A.P. at the Movies

Tin cans on the frontier

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Patricia Nelson Limerick opens her seminal 1987 study The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West with the following anecdote.

In 1883 Nannie Anderson married, left her home in Virginia, and traveled to her new life on a ranch in Montana. Reminiscing about those years, Mrs. Anderson noted a particular feature of Montana cuisine and landscape. "Everyone in the country lived out of cans," she said, "and you would see a great heap of them outside every little shack."

Hollywood did not commemorate those heaps in Western movies, and yet, by the common wisdom of archaeologists, trash heaps say a great deal about their creators. Living out of cans, the Montana ranchers were typical Westerners, celebrating independence while relying on a vital connection to the outside world. More important, the cans represented continuity, simply by staying in place. The garbage collector never came. And the evidence of last week's -- last year's -- meals stayed in sight. (17-18)

For Limerick, the cans symbolize the problems associated with making arbitrary breaks in the writing of cultural history. The 1890 U.S. Census, for example, showed that the frontier line -- defined as a point beyond which population density was less than two persons per square mile -- no longer existed, and so the American frontier was officially closed. This date has been widely adopted in American history as the "end of the West."

As an idea, "the West" is much more complex than population density, and, as Limerick argues in her study, there are continuities between past and present that call into question existing distinctions between the two. The cans, no doubt mass-produced by mechanized means in some factory back east, remind us of this.

Limerick is not concerned with the representations of the American West found in cinema, but her reference to Hollywood is an important rhetorical move, positing cinema as implicit in a process of myth-making that distorts history and reinforces the otherness of the frontier -- distinct from both the present, but also "the East."

Generally speaking, the movie Western is guilty as charged when it comes to failing to represent many of the more modern aspects of the frontier experience, canned food included. Earlier fictional accounts of cowboy life were not, however, so lacking in historical detail. Consider the following passage from Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902):

The early-rising cow-boys were off again to their work; and those to whom their night's holiday had left any dollars spending these for tobacco, or cartidges, or canned provisions for the journey to their distant camps. Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham; a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to the world's invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of the camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rustling over the face of the Western earth. (37)

It is more than a little ironic that what remains of the old West is, in fact, the detritus of modernity.

I suspect, however, that the following generations who patronized screen Westerns would have found the sight of heaps of tin cans behind each homestead rather incongruous with the genre's iconography, as much as canned provisions were an integral aspect of the historical American frontier experience.

Canned food does make its way into some movie Westerns, but I'm afraid this isn't something I've documented with any precision. (In researching my PhD dissertation, I watched well over 300 Westerns, but was not looking out for the kinds of food being consumed -- there's probably an interested article somewhere in this topic, but I don't reckon I'll be the one to write it!) As such, I can only make some anecdotal observations.

In Big Jake (George Sherman, 1971) -- the most underrated Western of the 1970s -- the characters break out the canned peaches one evening while running a cold camp. Here's John Wayne tucking in.

Wayne later tells Richard Boone's character that he got hooked on canned peaches when he was a "yonker" (period slang for a young man).

And, of course, there's also Deadwood, where canned peaches were the food of choice at any meeting convened by Al Swearengen.

The blog post that became a conference presentation. The conference presentation that became a book chapter.

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:26:00 +0000

Waaaaaaaay back in 2007, I wrote a blog post about Rob Zombie's remake of John Carpenter's Halloween.

Eight months later, I expanded those cusory thoughts into a more coherent conference presentation at New Nightmares : Issues and Themes in Contemporary Horror Cinema and Horror Film Criticism, held at Manchester Metropolitan University. There, one of the keynote speakers, Prof. Steffen Hantke, asked if I'd be interested in contributing an expanded version to a collection he was editing on contemporary horror. I jumped at the chance.

Now, in the July of 2010, that collection arrives: American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium. Buy it at a fine on-line bookseller near you!

I'll leave judgments about my own contribution to others, but it's a terrific collection, and anyone interested in contemporary horror should check it out.

Iron Sheik

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:25:00 +0000

At present, I'm seated in the departures lounge at the Toronto International Airport, waiting to catch a connecting flight to St. Louis where I'll be presenting a paper at the national conference of the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations.

And I just met the Iron Sheik. Yes, the wrestler.

He was seated at an airport bar, gold medal around his neck and with a wheelchair parked next to his barstool. Neither the bar, medal or wheelchair will come as a surprise to anyone who has seen any of his occasional appearances on WWE TV over the past decade or is familiar with his other, recent exploits (which are no doubt on WikiPedia).

All of that said, the Sheik was literally ranting and raving about Hulk Hogan just like it was 1984.

I introduced myself, told the Sheik I was a wrestling fan and had watched him as a kid. He quickly got to his feet and greeted me enthusiastically with a firm handshake. I asked the Sheik if he was in Toronto for a show, and he said he was doing a breast cancer benefit. He asked me where I was headed, and I told him I was going to St. Louis. The Sheik told me he was on his way home to Atlanta.

I wanted to get a photo, but the girl I entrusted with this task mistakenly took a video of it instead. I have no idea how she managed this. So rather than a semi-decent, cell-phone quality photo, my primary evidence of this epic encounter is a shoddy, sideways cell-phone video. At first I thought the photo hadn't saved at all, so the video is some consolation.

Blogger isn't cooperating with the video upload, so I'll have to try again later.

The Sheik was also kind enough to give me his card ("Making people humble since 1976") and an autographed picture.

Fess Parker, 1924-2010

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:28:00 +0000

Leonard Maltin on the passing of a legend.

The Green Police

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:29:00 +0000

A terrifying vision of the future. From...Audi.

Poster: Death of a Gunfighter

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:39:00 +0000

Another Western poster from 1969: the movie that marked the directorial debut of the late Alan Smithee.

As the story, or legend, goes, star Richard Widmark didn't see the eye to eye with the project's original helmer Robert Totten, a veteran director of television Westerns. Totten was fired, or left the film, and was replaced by Don Siegel. Once the film was completed, Siegel didn't want his name attached, feeling his contribution to the finished product didn't equal Totten's. Widmark didn't want Totten's name on the picture. A compromise was reached with the Director's Guild of America, and Alan Smithee was born.

As the movie's WikiPedia page notes, Smithee's debut earned positive notices from the likes of the New York Times and Roger Ebert.

And the rest is history.

Smithee "died" just before the release of Supernova (2000). But that's another story.

Poster: 100 Rifles

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:52:00 +0000

What I most like about this poster for 1969's 100 Rifles is the tagline, and its implicit critique of the tenor of much late-1960s American moviemaking (including, arguably, director Tom Gries's preceding Western, Will Penny [1968]).

Cowboys and Avatars

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:30:00 +0000

I'm arriving a little late to this party, so don't have much original insight to add. First and foremost, yes, the computer generated visuals were among the most impressive I've seen. Unlike others, I didn't experience headaches after scanning the 3-D frame or eyestrain during focus pulls. Avatar also wears its anti-imperialist, left-wing politics on its sleeve, but the allegory -- especially at the visual level, with jungle imagery -- struck me as less War on Terror than Vietnam. I guess some people just can't let go of the past (see also: George Lucas).

What I probably found most interesting, however, was the narrative. While the concept of remotely-controlled avatars is novel, the plot as a whole is flimsy, recycling a hodgepodge of elements from director Cameron's earlier pictures and using (essentially) magic to cover over gaping plot holes. The movie also features a boilerplate story viewers have seen time and again, particularly in Western: what Richard Slotkin calls the story of "the man who knows Indians," the invariably Caucasian protagonist who, either by upbringing or proving himself through trials, knows native customs and is accepted as one of them.

The most recent example of this story, referenced in a number of reviews of Avatar, is Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990). The narrative has a long history -- think Pocahontas -- but is a common one in the Wester genre, especially after Delmer Daves' influential 1950 Western Broken Arrow.

From the All Movie Guide:

Indian scout Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) is sent out to stem the war between the Whites and Apaches in the late 1870s. He learns (through an uncomfortably close encounter) that the Indians kill only to protect themselves, or out of retaliation for white atrocities. Befriending the sagacious Apache leader Cochise (Jeff Chandler), Jeffords ensures safe passage for white mail-carriers through Indian territory. As he becomes closer to his Native American "brothers", Jeffords falls in love with and weds a pretty Apache girl (Debra Paget). This being a 1950 film (miscegenation was frowned upon by the Production Code), you can guess what happens to her. Jeffords wants to avenge his bride's death at the hands of white renegades, but it is the so-called "savage" Cochise who advises him not to. Having learned much from each other, Jeffords and Cochise symbolize the white/Indian detente with the traditional broken arrow.

On one level, Avatar is patently aware of this genre lineage. Dialogue is peppered with "get the hell outta Dodge"-type cowboy references. Like Broken Arrow and Dances with Wolves (and many other "man who knows Indians" Westerns), Avatar also features a voice-over narration by the protagonist who annotates his experiences for us and explains the native customs and rites he is undertaking. Signifcantly, the indigenous people of the planet (or moon?) Pandora, the Na'vi, are patently stand-ins for Native Americans. They live in tribes, ride horses, shoot arrows, hunt in ritualistic fashion, and are in touch with the extra-terrestrial equivalent of the Great Spirit.

While it is common to argue that, along with the police actioner, the science fiction film succeeded the Western in the great chain of genre being as pioneering and gunslinging heroes set their sights on the final frontier, I think we need to be skeptical of simplistic arguments about genre succession. This isn't to say that genres aren't constantly reconfiguring themselves, or mixing with other genres. But if a science-fiction film contains elements from the Western, there is at least some conscious will behind it. And those transpositions have consequences.

