Thrower of Tantrums: LA BELLE NOISEUSE, THE ROCKER

One day he'll admit he can't draw, but not today

What does Jacques Rivette's LA BELLE NOISEUSE and THE ROCKER have in common? That's right: they both depend on nudity for substance, and they both suck. You heard me.


I hate to Emperor's New Clothes it with Rivette; the man makes a pretty picture, and there's some great subtle naturalistic work from Jane Birkin (Married to Serge Gainsbourg, she's the ideal rich artist's nurturing aesthete hostess) and I hear good things about JULIE AND CELINE GO BOATING, but it's not in my region on DVD nor ever on TCM. And this film is a pretty, airy bore; the worst part is - the "artist" played by Michel Piccoli can't even draw!

We see him spend so much time stalling and meandering around his big studio--prepping surfaces, choosing brushes, wiping off the flop sweat, laying out paper and pontificating evasively about passion, positioning his model (Emmanuelle Béart) around in different uncomfortable misogynistic positions--that we start to expect something pretty good. After all, this is a movie about an artist-- allegedly--and if you've seen any of those Picasso movies you know how fun and rewarding it can be watching a great master paint, but then when Piccoli goes to dip pen into ink or get a paint brush going, we see that he has absolutely no skill whatsoever. The guy who does his painting for him (we see the hand) is either playing possum or totally talentless. We cringe in pain as the dry quill of an ink-dipped pen scratches ineffectually at the paper, making a horrible noise, like cat claws on a mirror; we cry "why not use charcoal?" and it takes him an hour to do so. Finally there's a change of scene and when we next see the studio there's some decent sketches on the walls, no doubt the result of a quickly hired assistant working through lunch. Even so, the hands, feet, and heads are merde. 

Dat ass tho...

In the end Piccoli decides he's finished, and the final painting is a pathetic rendering of Béart--one of the most beautiful women in the cinema--crouched in a "pose of the child" yoga position, head, hands, feet obscured, disproportioned, the sort of thing any decent artist could draw from memory, with their eyes closed, in about five minutes just thinking of Picasso's 1902 "Blue Nude.", but it took Piccoli at least a week. Even Piccoli admits it sucks, and everyone kind of tip-toes around the fact at the celebration party... yes mighty Emperor, another... 'fine' set of clothes.

Watching a three-year old kid finger-painting would have been much more interesting, yet the film critics unanimously praise the hell out of this film. Maltin gives it four stars, the ultimate sign of bourgeois pantheon respect.

Which brings me to THE ROCKER-- a film so inane that even its points of tantrum don't make sense. The plot has Rainn Wilson having huge outbreaks of purposeless anger because he was kicked out of Vesuvius, his 1980's hair metal band, right as they hit the big time. We hardly blame Vesuvius, for he is a raging moron. Now it's twenty years later and his co-worker at some dingy office park is boasting about "waiting in line over night" to get the new Vesuvius CD... bragging about how great it is, etc., until Rainn attacks him and gets fired. But hey, some struggling youngster band wants his help -they need a drummer, or something.

Now, if the writers of this turkey had ever spent a single day outside of their Hollywood soap bubble they would know that:

a) Nobody waits in line for a CD anymore, and all those songs would have been long ago leaked to mp3 swap sites, if anyone cared.
b) Nobody would care, because 1980s hair metal is completely irrelevant outside of MTV reality shows.
c) Any musician who was almost famous is not going to work somewhere for twenty years without everyone in his entire office knowing about the band he played for that he 'purposely left' because he didn't want that level of sell-out fame.

Also - as someone who happens to have been in a band twenty years ago, blah blah, I can assure you that no "real" rocker ever has to be talked into playing... ever. if there's an instrument already plugged in, he will play it. If not, he is not a rocker, just afraid of revealing his lack of chops (I know this as someone who happens to have a major lack of chops). But our man Rainn needs to be convinced in a long, meandering talking scene, to open for Vesuvius. Whenever Rainn gets his head out of his ass for a nanosecond, we're supposed to stand up and cheer, like we're an audiences of dads with Hard Rock Cafe shirts on, lifting up our lighters and shouting: "Woo-Hoooo!"

