Daily

Today I ordered an English Bluray of Liliana Cavani‘s The Night Porter, which in my book is probably the most artistically valid expression of the Nazi-Fascist Perversion cycle of the early to mid ’70s. (Along with Salo and 1900, I suppose.) This scene is arguably the iconic-erotic highpoint of Charlotte Rampling‘s early career. I’m 90% sure someone is now going to write in and say “thanks for the warning…watching this video could get me fired!”

I’m sorry if the title of this post has struck some as vulgar, but (a) I love the sound of it and (b) with what other story or riff could I use it?

The best part of this Throck Morton video is the gas station fill-up. The LACMA Kubrick exhibition tour portion isn’t riveting, but it does give you a pretty good idea of what it is. The fisheye-lens headcam delivers reasonably good quality. I intend to purchase one for my own adventures. I’m thinking of visiting the LACMA Kubrick show sometime this week. I saw the show at the Cinematheque Francais in May 2011, and reported as follows:

“The Stanley Kubrick exposition at the Cinematheque Francais is a very thorough, abundantly detailed and absorbing presentation of Kubrick’s 54-year career, beginning with his photographer period (which began in 1945 when he took a shot of a newsstand proprietor looking forlorn the day that FDR‘s death was headlined) all the way through his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, and including exhibits from the three movies he worked like hell on but never made — Napoleon, A.I. and The Aryan Papers (which was killed by Schindler’s List).

“The icing on the cake is that the Cinematheque has gone the extra mile to put you in the mood — calling its restaurant the Korova Milkbar, laying a replica of the Overlook Hotel carpet on its floors, selling little red Lolita glasses in the gift shop, etc. A Clockwork Orange is screening this evening (i.e., right now) and there were six or seven fans dressed like Alex’s droogs (bowler hats, white shirts and pants, black boots) sitting outside at a table a couple of hours before.”

Here’s another amusing Throck Morton piece that deals in part with Merchant-Ivory and Howard’s End.

I told a friend that I had a dream the other night, and in it a well-known critic was murdered. It was a horrible dream. A kind of nightmare really. The friend suggested that the critic was being dispatched because he’s a fan of Lincoln. I laughed and said “that’s funny,” but I reminded her that I’ve never hated Lincoln. I hate the Lincoln Best Picture talk — that’s the difference.

I reminded her that I gave Lincoln a passing grade in my initial review….a pass with reservations. A good, intelligent film that is also a doleful, talky, slow, ponderous civics lesson. Plus that hateful Janusz Kaminski lighting scheme as a kicker. Yeesh.

“But there are worse films than Lincoln that could win Best Picture,” my friend replied. “Good intentions and all of that. Lincoln has made $120 million at the box office and is the highest grossing film so far of the Best Picture nominees. You can’t just discard that.”

My response: “People are going en masse because the legend of Abraham Lincoln has been drilled into them since they were 7 or 8 years old. It’s not the movie, really — it’s the man and the Steven Spielberg brand assurance and the Daniel Day Lewis performance. Nobody is truly aroused or turned on by that film…no one. They’re going because they feel it’s something they ought to do — it’s a kind of cultural duty — and because it’s about the great Abraham Lincoln and because they know that all Spielberg films are safe and schmaltzy and intelligent in their fashion.

“And so they go and they sit and watch like an obedient congregation, and then the lights come up and they stand up and trudge out with those blank or grim expressions (I’ve seen them so don’t tell me), and they tell each other afterwards that DDL was really good (which he is) and yaddah-yaddah. Lincoln is no one’s idea of an ecstatic or rousing or head-turning experience. You know it and I know it. It’s a kind of homework movie that audiences feel they should go see because we’ve all received the Lincoln legend, and we don’t feel we can ignore it or wait for the DVD or the Netflix download.

“It’s a better-than-decent film, I agree, but people have gotten carried away by the awards talk and because they’re saying ‘how can we go wrong if we give the movie about the great Abraham Lincoln our Best Picture award?’ It’s on that level rather than ‘oh,my God, this film is so great…I’ve seen it three times and I could see it again.'”

77 Sunset Strip and its three Warner Bros. TV spinoffs — Bourbon Street Beat in New Orleans, Hawaiian Eye in Hawaii, and Surfside 6 in Miami — came up in conversation the other night. Four versions of the same detective agency show — essentially the same characters, same colorful sidekicks, same wisecracking secretary. The 77 Sunset Strip scripts were sometimes re-dressed and re-shot for Surfside 6 or whatever. I’ve read that even an occasional cast member from one series would show up in a guest capacity on another…is that true?

The geographical location of the non-existent 77 Sunset Strip office (as well as Dino’s Lodge, the next-door restaurant that actually existed and thrived for 20 years) was at 8532 Sunset, on the south side of Sunset between La Cienega and Alta Loma. The post-premiere after-party for Vincente Minnelli and Glenn Kenny‘s Some Came Running was held at Dino’s Lodge.

Here’s an idea for an honest-to-God 2013 cable TV series. Three slacker-stoner layabouts in their late 20s are time-transported back to a black-and-white 1959 world, and not as losers but as the new 77 Sunset Strip guys. And they get to play games and drive around in T-birds and live these totally cool private-eye slickster lifestyles, booze and babes and fast cars and penthouses, and they also get rich by betting on sports events that they know the winner of. Maybe they also get to influence other historical events…or not.

You could go any which way but the basic idea is that three no-direction-home 2013 guys are “saved,” in a sense, by being thrust into the distant past and being forced to live in a black-and-white world in which they have all the advantages and then some. All kinds of opportunities for frolic and perversity, not to mention reflections on the evolution of our culture over the last 50 years. But it wouldn’t work unless it was shot in black-and-white within a 1.37 to aspect ratio.

