I sure am blue....

Roy Scheider died Sunday night... I heard about it yesterday. He was 75. He was a great presence and power of example as an actor: not a show-off, nothing to prove, no chip on his shoulder - the panther-like grace with which he moved in ALL THAT JAZZ or as Jane Fonda's smooth pimp in KLUTE was just how he was, or could be. There was no "Love me! Love Me!" grandstanding with this man.

L.A. scribe Kim Morgan has written a fine eulogy:

"Even with his dazzling, womanizing, pill popping triumph in All That Jazz and that iconic showdown with the world’s most famous shark, I can’t think of any bells and whistles and "I’m walking here!" moments associated with Scheider. He typically wasn’t a scene chewer and chose to mark his territory with a unique, subtle (and uniquely subtle) power that was so world-weary and frequently moving (even when playing a psycho) that he resonated with a curious mixture of timeless recognition and absolute mystery."

Damn right. I could write a 30 page paper on what the climactic "Bye Bye Life" number in ALL THAT JAZZ meant to me as an alienated 14-16 year old. But this is time to remember Roy Scheider, not my own grandiloquent teenage melancholia. Let's leave it at this: Scheider's generosity of spirit in that role was such that he reached down and handed me a path out of my self-absorbed depression. If he could be that cool, calm and collected while singing a joyful adieu to his own life in tight pants and open chest hair glitter shirt, then who was I--with my whole life ahead of me--to be cowering inside at home in a haze of self-centered fear and free-floating anxiety? In other words, watching Roy Scheider, I learned to dance.

Like a great older brother or cool father, Scheider showed strength without bullying, grace without mincing, and style without pomposity. Most of all, in those tired eyes we saw a reflection of what's best in ourselves--a hard-won universal love--and his Cheshire cat grin, which only got wider even as he danced the mashed potato into the hungry jaws of death. All who needed sustenance were welcome to follow his warm light through the darkened terrors of the deep. We did, we do... we will.

Alba and her Bow

This is a still from Jessica Alba's new movie, THE EYE. It's the story of a blind violinist (Alba, pictured) who gets second sight when she gets an eye transplant, courtesy a dead grown-up version of the Osment boy in 6TH SENSE.

Yeah it's not supposed to be very good and yeah, I have no intention of seeing it, but there's something very "acidemic" about this picture above. It's no big mystery how foxy violin virtuosos all put themselves on their classical album covers in order to sell more more more! What is it about the mix of bombshell sex appeal and high-fallutin' classical music chops that makes for such a dizzying high-low combo of attraction and art?

Here's a confession: I'm incredibly attracted to these foxy violinists. I don't buy their albums, but when I see their CD covers as I walk past a display, I have to make a concerted effort not to fall to my knees in a mix of envy, adoration, longing and resentment.

Be that as it may... we know Alba is no real life virtuoso violinist, but I would willingly hush hush and tut tut the bloggers who relish badmouthing her. She's perfectly fine as a b-movie actress, and that in itself is not an easy stunt to keep pulling off. Movie sets can be hurtful, dull, maddening places. It takes more discipline and patience than most of us have to keep your head above water. Alba's no worse than most and better than quite a few bombshells in Tinseltown's bombshell busting history. What she is, I'd guess, is consistent and reliable, and that's not easy. Sometimes having less acting talent may mean survival as opposed to psychotic druggie breakdowns ala the underused and misunderstood bombshell geniuses like the Monroes and Lohans we are so collectively fond of stoning with our bloodthirsty tabloid righteousness.

Of course that's all easy for me to say, since the only film I've seen that Alba has appeared in was 2005's INTO THE BLUE, but that was at a press screening on a hot summer's day, and need I add that film has JOSH BROLIN?!?!?!?!?! I LOVED IT! And If it wasn't for Scott Walker I might even watch it again... but I wont, not ever, because he dumps a whole kilo of cocaine into the water rather than let Scott Caan have it. What a douche. (2010 Postscript - Turns out I bought the blu-ray after all, so there you go!)

Move into the Moment.... with Morphine and Whiskey!

"I approach each thing for the sake of itself. I wish I could do in my life what I can do in my work, which is to really live in the moment. In my life, the past frightens me, the future frightens me. When I'm working, I'm all there." - Sidney Lumet

Perhaps it's age, perhaps it's a few years of living without television, but lately good acting in a film gets me drunk as wine. Sidney Lumet's 1962 film version of Eugene O'Neill's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is something I'd heard was fantastic, but loooong, and set at the turn of the century, and all talk. I had to wait until I was old! OLD!

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT's dialogue flows like mad poetry jazz out of the mouths of his hopped-up Irish American intellectual alcoholics. I'd heard from somewhere that the only person who could compare with Brando in the original run of STREETCAR was ROBARDS in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. Damn! I wish I wrote down who said that, so I could say: "You were right!"

