Ephemeral Firmament

Flipping the Trims into the Bin

As I've gotten older, and more committed to a particular vocation (the exact parameters of which I'm still working out), I've accumulated a few professional paths I can imagine I would have pursued in another version of my life: sleep researcher, Kafka scholar, and, most longingly, film editor. For a movie lover who could not possibly bear the stress nor summon the multi-tasking authority required to direct a picture, it seems the perfect job: take the images created by someone else and craft them, frame by frame, into scenes and stories. (Even though I'm a word person, it's actually more appealing to me than screenwriting--maybe because it seems closer to the heart of filmmaking, while screenwriting has an inherently frustrated relationship to the art.)

Would I be any good at it? I really don't know. My biggest character flaw probably would be that I'm a bit of a (a bit of a?) pack rat in terms of both things and ideas: I can see the potential value in almost anything, from an old cereal box to a poorly framed photograph, as long as they somehow reveal the human hand. That might not be the best quality in a film editor, who doubtless needs to be more ruthless. I can imagine, say, sitting at the editing suite with Terry Gilliam and saying, "Gee, you're right, Terry. That stuff is all fascinating. I think this really needs to be a five-hour movie, no matter what the studio says."

I've posted recently about probably the best-known, and certainly the most theoretically articulate, film editor, Walter Murch, and recently, on the Museum of the Moving Image site, I came across a very enjoyable interview with probably the only other celebrity editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, the three-time Oscar winner indentified even more strongly with Martin Scorsese than Murch is with Francis Ford Coppola. It's a fairly old interview, recorded in 2002 after a screening of Raging Bull, and just before Gangs of New York was released. And for me it covered some familiar ground, since listening to the commentary tracks to Raging Bull (there are tons of them on the deluxe DVD), Schoonmaker's among them, was one of my favorite art experiences of the past few years.

But it still seemed fresh, and really, I could listen to her talk for days. I often say that Scorsese, along with Jonathan Lethem, is one of my very favorite talkers, and Schoonmaker, seen above while working on Woodstock, her first major gig, is nearly as appealing: not quite as analytically enthusiastic as he, but close, and with an unperturbable calmness that you can imagine as a useful complement to his more anxious obsessions. I love the way Marty talks, but I also love the way everyone talks about Marty, since clearly his passions are infectious and draw similiarly passionate and hard-working craftspeople to him.

I usually favor interview transcripts over audio, but in this case I'd recommend the recording, to capture some of her aplomb. I tried to skim back through the transcript for a high point to excerpt here, but I think my favorite moment is this small one, which may or may not translate and is probably better experienced in the context of her larger discussion of switching over--reluctantly but inevitably--to digital editing. She's talking about going back to analog editing on film when she worked on a non-Scorsese movie after she and Scorsese had moved on to digital:

Yes; it was funny, because I found after about a week or so, I was enjoying flipping the trims into the bin, because I always used to know how to do that. You know, you have to do it a certain way, so the end of it will get in.

I just love that little workaday detail, "flipping the trims into the bin," one of the simple pleasures of a craftsperson's life (which could apply to almost anyone who learns to do something well, from parking cars to crafting Excel spreadsheets). Meanwhile, there's more traditionally substantive material in the long interview, from lots of detail about shooting and editing the fight sequences in Raging Bull to why she works so well with Scorsese. Podcasts don't usually fit into my life very well, since I usually can't concentrate on other words while I'm working--I envy my wife and my sister who have more space in their working heads for that kind of soundtrack--but I'm going to go back to the museum's site for more: Errol Morris, Jane Campion, and, yes, Terry Gilliam.

For Your Consideration: My Best Supporting Actors of 2011 (and By That I Mean Actresses Too--Well, One of Them)

Like much of the world, I think the Oscars are absurd but feel pain if I miss a minute of them. Among their absurdities (shared with the endless award season that now takes a third of a year itself) is that of the great variety of skilled and fascinating supporting performances every year, somehow the conventional consensus builds around just a few, to the point that around a billion of the planet's people already know what only PriceWaterhouseCoopers is supposed to know: that Christopher Plummer will win Best Supporting Actor on Sunday.

