Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

To accompany the previously linked Charlie Rose interviews, here is a collection of audio interviews (ten years’ worth!) with directors, actors and other various film-related subjects courtesy of critic Elvis Mitchell and his radio show “The Treatment“. I think Mitchell’s a pretty thoughtful interviewer and one of the things I appreciate about him is his relative knowledge of pop culture - unlike Charlie Rose (just to use a convenient example) Mitchell seems to genuinely know and like the films and comic books and music he writes and talks about.

The full archives of his show are here, while I’ve linked to few select shows below:

• Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine)
• Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles)
• Mike White (Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl)
• Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz)
• Quentin Tarantino (ER, Four Rooms, The Golden Girls)
• George Miller (Mad Max, Babe)
• Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children, Eyes Wide Shut)
• Walter Hill (The Warriors, The Driver, Southern Comfort)
• Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville, Short Cuts)
• David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Games)
• Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener)
• Ricky Jay (every David Mamet film)
• Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know)
• Todd Solondz (Happiness, Welcome to the Dollhouse)
• Wes Anderson (Rushmore, American Express commercial)
• Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman)
• Pedro Almodovar (All About My Mother, Bad Education)

On Jaws: The Revenge, which starred Caine as “Hoagie Newcombe”:

“I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

That’s right, I’ll go there! Is Morgan Freeman completely typecast or is he just a bad actor? He is the same character in every movie!

John Cassavetes was not only one of most important directors of independent films in the 50s, 60s and 70s, but he was married to one of the era’s finest actresses - Gena Rowlands - who happened to give many of her best performances in several of her husband’s films. The work they created together (and it was a real collaboration, as all of his films were, allowing and encouraging the actors to improvise and contribute to the process) betrays his affection and respect for Rowlands. The characters she was given to play are inspiringly complex, exceptional examples of the female presence in cinema, entirely unlike the rote, one-dimensional roles so commonly doled out to actresses - even talented ones - in most Hollywood movies.

My favorite Cassavetes film, which includes my favorite female performance of all time (seriously), is A Woman Under The Influence. There have been a lot (too many) films about mental illness, but this is one of the best, avoiding all the usual cliches (calculatedly “quirky” characters and situations, psychosis as superpower, etc.) and emphasizing the troubling ambiguity, elusiveness and unreliability of relating and living with - and still, loving - such a person. The film is careful to include all the family members in the “illness”; husband, children, friends, etc. all contribute to the unstable atmosphere, but there are no pat causes or diagnoses, nor are there any trite solutions. It’s a complex, open-ended study of behavior, and the lack of resolution or revelation only makes the whole of the film all the more moving.

Which one of you pukes left this jelly donut on the pillow of my bunk?! Was it you, Pvt. Joker, you silly little birthday-boy? I am sorry to inform you that your birthday is over! Today is your DI’s birthday and you maggots will all help me celebrate the occasion by dropping and giving me twenty! Thank you very much, now can I be in charge for a while?

Happy birthday R. Lee Ermey, Sir! On the periphery of the film business since serving as a consultant for (and appearing as a helicopter pilot in) Apocalypse Now, to bullying his way into the role of Gny. Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s classic recruiting film Full Metal Jacket, to the many gruff performances that follwed — we salute you!

Among his credits:

• Willard
• The Salton Sea
• Run Ronnie Run
• Taking Sides
• Toy Story 1 & 2
• Prefontaine
• The Frighteners
• Dead Man Walking
• Seven
• Leaving Las Vegas
• Naked Gun 33 1/3

On Baby Jesus’ birthday, there was a magic show; today is Matthew Modine’s birthday — our celebration consists of this pathetic little twinkle-toe blog entry. Private Joker has been in many movies, among the finest being our beloved Full Metal Jacket. The others (most of which are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian #@%!) are available in our local PX and are too numerous to catalog here. I suggest you cross reference this list with this one, if you’ve got the guts.

“Good night, ladies.”

Happy Birthday, James Coco. You’re no Frog, but you’ll do. Okay, not a lot to choose from, here - Coco (not to be confused with Zero Mostel) will be more remembered for his dozens of television appearances - but these four films are all worth watching.

• A New Leaf
• Man of La Mancha
• Murder by Death
• The Muppets Take Manhattan

He’s particularly unforgettable in A New Leaf. And who can dislike a man who played opposite a Styrofoam pig?

David Thewlis, had he played but one part in his career - that of “Johnny” in Mike Leigh’s Naked (above) - would surely still be remembered through the ages as one of the finest film actors of the 1990s. Fortunately, his twenty-plus year experience as a thespian has yielded dozens of roles for viewers to appreicate, all as finely rendered if not necessarily as durative or profound as his infamously scabrous performance in that film. Working with directors as well-regarded and varied (or in some instances at the nadir of their craft) as Alan Clarke, Paul Greengrass, Louis Malle, Agnieszka Holland, Henry Selick, John Frankenheimer, Joel Coen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Alfonso Cuaron, Ridley Scott and Terrence Malick, in projects both brilliant and ill-fated (The Island of Dr. Moreau? Hello?) Thewlis seems interested in occupying interesting characters, however brief or unlikeable their manifestations on screen. Among his film and TV appearances:

• The Singing Detective (’86)
• Life Is Sweet
• Naked
• Prime Suspect 3
• Total Eclipse
• Restoration
• James and the Giant Peach
• American Perfekt
• Seven Years in Tibet
• The Big Lebowski
• Besieged
• Gangster No. 1
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Kingdom of Heaven
• The New World

If you must choose just one to watch, let it be Naked — it’s a nearly perfect film with a central character as diamond black and as ferociously knowing as A Clockwork Orange’s “Alex,” requiring Thewlis to be as poetically articulate as any Shakespearean protagonist, as verbosely witty and erudite as any of Woody Allen’s urbanites, and as craftily venemous as a young Jack Nicholson. Some have called it one of the most depressing films ever made; I find it endlessing invigorating in its clear-eyed, hilarious and ultimately tender observation of the broken, displaced and unwanted (many more of us than is readily admitted).

There is a twenty-minute segment at the film’s middle that is, by itself, one of the best written pieces cinema of the last quarter century. Johnny, homeless and wandering, is let inside an empty office building by a sympathetic nightwatchman. What begins as a wary, inarticulate respect between the two is eventually ratcheted up to lacerating, Mamet-esque back-and-forth about duty, ambition, family, education, economics, politics, conspiracy and ultimately Our Place In The Universe and the true nature of the Cosmos — all without an ounce of pretension or condescension from the filmmaker or actors. I’ve watched this bit of the film a dozen times, and can’t imagine anyone wanting to be an actor - or a human being - without having seen and studied it as often.

Today is the birthday of creepy character actor par excellence Brad Dourif, perhaps most well-known for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (as seen above).

If that crazed yet vulnerable performance wasn’t enough for you, here’re a few more of his films available at the store:

• Heaven’s Gate (A gorgeous, stunning film)
• Dune (’84) (David Lynch, totally nuts)
• Ragtime (not seen it)
• Blue Velvet (awesome)
• Mississippi Burning (saw it years ago, have no memory of Dourif - or the film - at all)
• Trauma (Dario Argento, if that’s yer thing)
• LOTR: The Two Towers & Return of the King (he’s very good in these, even though the films do nothing for me at all)
• Alien: Resurrection (hahaha)

I also heard tell he’s in several epiodes of a TV show called Deadwood (though I ain’t never seen it myself, you filthy @!#$%&*-ers, so I can’t be sure).

And, my favorite of his performances (or is it a performance at all?): Werner Herzog’s Wild Blue Yonder, in which he plays an alien trapped on Earth, shuffling around a junk yard of overturned mobile homes and car parts, bemoaning his predicament and reciting a litany of complaints, finally concluding: “Aliens are stupid!”

No, pardon us — apparently we were too distraught over other news to notice that Ian Richardson died on friday at the age of 72, leaving behind scores of somewhat anonymous but fine performances in international film and British television, including the following (all available here at FIT):

Bleak House

Joyeux Noel

Marple: The Body in the Library

Murder Rooms

From Hell

Gormenghast

Dark City

M. Butterfly

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Cry Freedom

Brazil

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Man of La Mancha

Marat/Sade

He also starred in B*A*P*S (unfortunately we do not carry this important title) and was perhaps most well known to us dullard Americans as “that guy” from the the Grey Poupon mustard advertisments on teevee.