Author: Jandy Page 85 of 145

New Hollywood: The Long Goodbye (1973)

On September 9, 2010

[Rating:4.5/5]

originally posted on Row Three as part of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls marathon.

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was not on my original watch list for this marathon for a couple of reasons – I’d already seen it years ago in a college film criticism class, I already had a bunch of Altman films on the list and I wanted to diversify a little bit, and I didn’t particularly like it the first time around and wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit it, even though I suspected I would appreciate it a lot more if I did. But after I named Altman my favorite director of the marathon so far, multiple people recommended I give this film another look, and then it happened to be playing at a local rep cinema, and I figured it was a sign that it was time to rewatch Altman’s nearly revisionist version of Raymond Chandler’s 1940s crime novel. And I’m so glad I did.

I wrote recently about how much I love The Big Sleep, and I think my original distaste for The Long Goodbye was merely an inability to envision any other version of Philip Marlowe than Bogart’s, or any other take on Chandler than a straight-up noir detective film. But the brilliance of The Long Goodbye is precisely in how it takes the Marlowe character and the detective story and drops it into the extremely different milieu of 1970s Los Angeles, turning it into an ironic, knowing version of the very cinema that took Chandler straight in the 1940s.

Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe is a mumbling, ambling fellow who’s smarter than most everyone around him, but aloof enough not to bother pointing it out, except barely under his breath in a kind of on-going ironic mutter that feels more like an interior monologue than actual speech. He’s bemused at the spacey Yoga-practicing girls in the apartment across the way, has little use for the police, and spends a great deal of time trying to please his cat. The cat is something of a substitute for human engagement; his general response to any human interaction is “it’s okay with me,” a detached statement of passive affability and implicit refusal to get personally involved.

When a friend asks him for a ride to Mexico, he agrees with little hesitation, little realizing (or perhaps just little caring) that this action would embroil him in the case surrounding the death of the friend’s wife. The police think his friend killed her, but Marlowe won’t believe it, and the rest of the film balances his casual attempts to clear his friend and his work on a seemingly unrelated case for a woman searching for her alcoholic husband. The plot gets considerably more complicated, but through it all, Marlowe maintains his sardonic “it’s okay with me” attitude, allowing himself to drift where events push him and be held static by anything that shows any initiative (note that every animal in the film basically holds him captive until someone else intervenes).

It’s an interesting approach to a character who is often quite active in 1940s films. (They may be world-weary, but still don’t rest in their quest for the truth; this Marlowe is world-bemused and takes plenty of time to follow other pursuits, treating everything with a bit of a smirk.) This isn’t to say he doesn’t ever do anything – he does his job, he circumvents opposition when he needs to, he refuses to be browbeating by the police, he continues to check in on his client even after the immediate case is complete, etc., but he does so in such a lackadaisical fashion that he almost seems to be doing it because he doesn’t have anything better to do. Yet when it comes down to it in the final few minutes of the film, as he uncovers the truth, his “it’s okay with me” changes to “nobody cares but me.” This Marlowe is a fascinating mixture of detachment and engagement, yet his shifts between the two feel organic, never forced.

Yet though The Long Goodbye is a clear departure from the characterization and style of 1940s hard-boiled detective films, it knows them all. Various scenes pretty clearly evoke the noir of the 1940s-1950s, from the crime noir of The Big Heat and Kiss Me Deadly to the Hollywood melodrama of In a Lonely Place and A Star is Born. Casting Sterling Hayden, dependable lead of many classic noir films, in an important role is no accident, either, nor is the gatekeeper who impersonates classic stars like Jimmy Stewart and Barbara Stanwyck. This being the ’70s, there are also signs of European influence – at least I thought of Pierrot le fou when Marlowe smeared paint over his face in passive rebellion against police authority, and the ending is a pretty clear reference to the enigmatic final scene of The Third Man.

