Archives for 2004

The New York Times has a story
about Hollywood’s response to The Passion of the Christ. Some of the quotes are (ahem) revealing, but this sentence was what jumped out and caught my eye:

Last week a Gallup poll found that 11 percent of Americans had seen the movie and that 34 percent more said they planned to see it in theaters.

Is anyone else astonished by those numbers? And can any of you remember similar polling about any other film? I’d love to see comparable numbers for, say, Titanic, or for such middlebrow blockbusters of the past as Ben-Hur or Gone With the Wind.

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”

W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

A reader writes:

Had a thought this eve while viewing “Cinema Paradiso” for first tiime
since theatre run some 14 years ago and with horror of Madrid in mind as
I lived there two years some many years ago but thanks to the Web, could
find online the two major Madrid dailies: Pais (irony there) and ABC.
and have first-hand account from them. And have so strong love for
Spanish people and their civilized way of life.

Back to “Cinema Paradiso”, in world of film, we often ask of you, the
experts, what are your favorite 10 or 50 , “best” or “favorites” but
never: “what is the sweetest film in your experience”.
In this time of Spanish tragedy, I ask you the question of what is
your sweetest film–LOL just as if you pose that question on your blog,
we could all join in happy shared thoughts in a time of sadness.

I realize that I presume.

Not at all, and I can answer your question right off the top of my head. The sweetest movie I know is Michael Caton-Jones’ Doc Hollywood, a lovely little fantasy about life in a small southern town. Michael J. Fox never gave a better performance, and Julie Warner (I wonder what happened to her?), Woody Harrelson, David Ogden Stiers, Frances Sternhagen, George Hamilton, and Bridget Fonda are all just right. No, small towns aren’t really like that, but some of them occasionally come close, and Doc Hollywood reminds me quite strongly of the one from which I came. I can’t promise that it’ll put a smile on your face, but it’s never failed to put one on mine.

(Incidentally, it seems that Reflections in D Minor
is another fan of W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.)

– I was channel-surfing this evening and ran across Unfaithfully Yours, Preston Sturges’ 1948 comedy in which Rex Harrison plays the part of a conductor. It’s a funny movie, and Harrison obviously went to some trouble to learn how to simulate conducting–but it didn’t help. Yes, he knew the beating patterns, but his movements were weirdly rigid, sort of like an excitable robot that hadn’t been oiled from the waist up recently.

This reminded me of how impressed I was by Richard Thomas’ “conducting” in Terrence McNally’s play The Stendhal Syndrome, in which he convincingly “conducts” a complete performance of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde–facing the audience. Given all the cruel jokes that instrumentalists tell about conductors (Carl Flesch once called conducting “the only musical activity in which a dash of charlatanism is not only harmless, but positively necessary”), you’d think it’d be easier to fake convincingly. In fact, it’s just about impossible.

– In the past few days I’ve seen nine different Paul Taylor dances, several of which begin with a prelude–i.e., the lights go down, the music plays for a minute or two, then the curtain goes up. During each of these preludes, at least a half-dozen people sitting in my immediate vicinity kept on talking, often quite loudly, until the curtain rose. I wanted to tap them on the shoulder, preferably with a hammer, and tell them, “The dance starts when the music starts, dummy. Shut the hell up.”

(O.K., I’ll be honest. Having recently seen John Malkovich at work in Ripley’s Game, what I really wanted to do was drop a garrote over their heads and pull hard, but I didn’t think to bring one with me. A critic’s work is never done.)

I got an e-mail from a reader apropos of my posting on Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. He likes Crimes and Misdemeanors, and thinks that this film and a couple of others–I can’t remember which ones, alas–justify calling Allen a major filmmaker. I replied:

Very interesting. Do you really think that “two or three movies” are enough to put you on the top of the list? I can see arguing that “Citizen Kane,” “Touch of Evil” and “Chimes at Midnight” are three of the greatest movies ever made, but do they add up to a bonafide oeuvre? How many points does it take to make a curve? I don’t know–I’m asking.

To which he replied:

I come from mathematics on this issue. There is a saying, which I will quote and then explain: “You judge a mathematician in the L-infinity norm, not the L1 norm”.

— A norm is a measurement of the size of a function, “size” suitably interpreted.

— L-1 norm of a function is like an average value (many details omitted)

— L-infinity norm is like the maximum value of the function (many details omitted)

This is funny in a math class, believe me. One thing it means is that in the long run, productivity is not the standard for greatness. An example is Henri Lebesque, who has his definitions and theorems (and his name) in all the standard graduate textbooks for the work he did for his PhD thesis on integration and measure (which is the basis for modern analysis and
probability); that’s all he is known for, but that’s enough. Then there is Randall Jarrell’s famous remark: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times, a dozen or two dozen times and he is great”. This is another way of saying not to look at the “collected works” but at the “selected works”.

If we were under the gun to be official we would have to settle on a cut-off count (two? twelve?) for discrete achievements (theorems, poems, movies) in a given field. And for films, I’m saying three, although my reasoning doesn’t get much better than saying, well, if it’s three then the Woodman makes the cut….

To which I replied:

I’ll take your word that it’s funny! My answer would be that there’s a difference between discovering E=MC2 (or whatever) and writing one or two good books. Ralph Ellison is not a great writer–he just wrote a great book. I do think Jarrell is absolutely right about this, but note that his numbers are a bit higher than yours. It’s fun to kick around, isn’t it?

Indeed it is, although I don’t have any definitive conclusions to share with you, other than this: you don’t have to write a whole shelfful of great books to be a great writer…but it doesn’t hurt.

I just opened a FedEx envelope and pulled out a finished copy of A Terry Teachout Reader, the anthology of my essays, articles, and reviews that Yale University Press will be publishing on May 6. I guess I’m biased (to put it mildly), but I’ve never seen so beautiful a book. It happens that I’ve been very lucky in my designers–all my books have been handsome–but the Teachout Reader stands out. It’s just gorgeous, from the Fairfield Porter lithograph on the jacket to the subtly ribbed green binding to the elegant typography. This is my first book to be composed in Galliard, my favorite typeface. Even if you don’t like the way I write, I think you’ll like the way it looks. To all the folks at Yale, I offer my heartfelt thanks.

In the unlikely event that you don’t know already, you can pre-order a copy from amazon.com by going here.

If you like Unitarian jokes, go here.

(The headline, incidentally, is the punchline of my all-time favorite religious joke, which was told to me by a Lutheran minister who later became a Roman Catholic priest. He told it to me on a plane en route to Chicago, mere minutes after the captain had warned the passengers of a bomb threat. That’s savoir-faire.)

I was just on Amazon looking up books by the novelist Wayne Johnson. The first listing was his new book, which I’m currently reading (and enjoying), The Devil You Know. The second listing was something called Helicopter Theory. I clicked through, thinking, “ooh, that’s a good name for a novel.” Not yet, it’s not. It was actually a book on, um, helicopter theory, by another Wayne Johnson altogether. Needless to say.

Now the Amazon recommendation mill, which never, ever rests, is just positive I’ll find much to divert me in Principles of Helicopter Aerodynamics and Rotary-Wing Aerodynamics, and will doubtless be hawking such wares to me till kingdom come…