To refer to Giulietta Masina's work in La Strada as a "performance" seems inadequate. After all, do we praise Charlie Chaplin's acting ability in City Lights? Is Gene Kelly a master thespian because of Singin' In The Rain? How about the 18-inch model of King Kong, is it a Meisner devotee or does it subscribe to Stanislavski's system?
In La Strada (The Road), Masina is Gelsomina, bought for 10,000 Lira by the brutal Zampanó (Anthony Quinn) and conscripted as his assistant in a touring sideshow. Gelsomina is just a child (though not literally; Masina was 33 when the film was made, and Fellini’s wife), and Zampanó fails to recognize the flashes of innocence and inspiration that she brings to his “act”. Instead, he criticizes her and takes her for granted, crushing the naïve spirit that could have been his salvation. Richard Basehart is “The Fool”, the obnoxious and self-destructive jester who competes with Zampanó for Gelsomina’s attention, only to find himself on the business end of the brute’s lethal fist.
Masina is complete joy. It’s not a silent performance, but it sure feels like one. Like the clown she’s enlisted to be, she uses a minimum of face to a maximum effect. In fact, I took to naming the different faces she used throughout. There’s “pouty-bones”, “pleased as punch”, and “bawling-because-Anthony-Quinn-is-crushing-my-soul”. Whether it is Masina herself or Fellini’s slightly restrained direction as it relates to her, Gelsomina is magnificent.
Anthony Quinn, for his part, humanizes the monstrous Zampanó effectively. It’s a good thing, too, because, as it turns out, that’s the whole point.
Fellini, not yet obsessed with his own fetishes, has made a real live film here. Sure, it’s easy to recognize him through the Nino Rota score, the fixation on stage and spectacle, the beastly women, but I much prefer his particular brand of crazy when it’s projected onto the outside world and not directed solely within.
I also love this film because, unlike later works, it perfectly integrates Fellini’s love of the theatrical into its narrative. Sure, there are the indulgent cinematic flourishes, but he’s still operating within a lot of the neorealist framework, and has yet to move completely out of that movement and into his own head. He stops the narrative so that we can watch a high-wire act, and it’s thrilling and fun to watch, and then we move right along with Gelsomina’s story. Starting with La Dolce Vita and descending precipitously after 8½, Fellini’s work becomes all setpiece, all without context.
I saw this in the same week that I saw Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, and I think that the juxtaposition was illuminating. Here are two films by men often caught in the trap of their own affectations or neuroses. Burton is often damned with the faint praise of being a "visual" director, which means that his films are technical exercises without soul. Fellini would go on to direct films that seemed to take place solely within his self-obsessed, sexually charged ego. 8½ is more than two hours of the greatest masturbation ever caught on film. But with La Strada and Sweeney Todd, both men are able to make effective films by letting someone else do most of the emotional heavy lifting (in the case of La Strada, it’s Masina and Quinn, and for Todd, it’s Sondheim’s music). Fellini was never considered an actor’s director, but here, the performances are so affecting and beautiful that he does well to stand back, to not get in the way, and to watch his wife do great work.
I got lots of books for Christmas. Victory!
There's a scene in Taylor Hackford's Ray that makes me want to kill people. The very blind Ray Charles (Jamie Foxx) is sitting in a restaurant with a woman, and he proceeds to impress her by noticing the sound of the hummingbird just outside the window... across the restaurant. Y'see, he's blind, but his other sense are heightened.
He's not a goddamn superhero. He's a blind person.
