyebrows drawn on two level of her forehead. When she finally breaks down near the film's end, endlessly washing her spotless hands in a room whose walls are covered with an innocent victim's blood (the notorious traitor Fujimaki killed himself in the same room, now known as the Forbidden Room), wailing that she can't get clean, the effect is almost euphoric. Earlier, she exits through a panel in the dwelling's wall, vanishing into pitch black, then returning seconds later with a pitcher of drink for her husband.

Mifune's Washizu scowls even when he is laughing.

mist, colossal trees dripping with rain, rich black volcanic soil and bulky fortress architecture

Noh thousand-year-old theatrical tradition

The Noh stage must have on it three pine branches and a symbolic Shinto temple-arch. In the film, shots are carefully composed to include tangles of branches in the foreground, and the vast entrance gate of Washizu's fortress serves for the temple arch.
A Noh play features a "doer" (Shite) and a "companion" (Waku) who plays a subordinate role. Washizu and Asaji are the Shite and Waku respectively. Elements in the Noh include a battle-drama (we get one here) and a so-called "wig drama", in which a female character dominates the action. This is the central portion of the film, in the quiet of the fortress quarters, when Asaji ruthlessly manipulates her husband's ambition. Every Noh play has a ghost which appears to the Shite, and the spirit in the forest fulfils that function. Noh plays are never original works, in that (by a venerable convention) they are re-workings of ancient legends. Kurosawa follows tradition by quarrying his tale from Shakespeare's play.

There is no western term to describe the stylized striking of poses so important in Noh. Our word "dance" is a crude word which approximates to, but does not convey, the grace of the Japanese art-form. Asaji, alone with the blood-stain, gives us a glimpse of this delightful ritual.

Finally, Noh contains an aural richness almost totally absent from western tragedy - the complex rhythms of stamping and percussion which accompany the spoken word. In the film, the rhythmic patterns of horses' hooves on soil, and Washizu's bare feet on the boards of the banquet hall, are meant to reinforce the mood as they creep into our emotions by subliminal insistence.

A History of Cereal and Violence

Behind the times, as usual: just saw the sort-of gripping movie A History of Violence, which actually feels like a graphic novel without resorting to any animation whatsoever. Over the years, I'd seen the preview so often -- the loaded momentary truthfulness of Viggo Mortenstern's innocent life, the heavy foreshadowing (Ed Harris' scarred face and destroyed eye) that maybe old Viggo weren't so nice -- that I felt like I'd already seen the movie. Still, it's not far from being a pretty good movie -- how faintly can I praise it? Certainly, the sex scene with Maria Bello on the stairs (the two people I mentioned the movie to immediately referenced that), not to mention the 69 scene with her in a cheerleader outfit, are outstanding, and easily made the movie half its money. But what about the cereal box in several intimate breakfast scenes? I'm talking, of course, about Honey Bunches of Oats.
Why is Honey Bunches of Oats featured in at least two breakfast scenes? I can't think of a gentler cereal, it's almost Shakespearean in its sweetness:

Nay, though thou would run with me,
run down through thorn-scored hayricks in the crick,

shall I roll with thee in pearled honey bunches of oats.

Synecdoche, New York

Das Truman Show. At a bit over two hours it's too long, that's for sure, there's an awful long soft middle to the film, which is where it tries hardest to become a German film, but then it's back to the hard wrap and American time again. After reading so many advance comments on the film (when it was still being post-produced), and then advance reviews, I thought I was fairly clear on the plot, and the whole constructing-a-small-scale-but-complete-model-0f-all-of-Manhattan, but the reviewers must have picked up all of that from the advance material distributed with the release, because if you didn't know that was coming, it would take you the soft middle -- about 75 minutes -- to figure it out, that the director (Hoffman) of the play was now directing not just his entire life, but all of existence. (Well, he goes abroad briefly to Germany, to try to see his lost child Olive, and that part at least, seems to be "off screen.") I can bitch and moan -- and will, if I find the time to go back and review it act by act, but it's a fairly extraordinary film nonetheless. There are some great performances (Hoffman, de rigeur it would seem at this point in his nearly faultless career), Samantha Morton, Emily Watson (small part but great) but then there are a million other actors who seem to be as confused as I was. The movie is about ideas, the movie is an idea, and although the vision is not seamlessly revealed to us, it's pretty powerfully delivered in part.

Paul Newman

I picture my epitaph: "Here lies Paul Newman,
who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."