Sunset Gun

There Will Be Love

 

Through the years, I've yet to find another comic star who arouses such disdain as Adam Sandler. Critics, friends, record store clerks, audiences who flock to Johy Sayles movies (I'm generalizing here, but I've been defending him for so long), loathe Adam Sandler. Who else induces such contempt? Maybe very early Jim Carrey (but by The Truman Show and clearly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind he was rightfully embraced) and, of course, Jerry Lewis, who thankfully has finally gotten his due, even outside of France. (In fact, I'm surprised the French haven't taken to Sandler -- they so love explicating our Ugly Americans.) But Sandler -- he's a special case. Think of what many deem him -- lazy, homophobic, frat boy humor, contributing to the dumbing down of cinema, and America --  and though many of his pictures are indeed, lackluster and stupid, the stamp on the comic isn't entirely fair.

He's also capable of sensitive, inspired moments that show unique talent and depth. Those critics and certain Sandler-haters might change their tune with Judd Apatow's newest Sandler defense, Funny People, and that will bother me. Because Sandler already revealed his abilities in the underrated Spanglish (directed by James L. Brooks) and most especially in one of the most romantic movies of the last near ten years --Paul Thomas Anderson’s exalting, superb, poetic Punch-Drunk Love.

Punch-Drunk Love -- I was baffled by the picture’s lukewarm to mixed reception upon release (in 2002), and wonder why it remains misunderstood to this day. I know that even many Anderson lovers scratched their heads over the movie’s lack of epic heft, extra multiple storylines and large scale speeches. (Many did the same with There Will Be Blood, another movie that features a strong central performance and person who seems to polarize people -- the brilliant Daniel Day Lewis). And then there was that Adam Sandler bias -- the knee jerk and unfair question of, why? Why, Happy Gilmore? (And to clarify, I like Happy Gilmore). 

And I don’t just like Punch-Drunk Love, I love Punch-Drunk Love. I love it with an odd fear, and with my entire body, like how I feel when an anxiety attack has passed and my brain is still tripping from the surge of adrenaline --  when birds and trees and cab drivers suddenly gain a glowing, but warped beauty. An extraordinary, unique picture that manages to simultaneously subvert and showcase the Sandler persona beautifully, while maintaining  Anderson’s singular éclat as a filmmaker. Anderson’s masterpiece, There Will Be Blood has proven the director can handle multiple genres, but he had revealed his versatility earlier with Punch-Drunk. No long Anderson, extraordinary monologues, no expertly interwoven subplots, no drugs, Punch-Drunk Love was a film we'd not only never seen Anderson create, it was (and still is) a movie we’d never seen anywhere.  And no matter how you feel about Sandler, he leaves a lasting impression as lonely, alienated Barry Egan, the Californian businessman and put-upon brother who falls for the ever-patient Emily Watson.

To explain the off-kilter, dissonant power of Punch-Drunk Love (aided by Jon Brion’s compelling, lovely, yet anxiety ridden score) is nearly impossible: So alien yet incredibly human is the movie, it frequently puts the viewer right into the uncomfortable, anxious mind of Barry  -- an unsettling, but to many, familiar place to be. We have no idea what will happen next (but with delight, and sometimes heartbreak). Sandler, who had displayed talent before this, has never been so fantastically abstract, utilizing his scared-yet-angry-but-violent-little-boy persona with a sublime darkness. This may sound ridiculous to some but Anderson's influence on Sandler is somewhat akin to Alfred Hitchcock's use of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo (who had certainly played darker characters before Vertigo) --  pulling the dusky and misunderstood out of a popular American movie star and layering him with wounded depth. He did the same with Tom Cruise's transcendent performance in Magnolia ("I will drop kick those fucking dogs" is almost a Barry Egan moment).

