mary grantner

I’ve not been on Tumblr for a few weeks, and I’ve decided to abandon ship altogether. Know why? The relentless selling.

When I first joined I did so because it was a blog space with fewer-than-most idiots, and you had to seek out commercial entities. Now the commercialism impedes on me at every turn.

So while there’s still some cool stuff on here, and interesting people, there’s not enough to make it worth plowing through the gibberish.

When Alice Munro got the much-deserved Nobel for literature in 2013, one of the things that struck me was how UN-filmed her work is. And I can see why.  Reading her excellent short fiction is literary in the best sense -- it’s personal, intimate, tied to you and Munro and her very precise language. I thought her unfilmable. 

The exception here truly does prove the rule, and you can see it Thursday evening on TCM. Sarah Polley’s astonishingly beautiful, heart-breaking “Away From Her” is simply perfect. It is based on a Munro story, and I defy anyone to do a better job of adapting one of her little gems. 

I’m very much looking forward to “Araya” showing Thursday night on TCM. Directed in 1959 by Margot Benacerraf, it shared honors at Cannes alongside Resnais’ “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” and then promptly disappeared. It was restored a few years ago by Milestone, and by all accounts it’s a real beauty.

It’s listed as a documentary, but from everything I’ve read it’s a stretch to classify “Araya” that way. Even though Benacerraf wanted to tell the real story of wretchedly poor and hard-working salt miners in Venezuela, and the film features an all-local cast, it is also largely scripted. It’s that problem again, as old as documentary itself: is a film true, or is it telling a Truth? And how are we supposed to know the difference, anyway?

I’m happy to report that Ridley Scott is back.

The man who gave us two of the best science fiction movies ever (”Alien” and “Blade Runner”) returns to pop movie-making with “The Martian”. Yes, it’s silly sci-fi on many levels. But it’s also just well-crafted entertainment.

I’ve been much disappointed by Scott’s efforts for quite some time now. He’s made a few uber-dogs. Well, no, that’s disparaging to canines everywhere. He’s made some super-smelly features like “1492″, so painful that I couldn’t even sit through it. And what in the world was “Kingdom of Heaven” but a series of pretty images with zero thought behind them? Talk about no there there.

But now he’s back to form. “Martian” looks great -- not surprising since we always get handsome images even in the worst of Scott’s work. It’s back to form in terms of plot and character, too. Yes, characters are a bit pat, and we know what will happen long before it does. But performances are uniformly good, and there’s just enough humor and adventure built in to keep us paying attention for better than two hours.

Interesting line-up of films Thursday evening on TCM -- the work of Alice Guy-Blache. I know. I heard of her only recently, too. That was in 2012 when she got a Director’s Guild achievement award. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person asking, “Who?”

I found out that Guy-Blache was one of the inventors of the idea of narrative film. When she started working for Leon Gaumont’s photography business, she discovered that Gaumont was making little films mostly as curiosities, bits shown in vaudeville houses to spur interest in a paying client’s business, or in his own photography business. Alice had the idea that she could use moving pictures to tell stories.

In 1896 she did just that with “The Cabbage Fairy”. It’s not quite clear whether it was the very first narrative film, but it was certainly before Porter and before Melies. Regardless, Guy-Blache went on to write and direct hundreds of the things, helping to invent the form as she went. Eventually she moved to the US and started her own production company in partnership with her husband Herbert Blache. She chose not to follow the movie business west to Los Angeles, and by the 20′s returned to France where her career (and marriage, by the way) was pretty much done.

Before she died at age 95, she was recognized by France with the Legion of Honor, but she was largely forgotten and her films assumed lost. TCM’s gathered a bunch of them, all short as you might imagine. Or maybe you can’t imagine how short -- “The Cabbage Fairy” is all of about 60 seconds long.

How much of cinema convention we take for granted! For instance, Guy-Blache used double-exposure masking before anyone else did. That doesn’t seem like a big deal in the age of CGI, but it was a major innovation at the time.

I nearly fell out of my chair. Pope Francis in his speech to Congress today named four “great Americans” and one was Dorothy Day. I thought I was one of maybe three people who even know who she is.

