Take Three: Shelley Duvall

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Shelley Duvall

Take One: 3 Women (1977)

There aren’t very many characters like Millie Lammoreaux in the movies. Watching Robert Altman’s 1977 masterpiece 3 Women you can see why. Essentially there are two reasons: she’s a hard sell, commercially speaking, and Duvall has played her perfectly well here already; there’s no need for an imitation version from anyone else. Duvall made Millie so singularly and categorically her own. It’s her signature performance; the centrepiece on her C.V. As per the title, she shares the film with two other women: Sissy Spacek, as her new roommate and care-home co-worker Pinky Rose, and Janice Rule as Willie Hart, a local (to Millie’s apartment complex, the Purple Sage, where much of the film takes place) artist – the one who paints the mysterious swimming pool mural which seems so significant to these 3 Women, and (metaphorically?) permeates it with an uncommon atmosphere.

Millie’s unconventional in her desire to be the picture of conventionality, and therefore slightly barking by “normal” folks’ standards. She is awkward to be around, obsessed with women’s magazines and being the girl with the utmost social purpose, to an almost unhealthy degree; she’s too-brightly presented for her own good (literally and psychologically – her yellow and purple outfits cover a multitude of personality shortfalls), self-regarding, scared of tomatoes and is passive-aggressive 23 hours a day. But she’s never less than individual. A one-off. She’s also one of the most riveting, uncontainable and unique creations in all ‘70s American cinema. There’s humour in the awkwardness and then a wrenching sadness. We see Millie change, vividly and complexly, toward the film’s last scenes – just before the film waltzes gloriously off into its own unfathomable illogicality. Duvall quite rightly won Best Actress at Cannes and the LAFCAA for 3 Women. But she should have won much more.

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Nathaniel in Nashville Pt. 1

I thought I'd share a few of my adventures at the Nashville Film Festival whilst practicing on my wacom tablet -- so hard to get the hang of this, the wacom not the Nashville. (I've been to the Nashville Festival a couple of times so I think I have the hang of it now.) I arrived in my Herzog tee -- I always live in mortal fear that some Herzog freak will grill me about good ol' Werner since I probably don't know as much about him as I should given the human advertisement aspects of t-shirt wearing. My favorites are Grizzly Man and Aguirre the Wrath of God and Nosferatu but Werner is prolific so I can't say I've seen everything.

The jurors and guests of the festival stay in downtown Nashville where you can get to the touristy parts quick but the festival is actually at a multiplex called Regal Green Hill...(update:  but I'm hearing from Mark in the comments that this is not the same thing as Green Hills. What do I know? I live in NYC and never drive and am losing my spatial relations skills)  Nice theater with lots of screens. They shuttle you back and forth so as I'm waiting for the morning shuttle I am scribbling away at you.

Last night riding from hotel to festival I ended up in a van of fellow jurors, though none from my category. I was  happily chatting away with the guy in front of me when I suddenly realized Who He Was. It was Jamie Travis, a filmmaker I am so enthralled by -- the Patterns trilogy is genius --that I'm just grateful his back was turned and he didn't see my insta-tranformation into scary obsessive superfan.

It reminded me of my very first Life Drawing class in college where I was just randomly talking to the new kid in class. We're chatting for like 5 minutes and then the teacher walks in and new kid just stands up and starts taking his clothes off. (Was it something I said?) Turns out new kid was the nude model and suddenly I went from gregarious to totally awkward / speechless. It was kinda like that except for that nobody got naked.

In reality I'm sure I kept babbling but my sentences probably made less sense.

Celebrity Sightings
Some country music stars were doing the carpet but I never know who they are. I did gaze at Kris Kristofferson and Emmylou Harris chatting up TV crews on the red carpet for awhile though. The carpet had been mostly shoved into the VIP tent instead of outside where it usually is (very stormy and wet night).

Kristofferson had just received a career prize at the screening of his new movie Bloodworth. I arrived too late to see it but I heard from my driver Elaine -- a lovely retired woman volunteering at the fest -- that it was good and she was just raving about W. Earl Brown, who plays one of his sons in the movie.

I give it a 4.3 out of 5. "Brady" is Academy Award material!

Val Kilmer and Dwight Yoakam are also in the movie but it turns out that this W Earl Brown also wrote the movie and was smart enough to give himself a great part.

