Posts
Fear not, loyal readers, I dragged myself out of bed at 5:45 this morning to be at the first showing (6:50 AM) of the new Blue Raja movie in order to catch the debut trailer for the new "Star Wars" movie set for release during Christmas 2015 and I managed to record it and at risk of lawsuit for committing high treason have posted it below. So please try to enjoy it.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Giving Thanks For.....
That moment when possibly your favorite film of the year references your favorite film of all time.
"Have you seen 'Last of the Mohicans?'"
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
The Muppets Most Wanted
Now that I know a movie about the Muppets is essentially considered a "kid's movie." And I know that if you espouse negativity about a "kid's movie" or level a genuine criticism at a "kid's movie" in regards to its execution or intention that all sorts of angry Internet commenters will swoop in with indignant recitations of the standby remark: "It's just a kid's movie." This, of course, is the nephew of the ancient standby "It's just a movie" (*sounds of Nick throwing up*). And having established all of this as a means to open my review of "Muppets Most Wanted", Nicholas Stoller's sequel of the reboot of the original "Muppets" movies, I have to ask: do The Muppets have a dependency problem?
The film is driven by a Kermit doppelgänger named Constantine, the world's most dangerous frog, like Vincent Cassel in a Kermit costume (and come to think of it, the role might have worked better if it just had been Vincent Cassel pretending to be Kermit), who in a display of "Matrix"-ish movements busts out of a Siberian gulag and gets Kermit locked up in his place as a means to infiltrate The Muppets to use them as a cover to steal the Crown Jewels of England. Now obviously he's not Kermit and obviously The Muppets somehow can't tell in spite of that obviousness, but that's not the point. The point is The Muppets spend the whole film essentially sitting around and twiddling their thumbs and letting fake Kermit and his cohort, Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais), tell them what to do. They're not puppets, they're ignoramuses.
The Muppets were always endearingly out of sorts but they were never utterly hapless. Yes, Kermit got amnesia and disappeared in "The Muppets Take Manhattan" causing his cohorts to panic, but his cohorts also nutted up and went out and found him. In "The Muppets Most Wanted", Miss Piggy, the storied diva who worked at Vogue Paris in the 2011 film and had Emily freaking Blunt as her secretary, is like a John Wayne approved housewife. Remember when she karate kicked a mugger? WHERE DID THAT PIG GO?!
But this Kermit addiction gets worse. It gets worse because Nadya (Tina Fey, best in movie), who runs the Russian gulag as if it were the Plaza Hotel of hellscapes, harbors a secret obsession with everyone's favorite frog. And once she finds out the prisoner under her eternal watch is Kermit and not Constantine, she forces him to be in charge of the prison's annual talent show. And Kermit, dedicated professional that he is, complies, if reluctantly, and manages to wring something approach flair out of fellow inmates like Ray Liotta who appears to have so much fun I wish someone would cast him at once as Commander William Harbison. These scenes in the wintry stockade are the film's finest, energetic and emanating that can-do, put-on-a-show vibe so integral to Jim Henson's creation. You believe in the conviction of these convicts more than you do the Muppets, and that's a problem.
Re-writing movies is not the task of the film critic, of course, as those omnipresent "this is how you write movie reviews" watchdogs on Twitter cankindly advise forcibly command, but nevertheless. I yearned for a different movie. I yearned for a movie where the Muppets got tired of this imposter Kermit and locked him in his dressing room and proved they could put on a show all by themselves. And I yearned for a movie where Kermit, ever dutibound to those in his charge, remained in the gulag simply to finish putting on the show he started.
The film is driven by a Kermit doppelgänger named Constantine, the world's most dangerous frog, like Vincent Cassel in a Kermit costume (and come to think of it, the role might have worked better if it just had been Vincent Cassel pretending to be Kermit), who in a display of "Matrix"-ish movements busts out of a Siberian gulag and gets Kermit locked up in his place as a means to infiltrate The Muppets to use them as a cover to steal the Crown Jewels of England. Now obviously he's not Kermit and obviously The Muppets somehow can't tell in spite of that obviousness, but that's not the point. The point is The Muppets spend the whole film essentially sitting around and twiddling their thumbs and letting fake Kermit and his cohort, Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais), tell them what to do. They're not puppets, they're ignoramuses.
The Muppets were always endearingly out of sorts but they were never utterly hapless. Yes, Kermit got amnesia and disappeared in "The Muppets Take Manhattan" causing his cohorts to panic, but his cohorts also nutted up and went out and found him. In "The Muppets Most Wanted", Miss Piggy, the storied diva who worked at Vogue Paris in the 2011 film and had Emily freaking Blunt as her secretary, is like a John Wayne approved housewife. Remember when she karate kicked a mugger? WHERE DID THAT PIG GO?!
But this Kermit addiction gets worse. It gets worse because Nadya (Tina Fey, best in movie), who runs the Russian gulag as if it were the Plaza Hotel of hellscapes, harbors a secret obsession with everyone's favorite frog. And once she finds out the prisoner under her eternal watch is Kermit and not Constantine, she forces him to be in charge of the prison's annual talent show. And Kermit, dedicated professional that he is, complies, if reluctantly, and manages to wring something approach flair out of fellow inmates like Ray Liotta who appears to have so much fun I wish someone would cast him at once as Commander William Harbison. These scenes in the wintry stockade are the film's finest, energetic and emanating that can-do, put-on-a-show vibe so integral to Jim Henson's creation. You believe in the conviction of these convicts more than you do the Muppets, and that's a problem.
Re-writing movies is not the task of the film critic, of course, as those omnipresent "this is how you write movie reviews" watchdogs on Twitter can
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
The Fault in Our Stars
"This is the truth," Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), protagonist of "The Fault in Our Stars" declares at the film's onset, an impressive shot across the teenybopper flick bow. I mean, it takes an awful lot of chutzpah to begin your own Y.A., disease-of-the-week weepie by having the protagonist call out in voiceover every other Y.A., disease-of-the-week weepie for being piles of phony and manipulative you-know-what. But you know what? In spite of its numerous melodramatic machinations it still somehow comes across grounded in a tenable reality.
A teenager with terminal thyroid cancer, Hazel meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), who has lost his leg from bone cancer, at a patient support group. He comes equipped with a leather jacket which would seem to suggest he is the bad boy of the cancer patient support group, but that leather jacket is merely a misdirection. In fact, he is an incredibly gentlemanly complete sentence talker who may as well be riding in on a noble steed seeing as how he says things like "I am in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable.." Yet he's not just there to "save" her. In fact, the film does the niftiest little shift midway through where his invincibility gives way to vulnerability and instead of him being there for her, she is there for him. Isn't that love? That give and take? That both for one and one for both?
Yes, yes, yes. They're kids. I'm aware. "What do they know about love?!" demand all the stone-hearted fogeys who conveniently forgot what it was like to be kids and in that specific sort of love. But what is so ingenius about "The Fault in Our Stars" is that it recognizes how kids are always trying to graduate early to adulthood. Consider the sequence in which the two dress up and go out for a fancypants dinner. There is something terrifically beautiful and terrifying in it because it is overcome with the realization that their respective sicknesses might not allow them to graduate to adulthood and so they'll just go ahead and damn well make like grown-ups while they still can.
That dinner involves the film's greatest leap in which Hazel and Augustus take a trip to Amsterdam to meet her favorite book's author, a Salinger-esque recluse played by an actor who is so perfect for the part I refuse to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it. The objective of this meeting is for her to learn what happened to the novel's characters after the ending since he has never written a follow-up, a fairly obvious device to illustrate that Great Unknown awaiting each every one of us. Still, it works, and not only because the supremely crotchety author sort of (unintentionally?) directs invective at the type of Y.A. hoo-ha he's in, but because it modulates this dream come true and re-filters it through something harsher.
This nimble striking of tone can be traced to its lead actress. Like Molly Ringwald before her, the stately ingenue of the 80's who means so much to those of a certain age, Shailene Woodley has often conveyed a wisdom beyond the years of her roles - even in the remarkable "The Descendants" were she was both wise and dumb - and her turn as Hazel is numbingly wise. When her character is made to recount her entire ordeal, how she was diagnosed and how she came this close to death and how she somehow hung on because of a miracle, Woodley miraculously circumvents the mawkish phoniness of the word "miracle". She just, like, says it. People keep telling her it's a miracle and so, hey, what the heck.
She comes across entirely free of the forced sentiment that is often a fatal affliction of this genre, affording her character no false hope, having long ago accepted what's in front of her, more so even than her parents who dutifully fight through an unwinnable situation while putting on a happy face. She doesn't put on a happy face (even if facially, she does). She simply finds a way to be happy while still accepting the sadness within and all around her.
A teenager with terminal thyroid cancer, Hazel meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), who has lost his leg from bone cancer, at a patient support group. He comes equipped with a leather jacket which would seem to suggest he is the bad boy of the cancer patient support group, but that leather jacket is merely a misdirection. In fact, he is an incredibly gentlemanly complete sentence talker who may as well be riding in on a noble steed seeing as how he says things like "I am in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable.." Yet he's not just there to "save" her. In fact, the film does the niftiest little shift midway through where his invincibility gives way to vulnerability and instead of him being there for her, she is there for him. Isn't that love? That give and take? That both for one and one for both?
Yes, yes, yes. They're kids. I'm aware. "What do they know about love?!" demand all the stone-hearted fogeys who conveniently forgot what it was like to be kids and in that specific sort of love. But what is so ingenius about "The Fault in Our Stars" is that it recognizes how kids are always trying to graduate early to adulthood. Consider the sequence in which the two dress up and go out for a fancypants dinner. There is something terrifically beautiful and terrifying in it because it is overcome with the realization that their respective sicknesses might not allow them to graduate to adulthood and so they'll just go ahead and damn well make like grown-ups while they still can.
That dinner involves the film's greatest leap in which Hazel and Augustus take a trip to Amsterdam to meet her favorite book's author, a Salinger-esque recluse played by an actor who is so perfect for the part I refuse to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it. The objective of this meeting is for her to learn what happened to the novel's characters after the ending since he has never written a follow-up, a fairly obvious device to illustrate that Great Unknown awaiting each every one of us. Still, it works, and not only because the supremely crotchety author sort of (unintentionally?) directs invective at the type of Y.A. hoo-ha he's in, but because it modulates this dream come true and re-filters it through something harsher.
