The British film monthly Sight and Sound has gone online with its new issue, for January 2008. It is of special interest to me because this issue features (way in the back) my review of Tim Lucas’s biography of Mario Bava. Unfortunately, the issue won’t get to America until near the end of January (the December number isn’t even out here yet, though it should arrive soon). Until then, however, interested readers can abide with the magazine’s survey of critical favorites for 2007.

I’ve been negligent in posting information about this web experience, but for the record Martin Scorsese has made an interesting homage to Alfred Hitchcock in the form of a wine commercial. The conceit of The Key to Reserva is that Scorsese has unearthed four undated pages from an abandoned Hitchcock film. One-third mockcumentary, one-third homage, and one-third self-reference (the opening of the short reveals that Scorsese shot the film digitally in the manner that Robert Rodriguez shot Sin City), The Key to Reserva borrows tropes from several Hitchcock films and Bernard Herrmann’s music from North by Northwest. I won’t spoil the story except to say that the great Simon Baker (L. A. Confidential) is perfect in the Cary Grant role.

Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Future Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Strained Seriousness, More Less Than Meets the Eye, The Writers, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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Francis Ford Coppola (1939 -)
Ranking: Future Pantheon

Battle Beyond the Sun (as Thomas Colchart, of new footage, 1960); The Bellboy and the Playgirls (also writer, 1962); Tonight for Sure (also writer, 1962); The Haunted Palace (writer only, 1963); The Terror (uncredited, 1963); Dementia 13 (also writer, 1963); This Property Is Condemned (writer only, 1966); Is Paris Burning? (writer only, 1966); You’re a Big Boy Now (also writer, 1966); Finian’s Rainbow (1968); The Rain People (also writer, 1969); Patton (writer only, 1970); The Godfather (also writer, 1972); The Great Gatsby (writer only, 1974); The Conversation (also writer, 1974); The Godfather: Part II (also writer, 1974); The Godfather Saga (also writer, 1977 TV mini-series); Apocalypse Now (also writer, 1979); One from the Heart (also writer, 1982); The Outsiders (1983); Rumble Fish (also writer, 1983); The Cotton Club (1984); Captain EO (also writer, 1986 music video); Peggy Sue Got Married (1986); “Rip Van Winkle” episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre (1987); Gardens of Stone (1987); Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988); “Life without Zoe” segment of New York Stories (also writer, 1989); The Godfather: Part III (also writer, 1990); Making “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992, TV documentary); The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980 (also writer, 1992 video); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992); Jack (1996); The Rainmaker (also writer, 1997); Supernova (uncredited reshoots, 2000); Youth Without Youth (also writer, 2007); Tetro (also writer, 2009).

There are two Francis Ford Coppolas, and they even have two different names. As Francis Ford Coppola he is the towering figure from among the so-called movie brats, filmmakers who emerged in the late 1960s. In fact, Coppola was there first, and even cleared a path for some of his successors, starting with George Lucas. As Francis Coppola, temporarily shorn of his middle name, he was a gun for hire throughout the 1980s, lurching from one career-saving payday to another (though the two names and roles sometimes overlap their functions). But then Coppola has also been of two minds about the movie industry and the studio system. He was the first movie brat to make a film within the even-then crumbling walls of the otherwise exclusive studio system, i.e., the musical Finian’s Rainbow ; but as was often the case with Coppola in those days, he followed that film immediately with The Rain People , a Cassavetes-style tale of marital disharmony set on the road and focusing on a woman in a troubled marriage. It was as if Coppola could only stand to be in the studio system so long before he had to cleanse himself of its muck and undergo a purifying process of harsh location shooting far from the prying eyes of executives, films that were generally financed daringly on his own. Like Woody Allen, after a string of masterpieces he had a dark decade of work which never seemed to meet the approval of critics or match the heights he had reached earlier (he was also the first brat packer to win an Oscar, for the script of Patton ). Like Spielberg, he also became a prolific producer, but without the ease or consilience with the studio chiefs that Spielberg enjoyed. Coppola was always just outside the studio gates, at UCLA, or in Napa Valley, or on the road across America, or off in the Philippines going crazy.

