Ridley Scott's sore spots

American Gangster promises much from the advertising, highlighting to live-wire Oscar winners in the form of Denzel Washington and Russell crow as, respectively, a powerful Harlem based crime lord and an honest cop heading a narcotics investigation that eventually brings him to trial. Directed by Ridley Scott, this should have been a sure thing, but the lesson behind items bandied as safe bet is that they go sour more often than we wish.

Scott is, at times, a brilliant stylist who can set a mood, get atmosphere and move action and drama along concurrently, as is the case in his masterworks Blade Runner, Alien, The Duelist, Gladiator . The balance between the oddly composed frame, the baroque design and the character driven plots  made for what is now a rare thing in the industry, a well made Hollywood entertainment. He's never met a skewed color scheme or illogical edit he wasn't taken with, a fact that makes more than a few of his movies as if they're in competition with brother Tony Scott. Ridley Scott often gets as agitated and formula-glutted and offers up patented bits of nonsense like the predictable (but stylistically engaging) crime story  Matchstick Men and Kingdom of Heaven, generic equivocations of style employing an excess of trendy edits ,gauche camera filters that came to nothing at all except a noisy journey to forgone plot resolutions. American Gangster is somewhere between these virtues and vices, and it is to be commended that Scott has calmed his camera hand and offered up the wonderfully grit-textured scenery of a Seventies-era New York with a minimum of gratuitous flair.

The plot, though, is something pieced together from a half dozen crime dramas one could name, the most obvious being the face to face meeting between Washington's and Russell's crook and cop characters, where opposing world views are exchanged: the nod to Pacino and DeNiro in Heat is glaring, obvious as a zit. Scott also takes his time developing the story lines of the crime boss and the cop to where they eventually meet and lock horns, in between being the standard troubled marriages, drug addictions, mob hits, all proceeding at a snail's pace. Add to this drawn out build up the fact of Denzel Washington's persistent monotone and we have a collection of tics and quirks passed off as style. Russell Crow again manages to barely hide his Australian drawl and underplays his part as the dutiful and shambling cop, more cipher than character. 

Both characters are more stereotypes for the writers to hang their refurbished clichés on. Still, this seems old, contrived, pieced together by the numbers, and the assurance that this film is based on a true story doesn't mask the feeling of having seen all this before, nor can it make for the lack of dramatic tension. It's a paycheck, not a testament. Slowness is not a sin, of course, but there is the occasional mistake by good directors and their script writers who think slack momentum equals literary acumen, something this film maker obviously coveted. 

Black Hawk Down is a bad film by a good director, Ridley Scott does his best work when there is something of compelling literary interest here, i.e., characters that are written, not merely depicted as they are in Black Hawk. The Duelist, Blade Runner, Alien, and Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, among his best work, achieve a "suspended- disbelief" credibility in as much as image comes to match idea, and directing hand seems to catch some of the musicality of conflict and buried desire that gives off a sense of some larger insanity of desire that is hidden. Black Hawk is a routine war-is-hell yawner that cannot rise above its status as movie-of-the-week fodder. Scott is a fine stylist if he has the literary substance to make his approach more than just gestures and window dressing, as it is here. 

The moral drift of this thing is disturbing, and the feeble little declaration toward the end that the Marine's motivation in a rudderless, under-determined mission is being there for the other guys, your buddies, does not raise the level. I suspect Scott would do stronger, more compelling work if he were adapting a war story that had an implicit argument within it, or at least a consistent point of view that would make the visual displays fire up more than mere weirdness. 

It's intriguing to think what he would have done with Heart of Darkness had Coppola not beat him to it. There remain Michael Herr's brilliant Dispatches, a vivid gonzo journalism read on the Viet Nam war. Viet Nam, though, is pretty much tapped out as a film subject matter. The camera lingers too often in Black Hawk Down, lapsing into slow motion while presumably native music blasts over the speakers, the lens frozen as though dumbfounded, an acid head who discovers his face in the mirror. It’s a bad film that lacks the guts of these idealized Marines convictions. Had Ridley Scott given us something that suits the military culture BHD (the film) pretends to celebrate, something even on the level of John Wayne, we'd have a film with a narrative reason to exist. Scott, though, is a director of strange moods and articulate passion, and his diffidence here is betrayed by unmotivated characterizations --stereotypes , really, card board cut outs --and his frequent lapses’ into fluttering slow motion , accompanied by booming music, with piercing vocals. He loves exotica, and sometimes it works, but not here, when a straight up comprehension of military ethos and genre expectations would have worked much better than this distracted, protracted performance. ______________________________________________

Ridley Scott never directed a film as beautiful or as provocative as film Blade Runner, his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep much has been said of the film's look, an evocation of Los Angeles in a future time, with smart and stylish renditions of classic film noir style. If nothing else, this film does make fine... See More use of the extremes of light and dark, with a muted , earth toned schema for the matters in between that suggest the competing sediments of rust, dust, soot and chemical pollution, a suitable palette for a thriller set in the future. More than the look, however, is the set of issues the movies manages to cogently engage, from the spiritual ---the rogue androids quest to meet their creator and so extend their lives--to the sociological and philosophical. Immigration, urban densification, the mashing of cultures, the unprincipled introduction of technology into the marketplace. He's directed other noteworthy films ,but none of them have the combination of ideas, tone, or visual allure that made Blade Runner a singular piece of work; the odd thing is that it is that rare instance of when an elegantly designed vehicle contains any number of ideas that are substantial enough for a half-dozen discussion groups and a surfeit of monographs.

 This follows Philip K.Dick's fascination with how populations are willing to relinquish their humanity--the kind of inventive, curious, adventurous humanity that isn't afraid of hard work, using its brain, or risking death in the cause of finding out more of the world. In his novels technology is seen as the means through which the human being becomes less human by having the burden of having to use his Free Will less and less. As the machines take on more of what was exclusively the domain of flesh and blood, the tragedy that befalls those who've chosen convenience and leisure over a grittier essence don't seem tragic at all; it is hard to empathize with the products of pure leisure that haven't a care except for the entertainment of their senses.

Norman Mailer at the Movies : The New Yorker

Norman Mailer at the Movies : The New Yorker:

 I doubt that you have known a more dedicated Mailerophile than me. Even so, with all the wit, wisdom, nuancing and artful equivocation I've done over fifty years discussing this man's body of work, I do not like his movies. This article is the sort of "smart guy" talk that avoids the usually criteria of film criticism, evaluating whether a work succeeds on whatever terms the film choose to work within, and instead chat amiably (and gutlessly) about what ideas had or might have had while making his trio of films. The author here is smart enough to tie the films--Wild 90, Beyond the Law and Maidstone--to Mailer's own essays on film-as-art, and latched onto nice spring board with which to avoid passing a summary judgement on Mailer's skills as a film director. 

The discussion then becomes metaphysical, in the stratosphere of aesthetic reasoning where theorizing about a movie's intentions is more important whether something tangible, emotional cathartic , or arguably perception-changing was transmitted to a viewer as a result of seeing one of his movies. Interesting and strong arguments can be made in defense of muddled , imperfect works--I am one of those who argue in favor of Mailer's fiction, especially his late works like Ancient Evenings, Harlot's Ghost, The Gospel According to the Son and The Castle in the Forest--but there has to be elements in the flawed work that demand attention just be virtue of being outstanding , in itself, that element that deserves inspection, interpretation, praise, and contextualization. 

Mailer's movies, though, have no splendid moments; in the case of Mailer's essays about film and writing of his own experience, what he was thinking of was more interesting , far more real genius than the films he actually realized. It does look swell, of course, to have the term "film maker" in a biographical sketch when the curious desire to know what someone did in his or her lifetime. "Norman Mailer, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, newspaper publisher, film-director". Yes, all that sounds cool, very nice indeed. Mailer's achievements are in his writing, and it those, I think, that will continue to be argued for a few more generations to come. What he accomplished with his movies, though, is something less grand , which was to give a handful of film scholars and theory-driven academics some fresh material for their pipeline.

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I would suggest that Mailer's goal from the get-go was to be a volatile blend of genius and jerk,  as he writes in the first paragraph of his introduction to his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself:

 .“…Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that would go so far as to think it’s my present and future work which have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years, I could be wrong , and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all   agree it would cheat this collection of its true Interest to present myself  as more modest than I am.”

 This is not to suggest that he didn't regret that some of off-strength projects, whether films, plays, poetry or screenwriting, weren't as superb or revolutionary as he desired them to be, but he certainly didn't wallow in his failures. He got up  and went back to work on his next project, toward an unknown artistic success or career destroying embarrassment. Except his career didn't end. Even stabbing his wife in a drunk, speed-chased rage couldn't stop his career. Mailer believed in dualities in human personality, and he achieved his , admirable and loathsome at once. We are lucky he elected to remain a brilliant literary figure ,where his problematic nature could be contained, rather than get himself elected to office. God help us if he got his hands on any kind of real political power.

a few seconds ago ·

Tough Guys Don't Dance

The late Norman Mailer was one of the most important American writers in the 20th century who, despite what misgivings you may have about his vanity, arrogance, and odd sense of the masculine imperative, wrote some masterpieces. His novel, “Tough Guys Don't Dance", wasn't one of his master works, but it was a first-rate entertainment, a noirish murder mystery that combined Mailer's career long themes--the nature of courage, the search for knowledge through sexual encounters and violent challenges--with a wonderfully presented atmosphere and a cast of skewed, tortured, characters.

 The tale of an alcoholic, would be writer who tries to recover from a black-out exactly how a woman's head showed up in his marijuana plant stash is an intoxicating read. A tale of improbable events and impossible characters made plausible by the poetry of Mailer's writing. As a film director, however, Mailer is quite awful, being someone with notions of how a film ought to look and how it should achieve its effects but with no idea how to get anywhere near the mark he set for himself. 

 The dialogue, acceptable in the context of the dark and brooding world of Mailer's novel, is preposterous here, revealing a tin ear for the rhythms of how people actually sound. Good actors seem stiff and embalmed, and bad actors come off as automatons. In a more forgiving light, one might say that his is an art film, an avant gard production that just happened to have some money behind it, but that would be wishful thinking. The movie is just odd and awful.

Jeff Beck : less is less

Occasional guitar genius Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck is a tiresome guitar player whose penchant for sparse noodling sends too many listeners, seduced by legacy and legend,  into reveries about how "less is more" and the virtues of having a minimal palette of tones. Truth be told, less is merely less and a Jeff Beck performance means there will be huge, gaping spaces in an improvised section, while the guitarist waits for what seems like the random moment to lay another twist to the string. His band, particularly on the Live at Ronnie Scott's album, stays busy while the master awaits is riffing muse, laying down a carpet of funk with a fabric of high-register bass work, minimal drum work, and a variety of ethereal space chords emanating from the keyboards. John Cage had the notion that the audience need to sit in their impatient stews for some periods so they have a chance to listen to their own music (Zen/chance practices in music are more exciting theorized about than experienced firsthand) and the take away for me is that the point of going to a Jeff Beck concert is to confront his reputation and to wait for him to do something interesting. This is what the late critic Steve Esmedina called "boredom as aesthetic effect". Beck, I'm sure, intends other things, and thinks himself akin to Miles Davis, another musician who never burdened his solos with gratuitous technique. Davis, though, could build tension and, when required, fire on all cylinders and make it frantic, exciting, breathe taking. Beck does not do that. Decades go by and endless conversations refer to the genius of Beck and still, nothing happens at the address I was given. I understand that and we have, of course, is essentially subjectivities competing for dominance.

The matter isn’t whether Beck can play guitar. As a blues/rock guitarist who first came to American attention during the British invasion of the Sixties with the Yardbirds and later with his string of short-lived (but memorable) ensembles, Beck is a pioneer in matters of extending the vocabulary of an African American vernacular and incorporating elements of funk, jazz, reggae and fusion and rockabilly into his particular mix. He’s recorded quite a bit of music that still makes me turn my head and stare incredulously at the speakers; when he wasn’t being cheap with his playing and willing to lavish more in guitar bravado, his guitar work is of a whole piece.

 Not just flashy solos, which were, in fact, the least of Beck’s best art, but of control of tone color,  splendidly, tasty fills in the interstices of his band’s alternately rocking or funky fury, attacks, flurries and elongated elaborations on the tremolo bar when your attention was otherwise engaged.  What makes Jeff Beck a great guitarist (when he wants to show off) is that while his compatriots were concentrating on the number of notes they could cram into a twelve-bar or sixteen bar phrase, he did what Miles Davis did with is trumpet after he ventured from the fast, rapid, conspicuously virtuoso inclined sphere of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and instead pared back his soloing to what was essential and made musical sense. 

While others dominated their songs and performances with fusillades that eventually became a comfortable rut, Beck filled his accorded solo slots with the gift of space, fewer notes, high register bends, and unique tunings. I put forth his first two albums The Jeff Beck Group and Beckola in evidence and will skip ahead to his fusion release Wired and still later Beck’s Guitar Shop as prime examples. That sweet, discerning blend of flash, taste, discretionary speed, off-center attack and an uncanny mastery of electric guitar volume are marvels for future generations to listen to if they wonder what all fuss was about. These weren’t records by an artist still making his reputation. Presently, his reputation is made, his name now a brand, his work too frequently a stylized snore.  Again, I wish Beck would indulge the less savory side of his musical nature and burn a hole in the state no one can leap over.

That, though, is part of the fun of discussing musicians and their work. It just seemed to me that Beck has refined his style over the decades to the point that he is drastically essentialist in the tweaking of his playing; all the speedy, distorted, flashier bits are missing in large measure in the interest of a more mature purity, Artists, as they age, do that, but I think Beck's ruthless reappraisal of his chops has, for me, left much of what he's recorded sound empty. I would love to hear Beck rave it up again, to cram a lot of notes into a measure and make them stick, like he used to.

Ender does not end here

Ender's Game, a movie based on the novel by the currently controversial Orson Scott Card (who is in the soup for not knowing when put a cork in it), is a decently executed science fiction film, although I found Harrison Ford's unrelenting scowl as the head of the planet's military command to be a bit of a headache inducer. The furrows in his brow were deep enough to plant crops in. Director Gavin Hood keeps this enterprise moving along well enough, explaining its fake historical circumstances and contrived dream theory well enough , but there was really no anticipation in the story line. 

I hadn't read the novel and likely will not do so--I like my scifi on the screen where words don't matter--but I had a very good idea where this thing was going. Let me just say that with the Title and the plot's strong emphasis on battle simulations in preparation for war, the shocking twist was not a shock, twined or unwound. It is, you guessed it, a thinly  disguised critique of militarism and war mongering. It's not Noam Chomsky, but the subtext has the benefit of being easily grasped, too easily perhaps. The state of Political Commentary isn't that much smarter than the barely concealed verities in Ender's Game. The flashy  visuals, not a spoonful of sugar,make the medicine go down. 

The ending was an expected and unsatisfying set for the sequel; the dissatisfaction lies not in the fact that story was unfinished by the end of the movie, but that far too many movies you take a risk on seeing are likely not intended to be stand alone entertainments but rather the installments of studios hope will be profitable franchises. The prevailing feeling is "here we go again", as you feel part of the masses, teased by gossip, speculation and all other manner of celebrity non-news , responding in Pavlovian fashion to a vague , if  loud and flashy promise that you can relive the thrills you had over a cherished film from long, long ago. You may that particular memory from your own experience. Whatever the film, though, all of us know, in an unguarded moment of self-honesty, that those thrills are not coming back. 

PINK FLOYD'S LONG, TRUDGING MAGNIFICENCE

Rolling Stone has informed us that Pink Floyd, in order to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the release of their admittedly brilliant album "Dark Side of the Moon, has invited fans to tune to their website this Sunday, March 24, in order to stream the record, in full. I can't help but think this is less the gift to fans than the band might think, since any committed fan of Pink Floyd likely already owns the album and has been listened to it relentlessly for decades; myself, I know precisely where every pop, skip and hiss occurs on my long lost vinyl copy.  All told, this is one of those records that has been around for so long and has been played so often that I wish I could condemn it as nostalgia, but I can't. It is a brooding, moody, poetic and richly textured end-of-the the-dream concept album, a masterpiece of disillusion that rivals, I declare, T.S.Eliot and his beautifully distraught "The Wasteland".

