I'm reading that this morning because in last night's Sunrise Café, people got to talking about Kurosawa movies and I was motivated to search my own archive for Kurosawa. Kurosawa is only mentioned in passing in that 2021 post, on a list of movies I was excited to consume all at once when I was in college — "All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave — half a century of great stuff to catch up on."
But the last line of that old post — the line that is this post's title — resonated with a post from 3 days ago, where I quoted an author who wrote "I decide which parts of me you see; I curate the way you understand my pain with sharp precision." And: "This is my book, and you’re reading it. Presumably, you like me. At the very least, you’re stuck in my head, and I control the aperture."
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Tom T. Hall wrote (in his song She Gave Her Heart to Jethro) that, "a man is not writing unless he can relate all the things he sees in his life". A trite version of that is "what you see is what you get". And a writer--if he or she chooses to release his or her vision to the world is sharing an insight. Sometimes the writer will be told, "It sounds better when you tell it." And indeed it may.
“WHEN YOU WRITE, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.”
—Annie Dillard, “The Writing Life”
"All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave — half a century of great stuff to catch up on."
Don’t forget W. C. Fields!
That July 2021 post is one of my favs. The movies that had the greatest impact from my teens and twenties:
1. Star wars - incredible how new and great that was when it first appeared.
2. Wrath of Khan - finally the movies got star trek right.
3. Full Metal jacket - Seems almost tame today.
4. Vacation - Chevy Chase's best
5. Raiders of the lost ark.
Serious movies? Wasn't interested. Or in college, thought they were superficial and dull. Went to several ones (plus RomComs) to please my dates, but they had no impact. I just pretended to like them for their sake.
I'm reading the Bronte sister novels, all for the first time, except Wuthering Heights. Charlotte and Anne seemed to write themselves and family as characters, in such an obvious way that people who knew them recognized them. Emily Bronte created original characters out of her imagination, but revealed more of her emotional self in them.
It’s all these other voices called forth by the Althouse siren that make me question the limits of sanity. And after listening to Rachel Kushner read “The Black Lights” many times while falling asleep, the big bunny under the bed has supplanted Harvey in my mind when the subject of big bunnies comes up.
Kurosawa said he never finished a movie, he just abandoned them.
I generally don’t bother with movies that need subtitles, but I make an exception for Kurosawa. And I too would put “High and Low” at the top of my list.
Great post, Smilin' Jack.
Writers have 100% control, up until they send the book out, and then control slips away from us.
Film directors have maybe 10% control? A lot less control. Going from a writer to a film director is a culture shock of collaboration and trying to get along with other artists. "It's like herding cats."
Writing is an invasion of your own privacy.
Writing = sperm
Privacy = egg
Art = baby
I’m always curious why a particular comment of mine is deleted. It’s a mystery.
"I’m always curious why a particular comment of mine is deleted. It’s a mystery."
Best assumption: the spam filter misidentified it as spam.
Backup possibilities: You put in a bunch of blank spaces. You're completely off topic (while being one of the first comments). You wrote the "n-word." You're pointlessly getting personal with another commenter and going back and forth. Basically, you're messing things up around here in a way that is disrespectful to my 22-year project.
That said, I don't see you in the spam folder. I didn't delete you. Maybe you put your comment in the wrong thread and now can't find it.
Moviegoing isn't what it used to be. Neither is moviewatching. The Criterion Collection originally enshrined the film canon. Now just about anything gets into it.
My college years of film watching -- and early years of home viewing -- also followed an ambitious pattern, but the farther we get from actual cinema-going the less appealing the classics are.
Today, it's two screen viewing. We're doing something else and only look up when something catches our attention. So no more silent films. And a lot fewer films in languages we don't understand.
Sometimes I don't know maybe this happens in bunches two or three times every 2 or 3 months but I will post a comment I will see the comment someone else will post a comment on that comment and then that comment will disappear and then for some reason several hours later it will reappear.
