Stylish 60s TV Commercial

Stanley Kubrick's enthusiasm for the technique of certain television commercials, such as the early 1970s "The Night Belongs to Michelob" series, is well-known. I wonder what he would have made of this stylish early 1960s spot for Tiparillos mini-cigars? The restless panning captures the swanky nightclub energy perfectly. We never really get a good look at anyone except the vending girl; it all just slides by. The footage would not be out of place in an American knock-off of La dolce vita or La notte. It also demonstrates decisively that the Mad Men stylistic is not merely a retro imposition, but is part of the way the era felt about itself.

 

My Favorite Films by Director

In my web-group Confabulation, we had a challenge to come up with lists of our best/greatest/favorite films of all time (there was a lot of debate about the terminology!). I decided to restrict myself to one film per director, which meant that I had to figure out my current favorite for each significant director. The results are below, naturally offered with the proviso that my knowledge of every director's work is decidedly imperfect and incomplete. For approximately 185 directors, teams, and miscellaneous auteurs, I have listed my current top film, going in chronological order from the 1910s until today (and separating decades with spaces). All the selections are at a personal pantheon level of quality, although obviously for many directors, there would be more titles that met that standard. In cases like Hitchcock, Altman, Bergman, Ford, Fellini, Kurosawa, Ozu, it is especially difficult to hold to one title, but I did.

In 13 cases, I have allowed myself to select a set of films that go together strongly and seem to emanate from a single impulse. Those cases:

The 8 films that Preston Sturges made for Paramount between 1940 and 1944

The 9 films in the Val Lewton horror cycle, directed by Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, and Robert Wise between 1942 and 1946

The 3 astonishingly varied Westerns - Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma, and Cowboy - that Delmer Daves made with Glenn Ford between 1956 and 1958

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy

Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy 

Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series (5 films, 1959-1979)

Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, shot back-to-back and released in successive years 

Guy Maddin's Archangel and Careful, same situation

Monte Hellman's Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting, which were shot together

Jackie Chan's Project A and Project A Part II

The 17 Superman cartoons made by the Fleischer/Famous Studios between 1941 and 1943

Alan J. Pakula's Paranoid Trilogy - Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men

Michael Apted's Up series (1963-2012)

(Budd Boetticher's series of 7 westerns with Randolph Scott, 1956-1960, would also qualify, but I haven't seen all of those.)

At the bottom of the list of films is an alphabetical list of about 95 directors or teams that I am currently "punting" on; that list could obviously be expanded, but these 95 seem to have a claim to consideration in assembling a best/greatest/favorite films list. I'm punting for a variety of reasons, but foremost among them is a lack of familiarity with enough of the director's work. In many cases, I suspect I haven't yet seen the film that will be my top choice; in other cases I'm conflicted, or it has been a very long time since I have seen some of the important titles.

Of course there are cases when I did pick films for the main list by directors I could be much more schooled in. But in those cases I felt strongly about the titles in question. It's all on a case-by-case basis.

I'll keep this list up-to-date here - of course, there will be future changes!

Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) - 1916

Safety Last! (Harold Lloyd) - 1923
Greed (Erich von Stroheim) - 1924
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) - 1924
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau) - 1927
Napoleon (Abel Gance) - 1927
The Crowd (King Vidor) - 1928
October (Sergei Eisenstein) - 1928

Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko) - 1930
City Lights (Charlie Chaplin) - 1931
M. (Fritz Lang) - 1931
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy) – 1932
Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir) – 1932
Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh) - 1932
Dinner at Eight (George Cukor) – 1933
Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon) – 1933
The Pearls of the Crown (Sacha Guitry) – 1937
Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks) - 1939

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) – 1941
Bambi (Walt Disney) - 1942
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman) – 1943
Superman Cartoons (17) (Dave Fleischer/Seymour Kneitel/Izzy Sparber/Dan Gordon) – 1941-1943
A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger) - 1944

The Great McGinty/Christmas in July/ The Lady Eve/Sullivan’s Travels/The Palm Beach Story/The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek/Hail the Conquering Hero/The Great Moment (Preston Sturges) – 1940-1944

Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytrk) - 1944
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli) - 1944
Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra) - 1944
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne) – 1945
A Walk in the Sun (Lewis Milestone) -1945
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler) - 1946
Humoresque (Jean Negulesco) - 1946

Cat People/I Walked with a Zombie/The Leopard Man/The Seventh Victim/The Ghost Ship/The Curse of the Cat People/The Body Snatcher/Isle of the Dead/Bedlam (Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur/Mark Robson/Robert Wise) – 1942-1946

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz) - 1947
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston) - 1948
Fort Apache (John Ford) – 1948
Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky) - 1948
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls) - 1948
The Third Man (Carol Reed) - 1949
Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius) - 1949

Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder) - 1950
Orpheus (Jean Cocteau) - 1950
Los olvidados (Luis Bunuel) – 1950
D.O.A. (Rudolph Mate) - 1950
The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot) - 1953
I vitelloni (Federico Fellini) - 1953
Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones) - 1953
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi) - 1954
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa) - 1954
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich) - 1955
The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis) – 1955
Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges) – 1955
Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor) – 1955
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton) - 1955
Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk) - 1956
The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman) - 1957
The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold) - 1957
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick) – 1957
Abandon Ship (Richard Sale) – 1957
White Nights (Luchino Visconti) - 1957
Jubal/3:10 to Yuma/Cowboy (Delmer Daves) – 1956/1957/1958
Night Train (Jerzy Kawalerowicz) – 1959
Pather Panchali/Aparajito/The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray) – 1955/1956/1959

L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni) - 1960
The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young) - 1960
Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu) – 1960
Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju) - 1960
The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak) - 1960
The Innocents (Jack Clayton) – 1961
Blast of Silence (Allen Baron) - 1961
Harakiri (Masako Kobayashi) – 1962
Advise & Consent (Otto Preminger) – 1962
Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards) - 1962
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey) - 1962
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock) - 1963
Hands over the City (Francesco Rosi) – 1963
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard) – 1963
Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook) - 1963
Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo) - 1964
Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev) – 1964
I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov) - 1964
A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester) - 1964
Shock Corridor/The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller) - 1963/1964
Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellocchio) - 1965
The Loved One (Tony Richardson) – 1965
Brainstorm (William Conrad) – 1965
Au hazard Balthazar (Robert Bresson) - 1966
Seconds (John Frankenheimer) - 1966
Ride in the Whirlwind/The Shooting (Monte Hellman) – 1965/1966
Secret Ceremony (Joseph Losey) - 1968
The Night of the Living Dead (George Romero) - 1968
Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler) - 1969
Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville) – 1969
The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle) - 1969

Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean) – 1970
Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles) - 1970
A Touch of Zen (King Hu) - 1971
The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper) - 1971
The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich) - 1971
The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) - 1971
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog) – 1972
Deliverance (John Boorman) - 1972
The Exorcist (William Friedkin) – 1973
Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn) - 1973
The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola) - 1974
Chinatown (Roman Polanski) – 1974
Klute/The Parallax View/All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula) – 1971/1974/1976
Night Moves (Arthur Penn) - 1975
Jaws (Steven Spielberg) - 1975
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick) – 1975
Moses and Aaron (Jean-Marie Straub/Daniele Huillet) – 1975
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Jones/Terry Gilliam) - 1975
1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci) - 1976
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese) – 1976
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes) - 1976
Eraserhead (David Lynch) - 1977
Le crabe-tambour (Pierre Schoendoerffer) – 1977
Halloween (John Carpenter) - 1978
Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick) - 1978
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky) – 1979

The 400 Blows/Antoine and Collette/Stolen Kisses/Bed & Board/Love on the Run (Francois Truffaut) – 1959/1962/1968/1970/1979

The Falls (Peter Greenaway) - 1980
Used Cars (Robert Zemeckis) - 1980
Bad Timing (Nicholas Roeg) - 1980
Stardust Memories (Woody Allen) - 1980
Atlantic City (Louis Malle) – 1980
Prince of the City (Sidney Lumet) - 1981
Les uns et les autres (Claude Lelouch) – 1981
Thief (Michael Mann) - 1981
Southern Comfort (Walter Hill) - 1981
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) - 1982
Parsifal (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg) - 1983
Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone) - 1984
Choose Me (Alan Rudolph) - 1984
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader) – 1985
Vagabond (Agnes Varda) – 1985
The Fly (David Cronenberg) - 1986
Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox) - 1986
Project A/Project A Part II (Jackie Chan) – 1983/1987
Let’s Get Lost (Bruce Weber) – 1988
Eight Men Out (John Sayles) - 1988
The War of the Roses (Danny DeVito) - 1989

The Civil War (Ken Burns) - 1990
JFK (Oliver Stone) – 1991
Archangel/Careful (Guy Maddin) – 1991/1992
Actress (Stanley Kwan) - 1992
Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood) - 1992
Short Cuts (Robert Altman) – 1993
Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi) - 1993
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis) – 1993
Quiz Show (Robert Redford) – 1994
Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson) – 1994
Ed Wood (Tim Burton) - 1994
Three Colors: Blue, White, Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski) – 1993-1994
The Confessional (Robert Lepage) - 1995
Apollo 13 (Ron Howard) - 1995
Gummo (Harmony Korine) – 1997
The Spanish Prisoner (David Mamet) - 1997
Cabaret Balkan (Goran Paskaljevic) - 1998
Beau travail (Claire Denis) – 1999
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson) - 1999
American Beauty (Sam Mendes) - 1999

Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky) – 2000
Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson) – 2000
Timecode (Mike Figgis) – 2000
Code Unknown (Michael Haneke) - 2000
Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker) – 2001
Time Out (Laurent Cantet) - 2001
Lantana (Ray Lawrence) – 2001
The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro) – 2001
Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly) - 2001
Irreversible (Gaspar Noe) – 2002
Adaptation (Spike Jonze) - 2002
Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho) - 2003
Elephant (Gus van Sant) - 2003
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir) - 2003
Dogville (Lars von Trier) - 2003
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola) - 2003
Closer (Mike Nichols) - 2004
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee) – 2005
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney) - 2005
United 93 (Paul Greengrass) – 2006
The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach) - 2006
Zodiac (David Fincher) - 2007
I’m Not There (Todd Haynes) - 2007
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel) - 2007
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) – 2008
Man on Wire (James Marsh) - 2008
A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen) – 2009

Seven Up!/7 Plus Seven/21 Up/28 Up/35 Up/42 Up/49 Up/56 Up (Michael Apted/Paul Almond) – 1963/1970/1977/1984/1991/1998/2005/2012

Chantal Akerman
Pedro Almodovar
Lindsay Anderson
Theo Angelopoulos
Yevgeni Bauer
Mario Bava
Jacques Becker
Bertrand Blier
Budd Boetticher
Frank Borzage
Tod Browning
Leos Carax
Claude Chabrol
Souleymane Cisse
Rene Clair
Rene Clement
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Terence Davies
Jacques Demy
Vittorio De Sica
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Julien Duvivier
Jean Eustache
Louis Feuillade
Jacques Feyder
Robert Flaherty
Philippe Garrel
Jean Gremillon
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Kon Ichikawa
Im Kwon-taek
Shohei Imamura
Joris Ivens
Miklos Jancso
Derek Jarman
Abbas Kiarostami
Emir Kusturica
Spike Lee
Mike Leigh
Jerry Lewis
Marcel L’Herbier
Ernst Lubitsch
Dusan Makevejev
Rouben Mamoulian
Anthony Mann
Chris Marker
Leo McCarey
Hayao Miyazaki
Mario Monicelli
Errol Morris
Mikio Naruse
Manoel de Oliveira
Ermanno Olmi
G.W. Pabst
Sergei Paradjanov
Marcel Pagnol
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Sam Peckinpah
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Maurice Pialat
Gillo Pontecorvo
Vsevolod Pudovkin
Nicholas Ray
Alain Resnais
Leni Riefenstahl
Jacques Rivette
Glauber Rocha
Eric Rohmer
Roberto Rossellini
Raul Ruiz
Ken Russell
Werner Schroeter
Ousmane Sembene
Robert Siodmak
Victor Sjostrom
Mauritz Stiller
Josef von Sternberg
Jan Svankmajer
Seijun Suzuki
Quentin Tarantino
Jacques Tati
Bertrand Tavernier
Andre Techine
Tsai Ming-liang
Dziga Vertov
Jean Vigo
Andrzej Wajda
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Wim Wenders
Wong Kar-wai
Edward Yang
Valerio Zurlini

