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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, February 10th, 2006 - Comments Off on (The Return of) Screening Gotham: Feb. 10-12, 2006
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(The Return of) Screening Gotham: Feb. 10-12, 2006

Some of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
–It brings me extraordinary pleasure to resume this weekly Reeler feature by recommending a film like In a Glass Cage, screening this weekend as part of Lincoln Center’s Films in Catalunya series. Not that the movie has any shred of joy; to the contrary, Agusti Villaronga’s ghastly 1987 effort is about as fucked-up as movies get.

Too close for comfort: David Sust shaves Gunter Meisner in Villaronga’s In a Glass Cage
And I am not talking about those outer circles of transgression comprising, say, Miike’s incestuous necrophiles or Noe’s epic anal rapes, either. Instead, I am talking about a film that unflinchingly confronts the legacies of fascism without invoking, a la Pasolini’s Salo, literary myths or hyper-stylized oppression. Really, all I can say is that Cage relates the small tale of a young man whose relationship with an incapacitated former Nazi perpetuates a cycle of death and depravity that pretty much defies belief. Villaronga’s depiction of how inhumanity transcends moments, generations and, ultimately, civilization yields some pretty severe emotional consequences if you think you can handle them–and you absolutely should try. It is one of contemporary cinema’s most powerful confirmations that the extremes of what we see are no match for the extremes of what we feel.
–Attention Oscar completists: Your first chance to catch Best Foreign-Language Film nominee Tsosti is tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image. Short notice? Probably, but some of you are fanatical about this stuff, and I figure the least I could do is put out the heads-up, you know? Do not despair should you miss it, however; BAM’s Best of the African Diaspora Film Festival series will host the film’s offical NYC premiere Feb. 19. How is that for early warning, eh?
–And if nightmarish Spanish and social-realist South African cinema just are not doing it for you, feel free to drop by IFC Center for a midnight screening of GoodFellas. But that’s kind of playing it a little too safe, is it not? Of course, if you can believe we are a generation removed from GoodFellas‘ original run, you can imagine there are a crapload of young ‘uns out there who have never seen Scorsese’s gangster genius on a big screen. In which case this might be a top priority. Scratch that–it is a top priority.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon