Category: Film

Comments on film, directors, Hollywood, biopics, music in film, and so on.

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Douglas is Cancelled

Perverse but sometimes brilliant short series about a pair of newscasters (presenters, or what have you), Madeline and Douglas, who, outwardly, at least, have “chemistry”, until some anonymous person tweets that Douglas made an off-color “sexist” joke while drunk at a wedding.

The first mistake in this series is Douglas seeming to admit that he made the joke without remembering what it was (he is asked to repeat the joke over and over again). The second major mistake is having Douglas– supposedly a well-known media personality– be completely clueless about how to manage a softball lob from an anonymous hater (or, as far as we know, a prankster) until, when necessary for a plot twist, he suddenly and dramatically seizes the moment. His sudden assertiveness is as if from a different character altogether.

Douglas and Toby, his producer, immediately act as if the tweet will be believed by everyone and can’t be readily disputed. The most obvious path, to simply dismiss it as fake news, doesn’t seem to occur to them. If he doesn’t remember the joke, why confirm it at all? Add to this the ridiculously preposterous suggestion of crafting an actual anodyne joke of mild offensiveness for Douglas to admit, and one begins to lose faith in the narrative.

Then we go back in time to have the scintillating conversation in Toby’s apartment between Toby and ambitious young presenter Madeline. Toby, like Harvey Weinstein, suggests (without saying so directly) that Madeline will get the position she lusts for if she has sex with him. Spoiler alert!!! This is big problem for the series. Madeline doesn’t leave, in disgust, even when Douglas appears at the door to invite her down to the bar. Douglas, seeing “Do Not Disturb” on the door handle, assumes, without judging harshly, that Madeline has accepted the proposition and goes away. Madeline later blames him for not rescuing her. From what? Herself? She could have walked out, obviously, at any time. Why is Douglas at fault here, as the story obviously firmly decides?

And here is where the series is, finally, gutless: the story would have made sense and could have been powerful if Madeline had, in fact, made the bargain. But “Douglas is Cancelled” wants it both ways. They want to condemn Toby for making the proposition and Douglas for not stepping in, while preserving Madeline’s dubious virtue by having her reject Toby’s advances and then, ridiculously, photograph him naked in his bathtub as if that could be used to blackmail him.

But Madeline did not– when Toby’s intentions became clear– reject the offer and leave. The writer (Steven Moffat) also seems to have forgotten that Toby is single. Why should he give a damn if a young ingenue broadcaster posts pictures suggesting that she was in his bathroom while he was taking a bath? It’s plainly ridiculous. And it would still be his word against hers as to how the circumstance came about. It would also look like Madeline had accepted the bargain. It also definitely shows that Madeline did get her position through manipulation rather than merit (Moffat seems to assume the audience will believe that she automatically has the merit). And it is also clear that Madeline has manipulated events to get rid of her co-host, Douglas, to have the program platform all to herself.

For all it’s flaws, the one brilliant segment, Madeline’s dialogue with Toby in his hotel room, is remarkable, daring, and provocative. Too bad the rest of the series doesn’t live up to the quality of this sequence.

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The Trump Marathon

There are lots of movies that evoke the character of Trump’s hold on the Republican party and the republic– “The Godfather”, “Kingfish”, “Handmaid’s Tale”, “Succession”, “Peewee’s Big Adventure”– but the one I like the most– though it is a dark, unnerving film– is this one, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969). Trump as ringmaster of a dance marathon (they really did have them during the depression), offering desperate, unhappy people, a long-shot chance at money and fame, only to reveal to a contestant that expenses will be deducted from the prize money leaving the “winner” with nothing.

The ending is something only an adolescent could admire.  Heavy-handed, is the word.  It wasn’t necessary to make the point and though it has some narrative credibility the film would have been stronger without it.

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Revenge of the Mistress: Coralie Fargeat

But one of the most impressive feats of all is the way Fargeat subverts and co-opts the male gaze, turning it into something that’s both playful and fierce. The sexy and scantily clad Matilda Lutz initially looks like an irresistible piece of eye candy, and Fargeat knows you’re thinking that. She toys with your expectations of how a woman who looks like Lutz is normally photographed in a film like this before ultimately celebrating her character for the warrior she becomes.

