#48 In Praise of the KFC "Double-Down"

The ultimate Atkins Diet sandwich. Finally got rid of any deference to unhealthy bread-bunnage altogether--that white, overly- refined, gluten-laden, fattening abomination used traditionally as a mere convenience to stabilize the real food inside. And keep your hands clean. What? Not really necessary, considering that the Colonel made his fortune touting the animal residue left behind on our upper-phalanges. Finger-lickin' Good!

In fact it was kind of an apostasy that Kentucky Fried got into the "chick-fillet" competition a few years ago. A sandwich? At KFC? Shoulda stayed pure; it was enough they "chickened"-out to the food-police and buried "Fried" under innocuous initialism. (It's rampant: BK? DQ?--someone needs to inform me as to the offense borne by any of the words replaced. "Burger"? "Dairy"?--well, maybe "Queen." Taco Bell daren't follow the trend. Or Boston Market.)

With the Double-Down at least KFC is back to tradition: you're hands-on with cooked chicken-carcass again, and gonna get fried-chicken-grease on your fingers, unless you go prissy and use knife and fork. Or a napkin? Yes and no. EVERYBODY KNOWS that if you use a paper napkin directly following a good chomp on an "original-recipe" skin-crusty thigh-bone, say, then those icky-sticky (oh my) patches of napkin-fiber will be permanently epoxied to the tips of your fingers. The result is worse cosmetically than un-etiquette-ly inserting fingers in mouth first. Then the napkinning. Everybody knows that too.

I come to the D-D's defense because all the whiny food-nannies on the planet are against it. Even to the point of attacking the innocent barnyard creatures whose dead flesh (or fermented products therefrom) go into the making of it. Specifically, one Mark Morford who asks us, in his subtitled "One Sandwich To Kill Us All"--

Did you notice? How in in one pseudo-food item, you are consuming not one, not two, but the mutated, chemically injected flesh/by products of fully THREE different distended, liquefied, industrially tortured creatures? Feel the love, pitiable animal kingdom. (SFGate/HuffPost 4-11 here)

Great article, actually. Pretty much a pitch-perfect rhetorical rant, but you can see his sub-textual agenda. Not so much concerned with OUR health as that of industrialized food-fauna. Along the way, he also gets around to the evils of processed food, and, yes, capitalism. These are points to be made perhaps, but his stalking horse--that the D-D is a "fistful of nausea" in your mouth and a "toxic zoo in your colon [love it]"--just doesn't argue well at all. In fact, the guy may be a little muddled with some sort of anal retention/obsession about the whole thing. Listen to this:

For well I know this horrible CRAPBUCKET OF CHYME [wow!] joins a very long list of fast-food nightmares you should never put anywhere near your MOUTH, unless you deeply hate yourself and don't give a damn anymore, and you want to die fat and stupid like that rotting thing you found in your rain gutter.

Now, I must say, not much NOT to like about that. How about the nasty way he's got the whole alimentary canal covered, literally or allusively? He even attacks the digestive hygiene of your house! Problem though with the "chyme" analogy. If you're not familiar, chyme is "the semi-fluid mass into which food is converted by gastric secretion and which passes into the small intestine." You would definitely need a BUN for that. (more)
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#47 John Forsythe: "Grandpa" III

For me and mine, beyond that memorable afternoon at the races, the remainder of John Lincoln Freund's visit (apt birth-surname: "friend") was perforce anti-climactic ... except for simply everybody else on campus and hundreds of miles around. Trustee Del Mann couldn't have picked a better Hollywood guy to enchant an entire community. Natural charm. No effort whatsoever. (His teeth were entirely too big for his mouth, by the way. A curious anatomical fact, up close, but may explain his incredible smile, on- and off-camera.) And of course that VOICE! Notwithstanding these easily ingratiating qualities--he could have just basked in adoration the whole stay--no, like a true professional, he came to work.

First of all, he schlepped his own prints of his two personal-best films across the continent to showcase on the two successive evenings of the official gig. (No money for this, by the way; just good will by way of Tinseltown connectivity.) SRO both nights. After each screening it was simply Q&A between actor and audience, which would have lasted all night if I hadn't capped it at about a half-hour (we knew the autograph-stampede was yet to come). They were mainly Bachelor Father and his later-TV-series fans, and they were rabid, especially the women--he was no "Grandpa" to them. (Some threw panties and motel keys ... okay, wished they could--Bible Belt, you know.) Then autographs, which seemed to last forever. We didn't want any broken hearts.

His hardest work though was in the remaining daytime hours he was with us. For the next two days John Forsythe must have met every important supporter of the college there was--already at one formal dinner, then another, a couple of luncheons, a morning and afternoon tea or two, whatever. He was game for all of it. Never flagged for a moment. Of course he charmed everybody, and they in turn had their brush with celebrity. Also, we needed their money. We were struggling financially at the time (again, my first year), after a difficult transition from women's college to co-ed. But its fortunes began to improve significantly after Forsythe's visit. For all I know, he might have saved the college.

I got the clear impression that he was not at all bothered by the fact that his fame up to that time was primarily due to television. A come-down for the true actor, conventional-wisdom-wise, from stage or film. After all, he started out in the prestigious, hometown (for him) Actor's Studio alongside Brando and other future luminaries. He was even featured in several famous Broadway productions, including Teahouse of the August Moon and Mister Roberts. Then he went "downhill" into the new medium of television? Tsk.

It's also a fact that doing live TV drama is about as demanding on an actor's craft as anything else could be. Consider: it's a one-time shot. No second-plus shows, or takes. Everything rides on those scant and incorrigible 90-120 minutes in front of faceless millions. Forsythe paid those kind of dues in such classic TV franchises in the late 40s (!) and early 50s as Studio One, Kraft/Ford/Chrysler/US Steel/Goodyear "Theaters"--a dozen more--including Philco Television Playhouse where he worked with Delbert Mann. I count upwards of a hundred one-time performances, always in the leading or co-lead role. A hard-worker even then. So what if he was able to redeem those dues later on with the less-demanding but certainly more-fame-and-regular-paycheck-generating Bachelor Father (he was a real, bill-paying one), The John Forsythe Show, and To Rome With Love. And in the next two decades, as a real grandfather, Charlie's Angels and Dynasty?

So he wanted us to know for those two nights that he was a respectable screen actor as well. I'll vouch. Though never to be ranked with the acting greats, he had distinguished himself by that time in about a half-dozen memorable films, four of which helmed by the very best directors. Sad to say, these really represented his cinematic peak, all before his later, strictly TV-movie and sitcom success that kept him busy for the rest of his long and satisfying career.

Aside from the popular Kitten with a Whip ('64) opposite Ann-Margaret and Madame X ('66) with Lana Turner--both of which he preferred, he told me, NOT to be so damn memorable--he had starred in two films with Hitchcock: The Trouble with Harry ('55) and Topaz ('69); and two with Richard Brooks: In Cold Blood ('67) and The Happy Ending ('69). For her work in the latter, Jean Simmons (above)--director Brooks' wife at the time--was Academy-Award nominated for best actress in a leading role. (She just died this January.) We screened this one on the second night. A very brave pick, for John co-starred as Simmons' loveless and philandering husband, woefully dys-named "Fred"--a stretch for the usually nice-guy actor. Do you think the audience forgave him?

