Stop Making Me Cry, Dammit!

First I had a dream that I had a black Labrador retriever and someone was taking him away from me for some reason. They stopped the truck so I could pet him one last time and say goodbye, but somehow that didn't make it any easier. So I woke up this morning in tears (and also feeling manipulated by my subconscious ... I mean, a puppy, really? ).

Then this made me teary-eyed, too.

Of course I'm seeing Wall-E this weekend so I don't expect the flood of tears to end any time soon.

Because you despise me, you're the only one I trust

Ooh! Just found out it's Peter Lorre's birthday! I have a HUGE crush on Peter Lorre.

Yup, that's how I likes 'em: wall-eyed, adorable, and with funny voices.

We Have To Articulate Ourselves, Otherwise We Would Be Cows In The Field

Herzog's ramblings are always good for a chuckle, but I really love the way he phrases this. I always felt that creating art was what separates us from the animals. Except for those chimps and elephants who oil paint, of course.

Dear Little Things

The key to decorating a child's room is to put pictures/posters, etc. at their eye level, not yours. Remember to place artwork at about 3.5 - 4 feet off the ground to maximize their enjoyment.

Also, try a whimsical, fairy-tale inspired set like this to stir their imagination.

Monsieur Verdoux

Ah, Charlie -- excuse me, Charles -- Chaplin, you luckless bastard. Everyone apparently hated you when M. Verdoux first came out, and it took years before the world caught up with your cynicism.

Sorry about that. It's really not a bad little film.

Last night's Film Forum audience was appropriately appreciative, and we laughed out loud, often (possibly for the right reasons). Verdoux mixes slapstick and murder a lot better than, some other films that have attempted same (say Colin Higgins' Foul Play, which completely falls apart after the first thirty minutes, though somewhat redeems itself with Dudley Moore's "Beaver Trap" scene, or Arsenic and Old Lace, which is just too manic for its own good and, I just realized, was also a STAGE PLAY!). Laughs were especially plentiful during the scenes with Martha Raye, who I just realized played the Duchess in my beloved TV adaptation of Alice! There's a great scene where she drinks a whole bottle of wine spiked with hydrogen peroxide and doesn't bat an eyelash -- that's my kind of girl!

There's a nice analysis/appreciation of the film on Cinematical, that I more or less agree with. Chaplin's talkies certainly deserve respect but I don't think he really shines as a director in Verdoux. The story lacks momentum, that's my main gripe. Chaplin doesn't tell a tight story here, and the more leaden sequences detract from the overall effect. It's not all bad news though: moral interludes and asides were kept mercifully brief, for the most part, and the sentimental soliloquizing was confined to the last five minutes or so. So thanks for that, CC.

The film's greatest strength is Chaplin himself, of course. You can't fault his performance, which is by turns creepy, sad, cruel, depressing, and hilarious. Still, as one Cinematical commenter pointed out, imagine if the film had been directed by Orson Welles, the originator of the idea. That might have been the best movie ever. Finally, score an extra point for some great one-liners, including this very quotable line:

"What's the matter with you? You seem to have lost your zest for bitterness."

Stenography Hero!

On Tuesday, July 15th, game artist Mark Essen, a.k.a. Messhof, will "install five playable games at Light Industry, including two new titles: Stenography Hero, a competitive text-based stenography simulator in the spirit of Guitar Hero, and Rail War, a western-themed side-scroller projected in a Cinemascope aspect ratio." (!!!! - Ed.)

"Essen will present a short talk about his work during which he will upload Stenography Hero and Rail War live to his website for free distribution. Other titles available for play will include Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist (2008), Punishment: The Punishing (2007) and Flywrench (2007)."

(From lightindustry.org)

All I have to say is I really, really want to play Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist.

True Cime in the True North

Canadian police have found a sixth human foot washed ashore in Vancouver.

Update: True crime, my eye!

This is indeed a disturbing universe.

So long, Legs

All I knew about Cyd Charisse for the longest time was that she had her legs insured for millions of dollars (somehow this still strikes me as the epitome of glamour). Then I saw her in The Band Wagon and was like, Oh, that's why. (The dancing scene in the park is unbelievable. )

I also like this anecdote: She said her husband, the singer Tony Martin, could always tell with whom she was dancing. "If I was black and blue," she said, "it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn't have a scratch." (See that boys? Be a better dancing partner and maybe you'll get to dance with someone like Cyd.)

Gorgeous, incredible dancer, class act.