So to balance the scales just a bit, here is a very short tribute to five (actually six) memorable and unnominated supporting 2011 performances from my spotty moviegoing:

• Hunter McCracken, The Tree of Life: Maybe the only one of these that might have received actual Academy votes, McCracken carries more than anyone else the weight of this portentious (and glorious) movie on his skinny shoulders, playing the boy that would grow into Sean Penn with more lived-in intensity than Penn can muster. What of the performance is his art, and what is the genius of Malick's editorial curation? I don't know, but what's left on the screen of his brooding, flinching observation, his arms bent awkwardly from hands stuck only halfway down his jeans pockets, is beautiful.
• Nicole Beharie, Shame: Speaking of bearing the weight of a portentious but, to my mind, successful movie, I've already written a bit on how Beharie's subtle but deeply felt reactions to Michael Fassbender's main character provide the hinge for the story's impact. She's the sole resting place of reason in a film populated by madmen, and so, like McCracken, she channels the force of our own observation through her. Therefore, when she's carried for a moment into the madness as well, she brings us, curious and aghast, along with her.
• Babak Karimi, A Separation: I guess you could say that Karimi's character, an examining magistrate in Asghar Farhadi's domestic drama, is a stand-in for the audience like the previous two, a voice of reason in a relentlessly subjective dispute, but the brilliant note of Karimi's performance is that he makes his judge seem both reasonable and as subjective as anyone else, swayed by irritation and special pleading but still attempting to work decently within a legal system that to a Western eye might look capricious and casual. His offhand authority in the role makes you think Karimi might be an actual judge drafted into this drama, so I loved finding out he's actually a longtime film editor in Italy making just his fourth onscreen appearance.
• Jurgen Klodt, The Woman with the 5 Elephants: I've also mentioned Herr Klodt with affection before (though not by name) as the gruff friend the translator Svetlana Gaier (the "woman" of the title of this documentary) brings in to test the music of her Dostoyevsky translations against. Obviously, this is a documentary, but what actor could top the deadpan comedy of his stubborn failure to budge the even more stubborn Gaier in their debates about word choice and sentence rhythms. His final shrug of defeat--"I capitulate"--may be the great laugh line of the year not spoken by a bridesmaid.
• Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method, and Adrien Brody, Midnight in Paris: Imitations of real and famous people are given undue weight in Oscar consideration, but in these cases well-known actors brought new life to overly familiar cultural celebrities. Mortensen's Freud, elbowed to the side in a story of psychoanalytic history that puts Jung at the center, is thrillingly alive with a combination of intelligence, virility, and bourgeois ambition that makes you realize once again both the riskiness and the carefully accumulated cultural capital of his ideas, while Brody, in just a few minutes onscreen and with just one repeated word--"Dali!" (well, also "rhinoceros!")--gives Allen's hit confection an edge of giddy weirdness that for a moment makes Paris in the '20s actually seem strange and present.

Walter Murch and Josh Melnick and the Blink of an Eye

My favorite bit of Net I came across yesterday was the video artist Josh Melnick's interview excerpt with Walter Murch, the polymath best known for editing Coppola's early '70s masterpieces, on the Paris Review blog. I must have read Murch talking about cutting on the blink of an eye in at least four places by now (his book, titled appropriately In the Blink of an Eye, as well as The Conversations, his book-length confab with Michael Ondaatje, and my favorite technical manual ever, Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain on Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema--all excellent books!), and I haven't had enough yet.

Here's his discussion of the blink this time:

Like most people, I was oblivious to blinking until The Conversation, which was the first feature that I edited. I had the repeated, uncanny experience of watching Gene Hackman’s close-ups and deciding where to cut—He put the tape down, and now he’s thinking about what he’s going to do with the tape and … cut. Very frequently, more frequently than I would have thought, the point that I decided to cut was the point that Hackman blinked. I thought, That’s peculiar. Then, after one session that lasted all night, I went out to get some breakfast. It was a Sunday morning, and I passed a Christian Science reading room in San Francisco, down in the SoMA district. They had a copy of the Christian Science Monitor. John Huston had just finished Fat City, and there was an interview with him about the film. The topic of editing came up, and he said to the interviewer, “Look at me. Now look at that lamp. Now look at me. Did you see what you did?” “No.” “Well, you blinked. When you changed subject, you blinked. That’s what the cut is.” And I suddenly thought, Aha! He was doing it along with a change of visual frame, but I realized we also blink with a change in our interior view.

When we change thoughts?