This nimble striking of tone can be traced to its lead actress. Like Molly Ringwald before her, the stately ingenue of the 80's who means so much to those of a certain age, Shailene Woodley has often conveyed a wisdom beyond the years of her roles - even in the remarkable "The Descendants" were she was both wise and dumb - and her turn as Hazel is numbingly wise. When her character is made to recount her entire ordeal, how she was diagnosed and how she came this close to death and how she somehow hung on because of a miracle, Woodley miraculously circumvents the mawkish phoniness of the word "miracle". She just, like, says it. People keep telling her it's a miracle and so, hey, what the heck.
She comes across entirely free of the forced sentiment that is often a fatal affliction of this genre, affording her character no false hope, having long ago accepted what's in front of her, more so even than her parents who dutifully fight through an unwinnable situation while putting on a happy face. She doesn't put on a happy face (even if facially, she does). She simply finds a way to be happy while still accepting the sadness within and all around her.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Interstellar
Discussing a Christopher Nolan film is impossible without discussing Christopher Nolan himself, and this is because the noted cinematic gigantist is a full-fledged auteur. His films, proudly, loudly (really, really loudly) bear his hallmarks – the ear-grating exposition, the sound design that may as well double as a pharmacy prescription for extra-strength aspirin and female characters as simplistic as his plots are labyrinthine. More than anything, though, they are spectacles – gargantuan populist spectacles, which is precisely why he is such a gladiator at the box office. He knows what movies audiences are. Movie audiences are the mob. Conjure magic for them and they will come to the theater in droves. “Interstellar” may be significantly flawed, but it may be Nolan’s grandest spectacle yet.
Even as “Interstellar” purports to explore the possibility of our future it seems to inhabit a specific place in the past, imagining the end of Earth as looking an awful lot like The Great Depression, a 1930's Dust Bowl as a plague on all our continents. Natural resources have become virtually non-existent, save for corn, which Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), our hero, grows while raising a stalwart son and precocious daughter with whom he has a close, combustive relationship that becomes the film’s main through line. Offering an ample dose of his traditional drawling charisma, McConaughey in this environment distinctly evokes the Chuck Yeager of "The Right Stuff", which is appropriate given Cooper's lament that the film's earth has traded looking to the stars for digging in the dirt.
Directly implying the planet’s demise is tied to its failure to shoot the moon, it consequently argues that it's only chance for survival is putting a little faith in science. And so once Cooper convolutedly (or is merely...miraculously?) happens upon a literally underground NASA run by his mentor, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), he and Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) and assorted others will climb into a rocket ship to boldly go where several other men and one woman have already gone. That is, through a wormhole and to another galaxy where a trinity of planets might just offer hope for a new hospitable world to transport humans, so long as Dr. Brand can solve a riddle pertaining to gravity that flew over my head but which I'm sure Neil deGrasse Tyson and his legion of plot-hole-picking-out disciples would be happy to castigate for you.
For all its scientific gobbledygook, the overriding narrative theme of this epic odyssey to the far reaches of the cosmos is explicitly old-fashioned, summarized in the simple language of thousands of pop songs. “Do you believe in love?” Sir Huey Lewis asked rhetorically. “Oh, you can bet I believe it too.” To Nolan, however, themes are more like concepts, and even if love is an emotion, Nolan approaches it with all the thrill of a lab-coated pragmatist arguing his concept with an erudite term paper. He’s a maestro with effects but can’t convey actual human feeling with the camera. The relationship of a spurned daughter and a guilty father separated by galaxies is nothing much more than a game of emotional charades between ciphers.
The true ruin of Nolan, however, has long been exposition, and once again it crops up, threatening to be “Interstellar’s” waterloo. It’s not merely "disguising" theme as discourse - like having Hathaway annunciate the Love Theme in an extended monologue - but outfitting so many otherwise riveting in-space sequence with an out-loud explanation as to exactly what’s happening. It’s like the guy at the concert who won’t stop talking during your favorite song. And Nolan’s obsession with theoretical cogency routinely threatens to counteract the electricity of the sequences themselves. (No doubt the science itself would fail to appease him, but if you ever wondered how Mr. deGrasse Tyson would write dialogue...)
Still, for the endless chatter and weightlessness of the relationships, “Interstellar”, over and over, achieves transcendent flight, providing sequences of such raw movie-ness that the moviemaking itself is enough to lift you up and spackle over any flaws. Nolan’s real collaborator here is not his brother Jonathan, co-screenwriter, as much as it is his composer, Hans Zimmer, noted musical purveyor of bombast, who has concocted a score as colossal as the IMAX 70mm photography. Not content to just comment on the action, it becomes integral to it, and the sound design often overpowers the dialogue – further evidence the film not only would have benefited from its absence at many a moment but subconsciously intended for its characters to, more often than not, just zip it.
Early in the film, still back on the farm, Coop is ferrying his kids to school when an apparent drone swoops in and, suddenly, he swerves his broken old pickup off the dirt road and plows through his stalks of corn to give chase. The music soars and the camera assumes wings and even if you have no idea what is happening, it doesn’t matter, because the majesty of the moment tethers you to the screen, and all you are left with is sheer heartrending awe.
“Rage against the dying of the light.” That’s Dr. Brand borrowing the words of Dylan Thomas as a means to grant the mission a motto, but it might as well be the motto of Nolan, ambitious to the point of lunacy, raging against Lean Cuisine™ superhero epics and low budget handheld affairs of authenticity. If its astrophysics fail to check out, well, of course they do. This is not nuts and bolts but magic conjured.
Even as “Interstellar” purports to explore the possibility of our future it seems to inhabit a specific place in the past, imagining the end of Earth as looking an awful lot like The Great Depression, a 1930's Dust Bowl as a plague on all our continents. Natural resources have become virtually non-existent, save for corn, which Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), our hero, grows while raising a stalwart son and precocious daughter with whom he has a close, combustive relationship that becomes the film’s main through line. Offering an ample dose of his traditional drawling charisma, McConaughey in this environment distinctly evokes the Chuck Yeager of "The Right Stuff", which is appropriate given Cooper's lament that the film's earth has traded looking to the stars for digging in the dirt.
Directly implying the planet’s demise is tied to its failure to shoot the moon, it consequently argues that it's only chance for survival is putting a little faith in science. And so once Cooper convolutedly (or is merely...miraculously?) happens upon a literally underground NASA run by his mentor, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), he and Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) and assorted others will climb into a rocket ship to boldly go where several other men and one woman have already gone. That is, through a wormhole and to another galaxy where a trinity of planets might just offer hope for a new hospitable world to transport humans, so long as Dr. Brand can solve a riddle pertaining to gravity that flew over my head but which I'm sure Neil deGrasse Tyson and his legion of plot-hole-picking-out disciples would be happy to castigate for you.
For all its scientific gobbledygook, the overriding narrative theme of this epic odyssey to the far reaches of the cosmos is explicitly old-fashioned, summarized in the simple language of thousands of pop songs. “Do you believe in love?” Sir Huey Lewis asked rhetorically. “Oh, you can bet I believe it too.” To Nolan, however, themes are more like concepts, and even if love is an emotion, Nolan approaches it with all the thrill of a lab-coated pragmatist arguing his concept with an erudite term paper. He’s a maestro with effects but can’t convey actual human feeling with the camera. The relationship of a spurned daughter and a guilty father separated by galaxies is nothing much more than a game of emotional charades between ciphers.
The true ruin of Nolan, however, has long been exposition, and once again it crops up, threatening to be “Interstellar’s” waterloo. It’s not merely "disguising" theme as discourse - like having Hathaway annunciate the Love Theme in an extended monologue - but outfitting so many otherwise riveting in-space sequence with an out-loud explanation as to exactly what’s happening. It’s like the guy at the concert who won’t stop talking during your favorite song. And Nolan’s obsession with theoretical cogency routinely threatens to counteract the electricity of the sequences themselves. (No doubt the science itself would fail to appease him, but if you ever wondered how Mr. deGrasse Tyson would write dialogue...)
Still, for the endless chatter and weightlessness of the relationships, “Interstellar”, over and over, achieves transcendent flight, providing sequences of such raw movie-ness that the moviemaking itself is enough to lift you up and spackle over any flaws. Nolan’s real collaborator here is not his brother Jonathan, co-screenwriter, as much as it is his composer, Hans Zimmer, noted musical purveyor of bombast, who has concocted a score as colossal as the IMAX 70mm photography. Not content to just comment on the action, it becomes integral to it, and the sound design often overpowers the dialogue – further evidence the film not only would have benefited from its absence at many a moment but subconsciously intended for its characters to, more often than not, just zip it.
Early in the film, still back on the farm, Coop is ferrying his kids to school when an apparent drone swoops in and, suddenly, he swerves his broken old pickup off the dirt road and plows through his stalks of corn to give chase. The music soars and the camera assumes wings and even if you have no idea what is happening, it doesn’t matter, because the majesty of the moment tethers you to the screen, and all you are left with is sheer heartrending awe.
“Rage against the dying of the light.” That’s Dr. Brand borrowing the words of Dylan Thomas as a means to grant the mission a motto, but it might as well be the motto of Nolan, ambitious to the point of lunacy, raging against Lean Cuisine™ superhero epics and low budget handheld affairs of authenticity. If its astrophysics fail to check out, well, of course they do. This is not nuts and bolts but magic conjured.
Friday, November 21, 2014
Friday's Old Fashioned: Too Late For Tears (1949)
There is nothing more quintessentially American than a briefcase chock full of cold hard cash. It is because, I imagine, America fancies itself the land of opportunity, the nation that from sea to shining sea believes in new starts and second chances. It is also because, I imagine, America is strictly business, capitalistic through and through, and cash goes hand in hand with new starts and second chances. You can't have one without the other.