Harry and Happy were the actor's favorites. Moreover, he admitted to me that Jean Simmons' powerhouse performance brought out in him what he thought was the best job of acting he had ever done in his life. (more)
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#46 John Forsythe: "Grandpa" II

We picked up "Grandpa" John in Charlotte after his cross-country flight in "our" corporate jet. (The college was founded by Civil War "Major" J.L. Coker who founded the still family-owned Sonoco Products, a Fortune 500 company and major subsidizer of the school.) That was fun already. To add to the fun, it was a homecoming of sorts for the actor. He was familiar with the territory, having spent--surprise-- his only two years of college at UNC-Chapel Hill (right down the road from me lately). Smart guy. Even a bit of a prodigy. Only son of a NYSE broker, he was graduated from his Brooklyn H.S. at 16, and, after two years in the South, returned to his hometown to begin, at a mere 18, his career in show-business. As guess what? ... a VOICE! "Charlie Michelob's" smooth baritone was in demand already--in this case as a public-address announcer for the baseball Dodgers at Ebbets Field.

Conversation was easy with John, and we had a lot of time for it, in between events. It didn't hurt that the Blogman was already a semi-pro, pop-culture media and cinema freak, and had seen most of his work up to that time. Important work, that is. That included his best films, and, though I never watched a minute of his TV sitcoms, I remembered his starring spots on several of Alfred Hitchcock's weekly programs, which I never missed, or forgot. In fact, the actor had a long collaboration with my favorite director, and brought one of them along (of two films) to screen for his soon-to-be-revealed multitude of adoring fans that evening (and the next): 1955's The Trouble with Harry (above).

But first, it turned out that we had a lot of time to kill. His flight connections had got him to our general environs quite early in the day. He would have public exposure enough beginning in a few hours, but indicated that he didn't want to be motel-bound--rather, he wanted to go someplace private to relax, chat some more, and have a beer or two (he had just started his job with Michelob) to wind down before the spectacularities commenced. Since all the appropriate college mucky-mucks were occupied, frantically preparing for the high-toned Hollywood evening to come ... I just took him home. Heineken would have to do.

It was late spring, and my youngest, Andrew, was already back from a half-day at school, while his older brothers were still on full. So the six-year-old got all the Forsythe largess that afternoon. He was a cute and cuddly kid, and they hit it off immediately. As far as Andy was concerned, he became indistinguishable from one of the family. And it obviously was just the tonic, aside from the beerage, that the actor needed.

At one point in the lap-sittage, my son began fiddling with "Grandpa's" wristwatch. It was one of those big elaborate sports-watches (he was an avid tennis-player, and getting started as a breeder of racehorses) with several dials on its face, as I remember. These had really just hit the market, and were rather fascinating, even for grown-ups. "How about a RACE, Andy?"--taking off the watch in preparation. (We were in the backyard.) "We'll TIME it! You start here and run as fast as you can to that tree just before the driveway. Then run back to me and we'll see how you came out on this little dial here. Then we'll see if you can beat it. Okay, ready ... " Or words to that effect. He'd played this game before, no doubt with his same-aged granddaughter.

So it was off-to-the-races at our improvised Forsythe Downs, and the heirloom snapshots were taken. A "good time" was on record for all participants ... until too soon the time on his magic watch ran out. (more)
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#45 John Forsythe: "Grandpa"

His peers in elementary and high-school wouldn't believe it, so my third-son Andrew (named after my paternal Grandpa) had to bring periodically a couple of snapshots to the school-grounds to prove it. Yes, he had really sat on John Forsythe's lap as a tow-headed young boy of six in the spring of 1972. Played "race-against-the-second -hand" with him. Even called him Grandpa, because there was a strong resemblance to my father, and the child got a bit confused. Little kids will do that, and it didn't help that Forsythe, who died last week at 92, was so very grandfatherly. He had practice. His granddaughter, Deborah (from a short first marriage--his second lasted 51 years), was exactly Andy's age at the time.

Additional proof was required as the actor's fame grew back in the late 70s and 8os as the off-screen voice of Charlie on TV's Charlie's Angels (ironically: his very last acting jobs were to reprise that role for the Drew Barrymore movie-versions in 2000 and 2003), AND as Blake Carrington on Dynasty, enormously popular no doubt with many of the parents of my son's classmates as they progressed through school. "I've become a sex-symbol in my sixties," he was quoted as saying.

When he made his 3-day, 2-night appearance that spring at our little college in South Carolina, he was sort of in between careers, in a bit of a slump, really, as far as media-fame goes, which was one reason we were able to fetch him to such an un-commercial venue. The overriding reason, though, was this happy quirk of fate: Our new President was good friends with AA-winning director--for the landmark Marty '55--Delbert Mann. (Also did other notables like Separate Tables, That Touch of Mink, oodles of TV movies.) They were fellow Vanderbilt alums (like me, coincidentally), and Mann was recruited to be on the Coker College Board of Trustees. Hence Forsythe. They had in turn been best friends since TV's "Golden-Age" days when Mann had directed the actor (always with one foot in regular-paycheck television and the other in modest movie success) in several live-broadcast dramas of the day.

Trivia note: not in "Marty" though, which I remember vividly as a 10-yr-old in 1953 watching live on Philco Playhouse with my parents. Mann directed and Rod Steiger starred. Usually I was a captive audience for these high-cultcha TV events; however, this was first "adult" drama that really impressed, but which I didn't quite understand until pubescence had fully set in about two years later, when I saw Mann's movie-version with his fellow Oscar-winner Earnest Borgnine in the lead. Had no idea, then or now, why the great Rod Steiger lost the film-role, or why-in-the-world Borgnine won an Oscar.

But back to Forsythe's visit. Despite his relative downturn at the box-office and in TV fame, there was no lack of rabid fans in Hartsville, SC. Hundreds of middle-aged women flocked to our little campus to see the still-super-handsome star of the long-running Bachelor Father (through 1961, pictured above) and a couple of short-lived series in the 60s like the lately-canceled To Rome with Love. Their husbands too. He was currently narrating the popular the popular nature series, World of Survival, and was just starting his fifteen-year stint (!) as the voice of Michelob Beer--the "Weekends-Are-Made-for-Michelob" era. A lot of voice-over work during this period, culminating a few years later with Charlie.

Anyway, he was almost as big a smash as when the first McDonalds opened in our town that same year. And I was in charge. No fault of my own. New faculty are notoriously elected--as some sort of cruel initiation rite--the chairperson of whatever committee they happen to fall into. Mine was fortuitously that first year the "Special Events Committee." John Forsythe became my very special event. He lived up to his reputation--then, and right up to his death--as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. (more)
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#34 Six Quick Picks: Netflix 2008 Comedy Schtick Pix

Mostly unsung. And with a one year lag, allowing for Netflix availability. If you're a follower of this Blog, chances are you're sub-clinically addicted to that Mail-Order Miracle, and likely, moreover, to enjoy my favorites of 2008.

Hamlet 2 British very-funny-guy Steve Coogan as down-and-out expatriot H.S. drama coach directing his irreverent time-traveling take on the Bard. (Jesus C. in cast of play-within-a-movie.) Comedic trouble both political and domestic ensues. Formidable Catherine Keener and reliable Amy Poehler in support.

Burn After Reading Dark but hilarious Coen Brothers' spy-thriller-turned-upside-down. Gold-standard cast includes Clooney, Pitt, Malkovich, McDormand, Swinton. Enough said.

Tropic Thunder Offensive to the brink of off-putting, Ben Stiller's satire of Vietnam movies of Stone and Kubrick, and Hollywood every-which-way. Downey in black-face, Cruise unrecognizable. Jack Black, McConaughey, Coogan (again) in support. Nick Nolte almost steals the show.

Ghost Town If you can temporarily buy-into a Casper-friendly mis en scene, a warm-hearted story of misanthropic schlub Ricky Gervais' redemption with comic-cosmic implications. But down-to-earth funny. Always-believable Tia Leoni co-stars. Greg Kinnear and forever-under-used Kristen Wiig in fine support.

