The Mule

I see all the hubbub as totally hypocritical. The Superbowl is all about excess and T&A anyhow. Look at the cheerleaders or the beer commercials. Janet Jackson flashing the audience for three seconds is somehow worse? Did you see the promo for some CBS sitcom where there's a little kid eating breakfast gawking at his dad's girlfriend's ass in a thong? Janet was worse than that? Puh-leeze....

Yeah, there's your corporate synergy in action. Viacom owns CBS and MTV. Viacom has MTV produce the halftime show and CBS takes the heat.. It'll be country & western halftime shows from now on....

Yeah, we all saw what we thought we saw before CBS cut away in a big hurry...

Hang in there and don't give up hope. My dad has been battling acute leukemia for the past three years and so far he's defied the odds. Stay strong. My thoughts are with you and your family.

Just picked this up. I saw the Moutin twins live when they came to Los Angeles with Martial Solal and they were really impressive--especially Francois on bass. This is a terrific album, but I'll let Don Heckman from the LA Times tell ya: France's Moutin twins exemplify the music's international appeal. By Don Heckman Special to The Times January 18 2004 Jazz has been reaching out globally at least since World War I, when the appropriately named Lt. James Reese Europe and his 369th Infantry "Harlem Hellfighters" brought the rhythms of ragtime to battle-scarred France. Although the musical flow initially moved outward from the U.S., high-quality international jazz players began to arrive on the scene in the '20s. Since then, the romance with jazz has expanded to every corner of the world. In more recent years, with few American icons around to create new, pervasive stylistic genres, jazz has blossomed in boundary-less fashion, a panoramic garden blending the essential elements of improvisation and swing with sounds and rhythms from every part of the planet. "Red Moon" (Sunnyside Records) by the Moutin Reunion Quartet is a superb example of this cross-pollination. The group's leaders are French bassist Francois Moutin and his twin brother, drummer Louis Moutin. The brothers were heard most recently in the Southland as members of a trio led by the innovative pianist Martial Solal. Their ability to move gracefully with the sudden twists and turns of Solal's improvisational inventiveness stamped the pair as potentially significant artists in their own right. In the opening track of "Red Moon," the twins duet adventurously through Charles Trenet's "La Mer," transforming the classic melody into a joyous, hard-swinging romp underpinned by an irresistible rhythmic groove. The album closes with a harmonically off-kilter rendering of "Stompin' at the Savoy" featuring the quartet's other members, French pianist Baptiste Trotignon and American saxophonist Rick Margitza. In between are eight originals, four by each of the Moutin brothers. The moods range from the lyrical, inner atmospheres of "Soraya" and the roaring, groove-driven surge of "Jazz Married" to the disjunct rhythms of "Taking Off," the layered textures of "Sailing Through the Clouds" and the contemporary bop of "New-York Silly." Margitza, a far too under-recognized player, swings with Coltrane-inspired energies throughout. Trotignon, 29, is a real find — a casually virtuosic technician with a subtle touch, a rich melodic imagination and a propulsive sense of rhythm. But it is the playing of the Moutin twins that takes the music from the level of eminently listenable to the lofty plane of prime, world-class jazz. There are other rhythm section brother teams in jazz — Percy and Albert "Tootie" Heath, Victor and Roy Wooten. But no identical twins that come immediately to mind. And the remarkable interplay between Francois and Louis — intuitive, enmeshed, symbiotic — is a convincing aural manifestation of the belief that identical twins are connected in remarkable, inexplicable fashion.

Well, as an African-American friend of mine is fond of saying: "You gotta be some kind of racist to not want another holiday with pay."

That's the one-- I'm about 3/4 through. Not the most scintillating read, but interesting. The musical analysis is sometimes good, but often a little too gushing. And there are moments when I feel like I am reading some kind of gig-o-log just outlining one gig to the next... but still worthwhile because I find Evans' music so intriguing... Totally agree. I found the book to be a little wearisome. As you say, it becomes one of those, "and then he played..." sort of books. Very disappointed in the biographical aspects of the book as I felt it shed very little light on Bill Evans the man. I'm currently reading this novel: Written by Leslie Epstein, the son of CASABLANCA co-screenwriter Philip G. Epstein. It's sort of an autobiographical fiction based on his own life. Wonderful writing.

