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Stroll On

What a lousy week for art-house titans! I've noted my ambivalence about Antonioni's films here before, but I tip my cappello to him just the same (and not only because he and my paternal grandmother were both from Ferrara). Actually, Phil Nugent sums up my sentiments in a post today at ScreenGrab: "Some admirers feel that Antonioni didn't have much more to say than he said back in L'Avventura. But nobody ever pretended that he didn't say it beautifully." In his honor, here's that rock-out Yardbirds number from Blow-Up, and here's a fun 2004 discussion of Blow-Up between Stuart Klawans and Nathan Lee. Arrivederci, maestro.

The Silence

Bergman's gone. And as awed as I am by much of his work, I keep thinking of something Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in his review of Bergman's final film, Saraband: "I wouldn't dream of contesting Bergman's status as a film master. But I find a neurotic spitefulness and puritanical narrowness in the films he made after the 60s, and I think one would have to be as misanthropic as Woody Allen or critic John Simon to consider him the greatest of all filmmakers." I said as much in my own review of Saraband: "Bergman's an old hand at revealing the darkest elements of human nature, so you can get off on the exposure to unwelcome truths. But underneath is an undeniable coldness and cruelty … The characters don't merely suffer for their weaknesses; they are punished for them." I find myself agreeing with, of all people, the professional irritant Joe Queenan, who earlier this year watched Bergman's entire oeuvre in six weeks:

After a while, the films tend to run together; after a while the names tend to run together: Anna plays the Bach cello suites in front of a mirror while Henrik tells her that he really loves Marianne, whose mother Karin forced her son Johan to commit suicide. Henrik rants about his unhappiness for about 20 minutes — no one ever gets interrupted in mid-rant in Bergman movies; even characters absorbing the most virulent abuse seem content to let their partners run their mouths, hoping this whole thing will blow over — then reads from a letter that his father sent him when he was eight years old, telling him that he never liked him, that God does not exist, and that even if God does exist, his mother is still a whore. Anna goes right on playing the cello, listening to the voices of the dead emanating from behind the wallpaper, then suddenly stops, lights up a cigarette, poses her head diagonally behind Henrik's so that both actors are visible in the mirror, and confesses that she's been sleeping with Stig, Gunnar, Erland and Björn since Henrik forced her to have her third abortion 18 years ago. Henrik commits suicide, but not before slapping Anna's face, seducing Marianne's daughter, and having one last cigarette. Roll credits. Yes, while certain themes and visuals may vary from one film to the next, the one thing that all Ingmar Bergman movies have in common is this: when Eva Dahlbeck or Ingrid Thulin or Liv Ullmann or anyone named Andersson reach for their cigarettes, you can bet your bottom dollar that the recriminations, threats, busted furniture, and vaginal blood can't be far behind.

Of course, this doesn't apply to something like Smiles of a Summer Night, which is simply delightful. And it probably doesn't apply to All These Women — Bergman's 1964 "slapstick comedy," which Queenan describes as the real inspiration for Woody Allen's films: "It's all right there: The flapper era setting, the 'Yes, We Have No Bananas' theme song, the Groucho Marx impersonations, the bevy of beauties hopelessly smitten by a middle-aged scumbag." That I've got to see.

Schlock, Part Trois

He's at it again! In the past I've chaffed Dave Kehr for comparing John Landis to Hitchcock. And now, in his review of the Trading Places DVD in today's New York Times, he compares that adolescent yuk-fest to My Man Godfrey and says, "The cutting and framing reflect the almost scientific precision that is Mr. Landis’s trademark."

Scientific precision? Dave! I love you, dude, but what are you smoking?

America's Only Hope

Since Reagan's second term, Hollywood has responded to each administration with a Die Hard movie. And now at last we have the George W. installment. Bruce Willis, as the indefatigable NYC cop John McClane, this time saves (spoiler alert) the entire country from collapse by foiling a takeover of the national computer network. In a New York Times piece, Caryn James opines that Live Free or Die Hard "expertly captures a current fear: What if we're disconnected from our information overload?" She says, "The loss of our information fix … hits a very raw nerve. It evokes the disoriented feeling from April when all the BlackBerrys went out."

Uh, no. I didn't get a "disoriented feeling" when all the BlackBerrys went out, because I don't have a BlackBerry and never will, and Live Free or Die Hard didn't scare me because it tapped into some deep-seated fear of losing my Internet connection. It scared me because it gave a glimpse of an America in which pandemonium rules. Between kick-ass action beats, when McClane and his young hacker sidekick make their way to a D.C. police station after all the traffic lights and phones have gone out, and the stock market has collapsed and every city's transportation system has shut down, we get a brief, slo-mo sense of what true chaos feels like—it's post-Katrina New Orleans on a national scale.

Even scarier, the government is totally unprepared. ("It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome," the hacker reminds us.) That's what makes this George W.'s Die Hard: it's explicitly Homeland Security's incompetence and indifference that make the nation so defenseless. In fact, the terrorist mastermind is a former government security expert who wants to prove the network's vulnerability. So, naturally, a bald, fifty-something Luddite cop is America's only hope. But if Bruce Willis won't come to our rescue in real life, who will?

(Posted today on The Huffington Post.)

Some Kind of a Man

I'm sure I don't have to tell Looker's cinephilic readers which "Marlene" Orson Welles is addressing in this note, and which part in which movie he's referring to. I just like to imagine the huffy missive that must have prompted it ("personal appearance"? Never!). And now I'll forever think of Welles as someone who signed his correspondence with cute little hearts.