Read Good Shit On Musings

By Yasmina Tawil

Eyes Wide Shut: ‘Some Call It Loving’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ By Adam Nayman

By Yasmina Tawil

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Two roads diverged in a (Holly)wood: after the scandalous release of Lolita in 1962, Stanley Kubrick and his producer, James B. Harris, each set out to make a Cold War thriller based on a best-selling novel.

Suffice it to say that history remembers Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)—a movie that Harris helped to set up before blanching at his partner’s idea to turn it into a comedy—more vividly than the foursquare nuclear-sub drama The Bedford Incident (1965). Splitting from Kubrick on the eve of the director’s greatest popular success rendered the New York-born Harris as the proverbial footnote in a world-beating auteur narrative, a marginalization seemingly borne out by the fact that he only produced five features over the next forty years, three of which he also directed.

The most striking of these is Some Call It Loving (1973), a stylized erotic drama privately financed via a tax break scheme for $400,000. In a superbly written and researched essay included with the recent two-disc set from Etiquette Pictures, Kevin John Bozelka explains that Harris brought Some Call it Loving to Cannes in 1973, where it was critically admired (including by Pierre Rissient, who bought it for French distribution) and then destroyed by American reviewers later in the year. The film’s slow, stately style and baldly symbolic content were laughed off on contact: “a rambling, contemporary fable that is merely pretentious,” was the assessment of The New York Times.

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Pretentiousness is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but there’s nothing “mere” about Harris’ adaptation of John Collier’s short story “The Sleeping Beauty,” about a man who purchases a mysteriously slumbering woman from a traveling carnival and brings her home to be his companion. On the contrary, Some Call it Loving is fully, aggressively pretentious, wearing both its fable-like aspirations and caustic cultural critique on its impeccably tailored sleeves. Its characters live in the contemporary equivalent of an enchanted castle on the edge of the city, deliberately cut off from everyday society. The elaborate role-playing games of Robert Troy (Zalman King) and his female companions Angelica (Veronica Anderson) and Scarlett (Carol White)—which expand to include the expensively acquired and newly awakened Jennifer (Tsia Farrow)—are legible as a form of aristocratic folly: call it the discreet charm of the bourgeoise.

Luis Buñuel’s shadow falls over Some Call it Loving, particularly the scene in Viridiana (1961) where the angelic novice played by Silvia Pinal is drugged by a servant and served up to the unscrupulous Don Jaime (Fernando Rey); Bunuel luxuriates in the necrophilic aspects of the scenario even as his villain holds back from ravishing the unconscious virgin (a decision that plays as a pious hypocrite’s moment of grace). In Harris’ opening, Robert gazes uncertainly at Jennifer’s supine body and refuses to join the other carnival-goers in paying for a kiss; when he makes his offer of $20,000 to Jennifer’s handler, he shakes off the implication that he’s buying her for sex. Like Don Jaime, he’s powerfully attracted to the younger woman’s sleeping form, which also rhymes with the plight of Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his botched motel-room rape of his sleeping charge in Lolita—the difference being in Kubrick’s film, it’s bad luck rather than a guilty conscience that keeps him from following through.

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Terror Inside: ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Black Swan’ By Alissa Wilkinson

By Yasmina Tawil

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Baby girls get swaddled in pink, all sweetness and light, cooing little bundles of cotton candy. We sing them lullabies, play melodies on music boxes that cradle spinning ballerinas, nestle them between pillows and puffy stuffed rabbits. They grow. They pull on tiny pink tutus and soft pink canvas slippers and spin on their toes, glowing with joy. They grow. They have soft, cooing babies of their own.

Invert these saccharine trimmings of infancy and girlhood, though, and they grow sinister—a photonegative of innocence, a fleeing from the light. The opening titles of Rosemary’s Baby signal that such an inversion is happening before our eyes. While a pink script announces what you’re about to see in a self-consciously girlish manner, the eerie, wordless lullaby prickles your neck, and the camera’s perspective—hovering and descending over Manhattan—implies that a presence is about to alight, once it finds its mark: The Bramford, where Rosemary and her husband Guy are looking to rent an apartment and, soon, start a family.

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I don’t know what it’s like to watch Rosemary’s Baby in a man’s body, but I know my body thrills sickeningly with primal terror. Mia Farrow’s Rosemary seems at first both scrappy and brave; she chooses the apartment, she initiates sex, she oversees renovations, she is confident and happy and plenty capable of standing up to others if she wants. She isn’t a model of twenty-first century feminism, but she’s no shrinking violet, either.

Yet her body, growing another being, undoes her. Impregnated without her own participation—either by Satan or by her husband, who cheerfully informs her the morning after that she’d passed out so he’d just gone ahead anyhow—she rapidly becomes merely a vessel, to be shaped and scolded by everyone else: Guy, doctors who tell her not to read, Minnie Castavet and her foul smoothies. And maybe Satan’s spawn, from the inside.

The longer this goes on, the more isolated Rosemary becomes. She’s not a prisoner in her apartment, but she seems like one, with her bouncing bundle of joy turned to tiny jailer inside. Guy roams freely, and so do the Castavets, who seem to be everywhere. But Rosemary is basically housebound, left alone in the domestic realm with her thoughts, her fears, her pains, and the sounds she hears through the walls. It’s a recipe for disaster.

In an essay included with the Criterion release of Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin explained the origin of his novel. “Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears,” Levin wrote, “I was struck one day by the thought … that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!”

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Terror Inside: ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Black Swan’ By Alissa Wilkinson

By Yasmina Tawil

image

Baby girls get swaddled in pink, all sweetness and light, cooing little bundles of cotton candy. We sing them lullabies, play melodies on music boxes that cradle spinning ballerinas, nestle them between pillows and puffy stuffed rabbits. They grow. They pull on tiny pink tutus and soft pink canvas slippers and spin on their toes, glowing with joy. They grow. They have soft, cooing babies of their own.

Invert these saccharine trimmings of infancy and girlhood, though, and they grow sinister—a photonegative of innocence, a fleeing from the light. The opening titles of Rosemary’s Baby signal that such an inversion is happening before our eyes. While a pink script announces what you’re about to see in a self-consciously girlish manner, the eerie, wordless lullaby prickles your neck, and the camera’s perspective—hovering and descending over Manhattan—implies that a presence is about to alight, once it finds its mark: The Bramford, where Rosemary and her husband Guy are looking to rent an apartment and, soon, start a family.

image

I don’t know what it’s like to watch Rosemary’s Baby in a man’s body, but I know my body thrills sickeningly with primal terror. Mia Farrow’s Rosemary seems at first both scrappy and brave; she chooses the apartment, she initiates sex, she oversees renovations, she is confident and happy and plenty capable of standing up to others if she wants. She isn’t a model of twenty-first century feminism, but she’s no shrinking violet, either.

Yet her body, growing another being, undoes her. Impregnated without her own participation—either by Satan or by her husband, who cheerfully informs her the morning after that she’d passed out so he’d just gone ahead anyhow—she rapidly becomes merely a vessel, to be shaped and scolded by everyone else: Guy, doctors who tell her not to read, Minnie Castavet and her foul smoothies. And maybe Satan’s spawn, from the inside.

The longer this goes on, the more isolated Rosemary becomes. She’s not a prisoner in her apartment, but she seems like one, with her bouncing bundle of joy turned to tiny jailer inside. Guy roams freely, and so do the Castavets, who seem to be everywhere. But Rosemary is basically housebound, left alone in the domestic realm with her thoughts, her fears, her pains, and the sounds she hears through the walls. It’s a recipe for disaster.

In an essay included with the Criterion release of Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin explained the origin of his novel. “Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears,” Levin wrote, “I was struck one day by the thought … that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!”

