John Cassavetes - C or D

I got a hold of Johnny Staccato and love him in that short lived series.

...and yes, GREAT in the Tempest!

i was just gonna say he was good in tempest

Maybe it is finally time for this thread to take off: TS Seymour Cassel vs Lou Castel

I like Husbands OK, esp that Falk monologue that ends w/ "Badminton, that's a helluva game."

I thought of The Tempest too. I haven't seen it, but those five films would seem to have the acting end of it covered, Incubus notwithstanding. (When the three of them start shooting hoops in the gym, I got the definite feeling that Cassavetes and Falk were pretty decent players.)

Peter Falk is great in Husbands.

Am I the only one who sings "Panic In Detroit" with the words "looks a lot like Ben Gazzara"?

^^^ yes

Ben Gazzara and Debussy to a disco beat.

Never can figure out what the next line should be.

Chinese Bookie and Faces are probably my faves.

Cassavetes' improvisations are more on point than his scripted material.

We have have discussed this upthread but it's not true that Shadows was improvised. The title card that says so is pure self-mythologizing. I can't remember who said it but one of the actors was like "No way could I come up with lines like that on my own."

Bookie (Short Version), Opening Night and Love Streams are the ones I go back to most

Mikey and Nicky was impressive. I mean, not the third best film of the decade, which I think is where Stanley Kauffmann once ranked it, but for me it's been the best thing in the series so far. Parts of it felt cribbed from Mean Streets, but May supposedly wrote a version of the script as far back as 1954, so maybe not. Joyce Van Patten was great in her one scene as Nicky's wife. M. Emmet Walsh as the bus driver was amusing. Kind of amazing to think that it was directed by a woman in 1976. I've got to see A New Leaf.

A couple of more posts, and I will leave Cassavetes and this thread in peace. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie tonight, and I thought it was good. Slow, but without the interminable scenes and the occasional hysteria of some of the others. Good character study. I got the feeling that, after being battered around by Kael and Simon and some others, Gazzara was there as a surrogate for Cassavetes: beseiged on all sides, but trying to keep everything together and do right by his unorthodox extended family. Tim Carey was typically weird; Azizi Johari, whose name I shouldn't know but do, was good too, but enough about my bilious private life. James Quandt, who programs a lot of what the Cinematheque shows, was in front of us, and I heard him say this before the film started (I'm an inveterate eavesdropper): "I have a problem with his so-called purchase on reality." That killed me.

It's very sad that someone like me who would die to watch these Cassavettes movies on the big screen, instead has to read someone else take the directors seat with him.

I read that line earlier from JacobSanders, but quickly and didn't get the full gist of it. Good putdown, but...aren't you essentially taking the director's seat anytime you criticize a film? Earlier in the thread you wrote this: "But I am rarely critical of most films I watch. Film is the one medium I turn my brain off and just enjoy where the director wants to take me." I don't have a problem with anyone who feels that way, but the idea of just accepting whatever a director wants to give me is completely foreign to me.

i think too much has been made of cassavetes' "realism" without realizing the lengths he goes to to present a completely subjective emotional presentation ... the repetitions and tedium, the small, murmured lines and confessions, outbursts and epiphanies ... these define the shape of emotional life.

"present presentation" ... now I'm caught in it

Meant to say that Tim Carey's "opiates are the religion of the masses" is worthy of Norm Crosby.

I sort of contradicted myself with regards to stuff I wrote on another thread (Tree of Life?), where we got into the idea of "immersing" yourself in a film. To clarify: when I go into a film, it has to win me over before I start letting down my guard. How much I'm ready to "just enjoy where the director wants to take me," as JacobSanders wrote, is directionally proportional to how effectively it draws me in. So yes, if a film has completely drawn me in and I'm loving it, I'm sure my brain shuts down a little bit too, and I let stuff go that I'd question in a film I'm not enjoying.

Stayed for The Dirty Dozen last night, and thought the first half was terrific, before it got bogged down in the two big action set-pieces that were well executed but familiar. I was very happy that 17% of the Dozen was Greek.

I'm sorry Clemenza, that remark was unnecessary. I'm just not very critical of film as a whole. There are movies I lose interest in and don't like, but most often I like 90% of what I watch. I close my eyes during trailers so when I watch a movie I'll be surprised. I like surprises.

bunch of these expire on netflix streaming 8/3. just watched 'killing of a chinese bookie'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvhFsCpfrWw

XD

: )

absolutely love cassavetes despite all the "flaws"

!!!!!!

??????

I'm done--I won't have John Cassavetes to kick around anymore. No problem about your post, Jacob. I'm lucky I get to see so much where I am.

I held off posting till I saw my final two films: Minnie and Moskowitz, and today Opening Night. The first was tough. Rowlands was good, but it felt like two hours of Seymour Cassell yelling. He was a beacon of normalcy in the other films, so that was a surprise. I thought Opening Night was pretty good up till opening night--somewhat farfetched (wouldn't they have fired Rowlands fairly quickly?), but interesting and low-key like Chinese Bookie. And then it was nuts.

