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?
Friday, October 21, 2005
Day 21: Short Cuts
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!
Day 17: Corpse Bride
At once an exhilarating visual feast and a disappointing, shallow story, Corpse Bride is successful in creating an exciting world, but not in exploring it. Its main problem lies in its protagonists, passive characters who mostly wait for circumstances to revolve in their favor. The movie has a few good moments, but fails to capitalize on them. And yet, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable movie, probably because it is internally consistent. That and it’s very, very pretty.
I have a condition that is either genetically based or firmly rooted in my cultural upbringing. I like animated skeletons. It’s not something I have any control over. When I was a kid and saw an old Disney cartoon featuring dancing skeletons, I was delighted. Later, I became obsessed with the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion skeletons from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. There are a lot of animated skeletons in this movie and they are very well designed and have just the right lighting, highlighting the texture of the bones and giving them a nice expressive color. There’s a pleasing weight to the skeletons, too, an effect that only stop motion can produce. I realize I’m spending a paragraph here talking just about the fucking skeletons, but, again, I have no control over this. There were so many dancing, singing skeletons in this movie, it was like something out of a dream I had when I was ten.
The premise is storybook simple, wonderfully so. Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), is engaged to Victoria (who has the seemingly inevitable corset scene). It’s an arranged marriage in which the transfer of wealth benefits both of the two youngsters’ families. At the wedding rehearsal, Victor stumbles with his wedding vows to the point that the minister declares the wedding cannot go on until he can remember his words. Feeling the burden of saving these two families, Victor heads out to the woods, where, while practicing saying his vows, he inadvertently proposes to the corpse of a jilted bride. She whisks him away to the land of the dead, as she believes they are married.
The movie is clever in the way it paints the land of the living in grey, Victorian-era drabness while the land of the dead is a colorful, bawdy place. The animation is as top-notch and as inventive as it was in The Nightmare Before Christmas. But the story itself, while seeming like it should be a simple affair, is pretty stagnant. When Victor is taken to the land of the dead, he attempts one act of trickery to get him back to the land of the living, but after that, he mostly just sits around and waits for others to help him out of his predicament. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not particularly engaging here. The Corpse Bride is rendered with a striking scariness when she first rises, but her scariness disappears as quickly as Jack Nicholson goes crazy in The Shining. After a while, the rules governing the two worlds seem arbitrary and confusing (a bad step for any movie dealing in supernatural elements like this movie does) and, after we’ve revisited the same locations again and again, the two worlds feel too insular.
As much as it pains me to say this (being a huge Danny Elfman fan), the musical numbers don’t come off very well here. In fact, they’re a bit out of place. The big, bold, and brassy song that setups the back story to the Corpse Bride is the only song that seems to fit into the milieu correctly, appropriate to the New Orleans-esque land of the dead. The other numbers feel shoehorned in. The opening number suffers from this quite a bit. The characters singing are Victor & Victoria’s parents, stuffy, society people and they don’t look like characters that sing. Their song falls flat and goes on far too long. The other problem that the musical numbers have is something that has been bothering me since I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory earlier this year. I don’t believe that Tim Burton has a knack for staging musical scenes. The direction of both Charlie and Corpse Bride’s songs felt flat to me, not in tune with the music Elfman had written. The character and camera moves aren’t kinetic enough to carry the songs, and that’s too bad (particularly on the brassy one).
