Quote of the Day: “Phaedra”

 

Lee Hazlewood sings:

“Some velvet morning when I’m straight,
I’m gonna open up your gate,
And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra,
and how she gave me life,
and how she made it in,
Some velvet morning when I’m straight.”

Nancy Sinatra sings:

“Flowers growing on the hill,
Dragonflies and daffodils,
Learn from us, very much,
Look at us, but do not touch,
Phaedra is my name.”

This is what’s been wowing me on my Nano recently.

(If clip doesn’t work, try this LINK.)

The video is a little hilarious, but then so’s the song, in all its epic pomp. Just GO WITH IT. Lee H. rides a very long horse with very short legs across Californian beachfront property out of PLANET OF THE APES and THE TERROR, while Nancy S. attempts to flatten the song’s soaring psychedelic poetry with her very presence, yet she’s evolved beyond the odd troll glimpsed in Corman’s THE WILD ANGELS and can now actually WORK IT, milking the camera until it begs for time out.

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Nancy’s moist cavern is the same one seen in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, I think, and probably about a thousand other movies.

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If anyone knows where I can get Jules Dassin’s FEDRA / PHAEDRA, I’m seriously keen to see it.

Experiment on your kids!

 

New parents out there, this is for you.

My best friend, going way back to secondary school, Robert Thomson, ran some pretty interesting experiments on his kids when they were little. He showed them movies which, while not by any means falling into any area that might be deemed UNSUITABLE, nevertheless would not be found anywhere on a conventional list of SUITABLE films for kids aged between three and ten.

Item: Jean Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE.

This was when all three of the kids were two young to follow the subtitles, so the movie had to succeed on sheer visual magic, and whatever parts of its story that came across pictorially. Of course, those of you who have seen it know that it has much to offer in these areas. “It’s the same story as the other one!” the kids declared, delighted. They had seen the Disney.

Item: the silent Lon Chaney version of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Again, with Disney to guide them, reading inter-titles wasn’t altogether essential. This was a very scratchy print on a cheap DVD label specialising in out-of-copyright stuff at low, low prices.

“What do you think of the picture quality?” Robert asked his youngest.

The lad removed his thumb from his mouth, looked thoughtful, and said, “It’s…fizzy-facky.”

Please jot down this new terminology to use later.

The point is, kids will watch just about anything. All that’s needed to make proper cineastes out of them at an early age is to expose them to a wider than usual range of different film-stuff. The pernicious bias against black-and-white is something that comes from peer pressure, when the kids start school. But if they’re already enjoying Laurel and Hardy (in the uncolorized versions) then such prejudices can hardly find a foothold.

Since little kids will stare contentedly at pretty much ANY moving image that isn’t too disturbing, showing them foreign films will do no harm and may eventually help their reading skills. Improve their negative capability by showing them mind-bending stuff they cannot possibly hope to get their little heads around:

Try it on YOUR kids.

After all, it never did ME any harm.

(Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha…)

Euphoria #38: chase me, chase me

 

Musician / singer / songwriter Daniel Prendiville has a series of interesting suggestions for Cinema Euphoria, our ongoing project to condense the sum total of human happiness into a few thousand feet of celluloid and look at it on Youtube with a wry smile.

‘- the car chase in What’s Up Doc?

- the wedding scene in Guys & Dolls - I was always struck by the way the wedding crowd disperses immediately after the nuptials. It seems to emphasise just how impersonal the big city is - one minute you’re the most important person in the world - the next…

- anything from Welcome to Collingwood - particularly the dialogue where they are describing various capers.’

I like all these suggestions but I find MY HANDS ARE TIED — I don’t have a good copy of GUYS AND DOLLS and the key moment is not on Youtube. Nor are any scenes from WTC, the Russo brothers’ remake of Mario Monicelli’s BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET. So, just like Cybill Shepherd in the ’70s, we are STUCK WITH BOGDANOVITCH.

But that’s no big problem. Although this sequence from the end of Peter Bogdanovitch’s film of Buck Henry’s script is a bit bigger and altogether more climactic than I generally like for Cinema Euphoria (get me some more little moments, you… lurkers, you) we can remedy that easily by concentrating on the Small Things in this big-ass sequence.

The way this clip starts is super-great: I love the little musical set of sounds created by Verna Fields’ sharp and witty editing: muffled shouting / tip-tap footsteps of Streisand and O’Neil / car-horn blasts / whistling patsy. It’s kind of beautiful just to listen to.

Verna F’s inspired work (she also cut AMERICAN GRAFFITI and JAWS before retiring) continues with the marvellous orchestration of LOUD and QUIET in the coming chase. The way she cuts ahead to peaceful scenes lying in the path of the mayhem creates antici… pation that builds the comedy up. I’ve argued here that Boggo sometimes lets his dramatic instincts get in the way of his comedy ambitions, playing on spectacle and suspense in ways that aren’t relevant to slapstick, but it has to be admitted that few filmmakers since the ’20s have even attempted classical slapstick on this scale and with half this amount of success.

(Billy Wilder noted in the ’70s that only Richard Lester and Blake Edwards could shoot slapstick. Before that there were Tati and Tashlin. Preston Sturges loved slapstick but wasn’t particularly good at it. In the silent era there were many many brilliant orchestrators of elaborate visual gag sequences. Now the closest thing is the cartoony exaggeration of Jeunet or Raimi, which is a form of heightened action cinema, a different animal altogether.)

Bogdanovitch himself got to play around with pratfalls again in NICKELODEON, a flawed film (studio interference is at least partly to blame) but one that does boast some rather brilliant comic action, again filmed in bold long-shots like dance sequences. It would be great to see him turned loose on this kind of material again — Boggy may not be as hot as he was back in the day but I do think that any producer who gave him his head on a decent visual comedy piece would make a killing.