The Long Goodbye is a perfect example of a film very much of its time that both uses and plays against expectations based on previous cinematic tropes. It’s also a very intricate mystery with a good bit of enjoyable humor, though it’s not very suspenseful, largely because the Marlowe character is so detached throughout much of the film. This is part of why it didn’t work for me when I was younger, and I’m sure a good deal of why I enjoyed it more now is my greater knowledge of film history, but the film doesn’t really depend on that. It does depend on coming to it with an open mind and a willingness to buck expectations of detectives on film. Really, the rest of the film plays it pretty straight; it’s the unusual way Marlowe is portrayed that gives it a wild card feeling. It’s also very nicely shot, with a few virtuoso scenes (many of them at the beach house, using windows and reflections to get compositional effect) that will stick in your mind visually for quite a while. I’m really glad I gave the film another chance; it’s jumped right up there with Altman’s other films as one of my favorites in this series.

Short Cuts: Gene Deitch Animation

By Jandy

On September 6, 2010

In Film

Originally posted on Row Three.

Los Angeles’ fabulous repertory company Cinefamily shows an animated series every month hosted by Cartoon Brew‘s Jerry Beck. It’s always a great program, but a recent program focusing on the work of animator Gene Deitch is easily the most impressive of all the ones I’ve been to, despite the fact that I was not familiar with Deitch’s work beforehand. Deitch started off as an animator with UPA in the 1950s, then moved to Fox’s Terrytunes, with stints doing Tom & Jerry, Popeye, and Krazy Kat as well, before finally taking an opportunity to head an animation studio in Prague (where he still lives and works). Quite a varied and unusual career, held together by his unique eye and constant quest for new visual styles and innovative ways to use the medium. Deitch himself was here for the program, talking with Jerry about his career and his films, which was pretty special as he’s rarely back in the United States anymore. And of all the filmmakers who I’ve seen at Cinefamily screenings, he was probably the most engaging, with the most fascinating stories to tell.

But great stories are even better when the films they support are good, and I was quite simply blown away by the quality and creativity of these films, especially considering he was working with MGM and Fox, who are not as well known for pushing the envelope as UPA and Warner Bros. Deitch pushed it anyway, using a very angular, minimalist visual style as well as a highly abstract sense of story and narrative.

Watch what he does with Tom and Jerry here, taking two familiar characters and putting them in a very self-aware, meta-narrative story.

But more of the shorts we saw were original characters, like Flebus, a cartoon that was written and begun by Ernest Pintoff but completed by Gene Deitch, who was also the supervising director.

Or characters from books, like little Munro, who was drafted into the army at the age of four and had a Yossarian-esque odyssey trying to convince the higher-ups that their paperwork was in error.

There’s a wonderful simplicity to these stories – a walking box who just wants to be friends, a little boy who runs head-on into bureaucracy – but they’re both set apart by the uncharacteristically world-weary narration and the unusual animation style. Everyone raves, and rightly so, about the voice work that Mel Blanc did on Looney Tunes, but this is an almost wholly opposite strain of voice acting here that provides a wonderful counterpoint to what was going on over at Warners. It’s a bit more cynical, a bit harder-edged, and a bit more grounded in some ways. (Flebus is voiced by Allen Swift, Munro by Howard Morris.)

After moving to Prague (motivated in part by the promise of financing for Munro, which he obviously got – and the film won an Academy Award soon after), Deitch oversaw a bunch of Czech animators, who were working on animating children’s books. If you’ve seen Czech stop-motion animation, you’ll know how creative and off-beat their style is, and Czech hand-drawn animation is no different. Here’s a very strange short called Giants that was released in Czechoslovakia in 1968 – although Deitch originally meant it to be about Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it was immediately interpreted as a political statement on US/Russia relations, which fit rather well with events in Prague in 1968. I find it a little off-putting, personally, but it is….interesting. Yeah, let’s go with that. YouTube only has the Czech language version, unfortunately.

