The Irishman: A Crushing Disappointment

[David Andrews]

I saw part of El Topo at a college screening in the 1980s, and used the fact that I had missed the beginning as an excuse to leave after 20 minutes.  I have, however, sat through Zabriskie Point, which is similarly painful.

Edited November 10, 2019 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

OMG, David.

Why bring up Zabriskie Point?

Blow Up was a masterpiece.  And that is not me saying it.  It is Ingmar Bergman.  Its so good that Coppola copied it by transposing it from sight to sound.  And The Conversation, to me, is his best film and one of the finest films of the seventies.

Those two films, respectively, are relevant to both the JFK case and Watergate. Even though I do not think, in either instance, that was the intent.

Please don't get me started on how good American cinema used to be.  That was  what the Afterword to my last book was about.

[Anthony Thorne]

Also THE PARALLAX VIEW, another great paranoid 70’s thriller that had a clear view of what was going on. BLOW UP is excellent, and I’m fond of the foreign retread, Argento’s DEEP RED, where Hemings is again looking for clues and trying to remember what he saw.

DePalma’s BLOW OUT is a clunkier version of the theme that I still enjoy, and which has assassination and conspiracy references aplenty.

Coppola really stuck it to blockbuster superhero movies in an interview last week after Scorsese was gently reprimanded in clickbait articles for doing the same.

[David Andrews]

Opening weekend grosses per IMDB:

Midway - $17,500,000

The Irishman - Not posted

+++

Zabriskie Point is Antonioni reaching out for Manson and missing him by inches.

Edited November 11, 2019 by David Andrews

[Joseph McBride]

I didn't like ZABRISKIE POINT when it was first released because I thought

the two leads couldn't act and were like zombies. The film seemed muddled.

But many years later, as part of my Orson Welles research, since ZABRISKIE POINT

is the film he is primarily spoofing in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (and since

we filmed much of OTHER WIND in Carefree, Arizona, right down the road from

the house Antonioni "blew up"), I rewatched ZABRISKIE POINT on the big screen

at the Pacific Film Archive. I was surprised that with the perspective of time, I now liked it and thought it an insightful

look at that tumultuous period.

The atmosphere of incipient chaotic violence

that periodically erupts was well-captured as part of the times. The Angela Davis

scene is good documentary context. Rod Taylor's capitalist character is

well-drawn and complex. The slow-motion blowing up of the house at the end is

a spectacular metaphor. The shooting of the cop, I was surprised

to find, takes place right outside a building where I now teach at San Francisco State,

the Creative Arts Building, and the strike is partly inspired by our long student

strike. And the mindless fanaticism, lack of affect, and zombie-like behavior of the film's two leads now

struck me as reminiscent of the sociopathic behavior of some of the violent

student radicals I covered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for three years for The Wisconsin State Journal. After

participating in nonviolent student protests (some of which, such as our 1967 Dow

Chemical protest, turned into riots due to police attacks), I covered the riots 

that ensued later, almost every night. Although there were about 2,000 students

engaged in nonviolent protests, there were about 200 who were violent and would

start fires and break windows and throw rocks and engage in running battles with police, who

used clubs, bricks, and tear gas. Once I was pinned down in a gun battle

between the cops and some students. 

Eventually four students blew up a campus building (the

Army Math Research Center, which was plotting bombing runs for the Vietnam War) and killed

a graduate student (one of the bombers was a government provocateur who

is still at large and probably went into the witness protection program; the government

and police knew about the bombing beforehand and let it happen). That helped end the student antiwar movement, along with the

Greenwich Village bombing and Nixon's ending of the draft so he could widen the

war despite promising to stop it. Shortly before we began filming OTHER WIND,

I angered Welles by telling him the students were getting crazy and were going

to kill somebody soon. He couldn't stand criticism of antiwar students even though

he also angrily defended LBJ as a great president because of his civil rights record while shrugging

off my criticisms of LBJ's disastrous Vietnam policy.

Two days later, August 23, 1970, we shot the first day on OTHER WIND, I flew back to Madison, and when

I got off the plane at 7:30 a.m., I asked a cab driver what had been happening

over the weekend. He said, "The students just blew up a building."  So ZABRISKIE

POINT, for me, captures that Zeitgeist.

Edited November 11, 2019 by Joseph McBride

[David Andrews]

I've seen ZP twice also, hoping I was wrong the first time, and I respectfully disagree.  Antonioni is like a lost tourist in that film, as he is in The Passenger, a film co-written by one of my teachers, Peter Wollen, and which ought to have been directed by someone more familiar with the existential suspense genre, maybe John Schlesinger or Fred Zinneman.

