Cinema Styles

Please, Sir, I Want No More.

noreply@blogger.com (Greg F.) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:36:00 +0000

Maybe it's just me (in fact, almost assuredly, it is) but I find my generation of film enthusiasts a bit too hung up on the whole pop art aspect of cinema. I like the popular cinema, I do, really I do. But I also like film as an art form and as I watch more and more of it, that's the cinema I lean towards. I understand that as a business, film as a whole can't strut around displaying one Playtime, Persona or Repulsion after another and remain a viable enterprise. I understand the need for the blending of art and commerce, the kind made so popular and so successful by the likes of Steven Spielberg and I also understand films like Melancholia or Tree of Life don't fire up the imagination of the general citizenry like a good Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jaws (or even Warhorse or Tintin). I understand that and to take it a step further, I even appreciate the skill and talent behind Raiders and Jaws to the extent that I not only cannot imagine a cinematic universe without them, I wouldn't want to.

But can we stop talking about it? Or them? Or just Spielberg?

It's not that I hate Spielberg (I don't and not even Armond White's hyperbolic elevations of Spielberg or his crude put downs of anyone who doesn't like him can totally turn me off of Spielberg - although sometimes White comes close) it's that he is the most popular film maker of the last forty years. If I never read another thing about him and I live to be 125, I'll never suffer from a lack of analysis of the man and his works. And that popularity provides the very reason we should move on.

This isn't about Spielberg, it's about the thousands of films still to be discussed, still to be dissected. It's about the myriad directors whose works are still woefully under-known and undebated. And I'm not talking about the average, dull film goer. I'm talking about the goddamn cinephiles that populate my world. So when I see another piece on the brilliance of, oh I don't know, just pick one... say, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I can't help but think, "Okay, yeah, great, got it! Can we talk about something else now?"

Sorry, but I just don't care to rehash the same goddamn "oohs" and "aahs" that I've been rehashing for forty years now. I see one fucking article or essay or video salute or list after another about Spielberg and his films and the last one was so fucking inane the guy doing it didn't even seem to comprehend that A.I. Artificial Intelligence was a terrific piece of science fiction.

Or how about someone discuss 1941 for a change? How about that? It's a step, at least. It's a gesture. Discussing what is perceived to be a director's failure is often much more illuminating than discussing a success. And the miniatures used in that one are amazing pieces of craft work. But, in all honesty, I'd probably hate that, too.

Look, I'm not here to suggest films or tell anyone we should all start discussing underground Lithuanian cinema from the sixties, I just want to move on from Spielberg. It is my great misfortune to find him rather dull despite the fact that I admire his talent. This is my misfortune because, lately, online, I've seen him and his films discussed everywhere.

And I'm not talking about Warhorse or Tintin because those are new films and haven't had years and years of discussion yet. Want to discuss them? Fine. But don't give me another breakdown of E.T. the Extraterrestrial, please.

I'll shut up now. It's been inside me for a while. I have nothing to say to the argument, "But we should be discussing any film maker we want and you're free to discuss someone else, pal, so go ahead and stop your moaning!" I have nothing to say to that because it's true. Nothing I've written above (or very little, at least) can be supported by any form of logical argument that cannot be instantly dismissed with a simple, "Oh, so you're saying we shouldn't discuss one of the most critically and commercially successful film makers ever. Check [rolls eyes]." Yeah, I know, it's a rant ripe for ridicule. But it's a bitter piece of bile that made its way down to my asshole years ago and I just finally had to shit it out. Thanks for listening.

Five Years, Five Peeves, Five Reasons to Go On

noreply@blogger.com (Greg F.) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:45:00 +0000

When we make the decision to publicly announce our fondness for the cinema, write about it in an open diary and allow others to engage us in a discussion of our opinions, we take a risk. We take a risk that not only will someone, perhaps many people, disagree with us but that, at some point in the inevitable future, someone will violently disagree with us.

It's the chance you take when you become a writer of, or commenter on, opinion on classic or current cinema. The toughest part, excepting sociopaths with a bloodlust for online sparring, is stating your opinion without denigrating the opinion of another. Writers who spend much of their time insulting other writers' points of view develop a reputation for such behavior and, unforunately, that reputation often secures them well-paying writing gigs (because contrarianism pulls in the readers, I guess) while those they insult slog along writing with little to no exposure.

Obviously, I'm not going to point anyone out as an example, rather, I just want to assure that I am not that way, personally. I don't believe getting into any kind of situation where you're writing pieces entirely about another writer, and the argument that you're having with him or her, is very constructive and yet, I see it happen often enough to know it's not relegated to rare instances of ire that flare up under extreme circumstances. However, I have also noticed that this tends to happen almost entirely among paid writers, which would lend credence to the suggestion that, perhaps, they're simply doing it by request, as it were, to pump up the ratings.

When I look around the film websites and blogs, I see a lot of disagreement among cinephiles without ever seeing much vitriol and that's a good sign. It's a good group of people, for the most part (that's my favorite generic caveat, by the way, because it allows for everything while saying nothing), Mainly, I see people with a passion for discussing film, and engaging each other daily in an exciting back and forth of tastes, opinions and beliefs.

The thing is, I don't take part in most of it. I used to, for a short period, way back at the very beginning but I really don't anymore. I found that arguments in comment sections took up too much of my valuable time, cut into my writing and generally made me feel depressed. When I first started blogging, I started by direct confrontation, that is to say, I originally blogged about politics. Then, slowly, I worked film into the mix. Eventually, I let my true love of cinema take over, got rid of all the political stuff and the crazy comment sections it inspired, and became a classic movie blogger.

Not long after, I took up movie arguing and did so, often, on Dennis Cozzalio's great page, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. I spent so much time arguing with people there I had little time for anything else. Then I migrated over to Jim Emerson's Scanners and argued with people there but that was tougher because the comments had to clear approval first so an ongoing argument required a lot more patience.

Finally, after a few good rows at different blogs, I decided, "I got to cut this shit out. I'm not doing anything but arguing." But it's still there. It's still lurking under the surface, pent up and ready to explode. I see opinions all the time that bother me to no end and I say nothing, so snugly nestled in my own complacency am I. And it bothers me because I feel I'm not being honest but when I want to express it, it comes out angry and snarky and there has to be a way - has to be - to say it without raising anyone's defensive alarms.

So now, I'm going to try.

Let's begin.

1. THOMAS KINKADE HAS WON AND WE, ALL OF US, HAVE LOST

I have a problem with a lot of modern cinema. I don't like the way most of it looks, I don't like the way it's edited (too choppy and frenetic) and I don't like the way it's acted (so painfully naturalistic that a wide range of performances are thoroughly interchangeable). And I have that feeling with a frighteningly high percentage of modern movies. But mostly, I have a problem with the way the movies look. And when I say I have a problem, I mean even with movies I like. Take Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese. I use this movie as an example because it was a movie I liked and thus, I can assure you it is not me reacting to a movie I hate or using it as an excuse to hate the movie. No, I liked Hugo but I hated most of the look of it.

The opening pre-title-card sequence in Hugo takes us through all the mechanisms of all the clocks in the colossal train station that Hugo, the boy who lives, orphaned, inside the clocks, maintains daily. It twists and winds its way through the mechanisms in a way that a hand-held steadicam couldn't actually do so I know I'm not watching an actual set and scene presented on celluloid but a CGI construction. This is thoroughly unimpressive to me. The more elaborate CGI shots get (this one was reminiscent of the pathways taken by the winding camera that opens Fight Club) the less impressed I am by them. It's like this: There's a moment in Broadway Danny Rose where Danny, Tina, and Lou are walking along the hallway towards the camera. As they do, they discuss Lou's career and just before they get to the camera Lou announces he's leaving Danny for another agent. At precisely this moment Danny freezes right in front of the camera. The scene starts with them so far back in the frame, they're indistinguishable and ends with Danny in close-up, having just heard the news. It's a great, emotional moment that hits the audience in the chest as squarely as it hits Danny. Later, looking back on it, we can be impressed by how perfectly they timed their conversation with their approach so that it would end with Danny in front of the camera. We can savor the fact that the director and cinematographer had a vision about how the scene would play out and then, by God, they rehearsed it, prepped it, and did it. With Hugo, CGI animators were given a frame presentation of how and where the "camera" (the monitor screen on the computer designing the scene) would be and began to busily draw and render and create the scene. And the scene is quite elaborate, which is why, conversely, it is unimpressive. That walk in Broadway Danny Rose, that's impressive! It's simple, not complicated. It's not a Rube Goldberg construction designed to wow us beyond belief but an elegant play between actors and camera that performs its task so beautifully and, seemingly, effortlessly, that we cannot help but be moved. By contrast, at the end of the opening sequence in Hugo, after they've moved the "camera" through all the internal workings of the clock and finally get to the shot of Hugo looking out of the glass from behind the clock face, I thought, "Thank god that's over."

But it's also the look. Again, with Hugo, which I continue to use because I did like it, the skies all look like someone contracted Thomas Kinkade to do one of his famous paintings of light for every backdrop. I'm tired of the glossy, overly detailed design of most modern film. It's like we left modernism behind and re-adopted Late Baroque because we were tired of all that pesky streamlining and restraint and wanted every sky, in even the grittiest of dramas, to look like a Kinkade painting in every gaudy, gauche, and garish detail. Most of the scenes in the movie, whether inside the clocks, inside Georges Méliès studio, or the train station, all had an overly glossy, Tinkerbell dust, magical realm feel to them.

Okay, it's Hugo, right? It's a children's story and we shouldn't expect it to look like The French Connection or Midnight Cowboy. That's true and I understand that but why, I would ask, is the glossy, Kinkadish look necessary even for a children's story? You can make something look fantastical (Willy Wonka, Return to Oz, every other movie ever made before CGI) and give it a nice matte finish with flourishes of light and shadow without making everyone nauseous at the same time.

Finally, my biggest problem, aside from the general look of movies these days, is the fact that I do often feel quite alone in this and since the whole reasons I got into blogging was to talk about movies with everybody, it's a problem I have a difficult time comprehending, much less solving. I feel alone because when people see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, they say, "Oh, the CGI doesn't look as bad as it does in the ads or the trailers. In fact, it was really good." Now, see, the problem here is that, when I saw it, I started to think a mix-up had happened and somehow I saw the rough-cut, not the finished product because, oh dear Jesus was that CGI bad! You want to talk about being taken out of the film? I was taken out of the film. Ninety percent of this movie looked like a fair to competent rendering of a cut scene on the latest PC game technology. Caesar, the lead ape character, never, ever, ever, EVER looked real to me.

But that's not the problem. The problem I'm having is I don't understand why everyone else isn't bothered by the awkwardly, physically wrong feel of CGI representation and movement of living things. How is it that anyone thought the apes in the movie looked good?

Let me say it again from a different angle. I don't doubt Rise of the Planet of the Apes uses the most advanced CGI technologies available to it. It looks as good as it can given the limits of today's technology. The problem is, it still looks worse than old fashioned optical printing. Frankly, Caesar never looks visually connected to the rest of the action. In other words, optically printing a stop-motion creation over a live-action scene looks more "together" to me than a CGI overlay. With CGI, at least where the technology stands right now, everything starts to look airbrushed, as if the actors are real and they're walking around with a fantasy-art performance piece, and the physics, the mechanics of motion, never seem quite right either. Close, yes, but far enough off that they distract. And it's as frustrating to me as when I go to someone's house and they're watching an Academy-ratio movie or tv show on a widescreen tv, stretched out, and don't notice or care about the difference.

So the look of movies, clearly, bothers me. It bothers me to the point where I have to start saying it so people stop wondering why I rear up when I see certain visuals.

But let's look at problem number two.

2. I'M BORED, BORED, BORED TO TEARS WITH THE POST-SEVENTIES TEMPLATE OF ACTION/ADVENTURE/FANTASY

The modern template for action adventure movies comes from, primarily, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. It's an influence so great that you can see the setups and payoffs from Jaws, The Terminator, Aliens and Jurassic Park used again and again and again. These two directors, unlike the lead-footed, ham-fisted George Lucas, have a real feel for action. Both of them shoot and pace it extremely well. The problem is, a lot of people who don't have the same feel have followed in their footsteps and are too unimaginative to take it anywhere else. Zack Snyder seems to think ramping (slow down, speed up, slow down, speed up) is an innovation so special it must be employed everywhere and always. Edgar Wright, not an action director but certainly a notable contemporary sometime-fantasy director (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs the World) employs whiz-bang techniques in his stories like the hyper montages that show scenes of action!/no action/stillness/action!/no action/action!/no action and then the scene reverts to normal. It's his calling card and unfortunately, that's exactly what it feels like, a calling card. It doesn't ever seem to add anything to the surrounding movie.

Both of these directors have their supporters and I certainly don't think they are undeserving of such support. For right now, I'm simply calling out specific techniques. I think Snyder did a fine job as director of The Watchmen, even if I didn't love the movie, though I did like it, and as for Edgar Wright, I like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz both very much. But the top director (top offender, I suppose I should say) for me in this area is J.J. Abrams. I liked Star Trek and Cloverfield but, on the whole, Abrams style seems nothing more than Spielberg warmed over. Maybe that's why when most everyone else loved Super 8, I did not. It came up on Facebook when a posted a status update on how much a certain scene made me angry but then, I admitted to liking it a little or, at least, certain parts because I didn't want to have to explain all this but the simple truth is, if I never see that movie again, it won't be soon enough. I'm glad Abrams has such a nostalgia for seeing Spielberg in the seventies but I'd rather he just watch Spielberg movies from the seventies than try and emulate them and give me the ball-washing tripe of Super 8.

Let's use this to segway into number three.

3. WHEN WAS THE BAR LOWERED AND WHY WASN'T I TOLD?

Let's go back to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. As of this writing it stands at 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Personally, I hate Rotten Tomatoes but that's for another post. Maybe. For now, that means that 83 percent of critics reviewing it liked it enough, even if just barely enough, to recommend it. It's average rating is a better indicator and it's a high 7.1 out of 10.

When did this happen? When did a movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes start getting 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes? It's average at best and I don't mean that as a bad thing. What I mean is, it does what you would expect it to do, fairly well, although it is a bit predictable. It has most of what one would expect (Intended-to-be-touching scenes between ape and grandfather figure slipping into dementia. Caesar wondering if he is a pet, not an independent individual. Animal shelter owner revealed to be uncaring asshole. Shelter's animal keeper and feeder a sadistic monster. Caesar pulling together the other apes through strength and compassion, showing himself to be an enlightened leader who won't kill. Corporate CEOs blinded by greed who get their comeuppance in the end. And the list goes on.) and doesn't exert itself trying to provide much more. There's one predictable set-up and payoff every ten minutes or so, I'd say.

What entertainment value I drew from the origin story in the first few reels quickly gave way to the big action/battle climax for the last third as the apes make their way to their adopted redwood forest home. The movie tries to draw out some profundity, I suppose, by revealing the evils/sins/dangers(?) of animal testing but for the most part, it's just an average, if well made, adventure/sci-fi movie. And yet, it's got 83 percent. Shouldn't we reserve the upper levels of our ratings for the truly upper levels of cinema? Shouldn't four stars, or five or whatever the top amount given is, be doled out three, maybe four times a year? I understand liking a movie and thinking, "Hey, it's pretty good, nothing great but kind of fun," but that's not what I'm getting here. I'm getting reactions that should be reserved for much better movies.

I feel the same way about so much more. Toy Story 3, Inception, the last several Harry Potter movies... wait, let's go back. Toy Story 3. There exists in the bizarro movie universe of moral equality a category of de facto villain where a movie doesn't really have one, or need one, but creates one anyway using questionable methods. TS3 does this in spades. A discarded toy, Lotso, a bear that hugs a lot, becomes this movie's de facto villain. He was left behind, lost and replaced and became embittered, convincing the other toys left with him that they were purposely and maliciously replaced. This sense of abandonment has made him bitter and provides the perfect opportunity for TS3 to above and beyond and really explore this angle for kids. How a misunderstanding can lead you down the wrong emotional path but with friends (read: therapy through companionship) you can work through it and come out on top.

This doesn't happen. Instead, Lotso becomes psychotic and rather than try to provide any kind of emotional resuscitation, the film makers go for a cheap, mean, nasty joke. In the end we discover (and here comes the "joke") Lotso is tortured for the rest of his existence by being enslaved in bondage to the front of a truck. Ha, ha, that's so morally filthy it's funny! Oh wait, no, it's just morally filthy.

When I saw this, I wondered, "Why didn't anyone bring this up?" But, of course, I, myself, was equally guilty of not bringing it up. I knew what would happen if I did so I didn't. I knew I would get, "You're crazy for saying that a toy, who only turned out bitter because he was lost and replaced, shouldn't be tortured at the conclusion of the movie. Sorry Greg, but they should in no way teach redemption by having the Lotso bear recover from his bitterness, they should get a cheap laugh by showing us that he will spend the rest of his existence in bondage. What's wrong with you, Greg?!" And I will get that, I promise. I won't get, "Uh... oh, wait. Yeah, that is kind of screwed up." What I'll get is an apologist philosophy that roughly goes, "Sure, that part's bad but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater." And I'll think, "But that's its lasting and final image of Lotso bear and it's really kind of repulsive." And then I'll think about how it's like reading a book on child rearing where they give you 10 pieces of advice and two of them involve beating your child. And when you criticize that, you hear, "But, hey, those other 8 pieces of advice are pretty solid."

And yes, TS3 does have that other 80 percent that does work reasonably well. I understand that, I do. It doesn't work well enough for me, of course, and if I had given a proper review to the movie, I would have slightly split in favor of not recommending it for that plot choice as well as, if not more so, for doing little more with these characters than was done before. In the end, it felt redundant to me more than anything else but I guess I just wish the Lotso choice bothered more people than it did (this has happened with Pixar before, only worse, as explained in this earlier Cinema Styles post).

The point is, it seems to me the vast majority of films released should fall in the mid-range. We should only be getting "This film is GREAT" or "This film is AWFUL" a few times a year. Most movies are well-enough made and there are plenty of entertaining ones each year but let's not hand out top ratings and glowing reviews just because a movie does what it's supposed to do. Let's reserve that for movies that do so much more than that. For the ones that really stun you.

Onto number four.

4. HALF OF US LIKE THESE DIRECTORS, HALF OF US HATE THEM

In a way, this one is a kind of hanger-on from the last one, only reversed. Half of the folks I know and love like the movies in number three and probably half don't. Or maybe only a small percentage don't. But when it comes to directors, it's a different story. I once did a whole post on how some people love David Fincher and others hate him while some love Christopher Nolan and others hate him and how both hate each other for liking the other. I don't like doing this with directors and so, quite simply, I don't. But others do.

For instance, take a look above. Note my extreme distaste for Toy Story 3. It was directed by Lee Unkrich. He directed (co-directed, technically) Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo. I like both of those films. See, I didn't hate them because they were directed by him. Conversely, I didn't love Toy Story 3 because it was directed by him, either. Or take note above of my unenthusiastic response to the filmic stylings of Zack Snyder and Edgar Wright and then, recall, that I liked some of their movies. This is important because I get really tired of hearing about the Coen brothers being "frauds" or "hating their characters" or some such thing. Or "it's the same old Woody Allen." Or "here goes Fincher again, hating women." Or maybe that's Woody. Or it could be Christopher Nolan, who's so bad with action (and, actually, he really is, but he's good at other things) that we should hate everything he ever does. Oh wait, I wouldn't want to leave off Quenting Tarantino. "Dumb, predictable, talky Quentin Tarantino."

And it goes in the exact opposite direction, too! Steven Spielberg? "Never made a bad movie, ever." "Paul Thomas Anderson's a genius!" "Todd Haynes is my personal hero!" "Lars von Trier is God!"

The point is, seriously, just shut up. If you purport to love the cinema and don't take it on a film by film basis - Just. Shut. Up. Again, back to Toy Story 3. I don't like a lot of Pixar but sometimes, I do! So I keep watching them! Wall-E, for instance. I didn't like the second half but I did like the first half. And, importantly, I didn't dislike the second half for any moral reasons, like the Lotso resolution in TS3, simply that I felt it took a very powerful and moving story and ramped it up into a high-energy chase/slapstick production that worked against, not with, the first half.

