BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)



If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic!  After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married.  Now here’s the depressing part:  if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.

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The New York Times recently noted that this year marks the eightieth birthday of Tom Ripley, the favorite antihero of the late novelist Patricia Highsmith, who between The Talented Mr. Ripley (which was written in 1954, and in which Tom was 25 years old) and 1991's Ripley Under Water (published four years before Highsmith's death) wrote five books about him. Highsmith's Ripley is good-looking, well-built, implicitly gay but basically asexual, beyond suave, and sociopathic. When first glimpsed in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he's scuffling out a grifter's existence in New York before being drafted by the rich parents of a distant acquaintance, Dickie Greenleaf, to go to Italy and drag their slumming son back to the States. Instead, Ripley insinuates himself into Dickie's life, kills him, and essentially takes his place. He remains an American expatriate in Europe, where he uses his refined eye to become a formidable figure in the art forgery business.

Highsmith adored her creation. Ripley may be without conscience, but he has his own bizarre code, and he isn't casually murderous--he kills only as a last resort, though that's probably because dead bodies make for a mess. In some ways, Highsmith was the Ayn Rand of misanthropic hard-boiled crime novelists, and she seems to have judged Ripley as a superior sort of creature: he deserved to go undetected and live high on the spoils of his crimes so long as he was wittier, smarter, and had better taste than his victims. Highsmith's genius for plotting and nasty twists made her attractive to Hollywood, but her sensibility was too twisted and nasty for most mainstream filmmakers. One of Hitchcock's best movies, Strangers on a Train, is based on one of her non-Ripley novels, but in the movie, the hero, Guy, is horrified to discover that Bruno, the flirty psycho he met by chance has murdered Guy's estranged wife as a favor to him and now expects Guy to return the favor by murdering Bruno's father. In the novel, Guy is reluctant to fulfill his half of the bargain, but he gets over it. Likewise, there have been five movies made so far based on the Ripley novels--including the most recent, Roger Spottiswoode's 2005 Ripley Under Ground with Barry Pepper, which has yet to see either a theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. How have filmmakers succeeded in their attempts to bring Highsmith's hero to the movies? The results are all over the map:

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CHICAGO: Beginning January 3 and running through March 2, "In the Realm of Oshima" at the Gene Siskel Film Center provides a twenty-film retrospective of the long career of one of Japan's most provocative directors, Nagisa Oshima. Here, Oshima is probably still best known for the scandalous international success (based on an actual story of violent sexual obsession) known here as In the Realm of the Senses (1976). The schedule includes that film as well as its companion piece, Empire of Passion, which won Oshima the Best Director prize at Cannes, the cult favorites Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and Death by Hanging (1968), and Oshima's sole bid to storm the multiplexes of America, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), a partly English-language prisoner-of-war-camp film with a cast that includes David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Takeshi Kitano.

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There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

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There's a great moment early on in Frank Zappa's engaging autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, where a teenaged Zappa becomes obsessed with some long-forgotten doo-wop single.  Having recently started taking band classes, he marched to his music teacher, put on the record, and demanded to know:  "Why do I like this song so much?"  The teacher gave it a listen and responded, simply, "Diminished fifths".  This one moment began Zappa's lifelong affair with music theory, and the idea that there was more to why we responded positively to one song over another than simply matters of taste.  
 
The internet has been a real double-edged sword in terms of film criticsism; on the one hand, it's opened up the field to non-professionals in a really positive way, allowing those outside the traditional academic and journalistic worlds to take a shot at the discipline, often with a fresh perspective, a new approach, or an eye towards non-mainstream films and genres.  On the other hand, it's also subject to the same flattening effect on criticism that darkens the entire world wide web:  it seems enough to merely have an opinion, and no one has he right to tell you it's wrong.  Merely thinking something is enough, and the idea of defending your opinion intelligently -- let alone actually knowing what you're talking about -- is too often considered qualnt Web 1.0 thinking.  That's why we're grateful to sites like the Broadview Blog.

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Were the world a simpler and gentler place, Pierrot le fou would consist of 110 minutes of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Anna Karina) relaxing on the seaside. Instead, it's the most exhilarating elegy for a failed marriage and betrayal you're ever likely to see. Jean-Luc Godard's tenth film marked a turning point for the director, who divorced Karina around the time he made it. Afterwards, he abandoned its romanticism and upped the political references and Brechtian tactics that lie on the sideline here. It might be a good entry point for Godard neophytes, made at a moment where he could still celebrate American directors like Frank Tashlin, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller (who makes a cameo) and rage against American foreign policy, maintaining an uneasy balance of experimentation and accessibility.

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