Birdie Has a Cold

This is Birdie, the middle cat. She might look apprehensive because right after I snapped this, I picked her up and stuffed her into her cat carrier for a trip to the vet. She has a cold, you see, and it won't go away; one of its most charming symptoms is that she sneezes right in your face. This particular trip was more horrifying to her than most, because our car is at the shop and I had to walk the seven blocks to the vet, her carrier bumping against my leg. To add to the fun, she was late on her vaccines, so the doctor gave her two shots; I also learned that she has to go in for some serious teeth cleaning as soon as her upper respiratory infection is cleared up. That will be great fun for all of us.

Silent Sunday: Early Jesus

The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1902-1905) is one of the earliest feature-length films, although it's not much of a "film" by modern standards. It's a series of scenes, or tableaux, of the life of Jesus, from the Annunciation to the Ascension. Still and stodgy, the film provides some relief outside the obvious historical value: there's some really great tinting, along with some really impressive dissolves, masking, fading, and other early-cinema tricks that seem to belong more in a Georges Méliès film than in a dead-serious film about the Christ. (The best effect has to be when the baby Jesus appears—abracadabra!—in the manger, saving Mary the pain of labor.)

Read the full review.

It's available from Image Entertainment in a fabulous, meticulously restored, gorgeous DVD that retains much of Pathé's impeccable tinting and adds, for a bonus, another early Passion play, the 1912 film From the Manger to the Cross, which was shot on location in Palestine. The package is a model of attractive presentation and obvious love for the medium.

The Lord of the Hotel: The Return of the Concierge

MIKE: Only five Best Picture winners have won all the Oscars for which they were nominated, and we have two of them in this installment. In 1932, Grand Hotel became the only film to win Best Picture without winning, or even being nominated for, any other awards. It presents the intertwining tales of people living in various states of desperation at the finest hotel in Berlin: broke baron John Barrymore, dying bookkeeper Lionel Barrymore, stenographer (etc.) Joan Crawford, Prussian industrialist Wallace Beery, and depressive diva Greta Garbo. On the other end of the calendar is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, whose eleven-for-eleven tied it for the most Oscars ever. Shortly before its thirty-seven endings, epic battles occur, Gandalf (Ian McKellan) is wise, Gimli and Legolas (John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom) bond homosocially, Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood and Sean Astin) destroy the ring, and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) becomes king.

The two films present a perfect storm of nerdy Best Picture statistics trivia: only ten films have won the big prize without a single acting nomination, and these two are on that list as well. What's up with that? Grand Hotel presents a banquet of movie stars working at the top of their game; is it simply the lack of supporting categories and the limited space (three slots each) in the lead categories that caused its shutout? What do you think about these performances? And whereas great acting isn't the focus of the Lord of the Rings saga, does its lone nomination (Ian McKellan's for the first installment) give the series enough credit for its stars' acting chops? (Yeah, I know we're dealing with just this one film, but you'd have to be drunk on Louisiana Flips to think all those Oscars weren't for the entire series.)

NICK: See, that brings up a big point for me right away. Even if The Return of the King pitched that perfect Oscar game in part because AMPAS wanted to reward the whole trilogy, and even though principal photography was (famously) continuous on all three installments, I can't help thinking that The Return of the King is a stylistically different and frankly inferior picture to The Fellowship of the Ring. Not that it's a huge difference; I still like ROTK a lot, and it has plenty of the expressive color, the detailed designs and locations, the energy, the scale, and the emotional breadth that subtends the whole wonderful series. But I feel like ROTK gets stuck too often in these magnified close-ups of actors in frankly unimaginative frames, and the editing patterns don't keep all the fields of action and conflict as pristinely differentiated or as exciting as Fellowship did. (All three installments indeed boast different lead editors.) The serial and very protracted endings are a big problem for me in ROTK, and since you bring up acting, Mike, the emphasis on close-ups in ROTK, which should be even more actor-friendly, instead keeps emphasizing that some of the cast don't have the full control and technique that their roles require (Elijah Wood, John Noble) and others keep trying to screw their faces up and force out a convincing tear or two or twenty (Sean Astin especially, but also Billy Boyd). It's a tenser, fuller, more majestic movie than Two Towers, but I don't think it's the series apex that I coveted, or that Oscar commemorated, and I don't think it's as deserving a winner as Fellowship would have been.

