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View from room 802, the Pontchartrain Hotel, New Orleans.
Quick cinematic vignette from this weekend's visit to New Orleans: Walking through the door of a shotgun for a backyard crawfish boil in honor of the bride and groom, we arrive at the very moment Dennis Quaid begins to do Ellen Barkin quite a favor in 1987's The Big Easy [which is playing on the television in the living room]. Now that's hospitality!
As if the Pink Panther remake wasn't cynical enough on its own, there are the tie-ins.... {And you lucky devils can't even hear the plinky-plink midi music playing.]
Tomorrow the cinetrix and the Fesser set off for The City That Care Forgot to attend a baccanal wedding. So if you see us on the Internets after tonight, tell us to go out into the world to find some Sazeracs or beignets.
Owing to the vagaries of modern air travel, we won't return until late Sunday night, thus increasing the likelihood that I will still be underslept and underhydrated for Monday's 9 a.m. class. So I've asked the kiddies to read and be ready to discuss the Hays Code, and I thought I would share some of its wit and wisdom with you nice people, too.
V. Profanity
Pointed profanity and every other profane or vulgar expression, however used, is forbidden.
No approval by the Production Code Administration shall be given to the use of words and phrases in motion pictures including, but not limited to, the following:
Alley cat (applied to a woman); bat (applied to a woman); broad (applied to a woman); Bronx cheer (the sound); chippie; cocotte; God, Lord, Jesus, Christ (unless used reverently); cripes; fanny; fairy (in a vulgar sense); finger (the); fires, cries of; Gawd; goose (in a vulgar sense); "hold your hat" or "hats"; hot (applied to a woman); "in your hat"; louse; lousy; Madam (relating to prostitution); nance; nerts; nuts (except when meaning crazy); pansy; razzberry (the sound); slut (applied to a woman); S.O.B.; son-of-a; tart; toilet gags; tom cat (applied to a man); traveling salesman and farmer's daughter jokes; whore; damn; hell (excepting when the use of said last two words shall be essential and required for portrayal, in proper historical context, of any scene or dialogue based upon historical fact or folklore, or for the presentation in proper literary context of a Biblical, or other religious quotation, or a quotation from a literary work provided that no such use shall be permitted which is intrinsically objectionable or offends good taste).
I'd like to hear that last parenthetical set to music.
The righteous photographer, novelist, composer, and, yes, director of Shaft died in Kansas on Tuesday. He was 93.
"Gypsy woman told my mama, before I was born / You got a boy-child comin', gonna be a son-of-a-gun." Gordon Parks's life makes Willie Dixon's old blues song "Hoochie Coochie Man" sound like a documentary. In 1910, a fortuneteller traveling through rural Kansas predicted the arrival and rich life of Andrew Jackson Parks's seventh son - "You're going to have another child - and he's going to be a very special one." That's how the story was told to Gordon Parks by his older brother Clemmie. Gordon, born a couple years after the auspicious pronouncement, was Poppa Jack Parks's 15th child, the 10th with his second wife, Sarah. And the gypsy lady was right. He would become one of the most celebrated African-American artists of the 20th century, accomplished and revered as a photographer, writer, composer and movie director.
Shut your mouths.
The cinetrix has not seen any of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture.
And she has not seen Walk the Line [it's next in the queue]. Or last year's Narnia, Star Wars, or Harry Potter installment.
Here's what I did see: Junebug, Hustle & Flow, A History of Violence, The Squid and the Whale, The Constant Gardner [on dvd], Corpse Bride, The New World, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Murderball [at a festival/on dvd].
Does this destroy my credibility or enhance it?
Sometimes even a cinephage like the cinetrix is allowed to punt and settle for the also-ran, the safe but bland choice.
Case in point: Today Netflix wafted The Baxter to my door, a film about that hapless safe-choice guy we all know. Last summer it screened at the theatre down the street, but I could never be arsed to, you know, see it. There always was a sexier, edgier choice.
Until tonight, that is. And, well, it was the perfect slight indie at the end of a long and trying day. No more, no less.
I have no interest in rehashing Dana's spot-on Times review, but you should know these two things:
It probably wasn't fair to director Ondi Timoner, The Dandy Warhols, and The Brian Jonestown Massacre to watch their doc DiG! the same week the cinetrix revisited Altamont. It was a fine little film. I just wish there'd been more of an overview/contextualizing presence than that guy who writes for Paper, you know?
To be fair, the closest I come to knowing either band's work is exclaiming, "Oh, that's them?" when the Dandy's commercial-friendly "Like You" came on. [Oh, and owning a copy of Lilys' "Better Can't Make Your Life Better."]
Still, it's a tidy little look at a music scene and a textbook rivalry with some true hilarity and heartache along the way.
