Once Upon a Time in the West
(Thechniscope restoration from original negative)
My recently deceased hero Manny Farber, America’s greatest writer on the subject of cinema (who isn't Jame Agee) and one of its greatest painters, critically juxtaposed, in his most famous essay, “termite art,” which he loved, and “white elephant art,” which he caustically denigrated. This was before his wife Patricia Patterson started collaborating with him and all-inclusive judgments were excised altogether thanks to her judiciousness (or perhaps the earlier writings only provide the impression that his more blunt statements were such judgments, as they often seem lovingly intended if brash in character – such was Manny). Though Once Upon a Time in the West is one of cinema’s greatest totems of the White & Elephantine, I’m sure Manny must have loved it, as it also falls into another category he loved, “Underground Films,” not to be confused w/ experimental or countercultural ones – these were films whose “dry, economic, life-worn movie style … made their observations of the American he-man so rewarding,” more often than not principally about “barnstorming, driving, bulldogging.” Action films, then. Unwound films about the underworld. Once Upon a Time is, of course, as tightly wound as the fastest draw in town (each scene is slow and drawn out because we are perceiving things the way a quickdrawing motherfucker perceives them: in perfect, contracted detail), but otherwise fits the bill better than anything by Hawks, Walsh, Wellman, Kieghley, pre-Stagecoach John Ford, maybe even Anthony Mann. What separates Once Upon a Time is that it is film as Opera as opposed to shoot-from-the-hip existential mayhem – it is so calibrated that it can blow yr suspenders off in two shots at eleven paces. It is cinema-cinema, then, unlike those works by Farber’s heroes, and, for its time, it was the greatest popular exemplar thereof. There are still few, if any, what touch it. It’s life lessons alone guarantee its canonization as 20th Century must: never trust a man in suspenders and a belt because the s.o.b. don’t even trust his own pants; Jason Robards’ dying words, a bullet in the kidney: “Harmonica. When they do you in make sure it’s somebody who knows where to shoot.” Seeing the restored Techniscope negative in a proper theater was like a pillowcase of Halloween candy dropped from the sky. Paramount studios (who actually sent a liaison in Stampede garb to introduce) and The Film Foundation, under the guidance of one Marty Scorsese, have done an unbelievable (and no doubt unbelievably expensive) job sucking the earth tones out of Leone’s transcendent pop vision and blowing it back up into ‘scope, and I can now say that I have seen one of the great movies exactly how it was supposed to be seen. Now what else can you ask of a film festival? I beseech thee. More please! The Man from Laramie comes to mind (hint, hint)! Yee-haw!
(Thechniscope restoration from original negative)
My recently deceased hero Manny Farber, America’s greatest writer on the subject of cinema (who isn't Jame Agee) and one of its greatest painters, critically juxtaposed, in his most famous essay, “termite art,” which he loved, and “white elephant art,” which he caustically denigrated. This was before his wife Patricia Patterson started collaborating with him and all-inclusive judgments were excised altogether thanks to her judiciousness (or perhaps the earlier writings only provide the impression that his more blunt statements were such judgments, as they often seem lovingly intended if brash in character – such was Manny). Though Once Upon a Time in the West is one of cinema’s greatest totems of the White & Elephantine, I’m sure Manny must have loved it, as it also falls into another category he loved, “Underground Films,” not to be confused w/ experimental or countercultural ones – these were films whose “dry, economic, life-worn movie style … made their observations of the American he-man so rewarding,” more often than not principally about “barnstorming, driving, bulldogging.” Action films, then. Unwound films about the underworld. Once Upon a Time is, of course, as tightly wound as the fastest draw in town (each scene is slow and drawn out because we are perceiving things the way a quickdrawing motherfucker perceives them: in perfect, contracted detail), but otherwise fits the bill better than anything by Hawks, Walsh, Wellman, Kieghley, pre-Stagecoach John Ford, maybe even Anthony Mann. What separates Once Upon a Time is that it is film as Opera as opposed to shoot-from-the-hip existential mayhem – it is so calibrated that it can blow yr suspenders off in two shots at eleven paces. It is cinema-cinema, then, unlike those works by Farber’s heroes, and, for its time, it was the greatest popular exemplar thereof. There are still few, if any, what touch it. It’s life lessons alone guarantee its canonization as 20th Century must: never trust a man in suspenders and a