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, The Animators, The Documentarians, 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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Peter Berg (11 March 1964, United States -)
Ranking: Actors as Directors

Chicago Hope (also writer, various episodes 1994 TV series)
Very Bad Things (also writer, 1998)
Wonderland (also writer, TV series pilot)
The Rundown (2003)
Friday Night Lights (also writer, 2004)
Friday Night Lights (also writer, pilot and TV series, 2006 - )
The Kingdom (2007)
Virtuality (2008 TV movie)
Hancock (also writer, 2008)
Lone Survivor (also writer, 2009)
Bran Mak Morn (2008)
Painfully Rich (2010)
Cocaine Cowboysv (2010)
The Mission (2010);
Dune (2010)
Gone Like the Wind (2010)
Untitled Peter Berg-Mark Wahlberg Project (2010)

Manohla Dargis hit the nail on the head in her New York Times review of Hancock when she mentioned the director in passing, referencing “Mr. Berg’s downbeat tendencies.” In a commercial industry that increasingly emphasizes exhilaration, Mr. Berg is drawn to the muted, the somber, and the morally ambiguous as well as the unexpectedly deflating ending.

Berg’s somber view of the world begins with his big screen writing and directing debut, Very Bad Things. The film might be an incisive critique of masculinity to please the boys in the quarterlies except that as a actors ensemble piece it prefers a tone of unrestrained hysteria within a generally sour view of modern suburban life. In its drive to lay bare the vacuity of modern life, and the weird ethnic confusions of its characters, the team of bachelor party denizens (a popular premise of the time, as seen in Stag and other films) escaping to Las Vegas soon find themselves cutting up body parts for burial in the Nevada desert in a motivational leap lacking both logical plausibility. As an actor directing actors he has a script that indulges them to excesses that may have seemed funny at the time of conception. Christian Slater’s Nicholson-style ringleader, however, anticipates a recurrent character in Berg’s films. In the end, Very Bad Things aspires to the vulgarity of straight-to-video garbage such as Kinky Killers out of a misguided sense of humor.

The critical firestorm over Very Bad Things would have derailed most careers, but Berg bounced back with an effective (if not particularly popular) action film highlighting the persona of The Rock, The Rundown, and then a highly personal project, Friday Night Lights the adaptation of H.G. Bissinger’s non-fiction account of life in a Texas football town, the height of an American way of suburban life, which Berg later turned into a critically acclaimed television series. The show is actually better than the movie, which can’t disguise Berg’s drift toward the downbeat (the movie’s football heroes lose in the end to a superior team). Friday Night Lights the show is more emotional and less distanced than the movie, which is cold and downbeat, and doesn’t benefit from the superiority of TV to explore character. Visually, Berg’s first two films looked like other films in their genres. With Friday Night Lights, Berg introduces the influence of Steven Soderbergh, with a shaky intimate roving handheld camera that he maintains regardless of its inappropriateness to the genre, for example Hancock. Berg’s next film, The Kingdom, was a troubled production that resulted in an incoherent text, a film aspiring to a political statement while offering action to the groundlings, while marrying his newly acquired Sodergerbg look to Tony Scott’s visual style and rhythms.

A central figure in Berg’s films is “the handler,” the one who steps up and tries to rectify a degenerating situation. In Very Bad Things, it is Slater, who even calls himself a “success coach” for the rest of his pals, and there is a literal coach in Friday Night Lights. In Hancock, it is Jason Bateman as Ray Embrey, a public relations consultant who takes on the difficult case of reluctant superhero Hancock (Will Smith). Though a cinematic minter of money, Smith nevertheless, powerful as he is, allows Berg to approach the material as he did in his other films, with a downbeat realistic affect, in something of an anticipation of Watchmen in its consideration of a plausible clash between the idea of superheros and the real world.

What one soon notices throughout Berg’s films is that his “organizer” figures are virtual stand-ins for directors. They do what directors do, organize, boss people around, create a drama. Such chracacters are a likely source of inspiration for Berg, a man with directorial aspirations, because his directors would be the people he would have been most likely to observe on the set. Slater in Very Bad Things treads a thin line between chaos and philosophy, like a Samuel Fuller, holding things together in a panic, or like Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) in The Kingdom, competing with another definer of actifity, the local contact and investigator. In variation, The Rock shrinks from being in charge in The Rundown, so Walken, who thinks it is his world anyway, steps in as nemesis and antithesis.

