Monthly Archives: November 2011

From “The Age of Movies,” here’s P. Kael on History of the World, Part I:

When I saw History, there were hisses and walkouts during this number, and the film has been attacked as a disgrace by reviewers in the press and on TV. I bet nobody hissed or walked out on Candide. When Prince and Bernstein do it, it’s culture; when Brooks does it, there’s a chorus of voices saying, “He has gone too far this time.” Earlier in the film, the dancer Gregory Hines, who makes a breezy film debut as Comicus’ Ethiopian pal, Josephus, tries to convince the slavers who are sending him to the circus to be eaten by lions that he’s not a Christian but a Jew. With his loose-limbed body–his legs seem to be on hinges–he does a mock-Jewish dance, and then a shim-sham, and the racial humor didn’t appear to bother the audience. But during the Inquisition, when nuns toss off their habits, and a giant torture wheel to which pious Jews are attached is spun in a game of chance, there were mutterings of disapproval. Yet it’s Brooks’s audacity–his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke, and doing it in a low-comedy context–that gives History the kick that was missing from his last few films. The Inquisition is presented as a paranoid fantasy, with Jews as the only victims, and when Torquemada whacks the knees of gray-bearded old men imprisoned in stocks–using them as a xylophone–you may gasp. But either you get stuck thinking about the “bad taste” or you let yourself laugh at the obscenity in the humor, as you do at Bunuel’s perverse dirty jokes. The offensive material is a springboard to a less sentimental kind of comedy.

If Mel Brooks doesn’t go “too far,” he’s nowhere–he’s mild and mushy. It’s his maniacal, exuberant compulsion to flaunt show-biz Jewishness that makes him an uncontrollable original. At his best, he is to being Jewish what Richard Pryor is to being black: wildly in love with the joke of it, obsessed and inspired by the joke of it. What History needs is more musical numbers with the show-biz surreal satire of the Inquistion section; it’s the kind of satire that makes the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup a classic farce. Brooks goes wrong when he pulls back to innocuous loveability–when he has Gregory Hines say to him, “You’re the first white man I even considered liking.” (Now, if that had been “the first Jews…”) Hines’ dancing–the movie could have used more of it–deserves better than a suck-up line.

When Brooks has a hot streak on a TV talk show, you can see his mental process at work, and amazing things just pop out of his mouth. He can’t get that rhythm going on the screen with prepared gags. Some movie directors can give their material that surprise. Altman has often done it, and in Hi, Mom! DePalma did it, with a highly inflammatory race-relations subject. But Brooks isn’t a great director–far from it. He’s a great personality though, and he moves wonderfully; his dancing in his Torquemada robes is right up there with Groucho’s lope. Wearing a little mustache and with his lips puckered, Brooks as Louis XVI bears a startling resemblance to Chaplin in his Monsieur Verdoux period. I kept waiting for him to do something with this resemblance, but he didn’t. Was he unaware of it? Lecherous Louis did, however, make me understand why women at the French court wore those panniers that puffed out the sides of their skirts; we see those ballooning bottoms through his eyes. (Brooks may be wasting his talent by not appearing in other directors’ movies while he’s preparing his own.) As a director-star, he has the chance to go on pushing out the boundaries of screen comedy, because, despite the disapproving voices in the press and on TV, he can probably get away with it. Like Pryor, he’s a cutie.

Too bad for us, Mel’s movies never got better, but he sure did score a hit with the play version of The Producers.

Over at Codex 99, check out this cool post about subway tiles.

Last night, Jorge Posada told reporters: “I don’t think there’s even a percentage of a chance that I can come back,” Posada said. “It’s not going to happen.”

Mark Feinsand has the story.

We’ve talked about Posada’s fine Yankee career a lot this year. Tomorrow, William J will weigh-in on Posada’s case for the Hall of Fame.

Tintin is coming…

The Adventures of Tintin from James Curran on Vimeo.

This is my favorite Ginger Ale–the grown up soda. What brand do you prefer?

