SCREENING LOG - 8/7/2006-8/13/2006

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Splendor in the Grass (1961, Elia Kazan)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055471/
TSPDT #884
Wasn't sure what to expect going into this one. Kazan can be brilliantly emotive (ON THE WATERFRONT), overcooked (BABY DOLL), or sometimes even both (A FACE IN THE CROWD, STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE). A William Ince (PICNIC) screenplay wasn't terribly encouraging. But they sure don't pull no punches from the get-go, with Beatty on Wood in his convertible like a beaver slapping the dam. Well for 1961 standards at least. The next hour is a lot of fawning and pawing between the leads alternating with peering and sneering by their parents and the high school crowd (all played by actors who look like they're old enough to teach high school). All jibing aside, I must say that the first half of this film nailed some great moments that capture the thrill of teenage lust. That Wood and Beatty are well beyond teenage years makes their emotionally vulnerable, hormonally charged performances the more impressive (as Jon Lovitz as the Master Thespian on Saturday Night Live used to say, "'Tis ACTING!"). Wood is especially electric with her eyes that give off both innocence, lascivious desire and fear of unknown, unspeakable consequences.

I was totally expecting those consequences to come into play in the second half -- and perhaps it's a credit to Ince that he didn't settle for something so realistic and perhaps cliched as a teen pregancy. Or maybe he was just too chickendoody back in 1960 to deal with such a scandalous (but common) situation. So instead he concocts one ridiculous plot twist after another involving a bad night of foiled sexual intention, leading to nymphomaniacal hysteria, a mental institution, the '29 stock crash, a meet-cute with a redeeming angel at a Greenwich Village Italian joint, several mild doses of Freudian b.s., and a nightclub number with Phyllis Diller (ironcially, the most realistic and down-to-earth presence in the second half of the film). Natalie Wood, so nuanced and sensitive in the first half, plays it up in the second half for Oscar-reaching effect and scorches her character to the ground in self-parody. But she's nothing compared to the Actor's Studio ham who plays Beatty's rich yokel dad like a stray caricature from John Ford's stock company. So you get some of Kazan's best and worst in one film. Were they even aware of how much they cannibalized themselves in the second half or were they really taking themselves that seriously? Makes for quite a fascinating train wreck.
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Before Stonewall (1984, John Scagliotti, Greta Schiller, Robert Rosenberg)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088782/
Certainly an informative doc, probably ahead of its time. Looking at it, one can gague how much (or how little) the documentary genre has evolved in the past 20 years. It's your basic talking-heads-and-archival-footage history doc that one sees in the History Channel and PBS, though a lot less souped up than the glossier oral history docs of today. Instead of the smooth editing and musical transitions we take for granted, this one takes us back to the good old days of linear editing on the Steenbeck, and it shows. There are hard, awkward sound and visual cuts galore. I personally am not averse to this relative crude style -- though I'd say that this style one made less by choice than by the lack of resources to afford a really polished fine cut. Again, it's not necessarily a detraction in my book, but it goes without saying that a documentary with these production values wouldn't get aired on mainstream TV today.

That said, the content is rich, traveling through 5 decades of gay and lesbian American history, going into how gays and lesbians lived in each era. At times I kind of wished it would give less of a gloss and go more indepth with some of the points it touched on, such as to how society debated the controversy as to whether homosexuality was a psychosexual malfunction or a normal state of being (a debate that has shifted to the field of genetics today). The most interesting thing I learned was how World War II may well have sown the seeds for a national gay and lesbian community, in that it connected gays and lesbians from around the country to each other, and led many of them to stay in port cities after being discharged, creating communities that would continue to grow long after the war.

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Personal Archive: Travis Miles
Travis Miles, one of the curators at Anthology Film Archives, is sadly packing his bags for sunny Los Angeles. While he'll be sure to get ample doses of surf and smog, I doubt he'll find a gig as good as he had in Anthology. I'm not sure just how many or how good the arthouse or alternative theatres are in LA. He will be missed.

He bid us New Yorkers farewell with a cinematic "mixtape" culled from his personal archives, and it made for a fascinating look into a cinephile's tastes and preoccupations. Off the top of my head:

- close-up shots of Andy Lau barfing after eating bull penis and singing a folk guitar from some undiscernible Johnny To movies
- "Santa Claus with Punch and Judy" -- a very disturbing "children's" show with Punch and Judy inflicting extreme damage on each other for a roomful of enraptured kids
- A freaky excerpt from Jean Rouch's African documentary RAIN DANCE IN BOUKOKI
- An ultra-cheesy music video of the title song from BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, performed by The Coupe de Villes, an 80's rock group led by director John Carpenter
- A scene from a French DVD of Michael Mann's HEAT with Al Pacino yelling at Hank Azaria in French (making his acting look totally absurd)
- A moving sequence about the breakup of a relationship from an unidentified early Yvonne Rainer film.
- A scene with Donald Sutherland enjoying a snake slithering all over his face (can anyone identify what this is from?)
- Three elaborately choreographed long takes from Miklos Jancso films

Thanks for these memories, Travis!

I keep meaning to post something music related along with my reviews. This week I have exciting stuff to report. Saw Sonic Youth for the first time, along with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2nd time), at McCarren Pool in Williamsburg Brooklyn, the world's capital of hip. Tickets were going at $40 a pop, but the gf and I decided to just picnic outside the pool and listen for free. Then we sniffed around the premises and found an area that was just fencing with green netting temporarily put up to obscure the view. We watched YYY's on tippy toes and then for Sonic Youth we and others got the courage to tear down the netting. But then some security guard put it back up. Five mins later we tore it back down, and then he came -- this went on for over an hour before he finally gave up. Another victory for anarchists/voyeurs/cheapskates!

As for the music, it was sublime. Karen O was fun to watch as always (she wore a red and gold costume with a huge collar thingy that looked like a cross between Pharaoh Ramses and Fu Manchu) though I think her electricity is much more intense in a small ballroom setting. Fun but not as great as the last time I saw them (for $25). Sonic Youth was mostly marvellous, though they kind of petered out towards the end with slow undanceable stuff. They played a lot from the new album. But they did kick it off with "Daydream Nation" a masterpiece of a song that I always dreamed of hearing live. Kim Gordon, pushing 50, was arguably more electric than Karen O -- she had on a sheer silver dress that flowed in the wind whether she was tearing her guitar up or spinning like a true free spirit. Very inspiring, and best of all, FREE!

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