There are so many marvelous things about Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There.” How does it feel? The Shamus is still soaking it in. Thinking about it. Dreaming about it. Marveling anew at what Bob Dylan has given us over the years. It’s time for another Shamus List:

20 REASONS TO BE STUCK INSIDE A MULTIPLEX WITH THE OVERPRICED POPCORN AGAIN
(OR WHY TOM WATSON IS, ALAS, FALLIBLE)

1. Marcus Carl Franklin’s frizzy curls and profile. The kid looks so much like the young, rawboned Dylan that it’s scary.
2. Franklin and Richie Havens singing “Tombstone Blues” on the porch of a country shack. (And how about that dinner of catfish, tomatoes and greens?)
3. The haunting shot of Woody Guthrie lying in the hospital bed, set to Dylan’s beautiful lament, “Blind Willie McTell.”
4. Ed Lachman’s saturated photography. Especially the way he captures the autumnal colors of Elliot Landy’s classic ’60s photos of Dylan and The Band in Woodstock.
5. The romantic ’60s montage of Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s characters meeting and mating in Manhattan. That shot of them driving through the countryside, their hair blowin’ in the wind, is just the way we imagined love in the ’60s. And did The Shamus detect a little Hepburn-Finney “Two For The Road” feel there?
6. The Jack Rollins album covers. Did Haynes purposely pick the name of Woody Allen’s old manager?
7. The Richard Gere “Billy the Kid” sequence. It’s the most derided part of the movie, but it might be The Shamus’ favorite segment. Just imagine if Altman had directed “Renaldo and Clara” as a side project using all the actors from “Buffalo Bill and the Indians.” Full of that old, weird America — the phrase that Greil Marcus highlighted to describe Dylan’s “Basement Tapes.”
8. The glasses that Gere wears. Don’t they look like the glasses Dylan wore to play Alias in Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid”? Remember when Alias reads off the can labels, “Beans…succotash…beans…”
9. Julianne Moore’s dead-on cameo of Joan Baez. She nails Joanie’s bitter, catty side about Bob, especially when she describes Christian Bale’s Dylan as a “little toad.” (Bale was the weakest Dylan, though, wasn’t he?)
10. Bruce Greenwood! What a marvelously underrated actor. He plays both Jude’s snide inquisitor in the Blanchett segment and Pat Garrett in the Gere segment, and it made The Shamus wonder whether he will ever get the great breakout role his talent deserves.
11. The joy of Kris Kristofferson’s crusty opening narration. How about the way Haynes connects the dialogue to Kristofferson’s “he’s a poet/he’s a preacher” lines from “The Pilgrim”? Clever.
12. How Gainsbourg’s character gives us a feel for Bob’s ex-wife Sara, without us having to go through the garbage like Weberman. (Although she looks more like Suze Rotolo.)
13. The unbelievable editing by Haynes and Jay Rabinowitz. The way the different stories weave together. It’s nothing short of masterful.
14. The joky segment where the Black Panther tries to convince Bobby Seale that “Ballad of A Thin Man” was about their struggle. And did you see somebody naked walk into the room?
15. A Shamus question: Who was the actor that played the Albert Grossman part? He looked very familiar, but couldn’t quite place him.
16. The playful way that Haynes used the film to celebrate other films, especially those of the ’60s. There’s a bit of Godard’s “Masculin Feminin,” a silly bit of Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night” and even a moment of “Stardust Memories” (or maybe it’s supposed to be “8 1/2″). It gave the film another layer of meaning.
17. The tarantula.
18. Pete Seeger and the ax fable at Newport. As apocryphal as any Dylan story, but still funny as hell.
19. The sly handling of Dylan’s born-again phase and his little-known marriage to his backup singer. Todd knows his trivia.
And finally…
20. What? You thought The Shamus forgot? CATE BLANCHETT! Let me say it again: CATE BLANCHETT! It’s almost beyond description what she does here. Sometimes, she seems like she’s just doing an imitation, then she slips so fully into the character that you forget it’s her. How does it feel? Like she’s gonna be knock, knock, knocking on Oscar’s door, as Walter Monheit might have said. And here’s a bit of trivia to wrap this up: If she wins, it will be the second time she wins an Oscar for playing an Oscar winner.

One thing The Shamus should mention: Ain’t it funny how all the critics are mooning over “I’m Not There” but gave the Beatles fantasia, “Across The Universe” a hard day’s whacking? Because other than Dylan just being cooler to a certain generation of critics, The Shamus found both films to be very similar. Perhaps not in their approaches, but in the basic idea of romanticizing the era and the music. Both films will make my Top 5 of 2007.

Why is life worth living? It’s a very good question. Um, well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what…OK, um for me, I would say laughter. Um…comedy. Pure, funny moments. Groucho Marx singing “I’m Against It,” for one thing. Uh, um, Cary Grant screaming, “No, no, leave the rooster story alone, that’s human interest.” Any Nichols and May routine. A Dave Frishberg song. Um, Swedish movies, naturally. The Second Movement of Cheech and Chong’s “Los Cochinos”…Preston Sturges, Buster Keaton. ”Don’t be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party.” Um, the Coen Brothers, George Carlin on “the big invisible man in the sky”…uh…Thurber and White’s cartoon captions. The novels of Peter De Vries. Archie Bunker’s rants to Meathead, David Frye as Nixon. “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” John Prine’s “Dear Abby.” Moms Mabley. Paul Lynde in the center square. Um, Woody’s earlier, funnier films…Mark Twain’s letters…uh…Richard Pryor’s riffs on cocaine…Dean Martin’s roasts…”Laugh In,” “Seinfeld,” “30 Rock.” Dylan’s press conferences. Lucy and “Vegameatavitamins.” Barrymore and Lombard in “Twentieth Century.” “A Boy Named Sue.” Laurel and Hardy hauling the piano, uh, Chico and Harpo and Margaret Dumont. Tex Avery’s cartoons. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” “Are you a mod or a rocker?” “I’m a mocker.” Boris and Natasha. “Batman,” the TV show, um, Stan Corwyn’s record ads. Creem’s Boy Howdy ads. “Ninotchka.” Any line by Dorothy Parker. Um…“Pussy Galore. I must be dreaming.” Flip Wilson as Geraldine. George C. Scott in “Dr. Strangelove,” those incredible early years of “SNL” and “SCTV.” Uh…Charlie Chaplin’s face…

(Cross-posted at The Shamus’ shingle: badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

I’m not sure I want to revisit the entire series again. In fact, I’m certain I won’t. It’s probably got something to do with the way the show cuts to the bone of what teendom and the high school experience is like. And for many of us, as it was for Danes’ character of Angela Chase, high school was a chore and a burden to get through.

And we ourselves were a chore and a burden, too. Who needs all that melodrama again?

I was reminded of that while watching a bit of the pilot episode and the extras on the DVD this week. There is something about the heightened perceptions you have as a teenager, when your radar is being formed and you feel things more acutely than you ever feel them again, that Holzman captured brilliantly in Angela and her voiceover soliloquies. There’s that line of Angela’s about why she’s quitting the yearbook staff. She tells her teacher that if the yearbook ever captured what high school life was actually like, “it would be a really upsetting book.” So many of Angela’s observations ring so true. Did anybody not think about their parents and say to themselves, as Angela does: “Lately, I can’t even look at my mother without wanting to stab her repeatedly.” And yet, watching it for the first time as a parent, I felt such incredible sympathy for Angela’s suffering mother and father, played marvelously by Bess Armstrong and Tom Irwin, and could understand their see-sawing emotions and exasperation at this girl they want to protect, and this young woman they’re preparing to set free. I’m telling you: This show is like the suburban Bergman.

But more than anything, I wanted to hear The Line again. I can recall watching the pilot episode in 1994 and literally gasping at The Line. And there it was again, just as I remembered it:

Teacher: How would you describe Anne Frank?
Angela: Lucky.

I still think that might be the ballsiest bit of dialogue that network TV has ever produced. Not because it dares to say something about Anne Frank, but in the way it perfectly crystallizes the self-absorbed, modern American teenager. That one reaction speaks volumes to everything you feel in your high school years: Moodiness, fluctuating hormones, fear, uncertainty, moments of clarity and weird exhiliration, balanced by a I-gotta-get-out-of-this-place-if-it’s-the-last-thing-I-ever-do mentality. But more than anything, it’s that karmic feeling that your pain is sharper than any pain anybody has ever known. Me, me, me! Poor, poor pitiful, poetic me! You feel trapped and alive at the same instant, and it messes with your head.

I can do nothing but bow down to Holzman’s ability to tap into those memories and bring them so achingly alive in this show. Still, I don’t need to go back. I’m not sure high school ever leaves you, anyway. That’s the brilliance of “My So-Called Life.” (Great title, isn’t it? So self-dramatic!)

One other thing: In the extras, Danes says that she’s never had another character like Angela Chase and she’s always looking. I found that incredibly poignant. It made me wonder what it must be like to be an actor and get the greatest role of your life when you’re 13 or 14, and never find it again. I’m sure Danes has had a nice, so-called life but even show people have feelings that keep them up at night, and I got the strong sense that Danes has thought a lot about whether another Angela will ever come her way again. (Odd trivia: Guess who was the other actress up for the role of Angela? Alicia Silverstone.)

Anyway, if you want to go back with Rickie and Rayanne and Angela and remember the way that Jordan Catalano just…leans, “My So-Called Life” is there for you, starting Tuesday.

OK, one last quote. Kind of topical. Angela on Halloween: “When I was little I, like, worshipped Halloween. And truthfully, part of me still does. ‘Cause it’s your one chance all year to be someone else.”

But starting with “The Seeger Sessions,” Springsteen’s sphincter unclinched and he began to remember the soulful, footloose spirit that made his career. And now with “Magic,” there is an even stronger indication that he has re-embraced his musical roots. For as long as this phase lasts, we are reaping the sweet rewards of the Boss’ gift for melody. The songs on “Magic” have a joyful lilt to them, and there are lots of classic Bruuuuuuuce indicators, from the familiar plink of Roy Bittan’s piano to the “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”-style intro of “Livin’ In The Future” to the muted roar of Clarence Clemons’ sax. (And there are some new touches. Film fans should listen for the razor whine of Morricone-esque harmonica on “Gypsy Biker.”)

What makes “Magic” even more impressive, though, is that he has married his house sound to some of his darkest, most poetic lyrics. I would love to know what writers (and, I suspect, poets) he has been reading lately in addition to “The New York Times,” because something has led Springsteen down a more indirect path in his imagery. On several songs, he writes of color schemes and card tricks and bruised relationships and Catholic iconography (replete with drops of blood) and you know he’s talking about the state of the country, the war, the horrible, senseless loss of life. And it almost moved me to tears, because it is so much more expressive for not being plainly stated. In coming at his frustration and anger from a softer place, the effect is much more powerful. His words set off a chain of thoughts in the listener’s head, like all good poetry does.

