I was All-Schoolyard, tell her, Max.

“Sports to me is like music…It’s completely, aesthetically satisfying. There were times I would sit at a game with the old Knicks and think to myself in the fourth quarter, This is everything the theatre should be an isn’t. There’s an outcome that’s unpredictable. The audience is not ahead of the dramatist. The drama is ahead of the audience, and you don’t know exatly where it’s going. You’re personally involved with the players–they had herioc demensions, some of those players. It’s a pleasurable experience, though not intellectual–much like music. It enters you through a diferent opening, sort of…

You see, life consists of giving yourself these problems that can be dealt with, so you don’t have to face the problems that can’t be dealt with. It’s very meaningful to me, for instance, to see if the Knicks are going to get over some problem or another. These are matters you can get involved with, safely, and pleasurably, and the outcome doesn’t hurt you.”

Woody Allen to David Remnick, 1994

Well said, though I’m sure some fans would argue about not being hurt. Last night’s loss was a tough one, doesn’t matter that the Celtics should have mopped the floor with them. Carmelo Anthony was brilliant but Jared Jeffries will be the memory that doesn’t go away from this one. And that hurts, man.

R.I.P. Michael Sarrazin.

With Jane Fonda in Sydney Pollack’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

Ah, Natalie…

Chris Jones on Jeff Bridges in the new issue of Esquire:

“If some crazy idea stays in my head for long enough, then there’s no fighting it,” he says. “I just say, Okay, let’s go. Let’s do this.”

Bridges was sixteen or seventeen years old when he learned to stop fighting it. He had acted a few times — his first tearful lines onscreen were spoken to his black-and-white father, Lloyd, on an episode of Sea Hunt — but he wasn’t sure that acting was what he wanted to do. He liked music better, experimenting with his brother Beau’s guitar, along with other objects and instruments. His family had a beach house back then, down in Malibu, and one night, as he and some friends were leaving, he saw that they had left a light on deep inside the house. He went back to turn it off and click: He was in blackness.

“Normally, we push away the things we’re scared of,” Bridges says. “But for some reason, that night, I decided to let that fear in. I decided that it was okay for me to be afraid of the dark.”

He imagined all those things that aren’t there in the light. And by the time his friends came back inside and snapped on the lights — he had remained inside the darkened house for so long — they found him curled up in a ball on the floor, trembling and bathed in tears and sweat. He had opened the door to fear, and fear had rushed in.

“And then there was a rose,” he says now, looking clear through the fog. A single rose, in a tiny vase, on a table. And he imagined that the rose hid the same things that the dark kept hidden, and he felt his heart start racing again. He was terrified of the rose, and that’s the exact moment when Jeff Bridges learned the secret that would unlock the rest of his life. That night, he learned that there was no such thing as acting. There was only imagination, and that long succession of dreams and nightmares we all harbor. And if only he continued to let everything in — if all of us decided to let everything in — those things would join our imaginations and carry us wherever we might want to go.

Pauline Kael on Woody’s first trip into heaviosity, Interiors:

The people in Woody Allen’s Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.

Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it’s deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.

The movie is so unfunny it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s so unfunny that it’s funny, which is funny because the last thing it wants to be is funny.

Ah, bliss…

In all the tributes over this past week to Sidney Lumet, many have cited Lumet’s strong track record of guiding his actors to exceptional, even iconic performances. While Al Pacino’s work in Lumet’s “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon” may be the most famous examples of this, I don’t think any of Lumet’s lead actors was ever better than Paul Newman as a down and out alcoholic Boston lawyer in “The Verdict.”

“The Verdict’s” success is due to the remarkable collaboration between Lumet, Newman and David Mamet, who wrote the script. Mamet’s screenplay takes what could have been either a run of the mill redemption story or courtroom drama and finds those keen details that Lumet and his cast bring to life brilliantly. There are those little moments, like Frank Galvin (Newman) sipping his shot of whiskey off of the bar, too shaky to dare risk raising it to his lips that make the bigger ones, like his argument in chambers with a corrupt judge (Milo O’Shea), or his stunning summation really pay off.

