Pauline Again (Naturally) (2021)

I’m writing about Pauline Kael again. Cue Al Pacino in The Godfather Part III (one of Kael’s last reviews before her retirement, one that was perhaps a little too forgiving--I think she would have eviscerated that film in 1977).

I don’t really want out; I still enjoy talking and writing about her, and I expect I’ll be doing so for as long as I live. I had a flurry of Kael activity about 10 years ago, first when I interviewed Brian Kellow about A Life in the Dark, his Kael biography, and--an offshoot of that--also an intense and lengthy message-board argument with someone who didn’t like the book and ascribed all sorts of nefarious motivations and shortcomings to it that I found rather hysterical. Must have gone on for at least a couple of hundred posts; it was exhausting.

A year ago, another flurry. There was What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, a documentary that was a good companion piece to Kellow’s biography; not sure when it was released exactly, but I made the two-hour drive into Toronto to see it on Feb. 12 (I still have the ticket stub sitting on my desk). At the same time, I finally obtained a copy of Talking About Pauline Kael, a book I had been coveting for a few years. That must sound weird: if you’re so devoted to Kael, why would you covet rather than just buy the damn thing? Without getting into too much detail, it’s pricey--very pricey, as books published by smaller academic and university presses generally are. But, in a very Kael-like display of heedless spunk--kidding, kidding--I contacted the publisher and asked if they’d send me a copy if I promised to write about on my homepage. Which they graciously did. I read the book immediately, saw the documentary, and, come March, I was all set to go.

At which point, I got badly sidetracked for the next few weeks--no explanation necessary, right? By the time I re-focussed, enough time had passed that, with my very faulty short-term memory, I wasn’t really up to writing about either anymore. Life went on.

(God, I get bogged down in process…I really ought to be in the U.S. Senate.)

Sparked by Charlie Kauffman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and also by long-lingering guilt, I ordered a copy of the documentary, reread some of Talking About Pauline Kael, and I’m again all set to go. The Kauffman film, if you haven’t seen it, takes a very bizarre detour--bizarre for almost any other film, that is; it may be one of the less bizarre things about I’m Thinking of Ending Things--where one of the two principals begins quoting Kael’s review of A Woman Under the Influence (before or after which, there’s glimpse of Kael on a bookshelf--not Reeling, the book in which the review appeared). What did I think of that? Same thing I think after every film that gets a strong reaction from me, good or bad: what would Kael have thought of that (both the film and her inclusion)?

Anyway, I’ll start with Talking About Pauline Kael. I wasn’t quite up to re-reading the whole thing--the two weeks that would have taken more than anything--so I limited myself to three chapters: Ray Sawhill’s, which I singled out in a message-board post when I read the book last  year; Steven Rubio’s, because I’ve come to know Steven over the past few years (we’re currently collaborating with Scott Woods on a series of Zoomcasts about various films and TV shows); and Brian Kellow’s, because, as I mentioned, I interviewed him when his biography was published. I also think that’s a very good cross-section of writers in terms of their relationships to Kael: a close friend (Sawhill), a fan (Steven), and a biographer (Kellow).

I’ll start with Steven’s essay, and a (probably self-aggrandizing) note that this kind of reminds me of the ending of Kael’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday review, where she was writing about a film written by Penelope Gilliatt, her rotating partner at The New Yorker: “Miss Gilliatt and I are ships that pass each other in the night every six months. It is a pleasure to salute her on this crossing.” (Reportedly, they were far from actual friends.) I first got to know Steven close to 15 years ago via rockcritics.com. I can’t remember the exact details, but I soon started reading and posting reader comments on his blog, we were involved in a Facebook project once, we joined Scott in a long podcast on Robert Christgau’s memoir, and he’s been supportive above and beyond with my own self-published books ever since.

Steven’s chapter zeros in what he designates as Kael’s “expansive subjectivity,” which is a great description of the critics I tend to gravitate to, and also of what I hopefully get into my own writing. Eliminate either part of that and the writing loses out: too subjective, leaving the work behind and making it solely about the critic (I can think of examples I won’t mention), that can wear you down; the other extreme, a critic whose own self disappears and writes only of the work, well, I know that approach is viewed by many as the only legitimate approach to criticism, but it doesn’t really work for me, either as a reader or a writer. Here’s Greil Marcus describing in an interview what he was after in his old “Speaker to Speaker” column: “What does it mean to be a listener? What are we doing when we listen? What happens? What doesn’t happen? What could happen? I really am a critic in the sense that I don’t give a shit what the artist intended, or what he meant. I couldn’t care less. What I’m interested in is what happens when you listen.” (Italics mine.)

