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Raging Bull

2012-01-31T23:07:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 4
Year: 1980
Writer: Paul Schrader, Mardik Martin (adaptation), Jake LaMotta, Joseph Carter, Peter Savage (book)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Star: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci

“Raging Bull” tells the story of a monster. The film is exceedingly powerful, raw and horrifying—unafraid to look unflinchingly into the eyes of a man portrayed to have no redemptive qualities. The movie may not flinch, but I sure did. Here is a masterpiece I genuinely hope I won’t have to watch again.

Jake LaMotta is a famous enough wrestler that even I, who know nothing about boxing, have heard of him. The film, adapted from his autobiography by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, is not a conventional biopic in any sense of the word. It tracks LaMotta’s rise to fame and fall into self-destruction, yes, but it isn’t interested in the wrestling as anything more than an insight into his character. What the film is interested in is LaMotta’s relationships with his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) and wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), two (relatively) innocent people roped to him and incessantly suffering because of it.

From what we see, Jake doesn’t seem like a particularly smart man. He does terrible things to the people he claims to love and then takes punishment for it not from those he’s wronged, but from other boxers wailing on him in the ring. It’s a fascinating, sickening contradiction. He vents his rage (I honestly didn’t mean that to be a pun) against his opponents but also openly takes some of the worst beatings ever filmed…not for forgiveness but to feel even more sorry for himself. We’ve all met people like this—self defeated lugs who do horrible things, punish themselves and then expect you to forgive them because they are so pathetic, all the while beginning the circle once more. Over the course of the movie he spirals more and more out of control until he is left (deservedly) alone, jailed and obese. De Niro disappears into the role with his usual excellence—I’d say this is the bravest performance of his career because there is just nothing redeeming about the guy. At least we had sympathy for Travis Bickle.

Joey and Vickie, the two who suffer the most at Jake’s hands, are both fascinating. Vickie doesn’t seem all too interested in LaMotta when she first meets him, playing hard to get by not showing much emotion as to whether she likes him or not. Then she marries him. From this moment forward, he accuses her of cheating on him repeatedly (there’s never any evidence that she is) and there isn’t a scene she’s in after the first act where he’s not overcome with jealousy. There’s a flash-forward about halfway through the film to a scene in a hotel room before a match, and we finally understand just how much LaMotta has destroyed her. Her face is emotionless and she only answers questions with simple one-word responses, her eyes darting to her husband, hoping her answers haven’t enraged him somehow. She’s even afraid to order a cheeseburger here. During some of the fight scenes, director Martin Scorsese shows Vickie in the audience, watching her husband with an unreadable face. Is she hoping he wins, or praying his opponent murders him?

When the film begins, Joey seems to genuinely love his brother and thinks he knows how to handle Jake’s anger. They are both Italian Catholics, which of course is second only to Irish Catholics (I know this since I am one) in overwhelming guilt and familial bonds, even when they aren’t deserved. Joey tries to emulate Jake in a scene where he savagely beats a man who was speaking to Vickie, but realizes that’s not him. As the years pass, Jake gets more and more violent and unpredictable, causing Joey more frustration and danger.

Everything boils over in a authentically cringe-worthy (not a complaint since we’re supposed to feel that way) sequence where Jake accuses Joey of sleeping with his wife. When Joey leaves in frustration, Jake goes upstairs, berates and beats Vickie, then stomps across town to Joey’s house and physically assaults him in front of his children. This effectively ends Joey’s relationship to his brother, but Vickie (bruised face and all) returns to Jake later that night.

The sequence so unnerved me that, after it ended I realized I had made such tight fists with my hands that my fingernails had actually broken the skin in my palms. I had to turn off the movie for an hour, walk outside and stand in the sun. I should mention here that, while my family life never reached this level of drama, I was brought up in a household with an alcoholic father where things could escalate very quickly. Because of this, the movie touched certain nerves and got under my skin in certain ways most viewers would (hopefully) be immune to. That’s the reason I don’t want to see the movie again. Too many memories I’ve already dealt with and moved on from.

Anyway, now that I’ve finished oversharing, let’s get back to “Raging Bull.” Scorsese was right to shoot the film in stark black-and-white. It underlines the beauty of Vickie in the early sequences, but also emphasizes the revulsion of the fight scenes. Like in “Schindler’s List,” color would have undercut the power of the violence. The different fight sequences throughout the movie are jaw-droppingly staged and shot. I didn’t even realize until the sequence that showed an entire stadium of fans that the other fights only showed the first row or two of audience, instead draping the background in dark gray shadows and groups of lights. The fights are quite intense, and not just because of the generous use of blood and gore (when LaMotta breaks his opponent’s nose, I had to look away, and I never look away). Scorsese throws in some wild angles and the ring itself seems to alter in size from shot to shot.

To me, the heart of the movie is one of its last scenes. Years have passed, and Jake is doing bad stand-up comedy in New York when he fatefully sees Joey going into a convenience store. Jake follows Joey, doing everything humanly possible to make his brother talk to him again. When Joey reaches his car, Jake stops him from entering and physically forces Joey to hug him and will not let him leave until Joey promises to call him, even though they both know that won’t happen. Even all these years later, Jake still believes that the only way to get someone to love him is to force it upon him. He might be humbled, but he hasn’t changed. They never do.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Singin' in the Rain

2012-01-31T13:19:00.001-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 5
Year: 1952
Writer: Betty Comden, Adolph Green
Director: Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
Star: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds

The best musicals are the ones that are strong enough to exist without their musical numbers even though you can’t imagine the film without them. “Singin’ in the Rain” would function perfectly as a comedy were the songs and dances excised, and yet having them in there makes the film so much more fun. Watching this movie makes me wish it rained more in Los Angeles.

The film takes the essence of the Summer Stock “Let’s put on a show, folks!” musicals and transplants it to late ‘20s Hollywood. It is the end of the silent era. The show the folks are trying to put on is fictional studio Monumental Pictures’ first talkie. Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly, also the co-director with Stanley Donen) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagan) are the studio’s biggest stars and seem like the perfect team to launch the sound era…except that Lamont’s voice sounds like Eliza Doolittle’s before the singing lessons. Luckily, Don has recently fallen for ingénue Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), and she’s got a great singing voice that ultimately substitutes for Lina’s in the finished film.

Kelly, Reynolds and Donald O’Connor (as Kelly’s childhood best friend) form the trio at the center of the action. One would expect a love triangle, but the movie wisely avoids this unnecessary complication and instead just focuses on giving the audience as much time with these three very likeable actors as possible. They aren’t “characters,” per se, but simply extensions of the personalities we would expect from all the classic musicals. Aside from his job, how different is Kelly’s character here than his in “Summer Stock” or “An American in Paris”? And is Donald O’Connor really any different than his role in “Anything Goes” or from Danny Kaye’s character in “White Christmas”? But even as I write this, I’m not sure I mean this as a criticism. After all, you go to this type of film more for the actors’ charisma than original characters.

Kelly and Donan provide us with some excellent musical set-pieces, with O’Connor bringing down the house (literally) in “Make ‘em Laugh.” His physical comedy is spot on, and I rewound the DVD several times over the course of the number. However, I must say that the song is a blatant rip-off of “Be a Clown” from the Kelly/Judy Garland classic “The Pirate,” and that distracted me somewhat. And then there’s Kelly performing the title song in a rain-drenched street. Throughout the film, he shows an exuberance in his dancing that makes it appear much more effortless than it actually must have been. It’s probably my favorite musical piece from him, though “You Wonderful You” from “Summer Stock” (where his dancing partners were a creaky board and a newspaper) is right up there too.

Hagan comes damn near close to stealing the show as the dumb blonde who turns into the villain during the third act. She’s got many of the movie’s best lines, though I must note that the screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green is filled with genuine moments of wit and fun for all the characters. You actually feel a bit sorry for Lina during the first act, knowing she won’t have a career in a year or two, but after the monstrous things she does to Kathy’s character for no real reason (she believes she’s in a relationship with Don because the tabloids say so, even though Don is quick to remind her (and remind her (and remind her)) that it’s not true), it becomes fun to hate her.

There’s a lengthy musical interlude near the end of the second act where the movie literally stops to show a scene Don is planning to shoot for the movie. There are some tremendous moments in it, specifically a ballet between Kelly and a woman attached to a (literally) twelve-foot-long sheet of white cloth that floats around them, a character unto itself. And yet the scene doesn’t need to be there. It brings the movie to a halt and loses whatever tension there is leading into the climax.

I’ve always preferred the Kelly musicals to the Astaire ones (as evidenced by my article on fellow AFI Top 100 film “Swing Time”), but the truth is that I view most of the classic musicals as small pieces of one big whole. Yes, sometimes they transcended the genre, as with George Cukor’s “A Star is Born”, but there’s something I genuinely like about the familiarity of this genre. Sitting down with an MGM-style musical is the equivalent of enjoying a piece of cherry pie with lemonade on a summer day—there will be variations in taste and quality, but you know what to expect going in.

In a way, the songs in the movies don’t matter that much since they were oftentimes pounded into the screenplay randomly and made to fit even if it doesn’t feel quite right. Also because, more often than not, the songs are really great, especially if Cole Porter is writing them. Most of the movies are variations on the aforementioned “Let’s put on a show, folks” storyline, with few variations (three leads or four leads, location and the quality of the gags and dialogue) and are unafraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves. What makes the films really succeed or fail is the mix-and-match of the leads and supporting cast. “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “The Pirate” and “White Christmas” work because of this, while the chemistry just isn’t there with “Anything Goes” or “Till the Clouds Roll By.” My favorite has always been Howard Hawks’ “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, which has her iconic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number.

“Singin’ in the Rain” is better than most of those films because the main cast really gels and because Hagan is such a stunner as the villain. But I’m guessing it’s so high on this list because the film really is a love letter to Hollywood without the usual cynicism or heartbreak. Executives, directors, screenwriters, actors…everyone in the industry can watch this movie and come out of it feeling better about him or herself.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Gone With The Wind

2012-01-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 6
Year: 1939
Writer: Sidney Howard
Director: Victor Fleming
Star: Vivien Leigh, Clark Cable, Olivia de Havilland

I’m guessing that when “Gone With the Wind” was released in 1939, its final act meant something completely different than what we take away from it today. Our views of women and feminism have been so altered in the decades since Scarlett O’Hara first declared she’d “never be hungry again,” and yet the film perseveres. The best art appeals to every new generation in its own way and, though the movie is deeply flawed, the great things about it make it timeless…even if what take out of it has changed so much.

Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) is one of three daughters born and raised on Tara Plantation. Life there…well…it’s very high school, but with slaves (more on them later). Everyone is posturing, gossiping and gasping at the slightest hint of someone who is unafraid to let his or her real opinions be known. Scarlett is the loveliest belle in the area, and because she seems to be able to get any man she wants, all the women hate her and imply that she’s a whore. She doesn’t want just anyone, though. Scarlett is in love with the boring Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), but alas he’s married to the genuinely kind Melanie (Olivia de Havilland). Then there’s the handsome rogue Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), who sets his eyes on Scarlett as soon as he sees her.

Then the Civil War happens.

Suddenly all the delicate pleasantries of the South are met with harsh reality, and most of the women and men who so easily judged Scarlett die or fall completely apart. She doesn’t. Throughout the movie’s epic running time, she proves time and again how she will persevere no matter what you throw in her path. She’s got gumption. Spunk. And she’s probably my favorite character in all of film history.

One of the many things I love about “Gone With the Wind” is Scarlett’s relationship with Melanie, who is beloved by everyone who meets her. It’s delicate and could have drowned in easy melodrama, especially since Scarlett is in love with Melanie’s husband. But they really do become best friends. Melanie represents the sympathy and humanity Scarlett sometimes lacks in her “It’s all about me!” mentality, while Scarlett brings Melanie down to earth when she gets too precious for her own good. It is never explicitly stated, but they seem to sense an inherent strength and resilience in one another, and respect each other because of that. We think of Scarlett’s strong moments—driving that cart through occupied territory and the image of her shooting the Yankee soldier in the face…but it’s easy to forget that Melanie was in the back of that cart keeping a baby alive even though she could barely stay conscious herself because of the pain, or that she appeared at the top of the stairs seconds after the shooting with a sword in hand.

The movie is, of course, gigantic. It never gets bigger than the long, harrowing passages in Atlanta right before the Yankee troops arrived. That shot of Scarlett seeking out a doctor and wading through what appears to be the entire Confederate army, all dead or injured, remains one of the great images ever put on film. Of course, whatever else is going on in the world…the movie is all about how that affects its heroine. And, really, isn’t that how we are when we are young? Major, gigantic things are happening in the world, but what does that have to do with meeeee!?

Speaking of that pesky Civil War, the film’s inherent racist tendencies are still unsettling. During the main titles, cards sentimentalize the South as a time of “Master and Slave,” and almost all of the black characters (except for one who tries to murder Scarlett when she rides through a shanty town) are easily dominated and…well…dim. Big Sam’s introduction at the beginning of the movie has some horrendous dialogue, and poor Butterfly McQueen as the mentally handicapped Prissy has to screech the line “I don’t knows nuthin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies!” before getting slapped. The exception to this is Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), who is the brightest, most intelligent major character in the movie, even if her introduction yelling orders to Scarlett from an open window is pretty cringe-worthy. There are sweet moments, like when Scarlett gives her former slave Pork her father’s gold watch but, while I can understand downplaying the slavery issues because Scarlett genuinely doesn’t care about them, that doesn’t excuse breaking P.O.V. to show black characters acting like idiots simply to underline stereotypes.

The love triangle…er…square at the center of the film is really quite interesting. Scarlett “loves” Ashley, who may physically desire Scarlett (and like the fact that she’s after him incessantly), but she really loves Rhett. Rhett is in love with Scarlett but, as the film progresses, his bond with Melanie is built up to the point where we could realistically see a different version of the movie where he marries her and she “reforms” the rogue. Of course, Ashley is the most boring of the group, handsome but about as interesting as watching paint dry on a sunny day.

The performances here are really an embarrassment of riches. Leigh is perfect as Scarlett, simply perfect. You understand our frustration with her immaturity and yet cannot resist being swept away by her from the moment she is first introduced. It should also be noted it’s one hell of a lot of fun to see her do another variation on this southern belle character in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Gable doesn’t seem to be acting, which I mean as a compliment. Likewise, de Havilland is so good at being sweet and loving that you forget you are watching a character and simply watching a real person. McDaniel is also great, and seeing her laugh and blush when she shows Rhett her petticoat brings a smile to my face every time I see the movie.

Earlier I wrote about how the final act means something different today than when it was first released. I’m assuming at the time, the character of Scarlett could only get away with so much before being demeaned and showed up by a man. She’s resilient but, seriously, they didn’t want to see her walking into a sunset after all the stuff she pulled. Today, Scarlett represents a survivor who is smart in unexpected ways but refuses to mature until life forces her to. The entirety of the movie is life pushing her down before she stands up again and refuses to be defeated and, for me, the final act represents this happening again, but the woman who emerges this time is just that: a woman, not a girl. As much as she loves Rhett, he really doesn’t deserve her, and is much more immature and fragile (after their daughter dies, Mammy observes that God gives Scarlett the strength to stand up, but the tragedy breaks Rhett almost completely). She doesn’t need him. And Melanie, on her deathbed, saw Scarlett as a woman she could truly trust with the fates of her husband and, most importantly, her son. Melanie’s goodness has rubbed off on Scarlett, and she didn’t even realize it. So she’s free of her husband, free of the obsession with Ashley which dragged her down so often, has enough money to do whatever she wants, and is finally ready to approach her life as an adult, whatever tomorrow brings.

I love “Gone With the Wind,” with all of its wonderful melodrama, lavish colors and smart characterization. Recently, I watched Steven Spielberg’s new film “War Horse” and smiled to myself when I saw that the final scene incorporated those same deep oranges and yellows that we see here in the skies Scarlett so often stares into. Several people at AFI reacted badly, saying that the colors and heightened emotions were “exactly what is wrong with Hollywood.” Why? Yes, we live in an era of cynicism, but what’s wrong with emotions and sentimentality if they are deeply felt and come from a real place? “Gone With the Wind” is a movie unafraid to feel, and its core emotions still ring true no matter what era we look at them from.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Lawrence of Arabia

2012-01-29T19:18:00.001-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 7
Year: 1962
Writer: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Director: David Lean
Star: Peter O’Toole, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif

I have spent the last 220-odd minutes with “Lawrence of Arabia,” and yet I don’t feel like I’ve really seen it. If there was ever a movie that did everything but reach out of your television, shake you and insist “You really should be watching me on a big screen,” this is it. There are images here that impress on the television, but you can only get their full impact if you see it up on a huge movie screen. I was bummed to see there were no revivals in Los Angeles anytime soon (to see this onscreen at the Egyptian Theatre must be quite an experience), and yet seeing it as I did helped me to appreciate many of the more subtle gestures in a film known for its grand ones.

The movie opens with, in my opinion, a misstep. T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) rides his motorcycle at dangerous speeds through the English countryside, swerves to miss pedestrians, crashes and dies. We then flash back to his being stationed in Arabia to, essentially, observe and report on Prince Faisal (Alex Guinness). He ends up leading a major section of Faisal’s army to battle against the Turks, first with cooperation of the British Army and later notsomuch. I was genuinely unaware of Lawrence and all of the events that happened here when I saw the film, so knowing he survived everything hurt the element of surprise and suspense, particularly in the second half.

That said, so much of the writing here is brilliant and, despite the sometimes confusing and intricate histories of Arabian sects and the British military’s motives, the film never feels like it is talking down to its audience. Lawrence is given two young men who would be nothing more than two-dimensional sidekicks in a lesser film, but here co-writers Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson find ways to use the characters (and their fates) to enhance Lawrence’s emotional journey. Two other characters are introduced (played by Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif) and, subtly, become the two halves of Lawrence’s conscience and the closest thing he has to friends.

Of course, all of this would be of little use if the central character was not someone we wanted to spend 220 minutes with. There are many reasons why I cannot believe that this movie, on this scale, got produced, but centering the film on someone like T.E. Lawrence is right at the top of the list. He’s genuinely eccentric in just about every way, develops a horrifying bloodlust, is severely egotistical…and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. Just imagine if you had a token, stiff-jawed, shirt-torn action figure at the center of this story. He would be metaphorically eaten up by the desert locations around him by the end of the first half-hour. But, as majestic as Arabia is (and we’ll get to that in a paragraph or two), Lawrence is the real reason we remain engaged. O’Toole’s performance is stunning—we care about him but are a little afraid of him. He can pull off a magnificent scene where he must kill the man whose life he almost died saving and sell a scene where he humorously dances around in his new wardrobe with the same verve and energy. At no point in the film do we really “know” Lawrence, and that only adds to how fascinating he is. It’s astonishing…almost unbelievable…that he got away with so much and accomplished so many things, and yet the reality is that he did. Well, some version of reality. As with every other film on the top 100, I went out of my way to avoid historical context and other critical discussions until after finishing this writing, so I don’t know how true the film is to his real journey.

I think it’s safe to say that there has never been a movie that has eclipsed “Lawrence of Arabia” in terms of scope and epic nature, with apologies to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Avatar.” The locations, specifically in the first half of the movie, are so astoundingly created and shot that half the fun is wondering how they could realistically have been made. There are many scenes where a character (or a character on his camel) will walk into an untouched sea of desert, leaving a single line of tracks behind him. How could they have possibly set up for multiple takes? Other scenes involve the characters walking or riding through intense dust storms. How did the cameras continue to function, even with protection, through all of it? Everything here is just jaw-dropping, with images the viewer will never forget, which allow the movie to function as a poetic journey as much as a cerebral one.

There is little action, but when it happens, it really counts. Director David Lean stages a crackerjack train crash at the beginning of the second half where you convince yourself the train must be a miniature…until an army of Arabs race over dunes of sand and interact with it. It turns out Lean is a little fetishistic about trains. Here, “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “Summertime,” “Brief Encounter”…I’m sure there are more.

With O’Toole giving a performance for the ages, it’s only logical that the rest of the cast doesn’t quite live up to him. Sharif comes off best, and his exit from the film is an emotionally highlight. Quinn and Guinness struggle under some horrible make-up (Quinn in particular), while excellent character actor Claude Rains seems to have taken sedatives before every take. There’s also a journalist character (Arthur Kennedy) introduced in the second half who is superfluous, only serving as a way to get the main characters to say exposition in a fairly natural way.

And yet, even as I complain about “Lawrence of Arabia’s” shortcomings, I feel like they are mere quibbles in the scheme of things. This movie accomplishes more in one of its almost-four hours than most movies do in their entire running time. It’s the thinking man’s epic film, stands up on multiple viewings and making sure to fill every one of its 220 minutes with something fascinating. I only wish I could have seen it up on a big screen.

My Score (out of 5): ****1/2

Schindler's List

2012-01-25T22:16:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 8
Year: 1993
Writer: Steven Zaillian (screenplay), Thomas Keneally (book)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Star: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes

Of all the horrors, brutality and blood we witness in “Schindler’s List,” the moment that haunts me most is a small, easily overlooked one. A well-to-do Jewish family is being forced to leave their home for the Ghetto and, as they are led to a car to take them away, a young blonde girl screams hateful phrases after them. She can’t be more than 10, and this girl’s face is so full of revulsion…so filled with uncompromising disgust for these people she’s never met…it shook me deeply. She’s too young to understand why she is meant to hate the Jews, and yet the feeling seems have overwhelmed her entire being. The girl is never seen again, but that moment casts a long shadow through the rest of the movie. How can someone, let alone a group of human beings so large as the Nazis, hate like that?

The film takes on the Holocaust not by aiming its camera only at the horrors, but also at the hope. There are two men who stand at either end of the film. The first is businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who represents the goodness that can still be possible even in impossible situations. The other is Nazi official Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), a psychopathic monster who shoots those incarcerated in his Death Camp from the balcony of his villa. Schindler always puts on a big show—gifting high-ranking Nazi officials with the best wines and caviar and always appearing to be in support of the movement—but secretly saves over a thousand lives by bringing the incarcerated to work at his factories. As the war wears on, he begins taking more desperate actions to keep them safe, all the while spending more and more money to buy off anyone who might sense what he is up to.

Steven Zaillian adapted the screenplay, and though I don’t like to use the word flawless (because, honestly, nothing is), I sincerely believe that the structure, dialogue and style of his work here is as close to perfection as any screenplay before or since. The movie is over three hours long, filled with dozens upon dozens of characters and yet, when I ask myself what could be changed to improve the story, nothing comes to mind. There have been hundreds of movies about the Holocaust made at varying levels of quality, from comedies (“The Great Dictator”) to melodramas (“Sophie’s Choice”) and everything in between. And yet, despite all this, Zaillian still manages to approach the film with a fresh eye, finding new and intriguing perspectives to view the world from. Another scene of great power comes when hundreds of Jews are loaded on a train and told to label their luggage so it can be returned to them at their destination. We follow the luggage into a warehouse, where we see dozens of workers opening the suitcases, retrieving everything inside and stacking it. The scene is ghastly and stomach churning to begin with, but then Zaillian moves the focus to one Jewish worker going through valuables when a Nazi solider drops a bag of teeth that have gold fillings in front of him. How can he possibly react to that?

Another masterstroke is the push/pull in the relationship between Schindler and Goeth. Goeth believes the two to be friends, and they often talk at length about the Jews, the war and what is to become of the people. A lesser screenwriter would have written in subtle dialogue assuring us “It’s okay, Schindler is sickened by all this. He’s a good guy,” but Zaillian believes we are smart enough to get it and does not talk down to us. He also sets up a pitch perfect scene where, after Schindler is arrested for kissing a Jewish woman at his birthday party, Goeth actually testifies that Schindler is harmless and a friend to the Nazis.

The film is (almost) completely shot in black-and-white, and that was the right choice. Something about seeing these images in color would have been too much. Color adds a level of beauty to anything, no matter how horrible (think of the red blood of the Hammer Horror films of the ‘70s), so the black-and-white underlines how bereft of life this world was. And when Spielberg does use color, it is to great effect. Take the small girl seen wearing the red coat. We see her about an hour into the film and, because she is in color (however muted that color is), we take note of her importance. Later in the movie, Schindler sees her body unearthed from one of the mass graves and taken for incineration. And that’s it. I’m guessing we see at least a hundred human beings murdered in terrifying, disgusting ways throughout the movie. The girl’s body appears just at the point when the violence threatens to become numbing and, to me, it represents a reminder to the viewer that every body we see was a soul. Someone of importance whose death was significant and should not be discounted no matter how hard it is for us to process it.

“Schindler’s List” is certainly a masterpiece, but I must point out the film’s climactic moment. War is about to end, the Jews will be freed, and Schindler must leave those he has saved. As he walks toward his car, he begins to break down. Though he saved so many, he cannot live with himself. He could have done more, he insists, saved more people…somehow. He points to his car, his Nazi badge, wishing he could have sold them, and cries uncontrollably in the arms of his friend…one of the thousand he rescued. The scene moves me beyond tears and is one of the great moments in all of film.

And now, as is becoming regular in these final few entries, a memory. During my last months at AFI, we were invited to the filming of a pilot for a new documentary show for Turner Classic Movies called “Master Class: The Art of Filmmaking.” The first episode would feature Steven Spielberg and John Williams discussing their careers and giving advice to the Fellows. I was lucky enough to be one of the few chosen to ask them a question…and for the life of me I do not remember. I remember that words were coming out of my mouth, and that cameras were rolling, but nothing more. I do remember that, as I sat down, Spielberg smiled and said “That’s a good question.” I’ve seen the show three times on television and, to this day, I still get too excited to process and remember what I said. This man helped inspire me (and, I’m certain, hundreds of others) to become a filmmaker and, for as long as I live and wherever my life and career takes me, I’ll never forget him telling me I asked a good question…even if I will probably never remember what it was.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Vertigo

2012-01-23T21:21:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 9
Year: 1958
Writer: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor (screenplay), Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac (novel)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Star: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes

If “Rear Window” (my favorite Hitchcock film) tells us the most about Alfred Hitchcock as a director and “Notorious” (the best Hitchcock film) tells us the most about Hitchcock as a craftsman, then “Vertigo” tells us the most about Hitchcock as a man. If you have any familiarity with his body of work or his personal life, you’ll feel much insight into his personal obsessions and emotions after finishing the movie. Whereas so many of his other films are so polished, with every “i” dotted and “t” crossed, “Vertigo” is unafraid to be messy…to leave questions unanswered and emotional journeys unfinished. In an odd way, it’s the ultimate Hitchcock film but also his most atypical.

The story opens with a riveting chase sequence over the roofs of San Francisco. Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) almost tumbles over the edge of a building and, because he is so crippled with vertigo, accidentally allows his partner to fall to his death. This is the first time we see the much-imitated vertigo effect that has been used countless of times since whenever someone’s world goes wonky in a film or on television. It still works.

We fade to the future, and Scottie is shown about as emasculated as possible. His next scene is with his best friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), and he’s wearing a corset (yes, you read that right) and faints after stepping up on a chair. There’s also some implication that he’s impotent, but that’s the only subtle thing in the scene. The rest of the long-winded scene is bad-exposition central. “Here, let me tell you what happened with me retiring from the police force, who I am, what vertigo is and why we aren’t married” isn’t explicitly stated by Scottie, but it might as well be dialogue.

The next scene isn’t much better, with Scottie’s old college friend Elster (Tom Helmore) explaining how he wants Scottie to follow his wife Madeline (Kim Novak), because she disappears for hours at a time, both physically and mentally. Lots and lots of talking, but then Scottie begins his investigation and things pick up immediately. There are undertones that Madeline is being possessed by the ghost of an ancestor who committed suicide when she was young, and this “how realistically should we take this situation?” permeates the first hour of the film. Scottie becomes obsessed with Madeline, making fewer and fewer phone calls to Elster and they seem to fall for each other…until she “kills herself.”

Up until this point, “Vertigo” could be like any other Hitchcock movie, but then the really interesting stuff starts to happen. Scottie has a nervous break and, after recovering enough to be let out of an asylum, spies a woman named Judy (Novak again), and the obsession begins again. Judy seems almost identical to Madeline, and we quickly find out that’s because she is the same person. Instead of saving the twist for the final reel, screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor reveal that Judy was impersonating Madeline for Scottie so that Elster could get away with murdering his wife. It’s such a surprising place to make the reveal, but in doing so it gives the final act of the film added power. Judy really did fall in love with Scottie, you see, so things get complicated fast.

Because of this, we sympathize with Judy more than Scottie in the final act. Scottie becomes an animal, only interested in Judy because he wants to make her into Madeline, and Judy allows this to happen because she loves him so much. We sympathize somewhat with Scottie, knowing that the truth must be revealed and that it will break him once more, but watching him almost use every mental manipulation and abuse to get Judy to become Madeline just feels…wrong. There’s a scene in a dress shop that is particularly cringe inducing…in a good way.

You can’t watch these scenes without thinking of Hitchcock’s blondes. Grace Kelly was his ultimate blonde, and in a way every other actress who came after (Novak, Barbara Harris, Tippi Hedren, Eva Marie Saint, Vera Miles, Doris Day…phew, I’m sure I forgot someone) was groomed specifically to be some version of Kelly. Scottie’s devastated lines to Judy in the final scene seem especially apt:

“Did he train you!? Did he rehearse you!? Did he tell you what to do and what to say!?”

If that line works on a macro level concerning the Master director’s obsessions, it is also perhaps the most emotionally raw and unhinged we see any hero in one of his films (I write “perhaps” because of Ingrid Bergman’s drunken tirade at the opening of “Notorious”). Scottie screams these lines, but he might as well be screaming them at himself—he has, in essence, become the same monster he demeans. As dark as the ending is (Judy commits suicide after mistaking a nun for a ghost) and as close as the writers allow Scottie to get to the edge, they still give us the smallest glimmer of hope in the final seconds. After Judy falls, Scottie follows her out on the ledge of the belltower—not to kill himself but to look out over the edge at his fallen love. His vertigo is cured.

“Vertigo” is one of those movies that has great ideas and emotional depth, but is imperfect. As excellent as Stewart is here diving into his obsession, he’s really just not that good of a match with Novak in the love scenes. The lazy writing at the beginning grates, but the atypical, powerful third act more than makes up for it.

Speaking of obsession, when I was in grade school I became obsessed with Hitchcock and his films. I would go to the library on weekends and rent ten movies, then watch them in bulk over the course of the week. At some point after I had gotten through all the library’s movies multiple times, I came across an old VHS copy of Hitchcock’s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony. When I watched the ceremony I was swept away by the idea of the American Film Institute…and at one point Hitchcock turned to a selected group of Fellows from the Conservatory to impart knowledge on them. One of the clearest memories I have from childhood is running into the kitchen and telling her that one day soon I would be studying film at AFI. You want to know the best part about having dreams? Sometimes they come true.

My Score (out of 5): *****

The Wizard of Oz

2012-01-23T15:37:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 10
Year: 1939
Writer: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf (screenplay), L. Frank Baum (novel)
Director: Victor Fleming
Star: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Margaret Hamilton

At some point since 1939, “The Wizard of Oz” stopped being a movie and started becoming a shared American experience. Our memories of watching the movie have become just as important as the movie itself. It’s nearly impossible to sit down and view it with fresh eyes, especially when your mind keeps reminding you that one of your 150 favorite parts is only seconds away.

What I came away with most during this viewing is that the film is surprisingly vicious and subversive. Hell, the first song sung after Dorothy reaches Oz is “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead,” which goes into excessive detail about just how happy the Munchkins are that the Wicked Witch of the East came to an especially harsh end. Multiple people tell Dorothy that Auntie Em will have a heart attack when she figures out Dorothy has run away. Toto is threatened with death no less than six times. And the less said about those horrifying flying monkeys (they gave me nightmares when I was younger, how about you?) the better. But it’s all presented in such a fun, Technicolor, perky way that the movie gets away with it and parents seem to forget about the horrors until they introduce their kids to the film…and by that point it’s too late.