It's why the briefcase of money is such a staple of the cinema. It's all you need to set a plot in motion. We didn't need any backstory on Josh Brolin's Llewellyn Moss in "No Country For Old Men" to understand why he goes to such absurd lengths to keep his desperate paws on that cashed-up suitcase. No, a simple "yeah" upon seeing the stacks and stacks of green laid out before him provided all the necessary motivation. Of course, he'd risk his life and wife's life and his mother-in-law's life for it. What choice did he have? IT WAS A BRIEFCASE FULL OF MONEY! We weren't surprised in "A Simple Plan" when Bridget Fonda's Sarah Mitchell responds in the negative to her spouse's supposed hypothetical query of whether she would keep a gym bag of Ben Franklins upon finding it only to pivot in an instant when she actually sees a gym bag of Ben Franklins poured onto the kitchen counter in front of her. After all, it'd buy a ton of groceries.
There is something different about Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott, frankly terrifying), however, something more expectant, something more entitled. As "Too Late For Tears" (also known as "Killer Bait") opens she and her husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy) are driving somewhere she doesn't want to go, arguing about it, signaling tension in the marriage, when another car roars by and hurls a briefcase chock full of cold hard cash into their backseat. Seems it's intended for someone else, for Danny (Dan Duryea), who gives chase, but the second that Jane sees what's in that case she gets this smile like Sharon Stone in "Casino" sizing up some millionaire yokel at the craps table and turns into Ryan Gosling in "Drive" and takes the wheel and guns the engine. That's her money now, see, the gods of get-rich having finally answered her many, many prayers.
The story that follows in director Byron Haskin's noir, which was written by Roy Huggins which he adapted from his own serial for the Saturday Evening Post, is as sinister as a noir night is darkly unyielding, the emotional temperature of its protagonist growing positively more frigid with each passing scene. There is a moment tilted toward the beginning when her hubby, struggling to understand her financial cravings, opines that he tried his hardest to give her what she wanted, she scoffs: "All you ever gave me were twelve down payments and intallments for life." Uff da. It suggests the film's yearning to comment on the ancient chasm between the rich and the poor, but "Too Late For Tears" doesn't really have the gumption to explore that angle. Instead it's an arresting, mind-quaking thriller in which Jane is the jarring anti-hero and greed is the femme fatale.
Danny, the ne'er-do-well to whom the case belongs, inevitably comes calling for it, and plays the obligatory part of a 1950's sexist to the hilt, slapping Jane a few times when he doesn't get answers he likes and incessantly calling her "tiger." He means that ironically, of course, but the joke's on him because as the film progresses he's revealed as a paper tiger, a weak-kneed alcoholic who gets out-toughed and out-foxed by the woman he simply assumed assumed was his prey. To balance out the plethora of hard-heartedness, Huggins' screenplay turns Alan's sister, Kathy (Kristine Miller), conveniently living across the hall from his brother and her wife, into the angel-hearted opposition of Jane's cool reign of terror. Her ally becomes a purported old Air Force buddy of Alan, one Don Blake, played by my late Iowa homeboy Don DeFore, with an awesome kind of aweshucks disquisitiveness, his real motives under wraps.
He labels himself a "white knight" which I was suppose makes Jane the black knight, and yet it is still hard not to be reeled into her spectacularly selfish plight, not from empathy but from squeamish self-realization. It's difficult not to think, deep down in those places we only talk about at smoky bars in Acapulco, that if that briefcase full of cold hard cash landed in our backseat that we wouldn't get hyrdogen psychosis and do the same damn thing.
It's why the briefcase of money is such a staple of the cinema. It's all you need to set a plot in motion. We didn't need any backstory on Josh Brolin's Llewellyn Moss in "No Country For Old Men" to understand why he goes to such absurd lengths to keep his desperate paws on that cashed-up suitcase. No, a simple "yeah" upon seeing the stacks and stacks of green laid out before him provided all the necessary motivation. Of course, he'd risk his life and wife's life and his mother-in-law's life for it. What choice did he have? IT WAS A BRIEFCASE FULL OF MONEY! We weren't surprised in "A Simple Plan" when Bridget Fonda's Sarah Mitchell responds in the negative to her spouse's supposed hypothetical query of whether she would keep a gym bag of Ben Franklins upon finding it only to pivot in an instant when she actually sees a gym bag of Ben Franklins poured onto the kitchen counter in front of her. After all, it'd buy a ton of groceries.
There is something different about Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott, frankly terrifying), however, something more expectant, something more entitled. As "Too Late For Tears" (also known as "Killer Bait") opens she and her husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy) are driving somewhere she doesn't want to go, arguing about it, signaling tension in the marriage, when another car roars by and hurls a briefcase chock full of cold hard cash into their backseat. Seems it's intended for someone else, for Danny (Dan Duryea), who gives chase, but the second that Jane sees what's in that case she gets this smile like Sharon Stone in "Casino" sizing up some millionaire yokel at the craps table and turns into Ryan Gosling in "Drive" and takes the wheel and guns the engine. That's her money now, see, the gods of get-rich having finally answered her many, many prayers.
The story that follows in director Byron Haskin's noir, which was written by Roy Huggins which he adapted from his own serial for the Saturday Evening Post, is as sinister as a noir night is darkly unyielding, the emotional temperature of its protagonist growing positively more frigid with each passing scene. There is a moment tilted toward the beginning when her hubby, struggling to understand her financial cravings, opines that he tried his hardest to give her what she wanted, she scoffs: "All you ever gave me were twelve down payments and intallments for life." Uff da. It suggests the film's yearning to comment on the ancient chasm between the rich and the poor, but "Too Late For Tears" doesn't really have the gumption to explore that angle. Instead it's an arresting, mind-quaking thriller in which Jane is the jarring anti-hero and greed is the femme fatale.
Danny, the ne'er-do-well to whom the case belongs, inevitably comes calling for it, and plays the obligatory part of a 1950's sexist to the hilt, slapping Jane a few times when he doesn't get answers he likes and incessantly calling her "tiger." He means that ironically, of course, but the joke's on him because as the film progresses he's revealed as a paper tiger, a weak-kneed alcoholic who gets out-toughed and out-foxed by the woman he simply assumed assumed was his prey. To balance out the plethora of hard-heartedness, Huggins' screenplay turns Alan's sister, Kathy (Kristine Miller), conveniently living across the hall from his brother and her wife, into the angel-hearted opposition of Jane's cool reign of terror. Her ally becomes a purported old Air Force buddy of Alan, one Don Blake, played by my late Iowa homeboy Don DeFore, with an awesome kind of aweshucks disquisitiveness, his real motives under wraps.
He labels himself a "white knight" which I was suppose makes Jane the black knight, and yet it is still hard not to be reeled into her spectacularly selfish plight, not from empathy but from squeamish self-realization. It's difficult not to think, deep down in those places we only talk about at smoky bars in Acapulco, that if that briefcase full of cold hard cash landed in our backseat that we wouldn't get hyrdogen psychosis and do the same damn thing.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
30 for 30: Brian and The Boz
Early in director Thaddeus D. Matula's exploration of mid-80's college football superstar Brian Bosworth, he offers behind-the-scenes footage of what went into creating a gloriously cheesy Me Decade athletic "hero" poster - in this case, one re-casting Bosworth himself as existing in The Land Of The Boz. The perfectitude of this indescribably silly bit of wall hanging merchandise, however, had never so forcefully occurred to me. And it finally did occur to me because the theme of this ESPN "30 for 30" documentary, hammered home again and again, is that Brian Bosworth and The Boz were two different people, not unlike The Great and Powerful Oz and his more mild-mannered Professor counterpart. To be sure, Brian was not mild-mannered. As a linebacker at the University of Oklahoma he was arguably the best player in the nation, yet being the best player in the nation was insignificant next to the power of The Boz.
Though I first became a college football fan in the 1980's right as Bosworth was coming to prominence, I confess that I knew him almost exclusively as The Boz. I knew the haircut and the bandana and the sunglasses. I remember seeing him standing on the sideline in the 1987 Orange Bowl for which he had been suspended for taking steroids with the infamous t-shirt that read: "National Communists Against Athletes." I'm pretty certain that as a nine year old the full force of that shirt went flying over my head but still.....the image that I had of him as a player wasn't as a player but as that guy standing on the sideline in that shirt. As such, the film seeks to remedy that memory, or at least balance it out with a more intimate portrait of the man who brought The Boz to life.
The problems of Brian, the film argues, can be traced, as they so often are, directly to the son's father. It is made clear that while Foster Bosworth's incredibly tough love cultivated his son's football playing skills, it was the Oklahoma Sooners football coach, Barry Switzer, who showed up at Bosworth's high school in a beaver coat like a Great Plains Big Daddy Kane to recruit him that cultivated The Boz. In fact, several times, Brian reflects that Coach Switzer became his real father figure, an admittance that plays both as loving and tragic. And clearly the film's framing device of Brian and his son going through old memorabilia, while maudlin and somewhat circumspect since every confession comes with the knowledge the camera is right there, evokes the sensation of attempting to ensure he is the father figure to his own son.
At the same, "Brian and The Boz" contends this self-professed "extremist" was the birth of the modern athlete, one in which marketing a public image plays as big a role as feats of strength. It's not inaccurate, and the film makes clear that in a very real way his "National Communists Against Athletes" t-shirt was ahead of its time, the opening salvo fired against the oppressive NCAA in a war between them and the athletes theycare for take advantage of that continues to this day.
The film's subject seems genuinely contrite about his actions, including a tell-all book co-authored with Rick Reilly in his early twenties that helped level the boom on the football program, even if the boom likely would have been leveled with or without him. Still, it's not difficult to detect a wistful yearning for those halcyon days he essentially threw away. In repose, the aged Mr. Bosworth sometimes recalls the aged Mickey Rourke, and parallels to Rourke's "The Wrestler" become more and more evident as the film progresses.
Yes, he tells his son, as he removes that "Communist" Orange Bowl t-shirt from a box and holds it up, that this bit of fabric was the beginning of the end and his one true regret. But......he still has the shirt. He still holds onto it. The Boz may have tarnished Brian, but Brian can't let The Boz go. Hell, who could?
