Elia Kazan‘s Viva Zapata (1952) is the only Marlon Brando film that hasn’t been decently mastered for DVD. Why? I love and miss this film. It’s one of Bud’s three golden-era Kazan collaborations, two years before Waterfront and a year after Streetcar. And he’s truly great in the part. Ditto Anthony Quinn and Joseph Wiseman. (I love how Wiseman shouts in a crazy manic stream, “Zapata, in thenameofeverythingwefoughtfor don’t go!”) And Brando’s death scene near the finale (i.e., getting shot 112 times) is a classic of its kind.

Guillermo del Toro once told me he won’t watch it. “How would you feel,” he said, “if Mexico made a film about Abraham Lincoln starring a Mexican actor, and speaking English-accented Spanish?” He has me there, but the craft, heart and political conviction in Viva Zapata still feel genuine to me. (Even if it’s a little too simplistic and sentimentalized at times.) Kazan was coming to terms with ratting (i.e., confirming names) when he made it, but he was still an old leftie from the ’30s and knew about the emotion behind a rebellion.

“We wanted to focus on the mind-set of this man. We don’t change anything in his true story. Don’t have to, because it’s a great story. Dickens would do it. Mark Twain would write a great book. This guy who is basically a bum becomes president of the United States.” — W. director Oliver Stone speaking to N.Y. Times writer Richard L. Berke.

I wouldn’t have paid attention to this 10.4 SNL clip if Mark Wahlberg hadn’t recently complained about it. I think it’s mildly funny. The guy doesn’t sound like Wahlberg, but he has his speaking style down pat.

Another expression of down-home rural attitudes, this one captured outside of a Sarah Palin rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania yesterday — 10.11.08. And here‘s a story about the incident from CBS News’ Scott Conroy. And here’s a story about a weaselly McCain worker named Jeffrey Frederick in Gainesville, Virginia. (Imagine what it must be like to be that guy.) The racial pus is seeping out more and more, I think, because it’s been hitting the rightwing rurals that Obama might actually win and some are starting to freak out, which leads to acting out.

One of the perks of attending college in London is flying cheap to Europe via Ryan Air. So it fits the paradigm that Jett, currently enrolled at Syracuse University’s London annex for the fall semester, and his roommate Kyle Burda are off to Prague and Budapest next weekend. I’ve been to Prague three times — in ’87, ’92 and ’00 — so I sent Jett some photos this weekend and suggested some places he might want to visit.

Anyway, this all reminded me of a wild train-trip drama during my first trip there, which happened six months before the election of Bill Clinton. I had attended my first Cannes Film Festival that year (reporting for Entertainment Weekly) and would later visit Cortina d’Ampezzo and the outdoor sets of Cliffhanger for a Sylvester Stallone profile for the New York Times.
I took a train from Nice to Genova, Italy, and then switched to another heading for Prague. But an hour or so into the trip I realized the train was headed for Berlin and not Prague — I’d read the sign wrong. So I got off in Leipzig around 10 pm in order to catch a 2:45 am Leipzig-to-Prague sleeper. I was feeling whipped and unclean so I booked a hotel room to use it for three hours, long enough for a shower and a 90-minute nap.
I was back at the Leipzig bahnhof by 2:15 am. I bought a bunk on the Prague train and crashed in a sleeping compartment as soon as the train pulled out. Somebody had told me to be careful about sleeping-car thievery so I put my wallet (which had about $50 in Italian lira plus American Express traveller’s checks) under my pillow.
Right around dawn, or roughly 2 and 1/2 hours after we left Leipzig, I was awakened by sounds of shouting and agitation. Young women’s voices, one of them shrieking. The first thing I noticed after my head cleared was my wallet sitting on the floor — empty, cleaned out. We’d all been hit.

