in which the good guys win and all's right with the world

The week of panic and sleeplessness is done now. I've been waking up weary every day, not remembering my dreams, with only vaguely troubling recollections of nights poisoned by sisyphian tasks and trying to find my way through convoluted'd like to see them eating their left-brain, pragmatical, evil-wins-because-it-has-more-money words on a hefty Catalan platter today.

It's hard to say what did the trick, exactly. Man U hit the pitch all gangbusters and superpowered, controlling the game for the first ten minutes. Granted, Barca have a sort of tradition of starting slow, probing and exploring, finding their passing rhythm before making their first move, but in those first ten minutes I think Ronaldo created at least three chances for himself... all saved by my boys, of course. (The backline played tremendously yesterday. Sylvinho and Pique were downright heroes, and Carles Puyol is a damn superman, reining Ronaldo in over and over and getting continually battered for his troubles. I hope he's sitting today in a hot-tub full of supermodels. Certainly he's earned it.) And then somehow Cameroonian marvel Samuel Eto'o slipped up the touchline with the ball at his feet and tapped it past keeper Van der Sar into the net, ten minutes into the match, and I've never seen anything so quickly and finally turn an entire tide. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. Like all the life drained right out of Ferguson's men, and they were transformed in that one instant from a smoothly-oiled fighting machine into a pile of disengaged parts, still fighting, but without effect.



If you've never seen Barca play, you're missing a great pleasure. The footwork, the pace, the aesthetics of the passing... Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez are like two halves of a single person when they move the ball between them up the pitch. Much of the greatness of Barca lies in its youth training, a school known as La Masia. Boys are trained early in the ways of Beautiful Football, and a great many of them stay with the team for many years, a rarity in these days of nomadic players following the siren call of their bank accounts. Both Iniesta and Xavi rose up out of this youth program, as did manager Pep Guardiola (seen flying, below), first goalkeeper Victor Valdes and superstar Argentine forward Lionel Messi, as well as more recent additions Sergi Busquets and Gerard Pique. Intrepid Captain Puyol has been a staunch Catalan for nearly his entire career.



But these are the giggly mutterings of the near-exhausted. I've got that same empty feeling I had after the marathon that was the World Cup, this time with a patina of happiness washed across it, but there's that melancholy, too. The season's over. I'll have nothing but World Cup qualifiers, never my favorite dish on the menu, for a good three months. Add to that the prospect of three more months of nothing but summer fare at the cinema (GI Joe?! Trans-frickin'-formers?!) and I'm at a loose end. I've been watching the first season of Alan Ball's True Blood, which I'm enjoying (cajun country, vampires, and all those stellar character actors that get work on HBO. What's not to like?), but I'm jonesing for an obsession. My immediate impulse is to go out and watch Star Trek again, see if I like it as well as I thought I did the first time, put off Terminator Salvation for a few more days, and hope that if I leave myself open and vulnerable, some god or other might show up in the form of a flash of brilliant inspiration. Here's hoping.

there are times when tim roth is my freaking hero

Everybody knows him. If you're American, you probably didn't see him first in those early, gritty films about poverty and thuggery in England (Alan Clarke's Made In Britain, Mike Leigh's Meantime), but Quentin Tarantino saw to it that his laugh is etched in your mind from a moment that may have altered cinematic history in our time: in Resevoir Dogs, when the guy whose ear Michael Madsen's just taken during his little torture-dance asks Roth, "How do I look?" I may be misremembering my timeline, but it seems to me that a whole new Comedy of the Grotesque was invented in that scene, the repercussions of which have yet to play fully out. Roth has worked with Tom Stoppard on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Vatel, Stephen Frears on the Terence Stamp comeback vehicle the Hit (available this month for the first time on DVD), Robert Altman on Vincent and Theo, and Francis Coppola on Youth Without Youth. In all these many years, I have yet to see him act badly, but there's one performance that stands like a giant over them all.

