San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
MICK LASALLE
Dear Mr. LaSalle: I’m troubled by your column photo. I envisioned you writing your column at a bar near the Embarcadero. Your column photo does not do your image justice. You look like a kindly school counselor.
Tod Bedrosian, Sacramento
Dear Mr. Bedrosian: I’ve had lots of messages like yours, so I guess I should answer. Here’s the deal: Up until 40, I couldn’t take a bad picture. Even up to like 55, 56, the odds were in my favor. But then suddenly, at 60, getting my picture taken became a form of major surgery. I have to say that, at first, I liked that picture, because I didn’t come out looking like the Swamp Thing. But it has been months now; my friends keep making fun of it, and my wife says it’s doofy. I suppose I should at least look more like a guy with a sense of humor and less like the butt of a joke. Also, just for the record, I don’t usually do that with my hands — I look like I failed Prayer School. Anyway, this is not the fault of the photographer, who is great, but of me, for freezing up. I wanted to look good, but really, at 60, how good are you supposed to look? Anyway, when all this virus stuff is over, the third thing I’m going to do — after hosting a big dinner and buying a plane ticket — is a redo of that picture.
By the way, you will find that the older you get, the harder it is to imprint your personality onto a photo, because you’re basically having to blast through the generic acquisitions of age. Just as babies all look the same and hundredyearolds pretty much look the same, it’s in the early middle years of life that we look most distinctly ourselves. For men, the ideal is that JFK age, where you’re not young and not old, just pure you. And then, just when the flower is in full bloom, nature begins the slow process of making us generic. The hair loses color, the skin degenerates, etc.
That’s why when elderly people look at pictures of themselves, they think, “That’s not me.” They’re right. It isn’t them. Nature is blocking them, getting in between the camera and their essence, which was once on the surface, but is no longer.
Hey Mick: I was wondering about the influence of music in judging a film. Two examples come to mind: Bernard Herrmann’s music in “Vertigo” and Ennio Morricone’s in “Once Upon a Time in America.” It seems to me that “Vertigo” is dominated by the score. Does that make it hard to separate the influence of the music in assessing the quality of the movie itself ?
Chuck Morgenstern, San Rafael
Hey Chuck: No, because the music is part of the movie, not separate from it. Do you say, “If you take away the acting, this movie wouldn’t be any good?” No, because it’s all one thing. When I read your email, I put on Morricone’s score for “Cinema Paradiso.” The soul of the film is in there. Earlier this week — I don’t generally go around listening to film scores; I’m not that big a geek — I happened to be listening to Miklos Rozsa’s score to “King of Kings” (1961). It’s hard to imagine that movie without it. And think about what Nino Rota did for “The Godfather” and “Romeo and Juliet” (1968); or what Giovanni Fusco did for Antonioni; or what Max Steiner did, not only for “Casablanca,” but for Warner Bros. He was what Warner sounded like in the 1940s, just as Herbert Stothart will always be the sound of MGM in the 1930s. These are great contributions, though music can be abused, too. I hate the horns of hope in action movies. But there are good and bad examples of everything.