It's an old largely unsupported system at least that's the way I interpret it. I don't take it personal.
Speaking of old classic movies, I just rewatched The godfather with my 14 and 16 year old grandsons. Normally when we watch old movies together they get very bored because they are used to the Rattata tat editing of newer movies and television shows. This was different. They were completely absorbed in the story especially all of the intrigue I think it reminded them somewhat of their game of dungeon and dragons or magic the gathering I don't know. In any event I was quite pleased that they enjoyed the movie.
Wife is done with the Hollywood sewer and is watching mostly golden-age stuff from the 30s to early 60s these days. I watched Kurosawa's supposed masterpiece, Rashomon, with her, and it really did nothing for me. Toshiro Mifune is at least as big a scenery chewer as Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino or young William Shatner.
Apocalypse Now is the most hilarious war film ever made. Prove me wrong.
@Howard, I usually have the same experience with my daughter and her husband, but they were captivated by Chinatown when I talked them into watching it.
It does have some absurd moments
Garry Marshall said that Carl Reiner taught him to write based on events in his own life. Marshall continued, "When I realized that I could also steal from the lives of others, I knew that I would never run out of material."
"where and how far to invade."
Just the tip, I promise!
"you're stuck in my head, and I control the aperture."
That seems even more true for a director, but what neither writer nor director can control is the subjective reactions to what they have created.
The Criterion Collection is currently streaming the Romanian New Wave film "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." CC calls it "darkly comic," and others agree, but I did not see it that way. I found it poignant and affecting.
Mark Kermode can do a better job than I in describing the film, but it would be helpful to know the director's intent as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4WQrh-38jI
"Writing is an invasion of your own privacy..."
Invasion sound like a big undertaking. What about the one Trump used, "incursion". It's just me, not a Posse Comitatus.
"Presumably, you like me. At the very least, you’re stuck in my head, and I control the aperture."
If I'm stuck in my landlady's head, hopefully is not a permanent situation because nobody wants to be "stuck", and hopefully, I like my landlady head, and she lets my use my own head which I really like, if I may say do myself.
Note to self, 'stop being so self indulgent'.
Chinatown deserves a rewatch for sure
It does capture the chandleresque milieu
Although gittes was more spade than marlowe
M*A*S*H (1970) This movie seems very happy with itself, celebrating alcohol and sex while deriding religion and its followers. M*A*S*H is like the dark side of Darwin. We are animals, animals, animals. It's a celebration of animal spirits.
M*A*S*H takes a lot of shots at Christians, including a Last Supper gag (ripped off from Bunuel). It mocks Christianity in a war zone. It mocks people who are faithful to God, and it mocks people who try to be faithful to spouses who are thousands of miles away. And of course Christians are exposed as hypocrites. But that's not enough, so then the movie strips them naked.
Nurse Houlihan takes a shower. Our heroes rip off the curtain and expose her nudity for everyone to see. All the soldiers and nurses laugh at her humiliation, and we are invited to laugh. If she was a man, a dignified and pompous man, perhaps I might laugh. John Cleese naked, always funny. But to strip a woman bare in public against her will, how is that funny? It seems vicious and hostile.
War of course is a brutal subject, and Altman shows that side of it brilliantly. I think his idea is that war brutalizes these doctors, and their irreverence is the only sane way to respond to the insanity of war. Still, it's hard to admire this movie. Maybe the most obnoxious film Altman has made.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) Altman's film is both ugly and beautiful. Hookers, heroin, death in the snow. It's one of the seediest and most cynical westerns ever made--even more so than Sam Peckinpah. But it's nonetheless quite touching. These characters almost love one another, and you get the sense that if the world was just a little bit better, they would have. Altman's made more bad movies than any film genius has a right to make, but this is one of his magnificent ones.
The Long Goodbye (1973) Best. Ending. Ever.
