Jordan Hoffman Dot Com

I still haven’t seen “300,” but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my affection for Hellenic warriors. To that end, Ann & I went over to the Onassis Cultural Center (this is in the basement of the Olympic Tower) (which is next door to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Ave. . .the big kinda bland black glass building) to check out this show.

I dunno. . . something about ancient Greece turns me on. Always has.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a humongoid statue-head of a Hoplite names Leonidas from the 5th Century B.C. I don’t know why the ancient Spartans were naming their heavy infantrymen after Belgian Choclatiers either, but there it is. . .

Anyway, this exhibition space is free free free and there’s some quiet public restrooms as well. This tourguide strongly recommends this contemplative stop should you be schlepping around the Rockefeller/5th Ave section of town.

“Mon amour!” “Je t’aime!” “Mon amour!” “Je t’aime! Je t’aime!”

I’ve been meaning to get Ann to watch this for years. When I saw it was coming on cable I said, “here — watch this — you’ll love the wallpaper!”

Frequent comments from Ann as the film unspooled, “Oh! That wallpaper is fabulous!”

Comment: What’s fascinating about this tragic story is that the characters have done a really good job of convincing themselves they aren’t tragic figures. They have made their decisions and made peace with it and seem. . .content. They know things didn’t work out like they should, but they aren’t slitting their wrists any time soon. We, the audience, are the only ones who recognize the tragedy. Forgive me for making a generalization, but this is a very French trait. I know a handful of French people and this detached realism regarding injustice is, from where I am standing, a common trait.

Observation: Listening to French in movies (or in life) conversation blazes past at a rate I can never follow. I soon noticed, though, that when slowed down to singing speed that my high school french was still pretty intact and I could understand, say, 75% of what they were saying! Madame Reid, are you listening??

With all of my attention on Body/Antibody the last year, the strangest little thing has been happening. Ultrachrist!, our first film, is having a major uptick in sales. We sold a bunch of copies when it first came out, made a little (and I mean little) bit of money and then we figured that was it. Now — three years later — for whatever reason, people are getting into it again. I’m not saying it’s flying off the shelf. . .but someone somewhere out there said something to somebody. . .

The weather was finally good last night and it seemed like the whole world was out in the streets downtown. There was music everywhere. A chick singer in the subway, conga players in the park. All were made irrelevent by the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, working 14th St for hours.

Their mix of New Orleans funk, hip-hop attitude and genuine jazz chops stopped me cold in my tracks.

That was the key: a lot of these brass bands seem to be tapping into the “jam band” scene — and that’s fine. But what makes Hypnotic stand out is that they are definitely jazz artists. You can hear the influence of Charlie Parker in the riffs, of Gil Evans in some of the harmonies. One tune I heard was a Middle Eastern thing that sounded out of John Zorn’s Masada.

Hypnotic is from Chicago but they seem to’ve made NYC their new home. A quick look at their website tells me their leader’s old man played with Sun Ra. They’re playing next week at the Schomburg Center uptown — I’m gonna’ try & make it. . .and I’ll be playing the CD I bought off the street until then.

I have a little rule. If I keep thinking about a movie days after I’ve seen it, that means it is good. . .even if I don’t think it is good, you know?

This 2 1/2 hour film lecture from Slavoj Zizek (which never really lives up to the premise of its title) is very difficult to really get your hands around. I don’t think it is because Zizek is such a towering intellect that his concepts are not for us laymen — it is because there isn’t really one specific point. I took a quick poll outside the theater when the movie was done: “what was this guy’s thesis?” No one could give me an answer. Except one guy who said, “Well, you really need to read his books.”

This doesn’t diminish the film — basically a collection of movie clips (”Vertigo,” The Birds, Tarkovsky’s Stalker and “Solaris,” Piano Teacher, Duck Soup, Revenge of the Sith, “Fight Club” and a whole catalogue of David Lynch) with Zizek’s frantic, deep Slovenian voice over providing psychoanalytic commentary. Sometimes the commentary is obvious (The birds in “The Birds” are a symbol!) and sometimes they are obnoxious (the greatest fear any man has is that his father will not die.)

Zizek is a fascinating man, mostly because he is able to do this full time. Read my comments on his live appearance for more on that.

