Author Archive
by Dan Callahan on November 29th, 2011 at 11:20 pm in Film
It didn't happen all at once. Michael Fassbender snuck up on me. In Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), the story of Irish freedom fighter Bobby Sands, Fassbender was essential to the narrative, but the film is shot in such a way that it keeps you at a distance from him. That's a movie where the emphasis is not on his face but on his tormented body being dragged and tossed around by prison officials in the same curiously voluptuous fashion that marked Brad Davis's semi-porny imprisonment in Midnight Express (1978). In 2009, Fassbender played a jaunty film critic in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, and again, he wasn't allowed to dominate that movie, though he did show flashes of wit. It was only when I saw Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, made that same year, that I was suddenly thunderstruck by this actor, and it happened in his very first scene.
To read the rest of the article at Press Play, click here.
Tags: Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank, Hunger, Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender, Midnight Express, Press Play, Quentin Tarantino, Shame, Steve McQueen
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by Dan Callahan on October 19th, 2011 at 11:15 pm in Film
Let's conduct a thought experiment: what do you hear when you see the name Bernard Herrmann? The low, sleeping-beast woodwinds that signal the eminent death of Charles Foster Kane? The Irish horn-fiddle-cymbal flourishes that slice through The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)? The otherworldly, quivering theremin that hovers over The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)? You might need to struggle to piece together more than bits of those scores, but I'm guessing that you could probably notate almost all of Herrmann's black-and-white strings for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) or the sprightly anxiety of his score for North by Northwest (1959). Even the disturbingly sexy opening theme of Marnie (1964), with its straight-ahead male horn thrust (Yes, Marnie, yes!) and its ascending-descending female squeal of strings (No, Mark, no!).
The romantic maximalism of Herrmann's style was too grand for realist dramas or comedies. He is most at home in subjective psychological states and non-naturalistic dreamscapes where he liked to find a certain groove or melody or rhythm, repeat it, then repeat it with a slight variation. Herrmann had almost no sense of humor. "It was ridiculous!" Herrmann cried when his composer friend Elmer Bernstein spoke admiringly of Richard Rodney Bennett's cheerful, stately train departure theme for Murder on the Orient Express (1974). "That train was a train of death!" As Bernstein explained, "He was very intense. That's the way he saw things. If he would have done it, it would have been a train of death."
To read the rest of the article at Alt Screen, click here.
Tags: Alt Screen, Bernard Herrmann, Film Forum
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by Dan Callahan on September 16th, 2011 at 8:52 am in Film
Pretty boys in the 1990s usually wore bulky corduroy jackets and tight hats too small to fit their heads, and that's exactly what Mike (River Phoenix) is sporting when we first see him on the road in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991). Phoenix's performance as Mike–sweetly lost, feral, "who me?" sexy–paves the way for Jared Leto's Jordan Catalano, for grunge and Kurt Cobain, and for the collected works of Ethan Hawke. Like many '90s pretty boys, Mike is a connoisseur of his own damaged feelings. He makes self-destruction look fatally appealing and glamorous. Phoenix was compared to James Dean in his own short life and career, and that's because he had "love me!" pleas down to a science on screen and a similar unhinged physicality that is sometimes closer to the Polish street theater ravings proscribed by acting theoretician Jerzy Grotowski than Dean's more contained Actors Studio contortions.
A male prostitute who suffers from narcolepsy, Mike is forever getting stressed out and falling into sleep. On an Idaho highway, he touches his face in a self-conscious way, and we see his dirty-fingernailed hands start to quiver and his eyes start to shut as narcolepsy takes him and lays him out stiff on the pavement. Cut to time-lapse photographs of clouds scudding swiftly across infinite horizons.
To read the rest of the article at Alt Screen, click here.
Tags: Alt Screen, Ethan Hawke, Gus Van Sant, James Dean, Jared Leto, Jerzy Grotowski, Jordan Catalano, Kurt Cobain, My Own Private Idaho, River Phoenix
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by Dan Callahan on July 26th, 2011 at 8:50 pm in Film
Judy Garland was a few hundred thousand dollars in debt. It was the early 1960s, and she was still paying off taxes from the early 1950s. Enter wily David Begelman, a talent manager who brokered a deal with CBS for Garland to host a weekly television show and draw a weekly television paycheck, allowing the always-troubled, often performance-averse singer to pay down her debts and gain a measure of financial security. Judy was ready for some financial security, and she pulled herself together and buckled down to make it work. Many of her performances on the series qualify as personal-best renditions of the classics she's still known for. The Judy Garland Show was the actress' final public flowering, a last-gasp, Camelot-era incarnation that ended soon after Kennedy was shot (right after his assassination, Garland broadcast "Battle Hymn of the Republic" across the nation's airwaves).