Everyone knows the story. Dorothy and her house are picked up by a twister and plopped down into the magical land of Oz, where she goes off to see the Wizard to hitch a ride home. The first reveal of Oz, which is the first shot in Technicolor, is a doozy. It follows Dororthy’s P.O.V. for a few seconds but then sweeps forward, ready to explore the world itself, and takes in what seems like the entire Munchkinland set before returning to Dorothy and Toto for her realization that she isn’t in Kansas anymore. Anyway, Dorothy picks up some friends along the way: a Scarecrow who is in need of some brains, a Tin Man who just wants a heart to call his own, and a Cowardly Lion looking for some courage. No one mentions the obvious solution: Kill the lion (he’s a coward so he won’t fight back), give his brains to the Scarecrow and heart to the Tin Man…but that would have probably been a little too dark for even this movie.

Judy Garland is perfect as Dorothy, old enough to carry off the singing and dancing and gravitas but young enough to pull off being a lonely young girl. The rest of the cast, filled with fun character actors chewing on their roles (literally in the case of Bert Lahr, who was chewing on his tail for most of the movie), seem to be having the times of their lives. It’s all over the top, but still heartfelt.

Every piece of music from the film has permeated our culture to the point where everyone seems to instinctively know every lyric to every song, even if it’s been years since he or she has seen the movie. Side note: could someone please explain to me what a “slitch” is? You know, from the lyric “the house began to pitch, and the kitchen took a slitch.” And it’s not just the songs—the instrumental music is just as well known. And it’s all still great. The lyrics are inventive, the melodies sweet and simple…how can you not be moved by the “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the way director Victor Fleming stages it in the film?

Everyone remembers “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as perhaps the greatest song in all of film (AFI ranks it as the best song in all American Film), and who can’t completely relate to those lyrics in an honest, heartfelt way? What everyone forgets about the movie (myself included), is that Dorothy ends her journey by essentially saying she was wrong to sing the song. Right before she goes home, the Tin Man asks her what she learned from her adventures…and she says this:

“Well, I think that it wasn’t enough to just want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, and if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”

Um, excuse me? That’s what she got out of this adventure? That she shouldn’t dream big at all and certainly shouldn’t follow her dreams if she gets them? This bit of dialogue feels so tacked on and disingenuous it really threw me for a loop.

As a kid, the ending always felt like a bit of a bummer. She heads home for no real reason, the movie heads back to sepia tones and the fate of dear Toto is still very much up in the air. Looking at it as an adult, it’s still poignant and bittersweet, but her choice to go home represents something deeper than I think I could comprehend as a child.

After all, Dorothy only makes two decisions during the entire film. The first is to run away and the second is to go home. She is told to do every other thing in the film, and obeys because she is a (mostly) obedient Kansas girl. “Never take off the shoes!” “Follow the yellow brick road!” “Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West!” etc. Her first decision, to run away, is a very selfish one, based on her feeling like no one cares about her and what she wants. On the other hand, her decision to return home is a completely selfless one. It’s beyond her just missing her aunt and uncle—she takes upon herself the responsibility of being one of the family. She goes to ensure Auntie Em doesn’t have a heart attack. She goes because she knows it’s the right thing to do, not the easy thing to do. And, because of that, she takes her first step into adulthood.

“The Wizard of Oz” is a great film, but doubly special because most of us get to discover it many times throughout our lives and experience the story from a different perspective each time. First as a child, where we love the colors and the dance and the music. Then, often, as parents, where you can pick up on the sly adult winks you missed as a child (“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”). Then as grandparents. And often many, many times in between. And it’s still just as special. The film doesn’t age…doesn’t get tired or repetitive on multiple viewings. What it does do is make us smile just about the whole way through, and in times like these a gift like that is priceless.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Sophie's Choice

2012-01-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 91
Year: 1982
Writer: Alan J. Pakula (adaptation), William Styron (novel)
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Star: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol

With apologies to the other depressing films on the AFI Top 100, “Sophie’s Choice” is by far the most miserable and bleak. It tells a sad, sad story in just about the saddest way possible. There’s no hint of redemption or hope to be found anywhere—the filmmakers make sure of this. I’m pretty sure that’s what they were going for, so on those terms the film is a success, but really, the only reason to sit through these two-and-a-half hours is Meryl Streep. Her iconic performance makes the movie necessary viewing, though I doubt many would want to sit through it twice.

The film opens as an idealistic young Southern writer named Stingo (Peter MacNicol) arrives in Brooklyn looking to write the great American novel. He moves into a pink house and becomes fast friends with his upstairs neighbors Nathan (Kevin Kline) and Sophie (Streep). They seem so very much in love, but their relationship is bittered by Nathan’s frequent outbursts and abusive behavior. Stingo immediately becomes enamored with Sophie, a Polish immigrant who lost both of her children in German concentration camps during World War II. Things get complicated as secrets are revealed from both of his friends’ lives, and then everything gets very heightened and tragic.

Just who is Stingo? I kept going back to that question repeatedly throughout the film. It’s not that MacNicol gives a bad performance (he is, after all, a very good actor), it’s that the character is written so blandly that we get no insight into who he is. He witnesses conversations between Nathan and Sophie instead of involving himself in the conversation. He’s told horrifyingly tragic things, and yet we never see him react in any way other than widening his eyes. I would have loved to hear his opinion about everything that is going on, especially since screenwriter Alan J. Pakula (also the director) provides us with voiceover from Stingo. We never even get an idea of what his novel is about, other than that it concerns “the South” (that narrows it down). Since he’s the character we first see and it’s his voice narrating the story, one would assume that the film is “about” his journey. Nope. I understand that, in theory, his arc is that he begins with naïve aspirations and becomes slowly jaded by the sad realities around him, but I don’t see that anywhere. Hell, as the film ends, he sees his two best friends (one of them his first lover) dead in an embrace after committing mutual suicide, and he can’t even articulate a thought—he has to read it from a book of poetry.

The film is based on a novel, unread by me, which is heralded as a masterpiece by many. I’m guessing Stingo is the narrator there as well, and this could be the inherent problem. Look at classics like Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” or Berendt’s nonfiction piece “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Because they are ciphers who record the movements of more memorable characters and situations, the characters of Nick and John work on the page. But the film versions? The characters are ultimately unnecessary and snooze-worthy because film doesn’t need that extra translator. That is true here as well.

And then there’s Meryl.

Pakula seems perfectly happy to do what so many directors have done since this film. He sets the camera up with a slow zoom-in and then jumps out of the way to let her do her thing. Streep is phenomenal, putting so many just-right details into the character and giving Sophie all the layers of complexity the character deserves. She is so good that she manages to land jokes about her character’s accent and shaky English that were so bad they should have never gotten into the script (example: “Is that your Cocksucker?” “I think you mean Seersucker.”). It has to be one of the most difficult characters ever put on film, and Streep simply disappears into her. It’s a “showy” performance, at least in that the character screams and cries, gets her head shaved and has to speak in several languages…but it’s the smaller beats that make you believe in her. Look at Sophie’s eyes every time Nathan walks through the door…always excited to see her love but also just a little horrified that he might be brutal to her again. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s because of her that the film has achieved “classic” status and is on this list.

It’s not that the rest of the film is “bad,” it’s just not on the same level as her performance (and how many other Streep vehicles could be summed up in the same way?). There are good moments throughout, as when Sophie is caught trying to steal a radio by the young daughter of a Nazi general. The girl talks about turning Sophie in, but the truth is that she just wants someone to talk to. The reveal of the house Sophie will work in while at the Concentration Camps is well-done—Pakula’s camera swoops up from the death, destruction and mud behind her, over a barbed-wire covered wall…and into the equivalent of paradise.

There’s one genuine moment of happiness, when the three friends are playing around together at Coney Island by going on rides together, and even that is undercut by voiceover reminding us that Sophie and Nathan are doomed. Ultimately, I think the sadness becomes too oppressive and I just had to stop investing myself. We get a very long flashback to Sophie’s time in the Concentration Camp, then get more abuse from Nathan, then learn Nathan is a paranoid schizophrenic who has been lying to everyone in his life for years, then Nathan threatens to kill Sophie and Stingo with a gun, then Sophie relates to us what the “choice” of the title really means, then there’s the mutual suicide…it’s as if Pakula is repeatedly punching the viewer in the face and demanding that we “cry, damn it, cry!” Somewhere in there it stopped feeling real and started feeling like manipulation, and once “Sophie’s Choice” crosses that line, everything except Streep’s performance no longer works.

My Score (out of 5): ***

MAS*H

2012-01-09T22:08:00.000-08:00

Year: 1970
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 54
Writer: Ring Lardner Jr. (adaptation), Richard Hooker (novel)
Director: Robert Altman
Star: Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Tom Skerritt

When “M*A*S*H” began, I thought that its trio of main characters were cliché variations on high school bullies. By the end of the first act I believed them to be sociopaths. At the midpoint I realized they were plain ‘ole psychopaths and threw up my hands in frustration. I understand, in theory, why this film is supposed to be funny…but it’s not. It’s a black comedy that forgot to add in the comedy.

It tracks a trio of surgeons who operate about three miles from the front lines in the Korean War. They are Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland), Duke (Tom Skerritt) and Trapper (Elliot Gould)…and all are more or less interchangeable monsters from the start. I suspect that, in any given scene, the dialogue between the trio could be interchanged and no one would have noticed. I have no problems with bastards being at the center of a movie, but there’s a difference between rooting for the bad guy and what happens here.

Look, I get what screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and director Robert Altman were going for. Because of the genuinely horrifying things these guys see and must deal with every day, they have chosen to turn off their emotions so as not to deal with any of it. This might have been interesting if it had been handled in any sort of mature way (yes, this is a comedy, but the least you can ask of an Altman film is some insight into the human condition). But it isn’t, leaving the viewer to ask “So what? Who cares?” I don’t root for any of them. I don’t care about how they interact with one another or what is driving them.

The film also has a hugely troubling misogynist and homophobic bend to it.

The only major female character is Hot Lips (Sally Kellerman), who is introduced as strict head of Nursing for the company—a sort of Nurse Ratched. But it’s clear from the get-go that she doesn’t have a chance in hell of even developing into an antagonist for the surgeons because they begin to belittle her immediately. She gets the name Hot Lips after someone sneaks a microphone into her tent while she’s having sex, which is bad enough. But then the film becomes inhuman when the guys decide to find out if her carpet matches her blonde drapes, so they gather most of the men in the company to watch as they yank the tent up while she is showering. They all cackle and heckle while she screams, naked and horrified, in front of them. That was supposed to be…funny? I was cringing. And then, inexplicably, after she has sex with Duke for no apparent reason, she turns into a completely mindless cheerleader during the climactic football game. It’s not even the same character, and there is no transitory scene where she begins to root for them. The fact that the movie simply has her shack up with one of the surgeons and then appear brainless for the rest of the movie sickens me.

Then there’s a dentist in the unit (John Schuck) who is wants to kill himself. Apparently he got really drunk one night and couldn’t successfully bed one of the nurses, so he immediately thinks that he’s turned gay. The thought is so horrifying that he immediately asks the surgeons to help him commit suicide. Seriously.

Sutherland, Gould and Skerritt are all excellent actors who have done really good work elsewhere, but the screenplay does them no favors. They smartly choose to underplay their characters and nastiness, but I don’t identify with any of them.

Is any of this funny? Sure, there are fleeting, funny bits throughout. I liked a small moment where Hawkeye had a nurse scratch his nose mid-surgery, and there’s a random ingenious re-creation of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The aforementioned climactic football game was probably the best thing in the movie (I’m guessing because none of the surgeons play a major role in it), and I liked the way the M*A*S*H unit drugged the rival professional baseball player to get him off the field. But all these amount to are silly islands of humor in a vast ocean of nothingness.

I must also say that the film is very well-made. You can tell that there is one hell of a lot of talent in front of and behind the camera, and the way Altman stages scenes and shoots the unit are well-done and memorable.

Honestly, I feel like “M*A*S*H” is one of those movies that meant a lot more in 1970 than it does today. Even though it takes place in the Korean War, it’s “about” the Vietnam War and its anti-war messages come through loud and clear. The film is obviously anti-establishment, and perhaps at the time these leading assholes came off in the same way McMurphy did in 1975’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”—as a rebel without a cause. But today? Despite the fact that we are in a recession and barely out of Iraq, it no longer feels topical. “Platoon” remains searing, as does “Apocalypse Now,” but this seems to have lost its voice somewhere along the way.

I am not a surgeon, nor have I ever been to war, but that shouldn’t matter. Since film became a legitimate medium, its most important, enduring goal is to take the viewer “into” the film and invest them in what they are seeing. To put “us” in “their” shoes. In 1903’s “The Great Train Robbery,” audiences were so invested they gasped when a bandit pointed his gun at the screen and fired. There’s never a dry eye in the house when the Blind Girl recognizes Chaplin in “City Lights,” and I dare you to listen to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and not get goosebumps all over your body. “M*A*S*H” gives us plenty of well-done shots of jeeps driving through mazes of tents, but they might as well be photographs. I don’t care at all about this story and these characters. A surprise assault could have bombed the hospital an hour in, leaving everyone dead, and I don’t think I would have been phased.

My Score (out of 5): *1/2

Tootsie

2012-01-07T21:46:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 69
Year: 1982
Writer: Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal (screenplay), Larry Gelbart, Don McGuire (story)
Director: Sydney Pollack
Star: Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Charles Durning

“Tootsie” is a great comic film to begin with, filled with excellent performances and smart writing. But the filmmakers were interested in making something more than just a cross-dressing comedy. You’re watching discussions about sexism, sexual and gender identity, personal identification and emotional maturation…but you don’t really notice it because the film is just so damn good. Though the main character preaches, the movie doesn’t seem to, and though many of these topics have long since become softball subjects, the film is so well-told that it doesn’t matter. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again.

Dustin Hoffman plays Michael, a great NYC actor who is so difficult to work with that his personality has blacklisted him with every producer and director in the city. He’s desperate. He’s also a fantastic acting teacher and no one apparently told him that he’d be a good director, but forget that. His solution to finding work is to create Dorothy, a spunky woman who is immediately cast on a horrible daytime soap opera. To his shock, Michael finds that Dorothy seems to have a mind and values of her own (“I think she’s smarter than me,” he admits at one point), and these values actually help him improve as a human being. To the studio’s shock, Dorothy becomes the new star of the show, her unwillingness to be a female cliché refreshing to all the women watching at home.

Also in play is Julie (Jessica Lange), an actress on the show who befriends Dorothy and is inspired by her new friend to blossom as a human being while her father (Charles Durning) begins to crush on his daughter’s new BFF. Michael finds himself attracted to Julie as a man, but she’s in a bad relationship with the soap’s director, played by Dabney Coleman, who does another fine version of his “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” character from “9 to 5.” Oh, and Sydney Pollack (who also directed) is excellent as Michael/Dorothy’s agent, who always seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

By this point we’ve all seen what we expect is every variation on the cross-dressing comedy there could possibly be. The formula seems to be quite limited, and though it has resulted in two masterpieces (this and “Some Like It Hot”), can you think of another version that is even halfway decent? And yet “Tootsie” finds a way to feel fresh and engaging despite the apparent limitations of its genre. A big key to this is that there is no “transformation” scene leading into the first appearance of Dorothy. There’s simply a cut from the male Hoffman to the female version walking down the street. By doing this, screenwriters Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal (best worst last name ever) immediately establish Dorothy as a distinct character from Michael and that we should approach her that way. When we later see Michael transforming into Dorothy, he remarks about her as if she’s a real person (“She would live alone!”) because she “feels” like a real person to us.

I cannot underline enough how excellent Hoffman is as Michael/Dorothy, simply because he doesn’t overdo it. These are two different people and he treats them as such. He doesn’t overplay the little winks and nudges to the audience, which makes them all the funnier when they come. It’s weird, because he’s almost passable as a fairly ugly woman, and it’s odd how quickly we become used to his southern high voice. And I love how the screenplay uses both of these things to make the movie even more multi-dimensional.

It would be easy for Hoffman to steal the show, but the supporting cast is all-around aces. Durning is quite genuine throughout and we really feel bad for the guy when he proposes to Dorothy. Bill Murray brings the right amount of cynicism and snark to his brief scenes, and I’m very happy to see the film doesn’t overdo his shtick, because any more would feel overboard. Teri Garr is suitably hysterical as a woman Michael uses early in the movie before maturing, but the interesting thing is that Garr doesn’t turn her into a dumb blonde. She’s hysterical, but not stupid.

And then there’s Lange, who must have been quelling chuckles in just about every scene with Hoffman, even the dramatic ones. Because she’s so genuine with Hoffman in drag, we create genuine feelings for the character, and when the chips fall and Dorothy is un-wigged at the climax, I was surprised at how invested I had become in the relationship. The final scene, involving Lange and Hoffman out of drag, is beautifully balanced, written brilliantly and surprisingly understated. It feels just right.

In case I haven’t mentioned this yet, in addition to everything else, the movie is fucking hilarious. I was in tears from laughter during the magazine photoshoot montage, and for every bit of slapstick there is a really smart line worth quoting. It’s a mix that could have gone horribly wrong, but because every part of the creative team rose to the occasion, it works. And the writers avoid plot holes (well, fudge plot holes) by turning them into jokes about Dorothy having to do her own make-up or getting no close-ups on her show (“I’d like to make her look a little more attractive, how far can you pull back?” “How do you feel about Cleveland?”).

Yeah, it’s not quite as good as “Some Like It Hot” (there is one quite obvious weak point in the way the film treats the soap’s lead actor), but how many comedies are? “Tootsie” is the type of movie that feels irresistible. It feels universal. And it feels deep, which you never would expect of a movie about a dude in a dress.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Apocalypse Now

2011-12-17T23:02:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 30
Year: 1979
Writer: John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola w/ Michael Herr (adaptation), Joseph Conrad (novel)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Star: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall

Note: As with the other films on the AFI Top 100 which have alternate or extended editions, this article will be discussing the original theatrical version.

“Apocalypse Now” is a grand, angry, flawed film that goes deep and cerebral just when you expect it to get even louder and more bombastic. It’s a movie that isn’t afraid to try just about anything to underline a point or create a sense of dread, and the audaciousness of the filmmakers leaves a huge impact on the viewer. It’s big in every sense of the word.

We first meet Captain Ben Willard in his bedroom while he’s having a slight nervous breakdown after his experiences in the Vietnam War. He’s brought into a room of higher-ups and given a super-secret mission to cross the Vietnam border into Cambodia and find a Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz has apparently gone insane, murdered a bunch of people and is now regarded by the natives as a god among men. Willard must kill him.

Screenwriters John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola (also the director) transport Joseph Conrad’s novel from Africa to Vietnam, and though it follows the general beats of the book, it transcends it to become its own being. I mention this because I really dislike Conrad’s work—which is racist and barely makes dime-store insights into human suffering—and wonder why it’s consistently in print and taught in colleges when there are so many other, worthier, works from that timeframe that merit exposure and revisiting.

But I must admit that the structure and premise of the original is a good one, and it was a smart move to keep that, as the build-up to the introduction of Kurtz is at once menacing and tantalizing. Willard goes through a dossier of his life and decisions, trying desperately to make sense of who this guy is and what made him go crazy (or has he simply regained his sanity in an insane world?), and develops a deep respect for him before he even meets him.

Willard is sent up a river with four other soldiers for support, and every time they make a stop or take a detour the result seems to be a classic sequence. The best is still where we are introduced to surfing fanatic Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who invades an outpost simply because he wants to surf the beach (the waves break both ways). Here is the iconic “March of the Valkyries” action sequence, which retains all of its original power because you can tell there are no miniatures or trick shots used. Shit is really blowing up and these helicopters are really flying in formation. This realism makes the sequence epic, and that’s true about everything in the film. When the boat moves under a downed plane, or we see helicopters still smoldering in trees, we know that the actors are interacting with scale models, and the results are very impactful. It all “feels” bigger than other war films and makes you believe the actors and their predicament more as a result.

There’s also the sequence where Willard and another soldier go hunting for mangos and appear to be ants among the gigantic foliage surrounding them (hello metaphor!). And the sequence where the ship’s chief is impaled. And the bombing of the bridge. Each set-piece is excellent, long enough to resonate but short enough to not be too much of a distraction from the journey to Kurtz. The one sequence that doesn’t work is the detour with the Playboy Playmates, who eventually cause a riot thanks to their thrusting and boobies. It’s the only time where we expect the riot as soon as the women appear, and Milius and Coppola do not try to reverse our expectations.

Just who the hell is this Kurtz? What do we expect? Big budget action movies have taught us that war movies invariably end with lots of explosions and blood, but all of a sudden the boat reaches Kurtz’s home, which is a Buddhist temple. There’s a beautiful scene where all the natives of the town seem to have created a gate by standing on small ships in front of the temple, and they slowly part for Willard’s ship. And suddenly the movie goes cerebral. It’s a ballsier move than the viewer expects, that’s for sure, and I love the way the film underscores that, while Kurtz is a god among these people, his life is still very empty. It’s as if he’s seen or felt something he’s still coming to terms with, and just describing pieces of it to those nearby alters their lives completely.

This thinking-man’s third act underlines the major flaw with the film, which is that I just don’t care if Willard lives or dies. I want to see him get to Kurtz, sure, but that’s more because I want to meet Kurtz, not because I have some emotional investment in Willard. He’s a broken, horrible person, and the voiceover work that is written by Michael Herr seems to underscore this while still trying to make him human. It’s futile. I cared more about his shipmates than I did him, and when he does take Kurtz’s life at the climax, you feel as if Willard did not “deserve” to do it. A stronger man should have done it. But as I write this, I must say the fault is in the writing, not Sheen’s performance, which is aces.

Look at the AFI Top 100’s other serious meditation of the Vietnam War, “Platoon.” There I grew to care a lot for Chris and was deeply invested in whether or not he lived or died. It’s just not so for Willard. I think that “Apocalypse Now” is a better work of art than “Platoon,” but I also think the latter is a better film, if that makes any sort of sense.

The movie is long, and feels that way, and Coppola uses the epic nature of the war to create an intimate portrait of the enigma that is Kurtz. Brando’s performance isn’t a “performance”—he’s reciting the lines without much inflection either way and lets the lighting be the emotion his face lacks. The dialogue is great (“There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms.”), but Milius and Coppola will not give us any answers. Is he God? The devil? A man who has stared into the abyss and come back? Not come back? A little of everything? How seriously are we supposed to take his words?

Whether or not Kurtz represents God or Satan, Vietnam itself is hell, no question about it. It strips the men who are within its borders (both American and Vietnamese) from who they really are, leaving a shell filled with fury and confusing. There’s no future for Willard—he’s been too warped by his experience. “Apocalypse Now” is unafraid to stare this sad fact in the face, uncompromisingly. It’s a transcendent experience with deep flaws that bring you back to earth shaken.

My Score (out of 5): ****1/2

The Sound of Music

2011-12-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 40
Year: 1965
Writer: Ernest Lehmen (adaptation), Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II (music), Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse (book and libretto), Maria von Trapp (autobiography)
Director: Robert Wise
Star: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker

“The Sound of Music” is not the type of movie you can approach with cynicism, and since we currently live in an age of cynics, that’s difficult. If you sit down with the film expecting to want to punch the children in their smiling faces and root for the Nazis to find them, then that’s what you’ll feel. I sat down with a (relatively) open mind and found that within a half hour the movie had me under its spell.

I think it all comes down to how easy it is to fall in love with Julie Andrews. She plays nun-in-training Maria in Austria, who is sent to be a governess to seven rambunctious children who have recently lost their mother. She arrives at the huge (huge!) estate to find the children’s father Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) has become so withdrawn from grief that he runs the household and children like he runs the ships he captains in the navy. Of course, Maria breaks through to the children and falls for the father. Plus…Nazis!

The opening number, where Maria spins on a hill singing, has been parodied so many times that it’s lost much of its power, and the fact that she walks through a random stream she finds at the top of the hill that we know wasn’t there a second ago in the helicopter shots can bring on the chuckles. So can the second scene, where nuns complain about Maria by singing about how she sings in the Abbey (uh, hypocrite alert). But then Maria has a fun number called “Confidence” which is basically her just running toward her destiny, and I found myself starting to be won over.

The moment I just gave in and realized I sorta loved the movie is about the 40 minute mark, when Maria kneels down to pray on her first night in the von Trapp house. Andrews exudes charisma and humor here, and I accepted the movie on its own terms. It’s corny but utterly unapologetic about it – and that’s why it works. If any of the characters stopped and winked at the audience for even a moment, it would implode. But they don’t. Not even Plummer.

The plot is well-structured and the emotional arcs of the major characters resonate. I expected nothing less from screenwriter Ernest Lehmen in his adaptation. He’s got four movies (this, “North by Northwest,” “West Side Story” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) in the AFI Top 100 (sure, I loathed “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, but I’m trying to make a point here!), and wrote three others that easily could have been (“Sabrina,” “The King and I” and “Sweet Smell of Success”). He’s a master of structure (“North By Northwest”), creating appealing characters (“Sabrina”), and adapting near-impossible works (“West Side Story”). This guy is one of the greats in the industry and you can’t really call yourself a screenwriter unless you’ve read one or more of his scripts.

Sure, this is a three hour movie. There’s going to be some fat that could have been trimmed (how many times can you reprise a song?), and there are some character beats that feel false or are missing. For example, aside from the eldest daughter, we don’t get to know any of the children in any real way. Also, I highly doubt that the Mother Superior would recommend that Maria return to break up a happy couple and then sing a showstopper about it. And yet, when it works, it works beautifully. Lehmen does such a good job developing most of the characters (aside from those six pesky kids, but who’s counting?), that he pulls off a major tonal shift to suspense for the climax without altering the fabric of the film itself.

Then there is the music. Aside from “The Wizard of Oz,” has there ever been a movie whose music has so permeated our collective consciousness? I’d list the film’s standards, but then I’d be listing every song. Okay, I could deal without “The Lonely Goatherd,” and those damned puppets, but other than that there isn’t a clunker in the bunch. My personal favorite? “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” with a close second going to “Do-Re-Me.”

The songwriting team of Rodgers and Hammerstein is, of course, rightfully legendary. Both did great work with other collaborators, but together something just clicked between them both in their music and the content of the shows they chose to score. “Oklahoma,” “Carousel,” “State Fair,” “Allegro,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “Cinderella,” “Flower Drum Song”…the films created that are based on these shows (save for “Allegro,” which has never been adapted) vary in quality, but it’s never because of the music that they falter.

The choreography throughout “The Sound of Music” is simple and elegant. Look at the way the gazebo is used in “Sixteen Going On Seventeen,” with the eldest daughter jumping from one bench to another in a circle to show her joy at first love. Understated works for the film—if the kids were dance prodigies as well as singing ones, I don’t think it would have worked.

But then again, much of “The Sound of Music” should not work in the slightest, but for some reason does. The youngsters would drive me to insert Twizzlers in my ears in another movie. If Maria were played by anyone other than Julie Andrews I would strangle myself. And so on and so forth. But it really did manage to break through and emotionally involve me in its story and characters, which surprised me.

I suppose it’s easier to poke fun at the twirling and the nuns and the guitar case, but if you can set your skepticism aside, you might discover that this is a really good movie after all.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Blade Runner

2011-12-14T22:39:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 97
Year: 1982
Writer: Hampton Fancher, David Peoples (adaptation), Philip K. Dick (novel)
Director: Ridley Scott
Star: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

Note: As with the other films on the AFI Top 100 which have alternate or extended editions, this article will be discussing the original theatrical version.

The world of “Blade Runner” is one of the greatest in film history. It takes place in near future Los Angeles (where it rains every day instead of its current constantly sunny state) where skyscrapers are bursting with polluted fire and one layer of grime is piled on top of another, less stable, layer of dirt. The Tyrell Corporation at the center of everything is a fantastically designed, intricately created piece of architecture that you find yourself pausing your DVD to drink in. There are so many details that are stuffed into every frame, my favorite being the light-up umbrellas, that at times you feel as if you’ve wandered into a Terry Gilliam movie. The movie’s look has rightly become a touchtone for hundreds of futuristic worlds. It’s not a place you want to live, or visit, but one you must experience.

But the rest of “Blade Runner”? Meh.

Harrison Ford heads the movie as a detective named Deckard, who is assigned to track down four escaped Replicants and kill them. These Replicants are created by the aforementioned Tyrell Corporation, and seem human in almost every way. After a few years they even begin to develop emotions, which is one of the reasons they’ve been outlawed on earth. Rutger Hauer is the leader of the Replicants, who also includes Daryl Hannah. We also meet Tyrell himself (Joe Turkel), who has crafted a new Replicant named Rachel (Sean Young) who believes she is human.

There are “big” questions at play here, like what is the real measure of a man and what it truly means to be human. The writers, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, introduce these conceits and then pay them just enough attention to gloss them over and move on. I’m not asking for answers, obviously, but it would be nice to have them addressed and argued in an interesting, thought-provoking way. Instead the ideas are brought onstage and then forgotten about because…oh look! A big skyscraper with a Geisha projected on it!

Perhaps part of the problem is that I just don’t give a damn about any of the characters. Near the end of the second act, Hauer’s Replicant breaks into Tyrell’s home and threatens him, wanting to have a longer life and begging for answers to why he exists. The scene is directly inspired by Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” but the difference is that in the novel, both men are monsters that we sympathize with and understand. Here we’ve barely seen the Replicant for more than five minutes and intensely dislike Tyrell already, so the scene has no drive. Who cares if the Replicant gets his answers and who cares if his creator dies?

Thank God director Ridley Scott cast Harrison Ford in the lead, because he lends gravitas to a role that is thinly written. At best. Just because a character is supposed to be cut off from his emotions does not mean that he can’t be interesting or engaging. Instead we get a character who visually looks like he’s really constipated. Then we’re given plenty of unnecessary voiceover that spoon-feeds us what he’s supposed to be feeling at any given moment (along with unnecessary exposition we could have figured out ourselves). Of course, then there are the none-too-subtle hints that Deckard may in fact be a Replicant, but really, who cares? If we aren’t invested in Deckard as a human being, why should it matter if he’s not what he seems and is unaware of it.

Deckard falls in love with Rachel, which in theory could have been very fascinating, especially since his mission in life is to destroy her kind. In reality, the romance is barely sketched and just when we get hints that it will become interesting, Rachel is yanked off-screen and doesn’t come back until the final scene.

The entire thing comes to a head in an old apartment building called the Bradbury (obviously named as an homage to Ray Bradbury, who I’m betting could have written a much more insightful and emotionally complete version of this story). First up is a legitimately cool fight scene between Deckard and Hannah’s Replicant, which I wish would have lasted longer. Then there’s a way-too-long cat-and-mouse game between Deckard and Hauer’s Replicant where we’re never quite sure of the logistics of the large apartment they are chasing one another through. Deckard climbs up toward the roof when he should be heading down the fire escape (why do people always do that!?), then drops his gun and doesn’t bother to go back for it (why do people always do that!?). The stuff on the roof has some impressive special effects, but how many variations on this scene have we seen, including several in the AFI Top 100 alone? For my money, the coolest is still the finale to “Batman,” (sorry, “Vertigo”) and this one doesn’t measure up.

I understand how much impact this film has had on science fiction of the last thirty years, and know that’s why it was placed on the Top 100, though I’d argue that Scott’s “Alien” would have been a better choice. But looking at it today, it seems like a simplistic take on ideas and concepts that have been told much better elsewhere. Television shows like “Battlestar Galactica” and films like “Dark City” and “Serenity” are obvious offspring of “Blade Runner,” and both eclipse it in terms of quality and depth. It’s an important film to see, and it opened the door to many wonderful stories, but it just doesn’t hold up.

My Score (out of 5): **1/2

Addendum: The DVD contains five (five!) different variations on this film, and I do prefer the “Final Cut” to the original theatrical version. The deletion of the voiceover was a smart move, as was the abbreviated ending, but ultimately did not change my feelings for the film in a profound way.

The Last Picture Show

2011-12-14T00:34:00.001-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 95
Year: 1971
Writer: Larry McMurty, Peter Bogdanovich
Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Star: Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman

“The Last Picture Show” was one of the films on the AFI Top 100 that I hadn’t watched before, and now here I sit in awe of it. How could I not have seen this film …experienced these feelings…known these characters? How easily it has entered into my consciousness, its world a familiar one I feel like I’ve always known.

