Movies et al.

The Triumph of Wes Anderson, or Sympathy for John McCain

2009-05-21T11:31:00.004-04:00

Slate's got a nice little slideshow up about the rise and fall of Wes Anderson: his fantastic debut, his two masterpieces, his two lesser but still wonderful films, and then (the primary subject) the ubiquity of his imitators. You can check out the slideshow yourself here: http://www.slate.com/id/2218420/

On the way, though, something wonderful happened, for me at least. One of the slideshow videos is a set of faux John McCain ads made in the style of three directors Woo, K. Smith, and Anderson. You can check out the Anderson clip at minute 2:21 of the video - and I do highly recommend it.

Something weird happened to me while watching the Anderson parody: I came to feel enormous empathy for John McCain. Here's what Slate has to say "Tweaking the surface pleasures of Anderson's work, the ad unwittingly (or, who knows, maybe intentionally) highlights the director's drift toward a cinema of extravagant artifice and the diminishing returns it offers."

First, I think the "extravagant artifice" of "diminishing returns" was certainly intentional - this video clearly takes some shots at Wes Anderson surface-obsessed quirkmaster. But I had a completely different reaction. Watching a John McCain semi-lookalike glumly acknowledge that he has no chance in the matter, then gamely stroll through a classic Anderson sequence, complete with pitch perfect Bowie and track suits, gave me the first twinge of sympathy I've had for McCain in years. This was a man who had real principles, who abandoned them to try to win an unwinnable election against the most gifted politician in half a century, and went to his inevitable defeat. For abandoning those principles and engaging in pathetic pandering I hated him. But when this actor deadpans that he probably won't win, then walks off to his failure, I finally felt sympathy for the man.

And that, as far as I'm concerned, is the bottom line with Wes Anderson's style: it works. Say what you want about The Darjeeling Limited and the Life Aquatic, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite and the American Express ad (and granted, none of them reach the peaks of Rushmore or Tenenbaums), all of them have something going for them. That's because Anderson's style - the quirk, the colors, the props, the perfectly integrated pop music, and the heartfelt but off-kilter emotions - just plain works. In fact, it works so well that an obvious parody backfired to the point that I felt real sympathy for a man I've intensely disliked for years now.

Of course, the incongruity of the actual "I'm John McCain and I approve this message" bit snaps me out of it to a certain extent. It serves as a reminder that the Anderson aesthetic - the distillation of real emotional pain into whimsical scenes that retain emotional heft - is deeply in contrast to the look and sound of a real political campaign. Which, I think, just makes my point stronger: cutting through all that bullshit and making McCain a truly sympathetic figure is a seriously tough task. Faux-Anderson, though, was up to the job.

Just for fun: A Mike Gravel Campaign Ad

Are You Not Entertained?

2009-04-08T16:13:00.002-04:00

Every good cinephile remembers the 2001 Academy Awards as a disaster. Chameleonic actor Russell Crowe won the best actor award for monosyllabic he-man Maximus, a blatant makeup award for his failure to win in 1999's The Insider. The daring, provocative film Traffic, made by genius auteur Steven Soderbergh, failed to win best picture, as Crowe's Gladiator took that honor as well en route to winning the night.

The only problem with all this is that it's wrong. Soderbegh sucks, and Traffic is probably his worst film. And Gladiator, well, Gladiator is epic filmmaking done right. Please, head on over to Film for the Soul for the latest entry in Counting Down the Zeroes, that website's extensive look at 00s cinema. You'll find me singing Gladiator's praises: http://filmforthesoul.blogspot.com/2009/04/year-2000-counting-down-zeroes.html

Film Ignorance #31: City Lights

2009-03-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

Film: City Lights
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, other, less important people
Year: 1931
Reason for Ignorance: Saw clips in film class, never finished it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

The American Film Institute just named City Lights the greatest romantic comedy of all time. I'm pretty sure that's a mistake for two reasons. First of all, it's nowhere near as good as the best screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. It also doesn't stack up well against Woody Allen's best romantic comedies of the 70s and 80s.

My second objection is that it's just not a romantic comedy. Granted, I'm the very last person to police categories and genres. But this movie is in fact two intertwined tales. One of them is a classic, tragic romance involving Chaplin's Little Tramp and a blind flower girl who thinks he's a rich suitor. The other story is a slapstick comedy involving the Little Tramp and a suicidal millionaire who considers Charlie his best friend while drunk, then kicks the tramp out on the street every time he sobers up.

Although these two stories do end up intersecting at the end of the film, they're completely separate for the majority of the movie. In other words, this can't be a romantic comedy, because the comedy isn't romantic, and the romance is tragic. It's a comedy and a romance, side by side.

And it is a very funny comedy and a very sad romance. The suicidal millionaire who constantly befriends and then disowns Chaplin leads to a number of very funny moments, particularly whenever the Tramp has to prevent his suicide attempts. And the romance between the Tramp, who pretends to be a rich man, and the blind flower girl is quite moving.

Although I liked this movie a lot, I think it's pretty overrated; it's certainly not one of the greatest films ever made, and doesn't even stack up to a more sophisticated Chaplin film like Modern Times. And I can identify why it's received such critical acclaim: the final shot. The final shot of City Lights is one of five or ten most famous closeups in the entire history of cinema. Film luminaries from Fellini to Woody Allen to P.T. Anderson have closed some of their best movies with an homage to that shot. Without it, this is just an excellent Chaplin movie; with it, this "comedy romance in pantomime" has become a cinematic standard.

Bonus Game: What closeups can you think of that are as famous or more famous than this one? I think the "more famous" category is probably empty. But possibly as famous:

1.Gloria Swanson's "I'm ready for my closeup" closeup in Sunset Boulevard

2.Orson Welles is introduced in The Third Man

3.John Wayne is horrified by captive white women in The Searchers (I would also accept: John Wayne is introduced in Stagecoach)

Film Ignorance #30: To Be or Not to Be

2009-03-15T07:00:00.001-04:00

Film: To Be or Not to Be
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Stars: Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Robert Stack
Year: 1942
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Based on this and Ninotchka, I believe I understood the Ernst Lubitsch formula: take a serious subject with world historical implications, in which many people have or will die, and then turn it into a ludicrous comedy. In Ninotchka, Soviet famine and the threat of Stalinist liquidation became the subject for a sophisticated, ingenuous romantic comedy. In To Be or Not to Be, Germany's occupation of Poland, the Polish resistance, and the threat of concentration camps are the basis of an absurd and very, very funny farce.

The star of To Be or Not to Be is Jack Benny, a radio comedian who would occasionally do movies. He is not a suave or sophisticated comic player along the lines of Grant, nor does he offer the rugged charms of Gable, or the folksiness of Stewart. He is a radio comedian, at least one brow lower than all of those that I just mentioned, but very, very funny. Think Bob Hope, and you'll be in the right ballpark.

After seeing the ultra-sophisticated Ninotchka, I wasn't quite expecting slapstick farce of To Be or Not to Be. But it's damn funny. Benny and Lombard are a husband and wife team starring in Hamlet in pre-war Poland. Lombard doesn't take her vows too seriously, so she starts romancing a young Air Force flyer (Robert Stack, in a pre-Unsolved Mysteries role). Stack gets up for a little rendezvous with Lombard every time Benny starts hamming his way through "To be or not to be." This enrages Benny, but World War II breaks out and there's nothing to be done about it.

After the war, Benny, Lombard, and Stack get involved again, both romantically and in a plot to murder double agent Professor Siletsky before he can meet with the German commander, Col. "Concentration Camp" Ehrhart. From there, the movie throws every gag imaginable at you, and most of them work. An actor playing Hitler says "Heil myself." Benny does a bad, hammy impression of Ehrhardt for Siletsky, then gives Siletsky the same treatment for Ehrhardt. Lombard also has to seduce them both, and keeps getting caught in sticky situations. And over and over again, no matter who he's impersonating, Benny asks everyone if they've heard of him. The running joke is that no one has ever heard of him, but finally Ehrhardt has head of him, and dismisses him as a ham.

This is really a movie that shouldn't have worked. For starters, it's an absurd farce about the Polish resistance trying to assassinate a Nazi double agent; form and content started off at odds with one another. Benny can't really act, and was clearly just a radio ham doing ridiculous impersonations on screen. But the role (like all of those Woody Allen writes for himself) takes advantage of the fact that the comedian has zero range, is a complete buffoon, but knows his way around a one-liner. By playing that thinly veiled version of himself/his showbiz persona, Benny makes this cockeyed creation seem sublime. Ninotchka it ain't, but there aren't many movies that are funnier.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance # 29: The Kid

2009-03-08T07:00:00.000-04:00

Film: The Kid
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Coogan
Year: 1921
Reason for Ignorance: Not the hugest Chaplin fan
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Charlie Chaplin was never one for subtlety. The first scene of The Kid is a woman leaving a charity hospital with a child. As the nurse and doctor watch her leave with a mixture of pity and disapproval, a title card appears: "The Woman - whose sin was motherhood."

Ah, thanks Charlie, I get it now: this is a single mother, alone in the world, oppressed by society's mores and forced to travel the cruel world bearing the burden of her sin.

Charlie's not sure you got it, though, because the next shot is just a few seconds of a statue of Jesus weighed down by the cross. "See, she must bear the burden of her sin! She's like Jesus! Get it?"

Ah yes, we get it Charlie, we get it. But he's still not sure, so the next scene is The Woman sitting on a park bench, holding the child. In case you hadn't noticed it yet, this woman is alone and has nowhere to go. And what is the title card that appears to make sense of this shot of a lonely woman, sitting by herself, alone, with no one else: "Alone." Thanks.

Once the little tramp himself shows up, the picture picks up a great deal. The Woman tries to leave her child with a rich family, but the baby is accidentally kidnapped by a pair of car thieves, who leave the baby near where the tramp lives. Once The Tramp picks up the baby, he's stuck with him; a cop prevents him from putting him back down on the ground. And so Chaplin is left to raise a little boy, who quickly grows up to the tender age of five.

This movie is very funny, stringing together a series of hilarious vignettes that would have been all or most of a Chaplin film just a few years earlier. The kid breaking windows for the tramp to fix them, a cop catching on to their racket, the tramp flirting with the cop's wife after fixing her windows (if you know what I mean), the kid beating a local bully, the tramp beating the bully's enormous brother with the aid of a brick, and other sequences are very funny. And Chaplin, directing his first feature, has done his best to provide a story that holds all of the gags together, a story that mixes his trademark sentimentality with his trademark social conscience.

Unfortunately, not everything quite comes together. Although the movie is only an hour long, it actually runs out of plot elements and throws in a pointless and unnecessary dream sequence near the end - just, I guess, to make it "feature" length. And the ending is rushed and a bit forced, lacking the pathos that Chaplin would develop in his later 20s and 30s film.

The Kid's historical importance is incalculable: as Chaplin's first feature film, it was a risky studio endeavor that paved the way for Chaplin and his many successors and contemporaries (from Keaton to Fields) to make feature-length comedies with enormous creative control. As a film, it's merely pretty good. I enjoyed it very much, but it's a long way from mature Chaplin, and even at 60 minutes, feels a bit too long.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Did Comics Just Go Mainstream?

2009-03-06T08:16:00.003-05:00

No, I'm not referring to The Watchmen movie about the hit theaters, although I am a. Mildly excited about the film, despite the fact that 300 was a big waste of time
b. Pretty sure the Watchmen film had something to do with it.

No, what I'm referring to is the fact that The New York Times will now publish a graphic novels best seller list weekly!

Amusingly, their post, which I had not read when I started my own (I started writing just based on the headline) begins "Comics have finally joined the mainstream."

Certain minds, great or not, do think alike. Comics of course haven't finally joined the mainstream; it would be more precise to say that comics have rejoined the mainstream, or that modern comics have finally joined the mainstream. Obama, for example, is a fan of Spider-Man from way back, for four decades or so, comics were for kids, but most certainly mainstream. It is only for the last 30 years, when comics have mostly been for adults, that comics have been out of the mainstream.

Hopefully that's no longer the case. I was hoping, with the success of The Dark Knight and the insane sales of the Watchmen before the movie even came out, that comics might be inching their way to respectability. But if Time naming Watchmen one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century didn't make comics mainstream, a poorly reviewed movie doesn't seem likely to do so either.

This, however could. First of all, the New York Times is now a place where people can read about comics, every week. Although it's only about comics sales, and not the weekly comics reviews which would make an even bigger difference, it's a big step.

But more importantly - and here's where a best seller list is better than reviews - publishers can now slap "New York Times Best Seller!" on any comic that hits the list. That's huge for the general public, browsing a bookstore display where one nerdy employee has, under the employee picks, stuck a volume of Criminal between to Hundred Years of Solitude and Middlesex. Now the comic will not only have the employee's gushing description, but the seal of sales of approval the NYT brings - people are buying and reading this book, enough that the premier newspaper in the world noticed.

Furthermore, several of the industry giants - Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Robert Kirkman, Brian Bendis, Ed Brubaker, etc - have already been honored in this very first list. Now every new project by those authors - and every older product, even - can also have a sticker slapped on it that says "By the New York Times Bestselling author." That'll help even more.

Anyone else excited about this? Anyone considering giving comics a try now?

Film Ignorance #28: The Apartment

2009-03-01T07:00:00.001-05:00

Film: The Apartment
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray
Year: 1960
Reason for Ignorance: Never got around to it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Not only could Billy Wilder do no wrong, he could do no wrong in any genre he put his mind to. He was one of the greatest noir filmmakers of all time, and one of the greatest romantic comedy filmmakers of all time - one of the least comprehensible developments I can imagine. In all of Hollywood history, only Howard Hawks showed a greater ability to do more genres with such skill (Hawks films would be in my top 10 for the gangster, romantic comedy, screwball comedy, noir, and western genres, without ever having to use the same film twice).

So it is with some consternation that I tell you that The Apartment is brilliant, and I have no idea what genre it represents. It doesn't seem that romantic, it's certainly not very screwball, it's probably not a comedy at all, but I wouldn't want to call it a melodrama or just plain drama. What it really is is the premise for a crappy sitcom that's been turned into a damn fine movie.

C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) is a young corporate insurance employee. He's a good worker, but surrounded by thousands of other good workers, so his future wouldn't be bright - except for the fact that he's got an inside track on promotion. He keeps his apartment furnished with cheese crackers and liquor, and allows four of the company's executives to use it whenever one of them wishes to spend a little time with his girlfriend before going home to his wife. This means that Baxter gets great recommendations to the company's top HR guy.

Unfortunately, the HR guy Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) knows something is up, and will only give Baxter the promotion if he gets a piece of the apartment action. That's fine with Baxter, who finally gets up the nerve to ask out the object of his desire, the elevator girl Ms. Kubelik (MacLaine). She says yes, but eventually can't make it, because she winds up, you guessed it, at Baxter's apartment with Sheldrake.

That's the sitcom element here, but the dramatic irony isn't pitched for dumb laughs. It's actually heartwrenching stuff; the lovable Baxter pines after the unobtainable Ms. Kubelik, while the vulnerable Ms. Kubelik carries on a thankless affair with Sheldrake, who promises to divorce his wife and marry her in one of the least plausible lies ever. From there, the plot twists and turns; I won't spoil the fun, but Wilder's gift for dialogue and plotting is on full display.

Each of the the actors fits snugly into their role, as if they were meant to play them. Lemmon, a Wilder favorite, is charming in his classic persona: an affable, nervous fellow, a sort of low-key pre-Woody Allen, who overthinks things, lets himself get walked on, but through it all produces a string of pretty funny jokes. And MacMurray, another Wilder favorite, brings his full charm to exactly the sort of smarmy, so charming that he must be insincere role that Pierce Brosnan currently specializes in. Brosnan is great, but MacMurray is the all-time king; amidst the career deterioration that included Flubber, Son of Flubber, The Shaggy Dog, and My Three Sons, this movie stands out as a triumph.

But this is Shirley MacLaine's movie. I'm not sure I've ever seen an actress so at home with herself. Ms. Kubelik is an acting challenge: to most of the company she's the unobtainable ice queen, to Baxter she's a charming and almost obtainable girl next door, and for Sheldrake she's an emotional wreck, strung along by a career player because she's talked herself into believing in him. MacLaine embodies all of these aspects of this complex woman; she's both achingly available and achingly unobtainable. In her elevator outfit she's a forbidden treat ogled by the entire company, with Sheldrake she's a vulnerable woman, but with Baxter she's just herself. She comes to life when asked to do the least - to just sit, and talk, and be with him. The whole movie, in fact, could be described that way: it confounds genres and offers a complex resolution because, for all its high concept premise, it's about real people trying to make their way through the world, through love. There are relatively few movies that can say the same.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

AlternaOscars

2009-02-27T13:49:00.002-05:00

After a few really good years (The Departed, There Will Be Blood, and No Country for Old Men deserved every Oscar they got) I thought the Oscars fell flat on their face this year. I believe Slumdog and Milk deserved to be nominated for everything they were nominated for, as they were both great films, but the competition was embarrassing: Frost/Nixon, Benjamin Button, The Reader? Those were the 3rd or 4th or 5th best films made this year? That's a joke.

So first I set out to create an AlternaOscars, in which I did the nominations and awards myself, and then asked for your thoughts on who did a better job. But then I got a better idea: I'm going to nominate and choose winners for the major Oscar categories - and not use a single film or person in any category there were originally nominated for. And I will, I think, produce a better set of winners and near-winners than the Academy did, even though they had first choice.

Best Picture Nominees:
The Dark Knight
Frozen River
Iron Man
Rachel Getting Married
Wall-E
Winner: The Dark Knight

As Andre O'Hehir wrote in Salon, even though he didn't enjoy The Dark Knight, it not winning Best Picture is one of the great Academy "Huh?s" of all time. The people declared it the best film of the year, the critics declared it one of the best films of the year, and that's supposed to be what the Oscars are all about: finding middle ground between highbrow critical acclaim and mass tastes. With Dark Knight, they didn't have to bridge that ground: the people and the critics did it for them. Then they didn't even nominate it. Of course, the people and critics also loved Wall-E, which came in second in my heart's vote, and it also got no nomination.

Best Director:
Darren Aronofsky - The Wrestler
Jonathan Demme - Rachel Getting Married
Christopher Nolan - Dark Knight
Andrew Stanton - Wall-E
Guillermo del Toro - Hellboy II
Winner: Christopher Nolan

Again, this is kind of a no brainer - this was clearly the Dark Knight's year. But just looking at my list makes me sad - these are 5 brilliant filmmakers who made arguably their greatest films this yeah, and they were pushed aside for Opie and David Fincher in the year he chose to remake Forrest Gump?

Best Actor:
Robert Downey Jr - Iron Man
Werner Herzog - Encounters at the End of the World
Phillip Seymour Hoffman - Synecdoche, New York
Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight
Jason Segel - Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Winner: Heath Ledger

I'm certainly sad to not be able to nominate Rourke, Penn, and Jenkins. But Ledger's performance was not supporting - he was the strongest of Dark Knight's three protagonists, all of whom were leads (in my universe nearly every film has at least 2 leads, and 3 hour films usually have 3+). So he gets the win, and I also get to reward some performances in three kinds of movies that don't get honored for acting awards: superhero, Apatow comedy, and documentary. And Herzog...well, that guy should probably win best actor every year, just for walking around and pretending to be Werner Herzog. Also, Phillip Seymour Hoffman was nominated for the wrong film. Damn Academy.

Best Actress:
Catherine Deneuve - A Christmas Tale
Ronit Elkabetz - The Band's Visit
Sally Hawkins - Happy-Go-Lucky
Michelle Williams - Wendy and Lucy
Kate Winslet - Revolutionary Road
Winner: Catherine Deneuve

Sorry Kate. I know you don't have an Oscar. Neither does Catherine Deneuve. You've got plenty of time to catch her if I give her one. Again, the academy did better here than they did in picture/director - I wanted to give the award to Melissa Leo but they had to go and actually nominate her. Why nominate her if you weren't even going to think about giving her the award and it ruins my AlternaOscars? Of course, you did nominate Angelina Jolie for wailing "This is not my child, where is my child, etc" for 2 hours, so maybe you misunderstood Leo's performance anyway.

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem - Vicky Christina Barcelona
The Deranged Penguin - Encounters at the End of the World
Bill Irwin - Rachel Getting Married
James Franco - Milk
Danny McBride - Pinapple Express
Winner: Bill Irwin

I'm tempted to just rename this the Best Supporting Performance by Javier Bardem award and give it to him every year, but I found Irwin's performance as the mourning father of Rachel Getting Married even more compelling than Bardem. Lucky for both of them that Brolin and Downey were nominated for reals, because they would have been hard to pass up. Of course, the deranged penguin is even more moving than Irwin, but he (she?) didn't get much screen time.

Best Supporting Actress:
Maggie Gyllenhahl - The Dark Knight
Samantha Morton - Synecdoche, NY
Debra Winger - Rachel Getting Married
Dianne Wiest - Synecdoche, New York
Evan Rachel Wood - The Wrestler
Winner: Dianne Wiest

Ok, I admit it, I just love, love, love Dianne Wiest. I couldn't really decide who to give this to so I decided to give it to her. Also, I could have nominated pretty much everyone in Synecdoche for this award...some damn impressive acting in that movie.

Best Screenplay:
Thomas McCarthy - The Visitor
Charlie Kaufman - Synecdoche, NY
The Nolan Brothers - The Dark Knight
Jason Segel - Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Robert Siegel - The Wrestler
Winner: Nolan and Nolan

Again, despite the fact that there are four other great candidates here, The Dark Knight just has to win. Say what you want about a crazy 3rd act (and I personally have nothing bad to say about it) that was an utterly inspired script. And I can only imagine the mental gymnastics it took to come up with all of The Joker's various misdeeds - the bomb in a henchmen, the clown-hostages, the domino murders of the first heist - all of those are brilliant all by themselves.

So, interwubs, what do you think? Whose awards are better: mine or the Academy's? What would your own AlternaOscars look like?

Film Ignorance #27: 12 Angry Men

2009-02-22T07:00:00.001-05:00

Film: 12 Angry Men
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Sydney Lumet
Stars: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley
Year: 1957
Reason for Ignorance: Never got around to it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
"I don't really know what the truth is. I don't suppose anyone will ever really know."

Although 12 Angry Men was made in the 50s, it never feels like a 50s movie. Sure, the star power is there; Henry Fonda had been one of the biggest stars in Hollywood since the 30s. And the look is right; the crisp black and white cinematography and the abundant closeups fit right in with the movies of the age. But this movie, directed by the very young Sydney Lumet, feels if anything even more progressive in its politics than something like In the Heat of the Night. And it's setup is by 50s standards practically avant-garde: the movie plays out in real time, confined almost entirely to one room, as 12 men try to work through the facts of a murder case and overcome their own prejudices to get to the truth. It's the setup for a play or TV movie (both of which it was first) but is filmed and acted so well that it seems experimental, not uncinematic.

The movie takes place during a vicious heat wave, as a Puerto Rican youth is accused of murder and 12 middle-class white men have to decide his fate. 11 of the men are adamant that the young man is guilty, several of them arguing that "you know how they are" and of course one of "them" committed the murder. Only Juror #10, Henry Fonda, has some reasonable doubt. As you probably know by now, the inimitable Mr. Fonda coaxes and wheedles the other 11, breaking down the prosecution's case, noting the defense attorney's indifference, and piece by piece dismantling his colleague's assumptions about the case and their prejudices. Some are receptive to this, some aren't, and violence is threatened more than once.

By emphasizing the notion of "reasonable doubt," this movie becomes more than just an endorsement of the American justice system and a diatribe against racism and closemindedness. 12 Angry Men is also meditation on truth and uncertainty. Fonda reminds the jurors over and over again that none of them know what happened, that all they can do is approximate the truth, and that what matters is not proving guilt or innocence but knowing the limits of truth.