1995 was the year of the Scottish film. Before Braveheart, there was Rob Roy: a sentimental, epic blockbuster evincing traditional Republican family values, hard work, stoical persistence and physical courage, the importance of living by a personal code of honour, and taking up arms against The Man if you're feeling oppressed. I watched it several times in the theatre that summer, partly to take a long and vicarious holiday in Scotland, but mostly because Tim Roth gives one of the most polished, fantastic performances ever put on film.



His name is Archibald Cunningham. From the moment he walks into view, languid, limp-wristed and sleepy-eyed, less like a fop than somehow like a little girl, his mouth a rack of bad teeth periodically displayed in a smile that is simultaneously insulting and obsequious, he commands the screen, stealing the film from powerhouse presences like Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange as well as formidable Brits like John Hurt and Brian Cox. The character is very finely written: a poverty-struck bastard with courtly ambitions, only a total lack of conscience and an unearthly ability in a fencing match to recommend him. Roth turns in a perfect double performance: there's Archibald at rest, when he is out of sight of his superiors, and there's Archibald with courtly airs and careful jibes when in. As if that's not enough, there are various shades in between, when Archibald is in the presence of inferiors or those he has not yet placed in the social hierarchy (the cage in which he lives), and Roth captures them all with a breathtaking effortlessness. He communicates with the motion of a facial muscle or cast of the eye as much as if he were to deliver, Shakespeare-like, a soliloquy directly to the camera. There is no moment when we do not know what he is doing or thinking, although his words often belie the truth, and he never becomes predictable. I'm happy to go out on a limb here and call his final swordfight against Rob Roy McGregor (an excellent vehicle for Neeson), who is brandishing a huge two-handed Claymore against Cunningham's quick sabre, the best duel ever put to film. Not only are acres of nuances exquisitely captured by the camera, not only is the action given plenty of space and punctuated with just the right amount of close-up, but Roth keeps communicating his character to us, silently, while he fights.

He was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for it, losing out to Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Watching it again after all this time has reminded me of a thing that was chewing at the edges of my mind while I watched Heath Ledger as the Joker. Something felt wrong to me, just off-kilter, and I could never put my finger on it; Archibald Cunningham has snapped it into focus. There is no moment in Roth's entire performance which is not absolutely clear: no gesture, no grimace, no spoken word. Every choice is clearly made and clearly delivered. Next to it, Ledger's Joker looks out of focus and unfinished, as if he had all the right instincts about the role but needed more time to rehearse, to set his choices finally and completely, to deliver them cleanly.

Nowadays you can see Roth any given Wednesday night on Lie to Me, one of those 1001 All-Cops-And-Federal-Agents-Are-Smug-and-Self-Righteous shows we apparently love in this country (I hope to God that real cops aren't as obnoxious as the ones on TV. Can you imagine if your husband was killed and Vincent D'Onofrio walked in, turned his head sideways, started playing with your earrings while standing way too close, and asked if you secretly wanted your husband dead?). He plays a specialist in body-language who can tell instantly if you're lying. I've watched one ep. Frankly, it makes me nervous. I've seen too many fine actors lose all love of craft and joy in the process while picking up that astronomical weekly check from those bigwig studios. (And here, insert a wistful hello to my once-beloved Vincent D'Onofrio.) I wish him well with it. His kids will have their choice of expensive universities, and that's nice for him, but I don't give a crap about it. I'm selfish, and I'd rather he keep on acting well.

che part two: revolution as a protracted slog through increasing hardship into utter defeat

Yes, I did indeed see it without having seen part one, which was showing during the weeks that my Sweet Man had his heart attack and super quadrillion bypass surgery (which all seems to have come out just fine, gods willing, and thanks for asking)...

Undaunted, and convinced that these were films that ought to be given the fullscreen cinematic treatment, I took my seat in the darkened house after the Cuban revolution had been won and just as one shaven-headed Comrade Guevara (Benicio del Toro) was wending his way to Bolivia to do his level best to see communism proliferate throughout the new world. The upside is that I got to see it in its fullscreen cinematic glory. The downside is that because I'd missed the buildup in Cuba, the whole venture seemed doomed from the outset: two hours plus spent with a band of patriots getting scragglier, hungrier, more discouraged and disease-ridden, with nothing but camaraderie and noble rhetoric to buoy them up. Even if you didn't already know that Che left a handsome young corpse in a Bolivian mountain village, you're not long into the film before you can see they're heading inexorably for a bad end.

