Feb. 8, 2010

Who could have imagined that the 2009 NFL season would end with Peyton Manning, of all people, knocked on his ass after throwing a ridiculous interception to New Orleans' Tracy Porter, who promptly scampered for a 74-yard TD that gave the Saints their first-ever Super Bowl victory?

It's enough to make you think a politician who writes cheat notes on her hand before giving a ludicrously empty little speech for which she was being paid $100,000...

...can make it all the way to the White House! As they say in New Orleans, "Anything can happen." Of course, they're all shit-faced in New Orleans right now.

Paul Tatara

Feb 3, 2010

A filmmaker named Eric Rohmer died on January 11th, at the age of 89; you may have heard about it when you weren’t challenging people you used to know in high school to Facebook pillow fights. Rohmer was one of the legendary French New Wave directors who in the late 1950s and early 1960s more or less added personalized slang to the language of cinema, thus changing what the world was able to expect out of its movies in terms of both structure and content.

Techniques that we take for granted today, such as freeze frames and impact-generating jump-cuts, were either introduced or popularized by these filmmakers, which gave their movies the feel of handwritten essays on often nebulous topics that had never been covered before by Hollywood, or, at least, not covered in such a tactile manner.

Rohmer and such other New Wave luminaries as Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Francois Truffaut spent the early parts of their careers analyzing motion pictures for the periodical, “Cahiers du Cinéma.” Rohmer, in fact, was its editor. Although these guys were analytical thinkers who could write dense treatises on such apparently surface-deep directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, once they became filmmakers themselves, their grip on the possibilities of cinema paradoxically translated into what I once described as an “elegant primitivism,” an ethos that said capturing an emotion or intellectual concept on celluloid didn’t have to be a gargantuan act, an assault launched by a corporation. In fact, the more “handmade” the movie, the more powerful the experience could be.

In the 1960s, with the culture shifting beneath their feet, many audience members were prepared to participate when they entered the theater. And New Wave auteurs expected nothing less of them (Godard can even be heard off-camera, whispering conspiratorially to the viewer in “Two or Three Things I Know About Her.”) An exchange of ideas - some of them tender, some of them baldly radicalized - drove New Wave pictures. But human connection very much anchored this exchange. If you brought anything to the table when you watched, it was possible to leave a New Wave film with a fuller understanding of what it means to reside in your own skin. Or, in perhaps the most elemental of all stories, what it means to want to touch the skin of another.

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Rohmer himself made movies until the very end; his final picture, “Romance of Astree and Celadon,” was released in 2007, when he was 87 years-old. He seldom varied from the do-it-yourself philosophy of the New Wave. His production “crew,” if that’s the right name for it in this instance, regularly consisted of just a handful of people— a cinematographer, someone to set up the lights, and maybe two or three burlier types to lug everything around. He didn’t require 600 technicians to make a movie any more than he required 600 hired hands to help him speak to a person across a kitchen table.

Rohmer knew what he wanted, found sympathetic collaborators who understood what formed the heart of the story, and got it done. And his best movies, of which there are many, are subtle, humorous, emotionally grounded marvels that challenge you without even pretending to wave a stick in your face.

One of his most enduring films is a melancholy romantic comedy from 1970 called “Claire’s Knee.” In it, Jerome, an engaged-to-be-married French diplomat (Jean Claude-Brialy) suddenly finds himself falling for Claire (Laurence De Monaghan), the older teenage daughter of a woman he’s been vaguely in love with for years. Although he has no intention of bedding Claire while the group is summering at a seaside villa, Jerome becomes gently obsessed with the coltish teen, deciding eventually that he can quench his desire by simply finding a reason to rest his hand on her tanned, pristine knee.

As ridiculous as that sounds, Rohmer manages to wring a remarkable range of emotions from Jerome’s predicament. The folly of the human condition is examined in a series of forgiving, peaceful episodes that seldom rise above casual tête-à-têtes, and the interactions between Rohmer’s pitch-perfect cast members is one of the more enjoyable tightrope acts in all of cinema. And the French countryside is stunning enough to make you want to lower the shade on your own window.

