Caught up with Criterion’s characteristically excellent release of  ‘Downhill Racer‘, another film that reveals Michael Ritchie as an under-appreciated director (Honeslty, imdb-chatters, have you really nothing to say about the guy who made ‘The Candidate’, ‘Fletch’, and the deeply serious thriller ‘Prime Cut’?), Robert Redford as a far more nuanced actor than his reputation permits, and sports movies as the genre that may reveal most about the US American male archetype.

It’s a fascinating movie, inflected with a bit of Godard here, some Arthur Penn there, discordant cutting, unconventional sound, and a central character who can’t really be seen as attractive, despite being played by beautiful Bob.  ‘How far must a man go to get from where he’s at?’ asks the portentous voiceover on the trailer (one of those great 60s Paramount previews that bears the weight of assumption that you won’t go to see the feature length version of the film unless you know absolutely everything that’s going to happen in it first).  The answer seems to be wherever there’s snow, lycra, and hill gradients steep enough to propel a man faster than he should really be going.

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DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS / THE ROAD

THE BOOK OF ELI / UP IN THE AIR

An Education

Hi there folks – a new week, the sun is shining (but it’s making no impact on the snow in my garden, and the car windscreen isn’t going to clear for a while), Buddy Miller is doing his thing on the – what do you call ‘em these days? hi-fi?, a sealed Netflix envelope is preparing for its journey back to wherever sealed Netflix envelopes go (‘Downhill Racer‘, if you’re interested. I’ll post something later in the week. It’s pretty good.  Winning is everything, apparently.), the first cup of coffee has been downed, and I’m cranking up for the day.

The weekend’s plans were curtailed by the winter storm, so my birthday party shrank to the two guests within walking distance; we ate Hungarian Goulash and didn’t talk about ‘Inglourious Basterds’. It was fun. And warm. What better way to spend late Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights than blanketed in front of DVDs. (Hadn’t seen ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ for a while – the intentionally funny one – and boy does it stand up as a gorgeous example of 80s kitsch, and a reminder of the genuine comedic chops of Rick Moranis – a man who can fake naivety and still come across as strong; I wheeled out Herzog’s ‘Bad Lieutenant’ again – second time this week, an endlessly fascinating film that takes crime, punishment, trauma and policing far more seriously than most, and ends up being both more life-affirming than ‘Cagney and Lacey’ and less violent than ‘The Dark Knight’ (and turns out to be hilarious and grave at the same time; it has a profoundly moving last scene too); and then I got around to seeing ‘An Education’, which turns out to be one of those British films that US critics like a lot more than UK ones do, because we actually live there.  Or used to.  (Carey Mulligan’s grand, Alfred Molina’s the perfect-as-usual Alfred Molina, Emma Thompson has three delicious scenes, and director Lone Scherfig captures the reality of British grammar school life in the 1960s, but Nick Hornby’s script veers between profundity and blunt cliche; and at the end of the day, [spoilers ahoy] a film that climaxes with an Oxford University acceptance letter accompanied by swelling strings ends up producing a sense of disappointment that the protagonist has settled for so little.  It’s like ‘Up in the Air’ without the coruscating heaviness of utter despair for the future of the human race.

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* Note: This post is so full of spoilers it’s almost ridiculous – so only read the first paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet.  It’s also more of a personal review than I might otherwise write, mostly because ‘Paris, Texas’ has been resonating deeply with me since I first saw it about 15 years ago.  And finally, the photo credit: some images below are courtesy of the fine folks at the Criterion Collection.

I used to think that Thomas Merton, that earthy paragon of real life mysticism, who left this world too soon, was too wise to have lived in the twentieth century. But then I saw his character pop up in Robert Redford’s excellent little horror film Quiz Show and realised my mistake – his was a profoundly modern spirituality, with the gift of connecting ancient truth claims with contemporary reality, just what we need in these troubled times. Merton says that no one can find true life ‘unless you have risked your mind in the desert’. There’s something about the truth of Sam Shepard’s writing in Paris, Texas, available now in a classy Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray edition that leads me to believe Shepard must be familiar with Merton, and not just because it’s about a man wandering in the kind of desert that has real sand and baking sun. [Click Here to Read the Rest of the Post →]

DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:

THAT EVENING SUN / HAL HOLBROOK / SCOTT TEEMS / RAY MCKINNON / WALTON GOGGINS / RODNEY TAYLOR /  ASK THE FILM TALK / CAPRICORN ONE / THE BLIND SIDE

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