Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese

  

 

A little Italian let’s praise today:

The Topo Gigio of pictures, let’s say.

 

When Taxi Driver comes on TV,

I always drop what I’m doing, you see,

For Travis Bickle is my main man,

Because of DeNiro I’m such a great fan.

 

When first I saw this story bleak,

I had to through my fingers peek,

For though the end was a gory mess,

I couldn’t stop watching, I must confess.

 

 

 

 

Then I saw a picture of Marty,

Who supports the Italian Munchkin party.

Like my Uncle Aubrey his eyebrows were dense,

And his movies didn’t always make much sense.

 

But to the soul they spoke without fail,

For Raging Bull's a morality tale.

And fluids red from DeNiro’s face

Went gushing and flying all over the place. 

 

 

 

When we saw Jake LaMotta bash his head,

It filled us all with horror and dread.

But for our director, comedy was king,

For sociopaths were Marty’s favorite thing.

 

I can’t tell you all the movies he did,

For I’d be here all day, I do not kid.

But some of them were a big surprise,

Like Age of Innocence, pure sex in disguise. 

 

 

And Alice by Bursteyn, my what a trick,

For feminist views he laid on quite thick.

And when he did that movie of Jesus,

He went far out of his way to please us.

 

Then there was Goodfellas, my what a pic,

And I can’t say it was my favorite flick.

Every time I try to watch this thing,

It doesn’t exactly make me sing. 

 

 

 

No, there’s pictures where human flesh does rip,

And he and DeNiro seem joined at the hip.

It’s an odd sort of duo, a big guy and small,

With both of them Cosa Nostra and all.

 

Real genius is rare, so let's praise this guy,

And hope that his pic on Sinatra will fly.

His turkeys are few, though with Liza Minnelli

He went on a coke binge and turned into jelly. 

 

 

Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese,

Your pictures are great and drive film students crazy.

So some day I hope, in my brief mortal span

I can call you just Marty: cuz you is de man!

 

It's lies, I tell you! Dirty, filthy lies!

I will confess to one thing: I stay up late at night, and look for photos of - two! Two things I confess to. I stay up late at night and look for photos of Harold Lloyd - THREE! Three things I -

Sorry, I've just been in a Monty Python mood lately. It's the silly season, and I want to coast along and not put in the usual feverish effort that makes this blog so totally obscure, not to mention primitive to look at.

I found this lovely shot of HL, obviously a candid photo. I love the quality of light in it, sifting down as if some sun or moon dwells in the corner.  Someone is wearing a silk top hat, which is not something you saw every day even back then (likely in the  mid-1930s). Harold is wearing very fancy evening wear and, as usual, looks splendid in it (and as he said himself in his Nebraska-born way, "Well, some say I don't clean up too bad"). This was a  gentleman to the manor born, but what's he doing here? Who is the blonde, and why does Harold look just a tad guilty?

As you can see here, the private Harold looked very different from the Glass Character who propelled him to fame. He was better-looking, for one thing, with the clean Gregory Peck jawline that makes male movie stars so photogenic. He carried himself differently. He rocked a tux like no one else. But what's going on here - just the usual social whirl he was obliged to engage in (not always happily, as he was essentially a family man)? Then why does it look as if the attractive, willowly blonde, dressed to the nines, is signing a hotel register? Is it just too hazardous if HE signs it, even if it's Mr. and Mrs. Smith?  He might as well relax, because his fans won't recognize him anyway.

The faces in the background look vaguely familiar to me. Can you make them out? So could this just be one of those elegant Hollywood soirees that - no. Harold liked women, and he sort of liked them in bulk. Skimming through the photos, some of which I'd never seen, there were several of him as an older man photographing female nudes, his favorite of his many hobbies. Nudes, as in women decorously draped below the waist, but with mammoth breasts and considerable curves elsewhere. To his credit, Harold would not photograph a skinny woman and liked bodies that were not so much modelled on Monroe (whom he photographed, though clothed) as Jane Russell, practically exploding out of her Howard Hughes-designed bra.