Plus

Equals This:

[Picture Credit: Marrast]

More P. Kael from “The Age of Movies. ”

From the essay, “Fear of Movies” (September 25, 1978):

In his new book The Films in My Life, Francois Truffaut writes, “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.” Truffaut’s dictum may exclude films that some of us enjoy. You couldn’t claim that National Lampoon’s Animal House expresses either the joy or the agony of making cinema. It’s like the deliberately dumb college-football comedies of the thirties–the ones with Joan Davis or Martha Ray–only more so; it’s a growly, rambunctious cartoon, and its id anarchy triumphs over the wet-fuse pacing, the botchy lighting, and the many other ineptitudes. In its own half-flubbed way, it has a style. And you don’t go to a film like Animal House for cinema, you go for roughhousing disreputability; it makes you laugh by restoring you to the slobby infant in yourself. (If it were more artistic, it couldn’t do that.)

But that sort of movie is a special case. Essentially, I agree with Truffaut. I can enjoy movies that don’t have that moviemaking fever in them, but it’s enjoyment on a different level, without the special aphrodisia of movies–the kinetic responsiveness, the all-out submission to pleasure. That “pulse” leaves you with all your senses quickened. When you see a movie such as Convoy, which has this vibrancy and yet doesn’t hold together, you still feel clearheaded. But when you’ve seen a series of movies without it, whether proficient soft-core porn like The Deep or klutzburgers like Grease, you feel poleaxed by apathy. If a movie doesn’t “pulse”–if the director isn’t talented, and if he doesn’t become fervently obsessed with the possibilities that subject offers him to explore moviemaking itself–it’s dead and it deadens you. Your heart goes cold. The world is a dishrag. (Isn’t the same thing true for a novel, a piece of music, a painting?)

The pressing against the bounds of the medium doesn’t necessarily result in a good movie (John Boorman’s debauch Exorcist II: The Heretic is proof of that), but it generally results in a live one–a movie there’s some reason to see–and it’s the only way great movies get made…there’s enough visual magic in [Exorcist II] for a dozen good movies; what the picture lacks is judgment–the first casualty of the moviemaking obsession.

…There’s no way I could make the case that Animal House is a better picture than Heaven Can Wait, yet on some sort of emotional-aesthetic level I prefer it. One returns you to the slobbiness of infancy, the other to the security of childhood, and I’d rather stand with the slobs.

I love this.

More Heavy D.

And this classic, producer by D’s younger cousin, Pete Rock, a tribute to Trouble T Roy, one of Heavy D’s dancers:

I finished a novel this morning on my subway ride to work. I had to read the last paragraph twice and felt that peculiar almost weightless feeling that comes when you finish a book. I read the last page again and then looked up, disoriented. The car was crowded and two older women stood in front of me. I had noticed them before but didn’t want to break the spell of that last page.

Now that I was done I offered my seat to the shorter woman who looked older. She refused.

“You saying I look old?” she said and then smiled.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “If I see you again I won’t extend the courtesy.”

She liked that and when the person sitting next to me stood up at the next stop, she sat down.

“You know you are damned either way,” she said. “If you offer the seat you can offend someone’s pride, if you don’t offer it, you have no manners.”

“The worst is when you offer it to a woman you think is pregnant,” said her friend, still standing after she refused my offer to sit, too. “Then you find out she’s not.”

I told them that my parents raised me to have manners but for most of my life I performed acts of kindness selfishly, keeping score of how many nice things I’d done.

“Well, it’s karma,” said the standing woman.

“No,” I said, “it was a set-up to feel burned if things didn’t go my way.”

I said that now I do what I do because it makes me feel good not because it means anything else.

“That’s a good philosophy of life,” said the older woman sitting next to me.

I told her that it was a relief. We talked about courtesies and feminism and she said that women can confuse gender and manners. Then she said, “Where are we?”

“Two more stops,” her friend said.

I asked where they were going and the woman sitting next to me said, “Roosevelt Hospital.”

“Oh, for you or to see someone?” I said, regretting it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

“I’m starting chemo today,” she said.

“Really? You look vital,” I said and regretted that even more.

She said she felt great but worried that her children were so upset.

“I told them that I’m as strong as I’ve felt in a long time,” she said and we talked about feeling helpless. Her kids are helpless to make her better and she is helpless to help them. As she spoke I remembered the review of the new Joan Didion memoir that I’d read last weekend in the New York Times. The book is about how the author handled the death of her daughter, which happened shortly after the death of her husband. John Banville concluded his review with:

The author as she presents herself here, aging and baffled, is defenseless against the pain of loss, not only the loss of loved ones but the loss that is yet to come: the loss, that is, of selfhood. The book will be another huge success, for reasons not mistaken but insufficient. Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.

The older woman sitting next to me looked strong and she smiled and told me how much she liked her doctors. When we got to 59th street I leaned over and kissed her cheek and she stood up and the two women pushed through the crowded car. I looked after them and saw the older woman turn back and smile and me. I thought of my wife and how I always look after her when I leave her on the subway. The woman waved and then was gone.

[Photo Credit: Dark Magoo]

Some terrible news. TMZ reports that Heavy D died today at the age of 44.

Hard to believe.

This is for the rap nerds, a long interview with MF Doom.

Lecture: DOOM (Madrid 2011) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.

Picture by Jason Levesque

Check out this photo gallery of Penn Station over at Retronaut.

I found it difficult to look at these pictures without feeling torn up.

Jacques does tarts on the latest episode of Essential Pepin. Wonderful, and he’s charming with his granddaughter, too.

[Photo Credit: Saveur]

From “The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael,” here’s Kael on Robert De Niro.

First, in Mean Streets:

While an actor like Jeff Bridges in The Last American Hero hits the true note, De Niro here hits the far-out, flamboyant one and makes his own truth. He’s a bravura actor, and those who have registered him only as the grinning, tobacco-chewing dolt of that hunk of inept whimsey Bang the Drum Slowly will be unprepared for his volatile performance. De Niro does something like what Dustin Hoffman was doing in Midnight Cowboy, but wilder; this kid doesn’t just act–he takes off into the vapors. De Niro is so intensely appealing that it might be easy to overlook Harvey Keitel’s work as Charlie. But Keitel makes De Niro’s triumph possible; Johnny Boy can bounce off Charlie’s anxious, furious admiration.

The Godfather Part II:

Brando is not on the screen this time, but he persists in his sons, Fredo and Michael, and Brando’s character is exteneded by our seeing how it was formed. As Vito, Robert De Niro amply convinces one that he has it in him to become the old man that Brando was. It’s not that he looks exactly like Brando but he has Brando’s wary woul, and so we can easily imagine the body changing with the years. It is much like seeing a photograph of one’s own dead father when he was a strapping young man; the burning spirit we see in his face spooks us, because of our knowledge of what he was at the end. In De Niro’s case, the young man’s face is fired by a secret pride. His gesture as he refuses the gift of a box of groceries is beautifully expressive and has the added wonder of suggesting Brando, and not from the outside but from the inside. When De Niro closes his eyes to blot out something insupportable, the reflex is like a presentiment of the old man’s reflexes. There is such a continuity of soul between the child on the ship, De Niro’s slight, ironic smile as a coward landlord tries to appease him, and Brando, the old man who died happy in the sun, that although Vito is a subsidiary character in terms of actual time on the screen, this second film, like the first, is imbued with his presence.

…De Niro’s performance is so subtle that when he speaks in the Sicilian dialect he learned for the role he speaks easily, but he is cautious in English and speaks very clearly and precisely. For a man of Vito’s character who doesn’t know the language well, precision is important–sloppy talk would be unthinkable. Like Brando’s Vito, De Niro’s has a reserve that can never be breached.

Taxi Driver:

Robert De Niro is in almost every frame: thin-faced, as handsome as Robert Taylor one moment and cagey, ferrety, like Cagney, the next–and not just looking at the people he’s talking to but spying on them. As Travis, De Niro has none of the pleasant courtliness of his Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Vito held himself proudly, in control of his violence; he was a leader. Travis is danger in a different, cumulative way. His tense face folds in a yokel’s grin and he looks almost like an idiot. Or he sits in his room vacantly watching the bright-eyed young faces on the TV and with his foot he slowly rocks the set back and then over. The exacerbation of his desire for vengeance shows in his numbness, yet part of the horror implicit in this movie is how easily he passes. The anonymity of the city soaks up one more invisible man; he could be legion.

…Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness–he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance has something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in Last Tango. In its own way, this movie, too, has an erotic aura. There is practically no sex in it, but no sex can be as disturbing as sex. And that’s what it’s about: the absence of sex–bottled-up, impacted energy and emotion, with a blood-splattering release. The fact that we experience Travis’s need for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the quality of consummation, makes Taxi Driver one of the few truly modern horror films.

And Raging Bull:

As Jake La Motta, the former middleweight boxing champ, in Raging Bull, Robert De Niro wears scar tissue and a big, bent nose that deform his face. It’s a miracle that he didn’t grown them–he grew everything else. He developed a thick-muscled neck and a fighter’s body, for the scenes of the broken, drunken La Motta he put on so much weight that he seems to have sunk in the fat with hardly a trace of himself left. What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable. De Niro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with: his La Motta is a swollen puppet with only bits and pieces of a character inside, and some semi-religious, semi-abstract concepts of guilt. He has so little expressive spark that what I found myself thinking about wasn’t La Motta or the movie but the metamorphosis of De Niro. His appearance–with his head flattened out and widened by fat–is far more shocking that if he were artificially padded.

Raging Bull isn’t just a biography of a genre; it’s also about movies and about violence, it’s about gritty visual rhythm, it’s about Brando, it’s about the two Godfather pictures–it’s about Scorsese and De Niro’s trying to top what they’ve done and what everybody else has done. When De Niro and Liza Minnelli began to argue in Scorsese’s New York, New York, you knew they were going to go from yelling to hitting, because they had no other way to escalate the tension. Here we get more of these actors’ battles; they’re between Jake and Joey, and between Jake and Vickie. Listening to Jake and Joey go at each other, like the macho clowns in Cassavetes movies, I know I’m supposed to be responding to a powerful, ironic realism, but I just feel trapped. Jake says, “You dumb fuck,” and Joey says, “You dumb fuck,” and they repeat it and repeat it. And I think, What am I doing here watching these two dumb fucks?

I was flipping around the channels the other day and found a baseball game on the MLB Network. And there was Robinson Cano playing for the American team in Taiwan. It took me a moment to adjust to seeing him in uniform. It was like seeing someone still wearing their Halloween costume. Then I wondered, “Hey, should you be playing? Don’t guys get tired or hurt if they play in November?”

But I remembered that he’s a professional baseball player and that’s what he does. Then Cano smiled and I felt relieved and turned back to the football game.

Over at YES, Jack Curry has a little piece on Cano in Taiwan.

[Photo Credit: Washington Post]

Smokin’ Joe Frazier, a great heavyweight champion, died yesterday. He was 67.

Thinking about Frazier this morning I wished there was some way to remember him without bringing Ali into the conversation. As a final tribute to Frazier. But I don’t think it can be done. Still, let’s turn to Rick Hoffer, for clarity.

And while we are at SI, go directly to this piece by Mark Kram, and another fine profile by Bill Nack.

Collage by Fred Garbers (2011)

Nine years ago today I wrote the first post here at Bronx Banter. It was about Bill James and the Red Sox. Hard to believe it’s been nine years. The beauty part is I’m as happy writing and blogging at the Banter as I’ve ever been.

Thanks for showing up and coming back.

[Photo Credit: Jeremiah Cox]