For me, that means I’m not all that interested in how important Vertigo is to Hitchcock’s obsessive lifelong quest to find the perfect blond. I’d rather read about what it feels like to sit there and watch Vertigo, or what place it has in the writer’s life. And then connect that to the film, and its meaning, and go from there.

As other Kael observers have noted, Steven also writes of how Kael was never boxed in by a theory or prescriptive rules (the immediate contrast being Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory, which Kael methodically dismantled in a famous early piece of hers): “So how does a writer who lives in the moment by her wit, style, bombast, and immediate passions influence others?…I see what I got from her was less a way of looking at movies than a way of looking at life. Challenge everything, I hear her say in the lines, and often between them.” I like that: “A way of looking at life.” I’d apply that equally to Bill James, another writer I know I share a passion for with Steven.

Ray Sawhill’s piece, “A Memoir in the Style of a Long Blogposting About a Friendship with Pauline Kael” (also the title of a great Primitive Radio Gods song, by the way), is both a remembrance of Sawhill’s friendship with Kael, and also an attempt to dispel some assumptions and myths about her. As a friend and sort-of mentor (i.e., Sawhill resisted), Kael was always pushing him (or nudging; was he pushed or was he nudged?) to get on a career path as a critic, and she would help him by way of contacts and/or recommendations wherever she could. He wasn’t particularly ambitious, though, and that would create some tension in their friendship. Actually, if there’s one minor quibble I have with Sawhill’s piece, it’s that, in an almost passive-aggressive way, he gives an idealized version of himself as a drifting pure spirit resisting the blandishments of success being dangled in front of him. I’m not saying this isn’t an accurate portrayal of their relationship–I’m sure it was, and how would I know anyway?–just that he might have deemphasized that a bit.

Sawhill’s attempt to set the record straight on Kael comes in the form of nine numbered statements:

• Best not think of Pauline as a normal person.

• Best not to think of Pauline as complicated and/or neurotic.

• Best not to think of Pauline as someone who made a lot of sense.

• Consistency was not one of her defining characteristics.

• Don’t worry about whether she was a radical or a feminist.

• It may not be best to think of Pauline as an intellectual.

• Although her dissidence was frequently internalized, Pauline always remained a leftie.

• Pauline was also, it can’t be stressed enough, an extrovert.

• Best not to think of Pauline as a film critic, let alone a film geek.

Each is expanded upon, of course, with an explanation and examples. Best not to think of Pauline as a film critic–obviously, provocative and counter-intuitive, but Sawhill expands (there’s that word again) on these ideas in a way that will fascinate any Kael reader who’s wondered about these very things.

(Subjective interlude. As I read Sawhill’s sketch, at times I had this overwhelming sense that I was reading about another critic who has influenced me, one whom I have a personal relationship with. “Consistency was not one of her defining characteristics”--words that, if I had formulated and accepted such an idea 20 years ago, might have saved me from some self-induced trauma.)

The title of Brian Kellow’s chapter, “Detective Story: Notes from a Biographer,” says it all: where exactly do you begin if you’re writing a biography of Kael (or anybody, for that matter), especially someone whose biographical asides in her own writing, while certainly there, were still scattered far and wide across 40 years of writing? Kellow begins by visiting a couple of Kael’s old homes in California--actually, he begins by waiting a few years after Kael’s death, convinced that someone else will write the book he’d like to write; no one does--and by getting an interview (a not very successful one) with Edward Landberg, Kael’s husband for a short time who ran the Cinema Guild theatre in Berkley with her. And it builds from there, piece by piece--minus the participation of Kael’s daughter Gina, who politely declines (she’s heard from frequently in the documentary)--until he runs up against the awkward reality that Kael’s famous “Raising Kane” essay borrowed liberally, and without attribution, from the work of film professor Howard Suber. One of Kael’s confidants accuses Kellow of making it all up—bringing it back full circle to that message-board argument I found myself trapped in 10 years ago, I empathize.