John Cawelti, for example, has noted that the attitude toward technology in the Western and science-fiction genres are very different. In sci-fi, technology is usually embraced, if only by virtue of its ubiquity. It is the rare sci-fi film that questions mankind's increasing reliance on technology, and this questioning is often half-hearted. By contrast, the Western consistenly displays a conflicted attitude towards technological advancement. If something is gained, something is also lost.

In Injuns! Native Americans in the Movies, Ed Buscombe writes:

In an argument back in town Jeffords resists the notion that the Apaches started the conflict, recalling massacres of Apache women and children by whites, and the murder of Cochise's brother under a flag of truce. Fired up by the hostility of the whites towards the Apaches, Jeffords is provoked into a truly radical remark: 'Who asked us [i.e. the whites] here in the first place?' The implications of this are not fully pursued, since the film does not elsewhere challenge the rights of the whites to be in Apache territory. Instead, it falls back on the position that violence between whites and Indians is caused not by irreconcilable differences but by the actions of bad people on both sides. Give proper understanding, and an acceptance by the Indians that change in their traditional way of life is inevitable, peaceful coexistence can be achieved. (103)

The majority of Westerns, including those sympathetic to the Indian cause, acknowledge that "progress," while not without its disadvantages and tragedies, does bring with it benefits like modern medicine. In the opening scene of Broken Arrow, Jeffords "heals" a young Apache who has been shot in the back.

The theme then becomes analogous to the larger American project: cooperation by diverse peoples to build a new society. This tenuous balance is embodied in the Western hero, the man "not like other whites" who straddles, per Jim Kitses, the opposing poles of wilderness and civilization.

In Avatar, humans are on Pandora not to colonize it and build a new society -- the air is toxic -- but to mine a rare mineral called...unobtainium. Ugh. Anyway, we aren't told what this mineral is used for back on Earth, only that it is incredibly valuable. In contrast, we learn (in a characteristically brief snippet of expository dialogue) that the Na'vi have rejected both the white man's schools and his medicines. "We have nothing they want," says our hero Jake.

While the Western has always taken liberties with history, it is still, ultimately, constrained by it -- and, in this case, the knowledge of what became of American Indians. In short, the Indians can't win.

Avatar, like most sci-fi, has no such constraints. The Indians can win, and in Avatar they do. A leader fortold by prophecy, faith in mother Pandora and lots and lots of arrows triumph over the advanced, technological marvels of mechanized warfare. At the end, the Na'vi expel the greedy capitalist technocrats from their homeworld, and the "man who knows indians" literally, magically becomes one of them.

Therein lies the ultimately paradox, or hypocrisy, of Avatar, the most expensive, techonologically-advanced commercial film ever made: it is critical of the very things that make it possible.

New Year's...

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:01:00 +0000

"A Glorious Dawn"

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:47:00 +0000

The best thing I've seen in weeks.

Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

Year in Review: 2000

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

With the end of the first ten years of the 21st century fast approaching, "best movies of the decade" lists are sure to start appearing. Rather than simply naming ten or so movies off the top of my head, I'm going to attempt to review the decade, year-by-year, offering commentary and, hopefully, sifting out "list of the decade"-worthy movies. We'll see how it goes. I'm bound to overlook certain, important pictures, so if you feel compelled to do so please leave a comment. Also, I may want to expand on certain movies, so may eventually add an addendum or two (as separate posts).

A final note: I'll mostly be focusing on American movies. Not because I don't watch "foreign" films, but because, well, I mostly see American movies, and like them best. Because they are the best. But that's a topic for a future post.

So let's set the WABAC machine to the year 2000, when the world didn't end! Thank goodness for that.

BOX OFFICE

According to Box Office Mojo, the year's box office champ was How the Grinch Stole Christmas. No joke. It came in about $30 million ahead of Cast Away. Yep. Rounding out the top ten were Mission: Impossible II, Gladiator, What Women Want, The Perfect Storm, Meet the Parents, X-Men, Scary Movie and What Lies Beneath.

An interesting mix, to say the least. It strikes me as a little light on typical blockbuster fare -- that is, high-concept, effects-driven sci-fi/action pictures -- but, as a number of writers have noted, every year's most successful releases include some unexpected hits, so we shouldn't be surprised if any given year's most popular films include a variety of genres, both big and small.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas as number one? I thought director Ron Howard's live-action take on Dr. Suess's beloved children's tale stunk. That it came in at number one owes to a couple of factors, I guess. For one, the original story, and TV special, are ubiquitous around the holiday season. Also, family pictures aimed at multiple demographics tend to do well. That said -- and this is me remembering from nine years ago -- The Grinch of 2000 decided to take the easy route when it came to its cross-demographic comedy appeal: that is, lots of gross-out physical humor for the kiddies, and thinly-veiled sexual innuendo for the adults. (As an aside, I usually think of this as a key distinction between Pixar's movies and those of, well, nearly every other CG animation studio [in particular Shrek at Dreamworks]). I've only seen The Grinch once, in cinemas, and what I remember most clearly is a brief bit at a party scene, where the attendees each drop their car keys in a large bowl at the door. Funny how I don't remember wife-swapping in the original Suess story.

Cast Away strikes me as odd movie to do so well, even if it did feature Tom Hanks when he was at the height of his powers. For those who don't remember, Hanks plays a FedEx employee who ends up stranded on a tropical island for five years, with no-one but a volleyball to talk to.

I own this movie on DVD, but hadn't watched it for years -- maybe since the year I bought it.

Nine years later, I found the movie a little frustrating. Some of it works well, and the many of the scenes on the island are particularly engaging. There, director Robert Zemeckis adopts a detached, observational style, with many long takes that follow Hanks' character Chuck Noland as he explores and adapts to his new environs. The movie is at its best when it confronts the viewer with scenarios that forces us to ask, "What the heck would I do if that were me?"

In a few cases, however, Zemeckis doesn't know where to draw the line and things become tedious. A sequence of Chuck's repeated, pained attempts to make fire are one of the movie's high-points, but the film gilds the lily by following this up with a scene of Chuck dancing around a bonfire at night, singing "Come On Baby, Light My Fire." The movie's ending also falls a little flat, as it attempts to append philosophical meaning to Chuck's five-year ordeal.

Helen Hunt, who has a small role in Cast Away, stars opposite Mel Gibson in the funny What Women Want. Zemeckis managed the impressive feat of having two pictures crack the top ten, the second being What Lies Beneath -- in which the Hitchcockian touches are a little much at times, but is nevertheless an effective thriller with a strong turn by Michelle Pfeiffer.

X-Men has to be one of, if not the most influential movie released in 2000. I can remember a time when superhero movies, despite what would seem to be obvious appeal, were few and far between, and clearly viewed as far from a safe bet by Hollywood studios. To my mind, the movie that changed all of this is director Bryan Singer's serious, spirited, coherent take on the mythology of Marvel Comics' merry mutants. Nowadays every major (and not-so-major) comic book hero has either made it to the silver screen or will arrive there shortly. And if the adaptation doesn't work, then try and try again (e.g. the Hulk, Punisher, and what will surely happen to Superman).

Scary Movie. The film that gave us Anna Faris, a talented comedienne whose time has yet to come.

CRITICS, AWARDS AND SUCH

According to Rotten Tomatoes, the best-reviewed movie of 2000 was Chicken Run. According to MetaCritic, the best-reviewed movie was...a limited re-release of The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel, 1972). Huh. The second-best-reviewed movie was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Other widely-released pictures appearing near the top of both sites' lists include Yi Yi (A One and a Two), You Can Count on Me, Almost Famous and Traffic.

At the Academy Awards, Gladiator won Best Picture over Chocolat, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich and Traffic. Ridley Scott's Roman epic also won Best Movie at the MTV Movie Awards (over Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich, Hannibal [odd, as it was released in 2001] and X-Men) and Best Drama at the Golden Globes (over Billy Elliot, Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Wonder Boys).

Gladiator was clearly a big deal, combining strong box office performance with lots of awards -- which, as we know, don't usually go hand in hand.

As cliché as this may sound, Gladiator is a film very much in the epic tradition of Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959) and Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), combining thrilling battle sequences, engaging characters, political intrigue and a pace that belies the longish running time. In addition to Russell Crowe's star turn as general-turned-slave-turned-gladiator Maximus, the picture offered choice roles to wily veterans Richard Harris and Oliver Reed (who passed away during shooting).

I haven't seen Almost Famous. Not interested. Sorry.

2000 marked Steven Soderbergh's second coming out as an important filmmaker. Personally, I prefer Erin Brockovich to Traffic.

Chicken Run was part of a series of strong animated pictures released throughout 1990s. AMPAS introduced Best Animated picture category for 2001.

WORST PICTURES

2000 was the year of the universally-panned Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000. Fittingly, the movie cleaned up at the Razzies, winning nearly every category. Other Worst Picture nominees were Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (not a documentary this time!), Little Nicky (Adam Sandler plays Satan's son!), The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (it's a prequel!) and The Next Best Thing (Madonna is impregnated by her gay best friend!).

Of these, I've seen Battlefield Earth and Flintstones, but only once each. In cinemas. I remember the former as being bad, but not as bad as the critical overkill would indicate, and the latter as being enjoyable.

Finally, no list of worst movies of 2000 would be complete without How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

ODDS AND ENDS

The 6th Day. Having finally faced off against Satan in 1999's End of Days, there was no-one left for "Ahnold" to fight but...himself!