Yes Man Jim Carrey vehicle underrated because too much like an inverted Liar, Liar, his very best work. So what. Call it a sequel. Another self-absorbed schlub, Carrey "yesses" of himself into social an romantic salvation. Restrained-funny-Carrey movie with true-story-based depth. Worth watching if only for Zooey Deschanel's multi-tasked performance. Veteran Terence Stamp plays the "Yes"-Guru to perfection.

Vicky Christina Barcelona Woody Allen's best since Match Point, which had similar romantic complications, but here the filmmaker must set a record for sexual permutations/combinations thereof, only adding to the somewhat numb-inducing comic effect. (Sorry to say this, but it helps, too, that neither the Woodman himself or a surrogate, like Larry David, have any need to be in this film.) Melancholy-funny. Fresh, exotic/foreign venue, beautifully shot. Charismatic Javier Bardem and incandescent Penelope Cruz appropriately Allen-ized.

Satisfaction guaranteed. If you don't like any one of them, please feel free to send back by return mail.
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#27 Obama and THE Shaggy Dog Story

This is Bo, First Dog, Obama-family-wise. Not as shaggy as his master's AfPac speech last week, but 'twill do for illustration. I'll get back to more substantive analysis back over at the war-torn Daily Mosteller shortly, but gimme a break. His speech reminded me so much of a Shaggy Dog Story that I thought I'd "muse" myself over here and give you the classic original--which happened to show up serendipitously last week in the 22nd annual installment (haven't missed one) of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader! Here's his version:

A wealthy man lost his beloved, valuable pet dog, an incredibly shaggy dog, maybe the shaggiest dog in the world. The man took out a newspaper advertisement that read, "Lost: World's Shaggiest Dog. Large Cash Reward." A young boy saw the ad and wanted the reward, so he decided he'd find the world's shaggiest dog and return it. The boy combed his town, and the next town over, and the one after that, looking for shaggy dogs. He found some in pet stores and dog pounds, and they were shaggy ... but not shaggy enough. [At this point, BlogManFans, you can take the boy around the world, piling on the detail and repetition.]

Finally, after the 30th dog pound he visited, the boy found an incredibly shaggy dog. The dog was so shaggy that he tripped over his own fur, because it covered both his paws and his eyes. when he barked, you couldn't even hear the sound because it got lost in the dog's layers of fur. [A good storyteller could add example after example on this theme.] It was the shaggiest dog the boy had ever seen in his life, and there was no way a dog could be any shaggier.

So, the boy bought the dog and carried him all the way to the home of the wealthy man who had placed the ad for the lost shaggy dog. He had to carry him because the dog was so shaggy he couldn't see to walk properly. Finally, the boy got to the rich man's home and rang the doorbell. the man answered the door, glanced at the dog, and then said to the boy, "Not that shaggy."

Embellishment is all. Always pushing, Andy-Kaufman-like, the patience of your audience, begging them to stick it out for the grand finale, and then pulling the rug with an anti-punchline. (Hollywood recently made a whole movie, "The Aristocrats," with guest comics doing their versions of the same dirty joke, following the shaggy-dog template. Some of my favorite funny-men, but unwatchable.) The important thing it that it all end in complete bathos--low-down, disappointing anti-climax. Not humor for all tastes. My favorite is the first ever told to me: what I'll call the High-Lama of Ultimate Wisdom story. Severely elided version:

Unhappy man seeks meaning of life ... travels world ... many wise-men ... loses wife, family, job ... travels more world ... many more wise-men ... loses youth, money, health ... finally last chance ... shreds and tatters ... climbs to Tibetan Monastery high in Himalayas... wisest man in the world ... hundreds of years old ... "Father, what is the meaning of Life?" ... "My son, Life is a fountain." ... "What?! Why you *&#%$#@&! I've come all this way etc. etc. etc. and that's all you've got to tell me? ... shaken, the High-Lama replies, "It's not?"

Obama's shaggy-dog speech? Lots of narrative detail, embellishment--but bathetic in the end. No punchline. What starts out as an argument for "the strategy that MY administration will pursue ... " turns out to be not his strategy after all. It's no more than a Bush/Cheney "surge"--pure and simple. And it's not funny.
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#26 Mona Lisa's Pupillae

I was able to view Da Vinci's (see last posts) most famous painting "up close and personal" at the Louvre in 1973 while we were on our "Paris break" from one of those British-Isles-oriented, college-courses that I led overseas. This was before the museum began installing an ever tighter series of security barriers, including now a kind of plexiglass bubble-box that I must assume would keep the spectator at some distance--and optically interrupted--from the live surface of the world's most notorious near-anonymous face. Pity. Because ... if I had to view the original work in that constricted way for the first time, as others must do today, I never would have figured out what was so special about it.

For in those more trusting times--when you could actually hug a stone at Stonehenge--if you were a devotee of the divine La Giaconda, you had simply to LEAN (albeit awkwardly) over the conventional velvet-rope-and-brass-standard "barrier" lining the the gallery at a distance of about three or four feet from the wall. That is, if you manage to wriggle through to the front of the crowd. Not a problem for an aggressive Ugly American.

When once you're close enough, then comes the surprise. It's not the smile. It's all in the EYES. Okay, it's the eyes in conjunction with the smile. But here's the enormous difference between viewing the painting in an art book or on the TV screen and viewing it in person: you get to see the dots of her eyes, so to speak. The PUPILS.

For one thing, the actual portrait is larger than you might imagine: somewhat over 2 ft. x 3 ft.--big enough to see all of Da Vinci's detail, if viewed from a reasonable, fairly close-up distance. Now in the small photo of the painting above--and however/wherever else you are most likely to see it--her eyes come off as sort of unfocused brown and white. (A blue-eyed Italian lady might have been a different story.) Our little black lens-apertures are missing from view. They're simply below your threshold of perception, under these second-hand circumstances.

Even so, there's no doubt she's looking at you; Leonardo positions the irises just right, binocular-wise. He didn't study Anatomy for nothing. But in person, it's the pupillae that will effectively bring about the irresistible BOND between her eyes and yours. They take the woman's gaze, locked with yours, to another level of intimacy altogether. That's the secret to her fame, I believe. For those who have seen the real-life "Mona Lisa" under the formerly ideal conditions, her "look" becomes more than a casual glance: rather, it's a penetrating, philosophical, kind of Sartrean le regard. As if she knows something about THE YOU standing there--the painter, the viewer, whoever catches her eternal eye--that might be better left unknown. And knowing that ... she smiles.
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#25 Da Vinci Vindicated

Thought I'd better bring out the original, after shamelessly exploiting his "Vitruvian Man" for rhetorical purposes over in the Daily Mosteller. And it gives me a chance to recount an encounter with Leonardo, some 35 years ago.

First of all, it's an evocative piece of work. No wonder the drawing has been redacted/exploited for all manner of logos by myriad health/fitness/science entities like Blue Cross and Sky Lab II--though usually stylized and decidedly non-gender-specific, unlike the original here. Setting aside the artist's always interesting homoerotic subtext in almost everything he did--q.v. especially the Da Vinci Code conundrum about the ambiguous male/female figure at "The Last Supper"--this piece is a fascinating blend of art and science, or at least pseudo-science. It's the thought that counts.

And no man ever thought so much about so many things as Leonardo, as we all know. In fact, it got in the way of his work, more often than not. No greater "Renaissance-Man"; no greater procrastinator. My hero. All told, his greatness rests on a very small number of actual accomplishments. This one, though, is particularly interesting because it's an overt attempt to resolve, through his art, that persistent conundrum of his age: New Science vs. New Humanism. He was trying to humanize science here, and vice-versa. We know from the drawing's footnotes that he was faithfully following "scientific" guidelines for perfect human proportions, laid down by the Roman architect Vitruvius. (The artist had already been forced to study the "New Anatomy"--people were finally carving up people in the name of medical science--by his first teacher, and we can see it in those macabre "muscle-and-bone" sketches of his, which were nonetheless well ahead of their time for accuracy.)

