You find yourself doing a lot of things over the holidays and break—if you are lucky enough to have a holiday break—that you might otherwise not.
One example is socially drinking for thirty consecutive days. Another is idle listmaking; I got to exchanging “If You Haven’t Seen It, It’s New To You!™” top-old-films-for-the-year lists with a couple of friends, and I thought my results might just as well be shared:
Bell, Book and Candle (1958, Richard Quine)
The Big Trail (1930, Raoul Walsh)
The Cavern (1964, Edgar Ulmer)
The Funhouse (1981, Tobe Hooper)
The Italian Connection (1972, Fernando di Leo)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
Des Morts (1979, Jean-Pol Ferbus, Dominique Garny, Thierry Zeno)
The Other (1972, Robert Mulligan)
Nothing But a Man (1964, Michael Roemer)
Remorques (1941, Jean Gremillon)
They Made Me a Fugitive (1947, Alberto Cavalcanti)
The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959, Fritz Lang)
Twilight’s Last Gleaming/ Ulzana’s Raid (1977/ 1972, Robert Aldrich) (Talking of aging Burt Lancaster, I also liked Visconti’s Conversation Piece of 1974 a helluva a lot.)
Wake in Fright (1971, Ted Kotcheff)
The Window (1949, Ted Tetzlaff)
One can do a good deal of reading up on the burning issues of the day, as well. Over the preceding weeks, many a pundit and most everyone in my social networking groupthink feed made indignant hay from NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre’s comments about the shootings in Newtown, CT—and, yes, Right On. I am, however, always a little suspicious of any approach to a social problem that seeks to shunt full burden for responsibility onto the Other’s rights and pleasures (i.e. Automatic weapons), without any attendant examination of one’s own cherished rights and pleasures—or those one defends from the bugbear of censorship. (i.e. Splatterhouse for TurboGrafx-16, Natural Born Killers, and whatever other weirdly Clinton-era pop ephemera LaPierre excavated.) I have, therefore, been mulling over a number of articles with titles like “How to Change Pop Culture’s Reliance on Violence,” without landing upon any workable solution—save perhaps my own.
In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same title, a process called The Ludovico Technique, entailing of an overdose of ultraviolent and pornographic imagery, is applied to sociopathic teenager Alex in order to make the chastened subject ill at the very thought of transgression. I suspect that there is a fallacy in this conceit; that rather than making the subject nauseous at the sight of the red, red kroovy, the actual application of the Ludovico Technique would result instead in making them terribly bored with it. I believe this to be so because, in my largely unsupervised youth, I submitted myself to a form of the Ludovico Technique. As a tender stripling of ten I had watched not only Clockwork Orange, but “Eightball” being blasted to pieces in slow-motion by sniper fire in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. As an adolescent I was listening to NWA’s “Just Don’t Bite It” and leafing through unbelievably seedy three-pack porno slicks (Genesis, anyone?) at John Shimkoviak’s house. As a teenager I was ingesting every Shockumentary on the market, including the no-redeeming-social-or-artistic-value Traces of Death series, emceed by a sardonic narrator called Brain Damage who contributed witless commentary to documentary images of human beings being rudely butted off of this mortal coil. (i.e. “Looks like he caught the Express!” as a father of four is pasted by an Amtrak.)
The end result? When watching dull, thrill-kill, for-its-own-sake violence today, the desire for a nap immediately settles over this subject. The moment that James Brolin clipped off a thug’s hand through an elevator gate in Gangster Squad, which I recently took in at a press screening, my unaddressed mind felt free to drift into the cosmos. A modest proposal, then, based on this admittedly limited control group: Officially devote a period of the school day—I am thinking English, which today mostly has the effect of putting off anyone who has an aptitude for it—to Ludovico Technique! Just you watch those teenaged boys swarm to their Renoir retros and classical music youth associations!