From this review of “Revenge” by Coralie Fargeat.

A woman, Jen, is raped by one of her boyfriend’s hunting buddies while another buddy watches indifferently.  The boyfriend– who is cheating on his wife with Jen– returns and doesn’t seem very disturbed about it.  When she demands justice, she is chased to a cliff by the three men and pushed over so that she is impaled on a tree.  Remarkably, she recovers, and returns to the scene to take brutal revenge.

This reviewer, and others, celebrate this fresh, exciting story because, after all, she was raped: the men deserve to die, and the action sequences are pretty cool.

Maybe they do deserve to die.  That’s for another day, and another philosophical discussion.  Maybe the scenario is contrived to allow you to feel good about watching these men suffer and die.  (That is absolutely true.)    And maybe the transformation of Jen from an air-head exhibitionist potential valley-girl into an action hero capable of astounding acts of athleticism is a puerile fantasy.

It doesn’t matter: the critics fall over themselves to sing the praises of Fargeat.  Why?  Is it because action films that feature male protagonists chasing and murdering males is such marvelous entertainment that a simple role reversal only spikes the tension?  Or is it because those films have become boring and the role reversal makes it interesting again?

 

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Brutal Brutalist

Not overly impressed by “The Brutalist”.

One reason: it’s based on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, which I thought was a really bad novel.   So “The Brutalist” starts in a cesspool.

Second reason: Brody’s acting seems showy and broad, and obviously pitched for awards. Emoting, emoting, and emoting.

Third: it’s written by the director (from the school of James Cameron of “who needs a writer? Can’t be that hard. I’ll do it myself.”)  Director Brady Corbet’s previous experience is almost solely as an actor.  His co-writer– sometimes, a director writing his own movie will smartly bring in a real writer to help– is his girl friend, Mona Fastvold.

Fourthly: it is permeated with pernicious method acting (I am SO intensely into this character that actual articulated sounds fail me).

Fifthly: overuse of jerky, hand-held camera.  I’ll concede that there are rare occasions in which jerky hand-held camera works (like in, “Dr. Strangelove”, during the attack on the base).  But today it is mostly used to substitute incoherence for trajectory, movement for action, and evasion for composition.   It has become universal, like autotune in music recording, for artists who have realized that the vast swath of audiences don’t care about real artistic quality any more.

It all reminds me another incoherent film, “Megalopolis”.   In fact, there are too many similarities to dismiss the idea that they are alluding to the same source material, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.

I’ll be rooting for Chalamet to win best actor over Brody, but Brody has two things working in his favor: “Brutalist” is a Holocaust film, and he plays a character with an accent. Bonus points for playing an architect (Hollywood loves films that evoke tastefulness).

Watch the scene where Laszlo is reunited with his wife.   The most obvious thing about it is that it’s a dud, it falls flat.  Why?  There’s nothing about the long time they have been apart that shows up here.  They act as if they had just seen each other minutes ago at rehearsal.

What Brody does looks like great acting the same way the Mormon Tabernacle Choir looks like good music.  It’s size and quantity, rather than quality.  Brody can be very good– he was great in “The Pianist”– and he’s not really terrible in “The Brutalist”; just too much, and untuned dramatically and tonally discordant.  He’s committed and passionate but he’s trapped in a narrative so obtuse and clumsy that it just feels self-indulgent.  He’s a catalogue of moments that do not add up to a character.

There’s a big difference between a great actor directed by a great director and a great actor directed badly.

 

 

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The Ending of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I thought the ending as it was was rather maudlin and contrived. I rewrite it in my head every time I think about the movie.

Why is Del waiting in the station? He doesn’t (or shouldn’t) know that Neal will come back. By all the rules of the film up to then, he should be on his way somewhere else. So why is he sitting there? Because the screenwriter couldn’t think of any better way to construct that last scene. And the expression on Del’s face when Neal finds him makes me cringe. It’s all laid on a bit thick and, for me, diminishes the film. Most of us like to think we would be compassionate towards Del, if we were in that situation, but in reality most of us would find him really annoying. It’s a childish ending catering to the overflowing self-infatuation of American audiences.

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John Williams to tell you What to Feel

I keep seeing online commentators raving about John Williams musical scores.  Here’s a list of some of his projects.

