Colin Marshall

Yan-san's comforting anti-dramatics

I just got to the end of Let’s Learn Japanese Basic II, a language-learning video series the Japan Foundation produced in 1995. Before that, I watched Let’s Learn Japanese Basic I which they put out in 1984. Together, they form a 52-episode series that not only teaches the mechanics of the Japanese language but follows the extended narrative of Yan, a youngish Westerner (I’ll guess Egyptian-American, though the show keeps it vague) in Japan to study and practice architecture. He also buys a boom box, visits famous shrines and beaches, falls for a co-worker, gets jerked around by said co-worker, flees to the snow country for solace, and gets drunk viewing cherry blossoms.

The last quarter-century’s Anglophone Japanese-learners regard Yan as legend. Some have even tracked down Nick Muhrin, the actor who portrays him. Japanese teachers screened these videos in class when they were new — when Japan rode high on the global scene — and seem to continue doing so today. I can see why; their production value strikes me as obsessively high, at least by the standards of language-learning shows. Sure, you have to get yourself in a mid-eighties mindset (which I’m always in) to really appreciate some of the computer graphics used in the strictly instructional segments, but man, those skits? The costumes! The sets! The camera movements! The sheer variety!

I have a hard time engaging with episodic art forms the way they’d like me to — hence my non-participation in our current televisual “golden age” — but something about the anti-dramatics of this type of show keeps me hooked. (Well, that and my desire to learn the language.) Let’s Learn Japanese and its brethren don’t care about doling out precisely engineered doses of plots about bombs planted in the middle of D.C. or desert islands brimming with polar bears or cheerleaders sticking their hands down garbage disposals. Their characters go shopping, mail letters, take day trips, clean the house, and hang out on rooftop beer gardens.

These bare-bones, everyday life-derived stories free the show up to concentrate on its own distinctive texture. I want to label the resulting style something like “cheerful utilitarianism.” Each episode’s form follows its function, but it does so with a stereotypical Japanese verve for somewhat ramshackle slickness and slighty goofy efficiency. In these qualities, I sense the indescribable aesthetic-philosophical sensibility that first turned my head toward in Japan way back when.

I’ve already started missing one thing about watching Let’s Learn Japanese: the characters. Or should I just say “the people”? You’ve got the stout, resilient Yan-san, of course, but you’ve also got the hosts, the amiably robotic Althaus-sensei and Umino-sensei, she of the elaborate sailboat sweaters. Above all, you’ve got the skit players: Basic I young dude Kaihô-san, Basic I gamine Sugihara-san, Basic I middle-aged combover guy Mine-san, Basic II young guy Ando-san, Basic II gamine Koyanagi-san, and Basic II middle-aged combover guy Kodama-san. I’ll miss those middle-aged combover guys the most — or should I say, I’ll miss those middle-aged bākōdo otoko the most.

Jared and Jerusha Hess: Gentlemen Broncos

I still smart from my disappointment at the hands of Napoleon Dynamite. Primed by its brief but bright fan culture, I went into the movie expecting the heartiest laugh session of my life. In the event, I chuckled only once, at a deleted scene where Napoleon responds to one of his tormentors during a game of kickball, “Who's the only one here knows illegal ninja moves from the government?” Took me — and most of my generation, surely — right back to the playground. As Adam Cadre wrote, “Lines such as ‘I made like infinity of those at scout camp’ wouldn't be funny if not for the fact that they're just so authentic.”

But even some of Napoleon Dynamite’s most diehard boosters never heard, I gather, about Gentlemen Broncos, the third film from directors Jared and Jerusha Hess. Nacho Libre, which came between, starred Jack Black as a Mexican monk-turned-secret underground wrestler. All three display the Hesses’ strong fascination with social outcasts in marginal, religious patches of North America, chintz and tchotchkes piled high, and outsider art so inept that it very nearly comes around the other side. Where the moon-booted Napoleon had his Preston, Idaho, the home-schooled, Benjamin has Tooele, Utah. Where Napoleon drew heavily “shaded” notebook-paper-and-pencil portraits, Benjamin writes a novel called Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years.

