It is difficult to hold within our grasp that not all historical undercurrents have closure. Tuberculosis was a fungal epidemic effectively beaten back in the 1950's with derivatives of the breakthrough antibiotic of the 20th century, and hygiene campaigns which followed in its wake, but AIDS saw the condition make a comeback. As a terminal illness, it manufactured at least one serial killer in Doc Holliday. Stacy Keach portrays the gambler as an embittered existentialist against Faye Dunaway, in yet another revisionist Western. As a bio pic, in this part, Keach manages to transcend his composite swash buckler who pretends. It might have something to do with necessarily being as large as an embittered legend, liberated in having nothing to lose. Why Dunaway challenges her glamorous hauteur by enveloping herself in a wardrobe of slutty trash remains an unconvincing perplexity, but her Katie Elder is suitable playing off of Keach's manic undercurrent, bumbling their way about the set like paper cut outs, doomed by corruption and conspiracy. The Doc Keach adorns is naive in small ways, able to be taken in by the Mexican inn keeper for a pricey sum, or sold a house incautiously, and yet remains a man of leonine ruthlessness, calling a bluff, or aiming to kill.
To wit, though I am patently indifferent to national politics as having any bearing on Philadelphia as a cesspool of incompetent depreciation, I may rally around Ben Carson. Not to make too much of the contradiction in terms. Certain kinds of experience cuts across identity, and I comprehend, as a life long recipient of institutional stricture, why a black neurosurgeon would become a reactionary defining zones of exclusion. Can he win the nomination? Can he beat Hillary? What the fuck do I know?
But the possibility of igniting a third world war is exciting, so I'll wait in the wings with the fiery torches glaring from my pupils. Maybe I'll send his campaign a few dollars, Joan d'Arc in search of a sword and zeal, the thirst for cleansing purity. I had a difficult Wednesday on 10/14.
Showing posts with label faye dunaway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faye dunaway. Show all posts
Friday, October 9, 2015
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Tommy Lee Jones and persistent mediocrity of made for television
An elation had evidently penetrated to his vitals, and caused him to dilate as if he had been filled with gas. He snapped his fingers in the air, and whistled fragments of triumphal music.-- Stephen Crane, "The Monster"
Eyes of Laura Mars is too diaphanous in its denouement to amount to anything, but the link it makes between glamour, violence, our belief that there is something to ESP despite the charlatan horde, women scarred by it, men fractured by pain into remorseful killers trying to police themselves, makes it the signature syndication vehicle of adolescent imprint, laudably modish. The seventies lost itself into that kind of couture, that sartorial sensibility that Orhan Pamuk might wish upon Turkish police, the shag was real, so were bell bottoms, and Ms. Dunaway's boots, Carole King hair. It might have amounted to something if Jones, the rising Texan boy, had killed Faye, gotten away with it, and went on his merry way, though the script would have needed tightening. In the course of this project, I thought I had found the equally mopey British movie about a fraudulent EMS driver who steals a doctor's medical board exams and then destroys his one, two, friends who learn the truth. It too was a mediocre soppy deal, but Britons at least have the courage not to lie to themselves about brutal lack of ethics, and I believed I had tracked this chilling little number down and placed it in keywords, but if I did I can't find it, frighteningly plausible as it is. With Mars as a noted exception, Jones generally stays within his range, and developed his own sartorial sense in his sugar daddy years, opting out of his libertarian liberalism of The Park is Mine (why the fuck was this movie made at all?). Idiotic as this vet drama is, it was produced the same decade Terry Gilliam decided to dazzle his clique with Brazil. "Park" is like a weak stream of mostly water-clear urine that nevertheless anticipates 9/11 with its clueless governing class, who try to deliberately mislead the public about an angry PTSD warrior with an agenda. Race issues are very lightly trod, with Yaphet Kotto as the pragmatic operations officer, who kills a guerrilla fighter his superiors had approved to take Jones out, while meanwhile, in the background, your typical hustler is hawking orange Tees to feed the movement Jones supposedly sparks with his one man insurrection. Only through the droll do we get to the expansive legitimacy caricature of Men in Black, or the stoic disillusion of No Country For Old Men, or the warrior who has reached his limit in The Hunted. The reality of Jones' textured bluntness in this is life as hard as it is is complex, much like Crane's feudalism in his little New York town. Beneath the surface, "The Monster" asks many complex questions about moral obligation and social codes, the cruelty of social norms in every demographic. Ingenious novella that it is, if Harper published it today, it would remain a telling fable on the limits of tolerance on all sides of the isle, and nothing has changed in the America of black and white. Crane's naturalism has a veracity Caucasians are now forbidden to depict, the controversy I've sown a case in point.