Newman doesn’t just play a drunk; he captures a drunk’s self-loathing, his fear, his shame and ultimately, the slow rekindling of his pride and the attendant panic that it may be too late. The supporting cast around Newman, including Jack Warden, Charlotte Rampling, Edward Binns, and particularly the great James Mason performs at the same high level.

Looking at the summation speech, I was struck by Lumet’s quiet but incredibly effective technique. The scene is one, long interrupted take. The camera holds the wide shot for a full two minutes, only moving when Newman approaches the jury box. Then slowly, it moves in on Newman, as his speech draws us in deeper, as if we are the jurors. Lumet’s decision to use one long take allows Newman to build up slowly, to really let Mamet’s words create the true force of their meaning. He finishes, and slumps back into his seat. We can sense the physical and emotional exhaustion of both the character and the actor.

Lumet, Newman and Mamet were all nominated for Academy Awards for “The Verdict.” None of them won.

Roger Ebert on Buster. 

[Picture by Cecil Beaton]

The Tigers recently called up Alberto “Al” Alburquerque.

That man’s parents had absolutely the right idea. If my last name were Alburquerque, which sadly it is not, I would name my son the same thing and my daughter Alberta. Al is a 24-year-old pitching prospect from the DR, and I wish him a long and productive major-league career. It’s also at times like this that I fiercely miss Bob Sheppard. How much do you wish you could hear him say “Now pitching for the Detroit Tigers, Alberto Alburquerque”? I would cut off a toe.

Not only does the name roll off the tongue, but it gives me an excuse to link to my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, Billy Wilder’s inky-black and still alarmingly relevant social and media satire, Ace In The Hole. Sadly the clip can’t be embedded, but check it out:

“Even for Alburquerque, this is pretty Alburquerque.”

The longer Al stays in the majors, the more often I get to say that, is the way I look at it.

Lumet week continues with this big of fire from “The Fugitive Kind”:

From the Gothamist…man, does this ever look fuggin’ great (peace to Robby Rob for the link).

Guest Post By William D. Jackson

Last Friday, I checked into my Facebook account and saw a post from a friend referring to Sidney Lumet, the renowned director of such movies as “12 Angry Men,” “Serpico,” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” I instantly knew he was being memorialized.

I was caught by surprise, actually; the same way I was surprised when Sidney Pollack died. They were both full of energy, even if they appeared worn around the edges. Mr. Lumet certainly appeared to have walked a long way to the stage he was currently sitting on when I attended the TriBeCa Film Fest preview of “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead” in 2007. I was with a friend who’s a big Phillip Seymour Hoffman fan; he was there with Lumet and Ethan Hawke. My friend begged me to stand up and ask a question during the Q&A afterward, so I stood up and got noticed.

“I just wanted to say two things,” I said. “Mr. Hoffman, my friend here is a big fan of yours and wants to say hi” to which he and the audience laughed as she squirmed in her seat. “The other thing is, being that you shot most of this on location around the city, I wonder if you have any war stories to share concerning that experience.”

Hoffman talked about how while they were filming one scene inside a car with Marisa Tomei, they had to pipe in air because it was so hot inside, that after literally having a fan or an ac in the back seat out of frame that had broken down early on. Sidney spoke about how much give and take there is when you’re on location, but for the most part he loved it. His favorite shooting days were in Astoria, Queens. I sensed a reflective look from both of them, and Hoffman looked at me the whole time as if to say, “Ahh, I know you’re in the biz!”

(more…)

Pauline Kael on “Dog Day Afternoon” (from “When The Lights Go Down”):

In “Dog Day Afternoon,” we don’t want any explanation of how it is that Sonny (Al Pacino) lives in both heterosexual and homosexual marriages. We accept the idea because we dont really believe in patterns of behavior anymore–only in behavior. Sonny, who is trapped in the middle of robbing a bank, with a crowd gathering in the street outside, is a working-class man who got into this mess by trying to raise money for Leon (Chris Sarandon) to have a sex-change operation, ye the audience doesn’t laugh. The most touching element in the film is Sonny’s inability to handle all the responsibilities he has assumed. Though he is half-crazed by his situation, he is trying to do the right thing by everybody–his wife and children, the suicidal Leon, the hostages in the bank. In the sequence in which Sonny dictates his will, we can see that inside this ludicrous bungling robber there’s a complicatedly unhappy man, operating out of a sense of noblesse oblige.

