Snowy Snow

Yeah, it's been an adventurous weekend. The storm delivered all that it was promised to be, have to say that - couple feet of snow - piled up in quite impressive drifts - huge snowbanks - a mess. I went out into it yesterday, while the snow was still coming down, before much of it was cleared up - the roads were all plowed, but not sidewalks, there was snow everywhere. It was impressive. My front yard for instance - almost bare grass, and what must be a 7 or 8 foot drift...



One effect of all the wind was that there wasn't a lot of the kind of picturesque snow you associate with winter - evergreens laden down with slow. It all blew off - except in a couple neighborhoods with a bit more shelter.... Still:



It was odd. The city shut down early Friday - the streets were nearly empty by noon, though it really didn't start snowing hard until evening. I guess it makes sense to get everyone out of the way for when it did come down - I don't doubt that if they had left the rads and such open until 8, people would have been out driving to 8, probably out to midnight. That probably wouldn't have worked out so well. Things are still shut down (I'm off soon to find out how shut down they are), but in general, in the city at least, things are just - shut down. Nothing really bad seems to be happening. Not here anyway. The plows were out yesterday, and had the roads cleared before the snow stopped, even most of the side roads; by the time I got home, the sidewalks were cleared - you could see the crews out shoveling and snow-blowing around all the apartment buildings all morning. Days like yesterday, I feel a lot better about the rent and taxes I pay. I'd say I got my money's worth.



And so? I wasn't alone out there - people walking around, taking pictures, walking their dogs, skiing, snowshoeing, sledding - might as well enjoy it, right? it's here and it's gonna make the commute a living hell for a few days... might as well have some fun first.

A Blizzard of Music

"Nemo"? Please god... everybody's hoping it's "historic" - what's that, top 10 all time? With heavy winds, up to hurricane strength - brrr!

I should add that that's a fun list to look at. I remember a few of them, some very well. I was in Maine in 1978, and don't remember much about The Blizzard (#2 on the list), except that it obliterated beaches, ruined more than one of the fishermen in our town, and sounded a lot more fun in Boston... I was in Maine in December 2010 (#10), as well, so didn't get the city experience, but that was a big, fun snowstorm - being on vacation made it all quite enjoyable. Hang out with kids, who know how to enjoy snow - all good... Of the ones here: the strangest thing - the February 2003 storm that is listed as the heaviest snowfall in the history of Boston - I have forgotten, almost completely. I found a note somewhere that mentioned it, noting only that, even with 2 feet of snow on the ground, I was expected to go to work. Must have been some blizzard.... now - January 2005 (#5) - I remember well: I spent the storm on the computer, doing work for a class - writing about Samuel L. Delany and editing a collage of video to the tune of "Natural is Not In It." (I see I also found time to make fun of David Brooks and little Bush.) That is to the good. The 90s storms - I don't remember the one in 1994 specifically (#9) - but there was a lot of snow that winter, and I remember that. I remember the other two very well - the other #10, in 1996, I remember because I took a long walk along the beach in the middle of it. Very nice. But the big one - the definitive storm, really, of my days in Boston - was the April fool's blizzard of 1997 (#4).

You remember storms that time of year, obviously, but this one hit all the markers. Lots of snow - and a hard, vigorous snowstorm at that. And the very nature of the beast - a major blizzard overnight and all through the morning, then it stopped - and by afternoon, was sunny and the temperature well into the 40s, maybe the 50s. 2 feet of snow, and spring! And - it was a storm full of anecdote, for me. I saw Rebel Without a Cause Monday night (see? I remember the day of the week!) - remember walking home from that, in howling winds and snow - but very happy to have gone. Tuesday morning, I got up and got dressed and despite all the snow in the ground, went in to work - which, somewhat surprisingly, was closed. (The office had a bad reputation for staying open in all kinds of conditions. Probably not deserved - they closed for the real storms, and there aren't as many of those as you think, but you know how it is...) So I walked home, in the blast of the storm, because - I grew up in Maine and I love snow. So there. I stopped to buy pancake mix on the way, since who doesn't want to eat flapjacks in a blizzard? Home - and then I went out again, after the snow started, and wandered around town in the surreal, and quite wonderful, balmy winter wonderland. It was - a very good couple days.

Not losing power puts you in that kind of mood. In this day and age, really, that's pretty much all there is - if the power stays on, weather isn't going to do me much harm. That is a luxury for which I am grateful. (And, of course, I continue to hope the trees stay up. But they've stayed up through 2 hurricanes and a couple blizzards while I've been here, so I guess I should be all right....

ALl right - music: which, though it is too easy - how often do you get a big snow storm on a Friday? So you're getting snowy music today!

1. Black Sabbath - Snowblind
2. Captain Beefheart - Steal Softly Through Snow
3. Dirty Three - Ashen Snow
4. Frank Zappa - Don't Eat the Yellow Snow
5. Mercury Rev - Snowflake in a Hot World
6. The Pop Group - The Snow Girl
7. Pere Ubu - Snowy Livonia
8. Mono - Ashes in the Snow
9. DAvid Sylvain - Snow White in Appalachia
10. Galaxie 500 - Listen! The Snow is Falling

Video? I will have to settle for Dean and Britta, rather than Galaxie 500 (or Yoko), but I want a live version:



And - I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss diabolical influence, but - I don;t have this on iTunes, but... who can resist a shitty Styx video? not me!

Friday Music Post (post post post...)

February - winter's back, after a brief absence - not as bad, I suppose, as last week... Anyway - off we go! Randomly...

1. Radiohead - Bones
2. Six Organs of Admittance - Spirits Abandoned
3. AC/DC - Get it Hot
4. Otis Redding - Mr. Pitiful
5. Xiu Xiu - Pox
6. Echo & The Bunnymen - The Cutter
7. Outkast - a Bad Note
8. Jeff Beck - The Morning Dew
9. Sonic Youth - Quest for the Cup
10. Echo & The Bunnymen - Lips Like Sugar

Video - I think iTunes has sent a clear message there, huh?



And -



And for that matter - Radiohead at the most Echoish, no?

January Director of the Month - Nagisa Oshima

I am going to begin a new series - taking off from this one: A Favorite Directors Blogathon, started at Loren Rosson III's The Busybody, then picked up by others. I can't claim any direct connection, except that I've seen his posts (and some others, like Carson Lund's), and figure it is a good idea. I have been thinking about a way to write about directors - or maybe make some kind of ranking. I did that once, a long time ago - it's not a list that changes all that often, but it would be nice to revisit it...

And so - let us begin. I will start with Nagisa Oshima, partly to celebrate his career on the occasion of his death, though also because he makes a good starting point. To the extend that this is a countdown, he would make sense - he probably lands around 20 or so all time - though it isn't that much of a countdown. I prefer Andrew Sarris' method of lumping them - pantheon, far side of paradise, etc. (Though I've never quite managed to figure out how to make them fit his categories; but the general principal obtains.) Now - this series is obviously devoted to the pantheon - though even in the pantheon, there might be some striation. Up there at the top, there are the greater gods, the inner circle, the holy trinity - Ozu, with Capra and Godard and Mizoguchi right there at his side; then - oh - Hawks and Altman, Imamura, Rivette, Fritz Lang... and so on. I am not going to commit to anything like a list at this point - but I want to sketch in the parameters of what I want to write about....

That is enough preamble. Oshima: it took me a while to warm to him (if "warm" is a word you could ever use for him) - took a while to see enough of his films, and to see them in a proper format - and it was hard to know what to make of him when I did see them. I found him hard to place - it wasn't until I'd seen most of his films that he started to make sense to me. Some of this is because of his characteristic style and subject matter - which is to say - the lack of a characteristic style and subject matter. He changes constantly, in every dimension - content, style, form, tone - think just about the three films he made in 1960: Cruel Story of Youth - a youth behaving badly film; The Sun's Burial, an ensemble piece about a slum; Night and Fog in Japan, another ensemble piece, this time among political types; they are all fairly gorgeous widescreen color films, but the way they are made varies - look at how theatrical, formal, artificial, Night and Fog in Japan is, compared to the others... And move forward - he made black and white films, color films; widescreen and low tech; he adapted books (The Catch) and comics (Band of Ninja), worked with theatrical groups (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief - which remains the one major Oshima I haven't been able to see, to my intense annoyance), made films within films (The Man Who Left His Will On Film); made historical films and contemporary films, made pornographic films, horror films, surrealist comedies, samurai films, made films in English and French as well as Japanese...

It's odd: his eclecticism reminds me of Ichikawa, a comparison that might not go over very well - Oshima did not like Ichikawa, I believe. But they both have an ability to move among many styles, radically different styles, and maintain their identities. They carry their tone, almost everywhere - and it's a similar tone - dark, cool, comic - usually given fairly direct political implications by Oshima, more indirectly so by Ichikawa.... They are also alike in moving among all these styles while maintaining a similar technical mastery - neither one is capable of a bad shot... Oshima distinguishes himself, I think, steps above Ichikawa, in his critical capacity - as a filmmaker, you can never quite forget that he is a critic. He moves among a number of different filmmaking modes, always interested, I think, in how these modes work - he's always exploring film as a form, as a way of making meaning. This is something that links him to Godard, I think - Godard is like that too, an essayist in film. Many of the French New Wave directors had that quality - Rivette, Moullet - of using their films as ways to explore the art form... Oshima shares that. He does, I think, parallel the European filmmakers of the time - affinities appear, especially for Godard, Antonioni, and Pasolini. Though in fact, I think he is more varied and experimental than any of them, other than Godard. He did try damned near everything.