An avowed socialist and devout Catholoc, Day had many, many unpleasant encounters with American authorities. She observed once, “It’s a funny country. When you feed the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor are poor, they call you a Communist.” Her Lefty leanings made her some impressive enemies, not the least of which were Joe McCarthy and J Edgar Hoover. I like her on that score alone. 

And here she is mentioned in a speech along with Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

I’m pretty good at resisting media hysteria but I tell you  -- this guy is good. Nothing doctrinally has changed in the Church. But the change in emphasis, the brilliant imaging Francis has accomplished, is impressive. He’s managed to shift the focus to what is best about Catholicism. 

Many people find this whole “outsider” political phenomenon disturbing. It’s an argument that goes something like, “We distrust politicians so much, and with good reason, that we are turning to anyone who is an ‘outsider’, especially if he or she hasn’t ever held a political office.” In this storyline, Donald Trump is succeeding because he is the most populist, ballsy outsider.

Populists often step in at moments like this. Huey Long was almost as colorful as Trump, but is just one of a long line that includes William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Jackson. 

I suppose there’s some truth to that. Governments at all levels are certainly dysfunctional at the moment. In Illinois where I live, it is so dysfunctional that no one has even had discussions about a budget in the four months we’ve sat here without one. Last I looked, that’s the most basic function of state government. 

But I think there’s more to this phenomenon than a knee-jerk dislike of current office-holders. This is populism with a particular twist. The success of Trump and Fiorina and Carson reflect something built into American’s DNA: anti-intellectualism. Richard Hofstadter described this tendency in a book he wrote in 1964, so this is not a new observation. It goes way, way back. The Puritans, after all, figured book-learning just gave the Devil a bigger playground.

There’s some peculiar strain of American populism that isn’t just a distrust of elite, moneyed classes. It’s not even a simple distrust of fancy-schmancy intellectuals. Rather, it’s the insistence that ignorance is a positive thing. Isaac Asimov once took note of a “...constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

It’s a dangerous difference. It’s not just that I’m your equal in the eyes of God; It’s that my idiocy is every bit as valuable as your knowledge. Maybe even more valuable, since I’m not burdened by pesky details like facts. Or even thought.

This is a ground-breaker -- “Breathless” from Jean-Luc Godard in 1960. TCM is showing it Wednesday evening. Godard’s jump cuts, his literally breathless pace, his rebellious anti-hero, all of these things both defined “The New Wave” and introduced a style of film making that had long-lasting repercussions.

It’s a simple plot -- a small-time hood kills a cop, steals cars, and finds he has to hide out. He does all of this in the company of his American girlfriend. But the look and feel of this film are what really make it. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard gives this a grainy texture and came up with loads of clever work-arounds to fit a limited budget. For instance, they couldn’t afford a real tracking shot, so Coutard had himself rolled along in a wheelchair while holding the camera in his hands. The result is even better than the real thing.

I really couldn’t tell you what makes Jean-Paul Belmondo so hot, but he surely is. Maybe it’s just his “cool quotient”. Maybe his is one of those faces so ugly that it’s handsome. I have no idea, but I remain very jealous of co-star Jean Seberg.

I can remember seeing Lily Tomlin in one medium or another most of my life. Television to audio recording to stage to movies, she’s been a presence I’ve always appreciated as smart and funny. I should have known way back in 1985 when I saw her onstage in “The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” that she wasn’t just a good comic. She is a seriously good actress who also happens to be very funny.

This weekend she hit the ball out of the park in the film that gets my vote as best of the year so far, “Grandma”. Surrounded by some great supporting players like Marcia Gay Harden and Julia Garner, and directed by the very competent Paul Weitz, This is not a comedy, but is a story about mourning and grief that happens to have some very funny moments.

Sam Elliott makes an appearance and reminds us of why he was always such a sexy dude. Elizabeth Pena has a small part in what would turn out to be her final role. And they all shine in a smart script by Weitz.

Whether you’re the Ricketts family donating to Ted Cruz or George Soros donating to Obama, you have something the rest of us don’t have.

In today’s column in the Washington Post, George Will laments the damage being done to the GOP by “Trumpkins” (kudos for a great term). He writes, “If in November 2016, the fragments of an ever smaller and more homogenous GOP might be picked up with tweezers, Trump, having taken his act elsewhere, will look back over his shoulder at the wreckage he wrought and say: Oh, never mind.”