Screw the puzzle house, I want to live in a robot house

I'm very happy these days because of my programmable coffee maker. It's like having a little robot servant making me coffee in the morning. I've named it Ruggles.

But wouldn't my robot servant be even more complete if I had an entire Rube Goldberg breakfast-making machine to go with it? Gizmodo lists its top ten favorite Rube Goldberg machines and I can't help but notice that at least two of them involve breakfast.

May personal favorite, of course, is Doc Brown's machine in Back to the Future. Any day that starts with a BTTF reference can only go well.

Desk Set (1957), or, The Post In Which I Strain For A Pet Theory, Reject It, And Get Cranky

Is anyone else really bored here?

If one looks at the WGA list of the 101 Best Screenplays of All Time, one would find more than a few misfires (American Beauty!). Is this because screen writers aren't a very bright bunch? Possibly. But it may also have something to do with our criteria for what makes a script or a story good. I mention this in conjunction with my review of Desk Set now because the things that bothered me about Desk Set I've found common to a number of films on The List that also irk me.

I've been formulating an unscientific study (in my mind) in which I delineate the various irritants and trace them directly to a certain style and/or era and am thus able to create a sort of taxonomy of screen writing wrongness. I got as far as this:

1. the theatre
2. the 1950s

... before I realized I was talking out of my ass.

See, I had this theory that writing in the 1950s had evolved into an unfortunate art form characterized by stilted adaptations of stage plays -- and stagey acting -- overlong run times, bloated production, unnatural dialogue, and a loss of connection with the cinematic medium. Writing for the movies had become respectable and playwrights were imported with disastrous results? Was that it? But they'd been importing playwrights since the '30s, and novelists as well, often with successful results. That broad-strokes solution didn't work.

But since so many films I dislike were produced circa 1950, I thought there HAD TO BE something specific about the 1950s I could point to as a factor in creating these irksome filmed plays. Maybe it was the source material, the theatre itself, that was the problem.

So far I've found very few successful adaptations from theatre to screen, a problem that rests with the writing and the direction, in equal measures. Directors seem content to rest on the "sparkling" dialogue and writers seem content to shoehorn their theatrics into an entirely different medium. Again, these are over-generalizations, but by now I've begun realize I'm not going to make a thorough -- or even remotely fact-based -- study here. These are just a few observations of my own, backed up with a few isolated examples. I'd love to start a dialogue, though, and hear what others have to say on the subject.


Spencer Tracy will not change his expression ...

Back to Desk Set. I was so excited to watch this because I love Katharine Hepburn, usually. (Though I recently re-watched "The African Queen" and was like, how did I not notice before how damn boring this movie is?") And reference librarians are awesome. How could I go wrong? Well, for one thing, I don't think the Tracy/Hepburn combo really does it for me. I was bored by Adam's Rib, too. I just don't feel the chemistry between them, real life romance or no. And something about the laconic way Tracy played it in Desk Set just struck me as lazy. So there's that. And Katie wasn't given much to do either, other than throw away some one-liners and quote a few poems in her Shakespeare voice.

Joan Blondell will languish

After about forty minutes of talking heads I got that familiar feeling. "I bet this was a play, originally," I harumphed to myself. (This was during the rooftop scene.) Sure enough -- adapted from a play by William Marchant ... by the dreaded Ephrons (spawners of Nora). Well, no wonder, I thought. But possibly the worst offense director Walter Lang commits, other than FILMING A PLAY, is giving the brilliant Joan Blondell nothing -- NOTHING -- to work with. I've seen Joan Blondell with funny scripts and good direction, I've seen her paired with James Cagney. I KNOW WHAT SHE CAN DO. And you gave her nothing. Nothing. That I cannot forgive.
Hepburn explains the joke

As I let Desk Set drag towards its inevitable conclusion, I felt my animosity increase. The scene in Hepburn's apartment seems set up for comedy. Shoes in the oven. Men in bathrobes. Interruptions. The stage is set! Comedy MUST ensue! Something MUST happen! But, nope. Everything's fine. Men go home. Shoes come out of oven unscathed. Hepburn and Blondell have a good laugh. The scene is deflated, an anticlimax. And hey, isn't one of the first rules of comedy "There's nothing less funny than watching two characters laugh"? Or the fourth rule. Whatever.

There's one funny scene near the end of the film where the computer, and the electronics expert, start to freak out. I laughed, briefly. Then Hepburn and Tracy (surprise!) decide to get married and the damn dreary thing ends. And I get to thinking.

