Moonrise Kingdom

Pure Joy

Make no mistake, Moonrise Kingdom is a small film but feels enormous, not due to its big themes (the transcendent power of love), but in how it so completely crystallizes that which  Wes Anderson has been on about this last decade and a half or so.

I don't think you need to be an Andersonian to enjoy Moonlight, which is a great film by pretty much any definition.  But if Anderson is your thing, I cannot imagine a more joyous night in the cinema.  As an Andersonian from the start, I could watch it in a Loop.

But it isn't all joy, of course.  I am not the first to remark on Anderson's ability to infuse into all the whimsy an undercurrent of despair in his films, and it is there, in giant, difficult gulps in Moonlight.  In fact the cast seems to be have been assembled specifically for the ability to convey quiet desperation.  Hell, quiet desperation has given Bill Murray a second career.  Is there a stranger, sadder scene in the recent American cinema than when Murray, shirtless and paunchy and filled with so much unresolvable grief, grabs and ax and tells his sons "I have to find a tree to cut down?"

One may think Bruce Willis is the outlier in the cast, but of course his ability to carry the weight of the world has always been one of his more underrated talents.  In this, Unbreakable, 16 Blocks, 12 Monkeys, Sixth Sense et alia, he is our Saddest Action Hero.  I hope he gets his first Oscar Nomination for Moonlight.

Ah, but the joy. The joy.  It is also there in giant, difficult gulps.  The dance sequence to Francois Hardy on the beach is the most unbridled piece of joy on film I can recall since Denis Lavant tripped the light fantastic to David Bowie in Carax's Bad Blood.  Bravo, Mr. Anderson, for reminding us that without despair there can be no joy, and without joy, there is only despair.

Andrew Sarris is Dead

The Auteur Theory is no longer anything discussed with any passion since it is so much in the air even the most casual film goer breathes.  So upon the passing of Andrew Sarris it is important to remember that his Americanization of the Politiques des Auteurs, coining the controversial phrase for the first time in Volume 28 of Film Culture magazine in 1963, was an act of pure Cinehutzpah.

When he coalesced the Film Culture writings into a book, The American Cinema, in 1968, he created Holy Writ.  You think I am exaggerating?  Go Google Andrew Sarris is Dead and see.

So obsessed did I become with Sarris and his theory, so emboldened was I, that virtually every essay in school I was called upon to write in the year or so after first reading his Opus was on The Auteur Theory.  Aside from wondering why I had no life my professors also found the whole thing, both the theory and my enthusiasm for it, preposterous.  Everyone knows film is a collaborative art form.  The director, aside from the monocle and megaphone, was just another staff member.

And I have to admit the theory, in the end and under close scrutiny, doesn't exactly coalesce (what exactly is this "personality" that Sarris goes on and on about?).  But what made Sarris so powerful was the attempt to articulate what those of a certain cinematic inclination already knew:  that there was an abiding presence in the art of cinema, for good, bad or indifference, and we call that The Director.

And no one who thinks about the cinema today even thinks for a moment that this is controversial.

Malick's Type

Manz in Heaven

Caviezel in Red Line

McCracken in Tree

George C. Scott previews the latest Adam Sandler movie and finds it wanting

This is worse than The Savage is Loose

Okay, so this has been going around, and I have a done a fair share of sharing it myself.  But after the fourth or fifth somewhat luke warm response (wherein the comments were more along the lines of how funny Jack and Jill looked, rather than how hilarious the mash up was!), I realized, this is only really, truly sidesplitting to cinephiles of a certain ilk.

Why?  For one thing, one needs to know, love, or at least sort of admire Hardcore, the George C. Scott contribution to the mash up.  It is a grave-serious meditation on parental responsibility, guilt, the nature of evil, you know, the usual from fun-loving reformed Calvinist auteur Paul Schrader.  

The juxtaposition of the most intense scene (Scott's father character watches a porno film starring his missing daughter) from that most intense of films with the willfully ridiculous new Sandler high concept mall-rat bait is, well, sidesplitting.  And the fact Al Pacino, who probably redefines the word slumming with his appearance in J & J, regarded Scott as the greatest actor of of the generation before him, gives this an additional weird and wonderful meta-cinematic kick.  

Kim Novak

No Pushover

Male cinephiles tend to get all gaga over Kim Novak because she was in a ton of auteurist movies and...well...look at her.

This is Kim in Pushover, one of those t.v.-style late noirs that have been packaged so perceptively by Columbia and the like.  Directed by the solid but rarely inspired Richard Quine, one can sum up the pleasures of Pushover in pretty much two words (Kim and Novak) and a few choice images, including this one, which one wonders how in the world they ever got away with.

