Some Came Running

"My Best Day," at ReRun Gastropub Cinema June 14-20

Ashlie Atkinson and Rachel Style

It can be kind of awkward when you become friendly with someone who labors in the arts and you're not familiar with their work. The filmmaker Erin Greenwell has been a neighborhood friend of mine for a while, and we've had constructive discussions about movies, and she's been kind enough to offer me very useful advice on some of my own projects, but it was only recently that I got to see My Best Day, her 2012 film that premiered as part of the "Next" program at the Sundance Film Festival of that year. As you might imagine, I looked at it with some trepidation. I had heard good things about it; John Anderson, who's also a pal and whose critical judgment I consider very sound, wrote very positive things about it for his Variety review when it screened at Sundance. Still. You never know. As I say, could be awkward.

So I'm happy to report that I found My Best Day delightful. It's a small-town-set comedy that has a very credible sense of place to it—something that hardly happens at all these days in movies either studio-made or independent. Greenwell pitches her depiction of this environment perfectly between lyric-pastoral-potential (let's take a walk by the railway tracks) and you-could-be-bored-to-death-out-here (let's lie down on the railway tracks) perspectives; it's a perfect place for her characters, whose quirks stem from ostensibly postmodern identity issues that were likely always pertinent, but just never discussed in the Norman Rockwell days. Rachel Styles' Karen, raised by her mom, works as a refrigerator-repair dispatcher, and at the beginning of the single day covered by the movie—the Fourth of July, as it happens—gets a call from a household she believes is that of her biological father. So begins her odyssey, for which her helpmate is Ashlie Atkinson's Meagan, who had planned on spending the day figuring out whether she was going to stray from her long-term girlfriend or not. The folks they meet on their journey are in a sense kindred spirits in that they're all looking for a home, or at the very least some relief from a problem they believe makes them unique. Greenwell's point is that everyone's a misfit in some way, and it's through recognizing that fact that we can forge true community. But the movie makes its point the best way possible, through engaging you with the characters, and it does this via brisk writing and excellent performances (the cast also features Kate McKinnon, who's been making a big impression on Saturday Night Live recently). The direction is also very assured: Greenwell's aware that her human story is also a little on the fanciful style, and she doesn't try to disguise that with faux-gritty cinematography; her visual style is crisp, alert, attractive. 

The movie is getting its first New York theatrical run at the ReRun Gastropub Cinema starting tomorrow; check it out there if you're able. The movie's website, which will update you on how to see it and when, is here.

Zack Snyder and "Vulgar Auteurism"

Just kidding. A review of Man of Steel, for MSN Movies.

I'm not an inordinately star-struck kind of person, I don't think, but I am an admirer of Michael Shannon, and it was kind of cool over the past few summers to occasionally spot him doing laps a couple of lanes away from me at the Red Hook pool. I have a sneaking suspicion that won't happen this summer, alas. 

Also: reviews of The Purge and  Much Ado About Nothing. Later this week: This Is The End. 

UPDATE: As promised, a review of This Is The End. 

I am Romina Puga

For the record, I am firmly with Jesse Eisenberg with respect this ridiculous dustup, and I don't think what he did to the fluffy little Romina Puga falls under the category of "berating" at all. I also think Puga's response to it was repellently opportunistic. My advice to any self-described entertainment journalist who does "schtick" is, when in the cattle call situation of the movie-promoting video junket, to give a little heads-up to the publicist or the talent before you start rolling, so the talent at least has the benefit of some knowledge and hence the opportunity to play along if he or she wishes. Eisenberg is clearly caught off-guard by Puga's arguably ostentatiously breezy style right off the bat, and registers more trying-to-regain-balance bemusement than actual hostility for the rest of the encounter. For Puga to try and turn this around and act as if Eisenberg maliciously ripped her a new one is utter bullshit.

And yet. I understand, in a sense, her pain. In spring of last year, I was assigned by my MSN editors to do a round of video junket interviews for 21 Jump Street. I don't consider myself particularly telegenic, and the video junket format isn't my favorite way to conduct interviews. But as Hyman Roth says in The Godfather Part 2, this is the business we've chosen, and as an aging white male ostensible film critic in the twilight of print and all that my feeling is that maybe I ought to take every available opportunity to diversify my skill set and earn income. Although, like I said, in my gut I pretty much know I'll never be an entirely acceptable on-camera presence until I at least get my horribly dingy teeth replaced. And maybe grow some fucking hair.

I enjoyed the movie version of 21 Jump Street, and I was particularly amused by the way it toggled between coarse homoerotic male bonding jokes and relatively sophisticated meta humor. This suggested, in my mind, a question, that I mentally filed away prior to the day of the junket. The actual day of said junket was not an auspicious one, generally speaking. It was a gray and chilly and rainy day in early March, a Saturday at that, and my call to show up at the swanky hotel where the interviews were being staged was nine in the morning. To top all that off, I was starting to get a cold.

Arguably, 21 Jump Street costars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum might have had it a little worse. For their interviews, they dressed in costumes they wear to comic effect in the film, that is, the black shorts worn by police officers who patrol on bicycles. The joke in the movie being, they go through all this training and think they're gonna be totally badass and their first gig out of the academy is bike patrol in a local park. Ar ar ar. So here these two guys are at nine in the morning on a Saturday in silly outfits. Maybe it was their idea. I don't know. I choose, for some reason, to believe that it was not.

Perhaps that reason is their demeanor as I was brought in to begin my interview. In addition to the shorts and clingy shirts, Hill and Tatum wore dark wraparound sunglasses. We exchanged greetings that struck me as extra-perfunctory before I sat down.

As it happens, I'm friendly with both a director and an actor who've worked with Hill in kind of notable contexts, and I'm also on terms with a director with whom Tatum has profitably collaborated. My relations with these other people are arguably not intimate, but they're also on a level higher than that of cordial acquaintance. So I thought about dropping a name or two, if it could get things off on the right foot. And then I thought better of it. Because I didn't want to be that guy. (Even now, I worry that I'm being that guy just by mentioning it. God, no wonder I drank.)

Would that I had. Maybe it would have been worse. Anyway, as we began rolling I asked Hill, "As both a star and producer on this movie, did you keep tabs on the ratio of homoerotic male-bonding jokes to self-reflexive ones?" Or something along those lines. Delivered in what I hoped was my best hail-fellow-well-met jocular tones. And even from behind the shades, I could see Hill's genuinely withering contempt as he answered, "I assume that was some kind of attempt at humor, and I'm going to ignore it and just say I had a great time making the movie."

Now what the viewer is not privy to while watching these manufactured snippets is that each journalist doing these interviews is allotted a very specific time limit, and that time limit doesn't allow for reshoots. And when I say specific, I mean very—two minutes to the second, in some instances. So when my admitedly silly—but then again I mean what the hell, THEY were the guys sitting down in biking shorts—question got that response, my strong burning sense of humiliation mingled with a kind of panic. I had unwittingly wasted maybe thirty seconds of time, which means I had to scramble to get anything usable in my remaining minute and a half with the fellows. Even in the best of situations with these things, in which the talent is genuinely enjoying the exchange and you're actually able to get good stuff, there's a publicist off to the side giving you the throat-cutting sign. And yes, the talent has to sit there for the better part of an entire working day doing the same thing in two-to-five minute patches. How badly do you want to be famous? Badly enough to be cool with doing that? Because maybe you should try it some time.

I couldn't call to restart the session so I just switched to automatic inane innocuous pilot, and salvaged the encounter, but as anyone who looks at the footage will note, nobody involved in the exchange is particularly interested in simulating even a simulation of chumminess. 

Was I angry? Fuck yeah. I was furious. I got up and showered and shaved and dressed and schlepped to Manhattan on a rainy miserable Saturday morning when I could have been sleeping in with My Lovely Wife so I could be insulted by Jonah Hill? Seriously? When the video posted, I put up a blog post here and I alluded to the shutting-down and I remember feeling as if I was being incredibly restrained while so doing. One of the professional associates of Hill with whom I am friendly sent me an e-mail which in effect said, that's too bad. Which it was. And the point is: that's all it was. Too bad. It wasn't the end of the world, it wasn't cause for me to nurse a grudge against Jonah Hill (for all the good that would do). It's just a minor anecdote concerning an interaction that took place in a context that in most respects has very little to do with what constitutes the real world for either Hill and myself. Puga's reaction to the Eisenberg incident only has validity if one accepts the idea that she and Eisenberg have some sort of gnuine relationship to each other. They do not. Similarly, my day-to-day life has nothing to do with Jonah Hill's. All any of this means is that if one wants respect within the context of one's profession, one ought to conduct oneself professionally. That's not a guarantee that respect will be given, but at least it gives you a leg to stand on. Be an entertainmnent journalist, or be Rupert Pupkin. You can't have it both ways. 

And finally, as "Freeman" put it in Bonfire of the Vanities, "be decent to each other." And Romina Puga, buy a goddamn paper notebook or something. 