The film thus becomes a fantasy, in which the dangerous prospect of nihilism is harnessed by the American legal system to ensure justice is done. It's hard to know whether the jury's reasoning and their definition of reasonable doubt would allow any murderer to be convicted. But for me at least, it's a worthy fantasy: a reminder that, in a country that retains the death penalty, convicting someone of Murder One is an irrevocable decision that will permanently end a life. No one can, or should, ever be certain enough to take human life, which I think is ultimately the message of this ultimate message picture. It's not about the young man being innocent, or about a nihilistic belief that we'll never be able to ascertain the truth about anything. It's that a justice system that is willing to take a life must do so knowing that the truth is provisional, and that any worthy human being would shy from such a prospect. As such, 12 Angry Men should be what it probably already is: one of the foundational documents of how our modern justice system should and can work.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #26: In the Heat of the Night

2009-02-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

Film: In the Heat of the Night
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Norman Jewison
Stars: Sydney Poitier, Rod Steiger
Year: 1967
Reason for Ignorance: Never got around to it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

The setup for In the Heat of the Night is so simple as to be almost high concept. A rich white man is killed in a small Southern town, and the local fuckup cops pick up the only stranger they can find, a well-dressed black man waiting for a 4 am train. To the chagrin of the cops, the man they arrested is Virgil Tibbs, Philadelphia's #1 homicide detective. To the chagrin of both Tibbs and Bill Gillespie, the local redneck police chief, Virgil's Philadelphia police chief does more than confirm his identity: he offers Gillespie his top man for the week. The rich man's widow forces Gillispie to keep Virgil, and thus the most racially charged buddy cop movie ever made is born: Tibbs is stuck in a tiny racist town helping people he knows hate him, while Gillespie has to watch a man he believes to be racially inferior to him display a level of intelligence and competence that is far beyond his own.

This is first and foremost an actors movie, and both Poitier and Steiger shine. Poitier, Hollywood's first major black star, walks through this movie radiating an intense contempt for everyone he has to deal with: Gillespie, Gillespie's men, and all the locals. But it was Steiger who won the Academy Award, and he deserved it. Best known for this movie and as Brando's brother in On the Waterfront, Steiger was always a second fiddle. And Gillespie is possibly his finest hour: an overweight, underpaid small town police captain who loathes Tibbs but must play his caddy and protector for political reasons. This is the flashy role, and Steiger delivers; his distaste for Tibbs and his shame at Tibbs' superiority are palpable in every scene. He has many of the movie's best lines, as he browbeats inferiors, screams ineffectually at Tibbs, and occasionally waxes folksy philosophical.

If you know anything about this movie, besides that it became a bad TV show, you probably know the famous line "They call me Mr. Tibbs." It's no good without the setup:
Gillespie, enraged and shamed, says to Virgil: "Virgil, that's a funny name for a nigger from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?" Virgil puts him in his place, distilling all of Poitier's gravitas in a single line to remind Gillespie which one of them does actual police work: "They call me Mr. Tibbs."

Norman Jewison was nominated for best director for this movie, but he didn't win, which makes sense. Although he brought all the elements together for this crackling battle of wills, the strengths here are the performances and the screenplay, and the camera work and editing are both sometimes clumsy. Throw in a slightly overdone score, and this picture is far from perfect. But it succeeds in a lot of ways, as both a whodunit and as a message picture, and Poitier and Steiger have a level of chemistry rarely seen in any movie.

It's also a very compelling portrait of a steamy, racist Mississippi town, which is surprising: the movie was actually shot in Illinois. Although they were making a message movie, the filmmakers weren't about to risk Poitier's life by asking him to spend an extended period of time in 1967 Mississippi. Damn.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #25: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

2009-02-08T07:00:00.001-05:00

Film: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Jacques Demy
Stars: Catherin Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo
Year: 1964
Reason for Ignorance: Never Heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

In today's Tarantino-driven climate of pastiche, mash-up, homage, and outright theft, it's not often that I get to watch a film from any era that looks and sounds and feels like simply nothing else I've ever seen. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is such a movie. It's a certain kind of musical, one which I suppose I knew was theoretically possible but had never actually witnessed: there is no spoken dialogue, just singing. No musical numbers, no dancing, just 90 minutes of singing and a constant, jazz-influenced score.

But Umbrellas isn't such a revelation merely because it's all singing. It's a candy-colored confection, with every outfit shining brightly and every room wallpapered in some garishly glorious pattern. And, in addition to having colors that would make Powell himself weep, it's a very real and moving story of young love set during the French-Algerian war.

Our principals are Guy, a charming young gas station attendant, and Genevieve, a luminous young woman who represents my first visual experience of Catherine Deneuve (her voice acting role in Persepolis doesn't count). The two are in love, but Genevieve is too young to marry, and the draft looms in Guy's future. Genevieve's mother urges her to give up Guy and marry a rich suitor, especially since their umbrella shop doesn't seem to be doing very well, even though it's constantly raining.

Rather than try to disguise the three-act structure, Demy emphasizes it by telling us when each act begins with a title card. The first is the story of young love, and the charm of the music and the setting is matched only by that of the young lovers. The second act is the story of Guy's absence; the film's story switches to stark realism, which inexplicably works just as well in song in Candyland as it ever did in black-and-white in postwar Italy. And the final act, although the briefest, is the greatest of all: Guy's return is a brightly colored, musically and emotionally deep melodrama that provides all of the powerful sentiment in 20 minutes that The Red Shoes was unable to deliver in a 120.

I'm trying to regulate the giving of "Best. Film. Ever." so I initially rated this one as merely a classic. But it's more than that. Demy's vision gives us a triumph of life, art, love, color, fantasy, and realism, all wrapped together, and all inexplicably congruous. If you've ever enjoyed any musical and you haven't seen this one, give it a whirl. It's cinematic candy and a rich full meal, all in one.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #24: Shadow of a Doubt

2009-02-01T07:00:00.001-05:00

The Magnificent Ambersons has nothing in common with Shadow of a Doubt. It's a good movie.

Film: Shadow of a Doubt
Rating: But...This Movie Sucks!
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright
Year: 1963
Reason for Ignorance: Looked Stupid
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Another Hitchcock film, another disappointment. And especially disappointing because on this subject, I know Hitchcock could do more.

This is a movie about a young girl who suspects that her beloved uncle Charlie is actually the merry widow murderer. I was expecting a film like Rear Window and its successors, Disturbia, Manhattan Murder Mystery, et al: a movie in which both the audience and the protagonist suspects someone of murder, but it becomes increasingly clear throughout the movie that either the "murderer" is unbelievably suave and clever or the protagonist is insane. Neither the audience nor the protagonist knows which, so all they can do is follow the story, simultaneously suspecting the killer and doubting themselves.

Non-spoiler alert: Joseph Cotten's Uncle Charlie is the serial killer. Maybe you would have guessed that from how he runs from detectives in the first scene in the movie. Maybe from how he hides a newspaper article from the family. Maybe from how he angrily snaps at everyone at a moment's notice (how did he get close to those windows if he yells at everyone for no reason?)

Additionally, there are two unintentionally comedic clues that he is the killer: 1. One night at dinner he speechifies about how rich widows are a drain on society and don't deserve their money. This is supposed to be chilling, I think, but I found it hilarious. I know weird uncles say weird things at the dinner table, but this was over the top (They're the scum of society!, etc).

2.Believe it or not, he frequently makes strangling motions with his hands. One time, at a bar booth, he's holding some paper and repeatedly strangling it. Another time, he's alone and looking at a potential victim, and his hands make strangling motions again. This is hilarious. Not chilling. Hilarious.

So, if it's not a mystery about a suave killer, what is it? It's two movies, both stupid:

1.It's about Teresa Wright's character (also named Charlie) discovering the uncle is a murderer but being unwilling to accept her mom by helping the police. This is the psychological dilemma in the movie: My uncle has killed three women, but on the other hand, my mom likes him a lot. What should I do? Stupid.

2.A love story between girl Charlie and one of the detectives. I've said it before about Hitchcock, and I'll say it again: a stupid and nonsensical, poorly fleshed out, tangential love story is the worst way to ruin a movie that might otherwise be good. Girl Charlie and Detective Graham fall in love after about 3 minutes, stupid Hollywood style. The funniest line of the whole movie: Graham tells Charlie that he'll always remember a certain place in town because "it's where I first knew I loved you."

First knew I loved you? That was only 36 hours ago! And you had met her less than 12 hours before! Really?

Sorry H-Cock, I'm not buying any of it. And there's so much more of his garbage on my film ignorance list...

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #23: The Birds

2009-01-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

Film: The Birds
Rating: Meh.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy
Year: 1963
Reason for Ignorance: Looked Stupid
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Disclaimer: I'm one of those weird people who thinks Hitchcock was a good director but nothing special.

The Birds is essentially a Romero zombie picture in which the zombies have been replaced by marauding birds, the social commentary has been jettisoned in favor of a traditional love at first sight romance, and the lowbrow aesthetic has been replaced by the glossy sheen of Hollywood's most polished director.

If that sounds good to you, enjoy it. I wasn't particularly interested.

Everyone knows that Hitchcock loves to torture blond women, and boy does he torture Tippi Hedren in this picture. Maybe it's fair though; when his previous fetish object, Grace Kelly, left Hollywood to get married, he was without a stunningly gorgeous blond woman to cinematically torture. Then he saw a commercial with Tippi Hedren in it. So yeah, Tippi had an entire week of having angry birds flung at her for a single scene, but she also went from model to model/actor in the twinkle of the ole H-cock's eye (not that it helped her much. In the 25 movies she made after The Birds, 18 of them are rated 2 stars or less by allmovie. But at least she got work...).

I don't have much more to say about this movie. As for all Hitchcock movies of this period, it looks fantastic - he was always better shooting in color than black and white. Some of the special effects are chilling; some of them are laughable. The same can be said for various sequences in the film: many are quite well put together; another involves a gasoline spill, followed by a certain event that any four year old or person who's seen Zoolander could predict (why did he light that damn cigar?).

All in all, this was a kind of ok movie. But killer birds? That's just stupid.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #22: L'Avventura

2009-01-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

Film: L'Avventura
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Michaelangelo Antonioni
Stars: Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari, Monica Vitt
Year: 1960
Reason for Ignorance: Didn't Like Blow-Up
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
“Why, why, why?”

When Antonioni passed away, I was confronted with the fact that I'd never seen any of his films, so I watched the one I had heard the most about: Blow-Up. But Blow-Up sucks. It's a crappy movie (pretentious, draggy, pointless) which, like Ben-Hur or The Red Shoes, is built around an amazing sequence, in this case a photographer enlarging a seemingly innocent picture he took and discovering a potential murder plot. Needless to say, after feeling so contemptuous of Blow-Up, I didn't seek out anymore Antonioni.

But L'Avventura is an excellent film, maybe even the masterpiece it's cracked up to be. What's more, even though it's a 2.5 hour long plotless foreign art house film with aspirations of profundity, I actually enjoyed the experience. It's the story of Sandro and Claudia, who, along with Sandro's moody and unpredictable girlfriend Anna (who is Claudia's best friend) and a bunch of decadent elites, go for a summer boat trip. The group stops at one of a series of barren islands, Anna goes off on her own...and disappears. No one knows if its a prank, suicide, a kidnapping; she's just gone.

Film theorist David Bordwell argues that, although art cinema shares with Hollywood cinema an interest in "psychological causation," "the characters of the art cinema lack defined desires and goals." It's no surprise that L'Avventura is one of his examples. We don't know why Anna was so rude on the trip, why she seemed dissatisfied with Sandro, and why she ran away (as everyone suspects her of doing). We don't know why Sandro looks so hard for her, why Claudio and Sandro are so attracted to each other during their search, or why they feel so guilty about their attraction to one another, in the face of Anna's probable actions. We're wandering in a field of questions without answers, and can do more than follow along with the characters, observing their thoughts and feelings, unable to comprehend them, and unable to stop trying to comprehend.

And what a field it is we're wandering through! I said I enjoyed this movie - it's because of the gorgeous black-and-white photography. The first hour transforms the sea and its rocky islands into haunting and mysterious locations; they're so crisply barren that I myself wanted to jump off a cliff. And the rest of the movie is devoted to architecture; Claudia and Sandro (a failed architect) travel from small town to small town, and Antonioni manages to make the ancient architecture they find in small-town Italy seem even more desolate and lacking in humanity than uninhabited islands. The landscapes are what make this film, and what shape its characters; the bleakness of the settings are the closest thing we get to an answer to all the "whys?" we're asking. That, of course, and the total vacuousness of the society that Sandro and Anna traveled in: a preening, image-conscious, and self-obsessed collection of artistes and elites.

Through this wasteland of people and places, Sandro and Claudia try to find something worthwhile to hold on to. They eventually seek that worthwhile thing in each other. Although I've seen the entire film, I still don't know if they succeed.

Now that's art house.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #21: Tom Jones

2009-01-11T08:06:00.000-05:00

Film: Tom Jones
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Tony Richardson
Stars: Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith
Year: 1963
Reason for Ignorance: Never Heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
“We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.”

I would love to say that Tom Jones is a charming little movie. And it is certainly charming. But its 2 hr+ runtime, its unprecedented (for a British film) production budget, its status as an important literary adaptation, and its sweeping social critique make it a big film. And if I did find it quite charming, I also found it to drag frequently.

The film, like the novel it was based on, is a picaresque, and as such is more than a little uneven. It follows the diverse adventures and sexual conquests of the foundling Tom Jones (Albert Finney) as he journeys from his country home to London. And many, many of these vignettes are very funny, starting with the first of them, which is a silent sequence, complete with title-cards, in which Squire Western (Griffith) finds a baby in his bed and decides to adopt him. As a grown man, Tom dallys with the gamekeeper's daughter and romances the neighboring squire's heiress, and eventually, through some complicated maneuvering by his evil stepbrother, is driven away from home.

This is the wrong Tom Jones

As I said before, the film is full of charming moments. 18th century novels were frequently metafictional, and this film carries on that tradition - the narrator, and Tom himself, frequently address the audience directly. One of Tom's ladyfriends has a large and obviously fake mole; it's no surprise that it ends up on different sides of her face in different scenes. And the film is also full of slapstick moments, sped-up, Chaplin style chase sequences, and tons of wordplay. And its finale, in which all of Tom's allies, enemies, and paramours are thrown together in London and reveal some (damn predictable) plot twists, wraps the film up in an appropriately cheery and cheeky manner.

But along the way, I was frequently bored. Sure Finney is great - this is by far the earliest Finney movie I've seen, and although I could never recognize the Finney of Miller's Crossing or The Bourne Ultimatum, his distinctive voice seems not to have changed over the years. But there are too many vignettes, too many encounters with the ladies, and too many plot elements swirling about. What Richardson should have done is cut the film's running time (which he did in its 1989 rerelease, which I was unable to acquire), further emphasize the meta-moments, and deliver a less weighty but considerably more fun experience. It probably wouldn't have won a whole slew of Academy Awards, but it sure would be easier to sit through.

(Note: if the ideal version Tom Jones that I sketched out appeals to you, Michael Winterbottom made it a couple of years ago. It's called Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, and it's roughly 10 times funnier than Tom Jones)

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #20: The Red Shoes

2009-01-04T19:00:00.000-05:00

Film: The Red Shoes
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Michael Powell (and Emil Pressburger)
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer
Year: 1948
Reason for Ignorance: Waited to watch it with the Mrs.
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Even though I rated this movie Yep, It's a Classic, The Red Shoes was a massive disappointment. It's considered by many to be the best film by The Archers, a mid-century team of Brits - director Michael Powell and writer Emil Pressburger - who are among the most acclaimed creators of all time. I'd seen only one Archers film, Black Narcissus, which was excellent, and a Powell solo film, Peeping Tom, which is like Psycho meets Rear Window, but better than either of those admittedly great films. (George Romero has said many times that another Archers film, The Tales of Hoffmann, is what inspired him to become a filmmaker.)

Which is why, by being merely a classic, The Red Shoes was disappointing. And that score is a composite, because the vast bulk of this picture is just a good movie - a standard midcentury melodrama about love and art. Two young people, Julian Craster and Victoria Page, unexpectedly gain employment with the world-renowned Lermontov Ballet company, Craster as a composer and Page as a dancer. Through a series of unexpected events, Craster becomes the composer for the new ballet, The Red Shoes, and Page is the star. Along the way, they fall in love, but eventually become involved in a tragic love triangle (the third element of the triangle being, of course, "Art").

I certainly want to lay the fault for this movie at the feet of Pressburger, the writer; the melodrama is so cliched, the characters so stereotypical, that the whole thing just seems by the numbers. But the acting is great - particularly Walbrook, as "heartless monster" Lermontov, and various supporting members of the ballet company. And Powell's direction is so good, his gorgeous Technicolor cinematography makes everything, from the outlandish costumes to Shearer's hair, glow like it's ablaze.

But that's not what makes it a classic. If Ben-Hur is a technically impressive but crappy movie built around an exciting chase scene, The Red Shoes is a technically impressive but only good movie built around the best dance sequence ever filmed. For about twenty minutes, right in the middle of the film, we watch the performance of the Red Shoes Ballet and are transported to a ballet that unites music and color unlike anything I've ever seen before. Even the best dance sequences in An American in Paris don't compare to The Red Shoes ballet. The ballet is touching and terrifying, and represents a triumph of spectacle which might still be unmatched in cinematic history.

For that reason alone, this movie is a classic. Otherwise, it's merely a pretty good story that indulges deeply in stock characters and a rather silly belief in a romanticized vision of art (ie, "Art"). I've got plenty more Archers movies on my list, so I hope the rest of them are more like Black Narcissus than The Red Shoes...

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Movies et al is back! (sort of)

2009-01-04T16:38:00.003-05:00

Greetings out there in internet land!

If you have this blog set up in a feed reader, I hope you enjoy this post. If not, tell your friends - I haven't checked site traffic lately, but I imagine it's not good.

Anyway, the proprietor of a pretty sweet blog, The Dancing Image, just asked me via comment if I have abandoned the blogosphere. The answer is, in sooth, yes. But I do not intend to have abandoned it permanently. By mid-March, my PhD exams will be completed (unless I fail them!) and I hope, at least through the summer, to return to regular posting.

So what do you do in the meantime? I have 3 suggestions:

1. Check out the afore mentioned Dancing Image for one of the best and smartest writers of the internet if you're looking for readable, thoughtful and deep essays on topics all over the universe of film.
2. On the other hand (and this is not to say that these fellas are not readable, thoughtful, and/or deep) if you want to know what's good in the theatres and on DVD right now, you can do no better than MovieZeal. Evan, Luke, and company will keep you informed, as they collectively see far more movies than I do and, what's more, right honest to goodness reviews of them. Amazing!
3. Finally, come back here every Sunday for the forseeable future for a Film Ignorance entry! That's right, Movies et al will be back on a weekly basis, hopefully with an entry a week until such time as my exams are over and I can devote mental energy to blogging again. Enjoy!

Graham

Waking up Unhappy

2008-11-05T06:10:00.003-05:00

I know this is a movie blog, but I'm gonna talk about politics a little. (Actually, this currently isn't so much a movie blog as a non-blog altogether, but that's a different matter that I'll address this weekend.)

I want to talk about politics because I haven't been able to think about much else lately, and although I've resisted the urge until now, I no longer can.

What I want to tell you is that, after waking up and checking the election results, I've fallen into a deep funk of pessimism. Anyone who knows me knows that this makes no sense - I've been a fan of Obama for a long time, and I consider his victory by far the most important political event in my lifetime. Not only that, I voted for him in North Carolina, and although the networks still aren't quite willing to call that state for Obama, the vote is in and, barring a recount, he won it. The knowledge that my vote actually counted, and was a positive force for moving this country into the 21st century, should be feeding the euphoria that I felt last night. But it's not.

You see, all the conservatives across the web are moaning their loss, and all the liberals hailing the dawn of a new progressive age. And I want to believe that that's the case. I want to believe that American has moved on from the neoconservative nightmare that produced two and a half presidents (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and the more moderate George H.W. Bush) and dominated our domestic and foreign policy for almost 30 years. I want to believe that, last night, America grew up and moved past all of the silliness of the last thirty years: denying global warming, denying evolution, decrying a health care system that works as "socialism," embracing trickle-down (aka voodoo) economics, embracing preemptive real wars, embracing endless fake wars on abstract enemies ("drugs," "terror"), embracing torture, etc. And of course I understand that electing Obama won't magically render all of those issues moot, but I honestly believe that a country that sees what a progressive administration could do would move in a progressive direction for years (as the country did, even under Republican presidents, from roughly 1932 to 1980).

All my pessimism, I'm afraid, rests on the fact that - at the time of this writing - 86% of the vote is in on California's Proposition 8, and it appears certain to pass. If you don't know, Prop 8 is the ban on gay marriage that will amend the state's constitution. A previous ban on gay marriage was approved by voters as state law, but the California Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional. The conservatives quickly got the law back on the ballot as a constitutional amendment, but it seemed destined to fail. In Massachusetts, people had gotten used to gay marriage and realized that it wasn't tearing the fabric of our society apart; in California, Ellen was on the cover of People magazine in her wedding dress, and America acted like that wasn't the sign of the apocalypse. And the California State Attorney General left the writing of the amendment the same as the state law but retitled it a "ban on gay marriage," ensuring that everyone who voted yes knew that they were voting for less rights for their friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors.

Ironically (as several pundits pointed out) the same thing that gave Democrats this presidential election may have killed what would have been the biggest advance for gay rights ever. Whites and Asians were against the measure by 6 points; Latinos were for it by 2 points. Blacks, a group whose turnout was dramatically up across the nation because of the Obama candidacy, made up 10% of the electorate, even though they're only roughly 6% of the California population. But they opposed the measure by 40 points (70% yes, 30% no). The black voters that Obama got out to the poll were the deciding factor in this election; we have increased African-American turnout to thank for the fact that a new day may be dawning in America. But in California, black voters decided that gay people should not be treated like adults, and voted to take away their rights.

I imagine the despair I'm feeling right now will pass, as Obama leads this nation over the next few years. But right now, all of the hope I have in Obama remains just that - hope. I can foresee countless scenarios in which Obama is unable to achieve true progressive reform; I have no doubt he will be a better president than Bush II, and no doubt that, if given a free hand, the changes he would make in the economy, the Iraq War, health care, and our energy policy would be enormous. And I firmly believe that, without that last change, we could literally be facing the apocalypse, because if global warming isn't controlled, most of humanity will die.

But right now those future gains don't feel like much. California, unlike Massachusetts, is the progressive trend setter across the country. If Californians were ok with gay marriage, it would have been only a matter of time before most Americans realized that gay people aren't, in fact, demons bent on stealing their children. I would have expected gay marriage to be legal in Washington and Oregon in less than a decade, and for it to spread into blue state after blue state over the next few decades. I honestly believe that a victory here would have effectively ended the national debate on gay marriage, and it would have just been a matter of time. Now, with it blocked in California, I don't see gay marriage showing up in any state for decades. Sure, young people overwhelming supported gay marriage; when they get their chance to vote again in a generation or two, the outcome will probably be different. In the meantime, gay people will not be full adults. (I've been reading up and a number of pundits think this battle will be fought again in California within ten years. If that's the case, obviously this thing could be happening faster than I'm thinking it could)

My final point of pessimism is that, if gay marriage can't even win on the ballot in California, it's life as a wedge issue could be long. I was letting myself dream of a Republican "rump party," an increasingly irrelevant coalition of rural and elderly whites who would have to be content, over the next half a century, to dwindle from country runners to permanent minority party to mere gnats to be brushed aside. But if the Republicans can get their shit together, they can take anything Obama does to reform immigration and to push for "civil unions" and use them to leverage votes. The alternative is for an Obama presidency to be unwilling to touch contentious issues, which would be a victory for the conservatives right there, and would likely erode progressive support.

So there it is. Enjoy the Obama presidency, America - I intend to enjoy the first great political figure of my adult life, and possibly the first great one of my lifetime. But the sea change for gay rights that I saw in this country isn't coming, not any time soon.

David Price

2008-10-19T23:47:00.002-04:00

For President.

No, not this David Price.

This One:

Ode to Brolin

2008-10-17T10:37:00.008-04:00

My brain is absolutely fried. I can't think of anything to write. I just think 8-7, 8-7, 8-7, over and over again, followed by something along the lines of "never bring your best reliever in when your team is up 7-0, because that way if he gets in trouble and gives up a few runs, you can't replace him with your best reliever, because he's the guy out there who just got in trouble and gave up a few runs, and we're gonna have to look at Youkilis' beard for another decade at least, and the Rays are gonna leave Tampa, and Evan Longoria is gonna end up with a drug problem but somehow get clean just in time to play for the Rangers, and my last hope for having a hometown team win the World Series is gone forever, because although I have a few hometowns, only one has ever had a team, and it's probably moving to Oklahoma city in a few years."

Anyway, I still can't think of anything to write. So I just thought you might like to look at some pictures of Josh Brolin. That guy's fucking awesome.

Zombie Josh Brolin

Oh, sorry. Zombie Josh Brolin, for real.

Intimidate Denzel Josh Brolin.

Brain surgery Josh Brolin.

Cowboy Josh Brolin!

Cowboy Josh Brolin, pt II.

Monkey Face Josh Brolin

Imminent Dog Death Josh Brolin.

Clean Cut Josh Brolin? Uh, is this some sort of photoshop job, maybe?

Oh, here he is: Josh Brolin. Stage Left: Russell Fuckin' Crowe.

I hope you enjoyed that. I did!

Film Ignorance #19: The Killing Fields

2008-10-12T13:00:00.001-04:00

Film: The Killing Fields
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Roland Joffe
Stars: Sam Waterston, Dr. Haing S. Ngor, John Malkovich
Year: 1984
Reason for Ignorance: Dunno...
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

The Killing Fields is a highly disjointed movie, largely plotless, with no clear protagonist. I can't tell you whether or not this was intentional (I can tell you that this was director Joffe's first film and that he never made another film with an allmovie rating above 3). I can also tell you that it doesn't serve the film well. It's divided into roughly three portions: the first is a journalist in wartime tale, ala Joe Sacco's Palestine, the second is a story of hopeful and fearful waiting, and the third is a prisoner-of-war tale that finally introduces us to the titular fields.

But if the film's lack of cohesion doesn't serve it well, its story of friendship is almost overwhelmingly moving. Sam Waterston plays Sydney Schanberg, a New York Times journalist who is reporting on the Cambodia conflict with the aid of a Cambodian journalist, Dith Pran. Schanberg and Pran's collaboration resulted in a number of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, but the film de-emphasizes their success in favor of examining their relationship.

The two men are a study in contrast: Waterston, as Schanberg, is fierce and principled, a lanky figure with a left-wing beard who intimidates US and Cambodian figures with his passport and his prestigious credentials. Dr. Ngor, a Cambodian refugee who was not a trained actor, plays his earnest sidekick, whose life is in danger for most of the film; as a Cambodian citizen, he's never certain of respect from the Cambodian military or of aid from US or European officials.

What drives these men is their desire to share the atrocities committed against the Cambodian populace with the world. When Sydney gets Pran's family out of the country as the US pulls out, the Cambodian is insistent that he's remaning. "I'm a journalist too!" he repeats, over and over. This desire to tell the truth, and by doing so help the people of Cambodia, unites Sydney and Pran. Ultimately, the film turns on the fact that Pran must suffer for doing so, while Sydney receives nothing but accolades. Although others suggest that Syndey didn't act in Pran's best interests, Pran will hear nothing of it. He, unlike the naysayers, knows that they were in it together. The film reflects this - although we see Pran suffer immense physical and psychological torture, it's Sydney, helpless to aid his friend, who seems most emotionally burdened by it.

Ultimately, The Killing Fields is exactly the right kind of historical message movie. I didn't know that much about the Cambodian conflict or the horrors of the Khmer Rouge before I saw the film, and I didn't emerge from it with some sort of didactic understanding of the "issues" at hand. I emerged instead with a ground level of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and those that opposed them. Both Dith Pran and Dr. Ngor (both of whom are no longer with us) devoted their lives to shedding light on and alleviating the suffering of the Cambodian people. The Killing Fields is a document worthy of their lives, and of their service.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Review: Body of Lies

2008-10-10T16:31:00.003-04:00

"If only Ridley had cast me instead of Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven, it might have been worth watching."

Body of Lies
4/5

I was excited about Body of Lies more than a year ago, when it was an IMDb page with a different title. The combination of one of my favorite directors, Ridley Scott, with his man-muse Russell Crowe, was enough to get excited about. Throw in a newly-excellent Leonardo Dicaprio, a script by William Monahan (writer of The Departed), and hefty doses of violence, and you've basically got the perfect movie.

Well, Body of Lies is far from perfect, but I certainly enjoyed it very much. I thought last year's American Gangster was more Scott's movie than Crowe's or Washington's; the movie was so chopped up and quick-edited (something I loved) that neither of those actors had extensive chances to dig into their roles. But this movie is undeniably DiCaprio's. Leo plays Roger Ferris, a CIA field agent who risks his life in Iraq at the behest of bureaucrat Ed Hoffman (Crowe). Hoffman is moving up, and he takes Ferris with him, making him acting station chief of the bureau in Amman, Jordan. Hoffman is a blowhard asshole, but he knows talent, and thus Ferris is soon barking orders at and reprimanding agency oldtimers with complete immunity.

Although complex camera work and complex CIA machinations are on full display here, the movie really revolves around the ideology conflicts of three men: Ferris, Hoffman, and Hani, the head of Jordanian intelligence. All of them want the terrorist Al-Saleem, but can't agree on how to go about it. Hoffman is a blatant ugly American stereotype, an overweight suburbanite who thinks he can run the world while taking his kids to school. He gives Ferris unprecedented powers in Jordan, then issues orders behind his back. Hani is his aristocratic opposite; he bestows both favors and torture with an urbane sense of entitlement. Ferris, most comfortable on the streets doing the work personally, seems sharper than either of them, but is also constantly caught between them. Every time Hoffman tries to browbeat Hani, or Hani tries to outwit Hoffman, Ferris ends up paying a price.

There's also a surprisingly cliched and surprisingly still effective love story thrown into the whole bargain, as Ferris romances a nurse he met in a Jordan clinic. The film (like The Departed) goes to great lengths to draw parallels between DiCaprio's potential life with a woman on the periphery of a world of violence, and that world itself. This is actually one of the weakest parts of the movie; although we get a strong sense of Ferris' sensitivity and integrity (something both Hoffman and Hani are lacking in), we never quite understand either his connection to the nurse or to the war on terror. This is the crucial ingredient; although we're viscerally connected to Ferris, we never quite understand how he's connected to anyone else.

As everyone who has written about this film has noted, it contains a strong critique of American foreign policy (at times, Crowe seems to be channeling president Bush for his portrait of Hoffman). But it actually has more in common with the Bourne movies or Spy Game or any Clancy thriller than it does with something like Redacted or Syriana or Lions for Lambs. This is a spy movie with a strong anti-War on Terror undercurrent, but first and foremost, it's a spy movie. It's not a bad one, either.

My Favorite Movie is the Same Movie as The Best Movie of All Time

2008-10-08T07:40:00.000-04:00

Note to the Internets: If you think this is the best movie ever made, just say so!

This is rather long-delayed response to a post over at He Shot Cyrus, "What's Your Favorite Movie." In that post, Scott (arguing what I think is the majority opinion) lays down the law on people like me, who hold the minority opinion. His first nightmare scenario, when asked about his favorite movie, is: "Scenario#1: This guy can't distinguish between favorite and best. Is The Warriors the best movie or my favorite movie? When I tell him my favorite movie is The Warriors, he tells me I'm wrong and then proceeds to explain to me the artistic mastery of Peter Jackson."

Well, like Scott, I'm frustrated by the "favorite movie" question and I understand all of his frustrations; if you say anything besides the list he mentions (Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, something in the last 6 months, etc) you get confusion. After trying to explain Bridge on the River Kwai and The Searchers too many times, I've reverted back to my high school answer: Gladiator (which is still one of my favorites). Casual cinema fans always know the movie and almost always like it; Crowe-hating cinephiles have steam come out of their ears, and try to explain the greatness of The Searchers to me.

But unlike Scott, I make no distinction between "best" and "favorite" movie. I've actually discussed this several times with people, and have only found one who agrees with me. But here goes:

I have absolutely no criteria for judging a movie beyond how much I like it. How could I? One person I knew who argued that Citizen Kane was the best movie ever made but not his favorite tried to do so under the banner of technical competence. And yeah, Citizen Kane is probably the best made movie ever made. But why should that make it the best movie ever made? Saving Private Ryan is also one of the most technically impressive movies ever made, but I considered it a hokey piece of patriotic bullshit. Being well-made doesn't make it the best movie I've ever seen; me liking a movie a lot makes it the best movie I've ever seen.

The main point I have here is that I don't believe that there's any sort of universal or external criteria for judging movies. There just aren't. There's absolutely no way to sit in front of a movie screen and watch a movie and then say "That was one of the best movies ever made, but I didn't like it that much." If you can say that, your judging criteria are broken, and you're going to go see a lot more "best" movies that you don't like very much. Even I sometimes offer up the cheesy chestnut "I admired the movie but didn't like it that much," but that qualifies it for neither favorite nor best - just impressive in some manner that didn't really appeal to me.

I personally think that most people who make the favorite/best distinction do so for personal protection. There favorite movie is Dumb and Dumber, but they tell people Pulp Fiction, because they know Dumb and Dumber won't pass muster, so they distinguish between "favorite" and "best" disingenuously. I've just never found a reason to do that. I'm happy to tell people that Breathless, The Third Man, and Citizen Kane share space on my favorite/best film list with Zoolander, Knocked Up, and Sin City. Sure, those last three didn't win any Oscars, but fuck that. They're awesome! The bottom line is: each individual person can only judge a movie based on what they thought of it. There's no reason to hide what you felt about a movie from other people, and there's no reason to think that you're qualified to judge a movie based on any criteria other than how much you liked it.

Scott actually seems to offer up a different way to distinguish between favorite and best movies in a later post: Even back in high school, he says, "I knew the difference between "best" and "favorite." These were my favorite films, the ones you could put on anytime, over and over, and I'd watch them."

This is totally different from the distinction between personal favorite/universal best that I hate so much. Scott doesn't offer up a definition for best here, but he does offer up one for favorite: your favorite movies are the ones you can and do watch most often and always enjoy. Maybe I'm really weird but, again, this distinction wouldn't work for me personally. Sure, there are some films that I consider best/favorite that I've only seen two or three times (Citizen Kane, Third Man, etc). And there are others (Hellboy, for example) that I've watched many times and don't consider among the best I've ever seen, although they might qualify for "favorite" approval. But most of the movies on my favorite/best list are the same ones that I watch over and over again; Zoolander, The Departed, Lost in Translation, Royal Tenenbaums The Philadelphia Story, Sin City, The Searchers, Meet John Doe, Gladiator, pretty much every Coen Brothers movie...all of these films will make any top movies list I make, and I will watch them multiple times. For me, in almost every case, favorite=best=most watched and most rewatchable.

Irony Caveat: There's only one place where I will distinguish between favorite and best, and that's when one of my favorite movies sucks in whole or in part (complete or partial irony). I take things like my favorite movies and top films list much too seriously to ever put this kind of movie in those categories, but I watch at least part of, say, Red Dawn, almost every time it comes on. I don't ever watch all of it, because it's a horrible movie and I get tired of it, but Ifor a while, I enjoy its horribleness. Only when I love a movie for being bad would I be willing to distinguish between favorite and best.

As always, I want to know what you guys think. Do you have a different way to distinguish between favorite and best? Am I weird that Scott's definition of "favorite" movie doesn't eliminate many of the "best" movies I've seen? And of course, tell me what your favorite and/or best movies are - especially if the answer is Blade Runner. I would especially like to hear from Scott, but I don't even know if he reads this blog, so we'll just have to see about that.

Why Don't People Like Russell Crowe?

2008-10-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

(If you want to see a picture for this post, please scroll to the top of the screen)

This is a serious question: Why don't people like Russell Crowe? And I actually want answers. Whenever I bring up my (completely rational) love of Russell Crowe, people seem to agree or at least sound noncommital. But when I'm in groups not aware of my Crowe-love, and I mention loving Gladiator or 3:10 to Yuma, or being excited about the upcoming Body of Lies, people often seem a bit surprised. Surprised that I, a person quite informed about film, could like movies with Russell Crowe in them. And everyone wants to immediately point out that Bale was better than Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma, which is frankly not even close to being true (Crowe is better, but he also has the much flashier role - sort of like Jackman in The Prestige. In both cases, I prefer the Aussie to Bale, but he seems to be deliberately playing the second fiddle).

There are only two reasons I can think of for disliking Russell Crowe: first, he seems to be kind of a jerk, with an extreme temper. Well, I've never believed that personal life is a reason to evaluate an artist...otherwise our great artists would include pretty much only Paul Newman. And if you disqualify people from making movies for being jerks with tempers, well, I would advise you not to vote for McCain.

The other reason I can think of for not liking him is just not liking him. He might not be to your personal taste. I personally can't fathom that; his combination of Brando-like raw charisma and ability to underplay make him (like a very small class of actors, ranging from Newman to, yes, Bale) equally able to dominate as a larger than life character (Maximus, Jack Aubrey, Ben Wade) or disappear into a subtler role (Jeffrey Wigand, John Nash, Richie Roberts). But if you don't like him, you don't like him.

So now that I've gotten that out of the way, here's some perfectly objective reasons why you should like Russell Crowe:

1.He only makes good movies. Since he broke out in 1999 in The Insider, he has only made one bad movie, A Good Year. Besides that, he has only made good movies; the average metacritic score for his movies since 1999 is 68. That is damn high for an actor, who should at least be occasionally handicapped by a bad script or director. The universally lauded Bale, by contrast, has, over the same period, a metacritic score of 56 as a leading man. If you don't like Crowe, it shouldn't be because he makes bad movies. He doesn't.

2.He doesn't make too many movies. If there's one thing I get sick of, it's being overexposed to people I don't like. Don't like Christian Bale? Sorry, you're gonna see his face everywhere. Batman Begins, The Terminator, 3:10 to Yuma, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, even I'm Not There; good luck seeing a decent number of movie in any year without having to look at his face. He's even in fashion magazines (and there's totally NOT a Bruce Wayne Armani ad up on my fridge right now). But Crowe makes only about one movie a year; from The Insider through Body of Lies, he's only made 10 movies. For whatever reason, he chooses his movies carefully, and doesn't make too many. As someone who loves him, that can be a bit vexing, but it seems like a great reason not to dislike him.

3.He revived the career of Ridley Scott. Different communities believe different movies are the greatest film ever made. IMDb says it's Shawshank, critics and academics seem to agree on Citizen Kane, your average cine-fan will probably say The Godfather, and any group of college freshman will choose whichever movie made the most money the preceding summer. If, however, I had to pick a movie most beloved in the Blogosphere, I think it would probably be Blade Runner - everyone seems to love it. But its director was hurting in the 90s;in the ten years previous to Gladiator, master filmmaker Sir Scott made Thelma and Louise, 1492, White Squall, and G.I. Jane. Yes, in the ten years prior to Gladiator, Ridley Scott made only four movies, only one of them good.

Since he got Crowe fever in 2000, Scott has made eight movies, and in that time he's made Matchstick Men, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, and American Gangster. I don't know why he was in such a rut in the 90s, but the invigoration generated by collaborating with Crowe has gotten one of our greatest living directors back into making great movies. That couldn't make me happier.

So now you've heard three completely objective reasons for loving Russell Crowe; I've spared you my subjective ones. Please, tell me what you think. Do you dislike him, as so many people seem to? Why? How? Let me know.

Film Ignorance #18: Million Dollar Baby

2008-10-04T09:40:00.000-04:00

Film: Million Dollar Baby
Rating: But...This Movie Sucks!
Director: Clint Eastwood
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman
Year: 2004
Reason for Ignorance: Hated Mystic River
Ignorance Rating: Pending

You know in Barton Fink, when he's asked to write a terrible, cliched, melodramatic B-movie wrestling picture starring Wallace Beery, and he can't? Well, Paul Haggis, adapting some short stories by F.X. Toole, has managed to write it. It's called Million Dollar Baby.

Million Dollar Baby has that mixture of predictability and preposterousness that only Hollywood movies can muster. Sure, it's utterly preposterous that female boxer Maggie (Swank) would show up in Frankie's (Eastwood) gym and ask him to train her and - even though he doesn't train girls and she's too old - he trains her, she warms his heart and melts his curmudgeonly exterior, and becomes the best boxer in her weight class. Preposterous. And yet, also predictable.

In Barton Fink, the studio exec tries to get Barton started by reminding him that every protagonist of a wrestling picture must protect either a dame or a retarded kid. Barton ponders his options and finally offers: "How about...both?" The executive ain't happy - even a cliche monger like him wouldn't have the audacity to both in one film. Which is why, in Million Dollar baby, Frankie and his sidekick Eddie (Morgan Freeman) don't just train Maggie, they also let "Danger" Barch, a semi-retarded youth who dreams of being a boxer, hang out and train in their gym. And don't even get me started on the scene where the gym's bully is picking on Danger and Eddie puts on one glove to put the bully in his place. No, I can't believe it: the battle-hardened ex-boxer who spoke longingly of one more fight stood up to the bully and protected the simpleton!? Who could have predicted it?

Outside of the hard left turn that the film takes in its final act, it really is just a heaping bunch of maudlin cliches; from boxing cliches, delivered in voiceover by Freeman, to the absolutely vicious portrait of Maggie's families as worthless white trash, the film hasn't met an easy shot it didn't like. And I'll echo the party-line from all non-Eastwood lovers: post-1992's Unforgiven, every Eastwood-directed picture has been as standard as it could be: competent-looking and professionally made hackwork. (Beware The Changeling!)

Were I watching this film in a vacuum, I probably wouldn't have loathed it so much. But as a Best Picture and Best Director winner, as the leading film of the 21st century's most overrated director, and above all as the movie which featured Hilary Swank's corny slice of Americana winning the Best Actress award over Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine, I loathed Million Dollar Baby. It's a mediocre movie, made in a mediocre manner, but with such pretensions and aspirations to greatness that I can't help but hate it. Had it appeared on Lifetime, I could have forgiven it. As an Academy Award winner, I believe this: someone should have euthanized this picture.

Just imagine: In 2004, you could have honored this movie instead. Good job, Academy.

Public Service Announcement: The Wrestler is NOT Mickey Rourke's Comeback

2008-09-24T11:09:00.003-04:00

The new Aronofsky film, The Wrestler, is getting rave early reviews. Everyone seems to agree on two things: it's a great film, and it's Mickey Rourke's comeback.

You'll have to excuse me for not really knowing who Mickey Rourke is. Sure, I've seem him in some movies, and he seems to be a pretty good actor, but I'm simply too young to remember his first go round. But even I know that this is not his comeback. David Ansen of Newsweek, one of my favorite critics, wins the idiot prize on this one: "To say this is a great comeback for an actor whose talent was exceeded only by his self-destructiveness is obvious."

That's right. It's obvious. So obvious that Ansen couldn't even say it without noting its obviousness.

So now we get to play a little game. What if there was an actor who flamed out a long time ago but started working his way back into relevance? What if he had a series of small and medium size roles in movies as diverse as Domino, The Pledge, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Man on Fire, and a few others over the course of the last decade? And what if that upward movement of a dead career (some might even call it (obviously) a "comeback") resulted in the biggest, juiciest, flashiest role in a movie that also featured Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy, Benicio Del Toro, Jessica Alba, Powers Boothe, Michael Clark Duncan, Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen, and Elijah Wood? And what if that actor outshone all of those other actors (even the good ones!) and was wisely praised for his role, his biggest in decades? And what if that movie opened #1 at the box office, quadrupled its production budget in gross revenue, and got everyone (even young people like me, who'd barely heard of this actor prior to this movie) talking about this actor?

Don't call The Wrestler a comeback, unless you want people to think that you can't remember 2005. And if you can't remember 2005, meet Marv:

He has a way of making people remember things they think they've forgotten.

Coen Movie Appreciation

2008-09-21T19:11:00.001-04:00

The critics (myself included) liked, but didn't love, the new Coen movie. But should you trust us? Everyone who knows anything about the Coen Brothers knows that their movies get better with time (they appreciate). Each and every viewing of every Coen Brothers film rewards the viewer with unseen details and an increasingly significant subtext. Well, admittedly, I've only seen The Ladykillers once. But every other Coen film just keeps on getting better. I thought I'd take a look at the Metacritic scores of all the Coen films that we have scores for, to get an idea of what people thought of them initially, and then compare those results to my (incredibly unscientific) sense of what people think of them now as well as the allmovie rating. I'll also add my own initial and current ratings. Since you undoubtedly need even more information, I'll give you the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (TSPDT?) ranking for any of the films which is in the top 1000; They Shoot Pictures attempts to locate every important list of top films and index all of them to produce a 1,000 best regarded films ever made. And I suppose I'll throw in the current IMBD user rating for each film, even though I'm pretty sure most monkeys could tell that The Third Man (8.6) is a better film than The Shawshank Redemption (9.1).

Film: Blood Simple
Metacritic Score: None (The Director's Cut got an 81, but that was after everyone already acknowledged this as a masterpiece.)
My Initial Impression: 4/5. Skillful yet unformed
People Today: Tend to regard this one as an early, rough-hewn masterpiece; I'd say about 4.5/5 Allmovie Sez: 5/5

TSPDT?: 633rd best film ever made
IMDB. 8.4/10. That's pretty high
My Thoughts: 5/5. A small and nasty little film that is put together almost perfectly
Verdict: No Metacritic score means I don't know what the critics thought...
Appreciation: Hard to tell, but I think this one has appreciated some.

Film: Raising Arizona
Metacritic Score: 55. They didn't like it.
My Initial Impression: 5/5. One of the funniest movies I had ever seen.
People Today: Love, love, love this quirky movie.
Allmovie Sez: 5/5

TSPDT?: 747th best film ever made
IMDB: 7.5/10. They're obviously wrong
My Thoughts: 5/5. Gets funnier every time.
Verdict: The critics didn't know what they were watching, and got upset. Idiots.
Appreciation: Very High. This one went from critical hatred to classic pretty fast.

Film: Miller's Crossing
Metacritic Score: 66. Good, not great.
My Initial Impression: 5/5. More Coens, please.
People Today: Definitely like this movie alot.
Allmovie Sez: 4.5/5. More awesomeness from the Coens.

TSPDT?: 665th best film ever made

IMDB: 8/10.
My Thoughts: 5/5. Is it the best gangster movie ever made? Could be...
Verdict: They liked it more than Raising Arizona, but still weren't quite sure what to make of this sucker.
Appreciation: High

Film: Barton Fink
Metacritic Score: 69. Still in the good range, no more.
My Initial Impression: 5/5. I immediately worshiped the ground this movie walked on.
People Today: Often consider this their best movie. 5/5.
Allmovie Sez: 5/5. Those people like these brothers

TSPDT?: 529th best film ever made. That's getting there.

IMDB: 7.7/10. Wrong.
My Thoughts: 5/5. Is it the best movie ever made? Could be.
Verdict: They're still not quite getting it. How could this movie have a sub-90 Metacritic score?
Appreciation: Very High.

Film: Hudsucker Proxy
Metacritic Score: 52. Two points lower than You Don't Mess with the Zohan.
My Initial Impression: 4/5. A fun, off-kilter movie
People Today: Like, don't love, this one. 4/5, I'd say.
Allmovie Sez: 3/5. Not so much love

TSPDT?: N/A

IMDB: 7.4/10. Sounds right.
My Thoughts: 4.5/5. Hawks and Capra have very little in common. This movie fuses their styles. Surreal, brilliant, hilarious.
Verdict: The critics liking this one less than the last two makes sense. On the other hand, The House Bunny has a higher score.
Appreciation: Medium

Film: Fargo
Metacritic Score: 85. First acknowledged masterpiece
My Initial Impression: 3.5/5. Seemed a bit overrated.
People Today: Love this movie. 5/5.
Allmovie Sez: 5/5. Everyone agrees!

