Life is a carnival

AMARCORD NINO ROTA
Interpretations of Nino Rota's music
from the Films of Frederico Fellini
Recorded in 1981

Link via Cineville, with endless thanx to Berbert.

1. Amarcord (7:47)
Arranged and performed by Jaki Byard, piano

2. Interlude from Juliet of the Spirits (:33)
Arranged and performed by Dave Samuels

3. 8 1/2 (11:33)
Arranged by Carla Bley; performed by The Carla Bley Band; Carla Bley, conductor, organ, glockenspiel; Michael Mantler, trumpet; Gary Valente, trombone; Earl McIntyre, tuba; Gary Windo, tenor saxophone; Courtenay Wynter, woodwinds; Joe Daley, euphonium; Arturo O'Farrill, piano; Steve Swallow, bass; D.Sharpe, drums

4. Themes from La Dolce Vita and Juliet of the Spirits (2:40)
Arranged and performed by Dave Samuels

5. Juliet of the Spirits (4:40)
Arranged and performed by Bill Frisell

6. La Dolce Vita (7:17)
a. Introduction (1:35)
Arranged by Sharon Freeman; performed by Sharon Freeman, french horn, piano; Francis Haynes, steel drums
b. Notturno (2:50)
Arranged by Muhal Richard Abrams; performed by Muhal Richard Abrams, conductor; Claudio Roditi, trumpet; Emmet McDonald, trombone; Sharon Freeman, french horn; Henry Threadgil, flute; Bobby Eldridge, baritone saxophone, clarinet; Jay Hoggard, vibes; Amina Claudine Myers, piano; Fred Hopkins, bass; Warren Smith, drums
c. Interlude (:28)
Arranged by Sharon Freeman; performed by Sharon Freeman, french horn, piano; Francis Haynes, steel drums
d. Walzer (Parlami Di Me) (2:24)
Arranged by Michael Sahl and Chris Stein; performed by Michael Sahl, keyboards; Chris Stein, guitar; Deborah Harry, vocal; Charles Rocket, accordion, bell; Lenny Ferrari, drums

7. Satyricon (5:33)
Arranged by David Amram; performed by The David Amram Quintet; David Amram, penny whistle, double ocarina, shanai, guitar, claves; Jerry Dodgion, flute; Victor Venegas, bass; Steve Berrios, percussion; Ray Mantilla, percussion; with Sharon Freeman, french horn

8. Roma (4:36)
Arranged and performed by Steve Lacy, soprano saxophone, gong

9. Medley: The White Sheik, I Vitelloni, Il Bidone, The Nights of Cabiria (8:51)
Arranged by William Fischer; performed by William Fischer, conductor; Wynton Marsalis, trumpet; George Adams, tenor saxophone; Branford Marsalis, woodwinds; Kenny Barron, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Wilbert Fletcher, drums

10. La Strada (3:07)
Arranged and performed by Jaki Byard, piano

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20th Century Foxes No.3: Stéphane Audran

Preparing for bed with Michel Bouquet in Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle (1969).

Pussy whipped

Halle Berry as Catwoman

When Culture Snob announced the Misunderstood Blog-a-Thon, my mind headed straight for Catwoman (2004). Yes, that Catwoman: Halle Berry in black leather, directed by someone claiming to be called Pitof, a picture denounced from hither to thither. Despite the disapproving bobble-headed minions, it’s really not that terrible. But my objectivity may be a tad clouded. A cherished ‘comfort’ flick, I’ve seen Catwoman well over ten times and would gladly watch it again right now.

    One would think that at this point, with blogathon at hand, I’d be heaping up superlatives for Catwoman to prove how very, very wrong everyone is. But closed minds usually remain shut, and when the bobble-heads gather en masse—as an assembly of fans and critics bent on contradicting their own professed love for innovation and nonconformity—there’s little chance to sway their stiff, conservative dogma. But why bother trying? And why give them the satisfaction of enjoying my beloved Catwoman? As they say in the trenches: fuck ‘em.

    Truth be told, it’s leaner and more engaging than any of Richard Donner’s ponderous Superman movies and makes Tim Burton’s two Batmans look dour and awkward by comparison. As a narrative, Catwoman is more coherent and less grating than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or The Lost World: Jurassic Park. As an action picture, it transcends the gee-whiz-bang of Michael Bay’s The Rock and Armageddon. As superhero flicks go, Catwoman is nowhere near as boring as The Fantastic Four, a movie I should appreciate given my lusty longing for Jessica Alba.

    All of those movies made vast fortunes while Catwoman never earned back its cost during a limp theatrical release. Poor reviews certainly had no impact: made on a budget of $100 million, Fantastic Four, numbing drivel that no critic in their right mind would recommend to anyone, made $154 million in first run. Cynics used to say you can’t underestimate the taste of the American people, but I think it’s always been a global thing.

Above: The late, mild-mannered Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is given new life by the sacred Egyptian temple cat, Midnight.

