Dr. Metablog

English Teachers Are Such Jerks

English teachers are such colossal jerks, at least whenever they appear in movies.  A case in point is Smart People (2008), which is the second-best academic movie ever made in Pittsburgh (Wonder Boys is superior). Smart People offers us a Carnegie-Mellon Professor of English, played by a shambling Dennis Quaid, who is a depressed, angry, uncommunicative, and miserable being, and who insults and patronizes both his students and his family.  He's the perfect embodiment of traditional and persistent American anti-intellectual stereotypes.  Book-learning has turned him into a mere grammarian, a pedant, who must learn about "real life" from his rolling-stone, improvident, frequently-stoned but streetsmart brother.  Smart People is constructed around stereotypes that were exhausted when Shakespeare created Holofernes and Sir Hugh Evans more than four hundred years ago. 

I've known a lot of English teachers -- some good, some bad -- but I've yet to encounter the shallow stereotype.

English teachers make their way into a disproportionately large number of movies.  There are two reasons for this phenomenon.  The first is that the writer of the film wants to illustrate some thematic point, so he brings his characters into a classroom where a pompous old fart or fartess can provide some cheap laughs while explicating a poem or novel that is tangentially related to a point the film is trying to make.  The second reason is purely revengeful.  In films in which English teachers figure, there's often --almost always, in fact -- a young man whose writing is unappreciated by the narrow-minded professor.  In Smart People, he's the son of our own nasty hero, and his sparkling poem is published in the New Yorker while his indifferent father is still waiting to hear whether his critical-theory manuscript has been rejected yet once again.  This character -- the brilliant but unappreciated young poet or playwright or novelist -- stands in for the writer or director of the film, who is saying, in filmspeak, "look at me now, you colossal jerk. I'm making movies and you're still back in high school or at State U., grading freshman term papers. So there!!! That'll teach you to give me a C+."

By the way -- Smart People is an intelligent, well-written film.  I heartily recommend it. 

In Bruges/ Don't Look Now

We enjoyed In Bruges for its black humor, its witty profanity, and the unpredictability of its plot (that is, until the mandatory chase scene).  And especially for the lovely views of medieval Bruges, an old Hanseatic town.

In Bruges contains a film-within-a-film which is described by Chloe, the handsome drug dealer and thief, as an imitation or a homage or a 'nod of the head' toward Don't Look Now, Nicholas Roeg's scary-as-hell Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland masterpiece.  I've been racking my poor brains, trying to decide whether there's a meaningful connection between the two films -- or whether the writer-director Martin McDonagh is just planting red herrings.

Bruges and Venice (where the earlier film is set) are old, architecturally rich, becanalled towns and both directors make much of their warm civic atmosphere.  The plots of both films are initiated by the deaths of young children.  In each film, an important character is a dwarf who is, one case, the perpetrator of violence and in the other its victim.  That's all that I can come up with at the moment, so I'm leaning to the red-herring theory. But I'd be interested in other people's views.

Williamsburg Bridge/ Naked City

On two occasions this year the Williamsburg Bridge (from Manhattan to Brooklyn) has made a guest appearance in the plot of my life.

In January, as faithful readers know, we set up shop in Manhattan.  One day we strolled from the Lower East Side to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.  The bridge is a splendid monument of nineteenth-century technology and the view from above is spacious and commanding.  It's a restless, busy path from one side to another;  all around you, automobiles, subway trains, bicyclists, runners, baby carriages -- the works.  NYC in a Victorian nutshell. 

Then, a few days ago, came the news of the death of Jules Dassin.  Dassin is famous for Never on Sunday and Topkapi, but as movie-lovers know, he was a polished director of films noirs during the 1940s -- before Nixon, McCarthy, and the blacklisting drove him into exile.  We decided to embark on a Jules Dassin festival and tribute right here on our very own giant TV.  Our first choice was Naked City (1949), a highly unsubversive policier, markedly patriotic but disturbing because all the bad guys are vaguely "ethnic."  The climactic scenes of Naked City were shot in the Lower East Side (just where the Williamsburg Bridge hits Delancey).  The murderer/wrestler/harmonicat Willie Garzah attempts to flee.  A voice shouts, "he's on Norfolk near Rivington." Where we had just a few months ago wandered! It's right off the bridge!  And then Garzah panics and tries to escape by running across the Williamsburg into Brooklyn.  Police in pursuit, squad cars, pistols, shouting, shots.  Garzah climbs the girders -- the very same girders, which, just a few months before, I had decided to honor my acrophobia by not climbing.  And then he's wounded, and, just as always in the movies, falls theatrically to his death.