TSPDT?: 292nd best film ever made. Again, everyone!

IMDB: 8.1/10. Seriously, everyone!
My Thoughts: 4.5/5. Far from my favorite, but it's a damn good movie.
Verdict: Something clicked for the critics on this one. They got it right away. Not so much for me...I think I was expecting something life-altering, based on the hype.
Appreciation: Maybe a tiny bit? Started off pretty high.

Film: The Big Lebowski
Metacritic Score: 69. Another good, not great reaction.
My Initial Impression: 4/5. Very funny, kinda confusing.
People Today: No Coen Brothers movie is better loved than this movie. And that's saying alot. 5/5.
Allmovie Sez: 4/5. Allmovie tries to keep their cred by not overrating this "cult" film!

TSPDT?: 828th best film ever made. Probably just too recent, or too stoner, to climb.
IMDB: 8.2/10. IMDB users not worried about cred, rate this movie higher than The Graduate, Nosferatu, and His Girl Friday.
My Thoughts: 5/5. Yeah, I've watched this movie, um, more than once. It's good..
Verdict: Surprisingly good initial reviews, but as a cult film, it's not that weird that the critics didn't love it. Allmovie is still holding out, but this is definitely the best loved Coen movie.
Appreciation: High. The critics liked it, but didn't see the fan worship coming.

(They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, cuts off here - newer movies have a separate list that's meaningless in comparison)

Film: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Metacritic Score: 69. Apparently, Coen Brothers movies get 69s.
My Initial Impression: 4/5. Surprisingly funny.
People Today: People like this movie, but I'd say it's about a 4/5. The Clooney era hasn't been too kind to the Coens.
Allmovie Sez: 4/5. Allmovie goes the safe route.
IMDB: 7.8/10. Consensus reached.
My Thoughts: 4.5/5. A very, very good movie, with amazing music and a whole host of brilliant performances. Not a masterpiece, but close.
Verdict: Very good, not great, both then and now.
Appreciation: None. Came into this world Very Good, will leave it the same way.

Film: The Man Who Wasn't There.
Metacritic Score: 73. The critics look favorably upon neo-noirs.
My Initial Impression: 4/5. Dark, noirish, not very significant.
People Today: Like this one, I think. Doesn't get talked about much.
Allmovie Sez: 4/5. Allmovie goes the safe route.
IMDB: 7.7/10. Surprisingly high.
My Thoughts: 4.5/5. Doesn't reach perfection, but it's real good.
Verdict: Everyone agrees: an above average movie, but not an amazing one.
Appreciation: Marginal

Film: Intolerable Cruelty
Metacritic Score: 71. The critics look favorably upon neo-screwball comedies.
My Initial Impression: 3/5. Funny, but pretty stupid.
People Today: Are divided, on this one. I know plenty of people who, like me, love this movie, but plenty also consider it mediocre or worse.
Allmovie Sez: 3/5. Allmovie likes it less now than the critics did initially
IMDB: 6.4/10
My Thoughts: 5/5. I've watched this one more than any other.
Verdict: Pretty good, nothing special (except I love it!!)
Appreciation: Actually, mild depreciation. The critics liked it more than people do today.

Film: The Ladykillers
Metacritic Score: 56. The critics look unfavorably upon bad remakes of classics.
My Initial Impression: 2/5. Annoying, mostly unfunny. Hanks was great, though.
People Today: Do not like this movie. At all.
Allmovie Sez: 2.5/5. Bad, bad, bad.
IMDB: 6.2/10. Seriously? On par with Intolerable Cruelty?
My Thoughts: 2/5. Haven't rewatched it. Uck.
Verdict: This one sucks.
Appreciation: Again, mild depreciation. The critics didn't like it; now this movie is hated.

Film: No Country For Old Men
Metacritic Score: 91. One of the highest scores I've seen.
My Initial Impression: 4.5/5. What was up with that ending?
People Today: Still love this movie.
Allmovie Sez: 4.5/5. Very high for such a recent movie.
IMDB: 8.4/10. The people have spoken. Practically Shawshank good!
My Thoughts: 5/5. Saw it a second time, left my reservations behind.
Verdict: A masterpiece then, a masterpiece now.
Appreciation: None. But it doesn't have much room to appreciate, either.

Overall Verdict: I think you probably should trust us that Burn After Reading is good, but not great. Ever since Fargo, the critics have been aware of how good Coen movies are, and are no longer underrating them. By far the highest appreciation occurred in the early part of their careers, with Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, and Raising Arizona getting wildly underrated. But two of their most recent masterpieces (Fargo and No Country) were met with masterpiece level reviews. Hell, 2 of their last 4 movies have slightly depreciated. It looks like critics are suckups unable to look beyond past success. I think we already knew that. But at least they're not the IMDB users.

Film Ignorance # 17: Strike

2008-09-20T07:21:00.001-04:00

Film: Strike
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Stars: "The Actors of the Proletcult Theater" I'm not kidding, that's what they were billed as.
Year: 1925
Reason for Ignorance: Silent Soviet propaganda film...no thanks
Ignorance Rating: Pending

I was immediately blown away by this movie. Not since the first time I saw Breathless can I remember seeing a film which so forcefully announced itself as a cinematic masterpiece. In only the film's first minute, Eisenstein had already put together four incredible shots. First, there's a dissolve from a closeup of an evil capitalist to the scurrying workers providing his wealth and back again. Then a gorgeous crane shot of the enormous factory where much of the film is set (did they have cranes in 1925?). Then we watch some factory workers go about their business from behind a lighted screen, rendering them faceless silhouettes, part and parcel of the machinery of the factory. Finally, our first introduction to the strikers is shot as an upside down reflection from a puddle, so that we start by seeing the reflection of the factories smokestacks, then see the conspirators' feet appear upside down in the shot as they walk through the puddle, only to reappear rightside up in the reflection. And these are all in the first minute of the film, in Eisenstein's first feature film.

In other words, this dude wasn't fucking around. In case you don't know, Eisenstein was a Soviet film pioneer who more or less invented montage and used it to terrific effect. This movie is, like all of his others, a blatant ode to Soviet ideals. A strike at a large factory gets going when a loyal worker is falsely accused of theft. To prove his innocence, he commits suicide (another stunningly well shot scene, which cuts between the belt and footstool he uses before finally settling on his lifeless feet), and this galvanizes the factory to strike. The capitalist pigs in charge (who, with their fancy suits, top hats, and moustaches, look exactly like the capitalists in American films of the 30s and 40s) don't like the situation at all, and the shit hits the fan.

And boy does it hit the fan. Seriously, this is an insane movie. Babies are kicked, midgets dance on tables, boots are thrown at kittens, and toddlers are thrown off buildings. A team of hobo arsonists (led by a dwarf) are recruited out of the barrels they live in to burn down an apartment building that the strikers live in, and when the firemen arrive, they turn their hoses on the dispossesed people instead of the burning building. This last development is one of many that I couldn't figure out. This film was incredibly difficult to follow; the plot swings wildly from place to place, all the workers look pretty much alike (as do the spies in their midst), and I was generally clueless. But Eisenstein cuts so rapidly, so frequently, and so ostentatiously that I usually didn't have time to worry about it.

The weak link here is probably the worst acting I have ever seen on film. Somehow the workers manage to overact stoic defiance. But the capitalists...my god. There's hardly a single shot of a capitalist where he's not laughing with obvious evil, gasping with rage, or both. They laugh, they quiver, they gyrate, and they even jump up and down as evilly as they can manage. It would have been more subtle to simply dress them up with red horns and pitchforks that to led those particular proletcult players try to act "evil." It was absurd, over the top...and yeah, a lot of fun.

Which is a great way to describe this movie. It is propaganda of the most overt sort, with atrocities coming left and right far beyond believability, and acting to match. But it's also one of the most heavily stylized and forcefully edited movies I have ever seen. I can't promise you'll like it, but I can't imagine that you could ever be bored by it. This movie goes to 11!

Fall: Please, I Can Has Movies?

2008-09-17T07:03:00.001-04:00

So first of all, another apology. Just a few weeks ago I apologized for not posting enough, and promised to get Western Star of the Week back on track and start posting more in general. Fail. In all truth, this blog will probably get less and less maintained as my exams approach in February. I'll fight that as much as I can, but I'll probably have no choice. I'll do my best to have everything cruising again after that, and try to keep this sucker afloat in the mean time. But no promises. Unfortunately, blogs thrive on having as many posts as possible, and if I lose a few readers, my readership will be roughly zero.

On to my topic: the Fall. In case you weren't aware, there are two main movie seasons, if you live in a Megalopolis. The first is the summer, in which the biggest, most CGI-tacular releases are crammed down our throats. This year, for some reason, those releases were actually good. The summer starts earlier every year (like March this year) and then peters out in August. Hence, we were overwhelmed with everything from Iron Man to Hellboy II to The Dark Knight through July, then had to deal with everything from College to Disaster Movie to Star Wars: The Clone Wars (CG theatrical feature film) over the last 1.5 months.

Now the fall movie season is here, which will carry on until Christmas and might be called the holiday season by some. Burn After Reading kicked it off. This season is made up of three main kinds of releases: blatant, usually crappy "holiday fare" that warms people's hearts and/or appeals to kids and grandparents alike around Christmas and Thanksgiving, summer style movies that are frequently, but not always, more intelligent, stylish, and middle-brow than summer fare (Burn After Reading, Harry Potter (before it got moved!), Quantum of Solace, etc) and blatant Oscar grabs that won't make much money but could win some awards, including real and semi-independents, and foreign films (for this year, look at The Road, Appaloosa, and any other movie starring Viggo Mortensen). Obviously, certain movies, like Lord of the Rings, etc, can be in both of the latter categories, and some are even in all three.

But now we're at one of my pet peeves: you have to be in a Megalopolis to have this uninterrupted season. Here in Chapel Hill, there's really more like three seasons: Summer (Dark Knight et al), Fall (Quantum of Solace et al) and Films That Won't Be Released Until At Least After the Golden Globe Nominations, But Preferably the Oscar Nominations, Because The Only Way To Get Anyone To See A Movie As Relentlessly Bleak As, Say, There Will Be Blood Is To Dump It In Theaters In December To Qualify For Awards But Not Give It To The Moviegoing Public Until Jan/Feb After They've Seen It Get Nominated For Stuff.

This means that, for this blog, the actual movie year has to be Feb-Feb, or, more precisely, from Oscars to Oscars. A real critic, or a NY/LA/Toronto resident, can see all of "this year's" movies by Dec 31. I won't be so lucky. And in the case of foreign films, I often won't see them until after they've already won their Oscar, in which case I have no idea what year to put them in. It's frustrating to have A.O. Scott put The Lives of Others in the best movies of 2006, and then get to see it in April of 2007.

All of that's to say, it's fall. This is my favorite moviegoing time of year, and the most frustrating. Because, outside of the highly anticipated wide releases like Quantum of Solace, I just have to scan the local theaters and bitch about the fact that real critics have already made their top 10 lists, and most of the movies haven't even come to the Triangle yet. It's an exciting, nerve wracking period, trying to see everything notable, drinking everything in, and being painfully aware that I'm a second class film citizen, not worthy of There Will Be Blood until January. I can't stand it. Please, bear with me in this difficult time. Also, write your local studio exec and inform them that if every single under the radar Oscar release is put out in Dec and then expands in February, most of them will fail. May I suggest August?

A final note: I will open up five more spots on the year's top 10 list, to 15, which I'll fill as fall movies come out and I regard them as worthy of the list (I intended to put Burn After Reading on the list with as much pomp as I could muster, but that one turned out to be a whimper). I'll add five more spots (making 20 total) on Dec 31st; those 5 will be for the various Oscar releases, and let me recognize any fall or summer movies I've overlooked. That's right, my end of year list is 20 films. Because I'm twice as opinionated as any other critic.

Seinfeld Poll Results

2008-09-16T14:15:00.000-04:00

Well, the Seinfeld poll results are in, and there's bad news: you guys like Seinfeld. 11 of you voted that Seinfeld was "great" and four weighed in that it was "ok." I, and I alone, believe that it sucks.

It does make me happy that roughly a third of the people who answered the poll question weren't huge fans of Seinfeld. Take that, Seinfeld flamers: the show is not loved by 100% of people!

Actually, I've got some much more important numbers to throw at you. I know it seems like all of America watches American Idol. But it's Nielsen ratings (admittedly a flawed system) indicate that between 30 and 35 million people watch that show. Which means that for every American who watches American Idol each week, roughly 9 Americans didn't watch it that week. People are always saying that more people care about American Idol than the presidency; that's just silly. 61% of the people eligible to vote in 2004 voted, a process that involves registering to vote and then physically traveling to a polling place. 10% of the people in the U.S. usually watch American Idol, a process that involves turning your television on.

Which brings us to Seinfeld. I know, I know, everyone loves it, etc. But it never averaged more than 20 million viewers. Which means, again, for every person who watched a new episode of that show, 14 other Americans did something else. Seriously.

So here's my big finale: no matter how mainstream something is, no matter its media saturation, no matter if it's the highest rated show of the last 30 years or just made over half a billion dollars at the box office, odds are good that more Americans don't care than do. Just saying.

Review: Burn After Reading

2008-09-15T14:30:00.000-04:00

If you find vicious axe murders hilarious, you'll love this movie!

Burn After Reading
4/5

When I heard that the Coen Brothers were making a spy comedy as a follow up to No Country for Old Men, I was expecting a comical antidote to the nihilism of that uniquely bleak movie. Well, Burn After Reading is funny (although maybe not as funny as No Country*), but it's not an antidote to the nihilism of No Country. In fact, Burn After Reading is in fact probably more nihilistic.

I would not have thought that was possible. But No Country for Old Men, as bleak as it was, treated life as a vibrant and valuable thing. Ultimately, there may have been no solution to the murderous Anton Chigurh, but his violence was a terrible thing. Every time he took a life, even if it was a character we didn't know, we cringed. The loss of life was a loss that mattered.

Burn After Reading takes the exact opposite approach. A group of idiots (a personal trainer, a federal marshal, an ex-CIA analyst, the CIA analyst's frigid wife, and a lonely woman) are running around, sleeping with and killing each other, after the CIA analyst's memoirs go missing and the personal trainer and the lonely woman try to blackmail him for its return. As expected, things go wrong, people die, and laughs are had. Frequently, those last two are simultaneous.

That's why I regard this film as bleaker than No Country. The external observer in No Country was Tommy Lee Jones. Every death weighed on him; he was never directly involved in the chase for the mad killer, but we saw the true cost of those murders in Jones' eyes. The observers in this movie are a pair of disengaged CIA higher ups. Like Jones, they don't know what's going on, but unlike him they're unmoved by loss of life. When some of the characters die, when another commits murder, when another is in a coma, their only concern is that the agency come out looking ok. They, like the Coens and the audience, are completely divorced from some truly gory and vicious acts. These deaths are mined for comedy, and it's pretty clear that the characters deserve them, for adding to the world's surplus stupidity.

Which is not to say that this movie isn't funny; hell, death is frequently funny on film, especially in the hands of the Coens (Wheezy Joe, anyone)? But outside of some inspired silliness by Brad Pitt as the personal trainer, this movie is never fun. Clooney, Malkovich, and McDormand are also very funny; only Tilda Swinton and Richard Jenkins are saddled with nothing to do. But even the funniest of Malkovich's rants or Clooney's narcissistic acts or McDormand's cluelessness are anchored by a deep and abiding desperation.

I do recommend this movie. I admired the skill that went into it, and all of the Coens' skills are on full display here: quirky characters, perfect dialogue, inspired deaths, and an attention to detail in all facets of filmmaking. But it's not a fun movie. It's not a happy movie. And it's certainly not an antidote to No Country for Old Men. Rather, it's its more cynical counterpart, in which the devaluation of human life is no longer a tragedy, but a farce. Because of all the laughs, no one will probably condemn it for its nihilism, as they some condemned both No Country and The Dark Knight. But if you ask me, those who are in the business of condemning nihilism should consider this Exhibit A.

This is pretty much what I looked like when I walked out of the theatre.

*Like The Departed, except way bleaker, I found No Country to be a nihilistic tragedy/comedy. All of Woody Harrelson's lines? Brolin's mother-in-law? Tommy Lee Jones' blatantly made up story about the conflict between man and steer? All hilarious.

The Golden Age of TV: There's a Fucking Seinfeld Bus

2008-09-09T23:01:00.003-04:00

Seriously, there's a Seinfeld bus going around on college campuses to raise awareness about Seinfeld. Apparently someone is getting a bit antsy about Seinfeld's cultural hegemony. Newsflash: Seinfeld is bland. In today's TV Golden Age, Seinfeld is an ancient dinosaur that the kids aren't interested in.

Also, the AV Club is funny:
http://www.avclub.com/content/hater/further_adventures_in_press_4

The Golden Age of TV: Actors You Just Can't Get Enough Of

2008-09-08T07:03:00.002-04:00

Since Ive been busy, I haven't been able to support my Golden Age of TV idea as much as I wanted. I only got two posts out, and I've been planning this one for a while and never got around to it. So this'll be the last Golden Age of TV post for a while, unless I get less busy and more inspired in the real near future.

There's a certain brand of actor out there that I just can't get enough of. And I mean that literally, not figuratively. Figuratively, I just can't get enough of, say, Michael Caine. But hell, Michael Caine was a major leading man for three decades and has been a major character actor since. You could watch a Michael Caine movie a week and it would take you years to watch every movie with either a lead role or meaty supporting role.

Phillip Baker Hall is another matter altogether. I figuratively cannot get enough of him. But I also literally can't; I've only ever seen one movie where he has a leading role (Hard Eight), although I know there's a couple more out there. But for the most part, if you want Phillip Baker Hall, we're talking bit parts. We're talking 10 minutes in Rush Hour, 5 in Rush Hour 2, 15 in Zodiac, 7 in In Good Company, and some Holiday Inn Express commercials. That's what you have to wade through to try to get enough Phillip Baker Hall.

So I'm devoting the rest of this post to unobtainable actors, actors who I couldn't get enough of figuratively and literally, but who, unlike Hall, have found a place in The Golden Age of TV where they're beamed into our house once a week. Many of these actors started in TV before I was born or when I was a wee one, spent most of my lifetime in films, and have finally returned to the small screen, now that it's worth watching.

1.Tony Shalhoub
Show: Monk
Leading Film Roles: None

Tony Shalhoub is the king of this category. Either while enduring or after leaving the depressingly dull sitcom Wings, Shalhoub was a supporting actor ace, Coening it up in The Man Who Wasn't There, Barton Fink, and Miller's Crossing, and just plain being awesome in Men in Black and Galaxy Quest. But those 5 roles combined probably don't have an hour of screentime. Now, with Monk, you can see Shaloub on camera for an hour every single week. It's like striking character actor gold.

2.Bruce Campbell
Show: Burn Notice
Leading Film Roles: 5-10

Bruce Campbell's career can be broken down into three main categories: cultish lead parts in a handful of movies (Evil Dead, Bubba Ho-Tep), bad lead roles in terrible TV shows (Brisco County Jr, Jack of All Trades), and miniscule film roles in everything from Coen Brothers movies to McHale's Navy. Suffice to say, after you've watched the cult movies, there wasn't much left worth watching just for Bruce, until Burn Notice. As a spy's sidekick, Bruce is a hard-drinking, hard-punching ladies man in a Hawaiian shirt. I hope the show goes on forever, and I would watch it just for him.

3.James Cromwell
Show: Six Feet Under
Leading Film Roles: 0-5 (pretty much just Babe)

Like many others of my generation, I was first exposed to Cromwell in that masterpiece that is Babe. Since then, I'm still looking for another leading role for him. Sure, he's great in great stuff like L.A. Confidential and The Queen and in crap like I, Robot and The Sum of All Fears. Unfortunately, I haven't seen Six Feet Under, but the evidence is piling up that I need to. I'll probably be the only person watching it for James Cromwell, though.

4. Alec Baldwin
Show: 30 Rock
Leading Film Roles: 0-5 (in comedies)

Alec Baldwin's career as leading man in dramas and action movies pretty much disappeared on impact. But since that career imploded in the 90s, SNL fans have known that he's one of the funniest people in the universe. But to see him being funny, you had to either Youtube SNL, acknowledge the fact that The Departed is actually an action-comedy, or sit through dreck like Along Came Polly, Cat in the Hat, and Elizabethtown. Now you can just turn on the TV and relish 30 rock. Although I do recommend The Departed.

5.Ron Perlman
Show: Sons of Anarchy
Leading Film Roles: 0-5

I'm aware of the ancient Ron Perlman holy grail, Beauty and the Beast, which is just a bit before my time. Outside of that, you've got the Hellboy twofer, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children, and bit roles in everything from Alien Resurrection to In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. That's not pretty. There's only been one Sons of Anarchy episode so far, but it was a good un, and Perlman was great as the Godfather of a biker gang. I assume it will only get better.

6.Harvey Keitel
Show: Life on Mars
Leading Film Roles: 0-5

Martin Scorsese's original method muse quickly became a second, third, or fourth fiddle to the De Niro juggernaut. Since his brief heyday as a leading man, he's mostly just done crap or been an ensemble player in quality stuff like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Get Shorty. He's coming to the small screen this year in Life On Mars, the second attempt to do a U.S. remake of a show about a cop who goes back in time to the 70s (or something. Believe me, this whole situation has me confused). The role doesn't look huge, but I'll check the show out, just for Keitel. This one is pure potential.

Well, I'm sure I left lots and lots of people out. And I notice this post is totally missing the ladies; I guess Kyra Sedgwick would count, but I'm afraid I don't know her as a film actor and I haven't seen a single episode of The Closer. So I need some help here. Post away.

Review Roundup: Death Race, Man On Wire , Hamlet 2

2008-09-07T07:48:00.001-04:00

Greeting, Movies et al fans! Crazy stuff has been happening at Movies et al! And by crazy stuff, I mean: 1. Movies et al's piece about the Golden Age of TV was highlighted on IMDB, which led 6500+ people to visit the site, most of whom left a vicious comment suggesting that yours truly should not be allowed to talk about TV as I don't like Seinfeld. My favorite comment suggested that the writer of the piece be fired. Yeah, so, I decided not to fire the writer of that particular post, but I've decided to reduce his salary to nothing. Poor bastard is just gonna keep writing, but never get paid.

2. I had to grade some papers and deal with students, and stopped posting for a week! Sorry. I'll be better in the future. At the very least, Film Ignorance will keep going strong, as will Western Star of the Week, which will restart next week after a break for noir month. I know you've missed it, Ibetolis!

I'll also try to keep up with the reviews, which I've been slack about. For now, a quick paragraph about the three films I saw most recently. I might revive the "mini-review" format, but right now the reviews I write are about the same length as my original mini-reviews. So, here are some mini-mini-reviews.

1. Death Race
3.5/5

Halfway through the first of Death Race's three races, I realized something: I was enjoying this damn movie. I had no right to enjoy it. It had all the hallmarks of a Paul W.S. Anderson movie: terrible characters, worse dialogue, an incomprehensible plot. But somewhere along the way, he learned how to actually film and edit an action sequence. And I loved this film's cars, the races, and the vicious sadism that other movies pretend to have but always fail to actually bring. Our hero Jason Statham hates somebody, so he breaks their neck on national television. This is a movie that never went soft. And in a great piece of irony, it's Joan Allen, not Ian McShane, who says the word "cocksucker." Actually, she says "Cocksucker, you fuck with me and we'll see who shits on the sidewalk." Classic.