Here’s The Three Robbers, an example of the children’s book adaptations Deitch oversaw; in this case, he also provided the voiceover and all the sound effects, which makes for a unique experience. I love the abstractness of the animation here, how the robbers’ coats become darkness, and so on.

They ended the show with this short, The Juggler of Our Lady, even though it comes from earlier in Deitch’s career, back when he was with Terrytunes in the early 1960s, and fittingly so – it’s simply breathtaking.

Terrytunes has a reputation for being a little less willing to think outside the box than some of the other studios, for playing it safe, and sticking with formula. That’s surely not the case here, as Deitch and Co. take an existing picture book and stay true to the original minimalist, parchment-looking drawing style. He said he was fascinated by the idea of having this huge wide screen (CinemaScope had just been introduced) and having just little scribbles on it. The amount of negative space here is astounding, and used astoundingly well. It doesn’t show up as well in this version, which is not the CinemaScope version, but shown in the theatre in 35mm CinemaScope? Amazing. Not to mention the gorgeous score, which is also highly unusual for the time period.

He also had some interesting things to say about CinemaScope and how restrictive it actually was, especially on animation. With a nearly square screen, you could use it all and do interesting effects like spins that you couldn’t easily do with a physical camera. With CinemaScope, you couldn’t do those anymore, because the width being so much greater than the height, you couldn’t change orientation without losing a lot of the image – it restricted animation to be more like what you could in live-action. Also interesting was that for cartoons especially, you still had to make them so they looked good in non-CinemaScope theatres and on TV, so you basically had to compose everything for three different ratios (that’s presumably why the non-CinemaScope version of The Juggler of Our Lady is the one that’s prevalent on YouTube).

In addition to the cartoons above, we saw an entry in the Nudnik series, a character original to Deitch. The one we saw, which I think was Here’s Nudnik, I was unable to find on YouTube, but here is a sampling of the ones that are. We also saw an early Howdy Doody cartoon he did that never aired because he and his crew (who were young and rebellious at the time) refused to follow the house style of the show, and also a bit of “Tom Terrific,” a cartoon that aired as part of the Captain Kangaroo show. I quite liked Tom Terrific, which puts simple line drawings to really imaginative use, but again couldn’t find the one we watched. Here’s a little snippet of the opening, but most of the videos on YouTube have embedding disabled, so you’ll have to go there to see more.

All in all, it was a fascinating program with Deitch, and I’m very grateful to have been introduced to his work. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen any of it before, but be sure I’ll look for more of it now. Some of these things are difficult to find outside of YouTube bootlegs; it would be great if some of this stuff, especially the more obscure things like Tom Terrific, could find its way into DVD collections at some point. I’d eat it up.

Great Scenes: The Big Sleep

By Jandy

On August 31, 2010

In Film

Originally posted on Row Three.

There’s pretty much nothing I don’t love about Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep – Bogart’s world-weary but somehow still idealistic private eye Philip Marlowe, the chemistry between him and Lauren Bacall (now an off-screen couple starring in their second film together), the cast of colorful supporting characters like Martha Vickers as Bacall’s crazy sister, the witty and caustic script, the florid dialogue, yes, even the fact that some of the mystery isn’t even resolved. I love the very messiness of it. But when I think back about The Big Sleep, the scene that usually pops into my head is essentially extraneous to the main mystery, is unrelated to Marlowe’s relationship with Bacall’s character, and is basically an all-but-unnecessary interlude to the entire rest of the film. I’m talking about the scene where Philip Marlowe goes to a pair of rare bookstores to follow up on a clue.

