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And everything is going fine

The pure products of America / go crazy.

That's what I thought tonight when I learned of Billy Ruane's death at 53. Billy was the ubiquitious presence, the stamp stating "you are where you are supposed to be" marking my and many others' Cambridge/Boston twenties. A tireless impressario and promoter in his black blazer and sweaty white oxford barely buttoned [cuffs, never], a truant, outsized prep school student who zipped about Boston and Cambridge on his scooter sometime after the Lou Reed ad and before the Vespa revival. He was a florid original in a world with decreasingly less room for such.

It was clear he was a trust fund kid. How else could he move through the world as he did? And even as I learn now that his dad had been a school chum of Warren Buffett's, I always had fixed in my mind somehow that he was the outcome of tangled strands of swamp yankee DNA originating from somewhere around Newport, R.I. Top drawer all the way, but a little off, was my thinking. [Maybe he went to Brown?]

The same thinking had me manifesting and performing a Billy search-and-replace as I watched Steven Soderbergh's extraordinary [and, really, you should get a WASPy Rhode Islander to say that word for you, for you will be forever changed] documentary about a true little Rhody son last spring, one equally as troubled as bipolar Billy, tragically: Spalding Gray. Who, as the math of chance would have it, took his life at... 53.

Soderbergh's film And Everything Is Going Fine is some kind of achievement. Really too much to be taken in at a single sitting. Comprised solely of footage of the famed monologuist from various bits and performances across the whole of his public life, it is edited not chronologically, but by theme. As in, cutting from a scrolling VHS copy of an 80s performance to another, picking up just where the other left off and continuing the same anecdote, now refined, sometimes years later. Showing us how this mind worried and worked and honed his autobiography, his ongoing performance of self, this wonderful, vainglorious confession without the comforts of the confessional.

Gray rehearsed his life in public, revisiting it and trying to understand and occupy its fleeting moments of transcendance. I'd like to imagine this is what indie rock did for Billy: gave him the transport of being both outside and somehow most truly himself, all at once, even if only three minutes at a time. And, like Gray, he generously invited us all along, no matter how painful the business of being Billy might be from day to day, minute to minute.

And everything is going fine. And everything is going fine. R.I.P.

Attractions

Hal Hartley revisits his feature debut, The Unbelievable Truth, now available in a [gulp] twentieth anniversary edition. Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for Kelly Reichardt. Yeah, that Kelly Reichardt.

Joe Queenan is actually on-the-nose funny for the first time in, well, it's been a while since his theory of part 3s. His target? The art cinema.

The arthouse film is not interchangeable with the foreign film. Many excellent foreign films are merely commercial films that happen to be in a foreign language. A basic rule of thumb: if Jean Reno stars in a film, it is not an arthouse film. If Penelope Cruz is speaking English on screen, it is not an arthouse film. If she is speaking Spanish, it almost certainly is. There are a few examples of arthouse films that include martial arts – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – but not many. In fact, that may be the only one.

Typically, an arthouse film has an intrusive, overbearing soundtrack that won't give the audience a chance to relax for one second. Often these films are scored by the remorseless minimalist Philip Glass, whose music is at least as annoying as anything that takes place on screen. Integral components of a good arthouse film are a song or two by Leonard Cohen, Björk, tango master Astor Piazzolla and perhaps something introspective by Bach, though Albinoni will do in a pinch. You will rarely hear Slade or the Four Seasons or Wham! in an arthouse film. You are unlikely to hear Mariah Carey. And if you do, the director is being malevolently ironic.

Finally, so many clever-boots critics invoked "the cinema of attractions" in reviews of that 3D nonfiction flick burning up the box office, I thought it'd be servicey to share a recent University of Chicago interview [by an old classmate, as it happens] with the man who formulated the phrase that pays, Tom Gunning. An excerpt:

Do you feel taken seriously in film studies, at the University and more broadly? No. It's still a struggle. And I'm not sure it won't always be a struggle. I sometimes think it's generational. I don't think it ever occurs to younger people that film is not an art form.