This is my idea — I just want to make that clear. Whatever happens, I get a piece of the action.

I think it’s time to forgive Ordinary People for winning the 1980 Best Picture Oscar, and thereby denying that honor to Martin Scorsese‘s Raging Bull. I’m not arguing that the Scorsese isn’t a much bolder, richer and less schematic film. Everyone reveres it. I own a Raging Bull Bluray and have watched it a good nine or ten times. It’s just that I saw Redford’s film this evening and to my surprise it really got me. I’d forgotten how sad some of the scenes are. It’s too tidy and well-ordered, okay, but so well acted.

>

If nothing else Ordinary People taught the entire world to hate Mary Tyler Moore, the frigid, buttoned-down bitch of the suburbs. It defined her career. Her Beth character all but wiped out everything she’d done before on TV and certainly everything she did after. Beth’s example probably did a lot to open things up with all the real-life Beths out there. A lot of them probably said to themselves during a tough moment, “Wow, I’m turning into Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People.”

Aristotle didn’t tell the half of it. That faintly wild glint you’ll find in the eyes of almost all creatives is also in the eyes of most sociopaths (obviously except for those with dead shark eyes). It’s pretty much the same spark, the same faint irreverence or provocation or hint of an eff-you attitude. The difference is that creatives have an ability to distill this attitude into something clear and illuminating (or at least a potential to recognize and refine this ability). The lack of this is what guarantees that most criminals will live a shit life.

I say this as one who has a touch of that glint. I suppress it, of course, because it doesn’t help to flash it around in mixed company. I’ve also noticed the lack of this glint in more industry creatives than you might think.

27% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang has taken a dump on Les Miserables. But it opened huge yesterday, the fan base is really passionate, and it’ll make a lot of money. It’s been in theatres two days so what are HE regulars thinking? Is it too much of a mixed bag to win the Best Picture Oscar, or does it have a chance regardless?

During yesterday’s downtime I listed my favorite film performances from the late Charles Durning, who passed on 12.24 at age 89. Jack Amsterdam, the corrupt fixer-politician, in True Confessions. Det. Sgt. Eugene Moretti, the cop-negotiator in Dog Day Afternoon. The jovial song & danceman Governor in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And Lt. William Snyder, the bunko detective from Joliet, in The Sting, “searchin’ all the joy houses ’till I find him.”

I never saw Durning perform on stage. I’m especially broken-hearted that I never saw him in the Public Theatre presentation of That Championship Season. I interviewed him sometime in the mid ’80s at his place on Wilshire Blvd near Westwood. I remember his talking about “wise guys” he knew in the ’30s, and how they had “the glint of madness” in their eyes. And he was quite the movie buff. He had piles and piles of VHS tapes of all the great films, or most of them.

Durning’s N.Y. Times obit quotes a Parade interview in which Durning recalled a hand-to-hand combat episode during his World War II. “I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium,” Durning said. “A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot.”

They fought and rolled around, and Durning was stabbed eight or nine times with the bayonet before he finally picked up a rock and slammed the kid repeatedly until he was dead.

Can anyone imagine this scene being re-enacted in a war film in a satisfying way? 98% of the audience would be thinking “what the hell is wrong with that G.I.? We don’t care how old the kid is. He has a bayonet…waste him!” The screenwriter wouldn’t write it, and if he did the director wouldn’t film it because it doesn’t work. The only thing this scene would accomplish would be to persuade the audience that the Durning character is some kind of sentimental, unreliable flake. But that’s the difference, I’m presuming, between brutal real-life combat and the more clear-cut kind in war movies.

“Mr. Durning said the memories [of kiling this kid] never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else,” the Times obit says.

“There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don’t want anyone to know about,” During told Parade. “There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about — horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.”

I loathe Christmas Day to start with but yesterday was a record-book downer with the site blocked by Google (and flagged as a trouble spot by Firefox) for about 13 or 14 hours because of some malevolent Kazakhstan-based predator who sent out a trojan missile on 12.24 that manifested in God knows how many dozens or hundreds of websites. I begged three tech-support guys with my ISP Softlayer for any constructive help in the wee hours of 12.25, and they all said “sorry but it’s your problem — we just provide the bandwidth.”

The Godzilla trojan infected my ad server, it was finally determined. The only way to remove the Google block was to remove the ads and disable the ad server and then inform Google that I’d done this. They finally removed the block late yesterday afternoon. The ad server is being scrubbed and cleaned as we speak. The ads will presumably return before the day is out.

It didn’t feel awful to be out of business for a day. It just felt like…nothing. Stalled, neutered. I knew the problem would be remedied and over by sometime today.

So after sweating it out for 8 or 9 hours (plus a four-hour sleep break) I roused myself, picked up some Indian takeout and chilled at my girlfriend’s home. For the most part that meant suffering through a DVD screening of Brave. I’ve experienced moments of satisfaction and even uplift from the best Pixar films, but nothing suffocates my spirit like a glossy, connect-the-dots mainstream animated feature (i.e., big-name actors doing the voicing) looking to sell an empowerment fable about a young person being tested and fulfilling his/her destiny. I half-liked the big cowardly bear but it went no further. Every exaggerated expression and every gut-slam visual or aural effect felt like a tiny cyanide capsule. Give me a sword to hold as I jump into the wolf pit.

There is a certain Chicago life form who yesterday cheered Hollywood Elsewhere’s temporary misfortune. Exchanging blows in comment threads or on Twitter is part of the normal rough and tumble. But when you’ve been sidelined, most non-scumbags understand the basic Marquess of Queensberry about hostilties ceasing until you step back in, blah blah. But this is what we all love about the web, right? Mixing it up with halitosis creeps we’d cross a street to avoid if they were approaching, tossing this or that grenade and feeling low and filthy for the effort.