I also don't like every Coen brothers movie I see but I do like several and love some. But mother of mercy, I've come across bloggers and critics on this here interweb who practically hate the Coen brothers. They hate them! I mean, there's some mediocre, badly done shit out there in movie land and we can be thankful that the Coen brothers at least give us quality films, on purely technical terms, because they are very skilled film makers. To say otherwise is to be completely disingenuous. Take TS3, again. Do I hate its philosophy towards Lotso? Yes. Is it incompetently made on the technical level? No, of course not. It looks beautiful. Not even that Kinkadey. So when the complaints against the Coen brothers lapse into how they're bad film makers, I just move on to someone else not trying to convince me the world is flat.

But for the record, the "I hate the Coens/Spielberg/Allen/Tarantino/Fincher/Nolan/Anderson, etc." statements are bullshit, plain and simple. Cinema doesn't operate on averages, it operates on individual movies. Stop using sweeping statements against directors as a lazy way to "critique" their movies instead of taking on the movie directly and honestly.

5. THE BACKLASH BANDWAGON

So sick of this one. I'm sure I don't have to describe "The Backlash Bandwagon" to you but, actually, I'm thinking of it a little differently than you may be so, if you'll bear with me, I would like to explain. This isn't about everyone loving a movie and then, over time, more people voice their suspicion that it was over-rated. That's common and is often piled onto the "backlash" trash heap but it's really not the same thing, just eventual re-assessment. Backlash is something much harsher, much meaner and more clearly shallow, transparent and phony.

Let's go back to Avatar. When it was released, it received a fair amount of praise (Don't deny it, it did. Look it up.) Then it started making money. Lots of money. TONS of money! And then a backlash occurred in which, essentially, it was called garbage. It was horrible. It was one of the worst movies EVER MADE! Same thing happened with The Dark Knight. Again, it received very good reviews and then a second side declared, not that it was, perhaps, over-rated (I felt it was) but that it was awful. Abysmal. Bottom-scraping flying rodent fecal matter. And then everyone started yelling at each other and, even now, just bringing the title up can unleash a whole big mess o' smug from both sides of the movie aisle.

With both, I fell on the side of unimpressed but not hateful. Here is my original review of Avatar. I praise James Cameron's expert direction of action, critique its many character and story elements as poorly written but, on the whole, can only describe my response as middling, not vitriolic. I never gave a proper review to The Dark Knight but I felt much the same way: I didn't like it, but the "I hate it" camp seemed a little too extreme for my tastes.

There's a milder form of backlash that also occurs that I dealt with directly in this post last year on Black Swan (I'm nothing if not consistent about my online irritations). It's the one where there isn't so much as an overload of money or attention or praise, like The Dark Knight, but a movie that some think is great, like Black Swan, but others find not so great and express this by ridiculing either the movie, its supporters or both. It's happened many times, most recently with The Artist. I saw a comment from one critic that even described it by typing "movie" with the quotes there to signal us that, despite using a camera and a full cast and crew, The Artist somehow didn't even qualify as a movie anymore. I have seen some real hatred thrown at this very skillful, very well-performed, very entertaining movie and it feels all out of proportion. I hate to keep going back to it, but look at Toy Story 3. That has a story element that actually morally offends and still I can find the balls to say it's not a bad movie, just misguided in that element and redundant overall. But when people don't like Black Swan or The Artist, why is there a need among some writers to insult the intelligence of those who do? If you'd like a true template for how to handle this kind of thing properly, go to Ferdy on Films and read Marilyn Ferdinand's review of The Artist. She didn't like it, explains why and avoids calling anyone who did an idiot. We should all take a lesson.

FIVE YEARS, FIVE REASONS TO GO ON

I've been at this now for five years and in that time, the pet peeves I list above have gotten worse, at least to my eyes. Maybe that's nothing more than a perception problem on my part. Maybe it's the same as ever or has even improved but I'm so tired of dealing with the same old, same old, that it feels bigger to me now. Maybe. I do know that in my online experience I've started one blog after another and joined up with a few others to boot. I've done movie blogging, political blogging, humorous blogging, photo tumbling, group blogging and even a short stint at entertainment news blogging. I've stuck with two: Cinema Styles and If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. I was also lucky enough to be asked to join the group of great movie bloggers at TCM's Movie Morlocks for which I am eternally grateful.

That's three reasons enough, right there, to keep right on going, despite the frustrations and irritations that sometimes yank me backwards like a dog being choke-chained but there are a couple more, too. One, I wouldn't want to not converse with the online community of film lovers and friends I've discovered in this time and two, I've never learned more about the movies than I have in the last five years. Before that, it was all isolated knowledge that seemed pretty impressive in a room of people who didn't spend every waking moment thinking about, reading about and talking about cinema. But once I got online, I realized I was a novice. Hell, I realized we all were and if we didn't learn from each other, no one else was ever going to fill us in on the 99 percent of film history ignored by the film history books.

If there's any vow or resolution to be made here it's only that I be more honest with myself and everyone else about how I feel about modern cinema and not worry about getting into arguments. But if I'm to be honest now, right now, I have to admit that I probably won't. Instead, once a year or so I'll write a piece about how annoyed I am at this or that and do my best, the rest of the time, to write about those movies that bring me joy. If that's the deal I have to make to keep this blog going, I suppose I can live with that. After all, to not write about, talk about and share my love for movies would be to not live at all. And that's not a choice I'm willing to make.

Third Time's the Charm?

noreply@blogger.com (Greg F.) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 01:30:00 +0000

Trilogies were not always a part of the cinematic landscape. While serials have been around since the Nickelodeon days, with moviegoers paying to see the same characters again and again and again, trilogies are a later invention. First, of course, sequels had to come into their own, which took years, and only then was the trilogy truly born.

Sequels and serials, to state the obvious, are two different things. From Russia with Love isn't the sequel to Dr. No but a continuation of the character James Bond in a new adventure. Likewise, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are not prequels and sequels, as they are often called, but, again, continuations of the character, Indiana Jones, from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The fourth film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, continues the character further.

I said "to state the obvious" near the beginning of the last paragraph but it clearly isn't obvious as Wikipedia's entry on sequels list the James Bond films as sequels. Technically, I suppose they are and so I must distinguish that for the purposes of this piece, a sequel is the continuation of a specific story that was only partially completed by the conclusion of the first film. It is not the new adventures of James Bond, Indiana Jones or any host of other action characters, from those in Lethal Weapon to those in Rush Hour. Nor is it a series of three movies that have been classified together as a director's trilogy (Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and her Sister, for instance, would be Woody Allen's New York Relationship trilogy) or three films made with disconnected storylines and characters that are thematically linked by the same director (The Three Colors Trilogy by Krzysztof Kieślowski) It is a single story drawn out over multiple parts which, again for the purposes of this piece, would be, in particular, three parts. The story can be a biography following one character as he grows through life (The Apu Trilogy or, in a more limited sense, The Godfather Trilogy) or a specific story progression (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy aka The Millenium Trilogy, The Star Wars Original Trilogy, Lord of the Rings) with the same characters over three movies.

It was the audience desire to see the same characters again that gave birth to serials, which hit their stride in the thirties. Hollywood achieved consistent box-office success by giving the public the same characters in similar situations doing the same things they did last time, only with different supporting actors, a new script (loosely defined) and a new title. No one operated under the delusion that Boston Blackie, Torchy Blaine or Flash Gordon were ever expanding on their characters or exploring deeper emotional terrain in the next installment, they just wanted to see them again in a vaguely similar adventure and would happily pay for the privilege.

And serial characters weren't always confined to low budget affairs. The Thin Man movies proved that the idea could work on a big budget too, as long as you had top dollar actors (William Powell, Myrna Loy) willing to keep it up. The Andy Hardy movies were also given ample budgets and starred Mickey Rooney, for years the top draw in all of cinema. And, internationally, Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa scored big with their nameless men fighting for survival (their own and that of others) in the Dollars Trilogy and Yojimbo/Sanjuro movies, respectively.

But all of the above info can be found on the aforementioned Wikipedia page, linked here, where you too can, if you choose, read all about sequels and serials and how they came about. The above was only intended to differentiate between the two before getting to the meat of the matter, which, having amply buried the lead, I present in the form of a question: Do trilogies work?

The answer to that question is essentially meaningless ("some do, some don't") but acts as a good enough jumping-off point for a discussion. A better question might be, "At what point does a story's plot become so complicated and/or its characters so complex that more than two to three hours running time is required to tell the tale?" After all, practically every book ever written and every movie ever made is a trilogy in and of itself. They have a beginning, middle and end. In the case of a cinematic trilogy, the story is simply broken up over three installments rather than presented in one overly long film.

I would love to start the conversation with the trilogy generally acknowledged to be the seminal work of the form, The Apu Trilogy, but as it is not readily available for most to see (it is not on Netflix for DVD rental or instant viewing although an older DVD transfer of the set can be purchased on Amazon - this unavailability is, by the way, shameful) and since I, myself have seen only the final installment on PBS decades ago, I should reserve it for later discussion, when I have acquired the set or, if fortune smiles upon me, it is presented at the AFI Silver and I can take it in on the big screen.

Instead, we'll start a few years later with a trilogy that didn't become a trilogy for almost twenty years. For sixteen years, from 1974 to 1990, The Godfather movies were a pair, not a trilogy, until, finally, in 1990, Francis Ford Coppola decided it was time to finish the story of Michael Corleone. Even now, there is little consensus as to whether or not that decision was a good one. Nevertheless, The Godfather movies, especially the first two, are considered magnificent works of cinema by most cinephiles the world over.

The story of the trilogy is the story of Michael Corleone as he rises to the head of the Corleone Family. It follows Michael's character without a continuing story, that is to say, when the first Godfather ends, there is no cliffhanger, no unresolved moment we anticipate being the starting point of the next film. The movies aren't about plot but about Michael, how he changes, grows (or doesn't) and, perhaps, redeems himself. Interestingly, the movie of the trilogy most reviled, Part III, may be the most important for making the trilogy "work", to the extent that it does work at all.

The Godfather movies illustrate a problem symptomatic of many trilogies, one that, simplified, could be stated as such: The first movie tells the whole story. Many trilogies essentially work this way. From Star Wars to The Matrix to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the continuing story is unnecessary to the first movie. The continuing story of Michael Corleone, Luke Skywalker, Neo or Lisbeth Salander may be of interest and, perhaps, satisfying to the those seeking deeper exploration of the characters, but to the first movie, completely unnecessary. Had there never been another Godfather movie after the first one (or Star Wars or Matrix or Dragon Tattoo) no one would have noticed. The first installments of all of those trilogies work just fine on their own and feel completely enclosed. Had there never been another Godfather film, I don't imagine people would have been complaining, "I can't believe they left us hanging! What happens after that door closes?!"

And so the second installment must carry some emotional weight, some deeper understanding of character than the first, since the story is only of minor importance. The Godfather, Part II, in this respect, also seems to work on its own, independent of the first. It certainly helps if we have seen the first film but if we haven't, it's not a disaster. The second film contrasts father Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) with son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) at different stages of their familial career. In the first film, we saw Vito entrenched in his position as Head of the Family and Michael just making his way up, albeit reluctantly at first. In the second film we see the reverse: Michael is now entrenched and Vito is now making his way to the top. In both films, Vito seems to do his work with a personal connection to those around him. The first movie even begins with Vito accepting requests for personal favors on his daughter's wedding day. In the second film, this quality is explored further, including his rise to power by killing the kingpin of Little Italy, Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin).

Considering Vito's power-grab, one could argue that he takes on the risk of killing Don Fanucci, not only because he believes Fanucci's power is weak and doesn't want Fanucci demanding shares of his takes but also because he is tired of seeing the community terrorized by him. That may not be true but the point is, it could be true. It could be imagined that Vito would kill Fanucci for the good of the Italian-American community and, as a side-benefit, gets to be the new Don for the neighborhood for his troubles. Whether it is true or not is entirely beside the point. Vito is presented as someone for which that kind of action would not be entirely improbable.

In the first film, when Michael takes on the role as Head of the Family, it feels different. After his encounter at the hospital, where we see Michael emboldened for the first time, we see him at the family home telling his brother Sonny (James Caan) how he will kill the two men responsible for the near murder of their father. When he assures Sonny "it's not personal, it's business," we believe him. It's his father and family that have been threatened and yet we fully believe that, to him, it is just business.

That line about it being "business" only fully resonates when we see how unbusiness-like Vito's actions are in the second installment. When Vito helps a widow and her dog stay in the tenement building from which they were about to be ejected, it is of no possible financial benefit to him. In fact, he's paying out of his own pocket to make it happen. It's about as far from being business-like as one can imagine. It's personal, strictly personal.

And none of this has anything to do with a trilogy. The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II are two sides of the same coin. They simply tell the story of Michael, contrasted with Vito, with one movie, the second part, furthering the exploration opened up in the first. But, again, there is no point where Part II feels like an unfinished "middle movie" of a trilogy, like Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers or Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, in which the viewer is abundantly aware that there is more to follow. No one expected a Part III in 1976 which is why, when none appeared, people weren't demanding to know "what happened next" in the adventures of Michael Corleone. It was only in 1990 that the third installment created a trilogy, first by simply existing and, thus, making the sum total of Godfather movies three, but, more importantly, by shoe-horning into the "story" Michael's redemption or, at least, his attempt at it.

Whatever the qualities of the third film, or lack thereof, the point is that none of it feels necessary in the slightest. The first two films exist so completely on their own as individual works that the third feels like nothing more than an installment designed to create a forced trilogy where there wasn't one to begin with. In this regard, I'd have to rank The Godfather Trilogy as one of the worst trilogies under the definition of a trilogy used here. What it feels like is two masterworks of the cinema, Parts I and II, working off of each other but not necessarily continuing from one to the other, followed by a third unrelated film with the appendage "Part III."

For decades, and perhaps still, the most famous trilogy was the Star Wars trilogy. This trilogy, existing entirely between The Godfather, Part II and Part III with seven years to spare, falls more in line with a traditional story-bound trilogy. The second installment, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, leaves little doubt to the viewer that this is the middle of the story and there will be a final installment yet to come. And even though the first film works entirely on its own, a trilogy is created from it that feels more or less honest, even if it's not until the second film that it becomes apparent it is a trilogy. The same can be said of another eighties blockbuster trilogy, Back to the Future. Like almost every other trilogy, the first movie can easily exist on its own (and I like to pretend that's the case, quite frankly) but the trilogy that does exist works as a trilogy when viewed in totality.

More recently, another popular trilogy, The Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl that Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) followed the same pattern but made the exploration of its characters deeper and more meaningful to the story. The first movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, works as a completely contained single film. Again, no second or third movie could have ever been made and the first film wouldn't have felt unfinished. It's only in the second film that a continuing story sets itself up and by the end of the second installment, we're left wondering what will happen to Lisbeth, with a third installment clearly telegraphed to the viewer.

Still, The Millennium Trilogy works better than most because the main characters, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), resonate with the viewer as people with more going on inside their heads of interest than anything going on in the story. In fact, the story that takes us through the second and third installments interested me far less than simply watching Rapace and Nyqvist play their parts. The story, involving government intrigue, cover-ups, lies and courtroom showdowns, has already left my head a mere year or so after watching them. Most of it left my memory within weeks. What kept me interested was those two actors playing those two characters. They seemed real, vulnerable and desperate. The courtroom showdown could have been about anything, really. In the end, it's nothing more than a MacGuffin. The point is to watch Salander and Blomkvist and root for them because we feel connected to them. In this way, The Millennium Trilogy is one of the few trilogies that seems to exist as a lengthy character study, like The Godfather films and The Apu Trilogy.

However, what about a true trilogy, one in which even the first film makes it clear that the story within it is to be told in parts and the first part, upon completion, does not stand on its own as a finished story?

By those standards, The Lord of the Rings is probably the truest cinematic trilogy in existence. This may very well be the case because the original work upon which they are based, the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien, were intended to be one volume of a two volume set, rather than a trilogy. It was the publisher that decided the massive story should be broken into three works, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. This probably explains why the first installment doesn't feel entirely self-contained because it was, in fact, literally, the beginning of a story Tolkien had written as one volume with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. There is, within the trilogy, a specific story that continues from one to the next and each character within that story has specific goals and duties to perform in the service of that story. It is, without doubt, a trilogy, not just a set of three movies that have been made to work together. Each one stands on its own as a terrific entertainment but makes no attempt to be a complete story. The first two are adamant in their presentation that the viewer know this is only the beginning and middle. It passes the "First Movie" test of the trilogy, something no other trilogy discussed here has done: If no other movie were made after The Fellowship of the Ring, yes, people would wonder why the story was left hanging, as it were. The Lord of the Rings is indeed a trilogy, perhaps one of the few true trilogies in existence.

And so, it could be concluded, trilogies don't work very well, generally speaking. More often than not - much more often than not - they start with a first installment that, if need be, could stand alone as a single movie without ever having two sequels attached to it. Trilogies tend to feel like Hollywood greed more than a deep artistic need to "finish" the story. There's a first movie, it performs tremendously at the box office and the studios decide, "This should be a trilogy," at which point the second film gets made and finally starts a story to be completed in the third.

Trilogies have even started up in the middle of a film series that, otherwise, didn't originally set out to properly continue a story but rather present new adventures, ala James Bond. This happened with the Star Trek franchise after the success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The next two Star Trek films continued a story that hadn't existed as a continuing story until Star Trek III: The Search for Spock got made. By the end of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the story finally finished and it was clear there had been a trilogy and a fairly decent, if inconsequential, one at that.

The Lord of the Rings will most likely continue to be the standard bearer for true trilogies, that is, stories that break their beginning, middle and end into three separate films. The Godfather movies will continue to have two of the best movies ever made contained within a nominal trilogy, but it doesn't feel like a trilogy at all. The first two movies stand alone as explorations of Michael contrasted with Vito, to be watched in tandem or separately. The third is something else altogether and exists solely to make a trilogy where before there was none.

Sequels and serials will never go away. There's too much money to be made and audiences actually do enjoy seeing the same characters again and again. If they didn't, television would have never succeeded. But when it comes to a trilogy proper, the landscape is pretty barren. There are plenty of them out there but for most, the first time's the charm. The second and third times aren't even needed.

What a Wonderful World this Could Be...

noreply@blogger.com (Greg F.) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:30:00 +0000

...if we were all as nice as comment spammers. You know, comment spam gets a pretty bum wrap in my book. Comment spammers are looked on as leeches and parasites who pollute the online world with their useless info and even more useless links. Okay, maybe they do but here's the thing: They're so damned nice!

Now that I work for TCM I have a whole new world of spam that's opened up to me beyond the doors of Cinema Styles. I just started over there and already the comment spam is simply overflowing with effusive praise. Look at this one, for example:

"Hello my friend! I want to say that this post is amazing, nice written and include approximately all vital infos. I would like to see more posts like this."

That's from a nice young woman, or man, or genderless spambot from, best I can tell, somewhere in the former Czech Republic. He/she/it provides a very nice pop-up ad along with the comment (which I can't see as TCM has blocked it - Curses!) but look at the comment itself. "Hello my friend!" Wow, we haven't even met and I'm a friend. And judging by the exclamation point, a pretty cherished one at that. And my post? Nothing short of "amazing," although, disappointingly, with no exclamation point.

Now, I'll be honest. When I wrote the post this comment is for, a post on period films, I wanted to include all vital infos. I worked at that, and hard, and was hoping someone would notice. Czech Republic expatriate, thank you! You don't know how much it means to me that you did, indeed, notice that I had included all vital infos. Not some, mind you, all! Vital infos are really pretty useless unless you go the whole way with them.

Finally, the post ends with "I would like to see more posts like this." My mysterious genderless mass-marketing friend, I would like to see more commenters as nice as you!

I know what you're thinking: "Okay, Greg, that's one isolated example. I bet they're not all that nice."

Well then what do you make of this, for the same post: "Hey, I came across this amazing site and wanted to share it with my fellow Water Pipes enthusiasts." Hand to God, I shit you not, I was trying to reach Water Pipes enthusiasts with that post. 100% true. I can't adequately express my thanks to you, Zowslillies from getwomenfor dot me for not only noticing but sharing. You, sir or madam, are a trooper.