I don’t want to overstate the charms of “Magic.” I’m always wary of lauding music on only a couple of listens. It will take time to see if “Magic” holds up. I suspect it will. And while it may be his best work since “The River” and “Nebraska,” he is not the same man, and is never going to match those highs. But “Magic” strikes me as living proof that Springsteen really is worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Dylan, Eastwood or Philip Roth, artists who find a re-animated voice in later years and push an already extraordinary career to new heights.

(Cross-posted at the Shamus’ shingle: badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

— Bruce Springsteen

Opening scene: A quiet neighborhood. It’s late summer. Dusk. The lights have just come up. The camera glides in and pulls up short on the windshield of a Chevy revving its motor in front of a modest house. Somewhere in the suburbs of Jersey. A young hood — greasy hair, white shirt, busted-up blue jeans — sits impatiently behind the wheel. He looks up to the front door. Suddenly…

The screen door slams,
Mary’s dress waves
Like a vision she dances across
The porch as the radio plays…

If there is a rocker whose songs invoke the feel of cinema more moodily and triumphantly than Bruce Springsteen, The Shamus has never heard of him. Let’s face it: The Boss is a geek like us. A major movie nerd. Whoa, Thunder Road.

And in the songs that made his reputation, you can see and hear his love for everything from Robert Mitchum to John Ford, from Brando to Burt Reynolds, and especially for the darker, pulpy, brutal/romantic visions of film noir. Hell, the titles of his songs sound like a Warners box set: “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Thunder Road,” “Born To Run,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Incident on 57th Street,” “New York City Serenade,” “Kitty’s Back,” “Candy’s Room,” “Badlands.” Even The E Street Band sounds like a gang from “The Big Combo,” right down to the nicknames: The Boss, The Big Man, Miami Steve, Mighty Max.

Or as the Boss puts it himself on “Backstreets”:

Remember all the movies, Terry
We’d go see
Trying to learn how to walk like the heroes
We thought we had to be.

With Springsteeen’s new disc, “Magic,” coming out Tuesday and being hailed as a return to the guitar god of his earlier albums, it’s a good time to look at the nexus of film and music in his work. I’ve got to admit: Springsteen’s music hasn’t grabbed me for years. But there was a time when he meant everything, and he put on the two greatest concerts I’ve ever seen. I’m sure I’ll buy “Magic,” even if, for me, the real magic is in the old stuff. So, it’s time for yet another Shamus List:

THE FIVE BEST BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN “FILM” SONGS


THE SONG: “Meeting Across The River”
THE ALBUM: “Born To Run”
THE MOVIE CONNECTION: It’s a film noir screenplay, all dialogue, disguised as a song. It’s the kind of screenplay a Shamus can appreciate. Call it “The Big Haul.” A bunch of mooks — The Narrator With No Name, his lapdog pal Eddie and Narrator’s wisecracking moll Cherry are on the skids, looking for one score to put them over the top and set them up for the sweet life. Cherry’s almost had it, and she’s gonna walk if things don’t get better. After all, they just hocked her freakin’ radio. But, man, don’t she understand that two grand’s practically sitting there waiting for them tonight? All they gotta do is play it cool, show some style and take a little meeting across the river. Burnished by Michael Brecker’s moody noir trumpet, this song is a three-minute movie. In my opinion, this is the best song Springsteen ever wrote.
THE MOVIE “DIALOGUE”: “We gotta stay cool tonight, Eddie/’Cause man, we got ourselves out on that line/And if we blow this one/They ain’t gonna be looking for just me this time.” That’s a whole episode of “The Sopranos” right there.

THE SONG: “Adam Raised A Cain”
THE ALBUM: “Darkness On The Edge Of Town”
THE MOVIE CONNECTION: Elia Kazan and James Dean meet a blaze of guitar blowback. “East of Eden” is namechecked here, as is the classic Biblical story of a burning hate/love between a father and son. When Springsteen talks of the daddy in pain walking “these empty rooms looking for something to blame,” your mind flashes on those dinner table scenes from the Kazan film, those overhead angled shots looking down on Raymond Massey, or Dean in the hallway of the whorehouse looking for his mama. White hot fury, baby. Springsteen never rocked more insistently — or screamed out his inner pain more urgently — than on this gem of the “Darkness” disc and another underrated Boss classic.
THE MOVIE “DIALOGUE”: “In the Bible, Cain slew Abel/And East of Eden, mama, he was cast/You’re born into this life paying/For the sins of somebody else’s past.”

THE SONG: “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
THE ALBUM: “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
THE MOVIE CONNECTION: Springsteen’s most direct movie lift, from John Ford’s classic “The Grapes of Wrath.” Springsteen said it was the movie, not the Steinbeck novel, that prompted this song that connects the Okie homeless of the ‘30s with the soup kitchen drifters of modern America. It’s a song with a quiet vale of sadness that seems to almost meld perfectly with the feeling you get from the campfire soliloquy of Henry Fonda’s character, Tom Joad.
THE MOVIE “DIALOGUE”: “Now Tom said Mom, wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy/Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries/Where there’s a fight against the blood and hatred in the air/Look for me mom I’ll be there.”

THE SONG: “Nebraska”
THE ALBUM: “Nebraska”
THE MOVIE CONNECTION: This song is another movie, Terrence Malick’s “Badlands.” The opening lines of the song replicate the opening scene of the movie. Malick’s film, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a bored, thrill-kill couple, as well as such movies as Ulu Grosbard’s brilliant “True Confessions” had a strong impact on this album and its songs. Springsteen specifically referred to the “stillness” you can find in those films, and it’s true. Watch the opening scene of “True Confessions” in the desert and you’ll see how Springsteen got it into the grooves of “Nebraska.”
THE MOVIE “DIALOGUE”: “I saw her standin’ on her front lawn just a-twirlin’ her baton/Me and her went for a ride sir and 10 innocent people died.”

THE SONG: “Born to Run”
THE ALBUM: “Born To Run”
THE MOVIE CONNECTION: This is song as ‘50s teen alienation movie or biker movie, the ultimate “we gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do” anthem. While “Thunder Road” has the same cinematic atmosphere and “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City” namechecks Brando specifically, this is the real Brando song. Or a James Dean song. Or a “West Side Story” song. These rebels don’t have any cause but getting loose of the soul-deadening grind of a nowheresville town, to find out if revving engines can lead to mind-blowing sex and whether a mere kiss from the girl of your dreams can kill you
THE MOVIE “DIALOGUE”: “Together, Wendy we’ll live with the sadness/I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul/Someday girl I don’t know when we’re gonna get to that place/Where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun/But till then tramps like us baby we were born to run.”

Have you got a favorite Springsteen film song? Tell the Shamus.

(Cross posted at The Shamus’ office: badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

The Shamus has crunched the numbers and realized that it’s been 25 years since I graduated from college. I feel little nostalgia or romance toward my university years. My English degree was the biggest scam I ever pulled off, especially since I rarely went to class or wrote a paper before the night it was due. And, still, I managed to get good grades. It did allow me to work on my college newspaper, extend my strikeout record with girls and, perhaps most important, it kept me from having to work full-time for a few more years. My framed diploma has resided for over a decade in the trunk of my car. At one point, it hung above my toilet. That says it all, doesn’t it? But college on film? That’s something else. Time for a special Shamus List on college films:

HIPPEST ENGLISH PROFESSOR:
Prof. Dave Jennings (Donald Sutherland), “Animal House.”
The three reasons why:
1. Smokes dope with students
2. Sleeps with Karen Allen
3. Finds Milton boring. “Mrs. Milton found him boring, too.”


HOTTEST COLLEGE PROFESSOR (MALE):
Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), “Raiders of the Lost Ark”
Runner-up: Dr. Noah Praetorius (Cary Grant), “People Will Talk”

HOTTEST COLLEGE PROFESSOR (FEMALE):
Diane Stevens (Sybil Danning), “They’re Playing With Fire”

HIPPEST ‘60s GRAD STUDENT:
Elliot Gould, “Getting Straight”

MOST SCREWED-UP COLLEGE STUDENT:
Hamlet, “Hamlet.”

MOST SCREWED-UP COLLEGE PROFESSOR:
Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), “Wonder Boys”
Runner-up: Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels), “The Squid and the Whale”

BEST COLLEGE PROFESSOR NAME:
Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, president of Huxley U, “Horse Feathers”

UNLIKELIEST ’60s PROFESSOR
Anthony Quinn, “R.P.M.”

WOULDN’T YOU HATE TO BE IN HIS CLASS THE NEXT MORNING?
George (Richard Burton), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

BEST COLLEGE PROFESSOR SEX:
Eddie and Emily Jessup (William Hurt and Blair Brown), “Altered States”

BEST COLLEGE PROFESSOR NAME MISPRONUNCIATION:
“Frankenstein” instead of “Fronkensteen,” “Young Frankenstein”

NUTTIEST PROFESSOR INVENTION:
Wood-resistant fluid for baseballs, “It Happens Every Spring”

NUTTIEST PROFESSOR:
Peter O’Toole, “Creator,” who tries to clone his dead wife.

SADDEST PROFESSOR:
Isak Borg, “Wild Strawberries”
Runner-up: Eddie Murphy, “The Nutty Professor”

SADDEST IVY LEAGUE ROMANCE:
Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavalieri (Ryan O’Neal, Ali MacGraw), “Love Story”

BEST COLLEGE ROAD TRIP:
Walter “Gib” Gibson and Alison Bradbury (John Cusack, Daphne Zuniga), “The Sure Thing”

BEST SPRING BREAK MOVIE:
“Where The Boys Are”

BEST COLLEGE FILM (SILENT):
Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg”

BEST COLLEGE JOKE:
“I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” — Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), “Annie Hall”

COLLEGE EXPERIMENT I MISSED OUT ON:
“The Harrad Experiment.”

COLLEGE MOVIE I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE:
“Sex Kittens Go To College.”

BEST COLLEGE PET:
Bonzo.

STUDENT YOU’D NEVER WANT TO ATTEND MEDICAL COLLEGE WITH:
Patch Adams.

WORST PLAN TO GET INTO HARVARD:
C. Thomas Howell in blackface in “Soul Man.”

HARVARD FILM THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER:
“Harvard Man.” But it did have Sarah Michelle Gellar.

BEST LAST LINE IN A COLLEGE FILM:
“Waaaaaaaake up!” Spike Lee’s “School Daze”

PROFESSOR KINGSFIELD, YOU’VE GOT A LOVELY DAUGHTER:
Lindsey Wagner, “The Paper Chase”

BEST RICH KID COLLEGIATES:
Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan”

BEST COLLEGE TOWNIES:
“Breaking Away”

BEST FRAT BOY: Bluto.

