Slumdog Millionaire's night at the Oscars (with some NASCAR too)

-And the winner is... Slumdog Millionaire! A bunch of people come up on stage, after some initial hesitation, including the kids from the slum. Wow, what great television, the cute little kid is right up behind the podium. Christian Colson, producer, speaks for them all--"when we started out we had no stars, we had no power or muscle... but we had a script that inspired mad love."

A movie that almost went straight to DVD... doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Hollywood's ability to tell good stories, especially when the stories aren't filled with the same-old characters and faces.

And that's it, awards are all given out, 5 minutes shy of the clock striking midnight. Only appropriate that in the year of Barack Obama "Slumdog Millionaire" wins -- and of course, there is a connection.

Interesting, the montage at the end over credits is of upcoming releases; a great idea; makes me wish summer would hurry up and get here.

-Stephen Spielberg comes out, solo, to introduce a montage of past best pictures alongside this year's nominees. Wow, they do something really clever, using past best pictures intercut with clips from each of this year's nominees, like they're using documentary footage. Hardest with Slumdog.

-Best actor is next. The presenters get the standing O, all the old lions are there. I hope Frank Langella wins for Frost/Nixon, I saw him on stage and he was great. Robert De Niro says, "being a movie star can get in the way of acting; but not for Sean Penn." It's a great line, and captures Penn exactly--he wants to make films, not be a star.

Sean Penn wins, to big applause. Speech should be interesting. "You commie, homo-loving sons of guns!" is how he starts. At the end he tells those who voted for the ban on gay marriage to sit and reflect on their great shame and those of their kids and grandkids if they continue in that way....

"I'm very proud to live in a country that's willing to elect an elegant man president," and a country that in all it's toughness creates the kind of artists it does, with a shout-out to Mickey Rourke, "who is my brother."

-Wow, Sophia Loren, among others, on stage to present best Actress. They all get a standing ovation, as well they should. Loren looks regal. I like this personalized presentation where each nominee gets a little speech from a previous winner; can be a bit cheesy and over-the-top, but is also just interesting to watch.

Loren does Meryl Streep; she doesn't look very good, too made up and too much surgery; but you have to keep watching, she has presence. Nicole Kidman does Angelina Jolie, who's wearing emeralds apparently.

And Kate Winslet wins, which is cool; I like how she's grown over the years. It's her first win after 6 nominations. Tells her dad to whistle so she can see where he's sitting, and he does, to loud applause; it's a great moment.

Thanks a lot of people, is a pro at this; but the emotion shows through, a little shriek at the end even.

-Reese Witherspoon oddly enough is presenting the Best Director award. Man, hope Danny Boyle wins, very curious to hear him speak. And he does win, jumps up and down on stage, in the spirit of Tigger he says. Thanks his kids and his wife, his dad and sister, bunch of execs; thanks the guy who choreographed the dance at the end of the film who was left off the film's credits.

And thanks Mumbai, "you dwarf even this guy," referring to Oscar. 7 for Slumdog.

-Queen Latifa sings "I'll Be Seeing You" as they roll the notable deaths from the year; ah, how times do change, she has a pretty good voice for this. Hate how they show the people on screens inside the auditorium, it's such a self-conscious technique. And you can barely see some of the names as the camera moves around.

Charlton Heston doesn't seem to get either extra time or applause, which is a crime given his place in Hollywood history; Paul Newman appropriately does, they end with him. Heath Ledger was in there I guess, I didn't notice.

-Japanese movie wins best foreign language film, Departures. "I am here because of films... and we will be back, I hope," says director Yojiro Takita.

-Wow, a bunch of Indian dancers all in pink run up on stage to perform the first of two original songs from Slumdog, Rahman takes the mike and sings. It's an amazingly powerful and important moment. Wall-E's song is next, sung by John Legend; it's pretty cool too, with African dancers and chorus. Curious what the majority of white Americans who voted for John McCain are thinking and saying watching all this.

They sing the second Slumdog song; it just busts out through the stage, as John Legend and Rahman mesh their songs into a duet.

And the winner is... Jai Ho! 6 for Slumdog tonight, how great is that. Rahman's just been on stage continuously for the last 10 mintues. Thanks everyone from Mumbai, as an emotional Danny Boyle looks on; "all my life I've had a choice between hate and love -- I chose love, and here I am."

L.A. Times' blog, of course, is still writing about Bob Hope..... Classy Hugh Jackman gives the performers another hand.

-Alicia Keys looks resplendent in a purple gown, sounds regal in reading the nominees--properly pronouncing A.R. Rahman--for best original score. And he wins! 5 for Slumdog. He's one of my favorite composers today; says God is great at the end.

-Eddie Murphy presents a special humanitarian award to Jerry Lewis, whose work with the muscular dystrophy telethon will outlive everything everyone in the audience tonight has ever done. He comes out to a standing ovation; really, who cares about Heath, this should be the signature moment from tonight. What a great guy; gives a heartfelt speech, classy words from a throwback to another era.

-My god, 10:30 already and we haven't even gotten to the big 6 yet. "Slum dog Millionaire" wins again, its fourth, for Film Editing. Chris Dickens says he had a great time working on this film; and thanks his sisters -- Sally, Allie, Lizzy.

-Best Sound Editing, "Slumdog Millionaire" is up for it, "Dark Knight" wins. Hmm, interesting. Sound Mixing, "Slumdog Millionaire" wins for this. Nice to see some non-white faces speaking; Resul Pookutty. Is clearly overwhelmed, mentions the two others up there with him. Dedicates it to India, "sincere and deepest gratitude" to those he worked with on the film, and all the sound mixers.

-They do a super-long montage of, no kidding, car crashes and chases. Really, it's just pointless. "Curious Case of Benjamin Button" wins for best Visual Effects, beating out "Dark Knight." Uh, okay. Cause making one guy seem old is more impressive than creating Gotham.

-"Smile Pinki" wins best documentary short, the filmmaker Megan Mylan, all in red, seems like a real person, is all out of breath after running up there. I like her right away; the film is about kids with cleft lips, she talks about the subjects of her film, including Pinki Kumari.

-Documentary filmmakers get a video montage where they talk to the camera, which is appropriate. Hmm, the video was made by Albert Maisles, Bill Maher tells us afterwards. Documentaries are our "windows to the world" Maher tells us, while promoting his own; hmm, odd thing to say, considering theoretically we live in the world--why would we only see it when framed through small holes cut by others?

"Man on Wire" wins, which is great, since I actually saw and liked it. And up runs Philippe Petit, who the film's about; the shortest speech in Oscars history "Yesss." Then he keeps on talking, amkes a coin disappear, balances the Oscar on his chin, makes it bow; the man's frenetic, and absolutely unique.

-The winner of Heath Ledger's award, Best Supporting Actor, is about to be revealed. I didn't see the film so no idea how much of this is sentiment, but he wins, of course. Everyone stands as his parents and sister come up. Hmmm, no wife? Let's see if they dedicate it to the fire victims in Australia.

Audience is pitch-quiet as his dad thanks people. It's a classy speech by the dad, Kim; now his mom says they're choosing to celebrate; and his sister says they accept the award on behalf of his daughter.

It could've been a moment for the ages--his death reminds us of the death of hundeds in Australia... but nothing like that.

-Somehow Cuba Gooding Jr. is allowed back on stage, makes fun of Robert Downey Jr. for playing Tropic Thunder in blackface.

-Matt Kenseth takes the Auto Club 500, 3rd driver in history to win Daytona and the next race. Nice job.

-4 to go, Gordon's right front tire is smoking announcers say. They've been on top of that for a while; NASCAR announcers are great, entertaining and knowledgable.

-6 laps to go, Kenseth and Gordon are about to lap some of the slower-cars, again....

-10 laps to go, Kenseth's lead looks to have expanded even more. Announcers think Gordon has one more run in it, Busch now 6 seconds back. Now just hope some idiot back in the pack doesn't crash for nothing.

-Oscars are doing some idiot musical spoof with Jackman and Beyonce, so I'm still watching NASCAR.

-Kenseth and Gordon are waaaay out in front of the rest of the pack, 3.5 seconds ahead of Busch. 19 laps to go. Wow, with 15 to go Kenseth has really put down the hammer, his lead is up.

-Toyland wins best live action short, continuing the well-known rule that if you wanna win an Oscar, make something about the Holocaust. Wow, the director says he spent "4 years of my life on this 14 minute movie."

-There's some sort of skit with white stoner guys making fun of a bunch of films, it's probably funny to certain frat boys but kindof weird given that the films are all up for Best Picture. It goes on waaaay too long and is just dumb; yup, they have time for this, but cut off Oscar winners halfway through their speeches.

-Oscars take a second to thank the winners of the Academy's Scientific and Technical awards, handed out two weeks ago without TV coverage.

-36 laps to go, still under yello; Kyle Busch trying to win his third race of the weekend, which would be historic, Matt Kenseth leading though, after taking Daytona; folowed by Jeff Gordon. Lots of big names in the top 10....

-Anthony Dod Mantle wins best cinematography for Slum Dog Millionaire; it was shot really well, he takes a wry British shot at Natalie and Ben, "I found that really inspiring". The audience at least has stopped laughing. I like Mantle, seems like a normal guy; thanks his "ma and pa".