Big pluses: That Gollum-centric opening is still a corker, and the lighting of the beacons is a reliable thrill. And Shelob. Big minus: "Shadowfax, show us the meaning of haste!" This won for screenplay?

NATHANIEL: But it didn't win for screenplay... the trilogy won. I'd go so far as to say that all of the LotR wins and nominations are based on the whole, projected (in the first two years) or existing (once Return was playing). It's hard to hold the Academy's attention—this isn't (usually) the EMMYs where you can phone it in once you're well liked—but generally once you've got awards momentum, you've won half the battle. Return of the King had three years of mass emotional investment propping it up even if it hadn't proved as satisfying as it did.

I'll beat a dead horse and agree that it stumbles with those multiple endings. Not because they're there (there are dozens of characters to bid farewell to you know) but because Jackson underlines their ending quality so much. Why the multiple fadeouts? What a weirdly misjudged repeat "gotcha!" that decision proved. It reminds me of that great line from The Age of Innocence: "Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it." Why toy with our natural desire to exit the theater after three plus hours of satiating thrills? I suspect that if you simply erased the fadeouts—maybe a cross dissolve instead?—there would've been less griping.

But let's stay positive. There's so much to love. In both movies I might add. Is it just me or is Joan Crawford, often disparagingly viewed as something of a Shelob herself, a total kick in the pants in Grand Hotel? She's my favorite part of the movie and I like most of its parts.

NICK: I agree, it's not just the quantity of endings in ROTK, but beyond their constant elegiac quality, it's the insistence on soothing beauty that puts me off at the end. After the highest-stakes global struggle imaginable, the world has no scars or stretch-marks, the light gleams, and the actors get pushed in all those closing scenes between ineffable sorrow and beatific grins, often on a dime. I really feel like the emotional AND the narrative threads get sacrificed to bland, reassuring spectacle in those conclusions.

But, as requested, I'll stop griping: and yes, Joan Crawford is amazing in Grand Hotel. Even as the other actors spin reliable or even engaging versions of the archetypes assigned to them, Joan is by far the craftiest at making Flaemmchen neither "good" nor "bad" and keeping us guessing about the character...despite keeping her playing style so simple and direct.

Grand Hotel has at least as many close-ups per minute as Return of the King, but to such a different purpose: you are practically watching the advent of 30s-era movie stardom as you watch Grand Hotel, as the camera extracts as much behavioral implication and palpable personality as it can just by doting on these scrupulously lit faces. The stars become an indispensable part of Art Deco style, sleek and cool and reflective. But they also capture enough of the longing and desperation built into the script that the movie doesn't feel completely weightless... and stardom itself is more interesting for its connotations of loneliness and unreality.

MIKE: I like what you said about the dawn of 30s-era stardom, Nick, and it fits with what went on offscreen—Garbo and Crawford fought over screen time, Garbo and Beery refused to sign until they got extravagant salaries, and Garbo seems to be willing to poke a little fun at her own superstardom—"I just vant to be alone" and all that. I'm so glad we all agree about how great Crawford is here. For me, she nails the film's surprisingly dark ambience best. I love her most in the scenes where she's negotiating her relationships with the men around her, first with John Barrymore as the two of them, through some of the film's best dialogue, recognize a mirror image in the other, and later with Wallace Beery as they hash out the terms of her "employment." Like everyone in the film, she's grasping desperately for control over something in her life, and like everyone, her control is mostly an illusion. I think the only actor who doesn't nail practically every scene is Lionel Barrymore, who overplays his drunk scenes and is saddled with some painful "you like me, you really like me" lines, but his confrontation with Beery in the bar is one of the film's best moments.

I don't want to slight its technical achievements, either—Nick alluded to the great lighting and Art Deco sets, but I was especially impressed with the camera work, which seems to have recovered from the great-step-backward of Cimarron and recaptured All Quiet on the Western Front's fluidity. Those twin show-offy tracking shots through the lobby are fun, but I especially appreciated that it eschewed the boring pattern of 20-foot-high establishing shots and medium shots of its predecessor, instead valuing those luscious closeups. And I don't want to rewatch even a second of Cimmaron to double-check this, but is this the first of our Best Pictures with an incidental score—not just over the titles, but during dialogue scenes as well?

