Norm Macdonald (1959-2021)

 The Supreme Master of Comedy

Norm Macdonald died today after "a long battle with cancer," which "battles" he has an incredible routine about. Jake Fogelnest expressed the sentiment that this couldn't be true and instead we must hunt down his assassins. He was my favorite comic besides Louis CK, and he too was an auteur. I'll save the definition of that, though it will be obvious. I've never seen such an outpouring of grief on Twitter for anyone, and it's fair to say that, breaking my rule about the collective first-person assumption, we loved Norm. He moved me to tears of laughter so many times since the early '90s. My best friend and I had a wall in our senior-year apartment at college dedicated to the kings and queens (not enough queens, in 1998-99) of comedy; Norm had the biggest inkjet print-out. So many bits of his are immortalized on YouTube — you can go down a proverbial rabbit-hole to explore his work, which I urge. These include every iteration of his podcast, audio and video, JASH and Netflix. My favorite writer, William Faulkner, was his as well, and that of Conan O'Brien, on whose shows Norm unleashed a large percentage of his most devastating (a word used often today upon people learning of his death) comic bits. If you've been on Twitter today you know about many of them already — none perhaps so devastating as the Carrot Top put-down. This is not a particularly insightful post, and as Norm said on his final David Letterman piece, I neither have any "truck with the sentimental." But I'd like to share here what is for me his masterpiece: the "Dirty Johnny" joke which he shared on his Internet show a couple years ago.

This is Norm Macdonald's Dirty Johnny joke.

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Chungking Jungle (aka Chungking Express)

Every Possible Way

Wong Kar-wai's Chung-Hing Sam Lam [Chungking Jungle, aka Chungking Express, 1994/2019] (before the 2019 restoration an onscreen title in English announced "Chung King Express") is a film that can't be broken down in a traditional critical sense. It radiates the feeling of longing: a pop song. Faye Wong's rendition of The Cranberries' "Dreams," and the fetishistic return throughout to The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'," are touchstones that will forever mark the viewer of this first masterpiece of WKW, a faux anthology picture made of two stories, non-overlapping, that capture a moment in time (Wong exalts the fleeting moment-become-memory from film to film) when Hong Kong reached a cultural high-water-mark before the hand-over to mainland rule mere years later. 

For all its rushes there's something strangely melancholy about the film. I feel the same way about Days of Being Wild. Does that yearning feeling of 'those wonderful varied years' (the Chinese title of In the Mood for Love) come undissipated at the moment of release, say, the recognition that Tony Leung and Faye Wong love one another, and if so, why should this be? The film wants to have it two ways at once — perhaps the seed of the idea on Wong's part to break it up into a diptych. (Fallen Angels was originally to have supplied additional stories to the Chungking anthology.) It lends speed to the proceedings — two medium-length works back to back, perhaps a kind of corrective from the prolonged shoot on Ashes of Time, from which Chungking Express represented a respite! Wong's characters are always running a race against speed. (Kaneshiro rejects that a race is equivalent to jogging; this exercise should be done in private.) The 1 May 1994 expiration date on the cans of Del Monte pineapples looms; not only is (real-world pop singer) Takeshi Kaneshiro calling through the void to a woman, his missing May, he's also rushing to acquire as many of these expired cans as he's still able before they disappear to landfills — May-Day, his birthday. ("If someone could be canned, would they also have expiration dates?") Criss-cross: His double is the cool and conscientious Tony Leung, a police officer like himself; the 'cleaning burglar' (and real-world pop singer) Faye Wong's is drug-ring organizer Brigitte Lin done up in a blonde wig that updates the American 1940s femme fatale and predates Lynch's Laura Elena Harring. She carves her way through the improbable knots of the Chungking Jungle, that is Chungking Mansions (in that very Asian-specific sense of the word, i.e., clustered apartments, though not quite the upper-middle-class or upper-class manshon of Japan), and it's as though she owns the place... There's much to be said about this film but observations come in scoops. You can watch it five times in a row. There are two Mays — the one he loves and the other suggested to him at Midnight Express. Paul Thomas Anderson's new film is titled Licorice Pizza. •

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Other writing about Wong Kar-wai at Cinemasparagus:

Mong Kok Carmen / As Tears Go By [1988]

Aa fei zing zyun [True Story of a Hooligan] / Days of Being Wild [1990]

Chung-Hing Sam Lam [Chungking Jungle] [aka Chungking Express] [1994]

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La fille de l'eau

 Renoir No. 1

(Prefatory note: If you're watching this in the recent Kino Blu-ray edition [or stream] made from the 4K restoration, I personally suggest turning off the volume on the Antonio Coppola score, and opting instead for any other accompaniment you might enjoy — Coppola's cheery piano-plunks don't synch so well with the tone of the film, in my opinion...)

