Los Angeles Plays Itself – 2003, Thom Andersen

 

by Allan Fish

(USA 2003 170m) not on DVD

Call 555…

p/d/w  Thom Andersen  ph  Deborah Stratman  ed  Seung-HyunYoo

narrated by  Encke King

The wording of the title to Thom Andersen’s three hour visual doctorate thesis on his home town could act as its ultimate summarisation.  It’s Los Angeles, not LA.  There had been a film titled LA Plays Itself, of course; that infamous gay porn classic from 1972 which Andersen even includes and praises.  Yet Andersen spends some of his three hour address – actually spoken by Encke King – talking about how he hates the abbreviation and how Hollywood became complicit in the foreshortening of the name.  This attitude, pernickety in the extreme to outsiders, sums up Los Angeles’ curmudgeonly appeal.  It’s the prejudiced, jaundiced diatribe of a grumpy old man.  In some ways it’s reminiscent of Terence Davies’ later Of Time and the City, but twice as long and no less grouchy.

That in itself brings another thought, of Los Angeles as one of a series.  Say that the BFI commissioned, as they did the Century of Cinema series in 1995, a series of movie documentaries along the lines of Los Angeles, but with different locations.  Andersen talks of the difference between LA and New York, so New York’s an obvious one, with Marty Scorsese, but then how about London Plays Itself by Patrick Keiller, Paris Plays Itself by Godard or Rivette, Rome Plays Itself with Bertolucci, even Tehran Plays Itself with Mark Cousins?  Interesting concept, but one for another diatribe than this.

PAOLO SORRENTINO’S THE GREAT BEAUTY “My heart’s in the highlands, my heart is not here”

 © 2014 by James Clark

 What can we bring to an ambitious film masking its ambitions in many ways? This question becomes especially pressing in face of the ultra-sophistication inherent in an order of modern Italian cinema, generally perceived to be inexorably receding into oblivion. The peculiarities of such a dilemma might never have staged a counter-thrust without the deft cinematic archaeology of Paolo Sorrentino as disclosed in his film from 2013, The Great Beauty.

    It will take a while to lucidly get to the point of such a unique tangle; and as good a beginning as any would be a passage, near the work’s outset, where a celebrity journalist attends a display of site-specific performance art on the outskirts of Rome. Along with a few dozen middle-aged Gran Tourismo drivers and a clutch of academics having put through precious, runic (spring solstice?) paces their expensively educated young children, the writer, Jep, beholds a nude woman (with a hammer and sickle trim of her red-dyed pubic hair), her head covered by a veil, sprint headlong into an ancient stone pillar of the aqueduct defining the space, after which she lies on the ground, bleeding through that veil, and then gets back on her feet, announcing to the shaken audience, “I don’t love you!” But now having passed beyond that, and given her a couple of noncommittal claps of applause, Jep proceeds to interview her, the late sun having finally (iconically?) set. He interrupts the swarthy, bruised sensation of the moment, to protest her referring to herself in the third person, an inflating of her specifics in art-prissy terms of “The Talin Concept.” The unsmooth, rather rustic toiler, a far cry from Jep’s unmistakable urbanity, gallops into the infelicitous harangue, “I don’t need to read. I live on vibrations. The pattern of vibrations cannot be supported by the vulgarity of words.” When Jep registers his sense that that tangent is passé (“You can’t charm me with things like this…”), she retorts, “I’m starting to dislike this interview. You’re an ass!” (It may come about that she herself is one of a surprisingly viable herd of asses.) After arguing, the picture of reasonableness, “I want to know what a vibration is… Lives on vibrations, but doesn’t know what a vibration is…” Jep thinks to put her in her place by patronizingly informing her that he works for a journal that has “a core of cultivated readers” who are beyond being “taken as fools.” She backs down from this chastisement, quietly stating, “It’s a difficult journey for an artist…” But she signs off with the more energetic protest, “You’re an obsessive jerk!”

The Journey – 1987, Peter Watkins

by Allan Fish

(Canada/Sweden 1987 873m) DVD2 (France only)

To comment on the process of the film

p/d/w  Peter Watkins  ph/ed  various

Peter Watkins’ monumental study of life in the nuclear age had, for over 25 years, become a thing of myth.  Glimpsed as frequently as the village of Brigadoon, barely seen even when it was released.  It had been financed by various European organisations and Watkins intended it to be seen in schools, with each episode between 30 and 50 minutes, the length of a single class or period in a classroom.  After shooting for several years, over a hundred hours of footage were edited down to 19 episodes.  At its centre there was a summit between Ronald Reagan and Canadian leader Brian Mulroney, but also visits to Japan, Norway, Finland, West Germany, the US, Scotland (including the Isle of Lewis), Mozambique, Tahiti and the Soviet Union. 

Oscar Party, The Complete Hitchcock Festival and Classic 45 Band at the Whiskey Cafe on Monday Morning Diary (March 3)

99 year-old ‘Saboteur’ actor Norman Lloyd speaking to Film Forum audience via Skype from Los Angeles

Classic 45 band at Whiskey Cafe in Lyndhurst

by Sam Juliano

Incredibly, more of the white stuff is headed our way tonight, though forecast updates are now painting a much better picture than was was originally speculated.  (In the end we got nothing, praise the Lord!) The New York City area is now facing 2 to 4 inches overnight, with an expected starting time of around 8 P.M.  The way it stands now I’d be very surprised if any of local schools were to be affected, though as always the proof will be in the pudding.  In any case our annual Oscar party is being held at the Tiger Hose Fire House -I am actually writing this MMD just two hours before the gathering commences- where we are expected in the neighborhood of around 35 people.  The expected snowfall will probably impact the attendance of several people who must travel a long way to get here.  The party will be catered by a fantastic local Italian market – Dante’s, which will provide two robust six-foot heroes with three sections (fresh roast beef; turkey and cheese; and an Italian combination) and trays of meatballs, chicken parmigiana, eggplant parmigiana, sausage and peppers, cavatelli and broccoli and a three-color arugula salad, and beer, soda, coffee and desert.  As always we will be conducting our annual Oscar pool, where willing participants will choose winners from every one of the 24 categories.

