strange things are happening like never before/My baby told me I would have to go/I can’t be good no more/Once like I did before/I can’t be good, baby/Honey, because the world’s gone wrong.” — “World Gone Wrong,” traditional blues as performed by Bob Dylan
“I see skies of blue and clouds of white, the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night/And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.” — George David Weiss and G. Douglas’ “What a Wonderful World”
Like no other filmmaker, David Lynch knows in his soul that the world gone wrong and the wonderful one are the same — not mirror images that shift back and forth according to the phase of the moon or some giant collective whim, but two amorphous halves of a whole, their poison and nectar seeping into each other. Even in the context of Lynch’s most dismal movie, 1990′s “Wild at Heart,” or his latest, the disappointing, noirish “Lost Highway,” it’s futile to discuss the dark vision of David Lynch, simply because that vision doesn’t exist independent of an intense, deep-rooted romanticism.
Not even 1976′s “Eraserhead” — Lynch’s first and perhaps most unsettling movie, a singular exploration of fear, awkwardness and loneliness — can be called a nightmare picture of the world. It exists in its own world, one in which even the most slippery, unnerving nightmare wouldn’t be any kind of departure. And yet the movie’s final shot, the hero, Henry, locked in an embrace with “the lady in the radiator” — his comforting romantic vision come to life, with her cotton-candy hair and cheese-puff cheeks — is nothing short of a grainy valentine to silent-movie romanticism. Henry’s eyes are closed in exaggerated, childlike bliss, his raised eyebrows betraying both total exhaustion and a relief he hadn’t dared hope for. “Eraserhead” isn’t a vision of a world gone wrong — it’s a vision of a world in which nothing has ever been right. And yet even in this world, where the hero’s only chance for romantic fulfillment is a tiny lady who sings and dances inside his radiator, his dream — or rather, the dream he’d have dreamed if he’d dared — comes true: He gets the girl.
The only problem is, Lynch hasn’t always been true to his vision — and “Lost Highway” is a prime example. Lynch’s best work — “Eraserhead,” “The Elephant Man,” the “Twin Peaks” pilot and the incomparable “Blue Velvet” — are so astonishing, so subtle and florid at the same time, that even a competent, tolerable movie like “Lost Highway,” with its slashes of brilliance, seems like a betrayal. Here, Lynch has traded some of his disturbing originality for noir formula and schticky weirdness.
The story revolves around jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), who may or may not have killed his sultry, vampy wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette, in a magnificent, smoldering performance — hardly a surprise, after her stellar work in “Beyond Rangoon” and “Flirting with Disaster”), and is sentenced to death. Before he fries, though, a mysterious thing happens: After having a frightening hallucination, he melts into another identity. When the guards make their rounds, they find Fred gone from his cell and grease monkey Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) in his place. Pete is freed — there are no charges against him — and he tries to go back to his old life and his old girlfriend (Natasha Gregson Wagner, whose fragility is touching). Then, one day, the spitting image of Renee (Arquette again, reincarnated as a luscious blonde, a gangster’s moll named Alice) slithers into his world only to split it apart.
There’s no need to even try to make sense of the plot: Lynch, who cowrote the script with “Wild at Heart” author Barry Gifford, is merely playing around with the idea of twisted, intertwined fates and the notion of the eternal return. This movie’s big “meanings” are actually the most insignificant things about it. Aspiring to be the most artful and profound Lynch film yet, “Lost Highway” is really his most facile. The short guy in white-face makeup and dark-red lips (Robert Blake), who shows up now and then to make mysterious pronouncements and creep people out, is a symbol of the weirdness for weirdness’s sake that does “Lost Highway” in. Most of the bizarre happenings seem to have come from a recipe, instead of being plumbed from the subterranean reaches of Lynch’s heart, which is the effect Lynch’s ideas have at their best.
