Impossible remakes

Of late, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of anachronistic remakes, ones that would either improve the film in question or else shed new light on a familiar actor. I’d like to lead with two, and I hope you get the idea enough to participate in the game while you’re getting a break from family:

• Dirty Harry starring (the young) Jack Nicholson: Clint Eastwood seems to me like he’s trying to do a Jack Nicholson impression, except without the in-the-bones nihilism that would make it convincing. Every single scene, Jack Nicholson would’ve done qualitatively better — especially the part where the killer is making him run from phone booth to phone booth. Jack Nicholson’s “I sincerely don’t give a fuck but I’m going to do it anyway” would’ve been much preferable to … whatever it was Clint Eastwood was doing. By the way: what an absolutely shitty movie. This is what passes for an iconic classic?
• Raging Bull starring Jimmy Stewart: What sums up Jimmy Stewart better than impotent rage?

Inglourious Basterds

My expectations could not have been lower when I walked into this movie — the premise seemed ridiculous, and the preview is frankly terrible and obnoxious. Yet by the end, I was convinced that it was among Tarantino’s very best, perhaps even his best since Pulp Fiction. Certainly it’s one of his funniest, and it also didn’t fall prey to the pacing issues that made me keep checking how much time was left in Jackie Brown and Death Proof. It’s two and a half hours, but it didn’t feel unusually long at all. I recommend it highly.

Small press success story

Via IMDB, I stumbled across the following fun fact: Shane Jones’s Light Boxes, published by Publishing Genius, recently had its movie rights purchased by Spike Jonze. This is a huge deal for Publishing Genius, which my friend Adam Robinson founded a few years ago, and will hopefully give PG and small presses more generally closer to the amount of credibility they deserve.

Strategy in French New Wave Cinema

A few nights ago, I watched Last Year at Marienbad. I enjoyed it, but I became morbidly fascinated by the game that keeps coming up. It consists of taking objects such as cards and laying them out in four rows, with 1, 3, 5, and 7 objects, respectively. Players alternate picking up objects; they can take as many as they want, as long as they take them all from the same row. Whoever picks up the last one loses.

What makes it so interesting to me is that the character who introduces the game never loses. He says it’s possible for him to lose, but he just never does. When people start to suspect that whoever goes first automatically wins, he lets the other person go first and still wins. I suspect that he wins every time because his opponents are always distracted by extrinsic things, like the suspicion that he must be running some kind of scam, and don’t really think about the strategy. That’s a major advantage, but he still must have some particular strategy, right? What am I missing (other than the point of the movie)?

UPDATE: Minimal research indicates that they’re playing a version of Nim.

Favorite movies

If you had to name your five favorite movies as of right now, what would they be? Let’s say you don’t have to put them in a particular order unless you want to.

Mine, unordered, would be as follows:

• Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman)

• Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson)
• 8 1/2 (Fellini)
• Magnolia (PT Anderson)
• Synecdoche, NY (Charlie Kaufman)

(Tomorrow, maybe they’ll be different.)

A quick thought on Woody Allen’s latest

Who knew that Woody Allen had time to sit around watching House marathons on cable?

A minute with Godard

A Rambling Post About 1970s American Film

Last night I watched John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.  It was at the time, in 1976, a spectacular failure of a movie, surviving in theaters roughly six days, but has since been embraced by the film community. As a lover of 1970s cinema in general, I figured it was my duty to watch it. While I can understand its failure to gain an audience (the point of this post isn’t to comment on the film, but I will say I liked it — though perhaps only understood what the hell Cassavetes was shooting for after watching the interviews on the DVD’s special features), the full extent of its failure caused me to wonder when things started to change in terms of the reception of high-quality, edgy cinema in America.

The ’70s didn’t get off to a good start. The top two grossing movies in 1970 were, respectively, Love Story and Airport, neither of which you really ever have a reason to watch now — the year was slightly redeemed by the presence of MASH at number three. In 1971, things were a bit better. The top-grossing film was Fiddler on the Roof and third-highest was The French Connection. (Number two was Billy Jack (!!!).) In 1972 you had the undisputed reign of The Godfather — nothing else comes even close to it in terms of box-office pull. Then in 1973 you have a cluster of classics all at the top: The Exorcist, The Sting, Papillon . . . and, of course, Magnum Force.

So far, pretty good. Things take a noticeable turn, however, in 1974. The top movie of the year, The Towering Inferno, wasn’t awful, but certainly not something you’re likely to have near the top of your Netflix queue anytime soon unless you’re a Paul Newman or Steve McQueen (or, for the few & the proud, William Holden) completist. Rounding out the top five are the execrable films Earthquake and The Trial of Billy Jack.  If the year is rescued at all it is by the two enduring comedic classics, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.  All this may be enough to indict 1974 as the turning point, but it is not enough until we note, too, that The Godfather II was only the sixth-highest grossing film.

Things kind of returned to form in ‘75, with Jaws, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (ugh), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest & (shockingly) Dog Day Afternoon dominating theaters. They’re not all great, but each kind of “special” in their own way. I will submit, however, that 1975 was but the last gasp after the debilitating cock punch in 1974.

1976 may have given us Network, one of my favorite films of the late-70s, which incidentally did not crack the top-ten grossing films of the year, but it also birthed the Rocky series. Sure, the first one isn’t bad (neither is the second, really). But, aren’t they forever tainted now? 1976 also gave us All the President’s Men, which I watched again recently, and it just felt like it had aged as badly as Robert Redford’s face. The only two notable movies in the top-ten grossing films are The Omen and, of course, The Enforcer.

After this begins the age of the super-duper blockbuster, beginning with Star Wars and Close Encounters (1977), Superman and Grease (1978) — the highlight of either years being, respectively, Annie Hall and Every Which Way But Loose. In 1979 you have the spectacular death rattle that was Alien, Apocalypse Now, and The Muppet Movie. And then, like Keyser Soze, the ’70s were gone, replaced immediately by the 1980 onslaught of The Empire Strikes Back, Stir Crazy, 9 to 5, and Airplane! Now, yes, all of these delighted me as a child, but I can’t say I’ll be too disappointed if I never see any of them again, though surely TBS will test my resolve soon enough with a showing of 9 to 5.  Indeed, 1980 could not even be rescued by Clyde the orangutan, as even at the ripe age of six I was disappointed by the misguided sequel, Any Which Way You Can.

EDIT: I realized after submitting this post that it did not, in fact, have any point.  No upshot.  No argument, as such.  So what am I saying, really?  Basically, that 1973 was a watershed year for high-quality cinema that was eagerly watched by the typical American moviegoer, that 1974 was the cockpunch that knocked the life out this phenomenon — which means that while there were signs of life between 1975 and 1979, it had been dead for a while before it was finally buried in 1980.  This is not to say high-quality cinema ceased to exist.  Simply that the overall cultural & economic embrace of high-quality cinema in America did, and in large part contributed to the rise of the low-to-middlebrow films that spurred the massive growth of the major studios through the 80s and 90s.  I make no claims to originality in this thesis.

Why I don’t drive

From Godard’s Weekend:

This looks promising

The Girlfriend has alerted me to the existence of The Auteurs, a site that allows you to build your own online film library, with a strong bias toward art and foreign films.