My interest in seeing Alphaville was two-fold. It often comes up on lists of the best science fiction movies, a genre that’s been dear to me for most of my life, and it’s a Godard film. I’ve always been curious to see more of Godard’s films. Up until last night, I’d only seen Breathless, a movie that I enjoyed on a purely intellectual level. It’s been a long time, but I remember feeling that it was, basically, a movie about other movies searching for an identity of its own.
So, here’s the deal: Alphaville is a good science fiction film, but that’s not saying much considering the way the genre is often cheapened in films by a reliance on special effects and pretty lights. The story focuses on a film noir-ish secret agent who, sometime in the future, journeys to Alphaville with orders to kill an evil scientist living there. The film jettisons the standard trappings of sci-fi. Everything in the movie looks contemporary with the time the movie was made. This is an interesting choice, visually, since the landscape is so familiar, but the attitudes and structure of the society of Alphaville are not.
The whole time I was watching it, I was delighted by how the movie played with (and put the emphasis on) language. The whole movie is about the power of language: the way it shapes our worldviews, the violence found in the logic of scientific language, the illogic of poetry (and by extension, the illogic of emotion). The residents of Alphaville refer to the dictionary as The Bible (and words deemed too challenging are stripped from it on a daily basis). They are sort-of ruled by a computer, but the computer is really just an Internet-like compilation of information that makes decisions for the populace based on mathematically derived projections of how to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The citizens adhere to these decisions with apathetic obedience, even when other members of the population are killed for disobedience. Yeah, we’re firmly in Orwell-lite territory, but I enjoyed the way this movie sought to examine more deeply the effect of language control on the population. Godard’s random, chaotic style also makes this one of the only science fiction films (the original Solaris being another) that actually plays as strange as the otherworldly events it depicts. The film sometimes feels as if a foreign influence has infected it and it’s working hard to rid itself of the intruder, mirroring the plot.
But, having said this, Godard’s style makes watching Alphaville akin to being prodded in the ribs with a pointed stick every few minutes. Godard’s filmic digressions from the plot are rewarding when he focuses on poetry and language since these are thematically consistent, less so when the digressions are incidental to the internal concepts of the movie itself. The movie has an obnoxious score that has to be a (not funny) joke, punctuating everything in the first twenty minutes with loud, overbearing horns. There are random cutaways to blinking neon lights and other, even more contextless, meaningless insertions throughout the movie, the intentions of which I wouldn’t begin to guess. At times, the sound of the film erupts into beeps for no discernable reason. A fight scene staged in stills and a wildly cut-up car chase are as inept and misguided (and unintentionally funny) as anything in Zombi 3. There’s a mania to the film as it seesaws wildly from conventional plot mechanics to bouts of pretension.
Alphaville is a frustrating film. It’s occasionally great but often dull. I’m left, again, feeling intellectually satisfied by a lot of the movie, but angry at the idiocy with some of the choices here. What’s particularly frustrating is the fact that this incompetence gets in the way of some really fertile material. In addition, there are moments where the movie really connects with the illogic that must exist in a society founded on logic, solely due to Godard’s chaotic and ill-advised choices. Call it a wash. Anyway, I’m done thinking about this movie for a few days.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Day 25: Alphaville
Corsetted madness
I just realized that I forgot to praise Tess for not having a scene where she protests the corset. But then, part of the problem with the movie was that she symbolically embraced it, so I'm not sure what to think.
The Perfect Snob
Head over to Hollywood Elsewhere for Jeffrey Wells's honest and thoughtful evaluation of "The Film Snob's Dictionary", a book coming out next year. He includes quotes from the book's introduction which, among other things, talks about the film's snob's pride in having "populist, un-arty taste". Though I don't think I've ever been a film snob (I'm more of the Scorsese-style enthusiast also mentioned in the introductory text), I'm no stranger to having pride in populist, un-arty taste. But this is a trait I've been moving away from in the past few years of my life. Super-arty things like Bergman's films or My Dinner with Andre hit me harder, emotionally, than anything else these days (though like any decent human being, I'll shout the virtues of the very populist Sergio Leone or Dario Argento to anyone who will listen and sometimes to those who don't care.). I'm not entirely sure why this is, other than I'm tired of seeing people wrestle over who gets to hold the gun at the end of the movie.
