"And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." - H.G.
This is all you really need to know about me.
But you can reach me at eattothebeat AT gmail DOT com. Or ask me a question, I'll tell you no lies.
Or check out my archive.
Click on the links below if you really want to know more.
Bingham Ray died this weekend after suffering a stroke at the Sundance Film Festival. He might not have been a household name, but Bingham was, at least to me, one of the most important and committed forces for good in the world of independent film. He founded October Pictures, effectively introduced Mike Leigh to America, was responsible for getting films by everyone from David Lynch to Pedro Almodovar into theaters and the cultural conversation, as it were. (He has a large part in Peter Siskind’s ’90s-indie-film-chronicle Down and Dirty Pictures, largely playing in contrast to the Machiavellian Miramax crew.) Bingham was truly on the side of the angels.
I was lucky enough to meet and spend a few days with him at TIFF 2011, last September, where he was one of the “governors” (basically, mentors/advisors) at a program called Talent Lab I took part in along with a couple dozen other emerging filmmakers. I think I can say we were all very taken with this straight-talking but warmly friendly man, who seemed to make an extra-special effort to get to know us, to hang out with us, to drink with us, to encourage us.
Bingham would sit at the back of the room as we conversed with the other guest speakers, and would often join in the conversation, sometimes with hilarious candour. One of the most memorable moments of the week was when a legendary documentary filmmaker was visiting us, along with a smarmy, glad-handed sycophant who had the title of co-director on his most recent effort, and who seemed to think his opinions were most important to us than the legend in question. It was when this glad-hander interrupted the documentarian on the question “Who are your influences as a filmmaker?” to say, “Well, Marty’s films have always been a huge influence on me,” that Bingham could be heard to say, “What a douche!” and storm out of the room. We all loved him so much for that.
Most important to me, though, was when I had the chance to ask him a question that had been gnawing away at me for a long time. “Is it crazy to be a filmmaker and live in Montreal and not L.A. or New York? Am I out of my mind or wasting my time?” No, Bingham answered. You’re doing the right thing. Tell your own stories, don’t try and make the same films as everyone else. Stay where you are. That meant a lot to me.
I know I’m one of many, many people to have been touched by the man’s wisdom and good nature. There are probably thousands of stories like mine, most from people who knew him far better and longer. But the fact that just a few days’ acquaintance could have such an impact on me, and I know, my fellow Talent Labbers, says a lot about this extraordinary man. Rest in peace, Bingham, you were truly one of the good guys.
While at my family cottage last week over the holidays, I found this great old picture of my dad standing in front of his childhood home on Cecil St. in Toronto’s Chinatown, which was once a teeming neighbourhood of Jewish immigrants. Walking through Chinatown yesterday, I happened to pass in front of the same house, and had my friend Norm take a picture of me in the same pose. It’s an exercise in double nostalgia; the first picture, taken some 40 years ago, was shot years after my father and his parents moved uptown and he must have been just passing through, on a day (we can tell from the coat), much like yesterday.
“Hartley Coleridge began life with limitless promise—’all my child might be’—and ended it universally viewed as a failure. He is remembered not for his poems or his essays, though he wrote some fine ones, but for two things and two things only: he was the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he was a disappointment. He has been called a misfit, a dreamer, a sinner, a castaway, a wayward child, a hobgoblin, a flibbertigibbet, a waif, a weird, a pariah, a prodigal, a picturesque ruin, a sensitive plant, an exquisite machine with insufficient steam, the oddest of God’s creatures, and, most frequently—by his father, his mother, his brother, and his sister; by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle; and by countless others over the years—’Poor Hartley.’”
