Manana(.mp3)

In the New York City morning tourists with Gray Line All-Loops tickets scramble from Times Square to catch the boat to the Statue of Liberty. At the end of the day, these tourists need tour buses in Battery Park to collect them back to the hotel. At Gray Line these sweeper buses are called a Boat Pick-Up: they depart empty from 47th & Broadway so as to maximize seating from the Battery lowland landfill lines, and en route downtown the tour guide gets to ride the bus alone. . .

The Boat Pick-Up

Future Luxy

Jim Jarmusch is not a great moviemaker because of the way Ideas are postulated, but because of the craftsmanship of their scenarios. This movie is one lumbering scenario in the mask of an Idea, spiraling into tedium in its patterns and repetitions. The variation and routine is complexly laid out to little effect. The deliberately fuzzy aims become clear in the student-film level intellect and cheaply-wowed mystic spareness of the sequences and dialogue. Isaach De Bankole is a compelling, stone-chiseled countenance and infuses it with a delicate, spartan life, but the movie hardly supports him. The references to art, film, literature are all thrown bones with no marrow, footnotes of the moviemaker’s imagination – as if the movie should be left in the bathroom stack for hunched readers to skim like a book of famous quotes. The dialogue is collectively trite and quips about hallucinogenic drugs and molecular science limply suck those subjects of any suggestiveness. It feels as if one is being whispered repeatedly, tortuously like MK-Ultra, what one already knows, desecrating the richness of experience, and so, among other things, the cinematography fails to capture the audiences’ awareness of the Spanish environs (see the opening five minutes of Whit Stillman’s Barcelona). The climax showdown with typical asshole American epitomizes the meek lefty’s imaginary enemy. Is Jarmusch trying to make a movie from the perspective of an ill-informed Western European conspiracy theorist? The agent of the secret group for whom Lone Man kills speaks French to him, translated into English by a gold-chained oaf. Do the rest of the characters represent Euro-intelligentsia clichés? If so, the movie is natural to the Jarmusch canon, but it would then follow that Jim’s grave nods to the imagination should be deliberately trivial, which it cannot be said they are, and in effect one is embarrassed for them.

Bill Murray, the character called American, as always with all material whether Rodney Dangerfield or Shakespeare, is superbly in tune and makes the most with least. He tosses his toupee atop the decorative skull on his desk, and shares a quick stare with his own death-head that is more abundant with personality than most of the whole movie, and the excessive f-bombs are a welcome ring. Bill’s pedigree in sketch comedy – to work in context out of context – serves the movie’s groove that is otherwise mostly missed. Gael’s gaucho getup is enviably gritty and it seems John Hurt walks out of an Evelyn Waugh novel before hurrying back in, but, overall, a silly mod pop band from the late 60s could have taken this script and made it into a counterculture hit, just substitute the band for the Lone Man. The Limits Of Control puts Jarmusch in jeopardy of the Tarantino hero-worship syndrome – that obsessed fandom will let the moviemaker get away with any movie, and so the editing process in later work degenerates.

The theme of emptiness and dream-logic mystery peaked with 80s Cold War nuclear brinksmanship. The standards are different today. Good art about “nothing” can be engaging (like Naked & Seinfeld), but Limits seems to be a shoddy assemblage of discarded jots from the truly profound movies upon which Jim’s rep is based – Dead Man, Ghost Dog, Stranger Than Paradise etc. Among the digital age of information mega-scope (whether the info true or false), the smoky beatnik style of incessantly flip cultural references seems more dorky than cool. Jim knows this – he spoke sardonically and rakishly about transcendent socio-aesthetic paradigms in the Q&A after a screening of The Limits Of Control at Lincoln Center on April 30.

*For a more relevant and resonant experience of how alienation, imagination and authority mix a volatile cocktail, see Observe & Report.

There was a period in the 1980s when the idea of the profane macho-man devolved, from movies made by grown men with adult minds to movies made by grown men with adolescent minds, and most likely because the audience got younger and hopefully not the minds of men – and men who grew up on 60s & 70s tough guy movies took their young sons to the new ones coming out in the 80s – whatever the movie, as long as there was a male lead, big guns, bad guys, bad words and fucked-up action. And usually an objectification of females. In 1987 these men never took their sired to see Ishtar.