To read the rest of the article at Alt Screen, click here.
Tags: Alt Screen, Battle Hymn of the Republic, David Begelman, Judy Garland, The Judy Garland Show
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A lady recently called up Photofest, the company that licenses film stills, to ask for photos of Marilyn Monroe, and the rep asked this lady if she wanted photos of Monroe from any particular movie. "Oh?" the lady replied. "She made movies?"
The rep was shocked, but if Marilyn Monroe is better known today than classic movie stars like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, it's not because everybody is revisiting her films. Still photos of Marilyn have become iconic fixtures of dorm-room walls, retro-diner displays and chintzy t-shirts. Last week I was walking by a framed-photo table on 42nd Street in Manhattan and noticed a grotesque hologram drawing of Monroe set up in such a way that her clothes magically disappeared as you passed. She posed for nude photos herself to pay the rent in the late '40s, of course, and adoring Hugh Hefner has even bought the plot next to Monroe's grave, but I doubt Monroe would have wanted to spend all eternity next to the founder of Playboy magazine. Wouldn't she have preferred some sweet, bespectacled intellectual or scientific genius? Surely such geniuses might be found, for everybody seems to have a thing for Marilyn Monroe. The urge to sentimentalize her has become chronic.
According to IMDb, there are 69 print biographies available on Monroe, which sounds like a dirty Billy Wilder joke meant to test the inflexibility of her comic obliviousness. Anyone with any interest in Monroe has dipped into some of these books, which go from the most salacious gossip compendiums like Marilyn Monroe Confidential to such self-consciously literary meditations as Norman Mailer's Marilyn and Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, and I have to say that almost every one of these bios that I've encountered manages to insult Monroe in a way that kindles protective urges. I'm not a particular Monroe fan, but even I wanted to take that peek-a-boo hologram on 42nd street and hide it somewhere, or get a Joe DiMaggio type to come smash it up. In her films, Monroe sometimes seems like a toddler who has grown into a lascivious dirty-drawing body, and our continuing national obsession with her says a lot about America's vexed relationship to sex and to the idea of eternal childhood. Telling YouTube comment from "someguynamedaaron," below a clip of Monroe from The Seven Year Itch (1955): "she seems so innocent which makes her so FUCKING HOTT!"
To read the rest of the article at Alt Screen, click here.
Tags: Alt Screen, BAMcinématek, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Billy Wilder, Blonde, IMDB, Joe DiMaggio, Joyce Carol Oates, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn, Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer, Photofest, Playboy, The Seven Year Itch
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by Dan Callahan on May 22nd, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life never stops moving forward. It begins with a Bible quote and ends with a transcendental meeting of found souls on a beach, and it has the structure of a child's memories; it gathers in fragments, dreams, fancies, associations, glances, whispers, impressions. Most of it takes place in a small Texas town in the 1950s, and at a certain point, we see a truck that says "Waco, Texas," which is Malick's own hometown. We have no way of knowing just how personal this clearly personal film is, but there can be no question from what's on screen that Malick is working from his own most intimate knowledge of what childhood felt like. Every short shot preserves a sense of mystery, of expectancy, so that we're likely to feel like a character in a Virginia Woolf novel crying out, "Wait! Stop!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Brad Pitt, Hunter McCracken, Jessica Chastain, Laramie Eppler, Michelangelo Antonioni, Monica Vitti, Sean Penn, Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
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by Dan Callahan on May 4th, 2011 at 9:45 am in Film
A long-time editor, first for William Wyler and then for Norman Jewison, Hal Ashby was nearly forty when Jewison produced his directorial debut, The Landlord (1970), and while the visual tact of Wyler and the social consciousness of Jewison never left him, Ashby brought to his own productions a distinctive flavor that was his alone. He was such a dedicated pot smoker that his friends sometimes called him "Hashby," and he would direct his films with a kind of advanced on-set stoner passivity, his touch so light that it often seemed like benign neglect. But it was Hashby's ability to recede into the background that enabled some very talented performers to unleash their wildest instincts, and it was Hashby's ever-ready and undemanding affection–the fuzzy-soft, bleary-eyed bemusement with which he regarded people–that gave his films their distinctive vibe, that imbued his characters with something like a state of grace.
To read the rest of the article at Alt Screen, click here.
