ACTING CLASS, WITH BRANDO

Hamlet offered advice to the traveling troop of actors who visited Elsinore:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. . .

We act every day; life is performance. Most of us are not very good at it. Some elevate acting to the professional level. This clip is from a New York City acting workshop led by award-winning actor/director Thurman E. Scott.

An actor behind the scenes: Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola on the set of "The Godfather."

To help us, we've recruited Marlon Brando the greatest screen actor of his generation, perhaps all time, who revolutionized and naturalized the art of acting. Even if we skip the more familiar performances from "A Streetcar Named Desire," "On the Waterfront," and "The Godfather," there are still many dynamic scenes to choose from.


Marlon Brando started on the stage, and here he plays Marc Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." (1953) Contrast this big grand style of stage acting with the films that follow.


A scene with the amazing Anna Magnani from "The Fugitive Kind" (1960). Brando achieved stardom on Broadway, playing Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." Here he plays Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier in a film based on another Williams' play, "Orpheus Descending."


Paul's eulogy in "Last Tango in Paris." (1972) Believe it or not, this was the same year he played Vito Corleone in "The Godfather." An absolutely brilliant performance. (language warning on this clip)

Brando is interviewed in 1973, after winning--and rejecting--the Academy Award for Best Actor for "The Godfather." He skipped the ceremony and sent Native American rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather, in full Apache dress, to explain his objection to the depiction of American Indians by Hollywood and television. Needless to say, Brando stirred some controversy, especially among the old warhorses like John Wayne. Here, Brando plays himself.

VIOLENT SATURDAY

Violent Saturday is a sundazzled Southwestern film noir about a bank job in 1950s Small Town, America. Quibblers may question if true noir can occur in the booming noonday sun, but there is no need for rain-slicked streets and Venetian blinds to explore the darkness of the criminal soul, and once the heist kicks into gear the skeptics will forget such pedantry and enjoy the ride. Director Richard Fleischer does a great job orchestrating the plot and keeps the story snapping with suspense and twists and turns. The crux of a heist movie has always been quirky character actors, and here you have a cool ensemble that includes Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, J. Carrol Naish, Victor Mature, and Richard Egan. True to the code, the bad guys are bad and so are the good guys, or at least they're not the upstanding citizens they want you to believe. The bank manager is a peeping Tom, the librarian is larcenous, and there is a tightly coiled Amish elder itching for trouble. In Violent Saturday, American small town life is lifted like a rock to uncover its squirming creepiness beneath--decades before David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino made it their signature move.

"PACKED WITH TWISTS AND SURPRISES. Marvin proves most unsettling as a hard guy who’s always snorting from an inhaler (it’s psychosomatic: he once had a wife with a perpetual cold). Mature, with his stricken manliness, reminds you of why James Agee thought he would be perfect as Diomed in Troilus and Cressida."
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

"FLEISCHER'S PIVOTAL FILM... He turns the centrifugal storytelling into the motor for any number of tracking and sliding sequence shots, concentric circles turning within each other. Violent Saturday is a remodeling operation, a modernizing, abstracting, and reshaping of noir- and not only through its lengthened horizon. It is not drenched in shadows, but they are a significant and visually defining feature- from the band of shade under the brim of Marvin's hat that obscures his face, to the shadows that give weight and depth to space when the crooks case the town. The film's 'Bradenville'- part Bisbee, part studio set-is stylized but not stereotyped, with a depth and compositional care one could call painterly. Think of Edward Hopper. Violent Saturday is an artifical reality transfixed and transformed by light."
– Richard Combs, Film Comment

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.

CIAO, TULLIO

Tullio Pinelli passed away Saturday in Rome at age 100. You probably never heard of him, even if you're a film fanatic. Pinelli was responsible for co-writing several of Federico Fellini’s best films, including I Vitelloni, La Strada, La Dolce Vita, Nights Of Cabiria, Juliet Of The Spirits, and 8 ½.

Federico Fellini, actor Leopoldo Trieste, and Tullio Pinelli

Pinelli didn’t start writing until his late 30s, when he and Fellini met at a newspaper stand, reading two sides of the same newspaper clamped to the kiosk. They loved movies, and had similar ideas about the possibility of infusing life and energy into the grim neo-realism that dominated Italy’s post-war cinema. Drawing upon childhood memory, myth, and a boundless artistic imagination they created a cinema of fantasy, dreams, memory and desire.


Marcello Mastriani in "La Dolce Vita"

In "La Dolce Vita," Marcello is a gossip columnist who chronicles "the sweet life'' of fading aristocrats, second-string film stars, aging Romeos and working girls. Marcello is cynical and exhausted, and he navigates this decadent world in a rumpled suit and shades. He's torn between making something serious of himself, and drifting along in an empty stream of affairs and a profitible--yet meaningless--life as a hack. Sylvia, a giggling American actress, comes to town, and he's enchanted. They drive around Rome at night. In this classic scene, they come upon the Trevi Fountain. Is this his shot at redemption, or complete surrender?

--"La Dolce Vita"

RUNNING WITH DIONYSUS

Sigur Rós can be excused for joyous nudity because they're Icelandic. Their music is ambient, ethereal, post-rock, dream pop, and not for everyone, and neither is this video which is either from the pagan past when Dionysus ruled, or from some distant utopian future where hang-ups have been discarded like, well, clothes.

