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After a long winter snooze we’re back to regular updates here. Just to get things started, here’s a recent look at the new Criterion box set focusing on the early 1960s work of Japanese director Shohei Imamura – with a jump to GreenCine.com’s venerable daily blog, whose Powers That Be were generous enough to commisson the piece.

Although he bowed out in 2006, at age 79, as a globally revered grand master of cinema—his nation’s greatest living filmmaker—Shohei Imamura may have simply refined his touch over a 45-year career so that his gritty vision of Japanese society played more elegantly on the screen. He didn’t stake his reputation on arthouse propriety. Not that you’d necessarily infer that from the somber, poetic tone of latter-day productions such as The Ballad of Narayama (1983). Over time, the director became so smoothly transgressive that his final feature, 2001’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, could employ female ejaculation as a metaphor and not raise any eyebrows. … Read more at GreenCine.

Originally published February 2008 in the New York Sun.

Don’t look now. While studios have been busy hyping a receding wave of torture-themed horror films — namely the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises, as well as overbaked remakes of classics such as “Halloween” and “The Hills Have Eyes” — the horror genre is quietly experiencing a resurgence of its low-budget, high-anxiety, 1970s vitality.

“The thing about the late 1960s, and guys like me and Tobe Hooper ['The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'] and Wes Craven ['Last House on the Left'] was the anger that we had,” Mr. Romero said recently. “We showed a face. We showed our political viewpoint. We said, ‘this is what we’re angry about.’ But being angry doesn’t mean you go out and do something cruel. In a way, that’s terrorism.” Read the rest of this entry »

PEAKIN’ AT THE BEACON Jagger and Aguilera, the post-millennial Tina Turner/Merry Clayton, in Shine a Light.

Nobody loves the Rolling Stones as obsessively as Martin Scorsese. Think about the way Mick Jagger’s spastic shrieks on “Monkey Man” captured the paranoid craving of the cocaine-addicted mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas. Or the fateful way the guitars of “Gimme Shelter” shimmer like an elegy over the graves of dead Irish cops in The Departed. Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino even used two separate versions of “Satisfaction” to mark the passage of time. Through the years, the director has repeatedly made freshly iconic use of the band’s classics, usually to ramp up the visceral impact of key scenes, but also to remind us how edgy and spookily relevant the Stones once were.

So it’s hard to tell if Scorsese intends Shine a Light, his two-hour concert film of the band’s 2006 performances at New York’s Beacon Theatre, as a repayment of psychic debts or a prosperous fanboy’s act of generosity. Individually, the deathless guitarist Keith Richards and that rooster sophisticate, Mr. Jagger, are pop-culture avatars for the ages. Collectively, however, the Rolling Stones haven’t mattered to anyone but their accountants in roughly three decades. Excitement at news that Scorsese was at work on a Stones project quickly diminished with the realization that Shine a Light was mostly to consist of contemporary concert footage. The group commissions such things to document every tour. Back in the glory days, this sometimes made for unexpectedly dangerous filmmaking, namely the Maysles brothers’ epochal Gimme Shelter (1970), which placed the Stones at the epicenter of the death of the ’60s, and Robert Frank’s outlawed Cocksucker Blues (1972). In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard ventured into the studio to film the recording of “Sympathy for the Devil,” and Jagger brought his squirrelly zeitgeist to Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s dramatic feature Performance (1970). So why, exactly, did a filmmaker of Scorsese’s significance want merely to produce more fodder destined for suburban American home-theater systems?

Maybe because it was the only way he could be sure of catching a really great Stones gig — at least, as great a Stones gig as the band is likely to put on these days. Scorsese frames the event as a work-in-progress, turning the camera on himself as he frets over what songs the band will select for its set list and giving a himself — as the borderline manic “Marty” we see on American Express commercials and in guest shots on Curb Your Enthusiasm. There’s a humorous prelude in which Jagger, sitting on a jet, picks apart Scorsese’s lengthy, compartmentalized lists of songs for their shows, exuding an air of flippant self-regard that always has been a keynote of the singer’s persona.

It’s not clear if the director intends his own presence as an homage to all those great Stones documentaries devoted to “the process,” or if he simply wants to convey his epic adulation, but once the show starts, it’s pretty obvious that this is the Stones as Scorsese most wishes to hear them. Only one song that appears in the film was recorded after 1978 (that being “She Was Hot,” from the forgotten 1983 album Undercover). Aside from four selections off of 1978’s Some Girls, in fact, everything dates to 1972’s Exile on Main St. and earlier. Many are songs that accompanied whackings or wedding scenes in Scorsese’s films. Those choices alone redeem the effort. In a nutshell, this is the Rolling Stones show you’ll never get to see in person, because it’s liberated from all the crappy material the band has released in tandem with the Enormo-Dome tours it launches every three years or so. Even so, Shine a Light ultimately remains a curiously high-end commodity rather than an incisive backstage saga like The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s 1978 farewell to the Band that is counted among the better music documentaries. Between the songs, which consume roughly 90% of the two-hour running time, the screen lights up with vintage newsreel clips of interviews that emphasize the Stones’ commitment to their own longevity.

