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.
KINDA, SORTA IT’S A FEEL GOOD MOVIE?
Definitely, Maybe (2008)
Written and Directed by Adam Brooks
Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Will Hayes), Abigail Breslin (Maya Hayes), Elizabeth Banks (Emily), Isla Fisher (April). Kevin Kline (Hampton Roth), Rachel Weisz (Summer Hartley)
PLOT: Divorced man Will Hayes explains to his precocious daugher how he met and married her mother. In a series of flashbacks Will courts three women – college sweetheart Emily (Banks), New York temptress Summer (Weisz) and flaky but steadfast April (Isla Fisher) - against a backdrop of 1990s New York.
Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Toward the end of Adam Brooks’ interminable Definitely, Maybe Will Hayes, played by the puppydog sincere Ryan Reynolds, decides to give April (the charming Isla Fisher) thirty seconds to answer her doorbell and take a place in his life. He could give her ten seconds - but then the movie would be twenty seconds shorter, and director Brooks seems to think than length equals quality. Ah, if only.
Those twenty extraneous seconds are an indicator of this film’s main problems, its length and lack of dramatic substance. Almost two hours of watching theoretically witty twenty-somethings dither about their romantic entanglements is about thirty minutes too many. Add in the stereotypically cutesy-poo potty-mouthed child (Abigail Breslin, wasted in a terribly written part), cheaply anachronistic jokes (mainly about Bill Clinton’s romantic peccadilloes), punch lines that raise a guffaw at best, nauseatingly gooey “life lesson” sentiments and – well, if Definitely was a soufflé you could drop it and no one would be the wiser.
The other big problem with the movie is that our hero Will is one really boring guy. He seems to have no interests other than women. True, he has a career in politics, but outside of that, nada. No hobbies for this stiff! And his interest in women seems perfunctory, almost passionless. There’s certainly no sizzle between Reynolds and his three ladies, and the Hollywood notion that these three intelligent, beautiful women would fall for him (two of them more than once) stretches my Eastern seaboard credulity past the breaking point.
The one moment when Will threatens to develop a personality – when he starts to drink too much and self-pityingly lashes out against April – is frittered away by Brooks. Is it because a real problem would upset the fragile balance of this so-called comedy, or is it because Brooks is out of his depth? Will ends up as nothing more than a mouthpiece for some flat-footed witticisms, and Reynolds deserves some credit for remaining charming in spite of that. Weisz also brings charm to a thankless part, the (again) stereotypically ruthless but beautiful career girl.
For the latest exhibit in the Real Estate Of Cinema Hall of Fame, Definitely offers Will’s apartment, another in a long series of the unbelievably large New York apartments found only in the two-dimensional world. One of my favorites of this ilk was Rhoda Morgenstern’s New York apartment – enormous, with a balcony – on a window dresser’s pay. Yeah, right.
About midway through Definitely, I started wondering about my romantic entanglements. The movie made me rather glad that I’m currently single. Brooks makes love look so complicated and strangely lacking in fun that a life of celibacy, religiously enforced or otherwise, looks better. Once the movie ended and I left the theater, I realized the error of my thinking and I did feel better. But then I didn’t feel bad before I entered the theater…
Written and Directed by Adam Brooks
Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Will Hayes), Abigail Breslin (Maya Hayes), Elizabeth Banks (Emily), Isla Fisher (April). Kevin Kline (Hampton Roth), Rachel Weisz (Summer Hartley)
PLOT: Divorced man Will Hayes explains to his precocious daugher how he met and married her mother. In a series of flashbacks Will courts three women – college sweetheart Emily (Banks), New York temptress Summer (Weisz) and flaky but steadfast April (Isla Fisher) - against a backdrop of 1990s New York.
Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Toward the end of Adam Brooks’ interminable Definitely, Maybe Will Hayes, played by the puppydog sincere Ryan Reynolds, decides to give April (the charming Isla Fisher) thirty seconds to answer her doorbell and take a place in his life. He could give her ten seconds - but then the movie would be twenty seconds shorter, and director Brooks seems to think than length equals quality. Ah, if only.
Those twenty extraneous seconds are an indicator of this film’s main problems, its length and lack of dramatic substance. Almost two hours of watching theoretically witty twenty-somethings dither about their romantic entanglements is about thirty minutes too many. Add in the stereotypically cutesy-poo potty-mouthed child (Abigail Breslin, wasted in a terribly written part), cheaply anachronistic jokes (mainly about Bill Clinton’s romantic peccadilloes), punch lines that raise a guffaw at best, nauseatingly gooey “life lesson” sentiments and – well, if Definitely was a soufflé you could drop it and no one would be the wiser.
The other big problem with the movie is that our hero Will is one really boring guy. He seems to have no interests other than women. True, he has a career in politics, but outside of that, nada. No hobbies for this stiff! And his interest in women seems perfunctory, almost passionless. There’s certainly no sizzle between Reynolds and his three ladies, and the Hollywood notion that these three intelligent, beautiful women would fall for him (two of them more than once) stretches my Eastern seaboard credulity past the breaking point.
The one moment when Will threatens to develop a personality – when he starts to drink too much and self-pityingly lashes out against April – is frittered away by Brooks. Is it because a real problem would upset the fragile balance of this so-called comedy, or is it because Brooks is out of his depth? Will ends up as nothing more than a mouthpiece for some flat-footed witticisms, and Reynolds deserves some credit for remaining charming in spite of that. Weisz also brings charm to a thankless part, the (again) stereotypically ruthless but beautiful career girl.
For the latest exhibit in the Real Estate Of Cinema Hall of Fame, Definitely offers Will’s apartment, another in a long series of the unbelievably large New York apartments found only in the two-dimensional world. One of my favorites of this ilk was Rhoda Morgenstern’s New York apartment – enormous, with a balcony – on a window dresser’s pay. Yeah, right.
About midway through Definitely, I started wondering about my romantic entanglements. The movie made me rather glad that I’m currently single. Brooks makes love look so complicated and strangely lacking in fun that a life of celibacy, religiously enforced or otherwise, looks better. Once the movie ended and I left the theater, I realized the error of my thinking and I did feel better. But then I didn’t feel bad before I entered the theater…
THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT?
Michael Clayton
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Cast: Tom Wilkinson (Arthur Edens), Sydney Pollack (Marty Bach), Tilda Swinton (Karen Crowder), George Clooney (Michael Clayton), Ken Howard (Don Jefferies), Frank Wood (Gerald), Sean Cullen (Det. Gene Clayton)
PLOT: Law firm “fixer” Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is assigned to locate and corral the wayward Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), his good friend, senior partner in the firm and a manic depressive. Arthur has gone off his medication with disastrous results for the firm’s biggest client, a sinister chemical firm fighting a billion-dollar lawsuit alleging environmental poisoning. Clayton soon finds himself surrounded by duplicitous colleagues and murderous henchman.
Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton is the latest entrant in the category of Corporate Film Noir, joining Sidney Lumet’s still disturbing Network and Oliver Stone’s preachy and dated Wall Street. Clayton keeps its eyes myopically trained on a toxic juncture of money, power and murder. That single-minded vision gives Clayton its power to disquiet but also reveals its shortcoming – it’s not very entertaining, being mournful rather than suspenseful, didactic rather than playful. I watched Clayton two weeks ago and the feeling of regret it engendered stays with me, a power not every movie can boast of, but it’s not a movie I would watch again. It’s too joyless a piece of moviemaking for repeat viewing.
That joylessness was highlighted when I watched Brian DePalma’s hypnotic, exultantly cinematic Dressed to Kill for the fifth or sixth time shortly after seeing Clayton. Whether one thinks that Dressed is DePalma’s sick fantasy, his comment on society’s idea of women, an especially alarming gloss on the Hitchcock of Frenzy and Psycho, or an exercise in virtuoso filmmaking and audience manipulation, it is very provoking and entertaining. (How provoking it was on its original release is revealed by DePalma’s commentary on the DVD. He still smarts from some of the attacks made on him and his supposedly misogynistic movie.) DePalma revels in the basic stuff of filmmaking – the manipulation of image and sound. Clayton's director, Tony Gilroy, doesn't revel like DePalma and makes his points in Clayton without leaving room for argument or surprise. Greed and duplicity are bad, stick by your friends, and don’t lie: these are hardly exciting or provoking ideas.
The banality of Gilroy’s ideas would be less obvious if he indulged in some of the baser elements of film noir – sex and suspense. The lack of sex is a daring choice for Gilroy to make, but sex is a staple of the theatrical arts for a reason – it supplies natural tension. Clooney is, in Paris Hilton-speak, a Hottie (not a Nottie), and without a woman to flirt with his considerable charisma is unharmed but the audience is cheated of a basic thrill. Tilda Swinton (playing Crowder, the manipulative lawyer for the chemical firm) is a powerful presence but she and Clooney interact cursorily and without any hint of sex. For the rest of the movie Crowder is an androgynous corporate witch dressed in increasingly ugly outfits, the last of which is a woebegone, almost contemptuous schmatte a high-powered corporate lawyer would never wear, never mind own. By the end of the film Gilroy’s cursory plotting and his contempt for Crowder have made her pathetic, no challenge to Clooney. Their final showdown is not a seat-clenching duel between bloodthirsty equals but a prank on a stooge.