Kellow turns up a few times in What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, which I’ve now seen three times--had to watch it once more since I started this piece. The film seemed to get a mixed reaction, but with no real preconceived notion about what kind of Kael documentary I’d want, I thought it covered all the signature controversies of her life--her reviews of Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, and Shoah; “Circles and Squares”; her brief Hollywood sojourn, etc.--reasonably well, excerpted key passages from lots of reviews (including autobiographical detours from her Hud and Casualties of War reviews; Sarah Jessica Parker provides Kael’s voice), and was not a work of deification. You hear from Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris’s wife (she actually seems to be an admirer, if, obviously, a conflicted one), avowed non-admirers like Ridley Scott, Robert Evans, and William Peter Blatty (whose Tonight Show clip is in fact rather embarrassing), and wry ex-Paulettes Paul Schrader and David Edelstein (a “Paulinista,” he clarifies). The almost wall-to-wall assemblage of film clips seems arbitrary at times, and occasionally altogether wrong--narration suggesting you’re seeing something Kael celebrated matched with images from Network, Blow-Up, and other films she didn’t like at all--and sometimes they respond to the narration in gimmicky fashion. But most belong to that loose core of films one most immediately associates with Kael: Nashville, Shoeshine, Weekend, The Godfather, Carrie, etc.

A few things I really liked. The film begins and (almost) ends with an interview conducted by Allen Barra’s then 10-year-old daughter Maggie--Kael’s last, as it were. So many beautiful moments right there:

Barra: “What was your favourite time of your life?”

Kael, in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s and near death: “Now.”

(Something that made me laugh: when Kael described her famous Limelight review to Barra as a “con.” She meant that in the sense of a negative review paired with a positive one; at first I thought she was saying the film was a con, and that she was about to launch into a Kael-like diatribe to a 10-year-old.)

I loved the little montage of letters-to-Kael that flashed by, including correspondence from Carol Burnett, Marlene Dietrich (wanting to know where she can pick up The New Yorker in Paris), Spielberg, unpleasant ones from George Roy Hill and Gregory Peck, and even Bill Clinton (complimenting her on her Brubaker review). I share Lili Anolik’s reverence for Kael’s Casualties of War review, which is granted an extended close-up. Near the end of the film, there’s a fascinating few minutes of speculation on how Kael would fare in today’s media landscape. Carrie Rickey thinks she would have thrived on Twitter, with her gift for the acerbic, one-sentence dismissal. Maybe. Two of my very favourite things in the film suggest otherwise to me, that she came along at a moment--or rather, helped bring that moment into being more than anyone--when film criticism had a prominence in the culture that feels like science-fiction today: a two-page ad for Last Tango in the Times that consists of her review in its entirety, and, even more eye-opening, a TV commercial for her “Raising Kane” piece in The New Yorker. A TV commercial selling film criticism…not the world we live in. And while Rickey may be right, my own guess (or hope, maybe) is that she would have loathed Twitter’s character-count nonsense.

“I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”

Steven quotes that regularly--it’s on the masthead of his blog—and does so in his “Kael’s Influence: Expansive Subjectivity” piece. As the Hud and Casualties of War reviews I referred to earlier (and also, maybe most famously, Kael’s review of Shoeshine, excerpted in the documentary) attest to, autobiographical passages do indeed expertly weave in and out of her criticism. If you want to venture outside of her own writing, though, there’s a body of work beginning to emerge: along with Talking About Pauline Kael and What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, there’s Kellow’s biography, Conversations with Pauline Kael (edited by Will Brantley), Francis Davis’s Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael, and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me. I like them all. The final piece of the puzzle will appear when my own Kael biopic finally gets off the ground, with Meryl Streep as Kael, Ed Harris as John Huston, and Wallace Shawn as somebody (because you can’t make a Pauline Kael biopic without getting Wallace Shawn in there somewhere). Start date yet to be determined.

(Originally published in rockcritics.com)

By Gad, Sir--You Are a Character (2020)

It’s only a small part of Curt Schilling’s HOF résumé, but if you’re a Jays fan, you remember: in Game 5 of the 1993 World Series, the game before the game that even non-Jays fans could tell you about, Schilling pushed the Series to a Game 6 by throwing a 147-pitch shutout. He gave up five hits, walked three, and struck out six. I’m not sure if anyone’s thrown as many pitches in a WS shutout since then--truthfully, I’m not even sure if anyone’s thrown a WS shutout period since then. (Bumgarner?) Was Mitch Williams out in the bullpen warming up the last couple of innings? Is Juan Guzman (who pitched really well too) still fidgeting around on a mound somewhere as I write?

