Tag: Movie

RIP Harry Dean Stanton

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RIP the great Harry Dean Stanton, 1926-2017

…Kelly’s Heroes, Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Cockfighter, Renaldo and Clara, Alien, Wise Blood, Escape from New York, Christine, Repo Man, Paris, Texas, Red Dawn, Pretty in Pink, The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild at Heart, Fire Walk with Me, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Straight Story, The Green Mile, Big Love, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: The Return, and so many, many more.

Harry Dean Stanton elevated any film he was in, adding strange depth and soul to characters who may have otherwise been flat. Stanton was what people who write about film call a character actor, a subtly bizarre term, really, if you think about it, one that we use to easily distinguish between leading actors—“stars”—and the folks around them who are far more interesting. The greatest character actors are true artists, and Harry Dean Stanton was the greatest character actor. He did play the lead, occasionally though, as in Paris, Texas (dir. Wim Wenders), a cult film that look let me stop here and say, See Paris, Texas already if you haven’t, it’s amazing. And while he’s not exactly the lead in Repo Man (dir. Alex Cox), he’s certainly the weird bouncing gravity that both anchors the film and propels it forward. (I assume that Repo Man is still required cult film viewing for young folks?). It was a joy to see Stanton one last time this year in Twin Peaks: The Return, where his performance of “Red River Valley” was a standout scene in a show full of standout scenes. While I’ll miss seeing him in new films, Stanton’s long list of roles insures that we’ll still be able to wonder into a film or show and excitedly declare, Oh shit! Harry Dean Stanton is in this!

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (Full Film)

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Although Of Course You End Up Riffing Obliquely on How a David Foster Wallace Road Trip Movie Is a Terrible Idea

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  1. In 1992 I asked my grandmother to rent Steven Soderbergh’s film Kafka from Blockbuster so I could watch it. We watched it together. I was intrigued; she found it dull. I saw it again in college and then again a few years ago. It’s nothing special.
  2. In my freshman year of college I lived right next to a big video rental place that rented most old films for a dollar. This is where I discovered Where the Buffalo Roam, a 1980 semi-biopic starring Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson with music from Neil Young. My metaphorical lid flipped. I returned to my apartment to screen this strange find. Disappointment.
  3. Seeing and immediately being disappointed by Where the Buffalo Roam fits neatly into another memory: In 1991 a record store clerk dissuaded me from buying an expensive bootleg recording of Jimi Hendrix featuring Jim Morrison. The clerk went to great lengths to do this (short of opening the CD, of course), insisting that the record was awful, that it should never have been released. A few weeks later a friend loaned me a tape of the recording he’d somehow acquired. Total garbage. I didn’t even bother to dub it.
  4. (Sometimes when I see that some new scrap and tittle of a dead author’s work is going to be posthumously published, I think of that Hendrix/Morrison recording).
  5. In 1998 I saw Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Sloppy, cartoonish, vivid, and occasionally incoherent, Fear and Loathing is successful mostly because it isn’t a film about Hunter S. Thompson. It’s a film about the end of the illusion of the 1960s.
  6. I don’t remember when I first saw Barfly. Sometime in college. Undoubtedly I tried to keep pace with old Hank on-screen. Hence the poor memory.
  7. Factotum: I fell asleep at the end. But it wasn’t bad, I guess. A good attempt at interpreting Bukowski’s autobiographical novel.
  8. (But obviously the documentaries that feature Bukowski himself are so much more alive than any interpretation).
  9. Some interpretations of writers’ lives benefit from the distance—the distortion—of time: Quills,  The Libertine, Marat/Sade, any riff on Shakespeare (although I can’t think of one that isn’t crap, actually, right this minute), etc.
  10. In particular, Jane Campion’s film Bright Star is excellent, but it’s not really about John Keats: The film is really about Fanny Brawne. Again though, I think time’s distortion helps.
  11. (And oh lord I would love to see Val Kilmer’s one-man Mark Twain show, but that’s a whole other thing, not a film thing, not even a writer thing, more of a Kilmer thing).
  12. The Faulkner/Hemingway amalgamation in Barton Fink is something else.
  13. I turned off Capote.
  14. I turned off The Motorcycle Diaries.
  15. A few weeks ago I turned off Walter Salles’s adaptation of On the Road.
  16. The Guardian and other sources report that Jason Segel will play David Foster Wallace in a film adaptation of David Lipsky’s Rolling Stone interview-turned-full-length-book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. Jesse Eisenberg will reportedly take awkwardly stammer through Lipsky’s role.
  17. Jason Segel, of the hit CBS comedy How I Met Your Mother, will play the late David Foster Wallace, who wrote “Good Old Neon.”
  18. Jason Segel, a Judd Apatow stable staple, will play the late David Foster Wallace, who wrote an essay about misanthropy and a cruise ship.
  19. Jason Segel, whose goofy charm and lovable good-nature belie a sensitive temperament, will play the late David Foster Wallace, who often wore a bandanna on his head.
  20. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself covers Wallace touring on his Infinite Jest book tour; his fame explodes and he’s not entirely sure what any of it means yet—whether to enjoy it, how to enjoy it, is it even possible to enjoy it, etc. Lipsky inserts a heavy editorial hand—lots of bracketed thoughts in this one, as our interlocutor repeatedly registers, or attempts to register, his own verbal dexterity, his own writerliness. And who can blame him? What writer-critic can resist showing a little plumage to the writer under discussion (to steal James Wood’s phrase)?
  21. Lipsky’s book features one of the most intriguing characters in late twentieth-century literature: David Foster Wallace performing David Foster Wallace attempting to not-perform David Foster Wallace by acknowledging that David Foster Wallace is self-consciously aware of performing himself.
  22. I can easily envision the shape, the tone, the contours, the set-pieces of this proposed film adaptation. A road trip film, a buddy film, but a film about antagonists, bullshitters, waxing hard, some high laughs, some intense moments (gaining so much easy shallow depth from Wallace’s suicide), maybe a few reading scenes. Etc.
  23. And that’s what most bothers me about this film adaptation: How easily I can imagine what it will likely look and sound and feel like. How comfortable it all is.
  24. There’s just not enough of that magical temporal distortion I referenced in point nine. The film is likely to piss off real fans of Wallace’s work and give anyone else interested a facile notion of who the writer was and what he thought and how he thought and how he represented and shared what he thought. How is such a film not a crass cash grab? Even if the film were artistically successful (leave aside what that nebulous term could mean for a moment, please)—again, how is such a film not a crass cash grab?
  25. I could be wrong though. I’m fine with being wrong.