Sandler’s verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown, yet deeply romantic Barry is so powerfully beguiling that when Anderson films his journey to Hawaii, it's a moment that's so overwhelmingly romantic, so remarkably special, it both swoons with gorgeousness and rattles your nerves -- all those deep seated raw emotions bubbling to the surface. Tuned to Shelley Duvall singing Harry Nilsson's enchanting and offbeat "He Needs Me" from Robert Altman's great, underrated Popeye (so spot on, bullseye perfect), Barry moves from work to airport to cab to phone booth, where he finally takes a stand against his sister (“You’re killing me. You're killing me with the way you are towards me. All I want is the fucking number and that should be goddamn good enough for you!"), and then reaches Lena. In a beautiful touch, when she answers, the payphone lights up to her voice.  A musical sequence that plays like Anderson’s twisted version of the Arthur Freed unit (Barry’s Technicolor blue suit alone) it’s a masterful ode to vulnerability, fear and power, and something that seems impossible to replicate -- stamped with all that live wire, off the cliff Anderson energy and influence.

This might be why some respond so strongly to the picture, or just cannot wrap their heart or mind around the thing. I'm not certain. There are those who don't understand a woman loving her man so much that she wants to "chew" his eyeballs, and there are those who do. Love can make you do and say crazy things  --  and can become so overwhelming  that when it enters the realms of violent thought -- positive or negative -- it isn’t so strange, to you.  Anderson clearly digs this dynamic so, if letting your guard down leads to deception, you might kill that imposter in a rage a la There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview, who dumps his faux brother into a shallow grave and shovels dirt over his dead body (a scene I completely comprehend). And if finally sleeping with your beloved makes you realize the strength of your love so much, you can easily confess: “I'm lookin' at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fuckin' smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You're so pretty.” Well, that’s just bloody fucking brilliant beautiful.

Please Don't Let Me Love You

Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place is one of the most heartbreaking love stories ever committed to film. It's certainly one of the most poignant pictures (violently poignant at times) within the canon of film noir, a genre haunted by doomed love.

Noir love -- the kind that causes characters to throw that "Baby I don't care" caution to the wind -- is frequently a cynical fancy that won't survive the angst and ugliness inside the man or outside the world. Its happiness is typically intense, but brief. Love or lust often motivates action in noir, particularly via a femme fatale (as in Double Indemnity or Out of the Past). But it also holds up a mirror to myriad themes, largely existential, that hang over characters with profound malaise. Ray approaches the torments of Camus and Sartre with In a Lonely Place (1950) showing, not only the delicacy of true love, but the delicacy of creativity, violence, trust, and a person's own position in an often ugly, alienating world and the inner nausea it creates.

So begins my video essay on Nicholas Ray's 1950 masterpiece In a Lonely Place, a movie I love and admire and one I understand better each each year I live in this often alienating city -- Los Angeles.

Many thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz for putting this piece together so beautifully. I think I sound like a teenager who smoked about five packs of Pall Malls, but this is the voice God, and many sleepless nights gave me so deal with it. With that, watch this appreciation of Bogart's brilliant performance and one of Ray's finest (as well as one of the greatest Gloria Grahame roles), In a Lonely Place (orignally posted at The L Magazine). Watch.

Editing by Matt Zoller Seitz, words by Kim Morgan, adapted from my essay here.

Be My Bloody Baby: 'Mean Streets'

I miss New York City. I miss the New York City I've never seen -- the one I've only seen in movies. And after spending time in the Capital of the World a little over a year ago, I thought of all kinds of New York movies (from Manhattan to Rosemary’s Baby to 42nd Street to The Naked City to Midnight Cowboy to Something Wild -- the Carroll Baker Ralph Meeker version, to After Hours to Broadway Danny Rose to The Lost Weekend and on and on and on). But strolling through some beautiful areas and others much too cleaned up (Times Square), my mind wandered to James Cagney and John Garfield growing up so gorgeously tough and talented in various, rough and tumble areas, and the Dead End Kids gaining advice from both of those street-wise geniuses as they, cinematically speaking, brawled and cracked wise on those corners. And then my mind returned to a movie that for me, is this city -- Mean Streets. Even if much was filmed in Los Angeles, my point still stands, moreso even. Through Scorese's (and his actors) powerfully New York vision melding with that magic called movies, this does not feel like Los Angeles.

And of course much has been written about Martin Scorsese’s masterwork and most of us love it (if you love movies, how can you not?). But it had been quite some time since I watched the picture, and upon returning, my ardor was re-ignited. As Woody Allen would say, I don’t just love the movie, I luurve it. And with further reflection, I thought the picture, of late anyway, just doesn't get its due anymore. Do we take it for granted? We shouldn't. It's absolutely perfect.

