Netflix allows for mini-reviews of movies in 300 words or less, and here are some of mine over the past year:
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
One of the best comedies of the last few years, far better than US products that re-cycle SNL skits. This film works on so many levels that the word "ambitious" is (British) understatement. Mockumentary a la "This Is Spinal Tap," with homages to "Adaptation" as a movie about an unfilmable book. It is also a send-up of the British classic lit / movie industry. An ongoing joke is that no one has actually read the 18th century book, except one PA /AD, who is also the only one on set who spouts "cinema" art concerns. Steve Coogan plays himself as the "star" as we always suspected - vain, self-deceiving, pretentious, neurotic. Slowed only slightly by a few lazily edited improvised scenes, over all it is out loud laughs almost all the way.
Lucky Number Slevin A stew made of body parts from other films: plot tropes from "The Big Lebowski," "North By Northwest," "Pulp Fiction," plus Hwd's favorite persona, the Hitman, today's gunslinger. Smarten up stylized dialogue. Toss in a snippet of screwballish romance subplot, check your brain at the door and just let it wash over you.
Lower City
The love triangle in an exotic or desperate setting is the oldest of movie forms. As in depression era films, the struggle of the buddies for survival is threatened by the girl, whose passion offers temptation and redemptive love at the same time. The world of Brazil's slum life echoes ours in violence and impending tragedy, and also in its vibrant pulse of life. That love can survive in such a world may be a sentimental notion, but here it is convincingly portrayed and remains a gripping universal theme. Alice Braga is a star in the making, playing the prostitute who may have a heart after all.
Stay Re-title as "The 6th Non-sense." All style and no substance, a disappointing waste of starry talents. A jigsaw puzzle with all the best pieces chewed up by a dog. A "thriller" with no thrills, just arbitrary visual and editing gimmickry, an exercise in ego driven drivel.
Bitter Moon Polanski's life and films, like Woody Allen's, can't be separated easily. Like Picasso, their art and life interact. Polanski's current wife, Seignier, becomes a sex toy and an avenger in this opera buffo soft core fantasy about risky emotions released. The movie is an indulgent mess, but so is the artist's life and fantasies.
Mini's First Time "Wild Things" was a trash smash hit, capitalizing on the allure of sexy teen femme fatales in training. "Mini's" tries for the same tone, but fails miserably after Act I. The plot twists are tired rehashes of old noir bites, Baldwin's stepdad / lover patsy becomes drearily foolish and whiny. Luke Wilson is wasted, allowed no ironic dark humor that is his meat. Nikki Reed lacks the extra star presence needed to keep our interest and credibility past Act 2.
Casanova A period satire that flops on Saturday and every other night. It aspires to "Shakespeare In Love" bred with "Tom Jones" and lacks the wit, originality, passion and smart anachronistic edginess that those classics had in spades. Ledger is tepid, Lena Olin's fire is wasted, Sienna Miller has nothing much. Even foils Jeremy Irons & Oliver Platt, both comic talents are adrift in stylistic fog - not enough sex or laughs.
Freedomland Proof that good ideas dont insure a good movie. I like the theme - good intentions are not enough to dent the insoluble mess our society is in. So polarized are we that every "event" re-affirms our prejudices, no matter The Truth. A grim assessment, but insightful. "Communities" are islands of turmoil, ready to explode. Compassion and human scale emotions are left behind in such a world. Like "Crash," and "Syriana" these dramas are bleak, not entertaining, but contain more than a few glimpses of sad truth.
Everybody Wins Could have been "Blue Velvet" or "Twin Peaks" in hands of Lynch. Subject is ripe for noir - detective (Nick Nolte) with a past falls for a sexy hooker (Debra Winger) with a past to solve the crime. The corrupt town, the wrong man, the suspects. With irony, the world is not to be changed. Everybody's happy with a half truth. Okay, what's wrong? The director has no style, no pace, no tenstion, no consistent mood. Nolte & Winger are lost in character, with no help. Will Patton chews scenery. Pity.
The Libertine How to hook J. Depp onto your project - tempt with any or all of the following: disfiguring make-up to conceal his good looks and force him to rely on skill rather than star presence; require an accent, preferably English; permit him to mine a character we can love and despise at the same time; include the theme of the thrill of playacting; give him some well-written dialogue to poeticize; surround him with challenging actors like Malkovich, Samantha Morton, Rosamund Pike. Then give him the screen for as long as he wants and stand back.
The Proposition To Aussies, this film must be a shocking revelation, exploding myths about their history as our "adult" westerns did to Americans bred on our white hat / black hat myths. Frontier "justice" down under is shown as brutal. Few punches pulled as a lawman tries to civilize. Emily Watson, as the decent woman shocked by crime, demanding vengeance, learns that "right" is not so clear. Flawed by pacing issues but overall a needed twist on the Western genre, which seems to have run its course in American films, with rare exceptions.
Inside Man Act 1 is a standard bank takeover thriller, with some nice Spike Lee-isms, his insights to NY characters and racial irony. Act 3 is a fairly satisfying resolution - tho not in the class of "The Usual Suspects" as a surprise. The problem is mostly with Act 2, which drags with little credible action, contrived tension, and less than gripping characters. The exposition gives away the game, the true motives of the robbers, making the resolution less than satisfying. For better takes, rent "Suspects" or "The Hot Rock."
The Great New Wonderful The new urban angst of 9/11 memories is the subject of this ensemble film that tracks a few days in the lives of disconnected New Yorkers approaching the 1st anniversary of the event. Used to many reasons for insecurity in the city - crime, crowds, the rat race - this latest trauma has them stumped. Each in his / her own way is sleepwalking around the elephant in the room. The cinematic problem is that most of them are not all that interesting as individuals. Their dilemmas and their treatment of them are so "normal" that taking 9/11 ptsd out of the equation changes nothing. This perpective itself is a bit unnerving. If anything did change, it was only an edging up of the urban angst a few more unbearable notches.
Don't Come Knocking "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way," was Jessica Rabbit's famous apology for embarassing us. "Howard Spence," Sam Shepard's alter ego here is another self-conscious star, who is embarassd by his own extravagent outrages - tired of being a phony "hero." Now burnt out, he seeks redemption, finding a son and daughter he never knew he had, accepting the reality of fatherhood which is less than heroic, but with more possibilities for a kind of acceptance if not happy endings.
The Night and the Moment 18th Century Paris must have been a hoot. Crebillon wrote scandalous novels, of which this was one, followed by Leclos, who wrote "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," upped later by a bloke named De Sade. This 1995 effort followed the best of the many versions of "Dangerous Liaisons" (1989). Lena Olin is gorgeous and sexy, Miranda Richardson acts as if in "Tom Jones" but Willem Dafoe is sadly miscast as the upper class rogue in lust with Lena. Mostly "oral sex" i.e, a lot of suggestive talk about licentiousness, and a few titillating scenes, which fail to arouse much interest.
The Rules of the Game
In common with my favorite great film, Citizen Kane, Rules Of The Game is not only a great and profound film, it is also endlessly entertaining and involving, actually fun to watch, not just once but over again as many times as you wish. Both work on many levels, do not pound you over the head with "Art." Renoir, as Welles, loved to perform, do shtick, burlesque, as well as to comment subtly on their times. And both films were under appreciated in their time - as were their creators. DVD comes with a 2nd disc that contains great historical stuff.
The Matador A variant of the hitman-meets-nerd theme so often overused as dark comedy ("The Whole Nine Yards"), Brosnan & Kinnear make a quirky buddy movie with a clever twist into a relative morality parable. Intermittently entertaining, sometimes irksome, both actors seem to be having fun. The oddity of Hope Davis's character, grieving for her dead son, finding laughs and excitement in her hubby's new pal never goes the way we think it will - ie the cliche attraction - so there are some surprises and that's a nice change in a hitman movie (don't see "Collateral" if you want any originality).
A Real Young Girl
Breillat's work is aggressively feminist. This early effort is raw, influenced by surrealists. But touches on true & deep forbidden subjects - repression, sexual fantasies about fathers & mothers, curiousity about her body & sense of the power of her sexuality and its dangers.
Searching for Debra Winger
Rosanna Arquette + a sisterhood of whining women decry their dilemma: they cant have it all - career, motherhood, creativity, love, fame, privacy - i.e., perfect fulfillment. Uh, too bad, ladies. Welcome to the real world. Oddly, only Debra Winger seems to get it, though she also seems just a bit sad about her choice. Where are the men? And the children? The truth is that actors are pretend people, not like us at all.
Yellow Flower
Experimental and cerebral, Ji-sang Lee strips everything but what he deems the essence of symbolism of New Wave mood. Godard & Bertolucci are the icons he worships. Scenes with packed emotions are all he gives us. Sex, violence, crime, rebellion are casual but treated as the only "real" events worth living.
L'Atalante
In these days when movies are loud and coarse, this simple ancient little film reminds you of the power of a tiny story about people. Dita Parlo's face reveals all: her sweetness, naivete, yearnings for excitement. Today, this urge would have led to a "Fatal Attraction" or "Unfaithful," an erotic fanstasy thriller with her destruction. But in Jean Vigo's human vision, nothing so dramatic will occur. She will not take the fatal step, fate will be kind, her young husband will realize what he lost.
Basic Instinct 2
The trash classic "Basic Instinct" intro'd one of film's most rivetting femmes fatales, Catherine Trammell. She is a great villain: sexy, smart, sexy, devious, sexy, evil and oh yes, sexy. Sure its a parody, over the top with contrived plots dependent on stupid males easily manipulated, but so is "Dracula." Sharon Stone at 50 is amazing to look at and even more alluringly wicked. Check your brain at the door and have fun.
The White Countess
Merchant & Ivory specialize in tasteful English dramas. Passions are so restrained that you want sometimes to smack the characters to life. They like to put their English in passionate places: Italy, India, or here, in Shanghai on the brink of WWII. Ralph Fiennes plays an American, Natasha Richardson, her mom and aunt (the Redgrave sisters) Russians, but they act like they are English. When Fiennes and Richardson are on the brink of passion a spark lights, but the film is too polite to let it explode. Maybe that would not have been subtle enough. M&I are always subtle. Instead, the plot swerves to make its political point, which is not subtle. In the end, we are left not feeling enough about any of it.
La Belle Noiseuse
Though the film is certainly about the artistic process and can be infuriatingly and excrutiatingly detailed, I found another theme that is more interesting. Beart, as the "model," begins as bored and offended, but eventually finds complex emotions, self-realization, power in her role as the artist's muse, his object. She strips herself to the bone, giving herself but in the end proving to be more than her parts.
The Weather Man
As gripping as watching snow melt. Snow gets most screen time as director Verbinski underscores every transitional scene with lingering shots of nasty Chicago weather. We get it the first time — this is the winter of discontent for “Dave Spritz,” the lightweight TV weather man, his soul chilled and numbed by his failed life, yada yada. This is a pretentious and offensive Hollywood pseduo-intellectual view of American life. Condescending Hollywood movie people preaching values. What an oxymoron. See "LA Story" for sharp satire re weatherman; see "Quiz Show" for touching drama re son disappointing smart dad by silly TV fame. See Caine in ALFIE for better take on jerk-heroes.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic
This is Sarah's vanity project / audition for stardom. She has her own niche in stand-up, a "J.A.P." for the Gen X / Y / Z er's. Not Rita Rudner, more Lenny Bruce's illigitimate grandneice. Targets are PC no-no's: 9/11, AIDS, Race stereotypes. And her very one Nana, who belonged to that most laughable minority: old, dying people. She's a hoot, hot, wise and should get some acting parts as a result.
Friends with Money
A film in a long tradition - the Hen Flick. From the 30's, "The Women," to "Waiting To Exhale" & "First Wives Club," & even "Sex & The City." As a man, I am fascinated by the depiction of male characters: all clueless, insensitive louts. Feminism & post-feminism seems to leave couples in limbo hell according to these films. Empowered women still unfulfilled. What next?
16 Blocks
Willis lets Mos Def riff and steal the scenes while Bruce walks thru a character we know too well to surprise us - a burnt out corrupt cop. They lost me with the nonsensical plot from the jump - I'm a lawyer and can only laugh at the silly premise: DA entrusts snitch wit to cops to transport - the bus scene & escape is a riot. The alternate ending is better, but should have also included an alternate plot.
