A Quote and a LinkLisa Rosen has a nice article on some of the best bit-part casting of this past year (registration may be required to read the article):
- Brian Dierker 'Into the Wild'
- Peter Friedman 'The Savages'
- Garret Dillahunt 'The Assassination of Jesse James . . .'
- Gene Jones 'No Country for Old Men'
- Alessandro Nivola 'Grace Is Gone'
As we learned in Thespian Society, "There are no small roles; only small actors."
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And a quick quote from Josh Levin at Slate from his review of Meet the Spartans:
"...the movie is about an hour long and probably took about six hours to make..."
I recall my college friend Scott Morlock complaining about having to sing songs that take longer to perform than they did to write. That comment has been one of the best pieces of aesthetic judgment I have ever heard. Re-View: All That JazzBrian and I caught Bob Fosse's semi-autobiographical film on cable the other day. Brian had never seen it and seemed to enjoy it. I'd seen it several times, but had felt disappointed by it on my last viewing. This time, however, the film was better than I had remembered.
The film is basically a story of the director's own death, inspired by a heart-attack he had had while working on the show Chicago, and the last hour or so is a sort-of deathbed fantasia, complete with songs, dance numbers and even a TV Special filmed in front of a studio audience. I had never thought of the film as lyrical, but when viewed as a love story, the ending shot of the Fosse character moving towards his true love, Angelique, becomes almost romantic.
I've always been a sucker for films where all the people in a person's life show up at the end, like the ending of 8 1/2, which is one of my favorite film moments and which still fills me with joy. But I hadn't realized how much he had used Fellini's film as a model until I recognized that Fosse shot of the nurse in the same way that Fellini shot Claudia Cardinale.
I also hadn't realized how much complicity there was among his cast in his death (he is in the middle of staging a show when he has his heart attack). There seems to be no one either able or willing to make him stop his bad habits: smoking, boozing and screwing around (as the film so eloquently summarizes for us). The producers know that should he die, they will make a profit, but his dancers seem too enraptured by his charisma and love for life to stand up for him, especially since so many of them need the job just to make ends meet. (From what I know of Fosse's own life, this seems to be another autobiographical element. How Gwen Verdon and Ann Reinking continued to work with him I cannot understand.)
The film paints a bleak picture of Broadway life, much bleaker than I had remembered: greedy producers, naively desperate cast and crew, and a general refusal to be honest about how bad the situation is. Fosse's character realizes too late that what he has to live for is not his hedonism, but his daughter. Unlike Fellini's character, who learns to love everyone in his life, Fosse's character realizes that he's loved all the wrong people in all the wrong ways.
Zacharek on Reiner and The Bucket ListNot quite as blunt as Ebert's famous review of North, but good all the same. In fact, I don't know which quote I prefer: the directness of
Reiner couldn't have made the moment any cheaper if he'd tried.
or the careful set-up and vicious reversal of
When Carter and Edward climb to the top of an Egyptian landmark for a quiet, intense conversation, their noble heads bathed in golden sunlight, the movie achieves a kind of perverse nirvana: Rarely have I seen such serene poo.
Ouch!
Slate on PT AndersonIn preparation for the release of There Will Be Blood, Dennis Lim has a nice piece on Paul Thomas Anderson and his "maximalist" style of film-making over at Slate, including YouTube clips of scenes from his other films!
We may not be living in a golden age of American movies, but a new New Hollywood of sorts has emerged—a cluster of adventurous directors in their 30s and 40s who have figured out how to get personal films made with Hollywood or Indiewood money: Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola, Alexander Payne. Many of them have a specialty. Fincher is a visual virtuoso, Linklater a verbal stylist. Payne is good with character, Coppola with moods and music. Tarantino has the encyclopedic geek smarts, Soderbergh the taste for reinvention. With Paul Thomas Anderson, all of the above apply. His thing is that he can do it all.
Lim discusses Anderson's willingness to be sincerely emotional, his use of music, and the important differences between Anderson and his oft-cited models, Altman and Kubrick. Lim hints at something I've often thought, that Anderson is much more humanistic (in the sense of humane-ness) than most of his colleagues and predecessors.