That said, this is not a gruelling film (as are, for instance, Synecdoche, New York in an interesting way and Australia in a gruelling way). It's not difficult to sit through, it doesn't feel too long, and it's done with such a deft, light touch and a facility with the unexpected that one becomes engrossed in spite of any nagging political misgivings or preconceptions.

The politics of Guevara's legacy (hero of the people? bloodthirsty egoist chasing his own martyrdom? are the two mutually exclusive?) are of course endlessly debatable. Although this camera tries to keep an objective distance, one cannot avoid the magnetic draw of Benicio/Che's effortless and unswerving charisma, and I daresay even the most pacifist among us feels, almost unconsciously, a certain disrespect toward the leader of the Bolivian communist party (played by Lou Diamond Phillips, a yuppie sweater slung across his absurdly natty outfit as he trudges through the jungle to meet with Che) who refuses to endorse an armed revolution.

The script is startling in its utilitarianism. It hasn't got a funny moment. It has no small talk in it, except early on at a Cuban party, shot very much like it might have been in an early-70s docustyle (aka Medium Cool or the Candidate or fill in your favorite Robert Altman film) where the director gets all the period details right in costume and setting then wanders around listening in on what folks are talking about. Other than that, nobody says anything that's not about the matter at hand, which is usually something like what will we eat tonight? will we pay them for the pig or just take it? where is the ambush set? where can we cross the river safely? we need medicine. Do the villagers trust us? can we trust them? how can we bolster morale? and that may be a pretty fair depiction of jungle guerrilla warfare.

This project was originally slated for Terrence Malick to direct (a human who I sometimes in giddier moments think I love over all others, unless you count Mr. Spock as a real person). Soderbergh gives a few tips of the hat towards the other director in some moments of gorgeous nature cinematography (a shot straight up at overhead trees took me back to that brilliant final shot of the New World, and one from above of water reacting to soldiers wading through it might have been lifted directly from the Thin Red Line), but you'd never mistake this for the Malick version. For one thing, the inimitible Terrence tends to take the bones of history, dissemble them, and let them resettle in new and interesting shapes as he shoots. This one feels more structured by events as they have been set down in The Stone Tablet That Is History. (Please note: I do not mean that is a bad thing. I enjoy the playing-fast-and-loose-with-history only when it is a mad, visionary virtuoso like Malick doing the playing.) Also, although the jungle is a major player, here is not that strange and wonderful Malickian sense of man, ants, tree-limbs and musk-oxen being equal parts of one and the same vast and mysterious entity.

So much for what it's not. What Soderbergh DOES give us is a story intriguingly told via almost random but chronological dips into the daily lives of these soldiers, in short pieces with little attention to follow-up, scenes edited tersely but without sacrificing breathing space. And, of course, he gives us the preternaturally photogenic Benicio del Toro (I've always thought that Johnny Depp would love to look like del Toro; lose the obstacle of his extreme prettiness without losing photographability). The bulk of the film is done in medium or long shot with an apparently populist view to avoiding an overemphasis on the man himself, so when we finally get a sustained closeup (during an asthma attack about 2/3 of the way down the road), he is almost hypnotically fascinating to watch, a godsend and a revelation. During those final, quieter scenes of imprisonment, I found myself wishing for a different film, one in which I could spend more quality time with Che... Although, in retrospect, I think it's more time with Benicio I'm really looking for, and that, I'm happy to say, will soon be satisfied when the long-salivated-for Wolf Man movie comes out.

the best natasha richardson tribute

I read a lot of tributes that week, but this is the one that haunts me. It may be one of the best reviews I've ever read, as it makes me long to have seen the show and simultaneously creates images so strong in my mind that I feel I have. It's Sheila O'Malley talking about Richardson's Sally Bowles at the Roundabout some years back.