My direct experience of progressive rock

I hesitate to publicly take issue with Rob Sheffield for several reasons. First off, I find him an engaging, sharp, funny writer. Second, I'm acquainted with him and we share warm kind feelings for each other as people, I think. Thirdly, he's one of the greatest audiences I've ever had. Whenever I run into him and we converse, his laughter at whatever attempted witticisms I drop is the most appreciative I have ever heard. Knowing Rob and his pop tastes as I do, I wasn't surprised by some of the less charitable perspectives on prog (or "progressive") rock that he puts forward in his New York Times Book Review assessment of the essay compilation Yes Is The Answer. And in point of fact said review confirms, to my mind, some of the things I suspected about the book when I paged through it at a printed matter emporium and mused that this did not look like the prog-rock book I was looking for, if in fact I was looking for such a thing. 

As described by Sheffield (and his description jibes with the impression I had paging through it) Yes Is The Answer seems a rather silly book, and if I'm going to read a book on prog rock, I'd prefer it to be either entirely po-faced or uproariously funny rather than rather silly. Rob, however, takes the book's silliness as a cue to propound upon the silliness of prog rock itself as far as he's concerned, and to look down his nose at the social lives, particularly the sex lives of its enthusiasts. As for its makers, he chortles at the fact that Yes once stocked a recording studio with bales of hay to evoke a properly rustic atmosphere for inspiration. This IS indeed silly, but hoe much more or less silly is it than spending tens of thousands of dollars on heroin and/or cocaine, as so many other rock musicians, progressive and otherwise, have done? But he reserves most of his nyah-nyah you can't get laid disdain for consumers of the genre. One of the book's essayists, he notes, got turned on to the music of the loosely-defined Canterbury Scene by a high-school girlfriend; "not a typical prog story, to say the least." In his kicker, Sheffield states "oblivion seems entirely suited to prog, which at its best functioned as a shelter from school, from sex, from the frightening adult world." Even without parsing too closely, this seems a curious stone to have been thrown by the author of Talking To Girls About Duran Duran. The implied demand that a more acceptable music is one that assists teens and post-teens in facing that adult world seems, frankly, unrealistic. But really, the fallacy of the generalization stems from a not-uncommon rock crit problem, that is, mistaking one's practice with that of a sociologist's.

Sheffield's actually not even ten years younger than me, so my initial mental rationalization for his curious contempt doesn't hold, entirely. And since I never even liked sociology, let alone believed that critical practice compelled me to attempt any form of it, I can only respond with anecdotal evidence that for a number of my confederates in the late '70s, a taste for prog not only embodied zero contradiction to an engagement with adulthood, but also constituted a palpable asset to it.   For instance, and not to tell tales out of school, but take My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™. When I arrived at William Paterson College in 1977, he had transfered to NYU but was still a legend at the college paper, for his photographic acumen, his merciless sarcasm, his way with "the ladies" as some used to call them back then, and his ability to recite all of the dialogue from the 1933 King Kong. I didn't meet Ron until spring of 1978, at the funeral of a mutual friend who COULD have gone with me to see Richard Hell at CBGB on the weekend of his death, but instead went out to Central Jersey and...well, it's a long story...and at the funeral I asked him about the Kong thing and he responded with the exact contempt and merciless sarcasm that such an inquiry might warrant when delivered at a funeral. Ron eventually got around to forgiving me this trespass, and we became friends, and soon I was hanging around the basement of his folks' place in Clifton, which he had redone into his bachelor pad. He had an awesome stereo of separate components—I had only ever had variants of a Close-And-Play myself—and a huge record collection of mostly classical and prog. I was mildly appalled, really. King Crimson had its moments, I had to admit, having affected an appreciation of Shoenberg and Coltrane in my high school years, but despite my fondness for Eno and such I was at this point a reasonably dedicated punk rock person. "How can you listen to Yes? I mean that vocalist is the worst. And those lyrics!" "Eventually you learn to hear through it, or past it," Ron shrugged. "And you're complaining about lyrics? What about the Ramones?" "They're ironic," I nyah-nyahed back. We were both schmucks, but he made a little more immediate sense.

The point I'm taking my time getting to is that the component-stereo and sophisticated-musical-tastes combination was a crucial component of Ron's mystique in the dating department. It was I, Mr. Punk Rock and Socially Conscious Lyrics and I'm Against Society Man and all that other shit who had a bit of struggle. This is not to say that I came around to prog out of a desire to enhance my appeal to the opposite sex. My first college girlfriend, to whom I gave the flower that was my sexual innocence, was an exemplary suburban Punk Rock Girl (her copy of The Basketball Diaries was festooned with "I love you"s in the margins of the passages describing the most debauched instances of drug abuse), and when I brought home (to my first apartment, which I shared with a college roommate in Paterson, New Jersey in the late '70s, in case you're wondering where I earned my "street cred") a copy of Art Bears' debut album Hopes and Fears, which opens with an austere cover of Brecht/Eisler's "On Suicide" sung by Dagmar Krause in her direst sharp tones, she pronounced her conditional approval on grounds that it was bracingly abrasive. Which indeed it was.

The College Girlfriend, Ron, and myself, eventually started experimenting with making our own music. Ron  was a keyboardist, and a pretty good one I thought (he remains to my mind sometimes frustratingly dubious with respect to his abilities in this respect), the CG played guitar, and I played a little guitar, and bellowed, and had an outsize personality, not necessarily in that order. We had another friend, a college poet, who wrote lyrics and also bellowed, or wailed; and we dicked around in various permutations trying to write songs. We thought that our differing sensibilities—Ron's prog taste was supplemented by a slight Ray Manzarek jones, and a lot of his compositional inspiration was taken from the film score work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann; CG was a big Stones person; I was "literary" and obnoxious—might create interesting material. We were not particularly correct, but we persisted, and were very constructive in coming up with band names: Transparent Things (I know, I know), Plan Nine, etcetera. Eventually CG and I broke up, and she took up with more competent and dedicated musicians who later went on to stints in real bands such as The Brandos and Dramarama (look 'em up!). But Ron and I kept at it and eventually we, in the decades-later-to-be-immortal-words of Art Brut, formed a band. 

From left to right, Douglas Harvey, Ron Goldberg, Gene McCallister, your humble servant, Thomas Santamassino, circa 1981. God, I hated that air conditioner, can't you tell? 

Whether or not we were any good (and the debate continues to this day as we, having reconvened largely for the purpose of continued fellowship, slouch toward the completion of a professional-grade recording of material we "composed" over thirty years ago), our unusual concept—to create music that melded the complexity of certain prog with the DIY attitude and dissonance of punk and post-punk—was a way of enabling us to engage the world rather than retreat from it. We had to do things—write material, rehearse it, and play it in front of people. Our parents weren't involved in the project. Ron and some outside friends had rented a house, and that became the GHQ for band activities, the protest of certain neighbors and roommates notwithstanding. When drummer McCallister either quit or was fired (I honestly don't remember which...he's a cop now, if you were wondering), we had to go out and find a drummer, and we were blessed for a year with the best one in not just the Hoboken/North Haledon scene but in all of northern and central Jersey, Stanley Demeski, then also of the Phosphenes and Winter Hours (both of which bands really, really hated us) and later of the Willies, then the Feelies, then Luna, and now the Feelies again. If you're familiar with his work, you know that Stanley nails the 4/4 like nobody's business, but what you might not know is that, like his fellow one-time Feelie Anton Fier, he at one point in his development learned every drum pattern on the notoriously difficult (and some might say secretly proggy) Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Our band had one highly questionable (and unsingable-over) tune called "Refraction," the main section of which had a 9/5 time signature. Once Stanley left the band, that number left the repetoire. Actually, the whole band kind of fell apart; we couldn't find an adequate let alone competent full time replacement drummer, and the band's front man was such a mikestand-kicking prima-donna non-singing asshole that nobody really wanted to work with him any more. Guess who?

Anyway, the ideal remained alive in our sensibilities if not our musical practice. You might not remember this, but the reformed King Crimson—the quartet with Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford and Captain Fripp, and no mellotron—actually had some New Wave cred given Fripp's and Belew's session work with Bowie, Talking Heads, Blondie, and so on. Artificial Intelligence aimed to meld Gang of Four and Pere Ubu with Henry Cow, and the distances between those bands was not as huge as some might imagine. (The distinctions might not be cost-effective to poptimists such as Sheffield, I allow.) Even as Ubu founder David Thomas was running Seeds and Alice Cooper licks through a darkly arty iteration of Cleveland weltschmertz, he was engaging in correspondence with one-time Henry Cow drummer Chris Cutler, with whom Thomas later worked as a solo artist. Cutler himself drummed in an iteration of Ubu that included its biggest commercial successes, including the college-rock quasi-hit "Waiting For Mary." 

The point is that there was/is more to prog and its tendrils that is dreamed of in the institutional philosophy of the New York Times these days, Jon Pareles' presence at the paper notwithstanding. The sectarian anti-prog bias, not to be paranoid, is I think reflected in the illustration for Rob's review, in which Genesis-era Peter Gabriel is seen in stage makeup with mouth agape, an image meant to evoke a snicker. I do not laugh, because I'm vaguely aware of how many column inches the New York Times devotes to Lil Wayne, who, objectively speaking, doesn't present a much more overtly "admirable" visual picture. Also, one need not like what Gabriel did in order to appreciate the line his theatrical mode of presentation points directly to Lady Gaga. But again, this is par for the course for an institution that gifted us with the phrase "cultural vegetables," and at which a top reviewer interpreted an assignment to write on a book about video games as an occasion to voice his dislike of Jethro Tull.