The structure of “Dog Day Afternoon” loosens in the last three-quarters of an hour, but that was the part I particularly cared for. This picture is one of the most satisfying of all the movies starring New York City because the director, Sidney Lumet, and the screenwriter, Frank Pierson, having established that Sonny’s grandstanding gets the street crowd on his side against the cops, and that even the tellers are on his side, let us move into the dark, confused areas of Sonny’s frustrations and don’t explain everything to us. They trust us to feel without our being told how to feel. They prepare us for a confrontation scene between Sonny and Leon, and it never comes, but even that is all right, because of the way that Pacino and Sarandon handle their contact by telephone; Sonny’s anxiety and Leon’s distress are so pure that there’s no appeal for sympathy–no star kitsch to separate us from the nakedness of the feelings on the screen.

Sidney Lumet made some great movies and some decent ones and a bunch of clunkers. But he almost always got good performances from his actors. “Q&A” was a New York corrupt cop story, a Lumet specialty. It wasn’t a great movie but it featured a lot of solid performances–Armand Assante was never better–especially from the supporting cast, another Lumet trademark.

But it was Nick Nolte’s movie.

Man, when he’s on, Nolte is great.

Sidney Lumet, one of the great directors to come out of television in the 1950s, has died. He was 86. A New York legend, he was the man behind the camera for classics like “12 Angry Men,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network” and “The Verdict.”

Bow down.

Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson tap it out:

Old kicks on the wall at a running store…

Here’s more Albert, with his real life brother:

Sometimes there is a scene in a movie that is so good that the rest of the movie pales in comparison. I always felt that Albert Brook’s second movie, “Modern Romance” never recovered after this sequence, where Albert is high on ‘ludes. Enjoy (Mr. Popularity, Mr. Popularity):

The rest of the movie is fun–and we’ll feature another good scene shortly–but this one takes the cake.

Baseball is back, let us give thanks. The sermon today is from Annie Savoy:

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball and it’s never boring … which make it like sex. There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you gotta relax and concentrate. Besides I’d never sleep with a player hitting under .250 … not unless he had a lot of RBI’s and was a great glove up the middle.

You see, there’s a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I’ve got a ballplayer alone, I’ll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. ‘Course a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay. I make them feel confident and they make me feel safe and pretty. ‘Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime, what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball – now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake? It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ’em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul is the Church of Baseball.”

A-a-a-men!

Yesterday, Diane sent me this little piece on Christopher Walken from the New Yorker:

Walken doesn’t use a computer. “The Internet is strange,” he said. “There’s stuff on the Internet about me. I’ve tried to find out who puts it there. Something about how I go around to hot-dog festivals, that I’m a champion hot-dog eater.” Then, there’s the IMDB Web site, which says that Walken has a film “in production” called “Citizen Brando.” “I have no idea what that is.” He said he’d had a few encounters with Brando.

“Once, in the nineties, I was in Nova Scotia, doing a movie. It’s my day off, and I’m reading a book and the phone rings and this woman says, ‘Christopher Walken, are you going to be there in the next ten minutes? Marlon Brando would like to talk to you.’ I thought, This is one of my friends pulling my leg. So I said, ‘O.K.,’ and I hung up. And the phone rang again, and the second he spoke you could tell it was him. And Brando said, ‘I play the piano, you know.’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ And he said, ‘And I dance.’ He told me he wanted to put cameras in his house—he wanted to do a variety show out of his house. And I said, ‘Well, what can I do for you?’ He said, ‘You did this picture “Pennies from Heaven,” and I like the numbers in that. I want you to help me get in touch with the guy who did those.’ I told him it was Danny Daniels, the choreographer. Brando never did it, I guess. I’d certainly watch. Wouldn’t you?”

Perhaps my favorite Walken performance was in the movie version of Dennis Potter’s “Pennies From Heaven”–and if you’ve never seen the original TV series with Bob Hoskins, do yourself a favor and track it down. Dig this, it is sure to kick start your day: