There’s a certain type of “significant” movie (Babel, Crash, Philadelphia, Schindler’s List, et al) about an important subject (war, AIDS, racism) that I’m suspicious of. The directors and producers of these movies pat themselves on the back(s), show up on lots of magazine covers, get awards, but people keep blowing each other up, dying of AIDS or being otherwise put upon by life. And what is the moviegoer's response? I can’t think of a movie, or a series of movies on the same topic, that changed public opinion about a cause. One could argue that the cumulative effect of seeing gay people or black people portrayed in the media has altered our public consciousness for the better, but that’s only if we ignore Hurricane Katrina and the gay marriage brouhaha. If only disasters could happen after the movie - then everything would work out just fine.
An acquaintance saw United 93, and I asked her why. Her response - the movie was “cathartic”. I suppose that’s good for my acquaintance, but what about the people on the planes? I’m left with the unfortunate conclusion that these movies are cheats, exploitative reenactments of real suffering served as entertainment for those lucky enough not to be suffering.
Significant movies don’t age well, resistance to or transformation through aging being an arguable potential indication of quality. (A favorite example of mine is Petulia, a 1968 drama about marital infidelity. It didn’t cause much of a stir at the time of its release, but it has acquired a gemlike perfection due to its burnished visual style and its acquired identity as a time capsule.) However, I acknowledge that dreck sometimes lives forever, The Sound of Music and It’s a Wonderful Life being the archetypes.* Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (topic: racism) won a lot of awards in 1968. Now it’s seems like a simpleminded puppet show - “Look, children, black people have feelings too! One of them might even want to marry our lilywhite daughter!” In Philadelphia, Tom Hanks’ character never shows any physical affection to his boyfriend. This was was widely remarked upon at the time of its release. Ten years later it looks worse, since I’ve had time to wonder why, if the moviemakers were so “brave” about the subject, were they so cowardly about showing it?
Most of these movies have no sense of humor, either about the subject or about being a movie on that subject, and Pan’s Labyrinth is an egregious example of that. No one ever smiles or laughs or tells a joke, martyrs being notoriously dreary company. Having lived through a couple of disasters I can attest that I still found time to laugh occasionally.
The middle-aged and very crotchety Kingsley Amis once claimed “I won’t read any book that doesn’t start with ‘And then a shot rang out!” I’m inclined to agree. I like movies that are pure entertainment. I don’t need to know that the world is a difficult place. After all, I ride the subway every day.
*Please feel free to insert moans of dismay.
Friday, October 3, 2008
INTO THE WILD WITH TRICKY DICK AND THE DUKE
In 1973, The Statler Brothers recorded a song called "Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?" bemoaning the relatively recent lack of uncomplicated heroes in American movies. By then the western genre was in its twilight. John Wayne, its biggest star and most profound actor, made his last film in 1976 and died in 1979. The twenty-five years since have seen few attempts at a classic western, mostly notably Unforgiven, and its mutation into a variety of other genres - Die Hard, the Bourne films, Pitch Black, Star Wars and the recent and delightful Serenity all follow the conventions of the western. However, the neo-western hero hasn't returned to his pre-neurotic state. The lead men in all of those movies are driven as much by their emotional complications as by any real threat. However, they do also fight an outside enemy, a plot twist that Christopher McCandless, hero of Sean Penn's Into the Wild, doesn't indulge in.
McCandless (played by the remarkable Emile Hirsch) does indulge in his obsession with finding freedom from the constraints of society, a quaint idea last seen hereabouts in, say, 1973, and one any even slightly cynical person would question. The enemies that spur McCandless on are "hypocrites and politicians", the emotional turmoil of his parent's marriage, and his own personality. His journey ends with his death by starvation, presented by Penn as a spiritual victory. Like a classic western, the movie presents this obsession and journey without irony; the audience is not asked to question the validity of McCandless's motives but to watch as he fulfills them.
The most wrenching parts of this sincere but slamhandedly manipulative film show how much McCandless takes from other people and how little he gives back. The movie's climax, and its most brazenly cliched moment, is McCandless's deathbed realization that he might have been more open to others. (I hear the voice of Gomer Pyle saying "Golly Sarge, really?") The triteness of McCandless's realization doesn't hinder the drama, but emphasizes it - anyone could have those thoughts but the tragedy of his story is how long it took and how much it cost.
The oddest facets of the movie are how kind and friendly - with one exception - everyone McCandless meets on the road is, and how the two obsessions of American culture - sex and religion - are almost completely ignored. McCandless seems almost neuter. One character asks him if he's Jesus (a personage famously uninterested in nooky) - and his one encounter with the opposite sex is unconsummated. I kept wondering if maybe McCandless was gay, but then I always wonder about that - and it's a good thing to wonder, I might add. Ask about unexplained or invisible sexual desires and you'll be asking all sorts of el wrongo questions before too long.
Drawbacks to the film? The acting is uniformly powerful, but also relentless, like the direction, The Eddie Vedder songs are monotonous and inevitable - but inspire gratitude that I missed the grunge thing. Some fancy-pants cinematography - we get to watch Hirsch take a backlit outdoor shower, ludicrously akin to shampoo commercials and as dramatically relevant. The running time is about twenty minutes too long. The narrative queasiness - Penn uses a variety of narrators, on-screen chapter titles, and McCandless's own writings to move the plot along. The drawbacks are all balanced by the forcefulness and sincerity of the film.
Into the Wild brought up memories of a early 1970s Werner Herzog film called Strozsek, which concerns a German social outcast named Bruno and his search for freedom in Wisconsin. The end of the film features a most remarkable dancing chicken, an image not easily forgotten. Herzog called the chicken "a great metaphor". For what, who knows?