MOST UNLIKELY COLLEGE ROOMIES:
Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, “Carnal Knowledge”

BEST COLLEGE GIRLFRIEND:
Candice Bergen, “Getting Straight” and “Carnal Knowledge”

BEST COLLEGE FLASHBACK SCENE:
Katie and Hubbell (Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford), “The Way We Were”

FAVORITE COLLEGE COACH:
Bill Bowerman (Donald Sutherland), “Without Limits”.
Runners-up: Knute Rockne (Pat O’Brien), “Knute Rockne-All American”
Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell), “Miracle”

TRUEST COLLEGE QUOTE IN A COLLEGE FILM:
“And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education.”
— Wagstaff, “Horse Feathers”

BEST ARGUMENT IN A COLLEGE CLASSROOM:
Isaac (Woody Allen) and professor friend Yale (Michael Murphy) while a skeleton looks on, “Manhattan”:
Yale: You are so self-righteous, you know. I mean we’re just people. We’re just human beings, you know. You think you’re God.
Isaac: I gotta model myself after somebody.

SECOND BEST ARGUMENT IN A COLLEGE CLASSROOM:
James Hart (Timothy Bottoms) and Professor Kingsfield (John Houseman), “The Paper Chase:
Hart: You are a SON OF A BITCH, Kingsfield.
Kingsfield: Mr. Hart! That is the most intelligent thing you’ve said all day. You may take your seat.

BEST COLLEGE SONG:
“I’m Against It,” from “Horse Feathers”

I don’t know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
No matter what it is or who commenced it, I’m against it!

SECOND BEST COLLEGE SONG:
“I Gave My Love A Cherry,” from “Animal House”

BEST ALUMNI WEEKEND:
(Tie): “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” “The Big Chill”

OLD COLLEGE FRIEND YOU NEVER WANT TO MEET AGAIN:
Gavin Elster, who leads Det. Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) astray, “Vertigo.”
Runners-up: Graham (James Spader), “Sex, Lies and Videotape”; Frank The Tank (Will Ferrell), “Old School.”

THREE REASONS THAT COLLEGE KIDS AREN’T SO SMART AFTER ALL:
1. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”
2. “The Blair Witch Project”
3. “Hostel.”

OK, what favorite college films or college film categories of yours did I miss?

His insights on his strange odyssey with friends Pete and Delmar, and perhaps best summed up in his catchphrase “Damn, we’re in a tight spot!” were recorded for posterity in the 1930s by the archivists and folklore musicologists Ethan and Joel Coen for the “Pass The Biscuits Pappy O’Daniel Flour Hour.” (By the way, Pappy hopes you’ll eat his farina and vote for him.)

Anyway, McGill, as you will see from these collected speeches and random thoughts, was indeed endowed with the gift of gab.

Everett on work: “Say, uh, any of you boys smithees? Or, if not smithees per se, were you otherwise trained in the metallurgic arts before straitened circumstances forced you into a life of aimless wanderin’?”

Everett on follicle protection: “Say, Cousin Wash, I guess it’d be the acme of foolishness to enquire if you had a hairnet.”

Everett on a sense of place: “Well, ain’t this a geographical oddity — two weeks from everywhere!”

Everett on eating: “No thank you, Delmar, a third of a gopher would only rouse my appetite without beddin’ her back down.”

Everett on religion: “I guess hard times flush the chumps…Baptism! You two are just dumber than a bag of hammers.”

Everett on Satan: “Of course, there’s all manner of lesser imps and demons, but the Great Satan hisself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail and carries a hayfork.”

Everett on psychology: “Well, ya know, Delmar, they say with a thrill-seeking personality, what goes up must come down. Top of the world one minute, haunted by megrims the next. Yep, it’s like our friend George is an alley cat and his own damn humours are swinging him by the tail.”

Everett on love: “Pete, it’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.”

Everett on women: “Truth means nothing to a woman, Delmar. You ever been with a woman? Believe me Delmar, woman is the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man.”

Everett on self-confidence: “I’m goddamn bonafide! I’ve got all the answers!”

Everett on progress: “They’re flooding this valley so they can hydroelectric up the whole durned state. Yessir, the South is gonna change. Everything’s gonna be put on electricity and run on a payin’ basis. Out with the old spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions and the backward ways. We’re gonna see a brave new world where they run everyone a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable age of reason – like the one they had in France.”

Everett on self-improvement: “As soon as we get ourselves cleaned up and we get a little smellum in our hair, why, we’re gonna feel 100% better about ourselves and about life in general.”

Ain’t it the truth, folks? Just remember that The Shamus is a Dapper Dan man. I don’t use Fop.

Last year, as the annual Aug. 16 Elvis death date approached, I watched Jailhouse Rock. In that film, he essentially did a sexy version of a pelvis-popping, lip-sneering rock star, not much of a stretch, but it seemed to be his best. Not so. In King Creole, set in New Orleans and adapted from a Harold Robbins novel (!), Elvis gives a credible performance in the troubled teen/James Dean mold. At times, Elvis almost reaches into that mythic territory of ’50s Brando. And surrounded by good actors (Walter Matthau, Carolyn Jones, Vic Morrow, Paul Stewart), a real script and atmospheric camerawork, Elvis proves that he might have developed as an actor if the heinous, ex-carny, ex-dogcatcher manager who doesn’t deserve his military honorific hadn’t held him back. Or if Elvis hadn’t been such a timid personality.

Still, we’ve got King Creole, which may stand alone in the Elvis canon as the one film where the songs are weaker than the dramatic moments. You can tell you’re in for something different from the strangely edited opening sequence of peddlers crying out on a deserted French Quarter street. Throughout the film, Curtiz proves to be what blogger Damian Arlyn rightly described as “an aficianado of shadowplay.” Filmed in black and white, the movie is filled with marvelous noir-ish scenes of long, bleak alleyways and sidewalks, waterside docks and one great shot where E ascends a staircase lit by a single lightbulb. “King Creole” should truly be reconsidered as one of the Curtiz masterworks, a step down but not too far down from the classic films that made his reputation in the ’40s.

Elvis plays Danny Fisher, a moody teenager living in the shadow of an ineffectual father (Dean Jagger). This puts a rage in Danny that powers the entire film, and brings to mind a sort of juvey version of “East of Eden.” (The Shamus wonders what Elvis could have done if he had been directed by an Elia Kazan.) Early on, Elvis, his bangs all messed up and that hurt look in his eyes, delivers a long, thoughtful monologue to his high school principal Mr. Evans that is truly impressive in its delivery:

“Listen, Mr. Evans. We moved into this neighborhood 3 years ago. In that 3 years that I’ve been going to school here, I’ve shined shoes and dusted people off in a barbershop. I’ve done towel duty in 4 different men’s rooms. I’ve stacked chairs and bottles and swept the floor up of every joint on Bourbon Street. It’s gotten so I look longer at a dame with clothes on than one without. I’m not a hoodlum. But I am a hustler. I’ve had to be for a very simple reason - my old man. You see, sir, my mother was killed in an accident about 3 years ago. Well, after that, it might as well have gotten the old man too, because he took himself right out of the lineup. He quit cold. He lost the drugstore that he owned, he lost the house, and then finally what few little jobs he’s had since. You know, maybe I could’ve liked school, Mr. Evans. But every time I wanted to play ball, I had to go to work. Somebody had to. Anyway, now I’m through. I’m through.”

One of Danny’s jobs is busing tables at a nightclub owned by mobster Maxie Fisher (Matthau), a venal pig who corrupts everything he touches, including the once promising girl singer Ronnie (Jones), who has now turned into a lush and Maxie’s plaything. What I like about “King Creole” is it isn’t the usual white-bread Elvis movie plot: He robs stores, gets into fights, tries to lure a sweet girl into a hotel room, lusts for Ronnie and even takes part in a robbery that goes awry when his father becomes the victim. He even — gasp! — bleeds! The only thing that saves Danny is his singing talent, which leads him to a job headlining at Maxie’s competition, the wild club King Creole, where he is soon outdrawing a stripper covered in bananas. This draws the increasing ire of Maxie, who threatens Danny unless he comes back to work for him. The film isn’t New Orleans neo-realism like Kazan’s “Panic In The Streets,” but it doesn’t try to hide the darker feel of the city.

Matthau, in one of his early heavy roles, is greasily malevolent as Maxie. And I really liked Jones, pre-Morticia, who makes you feel the pain of her dashed dreams and her desire to protect and possess Danny in a very carnal way. With her boyish, black bangs and his greasy tangle of hair, they are alluring together, a demonic couple. And Jones and Matthau are positively toxic in their pairing: She has a great moment where she snarls at Matthau, “You don’t own me! You paid for me!” Matthau also forces her to pull up her dress and show Danny her legs, just one of many moments where you ask yourself: This is an Elvis movie?

Of course, there are the typical Elvis moments, especially in the subplot of his relationship with a sweet dimestore clerk (Dolores Hart), but even here there are interesting shadings as Elvis struggles with his good side and “the beast in me,” as he put it in “Jailhouse Rock.” The song interludes, except for a semi-lewd version of “Trouble” where Elvis throws out those forward hip thrusts and puts that rough-trade look on his face, are pretty saccharine. Curtiz shoots these scenes at a distance as though he’s waiting impatiently to get to the good stuff.

And there is plenty of good stuff in “King Creole.” It’s a propulsive slice of ’50s wild life, full of flesh-and-blood characters and complex motivations. It’s Elvis noir. And it rocks.

(Cross-posted at Bad For The Glass: badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

For anybody remotely interested in animation and film history, this is news of the highest order. For years, fans have traded crappy VHS versions or taped-off-TV copies of the original black-and-white “Popeye” cartoons from Paramount. No more. Now, Warners has issued a four-disc, remastered DVD set with 60 of the original black-and-white shorts from Fleischer Studios, along with gobs of extra documentaries, commentary tracks and the original bookend Paramount logos (for you hardcore animation types.) As the spinach-munching sailor would say, “Well, blow me down!”

The Shamus has to admit that I’ve never willingly been a fan of animation. Cartoons basically strike me as kids’ stuff and I watch enough of them with my kid. But I was completely bowled over by the first two discs of the “Popeye” set and my daughter was transfixed, too (although she seemed mostly transfixed by the Paramount logo at the end where the pen jumps into the inkwell. Funny what kids focus on.) I can’t wait to watch all of the discs. I’m not sure if I saw the TV airings of these original shorts when I was growing up, although I’m sure I saw some of the color TV series. They’re not the same thing.

