JPW Industrial-Grade Film Criticism

 

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

At times Martin Scorsese’s fascinating The Last Temptation of Christ [from 1988, year of the Calgary Winter Olympics], feels like an Off-Broadway Easter production that has decided to both play up the gritty New York City accents and to transport both cast and crew to the Middle East in order to stage the decisive one-night-only production where boorish middle class attendees complain of an ambient quality of displaced distaste and a heavy green fog of dismay like you’d expect to experience should the actual blessed Christ peer your way.

Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

I thought Seth Rogan was hilarious when he first appeared riffing in those early breakout (blunderingly heteronormative) Judd Apatow pictures, but largely I think on account of the repetitive and one-note nature of Rogan’s essential schtick I came before long to find the man enormously irritating and no longer my cup of tea. However, in Mr. Rogan’s favour, it must always be remembered the he wrote groundswell classic Superbad with his childhood friend Evan—about their own experiences, naturally—and they named the two principal characters after themselves. Now, you can’t tell me that’s not a solid dude. 

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

I have been forced in the recent past to face the fact that I no longer like Terrence Malick’s way iffy scattershot epic The New World even a little. Colin Farrell definitely gives the sloppiest and greasiest performance of his spotty career but what's even more concerning and dispiriting to my thinking is that despite the contributions and advisory interventions of members of the Chickahominy and Patawomeck tribes, documented nowhere more amply than on the special features accompanying the Criterion Blu-ray of Malick’s 1607-scale gambit, the gaze of the camera here is unambiguously that of a stentorian white man with mutton chops and a conquistador kink. (If you would like more information on the politics of the gaze, I refer you to Laura Mulvey’s film studies mainstay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.)

Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

In a number of interviews including one on the region-B Indicator Blu-ray for Alan Arkin’s epochal Little Murders, adapted from the caustic and quicksilver play by Jules Feiffer, star and co-producer Elliot Gould explains how they originally had nouvelle vague maverick and Jules Feiffer fan Jean-Luc Godard attached to direct, believe it or not, but it was not to be and the final straw came when Gould tried to explain to Godard that he, the grande Swiss cineaste, was going to have to be much more agreeable with studio brass if he truly wished to direct the film. Godard purportedly responded (as quoted by Gould): “When my wife or child ask me to tell them I love them I tell them to go fuck themselves.”

Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984)

In his hysterically funny warts-and-all memoir Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother, cinematographer-turned-director Sonnenfeld recounts a macabre and side-splitting anecdote concerning the production of Blood Simple, the first of three Coen brothers films he would lens. One night Sonnenfeld found himself filming while Joel Coen buried his little brother Ethan in an open grave in the backyard of Sonnenfeld’s “starter home” in East Hampton in order to get some guy-being-buried-alive second unit pickup stuff for the Coens' mostly Texas-shot narrative feature debut (and what a debut). Ethan gradually became completely covered in dirt and though he kept his composure for a good long while before raising a fuss, he eventually felt compelled to point out politely to the two silhouettes above him in the dark that he probably didn’t actually need to be under all that dirt at the point where the character would surely be unconscious. All there men shared a nervous chuckle.