Appreciation: Samurai 3 - Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)

Is Next Door.

Appreciation: Samurai 2 - Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955)

It is up over at the House. Check it out....

Appreciation: Samurai 1 - Musashi Miyamoto (1954)

Check out the House for the first of three appreciations covering the Samurai Trilogy.

Samurai Thought for the Day #1

Japanese samurai films tend to have something in common, and that something is loads and loads of exposition. Characters take up a lot of screen time sitting on tatami mats talking about the plot tactically and strategically. "If we do A, then they will do B, unless we do C which will probably cause them to do D" Is this something cultural? I don't know....

Wagstaff's lumber room #4

John Updike, from "Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer":

She had her abilities and her disabilities. She could not pronounce the word "realtor." She could spread her toes to make a tense little monkey's foot, a foot trying to become a star. He would ask her to do this.

Wagstaff's lumber room #1

Samuel Johnson on Reading, from James Boswell's Life of Johnson:

He [Johnson] said, that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to; though, to be sure, if a man has a science to learn, he must regularly and resolutely advance. He added, "what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read." He told us, he read Fielding's Amelia through without stopping. He said, "if a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it, to go to the beginning. He may, perhaps, not feel again the inclination."

Congrats to Wagstaff on a job well done!

His Bad News Bears appreciation has gotten some nice attention - most notably at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule where his post made up Mr. Cozzalio's entire weekly roundup from last week, and on The Sheila Variations who says it's not to be missed. And rumor has it that Bear team-mates have seen the post. Good show, Wagstaff!

King Kong - Skull Island is All

I finally finished watching King Kong last night and here are my thoughts. It's very long. The first night I only got through about 15 or 20 minutes before I fell asleep. It wasn't good and I was worried. I had something riding on this movie because when I was talking to my brother about my still unposted essay Do I Still Love the Movies? (yeah, yeah, it's coming soon) he kept giving me a hard time and wanted me to clarify what I meant by "love the movies." When I kept fumbling around he said "Look, if you like King Kong, then you still love the movies."
"Really," I said "You're just going to come right out and say that? You haven't even seen it."
"Yes, I'm just going to come right out and say that."
"Well, okay."

After that first night, I called him. "I don't know, man, I watched the first part, and whoa! it's gonna be a long one. I'm twenty minutes in and I haven't even seen Adrien Brody yet. There's way too much back story and the subject can't support it. I mean, the original was in and out in ninety minutes."
"What about CGI Manhattan?"
"Well, it looks pretty good on the hi-def monitor, but it's still boring somehow, and sloppy too. With all the effects, you'd think it would've forced them to plan it better, but instead it looks like an excess of footage. Jackson starts wide with all the buildings and taxis, then goes in for a two-shot conversation, and suddenly he widens out again in the middle of it for no reason. He just can't help showing it off. It's not done in blocks, like you'd think, and there's a kind of annoying montage that tries to convey the whole city during the depression. Just too much info."
"Too much, huh?"
"Yeah, let's just say we've already seen shanty town."
"Oh."

The next night, somehow the planets were in alignment and my wife and I were able to watch the movie together. We started at one in the morning and saw all the way till Kong was captured. By then, it was just too late and we were too tired to continue. Besides, my wife wanted to stop there anyway. She was already in love with Kong and didn't want to get sad watching the end. It turns out she did the smart thing, but I'll get to that. Once the movie gets on the boat it begins to pick up steam. Some supporting players help it along, especially Thomas Kretschmann as the captain, Evan Parke as the first mate, and Kyle Chandler as a full of himself ham actor. My wife recognized the last from the tv show Early Edition. I don't see very many new movies so these were all fresh faces to me ( I just looked them up on imdb) and I hope to see more from them in the future.

