I’m still doping out what I think of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Gran Torino, although I did see the latter in time and liked it enough to slip into some of my end-of-the-year ten-best lists. (Since my thoughts and inclinations tend to change over time, I’m reluctant to keep recycling the same list every time I’m asked for one.)
Having just seen Benjamin Button, I still don’t know whether I might have included it in any of my lists, but I have to admit that I suspect I already prefer it to all of Fincher’s other films, with the possible exception of Se7en. It took me a while to warm to the weird premise and some of the grotesqueries it involves, but I think part of what impresses me is how nervy it is in playing out the poetry of the conceit for all that it’s worth and letting all the social-historical elements—from two world wars to Hurricane Katrina (and not overlooking the degree to which it sidesteps all the racial issues)–take a back seat to the love story. It’s also more impressive to me visually than Fincher’s other works. Whatever one concludes about the story and all its ramifications, he certainly knows how to fill a frame.
Gran Torino’s own narrative premises are in some ways almost as unbelievable as Benjamin Button’s, even if we can more readily succumb to them for generic reasons. There are plenty of narrative and psychological gaps (or perhaps i should say holes); simply trying to get some rudimentary notion of what the racist hero’s just-deceased wife was like or how he related to her when she was alive gets one nowhere. What’s so nervy in this case—making it for me far more interesting than Eastwood’s overstuffed Changeling—is not just the upfront way it deals with American xenophobia and hatred, which are given Fulleresque dimensions, but the way the movie allows Eastwood to rethink his macho persona yet again, making it for me his most interesting performance since he deconstructed John Huston in White Hunter, Black Heart.
It’s intriguing to consider the radical split in the reviews of the Fincher movie between the indignant responses of Roger Ebert and Scott Fondas to the enthusiasm of A.O. Scott (even though the latter does own up to some of the ideological issues at stake). There’s also some apparent discomfort in many of the reviews of the Eastwood film—including even some of the favorable ones, which insist on calling it a “minor” work in the Eastwood oeuvre. (Does Changeling’s Snake Pit melodrama and White-Elephant-Art grandstanding qualify as “major” by comparison?) The ambivalent way Eastwood views his own character hardly makes this film a lefthanded gesture, any more than the comparable ambivalence in his view of the macho director in White Hunter had anything minor about it. The underplayed final scene of White Hunter may even be for me the most perfectly realized moment in Eastwood’s work to date. And despite the fact that Gran Torino is relatively bombastic, Eastwood’s performance in it seems no less measured and considered. [12/26/08]
Thanks to a post by Tom Brueggemann yesterday on Dave Kehr’s web site, I’ve just discovered the existence of a remarkable site cataloging almost 23,000 movie theaters around the world, including all nine of those in northwestern Alabama that were owned and/or operated by my grandfather between roughly 1919 and 1960, only a couple of which are still standing today (neither of which still shows movies). There’s also quite a lot of factual information about these theaters available on this site.
Cinema Treasures also features almost 1600 photographs of theaters, though, alas, not any of the nine run by my grandfather. It seems that the people in charge of this site got inundated with more photos of theaters than they could cope with, so they’re not currently adding any more, at least for the time being. But since a good many photos of my family’s former theaters are available in my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980), I’ve decided to reproduce a few here, restricting myself to exterior views of four of them. Directly overhead are the two that are still standing—the Shoals in Florence (which opened in 1948, and is seen here just after it opened) and the Ritz in Sheffield (which opened in 1928). The two below are the Princess in Florence (which opened in 1919 and is listed in Cinema Treasures as the Cinema—its second name, dating from 1958) and the Colbert in Sheffield ( which opened in 1942, and is seen here circa 1954). [12/25/08]
I find it curious that the great Iranian prose writer Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) should remind me so much of Edgar Allan Poe, because their backgrounds couldn’t be more dissimilar. Poe (1809-1849) was poor his entire life and Hedayat came from a very wealthy and privileged background; Poe lived in several American cities but never left the U.S. whereas Hedayat lived for extended periods in Belgium, France, and India as well as Iran.
Before the recent publication of Three Drops of Blood, a collection of Hedayat stories, I’d read only his novella The Blind Owl (1936), one of the most terrifying and unsettling horror stories I know, as well as a few of his other stories in French. It seems that most of his work is (or at least has been) available in French, but until the appearance of this slim anthology, The Blind Owl–freely if brilliantly adapted by Raul Ruiz in one of his craziest features, La Chouette Aveugle (1987)–has been virtually the only thing of his available in English. (12/25 postscript: Adrian Martin has just informed me that one can access many Hedayat stories in English translation, including The Blind Owl, for free here.)
As Homa Katouzian explains in his introduction, Hedayat wrote at least four different kinds of stories, which he terms “romantic nationalist fiction,” “critical realist stories,” “satire,” and “psycho-fiction” (the latter Katouzian’s own coinage). What I’m describing, perhaps too restrictively, as “horror stories” belong to the fourth category. The title story “Three Drops of Blood”, which is almost as scary as The Blind Owl, similarly deals with hallucinatory madness, despair, and a kind of convulsive fear of sexuality. I have yet to explore Hedayat’s other kinds of stories, but this anthology, translated by Deborah Miller Mostaghel, seems to offer a very useful introduction. [12/24/08]
What a pleasurable experience it is to pass directly from a slew of end-of-the-year screeners, most of which I can’t watch to the end, to a 1933 King Vidor opus that still isn’t commercially available on DVD. (According to Scott Simmon, Raymond Durgnat’s coauthor on King Vidor, American [1988], this is Vidor’s most underrated movie; Durgnat opts for Ruby Gentry.) A characteristic virtue of this character-driven adaptation of a Phil Stong novel set in farming country is a shot devoted to a dog wandering into a Sunday morning church service during the sermon, noticing that the place is full, and gradually sitting down under one of the pews. It’s the sort of inessential detail that I wouldn’t expect to find in any contemporary movie. I have no way of knowing whether or not this was scripted, but considering how little it has to do with the plot, I suspect it wasn’t—that Vidor happened on such a shot as an afterthought. Apart from the economy of 30s features, this sort of meandering poetry seems increasingly rare in today’s movies. [12/20/08]
Given my overall admiration for Elizabeth Drew as a sensible and straightforward political commentator, I’m happy to have her account in The Huffington Post of what’s dishonorable about the historical distortions of the recent Frost/Nixon movie. Even though I enjoyed the latter as middlebrow entertainment in the Stanley Kramer mode, which goaded me into ordering and watching some of the original David Frost/Richard Nixon dialogues—generally finding Ron Howard as a director to be one of the abler purveyors of this kind of dubious material, which I sometimes have a weakness for—it’s always useful to have someone like Drew pointing out the various misrepresentations.
Why, then, can’t I count on Drew to sidestep the grotesque Hollywood distortions about Nixon that automatically come with seeing him as “a tragic Shakespearean figure”—an absurd inflation that appears to have been invented by either Oliver Stone or his publicist (assuming that there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between the two) as part of the promotional campaign for his 1995 White Elephant Nixon starring Anthony Hopkins?
For me, there’s something unnerving about the way Nixon (the person) has been absurdly elevated and even validated in this cheesy fashion in order to sell a ridiculously overheated piece of merchandise, which Drew is all ready to buy into without blinking. How long do we have to wait now until Stone or someone else serves up a “Shakespearean” George W. Bush? (I haven’t yet seen W., which presumably doesn’t aim quite that high.) Isn’t this really a validation or at least a rationalization for the people who voted for these jerks? [12/17/08]
