billy wilder

The air conditioner broke at Time Warner Cable and everybody was grumpy. Everywhere I looked on the third of July I saw girls crying on boys' shoulders and in the Time Warner Cable office this old guy held onto a box and over and over again, wiped the sweat off his bald head. It was moist in there. Took an hour and fifteen minutes to give them the cable box, the remote and the internet router, tools of the modern apartment, and then out the door and up to the Apple Store on 5th Avenue.

That thing is underground, it has kind of a Louvre thing going, people could take the stairs but they were waiting for the elevator and blocking the stairs. A flow problem. New York City is one big flow problem.

The trains have been working relatively painlessly on the plus side, it would be almost boring but everytime I seem to get on a train there's a crying couple, everybody's self-conscious at those moments. Why is she crying? Is he a jerk? Has something terrible happened? What? The whole drama and there's no program.

Today the United States celebrated its independence from England, I stress the last because in terms of independence, most of our elected officials seem about as independent as the fingers from the hand taking the pay-out. The latest sham anger at the press is only the latest in a disturbing and disgusting effort to make dissent the scapegoat for the sins of this administration.

I've skipped fireworks, which I love for any reason, for the last few years because it's hard to celebrate our country's existence when we're killing tens of thousands of innocent people for no reason really, except that our president and his vice have certain ideas about the world leading them to the conclusion that it's not murder if you can call the victim a terrorist. That fifteen year old girl who was raped, had her body lit on fire and was killed with the rest of her family certainly might have been a terrorist, she's from the right neighborhood and she makes the right amount of money to fit in our conception of terrorist. They also suffer from the delusion that this is a democracy because they held a vote...you can see the logic.

Or you can see its absence anyway.

I didn't suffer or declare a hunger strike though, I watched a couple Billy Wilder films at Film Forum. One directed, one just written with Howard Hawks directing - Howard Hawks is no slouch. The first, directed by Hawks, was Ball of Fire, which was a lot of fun, it was also, besides the convivial nature of the collegues, a perfectly accurate depiction of the academic world as far as I could tell. Barbara Stanwyk was perfect, as she always is, always the suggestion that she's the smartest one there...

The Major and the Minor was also a lot of fun, a kind of accidental Lolita made out of a grown woman put in a military school - a fish out of water like Kool Aid Man at a wine tasting. It really was fun, the spectre of World War II about to be played out gave it an odd feeling of poignance.

Billy Wilder is so wonderful because there is no pretension in his work at all, he really focuses on the story to almost an insane degree, the best example is his handling of Double Indemnity. One of the problems I have with James Cain as a writer is he tends toward moralization, but in Wilder's hands the story, retaining all the sense of nemesis that is everywhere in Cain, veers from condemnation (you can point to Barbara Stanwyk's character, but even in her last scene there's no sense of justice being done, only a certain path followed to one of its natural conclusions) toward curiosity, and this allows the last scene between Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson (who is always amazing) to be one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. Wow, what a scene!

There are no scenes like that in the movies I saw today, but there are some amazing moments - any moment Barbara Stanwyk turns on the seduction is a moment to really sink into and watching Dana Andrews turn on the ham is always fun as well. Movies can be so wonderful, why are movies like Superman Returns made? That tired old movie without suspense and barely a reason for being beyond the profit motive depresses me so much when the medium has so much potential to fill the soul with life. Going through the motions is bad enough in a three minute pop song, but in a two and half hour bloated beached whale of a movie, it's simply agony. Perfunctionary humor, perfunctionary action, perfunctionary plot, it's as safe as an office park and tastes like aspirin.

Some moron critics talked about how the director wanted to make an icon out of Superman. Gee, that's some kind of goal, seeing as you're starting with the iconic figure of Superman. Thanks for making a movie pal. That's deep an all, but little things in a popcorn movie count, like suspense and plot, for instance. Never, and this is saying something because I don't think I've ever even thought of her, have I cared LESS about Lois Lane than I did while I was watching her. Really. I thought, why doesn't Superman just find somebody else? ANYBODY else. Other women would date him and not win Pulitizers for articles about how the world doesn't need him. Never have I imagined the ungratefulness shown by Lois Lane after Superman saved her life by stopping her plane from crashing.