When the ship gets pulled into the fog of Skull Island, the movie really kicks into high gear. I wasn't expecting the islanders to be Orcs, but maybe I should have, it being Peter Jackson and all. They are a particularly savage bunch, with weird get-up and strange coloration. When it started to rain, I half expected their body paint to wash off. Some of the old crones were in bad need of a shave. Well, I admire their tenacity for survival on this nasty island, anyway. What would you look like if a giant gorilla did a scary monkey dance on your community for god knows how many generations. Kong takes the girl, and after that, it's predicament piled on predicament in Temple of Doom fashion, with just one damn thing after another. We get every manner of life-threatening creature popping up and saying "Boo!", a spooky gorge bottom that is not fit for humans, and a spectacular dino-pile-up that reminded me of the elephants crashing down in Dumbo. When King Kong does battle with a couple of T-Rexes while hanging on industrial strength vines over the gorge, the acrobatics are ludicrous, funny, exciting, and great. There are plenty of How-the-hell-are-they-gonna-get-out-of-this-one moments and I heard myself saying "sheesh, Jackson you dog" a lot. By the time this island stuff was over, I was pumped and ready for Peter Jackson's 5 and 1/2 hour Sinbad movie. I wonder how long it would take him to show all seven voyages.

The final night, I called my bro again. "Well, are you up for it?"
"Up for what?"
"King Kong. The kids down for a late nap, if we start now we might get through most of it."
"I don't know."
"C'mon, you need to see Skull Island. It's gotta be one of the most inhospitable islands I've ever seen."
He agreed and we watched the whole damn thing. I could lose everything once they get back to Manhattan and never miss any of it. The problem is that in the original, people didn't know what was going to happen, and the makers just told the story: top of the Empire State Building, great ape gunned down in his prime, 'twas Beauty killed the Beast. I still think it was biplanes with machine guns, but okay. Now, though, everyone knows the story by heart, so what can Peter Jackson do? He takes the same thing and drags it out in color and lyricizes it. Slo mo with falsetto singing. It's boring and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It turned into The Passion of Kong.

So, to sum up, I spent close to 8 hours watching this movie. Much of it is bad, but if you start when they're on the boat and stop when they chloroform Kong, then you will see a hell of a movie.

Wagstaff Manifesto

Just so there is no mystery about where Wagstaff is coming from, here is his manifesto. And now I promise never to refer to Wagstaff in the third person again.

Politically, I would label myself as a forward-thinking 19th century liberal.
Today, that passes for a Man of the Right.

If there can be such an animal that melds the philosophies of David Hume and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Adam Smith and G.K. Chesterton, then I am that animal.

I think that the government should stay out of the bedroom, and just as important, vise versa.

I don't care about the federal deficit.

I believe a singular, objective truth exists that is larger than any one man, and therefore he views things subjectively. The opposite would be not believing in any singular, objective truth but trying to view things objectively.

I believe Jesus loves gay people.

I never met a person who didn't impress me with at least some kind of intelligence.

I believe human life begins at conception. You might think that is a leap, but I think believing anything else is even more of a leap.

I think Henry James is a great novelist.

I think the Bill of Rights is listed in order of importance.

In a sense, I think western literature after Homer and the Bible is all downhill.

I think that a goose-stepping army is always bad news. Never trust an army that goose-steps.

I think that any song, no matter how awful, can be used effectively in a movie.

I give thanks to God for Martin Luther King Jr.

I love Bob Dylan as a vocalist.

I read Catcher in the Rye when I was a teenager and I didn't relate to it at all.

I support every american war whether I agree with it or not. That is my carefully thought-out knee-jerk position.

I think you can be smarter than the average person, but you will never be smarter than ten average persons.

I think that every modern pop song is one minute too long.

I think that our current President is a lot smarter than anyone who calls him stupid. Yes, that means you.

I believe abortion is an abomination that should be restricted in most cases. I don't know how to do this.

I think Percy Shelley was a great poet, but in the battle of ideas between Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock, I side with Peacock.

I think a ruler who wears the same outfit every day is always bad news. Never trust a ruler who cultivates his own iconography.

