By D.K. Holm
February 11, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Godard Year Zero
NOTRE MUSIQUE
Disruptive, elegiac, urban, intellectual, the films of Jean-Luc Godard demand concentration and sympathy and a similar mindset of romanticism and political dispiritedness — or cynicism — which rests within the larger context of organized rebellion against authority. Godard's films are difficult, but there is a good, convenient study key that helps to grasp the big picture.
View Godard as a variation on Woody Allen.
They are surprisingly similar. Both fancy themselves as intellectuals in a cretinous business. Both have a cinematic penchant for young women. Both usually set their movies in an urban environment; are fascinated by — and alive to — street life; and view excursions into the countryside as occasions for fear and disaster.
They even made a movie together: KING LEAR, in 1987.
Both are engaged urban intellectuals, it's just that Godard is more political than Allen. And Allen feels more aesthetic sympathy with Ingmar Bergman, who hates Godard.
Another method for understanding Godard is simply to sit down and go along with the images and sounds and not dwell on trying to figure out their connections or search for a connecting narrative. That's the wining technique for viewing NOTRE MUSIQUE.
Godard always surprises you with yet another feature film just when you think that, like Bergman, he has retired from the scene. Made in collaboration with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard's latest feature film begins with a montage of images from newsreels and American movies, all moments of war and violence, some even from movies that Godard has professed to love, back in the days when he wrote for CAHIERS DU CINEMA. It's futile to try and orchestrate these images into a dialogue. There may be one, but if doing so takes you away from the film itself, stop and let them wash over you. That leads to deeper impressions and connections, such as that the images are frequently basically the same, and that they portray a democracy of evil, there being little difference between the massacre of American Indians and the napalming off a Vietnamese village. These chaotic images, which remind you of Alex's masturbatory fantasies in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, have that grainy, line-filled, bright-imaged quality of Godard's video work. It's a long sequence and the first of the film's three general sections.
The film proper begins with Godard talking in an airport lounge with what appears to be an Israeli journalist or scholar whom every leftie intellectual in Europe probably recognizes on sight but whom I still can't identify (I'm waiting to find a detailed plot summary). All I got out of him was that he greatly resembled Jean-Pierre Melville, who had a cameo in Godard's first feature, BREATHLESS. Their interview is interrupted by the approach of a characteristically cool looking young woman who mutters some secretarial info.
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What soon becomes relatively obvious is that Godard, playing himself, is in Sarajevo for a writer's conference that also features the Spanish poet Juan Goytisolo (who is shown reciting his poetry in various locations). Godard a relatively minor presence in the film after he introduces the character of an Israeli writer named Olga (Nade Dieu, I think — there seem to be two young women in the film with similar roles, leading to the kind of dreamy confusion that Malick's THE THIN RED LINE induces). She is the central figure in this middle section, making digital footage of the things she sees around her, including the odd presence of three Native Americans, who are there perhaps to create a link between American genocide and the Eastern European war. When she is done with her filming, she gives a disc of the finished film (the same footage we saw at the beginning?) to Godard, who is not shown actually watching it. He later receives an annoying, interrupting call while working in his garden, informing him that Olga, after returning to Israel, committed "suicide by police" in a movie theater.
The third section is surprisingly Godardian, that is, old fashion Godard from the 1960s. A woman wanders through an obscure if carnivalesque landscape that reminds the viewer of similar treks in past Godard films from LES CARABINIERS to WEEKEND. There is also a plethora of outside references, there because they further the theme or there because Godard had just thought of them. Among these is a quotation from Hawks's TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT ("Ever been stung by a dead bee?"), and a visual citation of crime novelist David Goodis. Overall, the film is fond of that typical Godardian dualism, in which statements are immediately contradicted. "The meaning of non-meaning, and the non-meaning of meaning" might be one of them. (Woody Allen has his own "dualisms" as seen in the plots for films such as CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, MIGHTY APHRODITE, and the forthcoming MELINDA AND MELINDA, among numerous others.)
In essence, you gradually come to realize, NOTRE MUSIQUE is another Godardian meditation on the Holocaust, a subject that has preoccupied him since at least the mid-1950s.
From the ideas and situations that Godard is here promulgating yet again you can see why Bergman despises him. Despite his own despair, Bergman still has a faith-based belief in the logic of human endeavor, while Godard appears to have the (convenient?) despair of younger yet civilized Continentals.