And yet even in “Lost Highway,” despite all its dank hopelessness, Lynch’s romanticism creeps through like a thick purple vine — one that bleeds. The movie’s opening 40 minutes are a numbing vignette of a disintegrating marriage that could have been filmed in stop-time, the pace is so deliberate and awkward. Arquette, in her fearless, starkly feline performance as Renee, is a heartbreaking femme fatale. With her sleek, dark Bettie Page hairdo and cushiony curves, she’s a fleshy, enticing ghost conjured out of pure shadow and light.
Fred and Renee talk to each other in clipped sentences that have been smashed flat, dried out, designed (like their starkly furnished ultramodern house, its rooms bisected by sharp diagonal shadows even in broad daylight) to communicate only the bare minimum: “You’re up early.” “That dog woke me.” “Who the hell owns that dog?” But the spaces between their words hang in the air, heavy and silent, like carbon monoxide. Their lovemaking is so rigidly mechanical, it’s painful to watch: Fred reaches for her across their shadowy bed, and she obliges, slithery and seductive as a serpent but completely vacant, despite Fred’s obvious desire for her. Afterward, she pats his back stiffly, as if her hand were an android’s. The brief scene does more than telegraph psychic suffering: It delineates, with a scalpel’s precision, the negative space that’s replaced the erotic delight that this couple used to take in each other.
Once “Lost Highway” starts taking its myriad hairpin plot turns, it loses that suggestive power and becomes more calculated as it moves on. That’s particularly disappointing in light of the rawness of Lynch’s last picture, the much-maligned 1992 “Fire Walk with Me.” A “prequel” to the “Twin Peaks” series that explains exactly what happened to the murdered Laura Palmer, “Fire Walk with Me” is a bumbling mess of a movie, sloppy and strange in all the wrong places — yet it’s so intense, moving and upsetting it stays with you. Sheryl Lee, as Laura, digs so deep into her character, she seems to turn it inside out: She’s a victim not merely of incest (her father is her rapist and her killer) but of her own misplaced desires and self-destruction, and her performance is like one silent, sustained wail of pain.
What’s most astonishing about “Fire Walk With Me” is the way Lynch walks Laura through her suffering — he doesn’t get off on it. Through the camera lens, he makes sure her beauty remains uneclipsed and uncompromised, even in the midst of her self-inflicted degradation. Although “Fire Walk with Me” bitterly disappointed most “Twin Peaks” fans, it’s really the natural tail end of the gracefully twisting thread that Lynch started with the series’ pilot: That breathtaking opening episode, with all its artful tone shifts and off-balance humor, ultimately reads as one mournful, elegiac love letter to Laura Palmer. In both direct and unspoken ways, Lynch shows how the whole town — from Grace Zabriskie as Laura’s crumpling, grief-stricken mother, to icy Joan Chen, who closes her lumber plant as a gesture of respect for Laura and her family — feels devastated by her loss. Even his exaggeratedly peaceful shots of pine trees swaying in the breeze are just another way of reminding us of her absence. Angelo Badalamenti’s plush, resonating guitar chords sound like sonnets. They’re miniature hymns to her beauty, which hasn’t even been diminished by the fact that she’s now just a pale corpse washed up on the shore.
It should be disturbing that Lynch lavishes so much love and attention on a blue-lipped corpse, and yet his love for his character Laura is more lyrical than necrophiliac. She’s Molly Malone, or the Bonnie who lies over the ocean, the girl who died of a fever or was perhaps lost at sea, and maybe all it takes is the right song to bring her back. In an age of movies filled with hip irony, what sets Lynch apart is his total lack of irony. His exquisite “Elephant Man” delves so fearlessly into the spongy heart of loneliness that in the end, it isn’t a movie about a monster at all, but a meditation on how even the most well-adjusted among us can at times feel painfully freakish and out of place.
