Posts by Richard Von Busack at Cinematical
Too much narration is death for a dramatic film.
But how do you film the most precisely narrated novel ever written without it? Case in point: this recently released to DVD version of (1949). It's directed by Vincente Minnelli, the ambitious (hell, vainglorious) MGM director who was certain he could do anything.
By anything, I mean make a movie based on a novel that is (a: is, for the most part unconcerned about morality, and (b): almost entirely free of sympathetic characters.To protect the film from censors, Minnelli includes a framing device with James Mason playing Gustave Flaubert in a French courtroom recreating the author's successful defense of the book against a charge of obscenity. On paper, this seemed like perfect casting.
It's difficult to read Lolita without hearing Humbert Humbert's words pronounced in Mason's drawling, ironical voice from the Kubrick film version.
And whatever Nabokov thought about Flaubert, the two books have similar approaches to the problem of depicting an outrage against public morality, and serio-comic protagonists doomed by their idealization of perfect love.
At times, Mason is satisfyingly right in his voice over description of the novels that rotted Emma Bovary's mind.
He describes books with heroes "as brave as lions, gentle as lambs...
the cavalier, the serenader, the long ago and the far away." But in the courtroom scenes, Mason is more the noble, suffering author, a mirror for the filmmaker toiling under censorship. Here, Mason is teary-eyed, where Flaubert was always nothing but clear-eyed.
In , Mason claims to have detested Madame Bovary when he saw it, and adds that his Flaubert was "lazily and unimaginatively played." I'd say that the film was already compromised by the censors, and fatally overproduced. But that doesn't mean it's bad; in fact there's much here that's savory and exciting.
Next week, the phenomenal opens, a 1977 movie at last hitting the theaters in the larger markets in the US.
Killer of Sheep demonstrates the importance of director/writer Charles Burnett as both an independent filmmaker and an American artist. An African-American artist, to add that part of it, since well-meaning critics like to give Burnett the distinction of being the best African-American filmmaker ever. It's a new century, so let's dispense with such categorization.
Burnett's qualities are more universal than parochial. True, his films are loaded with specific meanings that elude the white viewer. I still remember the gasp of shock a lady friend made when she saw a scene in To Sleep With Anger; her family was Creole from north Texas, and so she knew how tremendously disrespectful it was when a little boy let a broom touch the feet of Danny Glover's Harry.
What could be worst that to try to sweep someone away as if they were dust? And in Killer of Sheep, like To Sleep With Anger, the word "drylongso" comes up; meaning nothing has changed, probably nothing will ever change. And sometimes the word means "as if everything were normal.
" ("I can't just chase him out, drylongso."). Now, as Albert Brooks said in Real Life, "I'm not black, nor do I claim to be.
" I don't get it all, but I insist Burnett is too big to be bound by identity politics. He's a filmmaker for the world, with Ozu's ability to depict the tender side of disappointment, and--in Killer of Sheep, he has Jean Vigo's dreamy silvery imagery conveying the hopeless longing for elsewhere.
Trying to figure out how many prostitutes have turned up in the movies is a mug's game, but let's play it a little, shall we? James Robert Parish's 1991
Prostitution in Hollywood Films (McFarland) lists 389 films in which prostitution is a subject or subplot.
Parrish includes everything from Porky's to all six versions of the penthouse-to-pavement melodrama Madame X. The IMDB tops this number by claiming about 800 movies with prostitution as a subject. Ever since the first important film on the flesh trade -- the 1913 , just inducted into the Library of Congress -- the subject of the Fate Worse Than Death has fueled comedy, drama, and film noir.
Oh, and science fiction -- remember the "Furniture Girls" in Soylent Green? Playing a hooker is also good Oscar fodder. So far it's gained six Best Actress awards and 15 nominations, as well as seven Best Supporting Actress wins and five nominations.
This count requires some give and take: Madeleine Kahn's Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles (an Oscar nominee) was officially a dance hall girl (wink, nod). Sally Bowles in Cabaret didn't make the count, though it's fairly clear how she paid the rent. Ditto the no-visible-means-of-support .
Hey, we're all prostitutes! So the top seven below need kibitzing and counter suggestions, and perhaps some flame-broiling. The idea here is for time-tested films, meaning that more recent working girls aren't aboard, despite impressive acting by Sophie Okonedo in Dirty Pretty Things, Taraji P.
Henson in Hustle and Flow or Morena Baccarin in Serenity. (And Brittany Murphy was no slouch as .) Let's overlook Reagan-age free-market propaganda disguised as sex comedies, and pass on that famous trio of savvy businesswomen Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places and Rebecca de Mornay in Risky Business.
