All Clay

Books of history, fiction, comics and art. Seven movies.

Now at last I see what a clear influence Terry and the Pirates must have been for the Indiana Jones gestalt. Indy’s adolescent sidekick Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom could handily be read as an amalgam of the strip’s nominal protagonist Terry and the Chinese stereotype caricature Connie who serves as fixer, cook and omega wolf to Terry’s pack of heroes. Terry’s resourceful and ruggedly handsome thirty-something guardian Pat possesses some proto-Indy qualities and a sequence from Terry that involves the sexy, dynamic antagonist the Dragon Lady intimidating Pat and Terry with hospitality by offering them a succession of unpalatable delicacies is quite evidently a direct referent for the infamous gross-out banquet sequence in Temple of Doom. Besides being set in the same Interwar era as most of the Indiana Jones pictures, the atmosphere of Terry and the Pirates involves hunting treasure by torchlight in ancient temples, doing battle with rogues and mercenaries and traveling abroad in exotic lands; I always understood the Indiana Jones pictures as affectionate pastiche, but until now I didn’t know that some of the material they were honoring was sourced straight from the funny papers.

I finished reading that Civil War book Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton and I didn’t think it was possible to despise the Union General George B. McClellan more than I already did, but every time I learn more about his military peregrinations to and from the doorstep of Richmond and the narcissistic, cry-bullying persona he evinced in letters and telegraphs to allies and colleagues while tangling obstinately with the wiser and tougher President and Secretary of War to whom he thought himself superior, I find myself quite literally muttering aloud in loathing and disgust. Catton quotes a letter from McClellan to his wife in which McClellan even chides her for not congratulating him adequately on some bullshit that he didn’t even handle properly anyway. From everything I’ve read on him over the years he was a self-important loudmouth with a prodigious talent for projecting his own fears and flaws onto others and the very opposite of a humble man of bold action, which among other reasons was partly why the Confederate generalship so thoroughly outmaneuvered him and the rest of the Union eastern command from the Seven Days through to Antietam. He exulted at the battlefield failure of his professional compatriot and hated rival John Pope and even entertained, or at least didn’t repudiate, the vague concept of conquering Washington as a dictator. (Aren’t we all supposed to be on the same side here, and can’t we please leave the nightmare of Washington being conquered to the ambitions of the enemy?) Catton makes fine work of explaining why, for a time, the political entanglements and overlapping loyalties both of party politicians and of McClellan’s subordinate troops in the Army of the Potomac made it so difficult for even such a political and moral genius as Lincoln to extricate McClellan from a position of authority to which he was so woefully unsuited.

On the last page of Terrible Swift Sword, Catton quotes words that the “stout fighter” Colonel James A. Mulligan wrote after McClellan’s departure: “There is not a man in the nation destined to endurance. This great Republic, late the wonder and the envy of the nations, is crumbling into blood-stained fragments because there is no head and hand to guide and light it through the peril…There’s no human granite nowadays. It’s all clay.” Mulligan’s dejection is understandable from his contemporaneous point of view, but with the grace of hindsight we know how beneficently wrong he was. Our concern is that the McClellans of the current century are indeed overrunning the capital with nary a Lincoln to be found and that Mulligan’s words describe our own moment more accurately than his.

While I was at the public library waiting to do some scheduled volunteer work I stole a few minutes to read a beautifully-illustrated oversized children’s book called My Wild Family by someone named Laurent Moreau. And as promised in the last entry, I didn’t want to occupy my friend’s San Francisco apartment without dipping into the extensive collection of fine literature that lines nearly every wall, so while making my way through Terrible Swift Sword I pulled down and read a few short books — the great 1981 story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, a book of unimpressive paintings by Richard Diebenkorn and a tiny book containing two stories by Herman Melville, including the well-known, memorably bizarre Bartleby (usually presented as Bartleby, the Scrivener or Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, but this edition entitles the story by just the one word). I know by heart Melville’s poem about the Battle of Hampton Roads, a fascinating subject that gets a thorough and evocative treatment from Catton.

It may have been empty flattery or a veiled insult but a friendly acquaintance at the coffee shop where I’ve been hanging out in San Francisco glanced at the photo of Melville on the cover and commented that it looks like me, and also asked with straightforward incredulity why I would want to read literature as “modern” as Melville, explaining that he prefers to read classics in the original Greek. Then he introduced me to a Greek Orthodox monk visiting California from Mount Athos who sat and talked with me for about two hours and claims to have been present at the Altamont disaster, which I wrote about recently vis-à-vis Gimme Shelter. The monk was saddened and moved when I informed him of the recent news that Charlie Watts is dead and enthused to learn the not-so-recent news that there is a great documentary about the events at Altamont.

For the fourth time over a twenty-five-year period I watched Sergio Leone’s final film, the sprawling 1984 crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, a brutally violent, exquisitely-filmed, uncompromisingly ambitious story about Jewish kids from the slums of New York City who grow into vicious bootlegging gangsters during the Prohibition era and survive long enough to betray one another as they grow old amidst the bewildering social chaos of the late Sixties. The film has a talented and well-utilized ensemble cast, a fascinating aesthetic interplay between glitz and grime and a unique structure centered around an isolated and guilt-wracked protagonist who escapes into the delirium of an opium den where he experiences hallucinatory recollections of his past and dream-like flashforwards to a future that may or may not come to pass. There’s compelling action, severely flawed and interestingly complicated characters and harrowing ruminations on how bands of violent men can scrape by on intense brotherly love at the expense of any ability to understand or respect women.

