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3. Best Film Documentary: Il Mio Viaggio in Italia
Why isn't Martin Scorsese's rapturous anatomizing of Italian neo-realism out on video and DVD yet? This 4-hour. baptism by film was completed in 1999 and played on Turner Classic Movies last June. It's time for informed movie lovers to catch up with Scorsese's take on the films that shaped his films and his world. Where other kids went to Italian movies for the babes (an exemplary reason, by the way), young Marty was enthralled by the plastic artistry, the compositions and camera movements, the profound performances by non-professionals that seemed less like acting than a transference of souls. A great teacher and fan, Scorsese skillfully infects the viewer with his knowledgeable passion. Until you can catch up with the neo-real thing, check out the nearly-as-mesmerizing prequel, "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies."
Honorable Mention: "Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer." Robert Trachtenberg's study, from the PBS "American Masters" series, has unusually cogent commentary and a briskly comprehensive selection of clips to cast light on cinema's most ambitious and successful dancer-filmmaker. (But he still wasn't Astaire. And I still can't forgive Trachtenberg for cutting a talking head into the moment in "Singin' in the Rain" when the camera pulls back and up on the wet street and Kelly seems seized by an umbrella that suddenly has a whirling will of its own.)
4. Best Film Book: "A clean BREAST!" by Russ Meyer
America's premier (and self-designated) tittenfilmer, Meyer is thought to have a breast fixation. His autobiography proved a corollary: he has a size fixation. He always made big films — large-in-every-sense-of-the-word casts, reams and quires of dialogue, enough plots for a dozen melodramas by a dozen lesser directors — on a low budget. The book is everything the movies were, and astonishingly, expectedly, more-so. Twenty years in the writing, and 78 years in the living, this three-volume, 1200-page, 17-lb. engorgement of memories and mammaries is a coming-of-age saga (accent on the coming, and later on the sag), a WWII tale of comradeship in the battlefields and bordellos of war-torn Europe, and an inside peek at no-frills, haul-your-own-camera moviemaking. All told in Meyer's ornate, nay, bombastic prose. Need I induce more? "A clean BREAST!" is now available at the giveaway price of $149.99 (I paid $50 more) from the auteur-author-hawker himself.
Honorable Mention: "A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey" by Kevin Murphy. At the end of 2001 — a year in which the esteemed "Mystery Science Theater 3000" writer-performer (Servo, Bobo) saw at least a movie a day in a theater or theater-equivalent — Murphy proclaimed that he wasn't sick of celluloid. He was eager to see more movies, more bad movies, crummy scummy gimme gimme. To me, and I speak as a professional, Murphy's final cry sounds like a Jane Fonda film, only in Swedish: "The Stockholm Syndrome." And if he hadn't fallen in love with his captors, he may have become enamored of the notion that for a year he got to do that least painful job: movie watching. Think of it: some people go to work with the reasonable expectation that what passes across our screens is going to be either good or a beguiling variation on bad. A much better job is reading Murphy's book. It's funny, pained, surprised and surprising, the act of an open mind in the throes of discovery. Self-discovery too. Some of his best argument are with himself.
5. Best Real Book: "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898" by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace.
This was originally a tie with Philip Lopate's splendidly synoptic collection, "Writing New York." To decide the winner, I flipped a coin — actually a New York City subway token (another lesson in planned obsolescence). The Joseph Mitchell books I discussed in the September 10th column are fabulous works of archaeology and pathology, studies of a vanished species of urban eccentric. If "Gotham" gets the nod, it's partly because embedded in its 1,400 pages are a few about the Draft Riots of 1863. Those who've seen "Gangs of New York" and want a supplementary reading list can start with this history book, as dense and alive as the city it chronicles.
Honorable Mention: "Hellfire" by Nick Tosches. An oldie but goodie. Tosches' biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, first published in 1982 and updated twice, re-fries the story of rock 'n roll's finest piano-pounder in the tone of an Old Testament hipster. A country-horror ballad that singes as it sings.