I hope this doesn’t sound too contrarian-for-contrarianism’s-sake, but I like Gentlemen Broncos the best of all three Hess pictures. Wikipedia says that “due to poor reviews the national release was pulled from theatres,” which astonishes me. “Due to poor reviews?” If distributors pulled films due to poor reviews, Paramount would have spared us the Transformers series. I have to assume something else went on behind closed doors; maybe some higher-up found his excuse not to have to pay for a promotional campaign. But this movie turns out to work with both greater ambition and greater specificity than its predecessors, which makes it a much more worthwhile viewing experience. I probably won’t watch it again, but I’m glad I watched it once.

Gentlemen Broncos offers more to laugh at than did Napoleon Dynamite, not least the awkward dignity it gives the lead girl’s linguistic gaffes (“I’ve been studying in Belgium — namely, five months”) and the constant stream of ridicule — ridicule born of deep familiarity — it aims at pulp sci-fi’s sad grandiosity. Portraying Benjamin’s one-time hero Dr. Ronald Chevalier in a series of maroon turtlenecks, various Native American-y accessories, and a never-removed Bluetooth earpiece, Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords nails the pompous pathos you see when sci-fi and fantasy novelists surround themselves with supplicant fans. The Hesses come from a midwestern Mormon background, which region and religion both seem to have unique relationships with science fiction; that alone opens up plenty of rich storytelling soil.

Alas, they grow rather less in it than I’d hoped. Just like Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, Gentlemen Broncos works as an occasional master class in wonky production design (I still think about the mansion of Jack Black’s champion arch-rival, preserved in burnt-orange 1970 amber) and an ongoing reverse master class in how laughter works. These films don’t base their humor on their characters’ personalities, nor on the interaction between them, nor on the consequences and implications of their situations. They want you to laugh just because something is: because Benjamin lives in domed house, because he writes the word “yeast” so often, because his mom makes hideous nightgowns, because his would-be girlfriend shoots movies on VHS. Or because Nacho stumbles around and feeds orphans glop. Or because Napoleon wears a brown suit. We get an unceasing succession of free-standing (to use Ebert’s critical term of choice) jokes without punchlines. Now, I don’t insist punchlines — far from it — but then, why all the setup?

Terrence Malick: The Tree of Life

A Connecticut theater recently posted this notice:

Oh man. On the one hand, they refuse the walkers-out refunds. That’s good! On the other, they have to type something like this up in the first place. That’s bad! This all but rolls out a ready-made platform for screeds about the Decline of American Cultural Intelligence, but the years have left me less in the mood than ever to launch into those — and they’ve left me less convinced that such a decline, within these borders, would even matter. halogencycle articulated what I found irksome nevertheless:

Even if I didn't love The Tree of Life, it would never occur to me to ask for a refund because I just didn't like a film. If the projection was screwed up or the sound was wrong, sure, I'm happy to demand money back. But I don't understand the thinking that goes "You should have used psychic powers to predict my aesthetic tastes and programmed only films I would like." What kind of sense of entitlement leads people to think like that?

I don’t mind that they dislike the film, though I can’t imagine how they reach their verdict before the final frame; I’ve never managed that. I do sort of mind that they felt entitled to a film conforming to their specific set of likes and dislikes. As a smart fellow on Twitter recently twote, “I don’t want food made with ‘love.’ I want the work of chefs who hate my palate and its prejudices.” My culinary experience differs very little from my cinematic experience, or my experience of any sort of cultural expression: I want smells, tastes, textures, and combinations thereof that I don’t expect. Maybe I feel similarly entitled, but to that — I certainly feel disappointed when I don’t get it.

In other news, I deem The Tree of Life the American film of the decade. Admittedly, this sounds a tad premature, but still. American cinema hasn’t had a strong run lately, and, absent some sort of renaissance, I don’t foresee any picture as interesting sprouting from my home soil before 2020. (And, yes, this judgment includes the films I’ll make, but hey, I’ve got low self-esteem.) The press has flocked to cover the movie, and with excellent cause, but now I wonder what I can say that others haven’t. I refer you to Anthony Lane, A.O. Scott, and Roger Ebert.