-Whoah, Natalie Portman comes out with a Phoenixish Ben Stiller, with the wild hair and crazy beard and shades. She looks great in a purple dress. It totally detracts from the cinematography intro, the audience is just cackling. "You look like you work in a Hasidic meth lab," she says. It's really quite stupid and insulting as she starts cracking up and the audience too as Stiller wanders the stage as each of the nominated films is described.

-Hugh Jackman's been a boring host so far; it's like an extended presentation slot.

-Flip out of the Oscars' cheesy romantic montage or something back to NASCAR on Fox; the race is down the road from the theater in Hollywood, there's another yellow, lots of little rain delays tonight. Nice counter-programming.

-Domo Arrigato, Mr. Robot says Japanese filmmaker Kunio Kato after winning the best animated short for "La Maison En Peitits Cubes." (Of course the LATime's snarky blog, The Envelope, doesn't mention Kato's name or even the full name of the short--it only quotes a voter dumping on the film. Hollywood; where the establishment speaks for the rest of the world).

-Simon Beaufoy of "Slumdog Millionaire" wins Best Adapted Screenplay; hopefully this is a good sign for the film. Although my nightmare would be all the whites involved with the film winning and speaking, while the South Asians get shut out.

-Penelope Cruz wins for best supporting actress; she's one of my favorite actors, thanks Woody Allen in her speech for writing good roles for women.

Writing well about the worst movie ever

Joe Queenan has a hilarious article in The Guardian, simply entitled From hell. Inspired by The Hottie and the Nottie, he "goes in search of the worst movie of all time."

It's a journey through his mind, which proves illuminating even while bilious. There are a lot of choice lines; in the style of P.D. Wodehouse, the prose consciously and deliciously builds upon itself until it topples over with one final anecdote.

You'll be convinced by his choice.

Wikipedia, incidentally, has a great summary of the 'winning' film, with Vincent Canby calling it: "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room."

Cinema musings

Brains too, actually
Charles McGrath's Commanding Attention in or Out of Costume

A word Ms. Knightley uses often about herself is “obsessed.” “I’m quite obsessed with film,” she said. “I absolutely love watching it. I love knowing how movies are made, and I love being a part of them.” Over the course of lunch she rattled off half a dozen performances she had been studying lately, especially George Clooney and Tilda Swinton in “Michael Clayton,” Marion Cotillard in “La Vie en Rose” and Chazz Palminteri in “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.” But her most detailed commentary, oddly, was about some oldies, “On the Waterfront” for example.

“That scene with Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in the back of the cab,” she said. “Amazing! Today you’d never hold that scene in a two-shot. You’d be in quite close, and you’d be constantly back and forth. But there the shot is always quite wide, and the atmosphere between the actors, because it’s so held back, is completely amazing. I got quite obsessed by it.”

She also talked about “Brief Encounter,” Noël Coward’s classic weeper, set in 1945, and “In Which We Serve,” Coward’s patriotic saga about the crew of a British destroyer, which she and the rest of the cast of “Atonement” watched, along with Mr. Wright, as part of their World War II homework.

“I was very aware of the American films of that period, but not the British ones,” she said. “I don’t know why that is, but I think it may have to do with the accent. It’s a bit jarring. You don’t hear that accent in Britain anymore. After the ’50s it suddenly became uncool to sound that posh.

“But it’s such an incredible style — virtually without pauses. Today’s style is sort of pseudonaturalism, but actually not at all. There are a lot of indulgent pauses and a very definite rhythm to the way we work, and then to watch these people — it’s like machine-gun fire, where we would have been so labored. They just steam through. I actually sort of prefer it. Very matter-of-fact and yet you totally feel it. It’s very liberating.”

She paused and then apologized for going on. “Sorry,” she said. “But if you’re going to be part of this business, I think you have to be a little bit like this. You have to be a bit obsessed.”

They're Germans too!
Nicholas Kulish's A Hand That Links Germans and Turks

Fatih Akin has earned the right to be a little exasperated about the constant focus on his Turkish-German identity.

“Imagine I’m a painter, and we speak more about the background of the paintings than the foreground of the paintings, or we speak about the framing but not about the painting,” said Mr. Akin, a German film director and the son of Turkish immigrants. “For sure this is frustrating, and for sure that’s why I will leave it behind sooner or later.” ...

Then came the surprise triumph of “Head-On,” which won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin International Film Festival. Mr. Akin was unprepared for the celebrity it brought him in Germany as well as in Turkey. He was instantly seen as a cultural spokesman, far beyond his role as a filmmaker, to a large extent because of his Turkish roots, at a time when Germans were re-examining their complex relationship with their country’s large Muslim minority. About 2.7 million people of Turkish descent live in Germany today. ...

Brought over as so-called guest workers decades ago, most of the Turkish migrants never went home. But as a group they have not been embraced by mainstream German society

Imagine Hopper on a Lynch film
Dennis Lim's If You Need a Past, He’s the Guy to Build It

Mr. Fisk cited Edward Hopper’s famous painting of light-streaked storefronts, “Early Sunday Morning,” as an inspiration for the main street. The mansion he built in Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven” was modeled on “House by the Railroad,” another Hopper painting.

“Hopper would have been a great production designer,” Mr. Fisk said. “In art school I used to say, ‘Oh, Hopper, he’s just an illustrator,’ but he grows on you. He simplifies images, and that’s what production design is. If you understand the image immediately, it doesn’t take you away from the action.” ...

Mr. Fisk said his do-it-all approach might be a holdover from youthful diffidence. He landed his first art-directing gig (on the 1971 bikersploitation film “Angels Hard as They Come”) without a clear sense of the job description. “I was so scared of not doing what I was supposed to do that I did everything,” he said.

It was Mr. [David] Lynch who got Mr. Fisk his first job on a movie. Mr. Lynch, by then enrolled at the American Film Institute, had a job casting gold bricks from plaster on a western that was shooting in Utah. The work was so tedious that after a while he asked if his friend Jack could take over.

Recalling his first impression of Mr. Fisk at 14, Mr. Lynch said, “I thought he was a loser.” But they soon struck up a friendship. “In the whole high school we were basically the only artists,” Mr. Lynch recalled. “In this conservative world all we wanted to do was paint and live the art life.”

Photo of Keira Knightley from People

Mixing it up

Gleanings from Sunday's NYTimes:

A War on Every Screen, A.O. Scott:

There are other stories to tell and other ways to tell them, and Hollywood, in spite of its reputation for liberal bias, does not like to risk alienating potential ticket buyers by taking sides. This fear may be misplaced, since the highest-grossing Iraq-related movie released is also among the most polemical, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But it is remarkable that nondocumentary filmmakers consistently draw the boundary between fact and fiction in such a way that the most vexed political event of our time has its political meaning blunted.

Instead the movies supply emotion, sentiment, metaphor and abstraction. Even those bloody Iraqis at the end of “Redacted” function as symbols, since we know nothing about who they were or how they died. In other Iraq movies, including quite a few documentaries, the local population is almost entirely invisible. Films set in other contemporary war zones — Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, wherever “Rendition” is supposed to take place — manage to include more Arab and Muslim characters, but their function tends to be symbolic as well.

I think if you want perpetual war in the real world, a good way to ensure that is to pat yourself on the back for making and watching films set in other countries, while continuing to see the residents of those countries as backdrop.

Where Gods Yearn for Long-Lost Treasures, Nicolai Ouroussoff:

When this museum in Athens opens next year, hundreds of marble sculptures from the old Acropolis museum alongside the Parthenon will finally reside in a place that can properly care for them. Missing, however, will be more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, the Elgin Marbles, so called since they were carted off to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century.

Britain’s government maintains that they legally belong to the British Museum and insists that they will never be returned. The Greeks naturally argue that they belong in Athens.

Until now my sympathies tended to lie with the British. Most of the world’s great museum collections have some kind of dubious deals in their pasts. Why bother untangling thousands of years of imperialist history? Wise men avert their eyes and move on.

But by fusing sculpture, architecture and the ancient landscape into a forceful visual narrative, the New Acropolis Museum delivers a revelation that trumps the tired arguments and incessant flag waving by both sides. It’s impossible to stand in the top-floor galleries, in full view of the Parthenon’s ravaged, sun-bleached frame, without craving the marbles’ return.

Maybe a more accurate headline for Ouroussoff's piece would've been: Keep Your Mouth Shut Until I Yearn for Your Long-Lost Treasure.

A Teenager in Love (So-Called), Ginia Bellafante:

Television gives us teenage lust exercised or teenage lust repressed but rarely does it evoke the way young people translate their carnal urges into something they understand as a deeper abiding affection. “My So-Called Life” is essentially a study of a young mind processing desire into something less terrifying and more easily justified — substantiating it with false hopes — and in that regard it is more than a good TV show, it is a good TV show that attains the dimension and complexity of literature. The great postwar novels of adolescence deal with innocence lost; “My So-Called Life” deals with innocence sustained, but it offers a no-less-illuminating view of what it is to be young because of it.

The series, created by Winnie Holzman for the producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Hershkovitz, all of whom had worked on “Thirtysomething,” arrived before television began catering so aggressively to teenage tastes. Perhaps its morose and ragged appeal is best appreciated against the backdrop of what followed, an endless stream of teenage dramas — some good, some awful — that both recall and point it up as an essay embalmed in time about a way of being 15 that no one will ever experience again.