Let’s just start with the opening -- an opening that ranks as one of the greatest title sequences of all time.  The screen is black. A faceless narrator exclaims: "You don't make up for your sins at church; you do it in the streets; you do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it." A young man wakes up in the middle of the night. The sounds of the city are outside. He walks over to his bedroom mirror, takes a look at himself and then returns to bed. As his head reclines toward his pillow, he is suddenly moving in slow motion. The thumping beat of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" begins and the scene shifts to a screening of Super-8 films of the young man and his friends. Just as Ronnie Spector breaks into the beautifully sweet chorus of "Be my, be my baby," the film reveals its title in plain, typewritten letters: Mean Streets.

Yes. This opening always gets me right in the gut and mysteriously both the hard and soft places of my heart. It even, at times, almost makes me cry. No, not almost. It does make me cry. It’s just so raggedly lovely and wonderfully bittersweet and beautiful and tough and tender. It's reminiscent of a past that isn't entirely mine and yet, Scorsese makes me feel like it was -- almost one hundred percent. It gets me the way Wes Anderson gets me when Margot walks off that bus to Nico's "These Days" or Harold drives his car to Cat Stevens' "Trouble" or Benjamin Braddock depressively swims and fornicates to Simon and Garfunkle's "April Come She Will" or Sam Rothstein falls for Ginger to "Love is Strange" (I could list more than a dozen Scorsese music moments that touch me in multiple ways).   

Released in 1973, Mean Streets, a masterpiece of story, substance, music, camerawork and color, is one of the most influential movies of the last 30-odd years. Inspired by, among other influences, classic Hollywood cinema, the documentaries of David and Albert Maysles, the French New Wave, and of course, Scorsese’s own life growing up and observing life in New York City, Mean Streets' raw, blood-soaked power has still, in my mind, found no cinematic equal. Aesthetically and thematically honest, as well as experimental and purposeful, it’s a work of art that’s never faded through time. It still makes me revved up and emotional and depressed and happy and, yearning. There’s a yearning to Mean Streets that not only taps into creating something within your own personal life, but to create something, anything outside of it. As with all of Scorsese, there's a sensuality to it that's bloody and lovely and in moments, profoundly moving.

The story is noir bathed in red light. Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, an inhabitant of New York's Little Italy who is raggedly progressing toward manhood. His best friend is Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro), a volatile, immature but ultimately lovable character who gets Charlie in more trouble than he needs. Charlie is trying his best to become something, but he is met with constant dilemmas. He works for his uncle (Cesare Danova), an old-school Mafioso who would like to move him up in the business. But Uncle disapproves of Charlie's friends, chiefly his epileptic lover, Teresa (Amy Robinson), and Johnny Boy, who is "touched in the head" and an instigator of unnecessary disorder. Uncle advises Charlie to remove them from his life. But this is not so easy. Nothing is easy for Charlie. Strongly Catholic, he is guilt-ridden by his every move. While he sits at the bar in his neighborhood hangout, questioning his penance, he watches Johnny Boy walk toward him and almost humorously asks: "You talk about penance and this is what walks through the door?"

Johnny Boy certainly walks through the door. His entrance is a tour de force of exciting visual and sonorous stimuli. Bathed in the bloody red light of the bar, shot in slow motion and accompanied by the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin Jack Flash," the joy and ambiguity of Johnny Boy is summed up in less than 30 seconds. He is the streets; he is exciting, nervous energy; he is trouble amidst trouble; he’s your future if you don’t watch out. And he’s also one hell of a fighter on a pool table -- the way he kicks with such intent. In fact, that “Mook” fight tuned to “Please Mr. Postman” is one of my favorite fight scenes in a movie. It’s so sloppy and real yet funny and repugnant. This is how fights really happen. They're a scary mess but sometimes, oddly hilarious.

And Johnny Boy is kind of hilarious. The symbol of uncertainty that, like the streets, threatens the picture's world with kinetic violence, he’s an attractive force. But like many reckless forces, they burn out. Charlie attempts to ride this out with some semblance of control, but he can’t avoid the tumult that will engulf around his own life. What is so unequivocally brilliant about this film is that Charlie never has to tell us as much. Because of Scorsese's expert technique, we know the picture's nature instinctively. Scorsese displays the randomness of these people's lives with saturating experimentalism; his inventive style is not a glaring gimmick but a natural expression of street and conscience.