Finally - when I wrote about Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence last year, I noted that he was one of the great political filmmakers - he is. The complexity of the power relations in that film - the hierarchies, class divisions, national divisions (Japanese and Korean, English and South African, and Dutch and so on), personal divisions - is common to his films. They all explore power and its distribution, how it works in real society. His interest in the place of Koreans in Japanese society is a recurring example.... I don't think it would be too far off to say that he is the most interesting political filmmaker in the world.

Okay - enough of that... on to the films! I am not going to drag these out, just name and move on, unless something seems like it needs to be said.

1. The Ceremony - A big family saga stretching from the end of WWII to the 1970s, full of Manchurians, war criminals, right wing loons, a token communist, and series of ceremonies - with other activities (baseball, sex, meals) presented as rituals themselves. It reminded me of some of the big epic Oliveira pictures, Doomed Love or Francesca - that kind of absurdity, theatricality, with the gorgeous look of the rest of Oshima's films.

2. The Sun's Burial - plays like a nihilistic version of Pigs and Battleships - nasty criminals in the slums. A woman is buying blood from beggars and threading her way through a variety of obstacles - rival gangs, political; agitators, her junk lord father, various weak men who try to love her. She is a monumental villain, but she is also more or less indestructible. (She might as well be a vampire - immortal, living off the blood of others...) It is a great looking film, though we'll get to say that a lot in this post - understated lighting, all browns and golds, wonderful widescreen compositions, long fluid takes - not as showy as some contemporaries (SUzuki, say), or as detailed as Imamura, but still brilliant.

3. Boy - Story of a family of con men, who work by staging car accidents - seen through the eyes of a boy.... Again - extraordinary looking - no shots less than amazing, and many among the classics: the 2 kids sitting in the snow talking about their snowman/alien; a brawl at an inn in black and white that goes to color at the end. The family at the northernmost tip of Japan in a blizzard. Full of gorgeous off center compositions, oddly balanced, things coming in and out of the frame - some disruptive editing, plenty of sound and color tricks. Japanese flags everywhere...

4. Death by Hanging - R (a Korean) is condemned to be hanged - he is hanged, but doesn't die. This poses a problem - the cops and officials set out to prove to him first that he is R, then, that he is a killer, and third, that he is guilty and should die. They do this by acting out his story - first comically, but then almost seriously (as R starts to get involved) then moving out into the streets. Oshima gets in a number of modes in this one film - hilarious at times, horrifying, politically pointed, finally strange and haunting, and moving.

5. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - Well, I've said my piece on this before - it does not have the reputation some of his others have, but I think it probably should. It is hard to find anything approaching its political complexity in any other war films - especially as it applies its complex view of power to both sides. About seeing the other side from the other side, under pressure....

6. Ai No Corrida - Sada Abe story. She's a maid at an inn - she spies on the master and mistress making love, and soon enough he seduces her, and then it's off to the races. Famous for the sex, I guess, though it's a pretty convincing film - seeing the rest of his films reveals its place better. You can see how it builds on Ceremony or Boy. The satire is toned down, but it's still mordantly funny. And political - that famous scene, where he's passed by a column of soldiers, going the opposite way - they to their doom, he to his... though his seems a lot more admirable.

7. The Man Who Left His Will On Film - Begins with footage of a man with a camera who is immediately chased by someone else. The first man appears to kill himself while the chaser - Motoki - watches. From there it moves to a meeting by a group trying to make political films - then to scenes with Motoki and Yasuko (the dead man's lover? or Motoki's?) talking about film, these films, the other man - who may or may not exist - etc. You are down the rabbit hole in a hurry here. What emerges, though, is a film about Tokyo - documentary footage of riots, a film of landscapes they all argue about, the filmmakers going into the streets themselvesm to try to recreate the testament film - the most memorable, interesting element of the film is the view of the locations - the streets, the highways, the buildings, the neighborhoods. Which is an interesting twist...

8. Night and Fog in Japan - A wedding of a couple who met during the ANPO protests, a reporter and an activist; their friends gather, and old rivalries and such reemerge, mostly around a boy who disappeared during the protests. That, in turn,sets off flashbacks by the score - to 1950 when the groom's generation agitated against an earlier treaty andthe Korean war, as well as to the ANPO protests (which happened, one should note, in June 1960 - the film was released in October 1960 (though not for long...) Oshima uses every trick in the book - it looks like it's inpsired by La Chinoise at times, which is an impressive feat for 7 years earlier - black outs (and white outs), freeze frames, explicit theatrical lighting and other effects, automated camera movements (tracking around the room), hidden cuts, putting different times and places in the same shot, inserted texts (writing on the walls, like Ozu or Godard), books, inserted speeches, long arguments about politics, and very fractured narative. Though for all that, the story itself might not be so extreme - the wedding is a carvival site to bring all these people together - the airing of grievances follows. And while it is politically motivated, the basic story is mostly just a mystery story - how did the "spy" get away? who rang the buzzer? Still - it works - it makes the political factionalism vivid and interesting; individuates the characters to a remarkable extent - and generally retains the post-modern air of the whole thing.

9. Cruel Story of Youth - Story of student and a girl - he rescues her from a lecher, they hang around, he seduces her, they start shaking men down, using her for bait - these two disaffected youths are contrasted with her sister and the man she used to love - he was an idealist, but now he runs an abortion clinic.... In that, it anticipates the generational conflicts of Night and Fog in Japan, without the explicit politics. It skirts the political, though - released in June, 1960, it contains footage from some of the anti-ANPO demonstrations that spring.

10. Violence at Noon - Mostly about a rapist and murderer, with flashbacks to a love confusion at a kind of collective farm that was washed away by a flood. Marked by some very cool weird cuts. This one, like a couple of Oshima's films in the early 60s, feels at times like Imamura - oddly, Oshima tends to go for the shocks more....

There are plenty more worthwhile Oshimas - some of them, at least, on DVD in the states. They are worth seeing, though unless you want to see Charlotte Rampling having an affair with an chimp, you might want to steer around Max Mon Amour.

Torturer's Apprentices

Zero Dark Thirty (11/15) - There is a movie there, a pretty good one, too, a procedural in the vein of Zodiac (though not quite in Zodiac's league), with a more - conclusive - ending.... But the film as film has tended to be obscured by the talk about the torture in the film - and though it's tempting to sigh about that, that is also probably as it should be. It's unfortunate that the talk about torture has tended to make the film itself somewhat less visible than it might have been - you can see parts of the film world shying away from it - it seems to have cost Kathryn Bigelow a best director nomination, and to be making it more of a long shot for best picture than it might have been.... The first thing to note is that, whatever you think the film says about torture, the fact that it is willing to include it, to address it, directly (as directly as it does) is commendable. Torture is a shameful element of our history - and more shameful for our general inability to actually address it. We seem to want it both ways - we did it, we seem relieved not to do it anymore - but we don't quite want to face the consequences of having done it. That is very close to our official position on torture. The unofficial position might be even squishier - you can probably find enough people who would, if they were compelled to consider it, defend it - but these days, the culture seems to prefer forgetting about it. And that tendency leaves this film rather isolated - because it does address it, directly and seriously - whatever you think the film says about torture, it is certainly not eliding it. That, by itself, is something worth praising.

Still, that's just the start - what does the film actually say about torture? It is notable that in fact, there are claims on both sides - there are those who say it defends torture - some who say it condemns torture; some who say it shows torture working - others who say it shows torture not working.... with multiple positions between, and differing notions of how it positions the viewer and - more..... Well - to me, it seems that this multiplicity of interpretation is a feature, not a bug - it is a deliberate result of the film's design. I think Zero Dark Thirty is made in a way that allows you to see what you want to see. If you want to see the Americans as making themselves morally indistinguishable from the terrorists they are torturing - you probably can. If you want to see that torture works and without it Bin Laden would be alive - you probably can; if you want to see that torture is a terrible thing, and made us all a little worse, but ya know, in the end, without it, Bin Laden would be alive - well - you can probably find that, too. Whether you find it or put it there - there's plenty of room for all of these ideas. This openness is a function of the style - the distance, the neutrality, the coolness of the style - and the main character. Chastain does not emote, does not reveal much beyond her professional behavior - Bigelow does likewise, leaving Maya as a blank cipher, someone whose non-CIA life is invisible, whether it exists or not. Bigelow doesn't show it - and when other characters try to find it, Maya deflects it as well. You won't get any humanization here. You get emotion - but it's professional emotion - pride or impatience or disappointment... I think the effect of this strategy is to avoid judgment on the things we see. The film seldom guides us. It trusts us to understand what we see - it challenges us to think about what we see, and interpret it. Though I don't think it's unfair to say it's careful ambiguity is there precisely to avoid responsibility for what it shows - to avoid taking sides, on things where not making moral judgments might just be a moral judgment itself. At least - an unwillingness to commit, in public.

But on balance, I would say its neutrality is more a good thing than a bad one. And - despite it's unwillingness to really commit to a final word on torture, I think the film does make at least one fairly clear judgment about torture. It is, I have said, a procedural, a film about competence, about a task to be completed and the means of completing it, the methods for completing it... and in that context - torture is shown as a shortcut - it's cheating. And what's more, it's a waste of time. Taking it as a procedural - what you see is 7 years of torture that yields nothing, ends, more or less, in failure and frustration - only to start over again, with someone who has gone to the trouble of going through the files - a rather less exciting, or horrifying, piece of work than stuffing a guy into a box - but which works. And maybe all that torture gave them a clue or two, someone to look for - but none of it mattered without the real work of going through the files, tracking down phone numbers, getting wiretaps, putting agents on the ground, looking for him, staking out miles of road, to find out where he lived. There is a pragmatic argument against torture there - that it is time wasted. Anything you got with torture you could have gotten somewhere else, and probably faster.

The thing is - you can get what you want with torture, if what you want is to hurt people and make them beg for mercy. Maybe to intimidate other people - to control them.... Ask the Stasi! It's interesting that Christian Petzold's quite remarkable Barbara (12/15) has a somewhat similar beginning to ZDT. The character types in the opening parts of ZDT are very similar to those in Barbara - the new girl, a hotshot from the city; the charismatic old hand at this sort of thing, who initiates her and guides her... In ZDT he makes her a torturer; in Barbara he's a spy, and operates in a kind of moral half world between her and the Stasi. Barbara's story is this - a doctor comes to a remote part of Germany, from Berlin. She's some kind of political problem - the local secret police and the head doctor at the hospital where she works are keeping an eye on her. She does her job, she tries to help people - she also makes plans to escape. And - the police keep tabs on her - searching her, harassing her, every time she goes out of sight... There are subplots - a girl who keeps running away from a work farm; a boy who tried to kill himself - the doctors treat them, though sometimes the treatment needed isn't medical... Things build, to medical crises and political crises, sacrifices are made, large and small acts of heroism. All of it is shown with consummate care and style, without quite showing off. A great little film.

And one that, if we're thinking about torture, ought to tell us something - it is not ambiguous. It is not sentimental about torture. Torture, the police state, is aimed at intimidation - you can make anyone say anything you want them to. Which the CIA men in ZDT don't seem to realize is not what their job is - they want their prisoners to tell them things they don't know - but torture is designed to make people tell you what you want to hear. The one won't get you to the other. The East Germans didn't seem to have those illusions - they use torture to intimidate - and not just the person being tortured. They are made examples of - they are used to terrify other people into submission. Which works - until it doesn't... all that paranoia builds, and it reaches a point where the intimidation doesn't work anymore - people will do anything, risk death, to leave.

One more film: Central Park Five (11/15) - a documentary about five black and hispanic teenagers accused of a horrific rape in Central Park in 1989. Accused and convicted - but then freed, when the real attacker confessed in 2002. And this film provides what might be an even clearer statement of that half-hidden thesis of Zero Dark Thirty - that torture only gets people to say what you want them to say; that in police work, it is almost always a shortcut, used to avoid the real work of actually catching the perpetrators. The story here is an explicit version of what I said about ZDT - a crime committed - the cops rounded up suspects - went to work on them, using rather harsh and dubious means to get confessions - and as soon as the kids admitted something, the cops shut down everything else. They had reasons to be looking for Matias Reyes, the real attacker, from the start; they ignored evidence from the time that would have led them away from the people they arrested. There was no forensic evidence - how can you have a brutal rape and no trace of the rapist? or - have traces of the rapist, but no traces of the 5 people you arrested for the rape? there was no logic in it - but they got what they wanted, by keeping a bunch of teenagers up all night, berating them - maybe this didn't count as torture, though it's pretty damned close - especially used against 14 year olds.

Friday in January

Where did this week go? All right - I have a couple posts in the pipeline, so I might make up for the lack of posting with a surfeit of material in the coming week. (Surfeit, in my case, meaning, probably, 2 posts - oy...) Meanwhile, a completely random ten with no special significance whatsoever...

1. Brian Jonestown Massacre - Cold to the Touch
2. Spiral Stairs - Cold Change
3. Stephen Malkmus - Cold Son
4. Janelle Monae - Cold War
5. Klaus Nomi - The Cold Song
6. Husker Du - Ice Cold Ice
7. Public Enemy - Cold Lampin' with Flavor
8. Rocket from the Tombs - So Cold
9. White Heaven - My Cold Dimention
10. The White Stripes - In the Cold Night

Video? Well, who knows cold better than a Minnesotan? Mr. Mould?



Speaking of Minnesota - new Prince song out...



and I guess I'll post this too - audio only, but the world can always use a bit of White Heaven.... they sound cold!

Musical Friday

And - without much ceremony, here is today's Friday Random Ten:

1. Red Crayola - War Sucks
2. Jimmy Reed - Honest I do
3. Elvis Costello - Wednesday Week
4. AC/DC - Beating Around the Bush
5. Lone Justice - Pass It On
6. Elastica - Never Here
7. Melvins - At the Stake
8. Badfinger - Maybe Tomorrow
9. Velvet Underground - Sister Ray (Live)
10. Grateful Dead - China Cat Sunflower

Very good... and video? Let's go topical, with John Cale: when you've begun to think like a gun, the days of the year have suddenly gone...



hey don't you do that, you're gonna stain the carpet... though this is an all Jersey version, Feelies and Yo La Tengo...

Nagisa Oshima

Nagisa Oshima has died... The period in which he emerged, the Japanese new wave, if you can call it that, is one of the high points, the absolute high points, of film history. I am, fairly obviously, more of an Imamura man - but I guess that's like saying I'm more of an Ozu man than a Mizoguchi man - there's not that big a gap. And Oshima is the director who defines the period for me - his experimentation, overt political engagement, intellectual ambition, and rather all-encompanssing interests - epitomize the era - inventive, challenging, and always beautiful filmmaking. His contemporaries do seem to have found their niches, worked a more particular ground - maybe only Yoshida can approach the variety of film work Oshima did... He was, then, one of the great ones - and I salute him.

Gaming Imagination

Here's Ta-Nehisi Coates, talking about D&D as a kid. I took up D&D a lot later than he did, came to it by way of books (it was the Hardy boys that did this to me, when I was 7 or 8) - but yeah, I know what he's talking about. I'm rather curious about this film, now...

Friday Music Again

Another week gone - another trip through my music collection... which today manages to turn up a rather striking number of very highly rated favorites.

1. Minutemen - Sell or Be Sold [a very cool one]
2. Gogol Bordello - Think Locally, Fuck Globally
3. Lady Sovereign - Random
4. Mission of Burma - 2wice
5. Acid Mothers Temple - Supernatural Infinite Space Waikiki Easy Meat
6. Minutemen - The Big Lounge Scene (always a good day when the minutemen come up twice)
7. Feelies - When Company Comes
8. Scott Walker - It's Raining today [one of the all time greats...]
9. Social Distortion - It Coulda Been Me
10. Richard and Linda Thompson - Shame of Doing Wrong (live) [another of the all time greats; a good week for it.]

Video? not much in the way of video, but a recording of Scott Walker performing It's Raining Today on his TV show...



And - Minutemen, live, 1982, with the odd sight of D Boon playing a Les Paul...

1960s WITD Poll Votes

In the continuing yearly polls at Wonders in the Dark, they have reached the 70s - so it's time for me to post my votes for the 60s. This is - along with the 1930s and 1950s - one of the great decades, and one that featured the high point of a few of my all time favorite directors. Godard and Imamura in particular - both of them did work in the 60s that should count among the best decades of work in film history - up there with Kurosawa in the 50s or Keaton in the 20s, Capra in the 30s, almost up there with Ozu in the 30s or the 50s.... They were hardly alone - Oshima and Truffaut and Bresson and Suzuki and Pasolini and Olmi are all superb, Rivette and Rohmer got started - it's a blessed time for films.

The Decade:

PICTURE: The Pornographers
DIRECTOR (single film): Imamura, for The Pornographers
DIRECTOR (decade): Godard - for the sheer productivity - at an almost unmatched level. Imamura holds his own, but Godard made more films.
LEAD ACTOR (film): Toshiro Mifune, in High and Low
LEAD ACTOR (decade): Tatsuya Nakadai - who is in so many great films through the 60s... there's a good deal of competition - though the 60s strike me as a bit of an auteurist decade - at least the films I like the most depend much more on their directors than the actors.
LEAD ACTRESS (film): Hideko Takemine, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
LEAD ACTRESS (decade): Anna Karina
SUPPORTING ACTOR (film): Tsutomo Yamazaki, High and Low
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (film): Angela Lansbury, Manchurian Candidate
SHORT: The poll itself I think counted TV - which would get the likes of the Charlie Brown Christmas and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas on the ballot. That seems a bit off, though. Sticking to actual films, leaves Chris Marker's La Jetee as the clear winner.
SCORE (film): Ennio Morricone, for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
SCORE (decade): This is tough - Morricone and others hang around, but for me it comes down to a death match between two Japanese composers - Toru Takemitsu and Toshiro Mayazumi. And though Takemitsu turns up on more films, and gets more attention - I think I have to go with Mayazumi, who is an integral part of all those magnificent Imamura films.
CINEMATOGRAPHY (film): Shinsaku Himeda, The Pornographers - which might be the most eye-popping film I have ever seen.
CINEMATOGRAPHY (decade): Shinsaku Himeda, easily. Coutard's work is also astonishing, and there are a lot of great looking films in the world in the 60s - but those Imamura films are just transcendent. There's a reason for the fish on the banner on this page...