Anyway, this sounds like a book I'll have to pick up when it comes out.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Day 24: Tess
Roman Polanski’s Tess is a trying film, overlong and dry. It’s based on Thomas Hardy’s book Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I am unfamiliar with, but now know is one I won’t be reading. Most of the problems I have with this movie can probably be attributed to the source material, though that isn’t to let the makers of the film off the hook. I had a hard time caring for the main character here, a shy, retiring young woman whose naïveté is only surpassed by her capacity for self-martyrdom. The movie lacked any kind of traction in its narrative. At times I felt as if there were a checklist of plot requirements being checked off somewhere in the engine of this film. The movie has a sumptuous design and period detail to spare, but, when, twenty minutes into a two-hour and fifty minute film I am admiring the period detail, I think something’s gone wrong.
One thing that’s very wrong here is the lead performance by Nastassja Kinski as Tess. The character is withdrawn and depressed for most of the movie and Kinski plays only the surface levels of these emotions. She’s quiet, shy, withdrawn, but there’s never any indication that there’s anything motivating these character traits. Additionally, the few moments when Tess actually does make a decision and works to enact it are, for the most part, painfully confined to off-screen status. Very often, the movie abruptly cuts forward in time with little warning. At first it’s a great use of editing, but after three or four of these cuts, there’s a sense that all the developments the movie's skipping over would be more interesting to watch than the bits we do get to see.
And, so, we have a movie of inaction as Tess shuffles from job to job, is lusted after by various men and then abandoned by them. One sequence that stands out and illustrates the paucity of narrative friction in the rest of the movie is when a pious young man named Angel courts Tess. Previously, Tess had a child out of wedlock (the father was a louse and the baby died) and she decides to confess her history to him in a letter. When she discovers that, when she slid said letter under Angel’s door, she also slid it under the rug and, therefore, he never received it, the camera pans over, away from her and blinding sunlight fills the full frame. It’s a surprisingly effective evocation of her feeling, something the movie doesn’t engage in enough. Polanski has a gift for understatement, but in this movie, his stately, artful approach to filmmaking only serves to deaden the tale.
I couldn’t get over the feeling that this movie felt like a well-produced PBS version of the book. The movie’s narrative has a bit more weight when taken as a whole; Tess’s story is more moving in retrospect than during the piece. It’s the kind of feeling you have after reading a good book that is, at times, hard to get through. A book has the advantage of being an art form entirely out of time: one can set down or pick up a book at a whim, after all. Here, after the fourth or fifth time the movie depicts a character walking down long stretches of abandoned road, it becomes as plodding and dull as such a journey on foot would be. It's a feeling that the entire movie suffers from.
More dining with Andre
Got the following info from Phoenix about My Dinner With Andre for thems as is curious.
From Ebert:
Gene Siskel and I did a question-and-answer session with Gregory and Shawn after the first anniversary screening of the film's New York run. What I remember best from that night is that the two men, asked what they might do differently a second time around, said they would switch roles--``so that no one would think we were playing ourselves.''
Not in real time but filmed with exquisite attention to the smallest details by director Louis Malle over a period of weeks. And not in a New York restaurant but on a studio set. The conversation that flows so spontaneously between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn was carefully scripted. ``They taped their conversations two or three times a week for three months,'' Pauline Kael writes, ``and then Shawn worked for a year shaping the material into a script, in which they play comic distillations of aspects of themselves.''
Thanks Phoenix!
In other news: I haven't talked about this, but I've been watching these movies from the floor of my office. Over the weekend, back pain and leg pain inspired Tara and I to go buy some viewing chairs. They should be in sometime this week, at which time, I will give my thankful ass the opportunity to post on the blog.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Day 23: My Dinner with Andre
Wallace Shawn: I don’t know what you’re talking about!
Now this is how you do a movie about ideas. Two men, who were friends some time ago, sit down, have dinner, and talk for an hour and fifty minutes. Their conversation, philosophical and heady, contains some of the most riveting moments I’ve ever seen in a movie. I sat, rapt, leaned forward in an attempt to soak in every word. At times, it wasn’t even what they were talking about that held me in such sway, but how they were talking about it. There’s a frankness, an honesty, and an earnestness to the discussion between the two men that’s moving. Though they’re talking about concerns that can be readily dismissed with a flippant remark or a hostile joke, both men are game to probe their own minds and to take each other seriously. When they challenge each other’s positions, it’s in a friendly enough way but, nevertheless, still contains a great deal of suspense and tension. I never knew how extreme the emotions would get or how they’d be expressed.