Perhaps the point is made too easily that we watch hundreds of murders a day but rarely see someone's bum on TV. Sure, it's trite. Sex is ever present, of course, grabbing our attention and diverting it toward beer and pretzels and deodorant, and flirting meretriciously in so-called "reality TV" shows and all those cheesy double entendres in adult soaps like "Sex and the City." Wink, wink, nudge. Sex is everywhere. Still, you don't see this sort of prancing about. Why not? Sex is as prevalent as plastic, but maybe we haven't come all that far from the Victorian Era when people put pants on piano legs. We're still a bunch of prudes. Maybe if we'd grown up like these Icelanders we'd drop our guns and charge cards once in a while and not be so damn neurotic. Just a thought.

Until then, I give you Sigur Rós.

The life of the party: Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, dancing with friends in Ancient Greece

The band: Sigur Rós is jón þor (jónsi) birgisson (vocals, guitars), kjartan (kjarri) sveinsson (keyboards), orri páll dýrason (drums) and georg (goggi) holm (bass). The band were formed by jónsi, georg and original drummer ágúst in 1994.

CHE, THE MOVIE

Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh will release a four hour epic about the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The 257-minute biopic will be released in two parts in January. In a stroke of inspired casting, Benicio del Toro plays the Argentine revolutionary, for which he won top honors at Cannes. This preview trailer is for a special screening later this month in New York and LA.

The real Che

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a hero to some, a villain to others, and just a T-shirt design to many Americans. Che was a doctor, an asthmatic, a fervent bike rider, and a revolutionary who fought in Cuba, Africa, and finally South America, where he was killed by Bolivian Rangers under the direction of the CIA. This isn't lefty propaganda--nobody denies it; in fact, those involved took special pride in hunting down the rebel. They took turns posing around his corpse. I'm sure their intention was to demystify Che as a mere mortal, but the pictures provided a haunting pietà to the fallen guerrilla fighter.

After his capture and execution. Bolivia, 1967.

A declassified CIA document, an "Intelligence Information Cable" dated Oct. 9, 1967, is the first intelligence report on Che's capture. The cable states that the Bolivian army is dispatching an interrogator to confirm Che’s identity. The CIA also dispatched its own operative, Félix Rodríguez, who interrogated Guevara, gathered intelligence on his operation, and took photos of his documents and supervised his execution. To read the declassified document, click HERE for the pdf file.

The young Ernesto took a year off medical school and traveled the backroads of South America on a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle

Che's dramatic life has inspired several films, ranging from the good to the terrible. One of the best is "The Motorcycle Diaries" (2004) based on Che's journals. The film (and his journal) reveals a thoughtful young man gradually radicalized by the people he meets and the poverty he encounters traveling throughout South America.


A scene from "The Motorcycle Diaries" (2004) in which Che (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) and his best friend Alberto (Rodrigo De la Cerna) meet Peruvian peasants struggling to survive.

The worst film has to be "Che!" (1969) starring--believe it or not--Omar Sharif. Jack Palance plays Fidel Castro, I swear. Skip that one.

Read A. O. Scott's review of Soderbergh's "Che" in The New York Times HERE. For more on the life of Che, click HERE. Or HERE. Or HERE.


The rebel at rest: a candid shot after the revolution

"The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible to the majority, act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists, who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller — whether or not it is true — about the possibilities of success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this."

--Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967)

JIMI HENDRIX PAYS HIS DUES

This is a video from 1965, featuring Buddy and Stacey performing "Shotgun" on Nashville's WLAC-TV. The rendition is pretty generic, but the guitar player is a young Jimi Hendrix.

This is the oldest known film of Hendrix performing -- paying his dues in a back-up band. Check out the young avatar a full two years before his fiery debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967!

Jimi in 1965

THE INSULTS OF CYRANO DE BERGERAC

How often have we wished to be more clever, to send stinging insults to someone who has disrespected us instead of standing dumbstruck like a dullard? Sometimes the perfect rejoinder arrives too late, while one is running errands or trying to sleep, which only makes the sting worse. Still, we savor the perfect insult! From scrappy corner boys playing the dozens, to men in leotards exchanging volleys of theatrical repartee -- and every strata in between -- wit is met with delight. Unless, of course, one is its object. Or subject. Whatever.

One of the greatest wits to ever wound with an insult was the French duelist, Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, made immortal in the play by Rostand. A popular poet with a gentle soul, he also was a fine swordsman when push came to shove. I saw the play performed last summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It was brilliant and moving. There are many versions of the story on film, including the Steve Martin film, "Roxanne."

In this film clip, Cyrano is played by Jose Ferrer in the 1950 film. Here he instructs an effete aristocrat on the fine art of insults, and does a glorious job.

LAST MAN ON EARTH DIES

Charlton Heston, scenery-chewing actor, former conservative president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and the last man on earth, died at 84.
Famous for parting the Red Sea and battling planets full of apes, Heston retired to an apartment building after a post-apocalyptic plague swept the planet. By day, he traveled in a red convertible, hurling invectives and shooting his legally registered machine gun, but by night he was forced to barricade himself in a homemade fortress and fend off plague-infected zombies. It was a lonely life. He held out for years, but he could only hold out so long. Now he has joined the rest of us.