Aw.....I thought this thread was about JACK Kirby....

Got that right.

I listed SALESMAN above as one of the Criterions to get. I'm a huge fan of the Maysles Brothers work and Criterion carries three of their films. btw, there's no doubt in my mind that David Mamet saw SALESMAN before he wrote GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS...

It does indeed, but it's a close race between it and Michael Powell's other masterpiece, THE RED SHOES. My favorite Michael Powell is 'Peeping Tom', the first movie of his I saw when I got interested in films. Missed on him as a kid when I was terrified by a showing of 'Thief of Baghdad'. And a film about dance by the name of 'Red Shoes' had no appeal for the boy I was. His other films were badly distributed in France. Got interested in his films decades later after reading articles about Powell (and Pressburger) by the likes of Martin Scorcese and Bertrand Tavernier. The films show up pretty often nowadays on cable TV over here. Was stunned by the number of masterpieces Powell and Pressburger concocted. Love 'The 49th Parallel', 'A Matter of Life and Death', 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp', 'I Know Where I'm Going'. And of course 'Black Narcissus'. They're all great. LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP may be the next Criterion I purchase. I have the old laser disc of I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING--another wonderful film--so I don't feel the need to upgrade. Still waiting for A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH to be issued on dvd stateside. Can I assume you got over your boyhood disinterest in THE RED SHOES? PEEPING TOM is amazing and the film that destroyed Powell's career...

I agree with Lon about the later-career recordings. I've been listening to a lot of Getz's output on the Concord label lately and my favorite so far is: I would also highly recommend FOCUS (with strings and considered one of his most challenging dates) but it's hard to find these days:

Did a little more research last night and read an interview with Paul Schrader where he mentions Travis' racism. Evidently, in early drafts of his script, all the crooks in the whorehouse Travis kills are black. Both the producers and Scorsese demanded he change that. Schrader also mentions that both men Travis decides to vent his rage on are "father figures" for the women in his life. Betsy works for Palantine and Iris works for Sport. He also sums up Travis' relationships with the women this way: One woman he wants but cannot have. The other he can have but does not want.

I don't know how true that is. I'm looking at a 5/29/75 draft of the script and there are no overtly racist comments in the "All the animals come out at night speech." The most verbally racist character in the movie is Wizard--the cabbie played by Peter Boyle. This is not to say that Travis isn't racist. Most of the racial unease is non-verbal with Travis giving black men cold stares and his obvious discomfort with the black cabbie at the diner. Funny thing about the quick Scorsese cameo you mention. That shot of him sitting outside Palantine's campaign office lends a certain amount of credence to the story that the only reason Scorsese played the role of the jealous husband in the back of the cab is because the actor who they had cast didn't show up on the day of the shoot. If Scorsese had always intended to play that role, I doubt he would have also put himself in a non-verbal Hitchcockian background cameo as well.

Good excuse to read "The Dead" again. God, that's some beautiful writing....

I just checked the screenplay and Schrader DOES NOT have Travis sporting a mohawk. He says his hair is "cropped short." Now that I'm thinking about it again, I might have read or heard in an interview that the mohawk was DeNiro's idea. He'd seen pictures of Marines sporting mohawks somewhere--maybe Vietnam. You young-uns really don't understand how visually shocking that mohawk was. Nothing like it had ever been seen on a major American actor before. The film was shot in 1975 and that was before the whole punk thing really took hold, so people weren't very used to seeing mohawks unless they were watching old westerns. I also remember the mohawk causing all sorts of speculation amongst critics. Since Schrader cited John Ford's THE SEARCHERS as a major influence, several critics tried to make connections between the Travis' mohawk and native Americans or that the filmmakers were making some kind of political statement. Most of the theories were hogwash. Here's another bit of trivia: Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay in about ten days. He was at a very low-ebb of his life--practically homeless and abusing a lot of substances--and he cranked it out in one big burst to purge himself of these horrible feelings he was having.

It does indeed, but it's a close race between it and Michael Powell's other masterpiece, THE RED SHOES. I agree, the MY MAN GODFREY disc is also great. Some very funny outtakes of Carole Lombard cursing after a blown take...

