“Superheroes fill a gap in the pop-culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn’t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He’s not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he’s a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.”

IFB’s Quotations Page: General Index

“In this locomotive we call home there is one thing left between our warm hearts and the bitter cold. Clothing? Shields? No. Order. Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen death. We must all of us on this train of life remain in our altar’d station, we must each of us occupy our preordained particulate position. Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot.”

That monologue – delivered by Tilda Swinton approximately 20 minutes into Snowpiercer – is one of several reasons why this film may be the most thought-provoking science fiction movie in years. Brilliant, bloody, inventive … Snowpiercer has a great deal to say about social structure, class, fascism, capitalism, theism, man-made atrocities, and why wars are being fought and lost over controlling the means of production. Korean director Joon-ho Bong includes fitting nods to Oldboy, 2001, The Matrix, Blade Runner, Children of Men, The Empire Strikes Back and Battle Royale (among others). Bong’s assembled a solid cast here, as well. Chris Evans (Captain America) is very good. Tilda Swinton (all things Wes Anderson) is even better. Octavia Spencer, unfortunately, not so much.

Anyway, the point being, Snowpiercer is a warm tonic for a bitter day. And it is highly recommended. So it is.

(Snowpiercer opens in limited release this Friday.)

Twenty minutes into Nicholas Jarecki’s outstanding documentary The Outsider, Roger Ebert notes, “[Toback’s] typical picture is about a very smart guy who’s very hung up on sex, and often gambling. And because of the gambling, he gets in trouble with the mob.” While that statement may ring true, it is nonetheless remarkable to consider all Toback’s accomplished in that framework.

At 69, James Toback has taken on the role of a Svengali, a publicly-polarizing personality that simultaneously attracts people while repelling them. Toback is a Harvard grad, Magna Cum Laude, one-time editor of The Advocate. He’s given to addiction; he struggles with compulsion. As a student, Toback took hallucinogenic drugs to the near-point of insanity. As a post-grad, he hasn’t touched illegal drugs in years. He’s gained a reputation as a Lothario, a brilliant sloth who overcompensates by copulating. In terms of grandiosity, James Toback represents to the east what John Milius once represented to the west. The primary difference being that Toback took flight throughout the eighties, while John Milius dwindled off into the depths.

There is an honesty about James Toback’s work that can only be achieved via directors who insist upon writing – or adapting – their own screenplays (Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino come to mind). That sense of ownership tends to keep directors taut, willing to campaign for what is true and right and necessary about their work. James Toback, in particular, has never made a film I didn’t happen to enjoy. In certain cases, this might’ve been due to something as simple as a mechanism or a moment (e.g., Harvey Keitel carrying the entire soundtrack under his arm throughout Fingers or Neve Campbell acknowledging the camera toward the end of When Will I Be Loved). In other cases, I might’ve hooked into some riff regarding god or love or sex and death. Either way, the fact remains there are only a handful of directors who can pull off such a feat, and fewer still who can somehow manage it without the benefit of 60-mil. And so here now, in that spirit, is my list of the top five motion pictures Mr. Toback’s ever made:

5. Harvard Man (2001): In the same way surgeons are cautioned against operating on their own children, James Toback might’ve needed to take a step away from this semi-autobiographical motion picture. The lead character, played by Adrian Grenier, is a cunning, super-intelligent, totally selfless Harvard athlete who just so happens to be “the greatest fuck in the world”. The names have changed but the implication remains the same – James Toback considers himself to be a golden god, and he would like it very much if you would recognize that, too. Heidegger, Kierkegaard, sex, drugs, gambling and transcendence … Harvard Man is consumed with the quaint art of pleasure, and the desperation that occurs when one pursues it all too freely.

Notable Members of the Ensemble: Joey Lauren Adams, Ray Allen, Al Franken, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Adrian Grenier, Gianni Russo, Eric Stoltz.