It's peculiar, isn't it, when a store or a street-corner that you know in real life appears in the movies.  Does it mean that film tells the truth, is real, or does the celluloid appearance provide us with some evidence that our own life is genuine?  Why should the movies sometimes seem more substantial than the reports of our own five senses?  How can art validate life?  And at the same time, don't we feel a little cheated -- in the sense that our privacy -- our uniqueness -- has been violated and the things and stuff that are personal to us have been delivered over to an unappreciative anonymous world?  It's odd and disorienting when a familiar non-fiction bridge plays a supporting role in a fictional film.   

Naked City is a good, solid, intriguing piece of work, well-paced and well-written.  I'm not entirely happy with the way it treats women or the working-classes, but then, many such films were far more culpable.  I liked best the authentic, unstaged street shots of Manhattan as it was sixty years ago.  Delancey Street was nostalgic and poetic (although the shop signs, then lettered in Hebrew, are now mostly Chinese).  The Williamsburg Bridge, solid and substantial, has weathered the years extremely well.  It's well positioned to star in many another film.         

The Kent Theater/ Sex

I can't recommend Marion Meade's The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (New York, 2000), which I too hastily snatched off the library shelf. Written at the tabloid height of the Woody-Mia-Soon-yi fracas, it masquerades as a biography but in truth it's nothing more than scandalmongery.   

Before it gets down in the dirt, however, Unruly Life offers a quick summary of Allen’s life, a matter of which I was largely ignorant. Of course I knew that Allen was a Brooklyn boy who grew up in the old neighborhood.  Allen Koenigsberg attended P. S. 99 on East 10 Street near Avenue K (where my cousin Louie was also a student).  In addition, I knew, from Louie, that P. S. 99's principal was Eudora Fletcher and that, in the very inventive chameleon movie, Woody gave Ms. Fletcher's name to the psychiatrist who takes Zelig under her wing. 

But cousin Louie did not know, or did not bother to tell me, that Allen was a frequent patron of the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue and that it's rumored that it was at the Kent that the interior scenes in The Purple Rose of Cairo were filmed.  I've seen Purple Rose recently and if it wasn't the Kent, it sure looks like the Kent of my memory.  The Kent, along with its sister theater, the Leader, was one of my own childhood haunts.  In fact, it was my father’s aunt Manya, substitute cashier, who sometimes sat in the box office and took my quarter.   

It was not at the Kent but at the Jewel Theater on Kings Highway that Allen encountered Ingmar Bergman for the first time.  Well, not exactly Bergman himself.  It was Harriet Andersson disrobing in Summer with Monika that seems to have caught Allen's attention.  Unruly Life reports that Allen sat “with eyes bulging” to watch this and other early Bergman films. 

Allen’s protruding orbs brought to mind the impact that those shocking 1950s Scandinavian films had on the days of my early adolescence. It was at the Kent (aunt Manya must not have been on duty that day) that I once watched a Danish film in which there was a very brief flash of a woman in naked silhouette.  All I can remember is that I sat through to watch the picture again -- it might even have been a double feature -- and that by the time the silhouette appeared a second time, my poor bladder was so swollen (I was afraid to leave my seat for fear of missing the moment) that it was about to rupture.  How embarrassing it would have been to die of an aneurysm of the urinary tract simply to catch a glimpse of Harriet Andersson or one of her friends. 

In the 1950s, naked bodies were simply not on view.  Never at all, at least not in my slice of the universe.  I doubt that anyone from the post-Vietnam, post-sexual-revolution generation can imagine how nude-deprived were those severely repressed years.  Bodies, women's bodies, were so rare and mysterious that a brief and evanescent flash of shadowed skin, circa 1953, could remain in the memory for more than fifty years.

Which is why I retain the warmest feelings for Coney Island Avenue's Kent Theater.

Away From Her/Fiona Andersson/Julie Christie

Away From Her explores the infinitely sorrowful subject of early-onset Alzheimer's. Fiona Andersson, in her vigorous mid-sixties, has begun to lose her way and to forget names; she stores the frying pan in the refrigerator. She thinks that she’s “beginning to disappear.” Fiona’s plight is worrisome to every human being but it is especially disturbing to people of her own and of Julie Christie's generation.

