"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Friday, December 30, 2016
Debbie Reynolds (1932-2016)
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No, we're not allowed to embed this clip of Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Gene Kelly singing and dancing "Good Morning" from Singin' in the Rain, but you can watch it on YouTube, where it doesn't even look too bad expanded to full screen. Is this magic, or what?
by Ken
Yes, yes, it's horrible, the sequence that on consecutive days brought the deaths of Carrie Fisher, at only 60, and then her mother, Debbie Reynolds, 84, after coping first with her daughter's heart attack, the seeming gradual recovery, and then the end for first the daughter and the next day the mother. It's understandable that the question on so many tongues is whether it's possible to die of a broken heart. (As I read it, the answer seems to be quite possibly yes.)
But I don't want to talk about that, or for that matter about Debbie Reynolds' long and busy career. I just want to hark back to the beginning of that career, and to the amazing phenomenon of a volcanic talent erupting. It doesn't often happy as explosively and conspicuously as it did in 1952 in that happiest of movie musicals, Singin' in the Rain, co-directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, with not much question that the dancing was primarily Kelly's responsibility.
Wikipedia notes that the picture "topped the AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals list and is ranked as the fifth greatest American motion picture of all time in its updated list of the greatest American films in 2007." In the following clip there's lots of interesting stuff early on, but for me the really good stuff begins at 2:55, when the focus shifts to Debbie Reynolds, recalling making the movie at age 19, with no serious dance training.
I couldn't resist transcribing at least this much:
If you dance alone, you can make a lot of mistakes. It doesn't look like a mistake, because it's just you. When you're in a partnership with Donald O'Connor and Gene Kelly, you have to be equal to them. You did it Gene's way -- Gene's steps, Gene's style. I didn't have a style. He was a real taskmaster, because he had to be. In order for a young girl to learn that much -- that's almost impossible. We were redoing the number "Good Morning," the scene where we went over the couch, 40 times. He wouldn't stop. And then you just danced, danced, danced, danced. So I was in tears a lot. He worked me hard, but he taught me so well that I'm still in the business 53 years later, because of his teaching.
Did we really imagine that these things just happen? (You can also watch a couple of minutes of just Debbie talking about Singin' in the Rain. She mentions here that she was 17 at the time; I assume that while she may have been 19 -- the usually cited age -- when the movie came out, this is how old she was when she was cast in this career-making role.)
Then there's this, from one of the ten appearances Debbie made between 1999 and 2006 as the irrepressible, show-biz-besotted Bobbi Adler, mother of Grace (Debra Messing), on Will and Grace. Here they are, with Megan Mullally as the correspondingly irrepressible Karen Walker.
It's by no means Debbie Reynolds' best Will and Grace moment, but you understand why I had to pop it in here.
"Hugo" (at NYC's MoMI tomorrow) may be not just Martin Scorsese's best film but possibly the greatest movie ever made
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The trailer for Hugo doesn't give much hint of the movie's brilliance, but then, it may be that nothing except the movie itself could do that. Which is kind of the point.
by Ken
SHORT VERSION: If you’re available and within range of the Museum of the Moving Image on Friday afternoon, and you haven’t seen Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), or for that matter if you have, what you need to know is that there’s a repeat screening scheduled at 3pm, concluding the initial installment of the museum’s planned Scorsese retrospective, Martin Scorsese in the 21st Century. You'd be nuts to pass up the opportunity.
LONGER VERSION: I saw Hugo last Saturday afternoon knowing nothing about either the movie or the book it’s based on, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, except what I'd read in an online interview that was keyed on the MoMI page for the film, who was on hand to introduce the show and to sign books afterward, and by the time Brian finished his intro, before I’d seen a frame of the film, he’d sold me a book. By the time the film ended, I was entertaining the possibility that it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen.
That’s one reason I’m going back Friday – to see how Hugo holds up to a second viewing, and to a viewing with as much of the book as I can manage under my belt by then. Another reason is that I don’t know when I’ll have my next opportunity to see the film the way it was meant to be seen.
The first thing you're always going to be told about Hugo is that it's Scorsese's only "family" film, and this is true but misleading -- it suggests something very different from a film of unique richness, humanity, and depth. I'm hardly the world's biggest Scorsese fan, but there's never been any question in my mind about either his filmmaking talent or his passion for the medium. I've just tended to figure that the concerns that have tended to dominate most, or at least many, of his films, are just more important to other filmgoers than to me.
And then came Hugo.
Hugo (Asa Butterfield) and Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) inside the giant station clock in the movie, above, and in Brian Selznick's original pencil drawing, below. [Click to enlarge.]
THE MIRACLE OF THE BOOK
Ironically, Brian Selznick took it for granted that no movie could be made of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and probably some thinking of this sort went into his bold decision to make the book not just a written story (his original thought, he told us) but a hybrid of alternating text and pictures -- his own black-and-white, or rather many-shades-of-gray, pencil drawings. (He's a Rhode Island School of Design-trained artist.) So it came as a surprise when he learned there was interest in film rights, and something closer to shock when he learned just who was interested.
Brian has explained in interviews how the framework for the book evolved, out of his idea of an encounter between a child and an artifact of the all-but-forgotten pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès, which he had the idea of making one of the onetime magician's barely surviving automatons. (Yes, Méliès made automatons.) He sketched for us the steps by which Hugo Cabret was imagined, as the abandoned orphan son of a family of clockmakers, living secretly inside the hidden spaces of one of Paris's great train stations, filled with bustle and human traffic. (If I got right what Brian said, for the book he had imagined the Gare Montparnasse, but the film mostly re-creates the Gare du Nord. He even had a wonderful story of his own about a brief visit of his own, during the making of the film, to the real Gare du Nord; I wish he were on hand to tell it to you.) Within the station are a whole host of shops, including a toy booth presided over by crusty old Papa Georges, who has a goddaughter, Isabelle, becomes enmeshed in a complex relationship with Hugo. There's also a bookshop owned by a Monsieur Labisse, which is Isabelle's sanctuary; she lives her life through books.
Hugo, Isabelle, and the rest of the characters are his own invention, buttressed by apparently large quantities of research into the Paris of the period of the story, and of course into Méliès's life and times. It all works so well together that the book had a hugely successful life even when its creator thought it would remain a self-contained story.
THE MIRACLE OF THE FILM
But all that richness of story, character, and was sitting there waiting when the book found its way to Martin Scorsese, who wound up absorbing it all into his vision for a film that seems likely to stand as his testament as a filmmaker.
The stories of the book essentially are Scorsese's stories. Lonely Hugo looking out at the world through his clocks and grates apparently resonated powerfully with his childhood memories (and I'm guessing the the theme throughout the book of fiercely guarded secrets did too), and the history of film, not to mention film as the ultimate medium for dreams, is where he lives. And there's no question but that he "got" the book; it's breathtaking how much, in both detail and inspiration, Scorsese, screenwriter John Logan, and the entire production team drew from Brian Selznick's words and pictures.