This year, and maybe (probably) next year too, Schilling is the most interesting HOF debate. The Scott Rolen (somewhat of an itinerant, fragmented career) and Todd Helton (Coors Field) debates seem to have resolved themselves--both have picked up a lot of support, and both are going in (next year for Rolen, soon after for Helton). The Schilling debate, as with the procession of PED players from the past few years, has nothing to do with performance; I doubt there are many writers who wouldn’t vote him in on the merits if he were Orel Hershiser or Fernando Valenzuela or any other pitcher who was generally considered to be a Nice Guy and Good Person. But Schilling, these days, has probably surpassed Bonds and Clemens and A-Rod as baseball’s #1 villain, and as such, has both shifted and intensified the “character counts” argument that attached itself to PED users the past decade or so.

Two prominent voters wrote at length about why they were dropping Schilling from their ballot this time around, after having voted for him--and publically advocated for him--for years: Joe Posnanski and Jay Jaffe. (Actually, Jaffe was limited to advocating; he’s a first-time voter this year, even though he’s probably written about the HOF more than anybody the past decade.)

Posnasnki

Jaffe

Posnanski’s may be behind a paywall--it’s part of his “Outsiders” countdown, the 100 best players eligible for but not yet in the Hall. He’s got Schilling at #30, quite a drop from where he would have put him a few years ago. The accompanying write-up is a declaration, and quite compelling:

“...it isn’t Schilling’s politics. It’s his nastiness. It’s his intolerance. It’s his compulsion to troll. Curt Schilling pushes anger and fear and hatred. Every day he divides, every day he offends...and all the while, he makes sure to note that those he offends deserve it, and bleep ’em if they can’t take a joke, and if they happen to have a Hall of Fame vote they should give it to him anyway because he was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I’ve done that for eight years. He was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I still rank him as one of the 100 greatest players in baseball history. But I’m not voting for him. I suspect he will get into the Hall of Fame anyway, and that’s fine. He doesn’t need my vote. He shows every day he doesn’t want my vote.”

And to underscore his point, Posnanski has included in his countdown--and elevated their rankings to a position not quite supported by their on-field accomplishments--a few players and managers for the totality of their baseball lives: Curt Flood, Dale Murphy, Gil Hodges, Dusty Baker, and Felipe Alou, and he’s about to list Buck O’Neil in his top three, possibly even #1.

I’m all for this. Curt Flood should absolutely be in the HOF, and now that Posnanski has me thinking about Alou and Baker, I’d say yes to them too. Much less enthusiastic about Murphy, but the point is, giving guys credit for things that aren’t reflected in their Baseball Reference career boxes, I think that’s a good and probably overdue idea. (I’ve even jokingly hinted that players should get HOF credit for memorable nicknames--Al Hrabosky, your time may come yet.) Which brings everything back to Schilling. Credit, yes; does the obvious corollary--that they ought to be penalized when the totality is much less than what happened on the field--apply too?

I’m less sure than ever how I feel about these things. Towards the end of Bonds’ career, I was 100% a defender; as time passed, and the utter freakishness of those last few seasons nagged at me, I stopped caring. But I’ve also accepted that the ten or so players who’ve been kept out of the Hall because of PEDs are barely the tip of the iceberg, and that there are users already in there. I used to be bothered by itinerant careers like Rolen’s, or Tim Raines’; I still am, but I’m not sure that I should be. I never liked the Andruw Jones or Joe Mauer type career where a player’s value pretty much vanished after he turned 30 or 31, no matter how much they’d done before that; I still don’t, but I’m not sure anymore whether that should make a difference. (Are Albert Pujols’ HOF credentials any better today than they would have been had he retired in 2011 rather than limp along for another decade--recently as one of the worst everyday players in baseball?)

Schilling’s even trickier for me. PEDs are presumably exactly as advertised: performance enhancing drugs. Bill James (who, though I doubt he’d ever admit it, has himself been all over the place on this issue) wrote last week that PEDs don’t matter because sabermetrics always measures performance relatively, against the rest of the league, so a league- and park-adjusted stat like OPS+ puts everything in context. I don’t know--doesn’t that start from the assumption that 100% of the league was using PEDs? My sense is that the most liberal guesstimates generally put that number somewhere around 50%. If you used, you benefitted; if you declined to, you didn’t.