(How about Kathy Baker in Street Smart, in Pixote and Louise Smith in instead?)
(1927) The ultimate Victorian-era victim of circumstances, gold heart beating under a manhandled breast, pursued by the same hypocrite society that drove her to a life of crime. And now I'm making this really beautiful film sound terrible.
Gaynor, a small and frail-looking actress--a shadow of the streets, as Edith Piaf put it--is teamed with ultimate woman's-film director Frank Borzage. And Borzage was one of the few men who could make a movie that you'd weep at without hating yourself for it in the morning. Matching her here is frequent co-star Charles Farrell, who plays a Parisian sewer worker who wants to rise out of the depths to the open air.
Some (Catholics, probably) would make the mental connection between Seventh Heaven's pairing of the two trades and cold-blooded comment that prostitutes were like sewers: despicable but necessary to society.
"No tears for the creatures of the night! My eyes are dry!" -- the lyrics are from the San Francisco new-wave group Tuxedomoon. That song just might be their answer record to the much more popular "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus. The new-wave tune sums up the less-than-remembered 1989 black comedy Vampire's Kiss. Above we see Nicolas Cage as one Peter Loew, having his manly essence drained by a red-lipped, steel-thighed Jennifer Beals, known to posterity as "that Flashdance chick.
" The actor's current career, , can make us forget how Cage was the once the go-to man for really berserk cinema, the same way that Johnny Depp is now.
Rumors started about him. We heard Cage had several teeth removed to be in , for instance.
Not true, , Cage had just had some dental work done and decided to use it for his character in Birdy, which was incidentally the Reign Over Me of 1984. However, it is true he ate a bug on screen once, and that happens right here.
Posted Mar 18th 2007 11:01AM by
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Let me clear my throat for a second, here. For the near future,
is my favorite movie of all time.
Unfortunately luckless Yankees have to wait until April to see it. Watching it, I was humbled by this thought: I think of myself as a person who loves movies more than the average guy. Any excessive critical wrath I might have is due to losing a precious hour and a half of my life, which could have been spent watching something worthwhile .
.. instead of, say, .
In Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (of ) soaked in some of the really most bottom-drawer kinds of film, nearly the complete catalogue of Bruckheimer and Simpson, as well as Point Break.
It struck me that people who truly loved movies could have got something worthwhile out of watching even those wretched 1980s policiers, always starring some stone-faced joker with aviator shades and a toothpick sticking out of his yap ..
. and that they'd get something out of it besides boredom and a desire for revenge. As much as I love movies, I'll never have the undifferentiated love of every movie that Pegg and Wright have.
Or that Quentin Tarantino has, for example. As Cinematical's Jette Kernion QT temporarily turned the in Los Angeles into a grindhouse. I dang near wept looking at that schedule.
Tarantino will end up as president of the AFI, mark my words, and here's more proof: a few years back he was involved in a Rolling Thunder re-release of a lost film of no little interest, Detroit 9000.
If you have Orson Welles and a candelabra, you've pretty much got your movie done already, as we can glean in this still from Claude Chabrol's 1971 Ten Days Wonder a.k.a. La Decade Prodigeuse
. It's by a long chalk Claude Chabrol's most bizarre film, even though it comes from a relatively normal source: a 1948 pulp novel by the duo of mystery writers known as " ". Not having read the book, I can only wonder if the novel was existentialism disguised as pulp, or if the essentially blasphemous nature of the story kept it from being adapted into a film back in the 1940s. It would have been a crazy hunk of film noir. This is a plot that needs every shadow it can get, but Chabrol was working in the lurid Technicolor of the early 1970s, a color scheme that's worsened in the grimy prints and in bad home video transfers upon which this film is most commonly seen. Thanks to the scratches, the surface grime, and Chabrol's discomfort with the English language, Ten Day's Wonder takes some getting used to.
At 3am, Ten Days Wonder would look like a masterpiece.
At noon, when I saw it, it's camp that stays compelling because of the deep-dyed conviction brought to it by Welles. Everyone knows the story of the film student gone to heaven, to find that the Heavenly Throne is located in the middle of a replica of Xanadu from Citizen Kane: "That's where God lives.
He's delusional, he thinks he's Orson Welles." Here's the movie where Orson Welles thinks he's God, and he has more than a few of the characters here convinced that he is. Blackout: "This wonder, as wonders last, lasted nine days.