Prog rock, Sheffield snarks in the final line of his notice, "is the genre that gave the phrase 'comfortably numb' to the language." Except The Wall (a problematic record but maybe a better one than you remember) is the work of an arena-rock band—that's part of its whole subject. As spacey as Pink Floyd's music got, it never approached prog's level of difficulty (Dave Stewart, the Canterbury Egg/Hatfield/National Health guy as opposed to the Eurythmics guy, once observed of a Robert Wyatt concert he participated in that it "turned out well despite Nick Mason's inability to play in 7/4") or popularity.

"Real" orgasms

I.

I sometimes wonder the extent to which the much-celebrated Katz's Deli "I'll have what she's having" scene in Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner's 1989 When Harry Met Sally affected the sex lives of the Joe and Josephine Popcorns, if you'll excuse the phrase, who have seen it over the years. The scene is a classic for a reason; Meg Ryan's Sally hoists Billy Crystal's Harry by the petard of his own sexist presumption but good. But one reason the movie is as cozy a concoction as it is has to do with the fact that after the punchline, it never returns to the topic of female orgasm; the discomfort Harry feels after initially sleeping with Sally and then fleeing from her prior to the inevitable fateful facing of facts and return to romance has nothing to do with this particular facet of sexual or emotional exchange. Someone might expect, in the depiction of their growing intimacy, a query from the acceptably neurotic Harry along the lines of "how do I know you're not faking it with me?" But the viewer is left to presume that they've worked that all out. Actually, given the way the movie progresses to its conclusion, my feeling is that the filmmakers were/are hoping that you've pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. This is When Harry Met Sally, not The Mother And The Whore. The viewer is meant to feel pleasant feelings, not particularly complicated or uncomfortable or unpleasant ones. 

This idea as it pertains to comedy, and to romantic comedy, is changing—see Girls on the one hand, and the Hangover movies on the other (what they share in common is the view that pretty much all sexual relations are somehow predicated on hostility)—and it's also changing as it pertains to drama, and romantic drama. The ideas change, but the issues of representation remain just as fraught. Next to race, the depiction of sexuality on screen is about the most fraught thing ever, and right now it is as fraught as  it ever has been. And critics, depending on their ideological perspective, direct and/or unique experience, or just plain contrarian pissiness (to name just three of what could be dozens of factors) will unpack a given work dealing with this representation in sometimes wildly divergent ways. 

In 1969, expressing what he characterized as his sole major disappointment in director Tony Richardson's adaptation of his novel Laughter In The Dark (whose female lead's name, Anna Karina,  apparently amused him no end), Vladimir Nabokov said: "Theatrical acting, in the course of the last centuries, has led to incredible refinements of stylized pantomime in the representation of, say, a person eating, or getting deliciously drunk, or looking for his spectacles, or making a proposal of marriage. Not so in regard to the imitation of the sexual act which on the stage has absolutely no tradition behind it. The Swedes and we have to start from scratch and what I have witnessed up to now on screen—the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet—all of it is primitive, commonplace, conventional and therefore disgusting. The lack of art and style in these paltry copulations is particularly brought into evidence by their clashing with the marvelously high level of acting in virtually all other imitations of natural gestures on our stage and screen. This is an attractive topic to ponder further, and directors should take notice of it." This was in an interview with Philip Oakes of the Sunday Times of London that ran on June 22 1969 and was of course reprinted in Strong Opinions, a compendium of interviews and essays and occasionals by Nabokov. 

Since 1969, significant strides, one could say, have been made in the on-screen depiction of the sex act, although it would be useless to speculate as to whether they might have found favor with the notoriously particular Nabokov. Nudity is no longer so taboo, although the proscriptions regarding who may see nudity in films remain pretty strong. The simulation of sex acts has become more realistic via the use of prosthetics (see Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy, a droll behind-the-scenes look at the absurdity and awkwardness of a film set not unlike one of Breillat's own) and digital manipulation (by which means, say, an actress' body stocking can be handily erased). There is also a mild trend toward unsimulated sex. The sex in the early films of Joe Swanberg, while staged, is often not simulated. Martin Scorsese once said he didn't like nude scenes because they stopped a film's narrative dead; cinematic open-heart surgeon John Cassavetes also largely abjured them, perhaps for different reasons. In films such as those of Swanberg's, they are inextricable from the narrative. Although I continue to insist that the discomfort the scenes in Swanberg's films might cause in a viewer have little to do with Swanberg's intentions or motivations. (I continue to believe that Swanberg began his moviemaking efforts as a Joe Francis with a film-appreciation-class schtick under his belt, and that his current films are an attempt to live that unsavory fact down.) In matters sexual as depicted on screen, there's a continuing fascination with/desire for the real. Only it's not desired in the context of pornography, at least that's the party line. Pornography, no matter what it show us, isn't art. Pornography doesn't win Palmes d'Or, nor does it get its participants commended for their bravery. Pornography doesn't count. But why should it not? 

II.

Here is a passage from "Big Red Son," David Foster Wallace's essay chronicling the Adult Video News Awards of 1998. The character of "Harold Hecuba" is in fact Evan Wright, who was a writer and editor at Hustler magazine at the time. Not to potentially alienate any of my younger readership by getting too "Losing My Edge" on them, I can confirm that Wallace, writing under a dual pseudonym, here sets down the story pretty much as Wright told it (maybe overselling the super-decent-guy aspects of the detective character just a teensy bit): 

"Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.'s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.'s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box's return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective—60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy—was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was 'the faces,' i.e. the actresses' faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized 'fuck-me-I'm-a-nasty-girl' sneer and became, suddenly, real people. 'Sometimes—and you never know when, is the thing—sometimes all of a sudden they'll kind of reveal themselves' was the detective's way of putting it. 'Their what-do-you-call...humanness.' It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors—sometimes very gifted actors—go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: 'In real movies, it's all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.'"

Below, although it is not in any way explicit, is an arguably "not safe for work" image of then-porn-performer Stephanie Swift in an early appearance, in a segment from a pornographic anthology feature, one of whose prime directives involves demonstrating the intensity of Ms. Swift's actual orgasms. 

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: May 2013, A Memorial Day Gift To You From Some Came Running

How did this forty-disc monster CG happen, you may wonder? (Then again, you may not wonder, in which case just skip ahead to the capsules.) Well, it’s like this: whilst working on the De Niro book I would take breaks from the intensive De Niro watching by popping in a Blu-ray to “relax,” and mostly they would be things that I’d had in the “staging area” for the Consumer Guide anyway. Once the De Niro book was done, and I’d done another round of revisions on The Novel That I Delusionally Expect Will Catupult Me Out Of This Particular [redacted] Business, I had been hoping to get a few weeks work on another actually remunerative project, but that DIDN’T HAPPEN. Also My Lovely Wife has had to work late a lot. What’s a fella to do? Go to rep theaters? Interact with OTHER PEOPLE? Hell no.

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver. 

3:10 To Yuma (Criterion)

Commended by Andrew Sarris for his “stylistic conviction in an intellectual vacuum,” Delmer Daves does in fact offer stronger, better stuff than that, according to his post-Andrew champions. Dave Kehr has written compellingly on his frequently dismissed melodramas, Susan Slade and Parrish, particularly (“Call it Camp…”—Sarris) and in the booklet essays for this and the also-superb Jubal, Kent Jones makes the case that Daves was the master of a rare and particular kind of Western, one in which the depiction of goodness was paramount (“or call it Corn,” Sarris continued). Jones is compelling and well-informed, and his descriptions of Daves’ technical innovations in shooting his uniquely American landscapes adds persuasive ballast to his case for the director as a major one. But  here it’s really the seeing that’s believing. The simple-as-death storyline (adapted from an Elmore Leonard tale) gets a beautifully measured treatment here; this is a far, far more substantial film than its lazy movie-guide categorizations as a “solid B Western” or whatever give it credit for, and the transfer of the black-and-white film is gorgeous. Outtakes include still shots from an excised Felicia Farr nude scene. OK, that’s not actually true. Extras are sparse but as I said the Jones essay is an education. And I can’t emphasize enough that the movie is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, on pretty much every conceivable level. —A

Bakumatsu Taiyo Den (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema region B U.K. import)

This 1957 picture ranked fifth in a 1999 poll of greatest Japanese films conducted by the nearly hundred-year-old magazine Kinema Jumpo. It’s relatively obscure in the west; the reasons for the high esteem there and the scarcity of its reputation here are probably not unrelated; it’s a very culturally specific film, an allegorical farce in which the dwindling of  the shogunate in the mid-to-late 19^th century reflects upon the Japan of the time the film was released. The opening montage, as it happens, has a lot in common with that of the veddy British On Approval, reviewed below; taking the viewer by the hand and saying this story is about “then,” but it’s also about now. So what is it about, anyway? It takes its time with that; the ostensible plot hook, in which a broke brothel patron starts doing odd jobs around the joint because he can’t pay his bill, doesn’t really kick in until about 45 minutes into the nearly two-hour film, directed by  Yuzo Kawashima and co-written with his then protégé, the soon-to-be-great Shohei Imamura. The movie is diverting for its picaresque humor, social observations, and overall frankness (never not funny: when a bunch of the film’s male characters gang up for a group piss); sometimes it comes off like a Moliere farce with a change of venue. The disc boasts an excellent transfer of a recent digital restoration; extras are confined to the disc package booklet, which has some essays. I’d tend to recommend this most highly to viewers already very conversant with Japanese film looking to catch up on what had been a hard-to-find canon classic. —A

