Each Dawn I Die

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I was told yesterday that a University of Chicago student is looking to write an essay about prison movies. I was asked if I’d be willing to share some thoughts about this genre. Here’s what I sent along:

First and foremost, I don’t want to know from prison movies as a rule. Prison movies are almost always — inevitably — about systemic suffocation or more precisely and ominously a kind of state-imposed death…repression, resignation and the turning off of spiritual lights.  

I realize that the best ones address the age-old question “why does a caged bird sing?”

And speaking of birds…yes, I know that John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz (‘62) is about a kind of liberation within this hellish suffocation, but it’s still set in a place of grim, gloomy, concrete regimentation.  

Prison movies are generally bad for the human soul.  So much of real life and standard-issue drama is about spiritual or economic confinement. I am currently living in a prison of my own making, and every day I’m trying to bust out.

You know what a good “prison” movie is/was? Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman — both the Lee J. Cobb and Dustin Hoffman versions. Or Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Or Prince of the City..

I admired Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet (‘10) but I’ll never re-watch it because it simply lacks sufficient oxygen.

And yet I was deeply moved by Lazio Nemes’ Son of Saul (‘15), arguably the grimmest, most hopeless WWII concentration camp film ever made.

I respect Buzz Kulik’s Kill Me If You Can (‘77), but mainly for Alan Alda’s ace-level performance as Caryl Chessman. Ditto Lawrence Schiller’s The Executioner’s Song (‘82) with Tommy Lee Jones. And yet both are primarily legal strategy films.

The best “boy, it sure is fucking miserable living in a U.S. prison” flick is Robert M. Young’s Short Eyes (‘77), which is based on a stage play by Miguel Pinero. (It’s the only prison film I’ve seen more than once, and possibly even thrice.) 

The only ones I want to even think about watching or re-watching are prison escape movies:  Escape From Alcatraz, Call Northside 777, The Great Escape, The Hot Rock, Ben Stiller’s Escape From Donnemara.

If I never watch The Shawshank Redemption again, it’ll be too soon.

I loathe The Green Mile with every last fiber of my being.

Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing is a “lemme the fuck outta here!” film. I felt bored and drained by the set-up and especially by Colman Domingo’s soulful lead performance. The more emotion the prisoners summoned from within, the more bummed-out I felt. While sitting through it I was thinking “where is James Cagney and his Cody Jarrett break-out routine when you really need it?”

Oh, and I really hate Franklin Schaffner and Steve McQueen’s Papillon (‘73). Ditto Life Is Beautiful.

Quality of the Journey

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If you’re flying to Europe on the reasonably-priced Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), you’ll have to accept a stopover in Stockholm, Oslo or Copenhagen. So on my way to the Venice Film Festival (the outgoing JFK red-eye leaves late Saturday afternoon, 8.23) I’ll be staying in Copenhagen for 25, 26 hours…something in that vicinity.

But the next day I won’t be flying straight to Venice’s Marco Polo airport. Just for the eye-filling splendor of it all, I’m flying instead from Copenhagen–Kastrup to Luca Guadagnino’s Milan (haven’t stood before the Duomo since ‘92) and then taking a late-Monday-morning train to Katharine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi’s Venezia San Lucia. Just for the visual-sensual-spiritual-atmospheric aspects.

I’ve visited Venice as an X-factor traveller-tourist six or seven times, and have never stayed for more than two or three days. Next month’s visit will last 12 days.

I’ll be hitting Milan for nearly a full day on my way back

Sullivan Stood Up

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Sacha Jenkins‘ Sunday Best (Netflix, now streaming) is a heartfelt, somewhat simplistic tribute to the late variety show host Ed Sullivan and particularly a celebration of Sullivan’s defiance of racist norms in this country back in the ’50s and early ’60s by booking top black performers on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948 to 1971)

If you’d asked me for a capsule description of Sullivan before viewing this 87-minute doc, I would have said something like “famously stiff-necked TV host with a sharp eye for emerging stand-out performing talent…particularly Elvis Presley in 1956 and The Beatles in ’64 and ’65…whatever and whomever was beginning to attract big attention, Sullivan booked them on his one-hour Sunday night show (CBS, 8 pm), always leaving them bigger names than before they’d appeared.”

But to hear it from Jenkins (who passed last May at age 53), Sullivan’s proudest historical achievement was his support of black entertainers. In this respect Sullivan was damn near revolutionary or at the very least bold as brass, Jenkins is saying.