At first, an early-20s version of Jagger implies that he can only imagine the band making it through another year. Perhaps a decade later, he tells Dick Cavett that he has no problem with being onstage at 60. Meanwhile, a similar series of flashbacks gives us a progressively dissolute Richards suggesting that his survival is largely due to his not worrying about such things. And — bang! — the camera is back onstage, drinking in every crevice, rut, and tributary carved into the guitarist’s notoriously, gloriously ruined face: a face to stare down the Reaper and send him packing.

Richards, and his slashing interplay with the Stones’ second guitarist, Ron Wood, is the constant, alchemical element that keeps Shine a Light interesting — that is, until whatever point individual members of the audience begin to experience eye and ear fatigue. Mustering a small army of first and second cameramen and lighting technicians, Scorsese has opted for an annoyingly kinetic visual approach in which the camera, at any given moment, seems as one with Jagger’s forever wiggling butt. Just to amuse myself, I counted off the seconds between cuts from one shot to the next. Rarely did I get past “three.”

Jagger, whose fascinating elastic face, as ever, threatens to morph into that of Don Knotts as “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” is typically as erratic as drummer Charlie Watts is stalwart. The tight frames often overly emphasize how baldly theatrical he is, affecting broad facial gestures that are drained of his bandmates’ collegial spontaneity. There’s also the matter of his engagement with the songs. He’s more likely to chew up or throw away lyrics than to really sing them, even when he’s sharing the spotlight with guest vocalist Christina Aguilera, who out-belts him on the once-salacious “Live With Me.”Invited to fulfill the old Tina Turner-Merry Clayton soul-shouter role, Aguilera also marks a nod to the current pop moment. By way of thanks, Jagger gropes her from behind. (Two other guests, White Stripes guitarist Jack White and blues giant Buddy Guy, escape unscathed).

The singer is most thrilled when he’s doing songs from the disco-infused Some Girls, which briefly restored the group’s edge in the late 1970s, as Richards appeared on the verge of incarceration for drug charges. There’s something hilarious about the line “This town’s in tatters,” in reference to today’s building-boom Manhattan, especially when it’s sung at a charity benefit concert presented by President Clinton. Although now, a few months after the film’s theatrical release, it becomes newly meaningful in the wake of Wall Street’s recent collapse. Still, it’s the old-fashioned misogyny of “Some Girls” that feels most accurate to Jagger’s experience. The way he spits out the words implies a lingering distaste for alimony, lawyers, and gold diggers, though — oddly —one particular racially charged line (”Black girls just wanna get fucked all night …”) has been edited out of the performance, presumably for reasons of political correctness. (The horror!) But that’s not so much a disappointment as an obvious missed opportunity. Why not invite President Clinton to join in on a verse or two? Given the song’s context, the ironies would be delicious.

Originally published in slightly different form in the New York Sun. Shine a Light is out now on DVD.

Originally published in the New York Sun in advance of the Museum of Modern Art’s Jazz Score series. Scroll down for Arthur Penn’s comments on Mickey One, which screens Saturday (Nov. 15) at Anthology Film Archives. There’s also a nice essay at Moving Image Source, by Michael Chaiken and Paul Cronin, for further reading.

Cinema is frequently called the art form of the 20th century, but jazz lays equal claim to the title. The two crossed paths early on, beginning in the late 1920s, as Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway lent a bawdy dazzle to Max Fleischer’s cartoons on their way to bigger matinee stardom.

But jazz didn’t really seep into the cinematic consciousness until the 1950s, when directors began to find ways to integrate the music’s improvisatory verve and percussive tension into their story lines — rather than, say, making a biopic about a jazz musician (think “The Glenn Miller Story”) or throwing some racy saxophone into a sleazy nightclub scene in a film noir. The Museum of Modern Art’s sprawling new program ‘Jazz Score,’ which includes screenings of more than 50 films, an exhibit, and live performances, takes encyclopedic note of the ways jazz has influenced film.

