“Tokyo… After three long years. It makes my head spin. Just look at it. Why so many people crammed into tiny cage-like boxes? People… Such strange animals. What keeps them all going? They look like they’re half dead. Making a frantic pretense of being alive. What was so wrong about killing one of these stupid animals? I served three years… This is my territory… With no second thoughts, I’m back again.” – Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) in PALE FLOWER.

Masahiro Shinoda’s PALE FLOWER (1964) opens with this telling monologue recited by the handsome Japanese actor Ryo Ikebe. In the film Ikebe plays an aging Yakuza mobster called Muraki who has just been released from prison after serving a three-year sentence for killing another gang member. Instead of being overjoyed by his newfound freedom, Muraki expresses his despair as well as the disappointment that many of his fellow countrymen were feeling at the same time. Post-war Japan was in constant upheaval and the country was undergoing major changes under American occupation. There was a lot of confusion, anger and resentment towards the powers that be at home and abroad. People’s uneasiness and aggravation often found an outlet in many of the Japanese films made during the 1960s. Although the Japanese New Wave isn’t as familiar to western audiences as its French counterpart, PALE FLOWER is one of the finest examples of this extraordinary period in Japan’s cinematic history.

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Just what the heck is Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One? Is it a documentary or is it fiction? Or maybe it’s a pretentious mess masquerading as art or possibly the most unique experimental film of the late sixties. We’re talking about William Greaves’s rarely seen 1968 work which will air on TCM Underground on Friday, July 29 at 2 am ET and is currently available from the Criterion Collection, thanks to the efforts of filmmakers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi who were so impressed with this one-of-a-kind collaboration that they helped Greaves’s produce his long-in-the-works sequel to it - Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 1/2 - in 2005 (and which is also included on the Criterion disc).          READ MORE

Today Olive Films releases two lesser known Rainer Werner Fassbinder films to DVD in strong transfers: I Only Want You to Love Me (1976) and Despair (1978). The first is a bare-bones TV movie, the second a big budget international co-production starring Dirk Bogarde. According to Thomas Elsaesser,  Despair cost 6 million deutsche marks, when his previous works averaged 4-500,000. Despair was his bid to become a major European auteur, and to work on a larger palette. For this he received pushback from his growing cult (see Philip Lopate’s essay “A Date With Fassbinder and Despair” for a personal take on it), and it has generally drifted into disrepute, hence its unavailability on home video.

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Each month, I join my movie club for brunch where we engage in a lively discussion of all things cinematic. Being a down-to-earth group with no pretentions, we favor two watering holes on Chicago’s North Side, the Holiday Club and the Fat Cat Lounge. Meetings at the former generally entail discussions of film movements, foreign films from specific countries, or the work of acclaimed directors, while those hosted at the Fat Cat tend to cover contemporary films currently in the theaters. Nothing is more fun to cinephiles than sharing information on favorite films or dishing the dirt on duds.

Personally, I have a soft spot for the Holiday Club because the back room is decorated with posters from one of my favorite Frank Sinatra films, The Joker Is Wild, along with stills and memorabilia from other classic movies. The Joker Is Wild is an appropriate choice to don the back room of the Holiday Club, because the film is a biopic of Joe E. Lewis, sometimes called “the father of stand-up comedy.” Lewis was a Chicago-based entertainer who honed his craft in the clubs and bars on the city’s North Side during Prohibition and the Depression.  The story of his career is a testament to the gritty history of the Windy City.

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I’m in the process of assembling a spreadsheet of films that I’d like to bring to my fall calendar program. As an exhibitor, I wish I could give all (or, at least, most or many) of these films a home. But as the market place keeps shrinking the theatrical windows, and as V.O.D. becomes more rampant, the harsh reality is that a balance has to be struck between viable money-makers and smaller niche titles that are very interesting and compelling but lack high-profile visibility, this despite being top-shelf items. In the former category are titles such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In the latter category are movies like Marwencol or Bill Cunningham New York. I never need to see advance screeners for films in the former category as, for the most part, it’s pretty obvious what the big hitters are. In the latter category, however, it’s essential to watch the preview screeners sent to me by distributors because I really need to know if the material stands a chance of connecting with the audience in our area despite a low profile. Or, at very least, whether it resonates so strongly with me that I’m willing to champion it personally in the hopes that I might, despite long odds, find it an audience. Here’s what I’ve got queued up for the coming week. READ MORE

My family and I are working on a project to visit every one of the thirty MLB parks by the time my daughter graduates high school. Although this does give us a perverse incentive to encourage her to flunk a grade or two to buy us more time, we have in fact made it halfway. This week we’re off to San Francisco to see the Giants play (three times!) and I felt inspired by the occasion to say a few words about baseball movies.

It’s hard not to cite Abbott and Costello’s legendary “Who’s on first?” routine as the definitive marriage of baseball culture and film. I have two separate performances of this skit on celluloid–my Super 8 version was one of the very first movies I ever acquired, back in 1979. My 16mm print is a shopworn thing thanks to my daughter Ann playing it endlessly to memorize the dialog for an elementary school talent show.

There is actually a baseball player named Hu! He’s an infielder for the Mets.  That’s right–he doesn’t play first base! It’s a crime against comedy!

There have been many baseball movies throughout film history, but few of them meet up with my idea of what makes baseball great. The fact is, baseball doesn’t make for good movies.

For a sport that’s called “America’s Pastime,” it has little in common with the values and enticements Americans typically seek from their entertainment. Other sports are violent and fast-paced, more accessible for casual viewing. Baseball is a slog. The season is long; games are played almost every day. The games themselves are long and slow–the point of the game is to prevent the other team from doing anything.

There are some lithe athletes in baseball, but it is the only major sport that is so welcoming of the schlubby and the stout.

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Rival teams play each other often, robbing any individual matchup of the essential drama of an epic face-off. Baseball speaks of it’s statistics in grand terms–so and so is batting 400, his team is at 500. This is just a way of hiding the grim truth of the real numbers–what they mean is he fails 60% of his time at bat, for a team that barely wins half its games. These are not inspiring numbers–unless you happen to be a numbers geek like Bill James.

To artificially gin up the kind of obvious drama and sensationalism that audiences presumably crave, MLB has opted for gimmicks like the All Star Game (baseball’s equivalent of Battle of the Network Stars) or the Home Run Derby (a clip show). These are silly distractions, in my view. What makes baseball intensely dramatic are precisely its boring characteristics. When you don’t want anything to happen, because you’re up and the other team needs to be held at bay, then watching nothing happen is agonizingly nerve-jangling. And I dunno about you, but I’ve always found “agonizingly nerve-jangling” to be the opposite of boring.

When I said above about baseball being the game of the schlubby and the stout is part of this curious dynamic as well. Take a pitcher like Livan Hernandez (possibly my favorite player in all of baseball). He’s built like John Goodman and despite his insistent claims to youth is certainly quite ancient, and he throws the ball so slowly you half expect it to stop in midair before even crossing the plate. Now put him up against a batter like Adam Dunn, who looks like he was born to play Baby Bear in the live action remake of those Friz Freling cartoons.

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And yet, despite appearances, this will be a thrilling matchup.

It isn’t that baseball is impervious to athleticism–it’s more that the intricacy of the game allows for more idiosyncratic expressions of athletic prowess. That, and the intricacy of the game introduces complicating factors that overwhelm the importance of any individual expression of athleticism.

The thing is, though, that this kind of drama is hard to translate into narrative form. Almost nobody even tries. This has bummed me out, because it represents a failure of cinema. Year after year, the theaters fill up with the same kind of movies, endless repetitions of familiar tropes and genres that could lead you to believe that every story has already been told and all there is left to do is let pop eat itself. But we haven’t had every kind of story yet. Where’s the movie that reproduces, in filmic language, what it’s like to experience a ball game?

I’ve sometimes thought of baseball as the athletic form of chess, and movies about chess aren’t any better about capturing in cinematic terms what a chess game is really like.