NATHANIEL: Ah but what hath Grand Hotel wrought in doing so? I love the star mojo in the movie but the closeups are so well lit and performed and it's not always this way. Movies are rarely this careful in lighting now. And the acting... well, there's not always a reason to be cropping out entire bodies and even the tops and bottom of star faces as is the current style. I don't really want to measure the size of an actors pores. I just want to be wowed by screen beauty. Nowadays actors will get full frame treatment even if they're just doing something incidental like ordering food. It dilutes the actual potency of the important closeups. I love long shots and medium shots.

MIKE: The shots in GH really do show us how much has changed. By 1932, the "classic Hollywood look" seems to have been pretty much in place, as demonstrated here, and films made from there until the end of the studio system seemed to have a basic grasp of shot and editing patterns that gave proper weight to various shot sizes (of course I'm totally overgeneralizing). Each type of shot has its place, even the eyebrow-to-chin closeup favored today (and even the handheld shakycam that seems to be the default now), but I wish modern filmmakers thought variation was more important.

NATHANIEL: I hadn't really thought about this in terms of Lord of the Rings but as Nick suggested, the closeups in the third installment don't always pay off. It's one of the reasons I've never sat down to watch the trilogy back to back to back. I fear that after seeing Elijah Wood (bless) worry beatifically in tight closeup 20 times, you've seen all there is to see. And I'm guessing it's a lot more than 20 times if you do the marathon. Would the trilogy have lost some of its magic if we didn't have those year long breaks?

NICK: Oh, we wouldn't want to berate Grand Hotel for its paler (that is, even glossier) imitators any more than we'd want to arraign The Lord of the Rings for all of the Narnias and Golden Compasses and Spiderwicks we've been sloshing through since. If anything, when I see something like Pan's Labyrinth being robustly over-praised and over-Oscared, which never would have happened pre-LOTR, I'm glad to see an under-served genre like fantasy enjoying some benefit of the doubt, even from the AARP—I mean, AMPAS.

I've never done a 12-hour Rings-o-rama, either, Nathaniel, and I agree that the films wouldn't necessarily benefit. I'm guessing a lot of the battle scenes would start to look the same and the big speeches would run together—even within ROTK, this becomes a problem—and I've already made clear that the first installment is, for me, the grandest and the smartest.

MIKE: I think the pacing of the releases was perfect. Closer together, and I'd have overdosed on them; farther apart, and my faulty memory would have required revisits of the previous films (and perhaps forced me to give in to the temptation to watch the overindulgent "extended editions"). Speaking of losing some magic, I found that I was a lot less involved in ROTK watching it on my TV at home. It felt like theatrical viewing is required for something that's shooting for this level of majesty. I found the effects to be less convincing and the sheer blow-you-away scale I remember from seeing it in the theater to be pretty much gone. I still think it's a pretty great film, but its flaws are a lot more visible on the smaller screen (which seems counterintuitive).

NICK: Since I've been a bit stingy with my praise and I know we're all fans, I love the sheer, striving spectacle and the lack of cynicism that Return of the King brought to multiplexes, and I do love almost any BP winner that is such an anomalous pick for Oscar. For that matter, I'm hard-pressed to think of another Best Picture winner that much resembles Grand Hotel, either, in its unique blend of escapism and melancholy, and its successful admixture of dissimilar actors. Who knew that Crawford and Beery could shine in the same movie, and that any scenery could survive with two Barrymores on the premises? Future crazy-quilts of star cameos like some of the 1950s winners don't come anywhere close to what this picture achieves. Grand Hotel and Lord of the Rings aren't perfect, but their strongest elements and their dodgiest imitators confirm how special they are... and though neither would have won my vote, I love that Oscar's frequently lockstep voters appreciated and stood behind them.

Readers, what do you think about serial endings, use and abuse of closeups, Joan Crawford, our neglect of poor Gollum, etc. etc.?

More stuff: Nathaniel's post, Nick's post.

Previously: #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men

Silent Sunday: Don't Change Your Husband (1919)

In the first film Gloria Swanson made with Cecil B. DeMille, a pairing that would produce six films and make Swanson one of the biggest stars of the silent screen, she goes around dressed like a peacock, swathed in Oriental scarves and headdresses. She's a longsuffering wife whose husband is a slob, and when a suave ladykiller starts sniffing around, she falls for it. But the grass is always greener, better the devil you know, etc.—these words of wisdom exist for a reason!