I got up, ran out and began talking with a group of British high-school girls who were travelling to Prague with a couple of male instructors. More people came up to us, alarmed, anxious. A team of thieves, we quickly deduced, had crept into several sleeping compartments (which didn’t lock from the inside) in the dark, one after another, and taken all they could carry. And the poor British girls had been carrying nothing but cash.
But how long ago?, we asked each other. The train was moving so the baddies must still be on board, right? We started running from car to car, looking for help.
Then more shouting. The thieves, we were told, had been hunted down and were now huddled in one of the first-class compartments, protecting themselves from enraged victims who had chased and were now surrounding them, locking them in, taking them prisoner. Everyone in our group began running in that direction. Vigilante justice! Everyone enraged, determined, acting and thinking as one.
We came upon a beefy, red-faced German train conductor and pounced on him, demanding in a mixture of English, German and Esperanto that he call the authorities and have them meet the train at the next stop so the thieves could be arrested. But the conductor, a lifelong veteran of East German socialism, was terrified at the idea of taking the initiative. I speak no German, but it was obvious from his squealing voice — the guy literally resembled Porky Pig — that he didn’t want to go up against a team of possibly armed thugs. Leave me alone!
So to show Porky we meant business somebody — one of the victims, I mean — pulled the emergency cord and stopped the train. If the train crew won’t act the train won’t move! The thieves will be busted or else!

But less than a minute after the train slammed to a halt came more shouting. We all ran up to the first-class car where the thieves had been held only to hear they’d opened the windows and doors and jumped out and run into the forest, which was dark and damp-looking and dense with pine trees.
But about 150 feet into the forest the thieves had stopped and turned and just stood there in a group, smoking cigarettes and defying their victims to run after them. Nobody did. Nobody knew if they had weapons or what. Everybody (myself included) wimped out. The thieves looked like shifty-gypsy types — dark eyes, dark hair, moustaches, scruffy, heavyish, not young.
So that was that. I was out only 50 bucks but the British girls’ Prague vacation had been ruined. I had kept my stubs and got some fresh checks back from a local American Express office by the end of the day.
A little voice inside is telling me I wrote about this before, but I can’t find it if I did.

The reason for Dennis Lim‘s career-review article about director Abel Ferrara in today’s N.Y. Times is — wait three years for it — the 10.17 opening of Ferrara’s Mary at the Anthology Film Archives.

Abel Ferrara

A compressed, probing, well-ordered drama about eroding values and the lure of mystical transformation, Mary — which stars Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Heather Graham and Marion Cotillard — was completed and began to be shown three years ago. No U.S. distributor wanted it. That’s not fair or correct in a sense. I wrote during the ’05 Toronto Film Festival, which showed Mary early on, that it’s “Ferrara’s best film since Bad Lieutenant.” Which I still stand by.
“For more than a decade now [Ferrara’s] movies have gone largely unseen in the United States,” Lim says, noting thatThe Funeral (’96) was the last to receive a decent release.” Ferrara “moved to Rome for a few years after the 9.11 attacks,” he reports, in part because “it was easier for him to find financing in Europe.”
But “he has been working almost nonstop [and] remains a fixture at the biggest European festivals, and his recent movies, among his most fiercely personal, hardly seem the product of a discouraged artist.”
I’m discouraged, however, about the absolute refusal of anyone in the extended Abel Ferrara family (including film critic admirers like Lim) to even mention — much less call for the showing of — a likably loose and flavorful documentary called Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty, by European director Rafi Pitts.

I saw this made-for-TV doc five years ago at the Locarno Film Festival, and there hasn’t been a whisper about it since. No articles, no film festival showings, no DVD or online downloads, no esoteric-movie-channel cable airings…nothing. And nobody will talk about it. But this doc is one of the reasons I really love Ferrara.
Here’s my review, which appeared in my Movie Poop Shoot column in August ’03:
“My Locarno viewing got off to a lewd, boisterous start with Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty, a video documentary by French filmmaker Rafi Pitts.
“It doesn’t attempt an in-depth probing of a filmmaker’s career and aesthetics by the usual means — searching questions put to the director, a comprehensive array of clips, talking heads offering insightful assessments, etc. Pitts just follows Ferrara around New York — shooting the shit, filming some kind of music video, visiting and hosting friends, talking to women on the street, tossing off anecdotes about Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe (the stars of Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, King of New York and New Rose Hotel) — and lets him be himself.
“‘I knew that an interview situation wasn’t going to give us any new information about Abel,’ Pitts told the Pardo News, the local festival rag. ‘The best way to portray him was to show him how he is. The film is always from his point of view. He’s always in the shot.’ And it’s a cool ride. A wonderfully messy, slipshod, organically alive New York hoot.
“The festival program notes on this film describe Ferrara as ‘deranged,’ which I think is a little harsh. He comes off as a nutter, all right, but one deserving of respect. What comes through is a portrait of an anarchic creative teenager with the soul and finesse of a 51 year-old.

