Sunset Gun

Glenn Gould Is Trying To Break My Heart

Sometimes it's romantic to be alone. Not to wallow in the torpor of melancholy, not to yearn for emotional rescue, not to trick yourself with affirmational "love myself" platitudes (who always loves themselves? And who always should?) and yet, not feel disconnected from that large word (and world) called love, since amour not only comes in (as the saying goes) mysterious ways, it comes through people, yes, and the heart-sickness before returning to them, but music, art, flickering pictures, water, desert, speed, beauty, and the tenuousness of Kim Novak's smile. It's everywhere. As I've quoted before, German romantic composer Schuman said of his tortured idol Schubert, who died at 31 --  he could not speak of this man unless he spoke "to the trees and the stars." Overwrought? Not for me. This is a German Romantic. And he's right. Sometimes all you need are the trees and the stars. And solace.

Glenn Gould (whom I love, as a mystery, as a genius and as an inspired musician), one of the the world's most famous pianists, and iconic loner -- would well understand the above sentiments. Tomorrow is his birthday. Had he lived past 50, he would turn 78. I wonder if he would care? He spent much of his later life in isolation, he never married, and he loved...Petula Clark. The music, not the woman...so far as I know. According to the new documentary, The Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (out now, and which I will see on his birthday, alone) he also loved a woman named Cornelia Foss (wife of pianist, composer and friend Lukas Foss), and she discusses their long, eventual troubled courtship. Do I want to know about this? I'm not sure. I respect Gould, the elusive, but I'm naturally curious. 

Gould's mysteries and yes, romance, are beautifully rendered in Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, one of the most fascinating portraits of a musical genius ever created. Part documentary, part biopic, part music lesson, part enigmatic character study, Thirty Two Short Films (directed by François Girard and scripted by Girard and Don McKellar), eschews typical biopic trappings by, quite literally, telling the musical prodigy story of Gould (played brilliantly by Colm Feore) in 32 short films -- fascinating vignettes that wander through the eccentric Canadian pianist's life with reverence, mystery, amusement and a touch of sadness that (like real life) is never resolved.

Gould's depth and remoteness makes one charmed and intrigued by the man even more. The mystery is never broken, only exalted through the vignettes. Some of the pieces run less than 60 seconds, others several minutes, but each is subtly told, allowing an inside look into Gould's background, process, intellectualism and his unique relationship with music -- something he quit performing live at age 32 because, "I just don't like the sound of piano music very much."

Every short film is exquisite: Gould enjoying the aforementioned unexpected musical pleasure of pop songstress Petula Clark, his daily breakfast at a 24 hour Canadian diner where the talking, eating and clanking of coffee cups creates a kind of sonic rapture for Gould, a beautiful trip through the wires and hammers of his Steinway during the moment of his last concert, and discussions with those who chatted up the reclusive man on the telephone (Gould loved the phone and would talk for hours. Oh how I wish I could have received one of those calls). Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is a triumph in that while remaining elusive, you do you learn a few things about the man himself, but just as important, you truly feel his deep alliance (and combativeness) with his great love, music. No box of chocolates for Gould, Bach (played at proper room temperature, and on that worn out chair from his youth) was his valentine. As he said: "There is no greater community of spirit than that between the artist and the listener at home, communing with the music."

And as much as I revere Gould, I always thought I preferred Kempff and others with Beethoven. But this, one of my favorites, destroys me.

Yes, I Would Like To Swing On A Star

This doesn't ruin the end of my short, "Bing & Bela" directed by Guy Maddin, but...I choose Bing.

I love Bing. I love Bela. And I love Frank. But there are days I love/revere/ am captivated by Bing the most. Today is one of those days.

There’s a wonderful moment in the musical High Society during which Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sing an especially rousing version of Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah!”-- a moment I've watched too many times to count. Midway through the charming, inebriated song, in which two “swellegant” party pals swap banter, dish on guests and form a dipsomaniacal camaraderie, Crosby croons to Sinatra with his distinctive “ba ba ba boom” and Sinatra jokes, “Don’t dig that kind of crooning, chum.” “You must be one of the newer fellows,” Crosby answers back.

The idea of Sinatra being one of the “newer fellows” is amusing since, in 1956 (when the picture was released), the big-band, and balladeer musical style of crooning was already on the wane. Sinatra was well on his way to becoming the elder-statesman Chairman of the Board, Elvis would be anointed the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and Bing would be … Bing.