The DVD presentation brings up a common issue, especially when dealing with films that aren't under copyright protection anymore. It's part of Passport Video's Gloria Swanson Collection, and I'll admit that I'm happy to be able to see it at all, but I wish these companies would put a little effort into their presentation. There's no restoration to speak of, I'm convinced the "ending" we see is in fact evidence of missing footage, and, most gallingly, Passport chose to brand the picture with a "Gloria Swanson Collection" logo that never goes away; it sits there like someone spit on the screen.

Read the full review.

Million Dollar Land Grab

It's time for the fourth installment of Best Pictures from the Outside In, wherein Nathaniel, Nick, and I discuss Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby.

That's all I have left, aside from jet lag. Read the conversation.

Rome Part I

I feel like I've been sprinting through a museum, both because my feet hurt like hell and because I've been seeing Rome, the cradle of Western civilization, at a very high rate of speed. We got here late Sunday afternoon and found our way to the home of our friends Jennifer and David, and their children Lee and Isaac. They've spent the past year here and are returning to New York soon.

We spent Monday morning in ancient Rome and the afternoon in the Renaissance. MFAH, Jennifer, Lee, and I went to the Forum and wandered around. I was struck by how close together everything was; much like Chicago's own Milennium Park, where the sculptures are crowded together, forcing people to interact with each other, these monuments were crowded around a public space where everyday people from all over the Empire jostled together. (Yes, I just compared ancient Rome with the finest city in the Midwest.) Again, it was great to have such wonderful tour guides: both MFAH and Jennifer knew quite a bit about what we were seeing, and they were able to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of ancient Rome that Rome, I, Claudius, and Ben-Hur didn't fill. The highlight of the forum area was the house of Augustus, where you can still see original frescoes, or at least the fragments of them that haven't disintigrated yet. Both Jennifer and MFAH had horror stories about the disintigration of ancient artifacts: at Pompeii, there's a sort of crisis underway, as lots of the details that have been left exposed to the elements and to tourists' hands are gone, including some that MFAH's colleague wrote about only two years ago. The park employees were too pushy here: they gave you a set amount of time in each room and then started to usher you to the next. I understand they want to let as many people see it as possible, but a few minutes isn't long enough for more than a cursory look.

Lee and Jennifer left us after this, and MFAH and I went to see the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum. The Colosseum is a lot more impressive from the outside than from the inside; you can't go down into the basement, which is exposed, and although there is a wooden deck built at what would have been the floor level, you can't go out on it. Add to that the fact that the one bunch of seats that are "restored" are in fact completely wrong (there's apparently a lot of bad restoration around, most of it perpetrated under Mussolini and serving Fascist ends), and it's just not all that great. But the Arch of Constantine is amazing. When we were finished with the ancient stuff, we learned a valuable lesson about Rome: never eat lunch at a place that's within view of any ruins. We ate at a place outside the Colosseum, and we paid 15 euros (approximately $21) for what was basically a frozen TV dinner. Easily the worst meal we've ever had while traveling, and for MFAH, who has done significantly more traveling, that's really saying something.

After lunch was St. Peter's basilica, which a good friend called the greatest work of art ever created by man. I can't agree. It's impressive, certainly, but it's just too much. It's overdecorated, overstatued, overbronzed, overpillared, overpilastered, and overcooked. There are individual works of art that are phenomenal, but they're set against a Baroque riot of color and shape; the end result is incomprehensible and tiring. My favorite parts were the ceiling—which was, in fact, designed by Michelangelo instead of the overmannered Bernini—and the Bernini statues set into alcoves in the pilasters lining the nave. These Berninis were great because they were set against a plain background; since you could take them in as individual works, they didn't disappear into the exploding circus of the rest of the building. And of course, Michelangelo's Pieta, set off from visitors' grasping hands by plexiglass, was beautiful, but even more beautiful to me was an unlabeled and unidentified medieval bronze crucifix set along the wal of the Pieta's plastic prison.