White
Could be subtitled, "Revenge Of The Shnook." Karol Karol, our "hero," seems victim of a scheming "femme fatale." He seems like a bad "Polish joke," a loser. Just when we're ready to give up on him, tho, he finds backbone, a reason to live: to get back and get back AT his love. Will it be satisfying? The end teases, but leaves us wondering. Also incudes Julie Delpy. 'nuf said.
Fool for Love
Shepard, Basinger, Altman, Stanton. Whoa! Nope, never been much fer th' neo-western trailer trashy motel honky tonk school a' actin' & writn'. But I gotta admit that this group rilly gits yer attenshun. 'Spechully Kim - that gal's jest about the prettiest heifer. Shep's kinda Gary Cooper's illegitimate son, I guess an' the two of 'em make great lovers and siblings, too, jes' like back home in the hills. Yep.
My Life to Live
Filmmakers will always be fascinated with prostitutes. See "Klute" for one of the best. "Belle Du Jour" for another. Godard's social conscience and dramatist's sensibility watches a woman, the radiant star, Anna Karina, as she struggles to take control over her life, no matter the risk and outcome.
Miss Julie
Saffron Burrows is a former runway model who can think and act. She is very very serious about her acting chops. Has given herself to Figgis in at least 3 of his experimental movies ("Hotel" & "Loss of Sexual Innocence"). Waiting for a vehicle that makes her the star she deserves to be. See her in "Enigma," a better film actually than this dated exam of class sexual warfare between upstairs lady and downstairs footman. Who is exploiting who is the question and the answer is not very gripping as we learn how hard it is to be a poor servant with no hope of upward mobility. Really? Saffron tries to show how hard it is to be beautiful, rich, and lonely. Not buying it.
Memoirs of a Geisha
Subtitle: Gone With The Geisha. Scarlet (Chiyo) chases Ashley Wilkes (Chairman) through ante-bellum South (Japan) & post war ruin. Mixed with Oliver Twisty child abuse plot. Bad English accents by actors (Zhang Ziyi / Gong Li - who are great & beautiful Chinese stars) and others whose dialogue sounds phoenetically learned. Ersatz history.
See, instead:
The World of Geisha
A Japanese film that was banned there for years beause of the explicit sex. The sex is not pornographic - it is a power struggle stylishly and tastefully filmed to put you inside the heart of this woman. Geishas here are not the glamorous, timid entertainers of wealthy men. They are desperate to move on up by the only route they have - the love of a "client" tho all the rules, social, professional and emotional - warn them against it, and it is a low probability of success and high chance of pain.
Mrs. Henderson Presents
While we Yanks market only our present culture to the world, the British dwell, as The Beatles, sang, in "Yesterday." And they have so many of them. British law must mandate annual films of Shakespeare, Austen, and Elizabeth I. And their "Finest Hour:" The Blitz. Dame Judy and Hoskins have great fun with class clash and dry English witticisms. Stephen Frears lends his skill and Chris Guest is super. Sure, it's sappy, but stiff upper lip, chaps.
Dodsworth
Proof (as if it was needed) that the 1930's was THE Golden Age of filmmaking. Willy Wyler's genius direction of Walter Huston in Sinclair Lewis' famous novel. (Do high schoolers still read Lewis? "Arrowsmith," "Main Street"? Do they still read?) Huston was a "naturalistic" actor long before Brando co-opted the term. The story's values are worthy of argument & comparison to how it would be handled today (See, e.g., "Unfaithful").
Rumor Has It
It's time to admit that Jennifer Aniston doesn't have big screen star appeal. She's tried several matchups - Ed Burns, Kevin Bacon, Jake Gyllenhaal, not Mark Ruffalo & Keving Costner. None work - its her fault. She's not Meg Ryan for the new century - certainly no Jean Arthur or any of the golden age career girl / stars. Time to find another sitcom, Jen.
The Lake House
All romances demand a suspension of disbelief and an arc that ends in an inevitable happy ending. The problem here is that there are so few surprises once the time bending issue is established. I found neither lead character very compelling. Sandra Bullock was far more appealing in "Two Weeks Notice" opposite Hugh Grant and Keanu Reeves remains uni-dimensional at most. The contrivance of letter / conversation with voice overs becomes boring quickly and the plot turn leading to the ending is predictable from miles away. A film that relies heavily on a dog for smiles is in trouble.
The Family Stone
Not a romantic dramedy, but embarrassment humor, the kind that sets up a contrived sitcom family and dumps a stranger in it to quirm and be gallingly skewered. Not that Meredith (Sarah) doesn't rate it - she's hard to sympathize with. Mix in mushy contrived sentiment - mom has a terminal illness, a stable of cardboard "issues," a clumsy stab at screwball wit, and an ending wrapped in the chintziest fuzzy ribbon. Anyone who cried or laughed at this mess is too easy to please.
The Awful Truth
The template for the Screwball remarriage comedy that dominated the 1930's.
The movie that established "Cary Grant Type." Leo McCarey directed him opposite Irene Dunne. Look for the classic scene involving two derbies. Cary gets his laughs, and still looks like Cary Grant while doing it. He repeated this act in "My Favorite Wife" again with Irene Dunne, and in "Holiday" and "Bringing Up Baby" opposite Hepburn, and in "His Girl Friday," stretched it to its limits in "Arsenic And Old Lace" and and practiced a calmer version as late as "Charade." Dunne, the surprise of the movie, matches Cary for sophistication and screwiness. He dignified class was perfectly matched by a lowdown sexy playfulness. Arguably better than Hepburn was in "Bringing Up Baby."
Waking Life
Linklater is a unique artist. Independent, original, literate, philosophical, postmodern, but tapped into pop culture at its roots. This form - rotoscope animation of live performance - using various very talented graphic artists enlivens the talk, permits flights of fancy and subjective imaginative dreamlike atmosphere perfect for the musings of teen student Wiggins. The visual language of graphic novels is a perfect metaphor for pop-postmod life.
Just Like Heaven
Revives a tired formula for weepy romances. The moral is always to live life to the fullest each day. Okay! The new wrinkle is the ghost isn't quite dead, so a happy ending is guaranteed. Oh year, the rom/com conceit that there is a soulmate out there that chance / fate will attach at the fade out. But I kept wondering, what about Ruffalo's dead previous soulmate?
The Notorious Bettie Page
A film that works on 3 levels. 1st, it documents an era we can barely imagine today, when sex was a dirty secret. 2nd, it comments on a postfeminist acceptance of sexuality, women now ok with "objectifying" their beauty. Bettie's innocence now can be seen as her right to choose. 3rd, as an entertainment, it is charmingly naive, straightforward, allowing the irony to flow naturally from the story. Gretchen Mol is perfectly cast, with her angelic face and figure, she foreshadows the Playboy conceit of the all-American girl next door as desireable sex goddess. She also remains an enigma to us - e.g.: given the suggestion of incest, her later free attitude about nudity seems contrary to modern conventional psycho-wisdom.
Syriana
Like most political films, your vote depends on your bias. The message: dependency on oil corrupts. The remedy: drive a Prius(?) Is this really the problem and the answer? The ensemble multi-thread narrative form deprives screen time for the more gripping story lines. Clooney's burnt out spy (a la "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold") is under-written as is Matt Damon / Amanda Peet issue. Matt preaches. Other characters are bare caricatures.
The Sentinel
If you haven't "solved" the mystery by the middle of Act 2, you've never seen this genre before. Douglas joins Eastwood, Willis, Ford, as an aging action hero unconvincingly huffing & puffing his way to the end. Recycled action thriller with virtually nothing new or interesting to offer.
Don't Move
The joy in this film is watching Penelope Cruz stretch. Like Kidman, Streep, Theron, Hayek, she revels in the make-up & costuming that conceals her stunning beauty and exposes her inner actress. She overcomes the material and direction which focuses on the less interesting story of her lover. She still waits for a vehicle that will be worthy of her talent and presence.
Arms and the Man
If you want to know where many of the beats of romantic comedy conventions arose, read (or better yet watch) one by Shakespeare, Wilde, or Shaw. While the English recycle their lit often - Austen, Bronte, Dickens, etc, Shaw has been overlooked recently. But they are ripe for updates, being smartly anti war, upper class twits, hypocrites, sexual prudes, bureaucrats, parents - and is irreverent, even shocking - for its time, while being very, very funny with brilliant dialogue for the situations. Would love to see this one updated to a modern war or placed in our civil war, with the servants being slaves - that would be cool.
Strayed
Reminds me of Sophia Loren's "Two Women" in theme - survival of mother and child in war, but far more subtle. Beart endures by clinging to her faith in civilized values, while yielding to base passions exposed by need to survive. Delicate handling of mother and son's attraction to the "manly" wild boy.
Asylum
This genre is an opera with one recurring theme with infinite variations: Life can be so dull and unbearably secure that the need for passion and drama overcomes all reason, inexorably leading to destruction and disaster for all that one loves or cares about or knows is right. Even if you can foresee the end result, you can’t help yourself from continuing down the corridor; you need to feel something, anything — to prove you’re alive, even if it leads to pain and tragedy. Like and opera: (Bass) the boring, overbearing hubby; (soparano) the bored, lonely, sex starved woman; (baritone) the sweaty hunk with danger in his eyes.
Proof
This film is a sure flop: (1) it is full of words, without a single shot fired; (2) it demands concentration for more than a sound bite; (3) it helps if you have experienced some of life's risks: mental illness, creative doubts, grief, children, parents. Paltrow's father died a few years ago and she brings that to her performance along with all the depth her stage work in this piece formed. If you needed it, here's "proof" she can act.
Double Indemnity
Something few note about the noir genre which is the key to this movie's greatness. Walter Neff is not a dupe of a femme fatale. He's a dope, sure, but a more than willing one. He's the guy who is bored with convention, needs risk even tho he knows its fatal. He knows the blonde is absurdly cheap and bad, but he acts from a deeper urge: the thrill of danger - the jerk wants to be cool. That's why Fred is genius casting.
The Woman Next Door
A character says: "they could neither be togethe nor apart." And another says, "every love story has a beginning, a middle and and end." The French call it: "l'amour fou" (mad love) and it is inevitably tragic - you can't avoid the bad end - fate controls.
Shadows in the Sun
What is about Hollywood people and Tuscany? There was Diane Lane's vanity project, "Under The Tuscan Sun," with cute eccentric Italians and other foreigners welcoming the American lady to their - or her bosom. Now, Keitel & teen throbber Josh Jackson play out a trite play about a blocked writer father figure and his eccentric cute Italian friends teaching LIFE to a blocked American guy - only saver is watching CLAIRE FORLANI - but even her subplot romance with Josh is silly & contrived.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Ebert is on target, comparing to Huston-like subjects. Jones puts his heart and soul on the line - his South Texas roots and passion for the country are evident. Maybe too personal - things he prizes and lingers on may not be shared by many. There are nice picaresque touches - Levon Helm's cameo is super. A very personal story of honor, friendship, values.
10th District Court
[A French documentary showing a day's cases in a courtroom.] I was a public defender for many years and lived in France for a year. I was amused by the familiar echoes as well as the dischordant notes. US Misdemeanor courts are often treated with the same speed, despite pride in our perceived superior recognition of individual rights. Defendants and lawyers for both sides showed the same traits I saw in our courts: the amusing unawareness of the lameness of their arguments, the ease with which excuses are answered, the self-righteous pomposity of prosecutors. French cultural quirks evidenced: precise language, facial gestures, notions of gender character, resort to fatalism, class awareness.
Gentleman's Agreement
A historical document of film culture. Part of Hollywood's liberal guilty conscience in the post war about our failings: racism (see "Home Of The Brave"), etc. Ironic fact: Elia Kazan won Oscar, then later trashed the film for being too "weak" - yet he soon named names to HUAC's "leftist" cleansing (a term that inferred more than a little anti-semitism) that destroyed careers, including his film's co-star and close friend, John Garfield.
The Story of Qiu Ju
Like a fable, a shaggy dog story, or a gag about "fighting City Hall," Zhang Yimou and Gong Li entertain us with amusing characters and educate us about Chinese culture. This is the essence of "story telling," a Chinese Preston Sturges movie about country folk meeting complexities of modern life.
Design for Living
All contemporary romance comedy filmmakers should be forced to memorize every beat of this movie and then forced to make their movie sans gross gags & sex scenes as a test before being given any financing. Like a good book, like a radio play, like a silent film, Lubitsch proves imagination makes the best sex scenes. Hopkins languidly sprawled on a divan, breaking the menage's "gentleman's agreement" of no sex, sighing, "Unfortunately, I'm no gentleman," followed by slow fade out is as good as you're gonna get it.
