by CJ Mulholland
Artwork of the Day: Droll Stories (by CJ Mulholland)
Monthly Archives: August 2020
Music Video of the Day: I Forgive It All By Mudcrutch (2016, directed by Sean Penn and Samuel Bayer)
This was one of Tom Petty’s final songs and it’s also one of his best. This somber song features Petty looking back on his own past and forgiving his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship while he was growing up.
The video was shot on location in Los Angeles and simply features a man driving while thinking about the past. Of course, in the video, that man is played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who grew up not in Los Angeles but in Wales. However, Hopkins has spoken of having a similarly difficult childhood to Petty’s.
This video was directed by actor Sean Penn, who was a friend of Petty’s, and Samuel Bayer. Bayer has directed several music videos but will probably always be best known for directing Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Enjoy!
Film Review: Insignificance (dir by Nicolas Roeg)
The 1985 film, Insignificance, opens in New York City in the 1950s.
On the streets of New York, a crowd has gathered to watch as the Actress (Theresa Russell), a famous sex symbol, is filmed standing on a grate while wearing a white dress. Beneath the street and the Actress, a fan has been set up and the crowd of onlookers cheers as the Actress’s skirt is blown up around her hips, again and again. Standing in the crowd, the Actress’s husband, the Ballplayer (Gary Busey), watches and shakes his head in disgust. After the scene has been shot, the Actress hops in a taxi while the Ballplayer chases after her. A very famous man is in town and the Actress is on her way to pay him a visit.
In a nearby bar, the Senator (Tony Curtis), drinks and talks and sweats. Though it may not be obvious from looking at him, the Senator is a very powerful man. He’s leading an investigations into subversives who may be trying to bring down the United States government. He may look like a small-time mobster but the Senator can make and destroy people on a whim. He’s come to New York on a very specific mission. He and his goons are planning on pressuring another famous man into testifying before the Senator’s committee.
Though they don’t know it, both the Actress and the Senator are planning on dropping in on the same man. The Professor (Michael Emil) is a world-renowned genius. When we first see him, he is sitting alone in a hotel room and looking at a watch that has stopped at 8:15. The public may know the Professor for his eccentricities but, in private, he is a haunted man. The Professor’s work was instrumental in the creation of the first atomic bomb. And now, with both the U.S. and Russia stockpiling their atomic arsenals and the world seemingly on the verge of war, the Professor fears that his work will be the end of humanity.
Though none of the characters are actually named over the course of the film, it should be obvious to anyone with even a slight knowledge of American history that the four main characters are meant to be versions of Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, and Albert Einstein. Insignificance imagines a meeting between these four cultural icons and really, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which they all could have met. Joe DiMaggio actually was present during the filming of the subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch and most accounts record his reaction as being not that different from what’s portrayed in Insignificance. Albert Einstein was suspected of having communist sympathies and several scientific figures (including many who worked on the Manhattan Project) were investigated during the McCarthy era. Finally, Marilyn Monroe was often frustrated by her “dumb blonde” image and said that she found Albert Einstein to be a very attractive man. When she died, a biography of Einstein was reportedly found on her nightstand.
In the film, the Senator pressures The Professor to appear before his committee. It’s not long after the Senator leaves that the Actress arrives. The Actress announces that she’s fascinating by the theory of relativity and, using balloons, toys, and a flashlight, she proceeds to demonstrate the theory for the Professor. The befuddled Professor is impressed. The Actress informs the Professor that he’s at the top of her list. Meanwhile, downstairs in another hotel room, the Senator is met by a prostitute who bears a resemblance to the Actress. The Ballplayer sits in the hotel bar, tearing up a picture of the Actress and wondering why their marriage is failing.
