A Fun Opening Scene/Credits Sequence

I've Overlooked George Stevens

Gap-filling recently with Alice Adams (1935) and A Place In The Sun (1951), George Stevens is emerging for me as a bang-up director. Before this I'd mainly thought of him in connection with Penny Serenade (1941) [fine but not my sort of thing], Shane (1953) [great], and Giant (1956) [just OK], stupidly never associating him such star-identified classics as Swing Time (1936) and Woman Of The Year (1942). Given that Alice Adams is good with some great parts and A Place In The Sun is flat-out terrific - Stevens is already up to between 5 and 7 classics. Beyond that I have at least Annie Oakley (w/ Stanwyck) Gunga Din (w/ Grant), Talk of The Town (w/ Grant and Arthur), and The More The Merrier to further gap-fill with, and who'd bet against finding at least one classic among those?

Stevens is neither a dazzling stylist like Hitchcock or Kubrick nor a dialogue fireworks specialist like Wilder or Lubitsch, instead, rather like immediate peers Wyler and Cukor, he's a talented craftsmen who serves the story whatever it may be, gets great performances, always has the camera in the right place. The upshot is that Stevens racked up (near-)triumphs for more than twenty years, a very fine career albeit not a revolutionary one. But the history of any artform must give proper respect to its exemplary regular practitioners.

Note that about 28 mins into Alice Adams there's a 'rain streaks on the windows as tears' shot that substantially anticipates a famous shot from near the end of In Cold Blood (1967):

One difference: the rain-streak shadows are in addition to Katharine Hepburn's real tears whereas they're instead of Robert Blake's. But Hepburn's father in the film, hearing his daughter weep, gets (subtler) rain-streaks instead of real tears, so I say that Stevens and his DP Robert DeGrasse indeed gazump almost all of Richard Brooks's and his DP Conrad Hall's conception.

Update: Talk Of The Town (1942) is just OK. Above all it's brutalized by a crazy ending (apparently enofrced by giving A/B test audiences final cut!) in which, Movie-Star Logic holds - Cary Grant gets the girl - at the expense of Story and Performance Logic - a beautifully underplaying Grant allows and helps Ronald Coleman (w/ a touch of Victor Laszlo about him) to get the girl. Obviously Grant's movie-star-ness had deformed Suspicion (1941) the previous year so we're now pressing up against the serious downsides of the Golden Age studio/star system: it became impossible for beloved actors to surprise us, and only utterly archetypal story forms could be diligently cast and competently told. In the early '40s both Hitchcock and Stevens are trying to find new stories and open Grant and other stars up to different kinds of roles but the studios (and to some extent audiences) won't let that happen yet.

Great Songs of the '90s: Suede's 'To The Birds'

The B-sides of Suede's 'The Drowners' single were 'My Insatiable One' and 'To The Birds'. Taken as a whole, this was the best single I've ever actually bought. Unfortunately for Suede, their first three recorded songs were their best; they never hit these heights again.

Anita Ekberg before La Dolce Vita (1960)

Doctor Feelgood: Gap-filling Time Again

I plan to watch Oil City Confidential (2010) and to follow this advice on the music:

[Stupidity is] Definitely the place to start, followed by Down By The Jetty and then maybe Ian Dury’s Laughter just to hear how good and radical Wilko could be in different musical surroundings.

On Brody On Amour (2012)

What should we make of Richard Brody of The New Yorker's extraordinarily disdainful response to Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)? For example:

I don’t doubt Haneke’s sincerity when he affirms in interviews the personal and compassionate roots of the story—the sufferings of his ninety-two-year-old aunt, who had wanted him to help her commit suicide. But what comes off onscreen is the filmmaking’s smirking pleasure at depicting, with a chilling explicitness, a heinously affirmative killing—a peculiarly active variety of euthanasia. In doing so, Haneke lined his dominoes up perfectly. First, he constructed characters whose bonds of love seem incontrovertible, so that Georges couldn’t be accused of mixed motives. Second, he made this characters seem, angelic, so that there’s no trace of perversity or caprice on Anne’s part, no selfishness or cruelty on Georges’s. Third, he cast soulful actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, to play the couple.[my italics]