These problems are not to say that I dislike the movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit (see: skeletons). There’s a lot of cleverness to it. I really enjoyed the maggot character who talked like Peter Lorre and the way the dead came into the land of the living at one point in the film (though the reason they do so is, ultimately, boring). If I believed in star ratings, (I don’t) on a four star scale, this movie felt like the perfect three-star movie. Not enough to really sink your teeth into, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, but it goes through the paces enjoyably enough while you’re watching it for its running time (in this case, a paltry 82 minutes). I wish that it had connected on a simpler level with its very simple story, since many of the plot machinations served to literalize and dispel a lot of the magic. Perhaps it would have been better as a short-form film.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Day 16: At the Circus
J. Cheever Loophole: I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.
This is a definitely a lesser entry in the films of the Marx Brothers. The jokes are pretty stale, the plot is excruciating to sit through, and there’s a reliance on old tricks that worked better in previous movies. And yet, after sitting through Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine, it was clear that even a lesser Marx Brothers movie is still worth watching. At the Circus relies on a lot of the same tricks that Goldfoot did; it contains plenty of the same kind of mugging to the camera and contains a similar style of slapstick. But where Goldfoot felt like Carrot Top was nudging you for an hour and half and begging you to laugh, At the Circus feels more like spending time with an aging relative who is genuinely funny, but tired.
Full disclosure time! I watched this movie in about 20 minute increments as I worked on various things that needed to be done in my non-blogging life. I was also extremely tired when I watched it. I think both of these factors contributed to my liking the movie a lot more than I would have otherwise. As a straight-through 90 minute experience, I think the movie would have dragged on a lot more than I felt it did. And the second rendition of the song “Two Blind Love”, sung by the very boring non-Marx male lead, would have driven me to fits of violence.
I’d describe the plot, but it’s a Marx Brothers movie. The plot of a Marx Brothers movie is as irrelevant as the outfit a stripper wears at the beginning of its routine. Yeah, it sets the context for everything, but what lies underneath it all is what we’re here for. What matters is whether or not the three have the material they need to shine. As said, here they don’t. But there’s enough to keep one’s interest (if only in 20 minute increments). Groucho has a wonderful number in Lydia, the Tattooed Lady. The song is written with plenty of wit and staged (somewhat cheaply) with an anarchic fervor; it’s reminiscent of the musical numbers in Duck Soup. There’s a scene where Chico and Harpo search the living quarters of a strongman while he’s sleeping in them that builds nicely. By the end of this scene, after the two spend several minutes trying to be quiet (so as not to disturb the strongman), feathers from a pillow are flying around the room and Harpo is pretending to be Santa while ringing a bell. Additionally, Margaret Dumont makes a welcome appearance toward the end of the film, giving Groucho the opportunity to flaunt the high-society dame (and all the decorum she stands for) yet again. Oh, and special mention must go to this joke: After Harpo balks at going into the strongman’s room, Chico calls Harpo a coward. Harpo nods, pulls a gun out of his coat, and points it at his head.
It was somewhat depressing to watch several lengthy bits not work. There’s a scene with Chico preventing Groucho from boarding the circus train that felt like it was made up of bits that were cut from a much funnier scene from A Day at the Races and is so illogical in its placement in the film, it made the whole scene uncomfortable to watch. Groucho narrating the climax of the film (which features a gorilla and trapeze) as a sports announcer is the same joke as the one used at the end of Monkey Business with nothing any funnier added to it. Too much of the movie is taken up in adherence to the dud of a plot. This movie also continues a trend in the later Marx Brothers movies (started with A Night at the Opera) giving Groucho a sort-of Mad Max character arc, where he begins the movie caring only about himself, but he eventually starts working to help the young couple win out over adversity. This diminishes Groucho’s anarchic appeal, giving him some characters he won’t blithely insult.
But, you know, I don’t’ really care that this movie isn’t really any good. I can honestly say that no matter my mood, if I watch just a snippet of one of their movies (well, the snippets that contain at least one of the brothers [and not Zeppo]; the actors they cast as the young couples in love are always so bland as to make me prone to fits of violence) I come away feeling better. Even at their worst (Love Happy). There’s a scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Woody Allen, depressed to the verge of suicide, decides that life is worth living in a world where there are Marx Brothers movies. This is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly. I was tired while I watched this, cranky, and a little overwhelmed by the whole “movie a day” thing. I really watched this movie because I’d never seen it, it was already on my shelf, and it was short. By the end of the movie, when Margaret Dumont gets shot out of a cannon and a symphony orchestra floats out to sea, I was much happier. About pretty much everything. Take that for what you will.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Day 15: Dr Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine
Man on Motorcycle: Why me? Why me all the time?