Along with my recent discovery of Tex Avery (I know, I’m way behind the curve on this), I’m now fascinated by Max and Dave Fleischer’s house style, which seems as fresh and daring to me as anything done by Disney, or by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, for that matter. It’s all about the energy and the visual inventiveness. The frames literally seem to vibrate as every character and every backdrop seems to be in curving, curling motion.

Forget Gene Kelly, or Fred and Ginger, or Cagney. Popeye should be considered one of the screen’s great musical stars. His body moves with a ballet dancer’s nimble grace combined with sure-footed comic timing. (Check out the short called “The Dance Contest.”) His mutterings, his blown-up forearms, his jaunty step, the way his hand reaches inside his vest, rips open a can of spinach and grabs a fistful, the way he sings “I’m strong to the finish” and toots on his pipe, it’s all nothing less than poetry. And the marvelous speakeasy jazz scores and bouncy songs used by the Fleischers accentuate his every move.

The sight gags are astounding. I loved the early Swee’pea short where Popeye is parading the sleeping tyke in his stroller, but on every street corner he runs into people making a racket or playing musical instruments too loud. (Swee’pea even takes a toke off Pappy’s pipe, which would never go over today.) Inanimate objects, such as musical instruments, are given a sort of oversized life in the gags. In this short, Popeye sends a fist flying into a radio and his spinach-fed force is so strong it sends the musical note across the ocean and into a recording studio where it punches out the opera singer emoting into the mike. This stuff is sort of surreal. Popeye is like the Optimus Prime of early animation — everything he hits is transformed into something else. (Of course, if you watch a lot of these in a row, you realize that many gags are rehashed with slight variations and the basic plot of a Popeye short is always the same.)

The Fleischers also proved themselves to be top-rate action directors. There are great “set pieces” where Popeye and Bluto are battling each other over rivers and through forests, across ice floes and in boxing rings and fire houses, and the camera dances across the images. Especially pay attention to the classic short where a sleepwalking Olive Oyl walks across the flying beams of an under-construction skyscraper; it’s worthy of Windsor McKay.

These shorts wouldn’t work as well in color. The black-and-white gives the animation a livelier texture, which also rings true to the Depression era in which Popeye works and frolics. He’s no Daddy Warbucks: he lives in dumpy apartments or dingy homes with frames hanging crookedly from the walls. There are loose patches of plaster everywhere. Popeye and Olive Oyl could easily be the subject of a photograph by Dorothea Lange, which might be one reason that the cartoons and E.C. Segar’s comic strip resonanted so strongly with the working-class audiences of the time. I found my eye especially drawn to the backdrops and sets of the shorts, which have a three-dimensional feel (in one, there’s a great, deep focus shot of Popeye and Bluto running to the back of side-by-side apartment buildings as shot through a front window. It’s Popeye meets Gregg Toland.)

Of course, beyond the visuals, there are the characters themselves. These are some of the most twisted folks ever drawn, and their complexties give the movies a deeper resonance. Let’s just say that Popeye has issues. He’d be locked up if he lived anywhere but Toon Town — he’s clearly psychotic, itching for a scrap and passive-aggressive without the passive, but totally lovable, too. That’s the genius of what Segar and the Fleischers did. Then there’s that great skinny flibbertigibbet of a contortionist known as Olive Oyl. She’s nobody’s woman but her own, and it’s interesting to me how she’s often seen as a damsel-in-distress type. For one thing, she plays Popeye and big, bearish Bluto off each other like a pro. She never commits to either one, although we are given to believe that she really loves Popeye. But maybe she knows he’s nuts, too, and needs to be kept on a short leash. (See. Smart cookie.) And in some of the early shorts, she calls out for Popeye’s help, but she’s already dispatched Bluto leaving nothing for the sea salt to do but stand by and suck on his pipe. But this is definitely one of the more unusual relationships — hey, is this animation’s first three-way?

With all the extras (including rare silent shorts of Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff and more), “Popeye The Sailor” is easily one of your most essential DVD buys of the year. Hey, maybe it will even get my swee’pea to eat her spinach.

I know that every new soul artist from India.Arie to John Legend and Kanye West bows down to Stevie Wonder, as they should. But do younger listeners today really understand his importance? Do they know him mostly for treacle like “I Just Called To Say I Love You”? For decades now, Stevie has been calling it in musically, or paying more attention to his important work on social causes. Some may rightly wonder: Who is this guy who rates a standing ovation just for showing up and gets a Grammy nomination for singing a Gap ad Xmas song? Wonder, as unjust as it is, may suffer from hanging around and doing guest spots on Sting albums and Tony Bennett specials long after his last great stretch of pioneering work.

But I hope I’m wrong. I hope he’s still being rediscovered. For those of us who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, we were raised on a soundtrack of Stevie Wonder songs. Thirty years ago, from October 1976 to June 1977, “Songs In The Key of Life” ranked every month in the Top 10 albums, two of those months at No. 1. From 1972 to 1977, as Wonder emancipated himself from Motown’s grip and unleashed his muse, he released five albums, a string of hit singles and won three Grammys for Album of the Year. One could argue (and I do) that his burst of creative output is just as important as the Beatles’ similar stretch in the ’60s, or Dylan’s.

Listening to “Songs” again, I hear a young visionary who just couldn’t contain the music pouring out of his soul. It’s all here: love ballads, funk explosions, Latin rhythms, jazz fusion, Nawlins boogie, synthesizer experiments, harmonica workouts. In the sort of weird liner notes, Stevie explains that he wants to spread his “love mentalism” to the world, and lays out his mathematical key to the songs of life: “love + love - hate = love energy.” But the “love mentalism” phrase strikes a chord with me, because Wonder’s lyrical ideas of love (and, to a degree, God) have always struck me as the expressions of a person who cannot see the physical world, and so creates an alternative universe of mental feeling. And sometimes that feeling comes out in awkward, airy descriptions that are more internal. Innervisions, if you will. Musically, the song “Sir Duke” is the key to me. The idols he cherishes here are Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Glenn Miller. He didn’t pick the more radical jazz be-boppers — no mention of Bird or Coltrane or Monk. That’s because Wonder’s music has always been more mainstream in its approach. But the cutting edges he works into the formal framework of popular song is what makes him so damn daring and unique.

The joy of rediscovering “Songs” is to hear how he creates such hard, deep grooves out of synthesizers. Wonder has never been given proper credit for his producing skills: The bass and horn and synthesizer lines that jumble and tumble throughout “Sir Duke,” “Contusion,” “I Wish,” “Black Man,” “Isn’t She Lovely” and the second part of “Ordinary Pain” are simply stunning (as is the Latin drive that builds up from “Another Star”.) Most artists might be able to create a funk beat, but they couldn’t infuse it with such layerings of musical richness. Basically, they couldn’t make you think about what you’re hearing — and make your ass shake at the same time.

“Songs” doesn’t have any great ballads like “Golden Lady” or “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” (”Isn’t She Lovely” is sort of a ballad, but not.) The slower love songs here are mostly effective, though, because of Wonder’s gift for pitting the “hot” soulful scrape of his voice against his stately, “cold” and beautiful piano melodies. (I’m no music theory expert, but I’ve read that Wonder is a master of melisma, or stretching a syllable across several notes. Like many pop geniuses, such as Bacharach and Brian Wilson, his music is more technically complex than it may sound to the untrained ear.)

Wonder calls “Songs” a “conglomerate of thoughts” and it’s got a bit of a kitchen-sink approach: God, love, nature, birth, heartache, racial harmony, childhood memories, musical mentors and life on other planets are all addressed, some more successfully than others. In his late 20s, Wonder was at that sweet time of peak creativity and just let out everything that had been building up inside his soul. There are a few plodding songs on Disc 2, but it’s rather amazing how cohesively the entire album hangs together. Critics like to call it sprawling, but I don’t see that as a negative. This is Wonder at the height of his ambition — this is his “Smile,” his “Rhapsody In Blue,” his “Love Supreme,” his “Blonde on Blonde,” his “What’s Going On,” his “Blue,” his “Astral Weeks.”

Of course, there are probably fans of “The Secret Life of Plants” or the soundtrack to “Jungle Fever” or some of the ’80s-’90s singles who think that “Songs In The Key of Life” wasn’t his last major work. We can agree to respectfully disagree on that. But we probably all hope he’s got one more great album percolating somewhere in that cavernous musical mind. If nothing else, I’ve always wanted him to record an album of harmonica instrumentals — he is an unacknowledged master of the mouth harp, as well as about every other instrument he chooses to pick up. But that’s why he’s Stevie Wonder. That’s why he still rates those standing ovations.

(Cross-posted at Bad For The Glass: A Culture Blog. www.badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

50 REASONS I LOVE CAMERON CROWE

50. Because he was an extra in Orson Welles’ unfinished “The Other Side of the Wind.” Really.
49. Because he was the kid wonder for “Rolling Stone” magazine. Go back and read those interviews with Frampton, Led Zep, the Allmans, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison. He also wrote the Fleetwood Mac cover story that accompanied the famous bed photo. The articles are still pretty good. Especially for a teenager.

48. Because he wrote “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” and created the greatest role Sean Penn has played or ever will play: Jeff Spicoli. “Aloha, Mr. Hand!”
47. Because he wrote that scene with Phoebe Cates, and you know what I mean.
46. Spicoli on U.S. history: “What Jefferson was saying was, Hey! You know, we left this England place ’cause it was bogus; so if we don’t get some cool rules ourselves - pronto - we’ll just be bogus too! Get it?”
45. The Spicoli philosophy of surfing, Part 1: “All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.”
44. The Spicoli philosophy of surfing, Part 2: “Surfing is a way of life. It’s a way of facing that wave and saying, ‘Hey Bud, let’s party.’”
43. Because he gave us that marvelous couple, the uber-optimist Lloyd Dobler and the unattainable Diane Court (“She’s a brain. Trapped in the body of a game-show hostess.”)
42. Even though “Say Anything” is an awful title. What were you thinking of, Cameron? And where exactly do the ellipsis go?
41. It wasn’t all Dobler and Diane: Let’s not forget Lili Taylor’s 65 songs, all on one subject: Joe Lies!
40. The philosophy of Lloyd Dobler: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”
39. When Diane breaks up with Lloyd: “She gave me a pen. I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen.”
38. Lloyd’s sport: “Kickboxing. Sport of the future.”
37. The boombox. The rain.
36. The overcoat. The outstretched arms. The song:

35. For “Singles,” which gave us the great Seattle grunge band, Citizen Dick.
34. Backed by Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, and led by Matt Dillon in his most underrated role, the clueless Cliff Poncier.
33. Poncier’s signature song: ‘”Touch Me, I’m Dick.”
32. Cliff’s notes: “Well, I think ‘Touch Me, I’m Dick,’ in essence, speaks for itself, you know. I think a lot of people might think it’s actually about, you know, ‘My name is Dick, and, you know, you can touch me,’ but, I think, you know, it can be seen either way.”
31. Tim Burton’s cameo in “Singles.”
30. The way Crowe writes parts for women. Say anything you want, but he makes them glow. He loves women and he loves old-fashioned movie star glamour, and that comes through in the female parts, from Ione Skye to Renee Zellweger to Kate Hudson to Kirsten Dunst.
29. For “Jerry Maguire.”
28. “Show me the MONEY!!”
27. “You complete me.” “You had me at hello.”
26. And I’ve always loved Dicky Fox’s philosophy at the end of the film: “Hey… I don’t have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I have failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my life. I love my wife. And I wish you my kind of success.” Amen.
25. The “You Had Me At Hello” line even spawned a country song sung by Kenny Chesney.
24. Who, ironically, ended up briefly hitched to Renee Zellweger.
23. Other than “Magnolia,” “Jerry Maguire” is Tom Cruise’s finest moment on screen: Modern, edgy, scared, believable, trying to find his place in the world. He showed us the money.
22. And it all led to Cuba Gooding’s exuberant moment on winning the Oscar. Sure, after that he went straight to “Boat Trip,” but for a moment he was the ambassador of Quan.
21. Crowe should have won the Oscar for this screenplay.
20. For giving all of us Boomer rock fans “Almost Famous.”

