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Thrills! Chills!

An awesome assortment of faux grindhouse posters went up last week at Something Awful. Check 'em out.

Our Man in the Dark

The winners of this year's National Magazine Awards will be announced tomorrow, and here's hoping that Stuart Klawans is one of them. His nomination (in the "reviews and criticism" category) is his first since he began reviewing movies for The Nation in 1988, which I can only assume is an 18-year oversight, since he's the best film critic in America. Disagree? Here's a taste of the three reviews he was nominated for. On The Departed:

Here's something of the mood that Martin Scorsese invented: The Rolling Stones churn and rumble and keen on the soundtrack as the camera cruises like a vintage Chevy into a low-ceilinged urban storefront. You take in all at once an atmosphere of shadows, tribalism and menace; you sense the directorial momentum, as if the engine that drove you inside had been left running.

On Volver:

Of course, any dramatist can bring out a knife in act one. But once the knife has been used, it takes an Almodóvar to blend realism instantaneously into melodrama, and melodrama into a moment of comic relief that’s cutting in its own right.

On Borat:

Borat is the movie of the year, the picture that makes all other films irrelevant. Do I like it? In my office as cinematic guinea pig of the American left, do I approve? Yes, but so what? I look upon Borat in awe, as I would gape at the sublimity of a tidal wave sweeping everything before it. Public solemnity? Obliterated. Displays of craftsmanship? Drowned. Respect for any authority, any institution, any individual (other than an impecunious Alabama call girl)? You've got to be joking. Mere anarchy is loosed, and its name (bless him!) is Borat.

Klawans is up against some tough competition: non–film writers at The Atlantic, GQ, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. I may be biased—I've been lucky enough to know him personally since my days at The Nation in the '90s—but the guy deserves to win. Either way, isn't it time David Remnick put David Denby or Anthony Lane out to pasture and gave Klawans the critical catbird seat?

POSTSCRIPT: He won! Justice is served.

Modern Woman

New York readers, here's something to do between Tribeca Film Fest screenings: get thee to "Louise Brooks and the 'New Woman' in Weimar Cinema" at the International Center of Photography before it closes on Sunday. It's a small show featuring terrific production stills of the bewitching Brooks. (If you don't know her whole Wichita-to-Weimar story, you'll find that and much more here.) One still, a makeup test for Pandora's Box, shows Brooks sporting a curly coif at the insistence of G.W. Pabst; as Brooks later wrote, "After seeing the test, he gave up this point and left me with my shiny black helmet."

On your way out of ICP, don't miss a startling close-up of a different breed of Weimar woman: Leni Riefenstahl, in a 1930 glamour shot as a scary, sweaty ski-bunny. (It was taken by the Hungarian Jew Martin Munkacsi; a bit more about his Riefenstahl connection here.)

Notes from Underground

Ever seen a movie star on the subway? Today, I did: Julianne Moore was on the C train with a bunch of cute schoolkids. I wanted to ask her whether the ping-pong ball in Children of Men was CGI, but thought better of it.

Got a subway celebrity story? Do tell.

Mensches of the Desert

In 1964 Melville Shavelson set out to make a Hollywood epic about an American military man who helped establish the state of Israel. Though Cast a Giant Shadow had a generous budget, the full cooperation of the Israeli government, and a star-studded cast including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, and Senta Berger, it flopped. But something great came out of it: Shavelson's hilarious, groundbreaking 1971 book about the experience, How to Make a Jewish Movie. That his friends suggested a better title would have been "How Not to Make a Jewish Movie" gives a hint of what to expect.
 
By the 1960s Shavelson was well-known in Hollywood as a maker of comedies. He'd received Oscar nominations for co-writing two films he also directed: the Cary Grant–Sophia Loren romance Houseboat and the Bob Hope vehicle The Seven Little Foys. His association with Hope was his entry into the entertainment biz: Shavelson began writing for him in 1938, and didn't quit for 20 years. How to Make a Jewish Movie reads like the work of an expert comedy writer. Practically every paragraph ends with a punch line; nearly every sentence has an ironic kick. Shavelson is talented enough to make the story of creating a flop irresistible, and humble enough to accept at least some of the blame. And while the pleasure of How to Make a Jewish Movie comes from the funny stories of difficult actors and shattered $40,000 camera lenses, the book is also a milestone: quite possibly the first book by a Hollywood director devoted entirely to the making of his own movie.

Read the rest of my article about How to Make a Jewish Movie here, on Nextbook.

Color Me Blood Red

The closest I ever came to an actual Times Square grindhouse was in 1983 or '84, when I persuaded my friend Nicholai to head downtown to the Hollywood Twin on 48th and Eighth for a one-day revival of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. We were in eighth grade. I recall almost nothing about the movie, but I remember how scuzzy the theater was, and that we were the only 13-year-olds. We survived.

It was a feeling of having missed the glory years of watching appalling films in scary theaters that led me to see Grindhouse on the Deuce (if one can still call it that). The AMC Empire 25 takes its name and façade from the burlesque theater–turned–movie house that preceded it; the lobby is what's left of the theater itself, with the two balconies still visible and the proscenium arch towering over the ticket-buyers. In their piquant book Sleazoid Express, Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford say that "the Empire had a raunchy reputation for male hustling during the 1960s Midnight Cowboy era, but by the 1970s … the theater became a prime venue for the great three-day-run triple bills so endemic to the Deuce." They make it sound almost quaint: "A fella selling Dixie Cup ice creams occasionally patrolled the aisles, catering to a weed-smoking crowd that was hungry for sweets."

Grindhouse is to grindhouse movies as the AMC Empire 25 is to the Empire: a gussied-up homage that can't compare to the real thing. Rodriguez's Planet Terror is fun—a cheeky, fast-paced gross-out. Two of the four fake trailers are really clever: the spot-on Machete (by Rodriguez) and the witty Don't (by Edgar Wright). But they can't make up for Tarantino's wretched Death Proof, which commits an unforgivable cinematic sin. It's boring, just a talky set-up for a climactic car chase. Yet it features two genuinely horrific moments at midpoint—the kind of visceral shocks that only grindhouse films can deliver.

Landis and Clifford again: the Deuce's audiences "were film's harshest critics, and demanded that the exploitation movies the theaters screened lived up to the promises made by their graphic, outrageous ad campaigns and shocking trailers. If the movies let them down, the audience would react by shouting, tossing food containers, and physically damaging the theaters." The guy sitting in front of me showed his displeasure in another way. He was fast asleep.

Ladies' Man

I'm behind in my reading, as well as my moviegoing, these days, but I just caught up with something great: Daniel Mendelsohn's 5,000-word New York Review of Books piece, "The Women of Pedro Almodóvar." He charts the shift between "the director's earliest movies, with their DayGlo emotions and Benzedrine-driven plots, and the technically smoother and emotionally subtler films of the past few years," a shift most evident in his treatment of women:

The newfound emotional subtlety and technical restraint that you get in these films seems connected to a deeper appreciation of women than was previously evident—women not as camp harpies or hysterics or vamps (which is to say women as drag icons), but as something closer to the women of real life. This is so even in Talk to Her, where the women are more the objects than the subjects of deep emotions; it's as if his two principal male characters' fraught attention to the comatose women they adore has elicited from Almodóvar some deeper feelings of his own. It is surely no coincidence that the most disappointing film of the director's recent period, the overwrought and overrated Bad Education … has almost no female characters at all.

It's fascinating, and culminates in a well-observed examination of Volver, which took him two viewings to appreciate: "Out of an abandoned melodrama he has fashioned a drama that, in its very restraint, may be the most radical thing its creator has yet attempted." Check it out.

Did You Miss Me?

Seven years after he disappeared with the whimper that was Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven has returned with what may be his best film. His haters — those who thought Basic Instinct was misogynistic or homophobic, or who didn’t see the irony in Starship Troopers (“It’s spiritually Nazi, psychologically Nazi. It comes directly out of the Nazi imagination” — Washington Post) — aren’t likely to appreciate his latest: a slam-bang indictment of anti-Semitism and barbarity in which a Jewish woman and a Gestapo officer fall in love.

Though it’s critical, Black Book is no message movie. It’s a first-rate thriller. And, like most of Verhoeven’s films, it’s erotic, outrageously violent, and deeply twisted.

Read the rest of my Black Book review here, on Stop Smiling's website.

Strangers on a Train

The ubiquity of cinephiles is one of the reasons I love this dirty town, as my subway rides home to Brooklyn often remind me. Last night, on the very same F train, there was a curly-headed chap reading Pasolini Requiem, the 700-page Pier Paolo bio, and a skinny guy in white Chucks toting the massive Stanley Kubrick Archives. Last week there was the kid who, overhearing me and a friend discussing J. Hoberman and Nathan Lee, chimed in to say that Lee's review of Eraserhead was self-indulgent bullshit, and that the best critic in town—or at least the most honest—was Hizzoner Ed Koch. (Can you believe it, trixie?) Koch, after all, was the only one to say how crappy Children of Men really was; those long takes, the kid fumed, could've been done so much better by Brian De Palma. (For the record, I thought that Lee review was funny, and was amazed by Children of Men; I even said so on the radio.)

But my best subway sighting, a few months ago, was the goth girl with a huge tattoo on the back of one calf: Hitchcock's profile. Now that's movie love.

On the Air

My co–Film Snob, David Kamp, and I appeared on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show today to discuss films, snobbery, and the Oscars. You can listen to us here. As David notes on our Snobsite, the gods were tuned in...

In discussing nominee Helen Mirren’s oeuvre, Lawrence brought up her killer performance in 1980’s The Long Good Friday but couldn’t remember the name of that movie’s director. Seconds after we were finished with our segment, a WNYC staffer alerted us that Martin Scorsese was listening, and had instructed his assistant to call in to tell us that the director of Long Good Friday was John Mackenzie.

Thanks, Marty! What a wonderful way to underscore what we say about you in the book: that you’re an “effervescent enthusiast,” a film buff rather than a snob, because you want to share your knowledge rather than hoard it.