All this went along with the optimistic Renaissance notion of the perfectibility of man. "Drawing" upon a countryman from the classical period, Da Vinci used the architect's questionable geometrics to construct a human figure of ideal proportions. He was serious:

For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height ... from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the the underside of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the underside of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. ["Mona Lisa?"] The length of the foot is one sixth the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that that the the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown.

Leonardo even tried to crack that ancient chestnut, "squaring the circle," in his drawing above, and supplemented in the following:

Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses [think of the bygone, I assume, grammar-school chalkboard-compass--a giant one!] centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.

Perfect nonsense, of course. But it seemed to make good art. How about the perfect face ... the perfect "enigmatic" smile? (more)
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#20 Luck, Woody, Tennis, Gump IV

One last peeve. Love Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump (1994). Truly the Feel-Good-Movie-with-Grit for the ages. Whenever it comes around on its two- or three-year cycle on cable, I can count on being thoroughly entertained again. Sort of like my thing with The Thing--the John Carpenter/Kurt Russell 1982 version (NOT the albeit great 1951 James Arness original that I originally saw only fitfully through the seat backs and in between frightened runs to the lobby long ago at either the aforementioned Avalon or Stoney in Chicago)--but for different reasons.

Well, one of the movie's life-analogies--the more famous one--is to a box of chocolates, as pictured in last post and containing half of the home-spun words of wisdom. Adumbrated by his mother, and repeated way too often in the course of the motion picture, here it is from Forrest:

My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

Gnash! The sound you hear is teeth a-grinding. It's hard NOT to get bruxistic about this line of dialog, because #1 it's taken up so often by otherwise smart, well-meaning people, who, perhaps brain-washed by that popular and well-meaning film, are half-consciously convinced that these ARE words of wisdom about our life on this planet. Heck, I've heard it used quite seriously by one of my former colleagues as the basis for a commencement speech! And #2: Woody Allen's bogus "net-court" tennis-analogy rises to sheer genius when compared to this pile-size dump of pop philosophy. Illogic squared.

To be fair, though, to the film-maker and to the novelist from whose work the movie is adapted, the line may have been meant to be stupid, as a handy bit of character-exposition. Gump IS so very stupid vis a vis the ways of the world, while being so very SMART in other very important ways. (In the novel, by the way, he's portrayed as something of an idiot-savant, adept in Physics and Math, which keeps his grades up for football.)

However, "Momma" is portrayed as being much more worldly-wise than her son. If her philosophy of Life and Luck, other than being in good fun, is to be taken seriously--and Forrest has more than his share of tragedy in an otherwise well-spent life--then it fails in the following respects, in ascending order of importance:

• There's most often a "actual-size" map/key printed on the inside cover of the box indicating the varied make-up of each chocolate confection in their separate compartments. If you can read, then you'll "know what you're gonna get." Nary a soupcon of Luck involved.
  

• Even if you can't read, or can't even see, there's a SKILL to be developed by the inveterate boxed-chocolate-sampler sampler. (The element of skill is also what hurts Woody Allen's net-court analogy.) Set by industry tradition, the contents of each chocolate-covered piece is identifiable by its generic shape, in conjunction with a distinctive "swirl" on top. Nothing random about it.

• Assuming illiteracy or blindness or lack of bon-bon acuity, no matter what you randomly pick, you're still gonna get a CHOCOLATE something-or-other, for crying out loud, not a camouflaged pebble. "Momma wants you to try one one of these, Forrest, but watch out for the pebble look-a-likes" ... "But how am I supposed to know which-is-which, Momma?" ... "Just go ahead, son, I'm teaching you a lesson about Life." Much better analogy.

• Make a totally gut-wrenching pick? You can simply spit it out. Life works just like that, does it not?

So enough with the box of chocolates already, which took on so much of a life of its own outside the movie. A more palatable analogy about Life in a world of Chance and Circumstance, and the role that Luck plays in it, is the White Feather that floats willy-nilly upon the scene from time to time. Forrest himself "unwittingly" defines the symbolism at the end of his truly eloquent speech to his now grave-bound Jenny:

I don't know if Momma was right or if it's Lieutenant Dan. I don't know if we each have a destiny [not really supported by her chocolate-box nostrum, however], or if we're all floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time. I miss you Jenny.

Better ... but the white feather is so gratuitous. So inorganic to plot and character. At least the Wood Man makes the symbolism of the hovering net-court tennis ball tie in naturally with his mis en scene. Now, if Gump's feather had floated into his ear and given him a nasty infection ...
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#28 Luck, Allen, Tennis, Gump III

So ... even before the story proper begins, Match Point has us in suspense already by literally suspending us in mid-air along with the tennis ball about two feet above the net, ready to fall on either side, and so determine who wins and who loses in the course of the film to follow. Spoiler: the image never returns; the ball never drops. But something else does, analogously, later on.

Woody Allen's title takes literal meaning, of course, from the sport of tennis--the last point of the match that decides winner and loser, as we've seen in real-life examples. The main character, Chris Wilton, is a fictional real-life tennis-pro, retiring still-young from the tournament circuit, but--and this is important--already "winning" a job as an instructor at an exclusive club in the very first scenes of the film after the prologue. The title thus immediately and easily suggests figurative associations. From the other side of the tracks--working-class Ireland--pretty-boy Chris is a player in every sense. His only "skill" seems to be his intelligent, effortless charm, but that's enough to score winning points against the influential people in Society and Business who somehow come his way, and to make the right kind of "matches" that will get him ahead of the game ... except for one. Take a guess.

But let's take it ad nauseum. Sorry, bored, non-tennis-buffs. Got to do it. We never see Chris in competitive play (Allen has him standing at the net punching a few balls back to to wealthy clients just after he gets the job in order to credentialize his on-screen persona)--but we can imagine him NOT as a primarily offensive player like Federer, and especially Nadal, who power the ball at every stroke (as does most every other top-ten player these days). We perhaps are invited to see tennis-pro Chris as most like Andy Murray--another upstart out-lander, by the way; this time a proud Scot, which always seemed to cause media-trouble for him at Wimbledon--who is primarily a defensive shot-maker, relying more on placement than power, and waiting for the opportunity presented by his opponent to give him a ball that he can clearly hit for a winner. Not enough to win at the U.S. Open this year, but enough to be 3rd-ranked in the world.

Chris is at the top of his game as the movie opens. A mere twenty-minutes later, his charming, "passive-aggressive" style of play has already taken him to the top of London's upper-class society. His tennis-instructor connections have quickly led to the Irishman's plight-trothing with the daughter of an outrageously rich Brit, who has in turn hired him into a plush executive position in the family business. The audience must always keep in mind, however, that opening freeze-frame. The ball has not yet dropped over the net, one way or the other. (Bad analogy for Luck v. Life, but a great image.) You might say Luck brought Chris a future brother-in-law with a love-starved sister, but he had known just where to position himself, and had the skills to take advantage of the opportunity. Unluckily though, it would seem, the well-meaning brother brings with him a spoiler: his fiancee' Nola, the Scarlet Woman. (How well is the actress Ms. Johansson named, considering her role in the film?!) Do they fall in lust? Is a tennis ball fuzzy in the woods?