And if you think kindness and generosity are limited to the english language, think again. Or just read this: Много диет. Диеты для похудения. Начало · Диеты для похудения · Диеты чтобы поправиться · Лечебные диеты · Рецепты блюд · Украшения

Put that into Google Translate and you'll get, "Many diets. Diets for weight loss. Begin diets for weight loss diets to recover · · Therapeutic diets · Recipes · Jewelry." [places both hands over heart and nods head in thanks] You and I, nencileggleoms, we are one.

But I've saved the best for last because, sometimes, it's important to know we're not just doing this for ourselves. We're not just doing this to talk about movies. We're doing it for something more, something bigger, something grander. That's why this message from unbranka-dzienci touched my heart and moved me to tears. Here it is:

"We’re a group of volunteers and starting a new scheme in our community. Your web site offered us with valuable info to work on. You’ve done a formidable job and our entire community will be grateful to you."

Oh. My. God. Did you read that? Did you read it carefully? Folks, I have an entire community that is grateful to me. Repeat: Entire community! Well, kialzze.acc.tr, good luck with those schemes! I'm happy I was able to offer you valuable info to work on. Not to brag, but that's kind of my m.o. See, I offer all vital infos so it doesn't surprise you were able to cull some valuable infos from it.

And now, can the community of online readers and commenters follow the example of the kind and generous comment spammers? If I write about a movie, discuss it with me, sure, but also try and mention how your community considers me a kind of demigod. Mention how you noticed that I really broke through to all those Water Pipers out there or just offer up a simple thanks for the "vital infos" because, I promise you, I'll provide them all.

Not some, all. That's my vow to you or my name isn't ccziuueld at freegold dot com. Peace.

Laurence Olivier: Fine Film Actor, So Shut Up!

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 04:00:00 +0000

Many times during Laurence Olivier's film career, I felt for the guy (yeah, that's right, I just called Lord Laurence Olivier "the guy"). Unlike some of my younger readers (surely I must have some) I was actually around to see and anticipate the latest Laurence Olivier movie at the box office. Okay, by the time I was around for Olivier films he was no longer the star but, still, it's no less true. And when I saw those movies, like Marathon Man, The Seven Percent Solution, The Boys from Brazil, Dracula and, later, his earlier achievements leading up to the current stuff, like Wuthering Heights, Hamlet, Richard III, The Entertainer, Bunny Lake is Missing and Sleuth, I thought he was a fine actor. In fact, I thought he was excellent. But in interview after interview with some pissy theatre historian, arch film critic or jealous thespian, on tv and in print, I kept hearing (and Olivier surely must have, too) that Olivier was only an okay film actor and, alas, the world would never know his real talents because his great stage work was never preserved. I'd hear the snide little self-satisfied stories about how he had to be taught to act in the movies by William Wyler (like Wyler didn't do that with practically every actor!) as if to say, by telling the story, that we all understood poor, dumb Larry just couldn't cut it in the movies without lots of help. Well, here's the thing:

That's all bullshit!

Laurence Olivier was a damn fine actor, on the stage and on the screen, and I'm sick to death of the persistence of that deranged meme that he was really a stage actor and a great one and, thus, by some odd algebra, not very much of a film actor. Look, anyone who has acted knows that if you're really good on stage, chances are pretty overwhelming that you're going to be good on film. Where in the hell do you think 90 percent of tv and film actors have come from in the history of cinema? They've come from school, college, community and professional theatre. Yes, it can sometimes take a film or two for an actor to get the hang of it but it's not a career long crutch. Just recently, in a piece I wrote at TCM, I mentioned how big Jack Albertson played it in the movie version of The Subject was Roses but made sure to also note he was "a great actor in his own right." I mean, okay, he played it big for the film adaptation of a play he'd just done a few hundred performances of but guess what? He was Jack Albertson so he adjusted to the medium pretty damned quickly and so did Olivier.

And for 847th time, can we all understand that big ISN'T BAD! Big acting by a bad actor is bad. Big acting by a good actor is a gift to the audience. So Olivier played it big sometimes, with big accents and big mannerisms and big inflections. So what?! He was a pleasure to watch every time.

When I watch Sleuth, I don't want to see a subtle, under the radar portrayal of conceited, selfish playwright Andrew Wyke. I want that performance BIG because I need to feel in my bones that this guy is an Asshole with a capital "A". And Olivier delivers.

Or how about Szell from Marathon Man? Does that character (and that line - you know the line) go down as one of the great villains in film history if he's played by a schlep who really doesn't seem to know shit about acting in front of a camera?

How about Hamlet, the film version, not the stage version (obviously)? Ever watch Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh or Richard Burton perform the "to be or not to be" soliloquy? They're all available on YouTube and, actually, they're all pretty good but watch the Olivier version first and then notice all of them going out of their way to NOT do it like Olivier did it! Every choice they make makes Olivier's presence felt by default. They know Olivier's the man to beat here and every one of them is playing to his ghost.

Each movie I've mentioned is a movie in which Laurence Olivier excels. I don't think he was good all the time, hence, certain titles I haven't mentioned. But there are few actors who do nail every performance every time. I don't mean to say he was ever bad, just that some of his performances are much better than others, again, like any actor. But consistently calling him out on his film acting feels a bit like trade jealousy. A way of feeling you've one-upped him, cut him down to size.

But you haven't.

You haven't because Laurence Olivier wasn't just a fine stage actor, he was also a fine film actor. The record of that is preserved for posterity and the evidence is incontrovertible. Eventually, the naysayers will die off but the performances will continue to speak for themselves, loudly and boldly. And the message they speak will be clear: "Laurence Olivier was a damn good actor, regardless of the medium."

*************************

This post is a part of the Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh Blogathon held by Kendra Bean at the magnificently obsessed Viv and Larry.

The Unbearable Sadness of Being:Atlantic City, 1980

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:00:00 +0000

I saw Atlantic City when it was first released in the states (It was completed in 1979, released in Europe in 1980, and in America in 1981) and I liked it. I thought it was a fine picture but not much more.

I was a kid. A cinematic babe in arms. A waif.

I watched it again recently, thirty years older and in the midst of a very stressful financial period due to factors beyond my control, and found it an extraordinary film, moving and unbearably sad. Truly and deeply sad.

But also redemptive, renewing and fulfilling.

Honestly, I was unprepared for how well the movie explores the themes of self-delusion and loneliness. Of nostalgia and longing. Of the cruel tricks played on all of us by life and how, usually, the smallest thing will bring us back.

The plot revolves around an aging numbers runner, Lou Pascal (Burt Lancaster), who also earns a few extra dollars acting as a personal assistant/nurse to a mobster's widow, Grace Pinza (Kate Reid). He lives across from Sally (Susan Sarandon) and watches her wipe herself down with lemon juice each night to wash off the fish smell she gets from the oyster bar in which she works. Into both of their lives walks Dave and Chrissie (Robert Joy and Hollis McLaren, respectively), Sally's husband and sister (now with Dave and bearing his child). Lou gets involved with Dave who's looking to score big with some cocaine he stole off of a dealer in Philadelphia. Lou makes the drop for him, Dave gets killed and Lou ends up with the money.

That's as much plot as you'll get from me because the plot isn't nearly as important as the idea of desperate people, interacting, fooling themselves and fooling each other. Lou never was a big time mobster and probably never wanted to be. All Lou ever wanted was for people to think he was a big time mobster. Sally wants to think he was, too, so she can pretend something good will come of her relationship with him. She also wants to believe she's going to be a world-travelled blackjack dealer. Grace believes her dead husband, Cookie Pinza, was a big shot and, by extension, she is too. And Sally's sister, well, she believes in everyone and everything.

The film's screenplay, by John Guare, is brilliantly composed, building its characters in snippets, moments and small talk. There are no laborious monologues or deep exchanges. None. Practically every line in the movie is surface, functional and utilitarian but succeeds at the same time in providing a kind of poetry of self-delusion that the characters use to ameliorate their lonely, desperate existences. Some of its lines are famous, like the one about the Atlantic Ocean. Lou, thrilled to be taken seriously by the young Dave and running out of things to memorialize, laments, "The Atlantic Ocean was something then. Yeah, you should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days." Other lines are less so but carry enormous power like when Buddy, an old friend of Lou who now works as a towel boy in a boardwalk restroom, gets a twenty from Lou and says, "Listen, when things start going good for me I'll make it up to you." He's in his late sixties working as a towel boy. Things aren't going to get good. Things aren't going to get better. Buddy's at the end of the line. It's over. But there he is, with a smile on his face, seemingly convinced that, yes, by God, things are going to get better. They have to, right?

This cast of characters vibrantly pulsates throughout the movie because its director, Louis Malle, never lingers over a scene unnecessarily. Most scenes have an exit cut the millisecond the last line is delivered. That line of Buddy's, for instance. As the final breath in the last word "you" is being exhaled, the scene cuts. It's as if, throughout, Malle is making the decision to show the viewer only what is absolutely necessary to express the scene. These are delusional people living just above the poverty line, not skilled orators. They say what they mean and move on.

Atlantic City came and went in 1981. It received marvelous reviews and many critics awards but never enjoyed the kind of lasting reverence afforded other movies of the time. Cinephiles know of it and older movie fans but it's not discussed much anymore. That's a shame. Burt Lancaster was never better and I'm including Elmer Gantry in that assessment. Susan Sarandon shows the great potential she would later fulfill. Robert Joy plays the loser husband at a perfect pitch and Kate Reid is wonderful as a woman who plays it tough but is really as delicate and fragile as anyone. I hope Atlantic City has a revival of sorts, and soon. It's a superb movie and deserves to be ranked alongside the best that the last thirty years has to offer.

Love/Hate: Gangs of New York

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:52:00 +0000

There are several movies with which I have love/hate relationships. None of them actually involve love or hate but, rather, aspects I like or admire and aspects I find dull or uninspired or just plain wrong. One of the great Love/Hate relationships I have in the cinema is with the film Gangs of New York. There is almost as much I like about that film as I don't like so it comes about as close to an even split as I'm going to get. I will attempt to explain why but most of it is based on gut feelings, something that doesn't translate well into written analysis so listing may, instead, be the order of the day. I may say harsh things about a movie many love but hope that, in the end, Bill "The Butcher" Cutting himself would declare of this piece, "It's fair. A touch indelicate, but fair."

LOVE:

*Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill "The Butcher" Cutting. As always, Day-Lewis doesn't pull back and that makes for one hell of a watchable performance. In my view, people continue to misunderstand acting that many describe as "hammy" or "over the top." I have commented on this many times but will say it again: A bad actor attempting to ham it up or go "over the top" is painful to watch and, often, wooden. A great actor doing it is a joy to behold (Charles Laughton, Gary Oldman, Bette Davis). I love when he says the "indelicate" line quoted above. Also, after piercing Amsterdam Vallon's (Leonardo DiCaprio) side, announcing, "That's a wound."

*The look of the film. The sets and art direction are terrific to take in and director Martin Scorsese creates an other worldly feel with it, providing a real sense of space and depth within the sets that transport the viewer back in time.

*Jim Broadbent because, well, you know, he's Jim Broadbent!

*The time it takes to develop its story. It doesn't rush itself and doesn't necessarily go where one would expect.

*The history provided in the film, though largely fictionalized, is nonetheless fascinating and did actually inspire me to research it further.

HATE:

*Cameron Diaz. I just can't stand her in this movie. I find her line deliveries flat and unbelievable and no matter what they do to her costume and makeup, she doesn't look period. She's found a niche in comedy and I think she's skilled at it but in drama, especially this particular period drama, she doesn't work.

*Leonardo DiCaprio. I've grown to like DiCaprio in many things, including all of his other efforts with Scorsese but here he feels forced. From Day-Lewis and Broadbent I get period characters I believe, from DiCaprio I get unconvincing period affectations.

*The opening and closing music. God, how I hate it! This is probably the biggest "Hate" factor of them all. When the opening fight begins and, despite the rest of the film using period Celtic American musical motifs, goes into electric guitar riffs while the action slows to jagged frame by frame slow motion, I don't feel taken out of the movie so much as desperately wanting to leave the movie, and I don't even mind non-period music in period pieces.

Then, at the end, as Amsterdam ponders the future memory of who they were and what they did, cheesy synthesizer-sounding strings strike up (complete with electric guitar riffs, again) as if Scorsese said to the music director, "Now, listen, I'm serious, I really want you to totally screw up this ending," and then the music director pulled out his "100 Greatest Cheesy Movie Themes of the 80s" album and said, "I've got just the thing!"

*The CGI/Matte work/Special Effects. When the camera pulls back at the beginning to show where they are (pssst, it's New York) it looks like the worst matte painting in history as viewed through a broken down screen door. Honestly, I'm not sure if it's matte, CGI or a combination of both, I just know it looks bad. At the end, when Musical Cheese-Fest 2002 is going on, the New York skyline changes or, rather, the really bad CGI/Matte drawing of the New York skyline changes. Hey Marty, way to do everything in your power to destroy the closing shot.

*Finally, and here comes the big one, Martin Scorsese's direction. It's pretty dreadful. He makes some good choices (I mean, how could he not, he's Martin Scorsese so it's not a total loss) but he makes many more bad ones. Mainly, he doesn't stick with any one stylistic approach. There's the jagged frame by frame slow-mo of the fight scene. There's the varying musical approaches. There's the hectic, chaotic climax, narrated by a reporter reading off the telegraph machine so the viewer gets a play by play of the action. Dear Lord, that's got to be one of the most ill-advised approaches to a climax I've ever seen. Scorsese clearly wanted the ending to simulate a newsreel play by play but, alas, the story takes place during the Civil War so he goes with the reporter reading off the telegraph instead. The ending felt so disconnected from the rest of the film, so emotionally distant, that by the time we see the long line of dead bodies waiting to be claimed one feels relief only that, with the end credits nearing, the constant shift in styles will be mercifully over.

When Gangs of New York ends, and the big, overdesigned title card (seriously, the title card is overdesigned! How? Why?) I walk away with a sense of longing. A longing for a better, more consistent film. And, really, that's not a knock so much as an acknowledgement that I like a lot in the movie and wish I liked the movie itself more. And I'll watch it again. I'll watch Bill teach Amsterdam how and where to cut someone for maximum effect (another favorite scene) while I drift off as the Cameron Diaz scenes play out. I'll love it and I'll hate it and dream of what might have been but the movie's shortcomings won't keep me away. After all, with Gangs of New York I know where I stand. It's hit and miss and that's not deadly. That's a wound.

The Universal Language

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 31 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Last weekend my wife and I had time to watch movies together, something that doesn't happen as often as we'd like. After working, making dinner, cleaning up and waiting for everything and everyone to settle down, we usually have but a couple of hours of free time with which to paint and write, and we do. But on Memorial Day weekend we found time for not one but two movies together. We chose La Ceremonie and Topsy-Turvy and were, of course, more than happy with both choices as both are exceptional films. But what I kept asking myself, again and again, after watching them was, "Why didn't these get any acting nominations?"

I'm not going to go off (again) on how awful the selections are for the Oscars, year in and year out, or bemoan the fact that not one film nominated for Best Picture in 1999 can hold a candle to Topsy-Turvy, which wasn't nominated for the top award at all. I just want to say, quickly and cleanly, that the Academy members really need to start appreciating foreign language performances and films more often, as well as english language films from outside the United States, especially now that we are finally entering into a stage where practically everything is available to practically anyone who wants to see it.

They've done better by Britain over the years (you know, they use the same language and all, not that weird foreign stuff you have to read on the screen) but still, how any informed voting body can watch Topsy-Turvy and not find it in them to nominate anyone/everyone from the film is beyond me. Still, British film, on the whole, does fairly well, as witnessed by last year's winner, The King's Speech, for Best Actor, Director and Picture.

However, when it comes to foreign language, it's not just worse, it's downright soul-crushing. There are three winners in the history of the award: Sophia Loren for Two Women, Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose and [cringe] Roberto Benigni for [major cringe] Life is Beautiful. That's it. That's the sum total for foreign language performances taking home the Oscar. Okay, there are actually some others but they come from American films in which the performance is in another language (Robert de Niro for The Godfather, Part II, Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds, and so on - the complete list here). That's different than being in a movie made and released in another part of the world.

So after watching these two films, Topsy-Turvy and La Ceremonie, I kept asking, "Why no acting nods? Why?" Because I'm here to tell you that everyone in Topsy-Turvy is superb and that Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire delivered the two finest performances of 1995 (date of European release) or 1996 (date of American release) in La Ceremonie and to not be nominated is a crime. But this has been happening and will continue to happen.

Back in 2006 Carice van Houten was stellar in Black Book and yet managed to evade the notice of the voting members of the Academy. And if you think it's a current trend (after all, Sophia won back in the sixties, remember?) then how about Giulietta Masina? She should have been nominated for La Strada, should have won for Nights of Cabiria and given a lifetime achievement award for everything else. But it was not to be. She was never nominated. Ever.

Or Anna Karina, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Anderson, Isabelle Adjani or Chieko Higashiyama. Oh, there are some nominations in there but no wins. Or how about Norma Aleandro for The Official Story? She wasn't even nominated!

Ah, hell, what's the point? I suppose now I could list all the male actors ignored but this isn't about ticking off each individual snub. You know it happens and that it will continue to happen and, really, it's time for it to stop. Foreign films used to be pretty damn inaccessible outside of big cities but now, even if it doesn't hit the local multi-mega-plex, it can be sent to your home or streamed directly to your television for a small fee.

It's time for Oscar to adapt. It already has the prestige of being the biggest award for film out there. Now, it could become (possibly) respectable by nominating from the world instead of just what played in Peoria. Drop the Foreign Language Oscar and start nominating those films alongside the Best Picture nominees. I'd love to see a non-English language film win once in a while. It would announce the Oscars were about the best in film from all over the world, not just the states. But even if that doesn't happen soon, and it won't, can we at least start acknowledging the great work of so many great actors who have the "misfortune" of not portraying characters who speak english? Personally, I don't care what language they speak as long as the performance is good and when it is, everyone understands anyway. The language of a great performance is universal.

"Mom, a man just died."

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 29 May 2011 20:00:00 +0000

There's an old episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Homer are watching a McBain movie and cheering on McBain as he kills one enemy after another. Wanting to join in, Marge quips, after watching McBain snap a man's neck as he hurtles through the sky in a jet, "Now that's what I call breakneck speed!" She is only able to savor her quip momentarily as Bart turns to her and scolds, "Mom, a man just died."

Similarly, in the deleted scenes from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, friends of anonymous henchmen, killed in the movie without a thought, mourn the death of their friends, husbands and fathers.

The joke in both, of course, is that the onscreen death of a faceless, nameless character in an action movie is suddenly given the kind of weight and thoughtful consideration normally reserved for a central character, one in which the audience cares for deeply. And the joke of my movie-watching life, as I grow ever older, is that I give random, nameless and faceless deaths onscreen the same kind of consideration The Simpsons and Austin Powers did as a clever ironic statement, only with me, there's no irony.

It's actually not all that new, having started years ago, but has grown increasingly worse as I get older. It first manifested itself in childhood as I wondered about this or that person being killed by the likes of James Bond and wondering, briefly, fleetingly, "What's his story?"

The first time it ever truly took hold of me was during the viewing of a perfectly wretched catastrophe of a movie, Nothing but Trouble. It was the mid-nineties, I was up late flipping through the channels and on HBO there was this movie, written and directed by Dan Aykroyd, and I quickly realized it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. Needless to say, I kept watching. Like the driver slowing down to see how bad the carnage is alongside the road after a traffic accident, I wanted to see just how deep into the abyss of badness this movie would plunge.

Early on some hot shots in a sports car get pulled over by the lone police officer in town, John Candy. They're snorting coke and have plenty of drugs and it's implied they deal. They've got two women with them and they're armed. Candy arrests them and brings them before the horrifying town judge/dictator, played by Dan Aykroyd, who summarily executes them. They are sent onto a treadmill/ride into a shredder. This is played as a joke.

Okay, time for some personal background, for both me and Dan. For my part, I have a sister who got heavily involved in drugs in her twenties and thirties. When I say heavily, I don't mean she smoked some pot like you or I did in college or had the occasional hash brownies. No. I mean she was addicted to all manner of drugs, particularly cocaine, and unlike addicts you may have known, my sister married a drug dealer and was pursued, surveilled and eventually arrested by the F.B.I. After turning evidence and being released she sunk into alcoholism and eventually, unable to hold down a job, moved back in with my parents. The drugs she did had severe physical repercussions and now she suffers from brain seizures but there is a plus side to all this: She completely cleaned herself up. She's been sober now for more than eleven years, and while she still lives with my parents thanks to her neurological condition, she is drug-free and helping out my elderly parents as they get older and their health declines.

