Considerations...: Champions

Word of the day : wetware : the human brain or a human being considered especially with respect to human logical and computational capabilities

Congrats to the Heat, who trounced the superb Thunder on Thursday night to win the NBA Finals in 5 games. Lebron James was simply sensational throughout the entire playoffs' it was one of the greatest individual playoff runs I've ever witnessed. Mike Miller, Shane Battier, Norris Cole, James Jones were all, at various times, superb in support; Battier was the secret MVP of the series. With Bosh and Wade at their best, Miami was just too much to handle.

I'm already predicting that we will see this exact same matchup of teams in next year's finals.

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It's Day 4 on our trip through my 500 Greatest Performances of All Time. My next slot is reserved for...

Barbara Stanwyck
as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944)

As James Cain's ultimate femme fatale, Stanwyck's blood runs colder than an arctic tundra in Billy Wilder's masterpiece. Fred MacMurray's insurance agent thinks he's too smart for her but his downfall, of course, is underestimating just how duplicitous and conniving she really is. When MacMurray first encounters her, she matches him wit for wit and it's understood why he falls for her; Stanwyck's breathy aura seems to infect the air around her. She convinces him and us that she has fallen for him, but because it's noir we know that she'll ultimately be his downfall. Stanwyck makes Phyllis a character of many dimensions and she keep us off-guard and fascinated. But what rottenness!

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The great Billy Wilder, director of Double Indemnity, was born today in 1906; he died in 2002. Wilder was an auteur as a director, helming some of the finest studio films ever made. He was also a great screenwriter too. He was born in Poland and had one of his first jobs for a Viennese newspaper. He wanted to be a lawyer but it was a good thing for us filmgoers that his Jewishness forced him to leave Nazi Germany (where he was working as a screenwriter for German movies) for the U.S, where he went to work for the studios in the late 1930s. He frequently wrote or co-wrote the films he directed, movies that were marked by sparkling dialogue, well-rounded characters, sharp comic timing, indelible images. He directed mostly comedies, but he made some great dramas too, from Double Indemnity (maybe the greatest noir ever made) to Sunset Boulevard (1950), the greatest movie ever made about Hollywood, told from the point-of-view of William Holden's dead writer.
The Lost Weekend, about an alcoholic (Ray Milland), won Wilder two Oscars in 1945 - for directing and writing. Though the film seems overdone, overwrought and obvious today, it was an important film of its time (Milland won an Oscar too).

As a comedy director, Wilder's films were marked by fresh conceits, silliness, characters in over their heads, bickering, biting, fast-paced back-and-forth: the original version of Sabrina (1954) showed the crusty romantic side of Humphrey Bogart; 1955's The Seven-Year Itch had the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe's skirt blowing upwards; Some Like it Hot (1959) is by, most accounts, one of the Top-5 comedies ever made; 1966's The Fortune Cookie introduced to us what would be a decades-long glorious chemistry between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. (I want to add that Wilder's film version of Agatha Christie's Witness For the Prosecution - 1957 - was the finest version of Christie ever put on film.) He won three more Oscars for writing-directing-producing The Apartment, another comedy that is constantly near the top of the Great-Comedies-of-All-Time list; he made 7 films with Jack Lemmon.

He won 6 Oscars all together (a screenplay Oscar for Sunset Boulevard); he was nominated 21 times (as a writer, producer, or director), twice in one year (1941) for his screenplays for two different films.

An incredible career.

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Finally, let's wrap up the week with a brief nod to the next photographer on Professional Photographer's list of the "100 Most Influential Photographers." His name is Eric Boman (#52) and he lives in New York and works for Vogue. He is best well-known for the album covers he photographed for the band Roxy Music. He also did a striking series of photographs of Manolo Blahnik shoes (Blahnik is a friend of Boman's), in which the shoes appear in striking scenes and settings.