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New Orleans Social Aide and Pleasure Club

It occurs to me that what New Orleans needs now is a big old second line.

Stay with me: Any number of musicians, actors, writers, and artists have deep connections to New Orleans. Hell, how many times has the Superdome hosted the Super Bowl? And the city is home to a thriving film industry, so if you add to the number of expat natives like the Marsalis family and the Mannings and Emeril and Cokie Roberts all the actors and directors et al. who have worked in the city [The Dukes of Hazzard and The Skeleton Key, still in theaters, were shot in NOLA], you start looking at a pretty influential group of people. People who, if you'll pardon my non-influence-wielding crudeness, should get their asses on television and start raising some money. Now. Get the city and its people from this life to the next; mourn the dead and embrace the living.

The rest of the nation, and the world, is at a loss at how best to help. Give 'em a focal point. Round up some Nevilles and wheel in Dr. John and throw a party that reminds everyone of all that is lost if New Orleans is lost. Hell, Nudie in Nashville could lend the Indians some duds.

We are in time for the downtown swing of Neptune. The crowd has already moved from the lake side to the river side of St. Charles. It is quite dark now. The street lights make golden spaces inside the wet leaves of the live oaks. A south wind carries the smell of coffee from the Tchoupitoulas docks. Mounted police shoulder the crowd over the curb. To the dark neutral ground come Negroes from Louisiana Avenue and Claibourne; some Negro men carry children astride their necks to see over the crowd...

The floats rumble along under the leaves. Some fathers have brought ladders with orange crates, big enough for three children, nailed to the top. These lucky ones gaze openmouthed at the maskers who pass them at eye level and almost within reach. The maskers look like crusaders with their nosepieces and their black eye sockets. Yet these specters are strangely good-natured, leaning forward and dropping whole bunches of necklaces or sailing them over to the colored folk in the neutral ground. High school bands from North Louisiana and Texas follow the floats. Negro boys run along behind the crowd to keep up with the parade and catch the trinkets that sail too high.

The krewe captain and a duke come toward us on horseback. -- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

"Spend the night?" Ignatius thundered. "We're not spending the nght anywhere. We must drive straight."

"Ignatius, I'm about to drop dead. I've been in this car since yesterday morning."

"Well, get across Lake Ponchartrain at least."

"Okay. We can take the causeway and stop in Mandeville."

"No!" Myrna would drive him right into the alerted arms of some psychiatrist. "We can't stop there. The water's polluted. They're having an epidemic."

"Yeah? Then I'll take the old bridge to Slidell."

"Yes. It's far safer anyway. Barges are always hurtling into that causeway. We'll plunge into the lake and drown." -- John Kennedy Toole, Confederacy of Dunces

Films sur un toit à Montréal

Talk about your Canadian content, eh? It's time to head for the border!

Thursday night, Rooftop Films makes its way to Montreal, and oh, how the cinetrix wishes she could be there.

Since the screening will be taking place in a garden on an urban rooftop, we have put together a program of films that feature novel perspectives on contemporary environmental issues. But though the program is socially and environmentally conscious, it is first and foremost fun, and though it will include serious personal documentaries, it will also feature wild and hilarious animation, extraordinary experimental installations, shirtless men running through rainforests, ducklings jumping out of trees, frogs being flushed down toilets, buildings built like bugs, robots conquering the world, babies blowing up the world, and existential declarations by francophone crabs. This will be our first screening on a roof in a foreign land, and we couldn't be more excited about it.

Thursday, September 1st, 2005
7:00: Live music; 8:00: Eclectic environmental short films

In the Tele universite de l'Universite du Quebec Rooftop Garden
4750 rue Henri Julien in Montreal
Tickets are $5.00 Canadian and are available at the door
Dress warmly (it can get chilly on the roof)
In the event of rain, the show will be indoors at the same location

Get the skinny here.

And if you like chocolate, allow the Fesser to recommend the delicious Suite 88 for your prescreening rooftop picnic sweets. You just have to promise to eat some poutine for us, OK?