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By Yasmina Tawil

Electroma or: It Became Necessary for Daft Punk to Destroy Themselves in Order to Save Their CareersBy Craig J. Clark

By Yasmina Tawil

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When Daft Punks Electroma was unveiled in the Directors Fortnight at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, it was met with at best a muted response. Writing for Variety, Leslie Felperin chastised bandmates Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, who bizarrely choose not to use their own catchy tunes here, the one thing that might have given pic slim commercial legs. Felperin also invoked such cinematic endurance tests as Gus Van Sants Gerry and Vincent Gallos The Brown Bunny, and called the plot risible and had aud at projection caught ankling in drovesVariety-speak for the high volume of walkouts it inspired, which explains why its premiere received scant coverage.

A ready-made cult film with no spoken dialogue and only a handful of songs with lyrics, Electroma found its audience among the Daft Punk faithful at midnight screenings the following year, but those who missed seeing it in theaters must be willing to part with upwards of $100 if they want an unopened copy of the out-of-print Region 1 DVD. More frugal fans with a subscription to Tidal can opt for the tenth anniversary edition the band released exclusively on the streaming site last year or make do with one of the numerous versions of the film that have been uploaded to YouTube, one of which comes with an alternate soundtrack culled from Daft Punks own catalog. The one curated by the band and music supervisor Steven Baker is perfectly suited to the film, though, progressing from Todd Rundgren to Brian Eno to Curtis Mayfield to choir music and beyond. Their choices say a lot about how wide-ranging their musical tastes are, which would be less evident if they had merely dropped in tracks from Human After All, their then-current record.

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Released in 2005, Human was the bands much-anticipated follow-up to 2001s Discovery, which provided the soundtrack for their first quasi-feature, the 68-minute animated sci-fi tale Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Along with the robot helmets that made their debut around the same time Discovery did, Interstella took the focus off Bangalter and de Homem-Christo as individuals and gave them another creative outlet since they co-wrote its screenplay. (The Residentssubjects of the recent documentary Theory of Obscuritypulled off a similar feat a few decades earlier, cycling through a number of disguises in their films and live appearances before adopting the eyeball-head look that came to be their trademark.)

The urge to venture into new arenas continued with Electroma, which began life as a video for Human After Alls title track, but quickly expanded its scope to tell a complete, if simple, story about two robots and their doomed quest to become human. Hero Robot #1 and Hero Robot #2 arent just any robots, though, since they wear Thomas and Guy-Manuels signature helmets and the black leather outfits that were the bands uniform at the time, complete with their logo spelled out in metal studs on their backs. So, even though they arent played by Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, who were busy enough handling directing duties (with Bangalter doubling as cinematographer), they are Daft Punk for all intents and purposes, and the scenario devised for them by Bangalter, de Homem-Christo, Cdric Hervet (also the films editor and script collaborator on Interstella), and Paul Hahn (also its executive producer) can be read as autobiographical if viewed from the right angle.

The film starts on colorful rock formations in the California desert, where a black Ferrari with the license plate HUMAN awaits our heroes. So does a fiery reckoning, which the flames under the title prefigure. There are, in fact, a number of cutaways to these flames sprinkled throughout the film, starting with the scene of Thomas and Guy-Manuel driving down an empty highway (shades of the opening car ride in Gerry) to the accompaniment of Todd Rundgrens International Feel. So far, so normal, but then they pass a tractor ridden by a robot farmer with a Guy-Manuel helmet, which doesnt prepare the viewer for the sight of a whole town where every man, woman, and child from all walks of life is a robot sporting their headgear as Rundgrens spacy 70s rock gives way to Brian Enos moody instrumental In Dark Trees.

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By Yasmina Tawil

Electroma or: It Became Necessary for Daft Punk to Destroy Themselves in Order to Save Their Careers  By Craig J. Clark

By Yasmina Tawil

image

When Daft Punk’s Electroma was unveiled in the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, it was met with at best a muted response. Writing for Variety, Leslie Felperin chastised bandmates Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, who “bizarrely choose not to use their own catchy tunes here, the one thing that might have given pic slim commercial legs.” Felperin also invoked such cinematic endurance tests as Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, and called the plot “risible and had aud at projection caught ankling in droves”—Variety-speak for the high volume of walkouts it inspired, which explains why its premiere received scant coverage.