These photos of the photographer make me uneasy, for obvious reasons. Some of them are plain bizarre, with oddball props that make you wonder just what is going on. The family released a coffee table book a decade or so ago featuring the best of these nudes, so obviously they're not trying to hide anything. Some of them are in 3D, a technology which Harold may not have invented (that was Grandma's old Stereoscope that you held away from yourself like a selfie stick), but developed from its primitive William Castle roots to something that could  be seriously used in theatres. In an interview late in life, he claimed that in the future every movie would be shot and shown in 3D, and the interviewer made sure he mentioned in his writeup that Harold had gone a little crazy in his old age.

Now there is a Harold Lloyd Award for Excellence in 3D Photography. Martin Scorsese notably won it for - ironically - Hugo, where the main character dangles off the hands of a huge clock. Since he was a humble man, I think Harold would have been pleased by the respectful quote.

But getting back to it: Harold was human, but did absolutely nothing to attract women. They came to him. Flocked. It was wrong to say he chased them. He paid his models a flat fifty bucks, and the lineup ran around the corner of the block. There is a lot of evidence these bodaceously curvaceous women were quite willing to sneak into bed with the photographer.

I read part of a disgusting book called The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart. I forget who wrote it. I didn't buy it, folks, I read the "Look Inside!" excerpt on Amazon. It's one of the sleaziest things I've ever seen, so of course I had to read it (given my insatiable appetite for the tawdry). Pure fiction, so I should not pay any attention to the fact that there was a tell-all passage about Bebe Daniels, Harold's first leading lady in the 19-teens. She claimed that Harold was "proficient and good at" the sex act - well, my goodness! Hardly sweep-you-off-your-feet stuff, but BD then claimed she could expect to have at least three orgasms during these sessions.

It's lies, I tell you - a pack of dirty, filthy lies! But with HL's Nebraskan' thoroughness and his propensity for studying every facet of life until he WAS good at it, it may well be true. "Good at" means "satisfaction guaranteed, Ma'am", among other things.

Or so my wicked imagination tells me.

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Taxi Driver directed by Woody Allen

          "Do you realize what a thread we're all hanging by?"

TAXI DRIVER: all you need to know

More Lloyd synchronicity: brought to you by your Uncle Marty!

(Facebook-surfing can either be very boring, or. . . very boring. But I found something tonight. Then lost it, then found it again. It's an interview from this past spring for Humanities magazine, featuring everyone's favorite Italian uncle, Martin Scorsese. Then I get to the end of it and find a Lloyd double-whammy. OK, so when do I get the third one?)

LEACH: How big was the transition from silent to talkies? How did it affect comedies?

SCORSESE: It all became verbal. The comedy stars in the thirties were Laurel and Hardy, thankfully, and W. C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. Then after the war or during the war, Abbott and Costello, which was really language, old vaudeville routines. And then postwar it’s Martin and Lewis, which was a kind of manic craziness and kind of reflection of the freedom after the war.

LEACH: Two foils.

SCORSESE: Yeah, exactly. But in the silent era, it’s all physical and visual comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charley Chase, all these people we’re restoring. There’s a lot of them that are being restored. It’s quite remarkable seeing these on a big screen.

Young people, when I show it to them, they ’ll ask, Do they talk in this movie? I say, they don’t talk in this one, but you might find it interesting. And they do.

LEACH: I’ll bet.

SCORSESE: The great silent dramatic films really worked extraordinarily well. I mean, they still do if you’ve seen them restored, meaning at the right speed, the right tint and color, because everything was in color, but toned and tinted. In any event, they did have their own international language. Murnau wanted to use title cards in Esperanto. He said, this is the universal language, cinema. And then when sound came in, it changed again completely.

LEACH: The movie industry is America’s greatest presentation to the world in terms of public diplomacy. For instance, Charlie Chaplin was truly universal. You didn’t have to translate it into any language.

SCORSESE: Norman Lloyd, who was a great actor and producer, he worked with everybody: Hitchcock and Welles and Chaplin. He’s in his nineties now. He was just talking on television the other night on TCM, and he was saying that Chaplin is universal, probably the greatest, because he kind of told the story of the immigrant. And anywhere around the world people could identify with it.

LEACH: Well, we thank you.

SCORSESE: Thank you.

