Via The Times:

Kirk Douglas had a son, the little-remembered Eric Douglas, who was an actor and stand-up comedian. He once came over to the UK to do some gigs and inadvertently created one of British comedy’s finest legends. Eric wasn’t having a great gig at a London club; he was going down the pan. His opening line, I seem to remember, focused on the fact that he lacked the cleft in his chin possessed by both his father and brother. The audience was not in the least interested. Their indifference eventually overwhelmed him and he finally shouted: “Do you know who I am? I’m Kirk Douglas’s son!” The room looked on in silence, then someone in the audience stood up and said: “No, I’m Kirk Douglas’s son.” He was swiftly followed by several more. Within seconds, the entire audience was on their feet, all claiming to be Kirk Douglas’s son, in a pitch-perfect parody of the scene in Spartacus. That, by anyone’s standards, is a tough gig.

Read on: A nice discussion of the dark side of heckling going on at The Guardian.

New York’s blizzard of 1977 makes a riveting cameo appearance in “El Super,” an indie (before the term was formalized) film about the hard adjustments that immigrants make in coming to New York. The movie is great for many reasons, but the blizzard steals a few scenes as the main character — a Cuban super — walks around town. Snow is massed on cars, piled high in the streets, and pedestrians stumble through snow-walled sidewalk canyons. Quite a scene, especially in the 70s, when New York looked crumbly and decrepit.

Amidst the blizzard, the film is a melancholy document of the lives of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as they reckon with the immensity of New York City and their dismal prospects for work in the bad old days of New York. The dialogue is great, often funny, just as often poignant. Good stuff. I had to resort to extreme measures to find it, but you can buy it on VHS from Amazon. Or you can let me know, and I’ll hook you up.

Speaking of the blizzard, there’s an amazing Barney Miller episode about the blizzard? There is. Worth watching just to hear the theme song again.

Ever since I heard about Battle Royale, I’ve wanted to see the film ... Quentin Tarantino has called it “the best movie since 1992,” so it’s probably not surprising that it’s both extremely bloody and very darkly funny. The premise: Adults fear the rise of youth, and each year they put the most badly behaved kids on an island and force them to battle each other to the death.

Like Tarantino’s movies, the setup is quick and effective.

The humor darkens: A baby-voiced Japanese teen explains the rules of the game, including the fact that the collar worn by contestants goes “boom” under certain circumstances.

Each “player” gets their own weapon. As the plot unfolds, the “players” learn who has what, and figure out how to work with what they have.

Finally, there are liberal amounts of blood, and much killing. Mixed with the sardonic dialogue, it’s easy to see why Tarantino loves it so much.

Despite the nihilistic milieu, the story focused on traditional stuff — loyalty, trust and friendship; and in the end, it was actually sort of sweet, much sweeter than bleak 60’s and 70’s films like McCabe & Mrs. Miller or The Wild Bunch. Worth seeing, just for that weird juxtaposition.

Walking around the Maxwell Food Market near Singapore’s Chinatown reminded of Wong Kar Wai’s excellent movie about Hong Kong in the early 60’s In the Mood for Love. After I watched it last night, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to actually travel back in time, or just walk inside an imagined version of the past.

David Choe: Setting a good example.

I’m psyched to check out Dirty Hands, a new documentary about artist David Choe. I’m usually skeptical about “street art” films, but the trailer looks pretty great, and I’ve heard that Choe is kind of a madman. I compare everything in this street/art vein to Video Days — which, by the way, did you know that can watch all of Video Days on Google Video? — and I’m always hoping that new stuff will somehow advance the form that Spike Jonze laid out all those years ago. Maybe this will? Maybe other stuff has?

Choe worked some watercolor magic for a movie called Black Dynamite that just made some waves at Sundance.

David Remnick’s excellent biography of Muhammad Ali, King of the World contains a truly stunning scene that sprung to mind during last week’s inauguration. Before Ali’s first big bout, a meeting with Sonny Liston, the press didn’t know what to make of Ali’s confidence and bombast. A reporter asked: “Cassius, all these things you’re saying about Liston, do you really mean them? Do you really think you’re going to beat this guy?”

Ali: I’m Christopher Columbus ... I believe I’ll win. I’ve never been in there with him, but I believe the world is round and they all believe the world is flat. Maybe I’ll fall off the world at the horizon but I believe the world is round.¹

I feel like there’s a thread that runs directly from this statement to last Tuesday’s inauguration, and it made me want to dig deeper into Ali, the myth-maker. So last night I watched a 1964 documentary, made by photographer William Klein, called Muhammad Ali: The Greatest; it’s included in a recent Criterion Collection release called The Delirious Fictions of William Klein, which is cheap-o on Amazon right now, actually.

Typography suits the subject. ALI. Yeah.

