BP Quick Hitter: The Wizard of Oz (1939)

I hope we don’t end up sleeping at the Port Authority.

Director: Victor Fleming

Writers: Noel Langley. Florence Ryerson

Starring: Judy Garland, Florence Hamilton, Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr, Frank Morgan

I don’t have much to say about this movie, except this. For something that is supposed to be a building block for every child’s cultural mythology, I realized while watching it that it’s entirely possible I never paid much attention to it before. And what I discovered (unsurprisingly I am sure to most) was a much more complex and emotionally engaging film that I ever remembered.

That’s part, I suppose, of the magic of reliving films with your children. You see them in new ways, as an adult, but  also through the eyes of the child. You can witness the wonder, the pure joy, that films like this can provide even in our jaded 21st Century. Since we watched it the first time, my daughter has watched it four or five more times, preferring it often to much more modern and sophisticated entertainments from the Disney/Pixar assembly line.

More on I’m Not There

This film remains in my head for the second, or maybe third, straight day.

And hell, as long as I am writing this blog for myself, I might as well be self-indulgent. It’s the Dylanesque thing to do.

Despite my first reaction to the Richard Gere sequence on my first viewing, I have become convinced that if Ledger’s character is the heart of the movie, Gere is the soul, while Blanchett is the smooth surface, who serves up misdirection. She’s the joker in the deck.

It’s the Gere sequence that drew the greatest amount of derision from critics. Salon’s terrific writer Stephanie Zacharek admitted to feeling sleepy every time she heard wagon wheels. She wanted to get back to Blanchett, the live-wire 1966 Dylan.  And I am sure many viewers agreed with her.

Part of the reason for my change of heart involves a greater exploration of the source material. The first time around, I spotted the direct references to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the Sam Peckinpah movie in which Dylan acted in a supported role. But as it dawned on me (with some helpful reading) that this was also the Dylan after his mysterious motorcycle accident, the Dylan who holed up in upstate New York with the Band, who produced “The Basement Tapes” and “John Wesley Harding.” This was the Dylan who retreated from society and embraced the Cowboy Fantasy.

Five years ago, I did the same thing, retreating out to the Four Corners, near Durango, Colorado. I too embraced the fantasy that the West could heal. I was wrong.

The clincher, however, is the absolute blood-chilling funeral scene featuring a dead teenage girl dressed as a china doll, as the mournful “Goin’ to Acapulco” is sung by Jim James of My Morning Jacket. This Louisville band is the modern equivalent of the Band, its music serving as a survey of the landscape of the South. There was something so pronounced, so affecting by that scene that I haven’t been able to get that song or that moment out of my head. It’s David Lynch by way of Federico Fellini, with some Peckinpah left over.

BP/DVD Review: I’m Not There

When was the last time you watched a film again immediately? Last night, I watched Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There and found it absorbing and somewhat perplexing, but my recollection was that it dragged on too long and took a left turn two-thirds through with Richard Gere that damaged the overall arc of the story.

But it nagged at me all day Sunday. So I slid the DVD in and watched it again. Maybe it was the tequila Saturday night, but the second time around, the film revealed more to me than before. And I think I began to understand its undeniable brilliance.

The inventive premise in this Bob Dylan biopic is that Dylan, always a chameleon, could not be played by one actor. So Haynes employed six, including, most famously, Cate Blanchett, playing the 1966-era Dylan at the height of his fame. None of the characters are actually named “Bob Dylan.” (As has been noted often, even Bob Dylan wasn’t named that. Robert Zimmerman took the name from Dylan Thomas.)

I’m not a Dylanologist–I have no more than a passing familiarity with his classic albums from the 60s, although I’m a big believer in his later work, including “Blood on the Tracks” and “Time Out of Mind.” But even so, I could recognize how Haynes was attempting a high-wire act of fusing the ambiguity and inscrutable nature of Dylan’s lyrics with his persona.

BP Double Bill: Against All Odds/Out of the Past

Baby, the odds are my back isn’t gonna hold up much longer.

Sometimes movies choose you. You can’t choose them.

In this case, as with much of young adult life, I didn’t know any better.

So when I saw Against All Odds as a senior in high school, I thought it was a fairly cool movie, as I did with Risky Business, Top Gun, Blade Runner or anything of the era. Football, Southern California, a beautiful woman, and a fire-engine red Porsche 911. Murder, intrigue, sex, cold Mexican beer.

And you know what, I still think it’s a fairly cool movie.

This is what I mean about certain films being imprinted upon you. There’s little I can do about my warm feelings toward this movie, because they are intertwined with the state of being a teenager, hopeful and easily impressed, seeing the film at the old General Cinemas at University City in Columbus with my high school girlfriend, Jennie. The good news is that after a recent viewing, it holds up well, better than I could have hoped. (The bad news is that are many more movies of the time I cherished that do not. The Last Starfighter, anyone? I mean, Robert Preston?)

I didn’t learn until much, much later that Against All Odds is, of course, a remake of one of the most celebrated film noirs of all time (should that be films noir?), Out of the Past. That 1947 film is probably best remembered as a cold war between two of the smoldering tough guys of the time, Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, blowing smoke at each other, speaking elliptically, an undercurrent of tension always crackling. Mitchum sauntering through the California countryside in a trenchcoat and fedora, a former private eye who can’t escape his past.

The basic plot of the two films is the same, but the similarities end fairly quickly. Both begin in the present and dissolve into the past and both involve the staple of the noir, the femme fatale. But here is where the more modern movie, like so many attempted remakes of and homages to 40s classics, loses its footing.