Band of Outsiders (Criterion)

How audience friendly was this Godard film considered to be back in 1964? Please note the Columbia Pictures logo between the “Visa de controle Ministériel No. 28712” card and the opening title montage. Yep, with its tack-piano theme, jokey credits, quirky tendresse, and more, this really is the sort of film that represents to perpetually disillusioned one-time Godard fans of a certain age what “earlier, funnier films” meant to the aliens chastising Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories. To such an extent that one almost is tempted to trash it, the better to extol the virtues of Ici et aeilleurs. OK, not really. Much. It’s wonderful, the race through the Louvre and the much-bruited Madison bit are as great as everyone says they are, and in all this is Godard’s most Queneau-esque film, not just with respect to Gallic “charm” and all that, but also in terms of a structural self-consciousness that’s designed to enhance genuine feeling rather than preclude it. In short, a Great Film. This Blu-ray is a lovely upgrade of what had been an already excellent package, the wintry black-and-white rendered in exceptional crispness and detail. Even the booklet essay by Joshua Clover, quite possibly my least favorite writer of all time (because I’m sure you were wondering)  is better than all right. —A+

Black Sabbath (Arrow region B U.K. import)

I think this anthology picture may be Mario Bava’s best film, by virtue not only of its consistency but its variability. Alternatively dead serious and irrepressibly playful, every shot a wonder and certain images so hauntingly terrifying and sad as to be unforgettable, it’s a concise feast of very particular cinematic inspiration. I speak of course of the Italian language version of the 1963 film, entitled I tre volti di paura (The Three Faces of Fear), which retains the original order of the three tales and has a final shot featuring “host” Boris Karloff that’s an utter delight. That version is the highlight of this three-disc (one Blu-ray, two standard def) edition of the film from Arrow. There’s also the English-language American International cut, which gives us Karloff’s own voice, which is nice. The most salient extra on the Blu-ray is a very good half-hour video with split-screen explanations of the aural and visual differences between the two versions. The picture quality of my favored version, from red telephone to sickly green vampire family to grimacing jewelry-wearing corpse, is so staggeringly great it brought tears to my eyes, almost. A definitive edition and an intense pleasure. Wowsers. Co-starring Jean-Pierre Leaud’s mom, by the way.  —A+

Cloak and Dagger (Olive)

I raised my eyebrows in an approving way when I saw the logo of The Film Foundation on the back cover of this edition of the 1946 Fritz Lang thriller. The restoration presented here looks pretty grand. A little damage in the form of scratches and such is visible here and there, but overall this has really superb picture quality with excellent contrast and detail. It’s a damn fine film, too, boasting a solid Gary Cooper performance (whether you buy him as a nuclear physicist really doesn’t matter after about six minutes or so) and some very nice bits, including a a scene in which attracted-to-each-other-awkwardly roommates have to contend with a hungry cat, and a killing-in-self-defense scene that’s a definite precursor to the nasty kitchen-murder sequence in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. Check it out. —A 

Crimewave (Shout! Factory)

As the saying goes, films don’t get too  much more maudit than this 1985 item. Director Sam Raimi’s second proper feature, and the first that he and his associates (Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert, et. al.) made for/with THE MAN,  was a behind-the-scenes tragedy/farce from the get-go, from imposed leading man to unforeseen union overages to clueless execs doing recuts that mutilated a plethora of elaborate and possibly beautiful master shots and more. Surely an object lesson not just for Raimi and company but for co-writers Joel and Ethan Coen, who here dub a correctional facility “Hudsucker State Penitentiary” and make a blink-and-you-miss it cameo appearance (Frances MacDormand plays a nun, too). So how’s the movie? Sometimes quite entertaining, always exuberant, a bit of a mess, and an unexpected stylistic link between Raimi, the Coens, and honestly, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Like the Coens’ subsequent Raising Arizona, it’s a real cartoon movie, although at this point Raimi has a slight edge in chops. Still, never such innocence again and all that. And I bet Tarantino was a big fan, for reasons you’ll get if you watch it yourself. The picture quality is very good and will likely satisfy the recollections of the five people who actually got to see this in its abortive theatrical “release.” The extras are nicely explanatory overall but the jewel is of course the Bruce Campbell commentary, because production train wreck tales are way more interesting than success stories and because it’s the irrepressible Campbell telling them. Speaking of Reed Birney, who got the lead role that Raimi wanted for him, Bruce notes, “Reed’s pretty cute in this. I wonder why he didn’t work much after this. I guess it’s because we destroyed his career.” He also refers to Louise Lasser as “a piece of work.” Great stuff. —A

Day of the Falcon (Image)

Every now and then I hear of a direct-to-DVD (more or less) release of a film of the sort maybe that they don’t make anymore, and I kinda get my Sentimental Old Man hopes up, like somehow I’m gonna be gifted with a latter-day Khartoum or something that will help me to banish dull care or something. This is particularly weird because I don’t even like the actual Khartoum all that much.  Anyway, I thought maybe this produced-by-some-obscenely-rich-Middle-Eastern-dude item, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, might do some kind of trick in this realm, but alas, no. It opens in “The Yellow Belt, somewhere in Arabia.” And boy, that belt sure is yellow! The noble heads of warring factions come to an uneasy truce involving one of the scions of a warlord living under the safekeeping of the former rival, or something, setting the stage for an epic (not quite) series of conflicts once the land of the Yellow Belt is discovered to be oil rich. The disc looks very good, but the  visual splendor does not ameliorate a cliché-collection storyline and script, po-faced direction that takes every cliché dead seriously, phoned-in performances, and….well, the battle scenes take forever to get started, and aren’t so hot once they do. I’m sticking with Khartoum. —C+

The Devil And Miss Jones (Olive)

Ah, Olive Films. Its Blu-rays of old Republic Westerns (right, as opposed to the up-to-the-minute Republic Westerns) kept me sane when I took breaks from grappling with The De Niro Perplex and other inerleckshul challenges. And its off-kilter but hardly random selection of other vintage Hollywood fare consistently uncovers gems of substantial cinephilic pertinence. This 1941 Norman Krasna-scripted, Sam Wood-directed comedy is an excellent case in point, a swell vehicle for the great Jean Arthur and an amusingly agitationist pro-labor parable to boot, with Charles Coburn as a magnate who conceives the concept for the later television series Undercover Boss, as it were. A crackerjack picture with a standout sequence set in Coney Island, and a very interesting just-pre-World-War-II time capsule (although there’s not a single allusion to the troubles in Europe at the time). All this and production design by  William Cameron Menzies. (Cogent, but a little on the subdued side for him, although the Coney Island police station did give this viewer an eerie little pre-echo of Invaders From Mars.) The Blu-ray is crisp looking,  but a little lowish in the contrast department, which I sometimes find to be the case with Olive. Hardly a cardinal sin and in any event and the movie is well worth your time. —B+

Diary of a Chambermaid (Olive)

Hollywood-studio bound Jean Renoir is frustrating in a lot of ways, I noted as I began watching this, struck by the stage sets, and the sometimes-Mickey-Mousing musical score. This ain’t no Toni, in other words. However. Once you’re accustomed to the climate, the salient features of which include Paulette Goddard’s incarnation as a blonde, the movie builds up a nicely sly and sardonic head of steam. And of course this 1946 gloss on Mirbeau is an excellent double feature with Buñuel’s 1964 treatment of the same material, starring a Jeanne Moreau who’s permitted to keep her natural hair color. The cursory treatment Renoir accords this picture in My Life and My Films tends to confirm my suspicions that this was more a passion project for Burgess Meredith (co-star, co-screenwriter, co-producer, and Goddard’s husband at the time) than the director himself. In any event, the disc looks good, there’s a slight uptick in contrast relative to The Devil and Miss Jones, and ostensibly minor Renoir is still Renoir. —A-

From Beyond (Scream Factory)

Barbara Crampton’s metamorphosis from bespectacled researcher to  leather corseted dom is possibly the greatest sexy librarian switch in cinema history. And the Stuart-Gordon-directed 1986 followup to the immortal Re-Animator doesn’t disappoint in its other particulars either. The disc is first rate: Good detail, great psychedelic colors. Gordon’s brio and the overall inspiration of the rest of the crew bring this latter-day exploitation goodie way above generic Italian-studio Charles Band-dom. (Longtime Fangoria and/or Video Watchdog subscribers know too well what I mean.)  Filmmaking lesson: various gradations of psychedelic pink lighting definitely give your rubberized creature effects a more convincing feel. Good explosions and fire, always a sign of a well-done transfer. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “From Beyond has a machine!” —A

Frontier Horizon (Olive)

The good news is that this 1939 B oater, the eighth and last Three Mesquiteers picture to star John Wayne, is the best-looking of all such Blu-rays I’ve looked at thus far (I haven’t yet  gotten to Santa Fe Stampede and Red River Range). It’s one of the more unstuck-in-time Mesquiteers adventures, with an engaging land-grab storyline and tight narrative margins and brisk action; a real tonic. Also the film debut of Jennifer Jones, here billed by her real name Phyllis Isley, and looking and acting very fresh, innocent as she is of the knowledge that David O. Selznick would soon come along and CRUSH HER SPIRIT.—B+