George Clooney is one of those intrinsically beatified actors, like Cary Grant or John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, who it's difficult to kill off in a movie: the audience just isn’t going to buy it. So without a strong adversary for his character, and Crowder is hardly that, suspense is minimal. We expect Clooney will win – so what’s the big deal when he does? The two henchmen on his tail don't have names and are completely personality-free. Whether they live, die or succeed in killing Clooney isn't much of a concern for the viewer, and Crowder's motives are too obscure to either engage or repulse the audience.
The lack of suspense is offset by some considerable pleasures, chief among them Clooney's and Atkinson's performances. Clooney's is a subtle manipulation of his public persona. The sly grin is used as a disguise for self-contempt, the puppy-dog eyes are flirtatious yet pathetic, the handsomeness has artfully gone to seed. Atkinson's demented Arthur Evans is a delightfully showboating madman, almost a parody of one of The Snake Pit’s hammier denizens. All that keeps his performance from funny farm ludicrousness is a well-judged decision not to froth at the mouth. Atkinson's daring staginess really connects with the audience, and Evans's death is very disturbing. Another asset is Gilroy's fine feeling for atmosphere. The gritty set design and the cinematography, which makes even expensive interiors look dirty, add a great deal to the film.
My touchstone for film noir is John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, whose concision of plot and character are a reproach to Michael Clayton's sloppiness. Every character in Falcon has a name and at least one very strong motive (unlike Clayton's almost superfluous henchmen) and it is the combustion of those characters that makes Falcon eternally, iconically enjoyable. Clayton is a fine movie, but a twistier plot and more attention to the details of characterization would have pushed it a little higher in the pantheon of film noir.
Film noir is: man + woman + money = relentless doom and death. Clayton is: man + friend in trouble + androgynous corporate snake = some death, a little destruction, some soul-searching. Not quite the same sting.
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Cast: Tom Wilkinson (Arthur Edens), Sydney Pollack (Marty Bach), Tilda Swinton (Karen Crowder), George Clooney (Michael Clayton), Ken Howard (Don Jefferies), Frank Wood (Gerald), Sean Cullen (Det. Gene Clayton)
PLOT: Law firm “fixer” Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is assigned to locate and corral the wayward Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), his good friend, senior partner in the firm and a manic depressive. Arthur has gone off his medication with disastrous results for the firm’s biggest client, a sinister chemical firm fighting a billion-dollar lawsuit alleging environmental poisoning. Clayton soon finds himself surrounded by duplicitous colleagues and murderous henchman.
Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton is the latest entrant in the category of Corporate Film Noir, joining Sidney Lumet’s still disturbing Network and Oliver Stone’s preachy and dated Wall Street. Clayton keeps its eyes myopically trained on a toxic juncture of money, power and murder. That single-minded vision gives Clayton its power to disquiet but also reveals its shortcoming – it’s not very entertaining, being mournful rather than suspenseful, didactic rather than playful. I watched Clayton two weeks ago and the feeling of regret it engendered stays with me, a power not every movie can boast of, but it’s not a movie I would watch again. It’s too joyless a piece of moviemaking for repeat viewing.
That joylessness was highlighted when I watched Brian DePalma’s hypnotic, exultantly cinematic Dressed to Kill for the fifth or sixth time shortly after seeing Clayton. Whether one thinks that Dressed is DePalma’s sick fantasy, his comment on society’s idea of women, an especially alarming gloss on the Hitchcock of Frenzy and Psycho, or an exercise in virtuoso filmmaking and audience manipulation, it is very provoking and entertaining. (How provoking it was on its original release is revealed by DePalma’s commentary on the DVD. He still smarts from some of the attacks made on him and his supposedly misogynistic movie.) DePalma revels in the basic stuff of filmmaking – the manipulation of image and sound. Clayton's director, Tony Gilroy, doesn't revel like DePalma and makes his points in Clayton without leaving room for argument or surprise. Greed and duplicity are bad, stick by your friends, and don’t lie: these are hardly exciting or provoking ideas.
The banality of Gilroy’s ideas would be less obvious if he indulged in some of the baser elements of film noir – sex and suspense. The lack of sex is a daring choice for Gilroy to make, but sex is a staple of the theatrical arts for a reason – it supplies natural tension. Clooney is, in Paris Hilton-speak, a Hottie (not a Nottie), and without a woman to flirt with his considerable charisma is unharmed but the audience is cheated of a basic thrill. Tilda Swinton (playing Crowder, the manipulative lawyer for the chemical firm) is a powerful presence but she and Clooney interact cursorily and without any hint of sex. For the rest of the movie Crowder is an androgynous corporate witch dressed in increasingly ugly outfits, the last of which is a woebegone, almost contemptuous schmatte a high-powered corporate lawyer would never wear, never mind own. By the end of the film Gilroy’s cursory plotting and his contempt for Crowder have made her pathetic, no challenge to Clooney. Their final showdown is not a seat-clenching duel between bloodthirsty equals but a prank on a stooge.
George Clooney is one of those intrinsically beatified actors, like Cary Grant or John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, who it's difficult to kill off in a movie: the audience just isn’t going to buy it. So without a strong adversary for his character, and Crowder is hardly that, suspense is minimal. We expect Clooney will win – so what’s the big deal when he does? The two henchmen on his tail don't have names and are completely personality-free. Whether they live, die or succeed in killing Clooney isn't much of a concern for the viewer, and Crowder's motives are too obscure to either engage or repulse the audience.
The lack of suspense is offset by some considerable pleasures, chief among them Clooney's and Atkinson's performances. Clooney's is a subtle manipulation of his public persona. The sly grin is used as a disguise for self-contempt, the puppy-dog eyes are flirtatious yet pathetic, the handsomeness has artfully gone to seed. Atkinson's demented Arthur Evans is a delightfully showboating madman, almost a parody of one of The Snake Pit’s hammier denizens. All that keeps his performance from funny farm ludicrousness is a well-judged decision not to froth at the mouth. Atkinson's daring staginess really connects with the audience, and Evans's death is very disturbing. Another asset is Gilroy's fine feeling for atmosphere. The gritty set design and the cinematography, which makes even expensive interiors look dirty, add a great deal to the film.
My touchstone for film noir is John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, whose concision of plot and character are a reproach to Michael Clayton's sloppiness. Every character in Falcon has a name and at least one very strong motive (unlike Clayton's almost superfluous henchmen) and it is the combustion of those characters that makes Falcon eternally, iconically enjoyable. Clayton is a fine movie, but a twistier plot and more attention to the details of characterization would have pushed it a little higher in the pantheon of film noir.
Film noir is: man + woman + money = relentless doom and death. Clayton is: man + friend in trouble + androgynous corporate snake = some death, a little destruction, some soul-searching. Not quite the same sting.
YOU CALL IT PATINA, I CALL IT TARNISH
Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day
Director Bharat Nalluri
Writers David Magee and Simon Beaufoy
Cast Amy Adams (Delysia Lafosse); Shirley Henderson (Edythe Dubarry); Ciarán Hinds (Joe); Frances McDormand (Miss Pettigrew); Lee Pace (Michael); Tom Payne (Phil Goldman); Mark Strong (Nick)
Plot Summary Guinevere Pettigrew is a middle-aged London governess and a complete failure in her profession. Finding herself jobless, homeless and friendless, she inveigles herself as social secretary to starlet Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). She soon discovers that she has become involved in a lovers’ roundelay involving Delysia, her three suitors and Edythe Dubarry (Shirley Henderson), London’s premier dressmaker and supreme gossip.
If you have dangerously high blood pressure, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or are just easily scared, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is the movie for you. Not only will you avoid the risk of precipitating even the most minor medical crisis, you may actually accrue unexpected psychic balm from the soothingly predictable, tried and true, reliable-as-Lassie nature of this film. The reflexive banality of Miss Pettigrew is reassurance that the dusty corner of CinemaLand devoted to tasteful period romances remains untouched by the winds of time or the dogs of war or even the new paradigm shift. Pardon my clichés – and blame Miss Pettigrew.
Researching the idea of cliché led me, via Wikipedia, to “thought-terminating cliché”. What a lovely turn of phrase! Here’s the link, which contains a list of some of the offending phrases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9
But back to the task at hand. The charm of Pettigrew is its three lead actresses, who clearly relish the challenge of filling out the time-frayed contours of the golddigger with the heart of gold (Adams), the put-upon mousy governess (McDormand), and the stylish but shallow socialite (the delicious Shirley Henderson). Adams and Henderson are particularly delightful, the first for her expertly charming mixture of Betty Boop and Debbie Reynolds and the second for her highly stylized, almost Erté-esque socialite, all slink and moué and insinuation. Both actresses deserve a better, more challenging movie. So does McDormand, who has some very funny moments but is mostly a sounding board for her co-stars. Mark Strong, Lee Pace and Ciaran Hinds are the manly side of the picture, Hinds being the standout for contriving to make the entirely improbable acceptable in his role as Henderson’s straying fiancé.
When I bought my ticket, I noticed that the senior citizen price was a full four dollars less than my absurd $11.25 stinger. I thought “How lovely to be retired! I can hardly wait.” I do love a discount, but if Miss Pettigrew is what I have to look forward to I plan to be a full-price model for as long as I can.
