Last night on PBS, I caught the reverent and fascinating documentary No Subtitles Necessary: László & Vilmos, a look at the art, influence, and longtime brotherly friendship of the two most fabled Hollywood cinematographers of the 1970s, László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond. Like anyone else immersed in the classic American movies of that time (and, really, who isn’t?), I knew who these two men were, understood a few things about their art, and had a dim awareness of the fact (coincidence — or something more?) that they were both Hungarian émigrés.
I was amazed, though, at how much I didn’t know, starting with the nearly poetic fact that their baptism in cinematography occurred when the Soviet tanks came rolling through Budapest in 1956. The two, who were then film students, grabbed their cameras, shot the protests and the violent crackdown, and then smuggled the footage out of the country under the noses of Soviet guards. What I love about this story is that it captures how, for Kovács and Zsigmond, photographing movies was, from the start, something raw and essential and existential and real. It was those qualities that they imprinted upon the visual atmosphere of American movies, changing the face of an art form in the process.
The two started out on the grimy indie-exploitation fringes of Hollywood, shooting schlock horror and nudie-cutie films, where they were often billed as “Leslie Kovacs” and “William Zsigmond.” Easy Rider, which really kicked off the revolution in cinematography, was conceived, at least by its backers, as just one more outlaw biker flick. (Read full post)
I miss the days when actors had bad hair days. When their coifs weren’t so coiffed, when their heads were allowed to look scruffy, greasy, crazy, unkempt. Not Robert Pattinson mousse-mussed, but genuinely dishabille. I miss the days when they could even be — maybe we should whisper this — bald. I admit that I have something of a personal stake in this. I’m a follically challenged male, and perhaps I speak for others who are losing their hair when I say that it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if we were represented a little more often on screen, and not just by the usual character actors playing dweebish bank tellers and Internet wizards. I do like to think, however, that even if God had graced me with the Jim Morrison-on-Kiehl’s mane of Adrian Grenier, that I’d still want to stand up for a little more healthy hair diversity among contemporary Hollywood leading men. These days, if an actor is losing his hair, he isn’t allowed to show it. He’s got to be plugged, weaved, bobbed, re-strung. In effect, he’s not himself — he’s wearing a permanent costume.
Have you recovered from the shock yet? You may think I’m kidding about all this, but there’s a time-honored tradition of movies that get booed at Cannes and then go on to win a reputation as timeless, subversive works. The most famous is probably L’Avventura. In 1960, the crowd on the Riviera didn’t know what to make of Michelangelo Antonioni’s grandly arid and despairing anti-thriller, and so they booed its slowness, its joyless decadence, its mirror held up so pointedly to…well, them. But the film was soon recognized — rightly — as a kind of masterpiece of disaffection, and the memory of those early catcalls only added to its austere luster. Great works, of course, have been hissed and booed throughout history. The most famous example in our time is the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913, which caused a riot (though I’ve always found it hard to picture what, exactly, fancy Paris men in top hats and tails engaging in the act of rioting would actually look like). Pauline Kael evoked The Rite of Spring’s premiere when she wrote about the world’s first showing of Last Tango in Paris at the 1972 New York Film Festival — a movie event that provoked, if not boos, then (according to Kael) a hush that was deafening in its lack of enthusiasm. 
I loved the new Robert Zemeckis/Jim Carrey version of 
Oscar buzz for 'Crazy Heart,' or static electricity?
An obsessively long article in today’s New York Times chronicles the supposed emergence of Crazy Heart, a low-budget movie starring Jeff Bridges as a washed-up country singer , as a possible Oscar contender. Now, maybe Crazy Heart is great, maybe Jeff Bridges is great (he usually is), and maybe this is one of the best movies of the year. Or maybe not. The thing is, how the heck would you or I know, since none of us has yet seen it? For that matter, how the heck would Oscar voters know, since they haven’t yet seen it either?
With great love and admiration for the brilliant analysis my EW brothers and sisters (led by the erudite Dave Karger–hi Dave!) do in covering the great annual moviepalooza known as the Academy Awards, I’ve got an uncontrollable urge to jump in here and say: Show me the movie before you tell me the odds! Show me, even though my opinion (either professional or off-duty) doesn’t matter in this race. Show me (and you), even though I know that the winners of those coveted naked-bald-man statues are the result of a process that’s indescribably farklempt (as they say in Hollywood). I don’t know a movie-lover around who really believes that Oscar = Best. But it would be nice if, in the months and months leading up to the nominations and awards, we could at least believe that Movie = Seen.
And in the meantime, regarding Crazy Heart and its award-worthiness: Sez who?
You know?