Beginners

This week is when all the top ten movie lists for 2011 come out, and everyone has something to say about the state of cinema, with each critic trying to outdo the other and make their list more edgy or artsy or controversial.

However, I’m not here to talk about a movie from last year but the year before last – 2010 -- a year I was living overseas and woefully bereft of cinematic inspiration.

G put on a movie last night from our archives and this one would have occupied a premier position on my top ten list for 2010 simply by virtue of the canine actor, a Jack Russell named Arthur, who is in almost every scene. That and the fact that the director chose to include subtitles for this four-legged thespian.

I know some of you are cringing at the thought, summoning up smarmy scenes from Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marmaduke. But this was subtle and creative and, for any of you that actually have a dog and create speech bubbles for the creature on a constant basis, so very, very true-to-life.

The movie I'm talking about is Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, with an equally moving performance by French actress Melanie Laurent. McGregor plays Oliver whose mother dies of cancer after which his 74-year old father, Hal (played by Plummer), comes out of the closet and begins a new life as a gay man. As Oliver narrates, “My parents got married in 1955, they had a child and they stayed married for 44 years, until my mother died. Six months later my father told me he was gay. … He was gay the whole time they were married.”

No need for a spoiler alert, by the way, because all of this is revealed in the first five minutes of the movie, along with the fact that, after four years of living the life of Liberace, Hal also passes away, leaving Oliver with the rich remains of Hal’s long life, including his dog who has the crackerjack cuteness of a wirehaired terrier and the sage, contemplative regard of a Buddhist monk.

The director uses the dog’s visage with aplomb, artfully attaching commentary onto Arthur’s long, thoughtfully blinkless gazes. As Oliver chides the dog when he first brings him home, “Look, it’s lonely out here, so you better learn how to talk with me.” And Arthur replies with one of his signature, no-nonsense truisms, “While I understand up to 150 words – I don’t talk.” Hence the subtitles.

My favorite of his skillfully placed aphorisms, this one to Oliver when he’s clumsily courting Anna, the French woman he and Arthur meet at a friend’s costume party: “Tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something drastic happens right now.” Yes, that’s right, ever-so-eloquently uttered by a dog via a soulful stare and a single subtitle.

The movie shows us the painful demise of love and life – from the fear and doubt that plague the young couple (Anna: “Why do you leave everyone? Why did you let me go?” Oliver: “Maybe because I don’t really believe it’s going to work and then I make sure that it doesn’t work.”) to the father’s denial of his own mortality as he continues to throw parties in the hospital room despite a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. As Oliver points out, facing his own personal grief while confiscating everyone’s paper cups,“There is no stage 5!"

Yet there are also many moments of delight. Oliver’s imagistic way of providing exposition, detailing his life history while archival footage flashes across the screen: “This is 2003, this is what the sun looks like, and the stars, this is the president. And this is the sun in 1955, and the stars and the president.” The way the movie shows us a romantic connection that is vulnerably honest and authentic without the need for a single sex scene. And did I mention the dog?

It was one of those movies from which I expected nothing (I had never even heard of it before last night) and woke up with a bevy of vividly heartfelt scenes to cull through the next day. That’s the kind of quiet film that catches you off-balance, so surprising and rare in the scope of a year’s worth of movies -- like finding a forgotten twenty dollar bill stuffed at the bottom of a coat pocket.

So in the spirit of Spinal Tap, I think my top ten list for this year will have to go up to eleven.

By the way, a quick aside about Arthur: turns out his real-life name is Cosmo and Beginners is not his first film role, although I’ll spare you the titles of his previous movies because they’re akin to Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marmaduke. Cosmo was rescued from a shelter and trained by acclaimed animal-trainer Mathilde de Cagny who ended up adopting Cosmo herself. Seems she has a penchant for Jack Russells, and is most famous for training another well-known terrier named Moose who played Eddie in all eleven seasons of the television show Frasier.

And one last tidbit: McGregor was so smitten with his canine costar that he adopted a dog right after the filming ended. My research couldn’t uncover what breed it was, but I’d bet money it was a Jack Russell.

Perry's Place

Before the hug clutches and the offspring and the cast iron homilies scattered across the front lawn. Before the heartache of crow’s feet and bad French wine. Before that momentary lust for her own teenage limbs, quick-witted and carelessly indifferent.

One thing is for certain: she needs a drink.