Then he ruins the gig by showboating and then when they get a big break due to a viral video, he acts like a jackass - "catching up" as it were, on the gross frat boy hotel-thrashing decadence he missed out on as a youth (throwing TVs out the window and such). There's nothing "cool" about throwing furniture out the window of a hotel, and I should know, because I was stuck with the tab once (I was the only guy with a credit card). Real cool, guy. 

And if his outdated and inconsistent destructo habits weren't cringe-inducing enough, Rainn also embarrasses his much younger bandmates by treating every new event on the road with gaping dumb tourist pride that would make even that Hard Rock T-shirt rockin' dad cringe in embarrassment: "(our) first groupies!!" he shouts when two hotties want to buy the band beers. Yeah, dillweed, shouting that will really get you laid. When they go into a fancy recording studio he has to gloat and wheel around on the office chairs like a monkey finally sprung from the zoo. Real cool, guy. Vesuvius sure was short-sighted to 86 you. 

He's the sort of guy who ruins acid parties because he can't let a single experience happen without cheapening it through audio commentary, like those parents who have to point out everything to their kids "Isn't this ride fun, Caitlin? Caitlin, do you see the dinosaur?" Dude, try and transcend the need to ruin every transcendental group mind moment via egoic mind chatter!

Sorry if this rambles... I had to get it off my chest. The thing ultimately here is the sad gap between insulated Hollywood filmmakers and the real world they hope to depict and hence woo to the box office. These "players" of the industry spend so much time on the phone, making deals and making meetings, that they completely forget what "reality" is like. They don't bother to investigate, or to "feel" on a tangible level. Their egos are so amok that they genuinely think they have something to say about areas of art in which they have absolutely no experience. Have they been to a rock show? No, they just think a high school battle of the bands SCHOOL OF ROCK-style story fused to an 'Sandler-esque man-child idiot abroad' redemption comedy is a classic synergy fusion.

This is what separates real craftsman like Richard Linklater and James Mangold--who have a keen eye for life as it "really happens"-- from the hacks for whom reality is just a form of TV show not vice versa. Art is, ultimately, an expression of the divine in man. Put a camera in the hands of a real auteur and you get something incredible; the artist as a conduit to the eternal truth beyond symbolic differentiation. Put a camera in the hands of a Rivette or the oafs of Hollywood responsible for tripe like THE ROCKER, and what you got is an expression of infant in man, the artist as a magnificent thrower of tantrums.

END NOTE: On the plus side, both women in LA BELLE are amazing and in THE ROCKER we've got a new slacker-star in the form of a pleasantly low key musician-actor named Teddy Geiger- his songs and voice are great! Also Christina Applegate is fun as his mom. If the movie had been about their relationship and his awkward romance with bassist-babe Emma Stone, and they got rid of Rainn altogether, it would have maybe been pretty good. But no, America needs to see shirtless flabby men acting stupid... no wonder the French revere Jerry Lewis. At least he was, how you say, sexually active?

Rod La Rocque, you were just born in the wrong century! (THE LOCKED DOOR - 1929)

I've been going nuts with my new DVD recorder, and burning my way through the recent flurry of pre-code Stanwycks on TCM. One maligned but lovely item - THE LOCKED DOOR (1929), one of Babs' first major speaking roles, sticks out not because of her performance, particularly, but because of Rod La Rocque as the requisite debauched, womanizing cad!

The only review I could find of LOCKED online is from Dennis Schwartz who rates it a C:

The melodrama suffers from the static, stage-like look of early sound movies; it was a time when how to use sound was first being developed and still had many kinks to be worked out. Decades later when Stanwyck became a Hollywood legend, she was asked about The Locked Door and quipped: “They never should’ve unlocked the damned thing.”