But PES--performance enhancing stupidity--doesn’t exist. (PER--performance enhancing racism--does, if you go back to Ty Cobb and anyone else pre-integration, in that every white player faced inferior competition without any African Americans in the league. Relative to each other, though, they all benefitted equally.) Whatever Schilling has said since he retired--and he’s said some horrendous things, right up to and including the recent attack on congress--he didn’t benefit from this materially as a player. Even if he’d said these things while still active, ditto. For me, PEDs were never a character issue, something I would try to explain whenever someone tried to wave them away as such.

I would probably still hold my breath and vote for him. I think--I don’t know anymore. As I’m sure Posnanski and Jaffe point out, HOF induction is about more than just the honour and the plaque; getting into Cooperstown is a financial windfall in terms of what a player can charge for autographs at card shows. So even if (how I envision it) you induct him and then have him experience the indignity of a ceremony where everybody sits on their hands during his speech--the attending players, at least, if not all the fans; you Kazan him, in other words--once that moment passes, he’s out there charging $100 per signature for the rest of his life. And, you can bet, saying lots more stupid stuff.

Character counts...I like Posnanski’s efforts in trying to get this idea to take hold, but I wonder if that’s going to be even murkier than PEDs. With Schilling--or, at the other end of the spectrum, Buck O’Neil--it seems clear-cut enough. But sometimes, like with Kirby Puckett (or, this year, Omar Vizquel), you’re the greatest person in the world on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday you’re not. Dick Allen was a pariah for years; as time passes, a much more nuanced and favorable view of Allen has emerged.

I don’t have a vote, so I don’t have to decide. (Something else I always say to anyone exasperated by my fence-sitting: if you don’t have a vote, agnosticism is perfectly okay.) For those who do, it doesn't always seem to bring the same sense of excitement and privilege I’m sure it did two or three decades ago. Ken Rosenthal, writing about his ballot this year: “Right now, I’m reconsidering everything, including whether I still want to vote for the Hall of Fame.”

The results of this year's voting are released tomorrow night (Tuesday, Jan. 26). Schilling is right on the fence at the moment: 172 voters have released their ballots ahead of the announcement, roughly 45% of the electorate, and Schilling sits at 75.3%, just barely ahead of the 75% needed for induction. The way it usually works with sabermetrically strong candidates like Schilling is that they get their strongest support from voters who declare publically, then fall back when the rest of the votes are counted. With Schilling, I was thinking that it might work the other way, that some people who voted for him might want to keep that to themselves. But more important than any of that, he's thus far lost one net vote from last year, when he ended up with 70% support, so there's a good chance he'll miss again. (In a very strange development, some people who voted for him this year have requested that Schilling's name be removed from their ballots after he publically supported the insurrection three weeks ago.) If he does, he'll have one last chance next year, his 10th appearance on the ballot. With Ortiz coming on (A-Rod, also, who'll be starting an extended Bonds/Clemens purgatory that will take votes away from others), and Rolen and Helton getting stronger--maybe Andruw Jones and Billy Wagner, too--I don't see any last-minute momentum. If that's what happens, and he's dropped from the ballot, he can then set up shop somewhere for the rest of his life and complain about a rigged election, just like his mentor.

They Like to Help, You Know, Sometimes (2020)

Year-end list-making and me are just barely hanging on.

I didn’t put together a year-end music list for 2019. There was no Pazz & Jop last year, and that was the sole incentive (and, before Pazz & Jop, the yearly Eye poll out of Toronto; for a few years I submitted lists to both) that had me sit down every December, wade through all the other year-end lists that had already been published, and compress a year’s worth of listening into a couple of weeks...well, for at least the past decade--there was a time when I actually did keep up reasonably well on my own. I wrote lots and lots of comments, three or four pages of them every year--cumulatively, probably more than anyone in the history of Pazz & Jop except Christgau himself; I really do believe that--and waited to see if any of them were included in the published poll. In the interim, I'd post all the lists and the comments here. I could still do that, of course, but absent Pazz & Jop, the desire just isn’t there anymore. Scott Woods and I did draw up decade-end lists a year ago, and compared notes in a 23-part Skype conversation, but opportunities for decade-end  lists only present themselves every 10 years by my calculation.