And just before the highway disappears into the scrub-bald mountains, she finds it. A strip mall’s asphalt, headlights gleaming a sandwich board: Perry’s Place.

Tucked in the corner between the donuts and the hairspray, a miracle of sorts in this land of milk and nearly-lost dreams.

Christmas lights kindle the Jager maker, Blondie on the jukebox, and back behind the bar the bulbs strobe a million Bud reminders. Each barstool a tear-stained promise, a temporary home.

You wanna buy a car? the ramshackle bartender wheezes, passing the crumbled newsprint her way. A Buick Riviera, 1966, year-of-her-birth. All fin and vinyl and clamshell curves, the come-hither headlights edging the fenders. A Rolls Royce in the fog.

She sure was pretty once, he breathes. And so she orders another round, the new year startled into silence.

True Romance

“I feel like my heart is gonna go pee.”

That’s Patricia Arquette proclaiming her love to Christian Slater from the lip of a giant billboard towering over the Hollywood Hills. How did I ever miss this early 90’s classic? G got his hands on a director's cut of Tony Scott’s True Romance. Tarantino wrote the screenplay and it has his fingerprints all over it: the hilariously over-the-top violence, the droll cadence of the noir dialect, the palette of 1950’s Americana from Arquette’s turquoise stiletto heels and matching over-sized sunglasses to Slater’s silhouetted alter-ego in the guise of a young Elvis (played by Val Kilmer, by the way). And of course let’s not forget the Pepto-Bismol pink Cadillac.

Not to mention the cameos, the eye candy, the soundtrack -- from Big Bopper’s Chantilly Lace to Nymphomaniac’s I Want Your Body to Billy Idol’s White Wedding as a backdrop to the tattoo parlor scene when Arquette and Slater bond over matching tattoos.

A few other cinematic highlights:

Christopher Walken’s bone chilling portrayal of mob boss Vincenzo Coccotti and his interrogation scene with Dennis Hopper, the tension wound so tight you can hardly look at the screen. As Walken explains to Hopper with exquisite Walkenian impassivity, at once glacial and maniacal, “I’m the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood. You tell the angels in heaven you never seen an evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.”

Gary Oldman as the dreadlocked ersatz homeboy Drexl Spivey, with his black leather beret, glass eye, and metal-capped grin, his face a scarred map of knife fights, he looks like Jack Sparrow’s evil twin. As he states so very eloquently, “Now I know I’m pretty, but I ain’t as pretty as a couple of titties.”

Bradd Pitt’s Spicoliesque characterization of Floyd, the couch potato/stoner dude ripping righteous bowlfuls from a makeshift honey-bear bong (classic!). It’s a somewhat early role for Pitt (post-Thelma and Louise but pre-Fight Club) and it’s a deliciously goofy spoof, with Pitt donning a red-yellow-and-green Rastafarian beanie and the blank stare and dopey grin of a true pothead. Watching him chuckle stupidly confirms he's lit up a few real ones in the name of theatrical research. As the mob men burst through the screen door, shotguns cocked, Floyd mumbles from his horizontal position on the couch, “You guys wanna smoke a bowl?"

And Patricia Arquette’s Alabama Whitman, platinum blonde, her voluptuously whimsical wardrobe lighting up the screen: neon polka-dotted camisole, skin-tight leopard skin knickers, heart-shaped drop earrings. She’s the Goodwill’s poster girl, her New Wave sensibility bringing on waves of nostalgia and vivid memories of mothball smells and scratchy synthetic fabrics. As she says to Christian Slater after their first accidental date, “I’m not a whore. I’m a call-girl. There’s a difference, you know?”

The film is exceptionally violent, but I suppose that’s redundant considering who wrote the screenplay. I usually don’t gravitate towards films with gratuitous brutality, but I couldn’t help give a few sideline cheers as Arquette bashes James Gandolfini’s head in with a porcelain toilet tank lid after he beats her senseless in an attempt to find out where the suitcase of cocaine is hiding. He breaks the cardinal boy-rule that you aren’t supposed to hit girls, and he does it repeatedly and without shame. Difficult to watch, yet when the tables are turned and she jabs him with a corkscrew and then gets him straight in the eyes with a heavy mist of hairspray, lighting his face on fire, you find yourself egging her on with shouts of approval, the revenge is just that sweet.

Right before the ending credits roll across the screen, Alabama’s thick southern drawl in a voice-over narration:

“Amid the chaos of that day, when all I could hear was the thunder of gunshots, and all I could smell was the violence in the air, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool.”