Now, there are two parts to the scene, set in two bookstores. The first is plot-essential, as Marlowe follows up on a clue that leads him to Geiger’s Rare Books – it is Geiger who holds the promissory gambling notes that are being held over the Sternwood family. It’s really the second half of the sequence in the second bookstore that I find so memorable, but I’ve included both in the clip merely because Bogart delights me so much in the first part. Marlowe affects an effeminate persona with far more ease than you’d expect, presenting the brusque clerk with a erudite proto-nerd in search of rare editions. But Geiger’s is a front, as Marlowe is hoping this conversation will prove, and he is correct – the clerk sluffs off his queries without ever realizing the books he mentions don’t exist, while surreptitiously motioning a suspicious-looking character into the back room. I love that even after their business is complete from a plot perspective, she goes out of her way to attack him for saying “CER-amics” instead of “cer-A-mics,” understanding at some level his contempt for her and determined to regain the upper hand – he rebuffs with a backhanded slag suggesting the superficiality of her knowledge, leaving her little recourse beyond a childish retort.

After Marlowe establishes that Geiger’s bookshop ain’t all about the books, the plot requires him to wait a little while so he can tail Geiger to find out more. This could be done in a number of ways, none of which necessitate the second half of this sequence. But instead, we get a tiny little evocative scene as Marlowe goes to the bookstore across the street ostensibly to get a description of Geiger, where the girl DOES know something about rare books, confirming what we’d already guessed about Geiger’s being a fake. More importantly, she’s a quick study and figures out almost before Marlowe tells her what he’s up to, and gives him a description of Geiger with a level of observation worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Her immediate connection to Marlowe is both a mutual admiration based on intellect perceived in a matter of seconds and an attraction based on the promise of a brief but memorable encounter with a detective (a rather dashing and dangerous profession, at least in the minds of those who read novels, as she likely does) – she doesn’t hesitate at all to close her shop to spend an hour alone with this man, a stolen interlude before she puts her glasses back on and returns to the librarian-esque stereotype of her job and he walks out the door to continue his romanticized detective work.

Watching this scene, it feels like there’s a whole story here, a whole movie that could be written from this woman’s point of view about her brief involvement with this mystery. We hope she turns up again in the story we see, but she does not. Her character doesn’t even have a name. Yet she feels like a fully-formed character, and Dorothy Malone gives her far more of a personality and a presence than the script really necessitates. In a mere three and a half minutes of screen time, she manages to make us forget about Lauren Bacall’s existence in the film, and make her single scene as memorable as anything else in this supremely memorable film. I’ve only seen Malone in this and in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (for which she won a well-deserved supporting Academy Award ten years after The Big Sleep), but based on those two roles alone, I salute her.

Haven 1×06-1×08

By Jandy

On August 30, 2010

In Television

My intention was to write about these episodes as I watch them, preferably close to when they air, but I got sidetracked and three weeks happened. Oh well. We’ll just call this the least conventionally scheduled television column ever.

Post contains plot set-ups, but not spoilers for the endings, except in the case of one subplot, which I’ve set aside in a spoilery section at the bottom.

After my previous post about Haven, I got enough people interested in it that I hoped it would get better and show my cautious optimism was not in vain. And I’m happy to say that with the past three episodes, the show is starting to address the issues I had with it. Episode 1×07: “Sketchy” is easily the best of the season so far, and gives me great hope that the show is hitting its stride for real now. The characters are starting to become more interesting in and of themselves, and patterns are starting to emerge in the seemingly random weird events. The talk of the Troubles is getting more pervasive, suggesting that they are building toward a strong season finale.

In “Fur”, a man is torn to pieces in his car by something that appears to be a wolf – of course, this being Haven, our thoughts as well as those of Audrey and Nathan jump straight to werewolves, but, this being Haven, that answer is probably too easy. Could it be just a giant wolf that the hunters can take care of on their own? Could it be a hex by Jess Minion, a so-called witch living on the outskirts of town who is heavily disliked by the local hunters for her animal-friendly stance? Or is it something even more sinister and unusual? Well, this is Haven.

The doctor Eleanor is starting to become a more central character, which is good for a number of reasons – she’s interesting and funny and she knows about the Troubles, which is helping to ground the show. She’s being set up as a wise confidant for Audrey, a role that is needed and has been largely missing up to this point. I also really like Jess Minion and her addition to the show is definitely helping Nathan come into himself. Plus, yeah, okay. I like her Quebecois accent.