Now for Dan. He was close friends with John Belushi and despises drug use and drug dealers. Thanks to Cathy Evelyn Smith serving up a too potent speedball, his friend John Belushi lost his life. While she served time for this on manslaughter charges, it can never bring Belushi back. His life is gone, forever. Dan Aykroyd hates dealers. I get that and I sympathize. And I understand, that's where the scene comes from. It comes from the anger and hatred he holds for people who deal in death, at least in some cases.

But when I watched that scene, all I could think of was, "Those two women, why'd they get killed? Because they made the wrong choice? Lots of people make perfectly horrific choices and recover, grow up and turn themselves around. They chose to be with these loser drug dealers, like my sister did. I don't think they deserve to die for that."

Now, I know, it's all a little heavy for a throwaway scene in a perfectly rotten movie and perhaps you're thinking, "Greg, geez, come on, lighten up!" And you're right because I'm saying it too, which is why I'm writing this piece in the first place. Because what started in Nothing but Trouble has continued and I repeatedly find myself asking, even of several supposedly "bad" characters, "That person just died, doesn't anyone care?"

And to be sure this is all perfectly understood, I'm NOT talking about central characters or major supporting characters or even minor supporting characters. That's NOT what I'm talking about. With those you DO feel something and often are meant to. I'm talking about characters that the writer, director and actors want to be nameless and faceless. The characters of whom the audience is completely indifferent. Characters played by actors you will never know and whose credit listings are along the lines of "Man #3." I'm talking about THOSE characters. More often than not, lately, their onscreen deaths really bother me.

The most recent example of this came in the movie Kick-Ass, which came to theatres already swirling in controversy over the language and violence dispensed by the eleven year old character Hit Girl, played by then 13 year-old Chloë Moretz. The movie (from the comic book of the same name) deals with ordinary people taking on the personas of super heroes in the real world, a world filled with violence and danger. There is no "cartoon" violence in the movie. Blood flies, guts spill. It is exceptionally violent and while some critics, most notably Roger Ebert, found it morally offensive, I did not, unless you count the death of a certain nameless, faceless character. Then maybe I do but for the reasons I've outlined here, not because Kick-Ass is any different in this respect than any other action movie. It's just that in Kick-Ass, it seems more real and, thus, more impactful.

The death to which I'm referring is particularly troublesome for me because of another important plot line set up by the film. Here's the setup: Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a New York teenager who decides to become a superhero named Kick-Ass. Among his first assignments is to help out a girl he long been secretly in love with, Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca). She's been mixed up with a guy she wants to stop seeing and asks Kick-Ass to get that message to him. Kick-Ass goes to see the guy, Rasul (Kofi Natei) who is in an apartment with several other unsavory characters and they all appear to be drug-dealers. Kick-Ass is grabbed by them and about to be killed when eleven year old Hit Girl shows up and proceeds to viciously slaughter all of them with a mounted hunting knife. Finally, she turns her attention to the lone female in the apartment who breaks a bottle to try and defend herself before running to the door. She then tries to get it open, terrified, until Hit Girl pulls the knife mount apart, revealing another knife inside, and proceeds to skewer the poor girl before pulling the blades out and casually walking away as her lifeless body falls to the floor.

Ha, ha! She hooked up with the wrong people and now will never have a chance to learn from that and grow as a person because an 11-year-old girl decided it was time for her to die, never to experience life again. Ha, ha! Oh man, that shit is funny, huh?

Okay, it's not that funny but could be depending on your point of view, I guess. The problem with this scene is that the whole reason Kick-Ass is taking on Rasul in the first place is because Katie, the good girl of the movie, was mixed up with him! In other words, the movie is flippantly killing off one girl with Rasul, treating it as a joke that it believes the audience will follow along for the ride because, after all, she's mixed up with a drug dealer, so let her die! But wait! Katie was too! The whole thing feels more like bullshit Hollywood moralizing than anything else.

It's the same bizarre duality Hollywood has exhibited for years: Film folks get mixed up in drugs but portray people mixed up in drugs as evil. Film folks enjoy unimaginable wealth but often portray the wealthy as evil. Film folks sleep with a great many people and... well, you get the picture. There's a lot of projection going on in Hollywood, and not just the kind where reels get changed.

Of course, let's be honest: We've all laughed at people getting killed in films. As referenced earlier, the Bond films have made an artform out of turning a nameless character's death into a joke. One of the more famous examples comes from the beginning of Goldfinger in which Bond electrocutes a man in a bathtub and walks away shaking his head saying, "Shocking." This guy, whoever he was, was clearly in the business of killing people and, frankly, I don't care what happens to him. Likewise for the dealers in Kick-Ass. They are, we can assume, physically dangerous men who have killed and will kill again. It's the girl I have problems killing. The girl who, like Katie, hooked up with someone bad but unlike Katie, wasn't smart enough to unhook herself in time. Had I been the director, I would have had her get the door open and flee. We'd never see her again and leave the theatre thinking, perhaps, she turned her life around after that terrifying incident. Despite all the violence, mayhem and bloodshed in that scene, it is only her death that bothers me and I think it was a mistake to leave it in.

But lest we think this is some new trend in movies or that my dismay is reserved only for the female cohorts of drug dealers, I should say it's been going on since the beginning of cinema. In the film Heaven Can Wait, not the 1978 Warren Beatty film but the 1943 Don Ameche film, the lead character played by Don Ameche is speaking with Satan, played by the great Laird Cregar. As Ameche speaks with an elderly woman (assigned to Hell in the afterlife) Cregar bores of her and presses a button that opens a trap door releasing her to her eternal torment with a blood-curdling scream. After this I couldn't focus on anything else in the movie. All I could think was, "Right now, at this moment, she's being tortured, brutalized and tormented. This will go on forever and why? Because she was a gossip?" That's what's implied: She will be physically tortured for eternity because she was a busybody. And her release into Hell by Cregar is played as a joke. Had Lubitsch made her a rapist or a murderer or a gangster or, fuck, anything but a gossip I would have taken to the joke better. But by making her so innocuous, the joke was given an unfortunate weight, a weight that works against comedy. Well, for weirdos like me who focus on this kind of thing.

For the most part, this is all reserved for moments where a person's death is played off as a joke in a reasonably realistic way. That is, Rowan Atkinson backing off of the cliff in Hot Shots, Part Deux is played so ridiculously that the only thing to do is laugh since no one in the movie feels real in any way, and isn't meant to. But when the guy with the fancy swordwork gets casually shot by Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I think, "Damn, it's over for him now. He's dead." Of course, I laugh at the scene anyway, just like I'm supposed to, probably because Spielberg is skilled enough to keep just enough distance from it to make it work. The death isn't terrifying (like the woman sucked down to her torment screaming in Heaven Can Wait) or bloodthirsty (like the drug moll in Kick-Ass) and the swordsman isn't in closeup when it happens. But it doesn't mean I still don't think about it, if only for a moment.

A part of me is utterly annoyed with myself for these new found feelings of empathy for faceless extras in the movies but another part of me thinks it's perfectly normal and I'm happy I don't have a cold, mechanical reaction to anyone's death onscreen. I'm well into middle-age, have children on their way out the door and into their own lives and a lovely wife with whom I look forward to growing old. If that means I spend a little more time thinking about life in a way that makes casual onscreen death seem unnerving, so be it. It's not going to kill me.

Still Reeling (in the movies)

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 24 May 2011 02:17:00 +0000

It's been a tough month, what with obligations and parties and the busiest time of the year at work and promises to keep and miles to go and my horse thinking it queer and, really, just the whole goddamn thing. Seriously, go find a kit, get yourself a caboodle (Amazon has 'em cheap), combine the two and that's what I got in things to keep me busy. But I'm still watching, still thinking around the clock about movies, still trying to get excited for something, anything in this, my most dreaded movie season, the summer season. Really, there's just nothing I ever want to see in the summer season. It doesn't mean I don't usually find something worthwhile in the end but I never expect to and usually can't muster up enough excitement to look very hard anyway.

At home, I wait it out by watching, scanning, perusing or just glancing at hundreds of movies, all those now available to me on streaming whenever I want. Here are some things I observed last week:

Escape From New York: By god, it's still entertaining. It's still stupid as hell, too (I mean, seriously, the architecture, the center of commerce, the history, all of it thrown away to make a prison?! Hahahahaaaaa!) but damn, it's entertaining. The one area where the "New York as Prison" worked best when it was released was the wink and a nudge joke John Carpenter was making about New York already being halfway there anyway. Now, though, with the downtown area glossed up, Disneyfied and fun for the whole family, most people probably wouldn't realize there was ever a joke there.

The Blue Angel (Original German Version): The scene where the Professor (Emil Jannings) drops the cigarettes is a great moment. For those unfamiliar, he has to crawl under the table to pick them up while Lola (Marlene Dietrich) stays seated at the table smoking hers. Meanwhile her legs are down there, in his face, driving him crazy. It's a great shot by Sternberg, the once dignified professor, on his hands and knees, under the table at her feet while she goes about her business. Talk about defining a relationship in purely visual terms.

Easy Virtue: Silent Hitchcock melodrama. Not as bad as I'd heard. By any other director would have seemed decent. By Hitchcock's standards, fairly sluggish and dull. But the line Noel Coward pens for the closer is the ultimate in self-pitying mega-drama!

Greedy: Not much to say here except this: Phil Hartman, god what a loss!

Algiers: The moment where Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer first spy each other is fantastic. The camera focuses in on Lamarr lips as they widen to a smile. Boyer, meanwhile, is doing nothing but eyeing her jewelry.

When We Were Kings: The final fight and its analysis is a joy to behold but it should be noted: Norman Mailer does the worst Ali impersonation in the history of ever.

Finally, Ed Howard, the most prolific unpaid movie reviewer on the internet, has a music club now which I will be participating in but, alas, not this time or, at least, not on the first day. I dropped the ball, simply no way around it. I didn't get the album in time (though I do have it now) and still haven't listened to it what with everything going on. But, if you have listened to and/or know well the album Heart of the Congos by The Congos, by all means, hop over to Only the Cinema and join in the discussion. I'm sorry I missed it but will chime in later once I've listened to the album and formed something resembling a cogent opinion.

That's all for now. Back to work, watching movies and listening to The Congos.

When Music Kills the Mood

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:15:00 +0000

Last October my wife and I had an awful experience with a silent film, a modern score and an idiot emcee. It was, to date, our only bad experience at the AFI. The AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, MD is a place we visit often to take in classic Hollywood and world cinema and whenever I mention it here, it's usually glowing. But this time, we took in Nosferatu the night before Halloween and things didn't go as well. We had avoided it in the past (it plays every year) because it felt like one of those rare AFI events that pulls in the dilettantes, the folks who aren't really classic movie lovers but think seeing what they perceive as an old creaky silent with a counter-intuitive modern score will fill all kinds of awesome ironic longings in their cold, smug souls.

And we were right. That's exactly how it felt.

We felt surrounded by people who didn't know the first goddamn thing about F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, Max Schreck or silent films period. I'm not saying that is who we were surrounded by, just that it felt that way. I'm sure there were many classic film lovers there, like my wife and I, feeling the same thing we were, which was, to wit, "Who are all these interlopers?" Kind of like on St. Patrick's Day or New Year's Eve when all the amateurs come out to throw up on the bar floor and the real drinkers stay home or on Christmas and Easter when all those parishioners who didn't bother to show up on any other Sunday of the year suddenly pack the house.

"This movie's so fabulously dated! I so want a t-shirt of the bald guy!"

Then came the emcee, a local dee-jay whose name I can't remember and even if I did I wouldn't mention it here because why embarrass the guy, right? See, the thing is, he didn't know anything about silent film. Nothing. He got up on the stage in his Dracula cape and, frankly, before he even opened his mouth I felt like punching him. Then, when he opened his mouth, thoughts of punching him quickly gave way to, "How can I kill him in front of all these people and somehow make it look like the self-satisfied hipster couple in front of me did it and, hey, maybe I could figure out a way to make them die too as a bonus."

Seriously, here's what he does: He takes the emaciated, skeletal sliver of knowledge on Murnau and Nosferatu he culled from Wikipedia five minutes before going onstage and tries to turn it into some kind of Richard Pryor-esque shtick. He starts giving us details in stand-up format, like this: "Oh, so Murnau is all like 'oh no you didn't! I know you're not trying to sue me, woman! [referring to Bram Stoker's widow] and so F.W.'s all like, 'Take my movie? I'm gonna slide a copy of this film under my bed, uh-huh!" So, you can probably understand the homicidal thoughts I was having more clearly now, right?

Once the movie started, it got worse. The music took over. The movie? Oh, it was there, somewhere, struggling to compete with the ear-shattering percussion and endlessly clever found objects used as instruments that made you go, "Why that's a clever use of a wrench. I wonder how they... hey, wait a minute! I'm supposed to be focusing on the movie!"

To make matters worse, my lovely wife has less tolerance for this kind of malarkey than I do and when Count Orlock is making his way up the steps in what should be a very chilling and creepy scene and the "orchestra" is bombarding the audience with a full-on percussive assault using the kind of drum fills more appropriate for a battle sequence or John Bonham solo, I can sense her sitting next to me, steaming. I can sense it because, well, she is.

"I'm at the top of the stairs now. Cue the cannons."
In a way, though, I kind of have to hand it to the "orchestra" (sorry, I can't seem to type that word without the scare quotes) for some kind of dubious achievement in that I really can't imagine anyone else doing a better job of producing the opposite mood of what was on the screen than they did. To do so would require playing "Have you Never been Mellow" during the rape scene in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and who wants to go there?

When it was over, the lights came up and the audience erupted in thunderous applause. The couple in front of us couldn't contain themselves and started shouting, "Bravo!" and "Encore!" and "Sundance Movie Channel!" Okay, maybe not the last one. Anyway, I briefly contemplated pushing them over until Dracula took the stage again and my wife shouted, "Run!" We got the hell out of there as fast as we could. One more second of shtick from that moron and the evening would've ended with my best impersonation of the theatre climax in Inglourious Basterds with that mother fucker standing in for Hitler.

Afterwards, I thought on the experience long and hard. See, I have no problem with modern music for old films or modern music in new films that take place in the past. I've used modern music myself for montages of classic film and a film like Chariots of Fire takes place in 1924 but has a score entirely recorded on synthesizer. No problem.

My problem wasn't that it was modern music, nor was it that it didn't entirely fit. My problem was that it felt like it wasn't supposed to entirely fit. It felt like it was supposed to stick out, so you'd remember the score more than the movie. The composers weren't interested in complementing the movie, they were interested in impressing the audience with their skills and talents and endless cleverness. And that really bugged me.

Nosferatu is a great work and would have been infinitely more effective had we watched it silently, as in truly silent with no sound or music at all. I've watched it that way before. In fact, I've watched a few silent movies that way, actually. I've turned down the music on many a silent film just to watch it in silence. It's a wonderful experience and with the best silent films, can really become hypnotic.

"Wasn't the score ironic?" "Mmm-hmmm." "We should make it our ringtone."

But the point is, the music took center stage, not the movie. Last year, when I saw Upstream at The National Archives, it had a beautifully fitting piano and violin score composed for it. Some found objects were used too for sound effects but they never detracted from the film and Upstream is several rungs down the ladder from Nosferatu, with or without John Ford at the helm. Afterwards, the audience asked questions and one of them was for the pianist composer himself. He was asked what he thought about certain modern "orchestras" musical accompaniment to silent films and he said he admired their talents but they were more concerned with their scores than the movie and when you're scoring a movie, the movie comes first. The audience applauded. This was before my AFI experience (though I wrote it up afterwards in November) so I clapped out of appreciation for the idea rather than because of actual firsthand knowledge. After seeing Nosferatu, I immediately flashed back to that, though, and thought, "Damn straight."

Modern music for an old movie or a period piece is not a problem. It's become kind of a fad in recent years, in fact. The problem is music that doesn't fit the mood, or the point of a scene. It's a problem that happens from time to time with even the best of movies and exploring music in film is something I'd like to do more of here at Cinema Styles. Exploring how it fails can be just as instructive as when it succeeds. For now, I'm content to avoid any modern scoring of silent films for a little while longer until I get the bad taste out of my mouth. Of course, I'll go back to others but I think the AFI's annual Nosferatu showing and me are done. I ignored my instincts and it bit me in the ass. Lesson learned.

The Deer Hunter Redux A Look at the Film and the Controversy

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:00:00 +0000

I watched The Deer Hunter again recently for the first time in over 25 years. My memory of the film was shaky but I did have a strong recollection of not much caring for it the first two times around (having seen it twice in its entirety by the mid-eighties). I also recalled the controversy surrounding it and wondered if the recollection of any of that might be peppering my memory. I decided to give it another look, 25 years later, to see what it would feel like, decades removed from any controversy over the content of the film or the war in Vietnam itself. The experience was an interesting one, if not least of all for the fact that it has much to admire within its frames and much to deride. Suffice it to say, The Deer Hunter makes for a very conflicted viewing experience, giving the viewer plenty of time to process information about its characters but giving up precious few secrets about them on which to base that processing.

The film focuses on a group of friends in Clairton, PA during the height of American involvement in Vietnam. As the film opens we meet three friends who will travel to Vietnam together, Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage) and their buddies Stan (John Cazale), Axel (Chuck Aspegren, real life foreman of the steel mill used in the film) and John (George Dzundza). Steven is getting married to a woman pregnant by another man, Nick is in love(?) with Linda (Meryl Streep) and Mike is on his own.

As the film opens we see the three friends saying their goodbyes to coworkers as they will be leaving for duty in Vietnam after the wedding and a hunting trip. The wedding and hunting trip comprise the first third of the movie (the movie has a neatly partitioned three-act story) and it's here that the film's own storytelling conflicts reveal themselves.

The director, Michael Cimino, was coming off of his only directorial effort, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, when he took on The Deer Hunter, a story he had co-developed for a couple of years. It's hard to say anything about one movie influencing or instructing upon the other since they are so very different but it seems that Cimino combined some of the basic camaraderie elements of Thunderbolt... with the meandering mise en scène of Robert Altman to mixed effect.

That mixed effect is the result of clashing styles, something from which Altman never suffered. For instance, in the opening fifteen minutes the audience is treated to several wandering scenes of the friends saying goodbyes, joking around, drinking beers and talking about anything but how vastly different their lives will soon be. None of it is done in close-up, no one line is given any special attention and all of it feels like documentary-style eavesdropping. In the middle of this is a stilted belabored scene, mercifully brief, of the old world (Russia) mother of Steven delivering this awful piece of exposition to the priest:

"I still do not believe this. My own boy with a strange girl and not so thin, if you understand my meaning...The next thing you know, he goes to Vietnam...I do not understand, Father. I understand nothing anymore, nothing...Can you explain? Can anyone explain?"

The scene is less than a minute but it's a minute so awful and ill-fitting it lingers beyond its screen time. This example is the first instance of something that will happen throughout the movie: Long, fascinating Altmanesque sequences in which we voyeuristically gaze upon the characters weaving in and out of their own lives abruptly interrupted by obviously scripted moments. A well written movie never seems scripted. When it does, it's hard to recover. The Deer Hunter does recover, however, and for most of the first act, the Altman style dominates and renders the more obviously scripted moments bearable. But the clashing styles isn't the only problem to be overcome. The other is the clearly labeled metaphors. I must be honest right now in the interest of full disclosure: When a movie starts speaking in metaphors, it can lose me pretty fast.

While it's true that many films, and much great art, deal in metaphor, the fact is The Deer Hunter wields its metaphors in such a paint-by-the-numbers style that even the most obtuse viewer should be able to match the right colors to the right numbers every time. Most viewers would probably surmise on their own that the deer hunting rituals of Mike were religious to him without having a chorus singing Orthodox hymns behind the action. And the chorus starts right when Mike spots the deer and begins his pursuit. The Deer Hunter doesn't miss an opportunity to point out what it's doing whenever it can. This happens in the wedding sequences as well when, in the middle of several minutes (the sequence is roughly 25 minutes long) of Altmanesque perusing, our heroes happen upon a Green Beret at the bar where another obviously scripted sequence takes place to let the viewer know that the macho dreams of Mike, Nick and Steven are but puffs of smoke. It's handled well enough, much more so than the earlier mother scene, but is unnecessary. In fact, it's completely unnecessary, so much so that the viewer feels a bit insulted that the scene is even happening.

