Ali: Fear Eats the Soul [1974]
1. A field of yellow chairs in a beer garden, surrounded by bright green foliage.
2. The barmaid’s bright red thigh-high boots.
3. Parallel to All That Heaven Allows: in Sirk’s film her children buy her a TV set to keep her company, while in Fassbinder’s film one of her children kicks in a TV set after losing his temper.
Now that it’s summer, try this drink. Adapted from the Grog Log. And yes even if you don’t like gin, I promise you’ll like it.
ROYAL HAWAIIAN
juice of 1 lemon
3 oz. pineapple juice
1/2 oz. orgeat (almond) syrup
3 oz. gin
Shake ingredients with ice and strain into an ice-filled pilsner glass.
Fallen Angel [1945]
1. “That was four beers?” Dana Andrews shakes his head. “Four beers and one coffee.” And later in the movie he shouts, “Give me some hash, nice and brown.”
2. The disgraced detective puts on a single kid glove. Offscreen we hear him beat up the suspect. He repeats over and over, “You gave her the watch. You gave her the watch.” When he finally lets the suspect go we don’t see him again for the rest of the movie.
3. The envelope in the safe deposit box contains only a folded sheet of blank paper.
I’m now a contributing writer for CINE-FILE so check it out! My first piece is about An American in Paris.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [2008]
1. The weather-beaten Rolodex on the desk in Indy’s study at home. The edges of the cards are feathered from use. Also on the desk, two completely inauthentic framed photographs of Denholm Elliott and Sean Connery; they look like the movie stills that they probably are.
2. The Russian being devoured by ants. CGI ants. CGI Russian too, probably.
3. The nice cameo by the Ark near the beginning. It’s set up very well too, because when the sequence begins you think you won’t end up seeing it. But then suddenly you do. Whereas almost every other “surprise” in the movie is telegraphed.
Tomorrow evening I’ll be taking a look at the not-quite-finished rough cut of my not-quite-finished would-be feature film debut, Pause of the Clock. I wrote and directed it. We shot the film in 1995 and 1996, in pre-gentrified Logan Square, Edgewater and Colorado. Wild college years when I aimed for the moon because I wasn’t old enough to know how wacked-out the whole enterprise was. I raised about $6000 to finance the production, and to this day I still don’t know how I did it. I do know that it would be a hell of a lot harder to do now.
It was inspired by a Lorca poem. The story, such as it is, centers on a group of college friends who are making a movie called Crueler Than Truth. The roommate of the filmmaker chances upon his diary and begins reading it. He begins to imagine himself as the filmmaker. Eventually the film-within-the-film becomes less important, taken over by the clash between the imagined world contained in the diary and the real world. The soundtrack includes Pete Seeger and Kill Hannah. KH is on there because an acquaintance from college, Alan Morgenstern, was in the band at the time and there was a remix of theirs I liked a lot. Alan asked Andy from KH if I could use it in the movie and he said, “Sure.”
We shot in 16mm and recorded the sound using 1/4″ tape on a Nagra, two methods which (for good or bad) border on being obselete now. A 16mm workprint was created and the sound transferred to 16mm mag stock. I edited on a 6-plate flatbed, one picture track and two soundtracks (one for location sound, another for music/voiceover); and so thus the whole thing only exists at the moment in completely analog form.
I haven’t looked at any of it since 1999. That was the last time I has access to the “ancient” equipment necessary to do so. Well, through a few connections at Columbia I discovered that they still have a working 6-plate, so that’s where I’ll be tomorrow. The main point of rewatching it tomorrow night, aside from nostagia, is to help me decide if I want to try finishing the movie or if it’s best to just chalk it up to collegiate hubris and leave it at that.
It’s going to be a huge deal if I decide to go for it. The good news is that all the original camera negatives and location sound recordings appear to be in fine shape, pristine, which is kind of startling when you consider how much they’ve been schlepped around since 1995. The bad news is that aside from some carbons of the camera reports I haven’t been able to put my hands on any of the other supporting documentation. I can’t find the location sound logs or even my copies of the shooting scripts. So that will mean a lot of detective work.
The biggest challenge will be the editing. First everything will need to be digitized. I’ll either have to learn Final Cut Pro or find an editor I can really trust. Either one is a pretty tall order.
First things first though: I’m just excited to see it again.
I love doing interviews the most. I liked letting other people do the talking.
Interview: Bank of America Cinema Programmers Mike King and Mike Phillips
Last night I had a sad dream that nevertheless made me happy when I woke up as I lay there remembering it. I dreamt I was staying with Robert Altman. Sort of looking after him. He had just finished making A Prairie Home Companion and was now confined to bed, very weak but still coherent and talkative. I wasn’t ready for him to give up making films and I tried to convince him that he could still make another.
“What if we put you in a chair and wheeled you around,” I said. “Couldn’t you direct that way?”
“No, no,” he said. “It wouldn’t work. No, that’s all over.”
I was silent for awhile. Thinking. Finally I said, “Well, that’s a pretty good film to be your last one. Pretty good movie to go out with.”
We both chuckled softly and I looked away, remembering. Then I got into his bed and embraced him. It wasn’t sexual at all; it was just a gesture of love and appreciation. It only lasted for a moment and then the dream shifted, and I was sitting in a chair by his bed again and we were talking. I told him that Popeye had gotten re-released on DVD and was now so popular that even Starbucks was selling it.
I told him, “The kids love it, they just love it. It’s something else. It’s like, where were you in 1980?”
He agreed to my suggestion that I drive him over to Starbucks so I could buy him a copy. I left him in the car and went inside the shop. At the counter, when I asked for it the clerk told me that it was a promotional-only item and that I had to save enough points to send away for it by mail.
“But you have it here in the store. I saw you unpacking it,” I said.
The person behind counter thought for a moment, not sure how to respond. Then I woke up.
Not very many days go by that I don’t think of Altman. I’ll probably never get used to him being gone.
In the Realms of the Unreal [2004]
1. Henry Darger kept a weather journal for ten years in an attempt to trace and record the hubris of Chicago weather forecasters.
2. As he lay dying, Darger’s neighbor and landlord came to visit him, telling him that he had been in his room and seen his artwork. “Henry, your work is amazing.” Darger looked up at him and after a long moment replied, “Too late now.”
3. The close-ups of his paintboxes, each color meticulously labeled in Darger’s tightly-controlled cursive handwriting.
Michael Clayton [2007]
1. Clooney exits via the escalator. The shot is framed in such a gorgeous way: we see two moving parallel horizontal lines. It’s a brilliant bit of symbolism because you can’t be sure what it symbolizes.
2. Andy pointed out that Tilda Swinton’s hair is so so Condi! A pale-skinned Englishwoman is channeling Condoleezza Rice, and she’s totally on the money. That my friends is what I call an Oscar-deserving performance. In this movie it’s not what she says but how she says it.
3. Sydney Pollack: “Why? Because people are fucking incomprehensible. That’s why.”