In reflecting on the life and recent death of the excellent actor Michael K. Williams I revisited the 1999 Martin Scorsese picture Bringing Out the Dead, in which Williams has a brief speaking part. (His colleague Sonja Sohn from his days on The Wire also shows up in a well-cast role.) He doesn’t get enough screen time to flex the superior talent that makes us so sad to see him gone too early, but that disappointment is commensurate with the many flaws that make this movie so lousy. A formless tour through the dreadful life of an overworked, unravelling New York City paramedic in the early Nineties, it was written by Paul Schrader and gives the strong impression that the storied Schrader/Scorsese partnership is here drawing some odd and pointless analogy to their own much better work on Taxi Driver, a shorter, tidier and riskier film about an even-more unhinged young man in a job that also involves driving around Manhattan all night.

Philip Guston: A Life Lived is a short, workmanlike and engaging documentary from 1982 about one of my favorite painters that I dispatched in an hour. From there I moved along to Wrath of Man with Jason Statham, a grim 2021 heist/revenge outing that reteams Statham with the director Guy Ritchie, who launched Statham’s screen career with the great neonoir caper films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

But this isn’t the late Nineties, and Statham has matured into his antihero tough-guy screen presence too charismatically and competently to be constrained by the parochial parameters Ritchie coughs up here. Implausible, over-long and weighed down with extraneous scenes and characters, Wrath of Man has little to offer besides some serviceable Stathamicity, a churning, predatory musical score by one Christopher Benstead and an interesting but unsuccessful experiment in reprogrammed action-movie structure that smirkingly withholds key pieces of narrative information in lieu of conventional story development. Statham can carry dumb stuff better than anyone when he, his collaborators and the audience are all in on the joke together, but Ritchie is taking some very silly material way too seriously, leaving Statham to try and fail to split the difference.

After that I watched a brand new, slickly-assembled offering from Netflix starring Jake Gyllenhaal called The Guilty which was directed by Antoine Fuqua and is apparently a remake of a Danish film from 2018. It looks good in an unshowy and conventional sort of way and is largely carried by Gyllenhaal’s strong performance, though his character is the absolute last person in the theater to figure out what’s really going on before the Big Twist finally comes down.

There’s no good reason I’ve been watching so many Nicolas Cage pictures recently, from Leaving Las Vegas to The Rock to Bringing Out the Dead and finally on to Mandy, which was directed in 2018 by Panos Cosmatos and is by far the best of the four, both on the strength of Cage’s fitting casting and on all of its other astonishingly strong qualities. A bracing piece of psychedelic stoner action horror, Mandy is one of those fine works that unashamedly pays homage to its referents while repurposing them into something thrillingly novel, in this case with a story involving the evils inflicted by some kind of Christian cult in league with a gang of demonic outlaw bikers who are literally, perpetually experiencing a bad LSD trip and may or not be supernatural in origin and powers. (These monstrosities are almost always lit in stark silhouette, even when Cage’s protagonist character is confronting them in hand-to-hand, or hand-to-car, combat. What you can only imagine of their eyes and mouths is much more horrifying than what little the camera lets you see.) It would be giving too much away to explain the events that kick the story’s narrative action into the unrelenting high gear in which Cosmatos rides out the intoxicating back half of the film, so I’ll say just that this movie has an adventuresome but efficient storytelling sensibility, gorgeous and inventively-deployed trip-out visuals, solid casting and the feeling of a nightmare that grows more all-consuming the deeper into it the protagonist (and viewer) sinks. You can tell that everyone involved in this picture had confidence in the material and showed up with the intention of doing good work. The result is some strong movie-making and a deliriously fun watching experience.

Finally I rewatched Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 picture, the one that has stolen my heart as my favorite among his works, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (the title is a reference to the work of Tarantino’s hero Leone). The first time I saw this was when I happened to be working at a movie theater and had an opportunity to see it for free on a 70mm print; interestingly I noticed this time that a key sequence that was presented monochromatically on projected film was in color on the Blu-ray version. In any case I loved this movie both times I watched it. To me it seems to perfect a formula that Tarantino toyed with in the great, shambolic, flawed movies Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, making a metatextual point about cinema’s power to let us live out our fantasies of retroactively correcting ghastly historical atrocities (the Third Reich and American slavery respectively). Both movies rest overconfidently on unstable footing; Tarantino has the enthusiasm and competence to make the point without the moral sophistication to see that it’s a misguided point not worth straining so hard to make. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood brings the point home and corrects for these issues, focusing with the Manson Family murders on an atrocity of a far more manageable scale and taking full and meticulously-designed advantage of the setting of the Hollywood film industry of 1969 which is so deeply, personally baked into the mythos of Tarantino’s own development as an artist and individual. This seems to be where the serpent of his self-referential moviemaking career swallows its own tail and forms a perfect circle — enchanting to get lost in, feeling far shorter than its two hours forty and gliding gracefully towards an entertaining conclusion on the strength of its great look and sounds, immersive environment, focused story and gleefully good performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Al Pacino.

The two Once Upon a Time titles referenced in this entry would make an interesting double-feature pairing, though one would have to set aside a whole day for the project. Mandy is perhaps best enjoyed in the dark and on its own.