Watching without trying to sift as you go also works for TOUT VA BIEN (The Criterion Collection, No. 275, 1972, $29.95, Tuesday, September 15), now enjoying much needed DVD release. TOUT VA BIEN is a crucial transitional film in the Godard filmography. He was coming out of his most radical, activist phase, just before he retreated to Switzerland and jumped into video.
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It's also possibly his most Brechtian film. I would hazard to guess that it's impossible to understand Godard without appreciating his reliance on Bertolt Brecht. The German playwright and theorist arguably had an influence on Godard larger even than film itself. Here, in an elaborate multi-tiered set inspired by Jerry Lewis's THE LADIES' MAN, Godard allows his worker characters, who have seized their factory, to step forward, break the fourth wall of the movie screen, and address the audience with their litany of complaints. The film's "stars" are Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, but you get the impression that these old lefties with rad-cred didn't like being sidelined in the film by the anonymous workers.
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Fonda's unhappiness with the project, or what is described as her disenchantment with the project, may be the psychological motivation for Godard and his partner, Jean-Pierre Gorin, to make LETTER TO JANE, a 50-some minute film essay, also crucially included on the disc, that "deconstructs" an image of Fonda in Vietnam that appeared in a French magazine. This film really is like a letter. Godard and Gorin alternate addressing Fonda, while still images from TOUT VA BIEN alternate with a black blank screen, or with various views of the Fonda still. The filmmakers' point, to be reductive, is that the photo emphasizes the liberal sympathy of the star's distressed face over the faceless masses of the Vietnamese citizens she is listening to. Godard and Gorin speak in English and their discourse is fascinating, at least to one auditor.
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The Criterion disc offers a beautiful transfer of the widescreen (1.66:1, enhanced) film, with a clear DD mono track in French (and English subtitles). The disc also includes a 1972 video interview excerpt with Jean-Luc Godard and a lengthy recent video interview with Gorin, who ended up teaching in Southern California with critic and painter Manny Farber.
Finally, there is a 40-page insert with essays by J. Hoberman, Colin MacCabe, and Kent Jones, a contemporaneous interview with Godard and Gorin by Robert Kolker, plus cast and crew, chapter titles, and transfer information.
Yet after all this tutelage, you may still find the need for even more instruction in all things Godardian. Of recent books, the best place to start is Colin MacCabe's sympathetic bio, the first full length one in English, GODARD: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST (FSG, 432 pages, $25, ISBN 0 37416378 2, but recently released in paperback).
MacCabe speaks from a position of authority on Godard, having studied and written about him for years but also having occasion to employ him: as the head of television production at the BFI for a time, MacCabe hired Godard and Miéville to make a couple of movies. The results were not what they expected but more than they bargained for.
In a calm, clear, intelligent but not at all academic voice, MacCabe summarizes Godard's life and films, and manages to find gems of gossip in the already much-trodden-over-years from the New Wave to WEEKEND, but also lays out the most under-reported aspect of Godard's life, the mysterious post 1972 years, where Godard operates out of a secluded studio in Switzerland. On page 165, MacCabe makes a point that explains a lot about Godard's technique, especially in the films under consideration here. Godard "breaks up" his film's' components like a cubist. Using Brechtian principles, Godard operates as if "The fiction must not be unified by its form but present its elements to the audience to be analyzed and recombined."
There is so much information in the book that the reader can make connections that even MacCabe doesn't bother to assert. As a rebellious youth in Paris going to see movies every day and writing for CAHIERS DU CINEMA, Godard acquired a reputation as a thief, and may even have done time for a crime (he vanishes mysteriously, creating a gap in his chronology). As a venerable Lear-like patriarch of cinema who specializes, more or less, in collage art, Godard has decried copyright laws (like Michael Moore), which inhibit his free-form montage style of culling images from anywhere he pleases. Current copyright laws, in his view, place ownership of most of the world's intellectual property in the hands of a few global corporations. From a certain perspective, however, you could say, once a thief, always a thief.
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For a brainier treatment of the filmmaker's work, the reader can turn to the oversized paperback anthology FOR EVER GODARD (Black Dog Publishing, 461 pages, $45, ISBN 1 901033 69 4). Edited by James Williams, Michael Temple and Michael Witt, the book is divided into four sections (the first on Godard the man and his works, the second on his variations on formalism, the third on his use of sound, and the last, broadly speaking, on the impact of history and politics on Godard's work) and contains 22 dense, detailed, intellectual essays by a host of authors that includes Trond Ludemo (on Godard's video montages), Catherine Grant (on the collaboration between Godard and Miéville), James Quandt (on spearheading the Godard retrospective that coincided with this book), MacCabe again (on "The Commerce of Cinema"), Vinzenz Hediger (on Godard's art of the trailer), Nicole Brenez (on authority figures in Godard's films), Christa B&#l252;mlinger (on the recurrence of the "parade" in his films), and Adrian Martin, on recitation in Godard.