His Girl Friday

Like a quintessentially perfect pop song, true to its time and place, clever and ever-so-optimistic, His Girl Friday lifts us up and carries us along on a dogged path of lyricism.

A bit of history: when I was about ten, my parents newly divorced, I spent the weekends at my dad’s house. I remember with a child’s vivid clarity lying on the floor against one of those 1970’s corduroy floor cushions, propped up in my pop’s arms, and watching the That’s Entertainment series -- mostly musical clips from MGM’s black-and-white classics. I cut my teeth on Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, Judy Garland and Ann Miller. Their bold, East Coast way of speaking, as if every proclamation were first-time and fresh: “Lets put on a show!” and they did and it was colorful, and urgent and just-this-side of divine.

Things were so simple then; this 1940’s world mirroring the simple joy I felt nestled up in the crook of my dad’s arms, the clip-clap of tap dancing bouncing off the screen and the ebb and flow of love lost and gained.

Last night, for whatever reason I know not, G agreed to watch a B&W flick from the classic days; I didn’t question it, just told him to push play and we settled into a superbly entertaining evening of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in one of the most deliciously molten relationships in cinematic history. This is verbal choreography at its best, the characters dipping and diving through their lexical fencing.

The film is a battle of the sexes, the relevance of its message amazingly intact 60 years later: As women, what is our place? The house on the hill and a handful of children? A career where success is clawing and spitting and shoving your way to the top? A husband who punches a safeguarded clock or a life-partner who digs his heels into a doggedly animated vision of the world and whisks you along on his magic carpet ride?

Russell is breathtakingly at ease with her womanhood: tall, lanky, non-blonde, she exudes power, confidence, hunger and an agility with a turn-of-phrase that is stupefying. She is the spark to Grant’s self-centered ego-driven flame and together they heat the screen. It’s like a rap duet, so contemporary is the feeling of their rapport.

You can get this all on Wikipedia, but let me just give some quick background info: His Girl Friday was released in 1940 and directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation of the play The Front Page. So fascinating (to me anyway) to know that they changed the role of Russell’s character, Hildy Johnson, from male to female.

The film was originally supposed to be a straightforward adaptation of the play with both the editor and reporter being men. But during auditions, Howard Hawks's secretary read reporter Hildy Johnson's lines. Hawks liked the way the dialogue sounded coming from a woman, resulting in the script being rewritten to make Hildy female as well as the ex-wife of editor Walter Burns. Most of the original dialogue and all of the characters' names (with the exception of Bruce Baldwin, Hildy's fiance, who was of course a woman in the play) were left the same.

Hawks had a very difficult time casting this film. While the choice of Cary Grant was almost instantaneous, the casting of Hildy was a far more extended process. At first, Hawks wanted Carole Lombard, whom he had directed in the comedy but the cost of hiring Lombard in her new status as a freelancer proved to be far too expensive, and Columbia could not afford her. Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Margaret Sullivan, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunbar were offered the role, but turned it down, Dunne because she felt the part was too small and needed to be expanded. Joan Crawford was reportedly also considered.

The beauty of the black-and-white shadows is superb as are the scenes with Russell rushing back-and-forth among several hand-held candlestick phones with all her journalistic fervor, the technological irony alive and well. Communication was just as much a matter of multi-tasking in 1940 as it is with our iPhones and Blackberries today.

My favorite line of the film: "Get back in there, you monk turtle!"

My favorite bit of trivia (courtesy of G): In his early 50’s, Cary Grant underwent a series of controlled experiments with LSD. He ultimately became the first mainstream celebrity to hail the virtues of psychedelic drugs. In his autobiography, he writes eloquently about the benefits he derived from these psychiatrically monitored acid trips:

“The shock of each revelation brings with it an anguish of sadness for what was not known before in the wasted years of ignorance and, at the same time, an ecstasy of joy at being freed from the shackles of such ignorance.”