Best thing in this doc, though, is the clever use of recreating sets. Zizek pontificates from the bathroom in “The Conversation,” the stage from “Mullholland Drive,” the basement in “Psycho,” the hotel room in “Veritgo,” Regan MacNeil’s bedroom from “The Exorcist,” etc. It is a neat trick and even if you aren’t paying attention to the yabbering you’ll stay tuned just to see the next set.

Kerry and I were supposed to be taking care of some business in midtown — it got cancelled at the last minute. We were just walking, not really going anywhere, when we wound up in front of the MoMa. We knew we were headed there at 7:30, but it was only 5. What the hell, I said, let’s see what’s playing now? Turns out it was Duck Soup! We sit down. And unbeknownst to us, it isn’t just Duck Soup, but Duck Soup with an opening, um, lecture by Slavoj Zizek!

I won’t lie to you — I’d only kinda-sorta heard of this guy. I knew who he was, knew he was a little eccentric, but I’d never seen him before. Let me put it to you this way: no outrageous Saturday Night Live-esque parody will ever do him justice. You can’t out parody someone beyond parody. At the lecturn, he spoke like an ever erupting volcano — his arms flailing, face red, constantly sniffing and rubbing his nose (what’s that about?) all in a remarkable Slovenian accent. What was he talking about? Um. . .er. . .I was with him for a while, but eventually he left me trailing in the dust. (Kerry’s favorite line, “I am sure you are familiar with what Russian philosopher Blahblahblah Blahblah had to say about THAT subject!”) All I know is that remarks like “Kristallnacht is the ULTIMATE act of Carnivale!” got something of a gasp, as did its rejoinder, “much like Ku Klux Klan and the raping of the black girls and hangings of the black man in the American south is example of Carnivale!” as if we didn’t get the point. After thrity minutes, I admit, I kinda tuned out, but I did wake up as he said, “There is a car waiting for me outside, but before I go it is important you understand that the chant of the Marines — “I don’t know what I’ve been told/Eskimo pussy (pronounced Pooh-See) is mighty cold” is NOT a subversive act. It is the opposite of such. Thank you!”

The man is clearly a genius.

Anyway, Duck Soup. If you haven’t seen Duck Soup you are missing one of the greatest comedies of all time. I particularly like Groucho’s costume changes at the end.

I am being a little generous with my grade but I have to give extra points to a guy with a wacky German name like that. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck now outshines Dr. Jurgen Fauth as awesome German name that I know isn’t made up.

Anyway, this movie, which won the Oscar so doesn’t need my approbation, is an engrossing yarn in itself but also a nice antidote to Communist kitsch (see The Red Atlantis.) With the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s destruction approaching (I know, I know) it’s good to be reminded how awful that system was.

I can’t say this is a perfect movie — there are script problems. A dues ex machina that made me want to throw popcorn at the screen plus a coda that just kept on going. (Suggestion — and spoiler alert — the whole movie shoulda been done in flashback. It shoulda started with Georg looking at his file and then trying to learn who HGK/XX was and piece it together from there. Trust me, it woulda been better.)

Another problem, and forgive me if this is crass. Remember the old bit on Seinfeld, when Jerry’s girlfriend was attractive one minute, then hideous the next? That’s the story with the female lead here. There are shots where she is sexy and gorgeous, then others when you’ll swear she’s a man in drag. She’s a difficult character to have sympathy for in the first place. . .when you can’t look at her without thinking of Kiki and Herb it is even tougher.

Highest praise goes to the costume designer. Our hero wears a zip-up grey jacket (see second photo) in nearly every shot. Grey, corduroy, perfect. . .and with those little grey triangles with snaps that resemble military emblems and epaulettes. Of course they are blank because State Security is secret and no one has a name, no one is really there and you didn’t see anything.

Come to think of it, I’ve never posted Chris W.’s poster for Body/Antibody on this site.

Here it is.

Many moons ago the great Chris W., who had seen an early cut of Body/Antibody, suggested I check this film out. And then the next time I saw him he gave me a copy. And lo these many months later I finally got around to watching this glorious piece of cold war paranoid L.A. low budg brilliance.

Take Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Repulsion and Funny Games and, sure, a little “Body/Antibody,” throw is some pitiful dialogue and one or two dreadful performances, then set the whole mess on Sam Fuller and you’ve blended yourself quite a picture.

