Category: Film

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

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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.

 

 

 

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Tears in the Rain

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Rutger Hauer, the great Dutch actor, actually had a hand in writing these lines for the ending of “Blade Runner” (the exquisite original; not the boring remake). He was not satisfied with the script and received permission from Ridley Scott to rewrite his lines for the eponymous dying scene:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
I watched c- beams glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain

It doesn’t matter much what C-beams are or where the Tanhauser Gate is: the idea is that we should relish and value every spectacular moment of life, of the wonderful, amazing things we see and experience– not because they are forever but precisely because they are ours, and temporary, and will melt away with our memories “like tears in the rain”.

Rutger Hauer died today (2019-07-24) at 75 .

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The Boys in George Clooney’s Bloat

A few months ago, I started seeing trailers for the new George Clooney movie, “The Boys in the Boat”.   I breezily scratched that film off my list.  Firstly, Clooney is a mediocre director, as evidenced from his previous films.  Secondly, a plucky band of American working-class men incredibly, stunningly, unbelievably, amazingly, shockingly enter an athletics competition and win.  My God!!! Has that ever even happened before?  Will the audience be surprised by anything in the film?  Will the best rower prove to be a nice guy, and get the girl?  Will some group of nefarious, jealous, evil people try to stop them?  Will there be a last-minute hitch to shockingly overcome?

As if.  As if anything about this film was ever going to be even remotely interesting.  Then, I accidentally stumbled into the review on the Roger Ebert review site.  Now, I know rogerebert.com is overly generous to most films, but this review stunned me. I was completely wrong.  This magnificent film is fresh, exciting, rousing, and heroic!  You must see it!  3.5 out of 4 stars.

Seriously?  There is nothing in the description of this movie that even hints at a result like this.  The story is cliché-ridden, it’s directed by the “genius” who directed “The Monuments Men” (which Clooney himself apologized for) and “Leatherheads” which was reputedly so bad I never even bothered to see it, and it overtly toots the message of “believe in yourself” because if you believe in yourself you will win, even if all the other competitors also believe in themselves and win too.  We know for a fact that Nazi athletes do not believe in themselves, are not plucky, are never underdogs, and are known to deflower virgins.

No, I was not wrong.  Here’s a good corrective (the Guardian).

Will I see it?  I retch at the very prospect.  There is not one thing in the previews or reviews or trailer that displays the slightest hint of originality, insight, intelligence, or fun.

And rogerebert.com should scrape itself off the list of “review” sites.  This is not the first time, recently, that it has been excessively generous to a bad film.  I know you want to be popular and you hate disparaging films that you know the public is going to love, but it is a disservice to culture in general to throw yourself at a film like a cheap slut late, late, late on a Saturday night.

 

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Trial by Innuendo

To any casual observer, Mr. Weinstein’s history of accusations of abuse seems as though it should be admissible, and yet it was not.  NY Times (here)

A New York Times reporter is appalled that the conviction of Harvey Weinstein of rape was overturned.  I am not.

At the time of his conviction, I was rather shocked that the court allowed numerous women–who were not the victims in the case– to testify that Weinstein had treated them very badly.  I don’t doubt that he did.  I also think it’s likely he was guilty of rape and I would not have been displeased to see him convicted of it in a fair trial.  But what the prosecution did was unethical and unfair.  They lined up numerous witnesses who all agreed that Weinstein was an asshole.  Then they essentially said– “see what a horrible person he is?  He must also be guilty of rape.”  Of course, they used artful language to make it sound more sophisticated than that.  They said it showed a “pattern” of behavior, an MO, that corroborated what the actual victims experienced.

I don’t think it’s even close.  That was an indefensible tactic and both sides knew it and most informed observers were certainly aware of it.  The prosecution thought, well, this is special.  It’s a new era.  It’s “me too”.  The justice system should change to accommodate this new sensibility.

None of those additional witnesses laid charges against Mr. Weinstein.  All of their allegations were made without any attempt to prove them, and without giving Weinstein the opportunity to rebut or challenge them.  Some of them brought cases that were rejected because of police misconduct.  Presenting their untested evidence in court poisoned the well.