“Claire’s Knee” isn’t the greatest movie ever made— nothing much “happens” in it, and you won’t fall to the ground and weep when it’s over. But it’s a lovely meditation on the kinds of things that can make us fall to the ground and weep given the proper set of circumstances. It’s one of the more delicately humorous movies I’ve ever seen, and we’re blessed that Rohmer, whose movies are practically a genre unto themselves, repeatedly found it in his heart to create such confections.

Here’s a shot of Jerome pondering the glory of Claire’s knee.

And here’s the thing that stars in James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

I went to see “Avatar” several days ago, and I'm pretty certain I’ll never find a reason to watch it again. There’s no denying it’s unlike any movie you’ve ever seen; to pretend otherwise would be ridiculous. There’s always something, if not literally millions of things, to look at while it unfolds, and the relatively crisp 3-D shock is an enjoyable enough sensation for a while. But I eventually grew exhausted by the sheer force-fed hallucination of it all.

Enough is never enough with these game-changing movies, just like game-changing video games, and I’m sure James Cameron, who undoubtedly makes deep, passionate love to himself every night before going to sleep, couldn’t have imagined anything less than a quarter-billion-dollar mind-fryer that leaves people crawling out of the theater, lobe rattled and techno-rushed. He’s the King of the World, after all, and once you reach such a glorious peak, you don’t want some snot nose to dethrone you by (Gulp!) raking in more money at the box office than your last theatrical assault. Perish the thought!

So you spend five years of your life creating enough new technology to make NASA look like a bunch of slackers, then program a movie in which actual human beings full of honest-to-God emotions play distant second fiddle to computerized versions of themselves, although you figured out how to make their computerized counterparts appear to have…um…honest-to-God emotions. And you’re smart enough - Cameron is nothing if not smart enough - to devise a storyline that will blunt the audience’s slowly building digital trauma with heavy doses of cribbed spiritual “insight.” Then, for the final hour of what feels like a 10 hour movie, you drop the pleasantries and violently pound away at said audience like you’re Space Mountain swinging a fucking cattle prod.

That’s entertainment. Or “religion,” depending on how empty your vessel happens to be.

With all the crap that’s supposedly going on in “Avatar”’s final act, there isn’t that much crap going on. Cameron could have easily dispensed with 30 or 40 minutes of redundant Gazing at the Glow that are peppered throughout the movie and wrapped the damn thing up before audience members’ nerve endings began to merge with their seat cushions. But he didn’t, because that’s not what this trip is about. Not by a long shot.

Frankly, for all its jaw-dropping effects, by the time I walked out of “Avatar,” I felt exactly the same way I did after watching “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” back in the pre-“Jurassic” era. Rather than falling into a deep philosophical reverie about the pulsating interconnectedness of it all, I was watching a ping pong ball with “How’d they do that?” written on it bounce around inside my cranium. Or maybe I was shouting “How’d they do that?” out loud while I walked down Broadway. It’s hard to say, since I was also temporarily deaf and not completely certain I was walking down Broadway.

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If I learned anything while covering movies for 6 years at CNN, it’s that you're asking for trouble if you question, or even vaguely qualify, the success of a massive blockbuster. But what I learned long before I ever got to CNN, and what lies at the heart of who I am as a person, is that I have every right to feel how I feel, and if I can coherently delineate my thoughts on the written page, I’ve done my job.

There’s never been a blockbuster as big as “Avatar,” though, at least in sheer dollars generated at the box office. And, for the vast majority of moviegoers - and, you can be sure, for James Cameron - that’s all the proof anybody needs. This digitized cinematic snowball has just begun to roll, and there simply won’t be any stopping it— at least not between now and the end of the world. Rest assured that future grabs at blockbuster platinum will eventually make this one look like “The Great Train Robbery.”

So I want to shout a few words into the void before my voice fades away, not about a movie called “Avatar,” but about the experience of sitting in an audience full of people watching “Avatar,” and the supposed “message” that audience receives in the process. Surely, the game hasn’t changed solely on the screen, but I know full-well any suggestion that people have grown too emotionally and-or intellectually slack to recognize that they’re cheating themselves by embracing this thing as the Dawn of a New Age will be seen as a condemnation of anyone who enjoyed it.