Pedro Infante and Ismael Rodriguez

A great film collaboration which I am starting to become familiar with by virtue of where I live is Mexican actor-singer Pedro Infante (1917-1957) and director Ismael Rodriguez (1917-2004). Infante, killed at age 39 in the crash of a small plane he was piloting, died young like seemingly most Mexican stars  - his fellow Gallos Mexicanos (Mexican Roosters) Jorge Negrete (1911-1953, hepatitis) and Javier Solis (1931-1966, complications of gallbladder surgery), his frequent co-star Blanca Estela Pavon (1926-1949, plane crash). Infante is often described as the most beloved person in Mexican history; the Sinaloa campus of the Tec de Monterrey, where I work, is located on Boulevard Pedro Infante. He made 62 films, 17 directed by Ismael Rodriguez, and 2 more directed by Ismael's brother Roberto. (The Rodriguez brothers, including a third, Joselito, ran their own production company.)

Pedro Infante was the prototypical working class hero, and handled that persona stylishly. His many movies are easily picked up on Mexican DVDs with English subtitles, and I am enjoying getting to know them. The Rodriguez brothers were gifted and commercially astute directors who worked at high speed, like Infante himself (who averaged four features per year from 1943 to 1957). I just watched A toda maquina (Full Throttle), an action comedy about two motorcycle cops that is like a superior Mexican version of C.H.I.P.s. It plays as what we would today call a bromance or buddy movie, and it fascinated me to learn that for an ordinary, straight, red-blooded Mexican male in the year 1951, the choosing of a best friend, assuming you didn't have one left over from childhood, was urgent, un-ironic business, as serious in its way as the choice of a fiancee, and described in some of the same language ("Could this be The One?"). Once you had such a friend, he would always have your back as you would always have his; it was a commitment. The bromantic courtship might involve competition on a number of fronts including the romantic, and plenty of banter, horseplay, and maybe some actual fighting, but that was all just in the nature of testing the bond. In A toda maquina, Infante and co-star Luis Aguilar have to undergo a near-death experience together (brought on by their own stupidity) to realize their true friendship. I'm now very interested to see the sequel (shot back-to-back), ¡¿Qué te ha dado esa mujer?! - the title* indicates that the romantic rivalry will continue, friendship or no friendship.

* Roughly, What Right Do You Have to This Woman?!

Johnny Depp, Literateur

Department of the Ultra-Cool: Historian/biographer Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp are preparing Woody Guthrie's 1947 novel House of Earth, completed but never published, for its first printing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/woody-guthries-dust-bowl-novel.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all 

Bob Dylan is in on this, too; Brinkley and Depp shared the manuscript with him, and he was "blown away." I love it when writers, musicians, film people, artists cross their boundaries and promote each other's work. James Franco is a big literary type. Bruce Hornsby is an enthusiastic reader who recommends regional American novels in concert - I've heard him do it. Alec Baldwin is now the radio announcer for the New York Philharmonic and tweets often about his classical music listening. They should all be saluted. When we get tired of hearing about junk and trivia, it's nice to be lifted up by stories of people using whatever powers they have - and we all have powers - for the good.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

Today is the 90th birthday of the fine actor William Schallert, most famous for playing the father on The Patty Duke Show. In an exchange at The Blackboard, I mentioned that I especially liked Schallert "as English teacher Leander Pomfritt on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (but then, I love everything about that show - one of the greatest sitcoms of all time in my book)." I went on in a subsequent post:

I discovered the show in re-runs on Nick at Nite in the late Eighties. It's smart, charming, well-written and performed. I love the way that Dobie breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly; that was a fresh gambit at the time. The show is not without some sociological depth, either. As many have noted, it was one of the first efforts to capture the "new American teen," and also to go for the beatnik Zeitgeist, no matter how caricatural Maynard G. Krebs may seem. Socio-economic class is a persistent theme, in a light but telling way. Because why doesn't Dobie get all the girls? - he's good looking, neatly put together, and has charm to burn. It's the (lack of) money - his dad is a humble grocer, and he's competing with rich snots. Dobie is always scheming with ways to come up with more cash. But, and here is where he is morally appealing, what he won't do is try to fake being a rich type. That would mean, for one thing, dropping Maynard as a friend, and Dobie is loyal and able to appreciate people for what they are. The rich people in the series are constantly seen to treat others instrumentally, and Dobie Gillis is too genuine for that. Like him, like his friends - Maynard is non-negotiable. That is truly cool.

Election Day in Mexico

Today is Election Day in Mexico. Enrique Pena Nieto of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) is expected to win handily. The PRI had a stranglehold on Mexican politics for many decades, but is currently the challenger party to President Felipe Calderon's PAN (Partido Accion Nacional). Presidents in Mexico serve a six-year term but cannot run for re-election (similar to Korea, where they serve a five-year term with no possibility of re-election).

Pena Nieto, a 45-year-old former state governor, has been carefully groomed for this position. He is the very model of the modern telegenic candidate, handsome and glamorous. After his first wife (who bore him three children) died of an epileptic seizure in 2007, he began dating the superstar telenovela actress Angelica Rivera of the Televisa network. They had a fairy-tale "wedding of the century" in 2010, and Mexicans, like people everywhere, love a fairy-tale. Cynics (and there are many here, it is a national pastime just as much as star-gazing is) pointed out that the Televisa network is one of Pena Nieto's biggest supporters politically and that the whole arrangement is, shall we say, convenient. The leftist, anti-Pena Nieto newsmagazine Proceso has the journalistic equivalent of paroxysms on the subject.