An entertaining sci-fi yarn that with PG-13 violence whose topicality -- it's about human cloning -- dates it somewhat.

The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Yes, the live-action adaptation of everyone's favorite moose and squirrel, co-starring Robert DeNiro (who, as we see in the trailer, gamely parodies Travis Bickel) and...Kenan & Kel. Remember them? Like 1999's live-action Dudley Do-Right, this attempt to bring Jay Ward's cartoon creations to the big screen fell flat with critics and audiences. Which is a shame, really, because The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle is a good movie that capably captures the tenor of the original animated series.

As in the series, the movie brings us a nonsensical plot, punning wordplay, and sly cultural references. Yet it is in this final aspect that we find the largest change. Back in the 1960s, those references were to geopolitics, as chipper Yanks Rocky and Bullwinkle were constantly foiling the plans of Boris and Natasha, evil secret agents from Potsylvania (presumably a Soviet satellite). With the Cold War long since thawed, the movie turns its attention mainly to consumerism and television.

Most of the gags work -- one of my favorite being Bullwinkle repeatedly commenting on the series of identical fast food/gas station/motel complexes the heroes encounter on their journey -- but somehow a subtext of people being brainwashed by mindless television and advertising lacks the punch of mutual assured destruction.

As the FBI agent charged with chaperoning our animated heroes -- named Karen Sympathy, of course -- Piper Perabo is likable and funny. She was also the lead in Coyote Ugly in 2000, but didn't break out as a star. She's kept working, though.

Dinosaur. Disney's (non-Pixar) attempt at a CG feature, placing photo-realistic CG dinosaurs in real environments, with a story that channels The Land Before Time (the original, not the direct-to-video sequels). As I recall, there was something more than a little uncanny about seeing realistic dinosaurs talk. At least they didn't sing.

Mission to Mars and Red Planet. First volcanoes. Then asteroids. Finally, Mars!

The Patriot. One year before Michael Bay decided to try his hand at a "serious" movie with Pearl Harbor (2001), his main rival in the "what can we blow up next?" club, Roland Emmerich (whom I wrote a bit about here), made this American Revolution epic, starring Mel Gibson. After his drunken, post-arrest ramblings about "the Jews," its easy to forget that Gibson is, or was, a good actor.

In contrast to the Civil War, WWII or Vietnam, the Revolutionary War hasn't inspired many movies. Why is an interesting question, but one on which I can only speculate. The success of the recent John Adams miniseries seems to prove that there is an audience for depictions of the period of America's founding.

Space Cowboys. Escapist fare from director Clint Eastwood -- who, by the time I'm finished this trip down memory lane, may emerge as the most interesting filmmaker of the decade.

Unbreakable. Director M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up to The Sixth Sense is probably his best film -- which may or may not be saying much, depending on your perspective. Personally, I've found most of his pictures entertaining and formally interesting, even if they tend to bend under the exposition required by his trademark twist endings

Unbreakable reunites Shyamalan with star Bruce Willis, who gives a quiet, thoughtful performance as a man who may or may not be the real-world equivalent of a comic book superhuman. Samuel L. Jackson is effectively restrained as a comic gallery proprietor with a rare genetic disorder that makes his bones exceedingly fragile.

On the back of these two performances, the picture works well as a somber, pensive take on the nature of heroism and villainy. An interesting counter-point to the ascendant superhero genre.

Other notable releases from 2000 include American Psycho; Best in Show; Bring It On; The Cell; Charlie's Angels; Final Destination (inaugurating a respectable horror franchise that keeps on giving); Hollow Man (Kevin Bacon turns invisible and goes crazy); Requiem for a Dream (don't do drugs); Road Trip; Scream 3 (a convoluted ending to the saga of Sidney Prescott that awkwardly reveals a "mastermind" was behind the events from day one); Shaft; and Pollock.

CONTENDERS
(Films I'll return to, God willing, in my concluding post in four or five months time)

In 2000, I was film critic for my high school newspaper. Humble beginnings. Back then, I was so in tune to the cinema zeitgeist that I was able to correctly prognosticate the winners of the four major Oscar categories. Amazing, I know.

Anyway, my personal selection for favorite/best -- I don't recall which term I used -- movie of 2000 was the Cohen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Nine years later, I still find the film's episodic narrative, rich visuals, old-timey music thoroughly charming.

X-Men and Gladiator, for the reasons above.

Miss Congeniality. Sandra Bullock's FBI agent goes undercover as a beauty pageant contestant, with hi-larious results. Seriously, this film is darn good. Stay tuned for reasons why.

Pitch Black. Director David Twohy's taut, atmospheric sci-fi actioner with Vin Diesel as anti-hero Riddick.

R.I.P. John Hughes

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:33:00 +0000

Sad news his morning. Filmmaker John Hughes has passed away.

Hughes will be remembered most for writing and directing a string of successful, teen-oriented comedies in the 1980s that launched the careers of a new generation of young actors, dubbed "the brat pack," and established the themes and conventions that persist in teenpics to this day. Hughes is also often credited with giving a voice to the concerns of a generation of teenagers -- which is a little odd, if we consider that Hughes was in his mid- and late-30s at the time.

Certainly, Hughes had forerunners. The 1930s, 40s and 50s each saw cycles of pictures about juvenile delinquents. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney had countless teenage trysts in the guise of comedic misadventures in the 30s and 40s. In the 50s and 60s, Sandra Dee and other teens took the beach. And so on. As much as the increasingly youth-focused nature of Hollywood moviemaking complicates boundaries between "teen" and "adult" fare (as Thomas Doherty comprehensively details in Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s), movies explicitly aimed at teenagers continue to be produced (the American Pie movies and their countless imitators, Road Trip, etc.).

The nature of filmmaking as a business run by experienced professionals means adults making films for teenagers. As the cursory history I just laid out indicates, and as much as things change over the years, there have been definite continuities in representation of youths since the category "teenager" emerged in the 1920s. Hollywood has always made pictures about distressed youths (and the parents who just don't understand them). This isn't to say that Hughes wasn't "in tune" the youth culture of the 80s -- he undoubtedly was. But simply being sympathetic to the concerns of young people doesn't necessarily translate to being able to make good movies. What we shouldn't overlook, then, is Hughes's skill as a storyteller, and his ability to use contemporary trappings -- popular music, in particular -- in service of thematic ends.

It must be noted that Hughes's comedic range, particularly as a writer, extended beyond the confines of suburban Illinois high schools. Hughes wrote and directed two of late comedian John Candy's best pictures, Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) and Uncle Buck (1989), wrote the first three National Lampoon "Vacation" pictures. In the 1990s, Hughes turned his focus to younger viewers, penning the screenplay for the phenomenally successful, comically violent Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990) and two sequels, as well as updated takes on Dennis the Menace (Nick Castle, 1993), Miracle on 34th Street (Les Mayfield, 1994) and The Absentminded Professor (as Flubber [Mayfield, 1997]).

I make a point to watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation every December. It holds up beautifully. I was crazy about Home Alone when it was released, but haven't seen it in years. I must look it up.

Of Hughes's "brat pack" features, it seems The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) have emerged as favorites. My preference, as much as I have a soft spot for Weird Science (1985), is Sixteen Candles (1984). A remarkably accomplished directorial debut, and a showcase for the budding talents of the incomparable Molly Ringwald, the tale of Samantha Baker's forgotten 16th birthday is one of my favorite movies.

Unlike Home Alone, which I saw when I was roughly the same age as its protagonist, I have no nostalgic attachment to Sixteen Candles. I wasn't yet two years old when it was released in cinemas, and I can't even recall when I first saw it. Maybe on TBS when I was in my teens. I dunno.

As much as part of me is uneasy with the valorization of youth -- consider the movie's tagline, "It's the time of your life that may last a lifetime" -- or the fact that the heroine ends up with a guy whom both she, and we, know very little about, the movie still works as amiable teenage fantasy, and I appreciate that the movie makes has no pretensions to be otherwise.

"Well, hang in there, Samantha. The day’s not over yet. You may still get your wish."

Why Netflix doesn't stink

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:35:00 +0000

Time magazine's Richard Corliss has written a piece titled "Why Netflix Stinks: A Critic's Complaint." While Corliss acknowledges that Netflix is a good resource, particularly for hard-to-find and foreign titles, he nevertheless has reservations. Indeed, not only does Corliss have "misgivings about the service's usefulness, especially compared with that of a real, well-stocked video store," he's also worried about "the possibly harmful effect that Netflix and other online retail outfits may have on American society."

American society? Netflix?

According to Corliss, Netflix "stinks" because A) it is killing off video rental establishments, B) it makes you wait for your movies, a slave to the whims of Netflix's distribution system and the postal service, and C) customers "miss out on a face-to-face with a knowledgeable cinephile." This final point has the society-threatening ramifications. Internet commerce risks turning us into a "society of shut-ins" akin to the bulbous humans in WALL*E (which, incidentally, was Corliss's #1 movie of 2008), all because we are denied "the random epiphanies of human contact."

This argument strikes me as decidedly boilerplate, applicable to any form of Internet commerce. Indeed, it's not a far cry from the arguments used against big-box retailers like Wal-Mart that run "mom-and-pop" stores out of business.

Corliss acknowledges that Netflix is, or hopes to be, a stage between video rental and streaming video. But video-on-demand means giving into an evil greater evil: "So, O.K., soon there will be no more waiting for DVDs. But it'll come at a price. You'll be what the online corporate culture wants you to be: a passive, inert receptacle for its products."

