2014: Time To Die, Part One

2014: In pace requiescat!

Theme video for this annual series (especially instructive for those not familiar with the title or the photo, above):

1/14/14:

Another one gone way too soon.

I first figured out I should be paying attention to Roy Campbell when I listened to Matthew Shipp’s (highly recommended) Pastoral Composure (2000). I had already gotten hip to Shipp, knowing immediately he was one of a growing list of musicians whose every offering I would need to acquire. Not coincidentally, it was musicians with whom he frequently collaborated that fell into the same rarefied air: William Parker, Hamid Drake, Susie Ibarra, David S. Ware…

Campbell’s playing on Pastoral Composure borders on tour de force (Shipp was just getting started: this release signaled a decade that he owned, for my money, more than any other player on the scene): it is urgent, heavy and occasionally dark, in all the right ways. There is a somber energy pulling this album in ostensibly opposite directions: implosion and release, and Campbell is the engine (Shipp, as always, is the quarterback, if I may mix my metaphors).

I wisely became more familiar with Campbell and came to understand he’d been around for a while, so I picked up albums here and there (I can strongly encourage anyone to Ethnic Stew and Brew, which features the aforementioned Drake and Parker). You hear all sorts of influences, and styles –and cultures– in his playing: by embracing myriad sources of inspiration he developed a unique, all-encompassing style. That is exceedingly difficult to accomplish, and will likely be his legacy for future listeners. I find myself wishing he had been recorded more (live as well as in the studio).

Now he’s gone. We’re lucky to have had him while we did.

2/5/14:

Another exceptional artist of the old school has departed the premises.

Yet another individual of whom we can accurately say: his kind won’t (can’t) grace our presence in the future.

Being of a younger generation, I came to Schell later in his career. The two performances that stand out to me, both from movies I adore, evince his range and depth. In the first, from The Freshman –a platform for Marlon Brando to take the piss out his most famous role and have fun doing it– Schell has some brief, but delightful scenes as the wonderfully named Larry London.

As is so often the case, a very good-to-great screenplay can be elevated incalculably by an ideal cast. By luck or fate, virtually every role in Little Odessa is perfectly matched by actors up to the task, including Edward Furlong, who is best known for his histrionics in the very overrated Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Roth, as he was able to do seemingly without effort in his early years, lets the role absorb him and he, inexplicably, transforms his accent from British into Brighton Beach. Schell, on the other hand, brings experience and gravitas that only a man who has seen a great deal of joy, pain and injustice can conjure. In a sense, he is even bigger than the role, because however well-written, on the page we can’t hear or especially see the ways a human being invests a character with…humanity. In one of the more devastating scenes you’ll ever see, Schell confronts his wayward son (Roth) and we watch the spirit, all vitality and hope, just leave his body. It’s something slightly beyond acting, and it stays with you. For me, this is the role I’ll always associate with Schell, if for no other reason because I return to it almost annually. It’s not a pleasant watch, but it’s a necessary one.

That’s the ultimate mark of someone who used his skills and time wisely, and did what he was meant to do while he was here. R.I.P., Maximilian.

2/6/14:

My childhood would like to thank Arthur Rankin for living a long and purposeful life.

How empty would my life be without Yukon Cornelius and The Bumble? (A lot more on them, HERE.)

More on why anyone born in the 20th C (and most kids born in this century) know who he is, HERE.

Hint: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.

Snippet: Mr. Rankin’s stop-motion films were painstakingly handmade. Collaborating with Japanese puppet makers who fashioned each figure from wood, wire and wool — Rudolph was about five inches tall, Santa about nine inches — the filmmakers shot thousands of still photos of the incremental movements involved in every gesture each character made. Running them together at 24 frames a second created the whimsical, herky-jerky effect of dolls being moved by invisible hands. Mr. Rankin called it Animagic.

I think it’s quite safe to say Mr. Rankin very much left his mark on our world. Kids (and adults) everywhere owe him eternal gratitude and respect.

2/7/14:

The man I consider the best actor of his generation (and I’m certainly not alone), dead aged 46. Of a heroin overdose. Needle found sticking in his arm.

No chance. No way.

Method acting taken to its illogical extreme? Nope, he was a once-recovered addict, and as the stories began pouring out, it was revealed that he’d relapsed and had been struggling these last months with this monster that had moved into his life. That’s how it happens with addiction: it knocks on the door, or maybe it’s a case of breaking and entering. Once it gets inside it’s a hell of a lot harder to extricate it than it ever was to seek it. It is an equal opportunity assailant, going after the vital organs (the brain, the heart) and if or when its appetite for death becomes more powerful than the body’s ability to tolerate, people are found face-down on beds, curled up in alleys, or sitting in a bathroom with a needle in their arms. They become clichés in the sense that famous people dying of ostensibly self-inflicted wounds are clichés: we’ve seen this movie before.