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"The caress of foliage in a boat with a friend." As quoted in Nick Pinkerton's audio commentary on the new Kino edition, that's the feeling that Jean Renoir wanted to convey in this his first film, La fille de l'eau [The Girl of the Water, 1925] (the French title is also a pun on "le fil de l'eau," i.e., "the water's line," that is "the current"). (The film has circulated for years in English-language territories and now again on the 2021 Kino release as "Whirlpool of Fate.") In some ways it's the primeval Renoir sentiment. Was it Bazin or Truffaut who said that Renoir is like a cork floating atop the water?

Strolling along a towpath with a horse led by reins, a young girl, Gudule (Catherine Hessling, Renoir's love and muse at the time), guides a barge through a canal. Moments hence, before the dramatic nighttime recovery of her father's body inexplicably gone overboard in the water (one of two odd disappearances here), the film is clearly legible as a precursor to Jean Vigo's supreme 1934 L'Atalante, what with Uncle Jeff (Pierre Philippe), as though ploddingly underscoring the principles of Relativity, walking the length of the drifting barge while the background appears to remain stationary. Jeff (spelling in deliberate English according to the French intertitles) is the father's brother, a brutish incestuous uncle, who becomes the grand poobah after the burial of his sibling Marc, on the conclusion of which ritual he enters a nearby saloon to hold court in a scene mettait en scène like the early reelers by Arbuckle and Keaton. He will terrorize Gudule as the film progresses. In the meantime, the barge is put up for sale by the "Justice Authority," represented by a character resembling Harold Lloyd — one internal-half of whom is Wallace Stevens during working hours in Hartford.

(Sidenote 1: There's un fil de l'eau that stretches from Renoir's La fille de l'eau, to Vigo's L'Atalante, to Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, and on to Carax's Annette of this year.)

(Sidenote 2: Previous editions of La fille de l'eau on DVDs from StudioCanal and Lionsgate carried a 70-minute version; this new restoration might add some missing elements, and also elongates the runtime due to a different frame-speed, so that it plays at 83 minutes.)

Renoir's picture uses every trick in the silent-film-cabinet, in two sequences especially: Uncle Jeff's attempted rape of Gudule; and Gudule's dream sequence. 

First the former: Matted shot of Jeff's eyes on his niece. Close-up of Gudule's face out-of-focus as Jeff closes in. Rapid cuts (intercutting with the barking dog who senses alarm from the barge deck) as Jeff beats Gudule for refusing his advance. Gudule is saved by a passer-by on the towpath and escapes to shore... while the passer-by shares a chuckle with Jeff... Down with the patriarchy or what?

Soon upon her escape la Fouine ("The Weasel") (Maurice Touzé) spots her from up in a tree ("le garçon de l'arbre" as opposed to "la fille de l'eau") where he says he's "hunting." Human beings cannot give up their familiar animality, at least here in the countryside, where la Fouine takes caravan-residence with a mother? grandmother? an aunt? in any case someone named la Roussette ("The Bat") (Henriette Moret).

Picking up from the paragraph before the above: we also have the silent Gag exploited, as M. Raynal (Georges Térof), automobile-owner-of-the-village, leans back on a precarious balcony rail, not paying any heed to the would-be-imminent catastrophe, as he gives high marks before the tenants of a building he owns in town. Raynal's son Georges (Harold Lewigstone) is neither to be confused with Georges Térof nor The Weasel la Fouine nor the rich farmer, Justin Crépoix (Pierre Champagne) — he of the noble rich, who breaks up a dispute between la Fouine and a bicyclist. (Gudule's dog knocked the latter over.) —

— What happens to Justin after this scene? —

Anyway. There's not just a fire. There's "a Gypsy attack!" No, these hayfires are — What was that again?

They were set by la Fouine out of vengeance for the treatment of his assistant and lovely 'older sister.'

Raynal's offer to use his auto to quell the fires is "naturally rejected" particularly because the arson is... ten yards away from the lot. He marches out with the firemen nevertheless — more courage in the realm of the haute-bourgeoises, to which Renoir would attest to the end, in all relevant exceptions that proved the rule. A tracking shot across the pompiers' faces.

Pierre Renoir, Jean's brother and so Pierre-Auguste's son, appears among the fire-dousers with a scythe.

Incredible shot: Hessling will walk into the frame from the left — a pure provocation, an amateur entrance; the camera's already locked for this movement. 

The most virtuosic portion of the film involves Gudule's nightmare sequence in the forest rain when she's struck by fever: double-exposure; slow motion; blown-out film; animation lightning bolts; backwards trick photography; 'appearance' (out-of-nowhere) cuts; superimpositions; camera tilts for SFX to make figures 'walk on walls'; tricks of scale (the lizard wandering the corridor); distorted images (via reflections in a mirrored sphere); 'flight' accomplished by rear projection and superimposition...

End of Tale: Gudule is taken by Georges to the Raynals to convalesce. On her way to the market she's robbed by wooden-clogged Uncle Jeff; he extorts her again, Georges overhears, they brawl, Jeff gets knocked downstream...

A film fabricated of water and clay, spun, spun like a ceramic. •

Other films by Jean Renoir covered at Cinemasparagus:

La fille de l'eau [The Girl of the Water, 1925]

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