The overarching theme of Coppola’s films concerns a determined person who wants to free his or herself from the family, from the tribe, from society, from responsibility. Thus Natalie Ravenna of The Rain People, engaged in a crazy feminist flight from her husband, mirrors Michael Corleone in The Godfather , who desires to eschew the family business but ultimately can’t resist the fact that, unlike his brothers, he is a natural for it. He in turn anticipates Frannie in One from the Heart. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz has dropped out of family and society to fight a pure war; Peggy Sue wants to re-live her life with different decisions. Even Jack bristles under the turmoil of his ludicrous and sentimental situation. But just as Coppola’s visual technique alternates between the “classicism” of old Hollywood (added to the poise of European cinema) and the “authenticity” of close-to-the-action, light weight technology, the overriding text of his tales alternates between thinly disguised autobiographical stories ( You’re a Big Boy Now ) and allegories for his attitude toward and battles with the studios he is so drawn to and repelled by ( Tucker: The Man and His Dream ).

Coppola is that rare commercial director who deals in ideas. Apocalypse Now is as cold in its questioning of war in general as it is sensual in its depiction of it, just as Patton explored the ambiguity of the war lord psychology. There is a real question of family ethics and succession at the heart of The Godfather series, and The Conversation challenges our (then) ideas about privacy and the use of technology.

Youth Without Youth , in its exploration of European philosophical ideas about time and aging may represent yet a new direction for the director, who made the film when he was 67 after a 10-year hiatus from helming. Based on a novella by Romanian writer Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth is a distant cousin to Jack as it follows an aged intellectual (Tim Roth) near death who, in the late 1930s, experiences an inexplicable reversion to an earlier physical age, allowing him additional years in which to live through WWII, and well into the 1950s, while also re-igniting an old love affair though a contemporary surrogate and finishing his once-stalled life work. Though sometimes confusing and always sweeping in its historical gaze, the film seems surprisingly autobiographical, an old man’s meditation on aging and death, and on a life in which projects get left unfinished, as so many of Coppola’s have been.

Youth Without Youth may not fully “work” as a commercial film, but it is a fascinating departure from the director’s usual track. But that is to be expected from a director with a robust appetite for films as vehicles for ideas and observations of lived life. If some of Coppola’s work-for-hire films failed to live up to his ferocious talent, those projects in which it gains full sway are among the greatest films ever made.

Awake is a cacophony of accents. This medical thriller with supernatural elements plays host to a set of the most annoying voices now working in the movies. First off there is Hayden Christensen as the scion of a Manhattan entrepreneur who needs a heart transplant. Christensen, the former beta version of Darth Vader, is notorious for his fractured uncertain lingo, unheard on the screen since Stephen Boyd. His raw sound perfectly suited Shattered Glass where he played the callow huckster, but everywhere else he simply sounds unconvincing. In this he was the new Kyle MacLachlan, though that model improved considerably over the years. Meanwhile, Terrence Howard, as the best friend and heart surgeon conducting the transplant, speaks in a fluty monotone that, after several films, is beginning to grate; he’s entering Cuba Gooding, Jr., level of annoyance. There is also Lena Olin with her attractive but sometimes inaudible Swedish accent, as the scion’s widowed mother who literally gives her heart to her son, and finally there is Jessica Alba, who, like many of her confreres in the picture biz, finds it profitable to mimic the girly voice of stripper speak. She plays the secret fiancé of the scion, whom he is yet ashamed to introduce to his judgmental mother.

The medical thriller part of the tale begins when the lad goes in for his heart transplant (by the way, it is unclear as per the crime plot if he even really needs one, though he does by the film’s 50th minute). He is anesthetized but doesn’t go under. Thus he is awake but frozen as his doctor takes a buzz saw to his chest. An opening crawl indicates that this happens in 1 out of 700 or so cases, a most unnerving statistic, though the situation hasn’t cropped up on House yet.