I believe the South deserved to get thumped in the Civil War.

I think that generals Grant and Sherman were lovely, humane men.

I believe that if the material universe is in a state of entropy, then our mental universe is in a state of reverse entropy.

I think that the tendencies, prerogatives, and imperatives of each branch of the federal government will usually trump partisanship.

I think Ernst Lubitsch was the greatest movie director who ever lived, with Akira Kurosawa following close behind.

I think many of the greatest critics have been conservatives, but most conservatives make lousy critics.

I think that whether you believe in it or not, the story of Jesus in the gospels is by far the strangest, most original tale told by man.

I believe that sometimes it is just plain common sense to run with the herd.

I think it is not what you know, or who you know, but what other people think you know.

I believe that when Rome defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars, the good guys won.

I believe that Christianity as a religion makes the most sense. It also makes the most nonsense.

I think the best thing I ever heard about Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from Conrad Black, who said "third rate economics, first rate catastrophe avoidance."

I like what Winston Churchill said about supporting the church, but from the outside, like a flying buttress.

I think George W. Bush's foreign policy is profoundly unconservative.

I think a great thing about conservatism is that you don't have to be smart.

I don't think ratings codes and content advisory stickers constitute censorship.

I think pot should be legalized and probably all other narcotics as well.

I think you are fooling yourself if you think prolonged reefer smoking doesn't make you dumber.

I think if you can't make your opponent's argument better than he can, then you are losing the argument.

I think generations these days look back on the 50's as a period of normalcy we have deviated from or outgrown, but really the postwar consensus was one of the most abnormal periods imaginable.

I think most of the U.S. congress is a bunch of spineless boobies.

I think the most important fact about early cave paintings is that it was man who painted the animals and not the other way around.

I am not a purist of any kind. I keep my ideals pure only in the Platonic realm of ideas and not here on earth.

I am not a Platonist.

I think Aristotle was one of the smartest, most logical men ever to have walked the earth. He wrote the book on secular ethics.
I am not as smart as Aristotle.
Aristotle defended slavery as a matter of course.
I am a fool who flatters himself if I think I could have figured out slavery was evil on my own.

I think that Norman Rockwell was a great painter.

I believe the Iraq War is a war of necessity.

I am far more likely to be annoyed with Republicans and conservatives than I am with the President.

I believe marriage is marriage, but that we should have civil unions for everyone.

I support the President in most of what he does. I know that I don't have to.

I think that low voter turnout must mean things are O.K.

I think that just because your gay friend gave you fashion advice, it doesn't mean that it was good advice.

I believe that the deity might be looking at us through a one-way mirror.

I believe that becoming a Christian can be no easy comfort, on the contrary, it must stand as life's thorniest challenge.

I think you should forget about what modern critics say about Don Quixote being a loveable, foggy-eyed idealist. The book is brutal slapstick and that crazy son of a bitch is dangerous.

I think that Senator Joseph McCarthy was an ass.

I think that what Edward R. Murrow and the gang at CBS did was indeed a noble thing and good for the country, but what it wasn't was good journalism.

I think that the japanese internment camps during WWII were unconstitutional, but they might have been a better deal for japanese-americans than the alternatives.

I think it is a bad idea to try to hook Jr. High and High school students on reading by assigning them stories and plays that climax with mental breakdowns and suicide. What the hell are they thinking?

I believe that people will complain to those who listen; to those who don't listen they won't complain.

I think that military history should be part of the basic curriculum at every public High school.

I think that people who like pornography shouldn't worry. The government is never going to take your porn away.

I have never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I would vote for Joe Lieberman.

I think if you believe that a certain book, t.v. show, movie, music ect. can have a positive influence on someone's life, then you must also believe that a certain book, t.v. show, movie, music ect. can have a negative influence on someone's life.

I think that if history teaches us nothing else, it teaches that mankind abhors a power vacuum. If you have power and don't maintain the fight to keep it, there will always be someone in the wings ready to move in, single minded and with their eye on the ball.