And if you need to know who Randolph Scott is, hie thee to Netflix and rent Seven Men from Now or Ride the High Country, both westerns and both almost Greek in their dramatic ruthlessness. Scott started out as a startlingly handsome second lead and matured into a stone-faced but empathetic actor, and he made several classic westerns. He was also Cary Grant's housemate for about ten years, which has spurred all sorts of innuendo.
And about Tricky Dick - did the western die because Mr. Nixon's cavalry came to town and turned out to be crooks? Or was it the realization that the comic-relief crook had usurped the hero? When the deputies are Haldeman and Erlichman...
(http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/w/whateverhappenedtorandolphscott.shtml)
McCandless (played by the remarkable Emile Hirsch) does indulge in his obsession with finding freedom from the constraints of society, a quaint idea last seen hereabouts in, say, 1973, and one any even slightly cynical person would question. The enemies that spur McCandless on are "hypocrites and politicians", the emotional turmoil of his parent's marriage, and his own personality. His journey ends with his death by starvation, presented by Penn as a spiritual victory. Like a classic western, the movie presents this obsession and journey without irony; the audience is not asked to question the validity of McCandless's motives but to watch as he fulfills them.
The most wrenching parts of this sincere but slamhandedly manipulative film show how much McCandless takes from other people and how little he gives back. The movie's climax, and its most brazenly cliched moment, is McCandless's deathbed realization that he might have been more open to others. (I hear the voice of Gomer Pyle saying "Golly Sarge, really?") The triteness of McCandless's realization doesn't hinder the drama, but emphasizes it - anyone could have those thoughts but the tragedy of his story is how long it took and how much it cost.
The oddest facets of the movie are how kind and friendly - with one exception - everyone McCandless meets on the road is, and how the two obsessions of American culture - sex and religion - are almost completely ignored. McCandless seems almost neuter. One character asks him if he's Jesus (a personage famously uninterested in nooky) - and his one encounter with the opposite sex is unconsummated. I kept wondering if maybe McCandless was gay, but then I always wonder about that - and it's a good thing to wonder, I might add. Ask about unexplained or invisible sexual desires and you'll be asking all sorts of el wrongo questions before too long.
Drawbacks to the film? The acting is uniformly powerful, but also relentless, like the direction, The Eddie Vedder songs are monotonous and inevitable - but inspire gratitude that I missed the grunge thing. Some fancy-pants cinematography - we get to watch Hirsch take a backlit outdoor shower, ludicrously akin to shampoo commercials and as dramatically relevant. The running time is about twenty minutes too long. The narrative queasiness - Penn uses a variety of narrators, on-screen chapter titles, and McCandless's own writings to move the plot along. The drawbacks are all balanced by the forcefulness and sincerity of the film.
Into the Wild brought up memories of a early 1970s Werner Herzog film called Strozsek, which concerns a German social outcast named Bruno and his search for freedom in Wisconsin. The end of the film features a most remarkable dancing chicken, an image not easily forgotten. Herzog called the chicken "a great metaphor". For what, who knows?
And if you need to know who Randolph Scott is, hie thee to Netflix and rent Seven Men from Now or Ride the High Country, both westerns and both almost Greek in their dramatic ruthlessness. Scott started out as a startlingly handsome second lead and matured into a stone-faced but empathetic actor, and he made several classic westerns. He was also Cary Grant's housemate for about ten years, which has spurred all sorts of innuendo.
And about Tricky Dick - did the western die because Mr. Nixon's cavalry came to town and turned out to be crooks? Or was it the realization that the comic-relief crook had usurped the hero? When the deputies are Haldeman and Erlichman...
(http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/w/whateverhappenedtorandolphscott.shtml)
BLADE RUNNER STRIKES BACK
While watching the "Final Cut" version of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), I kept hoping that Sam Spade (in the guise of Humphrey Bogart) would appear and jazz things up a bit. Watching Harrison Ford sonnambulate through this ponderously art-directed sci-fi film-noir made me greedy for a basic of film: star quality. I would have settled for Robert Mitchum or Alan Ladd or even Richard Basehart - anybody with a little flavor - for Blade Runner is ineptly cast and plotted and needs all the help it can get. Maybe Victor Mature even?
The basics of the plot: Deckerd (Harrison Ford) is hired to search for and kill four replicants, androids with murderous intent and a four year life span. Along the way he meets and woos Rachel (Sean Young), damsel in distress and a replicant who sports the (I hope intentional) vocal inflections of a robot. Deckerd's boss (the usually entertaining M. Emmett Walsh, here hampered by nitwitted, repetitive dialogue) orders him to find and kill Rachel as well.
Meanwhile the replicants search for their creator, Tyrell (Joe Turkell) an old man wearing an amazing pair of what look to be quadrifocal glasses. Tyrell plays chess without having to look at the chessboard, a sure sign of cinematic eviliciousness. The replicant leader is named Roy Batty (delightful!) and is played by Rutger Hauer at his goofiest. Batty finds and kills Tyrell because Tyrell cannot extend his life span. Deckerd then has a showdown with Hauer, but not before a spectacular tussle with Daryl Hannah as a punked-out replicant assassin. Deckerd then escapes with Rachel.
Confused? Well, don't blame me, I only watched it.
In most film noirs the hero has at least one showdown with his enemies. The Maltese Falcon has several, cleverly skewing the moral compass of the film. In Blade, Deckerd's search for the replicants has little connection with the replicants search for Tyrell. Deckerd never meets Tyrell, a serious failing because the two strains of the plot never intermingle. Thus the climax of the film isn't the solving of a puzzle but two barely connected bloodlettings.
