Dennis Cozzalio’s bi-annual, bi-cameral, bi-sexual, buy-it-wholesale quiz is back, and having rocked the internet with my amazingly lame answers last time, I’m getting back on the horse…
1) Favorite unsung holiday film
I’m not sure it’s that unsung, because it’s a staple here for nursing a swollen belly after Christmas dinner, but the 1947 Australian gem Bush Christmas leaps to mind. It’s a product of the time when Aussie cinema was an artisanal affair, and a great romp for kids. It’s also a film that really gets the spirit of childhood, and the contradictory, cathartic need for both adventure and change, and familiarity and security, we feel at year’s end, all done with laidback charm that avoids processed sentiment.
2) Name a movie you were surprised to have liked/loved
There have been too many of these over the years, so I’ll go for a recent example: considering how unimpressed I was by his early work, I was surprised how much I’ve enjoyed David O. Russell’s conventionally written but cheekily funny and energetic The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook.
3) Ned Sparks or Edward Everett Horton?
Sparks for line delivery, Horton for facial expression.
4) Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy– yes or no?
Yes. It’s the film those Burt Reynolds movies are supposed to be but usually aren’t, and a fun spectacle of Peckinpah going populist, although the second half is weaker than the first.
5) What contemporary actor would best fit into a popular, established genre of the past
I was surprised at what a cool looking cowboy Daniel Craig made in Cowboys & Aliens, and only wished the film around him had been a proper western. Similarly, when Jude Law played Errol Flynn in The Aviator opposite Leo DiCaprio, I suddenly longed for a reborn Michael Curtiz or Henry King to make a real old-school swashbuckler (and not a bloody Pirates of the Caribbean-ish flick) with those two actors in it.
6) Favorite non-disaster movie in which bad weather is a memorable element of the film’s atmosphere
Many, many older horror films certainly come under this heading – the raging thunderstorm, the oneiric fog. So we’ll scratch that along with the disaster movie, and I’ll give my nod then to a film from another genre again: the opening sequence of Ronald Neame’s The Golden Salamander, as Trevor Howard tries to traverse a muddy road on a dark and stormy night, and all but crashes into his fate. Some runners-up would include the gales of Key Largo and The Wreck of the Mary Deare, the rainstorm of Seven Samurai, the snowstorms of Kaidan, Samurai, and McCabe and Mrs Miller, and sandstorms in Thank You Mr Moto, Lawrence of Arabia, and Them!
7) Second favorite Luchino Visconti movie
Rocco and His Brothers. My favourite is The Leopard, but it’s a close-run thing.
8) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD/Blu-ray?
Theatrically: The Counselor
DVD: Lone Survivor
9) Explain your reaction when someone eloquently or not-so-eloquently attacks one of your favorite movies (Question courtesy of Patrick Robbins)
Challenge to duel at dawn. No, not really. This depends, naturally, on the forum, and my temperament at the time. If it occurs in person, reasoned argument usually commences. As someone who expended far, far too much energy and emotion arguing about such things early in my online life, in that realm today I usually limit myself to a soft “bloody idiot” muttered under the breath, followed by closing that tab. Sometimes if the dismissal lingers however, it will inspire an essay on the film, just to right the karmic books. Indeed, that’s very much the spirit in which I first got into film writing, usually in reaction to some book or newspaper critique I’d just read.
10) Joan Blondell or Glenda Farrell?
Go go Glenda.
11) Movie star of any era you’d most like to take camping
W.C. Fields. We’d walk about twenty yards. Then he’d say he’s been bitten by a snake and needs the cure. All forward progress ends for the day as we get soused. The second day looks much like the first.
12) Second favorite George Cukor movie
Camille. My favourite is The Philadelphia Story. This may reverse after future viewings.
13) Your top 10 of 2013 (feel free to elaborate!)
Sorry, but you’ll have to wait for my yearly Confessions of Film Freak piece for that.
14) Name a movie you loved (or hated) upon first viewing, to which you eventually returned and had more or less the opposite reaction
As with 2), I’ve had many of these over the years. I think a notable recent reevaluation I’ve made was in returning to Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which like many I disliked at first for not being a James Whale or Terence Fisher film. But on return, having realised that Branagh is in large part always a maker of pseudo-musicals, I found he mated Gothic cinema with an original feel for the material’s roots in the giddy, transformative energy and self-dramatizing aspect of Romanticism, done with a positively Wagnerian sense of grandeur. It feels more like a spiritual adaptation of Percy’s Prometheus Unbound rather than Mary’s The Modern Prometheus…
15) Movie most in need of a deluxe Blu-ray makeover
Ask me if and when I get a blu-ray player.
16) Alain Delon or Marcello Mastroianni?
Mastroianni was probably, in the long run, the better actor, marvellously confident yet changeable on screen. And yet I’m leaning to Delon, whom I’ve often mocked as cinema’s prettiest actor whilst still enjoying his laidback, surprisingly introspective cool and subtle register, without which, for instance, the climactic scenes of Le Samourai wouldn’t have half their charge.
17) Your favorite opening sequence, credits or no credits
I could pick something that’s a glorious display of cinematic technique, or a brilliant example of setting a story in motion, or a study in creating mood, or a model of hooking the audience. But then there’s the opening of Jaws, which is all of those. Sadly, not the whole opening above.