The consensus the reader comes away with is that Godard is a director of collage, a man with a love-hate relationship to hid art form of choice, and a politically engaged activist who has bid farewell to activist cinema. Yet one more crucial response to the book is how remarkably vital his films remain if they can inspire this wealth of interpretation and celebration.
The book is a major event. Lavishly illustrated, it accords to Godard the serious consideration he deserves after almost 50 years making movies. It also provides an up-to-date chronology and filmography. It's pricey, but a must have for Godardians.
The Stranger
Also surprisingly Brechtian, it turns out, is Orson Welles, who was influenced by the playwright in the 1930s and thereafter (though it is not clear if they met while living in Los Angeles at the same time in the 1940s). And even more surprising influence on Welles is WHITE GODDESS author Robert Graves, and the director has told some of his many auditors that his work cannot be understood without an appreciation of Graves. These, to me, revelations, come via a new book on Welles, DESPITE THE SYSTEM: ORSON WELLES VERSUS THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS (Chicago Review Press, 402 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1 55652 547 8) by Clinton Heylin, previously the writer of books on musicians such as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison.
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There are two kinds of film critics in the media. There are those who essentially take the side of the industry. This type writes encomia to Clint Eastwood because everyone else is doing so. They generally take the side of produces over directors, and lavish attention on classic style stars. They tend to review books unquestioningly. The other type is one who takes the side of the reader. This kind of critic adopts the posture of a beleaguered outsider who sharpens his quills on behalf of the other outsiders, the readers who are not a part of the industry or an academic enclave. Examples of this type of critic might be Robin Wood and Raymond Durgnat, and in literature Martin Seymour Smith was one. Blogs have taken up much of the burden that this kind of reviewer, but the few who remain are isolated, independently minded thinkers who go into attack mode when defending their personal gods of cinema.
Heylin is in the second category. The over all project of this book is to defend Welles from various charges made by previous critics, from Charles Higham to David Thomson, who got Welles wrong and in part contributed to the damage to his reputation. Heylin takes as a focus Welles in Hollywood, from CITIZEN KANE to TOUCH OF EVIL, though Welles's pre-film and post-Hollywood career and films are considered. One particular charge that dogged Welles from the 1960s on was that he had a fear of completion, that he abandoned and thus ruined projects due to his lack of follow through. This theory was originally propounded by Higham, but flattered Hollywood types who preferred to banish the more complex and self-indicting reasons that many of Welles's films were taken out of his hands. It was studio politics that foiled Welles in a series of specific situations (for example, Heylin is very good on the internal feuds within RKO). A key Welles statement that Heylin quotes as a reflection on Welles's own difficulties in the studio system is that "a genuine individual is an outright nuisance in a factory."
Because of all that this is a most enjoyable book. Instead of couching views in carefully weighed words designed to offend no one, Heylin is a fierce advocate of Welles. Previous critics who prove unworthy of assessing Welles are in for it. David Thomson is a "self-styled iconoclast" and who later is cited as "writing the dumbest line in a rather dumb book." He refers to an unnamed "particular cretin" at LIFE magazine who reviewed Welles's MACBETH, Charles Drazin's history of THE THIRD MAN is "highly subjective." Peter Conrad's recent book on Welles is a "hefty, self-important tome."
Heylin also debunks numerous myths surrounding Welles's films. For example the test cards on THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS were not at all negative. In fact, they may have over-praised the film by making side comments such as "above the audience" and "too high for general consumption" in terms that scared the studio which chose to view them all as essentially bad (page 118 - 119), which also happened some 50 years later to FIGHT CLUB. And Heylin is not uncritical of Welles, able to see the irony of the fact that the director railed against editorial interference while being himself not averse to severely truncating and reordering Shakespeare plays.
Heylin has a prose style that I imagine comes from rock criticism, which entails a lot of colloquial phrases that show the writer is "one of us." There's a "pesky war" on page 86, and Welles "tackles" Shakespeare twice on page 343 (except the second one is "Shakespeere") and on the same page uses the solecism "from whence he came" (that "from" is unnecessary). There also appear to be a few Briticisms or at least a few phrases that threw me, such as "chancing his arm" on page 187 (I couldn't even figure out that one from the context). And on page 289 in order to emphasize the influence of Welles's friend Akim Tamiroff, he misinterprets a production still (printed on page 279) as a location scouting party when it seems more likely to be location shooting of a specific scene. On the other hand, Heylin touches on something interesting that I had never thought of, which is the unofficial competition between Welles and Hitchcock (culminating in the similarities between TOUCH OF EVIL and PSYCHO) and makes a few good puns (Welles's mise-en-scene is turned into a mess-on-screen). The book concludes with an good bibliography and a very helpful Welles DVD discography.