There's no denying its got its "kinks" but I've got a soft spot a mile deep for these old early creaks and hisses. That crude sound is an ear into a bygone age, far more bygone than just a year or so later, when sound caught up with itself and we could no longer hear the air or marvel at the sopping wet letters and telegrams. LOCKED DOOR is clearly a 'filmed play' and probably originally done on a bi-level trick stage, the kind where actors weaving in and out of closets and unlocked doors to hide from one another. They got that a lot in those days, especially for old dark house mysteries and bed-hopping farce. Here we have a little of both: the old dark art deco-gothic house redecorated as a giant bachelor apartment (danger, maidens!) vs. the spacious pre-war (as in Civil) mansion all stuffed with flowers and marble for multi-generations of family to worry about their honor in. With such a fuss made about who was photographed where and with whom we get a glimpse of a whole way of life that would be eradicated when the boys came home after the Next World War and found outdated morality waiting for them back at their multi-generational homes; they left in droves and moved into prefabricated worlds of the future where they could have sex all the time without small town gossip. The 'burbs, baby! Now you know the whole story. 

In these early sound films however, the importance of outdated, choking morality was still the stuff of woman's pictures, which were huge at the time (I'm reading Thomas Doherty's excellent Pre-Code Hollywood right now, so consider him referenced), and most of the plots revolve around vicious old bats running free-loving hotties out of town--or, if the film is set in the city, avenging the honor of so-and-so's daughter. That's the angle of THE LOCKED DOOR, which has for its centerpiece an extended scene in louche La Roque's swanky bi-level bachelor pad, where the blackmailed Babs goes to retrieve a compromising picture (which Rod holds over her head in exchange for a tryst). See, Stanwyck was once (almost) taken advantage of by La Roque on an "outside the legal limit" party boat (all the rage during Prohibition) and the pair had their picture taken while running off the boat during a police raid (when the boat drifted inside the limit).  The picture includes indications her dress is torn, and she's hiding under Rod's overcoat. But she can explain! 

Our story picks up years later where she's wealthy and married to some taciturn duffer played by the soon-to-be-dead-from-drugs William Boyd. Rod's bought the pic to keep it out of the papers, but figures it may come in handy, when he gets real horny.

Granted, La Rocque may be the villain, but he's hilarious fun, refusing to be pigeonholed into the role of a mere mustache-twirling cad. One can imagine Monroe Owsley or Conrad Nagel in this part being just tedious, but La Rocque will have none of their mewling surliness! No catalogue of sniveling blackmailer signifiers, he! Unabashedly tall and fey, completely at ease in his body and with the then-new trappings of sound - more so than Babs at the time (though she would have the hang of it by 1931's TEN CENTS A DANCE), Rod's having a grand time.

I've never really soaked him up before, but he has a great Vincent Price-meets-Cary Grant macho fey vibe, contrasting his huge rows of teeth and ungainly tallness handled with a dancer's nimble grace and unabashedly feline purr of a voice. Whereas Babs and the rest of the cast seem to be acting out a drawing room drama, hitting their marks and speaking... clearly... and stagey, La Rocque is living his role, and his sexual ease is eye-popping. He's a complex three-dimensional villain, radiating the seductive humor and "owning my own un-okayness" of a man whose love of premarital sex, drinking, and debauchery is very anathema to its stodgy time and--rather than give them up to fit in-- he just gives up all pretense of 'decency' (yet is truly decent when push comes to shove, unlike the more surface decent folks around him, who would rather shoot a man than lose to him). Hell, when the moral code of the time is this repressed, it's almost a true free spirit's sworn duty to buck it, a lesson that prohibition was making clear to everyone).

Also worth noting is Rod's dishy rapport with his old valet (the incomparably named George Bunny), whom he treats as a co-conspiratorial equal rather than a master. A mix of Leporello from DON GIOVANNI and a faux-shocked reprobate uncle in a Phillip Barrie play, Bunny is the icing on the cake!

Proving further Rod has the truest moral code in the whole play/film, the ending has him even clearing all the suspects of his own murder, via death bed statement exonerating the guilty patriarchs around him; it's not that he fancies himself at all a knight, but as if he feels truky sorry for these uptight socialites for whom a whiff of scandal is so horrific that they run around beating people up, waving guns, pleading and hiding corpses, just to avoid a casual sexual hook-up. Better a murder than a quickie for these 'moral' types- and that is punishment enough for them. In this liberated, loosey-goosey attitude, Rod all but screams "Jesus, maybe y'all wouldn't have had to shoot me if you would all just get laid once in awhile and shut up about it!" 

