Wednesday was a sad day for cinephiles — Arthur Penn, the visionary director of Bonnie and Clyde, passed away at 88. As well as being one of the great American filmmakers of the 60s and 70s, Penn also knew tremendous success directing for the stage, as well as television. Dave Kehr has a fairly comprehensive and thoughtful obituary in the New York Times. Roger Ebert also weighs in with a warm tribute. From Kehr’s piece, here’s a quote from Paul Schrader that nicely states what the fuss is all about:

“Arthur Penn brought the sensibility of ’60s European art films to American movies,” the writer-director Paul Schrader said. “He paved the way for the new generation of American directors who came out of film schools.”

Penn was not simply a stylist, but a director who got the best out of his actors: think of Gene Hackman in the brilliant, underrated neo-noir Night Moves, or Jack Nicholson, wonderfully underplaying to Marlon Brando’s outlandish dandy of a gunslinger in The Missouri Breaks.  (Heck, he even got something out of Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant.)

However, Penn will no doubt best be remembered for Bonnie and Clyde, a film usually attached to words like “seminal,” “revolutionary” and “watershed.” It not only indelibly altered Hollywood movies, but movie criticism as well. The vastly different reactions of old guard critics like the Times’ Bosley Crowther (who loathed it) to those of “young turks” like Ebert and Pauline Kael (in her first piece for The New Yorker) marked a new attitude in American film criticism to match the new films and younger audiences filling late 60s theaters. It’s also worth noting that it’s success essentially saved Warren Beatty’s career and launched Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder as movie stars. Looking back 40 plus years later, it’s easy to appreciate what a vivid and vital movie Bonnie and Clyde remains, if decades of copycats have taken away the shock that 1967 audiences felt.

It will be interesting to read more comments on Penn’s life and work as they roll in from his collaborators and directors he inspired (I’m especially curious to hear from Beatty and Martin Scorsese).  Now that 3D and CGI have too often become a substitute for substance in the cinema, it’s sad to see another master go.

Check out this lovely tribute to the late Paul Hemphill by Richard Hyatt:

I ended up at the Atlanta Constitution writing sports. A colleague told me about a former pitcher for the town baseball team in LaGrange. He had made Ripley’s Believe Or Not by pitching both games of a doubleheader — tossing a no-hitter in one game and a one-hitter in the other.

By the time I visited him in the old mill village in LaGrange, Scoopie Chappell’s baseball exploits were relegated to aging scrapbooks and stories he told at the beer joint down the hill. I wrote a feature story about him for the Sunday Journal-Constitution.

The article got me a phone call from Paul Hemphill. He wanted Scoopie’s phone number and directions to his house. Hemphill was researching a book about minor league baseball and he figured Scoopie was someone he wanted to visit.

The non-fiction book never materialized but Long Gone did. To me it is the quintessential baseball novel and equally good as an HBO film. It came out in 1987 and you’ll find Bull Durham — as good as it is — is a ripoff of Hemphill’s book.

Scoopie morphed into Stud Cantrell, played on the screen by CSI’s William Petersen. The character of Stud is as good as you’ll find in any work of fiction. In the movie, there’s even a speaking role for Teller — the small mute half of Penn & Teller.

If you haven’t read the book, do. If you haven’t seen the movie, find it.

Amen. William Petersen’s Stud Cantrell is closer to Paul Newman in “Slap Shot” than it is to Costner in “Bull Durham.” The ending of the movie is corny but the rest of it sings. And Hemphill’s novel is a beaut.

Bridges and the Coen brothers, together again.

My favorite Robin Williams flick.

It’s not about a salary it’s all about reality.

Hey, speaking of gangsters, remember this fargin corksucker?

The summer before my senior year in high school I got a job as a messenger in a post-production house in Manhattan. Martin Scorsese was editing “The Last Temptation of Christ” in the building. The movie was scheduled to debut at the New York Film Festival in September but there was so much controversy surrounding it, the date was pushed up. So Scorsese and his team of editors worked around the clock to mix the sound. One Saturday, I came into work to sit next to the projector in the machine room and watch. After an hour, Scorsese invited me inside. I was supposed to go visit my grandfather who was recovering from surgery at Lennox Hill, but I stayed in the dark mixing studio all afternoon. I watched and listened.

Scorsese was approachable that summer. He complimented me on my t-shirt collection, talked to me about movies, and one day when I brought my friends in, trying to show off, Scorsese spotted me and said hello,  a huge thrill.

The next summer, I’d graduated high school and Scorsese was shooting a gangster movie called “Wise Guy” (later changed to “Goodfellas). The Dailies–footage from the previous day’s shoot–were transfered to videotape for Robert DeNiro. Whenever I had down time between a run, I snuck into the transfer room and watched take after take of Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta, DeNiro and the gang. I’d never been so anxious to see a movie in my life. A few months later, I was walking past a studio where they were mixing the sound and I heard “Monkey Man,” my favorite Stones song. I stopped dead in my tracks.