Last December Pena Nieto, who had "written" a book promoting his candidacy, as politicians will, made an appearance at the Guadalajara book fair, and was asked during a press conference which books had influenced his life. Pena Nieto, who works best scripted (hence the frequent accusations against him of being an "empty suit"), visibly struggled with the question, and when he finally coughed up a title, misidentified the author. Well, this created a scandal. Everyone weighed in. A potential president who doesn't read? Shocking. Many accused Pena Nieto of being unworthy of office on this basis. Mexico's greatest living novelist, Carlos Fuentes (since deceased), said that Pena Nieto "does not have the right to become the President of Mexico due to his ignorance" (Fuentes's vehemence was perhaps not surprising, since he was the actual author of the book Pena Nieto misattributed to Enrique Krauze). Pena Nieto weathered the affair, but it was delicioso.

More recently came the revelation that, during his first marriage, Pena Nieto had fathered two sons out of wedlock with two different women. One had died in infancy; he supported the other financially, although he had little contact with the boy. Now, this was certainly newsworthy, but as far as scandal, no go; nothing compared to the book crisis. The general reaction seems to have been, so we have a male presidential candidate who is virile and keeps mistresses. What else is new? It's far less disqualifying than not being a reader; it's not disqualifying at all. Imagine the same situation in the United States, where the book business would barely create a ripple, but the paternity stories would destroy the candidacy.

If people want to ask me what I have learned after a year in Mexico, it has not related to drug cartels, but is instead this: Mexico (like, I presume, all the rest of the Latin American nations) is essentially a European country. The values, the emphases, are European; they have nothing to do with the United States.The intellectual class is tiny, a mere sliver of the population, but it is taken with the utmost seriousness (Fuentes's death was an occasion for national mourning). This may cast a cloud over Pena Nieto's presidency right from the start, because the intellectual class has a really hard time taking him seriously, and all his mis-steps are going to provoke a "We told you so - the guy is a nothing" reaction from many highly respected parties. It should be quite interesting.

This Makes Me Sad

Until quite recently, Woody Allen's new movie To Rome with Love appeared in lists as Nero Fiddled; in his New York Times review, A.O. Scott mentions that Bop Decameron was also considered as a possible title. Both the earlier proposed titles are cute, suggestive, and eminently serviceable. Nero Fiddled indicates the Italian setting and its historical dimension, and hints that there may be some craziness or surreality. Bop Decameron also indicates the Italian setting and its historical dimension, conveys Woody Allen's love for jazz, and tells us that there will be multiple stories. So why the change to To Rome with Love, which Scott calls a "fairly generic" title but is actually worse than that, sounding like the name of an LP by a Sixties supper-club crooner like Jerry Vale?

It has to be marketing-driven, and I can just hear the marketers: "Woody, Vicky Cristina Barcelona did fairly well, and that had the name of the city; Midnight in Paris did very well, and that had the name of the city. You've got to tell Americans what city they're in!"

So we have reached the point where the references in the titles Nero Fiddled and Bop Decameron are considered too obscure, not just for Americans in general, but for the Americans who would consider going to a Woody Allen movie. Can cultural illiteracy go much lower than that? (Please don't answer that question.)

As a teacher of humanities, one of my primary goals is that my students will not be culturally illiterate if I can help it. Not all of them will cooperate with me on that, but I do try. I know that my friend Eric Levy, and many others, fight this good fight every day, as well. I don't want to live in a world where "educated people" don't know what educated people should know.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Although I am and always have been a big Woody Allen fan, it is not because I like or would want to be part of the world that his films depict, but rather the opposite. I take a strong dislike to many of his characters, and invariably think that, if they are depictions of his real-life friends and family, well, better him than me. I should enjoy the culturedness of the core inhabitants of WoodyWorld, but since for a lot of them culture seems merely to be a high-class consumable, I sometimes wince rather than smile at the cultural references. Having grown up within the orbit of New York City (but having always been ambivalent about the place, too), I can confirm that there are plenty of real-life specimens that correspond to Allen’s characters - he’s not just making these people up – and that, unfortunately, they are often every bit as tediously egocentric and Manhattan-centric as they appear to be in the films.

I re-watched Hannah and Her Sisters remembering that it hadn’t been one of my favorite Allen efforts back in the Eighties, even though it is often judged to be among his top achievements. It seems to endorse the smugness and conventional-mindedness of its characters in a way that Allen at his best (Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Crimes and Misdemeanors) avoids. I will admit that there is something potentially delicious in the conceit that there are only three women available for relationships in the entire world and that they are all members of the same family – however, since I find the sisters themselves unappealing, that doesn’t take me very far. In fact, I don’t think that there is a single character in the movie that is even borderline tolerable, and thus I find the machinations of the happy ending disappointing (because I want them all to die) as well as quite unbelievable.

One scene that is particularly bothersome is the date between Allen and Dianne Wiest, in which they shuttle from a punk-rock performance (her choice) to Bobby Short playing at a jazz club (his). The attempted satire at the expense of the punkers is ugly, ungenerous, and dripping with unearned superiority. One doesn’t expect Woody Allen to like punk rock, but one does expect him to realize that much of the art he does like was absolutely revolutionary and discomfort-provoking in its day. His reactionary stance not only fails to understand the new, but puts the wrong frame around the old and the retro, too, and so winds up being unproductive no matter how you look at it. A punk fan’s contempt for Bobby Short would be just as tiresome; surely one of the glories of Allen’s beloved Manhattan is that it can contain the energies of a thousand styles, as well as open-minded people who can enjoy many of them.

When Woody is operating at his more thoughtful, self-critique is built in, and such issues become interesting instead of annoying to think about. But self-critique – indeed, any critical stance with respect to his characters’ crises within the cocoon of privilege - is noticeably lacking from Hannah and Her Sisters, which makes me wonder why this film has been among his most acclaimed (as well as his biggest earner before Midnight in Paris).

TV Noir of the Week: Shotgun Slade

[Cross-posted from The Blackboard.]

A genre hybrid such as Shotgun Slade can be fun simply because it exists as a specimen. In the late Fifties, the two hottest genres in television were private eye shoes and Westerns, and it was probably inevitable that someone would think of combining the two. And the novelist Frank Gruber, who worked in both genres, is precisely the sort of “someone” that would be! The character Slade, who never reveals a proper first name, is a wandering “detective for hire” who takes on a variety of assignments. He packs what is apparently – I’m no gun expert – an interesting piece, a combination “over/under” long gun that fires both rifle bullets and shotgun shells, therefore useful both at distance and in proximity. Like other detectives of the era, his surname puns on his potential lethality (Gunn, Hammer, “Slayed”). But as played by Scott Brady, Lawrence Tierney’s saner brother, Slade is quite affable, although naturally he knows how to handle himself. He also provides classic-style voiceover narration.

