0 Living in Oblivion (1995)

USA, 90 minutes
Director/writer: Tom DiCillo
Photography: Frank Prinzi
Music: Jim Farmer
Editors: Dana Congdon, Camilla Toniolo
Cast: Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle von Zerneck, James LeGros, Peter Dinklage, Rica Martens

The title for Living in Oblivion refers to a state of working on a project, working so intensely that time, reality, and life seem to fall away, leaving a binary existence, working inside of nothing trying very hard to make something. There's a kind of creeping self-pity to it just around the edges, which comes even more sharply into focus in interviews with director and screenwriter Tom DiCillo. Yet in spite of all the booby-trap plot points that threaten to blow it to smithereens of cliché it is an exhilarating ride, one of the best movies ever made about making movies—admittedly a sketchy category, perhaps matched for tiresome potential only by novels about writing novels.

But Living in Oblivion works. And it's not just a movie about making movies, but commits many other sins as well: extended dream sequences, a wanton mix of color and black and white film stock, and for God's sake Steve Buscemi, Peter Dinklage, Catherine Keener, James LeGros, and Dermot Mulroney, an early flush-out of talent in a new post-Tarantino era. So self-conscious is this that at one critical point Quentin Tarantino is mentioned by name (a late-breaking substitution during the shooting for Oliver Stone). Living in Oblivion is thus a walking, talking compendium of every indie hipster gesture you've come to loathe—but it's so good I have to wonder if it isn't maybe one reason all these things became cliches. Who needs to bother after this?



Buscemi as indie film director Nick Reve and Keener as his leading lady Nicole Springer turn in matched and subtly mysterious performances. The strange, swirling story this movie wants to tell, that it tries three separate ways to tell, revolves around the humdrum matter of getting a shot, and all the things that conspire against it. It expands from there to regions of Kafka and Sisyphus, and then on to redemption, managing a scope as big as the world with a handful of scruffy players acting make-believe in a New York City warehouse space.

I came to it a few years late—much like the characters it's built around, I don't think it has yet seen much of the recognition due it—and then it reminded me of nothing so much as Run Lola Run. Both movies exist in strange alternative realities, with formal redundancies and repetitions outside of time, told in triptych form, and they end on similar unlikely upbeat notes that feel more like genuine salvation than empty cheer. Even with all the hipster trappings they are profound, convincing, and tremendously heartening.

But forget the big picture. Consider the small parts, because more than anything else Living in Oblivion is a great thing made out of very fine small things. Catherine Keener's performance, for example, where she is required to convince us, across multiple takes of a single scene (three separate scenes, actually), that she is a very good actress attempting a very difficult scene, capable of nailing it entirely but more often hitting her strongest notes only occasionally and randomly. Because that's the way it goes when you're making a movie. Buscemi is equally convincing as the film director who knows what he wants, can feel it at the furthest edges of his fingertips, and is totally committed to getting it, but is foiled in large and small ways again and again at nearly every point.

The first third of the movie was originally conceived and shot as a separate short film, and that is where the greatest sense of futility occurs, almost at the level of pure abstraction. The shot they are trying to get is a delicate scene between Nicole's character and her mother Cora (Rica Martens), who share a background of unresolved pain, and one thing after another keeps fouling it up. Reve wants to get it in a long single take but problems occur: a boom in the frame (twice), a focusing goof, external noise. Finally the players are so frazzled by the interruptions and stress they start blowing their lines. Reve stops everything and calls for a break and a run-through of the lines. In the run-through, something is triggered in Nicole and Cora and the great scene starts pouring out of them. But Wolf (Mulroney), the camera operator, happens to be puking his guts out from bad milk and they will never get it. Is that why it is so tremendously moving as it plays out? Yes, of course, partly, but also Keener really turns it on right there, with a convincing depth I'm not sure we've seen from her anywhere else. It's a tremendously beautiful, isolated moment.

Everything else feels right too, starting with the integration of the second two parts with the original in the full version of the screenplay. While the narrative of Living in Oblivion is fractured by design, all parts have always felt coequal and organic to me, a seamless whole. And there are so many fine things here: the sulky but talented Wolf, the flinty efficiency of Wolf's girlfriend Wanda (Danielle von Zerneck) as the production manager, James Le Gros's hammy Chad Palomino, all the ways the crew interacts and gets its jobs done. It's possible I like especially that latter point because Living in Oblivion often reminds me of another movie about making movies that I like, Day for Night. But I have never actually been on the set of a movie. That's not the kind of verisimilitude I'm talking about when I say it feels right. It seems truest to me about the constant frustrations and meager rewards of creative work, where nine-tenths of all effort can feel like a futile, soul-deadening waste of time and effort.

It was thus generous and shrewd of DiCillo to give us the 10% that makes everything else worth enduring—and to give it to us at the end, amounting to the "happy ending" that is ironically rarely the hallmark of the indie production (though it is, actually). Not coincidentally, it is also the part of the movie that is funniest, with Peter Dinklage taking apart the whole enterprise of using small people to signify dream sequences in indie-addled movies (though I like it very much, Twin Peaks comes to mind at this point). Dinklage's thunderous fit of pique takes place amid the greatest collapse yet of Reve's quest to get a shot. And just when all is lost, the magic happens—but that only makes you realize how much magic has been happening for the movie's entire 90-minute length. It's a little masterpiece.

Detail: Living in Oblivion (1995)

0 A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)

USA / UK, 225 minutes, documentary
Directors/writers: Martin Scorsese, Michael Henry Wilson
Photography: Jean-Yves Escoffier, Frances Reid, Nancy Schreiber
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Editors: Kenneth Levis, David Lindblom
With: Martin Scorsese

I'm not always sure what others mean by "essay-film," but I know my own sense of it favors both an individual point of view, and movie clips—projects like Los Angeles Plays Itself and this long love letter from Martin Scorsese, his salute to the movies of America in the middle of the last century. As such, it is necessarily deep-dipped in the medium itself. Scorsese's Personal Journey was made in collaboration with the British Film Institute and originally aired on UK television in 1995 (making its way to the US some three years later). Scorsese is the host, with lots of voiceover explication. Organized by digressive rumination, it comes armed with—and this is the important part—copious film clips. You are usually looking at scenes from movies, occasionally broken up by archival interview clips with great film figures such as Clint Eastwood, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Gregory Peck, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and Billy Wilder. It is the medium on the medium.

I was flabbergasted to find out how much I did not know when I first saw Personal Journey several years ago, how much was simply unfamiliar. Yet even in those cases I was hardly prepared for all the daunting insight that Scorsese brings. The Band Wagon, Cabiria, Footlight Parade, 42nd Street, The Furies, Leave Her to Heaven, The Left-Handed Gun, Murder by Contract, My Dream Is Yours, The Naked Spur, The Regeneration, The Roaring Twenties, The Robe, The Tall T—some of them were vaguely familiar as titles. I furiously wrote down every one and immediately ported them to my Netflix queue. Those that are available anyway—a good many are not. I suspect I'm not the only one trying such an exercise, because many fall into Netflix's "very long wait" category.



The documentary is organized like a text, divided into three parts, each with its own set of chapters. Part 1 has sections on "The Director's Dilemma," looking at the competing forces of commercial consideration and artistic integrity that confront film directors, and "The Director as Storyteller," where Scorsese breaks down the developments of his favorite genres (Westerns, gangster films, and musicals), each of which gets a chapter. In Parts 2 and 3, he traces broader developments: basic origins, the coming of sound, then color, and then widescreen. In "The Director as Smuggler," which continues into Part 3, he explores trafficking in the socially taboo, including an impressively lucid discussion of film noir. Last, in "The Director as Iconoclast," he presents a kind of alternative canon, where the rules were broken, filmmakers made to pay a stiff price, and new standards created. Here you find discussion of films that surprise and don't surprise: Bonnie and Clyde, Broken Blossoms, Citizen Kane, Faces, The Great Dictator, Lolita, The Man With the Golden Arm, A Streetcar Named Desire, Sweet Smell of Success.

At the same time, all along, Scorsese offers a fundamental education on film, discussing the business of them and going in depth into what makes them a unique art form, at one point listing and showing wonderful examples of basic film syntax: close-ups, irises, dissolves, masking part of the screen for emphasis, dolly shots, tracking shots, cross-cutting. "I've always felt that visual literacy is just as important as verbal literacy," he says (in chorus with every film director ever). It's often a treat just to hear him explain things. I will say I have some misgivings that in his discussions of The Birth of a Nation and Elia Kazan he is silent on the controversies surrounding them. It did not surprise me with Kazan, of course. He's been clear on that elsewhere, and anyway I am beginning to soften to him too since a recent revisit to East of Eden, where Kazan's integrity on many levels is quite evident. Still, call me PC if you must, I think the vile aspects of The Birth of a Nation should be mentioned and confirmed in any discussion of it. It's a movie I respect, and enjoy, and despise in equal measures.