(Post-blog revelation. Don't ask me how I find these things. The above shot of the demented old man in the Shriners fez really is Harold Lloyd hanging off the Space Needle in Seattle when he was something like 76 years old. I would've doubted my eyes except, when I looked closely at his right hand, I could see that it was missing thumb and forefinger. How and why he'd do this is anyone's guess, but maybe he was thinking in terms of going out with a big splash.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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The day Marty Scorsese became my friend. . . sort of

I don't have time to be writing this cuzzadafact that my hubby and me will be leaving in a minute to have brunch at a Chinese restaurant we love. We're celebrating something amazing that happened to me last night, something closely connected to my novel The Glass Character, but I can't tell you what it is yet. Let the egg incubate for a while.

It's these phony Facebook pages. Yes, I know, they are probably ubiquitous and usually involve big Hollywood stars. I honestly wonder how many big Hollywood stars have TIME to keep a personal FB page. Anyway, one day a while back I stumbled on a so-called page for Martin Scorsese. There were at least half-a-dozen sites for him, mostly fan sites you'd follow.

I got curious. Hey, what if one of them IS his real FB page? It looks like you can send a friend request.  I sent.

Months went by and I forgot all about it. Today  I got a notice in my inbox that, yes, Martin Scorsese was now my friend! I was absolutely flabbergasted. Soon I'd be hobnobbing with all the moguls and glamor-pusses of the Silver Screen. Yeeee-owdimus!

But then, I looked a little more closely.

The whole page looked a little "off", somehow. There wasn't much information of any kind. But it plainly  said "in a relationship with Marina Filoc". I tried to find out anything about her, but could only determine she could not speak English and worked at a shiatsu clinic.

One of Marty's "posts" pictured Billy Wilder's grave with a caption that read something like, Do not say I am stupid, am only writer. There followed a FLOOD of fawning, ingratiating comments about the post, praising Marty's articulate brilliance. "Am only writer"! Look how he plays with the idiom, ignores it, turns it on its ear! Look how he stands up to the mundane rules of grammar! He is a genius! It went on and on. Oh, Mr. Scorsese, thank you for allowing me to be your friend, I love your work always, I love Taxi Driver, is my favorit movie when it come on theTV at night, etc. etc., hundreds of them.

Uh.

People.

It's not him.

Scorsese has been married to the same woman for years, and her name ain't Marina Filoc. Marina Filoc, who on one site stated that she working her English ver hard to improve, is trying to cash in by hitching her rickety wagon to his oblivious star. Surely if she's Marty's main squeeze, she's going to have lots of attention, plenty of offers for. . . whatever.  I guess there are no rules against that sort of thing, against trying to siphon something off in case all that drooling drivel slops over the edge of the bowl. 

But it does make you wonder how many other FB pages are completely bogus. After all, it's not strung very tight, is it? You can pretty much be anyone you want to. A 20-year-old shiatsu therapist can suddenly become one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood history, and instantly have thousands of people fawning all over her and believing her without question.

Given the level of discernment we see in the Facebook community, who's going to know the difference?


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http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Taxi Driver directed by Woody Allen

There are a couple of things I always get watching whenever they come on TV, and it's mostly against my will. They exert a vacuum-pull so powerful that I soon disappear into a sort of vortex like in that Time Tunnel show of the 1960s (or that Star Trek where they jumped through that, you know, that thing).

Whenever Taxi Driver comes on, which is about seventeen times a week in my neighborhood, no matter where in the story it is, I do the Time Tunnel bit and jump in. Or get sucked in. I'd say the movie sucked, but that's not exactly what I mean.

I can't help it. Its awfulness is irresistible. The movie has a sort of queasy, uneasy feeling to it, the sense that something absolutely horrific is about to happen, and it does. But not until the last five minutes. Scorsese somehow manages to hold it back until then. Meanwhile we have the shocking spectre of Robert deNiro looking like his baby sister or something, just peach-faced and innocent, yet ticking almost audibly with undetonated rage. 

This is a real morality tale, and in spite of what some critics have said, there's no gratuitous violence in it, just violence-violence. Illustrative violence, maybe. The ending is a full-scale splattering gorefest, but it's meant to make a point about "heroism" (with all sorts of murky undercurrents about the true nature of military glory) and how it can arise from the worst possible motives.