Threepeat

Don't anyone tell Pat Riley I'm dropping his trademarked neologism.* But how else to describe Ed Koch's Triple A-stizz triptych of reviews this week? I'm telling you, Hizzoner covers the waterfront.

Red Eye
This is a well-done, Grade-B movie except for one great flaw which I cannot divulge. The actors, all unknown to me, perform their roles superbly.

A Florida hotel desk clerk, Lisa (Rachel McAdams), is waiting at an airport in Texas for her return flight to Florida. At the airport she meets Jackson (Cillian Murphy) whom, she discovers, is on the same flight to Florida. Jackson is part of a terrorist plot to kill the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Charles Keefe (Jack Scalia). He seeks Lisa's involuntary assistance to change the hotel arrangements of Keefe and his family in order to make them vulnerable to an attack. How Jackson seeks to get her compliance, using a threat to kill her father (Brian Cox) at home alone in Florida, is the centrality of the plot.

The best part of the film takes place on the airplane, and the plot weakens when the plane lands. There are numerous chase scenes at the airport and elsewhere, some of which are ridiculous and devoid of common sense. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the action. The director, Wes Craven, has a reputation for doing these creepy B-movies well, and he scores again with Red Eye. If you are in the mood to see a thriller that requires no expenditure of brain power on your part, this one fills the bill.

And it seems like we're still not likely to run into Ed on W. 32nd any time soon.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
My experience with Korean films has not been good. I did not like "Oldboy," which was touted as an exceptional film nor did I enjoy "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" which was hailed by some critics. It is too gross, too brutal, and too violent.  It turned my stomach, and I hoped it would end as quickly as possible.

Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) is a deaf-mute.  He works with machines in a factory, and because of his physical impairment, I was constantly on edge that something would go dramatically wrong. Ryu lives with his sister (Lim Ji-eun) who is dying of kidney disease. He is not a suitable kidney donor because of his blood type so he seeks to buy one on the black market by selling one of his own. That experience sets the film's level of violence.

A decision is made to kidnap Yu-sun (Han Bo-bae) the daughter of Ryu's former employer, Park (Song Kang-ho). The violence increases once again with everyone avenging one another. Ryu’s girlfriend, Youngmi (Bae Du-na), looks just like his sister so occasionally I thought he was committing incest. Fortunately, he was not; nevertheless, the sex with his girlfriend was coarse and without sensuality. The script also involves a political aspect with a terrorist organization seeking revenge for the torture of one of its members.

All in all it was torture of a different kind to sit through this movie, and it was a very uncomfortable two hours for me.  (In Korean with English subtitles.)

But it sounds like you may spot him at Blue Smoke or Rib....

Junebug
I didn't think I would enjoy this film, so I avoided seeing it. After hearing favorable comments from a reviewer unknown to me, I decided to go, and I'm glad that I did.

George (Alessandro Nivola) has been married to Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) for about one year. She owns an art gallery and decides to go to North Carolina to view the paintings of a little-known artist. George accompanies her to North Carolina where they spend a few days with his family whom she has never met.

In North Carolina, Madeleine meets her domineering mother-in-law, Peg (Celia Weston); the quiet and henpecked father-in law, Eugene (Scott Wilson); her beautiful and guileless sister-in-law Ashley (Amy Adams) who is nine-months pregnant; and brother-in-law Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie). Johnny reminded me of Marlon Brando with a little bit of James Dean thrown in. He is working on his GED diploma and clearly resents the success of his brother, George. All of the actors give terrific performances.

At first I thought Madeleine had married into a Tobacco Road family, but that is not true. The interpersonal family relations depicted throughout the film are what make this movie so special. During her trip, Madeline does manage to meet with the artist, David (Frank Hoyt Taylor), who paints Civil War pictures with lots of exposed scrotums. One of his paintings depicts blacks with white faces. When asked why they are white, he explains that he has never seen a black person.

The movie sings with joy and sadness which, after all, is what life is all about.

Can I get an amen?

*Second definition, natch.