Then we headed back to J&D's before heading out en masse to dinner, which was the best dinner so far on this trip: real Neapolitan pizza at an outdoor cafe. I need to rest a moment—I feel lightheaded just thinking about it. We went on a walking tour of the city center, where David, an architect; MFAH, a Renaissance art historian; and Jennifer, who studied art history, provided me with an incredibly detailed and passionate explaination of all the wonderful architecture we were walking by.

Of course not everything can be so wonderful: we may have fried our camera beyond repair; if it's beyond repair, all of the photographs we took of the Forum and St. Peter's are lost forever. It's supposed to function on either 110 or 220 volts, and it's charged without damage before on this trip, but when we plugged it in to recharge this time, there was a spark, and now it won't turn on. We bought a new camera today, and maybe we can get the old one repaired.

Tuesday morning we went to the Borgese museum, which specializes in ancient art but has a pretty nice collection of Renaissance and later periods. There was a special exhibition of Corregio, a minor Italian Renaissance painter. I don't like him: I don't like his fuzzy, insubstantial backgrounds, and I don't like the fact that none of his faces look "right," for lack of a better word. Most of them were rather unconvincing religious paintings, but there were two mythological subjects that both I and MFAH liked. We tend to mostly agree on art, except where we don't. But the highlight here was surprisingly Bernini, whom I didn't like at St. Peter's. Here they had a bunch of incredibly kinetic sculptures of Biblical and mythological scenes, and they really looked like the figures were about to burst out of their marble prisons and run across the room. And because they weren't surrounded by a surfeit of decoration, I could appreciate them as individual works of art. They might have been my favorite things in Rome, but the museum had one more surprise in store: a room full of Corregio's drawings, which were so phenomenal I'm going to buy a coffee table book of them when I get home. If he couldn't paint a face to save his life, he drew some so achingly beautiful that I could have spent the afternoon looking at them.

This afternoon we're shifting gears and going to Dario Argento's World of Horror, a combination shop and museum dedicated to the work of the king of Italian horror films. His films are celebrations of style over substance, of scenes of individual brilliance surrounded by halfhearted plots and burdened by substandard acting, so I think Bernini would approve of our visit, even if Michelangelo might not.

More later—we just got back from walking several hundred miles, and I'm tired.

Silent Sunday: Brandherd (1921)

Brandherd hasn't ever been shown in the United States, at least not since the 1920s, which is a damn shame. Its particular brand of Expressionism is unusual—instead of crazy angles and painted shadows, it uses little scribbles, in chalk or crayon, on everything, to indicate where light and shadow are falling. (Sorry, no stills—I saw it at the Cinematheque Francaise, and I can't locate any online. Wish you could see it. It's really wild.)

Read the full review.

Bergamo Means "Heaven" in Italian

In the sixteenth century, after generations of citizens of the northern Italian city of Bergamo suffered a series of invasions by the French and the Spanish, the Venetians (who were occupying Bergamo when it wasn't being occupied by the French or Spanish) built seventy-foot-thick walls to keep out future invaders. However, they left large gates open throughout the walled city, effectively rendering the barriers useless except to attract tourists. And they came, the tourists, in droves. (This was some time later.) My favorite art historian and I managed to sneak in too. Of course we are not tourists; she wanted to come here to do research on something in a museum, and the fact that the museum is closed and we're here looking at the same things as the tourists does not make us tourists.

We arrived here after an overnight train dropped us in Milan and we transferred to a commuter. Overnight train travel in reality bears absolutely no similarity to what Alfred Hitchcock and others have shown me in countless movies. For one thing, there's no plush dining car, or at least I didn't see one. More importantly, there's no room: we were stuffed into a compartment along with four other people, and the beds, which fold down from the walls, are narrow, hard, uncomfortable shelves so tightly packed together that I couldn't lie on my back because my feet would have touched the luggage rack. We were berth-mates to a gaggle of French high school girls on a camping expedition, so we had to endure their constant chattering, their enormous backpacks that didn't fit into any of the storage spaces, and the inevitable gaggle of chattering teenage boys along on the same school-sponsored camping trip. We waited until they had all moved on to talk loudly in the hall and in neighboring compartments, and we quickly pounced, pulling down the beds and installing ourselves in the top bunks. When the girls returned, they were forced to sleep or at least lie down and chatter. I think they decided on the latter, but I had taken some nighttime sinus medicine, so I was able to sleep fitfully until our arrival in Milan at 5:30 in the morning. We took a quick, surreal trip to the local cathedral (surreal because I think I was still asleep for most of it), which is notable for its triangular facade, and made it back in time for the commuter train to Bergamo, a small city in the north of Italy. After a nap at our hotel, the Golden Fleece (or Lamb), we started exploring.