Blinking is some way of tabulating—a kind of carriage return, click, or save to disk—that helps the process of “Okay, now change the subject.” Every time you move your eyes, there’s an interruption in the visual field—you go momentarily blind when your eyeballs are moving. In order not to freak us out, the brain, almost condescendingly, inserts the last thing that we looked at, which has been stored in a sort of cache.

The motion of the eyes is the fastest motion in the body. The displacement of the eye has the most rapid acceleration and rapid deceleration. No other muscle can do it like the eye can. Ninety-nine percent of the time we’re dealing with somebody, we’re looking at their eyes. We’re not looking at their nose or their lips or whatever. So without knowing it, we have incorporated this idea of blinking into how we’re dealing with people. Can we trust them, or not? Are they telling the truth? It’s a perennial problem for politicians, because they’re up there giving a speech and, most often, they’re not really in the moment. They’re reading a text, and they’re thinking about ten thousand different things. Their mouth is in motor mode. As a result, their blinks are off, especially with the ones that don’t get elected. We don’t trust them. We say there’s something funny about this guy, and we don’t know what it is. A good percentage of that is the fact that he’s not blinking at the right place. Dan Quayle was notorious for this.

Of course the bit I love is that he had this moment of serendipity with Huston when he wandered into a Christian Science reading room.

The interview also made me want to see Melnick's video installation, The 8 Train, and the accompanying book by the same name, said to be coming out this spring but not listed yet on Amazon. (Although since the majesty of his ultra-slow-motion videos seems to come from movement, I'm not sure how it will translate to a book. But at least the book will have more interview with Walter Murch!) There seem to be no clips of The 8 Train online, but I did find this interview with Melnick, where he talks about the setting he chose for its silent, slo-mo portraits of (mostly) strangers:

The subway was the only place to shoot this project. Not only because of the photographic history of reportage photos of people on the subway that in some ways this project references, but because the subway itself creates a liminal trance-like state in people—it rocks back and forth, it’s dark, and it’s underground. There’s something very dreamlike about the subway to begin with and it’s also the place where there are barriers between people, these unspoken barriers. I grew up in NYC and have spent so much time on the trains. I’m fascinated by them.

And you can get a sense of the technique from his video for Cat Power's "Where Is My Love?" (unembeddable, alas), in which the second-most-dramatic moment (at least after all this discussion) is the man blinking from 1:29 to 1:33, although, as Melnick himself says he felt while editing it, I just wanted the camera to linger on each figure longer, through the gradual but monumental changes in their expression, rather than cut as relatively quickly as it does.

 

Buck, Rip, Candy, Nic, and Bowie

Wow. I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth for the first time, finally, a couple of weeks ago, on my laptop on the plane home from the holidays. Or rather I watched most of it: the flight ended before the movie did, and, it being a Nicolas Roeg movie, there were a number of scenes I fast-forwarded through for the sake of propriety. I caught up with the rest of it soon after and have been under its spell since. I'm not sure if all the extras on the wonderful Criterion edition have heightened that spell or broken it, though: after rewatching it in pieces that way the movie is even more impressive to me but has lost some of the strangeness that is its greatest power. The commentary track is a bit of a disappointment, especially given the commenters: Roeg, Bowie, and Buck Henry, for god's sake. Henry's too blandly analytical and Roeg doesn't seem that interested in putting his visions into words; only Bowie has the right measure of backstage storytelling and aphoristic insight. But the separate interview with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg is fascinating and gives a better view into Roeg's working methods than Roeg himself could.

One of those methods, clearly, is that Roeg trusted his gut and his sense of strangeness, and was prepared to accept the surprises his performers and craftspeople might bring him. It makes for a story told in images, which create echoes within the movie and outside it that, as in the Roeg movie I love even more than this one, Don't Look Now, aren't immediately explicable. And it's a story told through charisma: Bowie's alien charisma, which I admit I've been a latecomer to, and the oddball openness of Rip Torn and the great Candy Clark, who I'll take for your Karen Black any day.