The series, which begins tomorrow and runs through September 15, includes plenty of no-brainers — the kinds of films that jazz fans treasure, either for their soundtrack albums or for the way they factor into a legendary performer’s career. Highlights include Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows,” with its brooding Miles Davis score; Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder,” which marked a breakthrough for Duke Ellington; John Cassavetes’s “Shadows,” with its practically ambient backdrop of Charles Mingus pieces, thumping as if in the next room, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” whose libidinal Gato Barbieri theme became a boudoir staple in the mid-1970s.

The series also examines how movie composers soaked up jazz influences, whether reflected in Henry Mancini’s border-town exoticism in “Touch of Evil” (later remade as a killer homage by jazz greats Ran Blake and Clifford Jordan), or excursions into the genre by Japan’s Tôru Takemitsu (“Crazed Fruit”) and Poland’s Krzysztof Komeda (“Knife in the Water,” “Le Depart”).

Thankfully, the series avoids the more obvious “jazz flicks,” such as Bertrand Tavernier’s “’Round Midnight,” in favor of genuine obscurities. The 1970 documentary “Jack Johnson” inspired Miles Davis to record one of his groundbreaking electric sessions, and the 1962 Danish film “Dilemma” transposes Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite” to the deserted streets of apartheid-era Johannesburg.

But rarely has the music meshed as naturally with visual style as it did in “Mickey One,” Arthur Penn’s neglected 1965 film, which opens the series tomorrow with an introduction by the 86-year-old Mr. Penn. Exhibited in a fabulous restored print that lends seductive depth and richness to its black-and-white palette, “Mickey One” remains as curious as ever. Its opening scene establishes a surreal tone, as a nightclub comic (played by budding heartthrob Warren Beatty) lights up a cigar in a sauna, sitting fully clothed in foppish finery as a laughing chorus of fat, old guys cackles at him. Must be the 1960s.

Mr. Penn was flexing his creative muscles after an Oscar nomination for “The Miracle Worker” helped to win him a hands-off, two-picture deal with Columbia.

“I didn’t want to hear a bunch of suits talk to me about script changes,” the director, chatting recently by phone from his Manhattan home, said. “The idea was for it to be an unexpected movie.” Mr. Penn was so successful at that goal, expanding writer Alan Surgal’s stage piece into a kind of Kafka-meets-the-New-Wave fever dream, that “Mickey One” actually forecast the 1960s. The movie’s prevailing air of paranoia — as Mr. Beatty’s title character goes on the lam to escape an unspecified mob menace and invents a new identity — and tilted sense of reality succinctly captures the bizarro spirit of the times.

Cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, who would collaborate with Robert Bresson on several classics, contributed greatly to the film’s fugue-like atmospherics, with its pulp-fiction mugs of bartenders and bums leering as if through the bottom of a shot glass.

“I wanted black-and-white because I thought, there’s nothing about this film that’s colorful,” Mr. Penn said. “Conversely, when we were going to make ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ they said, ‘Do you want to shoot this in color?’ And we had to. If it was black-and-white, it would be a documentary.”

But most of all, it’s the score, by big-band arranger Eddie Sauter with solos by saxophonist Stan Getz, that defines the spirit of “Mickey One.” The music matches, or anticipates, Mr. Beatty every step of the way, as his character improvises a new identity and tumbles through the back alleys and burlesque dives of Chicago. The music alters its shape as vertiginously as Mickey perceives the city’s underbelly, cutting between Dixieland bustle and passages of breezy bossa nova, Bartok-inspired abstraction, and fiery bop, constantly lit up by Getz’s improvisations.

As it turns out, the latter was a happy accident.

“There we were, getting the score down and I didn’t anticipate that Stan Getz was a great pal of [Sauter’s],” Mr. Penn said. “Stan kept dropping by the scoring sessions, and picked up his horn and went to work.”

The film was very much a reaction to its times, Mr. Penn said. “I was pissed off at the movie business. I had started to work on a film with Burt Lancaster, but it turned out he had made a secret deal with John Frankenheimer to take it over. Burt arrived and had me fired.”

Eager to create something he could shove in Hollywood’s face, Mr. Penn also was responding to the previous decade in American life. “The paranoia? Oh yeah. The heritage of the McCarthy era. He scared a whole generation.”

But it was Mr. Penn who apparently instilled fear in his studio. Columbia opted out of the second picture in their deal. The director re-teamed with Mr. Beatty to shoot David Newman and Robert Benton’s New Wave-inspired screenplay of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and nothing was ever the same again. “Mickey One,” meanwhile, has lingered in the shadows, like one of Getz’s plaintive tenor solos.

“They didn’t get it,” Mr. Penn said. “They really didn’t. But left by itself, it continued to have a life. It’s incredible that as time goes by, there’s a higher estimation of it.”