“I was perhaps twenty-three when I first ate almost enough caviar—not to mention any caviar at all that I can now remember. It was one of the best, brightest days of my whole life with my parents, and lunching in the quiet back room at the Café de la Paix was only one part of the luminous whole. My mother ate fresh foie gras, sternly forbidden to her liver, but she loved the cathedral at Strasbourg enough to risk almost any kind of attack, and this truffled slab was so plainly the best of her lifetime that we all agreed it could do her nothing but good, which it did. My father and I ate caviar, probably Sevruga, with green-black smallish beads and a superb challenge of flavor for the iced grassy vodka we used to cleanse our happy palates. We ate three portions apiece, tacitly knowing it could never happen again that anything would be quite so mysteriously perfect in both time and space. The headwaiter sensed all this, which is, of course, why he was world-known, and the portions got larger, and at our third blissful command he simply put the tin in its ice bowl upon our table. It was a regal gesture, like being tapped on the shoulder with a sword. We bowed, served ourselves exactly as he would have done, grain for grain, and had no need for any more. It was reward enough to sit in the almost empty room, chaste rococo in the slanting June sunlight, with the generous tub of pure delight between us, Mother purring there, the vodka seeping slyly through our veins, and real wood strawberries to come, to make us feel like children again and not near-gods. That was a fine introduction to what I hope is a reasonably long life of such occasional bliss.”
“In the beginning was the Word; so it states on the first page of one of the most important books known to us. What is meant in that book is that the Word of God is the source of all creation. But surely the same could be said, figuratively speaking, of every human action? And indeed, words can be said to be the very source of our being, and in fact the very substance of the cosmic life-form we call Man. Spirit, the human soul, our self-awareness, our ability to generalize and think in concepts, to perceive the world as the world (and not just as our locality), and lastly, our capacity for knowing that we will die—and living in spite of that knowledge: surely all these are mediated or actually created by words?”
I used to make a list of the best and worst movies of the year every December for my old employer, and as the season gets chilly and Phil Spector plays on my stereo, and as I contemplate a year spent not being a full-time journalist/critic, I feel that old urge again. Let us then, discuss, my favourite things and experiences of 2011, and let’s not limit them to movies. This is, after all, markslutsky.com. This is my year in review.
If there is one thing that happily links my 2011 favourite, it’s the number of them that were made by, in whole or in part, by friends, acquaintances or countrymen. What does this cultural locavore-ism mean, if anything? Am I becoming limited, provincial? I’d prefer to say I just feel lucky to know so many talented and inspiring people.
Let’s start with food—which, if you know me, is where I always start.
My friend Dan Buller and I have this tradition where every year we create a Halloween pumpkin on a favourite theme. Okay, to be completely honest, Dan does most of the creating; I usually “produce” the thing. He’s an incredibly talented artist (and the star of my self-portrait) who makes the most impressive creative achievements look easy—just ask Snoop, who featured him and his work in his latest video.
Our last Halloween project was Robocop: The Pumpkin, which I thought was a fine tribute to a classic film, but this year I thought it would be nice to pay tribute to a recently deceased legend of the screen, the truly great Peter Falk. Naturally, we felt that the best way to memorialize him was in his guise as the great, Dostoyevsky-inspired detective Columbo.
So, this Halloween, I’m very proud to present the 2011 Peter Falk Memorial Pumpkin, or as Dan calls it, the Falk-O-Lantern.
Reading about Ghadaffi today, I couldn’t help but think of Suetonius’ Nero chapter in The 12 Caesars.
