Remembrances and Returns
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“Bad week for troubled geniuses,” sighed Patton Oswalt on Wednesday. A few hours earlier, the family of Brian Wilson announced that the mastermind behind the Beach Boys had died—just two days after Sly Stone passed away. Both were eighty-two and both were “hailed as songwriting giants well before they turned thirty,” as Craig Jenkins points out at Vulture.
“They both struggled to balance their aspirations and fans’ expectations, falling out of favor the further inward their critical lenses peered,” writes Jenkins. “But it’s in the disparate fortunes in the latter part of their careers—post breakdowns and reclusive periods—where the stories part in ways that illuminate the different stakes for Black and white geniuses of the time. Brian Wilson got a grace period and was making great music well into the 2010s; Sly tried but never entirely rebounded.”
“Brian Wilson gave us untold sonic pleasure and profound sonic melancholy,” writes Ty Burr, “and he suffered for it more than you or I will ever know, despite the tell-all books and two-part biopics. What must it be like to be the architect of America’s sunniest, most confident dream of itself while knowing the truth of the darkness inside split-level suburbia?”
Sly Stone and his band, the Family Stone, were “five dudes, two chicks, two white, five black,” writes Wesley Morris in the New York Times. “Motown, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, marching band, jazz, lullaby. For about three years, every one of their hits was most of all of those: America’s sounds pressed together into radical newness by seven people who dared to embody a utopia that, come 1968, when the band was reaching its apogee, seemed otherwise despoiled. For three years, this band was disillusionment’s oasis.”
This week’s highlights:
- The Yale Review is paying tribute to Edmund White, the great writer who passed away earlier this month—he was eighty-five—with a remembrance from Yiyun Li and the republication of White’s outstanding 1993 essay on the prickly relationship between Jean Genet, the subject of White’s first biography, and Jean Cocteau. Films such as Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950) and Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) are mentioned only in passing, but the piece does give us an opportunity to revisit White’s introduction to Jane Giles’s 2002 book Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and Cinema: “Could it be that Un chant d’amour might be seen both as an echo of Cocteau’s mythic, magical cinema and as a criticism of its crowd-pleasing use of linear narration, traditional plot, and famous actors?”
- “We are now a quarter of the way through the Chinese Century,” writes Mark Asch in a long and richly rewarding stroll through the oeuvre of Jia Zhangke for Notebook. “The stories of his characters, caught by the tides of China’s transition from far-flung agrarian communism to the world’s dominant economic and political force, are the story of our time in aggregate . . . But Jia, the boy from the provinces with a hunger for experience that could only be sated through movies and glimpses of pop culture, has always represented reality in eccentric, multifaceted ways, attempting to grasp and express a context that extends far beyond his frame. From the beginning, his mode was not naturalistic, but supranaturalistic.”
- Kevin Smith had spent the past twenty-odd years trying to rend Dogma—his 1999 comedy about two angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) looking to exploit a cosmic loophole and reenter the kingdom of Heaven—from Harvey Weinstein’s grasp when independent producer Alessandra Williams, working with investors from Dubai, managed to get the film screened in the Cannes Classics program in May and then into 1,500 theaters across North America. Talk about the art of the deal. Chris Lee tells this fun story at Vulture, where Bilge Ebiri writes that “the lo-fi, homemade verve of the film lends it a sincerity that suits the subject.”
- John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), the movie that made Julie Christie an international star, is back in theaters in the UK. For the BFI, Alex Ramon chats with screenwriter (and novelist and historian) Frederic Raphael about Roland Curram’s role as the photographer Malcolm, an early archetype of the “gay best friend”; his delight in working with Stanley Donen on Two for the Road (1967); and the anger sparked by his 1999 book Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. “I thought I’d written some kind of a love story, really,” says Raphael. “The relation between writer and director can be fraught: a bit like that between a president and a prime minister. There were ups and downs with Kubrick, but by and large we got on well.”
- Let’s wrap with a couple of useful tools to play with over the weekend. The team at Information is Beautiful has created Based on a True Story?, a series of interactive timelines that break down movies such as Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (both from 2013) scene by scene to answer the question: Did that really happen? And film historian Luke McKernan recommends Film Atlas, “a richly-illustrated directory of all of the forms in which film as a physical medium has existed—or rather, that’s the goal, since there have been a huge number of such formats (at least 650, they say), and they have launched with 125 of them. More will be added as the years ago by, with the planned end goal being 2032. Want to know all about Dufaycolor, Sonochrome, IMAX, Disney 3-D, Vivaphone, Minirama, Labyrinth or Zoechrome? This is the place to be.”
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