Looker

One Hell of a Yard Sale

From a friend in Pittsburgh (thanks, Rob!) comes the photo above: a Halloween-weekend sale in the yard of none other than George Romero. Save me some intestines, people.

Castaways

Thinking about Roman Polanski still being in jail led me to watch one of his lesser-known movies, Cul-de-Sac, from 1966. It's not currently on DVD, but you can see it on Hulu (if you can tolerate the scratchy print and incessant commercial interruptions). It reminded me of everything I love about Polanski's work. It's a black comedy starring Lionel Stander as a wounded gangster who makes himself at home with a newlywed couple played by Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac. (Stander was a charming, gravelly voiced hulk who'd been blacklisted in the McCarthy era and went on to play Max in the cheesy TV show Hart to Hart; Dorléac was Catherine Deneuve's older sister, who died in a car crash in 1967.) The couple's home is an actual castle, on Holy Island in England, and they're all stuck there while the gangster awaits rescue. In his 1984 autobiography, Polanski remembers the lead actors' insufferable behavior and the maddening challenge of shooting on the island (which he calls a "tiny, inbred community of under 300 inhabitants"), but none of that shows in the film: it's small, dark, and very funny, with clever role reversals and mockery of class and sexual politics. And every shot is perfectly composed.

Before the Fall

Lots of blogs picked up the hilariously prickly declaration Werner Herzog made in the press notes for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the one ending with: "I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers." Yet it seems no one has dug into a far more interesting statement later in the notes, wherein he not only links the noirish aspects of the movie (shot in the summer of 2008 and coming out next month) directly to the current mood of the nation, but also attests to some astonishing economic foresight. I caught a press screening of Bad Lieutenant last week—!!!—and herewith offer the paragraph in full.

Film noir is always a consequence of the Climate of Time; it needs a growing sense of insecurity, of depression. The literature of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett is a child of the Great Depression, with film noir as its sibling. I sensed something coming in the months leading up to the making of the film: a breakdown which was so obvious in New Orleans, and half a year before finances and the economy collapsed, the signs were written on the wall. Even films like Batman turned out to be much darker than anyone expected. What finally woke me up was a banality: when attempting to lease a car I was confronted by the dealership with the unpleasant news that my credit score was abysmal, and hence I had to pay a much higher monthly rate. Why is that, I asked—I had always paid my bills, I had never owed money to anyone. That was exactly my problem: I had never borrowed money, and hardly ever used a credit card, and my bank account was not in the red. But the system punished you for not owing money, and rewarded those who did. I realized that the entire system was sick, that this could not go well, and I instantly withdrew money I had invested in stock of Lehman Brothers while a bank manager, ecstatic, with shuddering urgency, was trying to persuade me to buy even more of it.

That's right: I instantly withdrew money I had invested in stock of Lehman Brothers. Prescient? Apocryphal? I hope someone dares to find out.