Who but Scorsese would have -- or could have -- managed to mount a film production on this scale? The production team's stunning re-creation of the Gare du Nord (with all the hidden spaces where Hugo leads his cloistered life), all the incredible clockworks and other machinery, the zillions of other scenic effects (the production designer was Dante Ferretti; the costume designer, Sandy Powell), the 3-D cinematography -- it all cost a fortune, but for once in a film that blew its budget, not only can we see where the money went but it appears all to have been well spent. It's hard to think of another director who would have had the chutzpah to attempt such a production, or the determination and grit to get it done. Viewed now, however, expensive as the picture may have been, for what Scorsese and his huge and hugely talented and skilled team got it looks like kind of a bargain. (Brian, who was present for most of the filming, mentioned that he wrote a book on the making of Hugo and the people who made it, of which he's quite proud. I've got my copy on order.)
Cinematographer Robert Richardson's 3-D is a crucial component of the story. The visual field, in fact, just barely contains the enormous amount of intimate human observation; for once, Scorsese's famous obsession with detail expands and enriches rather than suffocating the picture. As noted, I'm in awe of the created physical production. At least as notable is the richness of humanity Scorsese and team have created in and around all their locations -- principally, of course, the train station, where they have invented a whole teeming daily life including a whole roster of characters, some of them invented by the film team, but then there's the Station Inspector, Hugo's ultimate nightmare, who exists in the book, ultimately playing the exact same role he does in the film, but has been expanded in the film to a major player throughout, with a fleshed-out life and also an added plaintive, comic tinge that's perfectly suited to Sacha Baron Cohen.
The acting, the acting, the acting, from top to bottom. Ben Kingsley is hardly an unknown quantity, but if he's ever done anything better, I haven't seen it. The bitterness and deadness of soul that enshroud Papa Georges most of the way -- who would have thought he had that kind of performance in him? (Answer: Marty Scorsese.) Or there's Jude Law, another actor of enormous demonstrated versatility who even so is stunning in his tiny bits of screen time as Hugo's sainted father, in terms of dramatic importance one of the story's most important character. By comparison, Michael Stuhlbarg would have been an obvious choice for the film historian Tabard, keeper of the flame of Georges Méliès, but that doesn't make him any less fine in his role. Obviously an enormous amount depends on the children, and Asa Butterfield (Hugo) and Chloë Grace Moretz (Isabelle) are just splendid -- not as "kid" performers but as for-real actors.
So after the introductions to the introduction were over, the introducer -- who would also be the evening's moderator -- stepped to the podium tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and promptly got a standing ovation. Because the introducer-moderator was Martin Scorsese.
Now I'm crotchety about today's routinized standing O's, where it seems you can get one just for drawing breath. In addition, I'm hardly the world's greatest Scorsese fan. Still, it's, you know, Scorsese. You can hardly not respect the career, with that body of work and the immeasurable contributions to the preservation and appreciation of the medium of film. A standing O for Marty Scorsese is a no-brainer.
Marty proceeded to introduce the guest of honor, who he acknowledged needed no introduction -- "but I'm going to introduce him anyway." And he came out and also got a standing ovation. Because he was Jerry Lewis. If you're not going to give Jerry Lewis a standing ovation, who are you going to give one?
It was another event in the Iconic Characters of Comedy series co-presented by the Comedy Hall of Fame and MoMI. I've written about the grand times I've had at the tributes to Alan Alda, Marlo Thomas, and Norman Lear -- and only regret missing the evening with Stiller and Meara which predated my MoMI-going days.
Tonight the joint was packed, and I know that in addition the museum was selling tickets for a simulcast. As a result I had to settle for a seat fairly far back in the auditorium, and though my present glasses are only six months old, I can't say I could see Jerry terribly well. But never mind, he was there, and there was no difficulty hearing him.
Partly because when Marty and Jerry took their center-stage seats, Jerry made sure that the volume level on their microphones was cranked up to a point where they could really be heard. He was good-natured about it -- he's Jerry Lewis, after all -- but he didn't let the proceedings proceed until the matter was taken care of. As a result, for the rest of the event the audience didn't have to think about the volume level. I call that professionalism.
I suppose I should mention that the short walk to those center-stage seats wasn't easy for Jerry, and it was managed with a cane. Once he was seated, he said, pointing to the cane, that that thing was because he's nearly 90. And so he is. The record books tell us he turned 89 on March 16. Yikes!
Earlier in the day I mentioned in an e-mail to a friend, explaining where I was headed tonight, that Jerry Lewis's career is my lifetime, that I remembered the devastation my young self experienced at the news that Martin and Lewis were breaking up. To me it seemed like the end of the world.
I hadn't known about the addition of Marty Scorsese to tonight's bill; that must have been recent. I bought my ticket my online the day I got the e-announcement of the event a couple of weeks ago. It was certainly an interesting choice. After all, Jerry and Marty made an important film together 30-plus years ago. In addition, if someone's going to talk to Jerry Lewis about directing comedy on film, Marty's credentials as both a ranking film director and an obsessive student of the arts of filmmaking are pretty impressive.
Marty assumed we knew that film comedy isn't his genre, telling us that he had essayed several comedies -- like Goodfellas (and one or two others of his pictures -- I don't recall which). Later Jerry told us about time he spent with Stanley Kubrick while he (Jerry) was in London at MGM studios and Kubrick was editing 2001. "How do you write a joke?" Kubrick asked him. "How do you write a joke?" Jerry repeated.
Kubrick explained that he just didn't know how it was all done, meaning joke-making, and presumably comedy-making. Jerry pointed out that the movies he was making seemed to be working out fine, he was making a living -- "What the heck's the problem?" But he also explained that he really couldn't tell him how to write a joke. By the time it came time to use a joke he had written, it was already written; he couldn't really remember what had happened at the typewriter.
Jerry spending time with directors in the editing room wasn't limited to Kubrick. From the time he began watching movies, and then acting in them, he had been keen to understand what film directors do. He even had a mentor of sorts in Charlie Chaplin, spending chunks of time at Chaplin's home having him talk him through his own films almost frame by frame, and also looking at Jerry's work on film.
As Marty had noted in his introduction, Jerry was the first director to use "video assist" in his filmmaking. I didn't know what that meant, but it turns out to mean having on-site technical capacity to see what the movie cameras were recording on film. He explained that he'd gone to Japan to talk to the Morita family of Sony, and it was to the son that he explained what he wanted, and who produced it -- in time for use, I believe he said, on The Bellboy, which was the first film he directed, in 1960.
Nowadays, of course, filmmaking technology provides "video assist" as a matter of course, but Marty remembers having it available for the first time -- in the form of a tiny two-inch viewing device -- on The King of Comedy, and that's 1980-81. More than anything, Jerry explained, he needed such technology to see his own work on-screen. After all, the films he would be directing were films in which he would be starring. While it's been quite a while since I've seen The Bellboy or The Ladies Man or The Errand Boy, I suspect that the star is on-screen a very high percentage of the time, and how was director Jerry Lewis supposed to evaluate what the actor Jerry was doing. (We learned that while directing he always thought of that "Jerry" as a different person. During filming he frequently had to have tough talks with him, asking what he thought he'd been doing in that batch of takes.)