" (The slang expression "nine days wonder" meant a scandal that came and went with the newspaper headlines.) We begin in a cheap hotel somewhere on the Rue Bayard in Paris. Charles (Anthony Perkins) wakes up with blood on his hands and no good idea of how he got there; the tilt-a-whirl camera indicates his head is still spinning.
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Today's suburban mega-churches know the power of multi-media as well as any other marketers, thus the new site has popped up, offering (at subscription rates of $12 a month or $119 a year) the opportunity to download inspirational clips of various movies, running from 30 seconds to four minutes.
"We will only make WingClips available from movies that do no contradict Judeo-Christian values...
" claims the site, although this is a little hard to believe, given there are over 200 topics to choose clips from. I tried "sex" and got a clip from the 2005 indie . Here's the description: "Inga and Olaf are waiting on papers to be married.
In the mean time, their pastor catches them living together, dancing together and drinking coffee together." Drinking coffee?!
How about "atheism"? Nothing from , surprisingly enough.
Instead, WingClips will download for you the baptism scene from Nacho Libre; Oh, Lord, why do you test my faith with the continued success of Jack Black?
"Criticism"...
a noble subject, illustrated with a scene from a movie I never would have considered spiritual, where Anthony Hopkins quotes St. Theodore. Excuse me, Theodore Roosevelt.
(The World's Fastest Indian may be worrisome to some evangelicals, considering that the movie has Vanessa Williams' brother playing a good-hearted transvestite in it.) "Abortion" gets you a scene from the Dorothy Day biopic (and just try to tell story without using the word "socialist"..
.) "Denial"--another popular topic around these parts -- brings up a trove of films: the just released (my idea of a good religious movie, along with certain and efforts); Flight 93, and the Israeli documentary 39 Pounds of Love. Among the others offered for excerpts include Most and The Bridge to Terebitha, Pride and Spider-Man 3.
Posted Feb 27th 2007 6:03PM by
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Theodore Sturgeon, speculative fiction writer and visionary, once formulated a : "90% of everything is crud," though "crap" seems to be the word he was groping for. Cruel, maybe. And frankly, does the half-good, the good-in-spots, or the really-bad-with-a-couple-of-redeeming-moments counts as crap?
And the 9 out of 10 ratio means a lot of mulch for the talented 10%...
I mean, in this 90 percent are plenty of examples of what not to do, or what could be done better. However, there are 7 genres that are just so consistently low standards that Sturgeon's Revelation seems like blatant optimism. I'm tempted to use the above as one genre example -- the title card from John McNaughton's 1994 movie comes from the ever-reliable -- but there were all more frequent offenders that didn't even have the benefit of catfights and shower scenes:
No dropping-dead-of-shock if Scorsese wins Best Director at the Oscars a week from Sunday .
.. but if there's anything The Departed was missing, it was romance.
Arterial spray from massive head wounds, check. Smiling-cobra gang boss, check. Fatal romance that leads an innocent man into a life of crime .
...
not on Scorsese's agenda, but Jacques Becker's crime/romance has that romantic, fatalistic element like few other movies.
The helmet ("casque") in question is the piled-up blond hair of the lead Simone Signoret, one of the most unusual love objects in the movies. She wasn't delicate, and in fact made Mae West look physically slight.
Anyone complaining that all modern actresses are starve-lings need to have a look at this big woman's sensuality. But the title is bound to confuse: Signoret's Marie isn't a helmet-head in the old mid-1980s sense of the slang, back when Washington DC wives had lacquered coiffures that could dull a buzz saw. Certainly, though, Marie does give the sense of a girl whose cold common sense is like a crest and a shield.
It's never really fair to add to the million woes of the indie filmmaker by mentioning the troubles stirring around them pre-release. After all, it's what's on screen that counts. But there comes a time when the fuss is irresistible to watch, especially after a look at Cinematical's and reviews of Hounddog, as well as s earlier anticipation of the trouble to come, from that now notorious Sundance film best known as the "Dakota Fanning rape movie."
The LA Times's Robin Abcarian did the , taking the high road as she described the 21 credited producers, the usual horror stories of money dropping out and director Deborah Kampmeier hocking her car.
took a significantly lower road, reproducing, in all of its misspelled glory, the ad Kampmeier wrote for the Sundance newsletter which describes trying to avoid the unions while she made Hounddog. As a reward for this small act of union-avoidance, Volkswagen presented her with a VW Touareg. It's interesting to note in Neil Gabler's book on Walt Disney, by the way, that unionized newspaper critics refused to attend the screening of Pinocchio because of Disney's well-known labor troubles.