Klein is known for his still photography, and he brings a photographer’s eye, and a cavalier attitude toward editing. The movie is a montage of spontaneity and action, tracing Ali’s path from the build-up to his first fight with Sonny Liston to the Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman.

Klein catches a nice glimpse of another groundbreaking figure.

Ali’s second fight with Liston became infamous for the “phantom” punch that ended it. Rumors abound that Liston took a dive, either because he bet against himself or because he was afraid that the Nation of Islam would seek revenge if Ali lost. See it for yourself on the YouTubez.

Klein captures some amazing moments around the Rumble, which took place in Zaire, 1974.

The whole nation appears to be in and around the stadium. When We Were Kings tells the whole story. It will blow your mind, and make you love Norman Mailer at the same time.

Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s strongman president, is omnipresent in Klein’s footage from the fight. I love this image of his head slowly coming into focus from the clouds.

Back when the Berkeley Public Library was the hub of my social universe, I spent a lot of time in its video room — in the mid-90’s, it occupied a little corner of the basement — working my way through its extensive collection of foreign VHS movies. I had plenty of time on my hands, (also, no money), and I quickly exhausted the canon — Metropolis, The Seven Sumarai, Jules & Jim, Breathless and a lot of Godard. At some desperate point, I explored what were to me, at the time, the margins — Fassbinder, Jacques Tati, Andrei Tarkovsky, all of which were astounding, like gold, but Tarkovsky was the most revelatory. The library had Solaris, Nostalghia and Stalker, all of which twisted my noodle with their bizzare, dream-like, surreal sequences.

I just discovered that Thames & Hudson has published a stunning collection of Tarkovsky’s polaroids, taken of his family and travels. The Guardian displays of number of them here.

Lots more at this blog. In Russian, too. Nice.

If you’re 35-ish and you’ve followed basketball, you probably recall the virtues of the pre–David Stern NBA, the simpler times when corporate logos were incidental, local heroes more accessible, and the entire sport more truly fan-friendly. Stern always talks about fan-friendliness, but his NBA is a Product and the “friendliness” seems as produced as two-for-one chalupa night. Back in the day, a young Kansas City Kings fan could attend Kings practices at a local high school (for free), and afterward mingle with players like Ernie Grunfeld, Phil Ford, and Otis Birdsong. It goes without saying that most fans would take that over a free chalupa any night.

Red Hot and Rollin recaptures the simplicity and beauty of those times. Edited by Matt Love, it compiles a variety of recollections of the Rip-City-era Portland Trailblazers, and includes a DVD of a truly amazing document of the time — Don Zavin’s Fast Break. Zavin’s film is astounding in many regards. Primarily, it’s a bittersweet meditation on a lost NBA — the League before each player became a corporation unto himself, and before the entire visual experience of watching an NBA became NASCAR-ized with layer upon layer of corporate logos. Moreover, it’s possible that there is no team in the history of the NBA that is as antithetical to Stern’s NBA than the Blazers of 1976–77: a small market team without a marketable superstar, led by a vegetarian, Marxist, long-haired, Abe-Lincoln-beard-wearing center who stuttered when he was nervous.

The form of the film could be called “stoner verite.” With a soundtrack that is basically an extended tabla jam, it’s a documentary in the tradition of, say, Endless Summer with the crucial difference is that it’s unburdened by Endless Summer’s linear narrative and omniscient narration. I won’t give it all away, but it wanders through some amazingly intimate glimpses into the Blazers’ ecstatic run to the NBA title, for instance ...

This is former Blazers star Bill Walton on a classic Falcon racer. After the Blazers won the NBA championship, Walton took a bike trip up the Oregon coast, and scenes from this trip are interspersed throughout the movie. Again, could anyone imagine ANY current NBA star going on a bike trip alone during the off-season? Where are the entourages and Escalades and hotties? It’s also sort of amazing to see an NBA superstar engaging in an activity that non-superstars find enjoyable. Where are the strip clubs and casinos, the handguns and hot tubs? (You can’t really see in this photo, but the bike’s color is Falcon’s tell-tale powder blue. Awesome.)

Yes, this is Dr. Jack Ramsay, and yes, his pants appear to be some kind of psychedelic red-white-and-blue crazy quilt. Look out, Larry Brown.

This is actually the third time in the movie that Bill Walton ended up in a mosh-pit of fans. The fact that this would never, EVER happen today is part of what’s so bittersweet about Fast Break.

Some related stuff: A classic Time feature of Walton as a UCLA senior from 1974 called “Basketball’s Vegetarian Tiger,” a nice review by TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott (a Blazer fan) that includes a quick interview with someone who worked on Fast Break, and of course, you’ve got to see this one: Walton’s epic dunk over Kareem in the Western Conference Finals. [YouTube]

Thanks to a tip from fellow Simpsons fanatic and Cooper colleague Chris Noessel, I discovered that I could generate a Simpsons character with my likeness on the Simpsons Movie site. Holy crap. Truly, a dream come true. Now the only thing left is to have my likeness drawn in the Wall Street Journal “hedcut” style [a PDF on the Dow Jones site about how pictures become WSJ-ready].

