Essay Time

Essays by other people. The magical appearance of The Community Bookshop on my nearest main thoroughfare (Great Junction Street) has affected me much as the brief flowering of the All-You-Can Eat Bookshop slightly further away on Ferry Road did — I go in and feel obliged to buy something, and it leads to me picking up things I might not otherwise have tried.

There’s almost never anything worth getting in TCB’s film section, but it has everything else a growing boy needs. I picked up Tom Robbins’ Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, a collection of the novelist’s short writings, and will now be seeking out his longer works. This one, in an ode to Leonard Cohen, produces the finest poetic image I’ve ever read, in a completely throwaway fashion:

“Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium, flailing and screeching all the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side […]”

A grisly, hilarious image that imposes itself on the mind’s eye and also still seems like THE image for our times, almost another thirty years on.

Robbins includes panegyrics to Diane Keaton (“a kachina, a wondernik, a jill-o’-lantern”) Jennifer Jason Leigh (“I want to tell you about the Lizard Queen.”), Debra Winger (“She’s walked a tightrope between fire and honey.”) and the films of Alan Rudolph (“Horizontal layers of lust and angst crisscross with vertical layers of wit and beauty.”)

Terrific, terrific.

I’m an unfaithful follower of the wrings of Todd McEwen, who lives in Edinburgh but whom I have never knowingly met. How Not To Be American is a bunch of essays not so much loosely as falsely grouped, though I guess everything in there has something to do with than unwieldy continent. There’s a nice appreciation of HARVEY, in which all the comments apply equally to the film and the source play, but the one that wowed me is Cary Grant’s Suit, which views NORTH BY NORTHWEST from the standpoint of Grant’s grey Madison Ave. attire, once voted the finest suit in film history. McEwen views the suit as a kind of superhero, invulnerable and godlike, and Grant’s heroic quest is to be worthy of it. The suit starts the film empty, with Grant as a vapid streak of hype occupying it undeservingly — by the end he has shown the right stuff and after losing both suit and girl, gets them back in the much-celebrated final scene transition.

Imaginative, funny, and mostly completely CORRECT. He’s not reaching here, about everything he says is accurate and insightful and opens up the movie in fresh ways, even though the movie and the suit have invited a great deal of commentary.

There’s a bit about Godzilla coming up and also a chapter proposing how to film unfilmable books, with suggested cast and crew, eg.

Civilisation and its Discontents 1940 dr. Rene Clair. Fred MacMurray, Greta Garbo, Robert Benchley (as Jung). A timid European doctor is haunted by his own penis.

But I haven’t read those bits yet.

Granta 86, the film edition, is the odd one out, since it came from a charity shop in Stockbridge. They had a stack of Grantas and were selling them at £1 each. I’ll buy almost anything for a quid so I grabbed this one. Some of the literary types weighing in on an alien medium are not as enlightening or amusing as Robbins and McEwen, but Karl French produces a section on Art by Directors, featuring Hitchcock prep sketches, Kurosawa painting-storyboards, Takeshi Kitano’s fun canvases, Mike Figgis’ photographs and sketches, Satyajit Ray’s really gorgeous art in various media, Greenaway abstracts and John Huston paintings and sketches, finishing up with Scorsese’s childish storyboards which don’t really belong in such august company. They’re undoubtedly useful for MS, and so we can be glad of their existence, but it puzzles me that he doesn’t even draw in the right aspect ratio. Never mind the human figures (carefully shaded, blindly staring dwarfs), he can’t draw the right rectangle.

But, as Kurosawa put it, explaining his weakness as a self-pitying golfer, “It is enough for a person to be good at one thing.”

The best article, of those I’ve read, is Atom Egoyan’s Dr. Gonad, documenting the career of Paul Thomas, who played Peter in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, then went on to act in and/or direct over three hundred pornos. it’s an amusing piece, even if most of the hilarity comes from simply naming the films Thomas has been mixed up in. Beautifully structured, too, reminding me that Egoyan used to be quite good at structure.

The piece really calls out for a sequel, though, in which Thomas would consider Egoyan’s equally skew-whiff career (or, as we Scots sometimes say, squee-hook). Whereas Egoyan simply quotes from the Thomas filmography and pseudonyms, and that’s enough to get the laughs, Thomas would have to actually sit through WHERE THE TRUTH LIES and CHLOE. Since I assume he earns a decent living doing what he does, nobody’s likely to be able to pay him enough to consume the Armenian-Canadian eroticist’s oeuvre.

The Atlantic Ocean was something, then

I have a strange history of not watching Louis Malle & John Guare’s ATLANTIC CITY — or, as the print used in my rather poorly-transferred DVD inexplicably calls itself, ATLANTIC CITY, USA. I think I’ve started watching it twice… once was probably on BBC2’s Film Club in the eighties, or around then. I think the way the movie doesn’t insist that it’s heading anywhere (though it is), and doesn’t seem to care if you’re watching, allowed me to drift off. But those are now qualities I value highly, and bits of it certainly stayed with me. In the last few months I picked up both the DVD, and the book Malle on Malle, secondhand, so it was clearly time.

