The Bookseller

Image from Allures (1961)

Jordan Belson

1926 – 2011

George Kuchar

1942 – 2011

It Came from Kuchar

Facebook page

Baltimore Sun obit

Hero of outsider cinema

Huffington Post

SF Chronicle

Inspired John Waters

J Hoberman, Village Voice

San Francisco Bay Guardian

(part 2) (part 3) (part 4)
(part 5) (part 6) (part 7)
(part 8) (part 9) (part 10)
(part 11) (part 12) (part 13)
(part 14) (part 15)

Ulysses Seen

If the most perfect post-Hitchcockian mystery in cinema continues to be Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 between-Godfathers masterpiece, The Conversation, Giuseppe Capotondi’s debut film, The Double Hour, comes close enough to at least be mentioned in the same conversation. Both films present narratives that leave the viewer unsettled & scrambling to sort out what might or might not be happening, both feature great acting, and both (not coincidentally, I suspect) involve a central character devoted to surveillance audio.¹

Where The Conversation focuses on a paranoid detective played by Gene Hackman who takes a case in which he learns that the roles of victim & villain are not what they seem, The Double Hour focuses on Guido, a widowed ex-cop, & Sonia, a half-Slovenian hotel maid, in Turin, who meet at a speed dating event & slowly start to get involved. The film is primarily told from the perspective of Sonia, played by Russian actress, Ksenia (think Xenia) Rappoport, who won a best actress award for the role in the 2009 Venice Film Festival. Filippo Timi, who won a best actor nod at the same festival for his role as Guido, looks a lot like Javier Bardem, maybe a little shorter & more trim, especially with a close-cropped beard, even down to the soulful eyes. He is balanced by his best friend, the more phlegmatic Dante, who is still on the police force, one of maybe a half dozen secondary figures who play crucial roles in the various sleights of narrative going on simultaneously throughout the film. Sonia & Guido find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, an art heist carried out with Mission Impossible precision, shots are fired & we learn soon enough that both characters have been hit. What happens from this point forward, though, is almost impossible to discuss without presenting major spoilers other than to say that it’s not clear, ultimately, who the victims really are, with some suggestion that it’s possible for the criminal to be the true victim, even as they “succeed.”

Laura Winton (aka Fluffy Singler) is writing her dissertation on the absence of formally progressive poetics in spoken word poetry. In a recent message in Facebook, she noted my own comment on how, with performance and sound poetry so visible (audible) at the Text Festival in Bury, there was no sign of slam there, and wondered why.

That’s a good question. I don’t pretend to fully – or even remotely – grasp all of the local politics of poetry in the UK, but the contrast between the almost entirely white participants of the Text Festival and an afternoon just two days later in the giant plaza at Trafalgar Square in London, one of the most multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, multinational places on the planet, proved startling. Indeed, the difference between the Text Festival and the crowd at Katsouris’ deli in the famed (and very multi-multi) Bury Market just two blocks away was noticeable enough for Krishna & I to talk about it over lunch.

One aspect of this is simply sociological – what counts as literature to one community couldn’t be further from it to another. Looking at the White House poetry reading this past week, I feel much more sympathetic to the work, say, of Jill Scott than I do to the thinly veiled appeals to sentimentality that Billy Collins slips in just below the surface of his humor – she & I both have Philadelphia as a point of reference, plus we’ve both had to deal with Sudden Deafness Syndrome in our lives. Her poetry asks harder questions than Collins’ ever will. Yet it is inescapable listening to that reading that Scott’s work also looks to sentiment, just with more earnestness than Collins. Collins’ irony is much closer in practice to the work of Kenny Goldsmith, something that might appall them both. Where Kenny & Billy differ is that Goldsmith’s shtick has much more historical consciousness & contextualization, and to some degree depends on it.

Charles Bernstein & Yunte Huang
discussing Charlie Chan:
The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective
& His Rendezvous with American History
at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop

Warning: it may seem that there are spoilers in what follows. But the answers to the really important questions are deliberately not dealt with here.