Other times, other morals. Warmly heralding the director's "exploitative, racist piece of s--t," VanAirsdale links to Manhola Darghis' calling Hounddog "overinflated rubbish ..
. as sincere as it is stupid."
Posted Jan 29th 2007 9:01PM by
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We lost E. Howard Hunt recently.
One of the architects of the Watergate scandal, Hunt leaves his own small footprint on the Internet, including this to mark his passing. Hunt once told Who's Who that he was a movie script-writer for the military signal core during the Big War. And , if you believe Wikipedia.
And you shouldn't, according to Gore Vidal himself. (And let me make this perfectly clear, gamers, Hunt's Bimini Run is not to be confused with .) For $3, payable to the New York Review of Books, you can evaluate Hunt's skills as a writer, .
That great artist of malice grouses about how Hunt got a Guggenheim, and both he were both turned down for the grants.
Revenging himself, Vidal claims that Hunt couldn't get arrested in Hollywood ("Not even Universal would touch him," V. quotes MGM's .
) Being Vidal, he includes a sample from the late Hunt's 1944 novel Limit of Darkness. which we include for the benefit and instruction of budding writers: "Oh, Ben, if it only would stop.' She put her face into the hollow of his shoulder.
'No,' he said...
. 'We haven't killed enough of them yet or burned their cities or bombed them to hell the way we must. When I put away my wings I want it to be for good -- not just for a few years.
' " Moreover, there's a very covert reference to Hunt's Central American affairs in the hush-mouthed The Good Shepherd, in the passage about overthrowing the Central American president.
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As always, you have to scratch your head at some of these picks, and wonder how a dowdy creature like Elizabeth II got into a clothes-horse war with Marie Antoinette, but here goes:
Best Director
Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu),
The Departed (Martin Scorsese),
Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood),
The Queen (Stephen Frears),
United 93 (Paul Greengrass)
Achievement in Art Direction
Dreamgirls, The Good Shepherd, Pan's Labyrinth, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and
The Prestige;
Best Cinematography
The Black Dahlia (Vilmos Zsigmond),
Children of Men (Emmanuel Lubezki),
The Illusionist (Dick Pope),
Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Navarro), and
The Prestige (Wally Pfister)
Best Costume Design
Curse of the Golden Flower, The Devil Wears Prada, Dreamgirls, Marie Antoinette, and
The Queen.Best DocumentaryDeliver Us from Evil, An Inconvenient Truth, Iraq in Fragments, Jesus Camp, and
My Country, My CountryBest Documentary Short SubjectThe Blood of Yingzhou District, Recycled Live, Rehearsing a Dream, Two Hands. Best EditingBabel, Blood Diamond, Children of Men, The Departed, United 93Best Foreign FilmAfter the Wedding (Denmark)
, Days of Glory (Algeria),
The Lives of Others (Germany)
, Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico)
Water (Canada).Achievement in Makeup"Apocalypto" (Buena Vista) Aldo Signoretti and Vittorio Sodano
"Click" (Sony Pictures Releasing) Kazuhiro Tsuji and Bill Corso
"Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse) David Marti and Montse Ribe
Original Score"Babel" (Paramount and Paramount Vantage) Gustavo
Santaolalla
"The Good German" (Warner Bros.) Thomas Newman
"Notes on a Scandal" (Fox Searchlight) Philip Glass
"Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse) Javier Navarrete
"The Queen" (Miramax, Path e and Granada) Alexandre Desplat
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The Academy announced the nominees for the leading catagories on Feb 25; while at this writing (5:45 am PST) doesn't have the nominees up yet, here's 's listings; the site notes that
Dreamgirls picked up 8 nominees while somehow missing best picture. While contemplating these, remember James Rocchi's rule: "Who Would Vote For?"
Best Picture
Babel
The Departed
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen
Best Animated FilmHappy Feet
Cars
Monster House
Best ActorLeonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Peter O'Toole, Venus
Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness
Forest Whittaker, The Last King of Scotland
Best ActressPenelope Cruz, Volver
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
Kate Winslet, Little Children
Best Supporting ActorAlan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Mark Walhberg, The Departed
Best Supporting Actress
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal
Adriana Barraza, Babel
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel
Best original scripts were Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, Pan's Labyrinth and The Queen; best adapted scripts were Borat, Children of Men, The Departed, Little Children and Notes on a Scandal.
Keywords: Orson Welles, Days Wonder, Posted Jan, Ten Days, Claude Chabrol, Good Shepherd, Iwo Jima, African American, Ten Days Wonder, Marie Antoinette
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