The rock biopics of the past few years, namely Ray and James Mangold's Walk The Line (but let's not forget Kevin Spacey's ludicrously reverent Beyond The Sea) are such self-important nonsense, and they're often universally acclaimed. Critics and the public fall all over themselves praising the lead actors for what amount to impressions. I'm not necessarily saying that Foxx, Spacey, and Joaquin Phoenix don't give fine performances (they don't), I'm saying that critics seem incapable of recognizing the fact that performances which can be measured against the concrete evidence of history seem to get a lot more consistently favorable attention than those by actors who must create characters from scratch. Think of Cate Blanchett's ridiculous Oscar win for her performance as Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator. Blanchett's been nominated two other times, once for Elizabeth (of whom we have no footage), and once for Notes on a Scandal. She wins for a silly accent that makes people feel good about "Hollywood royalty", but she loses for the performance of her career, which just happens to be of a middle class schoolteacher. And who took home the best acting trophies that year? Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland and Helen Mirren for The Queen. The old joke is that if you play a retarded person, you'll definitely get an Oscar nod, but I think it's clear that the times they are a-changin'; famous people are the new retards.
But anyway, back to music biopics specifically. They are by and large terrible, and they do well because people like to hear songs that they know and watch famous people do impressions of other famous people.
So my heart leapt when I saw the first trailer for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, in which John C. Reilly plays the titular fictional rock legend. You mean there are others who can't stand these movies? In the vein of Anchorman and the underrated Talladega Nights (which I love on many levels), Jake Kasdan's new film holds the Judd Apatow approved mirror of schlubby irreverence up to a particularly offensive kind of cultural institution.
Yes, it's a one joke movie, the joke being that the musical biopic is a ridiculous genre. Kasdan hits all the tropes square on the head, from the dead brother to the bedraggled first wife to the moment of musical reckoning as Dewey is forced to change the course of rock history in fifteen seconds or less. Somebody telegraphs the meaning of every scene at least once (Jenna Fischer's wide-eyed "The sixties are an important and exciting time, Dewey!" is my favorite), and the film really captures the dull, checklist feel of the musical biopic.
So it's a one joke movie. But that joke is hilarious.
Wait, I lied. It's a two joke movie. The first of these jokes has to do with the hacky narrative construction of the music biopic, and the other joke is that blowjobs are funny. Really... there are a lot of blowjob jokes. A distracting amount of blowjob jokes.
John C. Reilly has been one of my favorite actors for as long as I've been paying attention to these things, and he was always able to lend an endearing, clueless humor to his characters. But this performance, the natural extension of his summer internship at Talladega Nights, is a great accomplishment, sometimes just as sincere and as lovely as Ferrell's work in Elf (Ferrell doesn't have a Hard Eight under his belt, so I think John C. wins that one). The songs are great; "Royal Jelly", for which Dewey is accused of stealing his sound from Bob Dylan, is a standout. And as with many of these comedies, there are a lot of cameos, and the expected comedy cameos seem to fill the role that the historically important characters serve in the music biopics. It's a nice fit for the two genres, including a hilariously incompatible stand-in for Paul McCartney.
Unfortunately, Walk Hard is just as servile to the formula as the films it's skewering. By sticking so close to the biopic template (and hey, that's your joke, you have to do it), it robs itself of the opportunities that the Apatow-produced Anchorman took advantage of, like the famous impromptu "Afternoon Delight" sequence. There's a lot of music in Walk Hard, but too little of the film has that same feeling of off-the-rails pathos, if only because we know where it's going and how it's going to get there. We've seen it all before.
Like A Mighty Wind before it, Walk Hard is just this side of too affectionate towards its subject, favoring the earnestness of its leads over real evisceration.
Still, while it wasn't the second coming of Christ I was hoping for (still waiting, Jesus), you can't argue with John C. Reilly singing lyrics like "Rim-job fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum, Oh say can ya see 'em?" There's a whole lot to love about Walk Hard, and so love it I will.
I am already done with I'm Not There (Todd Haynes) and Juno (Jason Reitman).
Haven't seen either, already don't want to.
Yes, Cate Blanchett is Bob Dylan. She's a WOMAN, and he's a MAN. How daring! It's not about Dylan the man, it's about Dylan the legend!
Can we stop making movies about musicians, now? Please? Is there anything more boring than another movie about a musician? Good on Todd Haynes for not making another wretched biopic, but Jesus Christ.