Will warns that Trump’s appeal to a narrow, very white, mostly male group of supporters is alienating most other sentient beings. Unless dealt with now, Trumpkins will so shrink the Republican party that it could not possibly win in 2016. Thing is, Will’s rhetorical skills aside, Trumpkins are a phenomenon the political class has brought on itself, and I don’t just mean the GOP.

There’s a reason that America votes in such low numbers. There’s a reason Americans are almost universally cynical about politics and government. And that reason is money, or, more accurately, the moneyed classes.

Trump is plainly a clown, but the fact is that the appearance of him or someone like him was inevitable. He or someone like him could just as easily have popped up in the Democratic party, or as an independent. His popularity is a symptom of what regular people have shoved in their faces all of the time: the rich and their giant corporations control everything, and the rest of us are their stooges. The truth is that whether you’re the Ricketts family donating to Ted Cruz or George Soros donating to Obama, you have something the rest of us don’t have, and that’s a voice in how things go.

Somebody said that an actor should never star with a dog or a kid. In “White God” the actors are up against both. Which is not to say that this is in any way a typical kid-and-her-dog movie. Oh, no. Director Kornel Mundruczo has made an amazing, affecting fantasy. You still end up on the dog’s side -- look at him for heaven’s sake, and tell me how you couldn’t! -- but this movie will still surprise you in lots of ways.

The plot begins by following the same trajectory of any heroic dog story -- faithful, trusting dog encounters people at their best and then worst, and wanders the landscape lost and lonely. But this is no “Lassie Come Home”. This is essentially a dog revenge fantasy. The title was inspired by a JM Coetzee story, in which the black African majority look on the white rulers as almost god-like superiors -- until they don’t.

Mundruczo does fabulous things with real dogs and old-fashioned skillful editing. No CG magic here. For instance, he shoots much of the dog’s story from the dog’s point of view, or at least his eye level. While Hagen the dog has no speaking power a la Disney, it’s amazing how much you think you know exactly what Hagen is thinking and feeling at any given moment as a result of the editing technique.

There’s similar skill involved in putting together some brutal scenes of training and dog-fighting, and with shots of a herd of dogs running rampant through Budapest. It was only on my second viewing of a couple of scenes that I realized how much was accomplished with skillful cuts -- you don’t, when you think of it, really see much violence. But you sure do feel it.

I’m always intrigued by the shift in mainstream movies once the Hays Code is in place. This week on TCM there’s another example of just how stuff changes its look and feel as a result of the Code. They’ll be showing two versions of “Waterloo Bridge”, a super-tearjerker that takes place during World War I. The soldier falls in love with the prostitute, and war and time and social norms conspire to keep them apart, and we can all guess the plot without ever seeing either one. But the plot is not the point.

The more famous version stars Vivien Leigh in 1940, and TCM is showing it Tuesday morning. She’s a much better actress than others who took the role of Myra. And though she has the misfortune of being with Robert Taylor here, he is not nearly as painful to watch as is Douglass Montgomery.

Which brings me to the 1931 pre-Code version being shown on Thursday evening. This one stars Mae Clarke, who isn’t bad. She lost stature as leading lady by the mid-1930′s, but she is immortalized by having James Cagney smash a grapefruit in her face. Anyway, acting and directing skills aside, what’s really interesting about watching two versions of the same melodrama is the Hays Code.

There’s just a much grittier look and feel to the pre-Code version, directed by James Whale. Once again, don’t look for anything soft-core. But Whale can be much more harsh and direct in depicting Myra’s reality.

We still have a variation on this Code, of course. It’s called the MPAA and it hands out ratings based on... well, I’m not sure what since they never explicitly tell us. But I’ve seen some gruesome, violent movies get a PG-13, while depictions of smoking can get you the R. The R rating can cost a film millions in attendance.

“Thunder Road” is one of those cult movies -- not much good when you really look at it, but odd enough to have a constant audience. TCM is showing it Wednesday night. If nothing else, tune in to see Robert Mitchum’s son James. Together like that on the screen, in appearance so much alike, you can just feel what made Robert a star and left James looking like no more than a kid trying to be like Dad.