the things i've been watching: april edition

Milk: (2008. dir: Gus Van Sant) The big hardship in filming biodrama is the temptation to work from an outline of facts and events, as in: "my audience must know that this happened, then this, and that my hero had this quality and said this then did this." You check off each thing or happening once it's filmed then tuck it into its chronological place on your Final Cut Pro, and when the checklist is all done, so is your movie. But what you end up with in a checklist movie is two hours of everyone saying exactly what they mean all the time (a thing that rarely happens in life) because your priority is in imparting clear information about your hero's life at the expense of both drama and entertainment.

It's tough, especially when the subject is recent enough that folks who knew him well are still alive and watching, ready to jump up and cry foul if you run astray from events as they happened or, more insidiously, from the party line. Point is, I understand the pressures and the difficulty. And what Van Sant has given us is not uninteresting, particularly as a chronicle of How They Lived during a pivotal decade in gay history. It's got compelling, sometimes breathtaking performances almost across the board. I'm particularly intrigued by James Franco, who seems to have relaxed into himself while I was looking elsewhere, offering up a turn so unobtrusive yet true that I wonder if he has not rounded a corner and embarked on that arduous stretch into the kind of greatness in which he can share a scene as gracefully as he can steal it.

The film is a timely one, and therefore greatly appreciated, but I think it will be remembered as a staid, successfully Oscar-worthy effort rather than a film to be enjoyed for its own inner vitality. In short, a film you admire, not one that you love. That spoken, I am fully willing to allow that if I were a gay man, I might be more passionate about it, and if I were a very young gay man, it might be life-altering.




Nobel Son: (2007. dir: Randall Miller) An obtrusive soundtrack further mars this dark and (damningly) unfunny hipster comedy from the "Lock Stock And Two Smoking We All Wish We Were Quentin And If We Were This Would Be A Great Film But We're Not Still The Studio Is Hoping One Of Us Will Be So Yay! I Got My Bad Movie Made" school of filmmaking. The crime is preposterous, the people are more flawed than not and in-fighting abounds; much of the unsuccessful humor centers around absurd mutilations, and it's all stultifyingly contrived.

And that's too bad, since the project offers up sizable roles with what ought to have been interesting things to do to old favorites Mary Steenburgen and Alan Rickman. It's not their fault the movie is bad. It's a house made of cleverness with nothing holding it together.




>SPOILERS, BUT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR TIME?<

The Godfather: (1972. dir: Francis Ford Coppola) I know, I know, no more ink needs to be spilled...

Except that it does! Because it amazes me, every time, this film. It's one of maybe ten in all of history that I PHYSICALLY CANNOT run across on TV without watching the rest of it, from any point, any scene. The endgame is so perfect that I begin to salivate for it, to physically crave it, the baptism and the preparations for battle, Michael Corleone saying that he does renounce Satan, he does renounce his works, and then hell breaks loose, but just for a moment, and the battle is won, all over the city, as Michael is winning the battle over the better angel of his conscience, and committing himself to his dark destiny. And then, and THEN! getting Carlo to confess and then Diane Keaton's best scene, maybe her best onscreen moment ever, when Michael concedes that he will, just this once, allow her to ask him about his business, and the way she says it, barely speaking it, her face twisted with pleading and dread, "Is it true?" And then that final shot, the camera following her into the other room and we see his soldiers gathering around Michael, acknowledging him as Don, and we see the darkness fall across her as the door closes and shuts her out forever.