And it’s me, right? Except there were no options for beards, which is strange considering that there are quite a few bearded Simpsons characters. Homer’s got a perpetual five o’clock shadow; God has a flowing white beard; Hyman Krustofski has the impressive ZZ Top-style beard befitting a cartoon rabbi; Dr. Marvin Monroe has a beard that is more like mine. So there’s got to be lots of existing styles to choose from.

When I did a Google search for “simpsons beard,” I discovered that Simpsons creator Matt Groening is a self-described beardo, as revealed in this email chat from 1993: “I’ve been mistaken more than once for Stephen King, Leonard Maltin has been mistaken for me, but I think I look more like a bearded hippie verson of Homer Simpson.” (This chat took place on Prodigy, of course. Wow. Simpler times.)

A moment from a beautiful, riveting scene in Killer of Sheep. Photo: Milestone Films.

Killer of Sheep is director Charles Burnett’s account of life in the LA neighborhood of Watts in the early 1970’s. It began life as his senior thesis at UCLA film school and until recently it was never seen outside art houses and museums. Despite all of that, it was among the first 50 films to declared national treasures by the Library of Congress. I saw it earlier this week at the Castro, and it lived up the hype.

Burnett’s account of his motivations in making the film seems like a good place to start unpacking the stuff that makes it so unique:

I wanted to tell a story about a man who was trying to hold on to some values that were constantly being eroded by other forces, by his plight in the community, and the quality of the job that he had. At the same time he wanted to do right by his family. I didn’t want to impose my values on his situation. I just wanted to show his life. And I didn’t want to resolve his situation by imposing artificial solutions like him becoming a doctor or a diplomat, when the reality is that most people don’t get out. I wanted to show that there is a positive element to his life, and that is that he endures, he’s accepted it. [From an excellent interview on Senses of Cinema]

To bring this story to life, he employs a style that seems improvisational, as much documentary as Italian neorealism. But there’s also something very new and genuine and particularly American about it — isolation, crumbling buildings, explosions of cruelty and anger, and the constant, chaotic motion of kids leaping across rooftops and crawling under buildings — combined, these things seem to evoke a very American way of poor, urban life.

More than anything, the movie makes you wonder at its very improbability: How in the world did he make that? Did he actually plan those moments that seem genuinely serendipitous?

Maybe it’s that the actors are untrained. The dialogue seems fresh, surprising and authentic even when it’s forced. Maybe it’s the pacing of the editing. Scenes start abruptly — children emerge from a hole, an entire neighborhood has assembled in a stairwell, kids hide behind a scrap of plywood. Most scenes also tend to end a couple of seconds early, or linger a few seconds longer. Maybe it’s the dialogue — it’s all mumbles or hollers or growls, with jazz and blues tracks adding rhythmic, sometimes hopeful counterpoints to the imagery. Who knows? What’s clear is that it speaks in a true, clear and unique voice. Go see it.

No dialogue. Dog mask. Chain link fence. Killer of Sheep. Photo: Milestone Films.

“Why would I put on a hat if my best friend just got blown up in front of me?” An excellent question posed by Jason Schwartzman’s character in Wes Anderson’s excellent Amex ad. In just under two minutes, the ad encapsulates the brilliance of Anderson’s vision: it’s filled with snappy dialogue, exquisite production design, and perfectly pitched non sequitors. It begins with a car explosion. Anderson shouts “Cut!”, acknowledges that it’s an ad (“Anyway, American Express ad”), and poses the question, “Making movies. How do you do it?” He then strides through a series of vignettes while attempting to give directions: “First, think up a good story,” but he’s then interrupted by a PA who wants to introduce him to the daughter of a man who loaned the a sportscar to the production. “Two, how do you tell it?” he says and then directs a propmaster to put a bayonette on a .357 magnum. “Next, there’s your collaborators,” while a PA is telling him that the producers won’t pay $15000 for a helicopter rental. As he prepares for the next shot, he concludes: “You mix it all together and that’s more or less it.” Slate posted an admiring review yesterday.

Of course Crash won Best Picture. Why wouldn’t Academy members — I’m assuming they’re mostly white and Angeleno — rally around a film that momentarily relieved them of guilt they feel for living in such a racially segregated city? (I have to admit that I love Ludacris’s rant about the racial implications of riding city buses. That, and Don Cheadle’s opening, were the only moments in the entire movie that weren’t heavy-handed, cheesy, or gag-inducing).

The Morning News has a great list of quotes from other reviewers who disliked the movie as much as I did. A sample: “Contrived, obvious and overstated, Crash is basically just one white man’s righteous attempt to make other white people feel as if they’ve confronted the problem of racism head-on.”