Quote of the day: Martin Scorsese

"You have films with happy endings, which show the triumph of the human spirit, in films like Rocky. And then you have pictures that are a little more realistic and deal with certain emotions and psychological character studies, and they don't necessarily have that uplifting effect. In the 50s through the 70s, they seemed to exist together. Now, it seems that some films don't even have the right to exist. With the advent of Rocky and Star Wars and the Spielberg pictures, on the best side they're morally uplifting; you leave the theatre the way you did at the end of Casablanca. And on the worst side, they're sentimental. Lies. That's the problem And where I fit in there, I don't know" — interview with Chris Hodenfield in American Film, 1989, collected in Martin Scorsese Interviews (Univ. of Miss.), edited by Peter Brunette

REVIEW: A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg)

A new discovery! 11.00am on Thanksgiving morning turns out to be the perfect time and occasion on which to see Kiera Knightley getting spanked in the new David Cronenberg psychoanalysis flick! It's a pitiless, David-Cronenberg time of day, 11 o'clock in the morning. You're awake, but you haven't eaten a full meal yet, insatiate yet alert — the perfect state in which to take in a cerebral chamber-piece about fin-de-siecle sexual repression and the birth of psychoanalysis. Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, unhappily married, sexually repressed and therefore wearing a suit half-a-size too small for him, so the Fassbender physique seems to be bursting at the seams. Kiera Knightley plays his hysterical patient, jutting her jaw and screaming with a Russian accent at least two sizes too big for her so you spend most of the film waiting for the invention of valium. Best of all we have Viggo Mortenson as Freud — the happiest piece of casting I have come across all year. There is probably no actor today more in contact with his unconscious mind than Mortenson, with his air of Oceanic internal fixation, his mesmerising horse-whisperer manner and unerring instinct for where the bones of a part lie. Here he goes big on the cigars and chiselled shrewdness — his Freud seems to spend much of his time weighing chess moves against his detractors — but also remembers to make him a voyager, feeling his way in the dark, like Aragon on the threshold of the pit of Mordor. "Columbus didn't know what country he'd discovered," he says, "only that he'd touched land." The script has two versions of why Jung and Freud fell out: one involving their principled difference of opinion on whether psychoanalysis should be allowed to touch upon matters of religion, mysticism and the like; and the second involving their principled difference of opinion over whether Jung should be allowed to paddle the ass of Knightley, which looks almost as much fun as beheading Orcs. You'll never guess which turns out to be the more compelling plot-line. That's always been the way with Cronenberg, whose talking heads have always come a distant second to his exploding ones, and A Dangerous Method certainly tends towards the chalkier end of the spectrum — as befits its origins as a stage play by Christopher Hampton, there are one too many lines of the "I take issue with his dogmatic pragmatism!" variety — but it also summons a nice tone of subdued hysteria, like the thinnest of cracks through the finest bone-china, and the period is beautifully observed, the Fassbender-Knightley relationship playing out against a Lake Geneva that looks so placid and dreamy you'll easily believe it the birth-place of the Jungian unconscious. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! B

The Return of Silent Cinema

'Of all the cinematic surprises of 2011—the ascendency of Elizabeth Olsen, the excellence of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Woody Allen’s return as hit-maker the renaissence of silent cinema was probably the hardest to see coming down the pike. When Harvey Weinstein enthused about a silent back-and-white film, starring two unknown French stars, which he’d just bought at Cannes, brother Bob suggested he check himself into a mental asylum. After it received a 15-minute standing ovation, Michel Hazanavicius’s homage to the days of swashbuckling matinee idols, iris shots, and Busby Berkeley dance numbers, The Artist, was marked up by Oscarologists as the outside favorite to win Best Picture.

Come November 23^rd, cinemagoers will have a choice of two valentines to the silent era: The Artist or Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3D adaptation of Brian Selznick’s bestselling children’s book, whose poster echoes Harold Lloyd’s clock shenanigans in Safety Last (1923) and whose final 25 minutes fondly revisit the earliest days of cinema, from Melies's A Trip to the Moon to the Lumière Brothers Arrival of a train at La Ciotat station, which sent its audience flying in panic from the theatre to avoid being crushed by that train. For the earliest filmgoers, 2D was 3D enough. “Two ladies in one of the boxes on the left-hand of the horseshoe, which is just where the flyer vanishes from view, screamed and nearly fainted as it came apparently rushing upon them,” ran one newspaper’s account of a similar film, Empire State Express, in 1897. “They recovered in time to laugh at their needless excitement.”