Poetry (Shi) is a beautiful if deeply sad motion picture from Korea about a woman who finds herself at a turning point in her life & decides to take a class in poetry being given at the cultural center of the unnamed farming town in which she lives. Directed by Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine, Oasis), Poetry stars Jeong-hie Yun as Mija Yang, who lives simply on a pension augmented by a part-time job providing elder-care while raising her teenage grandson, Wook. If Mija is a widow, we’re never told this directly and all we hear of Wook’s father is that the boy came to live with Mija after his mother’s divorce. The mother has moved to Busan to find work.

Mija has reasons for wanting to take a poetry class – as a child, she was told that she would become a poet one day. Now at 66, she is starting to have problems recalling the words for things, which can leave her confused and disoriented. She goes to the town’s clinic for a checkup, but there she comes upon a woman in the street hysterical with grief. The woman has just learned that her daughter has jumped from a bridge and drowned.

These events – the woman in the street, the trip to the doctor, the class in poetry – combine with Mija’s part-time job to make up most of the parameters of this complex, indirectly told tale. Poetry won the prize at Cannes for best screenplay, but it could very credibly have received awards for acting, direction & best film as well.

Poetry, the discipline, is not only a metaphor here. Your typical adult education course, the class is filled with beginners like Mija, led by a man in his 40s who obviously is a well-intentioned local poet doing his best to make ends meet with this job. His task for the month-long course is simple and straight-forward: they will write a single poem that month, but they will really write, finding that place in themselves that needs to be freed up in order to communicate whatever. He shows them an apple and asks them who has seen an apple before, which of course everyone has. Not really, he insists. You really have to look at the apple, really see it, before it will begin to appear.

Soon, Mija is dutifully carrying around a notebook, jotting down ideas, observations. She worries throughout the film that she never will be able to write a poem – she is waiting for an inspiration, a concept that the teacher teases her about. Were this all this film did, it might be a charming French film called Mija Writes a Poem.

But, at the same time, several other events are taking place that cause Mija enormous stress. One is her memory, another is that the old gentleman whom she tends is not such a gentleman at all, the third is the consequences of that woman hysterical in the streets. Her daughter had been in Wook’s grade, although Wook claims barely to have known her. The boy seems to have a life thoroughly confined to his PC, his little gang of buddies, and the video arcade. When his grandmother wants to play badminton because the doctor has told her to get exercise, Wook can barely stand having to do so.

One of the interesting aspects of this film, at least to this Anglo poet, are those points where contemporary Korean culture is nearly identical with life and institutions in the U.S. – one of which seems to be poetry as a social phenomenon – and the points where are they are radically dissimilar, such as the criminal justice system. It is perfectly okay, it would seem, to compensate victims for their suffering as though it were an ordinary business transaction. If all parties agree not to talk to the police, no investigation will ensue. If, for example, a teenage girl commits suicide after months of repeated gang rapes from a half-dozen boys in her grade, the fathers get together, come up with a figure, divide it among themselves and approach the girl’s family.

The problem with all this is that Wook has no father around to participate in such negotiations, his grandmother has no money to speak of, and the price they settle on – 30 million won – is roughly $27,000 US divided six ways. When the girl’s mother balks, the fathers implore Mija to speak with her, woman to woman. In many ways, Poetry is about the total lack of power women have in contemporary Korean society. Mija is as alone, and nearly as devastated by these events, as the girl’s mother. How will Mija come up with $4,500? What should she do with this feral grandchild, who is clearly a follower in his crowd, the one kid without a dad around?

Mija learns the dead girl’s name, Agnes, attends the funeral mass & goes to the farm where the girl’s mother lives. She makes some difficult decisions as to how to raise the funds. And Mija finds herself writing in her notebook as she goes through all these experiences. Even when the fathers are in the midst of tense negotiations, Mija just steps outdoors & pulls out her notebook. When we hear later what the other poetry students are (or are not) doing, airy, foggy musings that wrestle with memories and loss, Mija’s simple straightforward descriptions in her notebook take on enormous depth. There is one scene with an apricot worth the price of admission.

At this point in the narrative, Mija attends a reading in town, which looks like a local open-mic event. Some people are reading their work, others reading poems from favorite books. Afterwards, everyone heads to a bar where she complains that one guy, who used his reading to tell off-color jokes, was abusing poetry. One of the other women makes sure that everyone knows Mija feels this way – tho in fact somebody points out that this poet is an okay guy, a local detective who had been a big-city cop until exposing corruption got him demoted to the boonies – when who of all people turns up but Mija’s poetry teacher, who has been drinking in the same establishment with some of his writer friends. This is a fascinating moment, that instant when the local world of the community workshop, the small-town narcissism of the open reading, and the world of “the professional poets” suddenly interconnect. One of the poet’s drinking pals – an intense young man who we are told has been nominated for a major prize -- hears what his friend has been telling the locals about finding the poem inside themselves and letting it fly and can barely contain a certain snarky glee.