Not a network show, Shotgun Slade premiered in syndication one year after Peter Gunn jazzed up the TV landscape, and lasted two seasons. In its look, it’s very much your typical low-budgeted oater, but the producers cleverly albeit imitatively covered for that routineness by having composer Gerald Fried contribute a lightly jazzy Gunn-like theme and soundtrack music. The ploy works: it makes occasionally lumbering material into something more sprightly.

Scott Brady was 35 years old when Shotgun Slade premiered, and although he couldn’t have known it, the show pretty much marked the end of his career as a minor leading man. After this, it was mainly bottom-of-the-barrel Sixties product, back-up roles in biker flicks, that sort of thing. He was a drinking buddy of Archie Bunker’s in a few episodes of All in the Family.

The Shotgun Slade episode “Sudden Death” from late in its first season is a fair sample of the show:



There is quite a lot of plot for a half-hour, with seven characters besides Slade - most haunted by ghosts of past events - a murder investigation, crooked casino games, bar girls and violence against them, a vengeance stalking based on ethnic pride, a hysteric, a secret passageway, and several people who know how to throw an axe for maximum effect. Realistically, Slade does exactly the job he was hired to do and leaves all the rest for others to clean up, a nice change from the many screen detectives who take on all kinds of stuff that they are not getting paid for.

The Hardy Boys in "The Melted Coins"

The plot of this Hardy Boys mystery is as complicated and difficult to summarize as Dickens's Little Dorrit, and like that great novel, lends itself readily to a Marxist interpretation, since everything in it revolves around the theme of money - old coins, rare coins, counterfeit coins, buried coins, stolen coins, hidden coins, and of course the melted coins of the title. Freudians could also have a fun time with such episodes as the revelation of Aunt Gertrude's (clearly fetishistic) secret, and the homoerotic scene in which a maniac sailor captures Joe Hardy and starts to tattoo him on the chest!

In fact, the latter bizarre quasi-rape scene is worth quoting at length. A 1944 children's book, remember.

...Blackbeard was strong and powerful. 

"I'll tattoo you if it's the last thing I do!..." 

...Joe tried to shout, but the pirate's heavy hand was across his mouth, stifling any outcry...In a few minutes he was bound, gagged, and thrust onto a table. 

"Get the needle, Lopez!" ordered Blackbeard. 

...The pirate, his heavy arms folded, looked at Joe with a satisfied air. Then he reached down and ripped open the boy's shirt. 

"Give me the needle, Lopez!" he shouted. 

Joe was utterly helpless, yet he struggled grimly against the ropes that bound him. Lopez stood by, handed Blackbeard a long, sharp needle in a holder. Joe felt a stab of pain as the tattoo artist crouched over him and the needle pricked the skin on his chest. 

"You'll get a design you maybe never heard of before," grunted Blackbeard. "First, I prick the design. Then comes the dye." 

The sharp needle stabbed Joe's skin once more....

"The mark will stay with you for life," cried the pirate.

RIP Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

I just found out about the great baritone's death on Sunday, while catching up on my Google Reader RSS feed; I've been so immersed in following the Cannes Film Festival. I grew up on Fischer-Dieskau's Schubert Lieder recordings, but heard him on LPs in a vast repertoire; he was the most recorded classical singer of any era, after all. If memory serves, I don't believe I was ever lucky enough to hear him in person; he sang live mostly in Europe (never taking the stage at New York's Metropolitan Opera, for example). His fellow singer Elizabeth Schwarzkopf called him "a born god who has it all." My favorite contemporary baritone, Thomas Hampson, has said:

Few artists achieve the level of recognition, admiration and influence of Fischer-Dieskau, and even fewer live to see, that influence realised during their own lifetime. Ushering in the modern recording era, he challenged our perception and processes of how recordings could be made, explored the possibilities of modern recording and exploited the potential for popularity of classical music; and all this while setting standards of artistic achievement, integrity, risk-talking, and the aesthetic ideal that became our new norm. Wherever we bask in the beauty of his tone, revere the probing, questioning power of his intellect, or simply wonder at the astonishing physical abilities through all that he has achieved in his long recording career, we must also pause and say THANK YOU to this great artist, whose legacy, like a great and bright star lighting the way for those who follow in his passion for singing, is exemplary in every way.

The British music critic John Amis wrote:

Providence gives to some singers a beautiful voice, to some musical artistry, to some (let us face it) neither, but to Fischer-Dieskau Providence has given both. The result is a miracle, and that is just about all there is to be said about it.

Here are obituaries at the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the New York Times: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/18/dietrich-fischer-dieskau 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/9275911/Dietrich-Fischer-Dieskau.html 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/music/dietrich-fischer-dieskau-german-baritone-dies-at-86.html?ref=music&gwh=CE48ACB4E2531A8F4198B4EA80D52445 

And here is New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's initial reaction (his links are good, too): 

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2012/05/for-dietrich-fischer-dieskau.html 

Anthony Tommasini pays tribute at the New York Times: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/music/dietrich-fischer-dieskaus-incomparable-voice.html?_r=2&ref=music 

Fischer-Dieskau was every bit as great an opera singer as a Lieder singer, equally good in Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Richard Strauss - how many could say that? And he was an inspired interpreter of Mahler as well. 

Not least among his legacies is his commitment to modern music. He was one of the three soloists for whom Benjamin Britten's great War Requiem was written (the others being Peter Pears and Galina Vishnevskaya). He was a tremendous Wozzeck in Berg's opera. In fact, he always took on the most challenging parts, such as Busoni's Doktor Faust and Hindemith's Mathis der Maler. Aribert Reimann's opera Lear was written for him, and he sang the lead in the premiere of Hans Werner Henze's sublime Elegy for Young Lovers. No one else was so good in such a varied repertory. 

Here is a Schubert performance by Fischer-Dieskau and his great accompanist Gerald Moore, some 50 years ago:

 

Shep Smith, You Go, Guy!