Finally, in December, we have The Adventures of Tin Tin: Secret of the Unicorn, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the much-loved Belgian comic strip, a movie whose sight gags and breakneck pace hail back to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and from there to the hey-day of Mack Sennett and the Keystone cops. Nobody could accuse modern blockbusters of silence, but the aesthetics of silent cinema—its favoring of the visual over the literary, action beats over dialogue, international markets over domestic— is alive and well. Over at Pixar, filmmakers have been steadily mining Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to give us the opening 20 minutes of WALL-E and the first ten minutes of Up—modern silent-movie classics. Meanwhile, James Cameron’s Avatar, whose earthling-alien romance, like that in E.T., proceeded via sign language (I-see-you), marked the evolution of an international movie grammar which vaulted borders and left critical sniping about Cameron’s creaky dialogue looking like the nit-picking of flat-earthers. And the guilty secret of Michael Bay’s Transformer movies? They play equally well with the sound down, if not better.

“The eye and mind are both bewildered by the too sudden and too frequent shifts of scene,” wrote William Eaton in American Magazine. “There is a terrible sense of rush and hurry and flying about, which is intensified by the twitching film and generally whang-bang music.” Eaton wrote this in 1914, but it could as easily pass muster as a critical harrumph from the summer of 2011. In fact, the further back you push, the more familiar it gets, as dialogue, plots, and characters all fall away to reveal an exo-skeleton of pure action beats. The very first movies were by definition action movies, made fast and sold by the brand (“every day a Biograph feature”) to an audience made up of largely immigrants and teens, all demanding something “happening every minute, allowing for no padding with word-painting, following climax after climax” as the Brooklyn Eagle put it in 1906. “The backbone of today’s business is the attendance of young people from seventeen to twenty-three years of age,” sniffed Harold Corey in Everybody’s Magazine in 1919. “At 23 other interests develop.”

For The Lonedale Operator, D. W. Griffith mounted his camera on the front of a speeding train in order to better capture the rush; for A Girl and Her Trust, he placed it onboard a car that was racing alongside a racing train, with another car in hot pursuit. His mastery of intercutting between parallel action reached its apogee in the chase sequence of The Birth of a Nation. When that film was released, in 1916, the film’s cinematographer, Karl Brown, noted “bigger and better, bigger and better became the constantly chanted watchwords of the year. Soon the two words became one. Bigger meant better, and a sort of giganticism overwhelmed the world, especially the world of motion pictures.” In many ways, this whizz-bang landscape of thrill rides, cheap scares and teen kicks feels closer to us than the Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s, or even the 1960s and 1970s, when Hollywood, high on a mixture of the French new wave, auteurism, and pot, enjoyed an unparalleled creative growth spurt, one cut cruelly short by thekerr-ching of the cash registers for Jaws, and the boom of the laser cannons in Star Wars. As we all know by heart now, those two blockbusters flushed delicate arthouse sensitivities down the garbage chute and “pioneered the cinema of moments, of images, of sensory stimuli increasingly divorced from story” in Peter Biskind’s formulation.

This is fine as far as it goes, but if it’s the soul of cinema we’re fighting over, “the cinema of moments, of images, of sensory stimuli increasingly divorced from story” has a far greater claim on cinema’s central nervous system than the woozy psychedelia of Easy Rider. Looked at one way, Star Wars did not betray cinema at all, but plugged it back into the mains, returning the medium, after a brief spell of aesthetic etiolation, to its roots as a carnival sideshow, a magic act, one big special effect, punching through the fourth wall and rocking the audience back in their seats, as they were first rocked by the Lumière brothers cho-choo trains. “Star Wars is basically a silent film, was designed to be a silent film,” said George Lucas when I interviewed him for my book Blockbuster. “In terms of people’s aesthetics, especially critics: they complained bitterly when sound came in, that the medium had been destroyed, but the concept of cinema started as a vaudeville show. It started as a magic act. They took the magician off the bill, put up this sheet and they ran this magic thing, where you could see things you couldn’t see. They say summer is now dominated by films that are aimed towards kids. Well, kids are the audience. It’s a market-driven medium and it always has been.”'

—from my piece on silent cinema for Slate

REVIEW: J.Edgar / Tyrannosaur

One of the opportunities presented me by my wife's absence — apart from those for weeping fits, dietary experimentation and dust-ball accumulation — is the opportunity it presents me to catch up on the most depressing movies I can lay my hands on — the more depressing, the better. For some reason that escapes me we spent last Christmas apart, which I took that as a sign to go on a massive Michael Haneke bender, during the course of which I lost all sense of time and space, human warmth leaching from me, the lights of nearby towns and hamlets blurring into a distant memory, until I stood in our apartment — a poor, bare, forked animal, ready to feast on any Romanian abortion epic or neo-brutalist British kitchen-sink drama you could throw my way. The only problem was resurfacing without getting the bends. Kate came back for New Year's Eve and I — still in some kind of altered state — suggested we watch Ken Loach's first film Kes, forgetting that in the final reel the poor falcon, by virtue of symbolising youth's only hope of escape from the grim, dehumanising totalitarianism of the English education system, gets it in the neck with a shovel. I should have known better — all animals appearing English films from the seventies get it in the neck, be they otters or rabbits, if not with a shovel then a bullet. It's the closest we ever got to making The Way We Were. I'm not sure Kate has forgiven me.