Terrence Malick still lacks a truly robust sense of humor, but I found select laughs in The Tree of Life. (Not that these moments provoked much laughter around me.) And, yes, some of those CGI dinosaurs won’t look good ten years from now, but the non-CGI visual effects will remain impressive. And though everyone talks about the images, I actually found the sound taking a more central place. Often, the narrative moves through back and forth in time and space first through what you hear, and only then through what you see, with dialogue that gradually slips away or only slowly fades into the mix. I need a more precise word “dialogue”; a lot of what people say in the film, you’re not meant to hear clearly. That quality alone feels like the tip of the structural-fascination iceberg.

So I probably should’ve seen it at the Arclight like halogencycle did. Instead, I foolishly caught a screening here in Santa Barbara. Look; I like the Plaza de Oro well enough. It boasts at least a C+ selection of worthwhile films, which is more can say for most of the other theaters here. But, sonically, the PdO does not bring it. Even so, I suspect I heard what Malick needed me to hear. From the mouth of Brad Pitt’s frustrated fifties suburban patriarch, a would-be classical musician ultimately shackled to the whims of a local factory of no discernible specialty, comes the saddest sentence in the English language: “I let myself get sidetracked.”

(The saddest, that is, besides “I already know what I like.”)

Anthony asks about all this 10,000-subscriber fuss

Anthony comments on my push for 10,000 Marketplace of Ideas subscribers or bust:

Why do you need 10,000 subscribers to continue it? I realize you want to spread ideas, and that's not a bad thing, but you seem so intent on ending it without reaching a larger subscriber base.

Do you need that many people to justify its existence? Is this a self-imposed decision or was it forced upon you? I understand you're probably a freelance journalist and are busy and broke, but if you enjoy it, and your listeners enjoy it, there's no reason to push the boundaries of that relationship. If it becomes a burden then you can scale it back or pander for donations, or even end it. But begging for subscribers has always gotten on my nerves, regardless of the cause.

The only justification I can see for this is that in order to get more high-profile guests, you need an established reputation, and for a podcast, subscriber statistics are the best way to show that.

Strongly encouraging listeners to "recommend" and "share" turns me away. Nevertheless, I wish you success. I just hope you can attain it without succumbing to tired tactics that I've seen too often.

The long and short of it: because I expected to reach 10,000 subscribers years ago. At the current rate of growth, I'll die of liver spots before I can make a sustainable career out of this.

Interestingly, I haven’t had trouble getting guests of any profile; nobody’s even come close to asking for listenership figures. But while I seem able to invite any guest I want, there remain a few things I can’t do, the most urgent priority of which is to make the show without having to burn a huge chunk of my day on a job that has nothing to do with anything. To achieve that state, I reckon I’ll need at least the following:

• A five-figure podcast audience (because I keep hearing the refrain, “Don’t even try professionalizing any podcast with an audience smaller than five figures”)
• Some sort of major-city terrestrial broadcast presence (because, at its heart, I don’t see The Marketplace of Ideas as a fully “pull” medium type of show)
• Not necessarily a rapid rate of audience growth, but at least a constant rate of audience growth (as opposed to an oscillation between audience growth and decay)
• Listening enforced by law in at least 51 percent of Anglophone territories

Much soul-searching tells me that, content-wise, I have already done enough to achieve this, so the sticking point must lay elsewhere. (As Principal Skinner once said, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”) I choose to heed the golden words of wisdom Conan O’Brien uttered during his interview on WTF (a podcast that, coincidentally, recently hit it big on public radio): “Get into situations where you don't have a choice. I believe that's the definition of accomplishing things in this life.” Hence the decision to rip myself off of whatever teat now holds me back and move to L.A., with nothing lined up, in exactly two months.

I’ve heard the question before, in various forms: “Why can’t The Marketplace of Ideas continue as a hobby?” Because nothing can. Maybe my own personal psychological weirdness causes this, but, broadcasting, filmmaking, or writing, I can’t keep any pursuit rolling viably as a hobby. But nor can I convert them into “jobs,” traditionally defined and separate from “life.” There comes a point when they must integrate with my existence itself or begone — and the clock’s ticking.