I couldn't quite make out why Emmylou was with Kristofferson (she's not in the cast list of the movie) but she looked eerily ageless. She just turned 64 and her silver locks -- clearly not a wig -- are so thick and lustrous you'd think she was 30 or 40 but for the silver.

Okay, back to the festival with me. Ciao.

First and Last, Rain

Dave here with a weekend guessing game.

the first and last images or dialogue from a motion picture.

first image

and the first and last line of dialogue.

first: [character], what is it? I love you so much. Don't you love me anymore?

last: Everything we've done is forgiven. Everything.

Can you guess the movie?

Check the answer after the jump.

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Mix Tape: "Put the Blame on Mame" in Gilda

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, with one of the sultriest musical numbers ever committed to film.

Nightclub acts are scattered throughout the seamy annals of film noir. For starters, you've got Lauren Bacall singing "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine" at the casino in The Big Sleep, and Veronica Lake putting on a magic act in This Gun for Hire. Live music, cut with equal parts despair and eroticism, is just perfect for noir's postwar underworld. In Gilda, Rita Hayworth outdoes every other noir chanteuse with her unforgettable rendition of "Put the Blame on Mame." It's sexy, sassy, and bundles up the film's themes in a black satin ribbon.

By the time the nightclub performance arrives, though, we've already heard Hayworth rehearsing the song twice. She's humming along to it during her indelible introduction ("Gilda, are you decent?" / "Me?") and later, her paramour-turned-husband Johnny (Glenn Ford) catches her singing it for Uncle Pio, the old washroom attendant. Throughout, the song acts as Gilda's leitmotif, emblematic of her fearsome sexual power. It's a side of her that the jealous, overprotective Johnny doesn't want anyone else to see.

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Unsung Heroes: Jim James and Calexico in 'I'm Not There'

Michael C. from Serious Film here, eager to dive back into a film I’ve been meaning to revisit for ages: Todd Haynes’ whirlwind Dylan collage I’m Not There (2007). All this Mildred Pierce talk has given me Haynes on the brain.

I was the ideal audience member for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. I am a devoted Bob Dylan lover, a big admirer of Hayne’s work, and am literate in pop culture to the point that when Haynes paid simultaneous homage to Fellini’s 8½ and Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back I had no trouble keeping up. And while I found lots to admire in this hugely ambitious project – and I was grateful Haynes didn’t attempt a traditional linear biopic – the film mostly left me cold. I was too conscious of the intellectual constructs at every turn. Dylan’s music can be pretty cerebral at times too, but I love it because he combines that obliqueness with the ability to absolutely destroy me emotionally on a consistent basis.

And yet –and yet - right at the heart of the Richard Gere section of the film, the section I found most problematic, there is this amazing scene that I haven’t been able to shake since I first viewed it four years ago.

If I’m Not There is a whole movie constructed of tangents then the scenes involving Gere playing a character named Billy the Kid riding a horse around a bizarre Old West town called Riddle may be a tangent too far. I get that it’s supposed to represent Dylan’s self-imposed exile in Woodstock in the late sixties, and that the sequence is wild grab bag of Dylan references, but these scenes still stop the movie cold with their randomness.

Or at least that's the case until all the townsfolk wander to the center of Riddle to hear Jim James of My Morning Jacket sing a hypnotic cover of Dylan’s "Going to Acapulco" backed by the band Calexico. 

Covering Dylan is almost a genre of music onto itself and this incredibly soulful take of a relatively obscure track deserves a place along side the all time greats. For a little over three minutes I don’t care about Haynes’s thesis statement. Nor do I care about making sense of the riot of costuming and set decoration I’m witnessing (love the random giraffe). For those three minutes I don’t care about anything but the fact that James, Calexico, and Haynes have managed to tap into that thing I love about Dylan. All those levels of meaning can take a back seat to the visceral experience of the music.

We all have are our favorites movies, the ones we know scene for scene, line for line. But equally valuable are the individual moments, those stand alone gems from those films that otherwise didn’t reach us. The “Going to Acapulco” scene from I’m Not There is such a moment for me. I doubt I’ll ever unravel the mystery of why it made such an impression on me, not that I have any interest in doing so.

Related posts:
all episodes of "Unsung Heroes. Also check out the new songs-in-movies series "Mix Tape"