19. He did win the Oscar for this one.
18. And perhaps it’s justice that he won for his thinly veiled autobiography.
17. Billy Crudup’s sexy, charismatic performance as the talented frontman of Stillwater. “I am a golden god!”
16. Kate Hudson’s sexy, charismatic performance as groupie Penny Lane.
15. One of Frances McDormand’s finest performances. “Adolescence is a marketing tool.”
14. For Patrick Fugit’s debut as Crowe’s alter-ego William Miller.
13. For the great “Tiny Dancer” bus scene: It’s easy to forget how good Elton John was.
12. For the “Rolling Stone” office scenes: “A Mo-Jo, it’s a very high-tech machine that transmits pages over the telephone! It only takes eighteen minutes a page!”
11. For Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, and his philosophy of the uncool and how to deal with rock stars: “My advice to you. I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.”
10. For the Stillwater T-shirts.
9. For Lester’s advice on the people who hate William in high school: “You’ll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle.”
8. For the scene where William’s older sister leaves him all the albums “that will set you free.” They set a lot of us free.
7. For “Vanilla Sk…” Well, OK, this wasn’t a great one, and certainly wasn’t better than the original. But Cruz is better here than she’s ever been in any other American film. And I like the scene where they recreate “The Freewheeling Bob Dylan” album cover.
6. For “Elizabethtown.” Yes! Crowe’s most terribly underrated movie. Dunst is adorable, Bloom is a bit of a mope (admittedly), but I absolutely love the Southern family scenes, Susan Sarandon’s tap dance, the burning free bird, and the evocative use of another Elton John song: “My Father’s Gun.” And especially the final road trip and mixtape scene. It’s a sequence only Cameron Crowe could make. A film that will outlast the initial critical scorn.
5. For Crowe’s director’s commentary on “Say Anything,” where he says he believes in “optimism as a radical philosophy.” I do, too, or at least I’d like to.
4. For interviewing Billy Wilder and giving us the excellent book, “Conversations With Wilder.”
3. For writing the liner notes for Bob Dylan’s “Biograph.”
2. And “Frampton Comes Alive.” And Zep’s “The Song Remains The Same.”

And No. 1…
1. For living out every schlubby writer’s dream: he married Nancy Wilson, the hot chick from Heart! Spicoli would pronounce it awesome!

Cameron Crowe is a golden god! Happy birthday, man!

The Candidate, despite the sideburns and old cars, hasn’t aged a bit in 35 years. It’s one of the best films of the ’70s, one of Redford’s watermarks as an actor, a worthy Oscar winner for Jeremy Larner’s screenplay, a brilliantly naturalistic feat of direction by Michael Ritchie and the most cynically realistic view of the modern political machine. Nothing has changed: the spin doctors, the obfuscating campaign ads, the empty speeches. And Redford’s McKay almost seems to predict the rise of Bill Clinton: McKay is smart, handsome, drawn to the power and, yes, playing footsie with a campaign worker. Larner, a former Eugene McCarthy speechwriter, understood politics and politicians from deep inside the war room and that view makes The Candidate play at times like a documentary.

McKay begins as an idealistic lawyer trying to help farmworkers. When professional political worker Lucas approaches him with the idea of running, McKay insists that he will be his own man, and he’ll use the bid as a platform to make substantive change on the important issues of the time. Lucas says sure, you can do that, but you’ll lose. Besides, Lucas knows better. He’s seen something in McKay, in his genes, in his attitude, that even McKay hasn’t admitted to himself. He knows he’s got a sucker fish. Slowly but surely, we see the naive McKay trying to adjust to the political realities: the glad-handing, the greeting of the workers at the factory gates, the impromptu press conferences. We see him trying to fight the machinations of his political ad man (the reliably oily Allen Garfield). We see McKay slowly being manipulated to become a robot candidate, to abandon his stands on issues (abortion, school busing, etc.) in favor of mush-mouth generalities. As he says less, he gains more. And McKay becomes addicted to the game. And once it becomes a game, Lucas and his political operatives, who are only in it for the job and the money, have won again. And, as the film makes painfully and hauntingly clear, the people have lost again.

Ritchie’s film was set up as a real campaign, filmed on the streets of California with advance teams and using real politicos and reporters (including ABC’s Howard K. Smith and “Hardball” talking head Mike Barnicle). It’s shot and cut together beautifully with the rhythm of a politician plunging into event to event. Ritchie doesn’t draw attention to his direction with showy moves, but he makes good use of TV screens that display McKay’s increasingly vapid commercials and news reports on his campaign. They help to both break up the visual scheme of the fictional narrative and add a verite feel.

The acting is excellent across the board. Redford is best in modern roles, and this is his most effective performance alongside “All The President’s Men.” He acts through his eyes and his hesistant body language. He looks as though he’s crouching in a defensive stance as McKay girds for political battle. He displays a very real fear of having sold his soul. (Watch the scene where he breaks down under the campaign strain and starts mocking the banalities of his stump speech.)

Boyle also gives the performance of his career as Lucas: steely and cunning with laser-like eyes peering out from under a Mephistopholean beard. Lucas is a cynical pro with a job to do, a man who knows how to grease his candidate into doing what it takes to win. Melvyn Douglas has a cameo, but an important one, and gives another of his deep, post-”Hud” supporting performances (all the more surprising since he was such a callow leading man back when he was romancing Garbo). Special mention should be made of veteran character actor Don Porter, as the incumbent Senator Crocker Jarmon (Crocker, crock of. A beautiful in-joke). Porter’s nuanced performance captures the hollow, glib patter of the professional politician of the Silent Majority stripe. One of the many marvelous touches of Larner’s screenplay is the sense that McKay is well on his way to becoming another Crocker and would be shocked at the very thought of it.

But that may be Larner’s larger point: the way we delude ourselves is, in turn, the way we delude and ultimately disappoint the country. McKay’s poster tagline is “For A Better Way.” Whether you laugh or cry at that slogan may be a telling sign of how you react to this smart and only slightly satirical political movie masterpiece.

(Cross-posted at Bad For The Glass: badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

1. “Rehab,” Amy Winehouse. I’m not enamored of her whole “I’m a drunk, I’m so cool” persona, but it’s hard to deny that goth girl meets girl-group sound.
2. “Dashboard,” Modest Mouse. I have no idea what this song is about, something about a dashboard I guess, but it’s got the most propulsive, irresistible beat I’ve heard all year.
3. “Chick Habit,” April March. Not a new song, but it will be new to most people listening to the Quentin Tarantino “Death Proof” soundtrack. A Serge Gainsbourg number turned into a snappy bubblegum-garage anthem.
4. “Either Way,” Wilco. A tender love song that finally brings Wilco back from the experimental abyss.
5. “300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues,” The White Stripes. Jack White mixes blues, Arthur Lee and speed-era Dylan: What’s not to like?
6. “Theme from ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly,’” Quincy Jones featuring Herbie Hancock. From the “We All Love Ennio Morricone” tribute disc, a really good jazz reworking of the spaghetti western classic.
7. “The Supreme Being Teaches Spider-Man How To Be In Love,” Flaming Lips. The only redeeming quality of “Spidey 3.” This weird song has Muhammad Ali hanging out with Spidey to a Brian Wilson beat. But with the Lips, who the hell knows? Insanely catchy, though.
8. “Ride On,” America. The old soft-rock duo teamed up with Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger. Voila: new soft-rock classic.
9. “Again and Again,” The Bird and the Bee. Lowell George’s daughter sings this irresistibly chirpy song that mixes Brazilian beat acoustics and snatches of electronica.
10. “Sewn,” The Feeling. A sweet ’70s pop flashback from a British group that revels in the Raspberries, Queen and Elton John.
11. “Flathead,” The Fratellis. A pub-rock, bash-those-drums classic that became well-known through an iPod commercial.

Now, it’s your turn. Show us your lists!

Tearing Down The Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector is nothing if not timely. The biography by British journalist Mick Brown has been released just as Spector’s murder trial is a daily focus of Court TV. Brown got the last major interview with Spector mere weeks before he allegedly shot B-movie actress Lana Clarkson, and naturally decided to expand it into a full-dress account of the former Tycoon of Teen. With admirable sourcing and synthesizing of previous material, Brown covers the legendary rock and roll producer’s life in a thorough, ultimately damning fashion: The only thing a reader is left wondering is how Spector avoided a murder rap for so long.

Medicated to the gills, suffering from short man’s disease, thinning hair and a pathological need to be noticed, psychologically damaged from his father’s suicide, his mother’s coldness and his young son’s death and, oh yeah, armed to the teeth and surrounded by bodyguards, Spector is a walking WMD set to go off. It’s proof once again that fame and money can insulate you: Here is a guy who should have been involuntarily committed to rehab or extensive therapy years ago. (That picture above says it all, doesn’t it?)

Brown, to his credit, balances every outrageous anecdote with an understanding of the mental troubles and insecurities that have plagued Spector throughout his life. For all his wild-man actions, Spector can be an intelligent, thoughtful person (he is a student of history and Lincoln, and was a close friend to Lenny Bruce). But he is also a gonzo madman and an inexcusable louse. He had the ability to draw both men and women seductively into his orbit (Nancy Sinatra was dating him just before Clarkson’s death.) But his control freak side also led him to routinely screw friends and associates and constantly badger women. He virtually imprisoned Ronnie Spector in their home. Perhaps most unforgivable, he adopted three children and then ignored them.