The balance of the review is the kind of self-indulgent sloppy valentine that makes you cringe when read in print, even if you happen to share Bellafante's enthusiasm for Claire Danes' "acting". Still, it's nice to see MSCL appreciated all over again, on the anniversary of the release of what sounds like the definitive DVD collection.

She’s Famous (and So Can You), Guy Trebay. Buried halfway through Trebay's uncharacteristically-interesting article--about Tila Tequila not Stephen Colbert (not that you'd be able to guess from the headline)--is this:

By the standards of the new “Jackass” landscape, traditional stardom, with its career building stations-of-the-cross, its rigid talent requirements, its “Entourage” shtick, seems clunky and out of step with a culture so much more fluid now that a hit record — like the recent Internet sensation “I’ll Kill Him,” by Soko — could emerge from a young French woman’s bedroom and MySpace page.

It turns out the song is actually I'll Kill Her--below--and it's pretty good. Although I wonder now that we live in the age of say everything anytime whether the kick of the song's title and lyrics exists for fewer and fewer of us.



Trebay's piece is worth reading; there's this:

When Jake Halpern set out to write “Fame Junkies,” his book about what is now a universal obsession with celebrity, he was surprised to uncover studies demonstrating that 31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)

“Obviously people have been having delusions of grandeur since the beginning of time, but the chances of becoming well known were much slimmer” even five years ago than they are today, Mr. Halpern said. “There are an incredibly large number of venues for becoming known. Talent is not a prerequisite.”

And it ends with this:

“Whether you think Tila Tequila is corny or not, she already has a certain legitimacy to her name,” said Roger Gastman, the editor of Swindle magazine, an indie journal and Web site. Its most recent issue has Death and Fame as its theme. Tila Tequila may have “started out very niche, but she has crossed over to the mainstream,” said Mr. Gastman, citing what he termed “a body of work” including a Maxim cover, a hit show, a MySpace page that now links to a site offering guidance on how to become like her. “Tila could probably do signings at comic book conventions forever if she wanted to,” Mr. Gastman said.

And this would undoubtedly suit Ms. Tequila, for whom fame, she said, was never actually so much the goal as was fulfilling her love for acting and dancing and stripping and modeling and singing and, not incidentally, escaping the limited career growth available to someone who not long ago was posing half-naked on car hoods.

“The press and the media have glorified the celebrity thing and brainwashed people to live in that world,” Ms. Tequila said. “People try to stand out for nothing and they end up getting quote-unquote famous. I’m not into that at all. If you’re just into fame for fame, I’m like, ‘O.K., but what are you good at? What can you actually do?’”

Uncredited photo of Tequila via Vietnam.net.

Pay Up, Kid, or Your Igloo Melts, Mireya Navarro:

Like many parents, Mr. Rodriquez, a computer consultant, and his wife, Sarina, 37, a laboratory manager, are adjusting to a world that increasingly requires them to pay for their children’s computer play. Meanwhile, they are trying to figure out whether there is any reason to buy magical powers or virtual sunglasses.

The money-driven aspect of the games, whether involving actual or virtual cash, is becoming a concern for parents and consumer watchdogs as popular game sites like Club Penguin attract millions of new users. The number of unique monthly visitors to Club Penguin more than doubled in the last year, to 4.7 million from 1.9 million, while the traffic on Webkinz.com grew to 6 million visitors from less than 1 million, according to comScore Media Metrix, which tracks online usage.

What a great headline... if you read the rest of the article you find out it's not literally accurate, but it totally captures the story in seven words.

A jazzy dame

Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer turned into an unexpected treat. I didn't know anything about O'Day going in--but I always try to watch music documentaries at Tribeca, they're usually very good.

This one started out pretty unevenly--the filmmakers choose a very disruptive editing style, with lots of random graphics and distracting transitions. Maybe they feared otherwise it'd be just another Ken Burns talking head documentary--there are worse things than that style, and one of them is going MTV on a subject that requires gazing.

Plus some of the interviews were shot in an amateurish fashion, with bad lighting and awful backgrounds. There's one extended interview with O'Day, intercut throughout, that seems like she shot it herself in one of those 4-photos-for-a-buck booth. She's constantly out-of-frame or too close to the camera--if it weren't for a bad zoom at one point of the interview I'd have believed that she did just film herself.

But try forget all that, and just listen to her O'Day's voice. Oh, my, gosh. I had no idea. I've never seen facial expressions like O'Day; never seen songs performed like she does, with arm movements and shoulders and body positioning--not over-the-top, just totally apt. Her voice isn't unbelievable, but it suited the songs she chose and her persona so well.

All I really knew about her was that line from Let Me Off Uptown, where (a famous black trumpeter, Roy Eldridge it turns out) wails "A-nniiii-ta, oh A-nniiii-ta... say, I feel somethin'". There's a clip of it, via YouTube.

It turns out the back story is Anita doing that duet with Roy was a pretty risky thing in 1941; I hadn't realized she was white, and obviously all the back-and-forth of the song between Anita and Roy would've riled up people back in the day.

O'Day was just like that--she did her thing, and let the chips fall where they may. There's a lot in the documentary about her drug problems; initially, she was jailed for marijuana--which she says just made her say if people think I'm like that, then I'll become like that (to the point of clubs advertising her as the 'Jezebel of Song').

Then later in life O'Day was on heroin for like 15 years, in a very serious way--to the point that she really should've died, except for luck and some of her many devoted friends (including Carroll O'Connor) helping her quit.

Aside from the drugs and a lot of sleeping around, she also spent a lot of years in Japan when jazz in the 60s fell out of favor in the States; and also seemed to love horse racing, and talking people's ear off.

But in the end, the documentary's memorable because of her music, more so than her story. As one of the many interesting jazz commentators said, she did "wonderful things with time"--and that's it, she had a great sense of when to speed, when to slow, when to play with a phrase, when to let it out rat-a-tat-tat, when to scat, when to go silent.

The filmmakers said afterwards her personality--which totally comes across in the film--was uninhibited; she spoke her mind and let it all out. There's a hilarious interview with a younger Bryant Gumbel, who's actually being a good journalist in repeatedly asking in different ways why she did drugs; she keeps putting him off, until saying in a tart tone: "That's just the way it went down... Bryant."

There's also interesting interviews with Dick Cavett, and Harry Reasoner. In one of them, displaying her wonderful cadence, the interviewer asks, "How could you ever get involved with all that junk?"

Her pitch-perfect 'response' which isn't done justice by type: "How could ya."

If she were a different type of person you could say she was vulgar, even low-class based on some of her life experiences; but in the package she was it wasn't true at all, the opposite actually.

As one of the commentators says, "there was a lot going on under the surface that catches you unaware because it's mysterious, restrained--it's kind of secret."

O'Day died about a month after the filmmakers showed her one of the final cuts; we're lucky some of her performances were caught on film in her lifetime. My favorite:

-Sweet Georgia Brown, in Newport Jazz Fest 1958 (from the very idiosyncratic documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day)


The drawn-out junglish opening and snycopated timing works perfectly for the song; it's funny watching the (very white) audience in the first part, before the camerman focuses more on her. (The second song, Tea for Two, has a shot of the famed 'ice cream lady.')

And oh that outfit, in combination with that saucy voice punching it out; she's totally in her element. This is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen on film; it's so interesting.

And she alludes in the film to being high at the time.

Uncredited Anita O'Day photo at Newport from Time magazine in various places online. She tells the story in the film of how she pulled together the outfit at the last second.

Running for the future

Somehow I always wind up randomly seeing interesting films at the Tribeca Film Festival, even though I think the greater festival is a commercialized scam with a lot of trendy but hollow offerings.

The Third Monday in October was a great documentary about elections for student council president at four middle schools. It was slightly reminiscent of Spellbound in that took an offbeat look at some at-times vulnerable, often funny, diverse adolescents.

Its 'cast' of eleven was:

-Mick (serious and idealistic Filipino-American) vs. Jenny (sortof flighty and hard-to-read Chinese-American) at a slightly scruffy San Francisco school;

-William (short, nervous Caucasian) vs. Sam Arabian (uber-motivated, comfortable in his own skin sortof-Caucasian) vs. Beau (tall, hiding-behind-a-smirk Caucasian) vs. Katie (pretty, coltish Caucasian) at a very-suburban Marin County school;

-Sam (free spirited liberal Caucasian) vs. Dustin (surprisingly thoughtful Caucasian originally from France) at a progressive religious Austin school;

-Kayla (ambitious cheerleader African American with a driven mom) vs. Noelle (surprisingly competitive cheerleader African American) vs. Teekia (cheerleader captain African American) at a dirty-on-the-outside-spiffy-on-the-inside Atlanta school.

It's a lot of kids; hence the filmmakers resort to the shorthand of Asian Americans/suburbanites/granola private school/African Americans. It'd have been nice to have some real diversity inside the schools (no Hispanics?!) but it's not an issue after a while.

Cause the kids are great. They all come through in their various personalities and wonderful inconsistencies; Beau, for example, seems like kind of a spoiled jerk, the kind of kid who's a bit too comfortable pushing it with teachers--but one of the most poignant moments of the film reveals how much he cares about this race he passes off as a lark.

Dustin gets off one of the greatest lines, musing that elections really should be the leaders "representing each others' stories". Who knows where he picked that up--like all young kids he's a random sponge; indeed, one of the themes of the film seems to be how unpredictably but profoundly kids are influenced by the people and the world around them.