Yes, and the plot complications begin. I'll save us some time here and refer the Myriad Readers to Theodor Dreiser's classic novel, An American Tragedy, redacted in the equally great film, A Place in the Sun (1951), where Montgomery Clift plays the social-climber and Shelly Winters the femme fatale who would sabotage it all. The plots are well-nigh EXACTLY the same--I think Woody acknowledged his homage someplace or other. And the director borrows heavily, too, from his earlier award-winning and box-office-popular Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). In Match, the quadrangle soon becomes a triangle after Chris marries the daughter, the brother dumps Nola, who now can become the legitimate mistress, if she will. There are many lucky and unlucky twists that inhabit the line of action here, but the entertaining though never-funny comedy of manners inevitably devolves into the film noir we knew it would become. Bad luck: girl gets possessive and pregnant; threatens everything; must be killed. Boy kills girl. Good luck: boy gets away with it. Or so it seems as the credits roll. But the ball hasn't yet dropped.

At the end of Place, Mongomery Clift is punished for his crime. At the end of Crimes, the Martin Landau character, who does the deed through his ne'er-do-well brother and a hit-man, is not, at least not by the justice system. Both characters suffer their guilt, and in the former that guilt is expiated and mooted deus ex machina by the death penalty. Not so easy in Crimes. In the final moments of that film Landau confesses to the Woody Allen character, in a "hypothetical" conversation, that the "murderer" went through long periods of gut-wrenching guilt and remorse (he did), but one morning, surrounded by his happy family and accumulated wealth, it seemed that those demons had vanished. The character played by Woody remains dubious: "I just don't see how anybody could survive the terrible guilt of such a thing." Nonetheless, Landau rejoins and hugs his wife, and they return to the evening's wedding festivities. The credits roll.

Now here's the trick Allen plays on us in Match Point. Two or three tricks, really. First, it looks that after all Chris will not get away with his "perfect" crime, and will be caught by the authorities. Several events pop-up that would impede it, but he "lucks-out" on every one, and the murder has apparently succeeded in wonderfully noir-ish fashion. But then, after cleaning up the crime-scene, he throws potentially incriminating evidence into the Thames. All of the items make it over the guard-rail and into the river but one: a ring. It bounces off the top of the railing, hovers in mid-air for a slo-mo moment, and lands back on the embankment, after Chris had already turned and run off. Of course it sounds familiar, and visually it couldn't be a more perfect counterpoint to the first scene of the movie. True genius here. Bad luck has finally caught up with Chris Wilton. But nooooo--the homicide cops do investigate him, yes, for unluckily Nola has left behind a diary that her murderer overlooked ... and they find the ring. However, they find it in possession of a vagrant-burglar-drug-addict who had picked it up along the Thames, and who happens to answer beautifully to the bogus scenario that Chris tried to stage! Investigation over.

The ultimate twist, though, is more subtle ... and by allusion. Our protagonist is seen early on reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The novel most probably influenced Allen's earlier movie of almost the same name--Woody was a great fan of the Russian classics (cf. his Love and Death and Tolstoy)--but there's no doubt he wants us to apply it directly to what's going on in Match Point. To follow up on the book's appearance, he has the future father-in-law recommend the mentality of his daughter's suitor to his wife in the following terms: "Oh, yes, he's quite the educated young man; we had a nice chat about Dostoevsky the other day." As we know, after his murderous crimes, the novel's protagonist, Raskolnikov, is so violently guilt-wracked, that he has no choice but to give himself up in the end. Landau in Crimes, the same, as he confesses to the Allen character, though he stops short at turning himself in, and seems to get over it. But Woody plays Dostoevsky in that movie--"nobody survives the guilt"--and Dostoevsky plays Dostoevsky in Match Point.

Will Landau's character or Chris Wilton ultimately survive the guilt? Or is Woody Allen's vision totally bleak and morally nihilistic? Well, we see Chris in shuddering paroxysms of guilt before the fact, and of remorse, after. Apparitions of the slain women (he must kill two to stage the crime properly--thus three people counting the unborn) come to visit his fevered consciousness, even before he's questioned about the crime. The answer to my question earlier is NO. While we can't expect a simplistic, "Tell-Tale Heart" sort of resolution to the moral problems presented, I think Woody Allen is telling us pretty clearly that the guilty parties in both movies are deluding themselves. The guilt will catch up with them sooner or later, if not the authorities. In other words, the writer-director has given us implicit permission to condemn these characters to eternal psychological torture, punished for the rest of their fictional lives by the worst kind of Raskolnikovian misery. (more)

#27 Luck, Woody, Tennis, Gump II

Continuing from last post, the analogy of the "net-court" point with LUCK as a controlling factor in LIFE is a bad one, at least as formulated by Chris Wilton in the visual/voice-over prologue to Woody Allen's Match Point. His tennis-pro character should have known better, even if his creator did not. He's got the "luck" on the wrong side of the net.

But let's go back to Roger Federer for a minute to explain some of this from a real-life perspective. It so happens that he made a now-famous "lucky" shot--you may have seen a replay--penultimate to the for-real "match point" over Novak Djokovich in the semi-finals of the U.S. Open. It was a backwards between-the-legs shot, one that has now become classic since show-boaters like Nastase and Noah made it a crowd-pleaser a few decades ago. It's a desperation shot, but really the defender's only chance when caught too close to the net and the opponent's return is a low-trajectory lob. The ball is out-of-reach for an overhead smash, but chase-down-able. When the player catches up to the ball, there isn't enough time or space left to run around it and hit a face-forward, normal return (as in Roger's photo last post). So, while sprinting frantically away from the net toward the baseline, he must time his stroke for just when the ball, having already sailed over his head, is about to take its losing second-bounce. Down goes the racket between the legs, and ... thwack. Most of the time it's a futile effort--the ball dribbles away, or founders into the net--but the crowd applauds the lost-cause dedication all the more. Sometimes--more often than one would think--the acrobatically tortuous return makes it back over the net ... only to be put away by a smiling opponent now in near-impregnable net-play position. Even more applause. Quite often, though, the opponent will "net" the easy one, out of sheer shock that the ball came back at all. Most applause ever.

Not any of the above for Roger Federer. He hit a CLEAN WINNER! Utilizing his incredible speed and impeccable footwork, the world's #1 ranked player chased the ball down, hit it from between his legs at just the right moment, and at just the right angle, to send it cross-court past the astonished stare of Djokovich waiting at the net. That made it advantage and break-point for Roger in what was to become the deciding game. His opponent, doubtless shell-shocked from the previous point, blew his serve ... point and match! After the match, Federer was asked semi-facetiously by the always-sharp Mary Carillo about his miraculous shot-making:

--Is that a shot you guys practice a lot?
--More so than you might think, or that we should, really.

Aye ... there's the point, really. The over-and-under-and-between-the-legs thing is not a matter of luck at all--at least not if the opponent hits his lob to a place on the court that a skillful player can get to. Just how MUCH skill will determine the outcome. And Roger Federer's got it in spades.

Now let's go back to the bogus "net-court" analogy at the beginning of Woody Allen's fictional Match Point. (A peeve, I'll admit, but bear with me; it's a fine movie notwithstanding.) Recall that the tennis ball is freeze-framed above the net, equipoised between going forward or falling back. Totally in the hands of fate, it would seem. In tournament play, if the ball makes it over and drops unreachable on the other side, it's considered good tennis manners to give your opponent a sheepish little salute acknowledging your "lucky" shot. You're a spoil-sport if you don't. But it's simply a ploy to mollify the groaning fans. Behind that humble gesture is the knowledge--for any and every player--that the point was deserved. The "luck" involved is on the other side of the net: bad luck. The winner of the point has hit the ball skillfully enough that what might have otherwise flown cleanly over the net has hit near enough to the top to allow the ball to go over. Simple physics. In other words, the ball would have to be pretty-well-aimed in the first place. Less skill = lower on the tape. Point lost.