Brown is such a skilled interpreter of the nuances of Spector’s complex personality that you might even feel a tinge of pity for Spector. We just had to listen to the legend; he had to live with it, an impossible task. In Brown’s interview, which forms the spine of the book, Spector admits his problems and keeps saying he’s trying to be “a reasonable man” and a responsible parent to his daughter. You get the sense of a man desperately trying to get through each day without slipping over the edge, a rock ‘n’ roll Norma Desmond alone in his creepy castle in an unfashionable section of Los Angeles, wondering how the times have passed him by.

Of course, a little of this detail goes a long way, and Brown spends much of the book piling on bad-boy antic after bad-boy antic. At 452 pages, the book could have been a lot shorter. I would have preferred to see Brown devote more time to analyzing Spector’s actual career, but that doesn’t sell, naturally. I guess I am in the minority that feels Spector is undeniably talented, but possibly overrated. In my opinion, he produced one great album — the Christmas album, which I think will be his lasting contribution to pop music. And, yes, he undoubtedly helped fashion about a dozen great singles — “Be My Baby,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “He’s A Rebel,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” among others. He co-wrote “Spanish Harlem” and played the closing guitar solo on “On Broadway.” And he created the dense Wall of Sound technique, which I have always had mixed feelings about, probably because the maniacally controlling Spector has never allowed a properly mixed CD release that would allow us to hear its roar like listeners did on the 45 rpm singles. But its influence on everybody from Brian Wilson to Bruce Springsteen to this year’s It Girl, Amy Winehouse, can’t be denied. As for Spector’s work with the Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, I don’t think his production is why people are still listening to “Imagine” and “My Sweet Lord,” but he gets his props for it.

So, put that all together and it’s an excellent career, but does that really make him, as so many claim (including Spector, I’m sure), the great producer/innovator in rock history? I don’t think so. I think the Phil Spector mystique has papered over the Phil Spector product (although if Spector ever allows the release of his voluminous archived material, lots of sides by the Crystals and Ronettes that he didn’t think worthy of his legend, then I might have to revise my opinion.) Basically, Spector stopped growing, and personal problems clearly kept him from reaching his highest potential. You also could argue that he was a one-trick pony and didn’t know how to vary his production techniques, which made him quickly obsolete when his sound went out of fashion (Did you know he was on the same plane with the Beatles when they came to America? Flying in with his conquerors: Delicious irony.) And, perhaps most important, he has succeeded in downplaying the very important contributions of his performers, especially Darlene Love, and the Brill Building songsmiths who wrote most of the material.

In the end, Spector had a good run of four-five years, but he didn’t leave the mark that George Martin left with the Beatles, or Brian Wilson (whom Spector seems to be irrationally jealous of) did with “Pet Sounds,” or that Berry Gordy’s stable of writers, producers and performers did with Motown or Atlantic’s team did with a wide variety of performers or Jimmy Miller did with the Stones. Phil Spector seems to be most famous for a sound rather than a body of songs, and mostly for being unpredictable, outrageous and a reclusive talent that never went as far as it should. And, of course, he is now likely to be best known for the Clarkson death, even if it doesn’t eventually hold up in a court of law (and considering the recent streak of celebrities charged with murder, the odds may be with Spector.)

Mick Brown’s book is sturdy, well-written in a journalistic fashion and compulsively readable. He’s done his interviews and his research. He presents Phil Spector unvarnished, and it’s quite a spectacle. It leaves you with a decidedly less than loving feeling for its sad, odious and screwed-up subject.

(Cross-posted at www.badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

I don’t even remember when or where I heard it first. It was probably at home, on my FM radio, or maybe on a car radio driving somewhere with my parents. But I can remember the chugging strains of the piano keys, and Blondie Chaplin’s insistent vocals and the odd lyrics about “restful waters and deep commotion” and that cool bank of blissful background harmonies which pretty much rearranged my head in a nanosecond.

The song was “Sail On, Sailor.” The band was The Beach Boys. And I’ve been their faithful galley hand ever since.

Of course, it’s odd that my favorite song by my favorite musical group was only partially written by Brian Wilson, and he had nothing to do with the recording of it. If the stories are true, Van Dyke Parks practically had to force the bloated, drug-addled, cheeseburger-scarfing Brian to sit down at the piano and finish the melody so the band could have some possibility of a single for the “Holland” album. Ah, Brian. Who would have guessed that he would be the last Wilson brother standing?

Today is his 65th birthday, and I hope this magically gifted and troubled man is surrounded by family and love and peace and, yes, good vibrations. Considering the life he’s led, one of unimaginable triumphs and degrading lows, I can’t think of anybody who deserves it more. I don’t need to recount the Shakespearean surf saga of the Wilson family, it’s practically an industry unto itself. And the less said about the Iago of the band, Mike Love, the better. Ditto for Murry Wilson. And double ditto for Eugene Landy.

For me, it’s hard to imagine a world without Brian Wilson’s music in it. The Beach Boys were my first cultural obsession. (In some ways, they have remained forever so: Until recently, I was still subscribing to a Beach Boys fan magazine.) Of course, they were never cool and never less so than in the mid-’70s when I became hooked on them as my peers were jamming to Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan. I didn’t have anybody to talk with about what the music meant to me, and I’m not sure I could have processed my feelings about it, anyway. I was a pasty, pudgy, lonely kid growing up in an East Coast beach town, about as far away from being a bronzed surfer surrounded by babes and buzz and good waves as you could possibly be. I’d lie to friends that I went surfing and would carry around surfing magazines. Pretty pathetic, huh? Did I connect to Brian Wilson’s music because he wasn’t a surfer, either, but a person who understood and wrote convincingly about my adolescent loneliness and confusion? I don’t think so. The Beach Boys’ lyrics have never done much for me, and at times have been a struggle to look past. In the end, I think I connected emotionally to the music, that unknowable gift Brian has in building interlocking banks of harmonies and instrumentation and structuring them into pleasing and inventive musical patterns. And always, always with that driving beat, pulsing underneath. It’s that magical sound in his head, that radiant summery sound. It’s an ode to joy, and it has brought countless moments of it to me.

Basically, I don’t know the first damn thing about musical theory or composition, but I know what moves me. What moves me is the smooth harmonies that flow out of “Surfer Girl” and “Girls on The Beach,” or the musical ache of “The Warmth of The Sun” and “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” and “Til I Die” or the bouncy beat of all those surfing and car songs or the snap of Hal Blaine’s drum at the beginning of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” or that lonely echoing beat that kicks off “Caroline No.” Brian Wilson’s music flows through my life, as surely as blood flows through my veins, and I am so grateful to him for it.

It hasn’t been easy being a Beach Boys fan. I can remember silently fueling my obsession with the band in the ’70s and the quizzical look from a friend on the day I found the “Sunflower” album in a record store and begged, begged, begged my pal to lend me the money to buy it. “Why do you like the Beach Boys so much?” he asked. People still ask it, and how do you explain what you love the most? (Oddly enough, my favorite Beach Boys music is the post-”Smile” period, when Brian was in bed and mostly out of the loop. The other members of the band, especially the greatly underestimated Dennis and Carl Wilson, had to contribute to such marvelous discs as “Friends,” “Wild Honey,” “Holland,” “Sunflower,” “The Beach Boys In Concert” and “Carl and the Passions: So Tough.”)

The first time I saw Brian Wilson in person, he was wandering backstage in a bathrobe. I could see him from my nosebleed seat in the audience. It was around 1976-1977, I must have been 16 or 17 and I was such a dork that I had to get my parents to drive me miles away to the concert as a birthday present. My parents (thanks Mom; thanks Dad) had to wait around the town while I went to the concert alone. It was the “Love You” era, the band’s last truly creative disc and, in my opinion, Brian’s last great work. At least, I got to see the original Beach Boys lineup. Brian sat at the back, noodling on the piano. Dennis sang “You Are So Beautiful.” As I sat by myself, I looked around and talked to some other people who I could tell were as enthralled by the music as I was. I wasn’t alone! It reminds me of Lester Bangs’ speech in “Almost Famous” about the fraternity of the uncool, and we surely were, moved by the Beach Boys’ music when the hip culture had pronounced it unfashionably square. I can remember at the end of the concert, Al Jardine walking offstage and twirling alone, still lost in the music. And all of us fans walking out after the concert and how people started spontaneously singing the harmony part at the end of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” What a treasure.

Happy birthday, Brian. God only knows what I would have done without you.

***
Feel free to share your Beach Boys/Brian Wilson memories. And play “Sail On, Sailor” today. It’s still the greatest song in the world.

(Cross-posted at www.badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

The failure and the blame was widespread: the owners locked the poor workers in without adequate escape routes, the fire escapes that existed were dilapidated and useless, the fire department’s ladders didn’t reach above six floors and therefore couldn’t reach the eighth-to-tenth floors where the workers were trapped and when some workers jumped into nets being held by firemen on the ground, the nets disintegrated. When you stand on the street corner and look up at the building’s relatively modest height, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like that day when the sidewalk was a river of blood.

Reading the opening pages of Katharine Weber’s haunting novel Triangle, now out in paperback from Picador, is a difficult experience. I almost put the book away. In 13 pages set up as the transcribed memories of fire survivor Esther Gottesfeld, Weber brings the experience to vivid, terrifying life. After Esther escapes through the roof, she recalls watching the scene unfold: “So I crossed the street and there were all these people looking up and so I looked up, and what I saw was so terrible, the girls jumping, jumping from so high up, they weren’t like people, it was like watching insects or animals…and the sound was so terrible when (they) fell, like a bag of wet laundry falling.”

After this apocalyptic, unforgettable beginning, which reads as coldly precise as fact, Weber wisely gives us a needed breather. She slowly sets up a story that will not only be an intended echo of 9/11, but will also encompass a mysterious, long-held secret by Esther, a modern urban love story between Esther’s granddaughter and a famous composer and a pseudo-comic savaging of politically correct feminist academia.

There are long, engaging digressions on musical theory and disease research and immigrant life in the early century, but it all slowly spins back into the central triangle of the story: the pregnant Esther who watches her fiance Sam and sister Pauline perish in the flames and the nagging questions of whether the story she tells is the real truth of what happened that day. And what is truth, anyway, and who should it serve?

