1. "Manny Farber, 1917-2008": This one really hurts. Ray Pride remembers and gathers links. More at GreenCine Daily. On Glenn Kenny's blog, poster Tony Dayoub points us to a Paul Schrader short film on Farber's painting "Untitled: New Blue."
["Farber was one of the indispensable prose writers of our time, a great entertainer in his own write, yet deeper concerns than his own words permeate these pages. “One of the joys of moviegoing,” he once wrote, “is worrying over the fact that what is referred to as Hawks might be [screenwriter] Jules Furthman... and that, when people talk about Bogart’s ‘peculiarly American’ brand of scarred, sophisticated cynicism they are really talking about what Ida Lupino, Ward Bond, or even Stepin Fetchit provided in unmistakable scene-stealing moments.” These essays are ripe with an appreciation for texture, for the depth or shallowness of cinematic space, for stolen moments, for the wiles of Hollywood’s cheese-headed bores. Writing on films as diverse as those of Preston Sturges, Werner Herzog, Don Siegel and Nicolas Roeg, Farber does not blink. He remains our best: a curmudgeon, but a painstaking one who concedes that his effects are like the layering and smearing and reworking of layers of paint, that he is “unable to write anything at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting.”"]
2. Just 'cause. This book is indispensable. A favorite passage follows, from the 1952 essay "Blame the Audience." (Photo from Ray Pride, linked above.)
["While Hollywood, after all, still makes the best motion films, its 1952 products make me want to give Los Angeles back to the Conquistadores. Bad films have piled up faster than they can be reviewed, and the good ones (Don't Bother to Knock, Something to Live For, The Lusty Men, My Son John, The Turning Point, Clash By Night) succeed only as pale reminders of a rougher era that pretty well ended with the 1930's. The people who yell murder at the whole Hollywood business will blame the current blight on censorship, the star system, regimentation, the cloak-and-snit types who run the industry, the dependence of script-writers on a small group of myths, TV, the hounding of the Un-American Activities Committee, and what I shall laughingly call montageless editing. There is plenty of justification for trying to find what is causing this plague, and I point my thumb accusingly at the audience, the worst in history. The present crowd of movie-goers, particularly the long-haired and intellectual brethren, is a negative one, lacking a workable set of values or a sense of the basic character of the medium, so that it would surprise me if any honest talent in Hollywood had the heart to make good pictures for it."]
3. "Fishburne officially joins 'CSI'": From Variety.
["Laurence Fishburne, who first emerged last month as the leading candidate to fill the leading actor void on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" next season, has officially joined the cast. Fishburne joins the show following thesp William Petersen's decision to depart after eight seasons (Petersen continues as an exec producer). Fishburne will first appear in "CSI's" ninth episode this season. He'll star as a former pathologist turned college lecturer, who focuses on why people turn violent - including traits that he's disturbed to find in himself. The character joins the Las Vegas Crime Lab as a Level 1 CSI after assisting in a murder investigation. It's a homecoming of sorts for Fishburne, who played Cowboy Curtis on the Eye's classic Saturday morning series "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" in the mid-1980s."]
4. "SAVE US! Warner's 'Watchmen' In Legal Peril After Judge Won't Dismiss Fox Suit": A Nikki Finke report making the rounds.
["EXCLUSIVE: A federal judge has denied a Warner Bros motion to dismiss 20th Century Fox's legal battle over the rights to develop, produce and distribute a film based on the graphic novel Watchmen. This is huge Hollywood news because Warner Bros plans to release on March 2009 its highly anticipated big-screen version of the popular comic book written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Fox was seeking to enjoin Warner Bros from going forward with the project, and U.S. District Court Judge Gary Allen Feess on Friday refused to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Fox on February 12th of this year. "In essence, the Judge appears to conclude that Fox retained distribution rights in Watchmen through the 1991 Largo quitclaim, and he concludes that, under the 1994 turnaround, producer Larry Gordon acquired an option to acquire Fox's remaining interest in Watchmen that was never exercised, thereby leaving Fox with its rights under the 1994 agreement," a 20th Century Fox source just told me. "While the Judge's opinion is preliminary and his views could change in the course of the litigation, his current take on the facts is consistent with our position." I'm told the court is still contemplating Fox's motion for an injunction. This is indeed a stunning development which could imperil Warner Bros' entire 2009 movie slate. Sources point out to me that Warner Bros had a similar problem with the Dukes Of Hazzard movie before Judge Feess and had to pay tens of millions of dollars to release the film."]
5. "Cow chases bear away from her favorite tree": From MSNBC.
["Residents of a rural Colorado town said a cow named Apple chased off a bear that had climbed into her favorite apple tree. Jack McDonald of Hygiene, about 30 miles northwest of Denver, said the bear had climbed out of the tree when the cow approached it Sunday afternoon. McDonald said the animals touched noses and hung out together for a bit before Apple chased the bear off. "It was hilarious," McDonald said."]