Locarno Film festival montage that accompanied one of my columns from the ’03 gathering.

“A gnomish, stooped-over figure with longish graying hair in a leather jacket and a pink New York Yankees baseball cap, Ferrara is full of hyper, rambunctious energy. He plays guitar and piano (not too badly) and he loves to tell stories in one of those fuck-this, fuck-that Manhattan voices we’re all familiar with.
“An actor friend observes at one point Ferrara tends to do four or five things at the same time, and each one with distinction. It’s clear he likes to solve creative problems by immersing himself in chaos and sorting things out as he goes along.
“It’s also clear he knows from movies, and precisely what’s good and what’s not. He’s goes into a kind of frenzy when he’s working, and you can see why certain films of his (Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, certainly) work as well as they do and why, at the same time, constipated producer types might feel a little intimidated by him.
“But he’s great with actors and catching excitement on the fly. Bronx-born and quick with a quip, Ferrara loves taking cabs all over town and talking shit with people he runs into. There’s a great moment when he spots a long-legged brunette walking nearby and starts walking after her, making cracks like ‘tall…and that’s not all!’ and ‘those boots were made for walkin’!’
“I have one beef about the film. Ferrara was one of the eleven filmmakers hired by Canal Plus to shoot a short film for 11.9.01, the compilation piece about reactions to the World Trade Center attacks, but was fired, he says, because the producers ‘thought my ideas about the piece were dangerous.’ He doesn’t explain what these ideas were, and I think Pitts should have gotten him to cough up.
“Ferrara is a funny, charismatic, fascinating guy. He doesn’t hide his tendency to drink beer all the time from the camera, and he’s probably going to have a lot of friends tell him he should invest in some dental work after this film gets around. But that’s the honesty of this thing. This is who I am, exuberance and all, and fuck it if it’s not what you’d prefer.
“At one point Ferrara tells a woman he meets on the street that he’s being followed around by a video crew because it’s his last day on earth, and it occurred to me this is precisely the attitude he seems to bring to living his life.”

A warning from Gayle Quinnell, 75, of Shakopee, Minnesota. Originally posted by www.theuptake.org.

Two days ago David Poland referred to columnists who’d been fed certain argument points in the Scott Rudin-Harvey Weinstein tussle over The Reader as “typing monkeys.” I laughed out loud (which I almost never do, being a LQTM type) because the term has personal meaning.
The term “typing monkeys” refers to a Paleolithic Bob Newhart joke about a theory that “if you take an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later they would write all the great books.” But if this theory were put to a literal test “they’d have to hire guys…you know, to check on whether they were turning out anything worthwhile.” Newhart then became one of them as he reads a line that one of the simians has just typed. “I think this is famous or something,” the guy says. “To be or not to be, that is the gzorninplatt.”
For years I’ve used a variation of Newhart’s “gzorninplatt” (using a crucial spelling difference that I’m not going to reveal here) as a secondary username or password. So there’s your testament to the power of Newhart as well as a minor parable about degrees of separation.

Atlantic political blogger Marc Ambinder has provided a transcript and mp3 file of an invocation spoken by a pastor named Arnold Conrad this morning in Davenport, Iowa, prior to a speech given by Sen. John McCain. McCain repudiated Conrad’s words when he got to the lecturn.
As Ambinder writes, “This pastor sees the election as a religious war. Either that, or Bill Maher paid him to promote Religulous.”
Here’s the transcript: “I also would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and election day.”
Forget the mp3 — too bassy and echo-y, can’t hear the words.

Here‘s a relatively new Nike commercial directed by David Fincher and shot by Emmanuel Lubezki.