Knees of Fury
ONG BAK
ONG BAK starts like an episode of SURVIVOR before briefly turning into THE KARATE KID and then KICKBOXER and then becoming FAST AND THE FURIOUS before settling into ENTER THE DRAGON or any number of Jackie Chan films. If this suggests that ONG BAK (full title: ONG-BAK: MUAY THAI WARRIOR) is derivative, it is. What is unique about the film is the exceptional talent of Tony Jaa (real name: Panom Yeerum) as the film's main character. As a Thailandian entry in the international martial arts sweepstakes the film is a polished and professional job.
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The Ong Bak of the title is, if I follow the film correctly, a Buddhist statue in a small Thai village. When a former villager who is now a corrupted resident of the big city returns and steals the head for sale in the international market of relic trading, Ting (Jaa) is recruited to enter the big bad city and fetch it back, otherwise bad luck will befall the village (it's not exactly clear what religion the village practices, but it appears to be a blend of Buddhism and Medieval British old wives tales).
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Directed by Prachya Pinkaew from a screenplay credited to Suphachai Sithiamphian, ONG BAK doesn't have much plot but it does have a lot of clear, amusing, and sometimes awe inspiring action. Even the film is impressed with what Jaa can do, stopping the story to show a stunt to you again from a different angle or in slow motion, in the tradition of older Chan films. It is also an incredibly violent movie, but I guess violence is acceptable on increasingly sanitized America screens if it comes from a different culture.
What Ting practices is a form of kickboxing, the Muay Thai of the title. There is something crude and elegant about it at the same time. Like a bull the fighter hurls himself at the target, and yet the quick attack has a certain aesthetic beauty to it. The main body weapon seems to be the fighter's knees, which frequently find their way to the victims chest or neck, given the fighter the aspect of a Chihuahua leaping on a grizzly.
Ting picks up a couple of savior-helpers in the city, (Petchthai Wongkamlao from KILLER TATTOO and Thai model-actress Pumwaree Yodkamol) and except for a few skimpy subplots the film concentrates on the battles, which include an extended chase using motorcycle rickshaws called tuk-tuks and a lengthy Chanian showdown in a cavern where some of the stolen statuary is kept.
But it is all very professionally done and there are a few exotic moments. For example, at the end of one chase, Ting ends up in the drink, where he discovers that various statue and statue heads have been hidden in the water just off the dock. As he paddles amid this floating vestiges the movie takes on a momentarily surreal cast.
As a side note, Luc Besson's company, Europa Corp., is distributing the film in the United States and elsewhere. Besson is about the most Americanized of European directors whose films outdo their American counterparts in emotional impact and action zeal (is he the true heir to Leone?), and his films are sadly undervalued here. Of late he has been as much if not more a producer (the French TAXI series) and distributor as a director, and the presence of this gem on the American market is due to his diligence in seeking out films that reflect his sensibility and professionalism.
La La Land
Since it is Oscar season and the movies and most of our national magazines are in each other's pockets, both VANITY FAIR and LOS ANGELES, as they do every year (must do, I suppose, if they are to survive), have special issues tied in with the occasion.
What's funny about the Vanity Fair issue is that its cover led to a quietly funny deconstruction by Tanya Gold of the Guardian who charges that the cover "is a desperate sight to make all feminists tremble." For Gold, "Like the William Thackeray novel it is named after, this VANITY FAIR is a loveless world. It has imposed a brutal hierarchy on its exquisite models, who flew into Culver City, California in December for the shoot."
"Leibovitz's cover," she concludes, "is a simply a casting couch, a homage to the blowjob values of 1950s Hollywood. To watch 10 beautiful women (of which at least four are talented) bicker for the lens's attention like tarts in an upper class brothel is dispiriting." Beauty, though, trumps brainy deconstruction, and more people will cynically assess this cover than will act upon Gold's anger.
Of the two issues I found that I preferred LOS ANGELES, for two reasons. One, it's called the movie issue, not the Hollywood issue, thus narrowing the focus, and two, it has a great story about Michael Kinsley, who has taken over the editorial pages of the LOS ANGELES TIMES, editing them from Seattle.
