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What if there's no better word than just not saying anything?
I'm not writing about my life much these days; that's because it's not going very well. My physical health is on probation until the end of April. My emotional default is best characterized by that raspberry noise Bill the Cat used to make in Bloom County. Outside of the requirements of not losing my job and making sure that I get to my cats on a regular basis, I am putting most of my resources into Patreon reviews and other forms of thinking out loud because responding to other people's art feels like the last reliable thing my brain has to offer—and, to be fair, because it interests me and I enjoy it. I didn't pour all those words into Act of Violence (1948) or Moonrise (1948) to meet a quota. But I am not surprised that my predominant genre for some months now has been either noir or tonally adjacent. A lot of those drowning outsiders feel very familiar to me.
1. I understand this portrait is titled "Gustav Klimt," but despite the gold it makes me think more of Parajanov. Maybe it's the way the gold is deployed. Maybe the pose. The color palette is totally different, but I end up thinking of Sofiko Chiaureli in The Color of Pomegranates (1969), the poet's face screened behind red and white lace.
2. I have no idea why Criterion decided to come out with discs of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) rather than any other obscure or influential film, but it's one of my childhood favorite movies, so I pretty much don't care. At this distance I have only the dimmest recollection of the A-plot with Robert Montgomery's plane-crashing prizefighter prematurely translated to the next world by an overzealous angel and bodyswapped back to Earth by his eponymous urbane superior, where he wakes to a noir-suitable mix of murder, infidelity, and crooked financial dealing and turns it all into a screwball romance. He is able to prove his identity by playing the saxophone very badly. There's a girl who he ends up with, but I can't remember how they meet or who plays her; I remember the boxer's excitable manager only because I've seen James Gleason in multiple character roles since. What stuck with me was the heavenly bureaucracy, of which I think Mr. Jordan must have been the cinematic template—it predates Powell and Pressburger's more deliberately numinous A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and even Jack Benny's apocalyptically goofy The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945). There are rafts of cloud, clipboards, streamlined modern airplanes instead of pearly gates. Edward Everett Horton's dithery Messenger 7013 dresses like a commercial pilot and mournfully requests a transfer from New Jersey. First I saw Claude Rains as the endlessly ambiguous Captain Renault, then I saw him as God. Calm, wry, benevolently enigmatic, nothing surprises Mr. Jordan, but he hasn't seen it all yet. He has pilots' wings on his dark suit jacket and a silver streak in his hair. It took me until just now, this very moment, to realize that he must be named after the river as it figures in hymns: the crossing between worlds. I'd have backed the film with Angel on My Shoulder (1946), but maybe they're saving it for a future release. I don't understand their schedule. It's only taken them forever to get around to—no relation—Only Angels Have Wings (1939).
3. I knew someone on the internet would inevitably generate fanart of William Daniels' John Adams and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Alexander Hamilton. I just didn't expect it to be the New York City Center.
1. I understand this portrait is titled "Gustav Klimt," but despite the gold it makes me think more of Parajanov. Maybe it's the way the gold is deployed. Maybe the pose. The color palette is totally different, but I end up thinking of Sofiko Chiaureli in The Color of Pomegranates (1969), the poet's face screened behind red and white lace.
