The latter is playing down the street at a local theater in La Jolla, appropriately known as the Unicorn, which is appropriately located inside an occult bookstore. This interesting question about poetry (by Saltykov-Shchedrin, cited in a Viktor Shklovsky essay) comes back to me as I marvel at Katharine Hepburn’s happy capacity to make all her bones dance in SYLVIA SCARLET. “Why walk along a rope and yet squat down every four steps?” Notice the ugly dent that squat down makes in that suspension. Even the madness has been illusory.īut what if it’s the spacey bridge that suggests sanity, an escape from the lunacy of the Hollywood wish-fulfillment? Like Elliott Gould singing, whistling and humming fragments of “The Long Goodbye” out of tune and out of synch with an offscreen piano trio, it may only suggest a temporary misalignment of clich é s as they’re set in front of a distorting mirror - a glancing, ironic twist to the same old song and dance. But like all suspension bridges, it leads straight back to safety, the sweet terra firma of a Hollywood platitude -– a repeat of the dreamy alto theme.
#Sax and dotty repeat movie#
A plush, gaudy reverie on Cloud Nine - identified with comparably upholstered glimpses of Cybill Shepherd in the movie - slides almost imperceptibly out of the chordal comfort of Hollywood’s notion of wistful sanity and into a subtly splintered realm of two adjacent frameworks weirdly out of whack, each humming and buzzing away in mutual alienation like a Joan Didion heroine on Seconal.
#Sax and dotty repeat driver#
Original soundtrack recording of Bernard Herrmann’s TAXI DRIVER score, side two, track two, bridge of the first chorus: an unidentified muted trumpet (and later, muted trombone) begins to play in a different key from the accompanying strings and piano, which up to then have been caressing Tom Scott’s alto sax theme in a conventionally romantic, jazzy penthouse harmony. Chances are, they’d rather tell you what’s right or wrong with BLACK SUNDAY. How long will it take before many others get to see it in such conditions, or in any condition at all? Better ask the auteurists about that one, too. It’s amazing what a little bit of time on one’s hands and an epic space can do for an epic movie what initially provoked some resistance - over three hours of concentration on a woman’s life, mainly housework -– now becomes all-absorbing, even monumental. I’m still recovering from my third look at Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, a new movie which I was finally lucky enough to catch outside a film festival and on a big screen. This is one of them”), or scenes that unexpectedly and mysteriously take place in the rain? Better to leave such fine points to the auteurists.
#Sax and dotty repeat how to#
How to keep moving in the same way that this column must travel - from La Jolla, to Richard Corliss in Cannes, to Film Comment in New York, to wherever you happen to be reading it? Now that TV Guide generally has to take the place of Pariscope, Time Out, the New York newspapers, shall I write about the breathneck beginning of Sirk’s SLEEP, MY LOVE, the parallels with Preminger’s WHIRLPOOL,a wonderful exchange between Don Ameche and Hazel Brooks (”Doesn’t sound like my girl…” “You have a lot of girls. Note: the 35 mm screening of JEANNE DIELMAN alluded to here was set up by Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson on the University of California, San Diego campus while they were working on the last of their essays.
early that year after seven and a half years of living in Europe (Paris and London), my “Paris Journal” and “London Journal” column in Film Comment became “Moving,” a preoccupation that eventually yielded the title of my first book, Moving Places.
0 kommentar(er)