Because this film was directed by Nicolas Roeg, the film is full of seemingly random flashbacks. We see the Senator as an altar boy, trying to impress a smiling priest. We see the Ballplayer getting yelled at by his domineering father. We see the Actress, growing up poor and being ogled, at first by the young boys at an orphanage and later by Hollywood execs. Meanwhile, The Professor continually sees the destruction of Hiroshima. His visions are apocalyptic and, towards the end of the film, he even gets a glimpse into a possible future of atomic hellfire. It’s a film about fame and cultural transition, a film where people look to celebrities for hope while doomsday comes closer and closer.
Or something like that. To be honest, I wanted to like Insignificance more than I actually did. As is typical with so many of Nicolas Roeg’s films, Insignificance has an intriguing premise but the execution is a bit uneven. There are moments of absolute brilliance. Theresa Russell and Gary Busey both give perfect performances and the film’s final apocalyptic vision will haunt you. And then there are moments when the film becomes a bit of a slog and the dialogue starts to get a bit too pretentious and on-the-nose. Michael Emil has some good moments as the Professor but there are other moments when he seems to be lost. Meanwhile, Tony Curtis gives such a terrible performance as The Senator that he throws the entire film off-balance. Curtis bulges his eyes like a madman and delivers his lines like a comedian doing a bad 1930s gangster impersonation.
That said, Insignificance is still an interesting film. It’s uneven but intriguing. Though the film may take place in the 50s and may deal with a quartet of historical figures, it’s themes are still relevant in 2020. People still tend to idealize celebrities. Politicians still hold onto power by exploiting fear. The possibility that everything could just end one day is still a very real one. Insignificance is a film worth watching, even if it doesn’t completely work.
The Odder End Of Odds And Ends : Jim Woodring’s “And Now, Sir – Is THIS Your Missing Gonad?”
It’s always a tricky proposition to know what to say about Jim Woodring’s work simply because the depth and scope of his creative vision is both deeper and wider than the ability of mere language — even superlative-laden language — to keep up with. Which, yeah, is a roundabout way of saying that so much has been said about him already that there’s now much new to say — but then he comes out with a new book, and you figure that it would be a shame to ignore it just because you’re bound to say “it’s great, you should buy it.” So we’ll get that part out of the way first and see where things take us.
To that end, then : Woodring’s got a new book out from Fantagraphics, a handsome hardcover segmented into color-coded and thematically-linked pseudo-chapters called And Now, Sir – Is THIS Your Missing Gonad?
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The Pledge (2001, directed by Sean Penn)
Jerry Black (Jack Nicholson) is a detective who, on the verge of retirement, goes to one final crime scene. The victim is a child named Ginny Larsen and when Ginny’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) demands that Jerry not only promise to find the murderer but that he pledge of his immortal soul that he’ll do it, it’s a pledge that Jerry takes seriously. Jerry’s partner, Stan (Aaron Eckhart), manages to get a confession from a developmentally disabled man named Jay Wadenah (Benicio del Toro) but Jerry doesn’t believe that the confession is authentic. When Wadenah commits suicide in his cell, the police are ready to close the case but Jerry remembers his pledge. He remains determined to find the real killer.
Even though he’s retired, the case continues to obsess Jerry. He becomes convinced that Ginny was the latest victim of a serial killer and he even buys a gas station because it’s located in the center of where most of the murders were committed. Jerry befriend a local waitress named Lori (Robin Wright) and, when Lori tells him about her abusive ex, he invites Lori and her daughter to stay with him. Lori’s daughter, Chrissy (Pauline Roberts), is around Ginny’s age and when she tells Jerry about a “wizard” who gives her toys, Jerry becomes convinced that she’s being targeted by the same man who killed Ginny. Even as Jerry and Lori fall in love, the increasingly unhinged Jerry makes plans to use Chrissy as bait to bring the killer out of hiding.
The Pledge was Sean Penn’s third film as a director. As with all of Penn’s directorial efforts, with the notable exception of Into The Wild, The Pledge is relentlessly grim. Freed, by virtue of his celebrity, from worrying about whether or not anyone would actually want to sit through a depressing two-hour film about murdered children, Penn tells a story with no definite resolution and no real hope for the future. The Pledge is a cop film without action and a mystery without a real solution and a character study of a man whose mind you don’t want to enter. It’s well-made and it will keep you guess but it’s also slow-paced and not for the easily depressed.