2. I have no idea why Criterion decided to come out with discs of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) rather than any other obscure or influential film, but it's one of my childhood favorite movies, so I pretty much don't care. At this distance I have only the dimmest recollection of the A-plot with Robert Montgomery's plane-crashing prizefighter prematurely translated to the next world by an overzealous angel and bodyswapped back to Earth by his eponymous urbane superior, where he wakes to a noir-suitable mix of murder, infidelity, and crooked financial dealing and turns it all into a screwball romance. He is able to prove his identity by playing the saxophone very badly. There's a girl who he ends up with, but I can't remember how they meet or who plays her; I remember the boxer's excitable manager only because I've seen James Gleason in multiple character roles since. What stuck with me was the heavenly bureaucracy, of which I think Mr. Jordan must have been the cinematic template—it predates Powell and Pressburger's more deliberately numinous A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and even Jack Benny's apocalyptically goofy The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945). There are rafts of cloud, clipboards, streamlined modern airplanes instead of pearly gates. Edward Everett Horton's dithery Messenger 7013 dresses like a commercial pilot and mournfully requests a transfer from New Jersey. First I saw Claude Rains as the endlessly ambiguous Captain Renault, then I saw him as God. Calm, wry, benevolently enigmatic, nothing surprises Mr. Jordan, but he hasn't seen it all yet. He has pilots' wings on his dark suit jacket and a silver streak in his hair. It took me until just now, this very moment, to realize that he must be named after the river as it figures in hymns: the crossing between worlds. I'd have backed the film with Angel on My Shoulder (1946), but maybe they're saving it for a future release. I don't understand their schedule. It's only taken them forever to get around to—no relation—Only Angels Have Wings (1939).
3. I knew someone on the internet would inevitably generate fanart of William Daniels' John Adams and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Alexander Hamilton. I just didn't expect it to be the New York City Center.
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<3 <3 <3
I have been very much enjoying your writing about other people's art and your Patreon reviews; thank you.
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It's got gold on it! That makes it Klimt, right?
(I quite like it as an image, I just . . . wouldn't have named it that.)
I have been very much enjoying your writing about other people's art and your Patreon reviews; thank you.
Thank you for telling me. It matters and I am also very glad.
*hugs*
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You're welcome! It made me very happy.
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(a) I associate that title so thoroughly with An-sky, it's confusing that this film involves the afterlife and no dybbuks.
(b) Okay, the Leslie Howard role went to John Garfield! Would not have expected that.
(c) The heavenly examiner in Outward Bound is Dudley Digges, who played Gutman in the 1931 Maltese Falcon. I have no idea if this is significant of the casting process on the part of Warner Bros. or just one of those coincidences so beloved by IMDb trivia.
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That's got to be a remake of Outward Bound (1930), because the earlier film definitely does not have Greenstreet—The Maltese Falcon (1941) was his screen debut. I didn't even realize that existed. I wonder who plays the Leslie Howard role.
I fully admit I could google this, I'm just making conversation.
I don't mind at all. The general lack of response to my last couple of posts is one of the things I've been trying not to take personally, so the alternative is nice!
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Thank you.
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That interview with William Daniels and Lin-Manuel Miranda is terrific (as is the fanart!).
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I don't have as much of an affinity for James Gleason—I enjoy him wherever he turns up, but I don't seek him out—but TCM right now has half a dozen pre-Code films with Edward Everett Horton in the buffer and I am trying to figure out how many of them I can watch before Friday without hurting myself. Messenger 7013 really was my first image of him after Mr. Witherspoon. I think I still have somewhere in a box the staticky VHS copy of Here Comes Mr. Jordan that I hung onto past the advent of DVD because for years it still wasn't available.
(Robert Montgomery I just saw as a spineless, snitching young inmate The Big House (1930), of course, so the idea of him as a romantic hero is temporarily cognitive dissonance.)
That interview with William Daniels and Lin-Manuel Miranda is terrific (as is the fanart!).
The whole thing makes me very happy!
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Two chapters of Buck Rogers from 1939! That should be strange.
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< hugs >. I'm really sorry. Let me know if there's anything I can do, including coming by your place to entertain you.
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I can totally eat fruit buns.
*hugs*
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Nine
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It took me until just now, this very moment, to realize that he must be named after the river as it figures in hymns: the crossing between worlds. --Heh. I like it when that happens. Discovery in the process of writing. And I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't called it to my attention.
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I really think it's the prominent use of gold.
Discovery in the process of writing. And I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't called it to my attention.
I just accepted the name as a small child, whether it made sense to me or not. I didn't think about "Messenger" being a direct translation of ἄνγελος, either. I like when that sort of thing doesn't hit the audience over the head.