Perhaps not SFW

But it is the ambiguity of the look in the car mirror that is the key Novak image.  What in the world is being those eyes and that sloping nose?  Certainly most of the suspense of Pushover is wondering to what extent Novak's character is controlling the sap played by an rather sad-looking Fred McMurray, long past his leading man days, to do her bidding.   If she is really in control at all. 

Heartbreaking Photo Essay

75 Abandoned Theaters from Around the U.S.A. on Buzz Feed. 

Dream Theater, Tahlequah, Oklahoma

One can close one's eyes and picture smartly-dressed couples and families filtering their breathless selves into these former palaces to enjoy the unique experience of being taken away from their lives in Pinoche, Nevada and Bucyrus, Ohio via the magic carpet of movies. 

Remember when the advent of television had the movie industry all in a kvetch about how the idiot box would kill the movies?  Well, it didn't happen, entirely, because the movies figured out a way to continue to appeal to its audience's sense of otherness.  A big part of that was the building itself, palaces and shoe boxes of a grand or intimate nature which offered an experience more immediate and shared than a 19-inch Zenith could ever hope to achieve.

Now, I see these dead soldiers on the American horizon, and I close my eyes and picture those same couples and families, decked out in matching sweat suits and plopped in front of their home theaters arguing over whether American Idol is just not the same since Simon left, driving each other insane.

Murder By Contract

 

The best movie I have seen in the  last three months is not The  King's Speech, not Black Swan or True Grit or 127 Days, but Irving Lerner's taut, hilarious and disturbing Murder by Contract from 1958.  Long unavailable on any format until 2009 and packaged rather inappropriately by Columbia as a Film Noir, Lerner's Termite Opus makes a more pungent and succinct case than The Godfather 14 years later that killing is just another word for good business.

Irving Lerner was probably who Andrew Sarris had in mind when creating the chapter "Oddities, One Shots and Newcomers" for his seminal work of cinephilia The American Cinema.  Indeed, the kind of cinephilic excavation pioneered by Sarris and his troops was bound to stumble on Lerner hiding in the weeds of the American movie factory at some point, but not sure that would have happened without this, his masterpiece amongst some rather undistinguished titles (Studs Lonigan likely the most interesting of the bunch).

In a year when Gigi (not Minnelli's finest by any means) took home the big prize, when Stanley Kramer's stolid, artless Defiant Ones was widely believed to have been robbed of the award, Murder by Contract is, in hindsight, aside from Vertigo and Touch of Evil (neither of which was nominated, of course) the best picture of 1958.  And a preposterous idea like that is what The American Cinema, and the American Cinema, is all about.

The film concerns Claude (played by Vince Edwards with Elvis pompadour,  fresh off seducing Marie Windsor to betray Elisha Cook, Jr. in Kubrick's The Killing), who decides to eighty-six his Squaresville regular job and pursue a position with an unseen Mr. Big as a Hit Man.  True to Lerner's lean and mean storytelling, no back story is given why Claude would find this attractive, no pop-Freudian father-hating or sexual repression flashbacks.  It seems Claude is attracted to idea because it seems more or less a pretty sweet gig.   We know nothing of Claude except he looks and acts cool, and it is this attraction to the banality of this particular kind of evil that makes the audience complicit and, thanks to the whimsical script by Ben Simcoe, delighted in the events.

His handlers (Herschel Bernardi and Phillip Pine), who trail around with Claude seemingly to assure he doesn't flinch from his duty, seem similarly baffled and attracted to Claude.  They live vicariously through his amoral, emotionally detached walk through the world.  They mockingly refer to Claude throughout as Superman, a nod to both Nietzsche and George Reeves.

Claude is no clod.  He moves deftly from hit to hit, slowly building credibility with Mr. Big, until, of course, he meets his match with a canny Broad (the little-known but quite wonderful Caprice Toriel) doing time in witness protection, a gig which ultimately pushes Claude to the limits of his resourcefulness.

It is to Lerner's credit that as Claude is knocked off his perch it is not for moral reasons.  Killing simply gets harder, as if Claude is on some bizarre Peter's Principal path in his chosen career.   Success in this sort of business is hard-earned.  No hep cat off the turnip truck is going to be Superman without paying his dues.  Claude learns this the hard way, then Lerner fades out, careful not to make the point too emphatically.

Martin Scorsese, a more famous cinephilic excavator than even Sarris, provides a great, short introduction to the DVD.   One can imagine the young Marty, taking in and taking notes on Murder by Contract as the second bill in some Times Square flea bag the year of its release.   Scorsese admits to an homage (or is it theft?) to the sequence where Claude prepares for the call from Mr. Big by working out, a lone, solitary, totally committed figure, in a tiny apartment, to similar sequences in his Taxi Driver, and his far more disturbed protagonist, Travis Bickle.