Like All About Eve (1950) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), Desk Set suffers from my pet afflictions. What other writers -- our friends at AFI and WGA -- have deemed sophistication, wit, dazzling glamour and performance, I take for long, talky, windy, stuffy productions. All About Eve: too much diva, too much drama, too much talking and for far too long. Sunset Boulevard: too much goddamn voice-over! Desk Set: talking heads, flat, phoned-in performances, dull romance, waste of Joan Blondell. African Queen (1951): two boring people on a stupid boat and Hepburn's worst thrall scenes ever (she tends to do this thing where she's really proud at first and then utterly tamed by love, a faintly sickening display).

These particular films just bore me, they lack a lightness, they rely too much on perfs that are supposed to be iconic but fail to thrill. And I know I've got no case for, say, all screenwriting in the 1950s being horrible, or all play adaptations being wretched (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf floored me, although I envied the theatre audience their intermission -- again, I have a problem with anything over 90 minutes, usually ... my own cross to bear). I'm not going to find a formula here. But I think I can say I've identified a tendency in certain films, a fault of the writing, that leads to diminished enjoyment. And that thing, my friends, seems to be dialogue, of a type anyway.

I'm probably just stuck in my whole Leo McCarey/Preston Sturges 1930s screwball thing. Or stuck in my love of the Hawks/Fuller one-two punch (fast, hard, mean, funny, usually over in 100 minutes or less). I just want movies to effervesce all the time, I suppose.

Ironically, I find this romantic

According to imdb.com, Guillermo Del Toro "hates romance." This headline makes me smile, since I've very little patience with any sort of romance that isn't blended with laughs, and not in a Nora Ephron way, either.

"Sleepless in Seattle can go f**k itself," says my long-time crush, concurring with me.

"Monsters," he continues, "are the most beautiful creatures in the universe. I have no interest in everyday life, except through a twisted mirror."

Me neither! But wait, there's more:

"When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it."

Religion, meh. But definitely: art, fiction, ghosties, dreams ... insects, fauns ... mysteries.

Mystery on Fifth Avenue!

I wish I lived in a puzzle house ...

Hatari!

Saw Hatari! last week, and, as predicted, I liked it. First off, I like any film title that ends with an exclamation point! Secondly, I like any sequence that includes the following in combination:

1. Monkeys
2. Rockets
3. Red Buttons

I was going to stick around for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but was too sleepy -- plus I had to shuffle off to Buffalo the next day. I was sorry to miss it, but the business at hand was rather important. Once Saturday night came and said business had been dispatched, I returned to my hotel room only to find it playing on television (on the CBC, no less). I was just in time for my favorite scene.

An omen? Possibly. I'll take it as one.

A conversation about science ensued ...

Reading this made me happy: A government watchdog says NASA's press office "marginalized, or mischaracterized" studies on global warming between 2004 and 2006. This was in the news years ago, but it's only now the official reports are being released, confirming that government moles did indeed suppress new global warming data (some say it was initially suppressed because they didn't want it released during the 2004 presidential campaign). Anyway, I'm just glad this information was released. And to one colleague I spoke with today who said, "Who cares? We already know about global warming!" I have the following rebuttal for you:

"It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world."

That's from Brian Greene, a scientist a Columbia University. If he's good enough for Stephen Colbert, he's good enough for you. If you need me to spell out the connection, the point is that science enriches our lives and connects us to the rest of the universe. It has implications for the way we live our lives and, in this case, the way we treat our planet. To suppress new data or information for political or financial purposes is criminal. The fact that NASA exposed and fired the political plants working to countermand their institution's duty to the American public is great news to me.

In other news: I really want to attend this NYHS exhibit on the Cholera Plague of 1832.

Still Lives

I just finished Still Life by Louise Penny, which I started on Tuesday night. I'd heard so many good things about it and I really must say it (mostly) lives up to the hype. It's a classic cozy set in rural Quebec and it captivates, with its taut, clever puzzle and refreshing sense of place. Plus, it has a spinster!

The author clearly likes W.H. Auden, as she quotes him all the time, which was very timely and interesting to me because I just read an essay of his (more on that later) so I had Auden on the brain anyway. Penny adroitly works in numerous literary references into her book without seeming snotty about it, though her gay characters constantly referencing Oscar Wilde seems a little on the nose. (Her depiction of gay men is quite funny. Apparently they like Bed and Breakfasts, antiques, Wilde, and "It's Raining Men." Who knew?)