I might have more to say when I've finished the Walter Tevis novel the movie was based on (also included in the Criterion edition!), but in the meantime, here are a few of those images:

Moneyball 2: The Movie They'll Never Make

I still don't understand how they made a semi-hit movie about baseball statistics. With actual charts from old Baseball Abstracts. Really. (Two words, I guess: Brad Pitt.) Despite (or maybe because of) having spent my adolescence in nerdly thrall to the agate type of box scores and the Baseball Encyclopedia (my elves and orcs were Gabby Harnett, Lonnie Smith, etc.), only now, when it's hitting the second-run theaters, did I finally make it to Moneyball, which was the anticlimax I expected. Its big-picture lessons are ones I absorbed a quarter century ago, so naturally I was impatient with the way its tidy arc smooths out and sometimes just plain distorts the truth of what happened in Oakland in the early aughts.

After watching it I immediately caught up with the flurry of similar online criticisms, for example here and especially here. It's no wonder Art Howe despairingly objects to his villainization in the picture even more than the (very different) condescension he received in Michael Lewis's original book, and not only because, lean and almost laughably erect in life and more suitably embodied by John Malkovich or former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, he was played by dumpy Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Yogi Berra agrees.) And fans who remember the 2002 A's might be forgiven for hardly recognizing the team on the field: while the movie focuses on cheap, marginal players like Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford, you hardly hear a mention of the stars who actually helped them win the most, the once-in-a-generation young pitching trio, Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, and the free-swinging (i.e. anti-Moneyball) shortstop Miguel Tejada.

I could list and add to the quibbles at length, but there's just one I want to note for myself: in going back to the book I was reminded that Hatteberg, the walk-happy, damaged-goods catcher that Billy Beane resurrects as a bad-field, good-hit firstbaseman, is not the clueless goofus of the movie, but a brainy player as analytical as Beane who made himself into an on-base machine against all the objections of the old, idiotic Red Sox coaching system. (How could I have forgotten, when my old hero, and short-lived Sox hitting coach, Jim Rice is held out as the most idiotic of all?) Wouldn't it have made a better story to have Hatteberg be as smart as Beane and his bean-counters and to be thrilled to have finally found a team that understood him?

On the positive side, I can say that Parks & Rec's Chris Pratt, who plays Hatteberg, is pretty close to a dead ringer for the ballplayer (see above).

But what I really want to say about Moneyball (both the book and the movie) is that the other aspect of my impatience with the story is not with the falseness of its arc but the datedness of it. As every baseball fan knows, the story has moved on and even been altered in retrospect (since the Moneyball theories are theories about the future, what has happened since affects how we view what happened then). Beane is still in Oakland, but the A's haven't been over .500, or in the playoffs, in the last five years, while the Red Sox, the formerly idiotic team that almost made him their GM, won two World Series after he decided not to join them. And plenty of Beane's personnel decisions in the book don't look so laughably clear-cut in hindsight: Carlos Pena, the young firstbaseman cast aside for Hatteberg, went on to lead the league in home runs, as did Prince Fielder, the draft pick Lewis describes as too fat even for the A's, while the diamonds in the rough ID'd by Beane's analysts in that same draft have, with few exceptions, not panned out. And Jeremy Bonderman, the high school pitcher whose selection in 2001 by A's scout Grady Fuson (the other villain in the movie) caused Beane to throw a chair through a wall in fury, made the majors at age 20 after being traded to the Tigers and helped them do something Beane's A's still haven't done: play in a World Series.

Lewis has mentioned on a number of occasions that he has thought about writing a followup to Moneyball, to track the players Beane's team picked out--I'd love to read it. My Moneyball 2 would be a more ambiguous tale than the first, of course. On one hand, it would be a story again of money, and of the speedy diffusion of innovation. As long as Beane and his theories were weird outliers, there were plenty of bargains to be found. But when rich teams like the Yankees and Red Sox caught on to them, as they had already started to by 2002, Beane's advantages dried up. (Like any good franchise opener, Moneyball actually sets this sequel up with one of its best scenes, when new Sox owner John Henry, trying to convince Beane to come to Boston, gives a lengthy monologue that's more or less a summary of Lewis's book.) Beane's lessons, aided both by his success and, no doubt, by the bestselling book, spread beyond the rich teams too, to the point that Beane himself, in search not of eternal sabermetric verities but rather any undervalued advantage he can find, has turned in recent years to qualities he once disdained, and thereby made unpopular and cheap, like defense and high-school players.