    • Valley of the Dolls (1967)
    • Towering Inferno (1974)
    • Sugarland Express (1974)
    • Fiddler on the Roof (1971) *  (unfair really: the music in “Fiddler” is from the musical by Sheldon Bock and Sheldon Harnick)
    • E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
    • Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
    • Jurassic Park (1993)
    • Catch Me if You Can (2002)
    • Beach Blanket Bingo (just kidding)
    • Harry Potter (first three films, 2001-2004)

He has received the National Medal of the Arts (2009) and he is an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

And he is boring as hell.

I have watched a lot of movies.  I don’t think I ever thought a John Williams score was evocative or compelling in any of the films he has scored.  He is almost always bombastic, always predictable, and never striking or original or fresh.  His music is there for insecure directors who don’t have faith in their own work and want to make sure the audience knows what they are supposed to be feeling.

Here are some movies that I thought did have strong scores:

    • Amelie (Yann Tiersen, 2001)
    • Elevator to the Gallows (Miles Davis, 1958)
    • Psycho (Bernard Herrmann, 1959)
    • The Graduate (Paul Simon, 1968)
    • Blade Runner (Vangelis, 1982)
    • Once Upon a Time in America (Ennio Morricone, 1984)
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Ennio Morricone, 1966)
    • Dr. Zhivago (Maurice Jarre, 1965)
    • Paris, Texas (Ry Cooder, 1984)
    • Wings of Desire (Jurgen Knieper, Nick Cave, 1987)
    • Godfather (Nina Rota, 1972)
    • The Third Man (Anton Karas, 1949)
    • To Kill a Mockingbird (Elmer Bernstein, 1961)

In most of those movies, there is at least one sequence in which the music plays a powerful role in shaping your emotional response to the action on the screen.  The wistful, luminous score of “Amelie”, for example, has tinge of melancholy that deepens our response to the loneliness and regret expressed by characters she meets in the film.  “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” gives scenes of stark tension, fear, and waste.  Maurice Jarre’s music for “Dr. Zhivago” conveys the long and desire of Zhivago for his lost love, and life.  Vangelis contribution to “Blade Runner” helps create that disorienting, broken, shabby environment of the dystopian future.  Paul’s Simon’s music accentuates the generation gap at the heart of “The Graduate”.  The moody, exhausted landscape of a broken city and culture reverberate in Anton Karas’ zither music in “The Third Man”.

I am astonished that Steven Spielberg chose John Williams to provide the music for “Schindler’s List”.  And then I am not astonished.  Spielberg is a good director of schematic action sequences, and he can give you some good drama, but he invariably sloshes into sentimentality and contrivance, as in the last scene of “Schindler’s List”, and the awful, awful last scene of “Saving Private Ryan” (Ryan, as an older man, weeping at a graveyard in Normandy).

So, yes, John Williams is perfect, for a movie maker who never trusts his audience to “get it”.  The music is there to tell you how to feel, just in case the drama itself didn’t sink in.

 

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Monkee See

Here’s the well known story about the Monkees:

In the mid 1960’s– 1966, to be more precise– Screen Gems decided that a TV show inspired by (read– copied from) the Beatles’ movies “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night”– might be a hit.  They already had a young British singer and potential heart-throb Davy Jones under contract so they put out an ad in Variety looking for young male singers/actors and held auditions. They ended up with a couple of actual musical artists in Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, and a singer Mickey Dolenz.  They were hired as employees of Screen Gems and put to work.

The whole project was a typical piece of exploitive corporate derivative trash.  It was conceived of as trash, executed as trash, and will never not be be trash, no matter how much nostalgia one wafts over it.  It catered to the most manipulable segment of the television audience, adolescents and pre-teens.

The original sin of this project was Screen Gems trying– not too, too hard– to make it look like the Monkees were a real band.  They tried to hide the fact that the musicians on their first album were all paid studio ringers, though the vocals were provided by the actual Monkees.  On the TV show, the Monkees pretended to be playing their instruments as they performed the songs.  They were also pretending to sing, but that goes without saying– almost every piece of dreck at the time used studio recordings dubbed over the video of the performance, even on American Bandstand and Hullabaloo.  (Ed Sullivan was, generally, the rare exception.)