Much better to keep this kind of filth for when she's gone. So my first thought, upon waving her off to see her parents in Ohio, was simple: J Edgar. I knew there had to be a place in my life for Clint's stolid two hours of desaturated gay repression and institutionalised paranoia and this was surely it. I wore my Navy Peacoat, rather than my usual Mackintosh, not because I have any particular fear of being thought gay, but a closeted gay is a different matter. In the end, Eastwood didn't quite deliver: despite a lighting scheme that made me worry I'd paid the electricity bill, and the sight of Judi Dench bearing down on poor J Edgar's soul like the mother of Norman Bates herself, I rather enjoyed his movie, and even felt a little trembly of lip towards the end. Nothing like the unconsolable storm of grief that descended on me at the end of Bridges of Madison County, but a tremble nonetheless and for that I was grateful. Clint really getsrepressed emotion, the more depth-charged the better, and something about the tidy little kiss that Leonardo Di Caprio lands on Armie Hammer's forehead at the end of J Edgar did the trick. B-

But not nearly depressing enough, so this afternoon I headed off to see Paddy Considine'sTyrannosaur, which promised so much: alcoholism, wife battery, Northern pubs, rottweilers, the lot. Could it deliver? I wore my peacoat again — big mistake. I should have gone with the Mackintosh. Peter Mullan wears an almost identical peacoat in the movie, thus pointing the finger of shame my way, singling me out as I left the theatre as a fellow wife-beater and drunk. Naturally, there were only five or six men in the theatre, all of them were on their own, and all of them were, in my mind, as I was in theirs, wife-beaters, come to make their amends, to pay silent penance for their sins. You can't win, you see. Closeted gay or wife-beater — these are the two options faced by any man in his forties with limited wardrobe options going to the cinema alone. Anyway. The film. It's grim. A firm proponent of the fark-you-you-farking-caant school of British filmmaking. There's black eyes, racism, dog bludgeoning — and drinking, lots of drinking, of the kind that necessitates you stare into your pint as if discerning in the bleak apartheid of your Guinness the unbudging, fulminous morass of your life. Mullan is a little acting-workshopy — I preferred his alcoholic in My Name is Joe — and the ending is an out-and-out wrist-slasher, but Olivia Colman is as terrific as everyone says she is, and the Leisure Society song at the end is heaven sent. B-

NOTABLE FILM RELEASES: 2012

February 3rd

Chronicle (20th Century Fox)

March 9th

John Carter — Andrew Stanton (Pixar)

March 23rd

The Hunger Games — Jennifer Lawrence (Lionsgate)

April 6th

Titanic 3-D (Fox)

May 11th

Dark Shadows — Burton, Pfeiffer, Eva Green (Warner Bros)

The Dictator — Cohen, Kingsley (Paramount)

June 1st

Rock Of Ages — Cruise, Giametti (Warner Bros)

June 8th

Prometheus — Scott, Fassbender (Fox)

June 22nd

Brave (Pixar)

July 3rd

The Amazing Spiderman (Columbia)

July 22nd

The Dark Knight Rises (Warner Bros)

Aug 17th

ParaNorman — Casey Affleck (Focus)

September 14th

Argo — Affleck, Arkin, Cranston (Warner Bros)

September 28th

Savages — Del Toro, Lively, Stone (Universal)

October 19th

Untitled David Chase Project — Gandolfini (Paramount Vantage)

November 9th

Bond 23 — Mendes, Craig, Bardem (Sony)

November 21

Gravity — Clooney, Bullock, Cuaron (Warner Bros)

Deecember 14th

Great Hope Springs — Streep, Carrell, Jones (Columbia)

December 21

The Life of Pi — Lee, Maguire (Fox 2000)

This is Forty — Rudd, Mann, Apatow (Universal)

December 25th

Django Unchained — Di Caprio, Tarantino (Weinstein)

The Great Gatsby — Di Caprio, Mulligan (Warner Bros)

Undated

Moonlight Kingdom — Anderson, Willis (Focus)

Anna Karenina — Knightley, Wright, Johnson (Focus)

Lincoln — Day-Lewis, Spielberg (Touchstone)

Gotti: Three Generations — Levinson, Travolta, Pesci, Pacino (Fiore)

My Wild Life — Noyce, Kidman (Universal)

Take This Waltz — Rogen, Williams (Magnolia)

Untitled Bin Laden Project — Bigelow (Sony)

Photo: Eva Green

REVIEW: The Descendants

Things I loved about Alexander Payne's The Descendants:—

— the rattier bits of Honolulu.

— Clooney's tears by the side of the road, his back to us like Queen Elizabeth II.

— yes, alright, the running in sandals.

— the line about Hawaiian businessmen bearing a striking resemblance to "bums and stuntmen."

— Shailene Woodley's scenes on the couch, eyes raw and red. Her blend of prettiness and plainness.