I'm looking forward to seeing the film -- crazy ending and all!
The Great CroonersI believe I've lamented before in this space about the loss of the great male pop/rock singers of the 1970s: men who truly sang, full voice and full throttle. Now, having heard 3 weeks' worth of schmaltzy Christmas music from the 50s and 60s, I want to expand my lament.
It's not that I particularly like that style of music. But it strikes me as very curious how these men, with their creamy voices and supple vibrato, were accepted in their time as fully masculine. Growing up in the 70s, I never heard Perry Como or Andy Williams accused of being effeminate. Nat King Cole? Hardly. Frank Sinatra? Preposterous!
But whom do we have today? Michael Buble? Josh Groban? Sure, they have fans, but they're hardly considered "hip" (much less "hop"). Think of how Clay Aiken was treated during American Idol -- he was the throwback, retro contestant, popular among older crowds and teenaged girls. Would he ever be taken seriously as a "man"? (Whatever that term means nowadays.)
What has happened in our culture that has caused this style of singing to become dubious, so that the men who have the voices to sing them are considered soft?
BeowulfUsually when critics complain that the director can't find the right pace for a film, their comments fly over my head -- I can't quite figure out what they're talking about or even how to see what it is they're seeing in the film.
But last night, those kinds of complaints all made sense to me. Robert Zemeckis did the impossible and made George Lucas look like an actor's director. I couldn't believe how weak his direction was in the non-action scenes -- there was no dramatic tension at all. How do you make Hopkins, Winstone, Malkovich, Gleeson and Wright Penn sound like amateurs? Bad editing for one -- which I had thought is really hard to do in an animated film, but apparently not. Some of the transitions between scenes were painfully awkward, and the quieter scenes definitely suffered for this. But even within scenes, the dialogue has no life; there was often so much space between lines that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the actors weren't responding to each other when they recorded their parts. This is the kind of story that benefits from having the talking scenes kept hushed but quick, keeping the sense of urgency alive between the moments of action.
I have a feeling part of the problem was in the script. The first example that comes to mind is Unferth's sudden introduction of Beowulf's swimming contest, which felt like something novice screenwriters do -- not what you'd expect from the co-author of Pulp Fiction and an acclaimed comics writer. (Or maybe Gaiman was writing for the page rather than for the screen?) But Zemeckis managed to highlight seemingly all of the script's weaknesses; he only seems to know what to do in the action scenes, which are quite riveting (especially in 3D).
I know people will complain about the animation, and I agree with them. It's only good for the non-human creatures. I didn't think it was possible to make Angelina Jolie look unattractive. Robin Wright Penn's beauty suffers even more. Even the men suffer: Ray Winstone's facial hair was probably the most realistic-looking human element of the film. These characters look too much like the humans in the Shrek movies, and honestly, we don't go to the Shrek films for the human characters. (Besides, they're meant to be cartoonish....) I didn't think it was possible for me to want something closer to the visual style of 300, but I would rather have seen real human faces, with both their bumps and blemishes and their subtle muscle movement, than the wax figures Zemeckis delivered. Of course, maybe if we hadn't heard the line "I am Beowulf" 18 times in the film, the 300 comparison wouldn't have been so unavoidable.
But while I agree with the complaints about the animation, I don't think that was the main problem. The monsters looked fantastic, and the action scenes really were well done. I especially enjoyed watching it in 3D, since we get a sense of space that's often lacking in 2D action films. In one shot, Beowulf is running alongside a cliff while a dragon attacks the other side; I was pleased to see how clear the sense of distance was in the 3D. The final fight scene with the dragon even made me jump in my seat a few times, and was exactly the kind of climactic scene the movie needed.
I think the real problems were the weak script and most especially a director who fell into every pothole in that script. Zemeckis' animation certainly has potential, if he can find the material that plays to his strengths.