Running down a full circle, Hancock links up with Very Bad Things through its dyspeptic view of suburbia and its placement of a statuesque blonde (Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron) as an eventually revealed dominant force in an otherwise masculine world. While Very Bad Things’s lead actor, Jon Favreau, in his turn to directing, takes the traditional stylistic and narrative route in Iron Man, Berg pursues a parody of middle class life. Before the film descends into another incoherent text, imposed by genre and commercial conventions and derived, sociologically speaking, from the show Heroes, X-Men, Jumper and similarly-themed films, Hancock successfully utilizes the realistic visuals to successfully blend comedy and drama. But in the end, Berg prefers his viewers to be depressed rather than exhilarated, and his impulse ultimately clashes with the commercial end of Hollywood cinema.

The hottest movie ticket in town is the weekly outdoor screenings at Lance Kramer’s house in Southeast Portland, and the best part of the admission is that it’s free. Kramer has a beautiful set up, with DVD projection against a huge recently-repainted white wall that serves as the screen, one at least as large as those found in the Laurelhurst. Kramer’s unnamed venue may be the last outdoor theater in all of Oregon, now that the era of the drive-in has subsided.

On a recent Wednesday evening the humid night gave over to occasional lightning flashes in the sky as Kramer screened Unearthly Strangers, part of the so-called D. K. Holm Film Festival. Unearthly Strangers is an obscure, talky, but intriguing British science fiction film with very little science fiction in it. Nevertheless, about 30 or more dedicated cinephiles seemed to get a kick out of it, as the last embers of the grill glowed in the dark, and the last vestiges of hedonism’s beverages were drained from the cups.

Next week’s film is as yet unknown (Mr. Kramer favors spontaneity and also takes requests), but in two week’s time, on Wednesday, July 16, Kramer will offer the third in the D. K. Holm series, a double bill of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, followed by The Train.

Form Buster Keaton’s The General to the horror film Terror Train the train movie has been a vibrant subset of Hollywood pictures, in which the brisk movement of the train usually contrast pleasingly with the static moments in the compartments themselves. These are two of the best. Directed by Joseph Sargent in 1974 from a novel by John Godey scripted by the great Peter Stone (Charade, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a great heist film in which Robert Shaw leads a team of men to seize and hold for ransom a Manhattan subway car.

Walter Matthau is the transit cop out to stop him. Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, Jerry Stiller, and Doris Roberts also pop up in this gritty, funny, fast-paced tale fueled by David Shire’s jangly urban score. These days, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is most famous for being the source of Tarantino’s colorful gang pseudonyms for Reservoir Dogs, but new viewers will be won over by its gritty wit and cynicism.

The Train started out as an Arthur Penn film but after a dispute, John Frankenheimer took over. The 1964 film tells of a group of French resistance fighters and railroad workers attempting to thwart a German general (Paul Scofield) from stealing France’s great art as the last days of WWII wind down. Shot in a contrasty, grim black and white, The Train harks back to Keaton’s The General as a collection of difficult problems that one man must solve over a vast playing field, in this case, Burt Lancaster as the incongruous Paul Labiche. The Train is all about Lancaster as a physical presence, as a perpetual motion machine, sliding down staircases and running along hill tops in his lone effort to stop that train.

If Kramer’s loyal audience can last through a double bill, they’ll enjoy two of the finest train movies ever made, two movies that form a striking contrast between the two stylistic ends of the genre.

Forthcoming D K Hom Fest films include The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The World of Henry Orient (1964), Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), or some other Guy Maddin selection, a double bill of Them! (1954) and Tremors (1990), Little Murders (1971), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Showtime is around 9 PM, or whenever it gets dark and the spirit moves the multitude. Lance Kramer can be reached at 503 231 3561, or via kramer.lance@gmail.com.

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, The Animators, The Documentarians, 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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Clint Eastwood (San Francisco, 31 May, 1930 — )
Ranking: Actors Turned Directors

The Beguiled: The Storyteller (1971 documentary short)
Play Misty for Me(1971)
High Plains Drifter 1972)
Breezy (1973, director only)
The Eiger Sanction (1975)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
The Gauntlet (1977)
Bronco Billy (1980)
Honkytonk Man (1982)
Firefox (1982)
Sudden Impact (1983)
Pale Rider (1985)
“Vanessa in the Garden” (1985, episode of Amazing Stories)
Heartbreak Ridge (1986)
Bird (1988, director only)
White Hunter, Black Heart (1990)
The Rookie (1990)
Unforgiven (1992)
A Perfect World (1993)
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Absolute Power (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, director only)
True Crime (1999)
Space Cowboys (2000)
Blood Work (2002)
Mystic River (2003, director only)
Piano Blues (2003, episode of The Blues)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006, director only)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, director only)
Changeling (2008, director only)
Gran Torino (2008)
The Human Factor (2009, director only)

The most successful of all actors turned directors, Eastwood has fashioned a creditable body of work while making only one film that transcends its genre, the commercial limitations of the art form, and its director’s rigidly codified public personality.