It was incredibly beautiful there, with winding cobblestone streets too narrow for the cars that drove down them at high speeds, huge stone arches, little shops tucked into the sides of 500-year-old buildings, and hills. Lots of hills. The old city of Bergamo, the one surrounded by the porous walls, sits atop a mountain, and just about every direction is either downhill or uphill. While walking up one of them, we discovered the Church of Saint Erasmus, which, like just about everything else here, is undergoing restoration. The doors were half open, so we edged in, into one of the nicest vacation surprises either of us has ever had. A little old lady interrupted her duties—laying out programs for an upcoming service—and gave us an extended, private tour of the church, including areas that are normally locked away from the eyes of tourists. We wandered around behind the altar as she described the restoration process, the history of the church and the surrounding areas, and other things in Italian, which I do not understand at all. MFAH translated the important stuff, but it was sort of like subtitles on a foreign film: I got the information, but I missed the poetry. She led us down dusty halls, over and under scaffolding, and into the bowels of the building, talking rapidly all the while, until she shepherded us to what I'll call "the treasure room": a small room decorated with exquisitely painted, peeling, unrestored murals, topped by a vaulted ceiling lined with more paintings, and stuffed to the rafters with booty. (Can I call it booty? It would be booty if I were there to steal it. It would have made one hell of a haul for a pirate.) There were fabulous statues and candelabra and various carved and painted and gilded objets d'art, some being restored, some just moved there to get them out of the way of the scaffolding in the rest of the church. We got some wonderful photographs to go with our unforgettable experience.

But we had only a day there, and now we're on a train to Rome. The shouting children got off at the last stop, so it's relatively peaceful now. I'm watching the mountains of Italy roll past the windows, marveling at the ancient, tiny towns perched along rocky cliffs, all roofed with that pretty reddish tile that seems to be the national roofing of Italy, at least the few parts of Italy I've seen. Sometimes we go through miles-long tunnels, and I marvel at the effort involved in linking together cities in a region this mountainous. I'm wondering what we'll do when we get to Rome, where we're staying with a college friend of MFAH's, her husband the architect, and their children. I'm wondering how the show went last night at my theater, where my new minions were on their own for the first time with a 35mm film. I'm wondering whether I'll be ready to go back when I have to depart on Thursday: if four days wasn't enough time in Paris, how can parts of four days be enough in Rome? I guess I'll just have to come back.

(We're in Rome now! More on that later.)

Les Photos

I finally got some photographs uploaded to my Flickr page.

Comment dit-on "exchange rate"?

So let me start by saying that I came thisclose to meeting Mike Leigh, whose new film is opening in Paris soon. I was having lunch with a French critic who had a press conference with Leigh after lunch, followed by a personal interview. She called Leigh's publicist, claiming that she wanted to bring her assistant (moi)—although I'd have been able to assist in exactly nothing—but he said non. Mais non!

Last night was movie night. We walked through the Jardin de Yitzhak Rabin in the Parc de Bercy, which, like most Parisian parks, is exquisitely landscaped and treelined. We watched French people throwing French balls to their French dogs for a while, basically enjoying being in Paris with each other. We had some pretty darned good coffee out of a machine at the Cinémathè Francaise—it's nothing like what you get out of machines in the States—and then watched Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight, which was really good, except when it showed the seams of its multi-year production and its pieced-together-from-five-plays structure. It's among the most beautifully shot things Welles ever did, which is saying something. But I admit I almost fell asleep during the middle portion, and I never fall asleep during movies. After that was Hanns Kobe's Brandherd, aka Torgus, an interesting Expressionist film that they unfortunately played completely silent, i.e., with no musical accompaniment. That's flat-out the most unnatural way to watch a "silent" film, which were always, always, always accompanied by music. It was an excellent restoration, which makes me wonder why they didn't provide some kind of music. You'd think the French, who invented cinephilia, would know better. But it was well worth watching anyway, for its unique take on the grotesque set designs of the Expressionist movement. More on that this Sunday.