The African American girls aren't really differentiated as well as the other groups; all we really know is their once-tight friendship suffers as a result of the campaign, as they each discover how badly they want to win. There are some funny scenes of Kayla's mom, who's apparently a Democratic junkie, quizzing her about politics, with Kayla blurting out 'Shirley Chisholm' at one point before her mom can even laughingly ask the question.

The advisors and teachers don't come across that well for the most part--in three of the four cases they seem to have agendas, with some particularly head-shaking scenes involving the San Fran advisor (who seems to have good intentions and God knows she's got enough structural problems to deal with) but who has a bit of a condescending attitude and really seems to miss the whole point of democracy.

She actually tells Jenny after her speech she's upset and disappointed because she mentions school problems she promises to fix--put a positive spin on things for the younger kids what she, no kidding, tells the distraught girl.

And the San Marin teachers and principal just seem like self-absorbed, unpredictably insecure adults, who actually may be doing serious damage to their you'd-think-blessed students with their whole half friends/half dictators approach to education.

As for the parents--they're almost entirely absent from the San Fran part (the young but idealistic and trustworthy director said afterwards like many immigrant parents they work long hours to give their kids their dream of a better life), and a bit claustrophic for the Marin County kids. For the most part they come across as well-meaning, but a bit clueless, and definitely not great at communicating with their kids, or getting what drives them.

Which is this interesting mix of idealism, ambition and, once they get into things, genuine desire to do something, however fumbling. The filmmakers juxtapose a bit of the Bush-Kerry 2004 campaign with clips of the kids making posters, practicing their speeches and talking politics (in normal kid-like ways). It leaves you wishing someone--maybe a major donor?!--would force professional politicans to watch the film, and write an essay about what they learned.

My favorite kids, not all of whom win their election, are Sam from Marin County--because he and his peeps make like 900 stickers and he's savvy enough to come up with a catchy slogan (Student Action Man, complete with dressing in a Superman outfit); Sam from Austin, because he's the kind of nerdy verbal kid with a different passion every year who sometimes grows up to change things; and Kayla, because she's so unexpected and gets upset about things that matter.

Most of all, I--like the director--like Mick. Ah, what a great kid; the classic good immigrant striver, without a lot of the advantages of the suburban kids, but clearly more intelligent and thoughtful.

And with an appropriate perspective on life. Like he gets a bit bummed out when someone rips parts of one of his precious two posters, but when asked who he thinks did he, he thinks for a moment before shaking it off with, "someone who doesn't like paper."

Uncredite image of Sam Arabian via Tribeca Film Festival website.

Watching Hou

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is one of my favorite directors, along with Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Abbas Kirosatmi, John Ford, and his fellow Taiwanese Edward Yang.

He's very deliberate--and usually quite political--in his films. Things happen slowly, if at all; and key details slip in and out of frame. Quite different from most filmmakers working today. (This is what I wrote about Millennium Mambo).

I finally got around to seeing Cafe Lumiere, which has been on my list ever since it came out in 2003. It has an interesting back story; it was produced specifically in homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, on the centenary of his birth. Which is somehow fitting--other directors might pay tribute to a predecessor with a scene here or a line of dialogue there; very few would dedicate an entire film to the proposition.

I've never seen any Ozu films, specifically Tokyo Story, which Cafe Lumiere is most directly linked to. Having said that, Cafe Lumiere strikes me as a purposefully small-scale look at some big issues.

The story centers around Yoko, a young woman living alone in Tokyo who's recently returned from one of multiple trips to Taiwan. She's leading the typical life of a modern unattached urbanite--a small place of her own, much time going around the city and in cafes, friends of the opposite sex, days spent vaguely following what catches her fancy (in this case the study of a Taiwanese-born composer who'd spent time in Tokyo 60 years ago).

While she's on a visit home (for the annual grave sweeping day that is prevalent across Asia but unknown in the West) she tells her mom she's pregnant by her Taiwanese boyfriend. She doesn't want to marry him, planning to raise the baby on her own. Of course her mom--who turns out not to be her birth mom (in typical Hou fashion he subtly conveys that early on by letting the mother's greeting of her daughter contrast with the father's)--worries about this.

As does her father; but he shows this, as men tend to do, not by saying anything or even seemingly doing anything, but just by being tender toward her. In one scene, while they're eating her favorite dish, which her mom made at home and they brought in on a visit to the city, he pushes toward her some potatoes, saying they're always been your favorite, telling her simply, 'eat.'

It's one of three exquisite, quiet domestic scenes in the film. The first happens when Yoko goes home to her parents' home outside Tokyo--all that really happens is she lays on the floor while her mom makes food, then she goes to sleep in her room while her dad and then her mom eat, and then she gets up hungry after they've gone to bed and while she's looking for food her mom wakes up and makes her some. It's so simply shot, with great lighting and perfect pace, that along with a few lines of dialogue it conveys exactly the different lives two generations have.

The second scene, which I suspect is in direct homage to an Ozu scene, has the three of them lined up eating at a noodle bar with their backs to the camera; Yoko in black, her parents in white, after cleaning their relatives' graves. That's literally all that happens--the camera just watches them eat while seated closely together for a few minutes.

It points up a stylistic hallmark of Hou--he likes to let scenes unfold from non-standard angles. Throughout Cafe Lumiere, he'll shoot a location like most directors would, where you see everyone's faces; and then come back to that location later and shoot it from the reverse angle, often just showing the backs of the characters.

The film opens, actually, with a long scene where Yoko has just returned from Taiwan and is hanging up laundry and talking on the phone to her friend Hajime, who owns a used bookstore she frequents--all you see the first time you're introduced to the film's centeral figure is her back, with sunlight streaming in past her body.

I think it's all to point up how difficult it is to know what's going on, let alone to know each other; it all depends on what you see, what you're able to perceive. Hou deliberately, I think, allows his films to be hard to understand--you can often be left after a scene wondering whether anything happened. Either because you missed what was important, or else what's important is the feeling of the scene rather than anything more conventionally understood as action. Like in life, in Hou's films it's important to soak up things, without letting processing get in the way.

The film's full of little scenes that really don't sound like much and don't advance the plot in any conventional sense, yet stick with you. My favorite for some reason is a scene where Yoko walks in Tokyo along a bridge past a weeping willow tree.

That's it, nothing else happens--but the balance, the colors, the pace, are all so right, and convey an exact feeling of how Japan is this juxtaposition of the man-made and nature, melded into one, actually, more carefully than maybe any other country.

In some ways, Cafe Lumiere is just a cinematic capturing of a particular time in Tokyo's history. Preserving for posterity Ozu's city, just as in the film Yoko spirals in and learns about the Taiwanese pianist first via his music, then books, then visiting his Tokyo haunts, then talking to his widow and looking at her photos.

Even if you've never gone to Japan you can get a feel for what it's like--and if you have gone, you're reminded all over again of the cleanliness, the exactness of verbal and non-verbal communications, the clear line between stranger and non-stranger, the willingness to leave even important things unspoken, the idiosyncratic interest in the West, the central role food plays.

Building on the specificity with which Cafe Lumiere conveys Tokyo is the theme of trains. Hajime, who has quiet feelings for Yoko that he never directly expreses, really likes trains, memorizing all the train stations and creating a work of art centering on them (in which quite literally he's cradled by trains), and going around Tokyo recording the train system's natural sounds. It's only fitting that a film set entirely in and about Tokyo has one of the city's distinctive and almost organice features at its heart, with the sense of purposeful motion and getting somewhere that goes along with it, in contrast to the meandering of Yoko and to a lesser degree Hajime.

Toward the end of the film, you see Yoko's train being overtaken by another train, in which you can see Hajime standing, recording; she doesn't see him until they both get off at the next stop, and as the movie closes she waits while he spends many minutes recording the departure of her train and the arrival of another one.

Hou shoots them with the arriving train in the foreground--which can be read as how modern life, for better or for worse, is all about things like train timetables (time is a key theme for Hou), trying to bridge distance (there's a subtheme in this film of people living away), and an attempt to make art or beauty or meaning out of it all.

You can also see it as the two of them looking up from everyday life and discovering they've arrived at the same destination. Yoko's pregnancy is always in the background--she's only about 3 months in so it's not there visually, but you worry for her, wonder what she's going to do to support her baby. You hope she winds up with her kindred artistic soul Hajime rather than the Taiwanese scion of umbrella makers.

Because this film was made by a Taiwanese director about Japanese characters, you can't discount the political angle. There's an overt reference early, when Yoko brings back from Taiwan for Hajime an old-style pocket watch that was issued as part of the 116th anniversary of the founding of the Taiwanese railroad. Left unsaid is that the railroad was built by the Japanese, during the years in which Taiwan was their colony.

Like all colonized nations, the Taiwanese make use of and in some ways appreciate the public works projects their colonial overseers put up, but it's hard to forget the cost of the projects was always borne by the natives, both financially as well as often in blood, and that the projects weren't intended to benefit the people but to make ruling them easier.

I wonder if Hou is in some sly way saying not only did you Japanese bring the railroad and all that it made possible to Taiwan, but also filmmaking--and watch while I show you the heights to which us Taiwanese have brought it.