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Dr. Strangelove stands tall.... I'll add the five best not to make the top 20:
1. Lolita
2. The Producers
3. One Fine Day
4. The Servant
5. Night and Fog in Japan
Documentary: A Man Vanishes
Music/Sound: This has to be A Hard Day's Night

1. The Pornographers
2. Pierrot le Fou
3. Vivre Sa Vie
4. Playtime
5. High and Low
6. The Gospel According to St. Matthew
7. The Insect Woman
8. Breathless
9. Pigs and Battleships
10. Intentions of Murder
11. Dr. Strangelove
12. Alphaville
13. Mouchette
14. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
15. The Sun's Burial
16. A Man Vanishes
17. A Touch of Zen
18. A Hard Days Night
19. L'Amour Fou
20. Two or Three Things I Know About Her

1969:

Template:

PICTURE: A Touch of Zen
DIRECTOR: Rivette, L'Amour Fou
LEAD ACTOR: Rip Torn, Coming Apart
LEAD ACTRESS: Bulle Ogier, L'Amour Fou
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Tetsuo Abe, Boy
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Akiko Koyama, Boy
SHORT: Not sure; might come back to vote...
SCORE: Toru Takemitsu, for Double Suicide
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Motokichi Hasegawa, Eros + Massacre

Plus bonus picks:
Script: I want to plug Un Certo Giorno, a very fine film by Ermanno Olmi; he seems to slip under the radar, and I wish he didn't.
Music/Sound: I'm going to pick La Lit de la Vierge, Philippe Garrel's Jesus film, with it's Euro-rock and Nico

1. Touch of Zen
2. L'Amour Fou
3. Boy
4. One Fine Day (Olmi)
5. Z
6. Th eSorrow and the Pity
7. Eros + Massacre
8. Antonio das Muertes
9. My Night at Maud's
10. The Cow

1968:

PICTURE: Faces
DIRECTOR: Oshima
LEAD ACTOR: I'm going with Zero Mostel, I think; comedy deserves credit.
LEAD ACTRESS: Mia Farrow
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Seymour Cassel (though I'm tempted to say Keith Richards, who knows how to dominate a room, even a room with Mick Jagger in it, without ever seeming to notice the camera - more than anyone will ever say of Mick...)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Ruth Gordon
SHORT: Saute ma Ville, Chantelle Akerman's debut
SCORE: Morricone - though which one? there are like five to choose from... Once Upon a Time in the West, I suppose, is the best choice...
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sven Nykvist, Shame

Plus bonus picks::
Script: The Producers
Music/Sound: One Plus One, pretty obviously. Not that there isn't plenty of competition, but how do you improve on watching Sympathy for the Devil take form?

1. Faces
2. The Producers
3. Death by Hanging
4. Teorema
5. Planet of the Apes
6. Stolen Kisses
7. Rosemary's Baby
8. The Smugglers
9. 2001: A Space Odyssey
10. Shame

1967

PICTURE: Playtime
DIRECTOR: Tati
LEAD ACTOR: Lee Marvin, Point Blank
LEAD ACTRESS: Catherine Deneuve, Belle du Jour
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Gene Hackman, Bonnie and Clyde
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Katharine Ross, The Graduate
SHORT: not yet...
SCORE: Toru Takemitsu, Samurai Rebellion
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Tamas Samlo, The Red and the White

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Accident
Music/Sound: Don't Look Back - but not documentary
Documentary: A Man Vanishes - one fo the great docs ever, if it is, in fact, a documentary

1. Playtime
2. Mouchette
3. A Man Vanishes
4. Two or Three Things I know About Her
5. The Red and the White
6. Week End
7. Titicut Follies
8. Branded to Kill
9. Don't Look Back
10. Point Blank

1966

PICTURE: The Pornographers
DIRECTOR: Shohei Imamura
LEAD ACTOR: Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
LEAD ACTRESS: Anna Karina, La Religieuse
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jack Nicholson, The Shooting
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Charlotte Rampling, Georgy Girl
SHORT: I think Hold Me While I'm Naked would get my vote
SCORE: Ennio Morricone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (though it's tempting to load up on the Pornographers even more with another great Mayazumi score.)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shinsaku Himeda, The Pornographers

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Luc Moullet, for Bridgitte and Bridgitte
Music/Sound: a good spot to note the Velvet Underground movie...

1. Pornographers
2. Chelsea Girls
3. Masculine Feminine
4. Persona
5. Blow Up
6. Fighting Elegy
7. Tokyo Drifter
8. Violence at Noon
9. The Good the Bad and the Ugly
10. Yesterday Girl

1965:

I am surprised that this year, all the films I'm inclined to vote for, I haven't seen for - 10 years or more. The Godards excepted. It's strange, and makes it difficult.

PICTURE: Pierrot le Fou
DIRECTOR: Godard, Pierrot le Fou
LEAD ACTOR: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Pierrot le Fou
LEAD ACTRESS: Julie Christie, Darling
SUPPORTING ACTOR: John Gielgud, Chimes
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Kyoko Kagawa, Red Beard
SHORT: Well, if it's eligible, obviously, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
SCORE: I'll go with Vince Guaraldi
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Raoul Coutard - but which one? I think Alphaville...

Plus bonus picks:
Script: I'll say, The Golden Thread, Ritwak Ghatak
Music/Sound: Pierrot le Fou, I think...

1. Pierrot le Fou
2. Alphaville
3. Subara Nekha
4. Tokyo Olympiad
5. Story of a Prostitute
6. Ride the Whirlwind
7. Vinyl
8. Red Beard
9. Simon of the Desert
10. It Happened Here

1964:

This is an interesting year; certainly some stone classics, in the running for best X of all time (script, adaptation, etc.)... Another almost arbitrary choice between the top two, which I've ended up splitting between film and director...

PICTURE: Gospel According to St. Matthew - I think this might well be the lest literary adaptation ever made. Contends with The Maltese Falcon, for many of the same reasons - a kind of explicit faithfulness to the text, but controlled in a way that uses film's resources... really great.
DIRECTOR: Imamura, Intentions of Murder
LEAD ACTOR: Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove
LEAD ACTRESS: Catherine Deneuve
SUPPORTING ACTOR: this is a very difficult choice, since both are superb, but great in different ways... I am going to give the nod to Sterling Hayden over George C Scott, though not by much...
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jitsuko Yoshimura, Onibaba
SHORT: Scorpio Rising
SCORE: It's a Toro Takemitsu year - I think Kwaidan is the winner
CINEMATOGRAPHY: much competition, but I'll go with Urevsevski

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Dr. Strangelove - in some moods - most moods - I think this is the best script ever written...
Music: We have to revive this category to accommodate those four sweet boys from Liverpool... we are, of course, moving into the era of the use of pre-existing recordings for films, with Kenneth Anger's offering leading the way...

1. Gospel According to Matthew
2. Intentions of Murder
3. Dr. Strangelove
4. I Am Cuba
5. Umbrellas of Cherbourg
6. Charulata
7. Trial of Joan of Arc
8. Kwaidan
9. The Woman in the Dunes
10. Three Outlaw Samurai

1963:

PICTURE: High and Low
DIRECTOR: Shohei Imamura, Insect Woman
LEAD ACTOR: Mifune, High and Low
LEAD ACTRESS: Sachiko Hidari, Insect Woman
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Tsutomo Yamazaki, High and Low
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Sarah Miles, The Servant
SHORT: Yes, I'd say The House is Black is it...
SCORE: Georges Delerue, Le Mepris
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Coutard, Le Mepris

Plus bonus picks:
Script: I'll go with Pinter and the Servant here,
Song: The Pink Panther theme has to be here somewhere, though I think the Contempt score is better overall...

1. High and Low
2. The Insect Woman
3. Youth of the Beast
4. The Servant
5. Contempt
6. An Actor's Revenge
7. The Fiances
8. The Leopard
9. The Courtship of Eddie's Father
10. Feu Follet

1962:

PICTURE: Vivre sa Vie
DIRECTOR: Godard
LEAD ACTOR: James Mason, Lolita
LEAD ACTRESS: Anna Karina vs. Hideko Takamine vs Corinne Marchand - but I think Takamine takes it for Wanderer's Notebook....
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Peter Sellers, Lolita
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Angela Lansbury, Manchurian Candidate
SHORT: La Jetee
SCORE: Hikaru Hayashi, Akitsu Springs - probably not the best music in a film, but the use of music is extraordinary - it comes back to me now, that moment when the tone shifts (repeated over and over...)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Frederick Young, Lawrence of Arabia

Plus bonus picks::
Script: Cleo from 5 to 7

1. Vivre Sa Vie
2. Cleo from 5 to 7
3. Lolita
4. Autumn Afternoon
5. L'Eclisse
6. Lawrence of Arabia
7. The Manchurian Candidate
8. Ivan's Childhood
9. The Wanderer's Notebook
10. Sanjuro

1961:

PICTURE: Pigs and Battleships
DIRECTOR: Imamura
LEAD ACTOR: Mifune, Yojimbo
LEAD ACTRESS: Harriet Anderson, Through a Glass Darkly
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Scott or Clift
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Rita Moreno, West Side Story
SHORT: Very Nice, Very Nice
SCORE: Toshiro Mayazumi, Pigs and Battleships
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shinsaku Himeda, Pigs and Battleships

Plus bonus picks::
Script:

1. Pigs and Battleships
2. Yojimbo
3. Paris Belongs to Us
4. West Side Story
5. Viridiana
6. Il Posto
7. Human Condition III: A Soldiers Prayer
8. Alenka
9. E-Flat (Kormal Ghandhar)
10. Two Daughters

1960:

(This year just keeps going...)