Give me a break. What Corliss, and the countless others who make similar claims, never consider is that Netflix, Amazon, Wal-Mart et al are meeting the demands of customers. People like large selection and low prices. That vendors respond to those demands is a good thing.

I've been a member of the kind of specialty video stores lauded by some cinephiles, with massive collections of obscure and foreign titles. You may find that rare title but, in my experience, you pay a premium in the form of higher rental charges and shorter rental periods. As you should, because specialty vendors catering to a very small clientèle need to charge higher prices to stay in business. What folks tend to object to, rightly, is being charged specialty prices (by mom and pop, say) for general goods and services.

What Netflix and the like do is take the specialty out of these transactions. That's the wonderful thing about online commerce: what was once a specialty item, potentially out of reach for many consumers either because of cost, or because they don't live in a city with a specialist vendor, is now easily accessible. No brick-and-mortor vendor will ever be as "well-stocked" as an operation like Amazon or Netflix. On Zip, the Canadian equivalent of Netflix, I was able to rent literally hundreds of foreign movies that Ottawa's "elite" video renters didn't have. What's more, I could keep those titles for as long as I wanted, at a fraction of the cost. How is this a bad thing? Yes, I occasionally had to wait to receive them, but this was a cost I was willing to incur. At the end of the day, I won.

What is admittedly missing from the on-line experience is the element of human interaction that Corliss so prizes, the "face-to-face with a knowledgeable cinephile." Now, in my experience, the average video rental employee knows about as much about movies as the kid who takes my order at McDonald's knows about hamburgers. But that knowledge isn't a prerequisite for serving me a delicious Big Mac, just as it isn't for renting me Legally Blonde. Both activities can be done effectively and efficiently without, again, specialist knowledge. Hiring specialists means higher prices. Corliss is skeptical of the "you may also like" recommendations on Netflix -- which are likely generated automatically based on criteria like titles rented by the same user -- but I'd be equally skeptical of the recommendation of any Blockbuster employee.

For me, one of the biggest fallacies perpetuated about on-line commerce -- or on-line activity in general, really -- is that it is passive, with consumers nothing more than "inert receptacles." Internet activity is anything but passive, hence the ubiquity of the term "browsing." Shopping on-line is admittedly not the same as wandering around a store looking for books or DVDs, but it is still an exploratory activity. One title may lead you to dozens of others if you click on the link for the director's name, or the actor's, or the genre, or the release year. What's more, shopping on-line means you have ready access to the opinions of hundreds of others, ranging from professional evaluations to consumer feedback. Far from being denied "the random epiphanies of human contact," interaction and exchange is multiplied. The vibrant, thriving community of film blogging is surely a testament to that.

It strikes me that many people, Corliss included, want to have it both ways. They want to reap the benefits of a Netflix (or Amazon, or Wal-Mart), while still enjoying the luxury of sauntering down to the corner video store (or bookseller, or grocer) for some good ol' human contact. That's fine. It needn't be either/or. But don't begin complaining about how evil corporations have left us with no other choice than to use Netflix, or lamenting about how this portends the downfall of civilization. First of all, what does it say about "society" if human interaction is largely predicated not on, say, friendship but commerce? Is it not possible that on-line commerce, like the supermarket and department store before, frees up time for us to spend with our families and friends, rather than with the butcher, baker and candlestick maker? Corliss himself notes that cinema attendance is up 8% this year. Second, many independent vendors are able to compete successfully with larger chains by offering unique products and services, even at higher prices. A question I often ask people who lament the closure of a local business is whether they actually shopped at that store -- not as a child, but recently. The answer is almost always no.

Thanks to services like Netflix, on-line merchants, and increasingly on-line distribution, the average person, let alone a student of film, has access to a wealth of cinema unimaginable even ten years ago. Nostalgia for the past should not blind us to the fact that, for movie lovers especially, things are better now than they ever have been.

Updated: Stereoscopes west

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Click here.

Centered, and yet not

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:03:00 +0000

In the Spring, I taught a romantic comedy unit for an upper-year course on film comedy. Lots of fun. The last week, on "the new romance," gave students the choice of selecting, as a group, a movie to watch in addition to When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989). The class chose Garden State (Zach Braff, 2004). Which I hadn't seen, but who was I to oppose the will of the group? Fortunately, the film worked rather well -- particularly because it invoked one of the oldest romcom scenarios: the maladjusted man being transformed by the eccentric woman. In a reciprocal way, on this point the film also turned out to be more formally interesting than I might have expected.

Garden State is about a depressed Hollywood actor, Andrew (Braff), who returns home to New Jersey for his estranged mother's funeral. Shortly thereafter, he meets the kooky Sam (Natalie Portman). The two have adventures whilst falling in love. And so on. Some of the "indie" touches try to be a little too clever, and a general aloofness pervades that doesn't always work in the movie's favor. But, on the whole, I'd say Garden State is worth checking out.

This is the first shot in which we see Sam. Andrew's in the center, and she's at far screen left. As the scene develops we get closer views of Sam, as she and Andrew begin a conversation, but her introduction in this manner -- on the periphery of both the frame and, by extension, Andrew's world -- is significant.

Up to this point, the film has presented numerous centrally-framed shots of Andrew, most of which are obviously symbolic.

Like I said, pretty obvious.

There is a contradiction here between form and content. Though centrally framed, Andrew is barely aware of the world around him. He's been medicated to oblivion. The point of these repeated framings, then, is to reinforce the idea that Andrew is at the center of a world over which he has little control. (These stills may give the impression that the movie belabors this point, but it actually works rather nicely.)

After Andrew's initial contact with Sam -- after meeting in the doctor's office, he offers her a ride home, meets her equally eccentric family, gets to know her better, and becomes interested -- he becomes de-centered, representationally, yet thematically he is more aware.

In the scene above, Andrew is initially framed at screen left -- a more traditional framing for this kind of close-up. As the camera holds on him, the other diegetic sounds -- his friends talking -- begin to fade out until their are low and muffled. A comparable effect was used in some of "centered" shots from above, only here it becomes apparent that the diminishing sound doesn't represent Andrew zoning out, but rather tuning in. The reverse shot confirms that Andrew is focusing on something very specific (and, as you might imagine, narratively significant).

Subsequently, Andrew is again centrally-framed in certain scenes. In each case, the emphasis is on him paying attention, noticing things, becoming increasingly aware.

For her part, Sam is also transformed through her interaction with Andrew. In the movie's concluding shot, she joins him in the center of what is now their world.

What we have, then, is the tried-and-true romantic comedy plot about the transformative power of love actually rendered at a formal level in a consistent, sophisticated way. Nice.

Ghostbusters...of 1954.

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:51:00 +0000

Very, very clever.

Ostensibly, a review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Dan North has a good round-up of the critical invective that has been launched against Michael "Awesome" Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Having seen the movie, I have to agree that most of the condemnation is deserved. As much as parts of me -- the part with a youthful attachment to the original Transformers cartoon, in particular (but also the part that prompts me to write things like this, or this) -- really, really wants to launch a spirited defense of the movie, there just isn't much to defend.

Not that a record-breaking movie that earned $200 million in 5-days needs much defense by a lowly graduate student. The phenomenal box office success Transformers 2 has reignited the age-old debate about, as ScriptGirl eloquently puts it in her most recent report, "whether Michael Bay is an accomplished journeyman with impressive technical skills, a unique visual style and a finger firmly on the pulse of youthful moviegoers, or just a total douche."

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Bay had this to say about the chasm between critical and audience opinion:

"I think they reviewed the wrong movie. They just don't understand the movie and its audience. It's silly fun," Bay said over the weekend of the many "Transformers" critical detractors. "I am convinced that they are born with the anti-fun gene. The reviews are just so vicious. A lot of them are more personal than anything else."

To be fair to Bay, much of the highbrow criticism of Revenge of the Fallen is decidedly over-the-top and hyperbolic -- which is more than a little ironic, given the grounds on which his movie is being criticized.

I think my favorite headline comes from an Associate Press article: "'Transformers': Worst-reviewed $400 million hit?" Cuts right to the heart of the matter, yes?

While much has been made about the critical/commercial divide since the movie premiered, the AP article does point out that the majority of top-grossing movies, including summer blockbusters, are well-liked by critics. Last summer's The Dark Knight being a case in point -- although, interestingly, the resulting controversy there was how the movie was snubbed for award nominations. Even top-grossing movies that garnered mixed reviews like Star Wars: Episode One (1999) and Pirates the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) were still much better liked by critics than the Transformers sequel.

All of which would seem to indicate that, when it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, critics and audiences actually are in step most of the time.

Linda Holmes makes a similar point at NPR in "'Transformers' Opens Big: Does That Mean Critics Are Clueless?" She notes that a number of recent "pure-entertainment" movies has received good reviews, including Up, The Hangover and Drag Me to Hell.

There's a big difference between audiences thinking critics don't know what they're talking about — which goes to whether criticism itself is considered credible — and audiences thinking they simply aren't looking for critical quality — which goes to whether criticism is, as regards a particular movie, relevant....
Criticism is there to comment on the subjective things about the movie; some people are going because of the objective things: what it is, as opposed to how it is. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it seems like a leap to turn that old, old truth into a new chasm yawning between audiences and critics. In a world where critics gave hugely positive reviews to Borat, it's nonsense to argue that they hated your robot movie because it wasn't Shakespeare.