The other side to my Moneyball 2 is a subtle and human one, and it's best expressed in the story told by Keith Law, one of the models for the Ivy League laptop jockey played in the movie by Jonah Hill. Law was an opinionated analyst for the post-Jamesians at the Baseball Prospectus (which also spawned political stat superstar Nate Silver) who got the chance to try out his theories when he was hired by Beane pal J.P. Ricciardi to help run the Toronto Blue Jays. He arrived cocky and dismissive of traditional scouts (and was interviewed to that effect by Lewis) but came over time to value their more traditional expertise, especially as the popularity of the Moneyball method made it much harder to find bargains:

While I was there I worked with many scouts ..., many of whom tried to open my mind in 2002, 2003, when I was not open-minded, when I was 28, 29, and walked in the door and was told, "You're here, you're gonna replace ten scouts with the work you do." And I believed it, which was a terrible mistake on my part.

Why, that's a human story of comeuppance, redemption, and growth so moving that Hollywood might find a way to profitably sentimentalize it after all. How about Moneyball 2: Money Never Sleeps, with Law played by Shia LaBeouf? Oh wait, that movie tanked. Never mind.

Matinee Report: Shame

When I left the office world in March, I joked that I'd be spending my days at matinees, as indeed I did spend my first day off the job. But in the nine months since I've gone to two daytime movies, including yesterday, when I decided, since I was downtown already, to take in the 11:15 am showing of Shame at the only place it's playing in town, the downtown mall. I wasn't exactly surprised that from what I could tell it was me and a half-dozen other middle-aged men (I'm a middle-aged man! I'm a middle-aged man watching NC-17 movies on a Tuesday morning!) spread out across a giant theater watching Michael Fassbender's substantial dangling manjig*, and also watching a very good movie about which the cliche that a movie about sex obsession is not sexy at all is in this case (though not all cases) true.

That is, I guess, in itself an achievement, but I wanted just to mention a couple of things about Shame. One is the way it's a New York Movie. There's something about the way it inhabits the streets and subways of the city that makes it speak to some of the other great NYC movies--Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Manhattan--and to my mind hold its own with them (although in many ways his city, blue and cold, feels more like the London of Mike Leigh's Naked). There are elements (lust, blood, loneliness) that clearly echo those first two New York classics, but what made me think of Manhattan (having just watched that Woody Allen doc on PBS) was its contrast: whereas in Manhattan the Gershwin soundtrack is paired with panoramas of the city, in Shame, with Glenn Gould's Bach in the background, you're given hints of those sweeping views but never allowed to luxuriate in them. There's a moment in particular when someone remarks about how beautiful the city looks from a high restaurant window, but we never get to see that view ourselves.

Most impressive and moving to me about the film, though, was the way your sense of the main character's position undergoes a subtle but sudden shift about halfway through. You know to that point that Fassbender's character, Brandon (a name so bland it's hard to remember), is in some sense, well, a dick: cold, selfish, and ravenous. At the same time, though, his power is in some way attractive--he seduces you a little with it, the way he does the women he meets. (I'd be curious if a woman viewer felt the same way.)

But midway through, that floor falls out from under you, or under your sense of him, and his power feels more like a sickness, and his "winning" (in the Charlie Sheen sense) feels more like losing. And that largely happens in a fabulously awkward first date scene with a coworker (played with thrilling, reactive subtlety by Nicole Beharie), in which Brandon's way of life confronts the confused skepticism of someone outside its pathologies--the only character in the movie, in fact, who seems to be trying to live outside them. (The awkwardness is only heightened by the "insanely obtrusive" waiter, in the words of Glenn Kenny, who doesn't think his presence quite works. For me, though, his bumbling helped to make the scene even more of a bizarro-world version of the usual movie-dinner bit, in which the couple is so wrapped up in their seduction of each other that they are blind to everything else. In this case, they are seducing each other at the same time that they are bewildered by each other, or at least she by him. (He's bewildered by why she isn't being seduced.))

P.S. Carey Mulligan dimple update: it's largely played down here, except for the one scene where her character, Brandon's equally messed-up sister, is granted a little glamor and the great dimple is lit with all the care that Gordon Willis gave the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan.

*--since Roget's doesn't provide all the synonymical possibilities here, I turned instead to Nicholson Baker's bawd compendium, House of Holes.

Does The Social Network Have Its Own Forgotten Co-founder?