Pretty simple, but still unassailable evidence of mastery: an actor who can consistently make you loathe him, pity him or love him –sometimes in the same movie– is a rare breed. Quick: think of how many excellent, A-list actors are actually capable of making you cheer for them in one role and feel repulsed by them in another? While playing creepy, despicable dudes was, in some ways, Hoffman’s calling card, even in the roles where he was unctuous or obsequious (think his early work in Scent of a Woman for the former and his unimprovable turn in The Big Lebowski for the latter), and being the heavy, in many senses of the word, called for skills he was ideally suited to deploy (think Punch-Drunk Love or the blustery Lester Bangs from Almost Famous), he was perhaps most convincing as the vulnerable outsider (Magnolia) or the disconnected non-content (The Savages).

It’s one thing to play an outsider; it’s easy for a luminous actor to channel alienation or estrangement. But it is considerably more challenging to depict the type of turmoil and inner-anguish that are often best conveyed only in novels. As such, two of his big roles (Capote and Doubt) were near-perfect vehicles for a man who could realistically portray a person trying to convince others –and himself– that he is someone else.

A lot more on him, HERE.

2/15/14:

This one hurts.

You can have Cliff Huxtable. I was already too old to see him as a father figure by the time The Cosby Show rolled around. Plus, he was already The Cos: the voice behind the cartoon, the patriarchal yin to Richard Pryor’s tumultuous yang, and after you saw Billy Cosby: Himself (which the subsequent series was based on) what more did you need to know?

For kids born a decade earlier, Ralph Waite was the man who played America’s dad on TV (beating Michael Landon to the punch by several crucial years). Plus, while I can’t imagine revisiting either The Cosby Show or Little House on the Prairie as an adult, I’d happily cue up The Waltons. That show is not just history, it’s my history.

And to think, Waite almost passed on the role of his life.

There is a nice piece in today’s New York Times, which contains this nugget:

Mr. Waite was a respected New York stage actor when he was offered a role on “The Waltons,” and at first he was not enthusiastic about it. But his agent, he recalled, advised him to take the part so that he could “pick up a couple of bucks” in Hollywood and go back to New York.

And so, Ralph Waite is John Walton.

More on Waite, HERE.

3/4/14:

Consider this: a world without Animal House. Or Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day.

I can’t fathom how much less happy my childhood would have been without any one of them. A life without all of them? Unimaginable.

And I know I’m not alone. This is Harold Ramis’s legacy: he brought humor and happiness—the real, enduring kind—to millions of people. In a world (then, now) that is full of quick hits, tweets, 15 seconds of fame, weekend blockbusters, and increasingly formulaic, artistically DOA drivel, and their inevitable, unending sequels, it’s worth noting, and celebrating, funny films that endure. What makes a movie funny, of course, ultimately boils down to subjective criteria. But what makes a movie smart, particularly a funny movie that manages to also be smart, is a respect, if not affinity, with the viewer. Even at his most sophomoric (and the immortal Caddyshack might be the most sophomoric film consistently worshipped by adult males), Ramis was creating characters everyone could recognize and identify with on various levels.

Animal House, which Ramis co-wrote, aside from providing a template for so many comedies that followed, was notable for celebrating the outsiders and losers typically reduced to stock characters. We’re not talking about the underdog, necessarily, as that trope was well established (and predictable); Animal House subverted the entire notion of what being a “winner” meant. Delta Tau Chi was not just the fraternity that accepted the outcasts no other house would have, it was the fraternity full of guys who wouldn’t have any other fraternity.

The misfits and miscreants of the Delta House were rebels with a cause. Yes, they were down for mayhem and shaking things up by any means necessary, but they also lifted a middle finger at convention. They weren’t misunderstood so much as they understood they wanted no part of a culture that equated conformity with success and imitation as the most insincere form of self-flattery.

Naturally, it being a movie, the good guys get the last laugh, but importantly, all the ostensible winners get their comeuppance down the road. As has been widely noted, Ramis & Co. appreciated that the insufferable weasels from Omega House would be the ones working for Nixon and being fragged by their own troops in Vietnam. It’s a conclusion that is satisfying and depressing, because while true in part, everyone knows our country is still mostly run by the Omegas.

A lot more on Ramis, HERE.