Yes, I think that's true and I do believe it factored into TAXI DRIVER. I'll check the screenplay to see if that detail is in the script.

I can certainly see how one could come to that conclusion given that nearly the entire movie is told through Travis' point-of-view and Scorsese and Schrader do a masterful job of taking you inside a diseased mind. The end of the film has been controversial since the day it was released. Not just because of different interpretations (how much is real and how much was in Travis' head?), but also as to what it all really means. Some critics of its day assumed the film endorsed violence as a cathartic release--which was certainly not the intention of the filmmakers. Based on having read the screenplay and various interviews with Scorsese and Schrader, I believe that it was all intended to be "real" and Travis actually is seen as a hero at the end--which is meant to be deeply ironic and a comment on the nature of violence in America. As I said above--it's not that you kill, it's who you kill.

So I just watched the last 10 minutes of TAXI DRIVER on the old Criterion laser disc with the commentary by Scorsese and Schrader. I was a little off on the technique used to make the film "grainy" during the shootout. Scorsese did, indeed, go for a more grainy look for these scenes by printing this part from the interpositive which made the image more contrasty. In addition he desaturated the color from shot-to-shot to apppease the MPAA and made the blood less "candy colored" (as he put it). Depending on the shot, it could have been 70% color and 30% b&w; 50-50 and so-on. It's a technique pioneered by John Huston in MOBY DICK and used more recently by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and MINORITY REPORT. Scorsese had considered doing the entire film this way--to make it look more like the tabloid newspaper images of violence he remembered from his youth--but since these things were all done as time-consuming opticals in those days it was prohibitively expensive. Scorsese also said that when using Eastmancolor film one had to choose between a green base or a brown base for the image and he usually chose brown which gave those scenes that sepia-tone feel. As to the coda of the film, it was pretty much what I said previously. Scorsese refers to Travis as a ticking time bomb that could go off again at any time. Travis is calm now, but he can't stay that way for long. Looking at the film again, there are those two shots where he catches his own eyes in the rear-view mirror and quickly adjusts it so he can no longer see himself. These two shots look like they were also processed in a manner similar to that described above. One more interesting note. At the moment where Travis sees himself in the mirror, there's this startling musical "sting" to punctuate the moment. Scorsese told composer Bernard Herrmann he wanted a little something there. Hermann played him a short riff on a vibraphone and Scorsese said, "No, no, I don't like it. It's not quite right." Herrmann simply told him, "Play it backward," and walked out. Scorsese did and Herrmann was right...

It is and it's very atmospheric and creepy. The sound of the wind is practically a main character. You should also check out KWAIDAN, which is just as creepy and really, really beautiful...

It's a great city. Wish I still lived there!

One more thing about the coda to TAXI DRIVER---One thing you musn't forget is that Travis Bickle was all set to assassinate a presidential candidate and was thwarted. He then focused his rage on a more "socially acceptable" target and became a hero. If he had succeeded the first time, he'd be villified and notorious. Instead he's a hero and people like Betsy suddenly look upon him more favorably. Problem is, he's still the same guy who almost killed a presidential candidate. His rage was indiscriminate. He just happened to shoot the right people....

I actually think the problem with Di Caprio in GANGS is that his part simply isn't written very well. I don't think that Leo had anywhere near the great amount of stuff to play as an actor as Daniel Day Lewis did. Bill The Butcher was a much more complex and colorful character on the page and, frankly, the movie is about him. Leo's character, unfortunately, is pretty much just a plot device to hang the narrative on. I also suspect Mirimax pushed Scorsese to give more screen time to the "romance" between Leo and Cameron Diaz because they somehow thought Leo's TITANIC fans would be disappointed if he didn't get to fall in love with somebody...

Not in any order: BRAZIL THE THIRD MAN THE RED SHOES BLACK NARCISSUS PEEPING TOM CONTEMPT STRAW DOGS THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC THE COMPLETE MONTEREY POP GIMME SHELTER SALESMAN (documentary) HAXAN aka: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES WRITTEN ON THE WIND THE BLOB (the extras are better than the movie!)