Some of you will have already noticed that the original Wall of Paul slogan, "Paul Tatara on Movies (and so forth)," now reads "Paul Tatara on Pop Culture (and so forth)." In the winter of 2007, when we launched this site, I knew I'd initially draw readers who were familiar with my CNN and Goodauthority movie coverage, so I mostly wrote about movies. But I live in the same world everyone else inhabits, and I contemplate a lot of things besides motion pictures. It was my goal, then, to eventually examine music, sports, politics, religion, firecrackers, action figures, babies, fast food, heroes, hypocrites, air conditioning, parades, cream puffs, and a slew of other topics that have come to shape my consciousness. Thus the altered, and far more accurate, slogan.Contact Paul RSS Feed
I posted my first Wall of Paul piece on Sept. 15, 2007. Over the course of almost four years, I’ve covered scores of topics with varying degrees of positivity, resignation, good humor, ill will, and sarcasm. I hope there’s been a consistent streak of intelligence in there, too, but if there wasn’t, I’m sure I’d be incapable of recognizing it.
At any rate, Wall of Paul will now be falling dormant, which isn’t the same as being dead, but pretty damned close. I’m simply putting too much of my focus into these pieces to have them read by so few people each week, and the readership long ago reached what scientists like to call a point of stasis. I feel there are better things to be done with my energy and passion. I’ve long toyed with the idea of writing a novel, so I need to get down to what I imagine will be the absolutely brutal work of wrestling it from my brain to the page. I may not survive the process, but better to die trying.
I’ll be keeping the site in working order for the foreseeable future, so you’ll be able to re-read any pieces you enjoyed in the past, or catch up on any you may have missed the first time around. And, of course, the terrific music and video clips will remain.
If something truly earth-shattering happens in the world of politics - Another Great Depression anyone? - or if one of my favorite movie directors or rock & rollers suddenly releases an unexpected masterwork, I may have something to say about it. But new pieces will be very few and very far between from now on, and if I feel the Wall of Paul itch becoming a vague memory, I’ll likely stop altogether.
If you want to know why I feel the bombing sequences are the only parts of the movie version of “Catch-22” that properly capture the tone of the novel, or what I think of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, or why Randy Newman is one of my writing heroes, or why I consider Jack Nicholson’s performance in “The Last Detail” to be the best of his career, or why I have a soft spot for the Elton John song, “Philadelphia Freedom” (all articles I planned to get to sooner or later), just give me a call. I’m in the book.
There’s a handful of Wall of Paul enthusiasts who I met solely through my writing, and I now consider them to be my friends. I look forward to staying in touch with them via Facebook and email…and over beers, whenever they make it to New York City. Thanks, then, to Jody Whipp, Deanna Wallo-Whipp, Bill Wilson, Brady Goodman, Chris Collins, and Byron Lee for their repeated support and encouragement. And thanks also to my buddy, Bill Shaouy, who volunteered to design and maintain Wall of Paul in light of my idiocy in all things web site and Internet, and to Matt Dobbins, for always congratulating me on a piece when he thought I deserved it...which was more often than I thought I deserved it.
Now go watch a great movie or listen to some great music. Then tell someone about it, and encourage them to do the same.
It’s all sitting there, just waiting to become a part of you.
This man, the terrific character actor, G.D. Spradlin, is not to be confused with this man…
…the terrific character actor, J.T. Walsh. You should not confuse these two men, even though:
1.) They both eschewed first names in favor of initials.
2.) They both inhabited a relatively wide range of characters, but absolutely excelled when playing sleazy assholes.
3.) It's impossible to even find decent pictures of them on the Internet, so you have to use screen-grabs.
4.) As of this past Sunday, when Spradlin passed away at his ranch in San Luis Obispo, CA, they are now both dead.
***
Spradlin, you’ll immediately recall once I tell you, played the sleazy asshole Army colonel who, over a lunch spread of roast beef and absurdly large prawns, explains to Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard why Col. Walter E. Kurtz needs to be taken out of circulation up there in Cambodia.