Though I first became a college football fan in the 1980's right as Bosworth was coming to prominence, I confess that I knew him almost exclusively as The Boz. I knew the haircut and the bandana and the sunglasses. I remember seeing him standing on the sideline in the 1987 Orange Bowl for which he had been suspended for taking steroids with the infamous t-shirt that read: "National Communists Against Athletes." I'm pretty certain that as a nine year old the full force of that shirt went flying over my head but still.....the image that I had of him as a player wasn't as a player but as that guy standing on the sideline in that shirt. As such, the film seeks to remedy that memory, or at least balance it out with a more intimate portrait of the man who brought The Boz to life.
The problems of Brian, the film argues, can be traced, as they so often are, directly to the son's father. It is made clear that while Foster Bosworth's incredibly tough love cultivated his son's football playing skills, it was the Oklahoma Sooners football coach, Barry Switzer, who showed up at Bosworth's high school in a beaver coat like a Great Plains Big Daddy Kane to recruit him that cultivated The Boz. In fact, several times, Brian reflects that Coach Switzer became his real father figure, an admittance that plays both as loving and tragic. And clearly the film's framing device of Brian and his son going through old memorabilia, while maudlin and somewhat circumspect since every confession comes with the knowledge the camera is right there, evokes the sensation of attempting to ensure he is the father figure to his own son.
At the same, "Brian and The Boz" contends this self-professed "extremist" was the birth of the modern athlete, one in which marketing a public image plays as big a role as feats of strength. It's not inaccurate, and the film makes clear that in a very real way his "National Communists Against Athletes" t-shirt was ahead of its time, the opening salvo fired against the oppressive NCAA in a war between them and the athletes they
The film's subject seems genuinely contrite about his actions, including a tell-all book co-authored with Rick Reilly in his early twenties that helped level the boom on the football program, even if the boom likely would have been leveled with or without him. Still, it's not difficult to detect a wistful yearning for those halcyon days he essentially threw away. In repose, the aged Mr. Bosworth sometimes recalls the aged Mickey Rourke, and parallels to Rourke's "The Wrestler" become more and more evident as the film progresses.
Yes, he tells his son, as he removes that "Communist" Orange Bowl t-shirt from a box and holds it up, that this bit of fabric was the beginning of the end and his one true regret. But......he still has the shirt. He still holds onto it. The Boz may have tarnished Brian, but Brian can't let The Boz go. Hell, who could?
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Citizenfour
The crux of "Citizenfour" is the clandestine meeting in June of 2013 between the film's director Laura Poitras, Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill and Edward Snowden, leaker extraordinaire, most famous whistleblower to roam the earth, in which he provided comprehensive details on the cloak and dagger spy program being conducted by the NSA (National Security Agency) as a purported means to protect our civil liberties that formed the explosive bits of journalism metaphorically tearing the roof off the US Capital rotunda. Aesthetically, "Citizenfour" is fairly elementary, because when the subject of your film is forced to communicate either by spectacular email encryption or strictly covert face-to-face encounters it prevents scenic "60 Minutes"-ish walk and talks. No, if on the precipice of becoming the Obama Administration's Public Enemy #1 you're holed up for days at a time in a non-descript Hong Kong hotel with the curtains drawn.
Those curtains, however, allow for one of Poitras’s unfussy artistic flourishes, specifically a shot of Snowden standing behind them and peering out at the packed streets below after just being told – in the film's most hysterical line – that the street housing the apartment he has been forced to flee is suddenly jam-packed with construction vans. The shot, I reckon, must have been staged, but so what if it was? That's who he is in this context, a man providing not merely a peek behind the governmental curtain but ripping it off its hooks and casting it aside. Naturally that has led to labels of both patriot and pariah, and President Obama is seen on camera in archival footage essentially agreeing with the latter claim by rejecting the first claim, never mind that Sam Adams, the O.A.P. (Original American Patriot), was seen as a pariah by King George III.
Did that last sentence expose my biases? Of course it did! "Citizenfour" slants in favor of Snowden, because to acquire access to him it had to, and seeing as how the information he discloses on camera is the same information we all have already read and discussed and considered it is nigh impossible to enter the movie theater not having already made up one's mind about his actions, as evidenced by the two women at my screening who kept chiming in with audible hoots and hollers of support for Mr. Snowden that would not have been out of place at any old propagandistic-themed evening out. But as Greenwald himself said at the film's New York Festival premiere: "I always thought that the most powerful part of the story was not going to be the documents or the revelations, as important as those are. It was going to be the power of his story, the acts of this very ordinary young man who decided very consciously to sacrifice his whole life for a political principle."
Snowden's repeated assertion that the secrets he's divulging be the focal point rather than himself becomes wishful thinking. As Greenwald's quote suggests, it is not only virtually impossible for the person telling the story not to become the focal point, but that "Citizenfour's" overriding intent is to put a personality to the face of its title. And even if Poitras pairs a news anchor remarking how the entire episode evokes a John le Carré novel with a shot of Snowden as he trims his facial hair, trades his glasses for contacts and gels up his hair in an effort to evade detection after his name goes public, his personality comes across as the diametric opposite of any kind of international man of mystery.
The soul-searching he undoubtedly underwent about what such an act would and does bring about happened long before Poitras’s camera rolled. Nevertheless, Snowden's genuine matter-of-factness in approaching these earth-rattling developments is affecting, and all evidence on screen suggests he did what he did simply because he thought it was the necessary thing to do.
Of course, the obvious irony is that by exposing our country's compromising of personal freedom, he more or less forfeited all of his own, doomed to exile, to airport terminals to avoid extradition, and all at the expense of loved ones (though it is revealed his longtime girlfriend eventually re-connects with him). And while the film makes clear his sacrifice has inspired others to potentially blow the whistle, it still ultimately plays less like a hymn of exaltation than a pained elegy for what seems, frankly, an inevitable future ending. This is a film made most haunting by what it really is - cinematic life insurance.
Those curtains, however, allow for one of Poitras’s unfussy artistic flourishes, specifically a shot of Snowden standing behind them and peering out at the packed streets below after just being told – in the film's most hysterical line – that the street housing the apartment he has been forced to flee is suddenly jam-packed with construction vans. The shot, I reckon, must have been staged, but so what if it was? That's who he is in this context, a man providing not merely a peek behind the governmental curtain but ripping it off its hooks and casting it aside. Naturally that has led to labels of both patriot and pariah, and President Obama is seen on camera in archival footage essentially agreeing with the latter claim by rejecting the first claim, never mind that Sam Adams, the O.A.P. (Original American Patriot), was seen as a pariah by King George III.
Did that last sentence expose my biases? Of course it did! "Citizenfour" slants in favor of Snowden, because to acquire access to him it had to, and seeing as how the information he discloses on camera is the same information we all have already read and discussed and considered it is nigh impossible to enter the movie theater not having already made up one's mind about his actions, as evidenced by the two women at my screening who kept chiming in with audible hoots and hollers of support for Mr. Snowden that would not have been out of place at any old propagandistic-themed evening out. But as Greenwald himself said at the film's New York Festival premiere: "I always thought that the most powerful part of the story was not going to be the documents or the revelations, as important as those are. It was going to be the power of his story, the acts of this very ordinary young man who decided very consciously to sacrifice his whole life for a political principle."
Snowden's repeated assertion that the secrets he's divulging be the focal point rather than himself becomes wishful thinking. As Greenwald's quote suggests, it is not only virtually impossible for the person telling the story not to become the focal point, but that "Citizenfour's" overriding intent is to put a personality to the face of its title. And even if Poitras pairs a news anchor remarking how the entire episode evokes a John le Carré novel with a shot of Snowden as he trims his facial hair, trades his glasses for contacts and gels up his hair in an effort to evade detection after his name goes public, his personality comes across as the diametric opposite of any kind of international man of mystery.
The soul-searching he undoubtedly underwent about what such an act would and does bring about happened long before Poitras’s camera rolled. Nevertheless, Snowden's genuine matter-of-factness in approaching these earth-rattling developments is affecting, and all evidence on screen suggests he did what he did simply because he thought it was the necessary thing to do.
Of course, the obvious irony is that by exposing our country's compromising of personal freedom, he more or less forfeited all of his own, doomed to exile, to airport terminals to avoid extradition, and all at the expense of loved ones (though it is revealed his longtime girlfriend eventually re-connects with him). And while the film makes clear his sacrifice has inspired others to potentially blow the whistle, it still ultimately plays less like a hymn of exaltation than a pained elegy for what seems, frankly, an inevitable future ending. This is a film made most haunting by what it really is - cinematic life insurance.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Whiplash
Did you know Jo Jones, percussionist in Count Basie's Orchestra, once threw a cymbal at Charlie Parker's head? If you didn't, rest assured, you will by the time "Whiplash" concludes, considering it's the go-to dictum for Terrence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a hot-headed instructor at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, who employs the dictum's purported wisdom as a means to excuse his abusive teaching methods. In that way, writer/director Damien Chazelle's film is a little like what might have happened if Coach Herb Brooks of "Miracle" was tasked with coaxing balletic perfection out of Nina Sayers in "Black Swan." Of course, Brooks' medieval approach to instructing was excused because he beat the Russians in the midst of the Cold War and Nina's tale was primarily a ghastly yet beautiful descent into madness whereas "Whiplash" yearns to genuinely explore the notion of psychological torment yielding genius. The torment is palpable. The genius? Eh......
Fletcher co-opts nineteen year old Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) as his protégé, quickly promoting him from flipping note pages of jazz percussionists in line ahead of him to become the victim of his browbeating tirades behind the actual drum kit of his core competition group. Introduced as the product of a good-hearted if quiet father (Paul Reiser), vulnerable and terrifically shy, hardly able to muster the courage and verbiage to ask out the kindly concessionist (Melissa Benoist) at the movie theater he frequents, he consciously comes across as a cipher. Yes, he is afforded some jargon about wanting to be one of "the greats", but his skill seems less the point to Fletcher than his apple-faced disposition ripe for manipulation.