Amen, Rod, that's real morality, and in just a 40 years or so you'd be a man of your time.

Rod (in bed, where else), looking and acting ten feet tall. 

the 12 Lost Grail Memes of Doom 2: The Flossening

Movieman's Dancing Image is crazy with these meme blogs, the new one is all about films you want to see but never have and aren't available on DVD, aka HOLY GRAILS. Arthur... King of the Britains...

Most of mine have been found, in just the way I want them. I knew I would never have loved LUCIFER RISING or THE HOLY MOUNTAIN on some murky pan & scan dupe, but now that I've seen them in crisp DVD glory, and stolen their subliminal editing secrets like the harp out the beanstalk, I'm ready to die in peace, knowing the dark secret of... oops, nevermind.

Anyway, see Movieman's amazing dozen, and then track back to Out 1, which gave him the original idea. Man, I've never visited Out 1 before and I'm an instant fan. They smart and use good background colors! And their trippy banner is right after my own post modern heart.

Jesus, I can't think of anything, except CUL DE SAC, which Nathaniel R. eloquently mentions and in addition tributes the lovely Francois Dorleaq" - and how does that man get those weir French curliques in there (sorry, I'm not very eloquent today, I'm withdrawing from nicotine, caffeine, morphine, benzedrine and gasoline)

Why did this Francoise Dorleaq chick have to die, why why? Why won't those idiots release Cul-de-sac? WHY? WHY? (anyway it's on dvd in other regions... does that count?)

I looked for clips of Dorleaq on youtube. What's up with this trend of making videos matching footage of stars from different epochs? Someone named Gatta Ren loves mixing Francoise footage with that doe-eyed 21st century hunk Hayden Christensen, who wasn't even born when Mmme. Dorleaq died. Somehow, for some reason, Acidemic approves:

Barbara Stanwyck in "Ten Cents a Dance"

TCM had another one of their Stanywck days today, and Tivo saved me TEN CENTS A DANCE (1931). Mighty Babs starts out a naive--though world-weary-- dance hall girl and ends up a wizened (world-wearier) dance hall girl, with a slow burn from cheery can-do happiness to furious ranting. And the dialogue sizzles with half/double entendres, as when a new dancer is explaining what the stern matron of the dance hall, Miss Blanchard, told her about dancing with the guys: "She said be very careful, but not so careful. She tole me to be inna... inamit..intimate but lady-like. To feel my way along until I got the hang of things..."

Hmm, re-reading it now, it's not so tawdry. But it's how she says it, and where she says it... in a crowded pre-code dance hall. "Feeling your way until you get the hang of things" is not only a double entendre, it's site-specific! We all snug at home and spread out in something called the suburbs don't have this problem today, but there was a time when people lived with no privacy, a time when several generations lived under the same roof and unless you were married there was no bed, however small, that wasn't guarded by at least some embittered gossipy virgin equivalent of an East German Stasi. You do the math, especially when you hear Babs explain Mrs. Blanchard's job as "keeping it hot enough to avoid bankruptcy and cold enough to avoid raids."

The whole issue of censorship codes and codes of conduct for ladies and gentlemen itself was, these films slyly reveal, once not fixed in the stars. Nowadays we're so trained by moralist abuse that we never even think, for example, to whip off our clothes and have sex in public, or grind up against a sailor during one a' dem slow ballads, leading to him perhaps climaxing right there on the dance floor. Apparently sex once surrounded us from all sides in ways long forgotten, as in 1934 the mangy Bigfoot of "the code" dammed the river of Hollywood history, obscuring both sides of what should be an uninterrupted stream of sexual how-to's and do's and doesn'ts.

Take the loser Babs weds, for example, played by the odious Monroe Owsley. Babs hasn't been schooled in how to spot a social climbing drifter, so she passes over the amiable, slightly soused rich business guy bachelor who "sees something very special in her," and marries a talentless Mr. Ripley who proceeds to insult her cooking, belittle her choice in wall colors and insult her dresses as she scrimps and saves on the nickels he throws her from the job she got him. Naturally when he embezzles money for his social climbing (he's a terrible bridge player) it's saintly Miss Stanwyck who goes back to the bachelor--now her husband's boss--to "earn" her husband's freedom.

