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Appreciation

Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Christoph Waltz interviewed in Time:

TIME: What is it like to receive all these awards? Does it even matter if you get an Oscar, or is the praise enough?

WALTZ: Praise is nothing that accumulates. Praise is a sequence, especially if you've toiled for a long time. Praise does not pile up. So in a way, you can't get too much. I don't consider it to be a quantity that you can measure by volume. There's a new aspect to the appreciation and the acknowledgment every time, because it's always coming from somewhere else. So I try to take the praise very specifically, because then I really can utilize it as an encouragement. It's like a finger that points in a certain direction. I take praise as not just a reward and a result but also as the beginning of a new process.

If this role [in Inglorious Basterds] hadn't come along, would you still be an actor? Would you still believe in the craft?

I probably would still be an actor, because this is what I make a living doing, and I have been making a living with it for so long. To chuck it all in and start something else — it's a bit too late. Would I still believe in the craft? Absolutely, but on my terms, and that's where the difficulty would set in. It would feel like fighting a lost cause. But because I'm so bloody stubborn, I would fight it anyway... But all of a sudden — with the emphasis on sudden — it looks like it's not a lost cause. It looks like I was not traveling on the wrong steamship in the wrong direction. So in a way, after 30-something years, it's more than gratifying, it's more than just an accolade. It's really like a new start.

Shant quit ripping

I thought about Jack the Ripper a lot during The Wolfman, as well as Dracula and that book about girls running across the moors. The first half of the movie (actually the first two-thirds slashed down to span kidult attention) is classic Hammer Horror meets steampunk, as prescribed by the Rules of Bram: the tourist train twisting deep into the foreign land; letters from Mina -- sorry, Gwen (Emily Blunt); the Character Actor Pub; the handsome Jonathan Harker -- again, sorry, Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro); the asylum; the pseudo science; the address to a tiered medical audience. It's all lifted in solemn and direct tribute to Francis Ford Coppola's maligned-at-the-time Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). (Which I always considered near-perfect - is it finally getting the respect it deserves?)

I enjoyed The Wolfman's lifting, and the pastiche, and the flickering candle camp of the start of the film. The story's told in a hell of a rush, though so the filmmakers (sorry #3: the producers) can rush to the Big Face Off: a showdown between werewolves. This is where the movie stopped being a tribute to things I enjoy and suddenly became Wolverine. All movies have to have a Big Face Off now so that children will pay to see them and thus cover the overheads it took to computer generate said sequence, but even as the first half (two thirds) of the movie howled past I was hoping for a trade off, namely that director Joe Johnston (or someone - even old guy editor Walter Murch) - would ape not only the look and feel of classic Hammer films but also the structure. The structure being: very, very slow build up to The Terrible Thing (as per the first para: Stoker / steampunk / Victoriana rules etc); flash of psychosis and/or nudity somewhere along the line; lots of shadows and finally, only at the very end, The Terrible Thing Revealed. Mike Nichols followed this rule pretty closely with Wolf (1994) and it worked great. In fact, it worked as recently as From Hell (2001). But thanks to franchise fucking, nerves, big studios, The Kids, whatever, The Wolfman went all X-Men in the end.

It's a shame. The cast is fantastic, the sets and locations perfect, the acting just right. Anthony Hopkins is a gold-plated prick, Ms Blunt is distressed and lovely, and Benicio is the ill-fated outsider. There's an incredible movie in here waiting to bust out. Director's cut, maybe...

Bedside reading #2

Lots to write about this. One of the better author biographies I've read, but it's gloomy: his friends and family really did drop like flies. I had the good fortune to attend the recent Complicite production of Endgame which I had mixed feelings about -- I enjoyed it but began to wonder if the author's estate's control over the work was limiting its interpretation. Mostly however, watching Endgame I was struck not by the intellectual play but the human source of its deathly abstractions, in particular the death of his brother, Frank. Prior to that he was grieving for his father's early death and his Parisian comrades who died in the French resistance; after the war, first his mother passed and then the luminous Ethna MacCarthy. Once you take that into account along with his own health problems, the immobile creature in the chair with the kerchief draped over his face seems less of a stylisation. Beckett's was a rough life but it was brightened by his artistic contacts with James Joyce, Nancy Cunard, Marcel Duchamp and others. Knowlson's book includes mention of a time when Beckett and Duchamp whiled away their Occupation days playing chess - can you imagine? Such a scene seems incredible - a layered tableaux.

I'm the one on the left

From the 2010 Christian Bourgois catalogue. Writing is hard work but some days you get something nice in the mail and the wind at your back.

Meaningful stairs

Last time I was in Paris I walked around the corner and slap bang into a set of steps I had seen before. It took me a moment to spot where: I was standing in the square which became the final scene in Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale, one of those movies I shouldn't love but do. I snapped the photos on my Olympus XA 35mm and stitched the panorama together in Photoshop. Here is DePalma talking about noir and dreams:

I had this idea to do a noir movie, but I felt that noir only works in a surrealistic way. Which meant that I had to create a dream, and put the noir story in the dream. If you look at these old black and white movies, with their sort of fatalistic storylines and very stylized way of shooting, I thought the dream device would be the best way to re-imagine it in a contemporary setting. So I put the noir melodrama in the brackets of her dream sequence and I used a lot of things that sort of happen when you have a dream. Certain things you experience reappear in your dream in kind of strange juxtapositions, and that's why the noir story appears the way it does. It doesn't seem that many of the people who have written about it have quite seen that. Somehow they don't see where the brackets of the dream are, so they write about the movie like it's a straightforward, realistic noir melodrama, but in reality it's a kind of surrealistic rethinking of the noir form. There are things that don't make sense until you think about them later, much like in a dream. You have all of these images that you have to ponder later: "why was that there" but the driving sense of it is essentially pretty simple, you know, she steals the diamonds, these guys are after her, and they're going to kill her. All the things that happen, are more or less consistent with that very simplistic, fatalistic storyline.

The Morning After

My desk the day after finishing the ms. The breakfast items are new.