That's where the film grows curious. It's about jazz, sort of, in that way "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is about aliens. Jazz is primarily about individual expression within a musical collective and yet all sense of Andrew's individual expression is stifled. "Not my tempo," Fletcher repeatedly intones when he disapproves of his pupil's tapping of the beat. In other words, screw your tempo - I want my tempo. Outfit nearly the whole ninety minutes in black slacks and black short-sleeved shirt showing off rippled muscles, Fletcher evokes an archetypal Movie Bad Guy, never more than an early shot in which Andrew catches sight of Fletcher through a door window only to quickly duck from sight when Fletcher senses being watched and turns.
It could possibly be posited that his villainous ways are the device by which he cultivates the drumming brilliance of Andrew. The problem, however, is that little evidence is provided in the way of how Fletcher's student grows or expands as an actual percussionist. All we see are marathon speed drumming sessions that yield blood, sweat and tears while the music itself is paid virtually no mind. The closest the film gets to its hypothetical subject doubles as the closest the film gets to a genuine heartwarming moment, one in which Andrew stumbles upon Fletcher sitting in on piano with a jazz outfit at some small club.
There and only there, a sliver of joy can be detected on Fletcher's face as he taps ever so lightly at the keys, and we wonder if he is merely another in a long line of "misunderstood" characters. Alas, once he sees Andrew and calls him over for a drink, there is no talk of the music. Instead he trots back out the story of Jo Jones hurling the cymbal at Charlie Parker's head, reducing the revolutionary sounds of Bird to an isolated event like "Walk the Line" reducing John R. Cash to the sum of his older brother dying.
Thus, when the much talked about concluding drum solo arrives after the downturn of the second act, it feels neither triumphant nor like a validation of the mentor's methods. This is no deconstruction of how genius is nurtured - this is a horror movie, and Terrence Fletcher is the black-clad monster assimilating his prey.
Fletcher co-opts nineteen year old Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) as his protégé, quickly promoting him from flipping note pages of jazz percussionists in line ahead of him to become the victim of his browbeating tirades behind the actual drum kit of his core competition group. Introduced as the product of a good-hearted if quiet father (Paul Reiser), vulnerable and terrifically shy, hardly able to muster the courage and verbiage to ask out the kindly concessionist (Melissa Benoist) at the movie theater he frequents, he consciously comes across as a cipher. Yes, he is afforded some jargon about wanting to be one of "the greats", but his skill seems less the point to Fletcher than his apple-faced disposition ripe for manipulation.
That's where the film grows curious. It's about jazz, sort of, in that way "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is about aliens. Jazz is primarily about individual expression within a musical collective and yet all sense of Andrew's individual expression is stifled. "Not my tempo," Fletcher repeatedly intones when he disapproves of his pupil's tapping of the beat. In other words, screw your tempo - I want my tempo. Outfit nearly the whole ninety minutes in black slacks and black short-sleeved shirt showing off rippled muscles, Fletcher evokes an archetypal Movie Bad Guy, never more than an early shot in which Andrew catches sight of Fletcher through a door window only to quickly duck from sight when Fletcher senses being watched and turns.
It could possibly be posited that his villainous ways are the device by which he cultivates the drumming brilliance of Andrew. The problem, however, is that little evidence is provided in the way of how Fletcher's student grows or expands as an actual percussionist. All we see are marathon speed drumming sessions that yield blood, sweat and tears while the music itself is paid virtually no mind. The closest the film gets to its hypothetical subject doubles as the closest the film gets to a genuine heartwarming moment, one in which Andrew stumbles upon Fletcher sitting in on piano with a jazz outfit at some small club.
There and only there, a sliver of joy can be detected on Fletcher's face as he taps ever so lightly at the keys, and we wonder if he is merely another in a long line of "misunderstood" characters. Alas, once he sees Andrew and calls him over for a drink, there is no talk of the music. Instead he trots back out the story of Jo Jones hurling the cymbal at Charlie Parker's head, reducing the revolutionary sounds of Bird to an isolated event like "Walk the Line" reducing John R. Cash to the sum of his older brother dying.
Thus, when the much talked about concluding drum solo arrives after the downturn of the second act, it feels neither triumphant nor like a validation of the mentor's methods. This is no deconstruction of how genius is nurtured - this is a horror movie, and Terrence Fletcher is the black-clad monster assimilating his prey.
Monday, November 17, 2014
Movies: The (Real) Magic Kingdom (2000th Post)
Believe it or not, Cinema Romantico has been clogging up the interwebs for going on 2000 posts now. I have no long wind-up regarding that milestone. I only have this post. And thanks for reading.
Abbas Kirastomi’s “Taste of Cherry” ends with the protagonist laying down in a dirt hole of his own creation in the midst of a rain storm, the sky hardly illuminated by strikes of lightning, to pass away, possibly, and wait for another character to show up to bury him, possibly. This is a substantial open end, paving the way for much rumination, not so much narratively as philosophically. But then something happens. Another shot appears, and we are suddenly watching someone film a movie. In fact, we are watching Kirastomi on location filming the movie we have just finished watching. It is jarring, pulling you out of your emotional experience and reminding you that “it’s just a movie.” And that, I confess, is why I sort of hate it.
A couple Julys ago I watched “Un Plan Parfait” as part of The Music Box’s French film festival here in Chicago, and I mostly did not enjoy it. And that’s fine. You can’t enjoy every movie, unless you lie to yourself, and once it ended I could vanquish my seat and leave it behind. Except, I couldn’t, and I couldn’t because “Un Plan Parfait” chose to slap a smattering of comic outtakes over the closing credits. Naturally this caused everyone to stay in their seats until the outtakes concluded, and as I had chosen a seat in the center, I was stuck. I lowered my head and sighed. I, in fact, went so far as to do what we all do these days when momentarily outraged – I Tweeted my abhorrence of closing credit outtakes. A friend replied in the spirit of Kirastomi that “it reminds you it's all just a structured fantasy.”
This was my re-brought to the forefront of my mind in light of a recent New Yorker article by Ben Yagoda examining the phenomena of comedians “breaking”. The main example they cite is Jimmy Fallon, the Tonight Show host and one-time Saturday Night Live cast member who was constantly guilty of “breaking” in those late night/early morning sketches. Yagoda goes back and forth, providing points and counterpoints, citing as illustrious an example as “Hamlet” to demonstrate that breaking is bad but also noting how when a performer who rarely breaks – such as Stephen Colbert – does break, it kicks the humor up a notch. None of that is what truly stoked my interest, however. No, what did was a quote from the legendary Peter Sellers when it was revealed that his director on “Being There”, Hal Ashby, chose to include outtakes of Sellers breaking over the closing credits. Sellers was furious and cried: “It breaks the spell, do you understand? Do you understand, it breaks the spell! Do you hear me, it breaks the spell.”
A spell, as Merriam-Webster defines it, is “a spoken word or form of words held to have magic power”, and the cinema, as Orson Welles instructed, is “(where) the magic begins.” “The camera,” Welles said, “is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret.” In that sense, the camera becomes the sorcerer, we its subjects.
Oh, it can be dangerous to wade this far off the shore of reality and into the Magic of the Movies mill pond. “Is there a phrase more hackneyed than ‘the magic of the movies’?” wonders J. Hoberman. Then again, Hoberman does not necessarily dispute the argument that movies are magic, noting that “From the moment of their invention at the end of the 19th century, motion pictures have been perceived as simultaneously hyper natural and supernatural.” Rather his overarching thesis states that “Movies don’t necessarily record reality but they always construct it.” He concludes: “That’s what makes them magical.”
To that point, one of cinema’s most eternal tales goes that the Lumière Brothers’ 1896 public showing of “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat”, a 50 second silent film documenting, uh, a train’s arrival at La Ciotat, the audience members screamed and fled for fear the steam locomotive was about to magically emerge from the screen and plow over them. This incident has been debunked, and argued for, and debunked again because just like scientists going over every inch of Loch Ness with sonar, scholars are always yearning to prove and disprove myths rather than allowing myths to remain, you know, mythical. And as Parker Tyler once so astutely noted: “Myths are not factual but symbolic. I assume movies are likewise.” In other words, whether or not audience members at “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” factually feared for their lives is less the point than the urban legend’s symbolic underpinning – that is, reconstructing the reality of an arriving train paved the way for believing the train was about to magically depart the screen.
I took in “Million Dollar Baby” at the theater four times, and each time when Maggie Fitzgerald first emerges from the gymnasium darkness, hood drawn over head, a smile less cocksure than confidently quaint, and steps toward the camera, almost into it, she became my personal Train at La Ciotat. Perhaps my conscious knew she was merely a character on a screen but my subconscious presumed her to be alive - or, at least, an apparition, floating just out of reach in the motion picture ether. This is the Magic of the Movies in which I devoutly believe, not some cockamamie Academy-scripted banter between Ben Stiller and Kayley Cuoco.
A movie may reconstruct reality but it still casts a spell, and to egregiously slap a few ham-fisted outtakes to garner a few extra laughs on the end or to present raw footage of yourself, as director, on location with a camera and lighting and sound equipment and best boys? I cannot abide.
It breaks the spell, do you understand? Do you understand, it breaks the spell! Do you hear me, it breaks the spell.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
A Star Was Born...
As Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures" opens we are introduced to Melanie Lynskey's frightfully inward, dreamy Pauline, a Christchurch, New Zealand schoolgirl. One routine morning, Juliet (Kate Winslet), is introduced to Pauline's class by the school's headmistress. It's French class and so Juliet is asked to pick a French name for herself. She chooses Antoinette. The teacher, obligatorily haggard Miss Waller, returns to the lesson.
MISS WALLER: "Now, irregular verbs in the present subjunctive...'qu'il vienne'."
JULIET: "Excuse me, Miss Waller... you've made a mistake. 'Je doutais qu'il vienne' is in fact the spoken subjunctive."
MISS WALLER: "It is customary to stand when addressing a teacher...'Antoinette.'"
Juliet stands.
JULIET: "You should have written 'vint.'"
The grin. Goddam, that grin. Films are fantasy, and "Heavenly Creatures" is specifically about fantasy (albeit disturbingly so) and that haughty fuck you in the form of correct grammar was Kate the Great embodying the fantasy of every fed-up current, former or future schoolchild who just wants to tell his or her smarmy schoolteacher to piss right on off. It pulls us into her orbit, just like it pulls Pauline into her orbit, in a cinematic flash.