Sit back and relax, enjoy the show

A couple years back, there was an SNL sketch that made fun of the cliched and interminable trailers that multiplexes run before every show. The insipidly cheery "Thank you for coming to Loews" jingle kept playing between endless, unseen coming attractions that either promised, "In a world where..." or else began with James Brown's shout from the beginning of "(I Feel Good) I Got You."

Now that a James Brown biopic may finally make it to the big screen, what music will they use for its trailer?

"I don't know why it's taken so long to make a movie of my life," Mr. Brown said recently, speaking with characteristic assurance. "It's not like doing a movie about Jimi Hendrix or Marvin Gaye, where I've been told the music rights are a problem, because I've got the rights to my music."

Say it loud: He's got the rights to his music. So, basically, you should just replace that shout with a cash register's cha-ching because with every ad for a lame caper movie or one where white women get soul, Brother James has been shouting all the way to the bank.

No wonder he feels good.

Want more Manohla?

It's like the Times ad server can stare right into my soul or something.

Which reminds me. The cinetrix owes manohladargisofthenewyorktimes an apology. Back during the heady days of the Times' Cannes Journal, I may have suggested that Ms. Dargis was having trouble waking up, and that that in fact was the true reason she was shut out of an 8:30 a.m. screening of Jarmusch's flick Broken Flowers.

In fact, I have it on the best possible authority that she was there at 8:20 and the thing was already sold out: namely, Gerald Peary of the Boston Phoenix, who was also there and was also shut out, told me so over grits this summer.

The cinetrix regrets the insinuation.

Do the hustle

The Fesser and I settled into our appropriately broke-ass seats at the local theater last night to see Hustle and Flow. The cinetrix says "appropriately" because the opening credits and the overall Memphis milieu give the impression that the movie could have been shot any time in the last 35 years. Clapped-out Caprice Classics and funk-infused yellow title fonts had me scribbling "someone saw [the Beastie Boys' video] Sabotage" in the dark. Pretty much the only element of the, pardon my French, mise-en-scene that places the movie in the here-and-now is the music, crunk spilling out of speakers as basslines thud and echo off boarded-up buildings and cash-cashing joints.

In our tiny, rundown local theater, you can actually see the soundtrack, if you know where to look. Thanks to improper masking, it flickers against the red curtains that gird the screen, running along one side the image plain as day. The cinetrix brings this up because with Hustle and Flow, the moments in which the soundtrack overwhelms the image and the story are the film's strongest, temporarily lifting it out of a welter of expertly deployed cliches.

Writer-director Craig Brewer is slicker than his pimp protagonist DJay, but neither one misses a trick. Thing is, you rarely see Brewer sweat, while DJay glistens in the limpid Memphis heat in every scene. Terrence Howard deserves every last plaudit for his performance as this increasingly articulate man in crisis. I just wish he didn't look quite so much like a former winner on America's Next Top Model. And Taryn Manning adds another affecting notch to the bedpost of her white trash starlet acting career as Nola, but she's beyond typecast at this point. 

With Hustle and Flow, you get caught up in the story while it's unfolding, and you want to believe it's sincere, but once it's over you realize how expertly you've been played and how empty you still feel. My advice: Save your singles for the dvd with this one.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

The cinetrix blames her ennui on Bill Murray. He makes it look so easy, so chic, stretched across tasteful dun-colored sofas wearing one of a series of interchangeable Fred Perry track suits in the new Jarmusch flick Broken Flowers. Murray plays Don Johnston, a name that elicits either a disbelieving "Don Johnson?" or else a mildly contemptuous "Don Juan" reference from everyone he meets.

Of course, if it were up to Don, he'd meet barely anyone at all, what with all the sofa surfing and girlfriend-ignoring he's been doing since making a mint in computers. But it's not up to him. Somehow he's ceded responsibility to his neighbor Winston, an Ethopian immigrant and self-styled detective played with customary elan by Jeffrey Wright.

After Don receives an unsigned letter from a former paramour informing him that she had his now 19-year-old son, it is Winston who insists that Don track down and visit the women he dated then to see whether he can determine which one made him a latter-day babydaddy. Look for clues, he urges Don. Typewriters, backboards. And bring the women pink flowers.