I really enjoyed it last night. It reminded me a lot of the later TROUBLE IN MIND, from Alan Rudolph, only staged against a documentary backdrop (urban renewal in the titular city, with the crew rushing from site to site to catch demolitions in the background of its scenes, rather than attempting to transform a modern city into a place of near future/alternate reality possibilities. Both movies seem to enjoy an Altman influence, direct in the case of Rudolph, maybe just more zeitgeisty in Malle’s case, but actually stronger — a network narrative of interconnected characters whose paths criss-cross — crime — jazz — Americana.

Burt Lancaster always seems like a dreamer to me — you sense immortal longings. This is what led him, in real life, to make movies with European arthouse guys. His character here is a bullshitter, dreaming up a “romantic” past as a boardwalk gangster. His longings are for a past that never was: aspiration turned inside out into nostalgia. Circumstances finally allow him, in a crazy and ironic way, to play the hero in his own life. Burt gets several of the all-time great closeups. With Burt, the dreaminess perfectly counterbalances the acrobaticism, slightly in abeyance here. But he still has that precision of movement that makes you think of his athletic grace. Each gesture is powerful yet delicate, like a martial artist crossed with an assembly line robot and taught to dance.

Susan Sarandon is also really good. There are awkward old guy and young girl moments to get across, but Burt is still, in Fiona’s view, a viable leading man in his late sixties, and the script is so good, and of course Sarandon is not into Burt the way he’s into her… the voyeuristic element reminded me of Duvivier’s PANIQUE (and its remake, MONSIEUR HIRE, made nine years after AC) which is a possible influence since Malle seems more open to ’40s French cinema than the Cahiers mob (I can’t seem to refer to them collectively without making them sound like gangsters), who had a few favourites but mostly saw that school as an old guard to be replaced — by them.

All Sarandon’s early roles seem to be about her breasts, which is a bit embarrassing now because spectacular talents like hers are more unusual than spectacular breasts like hers. There’s generally a pathetic excuse, like the spilled wine in THE HUNGER that makes it absolutely necessary for her to become topless. Here she works in an oyster bar and spends her evenings rubbing lemon juice on herself at the window to eradicate the fishy smell. “How does she manage to get oyster on her ARMS? or her TITS?” asked Fiona.

Oh, and of course we were delighted to spot Wallace Shawn, poised to slip the script of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE to his director, and the exploding head guy from SCANNERS (the movie was made with Canadian tax shelter money). The guy, Louis Del Grande, proves he’s no one-tricky pony by playing a guy whose head does NOT explode. Although I admit we were waiting for it to happen.

ATLANTIC CITY, USA stars the Swede; Janet Weiss; Linda Loman; Inspector Ginko; Eden; Lizard; Lt. Bert Samuels; Quentin Hapsburg; Gold Leader; Dr. Bill Michaels; Vizzini; Felix Leiter; and First Scanner.

Hardcore Stenography

So, INVESTIGATING SEX — I had a hard time getting to see this. I heard about it when it was new, ie before it failed to come out, from Emily Bruni, who plays the wife of Alan Cumming and the lover of Til Schweiger in it, and she spoke very warmly of writer/director Alan Rudolph, whom I love (usually). Not long after, I shared a car with Alan Cumming, but I didn’t get a chance to ask him much of anything as he was on the phone most of the time. He seemed nice, but very very busy.

Meanwhile, years passed, and the film never got a UK distributor (despite featuring Dermot Mulroney, Julie Delpy, Neve Campbell, Robin Tunney, Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld…) and didn’t play any festivals near me.

Finally I obtained a copy, which proved to be dubbed into Greek, then another copy in English and subtitled in Portuguese, and then the film turned up on YouTube in its entirety, and I quite simply failed to watch it.

But now I have, and it joins the pile of really good Rudolphs, funny and sweet and romantic and just a little strange. At the mansion of an eccentric millionaire (Nolte), a group of (initially all male) artists, writers, filmmakers gather to recount their observations and experiences of sex. It’s 1929, so dressing a couple of lady stenographers in sexy black uniforms and employing them as combination secretaries/muses seems cool. The known factors (Campbell, who never previously seemed able to act, and Tunney, whom I don’t recall well enough from THE CRAFT because that had Fairuza Balk in it) are excellent, but the film also has up-and-comers Terrence Howard and Til Schweiger and Jeremy Davies — and the aforementioned Bruni, whose face has all these unexpected swoops and arches, like a wondrous funhouse Fonda, and John Light, neither of whom has caught on as they should (though they both work regularly, which is the main thing). Both have the kind of faces that make you lean forward, and maybe even cock your head sideways sometimes, which I regard as a good thing.

Funny how Rudolph’s ensembles — the main thing he shares with his mentor Mr. Altman, an exec producer here, is a desire to let the supporting players nose ahead of the leads — never really attracted a big audience. They’re always intriguing mixtures, like a great party you wish you could throw. Consider —

Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold, Keith Carradine, Lori Singer, Joe Morton, Divine…

Jennifer Jason Leigh, Campbell Scott, Matthew Broderick, Peter Gallagher, Wallace Shawn, Lili Taylor…

The film doesn’t have a Mark Isham score, normally an essential trait of any Rudolph joint, nor does it have songs per se, but Ulf Skogsbergh’s slightly eerie music — woven around the idea of the succubus that tantalises Mulroney’s character — is a standout. Why hasn’t he done anything else in movies? Google suggests he’s a photographer, unless there are two Ulfs.

Highlight: Nolte’s confession of a love affair with a donkey.

Retrospective, anyone? Or an Eclipse box set?