The setting is a small Texas town that seems to only have one main road and three open establishments: a bar, a burger joint and an old movie house, all owned by Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). We meet two best friends, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), and watch them come of age together. Sonny begins an affair with the wife (Cloris Leachman) of his football coach, while Duane struggles with his feelings for the town’s prettiest girl, Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Things get complicated before they get more complicated.

All I had heard about the film before seeing it was that it was a younger generation’s “Citizen Kane,” and you can certainly see similarities and inspiration drawn from the Welles’ film. As the credits roll, we see small snippets of scenes with the actors’ names, exactly the same as “Kane,” and then there’s the use of “deep focus” throughout. The moment where the inspiration is at its most obvious is when Sam sits at a pond and recounts just how in love he was with a woman years ago. Obviously, the scene comes from the businessman in “Kane” who clearly remembers a girl he saw once on a dock decades ago. That might well be the best written scene in all of film, and the one in “The Last Picture Show” is similarly moving and devastating, though in a different way.

However much co-writers Larry McMurty and Peter Bogdanovich (also the director) used “Kane” as an inspiration, that film was about the impossibilities of understanding a man. This film is about our inherent understanding of its characters. At different moments in our lives, we have been all these men and women, and we sympathize and understand their actions, however frustrating they may be. Leachman’s character is given a moment of rage near the end, after Sonny abandoned her for months, and the words are incredibly painful—we empathize so much with what she’s been through and how hurt she’s been. And yet we also sympathize with Sonny, who left her because he thought he was in love with a woman his age—and was too young to understand how to handle his feelings or the situation.

Even Jacy, who is portrayed as an enigma to the men who can’t help but fall in love with her, manages to get our sympathy. The boys at the center of the film never see their home lives explained or illustrated in any detail (they don’t need to be), but we get to know Jacy’s mother (Ellen Burstyn, nailing her small part), and there’s a small moment in the kitchen between them where the viewer goes “Ah, now I understand who this girl is.”

Bottoms is the heart of the film, wonderfully cast, and manages to emote the frustration of his situation without seeming like he’s pouting or waiting for a violin to play. Though he plays friends with Bridges, they look like they could be brothers, and the moment where they experience a movie together on the final night at the theater before it closes is just about perfect.

The town around Sonny is dying, and I don’t just mean that in a metaphorical way. Every shop aside from the three I mentioned above appears closed, and by the end of the movie the theater closes as well. Sonny has to work another job just to keep the bar open after he inherits it. We’ve all driven through towns like this, barely giving them a thought. What must it be like to live in that place, desolation around you, lonely and begging to hear anything other than your own thoughts, knowing you can never escape them. Sounds a lot like adolescence to me.

Bogdanovich shoots the film in black-and-white, which underscores the wretchedness of the place but also the beauty of his main actors. Shepherd is just about as lovely as any teenager I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to echo what I said earlier in my “Taxi Driver” article: I wish that she would go back to serious dramatic acting instead of settling for guest-starring roles on “Psych” and “$#!+ My Dad Says.”

There isn’t much of a plotline, per se, but I don’t think I realized that until I typed this sentence. “The Last Picture Show” is more about a collection of moments that build these wonderful characters for us and the ways those characters bounce off of each other in ways both expected and unexpected. We have a pretty good idea that the Burstyn character was the dame Sam was in love with, and when it’s confirmed there’s a lovely scene where she reminisces for a moment about how wonderful life was…right before she drives home to her horrible husband. McMurty and Bogdanovich ensure that each character gets the chance to become a complex, layered “person,” and that’s one of the reasons you remember the film as a state of mind as much as you remember the individual moments.

The biggest compliment I can give the film is that the characters linger in my mind like real people would. I wonder what will happen to them and where their lives will take them as they continue on their respective journeys, meeting one another from time to time and impacting each other in ways both obvious and subtle. When I wrote about the coming-of-age film “American Graffiti,” I mentioned that if the characters were real people, I wouldn’t want to be friends with them. Here, I’d love to eat a burger with Sonny and then watch “Red River” with him, Jacy and Duane, even if they are trying to get up her skirt the whole time.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

2011-12-09T16:46:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 73
Year: 1969
Writer: William Goldman
Director: George Roy Hill
Star: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross

“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is a fun buddy comedy that succeeds mostly because of the talent and chemistry of its two leads. For a film about two outlaws who are destined for death, it’s very pleasant. This is a good movie, but since it’s on the AFI Top 100, I was expecting something…more.

The two titles characters (Paul Newman and Robert Redford, respectively) are bank and train robbers extraordinaire. Butch is great with the quips and Sundance lets his crackerjack pistol aim speak for itself. They are both sorta kinda in love with the same dame, a schoolteacher named Etta (Katherine Ross).

The screenwriter, William Goldman, does a great job at setting up the characters quickly and with humor. Sundance is set up when a cocksure poker player immediately cowers upon hearing who he’s playing against, and we learn everything we need to know about Butch in how he takes down a mutiny within his own group of thieves.

Both seem attracted to Etta, but in different ways. Sundance is the one who is in a “relationship” with her, and it’s all about the sex and physical attraction. But the next morning she goes to Butch, and they play around together like little children. The two men joke around about who really loves her, but this is never brought to a head. In the end, Etta removes herself from the situation—which is just fine since this is a “love story” about the two men. And no, I’m not going to describe it by using the word “bromance,” because that word makes me want to die inside.

This type of buddy comedy needs a really good, engaging villain to make it pop, and there’s none here. One day, while robbing a train (in an inspired bit, they find themselves dealing with the same banker they almost blew up earlier in the film, who ends up apologizing to them for reinforcing his safe), a posse of men arrives and begins chasing them. They never stop. We are told who some of the men in the posse may or may not be, but we don’t meet them and they never share any lines or significant moments with our leads.

Now, let me make myself clear, this is a fantastic idea for a villain and a great way to build consistent suspense and a sense of impending doom. In a straight drama. But this is a comedy, and the long sequences of the group following Butch and Sundance no matter what they do to make them lose the trail simply doesn’t create suspense, no matter how well shot or atmospheric they are. They seem like scenes from another film, and the entire tone of the project shifts until the boys bicker about jumping off a cliff together into the rapids below.

After that close call, they decide to go to Bolivia (with Etta in tow), and then there’s a very odd, out-of-place “montage” of photographs showing the threesome leaving the Wild West and heading to New York before moving south of the border. It feels like the montage of photographs goes on forever, though in reality it must be under two minutes. But still, two minutes of photographs? Really? I would have much rather watched a two-minute scene of Butch, Sundance and Etta completely out of place in NYC or, especially, at the amusement park on Coney Island having fun with one another. Was this done to save money? I would tend to think so normally, but this was a Paul Newman movie made at the peak of his stardom, so I doubt it.

Once they get to Bolivia, there are a lot of fun little scenes, most of them of Sundance complaining about the country. Butch tries to convince him that all of Bolivia can’t be like the run-down pit they first arrive at, and Sundance’s response is great: “How do you know? This might be the garden spot of the whole country. People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot that we're standing now. This might be the Atlantic City, New Jersey of all Bolivia for all you know.”

The film’s ending also seems out of tone with the rest of the film. Yes, Etta had mentioned something about them being doomed to die, but the climactic gun battle seems like something out of an earlier script draft before all the wise cracks and quips had been plugged in. It’s all very “the last five minutes of ‘Thelma and Louise.’” But at least Goldman and director George Roy Hill had the good sense to freeze frame on the two guys going off into battle one final time instead of going all “Bonnie and Clyde” on us, which would have really left a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth.

I’m not a big fan of movies that pretend to be light and fun and then switch gears to become deep and tragic just to seem more meaningful than they are (I’m looking at you, “Moulin Rouge!”, with that exclamation point in your title and most depressing final act ever). The smarter thing to do would be to find a way to wrap your message into the fabric of the film without altering the tone completely. I’m not against killing off the two main characters at the end of a movie, but if Goldman and Hill were planning on it, they should have created a movie that better suited the ending.

Despite this, the movie still works, and that is because of Newman and Redford’s wonderful performances. No matter how much the tone of the piece changes, they keep the boat steady by making us believe in their friendship. Their personalities really do compliment one another well and there’s a fantastic give and take in their work together. This creative team really could have made a masterpiece together. Oh wait, they did. It’s called “The Sting.”

My Score (out of 5): ***1/2

Saving Private Ryan

2011-12-04T16:19:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 71
Year: 1998
Writer: Robert Rodat
Director: Steven Spielberg
Star: Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon

I hate “shaky-cam.” It’s overused so often in film and television and almost never adds anything to what it is supposed to be supporting. Instead, all the viewer gets is a headache and a cranky demeanor from having to put up with it. By the time I saw it show up in “Harry Potter” and that very unfortunate James Bond movie, I realized that we weren’t getting rid of it anytime soon, and I wanted to weep. And now I have just finished watching “Saving Private Ryan,” and realize that shaky-cam can be powerful and brilliantly-executed. Everyone else is just doing it wrong.

Director Steven Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski give us a perfect portrait of chaos (hello phrase I never thought I’d write) in the movie’s first twenty minutes, portraying the Normandy Invasion how (I assume) it must have felt to be there. And yet, the shaky-cam actually adds to the scene, because even though it’s difficult to get our bearings, Spielberg and Kaminski still clearly show us everything we need to see, while only giving us hints and glimpses of other horrors to underline their impact.

The rest of “Saving Private Ryan” follows a group of soldiers led by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) assigned to find a paratrooper named James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon). Ryan’s three brothers have all died in battle, and the Generals in Washington want to bring him home alive, citing President Lincoln’s famous letter to Mrs. Bixby, who lost five sons in the Civil War.

Screenwriter Robert Rodat presents us with a fantastic concept, full of moral ambiguities and ethical questions that the film touches on time and again. After all, is this one man’s life worth the lives of the eight men sent to find him? What if Ryan doesn’t want to abandon his men when he’s found? It’s a seemingly straightforward idea, but after two soldiers are dead and the other men find themselves in a seemingly unwinnable situation, things get much grayer.

But as much praise as I have for what Rodat accomplished with his screenplay, I also must admit that it seems like he was afraid to go all the way into the gray area, which is a shame. When Miller lies dying during the film’s resolution, his dying words are a plead for Ryan to “earn it.” Rodat then gives the viewer a handy-dandy frame story of an elderly Ryan at a cemetery asking his wife if he led a good life. Totally unnecessary. It is almost as if Rodat is hand-feeding the audience their happy ending with manufactured sentimentality that would have been better left on the cutting room floor or, even smarter, deleted out of Final Draft.

There are other odd tonal shifts in the film that feel like they are from a different movie. At one point Miller recruits an interpreter (Jeremy Davies) who has no experience in battle. Spielberg stages the scene like a farce, with Davies dropping his typewriter and knocking things over in a screwball-comedy fashion. And another scene, where the group finally discover where Ryan is, is a weirdly unfunny exchange where Miller tries to communicate with a man who has gone deaf because he was too close to an explosion.

To be fair, these are flaws that are pretty minor in the overall scheme of things. When the movie is good, it’s really fucking great. The dialogue between the men is well-written and gives the guys an extra layer of depth missing from most war films. A sequence where a German murders one of the men by slowly, terrifyingly slowly, stabbing him in the chest while comforting him is one of the most unsettling murders ever put on screen.

Hanks is just aces as the heart of the film, portraying a man who is closer to a nervous breakdown than he wants to admit to himself. His hands tremble and he tries to stay emotionally disconnected from the situation despite how he really feels about the assignment. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, including Damon, who communicates his “But why me?” attitude well.

The film’s final war scene is just as well-executed, in an entirely different fashion, from the one that opens it. Here the men are hidden in various points of a crumbled city protecting a bridge at all costs. They are outmanned, outgunned and their plan needs about ten things to happen by chance to go right. Here we know exactly where all the men are, what they must do and where the enemy need to be and, unlike the madness of the first 20 minutes, this underlines and enhances the suspense. There is still the element of surprise, as there must be in these types of action set-pieces, but knowing where the enemy troops are in relation to our main characters makes the sequence even stronger. Yes, the opening is great because of the staged anarchy, but I’d still take sequences like the climax any day because they have more coherency and, as a result, more impact.

I must admit, I’m not a big fan of the John Williams score. Perhaps the smarter thing to do would be to not have any music at all, because the score we hear is pretty cookie cutter and would have served better on an episode of “The West Wing.” Williams has created magnificent scores out of battles before (look at his work for “The Patriot” or his “Duel of the Fates” from “Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace”), but his work here is just a bit dry and expected.

“Saving Private Ryan” isn’t the kind of movie you “enjoy.” I doubt I’ll ever go to the AFI Library to borrow a movie and think “I’m in a ‘Saving Private Ryan’ state of mind.” If I am, something major has gone wrong in my life. But it’s still an important movie that means something. It asks questions that there aren’t easy answers to and illustrates World War II in way you’ve never seen before on film. It’s a shame its biggest impact on the industry was the shaky-cam and not the subtle storytelling and ethical questions, but what can you do?

My Score (out of 5): ****

The Bridge On the River Kwai

2011-11-27T18:07:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 36
Year: 1957
Writer: Michael Wilson, Carl Foreman (adaptation), Pierre Boulle (novel)
Director: David Lean
Star: Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, William Holden

“The Bridge on the River Kwai” is really two movies, one a masterpiece and one unnecessary. The masterpiece half follows the explosive relationship between a Japanese Colonel and his captive British Colonel over the building of a bridge on…*checks film title*…the River Kwai. The unnecessary half tracks a lying liar who has escaped the prison camp and must return to blow up the bridge.

Let’s start with the good half. A group of British soldiers have been captured and march into the Japanese prison camp in perfect formation while whistling a happy tune. Many of them have no shoes and are injured, but they still keep it up anyway. The scene reminded me of a moment from the original “Lord of the Flies” (made several years later in 1963) where the choirboys march across the beach after the plane crash, but it works better here. The group is led by the seemingly by-the-book Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness, amazing), and he immediately butts heads with the camp leader Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa, just as amazing). Saito needs the British soldiers to build the bridge, but Nicholson reminds him that, according to the Geneva Conventions (a copy of which he just happens to have on him), prisoners-of-war cannot be forced to do manual labor.

Saito needs the bridge built before a specific date or face committing ritual suicide, so he tosses Nicholson in a horrifying twist of the Greek Brazen Bull – a cramped metal box that slowly becomes scorching thanks to the hot sun. Days pass and both men refuse to give in…it’s an amazing battle of the wills. Finally Saito relents, and Nicholson oddly then chooses to go forward and build the bridge anyway (not just that, but build it as well as possible), claiming it will help with soldier morale. It slowly becomes apparent that Nicholson has gone mad.

This section of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is brilliant. There are beautiful, small touches, like the aforementioned fact that Nicholson just happens to have a copy of the Geneva Conventions on his person, and a small beat where we see Saito crying uncontrollably once he gives in. The writing couldn’t be better, and Guinness and Hayakawa are two of the best matched nemesis’ in the history of film. The film walks this amazing tightrope, because we understand who both of the characters are and yet every time they are onscreen they inevitably surprise us with their actions.

This is all so great that it almost makes you forgive the second story. A guy named Shears (William Holden) escapes from the same prison camp Nicholson is in, is rescued and pretends to be a Colonel for awhile to get better medical treatment. He’s soon caught and then blackmailed into going back into the jungle to blow up the bridge that Nicholson is building.

I get it, I do. Structurally, the idea of these two stories running parallel for awhile and then inevitably converging with the destruction of the bridge is very strong. But the Nicholson/Saito stuff is just so good that anything else just pales in comparison. It’s not that the Holden scenes are “bad,” they are well enough written and beautifully shot, but they just don’t have to be there. The movie would have worked just as well if we see Holden’s character escaping and then hear nothing from him until he and his band of soldiers arrive again to explode the bridge.

Perhaps a major part of it is that I just don’t like Shears’ character. Holden plays an asshole very well (see: “Sunset Blvd” and “Network”) but why are we supposed to care about this guy? He doesn’t care about anything other than getting home and getting laid, and his turn at heroism at the film’s climax doesn’t work. Watching the movie again, I was shocked to see that the major twist in the storyline (he stole a dead soldier’s identity!) was directly lifted in Don Draper’s character in “Mad Men.” Homage or unabashed rip-off? Hard to tell, especially since Shears is so similar to Draper’s character in general.

As I write that the entire storyline is unnecessary, I must admit that there is one great scene in Holden’s storyline. He and the other soldiers are bathing when several Japanese soldiers attack them. A bomb is set off, and literally thousands of birds take off from the jungle trees while a chase through the forest happens below. Seeing all those birds over the trees is an image I’ll never forget.

Of course, this is a David Lean movie, so there are plenty of similarly breathtaking images. He’d always had a great handle on the visual before this, just look at his Dickens’ adaptations “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” or the underrated, heartbreaking “Summertime,” but “The Bridge on the River Kwai” seems to be the tipping point in his career where everything went gigantic all the time. What’s amazing is that he’s one of the few directors who can give you grandeur without losing touch with his characters, and that’s why all his later films hold up much better than their VistaVision!/Cinemascope! contemporaries.

The film climaxes with the bridge exploding in a scene that is eerily reminiscent of the train crash in “The General,” and I must admit that Keaton did it better. I think it’s because Lean cuts to several vantage points during the crash, whereas Keaton just kept a single camera running. The editing, which was meant to underline the grandeur of the moment, actually manages to undercut it.

Despite my problems, I’d take a movie that reaches for so much and falters a bit over a movie that is content with just being “good” any day. And the problems with this film aren’t from laziness or tedium, they stem from the creators trying too hard. Even with the whole William Holden storyline pulling it back, “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is a great movie. There are too many moments of genius throughout to be anything but.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Taxi Driver

2011-11-26T18:58:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 52
Year: 1976
Writer: Paul Schrader
Director: Martin Scorsese
Star: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd

You first realize something might be screwed up in Travis Bickle’s head when he doesn’t complain about the traffic. Everyone in New York City, even those who don’t drive or never take cabs, complains often and loudly about the traffic. If roads are indeed the veins and arteries of a city, then New York is consistently in the midst of the worst heart attack ever. And yet Travis doesn’t seem to mind. He people-watches during all his time in standstill traffic, and what he sees around him sickens him.

Travis (Robert De Niro) is the taxi driver in “Taxi Driver,” and the movie follows his slow, sick slide into psychosis. He tries to become romantically involved with a political activist (Cybill Shepherd), but is rebuffed after thinking it was a good idea to take her to a pornographic film. He then attempts to take a twelve-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) under his wing, even though she insists she’s perfectly happy selling her body for money. All the while, he gets angrier and starts buying really, really big handguns.

Writer Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese present Travis in a series of seemingly disconnected scenes that slowly build his character. The voice-over narration tips us off that Travis might be a little…uh…psychotic, and when we see his handwriting this is confirmed since it’s scrawled in that creepy child-like way we’ve all seen on A&E serial killer specials.

But the really interesting thing is that, if you delete the voiceover, Travis doesn’t seem all too crazy in the film’s early scenes. He’s good looking enough, and when he charms his way into coffee with Shepherd’s character Betsy, he makes a speech at the diner where he talks about connections between people. I realized that, if you just look at this scene apart from the rest of the movie, the dialogue could easily be spoken by Ryan Gosling in his newest romantic comedy and not miss a beat. But in “Taxi Driver” the dialogue slowly gets under our skin. We become nervous…not because we think Travis will hurt Betsy, but because we still strangely empathize with his character and don’t want him to make a fool of himself. Shrader’s dialogue and characterization is just aces throughout this scene and every other - smart and brutal but still human.

To a certain extent, we all sympathize with Travis because we’ve all felt lonely and abandoned. Scorsese obviously does – when Betsy breaks things off with him the camera literally pans away, unable to show Travis’ world shattering. That’s the reason it breaks our hearts a little bit when the bullets start flying. We care, damn it. Though they aren’t tonally similar, if you compare Travis with similar characters from “Fight Club” or “American Psycho,” you will see that those films choose to make their anti-heroes all gloss and surface instead of really digging in. But Schrader and Scorsese aren’t afraid.

Soon he’s got a Mohawk and is planning a political assassination before murdering a bunch of pimps. Is he trying to “rescue” the women from their clutches? Perhaps he’s telling himself that. But then there’s the thought that these men are “keeping” Travis from these women he could love in one form or another…and because of them he has been abandoned once more. Is it revenge? Or has he just lost his mind to the point where he wants to lash out? Perhaps all of the above? The line is beautifully blurred and works any way you look at it, which just makes the writing and direction even more brilliant.

Of course, none of that would work without the right leading man, and De Niro is perfect here. He works well as the everyman, but there’s a hidden savagery in his eyes that allow us to segue with his performance into his mania. Shepherd is wonderfully appealing in her small, memorable role, and it makes you wish she’d get a great role to play with again, instead of guest-starring on “$#!+ My Dad Says” and “The L Word.” Foster is fine as the young prostitute, but even then had a knowledge and tenacity that make you think she would have been able to figure something better out.

The violence that climaxes the film is still overwhelming and brutal, not because of its savagery (it’s gross, but we live in an age of “Hostel” and “300” so we’re used to it) but because we do still care about Travis. Iris is there too, but we don’t fear for her safety so much as are horrified about how she’ll react to Travis’ actions.

I’ve had several discussions at AFI about whether the final moments of the film are a dream or not. I believe they aren’t, and not just because I really just hate movies with pseudo-dream endings (sorry, “Shutter Island”). The movie works much better if taken literally. There’s dialogue in the letter from Iris’ parents that subtly implies that she’s caught in a new type of hell back in Smalltown, USA, that would not be there had this been a “happy ending dream.” Also, my mind honestly just can’t imagine the final moments in the cab between Travis and Betsy, so understated yet filled with meaning, to be anything less than real. In fact, it’s almost too real and honest.

As I said earlier, “Taxi Driver” presents us with small disconnected moments in Travis’ life more than the slow-build narrative we would normally expect. And, really, isn’t that how we view the lives of everyone around us? Our best friends, our husbands and wives, our lovers, our co-workers…we only see small or long chapters of their life apart from the whole. There is only so much one can know or understand, and there will always be questions that remain.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Ben-Hur

2011-11-07T21:05:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 100
Year: 1959
Writer: Karl Tunberg (adaptation), Lew Wallace (novel)
Director: William Wyler
Star: Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd, Jack Hawkins

For a movie that clocks in at over three-and-a-half hours, I was surprised to find that “Ben-Hur” left several stones unturned in its sprawling, epic story. Huge sections of the title character’s life have been glossed over or take place completely off camera, and the result is a long film that still seems like it’s missing a lot of its major pieces.

We begin with the birth of Jesus, then flash forward a number of years to witness two old friends clashing over religion. Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a Jew, and Messala (Stephen Boyd) is now a high-ranking officer in the Roman army who expects Ben-Hur to sell out his people. Things spiral out of control after Ben-Hur’s sister accidentally drops part of a roof on a nearby General, and soon Ben-Hur finds himself a slave on a Roman war ship. He’s intent on vengeance against Messala, and soon his circumstances change and he finds himself with an opportunity to find out what happened to his family and how to avenge them.

There’s one hell of a lot more, of course, most notably a subplot connecting Ben-Hur’s journey with that of Christ’s. When Ben-Hur is being dragged away, Jesus gives him a sip of water, and the favor is returned when Jesus carries the cross. These bookend scenes are very touching.

As soon as the prologue fades, screenwriter Karl Tunberg makes an odd choice in beginning with Messala’s character and not introducing Ben-Hur until about a half hour in. These scenes would have been better spent developing Ben-Hur’s family so that we really feel something when he’s separated from them. Then there are endless scenes of talk, talk, talk delivered by a cast that is decent, but not overwhelmingly great. Heston is fine when he’s underplaying the role, which isn’t often, but can’t seem to pull off the inner torment of the film’s final act. Boyd doesn’t have much of a presence, such a shame because this could have been a gem of a role in the hands of the right actor (Montgomery Clift, Tony Curtis, John Gavin).

The movie has two enormous set pieces, a sea battle and a chariot race (which I’ll get to later). In the first, Ben-Hur is a slave who helps to row one of Rome’s great war ships, and has a chance to escape during battle thanks to a small kindness by a Roman General (Jack Hawkins). Ben-Hur then repays the favor by saving the General’s life. I’m sad to say the special effects of the sea battle have aged horrendously, and much of it is laughable now. The balls of fire launched from the ships at one another are obviously fireworks shot from one miniature ship to another, and as a result the scene doesn’t get any real tension.

It is around this point where Tunberg begins to play fast and loose with the storytelling. Blink and you’ll miss the part where Ben-Hur and the General form a father/son bond and Ben-Hur is adopted and becomes part of one of the richest, most renowned families in Rome. Also missing is the fact that Ben-Hur becomes one of the best chariot drivers in the world while hanging around with his adoptive daddy. These are huge developments and affect everything that follows, but apparently there just wasn’t time for it. I feel like this leaves a pretty big hole in the viewer’s understanding of its hero (especially the evolution of his feelings and sympathies with Romans), and wish the film had explored this.

Anyway, not only is Ben-Hur suddenly a great charioteer, so is Messala! What a coincidence. They race one another in the film’s high point. If the ship scene doesn’t hold together at all, the chariot race is even more impressive today, simply because we understand that these are real people in real danger where real accidents could have easily happened. The entire sequence is shot beautifully, filled with edge-of-your-seat tension and the bloody pay-off is shockingly brutal. Ben-Hur defeats Messala, who is also trampled by horses and dies. Wonderful! End of movie, right?

Nope, we’ve still got almost an hour to go. Turns out Ben-Hur’s mother and sister were in prison for years and became lepers and were let out and joined a leper colony which Ben-Hur’s main squeeze knew about but didn’t tell Ben-Hur about but then he found out anyway and almost went to see them but didn’t but then almost did again but didn’t and then got all broody and then oh wow there’s Jesus and now everyone is cured and they all live happily ever after * catches breath * Phew. There are sporadic, wonderful moments in this final hour, particularly the aforementioned scene where Ben-Hur gives Jesus a drink on his way to die, but it’s…just…too…much. The arc of the movie was set up to me Ben-Hur verses Messala, and with him dead there isn’t really a point to keep going. There had to be a way to dovetail the family’s leprosy and the encounter with Christ in with the battle between Messala, but Tunberg doesn’t seem interested.

Director William Wyler guides the film with a steady hand. He shows off when he must, but tries to keep the film intimate on the whole, more interested with the characters than the explosions. This worked for him often in his career of great movies. “The Best Years of Our Lives” is rightfully in the top 100, but there is also “Friendly Persuasion,” “Funny Girl,” “The Children’s Hour,” “The Letter,” “Jezebel” and many more. He’s possibly the most versatile director in the history of film, and I admire what he tried to do with this epic movie even if the actors held him back from succeeding.

I wonder if making the movie longer (gasp!) would have helped, but then part of me thinks somewhere in the three-and-a-half hour film is a crackerjack two-hour action drama. The movie is good, no doubts about that, but it’s uneven and stumbles when it had a real chance to soar. Ah well, the chariot race remains one of the greatest sequences ever filmed, and time has only made it more impressive. “Ben-Hur” needs to be seen if only for that.

My Score (out of 5): ***

E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial

2011-11-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 24
Year: 1982
Writer: Melissa Mathison
Director: Steven Spielberg
Star: Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Drew Barrymore

Note: As with all other films in this series, I’ve gone back to the original theatrical version for this article, not the re-release version.

“E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” believes in humanity, and that’s what makes it a masterpiece. The kids who find E.T. don’t fear him, they try to help him. They form a friendship with him and sacrifice things for him. Heck, even the man we think is supposed to be the antagonist turns out to be one of the good guys, who just wants to help the little alien. In any other studio movie, E.T. would be captured, killed and dissected before the first reel ends and, by the end of the first act, mommy and daddy alien would be returning for vengeance. So, in many ways, this PG-rated film with no sex or violence or language stronger than “Penis breath!” is actually ballsier than all its contemporary counterparts.

The story is so simple and straightforward that you know it kept the film’s writer, Melissa Mathison, up nights struggling to make it seem as effortless as it does. When a young alien is accidentally abandoned on earth, he’s taken in by a boy named Elliott (Henry Thomas) and his friends. Elliott names him E.T. and begins a mission to get E.T. back home with his family. Like I said, the story is simple, but Mathison injects her script with much subtlety. She doesn’t spell everything out, and as a result you notice things on repeat viewings you haven’t seen before.

Take the almost telepathic connection between E.T. and Elliott. Where does it come from? Watching the film again, it seems like E.T. has a telepathic connection with his mother at the beginning of the film, and when he loses it with her, he creates one with the first boy he encounters: Elliott. Later, the connection is severed because E.T. is dying, but his family comes for him just in time, recreating their own connection when E.T. needs it the most.

Thomas is immediately likeable and sympathetic as Elliott. He’s too young to hang with his older brother’s friends and doesn’t appear to have any close friends of his own. When he first realizes E.T. can understand him, Elliott jumps around his room, showing the little alien anything and everything that is so important to his world (“and this, this is Lando Calirissian!”), and the moment feels so real. Of course this is how a young boy would introduce an alien to our world.

And then there are the flying bikes. I’m not going to even hypothesize why Elliott and, later, his brother and friends have to keep pedaling while flying if E.T. is pulling the strings, but it doesn’t matter. Seeing Elliott flying across the moon is, quite simply put, one of the best, most memorable moments in the history of film. Goosebumps. Lots of ‘em. And the scene where E.T. “dies” while Elliott screams for his friend remains like a fist to the viewer’s stomach, even when you know E.T. isn’t really dead.

Spielberg stages the scenes so that we rarely see adult faces (with the exception of Elliott’s mother, played by Dee Wallace). There’s a man (Peter Coyote) who has a lot of keys hanging from his belt who is looking for E.T. We expect he is the villain of the movie, and for the first two acts he does indeed seem to be, but once his face is shown, we realize that he’s not a villain. He’s a good man who wants to help Elliott and help E.T. I was surprised to see Mathison allowed Coyote’s character to be present for the finale to see E.T. off, but feel like it works.

The kids in the movie act like kids. They aren’t spouting off dialogue obviously written by someone much older trying to seem hip or cool. Let’s face it, kids (especially the ones in this movie) aren’t hip or cool when they are hanging out with their family. The interactions between the children feels very improvised in the best way possible; they talk over one another and argue even when they aren’t the focus of the scene. This is incredibly difficult to pull off and make feel natural, but Mathison does just that.

The first act of the movie is shot overdramatically. I’m not sure if “overdramatically” is a word, but if not, I’m creating it now. It’s not that we don’t see adult faces and that E.T. is mostly hidden for the first half hour of the film—those choices were wise and helped create atmosphere. I’m talking about the overuse of smoke, steam, dirt and dust in just about every scene. It’s great in the moment where Elliott has his first encounter with E.T. in the barn, but then the haze is in just about every other scene for no particular reason. There’s even a beat where Elliott puts a plate in the sink and turns on the water, only to have so much steam billow out you’d think you were walking over a subway grate in December. I know, I know. It’s not a huge complaint, but this movie has few flaws, and the haze’s incessant presence really did take me out of the movie.

There are so many things I love about “E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial.” It doesn’t age. The effects still work as well as they did when the film was first released. The acting. The direction. More than anything, it’s one of those very special movies that can put a smile on the face of the most cynical among us. It gives us “hope,” which is a word almost all Hollywood writers have long forgotten.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Addendum: As always, I avoided looking up awards, the film’s development history or critical reaction before writing the article. After posting, however, everything is fair game. I discovered that, for the 1983 Oscars, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” lost the Best Picture Oscar to “Gandhi.” Also nominated that year were “The Verdict” and “Tootsie.” To this I must say, “Really, Academy voters? I mean, REALLY?”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

2011-10-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 33
Year: 1975
Writer: Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman (adaptation), Ken Kesey (novel)
Director: Milos Forman
Star: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Brad Dourif

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is one of those movies you admire so much in the broad strokes. I hadn’t seen the movie in years, and my memory had forced all the odd edges and annoyances out of the picture, and I remembered the film as a masterpiece. I remembered the fantastic moment where Nurse Ratched demands her soiled hat back. I remembered the Chief speaking for the first time. I remembered Nicholson begging the other patients in the ward to raise their hands so he can watch baseball. And those scenes are still great. But, looking at the movie today, I can’t help but be a little let down.

