10,000 Years and Imperial Yellow

I've spent several nights this week making my way through the four disc Criterion issue of The Last Emperor, and it's worth every second and every dollar ($55+ retail, $41 if you'd pre-ordered as I did). It not only holds up but actually exceeds my expectations. It is not unlike the Forbidden City itself, opulent and overwhelming in scope but filled with glorious ornate doors that take us into serene little gardens and tiny jeweled golden cubicles.

I wondered if it would still feel as mannered and stilted as it sometimes did when I first saw it two decades ago. It often does, but that is also appropriate for Pu Yi's surreal, stilted world. It's not as odd of a vibe as, say, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, but both have a score and acting by Ryuichi Sakamoto which is always a good thing.

John Lone is as appealing to me as he was in 1987, and it's a crime that he was not afforded more roles in films of equal quality. Many people praise Joan Chen, who is superb in her evolution from a teen bride to a drug addled, spitting shell of herself at the end. However, I am still drawn more by Maggie Han's portrayal of Eastern Jewel that borders or camp but is my favorite bisexual double crossing female pilot of all time. ("I'm a spy, and I don't care who knows!)

In the commentary, Bertolucci addresses Pu Yi's not so ambiguous sexuality that is at least hinted at in scenes such as the sheet play with the eunuchs. Ultimately it is not so much a David Lean epic as it is an Ozu domestic theatrical drama, finding grace in the path towards nothingness. The sense of dread and isolation that runs throughout still resonate with me on a deeply personal level, especially the sense of privilege and adoration being a form of prison.

The film came out at a pivotal time in my life, when I was just beginning my career in international work, when I purchased my first house, when I was beginning what would be the most long-term romantic relationship of my life which was intertwined with Asia. Perhaps it's fitting that the film is being re-issued 20 years since it swept the Oscars (a hollow ceremony that usually honors sewage such as Titanic and Forest Gump), at the Centennial of Pu Yi's ascendancy to the thrown and in the Year of the Rat, the point in the zodiac when he was removed and became a figure head.

In the meantime, I will keep praying that one day there will be an objective, non-racist portrayal of the much maligned Dowager Empress Cixi, one of the most fascinating women to rise to power in modern history.

Criterion Empire

Darn those folks at Criterion and their ongoing attempts to bankrupt me. As if reissuing 3 Penny Opera this fall were not mind blowing enough, they've got a line up this spring that not only includes a four disc reissue of The Last Emperor but also The Ice Storm and Hiroshi Teshigahara's review on the life and works of Gaudi. I also spent much of yesterday evening searching in vain for their release this week of the Lubitsch musicals, primarily featuring my maternal grandfather's muse, Maurice Chevalier. Don't worry, it doesn't diminish my love of hokum such as Skidoo and Earthquake, but I know I'll be investing money in these instead of wasting it to see Spiderman 6 at the Imax.

The Oddness of the Near Past

Few things are as perplexing as the recent past as it starts developing an odd patina, even the morning after an event. I've been finding that in my obsessive transferring of VHS tapes to digital, a project that I started in 2006 and am intent on completing by the end of this summer. I've not made accurate estimate of just how many hours that translates out to, but I'd say it's somewhere between 1,500 to 2,100 hours. How many of these I'll actually sit down and watch again is probably slim, but at least I can say that I have that option. The shot on the right represents the stash I transferred from Friday morning until tonight. I promise that I have enough of a life that I don't sit deligently monitoring the process and usually don't do that many in one weekend. But it's been dreary and rainy lately.

The photo below has been circulating a lot the past six and a half years as an eerie premonition. But does anyone recall the video above that aired as a TV ad for Jet Blue in June 2001? Needless to say it was shelved three months later.

I will have to post some Enron commercials I've come across as well.

Six Months, Two Discs

When the original version of Zodiac was made available in July, it was frustratingly released with absolutely no extras. If ever a DVD cried out for explanation, this one did. I was miffed but without hesitation got the two disc, jam-packed "director's cut" that has arrived not even six months later. I was expecting it to come by 2009 or so, but this sort of rush to get it on digital and then release a definitive two-disc version at essentially the same price so soon seems extremely exploitive. Ah, well, one more DVD to add to the garage sale pile along with the duplicates of films I bought after happy hour only to come home to grumble, "Ooops, I bought that on Amazon three months ago.."