Not that anyone would ever forget Bing Crosby. The crooner, born in Tacoma, Washington, had been cinema’s number one box-office draw from 1944 to 1948 and was an enormous, multi-talented star -- radio, recordings and motion pictures all earning him legions of adoring fans. And like another famous crooner who would count him as an influence (Dean Martin), Crosby had his own cinematic comedy team, making the frequently funny (and underrated) “road” movies with wise-acre Bob Hope. He even won an Academy Award (for Going My Way) and received another nomination for his alcoholic role in The Country Girl.

There’s no denying that Crosby was and is big time. And yet … why does he feel just a little slighted through the years? Like the only moment we enjoy his music is once a year, when we roll out “White Christmas” from our holiday collection of old standards?

Perhaps it’s just how antiquated his music sounds today -- beautifully, mysteriously antiquated, like something emerging from a dream….or a nightmare. In either moody reverie, when listening to the brilliant baritone sing “Pennies From Heaven,” “Ol’ Man River” or “Swinging on a Star,” you feel the music form around you, as if you’re riding on an ethereal echo chamber of air coming from a million miles away. It’s spacey, creepy and charming all at once. Which perfectly explains how effective the song “Mairzy Dotes” becomes in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, when daughter-murdering, Bob-haunted Leland Palmer crazily sings it in the midst of his meltdowns. And then there was that pairing of the two Thin White Dukes -- Bowie and Bing dueting “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy” -- ideal.  These were two sexy space aliens keeping Christmas a little bit Christian and a little bit…pagan. As much as I love Frank Sinatra, this kind of cross generational extraterrestrial-ness could have only been created with Crosby.

All of these elements of Crosby are so marvelously powerful, that his music remains (particularly his earlier recordings) ever haunting, ever romantic and, in some instances, ever celestial. As musicologist J.T.H. Mize put it, Crosby could “melt a tone away, scoop it flat and sliding up to the eventual pitch as a glissando, sometimes sting a note right on the button, and take diphthongs for long musical rides.” In short, Crosby sends me. He always does. And not only at Christmas time. Right now, actually.

Beautiful Beloved Beasts: Bing & Bela

When a woman wakes up with her beloved husband, and he has transformed into a white wolf -- a tragically deceased, beautiful, bloody white wolf -- the most natural inclination is to place him at the gravestone of either Bing Crosby or Bela Lugosi.

Being a Los Angeles woman, this is not an easy decision.

Bing and Bela are both laid to rest only a few plots from each other at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.  Bela bites. Bing sings. Both with bewitching beauty.

Bing...or Bela?

Stills and raw footage by Guy Maddin from his short Bing & Bela, showing with his series of Hauntings at the Toronto Film Festival. Show debuts Sunday for the opening of TIFF's new Bell Lightbox. Watch the full screen Bing & Bela stills here.

They Shoot At The Movies, Don't They?

This is exciting news for me. The balcony has re-opened, and in walks Harry Lime...

Well, for my segment anyway.

Really, it's Christy Lemire and Elvis Mitchell, taking on chief review duties, Omar Moore will serve as a special correspondent, focusing on the internet's role in movies, and Ebert will be there himself. It's a wonderful thing. (Read Roger's release here).

Roger Ebert has announced today the new At the Movies, of which I am to take part in special segments that highlight a classic movie (as in, waxing rhapsodic over The Third Man) and more. I imagine some Warren Oates, Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden, Tuesday Weld, Lee Van Cleef, Robert Mitchum, William Powell and John Garfield will find their way in there, as well as Sam Fuller, F.W. Murnau, Josef Von Sternberg, Jules Dassin, Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, Sergio Leone, Ida Lupino....this could go on forever...

Below is the demo for the new show. I'm proud to be a part of Siskel and Ebert history and many thanks to Christy, Elvis, Omar, Chaz Ebert and of course, Roger.

Psycho Sexy Schubert: The Piano Teacher

After listening to Schubert all morning...And the last repost here for some time. Vacation. And obsessions are obsessions.

In Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, the taciturn piano teacher cites Schubert and Schumann as her two favorite composers. Both German, both “Romantics” both tortured in art and life -- the composers are apt choices for this cinematic creature. Schubert, the bigger genius, outward bohemian and poet, was Schumann’s greatest admirer. Schumann cried over Schubert’s death at 31 and later went insane, dying in an asylum at 46. Schumann said he could not talk about Schubert unless he spoke “to the trees and the stars.”

