Make Room ! Make Room ! (Laserdiscs vs Blu-Rays)

Something I was pondering earlier as I was making more room of my shelves for some Blu-Rays arriving tomorrow: in terms of packaging, if I had the chance to reconfigure all my Blu-Rays to the laserdisc format (let's pretend the laserdisc was just as accommodating as a BR disc) - would I ? I love the physical look and feel of laserdiscs, and I'm imagining what the specialist labels like Masters of Cinema, Indicator and Second Run could do with the format, in terms of artwork, gatefolds, inserts and 12" booklets. In the eternal battle for shelf space, I find the 40-odd laserdiscs I have a far more tidy option in terms of storage - I could probably fit twice as many laserdiscs on the shelf as Blu-Rays. Oddly enough, I've never felt the same way with vinyl vs CD. The reduction in artwork size is regrettable, but the compact disc has always been my preferred music format - who would want to listen to Music for Airports with the silences filled with surface noise ? The laserdisc wave passed by Ireland without so much as a ripple so perhaps that's why I find the format still strangely futuristic. - my Japanese Warner Blade Runner laserdisc has always felt like the most appropriate format for the film...

Fat City (1972, dir. John Huston)

I watched Fat City last night courtesy of my old US DVD from 2002, whose tired looking transfer seemed to add to the film's grimy ambience. I'm tempted to call John Huston's film a classic of skid row poetry; it's certainly a classic, but even Tom Waits would find it hard to mine much poetry from this one, as the fate of two boxers is played out among the broken down streets, derelict lots, one-night cheap hotels and last-chance saloons of Stockton, California. I'd wager that screenwriter Robert Siegel had the film in mind when he wrote what would become Darren Aronofsky's 2008 film The Wrestler and perhaps Steve Buscemi's took some inspiration from Huston's film for his 1996 film Trees Lounge. Fat City is one of two late-career John Huston masterpieces, the other being 1979's Wiseblood, and the film is good enough to cash in my barebones DVD for Indicator's 2017 Blu-Ray which comes with a bounty of fascinating supplements, including a commentary track from film historians Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman, which for once I will put aside an hour and a half to listen to. All that to come, but for now, I indulged in a spot of armchair tourism earlier courtesy of Google Earth, seeking out locations seen in the film. My copy of the usually reliable The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations has no entry on the film, and perhaps that's not surprising: much of the area where Conrad Hall shot those bleached-white streets and dimly-lit bars no longer exists, having been torn down after the filming was completed to make way for a highway. Outside of the film, I hadn't any previous knowledge of Stockton, but passing thru parts of the city and neighborhoods on Google Earth, very little has been done to rid the region of the blight of urban decay, with poor housing planning, poverty, drugs, and neighborhoods lost to gang violence. It's no wonder Stockton is one of California's most undesirable places to live.

If the film gains immeasurably from the shooting locations, so too is the film well served by the terrific cast, a mix of well known actors - Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Candy Clarke, and non-professionals who were not so removed from the film's milieu, and I was especially fond of Curtis Cokes, a former World Welterweight Champion and trainer who plays the soft-spoken Earl with a tremendous dignity, even when fending off his erratic alcoholic lady. There's a great turn too from Art Aragon, another former boxer who plays the assistant coach. Good as Stacy Keach and a young Jeff Bridges are, Susan Tyrrell runs away with the film, playing Oma, an irascible, impetuous alcoholic. It's a shame she had such a patchy film career, but among the more forgettable fare she acted in, there were noteworthy pictures like Andy Warhol's Bad, Forbidden Zone, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Flesh + Blood, and Cry-Baby, plus voice work for two of Ralph Bakshi's animations Wizards and Fire & Ice, plus narration for the Dawn of the Dead documentary Document of the Dead.