Hou also touches upon the well-known racism of the Japanese, with the hanging silence after Yoko tells her mom she's pregnant--by her Taiwanese boyfriend. You flash forward and wonder what'll be worse for the kid to come in Japan--an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, no father, or the Chinese blood.

There is, though, a sense with this scene and the plot that for the younger generation these things don't matter as much--Yoko, after all, is not only sleeping with the Taiwanese but also studying one of their musicians. It doesn't matter not because they've thought about it and rejected old-fashioned hang-ups like racism, but because they're drifting, within a self-created world and thus tend not to inherit things like racism (or family life).

As always with Hou, I look to the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum for his take. He starts his review quoting Hou,

“It's very difficult to cross national borders and shoot a film about a different culture. How many films have you seen that do that successfully? There are very few. The reason is very simple. When we look at films [about our own country] made by foreign companies, they're not accurate. . . . But it's an interesting challenge."

Rosenbaum really is our finest living critic; I always read his reviews, and think, of course..... He writes of Cafe Lumiere:

Cafe Lumiere is a look at everyday Japanese life and how it's changed since Ozu's heyday. It uses some of Ozu's visual motifs -- trains, clotheslines -- and it beautifully reflects what English critic Tony Rayns has called the "persuasive" unassertiveness that characterizes much of Ozu's late work. It's an outsider's view of Japan that's really a two-way mirror, because the obsessive preoccupation of its 23-year-old Japanese heroine, Yoko (Yo Hitoto), a freelance writer based in Tokyo, is investigating the life of Taiwanese classical composer Jiang Wenye. Roughly a contemporary of Ozu, Jiang was born in Taiwan and educated in Japan, then spent most of the remainder of his life in mainland China. The only music heard in the film, besides a pop song over the final credits, is a selection of piano pieces he composed in Japan during the 1920s and '30s; they provide a historical and cultural filter through which we perceive the present. Yoko has just returned from Taiwan, where she's been researching Jiang's roots while teaching Japanese. She's pregnant with the child of one of her students, and she tells her elderly parents that she intends to raise the child alone -- a clear sign of the differences between Japanese life today and the life chronicled by Ozu.

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years, until 1945, only two years before Hou was born, and Japanese culture undoubtedly had a lingering effect on many aspects of Taiwanese life. Hou, who's long had an interest in Ozu, shares the older director's fascination with trains, and in Cafe Lumiere one of Yoko's friends, Hajime (Tadanobu Asano), who runs a used-book store, is obsessed with recording the sounds of trains.

Like Ozu, Hou is mainly nonjudgmental about his characters, though he does manage to suggest over the course of his almost plotless narrative that Yoko and Hajime are somewhat indiscriminate collectors whose preoccupation with music and trains shows more compulsiveness than passion. This may be a critique of contemporary life -- something also hinted at in the film's Japanese title, Coffee Jikou, which means "coffee, time, light" -- but if so, it's a judicious one that only adds to the sense of serene clarity.

That sense of doubleness is a Hou trademark; literally, with the liberal use of mirrors and windows and reflections, and of course metaphorically, with the twinning of characters and situations.

He's also good at featuring strong amateur performances--a lot of the side roles in his early films especially were played by friends or strangers he met in the shooting of his films. In Cafe Lumiere, Yo Hitoto plays Yoko; a half-Japanese half-Taiwanese singer who's in her first film, she also sings Hitoshian over the closing credits. Hitoto has a typically cute website, and her songs are all over YouTube, including the one below.



In addition to YouTube this also being the age of the DVD extra, there's a French documentary on it about Hou. He's fascinating to listen to--the specificity with which he thinks, the purposefulness, the way his crew works to make every aspect of his imagination real. His brilliance and committment to his artistic integrity are present when he speaks just as it his films, which often isn't the case.

It's somehow fitting that the French have a deep appreciation for Taiwanese and Japanese (and increasingly Chinese) films.

In many ways it's the passing of the torch; or more precisely acknowledgement first of the intermingling between the great French New Wave directors and the classic Japanese directors, culminating in a bitterseet Gallic nod as France now looks East for the vibrancy and inventiveness she once had.

Were the Lumière brothers around today, they'd probably be working in Asia.

Image from Café Lumière in various places online.

Oscar-gazing

-Observations from the red carpet: J.Lo has quite an interesting outfit, Ryan Seacrest is pretty good as host (although he flashes his temper at his co-hosts who are indeed total imbeciles), Kate Winslett is genuinely cool, a lot of Hollywood stars have no idea how shallow they are, adapting football telestrator technology to Oscar fashion works; and Penelope Cruz is My Fair Lady incarnate.

-The clip of past foreign language film winners is about as affecting a short film as I can remember the Oscars ever showing. Maybe in the 21st century it'll truly become a celebration of the best in world cinema.

-Glad Jennifer Hudson won; wish people would stop thinking American Idol's audience made a mistake not voting for her--most of them didn't watch the show then, so have no idea what they're talking about. It's like going after Michael Jordan's high school coach for not starting him--he simply wasn't ready yet (and Hollywood shouldn't fool itself into thinking the caliber of an Idol winner is so far below that of an Oscar winner--heck, not when the likes of Cuba Gooding Jr. has a gold statue).

-Nice to hear Mandarin again from the stage, as Ruby Yang wins for The Blood of Yingzhou District.

-I'll bet somewhere Bill Clinton can't believe between the two of them, it's Al Gore who's now officially Hollywood royalty. I no longer think, incidentally, that Gore will run for president this year. He looks like a Baldwin brother at this point; you've got to be fit to run (no joke).

-Am now 10-5 in my Oscar pool.

-Watching Ennio Morricone win his honorary Oscar--if Hollywood wasn't so insular he'd have long ago won for The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (or its two sister films); or Once Upon a Time in the West--makes me think not all Oscars are created equal. His caps a long, clearly heartfelt career; just how he holds the Oscar, dispalying it for the crowd, you can tell how very much it means to him. It's interesting watching Clint Eastwood play translator; makes me think about what an unexepected person he is.

-Whoah, Jack with a shaved head could be the poster child for AARP.

-I've always liked Ellen DeGeneres, I'm enjoying her as laid-back yet earnest host so far.

-J.Lo is headed toward Elizabeth Taylor territory, as she introduces the Dreamgirls cast doing some of their songs. Jennifer Hudson shows how much of a difference a little confidence can make, who'd have believed she'd look so comfortable on the world's biggest (for now) stage. Whoa, Beyonce appears out of a literal hole in the stage; it's like Venus appearing out of the sea--nothing beats a live performance, not even at the Oscars.

-In what's got to be one of the nuttiest co-host pairings, Queen Latifa and John Travolta come out and crack wise before announcing an upset in Original Song, I Need to Wake Up, by Melissa Ethridge (I guess the three songs from Dreamgirls split the votes, or else the Academy really is as white and out-of-touch as feared). She thanks her wife--that's gotta be an Oscars first, right? And another heartfelt thanks for Al Gore. Man, centuries from now historians might point to those few hundred voters in Florida as the most important of all time, as much because of the environmental damage the last 6 years as the international relations damage.

-Will Smith tells us the common thread in American cinema is there is no common thread, it's all over the place. It's true of us in every field, actually. Then follows an interesting collection of clips, with the common theme of 'America', which means it's about everything. Followed by--because in Hollywood craft has been replaced by unwitting irony--Kate Winslett. She names The Departed the winner for film editing, which means it'll win best picture/best director I'm guessing. It's a very unHollywood winner, Thelma Schoonmaker; looks like an older woman from any town in America, kindof cool.

-Jodie Foster, with her wonderful only in America accent, introduces the annual clip of Hollywood people who have died. This is always one of the best-made parts of the telecats; Glenn Ford, Don Knotts, Joe Barbera, June Allyson, Maureen Stapleton, Jack Palance, Robert Altman among others....

-Ellen comes back and does a funny bit pretending the show is over, and within schedule. Ah, time for the big four. First, leading actress--all of whom are people I like; Cruz, Dench, Mirren, Streep, Winslett. Mirren, of course, wins. It'd be great if someone did a movie with all five. She's, of course, appropriately British in her remarks; even to her (slightly awkward) toast to the Queen. In the Colonies, no less, so there's no roar of hear, hear from the crowd.

-Back with Ellen vaccuuming up in the front row; heh heh. Out comes a nearly-unrecognizable Reese Witherspoon with long hair. Leo, who's one of my favorite actors--even more so with his environmental activism; Ryan Goslin, who I know nothing about; Peter O'Toole, who's literally from a different era--Lawrence of Arabia was made in another Hollywood; Will Smith who I've also liked; and Forest Whitaker, who I also like, and of course wins. Wow--what a great moment for him. He reads touchingly from notes. He gives such a heartfelt speech about how far he's come that has many of the audience in tears. This is a real, serious moment for him; no flippancy, just absolute sincerity, including when he thanks the people of Uganda, his family and his ancestors.

-Some real heavyweights--Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg next, to give the Oscar for directing, which means Marty must win. Wow, what talent; they do a funny bit spotlighting Lucas never having won. Scorsese, of course, wins; the crowd goes wild, he's totally animated, and you know this is one of those moments they'll be replaying for years. It's so nice they got his friends up on stage with him; gosh, to be a fly on their wall tonight. He appopriately thanks Andy Lau's original Hong Kong film (which is better in my opinion, this isn't one of his best films); what a class guy, you wish Hollywood could all be like him.

-Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, with him playing his usual alpha male role, to present best film. And, of course, The Departed gets the Oscar. Really--it wasn't that great of a film; Marty watches, oddly, from backstage as some tone deaf British producer guy accepts and drones on, he really should just hand his time to him. What a strangely deflating end to the evening.

-So it ends, 17 minutes late. I finish 16-8 in my Oscar pool, having picked 5 of the 6 major awards correctly (missed on best supporting actor). I liked Ellen, and am left hopeful that Hollywood still has people who know how to do things properly.

The great movies once upon a time could be counted on be appopriate--things were subtle when they needed to be, epic when called for; the right words in the right places by the right people.

Now, a lot of people are making it up as they go; and it shows. We need more Leos, Kates, Whitakers, Hudsons--and Martys, even in an off year.

Moptop invasion

Every so often you pick up something without an understanding of what to expect. It's harder to do nowadays, with the hype machine picking up full blast anything that shows even the barest hint of promise--so unless you see something before anybody else, or are there when there's just the rawest of potential, by the time you're watching or listening or reading, you already know what to expect.

Unless, of course, you go backwards and don't do a google search beforehand. Which is how I came across the documentary of the Beatles' first trip to America, .

The film, it turns out, was done by the Maysles. The film shows all their trademarks--they get faces and small details, even if that means the camera is jerky, the only music and sound is ambient (if you don't like shrieking, you may want to skip this...), and the clips are edited non-smoothly. It's truth, at the expense of prettiness.

My favorite moments:

-The funny Beatles poster in the radio station, with their heads mounted on an album cover and moving like a bobblehead doll

-Walter Cronkite's voice as CBS reports on the Beatles coming to the U.S.; funny hearing him do a 'pop culture' piece--which appropriately runs at the end of the show, right before he intones, "And that's the way it is, Friday, Feb. 7, 1964."

-Ringo Starr, looking and acting like Tim's character from The Office; he's got the ability to detach, leading to a look in his eyes sometimes like he's not even there

-The New York press jostling and yelling to get them to pose in more interesting ways in Central Park

-The Beatles calling in to 1010 WINS (back before it went all-news), with Paul McCartney calling it WINS, Winston Churchill.

-Funny how much time they seemed to spend just hanging out in the hotel room, messing around with each other, always with the radio on

-On the famous Edi Sullivan show appearance, Paul and George's crazy eyebrows; the way the show's captions identified each of them in turn by first name (under John's name it read Sorry girls, he's married)

-Shaking it as they danced at the Peppermint Lounge, to the music of a black band

-Aggressively clowning around with the press on the train to DC

-Ringo rocking out as he sang I Wanna Be Your Man in DC, on an odd stage where they were in the middle surrounded by a totally bonkers crowd

-Ed Sullivan hosting his show from Miami Beach, and the Beatles playing new material in front of a nearly shriek-free crowd; after which Ed told them Richard Rogers ("who's one of America's most famous composers") had wanted him to tell them that he was one of their most rabid fans

-The band struggling to pack everything into their luggage (before stars had people for that kind of thing)

-The married John not being around much

-Sullivan's speech before the 3rd and final Beatles show, about how great their conduct has been; by the time he stepped in to insert "The Beatles!" with a jerk of his arm before their last song, you could easily imagine him quitting his day job and going on tour with them--this most enigmatic of figures seemed to just beam when he was with them

What a fun thing to watch. I think there's too much irony today for something like the Beatles to sweep through again. American Idol at its best might approach it; but I've never seen people as excited as they were to see the Beatles, it was almost like they were Japanese in their lemmingness.

Their tour of the U.S. took place in the depths of winter just a few months after JFK had been assassinated, so maybe the country was actively looking for a break. You forget what it's like to not have tons of tv channels, music everywhere and the internet at your disposal.

Plus, pre-baby boomer revolution everyone had all this pent up energy and emotion, and it was really only via shows like Sullivans and concerts that people could let it out collectively.

Hence, all the shrieking.

Uncredited AP photo of the Beatles with Ed Sullivan via CBC site.

Mostly awake

Dreamgirls is easily the best movie I've seen this year.

Jennifer Hudson lives up to all the raves she's been getting for her role as Effie White; she's got a great voice and captures her character in her body language and facial expressions as well. As such, she's absolutely believable as someone immensely talented but whose human failings and artistic distaste with compromise are enough to get in the way of some things she wants very badly, especially in light of the people and society around her. You wonder how many artists have lived out that story over the course of human history....

Because Dreamgirls is a complex film, Hudson winds up willing to compromise her integrity for continued material success (in part probably because she's just found out she's pregnant). Her subsequent rejection by the group on those same material grounds, then, is all the more bitter and engenders the highpoint of the film, her rendition of And I Tell You I'm Not Going.

I can't remember the last time I saw an audience interrupt a movie to applaud like they did after that song. There's something pretty touching, incidentally, about watching an audience--in New York City, of all places--moved to clap at a movie screen.

But Beyonce was nearly as memorable in the film; she's luminous throughout as Deena Jones/Diana Ross, someone you literally can't take your eyes off of. But her performance kind of sneaks up on you if that's possible for someone so overtly attractive, growing and changing throughout the film (young Deena has such a different appeal with her winsome smile and yet is equally arresting as the very womanly accomplished Deena) and culminating in her performance of Listen, which also elicited some applause from the audience.

The great thing about Dreamgirls is it's not single-track; it tells a complicated story about a group of different people well, and things aren't always Hollywood neat. Hudson and Beyonce's performances are joined by Eddie Murphy and Jamie Foxx's as an eclipsed star and a hard-headed businessman. Both are utterly convincing, and both somehow get enough screen time.

The film is in many ways a throwback, not just because it's (unexpectedly) a musical, but also because there are no silly throw-away scenes, played for cheap laughs or tears. Everything matters; the film has an interior logic; people act the way they do to further the story, and because that's how their character would've acted; not because some focus group suggested adding x, y, and z.

There's complexity, there are a few surprises, and above all there's a growing understanding of a greater message as the film unfolds. You're left with a sense for how soul-sucking the music and by extension film industry can be, especially for something that's built on artistic expression and all the attributes that go along with the inherent integrity of great talent.

But you're also left with a story that hints at something deeper about race relations in this country--about something authentic and hard-won being cheapened and ripped off for money so many times that at a certain point, for some people the dream can be reduced to wanting to at least be the ones doing the ripping off.

It's hard to fault Foxx's character in some ways; he wanted to make it in a tough business, and learned to lead with his sharp elbows. You feel bad for Hudson's Effie, who wavers between the self-knowledge that in a just world she'd be out front, and what's presented to her as the economic realities. And you identify with Beyonce, who uses what she's got and what others want to get to a point where she's able to have her eyes opened, and have it mean something.

That still of Beyonce in front of a montage of her own--seemingly real-life--print ads, hair shaped into what may as well be a corporate logo says a lot about the price people are sometimes willing to pay for success as defined by others (at least you hope they feel they're paying a price.)

And the hairstyles, makeup and outfits... wow, the color and sparkles and flow really evoke the 60s and 70s, and give you a feel for how the women and the country really changed. The whole film, visually, is a joy to look at, and sucks you into its world.

Which is not to say Dreamgirls doesn't have some important shortcomings. As the Times' critic, A.O. Scott, observes in
Three-Part Heartbreak in Motown:

But the problem with “Dreamgirls” — and it is not a small one — lies in those songs, which are not just musically and lyrically pedestrian, but historically and idiomatically disastrous. This is a musical, after all, about music, about an especially vibrant and mutable strain of rhythm and blues that proclaimed itself, boastfully but not inaccurately, to be “the sound of young America.”

Curtis is modeled — loosely enough to escape litigation — on Berry Gordy Jr., who turned Motown from a regional record label into a powerhouse. (The Dreams are a parallel-universe version of the Supremes.) The story of Curtis’s Rainbow Records is a familiar and potent tale of Faustian show-business ambition, as his climb to the top involves betraying and hurting the people closest to him. But without the right soundtrack, only half the story is being told. The performances are gratifyingly spirited, but what this movie most obviously lacks is soul.

The great Motown songwriters — Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the trio of geniuses known to posterity as Holland-Dozier-Holland — turned out great pop songs by the dozen, cutting bolts of blues, gospel and rock ’n’ roll into clean, trim, shiny garments. It is vain to imagine that Mr. Krieger and Mr. Eyen, who died in 1991, could replicate the Motown sound in all its variety, but as it is, the film barely acknowledges its existence.

There's gotta be a back story as to why Smokey Robinson et al didn't do the music for the movie; it could be something as simple as a rights issue. Or maybe the film's producer, David Geffen et al, didn't think they needed to pay for the real thing.

They were almost right; Hudson and Beyonce carry the film, and their performances alone make you forget most of the other stuff. But Dreamgirls, I think, could've been something timeless, something kids could watch in schools, something film students could write papers on.

Maybe part of it not rising to the canon level is because of the times we live in, where Hollywood's idea of relevence is limited to making raving films about the war in Iraq.

A bigger part of the problem may be the inspiration for the story, essentially the Supremes. Great films, unless driven by an inventive plot or a stylistic director, need to tap into and illuminate larger-than-life things like war and social change. The Supremes didn't grow into the civil rights movement the way Marvin Gaye did; and the film scants the broader issues of feminism--heck, self-discovery--a bit too much maybe, reducing conflicts between Foxx/Murphy and the girls down to personality.