In addition, Jerry found his video assist technology invaluable for working with other actors, who also couldn't see what the camera was recording them doing. Actors who didn't understand, or resisted, direction he was giving them were often startled to discover that what they'd actually done during a take wasn't at all what they thought they'd done.
One other thing Jerry mentioned is that he's preparing a new edition of his 1971 book The Total Film-Maker, one of the more highly regarded texts on film directing, which he recalled selling some two million copies when it was originally released. The book has been through a number of editions, and people still want it.
I think it might have been interesting if Marty had talked to Jerry more about their one joint project. I did learn one thing about The King of Comedy that I sure didn't know: that Marty had Jerry direct one scene in the picture. It's the sidewalk scene, where talk-show host Jerry Langford is walking down the street and is recognized by a woman on a pay phone, who tries to get him to talk to the person she's talking to.
The scene was shot from a distance, Marty explained, so that passersby believed that what purported to be happening was actually happening, and with Jerry directing, the actress playing the woman was able to time her part so that the whole scene fit together with terrific comic timing. Apparently Marty had the good sense to realize that he had a better choice than himself to direct such a scene right there on location, acting in the scene.
The whole affair, including all the introductions, lasted just an hour, but that was enough. By the end Jerry had earned his next standing ovation.
Sunday report: Fun with Michael and Gloria Schultz and "Cooley High" -- plus a first ride on the No. 7 to "34 St Hudson Yards"
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Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs as Cochise and Glynn Turman as Preacher, the central characters of Cooley High, and two of only three professional actors the budget permitted -- along with Garrett Morris as the teacher Mr. Mason
by Ken
There's a scene in Cooley High where one of the central characters, the Chicago vocational-high-school student Cochise, played by the pre-Kotter Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, comes home and searches for a letter he's expecting -- the verdict on his college basketball scholarship. It's not with the mail on the bureau, so he asks his mother, who asks him if he checked the bureau, where all the mail is. Poor guy! Then he notices his toddler brother standing in front of the toilet bowl, and he goes in the little bathroom and looks in it, and sure enough, there's an envelope with his name and address typed on it.
We learned two lovely things about this scene during the post-screening discussion at the Museum of the Moving Image (which I mentioned earlier today I was attending) with director Michael Schultz and his wife, Gloria, who was up to her eyeballs in the making of the film (immersed in script-writing, casting, coaching the almost all nonprofessional cast, and doing whatever else needed doing. As I noted earlier today, the film is celebrating its 40th anniversary (it was made in 1974 and released in 1975), and as someone who had never seen it, I can testify that even in a less than ideal print it holds up very well indeed, and it was a special treat witnessing the Schultzes relive the making of this extremely low-budget film -- in the heart of Chicago's most dangerous ghetto, Cabrini Green, using lots of locals with no acting experience in the cast -- as if hardly any time had passed.
The two things we learned about that scene:
• After Michael and Gloria had hammered out a script, based on autobiographical stories told by writer Eric Monte, Michael got what he describes as one of the best pieces of professional advice he's ever gotten: to go back and rewrite every scene in a way that he'd never seen on-screen. In the original script, Cochise comes home, looks at the mail on the bureau, and finds the letter. Trying to think of a different way to do the scene, he thought of a habit his and Gloria's then-toddler son Brandon had developed, of grabbing pieces of mail and dropping them in the toilet.
• The on-screen toddler who played Cochise's brother was the self-same Brandon Schultz. (And no, we learned in response to an audience question, Brandon didn't get paid.)
(The film is now out on Blu-ray as well as DVD. Michael recalled the long delay in issuing it on VHS caused by the impossibility of cutting a deal for the rights to the 17 Motown tunes used, which he'd gotten for hardly any money when the film was made, but which were esteemed considerably higher by the time it came to video release. It wasn't until Berry Gordy sold the company that an affordable deal could be struck, Michael said.)
For me it's always a hard-to-match treat to witness creative people who have created something substantial talk about how that something was created. Michael Schultz, who had already garnered major attention as a stage director for his work with the Negro Ensemble Company in New York (he staged the original production of Lorraine Hansberry's To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, and re-created that production for TV), has had a busy 40 years since Cooley High, including Car Wash, Greased Lightning, and Which Way Is Up?, all with Richard Pryor.
Now that I've discovered what engaging raconteurs Michael and Gloria are, I'm that much sorrier that I have schedule conflicts that wil prevent me from catching the three remaining events in the little series of conversations MoMI has arranged, unfolding over the next three Sundays:
Richard Pryor (1940-2005) was the most extraordinary comedian of his generation, and Michael Schultz made more films with him than any other director. This program will feature selected film clips of their collaborations, including Greased Lightning, Car Wash, Which Way Is Up, Bustin' Loose, and The Bingo Long Traveling All Stars & Motor Kings. Scott Saul [via Skype], author of Becoming Richard Pryor, will interview Michael Schultz about his directorial approach when working with Pryor and other comedians.
Michael Schultz’s films have been accompanied by some of the most popular soundtracks of the era. Grammy Award-winning recording artist, film composer, and talk radio personality James Mtumewill show film clips and engage Schultz in a conversation about his vibrant use of music in movies such as Car Wash, Cooley High, and Which Way Is Up?
A distinguished list of actors made their feature film debut under Michael Schultz’s direction, including Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Duke, and Blair Underwood, among many others. The program will include clips of those film debuts and a discussion with Michael Schultz about his casting instincts and methods in spotting new talent, moderated by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the award-winning actor of stage and screen.
Gloria and Michael Schultz (seen here at the 41st NAACP Image Awards in 2010): This afternoon, recalling the making of Cooley High 40-plus years ago, they sounded as if it happened last week.
NO. 7 LINE UPDATE
In my earlier post, I wrote at length about today's grand opening of the westward-and-southward extension of the No. 7 Flushing line from Times Square to 34th Street and Eleventh Avenue. No, I didn't try to get to the ribbon-cutting before the MoMI screening, but afterward I did take a No. 7 train to its new westward terminus, at the station officially designated "34 St Hudson Yards." It's fine.
For the record, onsite the new little park is called not "Hudson Park" but "Hudson Boulevard Park," which makes more sense. (Hudson Boulevard, East and West, is a newly created sort-of-street that runs north-south from 33rd to 36th Streets, between 10th and 11th Avenues. The entrance that's been completed is at 34th Street and Hudson Boulevard East. Another entrance is being built at 35th Street.)
For the record, on my first extended-No. 7 trip I notched my first "We are being delayed by train traffic ahead" recorded announcement -- a much-appreciated homey touch. In addition, I should note, relative to my earlier-voiced skepticism about the durability of escalator technology, that in the first bank of escalators I encountered, three of the four were working. That's pretty good for the first day, don't you think? I hadn't in fact realized just how deep the station is. You ascend and descend in three stages, one of them quite long and one extremely long.