Perhaps it’s because those aforementioned scenes (and many others) are so good, you want to like the rest of the movie more than it merits. Or perhaps it’s because the movie touches greatness so often you can’t help but notice its failures. Maybe I’ve just become more cynical. Maybe movies have just become more cynical. Maybe it’s a little of all of the above.

It all centers on McMurphy (Jack Nicholson, who is brilliant), who was in prison but gets a transfer to a mental institution to, ostensibly, relax and take it easy for a few months before he’s released. Little does he know that the ward is ruled with an iron fist by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher, every bit as good as Nicholson). The movie becomes anti-establishment, with McMurphy fighting against “the man” and introducing the other patients to sex, drugs and alcohol.

McMurphy is such a defining character that we’ve stopped thinking of him as a “character” and simply believe that he is Nicholson. Most actors hate the word “effortless” to describe a performance because so much effort is put into any good one, but that word describes Nicholson in this film. And Fletcher’s quiet reserve serves as the perfect compliment to Nicholson’s unhinged nature. When the relationship becomes explosive, it’s resonant because the moment has been built and paced beautifully over the film.

The rest of the patients in the ward are portrayed well by a great slew of character actors, including Danny DeVito, Will Sampson, William Redfield, Christopher Lloyd, Sydney Lassick and Brad Dourif. They know when to go subtle and when to go over-the-top, and I feel like their performances are the real reason we find ourselves laughing “with” these characters, not laughing “at” them.

The highest compliment I can give the screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman is that the dialogue doesn’t seem like dialogue. The entire movie has the feel of improvisation, which might be the toughest thing a writer can pull off successfully.

The best scene the movie comes when Nurse Ratched (and the audience) realizes that she’s lost control. No, not the late night orgy of booze and boobs, this comes earlier. They are having group counseling and McMurphy is livid because he’s realized he’ll have to remain an inmate until Ratched says he’s free to go. First, one of the patients simply asks why their bedrooms are locked during the day, and then another (played by Lassick) begins screaming for his cigarettes. Ratched remains stone-faced as the screaming turns into anarchy and the anarchy turns to violence…resulting in Lassick’s character, McMurphy and the Chief (Sampson) being taken to electroshock therapy. The scene is probably almost seven minutes and the direction, editing, acting and slow build of tension makes the entire thing crackle with energy. I look at those moments and think just how amazing the movie could be if every scene was as true as this one.

But then there are the problems.

First and foremost, it becomes clear that McMurphy believes (and the movie does as well) that he can cure these men through the use of masculinity. Just shove enough alcohol (never mind what side effects it might create for the drugs they are taking) in their mouths and enough breasts in their faces and they can recover. These men are mentally ill. The writers try (but don’t succeed) in side-stepping this by stating that most of the patients are there voluntarily, so obviously they aren’t crazy, right? Right? Yes, McMurphy metaphorically and mentally “frees” the Chief, but what of the others? The ones with real issues. Billy’s death is just as much McMurphy’s fault as Nurse Ratched’s, but it’s easier to overlook that because this is an anti-establishment story.

In fact, there’s an entirely different interpretation of the movie one could see, one where Ratched is the hero and McMurphy is the villain. She is, after all, just doing her job and he’s putting these guys in harm’s way every chance he gets. In this version, McMurphy gets what he deserves at the end and sanity is restored. I’d normally call a movie working just as well under several interpretations a great thing, but this movie is so obviously on McMurphy’s side, this can only be seen as a fault.

Also a major issue is the blatant misogynistic spin. Ratched has removed all semblances of femininity from herself, and as a result is called a “cunt” and “bitch” early and often by McMurphy. Her assistant barely has three lines. Dourif’s character has issues with his mother and ex-girlfriend, and Redfield’s character loathes his wife. The only women seen in a good light are the whores who go sailing with the boys and sneak the booze into the hospital.

And then there’s the little fact that the (I’m guessing) 40ish-year-old McMurphy was in prison because he raped a 15-year-old girl. This is actual dialogue: “She was very willing, if you know what I mean. I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, she might have been 15 but, when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don't think it's crazy at all…and I don't think you do either.”

We’re supposed to cheer for this guy. The movie basically forgets this little exchange happened five minutes later, so I guess they figure we should as well?

These are all major, major problems that prevent the movie from working as it should. But it’s so much easier to forget. To forgive the movie for its issues. To just focus on Nicholson and Fletcher and cheer when the Chief breaks that window and embraces his newfound strength. Good luck with that.

My Score (out of 5): ***

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

2011-10-29T12:27:00.001-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 39
Year: 1964
Writer: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern (adaptation), Peter George (novel)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Star: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Slim Pickins

The biggest joke in “Dr. Strangelove” is that is would have made one hell of a good thriller. In fact, it did. Ever see Sidney Lumet’s “Fail Safe”? Of course, until its third act, “Dr. Strangelove” plays its situation completely straight. No one winks at the audience. The actors twitch. A lot. But they never wink.

The plot involves a crazed General named Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) implementing Wing Attack Plan R (for Robert), in which all the American nuclear bombers go incommunicado and attack Russia. Ripper’s aide (Peter Sellers) desperately struggles to learn a code that will bring communication back to the bombers. Meanwhile, the President (Sellers again) convenes all his important Generals and severe-looking friends in the War Room to try and prevent the disaster. Most notable among the attendees is General Turgidson (George C. Scott), who chews a lot of gum and isn’t beating himself up over this little slip up, and Dr. Strangelove himself (Sellers a third time), a former Nazi with a hand that has a mind of its own. Oh, and we’re also following one of the bombers piloted by King Kong (Slim Pickins) as it approaches its Russian target. Personally, I wish the Kong role was a fourth for Sellers, but what can you do?

Writers Stanley Kubrick (also the director) and Terry Southern are brilliant in the way they slowly build their jokes by grounding them first in reality and then logically escalating them a step at a time until we are lost in the hilarity of it all. One of the best gags is when Ripper’s aide desperately needs to make a call to the President. The red phone in Ripper’s office has been destroyed. So has the regular phone. Good thing there’s a pay-phone in the hallway. But, crap, Sellers doesn’t have enough change. Can he call the President collect? Nope. Does a nearby soldier have change? Of course not, why would a soldier carry coins into battle? Sellers finally begs the soldier to fire into a Coke machine, and then they get into the ethics of destroying property of the Coke-a-Cola corporation. The solider finally concedes, but if Sellers doesn’t get in contact with the President there will be hell to pay. And then there’s the beautiful visual gag of Coke spurting from the machine all over the soldier’s face. The entire affair is underlined by the suspense that, if Sellers doesn’t make that call, the entire world will be plunged into a nuclear winter. It’s brilliant.

There are many genuinely funny scenes just like this peppered all around “Dr. Strangelove,” but I must admit that some of these jokes and payoffs just don’t land as they once did. It’s a shame because other filmmakers have ripped off many of the jokes so often and in such a literal fashion that they can’t help but lose some of their power. Look at the moment where Scott’s character takes a personal call with his secretary/whore in the war room. How many variations on this moment have we seen in film and on television? Or the scene where the secretary/whore carries on a conversation on the phone between two men by screaming at one in the bathroom?

Ah well, when the movie is at its best, it’s still maniacally funny. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, it’s the War Room!” is right up there with “Nobody’s perfect” or “Show me the money!” in the echelon of all-time-best comedic one-liners.

Sellers is great in his three roles. Dr. Strangelove is, of course, the showiest, and I’m guessing whenever they show a clip of Sellers in the movie, this is the first character they focus on. But, for my money, his “straight man” performances as the President and Ripper’s aide Mandrake are even better. Mandrake is probably my favorite, but that’s because the character gets my favorite extended gag (the aforementioned Coke machine sequence) in the movie. Scott’s performance is purposefully over the top, as if he’s playing to the third tier of a theatre without realizing Kubrick is filming in close-up. The result is splendid.

I must say that I think there is a major structural error in the movie’s third act. As Kong rides the bomb down to the ground, screaming in glee the entire time, the movie reaches its maniacal high point. But then, for some unknown reason, we move back to the War Room for more talk and plans of moving into mines for a hundred years or so. The scene is funny, but why is it here? Why couldn’t this scene have been moves to before the bombing moment, that way we are on a high when the film cuts to the “We’ll Meet Again” and the montage of bombs going off. The scene feels unnecessary as it is, and hurts the pacing of the final act.

Of course I make my complaints in the full knowledge that this movie getting made at all was miraculous, and that Kubrick and Southern actually pulling off making a nuclear disaster funny was nearly impossible. “Dr. Strangelove” is one of those once-in-a-generation features that breaks all the rules in such a way that they can never be broken in the same way again.

It turns out Kubrick was very good at this “breaking the rules” thing – in addition to this movie he similarly rewrote what we thought we knew about film with “2001: A Space Odyssey” (also in the AFI Top 100), “Barry Lyndon” and “The Shining.” This will be my final Kubrick article for this series (I’ve previously written on “Spartacus,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and I must say that even though his work has never emotionally engaged me on a level Chaplin, Hitchcock, Wilder, Spielberg or Huston do, I really admire what his movies aspire to be and love his technical expertise. They are all imperfect, sure, but Kubrick is unafraid to take us places and do things with his films other directors would never attempt to try.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Midnight Cowboy

2011-10-20T20:19:00.001-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 43
Year: 1969
Writer: Waldo Salt (adaptation), James Leo Herlihy (novel)
Director: John Schlesinger
Star: Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight

When I finished watching “Midnight Cowboy” I was surprised by how little it moved me. It had two engaging characters at its forefront and a few genuinely engaging moments, but so much of its edge has dulled and so many of the things that (I presume) were once groundbreaking are now eye-rolling and cliché.

Jon Voight stars as Joe Buck, the “cowboy” of the title. And yes, his name couldn’t be more on-the-nose. He hops a bus from Texas to NYC with the intention of being a well-paid, well-laid hustler, but the Big Apple has other plans for him. These early sequences on the bus and on the streets of the city take their time and give you a real feel for Joe’s character. There’s also a very funny sequence where a woman picks up Joe off the street and sleeps with him. The apartment she’s in is swanky and rich, but by the end of the night he feels so bad for her that he ends up paying her. Whoops.

There seems to only be two versions of New York City in film: The fairy tale, perfectly-lit version where the moon is always in frame and trees on the street are lit with Christmas lights…and the version where it seems like the production designers have smeared their own feces everywhere just before the cameras rolled. Director John Schlesinger, his cinematographer Adam Holender and editor Hugh A. Robertson have gone out of their way to turn New York City into a dingy, dirty (dirty!) character all its own. The signs Joe steps near seem to mimic his state of mind, and every surface of every room is covered in grime. Anyway, the cutting to the city is fine and interesting while Joe is getting acclimated to the city, but as the film wears on, my nerves wore thin, to the point where a glowing sun electric billboard slowly fading out during an emotional low point caused me to laugh.

Into Joe’s world hobbles Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Not the Muppet, that’s Rizzo the Rat. Joe’s never seen anyone like Rizzo before, and though they butt heads early and often, Rizzo eventually invites Joe to share his shack of an apartment, where they live together and become inseparable. He also has one or more of the following illnesses, so feel free to mix and match: polio, tuberculosis, cancer and/or pneumonia. Like Voight, Hoffman is tremendous in the role, making the viewer really care about the poor guy’s plight without making him a stereotype.

The friendship between these two characters is the best thing about the film and, really, the one part of the movie that hasn’t aged. In a few short scenes, writer Waldo Salt establishes the characters perfectly and there’s a real evolution of feelings and friendship between the characters as the movie progresses that resonates without becoming trite or obvious. When Rizzo tearfully tells Joe that he can no longer walk, our hearts break for both of them. Today it’s much easier to read into the relationship’s homosexual undertones (especially considering the scene where Joe abandons Rizzo to be with a woman and then cannot get an erection) but, to me, there’s a real beauty to the simplicity of two men falling in love without “falling in love.” Ah well, it works just as well both ways, and the ability of the actors to toe the line without being more blatant makes the movie all the more interesting.

After writing that last paragraph, I really wish I could say the rest of the movie was as special as the main characters are, but almost everything else stumbles badly. First, there are those horrible “Screenwriting 101” flashbacks to Joe’s life back in Texas that allude to horrible memories with his grandmother and first love. Even worse is the fantasy sequence where Rizzo imagines himself a gambling king in Florida with a bunch of wheelchair-bound elderly women. Oy. How these moments made the final cut is beyond me, especially considering that they undercut and water down some fairly good sequences they are injected into. Look at the scene where Joe is desperate enough to hustle a young guy in the movie theatre for a real missed opportunity.

And don’t even get me started on the Andy Warhol-inspired psychedelic party Rizzo and Joe find themselves attending.

The movie implodes the moment Joe loads Rizzo on a bus to Florida for the film’s denouement. Even before the bus took off I would have bet any money that Rizzo wouldn’t make it to his final destination…and wouldn’t you know it? He dies miles before he reaches Miami. Such obvious writing that basically does everything but reach out of the screen and forcibly extract the tears from your eyes. How can you emotionally engage in something that tiresome? Yes, I know variations on this have been done thousands of times, in everything from “One Way Passage” to “Battlestar Galactica” to that bittersweet scene that closes “The Age of Innocence.” And yet those works earned their endings. Here the truer thing would have been to keep our characters in the city to face their endings head on.

What makes all this all the more frustrating is because there was so much potential, and every time the film touches greatness it’s undercut by such sloppy storytelling. “Midnight Cowboy” should have been a masterpiece and could have been one. If only…

My Score (out of 5): **1/2

Goodfellas

2011-10-08T16:25:00.001-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 92
Year: 1990
Writer: Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Pileggi (adaptation), Nicholas Pileggi (book)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Star: Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci

For any film to be successful, it must transport the viewer into the world of the protagonist, however real or fanciful that may be. We think of this rule more for science fiction or horror films, but “Goodfellas” may just be the movie that gives its viewer the most immersive experience in film history. It’s not about the mafia, it is the mafia. Unflinchingly.

This is the story of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta as an adult, Christopher Serrone as a teenager), his life in the mafia and ultimate betrayal of those he once loved to spare himself. As a kid, he looked across the street at a store the mafia owned and, as soon as he can, he nabs a part-time job. One thing leads to another and before we know it Henry is exploding cars for his buddies and taking as much off the top as he wants. When we first see Henry as an adult, we are struck by his laugh. The only way I can describe it here is violent. That’s fitting.

Henry describes, in voiceover, everything his does and the practices of his friends in the mafia in a straightforward way. It might be repugnant to the viewer, but to him it’s perfectly logical. We might not agree with it but, hey, if it works for him. And it does work for him for a very long while. He makes more money than one could imagine, marries a beauty (Lorraine Bracco), nabs several mistresses and treats his friends like “family,” and yes, I did mean that as a pun. Of course he’ll never really be an insider…he’ll never be “made”…because he’s only half Sicilian, but his charisma and sure business sense almost makes up for that blood shortcoming.

Life continues to get bigger and better for Henry. Sure, he goes to jail, but he’s treated like a king there and learns a new way to slice garlic that I really should try sometime. Yes, his wife holds a gun to his face because she knows he’s cheating on her, but she’s never actually going to leave him. They move into a house where everything is so expensive and over-the-top you just know it’s the ugliest place in the city. We also meet many of the people Henry works with, most notably Tommy (Joe Pesci) and James (Robert De Niro). And there’s food. Lots and lots of food. The rest of the world, meaning the large majority that has no connection to the mafia, doesn’t exist to him or his family.

Writers Martin Scorsese (also the director) and Nicholas Pileggi just dive right into the world and don’t look back. They have a lot of fun with the mythos of the mafia and what our expectations for this type of movie are. Early in the film Henry says Tommy is “funny” and Tommy goes on an almost violent tirade against him, but it was all just a gag…until Tommy does physically beat someone moments later. Tommy’s girlfriend boasts “He’s so jealous. He said if I even looked at another guy he’d kill me.” By this point the viewer is thinking “Sister, you don’t know the half of it.” One of the movie’s high points is when Henry’s wife Karen hangs out with all the other mafia wives and observes how similar they all are in their look and speech. It’s funny but, at the same time, very sad, especially since Karen becomes one of those women she mocks soon after.

Violence is always there in “Goodfellas.” It opens with a bloody man being stabbed savagely and shot repeatedly in a trunk, even though logic tells us that when so many gunshots are fired into the trunk of a car at least one would break through into the gas tank and explode the thing. Scorsese shows us Henry’s first encounter with mafia violence when a man comes to the store Henry works with a shot hand. He’s told moments later that he shouldn’t have wasted all those aprons he used to stop the man’s bleeding. When the violence comes, it’s usually in quick spurts that have all the more impact because of their briefness. These moments happen more and more often as the film develops.

Henry’s great life lasts for as long as it can…and then it’s over with the snap of someone’s fingers. It’s hard to imagine that Henry couldn’t have expected this (he always keeps a brick of cocaine on hand in his home for emergencies, after all), especially since no mention is made of what the retirement plan from the mafia was. But his sins come back to bite him in the butt during a brilliantly staged day where Henry drives back and forth to many of his friends’ and family’s homes in a haze of cocaine, all the while followed by a helicopter. We don’t feel bad for him when he finally loses everything. How can we? And his punishment…an endless life in the suburbs, seems more fitting than a bullet to the brain lesser filmmakers might have ended the film with.

Though Pesci’s unhinged performance is the best of the ensemble, the most interesting performance is indeed Liotta. Thank God for the voice-over, because it helps to steer us through the waves of Liotta’s character. When we first meet him he’s charming enough and handsome enough to get away with just about anything he wants to, and he seems to be channeling a lot of John Travolta’s charm, especially in the early scenes with Karen. But as he ages and gets oilier and less handsome, you begin to see the cracks. He needs that cocaine and those mistresses because they tell him lies that he’s the man he once was. Liotta goes big a few times, wonderfully over the top, but that only underlines as good as he is at underplaying the rest of his work.

Scorsese plays some camera tricks and, with his cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, presents us with some tremendous long takes. Most of them work, though the many freeze-frames in the first act don’t hold up as well as the rest of the movie. Today they distract from instead of underlining what we see. However, that’s a small complaint when everything else around it is pitch-perfect.

Scorsese and Pileggi envelop the viewer so well into the world that you can’t help but lose control of your moral compass. I never “liked” Henry. Or Karen. Or Tommy. But I did find myself caring deeply for their world and involved in their fates. If a film’s creators can make me that invested in something so despicable, they’ve done the seemingly impossible, and the result is a masterpiece.

My Score (out of 5): *****

The Deer Hunter

2011-08-31T20:31:00.001-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 53
Year: 1978
Writer: Deric Washburn (screenplay), Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, Louis Garfinkle (story)
Director: Michael Cimino
Star: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep

“The Deer Hunter” has some good things in it, but the overall effect I got out of it was indifference. When I realized that the three act structure of the film would follow a character named Michael (Robert De Niro) before his tour in the Vietnam, during the tour and then the emotional aftermath when he returns home, I thought it was refreshing and couldn’t wait to dive in. Then, as the movie rolled on (and on (and on))) I began to realize that the film’s messages (the ones that came out when it wasn’t trying to be overly ambiguous) were nothing we hadn’t seen told better in other films. Ultimately, the movie feels ambitious, but in the sense that it’s overindulgent, overlong and overcooked.

The film’s first act mostly focuses on a Russian Orthodox wedding attended by Michael, his best friend Nick (Christopher Walken), the woman they both love (Meryl Streep), the groom (John Savage) and assorted drunken people. And yes, for awhile it’s very enjoyable to get such a slice of small-town life and see the joy and exhilaration of the celebration. But twenty minutes would have been fine…instead we’ve got another thirty to watch.

The main male cast are drunk for the first hour and ten minutes of the movie. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. Writer Deric Washburn and director Michael Cimino try give us one of those “this is how men really behave” feelings here. But let’s be honest with ourselves, guys. This isn’t how dudes really act when they are drunk. The actions we see here and the guys’ behavior is how men wish we could act while they are drunk. Here the characters have deep, logical, insightful conversations with one another, can drive wonderfully under the influence, go hunting and actually see well enough to shoot a deer, shower each other with beer on a pool table and perfectly play the piano. In reality, these characters would probably burp, pee in the corner of a room and then pass out on the couch.

The film picks up immensely once the men get to Vietnam, reaching its high point with an incredibly tense Russian Roulette sequence and nail-biting escape and rescue. Cimino does an excellent job of staging the Russian Roulette game, surprising us by having the gun go off in shot angles we would not normally expect. And yet, even here I have reservations about how to story tackles the subject. In the first place, none of the main men die here. Yes, I know what happens to Nick later, but still, the scene would have been more powerful had one of the main characters actually shot himself here. And, in many ways, it would actually serve to further underline Nick’s PTSD and psychosis in the third act. The only characters that die are faceless characters. The movie also goes out of its way to not characterize any of the Vietnamese people, whatever side they are on. In “Platoon” this worked because they seemed more like a force…more like ghosts, but here the creators had every opportunity to take a few moments to give a little depth to them and avoided it. It’s a missed opportunity.

When the Michael character gets home, the movie slows down and acts like it’s giving us real insight into its characters and their situations. But just about everything every character does here is expected and pretty predictable. Of course Michael isn’t going to want a welcome home party. And of course he’s going to be emotionally distant from Streep’s character, who of course will latch onto him not only because she loves him, but because he is a connection to the other man she loves. And we know Michael is ultimately going to go back to get Nick, but he will not be successful.

I feel like, despite my complaints, there is insight here and there are very deep, well-acted scenes. It’s just that I’ve just seen much better interpretations of the subject matter than here. For example, “The Best Years Of Our Lives” done two generations before about WWII, is much more emotionally shattering and intuitive in its portrayal of the men coming home from the war, scarred both emotionally and physically. And for all the suspense and horror of the Russian Roulette scenes, “Platoon” is so much better at showing the real terror and uncertainty of the Vietnam war. And hell, if I want to see a bunch of guys under the influence and scared about going to war, I’ll watch “Hair.” It has a better soundtrack.

More than that, this is the first time I’ve been watching a movie on the AFI Top 100 and thought “well, the critics must have loved this.” Today it’s business as usual for studios to release films (“The Reader”) that seem tailor-made (“A Beautiful Mind”) to be nominated (“Million Dollar Baby”) for a bunch of Oscars (“The King’s Speech”), even though the content (“The Queen”) of the movies themselves (“Babel”) may not merit the attention (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) they receive. That’s how I felt watching “The Deer Hunter.” Ooh, there’s the scene they shot for Streep’s Oscar reel! Oh look, an ambiguous ending that is bittersweet! Oh look, guys crying!

Look, I understand what Cimino was trying to accomplish here and I have a lot respect for what he did pull off. “The Deer Hunter” isn’t a bad movie, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as it could. It’s obvious and heavy-handed when it could have been subtle and impactful. It could have used a meat cleaver to chop off 45 minutes of fat. Sure, there were parts that were touching, and the performances of the leads are very good, but I also must say that I probably won’t remember most of the movie next month.

My Score (out of 5): **1/2

Forrest Gump

2011-08-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 76
Year: 1994
Writer: Eric Roth (adaptation), Winston Groom (novel)
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Star: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise

There’s no way that “Forrest Gump” should work. If you told me to watch a heartwarming movie about a “simple” man who manages to be involved with almost every major event in American history from the 50s to the 80s and, in the process, reveal many of the underlying truths in our culture, I would have probably laughed in your face. And yet, here I sit, greatly admiring screenwriter Eric Roth and director Robert Zemeckis’ sprawling epic.

Perhaps one of the secrets of the movie is that it doesn’t frontload its political and moral messages. Instead, screenwriter Eric Roth engrains several simple, t-shirt-ready universal truths into the character of Forrest (played wonderfully by Tom Hanks), often from the lips of his beloved Mama (Sally Field), and repeats them often (“Stupid is as stupid Does,” “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.”). Through those simple phrases we get perspective on defining American events, and a surprising insight.

Over the course of the movie, Forrest involves himself in the Vietnam War, begins the Watergate scandal, is one of the first investors in Apple Computers, almost becomes a member of the Black Panthers, helps to re-open American political relations to China and inspires John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I’m only scratching the surface here, there’s plenty more he gets himself mixed up in, mostly in quirky, original, memorable ways. Miracles happen early and often in Forrest’s life, beginning with the moment that he is running from bullies and his leg braces fall off. Instead of hobbling Forrest, when they fall off they free him, and he finds he can run faster than almost anyone else. Perhaps more miracles happen to him because he has a simpler mind and bigger heart than most, or maybe it’s because he’s smart enough to recognize them as miracles instead of just luck.

Just reading that last sentence misrepresents the movie as corny, oversweetened dreck, but it’s really not. There’s plenty of dark content here, thanks to Forrest’s true love and his best friend. We like Jenny (played by Robin Wright as an adult) almost immediately upon meeting her, thanks to the fact that she’s the only person who will give Forrest the time of day. There’s a beautiful scene early on where Jenny and Forrest run into her drunk, pedophile father’s fields to hide from him and she wishes to be turned into a bird. Roth revisits that moment twice later, first when the adult Jenny breaks down when she sees the house again for the first time in decades and later when Forrest has the house demolished, and each time it’s powerful.

Though Forrest remains slow and steady in his beliefs throughout his life, Jenny’s journey is really one of uncertainty and self-hate. She sleeps with a bunch of abusive losers and does a lot of drugs. In one scene she screams at Forrest, “You don’t even know what love is!” and at this moment she is, at best, a stripper. And that isn’t even her low point.

Forrest’s best friend is Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise), who he meets in Vietnam. Dan is bright and cheerful at first, but hates Forrest (and himself (and God (and everything else))) after Forrest rescues him from enemy bombing and he loses both of his legs. And yet it’s obvious he’s a good man, and at one point gets almost violently defensive when someone calls Forrest stupid. Sinise is one of the best character actors we have today, capable of revealing so much without seeming to do much at all, and this is one of his finest performances.

In fact, I’m not exaggerating when I say that all of the performances here are aces. All the actors, from Fields to Hanks to Wright, understand the tone of the material and go for it. Director Zemeckis is a brilliant director because he understands the technical side of the medium as well as the human, storytelling side. He’s also a great chameleon, giving us great diversity in his movies (“Contact,” “What Lies Beneath,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” “Back to the Future” “Romancing the Stone”) but remaining distinguished as a filmmaker. Watching the above films, you can always tell it’s Zemeckis behind the camera. Recently he’s focused solely on completely CGI films like “Beowulf” and “A Christmas Carol.” I really wish he’ll return to live action soon, because an industry more concerned with 3-D and Transformers than story and substance needs him. Badly.

However, for as much works in the film, there are several things, both major and minor, which don’t. A small example is the random flashbacks to the actors as their ancestors (for example, we see Hanks as the head of the Ku Klux Klan and several generations of Sinise dying in battle. And for all the historical moments that are just right (Watergate), Forrest’s coining of the phrase “Shit Happens” and accidental creation of the smiley face t-shirt are badly done. Another problem is the shifts in character point-of-view that happen throughout and annoy, especially since it’s Forrest relating his own story in a voiceover is that is very omnipresent. James Cameron got away with shifting points-of-view in “Titanic” because he didn’t overdo the voice-over. Not so here. When the story shifts to Jenny snorting cocaine or contemplating suicide or, in general, breaking through the bottom of the barrel to find new lows, the film grinds to a halt.

Despite these new lows, we like Jenny and what an enigma she represents for Forrest…at least until the film’s last act. Here is where Roth’s screenplay goes off the rails and he begins to forcefully extract tears from the audience instead of allowing the story to crescendo into something transcendent. It turns out that Jenny has given birth to Forrest’s child and hidden the child from him for years. Why? No reason is given. And the only reason she’s bringing Forrest into the picture now is because she’s dying of AIDS. Suddenly, any sympathy I had for Jenny is gone. The introduction of the son is the only moment we see Hanks’ astounding performance falter a bit. Roth ignores an amazing opportunity to actually show Forrest become angry about something (a thing he has every right to be given the Lifetime-movie-of-the-week circumstances), and has Forrest immediately accept the situation and marry Jenny. The final moments of the movie show Forrest and his son waiting at the bus stop for Little Forrest’s first day of school, and it’s very charming, but it’s not earned.

In many ways, Roth took a second stab at this movie with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and I’m shocked he had no qualms about ripping himself off so freely. The results were horrible.

There are so many great things about “Forrest Gump,” and it almost reaches masterpiece status. If only it didn’t rely so much on bringing false tears to the audience. For a movie that is so honest and true for most of its running time, the tricks it tries to play on us in its final reels feels like biting into that gross piece of chocolate toffee cream at the back of a chocolate box.

My Score (out of 5): ****

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

2011-08-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 50
Year: 2001
Writer: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson (adaptation), J.R.R. Tolkien (novel)
Director: Peter Jackson
Star: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen

Note: Like other films which have had extended editions issued, my article will be discussing the original theatrical version of the film.

Though it’s obvious “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” like “Star Wars,” has been chosen for inclusion on the AFI Top 100 as a representation of the entire trilogy, I attempted to discuss the latter as a self-contained film and avoid discussion of the other “Star Wars” films. Here, it’s almost impossible because all this film represents is the set-up. It ends on a cliffhanger with no closure. Moments and plotlines set up here aren’t adequately explained and remain confusing unless you’ve seen “The Two Towers” or “The Return of the King.” Was I emotionally invested in the journey? Yes. Did that emotional investment result in any pay-off? Nope.

The movie is, of course, an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-beloved novel, unread by me. It focuses on an evil ring that a hobbit named Frodo (Elijah Wood) possesses and must destroy in the fires of Mount Doom. He begins a journey with several friends and picks up others along the way, forming the Fellowship of the title. One of the smartest things writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson (also the director) do is that they don’t dumb down the world. I know that there are thousands upon thousands of Tolkien readers who can tell me exactly what the name of every horn and sword means, but to me they might as well have been saying “The Horn of Aquafresh” or “The Sword of Prell.” Characters talk about things we are unfamiliar with in familiar, passing ways and, by doing so, it gives the world of Middle Earth a visceral, real feeling. More than that, Jackson and his co-writers aren’t afraid to stop and smell the roses. They drink in the details of the shire Frodo lives in before his quest begins, and does the same thing with the many beautiful locations the Fellowship visits over the course of the movie.

Of course, like any fantasy film, there are many questions the audience asks about logic that the screenwriters don’t bother answering, sometimes because they are saving it for a later film and sometimes just because. For example, why doesn’t the Fellowship just hop on those big ‘ole eagles and hitch a ride all the way to Mount Doom? Why couldn’t Gandalf just blow up the bridge before the fire creature reached him? Why does Mordor look close at the beginning of the film and even further at the end? If all Frodo sees while wearing the ring are horrible firey death images, why didn’t Bilbo see the same thing? I’m sure Tolkien fans can answer those in a heartbeat, but it’s not explained properly here.

For a film so steeped in location, ideas and moments, I must admit that the characterization is a bit flatter than I remember. Of course it would be extremely difficult to introduce such a huge cast and make all of them three-dimensional beings, but it’s still fair to ask that all the characters in the central Fellowship are properly fleshed out. Of all the main characters, the only two that really jump out at me are Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Boromir (Sean Bean). We immediately latch onto Gandalf because we sense his desperation, first at the betrayal of his old friend and later at the difficulty of the journey before the Fellowship. Boromir is a fascinating, imperfect human—always trying to be the best he can be but in over his head and knowing it. He has the kind of depth that is lacking in a major way from characters like Legolas and Strider, who are as boringly heroic as can possibly be, and as a result Boromir’s death at the end of the film comes as quite the punch in the gut.