XLVIII. But this furious impulse subsiding, he wished for some place of privacy, where he might collect his thoughts; and his freedman Phaon offering him his country-house, between the Salarian [626] and Nomentan [627] roads, about four miles from the city, he mounted a horse, barefoot as he was, and in his tunic, only slipping over it an old soiled cloak; with his head muffled up, and an handkerchief before his face, and four persons only to attend him, of whom Sporus was one. He was suddenly struck with horror by an earthquake, and by a flash of lightning which darted full in his face, and heard from the neighbouring camp [628] the shouts of the soldiers, wishing his destruction, and prosperity to Galba. He also heard a traveller they met on the road, say, “They are (377) in pursuit of Nero:” and another ask, “Is there any news in the city about Nero?” Uncovering his face when his horse was started by the scent of a carcase which lay in the road, he was recognized and saluted by an old soldier who had been discharged from the guards. When they came to the lane which turned up to the house, they quitted their horses, and with much difficulty he wound among bushes, and briars, and along a track through a bed of rushes, over which they spread their cloaks for him to walk on. Having reached a wall at the back of the villa, Phaon advised him to hide himself awhile in a sand-pit; when he replied, “I will not go under-ground alive.” Staying there some little time, while preparations were made for bringing him privately into the villa, he took up some water out of a neighbouring tank in his hand, to drink, saying, “This is Nero’s distilled water.” [629] Then his cloak having been torn by the brambles, he pulled out the thorns which stuck in it. At last, being admitted, creeping upon his hands and knees, through a hole made for him in the wall, he lay down in the first closet he came to, upon a miserable pallet, with an old coverlet thrown over it; and being both hungry and thirsty, though he refused some coarse bread that was brought him, he drank a little warm water.
XLIX. All who surrounded him now pressing him to save himself from the indignities which were ready to befall him, he ordered a pit to be sunk before his eyes, of the size of his body, and the bottom to be covered with pieces of marble put together, if any could be found about the house; and water and wood [630], to be got ready for immediate use about his corpse; weeping at every thing that was done, and frequently saying, “What an artist is now about to perish!” Meanwhile, letters being brought in by a servant belonging to Phaon, he snatched them out of his hand, and there read, “That he had been declared an enemy by the senate, and that search was making for him, that he might be punished according to the ancient custom of the Romans.” He then inquired what kind of punishment that was; and being told, that the (378) practice was to strip the criminal naked, and scourge him to death, while his neck was fastened within a forked stake, he was so terrified that he took up two daggers which he had brought with him, and after feeling the points of both, put them up again, saying, “The fatal hour is not yet come.” One while, he begged of Sporus to begin to wail and lament; another while, he entreated that one of them would set him an example by killing himself; and then again, he condemned his own want of resolution in these words: “I yet live to my shame and disgrace: this is not becoming for Nero: it is not becoming. Thou oughtest in such circumstances to have a good heart: Come, then: courage, man!” [631] The horsemen who had received orders to bring him away alive, were now approaching the house. As soon as he heard them coming, he uttered with a trembling voice the following verse,
Hippon m’ okupodon amphi ktupos ouata ballei; [632] The noise of swift-heel’d steeds assails my ears;
he drove a dagger into his throat, being assisted in the act by Epaphroditus, his secretary. A centurion bursting in just as he was half-dead, and applying his cloak to the wound, pretending that he was come to his assistance, he made no other reply but this, “‘Tis too late;” and “Is this your loyalty?” Immediately after pronouncing these words, he expired, with his eyes fixed and starting out of his head, to the terror of all who beheld him. He had requested of his attendants, as the most essential favour, that they would let no one have his head, but that by all means his body might be burnt entire. And this, Icelus, Galba’s freedman, granted.
Since I no longer work for a Montreal weekly, I have the luxury to list films that haven’t opened here yet; this is just a list of new films I have seen this year, either here or atfestivals elsewhere, and liked. In alphabetical order:
Attack the Block - Joe Cornish Beyond the Black Rainbow - Panos Cosmatos Book chon bang hyang (The Day He Arrives) - Hong Sang-soo (I used the Korean title because I really don’t like the English one) Drive - Nicolas Winding Refn Fright Night - Craig Gillespie Hanna - Joe Wright Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2 - David Yates Melancholia - Lars von Trier Midnight in Paris - Woody Allen Oslo, August 31 - Joachim Trier Tree of Life - Terrence Malick (at least one solid hour of it) Thor - Kenneth Branagh TrollHunter - André Øverdal Your Sister’s Sister - Lynne Shelton X-Men: First Class - Matthew Vaughn