Movie Watch: "See It Big! 70mm" at the Museum of the Moving Image. Plus an Urban Gadabout note: "I Remember NY"
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Coney Island (this Sunday, August 9) is one of two neighborhoods tour leader Joe Svehlak will be revisiting this month in his Municipal Art Society series I Remember New York. Also coming up is Downtown Brooklyn (Sunday, August 30). See below.
by Ken
As I mentioned recently, I wiped out most of a day of potential Jane Jacobs Weekend walks to catch a 70mm screening of Robert Wise's 1965 film version of The Sound of Music, which as it happened I had never seen in any form, at the Museum of the Moving Image. These days, as digital projection takes over for theatrical showing even of movies that weren't made digitally, it's getting harder and harder to see films on, you know, film, and the 70mm jobbies -- forget about it. At the MoMI Sound of Music event, though, Chief Curator David Schwartz mentioned that the museum would be showing a 70mm print of West Side Story -- the 1961 film musical Wise had already directed which established him as candidate for the Sound of Music film when, apparently, nobody else wanted to direct it -- in an upcoming installment of its See It Big! series, this one devoted to 70mm films.
Well, See It Big! 70mm is here! Eight films, ranging chronologically from 1961 (West Side Story) through 2014 (Interstellar), each being shown either two or three times between August 7 and August 30.
With a higher resolution and more light hitting the frame, 70mm film offers a bigger, brighter image than 35mm. It also offers richer sound, with more space on the soundtrack. It is the ideal film format for ambitious cinematic spectacles, yet with the transition to digital filmmaking, 70mm movies have become increasingly rare.
But, as the introduction goes on to note, 70mm hasn't been entirely abandoned.
Filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan are keeping the tradition alive, with films that were surely inspired by the work of Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, Douglas Trumbull, and Robert Wise. From West Side Story to Interstellar, here is a selection of great 70mm films, including adventure, comedy, drama, musical, and science fiction -- and all indelible experiences.
THESE ARE BIG MOVIES
In the listing below, culled from the museum's listings, it occurred to me to include the films' running times, because so many of these are really big time-wise in addition to film-format-wise. Four of the eight are over 2½ hours, and a fifth, Interstellar, is only six minutes short. Two, in fact, are over 3 hours, and one is over 3½ -- Lawrence of Arabia, of course. Although director David Lean has been dead for 24 years, there are people who'll swear that the movie still hasn't ended.
It's a wild mix of films. I'm taking a pass on 2001, which I just saw at MoMI in 70mm -- but if you haven't seen it in 70mm, you should. It doesn't solve the film's problems or plug its gaps, but for the considerable effect it makes nevertheless, it really should be seen in full format. But I'm hoping to get to all the others -- some that I haven't seen, or seen theatrically, since they were new, and four that I've never seen at all.
It's the usual MoMI deal: Screenings are free for members at the "Film Lover" level and above; for others it's $12 ($9 for senior citizens and students), which includes museum admission for that day. Both members and nonmembers can book ahead; go to the link below and if you prefer follow it to the alternate date(s); then click on the "Order tickets online" link. I would be especially careful with the films that are only being shown twice.
With a higher resolution and more light hitting the frame, 70mm film offers a bigger, brighter image than 35mm. It also offers richer sound, with more space on the soundtrack. It is the ideal film format for ambitious cinematic spectacles, yet with the transition to digital filmmaking, 70mm movies have become increasingly rare. Filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan are keeping the tradition alive, with films that were surely inspired by the work of Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, Douglas Trumbull, and Robert Wise. From West Side Story to Interstellar, here is a selection of great 70mm films, including adventure, comedy, drama, musical, and science fiction -- and all indelible experiences.
See It Big! is an ongoing series organized by Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert, Chief Curator David Schwartz, and Assistant Film Curator Aliza Ma.
2001: A Space Odyssey
(dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968, 159 mins)
Friday, 8/7, 7pm; Saturday, 8/8, 2pm; Sunday, 8/9, 2pm
The Master
(dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012, 144 mins)
Saturday, 8/29, 2pm; Sunday, 8/30, 2pm
URBAN GADABOUT NOTE: Joe Svehlak's MAS "I Remember New York" walking tours
This month Joe Svehlak, the total sweetheart among NYC tour guides, a lifelong New Yorker who pours passion as well as charm into his tours, and has always given a generous sense of historical development in his neighborhood walking tours, has two more tours coming up in the wonderful "I Remember New York" series he's been doing for the Municipal Art Society: Coney Island this Sunday, August 9, 10:30am-12:30pm, and Downtown Brooklyn.
These will be more personal versions of popular tours Joe has been doing for some time, tracking changes in these much-changing neighborhoods. His tours have always been personal, but in this I Remember New York series he's undertaken at age 75, he has been unabashed in sharing his history with the places he's leading us through. It says something about Joe that I run into him all the time taking other people's tours; his enthusiasm and curiosity seem if anything to have continued growing with time.
On the first tour in the I Remember New York series, Joe mentioned that at his age he doesn't know how much longer he'll want to continue leading tours, and for anyone who appreciates the value of experience and memory, the walks in this series so far have been treasures. On those my schedule has enabled me to do, there was a special warmth to this walk through Manhattan's Financial District, where he had his first job and later worked for a considerable time; and then in the two-part traversal of Brooklyn's Sunset Heights, where he did much of his growing up and later returned as a first-time homeowner and pioneering preservationist. I really should have posted something about the series sooner. Sorry!
Not to mention that Joe is just good company. Again, there are links for online registration for both members and nonmembers. I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to find my way to MAS; now I can't imagine not being a member.
Join tour guide and preservation activist Joe Svehlak who still swims here, to reminisce about Coney Island in his younger years when Steeplechase Park was still a great amusement attraction before it was demolished in the 1960s. Hear Joe describe the thrill of the Parachute Jump and the Steeplechase. In addition to Steeplechase Park, Joe remembers four rollercoasters, merry-go-rounds, and an assortment of other rides, sideshows and games of chance. Both the Cyclone rollercoaster and the Wonder Wheel are New York City landmarks and a testament to Coney Island's illustrious past and resilience. We'll also view a new amusement park, a restored carousel, and two poignant memorials by the ballpark. Stroll the boardwalk as Joe remembers family outings, amusements, bathhouses, and other facilities and attractions by the sea. On our walk we'll learn about Coney Island's honky-tonk past and issues of preservation and planning for the future. Coney Island has seen many changes in Joe's lifetime. He's happy to see it coming back with new amusements, activities and restaurants. Stay for a swim and treat yourself to a Nathan's Famous! Please note that this tour has been offered before with a slightly different theme, and there may be significant overlap in content. Cost: $20 / $15 Members
In his lifetime, tour guide and preservation activist Joe Svehlak has seen major changes Downtown Brooklyn. Growing up in the 1940s and 50s, Joe remembers Brooklyn's Downtown as one of New York City's premier shopping and entertainment centers, with grand elegant department stores, specialty shops, fine restaurants and magnificent movie palaces. He would look forward to the special holiday shopping trips Downtown and the occasional treat of a movie in one of the great theaters. By the 1970s economic decline, the days of the grand department stores were over. The Fox and the Albee theatres were demolished for other commercial purposes. The Paramount became part of Long Island University and the Metropolitan is now the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Fifteen years ago Joe moved Downtown and is now witnessing dramatic high rise construction all around him. New streetscapes and plazas are adding to Downtown Brooklyn's new livability. New Hotels and shops are opening and even a new park is planned. Joe's thoughts and memories will guide us through his neighborhood as we view old civic buildings, new commercial development, designated New York City landmarks, the revitalized Fulton Mall, redesigned Flatbush Avenue, Metro Tech expansion, and even some surprising religious edifices. End by the landmarked monumental Dime Savings Bank and Junior's Restaurant, noted for its cheesecake. Please note that this tour has been offered before with a slightly different theme, and there may be significant overlap in content. Cost: $20 / $15 Members
SPEAKING OF MAS --
The new walking-tour schedule, likely to cover September, October, and November, should be coming out in the next week or two. Meanwhile there are still a whole bunch of really interesting-looking walking tours that can still be booked for August. Check them out here -- or go to mas.org anytime and click on "Tours."