The Fury (Twilight Time)

This, as it happens, is one of my favorite Brian De Palma movies, largely because it’s just the director going virtuosically nuts on a B-movie “Don’t fuck with Kirk Douglas” scenario. For the first quarter or so I was having a wonderful time with the high-def version. The beach scene with William Finley, and its bizarre depth-of-field show-offery, looked amazing. And I noticed that Hillary Thompson, the girl Amy Irving gives the nosebleed to, was a dead ringer for Sasha Grey, who was not even a concept in 1978. This is what movie watching’s all about. However. Once the night scenes started, the picture got pretty wonky: a good deal of speckling akin to what one sees in the Italian transfers of some Dario Argento pictures. It’s particularly evident in a scene after Douglas puts Irving on the bus: the over-graininess doesn’t get as bad as that of the misfire French Connection Blu-ray of a while back, but it’s close. Off-the-record consultations with technically trusted sources suggests the problem arises from an anomaly of an outmoded storage medium for digital transfers. It certainly didn’t kill the movie but it took me out of it for a bit, and it’s a poor comparison with the wonders inherent in the daylight scenes. A shame, and a problem I hope can be corrected at some point in time. —C

The Grandmaster (Mei Ah mixed region Hong Kong import)

If you wanna see the latest from Wong Kar-Wai before Harvey Weinstein regales the U.S. with his shorter-by-fifteen-minutes cut, this  pricey import would seem to be the way to go, and it’s a beauty. An evocative and sometimes elliptical biography of martial arts legend Ip Man (in case you were wondering, that’s the guy’s actual NAME, not like a superhero title or anything) it begins with a rain-soaked fight sequence that’s both quintessential and unlike anything the director’s done before. The colors are quietly ravishing, the performers profoundly enigmatic, and on the whole it’s more assured and cohesive than My Blueberry Nights, which I’ve actually gotten fonder of in recent years. On this disc, movie itself is region-free, and has English subs; special features are region-locked, and have none. They look pretty EPK-generic, as far as I can tell.  Your call. —A-

The Grapes of Death (Kino Lorber)

That’s a goofy title (and the French original, Les raisins de la mort, isn’t much better) for a genuinely remarkable horror movie, one of the most desolate films ever made, its often goofy special effects notwithstanding. There’s something about zombie-like pestilence occurring in the bucolic French countryside (Michael Haneke exploited it for rather similar effect, in fact, for his more arthouse-respectable [and also excellent] Hour of the Wolf) that just gets to you. Director Jean Rollin’s determined simplicity alternates with genuine (blank verse0 poetry, and the atmosphere of dread and despair is simply remarkable. Brigitte Lahaie-aiie-aiie-aiie is great as a not-what-she-seems character and her “behold my infection-free naked body” bit is a rather hilarious bit of exploitation deadpan in an otherwise mordant vision. The disc looks spectacular, very true to its source. Which source contains the aforementioned cheesy special effects, but what are you going to do. —A-

The Grifters (Miramax/Echo Bridge)

Ah, Echo Bridge, perpetrators of that wretched Blu-ray of Dead Man back in 2011. How I dread the idea of spending money on your product. So I think what happened is that I picked up this (admittedly cheap retail price point) disc in a trade in, because my curiosity got the better of me and also because damnit this is a pretty great picture that belongs in one’s library and it has a Donald E. Westlake script and naked Annette Bening and so there. Still, once it was home I didn’t look forward to checking it out. It’s not bad. The opening credits are in 1.66, which piqued my interest for a minute, but once they were through the picture reverted to a plasma-screen-filling 1.77 (not even 1.85, those motherfuckers). The picture’s solid, a little soft at times (like during Bening’s nude scene, imagine that) but it doesn’t have any jump-out-at-you pixilation screw-ups as Dead Man did. Not terrible, but also nothing special. I’d recommend you shoplift it but what kind of person would that make me?—B- 

The Hobbit (Warner)

I don’t have full-time access to a 3D display, so I acquired the flat Blu-ray of this, a movie I’d probably like a lot more if I smoked pot, because I was curious about how a more conventional version would look—I saw it on the big screen in 3D and at the controversial 48 fps projection speed and was mixed but sometimes very impressed. The “regular” version on Blu-ray is more…mixed. The textures of the visuals offers more disctrete distinction between the live-action and animated components within a given frame that I was comfortable with; the images rarely, if ever, merged into a coherent and satisfying whole. Again, this might not have been a problem had I been watching stoned. But I think the thing is, this movie actually needs  3D, if not necessarily 3D in 48fps. Having figures inhabit different planes just makes the multi-platform effects more digestible, as it were. Whenever I get a display upgrade (and it’ll probably be a while), I’ll give the 3D version a look and report back. —B

The Hudsucker Proxy (Warner Archive)

Almost ten years after their pal Sam Raimi got majorly burned on Crimewave, the Coen Brothers got a big budget and no studio interference on their own arguably final Full Cartoon movie, their first effort to really take a bath at the box office, as it happened. Like all Coen pictures, it’s since acquired a cult, but not nearly the one that The Big Lebowski entertains. And so, its Blu-ray gets a bare-bones Warner Archive release. Not that you go to Coen Brothers movies on video for the DVD extras anyway. This movie looks very nice; the disc nails the movie’s highly burnished look, which we come to understand as but one function of its Dada-by-way-of-Preston-Sturges snideness. By this time the Coens’ chops had come to match the ambition of their crazy gags (if you watch Raising Arizona today, while it’s still delightful, you might be shocked at how ragged some of it looks), and with more money to throw at production design and such, they really went to town. It’s kind of astonishing that the movie even exists. And yes, I think Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance works. —A-

The Jazz Singer (Warner)

One rather wishes that Michael Curtiz rather than Alan Crosland had directed this 1927, um, breakthrough film, but what are you going to do. It would have still retained its problem-picture status. What this Blu-ray really demonstrates is how great a result is yielded via application of expensive up-to-the-minute technology. I’m admittedly speculating here; I don’t have the details of how this transfer was made but it simply has to be a meticulous frame-by-frame scanning of good or eminently restorable materials. Look at the whites of Warner Oland’s eyes when he pops them out in indignation that Jakie is late to sing at temple. It’s incredible in a movie that’s almost ninety years old. As good as the older movies Olive puts on Blu-ray can look, their transfers are done by more conventional means, and it shows. The rest of this package runs along the same lines as the 2007 standard-def release, with multiple eye-popping hours of vintage musical entertainment, while the commentary track on the movie itself from  Ron Hutchison and Vince Giordano is one of the best of its kind. Just amazing. —A+

Knightriders (Arrow Region B U.K. import)

I cannot tell a lie: until this Arrow release came under my transom, I’d actually never seen this crucial George A. Romero film. I regret I didn’t sooner; it’s a pretty spectacular film. And it’s really not nearly as goofy as its conceit of stunt cyclists enacting Arthurian myth in the modern world might strike you, in large part due to Ed Harris’ superb lead performance and to the workmanlike, thorough way that Romero and his company enacts said conceit. Expansive, emotional, but never sentimental, it’s a quintessential Romero treatment on the wages of integrity. The transfer looks terrific, and the extras, including a commentary and a contemporary interview with Harris, are also excellent. Shout! Factory has this slated for a domestic release in July but I’m not sure if the company will best this particular product.—A+

Leave Her To Heaven (Twilight Time)

There has not been an extant Technicolor source for this glorious Technicolor film since maybe before you and I were even born, which is a shame and maybe even a crime. So as much restoration as it gets, we shall never be able to behold the full glory of John Stahl’s mesmerizing 1945 plunge into murderous neo-noir amour fou, starring Gene Tierney at her most hypnotically ga-ga gorgeous. But this Blu-ray boasts a beautiful picture for all that, so much more than passable that I wonder whether viewers of the real Technicolor were struck by Stendhal syndrome en masse. Essential. —A+

Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles (Warner)

What a sort of random idea: a two-Blu-ray anthology of  Looney Tunes mice-themed cartoons, billed as “The Chuck Jones Collection.” The adventures of Abbott-and-Costello-esque Hubie and Bertie are featured, as well as a bunch of shorts featuring neurotically gabby Sniffles. While I grant that a little Sniffles goes a long way, I also insist that in small doses he (she? it?) can be kind of winsomely delightful. Aw, fuck it, I’m a complete sucker for Looney Tunes on Blu-ray in any permutation, so maybe take my grade with a grain of salt. But know also that the collection includes “Trap Happy Porky,” which has that drunk-mice singing “On Moonlight Bay” and one of them hiccupping “You’re flat” at the end, still one of the most reliably hilarious gags in all of cinema, for my money.—A

 Major Dundee (Twilight Time)

The heroic-not-quite restoration of a too-much-messed-with Sam Peckinpah coulda-been-a-masterpiece looked great in the standard-def package released in 2006; this version looks better still. Even the 1965 Columbia opening logo has this particularity of grain that provides a Proustian rush of movie-palace power. The reconstruction of Peckinpah’s vision is a movie one wished one could have seen in precisely that context, because it would have blown minds; it begins by coloring very deftly within the lines of the standard Cavalry Western and grows progressively wilder and stranger while never betraying its prime directive, so to speak. It’s also one of the most emotionally stirring pictures of its kind. Cinephiles who are unconvinced by claims for Peckinpah’s genius will at least have to credit him for a very particular singularity of vision after seeing this. And in this format you need make no excuses for the presentation.—A+