I love a good DVD commentary track almost as much as a good movie, and I had heard the tracks for The Social Network were particularly excellent, so I rewatched it recently with both tracks, David Fincher's as well as Aaron Sorkin's with a few members of the cast (Jesse Eisenberg*, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, and Armie Hammer, the guy who played the Winklevi). It wasn't a game-changer, as far as commentary goes (my favorite is still Raging Bull, which has something like four or five superb commentaries, especially from Michael Chapman, the cinematographer, that I watched back to back to back over a few days and that made me love the movie even more--yum!), but pretty interesting stuff. My few notes of interest:

David Fincher, at least from the evidence of hearing him talk about his work and his colleagues for a couple of hours, seems like a total sweetheart and a wonderful person to work for. Can this possibly be so? I just assume you have to have a huge jerk quotient to direct hundred-million-dollar movies--especially if, like Fincher, you ask for 30 or 50 takes for each shot. And this may still be true, but he certainly presents well.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that over four hours or so of commentary, the name "Ben Mezrich" was never spoken. Does that name ring a bell? He was the author of The Accidental Billionaires, the book the movie was based on, but throughout the commentary, all the elements of the story and characterization were credited to Sorkin, the screenwriter. Which is certainly not new in the movies--the books movies are "based on" are often left in the dust, along with their authors. But in this case I remembering being struck, when I first saw the movie having already read the book, at how closely the movie hewed to the book, both to its weaknesses and its strengths. I knew, from interviewing Mezrich when the book came out, that the fact-to-book-to-movie adaptation had an abnormally compressed development (which nearly matched the speed at which Facebook has taken over our lives): Sorkin was working on the script at the same time Mezrich was completing the book. Does that mean that Sorkin did have a strong role in developing the story in the book as well? Could be, but my sense from Mezrich was otherwise, especially since the book so closely fits the narrative pattern of his other books.

Mezrich's book is not a great one--it's not written with much subtlety and it felt like he was cramming this big, complicated corporate drama into what has become the Mezrich formula: Ivy League nerds make a lot of money so they can finally get laid. I was frustrated with that in the book, and then very surprised at how closely to that formula the movie stayed (and I was also surprised at how good the movie was, despite that). But really, you're still going to try to tell me Facebook was just built out of sexual frustration?

But the thing that impressed me about the original book was that Mezrich, despite having a clear point-of-view because Eduardo Saverin, the disgruntled co-founder, was his main source, still managed to let you see the justice (and flaws) of each of the main characters' positions: Eduardo and the Winklevosses each were there at the beginning and had legitimate claims to the business, but none of them would have taken it to where Mark Zuckerberg did. And that moral balance is one of the great achievements of the movie as well, which brings me to my last note about the commentary track: I loved the way each actor still saw the story from the perspective of the person they were playing. Eisenberg was a passionate advocate for Zuckerberg, Garfield for Saverin, Timberlake for Sean Parker, Hammer for the twins, even though each of them, except perhaps Saverin, comes off unsympathetically at various moments in the story. And it comes out subtly enough (perhaps because most of the actors' commentaries were recorded separately) that only as the commentary goes on do you realize the investment each actor had--and still has--both in his character and in the real person in the actual drama.

I'll credit Fincher for shepherding his actors well, to encourage that investment. And perhaps the unmentioned Mezrich too, for giving each character his reasons. But it's funny to me that in this story of a forgotten founder being written out of the corporate history, the writer who first told the story seems to have largely been forgotten as well.

* Whose performance just gets better each time I watch the movie, by the way.

The Mumble Meets the Music in Guy and Madeline, Or the Thrill of Skill

Via my friend Josh, my Virgil through the seven circles of mumblecore, I came recently to Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, which rose to the top of my Netflix queue, arrived at my house, and then sat around unseen until I nearly returned it but first watched the opening few minutes just to see what I'd be missing if I did. That glimpse was enough to make me keep it.

This is not my place to make a brief for or against mumblecore, however you define the lo-fi, often improvisational films that have been appearing at festivals and on art-house screens the last decade (and have produced at least one legit crossover star, the fabulous Greta Gerwig). As with many genres, I've loved some I've seen (Humpday, Beeswax, Medicine for Melancholy), liked aspects of others (Hannah Takes the Stairs, Mutual Attraction), and been anti- or apathetic toward some more (I can't remember their names, but ask Josh--there have been a few!).