6. Best Lost Cause: "Dance of the Vampires."
The critics feasted on Jim Steinman's dark pop musical as if it were a virgin's pale throat begging for predatory fangs. It lost millions in its three-month Broadway run, which ended ignominiously Saturday night. So of course I liked it. I've had a soft spot in my head heart for Steinman since he wrote the "Bat Out of Hell" album for Meat Loaf, back in prehistoric vinyl days. The vigor of "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young" and his other songs for the film "Streets of Fire," which I saw in Los Angeles in 1984, sent me racing along Mulholland Drive, to keep up with the propulsive beat. I swooned under the operatic pretensions of "Total Eclipse of the Heart," his 1983 hit for Bonnie Tyler. Steinman was the guy I kept calling for to rejuvenate, or just plain juvenate, the Broadway musical. And now Broadway has told him to go back to the Bat cave. If we want a hip pop sound, the musical theater establishment pronounced, we'll play old ABBA records.
Maybe 50s rock 'n roll with a 70s preen isn't what the 80-year-olds who constitute Broadway's audience want to hear. But I knew from the first number — an angelic trio with a beguiling (what did they used to call it?) melody and some expert (the Andrews Sisters used to do it) harmony — that this would be my kind of score. In invention and effortless tonal rapture "Dance" is not up to the level of "Chess," the great mid-80s score the ABBA guys wrote with Tim Rice, but it's in the ballpark. The production, in the rock-mock-Wagnerian style that tends to play better in London and Las Vegas than in Manhattan, boasted some fine voices and sexy dancers.
Mainly, though, I wanted to hear Steinman's score again. Well, the New York reviews were so defiling that the Broadway cast was not recorded. But there is an album of the original Berlin production production, called "Tanz der Vampire." All right, it's in German, but think of all the English-language rock German kids listen to. And the 2-CD set is available from amazon.de for about $33.50, which is $10-15 less than you'd pay for it in the U.S., if you could find it. Order now, and the CD could arrive by Valentine's Day.
Honorable Mention: "Amour." Another foreign musical, this one from Paris, that closed two weeks after it opened, again to dismissive notices. (Hmmm, could this explain why France and Germany are resisting the U.S. pleas to join the new crusade against the infidel Saddam?) Michel Legrand's score (available on amazon.fr, if you're still feeling international) is not the point of enchantment. It's the mood that director James Lapine conjured up: ethereal, bittersweet, vulnerable to an audience's cynicism. Not me: it had me at "bonjour."
7. Most Missed Friend: John Johnson.
He wasn't famous. He worked, with a devoted anonymity, in the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film, cataloguing and doting on the old movies entrusted to MoMA. A connoisseur of the best of the past and the loveliest of the present, John was an informed and uncritical fan of Lana Turner, Ella Fitzgerald and Mary Corliss. A secret asset of New York City is that it houses thousands of sweet people who carry a torch for classic pop culture; they are curators by vocation if not by career. But no one was as sweet and generous as John. No one defended his old friends — when they were in danger of being crushed by the venality and vengefulness of ignorant bosses — with the passion John had when Mary and her colleague Terry Geesken lost their jobs at MoMA, as I chronicled in a That Old Feeling column a year ago. Mary and Terry's fight continues, but without John. He died in July, at 54, and a lot of the world's goodness went with him.
Honorable Mention: Chuck Jones. In his development of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a quarter-century of Warner Bros. cartoons, Chuck reached and raised the acme of comic animation. In person, he was every bit as witty, charming and graceful as those endearing critters. Chuck's little tragedy was to be thrown out of Termite Terrace when the brothers Warners shut it down in 1963. His gift from the gods was to live long enough to see his work recognized, lionized by a generation of ... grown men, for Heaven's sake. Surviving into his 90th year, he got nearly four decades, post-Warner, to spread the good word about classical cartooning and to hear quite a few thrown his way.
8. Most Missed New York Landmark: Kim's West.
This was my old video store, a Greenwich Village trove of rare, foreign, indie and crackpot cassettes, and the lending library for so many of my film adventures. It closed suddenly in September. Since then I've patronized the bigger Kim's across town on St. Mark's Place, but occasionally I get a memorial twinge. One day this week I called the St. Mark's place to see if it had a film I had once rented from the Village store: "Chronicle of a Dream," by the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman. No luck. Later that day I walked past the 10th Street location of Kim's West. The outlet had closed, we were told, because the owners demanded too high a rent. Well, they can't be getting much: the space is still untenanted. It's possible that my melancholy swells because the store was two short blocks from John Johnson's home — another place where a fierce fire kindles for the old, the weird and the damaged. I can't compare Kim's to that big crater further downtown, but now there's one more hole in the heart of New York.