— the link-up of the two plots via a cousin. The cousins in general, and the dramatic use made of this overextended brood.

— seeing Beau Bridges again.

— the ambling pace.

— Judy Greer's brand of guileless, vulnerable optimism. The heartbreak of seeing it depleted.

— Payne's emotional ambition and reach, and the invisible cover it lends the comic switchbacks, to the point where you can't say which came first. Born together, in mid-air.

— One in particular, Greer's bedside speech + Clooney's reaction, is faultless.

— the reveal of Sid's family history, together with his use of the word "boss".

Things I wasn't so keen on:—

— The first scene where they talk to the mother.

— the line "my joy, my pain". Too written. He had me at "my love."

A-

'Take Care' - Drake & Rihanna

Notes on Martin Scorsese's late style — All Things Must Pass

I'm going to review Hugo properly later in the month but for now would like to note a few stylistic similarities I noticed with Shutter Island — the imagery of ash and scattered paper-storms, together with a preoccupation with artifice and loss which reminded me of Shakespeare's late romances, particularly The Winter's Tale, in which the statue of a wife, long thought dead, comes to life, much as Leo Di Caprio summons Michelle Williams in Shutter Island, and The Tempest, in which an exiled artist-magician conjures storms and monsters:—

These are actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

That could equally well describe Hugo, a Faberge egg of cgi-confabulation featuring its own magician-hero, cobwebbed with loss, who in a climactic act of remembrance, summons his own insubstantial pageants from thin air. What kids will make of it, I can only guess, although I suspect many will find their attention wandering, but as a Melies festshrift, a fond exhalation warming the embers of one filmmaker's work with the breath of another, it works its own brand of wonder, offering us another slice of the gamey neo-Jamesian style with which Scorsese seems to make movies these days. In his review of Edward Said's On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain in The New Yorker John Updike wrote:—

What does haunt late works is the author’s previous works: he is burdensomely conscious that he has been cast, unlike his ingénue self, as an author who writes in a certain way, with the inexorable consistency of his own handwriting. Turning this way and that in his last creative torment, he kept meeting, with a shudder, his pet modes of imagining, chimeras on the fault line between the imaginary and the actual.

In other words, late works are haunted houses, characterised, as Hawthorne put it by “a drawing away of veils, a lifting of heavy, magnificent curtains". As the artist's imagination prepares for its final Check-Out, the vividness of lived experience recedes like a fading coal, veiled by a skein of remembrance and nestled within plots that unfurl like Russian dolls. "Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality,” says Said. A perfect description of both Shutter Island and Hugo with their onion-layering of illusion, their urgent summoning of the dead, and air of mazy, elegaic confabulation. The dead are rescusitated, the past disinterred; there are even a few statues looking ominously like they are about to spring to life; the recurring imagery of ash and scattered papers act as vivid memento mori — a previsualisation of all that remains when we, too, are vanished. Scorsese's late period would appear to be firmly in session.

ON MY IPOD: Nov 8th 2011

• 'It's Real' — Real Estate
• 'Facing the Sun' — Treefight for Sunlight
• 'Hurts like Heaven' — Coldplay
• 'Change the Sheets' — Kathleen Edwards
• 'Helix' — Justice
• 'We Found Love' — Rihanna
• 'Domino' — Jessie J
• '1979' — RAC
• 'Jesus Fever' — Kurt Vile
• 'The Same Thing' — Cass McCombs
• 'Dust on the Dancefloor' — The Leisure Society

I take great pride in not hating Coldplay but instead sifting through the chaff looking for the good stuff and 'Hurts Like Heaven', despite lyrics extolling the virtues of emotional masochism, is a full tilt into the wind, with harmonies that slice the room at shoulder-height: they make self-pity as exciting as bungee-jumping. I've never heard of Real Estate before but their entire album, 'Days', has me hooked: they sound like someone melodic from Manchester but in fact are from New Jersey and look to be barely out of their teens. I can't find a mix of Rihanna's 'We Found Love' that I'm happy with (is there one that doesn't sound so Hamburg rave-y?) but the song has me nevertheless. Nothing wrong with the production of Jessie J's 'Domino': the song hangs in mid-air, perfect as a plum. Kathleen Edwards I've already praised on this blog, but 'Change the Sheets' isn't getting any worse. Justice's 'Helix' is a guilty, chunky synth-funk pleasure: the song I most like restraining myself to on the subway. The Leisure Society: this song has really grown on me, but then the song itself keeps evolving, only repeating itself at the 1:50 minute mark. That's halfway through the song — my favorite example of chrysalis structure since Oasis's 'I Hope, I Think, I Know'.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Steven Spielberg

“What? What did he say, again? Well! If he really said that, you just made my last four decades. You're responsible for making my last four decades. I've never heard that!” — Steven Spielberg upon hearing Alfred Hitchcock's comment “young Spielberg is the first one of us who doesn't see the proscenium arch” seemingly for the first time

Films I am most looking forward to in 2012

1. Moonlight Kingdom. To see if young love (and a return to American soil) can revive Wes Anderson's live-action filmmaking.