Edmond
No original thoughts coming from Mamet's stylish pen here. His everyman coping with moral ambiguity, personified by perfectly cast Bill Macy, is severed from his middle class mediocrity for no good reason and has no center to keep him sane. He acts like a naif thrown into hell, completely ignorant of the rules, trying to apply "decency" to harsh reality. When he is victimized, he crumbles into insane violence. The whole voyage is unpleasant to watch and leaves you with no feelings for him - he squandered our sympathy with his foolish rants, nonsensical conclusions, and his predicament is wholly his own fault - or rather, Mamet's, who fails to convince us that this is a tragedy.
Viridiana
For those who think of Bunuel as obscure, dark, "arty," this film is a pleasant surprise. (Not unlike "Smiles Of A Summer Night" for Ingmar Bergman phobes.) It has less in common with the high ideas of Dali and Karl Marx than with the low comedy and satire of Mel Brooks and The Marx Brothers. Bunuel makes fun of dogmatic religion, do-gooders, every class, self-sacrifice, altruism, sexual desire in all its forms, the presumed nobility of the poor. The dining room scene with the revels of the poor, trashing their benefactress's table, parodying The Last Supper, is as funny and gross as any Coen Brothers film.
Gloomy Sunday
A wonderful surprise. Holden, critic of "NY Times," misses the point entirely when he ridicules the "suicide song" idea. It is not the song that kills, but the mood of hopelessness it evokes in people who have every real reason for desperation - they are about to be plunged into hell, and they see clearly how their peculiar arrangement for love will be destroyed. The love story of Ilona, Andras & Lazlo is heartbreaking, portrayed in human scale and much insight and compassion. Even the Nazi Weick possesses human traits. This is a story that might have happened.
Lie with Me
Bold & brave try for new look at sex & love for our times. Works on many levels. Dilemma of kids freed from past sex taboos now are emotional children despite their sophisticated sex attitude. Also thematic is effect of all this on post-feminist girls, empowered, but like children with explosive toys. For director, a bold try to avoid porn while being raw and explicit in a traditional romance form, modeled on "Last Tango In Paris." It works, more than titillation here, evokes real feelings for the characters. Last scene, not a cop out, but credible possibility of hope.
Firewall
Things I have seen too many times in a thriller: the endangered child who needs medication; the sadistic but intelligent mastermind; the criminal computer nerd; the crime team member with a heart; the crime team member who leers at the captive hot teen daughter; the hot teen daughter; the spunky wife; the 60 yr old hero dad who acts like a one man SWAT team, killing the much younger & supposedly deadly psycho kidnappers. This one will appeal to computer geeks who never saw any of the 50 prior movies exactly like this.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
"The Cotton Club" (1984) - Forgotten Coppola Classic
Another movie that is as famous for the back story surrounding its making and another movie that tanked commercially and critically at its release but which has gained in reputation over time. It may not yet be considered a “classic,” but it is gaining momentum on cable re-runs.
Robert Evans, who as head of Paramount, had been credited with producing and overseeing THE GODFATHER I & II and CHINATOWN, the best films of the 1970's, had gone independent and this was his big package deal. Script problems and financing woes overwhelmed him at a time when he was trembling on the high wire of the Hollywood power structure. Evans became a poster boy for the excesses of the late 70's and early 80's, involving inflated egos and cocaine budgets that marked the fall of many wunderkind of the 1970's Hollywood renaissance.
As time dragged on during the long pre-production troubles of this mammoth project, Evans allegedly played footsie with some Florida pharmaceutical “importers” who wanted to use their ill-gotten fortune to buy into Hollywood glamour. An attractive dame, Lainie Greenberger, and a complex cast of low-lifes, who could have served as the basis for Elmore Leonard’s GET SHORTY, circled the project and murder ensued. The scandal and subsequent trial, in which Evans played a tangential role, was like those that threatened the Hollywood of an earlier era of excess, the 1920's.
That the movie involved the relationships of gangsters and show business in the 20's and 30's was an irony that has added to the film’s legend over the years.
Eventually Francis Ford Coppola accepted the challenge of cobbling a script and directing, and it is his vision (along with co-writer Mario Puzo) that is all over the final result. It is a fair addition to the Godfather genre (certainly better than his later made-for-dough GODFATHER III), matching scenes of violence with alternating and intercut musical numbers which comment on the action much as "The Godfather" had done with violent counterpoint to family issues.
Unlike The Godfather and more like APOCALYPSE, NOW, COTTON CLUB tries for too much irony, spins too many plates in the air at the same time. It evokes the Cotton Club era, when colorful gangsters ran the posh and trendy jazz club smack in the middle of Harlem, catering to a whites only audience with “colored” talent. The talent included some of the best musical artists this country has ever produced: Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters and many others. Coppola wanted to show it all: the gangsters, the Black / White issue, talent in the grasp of evil patrons.
And it is very much a musical, recreating the popular jazz of the era with production numbers — singing and dancing in top hats, taps, costumes, big bands. By 1984, when the movie was released, the audience had lost its taste for musical movies, especially those full of American standards rather than rock. ALL THAT JAZZ (1979), Bob Fosse’s brilliant but difficult autobiographical film, had flopped. Only ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), and GREASE (1978), had clicked with the younger demographic in the 70's.
As in "The Godfather," the characters are a mesh of real people and some that are based loosely on real people or composites. The Lena Horne type, called “Lila Rose Oliver,” a light skinned chanteuse, is played by the beautiful Lonette McKee. Richard Gere plays “Dixie Dwyer,” a musician who becomes a movie gangster, a la George Raft. Diane Lane (then only 18), plays “Vera Cicero,” a gangster’s moll who wants to own a night club, like Texas Guinan. Nicolas Cage plays Dixie’s kid brother, “Vincent,” a gangster wannabe, who gets to be known as “Mad Dog” after a “hit” takes out some children as collateral damage. The real “Mad Dog,” Vincent Coll, made headlines in the early 1930's for similar activities.
Bob Hoskins plays Owen “Owney” Madden, the mobster who owned The Cotton Club (which had previously been owned by Black boxer, Jack Johnson). Madden was in fact English born, and was associated with Dutch Schultz, Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, and Charley “Lucky” Luciano.
The movie depicts a true event. Desperate for money, Coll and his cronies kidnapped George Jean “Big Frenchy” DeMange (Fred Gwynne), an intimate of Owney Madden, who paid $35,000 for the safe release of his friend and then patiently plotted his revenge. Coll was lured to a drugstore phone booth to talk “peace” with Madden, and while on hold, he was aerated with a tommy gun.
James Remar makes a convincing psychopath as Dutch Schultz, (born Arthur Fleigenheimer) the Jewish gangster (though he converted to Catholicism in time to get the Last Rites). Schultz ran the Harlem rackets (credited as perfecting the “numbers” game) until he threatened to assassinate Thomas Dewey, the “special prosecutor” who had been assigned to get him. Dewey later succeeded as a prosecutor, became governor of New York, and in 1944 and ‘48 ran for president and lost. Dewey, a small neat man with a thin mustache, was famously ridiculed by Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter: “He looks like the man on the wedding cake.”
The newly consolidated syndicate, headed by Meyer Lansky and Luciano, had Schultz eliminated, and this event is fairly accurately depicted in the film (although it happened a few years later, 1935). It is one of Coppola’s inspired editing jobs, a climactic scene intercutting a dazzling solo dance by Gregory Hines on the Cotton Club stage with the shooting in a New Jersey restaurant. The hired killers were contracted by Luciano and Lansky from Murder, Inc., the business run by Louis “Lepke” Buchhalter, and included, among others, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, Charley “The Bug” Workman, and other notable Jewish and Italian psychos who became famous in gangster movies and tabloid photos of their bodies in pools of blood.
Another sub-plot involves African American gangsters trying to keep their share of the Harlem rackets from the incursions of white mobsters. Laurence Fishburne plays real-life mobster “Bumpy” Johnson (here called Rhodes) as if he is a pioneering civil rights activist, integrating The Cotton Club, and proving he can be as ruthless as the white mobsters.
The history is not much different. Johnson was viewed by Harlemites as symbol of “Black Power” against the white Mob. He and Madame “Queenie” St. Clair had fought for their share of the numbers swag against the more politically connected, better armed and more ruthless white gangsters of the era.
In a touching sub-plot which tracks a common historical issue, Hines and McKee fall in love. Conflict over her wish to pass as a “white” star, and their ironic problem getting a hotel room because they appear to be a mixed couple, are highlighted. At another point, Hines is excluded from a night club where she is performing. They do get together for a happy ending.
Coppola also gives more than lip service to the heritage of great tap dancing that the era represented. “Honi” Coles and other tap legends do a bit with Hines, and Greg and his brother Maurice have fine moments on stage. Gwen Verdon, the legendary Broadway dancer ("Lola" in DAMN YANKEES) and wife and partner of Bob Fosse, plays Dixie’s mother, but gets to do only a couple of steps. The Cotton Club chorus of beautiful light skinned Black dancers (including a young chorus boy, Mario Van Peebles) do lively numbers to several of the jazz age’s best numbers, including “Diga-diga-do.”
Ellington’s great lyrical melodies are the underscoring for violent action. There are several effectively erotic sex scenes between Gere, then the big star, and newly adult Lane, in her first big chance. After this flop and a few others, it looked like Diane Lane would never make it big. She and Gere were matched again 20 years later, and Lane would steal the movie from Gere, attain “instant” stardom and an Oscar, in UNFAITHFUL (2002).
A footnote. George Raft, the actor who was the model for Gere’s role in COTTON CLUB, is a fascinating character. He was born in one of New York’s worst slums, Hell’s Kitchen, but resembled Rudolf Vaentino and learned to dance like the silent film matinee idol. That assured Raft a raft of female followers, including Texas Guinan, who kept him around her night club to “perform.”
In 1932, he made it in Hollywood with a supporting role in Howard Hawks’ SCARFACE, with a trademark coin tossing bit. He was typecast in gangster roles partly because his lifelong pals included Owney Madden and Ben Siegel. The Raft part in BUGSY was played by Joe Mantegna.
James Cagney claimed in his autobiography that when he was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, the Mob wanted to kill him for opposing their involvement in movie unions. He credited Raft in interceding with his friends to cancel the hit.
Under contract to Warner Brothers, Raft is most famous for turning down the leads in — no kidding: HIGH SIERRA (1941), THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), CASABLANCA (1942) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). He can therefore be credited with insuring the success of those classics, and making the careers of Huston, Bogart, Wilder and MacMurray.
He must not have been all dumb. He supposedly said: “I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part went for gambling, part for horses and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.”
Late in his life, he played a parody of his own image as “Spats Colombo” in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959).
(Sources include Wikipedia, IMBD, various contemporary critics)
Robert Evans, who as head of Paramount, had been credited with producing and overseeing THE GODFATHER I & II and CHINATOWN, the best films of the 1970's, had gone independent and this was his big package deal. Script problems and financing woes overwhelmed him at a time when he was trembling on the high wire of the Hollywood power structure. Evans became a poster boy for the excesses of the late 70's and early 80's, involving inflated egos and cocaine budgets that marked the fall of many wunderkind of the 1970's Hollywood renaissance.
As time dragged on during the long pre-production troubles of this mammoth project, Evans allegedly played footsie with some Florida pharmaceutical “importers” who wanted to use their ill-gotten fortune to buy into Hollywood glamour. An attractive dame, Lainie Greenberger, and a complex cast of low-lifes, who could have served as the basis for Elmore Leonard’s GET SHORTY, circled the project and murder ensued. The scandal and subsequent trial, in which Evans played a tangential role, was like those that threatened the Hollywood of an earlier era of excess, the 1920's.
That the movie involved the relationships of gangsters and show business in the 20's and 30's was an irony that has added to the film’s legend over the years.
Eventually Francis Ford Coppola accepted the challenge of cobbling a script and directing, and it is his vision (along with co-writer Mario Puzo) that is all over the final result. It is a fair addition to the Godfather genre (certainly better than his later made-for-dough GODFATHER III), matching scenes of violence with alternating and intercut musical numbers which comment on the action much as "The Godfather" had done with violent counterpoint to family issues.