Every now and then, The Simpsons will portray a parody of an entry into an older genre of film. Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine plays just like one of these parodies. Of the movies I’ve watched so far, it was the hardest to get through. It’s a frantic, horribly paced, unfunny comedy whose only saving grace comes, just barely, from Vincent Price’s gleeful performance as Dr. Goldfoot. The score is atrocious, playing constantly, Mickey Mousing every minute detail of the film. For all its sound and fury, it just winds up being noisy and, really, really not funny.
Was this kind of movie ever funny? It reminds me of the lesser entries in Leslie Nielsen’s oeuvre, titles like Spy Hard, or Wrongfully Accused. So very, very misguided and desperate to make you laugh, it resorts to pulling your pants down in public, pointing and laughing at your underwear, and then nudging you with its elbow, saying, “huh? Huh?” Frankie Avalon stars in the film as our protagonist and he’s like Jerry Lewis’s unfunny 3rd cousin. Clowning, mugging, and slapstick are the order of the day. There’s no wit to the wordplay and the script has a lot of, um, “fun” giving Vincent Price lines containing slang, the kind of joke you’d see Estelle Getty doing on The Golden Girls.
Poor Vincent Price. He’s clearly having fun playing against his persona as Dr. Goldfoot here. I thought that his having fun would be infectious for a while, but the movie fails him time and time again by giving Price the lamest line you can imagine and then cutting to Frankie Avalon smacking a door into his boss’s ass or falling down or mugging while a slide whistle plays in the background. Ugh. Goldfoot wants to take over the world, like any good super villain. The plan is to make sexy women robots trick men into marrying them, and, then, stealing all their money through power of attorney paperwork. Avalon works for some government investigation place that’s abbreviated SIC (leading to such classic exchanges as, “I’m a SIC man.” “I’ll say you are.” UGH) and gets wind of Goldfoot’s plot. Yeah.
To be fair: I did laugh once or twice in the movie. One scene has Price instructing his bikini-clad robots on the arts of seduction (this is funny in and of itself, in retrospect). One of the robots starts dancing and the music takes on a surf-music beat. Then, as if dancing is a virus for robots, the others start dancing too. Price blusters and screams, “STOP! STOP! STOP!” as they dance around him. If they had let this scene go on longer, I probably would have been on the floor. And there’s one joke that is inexplicably funny to me, just in the way it’s so completely nonsensical. Price, showing off his lair to some captives, walks to a door and says “I think you’ll like this.” He opens the door and a man is chained to a running a motorcycle. The man looks up to the camera and says, “Why me? Why me all the time?” I’m positive I’m missing a reference here because this makes no sense whatsoever. And that’s precisely why I was on the floor after this, um… joke?
The movie is shot, acted, and paced like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon. But part of the joy of those cartoons is their running times. Ninety minutes is far too long to sustain this breakneck pace and, anyway, there’s hardly enough story to go around. This movie would have been much better as a five to seven minute short and, preferably, directed by Chuck Jones. As it is, it plays like a stereotype of a bad sixties comedy, rife with sexism, pratfalls, and crossed-eye fainting. It’s certainly an interesting curio piece that is easier to laugh at than to laugh with.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Day 14: Dracula (1979)
Van Helsing: There is work… wild work to be done!
The story of Dracula, as Bram Stoker originally wrote it, was ultimately a story warning men that swarthy heathens from abroad will come to our homeland and pollute the purity of our blood lines by sleeping with our women. Additionally, these foreigners know things: secret, sexual things that we don’t, and so can seduce our women away right from under our clueless noses. Further, these vile creatures are so good at the act of seduction, our women will develop some kind of psychic bond with the thing and actually crave its company. What can we do against this threat but close ranks and make a circle around our women so they don’t succumb to the vile seductions of these beasts, the book asks? Indeed. I’ve seen quite a few filmed versions of the Dracula story, but this is the first one I’ve seen that actually seems to understand this subtextual essence and, what’s more, uses it to its advantage. In fact, up until the climax of the film, it plays counterpoint to these themes in the original material and, as a result, brings an air of freshness to this oft-told story.
