For Lowell and Kurt, too late

Long day. I don't like enjoy much about London at the moment but Saturday's pleasure is walking down to Camden to pick up the International Herald Tribune (IHT) and then walking back up to the Lord Palmerston for a big rioja and a slow read to burn off the demons. The IHT is the international (sic) edition of the New York Times and I buy it most days. Especially with the vino.

Today's edition included a review / feature on Kurt Vonnegut. Recommended. Kurt and Mark Twain are my two favourite authors in the whole wide world. Twain I don't read so much now but Vonnegut got me. He wrote short fiction and he was workmanlike, and constantly pissed off, and he loved people even after Dresden. Go figure. In George Plimpton's Truman Capote biography, Kurt talks about Capote coming round to swim in his pool at the height of the author's self-inflicted troubles. Kurt's account is flat as a board and as kind as casting an actress in a low light.

Soundtrack: Willing, by Lowell George. I don't know where I first heard Little Feat or Zappa. I still don't think either are very good, but they were there. Can't hang a man for that.

Lowell is Inara's dad. Inara's a peach. She's half of The Bird and The Bee, shown here covering 'I Can't Go For That' and later covering 'Psycho Killer' in white gloves.

Trip Checker interview (excerpt)

Leaning back in a patterned brown and orange booth of 246, the new space age arcade of Auckland City, New Zealand, Trip Checker enjoys a prawn cocktail and one of the latest drip percolator style coffees as the shoppers stroll beneath us on the ground floor. A week has passed since his discharge from Auckland Hospital: always bony and unshaven, the gentleman drummer is a little paler than usual. But he has kindly consented to keep the agreed appointment with Jazz Dispatch where we are keen to discuss his latest commercial forays plus rumours of a possible Muse Lounge reunion.

TRIP CHECKER: Is that thing on?

JANWILLEM DORIN: Yes I believe so. In 1969, you -

CHECKER: It's so damn small.

JD: It's one of the latest Japanese products.

CHECKER: And the mike picks up everything I'm saying?

JD: Yes. I was wondering if we could -

CHECKER: I'm hip.

JD: - if we could talk a little about Montreal.

CHECKER: That's a great town.

JD: Yeah?

CHECKER: It's a sweet gig. Yeah, I mean... we'd all meet up there, not in a planned way, you understand, but we'd meet up there see - I'd say to Clive [Janitor] and Elmore [Holdall] "see you at Montree." That was what we called it.

JD: Montree was your name for Montreal.

CHECKER: Swinging. [indistinct] So we'd be hanging around the tent. There were several tents, actually but the main tent you... [indistinct] ...the desk, right? And one of us would say - Elmore, usually, he'd say "let's do a gig." And we just would.

JD: With no rehearsal.

CHECKER: No, no. No rehearsal. Rehearsal's for squares, man! Rehearsal, I mean, hey, like we're not at school, you know? We're not like in class, this is not a class, man. You have to be there. You have to be there.

JD: But you had some sort of tonal framework, I understand -

CHECKER: No framework.

JD: Nothing? You had a scale worked out or something.

CHECKER: We had nothing, man. Nada.

JD: You just went in there?

CHECKER: You got it.

JD: And what if things didn't go as planned?

CHECKER: How could they? We didn't have any plans.

JD: I mean, what if things went wrong?

CHECKER: Then they went wrong. It's like life, you know? Why should Montree be any different?

JD: I think the danger is that the audience could think you were being indulgent.

CHECKER: We were always being indulgent. The only reason anyone ever heard us in the first place is because we decided to indulge ourselves by becoming a band. Everyone's indulging themselves. This interview's indulging you, I'm indulging myself by talking, you're indulging yourself by listening -

JD: Yes -

CHECKER: I mean, it's all indulgent, you know? We're all indulgent.

JD: OK. So, moving along -

CHECKER: I mean just moving along is indulgent. You dig?

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch, 1974
Translated from the original by Kirsty Widdell
(First reproduced | Dec 02, 2002)

I saw her today at the reception

On the edge: Up

The last 3-D film I saw was Jaws 3-D. It required painful eyewear and the sharks were stop-animated to preserve the effect of three dimensions. Fear alas was not one of these, nor was entertainment. For viewers who knew anything about the first Jaws or sharks (or films, for that matter) the experience was heavy going. Think aquarium ornaments wiggling muddily across a red lava lamp and you have the idea. As a result, despite James Cameron and Peter Jackson and Jeffrey Katzenberg loving the 3-D, I've been immune to the prospect of watching movies in stereo. If it's a story, it'll work on plasterboard. Since the cavemen and so on, blah blah.

Pixar may well have faced the same skepticism with their first digital animated features. How could a computer improve on the loveliness of hand-painted animation, let alone original pencils? Even so, I felt a flicker of hesitation (about 12 frames) when a friend invited me to a preview of Pixar's Up. Love to see it. Oh, in 3-D? Should I bring aspirin?

No fear. The new 3-D system works. The eyeglasses are tinted (Polaroid?) lenses. You can read through them like sunglasses. They are Ray Ban shaped and don't make you look like a dork. My host, already burdened by eye wear, simply popped the 3-D glasses over the top and remained completely presentable in the modern Joaquin Phoenix stylee. Everyone in the preview theater, in fact, looked pretty cool.

The film itself also functions. Visually and thematically, Up contrasts precipices with cosy internal spaces: the unknown with the known; flight with stability. The character design for Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner) was my least favourite; his sidekick Russell (Jordan Nagai) was better. The winners were the animals - the bird and, oh boy oh boy, Dug the talking dog, voiced by Bob Peterson, who also wrote the screenplay. A skit on the talking ape in Michael Crichton's Congo (I am sure), Dug's dog-thoughts are enabled but not educated by a voice-making collar. Blank yet perfectly observed, he soon becomes the star of the film.

The story hangs in two halves: Fredrickson loses his wife, and then goes on an adventure. His loss is the story's premise and his motivation but it's a wobbly fit with the eccentricities of the second half: I couldn't quite reconcile the "reality" of his dilemma with the explorer, his zeppelin, the primate collection, the importance of the bird and the army of - oh, well, you will see. Such wilful fun-ness seemed like a deliberate compensation for the grimness of the first five or ten minutes.

I am wary of watching children's movies in public. I've seen most of Pixar's and tend to break into sniffles. Toy Story 2 was the worst, peaking with Jessie's heart-string lament but there are many other examples. A NYT critic recently noted that the modern trend of infantalising "adult" movies stands in contrast to children's animations which are embracing more substantial themes. I think that's always been the case with children's movies in general -- something dark runs through the Disney canon, often around the two-thirds mark, and there's always Old Yeller. When I realised Up was going to address the subjects of death and loss (hey kids!) I braced, but by the end the mood was very... ah, yes. Now I see.

Wonderful Clouds

Public Enemies is a little short for a Michael Mann film and the ending is satisfying, which threw me. But it runs deep with the qualities that made Heat and Miami Vice resonate and confound. It's shot in digital, and it's beautifully loose. The cross-cutting is Mann's tribute to Godard's A Bout de Souffle (Breathless); the storyline a tip of the hat to Pierrot Le Fou. The big machine gun sounds that jump the cinema's broadcast levels could be a nod to Arthur Penn's infamous sound mix for Bonnie And Clyde but other (real) film critics attribute this to Mann's determination to mix his own movies despite the fact that he's going deaf. And it's true that the dialogue is muffled at key moments but after so many takes on the gangster flick, what is there really left for these characters to say? In a classic New Yorker cartoon a woman proclaims, "I don't care what Socrates thinks: I want to know what he feels!" I'm of the same mind with Mann. Never mind the width: feel the quality.

Public Enemies feels good -- or rather, well. The digital lens picks up skin, wrinkles, make up, faces: you can touch this film better than anything in 3-D. When a lone informant angsts over her betrayal of Dillinger in a crowd, you can pick her out of the line-up. But the lens is also drawn to clouds and fields, and the contrasting aesthetic thus revives Mann's noirish shorthand, giving the movie's characters the stark choice between sweaty proximities and an untouchable, epic landscape. When moviemakers began working with digital I thought it would be the end of cinema. Now I'm thinking it's a beginning: a return to the days when movies were lensed rather than storyboarded, and before the mis en scene got swallowed by the design department.

The story is The Untouchables deconstructed -- or The Black Dahlia put together right. Nobody knows Billy Crudup's Hoover is gay, but the audience does, and Mann's camera catches the white flash of his eyeballs as he greets Christian Bale's Purvis. Bale gets to act and not carry the film, telegraphing George W (Oliver Stone sought him for the biopic role). Depp plays it cool and wins: it's nice to see him dialling it back. Marion Cotillard is luminously pretty and real, surrounded by jugheads and thugs that more than recall Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. The underbelly of James Ellroy and Chinatown is just a stone's throw away.

The references would swamp a lesser filmmaker but Mann keeps them submerged. In the pig-headed manner of Howard Hawks, he mines the prosaic until it becomes flinty poetry. His stated purpose (storytelling, detail) is pursued so obsessively that it becomes romantic folly: more real than real, more cruel than cruel, more beautiful than any of the characters is permitted to acknowledge. This isn't period filmmaking: it's a full stop. A jerky, nouvelle vague watershed -- the feeling man's shoot-em-up. And a great romance, too. Stare at it long enough, you all might notice.