Unlike The Godfather and more like APOCALYPSE, NOW, COTTON CLUB tries for too much irony, spins too many plates in the air at the same time. It evokes the Cotton Club era, when colorful gangsters ran the posh and trendy jazz club smack in the middle of Harlem, catering to a whites only audience with “colored” talent. The talent included some of the best musical artists this country has ever produced: Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters and many others. Coppola wanted to show it all: the gangsters, the Black / White issue, talent in the grasp of evil patrons.
And it is very much a musical, recreating the popular jazz of the era with production numbers — singing and dancing in top hats, taps, costumes, big bands. By 1984, when the movie was released, the audience had lost its taste for musical movies, especially those full of American standards rather than rock. ALL THAT JAZZ (1979), Bob Fosse’s brilliant but difficult autobiographical film, had flopped. Only ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), and GREASE (1978), had clicked with the younger demographic in the 70's.
As in "The Godfather," the characters are a mesh of real people and some that are based loosely on real people or composites. The Lena Horne type, called “Lila Rose Oliver,” a light skinned chanteuse, is played by the beautiful Lonette McKee. Richard Gere plays “Dixie Dwyer,” a musician who becomes a movie gangster, a la George Raft. Diane Lane (then only 18), plays “Vera Cicero,” a gangster’s moll who wants to own a night club, like Texas Guinan. Nicolas Cage plays Dixie’s kid brother, “Vincent,” a gangster wannabe, who gets to be known as “Mad Dog” after a “hit” takes out some children as collateral damage. The real “Mad Dog,” Vincent Coll, made headlines in the early 1930's for similar activities.
Bob Hoskins plays Owen “Owney” Madden, the mobster who owned The Cotton Club (which had previously been owned by Black boxer, Jack Johnson). Madden was in fact English born, and was associated with Dutch Schultz, Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, and Charley “Lucky” Luciano.
The movie depicts a true event. Desperate for money, Coll and his cronies kidnapped George Jean “Big Frenchy” DeMange (Fred Gwynne), an intimate of Owney Madden, who paid $35,000 for the safe release of his friend and then patiently plotted his revenge. Coll was lured to a drugstore phone booth to talk “peace” with Madden, and while on hold, he was aerated with a tommy gun.
James Remar makes a convincing psychopath as Dutch Schultz, (born Arthur Fleigenheimer) the Jewish gangster (though he converted to Catholicism in time to get the Last Rites). Schultz ran the Harlem rackets (credited as perfecting the “numbers” game) until he threatened to assassinate Thomas Dewey, the “special prosecutor” who had been assigned to get him. Dewey later succeeded as a prosecutor, became governor of New York, and in 1944 and ‘48 ran for president and lost. Dewey, a small neat man with a thin mustache, was famously ridiculed by Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter: “He looks like the man on the wedding cake.”
The newly consolidated syndicate, headed by Meyer Lansky and Luciano, had Schultz eliminated, and this event is fairly accurately depicted in the film (although it happened a few years later, 1935). It is one of Coppola’s inspired editing jobs, a climactic scene intercutting a dazzling solo dance by Gregory Hines on the Cotton Club stage with the shooting in a New Jersey restaurant. The hired killers were contracted by Luciano and Lansky from Murder, Inc., the business run by Louis “Lepke” Buchhalter, and included, among others, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, Charley “The Bug” Workman, and other notable Jewish and Italian psychos who became famous in gangster movies and tabloid photos of their bodies in pools of blood.
Another sub-plot involves African American gangsters trying to keep their share of the Harlem rackets from the incursions of white mobsters. Laurence Fishburne plays real-life mobster “Bumpy” Johnson (here called Rhodes) as if he is a pioneering civil rights activist, integrating The Cotton Club, and proving he can be as ruthless as the white mobsters.
The history is not much different. Johnson was viewed by Harlemites as symbol of “Black Power” against the white Mob. He and Madame “Queenie” St. Clair had fought for their share of the numbers swag against the more politically connected, better armed and more ruthless white gangsters of the era.
In a touching sub-plot which tracks a common historical issue, Hines and McKee fall in love. Conflict over her wish to pass as a “white” star, and their ironic problem getting a hotel room because they appear to be a mixed couple, are highlighted. At another point, Hines is excluded from a night club where she is performing. They do get together for a happy ending.
Coppola also gives more than lip service to the heritage of great tap dancing that the era represented. “Honi” Coles and other tap legends do a bit with Hines, and Greg and his brother Maurice have fine moments on stage. Gwen Verdon, the legendary Broadway dancer ("Lola" in DAMN YANKEES) and wife and partner of Bob Fosse, plays Dixie’s mother, but gets to do only a couple of steps. The Cotton Club chorus of beautiful light skinned Black dancers (including a young chorus boy, Mario Van Peebles) do lively numbers to several of the jazz age’s best numbers, including “Diga-diga-do.”
Ellington’s great lyrical melodies are the underscoring for violent action. There are several effectively erotic sex scenes between Gere, then the big star, and newly adult Lane, in her first big chance. After this flop and a few others, it looked like Diane Lane would never make it big. She and Gere were matched again 20 years later, and Lane would steal the movie from Gere, attain “instant” stardom and an Oscar, in UNFAITHFUL (2002).
A footnote. George Raft, the actor who was the model for Gere’s role in COTTON CLUB, is a fascinating character. He was born in one of New York’s worst slums, Hell’s Kitchen, but resembled Rudolf Vaentino and learned to dance like the silent film matinee idol. That assured Raft a raft of female followers, including Texas Guinan, who kept him around her night club to “perform.”
In 1932, he made it in Hollywood with a supporting role in Howard Hawks’ SCARFACE, with a trademark coin tossing bit. He was typecast in gangster roles partly because his lifelong pals included Owney Madden and Ben Siegel. The Raft part in BUGSY was played by Joe Mantegna.
James Cagney claimed in his autobiography that when he was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, the Mob wanted to kill him for opposing their involvement in movie unions. He credited Raft in interceding with his friends to cancel the hit.
Under contract to Warner Brothers, Raft is most famous for turning down the leads in — no kidding: HIGH SIERRA (1941), THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), CASABLANCA (1942) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). He can therefore be credited with insuring the success of those classics, and making the careers of Huston, Bogart, Wilder and MacMurray.
He must not have been all dumb. He supposedly said: “I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part went for gambling, part for horses and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.”
Late in his life, he played a parody of his own image as “Spats Colombo” in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959).
(Sources include Wikipedia, IMBD, various contemporary critics)
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
BRICK (2006)
MEMO TO MDB FROM MPB RE: YOUR SCREENPLAY
Just ran dvd of BRICK and it should inspire you. On the commentary, Rian Johnson relates how he wrote the script in 1997, 1 year out of film school, then shopped it for 6 (!) years before he decided to get family members to bankroll him - he's from San Clemente, so I'm guessing the family had some $$ - he says his budget was 1/2 million. [Of course, you'll have to get a new family, but ...]
It was a Sundance prize winner for originality and got enough of an audience and critical approval for the writer/diretor to get more work.
He also says (interestingly to me - and probably to me only) how he got the idea. He started with MILLER'S CROSSING, which he memorized, then got into MALTESE FALCON and CHINATOWN.
Then (he says) he was told about the "source material" the books of Hammett, Chandler and Cain, which he then read and found the dialogue, settings and descriptions that inspired him to strip the location cliches and put it in settings he knew about, coming up with his own high school where he actually filmed it.
Of course, the result isn't entirely successful, as I see it. He's a bit shaky on the tightrope, almost falling into parody, too playfully self-conscious in stylized dialogue. Some critics compare it to BUGGSY MALONE a bizarre almost pedophilic movie in which little kids in 1930's costumes and makeup played gangsters and molls. Jodie Foster, at 11, was a femme fatale! Others liken it to CRUEL INTENTIONS as the high school version of DANGEROUS LIAISONS, more credible because it plugged into the "mean girls" paradigm.
Johnson remarks that producers shied away from the script, knowing that the filming was all important, and that if the tone was not perfect, it would crash and burn. It almost does. Judging by Netflix user comments, it seems that many didn't "get it" at all. Not surprising. You really do have to dig the genre and accept the conventions - the overly complex plot, the mandatory characters, the needed exposition. It is true that making a high school student act like Bogart - smart, tough, sadistic - is a stretch and some of the acting - most in fact, is way too self-conscious and mechanical to permit real involvement.
But those defects are inevitable when engrafting a genre that was credible in the hard bitten Depression to the self-indulgent suburbs of SoCal teen life. Yet, it does fit nicely into my thesis about the pervasive influence of the Noir ethic and style on pop culture.
Just ran dvd of BRICK and it should inspire you. On the commentary, Rian Johnson relates how he wrote the script in 1997, 1 year out of film school, then shopped it for 6 (!) years before he decided to get family members to bankroll him - he's from San Clemente, so I'm guessing the family had some $$ - he says his budget was 1/2 million. [Of course, you'll have to get a new family, but ...]
It was a Sundance prize winner for originality and got enough of an audience and critical approval for the writer/diretor to get more work.
He also says (interestingly to me - and probably to me only) how he got the idea. He started with MILLER'S CROSSING, which he memorized, then got into MALTESE FALCON and CHINATOWN.
Then (he says) he was told about the "source material" the books of Hammett, Chandler and Cain, which he then read and found the dialogue, settings and descriptions that inspired him to strip the location cliches and put it in settings he knew about, coming up with his own high school where he actually filmed it.
Of course, the result isn't entirely successful, as I see it. He's a bit shaky on the tightrope, almost falling into parody, too playfully self-conscious in stylized dialogue. Some critics compare it to BUGGSY MALONE a bizarre almost pedophilic movie in which little kids in 1930's costumes and makeup played gangsters and molls. Jodie Foster, at 11, was a femme fatale! Others liken it to CRUEL INTENTIONS as the high school version of DANGEROUS LIAISONS, more credible because it plugged into the "mean girls" paradigm.
Johnson remarks that producers shied away from the script, knowing that the filming was all important, and that if the tone was not perfect, it would crash and burn. It almost does. Judging by Netflix user comments, it seems that many didn't "get it" at all. Not surprising. You really do have to dig the genre and accept the conventions - the overly complex plot, the mandatory characters, the needed exposition. It is true that making a high school student act like Bogart - smart, tough, sadistic - is a stretch and some of the acting - most in fact, is way too self-conscious and mechanical to permit real involvement.
But those defects are inevitable when engrafting a genre that was credible in the hard bitten Depression to the self-indulgent suburbs of SoCal teen life. Yet, it does fit nicely into my thesis about the pervasive influence of the Noir ethic and style on pop culture.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
ASK THE DUST
L.A.: Where Dreams Come To Die
ASK THE DUST (2005) was not a box office hit. A period movie about L.A. in The Great Depression, with a less than subtle theme about prejudice against Mexicans was doomed even though it involves a love story between stars Colin Farrell and Salma Hayak (including some hot nude sex scenes), and the project was affectionately nurtured, written and directed by Robert Towne, a long time Hollywood heavyweight (SHAMPOO, TEQUILA SUNRISE, CHINATOWN).
ASK THE DUST is a certain failure for modern audiences, not only because they can’t “get” period movies, but because the plot is hopelessly dated. A writer is inspired by the tragic death of the love he didn’t appreciate until it is too late. The doomed beauty dies of Camille’s illness, the cough that appears just as happiness is in sight, in order to provide a tragedy.
Colin Farrell plays “Arturo Bandini,” an aspiring idealistic writer embittered by the prejudice he has been subjected to as an Italian in Colorado, who comes to LA with dreams of becoming a famous and important writer. He has one published short story, but now has nothing to write about and the samples we are shown are trash and he knows it. He lives in Bunker Hill, in a shabby hotel, meets some strange LA characters - a grizzled old alcoholic (Donald Sutherland) and a scarred, lonelyhearted girl (Idena Menzel), who he beds out of pity after which she conveniently dies in the Long Beach earthquake.
Down to nickels, he demeans “Camilla Perez,”a Mexican waitress (Salma Hayek) because she is illiterate, until she seduces him. Camilla wants to marry an Anglo (she toys with a bartender named “White”) so she can get a green card and live the American dream, and at first sees the poor Italian writer as not much of an improvement on her own lot. But there are sparks — the old fashioned kind of romantic chemistry, where they bitch at each other until they fall into bed. But when he refuses to marry her because she is a Mexican, she leaves him. When he realizes what he has lost, he finds her – as she dies in his arms - and now that he has suffered, he can write that great American novel. This is a period plot that stopped boiling around 1939.
