Day: February 17, 2008

In the 2.25 New Yorker, critic David Denby has written a lengthy love letter to Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning with an awed description of the first 20 minutes of No Country for Old Men.

(Illustration by Robert Risko)

Then he rolls the clock back to 1985 and Blood Simple and reviews the highlights of their career, tracing their gradual evolution from sardonic snickering jokers who often seemed outside their material to masters of austerity and dry irony and chilling silences, first in Fargo and then, 11 years later (and after at least a couple of films that seemed minor, if not out-and-out shortfalls), in No Country.
And then comes the wind-up to the finale and you think, okay, here we go, the crowning final paragraphs in which Denby will drape a red-velvet cloak over the Coens’ shoulders and annoint No Country as their ultimate, Oscar-worthy triumph and….wham, he trashes the ending.
“No Country is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness,” he writes. “If you consider how little the sheriff bestirs himself, his philosophical resignation, however beautifully spoken by Tommy Lee Jones, feels self-pitying, even fake.
“And the Coens, however faithful to the book, cannot be forgiven for disposing of Llewelyn so casually. After watching this foolhardy but physically gifted and decent guy escape so many traps, we have a great deal invested in him emotionally, and yet he’s eliminated, off-camera, by some unknown Mexicans. He doesn’t get the dignity of a death scene.
“The Coens have suppressed their natural jauntiness. They have become orderly, disciplined masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it.”
My God, those are the same beefs levelled against the ending of the film last May when it first showed at Cannes! Perceptions evolve, you move past, the fog lifts.
The last 20 minutes of No Country are about gathering forces and the tentacles of fate reaching round and grasping with unstoppable force. The movie becomes destiny itself — that thing you can’t see coming and can’t stop. It assumes the shape and inevitability of night. It becomes, in short, God-like, which is to say terrible, impassive, cruel. It isn’t very comforting (except in the words of Mr. Jones as he speaks of his dear departed father), but man, it sure holds you in its grip.

Here we go with another guys-crying-at-movies article, this one (undated) from e-harmony advice, a relationships and dating advice site. Included on its list of top 20 male tearjerkers (better sit down) is Richard Curtis‘s Love Actually. I don’t want to know any guy who says he’s felt even a tiny bit moved by this repulsive ’03 release. I understand girly-man attitudes but there are limits.
I ran a piece about this topic last March after MSNBC’s Ian Hodder went off on it. I wrote about it four or five years ago on Reel.com, and before that for the L.A. Times Syndicate.

Speaking of Mandingo and ostensibly “shocking” inter-racial sex, it would have been mildly interesting if the Film Forum had decided to include Sidney Lumet‘s Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (’70) in its currently runnng Lumet retrospective, which goes until 2.28.

I’ve only seen a portion of Hotshots, but it has a reputation of being extremely talky and dull. (The screenplay is by Gore Vidal, adapting a Tennessee Williams play called Seven Descents of Myrtle.) It has a suggested oral sex scene near the end in which Lynn Redgrave kneels before Robert Hooks, an African-American actor who’s worked almost exclusively on TV ever since. Mildly controversial for its time, but the movie mainly just blows a lot of florid air.
James Coburn plays Hook’s half-brother who marries Redgrave on a TV show and brings her back to his family’s run-down plantation, which is threatened by a rising river (and we know what that means!).

For the most part, the extra 18 or 19 minutes of footage in the American Gangster Extended Cut DVD (out Tuesday) feeds right into the whole with a sense of absolute harmony. We all know what it feels like when a film has had lumps added to its stocking with “flavor” or directorial “darlings.” This is not one of those cases. This is more like the extended Bugsy or Aliens. I would have been that much happier with American Gangster if these extras had been in from the get-go.

Josh Brolin (center), Ridley Scott (r.) during preparation of American Gangster‘s dog-shooting scene

The two biggest stand-outs are a “Bumpy on the beach” scene (a flashback to Denzel Washington and Clarence Williams III talking about supply and demand and the middle man out at Coney Island) and a follow/chase scene with Richie Roberts/Russell Crowe tailing a member of Frank Lucas’s gang who’s “carrying.”
One of the additional scenes seems gratuitous, but only a wee bit. I’m speaking of an extended finale after Washington gets out of prison and finds Crowe saying “welcome back” and taking him on a walk through the new Harlem. I enjoyed a line that Washington says about a trio of young hip-hoppers (“I guess you can only be young and dumb once” or something similar) that’s taken verbatim from Lucas in Marc Jacobson‘s “Return of Superfly” article. But the ending in the theatrical version is tighter, cleaner, preferred.
Disc 2, however, has an omitted alternate beginning that’s far superior to the one used in the theatrical version. Instead of a short nighttime scene with Washington setting a guy on fire and then shooting him as Williams looks on, the alternate is a blue-tinted, dialogue-free prologue in a diner (or a bar) that shows Washington walking in the front door and plugging a guy who’s just sitting there and tapping the seat of a chair with with a pair of drumsticks. The spooky, dreamlike aura gets you right off the top. I can’t imagine why Scott decided to use the other scene instead. Scott uses the last portion of this sequence at the tail-end of the extended version, after the closing credits.

Former basketball star, NBA commentator and Barack Obama supporter Charles Barkley ripped into “fake [Republican] Christians” on CNN this morning for their judgmental views about gays and other groups and beliefs deemed to be in defiance of Christian values. No argument here — intolerant religious purists are cut from the same cloth the world over, be they American or Middle Eastern — but Barkley is probably going to get a “chill out and shut up” phone call from an Obama campaign official, saying “don’t rattle the Obamacans!”