Are you kidding me? This is going to be the best movie ever.

I saw “Goodfellas” the day it opened, the first showing, high noon, over on the east side somewhere. Then, I saw it four more times in the theater.

That was 20 years ago. Check out the oral history of the movie featured over at GQ. It’s not great but it gives you some flavor behind the making of the movie that put Scorsese’s career back on the map and practically annoited him as the Dean of American Directors.

Good looking to that tweetin’ fool, Matt B, for pointing out this piece on Martin Scorsese’s favorite gangster movies.

I’m partial to this one, myself:

Smile, it won’t mess up your hair.

There’s a new documentary called Jews and Baseball. Looks promising. My father’s family is Jewish and baseball is the game that we care about. So many sportswriters are Jews, and yeah, there have been a couple of pretty good Jewish players as well.

Chris Jones profiles Javier Bardem in Esquire:

He apologized many times for his English; he didn’t need to. He talked about his reticence for publicity, how he thinks of himself as a working actor, not a celebrity. His mom was an actor, too, and she had raised three children in Madrid largely on her own by pretending to be other people. It was the family business. He said that he knows highly technical actors who can do the job regardless of their feelings for it. He said he is not such an actor: “I have to believe in what I’m doing, otherwise I don’t stand a chance.” He said that he tried to get out of No Country for Old Men, told the Coen brothers that he was a terrible choice, that he abhors violence and couldn’t drive and wouldn’t be able to say his lines without using a strange voice. They told him that made him perfect for it, and they were right. He said that when actors win Oscars, they’re happy only because it means they will probably get more work; he also said actors make lousy award-show presenters because “it’s the only time we have to be ourselves.” He talked about the choices he’s made, that he’s been lucky but also that he thinks about what he’s doing — not as though he’s making some grand plan but as though his days are numbered. He is deliberate. He talked about his doubts and fears and insecurities, this Oscar-winning actor who had just married Penélope Cruz. He talked about his dream of one day working with Al Pacino — “but I doubt that will ever happen” — and how he would love to play Pablo Escobar and Cortez the Killer. He said that he didn’t feel much need to talk about Eat Pray Love — “It doesn’t need any help,” he said — but that he would like to talk about Biutiful. “I think it’s a masterpiece,” he said, “and it needs help.”

On a fishing trip in 1939, film director Howard Hawks told Ernest Hemingway:

“Ernest, you’re a damn fool. You need money, you know. You can’t do all the things you’d like to do. If I make three dollars in a picture, you get one of them. I can make a picture out of your worst story.”

“What’s my worst story?”

“That god damned bunch of junk called To Have and To Have Not [sic.].”

“You can’t make anything out of that.”

“Yes I can. You’ve got the character of Harry Morgan; I think I can give you the wife. All you have to do is make a story about how they met.”

It’s not a great movie but it is good entertainment (and the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner of all people). Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael are winning in supporting roles and Lauren Bacall practically burns a hole in the screen. Man, what poise, what a kitten:

A talk with Catherine Deneuve.

One worth seeing…and I bet Matt B will agree with me on this one.

From Pauline Kael:

Melvin and Howard (1980) – This lyrical comedy, directed by Jonathan Demme, from a script by Bo Goldman, is an almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination. Demme and Goldman have entered into the soul of American blue-collar suckerdom; they have taken for their hero a chucklehead who is hooked on TV game shows, and they have made us understand how it was that when something big – something legendary – touched his life, nobody could believe it. Paul Le Mat plays big, beefy Melvin Dummar, a sometime milkman, sometime worker at a magnesium plant, sometime gas-station operator, and hopeful songwriter – the representative debt-ridden American for whom game shows were created. Jason Robards plays Howard Hughes, who is lying in the freezing desert at night when Melvin spots him – a pile of rags and bones, with a dirty beard and scraggly long gray hair. Melvin, thinking him a desert rat, helps him into his pickup truck but is bothered by his mean expression; in order to cheer him up (and give himself some company), he insists that the old geezer sing with him or get out and walk. When Robards’ Howard Hughes responds to Melvin’s amiable prodding and begins to enjoy himself on a simple level and sings “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” it’s a great moment. Hughes’ eyes are an old man’s eyes – faded into the past, shiny and glazed by recollections – yet intense. You feel that his grungy paranoia has melted away, that he has been healed. With Mary Steenburgen, who has a pearly aura as Melvin’s go-go-dancer wife, Lynda; Pamela Reed as Melvin’s down-to-earth second wife; Elizabeth Cheshire as the child Darcy; Jack Kehoe as the dairy foreman; and the real Melvin Dummar as the lunch counterman at the Reno bus depot. This picture has the same beautiful dippy warmth of its characters; it’s what might have happened if Jean Renoir had directed a comedy script by Preston Sturges. Cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. Universal, color.

Dave Itzkoff interviews the Wood Man in the Times:

Q. How do you feel about the aging process?

A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, “Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.” Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.