Here in our home we still manage to find appropriate places for the cooking utensil, mostly.  Nevertheless, things happen. We set out to purchase six items at the market and come home with just three. We have three errands to perform and we arrive back home with two of the tasks undone. We put the camera in a special secure place and then spend a couple of hours searching for it. Keys and lists and books and tickets regularly evaporate or disintegrate or dematerialize.  Are these forgettings normal or are we en route to something that is too horrible to contemplate?

We exercise, we eat carefully, we gulp those horrid fish oil boluses. Perhaps these defensive procedures have value. Perhaps we'll be the ones to dodge the Alzheimer bullet.  Perhaps we won't.

It doesn’t help that we spend many hours a week at the facility where the Aged Parent is incarcerated. We encounter people just like Fiona -- or the remnants of them -- every day.  They're hollow shells, slumped in the wheelchair or poking at the boiled-to-mush food. The angry ones, the ones with dead eyes, the ones who moan all day long, “help me.” Better the Seconal and applesauce, the ice floe, or the bullet in the brain than to live in such horrible oblivion.   

In Away From Her, Julie Christie is entirely persuasive as the alzheimered Fiona. But let me ask you, friends of a certain age-cohort, is it really possible that that gray old lady was Julie Christie? Here’s a woman I’ve known for forty-five years, ever since she was Liz for thirty incandescent seconds in Billy Liar -- and feckless Billy was too much of a jerkass coward to run away with her. Julie and I have had a long (albeit entirely one-sided) relationship.  I was dazzled by her when she was the voracious Diana Scott in Darling and I feared for her when she was Laura Baxter in Nicholas Roeg’s scary-as-all-hell Don't Look Now.  She was my favorite Gertrude. But Fiona Andersson is outside any recognizable trajectory;  she's too raw, too dislocating to my tender sense of the way things ought to be.  No, Julie will always be Liz to me.  I've held on to that first image for most of my adult life.

I have no intention of progressing to the "second floor," or to sunset village or to memory lane or to however they euphemize the place that they put the folks with clogged synapses, but, if I should find myself in such a state, let's hope that it won't be Fiona but Liz to whom the brain clings.

Sweet and Lowdown

Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown is a sentimental love story with an unhappy ending.  Like most of Allen's works, it has become a far better work of art with a few years on its back than it seemed on first viewing (1999) -- probably because audiences habitually come to the Woodman's films with the mouth set for wisecracks and one-liners.  Woody's films grow on you;  some day, when the fuss has died down, their emotional range and artistry will be better recognized.   

The lovers in Sweet and Lowdown are Emmett Ray, who talks constantly but says very little, and Emmett's girlfriend Hattie, who is mute but miraculously expressive.  Emmett is a shallow, vain, brittle, damaged bit of goods who exempts himself from emotion and human connection with the assertion that he's an "artist."  Hattie is said to be dull-witted but whether she is or not we don't know.  We do know that she's a woman of great appetites: for sex, for food, for music.  Emmett cannot acknowledge that she's his best audience and he runs like the wind when it's revealed that she loves him.  The climax of the film is inarticulate: all Emmett can manage is "I've made a mistake."  Viewers, however, can easily fill in the gaps.

It's a fine and lovely movie, well worth the re-seeing if only for the music and the affectionate re-creation of the 30s jazz scene.  And also for the acting.  Sean Penn twists his face into an expression of perpetual dissatisfaction.  His Emmett Ray, except for a redeeming moment or two, is horrid and knows it.  On the other side of the coin, Samantha Morton is transcendent as the vulnerable but resilient Hattie.

See Sweet and Lowdown for what it is.  It's not a farce;  it's not raucus.  Don't look to it for more than it offers or for something other than it offers.  It's sufficient unto itself. 

Two Three Tens to Yuma or Two Three Ten to Yumas

I had trace memory only of Delmer Daves' 1957 3:10 to Yuma, a film that I had not seen since the days of my youth.  In my mind it was bracketed with a much better morality-play western, High Noon (1952).  I am, frankly, a little vain that I was able to recall that Van Heflin played the Gary Cooper part of the good man deserted by fearful townspeople while the clock ticks toward the climactic arrival of the Iron Horse and while Frankie Laine strums and sings off-screen.  Of course, so much detail had evaporated from the ol'  tired brain that the return to the 1950s was, once again, well, not mind-blowing, but certainly eye-opening.