Korean cinema diary: Milky Way Liberation Front, The Show Must Go On, I Saw the Devil

I look back and find Seong-ho Yoon’s Milky Way Liberation Front (은하해방전선) far too goofy to have stuck in my brain except in individually hilarious fragments. Don’t take that as a disrecommendation. It has a story “about” a young filmmaker enduring script problems, lady problems, and, ultimately, speech problems — something thrusts total aphasia on him, so he has to have friend act as his ventriloquist — but don’t worry about it. I remember the experience as an explosion of colors, languages (at least Korean and Japanese, which, studying both, I found helpful), on-screen text of various sorts, movies and television shows within the film, and countless moments of teenage awkwardness. Despite my often saying that the second time you watch a movie is really the first time (since you don’t get distracted by following the plot) I imagine my second time watching this will feel like the actual first time.

Jae-rim Han’s The Show Must Go On (우아한 세계) stars Kang-ho Song, known for playing chunky dudes who usually don’t know what they’re doing but, in the heat of the moment, summon their own kind of competence. Think of the bumbling dad in The Host, the freewheeling detective in Memories of Murder, or the boisterous North Korean sergeant in Joint Security Area. The man’s also worked for Chan-wook Park, Sangsoo Hong, and Chang-dong Lee, making him one of Korea’s biggest actors. Here, he takes on the role of one of those Korean gangsters who juggles his problems at “work” with trouble at home, much like the lead of A Dirty Carnival. His son’s off studying in Canada, his daughter wishes he’d die, and his wife keeps an ever-more-worrying tally of his various injuries. He longs only to buy a “Western-style” McMansion and move his family in, but elaborate internecine plots to kill him complicate his dream’s realization. The picture gets mileage out of the contrast between his domestic struggles and the expensive-looking knife fights and car chases that separate them, if perhaps a little too much.

Setting a revenge-minded secret agent off after the serial killer who dismembered his wife, Ji-woon Kim’s I Saw the Devil (악마를 보았다) at first seems to go in the direction of one of those “avenger turns worse than the killer” movies, and maybe it actually does, but it feels a cut above that. The whole “Korea, land of EXTREME ASIAN MOVIES” comes, I would assume, from the popularity of movies like this and Oldboy and such. Most of the material wouldn’t seem out of place in a standard Western slasher piece: the serial killer goes around smashing women he spots at bus stops and whatnot, then sawing them apart back at his lair for his cannibal friend; the secret agent follows the killer around, repeatedly maiming him, letting doctors patch him up, and then maiming him again. But Kim goes into a great deal more visual detail than the Saws of the world, which still tend to work with implication, would lead you to expect. What weakness the film suffers from, it shares to varying degrees with much else in Korean cinema: despite approaching ideas worth going deep into — the killer’s supposed unscareability and convictions about everyone’s craziness but his, the secret agent’s slow crumble in the face of his own monstrosity — it stops just short, preferring to deal in expensive-looking camera moves instead.

David Sterritt: Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews

Although I’ve seen pathetically few Jean-Luc Godard films, my meager Godard watchedography ironically includes some pictures even his fans haven’t gotten around to, like his 1980 “second first film” Sauve qui peut (la vie)/Every Man for Himself/Save Your Ass. Though you wouldn’t know if from my failure to write anything about that movie — I did talk about it with Dave Kehr on this week’s Marketplace of Ideas, though — I did find enough cinematic inventiveness in it, even thirty years after its release, that I felt a renewed sense of responsibility to learn about the man behind it.

If you’ve never checked out the University of Mississippi’s Conversations with Filmmakers series, do it now. Vernon and Marguerite Gras’ Peter Greenaway: Interviews delivers, for me, the most articulate indictments of cinema’s failure to achieve its artistic potential. Livia Bloom talked with me on MOI about editing Errol Morris: Interviews. I just read, and felt invigorated by, Ludvig Hertzberg’s Jim Jarmusch: Interviews. The books all deliver exactly what they promise: interviews, interviews, interviews, over several eras, with several interviewers, and displaying just enough restatement and idea overlap to highlight each subject’s tics and preoccupations.