November's poem

You'd of bet a barn and a buttery treasure chest on just one thing:

I was this season's singular beauty

A hoop-skirted eyeblink

Clutching a kerchief

All wisp and veil

Tossing peanut shells and primrose

As pages of wheatsmoke

Rose spiral like doves

Wing-to-wing

In your near-to-perfect ignorance

Tragically sublime

I was your astronaut of the apocalypse

Your savior on a trapeze

Sky of tears above

Bucket of flood-tide below

A kiss is such a lovely trick

Go to sleep, my angel

Dream of babies and bouquets

The Sting Lily, your lost innocence

A single Belladonna for your resurrection

Like autumn’s impassive fire

Or this month’s eager heat

Or a pair of quiet arms outstretched

Begging a solstice moon

Zoology for big people

There’s no way to start this post but to talk about what I’ve already seen in this world animal-wise. Because last night, I saw a creature that boggled my brain and I’ve encountered a few brain-boggling beasts in my very short life: swimming with schools of tiger sharks off the east coast of Malaysia, petting a fifty-pound long-snouted tapir at an animal reserve in Ecuador, riding a ten-foot high elephant named Sunshine on the island of Koh Chang. But none of this prepared me for my encounter with the Weedy Sea Dragon.

G and I bought tickets to the Academy of Sciences' weekly Night Life event, when the venue is exquisitely devoid of children and, as the publicity department raves, you can sip creative cocktails against a backdrop of live DJ music and let exotic animals transport you to equally exotic destinations around the world.

We arrive about 15 minutes before the doors open and the line is already around the block. Swarms of twenty-something’s huddle together against the cold – the knee-high boot and hipster hat are much in evidence. Forty-five years old suddenly feels conspicuously middle-aged.

The line begins to move and once inside the cavernous museum, we stand in the foyer for several minutes, taking it all in: a life-size giraffe in one corner, a neon-lit mini-bar at the opposite end, the bones of a whale hanging above, and Claude, the ten-foot albino alligator, perched atop a rocky crag in the middle of a huge indoor pond.

We wind our way up and around the spiral rainforest and move onto Africa; I’m unfortunately underwhelmed by the lackluster dioramas and stoically taxidermied safari tigers and wildebeests. They look realistic enough but they’re all in bucolically supine positions, as if nudged peacefully awake by some khaki-clad nanny in a pith helmet.

I have vivid childhood memories of going to the Natural History Museum in L.A., haunted for weeks afterwards by the enraged grizzly bear standing upright, front paws raised to the sky, lips bared, all tooth and claw. Or the mountain lion lying on its stomach, head up, eyes boring a hole straight through you, a lifeless rabbit hanging from its blood-streaked mouth.

Now those were dioramas that kept you up at night and captured the unrestrained brutality of the animal world. The Academy’s stuffed animals were ample in verisimilitude but lacking in ferocity.

But the highlight of the trip for me is the penguins; I’ve been talking about them all day and they’re slated to make a special appearance at 7pm that night. Well, someone obviously forgot to let the penguins know about their theatrical showcase, because at 7 o’clock they are all lying prostrate on their bellies, lazily fanning their thighs (do penguins have thighs?) with flippered wings. No wading, no waddling, no high jinks; I’m about to ask for my money back but G leads me downstairs to the aquarium.

The aquarium is now a tropical disco with music thumping against the glass enclosures and first dates pressing against each other while eyeing the phosphorescent fish. This floor is mesmerizing: interactive tide pools where we run our fingertips along spiny anemones and poke leathery starfish, day-glo jellyfish that float like slow-motion ghosts, a giant female octopus with python-sized tentacles. Her suction cups press against the glass as she moves herself across the windowpane, raising her diamond-shaped head colored crimson, two impossibly tiny eyes surveying the crowd.

We move among the exhibits, from the Royal Python to the Fire Bellied Toad to a school of thick-bodied groupers swimming overhead along the glass ceiling. And in the center of it all, we come to a standstill. Stopped dead in our tracks. Frozen smack dab in front of the home of the Weedy Sea Dragon.

I stopped writing just now to Google images for these psychedelic sea horses but, of course, it doesn’t do them justice. To see them “in the flesh” is mesmerizing, their plankton appendages, tubular snouts and electric-rainbow flesh. They float gracefully above the sea grass like miniature prehistoric ballerinas, hypnotizing us with their freaky beauty.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m prone to personification when it comes to the animal world, but these sea-creatures seem primordially wise, gliding zen-like beneath the water’s surface, their beady eyes mystically opaque.

People call their friends over to see, a huge crowd has gathered, the question on everyone’s lips: “What the hell are they?”

Found only around the southern coastline of Australia, they are slow-moving relatives of the seahorse and rely on their leafy protrusions to provide camouflage. The docent arrives and answers questions, one after the other. He ends with a mini-lecture: the story of the Dance of the Dragons, their mysterious mating ritual where the male sea dragon mirrors the movements of the female, a dreamy underwater waltz.