[T]he director films his elderly couple with a superficial simulacrum of wisdom and experience, strips them of traits in order to reduce them to the function of the film to render the appalling act justifiable, to strip out the appearance of mixed emotions. And yet, what comes through is that Haneke likes filming a killing, takes a smirkingly ghoulish look at the act, and takes unconscious pleasure in the unconscionable. As Georges smothers the incapacitated Anne under a pillow, her legs kick in resistance: she may be willing to die, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to stop living. Nothing in Georges’s demeanor suggests anything but the desire to end Anne’s misery, in defiance of any objection the world might make. How he faces that opprobrium, or the force of law, we can only imagine. Haneke either knows and doesn’t show it, or doesn’t bother to imagine it; but, for him, it doesn’t matter. He has had his fun. He has shown murder and made his viewers love it, has brought them into complicity with his smirkingly ghoulish pleasure. The hollowness of the contrivance conceals the grotesquerie of the sacralized Grand Guignol. Where “Django Unchained” suggests Quentin Tarantino’s unconscious delight in the unconscionable “Amour” reflects Haneke’s calculated desire to stir up a reaction by way of a cynical ambiguity, to recalibrate a moral shock with an overwhelming preponderance of mitigations. [my italics]

The subject of “Amour” is powerful and true... That’s what makes Haneke’s rigid contrivances—the pristinely repressed and filtered script and images, the directorial straight face held with iron bands to suppress laughter—all the more repellent. [my italics]

Let's start with Brody's basic complaint that Haneke 'lined up his dominoes perfectly', that he engineers a kind of best/ideal case for euthanasia. Well, what's wrong with that? Obviously, as multiple old saws go, extreme cases, whether they be best/ideal or nightmarishingly murky and confounded, normally make for 'bad law' and/or lousy public policy. But Haneke's made a movie, not authored a treatise or a carefully weighted pros and cons style report on a projected law change. Haneke's ideal case can legitimately form part of the backdrop for a public policy debate but it's no substitute for that kind of careful discussion. Similarly, describing highly idealized cases of punishment and torture (where we know guilt with certainty, where there's intense time pressure, and so on) is one thing; developing and justifying public policy about punishment and torture is quite another. Extremely vivid highly idealized cases may mislead - taking account of that is why we have treatises, formal processes of policy development, and all the rest of it.

One can sort of see what's getting Brody's goat here: Haneke on euthanasia is playing the same game that 24 did on torture. But so long as we are clear that embracing euthanasia/torture as public policy would mean endorsing a whole euthanasia/torture regime, hence accepting lots and lots of highly non-ideal cases then we can stop panicking about jejune treatments of ideal/best cases. That is, we can allow ourselves to feel the power of Amour's and 24's types of cases precisely because such cases do nothing to establish (and, unless we are easily panicked, can never force us to take a position on) the moral viability of the respective regimes each might be felt to implicitly advocate.

Now consider Brody's claim that "How he [Georges] faces that opprobrium, or the force of law, we can only imagine. Haneke either knows and doesn’t show it, or doesn’t bother to imagine it". This point strikes me (and others, esp. swkaplan among Brody's commenters) as completely bogus. Haneke's film is clear that Georges ends his own life almost immediately after he end Anne's. He has no 'fun' left in him; here's can be no question of Georges gaining any advantage from killing Anne. He isn't now 'able to get on with his life' let alone achieve anything less noble. That this is so is, of course, another example of Haneke getting his 'dominoes in a row' for his ideal case. So this part of Brody's argument is riddled with falsehood and reduces to his main argument that (Straw Man-ishly) supposes that Haneke is making public policy, that Amour's drama is a treatise.

Update:An article by Haneke scholar, Roy Grundmann is worth thinking over. Grundmann's essay contains several obvious mistakes, but in grappling directly with the pigeon sequences and the paintings it's a useful starting point towards a more comprehensive reading of the film than I provide here (i.e., given that I'm really just trying to straighten out a basic logical point about the film's strategy and mistaken reception).

The Paintings in Haneke's Amour (2012)

Three quarters of the way through Amour, immediately after the terrifying moment when Georges slaps Anne, Haneke shows 6 paintings, each for about 8 seconds. Repeat viewings confirm that each is a gallery-lit closeup of (part of) one of the paintings from Georges's and Anne's apartment. Here are Amour's gallery-lit closeups (in Haneke's order) together with how we see them in the apartment.

The sequence begins and ends with paintings we see in the bedroom. We don't encounter the third painting in situ, in the living room, until the very end of the film.