I Love Larry

Curb Your Enthusiasm, the new series from Seinfield co-creator Larry David has the familiarity of a strange, looping dream. Larry David himself was the basis for Seinfield's character of George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander, and both men (or should we say, all three) share the same owlish stare. David is as tall as Kramer and stands with a similar stoop and when he speaks he sounds like Kramer or Jerry. When he shouts, it's impossible not to think of George. When he whines, you can hear Jerry with an Elaine rising.

The similarities between David and his co-creations becomes both the premise and the challenge of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jason Alexander appears in the debut episode as himself ("a great actor") discussing how audiences still see him as George. "They think I'm the schmuck, the idiot, the jackass!" Alexander smiles, ignoring his mentor's crushed expression. Larry David is hurt, of course, because if the fictional character of George is seen as the schmuck then the real George - Larry himself - must be seen the same way.

The joke is delivered fast, mumbled so quick that you could miss it. Like Seinfield, it's up to you to keep up with the rhythms of neglect, bitterness and insensitivity. David is a writer first and performer second. His best Seinfeld teleplays were simple expressions of complex characters trapped by their own psyche - tragedies, in fact, were they not so funny - and he has an ear for phrases that inspire the giggles. In tonight's episode when his on-screen wife Cheryl Hines dismisses a twittering noise as "a house sound" you're smiling before he picks up on it. "A 'house sound'?" David says with his eyes sparkling. "What's 'a house sound'?" By the time he's finished repeating it over and over, the term is immediately consigned to the lexicon alongside "spongeworthy," "bubble boy" and "close talker."

Curb is produced by HBO, the subscriber network behind The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and the emerging creative force in mainstream television. Tonight's episode kicks off the second season: a third is underway in the States. David is philosophical about its success. "When you're not concerned with succeeding, you can work with complete freedom," he says.

Filmed as a cheap reality show and ad-libbed by its celebrity guests, the show pokes fun at fame and the cruel reality of its passing. The fact that Seinfield has finished and its magic has been dismantled might seem like a good reason to avoid its stars and its co-creator but this depressing grimness is part of the series' bite. Even the show's title - "Curb your enthusiasm, folks!" - is an old stand-up dig at an audience that isn't clapping. Larry knows you're not expecting to enjoy his new show, but this is why you may.

-- NZ Herald, 2002

LA Stories

Miles Millar is a British screenwriter working in Hollywood. A poster for Kurosawa's Ran hangs on his office wall. David is a Hollywood agent. A poster for Batman hangs on his.

David says he sold the script for Batman. I'd be interested to know which one since the screenplay went through 10 drafts in as many years before being mostly ad-libbed on a sound stage, but I don't doubt his word. As the Italian saying goes: success has many fathers, but failure is always a bastard.

Writing is a group activity in Hollywood. Everyone does it - or rather would if they weren't so busy doing other things like producing or acting. I think Joan Didion said this - or perhaps it was John Gregory Dunne. Anyway, I'm saying it now in this review – and getting paid for it. See? That's how "writing as a group activity" works.

To receive their credit and a six-figure cheque for Lethal Weapon 4, Miles and his writing partner Al had to arbitrate with the Writer's Guild and pitch over the phone to Mel Gibson. In the premiere press line, the documentary crew ask Mel if he remembers Miles. Mel's handsome forehead jumps. He doesn't remember, and dollars tick behind his eyes as he calculates the time wasted answering the question. Lethal Weapon 4 had more writers than he has children.

Writer Simon Kelton and fellow expatriates play cricket in the Hollywood hills and go hunting, complete with horses and red coats and beagles happily bouncing through the scrub. They aren't hunting an actual fox, Simon smirks -- thus missing the deeper irony that, therefore, they aren't actually hunting.

Simon's is one of four 'LA Stories' in this documentary, and knowing how they end makes it no less enjoyable. Anyone with a working set of eyes will see it coming.

Tina Jenkins' script is about a man who turns into a cat. A newcomer to Venice Beach, she has mastered the language but not the lingo. She says "lorry" and "green-lit" instead of "truck" and "green-lighted". She borrowed £10,000 to come to LA. Guess how well she does.

"Nobody knows who writers are," Miles says gamely. It must be difficult coming up with what he originally describes as "a fresh idea" when your career path is already written for you.

The grim reality is that working Hollywood is as predictable as its product. If you like shouting down the phone, you could be a producer. If you like sitting on the other end of the line, then writing may be the way to go.

There is money in it. Hollywood makes less than 200 scripts into films each year but many thousand more are optioned so someone's getting paid.

Even fewer films are being made about Scottish hairdressers but one, The Big Tease is going into production as LA Stories begins. Co-writers Sacha Gervasi and Craig Ferguson say the film was green-lighted (sic) because of the success of The Full Monty. But don't worry - if it bombs, the credit will be all theirs.

-- NZ Herald, 2001