3:10 to Yuma is a remarkably spare noirish western -- not a classic, but respectable and well-made.  At its heart is the near-friendship that develops between the bad guy Ben Wade as acted by smooth and charming Glenn Ford, and his captor, the god-fearing impoverished settler Dan Evans, played by the ever-gruff Van Heflin (reprising his role in Shane).  As the two (Wade and Evans) test each other, an odd mutual respect springs up between them. Wade has money and authority and the perennial appeal of lawlessness while Evans is grounded in his ranch and his family.  Each envies the other.  The relationship is imperfectly delineated and as a result the ending of the film is huddled and unsatisfying.

Slipping the DVD of the brand new 3:10 to Yuma into the machine, I thought, ah, here's a chance to remedy the original.  This time, get that off-kilter relationship between Wade and Evans right;  clarify the ending.  I wanted a suspenseful film rich in psychological insights. I couldn't have been more disappointed. James Mangold's reworking of 3:10 to Yuma is bigger, noisier, and a ton more expensive than the original.  It adds a lot of ruckus:  a fight with Indians, a barn-burning, feuding townsfolk, a pair of sadistic monomaniacal killers, a gruesome bullet extraction that belongs on the surgery channel, a cursed pistol, thirty seconds of gratuitous torture, and most of all, hundreds of fatalities.  In terms of melodrama and gunfire, there's certainly much more bang for the buck, but the characters themselves are flatter and less interesting and the climax, problematical in the first 3:10 to Yuma, is totally botched and incoherent. An opportunity squandered!

And yesterday I saw the acclaimed Michael Clayton, an eastern western.  This time the bad guy is a woman, chief counsel to a nasty polluting international conglomerate.  Will the good man, Michael Clayton, under financial and emotional siege, resist temptation and stand up for the right, like Gary Cooper and Van Heflin and Humphrey Bogart before him?  What do you think?  Will it spoil anyone's appreciation of Michael Clayton if I hint that George Clooney finds his place in the long line of inarticulate American heroes?

Here's the paradoxical upshot:  there's less of the old 3:10 to Yuma in the new 3:10 to Yuma than there is old 3:10 to Yuma in the new Michael Clayton.

The All-Time Most Tired Movie Cliche

We watched, don't ask me why, the most recent Jason Bourne extravaganza  -- The Bourne Hyperventilation I believe it was called.  So-called "action" pictures are not my cup of tea.  In my view, it's a genre that is far too deeply infatuated with its own cliches.  The Bourne Mystification was not only prefamiliar but also unusually tricky to follow.  It consisted of swatches of flashbackstory interspersed with vigorous but interminable fight and chase sequences.  The "action" was delivered in a multitude of stitched-together one- and two- second slices, which, even on the small screen, were vertiginous and almost barfitudinous.

The Bourne Hyperbole is a multiple car-chase movie.  How many time do we need to revisit this cliche?  Cars spinning out of control, cars shouldering each other for a place on the highway, cars ramming into each other, cars becoming airborne, cars landing on their sides, cars weaving into the oncoming lane, cars on sidewalks, sirens blaring, hoods flying open, windows shot out, guys shooting pistols at each other while driving one-handed at 100 mph -- interspersed with one-second glances at the speedometer, one-second glances of a foot on a brake -- all followed by the inevitable noisy, multiple-vehicle crash where the nasty hired killer winds up dead while our invincible hero emerges with only a minimal, symbolic scathe.  Is there anything in movies today that is more hectic, more predictable, or more boring? 

Let me ask my readership this art-versus-life question -- what is the ratio of your own participation and/or observation of real-life car chases compared to the number of car chases that you've seen in movies?  Am I the only twentieth-century American who has never been shot at or pursued?  Never seen a fleeing Oldsmobile pass just inches in front of the oncoming semi?  Yet I've experienced the film version of that very scene scores -- perhaps hundreds -- of times. 

I think that in the next century, when movies will be studied by historians eager to understand the great age of petroleum-based transportation (as well as the golden age of film), our descendants will take it for granted that it was absolutely ordinary for pedestrians out for a Sunday stroll to be driven from the sidewalk by an out-of-control vehicle (usually a commandeered taxi trailed by a gaggle of motorcycle cops). They will think that in our century, there was never a time that a fruiterer put that last orange on top of his pyramid of oranges that some sort of vehicle didn't barrel into the display. They will know that any time, day or night, every plate glass showroom window in North America was liable to have a station wagon hurtle through it.  Often in slow motion.

