From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V6 #47 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Thursday, February 23 2006 Volume 06 : Number 047 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [loud-fans] Hamlin and Sallitt On Film (Agee, Ferguson, and Kael watch disapprovingly from on high) [] [loud-fans] Steve Wynn & M3 @ Jammin' Java ["Larry Tucker" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Hamlin and Sallitt On Film (Agee, Ferguson, and Kael watch disapprovingly from on high) From Andy Hamlin, who for some reason is being hassled by the list, man... - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: zoom@muppetlabs.com >It just popped up one day. I certainly didn't put it there - I don't know who did. An angel watches over you, perhaps. > Your take on NOBODY KNOWS? >It had some interesting texture. I loved the actress who played the mom. I dunno, Kore-Eda eludes me sometimes: he seems ambitious and offbeat at first, and then I start feeling as if he's going after simple goals. The mother's played by a woman known (in life, not film) as "You." She's a singer. So you feel as if the director vacillates between these two from film to film, or slips from one to the other within a single film? >> But seriously, is this take a shower in a TOOLBOX MURDERS grindhouse marathon sense, or something else? I've never seen anything else by [Martel]. >Her earlier film, LA CIENAGA, is equally accomplished but has a rather unclean feeling. Everything seems crowded, humid: you feel as if you're going to step in something nasty at any moment. Martel certainly has an original style of composition. She says it's because she's nearsighted, and the world looks that way to her. Do we ascribe unique traits to the several cyclopses among the world's leading directors? Well, Ray and de Toth, anyway >After seeing THE HOLY GIRL, I wrote in my diary: "She has a talent for crowding her films with seeming irrelevancies, but she's into >malevolence, stupidity, malfunction, discomfort, disgust for their own sake. She reminds me a little of Bigas Luna, even more of Verhoeven." You're still and probably forever up on me; I've never heard of Bigas Luna. Thought: when we say "for their own sake" do we inevitably mean a derogative, as "for their own sake" translates as "unable/unwilling to transmute the initial phenomena, presumably improving it by such transmutation no matter which direction it takes"? >I moved to Brooklyn a year ago, not entirely voluntarily. But I saw a lot of that stuff at Toronto this year. Brooklyn looks pretty interesting, actually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn Still not sure if the Hasidic Jews or the Jehovah's Witnesses run it, though. >> So, the endless BROWN BUNNY comparisons: apt, lazy, or otherwise? >To THE WAYWARD CLOUD? They have nothing in common, other than that a penis goes in someone's mouth in both of them. It's official; I'm missing out. > > Any perspective on Solondz you can give me so I'll like his movies better? I've tried, but I can't think of him in any function other than freak show ringmaster >Lots of people just think he's nasty, and I guess I can understand. I was slow coming to him. He can be snide, but I think he's genuinely open to the contradictions in people, and to the difficult aspects of human nature. I think he dares himself, as well as us, to push through the disgust and to keep being interested in these people. How do you compare/contrast him with Neil LaBute, who seems, to me, comfortable as long as he's got one character (unrealistically, but possibly symbolically) manifesting Satan, but loses himself otherwise (the misleadingl-titled POSSESSION, say)? >> [FUNNY HA HA] as a competent but plodding slice-of-life >Back to my diary: "An odd film, both appealing and irritating. Cute girl, maddening improv technique that obliterates wit, a lack of >progress and resolution that is intentional and probably a good thing. Basically, I liked it in spite of myself." As I say, I could afford to watch it again. And don't be too sure it was improve (unless maybe you got the press notes); Cassavetes when people ascribed that characteristic to material he'd spent, sometimes, years in the writing and years more in the editing (FACES took at least four years to finish; not bad for a project some in Hollywood called "impossible" to Cassavetes' own face). Seen MUTUAL APPRECIATION? > > [ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW] and the third as a bracing, insistent >>cojoining of quirky with cutesy > > then both with gross (except for the part where the little kid "talks" to his new friend over the computer using mostly cut'n'paste >Again, I was hating this film at first - too much eccentricity and metaphor at the same time. But some surface plausibility eventually set in, and a few scenes started impressing me - the sadness seemed real. July gets a lot of points for keying in on the childish nature of sexuality, not a subject that you see treated every day. And the kids were great - the scene you mention was my favorite too. I think you pinpointed my problem with the filmI never felt "surface plausibility." Except for the kid, his computer, his cut'n'paste, and the faceless figure, heart in mouth, on the other side. Which brings us, through no force but my own, to the subject of film critics. Reviewing the two Agee collections from Library of America, Phillip Lopate, writing in Agee's old stomping ground "The Nation" opines, "I consider Agee one of the five major American film critics, the others being Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael." So. I've got Agee's film book on the edge of the sofa, and absorbing a paragraph of him can seemingly take all night (Lopate wasn't kidding in saying Agee "was always on-the-one-handing/on-the-other-handing in his movie reviews. His torturous judgments, particularly on the typical Hollywood product, became almost comic in their whirling-dervish pivots." As welcome as even-handedness can be considering other critics' simplistic savagery, his refusal of decisiveness can leave him looking murky). I have Manny Farber's NEGATIVE SPACE on the coffee table but haven't looked through it much yet. I have THE FILM CRITICISM OF OTIS FERGUSON next to NEGATIVE SPACE but it's third or fourth in line. Sarris I have not yet begun to read. And I always avoided Kael, after reading to a certain saturation point, because she seemed to hate every film ever made except USED CARS. Your thoughts on the above? So it's THE INTRUDER for this afternoon and DUMA for tomorrow, Andy Aaron: What impact did