Robert Mitchum tried mightily over the years to rebel against the studio system, and this is one of his efforts. In 1958 he not only served as a producer, but he co-wrote and some say pretty much directed this movie. He even had a bit of a pop hit with the title song he co-wrote and performed. You know, he didn’t have a bad voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdwUpxkfSJw

I finally watched “The Last of the Unjust”, a film Claude Lanzmann pieced together from interviews he did in 1975 and present-day scenes of Viennese, Czech and Polish holocaust sites. It is deeply moving and unsettling.

The centerpiece of the documentary is Benjamin Murmelstein, a prominent Jewish scholar and rabbi in Vienna in the 1930′s who was tapped to help deport Jews from the city, and to be the last of the “Jewish Elders” at the Theresienstadt ghetto camp. After the war he was arrested and charged as a collaborator. The charges were eventually dropped, but he spent many years as a despised pariah. Historians credit his ability to befuddle the Nazi bureaucrats in Vienna with saving as many as 120,000 people.

Murmelstein is obviously an intelligent, well-educated man. His insights into Eichmann for instance, with whom he was obliged to work very closely, pretty much trash the “banality of evil” image. Murmelstein’s a sharp, detailed observer who calls Eichmann “a demon.” Lanzmann reads excerpts from Murmelstein’s book about the war years and his writing is even more sharp and affecting than his presence on film.

On the other hand, he survived Theresienstadt and we’re not quite sure how. As the story he tells progresses to 1945, he grows less focused and seems more defensive. He starts coming across as not just intelligent and an able organizer, but shrewd and perhaps somewhat cruel himself. While he says he understands his status as pariah, there’s something self-serving, almost self-righteous, and a bit mean about him.

No matter the extent of historical accuracy in the film (and many historians have said that Lanzmann takes Murmelstein’s word for things that just aren’t true), it’s a powerful piece of filmmaking. As readings and interview material are interspersed with drawings made by camp prisoners, you can’t help but confront the facts: that while Murmelstein might have saved Jews in Vienna, while at Theresienstadt he had a hand in keeping a brutal order in place.

He believes he helped to preserve some bit of European Jewry. In no small part, he also helped to rescue himself.

The first Les Blank film I ever saw was a documentary feature he did about Werner Herzog’s making of “Fitzcarraldo”. Released in 1982, the documentary “Burden of Dreams” shows what an unholy mess was the shooting of the fiction film, what with Herzog attempting to haul a ship through a jungle without the aid of special effects, and with star Klaus Kinski being seriously off his proverbial rocker. I remember watching this documentary knowing nothing about Les Blank. I was just interested in seeing something about Herzog; more interesting was the film making of Blank.

Les Blank as a director is a discovery I’ve often been grateful for since. If you don’t know his films, you can catch a whole evening of them Tuesday on TCM. Blank became very well known as a chronicler of music and the cultures from which musical styles spring. His movie “Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins” is a fabulous portrait of the Blues and a bluesman.

Blank did another string of films documenting food and food culture. Watch his documentary “Yum, Yum, Yum!” about Creole cooking and I defy your mouth  NOT to water. Or catch “Garlic Is as Good as 10 Mothers”, a fascinating look at mankind’s ages-old use of garlic.

Richard Cohen, Washington Post, July 20

Good column from Richard Cohen. He doesn’t just point out the obvious -- that saying sexual preference is a choice is stupid -- but points out a number of the other blatantly ridiculous things Walker has said. Based on a host of Walker’s statements one is forced to ask, Is Scott Walker ignorant by choice? Or is he trying to mask bigotry? No matter, the answer makes him “not intellectually fit” to be President.

Oh, I wish it were autumn, about 40 degrees, and late on a windy evening. Then it would be a perfect time to watch “Ladies They Talk About”.

As it is I am suffering stifling heat and humidity and will have to be in some meeting or other while the movie is shown on TCM Wednesday afternoon. This is a prison film with the wonderful Barbara Stanwyk that straddled the Hays Code era. Directed in 1933 by the forgettable Howard Bretherton, “Ladies” is delightful in the way that only a pre-Code women-in-prison movie can be. Stanwyk, of course, is one tough broad and a pleasure to watch, but the movie as a whole is perfectly silly. I love it.