Okay ... so Woody chose an inept analogy--this doesn't mean there's not a lot of luck involved in the opportunities he presents his protagonist with in the course the movie. Cast willy-nilly amongst the high-tone, tennis-and-horsey-set of English society, our hero must nonetheless employ a panoply of natural and social skills to take advantage of these opportunities. One of them is played by Scarlet Johansson. No, that's not her in Vermeer's most famous painting, "Girl with a Pearl Earring," but it might as well have been. Little wonder that Peter Webber chose the actress for his eminently watchable movie with the same title (2004)--the resemblance is so remarkable. (more)
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#26 Luck, Woody Allen, Tennis, and Gump's Sampler

Speaking of the Wood Man (last MM), I finally got around to Netflixing Allen's Match Point (2005), right after the U.S. Open just few weeks ago. Though the fellow at right lost his match-point to Agentinian Juan Del Potro in an incandesent five-set final, Roger Federer--still the greatest player of all time after winning his Career Grand Slam at the French and surpassing Pete Sampras in total wins (16) at Wimbledon--now holds the record for the "luckiest" shot in Grand Slam history. Or was it skill?

Woody Allen's Match Point made some history, too. It was the first film that earned money-over-cost for him in the U.S. since the estimable Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)--a cool twenty-one films previous. Ironically--since it's his first one shot entirely outside this country. This film is uncharacteristically but beautifully set in quaint upper-class London and the luxuriant English countryside. All of his previous three-dozen or so had barely made it out of mid-town Manhattan. So this unusual departure from a typical "Woody Allen" had modest "good luck" at the box-office (the eccentric auteur has never come close to a blockbuster). Could it also have been because of his canny "skill" in choosing the only American in the cast: the "luxuriant" Scarlett Johansson, cine-genic sex-goddess for our times? For many in the audience, she would be worth the price of admission, me included.Then again, it could be because Match is NOT a dead-giveaway as belonging to the Allen oeuvre--he's not in it, for one thing, and it's not in the least bit funny. Altogether a very strange and surprising film for him to make. And I've seen most every one.

More of that later, but first: LUCK. No subtlety at all about it, the movie harps on the theme from first line to last, from one scene to the next. Like Bunuel's in Phantom of Liberty--if you've been keeping up--the world of Match Point seems to be ruled by Chance and Circumstance, and for the characters in this film the only winning skill we can bring to the "game" is keen opportunism. (Difference: nobody ever really "wins," or has to, in Bunuel's surreal vision.) Allen broaches the theme in the very opening frames through a voice-over by the wily male-lead, "Chris Wilton"--I can't help but hear a little "Wimbledon" in his last name--a tennis-pro, as we are soon to find out. We're focused on a tennis-court net, like the one above, over which several balls pass back-and-forth during an obvious rally, until one return strikes the "tape," bounces straight up a couple of feet, and freezes in mid-air. Meanwhile, we have been listening to the following:

The man who said, "I'd rather be lucky than good," saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can go forward, or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose. [The ball remains frozen to fade-out, and the movie-proper begins.]

The very last lines of the film are a restatement of the opening, thus framing the whole story-arc: at a festive gathering of the principals, the brother-in-law "corrects" an earlier toast to Chris's new-born son by saying, "No, no--not to be great; I would just wish him to be LUCKY!" (more)
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#25 Two Books by Steven Berlin Johnson

Saw this pop-science/pop-culture author last March on "The Colbert Report," promoting his latest book, The Invention of Air (2008), ambitiously subtitled, "A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America." It's really all about Joseph Priestley, who has been a hero of mine for a number of reasons, and for a goodly number of years. Long library waiting-list. Just got it a couple of weeks ago, and a review is to follow in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile, I got hold of his earlier book, Everything Bad Is Good For You (2005), subtitled, almost as ambitiously, "How Today's Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter." Johnson's study of what I'll over-simply call "techno-culture" and it's effect on our collective gray-matter IS good for you, and will make you smarter and--this is most important--less guilty about the time you and/or your kids spend on playing video-games or watching television.

Johnson's got some science to back that up, but first, he got me hooked early on when he explains his central thesis by coining a metaphor from a Woody Allen movie!--

... popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years. Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a dumbing down--"an increasingly infantilized society," in George Will's words-- I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year ... making our minds sharper, as we soak-in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff. I call this upward trend the Sleeper Curve, after the classic sequence from Woody Allen's mock sci-fi film, where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional benefits of cream pies and hot fudge.

That's the author's only reference to the movie--he assumes probably correctly that most of his readership would've seen it, or at least heard about that "classic sequence." However, it's just too good not to share more fully with the Myriad Readers. Sleeper (1973) is perhaps my favorite from Allen's early, "mainly-funny-with-some-social-satire" period. Here one of Woody's trademark "schlemiel" characters, Miles Monroe, is brought back from an accidental cryonic state 2oo years into the future. His former diet was a regimen of all the hippie food-fads of the day; in fact, to hammer the point home unmercifully, Allen has him working at a health-food store! After thawing him out, two scientist-doctors discuss the morning after, all the while puffing on their cigarettes:

--For breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk."
--Oh yes [chuckling]. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
--You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or ... hot fudge?
--Those were thought to be unhealthy ... precisely the opposite of what we know to be true.
--Incredible.

Or later when, after they advise him to be sure to inhale deeply on a proffered cigarette, Miles confronts them with his confusion:

--Where am I anyhow? I mean, What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
--You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly 200 years.
--But they all ate organic rice!

This is the author's Sleeper Curve. Video-games bad? Nope. Turns out they're good for you after all. They are only one aspect of an intellectually rich, high-tech landscape through which a modern 10-year-old navigates: "shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching." That last was written before likes of Twitter and FaceBook (etc.) came into prominence, which can only further his point. Compare all of this to the rather simple-minded recreational toys and games of the past, and again you get his point. New stuff make brain good.

Public classrooms may be overcrowded and teachers underpaid--traditional test scores continue to go down--but outside of school kids' brains are developing sophisticated problem-solving skills. And IQ scores continue to go up. That's right: over the past 50 years Americans have improved by about 15 points, half of that in the last couple of decades. Johnson believes the paradox is solved when we look at what IQ tests test: problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial logic--a sufficiency of all of which is to be found in modern media technology. Q.E.D.

Even prime-time television has become more intellectually rigorous over the last couple of decades, Johnson believes. And I like his take on it. Ever since Hill Street Blues, he says (to paraphrase), a story-arc with multiple plot-threads has been de rigueur for the most successful sitcoms--popularly and critically--from Simpsons to Seinfeld to my current favorite, Scrubs. (Though I might contend that it really got started with shows like All In the Family and Mary Tyler Moore.) No longer "present tense" from one episode to the next, where the bare-bones "situation" was enough for the viewer to "get" the joke--Three's Company, Home Improvement--the newer shows require external references, an accumulated context that the audience must draw upon in order to be in the know. (That's why they're so popular in reruns: the viewers already have their ready-made "insider's playbook") Johnson points out Sam's past drinking-problem in Cheers, for example, or George Costanza's made-up character/entity "Art Vandelay," who appears in several episodes of Seinfeld. And I'll add the notorious "Master of My Domain" episode which keeps coming back in the form of "self-denial" in-jokes throughout the rest of the series.