This old warhorse must have been traveling up and down the states for years in that old version of pre-code cinema, roadshow theater, because every situation is played exactly how long it should and in all the right places to get maximum laughs and steakless sizzle. Personally, I love early sound theater-cinema like this, 1929-1931; the boxy static sound carries an oceanic charge; it always feels like everyone is underwater, like the oxygen is richer. It probably was. They have energy to go through long scenes without getting tired... or bored. Amphetamine flowed wild and free.

What makes TEN CENTS so good, too, is the complexity of Stanwyck's character and the importance of not judging by appearances. We're all set to moan and groan through a standard soap opera plot (Owsley is introduced with typical 'student' style nobility and ambition) but as the film goes along it seems to catch wise to itself; our innocent Owsley turns very slowly into the vilest of townies, all the while becoming more and more enjoyable as an actor. Stanwyck rises up through the classes, buoyed by moxie and a lack of attachment to material things... that's right you dumb social climbing townie, in order for the hot air balloon to rise, you got to let go of all the crap your clutching. If you can do that, you can be like Stanwyck and fall asleep while waiting for the rich drunk to come home so you can borrow money for your no good husband, and you can fall asleep in a threadbare old crackhead dress and wake up in the same dress gone double knit and cleaner and even satiny, just in time for a long near-seduction scene... like the fairy godmother spiffed her up between takes.

Stanwyck makes it all work; she's the Kali goddess of modern sound cinema, dispensing hope and sweetness with the right hand and smacking you down with the left. The film starts out all stiff and jerky; all the actors (excluding the "born smart" Babs) seem microphone conscious, and slow to enunciate, trapped in dorky types - the bachelor good guy shoved into the model of a straw hat college boy slummer; the weasel Owsley starting out one of those frazzled Odets-ianly earnest strugglers. But as the film creaks along, the oil slowly starts to take hold in the gears and the creaking grows almost inaudible. As it does, and these suitors switch their stripes, Babs morphs blissfully through the six stations of the Zen soap martyr--never lapsing from her perfect love into selfishness, tears, tantrums or even a frown--and then finally, from this silent film histrionic pupae, she bursts out with that barrelhouse Babs temper at last, letting her soul take wing and giving this Ripley the what's-what in no uncertain terms!

The censorship people's mistake was in thinking ignorant equals innocent. TEN CENTS A DANCE is practically a training manual for the battle of the sexes. It might show you the "plans" for some sketchy operations (the censors were always afraid of criminals "getting ideas"), but it also makes those operations public, so they don't work anymore anyway. That's called education, you grant to-someone else giving tartuffles!

Anyway, back to the past. When those brave hippie hunters finally scared the Breen Bigfoot out of the aforementioned love stream, was the current able to catch up with itself? Were we able to catch up with sex where we left off after thirty years of incarceration? No, we forgot everything. We ran wild, like the Lord of the Flies. Then, a decade or so of free love and everyone was dying; the 1980s came rising up on the crest of foamy institutional grade soap, Nurse Ratchett played by Meg Ryan, that was our half-shelled Venus!

But my friends! Now thanks to DVD and TCM we can begin to remember when we truly had a chance to be free. While the conventions that films like TEN CENTS were mocking have come back, we can at least begin to recognize them as conventions (enforced by a controlling elite) and not human nature. Even watching the film now it's easy to be mislead by its dated surface into thinking its all grandmotherly and proper, that it's gonna bore you or try and peddle some churchin'. No! Sonny, daughter, listen up! There was a time when Grandma and grandpa did things you'd never even think of doing (thanks to the code you don't even know you can). In the pre-code era they didn't fall for the wizard of Oz smokescreen; there was no easy placebo stopgap bullshit measures, no endless retrials and postponements. Come what may, come hell or high water, (and the water came hella high in 1931) you were gettin' a legit 'happy ending.' It's that endless delay of gratification that your giant capitalist conglomerate Miss Blanchard is counting on; she ain't your mother for free you know, and sexual frustration is the cornerstone of her wobbly edifice. Now is the time to topple it! Come and get some, and watch her Ratchet-y jaw drop like a '29 stock market... until you get the hang of things!