2. Lincoln. Because Daniel-Day Lewis's feel for American-historical sinew is second-to-none.

3. Under The Skin. Scarlett Johannson is a man-eating alien in Jonathan Glazer's first film since Birth (2004), the most under-seen great movie of the 2000s.

4. Life of Pi. Ang Lee + Depardieu + 3D + tiger. The choice of project feels both surprising and inevitable — our best hope for a masterpiece.

5. This is Forty. Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, Megan Fox in a companion piece to Knocked Up.

6. Django Unchained. The rhythms of black speech = Tarantino defibrillator.

7. The Dictator. Crunch time for Sasha Baron Cohen.

8. The Amazing Spiderman. For Emma Stone.

9. John Carter. Andrew Stanton's live-action follow up to WALL-E.

10. Brave. Hogmanay and haggis from Pixar.

Also: — Argo, ParaNorman, My Wild Life, The Cabin In the Woods, Chronicle

CAREER BEST: Leonardo Di Caprio

“When I can’t immediately define the character, and there’s an element of mystery to it and still a lot to be explored, that’s when I say yes,” the 36-year-old Mr. DiCaprio said in an interview last week on a patio at the Bel Air Hotel here. “I like those kinds of complicated characters. I just do.” Hollywood typically doesn’t like that answer. The star system may have become more subtle since the days of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, but it’s still a system: American actors are supposed to be more steady persona, less shape shifter. “The apparatus likes to box actors up,” said Brian Grazer, a producer of “J. Edgar,” which is set for release on Wednesday. “Once they become successful in one role, get them into picture after picture where they can do exactly the same thing.” — The New York Times

Why is it that in any battle between a movie star keen to prove his "method" credentials and the wicked studios, who want to entrap him in the role of movie star, I always tend to side with the studios? Nobody likes stereotyping, and yet there is nothing dumb about the aggregate wisdom that seeks out the platonic essence of an actor — in Di Cario's case, a young man's sprezzatura combined with a Huck Finnish resourcefulness. I'm thinking of his diamond smuggler in Blood Diamond and his teen fugitive in Catch Me If You Can, a role which perhaps more than the caught Di Caprio's brand of fleet-footedness, which seems to carry him across the screen like the moving dot over karaoke lyrics. Such gifts, even if they tend towards lightness, are not to be taken lightly. On the contrary they place him in the rarest company — one thinks of the very best movers, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant, both of whom raised the art of ease onscreen to a state of unparalleled grace. But effortlessness has fallen into disfavor these days — we prefer performances that break sweat — so naturally, it's the performance Di Caprio most disdains. The story goes that after filming Catch Me If You Can the actor foreswore ever taking on another ingenue role, preferring the more strenuous acting work-outs he got with Martin Scorsese. I must confess I love di Caprio as an actor and yet his recent career makes me miserable, his performances tending towards the twitchy and self-hating — strangely solitary affairs, as most attempts to prove something to oneself generally are. He goes the distance, but he doesn't take the audience with him, seemingly caught in a permanent state of self-chastisement for not growing up faster. Which is probably why he hated working for Spielberg, hellbent in the opposite direction, but there is something Peter Pannish about Di Caprio. He plays younger than he appears, which mean these attempts to play older seem misbegotten — a cat stroked backwards. He was appropriately feral in Gangs of New York, seething with hidden hatred for Bill the Butcher, but the role turned him into a sneak, so Day-Lewis blew him away. He was simply miscast in The Aviator — too young for the role, and badly let down by his voice, which can never quite hide its high spirits, despite no end of growling on Di Caprio's part. (If he had Kiefer Sutherland's stentorian boom, he would have had an Oscar by now). For The Departed he dug deep into his character's drug-addled psychosis, as if he we were appearing in one of Scorsese's Paul-Schrader-era collaborations, in orbit around a single lost soul, but even Scorsese doesn't summon the tone, or the energy, for such descents any more and Di Caprio looked stranded, even faintly comic, as if he didn't realise there were other people in the movie: every time we cut back to him, he just seemed more bug-eyed and out of it. Maybe that's why his best performances have been playing solipsists, in both Shutter Island and Inception, whose shared preoccupation with fantasy and reality suggests that these mazy, inner-space refugees may turn out to be defining roles for him. One can't but worry about the state of the Di Caprio psyche these days. All those supermodels can't be good for the soul; Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover, taken together, suggest an attempt at some sort of self-diagnosis. I hope he's having fun.