Whatever mumblecore may be, the existence of the genre is part of the surprising pleasure of Guy and Madeline. It's a thoroughly referential film (only confirmed by the film-geeky DVD commentary of its director, Damian Chazelle, a musician and film fanatic who shot the picture while a Harvard undergrad), starting with the title reference (which I did not pick up) to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. But all the references Chazelle mentions are to older cinema (Pickup on South Street, Gene Kelly, Anna Karina): while his movie is made with some of the conventions of mumblecore, it seems blessedly to live outside the hothouse of many of its peers, in which many of the same actors and directors (Bujalski, Swanberg, Duplass) show up in each other's films.

The hook in Guy and Madeline is that it's the "mumblecore musical." Chazelle doesn't put it that crassly, but his avowed goal for the movie was to smash up the lo-fi, verite style against the classical musical. And indeed he does: amateurish actors have ambiguous relationship scenes in bohemian apartments shot in shaky hand-held close-up, and then they also, from time to time, break out in song or, in the case of the lead trumpet player, Jason Palmer, in melody. And that's a fine idea in itself, but the musical side could have been done in a more traditionally mumbly way, where the singers aren't very good and they are just playing around with their instruments (think of the bathtub trumpet scene between Gerwig and Kent Osborne in Hannah Takes the Stairs).

But the beauty (and beauty is the operative word) of Guy and Madeline is that there's not just a collision between mumble and musical, but between amateurism and virtuosity. Because the music is good, as are the musicians who perform it. Jason Palmer's Guy may be mumbly to the point of incoherent in his relationships, but with his horn he is thrillingly skilled and emotionally compelling. Even Madeline, played by Desiree Garcia, though she is not a professional musician either in real life (instead, charmingly, she's a scholar of movie musicals) or within the story of the movie, turns out when she breaks into song to be able to put over a lovely talk-jazzy style quite well herself. And in the most audacious scene of the movie, a house party of, one assumes, music and theater students and young pros breaks out into a multiroom production number, with the camera swinging back and forth with as much rhythm and skill as the musicians and dancers.

That's a benefit of setting your mumbly relationship drama among musicians: they may still be haphazardly navigating the waters of urban twenty-something life, nearly unable to hold a standard conversation, but they have developed a sophisticated way of expressing themselves in one channel, and the tension between the two (as well as the beauty of those sophisticated expressions), makes Guy and Madeline perhaps my favorite mumbler yet. I expect that tension will appear again and again, as some of the other lo-fi practitioners grow up and reckon with their own increasing virtuosity.

The Purity of the Elderly Craftsperson: Svetlana Geier and Bill Cunningham

On the 99-degree day today, when, defeated by the heat, we had thrown aside any sightseeing plans in New York (and when our boys only set foot out of our friends' air-conditioned apartment in Brooklyn long enough to go down the street to get Italian ices), Laura and I snuck out to catch a matinee at the Film Forum in the West Village, a documentary I hadn't heard about before I saw it on their schedule, The Woman with the 5 Elephants.

You might not think that a documentary on literary translation would be moving and thrilling (well, I actually would--that's why we went to the movie in the first place), but this one is. Svetlana Geier was (she died last fall, after the completion of the film) a longtime teacher and a leading translator from the Russian into German who, late in her life, gathered a bit of fame for her series of translations of the great novels of Dostoyevsky (the "5 Elephants" of the title). Her life at age 85 and her approach to her craft are interesting enough as a subject, but her past, with a dramatic path through the wars and tyrants of the 20th century that so few Central Europeans avoided, makes her even more so. She was raised in Ukraine, the daughter of a successful farmer destroyed by Stalin's purges. The Nazi invasion and retreat, coupled with her study of German, then became the tragically fortuitous route by which she ended up a scholar and professor in Germany after the war.

That drama, which is brought into the present in the film by a return visit she makes to Kiev--her first since the war--is substantial and moving (and ambivalent, as she found her route to freedom through the same occupiers who massacred tens of thousands of Jews and others, her friends among them). But I was at least equally moved by the contemporary portrait of her daily life, which vividly echoed the wonderful documentary Bill Cunningham New York.