I believe you should never write a letter to someone when you are drunk. You'll regret it.

I think that if you have ever seen something depicted by the media that you knew about or were involved in personally, then you will know that they got a lot of it wrong, therefore I think it is a safe assumption that they get a lot wrong when you see them depict something you don't know about or weren't involved in personally.

I believe we are all sinners, that is for damn sure.

Confucius defined wisdom as "To say you know when you know, and to say you don't know when you don't know." This sounds so simple, but it is difficult as all hell.

Altman's Nudes

Okay, so maybe that title is a misnomer. Using Sir Kenneth Clark's distinction between the naked and the nude, I find few, if any, proper nudes in Altman's filmography. What follows is a brief study of the way Robert Altman uses nudity. This post is intended as a comment starter. Warning: Not Safe For Work. You can click on the smaller pictures to enlarge. Afterwards, for more Altman, go to The House Next Door for links and updates on the Altman Blog-a-thon.


The sexiest shot in Altman. I prefer it to Marilyn's "Isn't it delicious" air-blast in The Seven Year Itch.


Here begins the theme of nakedness and humiliation.



Here is a painterly triptych. I can almost smell the dirty woolen socks in this brothel.


The One-Armed Piccolo Player.


Altman likes to repeat these stray glimpses of his leading men. Keith Carradine plops his fanny down in front of the television.


Yeesh. I don't know which feels more painful and degrading to watch, this or Julie Andrews in S.O.B.


This scene brings to mind Faye Dunaway's very calculated nudity in Chinatown.


A Hollywood Mud Monster.



There are always layers in Altman to undercut any titillation. Altman made an anti-western. He also makes anti-nude scenes. Can we derive pleasure watching him watching her pretending to be dead for her mother, who's watching?


Awfully sporting of Huey Lewis. What was it rock groupie Pamela Des Barres said about him?


Nude ... and dead.


Pretty as a picture. The sisters share a giggle afterwards at husband Modine's awkwardness.


The audience pretends not to notice Julianne's flaming bush the way the characters pretended not to notice that hurricane in The Gingerbread Man.



The only idea in Preta-a-Porter's pretty empty head.


Kenneth Branagh wakes up next to a Nude, then remembers he is late to his acting exercise.


There are few shots I wish I could post but couldn't find, so this is far from comprehensive. Maybe I can add them later when I have more time.

In Brewster McCloud, avenging angel Sally Kellerman is nude in a fountain. Also, Bud Cort's surprisingly defined torso seen while doing chin-ups reminded me of the buff Buster Keaton whenever we see him shirtless.

I think I remember a bevy of topless party girls living across the way from Marlowe and his cat in The Long Goodbye.

Haven't seen Dr. T and the Women, but given the subject matter I'd be shocked if there wasn't nudity.

Did Vincent Van Gogh paint nude models in his little brown studio?

I've seen fewer than half of Altman's movies, but I think it's a safe bet that Shelley Duvall is naked in there somewhere.

Please let me know of any glaring omissions.

A few tentative thoughts: When it comes to nudity, Altman is an equal opportunity employer, at least by normal Hollywood standards. Be they female or male, young or old, pretty or plain, he doesn't shy from filming. I discovered that many of these shots don't work as stills. Especially 'Hot Lips' getting off the chopper. There's a reason they call them moving pictures. Also, I find that the attitude behind a few of these shots disturbs and makes me uncomfortable. Somewhere I once heard Martin Scorsese say that he didn't shoot nude scenes. It seemed like he took some pride in this. That struck me as odd, somehow, and perhaps not good. Why is he so comfortable with violence, but not with nudity? Robert Altman on the other hand has used nudity many times, but there is always something willfull and contrarian about it. So what's going on with Altman and nudity? Any patterns? Any thoughts?