1. Blood Diamond
2. Catch Me If You Can
3. Shutter Island
4. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
5. Titanic
6. Inception
7. Romeo + Juliet
8. This Boy's Life
9. The Basketball Diaries
10. Revolutionary Road

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Bill Simmons

'Why don't we remember Eddie's peak from 1981 to 1988 a little more reverentially? Why don't we think about race when we think about Eddie? Why doesn't Eddie get mentioned with Poitier, Cosby and Pryor every time? Why doesn't it matter that every successful black comic or actor that came after him — Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, any of the Wayans brothers, Will Smith, you name it — profusely credited Eddie for influencing him? Why doesn't Eddie get more credit for flipping Saturday Night Live on its lily-white ass, reinvigorating itand becoming its only truly successful black cast member? Why doesn't Eddie get more credit for, as he puts it, becoming "the first black actor to take charge in a white world onscreen?" Why doesn't everyone ever point out that Eddie is the most successful comedian ever, by any calculation?' — Bill Simmons, Grantland

Amen.

Contenders for poster of the year — suggestions welcomed...

INTERVIEW: Peter Sarsgaard

'The actor Peter Sarsgaard recently attended the 40^th birthday party of a guy from his high school – an all-boys Jesuit school in Connecticut. “One of them said the wildest thing to me. He said, ‘we all knew you were like artistic, but you also looked like you were really out of it. Were you actually thinking about something interesting or thinking about something? Were you think about, like, us?’”

He laughs — more of a giggle, girlishly high. “I told him, ‘I was probably just spaced out.”

Sarsgaard gets this a lot. With his low-lidded, almond-shaped eyes, and sly, insolent manner, he often plays men honeycombed with secrets — a killer in Boy’s Don’t Cry, an editor in Shattered Glass, a sharpshooter in Jarhead, the seducer of Carey Mulligan in An Education — parts which instill in the audience a similar paranoia: what is that guy thinking? Is he thinking about us? If so, is it nice or nasty? “I do think a decent amount of what I do as an actor comes from my ability to not express,” he says. “I just smoulder. I combust internally.”

— from my interview with Peter Sarsgaard for Mr Porter

The uses of enchantment

"Truly exceptional. Do see it. Walked out of cinema into the falling snow...lovely!" (from@raeofdawn...but what's falling snow got to do with anything? Unreliable viewer, too impressionable)." — Hollywood Elsewhere

I must say: that mention of snow makes me believe @raeofdawn all the more. That's one of the truest sign of enchantment, when you walk outside the movie theatre to find the air outside filled with the movie you've just seen — or else amazed that it has gotten dark, or that the world is even still there.

In agreement with herself, most of the time

"My father had a subscription to The New Yorker, and every week I would pick it up and start an argument with Kael. The argument had to remain in my own head, as that was well before the Web made it possible to storm into a comments section and tell off a critic. Usually, I didn’t want to tell off Kael, not exactly, no matter how much I objected to what she had written, and I objected to quite a lot. I wanted to ask her questions. I wanted some interaction with that brain. I would read her capsules in the front, or her ever-lengthening reviews in the back, and marvel at the syncopated, give-a-damn writing style and her utter faith in her own judgment. The fact that she was a woman mattered to me, too. Growing up in Alabama, I did not encounter many women with that kind of intellectual aggressiveness. Only gradually did I realize how widely Kael is criticized, even despised. The volume of things for which Kael is faulted begins to approach the size of her own output. She had too much power and wielded it unwisely. She collected acolytes, she started feuds. She overpraised Last Tango in Paris, she was blind to the virtues of Dr. Strangelove. She had no consistent set of criteria. She placed too much emphasis on screenwriters. Her kinship with ugly ducklings meant she gave too much credit to Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand. She sent David Lean into a spiraling depression with her review of Ryan’s Daughter. She helped ruin Orson Welles and the piece that did it, “Raising Kane,” showed lack of ethics, as did her stint in Hollywood, as did her rave over the rough cut for Nashville. She palled around with filmmakers, tuts Dargis, as though friendships with Woody Allen and Robert Altman kept Kael from hating Stardust Memories or 3 Women--the latter judgment prompting Altman to scream at her in the middle of an airport. (Altman got over it; Allen did not.) Others fault her for lack of loyalty to directors we now idolize. She never expounded “a theory, a system, or even a consistent set of principles,” points out A.O. Scott. And my response is, “well, thank god for that.” But the question also arises, is that the highest goal of criticism? Start Your Own -Ism?" — Self-Styled Siren

From the Siren's superb double-barrelled review of the Wolcott and Kael books. I've been amazed at the amount of sniping at Kael along the lines of "she was wrong about such-and-such", as if it were her job to get anybody's opinion right but her own. Who would they have her be in agreement with? Themselves, naturally, but even if she devoted herself to agreeing with person A, she would probably find herself in disagreement with person B and quickly run afoul of the old adage about not being able to please everyone all of the time. The worst thing you can say about a critic is not: she doesn't agree with me, but: she is not in agreement with herself. And Kael got herself right about 99% of the time.