If any of those women had valid charges to make, make them, and take him to court, where you can attempt to prove your case and Weinstein can be given a fair chance to rebut your accusations.  If you can’t or won’t prove them, you have no business testifying in a case you are not involved with in order to smear the defendant.

Complicating the matter is that many of these women did have consensual sex with Weinstein.  At least some of them, were hoping to advance their careers in the film industry as a result.  Even the two actual victims in the case who allege that Weinstein raped them  also had consensual sex with him.  This raises the possibility that many or all of the damaging character witnesses may be experiencing something like buyer’s remorse.  They consented to sex on the expectation that Weinstein would advance their film careers.  When he didn’t fulfill his side of the deal, they came to believe that the sex was, in some sense, less consensual than it was when they consented.

That’s not a crime.  It’s just contemptible.  Or, if it is a crime, the victims are the actresses who were unwilling to make a pact with the devil and, therefore, lost opportunities for a career in film and were replaced by actresses who were willing to trade sex for opportunity.  It is also contemptible for aspiring actresses to use sex to curry favor with producers and other powerful insiders in order to get juicy film roles.

Similarly, in the Bill Cosby case, the victim had agreed to a cash settlement with Cosby for which, as part of the agreement she voluntarily signed, she agreed to never again bring charges against him.  She didn’t have to take the money.  She didn’t have to sign the agreement.  The agreement was actually supervised by a judge through the court system.  So when the authorities decided to charge Cosby anyway, and she testified– breaking the agreement– I thought immediately that a judge should have thrown it out (or demanded that she return the money she received from Cosby).  I thought that was obvious.  Eventually, it was obvious and the case was thrown out.

Reporter Jessica Bennett seems to believe that a bedrock principle of justice– a very important principle– should be dispensed with so it would be easier to convict someone based on flimsy evidence (what could it be if not “flimsy” if it’s not strong enough to support a conviction on its own).   In a sense, it is the principle of having the right to confront your accuser.  The additional women who testified against Weinstein denied him the right to “confront” their accusations by making them in court in a case in which their charges were not being tested.  That is an afront to fundamental justice.

His conviction in California used the same approach.   And I hope that the higher courts throw out his conviction there as well.

Then I hope both systems re-try him and come up with a fair judgement based on the facts of the case– not on his reputation.

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Socialism for the Rich

In the contest for dumbest government programs, state funding of Hollywood productions must rank near the top, along with sports stadiums.

‘After a state economist determined that “the film incentives represent lost revenue” and that their economic benefits were “negligible,” Michigan, which cut funding for the police and schools while facing a severe budget deficit, eventually decided to end its incentives.’

Now Michigan wants to restart the program. Because Georgia and Indiana do it and we must compete in this race to the bottom! Both parties do it while selling the myth that these productions generate local jobs and increased tax revenue. Clint Eastwood, hard core self-reliant pull-your-bootstraps up Republican, is more than happy to take advantage of this welfare program for actors and directors.

‘A recent report prepared for state auditors in Georgia estimated that the tax revenue returned on each dollar spent on incentives was 19 cents. A similar report from New York determined the return was between 15 cents and 31 cents.’

Socialism for the rich.

It is very disappointing, to say the least, that taxpayers who are outraged by this or that or everything completely miss the biggest spending scandals happening right in front of them.

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Mumblecore

This is my response to a Facebook post praising actor Tim Robbins, especially for his super, mega, amazing role in “The Shawshank Redemption”–a highly over-rated film that substitutes the outward trappings of “significance” for real depth.  (Watch “Cool Hand Luke” for a film that really is what “Shawshank” thinks it is.)

Here it is:

It’s called “method acting” and I cringe every time I encounter it in a film. Makes me love British actors and others who speak in normal tone. The delusion is that, by mumbling, you latch into some kind of elusive authenticity or, better yet, convince everyone that you’re like Brando. (Brando could get away with method because he really was a very good actor at times.)

Devotees of the method will even mumble, absurdly, when speaking into large crowds or from distance. It’s like you believe that if you use the same plates and silverware as a gourmet restaurant your food will be just as good.