PICTURE: Breathless
DIRECTOR: Godard
LEAD ACTOR: Belmondo
LEAD ACTRESS: Takamine, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Fred MacMurray, The Apartment
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Janet Leigh, Psycho
SHORT: High Note
SCORE: Psycho
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Coutard, Breathless

Plus bonus picks:
Script: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

1. Breathless
2. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
3. The Sun's Burial
4. Shoot the Piano Player
5. Psycho
6. Home from the Hill
7. L'Aventura
8. Night and Fog in Japan
9. The Apartment
10. Cloud Tipped Star

Lincoln & Django Unchained

Well, what am I supposed to do? Given the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, and specifically, this week, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, how can I not write about these two films together? And how can I not think about the history, and what they do with history, doing it? I know it's a temptation to pull the chin and suck the thumb, but I am not going to fight it... They do make an interesting pair. It's somewhat of a rarity, films about the Civil War, that are directly about slavery, and that treat slavery as the issue of the Civil War - it was, but it's been hard to say so through the years. There have been films that did this, but they are rare - and to have two of them appear at once, major productions to boot - it is a rarity, and an occasion to mark.

Lincoln is the sober one, the serious one - and is, indeed, a fine sprawling epic chamber piece about passing a piece of legislation. Granted, one of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed in this country, the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. The moment, maybe, that the Constitution became a document for good in the world, on balance. And this very important thing is given the full force of many great talents - the film is, in fact, a very satisfying thing. It's also classic Spielberg, the good and bad - dynamic and intelligent, especially in the details - though also, alas, bombastic, sentimental, and so much on the nose, in the big moments. And, strangely enough, for a film about the end of slavery, it doesn't have a lot to say about slavery. Or about slaves - or free blacks, for that matter. We see some black soldiers - and the film dwells on a couple White House servants, William Slade and Elizabeth Keckley - but they are there almost exclusively to shadow the Lincolns, to connect the Lincolns to black people. (Something similar happens at the end, when Thaddeus Stevens’ domestic arrangements are revealed.) None of this is unusual, which is part of why it is disconcerting to see it here, in a film about the end of slavery. And then one might be led to read about Elizabeth Keckley herself - her background, her activities while working with the Lincolns, as an organizer and so on - and her passivity in the film becomes very jarring. It seems off that there is nothing here to reveal the rest of her life - the idea that she has a story of her own, outside this one. You get a little more of that with Stevens and his housekeeper/wife, which has the virtue of offering a little shift in your perspective. It can be a powerful effect - I’m reminded of the moment in Imitation of Life when the housekeeper’s life, outside her work, is shown. (And of course her death, where she insists she be buried like general - and can afford to do it.) This film doesn't really do that, and it is a shame - it needs it.

It might be surprising to discover that Django Unchained addresses slavery more directly - and more seriously, to be honest. Tarantino plays up the sensationalism, the horror of slavery - but it’s hard to say that isn’t justified. Read about Elizabeth Keckley - an educated house slave - beaten, raped, abused by her owners - one of whom was her father. Tarantino insists on the casual horror of slavery - you can say it's part and parcel to his usual treatment of violence, and it is - but then again, he has always taken a much more complicated approach to violence than he gets credit for. He jokes about it - but he has always made you feel it, one way or the other. If there is a weakness in his treatment of slavery, it might be that he makes its horrors seem a function of the plot, of this story, maybe not so casual after all. Django and Broomhilda's love story, their attempts to escape, their punishments, set up a lot of the abuse they suffer. That, and the particulars of the “mandingo fighting” might just explain too much - make their treatment seem exceptional. But it is hard to say that they are exceptional - I say again, read about Elizabeth Keckley - who went through most of the same things Broomhilda does, simply because she was property. Though still - everything that happened to every slave happened to an individual person, who had every bit as much a story to their lives as these characters do. Every slave experienced slavery as a human being, and as an affront to their existence. So Tarantino does what a story teller is supposed to do - takes something systemic, and embodies it in specific human beings. Though since he is Quintin Tarantino, he also embodies it in a gunslinger out of an Italian western. (With a friend and ally out of Karl May.)

He isn't trying to fool you. The film starts with a title, announcing it takes place in 1958, 2 years before the beginning of the Civil War - I doubt that's a mistake - it's a signal that this is not the real world, it's Tarantino-world - or maybe that this film is going to be about why the ware started a year earlier than it really did... The story and film itself is certainly entertaining - Django is a slave in Texas, bought by a dentist who turns out to be a bounty hunter - they find the men Django was purchased to find, then the bounty hunter takes him on as a partner - and then they go to find Django's wife. Which brings us to one of Tarantino's patented showdowns, between Django and King Schulz and the slaveowner, a pretentious fool who runs "mandingo fights" - though the real antagonist turns out to be Samuel L. Jackson. It all builds to a showdown -

...Reading about the film, I find a lot of disappointment with the ending - things turn ultra-violent at the end, and all the fairly serious stuff that went before is left behind. The ending is, I won't deny, highly entertaining, but it is also, I won't deny either, disappointing. The blood and guts does not really flow out of the story - and it loses touch with the themes. It really is thematically disappointing that, in the end, Django is treated as if he were genuinely exceptional - as if his story is not really implicated in the system anywhere. The ending gives the uncomfortable feeling that Tarantino wrote himself into a corner - couldn't think of a way out of the situation he'd created, so turned it into a bloodbath.... Of course, that's perfectly congruent with the history - the whole damned country wrote itself into a corner, and couldn't figure a way out of it except through a bloodbath - so maybe it's unfair to ask more of a simple filmmaker. Still...

I think this also indicates the main artistic problem with the film - it isn't all that well realized a story. It is, for one thing, the most straightforward, conventional film Tarantino has ever made. It is episodic and a bit rambling, though mostly chronological, without his usual machinations with time and structure. It has an interesting effect - it is long and rambling and episodic and not always all that well stitched together - but I didn't really care. I could have watched him run variations on these characters, with these actors, for hours without complaint. It's almost a disappointment when they stop talking and start shooting, even aside from the specifics of the ending. It's an odd thing to say, but this might be the first thing Tarantino has done that should have been a TV show instead of a film. He has the characters, the setting, the cast - he has the rudiments of a plot (though nowhere near enough to make a single satisfying story from, though any of the pieces could be expanded to make satisfying mini-stories...) - you could spin it out forever, if you wanted to. But TV is a step down - Tarantino's gift has always been for film scripting. Convoluted time frames, structural games - there is so much pleasure, and significance, in the shape of his stories, that it is a let down to see him start at the beginning and continue to the end, without doing much with the structure of the film.

Though I won't deny it - it's a fine way to spend a few hours.... The usual talk, violence and excitement, even enough serious ideas about the history to keep a history nerd like me happy... Wise too in its approach to the ways blacks were used to control one another - Jackson's Stephen is a nightmare, and answers Candie's question, why don't they kill us? because the one who steps out gets cut down first, usually by one of their own...

And most of all - it is an actor's dream, and everyone in it takes full advantage of it. Waltz and DiCaprio and Jackson devour the scenery, revel in their roles - Foxx smolders - all the bit players dive in with relish... it's nothing groundbreaking, but is very enjoyable and satisfying anyway.

First Friday

It's the new year, and time for another music post. 2012 was a bad year for me and music - I bought barely a dozen records - 15, it seems. Of which I have listened, from end to end, to 1. (Though I did watch the Led Zeppelin DVD - assuming that counts as a new record - a five year old recording from a 40+ year old band that broke up 30 years ago...) So I guess all I can do, if I want to list my favorite records of 2012, and be truly honest, is -

1. Scott Walker - Bish Bosch

And get back to the Friday Random Ten.

1. Harry Nilsson - Jump Into the Fire
2. Times New Viking - More Rumours
3. James Blood Ullmer - Overtime
4. Abba - Chiquita [sweet lord! what are you doing to me, iTunes?)
5. Modest Mouse - A Different City
6. Frank Zappa - The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet
7. X - SOme other Time
8. Steely Dan - Pearl of the Quarter
9. Thom Yorke - The Clock
10. System of a Down - Atwa [argh! more guilt! I bought this?... though actually, of that particular brand of music, they aren't all that terrible.]

Today's Video: I posted this once before, but - might as well again, since it is the one record I bought and listened to last year.... Scott Walker, the video:



And from the random list - let's go with Harry Nilsson, since that is a very fine song...

Best of 2012

2012 is gone - 2013 is upon us. As usual, time to make a list... These are, as usual, drawn from films that received a commercial release in the Boston area - which as of today does not, I fear, include Zero Dark Thirty - to name a prominent example. That's the problem with doing these things at the beginning of the year. But what can I say.