When I first came to Chicago, I was talking to someone in History—I won't mention the name. I said, "I'm kind of a historian. I'm a film historian." And he said, "Hah! And that makes you a historian?"

Do you remember the first movie you ever saw? Yes—Escape from Fort Bravo (1953). I remember the scene where a group of cavalrymen are crawling through the desert, and Indians are shooting at them. My memory was literally a shower of arrows. I thought later, I'm sure that was my kid memory. But it came on television, and sure enough, it was almost exactly the way I remembered it.

But you always wonder what's the "first" of anything. Because I work with early film, there always used to be this habit of [trying to identify] "the first close-up" and so on. And I tell my students, no one will use that word in this class, because we don't know. You could say "the first you've seen," or "the earliest one that's being discussed" but to say "the first" doesn't work, even with your own memory.

Do you watch movies for fun? Are you able to stop working and have the escapist experience? Do I ever turn my brain off? Certainly, but that's probably when I watch the news. I really do enjoy movies. I go for the pleasure. Avant-garde movies are pleasurable to me. Sometimes that pleasure is not a massage. It's a real challenge and it's difficult.

This is something that you encounter, particularly among undergraduates: "I don't want to take your course, because I want to just have fun at the movies, and you're going to ruin the fun." But I would say, "If I ruin some type of fun, I'm going to give you another type."

Let me clear my throat

More cache clearing, if you'll indulge a bit longer. Ah, fuck the importuning: Just like Barbara Krueger* and Booty Barbie above, I will not play nature to your culture, etc. etc.

• Film Threat gets with the apt neologisms: "Easy Listening Film. Because the ending was fine, it was proper, it made sense – but most importantly it didn’t mean in any way to challenge the viewer. You could arguably say it was a "happy ending." But the point is not the "happy," the point is the "comfortable." Therefore, I could envision the film playing very well across the country. I could see it being a cable-run staple. An easy pick at the Red Box, an eventual satisfy-everyone-in-the-house DVD purchase at your local Best Buy."

 

• The Boston Globe's Ty Burr assesses the latest Bahstan acksent infamy. "Laura Linney has said that the two accents that send a chill up an actor's spine are Boston and South Africa."
• Part of me wants to pitch it all and apply for Sundance's Festival Manager, Publications Production gig.
• This new books sounds up my alley: POST-CLASSICAL CINEMA: An International Poetics of Film Narration by Eleftheria Thanouli

 

• Have you been keeping up with Josh Glenn's Shocking Blocking and Odd Cameos over at Hilobrow? The latest example of the former is above. Josh is also part of the newly launched Semionaut.

• Glenn Kenny revisits Olivier Assayas's dreamlover demonlover, a flick that is inextricably linked for me with its 2002 lo-fi character double, Happy Here and Now.

 

*In my mind, always pronounced syllable by syllable, as did the Italian prof who first introduced me to her work. Try it: Bar-ber-ah Kroo-gherh. See, isn't that satisfying?

Hey, presto

Nothing up my sleeve, certainly not even a clever cobweb connecting any of the items in this post. [For illustration purposes, note only that my general disposition today most strongly resembles the middle row, above.]

Simply know this:

• Sometimes you just really need to [re]read a classic interview with Billy Wilder.
• Other times, consulting a handy infographic detailing clichéd female characters is just the thing.
• Then there's the item once read that you can't forget, like that the Brothers Quay are making a documentary about the Mutter Museum.

This thing looks like that thing

Don't get me wrong. J'adore Roman Coppola's CQ and its love for all things Eustache-meets-Danger: Diabolik. But I gotta say that his new spot with Wes Anderson for Stella Artois seems to get its gadgetry from Doris-and-Rock pastiche Down with Love.

Down with eyes romantic and stupid

Down with sighs, down with Cupid

Brother, let's stuff that dove

Down with love

Spitballing

How great would it be if Olivier Assayas helmed the film adaptations of William Gibson's Bigend trilogy?

You're welcome.