Eyes of Laura Mars is too diaphanous in its denouement to amount to anything, but the link it makes between glamour, violence, our belief that there is something to ESP despite the charlatan horde, women scarred by it, men fractured by pain into remorseful killers trying to police themselves, makes it the signature syndication vehicle of adolescent imprint, laudably modish. The seventies lost itself into that kind of couture, that sartorial sensibility that Orhan Pamuk might wish upon Turkish police, the shag was real, so were bell bottoms, and Ms. Dunaway's boots, Carole King hair. It might have amounted to something if Jones, the rising Texan boy, had killed Faye, gotten away with it, and went on his merry way, though the script would have needed tightening. In the course of this project, I thought I had found the equally mopey British movie about a fraudulent EMS driver who steals a doctor's medical board exams and then destroys his one, two, friends who learn the truth. It too was a mediocre soppy deal, but Britons at least have the courage not to lie to themselves about brutal lack of ethics, and I believed I had tracked this chilling little number down and placed it in keywords, but if I did I can't find it, frighteningly plausible as it is. With Mars as a noted exception, Jones generally stays within his range, and developed his own sartorial sense in his sugar daddy years, opting out of his libertarian liberalism of The Park is Mine (why the fuck was this movie made at all?). Idiotic as this vet drama is, it was produced the same decade Terry Gilliam decided to dazzle his clique with Brazil. "Park" is like a weak stream of mostly water-clear urine that nevertheless anticipates 9/11 with its clueless governing class, who try to deliberately mislead the public about an angry PTSD warrior with an agenda. Race issues are very lightly trod, with Yaphet Kotto as the pragmatic operations officer, who kills a guerrilla fighter his superiors had approved to take Jones out, while meanwhile, in the background, your typical hustler is hawking orange Tees to feed the movement Jones supposedly sparks with his one man insurrection. Only through the droll do we get to the expansive legitimacy caricature of Men in Black, or the stoic disillusion of No Country For Old Men, or the warrior who has reached his limit in The Hunted. The reality of Jones' textured bluntness in this is life as hard as it is is complex, much like Crane's feudalism in his little New York town. Beneath the surface, "The Monster" asks many complex questions about moral obligation and social codes, the cruelty of social norms in every demographic. Ingenious novella that it is, if Harper published it today, it would remain a telling fable on the limits of tolerance on all sides of the isle, and nothing has changed in the America of black and white. Crane's naturalism has a veracity Caucasians are now forbidden to depict, the controversy I've sown a case in point.
Human Automata
The modern concierge's daughter who fulfills her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. --George Bernard Shaw
It disappoints that the classic facial beauty Faye Dunaway emanates on screen leads with few exceptions to mere dilatory satisfaction. It may be the limitation of her range and roles operating off of each other, or that she never again had a director like Polanski, since Polanski seemed able to illicit a vulnerable tigress, a predatory feline who leaps forth as her hauteur fractures under pressure. The raging porcelain never quite delivers the suggestion of her intensity and emotional investment, once you look beyond Chinatown, except for her supporting role as Yolande fourteen years ago. She was a tour de force of conviction as a queen mother under duress in the face of the dissimulation of Franco national identity, despite the fact that The Messenger disserviced both the legend and the veracity of Joan d'Arc, a film of minute ensemble moments which could not carry the whole affair. Dustin Hoffman comes late in the day to post-modern fragmentation.
This does not detract from Dunaway's glamour; it only points to the juxtaposition between the promise of a glamorous figure and the expectations of catharsis within a performance. Marilyn Monroe had the same problem but conveniently overdosed into hagiography. Dunaway outlasted herself into the contempt of the familiar figure always on the verge of ferocious histrionics, devoid of climax and exhausted pleasure. She barely fakes it with Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. There is the glimpse of her breast, a diminutive curve in a room festooned under studio lighting, yet the erotic tension, repressed to the imagination, is nearly unbearable. Her contemporary stills evoke the octogenarian Mae West of my childhood, the capped teeth now garish, skeletal, somehow still beautiful. "I have completed a work," I wonder if this is how she settles her accounts with the residual impact of her rise during the decade of America's militant radicalism, a decade neither all that anarchist nor as transformative as is supposed among popular sentiment.