Robards doesn't knock it out of the park, he eats the park and then starts chomping down main street, then he stops and shifts to sublime pathos and suddenly the park is back where it was and he's gentle as a flower - just like the real life drunks you know and love and then hate and fear and then love again. But in the movie version it's not just Robards who's a big drunk sensation it's a calm young Dean Stockwell as the consumption-stricken mystic poet younger brother; Ralph Richardson is also superb as the miserly father, an Irish actor (O'Neil's real-life father got rich touring with THE MASTER OF BALLANTREE) warped into self-defeating behaviors by childhood memories of poverty. And Kate Hepburn. Oh god what a fantastical monster-dragon of an addict she becomes! She nails it pinning and screaming to the floor (I'm having a panic attack as I write this in her honor), she disembowels it and strips the meat off for soup and then reincarnates (stop panicking, Erich). Okay, roll the picture.

I suppose this means in order to be truly brilliant you have to be insane or alcoholic or both. It also means you are a lot of the times merely annoying as you drift off into the same soliloqy as the night before... but then there's a flashing moment of brilliance or sensational warmth that keeps your co-dependent family and friends smeared to your side. It's a continual dance of deception that, illuminated in the powerhouse text of O'Neill, begs the question: what is art but the smoke and mirror conjuring of alcoholics and dopers wishing to make their living room elephant "magically" disappear?

"No Continuity - No Interest:" Re-Visiting Godard's PASSION

One of the reader blurbs you find on the imdb.com page for Godard's PASSION (1982) is Eliot Gordon's: "Turned off VCR midway - no interest." The word VCR is, perhaps, key here as the film is world's better on DVD, remastered as part of the new Godard: Director's Series set which includes DETECTIVE, FIRST NAME: CARMEN and OH WOE IS ME. Along with the "Zero stars" ratings are Godard champions over there, of course, who cite that art shouldn't always be "fun." What? In the right mood this film is frickin' HILARIOUS!

My Argentine ex-wife raved about PASSION for years so when I bought her the VHS back in the late 1990s I was really expecting something. Instead I was totally turned off; the reason probably had a lot to with the picture being murky and badly cropped. In the intervening years I've learned a lot about Godard and years of therapy have made me much more open to modernism. I'd use a Zen enlightenment as a metaphor here: Godard's Brechtian "fourth-wall" self-reflexivity functions perfectly as a koan, the unanswerable riddle by which the student can free themselves of entrapping mindsets and let themselves dissolve into satori.

Of course as a cinema fan you invariably come to a Godard film with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography. Godard assumes this and intentionally screws with your expectations. The issue is, how dogmatically do we adhere to the "rightness" of these expectations? When you adhere too closely to predetermined narrative formulations, you have cliche' -- when you deliberately screw with them, you have modernism.

Here's what I mean: you see a knight on a horse trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden--thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: will you see this chick being abducted? Will you see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense. You fear and hate the knight and want to save the maiden, without even knowing the story (maybe she's a demon in disguise, who knows?) Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera, and the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman then she goes climbing up into the lighting rigging so the knight can't reach her, so he dismounts and goes to have a smoke.

There's two ways you can react to all that: one is to be angry or frustrated, to think you are "missing" something. Are they filming a movie within a movie here, or is this real? Why is she still running if she's not on camera? Who's filming this second movie about making the movie? The other is to grasp the ambiguity, the modern art/Zen response Godard is creating, and thus to laugh at your own predisposition to get so absorbed into narrative that you fight its cessation. For this second response, you are freed by realizing that the meltdown between the film and the film-within-the-film is intended to provide this response. Can you let go of your expectations, your obsessive need for character arcs, story lines, and dramatic resolution? If you can, you begin to see the ways film tricks you. Can you stand to watch stock characters and cliche types get melted down into meaninglessness? Will this technique frustrate you beyond endurance, or set you free from your steel trap mind?

Another example of Godard's humor involves a very young Isabelle Huppert as a a rhetoric-spouting worker on roller skates, a sort of loose riff on Agnes Varda's VAGABOND, who disrupts life at the factory at which she is employed. Michel Piccoli owns the factory and refuses to pay her back wages so she hangs around and is chased by cops. In one scene, she's rollerskating around the factory floor as others are working and discussing with the director how "films never show people working" and then adds "The factories won't allow it." The ironic joke here (obviously there is a camera filming her saying this in the factory surrounded by workers) is not stated, not spelled out in big American letters, you either grab it and move on or not. Godard is not going to stop and underline the script for your with a yellow marker, you American fascist swine!

Perhaps one needs a firm sense of the deadpan and absurd (watch some Marx Brothers or Police Squad movies beforehand) to appreciate PASSION's wry humor. If you get a headache from it, maybe you're holding onto your cinematic signifiers with the tenacity of Margaret Dumont; you have to just let them go. It's only then--Godard implies--that you can begin to see that all the world's a cave and all your presuppositions merely shadows on the wall. Be aware of your brain's trickery, its constant bending of the chaos of life into a 3-act structure, and stroll out of the cave. PASSION is a finger pointing towards the exit. If you just look at the finger you may well be bored out of your mind, but if you follow the direction, you might finally get to see the sun. A lot of folks are so afraid of that sun they deny it even exists. But it does, so drop your crucifixion shears and hobble along to PASSION!