It's not just the endgame that's perfect. This is a perfect movie. I'm dumbfounded by it every time. The effortlessness of it. There is not an element, not a moment that is out of tune or excessive, nor is there anything missing. Godfather II is also a work of genius, but in an affectionately erring, rambling, possibly greater but somehow more believable manner. This first film is so consummately marvellous that if I were ever to see Coppola in the flesh I would gaze at him slack-jawed, and, if I was drunk, maybe pinch him to see if he was really only human. I wonder if this is not at the root of our apparently collective mistrust of him as a director, like the one the British harbor toward David Beckham, because he's proved that he can work miracles and we resent him because he seems willful and malevolent in choosing not to do it every day.

valkyrie and the missing hamartia

This was the theatrical experience of tragedy as they taught it when I was a kid: it involved an emotional catharsis for the audience, which was set off by a character's reversal of fortune (or peripeteia), which in turn had been triggered by his own hamartia, or fatal flaw. Nowadays they're translating the Greek differently, I hear, and the hamartia can be something as simple as a mistake or an error in judgment, to which I say crap! utter rubbish. And I don't mean the translators are necessarily wrong, but that Aristotle was, if this is what he meant to say.

Valkyrie is a case in point. Why did it fail? One reviewer said the device of using British actors to play Nazis was too old and tired to carry a film anymore, but that's not it, not for me, anyway; I love it; I'll never get tired of that. That stiff upper lip thing slides right over into "Ve haf vaze ahf making you talk" wonderfully well, like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. "I ask you once more: is it safe?" Brrr! Chills me just thinking of it. (That said,-- sidebar here,-- it's one of the few genuinely Teutonic actors who has the most chillingly effective moment in Valkyrie: it's Thomas Kretschmann as the officer who must puzzle out what's going on and ultimately decide who triumphs, and the moment is the one in which he decides.)

It's a tough subject, the Valkyrie Plot, a moment so crucial in the German mythos that it in some ways defines the country. I understand the German reticence at Hollywood taking this hallowed story into its careless hands. A rough equivalent might be the Irish reaction if Roland Emmerich directed Hunger or the uproar in the Jewish community when Mel Gibson announced he wanted to film the story of the Maccabees (a film which I would give much to see and, alas, apparently never will).

The problem for me is this: sometimes I cannot surrender myself emotionally to a film. Usually the root of that failure lies in what might be called the Spielberg Hustle, in which a filmmaker uses every possible tactic to manipulate our emotional responses, employing elements not organic to the story or characters in doing it, and so abusing our trust and revealing an emptiness at the film's core where its heart ought to have been. Valkyrie, on the other hand, was a different matter: I mistrusted it because I knew the story, knew the vale of tears into which these people were headed, and I could not accompany them without withholding my heart. Afterwards I was disturbed by it: was the flaw in the film somewhere, which, from a technical standpoint, was very well done? or was it a flaw in me as a spectator? Have I become one of those yellow-bellied whingers who can only watch a movie with a happy ending? Surely not. After all, I know where Hamlet and King Kong are headed, and I throw myself full-force into the ring with those fellows with repeated zeal. Das Boot comes to mind: I know where they're bound, have since I saw it in the theatre, and yet I set off time and again in that claustrophobic little metal contraption and hope and laugh and fear and cry and emerge richer for it in the end. So why not Cruise's Stauffenberg on his ill-fated mission to assassinate the Fuehrer? What is it about Valkyrie that stopped me from committing?

I was cruising around the internet when I found the answer: it was on a website which outlined the basics of every known attempt on Hitler's life. In a passing remark, the webster wrote, "Stauffenberg believed that only he could accomplish it," and that set off the eureka moment in my mind. THAT was the fatal flaw which might have turned the pathos into tragedy. As the movie stands now, Stauffenberg's only mistake is in leaving the scene of the crime without verifying that Hitler is dead, a small error in judgment. If instead he'd been driven by the hubris of thinking only he could bring off this assassination, that it was a destiny of his and no one else should touch it, then there it is: the wound through which the gods enter. There's the flaw that makes him human and upon its back we can climb up to the heights of tragedy instead of wallowing in the mud of pathos, a state in which we are showed the horrors of life but given no exalting catharsis, no chance to come away from the cinema with that revitalizing awe which tragedy, when well done, inspires.