If all there was to Paris was great movie theaters, I'd still be glad I came, but just walking around is like being in paradise. (Except when my feet hurt.) I have the world's best tour guide in MFAH, who has lived here in the past and can tell me interesting stories about various little shops and cobblestoned streets she used to frequent; today she introduced me to the world's greatest falafel sandwich at L'As de Fallafel ("The Ace of Falafel"), which is endorsed by MFAH, Lenny Kravitz, and me. And if I ask about a sculpture or a carved cornice or whatever, the odds are pretty good that she can explain its significance. I'm scheming to turn this into a money-making venture so we can somehow stay over here, but don't tell her I said that. Today she had to go to a conference, so I played tourist by myself, but during her break we went shopping for DVDs (I finally have Bigger Than Life!) and ate the aforementioned falafel. Yeah, I went to a movie today too: Peter Collinson's entrancingly unusual WW2 film The Long Day's Dying (1968). Tonight we're going out for Vietnamese food, which is supposed to be excellent in Paris, and then we're going for ice cream. Tomorrow is the Louvre, then we leave. I don't want to go, and if Bergamo and Rome in Italy weren't the next stops on our trip, I might be pretty disappointed.

Je Prends le Croque Monsieur

This morning I bought cheese at a cheese store in French, and then I asked directions to the grocery store in French, after which I purchased salami and lettuce in French. Dear readers, I've gone native. Soon I will be wearing shirts with particularly wide stripes and employing exaggerated hand gestures when I talk. Hell, I already watched a classic American film late at night in a hole-in-the-wall revival house. I might as well order my beret and tear up my return ticket now.

Yesterday we discovered that the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, so we walked, and walked, and walked, down the Champs Elysées (prompting me to sing the chorus of that song "Aux Champs Elysées" that we learned the first week of French I, and MFAH's resulting look of confusion—doesn't everyone sing that over here?) toward the Arc de Triomphe until we got close enough to see it clearly as we dashed across the street, dodging scooters and large trucks. Then we backtracked to the Musée d'Orsay, which contains 19th-century French art as well as thousands of tourists, all of whom want to take a picture of ma and pa and the little one in front of Van Goughs and Monets and not so much Delacroixes and Cézannes, which was nice because I prefer the latter and was happy to leave ma and pa to all those haystacks and windmills. Buy the god damned postcard, people! It will look better anyway. And put your video camera away! When you get home and never watch the footage again, you may not realize that you didn't really experience the musuem at all. I started off my tour through the museum approving of the policy, so different than in American art museums, that allows photography, and ended by deliberately walking through people's shots because I was so sick of standing to the side while dozens of flashes went off.

Then we had a rather expensive lunch, where I learned the delights of the Croque Monsieur, which is ham and cheese on toast, although those simple words don't do this tasty snack justice. We rested our aching feet (well, I rested my aching feet and MFAH pitied me my old-before-their-time insteps) and deliberated whether we'd attempt Notre Dame or just go home for a nap. We decided to do both. Notre Dame is pretty amazing, he said banally. It's so huge, and the ceiling is so high up there, and the builders in the 12th and 13th centuries didn't have calculators or cranes, but they managed to create this stupendous monument to their faith. It's almost enough to make an atheist genuflect. Again, there were also thousands of tourists using flash photography, despite the fact that a flash is but an annoyance to those around you when your target is the chancel several hundred yards away.

Then it was nap time. One of my favorite things about this city is that no matter where you are, you can pretty much get where you're going in less than an hour. The trains are everywhere, they run constantly, and as long as you have a decent map, you can transfer with ease from one line to another, arriving back at your apartment with plenty of time for a doze. Après nap, we had dinner with Agnès et Ralph, two art historians (I think) MFAH knows, at Japanese restaurant that thankfully was not a sushi restaurant. I had a noodle soup, which I failed to eat elegantly because I still can't figure out why anyone would want to eat noodles with chopsticks. Then we took part in that most holy of Parisian experiences, the café crème in a sidewalk café somewhere along the same cobblestone streets where perhaps Hemingway and Sartre once sat drinking café crème. (But not together.) And then it was off to the cinema for what is now my favorite Michelangelo Antonioni film, because I liked it quite a bit, whereas I actively hated The Passenger and thought Blow-Up incredibly overrated. But Zabriskie Point was a compelling snapshot of the late 1960s, a strikingly beautiful film, and fodder for one of those fun "did she or didn't she" conversations on the train on the way back to the apartment. More on that later.