Strange Bedfellows
Everything is political, I guess, and after the exhaustion of the election season there is a sudden rash of political movies. Most disappointing is FIDEL CASTRO (Paramount, 2005, $24.95, Tuesday, February 1), which was made for PBS. I don't know why I was optimistic for it. There are few traces left of the old liberalism that so exercised right wing critics for 30 years, and both PBS and NPR are essentially quieter versions of the Fox news network.
Thus FIDEL CASTRO is a diatribe against the "dictator" disguised as a balanced assessment of the man's career. The paradox of "balance" is that in the media's view the United States government can never do anything wrong and Cuba can never do anything right. Castro has to hew to a much higher standard of conduct than our own corrupt politicians, so that any deviation by Castro is an outrage that confirms his corruption while in our own backyard kickback receiving yokels are only exercising "bad judgment."
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The documentary follows Castro's life chronologically and attempts "balance" by insinuating that, yes, Batista was probably not a very nice person. But all the talking heads, including hack Georgie Ann Geyer, are all anti-Castro and most of the bias against Castro is contained in the images which not so subtly portray Cuba as a starving land filled with sad people sitting in buses that don't move. I don't know what the solution to this bias could be. A film about Castro made by people sympathetic to him would be attacked by the Fox network, if not simply ignored into non-existence. But surely there are objectively true things to be said about Cuba and journalists shouldn't be bashful about simply stating them.
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This disc comes from PBS Home Video via Paramount, and has a nice wide screen format with audible DD stereo sound. For extras, the film has extra interview excerpts, plus video interviews with the producer of the series and the film's director, Adriana Bosch, who is the child of Cuban refugees.
I'd like to legislate silence in movie theaters, but the people will not obey such a law if people in movies won't shut up during scenes in which they are watching movies. For example, when Katie Holmes, the cutest girl in the world, cuter than anyone who has ever been or who will ever be, sits watching THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT, she can't shut up, talking to her prospective boyfriend throughout the scene about the banal subject of theater concessions. His replies are just as loud.
Like a sappy episode of WEST WING, FIRST DAUGHTER (Fox, 2004, $27.98, Tuesday, January 25) fantasizes that the President's daughter is a normal girl who just wants a normal life. Call this, the Baby Wing. Or the Pest Wing. It's something of a reversal of the recent "princess" brand of teen drama, in which a commoner finds out that she is royalty, or marries into royalty. Here she is already famous, but harried by the likes of Joan Rivers, the way Jimmy Carter's daughter was mocked. All she wants is for her dad to be her dad, not divided between her, mom, and 300 million Americans. To that end, she calls their bluff (she is a good card player) by embarking on a college career 3000 miles away from D.C.
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FIRST DAUGHTER is replete with the conventions of both the princess films and some recent presidential films. There's the "escape to the White House kitchen for some privacy" scene, there's the stoic but secretly caring Secret Service bodyguards, there's the mistaking-a-toy-for-a-weapon-take-down-a-civilian scene, there's the obligatory African-American best friend with whom she has the obligatory content-free argument, there's the "get drunk" scene, and the tearful final reconciliation scene that mimics or recalls a set-up established earlier in the film.
In the end, FIRST DAUGHTER comes across like the pilot to a sitcom except that the First Virgin also wants to get a little action, and ends up with the dullest white male on the west coast, with whom she eventually has a contrived argument. But still there are two or three really funny one-liners, a legitimate narrative surprise about an hour in, a nice poignant romantic feel, and Katie Holmes looks like she must be the greatest kisser ever.
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The Fox disc of this teen romance comes in an excellent transfer with good DD 5.1 sound in English (2.0 in Spanish and French), along with English subtitles (and Spanish). Extras include an audio commentary track by the main cast, Holmes, Marc Blucas, and Amerie. It's a double-sided disc with a full frame version on the B-side, where there is a supplemnt about the composer, the late Michael Kamen, and the members of the production who interacted with him before his death (the film's score was completed by someone else). On the A side, there are two deleted scenes, which are really extended versions of scenes already in the film. One of them shows a longer version of the FD's drunken dance on a stage in front of a bunch of frat boys and gives the viewer a fulsome view of Holmes in trashy white laced go go boots and a skimpy shirt.
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In the charming and amusing THE YES MEN (MGM, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, February 15) the viewer sees what is perhaps finally the only response to a political climate that seems alien to him — satire. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two academics with a sense of humor. Because they had a website that mocked and "exposed" the World Trade Organization they were often confused with it by far flung institutions and received invites to speak on behalf of the WTO, occasions which they would turn into exercises in performance art. The film recounts three of them and retrospectively relays a third, and the good spirits of their boys is catching, a sly way making their political position more acceptable than via an intellectual argument.
Directors Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Dan Ollman, who did AMERICAN MOVIE, do a fantastic job of clearly explaining where they are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
MGM offers up a transfer as good as it can be given that the movie was shot on video and at times has color and clarity problems. The Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 stereo tracks are audible (it's a movie that doesn't exploit a lot of sound effects). The main extra is a commentary track by the three directors and two main characters, which is as sly and funny as the movie itself and which mostly explains between the scenes aspects of what's on the screen. Also there are deleted scenes and trailers for UNDERTOW, CODE 46, WICKER PARK, SPECIES 3, WHEN WILL I BE LOVED and CONFESSIONS OF AN AMERICAN GIRL.
RAGING BULL is such an iconic film in Martin Scorsese's career and in American cinema in general it has permanently damaged Scorsese's career. It's as if he can never live up to it, and though he has several times it seems like such a personal work that you wonder why he gives himself over to things such as KUNDUN or THE AVIATOR that are really him.
About once every 10 years, just as a decade is about to begin, Scorsese issues a masterpiece. And RAGING BULL was his 1980s masterpiece, just as GOODFELLAS was to be his 1990s masterpiece (and GANGS OF NEW YORK should have been the '00s masterpiece). RAGING BULL is a harrowing tale of willful blindness, an American art film that made poetry out of the streets, the boxing ring, the smell of gloves and sweat and cigar smoke, of bedrock American emotions like jealousy and faith. It supplanted MEAN STREETS and then TAXI DRIVER as the quintessential Scorsese film and codified his reputation as our official "greatest living filmmaker."
So why didn't he want to make it?
According to the supplementary material on the new DVD release of RAGING BULL (MGM, 1980, Two Discs, $29.95, Tuesday, February 8), Scorsese wasn't particularly interested in the material. He resisted Robert De Niro's continual attempts to get the project off the ground with Scorsese as helmsman.
You could even argue that De Niro is the true auteur of the film. On the disc De Niro says that he had been thinking about Jake La Motta's book RAGING BULL as movie material since making 1900; Scorsese remembers hearing about the book from De Niro as early as MEAN STREETS. Whichever it is, clearly De Niro is the one who brought the initial passion to the project, and each successive writer, and then finally the director, had to find their own entree in to the material by finding one key, inspirational component.
Or maybe it is Paul Schrader who is the true auteur of the piece. After all, he was the go to guy when Mardik Martin's numerous drafts failed to seduce Scorsese. Schrader looked at the wealth of material and drew a blank until he realized (according to his testimony on the disc) that Martin had left out something important, and Martin had done that because La Motta had left it out of his book — his own brother, Joey.
Schrader had a terrible falling out with his own older brother, Leonard, who had been a co-writer on several of his scripts. Schrader felt that he "understood" siblings, and that was his access into the psychology of the film. He created Joey, a composite of the real brother and Peter Savage, a later crony of La Motta's who ghost wrote his autobiography.
But for a long time Scorsese still wouldn't bite. According to Martin, it wasn't until he could visualize the blood, starting with the glob of blood that drips off the top boxing rope, did the non-athletic sports-phobic director start to relate to the film.
This and numerous other tidbits and chronologies are related in both the three audio commentary tracks that go with the first disc and the hour long batch of retrospective making ofs directed by the ubiquitous Laurent Bouzereau, that take up the bulk of the second disc.
All this supplementary material is of the highest standard. The three yak tracks (which to my mind are presented in a star-fucking rather then a logical, chronological order, director to writers rather than writers to director) are especially illuminating. It is fascinating to hear how much De Niro and La Motta sound alike, a similarity that must have existed well before De Niro became obsessed with the book. One yakker insightfully refers to La Motta's jealous rages as the boxer's way of getting psyched for a bout, commensurate to the techniques that other boxers used to cope with their fear, Floyd Patterson's being to sleep for 14 hours day, or Ali's to engage in comical braggadocio. La Motta's was to slip into an irrational (or near irrational) jealous funk, punch his wife, and then tear the guy apart in the ring. The yakker calls it "Method boxing."
In both the commentaries and the makings of, Frank Warner, the sound supervisor, gives lots of fascinating detail about the arcane and little known world of sound composition, while Cis Corman, the casting director, makes revelations about dealing with the Screen Actors Guild. Michael Chapman, the cinematographer, gives a master class in movie making, and shows a deep knowledge of movie history while talking about shooting through the legs of the chairs during a fight scene like shooting through the horses' legs in SHANE.