Consider this: small, seemingly insignificant events in a game can have enormous consequences, indirectly, later on. You can walk the leadoff batter in the first inning and pay dearly for it two and a half hours later. Or, then again, you can get away with it.  That leadoff walk might be the most significant event in the whole game–you just won’t know until it’s over.

There are some films that have this aspect–few happen to be about baseball. Claude Chabrol’s films are languidly paced and follow an initially ambiguous narrative path. Only when the movie’s over and you know the final score can you review what came before and discern what mattered, what was a red herring, and how events led to one another. It’s a decidedly non-Hollywood way of telling a story but the result is. . . Baseballian.

Of the various movies that do put themselves forth as baseball movies, most simply stage some other kind of conventional narrative in a baseball milieu. The better ones do a good job of capturing the surrounding culture of baseball–

For example, BULL DURHAM, or SUGAR. Both, curiously, are set in the world of minor league play. One is a feel-good comedy, the other a feel-bad indie. I’d warmly recommend both but I’m not going to linger on them here because I’m on the hunt for that rare elusive beast, the baseball movie that captures something of the logic of the actual game.

THE NATURAL comes the closest of any that I’ve seen of being like watching a baseball game. By that I mean it has a broad, epic scope in which for some of the time it follows a predictable linear path towards an inevitable conclusion, but also has unexpected reversals of fate that throw that conclusion into doubt and change the course of the story. It’s about hubris and defeat, longing and hope, achievement and wasted opportunity. It’s about baseball.

I’d like to give the stage over to my lovely bride Julie, guest blogger and baseball Tweeter (follow her at ChicagoNatsGirl):

My route to baseball fandom was belated, circuitous and generally a long story and I won’t bore you pointy-headed film geeks with it. Suffice it to say that I have ended up among the most devoted Washington National fans (there are dozens of us), among the most sad sack teams in baseball history (Go Nats!  Believe!).

I loved THE NATURAL, however, forever. When the movie came out in 1984, I was a high school freshman and fully immersed in the Columbia City Joint High School speech and debate team (and I had the audacity to call you geeks . . .). I (somehow) saw in Roy  Hobbs’s rise to near glory, tragic fall and redemption, parallels to my own quest to become state champion in original oratory. Of course, I was not discovered delivering speeches in a cornfield (as Roy was discovered), though there were many cornfields available to me.  Nor was I shot by shadowy underworld figures, though those kids on the Chesterton team were tough and a little bit shadowy. But the desire to be known and, more powerfully, the desire to be remembered, is certainly familiar to anyone who has ever competed, regardless of the endeavor.

And that is what THE NATURAL is really about. As David said above, baseball is the vehicle for a story about human nature. But it worked because baseball is itself a story about human nature. I agree that THE NATURAL is more like baseball than most baseball movies because baseball has many stories of Hobbsian falls and Hobbsian returns to light-shattering glory.

I do not presume to be a baseball expert and I’m sure there are even better examples of comebacks but two recent examples are Washington National and long-time St. Louis Cardinal Rick Ankiel and the truly amazing story of Texas Ranger Josh Hamilton.

Rick Ankiel was drafted as a promising pitcher, some said the most promising in a generation. Everything was proceeding according to plan and his future was so bright he had to wear those expensive baseball player shades. Then, one day, he went to warm up and simply could not get the ball into the catcher’s mitt.  He just couldn’t. So first followed a battery of physical tests (he felt fine) and then a battery of psychological tests. They never figured it out. It was his bullet from Barbara Hershey’s gun.

But he got up again and reinvented himself as big league hitter and outfielder and went on to a successful career which continues to this day but probably in its twilight (but go Rick, Go Nats!).  One can imagine (or at least I can imagine) the voice of Roy Hobbs echoing in Rick Ankiel’s head as he dusted himself and learned how to hit.

