What's It All About?

A few weeks ago on NPR's Fresh Air, they played a 1997 interview between Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese done at Ohio State University. The two men are discussing Raging Bull- they played two clips from the film on the radio and it is fascinating just listening to the film- and Ebert begins the discussion like this:

...People will discuss the subject matter as if that is what the film is about. The film is about boxing, or it’s about gangsters. A film is not about its subject, its about how it’s about its subject. The subject is neutral, people don't understand that. Whenever anyone makes a statement I don’t like to go to movies about ... fill in the blank. My response is 'anyone who makes that statement is an idiot.' I don’t want to go to bad films about cowboys is maybe a more intelligent statement.

Well said, Roger. Raging Bull was about a boxer not about boxing.

If you want to hear 12 minutes of Ebert and Scorsese's discussion as well as listen to two scenes from Raging Bull, then go to itunes and look up the June 27 Fresh Air podcast or visit npr.org and go to the Fresh Air archives. It's a great, passionate discussion as well as an interesting insight into how Scorsese shot the boxing scenes for Raging Bull. Later in the broadcast Michael Imperioli talks about working on Goodfellas and what it was like to work with Robert DeNiro.

Check it out.

PeterH

Let's Play Two!

Meteorologically, today is the nicest day we have had in Chicago since a freakish 65-degree sunny day came and went in early January. The calendar says spring, but the Cubs played their first home game last Monday in a 45 degree mist. With the exception of today it still seems like spring is a ways off. However, today's nice weather got me thinking about baseball and more specifically baseball films.

Baseball pictures by and large stink. I like Field of Dreams and Bull Durham and a lot of The Natural. Eight Men Out is great, but that is more historical than anything else- plus who can resist John Sayles and our friend Studs Terkel as the writers Ring Lardner and Hugh Fullerton. But more often than not baseball films are garbage- especially if you are a baseball fan. William Bendix as Babe Ruth? Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig? The worst is Anthony Perkins as Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out. Trust me Perkins is scarier as a ball player than as a motel keeper in Psycho.

A problem I have with baseball films is that even the best baseball film is not better than the experience I have going to an average mid-season major league game. (Major League, the film is not a great movie, either.) And going to a minor league game is even better. It's just a blast and so much less commercial and more "joy of the game" than Big League ball-and way better than a bad baseball movie.

The best baseball film I have seen is a documentary HBO did years ago called When It Was a Game. They used home movies from fans from the 1930s- 1960s and voice over of real ball players to describe the experience. Some highlights include 16mm color film from the 1938 World Series between the Cubs and Yankees- color footage of Lou Gehrig. Take that Gary Cooper! Also, ball players like Enos Slaughter talk about how they played for the love of the game. They even had to bring their own sandwiches to eat between games of doubleheaders.

For you youngsters doubleheaders are what teams used to play on holidays and most Sundays so they could take the next day for travel. The owners wised up and realized they could maximize profits by playing 81 home dates, hence the opening days on in snowy March and a World Series that bumps into Halloween.

But of course you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

PeterH

p.s. I know that is a photo of Jackie Robinson and not Ernie Banks-the source of "Let's Play Two." Robinson is the most important player in baseball history- he is emblematic of the idea of when it was a game. His picture deserves to be here- just as it is a good thing that his number 42 has been retired by all major league teams.

Days of Wine and Roses

I often have a problem watching films about addiction and recovery. Even in the best ones there seems to be some sort of artificiality I can not get past. In The Days of Wine and Roses Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are great, but there comes a point in the film where it gets preachy and we can see the ending coming 45 minutes in advance. Worse, to me, is Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Milland set the standard for the bad drunk, but the D.T. scene is laughable- did they spend any money on that fake bat attack? Yet, the film won Oscars and for years was the touchstone for films about alcoholism.

Films just about addiction are no good. I like Leaving Las Vegas and really appreciate the director Mike Figgis, but I don't need to see Nicolas Cage drink himself to death. I get it already. The typical film is this: I am a junkie, it's fun for a while, it gets out of control, I leave a wake of destruction- physical and emotional- in my path, then I die miserably. In other words see Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, ad. nausea.

Films just about recovery are perhaps worse because we see none of the fun and we get preached at for two hours. These films actually make me want to drink. More. Right there in the theater. Where is the Martini concession? Is there a Pinot Noir vendor anywhere?