But even that pivotal turn in one of virtually everybody’s favorite movies has nothing on Spradlin’s performance as the sleazy asshole U.S. Senator (Is there any other kind?) who thinks he’ll be able to bitch-slap little Michael Corleone and his gang of guinea thugs in “The Godfather Part II.”
Boy, does that turn out to be the wrong approach! Spradlin is so convincing here, he almost seems rancid, like his soul has been left out of the icebox for too long.
Spradlin was a fascinating guy. He served in the Air Force during World War II, then became a big-time lawyer for Phillips Petroleum before striking it rich on his own with a couple of oil wells. Only then, at the age of 40, did he try his hand at acting, and he immediately started winning roles on such TV shows as “Dragnet” and “Bonanza,” which eventually led to scads of work on the big screen. (You might also remember him as the sleazy asshole Jesus freak football coach in “North Dallas Forty.”)
***
Of course, nobody outside of Spradlin’s friends and co-workers knew anything about his distinctive career path while he was still alive. Big-time character actors experience a very odd sort of fame. Certainly, far more people said, “Oh! I know that guy!” when they saw Walsh’s obituary in the paper (he succumbed to a sudden heart attack in 1998) than said, “Oh, dear God! J.T. Walsh died!” And even I wasn’t completely aware of Spradlin’s name the other day, when I glimpsed his photo under a headline containing the words, “has died.” I knew initials were involved somehow, but my brain immediately coughed up “J.T. Somebody” when I saw the picture.
That’s simultaneously too bad and really not so bad at all. If you can immediately recognize an actor but have no clue what his or her name is, and said actor fills you with a particular emotion on first sight, then that actor is doing something right.
You’re so convinced these performers actually are the people they’re portraying on the screen, it never even occurs to you to try to find out more about them once the movie is over. As far as you and I were concerned, then, Spradlin and Walsh really were sleazy assholes, even though by all accounts they weren’t. And that’s a workable definition of a great actor, if you ask me.
So now, all we have left is M. Emmet Walsh, who should not be confused with J.T. Walsh or G.D. Spradlin.
Here’s the trailer for the next Martin Scorsese movie. Ooooh. I can’t wait...
What’s the matter? Was Chris Columbus busy?
Please understand, I don’t think Martin Scorsese shouldn’t be able to make a children’s movie. Not really. I guess. I’ll even let it pass that Martin Scorsese has made a children’s movie that looks like it was helmed by Bob Zemeckis. I do think, however, that Martin Scorsese shouldn’t make a children’s movie that looks like it was helmed by Bob Zemeckis in which a mean dog slides uncontrollably across the floor during a chase scene and a man falls into a fucking cake!
As pointless as “Shutter Island” is (very), I’m sure Scorsese can cite scores of Michael Powell moments and mid-1950s crime melodramas as a defense for the oversaturated histrionics that comprise it. But this thing looks like “For the Love of Benji” with a budget. In 3-D yet.
Let’s all be offended together, why don’t we? I’ll scooch over. You can sit next to me.
***
I know it sounds vaguely ridiculous at this stage of the game, but Martin Scorsese used to make movies that actually had something to do with Martin Scorsese, the walking, talking, thinking, feeling human being who lives on planet earth by way of New York City. These movies are readily available for your perusal, and, since Scorsese appears to have forgotten that great motion pictures are directed by people who have something compelling to say about their own existence, maybe you should re-peruse them. He’s not likely to hand over another installment any time soon.
When a director transcribes his passion, energy, heart, and spiritual struggle onto the screen the way this man did with “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “The King of Comedy,” and three or four other pictures (one of which I’m about to extremely enthusiastically endorse), he’s not fooling around. But from the dreaded “Cape Fear” onward, Scorsese is lucky when he can manage half a picture that doesn’t feel like he’s poured it out of a box of visual and musical tics that he keeps in the cupboard. Gone are the days when he gathered fresh ingredients and baked from scratch.
Some guy named Orson Welles once said, “The greatest danger for any artist is to find himself in a comfortable position; it is his duty to look for and remain in the most uncomfortable position possible.” I know one could argue that that’s exactly what Scorsese is doing with a movie like the upcoming “Hugo,” but the comfort zone he’s entered - and this is a prevailing problem in modern Hollywood - sacrifices emotional connection in favor of stylistic flourishes and technical facility.