2.Man on Wire
5/5

The best documentary I have seen since...Bright Leaves? Fog of War? Ever? This is a masterpiece about a crazy Frenchman who, upon hearing that the Twin Towers are going to be built, immediately decides that he has to walk a tightrope between them. I can't explain why he feels that way, but this is a caper film and a half, the real life story of a team of deranged artists who break into the WTC so that their resident crazy/genius can walk on a tightrope between the towers. One of the most beautiful, and also most troubling, portraits of an artist that I have ever seen. And Phillipe Petit, our titular man on wire, is truly an artist. Provisionally, having only seen this film, I would call him one of the great artists of the 20th century. He was a guerrilla artist, three decades before the site of his art would become famous for terrorism. Petit imagined a world in which boundaries and rules were broken for the sake of art, not ideology. As a child of the 80s and 90s, I find it hard to believe such a world existed, but documentaries like Man on Wire assure me that it's all true..

3. Hamlet 2
1.5/5

It's like School of Rock, except not funny. It's also dull. Cliched. Tedious. Stupid. A complete and total waste of time, except for Steve Coogan's vicious wife (Catherine Keener) and dim-witted roommate (David Arquette). Keener, one of our best leading ladies, is not given much to do but is great in her few scenes, taking Coogan's no-talent ass-clown apart. Arquette is even better - his inane dialogue (I think he has only four lines) is so deadpan I don't know how he kept a straight face. His first line is "It's a sunny day outside" and his last one is "I left you a protein shake in the fridge. It's strawberry." His dialogue and character are so deprived of meaning as to be hysterical. The rest of the movie is just deprived of comedy.

Film Ignorance #16: Masculin/Feminin

2008-09-06T13:00:00.001-04:00

Film: Masculin/Feminin
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, various French people I've never heard of, and Brigitte Bardot for about two seconds
Year: 1966
Reason for Ignorance: Thought it was Truffaut
Ignorance Rating: 28 (7 votes)

Jean-Luc Godard viewed himself as more than a filmmaker; he believed he embodied the figure of the poet, the novelist, the painter, and perhaps above all the existential-political philosopher in the tradition of Sartre. You can instantly tell all of these things from his endless references to philosophy, to poetry, to painting. You can also tell, in Masculin/Feminin, when one of the title cards proclaims that the filmmaker and the philosopher have the same role.

Masculin/Feminin is more or less plotless. We see aimless Paul and his rising pop-singer girlfriend Madeline (played by 60s French pop star Chantal Goya) listlessly go through the motions of a relationship, surrounded by a few of Paul's friends and a seemingly endless series of incredibly pretty ex-coworkers of Madeline's. We watch these stylishly dressed hipsters go to bars, go to cafes, go to the cinema, ride the train, and do other, everyday stuff - and it's all, frankly, enrapturing. Because in addition to the pure and simple pleasure we get from watching these beautiful people in a beautiful city, we get to hear them talk.

Paul, Madeline, and their friends talk about everything. The "Masculin" side of the equation seems to be most interested in politics - Paul and his revolutionary friend bemoan de Gaulle, the Vietnamese War, the sad lack of interest in revolutionary politics. The "Feminins" make it quite clear that they don't care about politics, are squeamish about birth control, and prefer fashion and beauty above all things. This doesn't make them look particularly bad; Paul, after all, confronts the projectionist of a theater, passionately ordering him to stop showing a movie in 1.85 aspect ratio because it was decided that anything above 1.75 is excessive, and Godard points out several times that you can't spell "Masculin" without "Cul," which means "ass."

Speaking of: In his typically abrasive style, Godard points many things out to us in title-card asides and pronouncements. The most important one: this movie is about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. It's about an exciting and turbulent time that was about to give birth to mass protests in both American and France; more to the point, it's about the collision of political values and cultural style, playing across the lives of a bunch of uncertain young people. Along the way, Godard makes his political and philosophical points - a man stabs himself for no reason, another sets himself on fire in a Vietnam protest - but if the film certainly is didactic, it never feels didactic. It feels, instead, like exactly what it is: overwhelmingly natural and free-form, flowing from scene to scene and conversation to conversation with no goal except the capturing of this fragmented moment in the city of Paris.

In the trailer for Masculin/Feminin, Godard tells us: "Minors under the age of 18 not admitted...because it is about them." It seems to me that, to this day, it's about us. If you haven't seen Masculin/Feminin, but you've ever watched a Wes Anderson movie, or read some Sartre or Camus, or tried to look European while smoking a cigarette, or worn a fashionable trenchcoat, I recommend you see it. It's a film about the hipsters of 40 years ago - and they look and talk exactly like the hipsters of 2008. Except, you know, in French.

The Golden Age of TV: HBO Pulls the Plug on Preacher

2008-08-31T15:00:00.000-04:00

It has been widely reported that HBO has decided not to proceed with their plan to adapt Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's long-running comics series Preacher into a television show. This is some of the worst news that people who are fans of excellence have received in a while, with one very minor silver lining. You can read the whole story over at Newsarama, but here are my thoughts:

When I said this is bad news for fans of excellence, I meant it. You see, there's been a great deal of excellence going on in comics for the past two decades, and a great deal of it has hit the silver screen. But there are a number of absolutely fantastic series that have not managed to make the big screen, for the simple reason of length. When Batman or Spider-Man is made into a movie, the creators have decades of material to choose from, but that material is not arranged into a coherent plot, and it's up to them to make a movie out of it. And smaller projects featuring great recent comics have been made - like 300, Wanted, or V for Vendetta - but these have one single plot that (with modification) can be turned fairly easily into a movie.

But lingering beyond moviedom are some legendary series that took years to make and have 50 or more issues. Comics like The Sandman (the grandaddy of them all), Ex Machina, Transmetropolitan, Lucifer, Y: The Last Man, Fables, 100 Bullets, Doom Patrol, and yes, Preacher wouldn't make sense as movies. These stories often take a decade to tell and occur over the course of many years; to attempt to condense this long-form storytelling into 110 minutes would require the worst form of synecdoche. Some of them perhaps could survive the Hellboy treatment, with one of their more important stories serving as an origin/launching point for future adventures. But most of them are less episodic than Hellboy, and that means there's only one option to tell the whole story: TV.

The problem is, the comics revolution brought with it violence and dirty words. Those things don't play that well on networks or even regular cable. And even if they did, we're talking serious storytelling, the kind that you wouldn't trust the people responsible for Friends or Malcolm in the Middle to tell. So for as long as I can remember (at least, since the Golden Age of Television began) fans have called for the very best long-running comics series to be made into shows by the people that brought Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire to life. Only on HBO can you get the mixture of elements that would make these comics work on the screen: commitment to long-form storytelling, excellent acting and production values, willingness to show violence, gore, and sexuality, and the cultural cachet to turn these long beloved comics into legitimate landmarks of American culture.

Preacher was supposed to be the test case for this project. It's a little older than most of the other series I mentioned, and although it's not my favorite, it's certainly one of the best. If HBO could take Preacher and make it into a viable television series, the sky was the limit. No longer would we have to dread the upcoming film versions of our favorite comics, certain that 8 years of storytelling would get ripped up and rewritten into a single nonsensical movie. Instead, we could just sit back and relax while stories that were serialized over years were adapted over years by the best creators on the small screen.

There are a few pieces of good news. First, the man behind the Preacher series was Mark Steven Johnson. He was writing and executive producing, and he previously wrote Jack Frost (the Keaton vehicle), Daredevil, and Ghost Rider. His Preacher might not have been what we wanted anyway...

More importantly, Johnson said that HBO kiboshed Preacher because it "was just too dark and too violent and too controversial." Now, on the one hand, that's pretty scary: HBO is backing out of a violent and controversial show? And this defeats my point that HBO is the only place these shows could live. But, on the plus side, Preacher is one of the most violent and controversial pieces of comics literature ever made. So just because Preacher was too dark doesn't mean that 100 Bullets would be.

Both of those caveats aside, this is some bad news. True, D.J. Caruso's plan to do Y: The Last Man as a trilogy might be even better than an HBO show. What 3 2-hour movies would lose in nuance (when compared to five 12-hour seasons), they might be able to make up in superior budget and style. But Preacher would have been a giant step forward for bringing long-running comics series to life, intact and unsullied. I don't know when the next chance will be, but I'm hoping it's soon.

Film Ignorance #15: Sweet Smell of Success

2008-08-30T07:48:00.003-04:00

Once again, I bring you a Film Ignorance post on the same day that you can read about the same film over at MovieZeal for noir month. And the person at MovieZeal probably even liked the movie. Go support noir month!

Film: Sweet Smell of Success
Rating: Meh
Director: Alexander MacKendrick
Stars: Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster
Year: 1957
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: 40 (54 Votes)

Let me be upfront about a personal preference: I hate Tony Curtis. I think he's a hack who could never act in the slightest little bit. Now, I especially hate that this quintessentially 20th century ass clown was repeatedly cast in period pieces like Spartacus and The Vikings, which admittedly isn't the problem here. But man do I hate Tony Curtis. That guy sucks.

Sweet Smell of Success probably offers the best Tony Curtis performance I have yet seen, but you'll pardon me if I don't think that's so special. Tony plays Sidney Falco, an unbelievably slimy press agent whose only skill is being friends with J.J. Hunsecker, a gossip columnist who can change a nightclub's fate with just a few lines of text. When the film starts, Sidney is on the outs with J.J. because he has failed to break up J.J.'s sister's relationship with one of his clients. Thus, Sidney has to get slimier than ever to slander his own client to appease J.J. while preventing J.J.'s sister from finding out about J.J.'s involvement.

This is a pretty good premise for a movie, and when it's focusing on Sydney's wheelings and dealings, it actually works pretty well. Curtis may not have been a competent actor, but he's quite convincing as an asshole who's no good at his job but has managed to succeed based on his looks, connections, and inexplicable previous success (which we find out he sometimes fakes). As a desperate and failing man, all of Curtis' failings are rewritten as strengths; it's easy to believe that this guy has no idea what he's doing, and will sell his soul to keep his embarrassing career alive.

Unfortunately, as machination piles up on machination, the film's tone shifts and becomes more serious. Eventually, it seems to be aspiring towards Shakespeare - both with its incestuous and tragic themes and some dramatic irony of the type that always strikes me as charming in Shakespeare but clumsy and sitcomish in 20th century film. It doesn't help that Burt Lancaster plays J.J.; I like Burt, but I consider him something of an overactor. The overacting serves him very well in the film's first act - he's playing a god-like columnist, after all. When the business gets more serious and fate hangs in the balance, Lancaster's overacting combines with Curtis' natural hamminess to seriously hurt the movie.

There are really only three things I can unreservedly praise in Sweet Smell of Success. First, ace cinematographer James Wong Howe's work is absolutely superb - it reminded me of Gordon Willis' later vision of the same city in Manhattan. Second, Elmer Bernstein's score is, as you might expect, not just a pleasure to listen to but far better at conveying the emotions at hand than Curtis or Lancaster. Finally, Lancaster's reverse mullet (party in the front, business in the back) is one of the most awesome haircuts I have ever seen. But you don't need to watch the movie to appreciate it.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

The Golden Age of TV

2008-08-29T09:00:00.001-04:00

I don't watch that much TV. And I especially watch virtually no TV as it comes on the TV; I'm a Netflix TV guy. But even I have a few things to say about TV, as the new seasons start up and everyone notes, once again, that they're going to suck. I have no doubt that most of them will suck, and I certainly don't pay attention to what new sitcoms are going to be paired with Two and a Half Men. But in case you hadn't noticed, we're living in a golden age of TV. I'm probably not the go to person to talk about this, since I'm nowhere near as up on TV as I should be - I haven't seen a single episode of The Sopranos. But I have recently started filling out my knowledge of recent TV successes with shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, Deadwood, Dexter, and others.

The thesis of this post is that TV sucks, and by TV I mean the regular normative kind of TV: the kind of TV where every episode is exactly the same, follows the same formula, has no overarching storyline, has virtually no character development, etc. There was a time (aka the 50s) when the American mainstream wanted a reassuring and repetitive commercial art form, and they got it, and for some reason we've been stuck with it ever since. Occasionally, something great happens within this formula (like The Simpsons or Futurama) but regular, TV-TV usually delivers things more along the lines of Full House or CSI: Miami. I know both of those things have their fans, but they're not for me.

TV was pretty much this from 1950 through 2000.

But now we're not stuck with TV-TV. The revolution happened, and it happened by drawing elements from outside of TV's long and boring history of non-experimentation (for the most part, it also happened on pay channels, which is not a big surprise). Here's the ideas from outside of TV that I think have had the greatest impact toward making TV not suck.

1.The Godfather, Parts 1-60
Apparently, we had to wait 30 years for someone to realize that you could take a long-form, gritty, deep crime story, ala The Godfather, and tell it on TV, where it might be less gritty but could be even deeper and longer. Crime sagas were just begging to be epic TV shows told over years of deep and engaging episodes with an ongoing storyline, but no one did a good job of it until lately (various police procedurals, from Hill Street Blues onward, tried a version of this, but it rarely went outside the police procedural genre). And now we're practically drowning in (recently concluded) crime shows with an epic, overarching storyline. This is the genre that started the TV revolution, with The Sopranos, and if it's hit a low ebb now, I've still got years of DVDs to get through.
This Brought Us: The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Dexter

2.Christopher Guest on the Small Screen
In 1999, Larry David, the creator of the repetitive, bland, unfunny, and well-beloved show Seinfeld, did a one hour HBO mockumentary called Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was a TV special, shot with a single camera and treated as if it were a documentary about Larry's life. As a fake documentary, it represented a bold and different way of doing comedy. Well, the idea was bold and different for TV - Christopher Guest had been doing it on the big screen for decades, and Woody Allen invented it in 1969 with Take the Money and Run. Seriously, Woody Allen invented it 40 years ago and it came to the small screen like five years ago. Still, I'm glad it finally came, and it's responsible for the best of TV Comedy.
This Brought Us: Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office [UK], The Office [US], Arrested Development, 30 Rock

3.Did You Know Brian K Vaughan Writes for Lost?
The American people have told us at the box office, over and over again, that they have a taste for genre entertainment: science fiction, superheroes, neo-noir, etc. And in the comics world, those genres are being practiced with enormous success, particularly since they have a weapon movies don't have: the cliffhanger. Pair an exciting detective, science fiction, or superhero story with the cliffhanger, and then put it on TV, and you've got yourself a TV show only slightly less addictive than crack. It's no surprise that, when Lost started sucking, they hired comics writer and cliffhanger master Brian K Vaughan to right the ship (spoiler: he didn't).
This Brought Us: Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars

4. This car has a dent in it. And another dent here, and another dent here.
Quirkiness sells. It sells tickets to Wes Anderson movies, tickets to Napoleon Dynamite, advertising time on NPR's This American Life, books written by David Sedaris, and thousands upon thousands of "vintage" T-Shirts at thrift shops (awesome!) or Urban Outfitters (posers!). People love watching awkward and slightly weird characters have disjointed but ultimately charming adventures. And it didn't occur to anyone to put them on TV? I think Seinfeld might be as close as it gets, pre-revolution...yuck.
This Brought Us: My Name is Earl, Monk, Flight of the Conchords, Six Feet Under

As near as I can tell, those are the big four. But I know that I left out a lot of great shows from the revolution, and I probably left out a lot of influences from movies and other media that helped bring about the revolution. And since I'm not the most TV savvy guy in the world, I need your help: What shows and trends did I overlook? Post a comment and put me in my place.

Woody Allen Poll

2008-08-27T14:41:00.005-04:00

Well, I did my first poll for a while, and it got 11 votes, which is probably a record but also sad because it was up for a week. Of course, maybe people just don't have strong opinions about recent Woody Allen films...in which case they are excommunicated from my religion. Which is pretty much a one man religion which worships Woody Allen. Anyway.

The poll asked what was the best film that Woody has made since Husbands and Wives, Woody's last masterpiece. The obvious answer is Deconstructing Harry, which of course means that my vote was the only one that film received. The winners tied with three votes a piece: Manhattan Murder Mystery, which I love and almost voted for, and Bullets Over Broadway, which I have not seen. It just made it to the top spot on my netflix queue.

Outside of Harry, Manhattan, and Bullets, only two films received votes. Match Point, which I loathed but many praised, got two votes. "Other" also got two votes. Mighty Aphrodite (which I haven't seen), Melinda and Melinda (terrible but rather well-received), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (pretty ok!) got 0 votes.

Remind me never to do a poll again. Only getting 11 votes in an entire week is so depressing. If you remove my vote, that's like 1.1 votes a day. Welcome to Movies et al, where 1.1 readers a day enjoy the site enough to vote in the poll!

P.S. Woody is ageless. Those two pictures were taken roughly 40 years apart. I've aged more since 2005 than he has since the 60s.

Film Ignorance #14: Kiss Me Deadly

2008-08-26T07:00:00.002-04:00

This post isn't technically a part of MovieZeal's Noir Month, but I thought I'd get all the noir I could into this month while my favorite blog was celebrating it. Head on over to Movie Zeal for another review of Kiss Me Deadly, and so much more noir.

Film: Kiss Me Deadly
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Robert Aldrich
Stars: Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman
Year: 1955
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
"They. A wonderful word. And who are they? They are the nameless ones who kill people for the great whatsit. Does it exist? Who cares."

Allmovie calls Kiss Me Deadly "the ultimate film noir." It's hard to disagree with them; the movie follows the perfect noir arc, as our private detective protagonist meets a dame, has the dame die on him, and then must travel through the underworld, acquiring contacts that die minutes after meeting him, in search of "the great whatsit." And our hero, Mike Hammer, walks a nice balance between classic noir heroes: he's half upright detective, half sadistic thug.

On the other hand, his name is "Mike Hammer." Get it? He's big and hard and hits people. Mickey Spillane is a well-regarded hard boiled writer (and Kiss Me Deadly is reportedly not terribly faithful to the source material), but he was certainly no Chandler, Cain, or Hammett. Kiss Me Deadly is the ultimate film noir because it takes every noir element - already a hyperbolic treatment of the standard pulp story - and ratchets it up even further. There's no subtlety, no confusion, and most of all none of the fascinating character development that makes the greatest noirs so compelling.

The only thing I'd seen Ralph Meeker in before Kiss Me Deadly was the Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart western The Naked Spur. I guess he specialized in dense sadists; his Naked Spur role was an amoral cavalry man discharged because he was psychologically unfit. Mike Hammer fits right in with that role; he looks and sounds bland, and is a somewhat improbable lady killer, but his eyes light up when he's asked to do physical violence to a human being (improbably, he never hits a lady. What kind of noir is this?). He also apparently likes blonds a great deal; his partner/secretary/girlfriend is absolutely gorgeous, a film fatale who works for him gathering information, and spends her spare time practicing her ballet moves. But like L.B. Jeffries of Rear Window, Mike doesn't seem to have much interest in "hammering" this gorgeous lady who's in love with him. Instead, like Hitchcock himself, he chases every single blond he comes across, including the damsel in distress who starts off the whole thing, her equally in distress roommate, and even the sister of one of the heavies who menaces him.

Even if you've never seen Kiss Me Deadly, the great whatsit will seem familiar when it finally appears on screen: it's a dangerous glowing box that shouldn't be opened. But if Kiss Me Deadly's MacGuffin appears in Pulp Fiction, Repo Man, and even Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie is most similar to Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. The body count is massive, the violence is sadistic, and the misogyny is palpable. Mike is like a slightly subtler version of Marv; he doesn't seem to be brightest detective, but he finds out what he needs to know by slapping, punching, and, in one particularly sadistic moment, slamming the coroner's fingers in a desk drawer. Like Sin City, Kiss Me Deadly is larger than life noir. It goes on a bit too long, it's completely lacking in subtlety, and it's loaded with violence. But if you like noir, it does represent one of the ultimate experiences, especially if you enjoy it painted with a broad brush.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Roger Ebert: Ruining America's Movies since 1967

2008-08-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

Roger Ebert ruins movies. He just does. He always has. But I've recently run across a feat of movie ruining that I think is previously unmatched in Roger Ebert movie history.

I just watched, via Netflix's Watch Instantly feature, a really great documentary called King of Kong. If you haven't seen it, go rent it or watch it instantly immediately. It's that great. It's about two men who vie for the world record highest score on Donkey Kong. One of them, Steve Wiebe, is an affable, possibly mildly autistic laid off engineer. The other is a douchey, mulleted hot wing baron named Billy Mitchell. The whole movie is a good vs. evil struggle of the highest order, resting on a single question: which of these men will end up with the Donkey Kong record?

After rating the film on netflix, I checked out their link to Ebert's review, since I wanted to be mad at him for not praising it highly enough. I was treated to a shocking final paragraph:
"I would never dream of giving away the ending. But I can give away what happened after the ending. Today I went to www.TwinGalaxies.com and discovered that ... "in front of an audience of hundreds," [name redacted] topped his own record by scoring 1,050,200 points."

Oh God Ebert, you bastard. First you tease us with your well-known and longstanding predilection for ruining the ends of movies. Sure Roger, you'd never dream of giving away the ending. Not you, a paragon of non-spoilerness. But you don't mind at all removing the dramatic tension of the film, and EVEN BEYOND IT, by telling us that the victory in the film is rendered moot.

Seriously. This is like if there was some good romantic comedy - a real romantic comedy, like Knocked Up or Annie Hall, and you legitimately don't know whether or not the couple will get together. You're actually curious whether love will conquer all or not. And then Ebert writes:

"I would never dream of revealing the ending of this movie. But I do know for a fact that, two years after they get married, the couple in question gets a divorce." Sure, he didn't tell you how the movie was going to end. But he did something even worse: he told you how events would end, even beyond the movie itself.

Having actually seen this movie, I had no problem with Ebert giving us this information - I was glad to know. But I can't imagine reading this review before seeing the movie. Every time someone was going for the record - and those were some tense scenes - I would have thought "I know who wins in the end." How could I not have thought that? The world's most famous movie reviewer told me who ended up with the record. What a bastard.

Over 50% of Star Wars Sucks. Deal With It.

2008-08-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

I had a brief conversation about Star Wars with an incoming grad student, and he offered up a popular opinion: the most recent four movies (Episodes 1, 2, 3 and Star Wars: The Clone Wars 2008 CG theatrical feature film) aren't really Star Wars. Star Wars is, you know, that cherished thing we had when we were younger. And then Salon ran this amusing little Keith Knight cartoon: http://www.salon.com/comics/knig/2008/08/20/knig/index.html

According to the cartoon "Like any true fan, the new films are dead to me. Didn't exist. Never happened."

Ok fandom, I'm gonna tell you the truth now. You won't like it. You'd prefer not to believe it. It's probably striking deep at the heart of your self-image. But there have been seven Star Wars movies released in theaters, and four of them suck. Therefore, over 50% of Star Wars sucks. It just does.

I know you don't like living in this universe. This is obviously why Keith Knight would prefer to live in denial. But please, you're just embarrassing yourselves. Those movies did happen. We all watched them, we can't unwatch them (well, hopefully you won't go see Clone Wars). But they happened, and the new reality is that Star Wars mostly sucks.

Look, I'm not asking you give up your love for the original trilogy. You can even still love Star Wars itself. But for an entire generation, growing up has meant watching the beauty and joy of Star Wars die before our very eyes. That's what adulthood is like. Things, even Star Wars, start to suck. You can't make it go away.

So, Keith Knight et al, welcome to the new reality. More Star Wars movies suck than don't. You can either deal with it, or you can wait for Santa Claus and/or Jebus to make it all better. Have fun waiting.

Ziro the Hutt: Is America OK with Gay Characters in Kids Media?

2008-08-20T16:12:00.007-04:00

You might not see the need for this question. It sounds silly that anyone would be upset that a new villain in a terrible Star Wars movie is purple, wears feathers, and speaks like the recently popular film character Truman Capote. In other words, this character is amusingly gay, and no one seems to be too upset about it. What's the big deal?