Many years ago my friend Bill Galperin pointed out that his wife Tina had solved the puzzle of the film's final statement, a biblical quote that precedes the film's dedication to Scorsese's old NYU film teacher. The film begins with La Motta's tenement neighbor calling him an animal and ends with La Motta beating his hands against a cell wall "answering" that initial charge, saying that he is not an animal. Tina said that the final quote was a form of private admission to the teacher than Scorsese had finally awakened after several years lost in drugs and odd projects to something the teacher had tried to instill in him. Several of the tracks and the makings of now confirm, 20 years later, that Tina was absolutely right about her interpretation. If you wait long enough all good film criticism is confirmed.
The black-and-white widescreen (1.85:1, enhanced) is gorgeous in this second DVD iteration of the movie, and the Dolby Digital 5.1 shows the attention to detail that the rest of the disc embodies (there is also DD 2.0 and Dolby 1.0 in French and Spanish, plus English, French and Spanish subtitles).The three commentary tracks are divided into three categories, the first with Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, the second (Cast and crew) by producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, along with Robbie Robertson, actress Theresa Saldana, John Turturro and sound man Warner, and the last one called Storytellers" with Martin, Schrader, and La Motta himself along with his nephew Jason Lustig.
The second disc makings of are divided into four sections, with no play all option, stating with "Before the Fight" (26:00), and followed by "Inside the Ring" (14:00), "Outside the Ring" (27:00)
, "After the Fight" (15:00), and then a section about La Motta himself, "The Bronx Bull" (27:00), plus a shot-by-Shot comparison between the real and the reenacted, "De Niro vs. La Motta" (3:00). Finally there is short newsreel, "La Motta Defends Title" and the theatrical trailer. The whole package comes in a dual-DVD digipak with paperboard slipcase, and a 16-page insert with photos, press kit material, chapter titles, and extras info.
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Finally, the new DEMONLOVER: UNRATED 2-DISC DIRECTOR'S CUT (Palm Pictures, 2002, two discs, $24.99, Tuesday, September 14. 2004) arrived, allaying some of the confusion that occurred when the first version came out — was it the director's cut, or not. It wasn't and the new version has a few extra seconds of sexuality here and there but substantially it is what was released here theatrically at the time (it isn't any clearer, that is, in terms of some of the film's more oblique moments).
The widescreen image enjoys a terrific transfer and the sound comes in numerous options, DTS-ES 6.1 Surround, DD 5.1 EX Surround, and DD 2.0, with optional English or Spanish subtitles.
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The extras include disc one's trailer, filmographies and Palm Previews plus a Weblink for those who don't have Apples. Disc 2, as with RAGING BULL, has all the making of material. There is a nearly hour featurette (56:40) that shows lots of on the set B-roll stuff. This is followed by a set of interviews with Connie Nielsen (6:38), Chloe Sevigny (5:31) who hated working on the film, Charles Berling (3:12), and Olivier Assayas (4:48). The making of the music for the film, by Sonic Youth, is chronicled in NYC 12/12/01 (30:12). Finally, there is a video of a Q&A session with Assayas after a screening at Ohio State University on October 4, 2003 (39:10). Here he gives answers to some of the issues plaguing understanding of the film. Finally there is an Easter egg in which there is about five minutes of footage from the Hellfire website, making clear how much most of the female figures used in it are drawn from 1960s leather media (Fonda as Barbarella, Rigg as Emma Peel).
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Despite its occasional incoherence I still find the film fascinating and relished the excuse to watch it again.
DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From one of the three audio commentary tracks to RAGING BULL: "There never has been a published script of RAGING BULL because there really isn't one. It was changed so much in rehearsal process so that you would either have to publish the script I wrote or do a direct reprint of the film. But there is no real script. There is a lot of stuff in the film that was sort of inspired by the script. In fact I remember a meeting — because I had written the script in the Sherry Netherland sitting there in my … because they needed it right away and I was sitting there in my pajamas, I didn't leave my room for three weeks." —Writer Paul Schrader on RAGING BULL, Disc One, 00:51:39.
Letters
From Jan Elvsèn:
"Regarding your review of THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, it is always flattering when foreign nations show an interest in Swedish works of fiction. The Beck books are a mixed bunch. The first five are good, apart from the second one's rather positive stance towards Hungary in the late '60s, shown as a rather wonderful country. The sixth — about a random killing of a CEO in Malmø is borderline good. The last four stink to high heaven, and in the eight — with a mix of a bank robbery and a classic locked-room problem — a female bank robber escapes with the loot to Yugoslavia of all places. In the 10th and final book a Palme-esque Swedish PM gets killed.