Wallace Shawn (who actually utters the word “inconceivable” at one point in this film, bringing a meta-chuckle to everyone who’s familiar with his role in The Princess Bride) and Andre Gregory play the two men, presumably as themselves. Shawn is a struggling New York playwright, Gregory a once successful stage director who’s gone away for five years to indulge in consciousness expanding experiences. He’s done things like go out into the woods for days with a large group of people who don’t speak the same language, where they do… whatever feels natural. They talk about the state of the theatre, the way people conform to certain roles, science, and the nature of perceptual experience. Shawn starts off the movie distant from Andre (he’s going to the dinner out of obligation) and, for a while, humors the other man as he talks about things like the power of meditation and mind-over-matter. Soon enough, Shawn is swept along by Andre’s enthusiasm and engages with him. It’s here, where the two men begin challenging each other’s points of view, when the movie really takes off.
The overall theme of the conversation is consciousness itself. It’s amazing that, for its subject matter, the movie never comes off as pretentious or overly simplistic. A lot of this can be attributed to the two actors in the film. I don’t know how this movie was made, but the acting in it is so natural and honest, it feels like the director, Louis Malle, sat down with four cameras and just recorded these two intelligent men talking. Andre, in particular, is absolutely spellbinding as he relates his consciousness expanding experiences, nutty as they may seem to us and Shawn. He does most of the talking in the movie, and the way he talks about these moments in his life is evocative, creating images in the mind that are far more compelling than any filmic representation could be. Indeed, most of the experiences he describes would seem cheesy or cheap if they were shot on film, but how they affected him is so clearly written on his face that they can’t help but feel entirely genuine. One moment, in particular, when he describes a moment when he was buried alive, is so effectively delivered that it’s impossible not to share the fear and terror he felt.
But, if watching the movie is a great experience, what happens afterward is even better. When Shawn tells us, in a voice over closing the film, that he went home and told his girlfriend Debbie all about his dinner with Andre, I wanted to know all about that conversation (I thought it was too bad Malle didn’t make a follow-up film featuring Shawn and Debbie talking about the dinner with Andre). When the movie was done, I felt the way I always do after having one of these conversations myself, only, not being allowed to participate between these two men, I hadn’t yet gotten to say what I had to say on these subjects. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence or a desire for self-exploration will surely ponder the questions this movie asks, talk about these questions (as I did) with a similarly intelligent loved one, probe the thoughts and feelings this movie brings up. There’s a certain privilege in being able to think about the topics brought up here (a point the movie makes by having Andre, who’s clearly coming to the conversation having thought these subjects through more than Shawn has, pay for the expensive dinner at the end) and the film inspires one to take full advantage of that privilege.
Themes and Variations
THEMES
I'll begin the first themed week on Saturday, October 29th. I've decided to go with the deceptively simple theme: MAN VS. NATURE As of now, I've got 2 movies in mind for this week, Little Otik and Fitzcarraldo. Part of the fun of doing themes will be finding movies that don't exaaaaaaactly fit in, but a case can be made. Please post any suggestions for movies that could be viewed on the theme "MAN VS. NATURE" here. Also, if you have any further ideas for week themes, let me know!
VARIATIONS
As you can probably see, I've got a feed service going now and an email subscription thingy. Try them out and let me know if there's any problems with them.
MY STATUS
It's Day 23 and I'm doing all right. There's a feeling of obligation to the blog that, at times, is unpleasant. I've seen some great films in the progress, films that have inspired wonderful thoughts. I do feel as if I keep seeing the same plot over and over. I keep seeing women menaced by men or women controlled by men. Except in Who's That Girl? Which is probably why I was as nice as I was to that film. Last night, I watched My Dinner With Andre and that was also refreshing in that the man vs. woman factor was non-existent. The days are just flying by and I've realized how sad I'm going to be when this is all over.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Day 22: Dressed to Kill
Voice of Bobbi: Don't make me be a bad girl again!
This movie has the distinction of being the first one mentioned on this blog during which I fell asleep. It’s not entirely the movie’s fault, I was pretty tired, but I dosed for a moment during a protracted ten or fifteen minute denouement that was just excruciating to sit through. Before watching Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, I’d heard jokes made at De Palma’s expense about how he aped Hitchcock. Having never seen a movie where he does so, I never quite got the joke. I get it now. This is, essentially, a remake of Psycho with nothing new to add but explicit nudity and violence. You’ve got the same cross-dressing killer, the same “twist” where you learn a character you’ve been following the whole movie is said killer, the same slashing strings that mimic the killing you’re seeing, and the same Puritanical violent reaction to a fear of sexuality. Hell, the movie even carries over the worst part of Psycho, the stupid and nearly unforgivable psychologist scene at the end. This isn’t an unenjoyable movie to watch, the technical stuff is confident and artful, but it’s a waste of time.