And that’s also what I did in place of a year-end film list for 2019, put together a list for the 2010s instead, but with the full intention of returning to a yearly Top 10 in 2020. I’d stopped keeping up with new music, but new films were just part of living. Until March 11, 2020, anyway, at which point they more or less stopped too.

I probably did end up seeing 10-15 new releases this year--a few before the pandemic, a few more once theatres reopened (late summer? I can’t remember exactly--they’re closed again), and then supplemented that with a handful of TV-streamed films, like the Charlie Kaufman labyrinth. A year-end list would be meaningless, though: I liked the Michael Jordan extravaganza (which, if I’m honest, is less of a film than ESPN’s O.J. extravaganza), but midway through the list I’d be falling back on films I was basically indifferent to. So I’ll put that on hold for another year. Or two--the virus and various drug companies will decide that.

As a placeholder, here’s the list I submitted to a greatest-ever poll the ILX message-board is running in advance of the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, the one where Vertigo supplanted Citizen Kane at the top in 2012. You’re allowed to list up to 125 films. I’ve written before about my habit of watching my favourite films over and over again until I numb them into oblivion; a list of 125 for me would be at least half made up of such casualties. So I limited myself to 30--a Top 10, and another 20 I didn’t rank.

This is the first time I’ve done this since I joined Steven Rubio and Jeff Pike for a shared Facebook countdown in 2011 (literally the last time I said to myself, “Wow, isn’t Facebook great?”). I think about two-thirds of my new list is drawn from the Top 50 I assembled for that. The new additions are primarily guided by a) all the viewing I did in conjunction with writing You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen, and b) “prestige TV”--I hadn’t yet seen even one of these shows (the roll call should be familiar by now) in 2011, and I’ve been catching up ever since. Arguably the two most famous happen to be my two favourite; whether or not I should have included them here, that’s another question.

Which brings me to something I realized while putting together the new list: I don’t care anymore. I once thought of movie-going as a lifetime project, probably the most far-reaching and foundational one of my life, and that, over time, I’d eventually get around to seeing all the important films I needed to see. But it doesn’t, at the moment, feel like that project exists anymore. I want to say that this is mostly fallout from 2020, a temporary pause, but that sense of largeness has in fact been steadily eroding for years. I bought my first big-screen TV a decade ago, after which I was less committed to seeing everything in a theatre. Then all those TV shows I caught up with—when it became clear to me just how good some of them were, that scrambled everything up a little more. I left Toronto, significantly reducing my movie-going universe (two pretty-good rep theatres within an hour in either direction, about 20% of what was available to me in Toronto). And finally, COVID.

So I don’t really care that Mad Men and The Sopranos aren’t really films, or that Adventureland and The Perks of Being a Wallflower won’t be getting a single vote in the Sight & Sound poll (they won’t even get a second vote in the ILX poll). Writing in 2011, I issued an early warning that “Especially in the lower reaches of my list, I’ll have a few picks that no one’s going to mistake for art.” Ten years later, the lower reaches are moving up, the upper reaches are fading, and I’m including things that no one’s even going to mistake for films. And I’m okay with that.

1. Zodiac (2007)

2. Mad Men (2007-2015)

3. All the President’s Men (1976)

4. No Country for Old Men (2007)

5. Lost in America (1986)

6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

7. Nixon (1995)

8. Welfare (1975)

9. 20th Century Women (2016)

10. Advise and Consent (1962)

Adventureland (2009)

American Honey (2016)

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006)

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Boogie Nights (1997)

The Candidate (1972)

Casualties of War (1989)

Cold Water (1994)

Comfort and Joy (1984)

Double Indemnity (1944)

The 400 Blows (1959)

Goin’ Down the Road (1970)

Il Posto (1961)

Malcolm X (1992)

No Direction Home (2005)

Pather Panchali (1955)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

The Sopranos (1999-2007)

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

To Sir with Love (1967)

Partying Maskless with Rudy Giuliani and Vanilla Ice (2020)

This past Thursday marked my first year in St. Marys. Haven’t posted here since soon after I arrived, the decade-end lists Scott and I put together. I can’t remember how we did that, but I’m pretty sure it was pre-Zoom. 2020: as sequels go (to 2019, to all the other years before that), not great. Anyway, since then, I’ve been meaning to link to a bunch of things in a catch-up post.