And yet there is still so much to love. The setting is breathtaking, probably ranking as the most detailed, fantastic fantasy setting ever placed on film (sorry, Mr. Lucas). As the film unveils layer after layer of persons, places and things it becomes even more watchable and enjoyable. It’s suitably intimate when it needs to be, but when Jackson decides to go epic, the movie transcends just about every other blockbuster of this type. There are brilliant, creative shots that still linger with me years after seeing the movie opening weekend in theaters, like the one that begins on top of the tower Gandalf is imprisoned on, then drops through the earth into a literal hell of orcs. The high point of the film is the Fellowship’s journey through half-destroyed cave, cornered and chased by orcs all the while. There’s a long action sequence set on steps, and it’s just about a perfect meshing of special effects, stunts and music.

That entire sequence is so great that the last third of the film can’t help but feel a little pale in comparison. But the movie keeps going. And going. The places the Fellowship visits and the villains they encounter are interesting, for sure, but nothing comes close to reaching the heights of what has come before, and it begins to get a little bit tedious. It’s not bad, it’s just too much.

And then there’s the non-ending. For me, the best film in the trilogy is “The Two Towers,” which pays off many of the threads introduced here while still setting up the final movie. I’m torn as I reach the end of the article, because I think the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is tremendous, but this movie on its own falls a little flat. For example, it feels odd not to get a really good look at Gollum, who is so central to rest of the trilogy. And even though I know the characterization will improve in subsequent movies, it’s still not great here. And there’s only hints of the epic battles that would define these movies as the next step in the evolution of swashbucklers and special effects. If I were grading the trilogy as a whole, the rating would be higher, but I’m not.

My Score (out of 5): ***1/2

It's a Wonderful Life

2011-08-21T14:01:00.001-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 20
Writer: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra (adaptation), Jo Swerling (additional scenes), Philip Van Doren Stern (original story)
Director: Frank Capra
Star: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore

Of all those sad little feelings that slowly eat away at your soul, regret is possibly the worst. Not only does it make you wish you be anyplace else and anyone other than the person you truly are, but it makes it impossible to look ahead because you cannot accept the choices of the past. George Bailey (James Stewart) is a man of many regrets, the kind that seem small at first but snowball (not a pun, I promise) to the point where we doubt if he can ever truly be happy.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is co-writer/director Frank Capra’s best film, a near-perfect meshing of his quirky characters and underlying optimism with the outside world’s cynicism. From heaven’s point-of-view, we watch George grow up, take over the family business, get married and come to the brink of losing everything one snowy Christmas Eve. A guardian angel (second class) named Clarence (Henry Travers) is sent to stop George from committing suicide and, when George screams that he wishes he had never been born, Clarence grants the wish.

I’ve often stated that the majority of Capra’s films (see my articles on “It Happened One Night” and “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” or watch “Platinum Blonde,” “American Madness,” “You Can’t Take It With You”…etc.) have the opposite problem of most mainstream films. Instead of having a great first and third act and faltering during the second act, Capra’s films present us with uneven, hard-to-follow first acts and abrupt, almost non-endings. His movies really come to life in the second act, where he allows his main characters to become human by juxtaposing their personalities to the eccentric world around them. Here the problem is gone, with a charming opening, a real build and an ending that lasts just long enough to bring tears but doesn’t linger too long to get schmaltzy.

There are moments and characters here that are completely Capra. Look at the sequence where the pool opens up beneath George and his future wife Mary (Donna Reed, never lovelier). Now I don’t buy for a minute that a small town like Bedford Falls would have enough money to build a swimming pool under the gym, or that George and Mary wouldn’t realize the floor underneath them is moving, but since the performances are so endearing and because we know this is a Capra movie, we go with it. Then there’s the none-too-bright uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) who keeps crows and squirrels around the office, though no one ever complains about the mess.

There’s also a scene in the movie that is one of the sexiest in the history of film, though the characters barely touch. Mary’s beau has called her long distance and George somehow gets on the call as well. He and Mary stand next to one another, almost touching as they hold the phone, trying to keep the conversation going but unable to concentrate on anything other than one another. It’s beautifully done and a reminder to filmmakers in this “Friends With Benefits”/”No Strings Attached” era that sometimes the sexiest thing you can do is to keep it subtle.

Stewart’s previous collaborations with Capra resulted in pretty good movies, but his characters in “You Can’t Take It With You” and “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” are the unfortunately the blandest things in those movies. Luckily, in “It’s a Wonderful Life” the character of George is a beautifully realized three-dimensional protagonist, quirky, opinionated, charming and never, ever bland. If he were, the movie wouldn’t work and we wouldn’t accept the dark places George goes at the end of the second act. For me, it’s Stewart’s best performance in a career of great performances.

Every time I see the movie I’m always shocked by how dark it is. We remember the cute moments, like the swimming pool or when Mary gets trapped naked in a flower bush. What we may forget is that, seconds later, George learns his father has just had a stroke. There’s a moment where an old friend invites George and Mary overseas for a vacation, and he laughs it off, smiling brightly while declining. As soon as the friends leave he kicks his car violently, showing just how bitter he is that he never got to achieve his dream of leaving Bedford Falls. The film’s most emotionally shattering moment, and perhaps the high point of Stewart’s acting career, is George alone in a bar praying to God to help him before he kills himself.

Yes, the sequence in the alternate Bedford Falls (renamed Pottersville) feel a little overdone and George’s endless declaration that “this can’t be real!” feels like a beat repeated much too often, but this could be because the trope has been repeated thousands of times, from “Popular” to the Muppets, that it can’t but feel a little familiar and obvious.

The real magic comes when he’s returned to his life. When seemingly every person in town comes to George’s house to donate money, we’ve reached one of the most emotional moments ever put on film. It never fails to move me deeply and bring a tear to my eye.

Like all of Capra’s films, “It’s a Wonderful Life” doesn’t seem to age. In fact, the movie doesn’t feel like it has a specific time or place at all. When it was first released, parts of it must have seemed old-fashioned…I’m thinking specifically of the Dickens-like Mr. Potter…but today his bid to take over the entire town seems more than modern, as does the recession and tough times the town faces. Other moments that seemed up-to-the-second then have become old-fashioned for us today, but the blending of these elements makes it feel universal, able to speak to every generation equally. What a gift.

My Score (out of 5): ****1/2

Nashville

2011-08-19T16:40:00.001-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 59
Year: 1975
Writer: Joan Tewkesbury
Director: Robert Altman
Star: Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Ronee Blakley

I guess I just wasn’t ready for a Robert Altman movie. I was 16 and my first encounter with the filmmaker was “Gosford Park.” I didn’t know anything about Altman, all I knew was that it was a murder mystery…and since I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan I was very much anticipating the film. All I remember is that I hated (HATED) it, and in retrospect that’s probably because the style of Christie’s novels and Altman’s films could not be more different. Because my expectations were so skewed, there was no way I could have accepted the film for what it was.

I didn’t see another Altman movie for the next decade.

Therefore, it’s not a coincidence that I’ve written articles on almost 70 movies from the AFI Top 100 list before I tackled the first Altman movie. But now here I sit, completely in awe of what Altman and writer Joan Tewkesbury have accomplished with “Nashville” and eager to dive into his films and see just what I’ve been missing. Hell, “Nashville” was so damn good I might even give “Gosford Park” a second chance.

The film has a huge ensemble of at least 20 major characters, but other than that, it’s hard to put a finger on what the movie is “about.” There’s plenty of music, but this isn’t a “musical.” There are love stories, but this isn’t a “romance.” It’s funny but not a “comedy.” It has political undertones, but it isn’t a “message” movie. Tewkesbury refuses to give the viewer an easy answer, instead focusing on making the characters as three-dimensional as possible given the huge cast and time constraints (the movie is really long at over two-and-a-half hours, but doesn’t feel that way).

And there are some fantastic, memorable characters at play here. I doubt if Lily Tomlin is onscreen more than 20 minutes in the movie, but in that time she creates a fully-realized woman that the audience falls for. It would have been easy to make her “the pushover mother with deaf children,” but there’s much more to her. There’s a beautiful moment where she goes to a club to listen to the young, handsome singer (Keith Carradine) who invited her, and Altman’s camera just watches her as she (and, by extension, the audience) contemplates how to feel about the singer.

Tomlin’s character is only the first of a great many, and one of the gifts of “Nashville” is that many of the characters may appear to be shallow at first but end up surprising the audience with their depth and appeal. There’s a man named Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), and I’m guessing Haven isn’t his birth name, who seems like your classic stuck-up asshole country star, but after a tragic shooting at a large musical event, he’s the first to spring into action and calm the crowd before it takes on a stampede mentality and people get hurt. Oh, and he does this while his arm is bleeding from being shot.

Then there’s the much-loved Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who is the picture of a wonderful, loving songstress when surrounded by fans but, when alone, reveals her fears and anger toward her sad-sack husband (Allen Garfield). There’s a heartbreaking moment where she takes the stage after getting out of the hospital and can’t bring herself to sing because she wants to talk to the audience…something she never gets a chance to honestly do in her marriage. I’m guessing Shana Feste was taking a lot of notes and inspiration from this storyline in particular when she made the sort-of-good “Country Strong” last year, because many of these scenes are echoed beat-for-beat there.

Tewkesbury and Altman throw in dozens of small beats and moments that make the characters feel like people, and a lot of that comes from now natural the dialogue feels. I’ve only seen that one Altman film, but every person familiar with film at all knows that he’s famous for allowing his actors to speak over one another and talk like real people would. Barbara Baxley is given a long speech about the Kennedys (that foreshadows the shooting), and in most other movies it would seem theatrical and contrived, but here Baxley’s dialogue is so natural, and the word choice so honest that everything she says feels fresh.

In such a fantastic ensemble, two characters stick out like sore thumbs. The first is a BBC reporter (Geraldine Chaplin) who is so wrong-headed in everything she observes and the way she speaks to every character that she is immediately grating. Every time she gets onscreen, I cringed and rolled my eyes at most of her lines. There’s no moment where she becomes the real person much of the rest of the cast does, and as a result she’s nothing more than bad comedy. Speaking of bad comedy, there’s also Shelly Duvall as the most grating young woman I’ve ever seen, from her hair to her costuming to…well…everything about her. I know these characters are supposed to be annoying, but in a movie where a character like Haven can show such unexpected depth, this was a real missed opportunity.

The music throughout is very good, with a few standout performances from actors like Karen Black and Carradine, who sings my favorite song in the film, “I’m Easy,” in the aforementioned club scene with Tomlin. Because the movie is about so much, with so many characters and tonal shifts, the music is what keeps us consistently engaged. We see just about every style of country and gospel music, and therefore know that the types of stories we are watching will have that same type of variety.

What comes through more than anything else is the creators’ love for Nashville itself. Sure, Tewkesbury and Altman poke fun at aspects of the culture, but there’s a kind of love and admiration here that you rarely get from such epic films. From the traffic pile-up that turns into an impromptu party to Haven’s climactic declaration that “This is Nashville, not Dallas!”, this movie is a pleasure that makes me want to be part of the world. More than anything, “Nashville” has also helped open my eyes to a brilliant filmmaker I may have ignored, and isn’t that part of the point of the AFI Top 100? It’s “ranking” the movies, yes, but it also invites those who love film to open up new avenues in their viewing, and I’m very grateful for that.

My Score (out of 5): ****1/2

Unforgiven

2011-08-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 68
Year: 1992
Writer: David Webb Peoples
Director: Clint Eastwood
Star: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman

The Western genre has always been unique in the way it embraces its characters’ histories. The other genres, from horror to period drama to comedy, tend to sidestep backgrounds and history, giving the viewer the feeling that the characters began existing the moment the film began, complete with one or two quirks or traits, but not much else. That is not so with the Western. Every Western on the AFI Top 100…hell, every great or even good Western…involves what happened long before the movie began just as much as what happens during the film itself. “Unforgiven” is no exception.

Clint Eastwood (who also directed) plays Bill Munny, who was, long ago, a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad man who was drunk most of the time and had a tendency to kill people when drunk. But that was before he fell in love and married a woman who set him on the right path. As the film opens he stands near her gravestone. He has two kids to take care of now and little money to do it with, so when a young man named the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) rides up with a very enticing offer, Munny finds it hard to refuse.

The offer is $1000 to any man or men who kill two roughians who have sliced up a whore’s face. After some initial resistance, Munny goes to his old partner Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the three of them set off together. Little do they know the town they ride toward is run by a sadistic devil of a sheriff named Little Bill (Gene Hackman), who will beat a man within inches of his life for carrying a gun into the town, but does nothing to penalize the two men who cut up the woman.

Much is made of who Munny was before and his effort to not be that man anymore. He sounds rehearsed every time he talks about the evil things he’s done and how he was saved from his wickedness. He refuses whiskey even when hit with a horrible fever. Munny seems to be over-insisting that he’s a changed man, and even though he is trying to deliver justice, he can only kid himself for so long since he will be murdering two men he has no personal vendetta against. When the film focuses on that inner turmoil it is at its best.

We want to know more about the Logan character and his relationship to Munny, especially since Logan’s death is the turning point for the entire movie, but writer David Webb Peoples is stingy in developing him much more than that he’ll cheat on his wife with whores. What gravitas is brought to the character is thanks to Freeman’s performance, and the character simply acts as someone to speak his deep thoughts to.

It’s a shame, because Peoples had the opportunity to deliver a really emotional sucker punch, but instead keeps shifting around to other characters. Richard Harris appears as English Bob, shoots some birds and then gets beaten by Little Bill. Harris is great, but his character has nothing to do with the drive of the story other than to show us Little Bill’s craziness (something perfectly illustrated elsewhere). He never encounters Munny or Logan, and nothing has changed after he’s left the movie.

The time spent with English Bob would have been better spent on Logan, or even on the fascinating, also under-developed, Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), mistress extraordinaire, who puts the bounty out when Little Bill refuses to do anything.

Peoples seems to be trying to paint a diverse, interesting canvas of characters, and does to a degree, but the ultimate result is that the movie becomes unfocused when tension should be building. Luckily, the acting throughout is uniformly excellent and sometimes manages to make up for the scattershot script. I must admit, though, that there are a number of fantastic details Peoples presents us with that impressed me. Making the Scofield Kid near-sighted felt refreshing since ocular abilities is almost never addressed in Westerns, shocking since it is so important to everyone who owns a gun in those movies. Giving Little Bill a whip to further drive his horrors home. The Writer character explaining why Munny chose to shoot who he shot in what order after the fact. All great moments.

Eastwood is the most consistent of directors. He rarely shows off with the camera, and instead of using tricks or quick-cutting allows the scenes to breathe. This results in an even pace and slow build, both of which feel refreshing in an era where we are force-fed wild changes in pacing thanks to a generation afflicted with filmmaking ADD. What else Eastwood’s even-handed approach gives the film is a tonal consistency that might otherwise be missing. For instance, the film opens with a static distant shot of Eastwood standing over the grave of his wife while we read about his history with her. A moment later we are in a whorehouse watching a woman’s face be sliced up and urine being thrown everywhere. In any other movie, this kind of shift would bring everything grinding to a halt, but since it’s Eastwood and because his direction is so sure, we accept it simply as another part of the world he’s slowly presenting to us.

Despite not seeming to show off, Eastwood’s films have a style that is instantly recognizable. This film couldn’t be more different than “Changeling,” which couldn’t be more removed from “The Bridges of Madison County,” and yet they still feel like the same, sure hand guided them.

“Unforgiven” doesn’t match the same quality of the Westerns Eastwood did for Sergio Leone, like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” but it’s an entertaining, well-acted and directed film. I wish that the script had managed to rise to the quality around it, but even with that I still enjoyed myself a lot. Still, can I think of at least a dozen other Westerns that would be better placed on the AFI top 100? Yep.

My Score (out of 5): ***

Star Wars

2011-08-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 13
Year: 1977
Writer/Director: George Lucas
Star: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher

Note: In the case of “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” their inclusion on the AFI Top 100 is an obvious representation of the entire trilogy. Otherwise, why were the superior sequels not chosen? Still, my article will only address the listed film. Also, after a less-than-entertaining encounter with a re-release of Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush,” I’ve decided to, if possible, track down the original theatrical release version of all films on the list.

I love it when a movie announces its arrival with bombast and style. “All the President’s Men” grabs your attention immediately with the smashing of a typing key against paper. “Dead Again” opens with a loud musical note and the word “MURDER!” filling the screen. “Star Wars” explodes into our consciousness with John Williams’ lush score and the title filling almost every inch of the screen. It snaps us to attention and is the perfect way to introduce us into this world of lightsabers and jawas.

Writer/director George Lucas’ film is filled with such swashbuckling fun and so many moments that make you smile knowingly, that it might be easy to dismiss it as light entertainment. But then again, what the heck is wrong with a movie being “light”? Does that make the underlying themes and storytelling any less impactful? I don’t think so. In fact, one could argue that wrapping these themes and morals in a space adventure is much more difficult than dealing with things like “belief in a higher power” and “sins of the father” by stating them explicitly.

For a film that wears its “Flash Gordon” serial inspirations on its sleeve, Lucas actually does a few really gutsy and interesting things with the screenplay. In the first place, the film is basically driven by non-humans for the first twenty minutes. Sure, there are soldiers around and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) says a line or three, but these minutes are driven almost completely by two robots and a dude who might as well be one. Their faces are expressionless. Hell, R2-D2 can’t even speak—he beeps and boops when he needs to communicate.

And yet Lucas makes the sequences work and, in very subtle ways, communicates just about everything he needs to about the world (or, in this case, worlds) we are entering. After C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels under that gold suit) and R2-D2 crash on a desert planet, they argue with one another and choose to go in opposite directions. So, without having a human character babble on with exposition, Lucas shows us that not only do these robots (sorry, droids) have distinctive personalities, but they can also make decisions for themselves and form friendships.

The two droids soon become the possession of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), who teams up with a desert hermit named Obi Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) to save the Princess from the evil Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) and join the rebellion. Darth Vader is overseeing the final touches on their new space station called the Death Star. With names like Darth Vader and Death Star, no wonder there’s a rebellion, these people aren’t even trying to hide their wickedness.

Also in the mix is scoundrel Han Solo (Harrison Ford), who begins by acting as a taxi for Luke and Obi Wan before becoming part of the plan to rescue the Princess…for the reward, of course. The characters aren’t deep, but then again, they don’t have to be. These are archetypes more than characters, though the charisma of the actors playing the roles (save for a bland Hamill) makes us care more than we otherwise would.

Films usually end their second act with the low point of the hero or heroine, but Lucas instead decides to use it as a rallying point for our heroes. The Princess has been rescued (though once out of her cell did a pretty good job of protecting herself), and now she brings together the rebellion to launch an attack on the Death Star. How, you ask? Well, turns out there’s this two-meter wide hole in the outside that, if a bomb is dropped into it, will explode the entire space station. Seriously. If you didn’t smile at the preposterousness of that plot development, there’s just no talking to you.

Lucas loves to paint around the edges of his frame, giving us beautiful sights that mesmerize quickly. Hell, the first shot of the movie is what we think is a pretty big space ship being overshadowed by a star destroyer that travels into the frame from above and just. keeps. going. Lucas would later eclipse this with us another variation in his “Revenge of the Sith” opening, but the moment still plays outstandingly well here.

And then there are the special effects. I know that Lucas went back multiple times to fiddle with the movie, but looking at the original theatrical version again, I have to say that it still looks great. From the dogfight between the X-wing fighters and the Tie Fighters to the interiors within the Death Star, the movie looks great. When the characters enter a bar, it’s enjoyable to see the puppets with the glittery eyes mixing in with humans in grotesque make-up. Sure, the special effects might not be as polished as the summer movies of today, but then again part of the fun of the movie is the line Lucas tows between the fantastic and realism.

John Williams’ score is, dare I say, the best of his career and perhaps the best in the history of film? The secret is that he hasn’t scored “Star Wars” like a space movie, he scores it like a dramatic action flick.

Ultimately, “Star Wars” is fun. It’s always a little smarter than it needs to be, always has another trick up its sleeve and is always eager to please. It grabs you immediately, keeps your attention and makes you invested in its characters and world despite the fancifulness of the film’s happenings. I think I smiled all the way through, all the way from Tatooine to the ceremonial hall that closes the movie.

My Score (out of 5): *****

All the President's Men

2011-08-07T22:42:00.001-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 77
Year: 1976
Writer: William Goldman (adaptation), Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward (book)
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Star: Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards

For most of its running time, “All the President’s Men” is a fascinating, absorbing portrait of the slow, sometimes-desperate uncovering of the truth behind the Watergate break-ins. It takes a “just the facts, m’am” approach to its subject, content with the thought that the clues, details and conspiracies will be enough to make the film worthwhile while pushing aside characterization and emotional arcs.

The film begins showing us the details of the break-in, with a guard at the Watergate offices discovering a door has been taped so it cannot lock and reporting it to the police. Bob Woodward (Robert Redford), a reporter for the “Washington Post,” is called to cover the arraignment of the men who broke in, and is surprised to find they have an expensive lawyer on their side, the kind no one would expect. Woodward presses and begins to realize things aren’t right.

Another reporter becomes involved named Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), and though the movie gets thousands of the small details of journalism right, his first major interaction with Woodward feels wrong. Woodward has typed up his version of certain events, turns it into copy and then Bernstein immediately takes it away and starts to rewrite it, citing the fact that Woodward did not introduce the main person involved with the story until the third paragraph. I understand that Woodward’s character is meant to be a new reporter for the “Post,” but I don’t buy that. I have a Bachelor’s in Newspaper Journalism, and just about the first thing they teach us (aside from that the AP Stylebook is our bible) is to write news stories using the pyramid structure. There’s no way Woodward would have ever been hired in the first place if he didn’t know better and was burying leads like that in news stories. It’s a small moment, sure, but it took me completely out of the movie.

Woodward and Bernstein (fellow employees at the “Post” jokingly call them “Woodstein” and it sticks) don’t have a lot to go on at first, and watching the investigation take its first fleeting steps toward being viable is engaging because it feels so real. This is what real newspapermen do when following leads and trying to envision the facts of a story. They reach wildly through smoke and hope to catch something, making calls and using their names to get people to talk (though their job clams people up ten times as often). An entire scene is devoted to Woodstein cheering and using the fact that a secretary double-talked as a major breakthrough, even though nothing she said could ever be used in the paper.

From these shaky first steps, the duo continue punching water, making hundreds of calls (there’s a great long take of Redford juggling two calls that is both funny and gripping) and looking for something…anything…that can help them. Director Alan J. Pakula gives us a spectacular shot from God’s point-of-view that sums up their journey wonderfully. He begins close on Woodstein going through thousands of library request forms and then slowly pulling back and up, the tables and library around them creating a complex labyrinth.

We learn little about Woodward or Bernstein’s relationship outside of the investigation and even less about their personal lives. This is purposeful, and we do get to know them a bit through their personalities. Though Bernstein is better at the writing, Woodstein is fantastic with interviewing and knows how to contort a question or ask just the right thing so that, even if the answer isn’t explicitly stated, it’s inferred. There are interesting, barely visible moments in the first half where Bernstein is visibly annoyed by Woodward’s questions, but as the movie progresses Bernstein gets better at asking the right questions too. This movie gets another aspect of journalism exactly right in that many of the people being questioned just assume that the reporters know everything already and, as a result, tell the reporters much more than they knew in the first place and, sometimes, give a big breakthrough to the story in the process.

Despite the lack of character development, Hoffman and Redford shine. Redford, in particular, proves here definitively that he is one of the great actors in the history of film. Though his good looks sometimes work against him, here he simply disappears into the character, leaving no trace of the movie star we thought we knew. Also of special note is Jason Robards as editor Ben Bradlee, who convinces us early and often that he’s a grizzled editor who cares enough about the story to let the team follow it, even though more experienced reporters might have been better suited.

Pakula gives the movie the feel of a thriller even if we know the reveals and the ending, and for most of the movie the pace is taut and the events suspenseful. I’m surprised it flows as well as it does and kept me engaged as fully as it did, especially considering the lack of character development. Sadly, the movie is over two hours long, and by about the one-hour-and-forty-five minute mark the reversals and doors kicked open to reveal nothing become repetitive and the pace disappears. Things get a bit interesting again when Pakula begins to play up the conspiracy angle, with the reporters afraid their homes are bugged and are looking behind themselves all the time to make sure they are not being followed.

Then, suddenly, the movie ends. Structurally, it feels like we have reached the end of the second act, with high-ups in the government denying what Woodstein are writing and Woodward learning from his contact Deep Throat that his life is in danger. Then Bradlee gives him a motivational speech to end all motivational speeches…and the movie ends. There’s a little closure in the form of an AP teletype showing us headlines for the next three years, ending with Nixon resigning, but that’s it. It’s a non-ending that endlessly frustrated me, especially considering the care Pakula and writer William Goldman took in making sure all the details of the build-up were right. To make a bad metaphor, we see the dominos set up but aren’t given the opportunity to enjoy watching them knocked down.

My Score (out of 5): ***1/2

Pulp Fiction

2011-08-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 94
Year: 1994
Writer: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Star: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman

Watching “Pulp Fiction” is like opening a set of nesting dolls. Every time you open one up, another doll is found underneath, smaller but even more intricate. Though the movie takes place out of chronological order, it isn’t a puzzle. Each section of the movie can be enjoyed and understood on its own, but when put together the pieces become transcendent.

There are three major plot threads, all of which connect to one another in varying degrees. The first follows two hit men (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, both great) as they try to get back a mysterious briefcase belonging to their evil boss Marsellus (Ving Rhames). The second follows Travolta’s character Vincent as he takes Marsellus’ sexy, sexy wife Mia (Uma Thurman) out to dinner. Not a date, he insists. The third involves a wrestler named Butch (Bruce Willis) who is on the run from Marsellus but can’t leave town until he reclaims his father’s watch.

Each one of these storylines is hugely enjoyable and, as in all films from co-writer/director Quentin Tarantino, it’s the details that we linger on and remember after the film ends. His dialogue, which reads just half-an-inch above realism, is endlessly quotable, and I’ll do my best to not do any of it here, simply because it’s impossible to single only one or two speeches out. He takes his time setting up the characters and allowing the audience to get a feel for who he’s about to torture and maim, but in doing this he also weaves in plenty of little Easter eggs that will pay off later (or earlier, depending on the chronology) in the movie. In lesser hands, the set-ups and pay-offs would implode, but Tarantino’s (along with co-writer Roger Avary) writing is so crisp, so seductive, that you can’t help but invest wholeheartedly in it. Speaking of Easter eggs, another splendid thing about Tarantino films are the numerous references (Travolta dancing the twist) and homages (hello briefcase with unknown substance in it) to other films, making film buffs all the happier.

Tarantino and Avary takes their time setting things up and pays them off gradually, ensuring that what is happening makes sense in relation to the characters we’ve come to know. The even tone and pacing of the movie actually bring an elevated level of suspense to the proceedings than would be present in a movie that had more quick-cutting and thumping music. This is true of all of Tarantino’s work—look at the “Kill Bill” movies and “Inglourious Basterds”—but is most prominent in this film. Look at the scene where the Willis character arrives at his apartment, knowing that someone is probably there waiting to kill him. Tarantino’s camera follows him as he parks two blocks away and walks through yards to go into his building through the back way. The scene is shockingly quiet, and as a result (it seems to build forever even though it can’t be more than a minute or two long) the suspense becomes almost unbearable. The diner stick-up that climaxes the film is similarly tense because Tarantino takes his time getting to his point, not seeming to care that the audience is in their seats going crazy with anticipation.

The cast, on the whole, is brilliant. The writers have made a point of ensuring that all of the leads and supporting characters come across as fully fleshed out individuals, and the actors more than rise to the occasion. Thurman doesn’t have as much screen time as the other leads (though she does get the showstopper moment thanks to an adrenaline shot) but makes every minute count, and when she’s explaining her failed TV pilot with the kind of glee a kid on the schoolyard would speak with, you can’t help but fall for her. Willis seems at first like an odd choice, especially considering Tarantino’s dialogue, but makes his forlorn attitude and quiet demeanor work for his character. Harvey Keitel comes onscreen as the cinematic equivalent of an 11 o’clock musical number, and nails every line of his professional clean-up character. Instead of letting the article degrade into a list of praise for every actor in the ensemble (which it easily could), I’ll move on.

I do have to admit that the use of the word “nigger” throughout the film is way overdone and the one major thing about the screenplay that makes me grimace. It’s not that the characters use it, it’s that it’s used so often, and usually simply for shock value. It interrupts the flow of the movie. Sure, writers have been doing this for centuries…I’m currently re-reading Truman Capote’s work and constantly rolling my eyes at how often he uses “lesbian” and “faggot” simply to get a rise out of the reader…but the movie would have been stronger without it.

Tarantino’s visual style throughout is inventive without being too showy. The visual tricks he plays are usually subtle enough to not point themselves out to the casual viewer, like having a projection with older cars playing in the background while Willis is taking a cab-ride. His work with his editor, Sally Menke, is especially notable in how well it implies violence without having to show very much of it. Remember in “Reservoir Dogs” when a character lost his ear? Though we don’t see the act on camera, you remember seeing it. The same is true here with the moment Travolta pounds the needle into Thurman’s chest. I hadn’t seen the movie in a year or two, but I clearly remembered seeing the shot where the needle enters her chest. Watching the film this time, I was wrong. But Menke does such a great job of cutting around it that it feels like we have.

“Pulp Fiction” is a little over two-and-a-half hours, but feels like it’s just about the right length. The viewer feels exhilarated as the credits roll and immediately wants to see the movie again, partially to look again for all the little moments that connect the stories, but mostly because it’s just a damn great movie.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Platoon

2011-08-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 86
Year: 1986
Writer/Director: Oliver Stone
Star: Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger

“Platoon” is a horrifying, gut-wrenching film that leaves you dazed, depressed and conflicted. It’s also a masterpiece. I write that hoping that I don’t have to watch it again anytime soon.

The film begins in 1967 and centers on a young soldier named Chris (Charlie Sheen) arriving in Vietnam to fight for his country. As he and the other recruits land, they pass a pile of body bags about to be sent back to America. The metaphor is not lost on us.

Instead of wasting time and exposition on setting up the war, the infantry and our location, writer/director Oliver Stone simply cuts to Chris walking, hobbling and crawling his way through the jungles, immediately in over his head. He’s attacked by fire ants, leeches, mosquitoes and has several encounters with poisonous snakes during the film. We learn the most about his personality through annoying letters he writes to his Grandmother that are recited in voice-over narration. Stone seems to be trying to get his thesis about the war and how it changes men out through the voice-over, but ultimately it’s unnecessary and the conclusions Chris draws at the finale aren’t anything a smart viewer won’t come to on his own.

The movie is at its most tense when Stone drops us into a situation and lets the viewer play catch-up while the characters soldier on. He is honest and ingenious in doing this since real soldiers (I’m guessing) don’t know much about the situations they are getting themselves into before the fact and, ultimately, just want to get through it alive. By doing this, Stone layers the suspense brilliantly. For example, even if they can shoot the soldiers, then there’s some sort of fire-bombing happening, but even if they live through that there’s the fact that they lost their platoon, etc. It’s relentless and all the more real because of it.

I also have to say how wonderfully Stone shoots anarchy. At this point we’ve been force-fed “shaky cam” so long that, no matter what the movie and the circumstance, if anything is supposed to be a bit hard-to-follow or suspenseful, the shaky cam comes out. This is even if the sequence is completely at odds stylistically with everything else in the film. I’m looking at you, “Harry Potter.” Do you hear me, “Star Trek”? And don’t even get me started on goddamn “Battle: Los Angeles” or “Cloverfield.” Yes, shaking the camera disorients the viewer, but you know what else it does? It pisses us the hell off. Have you ever heard someone walk out of a movie and say, “That scene where the camera went all wobbly was just the best!” No. They say, “I need to go vomit my popcorn up in the bathroom, be right back.”

In “Platoon” Stone holds the camera steady, paying close attention to the lighting, the frame and the camera’s point-of-view. The sequence that begins when Chris and a fellow soldier are in a fox-hole and strain as they (and we) watch the fog and listen for any hint that the enemy might be close is a masterpiece in sustained suspense. The characters (and, as an extension, we) don’t know where we are, but by keeping the camera steady and the location visible, there’s even more apprehension. The Viet Cong could be anywhere in the frame, and Stone has fun teasing us that way.