In “Blue Velvet” — a movie so in love with both the familiar conventions and the dangerous possibilities of the movies — the opening and closing shots of velvet-red roses against an ice-blue sky are like twin promises. Even in the midst of the nihilism of “Lost Highway,” we get a glimpse of a love that’s hermetically pure, if only for a moment: Alice steps out of a car and walks toward Pete as if she were buoyed by a cloud, while Lou Reed sings “This Magic Moment” on the soundtrack, the words hovering in the air like soap bubbles the two new lovers could actually touch. For Lynch, this is a wonderful world, even when it goes spinning off its axis. Even if the guy can’t always get the girl — or bring her back with a sonnet or a song — he knows she’s out there, somewhere, if only because he can hear her, alive and laughing, in the wind that rushes through the trees. It takes a crackpot to make a movie as deeply terrifying as “Blue Velvet.” And it takes a sweetheart to make one so impossibly beautiful.
the new mob drama “Donnie Brasco” is the story of a federal agent (Johnny Depp) who goes undercover to bring down the mob and winds up bonding with the man (Al Pacino) he has to betray. That subject has already been done so indelibly in the first season of “Wiseguy” that it’s hard to see how any other treatment could go deeper.
“Donnie Brasco” doesn’t. The pleasure of the movie is the smarts and craft provided by the director, Mike Newell, and the screenwriter, Paul Attanasio (working from the book by federal agent Joseph Pistone, written with Richard Woodley). And if it’s always clear where the story’s headed, there’s nothing predictable about how Depp, as Pistone (a k a Donnie Brasco), and Pacino, as his small-time wise guy mentor, Lefty Ruggiero, get there. You wouldn’t mistake “Donnie Brasco” for a great movie or an important one, but it’s something that’s become almost as rare in American movies: a consistently absorbing and intelligent adult entertainment.
The emotional impact that the movie accumulates is all the more impressive when you realize how clear-eyed it is. “Donnie Brasco” is set among the mid-levels of New York’s Bonnano family during the late ’70s and early ’80s. Watching the wise guys milling around outside the family hangout, hoping to catch a word of approval from the big shots, may remind you of the dock workers in “On the Waterfront” angling to get a day’s pay from the foreman. But Newell and Attanasio don’t ask us to sympathize with these men. And they’re not making the movie to get jacked up on the garish show-biz style of their hoods, the way Martin Scorsese and Nicolas Pileggi were in “Goodfellas” and “Casino.”
Newell and Attanasio aren’t living out any fantasies here, and they don’t allow their actors — among them Bruno Kirby, and Michael Madsen as Donnie and Lefty’s big, scary boss — to degenerate into gangster schtick. We see these wise guys for what they are: paunchy, middle-aged men living out their own ruthless version of the old macho hokum about honor and loyalty, as well as the American credo of success. The perks of gangster life — the clothes and women and cash — make them feel like big shots.
There’s something almost comically small-time about the conventions these hoods observe, like the Christmas exchange of Hallmark cards stuffed with hundreds. Depp and Pacino turn the traditions into flawless deadpan routines. There’s an element of ridiculousness in the way Lefty walks Donnie through Little Italy, meticulously instructing him on how wise guys dress, talk, carry their money. Or the way Donnie later conjugates the various wise-guy meanings of the phrase “Forget about it” for the benefit of two fellow agents.
It’s been thrilling to watch Pacino’s work with younger actors in the last few years. Seeing him with Sean Penn in “Carlito’s Way” or with John Cusack in “City Hall,” you could feel a thread being spun from one generation of American actors to the next. That’s the same feeling that informed Pacino’s scenes with Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.” “Donnie Brasco” is the best in this series of duets.
Lefty can believe that he’s a somebody when he’s one-on-one with Donnie, ushering him into the mob world or playing host to him on Christmas Day in his shabby apartment. Among his cronies, he has to face how he’s failed to rise in the organization and, when he’s passed over in favor of Donnie, that he’s never going to. The role offers an actor a dozen different opportunities to go soft. Pacino doesn’t, even when Attanasio hands him a “What have I got to show for all my years” speech.
This is the warmest acting Pacino’s ever done. Lefty is the hood with feeling, a sentimental conception that Pacino dries out and makes three-dimensional. He’s vulnerable to Donnie, whom he sees as a surrogate son (his own is a junkie). If Donnie’s cover is blown, it’ll be Lefty who pays for bringing him into the family. Pacino carries all of Lefty’s disappointments and weariness in his stoop-shouldered gait, and all of his emotion in those huge, dark, baggy eyes. Pacino knows that sentimentalizing the character would cheapen him. His final scene is all the more heartbreaking for the economy of gesture and feeling he brings it. It’s an exit that does justice to both the actor and the role, and it leaves an ache in the movie.