After the wedding and hunting sequences the gang heads back to town, goes to John's bar, drinks some beer, listens to John play a longing piece on the piano as the distant sounds of a helicopter come over the soundtrack until we are burst into Vietnam, and the second act.

It is the Vietnam section of the film that caused the original controversies swirling around the film and contains its most famous scenes. But the scenes caused controversy for a wide variety of reasons, some valid, others less so. In Vietnam, Mike, Nick and Steven meet up, somehow, as a village is being bombed. Something happens (it's not clear what but vaguely looks like advancing Vietcong troops) and in the very next scene they are prisoners of war, held in a bamboo cage along the river. Here, they are forced to play Russian roulette for the amusement of their Vietcong captors. Steven is clearly suffering a mental break from all of it while Mike and Nick try to figure out what to do. Steven and Mike are pitted against each other and Steven gets the bullet in the chamber but the gun slips and he only grazes the top of his head. Both are returned to the cage and Mike tells Nick that the two of them will play next and he will get them out by demanding more bullets in the chamber, which he does and they do.

This is probably the single most famous scene in the whole film and one that worked exceedingly well for me as a young teenager taking in the horrifying, gritty brutality of it all. Seeing it again 25 years later the scene wasn't as nearly as gripping as I had remembered. Oh, it's done well and is quite gripping at times but not for the reasons I remembered. What stood out for me this time was not the actual scenes of Russian roulette but the scenes of Steven gasping for air in a state of shock every time he hears the revolver's hammer come down. John Savage is so extraordinary in the scene that it's baffling how he escaped nomination for his performance. Christopher Walken won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor that year for his performance as Nick, and while he is excellent, I felt John Savage did something quite amazing with his very small part.

Later in the second act, after their escape, Nick is separated from Mike and Steven who make their way back home, although Steven loses his legs and won't leave the Veteran's hospital in Pittsburgh. Nick is lured in by a French man, a remnant of Vietnam's colonial period, who promises him riches playing Russian roulette. He never returns home.

The third act finds Mike back home, dealing with the loss of Nick and heartbreak of Steven. He turns to Linda for solace and the two form a bond as a means of keeping Nick alive between them. The third act has some good moments, particularly with the weaselly Stan getting his comeuppance by an angry Mike, sick of Stan's bullshit bravado in the face of what he's experienced. John Cazale, once again and for the last time in his acting career, excels at the role and reminds us how much the cinema lost when John Cazale succumbed to cancer at the all too young age of 42. The third act stumbles when Mike decides to go back for Nick as Saigon falls. Here, and for inexplicable reasons, Cimino inserts stock footage from the fall into the actual footage he's shot. It's inexplicable because the actual footage shot by Cimino is amazing and jarringly disrupted by news footage so far from visually matching the film's footage as to be almost comical.

To add to the faults of the third act, Mike's visit to find Nick is too pat. It's so easy and happens so quickly the viewer cannot help but ask, "Why didn't he just do this before he left?" That's a valid question because before he leaves Vietnam the first time he sees Nick and it's clear that Nick is unresponsive to him and going awol. And yet, nothing happens. Nonetheless, Mike does go back, finds him easily and challenges him to a game of Russian roulette, where Nick has been playing professionally for six years without getting a bullet in the chamber once. The viewer would be a fool to bet against that happening now that Mike has shown up.

And, of course, it does happen. It happens just as there is some sign that Nick might realize who Mike is. Afterwards, Mike returns home with his body, we watch the funeral and at John's bar, everyone joins in an impromptu singing of God Bless America as the film closes.

What surprised me more than anything this time around was how unmoving was the ending. The character of Nick is so removed from the film by the time we witness his suicide that he seems little different than any of the extras we have watched shoot themselves. Now, I don't know, however, if that is a fault of the film or not. Here's what I mean: When we see Nick wander off with the French man late in the second act we already know he's gone so by the time we see him again, we've adjusted to the loss. Imagine losing a friend at the height of your friendship with them. It would be devastating. Now imagine that same friendship, only this time you gradually grow apart, move apart, lose contact and then, years later learn of their death. The blow is now considerably cushioned and easier to take. And I think, or at least believe it's possible, that that's the intention of the film. If we view Nick as the POW/MIA, we see him as a loss already accounted for. When he physically dies, it's more of a relief than anything else.

The Deer Hunter has conflicts in its storytelling styles but in one area, cinematography, it excels from the first frame to the last. It was photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond and it's a beautiful piece of work. Zsigmond has the task of doing intimate interiors (the bar, Linda's trailer), claustrophobic interiors (the bamboo cage, the Russian roulette den), menacing exteriors (the journey up the river, the shots of the refugees fleeing), gorgeous exteriors (the mountains of Pennsylvania), expansive interiors (the Cathedral wedding) and even both interior and exteriors at once (the car scenes in the mountains). The fact that a single cinematographer handled that many different settings with the absolute majesty that Zsigmond achieves is an extraordinary feat, and while I realize it is cinematic blasphemy to write the words I am about to write, I think it deserved the Oscar more (just a tiny bit more) than the also extraordinary work of Néstor Almendros for Days of Heaven, which did win.

Another area of supreme achievement for The Deer Hunter is in its performances. There's not a bad one in the lot, with even one-time actor Chuck Aspegren doing a fine job with his limited role. While De Niro certainly deserved his nomination for Best Actor, its a film of supporting performances and picking just one, Christopher Walken, from the group left a lot of fine work unrecognized. There's the aforementioned John Savage, about as good as he's ever been, and John Cazale, also doing great work and Meryl Streep, unfamiliar to most audiences at the time, turning in an excellent performance as Linda. But George Dzundza, an actor everyone knows but far too few appreciate, turns in a performance at least the equal of everyone involved. In fact, it's his performance that extracts the most emotion as his character seems to wear his feelings on his sleeve. When he silently breaks down in the kitchen of his bar in the final scene, it has a power most of the finale is lacking.

Finally, the music is superb. Stanley Myers' beautiful composition Cavatina is played evocatively by guitarist John Williams and used throughout the film to great effect.

Despite these good points, in the end, The Deer Hunter is hopelessly conflicted with how it wants to tell its story. It wants Robert Altman's stream of consciousness but also the formal drama of an old-school Hollywood war film. It wants gritty realism but infuses it with obvious metaphor and wooden exposition. Intentionally or not, it ends up as conflicted as the war itself. It's not a bad experience, though. I walked away from my fresh viewing with an appreciation for Cimino and Zsigmond's gift for framing and enjoyed that fact that movie did not attempt to answer any questions the world might have about Vietnam but asked a few for the characters, and made sure they were questions they couldn't answer. I'd have to say my experience was a good one but not as good as I'd hoped.

But that's my opinion of the film as it is, as a story separate from our actual experiences with Vietnam. The film's message, or construed one as it may be, was the focus of intense controversy at the time of its release, one that got to the heart of much of the debate about America's involvement in Vietnam. I made it a point, after deciding to watch the film again, to read not a word about the controversy until after I viewed it. I remembered some things, like Jane Fonda and husband Tom Hayden yelling, "The Deer Hunter is a lie!" at the Oscars, but not much else. When I finished processing the movie I started to read up on the criticisms, most of them having to do with the Vietnam sequences. As I said earlier, some seem valid, others less so.

The primary criticism was that the portrayal of the Viet Cong captors, as well as the Vietnamese roulette gamblers, was racist and one-sided. The secondary criticism, and one that you'll find repeated in one review after another, was that there was no documentation of Russian roulette ever being forced on POWs. The secondary criticism goes hand in hand with the first. That is, by inventing such a cruel device to portray the captors and free-market gamblers of Vietnam, they are caricatured as animals beyond redemption. The implication seems to be that there was plenty of horrific behavior on the part of the Viet Cong to show without having to make something up. One need but read up on the activities at the Hoa Lo Prison (The Hanoi Hilton) to know this to be true. So by devising the roulette game, the film was able to implicate both the North and the South Vietnamese in the cruelty, since both seem intoxicated by it.

In his defense of this criticism, on the commentary soundtrack of the DVD, Cimino states that the film is surrealistic and not intended to be "about Vietnam" any more than Apocalypse Now was or The Bridge on the River Kwai was about World War II. It is, he says, entirely fictional and the captors and citizen gamblers are but metaphors for a bigger picture (well, obviously - everything's a metaphor in the movie).

I buy into Cimino's view more. The film is, as stated several times so far up to and including the preceding sentence, clearly metaphorical. While it employs realism in its scenes it is not meant to be taken as a literal portrayal of events in Vietnam, at least not to my eyes. This is, you will recall, one of my problems with the film, the fact that it can't stick with the voyeuristic realism long enough to forget all the metaphor and allegory. The fact that this is a problem for me also means, by definition, that I don't believe Cimino is trying to bullshit his way out of this because it is all so clearly surrealistic. There are far too many contrived situations in this film (not least among them the fact that three friends from the same town all somehow end up in the same bamboo cage half a world away) to take is seriously as intentionally realistic and not metaphorically stylistic.

Of course, the criticism goes, one can be metaphorical and still include some decent Vietnamese characters. That's true as well but if they are not important to the story I'm not sure where to put them. In Brian De Palma's Casualties of War, the focus is on the crime committed by United States soldiers in Vietnam and the one soldier who stands up to them. It is necessary to the story to show the sole important Vietnamese character, that of the abducted raped captive, as humanistic and victimized. This does not mean De Palma was racist in his portrayal of American soldiers and glorifying in his portrayal of Vietnamese women as suffering angels. No, it meant he was showing the characters he needed to show to tell his story the way he needed to tell it.

Still, one does chafe at the gambling scenes in the village where Christopher Walken becomes a roulette star. The idea of people betting on other people like so many spins of a roulette wheel seems hard to take or, at least, hard to fathom that kind of inhuman cruelty for the sake of gambling. Not only that, but how soon is your business going to end? I mean, how many possible people can you drug up enough, and fast enough, to keep a lucrative suicide game going? Business-wise, it's idiotic and nonsensical.

So where does that leave us? Well, several decades removed from the original controversy, it's hard to see what all the fuss was about. Eight years later, Oliver Stone took metaphorical/allegorical Vietnam storytelling to ridiculous heights with his badly dated Platoon. With its simple-minded moralizing (Old America: Bad. New America: Good.) and laughably one-dimensional symbolic stand-ins for characters, it's hard to believe it didn't get raked over the coals far worse than The Deer Hunter ever was. But by 1986 America had already forgotten the Vietnamese anyway (they're not even a minor subplot in Platoon) and was focused on how hard it was for all of us so Platoon was aces in their book.

The Deer Hunter had to happen when it did. While there were other Vietnam movies that very year, and the year before, including The Boys in Company C, Go Tell the Spartans and Coming Home, America needed a mad, grand over-the-top opera like The Deer Hunter to get the conversation rolling. It may not be the best Vietnam movie out there (is there, in fact, a best one?) but its place as the one that really got Hollywood finally opening up to the idea of examining Vietnam, something The Green Berets failed to do nine years earlier, is an honored place and there are a lot worse movies that could hold it. That's pretty faint praise, admittedly, but it's sincere. And with all its faults, so is The Deer Hunter.

Clash of the Cults - Nolan and Fincher

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:30:00 +0000

At any given point on the internet, chances are pretty good that someone will be deconstructing a director or film while others support or detract, usually in large and vitriolic numbers. When this happens I find myself generally disengaged from the discussions, debates and diatribes taking place, usually because I'm a little late to see the movie. Other times I simply lack the energy to get in the middle of another 1,000 comment forum fight. However, just because I don't get obsessed about debating the merits of one director or film over another doesn't mean I don't appreciate the folks who do.

And when it comes to obsessively arguing the merits of one director over another one can hardly do better, or worse, than the cults of David Fincher and Christopher Nolan. It's not enough that they make good movies or excellent ones and sometimes mediocre or bad ones, no, that won't do. It must be proven that one is a cinematic genius (Fincher) while the other is an incompetent fraud (Nolan). Fortunately, this is one of the few debates or discussion or whatever the hell you want to call it on which I can authoritatively opinionate as I have seen every movie, save Following, that both directors have ever done. So far, just that one eludes me and maybe I'll watch it this week just to get it out of the way.

I will admit, here and now, that if I was forced to choose one over the other I would, without hesitation, choose Fincher. He seems to me the better director. I will further admit that I agree with many of the criticisms of Nolan, the principal being that he is visually clunky, or to put it another way, I find his films utterly lacking in visual grace. Action sequences can often feel visually awkward to say the least, what with all the going back and forth and coming in from the wrong angle after position has already been established. This means, in the movies, that when you establish a plane is flying from the right side of the screen to the left because it is going to California, you then show it from left to right when it is returning, only Nolan would show it going the same way both times and claim he was filming the plane from the other side on the way back so it was still correct, but visually clunky, awkward and confusing. That's pretty much Nolan visually. Sometimes, it really does feel like he's a blind man behind the lens.

But!

I would not go so far as to say Nolan's films are, on the whole, much better or worse than Fincher's. In fact, my main beef with Nolan is his visual clunkiness but I'd say he gets good performances out of his actors and paces his films well. Now, I know, having a strike against your visual ability as a director in cinema is a bit like having a strike against your throwing ability as a quarterback in football. It's kind of the main thing you're expected to do, and do well. However, Nolan can throw well, just not consistently.

His sense of visual consistency seems fine in movies like Memento and Insomnia and The Prestige so I'd have to restrict my criticism to say his main visual clunkiness seems relegated to action sequences, and, as a director, that's an acceptable level of incompetence, especially if you're not in the habit of making action movies. Of course, Nolan is in the habit of making action movies and that's the problem. He keeps making movies that exploit his primary weakness as a director. It seems a very odd thing to do, consistently return to your weakness, but in all fairness, plenty of modern filmmakers don't shoot action very well so Nolan's not even that unique on this front. And so, even though I think action's a problem for him, I find "takedowns" of his work to be generally unconvincing, hence the scare-quotes.

This "takedown" of Inception by A.D. Jameson, a movie I didn't like, works a lot better if you haven't seen the movie. Once you've seen it, many of the 17 points don't seem to work. Now, don't misread me here: I don't think Jameson is being dishonest at all in his piece, nor do I disagree with it on the whole (I'm about half and half in agreement/disagreement with the piece). I think Jameson honestly sees all of these things but I question how much of it could also apply to a director Jameson liked. Rather than go through the entire piece (please go to the link and read the whole thing for yourself) I will discuss the first six points and then jump to some points with which I agree rather than continuing to deconstruct all the points with which I disagree (five of the first six).

The first point is how much dialogue there is which leads into the second point about how "relentless" Nolan is with expository dialogue. He criticizes Nolan for using too much dialogue, in which the characters explain everything, and writes, "His primary—indeed, practically his only—tool for delivering information to the audience is character dialogue. Rarely does anyone shut his or her mouth during the 148 minutes that are Inception."

I didn't get that watching the movie. I watched it and found it had as much, or as little, dialogue as any other movie, including long sequences with no dialogue. He then provides this fairly weak example of how characters explain everything for the audience:

the line where Cobb points out to Michael Caine’s character—a university professor teaching in Paris—”You know extradition between France and the US is a legal nightmare.” Yes, Mssr. Professor Caine probably does, in fact, know that! But I’m sure that somebody way in the back row was happy to hear.

First of all, the way Cobb phrases it is obviously meant to signal that he knows Caine is full of shit when he tries to say Cobb could be extradited. Like if someone said to me, "Greg, I just caught the latest Pixar movie. Can't wait to see the review on Cinema Styles," and then I responded, "Now, you know I don't review Pixar movies on Cinema Styles." Of course they know, that's why I said, "Now, you know..." It's a common colloquialism. If that's the best example Jameson can come up with, and he alludes to the fact that it is, then you have to put a hash mark in the Nolan column on that one.

Then he complains that Nolan's characters repeat everything three times for the audience, you know, like in The Godfather, where Sonny and Tom are talking about how Sollozo must be dealt with and then Michael repeats this and explains how he will deal with it and then when they've decided on it, at a later time, Sonny goes over it with Sal and then Sal with Michael until the audience has been notified four times that Sollozo will be killed. You know, like that. Or how the director/reporter in the screening room in Citizen Kane says not once, not twice but three times that they need to find out what "Rosebud" means. Oh, but wait, those are two universally acknowledged great films, I probably shouldn't have used those examples. Or maybe those example are fine because it's only bad when Nolan does it. Again, I didn't notice this "flaw," a historically common enough device in cinema, any more here than with any other movie.

His third point chides Nolan for using too many insert shots, i.e., when Cobbs wife is mentioned we see a shot of her or when he's talking to his kids on the phone and when they speak we see images of them. Well, sorry, but insert shots are as common in cinema as the closeup. I can see to a small degree Jameson's point, which is that Nolan uses too many, but frankly, complaining about insert shots in cinema feels a lot like splitting hairs.

His fourth point is about the quality of Nolan's dialogue and here we fully agree. I was never engaged by the characters and much of this was due to all of them speaking like characters in an action movie rather than like people in the real world.

Point five is the weakest, I think, of all seventeen. He starts by saying, "Herr Wunderkind Nolan can accomplish in thirteen shots what it takes most directors six to do!" and then outlines the fourteen shots used in the opening scene ("1.slow motion pan of waves crashing against a rock 2.slow motion shot of waves 3.close-up of Cobb’s face as he lies on the shore 4.point-of-view shot of a boy on the beach making a sandcastle 5.reverse shot of Cobb’s face..." etc).

Again, I read this and immediately thought, "Fourteen shots doesn't seem like a lot for establishing an opening scene." Not every movie can start with a clean unbroken crane shot, ala Touch of Evil. In most cinema, cuts are pretty common. I went to Netflix Instant and started going through classic movies from the fifties and before, a period known for slower pacing and longer shots and I'll be damned if everybody still didn't use multiple shots to set up an opening sequence.

As an example, I picked one I felt would be unassailable, Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. It sails so far past fourteen it's not even worth counting. Let's see, first Dean Martin opens the door and looks in. Then, we see what he's looking at (the bar). Then we see him walk along the back of the saloon. Then he looks at the bar again. We see what he's looking at (Claude Akens, taunting him by pouring whiskey he knows Martin wants). Then we see Martin again. Then Akens again. Then Martin, again! Then Akens, AGAIN! Then. Martin. A-G-A-I-N! Then Akens... AGGGGAIN!!! Now, from this point until Akens shoots and leaves, we have fifteen more shots to come. That's a total of twenty-six shots, way past fourteen. So does that mean Howard Hawks was incompetent or this kind of thing is beyond common in establishing story and character? That's a rhetorical question by the way.

At point six ("Much of what is mechanically and prosaically explained to the audience throughout the film’s first hour—the set-up—turns out not to matter.") he quotes Jim Emerson asking why Nolan puts all the amazing visuals up front and then go prosaic during the climax of the actual dream sequence? Emerson asks, "Why would Nolan intentionally stick the movie’s most tantalizing images up front, instead of saving them for when the real action gets underway?" This isn't a bad question but, for me, I'd say it's because it would confuse the action too much (I know, I know, Nolan does that anyway) and as explained very clearly in the film (remember, apparently one of Nolan's faults is that he over-explains things) Cobb wants his dream architect, Ariadne, to create a realistic environment, not a dream environment. They make that pretty clear and the early phases of walking her around the surreal environments is a way of getting it out of her system in one regard and using the valid teaching method of pointing out what you shouldn't do, in the other.

In other words, what was "mechanically and prosaically explained" in the first hour does matter. The second half looks as it does because it HAS been explained in the first half. That was the point of the exposition and if one followed the exposition, one wouldn't ask the question that Emerson asked, which is a puzzler because Emerson described it in enough detail to prove he did pay attention. So, yeah, you got me on that one.

