The Silver Screen The Silver Screen Directed by Mark Rappaport ...
At this point in film history, it's time that a generalized, status-quo consensus give way to an original, personal comprehension. The analysis Mark Rappaport provides in The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender makes one re-see Hollywood history for the hidden codes of social struggle underneath the generic plots and stylistic conventions. Gay sensibility ("Whatever that is," says the film's interlocutor/narrator Dan Butler) concerns Rappaport less than the discovery of meaning in pop forms people frequently take for granted. It's the particular focus on Hollywood's presentation of gay stereotypes and its suppression of gay identity that makes Rappaport's film special. His personal approach deepens film analysis in ways that conventional film criticism has forsaken.
How Rappaport came to develop this approach can be seen in a bonus DVD feature of The Silver Screen titled John Garfield. This never-before-seen short suggests a rough draft of the outline for Rappaport's feature-length documentaries. It considers John Garfield's film career as more than just acting but as a symbol of a social identity (Jacob Julius Garfinkle) struggling against Hollywood conformity-same as The Silver Screen scrutinizes Hollywood's wrestling the reality of homosexuality. Rappaport himself does the narration, directly examining Garfield's screen image. The collection of clips shows Garfield in a full range of masculine humanity, but Rappaport takes him from screen idol to political figure. "He was tough but he could also be charming. He was also...well...sexy. And he was Jewish."
This observation covers a slowed-down shot from Body and Soul of Garfield baring his pits in the boxing ring. It's a startling mesh of politics and eroticism-impulses that give significance to Rappaport's scholarship. This is the kind of criticism that matters. Rappaport doesn't gainsay an objective response to movies; he articulates a personal awareness just as Garfield sought to more clearly define his (political, ethnic, sexual) sense of self.
Putting Garfield clips in an illuminating context, Rappaport goes from the wonderfully melodramatic He Ran All the Way to the haunting Humoresque, summarizing real-world knowledge that Garfield spoke on the screen: "One way or another you pay for what you are."
-Armond White
Perhaps that's why it's taken the U.C.B. five years to release its first season on DVD. The new two-disc set features audio commentary by the four founding members (Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, Ian Roberts and Amy Poehler), bonus footage, a Q&A with the group and the original trailers. Don't fast-forward through the commentary tracks: They're perhaps the most hilarious parts of the DVD. The comedians banter back and forth and finish one another's sentences like the old friends you imagine them to be. They describe settings, assign bylines to sketches and suss out the show's logic (or lack thereof).
The skits, like similar tv sketch comedy of the genre (i.e. The State, Kids in the Hall), are funny-but inconsistently so. The humor, though smart and irreverent, is slow to develop. The U.C.B., after all, are descendants of the long-form school of improvisation, a craft they honed under the late Del Close, of ImprovOlympic fame. Patience is required, as punch lines don't arrive neatly wrapped and served up. And there are clunkers, for sure. The sketches are chaotic and clumsy, but that's the appeal: imperfect comedy.
Without a doubt, the group's strongest game is below-the-belt humor. For instance, nothing tops the sketch of Roberts, over a game of golf, explaining deadpan the merits of his custom of sticking pennies up his ass; or Walsh playing an autistic-looking child who can't say anything else but "shut up," driving his parents and their houseguest ballistic. Despite such shades of comedic brilliance, the episodes never deliver the same belly laughs as, say, Monty Python.
That's because the U.C.B. are best seen on stage. Thankfully, three years after the show's demise, the troupe is still plying (and teaching) its trade of long-form improvisational sketch comedy from its unglamorous digs, tucked beneath a Gristedes in Chelsea. The fab four, having polished their chops, have developed a legion of cult-like fans and students. On any given Sunday, a line of go-lucky hipsters stretches down the block from the U.C.B. theater to see ASSSSCAT, the U.C.B.'s premiere show, which recently celebrated its 500th show and regularly features guest performers from Second City, Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
-Lionel Beehner
Well, fuck all of them. Dark Passage has long been one of my all-time favorite films. Less for the plot than for everything around it.