Quote of the Day: Isaac Asimov
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): 'Cause you can never get enough Cowboy.
Clip of the Day: ...never enough...
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Links for the Day (August 19th, 2008)
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11 comments:
"'Cause you can never get enough Cowboy."
Nice one. I'll have to use that during the next Dallas Cowboys game (my Walken impression is serviceable).
Personally, I can't see why you'd ever stop Watchmen.
Except for the obvious reasons. And this.
Farber's passing is a reminder of just how few critics are writing from the heart, for themselves first and foremost -- the best way, the only way really, to do it and have a shelf life longer than a few months. The best part of reading him (for me at least) is the sense that I'm getting a glimpse inside another person's mind and personality. It really is an example of what another one of the greats, Pauline Kael, described in her 1995 collection "For Keeps" as a continuation of autobiography by other means. His writing on directing and acting - and on the mysterious alchemy that happens between viewer and movie - was not just astute, funny, original and accurate, it was deeply humble in a way that very few great critics manage to be. It wasn't about providing answers; it was about the posing of questions and the construction of modes of inquiry that were never pseudo-omniscient or hectoring, never preening and utterly unconcerned with influencing the market or other critics or even moviegoers. In the fullness of his self-expression and the idiosyncratic nature of his achievement, he probably had more in common with Walt Whitman, E.B. White and George W.S. Trow than with almost anyone writing about movies right now. The highest compliment I can pay him is to say that the fact that he wrote about film seemed, at times, quite incidental. He would have been just as rich, satisfying and entertaining if he had written about sports, politics, architecture, history or whatever he happened to have for lunch that day. He was his own man.
I would have loved to read an article by Manny Farber on basketball, those Knicks teams of the 70s or Kareem's anti-social dominance or a Pistol Pete profile; hell, his ideas on Kobe would probably be a killer read. Baseball may be America's pastime but basketball much better suits the spatial acuity Farber brought to film writing; and it's definitely become a much more interesting, contradictory, stylish league in the last few decades, which makes it the coolest sport, probably, inflecting fashion and culture in a way that baseball simply cannot. The guys at a blog like Free Darko (you know it, Matt? Keith? House readers? any of you film nerds interested at all?) are getting there, especially the ringleader, who goes by the handle Bethlehem Shoals, now a writer for The Sporting News and SLAM magazine (birth name Nathaniel Friedman), whose prose eludes simple reduction yet remains vital and stimulating and readable. I don't know if he's the Manny Farber of new sports journalism but he's a talent to watch -- if you care about basketball. And, to boot, he's inspired me to try writing a basketball column next season, which I'm going to name after a ridiculous and hilarious phrase Jay Bilas uttered during the draft that, oddly, sounds like a Manny Farber coinage: "Considerable linear extent in space".
Shoals and the Free Darko crew are mostly very good -- and so are their frequent partners-in-blog JE Skeets (a Toronto boy, like me) and Kelly Dwyer (formerly of Sports Illustrated). More film nerds should also be basketball nerds. Ryland, I will read that column.
Ryland, Adam N: I haven't followed Free Darko because I'm not a sports buff (after leaving Dallas, I deprogrammed myself), but your intimations of Farber-esque thinking have convinced me to give it a shot. BTW, I am quite familiar with Bethlehem Shoals via the outstanding "Wire" blog Heaven and Here, linked to many times via The House.
Manny Farber was great.
I was only a year old when Manny retired from teaching at UCSD, but I've had the privilege of getting to know his "twin brain", JP Gorin.
"Rather die from passion than have passion die in me," JP would often say (quoting Godard). The ultimate desire he had of his students (mostly pre-meds), he professed, was not to generate an interest in film, but to spark in them a burning desire for something, anything.
I think its apt to say Farber would have been just as fervent writing about anything - sports, literature, marine biology - as long as the passion was there.
It's also fair to say that the fact that cinema was at the center, but not THE center of Farber's life might have contributed to his unusual perspective. The Paul Schrader interview linked seems to confirm this. He apparently felt no need to see every film by a particular director before rendering a judgement on his sensibility; it was sort of a film critic corollary to Emerson's idea that all of history is contained within an individual life.
Matt: Indeed, his approach is characteristically American, and it's no surprise that Cavell, too, was/is a fan of Farber.
Adam: Thanks! I hope it's interesting. And I hope you comment. The Raptors should be interesting next year. Hell, the whole East should only be getting better, you know?
Simon: Word.
Said Gorin: “A life is told chronologically: First he was this then he was that… But what makes him extraordinary is that he was in fact both [critic and artist] at the same time and from the beginning. What makes him extraordinary is that he was so fluent in so many spheres. Manny only had one religion and that religion was work.”
“He had a very profoundly American voice,” Gorin said, adding that one can just as easily say “Manny Farber, American” as one can say “John Ford, American.”
“I’m not the only one to whom Manny was essential,” he said. “But his death is not tragic – it is the conclusion of a life extraordinarily lived and extraordinarily full.”
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