Now, this could go on but I should get to some more of Jameson's points that I agree with as well. Number four was one, number twelve is another, in fact, the biggest one for me, which is Nolan's too literal-minded storytelling. Jameson writes, "as is always the case with his movies, disappointingly, one can bank on things moving toward the simplest solution." Again, read the whole piece to get a better idea of that but, basically, Nolan doesn't go in any unexpected directions. For those who haven't seen the movie, here's a general example. Let's say you're watching a mystery. At the start, a body is found and the butler is seen standing over it with a bloody knife. Now, the story could provide all kinds of twists and turns and multiple characters with motive, were it in the hands of someone like Agatha Christie. However, in a Nolan movie, a detective shows up, asks a bunch of questions and then arrests the butler who, in fact, was guilty just as the opening sequence showed him to be.

Like in The Prestige (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT), another of Nolan's films. Our lead character (Hugh Jackman) goes off to find Nicola Tesla (David Bowie) to discover the mysteries of teleportation. Tesla seems a bit flaky, runs some tests that don't work then, suddenly, is shown to have inadvertently created cloning. Our lead buys the technology and goes back to his show. Now, the audience wonders, has he been conned by Tesla? Did he kill that drunken double he used in previous shows to frame Christian Bale? If he did, how did he manage to get Bale to go backstage the night he killed him? Maybe the double killed the magician. Wow, that would be a turn of events! Oh my, so many questions, there's no way we can possibly figure this out. And then... it turns out he really was cloning, just like we were told. No surprises, no twists. In other words, everything - EVERYTHING - in a Nolan movie can be taken at face value. He is, to a fault, a literal writer. If a character says what his motives are, that's what his motives are. There is never misdirection. Never. So if you see The Prestige after knowing this about Nolan, the second you see Bowie produce all the hats and explain they were cloned, you know that cloning is real and that the solution to the murder frame-up is that Jackman is killing his clones each night. At the moment you see the hats, you can stop watching because you know that Nolan never misdirects. End of movie solved. Nolan just told you.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing but it is a dull thing. It means once you've seen a couple of Nolan's movies, you stop expecting to be surprised. When the characters say, "We want to get this guy to break up his father's company," that's what they want. They're not conning Cobb, there is no setup, there are no red herrings. There is no twist in which Cobb is actually the one having info extracted from by the bad guys but being made to think he's the one in charge. Nope, they are doing exactly what they say they're doing and when they're done, the movie will end, and does.

So, I agree that Nolan has his faults but none so overbearing as to warrant him being called out as vehemently and as persistently as is the case.

On the tail end of this coin is David Fincher. He has the opposite problem of Nolan in that I read all too many writers who see a lot of magical qualities in him as a director that I don't. As I said above, I'd pick him over Nolan anytime because I think Fincher is an excellent director but not a particularly ingenious one. I find that Fincher's fortunes rise and fall with the quality of his scripts more often than not. If the script is, say, Zodiac, everyone agrees, Fincher is a genius. If the script is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, not so much.

When I look at Fincher's credits (The Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac, Panic Room, Fight Club, The Game, Se7en, Alien³), I don't see the resume of an all-time great but a skillful director with a lot of potential. And in The Game, he even uses the same literal, face-value storytelling that Nolan does (in other words, yes, it is, in fact, a game). With Fight Club I see immaturity (philosophy for people who never quite grew up or took on adult responsibilities), Panic Room a ho-hum thriller, Se7en, the same and so on. What happens with Fincher is exactly what happens with Nolan: the movies that don't fit the bias get forgotten. With Fincher, all those other movies are ignored in the face of, say, Zodiac and The Social Network, and with Nolan, any movie that doesn't quite fit his takedowns, like Insomnia, gets ignored too.

And, hell, I'm fine with all of that. But when Fincher gets a good script, suddenly he's a genius again. This piece by David Bordwell gives so much credit to David Fincher, based primarily on the making-of documentary on the DVD, I can't really take it seriously (although Bordwell does make excellent points about actors' faces and how they're used throughout the piece and I highly recommend reading it). Bordwell focuses on the eyes and eyelids and eyebrows of the actors in The Social Network and says Fincher guided how they used them. I did theater in Washington, D.C. that was performed for several different school groups who would get to ask questions of the actors after the production in an onstage forum. Let me tell you, in all shamelessness, actors and directors promote themselves and what they do to ridiculous heights and we all play along with it. I can just see Fincher and lead actor Jesse Eisenberg going on about how David said to use the eyebrows in this way and tone them down in that way and... har, har, come on! Bordwell sees actors doing things that, in reality, would ruin a good performance. If an actor really did decide to pay attention to every tiny, minute detail of their face while trying to give a performance they'd be as wooden as Sherwood Forest during the dry season.

Those eyelid expressions and eye dartings and everything else come from an actor who knows how to instinctively put a performance together and a director who knows how to let them do it. Once an actor starts thinking, "Okay, now, when I say this line I'll curl the left side of my lip and lower my right eyebrow. When I react to the response, I'll narrow my eyes..." he's sunk. Now, he may still do those things and in that exact order but not because he focused on them but rather because he is acting as he believes his character would and those things naturally come out of that performance.

So what am I left with, after all this back and forth over Christopher Nolan and David Fincher? Pretty much nothing except my opinion, which is this: I found Inception to be fairly boring and I didn't like it. But guess what? I didn't dislike it because I thought Nolan was incompetent as a filmmaker, I disliked it because it was an action movie with a lot of explosions (another thing Jameson and I agree on) and that will usually bore me every time.

Also, I liked The Social Network and Fincher's amazing eyebrow magic aside, found little in it that I would call startlingly innovative and, believe me, I expected to because its most ardent supporters treated this goddamn thing like the Holy Grail of Cinema. It's a very well-crafted film, much better than Inception but if next year, Nolan had a movie that was much better than a Fincher movie I wouldn't be the least bit surprised, nor dismayed. And yet I know, if that happens, the Nolan haters will ignore it completely or attempt to explain to those of us too blind to see why it really isn't very good at all, using arguments that could apply to everything from Casablanca to No Country for Old Men. And I'll show up, late to the party and with no horse in the race, still wondering why I care at all.

*************

I recommend, again, reading both pieces referenced here in their entirety, Seventeen Ways of Criticizing Inception and The Social Network: Faces Behind Facebook.

I also recommend this review of Inception by Ed Howard and this review of The Social Network by Bill Ryan. In both cases, they pretty much sum up my feelings on both films.

We Disagree, Therefore, You're an Idiot

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 02:30:00 +0000

Look, a controversial movie we can all disagree on. Hooray!
Every now and then on these very pages I've flown off the handle to wildly rage against a movie that I feel is unjustly loved by millions, more often than not something born of the Pixar factory, that tireless purveyor of cinematic snake oil, lapped up by eager, gullible fans. And I feel justified in doing this because, after all, this is my space to write in, not yours. If you want to go off on how stupid everyone is in the world, except you, start up a blog. It takes barely a minute and it's free. Seriously, be my guest.

But you know what really gets me fired up? When someone else does the same thing with a movie I love! Don't they know they're stupid? Don't they know they're wrong? Don't they know I'm offended by their post? And if they know this, why'd they do it? I mean, it's me. Do you really want to offend me? Look at me, I'm lovable. I've got the puppy dog eyes and the little pouty mouth and, I mean, come on! I'm adorable, and you owe it to me to like the movies I like and hate the movies I hate. Asshole.

So, here's what's happening, okay? I finally get around to seeing Black Swan, a good month or so after everyone else has seen it because I'm on top of things that way. And I know it got a lot of nominations and a lot of people love it and I know some other people don't like it so much. And none of that matters anyway because all that matters in the end is what I think, but you already knew that.

So I watch it, and I'm excited to finally see it but that's nothing special because I love movies and, as a result, I'm excited to see pretty much anything. Seriously, seeing a movie is exciting to me because it's such an incredible art form and I love it so much that the anticipation of watching any movie holds some kind of a thrill for me. Okay, so I'm excited and I watch it. I get about half way through and I'm thinking, "When this thing gets to the climax it's going to be really special, I just know it! Because so far, man does this movie suck!"

And that's the honest to god truth right there. When I watch a movie and it's not going well, I stick with it always thinking somehow, someway this movie is going to right itself. So that's what I'm doing with Black Swan. I'm all like, "Okay, so far I got some adolescent fantasy shit and lots of faux-deep dark obsessed artist stuff but, brother, by the end, this fucker's going to wow me!"

And so, yeah, I got to the end and it didn't. But now at least I know what Darren Aronofsky thinks about when he goes to the bathroom to do his "business." And that's something, right? I mean, now I don't have to wonder anymore, not that I ever did, mind you.

Cake porn!

So here's where we are: I thought Black Swan was pretty flat as a movie and pretty meaningless as an examination of a tortured artist. And when I hear about its style I just think, "Do they still classify 'swirling around the actor with a steady-cam' as a style? 'Cause I think they officially dropped that designation 12 years ago."

Ahahahahahaaaaaaa!!! See what I did there? Did you get that? You got that, right? I don't mean the clever line about the movie's style, although, that was pretty good. No, I mean the way I took my opinion of the film and expressed in such a flippant, condescending and smug manner as to make it look like if you liked the film, you're an immature idiot. See how I did that?

Of course you did because you've done it too! We've all done that, and, trust me, I could go on but I don't think I could do much better than my previous implication that the whole film was just a two-hour act of masturbation by Aronofsky anyway so why bother. That pretty much hits the perfect balance of smugness and clever repartee so I'm done with that section.

Thing is, they're plenty of folks out there who like it and say I'm the idiot for not seeing what they saw in it. They're wrong and we all know that because I don't like it and, admit it, when I don't like a movie and you do, don't you kind of, just for a second, think, "Hmmm, maybe I'm a complete moron." Come on, you do, right?

You know who else didn't like it? Armond White! Ha, yeah, that's right, Armond White didn't like it. And guess what? I don't think he even understands what a movie is! I hate that guy and he's on my side. Man, things couldn't suck much worse than that. But that's okay because Mick LaSalle did like it, and he's an even bigger idiot! Here's what he wrote:

"For all its ham-fistedness, it captures something about the tyranny of the ballet world and, by extension, the neurotic imprisonment of female body image."

Ahahahahaaaaa!!! Take that Black Swan lovers! You've got Mick LaSalle on your side. Mick LaSalle! Hahahahaaa.

"But wait," you say, "We've got Roger Ebert and Glen Kenny too and guess who you got Ferrara?"

Oh, you calling me out?! Oh, all right, who then?!

"Rex Reed! Rex Reed didn't like it either!"

Damn, man, this was all kind of fun until you took it too far. I mean, Rex Reed. Shit, that's like finding out the only other person that agrees with you that the restaurant everyone loves is actually mediocre is the crazy guy who eats his own poop and everyone calls "Dogman."

"Damn, your neck is long! What's your secret?" "I eat like a bird."

Okay, so I got Armond White and Rex Reed but let's talk bloggers, baby! I got Marilyn Ferdinand, peeps, and Sam Juliano and that ain't no weak shit, motherfucker! But wait, you got Tony Dayoub and Ed Howard and, I don't know, maybe Bill. Or maybe I have Bill. I can't really tell, honestly. I read his review and... well, I think you've got Bill but I bet I could have Bill if I messaged him a few times on Facebook and sweet-talked him. But I don't really know.

Here's what I do know.

Sometimes, we disagree. Quite often, actually. And it probably doesn't do anyone any good to say that they don't know how to judge a film just because we disagree on something.

Unless it's you. You know who I'm talking about. Yeah, that's right, you!

You're an idiot.

Duke Ellington:The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse: A Suite in Eight Parts

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:30:00 +0000

At the start of Duke Ellington's album, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse: A Suite in Eight Parts, Ellington himself speaks for a couple of minutes about the whole world "going Oriental." Apparently, Marshall McLuhan said something to that effect (read full incomprehensible statement here) and while McLuhan had some good points buried in his "going Oriental" statement (mainly because he threw every idea he had about Indochina at the wall and by happenstance, some of it stuck) none of it really matters to the music that follows. Still, Ellington delivers his monologue sincerely and intones that he and his band mates have, in their travels, "noticed this to be true" (that everyone is going Oriental, that is - were The Vapors inspired by this too? Do we have McLuhan to blame for Turning Japanese?). Ellington's enunciation is so precise and eloquent I don't even care what he's says, I just like listening to how he says it. He speaks as if he's teaching someone how to pronounce the words properly in English and the result is, in it's own way, a kind of Ellington a capella lead-in.

The music that follows doesn't match up against the extraordinary body of work Ellington produced before it but then, how could it? What it does do, and rather well, is take Big Band Jazz, Eastern and Western instrumentation, Oliver Nelson-style television theme scoring and rock-centered backbeats and blend it into an exciting mix of something one could call Big Band Fusion. The first track, Chinoiserie, opens with Ellington hammering away at the piano, solo for a minute or so before the horns come in and transform the sound into something slightly menacing and dangerous. In fact, most of the album's mere eight songs evoke feelings of disquiet and unease. It's easily one of the most atmospherically successful albums ever produced.

This mood carries through the first six songs, even as each one takes a slightly different tack. Didjeridoo, despite it title, evokes nothing of the outback but much of risky urban life. Afrique rolls into its melody with drums meant to evoke tribal rhythms but really sounds more like Benny Carter by way of Max Steiner by way of the 1930's Duke Ellington. Acht O'Clock Rock is Oliver Nelson dramatic punctuation all the way, right down to it's dramatically heightened final chord. Gong brings the rolling drums back in for a thematic reprise of Afrique and Tang opens and closes with sustained brass chords mingled with plucking strings that clearly influenced Bernard Herrman's cue music to the bloody aftermath of Travis Bickle's whorehouse shooting spree for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

It's not until the seventh song that the mood noticeably changes when True brings in the breezy, swinging rhythms of the late fifties/early sixties as a kind of tonic to everything that preceded it. Not that what preceded it was bad, just a bit heavy and True finds a way to lighten the load and allow the listener a breather.

The album finishes with Hard Way which brings everything back home. It's easily the most conventional of all the songs on the album and its placement is no accident. Since the entire album has maintained the air of Big Band Jazz throughout, the final song isn't as jarring as it probably should be, considering it sounds like a piece Ellington could have written in between Sophisticated Lady and In a Sentimental Mood. Instead, it sounds exactly like an encore for a band performing a new sound but not wanting to alienate its audience to the point where they won't return and listen again.

To say the whole album is a pastiche is both true and complimentary while that same term might be derisive when applied to another artist. With Ellington, it isn't, because few composers had the talent and skill to imitate, blend and mesh other styles with their own and make it sound so good. My only complaint is that he didn't conclude the album with another perfectly enunciated monologue designed to gently guide the listener to go back to the start of the album and begin again.

Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 05:30:00 +0000

The 1985 documentary, Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal, provides an overview of the career of the famed animator, producer, director, writer and stop-motion pioneer as simply as it possibly can: It shows archival interviews with Pal, brief snippets of praise from both peers and acolytes and loads of scenes from his movies. In other words, it goals are modest, it's subject straightforward and it has no concerns with breaking new ground in documentary film making. Simply put, it's object is to show a lot of clips while giving the viewer the understanding that much of fantasy and science fiction of the sixties onward was heavily influenced by Mr. Pal. This isn't a documentary for fans of Ken Burns or Errol Morris. Fans of Barbara Kopple, don't bother. This documentary isn't about finding profound meanings hidden in the nooks or exploring the central core of Pal's being. It's about how cool the movies were that he made and how much they changed the landscape of fantasy/science fiction.

The point is made early, as in right in the opening scene, which isn't from a Pal movie at all, but Gremlins. This is followed by shots of E.T.,the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters and the message is immediately clear: Pal paved the way for the fantasy/sci-fi of today. But in watching the documentary one also gets the impression that his legacy may also be that a kind, gentle and generous person can actually succeed in Hollywood.

It's expected in a documentary of this sort that no one interviewed will have anything bad to say ("I hated that bastard!") but the sheer volume of praise from the wide variety of actors (Russ Tamblyn, Charlton Heston, Tony Curtis, Rod Taylor, Janet Leigh, etc) and the sincerity with which they give it makes one feel an immediate affection for Pal. All of them talk about the confidence he had in them, the exuberance, the sheer unswerving optimism, all from a man who fled Nazi Germany (unlike Veit Harlan) and then, seven years later, had to flee again (he had fled to Holland then left for the United States just before Germany invaded). He saw how bad the world could get but always knew it could be better.

And hard working? They don't make 'em as hard working as George Pal anymore. He built his career around the success of his stop-motion animation, later to become his famous Puppetoons, only it wasn't claymation, it was replacement animation! That means every time a character changed expression, or walked, or waved their hand or freaking blinked(!), a new puppet figure had to be inserted. His charts and storyboards for this were so detailed it made the operation schematics for the construction of the atomic bomb look like a recipe for boiling water. This fascination with detail and the nuts and bolts of things is what contributed to his greatest successes in live action when the time came.

Ray Bradbury comments, correctly, that Destination Moon was the first sci-fi film all about the science. It's all about how the rocket works and the journey there that matters, not actually being on the moon. And it was Pal's interest in solving problems that led him to provide efficient ways to communicate the science to the audience, like having the scientists show a Woody Woodpecker cartoon to potential investors to explain how the process of getting to the moon works. This technique was used again years later by Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park when John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) shows everyone a cartoon to explain how the dinosaurs have been created.

It's true, his movies are not masterpieces. The acting and writing seem unrefined at times and the budgets ran on the low side but, as stated again by Ray Bradbury, he did something very important for science fiction film: He made it respectable. Before Destination Moon, science fiction seemed entirely silly to most of Hollywood and most adult moviegoers but after Destination Moon, it proved it could take itself seriously and rake in the big bucks. It also helped that he hired the best artists and designers in the game, from the great matte artist Chesley Bonestell to model designer Albert Nozaki who created the iconic Martian spaceships for War of the Worlds.

George Pal continued to have success in film, most notably The Time Machine, with Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux in 1960, but it's his fifties sci-fi work that is most remembered today and clearly the most influential to future generations of sci-fi film makers. The pacing, style and action of today's sci-fi comes a variety of influences and directors such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron but the idea that it could be something more than cheap serial fare came from Pal, and it's an idea I'm glad he didn't keep to himself.

_______________________________________

This has been a contribution post to the Steven Spielberg Blogathon hosted by Ryan Kelly and Adam Zanzie.

Harlan – In the Shadow of Jew Süss

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Harlan - In the Shadow of Jew Süss is a 2008 documentary by Felix Moeller that examines the director of the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film, Jew Süss, Veit Harlan, by interviewing the many members of his extended family. The documentary is a captivating, incisive look into his life as seen from a distance by family members desperately trying to come to terms with being related to the only German director tried for war crimes, not once, but twice. Both times he was acquitted.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels is enthusiastically greeted by director Veit Harlan
The family tree of Harlan is a large one and director Moeller wisely has Harlan's granddaughter, Alice, map out the family tree on poster board for the audience, lest we fall into utter confusion. Each of the family members, from sons and daughter to grandsons and granddaughters to nieces and nephews, all, understandably revile the film that made the Harlan name infamous in Germany after the war. This is not surprising and had the documentary simply been about their denouncement of Veit Harlan's work it would have been a rather mundane affair. Instead, Moeller has latched onto something quite interesting here and, in the midst of so many talking heads all related in one way or another going on about their familial shame, something perhaps overlooked upon its release. Essentially, what one ends up with is a cross-section of Germany and it's reaction to its own complicity in one of the greatest crimes in human history. Having watched it twice now, I can say this is, I believe, what Moeller is going for and he succeeds.

Harlan married three times, had five children and these five produced more children, from multiple marriages until finally, even Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, is in the mix, being one of the nieces. Some of the children married into Jewish families after the war and one daughter, Susanne, even converted to Judaism after marrying Claude Jacoby, who escaped Germany and fled to America in 1938. Harlan himself married a Jewish woman in the twenties, his first wife, Dora Gershon. In 1943, Gershon perished at Auschwitz. The contradictions and complications of the Harlan family tree allow for a deeper look into their collective psyche and it is not long into the film that we realize that Moeller isn't really interested in Harlan's motivations but, rather, what his family thinks those motivations were. That is to say, and not to belabor the point, it's the reaction and coping of those indirectly involved that provide the insight into the reactions and copings of many Germans after the war.