INTERVIEW: Justin Timberlake

“I’ve been really, really lucky,” says Justin Timberlake, sitting back on a sofa at the Ritz Carlton in Battery Park, on the Southern most tip of Manhattan. “Because I look back and I don’t think I’m the most talented singer, or dancer or actor. I don’t think I’m that good. It just takes this inner head-down type of thing. That will-to-achieve was the other half of why things probably happened for me. It takes balls."

Oh to be in possession of Justin Timberlake’s balls. Let’s not be greedy. Just one would suffice to rescue the average Englishman from the confines of Prufrockish self-doubt, and propel him, blinking, towards the klieg lights of Grammy-winning pop superstardom. Two of those beauties beneath the bonnet and you would in all likelihood now be transitioning — via a successful clothing line, golf course, restaurant and vodka brand — towards the megawatt beneficence of movie stardom, as Timberlake is now.

“Its kind of like being on a rollercoaster,” he says. “ You don’t know when that rollercoaster is going to end, so you realise that enjoying every single loop and every left and right turn is the fun of it. You just get to a point — I feel like I’ve been through it in the last year or two — which is: you realize that who you are is not what you do” Timberlake presents a personable, even placid exterior. For someone who once sang “I'll let you whip me if I misbehave” on ‘Bringing Sexy Back’, he’s the politest sex God you ever could hope to meet, dressed head-to-toe in black like a studly waiter, with smooth, babyish skin, and pale blue eyes. “I feel that I’m painfully normal,” he says. “Other than the fact that I have an extremely aspirational profession.”

Only the worry lines on his forehead give some clue to the duck legs paddling furiously beneath the waterline. He peppers me with questions about the screening of the film I attended the night before. “Was Craig’s score on the film? They just did all the color. They ’re just doing all the sound mixing right now, which I think is a very integral part of the film. To hear the time going – ft ftf ft ft ft – and also the score. I’ve heard some of Craig’s score. It’s beautiful.”

— from my interview with Justin Timberlake in The Times

REVIEW: In Time (dir. Niccol)

In Time has such a rich premise — a future in which the poor run out of time at 25, and the rich stay 25 forever — that it is at least 20 minutes before you notice it's as dead as a Dodo. The film was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, whose fascination with fake utopias (he directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show) here furnishes him with a world divided, as has been traditional since the time of H G Wells, into the Haves and the Have Nots, with the Have Nots haggling for extra time via a device on their wrist — 'Got a minute?" ask the beggars on the street — and the Haves swanning around tony mansions, looking beautiful and 25 forever. Time is quite literally money. It looks like the longest credit card commercial you ever saw, the styling at its densest in the exquisite, paradisal form of Amanda Seyfried, wearing a Louise Brooks bob and Le Louboutin heels, in which she teeters heroically, like a refugee model, while fleeing the film's villains. There are three of them — a blonde one, a dark one, and Pete from Mad Men — all showing up for chases duties on a rotation scheme. They are first sign that the film is losing forward puff, the clincher being a plot that, for lack of anything better to do, devolves into an attempt to Overturn the Order of Things — viva la revolucion! — in order to get back to the pre-lapserian state we all enjoyed before the movie's writers came up with their bright idea in the first place. Never trust a movie whose second half basically entails undoing it's first. It's like someone arriving at a party with the announcement they're leaving — the conversation can't settle. Which is a shame because the first half has a nicely concealed satirical sting, at its sharpest in the scene where Timberlake, being shown his table in a fancy restaurant, is gently corrected by a waitress: she can tell he's ghetto, because he does everything so quickly. I'd never thought about this before but but's true: rich lives run slower, although they affect rush as a way of appearing not too ostentatiously idle. Much like In Time, in fact, which does a perfect impersonation of action-movie kinetics without proceeding an inch. C-

REVIEW: Lucking out (Wolcott)

I tore through James Wolcott's Lucking Out after managing to get my hands on a copy earlier this week — it took me three nights. I knew I was going to love the writing, Wolcott's prose inspiring in me the same gobsmacked awe that I get watching Chinese gymnasts and Grand Slam tennis champs. Responding to Patti Smith, the prose of Normal Mailer, Talking Heads, David Lynch, porn, Balanchine, Wolcott maps his own synapses with such a heady mixture of pinpoint accuracy and wind-blown abandon, that you don't have time to be astonished, for here comes some fresh wonder down the pike: "the women women in particular suggested minor characters in Dawn Powell novels who had slipped down several rungs in life and were left with nothing but late innings rituals and brief flurries of bother"; (his co-inhabitants at the Latham Hotel) "every phrase quivered like the handle of a knife whose blade has just lodged in the tree bark" (Kael). There's something like that on every page — a Federesque barrage of aces. What stops his writing from descending into mere Fine Writing — or, since Wolcott is too energetic a talent for silver-birch finery, the hyper-caffeinated rock-press equivalent, distracted by its own snarl in the bath-room mirror — are his sure, unshakable rhythms, and the simpatico match-up between his prose and his subjects. In each case, he locks into some obstreperous vitality in his subjects — a gnarly, wriggling life force — and then proceeds to write like a man possessed.