Father's Day -- next Sunday, June 21 -- is your once-a-year chance to show Dad how you really feel.
by Ken
When I shared the Museum of the Moving Image's horrific Mother's Day film lineup, I promised to return with the grisly details for the second half of the museum's celebration, "Horror Mother's Day and Father's Day." Unless you're lucky enough not to have e-mail, by now your e-mailbox should be choked with offers to take care of your celebratory needs. So you'll be glad to know that the museum has an equally, er, uplifting triple bill scheduled to honor Dad, the poor sonofabitch.
The primal bond between parent and child is undeniable, and is at the heart of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, which are observed on Sundays in May and June as though they are national holidays. For anyone looking for an alternative to Hallmark sentimentality, or for those parents -- or non-parents -- with great taste in movies and an appetite for horror, here are six classic movies to mark the occasions.
The deal again is that each film is is $12 ($9 for senior citizens and students; free for members at the Film Lover level and above). Museum admission for the day is included with the ticket. Advance reservation (for members) or purchase (for nonmembers) is not only possible but recommended.
And again, those of you who aren't within striking distance of the museum may wish to avail yourselves of your usual film sources to re-create all or part of this lineup in the none-too-comforting privacy of your own home.
"A never-more-menacing" Robert Mitchum as "creepy preacher Harry Powell"
Sunday, June 21, 2pm
Dir. Charles Laughton. 1955, 92 mins. 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation. With Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish.
Acting legend Charles Laughton’s sole screen directorial credit is perhaps cinema’s most remarkable one-off. Creepy preacher Harry Powell (a never-more-menacing Mitchum) offers naive widow Willa Harper (Winters) a fresh start, but her kids rightly worry his intentions are less than pure. Part horror film, part fairy tale, The Night of the Hunter is an idiosyncratic, dazzlingly shot cinematic wonder.
Georges Franju's "classic example of the poetry of terror"
Sunday, June 21, 4:30pm
Dir. Georges Franju. 1960, 88 mins. 35mm. With Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Edith Scob.
Working in his secluded French chateau, a brilliant but mad doctor tries radical plastic surgery to restore his beautiful daughter’s face, which was disfigured by a car accident that he caused. This “classic example of the poetry of terror” (Dave Kehr) is at once horrifying and filled with stunningly beautiful images.
From Stanley Kubrick, a "primal Freudian drama played out in a haunted hotel"
Sunday, June 21, 6:30pm
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1980, 144 mins. 35mm. With Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd.
“Here’s Johnny!” All work and no play makes Jack a monstrous dad in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s tale of a caretaker driven mad in a cavernous hotel during an isolated Colorado winter. A visionary child is pitted against a murderous father, as the primal Freudian drama is played out in a haunted hotel.
OK, so you forgot to book a place for Mother's Day and now the good places are booked up? If you're in the NYC area, here's a great way to celebrate
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And even if you're not in the NYC area, if
you're resourceful, you can do this yourself
In the history of cinema, what film says "Happy Mother's Day" more purely from the heart than Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho? This, of course, is Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, a boy who really loves his mom.
by Ken
Some of you may object that I've already had my crotchety say on the closing-in-on-us Mother's and Father's Days. But that was before I'd experienced the full horror of spending hours every day clearing my e-mailbox of the barrage of too-exciting-for-words Mother's Day offers.
Speaking of horror . . . .
That was also, I think, before I noticed, or at least took proper notice of, what the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, has lilned up for the big day: the first part of a two-part cinematic celebration, Horror Mother's Day and Horror Father's Day. Coming up Sunday is a triple bill of -- wait for it -- Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, and The Brood. How cool is that? On a day like that, smart mothers may deny having offspring. (Schedule conflicts make it impossible for me to catch Psycho or Rosemary's Baby, much as I'd enjoy seeing them again. But I've never seen The Brood, so that works out okay!)
Don't think MoMI is singling out Mom. Dad will get his turn too, and I'll try to remember to give you some links before we leave this evening. But this weekend, it's Mom's turn. (The films are $12 for adults, which includes free museum admission, and free for members "at the Film Lover level and above. Advance booking online is not only possible but highly recommended; see the individual listings for links.)
Of course, if you're not within striking distance of MoMI but you have access to a good DVD or streaming source, you can re-create the Mother's Day and Father's Day horrors for yourself.
Psycho Early in 2013 a tape from 1964 was discovered in BBC archives in which Alfred Hitchcock (seen here on-set) claimed that Psycho had always been intended as a comedy! As Xan Brooks told readers of The Guardian, the Master of Horror says on the tape, "I was horrified to find some people took it seriously."
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1960, 109 mins. 35mm. With Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles. Norman Bates, anxious proprietor of the Bates Motel, is horror cinema’s ultimate momma’s boy in Alfred Hitchcock’s shocker masterpiece. But as Norman explains about his mother to the lovely blonde guest, “She isn’t quite herself today.”
Dir. Roman Polanski. 1968, 136 mins. DCP. With Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon. Roman Polanski turned the stately Dakota into Manhattan’s most infamous apartment house in his unsettling horror classic. Mia Farrow is the unfortunate mother-to-be, married to a sketchy Broadway actor (played by John Cassavetes) and possibly carrying an antichrist in her womb. Ruth Gordon steals the show as the sinister next-door neighbor.
Dir. David Cronenberg. 1979, 92 mins. New 35mm print! With Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle. David Cronenberg made The Brood after a painful divorce, and described the film as a “fantastical Kramer vs. Kramer.” The mother is involved in “psychoplasmics,” a treatment that leads to her literally (and graphically) giving birth to her rage. Howard Shore’s musical score pays homage to Bernard Herrmann’s music for Psycho.
"Akira Kurosawa — Composing Movement" (h/t Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar)
by Gaius Publius
Akira Kurosawa is a master director in the same sense that Shakespeare is a master writer and Beethoven a master composer — every part in place, complex in ways that can defy reason, yet accessible and popular to the point of being, almost, a cliché. Immensely popular, yet undeniably in the top rank of the top rank. Who said great art can't delight masses of people? Yet few of the great ones accomplish what these artists have done.