A Trip to The New World

Our good friend Edward Copeland has spent considerable energy building on his website a compendium of unfavorable reviews of The New World with lots of links to Terrence Malick's naysayers. I admit I find odd and a little curious the prosecutorial glee with which he marshals attacks on a movie he has no intention of seeing. It's one thing to want to tear down the accolades automatically given to the latest contrivance from the Coen Brothers, but Terrence Malick? I thought his critical reception had always been mixed at best, I never guessed his movies made much money, and the last I checked, Rotten Tomatoes had The New World's fresh rating at a mere 55%.

On the flip side, Matt Zoller Seitz has written about the film with eloquence, passion, and an almost missionary zeal at The House Next Door. His praise and enthusiasm for the film feels infectious, if a tad hyperbolic at times. And I don't know what to make of such talk of "new cinematic languages" or "watershed cultural moments" and the like.

It was with these dueling opinions in mind, that my brother and I geared up for our journey to The New World last Sunday. During the smoke'em-if-you-got'em moments before the movie started we discussed as we have many times The Thin Red Line. My brother thinks it an absolute masterpiece, and I deeply admire large portions of it, but want to reign in a little, due to an overall disjointedness and what I felt at the end was either some clumsiness or a deliberate but needless and obfuscating ambiguity. But mostly when we talk of TTRL we talk about the way a match lights up the darkness, or how we first hear a diesel engine throb and then see a patrol boat through the trees cruising along the shore, or the way the brig really feels encased in thick steel deep within the ship's bowels.
"Terrence Malick knows how to film water", one of us will say, or "Terrence Malick knows how to film shoreline... how to film trees".
"Malick knows how to make the interior of a ship hum."

And then always there's the photography. To say that a Terrence Malick film looks good is an injustice. It's quite simply the best cinematography there is.

As we were walking through the multiplex, one of us noticed that we were both dressed a bit nicer than casual for some reason. "Gee, I do kind of feel like I'm going to church here."
"I think you'll like the service", I said.
"But will I like the people?" he replied. We went in and sat down.

And now that I've seen it, all I can say is: Wow, was Matt Seitz ever right and Ed Copeland wrong! It's a great big magnificent cathedral of a movie. It's an excavation, a digging down and a clearing away, it's a cleansing return to our creationist mythology. It's less a movie in any traditional sense, and more an object presented for meditation.

It's all here, of course, all that stuff that Malick's detractors find so worthy of mockery: the symphonic snippets of colloquial narration, the slow lyrical pacing, the hippie-trippy cutaways to trees, water, rocks, and birds. But I'm beginning to think this kind of ridicule is getting cheap and too easy. Here, let me try it:

What am I doing here?...how am I watching this movie?...is this a dream?...no ... this only is real...everything else is a dream...

Terrence Malick is one of the greatest filmers of nature ever. Like some japanese master, like an Inigaki, his nature inserts flow and pervade. What is background in other movies Malick puts front and center. Malick is the man to film Typee. And Omoo. And The Encantadas. Or all of Melville while he's at it. Or anything with a boat- or water- or trees- or a river.

I struggle to find other films to compare to The New World. Maybe Kurosawa's great film Dersu Uzala or Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur. I understand likening it to 2001: A Space Odyssey but Kubrick yanks our chain and dicks the audience around a bit ( shaggy God story and all of that.) There is none of that here. We are never lost in The New World, everything is up front, we feel we know exactly what it all means.

Perhaps it's easiest to describe it in terms and ideas borne out of Malick's previous work, especially the film it most resembles, The Thin Red Line. If you take the AWOL sections of that film, with James Caviezel roaming around and taking the jungle and islanders all in with those big, soulful, world-reflecting eyes ( I pegged him as an actor to play Jesus back in '98), add to it some stuff like the Ben Chaplin character's totemic sexual recollections of his wife, and mix it all with Malick's camera looking at everything like it has some sort of special Buddha lens attached to it, then we might approximate the movie we have here.