Of course, Scorsese’ movies since 1991 aren’t total embarrassments; only “Bringing Out the Dead” and “Gangs of New York” are truly look-away ghastly for their duration. He’s an incredibly talented filmmaker. But there’s an emotional and intellectual deadness to his output in the past two decades that relatively newly convinced viewers, through the encouragement of equally late-to-the-game awards shows and hack critics, simply choose to ignore.
At a time when James Cameron and his digitized vision is supposed to be whacking us straight in the soul, I suppose you take what you can get.
In a nutshell, Scorsese now either stylishly remakes “Goodfellas,” right down to the dolly shots, voice over, and music cues (“Casino,” “The Departed”), digs into a genre that encourages him to go for broke visually, with no real purpose (the aforementioned freak-out “Shutter Island,” the brightly colored, wholly perfunctory Howard Hughes biopic, “The Aviator,” the apparently “Road Warrior”-inspired “Gangs of New York”), or at least tries to say something compelling but ends up boring us to tears through a snail-paced parade of exhaustive production design (“The Age of Innocence,” “Kundun.”)
Frankly, the best movie Scorsese has made in the past decade is “Social Studies”— a 2010 HBO documentary about the curmudgeonly blocked writer, Fran Liebowitz, that’s a total blast because it mainly consists of a couple perfunctory camera set-ups and Liebowitz telling hilarious stories while Scorsese sits there and laughs at her. It’s a miracle of near-Fatima proportions that he couldn’t find a reason to swoop a crane over her head while blasting “Gimme Shelter.”
So that’s how I feel about it, and, no— I won’t be going to see fucking “Hugo” in 3-fucking-D. And if you do without at least bringing along a kid, you’re an enabler.
Now I’m gonna write about “Mean Streets.”
***
“Mean Streets,” which was released in 1973, wasn’t Scorsese’s first movie; it was preceded by two promising, but often awkward, low-budget pictures. But it’s the movie that announced the presence of an explosive new talent on the Hollywood scene, a director whose intensity and desire to tell his own story practically throbbed on the screen in deep-red neon.
Scorsese grafts John Cassavetes’ straight-forward documentary feel to the self-conscious, do-it-yourself aesthetics of Jean Luc Godard and the French New Wave, with a dose of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger tossed in to colloquialize things even further. Audiences at the time had never seen anything quite like it…and modern audiences wouldn’t have seen anything quite like Quentin Tarantino without Scorsese first blazing the trail right here.
Set in the exact section of Manhattan’s Little Italy where Scorsese grew up - many of the film’s locations are still immediately recognizable when you walk along Houston, Prince, and Elizabeth Streets - “Mean Streets” concerns itself with the frustrated rise to sainthood of Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a kind-hearted, would-be mobster whose Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova; he later played the put-upon mayor in “Animal House”) is an underworld caretaker of the neighborhood and is grooming Charlie for a position of at least middling power in the family. But Charlie has to carry himself with something resembling old-world dignity if he wants to climb the ladder, and he has a dead weight around his neck that he can’t force himself to abandon.
That would be his reckless, dim-witted cousin, Johnny Boy, as embodied by Robert De Niro, whose work here is, shall we say, somewhat removed from his delicate stylings in “Meet the Fockers.” None of Charlie’s on-the-take friends, all of whom gather regularly at a local bar to drink, mock each other, and pick up girls, can understand Charlie’s obsession with trying to set Johnny Boy straight, especially when Johnny winds up owing several thousand dollars to one of their own, a small-time, also rather foolish loan shark named Michael (Richard Romanus.)
In the following sequence, Johnny Boy arrives at the bar to the tune of the Rolling Stone’s “Jumping Jack Flash,” and, in the process, Scorsese announces himself as a talent to be reckoned with. (You’ll have to follow the links to see the clips, as embedding has been thoughtfully disabled by Warner Bros.):
Scorsese’s handling of music throughout “Mean Streets” is masterful. The use of pre-existing rock & roll tunes to support a scene has now become such a common moviemaking device, it’s important to remember that Scorsese and George Lucas, who pulled the same magnificent stunt the very same year, with “American Graffiti,” were the first commercial directors to ever employ it so thoroughly…and, once song publishers caught on to the game, future directors paid through the nose for iconic tracks.