For the record, I was only asleep for a few seconds. After the killer is disposed of and we get the unfortunate and questionable psychoanalytic analysis of why this guy was acting the way he was, there are a couple of unnecessary scenes in which characters chat about what they’ll do now that all of this is behind them. Then, as if whoring out the fun and scary ending to his version of Carrie, De Palma inflicts upon us a lengthy sequence in which Nancy Allen showers, hears a noise, and is attacked by the killer we thought was dead. Then she wakes up. I was asleep for a bit during the showering because at this point, there’s absolutely no reason to be watching the movie anymore. The story is over and the sequence adds nothing to the film but a cheap shock, one that any astute viewer should see coming from miles away.
Another ridiculous scene has Angie Dickinson, playing a sexually frustrated housewife, pursuing a man through an art museum. She’s interested in having a fling with him because her husband is bad in bed. There’s a great tracking shot through the museum and some Herrmannesque music plays. At first, it’s refreshing because this is a scene of conflicting emotions played silently. It’s clear that Dickinson wants to seduce this man, but isn’t sure it’s the right thing to do. But the scene continues, there are complications, and soon, Dickinson has given up on any hope of a fling but is still pursuing the man because he has a glove of hers that she wants back. As she follows him through the art museum, there’s a question of why she doesn’t just call out to the man so she can get the glove. The sequence has gone from kind-of cool to plain annoying because the craft of the movie (following Dickenson through the museum in a tracking shot that looks neat) begins to intrude on the characters. I guess she probably didn’t speak up because the music from the movie was playing too loudly and he wouldn’t have been able to hear her. I don’t really know, but it was infuriating to watch.
I’m not sure why this film exists. Psycho is a perfectly fine movie in its own right. It’s not like this movie is just borrowing elements from Psycho to tell its own story… that I can at least try to get behind. This is thematically the exact same story with a different plot as window dressing. I suppose one could argue that this movie puts Psycho into the modern age, changing the setting from a rural environment of isolation to an urban one and upping the sexual quotient to be more explicit. But if that’s true, then why is Nancy Allen’s prostitute character so old fashioned? She’s like a 15-year-old’s conception of a prostitute, a woman who’s sexually available but for whom the sex trade is as simple and consequence-free as sending a greeting card. What’s more, if you’re going to try and update Psycho, why align yourself with the simplistic and improbable psychological explanation from the original movie? Why give an explanation at all since it’s just going to read as simplistic and improbable? Am I being unfair in comparing this movie to Psycho rather than just judging it on its own merits? I don’t think so. The movie brazenly invites the comparison and fails to live up to its predecessor every step of the way. There are new layers to find in the story and different perspectives to examine, but all this does is give us the exact same perspective with only minor variations on the theme. Yawn.
Edit on 2/17/10: 4 and 1/2 years later, I find myself regretting the comments made about the pursuit through the museum. In all this time, I haven't stopped thinking of that sequence. I now think it's gorgeous filmmaking that should be applauded for its bravura. Hitchcock-inspired or no, it is exquisite. One of the benefits of doing all this in bloggy form is the ability to come back here now and say, quite publicly, that I think I was wrong.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Day 21: Short Cuts
Short Cuts is a fantastic film, a triumph of story matching form and vice versa. It follows the lives of many, many characters (too many to recount) living in southern California over the course of a few days. Some of them know each other, some don’t, many of their paths cross as the movie plays out, and some never meet each other. I’m not well-versed in Robert Altman’s work, but I’ve seen enough to know his style and to know that this movie’s subject matter is perfectly suited to it. As the characters go about their lives, the perspective of the film is like a wandering observer’s, focusing on whatever the hell it feels like. The movie glibly shows us a character we’ve already seen nonchalantly passing the character we’re currently focusing on, zooms in during peak emotional moments to details that seem irrelevant and resonant at the same time, and hears the cacophony of people talking at the same time, its attention dipping in and out from one conversation to the other like a loner at a party. It’s an overwhelming movie, both very dense and very long, giving it the feel of one of those novels made up of vignettes.