I thought (and might still think, if I had the spare time to rewatch) that both MASH the movie and MASH the tv show were overrated.
I saw Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice when I was around 18. It was very boring. I prefer an uptight sexuality with the screwballs trying to break free. That's funny as shit. Movies like this turn me into a prude. "Put some clothes on. Quit screwing around." Being a prude is the opposite of fun. Quit turning me into a prude, Hollywood, you suck.
I am probably living in the wrong era.
Addicted to Love (1997) I think it's the Rear Window of romantic comedy. Voyeur? Yes. Obsessive? Yes. Funny? Hell yes. Matthew Broderick is stalking his ex-girlfriend and Meg Ryan is stalking her ex-boyfriend, and they get in each other's way and annoy each other. You're mentally ill. No, you are. No, you are!
I think this film was not well received because people nowadays expect their romantic comedies (particularly Meg Ryan romantic comedies) to be light. The dark romantic comedy--known in the 30's and 40's as the screwball comedy--really has disappeared from the cinematic landscape.
I don't know why screwball comedies disappeared from our culture. I supposed in part it happened because American films became much more sexually explicit in the 1970's. Screwball comedies were replaced with bed-swapping farces like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Shampoo. As far as I'm concerned, these latter films are not funny, and I think the reason for that is there is little sexual tension. In the classic screwball, the repressed sexual energy was released by the antagonists throwing things at one another, or accidentally ripping each other's clothing. When everybody in the film is already nude, when everything's easy and nobody cares, there's not a lot of conflict. Or interest.
The screwball comedy is in even more trouble in the 21st century. "Sex harassment!" we cry. "Stalking! Obsession! Leave that poor woman (man) alone!" Our sexually explicit society has frightened people. We're scared of sex and love. We're so legalistic we kill off romance and wooing. Our society is all about pre-nups and control. Boooooooo. Give me the screwball era when people actually had feelings, even improper ones, and people did crazy stuff for love.
Oh sure, Addicted to Love is explicit about sex. "The only way she's coming back to you is if a blast of semen propels her out the window and across the street." But its mentality is classic screwball insanity. Yes, he's irrational, and she's irrational. Love has made them mad. Hasn't that happened to you? Isn't it worth exploring in art? I swear, sometimes I think our culture is tranquilized.
If you're a French new wave fan, you should watch Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague. Great fun.
McCabe and Mrs Miller had two good moments: The killing on the bridge and McCabe's final gun battle. Unfortunately, the movie takes place in Hollywood fantasy land and we're supposed to care about a Pimp and his whore. It was very "Subversive" in the 1970s - goodbye Randolph scott and John Wayne. But like a lot of counter-cultural stuff lost any relevance when the "counter" became "The Culture".
Having soft as pudding, where's my Mary Jane?, Warren Beatty in the lead role didn't help.
How can you have "screwball comedies" when "anything goes" and the crazy and the normal are the same? Leaving aside the decline in literacy from 1940 to 1970, jokes from being "Screwball" and violating societal norms only work if you have societal norms. Which had pretty much collapsed by 1970.
"Whats up Doc?" was good try to recreate the past but it was let down by the two leads who were pale imitations of the prior films. O'Neal couldn't compare to Grant or McCrea, etc. and Streisand had Hepburn's obnoxious behavior with none of her charm.
Getting back to Elliot Gould. Someone needs to explain why Elliot was given so many leading roles during this time. Don't get me wrong, I like the guy. He's funny. And he's not a bad actor. But he's not a leading man. And that's even more true of Donald Sutherland.
RCOCEAN II @ 8:13 PM
Streisand was closer to the mark than O'Neal, but I fault Bogdanovich for O'Neal's performance--he wanted it modeled after Harold Lloyd, which makes no sense for a screwball comedy.
If you're a French new wave fan, you should watch Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague. Great fun.
Agreed! Not as cool as Breathless, but still it's a fun, zippy little movie.
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