There is in both the mesmerizing defeatism of their respective projects; the shoulder-shrugging and firm embrace of the will to live fully have never found better, more seductive expression, both poem, and album. Refreshing in the music and lyrics of Pink Floyd, as well, was a what I think is unmistakable for the working class; along among British Art Rockers, PF avoided verbal drag and double talking allusions and planted their narrations dead center in a streaming disgust with the mess men have made of the world; politicians and corporations for being such greedy, short-sighted exponents of the profit motive and the misery index, and the common people, for believing lies told them and willfully buying into a fantasy that will only kill them all, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here" were two endearingly burnished sides of the same dented coin, legitimate and remarkable expressions of a lightly toxic worldview. 

Predictably, with commercial artists contractually obliged to produce new work on a corporation's schedule, they ran out of fresh things to say; later records tended to be as dreary as dour music is supposed to be. England has a tradition of hippie art-rockers going sour as they edge into their thirties; Barrett had the good sense to just break down and allow his legend to simmer on low boil for decades. It is an accomplishment that he has managed to be that footnote in the Pink Floyd saga that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE FAILS TO MENTION. I like that he his name persists on the band's name and legend with no effort on his part. His actual story is sad, though, and he would be the first example I would cite when arguing that drug taking without medical need is intellectually indefensible. Waters, though, stuck around, had his moment of glory in which truly great work was done, but he became a boring old cynic bemoaning variations of a faceless, grey, corporate England divorced from a romantically envisioned past. He reminds you of that great sex you had after a cocktail party where you fucked the fried liver out of your partner and then waking up and seeing who it was you were putting it to, or who was placing it in your personhood. Ugly recrimination followed rapidly and you wonder what was worth this current cramping of one's expressive style. Roger Waters never sang about that. Pink Floyd could have used more Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and less Basil Bunting.

Although I am sick unto death of ever hearing this album again, "Dark Side of the Moon" is a keen and sufficiently angsty expression of a generation's loss of idealism. Their narcoleptic music and vaguely saddened ruminations, in fact, are an extended impression of a very bad drug crash, when the good vibes of acid and pot became overwhelmed by the critical burn-through of methamphetamines. The irony is that for a band that has lampooned, bemoaned and besmirched regimentation with their mirthless minimalism, their goal, with the live streaming, is to get the last three citizens of the planet who haven't purchased the disc to buy it, finally, and to become a nonconformist just as the rest of us have always been. Like-minded free thinkers.

This Space: Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach

This Space: Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach:

"The problem with Kafka's fiction is that while in general the surface presents a generic world, recognisable even to those of us living a century later, the content is not familiar; it does not counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition or provide practical information and descriptions of places for the reader to absorb and use in their lives; there isn't even a happy ending in sight. The only resort for the reader is critical: 'What do I make of this?'."

I would venture that Kafka's fiction "--does not counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition--"  is exactly why it remains a literary art that remains powerful and continues to resonate  nearly a century after his death. One can make a cogent case for the primary mission of literature to be one of relaying stories of how characters, heroes and heroines both, meet their challenges head on and come out the other side, changed, but wiser and more or less intact, but I fear the rhetoric he would use would be the kind of religious insistence which,however presented and finely parsed with philosophical what-ifs and teleological what-nots, maintain rather simply that fiction , fabulation of any kind, be instructive.

That would be instructive in the ways of a culturally dominant habit of pervasive rationalization that there is a purpose to the way things are, that each trial is a test of faith and character (judged against a vague, abstruse creed) and that the individual is required to keep faith and entrust their well being and souls to Church, State and Banks.

Kafka is an artist precisely he didn't have much for the finely tuned , beautifully poetic rationalizations of one might term "moral fiction"; he was rather obsessed, both as individual and as writer making an aesthetic choice, to be true to his alienated, bleak, cruel existence where attempts to cajole and seduce a person to look on the bright side of things only intensifies that nothing makes sense and that existence is cruel, amoral joke. His loyalty was to truth as he experienced it,  and his fiction, splendid eviscerations of folk tales and judgment past, makes a reader consider their feelings of similar psychic destitution  and do the work of making something , something beautiful, truthful and meaningful, where nothing existed before.