Had I interviewed Godard myself — a job for which, as you know, I lack nearly all qualifications — Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews would constitute a full MOI hat trick: Past guest David Sterritt edited the volume, and past guest Peter Brunette then edited the series. But since past guest Jonathan Rosenbaum conducted one of the conversations within, I’ll settle for a pseudo-triple. Everyone involved gets good stuff out of Godard, a task which seems alternately effortless and impossible. Sometimes I think of the man as a classically aloof stonewaller, and sometimes I imagine him scattering seeds of cinematic provocation like a camera-wielding Swiss Johnny Appleseed.

Given my total disinterest in Marxism and my failure to see the death of cinema on the horizon, I’ve never set much store by Godard’s most notorious proclamations, but his ideas about how to work resonate more and more with me these days. He brings up his opinions about rapport with the gear a few times in this book: no man could call himself a great lover if he only touched a woman every few years, so can a man call himself a filmmaker if he only touches a camera every few years? In one extended dialogue, Godard goes back and forth with an engineer at Aaton about their attempt to invent a 35-millimeter camera small enough for the director to carry at all times and grab shots whenever and wherever they present themselves. The project fell apart, but I love that Godard lives close enough to the filmmaking metal that he would even want to push the technology forward like that.

I get the impression that Godard — “loves” to work doesn’t feel quite right, but — must work. He doesn’t do filmmaking; he is filmmaking. That sounds too grand, but I don’t want you to have to endure eight paragraphs of clarification. Even when Godard has fallen into moralistic periods (I don’t look too heartily forward to watching his seventies work) or had critics declare his irrelevance, he’s still worked, still found ways to make cinema thrill him. I don’t think he’s given himself a choice, and that I greatly admire. This excitement comes through in a Breathless or a Sauve qui peut (la vie) — and even in the less leaden passages of a picture like Contempt — but I look forward to feeling a lot more of it in the rest of his oeuvre.

(And let’s face it — anybody who collaborates so closely with ECM, I’m gonna get into.)

Observer's festival debut

My experimental short Observer just locked in to premiere on the evening of Sunday, July 10 at the Ventura Film Festival. According to the schedule, it screens during the 8-10 p.m. block at the Marriott. (You know, the hotel Little Miss Sunshine shot in.) I’m told a filmmaker Q&A will happen afterward, so feel free to turn up and ask me something. Make sure you concentrate on formless questions about what things “mean.”

Here’s Observer’s trailer, to refresh your memory (and you might even watch the full movie somewhere, if’n you’re nice to me):

I needed my memory refreshed, I can assure. Let me tell you something interesting I’ve found out about the filmmaking life, to the extent that I’ve experienced it: about a year separates shooting a project and hearing back from festivals about it, and by that point, if you’re like me, you’ve waded knee-deep into another project. I’ve already started shooting my next short, the all-Super 8, all-Borges-influenced, equally Polaroid-filled א. More on that soon.

My first auteur

Before I knew any other directors, I knew John Carpenter. You might not think him the kind of filmmaker one becomes a cinéaste with, and especially not the kind of filmmaker I would have become a cinéaste with, but his work intrigued me then and continues to intrigue me now. America has long considered him not far from a horror-fixated schlockmeister; “In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, I'm a filmmaker; in the U.K., I'm a horror director; in the U.S, I 'm a bum," he’s said. (Although, given that he goes by TheHorrorMaster on Twitter, maybe he now cultivates the image.) Though labeled as a genre director, he really does have more than something of the auteur about him, even though I can’t quite put my finger on it.

His Big Trouble in Little China did much to aesthetically shape my childhood. I’ve watched it regularly over the years, and thus I had one of the finest theatergoing experiences of my life when L.A.’s American Cinematheque screened it last weekend. Nothing quite like seeing an immaculate print of a 25-year-old favorite in a packed house of hundreds of enthusiasts even more steeped in the film than me — and then having the director himself emerge for a Q&A. Sadly, he had to endure a load of mouth-breathing questions like, “If Wang’s mind and spirit had aligned, would he have been able to cut the bottle in half?”, but he proved to be as cool as I’d suspected from listening to his DVD commentaries, a venue in which he effectively became my first filmmaking teacher.