In his book, Pistone (who’s now living under an assumed name and who still has a half-million-dollar contract on his head) acknowledges the toll his job took on his wife and daughters but says that he has no regrets about what he did. It’s curious, though, that the book’s last word belongs to Lefty Ruggiero. Pistone imagines a conversation that ends with Lefty asking him, “If you did so good exposing us, Donnie, whyzit you and your family gotta live a coverup for the rest of your lives?” Depp takes his cue from those doubts. For all the movie’s intelligence and craft, I can’t imagine it working without him. It’s a sensational performance. “Donnie Brasco” is Depp’s first fully adult role.
Here Depp is miles away from the dreamy, romantic presence of the gentle oddballs in “Edward Scissorhands,” “Benny and Joon” and “Don Juan DeMarco.” Yet this performance is a stunning reminder of the way actors carry their personalities with them from role to role. The movie hums with the tension of casting an instinctively expressive actor as a man whose life depends on being able to control his reactions. It’s unsettling because you can’t divorce your memories of that sweet young actor from this man who looks as if he’s being eaten alive from the inside out. Forced to take part in beatings, witnessing killings and disposing of the bodies, Pistone recedes into manufactured Mafioso role. Depp restricts his usual soft speaking voice to clipped, nearly grunted syllables. Even his cheeks seem to be hollowing out before our eyes. Depp’s Pistone learns to play “Donnie” so instinctively that he begins slipping into the role around his wife, Maggie (Anne Heche). And Depp makes you feel his fear that Joe Pistone won’t find his way back.
The scenes between Depp and Heche (who has the deceptively soft and pliant look of a `30s ingenue and gives a spiky, tenacious performance) have the prickly tension of real, unresolvable marital conflict. Maggie’s character isn’t an afterthought in the male world of the movie. She’s its reality check. Pistone loves this woman because she’s as tough as he is. And that’s what puts the marriage in jeopardy when he becomes more of an absence than a presence to his family. Implicit in these scenes is that Pistone is as caught up in this fantasy world as the hoods he’s working against.
The good guys win in “Donnie Brasco.” Joe Pistone’s undercover work resulted in dozens of convictions, and the moviemakers don’t pretend it didn’t make a difference. But there’s no triumph here. The feds seem as oblivious to the human cost of their work as the mob is. Between an aging hood flushed into the open and a young cop forced into hiding, the cost of winning just seems too damn high.
oh memories of Oscar of yore! In my wretched youth in the provincial 1950s,
Academy Awards night was my second favorite pagan high holy day — after
Halloween, when I could indulge in cinematic drag.
Perhaps nothing will ever match my electric ecstasy on the night in 1960 when
Elizabeth Taylor, still weak from her emergency tracheotomy at a London
hospital, won the Oscar for her role as a sultry call girl in “Butterfield 8.”
The next day at school, my feet scarcely touched the ground.
Still, year after year, I tune into the Academy Awards and hope for nirvana.
Nowadays, of course, we have our familiar preceptress, Barbara Walters, to
guide us into the evening with her annual pre-Oscar (or post-, depending on your time zone) special. Tonight, clad in
a white hostess gown, she greets us in a peculiar, stagy posture that is
half Loretta Young, half Ann-Margret, with just a touch of Gypsy Rose Lee.
Though I nearly pass out when Barbara confides that theater owners have
dubbed boring, horse-faced Harrison Ford “the star of the century,” I’m
mollified when she labels him “a poor schnook” as a child. Her other guests
have more pizzazz: cross-legged Woody Harrelson, looking like the Rasputin
Mahesh Yogi, gravely endorses “recycling sperm,” while hawk-eyed Lauren
Bacall imperiously oversees salmon-slicing at Zabar’s deli.
At last the Oscars begin, and I go into my usual frenzy of fury at the short
shrift given to the stars’ limousine-and-red-carpet arrival — a traditional,
sacred ritual for which Angelenos begin lining up at dawn. Why the hell
does the Academy think a billion people tune in around the globe?