Oh, newcomer Ellen Page is saucy and darling, and the script is by a former stripper!
Firstly, Ellen Page has been great for a while now, and secondly, one doesn't go to a movie to see a script.
My anger comes not from the fact that these movies aren't good, I have no idea how they are. And now I will never know. When I first saw the trailers for both, I was definitely excited for each. Now though, with the deification of Haynes and the Little-Miss-Sunshining of Juno, it's impossible to see these movies as anything but THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR.
I guess this problem is old, and everyone deals with it. I think it's called "hype". I just watched No End In Sight, and on the scale of problems to have, hype is not that big a deal. At least I'm not in Iraq!
Huzzah!
So I have a new principled stand. Buy digital music from Amazon, not from iTunes. Amazon's downloads are $0.89 per song as opposed to $0.99 per song. Amazon's downloads are DRM free, no pesky protections or restrictions. Amazon's downloads are of a much higher bitrate, meaning a better sound quality.
Buy Amazon! Support the little guy! Even though the little guy is the biggest company on the planet!
Two things that have made for a pretty good Tuesday night:
I bought (from neither Amazon nor iTunes, but from Tunes of Hoboken) 100 Days, 100 Nights by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and I am a complete sucker for people slavishly recreating the 60's Stax sound. Stick with what works.
And then there's Grant Morrison's All Star Superman.
Oh All Star Superman... you are the finest of comic books.
They know that they can stop, right? They don't have to make everything.
"Hey, we've got a Donkey Kong kill screen coming up."
Brian Kuh
It's a fine time to be a niche obsessive in our great nation. Whether you're into crossword puzzles, LARPing, quad rugby, spelling, Scrabble, or... Scrabble, if you've got a quirky competitive fixation and a complete lack of social skills, there are documentarians aplenty who will kill for the chance to bring your nerdy but ultimately endearing foibles to the screen. I admit to being wary of this entire genre, having seen a few examples of it that reeked of sloppy filmmaking and condescension. Mad Hot Ballroom is a film so taken with its own premise (inner city kids learn ballroom dancing!) that it forgets to be an interesting or engaging film; it offers no surprises. So when I first read about The King Of Kong, which follows hardcore Donkey Kong competitors, I was skeptical.
Seth Gordon's tremendous accomplishment with The King Of Kong is how effortlessly the story seems to present itself. Here is Steve Wiebe (pronounced WEE-bee, and if you don't think that's important then you don't know funny), affable father of two, laid-off on the day that he signs a new mortgage. Here is Billy Mitchell, mulletted hot sauce entrepreneur and superstar of the competitive arcade game circuit, as legislated by his cronies at Twin Galaxies. When Steve, consigned to his garage of shame, breaks Billy's record, questions emerge about his association with a nemesis of the Twin Galaxies video-game-industrial complex. Wiebe, a perpetual loser (even according to his wife), is forced to travel the country in order to defend his score, only to be treated like an outsider by the establishment and Mitchell's worshipful horde. The line between good and evil wasn't this clear in The Lord Of The Rings films, and that guy was a giant flaming eye.
As with films like I Am Trying To Break Your Heart and Dig!, Gordon's asset is in his access. He is there, and though it's not exactly the Dallas in November, 1963, it's got its own once-in-a-lifetime dramas unfolding. You can feel a true investment in subject, as opposed to a fleeting slice-of-quirk. A lot of effective documentaries are imbued with that invisible hand, in which the story seems to occur without the intervention of the filmmaker. That's hardly a novel observation, but it bears repeating in an age in which documentaries are often more of a showcase for the documentarian and his or her political perspective than for the subject (Michael Moore's films, Jesus Camp, Shut Up & Sing). The King Of Kong is about hardcore Donkey Kong competitors, yes, but it also documents the desperation for success in something, anything, that drives Wiebe. His wife, Nicole, is the perfect example of someone praying that her spouse's string of disappointments ends, even if it is just Donkey Kong. And Mitchell, coddled by the insular establishment of competitive gaming for decades, embodies a childishness that anyone familiar with Ricky Gervais' The Office will recognize immediately as fodder for great comedy.