"Evil," says Auden,"is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table." This sentiment seems to be the driving force behind the book and it is still singularly chilling no matter how accustomed we may have grown to the idea of evil in a small town. Other themes are explored, like greed and avarice, which are resoundingly condemned as the ultimate evil. There's a marvelous character named Yolande who embodies pretense, avarice and all things evil, as evidenced by her too-clean house (Lemon Pledge = pure evil).

Penny's character of inspector Gamache has drawn praise from authors like Reginald Hill, who compare him to Inspecteur Maigret, and he's not far off the mark. Both inspectors share an endearing humbleness and humanity, a gentle optimism in the face of unspeakable crimes. Penny also introduces another element to the team of police trying to solve the case: Agent Nichol, a rookie who actually stymies the case with her pig-headedness and bad attitude. I found myself wondering if this type of personage had appeared in other detective novels, if there was precedent. I wondered about her role in the case and if she would ultimately find redemption. She was a very interesting foil to Gamache, and created a great deal of suspense by blundering the case. If anyone knows more about her character I'd love to hear it. It would be the first question I'd put to Penny, actually.

So, while Still Life conforms to the rule of the cozy sub-genre closely enough to satisfy even Auden, it also manages to bring number of new and refreshing angles to the narrative. I'm also interested in reading the Temperance Brennan series now, since apparently she's a forensic investigator in Montreal. I guess I'll stay on my Quebec kick for a while. (Also, I guess the author of the books was the inspiration for the character in Bones, a show I'd love to watch if only I had more time ... sigh. Note to self: quit job and become full-time blogger/TV watcher. Pay bills later.) Quebecois crime has been in the news lately too, which makes everything seem all the more timely. This fun Jezebel commentary has lots of cute people exclaiming, "You guys have crime in Canada? How quaint!" To which I say, yes, duh, we have crime, both organized and random. But it's all in the spirit of fun: Canuckisms are always entertaining, and I enjoyed stumbling upon them in Penny's book, like when characters say "Tabernacle" and stuff, which is pretty much the best swear word ever.

Auden says, in his essay "The Guilty Vicarage," that we like detective stories because they return us to Eden, a state of innocence (everything is rectified after the fall) and that in turn this desire is born out of guilt: "The magical satisfaction [the detective story provides] ... is the illusion of being dissociated from the murder. The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt."

To which I say, perhaps. But this is rather highfalutin. I just like something that absorbs me completely on my long, dreary commutes. And I found that, prior to getting really into the genre, I was beginning to suffer from narrative fatigue. I was growing tired of books where people share and grow and learn and talk about their feelings and families and angst. I was tired, more than anything, of any story with a romantic angle. I was tired of stories that went nowhere, dammit. Mysteries, I found, had an inherent narrative drive, and could not, must not, meander slowly and pointlessly and navel-gaze solispsistically at the main characters' interior impulses and drives, or else they would be ... suspense thrillers. I just very quickly and suddenly developed extreme impatience with anything that didn't

a) make me laugh
or
b) tire me out with relentless and rapid page turning

I became the human equivalent of Homer Simpson sitting on the couch yelling at the TV during an episode of McGarnagle -- "It means he gets results, you stupid chief!"

And, although Auden denies it, I think we still do watch/read mysteries because of that whole catharsis thing. As Rex Banner says, "It's not up to us to choose which laws we obey. If it was, I'd shoot everyone that looked at me cock-eyed." See? Everything in my psyche can be explained by the Simpsons.

I prefer Bombay Sapphire

According to a report published Monday in The Journal Of Gender Studies, many American women are bucking centuries of traditional gender roles by placing stunted, emotionally unfulfilling relationships on hold in order to pursue mind-numbing careers devoid of any upward mobility.

Dr. Gillian Detweiller, a professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland and coauthor of the report, said that the data suggests a cultural sea change in how women choose to experience lifelong disappointment.

Once again, The Onion manages to laugh at life's horribly depressing realities.

Though a greater number of women have decided to waste their fleeting youth toiling away in unrewarding jobs, other statistics have shown that a growing faction are embracing the more traditional alternative of slipping quietly into a painless death with a handful of sleeping pills and a bottle of Gordon's gin.

What A Joy it is to Dance and Sing!*

The late works of Howard Hawks series is coming up at Anthology. I'm planning to sit through a double bill of Hatari and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and I'll try to restrain myself from singing along to the latter. Speaking of singing, there's a nice defense of "My Rifle, My Pony and Me" in Rio Bravo in the AV Club:

"It’s front and center and performed by the actors, with no apparent deeper meaning beyond the pure enjoyment of watching them. I don’t think the actors are even supposed to be in character here. We’re not meant to see Dude and Colorado, we’re meant to see Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, and bask in the effervescent glow emanating from their collective star power. "When you've got some talent, your job is to use it,” Hawks said of the scene, deflecting criticism he was being self-indulgent with his stars by shoehorning an unnecessary musical number into a western. Of course Hawks was being self-indulgent. Why would Hawks let a little thing like plot get in the way of giving the audience pleasure?"'