This year the grand entrances are even more amateurishly treated than
usual — a vile, clichid “Entertainment Tonight” montage of jittery, ugly, cramped
shots of a handful of ill-chosen celebrities. But of course the idiotic
producers of this show want to reserve all possible time for Billy Crystal,
the Host Who Ate Tokyo.
Why in Dietrich’s name must we tolerate these endless shenanigans by smug,
corny hosts? — at the expense of the stars who are the true raison d’jtre of
the evening. I and every drag queen from Rome to Rio want to see gowns,
gowns and glamour! What’s the point of designers and jewelers lavishing all
that luxury on nominees if we can’t see the bloody stuff in all its glory?
After Crystal’s fully 15 minutes of narcissistic shtick, it’s outrageous
that the actual award winners like Cuba Gooding Jr. are rushed off the stage
by the fascist orchestra, which goes into Juan Peron mode after the requisite
30 seconds. I cheer when Gooding refuses to leave the mike and dances
around, shouting and carrying on in rebellion.
My anti-Crystal mood lifts somewhat when he lobs a juicy shot at Gloria
Steinem and provokes a welcoming wave of applause for Larry Flynt in the
audience. Despite the usual humanitarian sentimentality of the Academy
establishment (e.g., a droning, senescent Arthur Hiller), the pornographers
seem to be winning.
Fashion standouts are the royally composed and chiseled-cheek-boned Kristin
Scott Thomas; Nicole Kidman, svelte in elegant Chinese puce; Sigourney
Weaver, stiletto-slim in wine-red; and Lauren Holley, whose pert bosom juts
on display in a very forward manner.
Barbara Hershey, who has gone through more bizarre life changes than Jane
Fonda, has forever forsworn her flower-child roots by appearing in tumbling
Victorian ringlets and a lush, parrot-green gown that encroaches into the
aisle and threatens to swallow a very prim Jodie Foster in the next row.
Nervously clutching the hand of her moist boy toy, Hershey makes the
solitary Foster look more sexless than usual.
This year, the show is experimenting with sending out single presenters,
which does eliminate the usual asinine interplay of tittering duos stumbling over names longer than Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, but which
cruelly exposes a whole series of unprepared girly-girls — Mira Sorvino,
Sandra Bullock, the mealy-mouthed Winona Ryder — to more sacrificial pressure
than they deserve. What is this — Iphigenia at Aulis?
Introducing Madonna, Crystal takes a swipe at a squirming Barbra Streisand by
praising Madonna’s “class” for performing, despite not being nominated
herself. Class, maybe; hara-kiri most definitely. Why did Madonna think she
could carry off a quiet torch song live? Frowning and straining with deadly
earnest and awkwardly waving an errant left arm, she breathlessly quavers
off-key and manages to cast renewed doubt on her singing abilities. When a
relaxed, radiant Celine Dion comes on to pinch-hit for the next song, it’s an
unexpected relief.
Presenter Courtney Love, following Madonna’s shaky screw-up, looks like the
cat that swallowed the canary. Quel oneupsmanship! — as Holly Golightly might
say. More statuesque than Madonna, Love looks chic and confident in silky
white. I’m no fan of Hole, which I think overrated, but Love has sang-froid
and real dignity onstage — in the way the slouching, servile Winona Ryder or
klutzy, tatty Claire Danes do not.
Whoops! Lauren Bacall, against every prediction, doesn’t win the Oscar for
best supporting actress. Bacall looks like she’s going to cry. I am
devastated and rush downstairs to get a beer. This past weekend, AMC was
showing one of my favorite Bacall films, “Young Man with a Horn,” so I’m taking
this very hard. She’s in my pantheon of major divas.
A very stylish, sexy someone named Jessica Yu, accepting the Oscar for
documentary short subject, is looking absolutely fabulous and upstaging most
of the show’s official stars. She even gets off one of the best lines: “You
know you’ve entered new territory when your dress costs more than your film!”