In this month's... Electronic Sound (No. 76)

Push and Mark, the editors of Electronic Sound magazine suggest reading the latest issue sitting outside with a cup of tea and that's exactly what I did earlier, with the morning sunshine bouncing off the magazine's customary expanses of white space. The lead feature in this month's issue is David Stubbs' interview with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti as they reflect on the music they produced as Chris and Cosey. This piece works well as a sort of prequel to the Carter Tutti feature in the March 2015 issue of The Wire. It's good to be reminded of the couple's post-TG albums, 1981's Heartbeat and the follow-up Trance (1982), both retain traces of TG DNA in Chris' rhythms and Cosey's cornet playing. In some respects the music became less interesting as the 80's wore on but albums like 1985's Techno Primitiv and 1987's Exotika have their moments. Perhaps their most widely heard track, the 1983 single October (Love Song), a lovely electro-pop confection ought to have been a sure fire hit but wasn't, such are the mysterious ways songs catch fire with the record-buying public, or don't in this case, but Chris and Cosey to my mind have achieved a level of success far beyond record sales. As they explain to David Stubbs, as early as 1981, they were offered to join Grace Jones on a world tour, and there were invitations from Depeche Mode and Blancmange, all of which were turned down so they could concentrate on their music and raise their son outside the glare of the limelight. Cosey's health problems in the late 80's notwithstanding, the duo managed to weather their four decade long partnership with little turbulence - there were none of the chemical burnouts that Coil suffered or the kind of disquieting antics that supposedly went on within Psychic TV. Closing out the feature is handy little primer on Chris and Cosey's albums which are now long out of print on CD. Perhaps Mute might consider a series of re-issues at some point.

Satisfactions that are Permanent: Monte Hellman 1929-2021

Monte Hellman, the great American film-maker has passed away at the grand old age of 91. I was first introduced to Monte Hellman by Alex Cox, who often mentioned the likes of Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter during his introductions for film screened as part of BBC2’s Moviedrome’s cult film season. Indeed Hellman’s signature film Two-Lane Blacktop was screened as part of Moviedrome’s 1989 season, but this was just a little before Cinema became one of my obsessions. In fact for a number of years, Hellman’s film were almost like rumors; impossible to get hold of here in Ireland, and I had to wait a few years for the arrival of DVD to secure Stateside copies of Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and Iguana (all courtesy of Anchor Bay) and The Shooting (VCI). The best of Hellman’s films are hard to pin down, and their pleasures not easily explainable. They can be mysterious and elusive, obscure and aloof, but most film scholars will agree that his best work are among the most remarkable films in post-War American Cinema. He was also the greatest director, Peckinpah included, of Warren Oates with whom he made four masterpieces with: the aforementioned The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and their last film together, the underrated and underseen China 9 Liberty 37. I’m looking thru filmography section in Brad Stevens' excellent 2003 biography Monte Hellman: His Life and Films and I’m reminded of the often uncredited film work he did, having a hand in The Intruder, The Terror, Dementia 13, The Wild Angels, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Head, Shatter, The Killer Elite, Avalanche Express, The Awakening and Robocop. Hellman was famously generous and supportive to film students, often taking them out of the classroom and into the field on his own productions and in the 90’s he became a sort of godfather to the American Independent scene when he helped secure financing for Reservoir Dogs, earning an executive producer credit.

To mark the passing of Monte Hellman, I watched Two-Lane Blacktop last night. By right I should have chosen Ride in the Whirlwind or Iguana, two Hellman films I haven’t seen enough, but the pleasures of Two-Lane Blacktop are inexhaustible, and despite numerous screenings over the years, the film retains that special mythical quality. As ever I’m fascinated by the casting of James Taylor in the film, and here he delivers a strikingly hesitant, even uncomfortable performance. I often wonder was the making of the film difficult for Taylor who famously had never seen the film until it was released by Criterion in 2007 (which Taylor put down to in part to the film being long unavailable, which is true), so it’s nice to see him in the pictures below looking relaxed and cheerful.

Watching the film again last night, it occurred to me that Taylor’s Driver is nursing a kind of death wish – not in the conventional sense, but it’s as if The Driver’s failure to make a connection with Laurie Bird’s Girl, results in his giving up the last vestiges of his humanity to meld with the Chevrolet 150. The Driver never sleeps in the film, unlike The Mechanic and G.T.O., and when The Mechanic suggests he get some sleep, The Driver replies: “I feel good. I can take it all the way”. It’s as it The Driver has become a man-machine, such is his obsession for motion. Famously in the film, the race between the Chevrolet and the Pontiac simply peters out, that the race was never about pink slips anyway, but about the rituals involved (engine maintenance, getting across states without being noticed, picking up the necessary cash at grudge matches). When G.T.O exits the film, the story finally runs out of road and the film is effectively over, and while The Driver has yet another drag race to take part in, the celluloid itself seemingly exhausted from these ever decreasing circles, combusts as if to say, “Enough, no more!”