"Patti already has her stage persona pencil-sharpened into a self-conscious, couldn't-care-less wild child, playing with a zipper like a teenage boy with a horny itch, pistoning her hips, hocking an amoeba blob of spit between songs, scratching her breast as if addressing a stray thought, and, during the incantatory highs, spreading her fingers like a preacher woman summoning the spirits from the Pere Lachaise graveyard where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde were buried to rise and reclaim their former glory."

Notice how, at the very point where most writers would be sneaking off for a well-deserved fag break, Wolcott whips one more delightful image out of the bag — the resurrection of Morrison and Wilde — like a sealion ending its balancing act with one final nudge, sending the ball flying into the delighted crowd. Being this deeply embedded in both the world and one's own reactions to it — a double patrol of two equally fierce perimeters — is hard, and he makes it look easy. Maybe we have New York to thank. "If nothing else the seventies in New York taught me situational awareness, a vital attribute for every slow-moving mammal prone to daydreaming." This book is a must for every such mammal.

Travis Bickle is dead

From my piece for Slate about the accelerated careers of today's young stars:—

"You remember child stars: those tap-dancing, ringlet-haired moppets, shoved onto stage by their mothers with a bright smile on their faces that, somewhere past the age of 12, required a cocaine habit to properly maintain. By contrast, the new generation are remarkable for their minimal flame-out rate, aerodynamic flight paths and Powerpoint career plans. They didn’t need mom to elbow them onstage. Drawn by the ghostly, pixillated light of the Mickey Mouse Club, like little Heather Rourke in Poltergeist, they heeded Hollywood’s siren call themselves and, newly arrived, immediately locked into Auteurist orbit. Think of Hailee Stanfeld holding her own in the Coen’s cussed remake of True Grit, Kristen Stewart narrowly surviving David Fincher’s Panic Room, Chloe Moretz slicing and dicing her way through drug dealers in Kick Ass, and now appearing in the new Scorsese film—the model for this kind of x-rated child performance being, of course, Jodie Foster's child prostitute Iris, ducking the arterial gouts at the end of Taxi Driver age 12. The Coens. Fincher. Scorsese. These are not kiddie directors. These are not kiddie careers. They are adult careers. They’re just happening sooner.

The irony is that if you ask any young actor worth their salt which filmmaking decade they most revere, the answer is almost unanimous—the seventies—but most of the actors that decade turned into stars had been lying in wait for some time: the young turks of the counter-culture were decidedly long in the tooth. “Taxi Driver is the ultimate independent-movie performance,” Leonardo Di Caprio told GQrecently. “Playing a character like Travis Bickle is every young actors wet dream” but De Niro was 33 when he appeared in that movie, having spent most of his twenties scrounging a living from the dinner theatre circuit, making movies that couldn’t even find distributors, and gluing the windows of his one-room walk-up together to keep the New York winters out. The stew of alienation and resentment that propelled Travis Bickle across the screen was very real. Gene Hackman, meanwhile, spent most of his twenties in the Marine Corps, serving as a radio field operator, and later working as a New York doorman before getting his break in movies—he was 37 by the time he appeared in Bonnie & Clyde and 41 in The French Connection. Robert Duvall was 41 by the time he got his big break in The Godfather, after serving as a Private in the US Army and worked as a post office clerk. Dustin Hoffman had worked as a restaurant coat-check, a typist with the Yellow Pages, and a stringer of Hawaiian Leis, and was 30 when he appeared in The Graduate—a good nine years beyond graduation. Is it any wonder that when placed next to that lot, the performances of today’s young stars can feel experientally thin, both too smooth and too strenuous in their search for imported texture, edge, grit? “The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life and you learn to use it in creating the character you're working on,” said Brando of the Method. “You learn to dig into your unconscious and make use of every experience you ever had.” What experiences can these young actors draw on, besides that of having been stars their entire life?

This moebius paradox has, in turn, become the dominant theme of today’s prize performances. For the most part, Di Caprio’s recent performances have felt like grim-faced self-expurgations, fretful with a young man’s self-war— he hasn’t taken an audience along for the ride since Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, a role he disdains—the exception being the reel of Shutter Island, when you finally felt his protracted apprenticeship with Scorsese paying off. But it’s no accident that Shutter Island shares with Inception a mazy preoccupation with veils of fantasy, and a quixotic search for the real. It is the theme, too, of Black Swan, in which Portman’s ballerina, lacking the experience that would round out her performance as the black swan, tries to speed-dial it, like Trinity in the Matrix downloading helicopter piloting skills. That’s why Black Swan was such a pivotal film for young Hollywood: over-compensating for experiential thinness was what the film was about. It’s safe to say, in fact, that one consequence of the Tween revolution is to sound the death knell of Method acting. In which case, Gosling’s advice is sound: actors should accelerate into the curve, not resist it. Travis Bickle is dead. The world belongs to Iris." — Slate