Back in August when the grand dame, acting empress Lauren Bacall passed, I noted in my obit that her very first scene in the movies was the sort of introductory sequence a great many great actresses are never afforded. And it's true. For every Lauren Bacall wondering if Humphrey Bogart's got a match, there's Hope Davis as a Parisian ticket agent telling Catherine O'Hara to try stand-by. Kate the Great, however, pulled a stone-cold Bacall.
"Heavenly Creatures" was released theatrically in America twenty years ago today, and with its release Ms. Winslet made her feature film debut, and she debuted by setting that sniveling professeur de français straight. It's like Kate was striding into the classroom of every starlet in Hollywood, sizing up their acting equations on the blackboard and saying, "Yeah, your notes are nice and all, but I'll just take it from here."
MISS WALLER: "Now, irregular verbs in the present subjunctive...'qu'il vienne'."
JULIET: "Excuse me, Miss Waller... you've made a mistake. 'Je doutais qu'il vienne' is in fact the spoken subjunctive."
MISS WALLER: "It is customary to stand when addressing a teacher...'Antoinette.'"
Juliet stands.
JULIET: "You should have written 'vint.'"
The grin. Goddam, that grin. Films are fantasy, and "Heavenly Creatures" is specifically about fantasy (albeit disturbingly so) and that haughty fuck you in the form of correct grammar was Kate the Great embodying the fantasy of every fed-up current, former or future schoolchild who just wants to tell his or her smarmy schoolteacher to piss right on off. It pulls us into her orbit, just like it pulls Pauline into her orbit, in a cinematic flash.
Back in August when the grand dame, acting empress Lauren Bacall passed, I noted in my obit that her very first scene in the movies was the sort of introductory sequence a great many great actresses are never afforded. And it's true. For every Lauren Bacall wondering if Humphrey Bogart's got a match, there's Hope Davis as a Parisian ticket agent telling Catherine O'Hara to try stand-by. Kate the Great, however, pulled a stone-cold Bacall.
"Heavenly Creatures" was released theatrically in America twenty years ago today, and with its release Ms. Winslet made her feature film debut, and she debuted by setting that sniveling professeur de français straight. It's like Kate was striding into the classroom of every starlet in Hollywood, sizing up their acting equations on the blackboard and saying, "Yeah, your notes are nice and all, but I'll just take it from here."
Friday, November 14, 2014
Friday's Old Fashioned: The Lineup (1958)
Director Don Siegel based "The Lineup" on the CBS television series that began in 1954 for which he directed the pilot, and initially it really shows. The first twenty minutes feel less like a hard-hitting piece of noir than a basic if solidly helmed police procedural. Its seeming protagonist, Lt. Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson), is sensible but wholly drab and you wonder why they centered an entire TV show around him. But then police procedurals on the boob tube take solace in the familiar, a structure repeating week after week, and that structure is the set-up for Siegel's macabre joke, one in which the cops in grey suits are just stiffs and the robbers are vibrant if disquieting personalities.
Guthrie attempts to piece together a crime involving an apparent wheelman named Lefty (because one in three 1950's wheelmen were named Lefty) who steals a taxi to abscond with a briefcase only to shoot a cop and get killed in return. When Guthrie determines the case belongs to American tourist who has returned from Hong Kong, he and we are immediately suspicious at the revelation of a statutette contained inside. After all, if the movies have taught us anything it's that no stautette is merely a decorative artifact. Indeed, the porcelain piece is hiding heroin, and though this would appear to put the finger on the tourist, that's too obvious. And at this point, "The Lineup" goes its own way. It is said, in fact, per TCM, that Siegel was wary of giving the film the same title as its source material, and it is understandable. You don't need a lineup to pinpoint the main attraction of "The Lineup."
If noir so often gives a voice to the anti-hero, here it gives a voice to a straight-up miscreant. Dancer (Eli Wallach) is a bad man. I don't mean bad as in good - I mean bad as in bad. "A psychopath with no inhibitions" is what Julian (Robert Keith), his boss, calls him glowingly, like a starstruck father. Over the course of their mentor/protégé relationship, however, that gives the film its wickedly crooked heart he will come to understand the full weight of that statement. Gradually, insidiously and hypnotically, he has control of his operation wrested from him, and, in turn, Wallach the actor wrests control of the film from everyone around him.
The bad guys’ game is to have unwitting, unknowing vacationers become drug mules, a racket that is not only effective but that effectively demonstrates their feelings toward humanity - as in, non-existent. This is embodied in a hauntingly matter-of-fact sequence that finds Dancer more or less flirting with a young mother, Dorothy (Mary Laroche), to get to her daughter to get to her doll to get to his heroin. In spite of the preceding violent and chilly air he has so ably cultivated, Wallach in this moment skillfully flips on a dime and exudes such warmth that it reels you in even if you know it's a put-on.
As the film winds thrillingly through the streets of San Francisco to a concluding car chase that cleverly puts the squeeze on our chief villain by way of freeway concrete, it becomes abundantly clear that Julian had it right – Dancer has no inhibitions. And when he takes Dorothy's daughter hostage in a last-ditch attempt to evade the inevitable vice it'll put a lump in your throat. Heck, even Julian looks at him with a taken-aback gawk. In that moment, you believe he could be capable of anything.
Guthrie attempts to piece together a crime involving an apparent wheelman named Lefty (because one in three 1950's wheelmen were named Lefty) who steals a taxi to abscond with a briefcase only to shoot a cop and get killed in return. When Guthrie determines the case belongs to American tourist who has returned from Hong Kong, he and we are immediately suspicious at the revelation of a statutette contained inside. After all, if the movies have taught us anything it's that no stautette is merely a decorative artifact. Indeed, the porcelain piece is hiding heroin, and though this would appear to put the finger on the tourist, that's too obvious. And at this point, "The Lineup" goes its own way. It is said, in fact, per TCM, that Siegel was wary of giving the film the same title as its source material, and it is understandable. You don't need a lineup to pinpoint the main attraction of "The Lineup."
If noir so often gives a voice to the anti-hero, here it gives a voice to a straight-up miscreant. Dancer (Eli Wallach) is a bad man. I don't mean bad as in good - I mean bad as in bad. "A psychopath with no inhibitions" is what Julian (Robert Keith), his boss, calls him glowingly, like a starstruck father. Over the course of their mentor/protégé relationship, however, that gives the film its wickedly crooked heart he will come to understand the full weight of that statement. Gradually, insidiously and hypnotically, he has control of his operation wrested from him, and, in turn, Wallach the actor wrests control of the film from everyone around him.
The bad guys’ game is to have unwitting, unknowing vacationers become drug mules, a racket that is not only effective but that effectively demonstrates their feelings toward humanity - as in, non-existent. This is embodied in a hauntingly matter-of-fact sequence that finds Dancer more or less flirting with a young mother, Dorothy (Mary Laroche), to get to her daughter to get to her doll to get to his heroin. In spite of the preceding violent and chilly air he has so ably cultivated, Wallach in this moment skillfully flips on a dime and exudes such warmth that it reels you in even if you know it's a put-on.
As the film winds thrillingly through the streets of San Francisco to a concluding car chase that cleverly puts the squeeze on our chief villain by way of freeway concrete, it becomes abundantly clear that Julian had it right – Dancer has no inhibitions. And when he takes Dorothy's daughter hostage in a last-ditch attempt to evade the inevitable vice it'll put a lump in your throat. Heck, even Julian looks at him with a taken-aback gawk. In that moment, you believe he could be capable of anything.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Christopher Nolan's Latest Big Announcement
You would have thought, naive reader, that superhero movie news could not have got any more bloated than the recent announcement of roughly 330,000 new superhero movies to be released over the course of the next 75 years with some planned filmmakers for some planned installments not having been born yet though, rest assured, the studios in question already have contingency plans in place because contingency plans in case of hypothetical directors for theoretical superhero movies failing to be born always takes precedence over, say, originality but I think I've become carried away in one of my patented run-on sentences and, speaking of which, I'm 34% convinced I saw Amy Adams on the the train yesterday morning because "Batman vs. Superman" is being filmed in Chicago right now because they never stop filming superhero movies and even though it might have just been a case of Superhero Movie Overload Hallucinations, oh my God, how desperately I wanted to go up to that probably-not-Amy-Adams-woman and say "Excuse me, but aren't you the Picasso of passive-agressive karate?"
What was my point? Oh. Right. Just when you didn't think superhero movie news could get any more bloated a report by Latino Movie Review emerged that Sony is considering a "Spiderman" spin-off that would not actually include Spidey himself and focus instead on Peter Parker's dear Aunt May.
Naturally this made Christopher Nolan, the King of superhero movie bloat, jealous and he immediately announced plans for a "Batman" spinoff that will not actually include Batman himself and instead focus on Bruce Wayne's momentary squeeze, Natascha, the prima Russian ballerina. Reports indicate the film will focus on her attempts to create the first ballet company on the moon after dancing is outlawed by the Republican controlled Senate. This, of course, likely means that Hans Zimmer will be tasked to re-imagine Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" which should make it a must-see for purists. It will probably also star Michael Caine.
What was my point? Oh. Right. Just when you didn't think superhero movie news could get any more bloated a report by Latino Movie Review emerged that Sony is considering a "Spiderman" spin-off that would not actually include Spidey himself and focus instead on Peter Parker's dear Aunt May.
Naturally this made Christopher Nolan, the King of superhero movie bloat, jealous and he immediately announced plans for a "Batman" spinoff that will not actually include Batman himself and instead focus on Bruce Wayne's momentary squeeze, Natascha, the prima Russian ballerina. Reports indicate the film will focus on her attempts to create the first ballet company on the moon after dancing is outlawed by the Republican controlled Senate. This, of course, likely means that Hans Zimmer will be tasked to re-imagine Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" which should make it a must-see for purists. It will probably also star Michael Caine.
 |
| Christopher Nolan's new muse? |
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Fair Play
Less a traditional sports movie than a thriller set in the sporting arena, "Fair Play" revolves around Anna (Judit Bardos), an 18 year old elite-level Czech sprinter who openly opines that she prefers "racing to running", and small wonder why. After all, it is 1984, the Cold War is still raging, and communist countries like Czechoslovakia are in an athletics arm race with those nansy-pansy democracies, determined to display their ideological might by essentially stating OUR people can run faster than YOUR people. Nah nah nah nah nah nah. And so Anna, enrolled into a "special" program that accounts for its "specialness" by having its athletes take seconds and thirds and fourths at the buffet table of anabolic steroids, has her body essentially co-opted by her country in the craven desire of implementing it as sprinting propaganda.