Monsieur Verdoux (Criterion)

Speaking of strange, Charles Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy, based on an idea of Orson Welles’, is one of the filmmaker’s odder creations, the character a very upfront mix of self-love and self, if not loathing, then some degree of disapproval. Verdoux is Barbe-bleu as bourgeois fallen on hard times, as it were, his endeavors in murder slapstick cookies dipped in arsenic and his exercises in restraint and/or compassion sentimentally self-aggrandizing. Fascinating, to say the least. This is a good-looking but not extraordinary rendering of the film—there’s apparently only so much that can be done with the material available from the licensing agent. Nevertheless, a necessary entry in the Cinema of Extraordinary Personality. And it’s pretty funny, at least in parts, particularly those parts in which Chaplin jousts with Martha Raye.—A

On Approval (Inception)

No, I had never heard of it before either. Dave Kehr had, of course Dave Kehr had, and it was his review of it in the Sunday New York Times that convinced me to check it out. I’m very happy I did. The 1944 take-everyone’s-mind-off the war comedy (set in the Victorian era, it has a present-to-past prologue that pokes gentle fun at the torn-from-the-distressing-headlines pictures of its day) is pretty much a fat-free puff pastry of droll dialogue exchanges in a Wildean mode, to wit, “You have a sweet voice, Helen.” “Thank you, George.” “But you seldom sing. That is a great accomplishment.” Reproduced in stellar, high-contrast black and white, and supplemented by a dry but informative commentary from scholar Jeffrey Vance. Aside from featuring a rare film performance by British comedy queen Beatrice Lillie, the wonderful movie happens to have been adapted, directed by, and starring Clive Brook,whom you may remember as “Doc” Harvey from Sternberg’s Shanghai Express. I had no idea he had it in him. —A 

Pals of the Saddle (Olive)

Another Mesquiteers title. No windowboxed opening this time. A clear crisp  image, not quite as crisp as that of Frontier Horizon. I like it better than Frontier Horizon though because it features kinds creepy quasi ventriloquist Max Terhune as “Lullabye” Joslin, whom I find a more compelling (not to say Lynchian) character than Raymond Hatton’s Rusty Joslin. Terhune’s character also indulges in some merciless mocking of sap Tucson, played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan. It’s also one of the Mesquiteer’s present-day-set adventures, and it involves a woman of initially ambiguous allegiances and the smuggling of something that’s not quite uranium but is definitely meant to be. Hence, the movie is Notorious avant la lettre, and hence cinematically important. Look, my point is that if you don’t get your hands on every Three Mesquiteers western you can, you’re a bad American. I don’t know how else to put it. —B

Panic In The Streets (Fox)

Essentially a high-def clone of  the Elia Kazan box set edition (note the menu, which is designed in the style of the box set), but a really good looking version of a masterful movie. As Kazan himself understood, this 1950 thriller was much more than a genre exercise, but it works on that level just fine. It’s thrilling filmmaking right from the get-go, with Kazan deploying genuine locations and idiosyncratic performers (Zero Mostel has a major role in one of his scarce films from this period before the blacklist kept him out of movies for pretty much a decade) with remarkable energy and invention. The contrast is just as I like it, the detail looks just fine to me. A couple of  newer extras are added (docs on costars Jack Palance and Richard Widmark), but the commentary from  Alain Silver and James Ursini remains the crucial one.—A    

The Telephone Book (Vinegar Syndrome)

This Blu-ray from a relatively new concern that seems commendably concerned with unearthing and preserving unusual grindhouse and quasi-underground fare does a nice job with this curio, written and directed by Nelson Lyon, whose unfortunate subsequent claim to fame would be accompanying John Belushi through a good portion of the Hollywood drug binge that killed the performer. This not-quite-tale of a girl Candide’s search for the world’s greatest obscene phone caller (no, really) boasts lovely vintage NYC locations rendered in yummy black and white and features, not necessarily in this order, Roger C. Carmel yelling “Fuck,” William Hickey contemplating a giant erection, and Jill Clayburgh loading a gun while wearing a sleep mask. Producer Merv Bloch provides a lively and sometimes sadly nostalgic commentary. Utterly intriguing but not for everyone. —B+

Tess (BFI Region B U.K. import)

One of Polanski’s greatest films, it’s rarely acknowledged as such for reasons I’m not sure I ought to speculate on. So I won’t, and instead will hope that this beautiful albeit extras-short Blu-ray from a restored source will help find it a newish and appreciative audience. Yes, the British countryside of Hardy, not to mention of Turner and Constable,  is  evoked via the ravishing cinematography (Ghislain Cloquet took over for Geoffrey Unsworth after the latter died some weeks into shooting) but the effects are not “merely” picturesque; the beautiful golden glow  that illuminates “Sir John D’Urbeville” throws that character’s strong ignobility into sharp relief, and throughout, natural glory is undercut by human stupidity and/or cruelty. The director is at his most expansive and his most crushing, simultaneously. —A

That Cold Day In The Park (Olive)

Pre-M*A*S*H Altman, but the purposeful murk of the imagery, and  the focus fakeouts throughout,  presage McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Images and Three Women more than they do the subsequent film that would make him famous. The movie got slagged as a squalid but conventional psych thriller at the time but seen today its particular tetchiness is really auteur-distinctive, if you ask me. The drab of the supposedly swank apartment inhabited by the Sandy Dennis character speaks volumes. The Olive disc seems to have been transferred from not pristine materials, but the Blu-ray renders what is likely a pretty accurate account of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs’ long-lens impressionism. Fun fact: after retiring from acting male lead Michael Burns became an academic historian and has written more than one book on the Dreyfus case. — B+

Tristana (Cohen)

Goddamn there are a lot of trailers before the beginning of this movie. And that’s my only complaint. This high-def version of what I still consider Buñuel’s masterpiece of masterpieces looks amazing right from the beginning, as it casts a seemingly simple but ultimately devastating spell. Kent Jones fortifies his reputation as The World’s Most Enviable Film Critic by hosting a commentary track with Catherine Deneuve herself, and he keeps it relaxed and gets great stuff.  The included alternate ending is interesting. The actual ending is…well, unbelievable. Get this. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “He was really happy to be back in Spain, to be back working in Spain.”  —A+

 

Ultimate Gangsters Collection: Classics (Warner)

Good idea, putting these things on Blu-ray. The individual discs reproduce the extras, “Warner Night At The Movies” cartoons and shorts and all, of the standard def editions. And we approve. As for the high-def picture quality, the films are, in backward chronological order: White Heat, which looks very nice; there's some crackle on the audio of the 1949 film, and one insert shot in the opening train robbery sequence kind of stands out like a sore thumb, but otherwise solid, terrific. The longest movie of the bunch, almost two hours, because it’s kind of surprisingly plotty. Never lags a minute though. 1936’s The Petrified Forest screened in a restored version recently, and I presume that’s what’s on this Blu-ray, because the picture is easily the sharpest and most consistent in the set (not that the others are considerably behind, mind you). I mean, you can see stray hairs pop off both Bette Davis and Leslie Howard’s heads in medium closeup when they’re facing each other. Also the painted desert backdrops of the set are more evident. Terrific film, a bit on the talky side, but great performances (it made Bogart a star, but Howard really sells his slightly ridiculous role; the guy was some actor) and interesting action…and the two African-American characters are not broad stereotypes or even really stereotypes at all, a near-impossiblity for a Hollywood picture of this time, I used to think. The Public Enemy looks spectacular, sometimes grain heavy but what of it. Little Caesar  displays a  little softness in the shallow focus shots but it’s likely endemic to the material and it’s neither displeasing nor “bad.” A wonderful thing in all respects. —A+

  Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning (Sony)

A lot of The Kids have been raving about this one (and I gotta say that getting behind Peter Hyams’ son could be Vulgar Auteurism at its most innovative), so I thought I’d check it out, despite the fact that I turned off the similarly-praised The Raid after about twenty minutes cause the thing looked as if it had been developed in a mud bath. The first twenty minutes of this were really disgusting (slaughter of lead character’s family in graphic detail, including much-teased adorable-little-girl death), and looked pretty damn good. Eventually I thought I discerned a pulpier, freaked-out extrapolation of The Bourne Legacy and/or Unknown, with some intriguing Fire Walk With Me "touches."Eventually I had to own up to the fact that I was being way too optimistic and that the movie really wasn’t about much more than a guy who comes out of a coma to discover that he has a British accent. This does have more nudity than an average Bourne knockoff, plus the lead actress is a pretty credible Stoya lookalike. (Don’t hassle me for knowing too much about porn stars, she was on the cover of the goddamn Village Voice.) The action stuff is pretty credibly bone-crunching, I admit. The commentary is the usual “we had a great second unit” stuff. Verdict: not as essential as you may have been led to believe. —B-

The Vampire Lovers (Scream Factory)