Rating 2.5 out of 5
Director Bharat Nalluri
Writers David Magee and Simon Beaufoy
Cast Amy Adams (Delysia Lafosse); Shirley Henderson (Edythe Dubarry); Ciarán Hinds (Joe); Frances McDormand (Miss Pettigrew); Lee Pace (Michael); Tom Payne (Phil Goldman); Mark Strong (Nick)
Plot Summary Guinevere Pettigrew is a middle-aged London governess and a complete failure in her profession. Finding herself jobless, homeless and friendless, she inveigles herself as social secretary to starlet Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). She soon discovers that she has become involved in a lovers’ roundelay involving Delysia, her three suitors and Edythe Dubarry (Shirley Henderson), London’s premier dressmaker and supreme gossip.
If you have dangerously high blood pressure, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or are just easily scared, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is the movie for you. Not only will you avoid the risk of precipitating even the most minor medical crisis, you may actually accrue unexpected psychic balm from the soothingly predictable, tried and true, reliable-as-Lassie nature of this film. The reflexive banality of Miss Pettigrew is reassurance that the dusty corner of CinemaLand devoted to tasteful period romances remains untouched by the winds of time or the dogs of war or even the new paradigm shift. Pardon my clichés – and blame Miss Pettigrew.
Researching the idea of cliché led me, via Wikipedia, to “thought-terminating cliché”. What a lovely turn of phrase! Here’s the link, which contains a list of some of the offending phrases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9
But back to the task at hand. The charm of Pettigrew is its three lead actresses, who clearly relish the challenge of filling out the time-frayed contours of the golddigger with the heart of gold (Adams), the put-upon mousy governess (McDormand), and the stylish but shallow socialite (the delicious Shirley Henderson). Adams and Henderson are particularly delightful, the first for her expertly charming mixture of Betty Boop and Debbie Reynolds and the second for her highly stylized, almost Erté-esque socialite, all slink and moué and insinuation. Both actresses deserve a better, more challenging movie. So does McDormand, who has some very funny moments but is mostly a sounding board for her co-stars. Mark Strong, Lee Pace and Ciaran Hinds are the manly side of the picture, Hinds being the standout for contriving to make the entirely improbable acceptable in his role as Henderson’s straying fiancé.
When I bought my ticket, I noticed that the senior citizen price was a full four dollars less than my absurd $11.25 stinger. I thought “How lovely to be retired! I can hardly wait.” I do love a discount, but if Miss Pettigrew is what I have to look forward to I plan to be a full-price model for as long as I can.
Rating 2.5 out of 5
SAME TIME, LAST YEAR - OR NOT?
Last Year at Marienbad
(L’Année dernière à Marienbad)
(France, 1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais; Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Plot Summary: Enigmatic tale of a love triangle in an unnamed, sumptuous but gloomy resort hotel. The hotel’s guests are sleekly dressed sophisticates who repeat inane dialogue while playing nitwitted board games. The three main characters have no names. The woman (Delphine Seyrig) may or may not have had an affair (last year at Marienbad, or was it Karlstadt?) with the man (Giorgio Albertazzi) and she may or may not be married to the other man (Sacha Pitoeff) who may or may not have killed her. After many eye-popping costume changes for Seyrig and no resolution of the non-plot, night falls over the hotel and its lights are extinguished.
According to a flyer posted in the theater lobby, Francis Ford Coppola has seen Last Year at Marienbad several times and is still not sure what it means, quite a comment from the man who brought us the inexplicable One From the Heart. It’s also a tribute to his fortitude as a moviegoer. At its hypnotic best, Last Year at Marienbad is a piece of art, striking, original and well out of the aesthetic orbit of most movies. It’s also so repetitive, sophomoric, and somnolent that its 94-minute running time is an endurance test to rival anything by Godard or Bresson.
Resnais and Robbe-Grillet use film technique to mesmerize the viewer into a queer semi-conscious state of half-remembered dreads and existential angst. Loopy, repetitive dialogue, a disregard for temporal clarity and fascination with baroque visuals are Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s ingredients, and the recipe works for about forty-five minutes. After that, you might tire of the Last Year's warmed-over ideas about love and death and the nature of society. That the ideas are never very clear might be an indication of their insubstantiality – it’s the emperor’s new clothes, philosophy department, subdivision existentialism. You’ve encountered the ideas if you have seen or read any Beckett or Sartre, but Last Year's are clothed in haute couture instead of Beckett’s antic humor or Sartre’s intellectual rigor. The high-style is no substitute for depth.
Last Year's visuals are astonishing. Seyrig’s costumes are like a Diana Ross concert: she can’t possibly top the last frock, but she does. The most amazing of all is her second-to-last, a white feathered creation that looks like the product of an erotic encounter between costume designer Coco Chanel and an egret. The camerawork, lighting and art direction are also on this stratospheric level. The camera floats sinuously through the hotel for the first ten minutes of the film, only the first of many examples of the cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s art. (Vierny was also the cinematographer for The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, another example of beautifully photographed pretentiousness.) The use of quick cuts to dislocate the viewer are so well done that its eventual overuse is forgivable, and the film lighting, baroque and sinister, is a painterly. But no matter how sumptuous, the visuals can't carry the movie over its trouble spots, most specifically its plot, dialogue and music.
That side of the picture is torture. The music, a swill of glamorous but forgettable orchestral music and organ dirges, could be sold as an over-the-counter sleep medication. (It couldn’t possibly be addictive.) The dialogue – the man endlessly beseeching the woman to remember last year and woman’s relentless rejections – is maddeningly repetitive. His narration is just as irksome. I silently cheered every time the woman suggests that he leave her be and go away – maybe the movie will finally end! But no, he keeps on narrating... it’s a metafictional Agatha Christie, Death by Narration.
Last Year is so unique that I’d suggest you see it at least once — it’s required viewing for the cultural sophisticate and not without its merits. But drink some strong coffee first and bring along a forgiving friend to poke you awake.
Rating: 5 out of 5. Essential viewing, but consider yourself warned.
(L’Année dernière à Marienbad)
(France, 1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais; Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Plot Summary: Enigmatic tale of a love triangle in an unnamed, sumptuous but gloomy resort hotel. The hotel’s guests are sleekly dressed sophisticates who repeat inane dialogue while playing nitwitted board games. The three main characters have no names. The woman (Delphine Seyrig) may or may not have had an affair (last year at Marienbad, or was it Karlstadt?) with the man (Giorgio Albertazzi) and she may or may not be married to the other man (Sacha Pitoeff) who may or may not have killed her. After many eye-popping costume changes for Seyrig and no resolution of the non-plot, night falls over the hotel and its lights are extinguished.
According to a flyer posted in the theater lobby, Francis Ford Coppola has seen Last Year at Marienbad several times and is still not sure what it means, quite a comment from the man who brought us the inexplicable One From the Heart. It’s also a tribute to his fortitude as a moviegoer. At its hypnotic best, Last Year at Marienbad is a piece of art, striking, original and well out of the aesthetic orbit of most movies. It’s also so repetitive, sophomoric, and somnolent that its 94-minute running time is an endurance test to rival anything by Godard or Bresson.
Resnais and Robbe-Grillet use film technique to mesmerize the viewer into a queer semi-conscious state of half-remembered dreads and existential angst. Loopy, repetitive dialogue, a disregard for temporal clarity and fascination with baroque visuals are Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s ingredients, and the recipe works for about forty-five minutes. After that, you might tire of the Last Year's warmed-over ideas about love and death and the nature of society. That the ideas are never very clear might be an indication of their insubstantiality – it’s the emperor’s new clothes, philosophy department, subdivision existentialism. You’ve encountered the ideas if you have seen or read any Beckett or Sartre, but Last Year's are clothed in haute couture instead of Beckett’s antic humor or Sartre’s intellectual rigor. The high-style is no substitute for depth.
Last Year's visuals are astonishing. Seyrig’s costumes are like a Diana Ross concert: she can’t possibly top the last frock, but she does. The most amazing of all is her second-to-last, a white feathered creation that looks like the product of an erotic encounter between costume designer Coco Chanel and an egret. The camerawork, lighting and art direction are also on this stratospheric level. The camera floats sinuously through the hotel for the first ten minutes of the film, only the first of many examples of the cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s art. (Vierny was also the cinematographer for The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, another example of beautifully photographed pretentiousness.) The use of quick cuts to dislocate the viewer are so well done that its eventual overuse is forgivable, and the film lighting, baroque and sinister, is a painterly. But no matter how sumptuous, the visuals can't carry the movie over its trouble spots, most specifically its plot, dialogue and music.
That side of the picture is torture. The music, a swill of glamorous but forgettable orchestral music and organ dirges, could be sold as an over-the-counter sleep medication. (It couldn’t possibly be addictive.) The dialogue – the man endlessly beseeching the woman to remember last year and woman’s relentless rejections – is maddeningly repetitive. His narration is just as irksome. I silently cheered every time the woman suggests that he leave her be and go away – maybe the movie will finally end! But no, he keeps on narrating... it’s a metafictional Agatha Christie, Death by Narration.
Last Year is so unique that I’d suggest you see it at least once — it’s required viewing for the cultural sophisticate and not without its merits. But drink some strong coffee first and bring along a forgiving friend to poke you awake.
Rating: 5 out of 5. Essential viewing, but consider yourself warned.
I DON'T WANT TO GO TO REHAB (ZERO TO 2.5 STARS)
Everyone's got an addiction - mine, like many people's, is Netflix. My queue is stuffed to saturation, my day revolves around making time to watch a movie and keep my queue moving, and I've become overly familiar with the pickup times at my local mailboxes – but there's a silver lining: a cornucopia of reviews.