The second bloodletting - Ford and Hauer battling it out in a futuristic Miss Havisham's - is a serious contender for most egregious use of inane symbolism, an award I christen The Ninnybot. Near the end of their fight, Hauer suddenly grasps a white dove, an amazing sight - such a clean bird in a such a grime-encrusted movie! Where did it come from? Maybe Hauer was hiding it in his form-fitting shorts, or maybe it's Stevie Nicks white-winged dove on holiday. Does the dove get its own trailer? All I know is that it's the movie's only moment of humor, intentional or otherwise.
Blade's art direction is, admittedly, stupendous. Scott and his designers created a Brueghel-like vision of the future. That vision is Blade's most pungent characteristic and all I remembered from 1982. I'd certainly forgotten Vangelis' music, dreadful, insipid and endless. None of the actors, with the exception of Hauer, can overcome the bad dialogue and the overpowering visuals to connect with the audience. There's also the film's lazy-minded misogyny. Women are dimwitted robots, either killers or lovers. I longed for Mary Astor or Jane Greer - they might have been standard femme fatales but by comparison with Scott's women they were epitomes of nuance.
Blade Runner has acquired a cult following and a reputation that far exceeds the movie's merit. Most of this is due to the visuals, which influenced rock videos and sci-fi films for the next twenty years. But it clearly touched a devoted audience. I was impressed to see that the Ziegfeld, the last of Manhattan's grand movie theaters, was almost full. That the audience was mostly male and about 35 years old is something for future anthropologists to decipher.
The basics of the plot: Deckerd (Harrison Ford) is hired to search for and kill four replicants, androids with murderous intent and a four year life span. Along the way he meets and woos Rachel (Sean Young), damsel in distress and a replicant who sports the (I hope intentional) vocal inflections of a robot. Deckerd's boss (the usually entertaining M. Emmett Walsh, here hampered by nitwitted, repetitive dialogue) orders him to find and kill Rachel as well.
Meanwhile the replicants search for their creator, Tyrell (Joe Turkell) an old man wearing an amazing pair of what look to be quadrifocal glasses. Tyrell plays chess without having to look at the chessboard, a sure sign of cinematic eviliciousness. The replicant leader is named Roy Batty (delightful!) and is played by Rutger Hauer at his goofiest. Batty finds and kills Tyrell because Tyrell cannot extend his life span. Deckerd then has a showdown with Hauer, but not before a spectacular tussle with Daryl Hannah as a punked-out replicant assassin. Deckerd then escapes with Rachel.
Confused? Well, don't blame me, I only watched it.
In most film noirs the hero has at least one showdown with his enemies. The Maltese Falcon has several, cleverly skewing the moral compass of the film. In Blade, Deckerd's search for the replicants has little connection with the replicants search for Tyrell. Deckerd never meets Tyrell, a serious failing because the two strains of the plot never intermingle. Thus the climax of the film isn't the solving of a puzzle but two barely connected bloodlettings.
The second bloodletting - Ford and Hauer battling it out in a futuristic Miss Havisham's - is a serious contender for most egregious use of inane symbolism, an award I christen The Ninnybot. Near the end of their fight, Hauer suddenly grasps a white dove, an amazing sight - such a clean bird in a such a grime-encrusted movie! Where did it come from? Maybe Hauer was hiding it in his form-fitting shorts, or maybe it's Stevie Nicks white-winged dove on holiday. Does the dove get its own trailer? All I know is that it's the movie's only moment of humor, intentional or otherwise.
Blade's art direction is, admittedly, stupendous. Scott and his designers created a Brueghel-like vision of the future. That vision is Blade's most pungent characteristic and all I remembered from 1982. I'd certainly forgotten Vangelis' music, dreadful, insipid and endless. None of the actors, with the exception of Hauer, can overcome the bad dialogue and the overpowering visuals to connect with the audience. There's also the film's lazy-minded misogyny. Women are dimwitted robots, either killers or lovers. I longed for Mary Astor or Jane Greer - they might have been standard femme fatales but by comparison with Scott's women they were epitomes of nuance.
Blade Runner has acquired a cult following and a reputation that far exceeds the movie's merit. Most of this is due to the visuals, which influenced rock videos and sci-fi films for the next twenty years. But it clearly touched a devoted audience. I was impressed to see that the Ziegfeld, the last of Manhattan's grand movie theaters, was almost full. That the audience was mostly male and about 35 years old is something for future anthropologists to decipher.
The Five Mao-sketeers
German is a lovely language, especially for its malleability. Need to coin a word? Just stick a few together and you've got what you need. Wagner did it all the time. He called Parsifal "ein Bühnenweihfestspiel." Means a Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage, in case you need to know – super-handy for cocktail party small talk.
I need German to describe Godard's La Chinoise (1967) which is either the funniest movie ever made or the most irritating. I do know that it produces a strong reaction in its audience. Walk-outs, groaning, snoring: Godard gets it all. This made me realize the limits of the English language, for we have no word for "exasperated rolling of the eyes during overintellectualized cinematic discussion of marxism." Ein godardenspiel, perhaps?
I am sure the strong reaction is intended and that's what makes the movie so funny - to the intellectually pretentious sadist with a fetish for watching movie audiences squirm. I might be that sadist, but most people aren't, and so I can't really recommend the film.
Godard's plot is slim. He places five young people with leninist ideals in a Paris apartment and supplies them with plenty of copies of Mao's Little Red Book. He then subjects them and us to a series of lectures/arguments about philosophy, Marxism, and Vietnam. None of the arguments is especially illuminating, but Godard uses a clever visual gambit, a visual paper collage, to make them exciting to watch. In one segment, the five communards dramatize U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam using model airplanes, sunglasses and paper masks, and this is the best part of the movie. It's also the only interesting part.