Okay, “fun” isn’t the right word. Nothing about the movie is “fun.” This is an action movie where the action feels like a punch to the gut. At first, keeping Chris’ character two-dimensional felt like a blow against the movie, but it’s actually one of the only instances where it ultimately works in the film’s favor. Because we only know the basics about Chris, we can’t quite anticipate his behavior in any given situation. When he loses it for a moment and begins shooting the ground where a one-legged man is standing, we are horrified, but it still feels in character.

That scene and the ones that immediately follow, culminating in Tom Berenger’s Sgt. Barnes shooting a civilian and almost murdering a child, are so gut-wrenching you can barely watch them. Stone doesn’t shy away from the ugliness, nor does he show it off, he merely shows it as it is.

Barnes is a fascinating villain. He’s horribly scarred, been shot many times, and some of the men think he simply can’t be killed. He does abhorrent things early and often, and we know that he was never a good man. But, and this is a big however, we can understand how his time in Vietnam has twisted him further into becoming the monster he is. Stone creates another character, Bunny (Kevin Dillon), who is likeable enough at first but quickly begins to show signs that he could easily turn into another Barnes. This is what the war…the jungle…the men…the world does to these soldiers. In showing the men as simply and matter-of-factly as possible, Stone has inferred just how complex the war really is, so much more than the bang-bang-you’re-dead of most war movies.

It is also worth noting that, although the movie is super-violent, there is not a lot of gore. Even when it happens, it’s quickly cut away from, instead showing us the men’s reaction to what is going on. More than that, the Viet Cong soldiers remain a shadowy menace throughout. We never get very good looks at them, which, again, makes them even more menacing. Stone strikes the perfect (yes, perfect) balance of what to show and what to leave to the audience’s imagination, a lesson directors need to remind themselves of today.

“Platoon” doesn’t get into the politics of the Vietnam War, nor does it give any insight into the General’s battle plans or evasion tactics. So, in theory, it views the war neutrally, focusing instead on the men and their reaction to the chaos around them. And yet, if there was a film that makes a more convincing anti-war case, I have yet to see it.

My Score (out of 5): *****

High Noon

2011-07-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 27
Year: 1952
Writer: Carl Foreman
Director: Fred Zinnemann
Star: Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Lloyd Bridges

“High Noon” feels like a crackerjack sequel to a great Western. It involves a villain, long thought gone, being released from prison and returning to the small town he almost pulled into anarchy upon to exact his revenge. All of the characters speak of this man, Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), in hushed tones wizards would reserve for the word “Voldemort.” We get the impression that the entire New Mexican town once united to defeat him, which makes the fact that no one will stand against him save for the lone marshal Kane (Gary Cooper) all the more devastating.

Perhaps I wrote “marshal” too soon, since we first see Kane getting married and turning in his tin law-enforcement tin star in order to go on his honeymoon. He won’t be returning to the job anytime soon, either. You see, his wife Amy (Grace Kelly) is a Quaker. The moment the townsfolk find out Miller is returning, they put Kane and Amy on a carriage out of town, but Kane can’t leave.

Why?

Kane makes some vague assertions that Miller will follow them wherever they go, but the Wild West was still awful big, and claims like that hold little water. It becomes readily apparent that the townsfolk are more than willing to step aside and allow Miller back into their lives. There’s no real reason for Kane to stand up like he does, except for the little fact that it’s what is right.

Screenwriter Carl Foreman does a great job of creating a real town, filled with people who have existed before the film began and will after the movie ends. One of the most interesting relationships is Kane’s former connection to a town “businesswoman” named Helen (Katy Jurado), who is now in a relationship with Kane’s former best friend Harvey (Lloyd Bridges). Harvey has always been jealous of Kane, and is the kind of man who can make any situation about him, no matter how inane the reasoning. He’s weak, and when Helen calls him out on this, he becomes even more blindly enraged at Kane. Ultimately, Kane and Harvey trade blows under the guise that Harvey wants to “rescue” him, but it’s really nothing more than a pissing contest Kane isn’t interested in participating in.

Also fascinating is the odd connection Amy shares with Helen. Amy suspects that Helen is the reason Kane isn’t leaving, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In their short conversation together, something “clicks” between them. The fact that Foreman developed this relationship at all is quite refreshing considering how women in Westerns traditionally get the shaft in characterization or storytelling.

While the story might not literally be a “ticking time bomb,” it’s just about as damn close as a movie can get. We learn early that Miller is coming in on the noon train, and from that moment that is all any of the characters can think about. Clocks are in almost every room, and when one isn’t handy a supporting character will helpfully report that “time is short!” Foreman crafts some outstanding moments out of this suspense, as when a members of a church want to debate, at length, exactly what the pros and cons are of standing up with Kane against Miller. The scene would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and that’s just the way Foreman and director Fred Zinnemann want it.

Though the screenplay is superbly structured and filled with absorbing moral quandaries, it’s not perfect. An early fight between Amy and Kane, moments after their wedding, feels more like something out of a bad ‘50s television show than one of the best films of all time. I feel that way about sprinkles of dialogue throughout the film—it’s not simplistic in a way that works for the characters but so direct that it causes a chuckle or a groan when it is supposed to work dramatically.

I have mixed feelings about the climactic chase sequence that occurs once Miller has arrived. It’s a little…blunt. The characters are too easily dispatched and I wish that there would have been a bigger cat-and-mouse element to the chase, rather than just shoot-out after shoot-out. I did, however, enjoy the way Zinnemann and Foreman involve Amy in the sequence, and like the way they underline what a hard decision it was for her because of her Quaker beliefs. It was a fine climax, but could have been much more.

Another problem with the finale is present throughout the rest of the film, and that’s the grating use of the song “Do Not Forsake Me O’ My Darlin’.” It’s a catchy-enough little ditty, but to have its melody play almost nonstop for the film’s last fifteen minutes could be annoying to even the most patient viewer. The patches of the song that are used earlier only take the viewer out of the movie instead of underlining what we’re seeing on screen, and that’s a shame.

Cooper and Kelly are great in their respective roles, with one major exception, and that is that I do not believe them as a married couple. Because they share so few scenes together in the movie, this isn’t a huge deal, but it would have been better if I was really rooting for them. It’s not that Cooper is way too old for Kelly, at least not fully (I still love Hepburn and Astaire in “Funny Face,” no matter how icky it is), but they simply don’t compliment each other as actors very well.

Despite my reservations, the final minute of the film is amazing. Seeing what seems like the entire town walk outside seconds after Miller falls dead to the ground to congratulate Kane, only to realize he doesn’t care anymore, is brimming with power, as is the moment he throws the tin star in the dirt. The filmmakers were brilliant in not dragging the moment down with lots of dialogue, simply letting the actors do their thing and pulling back the camera when the time came. The rest of “High Noon” doesn’t quite live up to that excellence, but it’s good enough that I wish they would have made a prequel.

My Score (out of 5): ***1/2

Chinatown

2011-07-27T14:35:00.000-07:00

AFI Top 100 Ranking: 21
Year: 1974
Writer: Robert Towne
Director: Roman Polanski
Star: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston

“You can’t eat the venetian blinds, I just had them installed on Wednesday” is the first thing Jake Gittes says in “Chinatown,” a knowing nod to the world the viewer is entering. We think we know the rules of noir…the black-and-white, the femme fatale, the dirty city see mostly at night…but writer Robert Towne and director Roman Polanski have other plans. The film is shot in lush colors that depict Los Angeles and its surrounding hills and valleys as a damn nice place to be. And the femme fatale? Turns out there’s more to her than there appears to be. The movie is still one of the most dark and twisted noirs ever produced but, like any great film, it plays with your expectations of the genre all along the ride.

Gittes is played by Jack Nicholson, who supplies the character with a seen-it-all attitude that can only mask inner pain. He’s a private detective who specializes in cheating spouses and says all the right things to his hurting clients even if his voice betrays a bit of tedium, as if he’s said this hundreds of times before. A woman who says she is Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray arrives at his office and hires him to investigate her husband, who is a big honcho in the Los Angeles water and power office. Days later, the husband is drowned, salt water in his lungs even though he didn’t die in the ocean, and the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) comes into play.

For my money this is one of the best screenplays ever written. If Raymond Chandler is considered the master of noir writing, one must agree that his work was all about mood and character over structure and story. His novels are a master’s course in style over substance (except perhaps in his screenplay to Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” where one could infer that Hitchcock demanded both), and I write that as a huge fan. What Towne does is bring all the style we expect from noir and connect it with a mystery story where everything ultimately connects in a surprising, fulfilling way. We get all the small noir flourishes, like Gittes using two watches and a tire to figure out when a character leaves a place, but also a big picture that can make sense when set apart from the shadows and double crosses.

And yet, to simply think of the movie as a mystery is missing the point. After all, none of the main characters really care about who is diverting water and, really, no one seems that shaken up about Mulwray’s death. The characters continue the investigation because they are fascinated with one another. Mrs. Mulwray shows up every reel or so for the first half of the film, as if she got bored at home and wanted to be entertained by Gittes. She didn’t have to come out to pick him up after he is beaten by orange growers, after all. Mrs. Mulwray is an enigma for both Gittes and the viewer; the more we learn about her, the more questions that are raised. Dunaway’s performance is masterful, keeping us at arm’s length enough so that we can still suspect she is a murderer but making us care enough about her to be devastated by the film’s final moments.

Towne and Polanski then begin to carefully layer on the details, always keeping them subtle. With water so important to the film, we begin to see fish everywhere—mounted on walls, sitting on plates with their head still attached, that salt-water fishpond that’s bad for the grass around it. Then there’s the fantastic, beautifully written scene where Gittes sees…something…in Mrs. Mulwray’s eye.

That isn’t to say that everything here is subtle. Nicholson’s furious slapping of an obviously horrified Dunaway in what is probably the best-remembered scene from the movie is wonderfully, purposefully, over the top. Gittes getting his nose sliced open (in a single long take that is excruciating to watch without wincing) is both a great way to make an impression and a great metaphor about the private dick in general.

Speaking of long shots, there are dozens in the movie, and almost none of them draw attention to themselves. They aren’t Brian De Palma-esque long shots—they seem simple (though I’m sure they were hell to light and set up) and are barely noticeable until you’ve seen the movie more than once. My favorite is the scene where Gittes faces off with Mrs. Mulwray’s father (a fantastic John Huston) that begins with Gittes waiting for the car to arrive and ends with the twosome in front of the sun setting in the distance.

The camera is often following Gittes (Nicholson is, as far as I can remember, in every scene of the movie), moving and angled just over his shoulder so that we discover things as he does. This is a great way to stage the scenes but, more than that, it adds a level of identification to the viewer’s relationship with Gittes. Since there’s rarely a reaction shot in these moments, we think how Gittes face would look and, in essence, become him.

Jerry Goldsmith’s score is one for the ages and, like the screenplay, probably one of the best ever written. It exists both with and outside of the action we see, sometimes contradicting it and sometimes gently supporting it.

And then there’s the ending. The question remains as to why Gittes took the baddies to Chinatown instead of taking them to Union Station and trying a getaway—not a flaw in the movie, just a question. It’s heartbreaking, but at the same time how could the movie have ended? What kind of happiness would the characters ever have had, even if they had escaped, and therein lies the real tragedy of the moment. And, even at the end, Towne and Polanski still manage to reverse our expectations. Honestly, has there ever been another film where someone can wildly shoot and manage to hit the driver from that distance? I don’t think so.

My Score (out of 5): *****

The Shawshank Redemption

2011-07-23T15:51:00.000-07:00

Year: 1994
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 72
Writer: Frank Darabont (adaptation), Stephen King (novella)
Director: Frank Darabont
Star: Morgan Freeman, Tim Robbins, Bob Gunton

Movies concerning slight-of-hand and tricking the audience, as a rule, keep the audience at arm’s length emotionally because we expect the reversals. We know there will be double crosses. We’re looking for clues that set up that seeming out-of-nowhere twist. One of the many special things about “The Shawshank Redemption” is that you don’t expect the revelations of the final act, and instead of contradicting emotions set up previously, it only serves to deepen our existing emotions regarding the main characters.

Those main characters are Red (Morgan Freeman) and Andy (Tim Robbins). They meet in Shawshank Prison after Andy has been sentenced to two life terms for the murder of his wife and her lover. Red is in prison for murder as well, a murder he freely admits to having committed. Andy, on the other hand, quietly insists that he is innocent, a statement laughed at by the been-there-heard-that inmates at the prison. Over the course of several decades, Andy and Red develop as close a friendship as two people could.

Though Andy is the one who ultimately does all the magical hoo-ha at the end, it is Red who narrates the story, as it should be. It’s Red’s story. The “Redemption” of the title isn’t Andy’s, after all, it’s Red’s. The film purposely keeps Andy at arm’s length throughout the film, and Robbins’ understated performance underlines this. We feel as if we know Andy is a good man, but he’s still an enigma we can’t quite get a grasp upon. Red spends the entire movie, even after they become close, trying to understand who his friend is, and through this narration we come to understand so much about Red as a person.

Darabont, working from a novella written by Stephen King, takes his time setting up the world and these characters as three-dimensional beings trapped in what at first appears to be a limbo state. This goes for the prison guards and administrators as well. They might not physically be behind those cell doors, but they spend their days trapped in the same hellhole the men are. Darabont uses the small character moments to surprise us. Captain Hadley (Clancy Brown) is horrendously abusive and a bad, bad man, but he still allows the men time to enjoy their beer on the roof. Heywood (William Sadler) would be the prison idiot in any other film, but here he develops a personality and a set of morals. He might be slow, but he still does what he thinks is right. Even though the movie is almost two-and-a-half hours in length, it doesn’t feel long, because these small reversals in scenes surprise us and hold our interest throughout.

Because the characters are well-written, and because the acting throughout is spot-on, we don’t notice all of the small clues and tiny bits of information Darabont is feeding us. The most explicit the screenplay gets in playing its hand is when Andy has a long moment with Red explaining how he’s created an alternate person out of thin air to keep the Warden’s (Bob Gunton) illegally obtained money safe. I’ve seen the movie several times and there are still small details and the briefest of exchanges I pick up on here and there that underline just how brilliantly Darabont structured his screenplay.

It’s not that the pay-off was so ingenious and so well set-up throughout the first two acts, though. It’s also that it represents everything the movie has been building toward and feels like an honest extension of the plot and characters we’ve come to regard as people. The rarest of motion pictures (“House of Cards,” the underrated “Thomas Crown Affair” remake) can pull that off and get away with it.

In addition to Robbins’ terrific, understated performance, I was surprised to see just how subtle Freeman is here. He doesn’t play Red as an angry man who hates himself for what he did, which would have been the obvious way to do it. His Red is more torn down and acquiescent, not at peace with his actions but at peace with the fact that he’s going to pay for it with for most of his life.

Behind the camera, Darabont’s work is tremendous. Everyone remembers the two shots that set up the prison: the first is from helicopter and follows Andy’s bus toward the building before swooping around the imposing structure to follow the inmates walking across the yard toward the approaching vehicle. The second stares up the endless walls of the prison just before Andy walks in. But there is so much more. Darabont and his editor, Richard Francis-Bruce, allow the scenes to breath and the pace to remain steady throughout, even when it would be so simple to use quick-cutting.

Quibbles? A few small ones. The prologue showing Andy before his wife is murdered is needless, and since we can instinctually tell from early on that he’s innocent, why doesn’t Darabont actually show this in the prologue? There are other small point-of-view problems where we switch to Andy. Most of the time it’s fine because we imagine this is Red’s interpretation of certain moments and scenes that he assumes happened or was told to him, but in others there is no way Red would know. Oh, and it was pretty damn lucky that Andy got the cell on the end of the row, no? But again, these are quibbles.

It’s really a wonder this movie got made. Darabont was a first time director whose biggest credit was writing “The Blob” remake (which is really awesome, by the way). As far as I can tell, there’s three women in the entire film who are onscreen for about twenty seconds total. It’s two-and-a-half hours long. Freeman and Robbins weren’t marquee names. It’s a prison movie. The title is “The Shawshank Redemption.” It’s meditative. There are no action scenes. And even though it’s based on a Stephen King story, it’s not scary enough to be marketed as a “Stephen King Movie.”

Thank God it did, though. “The Shawshank Redemption” works on a human level first and foremost, but it’s also one of the smartest and well-constructed films ever made. It’s brilliantly written, beautifully directed and perfectly acted. That’s the trifecta.

My Score (out of 5): *****

A Clockwork Orange

2011-07-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

Year: 1971
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 70
Writer: Stanley Kubrick (screenplay), Anthony Burgess (novel)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Star: Malcolm McDowell, Godfrey Quigley, Anthony Sharp

To me, the definition of “art,” whatever its medium, is the ability to create an emotional reaction the person experiencing it. Laughter, tears, empathy, sympathy, love, hate…whatever the reaction might be, if a piece of art creates some reaction, it is valuable. I’ve immensely disliked some of the movies on AFI’s top 100 list (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, “Sullivan’s Travels”), but there was still much in those movies that caused an emotional response from me, even if I disagreed with it.

So what should I make of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”? I felt numb throughout the entire film, moved to neither love or hatred. The film simply…was. Despite moments of wit, as a black comedy it wasn’t very funny. Despite moments of insight, as a parable it isn’t very clever. Despite moments of drama, the film isn’t very dramatic. And so on and so forth.

The film begins with the rapist/psychopath/murderer/other-evil-stuffer Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his buddies at a milk bar. They are soon beating up a homeless man in the cleanest alley ever and then break into a couple’s house, cripple the husband and rape the wife. On another night, Alex is caught after murdering another woman and sentenced to prison, where he is entered into a mental rehabilitation program and “programmed” to respond to rape, violence and Beethoven with immediately sickness. He’s released.

But his family doesn’t want him and, after bloody encounters with some of his former gang members and the homeless man he beat up at the beginning of the movie, he arrives on the familiar doorstep of the family who he beat and raped. The woman is dead now, unable to cope with her rape, and the man is wheelchair-bound. Then the film turns into “The Virgin Spring” for a reel or two, but with a bodybuilder and Gene Kelley impersonations.

I must say that there are very good things in the movie. The film is a technical marvel, like all of writer/producer/director Kubrick’s work. The first shot, which begins as a close-up on Alex’s dead, staring eyes (he’s not dead, just his soul and eyes) and the slow pull back of the camera, is a fantastic way to begin the movie. There are also moments of real wit, like the fast-forwarded sequence of Alex bedding two women whilst “The Lone Ranger” theme plays on the soundtrack. And yes, McDowell is very convincing as Alex, conveying a real psychosis sitting just beneath the surface of his charming demeanor. Oh, and that eye-holder-thingie is very creepy.

But then there’s everything else.

Yes, of course the rape scenes were disturbing, as any such scene would be. But really, there’s no emotional undertones for the rape scenes or…well…any other scene in the movie. Are we supposed to feel bad for Alex after the reconditioning (which he volunteered for) and that he’s being tortured by those from his past? Are we supposed to feel a swell of pride and happiness when he beats his mental blocks in the final sequence? He’s a rapist and killer. It’s impossible to feel any sort of identification with him.

Kubrick is obviously asking us to explore our feelings on good and evil, the lines therein and the areas of grey where the “good” guys are really in Hitler outfits and torture the bad guys. Or something like that. It supposed to be deep, right? If I want a deep examination of this type of material, I’ll rewatch the aforementioned “The Virgin Spring,” thankyouverymuch. Or, hell, even “The Last House On the Left” remake. I remember feeling very much for Monica Potter in that. Really.

So what’s left? The subversive comedy, I guess. But it’s more tongue-in-cheek than anything else and isn’t funny enough to make the movie entertaining.

I’ve already mentioned McDowell, but the rest of the acting in the film is either robotic or completely over the top. Psychotically over the top, in fact, which suits the movie, I guess.

A lot of this must have been very controversial back in the day. Today, this kind of sexual violence happens on “Private Practice,” but without the exposed breasts. I can get better political satire on “The Daily Show” or in any given issue of “The New Yorker.” Other “hugely controversial” films and television still hold up because their underlying stories and characters were engaging and interesting. Here we’ve got a lot of well-shot violence and…what else? I'm guessing that, much like the films "American Psycho" and "Fight Club," much of the audience "gets" that it is supposed to be parody, but a certain sect of the movie's superfans support the film for what it blatantly states and not what is between the lines. I don't write that as a criticism, just as an observation.

Oh, and can someone please explain to me what exactly “A Clockwork Orange” is supposed to mean? Anyone? Bueller?

So how to rate the movie? No movie with this type of technical mastery can really be a bust. I’ll remember certain scenes and shots from the movie after everything else has faded simply because they were so pretty to look at. McDowell is certainly a good psychopath. And yet I kept asking myself over and over…”so what?” In it’s own way, the movie is unclassifiable and exists on its own spectrum.

So I guess I’ll give the movie two stars and throw up my hands.

My Score (out of 5): **

The Grapes of Wrath

2011-07-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

Year: 1940
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 23
Writer: Nunnally Johnson (screenplay), John Steinbeck (novel)
Director: John Ford
Star: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine

Oh, “The Grapes of Wrath,” in which things suck, everyone is depressed, and then it gets worse.

In fourth grade I was traumatized for weeks after reading “The Pearl,” especially the sequence where the innocent child is shot to death. In sophomore year of high school I was surprisingly unmoved by the ending to “Of Mice and Men.” Even though Oprah told me I should, I didn’t enjoy “East of Eden” no matter how much I tried to care. The novels of John Steinbeck are not exactly subtle—the books I’ve read use beautiful images and lots of depression to make blunt statements about “morals.” Yes, I know so many of them are “classics” and are “revered” and whatnot, but they just aren’t my kind of story. If the guy floats your boat, great, I’m happy for you.

There have been fantastic movies made from Steinbeck’s work—Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” is a masterpiece and should have, for my money, been on the AFI Top 100. To me, writer Nunnally Johnson and director John Ford’s adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” feels like being punched repeatedly in the face for two hours. Characters overcoming great odds is great, hey, movies would be out of business if we didn’t have it, but come on! A sledgehammer to the face can’t be as painful as what these characters go through!

But I get ahead of myself. The film opens with Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returning home after a four-year stretch in prison. What did he do, you ask? While at a dance, another man stabbed him so Tom beat him to death with a shovel. How or why a shovel made its way onto a dance floor is left unclear. Anyway, he returns home to find his family has been evicted and have moved to a cousin’s home, a cousin who is also being evicted. With hope in the form of a flier asking for workers in California, they set out on Route 66 (which should have been re-named Route 666 after the toll it takes on this family). Then more horrible stuff happens to them.

Perhaps it’s just that the bad stuff is just so unrelenting. We don’t get to know who these men and women are outside of being screwed over again and again, so why should we care about them? Up until the final act of the film, the happiest moment in the entire movie comes when a diner clerk gives the children two candy canes for a penny instead of a nickel. Seriously.

Every other pseudo-happy moment is undercut with something horrible. Hey, we’re going on a road trip across the country and…oh…Grandpa is dead. They finally made it to California and…oh…Grandma just died too. We finally found a place to camp out for a week and get a little money and…oh…Tom was beaten, killed another guy and is now wanted by the police again. We finally (finally!) found a great place to live and work run by the Department of Agriculture and…oh…Tom has to run away. You just want to grab the filmmakers, shake them and scream “Let these people alone for five minutes!!!” Yes, I know three exclamation points is a bit much, but I was really feeling it there.

I’ve been on Route 66 and know it travels through some of the most amazing, beautiful parts of the USA. Why couldn’t we have a moment, just a moment, where the family just looks out of that weighed-down truck, smiles, and takes in the beauty around them? Or thanks God for the chance to see these sights so many others never see in their lifetimes? I’m not asking for a showy scene or a switch to Technicolor, but I would like a character-based moment of them enjoying something…anything about their life or journey.

Ford, who made some fantastic movies during his lifetime, shoots the movie in the most economical way possible, and it really suits the film’s tone and energy. The only time he gets a little flashy is when he shows us the P.O.V. of the front of the truck, and those shots are quite engaging and work in the context of the scenes they present.

No member of the family develops a personality…just issues the rest of the bunch has to deal with. Grandpa is going crazy. Grandma is getting more and more frail. Rose-of-Sharon’s husband walked out on her and she’s pregnant. Tom is wanted for murder. Any insight into who these people are in addition to their problems is sorely missed.

Look at Tom. I think Henry Fonda is a great actor, but who is Tom? What is he, other than angry? We first see him guilting a truck driver into a ride to his home. Is he grateful? No, he immediately yells at the driver and demeans him. We never see him grieve over the deaths of any of his family members, and he never seems very happy to see them. At the film’s climax, he tries walking out on his mother (Jane Darwell) without saying “goodbye.” Instead of being grateful for work, and knowing he’ll get the family thrown out of the peach farm if caught, he still decides to wander off and cause trouble on his first night there.

And don’t get me started on his final speech to his mother. Oh, well, I guess I already have. A character in that position, from that background, would never speak in the way Tom speaks. Look at the dialogue:

“I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eating the stuff they raise and living in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.”

When did Tom Joad turn into Batman?

Even worse is Ma’s speech that closes the film. Darwell is probably the best thing about the film, and can show so much sadness and emotion with her eyes, but her speech here makes absolutely no sense in the context of what the family has been through. It’s just Steinbeck and Johnson speaking to America directly without bothering to remain true to the character they created.

My Score (out of 5): **

The Apartment

2011-07-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

Year: 1960
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 80
Writer: Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond
Director: Billy Wilder
Star: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray

The apartment in “The Apartment” is nothing special. The air conditioner that may or may not work sits next to a relatively comfortable couch, but other than that, there are no bells or whistles to be found. The walls are paper thin, and the paper on those walls is slowly peeling off. You need a match to light the gas oven. There’s no closet space anywhere to be seen.

Upon first glance, you might also say that C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is nothing special. One of the hundreds of drones working in an unfriendly office space, he’s not rich. Or overly handsome. Or has any family or close friends to speak of. But he’s ambitious in his own way. Baxter is more than willing to whore himself out to get that three-window office next to the big boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). Sure, he’s not technically a prostitute, but he regularly allow strangers into his apartment for hours at a time to have their own trysts in order to get ahead at work. It’s all the annoyances of prostitution without the warm bed.

His fate is destined to cross with the wonderfully named Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator who wears flowers and likes that he takes off his hat in the elevator. She also happens to be having an affair with Mr. Sheldrake, who is married. Things begin to get complex.

Most Billy Wilder movies seem to exist out of time and place, perhaps because they are so singular. It’s a shame, then, to see that sections of “The Apartment” have dated rather badly, and not just because the main characters’ jobs are antiquated. Perhaps it’s because so many of the film’s conceits have been copied so often since the film’s release. We sense a familiarity with so many of Wilder’s (along with his co-writer, I.A.L. Diamond) tricks that we wish the pace would pick up. Anyone who’s seen a romantic comedy or a telenovella knows just about everywhere the story will go (with one exception), making the build-ups to the major reveals moot.

It’s not hard to figure out, for example, that the woman Mr. Sheldrake wants the apartment for is Miss Kubelik. Or that his secretary is his old flame. Or that he’ll fire her and she’ll tell his wife. And how many almost identical sequences have we seen to when MacMurray makes promises that he’ll leave his wife soon? For me, the worst offender is in the third act, but we’ll get there soon.

The one moment that still works viscerally is Miss Kubelik’s attempted suicide. The build-up to the moment is heartbreaking, and the long sequence where Baxter finds her in his bed, becomes increasingly alarmed and finally, desperately, goes to his doctor neighbor for help. We cringe when the doctor repeatedly, violently, slaps Miss Kubelik to get her to wake up.

Of course, one could (successfully) argue that the suicide-attempt and later intimation that Baxter is also suicidal are pretty out of line with the tone of other scenes in the movie, such as the one where Baxter is in what he thinks is a job interview and gets so excited he squirts an entire bottle of nose spray across the office.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the movie because, honestly, there is a lot here to love. Even taking into consideration the tonal shifts and (sadly) dated nature of much of the movie, which adds a level of predictability that was not there upon first release, I still enjoyed it. Really.

Another touchstone of Wilder’s films is his careful characterization of his women. I’ve already written about my love for Betty and Norma in “Sunset Blvd.” and Phyllis in “Double Indemnity,” so you won’t be surprised to know that Miss Kubelik is no exception. She isn’t a fluff sexbomb who just wants a husband. She’s in love with Sheldrake, damn it, and has her eyes open about the amount of pain the relationship is going to cause her (“When you’re in love with a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara.”). Wilder is subtle about the way her relationship builds with Baxter, never giving us “big” moments or “easy” chemistry scenes together. We may hate parts of Miss Kubelik, but we still grow to love her, thanks also to MacLaine’s aces performance.

Lemmon is also very good as Baxter, though most of the shifts in tone stem from his few moments of overacting (singing while making spaghetti, the aforementioned nasal spray bottle). When his character gets drunk alone on Christmas Eve, Lemmon does not overdo his drunkenness, a blessing after seeing how far over the top he went in “The Days of Wine and Roses.”

Wilder uses the space and shadows of the apartment well as a contrast to the bright, over-stimulated office environment. His camera here is much more subtle than in many of his other films, and it suits the movie well. The black-and-white is stark and uninviting, underlined when Wilder purposely places us in locations (Broadway, the Chinese Restaurant) where we would normally expect warm, blazing colors.

Despite the intricacies of the screenplay and how well Wilder sets things up and pays them off (however predictable this may be today), for me the false ending of Miss Kubelik going back to Sheldrake (after she almost committed suicide, no less!) and Baxter getting that swanky job on the top floor doesn’t work. It feels like the token bad romantic comedy moment that sets up the sweeping ending more than anything else. Perhaps this is because Wilder has set up the journeys of both characters so well and strengthened them palpably over their time shared in the apartment…but it just doesn’t feel right. Ah well, at least we get this amazing closing line out of it: “Shut up and deal.”

Sure, “The Apartment” might seem a little ordinary today, like the title abode in the movie, but there’s still more than enough to recommend. Even though all the trappings here are familiar and have been copied hundreds of times, that does not mean that they have been done better than they were here.

My Score (out of 5): ***1/2

The Wild Bunch

2011-07-05T23:07:00.000-07:00

Year: 1969
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 79
Writer: Walon Green, Sam Peckinpah
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Star: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan

“The Wild Bunch” is violence. Every scene deals with the build-up to violence, the act itself or the immediate aftermath. It does not judge the violence it presents or the men at the film’s center. These men are not heroes, and though they would be considered villains in any other Western, since the film does not present us with any heroic characters, they are all we have to identify with.

William Holden plays Pike, the leader of the Bunch of the title, a group of outlaws who, for most of the movie, are attempting to steal and sell a stock of weapons (including a machine gun). Pike’s group is being shadowed by Robert Ryan’s Deke. Deke used to be a member of the group, but was caught and now much catch them to gain his freedom, otherwise he’ll be hanged. All this happens during an uncertain period in the American West, with the time of such outlaws coming to an end. At one point, one of the outlaws is dragged behind a modern car for hours. The metaphor isn’t subtle.

The film opens with one of the most astonishing action set-pieces I’ve ever seen. It’s a bank robbery orchestrated by Pike’s gang that turns out to be a set-up by Deke. Instead of playing it out like a chess game, everyone just starts blowing everyone else away. Dozens of bystanders in the town are murdered in the crossfire. Even the priest gets it. The blood and guts aren’t focused upon, instead quickly filmed and cut away from in order to create a mood of chaos, violence (of course) and destruction.

The movie never reaches this high again. From the set-piece, we know that the Wild Bunch are villains we really shouldn’t like (they kill women and children!) and that they are all going to be dead by the end of the movie. This isn’t the kind of film that would present such a gutsy opening and then redeem these guys—it simply informs us that it has set them on their path for death and we’re in for the ride. Another none-too-subtle metaphor: the first images of the movie are that of a group of scorpions being killed slowly by hundreds of fire ants.