My comments on Reddit about the magnificent opulence of John Williams movie soundtracks:

I know I’m a minority (sigh) but I don’t think there is a single piece of music by Williams that moves me. Most of it reminds me of brass bands in parades. Most of it is pretty similar– individual pieces never stand out to me. In movies, Williams provides big crescendos to tell you to be impressed by the director, and the quantity of movement in the scene (armies, machines). Does he have a single melody you could say is “haunting”?

Music in movies that did move me: Yann Tierson (“Amelie”); Ennio Morricone “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. Maurice Jarre (“Doctor Zhivago”), Nino Rota (“The Godfather”). The theme from “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Elmer Bernstein is quite beautiful and lifts the movie. The music from “The Third Man” is not my favorite but it is at least very distinctive.  Far more distinctive and evocative than Williams.

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Profound Contrived Authencity: Little Bird (the MiniSeries)

Together, they reached for what Moscovitch calls “profound authenticity,” and created an opportunity for narrative activism: the idea that victims can help heal their trauma and change attitudes by telling their stories.  Globe & Mail

I don’t mind if someone wants to make a film or mini-series that “will help heal trauma and change attitudes”.  Just don’t put it on my playlist.

Changing attitudes is not the mission of real art.  Real art is about expression, revelation, insight, and beauty.  The minute you say, “oh, and we want people to  adopt our political views”, you have sold out the aesthetic dimension to the social dimension.  To make a film to tell people what to think about the way indigenous people were treated in Canada is to make a bad film.  To make a film about the way indigenous people were treated in Canada, just make a good film.  And if you are authentic about it, tell us what you know about the subject: not what you want us to think. And be honest: don’t caricature or exaggerate or make things up just to drive your point home.  Watch a film like “Come Sunday” which makes its point without dumbing down the issues.

So when my wife asked me to find the series “Little Bird” for her to watch, I checked it out.  I thought, it might be good.  I might want to watch it.  I looked for reviews on line and found the “review” (it’s not a review: it’s a press release disguised as news) linked above.

I suspect this series is about making liberal viewers feel great about themselves: I watched a sad story about injustice and felt bad for the victims for I am a good person.

I watched the first ten minutes.  As I feared, it starts by showing the girls who were abducted by the Canadian Child Family Services and RCMP living in nearly idyllic conditions with their happy affectionate parents.   Even worse: there’s that jerky hand-held camera work that immediately conveys “oh look how authentic we are we’re pretending we’re actually filming the real thing which wouldn’t be possible if we had a tripod” vibe.

I am immediately repulsed by most films that show parents being incredibly tolerant and affectionate and patient and loving with their kids as a setup for imminent tragedy or threat.  Nobody interacts with their children the way these parents do.  It’s manipulative and dishonest.  It is the hallmark of bad direction.  And that is how “Little Bird” starts.

In “Little Bird,” Bezhig is driven by her newly emerging repressed memories.  Variety

Oh no.  Seriously?  We’ve been through this movie before and it did not turn out well.  Not at all.    Not this time either.

Podemski: We looked at all the various ways in which trauma presents itself. Especially when it has been repressed for many years . We worked with our two story advisors, Nakuset and Raven Sinclair, who supported us in shaping the way in which our lead character, Esther, experienced PTSD through intrusive memory. We were able to express this authentically through the use of acoustic and visual layers which I think played very authentically throughout the story.

Okay, firstly, it’s not the trauma that has been repressed but the memory of it.  And memories are not repressed.  That is a fake trope from the 1980’s that has pretty well lost all credibility.   And the method by which they decided to tell the story of the “repressed” memories sounds more like therapy than art.  But please don’t try to claim anything like “authenticity” when you are clearly constructing a narrative that projects a political and social idea rather than any particular real human experience.

 

A CBC article on the movie contains this flag:

WARNING: This story contains distressing details

Oh please fuck off with your trigger warnings.   This is bullshit.  What kind of news is “distressing”?    A man falsely accused of rape while feminists claim that women never lie about sexual assault?  Al Franken resigning his seat in the Senate over ridiculously trivial allegations of inappropriate behavior?  Tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums?  Music by Neil Diamond?  Senile white men running the U.S. government?   Prescription drugs developed at publicly-funded universities which cost pennies to manufacture selling for $30,000 a pop?