Friday, May 31, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond 1960
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Made on the cheap this is an
entertaining if somewhat fictionalized
look at the life of Legs Diamond that was directed by Budd Boetticher who is
best known for his minimal elegiac westerns that he made with Randolph Scott.
As I said it was made cheaply and it shows in the back lot sets and the on
again off again look of the period, which takes place in the 1920’s but has the
look and feel of the late 50’s in style, sets and costumes. Cast as Diamond the nasty and unfeeling
gangster is the very handsome but wooden Ray Danton who does the best he can
with the role considering his limitations as an actor. The film opens with some stock footage of the
skyline of New York City and then we are plopped down in generic New York City
sets where Legs (still called Jack) lands in the big city with his ill brother
played by a very young Warren Oates. Before long Jack is hatching a plot to
steal some diamonds with the help of a naïve and unsuspecting dance instructor
played by Karen Steele who was a regular in Budd’s Western’s and gives a nice
little performance here considering what she had to work with. Jack soon finds
himself in lockup and manages on a jailhouse visit from the sweet Karen to
smooth dance with her out on a parole and into a gig as a dancing duo headlining
at the Hotsy Totsy Club where one night Jack spots Arnold Rothstein and hatches
a plan to maneuver his way into his gang. Jack is soon working his way up the
ladder and Arnold gives him the nickname Legs because of his dancing chops, but
in reality he got the nickname for his ability to snatch and run' in the
garment district. Legs is soon making it
with Rothstein’s double crossing mistress played by the legendary starlet
Elaine Stewart, and at the same time making enemies with some of the other boys
in the gang especially the really good pock marked Joseph Ruskin who plays Matt
Moran. There are a couple of memorable sequences in the movie especially the
one where Diamond mows down 3 would be assassins from a tenement window and
Boetticher shows them laid out in the street which makes for a well known still
that usually pops up in books on the gangster crime genre. The other well known
sequence is a clever montage like series of scenes of Diamond and Steele (who
he finally married not out of love but to prevent her from testifying against
him) on a vacation in Europe to avoid the heat coming down on him that consists
of the two of them bored watching movie newsreels in various capitals that show
the changes in the criminal underworld including the downfall of Mayor Jimmy
Walker and the imprisonment of Al Capone for tax evasion. Diamond who shows
more and more discomfort watching these newsreels realizes that it’s time to
get back home but its too late as the crime world has changed and Legs is a now
a relic of the past with a price on his head. I don’t need to say that it all
ends badly for Legs and fade to black. The film boasts better than it deserves
cinematography by the great Lucien Ballard whose long career ranged from B
movies to unaccredited work on several of Von Sternberg films to his long
collaboration with Sam Peckinpah. Also of note is the music score by Leonard Rosenmann who is most known for his
beautiful scores for East of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause and the costumes by
Howard Shoup who received an Oscar nomination for his designs. Also in the good
cast are a bushel full of great character actors including Jesse White, Simon
Oakland, Frank DeKova and Sid Melton and look for a very young Dyan Cannon in
her first movie role.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Heaven’s Gate 1980
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Sunday, May 19, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Jack Goldstein at The Jewish Museum
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Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Photography and the American Civil War
I saw this exhibition today at the Met, and I found it to be a little too lttle for my tastes. The show is made up of 200 photographic images, most of them small and intimate that were really hard for me to focus in on. Maybe I need better glasses. The lighting is dark and gloomy as befitting this kind of an exhibition and the look of it was over designed. The walls of some of the galleries are covered in canvas to simulate the look and feel of the kind of tents that were used to house the troops, too cute and clever for words. There are lots of small wallet sized portraits, tintypes and daguerreotypes that are presented in upright positions in glass cases, the better to make them look and feel like paper dolls ready to salute us. To be sure there are many touching and sad images included, and I was surprised by the minimal use of photographs of the dead on the battlefields. However the show makes up for this by presenting some really ghastly photographs that a doctor documented of the horribly wounded soldiers that made me gasp out loud. A sign warning of these images should be posted to let mothers and fathers with small children know what they are about to see. Many of the photographs are familiar to me, having seen them reproduced over and over again in books and in Ken Burns magnificent series “The Civil War” which gave me a more powerful and visceral experience of this dreadful war than this exhibition did. And no I did not take in the Punk show, instead as I usually do at the Met I just wandered around and found myself in the magnificent African wing, The Gallery for the Art of Native North America and the Oceanic Art collection which is housed in what has one of the most spectacular spaces in this or any other museum. And finally I saw the small but beautiful Paul Klee show-Path To Abstraction which I loved. I took lots of photographs but the ones posted here are from the Met's website.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Saturday, May 11, 2013
At the Galleries