Towne’s respect for the author in this case probably overwhelmed his judgment with dire results. Reportedly, he was unlucky. He wrote the screenplay in 1990 and, after unsuccessfully shopping it for years, had Johnny Depp interested in the lead. Salma Hayek turned it down 8 years ago because she was avoiding Mexican roles as a threat to her career. Several studios backed it and then backed away - until Colin Farrell signed on. Unfortunately, Farrell’s eyebrows are his only feature that can act and he is unconvincing and unmoving as a starving Italian from Colorado.
Towne, an LA native, had discovered the novel while researching CHINATOWN in the 1970's. It had been written by John Fante, a onetime screenwriter (A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962)) in the 1930's. Fante’s series of semi-autobiographical books about “Arturo Bandini,” had temporarily been compared with other Depression era novels exposing the limits of the American myth of “the pursuit of happiness.” Fante’s work was later rediscovered by the LA poet, Charles Bukowski, who told his own cult followers of Fante’s “genius” and allegedly copied his style.
In the midst of The Great Depression, LA was a hot magnet for desperate hopes. If you were going to be homeless, it might as well be in the sunshine. You might be hungry but at least you could eat oranges, avocados and walnuts from the trees. The rumors and realities of boom drew immigrants like locusts. Hollywood’s Dream Factory had been churning by that time for twenty years. Every pretty young thing and her mother had visions of Shirley Temple or Lana Turner dancing in their heads. At the same time, any New Yorker who could scribble a short story, play, or novel, was recruited to script dialogue for the Talkies.
While they all came for the money and fame, the writers, being a self-absorbed depressed lot by nature, hated themselves for selling out. They morosely drank their booze, not in speakeasies and cafés, but around swimming pools and night clubs, carping about their servitude to The Studio moguls who kept them like expensive whores.
Out of this alcoholic haze of self-hatred came the literary and cinematic form we now call “L.A. Noir.” Raymond Chandler is the icon of the genre, but he is just one of the many who mined the underside of the golden glitz of lotus land. CHINATOWN drew heavily from Chandler’s stories and aura of corrupt cops, sex, drugs, dirty secrets behind the facades of Pasadena mansions.
Nathaniel West wrote “The Day Of The Locust” (1939) about the losers at the fringes of Hollywood in the 1930's. The book which climaxes in a riot at a premiere, was rediscovered in the 60's by a generation that was living through similar cataclysmic times. While he wrote, West worked as a clerk in cheap hotels owned by his relatives and provided often free lodging to a number of aspiring writers, including James T. Farrell and Erskine Caldwell. According to Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett wrote "The Thin Man" there. West died in car accident after hearing of the death of his close friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was once the most famous novelist in America before becoming a mediocre screenwriter.
Billy Wilder is the epitome of the wise guy intellectual writer who flayed the Hollywood that fed him. DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1946) (which he co-wrote with Raymond Chandler from James M. Cain’s novel) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)(co-written with Charles Brackett, who had once been one of The New Yorker’s many theater critics who went west - like Herman Mankiewicz and Dorothy Parker) are products of this sensibility.
The genre continues into the modern era of novels and films.
TRUE CONFESSIONS (1981) starred Robert De Niro as a Priest and Robert Duvall as his police detective brother. From a novel by John Gregory Dunne and screenplay by Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, and directed by Ulu Grosbard, the movie follows the issues of the genre, corruption, sex, the seedy fringes of movie business as part of LA’s heritage.
Jack Nicholson (starring and directing) and Towne had failed to duplicate the success of CHINATOWN with its sequel, THE TWO JAKES (1990), although it deserves a second look without the unfair comparison with Polanski’s original work. Where CHINATOWN explored the corruption surrounding water and land development, THE TWO JAKES deals with oil and gas rights during the Post WW II San Fernando Valley building boom.
In 1995, Denzel Washington brought Walter Mosley’s sometime detective, Easy Rollins, to life in DEVIL WITH THE BLUE DRESS. Mosley’s Easy Rollins series of novels portrays LA’s African American heritage in the post war years, when a thriving Black middle class strove for the American Dream — before the freeways cut the life out of their community.
GET SHORTY (1995) written by Scott Frank from Elmore Leonard’s novel, and directed by Barry Sonenfeld has become a cult classic. “Chili Palmer” as played by John Travolta, became an instant icon, the east coast mobster who easily outtoughs the LA wannabes around the movie industry and drug traffic. Although the sequel, BE COOL, tried to recapture the Chili Palmer mystique, the wit was sadly strained.
MULHOLLAND FALLS (1996) also failed with critics and box office. The story was based on “The Hat Squad,” a group of LAPD officers who, in the 1950's, were assigned by reform chief Parker to dispose of mobsters. These corrupt cops (Nick Nolte, Chazz Palmentieri, Michael Madsen and Chris Penn) meet a hooker (Jennifer Connolly) who dies from radiation at a secret Army A-Bomb test site while servicing the head of the AEC (John Malkovich).
In recent years, the most successful movie of the genre was LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997). Although set in post war LA, the essential elements of LA noir — crooked cops, the seedy fringes of the movie business, racial prejudice — were there in James Ellroy’s novel. Ellroy, a self-proclaimed keeper of the flame of LA noir (his own mother was murdered when he was a child, a life altering event which sparked his continuing fascination with crime). Curtis Hansen directed the brilliant script by Brian Helgeland.
The film was a coming out party for emerging stars - Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce - provided an Oscar winning role for Kim Basinger as a burnt out call girl with a heart of gold and terrific parts for James Cromwell, David Strathairn, and Danny DeVito.
Following the formula of weaving fictional characters with reality, the movie convincingly depicted a turning point in LA crime when the LAPD began to reform itself under Chief Parker.
ASK THE DUST (2005) was not a box office hit. A period movie about L.A. in The Great Depression, with a less than subtle theme about prejudice against Mexicans was doomed even though it involves a love story between stars Colin Farrell and Salma Hayak (including some hot nude sex scenes), and the project was affectionately nurtured, written and directed by Robert Towne, a long time Hollywood heavyweight (SHAMPOO, TEQUILA SUNRISE, CHINATOWN).
ASK THE DUST is a certain failure for modern audiences, not only because they can’t “get” period movies, but because the plot is hopelessly dated. A writer is inspired by the tragic death of the love he didn’t appreciate until it is too late. The doomed beauty dies of Camille’s illness, the cough that appears just as happiness is in sight, in order to provide a tragedy.
Colin Farrell plays “Arturo Bandini,” an aspiring idealistic writer embittered by the prejudice he has been subjected to as an Italian in Colorado, who comes to LA with dreams of becoming a famous and important writer. He has one published short story, but now has nothing to write about and the samples we are shown are trash and he knows it. He lives in Bunker Hill, in a shabby hotel, meets some strange LA characters - a grizzled old alcoholic (Donald Sutherland) and a scarred, lonelyhearted girl (Idena Menzel), who he beds out of pity after which she conveniently dies in the Long Beach earthquake.
Down to nickels, he demeans “Camilla Perez,”a Mexican waitress (Salma Hayek) because she is illiterate, until she seduces him. Camilla wants to marry an Anglo (she toys with a bartender named “White”) so she can get a green card and live the American dream, and at first sees the poor Italian writer as not much of an improvement on her own lot. But there are sparks — the old fashioned kind of romantic chemistry, where they bitch at each other until they fall into bed. But when he refuses to marry her because she is a Mexican, she leaves him. When he realizes what he has lost, he finds her – as she dies in his arms - and now that he has suffered, he can write that great American novel. This is a period plot that stopped boiling around 1939.
Towne’s respect for the author in this case probably overwhelmed his judgment with dire results. Reportedly, he was unlucky. He wrote the screenplay in 1990 and, after unsuccessfully shopping it for years, had Johnny Depp interested in the lead. Salma Hayek turned it down 8 years ago because she was avoiding Mexican roles as a threat to her career. Several studios backed it and then backed away - until Colin Farrell signed on. Unfortunately, Farrell’s eyebrows are his only feature that can act and he is unconvincing and unmoving as a starving Italian from Colorado.
Towne, an LA native, had discovered the novel while researching CHINATOWN in the 1970's. It had been written by John Fante, a onetime screenwriter (A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962)) in the 1930's. Fante’s series of semi-autobiographical books about “Arturo Bandini,” had temporarily been compared with other Depression era novels exposing the limits of the American myth of “the pursuit of happiness.” Fante’s work was later rediscovered by the LA poet, Charles Bukowski, who told his own cult followers of Fante’s “genius” and allegedly copied his style.
In the midst of The Great Depression, LA was a hot magnet for desperate hopes. If you were going to be homeless, it might as well be in the sunshine. You might be hungry but at least you could eat oranges, avocados and walnuts from the trees. The rumors and realities of boom drew immigrants like locusts. Hollywood’s Dream Factory had been churning by that time for twenty years. Every pretty young thing and her mother had visions of Shirley Temple or Lana Turner dancing in their heads. At the same time, any New Yorker who could scribble a short story, play, or novel, was recruited to script dialogue for the Talkies.
While they all came for the money and fame, the writers, being a self-absorbed depressed lot by nature, hated themselves for selling out. They morosely drank their booze, not in speakeasies and cafés, but around swimming pools and night clubs, carping about their servitude to The Studio moguls who kept them like expensive whores.
Out of this alcoholic haze of self-hatred came the literary and cinematic form we now call “L.A. Noir.” Raymond Chandler is the icon of the genre, but he is just one of the many who mined the underside of the golden glitz of lotus land. CHINATOWN drew heavily from Chandler’s stories and aura of corrupt cops, sex, drugs, dirty secrets behind the facades of Pasadena mansions.
Nathaniel West wrote “The Day Of The Locust” (1939) about the losers at the fringes of Hollywood in the 1930's. The book which climaxes in a riot at a premiere, was rediscovered in the 60's by a generation that was living through similar cataclysmic times. While he wrote, West worked as a clerk in cheap hotels owned by his relatives and provided often free lodging to a number of aspiring writers, including James T. Farrell and Erskine Caldwell. According to Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett wrote "The Thin Man" there. West died in car accident after hearing of the death of his close friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was once the most famous novelist in America before becoming a mediocre screenwriter.
Billy Wilder is the epitome of the wise guy intellectual writer who flayed the Hollywood that fed him. DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1946) (which he co-wrote with Raymond Chandler from James M. Cain’s novel) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)(co-written with Charles Brackett, who had once been one of The New Yorker’s many theater critics who went west - like Herman Mankiewicz and Dorothy Parker) are products of this sensibility.
The genre continues into the modern era of novels and films.
TRUE CONFESSIONS (1981) starred Robert De Niro as a Priest and Robert Duvall as his police detective brother. From a novel by John Gregory Dunne and screenplay by Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, and directed by Ulu Grosbard, the movie follows the issues of the genre, corruption, sex, the seedy fringes of movie business as part of LA’s heritage.
Jack Nicholson (starring and directing) and Towne had failed to duplicate the success of CHINATOWN with its sequel, THE TWO JAKES (1990), although it deserves a second look without the unfair comparison with Polanski’s original work. Where CHINATOWN explored the corruption surrounding water and land development, THE TWO JAKES deals with oil and gas rights during the Post WW II San Fernando Valley building boom.
In 1995, Denzel Washington brought Walter Mosley’s sometime detective, Easy Rollins, to life in DEVIL WITH THE BLUE DRESS. Mosley’s Easy Rollins series of novels portrays LA’s African American heritage in the post war years, when a thriving Black middle class strove for the American Dream — before the freeways cut the life out of their community.
GET SHORTY (1995) written by Scott Frank from Elmore Leonard’s novel, and directed by Barry Sonenfeld has become a cult classic. “Chili Palmer” as played by John Travolta, became an instant icon, the east coast mobster who easily outtoughs the LA wannabes around the movie industry and drug traffic. Although the sequel, BE COOL, tried to recapture the Chili Palmer mystique, the wit was sadly strained.
MULHOLLAND FALLS (1996) also failed with critics and box office. The story was based on “The Hat Squad,” a group of LAPD officers who, in the 1950's, were assigned by reform chief Parker to dispose of mobsters. These corrupt cops (Nick Nolte, Chazz Palmentieri, Michael Madsen and Chris Penn) meet a hooker (Jennifer Connolly) who dies from radiation at a secret Army A-Bomb test site while servicing the head of the AEC (John Malkovich).