Like those novels made up of vignettes, the whole time I was watching Short Cuts, there was a growing awareness that these disparate stories must culminate into something (otherwise why make it other than as a stunt?). But, even as the movie built to its climax, I admired the way this movie tied its characters together with thematic links. Even more, I admired the way that the linking threads changed as situations in the movie changed. At a certain point, I thought to myself, “okay, so all these characters are connected by failed marriages” and then, later, “oh, no it’s a movie about bad fathering” and then, “oh, death unites them all.” All of these were probably right at the times I thought them, but on further reflection, I think it is life that unites all of these people. The movie captures the way life is full of accidents, happy ones as well as bad ones, but, with one well-timed exception, the movie never imposes upon its characters any plot contrivances to cause these accidents. Rather, the accidents that affect the characters are very often caused by the other characters in the film, people that are living in very divergent storylines. The end result is a very pleasing butterfly-effect ripple as one small action in one plot line culminates in a huge result in another.
And yet, the movie never feels too insular (which was a bit more of a problem in the similarly structured movie Magnolia). Because the movie is packed with characters and extras and the roving camera often highlights these seemingly unimportant details, there’s always a feeling that the characters live in a real living and breathing world with a multitude of untold stories surrounding the ones we’re watching. When the movie culminates with an earthquake, the only moment that unites all the characters, it doesn’t ring out as a false tie. Because so many random things have happened and the world feels so alive, it fits right into the mileau. The way the characters react to the earthquake evokes something about a change or a stasis in all of them and it felt appropriately climatic.
As the movie neared its ending point, I was relieved (the density and the length make this a demanding viewing experience) but I was also anxious. The writing and acting is so good in this movie (despite a few stumbles… oh Andie McDowell… when will you learn?) that I didn’t want to leave these people. I wanted to continue to see how their lives played out. And, really, the ending is like a slow fade on a song (which is not nearly as powerful as ending on a hard beat) eventually tapering to the credits. But, all quibbling aside, this is a wonderful movie about the way people interact with one another without even knowing it. That’s life, right?
The Cutting Edge
When I got home from work yesterday, I felt as if I'd hit the "movie a day wall". So, Short Cuts seemed like the best choice to make. I knew it'd be long, I knew it'd be dense. What better way to push on through the wall than a cinematic gorging feast? Anway, the full review will be up later tonight, but I'll say now that I think this is a fantastic film.
If you've seen Short Cuts, you know that this is a great ensemble piece. There was no one from ALF in it that I could see, which was disappointing. Still, I want to know who gives your favorite performance in this movie? For me, it's a toss up between Jack Lemmon and Fred Ward.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Day 20: Who's That Girl?
Madonna: “Hey! A mall!”
This is an early Madonna vehicle of little note. The look of the film is a flat, boring, TV look (the director of photography was Jan de Bont!) and this isn’t wholly inappropriate since the proceedings often feel like one of those awful made-for-TV comedies, the likes of which used to air on Saturday mornings after the cartoons. Madonna’s performance ranges from annoying to flabbergasting. About the only redeeming features the movie has are Griffin Dunne (was he angling for stardom?) and an agreeable silliness that keeps most of the sag out of the shopworn plotting.
The movie is a winker, one that tries to tell us that it knows it’s dumb, and that’s fine; it goes down easier that way. It doesn’t linger too long on the inevitable romantic conflicts, and moves through its plotline at a nice, economical clip. But it’s an old story in which an uptight man is coaxed out of his shell by a wild woman of the world. Dunne plays the uptight man; a tax attorney who’s engaged to his wealthy boss’s daughter and oddly charged by this boss with the task of making sure recently paroled Madonna gets onto a bus to Philadelphia, out of New York. If I tell you that his fiancée is rather uptight and that Madonna’s character believes she was framed for murder by some wealthy corporate guy, can you fill in the rest of the blanks? At a very early point in the movie, the only question I had about the plot was whether or not the movie had enough money in its budget to show the wedding get interrupted at the end, or if Dunne’s character would just not show up for his nuptials and declare his love for Madonna's character somewhere far away from them (for the record, the movie had the money for the wedding, but no one fell into the cake).