4. The Pick-up Artist (1987): There is this girl that I am in love with, and the rub of it is, this girl (whatever, woman) wants very little to do with me – a dynamic which I find distressing. Anyway, I think about this person whenever I happen upon The Pick-Up Artist, specifically toward the end when Molly Ringwald’s Randy (I mean, c’mon) insists to Robert Downey’s Jack, “I’ll always be grateful to you, but we’re not good for each other.”

The Pick-Up Artist is far from ideal. The dialogue is cheesy and the plot’s forever bordering on absurd. What’s more, the movie represents an exploration of what the majority of people find significantly off-putting when it comes to Mr. Toback. And yet despite that, there is a tremendous amount of charm gracing this picture, the kind that one experiences from watching Robert Downey woo an 18-year-old film star. Assuming all of Toback’s work represents some extension of his id, one might assume his biggest challenge isn’t so much meeting – or mating with – exceptional women, but getting them to stick around. The Pick-up Artist succeeds because it focuses on setting all that weak-ass shit aside, disposing with machismo in the hopes of something more.

Notable Members of the Ensemble: Danny Aiello, Victor Argo, Lorraine Bracco, Robert Downey, Jr., Dennis Hopper, Victoria Jackson, Harvey Keitel, Fred Melamed, Molly Ringwald, Tony Sirico, Robert Towne, Vanessa Williams.

3. Exposed (1983): Here we are confronted by a classic Toback tenet – the notion that great men regularly pursue and approach hapless women on the street, determined to have some profound, life-altering, impact on their being. It’s a silly preoccupation, one that Toback has attempted to push by for years. Only it’s nonsense, an exhausted plot device that often serves as a distraction.

There are several Toback staples in this movie, including (but not limited to): a classically-trained musician, 1950’s rock n roll, a sexual dalliance involving an academic mentor, and a brief appearance by Tony Sirico. Exposed unfolds with all the drama of a British crime thriller. Goethe, Nietzsche, fear as a catalyst for change … in Toback’s philosophical dystopia, beauty equal access, and vanity, a fatal flaw. That theme plays out exquisitely, thanks in large part to Natassja Kinski and (Toback stalwart) Harvey Keitel.

Notable Members of the Ensemble: Janice Dickinson, Stephanie Farrow, Pete Hamill, Iman, Harvey Keitel, Natassja Kinski, Norris Mailer, Ian McShane, Rudolf Nureyev, Tony Sirico, James Toback, Jose Torres.

2. Tyson (2008): During a 2013 Hollywood Reporter roundtable James Toback calmly stated, “I think anyone who today still feels that fiction films are competitive in terms of depicting the human condition with documentary – all other things being equal in terms of quality – has his head lodged so firmly up his colon that he should find a crane to remove it.” While Toback was on the scene to promote Seduced and Abandoned, he was also referring to a latter-day shift in his career, one that has seen him put out two feature films in the span of six years, both of them documentaries.

In the case of Tyson, Toback was dealing with the same basic building blocks Nicholas Jarecki had when approaching The Outsider (i.e., a captivating public figure who surrounds himself with controversy). Toback never set out to create another “Iron Mike” retrospective, and, as a result, his portrait remains the most humane of all the Tyson documentaries. There is no veneer, no filter, no sudden cuts to Bert Sugar chomping on that fat goddamn cigar. As Toback himself put it a year prior to the film’s U.S. release: “Ultimately, the truth is, who gives a fuck what Teddy Atlas has to say about Mike Tyson? Or, for that matter, who cares what any number of people who’ve written about him or talked about him have to say? It’s an opinion, and not one that has even an iota as much interest – at least to me – as listening to Mike and watching Mike. So I just thought, Why clutter up a chance of a lifetime to do a riveting portrait of a riveting figure by introducing a lot of third-rate garbage?”

Well put, Mr Toback. And exceedingly well-executed.