Where this version of Dracula differs most from the countless other versions of the tale is in its main female character, Lucy. She’s pluckier than most women in Dracula movies and more enlightened. In our introduction to her, she’s reading a letter of acceptance to a law school. Her friend, Mina, makes a comment about her defiance of all the expectations men have for a lady. Yeah, this is your standard “spunky” and anachronistically-enlightened-woman character development stuff that we’ve all seen thousands of times (usually in the form of “why do I have to wear this corset???”... groan…). But as I watched the plot unfold and Lucy become enamored with Dracula, it occurred to me that Lucy’s enlightenment, however clunkily established, gave this character actual motivation to like Dracula. And this was, perhaps, the first time I’d actually seen that element of the story done right. No longer was Dracula just engaging in rape when he got the main guy’s girl, and she wasn’t so awed by his sexual prowess during the rape that she actually wanted to drink his blood. This is refreshing and smart.
(A little digression here: In Bram Stoker’s book, the main female character is named Mina. Mina has a friend named Lucy who is the first to succumb to Dracula’s bite. And, for some reason, this movie decides to focus on Lucy as its main female character. Whatever. No good movie has ever been made by being slavish to the book, right? But the movie gives Lucy a friend named Mina, and here she is the first to succumb to Dracula’s bite. Additionally, it is Lucy who is engaged to Jonathan Harker in this version. Basically, they just switched the names of the two original characters. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to make this change, but it confused me on more than one occasion due to my familiarity with the scores of other Dracula movies, as well as the book. I think it even confused the person who made the subtitles on the DVD, because, towards the end, as Lucy was struggling with Dracula and making whimpering noises, the subtitles read “Mina struggling”.)
Of course, this Lucy lusts for Dracula and leaps into his arms. She’s not interested in what her fiancée, Jonathan, wants for her. She’s smarter than he is and quite a bit more ambitious. She wants to be more than a wife, more than a mother, and, certainly more than a protected treasure. This is something that Jonathan is unable to cope with. It makes sense that the man who offers her, on the surface, the convention-defying pleasures she seeks (you think she’s getting oral sex from the doofus with the ratty mustache? I doubt it.) is the man who is so very rooted in old-school ideas that he physically remakes her to be the loving, devoted wife and mother he wants. This aspect of the movie was a lot of fun to watch, since it’s the first time this part of the story has ever made any sense to my late 20th century mentality.
But as progressive and smart as it is, the movie fails on its promise. When, at the end, Dracula is spiriting the partially vamped-out Lucy back to his homeland on a clipper ship, Jonathan and Van Helsing spring forth to rescue her, and there’s a Darwinian fight between the men and the vampire for reproductive rights. Lucy, now straddling the line between human and vampire, fights the two men, defending her new lover and her newfound status as wife and mother-to-be. Here, Jonathan slaps her, giving him the character moment of putting his woman in place (you do not sleep with Romanians while we are engaged, got that?!) and, the movie would tell us, the power to destroy Dracula. It’s a silly and disappointing choice, since Jonathan has been, mainly, a supporting character in the Lucy/Dracula narrative. The movie seems to be headed towards a conclusion where Lucy offs Dracula herself, but then reasserts the male protector image and all of that development of Lucy goes to waste. Ah well.