Like last year, I thought this was a pretty soft year while it was happening. I saw a shockingly low number of films this year, new and old - but looking back at it now, it's not half bad. Look at the list down below - 6 of the top 10 are from this year, as of January 1. That's reverse of the last couple years - usually, for the type of films I like, it takes a while for the best ones to turn up in the theaters. And there are still quite a few highly regarded films to open in Boston - where will Zero Dark Thirty land? Amour? Tabu? By the time it is done, this year could go down as a pretty significant one. And the two at the top - are very solidly the best fo the decade so far... 2010 was a very deep year - but 2012 might come close to it, in the long run.

Enough - here goes:

1. Moonrise Kingdom
2. The Master
...these two are in front by a significant margin
3. Barbara
4. Oslo: August 31
5. The Kid With the Bike
6. This is Not a Film
7. Damsels in Distress
8. Killing them Softly
9. Lincoln
10. Django Unchained
11. Compliance
12. Hara-Kiri Death of a Samurai
13. The Central Park Five
14. Keep the Lights on
15. How to Survive a Plague
16. In Darkness
17. Argo
18. We Need to Talk About Kevin
19. The Deep Blue Sea
20. Beasts of the Southern Wild
21. Alps
22. The Secret World of Arietty
23. Bernie
24. Holy Motors
25. Keyhole

And the made in 2012 first cut:

1. Moonrise Kingdom
2. The Master
3. Barbara
4. Killing them Softly
5. Lincoln
6. Django Unchained
7. Compliance
8. The Central Park Five
9. Keep the Lights On
10. How to Survive a Plague

and 2011 in Retrospect - first, the top 10 from the beginning of last year:

1. Melancholia
2. Le Havre
3. Meek's Cutoff
4. Take Shelter
5. Martha Marcy May Marlene
6. The Skin I Live in
7. Jane Eyre
8. The Descendants
9. Rango
10. Page One: Inside the New York Times

And now, an updated list...

1. Melancholia
2. Oslo: August 31
3. A Separation
4. The Kid With the Bike
5. This is Not a Film
6. Meek’s Cutoff
7. Take Shelter
8. Le Havre
9. Damsels in Distress
10. Martha Marcy May Marlene
11. The Skin That I Live In
12. Jane Eyre
13. Hara Kiri: Death of a Samurai
14. Rango
15. Page One
16. Hugo
17. The Descendants
18. A Dangerous Method
19. In Darkness
20. Cedar Rapids
21. The Guard
22. Weekend
23. Contagion
24. We Need to Talk About Kevin
25. The Deep Blue Sea

Film Posts 2013

Another yearly index post.

Occasional Pieces:

1/15: Oshima Obituary
1/29: Director of the Month: Oshima
2/28: Donald Richie obit and comments (and a list)
3/31: Director of the Month - Akira Kurosawa
4/4: Roger Ebert Obituary
4/29: April Director - Mikio Naruse.
6/25: June Director - Kon Ichikawa
8/3: July Director (despite the date): Shohei Imamura
8/28: August Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
10/29: Yasujiro Ozu for Director of the Month
12/12: Ozu memorial

Published Elsewhere:

10/1: My review of the Coens' True Grit, at Wonders in the Dark, for the Western Countdown.
10/9: Bend of the River, also for the countdown
11/22: Winchester 73 atWonders in the Dark


Polls, Lists, Memes, etc.

1/2: Best of 2012 - first cut
1/9: WITD Poll - 1960s
2/23: Oscars and Categories
3/10: Spring Quiz - Jean Brodie
3/24: WITD Poll - 1970s
5/20: WITD Poll - 1980s
8/13: WITD Poll - 1990s
10/1: Western Countdown announcement
12/14: Larry Gopnik Quiz from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

Reviews:

1/5: Lincoln & Django Unchained
1/25: Zero Dark Thirty - plus Barbara and the Central Park Five
2/19: Up Series (56 Up released)
4/24: Big Roundup of Auteurist films seen this spring - To The Wonder, Upstream Color, Beyond the Hills, Spring Breakers, Like Someone in Love, Night Across the Street, Stoker and Side Effects
5/12: Roundup: Angel's Share, Mud, Renoir, In the House, Something in the Air.
6/19: Another Roundup: Stories We Tell, Deceptive Practices, Frances Ha, Before Midnight, Post Tenebras Lux, An Oversimplification of her Beauty
9/9: Very big roundup of summer film viewing: Much Ado About Nothing, The Bling Ring, A Band Called Death, Lone Ranger, The Hunt, I'm So Excited, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, Computer Chess, Crystal Fairy, The Act of Killing, The Way Way Back, Despicable Me 2, In a World, Prince Avalanche, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, The Grandmaster, Austenland

Then, thenceforward, and forever free

The president's proclamation on the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Happy New Year.

Turn the Calendar Over

Let us bid farewell to 2012 - I will not miss this year. It was full of personal loss - not only my father, but the mother of a close friend died, and several relatives and friends had serious health issues. We are all getting old I guess. On a less painful, but still very annoying note - I was perfect murder on machinery this year. My main computer died - then I dropped a camera into the Atlantic - then my video camera stopped working (the automatic lens cap won't open)... I bought a new camera, a nice DSLR - but the flash stopped working on that thing over christmas - resulting in lots of orange cats....



Here is where my old camera went in, crossing this stream....



With all the other stuff going on, I did not get as much writing done as I would like - and saw a shockingly low number of films. I'm working on fixing that - watched Heaven's Gate already - will end the year with more Jeff Bridges - True Grit I think... and will start the new year with Django Unchained. Get things going right. The one area where I did more or less do what I hoped to do was in reading and writing about the Civil War - relevant to the Tarantino film (and somewhat to the Coen Brothers) - and relevant here, because, well - today is another battle anniversary. Stone's River - one of those strange bloodbaths out west - here, both sides planned to attack - the Union on their left, the Confederates on their left - the rebels got started first and caved in the Union right completely... But the north was able to pull back into a strong defensive position - the Confederates were stopped. Both sides were fought out the first day - they did very little on New Year's day - resumed the battle on the 2nd, but nothing changed - and finally, Bragg and the rebels gave up and left. It was an odd fight - like Perryville, the south won the fighting on the field, as much as anyone won it - but Bragg pulled out anyway, and gave up the campaign. The biggest effect of the battle might have been that it helped Phil Sheridan build his reputation - he was one of the leaders whose men put up a strong fight on the first day of the battle, helping to save the army.

As far as the war goes - it was a nasty battle - one that the Union had to win, coming so close to Fredericksburg - and with Lincoln making the Emancipation Proclamation official on January 1, 1863. It was a close thing, but the Yankees held the field - and the war went on its way...

Fall Film Round Up #3

And finally, the last (well, almost) Fall round up post, this one featuring films that stand out - I cam't quite say they are the best, even the most important, even from an auteurist point of view (Ira Sachs seems to me to be a far more interesting filmmaker than the Wachowskis or Tom Tykwer, even at their best) - but they are the most interesting to gas about. (The "almost" up there refers to mostly to Lincoln, a very big film by any standards, which I have yet to write about. It is well worth gassing about, all the more so since it fits into my ongoing Civil War obsessions - so I am leaving it until I can work up something much more substantial. Maybe until I have seen Django Unchained, since there might be some thematic overlap there.... And of course, films are still coming out, including what might now be the best non-Anderson film of the year, Barbara - I have to think some more about that... I may never catchup...)

Killing them Softly - 12/15 - Andrew Dominick, director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has come back with another artsy take on American tough guys and genre pictures, this one about small time gangsters in the Boston environs... A card game gets knockled over - masterminded (if that's the word, and it probably shouldn't be) by a dry cleaner, handled by 2 schmucks - the point being that the guy running the game did it before and bragged and everyone will think he is doing it again. So Brad Pitt comes in to clean things up, meeting with Richard Jenkins in a car under a bridge - Cogan (that's Pitt) says they have to kill them all, Liotta's character included; the bosses are waffling... The schmucks talk, as schmucks will - so Pitt goes for the drycleaner and the schmucks as well. James Galdolfini comes in because Cogan knows the dry cleaner - but he ain't what he used to be... So, you know... The novel (George V. Higgins) was written and set in the low-70s; this is set in 2008, with the financial meltdown and bailout, and the election, playing in the background - this is mainly for the audio, though; the film looks like 1973, not 2008, and the time shift doesn't make much difference to the story. Mostly, the political soundtrack provides a comical counterpoint to the lowlifes in the film - the lowlifes, I suppose, providing a comical counterpoint to the grand politics as well. As serious political commentary - well, it's a bit too on the nose. But that's all right. It's a tight, nifty little film, mostly talk, but such talk - with a creeping sense of dread and inevitability to it all. As short and efficient as the Jesse James film was long and languorous... very nice work.