Mean Streets contains so many influential techniques it would require pages to list them all, but some do bear mentioning--particularly for how they are abused in present cinema. As most of us know, Mean Streets, like other filmmakers of the period utilized the New Wave technique of a moving camera, now seen often in movies and TV commercials. It used Super-8 film stock to convey happy, jumpy memories, which is now an overused, trite standard á la The Wonder Years and countless other more recent examples. Mean Streets employed the character-introducing title sequence, where key figures are shown doing something (Johnny Boy blows up a mailbox), and then their names are typewritten on the screen. This was used in Trainspotting, a movie that has more than a few references to Scorsese. It was scored with pop music as an interesting counterpoint to violence (clearly, Scorsese's musicality has been imitated effectively in films like Blood Simple and Reservoir Dogs). Mean Streets' film references -- Charlie watching John Ford's The Searchers and Uncle watching Fritz Lang's The Big Heat- -- contained a specific potency that plays differently than the reference-soaked movies of Quentin Tarantino. I love Tarantino's operatic movie mélange but with films now so readily available on DVD, Mean Streets snippet from The Searchers feels rarer, and in a way, more sacred.

I'm not one to downgrade the importance of Citizen Kane and its influences (and certainly Scorsese wouldn’t as well) but Mean Streets is at this point, just as influential. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas may make the AFI lists, but Mean Streets deserves high mention. So many films emulate Mean Streets, but very few have achieved its beautiful, ugly, vulnerable, violent and thrilling power. If a movie could talk me into having sex in a dirty bathroom in some dive bar in NYC, Mean Streets could. If a movie could serve as my most beloved dysfunctional ex boyfriend, Mean Streets would be him. It's one of the great loves of my life.

Black Malden Moan: Baby Doll

With the great, titan of acting and frequent genius Karl Malden passing (at 97 years of age god bless him), I'm posting one of my favorite Malden movies and performances -- Baby Doll. Though there's many brilliant Malden performances to choose from, this one will leave you fuzzy and buzzy. And I think we all need some of that right now.

"There isn't much of you, but what there is is choice. Delectable, I might say... You're fine-fibered. Soft and smooth…You make me think of cotton. No! No fabric or cloth, not even satin or silk cloth, and no kind of fiber, not even cotton fiber has the absolute delicacy of your skin.”

So says a predatory Eli Wallach to an aroused and “hysterical” Caroll Baker in one of the most notoriously erotic mainstream films ever produced at that time. The movie was Baby Doll, director Elia Kazan’s tragic-comic follow up to his already steamy masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, his controversial On the Waterfront and his poignantly powerful East of Eden. Used to a certain amount of censorship and hullabaloo (especially for Streetcar), Kazan was most likely, not prepared for the maelstrom of controversy when Baby Doll, a sultry Southern gothic he intended as a “sleeper” was released in 1956.

Denounced by the Legion of Decency and deemed “Just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited" by Time Magazine, Baby Doll, though not as “dirty” through time (at least in the common, modern comedy manner -- our current accessibility to salacious cinema isn't dirty in the right way...) still remains as sexually charged, perversely interesting and psychologically complex as it did then. It’s also incredibly funny, superbly acted and weirdly beautiful. Though somewhat, inexplicably forgotten through time (it finally got a DVD release a few years ago), Baby Doll is one of Kazan’s greatest accomplishments -- a masterpiece that stands on equal footing with Streetcar and Waterfront.

Written by that genius of Southern turbulence, Tennessee Williams (Baby Doll was his first original screenplay -- adapted from parts of two earlier one-act plays), the film gave Carroll Baker her first starring role with an entrance that, in terms of cult cinema, is about as sexually iconic as Marilyn Monroe’s upswept dress in The Seven Year Itch. Gorgeous, blonde 19-year old child bride Baby Doll (Baker) lies in an infant’s crib, sucking her thumb while her middle aged husband Archie Lee (a wonderfully frustrated Karl Malden|) leers at her through a peephole.