Now for Josh Hamilton. Drafted directly out of high school and paid more than any high school player in history, Hamilton looked destined for greatness and quickly. Until the young impressionable 18 year-old was left to deal with the undisputably difficult life of a minor league baseball player where he fell into a nightmarish spiral of drug addition that cost him his major league contract and quite nearly cost him his life. (As an aside, his book is really good. It’s called BEYOND BELIEF.). But  Hamilton, like Hobbs, was not ready for his story to be over and it’s not. He got clean, got a minor league contract and quickly returned to the major leagues. Although David the curmudgeon denigrated the Home Run Derby, I love it. It raises money for charity and gave Josh Hamilton a truly cinematic setting to cement his return from the ashes. He clobbered 28 home runs, three of them 500-footers–a first-round record. One nearly expected to see the super-humanly patient  Mrs. Hamilton back-lit and wearing a big hat a la Glenn Close.

And would it really been so hard to arrange to knock the lights out at Yankee Stadium and commission so and so to compose a stirring score for Josh?  

So thank you for allowing me this forum briefly. I truly love this movie and hope I’ve piqued your interest to watch it again or (gasp) watch it for the first time. Because, really, who among us has thought “I want people to say  ’There goes (insert your name here).  The best there ever was.’”  

Short answer: no. But dig… in 1965, the hard-working Hollywood character actor (THE KILLERS, SORRY WRONG NUMBER, -30-), TV director-for hire (HAVE GUN – WILL TRAVEL, BAT MASTERSON, 77 SUNSET STRIP), producer (AN AMERICAN DREAM, THE COOL ONES, COUNTDOWN), radio voice of Marshal Matt Dillon before GUNSMOKE came to television, narrator of THE FUGITIVE (“Name: Richard Kimball, doctor of medicine. Destination: Death Row…”), commercial voiceover artist and indefatigable BULLWINKLE pitchman released three feature films, rat-a-tat-tat, between January and May. Well-remembered less by those who saw these first run than by the generation that caught up with them on TV, TWO ON A GUILLOTINE, MY BLOOD RUNS COLD and BRAINSTORM have been lauded by genre archivists and cult film aficionados for their individual merits but never, to my knowledge, have the three been considered as a body of work bearing the signature of a back lot auteur. All three have been brought to DVD under the aegis of the Warner Archive Collection, making a reappraisal not only long overdue but deucedly easy. And yet that’s not my goal today. Today I want to discuss how Warners seemed primed to push William Conrad to the world as a fright-maker nonpareil, putting him on par with William Castle, the “King of the Gimmick.” Press releases hawking BRAINSTORM said as much, putting wheels in motion to build for Conrad a new reputation. And then… nothing. He never directed another feature film. What happened? READ MORE

Anthony Perkins is one of my favorite actors so I was thrilled when I recently got the opportunity to see Alan Rudolph’s 1978 film REMEMBER MY NAME. In the movie Perkins plays a man being stalked by his former wife (Geraldine Chaplin) but his low-key performance is just one of the elements that made REMEMBER MY NAME such a memorable viewing experience. I was predisposed to like Alan Rudolph’s neo-noir but his film surprised me in ways that I hadn’t expected and made me gain a new appreciation for the director’s work.

Rudolph forgoes simplistic plot devices and a clear narrative structure in REMEMBER MY NAME to explore the mind of Emily (Geraldine Page) who has recently been released from jail and has decided to track down her ex-husband (Perkins) and his new wife (Perkin’s real-life wife, Berry Berenson) in an attempt to frighten them. When she’s not terrorizing the couple, Emily tries to fit into conventional society by getting herself a new wardrobe, a new hairstyle and a new job but these superficial attempts at living mask untapped passions and a seething bitterness that have laid dormant for years. Emily is not a happy woman and she aggressively dismisses anyone that gets in her way while seeking revenge on the one person who she believes has made her life a living hell. That person is Neil, her ex-husband, who is surprisingly sympathetic at first. I’ve always been impressed with the ways in which Anthony Perkins can make the most despicable characters seem benign and in REMEMBER MY NAME he does an exceptional job of making us think that Neil is a considerate and caring man who is deeply concerned for the safety of his family. But his benevolent behavior masks a troubled past full of dark secrets and lies that never fully reveal themselves to the audience. The film also features brief but memorable performances from Jeff Goldblum, Alfre Woodard and in particular Moses Gunn, as the considerate manager of the halfway house that Emily is forced to live in after leaving prison.

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