belt because the s.o.b. don’t even trust his own pants; Jason Robards’ dying words, a bullet in the kidney: “Harmonica. When they do you in make sure it’s somebody who knows where to shoot.” Seeing the restored Techniscope negative in a proper theater was like a pillowcase of Halloween candy dropped from the sky. Paramount studios (who actually sent a liaison in Stampede garb to introduce) and The Film Foundation, under the guidance of one Marty Scorsese, have done an unbelievable (and no doubt unbelievably expensive) job sucking the earth tones out of Leone’s transcendent pop vision and blowing it back up into ‘scope, and I can now say that I have seen one of the great movies exactly how it was supposed to be seen. Now what else can you ask of a film festival? I beseech thee. More please! The Man from Laramie comes to mind (hint, hint)! Yee-haw!10/10
O’Horten
O’Horten is pure festival film happy-go-so-what? dross. Equally dull and saccharine in its eager-to-please middlebrow quirkiness, it is the cinematographic equivalent of sugar water, all the more irritating because that’s about the only drink they seem to serve in these “arthouses” w/ any consistency these days. Of course, the bourgeois audience, patting itself on the back for going to see a Norwegian film, was elated every time they “got” a fucking sight gag as though they’d just finished translating Goethe from the original German. Directed by Bent Hamer (ironically also what I call my penis), the film tells the story of Odd Horton (what an adorably quirky name, no?), a 67-year old train engineer on the cusp of forced retirement, as he decamps on a cutesy-poo picaresque through the streets of Oslo after showing up late for his last day of work. Even the sad mournful stuff is supposed to make everybody feel good and edified. Fuck that! Thank God for the amazing DP John Christian Rosenlund, who captures winter palates as well as anyone and helps sell the many excellent aforementioned sight gags by using the entire frame. Star Baard Owe, who you may recognize from his work w/ Lars Von Trier and who looks like the Norwegian love child of Vincent Prince and Peter O’Toole (who would clearly be the bottom in that relationship), is also great. Worst of all: somehow towards the end this sugar water started giving me a bit of a rush, I actually found it winning me over and began to blush in shame. Then the film shat its senile pants and ended. What? Are you pulling my fucking leg? O’Horten may be a better film than About Schmidt but it certainly doesn’t have that old fart pic’s awesome ending. Quite the opposite. It falls on it’s sword (or ski, I guess) and impales its own limpid self. I left the theater wanting to beat the shit of an adorable old person, though, so at least I felt something. Still, next time I hope they actually bring in a new film by Roy Andersson or especially the significantly more justifiably bitter Aki Kaurismäki, the two cineastes Hamer keeps ripping his style from.
O’Horten
O’Horten is pure festival film happy-go-so-what? dross. Equally dull and saccharine in its eager-to-please middlebrow quirkiness, it is the cinematographic equivalent of sugar water, all the more irritating because that’s about the only drink they seem to serve in these “arthouses” w/ any consistency these days. Of course, the bourgeois audience, patting itself on the back for going to see a Norwegian film, was elated every time they “got” a fucking sight gag as though they’d just finished translating Goethe from the original German. Directed by Bent Hamer (ironically also what I call my penis), the film tells the story of Odd Horton (what an adorably quirky name, no?), a 67-year old train engineer on the cusp of forced retirement, as he decamps on a cutesy-poo picaresque through the streets of Oslo after showing up late for his last day of work. Even the sad mournful stuff is supposed to make everybody feel good and edified. Fuck that! Thank God for the amazing DP John Christian Rosenlund, who captures winter palates as well as anyone and helps sell the many excellent aforementioned sight gags by using the entire frame. Star Baard Owe, who you may recognize from his work w/ Lars Von Trier and who looks like the Norwegian love child of Vincent Prince and Peter O’Toole (who would clearly be the bottom in that relationship), is also great. Worst of all: somehow towards the end this sugar water started giving me a bit of a rush, I actually found it winning me over and began to blush in shame. Then the film shat its senile pants and ended. What? Are you pulling my fucking leg? O’Horten may be a better film than About Schmidt but it certainly doesn’t have that old fart pic’s awesome ending. Quite the opposite. It falls on it’s sword (or ski, I guess) and impales its own limpid self. I left the theater wanting to beat the shit of an adorable old person, though, so at least I felt something. Still, next time I hope they actually bring in a new film by Roy Andersson or especially the significantly more justifiably bitter Aki Kaurismäki, the two cineastes Hamer keeps ripping his style from.5/10