the Kael-Sarris brand of movie criticism have on you? Glenn: As someone whose fascination with film was initially based in a genre, and hence, as someone who was attracted to film qua film rather than film as a manifestation of the larger popular culture, I was something of a Sarrisite by disposition. Before delving deeper into this potentially vexed subject, I want to talk about the first book on film I ever read, which was Carlos Clarens' An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films. I stole my school friend Allen Siegel's copy back in 1969 or so, when I was ten. I devoured the book and was obsessed with the idea of seeing, if not every film discussed in the book, then at least every film there was a still from in the book. (A quest that continues to this day--as I write this, I'm about an hour away from embarking to BAM Rose Cinema to catch a screening of Tod Browning's 1936 The Devil Doll!). Clarens still strikes me as an exemplary critic--informative, clear-eyed, authoritative in his judgments but never ostentatious in his pronouncements of them, possessed of an enormous erudition that he wears quite lightly. J. Hoberman is absolutely right, in the introduction he wrote for the 1997 Da Capo edition of the book, to call it "a beginner's history of the movies." A single sentence could set you off on the journey of a lifetime, e.g., "Obviously, Roger Corman is no Ingmar Bergman nor is he Luis Bunuel, both of whom he openly admires." Who's this Bergman, who's this Bunuel, and why does Corman admire them, my ten-year-old self asked. Clarens' passages on Lang and Dreyer were also fascinating, exhilarating. Years, in some cases decades, would pass before I would be able to see Vampyr or Day of Wrath or Lang's Dr. Mabuse films. But Clarens' book placed them at the forefront of my cinematic consciousness. As we know, Kael wasn't big on horror, and I doubt she would even take vaguely seriously the surrealist critics, whose ideas concerning the cinema as narcotic also influenced my sensibilities. Sarris' Americanization of the politique des auteurs created a critical atmosphere somewhat more sympathetic to those sensibilities--although I'm sure Andri Bazin would disapprove. But let me try to back out of this particularly murky swamp of cerebration I seem to be wading into and address the immediate matter at hand. While I aver that my disposition made me more attracted to Sarris than Kael, the whole question of preference is sometimes merely a matter of who got to you first. (The Jesuits, of course, understand just how crucial this is.) I was chatting with a critic friend just the other night about your question, and he remembered being 14 and reading Kael's essay "Circles and Squares: Joys And Sarris" and seeing it as such a convincing demolition of Sarris that it was years before he even approached The American Cinema--which I was immersed in at probably exactly the same time he was reading Kael. While American Cinema didn't exactly convert him, on reading it he did see that Kael's piece, like so much of her "Raising Kane," was largely based on deliberate misreading and malicious speculation. (The apogee of the latter as Kael practiced it is this sentence from "Raising Kane": "There's a scene of Welles eating in the newspaper office, which was obviously caught by the camera crew, and which, to be 'a good sport,' he had to use." Which of course is complete bullshit, it was called as complete bullshit, and Kael never budged on it.) All that notwithstanding it was Kael who had been the galvanic experience of criticism for him. (I understand that by taking issue with Kael I'm in danger of getting a verbal flaying from Greil Marcus in a future "Real Life Rock Top Ten" column, but that's something I'm just gonna have to live with.) As for the politique des auteurs, although it could be argued that it enlarged the sorry cult of the director, and hence helped create the sorry state of affairs in which The Mighty Ducks got advertised as "A Film By Stephen Herek," it should be remembered that Sarris himself never proposed it as an absolute--he wasn't like Schoenberg saying that the twelve-tone system was the answer to all musical challenges and that no other method could be considered acceptable from that point on. He offered it as a perspective. There's this old TV documentary about what it calls the auteur theory which opens with Robert Mitchum telling a story of working with Raoul Walsh, who is one of Sarris's "Far Side of Paradise" directors, I believe. The picture was 1947's Pursued, with Teresa Wright, and Mitchum describes with great relish how Walsh would turn away from the camera and roll a cigarette as a take began, and so on, really highlighting Walsh's seeming indifference to the proceedings. Mitchum's punchline is pretty much, "So there's your auteur theory." And he's Robert Mitchum, so of course he's persuasive to the point of being seductive, and the reflex reaction is, "Har dee har har, them egghead critics sure are a bunch of jackasses," or something to that effect. The only problem is, logic dictates that one arrives at an estimation of Raoul Walsh's films by actually watching the films--all or at least most of the films--rather than acting in precisely one of them. Which is not to say that one can automatically assume that whatever's up on the screen which is of value was put there by the director. I have a couple of screenwriter friends who told me that a couple of the lines that were singled out by critics and audiences for being particularly lame within a generally well-received picture they wrote were in fact the interpolations of, yes, the director. I'm still glad to have auteurism in my tool kit. - --film critic Glenn Kenny, from an interview by Aaron Aradillas at http://rockcritics.com/interview/glennkenny.html - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 11:45:17 -0500 From: "Larry Tucker" Subject: [loud-fans] Steve Wynn & M3 @ Jammin' Java Any DIME members out there? I've uploaded a really nice Steve Wynn & the M3 show I recorded last Friday night in Vienna, VA. It's a matrix mix. The band was in top form as always, but the real treat was that the surviving members of Gutterball all made the drive up from Richmond and treated us to a short Gutterball set "for our friend Bryan". It should also be availbale in a couple of days at the Live Music Archive. http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=83459 http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php - -Larry ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V6 #47 ******************************