The youngest of the family members, three granddaughters who appear to be in their teens and twenties, find the film repulsive morally but also dull and, in the words of one, "cheesy." It is in their history classes that they are gaining a fuller understanding of what it all meant. We see them first, and this makes perfect sense, because they represent the Germany of today. They know of the past horrors but it's all second and third hand to them and school provides their primary association with their own familial complicity. Gradually Moeller introduces others, nieces and nephews, who speak of a more direct guilt by association and finally, Harlan's children themselves, who run the gamut from something pretty close to outright dismissal of any wrongdoing by their father to overt guilt and gnawing feelings of responsibility.

One son, Kristian, takes the attitude that any thoughts he has about his father are his alone, understandable enough. But then he goes on to defend his father, using the argument that Harlan was forced to make the film even though he didn't believe in it. Still, he can't understand why his father made it so good. Harlan's other son, Thomas, supported his father when he was a teenager but as he grew older and learned more, he turned against him, something Kristian doesn't understand and feels caused Harlan unnecessary torment until his death in 1964 on the Isle of Capri.

Dorothea (Kristina Söderbaum) commits suicide after sexual coercion by Joseph Suss Oppenheimer.
But Thomas defends his views well, and spent his life making art films and aiding in the hunt for Nazi war criminals. His decision to do so came in 1952, after his father was acquitted a second time for crimes against humanity. Thomas describes Jew Süss, rightfully I think, as a murder weapon and says:

The judge, Dr. Tyrolf, who found him innocent on two occasions had, during the war, had Ukrainian women beheaded for the theft of a headscarf during an air raid. And the thought that my father had been found innocent amongst and by such people was abhorrent to me. That was it! I thought, this is a world I want no further dealings with. I must entirely distance myself from it.

Thomas doesn't believe his father was coerced into making the movie but made it of his own free will. Harlan was undeniably in the service of Goebbels but had he been forced to make something he considered evil, Thomas asks, would he have involved his wife, Kristina Söderbaum, in the production? Of course, she was a big star so Thomas' logic doesn't entirely work. Goebbels would have insisted, most likely, that Kristina be involved. But to the question of why he made the film so well, it could be because he believed in the film or, pulling a Colonel Nicholson, simply felt he should do the best job he could no matter what the subject. That explanation is a little thornier and a lot less believable.

One thing that makes the issue tricky for all involved is the question no one wants to ask and, in fact, never does: Why didn't Harlan leave Germany like the scores of other German filmmakers and actors? And what about his third and final wife, Kristina Söderbaum? In 1935, while others were fleeing Germany, she was moving there from Sweden to try and break into German films . The two, viewed through archival footage, including an interview with her conducted in the sixties, honestly don't ever seem very troubled about being the two biggest names in the Nazi film industry. Her archival interviews are all about the bad rap they got, not, "Oh my God! We made films for Nazis! I was directly involved in propaganda designed to incite the murder of anyone of Jewish descent. My God, my God, what have I done?" Nope, nothing like that. In fact, in what can only be described as extraordinary while fully acknowledging that the word "extraordinary" doesn't even come close to doing it justice, Kristina says in her sixties interview:

It [the film Jew Süss] ruined our lives. That's what it did. Like that. And at that point, you simply couldn't have guessed this. That it could be used in such a way. That it, that it could simply wreck a person's life.

"That it could be used in such a way." Not, in such a way as to incite the murder of Jews. No, that it could be used to wreck her life. And by saying, "used", she implies that, at face value, the film shouldn't wreck anyone's life but they twisted it and used it to stab her in the back. And, oh yeah, I guess some Jews died too but that's nothing compared to having to live out your life on massive German estates and the Isle of Capri knowing people didn't like your hate film. Poor thing.

After that, Thomas' theories gain credibility and the delusions of Kristian seem like nothing more than revisionism.

Veit Harlan and Kristina Söderbaum
Throughout the documentary, Moeller keeps the camera focused on the family, mixing in only occasional footage of Harlan and Söderbaum and the hateful Jew Süss. His intent is getting them to write the history, getting them to accept, deny or revise that which so horribly happened. He does it across generations, with Germans both Jewish and Gentile, directly and indirectly involved and, in the process, gets to the very soul of Germany and it's own tormented and conflicted feelings with its recent past. Jessica Jacoby, daughter of Susanne, gets to the very core of the matter when she notes that her grandfather on her mother's side, Veit Harlan, made films for the Nazis while her other grandparents, on her father's side, were killed by the Nazis in Minsk. What her one grandfather did, she says, her other grandparents "paid for with their lives." It's that bizarre counterpoint that Kristian won't look in the eye and from which Thomas cannot look away. The documentary provides no answers to any one question, one way or the other, but in many ways, examines Nazi Germany more thoroughly than most historic documentaries ever do.

Bad Science, Good Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:00:00 +0000

Let's say it's summer and you're flipping through the channels. Discovery is running Shark Week and you come upon one of their specials. For the 8,357th time you see some marine biologist telling anyone who'll listen that Great White Sharks don't really act the way they do in Jaws. Thanks, professor, I didn't know that.

Okay, maybe it's not his fault, he's a marine biologist and just wants sharks to be better understood. What's bad is when someone takes a piece of fiction, something that is by definition not true, and then dislikes it because it isn't real. In the case of Shark Week, usually, and thankfully, the marine biologist acquits him or herself by saying they love the movie anyway.

On my last post, Bill, Flickhead and myself discussed this very phenomenon in reference to The Core, which I still haven't seen. Bill and Flickhead both commented that it was a decent enough movie but that its most troubling criticisms were that the science in it wasn't accurate. Well, of course it wasn't accurate! It's a movie about setting the suddenly dormant earth's core back in motion. You're looking for accurate science in that? I'm looking for sci-fi entertainment. So sorry to hear about your head injury.

Around three years ago I even wrote a piece about how I really don't care if a movie is filled with inaccuracies and plot holes, as long as it's good (the ensuing comment discussion is lost forever because I was dumb enough to use haloscan for the first two years of this blog. That still chaps my ass). I wrote another piece a few months ago with a different take, imagining what it would be like to be Superman in the real world. I didn't write it for the purpose of deflating any particular Superman comic, cartoon or movie, I just thought it was a fun experiment but I assure you, the dozens of physical unrealities associated with Superman necessitating an extreme suspension of disbelief have never, once, stopped me from enjoying the movies or comics. What stops me is when they're bad. I couldn't care less if the science is wrong.

Here are some other things that have never stood in the way for me:

*Vampires not having reflections. The fact is, of course, that if your eyes can see them, so can a mirror. In order to see something, anything, it has to reflect light. If it does then you and the mirror will see the vampire, if it doesn't, neither will. It's both or nothing. Mirrors don't have some hidden spiritual side that refuses to reflect someone undead. I still think Francis Ford Coppola's version of Dracula is a garbled mess but not one part of that has to do with Dracula not being visible in a mirror.

*Frankenstein couldn't sew together dead body parts, shoot electricity through them and create a new, living person. If that stops you from enjoying the story of Frankenstein, I must be blunt: You're an idiot.

*I'm pretty sure if you take a sleigh and attach an oversized spinning wooden shield to the back of it, you won't travel through time.

*Your genetic structure cannot change back and forth at will, even if your name is Larry Talbot or Bruce Banner.

*If you're body is flooded with radiation through either insane lab experimentation or bites from radioactive spiders, you're not going to become indestructible. You're going to get cancer and die. It will be horrible for you and all those who love you.

The fact is, I don't go to the movies for lessons in science. That's usually something I'm pretty forgiving about as long as it doesn't cross any kind of "audience respect" threshold. For instance, Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider and attaining super powers is fine and thoroughly expected in the superhero universe. Same with Wily Coyote surviving accidents that would do in even the heartiest of mortals. No, as long as something follows its own logic, I think it runs little risk of offending or shocking anyone.

In fact, where I do usually have problems with wrong science or things being generally unrealistic is when I'm watching a drama presented in realistic fashion. In other words, a movie that takes place in a universe where Peter Parker being bit by a radioactive spider would result in him, at the very least, developing a malignant growth. In that universe I expect what's presented on the screen to be generally acceptable as something that could actually happen. But I must admit, even then, it's not a deal breaker if it isn't.

When I watched The Girl Who Played With Fire, I was disappointed, it's true, but not because it contained one of the most unrealistic scenes ever presented in a movie centering itself in a realistic universe. No, I was disappointed for reasons I can only outline once I've seen the third (I haven't yet) and take in the trilogy as a whole and, possibly, review it all here on Cinema Styles.

That scene, by the way, involves our hero, Lisbeth Salander, being shot three times (once in the head), buried under a few feet of dirt and left there, presumably dead. Then, the next morning (this is hours later) we see her hand break through the ground and realize she is digging herself out. Hell, forget the gunshot wounds for now. Get a bag of potting soil, stick your head in it and attempt to breath. Now, not being able to breath, keep your head there for six to eight hours and, well, nice to have known you (by the way, don't actually do that!). But, somehow, Lizbeth is able to breath under smothering conditions while suffering severe torso and head trauma. On top of that, once out, she's able to pick up an axe and hack someone in the leg and then defend herself against another with a gun. She's a hell of a gal but again, and I'm being honest, that's not what disappointed me. It was the lackluster story, forgettable characters and a continuation of formerly interesting characters that took them nowhere that disappointed. The multiple shooting/burial scene? Hell, it's the one thing I seem to remember so more power to it, right?

Bad science, even when presented in realistic drama, should never be a deal-breaker. I understand the temptation to use it for a movie we don't like but the reasons any of us think a movie isn't good should center around the writing, acting, direction, editing and so on. A movie with bad science can be great, just as a movie with good science can be bad. It's not the science that makes Bride of Frankenstein great, it's the acting, direction and writing. It's the set design. It's the cinematography. It's the contributions of every single man and woman working on the crew or for the studio that made it happen. But the science? Hell, if the science in that movie were worth anything I would have long ago created a whole menagerie of little people in jars to keep me entertained when there wasn't a good sci-fi movie on the tube. And when there was? Miniature popcorn tubs for all! Even the king!

Jacques Tati and the Playtime Color Palette

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Jacques Tati's Playtime famously, and sadly, bankrupted him. He obsessed over every detail for years, created a set so elaborate it was practically a "city" that became known as Tativille and removed all semblance of story or plot. Moviegoers, apparently, were not enthralled. To further complicate the matter, while most movies were still in the throes of full on technicolor rainbow assaults, Tati removed almost all color from his magnum opus. Every wall and floor, every chair or desk, every dress or suit is a variation on black, white, grey and dark blue. Even his ubiquitous character, Monsieur Hulot, seems to have lost most of the color in his argyle socks.

But, occasionally, a red appears:

Or a green:

Or both:

Throughout the movie, the colors are desaturated with only the occasional red or green making its way in front of the camera. As to the meaning of it all, that's up to you to figure out. Personally, I think Tati's idea, or the idea hoisted upon him by critics, of the modern world losing its soul to the homogenized sterility of mechanization is pretty basic and once photographed by Tati, a master of framing, rendered essentially meaningless. That is to say, he creates visuals so fascinating, intriguing and exquisite that any point about anything losing its soul is lost, a casualty to the sheer beauty, and soul, of the image on the screen.

And so, point or no point, I love the fact that there once was a director who obsessed so much about his vision that he went to the trouble of having entire buildings, floors, walls, dresses, suits and cars all play within a few millimeters of each other on the color wheel. Black, white, grey, blue. And then, suddenly, tantalizing glimpses of reds and greens.

All of which is to say, as far as visually obsessive directors go, Tati was one of the best. And someone I wish we had more of now.

Oscar Peterson: Motions and Emotions

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Oscar Peterson's career as a jazz pianist was always a bit tricky. Unlike a Bill Evans or Herbie Hancock or Victor Feldman, who could control a set through steady use of block chords and minimal melodic adornment, Peterson was all about flourishes. His style was such that the left hand was of only nominal use while the right hand created intricate melodic magic. Which is all to say, Peterson worked best as a front man, not an accompanist. And when accompanying him, best to keep it simple. Too much counter melody, too intricate a bass line and the whole thing could quickly become an incoherent mess. Perhaps that's why Peterson's foray into orchestral jazz turned out so well.

In 1969, Peterson recorded Motions and Emotions, an orchestral jazz album, sometimes derisively referred to as Muzak Jazz due to the lush strings and sonorous piano lines. Certainly those strings, beautifully arranged by Claus Ogerman, sound reminiscent of the type of music those over forty might recall hearing in department stores and elevators in their youth (hence the term, "elevator music"). But just because the unimaginative covers of popular hits for the Muzak corporation used lush strings doesn't mean they're a bad thing, just that they can be used well or poorly. On Motions and Emotions, Peterson and Ogerman use them perfectly.

Motions and Emotions, with its beautifully swirling wave cover, was a clear attempt by Peterson to put out music more tuned in to the new standards, if not more tuned in to the new sound. Peterson was no fool and wasn't about to start playing rock/jazz fusion just because most standard jazz was suddenly passé (to the incredibly short-sighted, that is). No, while other performers in jazz did just that, most notably Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, Peterson stuck to his strength and made nods only to song choice, not style. And those choices serve his style well, until the last cut on the album collapses under the weight of a musical genre gap that simply cannot be overcome.

The album kicks off, wisely, with a Henry Mancini tune, Sally's Tomato, from Breakfast at Tiffany's. If you're going to kick off an orchestral jazz album with any composer, there's probably not another one out there more suited to the task than Mancini. It also gives Peterson and Ogerman the chance to throw in a soft samba undertone, a foreshadowing of not only the album's grandest moment but one which may stand as one of Peterson's finest achievements. More on that in a moment.

After that we get into the more poppy of the new standards Peterson is covering, beginning with Sunny, that old pop hit warhorse covered more times than most other songs ever written combined. It may not be the gold standard of modern music but, by God, Peterson and Ogerman make it work beautifully with Ogerman giving the orchestra a dramatic punch that the original version, and every other pop cover of it, could only hope to replicate. Ironically, when the album collapses later, it will be with source songs infinitely better than Sunny. Go figure.

From here, Peterson breezes through Jimmy Webb's By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Gayle Caldwell's Wandering and Burt Bacharach's This Guy's in Love with You in a way that makes them all of a piece, kind of a trilogy stuck in the middle of the album. The tempos and rhythms of each move perfectly in and out of each other and signals in imagination not just in arrangements but of song order as well.

And then we get Wave. One of my favorite jazz composers, Antonio Carlos Jobim, penned Wave in 1967 and it became an immediate standard among jazz musicians. I have the original version by Jobim as well as four other versions. They are all splendid. Peterson's is majestic! It is not only the high point of the album but one of the high points of Oscar Peterson's recording career. Taking Jobim's original three minute samba song and extending it out to six minutes gives Peterson and Ogerman the time to transform it into an epic piece of modern music, slowly bringing in the low strings, then strumming guitar and horns before Peterson adds a few simple melodic lines, then trades off each verse with the orchestra until the final two minutes when both orchestra and piano build towards a crescendo that never arrives but fades away as Peterson and Ogerman see how many contrasting notes can be played without falling into the realm of cacophony. It is, quite simply, marvelous, and worth the whole damn album on its own.

After that, Mancini's Dreamsville is the perfect song to take the album out, gently serenading us into a hypnotic state of orchestral jazz bliss. And that's where it could have ended. However, there are three more songs and the first two are strong if redundant and the last is a serious misfire threatening to bring the whole enterprise down. Of course, it doesn't because no one song could bring down the greatness that precedes it but still, it's regrettable to say the least.

Two of the final songs are Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby by Paul McCartney and released, of course, by The Beatles (with the usual contractual "Lennon/McCartney" songwriting credit regardless of whether both had a hand in any given song or not). Those may be songs of superb craftsmanship but they don't work as well for jazz. The clash between the opening jazz tempo arranged by Ogerman for the orchestra and the suddenly altered tempo once Peterson starts playing the Yesterday melody is noticeable but Peterson still manages to make the song work splendidly. The two separate sections, the one playing the familiar melody and the one where Peterson riffs, are both well done, and the only real problem the songs suffers is that the melody is simply too familiar. One wishes Peterson had chosen a less iconic song.

Eleanor Rigby's baroque melody clashes with the feel of piano jazz in such as way that Peterson has to reinvent the melody halfway through and does so very well. Ogerman and Peterson do the best job they can and Peterson's flourishes pull out the melody in ways Lennon and McCartney (and producer George Martin) only hinted at. The only regrettable aspect of this is that putting two Beatles' songs back to back suddenly make the album seem like a Beatles tribute. One would have been fine.

Finally, the album reaches its final song with Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billy Joe and shifts abruptly, and I mean abruptly(!), into honky tonk! While Peterson and Ogerman's take on the song isn't half-bad really, it has the unfortunate effect of sounding as if it arrived from another album entirely, or maybe another planet. Imagine watching The Godfather for two and a half hours only to have the final reel replaced with the one from Brian De Palma's Scarface. They're both about gangsters, both star Al Pacino, but they really don't work together and take you in very different directions. This song's arrangement and inclusion on the album is a true head scratcher.

The fact that they weren't comfortable releasing an album with just nine songs is unfortunate because I can tell you that if this album ended after Eleanor Rigby, it would be damn near perfect. As it is, it is a work of orchestral jazz that has some of Oscar Peterson's finest work but crashes and burns within feet of reaching the finish line. Even with the crash and burn of Ode to Billy Joe, it's a masterpiece of piano and strings that can't be recommended highly enough.

For the Love of Film (Noir)

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Last February, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy of Films and Farran Smith Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, held a blogathon to raise money for film preservation. The money raised, some $30,000, was used to restore two silent film shorts, The Better Man (1912) and The Sergeant (1910), discovered in the New Zealand Film Archive in 2009. This time around, things will done a little differently. I'll let Marilyn explain it from her post currently up at Ferdy on Films:

Last year, we didn’t know what films we would be helping to restore, but this year, we do! In 1950, United Artists released a searing drama called The Sound of Fury, aka Try and Get Me. The film recounts the same story Fritz Lang told in Fury (1936) and was directed by Cy Endfield, who would run afoul of the Hollywood blacklist. Its star, Lloyd Bridges, never had a better role, and Eddie told me that when Jeff and Beau Bridges finally saw the film, they were blown away by his performance. A nitrate print of the film will be restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, using a reference print from Martin Scorsese’s personal collection to guide them and fill in any blanks. Paramount Pictures, which now owns the film, has agreed to help fund the restoration, but FNF is going to have to come up with significant funds to get the job done. That’s where we come in.

I know everyone loves noir, and that noir crosses all borders of time and place. That gives everyone a lot of choice of topics, and we hope everyone will join in what is bound to be a gigantic party. Once again, we’ll be offering helpful advice and taking suggestions from the film community on the For the Love of Film Facebook fan page, which we’ll be adding to regularly. Become a fan, and take a look around in the coming weeks for suggestions of topics, discussions about the blogathon, information about film preservation, and a lot more. And go to the For the Love of Film blog, where Cinema Styles’ Greg Ferrara has posted banners you can use on your own blog and Facebook page to promote participation and awareness.

The banners Marilyn mentions come in large and small sizes for use either within a post or on a sidebar. One of them, with Joan Bennett leaning against a street lamp, comes from Scarlet Street, Fritz Lang's 1945 masterpiece that my wife and I recently took in on the big screen at the AFI. I plan on writing that one up, as well as proselytizing, as usual, for seeing as many classic films on the big screen as possible because, once again, a movie I liked became a movie I loved once seen as originally intended. I also plan on giving to the cause, as I did last year, and hope you can too.

Here at the National Archives, my place of employment, I got to take in Upstream, a 1927 John Ford backstage comedy that was a part of the 2009 New Zealand treasure trove and, though we didn't specifically fund that one, felt proud to have been a part of a greater whole, one that works towards the goal of restoring works of art and pieces of history that might otherwise be lost forever.

So put up the banners, watch plenty of film noir and come ready to write, read, discuss and make a difference. I'll see you there.

A Time for BAMFs

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:30:00 +0000

As Footloose taught the world, there is a time for everything. I spend most of my time here deconstructing movies in one way or another in an effort to continually better my understanding of them and, as a result, watch movies with a sharper, more discerning eye than I ever did in my cinematic infancy. But sometimes I just don't have time for that 'cause I'm too busy thinking, "That is one badass mutha fucka!" So alert Kevin Bacon, because it's October and that means it's time for some shout-outs to my favorite BAMFs of horror and sci-fi!