Take a pass on Clean and Sober (though I like Michael Keaton) and especially When a Man Loves a Woman a Meg Ryan/Andy Garcia film. A good idea by Al Franken gone bad through a series of unfortunate filmmaking events. (No one knew the film they were trying to make.) A far superior film written by the same Al Franken is Stuart Saves His Family. Franken knows something about alcoholic families and co-dependency and Stuart is a surprisingly nice film.

All of this brings me to two films I saw recently that have a different take on addiction and recovery, but to me were maybe the most valid of all the films. Interestingly they both deal with killers, but in very different ways.
You Kill Me stars the always terrific Ben Kingsley as a hit man for the Buffalo, NY Polish mob who is sent to San Francisco to dry out. In S.F. he gets a job in a funeral home, where he meets Tea Leoni (who also produced the film. I wonder what attracted her to the material?) and goes to A.A. He gets a sponsor and gets his life together. There are several scenes in the A.A. meeting and several more with his sponsor, Luke Wilson. Though it is a dark comedy it touches on issues about addiction and recovery that those other films don't.

The other film is Mr. Brooks starring Kevin Costner and William Hurt. Costner is Mr. Brooks, Portland, Oregon's man of the year and a serial killer. (Where do they come up with these ideas?) He wants to stop killing but his alter ego, William Hurt, won't let him. He goes to A.A. meetings where all he says is that he is an addict and leaves it at that.

The thing that struck me about both these films is the power of the anonymous group and how people could sit and talk or not, but it was clear recovery was a process they were all going through. Very interesting, though a little thin on the fake bat attack scenes.

Peter H

Sentimental Education- Part 1

School resumed this week in Chicago and the big yellow buses are a reminder of just how much I hated going to school. While I was a good student and had lots of friends and did lots of extracurricular activities I just plain hated going to school. All those rules and regulations, do this and do that- who needs it? But now I am a college teacher so go figure.

From Montessori until I graduated from high school I went to school everyday with my father. Each morning we would get up and have breakfast- the same thing, cereal. After 1700 of these breakfasts before my 18th birthday I now refuse to eat cereal. (The last time was in England a few years ago when my alternative was a “healthy” full English breakfast.)

Our conversation consisted of this: Dad: Eat your flakes. Me: OK.

The sum total of 14 years of weekday morning conversation- 4 words.

Several of those years my dad had a Volkswagon I had to push to get it started and then run to catch up to the car a la Little Miss Sunshine. These moments with my dad were often the highlight of my school day. It was downhill - literally from that start- from there.

So with apologies to Gustave Flaubert below are a series of highlights (lowlights?) of my early education.

Montessori- My grandmother, Kakky, picked me up and asked me what I learned today. I said, “I don’t know.” She said you were in school all day and didn’t learn anything? Oh to have been able to shift into my adult head and say, “You know it was all that 2+2 is 4 and ABC bullshit. Give me a break grandma!.” Instead I said something like “we used crayons” and hoped for unconditional grandmotherly love.

Second grade- Luckily I was allowed to skip first grade, I don’t think I could have handled any more rudimentary education. However, skipping a grade made me forever the youngest in my class.

Fourth grade- Each weekend Mrs. Hackworth (a sometime reader of this page) made the class memorize a poem and be prepared to recite it in front of the class on Monday morning. Now as every fourth grader knows poems rhyme, that’s the definition of poetry, right? Evidently not. Mrs. H. gave us “real poetry” the crap that doesn’t rhyme or make any sense. Poetry and public speaking- I’m in fourth grade this is not Victorian England! Note to Mrs. Hackworth, thanks to you I still have trouble sleeping on Sunday nights in anticipation of failing my poetry reading.

Fifth grade- An insane woman comes to our class room and speaks only in French to us. She refuses to allow any English. This is funny for the first five minutes, then we think she is seriously disturbed. This continues for days and weeks. Finally I burst out, “Je vais a la salle de bains.” Where this comes from even surprises me but my point is made and I was allowed to escape to the bathroom. (I know it really means “I go to the bathroom” but we had covered “May I” yet.)

Seventh Grade- By now I am thoroughly ensconced in the third ring of education Hell. Our assignment is to write a science report and make an oral presentation to the rest of the seventh grade on a topic picked randomly from a hat. My pick: the reproductive process of amphibians. No, nothing safe an easy like the Big Bang (at least my school believed in that) . Being good (strict?) parents I had to rehearse my speech in front of them. I do not know what is worse, talking about frog sperm in front of my parents or in front of 50 7th graders.

Ninth Grade- What is with this incessant need for my teachers to insist on memorization and public speaking? Draconian Mr. Grunwald makes the class memorize the Declaration of Independence from the preamble through the charges section. (Even then I was certain this is something that I would never need to do at any time of my life.) Then, over the course of a month he randomly picked students to recite passages to the class. So I memorized the damn thing and he never called on me!

That’s enough for now I am having bad flashbacks.

PeterH

Buster Keaton

To me the greatest of the early silent film comedians is Buster Keaton. Yes, Chaplin is brilliant and Lloyd is terrific, but Keaton gets to me in a way the others don't. One reason for this, I think, is his on screen persona. His character was always caught up in the events around him with absolutely no control. The train leaves without him, his mother-in-law moves in to his house, he single handedly has to save the Union in the Civil War. He rarely gets the girl. The Simpsons writers knew what they were doing when they replaced Keaton's star on The Hollywood walk of Fame with Troy McClure's. It is a classic Keaton move.

Another reason I appreciate Keaton so much is how he understood the medium of film perhaps better than others. The is a story, true or not I do not know, that when he first met Fatty Arbuckle he asked to take a camera home. Keaton took the camera to his hotel dismantled it reassembled it. The next day he came to Arbuckle's set and asked for work as a cameraman as was hired. This tells me Keaton really wanted to understand the tools he had to work with and how to use them to his comedic advantage.

Many of my favorite Keaton moments involve filmmaking. In The Cameraman Keaton plays a news reel cameraman down on his luck- chasing fire trucks on their way BACK to the station and the like. In Sherlock Jr. he is a projectionist who dreams about being in films. His dream life is better than his real life.

Like most geniuses Keaton was a risk taker. He put himself in harms way by doing his own stunts. He cracked his skull once falling from a water tower onto a railroad track (it makes the cut if the film). He could have been killed by the house blowing over scene where the open window falls around him, but he did these gags because he knew the audience would identify with his character.

My favorite Keaton gag is from My Wife's Relations. He is given a portable house to build by his in-laws. And, much like me, he cannot hammer two boards together. The resulting house is a mess of bizarre angles. When it comes time to move the house, the car towing the house gets stopped as the house is on the train tracks. A train approaches, Keaton gets out and pushes with all his might and gets the house across the tracks just as the train passes. Whew! Beat, Beat. A train from the other direction comes and destroys the house. It's great bit of visual comedy done no justice here.

PeterH

Keys to the House

Because of my sister I am very sensitive to portrayals of handicapped people on film. No matter how good Daniel Day Lewis is in My Left Foot, or Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Sean Penn in I am Sam I still see the actor, not the character. Worse yet is when the disabled person in the film comes to some understanding at the end of the film, allowing us to leave the theater with a happy ending. My sister has never developed a new and better way to communicate just because we have been there for her. (The central premise of my film what's two+ three?- click on the link to the right if you are curious.) In some ways those other films are a bit offensive to me.

This brings me to this terrific little Italian film called Keys to the House. (So much nicer in Italian as Le Chiavi di Casa.) A man who has never seen his son takes him from Italy to a hospital in Berlin. The son, played by Andrea Rossi, has some mental and physical disability which is never fully explained, but is the reason for the entire journey. I haven't been able to learn much about Andre Rossi. According to imdb this is his only film. To me it seems as if he has cerebral palsy- he has a lazy eye, walks with a limp and has a withered arm. Now it certainly could be he is acting just like Day Lewis, et. al. but since he is not famous he became the character.

To me one of the best things about the film is that it doesn't try to explain everything. You don't (I didn't, but I am a dumb filmmaker) really know what his "problem" is or why the father is doing this, or what they are going to do at this hospital, or why they haven't ever seen each other. The film is simply about the relationship between father and son. I kept waiting for it to take a turn towards happy ending, but it didn't, though it is not at all sad. In fact the film ended sort of in the middle of things, leaving questions unanswered. It is by far the best film I have seen featuring a character with a disability and I encourage you to check it out.

PeterH