La Chinoise does have some strengths. The art direction during the first half of the movie is rudimentary, primary colored and fascinating. Once the five leave the apartment for ill-fated sorties into the real world, the art direction is ignored and the movie suffers.
The most fascinating part of the film is how it represents its era in hindsight. Deliberately crude and completely lacking in glamorous, La Chinoise is a child of its time. Right now we're being treated to a spate of highly politicized Hollywood movies (Rendition, Lions and Lambs and the upcoming Redacted from Brian DePalma). The first two get the full Hollywood treatment: big stars, top directors, whispers of Oscar nominations. Put Godard next to Redford and you see the difference between 1968 and 2007. Whether the passions behind the new movies is as strong as Godard's is interesting to contemplate.
I need German to describe Godard's La Chinoise (1967) which is either the funniest movie ever made or the most irritating. I do know that it produces a strong reaction in its audience. Walk-outs, groaning, snoring: Godard gets it all. This made me realize the limits of the English language, for we have no word for "exasperated rolling of the eyes during overintellectualized cinematic discussion of marxism." Ein godardenspiel, perhaps?
I am sure the strong reaction is intended and that's what makes the movie so funny - to the intellectually pretentious sadist with a fetish for watching movie audiences squirm. I might be that sadist, but most people aren't, and so I can't really recommend the film.
Godard's plot is slim. He places five young people with leninist ideals in a Paris apartment and supplies them with plenty of copies of Mao's Little Red Book. He then subjects them and us to a series of lectures/arguments about philosophy, Marxism, and Vietnam. None of the arguments is especially illuminating, but Godard uses a clever visual gambit, a visual paper collage, to make them exciting to watch. In one segment, the five communards dramatize U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam using model airplanes, sunglasses and paper masks, and this is the best part of the movie. It's also the only interesting part.
La Chinoise does have some strengths. The art direction during the first half of the movie is rudimentary, primary colored and fascinating. Once the five leave the apartment for ill-fated sorties into the real world, the art direction is ignored and the movie suffers.
The most fascinating part of the film is how it represents its era in hindsight. Deliberately crude and completely lacking in glamorous, La Chinoise is a child of its time. Right now we're being treated to a spate of highly politicized Hollywood movies (Rendition, Lions and Lambs and the upcoming Redacted from Brian DePalma). The first two get the full Hollywood treatment: big stars, top directors, whispers of Oscar nominations. Put Godard next to Redford and you see the difference between 1968 and 2007. Whether the passions behind the new movies is as strong as Godard's is interesting to contemplate.
LIKE, DUDE, I'M HAVING YOUR BABY
Unwed mothers aren’t what they used to be, to judge by Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s Juno. Not for their heroine is the shame of the scarlet letter or the deadly gossip of provincial neighbors. Instead, the 16-year old Juno, played by the angel-faced Ellen Page as a cynical but levelheaded romantic, seeks out adoptive parents (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), arranges the adoption, and then experiences the unexpected but hardly dramatic results. Juno isn’t ostracized, her parents express only concern, the topic of abortion is lightly touched on and just as lightly discarded, and then everyone lives happily ever after. Instead of treating the story as melodrama or as social commentary, director Reitman (son of Ivan, auteur of Ghostbusters) and writer Cody use Juno’s predicament for some lightweight comedy and some shallow character observation. It’s the easiest ninety-two minute childbirth I’ve ever experienced.
Juno’s greatest charm is its acting – specifically that of Juno and her family. Her parents are played by Allison Janney, clearly enjoying herself as a strangely glamorous lower-middle class mom, and J.K. Simmons, more familiar as the comically gruff Jonah Jameson of the Spiderman series. Cody gives Juno and her parents verbal slapstick that suggests Roseanne Barr meets Joseph Mankiewicz, without the former’s comic bitterness or the latter’s sustained pyrotechnics.
The other characters function as a chorus of sincerity; they do not get to make jokes but are the butt of them. This is particularly true of Juno’s boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Paulie is adolescent ineptitude personified: geeky, seemingly friendless, and a terrycloth-headbanded fashion disaster. Cera underplays Paulie to the point of somnambulism – he barely reacts to the news of the pregnancy or to Juno’s declaration of love at the end of the film. Perhaps Paulie is a sullen teenager, perhaps the filmmakers’ didn’t think out his character very clearly - or maybe blinking is the latest in method acting.
A lack of nuance – exemplified by Juno having only one friend, and her lack of interaction with her fellow students at all – is the movie’s biggest problem. Her parents’ banter is entertaining, but their reaction to their daughter’s news is unbelievably blasé. And Juno herself isn’t very believable. Her arrangement of the adoption is a case in point: Juno reads three ads in the local pennysaver and discovers the perfect parents, two well-salaried yuppies who have it all. They're unlikely advertisers in the pennysaver, especially for an adoptive baby, and it's just as unlikely that their lawyer would show up with papers drawn up and ready for signing at the first meeting with Juno. At least Reitman and Cody do not condescend to their characters, which is refreshing in a movie about working class characters.
Juno does have one very distinctive feature – its production and costume design. From the opening credits, a mix of animation, line drawings and film, to the décor of Juno’s home and the appearance of her suburban neighborhood, the movie looks just as it should – slightly claustrophobic, a little tattered on the edges, and well loved.
If you are looking for more comic takes on unwed mothers, search out Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944) or People Will Talk (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1951). Miracle - the hilarious tale of Trudy Kockenlocker, who knows she’s married but can’t remember the fella’s name, and her devoted but dimwitted beau Norval Jones - is one of Hollywood’s comedic peaks and has caused me to weep with laughter even after repeated viewings. People will Talk is Mankiewicz (All About Eve) as comic social commentator – he conjures up Cary Grant as a doctor who befriends an unwed mother and then has to deal with unpleasant consequences, namely rival professor Hume Cronyn. It’s a little dated as social commentary, but Grant is his usual expert self and is a great pleasure to watch.