The King Of Kong doesn't rest on its quirky concept, but rather mines it and finds something much more interesting than the "ain't-they-kooky" portrait it could've been.
That said, these guys really are some kooky bastards.
Here is a quick round-up of movies I've seen in the past week or thereabouts. I am lazy, and so I'm cleaning the slate with this entry that's made up of little more than notes.
- No Country For Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007)
A lot funnier than I expected it to be.
Best dog chase in cinema history?
- Messiah Of Evil (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1973)
Zoned-out model and polyamorous bourgeoisie folk historian fight zombie plague in California beach town.
Two superlative zombie sequences surrounded by impenetrable lo-fi "mood".
That supermarket sequence may be one of the most terrifying and skillfully made pieces of cinema I've ever seen. Not kidding.
- Bee Movie (2007)
Like watching Seinfeld's stand-up being strangled by wannabe-Pixar plot machination.
- LOL (Joe Swanberg, 2006)
Made on video, it's trying to say things about how we communicate in this modern world. But the characters are just dicks. They're not made so by the fact that they're obsessed with their cell phones and e-mail accounts. They just are dicks. It's easy to see how this film, narcissistic and unpleasant, could turn people against the "movement", such as it is.
Not in the same league as Bujalski. I'm a huge Funny Ha Ha fan, but if I never hear the word "mumblecore" again in my life, it will be too soon.
- Dan In Real Life (Peter Hedges, 2007)
Garbage.
You know how sometimes you just sit in a movie and pray that it will take a sharp turn and start to tackle the emotional effects of spontaneous combustion? Or a meteor strike? Or how about just mass homicide? Whatever, as long as they all die. Sondre Lerche, what are you doing?
- I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (Mervyn Leroy, 1932)
Ends exactly where it needs to end. Great ending, great final line. Terrifying.
I found this movie a lot more pleasurable than I think I was intended to. Well... I guess Mervyn Leroy probably wasn't intending it for some asshole in 2007. It's definitely a movie made to affect change in its time.
- Girl 27 (David Stenn, 2007)
Garbage. The blurb made it sound like it would be a documentary on some massive Hollywood conspiracy akin to the Black Dahlia murders. Alas, it is a masturbatory video diary by an "entertainment reporter" (that should be enough to send you running) in which he harasses a disturbed old woman about a rape that happened nearly eighty years ago. And what that means about things.
"Oooh Hollywood is a dangerous place for young idealistic actresses." Yes, we know, not only because that's a cliché, but also because you tell us three times in the first ten minutes. Jesus Christ is this movie heavy-handed.
And then we cut away to Judy Lewis, Clark Gable's illegitimate daughter by Loretta Young. And this is the most interesting part of the film, and it has nothing to do with anything (besides the tenuous "sexual mores in studio-controlled Hollywood" thing, but c'mon!).
Movie, I dub you a complete failure.
- O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson, 1973)
Explained to me as a film about Malcolm McDowell's character in Anderson's If... (1968) through the filter of his character's experiences in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), and that's an astute assessment.
McDowell's Mick Travis, now a coffee salesman, wanders through English capitalism for three hours. I could write a book on this movie, but suffice it to say it's really great.
Has the feeling of a cinematic anti-capitalist manifesto, and that's always good fun.
Young, hot Helen Mirren!
Great songs by Alan Price!
- Ocean's 13 (Steven Soderbergh, 2007)
This is the best Ocean's movie of the three, and it's also the most unabashedly male-centric. I don't think that those are unrelated, as Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones felt pretty worthless in the first two films. Not their fault, but unencumbered by love interest obligations, 13 is allowed to take off. Here, all we get is Ellen Barkin, and she's a pretty unflattering portrait of womanhood by the end of it (just a piece of machinery to be manipulated, like the laser security system or the underground drill).