Interestingly, despite its backdrop, the most important relationship in the film proves not to be athlete & coach but daughter & mother. Irena (Anna Geislerova) was once a promising a tennis star only to have her career negated by ties to government dissidents, and now, forced to work as a cleaning lady for the teensiest of wages, she fears her daughter failing to take advantage of her choice position in a society where choice positions are few.
The re-surfacing of Irene's ties in the form of an old lover, Marek (Roman Zach), who asks her to carry out vaguely defined yet clearly criminal tasks is one of the film's weaker points, never feeling properly lived in, too transparent as a plot necessity. Still, the motherly decision to engage in such activity at the possible expense of her daughter's career is evocative of a certain selfishness - a selfishness that pulsates through the entire picture.
It was Martin Luther King Jr. who observed "Communism forgets that life is individual", a sentiment which "Fair Play" both embraces and rejects. Even if Irena is acting out of what she perceives as her daughter's best interests, her actions are not simply spectacularly negligent (and not to be revealed in this review), but carried out in spite of Anna's wishes. This is underscored by the country's track program as a whole, one that builds her into a sleek sprinting machine for the glory of itself, the sports doctors admiring what a precise specimen they have created, snidely and not inaccurately taking credit for her accomplishments.
It is telling that for much of the film, Anna, more or less, takes a backseat to a story that nonetheless remains primarily about her. She is manipulated by her government in the name of common ownership and she becomes an unwitting puppet of her mother to strike back at communism's core values. And Anna purposely becomes lost in the middle, a victim even in victory of two sides of a political spectrum using and abusing her.
Interestingly, despite its backdrop, the most important relationship in the film proves not to be athlete & coach but daughter & mother. Irena (Anna Geislerova) was once a promising a tennis star only to have her career negated by ties to government dissidents, and now, forced to work as a cleaning lady for the teensiest of wages, she fears her daughter failing to take advantage of her choice position in a society where choice positions are few.
The re-surfacing of Irene's ties in the form of an old lover, Marek (Roman Zach), who asks her to carry out vaguely defined yet clearly criminal tasks is one of the film's weaker points, never feeling properly lived in, too transparent as a plot necessity. Still, the motherly decision to engage in such activity at the possible expense of her daughter's career is evocative of a certain selfishness - a selfishness that pulsates through the entire picture.
It was Martin Luther King Jr. who observed "Communism forgets that life is individual", a sentiment which "Fair Play" both embraces and rejects. Even if Irena is acting out of what she perceives as her daughter's best interests, her actions are not simply spectacularly negligent (and not to be revealed in this review), but carried out in spite of Anna's wishes. This is underscored by the country's track program as a whole, one that builds her into a sleek sprinting machine for the glory of itself, the sports doctors admiring what a precise specimen they have created, snidely and not inaccurately taking credit for her accomplishments.
It is telling that for much of the film, Anna, more or less, takes a backseat to a story that nonetheless remains primarily about her. She is manipulated by her government in the name of common ownership and she becomes an unwitting puppet of her mother to strike back at communism's core values. And Anna purposely becomes lost in the middle, a victim even in victory of two sides of a political spectrum using and abusing her.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Going To See Donna Reed's Oscar
A year ago, at the tail-end of a family vacation in Colorado that went awry when it happened to coincide with the state's terrible 100 Year Floods, we were eating across from our hotel at one of those restaurants that is intended to be a replica of a 50's drive-in diner but somehow feels even more modern than places specifically not trying to replicate a time gone-by that was too busy and too under-staffed and left our poor, poor waitress frazzled and out of her element and it was all simply awful and ridiculous and yet, simultaneously, an exquisitely symbolic capper to the entire sabbatical-turned-ordeal. Meanwhile my sister was moaning about how she was about to move from the Rocky Mountain State back home to Iowa and how Iowa had nothing good to which I quickly and simply replied: "Hey, Iowa has Donna Reed's Oscar." Which it totally did/does. The Oscar she won for playing Alma Burke in "From Here To Eternity", one of my ten favorite films of all time, is on display in her hometown of Denison, Iowa, and so in that very moment my sister and I made a pact to go see and pay homage to that Academy Award in 2014. This past June, we did. I wrote a little something about it.
While I would like to think it the work of the Divine, it was mere coincidence that the same day my sister and I pilgrimaged from Des Moines to Denison to see Donna Reed’s Academy Award, a thousand plus people gathered in Dyersville to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Field of Dreams with the film’s star, Kevin Costner. Chronicling an Iowa farmer building a baseball diamond in his cornfield as a cosmic means to summon the spirit of Shoeless Joe Jackson, it is the quintessential “Iowa movie”, embodying the state’s ethos of self-possessed stoicism by presenting a man journeying into the mystic on an even keel.
The trip from Small Town, America to Hollywood itself is a journey into the mystic and when Donna Reed made it in 1938 she maintained a stoicism befitting her Denison roots. Though she acted at Los Angeles Community College, she also demonstrated a Midwestern practicality by simultaneously studying to be a secretary just in case. She needn’t have worried, of course, but even as she became a legitimate movie star, she retained self-possession, evidenced by the pinup letters she received from G.I.'s during WWII which she refrained from mentioning to her children. She was made to work for her greatest role, that as Alma Burke in From Here To Eternity, repeatedly testing for it against other actresses and struggling to truly understand the part until - as recounted by Jay Fultz in his 1998 biography - she harnessed the determination instilled by her upbringing.
Upon winning the Oscar for that performance, she gave a humble fifty-two word speech, referencing the “long walk” from her seat to the stage, which alluded just as much to the long walk from the cornfields to the bright lights. She didn’t name check Iowa, but she didn’t have to, because she knew where came from, and is why upon her death she bequeathed the statue to her hometown.
It is on display at Denison’s W.A. McHenry House, a three-story Late Victorian model erected near the turn of the century, resting on a hill commanding a view of the town below, standing directly behind a Hy-Vee, a detail as evocatively Iowan as Field of Dreams. And rather than capping a grandiose tour, the statue, perched on a mantle above a fireplace in the parlor room, was the first item my sister and I glimpsed once inside, a sublimely unostentatious reveal befitting its recipient.
I had come four hundred and fifty miles to see it, all the way from Chicago where I have lived since leaving Des Moines ten years ago. I wished to pay tribute because I’m a film critic and because From Here To Eternity is one of my favorite films, but also because lately I’ve been deliberating whether I’m fulfilled as a happy transplant or if I’d prefer to officially re-connect as a proud native, and such a cinema-centric journey seemed potentially conducive to spiritual enlightenment.
Chicago, I have realized, is where I grew into myself while Iowa is and will always be the place that built the intrinsic values which informed and allowed for that growth; yet I wonder if claiming to be an Iowan in Chicago might be an oxymoron. Of course, Donna Reed's remains are in Los Angeles while the item which most exemplifies her Los Angeles life is now in Iowa, and I suspect it’s less a paradox than a delineation. She did not have to wind up where she began to remember where she came from.
---------
The trip from Small Town, America to Hollywood itself is a journey into the mystic and when Donna Reed made it in 1938 she maintained a stoicism befitting her Denison roots. Though she acted at Los Angeles Community College, she also demonstrated a Midwestern practicality by simultaneously studying to be a secretary just in case. She needn’t have worried, of course, but even as she became a legitimate movie star, she retained self-possession, evidenced by the pinup letters she received from G.I.'s during WWII which she refrained from mentioning to her children. She was made to work for her greatest role, that as Alma Burke in From Here To Eternity, repeatedly testing for it against other actresses and struggling to truly understand the part until - as recounted by Jay Fultz in his 1998 biography - she harnessed the determination instilled by her upbringing.
Upon winning the Oscar for that performance, she gave a humble fifty-two word speech, referencing the “long walk” from her seat to the stage, which alluded just as much to the long walk from the cornfields to the bright lights. She didn’t name check Iowa, but she didn’t have to, because she knew where came from, and is why upon her death she bequeathed the statue to her hometown.
It is on display at Denison’s W.A. McHenry House, a three-story Late Victorian model erected near the turn of the century, resting on a hill commanding a view of the town below, standing directly behind a Hy-Vee, a detail as evocatively Iowan as Field of Dreams. And rather than capping a grandiose tour, the statue, perched on a mantle above a fireplace in the parlor room, was the first item my sister and I glimpsed once inside, a sublimely unostentatious reveal befitting its recipient.
I had come four hundred and fifty miles to see it, all the way from Chicago where I have lived since leaving Des Moines ten years ago. I wished to pay tribute because I’m a film critic and because From Here To Eternity is one of my favorite films, but also because lately I’ve been deliberating whether I’m fulfilled as a happy transplant or if I’d prefer to officially re-connect as a proud native, and such a cinema-centric journey seemed potentially conducive to spiritual enlightenment.
Chicago, I have realized, is where I grew into myself while Iowa is and will always be the place that built the intrinsic values which informed and allowed for that growth; yet I wonder if claiming to be an Iowan in Chicago might be an oxymoron. Of course, Donna Reed's remains are in Los Angeles while the item which most exemplifies her Los Angeles life is now in Iowa, and I suspect it’s less a paradox than a delineation. She did not have to wind up where she began to remember where she came from.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Friday, November 07, 2014
Friday's Old Fashioned: Trouble In Paradise (1932)
One of moviegoing's most ancient chestnuts stipulates that's cinema provides an escape from reality. If you're a film critic, of if you fancy yourself one, you know this bromide well because occasionally upon leveling criticism at a film (hence the term "film critic") you will be dressed down with some variation of the phrase "Why so serious? Movies are just an escape from reality, man." Of course, it's never so simple. "Avatar" has earned more at the box office than any movie in history and while it was an escape from reality in so much as you sat down with goofy oversized glasses to watch something about a made-up planet, it brought everything back down to reality with a fairly overt pro-environmental message. Escapism is always muted by realism, you just choose whether or not you want to ignore the reality drumming on the roof.