The characters are well-developed considering that they are so unlikable. Instead of being characters we simply loathe, the gang are, for the most part, characters we find watchable, particularly Jaime Sanchez’s Angel, who tries to send a crate of guns to those rebelling against the warlord who has taken over his hometown (and the gang just happens to be in business with). Oddly enough, the least interesting characters in the group are the leads. I’m not even sure why Ernest Borgnine’s character was in the movie, and though Holden’s Pike is given flashbacks to pad his motivations and background, but they do little to turn him three-dimensional.

The most absorbing character in the movie is Ryan’s Deke, because he can’t have any motivations. He has to catch these men he’s worked with before, has to out-think them and has to ensure their deaths no matter how he feels about the whole thing. In any given scene, we’re never quite sure what he’s thinking or feeling, and that paradox makes him fascinating. One moment I missed from the movie is the group’s relationship to him. It’s implied Holden was his good friend, though something stated more explicitly in a movie where everything is stated explicitly and underlined for good measure would have been nice. Instead, they just treat him like a force of nature instead of a human being, which sounds cool when I type it but doesn’t work as well in execution.

Director/screenwriter Sam Peckinpah and his co-writer Walon Green seem to be intent on subverting as many Western genre conventions as possible, though in much more obvious ways than, say, “The Searchers.” The most obvious, already stated, is having the “heroes” be villains, but there are many others. Holden falls off his horse instead of mounting it like a pro. Many of the extra soldiers who are killed off are fifteen year old kids, not grizzled extras. Every woman in the movie is either a prostitute or canon fodder (or both).

The tone of the movie is somber and brooding (in other words, perfect for a Western), though there are two major shifts that come out of nowhere. The first is when a Mexican soldier repeatedly accidentally fires off a machine gun and almost kills dozens of people and the second is when it seems like an entire town is simultaneously laughing at a single person. Where did these moments come from and why weren’t they cut out?

In addition to the opening bank heist, there are two other big set-pieces. The first involves stealing a train out from under the nose of Deke, who just happens to be on one of the train cars. There’s some nifty direction and tension built here before the train starts moving, but instead of gaining momentum (sorry about the analogy) as it builds to its climax, the sequence peters out as the train speeds up.

The third is the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink climax, which involves the aforementioned machine gun and the deaths of what seems like hundreds of extras. It’s not quite on the scale of when Rambo killed an entire country, but it’s up there.

But what do these beautifully staged scenes and sequences add up to in a film where the audience has no emotional stakes in the story or the characters’ fates? Not all that much. I’m a sucker for a well-done action flick, and I was never bored watching “The Wild Bunch” and became involved in the major set-pieces, but more for the technical mastery than because I cared about what was going on. It’s obvious that Walon and Peckinpah meant to reinvent and subvert the Western genre by bringing realism (I use that as a relative term) and legitimate, consequential violence to the world of O.K. Corrals and Stagecoaches, and that they do. But perhaps they took it a step too far and cut off the audience’s emotional response in the process. There are great things in this film, but in the end it’s merely good.

My Score (out of 5): ***

Easy Rider

2011-07-04T00:35:00.000-07:00

Year: 1969
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 84
Writer: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
Director: Dennis Hopper
Star: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson

The magic of “Easy Rider” is the ease (not a pun, I promise) with which it observes and explores a moment in our culture’s uncertain history. For most of its running time, the film astounds with its restrained, straightforward observations of America. It’s such a shame that the movie spirals off-base in its final act with sudden, heavy-handed biblical references and incomprehensible plot developments.

The movie opens with Peter Fonda’s Captain America (he has an American flag sewn onto the back of his jacket) and Dennis Hopper’s Billy exchanging cocaine for a lot of money. They roll the money, stick it into a plastic hose and then slide the hose into the gas tank of Captain America’s (awesome) motorcycle. It’s one of the more ingenious ways to hide thousands of dollars, right up there with the stamps in “Charade” and the painting in “The Thomas Crown Affair” (and this is probably the only time these movies will be compared to “Easy Rider”). The duo get on top of their bikes and begin a cross country journey that will end at Mardi Gras.

Hopper (also the director and co-writer) sets the first scene of the film next to an airport landing strip, and any conversation the characters have is drowned out completely by the sound of landing planes. Though the moment is annoying itself because it just lasts too damn long, it alerts the audience to the fact that, for most of the movie, dialogue is unnecessary and mostly negligible when spoken. And yes, the first half hour of the movie has only a few lines of dialogue as far as I can remember, and what is said is superfluous. It might as well be a silent picture you watch while playing some of your favorite tunes, and I mean that as a huge compliment.

As a director, Hopper (with his co-writers Fonda and Terry Southern) is content to show us the story with simple, haunting images of the American landscape shot from mercifully empty roads with some fantastic classic rock songs playing on the soundtrack. The guys are just being guys, doing tricks on their cycles and contemplating deep things while looking forlornly at the horizon. On my way to Los Angeles I drove as much of Route 66 as is left drivable (which is probably less than half), and these scenes left me drooling and aching to get in my car and just start driving…it didn’t matter where. One could argue that this type of scene (the guys riding, breathtaking landscapes, rock and roll) is done much too much in the movie, but I couldn’t get enough of it. The repetitive nature of the moments made the film almost hypnotic.

The duo’s day in a commune (they are brought to it by a hitchhiker they pick up) is intriguing to see today…we watch the (almost entirely) young people desperately attempting to retreat to an innocent, back-to-the-basics lifestyle despite the weather and ground making it impossible to create a harvest. There’s an amazing 360 degree shot of the group circled for prayer and, as the camera slowly pans around, it makes the time to capture in every face in the circle and linger briefly. We have time to contemplate them, wonder how they got there and think about what their story might be.

We also wonder about Captain America and Billy, where they came from and how they got to know each other. They rarely speak to each other for more than a few lines, but then again, they don’t really need to. They work as non-characters—better at representing us as observers than themselves. Both are very good actors, but you won’t get that from this movie—the performances are almost nonexistent.

We are introduced to a slimy lawyer George (Jack Nicholson) when the two are arrested for riding in a parade without a permit. George joins them on their trek to Mardi Gras and there’s a beautiful image of George in a football helmet on the back of the motorcycle. There’s also a sweet scene of Captain America gently explaining to George how to smoke pot. While most of the movie would work as a silent movie, George’s hypothesis on how aliens have already invaded and are working amongst us must be heard to be believed.

Suddenly George dies, and the movie goes off the rails. He’s murdered by a bunch of thugs who mock and berate the trio in a diner (the scene works wonderfully at getting under the viewer’s skin and making him uncomfortable), and then is barely spoken of again. Captain America and Billy say he would have wanted them to finish their trek (instead of, you know, being taken to a mortuary and sent home to be buried), and they do just that. Wait…what?

And then Captain America turns into Jesus.

The metaphor is horrendous, ham-fisted and completely out of line with the rest of the movie that has led up to it. He, Billy and two hookers (one of which is Karen Black) have a really bad trip in New Orleans and we even hear church music playing loudly. There’s a scene where Captain America doesn’t quite say “This is my body, this is my blood,” but he might as well have.

By the time we reach the contrived, cringe-inducing ending that has both our leads killed off by a passing truck, the metaphor has gotten so heavy-handed you can’t help but roll your eyes.

Why couldn’t the movie have just kept observing? It could have gotten the same point across in a more subtle manner by making the diner scene the finale. We get that these men will never be accepted into normal society, we don’t need them literally blown away to underline that.

Many of the images and moments, mostly the smaller ones, linger beautifully after the film ends. This movie doesn’t ask us to swallow easy answers to life’s questions or judge those who are quickly judged. Despite its third-act implosion, I can’t help but love the trip.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages

2011-07-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

Year: 1916
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 49
Writer: D.W. Griffith, Anita Loos
Director: D.W. Griffith
Star: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Margery Wilson

Well, that was an ordeal.

Three plus hours. Four distinctive storylines spanning thousands of years. Innumerable variations on the word “Intolerance.” Babylon. Beheadings. Jesus. Wine. Angry Catholics. Hopeful geraniums. Cars racing trains. Lillian Gish rocking that damn cradle.

To steal a quote from the esteemed Dr. Ian Malcolm, it seems that the filmmakers “were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

There’s one heck of a lot here. Writer/Director D.W. Griffith (in case we forget that at any point in the movie, he makes sure to remind us by stamping his initials on the bottom of every title card) gives us four stories of intolerance throughout history. The first is about the fall of Babylon at the hands of the Persians. The second is about Jesus. The third is about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the final one tells of a family trying to live despite outside forces conspiring for their downfall.

The intercutting between these four stories doesn’t work, plain and simple. Yes, intercutting between several subplots that touch upon a similar theme to create a cohesive film has been used before (“Crash,” “Short Cuts”) and used well, but the stories are so dissimilar here and the intercutting so random and oddly timed that all it accomplishes is frustration and the immediate destruction of whatever tension had been built.

Even worse is the method Griffith uses to cut from story to story. It’s Lillian Gish rocking a cradle. And rocking. And rocking. It feels like she rocks that damn cradle for an hour of the movie’s three hour running time (obviously not, but it feels that way), and at times she’s rocking that cradle so intensely any child inside would be dead from being thrown back and forth against the wood. Yeah, it’s a metaphor, I get it. But it’s a bad metaphor and all it adds to the film is the possibility of a drinking game that could end in alcohol poisoning.

Why did Griffith feel the need to create four movies instead of just one? One really well-done movie about intolerance would be so much better than two pretty-well-realized stories and two tedious messes. The Christ subplot and the Massacre subplot are treated as superfluous throughout, almost to the point where we forget they exist until they appear again. The Massacre one in particular is bad. Really bad. The acting here, especially that of the Queen, is so hammy and overdone (and I’m saying this understanding the different styles of acting in silent films) that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. Even the quite daring development of killing off the main characters at the end of the Massacre arc is nulled since the same thing happens in the Babylon arc.

The “modern” storyline is just depressing. Really, how much abuse can these poor people take before the viewer just stops caring and tunes out. The main character is called the Dear One and here’s what happens to her over the course of the arc. Her father loses his job. Her father dies. She falls in love with a criminal. Just as her criminal boyfriend goes straight, he is framed for theft and sent to prison. She has a child while the now-husband is behind bars. She gets a cold. Her child is taken away from her. She is almost raped. Her husband, who just got out of prison, is charged with the murder of her near-rapist. Her husband is sentenced to death. The Governor denies her pleas to stop the hanging. I love a melodrama as much as the next Douglas Sirk fan, but this is too much. Tyler Perry would watch this and say “Whoa dude, maybe you should simmer this down a little bit.”

The Babylon storyline held my interest the most, not because the characters were engaging or the storyline moved me, but because there were plenty of neat toys and sets to oogle. The main city set is probably one of the coolest images ever put on film, and the battle scenes are fantastically choreographed and shot on a beautiful, epic scale. Griffith also is not afraid to shy away from the violence, showing multiple beheadings, stabbings and spearings during the invasion scenes, which have a surprising impact, perhaps because I was expecting none.

The title cards are also troublesome, beginning with the fact that there are so many of them. In the same way that the intercutting made the tension lax, the numerous cards do it in lesser ways. It’s also that the cards are so unnecessary in most cases. Some have trivia and tidbits that Griffith thought we might find interesting, like that each man in an army must perspire every day. Others just blatantly state stuff we are seeing on the screen. We don’t need a card telling us the wedding just ran out of wine if we are seeing characters tipping over wine jugs and realizing they are empty. Others are just inadvertently funny, as when a card simply says “the hopeful geranium” or the many, many, many times Griffith uses the word “intolerance” or some variation of the word that isn’t really a word (“he was intolerated for a term”).

No discussion of the movie would be complete without mentioning its close association with “Birth of a Nation” (unseen by me) and “Broken Blossoms.” There are black men in “Intolerance” in the Babylon plot, but they are called Barbarians and have horrible, cliché tribal costumes and markings. They also don’t look happy, possibly because they saw “Birth of a Nation.” I’ve read multiple times that this is Griffith’s apology for his portrayal of black people in “Birth,” but though I understand that point-of-view, I’m not sure I agree with it. Perhaps instead of apologizing, he’s simply stating that he did not appreciate the “intolerance” his last movie received from sane people everywhere. But I write that knowing that “Broken Blossoms” showed us the first interracial romance ever on film, even if the Asian man in the film was played by a white man and had an opium addiction. How muddied the water gets the more you try to see through it.

I had the distinct feeling that I was being preached at for almost all of “Intolerance.” But to what end? Isn’t this movie, by its very definition, preaching to the choir? What person is going to go into a movie called “Intolerance” and think “I wonder if being intolerant of other people is a good or evil thing?” In case you couldn’t tell from the first few paragraphs, the moral of the movie is that intolerance is bad. I have told you, in the two seconds you took to read that last sentence, what Griffith takes over three hours to convey. Thank me later.

My Score (out of 5): *1/2

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

2011-06-25T13:41:00.001-07:00

Year: 1939
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 26
Writer: Sidney Buchman (screenplay) Lewis R. Foster (story)
Director: Frank Capra
Star: James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains

I remembered “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” as much better than it really is. It’s a functional, inspirational film with great acting, but those qualities are almost overshadowed by the shoddy editing and confusing storytelling. It feels like the rough cut for something that could possibly be a masterpiece, but needs a lot of work and a few reshoots before getting there.

The first half hour of the film is the worst—I’d even call pieces of it horrendous. There are huge, awkward, unnecessary point-of-view shifts throughout that keep the viewer adrift, trying to latch onto something…anything of consistence. The film opens moments after the death of a senator in (as far as I remember) an unnamed state. The Governor (Edward Arnold) must decide between naming a political puppet (he’s pressured by a crooked businessman) or a popular reformer (he’s pressured by the citizens of the state). Instead he chooses Jeff Smith, the Mr. of the title, who is the leader of the Boy Rangers.

There’s a really awkward scene of men going to greet Jeff, building up his introduction, and then they walk into his house to the fanfare of a band playing…and the scene cuts before we meet Jeff. Why? Jeff’s real introduction scene at a celebratory dinner in his honor doesn’t function well as an introduction scene. It’s obvious Jeff’s introduction in his house was cut, but why? And if it had to be, why keep the random men-outside-the-house scene?

By the time we actually meet Jeff Smith (played very well by James Stewart), 15 minutes of the movie have gone by, and the movie still hasn’t shifted to his point-of-view. Instead we are with the corrupt Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), the other Senator of the state and an old friend of Jeff’s father. More time passes and Mr. Smith does indeed go to Washington, and wanders around it in a five minute (five minute!) montage of him at all the great landmarks of the city. It’s sub-travelogue editing and shot-choice here, and I feel like it was just put in to pad the running time.

As with most Capra, the film improves exponentially in its second act, thanks to the introduction of “Don’t-Call-Me-Clarissa” Saunders (Jean Arthur). She’s as cynical as they come and begins as a paid stooge, but soon finds herself unwilling to allow Jeff to wander his way before a firing squad.

Screenwriter Sidney Buchman, working from a story by Lewis R. Foster, sets up a fascinating dynamic between Smith, Paine and Saunders. Many would call Jeff’s filibuster the heart of the movie, but I think Jeff’s relationships with these two people are what makes the movie work and garner a depth we would not expect of it. After meeting Jeff for five minutes you know he would go to any lengths to do what is right, so the filibuster is to be expected—it’s the changes we see in these characters that are surprising and rewarding.

First there is Paine, played brilliantly by Raines. It would have been easy to portray him as a simple villain. A stooge for another, more evil, villain named Jim Taylor. But he’s not. He’s a good man who made one bad decision and has slowly been losing his soul for the past two decades. We think that he’s going to use his relationship with Jeff’s father as a tool for manipulation, and though he does at times, it becomes clear that Paine really did love Jeff’s father and cherished the friendship. And, damn it, despite everything, he really likes Jeff too. He doesn’t want to do the horrible things he does, and the audience really feels sympathy for him despite hating what he’s doing.

Then there’s Saunders, who works so well because she inherently shouldn’t be likeable. Arthur infuses her with a great cynicism early and often, and even after she switches over to Jeff’s team, she does it knowing that, realistically, it’s not even David vs. Goliath, it’s an ant vs. Goliath. The scene at the Lincoln Memorial where she convinces Jeff to do the filibuster has been copied thousands of times in movies after this, sometimes better, sometimes less so, but Arthur is so good with her careful body language here that it’s some kind of magical.

Most of the filibuster is very, very well done, and Stewart is tremendous as showing Jeff’s will even as his body is failing him. The scene becomes even more emotional given the parallel stories of Taylor doing everything possible to keep Jeff’s message from getting to his home state. Hell, Capra goes so far as having a montage of Taylor’s men almost murdering Boy Rangers in order to keep a lid on the story. It would have been nice to see the grassroots movement in the state pay off, but that would be a different movie. This is about the difference one man can make. Many of my friends think that Paine finally breaking down, attempting suicide and spilling everything is a deus ex machina, but I disagree. Buchman and Capra set this moment up throughout the movie very well, and we can honestly understand Paine’s feelings at that moment.

Other plots in the movie are half-developed or abandoned entirely. The most blatant of these is Paine’s daughter Susan, who Jeff is immediately smitten with. Taylor wants to use Susan to get to Jeff, but Paine says “absolutely not.” Then, two scenes later, Susan does just that. Obviously a transition scene is missing. And then Susan disappears for the rest of the movie and is barely spoken of again. Whoops.

The other is the complete lack of closure for Jeff at the end of the movie. The last time we see him he passes out and is carried out of the Senate. Then Raines comes in and confesses everything, there’s cheering…and the movie just ends on a shot of the Vice President chewing gum. What the hell? Where’s the scene of Saunders and Jeff reuniting? Of Saunders telling Jeff he won? Of Taylor being arrested? Or a shot of Jeff’s reaction to any of this? It’s such a huge cop-out, and there was no reason why Capra and Buchman couldn’t have added more scenes.

There are other really, really bad editing choices throughout. The ones that take me out of the movie the fastest are when there’s a cut from a medium shot to another medium shot, only inches closer or farther away, for no real reason. There are shots that make no logical or story sense and a sequence of Jeff walking through Washington punching random reporters that should have been cut immediately. Seriously, that scene is in there and yet we don’t get to see Jeff and Saunders reunite? Really?

“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” isn’t a bad film, but it’s an infuriating one. If only there would have been more care taken with the editing, continuity and storytelling this could have been a masterpiece. Right now, it just seems unfinished, with a first act that needs huge changes and a third act that is way too brief.

My Score (out of 5): ***

Sunset Boulevard

2011-05-15T23:29:00.000-07:00

Year: 1950
AFI Top 100 Rating: 16
Writer: Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman Jr.
Director: Billy Wilder
Star: Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim

I consider “Sunset Boulevard” to be the greatest film by a director who specialized in making great films. Though it incorporates elements of noir, horror, drama and comedy, it transcends these genres and becomes one of those rare films that is indefinable. It’s also just about perfect.

We first meet Joe Gillis (William Holden) as he is floating upside down in a swimming pool, very much dead. He’s a screenwriter though, so death doesn’t shut him up, and he narrates the story of how he got to be in that pool. Turns out poor Joe was also poor in the literal sense—about to get his car repossessed and pride long shattered from being turned down by every studio in Hollywood. A flat tire leads him to the marble doorstep of silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who invites him to stay with her and help her rewrite the script for her comeback…er…return to film. It starts as that, but soon develops into something much, much sicker.

The first time we meet Norma she is grieving the death of her pet monkey. She and her butler Max (Erich von Stroheim) mistake Joe for the undertaker and allow him into her mansion. To call Casa Norma an overstatement would be an understatement—it seems as if Paramount dumped the entire contents of its prop rooms inside those walls. Swanson overacts throughout the film, but it is a calculated overacting that makes the film that much more fascinating. It is as if the character of Norma Desmond got so used to acting like she was in a silent film that she began acting like that in real life, and no one was around to yell “Cut!” Her melodrama underlines all of her emotions, from her manipulations to the moments of her real desperation, which paradoxically makes her all the more sympathetic.

Yes, I said sympathetic. She’s a monster, but a monster we come to care very much about. The key to this is Max, who we learn was once much more than just her butler: He was the director who discovered her and became the first of her three husbands. He still adores her as much as he ever did, handling her like a cracked porcelain doll. He caters to her every need, resends fan mail and tries not to let Joe’s relationship with Norma eat him up inside. Because he cares, we care. Because he loves, we love. There’s a moment deep in the film where Norma leaves Max and Joe to meet alone with Cecil B. DeMille (playing himself), and we are anxious and horrified that her dreams will shatter. It is in that moment that we realize how much we have come to care for this weird, unpleasant woman, and because of that the final reel is that much more bittersweet.

Because the movie has a heart, however sick it is, screenwriters Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. have a field day making everything surrounding that heart as bleak, sarcastic and dark as possible. This begins and ends with the Joe character, who can’t be too upset that he’s dead because he knows he was never a very good guy to begin with. While he (barely) admits once in the film that he likes Norma, he fills minutes of the film with narration that deconstructs her entire world and those sad creatures that fill it. Norma’s waxworks (her silent film friends, including Buster Keaton in a great cameo). Her house. Her car. Her persona. Her script. They are all mockable and he digs in with both hands, perhaps because it is the only way to stop him from weeping from the sadness of it all. His relationship with Norma at some point becomes sexual, but Wilder is right to keep the details cloudy. During the nights, Joe escapes from Norma to meet with a young woman named Betty (Nancy Olson). She’s engaged, but he still falls for her.

There are many reasons I love the film, but Betty is one of the biggest. In any lesser film, her character would be such a write-off. She’s would be the ambitious upstart who is good personified and ultimately do the right thing, no matter the cost. But Wilder and his co-writers turn Betty into a free-thinking, strong woman. Not only does she challenge Joe in the first scene they share by insisting that his new script isn’t any good, but later is more frustrated that Joe left because he was a rung in her ladder, not because he’s just so (*bats eyes*) dreamy. She has layers. She even admits that she got a nose job when she wanted to be an actress. In the end, Betty walks out of the movie with the kind of dignity you wouldn’t expect from a character of her type.

Wilder made a career of making masterpieces, from “Some Like It Hot” to “The Apartment” to “Double Indemnity,” which are all in the AFI Top 100 along with “Sunset Boulevard.” But there’s also “Witness For the Prosecution” (rarely seen today but easily ranks with his best), “Ace in the Hole,” “Sabrina,” “The Seven Year Itch”…my apologies, I’m beginning to list. For me, this film has the most deeply felt emotions and one of the greatest characters ever committed to film. Its irony and cynicism is a mask that slowly degrades the more you watch the film, and you begin to realize that just because there is much melodrama and “loudness” (for lack of a better word), there is just as much subtlety and beauty.

The stuff that happened behind the scenes of this movie is just as interesting as what happens onscreen, and in this viewing I tried to put everything I learned and read out of my mind. And yes, the movie still works beautifully on its own, whether or not you know that Swanson was a real silent film actor and that von Stroheim was really her director for many years. There have been many masterpieces made about Hollywood, but only one of them has Norma Desmond, so let’s face it…nothing else can compare. Despite the film’s famous closing line, the film blurs to black before Norma can get that final close-up. She didn’t need it. She’s made quite an impact already.

My Score (out of 5): *****

2001: A Space Odyssey

2011-05-14T23:30:00.000-07:00

Year: 1968
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 15
Writer: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke (adaptation) Arthur C. Clarke (source material)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Star: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain

“2001: A Space Odyssey” is a movie I greatly admire. It is also a movie I don’t like very much and a movie I probably won’t feel the need to revisit for another decade. It’s a film filled with ideas and isn’t afraid to challenge its viewers in content or pace. And yet it’s a film, like most of director Stanley Kubrick’s work, so devoid of human emotion or connection that it left me cold to it every moment I should have been fully engaged.

The film begins in pre-history, with half-human/half-apes uncovering the greatest discovery since the opposable thumb. As he moves through a group of bones, one of the ape men discovers that using the bones as a weapon gives him, and his people, a power none of the surrounding species have. Oh, and a giant black monolith appears out of nowhere. Fast forward a few thousand years to 1999 when another monolith has appeared on the moon and a group of scientists is sent to investigate. Once more we fast forward to the title year and find two scientists (Keir Dullea & Gary Lockwood) on a spacecraft headed toward Jupiter. Controlling the spacecraft is a computer called Hal 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain) who, despite being a ball of red light, displays more emotions than any of the human characters. Is Hal malfunctioning, or are the scientists jumping to conclusions? Needless to say, the black monolith makes at least one more cameo before the end of the film.

Why are the monoliths there and why do they choose those specific times to appear? They obviously represent a far greater intelligence than ape or man…look at the contrast of the rounded, intricate space vehicles to the sleek, rectangular simplicity of the monoliths. It could be argued that they feed first the ape and then Dullea’s character (named Dave) with intelligence, but I don’t think so. I believe they are there simply to observe huge breakthroughs for humanity. They first watch the apemen realize their inherent power and then see Man triumph over the “perfect mind” of a computer. Note that they leave Dave alone to grow old and “die” (rebirth) in a makeshift five star hotel room with really bad floor lighting. And yet there are still questions, like why it behaves the way it does on the surface of the moon? Had Man become to reliant on computers and the monolith sensed that? Perhaps.

There are no easy answers, of course, simply much to observe before screenwriters Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke allow you to draw your own conclusions. Kubrick structures the movie at a very deliberate pace, never quickening or using unnecessary editing tricks to alter tension. He favors medium and long shots to close-ups throughout the first two-thirds of the film, not allowing himself (or the viewer) to get too close to the world or characters. In fact, the only character who really gets one hell of a lot of face time is Hal, but even there we find ourselves drawing our own conclusions as to what hides behind the simple red light.

The film has four parts, three of which are introduced via title in the film. The second, which depicts the moon mission in 1999, feels very dated and is an utter waste of time and energy. Its conceits, like using as many brand names (Pan Am, Hilton, etc.) as possible to underline a future of brand identity, not personalization, were fresh at the time of the film’s release but have become so commonplace today that they seem hackneyed. More than that, though, the entire section seems like weirdly unnecessary non-movement. There’s much to-do about rumors surrounding the moon mission, though characters never interact with any emotion or voice inflections. Sure, the last thirty seconds of the 25 minute section are fascinating, but were this section snipped entirely from the movie, would the viewer be really missing anything all that great?

Once we move to the Jupiter mission, it becomes apparent that Kubrick is bending over backward to keep us from making human connections to anyone in the movie. Though this would become a recurring theme throughout his work, I have to say that I feel the section (which is the film’s best) would have been much improved if we felt any sort of connection to Dave or Frank. Hell, there’s probably about ten minutes of material here before we get a good enough look at the two characters’ faces to tell them apart. Their personalities are interchangeable, and their voices remain stagnant and dull throughout. Even their “looks” are tedious: Dullea is handsome, but boringly so, and his hair is always perfectly parted. The characters don’t sweat. In what is supposed to be the most tense moment of the film, when Dave argues with Hal to let him back on the ship (“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”) and he realizes he must jump from his pod through space to get into the ship, his face never registers worry or tension.

There are still great moments here. Seeing Hal read Dave and Frank’s lips as they plot to disconnect it is quietly unsettling, as is listening to Hal go through its death throes as Dave silently “murders” it. And yet…I don’t care.

From a visual standpoint, the film is unmatched. I’d go so far as saying that it’s the best-looking science fiction movie ever made. Despite all the huge advancements in technology since 1968, I doubt the best team at ILM could make more elegant, poetic special effects than what we see here. The surreal sequence where Dave is pulled through the cosmos is still a stunner, and Kubrick was right to give all the tremendous images room to breathe and make an impact on the viewers.

Perhaps it’s that I’m a screenwriter. Perhaps it’s just the way I’m wired. Whatever the case, I just can’t manage to engage in a film, no matter how close to perfection it otherwise is, unless it presents me with characters that I care about. If Hal’s fatal flaw was that it allowed emotions to overcome its logical components, this movie’s flaw is that it is too far removed from its own emotions.

My Score (out of 5): ***1/2

West Side Story

2011-05-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

Year: 1961
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 51
Writer: Ernest Lehman (adaptation), Jerome Robbins & Arthur Laurents (source material)
Director: Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins
Star: Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris

“West Side Story” is a movie I love, but it is a movie I love with reservations. It is certainly one of the greatest film musicals and features moments of tremendous power and emotion, and yet it falls short of transcendence. It ones of those movies where you walk out of the theater on a high and tell your friends “Oh, it was amazing! If only…” The major flaw I find with the film is entirely different than the ones my friends and colleagues often cite, and I can understand their complaints as well. That doesn’t make this a bad movie—there are too many perfect moments for that—but it does make the movie very, very interesting to critique.

Everyone knows that the film is a modernized, musicalized (I’m pretty sure I invented a word there) version of “Romeo of Juliet,” with star-crossed lovers Maria (Natalie Wood) and Tony (Richard Beymer) caught in the midst of a New York gang war between the Sharks (Puerto Ricans) and Jets (Whites). Tony was once the head of the Jets, but has lately been searching for something more to his life, leaving the gang in the hands of Riff. The Sharks are led by Maria’s brother Bernardo (George Chakiris), and also in the mix is Bernardo’s girlfriend/Maria’s best friend Anita (Rita Moreno). If you have even a passing knowledge of Shakespeare, you know where this is going, though the film deviates from its source material by allowing Maria to survive the finale.

The major, almost unforgivable flaw comes in the film’s second half, after a bloody street fight leaves Bernardo dead at the hands of Tony. Tony crawls into Maria’s window and tells her what happens, and then Maria forgives him. Immediately. Not only that, but they then sleep together. Apologies for my vulgarity, but Maria might as well say the following dialogue: “You killed my brother? That’s okay, just fuck me!” How the heck did this make it into the movie? Screenwriter Ernest Lehman made one of the most convoluted plots of all time, “North by Northwest,” seem completely effortless, and had great success adapting such musicals as “The Sound of Music” and “The King and I” for the screen…so what happened here? Not only does it completely undercut the power of the death of a person we really like, but it is so heinous that it utterly destroys Maria as a character. Up until that point, you identify with her because she is a strong girl with her own opinions and ideas, but in that moment she becomes an unfeeling wretch. The saddest part is that the answer was in the source material! In the Shakespeare original, the Bernardo character was a cousin who didn’t have a deep connection with the Maria character, so his death was inconsequential to the love story but hugely important as the spark of the tragedy. Here, it’s just…icky.

Every time I watch the movie, I wonder whether that single move makes the last third of the film irreparable. And, to be honest, sometimes it does.

But if you can look past that, and I understand if you can’t, there’s just so much to love here. Consider the sequence that opens the film, where the gangs snap at one another and ultimately get into scuffles while performing some fantastic dancing. Jerome Robbins’ choreography still has the power to take your breath away in many of the sequences, not just because you just don’t see dancing like that anymore, but because it’s just so poetic and lovely. The dancing goes hand in hand with, for my money, the best score and songs of any musical. Ever. Sorry, “My Fair Lady.” There isn’t a clunker in the bunch. “America,” “I Feel Pretty,” “Maria”…the list goes on. My favorite is the quintet version of “Tonight,” which every smart composer and lyricist has ripped off at some point in his or her career.

The music leads to moments so perfect they stay with you, fresh as the first time you saw them, years after the end credits roll. Take the dance at the gym, where Maria and Tony first see one another and the manic mambo dancing fades away into a simple, intimate melody of newfound love between the twosome. Or when the men and women bicker with one another about the pros (washing machines) and cons (organized crime) of living in America via witty barbs and dance. At this point I’m just listing, so I’ll stop, even though there are many more.

Co-directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins try a lot of interesting things with the visuals, like when Tony walks in a daze from the school dance singing “Maria” and the backgrounds keep fading into others. Or, during the dance, when the dancers literally blur when Tony and Maria catch sight of one another. These kind of tricks could conceivably date the film, but they still surprisingly stand up because of the underlying romantic subtexts involved.