This state, called anesthesia awareness, has only tangential importance to the mystery plot, in that it “allows” the patient to have an incredibly helpful out-of-body experience in which he investigates what is about to be his own murder for profit. He is able to hear real dialogue in the real world, but also socialize with the ghost of his mother, who isn’t even dead yet. As medical thrillers, the film doesn’t have the suspense of Coma or the sheer convoluted brilliance of Malice, but it is easy to follow, if preposterous.

The film was written and directed by Joby Harold two years ago, according to other reports, and Mr. Harold is someone whose meager credits include a thank you on a film about the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo may not have been as great a screenwriter as his later martyrdom before HUAC makes us want to believe he is, but he was a great day to day writer, as his letters show, while Mr. Harold’s film is laden with laborious situation setting, an obligatory quasi-sex scene to establish the “beauty” of the romance, and a visual catalog of glamorous apartments, spacious offices, impressive great rooms, and toy-filled bedrooms. Oh, for the days of theatrical economy as found in Trumbo’s efficient screenplays. One of the final twists comes out of Hitchcock’s Marnie of some 40 years ago.

It should also be noted that Samuel Sim’s music is typical of contemporary scores, a continual tuneless see-sawing. On the other hand, Awake also features in minor roles the great Christopher McDonald as a substitute anesthesiologist, and Arliss Howard, impressive and commanding as the heart surgeon who takes over the operation at the last minute.

The Last Winter is an unusual horror film. Though it delivers on the expected promised of its “and then there were none” premise, it is rooted in ecological concerns, and ends in a manner that is both paradoxically clear and ambiguous at the same time.

The film opens with Ed Pollack (the generally criminally underused or appreciated Ron Perlman) arriving at the polar base camp of a unit working for North Industries, an oil company that wants to extract valuable fuel from beneath the North Pole’s crust in territory that was formerly protected. The voluble Pollack descends on the camp like a Santa Claus, dispensing gifts and flattery but also a little fear. He’s the ramrod for the team, and his mandate is to get environmental impact clearances from the house environmentalist attached to the team, Jim Hoffman (James Le Gros). It’s Red State versus Blue State (or perhaps ice state versus liquid state) when these two go at it. There is also a personal animosity. In the three weeks since Ed has been at the camp, Hoffman has fallen into a romance with the token hottie, Abby (Friday Night Light’s terrific Connie Britton). Pollack has also imposed upon the team the son of a friend, a callow youth named Maxwell (Zach Gilford), who is intimidated by the landscape, but is also the first to perceive the newfound hazards they face.

In brief, these hazards are due to global warming, which has caused the thin ice sheath or permafrost to start melting, releasing biological entities of untold age. One entity might be a gas that causes its consumers to go mad. Another might be a herd of some mysterious primeval animal that runs at night. Maxwell is the first to see them, and also the first to be victimized by them.

The Last Winter is written and directed by Larry Fessenden, an actor, producer, and director who is associated with another cult horror director, Ti West, and whose previous horror film, Wendigo, is warmly regarded by horror enthusiasts. The film was shot partially in Alaska and in Iceland, and it’s an innovative thriller in that it helpfully elides or summarizes, through snappy editing, those scenes we’ve seen all too often in previous horror films of a similar vintage (such as John Carpenter’s The Thing), scenes such as the arguments about what to do and then those patented horror film reactions to the first revelations. In addition, the note of ambiguity at the end, residing mostly in a terrific last shot that evokes memories of both the beginning of 28 Days Later and the end of Resident Evil, bears more weight thanks to the intellectual weight that has brought us there.

The Last Winter, which is copyright 2006, opens December 14th at the Hollywood Theatre.