Holy Motors - 10/15 - Return of Leos Carax, starring the very magnificent Denis Lavant. Mordant, funny, surreal, strange film... There's a prelude in a movie theater, with ancient films, audiences reacting to sounds (like Shirin), then Carax himself wakes up in a room, and uses a key in place of a finger to go into the theater, where it all changes. Lavant as many people - Oscar, a banker who leaves his house, talks about bodyguards and guns, etc - then has appointments: 1) as an old lady beggar; 2) in a body motion suit, pretending to fight, run, and fuck a woman in a suit; 3) "Merde" from Tokyo!, who bites the fingers off an american photographer's assistant, kidnaps Eva Mendes, turns her gown into a burka, then strips and cuddles in her lap (with a very large very erect penis). 4) picks up a mopey teenager at a party and drives her home.... Then there is an EntreActe where he leads a mob of accordian players around a church... 5) he kills a doppelganger in a warehouse, and is stabbed while trying to turn the other man into himself; 6) he kills the banker from the beginning in a cafe; 7) he plays an old man dying, and hopes to meet the girl playing his niece again, 8) (maybe - hard to say if this is meant to be an "appointment" or a chance meeting) - meets an old flame, who is his reverse - a woman, driven by - Lavant - playing parts... or 8) he dresses as a working class man, goes home to his family in a development - chimps... then - the driver returns the car and leaves and the cars talk to themselves like the Waltons. All this seems to amount to something about the end of the movies - characters pop up like in Cosmopolis to talk to our man in his limo, usually about movies, acting, identity, I guess - notably Michel Piccoli... Movies, acting, identity, image - it's all in there. I can't say it all adds up to much - but it is quite clever and amusing as it goes along. And lovely looking - though what's with all the big C's?

Cloud Atlas - 10/15 - The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer team up to make a big strange sprawling thing, that seems to have bombed completely in the theaters. Convoluted structure (sort of) - 6 stories, intertwined: 1849: a Maori slave stows away on a ship and is helped by a lawyer who is being murdered by Tom Hanks... 1936: a homosexual is chased out of Cambridge, goes to Scotland to help a composer write, does so, but ends badly, shoots the man, finishes his piece and kills himself... 1973: a blaxpoitation film manque - Halle Berry as a reporter, tracking down a series of murders, a nuclear scandal... 2012: Jim Broadbent as an editor who gets rich when his writer kills a critic, but he spends it all, and the writer's gangster pals come collecting, so he runs - he is put in an old folks home by his brother, though it turns out to be a prison - he and some other old timers run away, and he finds happiness... 2144: neo-Seoul, a fabricant (artificially built person) gets a soul, is rescued by a hero, gives a speech, tells her story and dies... 2321: civilization is gone - an advanced woman meets a primitive man, he guides her to an old observatory and they send a signal to the stars; meanwhile, his village is attacked, but they save each other and a child - etc...

All this is very clever, but a bit underwhelming. When it came out, there were some claims that it was confusing, but I can't see why - the stories are intercut, but they are all internally linear, and even with the same actors in all the sections, there isn't much attempt to throw anyone off. Everything makes perfect sense, really - and more, it is all tied together with gimmicky hooks - the cloud atlas sextet, a musical number; a tattoo; the way characters connect across the sections, etc. It does some interesting things with actors - as the same people appear in all the stories - crossing race, gender, age, and so on in different stories... The stories themselves, though, are pretty standard issue stuff. They're all about freedom and the like - love, sacrifice, sentimentality, with a dollop of goofball Buddhism thrown in. Even more disappointing, the film doesn't really do much with the genre possibilities at its disposal - all the sections are recognizable film genres (except maybe the 2012 one, though the comical-shenanigans-of-old-Englishmen type is not unknown), but only the 2144 one really uses the possibilities. This is especially noticeable in the 1973 section - it's got all the makings, the 70s paranoia plot, the blaxpoitation references - and there's almost nothing made of it. Hardly a zoom to be seen! The result is that you get the cliches, but you don't get the pleasures of the in jokes (except maybe in the 2144 one, though event hat is pretty bland) - in the end - the 2012 episode is the only one that really seems remotely fresh. In fact - it is quite good, and not like much of anything else. A lot of that is down to Jim Broadbent, who is just great - but the story is far more satisfying than anything else. Though the film deserved better than it got - all these complaints aside, it was an enjoyable enough affair, with some nice work. Just, nothing special.

Fall RoundUp Number 2

Continuing to catch up through the year.... Another batch of film capsules. At least one more to come this week - I've left out a number of the most "important" films I've seen this fall - figuring I can find a bit more to say about some of them... Anyway: here's another bunch of movies seen this fall...

Silver Linings Playbook - 7/15 - all very well made but so desperate! guy gets out of rehab, goes home, his father is just as bad as he is, OCD, obsessed with the Eagles - our hero was in the nervous hospital because he beat up his wife's lover, but is still obsessed with his wife. Meets a girl, sister of a friend, as fucked up as he is - she starts stalking him - eventually offers to help him get to the wife if he dances with her in a contest... etc. Then end up in love. Hooray. Hard to say why it's so irritating, though mostly - it's just noisy and desperate - a kind of endless hysteria until the end when it goes all gooey. Kind of like Dark Horse with a happy ending and - on speed instead of barbiturates. Not sure if that is praise or damnation. It also reminded me, especially the beginning, of Oslo: August 31 - that's not so good. It's not a good thing when the comedy leaves you more depressed than a film you know going in is going to end in suicide. (Sorry for the spoiler there, but Oslo is based on a 50 year old film and an 80 year old novel, so there you go.)

My Worst Nightmare - 9/15 - rather irritating French comedy about an uptight gallery owner with a lazy son and a lousy home life - she runs afoul a man, a sometime handyman, whose son is a bit of a genius, and a great friend of her son. Doesn't take long before the handyman is renovating the flat and hanging around with her live in lover - who promptly takes up with a tree hugger, leaving the woman and handyman to do whatever mismatched pairs are supposed to do in French comedies.... Cultures clash, but both of them, Patrice the apparently Belgian ne'er-do-well and Agathe the snobby Parisian, have a taste for drink and tend to bond by getting falling down drunk... and so on. It ends well, I guess, though it grinds along getting there. Truth is, it's mostly just 4 horrible people (Francois and Julie - the hippy - are no better) irritating one another and us, except that one of them is Isabelle Huppert, and she is Isabelle Huppert. She's worth all 9 of those points; nothing else in the film is worth seeing.

The Sessions - 9/15 - John Hawkes as a writer paralyzed with polio - he can't control his muscles, but he can feel things - so he can have sex. He is a virgin at 38, and after some talk hires a sex surrogate to teach him how. 6 sessions. Inevitably things get emotionally out of hand, so they break it off - but he meets a volunteer at a hospital and all is well. The film is amusing, Hawkes is magnificent, Helen Hunt gets naked, the thing ends sentimentally, there's fun to be had counting the Deadwood alum, and William H. Macy turns up as a hippy priest - it isn't terrible, though it's not much of anything, really...

Argo - 10/15 - When the US embassy was taken in Tehran, 6 of the employees escaped, and were hidden by the Canadian embassy. There they stayed for a couple months, but things were getting tough, so the US plans to get them out. The plan they came up with was to pretend to make a movie - Argo. They set it all up running, so that Ben Affleck's character could go in as location scout and get them out. He does this - funny stuff setting it up (the thing was quite elaborate - including story boards by Jack Kirby himself), then he goes. He gets the permissions, he has to take them on a scouting trip to a marketplace - where they are photographed and threatened, but they get out - but then the mission is canceled. But he insists on continuing. And they escape at the last possible second. All told - it is a first rate thriller, witty and well constructed and written - a nice mainstream film, as good a mainstream film as I have seen this year. Some nice story twists - one guy, who thinks he's smarter than the rest - he talks them into running - then when they are leaving, he tries to talk them into staying - but at the airport, he saves their bacon - he speaks Farsi, so gives a story about the film, about why he dreamed of shooting in Iran, he makes it all make sense. Nice twist. Now, as it happens, a lot of the suspense in Iran turns out to have been invented - but it's very interesting suspense, and seems to turn the film into Argo the film in the film, more than the reality - which isn't all bad...

Alps - 10/15 - Giorgios Lanthimos' follow up to Dogtooth.... a group of people substitute for the recently deceased, ostensibly to help them with the grieving process, though most of their assignments turn rather nasty at some point. They take a while to get intense - the actual replacements seem rather benign at first - reading to a blind woman; taking swims in the ocean, talking about diabetes to a man who owns a lighting shop, etc. Meanwhile, a tennis playing teenager is killed in a car accident, and one of the women in the Alps group, a doctor, impersonates her on her own, without telling the others. About that time, the other stories start coming apart (the blind woman catches her husband and friend in bed; the women with diabetes is obliged to let her lover lick her pussy, etc.) - and the doctor is caught, though by that time she has gone well beyond her role - taking the girl's boyfriend home, etc. So she is replaced, by someone else in the group, and she ends up breaking into the house, then, after she's chased out, hanging around outside the family's door, trying to get in - like a ghost - a fairly clear but of symbolism... It plays like a rather more surreal version of some of Atom Egoyan's films, with live action role playing instead of video, maybe - similar themes - faulty grieving, compulsive repetition of trauma and so on.... This is not quite so brilliant as Dogtooth, but Lanthimos is clearly a filmmaker to watch.

How to Survive a Plague - 11/15 - story of Act Up - particularly the treatment group, which later became Treatment Activist Group (TAG) - the film starts in 1987 and continues on, concentrating on the fight for drugs and treatments. A fascinating film. Fascinating people, who hold it together. It is a strange story - the way, in 1993 or so, they all thought they were going to die, sooner, not later - and then, in 1996 or so - they were saved. Quite a few of the people in the film did die, in fact - but the ones who made it to the late 90s made to to the present. A haunting tale. The film also makes it clear how they made it happen - how crucial they were, their tenacity, working, endlessly to get treatments. Not that doctors and scientists weren't working to get drugs and treatments - but that there were hosts of barriers between their work and the people who needed it, and Act-up and TAG were instrumental in getting past those barriers. A very nice film.