Olivia de Havilland is Joan Crawford, James Caan is Marlon Brando. Jennifer Billingsley as the blonde mixed in the wrong crowd is actually quite good. But no one is as good as the production designer (those telephones! that elevator! those steering wheels! those stockings! those batteries! that transistor radio!) and nothing beats the title sequence. . .surely the best Saul Bass impersonation you’ll ever see. Very much recommended.

I am so not ahead of the curve on this one. But here’s how it happened.

I don’t take all that many taxis — don’t have the dough and (I’ll admit it!) I love my subway system. So it’s taken me a while to realize that there has been a bit of a dynastic shift with our cabbies. Have you noticed it, too? Whereas they used to be predominantly Bangaladeshi or Pakistani, more and more these days are from West Africa.

Of course, I don’t care who the cabbie is so long as he knows that sometimes you have to get off the BQE and take McGuinness, but one thing you’ll notice when you ride with one of these West Africans — the music is awesome!

I always ask who’s on and the answer is “This is from my country! From Ivory Coast!” or “This is from my country! From Nigeria!” or (most common) “This is from my country! From Mali!” I’m then told the artist’s name and. . .I immediately forget. (You can guess my state-of-mind if my normal miserly state is usurped by the need to take a taxi home.)

Forward a few weeks and I’m watching channel 25. My girlfriend Julie Laipply isn’t on, but for some reason I don’t immediately change the channel. I see it is a replay of a concert from Summerstage. And after a few minutes I start to realize how incredibly terrific this band is.

I’m listening to Amadou et Mariam, a blind married couple from Mali. It is hard to define their sound other than just plain AWESOME.

Afrobeat, sure, but they really tear it up. Both have terrific voices and they lay down a tremendous groove.

Turns out that they sang the theme to the last World Cup (so, like, the whole world but me has heard them already) and they are huge in Europe. I was able to get their last album (Dimanche A Bamako) out of the library and it has been on constant repeat for days. It’s a little overproduced, but it is easy to overlook this. If you have an opportunity to hear their music, don’t pass it up.

J. Hoberman advances in my estimation from my favorite film critic to one of my flat-out favorite writers with this fascinating collection of tone poems on a vast and (so we thought) important culture sinking further and further into the muck of nevermind. From contemporary Berlin’s hawkers of Commie kitsch to the earnest artists constricted by the aesthetics of an ever tightening code of Stalinist acceptability, Hoberman draws us a direct line from hardcore Kool-Aid drinking Socialist Realism to the left-wing’s reactionary Realistic Socialism. Hoberman’s thesis is that Communism in the USSR was a giant piece of performance art constantly shifting and repurposing its idyllic (and unreal) present to keep on pushing to that nearly graspable Utopia. The fascinating thing is how this process kept self-replicating amidst the various fellow-traveller groups, the anti-Soviet leftists of Middle Europe and, to a certain extent, anti-Communists (and anti-anti-Communists) in the USA.

Where there are Commies there are Jews and Hoberman spends nearly as much time discussing them. Did you know Stalin tried to set up a “Jewish Homeland” in the USSR before the Holocaust? And it kinda-sorta worked for a while? (At least it made for some good movies.) I shit you not: it was called Birobidzhan and I never heard of it either.

Hoberman spends a fascinating chapter running a timeline of Czech culture from the Prague Spring through the Velvet Revolution emphasizing the unique influence of literature and film. Here we see how Prague’s most famous artist, Kafka, had his works reinterpreted from a perspective completely alien to him and, as a result, made him the most important dissident alive or dead.

Hoberman is a film critic first, of course, and a major section of the book details 24 different “frames” of Communism’s refracted projection to our collective eye — from Eisenstein to John Milius, with stops for Z grade sci-fi and unfinished Hungarian sports documentaries.

The best is last, though — a fever dream of The Rosenbergs, wherein Hoberman one ups E. L. Doctorow and Tony Kushner by dreaming up a successful escape to Moscow for the L. E. S.’s doomed lefties. They still wind up executed by a kangaroo court. (Hoberman may occasionally dip into nostalgia over pink rhetoric and its CCNY trappings, but he never lets us forget that, never mind who coined the phrase, “evil empire” was apt and life comes very cheap on the five year plan.)

I’m so glad this book is out there. I like the fact the Hoberman is plugging away, describing architectural blueprints for pavillions never actualized and screening solitary prints of disowned films. While reading this book I gave a tour to some fairly with-it 8th graders. The Wall had been down for two or three years before they were born. The Soviet Union, when they learn about it in school, will seem only like some hazy, crazy temporary endeavor. Hoberman would argue that, at heart, that’s what it always was.