But that’s not what I’m getting at. You’re allowed to enjoy “Avatar,” and to go see it as many times as you want; at this point, you’re almost duty-bound, if you don’t want to be shunned by your friends and neighbors. It’s the depth of many people’s experience with the picture that troubles me, that it takes $300-million worth of flashing lights and booming noises to make them even vaguely consider that maybe there’s something to life outside of “American Idol,” cool ringtones, and whatever Steve Jobs tossed in their laps at this year’s unveiling.

For all of Cameron’s prosthelytizing about the beauty of life, it would have been nice to have seen some actual life on the screen— you know, outside of the Sgt. Rock Marine with the cool scars on his face who wants to kill everybody. Or is that nitpicking on my part because what Cameron’s saying is about as honest as a big pile of self-deluded bullshit from a brilliant egomaniac?

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A recent “Entertainment Weekly” interview with Cameron (seen above with one of the humans who keeps getting in the way of his humanistic vision) was revealing on multiple levels. I can’t possibly be the only person who sees the deep, deep irony that a man who lives in a “multiple mansion compound” and wants to put up a prop robot from his latest blockbuster in his front yard to warn the neighbors not to “fuck with” him has made a movie that purports to be about ecological reverence and the spiritual synchronicity of all living things.

I’m no expert on calculating this stuff, but Cameron’s carbon footprint, which is defined as “the total set of greenhouse gas emissions caused by an organization, event, or product” must be about the size of a small Midwestern city’s. Everything this guy does is an organization, event, or product. Hell, just driving to the bank to deposit his residual checks must be eating a hole in the ozone layer.

Honestly, now. How many hundreds of jets do you think flew back and forth across the United States, if not around the world, in the making of his technological monument to the soul-sapping effects of technology? Forget that— how many plastic bottles of water have been consumed and discarded, along with tubs of popcorn, by the Deeply Moved while bowing down before Cameron’s monument to all things trees and foliage? I want to say are we really supposed to be that stupid, but apparently, given the ridiculously histrionic “Avatar” testimonials that are popping up all over the Internet, I don’t have to. A lot of us really are that stupid, and are willing to advertise it online.

I’m not talking, mind you, about those ”Avatar” audience members who honestly ponder such abstract concepts as their place in the grand scheme of things, and their relation to a guiding energy that hopefully flows between all organic entities. I know you’re out there, and I honestly think you’re getting more out of life for being willing to wrestle with such things. I’m talking about the other 93%, the ones who didn’t give shit until they saw the Blue Man group flying around on brightly speckled dragons. I’m talking about the ones who didn’t notice that the last portion of the movie made them cheer because the characters were all beating and shooting each other to a pulp. (And while we’re on the subject, outside of “Titanic,” which is loaded with money shots of characters banging their heads on railings on the way to their icy deaths, Cameron, the Great Seeker, specializes in people getting the shit kicked out of them. Cue up “Terminator 2” sometime and count the gaping gunshot wounds and cracking bones on display, all photographed through that remorseless ice-blue filter. What would the Tree of Life say?)

As for the eco-message that gets so bluntly stated via Cameron’s trademark lousy dialogue in “Avatar”: The newly head-turned will be shocked to learn that this information, the concepts that have moved you to tears and made you see God, have been readily available to you from the time you exited the womb until…oh…right about now.

Talk to a Lakota Sioux Indian some time, if you can find one now that our country has shuttered them in the middle of nowhere, with little hope of improving their day-to-day existence because we’ve so marginalized them for their “old-fashioned” ways of approaching life, and ask him or her to hip you to the whole interconnectedness of man, plant, and beast trip. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Ah, but discovering it without “Avatar” would require doing some Internet research, or reading a book, or renting a documentary from Netflix, and you’ve had things to do. Those episodes of “Jersey Shore” that you Tivoed aren’t gonna watch themselves. And who wants to learn things from a Sioux Indian? They’re not even in 3-D!