Fair enough.

Holmes' piece is worth reading in its entirety. Even though some aspects of her argument are questionable -- the idea of the "pure-entertainment" movie, for one -- she makes a number of good points. Yet, lurking beneath her commentary (and the larger issues at hand) there is a thorny question no one seems to be asking.

Jim Emmerson approaches it when he asks, "[W]hat good do reviews of a "Transformers" sequel do, besides providing a few million readers with some pretty energetic and entertaining copy?" Not quite the question I'm thinking of, but a good one nonetheless. The widespread acknowledgment that Revenge of the Fallen was going to be, and is, "critic-proof" might account for the turgid quality of much of the popular criticism -- reviewers know that people will see the picture regardless of what they say, so they take the opportunity to indulge themselves and argue that the vapidity of a nevertheless hot movie somehow portends the apocalypse.

Does it not stand to reason, though, that if certain films are "critic-proof" other are not? Do some films -- those without the benefit of giant robots or superheroes, maybe -- succeed or fail, then, based on critical opinion?

Doubtful.

As Holmes notes, the "pure-entertainment" horror picture Drag Me to Hell got great notices. But those notices weren't enough to save the picture from disappointing box-office. Was it critical opinion that put The Hangover over the top, financially? Or was it a good marketing campaign and very funny trailer? Certainly, critical opinion may -- may -- have something to do with whether a particular film is nominated for an award, but it doesn't seem to drive attendance. Likewise, top film critics may travel the globe seeing and extolling the most wonderful and original movies the world has to offer, but that doesn't mean those movies will ever play in a cinema near you.

Could it be, then, that all movies are "critic-proof"? If that's the case -- even to a degree -- the question to ask is: what is the point of popular film criticism? What does it do?

In a post last year, on year-end "best" and "top" lists, I wrote:

More so than in film scholarship or analysis, perhaps unfortunately, there appears to be an expectation in film criticism that the personality of the reviewer will come through in his or her writing -- which would imply that, as much as the reviewer's solemn duty is to help you decide whether or not to fork over your hard earned cash to see a particular movie, a degree of their personal taste is part of the equation.

Could it be that I got that middle part wrong? That popular film criticism is not about, even in part, helping moviegoers make informed decisions? Some critics seem to see it that way. The critic Dann Gire responds to Michael Bay et al:

If film critics were designed to be mere consumer advisers, then we really screwed up by kicking the lug nuts out of Michael Bay's screechy, populist piece of pandering pablum "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." But we didn't screw up, because we're not consumer advisers. Our job is not to say if a movie will be a big box office hit and everyone should go see it because it's a big box office hit. Our job is simple and direct: to assess the quality of a motion picture.

Gire goes on to stress that entertainment value is but one criteria that a critic will use in assessing a movie's quality, concluding:

What business people like Rob Moore [VP at Paramount] don't get is that critics consider a great many more elements to a movie than how diverting it might be and how much money it makes.

There's nothing wrong with the American public supporting a motion picture that the critics have taken to the firing squad. The two camps are not bound by the same criteria for what makes a successful movie. As it should be.

So, like Holmes above, Gire arrives at an "it's okay that audiences and critics disagree" conclusion. Film criticism only expresses an opinion -- an informed one, mind you, but still an opinion, with which anyone is free to disagree on their own subjective grounds.

To which I really want to ask: is that the best you can do? Millions of people the world over have just thrown your reviews back in your faces, and this is your reply?

Neither acknowledging that movie is "critic-proof" nor an after-the-fact "we're all free to disagree" alibi do much to strengthen or legitimize the field of film criticism. Is either not admitting, basically, that what you say doesn't matter? Of course, if you've appraised Revenge of the Fallen as nothing less than the harbinger of Satan -- or, for argument's sake, just a really bad movie -- what does that say, implicitly, about the millions of people who go to see it? Not an issue I foresee many critics willing to wade into!

So what about that there Transformers movie, then?

I suppose there isn't much to say that hasn't already been said. What I personally find most frustrating is that a franchise with such a rich mythology has twice yielded such poor cinematic results. A parallel could be drawn here to J.J. Abram's Star Trek reboot, which effectively drew upon an even larger, more complex mythology to fashion an exciting, new narrative out of familiar characters and conventions. Oddly enough, the screenwriters for Star Trek, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, contributed to the screenplay for Revenge of the Fallen. Talk about uneven results. Of course, the Transformers sequel was conceived during the recent WGA strike, which may account for why the movie feels like a series of pre-conceived special effects sequences loosely strung together by a weak, largely incoherent narrative.

"...the way it should have been"

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:54:00 +0000

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston, 1972) begins with an overhead shot of a map of Texas -- a map presumably from around the turn of the last century -- which promptly zooms in on the Pecos River. The Pecos, as the ensuring title crawl informs us, "marked the boundaries of civilization in western Texas. West of the Pecos there was no law, no order, and only bad men and rattlesnakes lived there."

Unto this, the infamous Judge Roy Bean (played by Paul Newman), self-appointed "law west of the Pecos."

If rank in the pantheon of American frontier heroes is to be judged by appearances in theatrical Westerns, Bean, despite being a colorful character, falls somewhere towards the bottom. Aside from the film in question, the notorious hanging judge of Vinegaroon features in two other movies of note: The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940), where the Judge, played by Walter Brennan, matches wits with Gary Cooper, and A Time for Dying (Budd Boetticher, 1969), played by Victor Jory. In both films, Bean is played mostly for laughs -- although the character's unrequited love for the actress Lillie Langtry lends a particularly tragic note to Brennan's performance.

Perhaps the best-remembered aspect of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is this bit of text, from the opening credits:

"The way it should have been."

At the site of these words, viewers even vaguely familiar with the Western are likely to think of newsman Maxwell Scott's famous refusal in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) to print "the truth" about hero-turned-politician Ransom Stoddard: "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

The sentiment is similar, only now the semantics are clearer.

It's admittedly tempting to make a giant rhetorical leap to claiming that this sentiment should be appropriately applied to the genre as a whole; that Westerns -- despite the countless claims to veracity made over the years -- have in fact always been in the business of presenting an (honestly) idealized representation of the past, nay-saying historians and their inaccuracies be damned.

Tempting, but not that tempting, if only because the consideration of the "the way it should have been" sentiment in light of both the specific movie it precedes and that movie's historical context is more productive than any rhetorical gloss that might be applied to the genre as a whole. Consider, first, that this statement introduces a movie produced during a period of the Western's development popularly referred to as "revisionist." At the time when the Western was -- supposedly -- self-consciously criticizing its own conventions (and their ideological implications), here we have a movie that is openly embracing an idealized (and, on balance, comic) presentation of history. Not only does the movie play fast and loose with history, it grafts the story of its protagonist onto a conventional plot seen countless times before in earlier Westerns.

As he was not a gunman of any renown -- in contrast to most top-flight Western heroes -- it is perhaps understandable that Bean did not find himself the subject of more Westerns. As far as heroics goes, the judicial branch isn't particularly exciting. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean attempts to strike a balance between earlier comedic portrayals and a more conventional frontier narrative. Here Bean is presented as an agent of change: the man who brings law to the wilderness, but whose brand of justice quickly places him at odds with emerging civilization around him. This is a common scenario in the later Western, with variations used in True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969), Death of a Gunfighter (Alan Smithee, 1969), The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (Burt Kennedy, 1969), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and other pictures.

In a way, then, this is the way it was -- or at least the way it has been.

As evidenced by the number of Westerns that draw on it, the story of the the unwanted gunfighter is clearly a productive and versatile narrative. Moreover, in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean the plot -- as with the majority of the other conventions drawn upon -- is used in earnest, often played for comedy, but without a hint of self-consciousness. This calls into question Ted Sennett's remark, quoted on the back of the DVD case, that the movie is "playful and wickedly irreverent." Playful? Yes. Irreverent? Not so much.

Ersatz Earps

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:48:00 +0000

Countless Westerns are based upon the lives and legends of a select list of American historical figures associated with the annexation, migration and expansion west of the Mississippi River that followed the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865. Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, "Wild Bill" Hickok, "Buffalo Bill" Cody and General George Armstrong Custer are among the men in this group. Yet the exact number of films each figure has appeared in is harder to gauge than you might think, owing to a number of factors. These include the less than perfect record of movies made during cinema’s early and transitional periods, as well as the contentious issue of movies that feature fictional characters based on historical personages. “Based on” is a slippery conception, as it can encompass “obviously based on,” “loosely based on,” “arguably based on,” and so on. Henry Fonda’s character in Fort Apache (1948), an arrogant Lt. Col. from the east with a blind hatred for Indians who leads his men on a suicidal charge that wipes out him and his entire force, is clearly modeled on Custer. The movie’s displacement of both the historical figure and his last charge onto an ostensibly fictional scenario is understood as the filmmakers not wanting to outright villainize a man still regarded by many as a national hero. Yet for every Custer-by-another-name, there are at least a half-dozen ersatz Wyatt Earps: "town tamers" who ride into gunplay-ridden towns and only don the sheriff or marshal’s badge as a means of avenging a personal loss.