I really don't see how Rod Taylor's character can be described as "well-drawn and complex"; the performance is a series of walk-ons in which the character is alternately paternalistic, vaguely lecherous, or coercive.  Perhaps if they'd lured Cary Grant out of retirement, he could have put a bit of iconic meat on the bones.  As far as political representations go, the Angela Davis scene smacks of the inchoate, extra-diegetic trendiness that punctuates Godard's One Plus One.

Antonioni should never have become an internationalist, never fallen for the lure of American studio money.  He was best as a resolute European, working the mysteries one could create among actors like Alain Delon and Monica Vitti.  In fact, I just downloaded Red Desert to try and find some of the old Michelangelo magic in the fog and the mist of red hair.

ZP is the film where Antonioni began to disappear up his own behind as a filmmaker.  They ought to put that on the DVD box liner.  They can credit the line to Marlon Brando, who at the time was loudly suffering through The Night of the Following Day.  I wonder if ZP would be on DVD at all if it weren't for the Pink Floyd soundtrack selling point.

Edited November 12, 2019 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

Now I feel guilty.

 

DId my review sink The irishman?  (😀)

[David Andrews]

2 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Now I feel guilty.

 

DId my review sink The irishman?  (😀)

You killed it.  As surely as if you'd shot it with a gun.

[Ron Ecker]

Rex Reed is still around and seems to hate almost every movie he sees. It will be interesting to read if and when he reviews The Irishman.

Where he stands on JFK I have no idea.

 

 

[Rob Couteau]

Slightly off topic, but since all the film buffs are here, Ira Deutchman's long awaited documentary on Donald Rugoff (the man who,  for decades, ran the best indy film theatres in New York City) has just premiered. Rugoff had a profound effect on contemporary cinema ... and he was also an amazingly eccentric character. And in the great American tradition, he's now almost completely forgotten. 

In the 1950s his theaters were the first to offer double features and to forbid patrons to enter toward the end of a film. In some of his establishments, instead of soda and popcorn, Rugoff served only coffee. Besides Rugoff's Cinema One, Two, and Three, there were also the Art, Beekman, Gramercy, Murray Hill, Paramount, Paris, Plaza, and Sutton theaters, where films were shown on an exclusive basis. Rugoff’s Gramercy Theatre specialized in foreign and independent films. There he introduced audiences to directors such as Costa-Gavras, Werner Herzog, and Nicolas Roeg. He also featured work by American filmmakers who had fallen into obscurity. In the early Seventies, he screened ten films by Mary Pickford that hadn’t been seen since the Thirties. Rugoff employed Noelle Gillmor to create a more accurate version of subtitles for Costa-Gavras’s film, Z, paying her $100,000 and leaving her to work undisturbed for six months, resulting in the finest and most expensive example of subtitling in the history of cinema.

"Tales of Manhattan: Ira Deutchman Chronicles the Rise and Fall of Cinema 5 Mogul Donald Rugoff":

https://www.boxofficepro.com/tales-of-manhattan-ira-deutchman-chronicles-the-rise-and-fall-of-cinema-5-mogul-donald-rugoff/

Edited November 13, 2019 by Rob Couteau

[David Andrews]

It's a comment on American emotional necessities that nearly no one wants to go to a repertory cinema anymore to see classic or under-exposed films on the big screen.  People used to want to get out of the house; now they want to hide in the house from the boss, from eventual failure, and order Thai food from Wheel Deliver.  Hold the kiddies close on the couch, tell them Home Alone 2 (with the World Trade Center CGI-ed out) is Jules et Jim.  Jules et Jim is for dirty people anyway, like the kids' transgender teacher.   Film buff is likewise a disreputable occupation, since Netflix doesn't use the term in advertising.

Edited November 13, 2019 by David Andrews

[Rob Couteau]

16 minutes ago, David Andrews said:

nearly no one wants to go to a repertory cinema anymore to see classic or under-exposed films

So true. One of the last ones in Manhattan is the Paris Theatre, the nation's last single-screen, first-run theater dedicated to platform releases, which seats 581. The Paris was originally owned by Rugoff, and it showed “A Room With a View” for a whole year. It still specializes in artistic films, but barely manages to stay afloat. Located near Columbus Circle.

Edited November 13, 2019 by Rob Couteau

[David Andrews]

And here I was about to delete, on the grounds of misanthropy.

Some of the happiest nights and weekend days of my life were spent at the Bleecker Street Cinema.  What a waste that this kind of culture and sociality is gone.

 

[Rob Couteau]

Misanthropy is a cultured man's healthy reaction to the present state of affairs. A highly underrated emotion. The Bleecker Street Cinema was a godsend. What decades did you hang around there? And the Village Gate, another cultural treasure, down the block at the corner of Thompson, is now a Chase bank. That  kind of says it all.

[David Andrews]

1979 to 1983, but also on frequent visits to new York through the mid-1970s.