So true. I love song and dance numbers, or even just songs, in my movies -- and I feel no real need to defend them, due to the fact that anyone who can't enjoy them is too dull to bother with. If I had to rank my favorite songs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I'd have to say "When Love Goes Wrong" is right up there, just because I love how seamlessly it's woven into the scene in the cafe in which our heroines commiserate over being broke with broken hearts. The big showstoppers are great too, but I can't help loving the scene where Lorelei and Dorothy cheer themselves up with a little song and dance number in a cafe.

* Angela Carter, "Wise Children"

Birthday Resolutions

As is my custom on my birthday (and most of my unbirthdays), I got tipsy at dinner. Sobering up now, I notice I wrote the following on a scrap of paper while mildly inebriated:

Birthday resolutions:

1. Touch toes

2. Organize photo albums

3. Be more businessy

I think these are all very sound.

Widdershins

I'm feeling very scattershot today, seemingly without the ability to concentrate on anything. As such this post will be appropriately unfocused.

I've been reading short stories; I read an Ellery Queen story in which the perp was a man named Harry Potter. This pleased me. I never know when I read these stories if it was written by the "real" Ellery Queen (two cousins from Brooklyn) or one of the many hacks they farmed the house name out to. Resorting to Wikipedia for research purposes doesn't help, but it does yield this little tidbit:

"In earlier novels he is a snobbish Harvard-educated intellectual of independent wealth who wore a pince-nez and investigated crimes because he found them stimulating. He derived these characteristics from his mother, the daughter of a rich aristocratic New York family who had married Inspector Queen, a bluff, man-in-the-street New York Irishman, and died before the stories began. His mannerisms in the first nine or ten novels were apparently based on those of the then-extremely popular Philo Vance character of the same era. As time went on, however, these mannerisms were toned down or disappeared entirely."

Which leads me to ...

I've been watching season one of "Hart to Hart," the 80s television series and brainchild of Aaron Spelling, and it rather neatly epitomizes the genteel amateur detective, a figure without whom the genre as we know it would not exist. Wealthy industrialist John Hart and his wife Jennifer (a sassy jet-setting author) solve crimes in their ample spare time, aided by their butler, Max. Definitely a fun series. In the last episode they foil a corrupt health farm rife with blackmailing, murderous hypnotists, cheat at a hand of poker and bilk a wealthy sheik out of gas money to propel their private jet to the diamond mines of South Africa, where more adventure awaits.

Update: Watched two more episodes of Hart to Hart and decided I like Jennifer Hart very much. She's quite sassy. Am also inspired to watch The Thin Man now, which I have bumped to the top of my queue. Husband-and-wife sleuthing teams are very much of interest to me right now.

Marge: Is this what you thought marriage would be like?
Homer: Pretty much. Except I thought we'd drive around in a van solving mysteries.

Je Suis Retournee!

I've just completed my Mabel Normand script. After ten months of investing countless molecules of emotional energy into creating a parallel universe in which Mabel Normand solved a series of murder mysteries in Hollywood in 1917 (yes, you read that right), I feel empty and drained, somehow on the verge of tears. This project meant a lot to me and now that it's over I can't imagine what I'll do with my mind, where it'll want to wander in moments of leisure. No longer needing to endlessly restructure and tweak my little film, what will I do to fill the empty spaces in my cerebellum?

What does one do when one is no longer completely consumed? As Rupert Giles says, I believe ice cream is usually appropriate for these sorts of things. Though even ice cream makes me think of Mabel! So I will watch "The Extra Girl" and clips on YouTube instead:



I will also share with you one of my favorite Mabel Normand quotes, from a Photo Play World interview in 1918:

"Nothing in the world is more vital to me at this moment than chocolate cake. I am expecting a four-storied one from the only shop I trust -- or that will trust me. But there is a maddening doubt in connection with it. "Will it or will it not,” I ask myself, "be iced on the sides as well as the top?” The sugar shortage forces economy and I have been warned to expect the worst ... Please go. I must be alone when is arrives. With great sorrows or great joys I seek solitude. I am not like other girls, you understand."