Most chilling moment: when Travis Bickle, his seething, swarming violence just about to erupt, appears at the political rally, so armed he's a walking weapon, and the camera pans from his feet up to his head. Mohawks weren't that common then, and his is sharp enough to cut your wrists on, absolutely bloody terrifying.

Well, having said all that, the OTHER thing that sucks me right down into the quagmire of cinematic glory are Woody Allen movies. I tell myself, no, I am not going to watch this. Not this time; I will resist. Since Soon Yi and that whole deal, since marrying what amounted to his daughter, I have sworn him off. It's true he is becoming increasingly creepy with age and, like Oliver Sacks, still uses an Olivetti manual typewriter (and where does he get the ribbons? They must be handmade by his ribbon associate or something). Nevertheless, when Manhattan comes on with that Gershwin music and he's sleeping with Mariel Hemingway who's all of fourteen years old and in junior high, or when Annie Hall comes on and she's all la-di-da and they chase the lobsters all over the kitchen, I just get. . .sucked in.

I do like the way Woody Allen talks. All his vowel sounds are sort of dragged-out and swoopy. It's unbelievable, except that's really the way he 
twwooa-ahhh-ks. Rick Moranis did a fatal impression of him on SCTV, but unlike most impressions, it was the opposite of exaggerated, almost toned-down so it would be quasi-believable. Nobody knows where this manner of speaking came from. It's sort of Brooklyn-ish or even Bronx-y, kind of nasal and almost sing-songy, and certainly not upper-class.

There IS a certain kind of educated or snobberific New York/Manhattan-ish accent, but it's more like Jacqueline Kennedy's. The swoops are there, but a little more musical and contained. And yet, and yet, Allen has always given the impression of being educated, or at least incredibly well-read. Who knows, maybe he never got past the Classic Comics stage, but he still gets it across. Maybe it's his salesmanship, which from the very start of his career was quirkily brilliant: he turned a skinny, shy, balding, nasal-speaking little Jewish nothing into a sympathetic and appealing romantic lead over and over again. Kind of puts Harold Lloyd to shame.

So here we have two of my best or worst movie obsessions, TOGETHER AT LAST!  This is a remarkably clever feat of dubbing, combining two elements that could not be less compatible: the whiny angst-ridden dialogue of a Woody Allen comedy superimposed on the half-insane machine-gun-fire conversation between a sociopathic stalker and an innocent blonde. And yet, and yet! As Woody talks about existential despair, meaninglessness and buying a gun, maybe he's closer to Travis Bickle than we realize.

It sucks. . . but in a good way.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese



A little Italian let’s praise today:
The Topo Gigio of pictures, let’s say.

When Taxi Driver comes on TV,
I always drop what I’m doing, you see,
For Travis Bickle is my main man,
Because of DeNiro I’m such a great fan.

When first I saw this story bleak,
I had to through my fingers peek,
For though the end was a gory mess,
I couldn’t stop watching, I must confess.

Then I saw a picture of Marty,
Who supports the Italian Munchkin party.
Like my Uncle Aubrey his eyebrows were dense,
And his movies didn’t always make much sense.

But to the soul they spoke without fail,
For Raging Bull's a morality tale.
And fluids red from DeNiro’s face
Went gushing and flying all over the place.

When we saw Jake LaMotta bash his head,
It filled us all with horror and dread.
But for our director, comedy was king,
For sociopaths were Marty’s favorite thing.

I can’t tell you all the movies he did,
For I’d be here all day, I do not kid.
But some of them were a big surprise,
Like Age of Innocence, pure sex in disguise.

And Alice by Bursteyn, my what a trick,
For feminist views he laid on quite thick.
And when he did that movie of Jesus,
He went far out of his way to please us.

Then there was Goodfellas, my what a pic,
And I can’t say it was my favorite flick.
Every time I try to watch this thing,
It doesn’t exactly make me sing.

No, there’s pictures where human flesh does rip,
And he and DeNiro seem joined at the hip.
It’s an odd sort of duo, a big guy and small,
With both of them Cosa Nostra and all.

Real genius is rare, so let's praise this guy,
And hope that his pic on Sinatra will fly.
His turkeys are few, though with Liza Minnelli
He went on a coke binge and turned into jelly.

Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese,
Your pictures are great and drive film students crazy.
So some day I hope, in my brief mortal span
I can call you just Marty: cuz you is de man!