Go Ahead, Eat Your Hearts Out!

Best opening lines of a movie set in a fogged in airport.

BAGGAGE HANDLER: Mr. Buda, aren't you rather overweight?

MAX BUDA (portrayed by Orson Welles): What, me, overweight? (Pause, realization.) Oh, zee luggage!

Las Horas y el Silencio

One of the many projects I started tinkering with during the two four-day holidays of December that I am continuing in the new year is the digitalization of VHS tapes that date back to my first VCR from around 1983 to 1984. There are a number of yet-to-make-it-to-DVD treasures in there that I can wow my friends with, including such obvious ones as The Boys in the Band and more really obscure ones like À corps perdu (Straight to the Heart), a late 1980s Quebec filmed drama.

Beyond that are some of the broadcasts captured through the years. It's fascinating to see interviews from Jon Stewart's mid-1990s Fox TV show, Charlie Rose asking Kissinger for his opinion on Iraq circa 1991. Then there are the commercials! A spot for a record retailer in Asbury Park from 1993. An ad for a strip club in Oklahoma City called Show Girlz with shots of poles, feathered hair and Jellies circa 1987. Another for something called The Hair Genie that comes with an instructional VHS tape all for just $19.95!

A particular surprise is 1991's The Hours and the Times that speculates on what might have gone down between Brian Epstein and John Lennon while on a holiday on the Continent. I really liked it when I acquired (I'll refrain from sharing how) more than a decade and a half ago. What I had completely forgotten is that it is set in Barcelona. About a quarter of the way through they go to see Bergman's El Silencio. It is one of the best uses of the city's scenery of a film set there that I can recall, especially of evoking foreigner's spending time there, at once a part of and distant from the landscape. It feels like it actually was made just before A Hard Day's Night and not in the Bush I era. It's also such a great title, so familiar sounding that you can swear that it's the name of a Beatles song you know that you have heard but can't find on any of their albums. I look forward to other similar discoveries as I weave through the hundreds of hours of other mystery VHS tapes.

Das Leben ist wieder schön

Besides coming home to be greeted by a stunning Baske fisherman, what could be more life affirming than to return from a business trip and reach down to find this at your front door. Nothing spells the holidays to me than dark, dismal Weimar culture, and having Fassbinder's take on it, in all 14 filthy episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz, his epic swan song. Ive even cheated a bit an sneaked a peak at the short 1931 version of the story in the supplements section. There will be true reason to give thanks this turkey day.

Octogenarian Jazz

Like many people, The Jazz Singer is so pivotal a cultural milestone that I am sure that I have seen it even though I've only witnessed a few seconds in countless cinematic historical reviews and references set in films of the same era. I actually did see the wretched 1980 remake and have managed to erase 99% of my recall of it.

Yet I succumbed to today's 80th anniversary reissue of the 1927 original which embodies the word deluxe even by Criterion standards. The restoration is so flawless, it's hard not to think it's a complete recreation from scratch. What's especially disconcerting is just how ethnic such a hugely successful mainstream, pre-World War II film was. Coming from a Jewish family that suffered mid-American anti-semitism during the same era, I can't help but wonder how it was received in places like Indiana, Kansas or Oklahoma at the time where Catholics and Jews were the main targets of the Klan.

In recent years I've come to gain an unexpected appreciation of Jolson, especially in the superb 1933 Hallelujah, I'm a Bum. The black face scense are still pretty hard to stomach, but the three disc accoutrements are enough to make me foget all of that, adding one more volume to my ever growing library of pre-World War II cinema.UPDATE: This article in the Miami Herald sheds some light on the racial blind spot this otherwise thorough reissue offers. How odd that this and the other early cinema milestone, The Birth of a Nation, are so intertwined with the most sordid, tragic aspects of our nation's history.

