"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Tuesday, April 25
From The Mouths Of Babes
So last night the wife and I were watching Shaolin Soccer (not a bad flick, though the wife never warmed up to it) while the 2-year-old Powell ran around shooting darts from a balloon pump. When he pointed this thing at my wife's head I stopped him sternly. "No!" I said. "Not at her face!"
"Okay, daddy," he said, smiling. "You face?"
Maybe you had to see how he asked if he could shoot me in the face, but the veneer of suave sophistication coupled with the promise of violence makes me think he's got a future as a Bond villain.
So Long, Farewell, Goodbye. I saw Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in a long time (over ten years - I hadn't met The Wife yet). Coincidentally, it was Roger Ebert's classic review this past Sunday.
I know many fans of Chandler didn't like this movie, but I thought it was squarely in the Chandlerite tradition. Elliot Gould's Marlowe is a man out of his time, as Ebert suggests, and its illustrated in the movie by his ancient car and his devotion to his suit and tie (contrasted with his clothing-optional neighbors).
But I thought he was more than a throwback. This Marlowe is presented as a buffoon, but this is mostly a facade, a clown mask. Putting down the world with an endless series of wisecracks is the only way he can fight back. He'll never be richer, or stronger, or more powerful than the people he deals with. His own friend calls him a "born loser". So he makes it all a joke, but it's strictly gallows humor.
He also seethes with resentment. He lives by a code and watches those who don't get ahead, and it pisses him off. Even people he trusts take advantage of him.
Most of the other performances were good, too. Jim Bouton was just right as Marlowe's old buddy Terry Lennox, who may have killed his wife. Nina van Pallandt was terrific as a friend of the Lennoxes who hires Marlowe to spring her husband from a rehab facility. Best of all is Sterling Hayden, whose turn as an alchoholic writer, once quite a man but now just a shell, reminded me of another fictional writer: Abraham Treahearn from Crumley's The Last Good Kiss. Which is sort of appropriate since, in many ways, that's a rewrite of Chandler's original.