Q. Has getting older changed your work in any way? Do you see a certain wistfulness emerging in your later films?

A. No, it’s too hit or miss. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything that I do. It’s whatever seems right at the time. I’ve never once in my life seen any film of mine after I put it out. Ever. I haven’t seen “Take the Money and Run” since 1968. I haven’t seen “Annie Hall” or “Manhattan” or any film I’ve made afterward. If I’m on the treadmill and I’m scooting through the channels, and I come across one of them, I go right past it instantly, because I feel it could only depress me. I would only feel, “Oh God, this is so awful, if I could only do that again.”

[Photo Credit: Suzanne DeChillo, NY TImes]

Because today we need to laugh.

I can get you a cheeseburger.

Saturday Night Fever was based on a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (It appeared in July, 1976):

Within the closed circuits of rock & roll fashion, it is assumed that New York means Manhattan. The center is everything, all the rest irrelevant. If the other boroughs exist at all, it is merely as a camp joke—Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens, monstrous urban limbo, filled with everyone who is no one.

In reality, however, almost the reverse is true. While Manhattan remains firmly rooted in the sixties, still caught up in faction and fad and the dreary games of decadence, a whole new generation has been growing up around it, virtually unrecognized. Kids of sixteen to twenty, full of energy, urgency, hunger. All the things, in fact, that the Manhattan circuit, in its smugness, has lost.

They are not so chic, these kids. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights; they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud. Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them by entirely. They know nothing of flower power or meditation, pansexuality, or mind expansion. No waterbeds or Moroccan cushions, no hand-thrown pottery, for them. No hep jargon either, and no Pepsi revolutions. In many cases, they genuinely can’t remember who Bob Dylan was, let alone Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary. Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, Altamont—all of them draw a blank. Instead, this generation’s real roots lie further back, in the fifties, the golden age of Saturday nights.

The cause of this reversion is not hard to spot. The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. No recession, no sense of danger. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes.

I don’t know from his best, but The Conformist is far and away my favorite Bertolucci movie. If you’ve got a big TV, do yourself a favor and rent it. If not, wait for it to play at a revival house. It’ll be so worth your time.

Movie is gorgeous to watch in more ways than one:

I once saw the actor Kevin McCarthy, Mary’s brother, walk out of my grandparent’s apartment building. I felt happy to see him, a recognizable face from so many forgettable movies. He was tall and elegant and though I didn’t say anything to him, I felt better just being near him for a minute.

He died on Saturday, 96 years old. R.I.P.

Dude, I couldn’t stay awake last night, missed the end of the game. When I woke up and saw the box score, I was like this:

Now, since I didn’t actually stay up late for the second night in a row to see Mariano lose that Texas Horror Show, I’m trying to remain hopeful. Yeah, even though Cliff Lee pitches today for the Rangers. This is Lee’s first game back from the DL and he hasn’t been his usual dominant self since joining Texas. I could see him shutting the Yanks out for seven innings but I could also see the Yanks touching him up some too. Maybe Derek Jeter has a great game.

It’s all up to that Mystery Man Moseley:

C’mon, son, make like Aaron Small and shut-shut ’em down.

Never mind the hankies, Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Is Joaquin Phoniex a put-on artist? Manohla Dargis reviews “I’m Still Here”:

For a twitchy, perversely funny stretch, he mumbled and fidgeted, softly, often monosyllabically, responding as Mr. Letterman’s formulaic jive grew testy. “What can you tell us about your days with the Unabomber?” Mr. Letterman asked at one point. Mr. Phoenix looked down while the audience roared at a joke few seemed to grasp.

More than a year later the joke continues, sputters, occasionally hits its target and finally wears out its welcome in “I’m Still Here,” a deadpan satire or a deeply sincere folly (my money is on the first option) about Mr. Phoenix’s recent roles as an acting dropout and would-be hip-hop artist. Directed by Casey Affleck (who’s married to Mr. Phoenix’s sister Summer), the movie, which is being unpersuasively sold as a documentary, is a gloss on the mutually parasitic worlds of celebritydom and the entertainment media. Those are worlds Mr. Phoenix knows well, having fed the beast since his breakout role as Nicole Kidman’s poignantly thickheaded lover in “To Die For,” Gus Van Sant’s 1995 comedy about the tragedy of fame.

“I’m Still Here” isn’t as merciless as “To Die For,” which was etched in acid by the screenwriter Buck Henry. Mr. Affleck and Mr. Phoenix have been involved in the movie business long enough to be disgusted (or maybe just irked) by it, but they don’t appear to have surrendered to cynicism. Whatever else their movie is, and whatever their actual intentions, “I’m Still Here” does take on, at times forcefully and effectively, the pathological fallout of the Entertainment Industrial Complex. Much of the movie involves Mr. Phoenix’s having, or more likely pantomiming, a meltdown, for which he puts on a really good show. (He snorts white powder, hires a hooker, abuses his assistants.) But the programmatic nature of his antics strongly suggests that he is self-consciously playing a role in a narrative, one that isn’t simply about him.