    Assuming for a moment that newspaper columnists affect opening weekend, consider Roger Ebert’s take. “Although the movie’s faults are many,” he wrote, “the crucial one is that we never get any sense of what it feels like to turn into a catwoman.” Ebert recognizes “the ambivalence that Peter Parker has about being part nerdy student, part superhero” in Spider-Man 2, but attacks Catwoman for not providing “the scenes where a woman comes to grip with the fact that her entire nature and even her species seems to have changed.” To date, I’ve yet to encounter a superhero movie which had me “feeling” like its lead character. And while we’re at it, I hope I never arrive at Roger’s place—for if ever I demand ‘realism’ from this loopy genre, please take me out to a field and shoot me.

    The box office failure of Catwoman shouldn’t be blamed on bad reviews or Halle or the handling of the material, but rather on the title and premise. It’s a case of history repeating: when Helen Slater played Supergirl and Jennifer Garner did Elektra, both pictures grossed only half of their production costs. Although both pictures, for lack of a better term, suck, those low numbers don’t reflect their quality so much as remind us that comics are the province of little boys of all ages who are afraid of women—especially mature, empowered ones. (Fear of castrating maternal figures must have something to do with it.) The films didn’t flop because they were poor; the 18-to-25 male demographic simply avoided them on principle. A (male) Netflix friend of mine who undoubtedly hissed at Catwoman before seeing it rated it one sad little star, but awarded Spiderman four. Granted, Spiderman is the better movie, yet is the gulf between them all that wide?

    I don’t believe so. But, again, objectivity is not on my side. What are Catwoman’s qualities—real or imagined—that impel me to watch the damn thing at least twice a year? Wouldn’t you like to know!

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Knowing what to say

“What is beautiful about They Live by Night is that it takes as its characters little people who don’t do great things or apparently have great feelings but live meanly and die horribly between the cracks of conventional aspiration.” Irene Dobson reflects back on When Bowie Met Keechie, now on Flickhead.

Adventures in moviegoing 2: SF in ‘78

Above: front and back of a Strand schedule from 1978 (click to enlarge)

A while back, I extolled the virtues of San Francisco’s late, lamented Strand Theatre …and it’s taken me this long to excavate through boxes and files to retrieve the handful of that institution’s two-sided schedules I’d stashed away during my stay there in the late ‘70s.

    I don’t believe anyone who came of age with cable TV or home video can appreciate this brand of powerhouse programming. Back in the day we had to make due with commercial interruptions during movies broadcast on TVs with thirteen stations and rabbit ears, hopelessly oblivious of widescreen vs. pan-and-scan. The powers that be conditioned us with cropped CinemaScope images and heavily cut prints.

    The Strand represented the tail-end of the revival houses and art theatres that flourished during the decade, and the knowledgeable billing provided an instant education in cinema. Unemployed and in the throes of my formative film years, I spent many, many days at the Strand (check out the early bird admission), in the front row of the balcony, absorbing every 35mm frame as it flickered by.

    If anyone wants to see more of these schedules, let me know and I’ll scan what I have.

The Strand at Cinema Treasures

Fur burger

In a pivotal scene early into Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006), Diane (Nicole Kidman) and husband Allan (Ty Burrell) are about to have sex, when her creative passion kicks in and she starts cooing, caressing and kissing his arm. An old school conservative, he doesn’t quite know what to make of the steamy overture and darts antipathy to cool the moment, sending them off to opposite sides of the bed. It reminded me of similar moments from years ago when my sincere, heated advances were met by incredulous reactions along the lines of “Do you feel OK?” or “Is everything alright?” Those young women I momentarily worshipped never realized that they’d branded themselves forever in my mind with all the embarrassment needed to harden my heart.

    It’s a case of my being overly sensitive, but this state—woefully detrimental in business, finance, sports or legal matters—is immeasurably beneficial for the appreciation of an otherwise ludicrous movie that’s inches away from becoming another Boxing Helena. Fur is flawed, some would say deeply so, and an unapologetic spin on La Belle et la bête. Yet, like a handful of other poorly received Nicole Kidman pictures—Birth, Birthday Girl and The Human Stain spring to mind—it can be oddly compelling depending upon how much tosh you’re willing to let slide. These particular films also make me wonder just how much control she exerts behind the camera: directed by different people, they all share a distinct, loony flavor, sleepy pace and an ethereal sense of eroticism.

    I’m honestly not up on Diane Arbus, so I’ll leave the debates over whether or not Nicole nailed the character to more learned souls…though I’m fairly certain they’ll say she botched it. Anyone expecting truth from “an imaginary portrait,” however, deserves disappointment. From the random sampling of her work that I have seen, Arbus appears to have been the Drew Friedman of the Camelot era. Both share a morbid fascination for jaundiced Americana and physical deformity—Diane through a passive-aggressive lens, Drew in insanely detailed stipple illustration. She eventually took her own life, while her ex went on to play the rather annoying psychiatrist on TV’s M*A*S*H*.