If “Avatar”’s success proves anything, it’s that getting modern audiences to feel an emotion or maybe even think a little in a darkened theater is really fucking expensive.

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Here’s a still from Eric Rohmer’s 1969 film, “My Night at Maud’s”, the third in his series of Six Moral Tales. If you’re having trouble grasping the image, it’s of a man and woman gazing into each other’s eyes. There’s snow on the ground. The woman is smiling, but the man may or may not be troubled about something.

If somebody could come up with the budget to digitally animate that, it might be really dramatic. It’s so hard to tell when it’s just plain old people.

Paul Tatara

Feb. 1, 2010

In 1957, after more than a decade of poverty-stricken, often demeaning struggle as a jazz artist, Thelonious Monk enjoyed a lengthy engagement at an East Village club known as The Five Spot. Monk recruited John Coltrane (seen above with Monk and Monk’s devoted wife, Nellie), who had recently been kicked out of Miles Davis’ quintet due to struggles with drugs and alcohol, to join his band. During their time together, the two men promptly joined the ranks of the biggest names in all of jazz.

Lines formed around the block to see Monk’s quartet at The Five Spot. Most of the people in those lines were genuine enthusiasts— Village bohemians who came to hear some of the most startlingly innovative, oddly swinging music in jazz history. Others, unfortunately, were more interested in gawking at Monk’s perceived eccentricities, judging him to be some sort of magically gifted wacko, rather than an intellectually curious, almost obsessively focused original who didn’t suffer fools gladly.

There are a lot of stories that illustrate where Monk was (usually) coming from. For instance, one evening the quartet played an entire set without Coltrane on the stand. When they finished, someone in the audience shouted, rather rudely, “We wanna hear Coltrane!” Monk replied simply, “Coltrane bust up his horn.”

After a cigarette break, Monk and the band returned to the tiny stage...again without Coltrane. The same guy immediately barked, “We want Coltrane!” and Monk again replied, “Coltrane bust up his horn.” Then the audience member, who was now really more of a heckler, asked, “Whatta ya mean, ‘Coltrane bust up his horn?’”

At this, Monk slowly rose from his piano seat, his tall frame looming over the front tables full of people, and said, “Mr. Coltrane plays a wind instrument. The sound is produced by blowing into it and opening different holes to let the air out. Over some of these holes is a felt pad. One of Mr. Coltrane’s felt pads has fallen off, and in order for him to get the sound he wants, so that we can make better music for you, he is in the back making a new one…you dig?”

On another occasion while playing the club, Monk suddenly left the building and no one could find him. Joe Termini, who ran the The Five Spot with his brother Iggy, eventually located Monk standing a few blocks away, gazing silently at the moon. Termini asked Monk if he was lost, to which the pianist replied, “No. I ain’t lost. I’m here. The Five Spot’s lost.”

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Here’s Monk playing his nifty composition, “Rhythm-a-Ning,” from his album, “Thelonious in Action,” which was recorded live at The Five Spot. It’s a marvelous document— there’s a lot of ambiance to it; you can sense the excitement in the air while the band plays.

The saxophonist on this occasion is Johnny “Little Giant” Griffin, and that’s Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums. These guys could flat-out play, but that was a prerequisite if you had any hope of following Monk’s oblique concepts. On this track, Abdul-Malik, in particular, sounds possessed.

Coltrane, by the way, hadn’t bust up his horn again. Cleaned up and spiritually rejuvenated, he had left Monk to work once again with Miles, but would soon be leading his own group, and recording his landmark album, “Giant Steps.”

Holy cow. Order me another whiskey. Straight, no chaser.

Download: "Thelonious in Action" (1958) by Thelonious Monk.

Paul Tatara

Jan. 30, 2010

Gene Hackman, one of the greatest film actors of the past 40 years, turns 80 years-old 0n Jan. 30th, and isn’t it great that he’s still out there? His last screen appearance was in an immediately forgettable commercial comedy back in 2006; he’s chosen instead to focus mainly on writing novels in his twilight years. But Hackman has earned the right to do any damn thing he pleases.