But why must he leer at his own wife? As we soon learn, Baby Doll is a virgin -- she married Archie for what she thought would be a cushy life of prosperity and Southern comfort. But at this point Archie’s lost his cotton gin to a Syndicate Plantation and is so in debt that his furniture (or, as she drawls "fornichore" which is how what every woman should call a sofa) has been removed from the house. An exasperated, angry Baby Doll threatens to leave Archie while he desperately waits out the day -- the eve of her birthday --  for their especially provocative “agreement:” that when she turns 20, he can finally sleep with his wife.

But things take a turn when lumbering, impetuous Archie loses his temper and burns down the Syndicate Plantation and Cotton Gin, managed by the cocky Sicilian Silva Vacarro (Wallach). Seeking revenge, Vacarro finds the one thing that’ll make Archie murderously angry -- Archie’s wife. And not just his wife but, perhaps (not to be revealed here) his wife’s maidenhood as well. That is, if you could call the sassy, sexually curious tease Baby Doll a “maiden.” She’s certainly not-as-infantile-as-she-looks -- and she will reveal herself to be smart--making her all the more sexy.

The cat and mouse games and tricks played by Baby Doll and Vacarro result in the picture's gleefully demented, yet supremely hot seduction sequence on a porch swing that some viewers thought was downright pornographic. What were his hands doing? (I know) Why is she swooning that much? (We all know) This hyper eroticism is heightened by the film’s lovely counterpoint of a blonde, summer dress-wearing Baby Doll to the darkly dapper, swarthy Italian who picks floating cotton off her dress and holds a riding crop, no less. And to further amp things up, after some antics in the shell of a house, Wallach will be seen riding Baker’s hobby horse to the rock tune of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” The beautifully seamy shot of his shadowy rocking suggests a whole helluva lot more is going on here. Yes, lots of s-e-x. Good, bad, dirty southern s-e-x.  

But there’s more to the film than just overheated sensuality. Starkly but stunningly shot in black and white, the picture showcases a sad, crumbling South which is perfectly encapsulated via Malden’s distressed and ultimately crazed performance as a cotton farmer being taken over by big business. You feel for poor Malden, as dumb as he is, and the intelligent actor nails sleazy, desperate, sad, cruel and touching all at once. Malden could be a powerful passive aggressive (check A Streetcar Named Desire, in which his "nice" guy ends up being one of the most despicable characters in the picture), and a powerful, noble aggressive aggressive (like his tough priest in On the Waterfront). Here he's just a lost soul who strikes out, but like his relationship with Baby Doll, his fire will ultimately be extinguished. No (for lack of a better word) orgasmic pleasure will come from this. He can't keep anything. Not his gin, not his wife, and not the old Southern way. He can't even be a proper southern gentleman without becoming a leering pervert (after all, in a time when he could have taken her by force without much condemnation, he is honoring her wish to remain a virgin). So as loud-mouth and as stupid as he seems hollering "Baby Doll!" at the top of his lungs, you can see that Williams, Kazan and Malden understand this is a man who has lost all dignity -- and though frequently funny, this is just plain sad.

And really, everyone here, save for his stray plantation hands whom he sneaks shots of hooch with, are sad. And, in their own way, creeps. But they're all-too-human creeps and earn sympathy for each of their dire situations. Baby Doll as the unhappy, clever though unschooled wife, Archie as the out-moded Southerner and Vacarro as the despised outsider. No one is inherently good, but none of are purely evil either. They are corrupted, vindictive, mean and in the case of Baker -- achingly sexy on top.

I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Baker’s Baby Doll is one of the sexiest film performances in screen history. With that alone shouldn’t the film earn greater respect through time? It did somewhat in its DVD release (in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams’ box set which also includes that other underrated depiction of frustrated sexuality and a sizzling Lolita Sue Lyon -- The Night of the Iguana) with an accompanying short documentary. Chronicling the film’s scandal (happily all three spectacular leads are alive to discuss the movie -- god bless you Karl Malden for even making it thatfar) and appreciating the picture’s placement within Kazan’s esteemed canon of work, it’s a nice addition. But I wanted more. I always want more with Baby Doll. More movie, more respect, more thumb-sucking and ice cold glasses of lemonade. 

As Baby Doll express at the end of the film, “we got nothin' to do but wait for tomorrow and see if we're remembered or forgotten.” Thankfully and respectfully (maybe ironically so) Baby Doll is indeed remembered. Really, how could it have ever been forgotten?