This has already gone viral, but I cannot resist giving my own "Attaboy!" to Shep Smith's blow for sanity:



Politics is weird, and creepy, and now I know lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality.

On her own show, Rachel Maddow was agog with admiration, and it is safe to say that the nation's intelligentsia (such as we are) was right there with her.

British Forthrightness

I get the Telegraph (U.K.) obituaries in my Google Reader feed, and I laughed out loud today when I spotted this:

Charles Higham

Bitchy biographer who tarnished the names of Errol Flynn and the Duchess of Windsor, among many others 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9250507/Charles-Higham.html

Looking at the obit itself after that memorable tag, one sees:

His most sensational work was Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (1980), in which he alleged that the swashbuckling matinee idol was an unscrupulous Nazi spy and rampant bisexual whose appetites led him to Mexico for the procurement of young boys and who had affairs with Truman Capote, Howard Hughes and Tyrone Power — to name only a few.... 

The Flynn biography was a fairly typical example of Higham’s approach, and much of what he wrote about the rich and famous (particularly those who were no longer alive to sue) was regarded by many critics as the product of an overactive and self-serving imagination.

In his unashamedly self-promoting memoir, In and Out of Hollywood (2009), Higham presented himself as a sort of Chandleresque figure, dedicated to sniffing out other people’s darkest secrets. Yet as he admitted, he hated interviewing people for his books, and critics remarked on how much of his work was based on the testimony of anonymous witnesses.

....His Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life (1988) might have been more aptly titled “Fascist, Lesbian Harlots at the Court of St James”, suggested one reviewer, who went on to observe that for the Duchess to have been guilty of even half the peccadilloes attributed to her, “early on she would have succumbed to exhaustion”.

....Higham was not pleasant company. He had an irritating habit of insulting waiters in restaurants, and often sat at the table for 45 minutes before deigning to consult the menu.

Can you imagine this appearing in a U.S. newspaper equal in stature to The Telegraph, which is not some rag (they have those too)? Sacre bleu! Equally good is another fresh obit:

Angelica Garnett

Artist and writer who was brought up in the Bloomsbury Group and married her father's lover

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/9250509/Angelica-Garnett.html

The illegitimate daughter of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (conceived when Grant decided to take a rare break from his usual rampant homosexuality), Angelica grew up thinking that the art critic Clive Bell was her father (although her true parentage was an open secret among her parents’ friends). When she was 17 she was informed by her mother that Grant was her father, and then told never to mention the subject.

At the age of 24 Angelica married the writer and publisher David Garnett (known to everyone as “Bunny”), 50 years old and one of Grant’s former lovers. A serial philanderer, Bunny had lived with Grant and Vanessa Bell (whom he had also propositioned, though unsuccessfully) at Charleston, East Sussex....

Nobody told Angelica that she was about to marry one of her father’s former lovers....Their flirtation began while Garnett was still married to his first wife, and became “a courtship ... about which I had very ambivalent feelings” following his wife’s death from cancer. Angelica lost her virginity to Garnett in HG Wells’s spare room, and in 1942 they married. Vanessa, oddly, seemed to approve of her daughter having an affair with her husband’s ex-lover, but not of the marriage. Neither of Angelica’s parents was invited to the wedding.

Virginia Woolf was horrified, confiding to her diary the hope that Angelica would “tire of that rusty, surly old dog with his amorous ways and his primitive mind”. But no one supplied Angelica with the vital information that might have led her to call off the marriage.

The economist John Maynard Keynes made some sort of effort to warn her, but, like everyone else, failed to come clean about what the problem might be: “He sent for me or he had me to tea or something and he tried to talk about it, and warn me that it might not be a very good idea. And I wish I’d listened to him, really, but naturally I couldn’t because I was in love with Bunny.”

Love the specificity of "H.G. Wells's spare room"....I imagine that The Telegraph obituary desk must be a jolly place to hang out, not to mention going for pints afterwards and laughing uproariously well past midnight. Gotta love those Brits. I certainly do.

More on The Tree of Life

An obvious comparison that many have made is between The Tree of Life and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have never heard anyone intelligent complain about "The Dawn of Man" sequence in Kubrick's film or say that they didn't get why it was there. When you have the whole film in mind, the thematic linkages are very obvious, and the way that the early sequence "enlarges" the later sequences should be easily grasped by almost anyone who has some experience of movies.

Even before you have the whole film in mind, while you are watching it for the first time, "The Dawn of Man" fits easily into the experience, in part because of Kubrick's thrilling match-cut of the caveman's bone to the spaceship. That moves any reasonably receptive viewer aesthetically; it is an example of what Hitchcock would call "pure film."

I don't get any similar sensation from Malick's history of the universe. Some will like that sequence better, some (such as me) worse, but in relation to the rest of the film, it feels like a "stand-alone," as my friend Saul Manjarrez put it to me.

The Sean Penn scenes and the conclusion on the beach offer different challenges. I found the contemporary scenes beautiful to look at, largely because of the effective use of low camera angles to convey the strangeness of the modern city. That does form a nice visual contrast to the home-town Texas scenes. But the contemporary scenes and Penn's very game acting in them, although clearly emotional, are also emotionally inarticulate - as I wrote earlier, I just don't think there is enough information in them. Surely Penn's obvious unhappiness doesn't stem solely from his brother's suicide, from one moment in his life. People do move on. It's as if the thirty years in-between his boyhood and his present didn't matter at all, that nothing happened during them, that he did not live them. Odd, to say the least.

The beach sequence is to my mind the least defensible part of the movie. I get it thematically, but it is embarrassingly trite. Watching it, I felt bad that someone with persuasive power hadn't talked Malick out of including it in the film. Sure, let the director film the sequence if he needs to get it out of his system, but let it stop there. I have not read any defenses of this ending that are even slightly convincing to me.

POSTSCRIPT: When I speak of the brother's suicide, I should be careful; it isn't actually stated as such in the movie. All we know is that he died. We are not give much information in this instance, either, to have any basis for understanding the event or the other characters' reactions to it. For someone who so obviously uses Freudian Oedipal concepts, Malick seems very disdainful of psychology in other ways. In several places, he denies us the data for psychological insight. All we can do is guess.