Well, the big deal is that this probably would have been a big deal earlier in the 21st century. Remember, we've had at least three "the homosexual lifestyle is being promoted through children's television" controversies in the last ten years. In February of 1999, Jerry Falwell warned that "Tinky-Winky" the Teletubby was gay and encouraging a gay lifestyle. In 2005, the current Secretary of Education found it unacceptable that Buster the Rabbit visited a Vermont town with lesbians in it - some of the children he met had two mommies. Also in 2005, James Dobson and Focus on the Family alleged that Spongebob Squarepants was gay because he held hands with his friends and appeared in a video promoting tolerance and diversity.

So, if the practice of finding gay messages in mainstream children's programming is less than a decade old, and reached its high point only three years ago, why has the flagrantly gay Ziro not received any right-wing media attention. Here are some of the answers I can think of:

1.He's not actually gay. This is the Lucas party line: the Hutt's not gay. He just, you know, looks and talks gay. And I'm sure James Dobson will absolutely love the explanation, from director Dave Filoni: "He’s of questionable [sexuality] at least as a slug. They tell me that these slugs can be either male or female depending. That’s something I guess that slugs and snails do." This charming purple Hutt isn't gay, it's of ambiguous sexuality, and probably a hermaphrodite! Surely this would not protect Ziro from right-wingers' wrath.

2. It's movies, not TV. This one doesn't make any sense to me, but the FCC and people at large seem to think that something that is broadcast into your home is demonstrably worse than something that you have to go and pay to see (this would only make sense if you didn't have control over what channel you were watching). I would maybe buy this one, except that advertisements for this crappy movie ARE being broadcast into every home in America, and are obviously working, judging by all the kids in the theater when I went to see this. So if the conservatives aren't worried about this character because he, unlike Spongebob, resides at the movie theater, I think they're a little confused. Plus, that didn't prevent them from raining their wrath down on sexy Jesus.

3.It's not educational. All of those three previous examples have some sort of educational angle. Postcards from Buster is pretty classic edutainment. Spongebob is not educational at all, but the controversy occurred when Spongebob was trying to teach kids about tolerance. And although I can't find the slightest educational angle in Teletubbies, I think it's supposed to teach problem-solving and getting along, or something. But I'm pretty sure that homophobes have been getting mad about plenty of non-educational gay-themed things for a long time, so I still don't think that goes all the way to explain it.

Which brings us to my slight optimism. True, we may not have heard any complaints because Ziro is a giant space slug who is not beamed into homes and who is a role model. But I'd prefer to believe that America has, in the smallest way, moved on. Which is not to say that the complaints about Spongebob, the Teletubbies, and Buster were really taken that seriously by mainstream America. I do not think we were in the grips of gay lifestyle promotion hysteria three years ago. But some people with (admittedly right-wing) credentials complained about each of those events, and each of them got media coverage. Whether it was blown out of proportion or not, in each instance someone decided that there was a problem with kids witnessing gay characters, and decided to go to the media with their complaints. That hasn't happened with Ziro. Maybe, just maybe, that's progress.

Of course, William Gatevackes over at Film Buff Newsreel does think someone might be offended by Ziro. He writes "It appears that Lucas is trying to present Ziro the Hutt as a gay sterotype. I don’t know who is going to be offended more–gay rights groups or hardcore Star Wars fans." The fact that he thinks Star Wars fans will be horrified by this character is silly; the movie is considerably more offensive to the Star Wars lovers than the character.

I probably don't won't to get into the issue of whether or not Ziro is offensive to gay culture. I personally found this ridiculous bit of camp to be the only breath of fresh air in this entire deplorable movie. But the mere fact that Gatevackes thinks that gays will be offended before he thinks that homophobes will be offended strikes me as a good sign. If we're more worried that a character in a kids movie shortchanges gay culture than promotes homosexuality, it seems like we've come a long way since 2005.

Am I Crazy, Or Does Traitor Look Pretty Good?

2008-08-20T07:00:00.003-04:00

Everyone knows that late winter/early spring is a terrible time for movies. Late summer/early fall is also pretty bad, as subpar summer blockbusters get dumped at the same time as subpar "prestige" films get chucked out so they don't interfere with the releases of better pictures. In other words, we get both Death Race and more screens of Elegy this week.

But they've been advertising a movie that actually looks good to me: Traitor. Here's the trailer:

I haven't heard a word about this movie, beyond a few TV ads. I haven't even seen the trailer in theaters. There's buzz and/or hype around obvious garbage like Babylon A.D., Henry Poole is Here, and The House Bunny, while Traitor is invisible. That should mean it'll suck. And yet...this movie looks good!

Frankly, the production credits don't excite me: This is the directorial debut of Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who also wrote the script. His only previous credit is co-writing the crapfest Day After Tomorrow. But that trailer makes it looks like the rarest of all film animals*: an intelligent action movie. And Don Cheadle as a conflicted double agent, Jeff Daniels as his paper-pushing CIA Handler, and Guy Pearce as the goateed FBI douche bag hunting Cheadle makes for a damn fine cast. I imagine it won't be The Departed or The Bourne Ultimatum, but I'm excited about Traitor. Weird.

*Not that long ago, I would have thought the intelligent grossout comedy to be the rarest of all animals. See Filmography: Apatow, Judd for why that is no longer so.

Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

2008-08-19T11:51:00.007-04:00

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
4/5

I instantly loathed Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Sure, it showcased beautiful people in a beautiful city, beautifully photographed. But it seemed unbelievably facile. For starters, it is possessed of one of the worst, no, scratch that, the absolute worst voiceover of all time. The bland, uninteresting voiceover works like captions in pre-modern comics: it describes the things that you can see happening on the screen. The voiceover tells us that our two heroines are arriving at the hotel and checking into a different room than that of their Spanish suitor...and we see them arrive at the hotel and check into separate rooms. Mind-blowing. Furthermore, the voiceover also tells us about the characteristics and emotions of the two women, which is one of the most bizarre developments in recent filmmaking: everyone knows that Woody Allen's characters display their emotions via copious buckets of confessional dialouge. A voiceover, in lieu of this process, just felt wrong.

Of course, I reconsidered this stance when Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) started explaining their feelings via dialogue. As Johansson has demonstrated several times, and as Hall demonstrated throughout this film, neither of them can handle Allen's hyper-literate dialogue. The worst voiceover of all-time suddenly seemed sophisticated and nuanced, compared to Hall and Johansson's clumsy butcherings of the English language.

But a number of things happened to defuse my loathing and ultimately transform it into pleasure. Most importantly, the newly-minted international superstar Javier Bardem arrived. Just as in No Country for Old Men, Bardem is palpably charismatic, although this time out he kills considerably fewer people. He plays Juan Antonio, a Spanish painter interested in both Vicky and Cristina. Vicky is an engaged Type A personality who is certainly not his type; Cristina is an aimless psuedo-artist who certainly is. And yet both of them are interested enough in Juan Antonio to travel with him to Oviedo to look at some sculpture.

The person on the right speaks demonstrably better English than the two on the left.

Beyond the sheer magnificence of Bardem, this film's greatest strength is its deceptive complexity. The film's trailer and opening quarter make it appear hopelessly schematic: Cristina is an artistic free spirit, Vicky is hard-nosed realist, Juan Antonio is a suave lady killer, Juan Antonio's crazy ex-wife (Penelope Cruz) is a violent wacko, and Vicky's fiance is a boring Wall Street douche bag. But after allowing us all of these illusions, Allen slowly twists them. The film's only truly sympathetic character is the fiance, who turns out to be a genuinely nice guy with a romantic streak. Cruz is in fact a better artist than Juan Antonio, and is a more efficient ladykiller. Juan Antonio's ladykilling is not so much calculated as hopelessly romantic. And most importantly, both Vicky and Cristina are revealed to be characters of problematic depth, with complex and contradictory desires. Luckily for us, they have relatively few scenes together after the film's opening moments; for some reason, when they're separate, they seem to handle the dialogue much better. This may be because they aren't stumbling over each other's incompetence, or possibly because Bardem, Cruz, and the girls' mentor Patricia Clarkson are such masters that I failed to notice their incompetence.

You could say that almost any Woody Allen movie is about adultery, and you'd usually be right. But what his movies are really about is the way that desire overcomes the channels it's supposed to run through, and finds new and unexpected ways to express itself. Vicky Cristina Barcelona explores a number of the different ways desire can flow. It problematizes all of them and valorizes none of them, but it also finds room to praise love in all its forms. It may not be Hannah and Her Sisters, but it's as good as we're likely to get from latter-day Allen. I, for one, am grateful.

Avril Lavigne

2008-08-18T08:02:00.001-04:00

I know this isn't film news, but I couldn't resist:

" Malaysia's Islamic opposition party has urged the government to cancel a concert by Avril Lavigne, saying the Canadian singer's on-stage moves are "too sexy," an official said Monday."

Clearly, Malaysia's Islamic opposition party hasn't ever actually seen Avril Lavigne's on-stage moves.

Film Ignorance #13: In a Lonely Place

2008-08-17T15:16:00.005-04:00

Ok, so it's a bit late in the day, but I've got another film ignorance entry for you on the same day that the same film is featured as part of Noir Month over at MovieZeal. Enjoy!

Film: In a Lonely Place
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Nicholas Ray
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame
Year: 1950
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Dix Steele (Bogart) is a hard case in a bad way. He's a hard-drinking screenwriter who hasn't had a hit for years. His only friends are a drunk Shakespearean who bums brandy off of him and his loyal agent. He's got a hair-trigger temper, a history of barfights, and is a rumored abuser of women. But he's not a murderer. Or is he?

Steele can't stand to read the trashy novel he's supposed to adapt, so he invites the hat check girl who read the book while holding it for him back to his place to tell him the story. He immediately loses interest in the crappy story, gives the girl cab fare, and sends her home. The next day, she turns up dead in a gorge. Steele's heartbroken:

The police captain: You're told that the girl you were with last night was found in Benedict Canyon, murdered. Dumped from a moving car. What's your reaction? Shock? Horror? Sympathy? No - just petulance at being questioned. A couple of feeble jokes. You puzzle me, Mr. Steele.
Steele: Well, I grant you, the jokes could've been better, but I don't see why the rest should worry you - that is, unless you plan to arrest me on lack of emotion.

Luckily for Steele, his neighbor provides him an alibi: she saw the girl leave. And after meeting each other at the police station, Dix and Laurel start to fall in love. With her, his passion is rekindled, his new script flourishes, and his violence seems restrained. But cracks appear at the edges, and as Laurel gets to know him better, and witnesses him nearly kill a man in a fit of road rage, she begins to question his innocence.

This is a shockingly difficult film to watch. There's no doubt in my mind that it's Bogey's darkest film and his darkest role. We legitimately don't know whether or not Dix is the killer. We can tell that he loves Laurel, and that she loves him, but although his violence and his drinking seem in check, her doubts are our doubts. At first I simply didn't believe the idea of Bogart as a murderer, but by the time we finally learn whether or not he killed the girl, I no longer had any such convictions. Either result seemed equally plausible; Dix was, particularly before meeting Laurel, a broken, violent, and unpredictable man.

Of course, by the time you learn the truth, it has largely ceased to matter. The film shifts from the noirish murder-mystery that it seems to be to an authentic, troubling love story. Dix and Laurel are two very different, equally vulnerable people. Laurel has a history of running out on men; Dix has a history of holding on too tight. Bogart and Grahame are both shockingly believable; it's been argued that Dix, as both a violent tough guy and a vulnerable depressive, is closer to the real Bogart than any of the tough guys he played. And Gloria Grahame was a good actress under any circumstances, but the deterioriation of her marriage to director Ray brings added poignancy to this tale of two broken people who found each other but are breaking apart.

Which brings me to Nicholas Ray. Talk about Film Ignorance: I had never seen a film by this legendary auteur. I always feared that what people regarded in the 40s and 50s as shocking sensitivity and profound alienation would seem dated and contrived today. But if Rebel Without a Cause and Ray's other pictures are like this one, I have nothing to worry about. This is a remarkably true story, with characters that think and act and feel real. It reminded me, of all things, of Woody Allen. This, at long last, explains the appeal of Bogart to Allen; although I see few similarities between Allen's Little Jew persona and Bogart's Casablanca/Big Sleep/Maltese Falcon persona, Allen and Dix spiritual brothers. They're both real people, just trying to find love in a crummy world of alienation and unhappiness. In other words, they're just like the rest of us.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Review: Stars Wars: The Clone Wars

2008-08-16T18:47:00.001-04:00

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (not the 2002 video game Star Wars: The Clone Wars nor the 2003 traditionally animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars nor the forthcoming 2008 CG animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but rather the 2008 CG theatrical feature film Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Maybe they shouldn't have given four different things all the same name?)
1.5/5

Like Citizen Kane, Star Wars: The Clone Wars delivers its exposition via a faux-newsreel voiceover. As you might have guessed, the similarities end there. Clone Wars is one of the most annoying movies I have ever seen. It follows the adventures of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker as they try to rescue Jabba the Hut's infant son from Count Dooku's evil clutches. It also introduces Ahsoka Tano as a young padawan of Anakin's, who he insists on calling "Snips" for no clear reason. (People apparently do not have real names in Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008 CG feature film). "Snips" refers to Anakin as "Skyguy," and they both refer to Jabba's son as "stinky." The fact that no one calls Dooku "Dooky" represents a serious lapse in continuity.)

On a Star Wars scale of character annoyingness, where JarJar is a 10, A New Hope's Obi-Wan is a 0, and Luke Skywalker is a 5 or so (whiny but tolerable), Snips is somewhere in the 9 to 9.5 range. Everything she says is whiny, and her "character growth" with her "mentor" "Skyguy" is as contrived and laughable as anything outside of the Padme-Anakin scenes in Episode 3. Skyguy himself registers an annoyingness rating of about 8.5, which, while intolerable, is a good deal lower than the Hayden Christiensen* Skyguy of episodes 2 and 3 (who I rate at around 9.999).

This story's plot is so simultaneously simplistic and convoluted, and its dialogue so bad, that I have a hard time believing that it wasn't written by George Lucas. Three writers were credited, but I will leave their names out of this review to protect their families; you can look them up if you desire, but I must try to protect the innocent. I've decided to ladle most of the non-Lucas blame on director Dave Filoni. You might remember that I included this movie in my feature about late-summer movies to look forward to. Well, I did so based on the fact that Star Wars: The Clone Wars (the 2003 traditionally animated TV series) was so excellent, and it looked like this movie would effectively translate Genndy Tartakovsky's handdrawn saga of amusingly stylized, plotless, action-driven nonsense to the big screen.

Fail. Of course, part of that has to do with the story; whereas Tartakovsky ignored both plot and character in favor of sheer action-mayhem, this attempt at a coherent and "moving" story is grating. But mostly, the character designs here suck. Or rather, they suck when they try to move. As stills, or in a brief trailer, they seem to be some version of Tartakovsky's visions: charmingly elongated cartoon caricatures of the various bad actors appearing in Episodes 1-3. But in Filoni's hands, they are wooden and awkward creations. They can't cross their arms, or lift a lightsaber, or even speak without appearing to be crude puppets manipulated by drunken sloths. Every bit of movement in this film belies anatomy, tortures animation, and gives Tartakovsky a bad name.

As near as I could tell, the audience I saw this with enjoyed it very much. But my friends and I were the only adults in the theater without children. It seems that, with Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008 CG animated theatrical feature film) we've finally come full circle. Lucas feared that the original Star Wars would only appeal to children, and could succeed only through merchandising tie-ins. Almost exactly 30 years later, he's finally produced a film that only a four year-old could love. Which, after all, seems to have been his dream all along.

Having gotten all of that out of the way, there is one bit of this film that deserves unmitigated praise. It turns out that Jabba has an uncle. An uncle who is purple, dresses in feathers, wears makeup, and speaks in a voice that is more than a little reminiscent of Truman Capote's. Yes, the Star Wars universe has its first ever Hut drag queen. Awesome.

*I probably misspelled that name, but I'm not bothering to look it up.

Film Ignorance #12: Gun Crazy

2008-08-16T07:00:00.005-04:00

Another day, another Film Ignorance entry in the world of noir. If you don't know already, this is Film Noir Month at MovieZeal, and that site will be running its own (undoubtedly inferior) review of Gun Crazy. Not to mention numerous other noir-related reviews and features.

Film: Gun Crazy
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Joseph L. Lewis
Stars: John Dall, Peggy Cummins
Year: 1949
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Bart Tare (John Dall) is a regular kid. Although he's an orphan, his sister has done a great job raising him. He's a nice, well-adjusted boy who usually behaves well in school. He's got a few close friends, including the sheriff's son. He may not be the brightest kid who ever lived, but by all accounts he's a good guy. Except Bart likes guns a whole lot.

Now, it doesn't seem to be the most unhealthy obsession. He kills a baby chicken with a BB gun once, and is so horrified by the experience he vows never to kill again. He wants to have a profession that involves guns, but he certainly doesn't want to hurt anybody. He's not mean, or cruel, or deranged. He just likes guns.

This film is a nice psycho-analytic companion piece to White Heat. In White Heat, Cody Jarret becomes deranged because all of his sexual desires are tied up with his mother. In Gun Crazy, Bart Tare begins a life of crime because he finally finds a sexual object that gratifies his love for guns. The object in question is Annie Starr (Peggy Cummins), a carnival sharpshooter who returns his favors because she sees in him a kindred, gun crazy spirit.

In the misogynistic world of film noir, Bart is a lovable guy who just happens to like guns. But Annie is something worse - the film's alternate title is "Deadly is the Female." Annie wants a life of crime, and she drags Bart into it. But while she certainly is a femme fatale, Annie's not out to get Bart. She just wants to go a little deeper into the world of guns and violence than he does; while he's fascinated by it but ultimately too good-hearted to delve into it, Annie is willing to kill. But their relationship does flourish; like Bonnie and Clyde a couple of decades later, their sexual life is ignited by their life of crime.

Gun Crazy probably has the most authentic relationship of any film noir I've yet seen. Annie and Bart's dialogue is perfectly naturalistic, and they bicker and make up and bicker again just like any other couple. Dall is perfectly suited to play Bart, who would be a harmless screwball if his attraction was for anything besides guns. Cummins makes Annie a sympathetic femme fatale, a woman who's a bit further off than Bart, but who loves him and who is a far cry from the vicious femme fatale type. Their relationship especially shines through in their last heist, which is shot in a single take, from the back of their car, and features a real small town and improvised dialogue to heighten the naturalism. Seeing them actually drive the car through town gave me enormous joy, especially when Hitchcock would still be splicing cars and scenery together more than a decade later.

The authenticity of their relationship, and their deep feelings for each other, make this film a classic. Annie might be bad news, but she's also just like Bart: a lost soul who briefly found happiness with another of the same type. As such, Gun Crazy is just one happy ending away from being a screwball comedy - a happy ending that we know, from the very first scene, isn't coming.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Fire Stephanie Zacharek

2008-08-15T11:14:00.004-04:00

As I have stated many times, last year was one of the best years for movies, ever. It was fantastic through a combination of prestige pictures (Darjeeling, Blood, No Country), great indies (Once, Away from Her), animated pleasures (Simpsons, Persepolis), and thinking man's genre entertainment (Bourne, Clayton, Knocked Up). One branch of moviemaking painfully, disastrously failed: summer blockbusters. A whole group of 3s (Spidey, Rush Hour, Shrek, Pirates) just flat-out sucked. Although they made tons of money, the studios completely failed to deliver good popcorn movies in 2007.

Of course, that's not the case in 2008. The big pictures have been not only big, but great. Iron Man, Wall-E, Hellboy II, Dark Knight, and Tropic Thunder have all delivered. Indy 4 and Prince Caspian weren't masterpieces but were a lot of fun. Even Incredible Hulk, Wanted and Hancock weren't horrible (ok, Hancock was almost horrible).

So you'd think a critic would be happy that Hollywood rebounded from one of its worst summers ever with possible the best ever, right? Wrong. Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek has been making a name for herself this summer as one of our worst critics (disliking Dark Knight, loving You Don't Mess with the Zohan, raving about the merely tolerable Indy 4). Now, not content to miss the boat on individual films, she wants to be wrong about the entire summer.

To be fair, Zacharek's article sounds at first like she's tired of summer hype, not summer movies. Statements like "Just how much excitement can movie advertising realistically whip up? Is there a limit to how much movie hype we can take in before we say 'So what?'" are certainly accurate, although also not very interesting (News flash: Online movie critic tired of movie advertising!)

But Zacharek goes off the deep end when she complains: "And when it comes to the movies themselves, how big is too big and how much is too much - in terms of money spent on special effects and marketing at the expense of the basics, like having a decent script and a director who knows how to tell a story visually?"

Here, she's got no case. Sure Stephanie, unlike last year's "auteurs" (Michael Bay, Sam Raimi, Gore Verbinksi, Brett Ratner) Hollywood sure put their hopes in a bunch of hacks this time: Guillermo del Toro, Andrew Stanton, Christopher Nolan, Ben Stiller, and your favorite, Spielberg. Of course, none of them knows how to tell a story visually - they've never done it before, in Zoolander or Pan's Labyrinth or Memento or Finding Nemo or Schindler's List. Oh Stephanie, how I yearn for yesteryear, when the biggest movies were delivered by the brilliant minds behind Mouse Hunt, After the Sunset, the Hercules and Xena TV shows, and Pearl Harbor. Boy, it wasn't exhausting at all watching the films from last summer, but after Iron Man, Hellboy II, and Dark Knight, I'm worn out. Please Hollywood: no more good movies!

Zacharek also manages to completely misunderstand how blockbusters work, which is something I've harped on over and over again. First, she points out that success for blockbusters is based on anticipation. This is partially true: Dark Knight and Iron Man made lots of money because they were anticipated. On the other hand, great reviews and word of mouth drove them to make hundreds of million dollars more after they were out and no longer being anticipated.

But she really fails by believing (as the studios clearly do) that marketing is what creates anticipation. She notes: "Last summer "Spider-Man 3" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" raked it in at the box office, and even though many die-hard fans of the "Pirates" franchise found the final installment disappointing once they saw it, the picture was so highly anticipated that its quality -- or lack thereof -- barely mattered. Blockbusters are built, and marketed, to make money, and more often than not, they do."

She's absolutely right that those movies sucked, and that they made money because they were anticipated. But they weren't anticipated because they were hyped. They were anticipated because Spidey 1, Spidey 2, Pirates 1, and parts of Pirates 2 were really good. Message to ignorant studio heads and elitist film reviewers: people do not see movies because of hype. People want to see movies that are good! That is all! And when the hype for something makes it look good (see the first Spider-Man) they will go to see it. When the hype for something makes it look bad (see The Love Guru) they will not go. Yes, anticipation can help make money, but the anticipation for Pirates 3, Spider-Man 3, and Shrek 3 were based on previous movies being good. Good movies, not marketing, raked in those hundreds of millions of dollars.

I don't even really feel like discussing the rest of Stephanie's points. She spends the middle third of her article explaining what the blockbuster is, and how Jaws was the first one, which I found interesting when I first learned that when I was 17. Then, in yet another absolutely pointless and pretentious jab at The Dark Knight, she writes "I suspect 'The Dark Knight' will inspire more budding video-game designers than it will filmmakers." Finally, she tells us that great summer blockbusters are rare.

That last bit is probably true - most of the time. But it's not true this summer. So if she's exhausted, she needs to get the hell out of the theater, and maybe even find another job. When your response to the best summer of blockbusters ever, which came just after the worst summer of blockbusters ever, is "I'm tired of these movie," you might not be film critic material.

News: Harry Potter 6 Gets Pushed Back

2008-08-14T20:52:00.003-04:00

This certainly isn't a news site, so if I discuss a piece of news it's usually because I feel strongly about it. This, well, I don't know how I feel, but I feel strongly about it: the sixth Harry Potter film was moved from Nov 08 to July 09 because Warner Brothers "decided to make the change to bolster its release schedule for the lucrative summer moviegoing season."

I can't say exactly how I feel about this, but it seems odd. The AP article does mention that HP5 came out in the summer, and outperformed all the others except the first one. While that's a good point, the counter point is Chronicles of Narnia. The first movie came out during the holiday season, and succeeded because it had great word of mouth and was the perfect family movie - not just for grandma and tiny Tim, but also for your disaffected 16 year old who just likes violence and androgynous witches. But in the summer model, where family time is out and the first weekend is all that matters, Prince Caspian underperformed, and its May release date was blamed. It did well, but not like the first one (admittedly, it wasn't as good.).