More Clinton-Wolfson ick — desperate, agitated, flailing — refuted by Sen. Ted Kennedy and Wisonsin Gov. Doyle.

I don’t know how to respond to this alleged clip from Spike Jonze‘s Where The Wild Things Are, which won’t be out until 2009 (according to the IMDB).
Could it be legit? If so, I’m 90% committed to running the other way when this film comes out. A live action piece with bipeds in big animal costumes voiced by name actors (Forest Whitaker, Catherine Keener, Paul Dano, James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Lauren Ambrose)?
The clip shows a guy in a big Cheshire Cat costume talking to a kid in a white animal outfit, and then asking to be hit in the stomach with a stick. (I thought it was going to be a Harry Houdini scene with the kid hitting the cat when he’s not ready, but no.) Jonze is a respected, very sharp, avant garde-meets-commercial director but c’mon….this?
Co-produced by Legendary Pictures, Playtone and Warner Bros. and co-written by Jonze and Dave Eggers, Where The Wild Things Are is an adaptation of Maurice Sendak‘s classic children’s bok.

A Rec Show rant from Ray about a recent piece by AICN’s Harry Knowles that indicates (in Ray’s view) that Harry was an HD-DVD supporter because he received free Toshiba/HD-DVD booty (including four HD-DVD players) and had only one Blu-ray player. Fairness requires a statement that Ray’s case doesn’t seem conclusive. (To me.) But I’m amused by the colorful prose in the opening graph that mentions Harry’s grandmother.

I saw Richard Fleischer‘s Mandingo with a couple of friends at one of the New York repertory cinemas (probably the Carnegie Hall or the Bleecker) in the late ’70s. Unavailable on DVD in this country, it’s a piece of rank steamy pulp about a slave (Ken Norton), slave-owners (James Mason, Perry King) and inter-racial shtupping (Susan George being a significant participant).

Mandingo had originally opened in ’75, but by the time I saw it the cool-cat revisionist attitude had settled in. It wasn’t a hoot as much as a howl — one of the most appalling sexual soap-operas ever made, but also a knowing wallow. It was a cinefile’s version of mud wrestling or Tijuana donkey sex made extra-laughable by cheap social criticism. The stamp of “produced by Dino de Laurentiis” made it all the more delicious.
I don’t remember laughing or even smirking. (Although one of my friends did.) I don’t remember it being a turn-on, even. I’ve repressed most of the experience (the mind flushes this stuff out as a kind of survival mechanism), but I do remember the repulsion. I’ve seen my share of exploitation films, but my lingering impression was of a film that truly stunk from the head and the groin.
I was young at the time, however, and I didn’t have the perspective to appreciate Mandingo‘s undercurrents. To hear it from N.Y. Times resident film-dweeb Dave Kehr, Mandingo, to be screened this coming Saturday as part of a mini-Fleischer retrospective at the annual Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, is Fleischer’s “last great crime film” as well as “a thinly veiled Holocaust [parable].”
Kehr’s auteurist-revisionist view is a classic case of “believing is seeing.” Ignore the experience of the film and whatever primal reactions you may have had to it. Consider instead the director’s thematic tradition, and focus on the high-minded intent that hangs suspended above the swamp.

“When Mandingo was released, many critics erupted with rage over its aggressively tasteless portrayal of the slave-owning South,” Kehr begins, “which seems in retrospect both a desired and appropriate response. More than a portrait of social decadence, Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system.
“For the French critic Jacques Lourcelles, one of Fleischer’s most articulate admirers, the recurring theme of his work is society slipping into decadence. Fleischer’s most provocative film on this theme is the still potent Mandingo from 1975 (Feb. 23, Walter Reade Theater), an anti-Gone with the Wind that treats the pre-Civil War South as a swamp of degradation for white masters and black slaves alike.
“Rattling around a tumble-down Tara of peeling plaster and near-empty rooms, James Mason (Captain Nemo in Fleischer’s children’s classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) presides over a human breeding farm. He is as occupied with finding a suitable stud for his prize female slave as with finding a bride who will give his lame son (Perry King) the male heir he requires.
“The treatment of humans as so much chattel, to be bought, sold and cruelly abused regardless of their social position, makes Mandingo a thinly veiled Holocaust film that spares none of its protagonists. More than a portrait of social decadence, Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system.”
DVD Availabilty Update: Pete Hammond reports he bought a DVD of Mandingo and Drum at Ameoba two years ago. The DVD distributor is Blaxfilm, he says.
Hammond says that copies are available on E-Bay.

In a piece about Chloe Sevigny‘s personally designed clothing line on view at Manhattan’s Opening Ceremony, the Guardian‘s Ryan Gilbey writes that while “the 33-year-old Sevigny is tall and slender in tight, dark jeans, black boots and baggy leather jacket, she walks with a slight galumphing awkwardness, planting her feet purposefully as she goes.

“Her face is long and elegantly pointed, offset by a formidable jaw on which you could crack open a bottle of beer. Her droopy-lidded eyes can lend her a docile vagueness, which came in handy during an early run of movies set in the white-trash hinterland (Gummo, Boys Don’t Cry, Julien Donkey-Boy), in which she played characters for whom a move to the arse end of nowhere would have represented unimaginable social promotion.”