All of the important decisions in this film occur from this point forward, most of them off camera, and I won’t discuss them here, other than to note that the director lets us see them, just barely, without ever telling us precisely what they are. It’s a fabulous bit of not saying too much, steering away from that fatal disease of so much American cinema.

Poetry has played at several festivals and is about to make a run of art-theaters and campus film society one-nighters, starting this week in Rohnert Park. Given Lee Chang-dong’s reputation as the leader of Korean new wave cinema – and the sorry fact that his key works, such as Oasis & Secret Sunshine, are not yet available on DVD, this would represent a major film event even if it had nothing to do with poetry. That Lee Chang-dong actually gets it and gets it right in terms of what a poem can be as an act of thinking is itself an accomplishment on a whole other level.

It was Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao, not Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was arrested by the San Francisco police department for selling a copy of Howl on June 3, 1957. As I noted in my original review last September. Shig, the manager of City Lights Books from the mid-1950s until 1976, spent the night in the Bryant Street jail and was bailed out the following day. He was tried alongside Ferlinghetti, but where the latter had published the book as well as owned the bookstore in which it was sold, and thus really depended on the Judge Horn’s ruling that Howl was not obscene, Murao had only to testify that he didn’t know its contents and had not read every single book in the store.

Having been interned in the US concentration camps for the Japanese in the first years of the Second World War, Murao later served as a US intelligence specialist in the South Pacific. I don’t know of any other job he had during his career, though he must have done something between the end of the War and when he was hired at the bookstore in 1955. In his day, Shig was as much an icon of City Lights as was Ferlinghetti. He died in 1999.

The one person of color in the history of the Howl bust and trial, Shig does not appear anywhere in the motion picture Howl & thus nobody portrays him in the Epstein-Friedman film. Of the first 68 entries into my little contest, somewhat less than half got the two questions correct. The first three to get both right did so within 35 minutes of the contest being posted. They are, in order,

Steven Coons of Salt Lake City
Stephen Ross of Oxford, UK
David Wilk of Weston, Connecticut

During the first couple of hours, most of the responses guessed Ferlinghetti – it was a logical choice, but way too easy, an obvious misdirection (or so I imagined) – but by early evening, most of the entries still trickling in were right.

It’s worth noting that Oscilloscope, the distributors of the film, knew in advance exactly what my questions were going to be, and the answers, and thought it was a great idea. Shig’s absence from the film may have been the strangest erasure since Tom Bombadil disappeared from Lord of the Rings, but it’s in the redactive nature of filmic narrative, not unlike having none of the other major characters – Kerouac, Cassady, even Ferlinghetti – say a single line, not explaining the historic nature of the reading at the Six Gallery, tho it’s shown on screen, or leaving out more famous witnesses than those presented, including Kenneth Rexroth, Mark Linenthal, Walter Van Tilburg Clark & Herbert Blau, or maybe even – I think the jury’s out on this one – filming the bulk of the movie in New York City.

My thanks to Oscilloscope, to all who sent entries, and especially to the memory of Shig Murao, who took the hit for poetry readers worldwide. We owe you.

A contest for
“the best minds of my generation”

Howl, the motion picture by Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, a film that I have called both “a wonderful motion picture” and “the best exposition of a poem in a major motion picture,” is now available on DVD & Blue-Ray. You no longer need live within driving distance of a major urban center or a good college art house film scene in order to view it. And view it you should. Franco as the young Ginsberg is fantastic. The DVD also has extra features not previously available and comes with English & French subtitle options.

The film was nominated for a Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Berlin Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Carter Burwell was nominated for film composer of the year award for this and four other films at the World Soundtrack Awards. Howl won the Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review.

I have a copy of the new DVD of Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s motion picture Howl, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, for the first three readers of this blog who correctly answer the following two questions:

Who actually spent time in jail when the SFPD “busted” Howl?

Who played this person in the film?

Members of my family, immediate & extended, and regular contributors to this blog are not eligible. Neither are current or former employees of City Lights nor residents of Nowhere Zen, New Jersey. Send your entries via email to Silliman AT gmail DOT com. You must put HOWL CONTEST in the headline.

Here is Ginsberg at Reed College in February, 1956, giving the earliest recorded reading of Howl. This may be the only recording of the poem where an audience has never before actually read the text. Ginsberg was hitch-hiking around the Northwest with Gary Snyder at the time, and reads only the first part of the poem. Interesting to note where (and how nervously) the laughter falls.

Norman McLaren: Synchromie. Musique Optique

From Vernissage TV

I saw the best exposition of a poem in a major motion picture, Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl, coming to art theaters starting on the 24th & also, I believe, available thru various video-on-demand services. Howl is also perhaps the only major motion picture I’ve ever seen that is, in both form & function, the close reading of a text. I have never seen a film based on a work of literature that even remotely approached Howl’s devotion to the words on the paper. If you’re a writer, or care about poetry, you are almost certainly going to love this film. Howl was made for you, with intelligence & more than a little cinematic bravery, and it shows. Howl is a wonderful motion picture.

It is a lot harder, however, to imagine Howl appealing to a broad audience. Virtually every word in this film comes directly from the poem itself – maybe one third of its 90 minutes are given over to a pastiche of different readings that start with the film’s first words, James Franco as Ginsberg reading the title and dedication at the Six Gallery in 1955, then launching into a surprisingly soft [and quite effective] presentation of its famous opening words

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked

– or from interviews with Ginsberg or the records of the 1957 obscenity trial in San Francisco’s municipal court, Judge Clayton Horn presiding. This makes for a very curious film dynamic – terrific for opening the poem up, maybe not so well suited to holding the attention of Borat fans. Actors portraying Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Peter Orlovsky & Lawrence Ferlinghetti are on screen a lot, but not one has a single line in this film. The closest we get is Ginsberg reading Cassidy’s “Dear John” letter explaining that the Adonis of Denver really does want to be straight. Other major figures – the other poets at the Six Gallery or other witnesses in defense of the poem, which included Kenneth Rexroth, Mark Linenthal, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Herbert Blau, Arthur Foff & Vincent McHugh – are missing from the film entirely.

This push-pull between complete erasure & obsessive detailing is a fundamental (albeit strange) dynamic of this project. We learn, for example, which colleges the prosecution witnesses worked at, or hear William Burroughs & Herbert Huncke mentioned by their surnames because they’re in the poem, tho otherwise never present in the picture, Lucien Carr only by his first name for the same reason, yet Shigeyoshi Murau, who was actually arrested & spent the night in jail for selling a copy of the book to the police, is entirely absent. He was the co-defendant. And perhaps most strangely, given that Epstein & Friedman are San Franciscans, or that Ginsberg wrote the poem at Peter Orlovsky’s apartment at 5 Turner Terrace atop Potrero Hill or that the trial was a San Francisco affair, Howl was filmed entirely in New York.

Except for that portion that was done in Thailand. A major component of the film is a series of animations created by a team led by Eric Drooker to illustrate those aspects of the poem that are too abstract (Moloch!) or too literal perhaps in their presentation of matters physical (a child emerging from its mother’s vagina being the most explicit), often as sparkly spirits swoop overhead – these spirits are not so much elements of the poem (unless of course we imagine them as angel-headed hipsters) as they are aspects of forced narrative cohesion. There are some moments where I laughed out loud at animated clichés (my fave is a forest of undulating penises looking ever so much like seaweed), but the animation mostly solves one of the major cinematic challenges of this work – what to look at while listening to a poem.

One of the reasons I’ve never tried to parlay my love for cinema into a full-time reviewing gig – besides the fact that the field is crashing thanks to the implosion of newspapers – is that, as a poet, I relatively seldom watch an entire picture, at least not the way I’d want a genuinely good reviewer to do. I focus instead on those elements that have more-or-less direct analogs in poetry – writing, direction, problems of narrative, the score, the photography, editing. There is, in fact, so much more in film than just those elements that I’m always abashed to read a review that does a good job, for example, with the role of costumes or sets as it always exposes to me just how much of the film I actually missed while sitting there in the dark.