Too bad Scott doesn't take the next step and note also that the movie was based on a musical written by a white guy to appeal to Broadway's white patrons; the film itself was produced by the uber-white Geffen.

For Pete Travers, what there is in there about race is apparently quite enough; Travers, in hisRolling Stone review, calls director Billy Condon:

[t]he white guy with the brass to direct a tale of black artists who break faith with race, family and R&B to swim in the mainstream. ...

Dreamgirls is hunting bigger game than biopic exploitation. Even more onscreen than it was onstage, Dreamgirls is a story of its time. Condon lets the civil-rights movement slip into frame with headlines, news clips and a startling scene in which Effie confronts a riot in the streets with stunned silence. But Condon never stops the hurtling motion of his film to preach. ...

Krieger's music has taken hits from critics for not being Motown enough. Duh. It's a Broadway score, channeling its force and feeling through a Broadway idiom. Condon follows suit, dedicating the movie to Michael Bennett, who died of AIDS in 1987, borrowing bits of Bennett's original staging and even using the show's Playbill in the final credits.

Ah, yes--'preach', along with its cousin 'politically correct', those tagwords white males love to play, oblivious as ever.

Thank you, Billy, for directing this tale of black folk, and for letting the civil rights movement 'slip' into the film no less. And thank you, Hollywood, for putting on screen this Motown film--as properly scrubbed first by the Great White Way, of course.

Sheesh... not that Travers or Scott will see it, but the movie's story of the Dreamettes stripped of their soul in a bid for 'cross-over' appeal applies a bit to itself as well--it's a story about black music told by white folk, who however well-meaning and talented (if nothing else we should thank Geffen for, according to wikipedia, putting Hudson in the film over Fantasia Barrino) aren't likely to fight for an 'authentic' soundtrack.

Or, frankly know or care very much about Motown's intertwining role with the likes of Martin Luther King and angry black people in the streets, aside from a few cameos. The film doesn't even put its searing images of the riots in Detroit into the context of Jim Crow, lynchings, MLK's assassination and poverty. You're left feeling as if Beyonce and Foxx luckily escaped a self-destructive city for the literal golden white warmth of California, leaving Effie and her tired tirades behind.

But, listening to the Supremes as I write this, I'm reminded that art doesn't always have to be great or grand or, dare I say it, even express truth to be appreciable.

Where Did Our Love Go, Stop in the Name of Love, Reflections, and of course You Can't Hurry Love.... It may not Bach or even Dylan, but a catchy beat, pleasant voices and smooth (if at times illogical) lyrics have its place.

As long, of course, as it's recognized for what it is.

Uncredited Dreamgirls photos of Beyonce, Jennifer Hudson, and Beyonce/Foxx found in various places online.

Scott, incidentally, overreaches as movie critics are wont to do and writes:

The dramatic and musical peak of “Dreamgirls” — the showstopper, the main reason to see the movie — comes around midpoint, when Jennifer Hudson, playing Effie White, sings “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” That song has been this musical’s calling card since the first Broadway production 25 years ago, but to see Ms. Hudson tear into it on screen nonetheless brings the goose-bumped thrill of witnessing something new, even historic. A former Disney cruise-ship entertainer with a physique to match her robust voice, Ms. Hudson was notoriously dismissed from “American Idol.” This sad instance of pop-cultural philistinism is echoed on the cover of the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, which omits her in favor of her better-known, thinner “Dreamgirls” co-stars Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx and Beyoncé Knowles.

It's funny how often film critics are glib about things they know nothing about, in the process making themselves look unnecessarily foolish and often undermining the very point they think they're making.

Hudson wasn't 'notoriously' dismissed from AI--unless by notorious Scott means that she, like a number of other contestants over the years on the show, had a bad week, and didn't get enough people voting for her that week despite having a better voice than people who moved on.

Heck, in some ways the entire premise of AI is built on seeing if it's the look or the voice that wins out; some weeks and years the 'wrong' one wins, although Simon Cowell would argue in that case the music industry itself is all wrong.

Besides which, Scott makes it seem like Hudson sang on AI like she sang in Dreamgirls but the dumb AI audience wasn't able to look beyond her size. Hudson's really developed her talent the last few years, as Cowell predicted she would, and her scene in Dreamgirls wasn't quite the one-take that AI is.

Sheesh, I watched that episode (like I have every other AI episode of the past few years); and she wasn't my favorite that night either. Was she last on my list? No; of course not; but that's not how AI's voting process works.

The then-undiscovered Hudson had a lot of fans on AI (I'll bet Scott had no idea she existed until Dreamgirls), just not enough. There's a good discussion of this here. It's too bad Scott didn't read it before writing--you'd think someone devoted to covering pop culture would have a better sense of when he was so off.

Great black hopes

The second day at Urbanworld I saw The Pact, a documentary directed and produced by Andrea Kalin. The film's based on a book by ex-Washington Post reporter Lisa Frazier Page (who I once upon a time worked on a project with) and tells the story of three black men from Newark who started up in the projects and wound up as three doctors.

It's one of the best documentaries of its type I've seen--not cheesy, but sufficiently inspirational that if they indeed get copies of it in every school in America it'll definitely help increase the number of black professionals, at least to the extent the Cosby Show did. Which shouldn't be understated.

All three doctors are amazingly personable, down-to-earth and good people, in no ways forced or fake. Dr. Sampson Davis--his coworkers call him 'Dr. Hollywood'--is probably featured the most of the three doctors--he strikes me as the most 'normal' one. And a significant subplot centers around his attempt to balance his work at Beth Israel in Newark with his growing inspirational role (Oprah and everyone else comes calling). He seems to still have some demons, one of those people who are always observers, taking everything in, assessing; but with all the right intentions.

Dr. Rameck Hunt is shown initially lifting weights in his apartment; later on his way to an event he's changing in his SUV, which seems par for his life. He also takes in his sister, and attempts to motivate her. He seems to have a pretty cheerful attitude about things, just keeps moving forward.

Dr. George Jenkins--who's a dentist--is tall and spare, is on screen the least. I found out online that he's actually the one who convinced the other two to apply to the special Seton Hall program that set them on their paths to being doctors. (Hmm, you also find out online that Hunt at 16 was involved in the beating of an old man).

If I had one criticism about the film, it's that you don't get enough of the interaction of the three, there's no sense of what the group dynamics are like. There is a scene where they express reservations about whether the documentary will intrude into their personal lives, so maybe that was a deliberate condition (you never see any of their wives, either).

The emotional heart of the film aside from the doctors is Malique Kenny Bazemore, who with his mother attends a book signing--after reminding her of it every day for a month, she says--and who the three doctors adopt as one of their many mentees. He's a great kid, but a normal one; I think it's his mom who keeps him on the straight and narrow, along with the situation with his sister.

The film actually sparked an interesting discussion with a couple friends over the weight the factors of motivation, intelligence and environment play in personal success or failure. I think having any one of the three is enough to make you moderately successful, but realistically, since a kid can only directly control one of the three, it's all about motivation--which is also the only factor that, I think, can overcome deficiencies in the other two.

The documentary focuses most on motivation; it's obvious all three doctors were pretty smart to begin with and had at least one caring parental figure, but I think it only buttresses my point that one of them was involved in armed robberies even with his 'advantages,' and only turned his life around after the resulting attitude adjustment.

As one of the doctors said in the film and in the post-film Q&A (the place should've been packed, instead there were only about 40 people), he can't help someone who isn't first motivated to help himself. In our post-Jim Crow society, as Bill Cosby says in the film, there are all sorts of of remnants of institutional discrimination and unfairness--but there are also plenty of programs for those who want to take advantage of them, opportunities that often go begging.

I once read an interview with either Harold Bloom or Norman Mailer, who said if he could, he'd want to be reincarnated as a smart black man. It was kind of a dumb statement--he was assuming he'd have the same childhood and outlook, except he'd be black. The trick is to get inner city kids into the frame of mind where they see those opportunities and are able to take advantage of them, aren't hobbled by dysfunction.

It's something that either requires a good upbringing, or certainly not an equivalent replacement but possibly sufficient, the intervention of a film or book like The Pact. The best school system in the world may also suffice; but that, of course, requires billions.

Because it's pretty unrealistic, it's a way I think for people to feel better about themselves--look at me, I support spending all this money on these poor black kids--but there's also an air of patronization about it (without shiny new buildings of course these kids can't make it; without the intervention of us outside folk this community can't do anything, they need us) and because there are always huge political obstacles in the way it lets well-meaning liberals twiddle their thumbs for years, while engaging in their favorite sport, bashing conservatives.

Much more realistic are the Barack Obabamas, Oprah Winfreys and three doctors of the world, who in essence say fine, let's let people try for structural changes and do their job, in the meantime we're going to do ours and try and inspire kids one at a time. Granted, they can't possibly have the impact of parents; but maybe they can jump-start a fire within.

If nothing else it gives kids something to aim for apart from basketball nets and the end zone. And it's not unknown in human history that something like a book can, all by itself, turn around someone's life.

Photo of l-r Jenkins, Hunt and Davis from their foundation's website.