Tags: Alt Screen, BAMcinématek, Hal Ashby, Norman Jewison, The Landlord, William Wyler
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by Dan Callahan on March 23rd, 2011 at 10:43 pm in Film
It seems like Elizabeth Taylor had been ill or at least in fragile health for at least fifty years, when she won her first Academy Award in 1960 as a call girl in Butterfield 8, a movie she hated. After her name was called, Taylor ascended the Oscar podium and thanked everyone in her most whispery voice; she had just undergone a tracheotomy. "When Elizabeth Taylor got a hole in her throat, I canceled my plane," said Shirley MacLaine, who until Taylor's illness had been an Oscar favorite for her role in The Apartment. 1960 was a kind of hinge for Taylor, when the most beautiful woman in movies began to morph into the most talked-about and most scandalous woman of her time, eating, drinking, marrying, indulging, her violet eyes a symbol for the most unrepentant and innocently childlike greed. I gasped when I read that she had died this morning; it didn't seem like death was ever a real possibility for her. Taylor was always too busy not just living but living it up; even confined to her bed, she still managed to keep our attention on Twitter.
To read the rest of the article at the L Magazine, click here.
Tags: Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P., The L Magazine
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by Dan Callahan on March 5th, 2011 at 9:19 am in Film
Catherine Deneuve is a bit like Garbo in that we as an audience have always projected our own fantasies onto her phenomenal beauty; like Garbo, so much of Deneuve's beauty is in the allure of her heavy eyelids and in the space between those lids and her arched eyebrows. Unlike Garbo, Deneuve is a blond, the ultimate blond, in fact, and she has maintained that perilous status long past the age Garbo retired and went into semi-hiding to preserve her legend. After seeing Luis Buñuel's Tristana (1970), one of the movies playing in BAM's month-long Deneuve retrospective, that ultimate blond enthusiast, Alfred Hitchcock, marveled to Buñuel at a Hollywood party about the last third of the film, where Deneuve's former innocent in pigtails has been transformed into a haughty woman whose artificial leg only adds to her sex appeal. "Tristana's false leg," Hitchcock kept murmuring to Buñuel, at a loss for words at the fetishistic power of this image. Continue Reading »
Tags: BAM Rose Cinemas, Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve, Donkey Skin, Françoise Dorléac, Jacques Demy, Luis Bu, Potiche, Repulsion, Roman Polanski, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Tristana
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by Dan Callahan on February 23rd, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Heartbeats opens Friday, February 24th at the IFC Center in Manhattan.]
When I first saw Xavier Dolan in his debut film as a director, I Killed My Mother (2009), I immediately thought that he looked like a Jean Cocteau drawing, with his impertinent nose, his big, swirly ears and the curly hair that fell down over his forehead. In that movie, which he wrote, directed, and acted in at the age of 19, the Quebec-raised Dolan seemed a kind of cinematic Raymond Radiguet, who was Cocteau's young lover and wrote a major novel, The Devil in the Flesh, before his death at age 20. Many critics saw Dolan's visual influences as a director, the borrowings from Wong Kar-Wai and Jean-Luc Godard, but his rude sensibility as a writer and as a squirrelly, antic performer are all his own. Dolan deals directly with the large feelings of youth; it's clear that he works mainly by instinct, and I hope he's able to keep throwing out movies fast.
I Killed My Mother and Dolan's second film, Heartbeats, seem to me like breaths of cold fresh air after being trapped last year in stuffy, darkened rooms, cinematically speaking. They take great pleasure in things like color, shape, and form, and their effect can be extraordinarily sensual, as in the I Killed My Mother scene where Dolan and his boyfriend do some Jackson Pollack drip painting and then make love on the floor all covered in paint. Dolan shoots the lovemaking in slow-motion fragments, and he intensifies this effect throughout Heartbeats, where nearly half the film takes place in slow motion imagery set to lush music. Some might find all this slow motion exasperating, but why not use the camera to slow life down in order to really look at it? Isn't that what most romantics would like to do? In Heartbeats, Francis (Dolan) and Marie (the extremely striking Monia Chokri) are both in love with Nicolas (Niels Schneider), and they always seems to be moving toward him slowly, trapped by their feelings but trying not to show their obvious discomfort in his presence. Continue Reading »
Tags: Anne Dorval, Audrey Hepburn, Heartbeats, I Killed My Mother, Jean Cocteau, Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider, The White Paper, Xavier Dolan
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by Dan Callahan on February 21st, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Public Speaking opens on Wednesday, February 23rd at Film Forum in Manhattan.]