Some Day I Shall Be Released

Junk Thief just got in from downtown for drinks and dinner with a friend and did a little DVD shopping before heading back home. He was in one of those, "let's see what I can nab for under $35 at Virgin." Try these three: Cleopatra Jones, Mulholland Drive (even though I've yet to watch my copy of Inland Empire) and The Day of the Locust. See a trend there? All set in L.A. All feature strong, quirky women. All feature a certain calamity and cultural clash in the land of sun and fun. Junk Thief actually loves a lot about L.A. He has long said that while San Francisco is the most pretentiously unpretentious city in the U.S. L.A. is the most unpretentiously pretentious city of the nation. It celebrates and does not apologize for its gloss and glitz, yet some of the brightest and most sensitive people I have known are from there.

San Francisco on the other hand...Oh don't get me started. I even get into trouble when I say I am going "downtown." Well, there really isn't such a place here. I usually mean that when I am going in the general vicinity of Union Square to Embarcadero. I got into the same problem when I called Midtown Manhattan the same.

Nabbing (yes, I actually paid for them) three DVDs got me to thinking about a comment from someone the other day who said "You can get anything on DVD now." Sorry, not true. While you can find the first couple of seasons of C.H.I.P.S. on multi-disc sets, there is still a number of things that border on criminal for their lack of release. I could give a long list, but here is my current top five.

5.) Cruising (1980) directed by William Friedkin. I sort of cringe putting this on the list. I may or may not buy it when it's released on September 18. Yes, it's hard to watch but in a train wreck kind of way. I actually saw it just before it was released when I was working for a movie theater circuit. I saw it in a screening room with a group of 20-25 straight men in gray suits, grunting and smirking and making snide remarks. It's often very bizarre yet still captures the vibe and scene of a very specific time in a way that those who were there say for all its wrongheadedness is often accurate at capturing a long lost era and many people on the screen who likely died within a few years after its release. The flick's not without its laughs, such as the scene of the cop/Honcho magazine model bitch slapping Pacino who seems to have gone into denial that he ever made the film.

4) Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) directed by Rainer W. Fassbinder. After a highly praised screening in New York this spring, this epic swan song of one of German's five greatest directors is supposedly being released by Criterion "this fall," but I have yet to see a release date. At five and a half hours, I can't imagine the price tag. Since many single disc Criterion's can fetch $36, I may need to take out a second mortgage for this one. But I can guarantee I will buy it.

3) Die 3groschenoper (1931) directed by G.W. Pabst. Okay, this one was likely to be my #1. Arguably the greatest pre-war German director (I put him far above Lang), the greatest piece of musical theater of the 20th century (Sorry, Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady don't come close) and Lotte Lenya all in the same screen is more than I can stand. It's a flawed adaptation of the Brecht-Weill stage version, missing many key songs, but still often brilliant. I actually have a VCR to VHS to DVD copy of a late 1980s WNET-TV broadcast that is of surprisingly decent quality (even featured in an episode of Junk Thief TV), but I've longed for the day when a nice print might be available. If there were justice, KINO might take a crack of it. Knowing it will never happen, I did a quick search, and effing mother of god!!! A Criterion release is coming September 18. Eight days before my birthday. Thanks for considering buying it for me, but I've already pre-ordered it. There is a God after all.

2) Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) directed by Richard Brooks. Okay, okay. This is almost up there with Cruising, but it too is a key product of its times. Keaton was brilliant in it. It was Richard Gere's first significant role. And Tuesday Weld was...well some say she should have played the lead. The soundtrack is pretty good too, certainly evoking the era, although already a bit dated (some going back to 1974) even when it was relased. I don't even have a VHS copy of it. Pity.

1) Play It As It Lays (1972) directed by Frank Perry. Alright. I have four words to say: WHERE. IS. THE. OUTRAGE. You can't find this on any format anywhere. It never airs anywhere. Tuesday Weld in the lead. Supporting work by Tammy Grimes and Anthony Perkins. Based on a book by Joan Didion. Never mind the lack of outrage about Iraq. Where is the outrage that we are denied this key important work of the late 20th century! I mean, you can get Mel Gibson in Tim, It's Pat, the Care Bear movies, but not this? Unite, take action, demand your rights. I refuse to leave this earth until I have a pristine print of this puppy to put in my highest definition, 70 foot wide, plasma, state of the art player. I just pray that it comes out before my eyesight and hearing give out.