    Why the film is ‘about’ Arbus is a thorny issue, since there’s no trace of her actual work on screen (one assumes her estate objected to the production), and there’s no need for the photographer to be a character in it at all. In adapting Patricia Bosworth’s celebrated Diane Arbus: A Biography, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson and director Steven Shainberg (co-conspirators on the James Spader-Maggie Gyllenhaal cult item, Secretary) dispose of the life story in favor of some weird speculation on what spurred her interest in oddballs and freaks. It would’ve been tactful to change the names and protect the innocent—especially considering Arbus is impotent as a box office draw—and let the romance between Nicole and Robert Downey Jr.’s hairy asthmatic play out as a fractured fairytale.

    But Hollywood’s a kooky place and Nicole’s evolved into a true eccentric. Any attempt to apply logic or reason here will be an exercise in futility. Still, I stayed with it from start to finish…framed, of all places, in a nudist colony. When Nicole’s asked by the chief nudist to try to refrain from getting an erection, I didn’t bat an eye. It was a slow night.

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20th Century Foxes No.2: Haydée Politoff

A portrait of Haydée Politoff from the opening scenes of Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse (1967).

(Via Filmbo.)

Recent rentals

Angela Bassett, Curtis Armstrong, Laurence Fishburne and Keke Palmer in Akeelah and the Bee

Inexplicably released as a two-disc set from (gulp) Criterion, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) is wafer-thin stone-faced “comedy” from Wes Anderson. Going over my Netflix ratings, I see that I gave each of his earlier movies one star apiece. (Don’t ask me what they were about, for I can’t remember a frame from any of them.) Following their lead, watching The Life Aquatic is like being trapped in an elevator with an overage adolescent who’s meandering incessantly over nothing of value or substance, yet who thinks he’s being terribly witty—without quite knowing or caring about the definition of that word.

I’m not sure what the impetus was for renting Supergirl (1984)—all the brouhaha over the new Spiderman, perhaps? Still, one imagined it would be good for the proverbial shits and giggles. My bad. Without an ounce of humor and seemingly unaware of its built-in camp appeal (Faye Dunaway, Peter Cook, Brenda Vaccaro and Peter O’Toole fill the cast), clocking in at a coma-inducing 125-minutes, it’s a fat catalog of misspent opportunities. And Helen Slater, despite her youth, beauty and physique, is rather cold and sexless as the girl from Argo City.

It has three wearying movie montages too many, and a handful of clichés that sting, but Akeelah and the Bee (2006) is an engaging and heartfelt family film concerned with education and achievement. Seventh grader Akeelah (Keke Palmer) transcends her impoverished neighborhood to tackle the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Contrived and rigged to be sure, but yours truly—a dyed-in-the-wool, teary-eyed and sniveling pantywaist of the highest order—went reaching for his hankies more than once.

You fill me with inertia

Drimble Wedge & The Vegetations

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Cockroaches and pubic hair

Baby's been a bad gurrl...

In the spring of 1974, I visited my father for a month in Puerto Rico. He was working there as a consultant for Ramada Inns and lived in one of their rooms for a little over a year. It was located on a strip of hotels in San Juan, where one sucked up Piña Coladas poolside in picture-postcard afternoons and gambled the nights away in casinos with stringent dress codes, the kind of bourgeois playgrounds you see in 007 movies, the upper crust hobnobbing in tuxedos and evening gowns.

    There was only a single movie theatre in town and for more than a year they showed but one film: Last Tango in Paris (1972). I suppose the quick turnaround of the tourist trade made such lax scheduling possible (back when kids were left at home and vacationing adults could indulge in "mature" whims), especially since Last Tango was a scandal in its day, the kind of picture chuckled over by the rich and decadent who secretly desired the hedonism it reveled in.

    Too young to appreciate it on any level—Maria Schneider seemed too funky to get worked up over—I merely wondered how Brando fucked her with his trousers on, butter or no butter.

    About sixteen years later, when I was thirty, I revisited Last Tango to find a completely different film from the one I’d seen before. My twenties were turbulent, filled with personal loss and craziness, so by the time The Big Three-O came around, it was as if Bertolucci and Brando had mined their work directly from my brain. Last Tango was nothing short of a revelation. I finally “got” what the critics had raved about.

    Blame it on evolution: fifteen years after that, when I was forty-five, I went back to Last Tango again and found yet another different film. But this time the situation had somehow soured. As I sat there observing the brilliant camerawork, the careful orchestration of color and light, Brando’s measured intensity, and the heated screenplay simmering before me, it all seemed very…ridiculous. As if it were addressing issues men of Brando’s age should have squared away much earlier in their lives—personal issues beyond his character's wife's suicide. He was forty-eight when he made it, a year younger than I am now, fighting demons I’m so glad I don’t have to fight anymore. With the help of low-fat, cholesterol-friendly spreads, of course.

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Shall we gather at the river?

In honor of an upcoming John Ford retrospective, Vincent at the French Inisfree has proposed an international John Ford Blogathon to be held from June 29 through July 9 (the days of the festival).

Be there, pilgrim…