Earp has, of course, received countless big screen treatments. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) established in the character of Earp the prototypical frontier lawman, while eleven years later the phenomenally successful Gunfight at OK Corral (Sturges, 1957) helped reinvigorate the genre during a brief spell of commercial decline (1). Earp also appears "as Earp" in Frontier Marshal (Dwan, 1939), often neglected in discussions of the genre's flowering in 1939-40; Wichita (Tourneur, 1955), starring Joel McRae; the infamous interlude in Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), with James Stewart playing the white-clad Earp role for laughs; Hour of the Gun (1967), Sturges' attempt at a a more historically-accurate and serious version of the legend, with James Garner in the lead; Doc (Perry, 1971), a dust-caked debunking of the Earp legend with Holliday (played by Stacy Keach) as the main character; and two late entries, the entertaining Tombstone (Cosmatos, 1993) and the lumbering Wyatt Earp (Kasdan, 1994).

On the ersatz side, we find a number of notable examples, including Dodge City (Curtiz, 1939), with Eroll Flynn as an Earp-inspired lawman charged with getting the riffraff outta Dodge; Law and Order (Juran, 1953), a solid programmer featuring Ronald Reagan as a lawman bent on retiring but who finds himself facing the prospect of yet another town to clean up; Man with the Gun (Wilson, 1955), starring Robert Mitchum as notorious "town tamer" Clint Tollinger (a great handle!); Warlock (Dmytryk, 1959), a smart, self-conscious re-working of the Earp myth with Henry Fonda as the gun-for-hire and Anthony Quinn as his gambler right-hand man; Young Billy Young (Kennedy, 1969), with Mitchum again in the law man role; and Lawman (Winner, 1971), starring Burt Lancaster.

It bears emphasizing how even this cursory survey of the various representations of Earp speaks to the heterogeneity of the genre. We need not wait until the 1960s or 70s for narratives that scrutinize or offer an alternative to the representation of valor found in My Darling Clementine (2). While Law and Order and Wichita present comparably noble accounts of the life and times of Earp, both Man with a Gun and Warlock present less flattering views of both the burgeoning frontier community and the gunman that community enlists to eradicate its more undesirable elements. To be sure, uncharitable depictions of Western communities -- cowardly citizenry, in particular -- are a common feature of the genre after High Noon (Zimmerman, 1952), yet we can find many examples in earlier pictures: the town of Tonto in Stagecoach (Ford, 1939), or the wrongheaded collective action in The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman, 1943)(3).

----------------------------------------
Notes

1. The latter movie also placed a greater emphasis on masculine camaraderie, a feature that would be elaborated in Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959) and continue to feature prominently in Westerns of the 1960s in pictures like The Magnificent Seven (also Sturges, 1960), The Sons of Katie Elder (Hathaway, 1965), The Professionals (Brooks, 1966), El Dorado (also Hawks, 1967) and The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969). For a number of critics, a focus on frontier fraternity is a defining feature of the 1960s Western. As detailed most notably by Will Wright in his structural study of the genre Sixguns & Society, during this time Western movie narratives increasingly centered on groups of “professionals” who defend society only as a job they accept for pay, for love of fighting or out of friendship. Becoming less common were solitary heroes purely committed to the ideas of law and justice.

2. Tag Gallagher has questioned, rightly, the degree to which that representation of Earp was so upright in the first place. See his article “Shoot-out at the Genre Coral: Problems in the ‘Evolution’ of the Western" in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant.

3. In Stagecoach, it is the town's leading ladies who most characterize Tonto as inhospitable as they parade Dallas out of town. The "ladies league" as prudish meddlers becomes a recurring convention of the genre, dependably representing the temperate, intolerant aspects of a given town. The Gunfighter (King, 1950) features a notable appearance, as the ladies league is taken aback when the kind gentleman they have been speaking with is revealed as the notorious gunman Ringo.

Stereoscopes west

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:17:00 +0000

Updates: One More Train to Rob (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1971) [8/4/09]

Over the past few years I've watched hundreds of Westerns as part of my research. This kind of saturation viewing has both benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, what we might call the transtextual dimension of the genre comes vividly to life. Not only do larger narrative and thematic links emerge, transcending decades, studios and directors, but more minor connections -- lines of dialogue, pieces of mise-en-scène -- materialize. On the other hand, watching Western after Western after Western means that these links, both large and small, can evade even the most attentive analyst -- or if not the most attentive analyst, at least this analyst. There were a couple of stretches last year where I was screening between 15 and 20 Westerns per week. On paper, the prospect of watching this many Westerns is, of course, awesome. In practice, however, it became a little trying. Despite my best efforts at note taking, I often reached a point where my day's, or week's, screenings confusingly coalesced in my mind into one epic frontier narrative. I eventually settled into a less ambitious routine, but was still able to retain a number of interesting linkages -- many of which I explore in my in-progress dissertation.

One interesting strain of observation that may but most likely will not find a place in said dissertation, falling to the small side of the dichotomy I've just sketched, is the recurring appearance of stereoscopes in Westerns. This has only really just struck me, meaning I've probably overlooked the presence of this motion toy in umpteen pictures.

What I'd like to do in this post is document when these optical marvels appear in Westerns, and their possible significance. I've started with a few instances, and shall endeavor to update this post as new examples come to me.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, 2007) and The True Story of Jesse James (Ray, 1957)

The Assassination of Jesse James is punctuated by an intermittent voiceover narration, from an unseen, unknown source. These passages include shots in which the image is slightly distorted; the center of the frame is in focus, yet the edges are warped and blurred.

The meaning of these dysmorphic shots becomes clear following Jesse’s murder, when the narrator informs us that a photo of the outlaw’s corpse was taken to be viewed in a stereoscope, alongside such wonders as the Sphinx and the Taj Mahal.

In a sense, our knowledge of James has been doubly mediated throughout the movie, through an apparently omniscient narration and through the distorting lens of the stereoscope.

Interestingly enough, in The True Story of Jesse James, Robert Ford is playing with a stereoscope just prior to carrying out the murder of James.

Unlike in The Assassination of Jesse James, here the stereoscope serves no thematic or stylistic purpose. While The True Story of Jesse James does consider the role of (what we now call) media in the creation of heroes -- particularly through the the reflexive device of Jesse’s awareness that a measure of his fame owes to exaggerated, dime novel accounts of his exploits -- the stereoscope does not figure into this. Nor is it seen at any other point in the movie. Ford is simply shown reclining in a chair in James' house, looking through it. We aren't told or shown what the slide is. Is the point to add period detail? Maybe. The image of the prostrate Ford looking casually through the stereoscope's lenses is a striking one in the context of the heinous act he and his brother are about to perpetrate.

Dirty Little Billy (Dragoti, 1972)

At the start of Dragoti's decidedly grimy interpretation of the Billy the Kid legend, young Billy (Michael J. Pollard), his mother and step-father descend from a smoke-spewing locomotive into the muddy streets of Coffeyville, Kansas. "Jesus" is all the New York-bred Billy can say at the sight of the dirty, backwater town.

As he struggles down out of the train, we see that he is carrying a canvas duffel bag and a stereoscope. The device is seen at frame left in the capture below, after Billy has tumbled backward into the mud on his walk into town.

Dirty Little Billy plays up the east-west dichotomy from the get go. Along with his clothing and conspicuous bowler, the stereoscope helps to mark Billy as out-of-place in his new environs.

Yet while the device remains in view in the subsequent scene, where Billy and family are shown their new house, at no point is our direction drawn to the stereoscope by means of a close-up. Nor is Billy ever seen using it, like Robert Ford in The True Story of Jesse James. As such, positing much function beyond serving to mark Billy as out-of-place (and also, again, being period detail) would be a stretch.

One More Train to Rob (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1971)
[added 8/4/09]
A largely forgotten Western helmed by veteran Andrew V. McLaglen, One More Train to Rob is about charismatic train robber Harker Fleet (George Peppard) seeking revenge against the partner who double-crossed him (John Vernon) and stole his woman (Diana Muldaur), only to end up helping the members of a Chinese mining camp trying to get a shipment of gold safely to San Francisco. As Roger Greenspun aptly noted in his review in the New York Times, "The plot, built out of these elements, is more than usually complex, and the characters who act it out are more than usually complete."

The stereoscope pops up in a single scene. It isn't so much as looked at by any of the characters, but it's there.

On the table. (Apologies for the quality of the image -- the only copy of the movie I've been able to find was taped from TV). I'm assuming that the device detaches from its base, enabling the user to hold it up. Also on the table are three stacks of stereo cards.

As I indicated above, the stereoscope here serves no other function than as a part of the decor. Yet, compared to the other examples encountered thus far, this appears to be an up-market device -- something the wealthy use to appoint a living room, a perfect complement to the silverware and the porcelain figurines. As an element of mise en scène, then, is the stereoscope the equivalent of, say, the radio or, later, the television? That is, an appliance we can expect to find owned by rich and poor alike, albeit in according models? Maybe.

Barbara Stanwyck, Cowboy Queen

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:31:00 +0000

This is (more or less) the text of a presentation I gave at the 2009 conference of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association, held at the National Media Museum in Bradford in January. Some of this material makes up a small section of my doctoral dissertation. I'm hoping to (eventually) expand the whole thing into a proper article, but for the time being I figure I might as well share it with the world. Feedback appreciated, as always.

Following the critical and commercial success of Dances with Wolves (Costner, 1990) and Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992) – and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Back to the Future Part III (Zemeckis, 1990) – the mid-1990s witnessed a small resurgence in the production of movie Westerns. Between 1993 and 1996, fourteen Westerns were released theatrically in the United States, a level of output not experienced since the 1970s, and certainly not experienced again at any point thereafter. This cycle of Western production is notable for its diversity, with films ranging from updated takes on mythical Western heroes Wyatt Earp, Jesse James and Wild Bill Hickok to narratives that privileged groups the genre had historically been inclined to marginalize, including Native Americans, blacks, and women.