The Lubitsch Touch, referring to the metaphorical silver screen touch of German-American director Ernst Lubitsch, is, like MacGuffin, one of the most enduring axioms in the cinematic lexicon. It is also, I think, what people are really talking about when they dredge up that hoary debate about escape vs. reality at the cinematheque. It is defined by William Paul as "the conjunction of lightness and seriousness, of gaiety and gravity". Outside the multiplex is an endless deluge of gravity and seriousness whoosing out of life's downspout. Inside the multiplex is a gaiety and lightness meant to provide tonic toward what we feel the other 22 hours of the day. And "Trouble in Paradise", first and foremost, has more tonic than nasty gin.
The film opens with a Venice garbage collector picking up a heap of trash and tossing it aboard his gondola cum garbage truck. Even the city of canals needs its trash emptied, I suppose. This is the lingering effects of the outside world. But even as the sequence unfolds, Lubitsch is already counteracting it by having the garbage collector operatically sing, per Tim Dirks, "O sole milo", a song that finds hope and a means to celebrate with every morning sun.
It couldn't have been easy to celebrate with every morning sun in 1932, the film's release. "In times like these..." is a phrase that crops up a couple times in "Trouble In Paradise." "In times like these," the board of directors advises widowed Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), heir of Colet & Cie, Paris, Parfumeries, "cut salaries." The "times" to which they refer, of course, is The Great Depression. Yet, the effects of The Depression are only referenced, and barely, they are never felt. One scene of genuine comic horror finds Madame Colet buying a MORE expensive item after initially turning down a less expensive one because of "these times".
The framework of "Trouble In Paradise" is fairly routine, a drawing room comedy centered around a love triangle. But the drawing room comedies typically focus on well-mannered characters of polite society and two of the characters in "Trouble In Paradise" are not what they appear. Or more accurately, they are not what they claim to be. Gaston (Herebert Marshall) and his dearest Lily (Miriam Hopkins) are jewel thieves, united not only by love itself but a love of high-scale larceny. The plot turns on their attempt to grift widowed Madame Colet, with Gaston posing as her secretary - a nifty reversal of the sexes - as a means to maneuver a significant sum of cash to a specific case which he and his partner in crime and amour can lift. But is Lily still his partner in love?
That question drives the film. He seems to develop affection for Madame Colet, so much that Lily understandably becomes jealous and threatens to go off-script, and as we, the audience, have, in all likelihood, seen upwards of ten zillion love-triangle based rom coms, we assume that he's developing affection for Madame Colet even as we remain suspicious that it's all part of the ruse. Marshall, however, walks the highwire so adroitly that it is impossible to tell whether or not he is faking. And because we can't tell if he's faking, we find ourselves being pulled in by this potentially unfounded romance, not unlike Madame Colet.
Spoiler Alert: he's faking. Well, not really. Well, he is. And he isn't. Yes, he decides he loves Lily, but there is most assuredly a part of himself that is sad to say goodbye to Madame Colet. And even as Madame Colet is sad to say goodbye to Gaston, she seems aware that their wondrous romantic reverie could not last. "But it could have been glorious," she sighs. "Lovely," he agrees. "Divine," she adds. Indeed. But it isn't (though it is). Just like life, I suppose, which is why, I suppose, we go to the film de cinema, where it's always glorious and always lovely and always divine.
The Lubitsch Touch, referring to the metaphorical silver screen touch of German-American director Ernst Lubitsch, is, like MacGuffin, one of the most enduring axioms in the cinematic lexicon. It is also, I think, what people are really talking about when they dredge up that hoary debate about escape vs. reality at the cinematheque. It is defined by William Paul as "the conjunction of lightness and seriousness, of gaiety and gravity". Outside the multiplex is an endless deluge of gravity and seriousness whoosing out of life's downspout. Inside the multiplex is a gaiety and lightness meant to provide tonic toward what we feel the other 22 hours of the day. And "Trouble in Paradise", first and foremost, has more tonic than nasty gin.
The film opens with a Venice garbage collector picking up a heap of trash and tossing it aboard his gondola cum garbage truck. Even the city of canals needs its trash emptied, I suppose. This is the lingering effects of the outside world. But even as the sequence unfolds, Lubitsch is already counteracting it by having the garbage collector operatically sing, per Tim Dirks, "O sole milo", a song that finds hope and a means to celebrate with every morning sun.
It couldn't have been easy to celebrate with every morning sun in 1932, the film's release. "In times like these..." is a phrase that crops up a couple times in "Trouble In Paradise." "In times like these," the board of directors advises widowed Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), heir of Colet & Cie, Paris, Parfumeries, "cut salaries." The "times" to which they refer, of course, is The Great Depression. Yet, the effects of The Depression are only referenced, and barely, they are never felt. One scene of genuine comic horror finds Madame Colet buying a MORE expensive item after initially turning down a less expensive one because of "these times".
The framework of "Trouble In Paradise" is fairly routine, a drawing room comedy centered around a love triangle. But the drawing room comedies typically focus on well-mannered characters of polite society and two of the characters in "Trouble In Paradise" are not what they appear. Or more accurately, they are not what they claim to be. Gaston (Herebert Marshall) and his dearest Lily (Miriam Hopkins) are jewel thieves, united not only by love itself but a love of high-scale larceny. The plot turns on their attempt to grift widowed Madame Colet, with Gaston posing as her secretary - a nifty reversal of the sexes - as a means to maneuver a significant sum of cash to a specific case which he and his partner in crime and amour can lift. But is Lily still his partner in love?
That question drives the film. He seems to develop affection for Madame Colet, so much that Lily understandably becomes jealous and threatens to go off-script, and as we, the audience, have, in all likelihood, seen upwards of ten zillion love-triangle based rom coms, we assume that he's developing affection for Madame Colet even as we remain suspicious that it's all part of the ruse. Marshall, however, walks the highwire so adroitly that it is impossible to tell whether or not he is faking. And because we can't tell if he's faking, we find ourselves being pulled in by this potentially unfounded romance, not unlike Madame Colet.
Spoiler Alert: he's faking. Well, not really. Well, he is. And he isn't. Yes, he decides he loves Lily, but there is most assuredly a part of himself that is sad to say goodbye to Madame Colet. And even as Madame Colet is sad to say goodbye to Gaston, she seems aware that their wondrous romantic reverie could not last. "But it could have been glorious," she sighs. "Lovely," he agrees. "Divine," she adds. Indeed. But it isn't (though it is). Just like life, I suppose, which is why, I suppose, we go to the film de cinema, where it's always glorious and always lovely and always divine.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
36 Things I Love About A Life Less Ordinary (that no one talks about)
My friend Alex of And So It Begins... regularly assembles these spectacular posts in which he lists a plethora of things in films he adores that no one else - so to speak - talks about. They are a delight. I love them. I love this one. And this one. Oh, and this one too! And I have been desperate for some time now to pay homage (rip him off). The time has come.
I love "A Life Less Ordinary", may God have mercy on my soul. If I could only watch one Danny Boyle film before I passed forevermore.....well, I'd watch "Sunshine." But if I could watch two Danny Boyle films before I passed forevermore, I'd watch "Sunshine" and "A Life Less Ordinary." Perhaps it's a bit of a, shall we say, mess, but life's a mess and love's a mess and the world's a mess and I adore every last iota of "A Life Less Ordinary's" mess. Here are 36 iotas in particular.
36 Things I Love About A Life Less Ordinary (that no one talks about)
What a perfect opening shot. It looks like an album cover from when the sixties were starting to go bad and no one knew it.
I love the faux-rapture with which the dude on the right is listening to Robert blather about his trash novel to end all trash novels. And I love how the dude on the left just forgoes the fauxness.
The establishing shot of the scene that will transform Celine's existence - her father prattling on about her irresponsibility and all we see to let us know she's there is the designer boot.
As the emerging plot is set in motion, we see our protagonists via the God's Eye shot, reinforcing the idea of the divine.
That shirt.
Walt.
Look at how HAPPY Celine is while hard-working Walt gives her his schpiel!
The set design! Holly Hunter's pose!
Even after kidnapping her and tying her to a chair, he's still offended by the thought that someone else would have been so rude as to kidnap her.
"I'm not interested in you, or your novel, or any other pathetic idea you have to change your miserable, mundane existence."
When Celine tells Robert to go to his "dark side", that's his ensuing expression. THAT! His dark side is like forgetting to ask for extra hot sauce with his wings.
Holly Hunter's performance in this film is one of my secret Favorite Performances Of All Time. Partially because every physical acting choice she makes it's like this one - what is she doing?!
"Catch ya later there, Mr. Johnson."
Sometimes it's easy to forget just how beautiful this movie looks.
"It's a common scenario." (I say these words - or write these words, or think these words - all the time. And when I do, I'm thinking of them here in Cameron Diaz's voice.)
In the crosshairs.
Local boy Scotty Sherman.
Richie Vanderloo.
Love how Robert, typically so slow-witted, instinctively plays up the part of being Todd Johnson's close personal friend with the hug.
Ian Holm doesn't get a lot to do, but when he's on screen, he makes it count.
"You were great."
"I was?"
Those trees!
Holly Hunter!
Holly Hunter's Hand! Playing the part of The Monster That Cannot Be Killed.
Holly Hunter's Chaw! My favorite affectation in a film full of little affectations. I like to imagine she just showed up on set that day with the chaw and carried it on camera without telling anyone.
"All right, kill me! Just don't touch the girl!" yelled the gentleman bank robber.
"I often wonder what became of that girl. Sweet Eliza Gray."
Stanley Tucci so perfectly exemplifies a jackass.
Cameron Diaz's best effort at doing a Holly Hunter.
The rain slicker on Jackson's fedora. Prop of the year.
"How could anybody be that honest?!"
The look of a man who's confusedly run up against fate.
"I'll get the door. You play blackjack with the hostage."
I love how protective Jackson is of O'Riley in this scene.
Miracles.
Ah, love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)