So because it's Friday and the weekend looms, I'd like take a break from California drought news to present the short film above, an examination of Kurosawa's visual mastery that will delight and inform — perhaps even open your eyes to why Kurosawa, so popular, is also so good.
If you haven't heard of him, Kurosawa is most famous for his samurai films starring the amazing Toshiro Mifune (pictured above and below), including Seven Samurai, which was remade into The Magnificent Seven; Yojimbo, remade into A Fistful of Dollars; Throne of Blood, a remake of Macbeth; and Ran (which Kurosawa considered his masterpiece), a remake of King Lear. Each of these films, plus a few others, are described below.
Toshiro Mifune (right) in Yojimbo (click to enlarge)
If you haven't yet clicked on the video, I urge you to do so. It's eight minutes of your life you'd gladly spend the same way twice. Kurosawa is a delight, magnificent as a visual filmmaker, and this "video essay" by Tony Zhou — "Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement" — is the best teaching film I've seen. Be sure to full-screen it. You won't be sorry. (For more of Tony Zhou, see his Tumblr blog, Every Frame a Painting, and his YouTube channel of video essays.)
A Guide to Six of Kurosawa's Best
From the same Batocchio (the "Vagabond Scholar") who provided the Tony Zhou link, but from a different post, I offer this, a guide to several of Kurosawa's best. There's more at the link. This discussion is from a longer one called "The Key Nine" — all are worth your attention. Batocchio, in a very fine piece of film characterization, writes:
Rashomon (1950): A rape and murder occur in the forest, but the four different accounts of these events conflict. What's truth and what's perception? This film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Academy Award, establishing Kurosawa's international reputation. Its core device has been copied many times since.
Ikiru (To Live, 1952): A petty bureaucrat discovers he's terminally ill, and turns first to hedonism but then struggles to find some deeper meaning or last gesture. This one starts slowly, but is well worth the time, with a great performance by long-time Kurosawa collaborator Takashi Shimura. There's some funny and occasionally very dark satire in this one, including a wonderful bureaucracy montage. (There's also a scene of overacting that makes me wince, but hey, it was the young actress' first film.) The story cycles around and ever closer in on Kanji Watanabe (Shimura), building in emotional power. There's a scene in a park near the end that's one of the most moving I've ever seen. It's true of many Kurosawa films, but this one will really stay with you.
Seven Samurai (1954): One of the greats. Poor farmers recruit samurai to protect them from 40 bandits intent on stealing their harvest. This was often called an "eastern Western," and many an action film and buddy film owes it a debt. Even though the full version runs 207 minutes, it clips along, because there's so much energy, humor in between the drama, and we really come to care about the characters and their fates. Takashi Shimura as the unflappable lead samurai Kambei and Toshiro Mifune as the manic Kikuchiyo are standouts. This one's been remade several times, most notably as The Magnificent Seven. (A Bug's Life also borrows from it, although very loosely!)
Throne of Blood (1957): Kurosawa's version of Macbeth, incorporating elements of Noh theater. It features an intense Toshiro Mifune and very controlled Isuzu Yamada as his wife. The supernatural scenes are effectively creepy (with some great lengthy camera shots) and the climax is unforgettable. Many critics consider this one of the great Shakespeare films, probably because Kurosawa keeps Macbeth's core story and drama but delivers the visual equivalent of poetry. Noted stage director Peter Brook hated it, however, because it didn't use Shakespeare's actual text. I've read that this was one of T.S. Eliot's favorite films, but have never been able to confirm that. (The actual title in Japanese translates closer to "Castle of the Spider's Web.") ...
Yojimbo (The Bodyguard, 1961): A nameless, scruffy ronin hires himself out to two rival gangs who've overrun a town nominally run by corrupt officials. He plots to set them against each other and themselves, and as Pauline Kael put it, he becomes a bodyguard who kills the bodies he's hired to guard. As with many Japanese "action" films of the era, this has long stretches of drama and anticipation, punctuated by short bursts of action and violence. The same rhythm's in most of Sergio Leone's films, who remade this one as A Fistful of Dollars (and Walter Hill remade it as Last Man Standing, inviting Kurosawa to the premiere). I never get tired of this film, which has some very dark comedy, starting with the very tiny dog near the start (you'll see). Kurosawa really exploits the scope format in this one, and luckily the old, horrible pan-and-scan video versions are largely gone now. I've read one analysis that makes the case that Kurosawa was in part satirizing the film studio heads with whom he often clashed. Mifune's character was a strong departure from the then-common portrayal of samurai as upright, clean, and outwardly noble. He reprised his cool, unassuming warrior in many other films even if his character name changed, and John Belushi based his SNL samurai sketches on him. ...
Ran (War/Chaos, 1985): Kurosawa does King Lear, mixed in with some Japanese history, a new invented subplot and some of his own notions on loyalty. This one starts slowly but builds in power. Seriously, see this on a big screen if you can – the use of color and the scope of the first epic battle sequence and its aftermath are simply stunning. Several sequences and images are unforgettable, and Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) is one of the great screen villains. (Lady Macbeth ain't got nothing on her – watch that grasshopper! And don't forget the tale of the stone fox.) Kurosawa considered this one his masterpiece, but also noted that while it was the culmination of his life's work, it was not the conclusion. DVD notes – the Fox Lorber transfer is notoriously bad. The Masterworks version is much better, but Amazon reviewers rate the Criterion version (which I don't currently own) as the best. That DVD package also includes Chris Marker's documentary on the making of the film, AK, which is worth a look. ...
I deliberately included one of Kurosawa's contemporary-era films, Ikiru, in the discussion above. There are several others worth your time to discover. Check out the description of Dreams, one of his last films, at the same link as the above.
Toshiro Mifune, detail from the Yojimbo poster
If you watched Kurosawa films growing up — because, samurai! — you grew up loving them. I hope Tony Zhou's video essay helps you see what you missed before. You'll enjoy them that much more. It's a terrific examination of Kurosawa's visual mastery.
Thinking about the "Godfather" films in the spirit of "the one-dot theory of history"
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Can we imagine The Godfather without Brando? Or Coppola?
"History is the prediction of the present. Historians explain why things turned out the way they did. Since we already know the outcome, this might seem a simple matter of looking back and connecting the dots. But there is a problem: too many dots. Even the dots have dots. Predicting the present is nearly as hard as predicting the future."
And I wonder whether what Louis Menand has in this wonderful piece to say about the inherent difficulties of writing history also apply to fictional history (not to mention the history of fiction).
Anyway, it's interesting approaching, or should I say re-approaching, the Godfather films (or at least the two great ones, I and II) with Menand's mediation on history fresh in mind. You really need to experience for yourself the way he uses the "too many dots" image to explain why none of the many ways we've devised for looking at history prove "wholly persuasive."