In movie after movie over the course of a remarkable career, he’s never been anything less than utterly believable, regardless of how weak the movie itself might be. He always brings his “A” game, staying consistently focused on finding the core truths that drive his characters. Known throughout the film industry as a consummate professional, he’s simply incapable of doing it any other way.

You can tell from his performances that Hackman’s a tough, no-nonsense kind of guy, and his pre-acting life bears that out. Born in San Bernadino, CA, his family moved around a lot before finally settling down in Danville, IL. He’s said that he’s often taken film roles that are beneath him because he was so poor when he was growing up, he’s forever felt that his comfortable Hollywood existence could be snatched away at a moment’s notice.

Hackman's poverty-stricken childhood led him to escape to the Marine Corps at the age of 16, after which he moved to New York, but finally ventured back to California to become an actor. There, at the Pasadena Playhouse, he met his lifelong friend, a sarcastic little guy you also may have heard of named Dustin Hoffman.

Hackman would later move back to New York with Hoffman, where they shared a walk-up apartment with another fledgling thespian named Robert Duvall. All three roommates would struggle for a while in off-Broadway plays, TV commercials, and episodic television, but each would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Hackman was first, when he collected the honor for his 1971 performance as the obsessed narcotics cop, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” Years later, he would also win Best Supporting Actor, for his role as the sadistic sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.”

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Hackman delivered a string of great performances in the 1970s, because - it’s no secret by now - that’s when Hollywood had an abundance of complex parts to offer ambitious actors, and maverick filmmakers were given a long enough leash to allow everyone from actors to screenwriters to do their best work. I’ve already written extensively about Hackman’s darkly humorous, clenched-jaw turn in ”The French Connection”, but I think his single most towering achievement still might be his performance as Harry Caul, the guilt-racked surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece, “The Conversation” (Talk about a hot streak— Coppola squeezed the picture in between “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part 2,” just to make it three in a row.)

As the film begins, Caul, a surveillance legend, has been hired to secretly record a conversation between a young man and woman (Frederick Forrest and Cindy Williams) while they stroll through a park in San Francisco. Later, Harry breaks a cardinal rule when he starts paying attention to what’s actually being said in his recording, rather than simply cleaning up the tape as much as possible and taking his payment. He soon grows convinced that the corporate bigwig who hired him is going to use the recording as reason to murder the couple, and a life of professional immorality finally starts to take its toll on the previously remorseless wiretapper.

A vortex of despair and almost inconceivable loneliness swirls around Harry throughout the film. Not even the false lifeline of the Catholic church, which has apparently saved him in the past, can keep him from being pulled under when he starts to realize he may be party to the deaths of two innocent people.

Harry, like Travis Bickle in ”Taxi Driver” is in a self-made hell, and he's very much on his own. He’s never allowed himself the luxury of real connection with another person - he won’t even tell the dimwitted woman (Teri Garr) he’s sleeping with where he lives - and now he finds himself connecting with two possibly doomed people he's only eavesdropped on.

Hackman’s often silent performance is precisely measured throughout, and, in the end, absolutely devastating. He allows us to see Harry fall apart in increments, transforming him before our eyes from a sharp, cocky professional to a death-rattled emotional orphan.

In the following scene, Harry’s established that the couple he recorded will be meeting up with his faceless employer at a local hotel, so he checks into an adjoining room to listen in. Powerless to help if something horrible takes place, he still needs to know what, if anything, is going to happen to the couple. One has to wonder if it’s lost on Harry that he’s fallen so low he’s literally listening to muffled voices at toilet bowl level.

The moment when he hears his tape being played in the next room, then rewound, is he thinks, the point of no return. But the real blow is yet to come. Note how Hackman slowly strips away Harry’s business-like demeanor until he collapses into an infantile state, hiding under the covers from his personal boogey man, the worthless, disconnected life he’s forged for himself.

That’s the work of genuinely masterful actor. We won't be seeing the likes of Gene Hackman again, and I hope I can raise a toast to him when he turns 100. Although he may not be gracing us with many more big screen performances, his has been a job exceedingly well done.

Paul Tatara