In an essay on tragedy, Edith Hamilton(*) writes, "Undeserved suffering is not in itself tragic. Death is not tragic in itself... It is not Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle that is tragic. It is his power to feel. Change all the circumstances of the drama and Hamlet in the grip of any calamity would be tragic, just as Polonius would never be, however awful the catastrophe. The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that is tragedy." It's possible that Cruise gave us too much noble action figure and too little true feeling; it's possible that the fault was in the script and not any of his. It is also possible that the same political correctness which lambastes filmmakers when they try to examine Hitler as a human being instead of a mere monster (as in the initial outcry, later tempered by some, to 2002's underrated Max) may have stripped this particular Stauffenberg of the very humanness which might have raised him up onto the giddy heights from which tragic heroes gaze forlornly down at us.

* see Gilder et al. Theatre Arts Anthology, Theatre Arts Books, NY 1950

what i'm watching: march edition

>SPOILER ALERT<

Let the Right One In: (2008. dir: Tomas Alfredson) I remember the day I gave up coming-of-age films. I was in high school and sitting in the Varsity watching a French film in which (as I remember it) a teenaged boy arranges for his older brother to get burned across the ass on a heater to keep him from sleeping with the object of his (the teenaged maimer's) affection. The brother sleeps with her anyway; it's unclear why the girl sleeps with the brother, except perhaps that she is enigmatic and French; and I thought to myself, "No more French coming-of-age films. I've reached my saturation point. Enough." By the time I was outside the theatre, that resolution had expanded to include ALL coming-of-age films not made in the U.S. and most of them that were, and I've stuck with it fairly well, missing Cinema Paradiso and My Life As A Dog and countless others that have been advertised as the best thing since canned beer.

This ruthless tenet by which I've lived for so many years combined with the fact that Netflix sent me this movie when I really wanted the Star Trek episode that was, in fact, at the top of my queue (yes, yes, I know how that sounds, no need to rub it in) stacked all my cards against liking it when I sat down to watch, grumpily wishing that Mr. Spock or Q would make an appearance. And still it won me over. My worst fear was that it would be Twilight on steroids, but it had more in common with some unflinching philosopher's body of work, Kierkegaard maybe. Like all good vampire films, it's not just about blood-sucking, although there are copious amounts of blood. You could say it's about being loved in spite of what you are, and also about the importance of activating your own dark nature, but saying it out like that makes it sound less than it is. I hear you now, groaning, "Oh, is THAT all?" It's not all. In fact, the parts that lifted it from good into great for me were in the last section: the attack by the cats, the vampire suicide, the way the massacre at the pool was filmed. There's something balletic about the film, and by that I don't mean the boring parts of ballet but the grace of it, the graceful interweaving of sound, vision, and action. The director has a complete vision, and he does not waver.





The Last Tycoon: (1976. dir: Elia Kazan) Man, this should have worked. De Niro was in the perfect place to play this role: he's got the effortless charisma, he's sexy as hell, he's still got the old intensity but he's relaxed enough that he can enjoy the genuine niceness of the character. He's Monroe Stahr, a version of Irving Thalberg as seen through the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald during his unhappy screenwriting stint in Hollywood. The book was unfinished when Fitzgerald died suddenly, and it's still a good read.

My first thought was that it ought to have been filmed either twenty years earlier or twenty years later. Kazan directed; Pinter wrote the screenplay. Pinter had even at that time adapted at least two other books into film (the Go-Between, the Quiller Memorandum), so he was no greenhorn. Kazan hadn't directed anything for years, and nothing great for twenty years. Here's a man who ought to have been able to give us an interesting look at the studio system... and he just doesn't! Like, out of perversity or something. Or had he just lost the touch? Or maybe his power had been so stripped in his time away that he hadn't the resources... Your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, the old Gadge magic is nowhere to be seen.