Here's just a taste:
No historian lines up all the dots. Every work of history is a ridiculously selective selection from the universe of possible dots. What the historian is claiming is that these are the particular dots that lead us from there to here, or from time step 1 to time step 1.1. Lots of other stuff happened, the historian will agree. But, if these things hadn’t happened, then life as we know it wouldn’t be, well, as we know it.
This can be an existentially entertaining thought—that, but for some fluky past event, experience would be entirely, or at least interestingly, different. We tend to imagine our own lives that way, a story of lucky breaks, bullets dodged, roads diverged on a snowy evening, and the like. Speculating about sparks that failed to ignite versus sparks that did and contingencies that failed to materialize versus contingencies that did is one of the reasons people like to write history and like to read it. There is even, to appeal to this taste, the subgenre of counterfactual history, in which Napoleon conquers Russia, or the Beatles give “The Ed Sullivan Show” a pass.
The problem: just too many dots. Which perhaps explains the appeal of the the "single dot," or "the x that changed the world" form, where everything that followed is explained according to the single person or event or year championed by the explainer of the moment. It's a form that Menand suggests is not only the most enjoyable kind of history to read but probably the most enjoyable to write.
They try to make the course of human events turn on a single phenomenon or a single year. Recent works in the single-phenomenon category include books on bananas, fracking, cod (that’s correct, the fish), the Treaty of Versailles, pepper, the color mauve, and (hmm) the color indigo. (All right, who’s the baddest color?) In the single-year category, we have books on 33, 1492 (huh?), 1816 (long story involving a volcano), 1944, 1945, 1959 (even though, without going to Wikipedia, you probably can’t come up with two important things that happened in 1959), 1968, 1969, and 1989.
This is part of Menand's way of leading up to writing about W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began (California), "a worthy, informative, and sporting attempt to convince us that the world we live in was crucially shaped by things that happened in 1995" -- to which he adds parenthetically: "Campbell insists that there is a distinction between 'the x that changed the world' books and his own 'the year the future began' book, although it's hard to grasp."
"The book is not completely persuasive," Menand writes, "but that's not important. None of the 'x that changed the world' books are completely persuasive, for the reason that all dots have dots of their own." After all, "Whatever happened in 33 or 1959 or 1995 never would have happened unless certain things had happened in 32, 1958, and 1994. And so on, back into the protozoic slime. All points are turning points." Nevertheless, he argues, the valuable books of the single-dot genre are valuable because the make us look more closely at people, events, or whatever that we might not otherwise.
So how does this apply to the Godfather films? Well, only vaguely, since there are, after all, many fewer dots to connect in this species of history. Mostly it applies because this afternoon and evening I'm headed for screenings of both Godfather and Godfather II at the Museum of the Moving Image, in a series called See It Big, which in the case of these pictures I haven't in quite a while, and am really eager to. Only, to say that I haven't "seen them big" recently doesn't mean that I haven't seen them recently. In fact, I've never stopped watching them. I had them, and regularly watched them, on VHS and then on Laserdisk and now on Blu-ray -- and also the clever VHS Godfather Chronicles, which rearranged I and II in chronological format, gathering the "prequel" portions of II and placing them before I and gathering the "sequel" portions and placing them after.
For the record, I also have Godfather III on VHS, Laserdisk, and Blu-ray, and I'm here to tell you that I can actually watch the thing (though somehow I don't believe I've quite gotten around to watching the Blu-ray yet). As I've written here before, there are interesting things in it. But for our present purposes let's just say that in Godfather II Francis Ford Coppola made maybe the greatest sequel to anything ever, and then in Godfather III he didn't.
In case you hadn't detected it, I'm a little nervous. Am I possibly just a bit Godfather-ed out? I guess I'll find out.
Possibly by way of mental distraction, I found myself pondering a side question, which it occurred to me later is of the "single-dot" variety: Would the whole Godfather kaboodle have been what it was without Brando?
There is, of course, a vast literature about the Godfather films, which I've mostly tried to avoid dipping into. But I know enough to know that Paramount fought Coppola on almost all of his casting choices for I, generally preferring nice, safely bankable Hollywood types, and was prepared to dump him from the project over his fascination with Brando, of whom they were scared stiff, seeing him as a has-been who would make it impossible to get the picture made.
Honestly, I suppose there were any number of actors who could have made the part work. In much the same way that when Coppola went looking for an actor play the young Vito Corleone in Godfather II, with no "young Brando" available, he found Robert De Niro. There might even have been other actors who would have made the Godfather himself memorable. But, I'm thinking, not "Brando-memorable." And just think how much his presence saturates the Godfather films in which he didn't appear.
At some point in my idle speculations I found myself inadvertently bumping back into the question, what would the Godfather film(s) have been without Francis Ford Coppola? Certainly the first film would have been made, and with whatever version of a script Mario Puzo would have written for another director (I find it interesting that, for all my Godfather obsession, I've never been impelled to read Puzo himself), it probably would have been successful, maybe even very successful. But would it have achieved anything like the stature of the film Coppola made? And even if it had been successful enough to spawn a sequel, is it possible to imagine one of the quality of the one we got?
Which is all the more intriguing if we look at the rest of Coppola's filmography, where the closest thing there is to a point of interest is the mess that is Apocalypse Now. Hmm. What can I say except that in the grand scheme of thigns, when you make films of the quality of Godfather I and II, you really don't owe anyone any explanations or excuses.
And you know, it's been a long time since I looked at the Godfather Chronicles version. Yeah, I've only got it on VHS, but still . . . .
Movie Watch: A grand time with the Zellner Bros. and their latest film last night at the Museum of the Moving Image
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This trailer contains more information than I would have liked to have before seeing the Zellner Bros.' Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, but it may give you some flavor of the picture. Rinko Kikuchi, who plays Kumiko, is the biggest star -- internationally speaking -- the Zellners have worked with. Her credits include an Oscar nomination for Babel.)
by Ken
Sometimes you have to wonder how it is that people who've stumbled into an opportunity to yammer forth unto their fellow citizens don't seem to listen to their own yammering. Okay, what I'm really thinking of just now is "my own yammering."
Oh, sometimes I listen. As some of you are all too aware, lately I've found abundant opportunities to make and remake the point that I wish oh wish I could approach any movie or TV program I haven't seen before knowing as little as possible about it, the point being that we can re-watch the thing to our heart's content, especially now thanks to DVD, but we get only one crack at watching it for the first time. Last night I got to put this into practice, and it accounted for some of the splendidness of the time I had at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, which some of you already know is one of my favorite places on the planet.
The occasion was a special pre-release screening of Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, a film by the Zellner Bros. which has been shown to great enthusiasm at such places as Sundance (last year). I went into it knowing about as little about the film as a person could possibly hope to know. Let me embarrass myself by saying that I didn't even know who the Zellner Bros., David and Nathan, are, though I was guessing that they (a) are brothers and (b) make movies together.
Nathan and an uncharacteristically poker-
faced David Zellner, at Sundance
I expected, however, that I would come away richly illuminated, as I usually when I come away from MoMI events. Not only would I have sen the film, but I would have heard a discussion of it by the brothers themselves, who had that very morning abandoned the comfort of Austin to brave our latest snowstorm to talk about their creation. As a matter of fact, though, as David Z pointed out in a brief pre-screening greeting, though, our weather was totally appropriate to the film, and was it ever!