Nathan’s innate inability to relate to people becomes explicit and a source of humor in “Sketchy,” as Jess tries to make up excuses to see him and he, much to Audrey’s amusement, is a total dunce about the whole thing. The monster of the week, too, is really good. People are being killed in really bizarre ways, from crushed and twisted in unnatural ways to having their faces suddenly go blank. The way this one plays out had me fully enthralled, and it may be the one time on the show so far that main plot and subplots have all worked so well.

I’m not sure “Ain’t No Sunshine” was quite as strong an episode as “Sketchy,” but I’m fairly invested now and definitely ready to see the show through the finale. In this one, a couple of stabbing murders lead back to a hospital, where grieving family members are convinced their loved ones were killed by a “Dark Man.” The effects and tension were quite well done here, and aside from a slightly too-easy resolution, I can’t really fault the main story. And I liked what they did with the Nathan-Jess subplot during this episode, but the way they left it and set up the rest of the season in terms of romance subplots? Not so much. I’ll have some spoilers about that in a second. The Audrey-doesn’t-have-friends running gag ran a little too long.

So far, what ties all of the monsters of the week together is that they’re unintentional monsters – nobody who has these strange abilities can control them, and often they don’t even know they have them until Audrey and Nathan figure it out. Also, most of the powers, though not quite all, seem to be triggered by anger or fear, so perhaps heightened emotions are involved in some way. So, are these strange abilities themselves The Troubles, or are The Troubles something else entirely that merely cause these abilities to manifest? What happened last time they were here, why doesn’t anyone speak about them (except for Eleanor), and what does Audrey’s mother have to do with it? These aren’t really new questions since my post three episodes back, but I care about the answers now more than I did then.

*SPOILERS for the end of Ain’t No Sunshine, romance subplot, after the screencap*

Giving Nathan a love interest OTHER than Audrey was smart, and they gave him a pretty interesting one, too. The end of this episode hints that they’re going to go the more conventional Nathan/Audrey ship, which….no. Boring. Done. The only bright spot is that the way Jess framed her leaving seems ripe for her to return. She doesn’t seem the type that would just run away to protect herself at others’ expense, so I can only guess that she actually has something to do with the Troubles and will eventually have to return by the finale. I do hope so.

Summer 2010 Soundtrack

By Jandy

On August 14, 2010

In Music

Or perhaps more correctly, this is the soundtrack to my own personal summer 2010, but hey. Semantics aside, these are basically my earworms of the summer. The few criteria I worked with: they had to be songs I’m listening to almost constantly this summer, or keep coming back to off their respective albums; they had to be off albums that were current (a full list of my earworms right now would include some Joan Jett, but that’s really it outside of this year’s releases, and that would seem anomalous); and they had to be good songs for listening to while driving with the windows down. At first I tried finding all really upbeat, summery songs, but that quickly ran askew of the first criterion, but even the slower/mellower songs on here rise to pretty awesome levels by the end. So it’s cool.

Download the full .zip file here.

01. The New Pornographers – Crash Years
02. Mates of State – Long Way Home (Tom Waits cover)
03. Admiral Radley – Sunburn Kids
04. Stars – We Don’t Want Your Body
05. Metric – Black Sheep
06. Seaspin – Reverser
07. Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring
08. Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
09. Beach House – Zebra
10. Charlotte Gainsbourg – Time of the Assassins
11. Broken Social Scene – All to All
12. Kathryn Calder – Slip Away
13. Kaki King – The Betrayer
14. The New Pornographers – Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk
15. Jenny & Johnny – Big Wave
16. She & Him – In the Sun
17. Kathryn Calder – Castor And Pollux
18. Best Coast – Our Deal
19. Arcade Fire – Ready to Start
20. Stars – Wasted Daylight
21. Broken Social Scene – Meet Me in the Basement