Now I'm a little confused as to which cut of the movie I saw, and I need to read up on the different versions, but this one felt brief and incredibly tight. The characters were spare, the storyline was tidy and simple. ( Did I mention the movie is tight?)

With most novels and lots of movies, I think I enjoy them best after the fact. Once downloaded, I can take it apart and put it back together in my head, spin it around and examine it from different angles. Not so with a Malick film. The best time and place for his movies is in the dark, letting the images and sounds wash over you. Like a great piece of music, it's not enough that we can remember it or even sing it, we need to actually hear it again.

Just take the opening sequence, with our settlers getting their first glimpse of land, and the natives stopping to see the mysterious ships gliding into harbor, the music, serene yet always rising, the skillful weaving of multiple vantage points done with an exhilarating perfection, John Smith in chains, looking up at a small square of blue sky, with it's intimations of a new liberty ... if this isn't great filmaking then I don't know what is! I felt all tingly while watching it.

Or how about Pocahontas's trip to England. We disembark at a dingy portside, the squalor of which makes us wonder if she'll ever be impressed. We progress down cluttered streets, and pass buildings that grow increasingly more grand and imposing, until finally ( in a scene that echoes John Smith's entrance into Chief Powhatan's hall ) we enter the court of King James, sumptuous yet cramped somehow, and very real looking.

The performers are all good. Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas is an especially sweet discovery. When one of the white woman settlers takes our princess under her wing and has her wash her face, my brother quipped, " Nobody in this movie needs to be giving any pointers to Pocahontas on skin care, that's for damn sure." Colin Farrell as John Smith completely overcomes whatever prejudice I have against him. Christian Bale as John Rolfe is fine as always. In truth, though, I think that this movie could be recast a couple of times over and it wouldn't change very much. I might fight a bit harder to keep Christopher Plummer, whose very voice and demeanor conveys in the godforsaken Jamestown settlement the comfort and assurance of centuries of western civilization.

Now I can't honestly say I've ever really cried much at the movies, ( and as an insurance policy I never watch anything where something horrible befalls a child, as I know I can't handle it) but somewhere during the last reel of this one, what with that Wagner music swelling, and the wind gusts blowing in ( you can almost smell the salt) and Pocahontas chasing after her little son across the lawns and along the hedges, and that hide-and-seek camerawork, it all got to working on me and I welled up and sat misty-eyed right through to the end, with its final shot so perfect and apt and unmistakably clear in its poetry.

The New World bore through me in an emotional way that few films have. I think it reaches the summit of film art. And it will take its place there, and join in my moviegoer's heart with other films cherished for the humbled awe I feel when witnessing something de profundis. With the bottom-dropped-out heartache I felt watching two condemned men reach for each other's hands instinctively as they walked to their execution in Breaker Morant, with the gratitude that I owe F.W. Murnau for providing Sunrise with a happy ending, with the dumbfounded, quivering mass of mixed emotions that I turn into if I even start thinking about Rossellini's great masterpiece Paisan.

The human story here is affecting, but I don't think that's what got to me. It's something else. It's not like, say, some italian neorealist film, whereupon leaving we rejoice and want to shout across the rooftops " Now That's Humanism!" No, it's something else, something profound and metaphysical. Something Zen like, and to do with the individual's relation to reality. Throughout this movie we always feel the weight of future generations, and in our mind's eye we superimpose the country and people we know today onto the tracts of wilderness.

To conclude, I'll just have to say thank you Matt Seitz, for your evangelism. The church service was exceptional and the people good. And Mr. Copeland, I urge you to attend this movie. You may indeed find it boring and not like it, in which case we'll examine your head in Part Two. Here I'll end with the only words my brother and I could muster as we left the theater and made the long walk to the car, the only words, that is, until we got home and started bouncing around saying how fucking awesome it was.
" Terrence Malick knows how to make an old ship creak."
" Hell, man, Malick knows how to make a creek creak."