The boys did record the vocals, in a studio.  Producer Don Kirshner quickly discovered that they had to bring the boys in one at a time or they would clown around endlessly and run up expensive studio time without getting a decent take down.

Here’s the popular conception about it today: the Monkees really wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and they complained bitterly that the studio, led by a crass producer, Don Kirshner, wouldn’t let them.  Most writers about the issue today are sympathetic to the band members.  They were oppressed and exploited by Screen Gems and their talents cruelly repressed.

Because, after all, they really were a great band.

Let’s get that out of the way for a moment: the Monkees were a shallow pop band of no artistic significance whatsoever.   Like ABBA and Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy and the Partridge Family, they were a product, shallow, derivative, inane, and trivial.  The studio musicians used on the recordings were competent– sometimes excellent– but they were interchangeable parts of a complex of almost mechanical production.

(I saw a recent interview with Bobby Hart, one half of one of the song-writing teams that wrote songs for the band, and he was quietly lobbying for more respect by insisting that “Last Train to Clarksville” was actually a protest song because the narrator had been drafted and was going to Clarksville to be sent overseas: “I don’t know if I’m ever coming home”.  Yeah.  Deep.)

They began to believe their own press.  They became delusional, attributing their popularity to something magical they had in themselves, outside of the entertainment complex that nurtured and managed and exploited them.

I am not sympathetic.  I absolutely believe that Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, and Davy Jones, and Mickey Dolenz should have been completely free to not sign contracts with Screen Gems, not audition for them, and embark on musical careers on their own, play gigs, rehearse, practice, go to New York, whatever they want.  On their own.  Without the massive and overwhelming support of the Hollywood machinery that made them famous.

Nesmith might well have had a career.  He had money– his mother invented Liquid Paper (that’s a whole other era!) and time.  Tork was somewhat known as a solo artist in New York, though I doubt he would ever have become famous.  Dolenz and Jones were not going to have an impact anywhere, though Jones might have made it on TV as a Bobby Sherman type teen heartthrob for as long as it lasts.  They were all born on third base and thought they hit a triple.

But this righteous indignation!  If I had been in Kirshner’s position (as much as I despise him), I would have fired them all and enthusiastically encouraged them to go for it: embark on careers in the music industry and fulfill your heart’s most passionate desires, to write songs and perform with your instruments, and the best of luck to you.

Does that mean we won’t be on TV in prime time every week for a couple of years?  Well, no: that’s the job you turned down.

That is not what you were hired for.  And that’s not the agreement that was signed.  You voluntarily signed up to be actors in a contrived, derivative TV program.  Then you decided you wanted to be co-creators of the TV show for which you were hired as actors.   The creative jobs were already taken when you signed on.  Good bye.

It is unseemly to take advantage of the monumental publicity apparatus Screen Gems provided them and the privileged access it gave you and declare that, as someone else observed, you really are Vulcans.*

It’s similar in some ways to Hilary Clinton running for president.  Yes, she may have been cute and had a great hair-style, but she obtained the platform from which to run by virtue of being married to Bill Clinton, who did start from nothing, built a career as a local politician and then a governor, acquired a stable of donors to fund a presidential run, and ran for and won the presidency.  He gave you some high-profile jobs in his administration– and a lot of privileged connections– which you leveraged into a Senate run and then a run for the presidency which, against all odds, you lost, to an idiot, the worst candidate for president in 200 years.

She may have been smart.  She may have been as qualified as any other presidential candidate in recent history.  But there really are lots of those around.  She was the fucking wife of a former president who leveraged her privileged access to the corridors of party politics to push herself to the front of the line.

  • * Peter Tork stated:  “The Monkees creating the album Headquarters was like Leonard Nimoy becoming a Vulcan”.  Here.

 

 

 

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Arthur Miller on Method Acting (The Lee Strasberg School of Mumblecore)

Arthur Miller on Lee Strasberg.

While filming “The River of No Return”, director Otto Preminger apparently grew quite exasperated with Marilyn Monroe because every time he gave her direction she would go to her private “coach”, Natasha Lytess, and take direction from her.  Lytess bizarrely coached Monroe to enunciate every syllable cleanly and counteracted Preminger’s desire for a more fluid, compelling performance.  Preminger should have fired Monroe on the spot but it was the nature of Hollywood then– and now– that big stars command deference, because audiences are stupid and choose their entertainment based on how much they care about the celebrity actors than the writer or director.  That’s why so many small-scale independent films are so much better than major Hollywood productions, especially the ones that feature older celebrities playing characters who should be ten, twenty, or even thirty years younger.