The story is simple: Bogart plays a man wrongly convicted of his wife's murder. As the movie opens, he escapes from prison with a mind toward finding the real killer. In order to evade the police as he does this, he gets plastic surgery to disguise his identity. A woman (Bacall) gets involved; there's a blackmail scheme; and before long the bodies start piling up. It's a dark, grim film with a happy ending that still feels downbeat.
Dark Passage is mostly remembered for the fact that the first third is shot from Bogart's point of view. It was a tricky device in those days, and nobody was really thrilled with how it turned out. The film's also remembered for its crisp black and white cinematography and its art deco sets (it was filmed on location in San Francisco).
Myself, I love the film for its performances. Not those of Bogart and Bacall, or even Agnes Moorhead's shrill turn as a scheming bitch. Much more than the leads, I love the minor characters, the walk-ons. Never have I seen a film in which every single character-even if they're only onscreen for a few seconds-is so memorable and so fully formed. However briefly you see them, you learn everything about these people. It's in their faces and their eyes. The guy who stops Bogart in an alley and asks for a light. George, the down-on-his-heels trumpet player. The counterman at the diner who opens his mouth at the wrong time. Sam, the cabby with his story about the goldfish. Even the cigar-chomping ticket salesman at the bus station has real depth.
Perhaps most amazing, though, is Houseley Stevenson as the German plastic surgeon who tells Bogart, prior to the operation, "If I didn't like a fellah, I could make him look like?a bulldog! Or a?monkey!" before breaking into maniacal laughter.
Dark Passage was unlike anything coming out of the studios in those days-which is why it's such a shame to hear it dismissed as just a minor Bogart/Bacall vehicle.
-Jim Knipfel
Q: "What's the difference between an onion and a hippie?"
A: "An onion doesn't scream when you cut it."
It's an old one, I know, but it never fails to make me laugh. In the movie it's told by a pizza delivery boy/failed stand-up comedian who, in reality, is an alien sent to Earth decades ago to kill beatniks. Or maybe hippies. Anyway, he's trapped here now.
That should give you at least a hint of what you're dealing with. To be honest, trying to summarize the plot is pretty much impossible. But I'll try.
Another alien named Blackie returns to Earth after spending 40-odd years in that other dimension. The first time he was here in the late 50s, he'd been conscripted to kill 12 beatniks, but his time ran out after he only killed 9. Now he's back.
While the world has aged, he hasn't. He still looks and dresses like an extra from Rebel Without a Cause, and still drives a red vintage convertible. He liberates another alien (I think he's an alien) from an asylum. This one also hasn't aged at all, and dresses, oddly enough, like a beatnik. The two pick up some comic books and set off across Mississippi to kill people.
Along the way, they hook up with an angry, plump, redheaded punk chick and, for a little while, a less-angry, plump brunette punk chick who turns out to be an alien amazon sent to Earth with a message about the impending apocalypse. There are lots of killings (more than the allotted three, which causes trouble), lots of garage punk (including a performance by Guitar Wolf), colors that'll make your head hurt, x-ray specs that really work, plenty of chubby punk chicks getting naked, old people who sort of come back to life after being killed, men in black, a "Malt Liquor Angel" and a dozen or more subplots that rarely make any sense.
The one thing I will give writer/director McCarthy (an NYUFF favorite) is that he tries really, really hard. Unfortunately, he's trying really, really hard to be John Waters and Quentin Tarantino simultaneously-only hipper. The pop-culture references are tossed around fast and furious, the plot is intentionally absurd, and the young ensemble cast (mostly culled from McCarthy's other films, it seems) is clearly in on the joke.
It was, admittedly, fun for a little while. After about 20 minutes, though, it became a shrill and painful ordeal. In the end, instead of either Waters or Tarantino, it felt more like a Troma picture, but with higher production values and better camera work. I guess that's worth something.
This was originally released by ETD, but quickly went out of print. The copy I saw came as part of Brentwood's Hotter Than Hell package, together with three quasi-pornographic movies about witches.
-Jim Knipfel