Plus, BJM lead messiah Anton Newcombe is totally rocking a James Taylor circa Two Lane Blacktop vibe.
Today was part deux of Gimme Shelter, and, as usual, I wish I had had more time.
The text we use bundles documentary with experimental films, which is fine, but it meant that I felt obligated to touch on the more experimental-oriented material today, too. Only problem is, there are next to no examples of experimental film readily available in the libraries here to throw up as demonstrations.
See, I know why Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is a good illustration of a cumulative expositional approach [and, yes, I made the obligatory Simpsons reference to "Thirty-Two Short Films About Springfield," but the kiddies all watch "Family Guy"], or what would prompt a person to cite Scorpio Rising as an example of developmental exposition, because I've seen these films. By choice, and because when I saw them I lived somewhere with an embarrassment of indie/alternative film options. Not so much of that around here.
So I gave them just a taste of Sans Soleil, specifically the Icelandic children sequences at the beginning and end of the film. I yammered something about ethnography and ritual and rhythms, probably. And I drew their attention to the filmmaker's stated initial difficulty linking this image of happiness to any other at the beginning, only to show it no longer offset by black leader but "integrated "into the "narrative" at the end. Did I make any sense? Got me.
Then it was on to Gimme Shelter. As I suspected, the youth found it slow. Imagine: three whole musical numbers punctuated only by press conferences and lawyers on the phone. And no flashy jump cuts. Interminable!
But this observation/complaint did allow me to suggest that the way the filmmakers chose to marshall the information--letting you hear the radio dj talk about Altamont almost immediately, then showing the growing logistical boondoggle in Mel Belli's office--helps generate suspense and a mounting sense of dread. All of it leads you slowly and chronologically to the moment of crisis
Then we looked at the three musical numbers from Madison Square Garden from the beginning of the film. What I realized watching it this time is how differently each performance is shot/edited together. The first number is all about Mick. One camera follows him on stage, often in medium close ups, staring at his face and watching him dance. We can tell the music is diegetic, and that the other members of the band are on the stage, too, but save for a few out-of-focus glimpses of the other Mick behind Jagger, you wouldn't know it.
The second song is "Satisfaction," and with that, the viewer gets to see the whole band and, indeed, the "reaction shots" of the audience. We perch up by Charlie Watts' drum kit and watch Mick and the rest in wide angles. Same show, totally different feel.
Which brings us to "Love in Vain." I mentioned the Stones' reverence for the blues, and the cinematography/editing reflects that. The camera pans across the faces in the crowd, awash in red light, captured in expressions of almost religious ecstacy. They, like Jagger, are shown in slow motion. And no attempt is made to match his voice on the soundtrack with moving lips; instead he is displayed for us to look at him, and shot not unlike Bergman in Casablanca. [Yes, I snuck in the notion of "to-be-looked-at-ness."] Even though the sound is not strictly synched, the slow-motion image matches the emotional effect of the music.
Or at least that's what I told them.
We cleansed our palates with a bit of Keith singing along to the playback of the just-recorded "Wild Horses" at Muscle Shoals. We know he's not the singer, and the sound doesn't quite match the image of his mouth moving. But it's also not diegetic. We are listening to the same track the band is, but it is not reflected sound moving through the space they inhabit. [Also, what's up with a film that asks us to watch people listening?]
And then we ended, as one must, with "Under My Thumb" at Altamont. I wanted to get at how it differed from those shows back in New York, and demonstrate why the tedium of watching the "normal" performances was necessary to understand how everything is going wrong here.
The camera knows this. It abandons the stage and the "stars" almost immediately to investigate the crowd and stays there, searching for something. Indeed, throughout this sequence, there are some really powerful editing choices in terms of mise-en-scene. Forget the band's and the fans' elaborate costumes. Pretty much any time you see a member of the band, there's that Hell's Angels insignia hovering right there in the background, like a portent.
Sometimes it's even more pronounced. Remember the guy undergoing some sort of psychotic episode mere feet from Jagger? The song reaches the bridge, and Jagger steps away, but instead of following him to watch him dance, we stay with the ominous freak-out guy until he is ejected into the swarming massed crowd.
About the music. After we watched the sequence, I played the studio version of "Under My Thumb" because I wanted the kiddies to realize just how off it is during this bit. The music sounds sick, sour, anxious. And it doesn't sound anything like the other songs we've heard performed.
Finally, of course, we came to the moment of poor Meredith's murder. It's a terrible thing to say, but had this been a fictional reenactment of the event, he couldn't have been better costumed. His electric-green leisure suit leaps out from the scrum of Hell's Angels jackets surrounding him. Once we know where to look, our eye moves directly to him when we watch his murder again in the film, seconds later, as Jagger and the filmmakers review the footage on an editing machine eight weeks after the event. It's awful.
Or as the understated Jerry Garcia put it, "Bummer."