“The dance,” he says, leaning into the crowd and pausing for dramatic effect, “can sometimes last for hours.”

Festival of lights

There's always a period of curious fear

between the first sweet-smelling breeze

and the time when the rain

comes cracking down.

Don Delillo

I'm thinking a lot about my friends in Thailand right now, especially the Bangkok crew. This week is the Loy Kratong festival, one of the most beautiful celebrations in a country of many breathtaking traditions. Every year when the moon is full and the rainy season comes to a close, Thailand’s rivers and canals fill with millions of kratongs, floating lotus-shaped lanterns. The tradition, centuries old, is meant to placate the country’s goddess of water.

My first Loy Kratong celebration was eleven years ago; we were invited to a friends’ house and when we arrived, her entire family was there, the living floor strewn with banana leaves and bright yellow marigolds. We spent the entire afternoon building our banana leaf floats, decorating them with flowers, incense sticks, and candles. As soon as the sun went down, we gathered along the banks of the Wang River that ran through our town and let go of our kratongs, making a wish and watching them drift out to join a parade of candlelight making its way down the river.

I know this year will be especially poignant for so many Thais with floods still threatening the provinces. Earlier this year, with the Red Shirt riots raging, I wrote this poem and somehow it seems fitting months later, with the sadness that still blankets the country. But from what I’ve heard from friends still living there, this year’s Festival of Lights was just as spectacular as ever.

curious fear

this isn’t your milk & honey wilderness

this is tongues-on-grass

and tracer fire

these magnesium ghosts

breathing crimson

across the riverbank

a kingdom, a cabaret,

a translucent sheet of cloth

this is memory

and monkey-shine,

a camera-eye invention

your helicopter patio

too close now

to petrol paraffin

and a matchbox sky

this is your seven-colored

shadow dance

stained plasmic by spirits

too unruly for these

tender-hearted houses

sweep up a garland of chicken bones

and a single cigarette

still burning days after

these savage rains

who are these slash-and-burn warriors

trespassing your buffalo folklore

as june’s clouds

pummel the pockmarked streets?

land of tears, you whisper

and the firecracker-madness

floods the sky once again

The Man With the Movie Camera

Went to Pacific Film Archive last night to see The Man With the Movie Camera, a film from the series Kino-Eye: The Revolutionary Cinema of Dziga Vertov. We’d seen this film once before, a decade before in my studio apartment in San Francisco. We watched it from bed, pillows propped against the wall, the images playing across a 24-inch cathode ray tube television. We played an exterior soundtrack by Biosphere which further psychedelicized the whole cinematic experience. It made an impression back then despite (or maybe amplified by?) the small television screen and homespun environment.

In the PFA auditorium, this print was much larger than life and accompanied by a live piano score. Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov (born Denis Abelevich Kaufman ~ 1896–1954) is an essential name for any film student, of whom there were many in the audience last night. And this particular film, I think, is a must-see for anyone interested in the evolution of cinema.

The 1929 silent documentary, edited by Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova, records life in Odessa and various other Russian cities. Certainly the subject matter, getting such an expansive glimpse of 1920’s Russia, is enough to hook a viewer. But it’s the stylistic elements of the film that create the experimental excitement, with slow-motion, split screens, inconceivable angles, and the most powerful technique -- frames flickering by in a breathless, almost contemporary MTV-ish manner. In the span of just a few moments, we see a row of newborn babies in a hospital room, a beggar on a dirty sidewalk, a crowded lunchtime coffee shop. And of course, we see the camera, literally and figuratively, aware of its presence in every frame. With no story and no actors, the camera becomes a protagonist.

As Vertov himself wrote:

"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

One of my favorite scenes is of a convertible speeding down the open road, the driver and passengers all young and fresh-faced, laughing into the camera – and Vartov balancing himself on the side of the car as it bumps along, impossibly juggling tripod and camera while filming the jubilant faces against the backdrop of the countryside. He is filming and being filmed; in this scene and throughout the entire film, we witness subject and object simultaneously.

Though not all the images are uplifting or triumphant, there is a joy that threads the entire film. Vertov’s work has often been compared to Whitman, and this connection struck me immediately. The rapture of the ordinary, the pulse of life, the simple and profound joy inherent in the act of observation.

I went back to some Whitman this morning; here’s a passage that would be a perfect companion to Vertov’s man with a camera:

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.