Lytess could never have written a screenplay if her life depended on it– she was a parasite, sucking the blood out of the real artists, and Monroe was a repugnant diva more obsessed with her own image and fame than with artistic achievement though she would frame her narcissism as “artistry”.

Anyway, this is an excellent dissection of the Strasberg school of acting:

The following was posted on Facebook 2024-07-09.

I think [Lee] Strasberg is a symptom, really. He’s a great force, and (in my unique opinion, evidently) a force which is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I mean that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing. …But the Method is in the air: the actor is defending himself from the Philistine, vulgar public. I had a girl in my play I couldn’t hear, and the acoustics in that little theater we were using were simply magnificent. I said to her, ‘I can’t hear you,’ and I kept on saying, ‘I can’t hear you.’ She finally got furious and said to me, in effect, that she was acting the truth, and that she was not going to prostitute herself to the audience. That was the living end! It reminded me of Walter Hampden’s comment–because we had a similar problem in ‘The Crucible’ with some actors–he said they play a cello with the most perfect bowing and the fingering is magnificent but there are no strings on the instrument. The problem is that the actor is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions; I’ve heard actors change the order of lines in my work and tell me that the lines are only, so to speak, the libretto for the music–that the actor is the main force that the audience is watching and that the playwright is his servant. They are told that the analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, the verbal texture, is of no importance whatever. This is Method, as they are teaching it, which is, of course, a perversion of it, if you go back to the beginning. But there was always a tendency in that direction. Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had perverted ‘The Seagull.'”

Arthur Miller Interview with Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron
The Paris Review, 1966

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An Alarming Digital Theft

We live in an age of digital theft, though not the kind you think of.  The real digital theft is committed mostly by companies like Google and Meta that steal your data and then resell it back to you in the form of advertising.

But some digital theft feels more like highway robbery, as in this story in the Times about some humble folk artists who were robbed of the ownership of their own original songs.

No one should be surprised that there is theft, even of intellectual property.  What is disconcerting is how difficult it is to reclaim ownership of the stolen property.  Our “system” of publication and distribution of intellectual property is clumsy and defective.

But I believe the genie is out of the bottle on this issue.

 

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Confusing the Men

A New York Times article by Vanessa Friedman said this:

The clothes were like a dare to the watching world, a refusal to cater to pretty-girls-in-pretty-dresses gender expectations and a good-natured riposte to the idea that provocation is an invitation. An “I see your judgment and raise you one” piece of fashion politics.

The writer is referring to sequence of very revealing outfits worn by actress Kristen Stewart as she toured various events to promote her film “Love Lies Bleeding”.  I find it kind of incoherent.  Do you?  How is a provocative outfit a “riposte” to the idea that “provocation is an invitation”?  What is the “riposte” part?  Is what she is referring actually better known as a tease?

We are told– endlessly, it seems– that the “male gaze” objectifies and dehumanizes women.  Male directors demand that actresses reveal their bodies to gratify fantasies of male sexual desire.  Wolf whistles and leering stares are acts of oppression.  Choosing a new employee based on sexual appeal instead of skill or qualification is very, very wrong.

So what is the meaning of Ms. Friedman celebrating Stewart brazen exhibitionism?  She states:

Ms. Stewart and her stylist, Tara Swennen, have taken the film’s carnality and covert politics and translated them for the promotional panopticon, forcing anybody watching to confront their own preconceptions about women’s bodies, their sexuality and exactly what empowerment means, while at the same time undermining the whole circus of branded celebrity dressing.

Does that actually mean anything, other than, having it both ways?  We can decry the male gaze while manipulating it?  Instead of admitting that some women– at least– cultivate the male gaze and revel in it, and profit from it, and feel exhilarated by the attention, we can twist the logic into a cultural pretzel in which up is down and down is sideways.  Kristen Stewart is getting a kick out of the looks she wants: she is making a political statement.  Don’t you dare believe she enjoys the attention.

If you believe Ms. Friedman.

Or you can believe Stewart gets her kicks.