Talking of violent pastimes: With idle holiday days on hand, one turns to entertainments that one might not otherwise be drawn to. I paid good money to enter Paul Brown Stadium for a game in which a (partially backup) Cincinnati Bengals team best a (mostly backup) Baltimore Ravens team, 23-17, a match with almost no playoff consequences whatsoever. This enabled me to view what was likely the last and nearly the first impressive play of Bruce Gradkowski’s NFL career, a 44-yarder to Brandon Tate, as well as to marvel at the PBS PA announcer’s almost pathological obsession with the phrase “stacked up,” and to note with sadness that the LED screen pregame-hype video that had been in place since 2000 has been updated with a new, marginally less chintzy version. It is fascinating, in strolling around PBS, to note the many little signs of Bengals owner Mike Brown’s legendary stinginess—in contrast, say, to the famous largesse of Jerry Jones’ stately pleasure dome in Arlington. So that one won’t miss a moment of on-field action, the PBS concession areas are equipped with TVs, as is standard—but they’re tube televisions, about 32”s. In fact, I think they may be the same model that my local sports bar—the one with imitation wood paneling and $6.00 buckets-of-Bud and a troglodytic woman with a squint installed at the end of the bar—threw out three seasons ago.
I also saw some movies that I might not, in the ordinary run of things, have seen. I saw Jack Reacher—that rare film whose title no amount of tampering could make sound any more like gay porn—at the AMC Newport on the Levee 20 in Northern Kentucky, where the “MacGuffin’s” pub in the lobby is slated to open next week. I have hardly found a word that I disagree with in any of the savage write-ups of Jack Reacher that I have encountered, and yet I think very little that I saw in 2012 will stay with me like the lone scene shared by Tom Cruise and screen nemesis Werner Herzog, two extraordinarily tenacious careerists from very different sectors of the film world. It should also be noted that Reacher contains the year’s second-best establishing shot of a fiftysomething male star waking up in a room next to a young woman’s stunning be-thonged ass, the best of course being Denzel’s in Flight. I almost hope this shot keeps recurring until it becomes a Hollywood inside joke, like the Wilhelm scream, or… well, like Hollywood itself!
I did see a foreign film as well—or the nearest variant that plays the Midwest, New Zealand’s The Hobbit. Although I’d variously enjoyed each installment of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, I supposed I had had enough. I expressly did not intend to see The Hobbit. I think it was something about the swaggering laziness of the trading cards subway adverts, consisting of nothing but pictures of the dwarvish dramatis personae, as if to say: “We don’t even need to try. You know you’re going to see it.”
They were right, goddamn it, and I’ve no regrets. I was suitably gobsmacked by those ethereal Edward Burne-Jones elves upon returning to Rivendell. I was moved by the covetous pathos of Gollum, Andy Serkis’s finest performance since Planet of the Apes. (“Is he just really good at crouching?” a friend asked me as we were discussing Serkis’s cornering the market on CG performance.) I found, in The Hobbit, a quest film that bore its comparable runtime considerably better than Django Unchained and, in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a considerably more seductive—and certainly better-researched—immersive environment than Tarantino’s Deep South. Both Tolkien and Tarantino, as I’m sure has been pointed out already, draw from the mythological wellspring of the German Nibelungenlied, although Tolkien’s 1938 response to a German publisher, which made the rounds yesterday on the anniversary of the author’s birth, would alone be enough to mark him a more courageous figure than the mood-faced peddler of provocation—if indeed it was posted.
Watching The Hobbit, I thought back to 2001 when Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Jackson’s Ring films, came out, and to the professor of the medieval literature class that I was then taking, Dr. Thomas Limouze, who would recite Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to us in Old English. He complained that Fellowship had stripped Tolkien’s story of its restive, its pastoral, and its idyllic moments, leaving only the hard spine of action. I wondered if the niggling, minutiae-obsessed The Hobbit was the sort of Tolkien movie that Dr. Limouze, a medievalist like Tolkien, had hoped for; certainly it doesn’t seem to be the sort of movie that many a film critic wanted, even as its trotted-out technology has promoted much conversation. In the NY Review of Books, for example, J. Hoberman found himself “wondering what percentage of CGI is necessary for a movie to be considered graphic rather than photographic,” while referencing Ralph Bakshi’s rotoscoped Lord of the Rings of 1978, a film that was so dear to me as a young man, reading Dragonlance paperbacks faster than Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman could write them. In fact, to this day I cannot watch the following—shades of that Full Metal Jacket sniper scene—without a terrific shudder of emotion:
For a goodly portion of The Hobbit’s runtime, it all came back in an atavistic geyser—the boyish Anglophilia and the obsession with ancient martial tradition and Sir Thomas Mallory and all manner of smiting and cleaving in twain. Not an argument for great art, perhaps, but one for mighty entertainment. And it is nice to know that the economy of New Zealand is secure for another year. Which brings us, I believe, to our first outro jam of 2013…