I do not have one single book from the series in my home. They feel rather dated. Sjøwall/Wahlø ø actually translated about 10 of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels into Swedish before they started out on their own. Per Wahlø ø wrote a lot of novels on his own before going into partnership with Maj Sjøwall. One was filmed by mediocre Swedish director Mats Arehn, co-starring Fernando Rey and Christopher Plummer, who acted the shit out of Swedish hack — and convicted pedophile — Thomas Hellberg. When Wahlø ø died of cancer right before publication of THE TERRORISTS, Sjøwall carried on briefly co-writing with a Dutch crime novelist, but not much came of it. There was a Beck short story in the Sunday supplement of the Swedish tabloid AFTONBLADET in the middle '80's, 10 years after the last book. Sjøwall had a lot of tax problems due to her late partner's indifference to the Swedish version of the IRS. This was solved by two factors: 1) Fellow Swedish novelist/journalist Jan Guillou (writer of 10 novels about Swedish Military Intelligence agent commander Carl Hamilton, among other things) loaned her his accountant; and 2), six or seven Beck films, very loosely based on some of the books, were made with G østa Ekman in the title role. These flicks were made very fast, some shown on TV and some first shown theatrically. Some German money was involved (Sjøwall / Wahlø ø, as well as Henning Mankell, are very popular in Germany). This was 1993 - 1994. Then in 1997 original scripts were written for eight additional Beck films, likewise with releases mixed between cinema, video, and TV. Here Beck was played by Peter Haber, who seven years earlier portrayed the afore-mentioned Hamilton in a miniseries for television (he has also been portrayed by Stellan Skarsgård in the late '80's and by Peter Stormare in the late '90's). Haber repeated the Beck role three years ago in nine additional films. None of these flicks with Ekman and Haber are good.
If you go to Sjøwall / Wahlø ø on the IMDB, you will find that the late stage actor Keve Hjelm — a very good actor — played Martin Beck in the mid-'60s film of the first novel ROSEANNA. Terrible film. Then not much happened until Walter Matthau got the job. In the early 1980s Derek Jacobi filmed the second book, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE. I have not seen that one, but it is rumoured to be very bad. And in the middle '70's, Bo Widerberg of ELVIRA MADIGAN fame took Swedish comedy actor Carl-Gustav Lindstedt and made a very boring film from the very boring seventh book about an ex-cop killing a loathsome former police chief. It just had a theatrical re-release for some odd reason. It counts as a classic among some people.
For something good, go to Denmark. Just this evening I watched the second of eight one-hour episodes about Danish hard-as-nails special cop Hallgrimsson (Icelandic father, Danish mother), called THE EAGLE (ØRNEN at IMDB), with Danish actor Jens Albinus (he has appeared in some von Trier films). He and his fellow Danes are on the track of some Russian Mafia guys. This is tighty written and directed, and very well acted. Ghita Nørby who had a part as a female anesthesiologist in von Trier's excellent THE KINGDOM — for my money the best hospital series ever — plays the chief of police. Two years ago, there was a three part, 150 minute series called THE SERBIAN DANE (Den serbiske dansker on IMDB) about a Serbian hit man — who spent 10 childhood years in Denmark — hired to kill an Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner on a visit to the Danish shores, also very good. Likewise the late '90s six-part series THE SPIDER (Edderkoppen on IMDB; SPIDER-MAN in Danish is Edderkoppe-Manden) about the Copenhagen black market just after WW2. The Danes know their shit. There is nothing meek or fancy about their stuff. The Swedes and Norwegians just aren't able to get it right.
And yes, in some ways the Wallander books are heirs to the Beck books, except Mankell has written so many and didn't just set out to write just 10. There are a lot of other writers trying to make a buck with various detectives, like Håkan Nesser with his Van De Weteren novels (played by Sven Wollter, who was in Widerberg's Beck film as Kollberg and also played the decrepit Viking chieftain in THE 13TH WARRIOR, in my opinion a very under-rated flick). I have not gotten around to reading these books. I am as suspicious of Swedish literary crime fiction, as I am towards Swedish film in general.
I don't think Mankell or any of the other writers are as overtly leftist as Sjøwall and Wahlø ø. They are very much children of their particular time and that time has well passed."
NEXT TIME:OLD BOY, numerous crime shows, more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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