The cast is made up of familiar character actors, most of whom probably took their roles as a favor to Penn. Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Noonan, Patricia Clarkson, Sam Shephard, Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, and Mickey Rourke have all got small roles and they all give good performances, even if it’s sometimes distracting to have even the smallest, most inconsequential of roles played by someone familiar. Most importantly, The Pledge actually gives Jack Nicholson a real role to play. Jerry Black is actually an interesting and complex human being and Nicholson dials back his usual shtick and instead actually makes the effort to explore what makes Jerry tick and what lays at the root of his obsession.
Though definitely not for everyone, The Pledge sticks with you and shows what Jack Nicholson, who now appears to be retired from acting, was capable of when given the right role.
Artwork of the Day: The Pleasure Seekers (by Lou Marchetti)
by Lou Marchetti
Music Video of the Day: You Don’t Know How It Feels by Tom Petty (1994, directed by Phil Joanu)
Believe it or not, this song was considered to be controversial when it was first released. Even in 1994, there were apparently people shocked to discover that some musicians not only smoked weed but openly admitted it. The song actually played on some radio stations with the words “roll’ and “joint” blanked out. On MTV, the lyric was changed to “let’s hit another joint.” I’m not sure how “let’s hit another joint” is somehow less pro-weed than “let’s roll another joint.”
This video was directed by Phil Joanou, who also did several videos for U2 and who directed the cult classic, Three O’Clock High. The woman in the video is Raven Snow, who is apparently best known for appearing in several episodes of Red Shoe Diaries. Remember Red Shoe Diaries?
I miss Tom Petty. Don’t we all?
Film Review: Radioactive (dir by Marjane Satrapi)
If you want to talk about the birth of the modern world, you have to talk about Marie Curie.
That’s the argument made by the biopic, Radioactive. It’s a compelling argument and it’s very much correct. Born in Poland and a citizen of France, Marie Curie was the 1st woman to win the Nobel Prize, the 1st person and only woman to win the Nobel Prize a second time, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She shared her first Nobel Prize (in Physics) with her husband, Pierre. After Pierre’s tragic death, Marie won her second Nobel, this time for Chemistry. Both her daughter and her son-in-law would go on to win Nobel Prizes of their own and the Curie family continues to produce notable scientists to this very day.
Marie Curie is best known for her pioneering research on radioactivity, a coin that she termed. She developed techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes. She discovered that radioactivity could be used to battle aggressive forms of cancer. Without her research, there would be no nuclear power, no chemotherapy, no X-ray machines, and no atomic weaponry. Marie Curie is one of the few people about whom it can legitimately be said that they changed the world. Of course, Curie herself later died of a radiation poisoning.
Radioactive opens with Marie (played by Rosamund Pike) on the verge of death, before flashing back to show us her early life and she went from being an obscure scientist to becoming the world renowned Madame Curie. We watch as she meets and falls in love with Pierre Curie (Sam Riley). The film celebrates not only their love for each other but also takes a look at Marie’s struggle to escape from Pierre’s shadow. Though she was acknowledged as his partner and won her first Nobel Prize with him, it’s not until Pierre is trampled death by a bunch of horses that Marie’s genius is truly acknowledged. The scenes in which Marie expresses her frustration at being overshadowed by her husband are some of the best in the film, largely because the film doesn’t make the mistake of attempting to portray Pierre as intentionally stealing all of the glory for himself. Instead, society just assumes that Pierre deserves most of the credit because …. well, Pierre’s a man and Marie’s a woman.