Harley & Marlboro makes several nods to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (a movie which is, equitably, rather chaste among many others in this canon), just as Ishtar nods off like a junkie to old Hope/Crosby capers. Beatty & Hoffman exude a certain shameless honesty, the male bonding that is both pathetic and exalting. Their songster schtick is out of whack and flat when merged with the silly 80s stagecraft, but these fashions become picturesque when Hoffman runs around Ishtar wearing a faux-futuristic Grace Jones-style headband.

Harley & Marlboro is just as shameless in its male-bonding scenario, and Crockett and Rourke’s pan-fried personas inspire a bit of trust in the subtext. These renegade pre-apocalyptic ramblers are out to save their favorite hangout, The Rock N Roll Bar & Grill, from the Great Trust bank, a financial conglomerate run by slick-haired, black shiny overcoat-clad android yuppies (a staple villainry of 1990s movies). One of the yuppies continually refers to Harley and Marlboro as “dilettantes.” Our guys just try keeping it real: classic Americans standing off in defense of hard-earned property. If the movie had been a hit, would it have spawned a series of blue-collar product-hero movies set in the not-at-all-distant future? Marlboro’s love interest is Virgina Slim (she’s a cop), and ex-WWF wrestler Big John Stud plays Jack Daniels (he gets blown away).

The audience for Harley & Marlboro, at the time, surely expected nothing more from Don Johnson and Mickey. But the audience of Ishtar expected more from Hoffman and Beatty (neither Don nor Rourke had ever made award-winning Communist epics or been part of the Tootsie consciousness). Ishtar falls in the canon of screwball but the actors and director veer back and forth between the self-awareness of it and of not – and the flick only works engagingly when not: Beatty reaching out to Hoffman on the Upper West Side ledge where Hoffman threatens to cast himself off, the inverted ironical moment of intimacy, “You have the guts to admit you have nothing. . .” Hoffman auctioneering in nonsense Bedouin language and Beatty disguised as a sandman pretending to understand the dialect. A fine metaphor for the characters’ relationship. And their fantasy hit song, “Dangerous Business,” passes the Old Grey Whistle Test with depressing catchiness, a real kneeslapper in the sequences of the two actors as failures composing it, mistaking the random for the inspired, until they are crawling deliriously around the desert, spouting inane Tin Pan Alley rhymes. Producer Warren has withdrawn the film from the data stream for fear of subsequent exposure[?], but Don Johnson basically mimicked his portrayal of The Marlboro Man weekly as Nash Bridges.

ps: Ishtar was viewed on VHS, Harley & Marlboro post-analog.

Dominick “Fatso” DiNapoli is not so fat – played with more pathos than bathos by a pre-Cannonball Run Dom DeLuise, he is not obese like his cousin Sal. When Sal and Fatso were alter boys together during Mass, Sal would secretly pass Fatso chocolates. Sal dies at 39, slain by gluttony. Anne Bancroft, who meagerly wrote and directed the movie, plays Fatso’s shrill cousin, wailing over the coffin and warning Fatso that he is next for the grave. Fatso mourns Sal in the only terms he knows. Fatso’s meditation on death is delightfully meaningful but the movie is wounded by its blaring overhead lighting like an office bathroom, and lack of any charm or hint of dynamism in its attempt at a Cassavettes-like cavalier vibe, only cringingly ineffective.

Fatso has a knack for the art of topping a slice of Italian bread with marinara. He cries over Sal while stirring and salting the tomato sauce. He is not a vile eater but a constant eater. He is proud of the delicacy with which he prepares his pathological food. Whereas Fatso is patient and genial, walking to work in the old Italian West Village and greeting neighbors on the street on the way to DiNapoli’s Card Store, his family and friends are stressed and overworked and unhappy Italiano stereotypes, and pick on Fatso more than look after his welfare. After dabbling with Dr. Schwartzman, a diet quack on East 65th Street, Fatso finds the girl of his dreams, a shy little blonde pumpkin. In the end he’s still fat.

Talking First Day Of The Year(.mp3)

The Goose Is On My Trail(.mp3)

Belltowers Bellows(.mp3)

An introduction to the largest cave system known to Man. . . .

The Cave City Ranger