So here's my proposal for a new rating system for movies.  In addition to the stars, let's announce in advance how many car chases we are going to experience  -- or better still, exactly how many cars were destroyed during the making of the film.  It would certainly help me choose my entertainment if I were to learn that The Bourne Yesterday was a three-star, two-car chase, 197 exploded vehicle film. 

While we're changing the rating system, I have another idea.  Let's also have a Cute Puppy warning.  I'm thinking of that scene where the hero and heroine finally make it to bed and there's a reaction shot of Cute Puppy putting his paw over his eyes.  I never, ever, want to see that one again.  Agreed:  no more car chases, no more Cute Puppies.  Life will be richer.

One further exercise:  let us divide the number of cases of amnesia encountered in film by the number of cases of amnesia encountered in real life.   And the answer is:  it's impossible to divide by zero.       

Roth/Allen's Breasts

Michael Hollingsworth writes: 

"Dear Dr. M.:  you're directly on target when you claim that Woody Allen and Philip Roth are the same person, but you've unaccountably omitted to mention the most pressing evidence. The year:  1972.  Philip Roth published The Breast, a fantasy about a writer transformed into one.  Woody Allen released Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, in which a giant female breast wreaks havoc upon the countryside.  Obviously, both "Roth" and "Allen" had recently read Gogol's The Nose and Kafka's Metamorphosis.  Just as obviously, "both" of "them" were struggling with some seriously unresolved maternal issues.  How fascinating that both of their boundless cups of creativity "runneth over" so to speak, in such similar ways. A coincidence?  Hardly. 

By the way, both "Roth's" and "Allen's" contributions are embarrassingly false and flat."

Dr. M. responds:  "You know, Professor Hollingsworth, I think I support your breast remarks.  I'd been aware of both of these upwellings of mammariness but I never put two and two together.  If Roth/Allen aren't doppelgangers, they're certainly developing along twin tracks.

And let me add my own reservations:  the short stories by Gogol and Kafka are untouchable contributions to world literature.  Both writers create astonishing fantasies; they also manage to skewer the particularities of, in the one case, czarist Russia and in the other, early twentieth-century Prague.  Frankly, neither Roth's nor Allen's breasts are anywhere nearly as full or pointed."    

Flirting with Incest, Part II

Yesterday I considered the near-incest situations of Philip Roth and Woody Allen.  In Roth's My Life as a Man, Roth's shadow Nathan Zuckerman marries Lydia Kettering and when she commits suicide he takes up with Monica, who is Lydia's sixteen-year-old daughter by a previous marriage.  When Lydia turns twenty-one, Zucerkman proposes marriage but she, wiser than her step-father, declines.  I do not know whether Zuckerman's borderline incest had a precedent in Roth's real life.  I do know that Roth's doppelganger Woody Allen eventually married Soon-yi Farrow Previn and that he has adopted two children with her.  (The woodman now has five offspring in his complex family, including two adopted and one created in the downright way with Mia Farrow.  Child-averse Roth seems to have avoided paternity.)

While reading My Life as a Man I've also been watching movies by Nicholas Ray.  Last night I saw In a Lonely Place (1950) with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.  I recommend it to all who love film.  It's tough and intelligent, filled with great dialog, brilliant lighting, excellent music and stylish direction.  Trust me, It will hold your interest and give you something to admire.  Gloria Grahame steals the show;  she's just as good and much more subtle than Humph.

I didn't know anything about Grahame's career and life, so I looked her up on the standard databases.  Her life was so unusual that I might even try to track down a biography.

With the Roth/Allen/incest theme on my mind, I discovered these facts about Gloria Grahame.  In 1948, Grahame married director Nicholas Ray and gave birth to a son who was named Timothy.  She and Ray were divorced;  in 1960, Gloria married Anthony Ray, Nicholas Ray's son, and subsequently gave birth to two more boys, Anthony Jr. and James.   She had biological children by both father and son and has therefore left incest-flirters Roth and Allen in her dust.  What an achievement!

Query:  Tim, Anthony Jr, and James are half-brothers -- but are they also uncle and nephew?   Half-cousins?  Cousins?    I never fully grasped the theory of relativity.