The best bit in the book is a meeting between Stahr and a high-falutin' British writer who's been recruited to the studio and is miserable, can't understand the first thing about making movies. Instead of trying to explain it, Stahr tells him a simple story about watching a girl walk into a room and perform a series of simple but strange tasks (empties her purse on the table, puts two dimes back in, lights her gloves on fire, etc). He tells it simply and it has no end, but both the reader and the recalcitrant screenwriter are intrigued. Pinter also recognized its power, placing the telling of it twice in his screenplay: once where called for in the book, again during the improvised, montage-like ending. And the story doesn't work in either place. I don't blame Pinter. In the book it has power because it is simply told in a quiet voice, and one can feel the screenwriter being drawn in by Stahr's personal charm. Kazan doesn't trust his actor enough just to let the camera stay steady on him while he speaks -- and what would you rather look at than De Niro, back then, sitting still and telling a story? that magnificent face, and the wonderful, subtle things he did with it -- and so has him running around the room, miming actions, and the focus is lost.

And so it goes with the rest of the film. Pinter obviously has great respect for Fitzgerald's original dialogue, which deserves it, and uses great chunks of it where he can. Again, it ought to have worked. Again, I blame Kazan. The editing is lousy, and the sound is lousy. It looks and sounds like a TV movie. Not the kind now, which can be good, but the '70s kind, which was not. The sound is unbalanced and weird, with background noise mitigating focus during important moments (again, not in that Conversation-style early '70s-realism way, but in a lazy-assed way). Add to that a cast of over-the-hill studio players doing cameos, it's even more movie-of-the-week, and it all comes out looking cheap and wrong.

The best parts of the film, as in the book, are when we follow Stahr during his work-day, responding to dailies, giving advice on films. Thalberg was a genius in his own specialized way, and Fitzgerald has caught it with his pen. The notes Fitzgerald left for the end of the book are best ignored (it gets Grand Guignol, with hitman murders and airplane crashes and tuberculosis), but Pinter tacks on an unsatisfying non-ending which, although it has the virtue of unpretentiousness, really doesn't play. By the time it comes around, though, things have been going wrong for long enough that it doesn't much matter. There's a bit with Jack Nicholson which ought to have been fabulous: Nicholson is the guy from New York who's come to talk the studios into unionizing the writers. Seeing him with De Niro promises much, and delivers nothing. It's the writer's fault; they have nothing to do. You ask yourself: why did this guy fly all this way to sit and say nothing? He never talks to Stahr about anything, just answers his questions in monosyllable, endures his drunken taunts, decks him, and leaves. In the book, this character is a communist off the street with whom Stahr on a whim arranges to talk, which explains the lack of motivation, but doesn't make the incident any more interesting.

In the end, it's all very frustrating. If you're having a De Niro-festival, you can't miss this one. Otherwise, alas, you can.




Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: (1974. dir: Sam Peckinpah) Ah, Sam, Sam. I love you, man. But your movies about the relations between men and women... ah, Sam. Leave it at home, will you? Like that Ballad of Cable Hogue nonsense. You seriously wanted this to be part of your legacy? Not that old Alfredo here is on that same low par; this one has much to recommend it. Warren Oates, for one, who may be the perfect Peckinpah stand-in, a fellow who never takes off his sunglasses, who brings a near-unbearable poignancy to the defensive, barked phrase, "Nobody loses ALL the time." Then there's the strange, timeless Mexican estate from which the death sentence is issued, a place that has one foot in the 1800s and one in the modern day, none of it in the real world, a place where a daughter's illegitimate baby is celebrated even as news of its father's murder is rewarded. There's Gig Young in one of his creepily convincing sadist roles. There's a baby-faced Kris Kristofferson, who reshapes a single-scene, Harley-ridin' rapist into a poetic, romantic hero. But then... are you listening, Sam?... in the Peckinpah-'verse, no woman is raped who doesn't really want it, and their long-suffering men are held up as virtuous martyrs for fighting for them anyway. Heavy sighs all around.

It's a slow and unwieldy film, with big chunks of dully-written dialogue, and yet it unwinds with such a strangeness that it weaves its own magical spell. If nothing else, you'll be left reminiscing about the good old days when a person could check a human head through customs and still make it onto the flight to Mexico.