Honorable Mention: The Stork Club, as seen in "The Sweet Smell of Success." That grand and pungent of slab of rotten meat — the 1957 movie, not the night club at 3 W. 53rd Street — gave the truest picture of the guilty pleasure New Yorkers used to take in thinking of themselves as conniving Scoundrels of Broadway who happened to be smarter and slicker than all the other conniving S.O.B.'s. The Winchellian Devil (Burt Lancaster) and his eager imp (Tony Curtis) testified that, in the bad old days, evil was practiced with a lot more style and sulfur than it is today, at least on 53rd Street.
9. Best Centenary: Leni Riefenstahl
On her 100th birthday last August, Leni Riefenstahl was still alive and kicking (underwater; she's a Scuba diver). To some of us, Riefenstahl deserves to be counted as one of the great filmmakers; to others, Hitler's favorite director is the thing that wouldn't die. And the nays may have it. You might think that any new film from a 100-year-old woman, let alone the most famous/notorious in screen history, would have a little want-see for critics and serious moviegoers. "Underwater Impressions," the first Riefenstahl film to be released in 48 years, did play on the Arte Channel in Europe; but it was shown at no U.S. film festival, played on no North American cable station and has logged not a single critic's review on IMDb. Once she was blacklisted ( though she was not a Nazi) for making "Triumph of the Will." But 67 years later, does her poetic documentary on marine life need to undergo denazification?
Honorable Mention: That old gang of ours. Fully six of the 31 That Old Feeling columns I wrote last year were devoted to centenaries. Marlene Dietrich high-kicked her amused derision from beyond the grave and sent back a message that the afterlife was "fwightfuwwy boring." Century celebrants hummed Richard Rodgers' beautiful melodies, and reread Ogden Nash's cute-iful verse. Here I need to mention another departed friend who would have been 100 on December 2: Howard Koch, whose achievements included writing the most famous of all radio broadcasts (the Mercury Theatre version of "The War of the Worlds") and co-writing the most cherished of all Hollywood movies ("Casablanca"). He was one of the dearest, most dedicated and innocent people I've known, and I hope to return to Howard later this year, on the 60th anniversary of his most notorious film project, "Mission to Moscow."
10. Best Fight: The Hullabaloo Over Halle Berry.
That was a wild and instructive one. I had criticized Berry's thank-you speech when she won the Best Actress Oscar for "Monster's Ball." I said she claimed way too much as the shining representative of generations of black movie actresses who preceded her, and that she was the beneficiary, not the victim, of white voters' attitudes. My readers (about 60 of them) also had some strong opinions: that I was "profoundly racist," "a closet racist" or maybe an "outright" one, a metaphorical flesh-burner of black Americans. One reader considered the possibility that I was the "son of Satan" before settling on "dumb-ass." The only hope I could take was from one helpful soul who wrote: "I encourage you to keep on doing what you're doing ... or else I wouldn't have anyone to be pissed off at."
Honorary Mention: the Cal Ripken Calumny. In a TIME.com rant I chastised the public, which was called upon to choose Major League Baseball's Memorable Moments, for putting the Oriole shortshop's longevity record at the top of their list. Read the two stories: you'll see I was a lot more anti-Cal than anti-Halle. Again, 60 or so readers turned writers, though this time about half of my correspondents agreed with me.
Somehow, all of us — Cal and Halle, and me and you, dear contentious reader — made it through 2002. I'm grateful to everyone: the public figures who give me something to write about, the readers who give me someone to write for. I'd also like to thank the Academy of TIME.commissars, Josh Macht and the humanely nurturing, inhumanly patient Mark Coatney, for sustaining this forum. I'm eager to see what pop culture has to offer this year, especially if it reminds me of old music and movies, theater and books. Old feelings. The best of them make me feel young, or at least remember what they felt like the first time around. I want to remember ... oh, hell, anything. The titles of Academy Award-winning movies, I've heard, are the first bits of brain data to go. And after that ...
Remind me, readers: Who won last year's Oscar for Best Actress?