In recent years, the most successful movie of the genre was LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997). Although set in post war LA, the essential elements of LA noir — crooked cops, the seedy fringes of the movie business, racial prejudice — were there in James Ellroy’s novel. Ellroy, a self-proclaimed keeper of the flame of LA noir (his own mother was murdered when he was a child, a life altering event which sparked his continuing fascination with crime). Curtis Hansen directed the brilliant script by Brian Helgeland.
The film was a coming out party for emerging stars - Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce - provided an Oscar winning role for Kim Basinger as a burnt out call girl with a heart of gold and terrific parts for James Cromwell, David Strathairn, and Danny DeVito.
Following the formula of weaving fictional characters with reality, the movie convincingly depicted a turning point in LA crime when the LAPD began to reform itself under Chief Parker.
Friday, June 09, 2006
GAME 6 - "This could be it."
Just when you think you’re free from sentimental baseball parables about The Meaning of LIFE, they suck you back into the vortex of sappy metaphors for loss and hope.
Of course, it is easy for me to get sucked in because I’m the lead sucker for this sort of hoke. Trapped in Brooklyn in the 1950's, I was baptized into the Dodger religion too early to know better. I suffered through a decade of almost beating the hated Yankees with all the imagined metaphors of good and evil spinning in my tousled head.
Then, they finally became winners when I was 12 years old - and my childhood was over, cut short in its prime by cruel capitalism and the stinging reality of inexorable change. The lesson was bitterly learned. Nothing (good) ever lasts. My childhood was stolen by the crime of the century when the devil O’Malley abused my faith, robbed me of my innocent belief in games.
Baseball movies try to capture the symbolism of these memories - when hope for perfection still lived. They trade on our naive wishes for heroism, justice, love, loyalty. But they often lose their balance. Melodrama overtakes, chokes away true feelings. They reach too far for the outside pitch of metaphor and whiff.
Bernard Malamud’s THE NATURAL is one of those pretentiously symbolic legend reaches. BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY is another.
FIELD OF DREAMS is probably the most blatant, trying to tie the game up with America’s stolen pre-1968 supposed innocence. I cried like every other sap when Ray choked out “Wanna play catch, dad?” But on reflection, I knew that the rebellion that had led the teenage Ray to reject his father’s stifling dreams for him had been a truer impulse.
At least BULL DURHAM swung at a faster pitch - equating baseball with sex - and hit it over the fence.
The lack of credible athleticism has always been problematic for actors in this genre. De Niro looked better as a boxer in RAGING BULL than he did as a catcher in BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY. Cooper was famously inept in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, as was Anthony Perkins (FEAR STRIKES OUT).
Costner looks like he can play better than he can act and so, is credible as a fading pitcher (FOR LOVE OF THE GAME) and an ex-player (in the otherwise awful THE UPSIDE OF ANGER). Dennis Quaid (THE ROOKIE), and Charlie Sheen (MAJOR LEAGUE) have the same talent.
My own Dodger demons prevent me from sympathizing with the lore surrounding the Boston Red Sox. Although many northeast intellectuals have waxed poetic about the tragedy of rooting for this team which broke hearts for 70 years, I never could get worked up about them.
For one thing, I viewed the Sox as unworthy of devotion by comparison to my team. On the level of social symbolism, the Dodgers stood for integration (Jackie, Campy, Newk), while the Sox were for Whites Only - the last major league team to integrate. Their owner, Tom Yawkey, was overtly racist, and their fan base was almost exclusively White. Their fans booed Ted Williams - the last true American Hero, because he refused to love them back. And they booed Jim Rice, their only African-American star.
In 2005, FEVER PITCH played with Red Sox fanaticism in a romantic sitcom, matching Drew Barrymore with SNL's Jimmy Fallon. Adapted by Nick Hornby - from his own novel which was about Brit soccer nuts - and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, the movie was a success, giving hope to nerdy boys that a Drew might overlook their kiddy obsessions and find them "cute and charming" enough to fall for them.
GAME 6, a far better movie, sunk almost without notice the same season. Novelist Don DeLillo wrote the script. Michael Keaton is a playwright and Sox fan on the day of game 6 of the 1986 World Series, when the Sox, on the verge of winning their first Series since 1918, are destined to blow a two run lead with 2 out in the ninth and lose again, denying redemption for Keaton's character.
It is also opening night of Keaton’s play and the game becomes an imagined turning point, testing his faith in life. Robert Downey, Jr. is a scathing critic who Keaton seeks out to destroy after the game. An uplifting ending sugar coats an otherwise effective noir fable.
Both of these films have lost some impact because of the improbable coincidence of the Sox Series win in 2004. When my Dodgers finally overcame destiny and beat the Yankees in 1955, everything after that was anti-climax.
The world did change, but victory was hollow. They lost again the next year to the Yankees and then O’Malley crushed the rest of the illusions of youth, cruelly trading Jackie to the Giants and courting L.A.
O'Malley proved that THE GODFATHER had a better handle on the truth: "It's not personal - it's just business."
The sentiment of my childhood dissolved and I searched for something else to love, now wary of giving my heart to anything or anyone else.
Of course, it is easy for me to get sucked in because I’m the lead sucker for this sort of hoke. Trapped in Brooklyn in the 1950's, I was baptized into the Dodger religion too early to know better. I suffered through a decade of almost beating the hated Yankees with all the imagined metaphors of good and evil spinning in my tousled head.
Then, they finally became winners when I was 12 years old - and my childhood was over, cut short in its prime by cruel capitalism and the stinging reality of inexorable change. The lesson was bitterly learned. Nothing (good) ever lasts. My childhood was stolen by the crime of the century when the devil O’Malley abused my faith, robbed me of my innocent belief in games.
Baseball movies try to capture the symbolism of these memories - when hope for perfection still lived. They trade on our naive wishes for heroism, justice, love, loyalty. But they often lose their balance. Melodrama overtakes, chokes away true feelings. They reach too far for the outside pitch of metaphor and whiff.
Bernard Malamud’s THE NATURAL is one of those pretentiously symbolic legend reaches. BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY is another.
FIELD OF DREAMS is probably the most blatant, trying to tie the game up with America’s stolen pre-1968 supposed innocence. I cried like every other sap when Ray choked out “Wanna play catch, dad?” But on reflection, I knew that the rebellion that had led the teenage Ray to reject his father’s stifling dreams for him had been a truer impulse.
At least BULL DURHAM swung at a faster pitch - equating baseball with sex - and hit it over the fence.
The lack of credible athleticism has always been problematic for actors in this genre. De Niro looked better as a boxer in RAGING BULL than he did as a catcher in BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY. Cooper was famously inept in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, as was Anthony Perkins (FEAR STRIKES OUT).
Costner looks like he can play better than he can act and so, is credible as a fading pitcher (FOR LOVE OF THE GAME) and an ex-player (in the otherwise awful THE UPSIDE OF ANGER). Dennis Quaid (THE ROOKIE), and Charlie Sheen (MAJOR LEAGUE) have the same talent.
My own Dodger demons prevent me from sympathizing with the lore surrounding the Boston Red Sox. Although many northeast intellectuals have waxed poetic about the tragedy of rooting for this team which broke hearts for 70 years, I never could get worked up about them.
For one thing, I viewed the Sox as unworthy of devotion by comparison to my team. On the level of social symbolism, the Dodgers stood for integration (Jackie, Campy, Newk), while the Sox were for Whites Only - the last major league team to integrate. Their owner, Tom Yawkey, was overtly racist, and their fan base was almost exclusively White. Their fans booed Ted Williams - the last true American Hero, because he refused to love them back. And they booed Jim Rice, their only African-American star.
In 2005, FEVER PITCH played with Red Sox fanaticism in a romantic sitcom, matching Drew Barrymore with SNL's Jimmy Fallon. Adapted by Nick Hornby - from his own novel which was about Brit soccer nuts - and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, the movie was a success, giving hope to nerdy boys that a Drew might overlook their kiddy obsessions and find them "cute and charming" enough to fall for them.
GAME 6, a far better movie, sunk almost without notice the same season. Novelist Don DeLillo wrote the script. Michael Keaton is a playwright and Sox fan on the day of game 6 of the 1986 World Series, when the Sox, on the verge of winning their first Series since 1918, are destined to blow a two run lead with 2 out in the ninth and lose again, denying redemption for Keaton's character.
It is also opening night of Keaton’s play and the game becomes an imagined turning point, testing his faith in life. Robert Downey, Jr. is a scathing critic who Keaton seeks out to destroy after the game. An uplifting ending sugar coats an otherwise effective noir fable.
Both of these films have lost some impact because of the improbable coincidence of the Sox Series win in 2004. When my Dodgers finally overcame destiny and beat the Yankees in 1955, everything after that was anti-climax.
The world did change, but victory was hollow. They lost again the next year to the Yankees and then O’Malley crushed the rest of the illusions of youth, cruelly trading Jackie to the Giants and courting L.A.
O'Malley proved that THE GODFATHER had a better handle on the truth: "It's not personal - it's just business."
The sentiment of my childhood dissolved and I searched for something else to love, now wary of giving my heart to anything or anyone else.
Monday, June 05, 2006
MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
If you think you and your group of friends are expert at incestuous intrigue, clever put-downs, and collaborations that can produce some insights, next time you get together with your crowd rent this movie.In the New York ‘20's, a group of young men and women, mostly aspiring writers who toiled at newspapers and magazines, began to meet for long lunches, gossip, what we would now call “networking.”
In 1994, Alan Rudolph directed this movie, a bio of Dorothy Parker and the other brutally witty members of an informal club who frequented the Algonquin Hotel dining room daily and became known as the Round Table. These liberated men and women became as famous as their expatriate counterparts in Paris - Stein, Toklas, Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Murphy, etc. - and had an arguably greater cumulative impact on popular culture of their period. They remain relevant today.
The movie shows the competitive and convivial atmosphere that spurred the group to eventually create some of the best literature, plays, and movies of the 20th Century. Their voices - urbane, sophisticated, witty to the point of cruelty - became the voice of some of the most memorable Broadway and Hollywood product of the 1930's and 1940's.
Dorothy Parker was more immediately famous for what she said than what she wrote. She coined many of the most notorious barbs of The Table: Reviewing Katherine Hepburn’s Broadway performance: “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” About a notorious society trollop: “That woman speaks 18 languages and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.” Did she enjoy the cocktail party? “One more drink and I’d have been under the host.” And my favorite: “You may lead a whore-to-culture, but you can’t make her think.” When someone commented that a particular actress was her own worst enemy, Dot winked: “Not while I’m alive.”
But she wrote some of the best short stories of the time and poetry which she derided as doggerel but when read today still bites. She became an icon for women of the era, who pioneered feminism, dove into a liberated life and nearly drowned in tears, alcohol, and eventual misery. She led an unhappy but very productive life.
In Hollywood with her husband Alan Campbell, she wrote A STAR IS BORN, and the original screenplay for Hitchcock’s SABOTEUR, added scenes and dialogue for her friend Lillian Hellman’s THE LITTLE FOXES.
The role is a tour de force for Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose performance includes a difficult to take nasal delivery that approximates Parker’s alcohol induced speech. Rudolph is a disciple of Robert Altman, who produced and influenced the style of ensemble acting and camera work, eavesdropping on the overlapping dialogue.
The cast includes Campbell Scott as Robert Benchley, Parker’s soulmate, Matthew Broderick as her lover, Charlie MacArthur, Andrew McCarthy as Eddie Parker, her morphine addicted and abusive husband. Stanley Tucci, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Beals, Stephen Baldwin, and Heather Graham have small roles.
The Round Table included the following characters with their eventual work:
George S. Kaufman (played by David Thornton). Playwright, often collaborating with other Round Table friends - Moss Hart, Marc Connelly, Ring Lardner, Edna Ferber, or Morrie Ryskind, among others).
Films adapted by others from his plays include the Marx Brothers’ plays/movies: THE COCOANUTS (1929) and ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930), and DINNER AT EIGHT (1933), STAGE DOOR (1937) and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU (1938), and THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER (1941), which included a character based on Alexander Woollcott, the critic and member of the Round Table, whose famous quote was “Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.”
Kauffman hated Hollywood and co-wrote only one script - with Morrie Ryskind, A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935), the best and funniest of the Marx Brothers films. He returned in 1947 to direct THE SENATOR WAS INDISCREET (1947), a very funny political satire starring William Powell.