Behind the screen

Saw two interesting movies, and three shorts, as part of the Urbanworld film festival, which focuses primarily on black and latino films.

Friday saw The Slanted Screen, Jeff Adachi's look at how Asian American men have been portrayed in movies. The film consisted of clips and interviews and would make a good addition to any Asian American Cinema 101 class.

It had its flaws--a weirdly-affected female narrator, an abrupt beginning, the startling omission of either Greg Pak or any of his films, and no interviews with Justin Lin or Wayne Wang--but managed to pack a lot into its 60 minutes.

I learned about Sessue Hayakawa, a silent-film era star born in Japan who had a remarkable life and career in Hollywood. From Wikipedia:

Sessue Hayakawa was born Hayakawa Kintaro in Nanaura, Chiba, Japan on June 10, 1890, the second eldest son of the provincial governor. From early on he was groomed for a career as a naval officer. But in 1907, at 17, he took a schoolmate's dare to swim to the bottom of a lagoon and ruptured an eardrum. He was studying at the Naval Academy in Etajima but his perfect health was now shattered and he failed the navy's rigorous physical. His proud father became depressed, humiliated and shamed. Consequently, the father-son relationship suffered.

The strained relationship between the Kintaros drove the 18-year-old to decide to commit harakiri. One quiet night after dinner Hayakawa entered a garden shed on his parents' property, locked his favorite dog outside and spread a white sheet on the ground. To uphold his family's samurai tradition, Hayakawa stabbed himself in the abdomen more than 30 times. But the dog's barking alerted Hayakawa's family and his father smashed through the shed door with an axe in time to save his son.

Hayakawa was on vacation in Los Angeles when he drifted into The Japanese Playhouse in Little Tokyo and became caught up in acting and staging plays. That was when he first assumed the name Sessue Hayakawa. ...

This was Hayakawa's Hollywood heyday. Hayakawa was one of the highest paid Hollywood stars of his time, making over $5,000 a week in 1915, then $2 million a year through his own production company in 1920s. Hayakawa's popularity rivaled that of Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and John Barrymore with film audiences. He drove a gold-plated Pierce-Arrow. He entertained lavishly in his Hollywood castle, the scene of some of the film community's wildest parties. Just before prohibition took effect in 1920 he bought a carload of booze. Hayakawa once claimed that he owed his social success to his liquor supply.

A bad business deal forced Hayakawa to leave Hollywood in 1921. The next 15 years saw him performing in New York, France, England and Japan. In 1924 he made The Great Prince Chan and The Story of Su in London. In 1925 he wrote a novel, The Bandit Prince, and turned it into a short play. In 1930 he performed in a one act play written especially for him, Samurai, for King George V of Great Britain and Queen Mary. He also became very popular in France thanks to the prevailing French fascination with anything Asian. In 1930 Hayakawa returned to Japan and produced a Japanese-language stage version of The Three Musketeers, and adopted two girls and one boy.

In one night during the peak of his success, he gambled away $1 million at Monte Carlo, shrugging off the loss while another Japanese gambler who lost a fortune committed suicide.

In the 1930s his career began to suffer from the rise of talkies, and a growing anti-Japanese sentiment. Hollywood deemed his gifts unsuited to the new talkies. Hayakawa's talking film debut came in 1931 in Daughter of the Dragon starring opposite Anna May Wong.

I'd only known him from Bridge Over the River Kwai; hearing and reading about him reminded me of Anna May Wong's perhaps even-more remarkable story. She suffered a similar career arc, which reminds you that progress is neither linear nor assured and you never know when those days are over.

The documentary also focused on Bruce Lee, of course, winding up with more recent film and television series such as Better Luck Tomorrow, Charlotte Sometimes and Lost. The message seemed to be Asian American males are increasingly occupying the behind-the-scenes power positions of screenwriter, director and producer (not to mention high-level studio and network executives), and are thus able to share their view of reality.

Then again, one of the guys interviewed recounted how an Asian American friend of his had been invited to submit a screenplay for The O.C.; when he got it back, all of his incidental Asian American characters were changed to white. When he asked why, the reply was well, the O.C. characters aren't the type to hang out with anyone non-white.

Which is interesting, insofar as that makes the characters racist--anyone who's ever been to Orange County knows only a deliberate attempt would allow you to avoid non-whites. Glad to see in 2006 a hit television series isn't afraid to show the interior lives of racists, look forward to Ryan/Marissa/Seth discovering the Klan.

At any rate, the most interesting discovery for me was Dr. Darrell Hamamoto, a professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, and Frank Chin, a Chinese American playwright.

Hamamoto was well-put-together, smoothly articulate, affable and gave off an air of being easily perceptive. Chin was his opposite. Hamamoto, I'd say, is the perfect person to analyze Asian American film on camera, he's someone whites would be persuaded by and easy to understand, like most female Asian American newscasters. But at the same time he's not a sell-out nor does he just make shallow, unobtrusive points.

Chin is not as good at playing the game. The Heath Anthology says:

Much of Chin’s notoriety stems from the positions he and his colleagues take in the introductory essays in those collections. One of their central concerns is the emasculating effect of anti-Asian racism as epitomized by stereotypical figures like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. Another controversial aspect of Chin’s nonfictional writing has been his relentless criticism of writers such as David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan; in his view, these writers falsify Asian and Asian American culture. Critics point out the misogyny and homophobia that propel Chin’s polemics, but they also acknowledge the significance of his pioneering work as a literary historian. Indeed many of the writers that Chin and his colleagues champion—such as Louis Chu, John Okada, and Hisaye Yamamoto—have been accorded a privileged place in Asia American literary studies.

I can see why people, even Asian Americans, might not like him and dismiss what he has to say. The way he communicates is a bit too straight; it's not polished or prefaced.

For example, he says straight out he thinks of Bruce Lee more of an indictment of the way Asian American males are portrayed on-screen, rather than as the transcendental figure most of the other commentators (the actors especially) make him out to be.

After all Lee, Chin says, was an American (now how many people know that?!), born in San Francisco. His family returned to Hong Kong when he was a year old--despite coming back to America to attend school and start his filmmaking career, he could only become a big star by going back to Hong Kong. In this country, his on-screen roles, Chin points out, were relegated to driving and washing a car for his white boss, and attacking--sic, Bruce!--when told.

It's an uncomfortable but accurate truth that continues to this day--there are very few incidents on-screen where Asian American males are leaders, and white males are followers.

And those rare cases tend to be written or directed or produced by Asian Americans themselves. Chin says this is because whites are afraid of Asian Americans--we're smarter, we work harder, if we're not blocked we'll take over. This is made manifest in shows like 24, a wildly-popular series where a white male single-handedly drives all and saves all, and who next season takes on the Chinese government (wonder who'll win).

But it's usually more subtle than that--head doctors and executives are white, underlings are Asian American; undermining comments are made by whites and directed at minorities; plot is driven by the motivation and personal stories of the white characters, people of color either play the patronizing 'magic negro' roles, are the bad guys, or are there to bring out elements of the white characters--to be talked to or acted upon.

And less you think it's just Chin and me, Lois Salisbury, the former director Children Now, says in the documentary that in the studies they've done with children, kids always assign leadership roles to whites, and underling roles to minorities. And that the Asian American kids notice that they're rarely portrayed in media.

Maybe that's because certain white actors are better at playing Asian and Asian Americans?

Angry Asian Man: More yellowface news! There's a Marco Polo TV miniseries in the works, telling the story of the 13th-century traveler and his journey to Mongolia and his time in the court of Kublai Khan: 'Lost' Vet Plays 'Marco Polo'. Ian Somerhalder, formerly of Lost, will play Marco Polo. That's not the yellowface news. B.D. Wong will plays Marco Polo's servant. That's not the yellowface news either. Brian Dennehy will apparently play Kublai Khan... who, if history remembers correctly, was Asian. Now how are they going to pull that one off?

Of course, Asian American males aren't alone in Hollywood et al's myopia; preceding the documentary were two shorts, both by female directors. Untold Legacy used NYC to explore a national movement to require companies that do business with cities to research their archives and disclose the company's actions and profits, if any, during slavery. As the first step toward reparations, there are no penalties of any kind, except for companies that refuse to disclose.

Theresa Thanjan's Whose Children are These is probably one of the most powerful short documentaries I've ever seen. It looked at three American Muslims in NYC who were affected by the 2002 National Security Entry Exit Registration System, which required boys and men 16 and older from 23 Middle Eastern and Arab countries (and North Korea) who were not citizens or green card holders to register with the government.

Ultimately, Thanjan's film says, 83,000 men registered; 13,799--many long-time American residents with families--were put into detention or deported. How many were charged with terrorism, or a terrorism-related crime? None.

Each of Thanjan's three subjects are great on-screen--one because of her well-argued points, another for the power of how he and his friends respond, a third because of sheer emotion. They're all throughly American, represent the fulfillment of their parents' immigrant dreams and actually you'd be hard-pressed to find three more normal and appealing teens.

And they've had a more hard-headed version of American shoved down their throats. Including the well-meaning but idiot teachers of one of them, who had her take off her headscarf and crouch down in the back of her car as she raced to get her home on 9/11.

Symbolism matters--for a white person to tell someone that in their own country the only way they could survive is by hiding is pretty harmful.

Photo of Sessue Hayakawa via Golden Sea.

Photo of Navila from Whose Children Are These.