Finally, and incidentally, my kids came up and along a bit before the monster techno-media revolution--somewhat ahead of the Sleeper Curve--but the author cites various fantasy and role-playing games as possible precursors to that revolution. One of those he mentions is Dungeons and Dragons, to which my first three sons were devoted player-aficionados. As far as I know, they never gave it up. I guess that's why they're so very, very smart. Or not.
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# 24 Bunuel and Defoe--a Footnote

Little did I know ... a favorite movie from my youth turns out to be the work of none other than Sn. Luis Bunuel: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954). Despite the poster, Dan O'Herlihy spoke English, I'm pretty sure. All his Mexican co-players were dubbed, I assume, but that would probably have escaped an eleven-year-old. Haven't seen it since I sat down to watch it--probably one of a double-feature--at the old Avalon movie palace in Chicago (see DM for earlier references--way too many of them for a healthy childhood). What a shock it was to discover, in looking over the director's corpus last week, that he played a then-anonymous part in my formative cinematic years and beyond. I had either read the book before or soon after the Avalon, but at any rate I felt at that young age I had a real fix on Defoe "academically," long before I caught up with his if-not-better-works: Journal of the Plague Year and his true classic, Moll Flanders--later in life.

You may have noticed a rather conspicuous gap in the Spanish auteur's career, as I have presented it anyway, between the 1929 Dog and his breakout Mexican/French films of the 60's--amazingly, that figure also represents his age! Briefly: after his exile from his homeland, he did menial dubbing and editing work in Hollywood for awhile, before settling in Mexico permanently, where for a couple of decades he ground out essentially B-movie, commercial fare of little consequence at all. Except for Crusoe. It was released internationally to some acclaim--again, much of this comes as late-breaking news to me--with the Irish-born O'Herlihy in the lead, for which he got his one and only Academy Award nomination. (The actor, a good one, was a man of few significant parts, it seems, though I did recognize him when he appeared later in a major role in Fail Safe (1964), and in many more less-major ones over a long career in film and television.)

Crusoe came out at just the right time, at least for us kids. It was an era of Saturday matinee swashbucklers and desert-island adventures like Treasure Island and Swiss Family ROBINSON, and you can tell from the poster that Bunuel's movie was advertised as such. Moreover, that's the only way I can remember it.

HOWEVER: now that I know that the film was/is a "Bunuel," let me just speculate a review, from a grown-up perspective. We are "musing," after all. Right off, exile and castaway would be the perfect subject-matter for the expatriate and, even more importantly, existentialist director. Here we've got total free-will (except for Friday the "willing" slave), unencumbered by the superficial constraints of bourgeois society that the writer-director satirizes so unmercifully. And, wow, couldn't Bunuel nail this theme definitively when Crusoe finally grants his "man" the gift of complete freedom. Conveniently, Friday's "phantom of liberty" is quite literal, but enslavement in any form to anyone or anything would be Bunuel's idea of the worst crime imaginable, and he probably allows this to play upon his hero's psyche. Why probably?--because I DO recall several nightmare dream-sequences (of course) involving mainly Crusoe's father (a potential Freudian wonderland) in the course of the movie. But I no doubt ignored their thematic significance at the time. They would have been getting in the way of the "aventuras."

And what about Bunuel's trademark imagery? When I revisit the film I'll look for lots of ANTS. They pop up in almost every one of his movies as a symbol of one thing or another, and what better place for them and other scary mini-creatures than a desert island? Here the very real would translate easily to the surreal, and vice-versa. (Incidentally, his collaborator on Dog, Salvador Dali, loved the little fellows too--check out the ant-riddled clock in the lower-left corner of his most famous painting, "The Persistence of Memory.") And I know I'll find nature's sufficiency of Bunuelian megafauna--both the quick and the dead.

But then again ... Netflix notwithstanding, I may just leave his Adventure of Robinson Crusoe as a very pleasant childhood memory.
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#23 "Milky Way," Bunuel II

How could Bunuel NOT be the founder and chief practitioner of surreal cinema, considering his earliest credential: An Andalusian Dog (1929)? It was co-directed by Salvador Dali, of all people, and they both have roles in the film. A curiosity of film-making in it's infancy, it's nonetheless revolutionary in its imagery--Freudian symbolism to the core. No discernible plot (a murder is there somewhere), but rather it assails us with a series of nightmarish scenes invoking the flow of the unconscious. Ants are crawling, death's-head moths are perching, and sea-urchins are urching about in all the wrong places. At one point, and for no discernible narrative purpose, the distracted "husband" of the film hitches himself to a heretofore-unseen grand piano with two rotting donkeys inside, attached to which in turn are two trussed-up and bewildered priests dragged along behind. Cut. A blind detective appears fitfully to seemingly piece things together. Impossible. That gives you a gist--and I didn't even mention the (most) notorious image of a woman's eyeball being slit open to the tune of a cloud passing over the full moon. Don't rent this one. Rather, re-watch with pleasure Hitchcock's thriller, Spellbound, where G. Peck and Dr. I. Bergman try to make more sense out of Salvador Dali's dream-sequence imagery. Yes, he collaborated.

And speaking of Hitchcock, also avoid Bunuel's two films with leading-lady Catherine Deneuve: Belle du Jour (1967) and Tristana (1970). Though Bunuel was not quite as obsessed as the American director with icy-blond heroines, the auteur's choice of Deneuve pretty much ruins these movies, as Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren almost did for Hitchcock's post-Grace-Kelly efforts. (Sorry ... love Hitch, but never quite Birds and Vertigo.) Award-winning but a bit overrated in my view, Bunuel's films with Deneuve about repressed sexuality in hypocritical bourgeois society might have been okay but for her terminally repressed acting style. Showing us, as the old Hollywood saw goes, a range of emotions from A to B. Then again, it might have been the scripts. Too earnest in the satire, without enough comic grotesquery.

Herewith, then, are my six must-see films of Luis Bunuel, without undue critical baggage--he was one of the great critic-haters, by the way, because of the cretinous reception often given his more "serious" (i.e. non-commercial) films--in chronological order:

• An Andalusian Dog (1929). Okay, so I take back my earlier comment. Everybody should spend just 16 entertaining/excruciating minutes with this infamous and influential almost-movie but once in their lives. Compare: David Lynch's Eraserhead.
  

• The Exterminating Angel (1962). Upper-class guests arrive twice at dinner party. Servants inexplicably leave. Guests discover they can't, though there are no physical barriers preventing them. Hilarity ensues. Spend several days (or weeks?) trying to figure out their pseudo-problem, eating leftovers and starving to death and dying of disease. Meanwhile, a pet bear and some sheep escape from hostess' bedroom. Sheep killed, grilled, and eaten. Idea to sacrifice host to alleviate situation. Commits suicide instead. Finally figure out they can leave after all. Survivors attend funeral mass in nearby church, additional real-live sheep following them in. We hear gunshots in background as police shoot down working-class rioters who had been gathering outside the mansion-house throughout the movie. Perhaps surreal is not a strong enough word. Compare: Lord of the Flies (1963).
  

• Simon of the Desert (1965). Based on 5th-Century Saint Simeon Stylites' supposed son, the pillar-sitter has denied all natural, human desires for 6 years, 6 months, and 6 days. Hilarity ensues. Satan, in the form of the luscious Spanish actress Sylvia Pinal (she was in three by Bunuel, including Angel above), tempts him unmercifully but apparently unsuccessfully in several guises and scenes of fleshly lust. (It's a scant 45 minutes, owing to two other directors dropping out of two other projected "acts" for the film.) Suddenly, in the final scene, we are magically transported to a swinging 60's discotheque, where we find Simon and Sylvia in modern dress, and now somehow a couple, talking and flirting, enjoying their drinks, and watching the carefree patrons dancing to the music of a band called "Radioactive Flesh." Humanity will out. Compare: Monty Pyhon's Life of Brian.
  

