Thursday, February 26, 2009

The Firemen's Ball (1967)



Milos Forman: "In the totalitarian system that I lived in the pressure was ideological . . . On the other hand, here in the West, ideological pressure doesn't exist at all, at all. But there is a commercial pressure, because a film is a very expensive undertaking and everybody who puts money into it wants money back."

But isn't commercial pressure ideological precisely because of its non-ideological pretense?

Isn't the allegory of rampant thievery applied to 1960s Communist Czechoslovakia equally applicable to contemporary Wall Street? Instead of the poor stealing from the poor the rich steals from the rich.

And which is the greater crime: pilfering a head cheese for future jellied meat treat or plundering a national treasury to furnish Montana ranch manor, South France coastal villa , 6 car garage of Hollywood Hills home, W Hotel beach front Fort Lauderdale condo and Upper East Side penthouse overlooking 40,000 shelter scramblers, dragging dirt stiffened clothes in punctured plastic bags through streets of outer boroughs? Poor schmucks.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Damnation (1987)



Dreaming CK guides me in a deliberative dolly shot through her top floor flat on Spring Street, "slowly, slowly," she tells me, "let the scene speak."

Lens pulls back to reveal french doored bedroom, sweater sleeve hanging from half open dresser drawer, overcoat from mahogany tree, remains of fifteen year absence from narrow flight.

Give permission to the silence, the anxiety for narrative purpose found in first generation Nyugat poets--Endre Ady, Árpád Tóth, Mihály Babits--broken only by squeak of industrial gondola lift, Bartók inspired sounds of Hungarian avante-garde.

The forced gaze at luscious rain trickling down stucco brings longing for the beauty of a Budapest post-wall rave, where CB--now Bruce-Lee--broke an ankle to hobble on my shoulder after last Metro through streets of le sixième arrondissement.

Dark drenched front legs of black khakis, cotton socks soaked through loafers, side winding water, yard long gutter puddles must be met without nylon pant shell, duck shoes but with eyes of Minnesota's Strand, Minor White: frenzied serenity.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Kicking and Screaming (1995)



Five minutes in, I understood the title's meaning.

Noah Baumbach is to filmmaking what Rod McKuen was to poetry, except that McKuen made me laugh.