Mazel tov to Ms. Yu, and here’s hoping we see more of her!
Despite being done to death on recent, hectoring PBS fund appeals, Michael
Flatley (formerly of “Riverdance”) and his “Lord of the Dance” troupe storm
onstage in a fiery burst of genuine creative energy. The red and black
leather costumes are a bit Pat Benatar (I love her; don’t get me wrong), but
all this sweaty physicality feels real good after Billy Crystal’s smarmy
nattering.
Debbie Reynolds, pushing a ship’s prow of enormous bosoms, sails to the mike
and pronounces her prompter text “drivel.” Out comes the sheepish
writer — her depressive nudge of a daughter, Carrie Fisher, hunchbacked and in
slacks. How remarkable that the postmenopausal mother seems more female and
more vital — the vampire lives!
Bounding onstage are the three indomitable stars of “The First Wives Club”:
Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton, bubbling over with infectious
glee. What fun! Their chemistry is so obvious that Hollywood has to be
crazy not to plan a sequel.
Jodie Foster strides purposefully out to give the screenplay awards. She
looks better standing up, her silver lami pants swishily glittering under a
white tunic. But then she opens her mouth, and out comes that horrible,
pinched, snide, nasal accent — Candace Bergen Goes to Yale on a Feminist Visa.
The evening is wearing down. I’m glad that Frances McDormand — an honest,
spunky Carol Burnett type — wins for best actress, but I’m peeved that
Geoffrey Rush gets best actor for mimicking a real-life person with a
disability — Hollywood p.c. with a vengeance. At least Ralph Fiennes didn’t
get it, thank heavens — what an awful, obvious actor. Only in a Harrison Ford
age could anyone think the uptight, antiseptic Fiennes sexy. Bring back Kirk
Douglas! — a dreamboat in his prime.
Well, I’m off. Can’t wait till next year!
i didn’t like “The English Patient.”
Another journalist girlfriend of mine was covering the party that voting
New York members of the Academy attended at famous Elaine’s. “How were
they?” I asked, wondering what the Academy people looked like.
“Prunes. Awful. Sucked dry,” she said.
“Any stars?”
“Old, old. Chita Rivera, Sylvia Miles and Tina Louise — Ginger from
‘Gilligan’s Island.’”
“Octogenarian Trim.”
“Exactly. Old slags who couldn’t get invited to the real one.” I
pictured some hairy old white vulture gawking at the rivulets of puckering
skin down the neckline of Tina Louise, trying to get her fucked up on
Frangelico. Ow.
Once again, the Academy has made it perfectly clear that Retards are the
order of the day. This has been true ever since “The Miracle Worker.”
Anybody portraying somebody with the bootprint of a clumsy god pressed into
their forehead — waggling palsies and tongues like tennis balls — will
take home a naked gold man on Oscar Night. The Academy has never figured
out that doing those spasms and tics is much easier than simply delivering
an emotionally complicated line.
Last night, added to Billy Bob Thornton and Geoffrey Rush were ACTUAL disabled
persons David Helfgott and Muhammad Ali, both doddering vegetables,
although Helfgott was still able to crank out a savant edition of “Flight
of the Bumblebee” better than most ninth-grade piano competition winners.
Ali, teetering on the verge of any unimaginable flight of punch-ruined
behavior, had to be escorted away from the cameras as quickly as possible
before he urinated on Sigourney Weaver or something equally unsocialized.
When the camera was cutting away to people’s faces Moved by the Presence of
Ali, they made the mistake of showing James Woods, who was shaking his head
in agony and saying something out of the side of his mouth like “Jesus, get
that poor uncomprehending infant off the stage. Give him some soft foam
animals and a bag of Cheetos, and let him go play with Rodney King.” The
cameras quickly pulled all the way back to the 900th row in the balcony and
focused on Oscar’s golden buttocks, while the music and applause knobs
turned to deafening levels designed to obliterate Ali entirely.
I noticed with some amusement that “When We Were Kings” won for best
documentary — I guess it was the (H)Ooops! Dreams Award. Yeah. I guess
that makes it all OK now.