I didn’t see 1974’s Dark Star, Carpenter’s student film, until the mid-2000s, unfortunately for me. Watch it, and you obtain the key to the Carpenter-at-his-best cinematic sensibility: minimalist yet striking designs, pulsing synthesizer scores, small budgets used creatively, undammable currents of goofy humor, and plenty of moments of genuine freakiness. Hammered together out of $60,000, a beach ball dressed up as a maneating alien, and a hallway repurposed as an elevator, this remains Carpenter’s only more-or-less straight-up comedy. I defy you not to appreciate that final “surfing” shot.

1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 I find perpetually watchable, despite — or maybe because of — its being basically a seventies-upped Rio Bravo. Who can fail to applaud the bravado of removing the point-blank little-girl-with-ice-cream-shooting for the ratings board, then splicing it right back in again? Despite having seen it theatrically, I forget Jean-Francois Richet’s 2005 remake almost entirely. At the Big Trouble screening, Carpenter claimed credit for the idea of change the bad dudes from a “multiracial street gang” into a scrum of corrupt cops.

Everyone already knows about 1978’s Halloween, no doubt the highest return on investment to Carpenter’s minimalism; he used what, a couple houses, a knife, a sprayed-white Ronald Reagan mask, and three keys on his keyboard? I used to enjoy playing the Atari 2600 tie-in.

You find Carpenter’s core, I say, in 1981’s Escape from New York. When I realized the same dude did both it and Big Trouble, I knew I had to learn much more. Using a few crumbling blocks of East St. Louis, he crafted perhaps the most striking dystopian vision I’ll ever see. Many qualities emblematize the movie’s triumph of the handmade, especially the fact that, for the wireframe “computer graphics,” Carpenter’s team built and shot an actual, physical model of New York city, all black but for reflective-tape-lines at all the edges. Also, from Wikipedia: “Carpenter originally wrote the film in the mid-1970s as a reaction to the Watergate scandal, but no studio wanted to make it because Carpenter proved unable to articulate just how this film could relate to the Watergate scandal.”

Escape from New York’s sequel Escape from L.A. came in 1996, and oh lord, did Colin-12 get psyched about it. People seemed to regard the movie as a disappointment, and with its big-budget baroqueness, it does depart from the feel of the original. But how empty could it be if I still remember it, and clearly, fifteen years on? At the time, I took every event’s mirroring of every event in the original — Snake gets a real virus in N.Y but a fake in L.A., he rides a glider into N.Y. but a submarine in L.A., he gets into a cage-fighting match in N.Y. and a basketball-throwing challenge in L.A., the de facto ruler of N.Y. drives a car with a chandelier on its hood and the de facto ruler of L.A. drives one with a disco ball on its trunk — as a mark of shoddiness. “Did they just forget what happened in the first one?” I wondered. But to appreciate Escape from L.A. you must accept that it satirizes everything — especially Escape from New York.

(Fifteen years separated Escape from New York and Escape from L.A.; fifteen years separate Escape from L.A. and the present moment. Carpenter mentioned his and Kurt Russell’s perpetual readiness to work together, if presented “the right material.” Could Escape from Detroit loom far off? You wouldn’t even have to do much set dressing, as I understand it.)

Starman, from 1984, has a stark early-eighties feel and gets close to some rich ideas about the line separating identity from perfect impersonation, but it backs off from them in a Hollywood-y enough way that it has to count as a missed opportunity. Same with 1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man, a showcase for then-advanced effects — not Carpenter’s way — that neither explores the everyday complications of invisibility that Adam Cadre says H.F. Saint’s source novel does nor uses Chevy Chase to his fullest. I recall 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness having the same problem, though it non-uses Sam Neill, an actor whom I “like” but whose presence in films actually signals negatively about those films.