Let me say that Kumiko is a wonderful movie, with an outlook, and a look and sound, and a manner of story-telling unlike those of any picture I'm familiar with. It makes me curious about their other work, which will bring us eventually to the screw-up I alluded to at the top of this post, which we'll come back to. In the meantime, as MoMI's chief curator, David Schwartz, pointed out during the post-screening discussion, a bunch of the brothers' short films can be viewed on their website, zellnerbros.com, which also features this photo, taken when Nathan in particular, who's two years younger than David, had a lot more hair than he has now.
The Zellners have been making movies together since they were children, and while they both got themselves educated for real-world jobs (and yes, in cubicles, so that they had a personal-history stake in the office-centered early portion of the film -- and never mind that the office in question happens to be in Tokyo, for which they researched Japanese office life intensively), they continued making movies while they held down their day jobs.
After the screening, first David S talked to the brothers, and then he threw the discussion open to audience questions. As I've said here more than once, MoMI audiences ask the best questions, in terms of getting the subject(s) to talk about things we would have hated not to hear about. So in addition to filling us in on the origin and genesis of the project, they talked about all sorts of fascianting things about their work and this particular project. Well, mostly David Z talked, though Nathan piped in often enough, especially when the question was about the way the film's sounds were created and integrated, in collaboration with the Octopus Project. (We already knew that Nathan, in addition to production duties, is responsible for the sound plan. The scripts are written jointly, as they have been since the boys started making movies as children. David directs.) You only had to watch a few minutes of the film to grasp that the brothers don't think about movie sound the way most filmmakers do -- adding in music and effects in the later editing stages. They explained that they think of dialogue, sound effects, and music as all part of a total sound package, which they begin to imagine as they write the script and refine and solidify as they film.
As for the background of the project, here's how our lads explain it in the press kit. This is taken from the sheet of program notes that's always handed out at MoMI screenings. Let me stress that I never read the notes until after I've seen the picture, when I'm delighted to have them. You can make the decision for yourself.
In 2001, a story circulated online about a Japanese woman who left her Tokyo home for the frozen countryside of Minnesota, in search of the fictional buried money from the movie Fargo. It immediately captured our attention, the mysterious and vague details intriguing us all the more. Initially there was no more information available, and to satiate our curiosity, we began developing a story of what could lead someone into that scenario.
It brought to mind tales of Spanish explorers searching for gold, in particular the film Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Instead of a 16th century conquistador searching for El Dorado, it's a modern day Japanese woman looking for a bag of money in the snow. The idea that someone in the twenty-first century would cross the globe searching for a mythical treasure seemed strangely anachronistic, as if these sort of tragic, foolhardy quests just don't happen anymore. Sadly there are no more uncharted or unknown lands. In the age of globalization, social networking and satellite mapping, the world is no longer the mysterious place it once was.
Over time more details emerged online around the actual story, eventually debunking it as simply an urban legend. All of the sudden there were different versions of The Truth floating around. A Japanese woman did in fact venture into the Minnesota wilderness; though the treasure hunt, the obsessive quest spurred by a film, were all the stuff of fables, taking a life of its own via the telephone game. At first this discrepancy alarmed us, and then we realized it was the legend and the quest elements of the story that drew ourselves and others in to begin with. As with all folklore, this tale had its own sort of truth to it, though on more of a human level than factual. And that endeared us to it all the more.
Last night at MoMI, David Z stressed how much information-spreading has changed just since 2001, when it took a lot longer than it does now for additions and accretions to a story like this one to add and accrete. He also filled us in on some of the extremely strange history of the project over the dozen or so years between that initial inspiration and the making of the actual film.
Another questioner asked about the brothers' acting in their films, and David explained that yes, they usually do. They both have roles in Kumiko, which David confirmed they had indeed created for themselves. Beyond that, he said, well, it all depends on the needs of the project they're working on, according to which each of them may wind up with a larger or shorter role, or none at all. He stressed that they carefully respect their limitations as actors, but that after all they've been acting in movies since they were children making movies, when one of them would be acting while the other was filming. Back then, he said, they knew what acting is; what they still had to find out was what directing is.
He also explained that in casting they like to mix real actors and non-actors. We learned the more or less serendipitous path by which the internationally celebrated Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi became not just associated with but passionate about the project, and became the biggest star the brothers have worked with. (As it happened the vast time scale of the project worked to their mutual benefit in one way. When the brothers first met Rinko, they had to speak through an interpeter. By the time they actually started making the movie, four years later, she had become fluent in English, though you wouldn't guess it from the film.)
At the opposite scale of acting credentials, the older gentleman seen in the scene with Nathan Z of which there's the quickest hit at about 1:46 of the clip turns out to be the boys' grandfather! There's no question, David explained, of getting him to learn lines. They just clued him in to the situation and let it roll! David himself, by the way, has quite an important role in the film, and he does it so splendidly that, not realizing who it was while I watched (gimme a break; he's shaved off the moustache he has in the film and, I see, in all the other pictures of him), I made a mental note to be sure to find out who the actor was!
SO WHY WOULD I PAY $15 (THE MEMBERS' PRICE)
FOR THIS, KNOWING NOTHING ABOUT THE FILM?
Good question, and the answer is the aforementioned David Schwartz. whose judgment about movies I have come to not just value but cherish. In my experience at MoMI, when he schedules a movie, he knows what he's doing, and there's something worth seeing.
Movies make David S happy!
Which brings me back to the screw-up I mentioned at the top. Yes, I trusted David S's judgment, which I have touted here before on multiple occasions, to the tune of yet another $15, and that's a distinctly pricey tune for someone as cheap as me. What I didn't do, however, was take a closer look at the MoMI schedule to see whether this screening perhaps tied into any adjacent programming. (I might mention that the museum screens a lot of movies, and non-"event" movies are generally free with museum admission, meaning they're free to members.) I said earlier that on the basis of seeing Kumiko and getting acquainted with the Zellner Bros., I would love to see more of their work. Well, it turned out that this screening-and-event was -- you guessed it -- the climax of a retrospective of that work.
To make this still more embarrassing, I've done this before. Shortly before the commercial release of Darren Aronofsky's Noah, the museum announced a special free-for-members screening, which I naturally signed up for. Since I pay much less attention to the current movie scene than I once did, I'm embarrassed (again) to say that I didn't even know who Darren Aronofsky is. I had an extremely jolly time at the screening of Noah, and naturally one of the first things that popped into my head afterward was that now I was really curious about his other work. Imagine my chagrin to discover that I'd just missed a MoMI Aronofsky retrospective! (Some months later, though, the museum had another screening of Noah, so I saw it again, and appreciated even more the ingenuity with which it's put together.)
What can I say except that the museum screens so many movies (always with the best materials they can lay hands on), and my time is already overcommitted, and it's a schlepp for me getting out to MoMI and then home. Somehow, though, the trip home last night didn't seem all that arduous.
