Beautiful Horizons

Robert Sklar

I was stunned to hear of the news of Robert Sklar's death, especially, given the circumstances: a bicycle accident in Barcelona.

I had read his seminal work, Movie Made America years before I had the pleasure of meeting him when I worked for Films, Inc. a distributor of feature films in 16mm format for showings in non-theatrical settings. Not only was he one of my customers, but I arranged several screenings of some of the more obscure Bogart, Cagney and, in particular, John Garfield films (we had an extensive collection of RKO titles) for his book, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, for which he was gracious enough to give me an acknowledgment when the book was published several years later.

He was one of the primary figures to establish the link between studies of popular culture and social history.

Another role for which he was less well known was as one of the founders of Rotisserie League Baseball, i.e. fantasy league baseball.

Rest in peace, Bob.

I'm really getting tired of writing obituaries . . .

Peter Yates, RIP

I believe it would be a bit harsh to refer to Peter Yates as a journeyman filmmaker. Granted that he had a diverse body of work and made some films that were truly dreadful (The Deep, Krull and The House on Carroll Street), but while he gained much attention for Bullitt, I believe that he should be remembered for The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Breaking Away.

Rest in peace.

The man who saved "Star Wars," RIP

Irving Kershner - 

Mr. Kershner was the only person to direct both a “Star Wars” film and a James Bond film, but even he thought he was an unlikely choice to direct “Empire Strikes Back,” the now-highly regarded 1980 follow-up to “Star Wars” (1977),George Lucas’s colossally successful intergalactic shoot-’em-up. Mr. Lucas had been Mr. Kershner’s student at the University of Southern California film school, and the two had remained friends. Even so, Mr. Kershner turned down Mr. Lucas’s offer at first, until, as he recalled in a public interview at the Colorado Film School, Mr. Lucas told him the future of the series was at stake.

“ ‘Well, I want you to think about it,’ he says,” Mr. Kershner related, “ ‘because if the second one works, then I’ll make more.’ He says, ‘If it doesn’t work, that’s the end of “Star Wars.” ’ ”

After extracting a promise that Mr. Lucas would give him freedom to make his own picture, Mr. Kershner accepted. The result was a film that introduced the gnomish character Yoda, who supervises the Jedi training of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) while Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) and the villainous galactic empire pursue the spunky band of heroes including Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) from “Star Wars” as well as a new character, Lando Calrissian, played by Billy Dee Williams. It is the film in which Darth Vader reveals he is Luke’s father, and in which Leia tells Han she loves him, only to be told in return, “I know.”

... “I considered him a mentor,” Mr. Lucas said in a statement after Mr. Kershner’s death. “Following ‘Star Wars,’ I knew one thing for sure: I didn’t want to direct the second movie myself. I needed someone I could trust, someone I really admired and whose work had maturity and humor. That was Kersh all over.”

“I didn’t want ‘Empire’ to turn into just another sequel, another episode in a series of space adventures,” he said. “I was trying to build something, and I knew Kersh was the guy to help me do it. He brought so much to the table. I am truly grateful to him.”

 

Inside Job

All week, I've been meaning to urge everyone to see this documentary on the financial meltdown - if only for the section where the academic economics profession gets raked over the coals for acting as flaks for corporate ideology.  I'll stick to seconding this very good commentary by a blogger at Huffington Post, management consultant(!) Charles Green.

The Secret in Their Eyes

I honestly can't remember how long it has been since I have enjoyed a new film as much as I enjoyed The Secret in Their Eyes - at least not since Gomorrah.

It was utterly captivating: weaving unrequited love, sacrifice in the name of love, a government suborning murder in the name of the pettiest of vindictiveness and probably the most compelling example of revenge being a dish best served cold. A seamless weaving of past and present underscores the story and every note it strikes is true, every emoition sincere and heartfelt and every plot twist pulls the viewer - and the story - along.

An impressive work and deserving of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Claude Chabrol - An Appreciation

I'm a bit late getting to mention of the French filmmaker, Claude Chabrol's passing. When I was going to film school, Chabrol was not taken very seriously by most of my colleagues; they were far bigger fans of Godard for the political point of view.

I love Chabrol for his storytelling. There is no better example of the adage that revenge is a dish best served cold than Chabrol's The Beast Must Die; few films covered ugly family intrigue better than La Rupture or Violette. The way in which the banality of marital infidelity explodes into horrific violence in La Femme Infidel still sends chills up my spine.

I agree with David Thomson's appreciation here: much of Chabrol's work will be appreciated even more as time goes on. I 'm just sad that we can't expect any more work from him.

A Fine Appreciation

There is an excellent appreciation of James Dickey's Deliverance in Wednesday's New York Times and it's definitely worth your time. I've always enjoyed both the book and film for entirely different reasons. Often you see good films made from mediocre books (e.g., The Godfather), but Deliverance is a brilliant film made from an extraordinary book.

Spoiler below the fold.

Bill Forsyth

I loved this profile of Bill Forsyth in Thursday's Times, but it also left me a little sad. Local Hero is one of my favorite films of all time and Comfort and Joy is not far behind. I also enjoyed the underlying current of sadness in Housekeeping and will forgive him the hideously mawkish Being Human.

That being said, I'm sorry to see that he's no longer directing films. I'm a big fan of making puns and his first film, That Sinking Feeling has one of the best I've ever heard. The story is about four unemployed Glasgow teenagers, who decide to make a little money for themselves by stealing stainless steel sinks. After the caper is over, one of the teens asks another if he's concerned that this will lead to a life of crime. He dismisses the idea with the comment that "I think I'll just retire with my ill-gotten drains."

It doesn't get any better than that.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

When I lived in Germany in the 1970's, the Baader Meinhof Gang aka the Red Army Faction (RAF), were the Al Qaeda of that decade. A group of leftist middle class terrorists, they targeted media, especially the Axel Springer Group, publisher of the wretched Bild Zeitung, US military sites in Germany, including Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg, resulting in the death of three, and numerous bank robberies to finance their activities, one of which took place in Kaiserslautern about nine months before I moved there.

I recently got the BluRay disc of The Baader Meinhof Complex, a film that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008 and cannot recommend it enough. It faithfully captures the era, but it is also an excellent character study of the main protagonists: Andreas Baader, the leader was captured effectively in all his rage, sexism and bombast, Gudrun Ensslin, Baader's girlfriend and a fiercely dogmatic and subtly cruel "revolutionary" and Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned terrorist, willing to wreck her daughter's lives in the name of "revolution." The two scenes that resonated with me deeply were the blatant culture clash at the Fedayeen training camp in Jordan and the moment when Ulrike Meinhof has the opportunity to say no to terrorism and, by jumping out a window, says yes.

I am also reading the book on which the film is based, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., by Stefan Aust. While the book is gripping, it appears to have been translated rather poorly and for a British English reader, using such terms as holdall (a duffel bag in England, I believe) and boot for a car trunk.

Notwithstanding the fact that he and Ulrike Meinhof worked for the same publication at one point and he knew her, he injects precious little of himself in the book. Indeed, it was him along with a former RAF member who rescued Meinhof's daughters from being turned over to a guerrilla training camp in Jordan and reunited them with their father. He did so, I might add, at great personal risk. His account in the preface may be one of the most dry examples of understatement I have ever read:

There was an attempt after that to shoot us in Hamburg, but it failed.

I do believe that I would find it difficult to be quick that casual about it.

One of the great Hollywood "mea culpas"

Screenwriter's remorse.

Here.