A ready-made cult film with no spoken dialogue and only a handful of songs with lyrics, Electroma found its audience among the Daft Punk faithful at midnight screenings the following year, but those who missed seeing it in theaters must be willing to part with upwards of $100 if they want an unopened copy of the out-of-print Region 1 DVD. More frugal fans with a subscription to Tidal can opt for the tenth anniversary edition the band released exclusively on the streaming site last year or make do with one of the numerous versions of the film that have been uploaded to YouTube, one of which comes with an alternate soundtrack culled from Daft Punk’s own catalog. The one curated by the band and music supervisor Steven Baker is perfectly suited to the film, though, progressing from Todd Rundgren to Brian Eno to Curtis Mayfield to choir music and beyond. Their choices say a lot about how wide-ranging their musical tastes are, which would be less evident if they had merely dropped in tracks from Human After All, their then-current record.

image

Released in 2005, Human was the band’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2001’s Discovery, which provided the soundtrack for their first quasi-feature, the 68-minute animated sci-fi tale Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Along with the robot helmets that made their debut around the same time Discovery did, Interstella took the focus off Bangalter and de Homem-Christo as individuals and gave them another creative outlet since they co-wrote its screenplay. (The Residents—subjects of the recent documentary Theory of Obscurity—pulled off a similar feat a few decades earlier, cycling through a number of disguises in their films and live appearances before adopting the eyeball-head look that came to be their trademark.)

The urge to venture into new arenas continued with Electroma, which began life as a video for Human After All’s title track, but quickly expanded its scope to tell a complete, if simple, story about two robots and their doomed quest to become human. Hero Robot #1 and Hero Robot #2 aren’t just any robots, though, since they wear Thomas and Guy-Manuel’s signature helmets and the black leather outfits that were the band’s uniform at the time, complete with their logo spelled out in metal studs on their backs. So, even though they aren’t played by Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, who were busy enough handling directing duties (with Bangalter doubling as cinematographer), they are Daft Punk for all intents and purposes, and the scenario devised for them by Bangalter, de Homem-Christo, Cédric Hervet (also the film’s editor and script collaborator on Interstella), and Paul Hahn (also its executive producer) can be read as autobiographical if viewed from the right angle.

The film starts on colorful rock formations in the California desert, where a black Ferrari with the license plate “HUMAN” awaits our heroes. So does a fiery reckoning, which the flames under the title prefigure. There are, in fact, a number of cutaways to these flames sprinkled throughout the film, starting with the scene of Thomas and Guy-Manuel driving down an empty highway (shades of the opening car ride in Gerry) to the accompaniment of Todd Rundgren’s “International Feel.” So far, so normal, but then they pass a tractor ridden by a robot farmer with a Guy-Manuel helmet, which doesn’t prepare the viewer for the sight of a whole town where every man, woman, and child from all walks of life is a robot sporting their headgear as Rundgren’s spacy ’70s rock gives way to Brian Eno’s moody instrumental “In Dark Trees.”

image

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Pragmatic Rebellion of Roger Cormans The Tripby Jessica Ritchey

By Yasmina Tawil

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Pre-production for a movie rarely involves dropping acid, yet in the spirit of due diligence, producer/director Roger Corman spent a weekend in Big Sur, California doing this essential prep work for his 1967 odyssey The Trip. At the time, Corman was one of the main forces behind American International Pictures (AIP), a powerhouse independent that filled drive-ins and neighborhood theaters with titles as diverse as Viking Women vs. The Sea Serpent and The Wild Angels. Corman had originally studied to be an engineer, and brought that background into the movies: Just as an engineer puzzles over objects to see if they can work more efficiently, Corman looked at B-movies and figured out how to produce them on even more stripped-down budgets and schedules.