At first glance, Martin Scorsese seems like an odd choice to do an interview movie with Fran Lebowitz, a Brooks Brothers-wearing gadfly and gladiatorial talker famous for two collections of humor essays, Metropolitan Life (1974) and Social Studies (1981), and for her subsequent three decades of silence in print, which she attributes to sloth; her writer's block is proverbial, and it seemed to be lying in wait for her even in the pithy articles that she did manage to write. Wes Anderson was originally set to direct a Lebowitz movie, but when his scheduling didn't allow this, Scorsese took it on, and the result is Public Speaking, a film that lets Lebowitz hold forth on most of her expected subjects, regaling her director and his crew from her table at the Waverly Inn, a restaurant and semi-private club run by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who initiated this project. Lebowitz has always made it her business to make friends in high places, and she has made her living through no-doubt exhausting lectures at colleges but also as a kind of court jester (this is Edmund White's phrase, which he immediately took back as too mean in one of his memoirs) to the rich. Continue Reading »
Tags: Film Forum, Fran Lebowitz, Joan Rivers, Martin Scorsese, Public Speaking
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by Dan Callahan on February 17th, 2011 at 9:04 pm in Film
[This is a contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathan.]
When we think of classic film noir, it is in black and white; there are dark shadows, darker voice-overs and deadpan women in tight sweaters leading men to their doom. Sex is underneath practically everything, and it takes place mostly off-camera. I'm not sure when the term "neo-noir" was coined, but the real start of this modern noir seems to me to be Body Heat (1981), which is an "adult" movie that I watched over and over again as a teenager, internalizing its sweaty atmosphere and its panty-discarding, shuddery sex, but when I tried to watch that movie again recently on television, it didn't hold up for me at all. I was surprised by its slow place and too-somber attitude; all of its sex scenes had been parodied so often that they didn't have heat anymore, only "heat." Thinking of other neo-noirs, I was struck by how often sex plays a role yet seldom gets much of a work-out on screen, and if it does, as in Basic Instinct (1992), there is a coldness about the "heat," as if everyone involved knows how easily a big "sex scene" can seem ridiculous. This is a problem that the makers of classic noir didn't have to deal with. Continue Reading »
Tags: After Dark My Sweet, Basic Instinct, Blog-a-Thon, Body Heat, Film Noir Blogathon, IFC Channel, Jason Patric, Rachel Ward, The Grifters
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by Dan Callahan on February 5th, 2011 at 12:18 pm in Film
There was a line all the way down Second Street off Second Avenue in Manhattan last night; film fans were waiting in the cold to see John Waters present one of his favorite movies, the Ann-Margret vehicle Kitten with a Whip (1964), as a special event to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the venerable Anthology Film Archives. Waters was charmingly introduced by the mighty founder of Anthology, Jonas Mekas, who did a kind of Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda (1952) spiel: "I showed John's first big movie...here!" Mekas said, in his halting Lithuanian accent. "It was Pink...Flamingos! And it was...disgusting! But you knew...you must watch...this disgusting...film!" At just the right moment, Mekas cut off his musings and introduced Waters himself to the packed house; nattily attired in a suit with a yellow scarf, Waters gushed about the merits of Kitten with a Whip, which he first saw as a teenager with his longtime star and friend Divine. Continue Reading »
Tags: Ann-Margret, Anthology Film Archives, John Forsythe, John Waters, Kitten with a Whip
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by Dan Callahan on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:17 am in Film
On Wednesday, January 26th at 8pm, at Participant Inc. (253 East Houston St.), the writer and curator Bradford Nordeen has programmed an evening of Curtis Harrington films for the new monthly screening series Dirty Looks, starting with two of the director's experimental shorts, Fragment of Seeking (1946) and On the Edge (1949), and ending with "Tracy" (1983), a Harrington-directed episode of the TV soap Dynasty. Harrington, who assisted Kenneth Anger on some of his early films, made his first independent feature in 1961, Night Tide, which starred a young Dennis Hopper. He fell in with the Roger Corman crowd and directed some films for Corman, then found his niche as the director of horror-inflected melodramas which usually starred blowsy ladies of a certain age like Shelley Winters and Ann Sothern. In the 1980s, Harrington started directing for episodic television; he died in 2007. I recently spoke with Nordeen about his Harrington program and why this director remains such an intriguing cult figure. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bradford Nordeen, Curtis Harrington, Dennis Hopper, Dirty Looks, Dynasty, Fragment of Seeking, Night Tide, On the Edge, Participant Inc., Roger Corman, Tracy
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by Dan Callahan on December 17th, 2010 at 12:17 pm in Film
There were several hundred movies released in New York in 2010, but at the end of the year, critics and journalists and members of film unions receive around thirty or so screeners that represent "the best" of the year, or the end of the year, or the films that have some kind of money behind them and might have a chance of winning something or other. I never wanted to write one of those pieces that begin, "2010 was the year of the underdog," or "2010 was all about chairs," etc., but I have some specific problems with the movies that are rising to the top for awards nominations, and I think the problems I have might be germane to a more general discussion of what's wrong with our movies at this point in time. And by "our" movies, I mean mainly American films produced by some "independent" branch of a big studio. Continue Reading »
Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Black Swan, Claire Denis, Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, White Material
28 Comments »
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