I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil the pleasures of this intriguing, interlocking novel for you. I want you to read it for yourself. It’s not a perfect book. Weber is a clean, smooth writer, but a postmodern trickster, who plays with form and linear progression to tell her story, setting up parts of the book as transcribed interviews and newspaper articles. It may be a little longer than it needs to be, and the comic interludes with the humorless “herstorian” are a bit cliched and obvious. But you find yourself caring deeply for these characters, especially the proud and prickly Esther and her equally vibrant granddaughter. Weber lets the reader easily guess Esther’s secret, by the way, but for a reason: The secret isn’t as important as the details of the secret, which when unspooled, are as emotionally devastating as the disclosures that fuel the close of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

Triangle is a novel that has rattled around in my head for days. It takes fiction and uses it to bring the past into the present. The Triangle fire is a footnote in American history, not known to many, but Katharine Weber doesn’t want to let us forget it. It’s more than just an interesting story to her. It’s part of her own family history: The book is dedicated to her grandmother, Pauline Gottesfeld, “who finished buttonholes at the Triangle Waist Company in 1909.”

(Cross posted at www.badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

The Shamus was out waxing his board and almost missed the latest crest of the surfing wave in pop culture. This weekend begins a two-pronged assault, with the animated flick Surf’s Up and the HBO show about a surfing family, John From Cincinnati. Then next weekend comes a long rider from deepest space. Time for a Shamus list:

The 10 Greatest Surf Contributions to Pop Culture:

10. The curling wave in the opening credits of Hawaii Five-0. Everybody’s mental image of the pipeline.

9. “Two girls for every boy.” The real reason everybody wanted to be a surfer: An endless summer of bitchin’ Betties. From Jan and Dean’s Surf City.

8. Surf slang. Surfing has enriched the English language. Without waves, would we have ever used these words and phrases: Baggys, gnarly, goofy-footer, hodad, gremmie, hang five, longboard, shoot the curl, wipe out and, of course, stoked. And let’s not forget: Cowabunga! According to Wikipedia, it evolved from the word “kawabonga,” used by Chief Thunderthud on the ‘50s puppet show, Howdy Doody. “What time is it, boys and girls?” “It’s surf time!”

7. Kem Nunn’s surfing novels. Nunn, co-writer of the new HBO show John From Cincinnati, is the only serious surf novelist, in my opinion, working the sport into his gritty thriller and detective novels. His best book is The Dogs of Winter, but Tapping The Source and Tijuana Straits are also recommended.

6. Big Wednesday. The best surfing feature film. John Milius’ memories of his early ‘60s surf rat pals. Starring Jan Michael-Vincent and Gary Busey before their personal waves turned bad. Plus a cameo by Gerry Lopez!

5. “Charlie don’t surf!” Col. Kilgore. Apocalypse Now. Written by Milius, it’s the greatest surf-related moment in feature films. (Runner-up: “I caught my first tube today…sir!” Whoa! Keanu Reeves as Johnny Utah, FBI agent turned surf stud, in Point Break.)

4. The ferocious opening chords of Dick Dale’s Miserilou. The song that defines surf guitar now and forever. Just ask Quentin Tarantino.

3. Bruce Brown’s surf documentaries. The Endless Summer, with its clean-cut surf dudes, exotic locales and innocent voice-overs, made surfing romantic for even the most hopelessly land-locked. It helped stoke a never-ending surfing documentary craze, from the little films shown in surf shops and hangouts in the ‘60s and ‘70s to polished productions today like Riding Giants, Step Into Liquid, Dogtown and Z-Boys, etc.

2. The Silver Surfer. The saddest, most potent and mythic character in all of comics: Exiled from his homeland by the evil Galactus and forced to serve as a space-riding herald helping to consume planets until he is “saved” by the Fantastic Four and exiled on Earth. They better not mess this movie up; Silver Surfer fans are fiercer than those Transformers geeks.

And…
1. Three brothers named Wilson and a cousin named Love. One day in the early ‘60s, they gathered in a garage in Hawthorne, Calif. and started plunking out a song called Surfin’. The rest is history. They didn’t start the surf music craze but they immortalized it. You could almost argue that Brian Wilson, more than Frankie, Annette or Gidget, helped popularize the idea of summer in pop culture. Surfing and the Beach Boys go hand in hand, even if Paul LeMat did make a good point about the primacy of their car songs in American Graffitti.

So, did The Shamus forget anything?

(Cross-posted at Bad For The Glass: badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

Path to War was the last film in the topsy-turvy, up-and-down, but never dull career of director John Frankenheimer. He made it for HBO, which was the only outlet that could back a three-hour film of suits around desks discussing the buildup and bombing patterns of the Vietnam War. In a career of amazing highs — The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, The Train, Seven Days In May, Ronin, 52-Pickup, The Iceman Cometh — Path to War ranks high, even if it doesn’t have some of the expansive widescreen action sequences he is best known for. But in its editing rhythms, compelling storytelling and attention to detail, it is pure Frankenheimer. He died of a stroke at age 72, after completing this film in 2002. Path to War is an epitaph any director would be proud of.

The film is anchored by a riveting, complex performance by British actor Michael Gambon as Lyndon Johnson, one of the most Shakespearean of presidents. Even more than Nixon, Johnson is the ultimate tragic figure of ‘60s politics, trapped between his genuine desire to advance an ambitious agenda of civil rights and helping the poor and disenfranchised and his inheritance of a war in Southeast Asia that slowly swallows up his presidency. Johnson is one of those politicians you don’t see anymore — a person who craved and worshipped power, but wanted to use it for good. He was big and persuasive, boisterous and wily, and cunningly crude: an effective elbows-out in-fighter. As played by Gambon, he has a habit of putting his big frame right up close to you and using all his body English to make you see things his way. A full-metal LBJ jacket was probably a hard thing to resist. And yet, Gambon also makes you feel the internal pain and stress that Vietnam brings to Johnson, the sense that all he has worked for is slipping away from him. There is nothing sadder than Johnson clambering into the War Room to anxiously await results from bombing runs or stalking through the White House kitchen in search of some kind of emotional solace. Or the silent grief as he faces the growing stack of letters to dead soldiers’ parents that he must sign.

The best parts of Path to War are the meetings, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Alec Baldwin) and the Pentagon brass encourage Johnson to continue escalating the war, making promises that if we just commit more troops we can surely bring these barbarians to heel. There is no way Ho Chi Minh can be smarter than the buttoned-down, best and brightest Ivy League holdovers from John F. Kennedy’s administration. But he was. And he destroyed them all. As is happening now in Iraq, we were ignorant of our history and more important, ignorant of theirs. Under-secretary of state George Ball (Bruce McGill) and adviser Clark Clifford (Donald Sutherland) try to argue LBJ away from Vietnam, but the pull of American military and historical tradition is too strong. Communism, the domino theory, they were all accepted dogma. It would have been hard for any president to resist it. And it keeps going wrong for everybody — for McNamara, once a shining star during the Cuban missile crisis who keeps advocating for a war he personally believes is hopeless; for Clifford, who starts out as a moral exemplar but eventually compromises his ideals, too, to help LBJ stay politically viable. Frankenheimer keeps ratcheting up the tension: McNamara’s family ulcers, LBJ’s volcanic explosions, the jettisoning of Great Society initiatives, the growing chants of protesters outside the White House and Pentagon walls, all leading up to a confrontation when Clifford tells LBJ: “We only advised you. You decided.” The harrowing look on LBJ’s face could easily be the one on King Lear’s, as that simple truth seems to reverberate inside his skull.

This is a film marked by superb, old-school acting. Sutherland’s Clifford is one of his finest performances: calm, judicious, analytic but quietly forceful. Baldwin has a tougher job because he has to play McNamara’s opaqueness, and Baldwin is better mocking power as he does on 30 Rock than playing it straight. The often overlooked McGill is marvelous as the conscientious Ball, who can say more with a disapproving look in his eyes than a long speech. And it may take you awhile, as it did me, to even recognize Felicity Huffman under that dark wig as Lady Bird Johnson.

In the end, of course, it’s impossible to watch Path of War and not think of the path we have taken to Iraq. In Vietnam, we simply were ignorant of that country’s history and suffered from a hubris about our own superiority and military might. You’d think we’d have have learned a lesson that would resonate for longer, but history does tend to repeat itself and we are once again in a quagmire. In both wars, there seems to be a sense of pride in powerful men that won’t let them honorably back away when they know they should (George Ball makes the point that all good calvarymen know when to retreat.) Inside the White House then, they knew they couldn’t win Vietnam and persisted. Inside the White House today, they know they can’t win Iraq and persist. Pride or political gamesmanship seems to be more important than young men and women’s lives, and that is truly unforgivable. The big difference of course is that George W. Bush is hardly the same figure as LBJ. They’re both from Texas, but from different mindsets and backgrounds. LBJ wanted to do good, and did some with the social programs that he initiated. Bush is just part of the same venal, self-dealing Republican mentality that began with Nixon and has never really ended. But as much as historians may want to rehabilitate LBJ, I don’t think he will escape the judgement of Vietnam. It was his most important decision and he came up lacking. On the other hand, unlike any other president, he did the honorable thing and stepped down. That hasn’t happened since, on either side of the aisle, and it will bode well for Johnson’s legacy.

Frankenheimer’s Path to War captures Johnson’s unique complexity and the pressures he faced. It’s a brilliant examination of how even the best of intentions can go horribly awry.

(Cross-posted at The Shamus’ site, Bad For The Glass: www.badfortheglass.blogspot.com)

Jane Smiley’s new novel, Ten Days In The Hills, reminds me a lot of Isherwood in her sensual, satiric evocation of place and character. Like Isherwood’s, Smiley’s book is probably more of a Los Angeles novel than a Hollywood novel. The characters could just as easily have been in some other business, but it’s set in L.A., so they’ve got to have some connection to the industry. The book is 449 pages, in really small type, and it sometimes gets lost in its tangents, but Smiley has a marvelous gift for creating characters with compelling flaws and for writing great gabs of free-flowing dialogue. It’s a book that may wear you out getting to the finish line, but it keeps pulling you forward nonetheless. It has the rounded pleasures of those old-fashioned pop blockbusters that weren’t afraid to lace a little intelligent dialogue and subtle characterization in between scenes of beautiful people having sex in gorgeously appointed homes.

Full disclosure: Smiley’s novel is apparently based on a 1353 Italian book I’ve heard of but never read, Boccaccio’s The Decameron. That book was about a group of people walling themselves off from the plague; Smiley’s novel concerns a group of Los Angelenos who, the day after the 2003 Oscars, gather in a film director’s spacious home and try to shield themselves from the Iraq war, even as raging debates break out among the characters.

The Hollywood stuff is pretty incidental. Max is a calm, mensch-like writer-director who won an Oscar years ago for penning a screenplay of a film directed by Michael Apted. Max then became a director, with some success, but he is now in his late 50s and is coasting, seemingly content to putter around his spacious hillside abode with its beautiful gardens and view of the Getty Museum. The book begins with Max and his lover Elena, in bed, the morning after attending the Oscars. They are talking about the glamorous evening, and Michael Moore getting booed, and the war, and how Max wants to make a small movie of him and Elena that would do for the indie sex film what My Dinner With Andre did for the indie yapping-and-gnoshing film.

