BUDD SCHULBERG DIES

Marlon Brando was brilliant, and Rod Steiger was no slouch, but who put the words in their mouths? Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who died today.

The controversial Schulberg had a fascinating life that included working with John Ford's documentary unit in WWII, and being one of the first US servicemen to liberate Nazi-run concentration camps. Later, during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, Schulberg was named as a communist, and he buckled and decided to "name names" as a friendly witness. It was not his finest hour.

Maybe he assuaged his guilt with "On the Waterfront." The movie seems to be a parable about the courage of a man to "name names," in this case a palooka named Terry Malloy (Brando) whose brother, Charley the Gent (Steiger) is the lawyer for a mobbed-up union boss named Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). This iconic scene in the taxi is a testimony to Schulberg's art as well as the actors, and we feel Terry's pain as he laments his wasted life as a bum who "coulda been a contender," and then decides to do the right thing and be a "cheese-eater."

Budd Schulberg, 1954

PRIMER

An ingenious mind-bender shot for a purported $7,000 in Super 16, Primer is a better science-fiction film than George Lucas could make with all the money in the world. And it's only technically sci-fi. It's difficult to pigeon-hole a film that so successfully mixes science, philosophy, and the nature of reality in such a disarming way, and without resorting to the standard science-fiction tropes.

See, it's all about the story. With little or no money, DIY filmmakers (such as writer/director Shane Carruth) must rely on their wits since they can't dazzle you with expensive special effects and big name stars. Primer begins with four engineers working nights and weekends in a garage building error-checking devices. They spend their free time tinkering with this and that, and accidentally tear a hole in the space-time continuum. To tell you more would spoil the fun. Primer won Sundance's Grand Jury prize in 2004.

31-year old Shane Carruth wrote, directed, and acted in Primer. Carruth was a math major in college who worked as an engineer before teaching himself filmmaking. He was interviewed by the Village Voice:

How did you come up with the film's principles of time travel?
Richard Feynman has some interesting ideas about time. When you look at Feynman diagrams [which map the interaction of elementary particles], there's really no difference between watching an interaction happen forward and backward in time. That's something I got interested in early on. I always knew what the story was thematically before it turned into science fiction. It would be about trust and how that's linked to what's at risk. I was reading about innovation and that's where I got the setting. Now what is this device? At that point, I'm where a lot of sci-fi writers are—just going through the list of what this thing could be. When I got to the ability to affect time, there was a lot of material to mine that I hadn't seen before—it's usually warpspace or wormholes. In almost any time travel story, people pick themselves up at one point in time and then immediately exist at another—they move from the present day to the 1950s or prehistoric times, and I never liked that because if I were to jump back a day, I'd find myself in a different space because of the orbit of the earth. Whenever you're addressing moving in time you need to talk about space. When you walk to the door you have to walk every moment between here and there, so it seems that, if you're moving through time backwards, you should have to pass through each moment back to get there. That would be the price you pay.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Watch these clips and rent or buy Primer soon.

FELICIDADES!

Gwyneth Paltrow, or a small brown country of no consequence

In case you missed it, Salvadorans voting in Sunday's election put Mauricio Funes of the FMLN, the former rebel party, in control for the first time, ending two decades of right wing Arena party rule.

The US media didn't highlight the story, and it figures. The U.S. should be ashamed of its history with the tiny Central American country. The U.S. isn't very good at finishing things (Afghanistan, Iraq, V...) but it sure jumps into bed with plenty of nasty people for expediency sake.

Jennifer Anniston, or the CIA secretly torturing prisoners at "black sites"

According to CNN ("Leftists Claim El Salvador Presidency," a nice value-laden header):

"Mauricio Funes, a member of a political party that waged guerrilla war against the government 17 years ago, claimed the presidency of El Salvador on Sunday night." It goes on, almost in passing. "The FMLN, which is the Spanish acronym for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was formed in late 1980 as an umbrella group for five leftist guerrilla organizations fighting a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. The guerrillas and the government signed a peace pact in 1992 and the FMLN became a legitimate political party. By some estimates, 75,000 Salvadorans died during the war."

Mauricio Funes, or the cast of "Friends"

Bury that below the fold. A newsreader might stumble upon the phrase "U.S.-backed military dictatorship" in a country where "75,000 Salvadorans died." It's kind of messy and requires explanation, and we Americans (Norteamericanos, that is) are so busy, go, go, go. We don't have time for the follow-up story. Or the backstory, for that matter. Or history in general.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, or thousands of "disappeared" dissidents

Dictatorships are depressing, and our attention span is short. News crews need to cover more important things, such as the ongoing love story of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and poor jilted Jennifer Aniston. Or the woman with octuplets. Or anything that affects our pocketbooks, and jostles our Comfort Zone. Besides, news needs to be flashy to compete with "America's Most Idle" and "Big Fat Loser." A few important stories slide.

Don't get me wrong. The El Salvador story is out there. But not nearly as prominently displayed as one would think considering our history propping up this quasi-fascist police state for so many years. I'm not naive; I don't expect the news to trumpet shameful episodes of our past, but I expect some sense of recognition and historical responsibility, especially regarding conditions we've helped create. We can be a force for great good, or we can continue to support convenient bullies, and we won't know the difference without a truly independent news media asking tough questions.

Julia Roberts or nameless Salvadoran exercising democracy

Jack Kennedy once said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. In this rare instance, the revolution was peaceful and that should be celebrated.

¡El Cambio es Hoy!

ASTRAL WEEKS, ASTRAL DECADES

And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats and they'll get high
On a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky
And I will never grow so old again

Once in a great while the magic strikes, rivers run backwards, planets line up like billiard balls, and the wind plays strange melodies on empty bottles. Astral Weeks is just such a moment. The album signaled the end of the "Brown-eyed Girl" radio-friendly pop of early Van Morrison and carried us into the mystic. This wasn't top forty music at all, but something luminous, deeper and more personal, new Celtic soul and folk rock with jazzy notes--and enough bizarre lyrics to keep the hopheads up late at night working their decoder rings.

If I ventured in the slipstream Between the viaducts of your dreams Where immobile steel rims crack And the ditch in the back roads stop Could you find me?

Elvis Costello said Astral Weeks is "still the most adventurous record made in the rock medium, and there hasn't been a record with that amount of daring made since."

Van at the Hollywood Bowl, 2008

In 2008, forty years after its release, Van Morrison returned to this cycle of songs with a series of concerts in Los Angeles in which he played the album in its entirety. "Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl" will soon be released on CD and DVD. Before the shows, Morrison offered this explanation:

“Astral Weeks” songs...were from another sort of place—not what is at all obvious. They are poetry and mythical musings channeled from my imagination...[They] are little poetic stories I made up and set to music...The songs were somewhat channeled works—that is why I called it “Astral Weeks.” As my songwriting has gone on I tend to do the same channeling, so it’s sort of like “Astral Decades,” I guess.


And I will raise my hand up
Into the night time sky
And count the stars
That's shining in your eye
Just to dig it all an' not to wonder
That's just fine
And I'll be satisfied
Not to read in between the lines
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain
And I will never, ever, ever, ever
Grow so old again.

Lester Bangs wrote a review of the album back in 1979, and he called it "the rock record with the most significance in my life so far." Bangs said this was " a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend." Lester was probably stoned when he wrote that, but even so...the album clearly is shooting for more than your standard rock tropes of girls and cars and the diddy-wah-diddy. Maybe it's worth some late night contemplation.

(You can read the rest of Lester Bang's rambling review by clicking here).

Listen to the title track "Astral Weeks" by clicking the button:

(track removed by request from WEB SHERIFF on behalf of Exile Productions and Exile Publishing. See comments)

SAID THE JOKER TO THE THIEF

The late Heath Ledger--who died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs--has been posthumously nominated for Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight, the latest film in the Batman franchise. Ledger stole the show with his evil antics, but no less of a performance was his turn as singer Bob Dylan in the arty, experimental film from 2007, "I'm Not There."

Heath Ledger as the Joker, posthumously nominated for an Oscar

In the Todd Haynes film, six actors portray various sides of the mercurial songwriter, and Ledger plays Robbie Clark, an actor in Greenwich Village struggling with his career and his marriage to Claire (a fictional character based on Sara Dylan, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg).

Like Dylan, the film isn't for everyone--and those seeking formulaic entertainment or a standard bio-pic should look elsewhere--but it brims with excellent performances and a thought-provoking montage of styles that mirror the phases of the shape-shifting singer. Ledger's performance is dark and complex, as you can see from this clip.


Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg in "I'm Not There" (2007)

Listen to the song, "I'm Not There," by Bob Dylan, one of the unfinished basement tapes recorded with The Band at Big Pink. Just push the button to play.

SPACE IS THE PLACE

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" is a brilliant movie, a science fiction film that rises above it's humble, cheesy genre to the level of a Hollywood classic. We're talking the 1951 version, not the remake currently in theaters starring Keanu Reeves.

Why?

Again, we ask the question: "Was this remake necessary?"

What next? "The Godfather" with McCauley Culkin? "From Here to Eternity" with Ben Affleck? (Oh, they actually did that one.) How about "Psycho" with Vince Vaughn? (They did that, too?)

Oh, God, no!

Here's another terrible idea. Madonna wants to remake "Casablanca." I kid you not. So far, the response has been lukewarm. If she somehow succeeds, we will personally picket her home. More on her bad idea here.

"Klaatu barada nikto!" Gort from the 1951 classic "The Day The Earth Stood Still."

You want outer space? WAY outer space? Here's a true extra-terrestrial, and brother from another planet--Saturn, to be precise--jazz master and eccentric Sun Ra.

WITH A LITTLE SEX IN IT

The great Preston Sturges directed some of the wittiest films ever made. He reinvented comedy for Hollywood. This trailer is from a film retrospective of his work at Bryn Mawr Film Institute, and a reminder that "he's still the guy to beat."



I saw a brand new comedy this weekend. My girlfriend Wendy and I sat in the darkness, waiting for laughs. We sat there like Vladimir and Estragon, albeit with Diet Coke. Time slowed down to a near standstill. The movie was "Baby Mama" starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, two very funny people. What happened? Hollywood has recently discovered the hilarity of pregnancy -- wanted, unwanted, too old, too young, with surrogate mothers -- and this is the latest in a half dozen. What ever happened to originality?



Preston Sturges was original -- and funny. If you want a good laugh, skip all the formulaic, market-tested comedies out there, and rent "Sullivan's Travels." It tells the story of a Hollywood director who is sick and tired of making mindless fluff. He dreams of moving among the real people, and making a great film of social significance -- and it's hilarious. By the way, the film he dreams of making is called "Oh, Brother Where Art Thou." Years later, the Coen Brothers honored Sturges in a film of this name. With a little sex in it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ELVIS! LITTLE ANTHONY!

January 8th is a big day for birthdays. Not only is it Elvis Presley's, it's also the birthday of David Bowie, and Robbie Krieger, guitar player of the Doors. It's the birthday of Shirley Bassey, who sang the theme from "Goldfinger," Dave Eggers, American writer, rapper R. Kelly, cranky chef Gordon Ramsey, comedian Soupy Sales, New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno, actress Butterfly McQueen, Mary Queen of Scotts, and Little Anthony. My birthday isn't for a couple days yet, but I've requested a medley from Little Anthony and the Imperials.