Movies: At Least the Baby got to see Australia

There are three facts that I am pretty sure of.

1. America has all but forgotten about its most important artistic contribution of the last 100 years, jazz.
2. Americans dislike the French.
3. Americans don't like trucker movies anymore.

Wesley Snipes character, Shadow Henderson, stated in the 1990 film Mo' Better Blues: "If you played the shit that they like, then people would come, simple as that." This simple statement speaks volumes about the sad state of jazz in America circa 2008.
To say jazz has been relegated to a third tier in the hierarchy of American music is an understatement.

In the last two major wars that involved America, France was the charter member of what was dubbed the "Axis of Weasels" in 2003 for their lack of support to the U.S. going into the Iraq invasion. Prior to that, they got saddled with "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," and before that, there was the U.S. military issued handbook, 112 Gripes about the French.

Convoy came out in 1978 at the height of the American CB Radio/trucking craze. Perhaps as America crawled out of the free living, post-On The Road hippie decade, there was some source of comfort in such films as the above mentioned movie by Sam Peckinpah and its cousins such as Breaker! Breaker! and Smoky and the Bandit. America just wanted to "keep on truckin'..." and it did; for a little under 5 years.
For whatever reason, the national obsession passed and to this day there is yet to be a proper revival.

I made it out to The Museum of Modern Art, where the good people at that wonderful establishment have taken it upon themselves to curate an almost 6 month celebration of soundtracks of the films whose direction was guided by names as Godard, Allen, Polanski, Cassavetes and a number of others. On display was the 1977 film La Menace, a film that somehow manages to capture the seemingly incongruous triad of things I have just discussed. It is a French film; it is, for the most part, a trucker film; the score is created by the late saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.

Where the idea of watching a French film with a jazz score at MoMa might conjure up visions of highbrow snobbery almost 30 years after its release the film comes off as almost campy. Basically Henri Savin (played by Edith Piaf's ex-lover Yves Montand) creates a plan to help free his current lover Julie Manet (played by the beautiful, Jane Birkin-esque Carole Laure) from false imprisonment for the murder (although it was a suicide) of his FORMER lover, the beautiful, older and somewhat obsessive Dominique Montlaur. The plan includes Savin verbally tearing Julie to shreds in front of a judge in a disposition, planting false evidence at the scene of the "crime", running scissors up and down his arm to create the look of a struggle and then escaping to Canada to fake his own death only to cross the paths of some truckers who believe Henri is responsible for the murders of some of their comrades. The film ends with Julie leaving France,newborn baby in tow, to rendezvous with Henri in Australia. Tragically, Henri has suffered the great consequence of telling one great big lie, when all the while the lovers could have just fessed up and everything might have been okay.
Confusing? Grandiose? Ludicrous?
Oui. Oui. Oui.

Leaving MoMa after watching this film (played to a sold-out audience I must add) I began to wonder if this was possibly where America began to turn. In just a few short years "smooth jazz" would become a common term, trucker films would fall out of vogue, and the French would continue to be a source of mockery among Americans for years to come. Whatever the case, with its plot line having as many holes as Tony Montana at the end of Scarface, its bumbling cops and a pretty wonderful jazz score, La Menace might be the almost unknown camp classic of the entire Jazz Score retrospective.

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Commenting: The Solypsisyphisticate #1

No Really, Why So Serious?

Why in hell has The Dark Knight made so much money? Yes, it’s a big-budget action flick, but it’s also a morally complex and ultimately ambiguous meditation on the possibility of human redemption in an inhumane world. It’s also goddamn disturbing, thanks to Heath Ledger’s brilliant performance as the Joker, re imagined by the Nolan brothers as a psychotic genius devoid of any rational motivation, a man who states what might be a strident motto for another movie villain with a wistful serenity: “Everything burns.”
So How is a movie like this able to play in the sticks?

One of the most striking differences between this and previous Batman films, including to a certain extent Batman Begins, is the realism of its setting. Not a hint of the kitsch of the Adam West days, the noirish mood of Tim Burton, or the ridiculous dayglo of Joel Schumacher. Rather, Nolan transforms Chicago into a truly representative city by rendering it nearly unrecognizable. In the opening shot, we zoom in on a blocky, nondescript glass-and-steel edifice that could be in any American city, and before we have time to get our bearings, the terror begins as a window explodes into a clear sky. The responsible party is, of course, the Joker, who stashes grenades in his jacket, blows up hospitals, holds public transportation hostage and tries to assassinate public officials. Why? Not for money, or power, or even pussy. It must be because he hates our freedom.

On the other hand, we have the Bat-Man, a shadowy government operative who performs brutal interrogations, carries out highly illegal extraditions, and oversees a secret surveillance program that the butt-baby of Orwell and Foucault (who’s the top in that scenario?) would have been hard pressed to imagine. Voice of God and drug rehabilitation expert Morgan Freeman expresses the powerful “uh-uh” factor that any responsible person would feel if faced with this technological nightmare, but he swiftly decides that, seeing as it will only be used against the “evil doers”, he’ll go along with it just this once. When the task is complete, he destroys the system, just as the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus will be reinstated when the terror alert goes down to green.

So The Dark Knight is about the War on Terror? Not exactly.* At least not in the same way that, say, The Manchurian Candidate is about McCarthyism. But it does reveal more about our current situation than does fearmongering propaganda like 24. There the functioning of power is too obvious; here we see that the manner in which power replicates itself is subtle. The discourse of terror and fear survives, not through a conspiracy, but because we all participate in it. The Dark Knight is, in many ways, a response to and a symptom of the general anxiety of the last seven years. Though it seems to me that lately people haven’t been quite as scared, or conversely, as pissed off about everyone being scared, as we previously were.
Perhaps we’ve just gotten used to it, or maybe we love this movie because we miss that fear?


*Though at least one Australian wacko would have you believe as much. Read more On "Commenting: The Solypsisyphisticate #1"!