It also meant that if he was going to make a movie about LSD, he had to try it first. Hippies, and their acid trips, were a subject that were often overly romanticized or condemned. Cormans pragmatic remove from the counterculture and its recreational drugs runs through the finished film. And it means The Trip has aged a good deal better than many countercultural curios like Skidoo or The Strawberry Statement. Corman sympathizes with the youthful impulse to rebel, but hes also keenly perceptive about what happens when rebels age into their 30s, and the growing pains, in work and in love, are more acutely felt. Expectations about careers and relationships that would sustain and fulfill them start coming apart at the seams.

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Pragmatic Rebellion of Roger Corman’s The Trip by Jessica Ritchey

By Yasmina Tawil

image

Pre-production for a movie rarely involves dropping acid, yet in the spirit of due diligence, producer/director Roger Corman spent a weekend in Big Sur, California doing this essential prep work for his 1967 odyssey The Trip. At the time, Corman was one of the main forces behind American International Pictures (AIP), a powerhouse independent that filled drive-ins and neighborhood theaters with titles as diverse as Viking Women vs. The Sea Serpent and The Wild Angels. Corman had originally studied to be an engineer, and brought that background into the movies: Just as an engineer puzzles over objects to see if they can work more efficiently, Corman looked at B-movies and figured out how to produce them on even more stripped-down budgets and schedules.

It also meant that if he was going to make a movie about LSD, he had to try it first. Hippies, and their acid trips, were a subject that were often overly romanticized or condemned. Corman’s pragmatic remove from the counterculture and its recreational drugs runs through the finished film. And it means The Trip has aged a good deal better than many countercultural curios like Skidoo or The Strawberry Statement. Corman sympathizes with the youthful impulse to rebel, but he’s also keenly perceptive about what happens when rebels age into their 30s, and the growing pains, in work and in love, are more acutely felt. Expectations about careers and relationships that would sustain and fulfill them start coming apart at the seams.

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By Yasmina Tawil

Portrait of the Artist: Magic Mike XXL By K. Austin Collins

By Yasmina Tawil

To start his day, Jerry Mulligan, the hero of Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 musical An American in Paris, does a curious thing. He’s an ex-G.I. in Paris who lives in a studio above a restaurant and café. It’s a cheap spot—small, like his income, with what little room there is being overwhelmed by clustered bouquets of old paint brushes and studious stacks of better artists’ books. Starting the day at home means, first, giving himself a little room to maneuver.

And so, in order to work, he hoists his bed up to the ceiling with a pulley, grabs a towel from the clothesline above his bed, kicks a stool aside to make way for a fold-out table, corners an overlarge den chair to replace it with one smaller. He opens the patio doors and, taking in the sun for a moment, greets the day—then he hops back to business, setting the table, picking an outfit, setting out the coffee pot. This all happens in a matter of seconds, an automatic series of kicks, spins, and slaps, nimbly matched to the cosmopolitan orchestral swing of George Gershwin’s eponymous jazz suite. Mulligan does it without thinking. And Minnelli’s amused, astonished camera gently pans to and fro, eager to capture what happens in one long and, despite the cluttered setting, spacious image.

It is a ritual: practiced, well-worn and precisely choreographed, with no pretensions to appear otherwise. But Mulligan’s body goes through these motions with refreshed spontaneity, subsuming the practical need to get ready beneath his wary joy at the prospect of a new day and the unlikely possibilities it might provide. It seems he cannot help but infuse the ritual with feeling.

Mulligan may be a failed painter, but he is nevertheless, in the film’s view, an artist, a man who naturally inflects a routine as banal as tidying up his apartment with a sense of complex expression. He’s an artist by virtue of being played and designed by one: the dance-auteur Gene Kelly, whose peculiar talent as a choreographer and performer was for fashioning the everyday into an excuse for his characters’ creative impulses to run amok. That was his genius—he could make a dance, or a prop, out of anything.

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