Wonderful Town
This is not a wonderful town, in fact Sunday night I had the worst experience I’ve ever had at this or any festival, which is really saying something. It has nothing whatsoever to do w/ Aditya Assarat’s very-good-but-not-great Tsai Ming-liang-esque tragic love story, as usual, but with the context of my reception of it here at the Calgary International Ha Ha Go Fuck Yrself Film Fans Festival. I managed to suck it in when some asshole in the lobby was talking loudly during Once Upon a Time in the West and they managed to totally flub every second reel change, but this Wonderful Town experience was a different kettle of rancid fish all together. There weren’t many people in the theater and when the absolutely gorgeous 35mm print of the film was proven to have French instead of English subtitles nobody got up or audibly guffawed. I was even sort of exited to maybe deduce some more French vocab from the experience. But no, fat fucking chance. The programmer, Brenda Lieberman, may she suck an exhaust pipe, stops the film, apologizes, and tells us that they are going to project the, get this, PREVIEW ONLY DVD OF THE FILM WHICH HAS WORDS IN THE TOP RIGHT CORNER INFORMING YOU THAT THIS IS INDEED WHAT YOU ARE WATCHING … FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THE FILM. So instead of a gorgeous print – in which the opening shot of water and foam cascading against the shore invoked both the paintings of the master, Paul Cézanne, and the tidal forces which will consume anything (our male lead as standing-reserve here) that tries to separate this tsunami-ravaged coastal community from the symbolic-symbiotic innocence of one of its favorite daughters, a last desperate icon of what this community was before its spirit was covered in destroyed cars and crumbled buildings, then pulled violently back out to sea, only the buildings having subsequently been rebuilt, the spirit still squashed – what we got instead was a muddy, undetailed, out of focus, light-and-shadow-destroying, live public abortion. A WALKING ABORTION. And I don’t need to tell you that a walking abortion is the worst kind. Sure I sat through the whole thing. I had to have a hot shower afterward, too, for my trouble. It were as though I were the one who has just been fucked ungently by a straightened-out coat hanger for the better part of 90 minutes. In the words of Charlie Brown: AAAGH!
Wonderful Town
This is not a wonderful town, in fact Sunday night I had the worst experience I’ve ever had at this or any festival, which is really saying something. It has nothing whatsoever to do w/ Aditya Assarat’s very-good-but-not-great Tsai Ming-liang-esque tragic love story, as usual, but with the context of my reception of it here at the Calgary International Ha Ha Go Fuck Yrself Film Fans Festival. I managed to suck it in when some asshole in the lobby was talking loudly during Once Upon a Time in the West and they managed to totally flub every second reel change, but this Wonderful Town experience was a different kettle of rancid fish all together. There weren’t many people in the theater and when the absolutely gorgeous 35mm print of the film was proven to have French instead of English subtitles nobody got up or audibly guffawed. I was even sort of exited to maybe deduce some more French vocab from the experience. But no, fat fucking chance. The programmer, Brenda Lieberman, may she suck an exhaust pipe, stops the film, apologizes, and tells us that they are going to project the, get this, PREVIEW ONLY DVD OF THE FILM WHICH HAS WORDS IN THE TOP RIGHT CORNER INFORMING YOU THAT THIS IS INDEED WHAT YOU ARE WATCHING … FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THE FILM. So instead of a gorgeous print – in which the opening shot of water and foam cascading against the shore invoked both the paintings of the master, Paul Cézanne, and the tidal forces which will consume anything (our male lead as standing-reserve here) that tries to separate this tsunami-ravaged coastal community from the symbolic-symbiotic innocence of one of its favorite daughters, a last desperate icon of what this community was before its spirit was covered in destroyed cars and crumbled buildings, then pulled violently back out to sea, only the buildings having subsequently been rebuilt, the spirit still squashed – what we got instead was a muddy, undetailed, out of focus, light-and-shadow-destroying, live public abortion. A WALKING ABORTION. And I don’t need to tell you that a walking abortion is the worst kind. Sure I sat through the whole thing. I had to have a hot shower afterward, too, for my trouble. It were as though I were the one who has just been fucked ungently by a straightened-out coat hanger for the better part of 90 minutes. In the words of Charlie Brown: AAAGH!?/10
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