I can – and often do – watch actors with much the same eye as I do dancers, ice skaters or athletes. There are a handful of actors in each generation who seem to raise their craft to a level heretofore unimaginable to us mere mortals. Their bodies, their faces, everything their eyes do & don’t say, the corners of their mouths – all are in play whenever they take the stage. Their nostrils are in character. Many actors are great for a time – Robert De Niro would be an example, as was Marlon Brando – but then opt to get rich or strange rather than better. Some others (Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp) develop cults & thereafter struggle to not simply to play to that. Yet the very best actor, like the very best dancer (think Baryshnikov), can be a revelation at whatever they do, even sitting silent in a chair. In my life, I can think of just four actors who I think achieve that level of luminescence and hold it throughout their careers – Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Cate Blanchett & Julianne Moore. If they were doing Alpo commercials, I’d probably get a dog.

Calling Molly Ringwald: a brat pack for our time

I will be curious to see if Scott Pilgrim vs. the World can get beyond the curse of a disappointing opening weekend to build on word-of-mouth – its rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a solid 80%, 8.0 on IMDB’s 1-to-10 rating scale – or whether the film will capsize under its very own strengths.

If the filmmakers want to know why the picture tanked on its first weekend, all they have to do is to check the demographics of their receipts – there could not have been more than 3 women in the (mostly empty) theater where I saw the film, and the IMDB ratings Saturday night were as follows:

Being the internet, all IMDB stats skew male – 60% of the ratings for Sex and the City were from guys – but these numbers border on 86%. This suggests a gender disturbance in the force, so to speak, which may seem odd to somebody who doesn’t know the comics on which this film was based, given that it’s about a sensitive guy who has to learn to trust his feelings, with two strong female characters (Mary Elizabeth Winstead & Ellen Wong) playing against Michael Cera’s oh-so-vulnerable title role.

To demonstrate The Saragossa Manuscript’s status as a cult classic, all one need do is to point out that this 1965 film by Wojciech Has was being restored at the Pacific Film Archive at the behest of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia when he died, and that Martin Scorsese stepped in at that point to ensure the project’s completion. The so-called “Polish National Epic,” written of course in French & set entirely in Spain, is the shaggiest of shaggy dog narratives, as one character after another sits down or leans forward to tell you a story, taking you further & further into a nested sequence of interlocking narratives that never quite works it way all the back to the original frame tale. It was exactly the sort of flick that film fans as diverse as Garcia & Scorsese would have gone to see again & again, partly because it was (& is still) such a delightful head trip, and because one inevitably saw new material on each repeated exposure.

While the network of little repertory cinemas that foreign & indie films depended on for distribution in the 1960s barely exists a half century later, The Saragossa Manuscript’s spiritual grandchild showed up in theaters late last week under the title Inception. Like Manuscript, it’s the wooliest of narrative constructions, a Rube Goldberg machine of film tropes, not to be confused with any attempt to use cinema as a medium for serious thought. Also like Manuscript, it’s a film that exudes its love for the possibilities of its own medium & feels at moments like a test: just how many layers of narrative can one keep separate but simultaneous in a film. Try this:

Once upon a time, the late Gil Ott shared a tree-house in Bolinas with an anthropologist named Kush. Kush, aka Steven Kushner, would go on to teach at the late lamented New College of California & simultaneously begin videotaping many of the poetry readings he attended around San Francisco. As in thousands of them. Some of these events were also taped by others – most often the Poetry Archive at San Francisco State – & there was something of a rivalry over the quality of the work. How accurate this debate might be is impossible to ascertain from nearly 3,000 miles away since both archives – shockingly, to my mind – remain offline. For all I know, Kush’s archives are sitting in boxes in a garage or attic somewhere, or worse. But even if we presume that the quality borders on the non-existent, the reality persists that for hundreds, maybe thousands, of poetry readings in the Bay Area over the past 40 years, Kush’s archives are the documentation, the only remaining evidence of what happened, what was read & who was there.

I thought of Kush a lot when watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, Bansky’s documentary about street art documentarian Thierry Guetta & his morphing into millionaire street artist Mr. Brainwash. Exit is flat out one of the best films I have ever seen on the visual arts, easily the best since at least Basquiat, a film not-coincidentally directed by Julian Schnabel, a major painter before he turned to film (The Diving Bell, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly). Presuming, that is, that Guetta actually exists & is not himself a Banksy art product rather in the way that Kent Johnson produced Araki Yasusada.