Like a TV show that's finally finding its footing after a passable pilot and a likable first season, Ocean's 13 moves with an unambitious assurance of purpose that allows it to be one of the funniest, most endearing movies of the year.
In this week's New York Magazine, Trent Reznor spoke briefly about OiNK's demise. I found it to be the most clear-headed analysis I've read so far. Like its older siblings prostitution, drugs, and abortion, illegal music downloads are a reality, and will be until the internet is over. Instead of unenforceable law and criminalization, authorities and business execs should be figuring out how to have the best download service. Downloading music should be safe and legal. People will pay if, as Reznor says, they don't have to see John Mayer's face pop up all the time.
What do you think about OiNK being shut down?
Trent Reznor: I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up. I feel like I'm being hustled when I visit there, and I don't think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that's what's such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they're grateful for the person that uploaded it — they're the hero. They're not stealing it because they're going to make money off of it; they're stealing it because they love the band. I'm not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.
When the most interesting portion of a film's story is conveyed in "Where Are They Now?" subtitles during the final thirty seconds, you know you're in trouble. Although you probably should have realized you'd be in trouble walking into a movie called American Gangster, a title that clearly illustrates the misplaced reverence and beat-you-over-the-head "American Mythology" that the movie delivers.
Ridley Scott's American Gangster could've been made by one of its titular character's flunkies, it's so fawning and flattering. Sure, Denzel Washington's Frank Lucas is a drug dealer, but never forget that he's just an African-American businessman serving the people, rising above, operating according to his principles. He and the detective who's after him are different sides of the same principled coin, which is why they get on so famously when they finally meet up some time after the two hour mark.
I'm serious when I say that the first two hours and twenty minutes of this movie are superfluous at best.
There's a story (maybe apocryphal, as I can't find the quote) that Harrison Ford criticized his character in Blade Runner as a "detective who doesn't do any detecting". By comparison, Russell Crowe's Richie Roberts makes Ford's Rick Deckard look like Hercule Poirot. Roberts' main accomplishment is finding out his quarry's name, from which the pieces fall into place for him and his scrappy band of honest cops. Richie is that rare clean cop, something we are shown early on and then told a dozen times throughout the film. "Remember when Richie didn't take home that trunkload of cash?" Yes. It was twenty minutes ago. I just saw it. And then you told me twice. I remember. When Roberts isn't sitting in a room letting the investigation come to him, he's dealing with his tattered personal life. Oh boy is his personal life in shambles. I understand. And I don't really care.
To be fair, Crowe and Washington are both interesting to watch, although it's the most conscious I've been of "acting craft" being exercised since Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett caterwauled at one another in Babel.
There are extended sequences of cash porn, shots of greasy thousand dollar stacks shot from as many angles as could be conceived of by Scott and cinematographer Harris Savides (Zodiac, Elephant). There is a period soundtrack to convey CONTEXT IN BIG LETTERS, there are "heavy" sequences of G.I. drug use. Plenty of opportunities for tension are discarded in favor of what must be slavish attention to historical accuracy, as when one of Lucas' henchmen is forced to wear a wire the size of a shoebox for Roberts and his detectives. Instead of mining this for drama (Donnie Brasco, anyone), the henchman records the necessary information secondhand through someone who's on the phone to Lucas in Asia.
The story's most interesting sequence revolves around Roberts' investigation of drug smuggling by way of the caskets of American casualties of Vietnam. But the drama is ratcheted up so far past the point of credibility (It's so surprising that the stodgy military officials don't want a detective going through dead bodies on the runway of the airfield!) and then becomes a non-issue so quickly that I felt duped into interest. Duped and angry.
In the end, the film succeeds admirably at being "The Black Scarface" that it's billed as, and you do with that what you will. Not a big Scarface fan, myself.