Vampires, from 1998, has a lot of individually interesting qualities, including but not limited to James Woods’ performance as a weary, embittered vampire hunter. I doubt you could call it “actually good,” but Carpenter and co. made it with so many down-and-dirty, rough-and-ready techniques and tricks — I don’t remember any CGI at all, real or fake — that the director’s commentary track, which kicked off the informal “film school” that is now my life, offers a wealth of information on how to do it all yourself. I also remember the movie drawing accusations of misogyny. Roger Ebert wrote that main hooker-girl’s wardrobe “displays the precise 2.2 inches of cleavage that Carpenter's heroines always display, as if just that much and no more or less comforts his libido.”

My previous Carpenter-related filmgoing opportunity came a decade ago, with Ghosts of Mars, practically a remake of Precinct 13 — though more fun than Richet’s — and so, in effect, practically a remake of Rio Bravo. It thus dresses, like most of Carpenter’s pictures, in modern genre drag to hide the western it really is. Big Trouble began its life, — under the steady screenwriting hand of Buckaroo Banzai director W.D. Richter, Carpenter’s old school friend — set in San Francisco’s Chinatown of 1870 rather than San Francisco’s Chinatown of 1986. I think the hybridity of secret westerns works for Carpenter, though part of me just thirsts to see him go all-out with a straight-on Hawks homage.

(I haven’t seen or have forgotten Someone’s Watching Me!, Elvis, The Fog, The Thing, Christine, Prince of Darkness, They Live, Body Bags, and Village of the Damned. Any suggestions, Carpenter-savvy readers, on which I should soonest visit/revisit? Should I get excited about his recent comeback, The Ward?)

Peter Biskind: Down and Dirty Pictures

I “came of age” as a cinephile during the nineties U.S. independent film boom. I thus took a while to realize that guys like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Steven Soderbergh — high profiles who came from low budgets — had not always ruled and would not always rule American cinema. Other than Russell, both Andersons, and the occasional Soderbergh, I haven’t looked back to these guys for much inspiration in my own filmmaking, though they all share the credit for firing me up in the first place. Weirdly, I’d never researched the historically distinctive era that brought them all to such prominence so quickly. How had it happened?

To remedy my ignorance, I first went to Peter Biskind, a well-known chronicler of the American movie business. You might know Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his account of “the New Hollywood,” the nineties indie movement’s direct formal predecessor in the seventies. (I always felt all that burnt-orange revivalism ran deeper than That 70s Show.) The folktale about the New Hollywood goes something like this: Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper made Easy Rider for cheap, Easy Rider made pantloads of money, and so the studios started casting around for other artistic young filmmakers in a cargo-cultish attempt to replicate the Easy Rider trick until they realized they couldn’t sustain it. The folktale about the indie boom goes like this: Soderbergh/Tarantino/Smith/Rodriguez made sex, lies, and videotape/Reservoir Dogs/Clerks/El Mariachi for dirt-cheap, sex, lies/Dogs/Clerks/Mariachi made balloon-seat-pantloads of money, studios cast around for other rough-and-ready young filmmakers, etc., etc.

Down and Dirty Pictures tells this folktale in welcome (if near-oppressive) detail. Simon and Schuster gave the book the subtitle “Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film,” which, despite coming in the terribly unpromising “a, b, and the x of y” form, points out a couple entities I’ve never really understood but who, by Biskind’s reasoning, made indie film into Indie Film. Biskind spends more time on the legendarily brutish Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein than any of the scores of other suits he mentions; I quickly lost count of the many “Harvey, the veins in his purple face throbbing with rage, sprayed an arc of spittle across the conference room” and “For reasons known only to himself, Harvey began throttling the intern” moments described.

I actually feel a 280-page Harvey Weinstein biography somewhere in these 484 pages, the rest of which do indeed discuss Sundance, the careers of involved directors, and the ill fates of would-be Miramaxes. Biskind’s Harvey reads like a tragic figure of antiquity, driven by sheer love of film to found Miramax, a company that would acquire and promote the living hell out of adventurous passion projects, to get them on the same turf with and ultimately beat out the prevailing Hollywood pablum. He stuck to the plan up through about Pulp Fiction and the sale of the company to Disney; each taste of money just made him thirstier for more, which forced Miramax to play it safer and safer. The company that once distributed The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover worked its way down to The English Patient, then Shakespeare in Love, then She’s All That.