Today it's lunch with a Parisian movie critic, followed by a trip to the holy of holies—the Cinémathèque Francaise—for a screening of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight and later a screening of Brandherd, a German silent film so unknown to the United States that it as yet lacks five votes on the IMDB. Perhaps I will be #5.

Je Suis Dans Paris

Nobody here will speak French to me. I got off the plane prepared, even if misconjugated, to buy my train ticket to our room at the University of Chicago Paris Center, which is only a few blocks from the new Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris. "Je voudrais acheter un billet à Chatelet," I said to the woman at the ticket counter, "et prochaine à la quatorze à la Bibliothèque Francois Mitterand." Yeah, it's probably not perfect, but it's pretty darned good, considering the fact that I haven't spoken French since my four years in high school, which was a really long time ago. (Fourteen years!) But she said "That will be eight forty," and after I had my ticket and said "merci," she said an exaggerated "bye!" As soon as people see that I'm an American, they switch to English. Which is nice, but I'd really like to practice my French.

I found our apartment, which overlooks the Seine, relatively easily, although when I asked a couple of people for directions coming out of the train station, they pointed me in the wrong direction. But because water tends to flow downhill, I decided that rivers should also be downhill, and I was able to locate the Paris Center. Did I mention that it overlooks the Seine? I'm looking at it right now! I was wide awake and full of energy when I arrived, so we planned an afternoon of cultural events: to the Bibliothèque so MFAH could get a €35 library card et prochaine to the Cinemathèque du Quartier Latin so we could take part in that French national pastime of watching old American movies on the big screen. We were going to see Richard Brooks's antiwestern The Last Hunt, mais il y a des chaises très confortable dans the lobby of the Bibliothèque, where we had to wait for a half hour while the IT department repaired the cash registers, and I was pretty much out. We stumbled—well, I stumbled, she supported—back to the room for a two-hour nap.

But after that I was wide awake and full of energy. I still am, and it's 4:42 in the morning here. I really should be asleep. Maybe the problem is that I've had a gallon of caffeine since I got here, from the Coke Zéro MFAH surprised me with in the apartment to the Coke Zéro they sold at the sandwich shop to the café we had after dinner with Chad the American Studies Guy and his mother. But those who know me personally know that I always drink a gallon of caffeine, and it doesn't usually trouble my sleep, so maybe it's just jet lag. Tomorrow it's tourist time: we're going to the Louvre and Notre Dame, so perhaps I should try this sleeping thing again.

Silent Sunday: Salome (1923)

Alla Nazimova's titanic flop Salome is positively florid, with sets and costumes after Beardsley and acting somewhere between Stanislavski and Pavlova. It's really weird, for lack of a better word, and interesting because it's like nothing I've ever seen before. It's too bad it's hampered by a painfully glacial pace.

Read the full review.

I'm going to Paris and Rome! I'm hoping to post some travelogues like I did during my trips to England and Southeast Asia (and other exotic places like Michigan and Maine). And I'll be participating in the fourth installment of Best Pictures from the Outside In, this time discussing Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby.

"We try not to be killed/racists, but sometimes we are."

The third installment of our trip to the middle of Oscar's top category is up over at Nick's Flick Picks. This time, we address Crash's deficiencies and All Quiet on the Western Front's general greatness. Despite what you've heard, Crash is not the worst film to ever win Best Picture. (You'll have to wait almost six months to hear my nomination for that prize.) And I think that I wasn't exactly fair to it in some respects in my original review: Nick opened it up to me quite a bit when he suggested that it's "a Eugene O'Neill-ish exercise in forcing characters to speak their subconscious thoughts aloud." But on second viewing, even if I can credit it for not attempting to be completely realistic, I can't credit its substandard cinematic qualities, and I still can't credit its reductive ideas about race.

The second or third time around was still kind to All Quiet on the Western Front, which currently sits at #14 on my Top 100 of All Time. That list needs a major overhaul—perhaps even defenestration—but when and if I get around to patching its leaks and throwing the bums out, this film is staying, at least in the top half.

But that's enough from me, because I'm running around ineffectually attempting to prepare for my upcoming European vacation. Have at it!