• The Milky Way (1969). Two Beckett/Stoppard-like vagabonds (Peter and John) are on a pilgrimage along the ancient road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, traditionally following the direction of the galactic band in the sky--hence the title. Starting out hitch-hiking on a modern French highway, they step in and out of a panorama of religious history stretching from biblical times to the present. Sometimes they participate in the theological debates and confrontations--trinity or not; free will or predestination; universal salvation or damnation--other times they witness or dream about them. Or the anachronistic scenes are simply intercut without apology.The cast of characters they/we meet includes Jesus getting advice from Mary on whether he would look better without a beard; the Grand Inquisitor digging up a dead saint and burning the body for posthumous heresy; the Pope standing before a firing-squad of anarchists (bizarrely prescient); the Marquis de Sade debating God with his bound concubine. All in good fun. Really ... or sur-really, if you will. At the end of their odyssey, the pilgrim pair resort to, and cavort with, two harlots plying their trade around St. James Cathedral--seeming to fulfill a prophesy, given at the beginning by a God/Death figure, that they will conceive anointed children of some kind. Compare: Coens' Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
  

• The Discreet Charm Of the Bourgeoisie (1972). As in Angel, Bunuel again employs the conceit of the dinner-party as a key to the facade of conspicuous consumption lived by the middle and upper classes. This time, though, it's in reverse: nobody ever gets to consume. In a comic series of unfulfilled expectations, lunches and dinners are planned, even sat down to, only to be interrupted--and here's the satirical thrust--by complications as mundane as crass forgetfulness to a military coup. We see beneath the specious good life and good manners a panoply of political intrigues, international tensions, financial chicanery, adultery, drug-dealing, murder, and a demented priest. Compare: Robert Altman's Shortcuts.

• The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Bunuel's favorite. Narrative structure turned upside-down into Freudian free-association and determined purely by chance connections between one character or one scene to the next. Most of them comic, some tragi-comic. And then forgotten. His most "existential" film. Randomness rules the universe, but, as a result, we are rewarded with total free-will, or some phantasm thereof. One theme throughout: Humane Morality is all we can count on to withstand the depredations of chance and circumstance. Defies summary, so I won't try. It has to be the most dashingest-of-expectations movie ever made, and yet--in spite of, or because of that--one of the most thoroughly entertaining. Compare: nothing like it.

But in that vein, Myriad Readers, do yourselves a favor and rent/watch Woody Allen's favorite of his own making: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Or re-watch it, as I did the other night. I feel sure that Luis Bunuel would have approvingly watched the Woodman's surreal satire several times over ... had he not died two years earlier.
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#22 "The Milky Way" a la Luis Bunuel

That's the English title of Bunuel's La Voie Lactee' (1969), my favorite of all his films. Our little excursion last time into the surreal world of cosmology and the fate of our titular galaxy reminded me of the film, only one of a surreal corpus that most often deals with cultural apocalypse, but always with cosmic overtones. And the ones I'll recommend are, moreover, shamefully funny.

His very last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977--I'll use the English titles hereafter) had just played on one of those 300+ movie channels, and I had just become infested with several strains of flu-virus--one of which could have been swinish, since I often bought fruit from a Mexican market around the corner--and, accompanied by multiple-orificed catarrh, laid me up and down for about six weeks. Bunuel kept me company, along with reruns of Scrubs--that highly entertaining TV sitcom which has a nice Bunuelian mix of fantasy and reality for comic effect. Obscure, which I hadn't seen, was disappointing ... not good medicine. So, with a little help from Netflix, I tested my very positive recollections of the auteur-director's earlier work that I had seen, along with some others, to see how they all matched up.

But first, if you're unfamiliar with Bunuel, or have seen only the Academy Award winner The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972--Best Foreign Film), think Coen Brothers. While as far as I know they haven't publicly acknowledged any influence--as have David Lynch and Kubrick--their Raising Arizona, Lebowski, Oh Brother, and especially Barton Fink could have been made by Bunuel. I'm convinced, for instance, that most of the utterly surreal last half of Fink--from and including the murdered woman the hero finds next to him in bed--is a warped dream-vision of a guy with writer's block ... or maybe not. The Coens' movies rely above all on almost total unpredictability--unexpected flashback and forward, startling occurrences and disturbing imagery, fantastic dream-sequences that may or may not be dream-sequences, grotesque characters, inexplicable cut-aways, and crazy plot-lines that become, more often than not, befuddlingly lost to the audience altogether in the course of the movie. Great fun.

And that's also Bunuel at his best. What sets him apart, though, is his abiding social conscience. Informing all the outrageous funny-business is SATIRE. Main target: the hypocrisy of the middle-class. And secondarily that mask of justification for bourgeois lust and greed: ORGANIZED RELIGION. In Bunuel's case, given his own background and the backdrop of his movies, that means Roman Catholicism. Sect doesn't really matter--any dogmatic creed would have served his purposes (likewise, Bergman naturally chose high-church Lutheranism). How effective was his social satire?--at the end of his Spanish period he was lucky to escape the Fascist/Catholic-dominated country of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who's still dead, by the way) with his life. Repatriation to Mexico didn't keep him out of trouble, but it did eventually lead to some of his greatest films. (more)
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#19 Hughes,Candy, Death IV--Threnody

Because many on the paternal side of my family have the unfortunate habit of dying of a broken heart, literally, I once asked a doctor-friend--no, the other kind: a physician--"What's the primary symptom of heart disease?" My closest friend for over 50 years and best-man at my first wedding answered, "Sudden death." Ha ha, I thought. Joke between friends. Not. That's the earliest warning sign, ironically, for one-out-of-three of those half-million a year (USA) who die of some form of cardio-pathology. Among celebrity examples, we can remember the shock and disbelief over John Ritter's untimely death a few years ago, and, more recently, Michael Jackson's. It's been 15 years since John Candy's fatal attack--"un-symptomatic" till the end--unexpected but totally understood, given his personal habits and family history. As for John Hughes, hale and fit by all accounts, it happened on a quiet Manhattan morning walking his dog.

Candy and Hughes were good-hearted people too, though I suppose that's too silly an irony. But their movies, as I hoped to make clear already, always had the human heart at the center of things. Along with family, as Hughes got older. Never mean-spirited. That's why their work has been so enormously popular, if not critically acclaimed, from the very good to the not-so-good at all. The latter seemed to happen to them, coincidentally, when CANDY played the lead in a movie without the Hughes connection--Who's Harry Crumb? (same year as Uncle Buck) and too many others--and when HUGHES went on an assembly-line-sequel binge--the Home Alone and "Lampoon Vacation" pluralities--without the Candy connection, at least in a supporting role. To over-simplify a bit. But no question that when properly teamed up, they could make movie magic.

Another reason I'm drawn the Hughes films, and seen most all of them (except those dreadful sequels), is his choice of locale. It connects with my late-teenage years. Despite my Southern roots, I spent a lot of my pre-college days ranging about those same Western and Northwestern suburbs of "Chicagoland"--Lombard up to Lake Forest and into the city itself--that Hughes uses as a backdrop for the majority of his movies. Ferris Bueller's epic landscape was very familiar to me, as were his antics. Ah, nostalgia.

And then there's the odd configuration of morbid numerology that struck me at the announcement of John Hughes' death at age 59. My father was 59 when his first heart-attack hit. He survived, but another one took him out less than two years later. Some fifteen years before Hughes, John Candy died suddenly at age 43. At the time, and being great fans, my family and I couldn't help but notice that he died at the same young age as another one of our bad-gene, infarction-prone, paternal-side relatives. He was my father's brother, Dwight ... my favorite Uncle.
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