The reviews are broken up into three sections by their starred rating: 5 stars, 3 to 4.5, and 0 to 2.5. Movies that make my Top Ten or Top Twenty are marked as such. There's also a hall of shame -– the Bottom Ten.
ZERO STARS
Two for the Road (1967)
Bottom Ten
Unendurable, faux-sophisticated tripe about a married couple (Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney) and the various stages of their marriage, from carefree youth to embittered middle age. Hepburn and Finney are two of the most charismatic of movie stars but their roles as a shrew and a bully waste their talents. Hepburn wears some astonishing outfits, but fashion shows are usually ten minutes long, not 112. The broad caricatures of Americans (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron) are symptomatic of the reflexive English snobbery this movie wallows in. The idiotic script, a cornucopia of trite dramatics and moronic ponderings on the emptiness of success, is by Frederic Raphael and was nominated for an Academy Award. Go figure.
1.5 STARS
The Fortune Cookie (1966)
A Billy Wilder misfire. After Jack Lemmon is hurt at a Cleveland Browns football game, his lawyer brother-in-law Walter Matthau steps in to make them both a fortune. Matthau is a breath of fresh air in what is otherwise a stale, sour comedy.
The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
Irritating and overlong animated film about a bicyclist, his mother and the eponymous triplets. The theme song will crawl into the corner of your brain reserved for irritants like Achy Breaky Heart and The Macarena.
What's New Pussycat? (1965)
Spoilt milk disguised as a frothy romantic comedy. The animated opening credits are the high point of the film. Paula Prentiss, who’s made far too few films, brings a goony comic punch to her scenes, but the rest is almost unendurable. Also stars Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, Romy Schneider and Woody Allen in his first big-screen performance. Allen also wrote the film. He’s improved since then.
TWO STARS
Funny Face (1957)
Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn star in this theoretically lighthearted musical about a photographer (Astaire) who discovers the mousy Hepburn in a bookstore, turns her into a world-famous fashion model and falls in love with her. The big problem is that Astaire, thirty years Hepburn’s senior, is simply too old to play the part of an antic genius. Their December-May romance is both unbelievable and a little disturbing; watching Astaire woo Hepburn with a song and dance act is embarrassing, and his trip to the “bohemian” side of Paris is no help. Fortunately, Kay Thompson, gonzo musical comedy performer (and author of the Eloise books), is on hand to liven things up. Her solo number “Think Pink” and her duet with Astaire are the highlights of the film. She’s a confident pro whooping it up. The film is not without some other pleasures. The satire of the fashion world is fitfully amusing, and the springtime Paris locations are beautifully shot by cinematographer Ray June. Songs by Gershwin include S’Wonderful, He Loves and She Loves and the title tune.
Muriel's Wedding (1994)
Married With Children meets Diane Arbus, Muriel’s Wedding is a queasy mixture of comedy and unpleasant family melodrama. Many viewers describe it as funny, but it’s cheap sadistic voyeurism, like laughing at tone-deaf karaoke or the dimwits of The Jerry Springer Show. Toni Collette is fearless as the matrimonially desperate Muriel and Rachel Griffiths pizzazzes things up.
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Highly praised, heavy-handed melodrama about social class based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Place is mostly remarkable now for its shockingly beautiful co-stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Clift has one of the great film entrances: first seen hitchhiking with his back turned to the camera, he turns to face the audience and his handsomeness is thrilling. Unfortunately that’s the high point of the movie, and there’s two more hours of predestined tragedy to grind through. Co-stars Shelley Winters as Clift’s lower-class girlfriend.
Repulsion (1965)
Roman Polanski flick, admired by many. Catherine Deneuve, young and almost impossibly beautiful, stars as a deranged young woman. That’s the plot – she’s deranged. She’s deranged in the kitchen, she’s deranged in the living room, she’s deranged in the street. The bathroom, too. In spite of Polanski’s considerable technique and inventiveness, all the derangement is really quite dull.
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Celebrated late 60s high-toned schlock. Faye Dunaway plays a beautifully dressed insurance investor on the track of gentleman bandit Steve McQueen. Dunaway is fun to watch in spite of the thin material, but the handsome McQueen brings his minimalist acting style to a new low. He’s got one facial expression and he uses it profligately. Remade with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in 1999.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Oddly tension-free thriller directed by Sidney Pollack. Robert Redford plays a low-level CIA employee on the run from a cabal of rogue CIA agents, Faye Dunaway is his unwilling accomplice, Cliff Robertson is Redford’s boss, and Max Von Sydow plays an amusedly amoral killer. The first twenty minutes, during which all of Redford’s coworkers are murdered, is nerve-crackling but the rest of the movie mosies by unthrillingly. Redford makes much of the movie work through star power and physical beauty, but Dunaway is miscast as a stereotypically helpful handmaiden. She’s just not a passive presence – asking her to be a girlish victim is like hiring Bette Davis to water your houseplants. Dunaway has one good, very funny scene in which she helps Redford kidnap Robertson; you can see the relief in her eyes at having something to do other than simper. Robertson sports one of the more astonishing of cinematic hairdos, a combover so elevated it approaches Eraserhead status. The dialogue has one classic howler: Redford: “Well, at least I haven’t raped you!” Dunaway: “The night is young!”
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Steve Coogan is great as the late Tony Wilson, record producer and TV personality who spearheaded the Manchester music scene of the 1980s. The movie itself doesn’t quite come up to his level – it’s a scattershot affair, excitingly filmed but dramatically inert. The most moving part of the film is the saga of Ian Curtis, the doomed lead singer of Joy Division. Also starring Shirley Henderson.
The reviews are broken up into three sections by their starred rating: 5 stars, 3 to 4.5, and 0 to 2.5. Movies that make my Top Ten or Top Twenty are marked as such. There's also a hall of shame -– the Bottom Ten.
ZERO STARS
Two for the Road (1967)
Bottom Ten
Unendurable, faux-sophisticated tripe about a married couple (Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney) and the various stages of their marriage, from carefree youth to embittered middle age. Hepburn and Finney are two of the most charismatic of movie stars but their roles as a shrew and a bully waste their talents. Hepburn wears some astonishing outfits, but fashion shows are usually ten minutes long, not 112. The broad caricatures of Americans (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron) are symptomatic of the reflexive English snobbery this movie wallows in. The idiotic script, a cornucopia of trite dramatics and moronic ponderings on the emptiness of success, is by Frederic Raphael and was nominated for an Academy Award. Go figure.
1.5 STARS
The Fortune Cookie (1966)
A Billy Wilder misfire. After Jack Lemmon is hurt at a Cleveland Browns football game, his lawyer brother-in-law Walter Matthau steps in to make them both a fortune. Matthau is a breath of fresh air in what is otherwise a stale, sour comedy.
The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
Irritating and overlong animated film about a bicyclist, his mother and the eponymous triplets. The theme song will crawl into the corner of your brain reserved for irritants like Achy Breaky Heart and The Macarena.
What's New Pussycat? (1965)
Spoilt milk disguised as a frothy romantic comedy. The animated opening credits are the high point of the film. Paula Prentiss, who’s made far too few films, brings a goony comic punch to her scenes, but the rest is almost unendurable. Also stars Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, Romy Schneider and Woody Allen in his first big-screen performance. Allen also wrote the film. He’s improved since then.
TWO STARS
Funny Face (1957)
Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn star in this theoretically lighthearted musical about a photographer (Astaire) who discovers the mousy Hepburn in a bookstore, turns her into a world-famous fashion model and falls in love with her. The big problem is that Astaire, thirty years Hepburn’s senior, is simply too old to play the part of an antic genius. Their December-May romance is both unbelievable and a little disturbing; watching Astaire woo Hepburn with a song and dance act is embarrassing, and his trip to the “bohemian” side of Paris is no help. Fortunately, Kay Thompson, gonzo musical comedy performer (and author of the Eloise books), is on hand to liven things up. Her solo number “Think Pink” and her duet with Astaire are the highlights of the film. She’s a confident pro whooping it up. The film is not without some other pleasures. The satire of the fashion world is fitfully amusing, and the springtime Paris locations are beautifully shot by cinematographer Ray June. Songs by Gershwin include S’Wonderful, He Loves and She Loves and the title tune.
Muriel's Wedding (1994)
Married With Children meets Diane Arbus, Muriel’s Wedding is a queasy mixture of comedy and unpleasant family melodrama. Many viewers describe it as funny, but it’s cheap sadistic voyeurism, like laughing at tone-deaf karaoke or the dimwits of The Jerry Springer Show. Toni Collette is fearless as the matrimonially desperate Muriel and Rachel Griffiths pizzazzes things up.
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Highly praised, heavy-handed melodrama about social class based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Place is mostly remarkable now for its shockingly beautiful co-stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Clift has one of the great film entrances: first seen hitchhiking with his back turned to the camera, he turns to face the audience and his handsomeness is thrilling. Unfortunately that’s the high point of the movie, and there’s two more hours of predestined tragedy to grind through. Co-stars Shelley Winters as Clift’s lower-class girlfriend.
Repulsion (1965)
Roman Polanski flick, admired by many. Catherine Deneuve, young and almost impossibly beautiful, stars as a deranged young woman. That’s the plot – she’s deranged. She’s deranged in the kitchen, she’s deranged in the living room, she’s deranged in the street. The bathroom, too. In spite of Polanski’s considerable technique and inventiveness, all the derangement is really quite dull.
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Celebrated late 60s high-toned schlock. Faye Dunaway plays a beautifully dressed insurance investor on the track of gentleman bandit Steve McQueen. Dunaway is fun to watch in spite of the thin material, but the handsome McQueen brings his minimalist acting style to a new low. He’s got one facial expression and he uses it profligately. Remade with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in 1999.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Oddly tension-free thriller directed by Sidney Pollack. Robert Redford plays a low-level CIA employee on the run from a cabal of rogue CIA agents, Faye Dunaway is his unwilling accomplice, Cliff Robertson is Redford’s boss, and Max Von Sydow plays an amusedly amoral killer. The first twenty minutes, during which all of Redford’s coworkers are murdered, is nerve-crackling but the rest of the movie mosies by unthrillingly. Redford makes much of the movie work through star power and physical beauty, but Dunaway is miscast as a stereotypically helpful handmaiden. She’s just not a passive presence – asking her to be a girlish victim is like hiring Bette Davis to water your houseplants. Dunaway has one good, very funny scene in which she helps Redford kidnap Robertson; you can see the relief in her eyes at having something to do other than simper. Robertson sports one of the more astonishing of cinematic hairdos, a combover so elevated it approaches Eraserhead status. The dialogue has one classic howler: Redford: “Well, at least I haven’t raped you!” Dunaway: “The night is young!”
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Steve Coogan is great as the late Tony Wilson, record producer and TV personality who spearheaded the Manchester music scene of the 1980s. The movie itself doesn’t quite come up to his level – it’s a scattershot affair, excitingly filmed but dramatically inert. The most moving part of the film is the saga of Ian Curtis, the doomed lead singer of Joy Division. Also starring Shirley Henderson.
I DON'T WANT TO GO TO REHAB (3 TO 4.5 STARS)
Everyone's got an addiction - mine, like many people's, is Netflix. My queue is stuffed to saturation, my day revolves around making time to watch a movie and keep my queue moving, and I've become overly familiar with the pickup times at my local mailboxes – but there's a silver lining: a cornucopia of reviews.
The reviews are broken up into three sections by their starred rating: 5 stars, 3 to 4.5, and 0 to 2.5. Movies that make my Top Ten or Top Twenty are marked as such. There's also a hall of shame -– the Bottom Ten.
THREE STARS
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Keir Dullea (of 2001), Carol Lynley, Laurence Olivier and Noel Coward star in Otto Preminger’s dank melodrama about a missing child and a hysterical mother. Not a particularly good movie, but the savory Olivier hams it up and Coward, along with a host of British actors in cameo roles, make it worth a once-over.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Jeanne Moreau stars as an adulterous murderess in this French film noir, the first directorial effort from Louis Malle. It’s like Godard’s Breathless fleshed out with a good plot and realistic characters and is much superior to that overrated “masterpiece”. Maurice Ronet co-stars as Moreau’s patsy of a boyfriend and Jean Wall is her rich but unwanted husband. The plot mechanics twist around an elaborate murder plot that goes without a hitch – except for that wayward elevator. Miles Davis composed and performed the score. The one drawback to the movie is a long sequence that features Moreau wandering through a glitteringly noctural Paris while she mutters inanities about love. It’s really silly and quite out of place in what is otherwise a trim little thriller.
Peyton Place (1957)
Lana Turner stars in this Technicolor soap opera, based on the best-selling novel of the same name. Risqué for its time, Peyton Place now seems rather talky and stiff. Youthful co-stars Hope Lange and Diane Varsi bring some zip to the proceedings, but it’s still a long slog.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Walter Matthau stars in this gritty thriller about a subway car hijacked by a gang of go-for-broke criminals led by Robert Shaw and including a youthful Hector Elizondo and the perennial Martin Balsam. Matthau leavens the somewhat repulsive goings-on with his patented brand of hang-dog cynical humor. The movie is fascinating for its glimpse of a much different New York City. One of Quentin Tarantino’s many sources for Reservoir Dogs; the Pelham hijackers are code-named Mr. Blue, Mr. Pink, etc.
3.5 STARS
Barbra Streisand: The Television Specials
My Name is Barbra and A Happening in Central Park are the clear winners in this package and are essential viewing for all Barbraphiles. Both specials show Streisand at her singular best. Color Me Barbra is campy fun, but the other two segments are only sporadically entertaining. The whole package charts the evolution of Streisand from an affected but powerful performer to glossy Hollywood royalty.
The Deep End (2001)
Tilda Swinton and Goran Visnjic star in this remake of genius director Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment (1949). Swinton is the mother desperate to save her gay teenage son from a possible murder charge and Visnjic is the morally confused blackmailer on her trail. Swinton uses her remarkably ascetic and powerful screen presence as a hermetic weapon; she doesn’t engage with others so much as plow them over or bounce off them. The Deep End was filmed around Lake Tahoe and co-stars Jonathan Tucker as the son and Josh Lucas as the dead guy.
Divorce, Italian Style (1961)
This acerbically plotted, highly amusing comedy stars Marcello Mastroianni as a beleagured husband who wants to divorce his wife and marry his lovely and much younger girlfriend. Mastroianni’s finely tuned performance as a hangdog roué caught in a comic web of lust and murder is memorable.
I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
Tom Tryon and Gloria Talbott star as newlyweds whose honeymoon is interrupted by a body-snatching monster in this 1958 low budgeter. More like film noir than sci fi and part of the paranoiac tradition that includes Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Blade Runner, Married displays a cynical intelligence about societal mores that make it a distinctive addition to the genre.
Swimming Pool, France (2003)
Fans of Patricia Highsmith’s glowering suspense stories will enjoy this sun-kissed twister. Charlotte Rampling plays a repressed mystery writer who goes on vacation to the South of France and gets a lot more than a nice tan. Voluptuous Ludivine Sagnier co-stars as the fly in the ointment. Rampling’s witty performance is the polar opposite of her melancholic turn in Under the Sand, also directed by François Ozon.
Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse (1996)
Everything you always wanted to know about… George Balanchine and dancer Suzanne Farrell’s professional and personal relationship. If you’re interested in ballet history, this is a must-see. The footage of Farrell in performance is revelatory.
The World of Henry Orient (1964)
The eccentric but affecting tale of two footloose adolescent girls in pursuit of rakish, dimwitted classical pianist Henry Orient (Peter Sellars). Angela Lansbury and Paula Prentiss co-star and both turn in distinctive performances, Lansbury’s a close cousin to her malevolent turn in The Manchurian Candidate. Henry Orient might be billed as a comedy, but its bitter view of the machinations surrounding romantic love give the film a distinctively melancholic tang.
FOUR STARS
Contempt (Le Mepris) (1963)
Godard’s Cinemascope essay on the perils of filmmaking stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance and fabled director Fritz Lang as himself. Contempt is fascinating and infuriating, beautiful and boring, sincere and cynical. Filled with references to classical mythology, his own films and his personal life, it’s catnip for serious-minded filmgoers. For the rest of us, even if much of the film seems tedious, the beauties on display – Bardot, Rome, Capri – are entertaining. The most brazen sequence in the movie is a twenty-minute long argument between Bardot and Piccoli that’s shot within one small room in real time. It’s like being trapped in someone else’s marital disarray and is a most disquieting experience, itchily, uncomfortably entertaining. Contempt justifies Godard’s exalted reputation as a rebel genius much more than any of his other films. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia.
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger star as a black Philadelphia cop and a small-town Southern sheriff involved in solving a murder. Heat hasn’t dated as message movies are wont to do; it still carries an emotional punch. Both lead actors are excellent (Steiger won an Oscar) and Lee Grant, as the victim’s wife, makes her few minutes of screen time really count. The cinematography by legendary Haskell Wexler is both beautiful and dramatically pungent. Wunderkind director Hal Ashby was the film editor.
Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960)
An enchanting record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, cherishable not just for capturing jazz immortals – Thelonious Monk, George Shearing, Gerry Mulligan, Big Maybelle, Louis Armstrong, among others – in their prime but also for its luxuriously tactile record of a sensuous East Coast summer. The peak of the movie is a wackily behatted Anita O’Day giving the performance of a lifetime – hers, yours and mine. If you need a summer vacation or have the wintertime blues, watch this movie for an instant cure.
The Long Goodbye (1973)
One of the highly overrated Robert Altman’s few good films. Raymond Chandler’s 1954 novel – his best and a true American classic – is updated to the 1970s. Elliott Gould stars as a hapless post-hippie version of gumshoe Philip Marlowe, Sterling Hayden turns in a monumental performance as a deranged alcoholic, and Frigidaire-cool blonde Nina Van Pallandt is the femme fatale. Also stars Mark Rydell as a vicious thug and Jim Bouton as Marlowe’s erstwhile friend.
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Top-notch British sci-fi/horror from the late 60s, Quatermass is the story of a London subway excavation that unearths remnants of Martian civilization on earth. The results are predictably dire, but the film’s suggestiveness and simple but terrifying effects make it a very special movie. Highly recommended.
4.5 STARS
Caballe: Beyond Music (2003)
A documentary about Montserrat Caballé, the Spanish opera singer and one of the great stars of classical music. Caballé is almost impossibly endearing, with a winsomeness that belies her magnificence. Performance films and interviews with her family and operatic compatriots give a good sense of her prodigious talent and the regard with which she is held. The only drawback to the film – it ends. There’s no such thing as too much Montsi.
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Another Pressburger/Powell success. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstrong young woman on her way to her wedding on a remote Hebrides island. Her obstinacy in the face of nature’s unwillingness to accommodate her plans causes havoc for all. A delightful, very relaxed adult comedy.
It's a Gift (1934)
W.C. Fields at his considerable best. The shambolic, almost surreal plot lets Fields and his cohorts (including Fields’ infantile nemesis Baby LeRoy) make unforgettable comic hay. Essential viewing for fans of American comedy.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Hitchcock demonstrates both his mastery of the spy film genre and his genius in transforming its basics into an experience uniquely thrilling and comic. Dame May Whitty is the disappearing lady, Margaret Lockwood is the suspicious fellow passenger, and Michael Redgrave (father of Vanessa and Lynn) the foppish folklorist who helps Lockwood uncover the truth. The character actors who give the film its distinctive tang include Paul Lukas, Googie Withers, and most especially Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as two cricket-obsessed passengers. Most of the action takes place on a train trip across unnamed but hostile European countries and the tone of the film clearly reflects a late 1930s anxiety about war.
Petulia (1968)
The ineffable Julie Christie stars as Petulia, a young woman with a bad husband in gorgeous rich boy Richard Chamberlain and an adulterous yen for George C. Scott’s divorced doctor. Christie is in her prime both as an actress and a great beauty, and Scott is hammily effective as the bewildered object of her affections. The last shot of Christie will haunt you. Shirley Knight and Joseph Cotton are also on handto give notable performances, and Janis Joplin performs in an early party sequence. The movie is worth watching just for its late 60s San Francisco setting, exquisitely photographed by Nicolas Roeg (soon to turn to directing himself). Richard Lester directed.
The reviews are broken up into three sections by their starred rating: 5 stars, 3 to 4.5, and 0 to 2.5. Movies that make my Top Ten or Top Twenty are marked as such. There's also a hall of shame -– the Bottom Ten.
THREE STARS
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Keir Dullea (of 2001), Carol Lynley, Laurence Olivier and Noel Coward star in Otto Preminger’s dank melodrama about a missing child and a hysterical mother. Not a particularly good movie, but the savory Olivier hams it up and Coward, along with a host of British actors in cameo roles, make it worth a once-over.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Jeanne Moreau stars as an adulterous murderess in this French film noir, the first directorial effort from Louis Malle. It’s like Godard’s Breathless fleshed out with a good plot and realistic characters and is much superior to that overrated “masterpiece”. Maurice Ronet co-stars as Moreau’s patsy of a boyfriend and Jean Wall is her rich but unwanted husband. The plot mechanics twist around an elaborate murder plot that goes without a hitch – except for that wayward elevator. Miles Davis composed and performed the score. The one drawback to the movie is a long sequence that features Moreau wandering through a glitteringly noctural Paris while she mutters inanities about love. It’s really silly and quite out of place in what is otherwise a trim little thriller.
Peyton Place (1957)
Lana Turner stars in this Technicolor soap opera, based on the best-selling novel of the same name. Risqué for its time, Peyton Place now seems rather talky and stiff. Youthful co-stars Hope Lange and Diane Varsi bring some zip to the proceedings, but it’s still a long slog.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Walter Matthau stars in this gritty thriller about a subway car hijacked by a gang of go-for-broke criminals led by Robert Shaw and including a youthful Hector Elizondo and the perennial Martin Balsam. Matthau leavens the somewhat repulsive goings-on with his patented brand of hang-dog cynical humor. The movie is fascinating for its glimpse of a much different New York City. One of Quentin Tarantino’s many sources for Reservoir Dogs; the Pelham hijackers are code-named Mr. Blue, Mr. Pink, etc.
3.5 STARS
Barbra Streisand: The Television Specials
My Name is Barbra and A Happening in Central Park are the clear winners in this package and are essential viewing for all Barbraphiles. Both specials show Streisand at her singular best. Color Me Barbra is campy fun, but the other two segments are only sporadically entertaining. The whole package charts the evolution of Streisand from an affected but powerful performer to glossy Hollywood royalty.
The Deep End (2001)
Tilda Swinton and Goran Visnjic star in this remake of genius director Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment (1949). Swinton is the mother desperate to save her gay teenage son from a possible murder charge and Visnjic is the morally confused blackmailer on her trail. Swinton uses her remarkably ascetic and powerful screen presence as a hermetic weapon; she doesn’t engage with others so much as plow them over or bounce off them. The Deep End was filmed around Lake Tahoe and co-stars Jonathan Tucker as the son and Josh Lucas as the dead guy.
Divorce, Italian Style (1961)
This acerbically plotted, highly amusing comedy stars Marcello Mastroianni as a beleagured husband who wants to divorce his wife and marry his lovely and much younger girlfriend. Mastroianni’s finely tuned performance as a hangdog roué caught in a comic web of lust and murder is memorable.
I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
Tom Tryon and Gloria Talbott star as newlyweds whose honeymoon is interrupted by a body-snatching monster in this 1958 low budgeter. More like film noir than sci fi and part of the paranoiac tradition that includes Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Blade Runner, Married displays a cynical intelligence about societal mores that make it a distinctive addition to the genre.
Swimming Pool, France (2003)
Fans of Patricia Highsmith’s glowering suspense stories will enjoy this sun-kissed twister. Charlotte Rampling plays a repressed mystery writer who goes on vacation to the South of France and gets a lot more than a nice tan. Voluptuous Ludivine Sagnier co-stars as the fly in the ointment. Rampling’s witty performance is the polar opposite of her melancholic turn in Under the Sand, also directed by François Ozon.
Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse (1996)
Everything you always wanted to know about… George Balanchine and dancer Suzanne Farrell’s professional and personal relationship. If you’re interested in ballet history, this is a must-see. The footage of Farrell in performance is revelatory.
The World of Henry Orient (1964)
The eccentric but affecting tale of two footloose adolescent girls in pursuit of rakish, dimwitted classical pianist Henry Orient (Peter Sellars). Angela Lansbury and Paula Prentiss co-star and both turn in distinctive performances, Lansbury’s a close cousin to her malevolent turn in The Manchurian Candidate. Henry Orient might be billed as a comedy, but its bitter view of the machinations surrounding romantic love give the film a distinctively melancholic tang.
FOUR STARS
Contempt (Le Mepris) (1963)
Godard’s Cinemascope essay on the perils of filmmaking stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance and fabled director Fritz Lang as himself. Contempt is fascinating and infuriating, beautiful and boring, sincere and cynical. Filled with references to classical mythology, his own films and his personal life, it’s catnip for serious-minded filmgoers. For the rest of us, even if much of the film seems tedious, the beauties on display – Bardot, Rome, Capri – are entertaining. The most brazen sequence in the movie is a twenty-minute long argument between Bardot and Piccoli that’s shot within one small room in real time. It’s like being trapped in someone else’s marital disarray and is a most disquieting experience, itchily, uncomfortably entertaining. Contempt justifies Godard’s exalted reputation as a rebel genius much more than any of his other films. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia.
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger star as a black Philadelphia cop and a small-town Southern sheriff involved in solving a murder. Heat hasn’t dated as message movies are wont to do; it still carries an emotional punch. Both lead actors are excellent (Steiger won an Oscar) and Lee Grant, as the victim’s wife, makes her few minutes of screen time really count. The cinematography by legendary Haskell Wexler is both beautiful and dramatically pungent. Wunderkind director Hal Ashby was the film editor.
Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960)
An enchanting record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, cherishable not just for capturing jazz immortals – Thelonious Monk, George Shearing, Gerry Mulligan, Big Maybelle, Louis Armstrong, among others – in their prime but also for its luxuriously tactile record of a sensuous East Coast summer. The peak of the movie is a wackily behatted Anita O’Day giving the performance of a lifetime – hers, yours and mine. If you need a summer vacation or have the wintertime blues, watch this movie for an instant cure.
The Long Goodbye (1973)
One of the highly overrated Robert Altman’s few good films. Raymond Chandler’s 1954 novel – his best and a true American classic – is updated to the 1970s. Elliott Gould stars as a hapless post-hippie version of gumshoe Philip Marlowe, Sterling Hayden turns in a monumental performance as a deranged alcoholic, and Frigidaire-cool blonde Nina Van Pallandt is the femme fatale. Also stars Mark Rydell as a vicious thug and Jim Bouton as Marlowe’s erstwhile friend.
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Top-notch British sci-fi/horror from the late 60s, Quatermass is the story of a London subway excavation that unearths remnants of Martian civilization on earth. The results are predictably dire, but the film’s suggestiveness and simple but terrifying effects make it a very special movie. Highly recommended.
4.5 STARS
Caballe: Beyond Music (2003)
A documentary about Montserrat Caballé, the Spanish opera singer and one of the great stars of classical music. Caballé is almost impossibly endearing, with a winsomeness that belies her magnificence. Performance films and interviews with her family and operatic compatriots give a good sense of her prodigious talent and the regard with which she is held. The only drawback to the film – it ends. There’s no such thing as too much Montsi.
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Another Pressburger/Powell success. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstrong young woman on her way to her wedding on a remote Hebrides island. Her obstinacy in the face of nature’s unwillingness to accommodate her plans causes havoc for all. A delightful, very relaxed adult comedy.
It's a Gift (1934)
W.C. Fields at his considerable best. The shambolic, almost surreal plot lets Fields and his cohorts (including Fields’ infantile nemesis Baby LeRoy) make unforgettable comic hay. Essential viewing for fans of American comedy.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Hitchcock demonstrates both his mastery of the spy film genre and his genius in transforming its basics into an experience uniquely thrilling and comic. Dame May Whitty is the disappearing lady, Margaret Lockwood is the suspicious fellow passenger, and Michael Redgrave (father of Vanessa and Lynn) the foppish folklorist who helps Lockwood uncover the truth. The character actors who give the film its distinctive tang include Paul Lukas, Googie Withers, and most especially Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as two cricket-obsessed passengers. Most of the action takes place on a train trip across unnamed but hostile European countries and the tone of the film clearly reflects a late 1930s anxiety about war.
Petulia (1968)
The ineffable Julie Christie stars as Petulia, a young woman with a bad husband in gorgeous rich boy Richard Chamberlain and an adulterous yen for George C. Scott’s divorced doctor. Christie is in her prime both as an actress and a great beauty, and Scott is hammily effective as the bewildered object of her affections. The last shot of Christie will haunt you. Shirley Knight and Joseph Cotton are also on handto give notable performances, and Janis Joplin performs in an early party sequence. The movie is worth watching just for its late 60s San Francisco setting, exquisitely photographed by Nicolas Roeg (soon to turn to directing himself). Richard Lester directed.
I DON'T WANT TO GO TO REHAB (FIVE STAR MOVIES)
Everyone's got an addiction - mine, like many people's, is Netflix. My queue is stuffed to saturation, my day revolves around making time to watch a movie and keep my queue moving, and I've become overly familiar with the pickup times at my local mailboxes – but there's a silver lining: a cornucopia of reviews.
The reviews are broken up into three sections by their starred rating: 5 stars, 3 to 4.5, and 0 to 2.5. Movies that make my Top Ten or Top Twenty are marked as such. There's also a hall of shame -– the Bottom Ten.
FIVE STARS
Cat People / The Curse of the Cat People (1942, 1944)
Top Twenty
Cat People is one of the great fright films. Simone Simon stars as a young woman convinced she turns into a murderous feline. She’s right, but not everyone believes her, to their clawed regret. Jacques Tourneur directed this masterpiece of shadows and suggestion; the terror highlight is a nighttime walk through Central Park. However, the sequel is an entirely different affair, a weird, daffy fantasy about an unhappy girl and the strangely helpful spirit of Simon’s cat person.
Jules et Jim (1962)
Top Ten
A signpost of cinema, Jules et Jim is one of Francois Truffaut’s masterpieces, an exploration of love and its bitter discontents. Jeanne Moreau is unforgettably alluring as Catherine, the romantic cynosure of Jules (Oscar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre). Jules et Jim has acquired the weight of a masterpiece, but its gracefulness in telling a disturbing story belies that weight. Possibly the most adult film ever made, Jules et Jim is a must-see.
Liza with a 'Z' (1972)
Electrifying. Liza with a 'Z' is a long lost TV special from 1972, directed by Bob Fosse and starring a youthful Liza Minnelli. The picture’s a little grainy and the music might be called kitschy, but Liza is nuclear fission incarnate, a true star basking in the well-deserved love of her glamorous audience. A peak number is “I Gotcha” – the pink spangled Halston minidress, the supersexed-up Fosse choreography and Liza’s wacked-out divaness add up to camp nirvana. If her tabloid exploits obscured Liza’s talent and left you wondering what the original fuss was, Liza with a Z is your answer. The extras include an interview with Liza and the video restoration team that’s as pure an example of fan worship as you’ll ever see.
The Red Shoes (1948)
Top Ten
The Red Shoes is essential viewing, a Technicolor extravaganza unlike anything else in the movies and so uniquely designed, acted and filmed that it singlehandedly justifies the elevation of the movies into an art form. Based on the Hans Christian Anderson story about a doomed ballerina, and filmed by the writer/director team of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell in a style describable as celestial kitsch. Stars the glittering Moira Shearer as the doomed ballerina, Marius Goring as her composer and lover, and Anton Walbrook as the Diaghilev-like impresario. With its glimpses of post-Ballet Russe dancing and Leonide Massine’s performance as the ballet master, The Red Shoes is catnip for ballet fans. Its aesthetic descendants include Jacques Demy’s equally entrancing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Rififi (1955)
Top Ten
Jules Dassin’s heist flick has a hurtling dramatic power. Almost lighthearted at the beginning but ultimately a Shakespearean tragedy, Rififi is a true original, a scathingly misanthropic hair-raiser. The famously dialogue-free heist sequence is remarkable. Rififi is clearly indebted to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and an inspiration to cinematic sponger Quentin Tarantino.
The 39 Steps (1935)
Top Ten
Hitchcock’s 1937 film of the John Buchan adventure novel is one of his best and is the ur-text for the spy film genre, the stylish Bourne Identity being its most recent variation. Suave Robert Donat stars as Hannay, accused of murder and racing to find the real killer with persnickety blonde Madeleine Carroll as his unwilling accomplice. Hitchcock’s storytelling verve is at its purest: the escape by train, the pursuit through the Scottish highlands, the encounter with the man with the missing finger are all prime examples of Hitchcock’s remarkable genius. Its ramshackle special effects are a special delight. Check out the helicopter!
Further Viewing: The Lady Vanishes, 1938.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
Top Ten
Magic. Jacques Demy’s unforgettable pop-art musical of young love is one of the supreme cinematic creations. Breathtakingly lovely Catherine Deneuve stars as a young woman in love with a handsome but penniless garage mechanic (Nino Castelnuovo) who is sent off to the Algerian War. The sung dialogue is startling at first and the art direction is goofy to the point of psychedelia, but Demy spins these potential distractions and Michel Legrand’s elegant music into fairy tale gold. If you have the chance to see it on a big screen, jump! Restored to its original glory in 1992.
The reviews are broken up into three sections by their starred rating: 5 stars, 3 to 4.5, and 0 to 2.5. Movies that make my Top Ten or Top Twenty are marked as such. There's also a hall of shame -– the Bottom Ten.
FIVE STARS
Cat People / The Curse of the Cat People (1942, 1944)
Top Twenty
Cat People is one of the great fright films. Simone Simon stars as a young woman convinced she turns into a murderous feline. She’s right, but not everyone believes her, to their clawed regret. Jacques Tourneur directed this masterpiece of shadows and suggestion; the terror highlight is a nighttime walk through Central Park. However, the sequel is an entirely different affair, a weird, daffy fantasy about an unhappy girl and the strangely helpful spirit of Simon’s cat person.
Jules et Jim (1962)
Top Ten
A signpost of cinema, Jules et Jim is one of Francois Truffaut’s masterpieces, an exploration of love and its bitter discontents. Jeanne Moreau is unforgettably alluring as Catherine, the romantic cynosure of Jules (Oscar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre). Jules et Jim has acquired the weight of a masterpiece, but its gracefulness in telling a disturbing story belies that weight. Possibly the most adult film ever made, Jules et Jim is a must-see.
Liza with a 'Z' (1972)
Electrifying. Liza with a 'Z' is a long lost TV special from 1972, directed by Bob Fosse and starring a youthful Liza Minnelli. The picture’s a little grainy and the music might be called kitschy, but Liza is nuclear fission incarnate, a true star basking in the well-deserved love of her glamorous audience. A peak number is “I Gotcha” – the pink spangled Halston minidress, the supersexed-up Fosse choreography and Liza’s wacked-out divaness add up to camp nirvana. If her tabloid exploits obscured Liza’s talent and left you wondering what the original fuss was, Liza with a Z is your answer. The extras include an interview with Liza and the video restoration team that’s as pure an example of fan worship as you’ll ever see.
The Red Shoes (1948)
Top Ten
The Red Shoes is essential viewing, a Technicolor extravaganza unlike anything else in the movies and so uniquely designed, acted and filmed that it singlehandedly justifies the elevation of the movies into an art form. Based on the Hans Christian Anderson story about a doomed ballerina, and filmed by the writer/director team of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell in a style describable as celestial kitsch. Stars the glittering Moira Shearer as the doomed ballerina, Marius Goring as her composer and lover, and Anton Walbrook as the Diaghilev-like impresario. With its glimpses of post-Ballet Russe dancing and Leonide Massine’s performance as the ballet master, The Red Shoes is catnip for ballet fans. Its aesthetic descendants include Jacques Demy’s equally entrancing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Rififi (1955)
Top Ten
Jules Dassin’s heist flick has a hurtling dramatic power. Almost lighthearted at the beginning but ultimately a Shakespearean tragedy, Rififi is a true original, a scathingly misanthropic hair-raiser. The famously dialogue-free heist sequence is remarkable. Rififi is clearly indebted to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and an inspiration to cinematic sponger Quentin Tarantino.
The 39 Steps (1935)
Top Ten
Hitchcock’s 1937 film of the John Buchan adventure novel is one of his best and is the ur-text for the spy film genre, the stylish Bourne Identity being its most recent variation. Suave Robert Donat stars as Hannay, accused of murder and racing to find the real killer with persnickety blonde Madeleine Carroll as his unwilling accomplice. Hitchcock’s storytelling verve is at its purest: the escape by train, the pursuit through the Scottish highlands, the encounter with the man with the missing finger are all prime examples of Hitchcock’s remarkable genius. Its ramshackle special effects are a special delight. Check out the helicopter!