Notably, female protagonists came to the fore in three pictures: The Ballad of Little Jo (Greenwald, 1993), Bad Girls (Kaplan, 1994) and The Quick and the Dead (Raimi, 1995). Of these movies, it is The Ballad of Little Jo – director Maggie Greenwald’s saga of an eastern society woman who, to avoid disgrace after bearing a child out of wedlock, heads west disguised as a man – that has garnered the most attention. Although not as high profile a movie as Bad Girls or The Quick and the Dead, upon release the picture received positive notices from the likes of Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin, and has since received critical consideration from scholars ranging from B. Ruby Rich to Jim Kitses, whose monograph Horizons West remains the most influential study of the Western genre.

Critical examinations of the representation of women in the Western genre have largely limited themselves to the stereotypes prevalent in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Indeed, the conventional woman characters found in the Western are so well known that they are invoked by the advertising for The Ballad of Little Jo as a point of product differentiation. To quote the movie’s tagline: "In 1866, a woman had two choices…she could be a wife or she could be a whore. Josephine Monaghan made the boldest choice of all. She chose to be a man."

Yet not all Western women were maternal schoolmarms or deviant saloon girls, and gun-totting female screen heroes appeared long before the 1990s. Greenwald acknowledged as much in a 1995 interview with Tania Modleski published in the Winter issue of Film Quarterly. Questioned about what motivated her to make a Western, Greenwald says that the “few [Western] stories that have women as main characters were not interesting” to her (7). When asked which films she’s referring to, Greenwald responds: “The woman in High Noon – not very interesting…. Barbara Stanwyck as a land baron – not interesting” (7).

The premise of The Ballad of Little Jo is drawn from the work of new western historians – namely, the discovery that the practice of cross-dressing was more prevalent in the “Old West” than earlier scholars could have imagined, or were willing to admit. (The same is true of homosexuality, I might add.) Yet it is clear from the Film Quarterly interview that Greenwald’s knowledge of the Western movie genre is rather limited, her interest in it being largely iconographic. This is apparent in the movie. To use Rick Altman’s terminology, the syntax of The Ballad of Little Jo is not one common to the genre; instead, Western semantic elements are grafted onto the kind of “passing” narrative more common to melodrama or the women’s film that sees a female protagonist forced to conceal her true status – economic, racial or cultural – in order to “pass” for a member of another social group.

My contention is that Barbara Stanwyck’s association with the Western genre is significant and, indeed, interesting. Although perhaps best remembered as a femme fatale or screwball comedienne, Stanwyck’s involvement in the Western equaled that of many of the genre’s well-known male stars.

Over the course of her career, Stanwyck starred in eleven Western features, as well as the television series “The Big Valley” from 1965 to 1969. As her biography in the BFI Guide to the Western says, Stanwyck was “virtually without peer in her portrayal of tough, fearsome women of the West.” Not only do the majority of Stanwyck’s Western characters defy the wife/whore dichotomy, they invert the traditional scenario that has strong females nonetheless defined by their relationships with heroic cowboy characters.

After having made two Westerns in the thirties and two in the forties, Stanwyck starred in seven between 1950 and 1957, after which her career was largely confined to television. In the context of Stanwyck’s career, then, most of her Westerns came after her better-known movies from the 1930s and 40s, like Stella Dallas (1937), The Lady Eve (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). It was during that time that Stanwyck was the highest-paid woman in the United States.

I’ll touch on Stanwyck’s own thoughts on the Western shortly, but at this point it deserves mentioning that it was not uncommon for male stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age to favor the Western as they aged, as was the case with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrae, Gregory Peck and Burt Lancaster.

Today I’d like to focus on a particular screen persona – that of the “cattle queen” – that emerges in the latter half of Stanwyck’s career, concentrating on three pictures she made in the mid 1950s: Cattle Queen of Montana (Dwan, 1954), The Maverick Queen (Kane, 1956) and Forty Guns (Fuller, 1957). The description of her character in Forty Guns as a “high-ridin’ woman with a whip” captures nicely the sense of this persona: a strong-willed woman of independent means, riding tall in the saddle, cracking her whip at horse and man alike.

While there are elements of this persona in all of Stanwyck’s Western characters, it is over the three movies highlighted on the screen that it crystallizes, helping to lay the foundation for her starring role on “The Big Valley.”

Let me say here that anyone expecting these movies somehow not to be from the 1950s will be disappointed. Expectedly, Stanwyck’s characters all ultimately pay a price, as it were, for their agency and independence: death in the case of The Maverick Queen, and being relegated to one half of the good heterosexual couple in the other two pictures. But that these movies in the end conform to societal and industrial norms should not dissuade us from investigating how Stanwyck’s characters were able to stand up to and alongside their male counterparts.

While the Western may be, on balance, a “masculine” genre, we should not underestimate its longstanding appeal to female viewers. The initial resurgence of Western production in the 1930s was partly an attempt by the Hollywood studios to exploit the appeal of their male stars to what was then a predominantly female audience. Also, Peter Williams Evans has noted how the Western heroines of the late 1930s, like those in many other genres, often reflect significant advances in women’s emancipation. Yet Evans also says that, by the late 1940s and 1950s, the genre restores women to their more traditional roles of “decent and long-suffering matron or sexually-aggressive adventuress” (“Westward the Women” 211). The corollary to this purported change in the representation woman is the idea that, in the classic Western, women are ultimately a destructive influence on the independent cowboy hero, and so he must reject them. The iconic ending of John Ford’s 1946 movie My Darling Clementine comes to mind, where Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp rides out of Tombstone, telling Clementine that he might be back that way, some day – a doubtful proposition, if there ever was one. Never mind that Fonda’s lawman character in Anthony Mann’s The Tin Star, released in 1957, rides away with the woman in the end. Or that the majority of Westerns, like most classical Hollywood pictures, end with the formation of the couple.

Perhaps the most problematic tendency in scholarship on the Western is the continued use of reductive interpretive models based on a select canon of films. As a result, some films are homogenized in order to have them conform to those frameworks, while many others – including those of Barbara Stanwyck – are neglected altogether.

In truth, Westerns continued to be aggressively marketed towards women throughout the 1950s, as we see in this trailer for Two Flags West (Wise, 1950).

In fact, one of the most striking aspects of the promotional materials for Westerns of the 40s and 50s is the prevalence of the word “romance.” Cattle Queen of Montana is alternately described as a “romantic action drama” and “romantic adventure story.”

In this way, Stanwyck’s characters appear in a genre that had an imperative to attract woman viewers, and was thus quite receptive to strong female characters. This is not to say that “Cattle Queen” characters were at all common – they weren’t, a fact acknowledged both in the promotion of these pictures as well as in the movies themselves. As one character says in The Maverick Queen, “[She’s] supposed to be a big wheel in this town. That’s unusual for a lady.” The question then becomes how Stanwyck was able to pull off these kinds of roles while other actresses could not.

Over the course of her long career, Stanwyck never shied away from physical stunts – in contrast, it must be said, to many of her contemporaries. Describing herself on several occasions as a “frustrated stuntwoman,” Stanwyck grew up idolizing not Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish but Peal White, the “stunt queen” of early cinema best known as the star of the Perils of Pauline serial (1914). From 1931’s Night Nurse, where her character is pushed, shoved and punched out by a young Clark Gable, right up to “The Big Valley,” where, though nearing sixty years of age, she continued to insist on doing many of her own stunts, Stanwyck’s ability to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ always adds an interesting dimension to her performances. It is in her “Cattle Queen” roles that these qualities come to the fore, as her characters are required to ride, shoot, fight and even be drug along the ground repeatedly until director Sam Fuller is satisfied.

This “physically active” dimension of Stanwyck’s acting could support a paper of its own, but suffice it to say that her ability to lend physicality -- and a kind of authenticity -- to her performances without sacrificing her femininity made her particularly suited to the Western. Richard Dyer put it well when he writes, “When I see Barbara Stanwyck, I know that women are strong” (Stars 184-85).

As I noted earlier, Stanwyck’s “Cattle Queen” characters differ from other strong female characters found in the genre in that, unlike those women, her heroines are not defined by their relationship with a cowboy hero. Which begs the question of just what kind of men she found herself up against.

Extra-textually speaking, in these pictures Stanwyck found herself matched with actors from the genre’s second-tier. Barry Sullivan plays the male lead in both The Maverick Queen and Forty Guns, and Ronald Reagan is the cowboy hero in Cattle Queen of Montana – making that picture something of a right-winger’s dream, given Stanwyck’s own conservative politics.

While it is fair to wonder how the Cattle Queen would have fared if paired up with a higher caliber of male co-star, the fact is we’ll never know. Established Western stars like Gary Cooper and new ones like Robert Wagner weren’t making movies at the struggling Republic Pictures studio, or for director Sam Fuller. And Stanwyck was working with both actors in projects at the major studios.

Moreover, it would be would be wrong to simply equate actors of lower stature with weak or unbelievable performances. This is not a case of a female character only having strength in relation to weak males. Although Reagan’s acting may leave something to be desired, Sullivan is particularly good in both The Maverick Queen and Forty Guns. In the case of the former, his history of playing Western villains works in the film’s favor, as part of the intrigue is the question of where his character’s loyalties lie.