Schubert worship runs through Haneke’s picture as teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) instructs in Schubert’s dynamics from “scream to whisper, not loud to soft.” Such is her disposition, and, like Schumann, she, the outwardly ordered woman is inwardly screaming -- one step away from the nuthouse herself, where as we learn in passing, her father is suffering through the rest of his life.

But that’s only one aspect to Haneke’s intensely complex study of a woman living on the precipice. As with all of Haneke’s philosophical “horror” pictures from Benny's Video to the brilliant, terrifying Funny Games (and the underrated, powerfully horrifying re-make) to Code Unknown to The White Ribbon, there’s a consistent theme of claustrophobia, voyeurism, oppression, terrorism (personal or institutional) and perversion -- perversion of not only the characters, but also of audiences wishing to lap it up and beg for more (master). But Haneke (and this is where many cannot stand the director, and I have to admit, I can barely read an interview with the man -- he spells it all out...) wants you to think while salivating and, in his own cleverly cinematic way, punishes you for doing so (it's no wonder Haneke was -- as he states on the DVD -- profoundly influenced by Pier Pasolini’s Salò). He likes to rattle your brain and moral center, making you ruminate long and hard on what you’ve just witnessed. With The Piano Teacher, it might be when our fine character lies in a bathtub and...I'll get to that moment later. The Piano Teacher, as squirm inducing as it can become, may be the director's most powerfully unsettling, erotic and at times, comic film.

The movie has the 40-ish Erika still living with her unpleasant mother (Annie Giradot) in a relationship so antagonistic, unhealthy and, for lack of a better word, close that the two still share a bed (and you’ll see what that’s like through the course of the film). Erika is a distinguished professor at a prestigious Viennese school who’s worshipped but feared as she harshly criticizes students: “A wrong note in Beethoven is better than a bad interpretation.”

But she’s a loner with some pretty intriguing outlets for her sexuality. Trolling sex shops, sitting in the booths to smell the refuse left by horny patrons, she’s more than just a repressed female seeking release -- she’s a sadist as well. And there’s something proud about her thrills that, amid the beautiful classical piano music, works some convoluted ideas about the human condition. Gorgeous depravity or rather...is anything truly exalting unless you’ve witnessed the sullied? The disgusting? The sexually deviant? She's something you rarely see in cinema --- a beautiful female creep. And that (for men possibly more than women...but possibly not) is simultaneously erotic and especially scary.

When a curious, handsome young student, Walter (Benoit Magimel), becomes interested in her musically and sexually, he falls hard for the seemingly placid teacher. He changes a public performance of a Schoenberg piece to Schubert just for her (and that is quite a difference -- modern discordance to Romanticism), and she begins to test his limits of sexuality, specifically in a masterful sequence in the conservatory’s bathroom where a bizarre, painful dance of erotic control commences.

Few films really dissect "odd"/neurotic female desire on film (Polanski's Repulsion, so far, for me is the greatest study of this. Hitchcock's Vertigo and Marnie and Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves ranks high as well), and The Piano Teacher goes right (as Edward Albee's Martha would say) to the meat of things. This may be the only film I can think of where the female protagonist is something of a lurker, a sadist/masochist (in one scene she places broken glass in a student’s coat pocket; in another she cuts her vagina in the bathtub -- tough to watch but weirdly mesmerizing) and yet, she is oddly sympathetic. We feel for her. Some may even like her (I did).

In one of film’s bravest performances, Huppert creates a character of such intrigue and bottomless depth that we can’t possibly crack her. Though something of a female "pervert" (whatever that means) she remains reserved -- acting through pinched, near non-expressions that explode into manias, she's never obvious, never entirely fathomable, never strained or trying too hard to be transgressive. Somehow, the actress feels naturally perverse, at times frightening. And though a lover of Romantic music, she is anything but romanticized. Subversive, meditative and poetic, The Piano Teacher, thanks largely to Huppert, is a daring work of sexually strange, unmitigated genius. Like truly feeling music, which comes from precise craftmanship and then spins you into mysterious, emotional and exalted places, so can the workings of love and all the other, stuff. Sex, desire, neurosis and romance are often quite specific and yet deeply enigmatic sensations. For that, the movie, though disturbing remains unsettling erotic and yet unusually romantic. To the trees and the stars and the beds and to the...sex shops.