The 44th anniversary of JFK’s assassination passed a couple of weeks ago without the predictable fanfare. Perhaps the debunkers and apologists are waiting for the rounded-off 45th anniversary in 2008. Yet still, there was some publicity for this event that still haunts the American imagination. Vincent Bugliosi published his long-awaited, mammoth brief on behalf of the Warren Commission. And numerous documentaries on DVD wrestled with the facts and myths of the case, including The Murder of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald Behind the Iron Curtain , as did Oswald’s Ghost on the big screen (curious that Norman Mailer died soon after the film’s release…hmmmmm). In addition, MPI, as part of its True Stories Collection, has published JFK: Reckless Youth (MPI, $9.99, street date Tuesday, June 27th 2006), a 1993 miniseries based on the first volume of Nigel Hamilton’s thwarted multi-volume bio of the 35th president.

JFK: Reckless Youth follows JFK from a school boy to election night in 1947 when he won the congressional seat for District 11 in Massachusetts. By covering such a broad swath of his life, the mini-series encompasses two other movies set in parts of the same period, P T 109 (the 1963 release in which Cliff Robertson played the young naval lieutenant…Kennedy wanted Warren Beatty) and Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (a TV movie from 1977 that focuses solely on the 1946 debutante congressional race and casts Paul Rudd as the young Kennedy). In Reckless Youth, Patrick Dempsey embodies a new version, or some would say a truer version, of the president. As per the title, he is a sickly hedonist always in the shadow of his older brother Joe, groomed by the paterfamilias to lead the family name to great heights. Joe, however, dies during World War II, and in the end, John agrees to be the receptacle of Joe Sr.’s hopes and dreams. Before that, John must be frankly on display as a womanizer (an impulse he later realizes that he inherited from his father), go against his Nazi-sympathizing dad by publishing a book calling for the world to stand up to Hitler (While England Slept)–standing up to oppressors being a lesson he learned early from both his bother and his father, as credited writer William Broyles Jr.’s screenplay is at pains to make clear (in typical TV biopic fashion, no statement or action goes unnoticed by the hero, who incorporates later in his philosophy or verbal chatter, the way the Dude picks up other people’s phraseology).

The consequence of all this is not that Kennedy comes across as a “reckless youth” and therefore a reckless adult, but that he is a hero of a different kind to a new generation of politicos who might see politics as a forum for profit and an avenue to sexual excess. He appears to be the only member of his generation to have sex (with, among many others, a Danish reporter who may have been a German spy), and to have the foresight to think that his school cronies could take over for the bloated Irish pols that ran Boston in his father’s day and run a modern, successful campaign. This is less a matter of cleaning up Kennedy’s residual reputation from Hamilton’s book, which the movie does anyway, than of wised-up insider-ish Hollywood types seeing commonality between Kennedy’s hedonism and the fruits to be plucked in their own industry.

Is this three hour mini-series worth seeing? It does offer a fairly accurate account of Kennedy’s early life, and has terrific actorial turns from the likes of Terry Kinney as Joe Sr., and Claire Forlani as temporary Kennedy squeeze Ann Cannon (who in the movie ends up with future New Yorker writer John Hersey). You’ll also note professional Irishman Malachy McCourt as Kennedy’s maternal grandfather. More important, the miniseries, otherwise conventional, offers a broad background to Kennedy’s eventual assassination. One wonders if the assassination would have been averted if old Joe Sr. had been still been a force dominant enough to pull strings and wheel and deal and avert disaster.

I know, I have neglected this blog. I do apologize. Okay…now for the nitty gritty. The front end! The front end can really make or break your rig. Putting 32″ tires on it and taking it wheelin’ with just the lift on and nothing else done might be okay…but the key word here is might. So beefing up the steering and components on the XJ in addition to the new tires wasn’t really an option–it was necessary. So as far as the steering goes, you have already seen the ZJ Tie-Rod set up. But to help keep the axle centered I opted for a Rusty’s adjustable track bar, WITH the heavy duty mount. The lift kit came with a track bar relocation kit, but this is like a band-aid over a gaping wound. It would be okay if it were only going to be a pavement pounder, but remember, we are building this to handle off-road too!

More to come…