Unfortunately, Radioactive makes some perplexing narrative choices. Throughout the film, there are random moments when we get a sudden flashfoward and see random people interacting with radioactivity. For instance, we go to a hospital in the 1950s and we listen as a doctor explains that he’s going to use radioactivity to help a patient combat cancer. Another scene features the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. We see the nuclear tests in Los Alamos. One moment, Marie is crying in the middle of the street. The next minute, an ambulance drives past her, on the way to Chernobyl. On the one hand, it’s easy to see what the film’s going for. It’s showing us everything, good and bad, that will happen as a result of Marie Curie’s work. It makes the very relevant argument that sometimes, in order to get something good (less pollution, treatments for cancer) you have to risk something bad, like the possibility of being vaporized by an atomic bomb. But the flashforwards are handled so clumsily that they actually detract from the film. When I watched the sequence taking place at the hospital, I found myself wondering if Marie Curie discovered bad acting before or after she discovered radioactivity. This is probably one of the few instances where a biopic would have been helped by taking a more traditional approach to its material.
On the plus side, Radioactive does feature a very good performance from Rosamund Pike, who really deserves to be known for more than just killing Neil Patrick Harris in Gone Girl. (Don’t spoiler alert me. The film’s nearly 6 years old. If you haven’t seen it yet, you weren’t ever going to.) Radioactive is currently playing on Amazon Prime and you should definitely watch it if you’re planning on keeping radioactive isotopes in your desk at work. Seriously, don’t do it.
Who? (1974, directed by Jack Gold)
Lucas Martino (Joseph Bova), an American scientist who was previously captured by the Soviets in East Berlin and who was gravely injured in a terrible car crash, is finally returned to the Americans. But is it really Dr. Martino? Making identification difficult is that the Soviets had to totally rebuild Martino’s body after his car crash. He appears to still have one of his original arms but he’s otherwise a cyborg. He now has a metal head with an expressionless face. Is he really Lucas Martino or is he a spy? Even though his fingerprints check out, it’s possible that the real Martino’s arm could have been surgically grafted onto an imposter’s body.
It falls to agent Shawn Rogers (Elliot Gould) to determine whether or not this Martino is the real Martino. Rogers interrogates the man claiming to be Martino but struggles to determine whether or not the man is who he claims to be. Complicating matters is that, even if Martino is Martino, it’s possible that he could have possibly been brainwashed by Shawn’s Soviet counterpart, Col. Azarin (Trevor Howard). As Shawn interrogates Martino, the film frequently shows Azarin asking Martino the exact same questions. Is the film showing what Shawn thinks happened or is the film showing what actually happened?
Who? is based on a classic sci-fi novel by Algis Budrys. It’s pretty faithful to its source material but it doesn’t really work as a film. Some of that is because, despite the fact that Bova gives a good performance, the cyborg makeup is never really convincing. Many potentially dramatic scenes are ruined by how silly Bova looks. Trevor Howard is too British to be convincing as a sinister Russian and Elliott Gould is likewise miscast as Shawn Rogers. Gould was always at his best playing quirky, counter-cultural characters. Just think about his performance in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, where Gould was such a strange P.I. that it allowed Altman to deconstruct the entire genre. In Who?, Gould is meant to be a much more conventional secret agent and he seems lost in the role.
Speaking of Robert Altman, he’s the type of director who probably could have worked wonders with Who? I think Michael Crichton probably could have pulled off the film. Maybe Mike Hodges, as well. But Jack Gold was a much less adventurous director than any of these filmmakers and his direction in Who? is often too low-key and conventional. I kept waiting for the film to really go for it and challenge my expectations and surprise me but it never did. Who? doesn’t seem to know what type of film it wants to be. Is it a spy thriller or a sci-fi film or an examination of what it means to be human? It tries to be all three but just doesn’t succeed.
The idea behind the movie is a good one and Budrys’s book remains intriguing. This is one that I wouldn’t mind seeing remade, perhaps by someone like Denis Villeneuve or Alex Garland.
Artwork of the Day: The Stocking Parade (by Earle Bergey)
by Earle Bergey
Through the Shattered Lens 