Recently, I dragged Mrs. CFS to a documentary called Free Solo, the one featuring Alex Honnold, who is, quite simply, an athlete without peer, maybe the greatest ever.
For those who don’t know, Honnold, 33, is a free soloist, which means he climbs sheer rock walls with no ropes, no crampons, no carabiners, no parachutes, no jetpacks, no nothing to arrest his fall if he makes even the teeny-tiniest mistake.
With writer/director Paul Schrader currently in the news for his critically lauded new film, First Reformed, it might be a good time to discuss one of his earlier efforts, one known to about five people outside of The Criterion Collection enthusiasts and a favorite of yours truly since checking it out on VHS back in the late 1980s.
Unless you live under a proverbial rock, you’ll know that journalist/author/dandy Tom Wolfe died on May 14 at the ripe age of 88. I won’t rehash his impact on American arts and letters — there’s been plenty of ink spilled for just that purpose the last week or so, including this obit in the “failing” and now “crooked” The New York Times.
Since first laying eyes on the famous General Cinema Feature Presentation bumper playing across the screen in a darkened theater — this as a grade schooler back in the mid-70s — I’d been unabashedly captivated by movies. But it wasn’t until later in the decade that my appreciation for a film’s carefully wrought visuals began to make an impression. The year was 1979, the flick Carrol Ballard’s take on the famous Walter Farley children’s novel,
In a recent, hugely popular CFS post (∼30 views, 0 comments…and counting!), you might recall that I recycled the well-worn assertion that prose has a distinct advantage over film in how the medium can “get inside people’s heads, which allows for an interior complexity that movies simply can’t hope to match.”
Such is the immortal nature of images captured on celluloid that even a (self-proclaimed) cineaste occasionally finds himself confusing the dead for the living, an embarrassing scenario that usually plays out thusly: sprawled on the couch, clicker in hand, the CFS stumbles across a film featuring a performance by such-and-such that’s so clever he finds himself activating IMDB’s phone app to see what such-and-such has done lately, only to be reminded that such-and-such now resides in the great proscenium in the sky.
I know, I know—it’s been forever since I last posted. Seven months, actually, an absence no doubt weighing heavily on my vast¹ and vocal² readership. (¹ Thirty-eight; ² Zero comments)
But for those of you keeping vigil in my front yard, it’s time to pack up the tents, scrape the candle wax off my sidewalk, head home to your parents’ basement to once again fire up those computers. Because I just watched a favorite scene from Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation for about the 20th time and feel the need to talk about it.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you didn’t pass high-school English by the skin of your teeth and you actually spent some quality time with the poems of Emily Dickinson, specifically this one:
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Living in the big city one sadly tends to take certain landmarks and cultural institutions for granted. Take, for instance, the John Hancock Center and Willis (Sears) Tower, two architecturally significant Chicago skyline stalwarts whose burly frames attract visitors from across the globe. And while multitudes daily gawp up at, and down from, these iconic landmarks, The Conflicted Film Snob, who’s seen them maybe a million times in his four-plus
Lonesome Dove, the epic 6.5-hour miniseries, is indeed my pick for the greatest book-to-film adaptation ever. Before we dig into the particulars of the series, let’s quickly take a look a the source material, a sprawling novel (843 pages hardcover, 945 paperback) written by Larry McMurtry.