Another point that suggests how effective Scorsese is in Personal Journey: Scorsese's avowed favorite film genres, into which he travels so deeply, are probably my own least favorite. Scorsese compares them to jazz, as inherently and uniquely American art forms, pointing out the appeal of the Western to the enduring American frontier myth of the West, the gangster film to the burgeoning metropolises of the East with their constant flows of immigrants, and the musical to its obvious source, Broadway. He makes them sound interesting. His narrative makes films I know I don't like look vibrant and interesting—Murder by Contract, The Left-Handed Gun, The Searchers—and he makes me want to look at them again. Often it turns out I still don't like them. But I sure like the way they play in this documentary.

Scorsese's whole approach is at once so ambitious and so illuminating that I'm happy just watching him break it all down and following along where he rambles, wherever he wants to go. At nearly four hours it's way too short. He almost casually grapples with giant issues, and the insights can come thick and fast and from all directions as he clarifies things. He doesn't shy away from difficult and complex issues such as violence either. In that particular case, he turns to Fritz Lang to make the point. I recommend looking at it for maximum effect—with Lang wearing an eye-patch and monocle, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette, speaking in rumbling tones with a thick German accent, and laying it out straight: "Violence has become in my opinion a definite point in the script. It has a dramaturgical reason to be there. You see, I don't think that people believe in the devil, with the horns and the forked tail. And therefore they don't believe in punishment after they are dead. So my question was ... what are people fearing? ... And that is physical pain. And physical pain comes from violence. And that, I think, is today the only fact which people really fear, and therefore it has become a definite part of life, and naturally also of scripts."

Detail: A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)

0 Everything Is Wrong (1995)

I'd been aware of Moby before Everything Is Wrong, but this third album by him (not counting anthologies and remix projects) was about where I got on board with the larger project—as I recall, it got a lot of warm reviews, and was the shiny object of everyone's attention for a few minutes. It is uneven—Moby seems to have some formal ideas about incorporating electric guitar and punk-rock noise into some of these tracks—something about "authenticity" I think, or maybe it was just that it was still the post-grunge times. They don't work as well. I get the sense Moby decided "punk-rock" meant "ugly as you can make it," which of course is wrong. But not everything here is, by any means. In fact, the high points—"Hymn," "Feeling So Real," "Everytime You Touch Me," and many others, including the exquisitely titled "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" (longest song here, clocking in at 7:22)—are high points of his whole catalog. Everything Is Wrong is not skimpy with them at all. I think these soaring exercises he seems capable of pealing off are just remarkable, reducing me to all kinds of tender emotional submersions. Moby's music absolutely can take one by surprise. It is startling in its beauty, deeply felt and moving, even against one's will, though all he appears to be doing objectively is touching high notes on keyboards, powered by interesting beats. Actually, it's the melodies doing the work, and the gospel sources, tracing dynamics and swells so few even try for, entering spiritual realms of peace and joy. Listen to me. I am often surprised all over again when I play his stuff. Speculation: Eminem hates Moby so much for exactly this reason (if indeed that is anything more than a convenient public stance Eminem has adopted, which is quite possible, though the animus feels real, not least for its persistence). Moby is Gallant to Eminem's Goofus, and everything he touches becomes good and beautiful. No wonder Eminem resents him. I suppose Moby might also seem lame to a red-blooded American character such as Eminem, but hey, Moby is the one with bloodlines back to Herman Melville. In fairness, and as a consumer guide note, the best of Everything Is Wrong is collected (and the least of it eliminated) on the anthology MobySongs 1993-1998, which is probably the wiser use of your money.

Detail: Everything Is Wrong (1995)

0 Old 97's, "Holly Jolly Christmas" (1995)

(listen)

If writing about a Christmas song in July is perverse, then I am perverse. But the anthology this comes from, Big Iron's Honkey-Tonk Holidays: Christmas in Deep Noellum, appears to be a hard find now, and maybe you want the time. I know you will want it for the coming season. That’s my story and I'm sticking to it. Written by Johnny Marks, who also concocted "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and, indeed, made himself something of a specialist in seasonal fare, though he was Jewish (perhaps, somehow, because he was Jewish?), "Holly Jolly Christmas" is, of course, the classic Burl Ives. It blew up out of a 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special, and Burl has owned it ever since because no one does it better. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't keep trying, as it's a fine Christmas standard, mercifully short, and there's room on this bus for everyone. Ask Johnny Marks. The Old 97's key right in, keeping it spry and loose, tarting it up with raunchy horns, and inserting a twangy fluid guitar to texture the melody. It feels almost sloppy, but really it's pretty tight, and the song's forward momentum and polish play well against the relaxed performance. Plus it's stubbornly evocative of holiday times. Well, the whole album is, mixing up standards like this and "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "The Little Drummer Boy," and "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" with new models that can hit hard (don't miss "Alcoholidays" by the Sutcliffs). In sum, in short, oh by golly have a holly jolly Christmas, this year.