Now this won't be a list per se, more a haphazard collection of thoughts on some of my favorite BAMFs in the horror/sci-fi universe that kind of, sort of forms a list-like thing. Plus, there's no rules. Sometimes it's a character, played by multiple actors, sometimes it's a particular actor playing a particular character. Sometimes it's lead, sometimes supporting. I guess the only thing I'm going to purposely avoid are the characters that are written as badasses, you know, the Vin Diesel or Arnold Schwarzenegger types or what Ripley became to the Alien series. Ah, hell, let's just get started?

- The BAMF that got me thinking up this whole thing in the first place is Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing. Now this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about because Van Helsing's been played a million times, from Edward Van Sloan's unflappable Nosferatu obsessive in the original adaptation of the stage play of Dracula (1931) to Anthony Hopkin's rather loud and excitable vampire hunter in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). But nobody, and I mean nobody, got Van Helsing as undead-on right as Peter Cushing.

When you watch Cushing at work in Horror of Dracula or Brides of Dracula, you see an actor at the top of his form, yes, but also an actor who understands the character he's playing better than anyone else before or since. When it comes to playing Van Helsing, Cushing really is the smartest guy in the room. He's got the analytical side, the blood-vengeance side and, above all, the cool-in-the-face of terror side that makes his Van Helsing the best there is to offer. Take away his hammer, stake and crucifix and this mutha will grab a pair of candlesticks, construct a makeshift cross and bring the curtains down, literally, to do away with your sorry blood-sucking ass. Bite him on the neck and leave him for undead and guess what? He's going to whip out some holy water and a hot iron and burn your filthy disease right out of his body while another couple of vampires look on in stunned amazement. When all's said and done, there's no doubt about it: Peter Cushing's Van Helsing in one Bad Ass Mutha Fucka!

- Now for a character from a series of movies I usually give a pretty hard time here at Cinema Styles: Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars Saga. Now, it's true, I got my problems with the saga overall but there's no questioning old Ben Kenobi's official BAMF status. And for the purposes of this inclusion please understand, I'm not talking expanded universe, I'm talking about the movies that were released. So I don't really care if there's some bigger bad-ass in Jedi Exile: The Journey to Malachor V or if something that happens in the movies is explained away in The Great Sith Encasement, Episode 17. Really, it's not possible for me to give even two shits less than I already do on that front. But Kenobi in the movies is number one, unquestionably.

When Darth Maul takes down everyone who stands in his way, including Kenobi's own mentor Qui-Gon Jinn, Kenobi leaps up from a prone position, grabs his saber in mid-air and slices the Sith shitheel in half. Anakin Skywalker, darkside Jedi at the height of his powers? Ha, ha, that's funny, because while Anakin can kick everyone's ass, from Count Dooku to an entire village of sand people, he can't do shit to Obi-Wan. In fact, when Anakin attempts a leap-in-the-air-from-prone-position finisher like Obi-Wan did with Darth Maul, he gets the legs cut out from under him, literally, and an arm too, just for good measure. Years later, an old Obi-Wan doesn't even break a sweat holding off Anakin, now Darth Vader. It takes Luke giving in to his anger to defeat Vader in Return of the Jedi but Obi-Wan? Sheeee-it, he not only dies of his own choosing but - and think about this - has the situation so under control he can actually take the time to look over at Luke, and mull it over first(!), while in the middle of a lightsaber duel with Vader! Obi-Wan Kenobi - Bad Ass Mutha Fucka!

-Next up, Rosemary Woodhouse from Rosemary's Baby. Yeah, yeah, I know, you're thinking, "Don't you mean Sarah Connor from The Terminator or Ripley from Alien?" No, I don't. See, they're like the Diesel/Schwarzenegger characters, as in, prepackaged badasses, even if theirs were quite a bit better rendered than any Diesel or Schwarzeneggar characters ever were. Besides, you know how every now and then you stumble upon (usually by, in fact, using StumbleUpon) some list of the top ten this or that in the movies and the lists always suck because their choices are SO FUCKING OBVIOUS! That's because they're written by and for idiots who have no real connection to the movies or understanding of dramatic conflict. Well, guess what? Those guys would put Ripley and Connor on their list of badasses and for Star Wars, they'd list Vader, not Obi-Wan. Whew... so, back to Rosemary.

Rosemary's a badass because, in the end, she takes control and doesn't look back. Her husband, her doctor and seemingly every member of the AARP do their level best to marginalize her out of existence but when it comes time to walk the walk, Rosemary does a full-on strut! Keep in mind, this is a woman who was roofied by Satan and had her baby stolen by the Beelzebub Chapter of the Boynton Beach Club and she still has enough guts to 1) yell at everybody for what they did to her baby, 2) shove Roman's lies right back in his face ("Shut up. You're in Dubrovnik, I can't hear you.") and 3) in the middle of listening to a bunch of old witches bitch about how she's unfit, pick that baby right up and say, "Fuck it! It's here, it's mine and I'm taking care of it." She owns the situation and everyone present. Only one thing left to say: Bad Ass Mutha Fucka!

- And speaking of mothers, how about Diane Freeling in Poltergeist? Seriously, think about how much she does in that movie. First, she handles the loss of a pet with aplomb. Second, she's naturally curious, not scared, of the strange phenonemon taking place in her house. And on top of that, she never looks exhausted and worn out like hubby Steve Freeling does even though she's handling much more. When her daughter gets taken she bucks up, brings in people to explain the options and stands at the fore (remember when the ghosts start descending the stairway and she's right there, ready to go up those stairs to meet them?). When someone has to go into the void to get their daughter, Steve says he'll do it but she gives him some malarkey about how they need him to hold the rope and yadda, yadda, yadda. We all know the real reason is because he'd fail. Here's why (and I say this in all seriousness): Once, at work, I heard two people talking, one of them complaining about a seemingly impossible series of tasks that would have required either several people or one person with eight arms. That's when the other one said, "A mother could do it." She was, of course, a mother. That was before I was with my wife and our children but now that I am let me just say, "Yup."

So anyway, she goes in, gets her daughter and comes back out. Later, the gates to hell relocate to the closet in the kids' bedroom and Diane is thrown against the floor, walls and ceiling of her bedroom to prevent her from reaching her kids. She gets out. Then, the hallway elongates to the point where running gets her nowhere. But she keeps running anyway and eventually, she gets out of that one too. Then, when she swings the door open to the kids' room she damn near gets sucked in to a full-fledged vortex. But she doesn't. Know what she does? With one arm on the door frame and one arm holding onto her kids against 200 mile-per-hour sucking winds, she pulls those goddamn kids out, that's what she does. And I didn't even mention the monster in the hall, the corpses in the pool or the completely useless idiot neighbor. Diane Freeling gets everybody out to safety, no exceptions. After doing all the dirty work all hubby Steve has to do is get everyone in the car and drive them to a motel. Lucky for him his wife is one Bad Ass Mutha Fucka!

- Let's top out our first five with Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist. Karras is different kind of badass because everything that makes him a badass comes as the final culmination of taking one flying turd in the face after another. Damien Karras is a priest the world has decided to shit on, daily. He's stressed out and broke, has to go to New York weekly, from Washington, D.C., to take care of his ailing mother, then deal with her being in a horrible nursing home until she dies alone and depressed while he's 300 miles away. If that weren't bad enough, he's brought into a bad situation with a demon-possessed girl who insists on vomiting on him when he asks her to back up what she's saying about his dead mother. And through it all, he follows the rules. He does his duty, to a fault. He psychoanalyzes and when that doesn't work he goes to the church and asks for special permission to conduct an exorcism. When he's told "No, but you can assist this old bastard we know who'll run the show," he doesn't complain. When he tries to fill the old guy in on what they're about to walk into ("The demon seems to have three distinct personalities") he's rudely cut off ("There is only one!"). While most of us would respond with, "Hey, fuck you, I'm just trying to help," old Damien keeps quiet. When he walks in the room and the demon looks like mom and he yells "You're not my mother!" and starts crying and the old guy says to leave, he does.

But then, when he comes back in and the old guy's dead and the demon possessed girl is on the bed, giggling, brother, he's done! He's tried talk. He's tried following church procedure. He's tried doing what the old guy says. And now, finally, Karras' true badass self emerges as he quietly says in his head, "Man, fuck it, it's clobbering time!" What follows must surely be the only time in cinematic history that the sight of a grown man viciously pummelling the face of a 12 year old girl is not only welcome, but encouraged. But that wouldn't make Karras a badass of the Mutha Fucka variety. No, you know what it is that does that, right? It's when he makes his whole goddamn life worthwhile in one single instant by saying to the demon, "Come into me! Take me!" He's saving the girl and sacrificing himself at the same moment. People, that's not just a hero, that's a Bad Ass Mutha Fucka!

And that's it for now. Sure there are millions more I could have done but I'm hoping these were the less obvious choices than, say, Taylor from Planet of the Apes (although I in no way deny his status as a fully licensed BAMF). Also, another non-obvious runner-up: Dave Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL kills everyone on board and then tells a stranded Dave that he isn't going to open that pod bay door and that Dave is screwed because he doesn't have his helmet so he can't come in manually. And you know what Dave does? He comes in manually anyway, without a helmet, and takes HAL apart! After that he follows his own destiny to beyond the infinite and becomes the star child who will provide the next step in our intellectual evolution. Awww, fuck yeah!

And so I leave you with dreams of your own favorite BAMFS of sci-fi and horror. To paraphrase the immortal words of Mr. Bacon, there is a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to mourn and there is a time for BAMFs. Everybody dance!

When Horror Doesn't Scare You

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:00:00 +0000

There's a phrase that I find particularly frustrating when applied to a good horror movie, especially one I happen to like: "It's not even that scary!" My reaction, usually, but not always, spoken silently to myself is, "Oh, shut up."

I know this will sound strange to some, yet obvious to others, but horror doesn't have to be scary to be good. It's basic quality of goodness or badness has, in fact, little to do with how scary it is and more to do, as with all art, with how effectively it conveys its meaning. If that means an overall sense of dread rather than a lot of scares, so be it. Hell, I like an overall sense of dread in horror.

On Facebook recently I posted a status update alluding to The Exorcist and Larry Aydlette chimed in to say he never found the movie scary. He was not, as some do, posing this as a criticism, merely an observation. Rod Heath did the same, carefully adding, "but that's not a fault, just a personal reaction." Marilyn, on the other hand, wrote, "I was terrified the first time I saw The Exorcist. The audience was freaking out all around me, people running up the aisle screaming. It was a happening." Sounds like it. My first experience with The Exorcist was quite different.

I saw it on an early cable showing in the seventies (it may have been HBO but I can't remember) with my sister, mother and father. Yes, I was around ten and my parents watched it with me. They were never the hysterical type, worried that if we were exposed to something with violence or language we would turn to a life of crime or insanity. And my father, and this is important, was a true believer, still is. He left college after his parents died to enter the monastery but left before taking his vows, deciding that marriage was the sacrament for him. His sister, on the other hand, stuck with it and became a nun who became Mother Superior of an order in Massachusetts. Finally, in our house, along the second bookshelf in the den, was and is the entire set of the Encyclopedia of Catholicism. So The Exorcist was a movie he had to see and, what the hell, might as well watch it with the kids.

My sister was decidedly scared and freaked out through most of it and I, while more fascinated than upset, was a little creeped out by things like the desecrated statue of Mary and the death mask flashing on the screen. By the time Merrin and Karras were doing battle with Regan in the bedroom at the end of the hall my father was more bemused than anything else. Bemused with my sister's reaction and the movie itself. He assured my sister there was nothing scary in the movie. It was a girl under the control of a demon, a demon that would be driven out by the faithful. No harm would come to her and, aside from exploiting an old man's weak heart, she could bring no harm to anyone else (Burke Dennings notwithstanding). Besides, he noted, this stuff doesn't even really happen like this. Yes, my dad's one of those types of movie viewers, the ones that too often let reality get in the way of a good story. But here's the thing: I agreed with him (on the "not scary" part, not the other stuff). I thought it was an excellent movie, but I couldn't be sure what everyone found scary about it. I mean, it's a girl. On a bed. Tied down, no less.

When I got older I realized that, while some people may be scared by it, what I felt was a sense of dread. A pall of death and familial collapse hangs over the house throughout the movie. Very, very little, if anything, in the movie actually feels good. And that is what makes it a great horror movie. To me, it's not meant to scare, it's meant to disturb, and those are two very different things. The Exorcist is disturbing, as in it disturbs our view of a normal mother/daughter relationship. It disturbs our view of faith, in ourselves and, if we choose, God as well. Most of all, it disturbs our view of what is right and wrong and good and bad. It is, in fact, one of the most disturbing movies I have ever seen. So whether I'm scared by it or not hardly even matters. The feeling's the thing, and the feeling is one of dread, a dreading of what's coming and how much worse it can still get.

I've had that feeling with several movies and some movies I consider the very best of the genre I would never consider scary, The Wicker Man for instance. I think it's brilliant but not because it's scary, rather, because it feeds on uneasy feelings of isolation, "us and them" belief systems and societal dysfunction. That it's not scary doesn't affect its quality one iota. It's brilliant, as is The Exorcist, in taking a feeling and building a whole movie around it. Sometimes people get the wrong idea about horror, even if they're a fan. They think it's about jump scares and gore and evil creatures and, actually, it is! It is about those things but it's also about so much more and whether or not it frightens isn't always the end-all, be-all of whether or not it succeeds. Sometimes, the best thing a horror movie can do is fill you with a vague, creeping sense of discomfort. Disquiet. Disorder. And when it's done right, it can be downright scary.

The King of the Retro-Fit, or:Why I Hate George Lucas

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:02:00 +0000

I don't actively hate George Lucas. I don't even dislike him. But he gives me that "God, I hate that guy!" feeling enough times that I think subtitling a piece, "Why I Hate George Lucas" is perfectly acceptable. And right now I have that "God, I hate that guy!" feeling all over again. See, George is going to convert all six Star Wars films to 3-D for theatrical re-release starting in 2012. Maybe the world does end then, after all. And I'm not pissed because he's taking an overly expensive, screen-darkening trendy fad and giving it unneeded and unwarranted extra life, although that's bad enough. I'm pissed because movies, particularly popular effects movies, are being lost as artifacts of their time. Let me explain.

I love science fiction movies, primarily older science fiction movies from the fifties. I love Forbidden Planet and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. I love The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars. I love The Incredible Shrinking Man, Them!, War of the Worlds and every other great or not so great sci-fi flick of the fifties and sixties and I even love At the Earth's Core and Logan's Run from the seventies too. And a part of why I love them is their lack of seamless perfection. I don't ever, EVER, want to see Doug McClure and Peter Cushing in a CGI-enhanced Earth Core drilling machine thingy. I want to always see them in that glorious throwback of a machine created for the original 1976 movie. I don't ever want the ants in Them! to look like honest-to-goodness real live ants, I want them to look like those big furry props that grab a hold of James Whitmore and don't let go. And, dammit, I want (and really would have fucking loved, George!) to have the original Star Wars Trilogy look the same from when I first saw them.

"But wait," you say, "Didn't they release (for a limited time) the original, unaltered films on DVD as part of a boxed set?"

Yes, they did and no, I didn't buy it because I cannot invest that kind of money in a box set. And it's not really what I mean anyway. What I mean is, despite being technically available, the original unaltered trilogy will never, ever be shown on cable or television again. All anyone is ever going to grow up seeing are the altered versions and that's a shame and a real loss. I understand the arguments for updating it to keep it going from generation to generation and keep the profits rolling in. I understand, I just don't care. I think it's important for people, film fans whether casual or hardcore, to enjoy a film for its place in history as well as for its technical specifications. When Gus Van Sant remade Psycho shot for shot in 1998, he proved, whether unwittingly or not, that a film does not just rise or fall dependent upon it's exacting technical content but upon when that content was originally done as well.

A film is a time-capsule and an archaeological object as well as a work of art. It is a piece of frozen time whose importance is, in the end, a lot more tied to historical significance than its bottom line. Watching an older movie takes me to another time in history and watching a movie I love takes me to the time in my life when I fell in love with it. Increasingly, all I see when I watch Star Wars (which, for these purposes is rhetorical because I don't watch it much these days) is a product that keeps getting a "New and Improved" sticker slapped on it. I'd love to say I've seen the trilogy and that's that but I know I haven't. I know that it will continue to be changed, most likely long after George Lucas' death, as he has probably already laid out in his will that the trilogy should be technologically updated in perpetuity with the requisite re-release for each new retro-fit. I wouldn't even be surprised if, eventually, it doesn't star Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher or Harrison Ford but rather whoever the big new stars are of the day, digitally inserted to keep the next generation interested.

My advice to everyone who wants to pass on the magic of Star Wars to their kids: Show them something else. Show them the great sci-fi of the fifties, sixties and seventies and the cheesy ones too. Show them Forbidden Planet and Planet of the Apes and Fantastic Voyage and Soylent Green and even Lucas' THX1138 and make sure you give them a healthy dose of Amicus while you're at it. Because it's those films that represent the true feel and time of the original trilogy, not that fleeting, ephemeral thing that's out there now that changes so much it's become impossible to ever actually see the final product. It's like Star Wars doesn't even exist anymore. It's a spirit, a phantom, but not necessarily a menace. More just a waste of time.

Overlord (1975)

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 16:45:00 +0000

In the summer of 1975 Overlord took home a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and then promptly disappeared for almost thirty years. It resurfaced at the Telluride Film Festival in 2004 and had its U.S. premiere shortly after at the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, as well as the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, Illinois. Its director, Stuart Cooper, used archival footage for over one quarter of the film, footage he had pored over for some three years at the British War Museum in London, and it is that footage that gives Overlord its power and, in the end, its greatness.*

Stuart Cooper has done little else with theatrical film. After only three feature length theatrical outings, none of which I have seen, he directed for television exclusively until his retirement in 2000. But with Overlord he achieved something special, something unique. He created a film whose fictional aspects only work as setups for the non-fictional archival footage and whose impact comes from knowing exactly where the fictional story is going. It's a clever cyclical trick that Cooper pulls off quite well. Neither the fictional story nor the actual footage would work without the other.

The story follows Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner) as he leaves his parents home in London to begin basic training after being called to duty in the midst of the greatest destructive event in world history, World War II. The plot is simply that:
Tom going through his training for battle as well as meeting a girl. The training is monotonous and tedious and Cooper intercuts it with stunning archival footage of the war that at once illustrates the different worlds Tom and the war inhabit and how, inevitably, they will be brought together. When they do finally meet, the outcome has already been telegraphed from the first moments of the film onwards. While there is little emotional impact to the ending, simply because the audience is never allowed to go too deeply into Tom's psyche, it has a structural power because Cooper has been informing us all along that this is how it will end. Tom has enough visions of his own death, and early on, that to not know his character will die in the Normandy invasion (Operation Overlord, hence the title) is to be either delusional or exceptionally lazy as an observer. Cooper wants you to know, or at least strongly sense, that Tom's ticket out of this world has already been purchased from the moment he says goodbye to his parents. Because the tragedy is that this young man will spend the last days or weeks or months of his life doing nothing meaningful. As each tedious training routine goes on we want Tom to do something else. Write a poem, compose a sonata, paint a landscape, anything! Don't you know you're going to die? Stop being reticent with that girl. Make passionate love to her, woo her, marry her!

Instead, Tom does his duty. He even writes a letter home letting his parents know, in advance, that he believes he's going to die, to prepare them. And as he trains the war draws closer, the battle footage grimmer, the damage more devastating. They eventually start training on a beach and Cooper intercuts extraordinary archival footage of massive cutting and whirring and rolling machines that drive home the point even further that Tom, indeed all his comrades in arms, are part of a larger machine, one so massive that none of them can see it or even intuit what their part of it is, only that they have a part, and a necessary one.

Overlord is a triumph of design. It is one of the best, if not the best, combination of real and archival footage I have ever seen. What it lacks in emotional resonance it more than makes up for in what one could call "steel trap story structure," that is, sharp, tight and strong. It leaves nothing unresolved while drawing power from the fact that nothing that happens is, alas, unexpected.
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*It should be noted that the film's Director of Photography was longtime Stanley Kubrick collaborator John Alcott, who provides the film fictional sections with a beautiful greyness to match the archival footage. He worked with Cooper on Cooper's other theatrical films as well. Please visit Unexplained Cinema for a series of posts on the look of the film.