Hey — shoot me — I never saw this before. And, technically, I’m a member of a Union, a Guild and an Association. I know. I suck.

Listen — I know Norma Rae is a well-respected movie and I know that Sally Field’s performance was a hallmark of the women’s movement but I gotta call it like I see it: what a horrible script! I won’t take anything away from Field — she is very good and believable. It’s just the caravan of cliches that comes out of everyone’s mouth that makes me wanna puke. Worst is Ron Liebman as the New York Jew down in the Carolinas ready to love everyone to death. When he isn’t griping about the lack of Nathan’s Hot Dogs he’s ordering up a seltzer or waxing poetic for his summers under an open hydrant or Sunday mornings with the New York Times. He is a shanda of all times and he’s doing a lousy Pacino to boot!

The other big problem: the bosses Norma is fighting agains. Sure, they suck. . .but they don’t really suck. I kept waiting for some truly heinous act on their part. . .but it never came. You wanna see awful bosses, rent John Sayles’ “Matewan” or the early Barbara Kopple docs.

And, of course, in 2007, we can’t help but watch this and realize the finally victory rests not with the newly unionized workers. 25 years and all these Carolina mills will be in Indonesia or China. Maybe they’ll give this a new translation. Solidarity Forever indeed.

Iron Maiden at the absolute top of their game.

Just incredible stuff.

I hate to be mean — ’cause Nathaniel Kahn seems like a nice guy and I know this is his life I’m talking about — but what self-indulgent, boring crap! It is especially painful having just seen the brilliant Daniel Johnston documentary. You can’t just say “Oh! Dysfunctional family and (somewhat) famous guy! Let’s shoot!” No. You need to have something to say. . .or at least a better hook. ‘Cause there are movies out there like “Capturing the Friedmans” that are going to out-weird you, or movies like “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack” where the man at the center just. . .does more! Sure, a couple of shots of Louis Kahn’s buildings with some tempestuous orchestral music. . .it looks great in the trailer. . .but what about the other 118 minutes?

And, if I may, many of Kahn’s buildings aren’t that inspiring. And his lectures about “listening to brick” make him sound like an ass. Nathaniel Kahn should be glad this dingus neglected him.

We didn’t know it in 1981, but they didn’t make ‘em like that anymore. This is an irony-free WWII spy soap opera with great scenes that open with the name of the city spelled out in plain white font as we meet all the major players. Basic premise is good: what if a German spy had the dope on the Normandy Invasion but couldn’t get to a telephone? Donald Sutherland is both creepy, menacing and charming as the Nazi running around the cliffs of Scotland with his switchblade and British mannerisms. I recommend this well-made, predictable film.

1/2

Despite the bad pun, this episode is acceptable. Especially after the two gawdawful clunkers that preceded it. Did you know that Data was just “discovered” kinda like a shipwrecked boy? No, me neither. There’s been much (ahem) lore about his origins, so the Enterprise takes a little road trip to where he was discovered (just a few exits out of the way before puffing out its chest in the Neutral Zone.) There we see a dead planet with (I shit you not) a secret door only Geordi’s visor can see that leads to an underground lab. All the sensors on the mighty enterprise can’t view through stucco, eh?

Anyway, here’s where we meet Data’s evil twin Flexo — I mean, Lore. The usual crosses occur (and, of course, snottly little Wes in his rainbow shirt is the only one who knows it) and then life moves on. Still, fun. Mostly.

I don’t know if I told you, but Body/Antibody is basically done. When there’s more to tell I’ll tell it, but for now simply know that we’ve basically stuck a fork in it.

Earlier today I was looking for someone’s address and found this piece of scrap paper underneath a pile of crap on my desk. It is the last round of notes Kerry & I took on our last viewing of the penultimate sound mix. Scribbled down around 1 AM before we went back to make final tweaks, it basically represents, I think, the last piece of actual tactile work on the production or post-production of the film. That is until some big distribution company calls and tells us to reshoot and add a talking pie.

Mark and Matt Levy in Flushing. This was taken during a dry run of the Panorama Challenge and before (yet another) assault on the dumpling kiosks in the underground mall on the corner of Main St. and 42nd.