But much more troubling to me is the fact that they made this decision about such a fan-centric film. If Hancock had been announced and pushed back, no big deal; people ended up going to that movies in droves, but they weren't writing Will Smith/Jason Bateman fan fiction about it. They loved it, but weren't anticipating it with bated breath. This movie, on the other hand, is bound to have Potter fans salivating - the books are done now, so all they can look forward to is the movies. And with a giant fan base foaming at the mouth, I find it bizarre to say to them "Yeah, we have the movie ready, and we told you that you'd get your Potter fix this fall, but we just decided to move it back because our summer movie slate was a little slim. It was a purely financial decision that had everything to do with the writer's strike and our inability to make blockbusters. The movie's done, but you don't get to see it. Sorry. Enjoy the new Twilight book."

I imagine everyone will still on board the Potter fan express, but that doesn't strike me as a nice or wise way to treat your fanbase. When your success is built on satisfying rabid true believers, making them wait for a purely artificial reason doesn't seem like a good idea.

Review: Tropic Thunder

2008-08-14T16:17:00.006-04:00

Tropic Thunder
4.5/5

In this Apatow-dominated world, Tropic Thunder is simultaneously a frat pack triumph and the the final proof that the frat pack is finally, unalterably dead, swallowed by the juggernaut of comedy that is the Apatow brand. The triumph part is easy to explain: for the first time since Apatow and Co burst on to the big screen, the frat pack have a movie in theaters that is superior to the current Apatow offering: Tropic Thunder is better and funnier than Pineapple Express. That's something I didn't think was possible, but it is.

Now for the frat pack's death rattle. Although Stiller is acknowledged as the leader of the frat pack, the film's enormous cast includes: Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey, Jr, Nick Nolte, Tom Cruise, Steve Coogan, Matthew McConaughey, Bill Hader, Jay Baruchel, Brandon T. Jackson, and Danny McBride. The leader of the frat pack brings only himself and Black, a marginal packer, to the proceedings. Non-frat packers include Nolte, Downey, Cruse, Coogan, McConaughey, and Jackson. But here's the crucial bit: Baruchel is an Apatow kid, by way of Knocked Up and Undeclared. Hader was in Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Pineapple Express. McBride just hit the public consciousness in Pineapple Express, and was discovered by Adam McKay, who has never made a movie not produced by Judd Apatow. With Vaughn, Ferrell (who's had 3 movies produced by Apatow), and both Wilsons conspicuously absent, Tropic Thunder has Apatow players (3) outnumbering frat packers (1.5).

This film could not be a more fitting elegy for the frat packers' brief (2000-2007) run as the world's premier comedy creators. It's the least elegaic elegy ever. Like all the greatest frat pack movies, it is relentlessly crude, profoundly unsubtle, deeply strenuously, and riotously, gloriously, painfully funny. As a satire of Hollywood filmmaking, this story rings true: a troupe of Hollywood actors who, while filming a Vietnam War movie, get involved in a real military conflict. It smacks of the Hearts of Darkness fantasy that animates so much of our Hollywood dreams: the attempt at art which becomes life, which translates back into perfectly lifelike art. Compared to stories of Apocalypse Now, Stiller's washed up action hack, trying to go legit; Black's Eddie Murphy style prosthetics comic; and Downey's psychologically unstable method actor hardly even seem exaggerated. And they're surrounded by a troop of great actors in roles that fit them perfectly: Nolte as a deranged Vietnam vet, Coogan as a clueless director, McBride as a demolitions madman, Hader as a studio yes-man, Jackson as a rapper/drink spokesman, and Baruchel as a regular guy trying to make it as an actor.

I now write one of the strangest sentences in blogging history: Aside from the sublime Downey, the film's best performances come from McConaughey and Cruise (cue Universe implosion). McConaughey is great because, as a surface-obsessed dick, his turn as a surface-obsessed agent named "Pecker" requires no acting at all. Cruise is brilliant for the opposite reason; although he's a real life douche and studio head, his turn as a foul-mouthed, hairy, balding, giant-handed studio exec makes him into a completely different kind of studio head/douche.

Tropic Thunder (as you might have guessed by now) is not a movie that seems to need a critical evaluation, beyond "it's funny." Well, here it is: it's a very, very funny movie, packed to the gills with funny people doing what they do best or (quite enjoyably) what they do very well even though we had no conception they were capable of it. Every word Downey says is funny, and most of the rest of the movie is too. And Tom Cruise dancing to faux hiphop is possibly worth $10 right there.

Film Ignorance #11: White Heat

2008-08-14T07:01:00.003-04:00

What we have here are my thoughts on White Heat. Head on over to MovieZeal, if you haven't already, to get somebody else's thoughts on White Heat, and all the articles on noir you can handle in a month. It's noir month over at MovieZeal, and I'm just along for the ride.

Film: White Heat
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Raoul Walsh
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Margaret Wycherly, Edmond O'Brien
Year: 1949
Reason for Ignorance: Hated The Public Enemy
Ignorance Rating*: 40 (5 Votes)
"Made it, Ma, top of the world!"

A couple days after The Departed came out, I was trying to make sense of its over-the-top nature (the rat scene, Jack with the dildo, the FBI nonsense) and I came up with an analogy. Just as White Heat came out 20 years after the heyday of the gangster movie of the early 30s, and represented a ratcheting up of its melodramatic and libidinal concerns to a point nearing self-parody, so did The Departed represent a hyperbolic and near-parodic rendering of the concerns of the classic 70s gangster movie. White Heat: The Public Enemy, Scarface, Little Caesar::The Departed: The Godfather Parts 1 and 2, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver. (The fact that you could replace The Departed in that analogy with 1983's Scarface didn't bother me in the slightest, even though Scarface is basically a White Heat remake).

Of course, as you can tell from its status as Film Ignorance, I had only read about, not seen, White Heat. Please, whatever you think of my analogy, allow me a little delayed self-congratulation: I can't think of any movie (not even Infernal Affairs) as similar to The Departed as White Heat. Not only are both absolutely over-the-top gangster movies that nevertheless manage to tell tight and exciting stories, both of them feature gangsters whose sexual desires have been radically diverted. And the coup de grace is: unbeknownst to me, White Heat is also an undercover cop story. Dynomite!

In the 30s gangster film, and particularly in Cagney's Public Enemy, critics noticed that the gangster seemed more attached to his Ma than to any more appropriate object of sexual desire. Dames and molls could come and go, and might get a piece of grapefruit in their face for their trouble, but the gangster would always love his Ma. White Heat's Cody Jarret takes these subtle undertones and makes them blatant, blazing overtones: Cody kills his own men indiscriminately, and displays almost no interest in his wife (sexual or otherwise) but this dude loves, loves, loves his Ma. In a very Freudian move, he used to fake headaches to get her attention, but now the headaches come unbidden as part of his psychoses. Cody Jarrett is a portrait of degeneration; he's falling apart at the seams, and getting more violent as he does so, as his libido builds up without finding an acceptable outlet. The only place it can come out is in death and destruction, which White Heat has in spades: I cannot believe the Production Code allowed such a murderous sociopathic portrait to hit the big screen. I've always considered Cagney a comical overactor (hence my dislike of Public Enemy) but in this film, his overwrought mannerisms are both enjoyably comical and murderously chilling (just like Jack's in The Departed).

But White Heat is not just about Jarrett and his hangups. It's an absolutely fantastic gangster film and undercover cop film. When Jarrett's in jail - having confessed to a crime he didn't commit to get an alibi from a worse crime - the FBI sends their undercover specialist Hank Fallon (Edmund O'Brien) to get info on the crime Jarret actually committed. Posing as a criminal, Hank has to get close to Cody, which is nigh impossible, as Cody seems to only trust his mother. Furthermore, Hank had a career as a regular FBI agent, so he also has to avoid criminals who know him. As in The Departed, this makes for some of the tensest and most exciting sequences in gangster film history, as Hank has to gain Cody's trust while keeping his own sanity and avoiding those who know him. If Cagney is the movie's flaming ID, O'Brien is its tortured Ego, trying to keep himself intact while performing a troubling moral balancing act.

To put it simply, White Heat is one of the most exciting and satisfying movies I've ever seen. Both the vicious opening heist and the overblown final heist provide action and suspense, as does the relationship between Cody and Hank. And the film's awkward love parallelogram between Cody, his wife, second-in-command Big Ed, and Ma has got sexual energy to spare. White Heat is a romp through America's criminal underbelly, not one in which criminality is revealed as the wretched, doomed inverse of the American dream, but the absurd, violent, and sexually charged perversion of the American dream. No film would make the romp so much fun until The Departed (or maybe Goodfellas).

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Review: Pineapple Express

2008-08-12T19:19:00.005-04:00

Pineapple Express
3.5/5

For several decades, Hollywood spoofs followed the Mel Brooks/Abrahams and Zucker format of complete silliness and lack of narrative cohesion. Movies like Space Balls and Airplane take a movie or genre and spoof it into the ground, with no attempt to make it a watchable or enjoyable experience, beyond the spoofing. This has led to all the "Movie" films (Scary, Epic, etc) many of which are by Abrahams and/or the Zuckers, in which gag after gag is piled up, all of which you're simply supposed to laugh at because they remind you of something else.

For the last decade or so, a new brand of movie arrived. Scream, in fact, might be the first of these, but they've really exploded in the last few years: Dodgeball; Shaun of the Dead; Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang; Hot Fuzz; Old School; Galaxy Quest, etc. Each of them is both a parody, satire, or meta-genre picture and an actual example of that genre. Whereas Airplane is only a spoof of a disaster movie, Dodgeball is both a spoof of a sports movie and a sports movie - it lampoons all of the sports movies cliches while simultaneously asking us to enjoy them.

And at last we get to Pineapple Express, the supposed subject of this review. Pineapple Express is the mostly forgettable newest entry to this list: a stoner movie that becomes a meta-action movie. Especially in its latter half, in which the bullets start flying and the Asian assassins become prevalent, Express asks us to both laugh at and enjoy action movie cliches. Unfortunately, in the burgeoning meta-action picture genre (which is about to include Tropic Thunder) Pineapple Express doesn't make much of a mark.

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the movie. The story is relatively clever: a process server and his drug dealer go on the run when the process server witnesses a drug-related killing and the two realize the roach he left at the scene of the crime can be traced back to them. James Franco, finally shedding his pretty boy act, is fantastic as the dealer, and Seth Rogen brings his reliable regular guy who just happens to really like smoking weed persona to the server. Their sometime ally and enemy Red is played by Danny McBride, who was not very good in the not very funny Foot Fist Way. McBride shines here; he gets all the good lines, may of which sound like adlibs.

But I consider this movie a failure, after last year's Superbad (written by the same people and starring some of them) was not just the funniest movie of the year but probably the funniest of this century. Many of the jokes and running gags seem forced; even the banter between Franco and Rogen, which should have the relaxed quality of Rogen and Paul Rudd's classic "You know how I know you're gay?" scene, seems to be trying to hard. And the action movie cliches just add to this problem; it's as if the filmmakers are hitting us over the head with the knowledge that they're using cliches. We get it, Seth, Evan, and David. We get it. Try again, and come back when you have something as good as Superbad. Or Knocked Up. Or Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Or 40-Year Old Virgin.

Let's hope Stiller and company offer up something better with Tropic Thunder. Otherwise this summer - probably the best in history - could end quite poorly.

Review: Tell No One

2008-08-11T08:04:00.000-04:00

Tell No One
4/5

Tell No One is a tense thriller that owes more than a little to Hitchcock, and probably even more to Frantic, Polanksi's Parisian ode to Hitchcock. Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet) was enjoying a swim with his wife at the lake on his family property when he hears her scream. Going to her aid, someone knocks him unconscious, and when he wakes up, she has been murdered - another victim of the serial killer Serton. Eight years later, Beck is still in mourning, but the seemingly closed case has a break: a government crew laying pipe finds the bodies of two men in the area. Later that day, someone emails Beck to tell him that his wife is still alive, but "they" are watching so he must "Tell No One."

Although Tell No One's everyman protagonist on the run from both police and the dangerous "them" is straight out of Hitchcock, this film is strikingly similar to Michael Clayton in its construction. Godfrey Cheshire identifies Michael Clayton as having a "Jigsaw Puzzle" manner of fragmentation, in which "virtually every scene stands apart from the others, leaving the viewer to discern—or construct—the presumed pattern of meaning that unites the m." Tell No One is nowhere near as fragmented as Michael Clayton, but it does partake in the jigsaw puzzle method; event after event occurs, and for the first hour or so it's not clear how they relate to each other. Indeed, quite early in the film it becomes obvious that a major character must have been in on the fake death, but we have nothing to do with this information. It's just another piece of the puzzle that must wait, unused, until we know where to place it.

As Alex, Cluzet is a highly believable everyman, an upper-middle-class pediatrician who displays unsurprising depths of intensity when his world is turned upside down. The entire cast surrounding him, from his gangster client Bruno (who becomes a useful ally in dealing with "them") to his sister to the dogged police inspector who believes he killed his wife, is made up of consummate professionals, who bring a very gallic sophistication to all the roles. All the roles besides Bruno, who is played with appropriate thuggish relish and a keen sense of obligation. But the movie's shining star is Kristin Scott Thomas. When Thomas appeared in 2005's failed black comedy Keeping Mum, my response was: Where has she been? If Tell No One and The Valet are any indication, Paris.

Thomas plays Helene, Alex's sister's wife, a restaurant owner who also appears to be the only human being he speaks to since his wife died. Although she doesn't believe in "them" or the seeming resurrection, Helene is Alex's only ally, facillitating a lawyer and providing financial aid, but above all serving as a friend and confidant. It's one of the film's many mysteries that, while neither Alex nor Helene seem particularly close to his sister, the two share a deep connection.

Perhaps the strongest thing in Tell No One's favor is that, unlike Frantic, Michael Clayton, and even North by Northwest, the dark secret of "them" doesn't turn out to be a matter of national security or national health. This is a more personal drama, eschewing a "thrilling" connection to larger issues for the smaller concerns of Alex and his wife. As such, its ultimate revelations are all the more chilling for being so intimately tied up in their lives.

Review: Encounters at the End of the World

2008-08-10T07:36:00.004-04:00

Encounters at the End of the World
4.5/5

Ever since Werner Herzog's first film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, it's been clear that Herzog is something of a crazed individual. Ever since Les Blank's 1980 short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (you can find an excerpt on Youtube), it's been clear that his derangement can be harnessed, not just for making movies, but also within them, and Herzog has capitalized on that over the last 25 years or so by focusing on documentary features that he narrates or appears in. The latest of these efforts, Encounters at the End of the World, is yet another entry into that canon, and I found it absolutely spellbinding.

Herzog has structured this film quite loosely, shaping a sort of picaresque travelogue; there's no plot or overarching thesis, just an insane German traveling to various places in Antarctica and filming the derangement he sees there. The film was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and distributed by the Discovery Channel, and there are certainly sequences in it that would fit beautifully into any nature-as-spectacle film that IMAX theaters show at kids' museums. But Herzog's interest remains, as it always has, not in nature but in the effects of nature on humanity in extreme situations. In fact, he hates McMurdo, the largest settlement on Antarctica, not for being a dirty blight on the Antarctic glory, but for containing such mundanities as yoga and bowling.

Herzog's focus is on the kindred spirits he meets on the ice, those untouched by normalcies like yoga. The forklift operator whose knowledge of philosophy seems boundless. The failed linguist in charge of the greenhouse. The Apache plumber who claims to be descended from Mayan royalty, and has the finger length to prove it. The geologist who instructs him to carefully sidestep flying volcanic bombs. The woman who entertains the camp by having herself zipped into a duffel bag. And most of all Samuel Bowser, the marine biologist whose obsessions most clearly mirror Herzog's own. Bowser imagines a miniature version of himself in the microscopic world he studies, a world so full of savagery that he tells Herzog mankind dragged itself out of the ocean purely to escape it. And in his staff's downtime, Bowser shows them 50s science fiction films that more or less reenact his dream, with giant insects terrifying the populace, and the end of the world always nigh.

Herzog can't let go of the concept of the end of the world. More than one of the people he interviews uses the same metaphor: the South Pole, as the literal end of the world, is a place where people end up when nothing ties them down, or the rope that ties them down has too much slack. And here, at the geographical end of the world, a number of them are obsessed with the end of the human world, predicting - as Herzog often does - that nature will eventually wipe mankind off the face of the Earth. There are not, it seems, any technological optimists on Antarctica, but merely deranged people who have ended up in the South Pole because they lost their way, but found a place that suited their derangement.

It is hard to imagine a place, even the legendary jungle of Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, and Burden of Dreams, that more perfectly suits Herzog's derangement. The film's most touching moments involve a taciturn penguin researcher who no longer regularly associates with humanity, but does his best to answer Herzog's questions. Herzog, insistent that he's not making another March of the Penguins, only wants to know about penguin abnormality. Are there gay penguins? Are there crazy penguins? The answers, when we receive them, are simultaneously awe-inspiring and chilling. In Herzog's hand, the penguin is not an adorable figure or even an animal engaged in a crushing battle for survival. A penguin is instead, like anyone Herzog is interested in, a person near the end of their rope, buffeted by nature and unable to maintain normalcy. In Herzog's hands, penguin derangement is more touching than that of any human subject.

Film Ignorance #10: The Killers

2008-08-07T08:00:00.003-04:00

Note: This post represents counterprogramming to MovieZeal's entry for Noir Month. Head on over to MovieZeal for another review of the same movie - odds are good it's by a better writer.

Film: The Killers (1946)
Rating: A Good Movie.
Director: Robert Siodmark
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien
Year: 1946
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: 33 (3 Votes)
"Don't ask a dying man to swear his soul into hell."

The Killers has a premise so strange and, frankly, so unwise that it's remarkable that a good movie emerged from it. Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story "The Killers" covers only a couple hours and barely makes it to double digits in page count. It's a taut story of a pair of hitmen who invade a small town diner looking for an ex-boxer, a big Swede, before eventually leaving the diner to kill him in his apartment. One of the diner customers reaches him first, but the Swede is unwilling to run, electing to remain in the room and accept his punishment for past misdeeds.

I can only imagine the session that led to the creation of this movie:

Hack 1: You know that Hemingway short story, The Killers? I think it would make a good, whatchamacallit, noir movie.
The Voice of Reason (probably the uncredited John Huston): It's only 10 pages long. It couldn't be a movie.
Hack 2: Yeah, but we could, ya know, just fill in some stuff. Like adapt the story for the first 15 minutes, and the next 90 minutes could be a detective finding out why they wanted him dead in the first place, like in one a them Bogart pictures.
Reason: But the original story succeeds in large part because it leaves those events vague. It's a masterpiece of economical storytelling, of tension building, of the evoking of a moment. It's possibly the purest artistic expression of the finest living American author - possibly the finest American author who ever lived. How could we ever make a film that didn't obviously and disastrously fail to live up to the original story, while simultaneously demonstrating how far we fall from Hemingway's genius?
Hacks [in unison]: Nah, we'll figure something out.

Strangely enough, the hacks are actually right on this one. I didn't find The Killers to be a great film, and its best sequence is the opening fifteen minutes or so. That sequence depicts the events exactly as Hemingway described them, with almost every word of the original dialogue retained. But it is a good film, a solid detective film in the classic noir tradition.

The film bills Burt Lancaster (in his debut) first as the Big Swede and Ava Gardner, as the Swede's old flame, second. Burt probably has about 20 minutes of screentime; Ava 15 or so. These are weird billings. Our hero is played by Edmond O'Brien, an insurance investigator who thinks the Swede's death might have an interesting, and potentially relevant, story behind it. This hunch doesn't make too much sense, but of course it pans out, and our intrepid gumshoe turns out to have been right all along: the death of an obscure prizefighter did, in fact, have something to do with his insurance company. Go figure.

Undoubtedly, The Killers' plot, with its femme fatale, heist gone wrong, hitmen out of the past, and melodramatic love story was not terribly cliched in 1946, at least not in film. But its take on all of those familiar noir elements feels, in retrospect, like the filmmakers were going through the motions. Its best elements by far are the production values; the film uses both negative space and shadows brilliantly, with whites glowing and blacks fading into nothingness.

The Killers is a pretty good movie with a fantastic opening sequence. It's also got a great coda which deflates the movie's aspirations in a refreshing way. After the mystery is solved, the wrongdoers punished, and the insurance industry saved, O'Brien's boss congratulates him, noting that 1947's insurance premiums will go down "one tenth of a cent." When O'Brien responds that he's tired after such a hard case, the boss needles him again: "Why don’t you take a good rest? I must say you’ve earned it. This is Friday; don’t come in till Monday."

O'Brien's boss apparently didn't take his heroic and nigh-psychic solving of the case of the Big Swede too seriously. I didn't either.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #9 : Mildred Pierce

2008-08-05T10:00:00.004-04:00

This post is a part of Noir Month over at Movie Zeal. If you have any comments, be sure to make them over there - literally dozens of people will read them. Whereas over here...I'll read them, and my mom probably would, except I'm pretty sure she doesn't know about this blog.
Film: Mildred Pierce
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Michael Curtiz
Stars: Joan Crawford
Year: 1963
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: 25 (8 votes)
"Oh men. I never met yet one of them that didn’t have the instincts of a heel. "

Michael Curtiz may not have been one of the greatest Hollywood directors; he was certainly no Hawks or Ford. But he was an excellent director who made more than his share of great films, and produced one movie that anyone, from any era, would be proud of: Casablanca. To that elite list of unchallenged masterpieces, I'd like to add a second film: Mildred Pierce.

Based on a novel by James M. Cain, the author of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce is a classic genre mashup. In the canonical noir films, there's a femme fatale who can bend everyone to their will, an alluring woman whose charm is inescapable for the male of the species. In the canonical 30s and 40s melodrama, there's a lost mother who will give everything for her children, and ultimately must sacrifice herself for their happiness. Mildred Pierce does something brilliant, yet so simple that it's a wonder it was never done before: Joan Crawford, in the title role, is a femme fatale who is also a self-sacrificing mother. The plot threads of the noir and the melodrama come together, intertwine, and double up, and the result is a noir as fine as The Maltese Falcon and a melodrama as moving as Stella Dallas. It's hard to ask for much more.

Allmovie notes: "his detractors have noted that Curtiz's much-praised visual style was due more to Warner's team of cinematographers and art directors than to the director himself." I can't speak for the accuracy of those statements, but I can tell you that the cinematography and art direction in this movie are pitch perfect. We begin at the end: a man is shot, calling out "Mildred" as he falls, and Mildred - femme fataled out in a glamorous fur coat - flees the scene of the crime and, after being interrupted in a suicide attempt, lures an old flame back to the beach house to take the rap. The house takes on the funhouse look of the best Welles noirs - striking mise-en-scene lit for a chiaroscuro effect and filmed from unexpected angles.

Eventually, we flashback to the events that lead up to the murders, and the story slowly develops. We see Mildred, decidedly un-fataled out, as a regular housewife dealing with her devoted younger daughter and her spoiled older daughter. A number of men are in play: her deadbeat husband, her husband's ruthless partner (who turns out to be the patsy), and a rich man who gives both Mildred and her elder daughter a taste of the fine life - who is described as her second husband, and who we recognize as the corpse. These people come in and out of Mildred's life, as she tells her story to the police. The twist is: although she's tried to setup her first husband's partner, the police have latched on to her first husband as the villain.