No real complaints from me on this one. Yeah, maybe the materials weren’t pristine/super-restored, but they look decent. If there’s ever a Blu-ray of Fearless Vampire Killers, I’ll expect it to look better. But, no disrespect to Roy Ward Baker intended, the way this looks is both objectively good, and also entirely appropriate to the movie’s aesthetic pay grade. Inspirational dialogue: “German’s so difficult.” Among the extras: ten minutes of pasty but nicely dressed white males trying to come up with more erudite ways to exclaim “Boobies,” (because there sure are a lot of them in the movie, and most of the guys saw the movie when they were at an impressionable age). On the other hand, while the very sensible and nice and still lovely second female lead Madeline Smith gives an interview my wife characterizes as “darling!” Commentary features very sedate-sounding Ingrid Pitt,  delightfully named screenwriter Tudor Gates,  and the great Baker in a dry but informative interview format. (All three are now deceased, which is lamentable but inevitable.) —A

Van Gogh (Gaumont Region B French import)

Gaumont’s been putting out the Pialat catalog in new high-def editions and while I am sufficiently pleased by my current Eureka!/Masters of Cinema standard-def editions of the films and I figure eventually the company or some like concern will step up to the plate with versions featuring English-language extras, in a couple of cases I have not been able to resist. This 1991 picture is one. (It’s not among the MOC titles, is one reason.) This is a magnificent film, an artist’s portrait of an artist that concentrates on interstices, pauses, and work, work, work rather than the usual romanticized “artiste” stuff. It’s kind of the ultimate act of respect to its subject and likely a kind of self-portrait of its director. It looks sweet throughout, though there are hints of noise in some of the darker scenes near the end (for instance, Jacques Dutronc’s Van Gogh with a prostitute in the Moulin Rouge back room). I hold out hope for cheaper, more English-comprehensive editions (you’ve got subtitles on the feature but not on any of the extras) but I’m still glad to own this. —A

The Verdict (Fox)

The long-awaited (by me and Jeffrey Wells and probably some other people too) Blu-ray of the 1982 movie looks pretty splendid: a good library copy of a movie that belongs in your library. Watching it this time around I noticed for the first time that the relationship between Paul Newman’s Frank Garvin and Jack Warden’s Mickey Morrisey rather neatly reverses the dynamic between the Jimmy Stewart and Arthur O’Connell characters in Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. Director Sidney Lumet often complained that critics didn’t really appreciate the depth of cinematic craft he brought to his deceptively straightforward storytelling; this movie is a master class in it. As Phillip Lopate put it in a recent Cineaste review of the Blu-ray of Lumet’s film of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (which I haven’t gotten around to looking at yet), “If Lumet refuses to disguise the theatricality of the source material, he brings an impressive array of cinematic techniques to its moment-by-moment realization.” Where, say,  Preminger moved the camera, Lumet likes to place it in a comprehensive overview position and keep it there for a good long time (see the pretrial conference with Newman, James Mason, and Milo O’Shea), but he then places his emphases via judicious cutting to ground-level medium shots as the scene builds in verbal and strategic complexity. In other words, he is rather like a theater director in that his moves service the script, and this script, by David Mamet from  a novel by Barry Reed, is a very strong one. One of the best by the director, the screenwriter, and the star. —A+

Viva Zapata! (Fox)

I haven’t kept up on the critical reputation of this 1952 picture, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time,  and I have to say I was not that thrilled by it (and I recall not having been too thrilled by it first time around, which must have been when I was in my twenties). It looks beautiful; Joseph MacDonald’s lensing of various parts of the North American west standing in for Mexico is inspired. But I  found it dramatically stilted (John Steinbeck’s script wears its earnest didacticism on its sleeve) and kind of a waste of Brando, who is very conscientiously consistent in his portrayal of the plaster-saint version of the title character. This movie immediately precedes another Kazan non-favorite of mine, Man on a Tightrope. Maybe the guy was having personal problems in the mid-50s, I dunno. The disc is a solid presentation to be sure.—B

Wake In Fright (Alamo Drafthouse)

This highly disquieting 1971 thriller directed in Australia by Canadian-born Ted Kotcheff could just as well be titled Alcohol Is A Hell Of A Drug. A dissatisfied outback schoolteacher en route to Sydney makes a stop in the so-called “Yabba” that, after a few beers and a few more after that, submerges him in what we’ll call a distinctly unwholesome culture. Definitely a movie you ought to show anyone who thinks the “Wolfpack” ethos endorsed by those idiotic Hangover movies is something, you know, real. Also, you'll never see Donald Pleasance the same way again, even if you already do know Cul-de-sac. Long considered lost, Wake was revived on the rep circuit recently and the Blu-ray from relatively a new distrib outfit (an offshoot of the legendary Texas movie venue) is highly admirable: a great transfer that really puts across that baking-heat yellow light that seems endemic to Australia and certain Australian films, and good extras. If you can stand the (multiply disclaimered) kangaroo hunt that’s the movie’s horror centerpiece you’re golden. If not, well, you’ve been warned here. —A

War of the Wildcats (Olive)

Lest anyone accuse me of being completely in the tank for any Republic western, I cite this 1943 relative dud, which is kinda dull although arguably as semi-interestingly weird as one would expect any movie that casts Albert Dekker and John Wayne as romantic rivals to be.  Originally titled In Old Oklahoma, it features Dekker and Wayne as two different types of oil men, one the rapacious land-grabbing type, the other the hard-working man of the people. Guess who’s which. Martha Scott plays the object of their affections, a former school teacher turned early 20^th-century chick lit purveyor. Nothing against Scott, but Claire Trevor might have put more oomph in the role. Also featuring Sidney Blackmer as Theodore Roosevelt. Seriously, it’s not as good as I’m making it sound. And the disc presentation itself is quite mixed, what with the frequent speckling of the source material. For Republic junkies only.—C

Zeta One (Kino Lorber)

This 1969 secret agent/sci-fi pastiche looks pretty good. GREAT colors. (Note the orange kitchen. If you watch it. Which I'm not recommending.) Whiter than white whites. Too bad it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. INSIPID direction, coy dialogue, flat delivery. Nice 60s art direction…I think my parents had those white swivel chairs. The first scene goes on forever and nothing happens. It’s like The Room of James Bond parodies, honest. But I watched it all the way through! And the the image quality does hold up but man, does this movie ever answer the question “How bad can it be?” And the answer is: in the final shots, the At the end the hero is surrounded by six naked and/or semi-clad women and he looks absolutely bored to death…and you completely understand how he feels. Brilliant. —C+

Zombie Flesh Eaters (Arrow Region B U.K. import)

This 1979, um, classic, looks pretty amazing, and you’ll know a little about why from the interview I conducted with supervisor James White, here. The clarity and detail is such I was able to cogently identify (for my own self) the hallmarks of  The Lucio Fulci “Look:” Shallow focus, almost exclusively long lenses, not ostentatiously lit, lotta “natural” light. And you know, maybe it’s my grindhouse taste talking, but I think it’s a pretty good horror movie. And now one word never associated with prior video versions can be applied to it: beautiful. Nifty extras, too, including three different discrete title sequences, ‘cause that how international distribution of Italian exploitation cinema used to roll. —A+

Kouples kounseling Kool-Aid: I drink it up

I wish I could be somewhat less predictable but alas the day has come when I join thousands of other white heterosexual film reviewers of a certain age and say nice things about Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, in my review for MSN Movies. The extent to which I am being sarcastic when I commend it as a good date movie is up to you to decide. For the record, I haven't believed in "date movies" since I took Debra B. to see Eraserhead at a midnight show at the 3rd Street Playhouse (now the IFC Center) in late 1979 and she said it reminded her that she had to do her laundry. If you're interested in a dissenting voice on the Linklater, Richard Brody duzn't like it and he don't mind telling you.

I also review Epic, which wasn't good. 

Did Julien Temple invent Baz Luhrmann?

Patsy Kensit attempting to make an anthem of a song called "Having It All" in Temple's Absolute Beginners.

I have to admit I was kind of disappointed with my level of disappointment with Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby. At least one other critic of my acquaintance has noted that as summer movies go, it's the one that's the most fun to argue about, but I'm not much inclined to join said fun, just because I don't feel all that strongly about this Gatsby. While A.O. Scott avers that the movie is "eminently enjoyable," and good for him, I found it a bit of a slog, although when I cite its slogginess I take care to make it clear that I'm in now real way offended by what Luhrmann "does" with or to the book; as much as I was unengaged, I wasn't affronted either. If anything, I found the enterprise, for all its mammoth-ness, kind of tired. Flappers dancing to Jay-Z did not excite my sense of sacrilege at all; indeed, I found that and other such showbiz fillips as the movie offered entirely expected.