18) Director with the strongest run of great movies
Orson Welles. With the exception of The Stranger, a film that has flashes of brilliance but is otherwise rather flat, his whole oeuvre makes me giddy.
19) Is elitism a good/bad/necessary/inevitable aspect of being a cineaste?
This is a very interesting and loaded question for me. I’ve long consciously resisted an elitist approach to thinking and critiquing, and the older I get I find I have even less time for people who belittle popular or genre cinema. There is an important codicil to this, however: it is not an excuse to ignore challenging, original, or deliberately unpopular modes of filmmaking. Nor is it a repudiation of critical standards, or an acceptance of the not-so-secret motive of those who wag the ‘elitist’ tag, which is a coded act of bullying, aimed at making us kowtow to commercial interests in the name of an imagined mass culture. I know damn well that “average” people have an infinite variety of reactions, ranging from bliss and wonder to hilariously cynical contempt for the mass-market cinema they’ve encountered. The difference between a cineaste and “ordinary” people is usually more one of animating purpose: a cineaste actively hunts for new realms in movies, where many others simply look at what’s in front of them on a marquee or new release shelf. Even in my own experience I’ve had the pleasure of turning friends on to what is, to a film freak, a very familiar pleasure like The Shining, and delighting in the response of unfamiliar eyes. And that’s where a touch of elitism can be helpful, in creating a reservoir of worth to help push people into new zones of entertainment. If we can call informed advice elitism, which I’m sure many would like to do.
20) Second favorite Tony Scott film
Crimson Tide.
21) Favorite movie made before you were born that you only discovered this year. Where and how did you discover it?
I usually encounter a lot of great older films I haven’t seen before in the course of a year, and it’s very hard to limit to just one. Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie is probably the one most badly in need of a shout-out considering its reputation and one that’s truly haunting me. It’s a genuinely rich and disorientating portrait of cultural crack-up, and it sports Julie Adams’ greatest performance. Shunya Itō’s magnificently mad Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41certainly deserves greater attention too, as does Val Lewton’s criminally unknown last film as producer, the Hugo Fregonese-directed Apache Drums, which manages to prefigure everything from The Searchers to Assault on Precinct 13. I felt instant love for these and more.
22) Actor/actress you would most want to see in a Santa suit, traditional or skimpy
Rinko Kikuchi. In full traditional Santa garb, including beard. I’m kinky that way.
23) Video store or streaming?
Video store. I’ve not yet had a complaint-free streaming experience. Plus I like the colours on the boxes and the faces on the staff.
24) Best/favorite final film by a noted director or screenwriter
Although a lot of directors’ careers climax in frustration with lesser works, this is still a wide-open field. John Huston’s The Dead is an obvious contender and one that seems to fit the bill not least because it consciously acts as a grace-note and submission to mortality, as well as aesthetic statement in line with the director’s whole oeuvre. John Ford’s cheap but beautifully mordant 7 Women does the same thing but in a completely opposite manner, meeting breakdown, dead-end, and death with raw insolence and careless art. Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America is a towering masterpiece that wasn’t supposed to be a final statement but does for one anyway, as does Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
25) Monica Vitti or Anna Karina?
Monica, for Modesty Blaise.
26) Name a worthy movie indulgence you’ve had to most strenuously talk friends into experiencing with you. What was the result?
I’m more a lone wolf of cinemagoing, and I’ve never felt the need to drag people along to movies. I did however once convince both my father and a friend to go and see The Thin Red Line with me in early 1998, as they both had a certain interest in film representations of war, especially my friend who was a history major. It turned out to be an unexpectedly gruelling experience: neither of them liked the film, which dragged on for three hours in a theatre with a poor sound system so that most of Malick’s trademark overlapping and voiceover dialogue was difficult to hear, helping make the film almost unbearably obscure. The phrase “never picking a movie for us to see again” was uttered several times in the following months.
27) The movie made by your favorite filmmaker (writer, director, et al) that you either have yet to see or are least familiar with among all the rest
Well, I resist the idea of a single favourite filmmaker, and completism has always been difficult for me as someone who has until recently lacked unfettered access to the great panoply of film. Amidst my general field of favourites the size of, say, John Ford’s oeuvre, taunts me with the difficulty in ever encompassing it all, whilst the few scattered films of Alfred Hitchcock that I haven’t seen (Mr and Mrs Smith, Waltzes From Vienna, The Ring) do dog me. Of more recent filmmakers, until recently I wondered, considering how much I like Joe Wright’s films, why I hadn’t yet checked out The Soloist. And then I tried to watch it, and soon realised ignorance was bliss.
28) Favorite horror movie that is either Christmas-oriented or has some element relating to the winter holiday season in it
At the risk of being obvious, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas is one of my favourite ‘70s horror movies in general, and a peerless companion for when the yuletide cheer runs a little darker than usual. Ho ho ho shit.
29) Name a prop or other piece of movie memorabilia you’d most like to find with your name on it under the Christmas tree
That copy of the Maltese Falcon that sold the other week for a million bucks. Not for the price. Because it’s the Maltese Falcon. It is, after all, the stuff that dreams are made of.
30) Best holiday gift the movies could give to you to carry into 2014
If the rumoured impending release of The Other Side of the Wind could be confirmed, I would be a right jolly old elf.