Unlike other actresses who turned to genre pictures out of necessity, Stanwyck genuinely loved the Western. “I’m crazy about westerns,” she said in a 1981 interview, “that’s why I’ve made so many of them. My one big frustration is that Duke Wayne never asked me to co-star with him.” “The Big Valley” came about after Stanwyck worked for nearly a decade to get a Western television series off the ground.

Fittingly, Stanwyck’s association with the Western – and awareness of this association – increased as time passed. In 1973, she was awarded the Wrangler Award for “Outstanding Contribution to the West through Motion Pictures” from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center and was the first woman inducted into its “Hall of Fame of Great Western Performers” – the only award, she said, that she wasn’t nervous to receive. Upon her death in 1990, obituaries referred to her as the “Queen of the Cowboys,” “Hollywood’s Queen of Westerns and Wisecracks” and the “Gorgeous Dame on the Horse.” Many of the accompanying photos depicted her in cowboy dress.

The Western, then, may be a genre with room for many kings, but only one queen.

Studies Beyond the Screen: aftermath

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:10:00 +0000

A brief post to say that our little symposium went off without a hitch. The facilities were unlocked and ready for use, the food and drink arrived on time, and, most importantly, each speaker delivered a fascinating presentation. The response to the symposium was extremely positive, both from attendees on the day and in subsequent email correspondence. From this feedback, it is clear that the symposium offered attendees a unique insight into the methodological approaches of established scholars. A good deal of thanks are owed to both Screen and Exeter’s Department of English for helping to make this event
possible.

My intrepid co-organizer Lisa has a post up at her blog. For those interested, a complete report is available at the Screen website.

Waiting on a train

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:09:00 +0000

The Train Robbers was filmed in the spring of 1972 under the direction of Burt Kennedy, who also wrote he movie’s screenplay. The movie stars John Wayne as Lane, a Civil War veteran who enlists the help of two old war buddies and three younger men to accompany a young widow, Mrs. Lowe (played by Ann-Margret), to recover and return a gold shipment stolen by her late husband so she can clear his name before a gang of the husband’s old partners beat them to the treasure. Despite the fact that both were identified principally with the Western, Wayne and Kennedy had worked together only once before: on the Kennedy-directed The War Wagon (1967), one of the Duke’s stronger pictures of the 1960s.

The movie opens with a striking series of shots that survey the desolate town of Liberty, Texas. The town is comprised of only five buildings – a livery, saloon, hotel, railway station and a water tower with windmill – situated in the middle of a barren, sun-scorched landscape. There is no non-diegetic music. Instead, the only sounds we hear are the blowing wind and whatever objects it animates. Signs creak back and forth. Saloon doors bat open and shut. Rocking chairs sway slowly forward and back. Seated at the railway station is Jesse (played by Ben Johnson), awaiting the arrival of the train. He is the only person visible in the entire town.

With its use of diegetic sound and the setting of a frontier whistle-stop, the sequence clearly brings to mind the opening sequence of another, recent Western: Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969).

Which begs the question: is this a rip off?

Let's do a little Western genre archeology.

As famous as the opening to Once Upon a Time in the West may be, it is itself an obvious and well-known play on High Noon (1952), where a gang of outlaws awaits the arrival of their leader Frank Miller at the town’s train station.

Leone’s Westerns are each famously packed with references like these. Christopher Frayling detects no less than 57 “explicit citations of American Westerns” in Once Upon a Time in the West alone (Once Upon A Time in Italy 59-63).

That said, Kennedy's choice of so recent a Western as "source" in The Train Robbers, coupled with a formal mimicry, mean that the motivation behind the reference could be taken as opportunism.

Some might add that Kennedy, genre veteran though he may be, was no Leone. Which is true, but misses the point.

In his book Wild West Movies, critic Kim Newman says of actor John Wayne's later Westerns: “[In the late 1960s and 70s] the Duke is just going through the motions in an era when the West was the province of Leone and Peckinpah not lazy comics like Andrew V. McLaglen and Burt Kennedy” (195).

Now, by "province" what Newman really means is the Westerns that scholarship on the genre has canonized as being of artistic worth, as opposed to either box office success or even sheer number of pictures made. The top-grossing Westerns of the era were not those of Peckinpah or Leone; they were, in general, Wayne's. Moreover, in the 1960s and 1970s, Leone made 5 Westerns and Peckinpah made 6. Kennedy made 12, McLaglen 11.

And that's not all.

As it turns out, the same year that Leone was drawing on High Noon to craft the striking opening to Once Upon a Time in the West, Kennedy was also looking back on Zimmerman's genre classic, albeit in a rather different fashion.

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969) features a similar instance of a group of outlaws awaiting the arrival of a train.

Kennedy's take on the scenario is perhaps less stylish, but equally knowing. The outlaw gang's patient anticipation is breached by the arrival of the entire town, ready to greet the train with an entirely different kind of fanfare.

Returning to The Train Robbers, I would also argue that the opening credits establish a stylistic and thematic minimalism that permeates the remainder of the film – a minimalism that actually risks a dearth of material (as evidenced by a conspicuous number visually striking yet increasingly redundant sequences of Lane and co. riding through the desert).

The frontier town of Liberty, as presented to us, has been in effect stripped down to its most basic elements. In one shot, as the camera tracks rightward following Jesse as he walks from the railway station to the water tower, we see the charred ruins of another building behind the saloon, suggesting the removal of a superfluous structure. The villains are not individuated in any way but are instead a faceless group of bad men characterized by a driving musical theme that contrasts with the more sweeping melodies that accompany the protagonists. Little is presented by the narrative to detract from its focus on the main characters, with the exception of a mysterious figure (played by Ricardo Montalban) who follows both the protagonists and their pursuers from a distance.

Studies Beyond the Screen

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:11:00 +0000

Those of you in the U.K. might be interested in this symposium I'm organizing.

Studies Beyond the Screen
April 25, 2009 at the University of Exeter

Part of the journal Screen's ongoing 50th Anniversary celebration, "Studies Beyond the Screen" will be an engaging, one-day symposium featuring established cinema scholars speaking on their use of archival and extra-textual materials, focusing on the investigative procedures, methodologies and research activities that go into the production of academic work. Each presentation will contribute to an emerging sense of how these kinds of materials are used in the creation of theoretically informed screen studies scholarship.

The day will be of particular interest to graduate and postgraduate students making use of extra-textual resources in their own research, and will provide a forum for interaction and exchange between attendees and speakers. The event will also introduce attendees to some of the resources available in England's Southwest region including the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.

Confirmed speakers include:
Ian Christie (Birbeck)
Peter Jewell (Founder, The Bill Douglas Centre)
Steve Neale (Exeter)
Andrew Spicer (UWE)
Sarah Street (Bristol)

To register, please visit: http://www.sall.ex.ac.uk/content/view/2012/577/

If you have any questions, please contact Andrew Nelson (apn203@ex.ac.uk)

For more information about Screen's 50th Anniversary, visit: http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/50thanniversary/

The Andy Williams Christmas Album

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:21:00 +0000

Let's switch both gears and media for a moment, shall we? Tis the season, after all...

Choosing the right Christmas album ain't easy. Sure, we all know the standard carols and hymns, but who sings them makes a lot of difference. If you're like me, you know that, when it comes to renditions of your holiday favorites, the standard set by the satin-voiced crooners and songstresses of the 40s, 50s and early 60s has yet to be surpassed. Singers like Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Ella Fitzgerald recorded some of the best-loved and -- dare I say? -- definitive versions of those Yuletide classics that bring to mind warm memories of holidays spent in the company of kith and kin.

Of course, today most folks aren't terribly familiar with these artists, and I'm no different. What I've always found frustrating is recognizing a particular recording of a carol but not knowing who sang it. Let's face it: they can't all be sung by Bing Crosby.

90%, sure, but not all.

The Andy Williams Christmas Album by Andy "Moon River" Williams.

Well-known recordings: "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," "Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season."

This record was released in the 1963, but I write about it first because it features my all-time favorite version of my all-time favorite song, "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year". Williams' high-energy take on this classic song is without question the definitive recording. This is the version you all know and love. If you don't, there's something wrong with you.

My other three favorites off this album are what you might call "non-standard" carols. This is a little difficult for me to admit, because I've always felt there was a certain futility in trying to come up with "new" Christmas carols. I can understand the commercial imperative to come up with new material, but in this case it's hard to top the old standbys. One of the low-points in my non-illustrious stint in junior high band was having to play a monstrosity called "Santa's Sleigh Ride" in the annual Christmas concert.

Anyway, I actually really like "Happy Holiday/The Holiday Season" and "Kay Thompson's Jingle Bells." Both are cheerful numbers in the vein of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." On a more sombre note, Williams' emotional rendition of "Sweet Little Jesus" is a great showcase for his range.

Standards "White Christmas," "The Christmas Song," "The First Noël" and "O Holy Night" are handled with class. A re-working of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" called "A Song and a Christmas Tree" is, well...different. Decide for yourself.

The only weak songs are "Away in a Manger," "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Silent Night, Holy Night." On each Williams is joined by a choir of children who couldn't sing in key if their lives depended on it.

There are a number of Andy Williams Christmas compilation CDs out there, but unless you're looking to cherry-pick songs off of iTunes, I'd recommended this album and Williams' follow-up record Merry Christmas. Both albums were huge hits and helped earn Williams the moniker of "Mr. Christmas."

None of the songs on the latter LP achieved the ubiquity of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," but it's still a solid collection of (mostly) standard carols delivered with the same laid-back exuberance as its predecessor. Williams' take on "My Favorite Things" is particularly good.