Anyway, subtext, shmubtext. The horrific stuff is nicely handled. There are a few genuinely creepy scenes (one in particular when Mina rises from the dead as a vampire). The effects in the movie aren’t exactly top-notch, but the actors take them seriously and, so, lend them an air of legitimacy. Frank Langella does a fine job as Dracula, playing the character like a soap opera star come to live amongst Midwesterners. He has an air of regal superiority that turns to a believable menace when he’s crossed, believable the same way you’d believe a member of royalty wouldn’t hesitate to kill some peasants in order to preserve their way of life. The mythology of the character is nicely tucked into the script too; there are glancing mentions of his past as a king, his unnaturally long life, and his species being on the brink of extinction. The movie doesn’t dwell on these things, so avoids the all-too-common poutiness of vampire tales of late. The score by John Williams is effectively tragic and romantic, though it’s far too overwrought at the beginning.
Curiously, this movie feels to me the way I always imagined a Dracula movie would feel when I was a kid. Dracula seemed like a real threat, very powerful, and nearly unstoppable. His lady vampire creations were as pale white and shiny eyed as I’d always imagined they would be. Purists will probably hate this movie since it eschews so much of the book, but the cuts rid the movie of a lot of unnecessary dramatic dead-weight (see Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you want to see how economical this Dracula is versus that movie’s near-unwatchable bloat). I particularly liked the way it toyed with the gender roles and the way it moved deftly over familiar material to draw new ideas from an old, old well. It’s interesting that a cross is the symbol used to ward this menacing foreigner away, since the cross symbolizes (among other things) the unifying aspects of Western society. Unfortunately, the film concludes that it’s a good thing when an English lad scares Dracula away from “his” woman’s womb using this symbol. That it’s his choice to make and not hers.
2 things this morning
I've been getting a lot of comments about my review of The Passion of the Christ. I'm not entirely surprised since that movie seems to attract controversy like Africa attracts missionaries. But...I'm bracing myself because tomorrow morning, I'm going to review a movie that will no doubt inspire even more controversy: Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine
Yesterday, I posted my review of Rasputin and wished that the voice of society in the film was more compelling than the voice bent on flaunting all societal conventions. I was thinking about it, and it occured to me that is the problem with too many movies (the Batman movies, for instance). In fact, I can think of only one movie that successfully shows us characters that defy society and characters that protect society with equal weight. Quick Change, with Bill Murray. Weird.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Day 13: Rasputin: The Mad Monk
Rasputin: Careful, Peter. There are acids in here.
Clocking in at 92 minutes, Rasputin: The Mad Monk is a lean Hammer Horror film of little consequence. It plays out inoffensively; it hits its plot points with efficiency, but doesn’t go anywhere altogether interesting along the way. To its credit, there’s a hammy, fun performance by Christopher Lee as the title character and it’s a jollier movie than I would have expected. The movie traces Rasputin’s life from his time at a monastery through his ascent to a life of privilege and influence in the Russian government. As this is a traditional horror film, there are a few deaths and mutilations along the way.
Rasputin lives as a monk in a monastery, but, like a naughty boarding school student, sneaks off on the weekends to get drunk and party down at a local tavern. When the movie opens, the tavern owner’s wife is ill and Rasputin, wanting nothing more than to drink wine, heals her with his magic hands so that the tavern will reopen. After throwing a party to celebrate the wife’s recovery, Rasputin gets caught making out with the owner’s daughter. There is a fight, Rasputin cuts off someone’s hand, and flees back to the monastery. He is soon after forced to leave the monastery due to his bad behavior and for unapologetically using the special healing powers in his hands that, according to the other monks, could only have come from Satan. So, Rasputin takes his special healing powers and his hypnotic eyes to the big city. Here, he uses his magic eyes and hands on several people high up in the Russian government to gain access to wealth and luxury. Eventually, he takes things too far and subjects loyal to the government plot to take him out – with extreme prejudice.
The title of this film should really be Rasputin: The Hedonist Monk since Rasputin isn’t so much mad as desperate to have a good time, whatever the consequences may be. He hypnotizes women for sexual purposes, heals those who will give him the most stuff, and drinks a lot of wine. It’s fun to watch Christopher Lee play him. He belly laughs when he gets his way, dances with gusto, and eats food like every meal will be his last. When he hypnotizes someone, the movie cuts to Lee in a close-up, his eyes get as big as a giant squid’s. “Think only of my eyes,” he intones to his victim in an icy cool voice, sounding like someone who’s just eaten 40 breath mints. Lee is always a compelling actor, but I’ve never seen him so gluttonous and bawdy before. It’s utterly charming.