Opening Night — John Cassavetes (Full Film)

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Spellbound — Alfred Hitchcock (Full Film)

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71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance — Michael Haneke

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Performance (Full Film)

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Family Nest — Béla Tarr (Full Film with English Subtitles)

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Val Kilmer Plays Val Kilmer in Harmony Korine’s The Fourth Dimension

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Stalker — Andrei Tarkovsky (Full Film with English Subtitles)

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The Sin of Harold Diddlebock — Preston Sturges (Full Film)

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Watch Moog, a 2004 Documentary about Robert Moog, Pioneer of Electronic Music

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Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (Full Film)

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Watch Derek Jarman’s Stylized Wittgenstein Biography

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Bill Murray Plays FDR (Hyde Park on the Hudson Trailer)

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Elvis Vs. Cthulhu (And Other Alternate Universe Movie Posters by Sean Hartter)

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Sean Hartter’s fantabulous collection of movie poster designs from an alternate dimension relay such a precise aesthetic that they almost make me sad that these movies don’t exist. Still, I find some consolation by imagining scenes from, say, a Jodorowsky-helmed Star Wars or  Vincent D’Onofrio in an x-rated version of Avatar. (Thanks to Tilford for the tip).

As studios increasingly rely on franchises—and rebooting those franchises every decade—it makes sense that franchise titles will continue to evolve like comic books have, with new artists (directors, producers, writers, etc.) doing their “take” on the property.

A few of Hartter’s images, but I suggest getting lost in his site:

Eleven Excellent Films About Films and Film-making

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Eleven Excellent Films About Films and Film-making 

1. Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola, et al

2. Lost in La Mancha, Keith Fulton et al

3. Burden of Dreams, Les Blank

4. Adaptation, Spike Jonze

5. Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry

6. The Player, Robert Altman

7. Ed Wood, Tim Burton

8. Stardust Memories, Woody Allen

9. Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges

10. American Movie, Chris Smith

11. Barton Fink, Coen Brothers