Suffice it to say that Rolling Stones tunes no longer appear in cheap indie movies, and Scorsese, whose inner jukebox remains well-stocked to this day, includes everything from the Stones to the Ronettes to the Chips’ 1956 hit, “Rubber Biscuit,” on “Mean Streets”’ soundtrack.
Note also, and this is significant, that the lyrics of the songs in “Mean Streets” are not as important as the sonic textures of the recordings. You’re not being told what to think here via a pedantic radio hit (watch “Forrest Gump” some time if you want what should be unspoken information shoved down your throat via Mr. and Mrs. America’s Greatest Hits. ) Scorsese makes you feel the inherent craziness and danger in Johnny Boy’s presence through a sensuous mix of sound, light, and movement.
This is an electrifying, hypnotic piece of filmmaking, and “Mean Streets” is littered with such dazzling moments, even as it keeps its feet flat on the sidewalk. Scorsese displays astonishing control of the medium at an early age (he was 29 when he started working on the picture), but he’s repeatedly willing to sit back and let his characters simply talk, minus any visual pyrotechnics, if it illuminates their relationships in some significant way.
The following clip, in which Charlie tries to talk Johnny Boy into finally giving Michael the money he owes him, is relatively lengthy. But I want to include it because it suggests that there’s a thriving environment beyond the edges of the frame that informs the two friends’ existence, and our knowledge of it lurking out there gives the movie a jazzy energy:
These are unique, fully-drawn characters, not clichéd archetypes, and De Niro and Keitel are incredibly naturalistic— in fact, much of their banter was invented on the spot! This is one of my favorite scenes in any Scorsese picture, and he wouldn’t be caught dead doing it nowadays.
Nobody, by the way, wants to owe money to Joey Clams and Frankie Bones.
***
The better portion of “Mean Streets,” from a narrative standpoint, consists of Charlie trying to get Johnny Boy to pay Michael his money before somebody gets hurt, if not killed, and-or before Charlie’s uncle hears about the whole tawdry mess. Charlie is also secretly seeing a girl named Amy (Amy Robinson), who Giovanni says is no good for him because she’s an epileptic. But there’s tons of less overt stuff going on, too, and it’s not the sort of thing that’s usually pondered in American movies.
It may be loaded with low-rung punks grandstanding, cursing, and waving guns in each other’s faces, but “Mean Streets” is, first and foremost, a deeply spiritual motion picture, a little Catholic guilt trip disguised as an often very funny gangster movie. In this sequence, Charlie and the guys, who aren’t exactly hanging onto their catechism the way Charlie is, discuss how the priests used to manipulate them at teenage spiritual retreats (By the way, I love Johnny Boy’s inability to completely grasp the point here. That says something about the character, too.)
Early in his career, Scorsese was absolutely alone among his fellow “movie brat” directors in examining the nature of spiritual beliefs as they stack up against the hard realities of the street, and he often did so with a dark sense of humor that likely horrified the nuns and priests who nearly convinced him to join the priesthood himself before the filmmaking bug hit. Catholic iconography abounds in “Mean Streets,” and the other characters are obviously aware that Charlie struggles with trying to be a good Catholic in the middle of what amounts to a gathering of fallen angels.
It’s made clear, literally from the film’s very first moments, that Charlie sees his day-today trials, and the scourge of Johnny Boy in particular, as a way to pay for his sins on the street, to do penance in the real world rather than simply reciting a string of Hail Mary’s while kneeling in church.
Scorsese’s willingness to wrestle with such an original concept - name another crime movie before this one that even approaches it - and his ability to convey a distinct sense of time and place through evocative shots of dingy hallways and battered landmarks while giving his actors territory of their own to explore, makes “Mean Streets” a genuinely rewarding experience, and one of the very best films of the 1970s.
Ask me on the right day, and I might even say it’s the best picture Scorsese has ever made.
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