Charles MacArthur was a Chicago newspaperman who teamed up with Ben Hecht to write several Broadway hits, including THE FRONT PAGE (1928) better known in its Howard Hawks adaptation (HIS GIRL FRIDAY) and TWENTIETH CENTURY (1932), a classic movie starring Carole Lombard and John Barrymore. With Hecht, he wrote the script for WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939). MacArthur married actress Helen Hayes in 1928 and their adopted son is actor James MacArthur.
Moss Hart wrote the screenplays for GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, PRINCE OF PLAYERS.
Robert Benchley. He was managing editor of Vanity Fair, then a columnist for the New York World, later drama editor of Life and ltheater critic for The New Yorker. He became famous doing stand up routines that satirized middle class values, including short films in the form of lectures: THE SEX LIFE OF THE POLYP, THE TROUBLE WITH HUSBANDS, and HOW TO TAKE A VACATION, HOW TO SLEEP. His son, Peter Benchley, wrote JAWS.
Robert E. Sherwood (Nick Cassavettes). In the 1920's, he was movie critic for Life Magazine and the New York Herald. In the 1930's, he wrote plays which became famous films: WATERLOO BRIDGE, THE PETRIFIED FOREST, TOVARICH.
In Hollywood, he adapted his own plays: IDIOT'S DELIGHT, ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS and wrote or co-wrote original screenplays: THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, REBECCA, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, THE BISHOP'S WIFE.
Ben Hecht was an occasional member of the club. He was probably the most successful screenwriter of the crowd, though later in his life he demeaned his career as a waste of his talent. The story for SCARFACE, scripts for DESIGN FOR LIVING, TWENTIETH CENTURY, VIVA VILLA, NOTHING SACRED, GUNGA DIN, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, SPELLBOUND, NOTORIOUS, KISS OF DEATH, MONKEY BUSINESS.
Other members of The Circle include Edna Ferber (played by Lili Taylor) - wrote the novels GIANT and SHOW BOAT, the plays STAGE DOOR and DINNER AT EIGHT with Kaufman); Harpo Marx, Will Rodgers (Keith Carradine); Broadway critic and wit Alexander Woollcott (whose personality was the basis of “The Man Who Came To Dinner” and the Clifton Webb character in LAURA); Harold Ross (Sam Robards), founder of The New Yorker for whom Parker and many others of The Circle contributed stories and reviews; Franklin P. Adams (Chip Zein), wit and columnist; James Thurber (THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY), New Yorker cartoonist and writer; Ring Lardner and Heywood Broun, sports columnists and writers.
Occasional diners included Elmer Rice (Jon Favreau) playwright and screenwriter STREET SCENE; Marc Connelly (Matt Malloy) who wrote CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS; and Donald Ogden Stewart (David Gow) screenplays for Phillip Barry’s plays HOLIDAY and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, and LOVE AFFAIR (remade twice) AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, Lubitsch’s THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING, and the Tracy - Hepburn WITHOUT LOVE. He was also script doctor on many films, including DINNER AT EIGHT, with his fellow lunchers.
After you and your friends watch the movie, get sober and start writing.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
KING KONG 1933-2005 - who really killed the beast?
Kong has always been more than a monster to me. Not implacable, mechanical, heartless, like those in ALIEN, JAWS, or THE TERMINATOR. He is warmer than FRANKENSTEIN who also had a tragic aura about him - but he whined a bit too much for my taste.
Okay, Frankie suffered from PTSD and all those electro-shock treatments --- and his HMO must have been one of the worst. What’s the co-pay for Dr. F, the mad scientist?
Serial killers in the movies are our modern urban monsters of the implacable sort. Their stories rarely give them redeeming qualities meant to touch us. Ralph Fiennes in RED DRAGON had a bit of it. PHANTOM OF THE OPERA grasps for this sentiment.
But KONG is not really a beast. He is more like me — misunderstood, unloved, a lonely guy in a scary jungle, apparently the only one of his kind - a mammal stranded among stupid dinosaurs who can’t take a joke. Like me, he craves some warm-blooded company, some companion, preferably someone in a slip.
Of course, Kong’s story involves an inter specie love story - truly the love that dares not (and cannot) speak its name. Sure, its a mismatch, but no worse than Ashton and Demi, Tom and Katie ... or any on The Bachelorette.
The story has always been a kin of the road film, where a woman is captured by an apparent brute who she tames and ultimately destroys or redeems with her femininity.
It takes a little from many fables, “Jack And The Beanstalk,” IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, THE LOST WORLD, even the ending from TITANIC.
I won't mention "Beauty And The Beast" because ... well, you know, "T'was beauty killed the beast" is as familiar a bit of corny movie poetry as "Here's looking at you, kid."
If you want to see the story with poetry, watch Cocteau's BELLE ET LA BÊTE.
The original KK had some nasty implications as a racist / sexist cautionary tale - the dark eyed male beast abducting the white woman in order to peel her lingerie like a banana. The latest Kong seems to have the same hang-up about blondes, but that's where his humanity ends.
The 1933 Kong was big, but somehow, when I first saw him on TV in black and white on that small screen, he seemed to be almost human. True, he swatted men, pteradactyls and biplanes like wasps and wrestled a T Rex to the death, but he was no superduperhero like the CG cartoon of the latest incarnation. This one is more a stuntman than a hero, more a circus performer than an ape in trouble.
One thing that I wondered about was whether Kong killed all the previous offerings and what made Ann Darrow such a delight that he was willing to risk all. I must admit that every actress who played the part - Fay Wray, Jessica Lange, and now Naomi Watts - has been a dish. But none have been what I would call femmes fatales, intentionally drawing the powerful male to his doom.
I suspect that what makes this story so cool for boys and girls is that it means something visceral to each sex - and the meaning is different to each sex.
To boys it simply is a fantasy of masculine power - KK is the essence of “Awesome.”
And to girls, there is something irresistible about a guy who can slay dragons while you’re safe in the palm of his hand. A post-feminist hero defined. Respectful, tender, and strong. Because Ann is innocent of her allure, she is an eye-opener for girls who can be sexually empowered with little effort.
And please, hold the jokes about bad breath, banana peels all over the house, and who’s gonna clean the bathroom?
It is a nice, little love story, perfect for an independent movie about misfits trying to mesh.
Unfortunately, as Oscar Wilde observed, “Nothing succeeds like excess.”
Peter Jackson’s movie is like taking a 747 to go to the grocery store.
He has more in common with Cecil B. DeMille who magnified Bible parables into super colossal, stupendous behemoths with casts of thousands. Jackson identifies more with Carl Denham than with any other character and he is fully aware of his folly and his tragedy.
Loving the magic (of Hollywood), he has mastered it and all but destroyed it with his excessiveness. He shows the same callous contempt for the audience of his movie that Denham shows in his exhibition. He tries too hard to impress us with his computer tricks, when in reality, he had a pretty good little tale to tell.
Tell the truth. Did you ever once forget that blue and green screens were behind the curtain?
What Jackson and the other techno-thrill ride creators forget is that roller coasters, no matter how fast they are, lose their wallop with each trip. We're hip to all the video game illusions - and they no longer move us very much, no matter how much we admire the technical wizardry behind them.
Naomi Watts saves the movie because of her expressive innocent sensuality, her close-ups the only acting that goes on in a human scale in this gargantuan monstrosity of computer design gone berserk.
Her relationship with the big guy arcs like that of a pet for its benefactor. She is like a toy poodle, first terrified by her enormous owner, then winning him with amusing tricks and her cuteness. She cowers, seeks his protection. Eventually, she bonds with him and now yaps at his enemies. Ultimately, she mourns him.
And so do I. Jackson and his minions have taken my Kong away from me.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
SHOPGIRL - a pop quiz
1. Steve Martin is either:
(a) a first rate artist and thinker who has made the almost impossible jump from lightweight comic to satiric genius to writer of real “literature” and weighty scripts; or
(b) a pretentious pretender to Woody Allen’s dubious title as the aging clown who wants to make us cry and who egotistically miscasts himself as potential lover to 20-something girls, without Bill Murray's self-restraint.
2. “Ray Porter,” the character he created in his novella and his screenplay and plays in the film is either:
(a) an emotionally crippled but basically decent man who has reached the stage in his life where he can accept ‘love’ only on superficial terms, thereby losing a chance to assuage his isolation with true commitment of his heart, to his eventual regret; or
(b) a self-deceiving over-the-hill seducer of an emotionally fragile girl - the only prey he could impress with his sprayed on charm and ostentatious wealth.
3. Claire Danes is either:
(a) an enchanting actress who perfectly embodies an almost beautiful girl/woman who begins without self-confidence, but when treated as desirable and glamorous, becomes a radiant star; or
(b) an empty shell with a minimal emotional range and less sex appeal.
4. “Mirabelle Buttersfield,” the character Martin wrote and Ms. Danes portrays, is either:
(a) a delicate moth about to become a butterfly, with and for the right guy, finding the strength to face the pain of failed love and the possible rejection of her art; or
(b) a man’s idea of a foolishly immature and dull young woman who is drawn to losers and users, with every right to be depressed, especially when she is dumped by a sugar daddy, who buys her nice clothes and pays off her student loan, freeing her to miraculously "self-actualize" as a successful artist and finder of true love.
5. Jason Schwartzmann is either:
(a) a talented actor who shows surprising scope - able to credibly mature from male ditzy-slacker-nerdy dude roles to a more adult kind of “real” person; or
(b) still a B-list undergrad Ben Stiller type who can't even reach Adam Sandler's bootlaces.
6. “Jeremy,” the character he plays, is either:
(a) a socially inept and offensively insensitive boy who makes the commitment to mature when he senses hope for love from a terrific girl, and does grow up and gives his heart to her; or
(b) a caricature of a type barely remembered by the over-middle-aged writer who used to be a sort of “Jeremy” when he was THE LONELY GUY and THE JERK, but is now rich, famous and "wiser."
7. SHOPGIRL is either (a) a delicately balanced and tenderly performed movie about people adrift in the dreamworld of Los Angeles, a worthy sequel to Steve Martin’s previous satiric insights about this city, L.A. STORY and BOWFINGER, but with “a little sex,” and a straighter face; or
(b) an overwritten, over-directed, self-consciously acted embarrassment that aspires to but utterly fails to be what LOST IN TRANSLATION and BROKEN FLOWERS achieved.
The right answer to every question is: (a) or (b), depending on your digestion, tolerance, zodiac sign, the phase of the moon, your age, sex, marital status, and / or mood.
(a) a first rate artist and thinker who has made the almost impossible jump from lightweight comic to satiric genius to writer of real “literature” and weighty scripts; or
(b) a pretentious pretender to Woody Allen’s dubious title as the aging clown who wants to make us cry and who egotistically miscasts himself as potential lover to 20-something girls, without Bill Murray's self-restraint.
2. “Ray Porter,” the character he created in his novella and his screenplay and plays in the film is either:
(a) an emotionally crippled but basically decent man who has reached the stage in his life where he can accept ‘love’ only on superficial terms, thereby losing a chance to assuage his isolation with true commitment of his heart, to his eventual regret; or
(b) a self-deceiving over-the-hill seducer of an emotionally fragile girl - the only prey he could impress with his sprayed on charm and ostentatious wealth.
3. Claire Danes is either:
(a) an enchanting actress who perfectly embodies an almost beautiful girl/woman who begins without self-confidence, but when treated as desirable and glamorous, becomes a radiant star; or
(b) an empty shell with a minimal emotional range and less sex appeal.
4. “Mirabelle Buttersfield,” the character Martin wrote and Ms. Danes portrays, is either:
(a) a delicate moth about to become a butterfly, with and for the right guy, finding the strength to face the pain of failed love and the possible rejection of her art; or
(b) a man’s idea of a foolishly immature and dull young woman who is drawn to losers and users, with every right to be depressed, especially when she is dumped by a sugar daddy, who buys her nice clothes and pays off her student loan, freeing her to miraculously "self-actualize" as a successful artist and finder of true love.
5. Jason Schwartzmann is either:
(a) a talented actor who shows surprising scope - able to credibly mature from male ditzy-slacker-nerdy dude roles to a more adult kind of “real” person; or
(b) still a B-list undergrad Ben Stiller type who can't even reach Adam Sandler's bootlaces.