Everyone looked lovely, with the exception of Mira Sorvino, whose dress
was made entirely of Cheerios, blowsy old Susan Sarandon and the generally
dowdy Diane Keaton, who appeared to be wearing a rhinestone whiplash brace.
I found it incredibly ironic that Courtney Love presented the award for
Best Makeup Artistry, her own appearance being a feat of rubber tubing and
silicone putty disks no less spectacular than that of Eddie Murphy’s
award-winning transformation in “The Nutty Professor.”
Madonna has always looked naked to me at the Oscars, because at the
Oscars there are usually six or seven truly talented people in the
audience, and she’s performing in front of them, and they can see exactly
what she is, and she knows it, and she’s always shivering with fear and
bracing herself with that steely “You Must Love Me” brand of tenacity she’s
always had. She did it with some forgettable Dick Tracy number a couple of
years back, and last night felt compelled to weep real tears singing the
Andrew Lloyd Webber snore lullaby because she knew she couldn’t actually
sing it, and decided to balance out her lack of pipes with some “acting”
that the folks could appreciate. “My, she can cry on cue, just like an
Actress,” we were meant to say, not noticing her weak, tremulous, dumb
musical theater voice. It was like watching your cousin in a high school
talent show sing some bad slow song real sincerely with too much vibrato,
where the guilelessness of it hurts because she isn’t very good and it’s
cringeworthy. It always becomes blindingly clear, whenever she has done
this, that Madonna isn’t a singer, and should go with that thing she does
do, which I guess is be personally interesting and super-famous, like
Courtney Love, who now has the advantage over Madonna of being able to play
herself on film. That’s something Madonna could never do, because she never
had a self. Courtney was lucky in a way Madonna wasn’t : You can’t avoid
having a self if you’ve done a ton of drugs while you’re a mom and your
husband is dead. Celine Dion is a worthless establishment whore, a
simpering, white-cake Karen Carpenter stroking the most banal priapic nerve
denominator in the music industry, but she still sounded a lot better than
Madonna. And I even LIKE Madonna.
LORD OF THE DANCE. Jesus save our poor imperiled souls. Watching the
obscenely huge, swollen phenomenon of Michael Flatley, the hopping, bucking
satyr in the rubber pants and leather headband, was sort of like peeking
into Oscar’s top drawer and seeing a two-foot black strap-on dildo on top
of a bunch of Zamphir CDs. The pipes of Pan are deep up inside of Michael
Flatley. That man is ubiquitous, and it is because he is the Devil. If
they’re supposed to be Irish jig dancers, why are his back-up dancers
dressed like French maids from a German latex fetish video? Why is his
chest shaved and oiled? Why is he wearing LaToya’s matador jacket? Why? He
is the Devil. Those aren’t fire pots on the stage. Those burning explosions
that came like exclamation points to each jab of sweatily jigging torso
came directly from Michael Flatley’s sulfury bowels. I beg of you. The Lord
of the Dance is a False God, a heathen aberration intent on the smiting of
everything pure! Beware!
There were at least two great things about the Oscars: Billy Crystal,
who is now so utterly relaxed and pleasant in front of everybody in the
world that it doesn’t matter what he says, he’s just nice to watch, and
Frances McDormand, the least likely
Best Actress of the bunch, but easily the most fun. Choreographer Michael
Kidd, who won some kind of special Oscar for all of his work in the past,
said something to the effect that film has forgotten how to celebrate the
Joy of Living. We certainly need more Frances McDormands in Hollywood, even
if her husband did make her famous. She delivers the Joy.
favorite movies, like certain songs — or, for that matter, the sense of smell — seem to slip in under our rational faculties and head directly for the most primal parts of our brains. It’s telling how many of the contributors to Salon’s latest Personal Best issue seek to pin down a mood, something almost as hard to describe as perfume. “Holiday,” one of Hollywood’s classic romantic comedies, makes Stephanie Zacharek sad, and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” one of Robert Altman’s ’70s masterpieces, has a similar effect on Charles Taylor. “This is Elvis” made Gary Kaufman want to drive 100 miles an hour, and “Psycho” gave Mary Elizabeth Williams a permanent case of the unholy Freudian creeps. We all know that each of these is “only a movie,” but sometimes film works so much like a drug it makes you marvel that the stuff is legal.