Within this country’s generally racist whitebread culture during the eras of Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK and even Lyndon Johnson, Sullivan was way ahead of the social curve — impassioned, color-blind, conservative but adamant.

Sullivan biographer Gerald Nachman: “Most TV variety shows welcomed ‘acceptable’ black performers like Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr….but in the early 1950s, long before it was fashionable, Sullivan was presenting more obscure black entertainers…Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, the Platters, Brook Benton, the Supremes, Nina Simone.”

TV critic John Leonard: “There wasn’t an important black artist who didn’t appear on Ed’s show. [The Irish, Harlem-born Sullivan] defied pressure to exclude black entertainers or to avoid interacting with them on screen. Sullivan had to fend off his hard-won sponsor, Ford’s Lincoln dealers, after kissing Pearl Bailey on the cheek and daring to shake Nat King Cole‘s hand.”

If you search around there are several anecdotes that suggest Jenkins’ portrait of the straightlaced, somewhat prudish Sullivan is less than fully candid, if not sugar-coated. (Read his N.Y. Times obit, which is much tonally dryer and more circumspect than Jenkins’ cheerleader approach.)

Of course it’s partisan! Jenkins’ film is sharing a cultural-political viewpoint that many boomers (kids during the show’s heyday) probably haven’t considered, which is that in terms of encouraging liberal thought and condemning racism, Sullivan, by ushering scores of black performers into America’s living rooms, was as much as a positive social influencer, in a certain sense. as Martin Luther King.

Over the last 60 or 70 years Sullivan’s default associations have been Presley and the Beatles, slam dunk. Ask anyone. Jenkins doc, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in ’23, pushes the “ballsy racial reformer” portrait much more than any colorful side sagas or anecdotes about white performers.

How good is Sunday Best on a craft or audience-absorption level? Passable, not great.

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Joel Saga Descends Into Lament, Downshifting, A Hint of Downerism

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Last night I watched the second half of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, and honestly? I didn’t like it as much as Part One, which is like the first half of Lawrence of Arabia — troubled beginnings, difficult development, Joel’s relationship with wife #1 (Elizabeth Weber), the gradual finding of success in the ’70s and then up, up, up into the early ’80s…pow!

The second part is about basically about the pressures and difficulties of life at the top — 1982’s Nylon Curtain album, trying to connect with his emotionally remote father, the initially very happy Christie Brinkley years and the arrival of his first daughter Alexa, getting financially ripped off by his manager Frank Weber, “We Didn’t Start The Fire“, the Katie Lee Biegel marriage, serious alcohol abuse (Joel dried out at Silver Hill in ’02 or thereabouts), the marriage to Alexis Roderick and their two daughters, but gradually running out of gas and losing the drive to write new songs, etc.

Hell, the documentary runs out of gas. The general narrative drift is “things are harder, more complicated, boozier as the creative fire gradually dims,” etc.

Being married to a driven creative type with a turbulent emotional past is never a day at the beach…guaranteed.

It’s a bummer to think that the most recently composed Joel song that I’ve really liked is The River of Dreams (“In the middle of the niiiight”), which came out in July ’93. There hasn’t been an album of original songs since. 32 fucking years ago, man. Joel explains that songwriting-wise he’d become a burnt-out case, “tired of the tyranny of the rhyme,” etc.

Remember When Coen Bros. Stuck Pins Into Their Characters?

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Back in the old days the Coen brothers would sadistically fiddle with their flawed characters…hapless or misguided fellows who struggle against a world that is often indifferent or actively hostile to their aspirations and plans. But the Coens didn’t just make things tough for these characters — they would stick little needles into them.

In a certain light A Serious Man is almost a kind of companion piece to Todd Browning‘s Freaks, except that Browning’s film is compassionate and caring while A Serious Man is anything but.

You know what A Serious Man is deep down? In a philosophical nutshell, I mean? That old joke about two anthropologists captured by cannibals in New Guinea. Chief to anthropologist #1: “You have two choices — death or kiki.” Anthropologist #1 chooses kiki and is promptly beaten, stabbed, tortured, whipped, flayed and finally thrown off a cliff and eaten by crocodiles. The chief offers Anthropologist #2 the same choice, and the guy replies, “Good God…well, I’m not a brave man so I’ll choose death.” And the chief goes, “Very well, death…but first, kiki!”

fferent or actively hostile to their aspirations and plans.