6. “Jeremy,” the character he plays, is either:
(a) a socially inept and offensively insensitive boy who makes the commitment to mature when he senses hope for love from a terrific girl, and does grow up and gives his heart to her; or
(b) a caricature of a type barely remembered by the over-middle-aged writer who used to be a sort of “Jeremy” when he was THE LONELY GUY and THE JERK, but is now rich, famous and "wiser."
7. SHOPGIRL is either (a) a delicately balanced and tenderly performed movie about people adrift in the dreamworld of Los Angeles, a worthy sequel to Steve Martin’s previous satiric insights about this city, L.A. STORY and BOWFINGER, but with “a little sex,” and a straighter face; or
(b) an overwritten, over-directed, self-consciously acted embarrassment that aspires to but utterly fails to be what LOST IN TRANSLATION and BROKEN FLOWERS achieved.
The right answer to every question is: (a) or (b), depending on your digestion, tolerance, zodiac sign, the phase of the moon, your age, sex, marital status, and / or mood.
Monday, May 22, 2006
ALEXANDER - revising the revisionist vision
As Oliver Stone begins his softening campaign to prepare the world for his 9/11 movie, WORLD TRADE CENTER, I thought it timely to re-evaluate his last production. Stone re-cut the movie for his DVD, and included his own very revealing commentary. The result tells us more about Stone than about the subject of his film.
A director’s cut usually adds scenes that had been cut for commercial reasons. This one is the opposite. The movie was such a failure with audiences and critics that Stone felt compelled to re-cut it, shorten it, re-order scenes, in order to make it coherent. It is still a mess, but the real problem is that, like Greek tragedy, it was doomed from its conception.
The first problem is the subject matter. A historical biography of this nature must contain two parallel arcs: the Macro and the Micro. The needs of Drama defy coherent telling of both lines in Alexander’s case. The famous general events of his life must be touched. They contain hints of “story,” but the truth is complex, lengthy, and doesn’t provide a natural arc and climax. He conquered and then he conquered more, and then he died. His death was anti-climactic; his life was unfinished, his legacy muddled.
The Micro story is even more problematic as a drama for contemporary taste. As with all great leaders, people have been trying to figure him out and Stone gives it a shot, trying to wedge him into his pre-conceptions. Alexander was a Greek, which meant being raised in Greek mythology, religion, sexual values. His motivations, demons, actions, are strange to our sensibilities.
Stone tries to psycho-analyze the great man, so that modern audiences can nod in some kind of recognition. His family was dysfunctional. Father Phillip the king of Macedon, played by Val Kilmer, was a drunken brute who feared his son’s challenge to his power.
Mother Olympias, played by Angelina Jolie, was even stranger. She raised her son to believe he was descended (even sired) by The Gods. She kept pet snakes in her bedroom for company - and metaphoric references. Snakes are like men, Stone has her telling Alex in her Natasha-like accent.
No wonder the kid was screwed up, driven, neurotic, insecure, ended up liking boys more than girls.
Stone, as revealed by his commentary, knows he is walking in the sandals of giants. For him they are De Mille, Lean, and other “epic” filmmakers. He also knows his own filmography, and refers frequently to his other war film, PLATOON.
Stone cannot evade his own political nature, and can’t help finding parallels between Bush and Alexander, referencing military escapades of Westerners into "The East" - Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Western leaders go East with “good” intentions, but Alexander, in Stone’s view, was wiser and nobler than ours. He wanted to unite East and West and his policies toward enemies were benign, respecting their religions and even their leaders after he defeated them. His generalship was better. Alexander never let go of one enemy to pursue another.
Stone opines that Alexander would never have let Bin Laden slip away. It seems like an argumentative stretch.
A second insurmountable problem for Stone is that his Alexander, Colin Farrell, is too small for the role of world conqueror. He is fine in the micro moments, when his sad little eyes seem frightened of his parents, of his lovers, of his obsessions. But when he must be Heroic, inspiring his troops with speeches, he lacks the presence of George C. Scott (PATTON), the brute macho power of Mel Gibson (BRAVEHEART), the tortured ambiguity of Peter O'Toole (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA), or the poetry of Olivier (HENRY V).
Stone decided to use Irish and Scottish accents -except for Angelina’s silly sounding Albanian (?) accent - for his Greeks, arguing in his commentary that the Macedonians had Celtic origins, were a crude bunch, and Greece was a “diverse” population. He likes the lilt of Irish and shied from the usual classic English - as in the 1954 Richard Burton ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
Okay, but it still sounds out of place to our ears, diminishes the larger-than-life element that legendary heroes require.
A third problem he fails to solve is how to make the complicated battles coherent. Stone tried to faithfully suggest the tactics of the famous Battle of Gaugamela, in which Alexander defeated the enormous Persian hordes of Darius by martial genius and near maniacal courage. But, despite aerial shots, explanatory dialogue and other devices, it remains a jumble in the desert. Compare these scenes with comparable battles in LAWRENCE.
Stone had a terrible time with the syntax of the narrative. He responded to the audience’s reaction to the theatrical release. Apparently the previews hadn’t warned him. In the DVD, he changed the order of scenes to a less linear telling, saving key events of Alexander’s childhood and rise to power until after battle scenes, moving some to the second and even the third act. His arguments for the change are convincing, but don’t solve the inherent problems.
Finally, Stone has to prove that this story has “relevance” and an important theme for us. As usual, he hammers his ideas. Alexander wanted to be civilized, but he still possessed the brutality of his nature, symbolized by the primitive lust for power and death embodied by the mythological Titans.
Anthony Hopkins, as Alexander’s general Ptolemy in old age, narrates throughout the film as Stone’s voice. In the epilogue, he “reveals” to us that Alexander was poisoned by his friends, that he knew the wine was poisoned, but wanted to die after his lifelong “companion,” Ephistaion, died - probably also poisoned, according to Stone.
Alexander was a dreamer, and therefore had to be killed by his generals — including - Stone, ever the conspiracy seeker asserts — by Ptolemy himself.
Stone’s commentary admits that all of this is speculation which some historians have permitted, but Stone likes it because it suits his theme. The dreamers must be killed because they exhaust us with their dreams. They are dangerous to peace and tranquility. He’s still arguing for JFK’s hero status and his assassination rationale.
The commentary is full of praise for his subject, distinguishing him from tyrants who led armies for conquest, like Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler. The argument is self-serving and superficial. Yes, Alexander carried the benefits of Greek cutlure, had some enlightened policies. But all conquerors can say that, and all of their propagandists have made that argument.
I think it is revealing that Stone admits that he first became enamored of Alexander through his boyhood reading.
Stone, whose reputation is as opponent to war (BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY) and governmental power (NIXON, JFK), reveals himself to be a film director who loves power more than any ideas. Part of the thrill of directing on this scale is the exercise of generalship, moving toy soldiers around a story board.
Stone wins the battles he has scripted but loses the war of ideas and drama. No wonder he is nervous about the reception to his 9/11 movie.
A director’s cut usually adds scenes that had been cut for commercial reasons. This one is the opposite. The movie was such a failure with audiences and critics that Stone felt compelled to re-cut it, shorten it, re-order scenes, in order to make it coherent. It is still a mess, but the real problem is that, like Greek tragedy, it was doomed from its conception.
The first problem is the subject matter. A historical biography of this nature must contain two parallel arcs: the Macro and the Micro. The needs of Drama defy coherent telling of both lines in Alexander’s case. The famous general events of his life must be touched. They contain hints of “story,” but the truth is complex, lengthy, and doesn’t provide a natural arc and climax. He conquered and then he conquered more, and then he died. His death was anti-climactic; his life was unfinished, his legacy muddled.
The Micro story is even more problematic as a drama for contemporary taste. As with all great leaders, people have been trying to figure him out and Stone gives it a shot, trying to wedge him into his pre-conceptions. Alexander was a Greek, which meant being raised in Greek mythology, religion, sexual values. His motivations, demons, actions, are strange to our sensibilities.
Stone tries to psycho-analyze the great man, so that modern audiences can nod in some kind of recognition. His family was dysfunctional. Father Phillip the king of Macedon, played by Val Kilmer, was a drunken brute who feared his son’s challenge to his power.
Mother Olympias, played by Angelina Jolie, was even stranger. She raised her son to believe he was descended (even sired) by The Gods. She kept pet snakes in her bedroom for company - and metaphoric references. Snakes are like men, Stone has her telling Alex in her Natasha-like accent.
No wonder the kid was screwed up, driven, neurotic, insecure, ended up liking boys more than girls.
Stone, as revealed by his commentary, knows he is walking in the sandals of giants. For him they are De Mille, Lean, and other “epic” filmmakers. He also knows his own filmography, and refers frequently to his other war film, PLATOON.
Stone cannot evade his own political nature, and can’t help finding parallels between Bush and Alexander, referencing military escapades of Westerners into "The East" - Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Western leaders go East with “good” intentions, but Alexander, in Stone’s view, was wiser and nobler than ours. He wanted to unite East and West and his policies toward enemies were benign, respecting their religions and even their leaders after he defeated them. His generalship was better. Alexander never let go of one enemy to pursue another.
Stone opines that Alexander would never have let Bin Laden slip away. It seems like an argumentative stretch.
A second insurmountable problem for Stone is that his Alexander, Colin Farrell, is too small for the role of world conqueror. He is fine in the micro moments, when his sad little eyes seem frightened of his parents, of his lovers, of his obsessions. But when he must be Heroic, inspiring his troops with speeches, he lacks the presence of George C. Scott (PATTON), the brute macho power of Mel Gibson (BRAVEHEART), the tortured ambiguity of Peter O'Toole (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA), or the poetry of Olivier (HENRY V).
Stone decided to use Irish and Scottish accents -except for Angelina’s silly sounding Albanian (?) accent - for his Greeks, arguing in his commentary that the Macedonians had Celtic origins, were a crude bunch, and Greece was a “diverse” population. He likes the lilt of Irish and shied from the usual classic English - as in the 1954 Richard Burton ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
Okay, but it still sounds out of place to our ears, diminishes the larger-than-life element that legendary heroes require.
A third problem he fails to solve is how to make the complicated battles coherent. Stone tried to faithfully suggest the tactics of the famous Battle of Gaugamela, in which Alexander defeated the enormous Persian hordes of Darius by martial genius and near maniacal courage. But, despite aerial shots, explanatory dialogue and other devices, it remains a jumble in the desert. Compare these scenes with comparable battles in LAWRENCE.
Stone had a terrible time with the syntax of the narrative. He responded to the audience’s reaction to the theatrical release. Apparently the previews hadn’t warned him. In the DVD, he changed the order of scenes to a less linear telling, saving key events of Alexander’s childhood and rise to power until after battle scenes, moving some to the second and even the third act. His arguments for the change are convincing, but don’t solve the inherent problems.
Finally, Stone has to prove that this story has “relevance” and an important theme for us. As usual, he hammers his ideas. Alexander wanted to be civilized, but he still possessed the brutality of his nature, symbolized by the primitive lust for power and death embodied by the mythological Titans.
Anthony Hopkins, as Alexander’s general Ptolemy in old age, narrates throughout the film as Stone’s voice. In the epilogue, he “reveals” to us that Alexander was poisoned by his friends, that he knew the wine was poisoned, but wanted to die after his lifelong “companion,” Ephistaion, died - probably also poisoned, according to Stone.
Alexander was a dreamer, and therefore had to be killed by his generals — including - Stone, ever the conspiracy seeker asserts — by Ptolemy himself.
Stone’s commentary admits that all of this is speculation which some historians have permitted, but Stone likes it because it suits his theme. The dreamers must be killed because they exhaust us with their dreams. They are dangerous to peace and tranquility. He’s still arguing for JFK’s hero status and his assassination rationale.
The commentary is full of praise for his subject, distinguishing him from tyrants who led armies for conquest, like Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler. The argument is self-serving and superficial. Yes, Alexander carried the benefits of Greek cutlure, had some enlightened policies. But all conquerors can say that, and all of their propagandists have made that argument.
I think it is revealing that Stone admits that he first became enamored of Alexander through his boyhood reading.
Stone, whose reputation is as opponent to war (BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY) and governmental power (NIXON, JFK), reveals himself to be a film director who loves power more than any ideas. Part of the thrill of directing on this scale is the exercise of generalship, moving toy soldiers around a story board.
Stone wins the battles he has scripted but loses the war of ideas and drama. No wonder he is nervous about the reception to his 9/11 movie.
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