Keep The Lights On - 11/15 - autobiographical film from Ira Sachs: a Danish filmmaker meets a lawyer at Random House through a phone sex line - they meet, they fuck, they hit it off, and before long they move in together. But the lawyer is a crackhead - and over time, his drug addiction and erratic behavior ruins the relationship - though we also see some of the passive aggressive behavior of the filmmaker. Film covers 9 years, 1998-2007 - nice subtle charting of the times - from phones to cel phones to blackberries, to ipods. Sachs has long established a fine sense of the dynamics of bad love, and continues that here.

Looper - 10/15 - We're back to the beginning of fall here.... a mash up of Terminator, 12 Monkeys and the like - loopers are people in 2044 who kill others sent back in time from 30 years in the future - the criminals of the future are the only ones with time travel ability, so they send their victims back in time to be disposed of. Anyway - one of the loopers (Paul Dano) sees himself come back - singing a song he recognized - "closing his loop" (the looper kills his future self, and gets a big payoff and gets to live 30 years on the proceeds)... But this guy hesitates - lets the man go - he runs, but mentions the "rainmaker" - a future villain, killing all the loopers, etc. All right - so Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Dano's friend - but he sells him out.... Then his future self comes back - without a mask... he too escapes, or - does, then doesn't - then we follow him through the future to when he is sent back. But he has spent those 30 years becoming Bruce Willis - tough and professional, a real gangster and gunman - so when he goes back, he isn't so easy to kill. So - all right - Bruce WIllis is on the loose in 2044, and everyone is trying to kill him, including Gordon-Levitt, who wants to live to become Bruce Willis, I guess it is.... But Bruce has his own mission - to find the Rainmaker before he becomes the rainmaker! And JGL finds a woman on a farm with a kid who has telekinetic powers - all this is no more than halfway into the film, and by this time it's clear enough who's who in 2074 and just a matter of seeing how they get there... or don't, if that's what they don't do. Anyway - in the end, someone does the Right Thing and thus negates all the Bad Things, or something like that. It's nonsense the second you think about it - but it's all pretty well done on the way. Though it does bog down some, once the Terminator plot kicks in.

Friday Random 10

Friday music time... nothing special today... I have a couple movie posts a-comin' - just roundups, trying to catch up on writing about what I've seen in the last couple months... Then - tis the season, ho ho ho, for spending money and eating chocolate, activities oft inconducive of blogging, even in the minimalistic way I have specialized in lately.... but for now, it's Random Ten time....

1. Jeff Beck - Rock My Plimsoul
2. Minutemen - The Process
3. Beach Boys - I'm Waiting for the Day
4. Interpol - Barricade
5. Outkast - West Savannah
6. Reed/Cale/Nico - Heroin (live at Le Bataclan)
7. Michael Jackson - Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
8. Deerhoof - Odyssey
9. Sleater-Kinney - Ironclad
10. Foals - Like Swimming

Video? The Reed/Cale thing is online, but embedding is disabled... so - here's footage from their dotage:



How about Sleater-Kinney, at a show I should have gone to?

Fredericksburg

As we continue to follow along with the events of 150 years ago - today we reach the Battle of Fredericksburg. I've had plenty of occasion to talk about bad generals in the civil war already - but Fredericksburg might top them all...

It was a singularly one sided fight. The Union army crossed the Rappahannock river at Fredericksburg today, December 11, 1862. After a day or so of preparation, they launched an attack on the rebels on the 13th. This started south of town, where Stonewall Jackson was - Jackson was spread out, generally on high ground, but it wasn't a commanding position. The Yankees might have had a chance there - but they never attacked with more than a division (though there were two entire army corps on hand, and more available.) The North had some luck there - they broke through, briefly - but nothing came of it. The main attack came due west of town.

There - the Union soldiers had to march across a small plain into the face of a line of hills - which constituted about as impregnable a naturally occurring line of battle as either side was going to face in the war. It looked bad enough - marching across open ground to attack a hill - but it was worse than that. There were walls and a sunken road on the hill that gave the rebels perfect cover. There were various canals and bogs and whatnot on the plain that funneled the attackers right into the center of the defender's field of fire. It was hopeless - but the Union soldiers went in, and were shot to hell, a division at a time, more or less - and kept going in all afternoon. It was a mind-boggling display of pointless slaughter, and has made the Union commander, Ambrose Burnside, a watchword for military incompetence.

He was a character. He was a dreadful general, but a rather fascinating person. He invented a pretty effective breech-loading carbine before the war, though he'd gone bankrupt trying to sell it. He became a governor and Senator after the war. He leant his name to many things - the Burnside rifle - Burnside's bridge - the side burns (since he sported a magnificent set of muttonchops.) And - he stands out as one of the most overmatched men to lead an army in the war. He knew it, too - he had had some success early in the war in the Carolinas, and was offered command of the Army of the Potomac more than once in the summer of 62, after McClellan had conclusively proven his unsuitability for command, but refused it every time. He tried to refuse it again after Antietam, but was finally compelled to take the position, and do what he could... Which turned out to be the battle of Fredericksburg, and then the "Mud March" - an attempt at a winter campaign in Virginia, undone by rain....

But what ruined poor Burnside, in everything he did, was a kind of helpless stubbornness - the kind of pointless repetition of failure you see in the attacks at Fredericksburg. Though it started even before that. He'd begun the campaign with a scheme for crossing the river (at Fredericksburg) while Lee was off to the north and west. It was a decent plan, and he stole a march on Lee, and he might have gotten somewhere - except that the arrangements for the pontoon bridges were screwed up - they weren't where they were supposed to be, and by the time they were brought up, Lee had occupied the high ground around Fredericksburg, and there was no point in crossing there. But - Burnside's plan was to cross at Fredericksburg, so by god, he was going to cross at Fredericksburg - and then attack. He never seemed to be able to hold more than one thought in his head at a time.

It marked his career - especially the bad parts, and he was in the middle of some really big disasters. At Antietam, he was charged with attacking on Lee's south, to take advantage of the main attack to the north. But he had been placed in charge of 2 army corps until the last minute when one was moved to the other end of the line - but he acted as though he had 2 corps, and refused to take personal command of the one he had, even though it's commanding officer had been killed... He was supposed to cross a bridge - and he spent half the day trying to cross this one bridge, over the Antietam creek, which was wadable more or less everywhere. And so - by the time he got across and moved on Lee's army (which had been utterly wrecked) he gave time for one last batch of reinforcements to arrive and drive him back....

Then there was the battle of the Crater - that was part of the siege of Petersburg in the summer of 1864. And as happened from time to time, in the run up to the fight, you can see why Burnside might have been worth something as a general. (Truth is - everywhere but with the Army of the Potomac, he did pretty well - in the Carolinas at the beginning of the war; in east Tennessee in the fall of 1863 - he acquitted himself well. He was cursed when he went east.) The idea at the Crater was to build a mine under the rebel lines, and set off one hell of a bomb - it was a bold, risky plan, and Burnside supported it - and, in the event, when the thing blew up, it worked like a charm, and might well have broken the rebel's hold on Petersburg..... Except... Burnside, for a variety of reasons, most of them good, had decided to use a division of Colored Troops to spearhead the attack. They were, in fact, prepared very well - careful plans made, their roles defined - they were ready to go. But at the last minute, General Meade decided that they could not use black troops to lead the attack. Burnside argued for them - Grant backed up Meade.... it is clear enough that Meade and Grant were dead wrong on this - but they made the call. And Burnside - had no second thought. All he could come up with was to draw lots among the other units - and got the worst of the bunch, whose commanding officer spent the battle passed out drunk. No one bothered to try to get this unit to follow the plan for a breakthrough - so the whole business failed abysmally. (And the black soldiers ended up being sent in after the fight was lost, and were shot to hell.) That was the end of Ambrose Burnside as a civil war general.

And so.... I should note another thing that distinguishes Burnside's failures (and relates, to my last post about underwear, sort of, because war is not just shooting...) His tenure as commander in chief was marked by simply abysmal logistics and discipline. That's almost as much a mark of his failure as his stubbornness - all these campaigns went south on logistics, staff work, preparation, the details of command. At Antietam, no one under Burnside's command thought to find out if the Antietam creek could be crossed anywhere. The trouble at Fredericksburg started because no one arranged for bridges to be brought to the Rappahannock in time for the army to cross. His orders at Fredericksburg were botched - he might have intended for the attacks south of town to be as vigorous as those west of the town, but that is not what he told his generals. The mud march was - a logistical nightmare, with confusion on the roads in addition to the lousy weather. Desertion and bad discipline were at their worst during his days in command. It is notable - other commanders of the Army of the Potomac had their problems - and the army was always a ponderous and rather inefficient organization.... But McClellan was a master organizer, and trained and equipped the army to the very highest standards... and Joe Hooker, Burnside's successor, proved to be just as good as McClellan, giving the army its discipline and pride back. Burnside stands aloe on that score....