In the end, I'm going to think of him like Captain Beefheart. CB's music is not for me, but I'm aware of how much he influenced Wire and Sonic Youth and lots of stuff I do love. Ditto Cassavetes--his influence looking ahead was all over these films. Even in Opening Night, in the frenzy as they left the theatre early in the film, there was an shot--the girl placing her hands on the car window--that Scorsese copied exactly in King of Comedy.

but it felt like two hours of Seymour Cassell yelling.

haha i watched faces last night and i half liked it and half found it tortuous cuz it was 2 hrs of drunk ppl cackling @ stupid shit

shadows is great

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2714/4220045140_817548d6a0_o.jpg

Mikey and Nicky? (Cassavetes looks older than in Husbands.) I liked Shadows, and liked seeing Ben Carruthers turn up in The Dirty Dozen.

Just got done w/the "Johnny Staccato" complete series box--goddamn what a tv show! Kind of amazed it got made in '59-'60. Heavy noir influence, with a great feel for genre outer limits.

Brooklyn retro of the acting and directing:

http://www.bam.org/film/2013/cassavetes

saw the 108-minute cut of ...Chinese Bookie. Admired about a quarter of it. Cassavetes and I don't mix -- and I've tried.

try the Elaine May version!

Elaine May version?

i love that cassavetes' favorite director was frank capra.

Big Trouble playing this weekend in NYC. I'll finally cover the Falk-Arkin diptych.

Just read the Ray Carney BFI monograph on Shadows, after watching the movie for the first time. Carney confirms what Tracer Hand said way upthread and a lifetime ago, that the second, longer version (the one that's in circulation today) was almost entirely scripted, although the film did initially have its roots in an improvisation.

I like the fact that Cassavetes would constantly rework his movies, so that a number of them - Shadows, Chinese Bookie, Husbands - exist (or existed) in markedly different versions, because the films themselves often give off the sense that they're as much about process and play as they are about arriving at any kind of fixed, permanent statement or narrative. Flux cinema.

Big Trouble might be the worst movie I've ever seen by a director I otherwise love.

well even ppl who like it agree it's only partly "his"

http://www.avclub.com/article/my-year-of-flops-case-file-37-ibig-troublei-14928

Yale-pajamas!

last half hour of Big Trouble in partic is an unholy mess, but early peaks of Arkin's "sardine liqueur" take and Falk "heart attack" in drug store are LOL.

"Shadows" June 15th at Nat. gallery of Art in DC

Finally saw Love Streams.

I've undoubtedly had my expectations inflated by the years of the film's inaccessibility and its status as the last real Cassavetes film, going into this unable to accept anything less than an flat-out masterpiece. The shift towards surrealism in the final act were startling, to say the least, but I'm not sure how successful they are--Rowlands's joke-shop pranks on her family are every bit as hilarious/sad/unhinged as her on-stage breakdown from Opening Night, but the ballet sequence feels like a bit of an overreach, and the dog/man bit towards the very end (an in-joke stemming from the director's staging of the source play, the Criterion essay informs) is a bit of Bunelian whimsy that doesn't quite work. Other attempts at symbolism are outright ham fisted--Rowlands literally travelling around with too much baggage feels like a rookie's touch, not a veteran's. I also thought Cassavetes offering his eight-year-old son a beer put too fine a point on the scuzziness of the character; his later abandonment of the child in a Vegas hotel room felt more like something the character would do (negligence, rather than willful corruption).

There's still a lot that's great here, though: I think Rowlands was supported by stronger scripts in both A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night, but no one ever offered her better roles than her husband (Minnie and Moskowitz needs to become available next), and any moment she's on screen here is captivating. The minor character of the lounge singer's mother was a nice touch; I don't know that Cassavetes's work was intended as a diagnosis own generation as broken and rudderless, but the occasional inability of his characters to comprehend the ambitions and responsibilities of of the younger generation emerges as a subtle thread (see also, Faces). The presence of children in the film--one unwanted by his parent, another rejecting the emotional neediness of hers--probably alludes to enough of a backstory for the two main characters that we don't need the script to fill in the details of how they got to where they are.

OK, I'm liking the film better already...

Minnie and Moskowitz is available as a Region 2 DVD:

http://www.mrbongo.com/products/minnie-moskowitz-1971

nice review, crypto. I watched the Criterion edition. The continuity in places is still baffling, and in eight places out of ten Cassavetes will put the camera in the wrong spot.

Thanks!

The film has been lingering in my mind quite a bit since I watched it last week, my initial objections feeling less and less relevant.

I'm still thinking about it

Those kids in Love Streams are pretty terrible actors.

Late JC just makes me think of that story of Bette Davis stomping out of a Broadway rehearsal of Night of the Iguana, screaming "I'm sick of this Method SHIT!"

what is the point of that ballet/opera dream sequence, when the camera is miles away from anything interesting?

I was unsurprised to learn that JC threw out the last third of the play script... a shame he didn't replace it with anything, perhaps.

(Diahnne Abbott looking lovely in the CC supplementary interview btw)