As a melodrama, Mildred Pierce is a story of class and a social rise and fall, as Mildred builds her fortune and gives her daughter the best things in life, but is unable to achieve happiness through wealth. As a film noir, Mildred Pierce is a story of degeneration, telegraphed by Mildred's increasing taste for whiskey and her eventual indulgence in things like the fur coat we see her in in the opening scene. Both Hollywood noir and Hollywood melodrama have their roots in the naturalistic literature of the late 19th century (Dreiser, Zola, etc), and thus Mildred Pierce represents a sort of homecoming. The decadence of melodrama and the degeneration of noir are reunited, a double-shot of naturalism that burns like fire going down but gives you a taste for the seedy side of life you won't ever be free of. I recommend drinking it straight. You won't regret it.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

The 12 Movies Meme

2008-08-01T18:47:00.003-04:00

So now I've been tagged 3 times for Piper's 12 Movies Meme. The premise is: comically overrated screenwriter Diablo Cody has been asked to chose 12 movies to be shown at the New Beverly Cinema. If she can do it, why can't we? Thanks to Piper for this great idea, and to the lovely people at Cinexcellence, Big Mike's Movie Blog, and MovieZeal for the tags.

I thought I'd respond to this meme with another meme, one which has been running through film since 1956:

Society is under siege. A woman has been kidnapped by the evil, "other" society that threatens our familiar culture. A man is dispatched to find her, and along the way must delve into that other society, at the risk of being contaminated and transformed by it. "He Had to Find Her, He Had to Find Her." Yep, it's The Searchers.

My 12 films are The Searchers and 11 other films that are The Searchers. I consider all 12 masterpieces, and all 12 are directed by one of the leading figures in the cinema or George Lucas.

12 Movies that are The Searchers

Monday

Let's start off with a bang - The Searchers. John Wayne's and John Ford's best film, the best western ever made, etc. And we'll pair it with Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, which reimagines The Searchers as a battle between two samurai clans.
Tuesday

If you think that the Wachowski Bros. made The Matrix by putting Dark City and The Invisibles in a blender, and adding Keanu Reeves, you'll be even more blown away by how much Lucas ripped off both Searchers and Hidden Fortress for Star Wars. Then you can watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind to see a film which references The Searchers effectively without stealing everything in it. Star Wars is still better.

Wednesday

The Searchers has a controversial sexual undertone, which both Paris, Texas and Taxi Driver make explicit by having the lost woman be a prostitute. And you can marvel at how different these movies are, since they're both remakes of The Searchers that emphasize human alienation: Taxi Driver is intense, violent, and nihilistic, while Paris, Texas is slow, meditative, and offers Wim Wenders' characteristically irrational hope. If the last two days got you hyped up, Wednesday should leave you drained.

Thursday

The Searchers goes to Asia in "Aging and Irrelevant Movie Star Addition." Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza is a highly underrated gangster film that takes the form of a meditation on the interaction between American and Japanese culture, starring old Robert Mitchum, chin dimple intact. Apocalypse Now is, well, Apocalypse Now. Marlon Brando's in it for about 5 minutes.

Friday

Since it's the weekend, we ratchet up the intensity. Die Hard: The Searchers in a building! Frantic: The Searchers in Paris! Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis step into John Wayne's shoes - Ford's second chance to do so.

Saturday

For our first film, bring the kiddies: one of Pixar's finest films gives us The Searchers underwater, and removes the sexual element by creating a sweet, father-son story. Land of the Dead also removes the sexual element by making the lost lady a zombie killing tank called "Dead Reckoning." To the best of my knowledge, Land of the Dead is the only zombie version of The Searchers. It's also probably my favorite Romero film, which I understand to be an unpopular opinion.

Ok, I only have one tag: Dan at Film Babble Blog. Every other blog I read has already done this. I guess this is my penalty for being so late. Sorry Piper. But please, tell me that this means I didn't technically break the chain!

The Dark Knight: Box Office "Potato Chips"

2008-07-31T17:13:00.003-04:00

I know the week of The Dark Knight is over, but I enjoyed tearing into Monica Corcoran so much that, seeing a chance to do something similar, I've found one more post. I read an article today in Yahoo Movies news - from E! Online - about whether or not The Dark Knight could take Titanic's record as highest grossing domestic box office film, ever. I don't think it will. But one of the people E! Online chooses to interview rates very, very highly on the unintentional comedy scale:
(The article itself is here http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/eo/20080730/121746906000.html
but this time, I see no reason to read it)

"To Vicki Kunkel, author of upcoming Instant Appeal: The 8 Primal Factors That Create Blockbuster Success, movies that play on and on and on, like Titanic, are the cinematic equivalent of potato chips—one viewing is not enough.

"Titanic pretty much had all the elements that light up the endorphins on the brain," says Kunkel. "Anything that makes us feel good is addictive." "

Wow. Wow. Wow.

So first, Kunkel says that Titanic was successful because it had "all the elements that light up the endorphins in the brain." In other words, people liked the movie because...people liked the movie. Then she says "anything that makes us feel good is addictive." Really Vicki? Really? I am so glad that you are being paid to write a book about this. So we can boil what we've got so far to: "People liked Titantic because people liked Titanic. And when people like something, they want more of it." Oh god, someone call MGM and tell them we've got their formula: people like movies that people like, and will want to see more of them.

Now, Ms. Kunkel, what are these elements that people like about Titanic?

"If all blockbuster movies contain like elements, Kunkel points out, then Titanic had all the right elements, including a love story (see: Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack and Kate Winslet's Rose), a self-sacrificing heroine (see: Rose spurn her rich fiancé, Billy Zane's Cal, for poor Jack) and a clear-cut battle between good and bad (see: Jack take on Cal)."

Huh, well, maybe you could go all Joseph Campbell on us and tell us that all blockbuster movies contain like elements. You could try. It wouldn't work. But your like elements are:
1. Love Story
2. A self-sacrificing heroine
3. Good vs. Bad

It is true that more blockbusters than not have love stories, but it's also been proven many times that blockbusters don't need love stories to succeed. Last time I checked, #s 2, 4, and 5 on the all time domestic list were Star Wars, ET, and The Phantom Menace. None of those (assuming you don't count the love between a boy/starship captain/George Lucas and his alien) have love stories. And these are 3 of the top 5. Ever.

Do I need to mention a self-sacrificing heroine as a key element for a blockbuster? No? Ok, moving on: good vs. bad. Thanks Vicki. Your first two "elements" are bogus and your third is "good vs. bad." I am so writing a book too. I will tell studio executives that people like good vs. evil stories. I will make so much money.

Finally, Vicki doesn't think that The Dark Knight can pass Titanic because: "We relate more to real people than we do to superheroes," Kunkel says. "And that's when the real addictiveness happens, when we have a deep primal connection."

Ok, I'm gonna bypass the "primal" stuff. She gets a pass she doesn't deserve there. But first, "real people." She does know that Jack and Rose aren't real people, right? That their names in real life are Leo and Kate? Does she know that? Maybe. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume she means relatively mundane people who don't, I dunno, have fantastical larger than life adventures or befriend ogres or are ogres. I ordinarily would be kind and say that Batman is a "real" person in a way that, say, Gandalf isn't, but she has argued for a distinction between Batman and "real" people, so she has to live with it.

Now let's look at the main characters of the Top 25 Domestic blockbusters of all time:

"Real People": Rose and Jack; Forrest Gump; Jesus (It is my personal belief that those latter two have fantastical larger than life adventures, but I'm cutting Vicki some slack);

"Not Real People": Luke, Leia, and a Wookie; Two Ogres and a Donkey; ET; Jar Jar and some Jedi; Captain Jack Sparrow; Spider-Man; More Jedi; Aragon and some Hobbits; Spider-Man again; Dinosaurs; Batman; The Hobbits again; Talking Fish; Spider-Man again; Talking Lions; The Ogres again; Robots who transform into cars; a Boy Wizard; Iron Man; Gandalf and some Hobbits; a Globe-trotting Archeologist; More Jedi.

So there, Vicki, your primal connection to "real people" has 3 votes for, 22 against. And I let you count Jesus, for Christ's sake. You are seriously wrong about everything.

Now, finally, someone might say that my top 25 aren't valid, because they're all pretty recent, because of ticket inflation. You could argue that...but if you account for ticket inflation, then Titanic isn't #1 anymore. And since our lovely author's entire premise is that Titanic is the #1 movie of all time because it has the right "primal" elements...that's not a good way to go.

Film Ignorance Guest Blogger #4: Dr. Strangelove

2008-07-29T14:25:00.004-04:00

If a space alien landed out of the sky and asked me to take him to my leader, one of my options would be to send him to Blog Cabins, where Fletch, the fearless leader of the Large Association of Movie Blogs, makes his online home. Well, today Fletch is stopping by Movies et al as our Film Ignorance Guest Blogger. Hope you enjoy his review.

Film: Dr. Strangelove
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stars: Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers
Year: 1964
Ignorance Rating: Pending

Bring on the hate mail.

Were my expectations too high? It's hard to say. Probably yes, as Dr. Strangelove is considered one of the best comedies (and films) of all time - nominated for four Oscars, firmly entrenched in the IMDb Top 25, #3 in the LAMB's rankings of the Top 10 Comedies.

And I should have loved it - Kubrick, Sellers, a great topic, black comedy - all up my alley. But...it just didn't connect for me.

Now, as you can see in the rating given above, I definitely think it's a good movie. There's brilliance aplenty, from the Presidential phone calls to the Russian Premier to Slim Pickens' wild ride to Sellers' multiple (varied) roles. The opening credits were a marvel of simplicity, and it was eye-opening to see George C. Scott in such a wild-eyed, loose role (just as it was almost as jarring to see the young James Earl Jones at all).

I just didn't laugh much - instead, I spent much of the time trying to put myself in the shoes of someone watching the film in 1964, with the Cold War a very real threat, wondering if the film was seen as taboo or "too soon" at the time of its release. It's easy to watch the film today and laugh at the things children were taught ("Hide under your desk!") in fear of a nuclear attack, but I'm left somewhat in awe that the film was received well in 1964 at all, thinking perhaps that the audacity of the film's mocking of the situation was a key ingredient to its success.

I'm sitting here trying to think of ways to delicately put this, but it's really of no use, so I'll just come out and say it: I prefer Strangelove's spiritual child to the original. That's right - if I were given the choice of watching only one of two films about mutual assured destruction between the United States and the former Soviet Republic...I'm choosing Spies Like Us every time.

BOOM!

Fletch's Film Rating:

"Darn tootin!"

Casting Cowboy Bebop

2008-07-29T09:13:00.001-04:00

I hold Shinichiro Watanabe's anime series, Cowboy Bebop, in very high regard. Not only did I name it the best Western of the past ten years, it's also possibly my favorite TV show ever. So there's some bad news: It's being made into a Hollywood live-action movie by Erwin Stoff.

Now, Mr. Stoff has produced some excellent movies, like The Matrix and A Scanner Darkly. But he's presided over a number of bad to terrible movies, including Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Chain Reaction, The Devil's Advocate, Hardball, Sweet November, Constantine, The Lake House, and Street Kings.

If you haven't figured it out yet, this means that the new movie will probably be bad. Much worse, it will probably star Keanu Reeves (I didn't cherry pick those movies. That's roughly 2/3 of Stoff's credits...ALL WITH KEANU REEVES).

To head off Keanu Horror, my wife and I decided we'd cast the movie before Stoff could. We went with people who could play the role, not so much have the right physical appearance. Hope you like it:

The Character: Spike Spiegel: Our hero is a fun-loving bounty hunter, spaceship pilot, and one man army. He likes eating, kung fu, property destruction, and shooting gangsters in the forehead. He's generally a big joke, unless his archnemesis Vicious is around, in which case people die. Lots and lots of people.
The Challenge: Finding an actor who can be comic relief and a stone-cold head-shooter
The Candidates:
1.Robert Downey, Jr. If Bale can be Bruce and John, I see no reason why Downey can't be Tony and Spike. He's got the gift for physical comedy, verbal comedy, and blowing shit up. Like all of our choices, he'd need some kung fu training, but I can't imagine anyone who could blend the off the cuff comedy and the deadly seriousness of the Spike role better.
2. Owen Wilson. At heart, Spike is just a clown in a silly suit who wants to get paid, get something to eat, and not be bothered by tomboys, kids, and dogs. Wilson would be even better than Downey at this aspect of the role, and if he had more action cred, he'd be my #1 choice.
3.Brad Pitt. Although I have a newly awakened desire to loathe the Bradster, he's a monster talent who, again, has both the physicality and the way with a one-liner to be Spike.

The Character: Faye Valentine. Faye is a smoking hottie with giant boobs, hotpants, and the unerring ability to piss Spike off. My wife just named a bunch of no-talent hot chicks of the Lopez, Berry, Jolie variety, which I vetoed in favor of some women who can/might be able to actually act. She vetoed Tilda Swinton for not being pretty enough. Still, our version opts to downplay Faye's sexuality in favor of acting skill. I can dream, can't I?
The Challenge: A highly attractive A-List female actor that can actually act? Do they even make those?
The Candidates:
1. Zoe Bell: If you've seen Kill Bill, you know Zoe Bell kicks ass, even if she had to pretend to be Uma. If you've seen Grindhouse, you know she can kick ass and deliver bad dialogue in a pretty sweet accent. And if you've read this, you know she will be kicking ass on a regular basis on the interwubs. She's got my vote.
2.Carla Gugino. Carla Gugino would probably look better in the Faye-suit than Zoe, and she'll either be a total laughingstock or have lots of hipster cred after The Watchmen movie. But she ain't no Zoe.
3. Zooey Deschanel. Here we were just reaching for someone who was the right age, gender, and could act. The main reason I'm including her is because, after my wife said her name, I knew the real Zoe was the way to go.

The Character: Jet Black is a cop turned bounty hunter who is Spike's mentor, father figure, cook, and nursemaid. He also has a badass robotic arm and some sweet, sweet boots.
The Challenge: No challenge. Unlike the ladies, who disappear when they cross 30, Hollywood men hang around after 45 and play Jet type characters for decades. He was by far the easiest to cast
The Candidates:
1.Bruce Campbell. My wife's stroke of pure genius. He's a big tough guy who's actually a softy, who throws a great punch, who might be able to cook, whose chin is a registered weapon, and who would fill the theaters with fans (if the theaters were small and near known geek headquarters).
2. Ron Perlman. It's time to show the big red guy some love. Most of his best roles have been been as weirdos, usually obscured by prosthetics and makeup, but Ron Perlman has the gruff attitude and hideous mug to make the perfect Jet.
3. Jeff Bridges. My wife said "Jeff Daniels," but she meant the Dude. Playing Jet would be pretty much exactly like playing Obadiah Stane, but not being evil. Somehow, I think Bridges could handle it.

The Character: Vicious. Spike's archenemy is a creepy as hell, samurai sword wielding psychopath.
The Challenge: Although we didn't go for physical appearance with the others, we weren't able to get Vicious' angular, evil face out of our heads.
The Candidates:
1.Tilda Swinton. No one does creepily androgynous like Tilda Swinton. My wife's unconvinced, but she could play Vicious just like she played Gabriel in Constantine, and I'd be cowering. Plus, she has to go somewhere, and apparently it's not Faye.
2.Cillian Murphy. Again, creepily androgynous. I would fear the Murph, but I would also spend all his fight sequences biting my knuckles with fear, so worried would I be that Spike would break those glorious cheekbones
3.Adrien Brody. I don't know if Adrien has the malevolence to play Vicious, which our first two candidates have in spades. But he sure would look right and could use another interesting acting challenge, after delivering such stellar performances in movies like The Jacket and The Village.

The Character: Edward is a pre-adolescent girl who speaks some sort of unintelligible pidgin and is considerably more trouble than she's worth.
The Challenge: None
The Candidate: Oh yeah, Keanu's got this one

The Character: Ein is a genetically enhanced Welsh corgi who turns out to be the best hacker in the universe
The Challenge: None
The Candidate: My friend Chad's Penny would be perfect. I love corgis!

Film Ignorance #8: The Conversation

2008-07-28T07:02:00.001-04:00

I wrote this post for Film Ignorance several weeks ago (you can tell by how long it is; I've made a conscious choice to write shorter posts). After I'd written it, a happy surprise: The Conversation is the Large Associations of Movie Blog's Movie of the Month! Head on over to The LAMB to see what other film bloggers think of this movie (if they don't like it, be sure to leave them irrational hate comments)

Film: The Conversation
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Harrison Ford
Year: 1974
Reason for Ignorance: Shame Spiral
Ignorance Rating: Pending

For a considerable amount of time, I believed that Francis Ford Coppola was the greatest American director of all time. Although he made only four films that were considered great, their greatness was so unquestioned that I didn't think it was an indefensible statement: The Godfather, The Godfather pt. II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now.

The only problem was my hidden film ignorance: I hadn't seen the third masterpiece. I don't know why I never got around to it. It wasn't even in my queue. And one reason why I started arguing for John Ford or Orson Welles instead of Coppola was the shame of not having seen The Conversation.

Now that I've seen it, my shame is multiplied many times. The Conversation is a masterpiece. Although it's a small picture, nothing like Coppola's three epics, it stands worthily along side of them as a picture that is not only excellent, but pushed the entire world of filmmaking forward.

The film opens with a man and a woman having a furtive, awkward, fearful conversation in a busy public square, while Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) runs a little surveillance group recording their conversation. Later, in his loft office/safe-house, Caul takes the three different low-quality tapes his team obtained and melds them into a single high-quality recording. And, in an obvious reference to Antonioni's Blow-Up, he hears something: the man says "He'd kill us if he had the chance."

From there, it's downhill for Harry Caul. His life is all about compartmentalization, locked doors, sealed-off spaces. He becomes upset when he learns his landlady has a key to his apartment - she used the key to leave him a birthday gift. He refuses to give his girlfriend his number, but only drops in on her unexpectedly late at night. He won't tell his sidekick (John Cazale) anything about their projects or technology. And above all, he wants to seal himself off from the potentially dangerous consequences of his surveillance subjects could suffer. So when confronted with the direct knowledge that this tape could get his subjects killed, Caul goes into a downward spiral, unable to break through his compartments and take action but equally unable to resume his normal, compartmentalized life. He's caught between his professional ethics and his personal morals, and the film becomes a creepy, suspenseful thriller as the events continue to play out and Caul haunts them like a ghost.

The film, as is to be expected, is a technical marvel. The minimalist score, containing both diagetic and nondiagetic elements, is haunting. The sound editing is perfect. The film editing is inspired, serving the storytelling by working with and against the sound editing to leave the viewer, like Caul, uncertain of what's coming next. And there's a bathroom scene that's even tenser and scarier than the classic one in Psycho.

The acting, of course, is superb. Caul is one of Hackman's best and most subtle performances, and 70s super-supporting actor Cazale is, as always, the perfect second-fiddle. Harrison Ford plays a rare heavy as Caul's employer's emissary, and Allen Garfield practically made my skin crawl as Caul's chief competitor, an overly friendly man obsessed with one-upping and disorienting Harry.

If you can believe it, The Conversation came out the same year as The Godfather Part II. Coppola was nominated for both best picture and best screenwriter for both pictures, winning both awards for The Godfather. This is the strongest praise I can give The Conversation: I can't tell you whether or not the Academy made the right choice.

The MPAA: FAIL

2008-07-26T08:22:00.002-04:00

I've never seen This Film is Not Yet Rated, but watching The Dark Knight made me think about how incompetent the MPAA is. That movie was PG-13? Really? I know, Nolan artfully cuts away right when something hideously gruesome is about to happen, but that makes it worse! So I'm just gonna run down a few movies that got the wrong ratings, and then I need your help to finish it out:

1.The Matrix (1999)
Rating: R
Should've Been: PG-13
I guess there is a lot of shooting of (virtual) people, but this movie is exactly the kind of fun fantasy that should be PG-13. Iron Man, for example, is much more troubling and violent.

2.Once (2007)
Rating: R
Should've Been: G
I guess the F-bomb is dropped a few times in this perfect musical that, otherwise, anyone could watch. Way to rate a movie that a 4-year old could enjoy R, MPAA.

3.The Dark Knight (2008)
Rating: PG-13
Should've Been: NC-17
Seriously, I'm not really a horror movie connoisseur, but I think this might be the most terrifying movie I've ever seen. And remember, when I say this movie should be NC-17, that's because lots and lots of movies should be NC-17, if the MPAA weren't a bunch of hypocritical do-gooders.

These are the big three I can think of. Ordinarily I wouldn't post until I had more, but this time I'd rather just hear from you guys. What else has the MPAA blown big time?

Film Ignorance Guest Blogger #3: Midnight Cowboy

2008-07-25T23:10:00.004-04:00

Welcome back to Film Ignorance, our first non-Batman related entry of the week. This week, Mike of Big Mike's Movie Blog weighs in on Midnight Cowboy, a movie that's on my Film Ignorance list, but I haven't gotten to yet. Thanks for the post, Mike! I'll try to get to the film this week, so we can go head to head.Film: Midnight Cowboy
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic.
Director: John Schlesinger
Stars: Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman
Year: 1969
Ignorance Rating: Pending

Watching Midnight Cowboy for the first time and taking in the historical context of the film, while people might inevitably compare it to Brokeback Mountain, I was reminded of Raging Bull. Raging Bull was made at the end of the Seventies and became regarded as one of the greatest movies of the Eighties. Likewise, Midnight Cowboy, released during the summer of love in 1969 became an indication of the direction films would take in the Seventies.

The ‘gay cowboy movie’ of my parent’s generation, Midnight Cowboy was important in many different ways, the least of which was its subject matter. Jon Voight stars as Joe Buck, a naïve young Texan who goes to New York City with dreams of becoming a male hustler. It’s not long before he realizes that it won’t be beautiful women paying him for his body, but the Jackies on Forty Second Street. Then he meets Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman who after scamming Joe out of money, tries to take him under his wing and manage him in the ways of the New York hustler. That’s the movie in a nutshell, with the pair becoming closer as they get more impoverished and desperate for cash.

Both Voight and Hoffman were nominated for Best Actor for their performances. Voight plays the part of the dumb hick to perfection and you can get a sense of the hungry, young actor inside, yearning to please and be accepted. This movie would catapult him from a struggling New York theatre actor to a star, like The Graduate had done for his co-star the year before. Hoffman’s role has become almost the stereotype of a New Yorker by now, but it was miles removed from Benjamin Braddock and cemented his status as a serious actor in only two years in Hollywood.

Directed by John Schlesinger, whose claim to fame had been the Julie Christie movie Darling, he made the film more personal than people knew. He was in the closet at the time and was constantly under the stress of keeping his private life private. I was struck by how he shows us clips, montages and flashes of Joe’s life in Texas and a violent event that has changed him, but we’re never told explicitly what happens. Schlesinger shows us without telling us. In a way, I could understand his motivation and he desire to share secrets with us, but holding back from giving away too much. It was this style of filmmaking that really made it remarkable to me.

The movie was released with an X rating for the sexual content and brief nudity. Eventually, it was changed to R in 1971 without having to change a frame. However, it would win the Oscar for Best Picture carrying the X rating, the only film with that distinction. It helped the fight for freedom of expression that continues to this day and also won Oscars for Best Director and Screenplay (Adapted).

I couldn’t help but notice how cyclical the movie was. In the end, Joe is basically back where he started from, geographic location notwithstanding. He is alone in a new city, but his experiences have changed him and his outlook on life. Joe didn’t change to adapt to the city, but tried to remain true to himself and while some may think he failed, I believe he succeeded by surviving and moving onto the next chapter. It almost seemed to me like the film predicted how the Seventies would go for Hollywood. After the big budget, star driven films died off to be replaced by the films of people like Schlesinger, Voight and Hoffman; the studios would eventually regain control to put out large budget, star driven movies of the Eighties. Sadly, thirty years later, Schlesinger would be reduced to directing romantic comedies for Madonna and as for Voight and Hoffman… I only have two things for you. Karate Dog and Mr. Magorium. Like a friend of mine wrote earlier this week, both of them should be ashamed of themselves. Between the two of them, they were in Midnight Cowboy, Catch-22, Straw Dogs, Deliverance, Marathon Man, Coming Home and Papillion. In the past FOUR years, they have made TWO National Treasures, Lemony Snicket, Bratz and Meet the Fockers.

For shame