The movie draws inspiration from screwball comedies of the past (something that took me longer to realize than it should have) utilizing the age-old “they hate each other at first, but then they fall in love!” arc and borrowing the wild cat from Bringing Up Baby. But, honestly, the last thing in the world I wanted to see was Madonna’s annoying character win the heart of anyone, much less Dunne’s non-character. Dunne coasts on a natural comic ability (he’s the only thing that made me laugh in the movie), but he really has nothing interesting to do but goof on the archetype he’s playing. There are some nice, absurd choices at times (the way the bickering cops end up is pretty goofy and the swordfight is fun and dumb), but, you know, I’m just being nice to the movie. I’ve seen what this movie’s doing countless times and much, much better. It’s Something Wild for the young adult set and, as such, the nuance has been drained out of it to make it more palatable for “young minds”.
Really, this is a middling, bad movie, aimed at teens that probably aren’t aware of how many clichés are being recycled. An unscientific survey at work and among friends revealed that this movie was a milestone for many people of my generation. This movie wasn’t part of my landscape when I was growing up, but it reminded me a lot of another movie that was: the Weird Al Yankovic movie, UHF. I liked UHF a lot when I was a kid, but recognize now that it’s middling at best. Both movies are vehicles for iconic 80s singers who have long since outstayed their welcome and have a screen presence that tends to be grating. Both have similarly uneven writing, bursts of inspiration in the casting (Who’s That Girl? has Dunne, UHF has Michael Richards and The Kipper Kids), and boring, TV-style cinematography. And both have an agreeable silliness, a breezy quality that makes it impossible to think about them seriously. The tone pushes the movie into and out of your mind before anything can register, erasing the memories of all you have seen and felt while watching them. I can’t say I don’t like this movie, because it’s too insubstantial to make such a claim. I can’t say I like it or hate it, because that would require it inspiring passion. I can say that at times I was mildly entertained by the film, but also bored by it. I’m bored writing about it now. Though it does make me want to watch Bringing Up Baby, a movie I’ve only seen segments of.
(By the way, this is the second movie in a row that featured a cast member from ALF! All That Jazz had Max Wright a.k.a. Willie and Who’s That Girl? had Liz Sheridan a.k.a. the nosy neighbor next door on ALF and also Jerry Seinfeld’s mother on Seinfeld. Who from ALF will appear next?)
All that Jazz: Part II
I forgot to mention in my review that the cast of All that Jazz includes turns by Wallace Shawn, John Lithgow, and the guy who played Willie on ALF. It's like a kitsch dream come true.
In Dreams
Last night was one of those nights. I was already dead tired at 11 o’clock when I sat down to watch the evening’s movie. I had planned to watch Short Cuts, but when I saw the running time, I knew that no matter how well crafted this Altman film was, I would be in very bad shape while watching it. In desperation, I took a look around the house to find something shorter that I hadn’t seen and what caught my eye? Tara’s copy of Who’s That Girl, starring Madonna, a VHS she’s had since her childhood years. I never thought that my blog would enable me to say I am a person who’s seen Who’s That Girl, and yet, there it is.
Tonight is going to be another late night for me and of the two movies I have from Netflix in the house, there’s Short Cuts with a running time of over 3 hours and Roman Polanski’s Tess which has only a slightly shorter running time. Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt into my TV screen. But, no pain, no gain, right?
The blog is working magic on my brain. Last night, my dreams had something to do with All That Jazz. I can’t wait until my subconscious suddenly mixes Zardoz and Who’s That Girl.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Day 19: All That Jazz
Joe Gideon: Sometimes I don't know where the bullshit ends and the truth begins.
I don’t know anything about Bob Fosse. I’ve seen the movie Chicago and a stage version of Cabaret, but that’s the extent of my knowledge of the man and his work. I rented this movie because I’d heard that it was an autobiographical film about his life and I knew it starred Roy Scheider (who will hereby be referred to as Roy (Jaws) Scheider) as Fosse. The idea of Roy (Jaws) Scheider playing an influential choreographer seemed odd, to put it mildly. I was familiar with his work from Jaws, of course, as well as The French Connection, and Sorcerer (not to mention The Curse of the Living Corpse, but that’s a story for another day). I thought this was something different for him, because I always had this association in my mind of Roy (Jaws) Scheider in roles of sweaty manliness. Well, I was wrong and kind-of stupid. Why I didn’t think the world of dancing would lead to a similar form of sweaty manliness can be attributed to several cultural blind spots that I labor to remove every day of my life.
But about the movie: All That Jazz can best be summed up by two montages that open the film. The first details the morning ritual of Joe Gideon, by all accounts Fosse’s fictional stand-in. He listens to classical music in his bathroom, takes Alka-Seltzer, showers, and pops some Dexedrine. Ready to face the day, he looks himself in the mirror and intones, “It’s showtime.” This montage is used throughout the film, and to good effect. The bathroom is unclean and disordered, gritty and real. It’s edited quickly and economically, telling us all we need to know in a matter of seconds. The second montage in the film is a tiring, endless depiction of a cattle call audition for dancers. It goes on and on, using nearly the entire length of the song “On Broadway” as the large crowd is thinned out to Gideon’s final selections. It’s fun at first, watching the crowd slowly thin, but the whole montage wears out its welcome long before it ends. The conflict between these two types of story telling goes on for the entirety of All That Jazz, up until the final moments of the film. At the end of the movie, Gideon/Fosse performs in an overlong rock-operish musical number saying goodbye to his life and then the film cuts to his lifeless body, zipped up into a body bag.
The movie has one of those confessional tones that is endearing, yet superficial. The movie cuts periodically to Gideon discussing his life and attitudes with an angelic figure in an empty theatre and he’s blatantly honest about hurting others for his own purposes. This allows Fosse/Gideon to confess his many sins to both the angel and the audience, but the movie often winks at us and says of Gideon, “He can’t help it…” or “Ain’t he a stinker!” The result is that the confessions feel like an insincere apology, nice on the surface but fundamentally empty. The movie does effectively present Gideon’s self-hatred and how it feeds off the way he’s worshiped by the people he hurts. (Jaws) Scheider shines in the role as the conflicted, womanizing director. One scene in the movie has Gideon’s girlfriend and daughter performing an awkward dance routine for him and Scheider conveys a response that is at once embarrassed (at the bad dancing) and appreciative.
And then there are the musical numbers. The numbers are well choreographed, shot and edited with flair, and have an energy to them that is hard to deny. Generally, the set pieces depict an interior state of the main character’s mind, even when they aren’t hallucinations or dream sequences, and this is smart, but most of them go on way, way too long. They interrupt the flow of the narrative and pad the movie’s running time into overlong territory. One of them, in which dancers flop about in sexual poses, peel off their clothes, and cavort around, veers terrifyingly close to the ending dance sequence in Stayin’ Alive, a land no movie should wander near. The ending number goes on for ages, repeating the same emotional beat over and over again. It was hard to sit through, especially since some of the costuming would be more at home in a deliberately campy movie like Barbarella. It’s too bad that the dance sequences outstay their welcome because they are otherwise dramatically smart and, up until the overlong point, very fun to watch.
This movie is indulgent to its core. It wants to show us the flaws of the Gideon/Fosse character, redeem him, and then kill him. It hits all the tortured artist clichés that have been with us since the first caveman couldn’t finish his wall painting. But, for all these shortcomings, it’s surprisingly good. A lot of the credit must go to Scheider, but there’s a real intelligence to the editing for about half of the movie. When Gideon wanders the hospital in a drug-induced fervor, the movie cuts in segments of a stand-up comedy monologue we’ve seen throughout the movie. The way the stand-up routine (which we’ve seen so many times that we almost know it by heart) comments on the action in front of us is clever and poetic. One scene foreshadows Gideon’s health problems with shock cuts that is as effective at conveying the premonitions of bad health as anything in memory. It’s a fascinating, layered movie, but a deeply flawed one, not unlike Fosse/Gideon himself.
Weekly Themes
Starting on October 29, I'm going to start doing weekly themes. I want to avoid themes like "films directed by Peter Weir" and go more the route of stuff like "films directed by actors" or "Monsters, makeup, and mahem" or even something like The Onion's AV Club Underrated Movie List. Any suggestions out there?
Another blog to give a looksee
Check out Without Feathers. Another crazy-tastic moviewatching blog in which some poor soul attempts to watch Woody Allen's movies in a month! Outrageous.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Day 18: Shadows
There’s a title at the end of Shadows informing the viewer that the movie was improvised. It’s not surprising. Shadows is a free-form and lively character driven film. There’s a plotline, but it moves forward based on the characters and their actions, and there are many detours from it along the way. The movie pauses for long stretches to observe the behavior and attitudes of the people involved. And there are times when, perhaps, the movie pauses a bit too long or repeats itself as the characters find different ways to express the same thing. In short, it has the benefits of a good improvisation (feeling emotionally “live” and the ability to explore tangential areas at a whim), but contains some of the drawbacks (being too indulgent). It’s not a powerhouse of a movie, but it’s well observed and thoughtful.
