MADness—the Blog

People talk about great developments in film history—sound, color, widescreen, 3D.  I think it’s hard to overstate the value of the DVD audio commentary.  Hard to believe we ever lived without it.  I’m not interested in a lot of the special features the studios throw in, but the audio commentary—especially when a good director is doing it—is invaluable.  You can watch a film and get a film school education at the same time.

Anytime you have a chance to listen to Robert Altman, you should.  The man had a wealth of knowledge, insight, and wisdom.  Here are some comments he made for the DVD of Kansas City, his 1996 film about gangsters, jazz, and a kidnapping gone bad.  People in the business generally don’t say these kinds of things, in deference to the powers that be.  Altman didn’t pull his punches.

Altman, on film preservation, money, and art:

Ten, twelve years ago, I would say most of my films were lost.  The films I made in the ’60 and the ’70s—they were using a really cheap kind of stock then, Kodak stock, and the film didn’t last.  It deteriorated.  The color went.  It’s very expensive to remaster those films.  That’s what Scorsese, and myself, and many of us have with this film program of saving these films.

It’s kind of a silly thing, when you think about it, that we go out and raise the money—a lot of money—in order to save the assets of a company that won’t spend that money themselves.  We do it for them, and it’s amazing how much people will do for art.  And that’s why I don’t even get angry with people—people who are in the money part of this business:  they’re of no interest to me whatsoever.  I use them and their money to make my films, cause that’s all I’m concerned about.  A hundred years from now, whether they were very successful or not is not going to have any bearing on anybody, anywhere, anytime.

But the fact that our culture has come to such a point that the people who have the money won’t be responsible for the material they deal with—I find it obscene.  They should be doing that.  They should say, “God, how do we pay back what they’ve given us?”  These people all drive more cars than they can afford garages for, they build up these mass fortunes, and they don’t really mean anything.  But that’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s always been, and I think that’s the way it always will be.  Until we can get to a gentler place.

I think that America has become very, very mean-spirited in the last 20 years or so, 20, 30 years.  It used to be that art had an importance.  We found an audience—because there is an audience out there for it—you just have to deliver it to that audience.  And now we have an audience that’s built up of mainly 14-year-old males.  They come to all these multiplexes.  They have a whole social life there.  So we just want to keep feeding stuff in that serves that purpose.

In the news—some good and some not-so-good.

• Movie tickets heading toward $20 a pop.  Still cheaper than courtside seats at a Lakers playoff game.
• The next generation of film critic has arrived.  Starfish! 
• Hollywood is remaking the ’80s.  They picked the wrong decade.
• Dennis Hopper lives!  Be well.

It’s the end of an era.  At the Movies is no more.  The weekly TV show, first hosted by critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, has been canceled.  It will not be returning after this season.

I will miss it.  I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent watching over the years—many!—the show was often more entertaining than the movies it covered.  I’ll need to find something new to do Sunday nights at 6:30. 

What happened?  What’s next?  Roger Ebert reflects.

By now you have heard that the great Akira Kurosawa would have turned 100 on Tuesday, the 23th.  No better way to celebrate the day than by tuning into TCM.

It’s Kurosawa all day.  A great way to catch up on some classics.  (All times ET.) 

Happy 100! 