It was like he never flew down from space, avoided chunks of plane and single-handedly stopped her plane from crashing into a baseball diamond at about Mach 2. Her son owes his mother to this Man of Steel and she can't get over the fact that he left to go back to Krypton a few years back. Could care less, luckily for everybody, though fat good it does old Sup, she cares more about the power outage. Why? It's never explained how she seems to think it's something more than a plain old power outage. What does she think it is? Why does she think it's so important? Because nobody can give her a straight answer? Because the story needs her to be interested? And I hate to say this, but the kid actor was one of those terrible kid actors like Sam in Diff'rent Strokes...the fine line between obnoxious and cute is explored in microscopic detail and at some point obnoxious wins and then starts bragging.

The story was apparently written by a committee after doing a study entitled "Successful Components of High Grossing Movies" and really, the piano scene has to be seen to be believed in its awful patness. I was in an agony of suspense to find out if it was going to be as predictable as I imagined it would be and in the end it was somehow more predictable, to the point where it felt somehow defeated by the weight of its own celluloid. The film itself seemed to ask, "do we have to go through these motions? Or can we simply assume them?"

In Ball of Fire I knew the boy would somehow win the girl, but the journey itself was full of all kinds of delights, sometimes it was a delight of the script, or the cinematographer, of the actor or actress, of a director's decision. Every scene was infused with the joy of telling a story that felt fun, absurd and optimistic. In contrast, Superman Returns was an exercise, something pasted together to insure profit. Of course the studio behind Ball of Fire wanted to make a profit, as much profit as it could, yet it succeeded artistically whereas Superman Returns was about as artistic a Celine Dion concert. Instead of relying on special effects and the idea that the audience will be impressed because it's supposed to be impressed, Ball of Fire offered character, story and action driven by the consequences of the story, rather than a story dependent on the needs of the CGI and accounting departments of a major studio, there was little, if any, self-satisfaction in it.

It also didn't appear to hold its audience in disdain.

I also saw The Devil Wears Prada. I bought the tickets for these movies on Fandango. Today I received a questionaire from Fandango. The questionaire was all about how much I had noticed the S-Class Mercedes in The Devil Wears Prada? What else is there to say?

Finally I saw The Road to Guantanamo, an odd film directed by the always compelling Michael Winterbottom. His Code 46 deserved to be seen by more people and his Tristam Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story was wonderful and life-affirming. This film, mixing the voices of men who were falsely imprisoned at Guantanimo Bay with acted recreations of their experiences allowed Winterbottom to accentuate what he felt were keys into the characters of these men who endured hell because of the political monstrousity of the current U.S. government. It was a difficult film to watch because it worked so well as propaganda against the United States, and that was shameful. Also, however, the recreations allowed one to avoid the questions raised by the movie by leading one to wonder about the legitimacy of the scenes just witnessed. How real was this? Was it just like that? More important questions were left behind at the disbelief of seeing this inhumanity in action. To what degree is this what Winterbottom wants us to imagine Guantanamo is like and to what degree is it an accurate portrayal of Guantanamo. Strangely enough, one doesn't have these questions rise up as to the nature of Solieri while watching Amadeus.

Anyway, the sentimentality of patriotism is so sham as to make me want to puke. It really comes out on July 4th and Memorial Day, these morons who have no trouble with a president who sends soldiers into harm's way without a defensible reason, oh right, weapons of mass destruction and torture, anyway, they get so sentimental about these same boys they've happily supported marching off into a madness of violence. Instead of getting sentimental, it would be great if they got real. This war is so sad, so misguided, I keep coming back to it like a stutter.

I should sleep. Tomorrow is all about preperations for the summer.