My friend Robert Kennedy has suggested that the mother's example will always be with her boys. Jessica Chastain is indeed luminous, and does about as good a job of embodying an abstract concept like "the way of grace" as any actor could. Her message is joyful. It is curious, then, that the message seems not to have "taken" with the grown Jack. Penn seems miserable, about as far from leading a life of joy as a life-prisoner. Was the mother's message that weak in relation to the father's message? Is that what the movie is saying? It sure doesn't say much for the way of grace if that is true - doubly so if the second son did commit suicide, since one thing suicides uniformly have in common is that they can find no joy in life. If at least one or two of three sons can find no joy in life after having such a mother, what chance is there for anyone else? Roger Ebert finds The Tree of Life hopeful and positive, in part because of the imagined reconciliations on the beach. But I do not. Imagined reconciliations are not enough. For the movie to be truly hopeful, Penn's grown-up Jack should glow with an inner light. I don't see one.

SECOND POSTSCRIPT:  A lot of us read the suicide into the movie because of the suicide of Malick's own brother. Nothing in the movie contradicts that reading. Malick underlines the similarity of the second brother in the movie to his own youngest brother by including those scenes of guitar-playing. It was during his advanced guitar training that Larry Malick "broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies," and then killed himself (in 1968). In the movie, Brad Pitt's father expresses regret over not pursuing a musical career, and it is easy to extrapolate from the combination of information inside the movie and outside the movie that a father like that might indeed pressure his musically talented son. If Malick didn't want us to perform those combinations, he shouldn't have made the movie so closely reflective of his autobiographical reality.

By the way, Malick's other brother Chris "was badly burned in a car crash that killed his wife" - you'll recall that burns play a part in The Tree of Life, too.

http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/39-facts-about-terrence-malick/

(I had no idea that Malick was in the same American Film Institute class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader? The mind boggles. I wonder if the three men are friends.)

One critic I read suggested that the brother's death in The Tree of Life could have been a military death, but I don't think that's possible. During the Vietnam War and thereafter, the military services used Casualty Notification Officers to visit families with the bad news. (Up through the Korean War, telegrams were used.) Of course, the death in the movie could have been an accident. The reason for the death is simply not explicitly stated.

Culiacan Zoo

[Cross-posted from ZooChat.]  I am an American teaching at a top-notch Mexican university high school or "prepa" in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state on the west coast. Culiacan is about two hours from the popular resort of Mazatlan, also in Sinaloa. This is not a tourist town, possibly because it has a reputation as one of the two biggest centers of the Mexican drug traffic (along with Ciudad de Juarez). But it is actually a quite pleasant city to live in. 

The Culiacan Zoo is only a few blocks from my house, part of a larger park complex, and so I have visited it a number of times, including today. It is a charming and popular small zoo. The animals seem healthy and well cared for; I have not noticed any obviously neurotic behaviors. The enclosures seem generally appropriate, and are full of variety for the animals; there are no bare or depressing enclosures. The enclosures for the big cats could be bigger, but they are no means bad; there are ponds for bathing, plenty of material for climbing and playing, and places to hide and take a break from the public. The whole zoo is pleasantly shady, which is a good thing because it does get quite hot and humid here in the summer.

Here are some of the features and species you will find at the Culiacan Zoo:

Tigers (including a white tiger), lions, jaguars, leopards (very perky today; they looked great), cheetahs, caracals, wolves, hyenas

Chimpanzees, Geoffroy's spider monkeys, lemurs, Hamadryas baboons

A variety of smaller monkeys, including a separate house for titis

I have seen black bears before, but not today

Coatis, raccoons

A large hippo enclosure with a pair who seemed to be having a blast in their pond today

A kangaroo/wallaby enclosure that also houses giant tortoises and Patagonian cavies

The largest enclosure in the zoo includes giraffes, zebras, ostriches, multiple species of deer, antelopes, and wild sheep, and capybaras - not exactly geographically coherent, but pleasant

A flamingo/swan pond

A petting zoo

A herpetarium with a nice array of species, including many snakes and lizards and some tarantulas

A king vultures exhibit

A very large, multi-level, well-designed flight cage (including a pond) with a wide variety of parrots (including a thriving colony of hyacinth macaws), toucans, ground fowl, and waterbirds

Some Notes on The Tree of Life

I watched The Tree of Life over two evenings - the first hour on the first night, the rest of the 139-minute movie on the second night. I watched it on DVD on a medium-sized screen, not on Blu-Ray on a bigger screen, and therefore not under the optimal conditions that cineaste friends recommended (not within my current ability to create). I posted an interim report after watching the first hour:

- I am not sold on the history of the universe sequence. I'm not speaking to its place in the overall structure of the film, which I don't fully know yet, but to its qualities in itself. Both the visuals and the voiceover feel trite to me. I suspect that Robert Bresson would be appalled by the tackiness.

- Half-way in, I sort of feel that the movie hasn't started yet. Although, the history of the universe sequence aside, it looks great.

- At its best, the spirituality of the first half of The Tree of Life represents a kind of country church naivete, touching but strikingly devoid of theological, philosophical, or intellectual content. At its worst, with its rote phraseology and celestial choirs, it suggests greeting-card Christianity.

- I say all that in the full knowledge that Malick was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, majoring in philosophy, and is a published translator of Heidegger. Hmm.

- Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane shrewdly points out something I would not have noticed on my own: the Sean Penn scenes are the very first in any Malick movie that are set in the present. Lane says, " It is no sin to veer away from your own time—indeed, to stick doggedly to it can smack of historical vanity—but the suspicion lingers that Malick finds something distasteful in our current mores." In the first half of the movie, these contemporary scenes, although striking-looking, give me very little in the way of information to work with.

- Malick's writing of the voice-overs he is so fond of seems to have gotten vague and windy compared to the frequently marvelous lines that Linda Manz delivers so memorably in Days of Heaven. None of the language in the first half of The Tree of Life comes remotely close to such simple, powerful writing as the last lines of Days of Heaven: "I was hopin' things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine."