6:00am		Sanshiro Sugata (1943) A young man struggles to learn the ssence of the martial arts. Cast: Sugisaku Aoyama, Susumu Fujita, Denjiro Okochi, Takashi Shimura Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-79 mins, TV-PG
7:30am		Most Beautiful, The (1944) Japanese women sacrifice everything for the war effort. Cast: Takashi Shimura, Ichiro Sugai, Yoko Yaguchi, Takako Irie Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-85 mins, TV-PG
9:00am		Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, The (1945) In medieval Japan, a feudal lord undertakes a perilous mission to put his brother’s soul to rest. Cast: Denjiro Okochi, Susumu Fujita, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-59 mins, TV-PG
10:00am		Sanshiro Sugata Part 2 (1945) A judo fighter continues his training to prove his superiority to foreign challengers. Cast: Susumu Fujita, Denjiro Okochi, Akitake Kono, Ryunosuke Tsukigata Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-82 mins, TV-PG
11:30am		No Regrets For Our Youth (1946) A woman flees society after seeing her father and lover destroyed by government oppression. Cast: Denjiro Okochi, Eiko Miyoshi, Setsuko Hara, Susumu Fujita Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-110 mins, TV-PG
1:30pm		One Wonderful Sunday (1947) An engaged couple tries to enjoy their Sunday holiday without spending any money. Cast: Midori Ariyama, Chieko Nakakita, Ichiro Sugai, Isao Numasaki Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-109 mins, TV-PG
3:30pm		Drunken Angel (1948) An alcoholic doctor builds a shaky friendship with a dying gangster. Cast: Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Michiyo Kogure, Chieko Nakakita Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-98 mins, TV-PG
5:19pm		Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Dogs ‘N Ducks (1953) BW-10 mins
5:30pm		Stray Dog (1949) When a detective’s gun is stolen, he tears apart the underworld to get it back. Cast: Takashi Shimura, Ko Kimura, Toshiro Mifune, Keiko Awaji Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-122 mins, TV-PG

What’s On Tonight: TCM SPOTLIGHT: AKIRA KUROSAWA’S 100TH BIRTHDAY
8:00pm		Rashomon (1950) In medieval Japan, four people offer conflicting accounts of a rape and murder. Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Takashi Shimura, Masayuki Mori Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-88 mins, TV-PG
9:30pm		Seven Samurai (1954) Japanese villagers hire a team of traveling samurai to defend them against a bandit attack. Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Kuninori Kodo, Yoshio Inaba Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-207 mins, TV-14
1:00am		Yojimbo (1961) A samurai-for-hire sets the warring factions of a Japanese town against each other. Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Eijiro Tono, Seizaburo Kawazu, Isuzu Yamada Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-111 mins, TV-14
3:00am		Sanjuro (1962) A wandering samurai recruits younger fighters to help him battle corruption. Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Takashi Shimura, Yuzo Kayama Dir: Akira Kurosawa BW-96 mins, TV-14

The ghostwriter does not get his name on the cover.  No one knows who he is.  People will buy the book, or not, for its subject.  The author does not matter.  That’s the way it works in the book business, at least when it comes to political biography.

When it comes to movies, and especially the recent movie about a ghostwriter and his subject, a former British prime minister named Adam Lang, it matters greatly who the author—or in this case, director—is.  Especially when his name is Roman Polanski.

The reaction to his new film The Ghost Writer is very divided.  Critics generally have been positive, and some have been especially enthusiastic.  But other reaction I’ve read has been highly negative.  The film is very good, though hardly perfect—yet some of the negative reaction doesn’t seem to me to be in proportion to whatever flaws the film has.  I suspect if the director were anyone other than Roman Polanski we wouldn’t be hearing some of that vitriol.

Pierce Brosnan gives a terrific performance as Adam Lang, a role patterned on Tony Blair in some ways.  Ewan McGregor plays the ghostwriter.  He doesn’t even get a name in the movie—he’s just the writer, or more often “the ghost.” Polanski might want to try that next time out.

Several of the things I’ve been reading this week in one way or another relate to women in Hollywood.  Here are a few links, in case you’re interested.

How Oscar Found Ms. Right
There are times when I think the best writer covering film today is Manohla Dargis at the New York Times.  When I read this article it was one of those times.  Dargis gives the best take I’ve read on the Oscars for Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker and takes on a few other women to make her point.  (Read more about scopophilia here and here.)

Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) She generally makes kinetic and thrilling movies about men and codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her technique might be masterly [sic], because she learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But she is very much her own woman, and her own auteur.