But unlike drugs, movies have an effect that’s so unpredictable and idiosyncratic that a concept like Personal Best seems the only way to write about them. For an art form so saddled with numbers (budgets, box office grosses, video sales) and technical terminology (dolly shots, fades, steadicams), film is, ultimately, sheer voodoo — what really matters is whether or not you believe. At Salon, we’ve argued, and heatedly, about movies like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Breaking the Waves” and “Lone Star” over the past year and a half, the Fors and Againsts eyeing each other across the table with a mixture of bewilderment, derision and hurt. This stuff really is personal. Perhaps that’s why top 10 lists consistently fascinate us even though they vary wildly and it’s simply impossible to name the “best” moves of the year, let alone of all time. Reading those lists is really just a covert way of snooping around in other people’s fantasies. Our choices reveal more about us than they do about the movies themselves.
When you’re done, we’d like to recommend Salon’s previous two Personal Best issues, on music and books.
JON CARROLL:
ALL OF ME
DWIGHT GARNER:
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
GARY KAMIYA:
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
GARY KAUFMAN:
THIS IS ELVIS
LAURA MILLER:
THE THIRD MAN
JOYCE MILLMAN:
THE KING OF COMEDY
SCOTT ROSENBERG:
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
ANDREW ROSS:
DAYS OF HEAVEN
JENN SHREVE:
DELICATESSEN
CHARLES TAYLOR:
MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER
MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS:
PSYCHO
CINTRA WILSON:
NETWORK
STEPHANIE ZACHAREK:
HOLIDAY
for those of us who grew up in polite, suburban, nicey-nice families — in mine, there were no raised voices, no verbal jousting — there’s nothing more transfixing than being around people who can really let fly, who leap into arguments as if things (people, ideas, art) matter. The sound of hot dispute, weirdly enough, can begin to seem like the sound of love. There’s zero love lost, on the surface anyway, between George and Martha, the mightily warring couple in Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” They go at it like King Kong and Godzilla right from the start, clubbing each other over the head with gleeful scorn, and leaving huge patches of scorched earth. (Martha is furious that George, an academic, hasn’t advanced at the college where her father is president; George coolly observes Martha’s slide into various forms of debauchery.) “If you existed, I’d divorce you,” she spits at him. “Martha, rubbing alcohol for you?” he asks in retort, fixing drinks for guests.
A few clunky attempts to “broaden” “Woolf” for the screen aside, Mike Nichols, directing his first film, has the right instincts — he keeps close to the abrasive immediacy of Albee’s language. Even better, he coaxes nearly miraculous performances out of Elizabeth Taylor (who won an Oscar for this) and Richard Burton. They both ooze a riveting amount of shabby-genteel, gone-to-hell glamour. That’s not blood running through their veins — it’s booze, spite, nicotine and fear. Taylor and Burton seem turned on by each other’s performances, and that fact not only puts wind in the film’s sails but helps undergird some essential truths about their relationship. “Martha and I are merely exercising,” George says to a hapless young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) who drop by for a nightcap and are sucked into the whirlpool of George-and-Martha agonistes. “We’re walking what’s left of our wits.” In other words, George and Martha’s intellects are all they have left. They rejoice in their can-you-top-this ability to mind-fuck each other.
Albee’s play has some problems that the screen version can’t avoid, notably the way Albee lards his theme about “truth and illusion” with some overly broad (and overly Oedipal) speechifying. But there is still something wildly entertaining about watching Taylor and Burton, two actors at the top of their craft, wickedly knock the crap out of each other — particularly now, when so many young filmmakers’ idea of snappy, intelligent, “adult” dialogue is sub-Tarantino riffs on the relative merits of, say, Doritos and Cheese Doodles. George and Martha may torment each other, but “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is never torture to watch. “You have ugly talents,” George says, almost admiringly, to Martha. So does this movie.
