Posted in: by Robert Horton, by Tom Keogh, Film Reviews, remembrance

In Memoriam: Tom Keogh

On September 28, 2021, the Seattle film community (and many other communities) lost a mainstay in Tom Keogh, and I lost my closest friend. Tom wore different hats in his life, but his interest in movies and his passion for writing about them was a constant.

I am sure I will write and talk about Tom many times in the future, but I thought it would be good to let him speak in his own voice. Thus we are re-printing a piece Tom wrote for The Informer, the monthly newsletter of the Seattle Film Society, in November 1984. This in itself was a kind of memorial: Truffaut had just died, and I wanted to do a tribute in The Informer. So I published a program note I’d written about Jules and Jim, and Tom wrote this piece on The Wild Child, which the SFS has just screened on a bill with Truffaut’s short, Les mistons.

I thought the piece, which begins with an adolescent memory, marked a turning point in Tom’s writing. I believe Tom did too. Some of his obsessions are here, and his communion with cinema, and his strong feeling for childhood. This piece is insightful on a particular film, but it also shows you a writer – which is what good film writing does. I hope it helps you appreciate our friend. (Thanks to Marni Wiebe-Keogh and Kevin Keogh for their blessing and the photo of Tom.) – Robert Horton

‘The Wild Child’

The Wild Child

by Tom Keogh

In the relations between artist and critic, everything takes place in terms of power, and curiously, the critic never loses sight of the fact that in the power relationship he is the weaker even if he tries to hide the fact with an aggressive tone; while the artist constantly loses sight of his metaphysical supremacy. The artist’s lack of perspective can be attributed to emotionalism, sensitivity (or sentimentality), and certainly to the more or less powerful dose of paranoia that seems to be his lot.

When I was a critic, I thought that a successful film had simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema; La règle du jeu and Citizen Kane corresponded to this definition perfectly. Today, I demand that a film express with the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not interested in those films that do not pulse.

–Francois Truffaut, “What Do Critics Dream About?

Seventeen years ago, I was a fat, morbid Catholic schoolkid in dreamland, sitting politely in a rented movie theater in Honolulu with a thousand other Catholic schoolkids who were, largely, running amok and having a better time than me for it. Why I was missing my freshman English that day and even (shudder) mixing with girls for this, I didn’t know. Then a local priest, popular with kids for his gentleness and slightly maverick reputation, walked slowly in front of the screen and quieted everyone.

“This is an experiment,” he said. “I asked your schools to let you be here for something new. I want you to really look at this movie today. Look for symbols, especially Christ symbols. See if you can understand why the hero is a Christ symbol. Then go back to your schools and talk about it.”

I looked. It was the first time I really looked at a movie at all: On the Waterfront. Afterward, I sensed there was more to talk about than how many times Marlon Brando fell and rose again, unaided, Christ-like, before wobbling all the way to the dock and redeeming the lifeless workers, but it didn’t matter. “Christ symbols” gave me a strange way to read a movie, but I got the idea I could do better. There was something living in the film, and now, between coming out of the closet about loving rock and roll (the anti-Christ in grade school; a valuable teaching tool in high school) and a desire to see more films, I had something to do with myself. Enter Francois Truffaut.

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Posted in: 2000 Eyes, by Tom Keogh, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: 102 Dalmatians

[Written for Film.com]  

Shortly before the end of a promotional screening of 102 Dalmatians, an anxious Disney publicist leaned into the press row where I sat and announced that a couple of the film’s reels had been shown out of order. Did we critic types happen to notice, she asked?

Of course, reply my astute colleagues. I, however, keep my mouth shut. You could have shown me this shrill hunk of junk upside down and backwards, and I would have remained willingly obtuse.

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Posted in: 2000 Eyes, by Tom Keogh, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: The Contender

[Written for Film.com]

With Aaron Sorkin running around holding an armful of Emmys and basking in the love of a nationwide TV audience for creating NBC’s “The West Wing,” the idea of releasing a lesser political drama on movie screens right now is risky business. The Contender indeed looks narrow and one-dimensional by comparison to the layered drama and comedy of Sorkin’s show, though this new film by former critic Rod Lurie (Deterrence) does help clarify what it is that Sorkin does so well simply because Lurie isn’t doing it here.

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Posted in: 2000 Eyes, by Tom Keogh, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Snatch

[Written for Film.com]

Guy Ritchie’s sophomore feature makes no apologies for clinging to familiar if engagingly iconoclastic material, specifically to Ritchie’s own popular crime comedy from 1999, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

Refreshingly funny, Lock, Stock introduced a new filmmaker whose incoherent visual aesthetic seemed, at the time, a petty misdemeanor in light of his gift for creating an entire class of characters—ne’er-do-wells on the fringe of the underworld, as well as the hardened professionals stung by them—out of wholecloth.

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Posted in: 2000 Eyes, by Tom Keogh

2000 Eyes: Small Time Crooks

[Written for Film.com]

“My husband Otto was dyslexic,” recalls Elaine May’s sweet but ditzy character, May, in Woody Allen’s new film. “The only word he could read correctly was his own name.”

Ah, bliss. The return of an Allen trademark: a layered-in, conceptual one-liner counterpointing the hard narrative thrust of a scene. In this case, a scene in which both May and Allen’s characters are exercised about some criminal plans. The tossed-off gag gives the moment a shot more oxygen as only Allen can do, delighting in May’s surreal urgency unrelated to the crisis at hand.

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Posted in: 2000 Eyes, by Tom Keogh, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Road Trip

[Written for Film.com]

Summer’s here as far as Hollywood is concerned: put down that Harold Bloom tome and rediscover the smartass, breast-obsessed 13-year-old boy within. As for rediscovering one’s inner 13-year-old girl, well … autumn will be here before you know it.

As if enshrouded in mythology, the silly story of Road Trip is narrated by a perpetual college student, Barry (Tom Green), who recalls the epic journey of four pals traveling almost 2,000 miles to salvage a longtime romance. Sweet, no? No. The tale begins with Josh (Breckin Meyer of Go), who is going to a New York university while his girlfriend Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard) attends another in Texas. It’s their first major separation since the age of 5, and it weighs on them.

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Posted in: by Tom Keogh, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Bobby Deerfield

[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978]

Sydney Pollack has carted the same thematic luggage down the road so consistently that running a standard, connect-the-dots literary tracer through his feature works is relatively easy. Pollack has concerned himself not so much with issues of death as with things that are dead, or so close to death that there is no appreciable difference. His films imply that rigor mortis set in long before the scenario began, and will spread after the last reel. To his credit, the repackaging of the principal components of this tragic vision has always been fresh. We’ve had the opportunity to see Pollack’s marked men and women slowly die while slavishly and knowingly dressing up the cancer of a metaphorical promise (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), through the ultimate victimization of human relationships by virtue of living in vulgar, extremist times (The Way We Were) or by a contagion of paranoiac losses (Three Days of the Condor).

Pollack’s thematic constancy has not been matched by aesthetic constancy, however. They Shoot Horses is marred by an imbalance of subjective shots and the infamous cuts to Michael Sarrazin under arrest and on trial; but the film’s imagistic cohesion and integration are highly personal and architecturally sound. And Pollack’s exquisite montage of Sarrazin straining to catch a fleeting leak of sunlight while dancing in the sealed ballroom suggested a primitive urgency on the new feature director’s part straining against the classical/polemical loftiness of the project.

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