Let’s presume here that Guetta / Brainwash are for real. The story, as such, is this. Guetta, an LA-vintage clothing store owner with a Euro-orphan background not unlike that of Andy Grove or Bill Graham, gets a video camera and becomes obsessive in his recording of everything. But one of the things he records, on a family trip back home to France, is a cousin, Space Invader, one of the first generation of street artists, who unlike the graffiti taggers they so palpably emulate appear all to have gone to art school. Film Space Invader in France, and then back on his own home turf of LA, Guetta meets LA’s resident street art hero, Shepard Fairey, pre-Obama image & Time magazine cover (& pre-Associated Press copyright suit over the use of an AP photo of Obama as one source for his iconic poster). Guetta becomes the sorcerer’s apprentice & soon finds himself everywhere, since he has no fear of heights & gets off on the idea of the danger of getting arrested. Fairey, Invader & the other street artists he soon gets know (virtually all guys save for one street-named Swoon) teach him not only the tricks of their craft, making spray art stencils at the local Kinko’s but to film from a distance & in low-light situations so as not to attract the police.

Guetta tells everyone he is making a documentary, but it appears to be one on the order of Kush’s: lots of tapes, but no real archive that can be credibly accessed by outsiders. The artists all seem to value not only his help, but the idea of creating a lasting archive of work that all too often gets sprayed over pretty quickly (tho, and it’s not noted in passing, we do later in the film see one Bansky Andre the Giant disappear as Mr Brainwash himself pastes his own newer work over it).

But as he gets to know the street art scene, Guetta comes to understand that his compulsive documentation has a major gap. He needs to interview Banksy, the “international man of mystery,” who is the Batman to all these various Robins of Street Art. The catch is that it’s impossible. Everyone professes not to know who he is or where he is. He is said not to own a cellphone. However, coming over to the US to do some work in the LA area, Banksy’s assistant is turned back at customs – the cover story on the rationale for the trip doesn’t get him through. So Banksy calls up Shepard Fairey to see if there is anyone who can and wants to help. Why not, suggests Fairey, this middle-aged boutique owner & camera nut who happens to be Space Invader’s cousin. Unable to find Banksy, Banksy comes to him.

Pepper Potts & Tony Stark in the original Iron Man

Because one of my kids owns the DVD, we prepped for Iron Man 2 by rewatching the original Iron Man last week. Big mistake. Numero 2 of the projected trilogy is but a shadow of the first film, which wasn’t any Macbeth or Godfather to start with. This is the case for two reasons. The first is narrative. The most interesting part of Iron Man lay not in the CGI or battle scenes, which were by-the-book fare at best, but in the development of the characters, particularly in the sexual tension between playboy-billionaire-turned-superhero Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) & his personal assistant Pepper Potts, played by & Gwyneth Paltrow, and also in Stark’s relationship with his best bud, James Rhodes¹, & even the primary bad guy, Obadiah Stane, played by Jeff Bridges. There is a presumption in the first film that we need to draw these characters out, and that’s at least half of its charm, given the quality of the character actors filling key roles. With the franchise established, director Jon Favreau (whose previous motion pictures were Elf & Zarutha: A Space Adventure) seems to feel that we already “get” the characters & can just cut to the chase, which is mostly what this film does, save for two subplots, one about Stark’s father, the other about his blood toxicity. The result is far thinner fare. The two other subplots, one about Pepper’s ascendancy to the CEO spot at Stark industries, the other about the presence of Natalie Rushman / Natasha Romanov (played by Scarlett Johansson) in the Stark inner circle are handled badly to the degree that they are handled at all. Paltrow, central as she is to the plot, has very little to do in Iron Man 2 except look great & scream a lot.

The second reason is a consequence of the first – not having to reintroduce or further develop the characters means not addressing the 800-pound gorilla in this film, the replacement of Terrence Howard as James Rhodes with Don Cheadle. Cheadle is a fine actor, but you never see – not once, not for a second – the softness & caring that is the essence of Rhodey’s intimacy with Tony Stark, something that was evident throughout the original Iron Man. There are conflicting stories as to why the switch – Howard was a difficult actor & got paid more than anyone else in the original film², more than Downey even – but the investment is evident onscreen. Howard’s a bargain at any price. This film is fundamentally unfair to Cheadle, simply because it makes a good actor look mediocre.