Shadows is shot and edited not unlike Godard’s Breathless, a low-budget, haphazard style that obeys none of the traditional conventions and flaunts them at whim. There are a lot of close-ups in the movie, and there are a few sequences where the movie dissolves at random from one angle, close on the actor, to a second angle equally close. The sound ranges from adequate to awful. It’s unclear, from watching the movie, whether the roughness is a matter of choice or a matter of economic necessity. I’d lean towards the latter. But this is one of those movies, like Night of the Living Dead, where the dirt poor production values are an asset rather than a drawback. For instance, the score of the film is mostly solo instrument improvisation, not really synced to the action taking place. Because the movie deals, in part, with musicians, it feels like source music and is more effective at drawing us into the world than any finely orchestrated counterpoint could be. The story focuses on people who are on the fringes of society and the gritty, scrappy production echoes their lives. You could say this is a happy accident, but it’s also good casting: putting the right ideas into the right aesthetic.
The movie focuses on three siblings in New York City, sometime in the late 1950s. Hugh is an unsuccessful singer; when the movie opens, he has a gig at a strip club and he suffers the indignation of introducing the strippers after his set. Benny is a rootless, aimless young man. He hangs out with a two other similar men and together they play cards, wander the streets, and try to pick up girls. Leila is Hugh and Benny’s sister, a young woman, still uncertain who she is or what she wants out of life. She is somewhat enlightened (note: this being the 1950s, there is no scene involving a corset) and defies the convention that she must be subservient to or classified by the men that she dates.
All three characters are African American and they are rendered with an honesty and realism that seems progressive for the time. The emotional crux of the film occurs when Leila, who is so fair skinned she passes for white, sleeps with a white man named Tony. But, as this is an observational movie at its core and not a didactic, message movie, the racial conflict is subtly drawn. Tony is conflicted when he meets Hugh, and, though he’s just professed his undying love to Leila, makes a feeble excuse to leave the apartment. When Hugh then insists that Tony leave in order to protect his sister from being hurt, Tony insists that the two remember he was forced to leave. It’s an interesting character beat, showing Tony’s uncomfortability with the fact that he’s slept with a black woman, as well as his desire to not be seen as prejudiced. He later tries to redeem himself by offering some bland, racially sensitive platitudes and the movie wisely ridicules him for this empty gesture.
The acting in the movie is, for the most part, a treat. There are a few false steps every now and then, particularly with Leila. However, for every bad, overly acted moment, there’s a naturalistic one that follows it. Like everyone you know, the characters’ extreme emotions are held in check and break out in only the most dire of circumstances. And sometimes they break out in very interesting (and very honest) ways. Leila reacts to the hurt Tony causes her by making a new suitor wait for hours while she gets ready for their date and acting in a very controlling, powerful manner. Benny and his cohorts flee to an art museum when challenged about their unambitious lifestyle and engage in some funny and poignant discussions about the art they find there.
Where the movie succeeds is in its matter-of-fact presentation of the lives of these characters. So often, matters of racial inequality or discrimination are presented with pointed fingers and an epic grandiosity that cheapens all the characters involved, reducing all of them to “types,” no matter how well drawn the characters are (I’m looking at you, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner). Here, we simply observe the way these characters live and interact with the world around them. Racial issues are a part of their lives, but not all of their lives. Near the end of the film, Benny and his friends hit on some girls whose boyfriends are momentarily absent. When the boyfriends return, a fight breaks out between the two groups. I wondered if the extremity of the boyfriends’ reaction had anything to do with Benny’s race. The movie doesn’t say and there’s really nothing in the movie to suggest it. A lesser movie would make that the only reason the fight breaks out.
Monday, October 17, 2005
The Rules of the Game
Editor’s note: These reviews are getting later and later, aren’t they? I’m having some trouble keeping up. Heh. This is getting fun. For the record: the rule is I post the review before I go to bed. Not some, “ah! It’s not up by midnight! I got you! You’ve failed at your blog!” Gremlins-style rule. Though if I eat after midnight, I sometimes dream of kissing a mogwai. And sometimes, if I get wet, balls of fur pop out of my back. But the fur thing is a medical condition known as mogwaitis. It doesn’t result in gremlins. But if you like Gremlins, you’ll love the Kappa!