Sam, Dennis, Pierre de Plume and Sammy give Oscar predictions: A video by Melanie Juliano

Sam, Dennis, Pierre de Plume, and Sammy give their predictions for the 2014 Oscars.

Note:  Pierre de Plume appears at the 1:05 (one hour and five minute) mark.

Sachin Gandhi reports on ‘Sundance Film Festival’

by Sachin Gandhi

2014 marked the 30th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival, a festival that has been the launching pad for many exciting cinematic voices over the years. The festival’s importance in discovering new directors was nicely highlighted by the trailer shown before all the films which gave a glimpse of some of the stellar titles that played at the festival. The first Sundance was held in 1985 but it is acknowledged that the festival shot into the limelight in 1989 with Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotapes which changed the perception of the festival. Besides being the launching pad for Soderbergh, Sundance ushered the discovery of many other American directors including Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, 1992), Kevin Smith (Clerks, 1994), Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass, 1994), Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight, 1996) and Darren Aronofsky (Pi, 1998). All of these directors, plus many more, have made the jump from Independent to Commercial cinema thanks to their discovery at Sundance. Even James Wan’s Saw premiered at Sundance before it transformed into a multiplex franchise.

The success of certain Sundance films or genre means the media attention seems to gravitate towards a similar subset of the festival’s output. One hears plenty about how a certain work is a “Sundance film”, words which paint the festival in a single light. In recent years, that term has been associated with Little Miss Sunshine or Sunshine Cleaning, two films that seem to embody the kind of films that Sundance loves. But these films are not representative of the entire body of carefully programmed films that make up the Sundance film festival. Over the years, documentaries and a growing list of foreign films have premiered at the festival. Although, one would not know that from the media coverage. As this year showed, the films at Sundance represented a multi-tiered global outlook, not only in terms of the foreign film selections but the topics covered in many American films as well. Even though many films were American productions, they were shot in foreign locations or featured topics that were universal in theme. And as it turned out, through a series of intriguing choices, I ended up with many films which were tied together despite coming from different parts of the world. The 13 films I saw can be grouped together in the following 5 categories.

Panel Discussion on books at Simmons College in Boston, Omar and The Complete Hitchcock Festival on Monday Morning Diary (February 24)

Sam with Horn Book editor-in-chief Roger Sutton after panel discussion at Simmons College in Boston on Thursday, Feb. 20.

by Sam Juliano

The past week’s spotlight event was staged on the fifth floor penthouse of the management building at Simmons College in Boston on The Fenway, just a stone’s throw away from the famed baseball stadium.  Or maybe just a bit further than that.  The 90 minute panel discussion “Why did that book win?” was moderated by longtime Horn Book editor-in-chief Roger Sutton.  His co-panelists included executive editor Martha Parravano, Lesley University children’s literature professor Julie Roach and Kirkus Reviews book critic Vicky Smith, all of whom vigorously promoted a spirited discussion centering around the recent awards given out by the American Library Association.  Ms. Roach expressed gleeful surprise that children’s author extraordinaire Kate Di Camillo’s profusely illustrated Flora & Ulysses won the Newbery Medal despite the general aversion to books that veer away from the generally all-prose format.  A subsequent question from the audience later on addressed the confusion that sometimes emanates from the indecision of whether to honor words or pictures in a book that is seemingly divided equally, as was the case with the Caldecott Honor book Bill Peet: An Autobiography in 1990.  Mr. Sutton pointed to a similar perception in 2008 when Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret won the Caldecott Medal despite the marked division of prose and pictures.

While Ms. Smith was delighted with Brian Floca’s  Caldecott Medal triumph for Locomotive (“the author is no longer a bridesmaid”) there was some disappointment with some of the omissions, a sentiment that prompted Sutton to quip that the title of the discussion should have more in tune with “why certain book’s didn’t win?”  Sutton bemoaned the failure of Kirkpatrick Hill’s Bo at Ballard Creek to achieve recognition in the awards process, while Ms. Perravano was amazed and disappointed that Cynthia Kadohata and Julia Kuo’s National Book Award winner The Thing About Luck didn’t figure in the final Newbery line-up.  The panel addressed the matter of certain books that win the subsidiary awards (Pura Belpre, Coretta Scott King) but fail to win Caldecott or Newbery mention because the perception is that they have their own category.  This has always been the mind-set of the Oscars, where a nomination or win in the animated film and/or foreign language category always always results in being passed over in the major categories.  One spirited questioner talked about the specific perceptions and expectations of certain books aimed at a minority audience, and how those perceptions might be different among a more general reading audience.  Another commenter, an artist and designer, appeared to intimate that some of the committee members should have a more artistic background, and that such a reform would result in different books winning the awards.  This was not a position that others in the group (myself included) shared, and the panel and another commenter with an artistic background argued against such a narrow qualification.