Juno’s greatest charm is its acting – specifically that of Juno and her family. Her parents are played by Allison Janney, clearly enjoying herself as a strangely glamorous lower-middle class mom, and J.K. Simmons, more familiar as the comically gruff Jonah Jameson of the Spiderman series. Cody gives Juno and her parents verbal slapstick that suggests Roseanne Barr meets Joseph Mankiewicz, without the former’s comic bitterness or the latter’s sustained pyrotechnics.
The other characters function as a chorus of sincerity; they do not get to make jokes but are the butt of them. This is particularly true of Juno’s boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Paulie is adolescent ineptitude personified: geeky, seemingly friendless, and a terrycloth-headbanded fashion disaster. Cera underplays Paulie to the point of somnambulism – he barely reacts to the news of the pregnancy or to Juno’s declaration of love at the end of the film. Perhaps Paulie is a sullen teenager, perhaps the filmmakers’ didn’t think out his character very clearly - or maybe blinking is the latest in method acting.
A lack of nuance – exemplified by Juno having only one friend, and her lack of interaction with her fellow students at all – is the movie’s biggest problem. Her parents’ banter is entertaining, but their reaction to their daughter’s news is unbelievably blasé. And Juno herself isn’t very believable. Her arrangement of the adoption is a case in point: Juno reads three ads in the local pennysaver and discovers the perfect parents, two well-salaried yuppies who have it all. They're unlikely advertisers in the pennysaver, especially for an adoptive baby, and it's just as unlikely that their lawyer would show up with papers drawn up and ready for signing at the first meeting with Juno. At least Reitman and Cody do not condescend to their characters, which is refreshing in a movie about working class characters.
Juno does have one very distinctive feature – its production and costume design. From the opening credits, a mix of animation, line drawings and film, to the décor of Juno’s home and the appearance of her suburban neighborhood, the movie looks just as it should – slightly claustrophobic, a little tattered on the edges, and well loved.
If you are looking for more comic takes on unwed mothers, search out Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944) or People Will Talk (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1951). Miracle - the hilarious tale of Trudy Kockenlocker, who knows she’s married but can’t remember the fella’s name, and her devoted but dimwitted beau Norval Jones - is one of Hollywood’s comedic peaks and has caused me to weep with laughter even after repeated viewings. People will Talk is Mankiewicz (All About Eve) as comic social commentator – he conjures up Cary Grant as a doctor who befriends an unwed mother and then has to deal with unpleasant consequences, namely rival professor Hume Cronyn. It’s a little dated as social commentary, but Grant is his usual expert self and is a great pleasure to watch.
Another Lurid Saturday Night
Are you stuck at home and need to feel kinda dirty? Here’s a finely-tuned list of some lurid cinema to help you along.
The Eyes of Laura Mars (1977)
Faye Dunaway is Laura Mars, exotic high fashion photographer whose work uses sex and death for fashion thrills (it’s really Helmut Newton’s). Unfortunately for Laura, someone is imitating the photographs and killing all of her friends. Even more alarmingly, Laura sees the murders as they happen. Naturally these visions are in soft focus, from the murderer’s viewpoint and cause temporarily blindness, so Laura never gets to the phone in time to warn the victims. Watching Faye lurch around “looking” for the phone is a masterclass in overacting.
Helping Faye is Tommy Lee Jones, as a policeman who badly needs to get his unibrow waxed. This fashion faux pas does not stop true love, and the movie’s first and only love scene, which takes place right after a funeral, is a camp classic. Tommy’s acting style, minimalist at best, highlights Faye’s uninhibited scenery-chewing all the more.
Eyes also offers some Hollywood-style faux-kinkiness, 70s department, i.e. gay guys, dwarves, and lesbian models. Other highlights are Faye’s deluxe Halston-style apartment, a weirdly spacious Soho gallery opening, and Faye’s frumpy costumes and librarian hairstyle, bizarre in a supposed fashionista. One real plus is the location work, which shows the dirty, grimy New York City I fell in love with and miss so very much.
The Best of Everything (1959)
Advertising tag line - The Female Jungle Exposed!
Great-Grandbitch to Cashmere Mafia and The Lipstick Jungle, Best is the story of three young career girls in 1950s Manhattan. Hope Lange is pretty and sensible, Diane Baker is pretty and naïve, and 50s supermodel Suzy Parker is gorgeous and therefore crazy. The plot is sex, abortion, sex, stalkers, sex, drunkenness - plus Joan Crawford as a queen bitch book editor!
Bland but handsome Louis Jourdan plays the roué director that Parker falls for and cleft-chinned hottie Stephen Boyd (Messala from Ben Hur, another turgid classic) plays Lange’s alcoholic amour. Crawford’s spinster editrix Amanda Farrow is a frightening portrait of one of Hollywood’s perennial horrors – the unmarried (and by movieland logic doomed to unhappiness) middle-aged woman. Joan’s face is like Mount Rushmore – it’s impressive and it never moves. The cast is filled out by Brian Aherne as a Mr. Shalimar, a randy oldster, and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture) as randy prepster Dexter Key. Gotta love those names!
Best's impressive production values include a Johnny Mathis theme song, on-location shots of 50s New York, and color by DeLuxe. As a child, I thought DeLuxe was a person, like DeVol, the composer of the Family Affair and Brady Bunch theme songs. But there is no Mr. Deluxe, sad to say.
The movie is based on Rona Jaffe’s eponymous novel, which is far superior to the glossed-up movie. Published in 1951, the book is still racy and destroys the theory that sex was invented in 1963.
Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Karen Black in a 1975 made for television scream-a-thon – need I say more?
Our Karen always guarantees a good time, intentional (Family Plot, Five Easy Pieces) or otherwise (Airport 75). Trilogy’s final segment - an unfortunate encounter with an African doll - is the pick of this demonic litter and will ensure that you never ever buy any tribal knickknacks, ever ever again, ever.
The Story of Esther Costello (1957)
Deeply weird melodrama, starring Joan Crawford as a well-meaning rich woman who adopts a deaf and dumb orphan girl whom she turns into a Helen Keller-type celebrity. Problems arise when Joan’s estranged husband takes more than a shine to the fetching little deaf-mute.
Story is the kind of simpleminded Hollywood product where the husband must be bad because he has a foreign accent and Joan Crawford is admirable and good because she’s rich and she’s Joan Crawford. The weirdness comes in with the kicker to the plot. I can’t reveal it here but the manner by which the little girl gets her senses back would make Sophocles roll in his grave.
Crawford, as usual, substitutes stone-faced hyperventilation for acting. Her finest scene is when she discovers her husband’s perfidy and goes about her enormous house turning off all the lamps, one by one, with mascara-stained tears dripping down her face. I dare you not to laugh, and I dare not to want to relive the scene in your own home.
Mahogany (1975)
A cornucopia of ineptitude and the movie that killed Diana Ross’s film career, Mahogany is best watched with a large group of snarky, preferably tipsy friends.
Ross plays Tracy, a girl plucked from the ghettos of Chicago by lecherous photographer Anthony Perkins and transformed into world-famous fashion model Mahogany. Tracy/Mahogany really wants to be a fashion designer, misses hometown true love Billy Dee Williams, is being stalked by the rejected Perkins and goes to too many Eurotrash shindigs, so her redemption is quite the uphill struggle.
You’ll never forget the fountain scene, the “twirl, Tracy, twirl” scene, the wax-candle torture scene, the “due due” scene, or the flameout finale, and those are just of a few of the lows this film stoops to. My favorite nadir is Tracy’s first fashion show, a psychotic marriage of Ming the Merciless and Claude Montana circa 1985. Phyllis Diller once described her own stage outfits as “I dressed up as a lampshade in a Chinese whorehouse.” Once you see Mahogany’s couture classics, you’ll know where Phyllis shops.
Don’t forget to sing along with the he ineffable theme song, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? Do you know what life is showing you? Do you know? Well, do you?
The Bad Seed (1956)
There’s a blue chair for boys and a pink chair for girls!
Stage play translated to the screen with all its staginess intact, and a camp delight. Patty McCormack plays titular demonchild Rhoda Penmark, and Nancy Kelly plays her at first disbelieving and then horrified mother. The Bad Seed is an actor’s delight, full of hammy moments, and none of the actors disappoints. Best of all is Eileen Heckart as the mother of one of Patty’s victims. Her second scene, complete with an irrational drink cart, is a highpoint of cinematic dipsomania. And the finale is electrifying!
The Eyes of Laura Mars (1977)
Faye Dunaway is Laura Mars, exotic high fashion photographer whose work uses sex and death for fashion thrills (it’s really Helmut Newton’s). Unfortunately for Laura, someone is imitating the photographs and killing all of her friends. Even more alarmingly, Laura sees the murders as they happen. Naturally these visions are in soft focus, from the murderer’s viewpoint and cause temporarily blindness, so Laura never gets to the phone in time to warn the victims. Watching Faye lurch around “looking” for the phone is a masterclass in overacting.
Helping Faye is Tommy Lee Jones, as a policeman who badly needs to get his unibrow waxed. This fashion faux pas does not stop true love, and the movie’s first and only love scene, which takes place right after a funeral, is a camp classic. Tommy’s acting style, minimalist at best, highlights Faye’s uninhibited scenery-chewing all the more.
Eyes also offers some Hollywood-style faux-kinkiness, 70s department, i.e. gay guys, dwarves, and lesbian models. Other highlights are Faye’s deluxe Halston-style apartment, a weirdly spacious Soho gallery opening, and Faye’s frumpy costumes and librarian hairstyle, bizarre in a supposed fashionista. One real plus is the location work, which shows the dirty, grimy New York City I fell in love with and miss so very much.
The Best of Everything (1959)
Advertising tag line - The Female Jungle Exposed!
Great-Grandbitch to Cashmere Mafia and The Lipstick Jungle, Best is the story of three young career girls in 1950s Manhattan. Hope Lange is pretty and sensible, Diane Baker is pretty and naïve, and 50s supermodel Suzy Parker is gorgeous and therefore crazy. The plot is sex, abortion, sex, stalkers, sex, drunkenness - plus Joan Crawford as a queen bitch book editor!
Bland but handsome Louis Jourdan plays the roué director that Parker falls for and cleft-chinned hottie Stephen Boyd (Messala from Ben Hur, another turgid classic) plays Lange’s alcoholic amour. Crawford’s spinster editrix Amanda Farrow is a frightening portrait of one of Hollywood’s perennial horrors – the unmarried (and by movieland logic doomed to unhappiness) middle-aged woman. Joan’s face is like Mount Rushmore – it’s impressive and it never moves. The cast is filled out by Brian Aherne as a Mr. Shalimar, a randy oldster, and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture) as randy prepster Dexter Key. Gotta love those names!
Best's impressive production values include a Johnny Mathis theme song, on-location shots of 50s New York, and color by DeLuxe. As a child, I thought DeLuxe was a person, like DeVol, the composer of the Family Affair and Brady Bunch theme songs. But there is no Mr. Deluxe, sad to say.
The movie is based on Rona Jaffe’s eponymous novel, which is far superior to the glossed-up movie. Published in 1951, the book is still racy and destroys the theory that sex was invented in 1963.
Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Karen Black in a 1975 made for television scream-a-thon – need I say more?
Our Karen always guarantees a good time, intentional (Family Plot, Five Easy Pieces) or otherwise (Airport 75). Trilogy’s final segment - an unfortunate encounter with an African doll - is the pick of this demonic litter and will ensure that you never ever buy any tribal knickknacks, ever ever again, ever.
The Story of Esther Costello (1957)
Deeply weird melodrama, starring Joan Crawford as a well-meaning rich woman who adopts a deaf and dumb orphan girl whom she turns into a Helen Keller-type celebrity. Problems arise when Joan’s estranged husband takes more than a shine to the fetching little deaf-mute.
Story is the kind of simpleminded Hollywood product where the husband must be bad because he has a foreign accent and Joan Crawford is admirable and good because she’s rich and she’s Joan Crawford. The weirdness comes in with the kicker to the plot. I can’t reveal it here but the manner by which the little girl gets her senses back would make Sophocles roll in his grave.
Crawford, as usual, substitutes stone-faced hyperventilation for acting. Her finest scene is when she discovers her husband’s perfidy and goes about her enormous house turning off all the lamps, one by one, with mascara-stained tears dripping down her face. I dare you not to laugh, and I dare not to want to relive the scene in your own home.
Mahogany (1975)
A cornucopia of ineptitude and the movie that killed Diana Ross’s film career, Mahogany is best watched with a large group of snarky, preferably tipsy friends.
Ross plays Tracy, a girl plucked from the ghettos of Chicago by lecherous photographer Anthony Perkins and transformed into world-famous fashion model Mahogany. Tracy/Mahogany really wants to be a fashion designer, misses hometown true love Billy Dee Williams, is being stalked by the rejected Perkins and goes to too many Eurotrash shindigs, so her redemption is quite the uphill struggle.
You’ll never forget the fountain scene, the “twirl, Tracy, twirl” scene, the wax-candle torture scene, the “due due” scene, or the flameout finale, and those are just of a few of the lows this film stoops to. My favorite nadir is Tracy’s first fashion show, a psychotic marriage of Ming the Merciless and Claude Montana circa 1985. Phyllis Diller once described her own stage outfits as “I dressed up as a lampshade in a Chinese whorehouse.” Once you see Mahogany’s couture classics, you’ll know where Phyllis shops.
Don’t forget to sing along with the he ineffable theme song, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? Do you know what life is showing you? Do you know? Well, do you?
The Bad Seed (1956)
There’s a blue chair for boys and a pink chair for girls!
Stage play translated to the screen with all its staginess intact, and a camp delight. Patty McCormack plays titular demonchild Rhoda Penmark, and Nancy Kelly plays her at first disbelieving and then horrified mother. The Bad Seed is an actor’s delight, full of hammy moments, and none of the actors disappoints. Best of all is Eileen Heckart as the mother of one of Patty’s victims. Her second scene, complete with an irrational drink cart, is a highpoint of cinematic dipsomania. And the finale is electrifying!
THE EMPEROR’S NEW $12, 158-MINUTE MASTERPIECE
THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson)
PLOT: Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a sociopathic oilman. Paul Dano plays his nemesis, greedy revivalist preacher Eli Sunday. Plainview adopts the son of a fellow oilman killed in an accident and raises him on his own. The child, H.W. Plainview, is deafened in another accident and is sent away to a school for the deaf. After killing a con man posing as his brother, Plainview is blackmailed into being baptized into Sunday’s congregation and into retrieving the deaf child. After great financial success, Plainview drives away H.W. after revealing his true parentage and then drunkenly kills Sunday.
Newspaper advertisements assured me that There Will Be Blood is a “masterpiece,” “enthralling,” “wholly original” and “powerfully eccentric”. So I was prepared to hate it. I didn’t! Hating the movie itself is unrewarding. As an inanimate object it can offer no satisfaction. But Paul Thomas Anderson – him I can hate for stealing 158 minutes of my earthly existence and $12 of my hard earned money. It’s possible that the goddess of circumstance will give me the opportunity of retrieving my $12 (167% of New York state minimum wage) from Mr. Anderson. New Year’s resolution #2: brush up on my pickpocketing. But those 158 minutes…
$12 for 158 minutes of looking at Daniel Day-Lewis’ handsome visage isn’t to be sneered at. Day-Lewis makes far too few movies and as it appears that he’s turning into Jane Fonda circa 1975 - he only makes socially significant, “important” films - I’ll have to take what I can get. But 158 minutes is forty minutes longer than Citizen Kane, a movie on the same theme, the corruptive power of money and greed on a emotionally stunted man, and generally accepted as a masterpiece. Forty more masterpiece minutes than Kane – what are they? Extraneous but technically fluent shots of scrubland, irrelevant plot developments, cornball devices, poorly edited action sequences, and wasted acting.
The movie opens with a dialogue-free sequence showing Plainview digging for gold and breaking his leg in the process: frightening but pointless. Anderson then takes twenty minutes to show us Plainview exploring for oil, his partner's death and Plainview's somewhat casual adoption of this partner's child’s. Five well-edited minutes would suffice. Another sequence shows Plainview buttering up landowners for access to their oil-rich property, and like many of Blood’s dialogue sequences it’s played at half-speed, every word enunciated with a cloud of pauses floating around it. The mid-movie reunion between Plainview and his adopted son is shot from a distance, which allows for a nifty tracking sequence but not for the viewer’s involvement. The confrontations between Plainview and Sunday (Paul Dano) are irrational,and Dano is so irritatingly shrieky an actor that the he loses the audience’s affection and so any dramatic tension between the two men is muted to inaudibility.