In Praise of Pretentious Movies?Over at The Guardian Unlimited, novelist Danny Leigh has posted a persuasive article in which he argues that the charge that a film is pretentious is a meaningless insult, other than signifying that the film in question went over the reviewer's head and thereby called into question the his/her knowledge and/or intelligence. In fact, he claims, pretension is essential to film:
The problem is that without "pretension" we'd have no Welles, no Kubrick, maybe no cinema at all. What could have been more pretentious in 1896 than the idea the gimmicky device scaring thrill-hungry Parisians with moving pictures of trains pulling into stations might become the next century's major art-form? And now, the term is all but redundant - just a byword for ambition if whoever's writing doesn't like whoever made the movie, particularly if they're a few years younger than them, from the wrong kind of background, or have already been slated by all and sundry.
And therein lies the lesson: if you want to avoid the taint of pretension, stick to telling people what they already know.
I'm not sure if Leigh is giving enough attention to the social effects of popular media -- even church sermons can't afford to fly over the heads of their listeners -- but I think he's given us a valid insight into how to read criticism critically.
Family Guy v. The SimpsonsMSNBC has a nice article on why Family Guy is a better show than The Simpsons. I don't have anything to add, but I'm glad to see that someone else has noticed the way the show uses the technique of lingering on a joke much longer than expected -- it's one of the aesthetic devices that I think sets the show apart from other sitcoms.
And it raises another issue I've had on my mind lately: I've been wondering about the way sitcoms tend to re-set everything to their starting point. This topic interests me because one theory of the New Comedy (continuing down to today's Romantic Comedies) is that the marriage at the end of the story is brought about by fixing something in the culture: instead of re-setting the characters to where they were at the beginning of the story, this older form of comedy re-sets the culture to eliminate the social obstacles that interfere with true love.
How has our sense of comedy changed from fixing what is wrong to preserving the status quo?
JourneymanJourneyman has been struggling in the ratings, which is a shame, as it's got some very smart things going for it. I only watch it because it follows Heroes, but I've been impressed by how it handles the situation's complexity for its characters. Dan is honest enough to tell his wife, Katie, that in his jumps to the past he is working with his (presumed deceased) former fiancée Olivia, and to tell Olivia that he has married her good friend Katie. What's more, the two women handle this situation with a great amount of maturity. I cynically expected the show to have Dan try to rekindle his relationship with Olivia, or to have Katie to remain constantly jealous. Even Dan's overly suspicious brother, Jack (Katie's ex), showed some nice complexity the other night in his interactions with Dan and Katie's son. These characters may be a little more mature than the average person, but it sure is refreshing to see how people could react to difficult situations.
This show is only partly about Dan's trips back in time. I like the psychological implications of these trips on the characters, and the intelligent way they handle things. Definitely worth checking out!
Rear WindowI accidentally and for the first time saw Hitchcock's Rear Window on the telly last night. For some reason, I'd never had any interest in it, but it sucked me in like an episode of CSI or Law & Order. I was really surprised how interested I was in the story. I think that was in part because of the way Hitchcock shoots the other buildings to put the audience in Jimmy Stewart's position: like him, we're curious about what's going on in those windows. It's a people-watcher's delight!
On the other hand, I was a bit put off by Grace Kelly's character: the precious socialite (made worse by that horribly breathy voice that is such a common acting style for "proper" female characters -- as if real women don't use their full voices -- blech!). My reactions to her were complicated: At first, I wanted Stewart to dump her, as she was too spoiled and flighty. But I was glad to realize that part of the plot was her having to learn to be adventurous in order to marry Stewart. But this realization had a mixed flavor, because insofar as the story forces Kelly to learn to live amongst "real" people, it simultaneously falls into the cliché of the woman who must change to suit her man. Bah! Sexism in the guise of critiquing classism!
Still, I enjoyed the movie, and it was fun to see Kelly acting like a secret agent in her fabulous dress. And I really enjoyed Thelma Ritter as the therapist who gives love advice before becoming the lovebirds' accomplice. How could she have never won an Oscar???
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