- Malick seems to want his movies to be all transcendence without connecting tissue, and he comes reasonably close to achieving that in Days of Heaven, but this time I'm not feeling it. Soaring flights are more impressive when a movie spends some time on the ground. Telling a story is a good way of accomplishing that grounding, but in The Tree of Life, Malick seems less interested in story-telling than ever.

- Like some other grandiose directors, Malick is notably weak in a sense of comedy. I can easily imagine the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 - or the Woody Allen of the period circa Love and Death - taking down The Tree of Life with some devastating one-liners. It wouldn't be fair, but in his super-solemnity, Malick kind of invites it. If you want to make do entirely without humor in your work, you had better be so impressive that no one thinks of the lack - you had better be a Bresson. Spiritually ambitious novelists like Dostoevsky don't do without humor - in fact, their comedy can be particularly cutting and intense.

- This is not an especially feminist film, is it? Jessica Chastain's mother is unrealistically perfect, in keeping with her symbolic function of representing "the way of grace" (a theme which Malick plops quite nakedly into the film instead of letting us figure it out on our own). She exists solely for the sake of her three boys and her husband, and has no separate status in her own right. I'm well aware that Malick had two younger brothers (one of whom committed suicide) and no sister, but in creating the movie, he might have challenged himself by putting a sister into the mix. With one, I suspect it could have been a richer and more universal movie, and Chastain's character might not have seemed as if she was being sacrificed on the altar of patriarchal continuity.

After viewing the rest, I wrote further:

The second hour of The Tree of Life is a lot better than the first hour – unfortunately, the last 15 minutes is bad. If I had been Malick’s executive producer, I know exactly what I would have done. I would have fought him tooth-and-nail on the following points:

- Excise the history of the universe segment, in its entirety. In my opinion, if you have to include the history of the universe to prove your story is universal, you’re in deep trouble as an artist.

- Excise all the Sean Penn footage, including the ghastly ending on the beach. It all adds nothing. This probably means the brother’s suicide goes, too – everything that lies in the future as related to the body of the movie. End on the car pulling away from the house in Waco.

- Change the title to something less grandiloquent. Lose some of the over-explicit spiritual voiceovers - Jessica Chastain’s “way of nature, way of grace” monologue, and some of Hunter McCracken’s less natural locutions (“Mother, father, you are always wrestling within me,” etc.).

 - Re-edit the Texas sequences slightly to reinforce the sense of a story – or two stories, actually, McCracken’s coming-of-age and Pitt’s career disappointment.

What would be left would be an exquisite, 80-minute poetic feature, not flawless by any means, but awfully good and maybe even worthy of that Palme d’Or (which the current version, in my opinion, is not).

Some commentators have written that any such suggestions as I have made are equivalent to telling Herman Melville to cut all the extraneous stuff from Moby Dick, but that presumes that Malick is Melville’s equal as an artist, and I hate to disappoint everyone, but he’s not that. As I suggested earlier, he’s not Bresson either, nor Tarkovsky, nor Bergman, nor Kubrick. He’s not of that caliber; he’s not as robust as those directors. He’s a rather fragile talent who needs to be saved from his own gas attacks.

I stand by all of my earlier comments, pretty much. Jessica Chastain’s mother does show a little more mettle and individuality in the second half. I like the way the movie moves into Oedipal territory. Chastain is young, gorgeous, and very physically free with her boys, and given the lack of a sister for balance, that sets up a real tension; I’m glad this was explored. Brad Pitt is tremendous in his role, and the father’s sense of his placement in the economic scheme of things, which doesn’t come up in the first half, adds true depth to the second. I guess that part of my complaint with The Tree of Life is that it takes so long to get to its good stuff, which is often very good, indeed. The dinosaurs are just a delay, as too much of that first hour is.

Having flayed Malick for his lack of humor, I will admit that the scene with the DDT truck is in the nature of a sick joke, and a pretty funny one, too!

The scenes with Laramie Eppler (a ringer for a boy Brad Pitt) playing the guitar are affecting in a way that, strictly speaking, is extrinsic to the movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Malick

Malick had two younger brothers: Chris and Larry. Larry Malick was a guitarist who went to study in Spain with Segovia in the late 1960s. In 1968, Larry intentionally broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies. Emil went to Spain to help Larry, but Larry died shortly after, apparently committing suicide.

Malick is famously private and refuses to give interviews or answer questions about his family, but it would be disingenuous of him to take offense at viewers interpreting his movie in the light of information that is publicly available, and that the film seems to be in dialogue with.

Finally, it should go without saying that anyone interested in film needs to see The Tree of Life for themselves and make up their own mind about it.

POSTSCRIPT: Within my group, the question came up as to why I watched the film over two nights - my usual procedure these days. Not too difficult to explain. 

First, I put in really long days at my teaching job . Officially, my day goes from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, but usually in actuality from 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM, and I get home at 8:00. I am wiped out at that point, and have to hit the hay by 10:00 at the latest in order to start all over again the next morning. I don't have a lot of time to play with - an hour of a film, or one TV episode, or a few chapters of a novel, is usually all that I am able to manage. It's better than nothing. Weekends offer more time, but I'm doubly wiped out by the weekend, and nap a lot on Saturdays and Sundays.

Second, I'm on - and will be on for the rest of my life - a prescription medication for which some of the side effects are diminished energy and fatigue. My doctors and I worked out that the optimal timing for my daily dose is late afternoon. If I take it at bedtime, I can't wake up in the morning; if I take it when I wake up, I fall asleep at work. So most of the time when I settle in to watch a film, the medicine is starting to creep up on me, and when I begin to feel that it is interfering with my focus, I call it a night. The DVD will still be there tomorrow, and I appreciate that.

My circumstances are just my circumstances, but who doesn't have circumstances nowadays? It's the New Global Economy. In Korea my hours were worse - 6:30 AM to 10:00 PM, every weekday. It's the price one pays for being employed at all - and at least now in Mexico, I have a good job, one that I like.

For every one person who is so fortunate as to be able to arrange their life in keeping with the demands of the Church of Art - usually someone comfortably well off as a result of the family they were born into (I know some such) - there are a thousand who would like to, but cannot. Given that I choose not to be in a relationship, not to have a family, and that part of the reason I opt against those is that they would cut into my intellectual time - well, I consider that I do my best.