With a nice nod to the strange relationship between Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity [Don calls after Winston, "I love you, too."], Jarmusch has Winston, a regular Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, Mike Hammer, and Dolomite in one, pull together an itinerary, reservations, maps, even a travel CD of Ethopian music--"good for thinking"--and just like that, Don and the movie hit the road.

I know what you're thinking: the road? Not in a Jarmusch movie? Yeah, I was shocked, too. What's different is that this road movie, unlike most in American cinema today, leads Don to more top-flight actresses of a certain age than any movie since 8 Femmes, which, being French, hardly counts.

First up is Sharon Stone, Nascar widow and mother of the aptly named Lolita. But that "Haze woman" never looked like Stone. However, there's no sign of a son, or a sun, there [although there is quite a moon], so Don moves on to Dora [Frances Conroy] in suburbia. A former flower child, Dora is rich--she and her husband are in real estate, selling soulless trophy homes just like theirs--and childless.

At this point I could continue to rattle off the actresses [a worse-for-wear Jessica Lange, a reliably fierce Tilda Swinton] and rate the relative skill of their plastic surgeons, trainers, etc., but where's the fun in that? Suffice it to say that Broken Flowers is the sort of film where, at the end, you can't believe Patricia Clarkson wasn't in it.

In its way, Broken Flowers shares a prediliction with porn, at least as identified by Umberto Eco, in its refusal to elide the mechanics of everyday life. Porn does it to break up the fucking--think of the hilarious Log-jammin' line, "He fixes her cable?" in The Big Lebowski if you need an example. But here, the interesting stuff happens in the interstices, the getting from point A to point B, the anonymous rental cars, airports, and hotel rooms that have long held a fascination for Jarmusch. We're encouraged to linger, to savor strange coincidences, like a dog named Winston, and cinematic shoutouts [an unseen character named Lianna; a beat-up Murray coming to in a field a la Chinatown].

And then there are the airplane dreams. In transit, the truly neither here nor there Don dreams of the women in his life in nonlinear sequences that are wonderfully edited, phantasmagorical, and--if you'll indulge the cinetrix--lowercase "f" fellini-esque [I'm thinking particularly of Guido's dreams in Otto e mezzo]. Can we deduce from their complexity that Don, inert appearance to the contrary, has a rich inner life that helped him land all of these fascinating women? Not entirely, but these liminal interludes were by far my favorite moments in the film.

Yeah, but what about the son? Oh, there are sons [and even one lovely Sun] everywhere, but we might as well call the kid MacGuffin or George Kaplan for all he matters.

If you even had to ask, clearly you need a remedial course in Jarmusch's patented the-journey-is-the-destination oeuvre. Allow me to recommend Mystery Train, which the cinetrix was fortunate enough to catch at the Brattle [as a double bill with Big Time, which someone really needs to release on DVD already] a week before seeing Broken Flowers. It rehearses so many of Jarmusch's ongoing obsessions that it's as good a place to start [or start over] as any. I'll leave you with a little dialogue so you can see what I mean:

Mitzuko: Jun, why do you only take pictures of the rooms we stay in and never what we see outside while we travel?
Jun: Those other things are in my memory. The hotel rooms and the airports are the things I'll forget.

Stars: They're Just Like Us!

The Fesser sends along a curious artifact of celebrity culture in the age of globalization, discovered in Tehran.

Some enterprising artist had drawn postcard portraits of Katie Holmes, Natalie Portman, Laetitia Casta, and Kate Winslet--all wearing chadors--which were on sale in a Tehran post office.

What would Walter Benjamin say?

As time goes by

The screenwriting brothers Epstein, Philip and Julius, were born on this date in 1909.

Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed. 

Now if you'll excuse the cinetrix just a little longer, she needs to have a conversation with her DSL provider about, you know, providing some DSL. Back once I no longer have to poach wifi.

R.I.P. George Fasel

The elegant proprietor of A Girl and a Gun has passed. George was 67.

Our heartfelt condolences to his family.