Detail: Old 97's, "Holly Jolly Christmas" (1995)

0 Savage Art (1995)

The thing I like best about Robert Polito's biography of Jim Thompson is the light it sheds on Thompson's work. What I consider the best of that work—A Hell of a Woman, say—is not necessarily as celebrated as a few, and one in particular: The Killer Inside Me. Granted, Savage Art is a biography, and Polito's critical assessments have to be extracted. But until this I had flailed away at reading Thompson without direction, and often disappointed. Thompson's catalog runs to 30 or better titles, and there are some fairly stinkers in the mess. I know because I read two of them—The Alcoholics and The Criminals, bought for their titles obviously. I was thus happy to see Polito dismiss them quickly, which had the effect of making me more inclined to believe him generally. And he's a good writer in his own right. Thompson lived a singularly depressing life, but Polito's own hard-bitten voice keeps things moving along. Lots of interesting stuff about Thompson and his life, of course. I wasn't surprised but still fascinated to learn that Thompson was a binge writer, locking himself away for intense bursts of work. His best usually has that magical quality of first drafts that somehow came out just right (see also: Sherwood Anderson, Philip K. Dick). It's so rare and unusual it's something to appreciate itself (for all his reputation for that kind of thing, for example, I think Jack Kerouac managed it only once, with The Subterraneans). Polito has also proved his critical bona fides with the two great Library of America volumes, Crime Novels: American Noir, so one always feels in good hands, and Jim Thompson is obviously right in his wheelhouse. Thompson himself is about what you would expect him to be from reading the novels, a leathery old drunk with a marked edge of desperation. A faintly Bukowski type of character, alcoholic and impoverished for much of his life. All that anxiety in the novels had to come from somewhere, of course, and Polito neatly catalogs it from start to finish. I thought the saddest part of Thompson's life, the way Polito tells it, was that Thompson always felt strongly that his work was not recognized for what it is, Stanley Kubrick's late interest notwithstanding. Thompson always held out hope for it—how could he not? At this point, I'm not sure you can overstate his position to the second half of the 20th century, in terms of the fascination for human depravity that wears a crime fiction mask. Polito and this book steered me to most of my current favorites by Thompson. For that alone I love it.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Savage Art (1995)

0 Dirt Track Date (1995)

This creased my attention about the time I was publishing a fanzine, came through the mails. I warmed to it a lot, having no clue what it was beyond the self-evident razor-sharp unit on display with full command of Southern boogaloo, from every pore. Digging around on the Internet for a little more information about Southern Culture on the Skids and Dirt Track Date, it appears it's the fifth of some dozen or more albums, including live sets, a covers album, so on so forth, and generally considered one of the best. So it appears at least I was infatuated with the right one (or that somebody sent me the right one) of a big bunch of choices, 1986-present: Southern-fried varieties of rockabilly, boogie woogie, and all the usual blues variations, done up to a tee with more or less straight faces, at least the music. This is a very fine band. The music is down and dirty and persistently insinuating, raw and rocking and a pleasure loud, all the things we know to say about the irresistible albums, and this is one of those for me. Overlaid on top of the grooves is a saucy wide-ranging psychotronic array of gestures, ridiculous science fiction and monster movies, Ed Roth hot rods, trailer culture, the usual freedoms of a certain vein of boozy devil-may-care. At that point, the jokes get nearly as good as the sizzling music, as indicated by some of the choice titles: "Skullbucket" (that's for an instrumental), "White Trash," "Fried Chicken and Gasoline," "8 Piece Box." But note that the jokes would not be so good if the music were not so unspeakably fine. That's where it all starts here, moving with spirit and attitude from groove to groove, approximately the Cramps times the B-52's (but these things are always so hard to calibrate with any accuracy, my appreciation for the Blasters is reflected in this mess too), 14 gem tracks in a row, each and every one dead on the money hot and full of itself and ready to go again. And the band evidently looked and saw all was so good they closed the album on the title song, featuring five whole minutes of pure dirt track din ("demolition derby figure eight"), engines droning away in and out of range, tires squealing, and not a whisper of music either. That takes a little getting used to, until you know that's the way they end the album. It is otherwise all pure pleasure.

Detail: Dirt Track Date (1995)