Pretty ugly: Can we please stop pretending that beautiful women aren’t beautiful?
I don’t watch TV much.  At some point in my adult life, I came to the conclusion there were better things to do with my time.  But I watched a lot when I was younger, and I remember having very much the same conversation back in a college dorm.  Actresses you see on TV, or on the big screen, for that matter—even the ones you who are supposed to be playing “ugly”—and still quite beautiful by almost any standard, and yes, that distorts even further what society thinks about women and beauty.  (Some things never change.  Bette Davis at times described herself as the ugly ducking.  You wouldn’t know it from looking at the picture here.)

Does a Best Actress Oscar Lead to Divorce?
Something  more than coincidence seens to be going on, I’d say.

As promised, your Sunday morning crossword has arrived.  Solve promptly for an important message.

It’s called “Standard Deviation.”  You can get it at the MAD Puzzles page.  Enjoy!

Hollywood does get a wee bit silly in the run-up to the Academy Awards.  Now that the Oscars are over, the town can return to its former self, that is, being dumb-as-a-rock stupid.

It is hard to say exactly which of these news items is the most bone-headed idea of the week.  You pick.

• A remake of The Wizard of Oz — ”I know fans could burn my house down” (the writer of the remake).
• The new big-screen action-adventure hero:  Leonardo Da Vinci (!) — ”We had to check our calendars to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day already with this one.”

They must do these things just to make the making of Jackass 3 in 3-D look like a good decision.

Much has been made  about the oversights for the In Memoriam segment at the Oscars on Sunday.  Most of the complaints have been about Farrah Fawcett, Bea Arthur, and Gene Barry, all actors who worked in movies but were better known for their TV roles.

There was no excuse at all for leaving off composer Maurice Jarre, who’s featured in the Friday Minute on the front page today.  Not only is Jarre one of the great composers in film history, he’s easily the most honored of all members of the Academy who died last year, with nine Oscar nominations and three wins.

Inexplicable.

Constructing a crossword puzzle always is an experiment.  I don’t mean to sound like Forrest Gump, but you never know what you’re gonna get.  Sometime about a year ago I was working on a themeless puzzle. I had the bottom half of the grid done and was sailing along, but then never could find good fill for the top of the puzzle.  In desperation, I even ripped out a 15-letter answer, one of my seeds, and after a while I found another 15 that allowed me to fill the grid.  But just barely.  I had letters for all the squares, but overall it wasn’t especially pretty.  There was one answer, however, that I liked a lot.  It was that substitute 15 that I had found for the top of the grid.

That 15 had greater potential than just another pretty entry in a themeless, however, and long story short, that’s how I stumbled into the theme for the puzzle that’s running in today’s* New York Times.  If you’re a NYT crossword subscriber, you can get the puzzle here (Across Lite).  I won’t spoil it here, but if you want to read comments about the puzzle, you can check the usual places (the blog links are always on the sidebar):  Wordplay, Amy, Rex, R&B, an Englishman.

Meanwhile, I had an old, abandoned themeless grid, filled but never clued (just one of many in the collection).  I took another look at it this week, and last night I decided to take another crack at it.  As an experiment.  The experiment was (a) to see if I could find better fill for the grid (I liked that it had no 3-letter words), and (b) to see if I could finish the job quickly (I’m not normally a speed demon, but time is short this week).

The final result:  I changed a few things, opening the grid even more (it’s now 64 words).  I didn’t time myself but I felt like I was going 90 down narrow roads and around twisty bends, and there may be a few scrapes and dents when I look at the body but I’m glad to report I didn’t go over the side.

You can enjoy the ride, or judge the damages yourself.  It’s MAD Puzzle #4, and you can find it at the Puzzles page. 

One other note:  MAD Puzzle #5 will soon be on its way.  Look for it this weekend, likely Sunday morning (if not before).

* Last point:  what do I mean by ”today”?  Today means tomorrow—that is, Thursday, the 11th.  In the puzzle world, the next day doesn’t start when you wake up in the morning, or at midnight, but at 7:00 p.m. PT.  Right now, tomorrow is today and today is tomorrow.  It’s puzzling, but that’s the way it works.  They don’t call them puzzles for nothing.

UPDATE:  Interview with the constructor, with spoilers on today’s NYT, after the jump:

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