Not that this will impact worldwide sales any. There is a cynicism to this project that suggests that the producers did not feel much need to do it very well just because they have some terrific character actors in all the leading roles (save maybe for Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer), and even in some minor ones (Samuel L. Jackson, Jr., mails in his one scene as Nick Fury, making me wish they’d gotten Laurence Fishburne). Just fill it out with special effects & heavy metal music & take it to the bank. Getting the director of Elf to helm the project is just one index of how Marvel cut costs wherever it was felt they weren’t necessary. Like direction.

On the plus side, the roller coaster ride is mostly effective & these are some marvelous actors who have no reason not to chew on the drapery here, and for the most part do so with gusto. Johansson is surprisingly good in this respect. Mickey Rourke’s rogue Russian physicist is terrifyingly made up to look like Mickey Rourke. And I loved one tiny touch, likely missed by anybody not in the computer industry: when Stark arrives to open Stark Expo (a world’s fair of high tech weaponry, complete with Ferris wheel), one of the wannabes who rush forward to try & touch him is Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle & an industry exec known for his Tony Stark-like lifestyle, “as himself.” It’s a more knowing cameo than Larry King’s cadaverous presence or Christiane Amanpour’s one badly directed scene.

There is a trend these days to go with counter-intuitive casting in action-thriller flicks. Downey, Toby Maguire, Johnny Depp & Matt Damon all make unlikely action figures, Daniel Craig only a little less so. Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes is another case in point – who would ever have thought that this slightly built poster child for never giving up on drug rehab no matter how many times you have to try would become the Errol Flynn / Johnny Weissmuller of our time? On the other hand, imagine just how bad the Iron Man films would be, say, with Nicholas Cage. Downey is one of the great acting talents of our time and cartoon projects are ultimately a waste of his considerable skills, save for the quiet moments, which in this film involve Stark dealing with his father issues & the nasty problem that his artificial heart (no accident that his sidekick A.I. system is named Jarvis) is not so slowly poisoning his system. Stark carries a blood toxicity monitor that will come as a sudden rush of reality to any diabetic who wears a monitor for tracking glucose. It’s an odd touch, but Downey’s interactions with the monitor are among the very best parts of this motion picture. As one of my kids phrased it, Tony Stark is a lot more interesting than Iron Man.

¹ James Rhodes, nicknamed Dusty, was a major league baseball player with the New York Giants in the years just before Marvel came up with Iron Man. Primarily used as a pinch-hitter for Monte Irvin, he was a cult figure and, with Willie Mays, a superhero & household name because of his role in defeating the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series.

² Apparently because he was the first one to sign on, before the producers redid the budget to bring the project in at a lower cost, partly by focusing on actors like Downey & Paltrow rebuilding their careers & willing to work for less. That Paltrow, who took time off to have children, is having to “rebuild” her career tells you way too much about what’s wrong with the film industry.

Louder Than a Bomb
wins 2 prizes,
including the
Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award
for best film
at the Cleveland International Film Festival

Jean-Luc Godard’s homage to Eric Rohmer

In an attempt to arouse audience interest in the Oscars, the Academy expanded the number of nominees for best picture this year from its usual five to a new total of ten. But in keeping with the Academy’s long-honored tradition of doing everything in an incompetent manner, it failed to expand beyond five the number of nominations in other categories, including best direction. This leaves us with a two-tier nominating phenomenon: best picture candidates whose directors were likewise nominated for best director, and those that were not. It would be a major shocker if any of the films in that latter category – The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, A Serious Man or Up – walked off with the statue for best picture. They’re there really for show. As it is, Jim Sheridan’s Brothers isn’t up for anything, and it’s easily better than at least 8 of the 10 “best picture” nominees, and its lead actor Tobey Maguire is far better than any of the best actor nominees, even including Jeremy Renner, who should win the Oscar, or Jeff Bridges, who probably will.

Renner’s film, The Hurt Locker, is up for best picture & best director, Kathryn Bigelow being only the second female ever nominated in this category (the first was Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation). Bigelow has already won the Director’s Guild of America award & the BAFTA & deserves the Oscar strictly on the merits. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the only other film that even warrants serious consideration here. It, The Hurt Locker & Brothers are on a completely different tier this year.

All three are also about war, a genre I’m not keen on, tho each treats it in a radically different manner. Tarantino’s film is the most ground-breaking, a comic imagining of what should have befallen the Nazis, as gleeful an orgy of revenge as one might imagine. Brothers is about the impact of the war on the warrior, especially once he returns home. The Hurt Locker covers that moment as well, but does so in about five of its 130 minutes as its chief character, Renner’s William James (!) runs back to Iraqi bomb squad duty as fast as he can, feeling far more at home amongst IEDs than he does at a big box grocery where the cereal aisle alone overwhelms him.

At the beginning of The Hurt Locker is an epigraph taken from Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:

The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug…

That is pretty much the premise of this film & Bigelow is none too subtle about it, reiterating that last phrase on the screen before we arrive at the first scene, a small robot slowly approaching a bundle of plastic bags on a Baghdad street. Quoting Hedges is an interesting choice, in that his views of war (and the American right) can be nearly as strong in kind as those of Sy Hersch, but his distance from the American left is just as great, his own perspective having been forged while in the seminary. Bigelow is careful throughout The Hurt Locker to underscore the uselessness of the misadventure in Iraq without making an anti-war film, and her capacity to do so really shows the intelligence she brings to the project. As does the film’s key emotional event, the discovery of a bomb-factory in a school, complete with the corpse of a 12-year-old boy whose body has been armed as a “body bomb.” Watching Sgt. William James, who is sure he knows this kid, have to fish around the dead boy’s innards looking for the explosives is an appalling touch that I doubt a male director would have imagined. It’s done in real time & quite graphically, realistically enough that my son wondered aloud “how did they pull off that stunt,” a question that I believe was as much about neutralizing the visual impact as it was about the cinematic process.

Likewise, Bigelow is careful to make this a film about “ordinary people.” None of the three main actors, Renner, Antony Mackie or Brian Gerharty, was at all well-known prior to this film, tho Renner starred in the title role of Dahmer. Name actors abound at the fringes of the story – Guy Pearce, David Morse, Ralph Finnes, Christian Camargo & Evangine Lilly among them – but not one is onscreen for more than five minutes & three of the aforementioned are very quickly dead.

Instead what we see, almost exclusively, is how these three young men do their jobs & process the results. When the team’s first leader is killed in the film’s opening scene, the two remaining members are appalled at the recklessness of his replacement, who throws away his headset when the base team talks too much or strips out of his protective wear when the amount of explosives are so great that the gear won’t make a difference. They think James is suicidal – in love with death would probably be more like it – but from his perspective (and my only serious criticism with this film is that it isn’t clear enough about this), it’s really about focus. Far from being the “wild man” David Morse proclaims him to be, James is a monk whose practice entails “disarming the det.” When he is confronting an IED, he is absolutely riveted on getting the job done. When he’s not, the flood of thoughts & emotions overwhelm him. Although Bigelow hints at this throughout, the scene in which this becomes most clear is the one instance in which James cannot disarm the bombs (plural) before the timer is set to go off. They are strapped to a man by means of a metal vest & there are more padlocks to break than the two-minutes James has in which to work can handle. James’ apology to the father of four that he cannot save him as he puts his helmet back & runs for his own life represents the absolute contradiction of his occupation. 40 seconds later, nothing remains of the victim but a crater in the street.

James’ teammates have very different perspectives toward him. Gerharty’s Owen Eldridge sees only the consistent need for risk & excess &, as he lifted onto a chopper out of combat, gives James a final fuck you. Mackie’s JT Sanborn, a sergeant who spent many years in military intelligence before volunteering for the bomb squad, sees the method in James’ madness & wonders instead if he is capable of the same. James, after all, has disarmed nearly 900 IEDs & other explosive devices. James’ only concern is the next one. He keeps souvenirs of his IEDs in a half-size milk-crate under his bed, the closest thing in the film to an actual hurt locker, but he keeps his wedding ring in there as well. Asked to describe his relationship to his wife, he can’t really do it. Actual life is too messy & too full of grey areas. The high of his job is that it is exactly not that.