If only the movie wasn’t so moralistic. Rasputin upsets the natural order of things by being so manipulative and greedy, and so, of course he has to die for this reason. Though lip service is paid to the idea of Rasputin messing with the government, the movie glosses over any political implications of a hypnotist in a position of power. Instead there’s a rather boring subplot of some military officer’s sister being seduced by Rasputin and so, naturally, revenge must be had. I don’t know anything about the historical Rasputin (though I’d be very interested in learning: from what I do know, there’s a good movie in his story somewhere) or how he died or what exactly he did. What I do know is that this is too ignoble a death for Lee’s character. He gnaws on some poisoned chocolates and sips some poisoned wine while waiting for his next sexual conquest to show up. He screams and clutches his stomach as the poison kicks in and, eventually, falls out of a window. Yawn. The food poisoning makes sense for the character, but the Rasputin we’ve watched for the previous 85 minutes or so would have, upon realizing he’s been poisoned, scarfed down more poisoned chocolates and guzzled the poisoned wine while laughing and, probably, dancing.
It’s funny, watching this movie after Carnal Knowledge. Rasputin is the person Jack Nicholson’s character wanted to be: heedless, irresponsible, and selfish. There’s a breakup scene between Rasputin and one of his paramours that was eerily similar in tone and consequence to one in Carnal Knowledge. The main difference here was that Rasputin felt nothing was wrong about the fact that he was emotionally hurting the woman in question. He was bored with her and ready to move on. I realized that one of the interesting things about Carnal Knowledge was that Nicholson’s character, Jonathan, felt exactly the way Rasputin did, hated himself for this, and hated the woman for, as he saw it, putting him in a position where he hated himself. Part of the fun of watching a character like Rasputin is that he feels no such boundaries. It’s undeniably fun to watch him or, for that matter, Diabolik shuck all of society’s rules and conventions to get what they want. Indeed, Rasputin gives a justification for his hedonism to the head monk that is priceless: God is able to forgive Rasputin more than the other monks, because he sins bigger than they do! I think the key to making a movie about a character like this work is to make the alternate voice of society as compelling and interesting as the impish destructor. But those who plot against Rasputin are boring. Because of this, Rasputin: The Mad Monk is slight and, except for Lee, pretty forgettable.
an experiment in dancing
While watching Rasputin: The Mad Monk last night (review up later today), I was miffed that the movie missed two opportunities for a dance-off. I go crazy when I see a two or more people resolving conflict via dance. It's so stupid. But, you know, I guess it's no more ridiculous than people hitting one another or writing scathing letters to the editor about one another. The setup usually goes something like this:
Guy 1: "She's my girl!"
Guy 2: "No she's mine!"
Guy 1: "We'll see about that!"
Then, Guy 1 busts a move, right in Guy 2's face, as if to demonstrate to Guy 2, that if Guy 2 does try to woo Guy 1's girl, he will have to contend with Guy 1's dancing while they date, ruining any chance Guy 2 has of setting the mood! (Girl: "So, I've never been to this restaurant before, it's really... is that Guy 1 dancing over there?") Guy 2 responds by dancing back at Guy 1! This escalates until they've danced away their troubles or one of them throws a shoe and has to be shot.
Besides West Side Story or Strictly Ballroom, anyone know of any good dance-off scenes? And if there are any featuring monsters?
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Day 12: Carnal Knowledge
Sandy: You can't make fucking your life's work.
