Day: December 25, 2005

Nathan Lane and four chorus-line guys performed a funny spoof, about Brokeback Mountain a la “Oklahoma” on Late Night with David Letterman last week. Funny like skits on the “Carol Burnett Show” used to be in the ’70s. Funny if you just sit back and give in to the lame-itude for the sake of seeming like a good sport. But if you think about where Lane is coming from for more than two or three seconds…no, don’t! Then it won’t be funny. And nobody wants to be a sourpuss and not laugh at a venerated funny guy and Tin Pan Alley legend who happens to be a bit of an asshole. But if you take the skit as Lane’s audition for the Oscar-telecast gig, then I guess it was fairly successful.

My best Christmas moment so far was coming upon those carolers on East 3rd Street a few days ago, but my second best moment (and I’m a little ashamed to admit this) was walking around a Wild Oats store in Norwalk, Connecticut, on Saturday afternoon and hearing this impossibly dippy Paul McCartney song playing and starting to quietly hum along. I’m sorry but those McCartney hooks get me, and I always feel like a sap when I cop to this. I also feel Christmassy when this old Beatles chestnut plays…jeez.

In his King Kong review, New York press critic Matt Zoller Seitz says that the film’s “unwelcome intrusion of refrigerator logic” recalls a moment from the 1998 crime thriller Phoenix, in which Ray Liotta “poses a question the original Kong never gave us a chance to ask: If the natives built that wall to keep Kong out, why’d they make doors big enough for him to get through?” In fact, that observation was first delivered by the late film scholar and archivst Ron Haver on the 1985 Criterion Collection King Kong laser disc, which contained one of the first-ever audio-track commentaries ever put on the market.

The typeface is screwed up (i.e., all italic) but sufferin’ suckotash, New York Press critic Armond White has found an angle or two to admire in The Family Stone. I don’t know if the support of Manhattan’s most ardently contrarian wack-jobber means Thomas Bezucha’s home-for-the-holidays dramedy is doomed or has a new lease on life. Oh, and Armond? When Sarah Jessica Parker says “I dont care what you think about me,” the “grinning Stone” (i.e., Rachel McAdams) coolly replies, “Oh…of course you do”….NOT “Yes, you do.”

It’s not the purgatory of “Christmas” that I mind so much…I’ve dealt with the myriad oppressions of this wretched holiday for years…but all the stores being shuttered. The greatest thing is the day after when everything starts up again. There is no greater sound or vibe than the hustle-and-bustle of commerce.

I’ve had it with slow-to-react protagonists wearing those dull, stunned looks. I’ve seen them in heavy drama after heavy drama…younger lead characters who go through all kinds of hell and all they seem to do is suffer and take it and look blown away. No more of these! If your life is threatened you don’t shut down, dammit…you snap to attention. Your senses and state of alertnesses become far more acute than usual, and all you have…all you can think of or improvise is irrefutably about what to do in order to avoid getting hit again or killed. Nobody but nobody just stands there with a bombed-out, numbed-out expression.

I’ve seen my first near-great film of ’06…shot in ’04 and shown at several film festivals (including Telluride, Toronto and Karlovy Vary) in ’05, and apparently due for release by ThinkFilm before long. “Near-great” because the exquisite wide-screen framing and destaurated color and note-perfect editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made. (As well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story). It’s called Fateless, and it’s no surprise that director is Lajos Koltai, one of the great all-time directors of photography (Max, Being Julia, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway). Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It doesn’t have the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but there has never been quite so beautiful a portrait of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death.

In between my Munich postings, which have been precise and exacting but have struck some as obsessive, I’ve been suppressing a fear that I may sound like (and may be perceived as) George Grizzard‘s Senator Fred Van Ackerman character in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (1962). If that were so I think I’d need to jump off a bridge as an act of atonement.

New York Times critic Manohla Dargis has explained better than anyone else why Brokeback Mountain and Heath Ledger’s hurtin’ cowboy are connecting all over: “It’s partly because [Ledger’s] character in Ang Lee’s romantic tragedy, Ennis Del Mar, represents a kind of impacted masculinity that a lot of us recognize: I don’t know a single straight woman who hasn’t been involved with a man as emotionally thwarted as Ennis, the man who can’t tell you how he feels because he may not honestly know. And because the film is, in many respects, about how difficult it is to live in a culture that punishes men who give the appearance of being too soft, too weak and too feminine, I imagine that a lot of men, gay and straight, recognize Ennis, too.”