Further Viewing: The Lady Vanishes, 1938.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
Top Ten
Magic. Jacques Demy’s unforgettable pop-art musical of young love is one of the supreme cinematic creations. Breathtakingly lovely Catherine Deneuve stars as a young woman in love with a handsome but penniless garage mechanic (Nino Castelnuovo) who is sent off to the Algerian War. The sung dialogue is startling at first and the art direction is goofy to the point of psychedelia, but Demy spins these potential distractions and Michel Legrand’s elegant music into fairy tale gold. If you have the chance to see it on a big screen, jump! Restored to its original glory in 1992.
UP IN THE SKY
Man on Wire (2008)
Director: James Marsh
The documentary Man On Wire portrays Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as an outlaw artist’s championship feat, an action disconnected from normal social interaction and free of any historical significance. It’s like an adventure story from 1930s Hollywood. As in She or King Solomon’s Mines, no one questions the reasonableness of the adventure, and the story takes place in a vacuum, simultaneously heightening the drama and making it more unreal. Proponents of the auteur theory will love Man on Wire’s re-creaton of the basic ingredients of a Howard Hawks film: brave men, unquestioning female, hopeless task which no one expects to return from. Man on Wire is a tidy little film about an almost impossible, inhuman feat that occurred on the site of a future tragedy. The tidiness both disconcerts and fascinates.
The story of Petit’s obsession with walking between the towers began when he saw an article about the building of the towers while sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968. From this humdrum beginning, Petit and his accomplices — who include his girlfriend, his best friend, plus a wire-walking expert and a fluctuating assortment of starry-eyed countercultural types — planned the walk over a five-year period. Petit had been obsessed with wirewalking since childhood and previous to the WTC walk had planned and executed outlaw walks on Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney Australia.
The details of the planning are one of the fascinations of the film. The construction of the wire bridge on the roof of the WTC at dawn after a night of hiding from security officers makes for a great little caper film, and the director James Marsh plays up the sequence with some noir-esque touches. The other great charm of the film is the personalities involved in the feat. Petit himself is magnetic and playful, and it’s a salute to his magnetism that his friends and accomplices hardly seem to question his sanity. The accomplices are just as interesting: his girlfriend and best friend are as wholeheartedly committed as Petit, and their matter-of-factness about the nuts and bolts of the enterprise make their obsession all the more striking. The other accomplices are a mixed salad of 1970s post-flower child types: the songwriter who chickens out at the last moment, the be-whiskered bureaucrat who helps Petit’s team gain access to the building as part of his anti-establishment stace
The film’s refusal to acknowledge Petit’s feat as part of the history of the World Trade Center and their destruction gives the film an unusual power: it makes 9/11 seem more like what it is, a historical incident in a series of historical incidents, rather than what politicians and public hysteria have turned it into.
Director: James Marsh
The documentary Man On Wire portrays Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as an outlaw artist’s championship feat, an action disconnected from normal social interaction and free of any historical significance. It’s like an adventure story from 1930s Hollywood. As in She or King Solomon’s Mines, no one questions the reasonableness of the adventure, and the story takes place in a vacuum, simultaneously heightening the drama and making it more unreal. Proponents of the auteur theory will love Man on Wire’s re-creaton of the basic ingredients of a Howard Hawks film: brave men, unquestioning female, hopeless task which no one expects to return from. Man on Wire is a tidy little film about an almost impossible, inhuman feat that occurred on the site of a future tragedy. The tidiness both disconcerts and fascinates.
The story of Petit’s obsession with walking between the towers began when he saw an article about the building of the towers while sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968. From this humdrum beginning, Petit and his accomplices — who include his girlfriend, his best friend, plus a wire-walking expert and a fluctuating assortment of starry-eyed countercultural types — planned the walk over a five-year period. Petit had been obsessed with wirewalking since childhood and previous to the WTC walk had planned and executed outlaw walks on Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney Australia.
The details of the planning are one of the fascinations of the film. The construction of the wire bridge on the roof of the WTC at dawn after a night of hiding from security officers makes for a great little caper film, and the director James Marsh plays up the sequence with some noir-esque touches. The other great charm of the film is the personalities involved in the feat. Petit himself is magnetic and playful, and it’s a salute to his magnetism that his friends and accomplices hardly seem to question his sanity. The accomplices are just as interesting: his girlfriend and best friend are as wholeheartedly committed as Petit, and their matter-of-factness about the nuts and bolts of the enterprise make their obsession all the more striking. The other accomplices are a mixed salad of 1970s post-flower child types: the songwriter who chickens out at the last moment, the be-whiskered bureaucrat who helps Petit’s team gain access to the building as part of his anti-establishment stace
The film’s refusal to acknowledge Petit’s feat as part of the history of the World Trade Center and their destruction gives the film an unusual power: it makes 9/11 seem more like what it is, a historical incident in a series of historical incidents, rather than what politicians and public hysteria have turned it into.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
UP IN THE SKY
Man on Wire (2008)
Director: James Marsh
The documentary Man On Wire portrays Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as an outlaw artist’s championship feat, an action disconnected from normal social interaction and free of any historical significance. It’s like an adventure story from 1930s Hollywood. As in She or King Solomon’s Mines, no one questions the reasonableness of the adventure, and the story takes place in a vacuum, simultaneously heightening the drama and making it more unreal. Proponents of the auteur theory will love Man on Wire’s re-creaton of the basic ingredients of a Howard Hawks film: brave men, unquestioning female, hopeless task which no one expects to return from. Man on Wire is a tidy little film about an inhuman feat that occurred on the site of a future tragedy, and the tidiness both disconcerts and fascinates.
The story of Petit’s obsession with walking between the towers began when he saw an article about the building of the towers while sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968. From this humdrum beginning, Petit and his accomplices — who include his girlfriend, his best friend, plus a wire-walking expert and a fluctuating assortment of starry-eyed countercultural types — planned the walk over a five-year period. Petit had been obsessed with wirewalking since childhood and previous to the WTC walk had planned and executed outlaw walks on Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney Australia.
The details of the planning are one of the fascinations of the film. The construction of the wire bridge on the roof of the WTC at dawn after a night of hiding from security officers makes for a great little caper film, and the director James Marsh plays up the sequence with some noir-esque touches. The other great charm of the film is the personalities involved in the feat. Petit himself is magnetic and playful, and it’s a salute to his magnetism that his friends and accomplices hardly seem to question his sanity. The accomplices are just as interesting: his girlfriend and best friend are as wholeheartedly committed as Petit, and their matter-of-factness about the nuts and bolts of the enterprise make their obsession all the more striking. The other accomplices are a mixed salad of 1970s post-flower child types: the songwriter who chickens out at the last moment, the be-whiskered bureaucrat who helps Petit’s team gain access to the building as part of his anti-establishment stace
The film’s refusal to acknowledge Petit’s feat as part of the history of the World Trade Center and their destruction gives the film an unusual power: it makes 9/11 seem more like what it is, a historical incident in a series of historical incidents, rather than what politicians and public hysteria have turned it into.
Director: James Marsh
The documentary Man On Wire portrays Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as an outlaw artist’s championship feat, an action disconnected from normal social interaction and free of any historical significance. It’s like an adventure story from 1930s Hollywood. As in She or King Solomon’s Mines, no one questions the reasonableness of the adventure, and the story takes place in a vacuum, simultaneously heightening the drama and making it more unreal. Proponents of the auteur theory will love Man on Wire’s re-creaton of the basic ingredients of a Howard Hawks film: brave men, unquestioning female, hopeless task which no one expects to return from. Man on Wire is a tidy little film about an inhuman feat that occurred on the site of a future tragedy, and the tidiness both disconcerts and fascinates.
The story of Petit’s obsession with walking between the towers began when he saw an article about the building of the towers while sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968. From this humdrum beginning, Petit and his accomplices — who include his girlfriend, his best friend, plus a wire-walking expert and a fluctuating assortment of starry-eyed countercultural types — planned the walk over a five-year period. Petit had been obsessed with wirewalking since childhood and previous to the WTC walk had planned and executed outlaw walks on Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney Australia.
The details of the planning are one of the fascinations of the film. The construction of the wire bridge on the roof of the WTC at dawn after a night of hiding from security officers makes for a great little caper film, and the director James Marsh plays up the sequence with some noir-esque touches. The other great charm of the film is the personalities involved in the feat. Petit himself is magnetic and playful, and it’s a salute to his magnetism that his friends and accomplices hardly seem to question his sanity. The accomplices are just as interesting: his girlfriend and best friend are as wholeheartedly committed as Petit, and their matter-of-factness about the nuts and bolts of the enterprise make their obsession all the more striking. The other accomplices are a mixed salad of 1970s post-flower child types: the songwriter who chickens out at the last moment, the be-whiskered bureaucrat who helps Petit’s team gain access to the building as part of his anti-establishment stace
The film’s refusal to acknowledge Petit’s feat as part of the history of the World Trade Center and their destruction gives the film an unusual power: it makes 9/11 seem more like what it is, a historical incident in a series of historical incidents, rather than what politicians and public hysteria have turned it into.
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