I do often think by comparing, and throughout this picture I was thinking of the other. On one hand, they are both portraits of elderly craftspeople who carry with them, both in their everyday lives and in their work, a purity of spirit and purpose, living by ideals that seem out of place in our time, but may have been out of place in any time. They hold themselves to standards far beyond what anyone else might. (Geier's fierce attention to the simplest of tasks has certainly made me rethink my lifelong aversion to ironing.) And their crafts are each secondary ones, depending on another's art: Cunningham's photography on the personal fashion he hungrily records and Geier's translations on what she calls the "inexhaustible" texts of a master like Dostoyevsky. Perhaps that shared modesty toward what they record and translate is related to the personal discipline that's so remarkable in each.

But their working methods, and their lives, are not entirely similar. Cunningham is a classic loner (whose past remains largely untold, not least by himself), and much of the tension of his story comes from the gap between his passionate and social professional life and his mysteriously ascetic personal life. Geier, on the other hand, is--and I don't mean to make a pun about her wartime experiences--a collaborator. She is surrounded by family, cooking with children and grandchildren and traveling with a granddaughter who clearly adores her. Even her translating work is not done alone. She dictates her translations, sentence by sentence, to a trusted friend who often helps her refine the text as she speaks. And then she listens as another friend, a gruff but "reliable" musician, reads her text back to her and debates the fine points of music and meaning therein.

The most thrilling and hilarious scene in the film is between these latter two, in a short discussion of a few sentences that approaches the wordless battle-of-wills genius of Judy Holliday's gin game (start at 4:00) with Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday (which really deserves a spot on a Firmament list if I can concoct a category for it). You can see a snippet of that scene ("I capitulate") in the trailer for the movie, followed by a glimpse of one of the other most thrilling elements of the film, the laughing but piercing glance of her giant eyes, so often hidden by the exhaustion and gnarled posture of age.

I've been recommending Bill Cunningham New York to anyone and everyone the past couple of months, and I'll do the same for The Woman with the 5 Elephants, if it's fortunate to get and keep the kind of exposure that BCNY has. (I also enjoyed watching a short Q&A with the director, Vadim Jendreyko, from a festival appearance in San Francisco last fall, which adds to his portrait of this singular woman.)

Rubberneckin' in 1969

They were playing the Elvis channel at the dentist the other day, and I got infected by a Nancy Sinatra-sounding cut I probably should have heard before but hadn't: "Rubberneckin'." (I still can't get it out of my head.) And when I tracked it down later, it turned out to have come from Elvis's last movie (though it was recorded for his '68 comeback album), Change of Habit, a 1969 Mary Tyler Moore vehicle (until Elvis came on board) about three nuns who work as civilians in a South Bronx clinic. One of them (MTM) falls for the clinic doctor, a streetwise sometime-singer from Shelby County, Tenn., and then has to choose (quite literally) between Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley (playing a character named Dr. John--wait for it--Carpenter: maybe it's not a choice at all!).

Streamable on Netflix? Check. How could I not make it (or at least the first half-hour) my lunchtime entertainment? But what a thrillingly weird cultural document it turned out to be: on one hand a cheesily implausible Elvis showcase, including an upstairs house party performance of "Rubberneckin'" (see below), on the other a "gritty" social drama, played mostly straight, that could have been made at no other time than those hopeful and freaked-out years when the '60s ended and the '70s began. Autism, Vatican II, urban poverty, predatory pricing, abortion and rape jokes, ... and "Rubberneckin'"! It's like The Love Boat deciding to dock for an episode at Port-au-Prince instead of Puerto Vallarta.

Not that anyone needs me at this late date to point to the depths of pop culture, but to call it merely cheesy does it a disservice (or is a reminder of the complex flavors and varieties of cheese). It's complexities are not the same as, say, "Benito Cereno," but a work like this is such a tangle of culture that you feel like you could pull on any strand (say, when Elvis says to Barbara McNair, "I've been all of those things except black") and eventually yank out almost all of 20th-century America. I'm starting to imagine a tasty course syllabus: Change of Habit, Midnight Cowboy (a studio exec apparently wrote to John Schlesinger, "If we could clean this up and add a few songs, it could be a great vehicle for Elvis Presley"), Sesame Street, Sweet Charity, Putney Swope, The Exorcist...

Here are the first 10 minutes, including a nun striptease during the credits and the great "Rubberneckin'," which is our first glimpse of Dr. Carpenter, although if you want to go straight to the song start here.

Am I right in guessing it wasn't intentional to cut between Elvis's anthem to checkin' out the ladies and the nuns getting harassed by the locals on Washington Street?