Unforgiven was duly honored by public and Oscar alike, and remains an all too unique chapter in his nevertheless still fascinating career. An often no more than efficient director both stylistically and financially, Eastwood began his directing career while blazing brightly as one of Hollywood’s most popular American stars, an heir to John Wayne, and an actor who appealed to both men and women. Now his status as an eminence grise within Hollywood virtually guarantees Oscar noms, if not the occasional win.

Though he found fame through the spaghetti westerns he made for Sergio Leone, it was as a disciple of Don Siegel that he made his directorial debut, with Play Misty For Me. This film, coming as it did from an international sex icon, was an odd tale, one bespeaking of an almost paranoid suspicion of women within a view of sexuality that foreshadowed Fatal Attraction in its account of a female stalking her prey with unlimited patience, while also anticipating the reliance on the stalker as a fundamental figure in the films of the ’90s. In fact, this thriller showed more the influence of Siegel (who has a cameo) than Leone, and Eastwood starred in Siegel’s The Beguiled, which has a similarly paranoid view of womankind. In the end, Misty had more to say about the screen actor as besieged public figure (and about Eastwood’s affection for jazz) than it did about the genre with which it was theoretically aligned. Suspicion of women also crops up in Breezy, a businessman-meets-hippy tale staring an icon from an earlier era, William Holden.

Eastwood’s career can be divided broadly into three phases. From 1971 through 1976 Eastwood was an actor-turned director still better known for his acting. His directorial projects, usually popular with the public but designed simply to support and continue that popularity, alternated with blockbusters made with other directors who increasingly proved to be cronies from his old Rawhide days or stunt or second unit directors, men of little creative or visual distinction who could be relied on to serve the star’s needs.

But with The Outlaw Josey Wales, on which he took over the direction after filming started, a new Eastwood emerges, one who makes lengthy, deliberately paced films that emphasize groups or ensembles over Eastwood as sole star. This phase announced the collaboration, personal and professional, with actress Sondra Locke. Yet in the end this phase also proved to be a creative nullity, though coincidentally it came at a time when other directors (Woody Allen) and stars (Robert DeNiro) were experiencing similarly long and inexplicable dry spells. Yet at least Eastwood was exploring unusual characters, some comic, some tragic, while in the other side of his career as mere superstar he was appearing in a string of bread and butter hits.

After the Locke years, Eastwood endured a rough transition. Anomalies such as the hit aspiring Heartbreak Ridge , A Perfect World, and The Rookie paired the aging Eastwood as a mentor to younger actors, and the narrative content of these films seemed more explicitly political than his elegiac westerns. But with the watershed achievement of Unforgiven, written by David Webb Peoples, a new, mature set of tones invaded his work: feelings of melancholy, twilight moods of loss, regret, memory, and the desire to change. What is most interesting in the otherwise routine if entertaining Absolute Power is the mood of remorse over his daughter that Eastwood’s character feels, and the continued use of Gene Hackman as a linchpin of near successful malice, the moral mirror of the star but whose evil is much greater then that found in the unconventional characters Eastwood cast himself as, men who are deemed “officially” evil by society (thieves, alcoholic reporters).

Also interesting in Absolute Power is its confirmation that Eastwood has always been better on screen with great actors, be it Richard Burton, or in this case Ed Harris, than with similar “stars” such as Burt Reynolds, types whom he has been all too often pair for strictly commercial reasons.

The mood of regret reappears in True Crime, and offsets the concurrent thread in Eastwood’s directorial career, that of official adaptor of popular novels, on par with fellow actor turned director Robert Redford. Eastwood lacks the visual zest and attention to detail to qualify - at this point - for the Pantheon, but his films show much more thematic variety within narrative consistency than they at first seem to offer, a sign that Eastwood, behind his pose as a simple man, is in fact working out complex ideas and responses to life. As his content spreads to a middle of the road liberalism focusing on the troubles of women, Africans, and African-Americans, his films remain paradoxically too long for a fiscal conservative, pedestrianly photographed, and all too often intellectually incoherent.