It disappoints that the classic facial beauty Faye Dunaway emanates on screen leads with few exceptions to mere dilatory satisfaction. It may be the limitation of her range and roles operating off of each other, or that she never again had a director like Polanski, since Polanski seemed able to illicit a vulnerable tigress, a predatory feline who leaps forth as her hauteur fractures under pressure. The raging porcelain never quite delivers the suggestion of her intensity and emotional investment, once you look beyond Chinatown, except for her supporting role as Yolande fourteen years ago. She was a tour de force of conviction as a queen mother under duress in the face of the dissimulation of Franco national identity, despite the fact that The Messenger disserviced both the legend and the veracity of Joan d'Arc, a film of minute ensemble moments which could not carry the whole affair. Dustin Hoffman comes late in the day to post-modern fragmentation.
This does not detract from Dunaway's glamour; it only points to the juxtaposition between the promise of a glamorous figure and the expectations of catharsis within a performance. Marilyn Monroe had the same problem but conveniently overdosed into hagiography. Dunaway outlasted herself into the contempt of the familiar figure always on the verge of ferocious histrionics, devoid of climax and exhausted pleasure. She barely fakes it with Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. There is the glimpse of her breast, a diminutive curve in a room festooned under studio lighting, yet the erotic tension, repressed to the imagination, is nearly unbearable. Her contemporary stills evoke the octogenarian Mae West of my childhood, the capped teeth now garish, skeletal, somehow still beautiful. "I have completed a work," I wonder if this is how she settles her accounts with the residual impact of her rise during the decade of America's militant radicalism, a decade neither all that anarchist nor as transformative as is supposed among popular sentiment.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Fruitful Multiplication
"Do you understand, or is it too tough for you?" -- Faye Dunaway
A veterinarian with Parkinson's disease tracked from diagnosis to demise in a Bill Moyers documentary on degenerative illness was the first video of its kind, a viewing that would lead to almost incidental accretion, dozens of cancer treatments won and lost. Physicians who never talk about dying for the cause and effect of their insurance premiums, say instead "We could talk about hospice." A painter tracked through the unraveling of his sinews due to muscular dystrophy, a pathos Good Housekeeping domestication enforcers sop up with bistro dinner rolls, activists rebel against and the telethon moderates itself attempting to placate empowerment inside of wretched pity. Maupassant can be faulted for this overweening saturation in his later stories as his own disease blew the sprockets in his neural net, but American public television producers never say die when it comes to exposing the free market exploitation of death. Suicide tourists and militants, what we have lost isn't just acceptance, but willingness to see death as routine. The right to control dying, the right of self determination within physical vulnerability are not incompatible. Both are about control, but there is only so much control any one of us can exert without some form of scaffolding. Was Noah Cross as sinister and dangerous as Polanski makes him out to be? We'd have to enlarge the question to examine the American mogul.
I am a right to die advocate, slightly complicated by my belief that death should be used as a form of political protest, but it is a form of extremism, like the practice of Sati under the Indian caste system. Chinatown is a kind of extremism that makes it one of the greatest movies ever made, and Polanski managed to make it without the hatchet jobs which Orson Welles swallowed into morbid obesity. Some films as pandering trash should have never been made. Orca is what? The burgeoning birth of Eco feminism reviving Melville? There are times when death by stoning for Richard Harris is too kind to ham as an interesting meat.
A veterinarian with Parkinson's disease tracked from diagnosis to demise in a Bill Moyers documentary on degenerative illness was the first video of its kind, a viewing that would lead to almost incidental accretion, dozens of cancer treatments won and lost. Physicians who never talk about dying for the cause and effect of their insurance premiums, say instead "We could talk about hospice." A painter tracked through the unraveling of his sinews due to muscular dystrophy, a pathos Good Housekeeping domestication enforcers sop up with bistro dinner rolls, activists rebel against and the telethon moderates itself attempting to placate empowerment inside of wretched pity. Maupassant can be faulted for this overweening saturation in his later stories as his own disease blew the sprockets in his neural net, but American public television producers never say die when it comes to exposing the free market exploitation of death. Suicide tourists and militants, what we have lost isn't just acceptance, but willingness to see death as routine. The right to control dying, the right of self determination within physical vulnerability are not incompatible. Both are about control, but there is only so much control any one of us can exert without some form of scaffolding. Was Noah Cross as sinister and dangerous as Polanski makes him out to be? We'd have to enlarge the question to examine the American mogul.
I am a right to die advocate, slightly complicated by my belief that death should be used as a form of political protest, but it is a form of extremism, like the practice of Sati under the Indian caste system. Chinatown is a kind of extremism that makes it one of the greatest movies ever made, and Polanski managed to make it without the hatchet jobs which Orson Welles swallowed into morbid obesity. Some films as pandering trash should have never been made. Orca is what? The burgeoning birth of Eco feminism reviving Melville? There are times when death by stoning for Richard Harris is too kind to ham as an interesting meat.
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