1. A couple of weeks after the pandemic started (“started” as in the March 11 marker most people use), I walked around town taking photos of newly closed businesses in St. Marys and posted a photo album on Facebook. I also contacted the local newspaper about publishing the photos, but everybody turns into the New Yorker with me.

2. Scott took the photos and turned them into YouTube clips with some new software he purchased.

3. I turned the “You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen” blog into a book. (Title: You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen.) This led to much pandemic-related squabbling with Kindle.

Canada

U.S.

4. As he always does, Steven Rubio wrote about the book on his blog.

5. Jeff Pike, who did the Facebook movie countdown with Steven and I a decade ago, also did.

6. I did a phone interview with Richard Crouse.

7. Todd Burns conducted an e-mail interview for his Music Journalist Insider Substack blog.

8. Scott and I began a series of Zoom conversations based on the 107 songs listed in the book’s “clipography.” We’re close to halfway through.

Elsewhere, the election was finally called for Biden a week ago. I’ll try to post something related to that closer to the inauguration. Two of the election night highlights were Fox calling Arizona days before anyone else, and John Lewis’s district being the one that moved Biden into the lead in Georgia for the first time. After it became clear (late Wednesday?) Biden was going to win everything, I suggested on the ILX message board that one of the posters there, a guy who’s very good with GIFs and graphics and such, come up some visual with Trump and the ghosts of Lewis and John McCain.

No--Lewis was in heaven and McCain in hell, someone immediately assured me, implying it was sacrosanct to even mention them in the same sentence (“otmfm” someone else just as quickly chimed in, evidently some mysterious configuration of a silly and ubiquitous internet acronym that may be an ILX invention, I’m not sure).

No argument with Lewis, though I did ask for some clarification on this heaven and hell business. With McCain, a few things I know about him:

-- as a POW in Vietnam, he refused release unless those who served alongside him were granted the same

-- he had a big role in the savings and loan scandal of the late ‘80s

-- he fell in line with his party far more loyally than his carefully managed media persona (truth-telling, “maverick” moderate) would suggest

-- to jump-start a flailing presidential campaign, he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, arguably the most reckless thing ever done by someone running for president

-- he gave a very gracious concession speech when he lost

-- he more or less got out of his deathbed and cast the vote that saved the ACA (almost purely out of spite, I think, which is okay by me)

Good, bad, and points in between--a mixed bag, in other words, which is the case with most people.

I’ve said this before--many have--but consigning John McCain to hell is part of why Trump was elected in 2016. A small part, but somewhere in the mix. Because if you try to sell the idea that John McCain is the Worst Person in the World in 2008, then casually move onto the idea that Mitt Romney is the Worst Person in the World in 2012, then you invariably end up clearing the ground for the Actual Worst Person in the World in 2016. Basic boy-who-cried-wolf stuff. But it’s a way of thinking--of not thinking--very conducive to social media, a universe that isn’t big on the grey area.

Look Up Ahead Now (2020)

I’m taking the easy way out twice over: a decade-end list instead of a yearly Top 10, and a Skype conversation with Scott Woods* instead of written comments. (Easy for me, that is--Scott, as always, spent endless hours editing, rearranging, and soundtracking the Skype conversation into something resembling a podcast.) To reiterate something I wrote in the decade-end film post a few weeks ago--and elaborated upon in the first audio clip below--I’m reasonably sure there won’t be a similar list in 2029; as Pazz & Jop went, so did I.

1. “Inspector Norse,” Todd Terje (2012)

2. “Fountain Stairs,” Deerhunter (2010)

3. “It Is Not Meant to Be,” Tame Impala (2010)

4. “You Could Get Lost Out Here,” A.C. Newman (2012)

5. “Echelon,” Angel Haze (2014)

6. “How Can You Really,” Foxygen (2015)

7. “Bobby,” Alex G (2017)

8. “Driftin’ Back,” Neil Young (2013)

9. “Pizza King,” Wussy (2012)

10. “Down on My Luck,” Vic Mensa (2015)

11. “Adjustments,” Benoit & Sergio (2014)

12. “Apeshit,” Beyonce & Jay-Z (2018)

13. “Nothing Is Real,” Boards of Canada (2014)

14. “Sore Tummy,” Paws (2012)

15. “Ima Read,” Zebra Katz & Njena Reddd Foxxx (2012)

16. "Lookout," the Julie Ruin (2013)

17. “An Impression,” No Age (2014)

18. “Apoptosis,” Tall Friend (2017)

19. “Cheers (Drink to That),” Rihanna (2011)

20. “All Night,” Chance the Rapper (2016)

21. “Knowing We’ll Be Here,” Daniel Avery (2014)

22. “December 24,” Earl Sweatshirt (2018)

23. “212,” Azelia Banks (2011)

24. “Avant Gardener,” Courtney Barnett (2014)

25. “No Question,” Waxahatchee (2017)

*(Currently unavailable; will repost when and if I can.)

A Tremendous Way to Learn About the World (2020)

2010s: My Favourite Films

1. 20th Century Women (2017)

2. Best of Enemies (2015)

3. Boyhood (2014)

4. The Social Network (2010)

5. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

6. Carlos (2010)

7. American Honey (2016)

8. O.J. Simpson: Made in America (2016)

9. At Berkeley (2013)

10. Room 237 (2012)

11. The Promised Land (2012)

12. Inside Llewyn Davis (2014)

13. Rabbit Hole (2010)

14. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground (2019)

15. Design Canada (2018)

16. Mildred Pierce (2011)

17. Margaret (2011)

18. Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011)

19. Obit (2016)

20. Frances Ha (2012)/Mistress America (2015)/Maggie’s Plan (2015)

I can vouch for the first 11 or 12 of these; the rest involved a certain amount of guesswork, especially Bobby Fischer and Obit, neither of which I ever saw a second time. The three Greta Gerwig films at #20 are grouped together because I liked them all and could not tell you from memory which one is which. Most of these I lifted from yearly top ten lists I’ve been making since 2013; a few predate that, and for some reason American Honey wasn’t on either my 2016 or 2017 list. I don’t really have anything from 2019; I saw a Hot Docs screening of the Barbara Rubin documentary in 2018, and had it as my #1 for that year, but it’s listed as 2019 on IMDB. Of the new films I actually did see in 2019, the Miles Davis American Masters was probably my favourite. It falls just short of the decade list.

As I began my third or fourth rewatch of Mad Men recently, I said on the I Love Everything message board that I doubted there was a film from the 2010s that meant as much to me as Mad Men. 20th Century Women comes close, but I think that statement holds true. Carlos and Mildred Pierce are technically TV mini-series; not sure where I draw the line on what I feel is okay to list and what isn't. O.J. Simpson: Made in America also started life on TV, and I think Frederick Wiseman films like On Berkeley still get played on PBS somewhere between festival screenings and limited first runs. Honestly, I really don’t care about the relationship between Netflix and the film industry, the difference between a festival screening and an official release date, or any of that stuff. I either saw something or I didn’t, and it was--in my mind--either a film or it wasn’t.

I know I’d get grief on the same message board for the almost complete absence of non-English language films on my list. All I’ve got is Carlos*--I considered Eden, too, the Mia Hansen-Løve film from 2014 about an aspiring group of club DJs. It’s stayed in my mind for some reason, and I’ve been hoping to see it a second time. I didn’t really care for acclaimed films by Kiarostami or Weerasethakul, I again find Godard impenetrable (which, coming from an ornery old guy in his 80s, I do find admirable), and things like Holy Motors and Toni Erdmann held no appeal for me whatsoever.

I’d guess that I see fewer documentaries now than I did 10 years ago. I’ve probably settled in the neighborhood of half-and-half, which is close--8/20--to what’s on the list. I went with At Berkeley for Wiseman, but National Gallery or Ex Libris could have been there instead. I’ve started but haven’t finished Monrovia, Indiana--not sure about that one yet. Wiseman, about 11 months older than Godard, was my pick for greatest living filmmaker in an ILX poll a few years ago.

I usually don’t get much from the socially-conscious, more mainstream half of Gus Van Sant’s career--Good Will Hunting, Milk--but I’ve seen The Promised Land five or six times now. It won’t show up on any other decade-end lists; it came and went and left no trace. For me, it’s a beautifully modest echo of The China Syndrome, Norma Rae, and other such ‘70s films (one of Hal Holbrook’s last performances helps get that mood right).

Now that I’ve moved two hours out of the city, I very much doubt I’ll be able to put together a decade-end list 10 years from now, not unless some new kind of technology comes along that teleports me back to the Bloor and the Lightbox a couple of times a week. Last time around, as the Wussy song says.

*Which, come to think of it, is about 90% English too--so I guess I'm a complete middlebrow rube after all.