Soon, the house fills up with a panoply of vivid characters: Not only Max and Elena, but Max’s ex-wife, the beautiful, half-Jamaican singer/film star Zoe Cunningham and Paul, her charlatan guru boyfriend; Max and Elena’s embittered, 23-year-old daughter Isabel and her lover, Max’s thirtysomething agent Stoney Whipple, who has been secretly romancing Isabel since she was 16; Elena’s son, Simon, a laissez faire lothario and half-hearted college student who has just shaved his head to play a dancing penis in a friend’s student film; Charlie, Max’s childhood friend and a hard-core Bush supporter; Zoe’s mom, Delphine, an intimidating presence who still lives in Max’s guest house and her next-door neighbor and good friend, the art dealer Cassie, a chatterbox who insists on being buried with her expensive handbag.

Stoney is trying to talk Max into remaking the old Yul Brynner Cossacks-and-horses epic, Taras Bulba, bankrolled by some mysterious Russians who want it filmed on location in the Ukraine. Max wants to make his little sex flick. Stoney, still trying to measure up after living in the shadow of his legendary agent father, worries that Max no longer has the fire for the heavy lifting of a Hollywood career:

“You want to make a Hollywood movie about an unmarried couple with grown children talking about the Iraq War and making love, with graphic sex? You know better, so this must be a joke. It has every single thing that Hollywood producers hate and despise, and that American audiences hate and despise — fornication, old people, current events and conversation.”

Of course, Smiley’s ironic point is that is exactly what her whole book is about. She takes some lightly glancing blows at the usual Southern California stereotypes — self-absorbed celebrities (Zoe); sham, New Age healers (Paul) and pill-peddling, self-empowerment types (Charlie). But the beautiful thing about Smiley’s writing is her deft hand at shading: All of these characters have just as many good points as weaknesses. Her strength is forcing us to see that people are not easily classified, or what they initially seem.

The most fascinating character to me is Elena, a woman who is obsessed with the Iraq War. I’ve met her type in real life, but never in fiction: the person who simply boils with righteous, unceasing hatred for the Bush administration and everything it stands for. You can’t joke with them; you can’t suggest that, yes, the war is awful and Bush is bad, but come on, there are other things we can focus on. They will not waver from their laser-like intensity. What Smiley captures here, almost without you realizing it at first, is this notion of how people endure during dark ages. It’s not that they are complicit with their government necessarily, it’s just that America gives them plenty of diversionary opportunities. But Smiley is asking us, through Elena, if that is how we want to be remembered. Do we want history to record us as political ostriches who kept driving our gas-guzzlers and taking our vacations and living our self-absorbed lives while something much bigger was happening? Did we do everything we could to stop it? Did we take to the streets in protest, or to the Gap for the spring sales? Elena serves as our wake-up call, if we choose to heed it, and she’s made even stronger by the time period of the book, when we now know the war didn’t turn out to be the quick, “Mission Accomplished” fix that Bush guaranteed and that Elena’s political opposite, Charlie, so fervently believes.

That Smiley is able to weave such a compelling statement into her story about upscale lovers falling apart and coming together, children straining against their parents and middle-agers wondering about their next (and possibly) last act is yet another testament to her strengths as a novelist. On top of that, you get rapturous descriptions of landscape, interior design, Russian literature, religious questing and discussions of films from Casablanca to The Seventh Seal. There’s even a three-way scene and some mild phone sex. Smiley leaves no demographic unchecked. Ten Days In The Hills may not be the great Hollywood novel, but it’s one of the better works of literary fiction I’ve read in several years.

An early happy birthday to Spike Lee, who turns 50 on Tuesday. He has always struck me as the most interesting modern American director, because he is so unpredictable. Indie films, big budget films, riveting documentaries, music videos, sneakers commercials. He’s done it all, and he only seems to be getting better. I’ll admit that I wasn’t that crazy about Inside Man, his foray into the Hollywood studio film last year, but I believe that When The Levees Broke, his documentary on Katrina and its aftermath, was the best film of 2006.

So, his birthday this week seemed the right moment for me to revisit Do The Right Thing, which I hadn’t seen since its release in 1989. I remember not being sure how to process the film as a film back then, since it was so entwined with all the overheated “controversy” on editorial pages. Looking at it again now, I see beyond the headlines of that time and marvel at what a masterful work of art Do The Right Thing is.

In many ways, the film is a perfect blend of the real and the theatrical. The real, in terms of its modern themes of race, class and prejudice in New York and its central philosophic question of violence vs. non-violence. And the theatrical, in the way these “characters” explore their inner demons, their hopes, desires and failures, as they intersect on a Bed-Stuy street that is as artifically primed as anything you’d see in, say, West Side Story. It could be called Bed-Stuy Story, and audiences years from now are not going to need to understand the references to Tawana Brawley, Howard Beach and the New York mayoral election to appreciate the film.

The film has so many things to recommend, beyond Lee’s vivid writing and direction. Ernest Dickerson’s photography and the set design recreate a sense of sweltering, oppressive heat. The voice-over by the radio DJ Senor Love Daddy ties the street tales together with a fluid, comic grace. Bill Lee’s underrated score pulses with everything from traditional jazz themes to Copland-esque motifs (and, of course, the central Public Enemy song, Fight The Power, with the unforgettable line that “Elvis didn’t mean s— to me.”)

The performances are brilliant across the board, not only from such early glimpses of Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez and Martin Lawrence, but in the depth of feeling and nuance that Ossie Davis, Danny Aiello, Ruby Dee, John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito and Lee bring to their roles. And for all the years I’ve been watching Bill Nunn in TV and film as a sort of gentle giant, I had completely forgotten the towering, haunted performance he gives as Radio Raheem.

What was hard (at least for me) to see in the take-sides debate during its initial release was how democratic Lee is to his characters, exploring how we’re all flawed human beings with good and bad impulses and how we all have prejudices that we fight to control and understand. It’s most evident in the creation of Aiello’s pizzeria owner Sal, who could have been a straight-up cracker racist. But Lee gives him shadings of decency and morality and tenderness, which makes the ending burst of violence and pent-up rage on all sides so much more powerful and saddening.

What an affecting, genuine work of poetic art. And with such films as When The Levees Broke, Malcolm X, 25th Hour, Get On The Bus and Bamboozled, Lee continues to be the most misunderstood and least appreciated of major American directors. Do The Right Thing is a film of its time, but one that will endure long beyond it.

R.I.P. Betty Hutton. It was a long, somewhat sad life. Other than a memorable appearance on a TCM special, she spent most of the past four decades out of the limelight. She wasn’t like her screen image. Married and divorced four times. Went bankrupt. Lived in a church rectory. Underwent psychiatric care. When she was buried this week in California, her three children didn’t come to her funeral, just her landlord.

Betty Hutton compared her career in Hollywood to being a piece of meat (”a hot dog,” to be specific.) While most of her obits led off with her replacing Judy Garland at the last minute in Annie Get Your Gun, her greatest artistic triumph will always be her starring role in Preston Sturges’ 1944 comic masterpiece, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. As the sweet but suddenly pregnant Trudy Kockenlocker (a name for the ages), she made poor Eddie Bracken see “Spots! Spots!” She was the last of the brilliant comic actors of Sturges’ movies, and now they are all gone, as is an era that would give free rein to an imagination as cockeyed and courageous as Sturges’.

I still don’t know how Sturges got away with The Miracle Of Morgan’s Creek: Sweet, small-town girl Trudy has a few too many drinks at a G.I. dance and wakes up pregnant. The unknown daddy, somebody named Ignatz Rat-Ratz-Ratzkywatsky, has shipped out. And Trudy is desperate and, of course, unmarried (how did Sturges slip this by the censors? Did he serve them the same drink as Trudy?)

Sturges wrote and directed a lot of great films (The Palm Beach Story, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, Unfaithfully Yours, Christmas In July), but none with quite this delicate balancing act, incorporating knockabout farce, sentimental pathos, wartime mischief, small-town romance and a bit of the Lifetime Channel, circa 1944. It’s so well acted by the stars. Hutton plays the determined ditz with her usual verve, but she never makes you think she is stuck up or superior, just a young girl making a young girl’s mistakes and paying severely for one night of forgotten fun.

But to me, it will always be Bracken’s movie. I sympathize (what guy doesn’t?) with the lovestruck, plain little fellow who adores the big, blond beauty and will do anything she asks, even pretending to take her on a movie date so she can slip away to a dance before the G.I.’s are dispatched overseas. The hurt look on Bracken’s face, the way his nervous Norval balances befuddlement, slow-burn anger and the ache of unrequited love, just breaks my heart. Remember the way he gazes at Trudy as she gives the lip-syncing demonstration in the record shop? How thrilled he is to go on a date with her and how devastated he is when he finds out he’s just playing the beard? Or the sweet walk they take around the town as he discovers the trouble she’s in and suddenly that old affliction — the one that’s unfairly kept him out of the service — rises up again before his eyes: “Spots! Spots!”

And, yet, what a kind, decent man Norval Jones is. He pledges to take care of Trudy despite what she’s done, and to me that’s the greatness of the movie: its underlying compassion. It comes through Norval’s character. And the scene with the Doctor that Trudy visits, who doesn’t berate her or treat her like a whore. It’s in the love you feel underneath the wisecracks of Trudy’s little sister (the wonderful Diana Lynn). And it especially comes through her old man, the cranky and seemingly clueless cop Col. Kockenlocker, when he finally discovers what has happened:

“The trouble with kids is they always figure they’re smarter than their parents. Never stop to think if their old man could get by for 50 years and feed ‘em and clothe ‘em, he maybe had something up here to get by with. Things that seem like brain twisters to you might be very simple for him.”

God, the genius of William Demarest. If anybody was ever overlooked for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, it was William Demarest in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. He should have won for the quality of his backwards pratfalls alone. Or the big fight scene on the lawn, which was the equal of anything by the Marx Bros. Or the crusty way he spit out the ever-timeless line that all fathers feel at one point or another: “Daughters! Phooey!” But you could see the heart underneath all that craggy contempt, the deep commitment to his girls, and never more so than in the wintry Capraesque scenes after Demarest loses his job and the family is forced to go to another town when Trudy’s pregnancy shows. The movie gets a little muddled here, as Sturges has to figure out how to get out of its predicament and you’ve got to hand it to him to turn disaster into a patriotic opportunity, courtesy of those old rogues from an earler Sturges flick, McGinty and the Boss.

God, what a movie.

The best way a film fan can honor Betty Hutton this week would be to watch The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek again. It will make you sad for her passing, but even sadder for knowing we’ll never have another Preston Sturges.