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The two Jeff Koons extravaganzas now on at David Zwirner and Gagosian Galleries will no doubt satisfy his admirers and collectors for they are more of the same. I am not an admirer of his, I find his work (and these two fun house exhibitions) to be vapid and dull. The works are vulgar in subject matter and techniques and big in size, so the idiots buying these things feel that they are getting their millions worth. I don't want to dwell on these shows, instead I would like to mention the shows on now that are worthwhile and intriguing to me as an artist. The best show on right now is the wonderful show by Richard Serra of his early work also at one one the Zwirner galleries (there are so many of them out there). These are big pieces yet many of them are graceful and delicate. I especially love how he used materials that we think of as hard and static and molded and twisted them into sculptures that breathe. The main big gallery is filled with 18 of his sculptures covering the walls and floors, and the back gallery has his famous lead prop pieces that are beautiful and scary at the same time. They weigh tons. Upstairs is a nice show of the late artist Blinky Palermo's delicate small drawings, that are quick and loose and I liked them. Other shows that I liked are the two Ellsworth Kelly exhibits of his clear clean and beautiful minimal shaped canvas's that he is known for. Anselm Kiefer's very big and overwhelming paintings of flowers that the press release says are photographs that he painted on, these are mostly dense and dark, there are also two weak sculptures that he should have left out, they do nothing but distract from the paintings which are after all sculptural in their own right. His work usually gets a lot of flack but I always find his stuff exciting. Also a small show of paintings by Beauford Delaney whose life was rough and tumble at Levis Fine Art, Ugo Rondinone's big rough figures made out of stacked blocks of stone that fill the Gladstone gallery, you can't help but be impressed by these, although some might find them facile and repetitive which they are but I still liked the show. A nice but uneven show by the late Victor Pesce at Elizabeth Harris, and a show of Phillip Taaffe's very colorful and decorative paintings at Luhring Augustine. Also a small show of George Sugarman's at Gary Snyder. I've always liked his work and wish it was a bigger exhibition. And finally an interesting large show of Benny Andrews at Michael Rosenfeld, some of the paintings are a little too "expressionistic" but still this is a show worth seeing. I sure I left out some shows, and I promised myself that I would not mention the many shows that I didn't like, other than the Koons.
Friday, May 10, 2013
The R Train
I hate the subway, and I particularly hate the R line, which
is the train that services my Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. I live near
the next to the last stop (or the first stop depending if you’re going to the
city or coming back from the city. I’m a native New Yorker, Brooklyn born and
raised and when I was growing up we always referred to Manhattan as the city,
we went to the city to go to a movie or to shop, and we never said anything
else. The R line runs from the south end of Brooklyn, near the great Verrazano Bridge,
which I see every morning when I leave my house, it looms over 3rd
avenue, and is one of the reasons why I decided to move here, that and the
sound of the fog horns on rainy foggy nights that I love listening to. I live 3
blocks from the water. The R line runs all the way to Queens. It slowly makes
it way up 4th avenue through Sunset Park, Downtown Brooklyn, Lower
Manhattan, Soho the Village, midtown and then on to Queens. I could change for
an express train at 59th street in Brooklyn but I would never get a
seat and besides all the stops that I usually need are all local, and since I
get on at 86th street which is the next to the last or first stop
(please see above) I always get my favorite seat. I know exactly where the
train will stop so I can hop on and get my two seater, and I always take the seat on the
right side so I’m protected from people pressing their fat asses and backs in
the opening that is on the left side. Sometimes there is someone sitting in my
favorite seat when I get on at 86th street and I get all sullen and
mad. Sometimes I get lucky and no one sits next to me for most if not always the
entire trek into the city, but not always. I dread it when an overweight person
will try to squeeze their full figures in the narrow space next to me, and
sometimes when this happens I will be so uncomfortable that I get up in a huff
giving the overweight man/woman a dirty and glaring look as I move directly to
the two seater for disabled people directly across from them. Of course most of
the riders never pay no mind that these seats are for people with disabilities
and they will plop down in them, so I have no qualms about sitting there since
I am 66 years old. Its a long ride into the city as the R train toddles along
at a snail’s pace. The N train is nice because it runs over the bridge and you
get some spectacular views of lower Manhattan that the tourists love. After the
early days of 9-11 the R train had to
also run over the bridge and we would gaze at the missing space and the dust
and haze that still hung over the lower part of my city. The subway car would
always get silent until we went over the bridge and back into the tunnel, it
was a daily memorial service. I always have to have something to read, and
since moving back to Brooklyn I now do most of my reading on the subway. I’ve
read what seems like 100’s of books, newspapers and magazines, and Heaven help
me if I don’t have something to read to pass the time during this long and
boring subway ride. Sometimes I don’t feel like reading and I will put on my
sunglasses and stare at my fellow passengers, hoping some hubba hubba guy will
be sitting across from me preferably with legs spread wide and sometimes I will
carefully and Unobtrusively snap a few pictures of my
fellow passengers. I hate the ones who
eat on the train, the smells of their friend egg sandwiches or McDonalds
turning my stomach. I also don’t care much for the women who wear lots of cheap
perfume. Once a woman reeking sat next to me, and I was starting to feel ill
from the smell. She noticed my condition and asked me if her perfume was
bothering me, yes I said struggling to get the words out as my throat
constricted and my eyes started tearing. Sorry she said and got up to find another seat
which I thought was very considerate of her. I won’t go into my feelings for
the nail bitters and the nose pickers just use your imagination. I’ve always hated the subways even when I was
a kid. I use to have a close friend who no longer lives here, but when he
visits usually in the spring he will spend a day of his vacation just riding the subways, I think he’s
nuts.