I can’t think of a movie, apart from any number of Godard films, that so resolutely refuses to accumulate dramatic momentum. The two most engaging parts of the film, a nighttime oilwell explosion and Plainview's baptism, are both followed by sequences so flat that they cancel out the viewer’s enthusiasm. And Anderson’s corny attempts to let the audience “experience” the child’s deafness – the movie’s sound goes off, ooh! – pure cheese. I was kind of wishing the child had been blinded. Then Anderson would turn off all the lights and I could have taken a nap.
Ciaran Hinds, an incisive and distinctive actor, plays Plainview’s second-in-command, a part so sparsely written thatit's a waste of Hinds' considerable presence. The problem with casting an actor like Hinds and then underusing him is that the actor’s charisma leads the audience to expect something from him, and when nothing happens we feel cheated.
This charisma cheat is magnified with Day-Lewis. He’s got a some great moments – the baptism, his murder of the con man, the comic mayhem of the finale, – but mostly all he gets to do is lope around alone looking deranged. Blood reminds me of Mommie Dearest. The audience is supposed to love/hate Mommie, like we should love/hate Plainview – but they’re the most interesting people in their movies, more vibrant, more exciting, so we root for them instead. The balance of ambiguous allegiance, necessary for dramatic tension, is lopsided. So Mommie Dearest becomes campy, and Blood is inert.
I can’t blame Day-Lewis for taking the part. On paper it probably looked great, but once Anderson gets jiggy with the camera any dramatic opportunities are, like my 158 minutes, gone with the wind.
PLOT: Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a sociopathic oilman. Paul Dano plays his nemesis, greedy revivalist preacher Eli Sunday. Plainview adopts the son of a fellow oilman killed in an accident and raises him on his own. The child, H.W. Plainview, is deafened in another accident and is sent away to a school for the deaf. After killing a con man posing as his brother, Plainview is blackmailed into being baptized into Sunday’s congregation and into retrieving the deaf child. After great financial success, Plainview drives away H.W. after revealing his true parentage and then drunkenly kills Sunday.
Newspaper advertisements assured me that There Will Be Blood is a “masterpiece,” “enthralling,” “wholly original” and “powerfully eccentric”. So I was prepared to hate it. I didn’t! Hating the movie itself is unrewarding. As an inanimate object it can offer no satisfaction. But Paul Thomas Anderson – him I can hate for stealing 158 minutes of my earthly existence and $12 of my hard earned money. It’s possible that the goddess of circumstance will give me the opportunity of retrieving my $12 (167% of New York state minimum wage) from Mr. Anderson. New Year’s resolution #2: brush up on my pickpocketing. But those 158 minutes…
$12 for 158 minutes of looking at Daniel Day-Lewis’ handsome visage isn’t to be sneered at. Day-Lewis makes far too few movies and as it appears that he’s turning into Jane Fonda circa 1975 - he only makes socially significant, “important” films - I’ll have to take what I can get. But 158 minutes is forty minutes longer than Citizen Kane, a movie on the same theme, the corruptive power of money and greed on a emotionally stunted man, and generally accepted as a masterpiece. Forty more masterpiece minutes than Kane – what are they? Extraneous but technically fluent shots of scrubland, irrelevant plot developments, cornball devices, poorly edited action sequences, and wasted acting.
The movie opens with a dialogue-free sequence showing Plainview digging for gold and breaking his leg in the process: frightening but pointless. Anderson then takes twenty minutes to show us Plainview exploring for oil, his partner's death and Plainview's somewhat casual adoption of this partner's child’s. Five well-edited minutes would suffice. Another sequence shows Plainview buttering up landowners for access to their oil-rich property, and like many of Blood’s dialogue sequences it’s played at half-speed, every word enunciated with a cloud of pauses floating around it. The mid-movie reunion between Plainview and his adopted son is shot from a distance, which allows for a nifty tracking sequence but not for the viewer’s involvement. The confrontations between Plainview and Sunday (Paul Dano) are irrational,and Dano is so irritatingly shrieky an actor that the he loses the audience’s affection and so any dramatic tension between the two men is muted to inaudibility.
I can’t think of a movie, apart from any number of Godard films, that so resolutely refuses to accumulate dramatic momentum. The two most engaging parts of the film, a nighttime oilwell explosion and Plainview's baptism, are both followed by sequences so flat that they cancel out the viewer’s enthusiasm. And Anderson’s corny attempts to let the audience “experience” the child’s deafness – the movie’s sound goes off, ooh! – pure cheese. I was kind of wishing the child had been blinded. Then Anderson would turn off all the lights and I could have taken a nap.
Ciaran Hinds, an incisive and distinctive actor, plays Plainview’s second-in-command, a part so sparsely written thatit's a waste of Hinds' considerable presence. The problem with casting an actor like Hinds and then underusing him is that the actor’s charisma leads the audience to expect something from him, and when nothing happens we feel cheated.
This charisma cheat is magnified with Day-Lewis. He’s got a some great moments – the baptism, his murder of the con man, the comic mayhem of the finale, – but mostly all he gets to do is lope around alone looking deranged. Blood reminds me of Mommie Dearest. The audience is supposed to love/hate Mommie, like we should love/hate Plainview – but they’re the most interesting people in their movies, more vibrant, more exciting, so we root for them instead. The balance of ambiguous allegiance, necessary for dramatic tension, is lopsided. So Mommie Dearest becomes campy, and Blood is inert.
I can’t blame Day-Lewis for taking the part. On paper it probably looked great, but once Anderson gets jiggy with the camera any dramatic opportunities are, like my 158 minutes, gone with the wind.
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