Notable Members of the Ensemble: Mike Tyson

1. Black and White (1999): Black and White is the most Tobackian of all James Toback’s movies. It is consumed with orientation, race and culture, one side exploiting the other to achieve its own selfish end. The white kids want to be gangsters, the black kids want to be capitalists, and every group continues feeding off the lifestyle it abhors. Black and White is the story of urban life in America, featuring completely out-of-body turns by Elijah Wood, Brooke Shields, Claudia Schiffer, Robert Downey, Jr., Bijou Phillips and a plethora of others. The most memorable moment? A frustrated Mike Tyson bitch-slapping Robert Downey, Jr. to the floor. “We still don’t know if it was fake or not,” producer Hooman Majd insisted during an Interview Magazine Q&A. Either does the audience, and that’s why it continues to feel so incendiary.

Notable Members of the Ensemble: Scott Caan, Robert Downey, Jr., Ghostface Killah, Gaby Hoffmann, Hassan Johnson, Michael B. Jordan, Jared Leto, Marla Maples, Method Man, Joe Pantoliano, Bijou Phillips, Raekwon, Brett Ratner, Claudia Schiffer, Brooke Shields, Ben Stiller, James Toback, Mike Tyson, Elijah Wood, Chuck Zito.

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

“I am often asked which of the participatory exercises I have been involved in was the most frightening. People are always startled when I say the one that frightened me the most was not playing football with the professionals, or basketball, or boxing, but when I played with the New York Philharmonic.

I played the triangle. And some of the other percussion instruments.

One reason it was terrifying was that in music you cannot make a mistake. Almost all sports are predicated on the concept of an error being a determinant in the outcome: in tennis you put a twist on the ball in the hope your opponent will make an error; in boxing you feint and hope the other fellow is going to drop his guard so you can pop him; football is an immense exercise in trying to get the other people to make mistakes – not to be where they should be.

But in music you cannot make a mistake. It is not part of the zeitgeist. If you make a mistake, a big one, you destroy a work of art. The thought of doing this nags, of course, at the consciousness of all musicians, even the very good ones. In the rehearsal rooms of the great concert halls the musicians getting ready for an important concert have that same glazed look I have seen on the faces of professionals going out to face the Chicago Bears. In fact, I got to know a violinist with the Philharmonic who told me he was so frightened of making a mistake – especially in rehearsals, where the conductor can stop everything and glare at you and point out that it’s a B-flat not a B – that he toyed with the idea of putting soap on the strings of his violin so that when he played it hardly any sound would emerge off it. The idea was to do this until he got a surer sense of where he was – got his confidence.“

(Excerpted from The Best of Plimpton)

IFB’s Quotations Page, General Index

Woody Allen once referred to Liam Neeson as being “incapable of a graceless moment in front of the camera.” Over the past several years, Liam Neeson has put that theory to the test. Starting with The A-Team, up and through Battleship, and now as the lead in Paul Haggis’s forthcoming Third Person, Neeson – perhaps the most affable screen presence on the planet – continues to place himself in roles that scar his credibility. And yet the beauty of it is the 62-year old actor’s quote somehow still manages to rise, almost in spite of all the lackluster material.

More confounding in the case of Third Person is Paul Haggis, a writer and director as historically uneven as his very public background. Haggis, a former scientologist who also published the most scathing insider account of that religion, wrote Casino Royale, one of the best Bond films of all-time, before going on to write Quantum of Solace, universally regarded as one of the worst. Haggis wrote and directed Crash, the most overachieving motion pictures of all-time, before going on to write and direct In the Valley of Elah, one of the least. Haggis is in, he’s out. He’s up, then down. And so now he’s finally come full-circle, directing yet another film-as-collage, one that lacks the smooth cohesiveness of Crash, if not the truth it seems so desperate to unravel.

The lead character in Third Person (played by Neeson) is an aging writer, living vicariously through the mishaps of his characters. In reality, this is Haggis on Haggis, a writer writing about a writer who seeks redemption through his plot valves. As an audience, we’ve seen this entertainment before, sinners working out life problems in the hope of being born anew. While there are moments of great clarity and tension (including one particularly gripping sequence involving James Franco and Mila Kunis) Haggis largely squanders a first-class acting troupe on what amounts to several one-acts. There are common threads connecting one piece to another, yet for the most part this is a case of Haggis returning to his once-prosperous well. Third Person is a dramatic-romantic-comedy (a drom-com?) that ultimately descends into absurdity. A trio of relationships, each of them complicated by some echo from the past. Confront the echo, remove the thorn. It’s 137 minutes worth of tedium featuring 45 seconds worth of Olivia Wilde, naked as a jaybird, parading around the halls of a hotel.

(Third Person opens in limited release this Friday.)

I arrived at work a half-hour early on that morning. Bill’s Concessions was expecting a delivery, the final stock truck of the season. Deliveries were always scheduled before noon to minimize distraction, uniformed employees unloading a tractor trailer full of plush. It was up a ramp, across the boards, along the carousel, in through a golf course, one step up, then 10 more down, before continuing into a room where bags of plush were stacked like loaves.

That particular morning I opted to stack rather than carry. It was mid-August and it was hot and there were 400 textile lions that needed to come off of that trailer. By one o’clock the truck was empty, and yet the work downstairs had just begun. The air ran dank and desolate in those stock rooms, indicative of why so many supervisors disappeared beneath the pier to drink or drug, take naps or fuck. There was a rumor – long-standing, unsubstantiated – that an employee’d lost his job back in the 70s for poking holes inside these animals then screwing them inside pier stock rooms. And yet these rumors, they tended to mothball, to the extent one risked integrity by telling them. There were more than ample truths to go around, dispensing any need for smoke and mirrors.

I finished stacking around two, at which point I emerged to find a happening – local authorities and EMTs, a network news van, low-circling copters. There was a barricade set up along the north side of the pier, and Donna White, a pier employee, was being rushed toward First Aid in tears. There had been an accident, a nearby maintenance man informed me, and it was believed that Donna’s husband, Dallas White, had died.

*** Continue reading →

If Petrarch wanted to express his gratitude, he might write someone a sonnet; Emerson, a short story. Charles James, on the other hand, might design someone a dress, much like he did for Washington, DC socialite Sidney Kent Legare. James, a British-American designer who Christian Dior once credited with inspiring “The New Look,” approached fashion in the same way brilliant artisans approach a canvas. “A great designer does not seek acceptance,” James is quoted as saying in one of 18 signature Metropolitan panels. “He challenges popularity and by the force of his convictions renders popular in the end what the public hates at first sight.”

Charles James, curated in conjunction with the newly-minted Anna Wintour Costume Center, furthers the Met’s ongoing campaign to meld the worlds of art and fashion. Unlike 2013’s Punk: Chaos to Couture – a wildly popular exhibit which contrived a certain necessary grit – Charles James remains exquisitely resplendent … engaging, bare and honest throughout.

(Charles James: Beyond Fashion continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 10th. Free with suggested donation. 5th Avenue @ 82nd Street.)

Five More For The Offing: 

• In a World of Their Own: Coney Island Photographs by Aaron Rose @ The Museum of The City of New York ($10 general admission, through 8/3, 1220 5th Avenue @ 103rd Street)
• Paintings & Drawings by Robert De Niro, Sr. @ DC Moore Gallery (Free, through 7/11, 535 West 22nd Street)
• Mark Cohen @ The Danziger Gallery (Free, through 6/20, 527 West 23rd Street)
• Theater and Orchestra Paintings by Silke Schoener @ Dillon Gallery (Free, through 6/11, 555 West 25th Street)
• Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Harmony Korine, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Rudolf Stingel, Franz West @ Gagosian Gallery (Free, through 7/18, 555 West 24th Street)

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

“I looked at myself and saw a walking embodiment of everything the world around me seemed to despise: an unattractive, poor, Black woman. Undervalued by her family, a perpetual workhorse. Undervalued by society regarding her labor and her beauty. This seed buried itself in my stomach and bore fruit. I hated myself. That seed bloomed in the way I walked, slumped over, eyes on the floor, in the way I didn’t even attempt to dress well, in the way I avoided the world, when I could, through reading, and in the way I took up as little space as possible and tried to attract as little notice as I could, because why should I? I was something to be left.”

(Excerpted from Men We Reaped: A Memoir)