Sadder still, Harvey appears never to have had the taste he thought he did. Though, in his own mythology, he experienced his awakening during a screening of The 400 Blows, he grew up to become the man who would loose Life is Beautiful on the American public. In apology to one young director he kept browbeating and browbeating to cut down her film — Biskind describes Harvey demanding cuts even more often than he describes him exploding — he sends flowers, a book of Truffaut essays, and a card explaining that, see, I love art films too, y’know? But if he truly considers Truffaut the far “art” end of the spectrum, well, that says everything you need to know.

Biskind has the indie bubble burst around 2000, though Sundance, Miramax, Weinstein, and most of those auteurs soldier separately on. I don’t know how much things have changed. Reporting from Sundance a year or two, The Sound of Young America host (and past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Jesse Thorn asked, “How can these great artists work for such UGG-booted dunderheads?”

Culinary reportage is cultural reportage

I don’t believe in opinion, but I do believe in food. Whatever that means. Hence my decision to join Yelp and incentivize my own writing of, effectively, two- to three-paragraph pieces of gastronomically themed writing. I’ve quite enjoyed getting a handle on this short form, despite never claiming brevity as a strength. Or maybe because of that. I’m with Tyler Cowen when he says, in his Ethnic Dining Guide, "Restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism. Entrepreneurship, international trade, and cultural exchange all come together in these communal eateries."

Some principles I’ve thought up while crafting my first seven writeups of eateries in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara:

• If a writeup runs over three paragraphs, I’m not making it dense and/or concise enough.
• If a writeup runs under two paragraphs, I didn’t pay enough attention when I ate at the place.
• The food makes up half of what’s important about a restaurant — at most.
• Objective evaluations of food don’t exist — or if they do, who would want them?
• If a writeup has not reached beyond topics of taste, service, decor, and suchlike, that writeup has failed.
• My tastebud chemistry ain’t transferable.
• The words “good,” “bad,” and all synonyms thereof have the same place here as they do in any critical endeavor: none.
• At no point can I consider food separate from other varieties of world cultural product, including but not limited to music, film, literature, and visual art.
• “Authenticity” has neither any particular relevance, nor value, nor even meaning.

I aim to iterate toward making these restaurant writeups interesting enough reading that they can work as blog posts in and of themselves. Here’s my review of Blue Owl in S.B., which users have so far voted “Cool” once and “Funny” once:

This place cleverly hacks Santa Barbara nonsense laws — or at least the particular Santa Barbara nonsense laws that prevent food trucks from parking on streets. Where, y'know, food trucks park. The proprietor sets up her stand outside at 11:30 (more like 11:45 when I went) and uses Zen Yai's kitchen to whip up a few different dishes, including egg-topped fried rice, shrimp sandwiches, "peanut butter burgers," and trip-tip sandwiches with oyster mayo.

These dishes all but force you at gunpoint to eat them — and fast. Those with health concerns, know that they're as good for you as anything so compulsively wolfable isn't. Not to say Blue Owl tries to pull a Jamba Juice; I distinctly recall the promotion pretty naked playing the whole "food for after you've burnt the evening drinking" angle. They serve dishes in the Roy Choi tradition, meaning they taste apocalyptically buttery even when/if they don't actually contain butter. Not that they could fool anybody — I mean, even decadent ancient Rome couldn't dream of peanut butter burgers.

People told me Blue Owl operates firmly on the take-your-shite-and-leave business model, but the woman in charge offered us a seat at one of Zen Yai's tables without hesitation. Plates, utensils, and water, too. We had ourselves a mini-restaurant going. I still feel like I'm languishing in the provinces when I eat food-truck food in a brick-and-mortar because of the quaintness fetishists around here — remember when the Kogi truck came to town and we all waited in line for hours? -- but this stuff oughta hold me for the months before I move down to Babylon.

Here’s my Yelp profile. Do you use Yelp? LET’S BE FRIENDS GUYSCulinary reportage is cultural reportage