While watching Carnal Knowledge, it struck me how perfect an actor Jack Nicholson is for director Mike Nichols. Both men seem to have an impeccable understanding for the comedy found in every moment of high drama and the drama found in every moment of comedy. Carnal Knowledge is full of moments where Nicholson says something that makes you laugh while it simultaneously makes you cringe. It’s a raw, nerve-jangling movie about misogyny, sexual dysfunction, and male ego that pulls no punches. It’s powerful and honest from moment to moment, but there’s something ultimately off-putting about it as a whole that keeps it from gelling into a sum greater than its parts.
The movie opens, not unlike a Woody Allen movie, with credits over a black screen. It’s hard to put the similarity out of your mind as two men talk over the credit sequence about the kind of women they would like to have in their lives. The two men are Sandy, played by Art Garfunkel, and Jonathan, played by Nicholson. At the movie’s start, Sandy is nerdy, shy around women, and virginal. Jonathan is brash, confident, and equally virginal (though he hides this quality in himself behind a false bravado). The structure of the movie presents vignettes from their lives (beginning in college and ending in middle age), during which they fall in love, pursue relationships with various women, and break up with them.
This structure is compelling, but it is also one of the problems with the movie. The jumps in time are followed by some laboring on the script’s part to bring the viewer up to speed on where the two are in their lives and what girls they’re with. At these moments, the movie’s dialogue, otherwise elegant and stylish, is too expositional. Indeed, the overall pace of the movie is interrupted at these time shifts, since the movie has to pause while we get our bearings. It’s an admirable concept, depicting the characters’ lives as defined by their relationships with women, but the execution didn’t work for me.
What really does work in the movie is Nicholson. He’s a joy to watch as he sinks his teeth into the script (and at times, the scenery), creating a character that is realistically angry at women. He’s not a two-dimensional cad, but a very, very confused man. When a woman tells him that all she wants is him, Nicholson screams, “I’m taken!..... by me!” The beat between the two lines is both absurdly funny and bitterly honest. Art Garfunkel also has a nice turn here, surprisingly convincing as Nicholson’s nebbishy foil. He is equally unjust to women, though he means well and hides his anger in sublimation.
And that’s just it, the two characters mean well, but they suffer from misogynistic tendencies; they treat women as sexual objects first, trophies second, and actual people never. This, too, is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s films, but Jules Feiffer’s script doesn’t let these two off the hook the way Allen does. Where Allen’s films surrender to the misogyny of their main characters, at best (celebrate it at worst), Carnal Knowledge examines the results of the misogyny, not just on those it hurts, but on the men who exhibit it. At one point, Nicholson launches into an angry tirade at his live-in girlfriend and then collapses and asks her to leave him. “I’d marry you if you left me,” he sighs.
Another problem in the movie has is some stylistic choices by Nichols. The script is somewhat stagy and Nichols is certainly adept at transforming stage work to film (I’ve only seen the 1st half of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that was more than enough to impress me), but here, for every neat trick that works there’s one that doesn’t. It’s emotionally resonant when a prostitute, kneeling between Jack Nicholson’s legs while reciting a monologue, is framed in front of wallpaper that is constantly moving upward (lending the appearance that she’s going down (heh) the whole time she is speaking) but not so much when Nicholson wines and dines a woman and the restaurant revolves around their table.
At all other times, Nichols’s direction is fantastic. This is first an actor’s movie and then a writer’s movie, but Nichols is able to put his own stamp on it. The camera setups are lovely and the blocking of the actors in relation to the camera is delightful. The characters are constantly moving into the foreground, the background, off camera, into light, and out of light in accordance with their emotional state. There’s a close-up of Candice Bergen laughing and laughing as she flirts with both characters that goes on so long it crosses the line between comedy and drama at least twice.
Carnal Knowledge is a fantastic movie in fits and starts. It’s a pity that these bits couldn’t have come together, for if they had, it probably would have been one of the all-time greats. As it is, it’s worth it just to see Jack Nicholson at the top of his game and a script that never flinches. Some of its sexual politics are a bit dated in this day and age, but the emotions on display have, unfortunately, never gone out of style.