Now when Luhrmann had the cheek to put "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Moulin Rouge, and have it bellowed by Jim Broadbent, that was my idea of purposeful, almost revelatory sacrilege, and a reminder that an anti-showbiz protest is in fact an irreplaceable staple of showbiz. The anachronisms of Gatsby don't just tell us what we already know, they make points that unduly flatter us, as we intone sentences about how the materialism of the so-called Jazz Age is echoed in today's hip-hop fueled madness for "bling," and man, I just lost a little bit of the will to live merely typing that. The more people have been talking about Gatsby, the less I've been inclined to think about Gatsby. Instead, my thought turn to Julien Temple, about ten years Luhrmann's senior, and I think, why isn't HE allowed to make these sorts of movies anymore. By "these sorts of movies" you might think I mean, yeah, Baz Luhrmann movies, that is, gargantuan-budgeted lavish real-or-quasi-musicals—and think how genuinely sacreligious Gatsby would have been as a real musical, with its lead character, say, rapping about how good it felt to be, well, him; how queasily exhilarating the picture could have been if Luhrmann had risked that sort of ridiculousness and made it pay off—that take years in the gestation and production. Not quite, I'd answer. But in thinking, or not thinking, about Gatsby I also got to really thinking about Absolute Beginners, the musical Temple, a punk-weaned filmmaker who assembled a Sex Pistols feature of sorts before moving to music videos, made in 1986, quite some time before Luhrmann's film debut, Strictly Ballroom. The picture was poorly recieved at the time it came out. Looking at it now, it seems practically prophetic of the whole Luhrmann aesthetic, albeit with some interesting differences—none of which really explain why Temple's career in doing this sort of thing faltered, while Luhrmann's took off. That's not to say that Absolute Beginners is anything like a perfect film, but in terms of its conception and overall "attitude" it's remarkably and often giddily free. Adapted from a Colin MacInnes novel of social upheaval in '50s London, it stays true to its source in its fashion (e.g., a sense of social consciousness/conscience) while exercising a colorful fluidity in most other respects. I looked at it the other day and thought it held up pretty well; not only that, all the things that critics of its day gave it a hard time for—established pop songs lip-synched by the actors/characters within the diegisis, a purposeful carelessness in coloring outside the lines of its ostensible period, and more—are now regarded as, depending on the critic,  entirely acceptable devices (particularly when Luhrmann uses them), or no big deal. It's true that Temple doesn't nose around the vicinity of Camp as much as Luhrmann does, and that the relentless Brit-centricness of Absolute Beginners' content might have been as much of a roadblock to its making a wide impact as its formal playfulness was...but all things considered I have to say that Beginners qualifies as a movie that was genuinely ahead of its time, and that Luhrmann came along with an ethos that flirted with the postmodern even as it gave up big fat heartfelt melodramatic frissons in a superelaborate package just when mass audiences were ready for it. Temple's subsequent Earth Girls Are Easy is also way better than its reputation suggests, but doesn't function as well for my case because it's more overtly frivolous. 

These days Temple mostly gets to make imaginative, knowledgable documentaries about music and musicians, but his last fiction feature, 2000's Pandaemonium, which sort of makes rock stars of Wordworth and Coleridge, albeit not in a stupid way, showed that he's still in possession of the technical chops and the perspective to make cheekily new the things audiences have become accustomed to thinking of as old. It rather makes one regret that the only filmmaker today with permission to make Baz Luhrmann movies is, well, Baz Luhrmann. 

Green blood, Jim

Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine in Star Trek Into Darkness, for which I wrote a largely spoiler-free (although apparently the thing these days is to drop spoilers, and to care passionately, or something) review for MSN Movies. I liked it!

Also: I confirm my status as a member of a spider web of Noah Baumbach confreres who share his warped Manhattan/Brooklyn boho-bourgeoisie values by giving a positive review to Frances Ha. So sue me. 

New avenues in De Niro research: Grace Hightower's coffee

So. I've submitted the manuscript of Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro to the editors at the book publishing arm of Cahiers du Cinema. The book is part of a series (Karina Longworth's consideration of Al Pacino is out soon, and Longworth has started a Tumblr devoted to the book; I might do same myself, or something, when the time is appropriate and I Oh Christ do I have to think about it right now) that's pretty strictly formatted: General introduction, essays on ten films that encompass the whole of the performer's career until now, outro (or "Conclusion"), ten sidebars, and supplemental materials such as biographical chornology, filmography, and footnotes footnotes footnotes. But of course in writing about the ten individual films one does contextualize by discussing other movies, and so in the short time I had to write the book I ended up extremely immersed in the man's work. Thank God for Amazon Instant Video, and by the way, Ivan Passer's Born To Win is actually worth your time if you haven't seen it already. After a little bit I started developing a slight resentment. Then I began to feel like Steve Brody in the Looney Tune Bowery Bugs, at the point when he fails to put two and two together on discovery that all of his tormentors throughout the cartoon have been Bugs Bunny in various disguises. "Everybody's turning into rabbits!" he laments before diving off the Brooklyn Bridge. Substitute "De Niro" for "rabbits" and you get where I was coming from. I won't go into the details of a dream I had in which an appendage...well, as I said, I won't go into the details. 

The book doesn't mention De Niro's personal life all that much, which was good for me given that the two De Niro biographies I worked with were highly problematic anyway; when I started this project I learned that my pal Shawn Levy is working on a proper De Niro bio, and I regret it wasn't available to me as it would have been an excellent resource. (See Shawn's superb bio of Jerry Lewis and you'll understand what I'm saying.) But given the extent to which certain of De Niro's career decisions have been affected by changes in his personal life, and by his increased visibility as a public person, and so on, some things are discussed. I'm not sure if I necessarily would have made room for a mention of the below discovery had I made it before finishing the book. Said discovery occured at the Court Street branch of Union Market, a grocery much favored by the Young And Awful Parents Of Gen-X-and-Y Driven Bourgeois Brooklyn. What can I tell you? It stocks a lot of good, albeit pricey, stuff, and it generally plays vintage Blue Note fare on its sound system, which is nice. (And sometimes, as when the "free" section of Herbie Hancock's "Survival of the Fittest" came up on  one Sunday morning, this music makes the Young And Awful Parents Of Bourgeois Brooklyn a little uncomfortable, and they're not sure whether admitting to their discomfort will make them seem unhip, and their psychic gyrations in this respect are a wonder to behold. Unless I'm just projecting. I could be.) It was in the coffee section. New among the offerings of Stumptown and Peet's and all these new concerns whose rubber-stamped-logos-on-plain-brown-paper-bags contain beans as costly as gold I saw a shiny deep purple package and on closer inspection discerned it was a product from Mrs. Robert De Niro. 

You wanna talk pricey? $12.99 for a 10-ounce bag. But I bought it. How could I not. 

Let's get into the coffee first. On opening, one encounters a pretty nice looking bunch of beans. I took a picture of those, too. 

I threw said beans in the Krups burr grinder and brewed up a big pot for myself and My Lovely Wife. 

It's pretty fruity," My Lovely Wife observed. Whenever I hear anyone say "fruity," I think of Mrs. Bates protesting to Norman about being displaced from her bedroom, but I let it go quick and— agreed—it did have a ripe but acidic sweetness to it. "Do you prefer the African bean or the South American bean?" My Lovely Wife asked. I had to admit that as much of a coffee connoisseur, I mean HOPELESS AND ABJECT COFFEE ADDICT as I am, I hadn't given the matter much consideration before. I guess when it comes right down to it I DO prefer the South American. The best cup of coffee I've experienced in recent years was from a Honduran bean harvested by Those Fucking Hippies at Ritual Coffee. Scarfed it down in San Francisco, brought home a bag, haven't been able to find another since. As it happens I'm not crazy about the fruitiness for which African coffees are renowned; I prefer something a little more robust. Although I'm extremely partial to the Tanzanian peaberry. I contain multitudes, clearly.

Anyway, none of this is to say that the coffee from the Rwandan bean that's the signature of Hightower's brand was bad. It's highly flavorful—complex, as the reviewers like to say. I could totally see it, personally, as a dessert coffee, if I was back on dessert. 

The other salient feature of the Grace Hightower/Coffees of Rwanda brand brings us back to the packaging. Which is shiny and has a weird design (I don't think that extended ampersand really works, frankly) and features a shit ton of copy. On one side there's copy that begins, "There is a place called Rwanda." On the other side a couple of paragraphs signed "Grace Hightower De Niro," beginning "We believe that doing good business means doing good for the communities in which we work." On the back, a sticker that, in this case, tells the story of Buf Café founder Epiphanie Mukashyaka; below that, on the package itself, an explanation of the "Signature Series."  If all this copy doesn't keep you engaged while the coffee brews, or if you want to learn more (and my feeling is that the people behind the product are going for the latter) there is of course a website for you. 

I don't point this out to make fun. It's pretty clear this business idea emerged from a philanthropic impulse on Hightower's part, and a laudable philanthropic interest at that. What's interesting is the way that this enterprise so neatly slots into the contemporary Way Of Doing Things. Anyone who's tried to get a business off the ground or publish a book or do something along such lines is invariably told that regardless of how strong your idea might be, it cannot be launched without a PLATFORM. A celebrity, or the wife of a celebrity, or the partner in a celebrity marriage that has already established its philanthropic bona fides, already has, it is universally acknowledged, a viable platform. Once that's established, the individual with the platform will be told that he or she needs to construct a narrative. This is regardless of whether the venture is charitable or profit-driven; narrative is all, even if it's made up. In Hightower's case, the possible narratives have deep roots in recent history and of course the chosen narrative is the one that is all about hope. One that also, here, tends to assuage non-climate-change-related concerns about the ethics of coffee consumption. At least until the contrarian perspective on that starts coming into vogue, as it may be. (I read a headline somewhere the other day about how "foodies" were actually morally reprehensible, or something, but you know I almost never have been able to hear or read the word "foodie" without throwing up so I skipped the actual article.) Until then, if you're looking for a fruity and complex coffee that supports a growth industry in a particularly fraught part of Africa, I give Grace Hightower's brand a thumb's up.