Then there’s the acting. Wood’s performance is often stomped upon by my friends, but all I see is a young woman with high spirits and a lot of chemistry with the rest of the cast. She is so…well…pretty and charming and gay in “I Feel Pretty” that I wonder if they are watching the same film as I. Perhaps it is because of the character assassination moment I wrote of earlier that leaves a bitter taste in viewer’s mouths. Beymer is unfortunately quite wooden when left alone, and does not convince any viewer that he once led a street gang, but his scenes with Wood have an innocent, sweet charm that I wasn’t expecting.

Moreno and Chakiris are both standouts, with charisma to spare and a great repoire with one another. I can’t be the only one who secretly wishes that there was another film tracking their love story to compliment this film, can I? Tamblyn is also very good as Riff, with his great early “Jet Song” wonderfully interpreted and danced.

The highest compliment I can give the film is that, after it ends, I still wonder what happened to the characters as they continue their lives. What did Maria do with her newfound strength? Did she ever reconcile with Anita, and how will Anita’s near-rape at the hands of the Jets strain the uneasy peace between the gangs?

With a movie that reaches such powerful heights, it’s easy to get carried away with it. To overlook those obvious flaws. Rewatching the film on the big screen reminded me what a “big” movie it is, both in terms of scope and emotion, and what an achievement it is that it works as beautifully as does. It’s definitely one of the greats. And yet…

My Score (out of 5): ****

Bringing Up Baby

2011-04-17T20:52:00.001-07:00

Year: 1938
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 88
Writer: Dudley Nichols & Hagar Wilde
Director: Howard Hawks
Star: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles

“Bringing Up Baby” is one of those great, one-of-a-kind movies that captures comedy lightning in a bottle in every sense. If I had to brand it, I would say it’s a “Screwball Comedy,” but it’s so much more realistic than the Marx Brothers comedies. And yet I can’t class it with the more sophisticated comedies George Cukor directed…its tone is somewhere in the middle. It makes logical sense on its own terms, but those terms aren’t anywhere near reality. Its brand of humor is certainly polarizing—but I personally consider it the best comedy film I’ve ever seen.

To describe the plot would be madness. It involves a one-million dollar grant David (Cary Grant) wishes to receive for his museum, and how his chance meeting with the eccentric Susan (Katherine Hepburn) keeps muddying those prospects. It also involves a Brontosaurus’ intercostal clavicle, two leopards, mistaken identity, a dandy trick with making olives disappear and numerous recitations of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.”

All through the film Grant and Hepburn circle one another in an odd dance, delivering some of the best dialogue ever committed to film at a rapid fire pace that brings lingering laugh after lingering laugh. Alone, David is a wet blanket of a character under the domineering thumb of his fiancé. And when Susan is by herself, her babblings seem more insane than anything else. But when the two meet, the chemistry is palpable. As great as the direction and script are, if Grant and Hepburn did not immediately come across as two people so frustrated with one another they cannot see that they are meant to be together, then the movie would have imploded. The movie is funny, but it is also a romance where the viewer grows to care deeply about over as the film develops, and the moment Susan realizes she’s head over heels for David is one of those pitch-perfect moments in all of cinema.

Grant’s performance at first seems to be a variation on the one he gave in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” where he slowly went cuckoo after realizing his dear old aunts were killing people, but he does it with such gusto that he gets away with it. But even as I write that I remember, despite what was going on in that film, that Grant remained very romantic with his leading lady, especially at the beginning. Here he seems to have dropped every ounce of sexual charisma he usually brings to his romantic comedies, plasters on a pair of glasses and acts completely dorky and asexual until the final scene.

Hepburn is harder to define—looking at the film the wrong way her character can be grating and her performance even moreso—but I cannot help but fall in love with her. She (Susan) has such a gusto for life, and in the second act when she does everything possible to help David because she loves him (of course everything keeps getting more and more screwed up) you really grow to love her for it.

Something about the way they interact with one another just…works. Simple as that. It would be easy to overanalyze their scenes together and talk about tiny beats and small moments, but why? When something this special works, you shouldn’t question it. I’d rank Susan and David’s chemistry here as second to only my beloved Nick and Nora in the “Thin Man” movies, and that isn’t fair since those two have six movies to impress with.

The entire film has this timeless quality to it that many of the screwball comedies of the late thirties and forties just don’t have. Portions of “The Philadelphia Story” have aged horribly, and movies like “His Girl Friday,” “Topper” and “Dinner at Eight” are still funny and great films, but it helps when they are taken within context of when they were made. “Bringing Up Baby” seems taken out of time entirely…probably because the movie deals with reality on its own terms. If you can buy that there can be such a thing as a domesticated leopard named “Baby” in New England that makes friends with a terrier and will only be calm when sung to, then this is the movie for you. If not…well…there’s just no talking to you.

I’d say that the movie seems cartoonish in places (and I mean that as a compliment), but whenever it gets too loopy for its own good, Hepburn and Grant’s chemistry grounds it. The dialogue is so fast-paced, so quippy and so witty it would be an injustice to reproduce it here. It’s all about the delivery and the way it informs David and Susan as characters. Needless to say, the script juggles at least a dozen balls with ease, complicating things wonderfully and wrapping things up even better.

This is Howard Hawks’ only film on the AFI Top 100, and that’s a huge injustice to one of the best, most versatile directors of his or any time. How is it possible that “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” did not make the list? Or “His Girl Friday”? There are other classics, such as the original “Scarface,” “The Big Sleep,” “Rio Bravo” and the original “The Thing.” The connective thread of his best work is a complete devotion to getting his characters just right before having fun with the concepts and premises.

And if he hadn’t done that here, “Bringing Up Baby” would have been disastrous. But he did. I can’t help but watch the final scene of the film, where Susan teeters back and forth on a high ladder in glee after finding out David loves her, with a huge grin on my face. Like the earlier scene where she realizes she loves him, here is another “just perfect” moment in cinema. I believe in them as a couple, crazy as they may be and crazy as the circumstances they encounter are.

When I was writing my first book, I couldn’t help but give this movie several shout-outs. When I’m in a bad mood, this is the movie I turn to. “Bringing Up Baby” makes me completely, utterly, irrevocably…happy. Simple as that. And what more can you possibly ask for? Taken on those terms alone, it’s perfect.

My Grade (out of 5): *****

All About Eve

2011-04-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

Year: 1950
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 28
Writer/Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Star: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders

The secret of “All About Eve” is that it convinces you for a very large part of its running time that it’s much more cynical than it actually is. Considering the film’s title, purposely dry voiceover and the framing of the movie so it begins at Eve’s moment of triumph, one would believe the story is simply about Eve (Anne Baxter) knocking everything and everyone out of her way on her path to stardom, but I think that’s wrong. It’s about those people who survive Eve as she pushes her way through them—they are good, flawed people who ultimately find the strength to be happy despite the fact that the could have easily been roadkill.

We first meet Eve, and those survivors, in the film’s opening minutes, at a theatre awards dinner where she is about to be given, from what I can surmise, the “Greatest Actress Ever” award. The voiceover that introduces us to the characters is provided by Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), a theatre critic and columnist who has declared himself the most powerful man on Broadway. He doesn’t actually say this in the film, but I’m guessing he’s forced that surname into the masthead of his newspaper. A close cousin of the Waldo Lydecker character in “Laura,” he’s the kind of guy who you can’t help but call by his first and last name because to do otherwise would feel wrong, and his words here crackle with wit:

“The distinguished looking gentleman is an extremely old actor. Being an actor, he will go on speaking for some time. It is not important that you hear what he says.”

We soon flash back to how Eve got on that podium, and meet the people she will step all over to get there. Chief among them is Margo Channing (Bette Davis), who Eve basically stalks until she gets an introduction thanks to Margo’s best friend Karen (Celeste Holm). Davis’ performance doesn’t seem like a performance, which is the highest compliment I can give it. Margo has recently turned 40 and is at the peak of her career and skills, but knows she’s now too old to play young 20-somethings. She is horrified about what will happen when the rest of the theatre community realizes this as well. She’s so afraid of her age that she refuses to marry the love of her life, Bill (Gary Merrill, memorable thanks to the extremely annoying way he holds his cigarettes) because he’s a few years younger.

Margo and Eve become “friends” and Eve begins to use Margo’s contacts as stepping stones, making small jumps at first until she ultimately uses blackmail and threats of adultery to get her way. Margo’s maid Birdie (Thelma Ritter) notices things first; “It’s like she’s studying you!” she says to Margo at one point, and soon enough Margo gets wise to what’s happening as well. Mankiewicz is extremely smart to let the characters become privy to Eve’s motives early enough to make them seem wise and not like the idiots in soap operas who can never see what’s right in front of them.

It’s the women that notice everything first, of course, and their men take a bit more time to get it together. All the while I was astounded by how raw and real the characters, particularly Margo, were. When Margo self-destructs at a party for Bill, we are horrified but our hearts still go out to her. Because we recognize Margo as a fragile person, we don’t want Eve to succeed, but of course ultimately Eve’s machinations are just the kick in the pants Margo needs to get herself and her life together.

Eve’s character becomes much more prominent as the film continues, with Mankiewicz phasing Margo and the other characters out once they’ve found their strength and happiness. Davis gets all the huzzahs for her performance while Baxter’s is usually regarded as less-than-stellar, but I don’t know about that. I’m guessing that Mankiewicz wanted her to be a cipher more than anything else, and the way he shoots and blocks her supports that. In his tremendous script, full of intelligence, humor and wit, there isn’t a single line from Eve that lingers in our mind. She never begins a conversation and only seems to speak in response to what other people say. The most initiative she takes (until the final scenes) is to ask questions instead of making blatant statements. Perhaps that is why everyone finds her so acceptable—because she agrees with everything they say and there’s a vagueness about her personality that makes you define her instead of defining herself.

Mankiewicz’s script breaks a bunch of rules about structure, voice-over and narrative point-of-view, but does it with such elegance and ease that you can’t help but go along for the ride. Note, for example, that we never see Margo or Eve actually acting on stage in a film that is about actors. I’ve seen the movie a few times now, and with each viewing I become more in awe of his direction, and that he didn’t stoop to theatrics. The movie didn’t need it. His camera is never showy until the last shot, but its placement and use is still great. Note how he always frames Eve in the frame with Margo and Bill early in the movie, foreshadowing what is to come later. Or how he blocks Margo and Bill breaking up, the most melodramatic moment in the film (purposely so) on a stage among exaggerated props.

Oh, and did I mention Marilyn Monroe is in the movie in a small-but-crackerjack supporting role? She’s never given a major close-up and yet our eyes cannot help from lingering on her no matter what else is happening in the frame. I believe that’s what it means to be a movie star.

Perhaps the smartest move Mankiewicz makes is not allowing Eve to get her comeuppance during the film. She thinks she’s triumphed, but we see that the other characters have moved on from her games and will not have to deal with her again since she’s leaving for Hollywood. And then, of course, there’s Phoebe, Eve v. 2.0. Just her introduction and a small hint of what to come was enough. Anything else would have been unrealistic and far too much. Here is a movie that knows its audience is smart, knows it can get away with subtlety and knows what we come up with for Eve’s fate is so much more delicious than anything that could have been up on screen.

My Score (out of 5): *****

The Gold Rush

2011-03-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Year: 1925
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 58
Writer/Director: Charlie Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain

Ah, Charlie, why’d you have to go muck up a good thing? This review comes after a viewing of Chaplin’s 1942 re-tinkering of his 1925 “The Gold Rush,” leaving it, I suspect, much shorter, meeker and just a little annoying. In addition to losing every title card and adding a completely unnecessary, annoying narration, Chaplin also uses the narration to convince us that Georgia, the film’s love interest and a nasty woman, is actually a kind-hearted dame. All of this is conjecture, of course, since I have never seen the original. If I’m wrong, please tell me.

The films tells a story concerning (unsurprisingly) the Klondike gold rush. We first see Chaplin’s Tramp character adrift in the snow, searching for gold and trying to keep track of his location with a paper compass. Yes, you read that right, a paper compass. He finds a cabin, falls in with a wanted murderer and a Prospector (Mark Swain), and the three try to outlast the storm…and each other.

Basically, as long as the Tramp remains in the cabin the film is near-perfect. Despite the heinous narration (which I muted at certain points), the ingenuity of the humor here remains amazing viable today. Yes, Chaplin eating his shoe and appearing like a chicken to the Prospector have lost some of their spark since they’ve been ripped-off so many times in lesser films, but there is so much more to love. The climax of the film, which has the house literally blown away, left teetering on the edge of a cliff, ranks up there with the tightrope walk in “The Circus,” the boxing match in “City Lights” and getting lost in the gears in “Modern Times” as one of the very best comedy routines of all time, not just within the Chaplin canon. The audience knows before the two characters that the house is halfway off a cliff, so their movement within becomes a fantastic ballet of suspense and laughs. Finally the house begins tipping and the men desperately try to find a way to climb over each other to get out of the house before it falls. Moments like that are film magic, plain and simple.

I’m surprised the film gets so much mileage out of its concept. The sight of the iconic Tramp character, who we always expect to see on city streets or wandering on the waterfront, making his way through snowdrifts, is hilarious. But then we wonder how many more laughs we can get from that gag. Ten minutes in, we realize how easily the Tramp has become part of this world, and how Chaplin hadn’t even changed the style of his humor, but instead made the really odd locations work for him.

Which makes the appearance of that damn Georgia (Georgia Hale) all the more annoying. She’s a barmaid at the local pub, and the Tramp is smitten with her the moment he sees her. This is a shame because she only dances with him because she’s trying to make another man jealous. And she and her friends only treat him nicely because they are playing a game with him. She’s kind of a witch, all things considered, and she doesn’t deserve The Tramp. The Blind Girl and the Gamin saw the Tramp’s heart and so there was a real attraction there. Here the romance is forced at best, disgusting at worst.

To make matters worse, Chaplin’s narration seems to be trying to make excuses for her. When Georgia and her friends come to taunt the Tramp at a house he is taking care of, the narrator insists it’s not her fault she is that way, it’s because of where she works. Sorry, Mr. Chaplin, but a douchebag is a douchebag, no matter how many excuses you make for that person.

Because of this, the closing passages to “The Gold Rush” feel…odd. In the first place, the Tramp and his friend become rich and famous, which feels a bit at odds with the character we’ve come to know in all his other work. In “City Lights” and “The Kid,” Chaplin really worked to attain his happy ending (neither of which involved money), but here all he does is wander around in the snow with a dude who may or may not want to eat him until they come upon gold. The way Chaplin goes about “redeeming” Georgia is fine, I suppose, but doesn’t make up for the way she treated him all throughout the film.

When the film moves its focus from the Tramp’s love interest, it works in all the right ways. We always remember the big moments in Chaplin’s films, but it’s really the subtleties that make the movies work as a cohesive whole between those big moments. Look here at a small scene when the Tramp, cold and hungry, lies down outside a cabin door and pretends to be frozen solid in order to gain entrance and partake in the cabin owner’s coffee and beans. It’s a funny bit, but what really makes it work is that Chaplin asks for sugar cubes before drinking his coffee and salt for his beans. There’s another moment, earlier in the film, where the Tramp is trapped in that cabin with the Prospector, who is at this point almost delirious with hunger. The dog in the cabin walks outside and the Prospector follows…and he’s the only one who returns. Chaplin doesn’t mug for the camera or put a huge emphasis on this, instead letting the scene breathe just long enough to create the laughs of recognition.

By the way, the dog wasn’t dead.

This is the third Chaplin film on the AFI Top 100, and it doesn’t reach either the emotional or comedic highs “City Lights” or “Modern Times” do. But then again, there are probably only a dozen or so films that do reach that pinnacle. I discovered Chaplin through writing these articles and, in an odd way, silent cinema. I remember watching some silents as a child, but hadn’t revisited that part of cinema in over a decade. Now I’m ecstatic that I have most of Buster Keaton and all of Harold Lloyd to discover for myself…not to mention all the fantastic dramas that I was so unconsciously dismissive of before. And as for Chaplin, he has yet to disappoint. I’ve already taken in the greatness of “The Kid,” “The Circus” and “Limelight” but have so much more to look forward to. I’ve already ordered “Monsieur Verdoux” and “A Woman of Paris” and eagerly anticipate the Criterion release of “The Great Dictator.”

That’s part of what this list is about, after all. Sure, it’s “ranking” great movies, but it also strives to open up new avenues of film for those who might otherwise miss out on it. I can’t imagine my life without Chaplin now, and even though “The Gold Rush” isn’t my favorite of his films, it might be yours.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

2011-03-26T00:00:00.001-07:00

Year: 1937
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 34
Writer: Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rikard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, Webb Smith
Director: David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen
Star: Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Roy Atwell

It’s often remarked that animated adaptations of fairy tales “Disney-fy” them, meaning that all the darkness and death have been removed from the story in order to make them more family friendly films. Obviously, these people have never seen the Walt Disney produced “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Not only do you have the poisoned apple and the glass coffin, but you have horrifying trips into a haunted wood, psychedelic experiences of black magic, a hunter who guts a pig, stuffs its heart into a box and then pretends he tore the heart out of the title character. Sure, the film doesn’t include the Brothers Grimm’s original ending, where the Evil Queen is forced to wear hot metal shoes and dance until she dies, but in this version she is struck by lightning, falls off a cliff hundreds of feet into a ravine and is then squashed by a falling boulder. To me, it’s a toss-up which one is more grotesque.

The film begins with Princess Snow White thrown in rags and forced to clean her evil stepmother’s palace. She dreams of finding someone to love, and a convenient Prince (though he is never identified as such) just happens to be riding by on horseback and instantly falls in love with her. Her stepmother, the Queen, is obsessed with being the most beautiful woman in the land, so instead of forcing unnecessary plastic surgery on her step-daughter that would hinder her beauty, she orders her Huntsman to murder Snow White and return with her heart in a really nice box. The Huntsman allows Snow White to escape and she happens upon the house of the Seven Dwarfs.

Though it would be over a decade before her rise to fame, Snow White sounds and carries herself almost exactly like Marilyn Monroe. Though she doesn’t have the bust-line Monroe did (family film, people! Family film!), Snow White wanders through scenes shaking her booty and waving her arms randomly. In other words, she carries off being an idiot extremely well. She might get first billing in the title, but this movie is really about the seven dwarves she meets and the queen she shares a single scene with.

And that Queen…holy crap. We first see her draped in black, cloth covering almost every inch of her body, save for her face (her hair is covered as well), and the animation reveals subtleties in her expressions that even modern animation can’t quite match. Her castle is huge and empty—the only characters she communicates with are the Huntsman and the mirror that will never tell her what she wants to hear, which of course makes her need to go back for more. Here is a woman so obsessed with murdering her (let’s face it) simple-minded stepdaughter that she will literally strip herself of her most coveted possession, her beauty, to achieve her goal.

Those rascal-y Seven Dwarfs get the most screentime here, and you can tell that the filmmakers were having a fun time bringing them to life. Too much fun, it seems. Alas, their scenes today lag and linger much longer than they should. They think Snow White is a ghost. They wash their hands. They dance. They play music. They look for places to sleep. They say “Heigh Ho!” quite a bit (okay, that’s enjoyable). Looking at the film today, you can tell the animators are going wild, but there’s so little substance to the scenes that they can’t help but feel thin and a tad tedious.

The film is still surprisingly smart in how it approaches storytelling from time to time. Yes, it’s a film of clichés and big sweeping plot development (who is that Prince guy again and where is he for most of the movie?), but that doesn’t mean that the slew of writers who worked on it didn’t know how to tell a good story. From the first time the dwarves encounter Snow White, Grumpy is (unsurprisingly) the most vocal about not trusting her and not allowing her into their home. Moments before the Evil Queen arrives to feed Snow White the poisoned apple, Snow White kisses the dwarves goodbye and we realize that she has finally won over Grumpy. Even he loves her. The family is complete. That makes what follows even more heartbreaking for viewers, especially because the very last thing she does is finish a gooseberry pie made especially for Grumpy.

But let’s face it, the movie’s real triumph is the world it creates. The forest Snow White races through ranks right up there with the ferry ride in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” as one of the most terrifying sequences in a family film. The Dwarves’ home is filled to the brim with beautiful touches, and the animation is flawless throughout. Call me old fashioned, but this is a damn fine animated film that looks better than the CGI-worlds we so often find spewed before us in current animated movies.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” isn’t the best animated movie produced by Walt Disney Studios. My money is on “Beauty and the Beast,” but how can you discount other masterpieces like “Fantasia,” “Pinocchio,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty”? To me, any of those films are more emotionally resonant and have more well-defined characters. And yet there’s something downright haunting about seeing where it all began and seeing Walt Disney and his amazingly talented creative team make such a good movie right out of the gate. The other films I’ve listed might have improved on the intricacies, but their broad strokes remain firmly reminiscent of, and in debt to, this film.

My Score (out of 5): ****

On the Waterfront

2011-03-20T20:14:00.001-07:00

Year: 1954
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 19
Writer: Budd Schulberg
Director: Elia Kazan
Star: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb

We’ve seen uplifting sagas like “On the Waterfront” hundreds of time before in the movies—there’s something so encouraging about seeing a flawed individual overcome tremendous odds in order to restore justice that it has become part of our consciousness. The AFI top 100 is filled with them, from “To Kill A Mockingbird” to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and probably a dozen others. Stories like these are especially important today, where headlines like “Corporate Corruption” or “Bail-Out” are seen more often than sunny days in Los Angeles. We desperately want these greedy men and women, with their endless pockets and swarmy lawyers, held accountable for their actions, and the thought that an average joe like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) could overcome such vast odds gives us hope. Fleeting hope, but hope nonetheless.

“On the Waterfront” is a very good example of this type of film, with Terry beginning the film an enforcer for a corrupt union boss named (seriously) Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and ending the film a mouthpiece for the hardworking men and women of the union. There’s a dame who helps open his eyes to how wrong he has been (Eva Marie Saint), a priest who only wants to help (Karl Malden) and a familiar connection to the corrupt bosses in Terry’s brother Charley (Rod Steiger) being Johnny’s lawyer.

All of this reeks of cliché and, to a point, it can’t escape it. And yet writer Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan succeed in creating more depth here than other films of its type. Brando gets all the attention for his fascinating, multi-layered performance and he certainly creates a wonderful emotional anchor for the film. Terry, a former boxer, has always communicated best with his fists but, in this circumstance, is powerless to stop Johnny Friendly unless he uses his voice to indict him. He’s certainly not stupid, but he’s simple. He hates emotions and hates it even more when they begin to affect him. But he’s emotionally (there’s that word again) stronger than he seems, and his final, torturous walk that closes the film is rescued from eye-rolling because of how involved we are in Terry’s character.

With Brando so obviously shining, it’s easier to forget about the hugely talented ensemble who make the film more multi-layered than you expect. Kazan always filled his films with really interesting character actors, and “On the Waterfront” is no exception. Look at what Malden does with Father Barry, a thankless role that could have come across as one-dimensional dreck. Malden gives Father Barry an inner-strength and makes us know he is thinking, even in the scenes where he does not speak, and his savage indictment of the union bosses while standing over the body of his friend (and having eggs thrown at him!) is one of the high-points of the film.

Ditto for Steiger. When we first see Charley in the film we suspect we know what kind of character we’ll see, but then Steiger surprises us by veering away from cliché whenever possible. Everyone remembers Brando’s “I coulda been a contenda!” speech in the taxi, but that’s not the heart of the scene: It’s when Charley pulls the gun on his brother and then chooses to let Terry go even though he knows it is damning him.

Schulberg has a field-day with the dialogue here, which has all the zingers we’d expect from the best gangster villains, especially some early business about a canary, but the best line comes from Saint’s Edie to Father Barry: “What kind of saint hides in a church?” Much of Saint’s performance has sadly aged worse than the rest of the film, but her resilience in this early scene after the death of her brother still strikes precisely the right note. Most spectacularly, Schulberg gives Terry a voice that is never too slow and yet never too all-knowing. His final speech to Johnny isn’t an exquisitely thought out barn burner—it’s just a few simple lines screamed at Johnny that feel true to Terry’s character. That Schulberg didn’t feel the need to indulge what could have been a very dangerous ploy writers often concede to makes his script all the more successful.

If only Leonard Bernstein’s score for the film were as successful. For such an accomplished composer, the score here telegraphs every emotion far too much and is cranked up way too loud on the soundtrack of the film. In fact, the first five minutes of the film is almost torturous, with the music distracting almost completely from the dialogue and visuals.

Kazan made a career out of films that were about “something.” It never seemed to be enough for him to settle for a simple character drama or flashy thriller—there always had to be deep underlying morality plays or “big” questions that haunt viewers long after the film was over. He only has one other film on the AFI Top 100, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” but has several other films that could or should be. To me, the biggest oversight is the lack of the masterpiece “East of Eden,” but also there’s “Baby Doll,” “A Face in the Crowd,” “Panic in the Streets,” “Splendor in the Grass” and the unfortunately-mostly-forgotten “Gentleman’s Agreement.” I’ve always felt that, at his best, Kazan represented the perfect meshing of attention to acting and visual pizzazz, instead of tipping toward one or the other.

“On the Waterfront” is, understandably, his most raw film, and because of that he allows the tone of the film to sometimes feel out of place. Most of the movie is a perfect meshing of gangster dramas and character ensemble, but at times (I’m thinking particularly here of the assault on the church) it tips over into unnecessary melodrama, especially considering how tonally reserved most of the movie is. But there are many moments here that a lesser filmmaker could have botched. Look at Terry’s final, bittersweet-yet-triumphant walk across the dock. A lesser film would just show him walking, but Kazan cuts to his warped point-of-view, showing just how difficult the walk is for him and just how triumphant the moment really is. Terry is, after all, a hero, but the magic of this film is that his heroism sneaks up on you.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Titanic

2011-03-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Year: 1997
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 83
Writer/Director: James Cameron
Star: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane

“Titanic” is proof that there is such a thing as good melodrama and that sentimentality can be deeply affecting when done well. Here is a film filled with tremendous special effects that remains grounded because we believe in its central love story.

Everyone knows the story of the “unsinkable” Titanic, and it has been filmed numerous times at varying levels of quality, ranging from overblown tedium in the 1953 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle to gripping realism in “A Night to Remember.” This version begins in the present, with an undersea explorer (Bill Paxton) searching for a fabled blue jewel called, rather obviously, the Heart of the Ocean. They don’t find the jewel, but do discover a charcoal drawing of a nude woman wearing it that is dated the night the ship sank. An elderly woman named Rose (played in the present by Gloria Stuart and by Kate Winslet in flashbacks), claims she is the woman in the photo and offers to tell her story.

Rose boarded the Titanic trapped in a loveless relationship with her fiancé Cal (Billy Zane doing a great tip of the hat to Orson Welles) and, on the night she intended to commit suicide, was saved by a spirited wanderer named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). Rose is first-class, Jack is third-class, and yet first they form a friendship that leads to intense passion and romance. Even if you have not seen the film, you are familiar with the sight of Jack and Rose kissing on the front of the ship at sunset, and it is indeed one of the greatest romantic moments in all of film. What surprised me, visiting the film again after a decade, is how beautifully Cameron sets up this moment. One of the best moments in the film is a quiet one, without any of James Horner’s great music or any of the numerous impressive special effects, and that is the moment Jack and Rose discuss her attempted suicide. They dance around each other in their dialogue, Jack unafraid to speak his mind and Rose unsure of how to speak hers after a lifetime of suppressing her voice. Another splendid contrast between their lifestyles comes first when we see Jack attend a dinner in first class (Cal invites him as a “prize” for rescuing Rose) and later when we see Rose dance and drink cheap beer in third class. I cannot underline enough how easy and unforced the chemistry between DiCaprio and Winslet is here, and how quickly we accept their love despite the class difference between them.

A bit more hazy is the relationship between Cal and Rose. Yes, Cameron establishes early that, from Rose’s perspective, it’s just for the money. And yet, with the way Cal is characterized in the first half of the film, I cannot fathom him being attracted to Rose or choosing her as a mate.

As both a screenwriter and director, Cameron takes great pains to paint around the edges. He fills the screen with great character actors (most notably Kathy Bates as the unsinkable Molly Brown and Victor Garber as the soul-heavy ship designer) that make huge impressions in their few lines so that, when they either die or find salvation in the film’s second half, we feel something.

Structurally, “Titanic” is as close to perfection as any film I have seen. In the frame story, Cameron ingeniously shows us the exact circumstances under which the ship sank in a video Rose watches. Everything he introduces in the present is paid off in the past, and every character, subplot and idea he introduces before the iceberg is struck is paid off dramatically. Moments before the ship finally goes under, Rose suddenly realizes “Jack, this is where we first met!” and you can’t help but getting goosebumps. Yes, some of the dialogue is less than fantastic and a few modern beats (Rose flipping someone the bird) feel out of place, but these are easily forgivable.

For me, the reason the disaster genre (and I’m not reducing “Titanic” to a mere “disaster” movie here because it’s much more than that) remains so viable when done well (“The Poseidon Adventure,” “Airport”) is because after characters encounter the impossible in their everyday lives and then have time to process what is going on and react to their probable deaths in very different, very “human” ways. In the last hour of “Titanic” we see acts of great humanity, but mostly we are shaken by the horrors. The third class is literally locked below deck until they die. The first class lifeboats refuse to return to pick up survivors. It’s sickening, and not only do we wonder how we would act in those situations, but the movie has made us care about these characters as human beings. The fact that not a single character we meet from the third class survives is heartbreaking, as is the fact that unlikable characters Cal and Rose’s mother get away so easily. It’s unfair, and all the more impactful because of it.

Cameron (who was also one of the three editors on the film) is amazingly skillful at making the sinking of the ship both sickening and gorgeous. The first reveal of the sinking ship, seen after an emergency flair is fired off, is beautiful, and the way Cameron comes up with new ways to show the Titanic going down is always inventive. It’s visceral, and the special effects throughout are flawless. In fact, I’d wager that the effects seen here could not be done better today, no matter how much technology has advanced since 1997.

Of course, all that would be moot if we didn’t care about the sinking on a human level. Though “A Night To Remember” is a great film, it lacks a soul thanks to its straightforward presentation. Ultimately, “Titanic” offers us the definitive version of the story because it touches our hearts while offering us plenty of suspense and eye candy that is only underlined by the inevitability of the circumstances.

As the movie draws to a close, the elderly Rose says the line, “He saved me…in every way a person can be saved.” After returning the Heart of the Ocean to the sea, Rose dies quietly in her sleep and we follow her soul down into the ruins of the sunken ship, but we see it anew. All of the dead passengers wait for her, including Jack, who kisses her on the grand staircase. In most other films, that dialogue and finale would be cheesy, but “Titanic” earns them. It’s the rarest of spectacles—an uncynical love story where the grand special effects never outshine the film’s soul.

My Score (out of 5): *****

The General

2011-03-10T00:17:00.001-08:00

Year: 1926
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 18
Writer: Al Boasberg, Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton
Director: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman
Star: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack, Jim Farley

The more real the comedy is, the more awesome it becomes. “The General” is a comedy of moments, each one as real and visceral as the next. There is a never a scene we doubt that Buster Keaton is performing hugely-dangerous stunts on a real, moving train, and because of that the film reaches moments of transcendence. You can’t help but hit the rewind button on your remote dozens of times because you just can’t believe what he pulled off this time.

“The General” springs to life when its hero, Johnny Gray (Keaton) is aboard his train. The film revolves around two very intricate chase scenes involving multiple trains, most notably The General of the title, of which Keaton is the engineer, and as long as we are on those trains, the movie is close to flawless. It’s when the characters place foot on land that the movie goes off the rails (yes, that will be the last train metaphor of this review. Hopefully.)

The film takes place during the Civil War, and we are informed via title cards that Johnny has two great loves in his life: his train and Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). Johnny tries (unsuccessfully) to enlist in the Confederate Army to impress Annabelle, who dismisses him because he doesn’t have a uniform. One day both Annabelle and The General are stolen by Union soldiers and Johnny immediately gives chase.

Waitaminute…let me back up. Yes, our hero is desperate to enlist in the Confederate Army. And we see him fighting and winning battles for the South. So basically…he’s fighting for slavery. Okay, as much as I try to avoid research and other critical analysis of the films I discuss in order to approach the AFI Top 100 as freshly as possible, there’s been so much written about the film that knowledge of how it came to be is almost unavoidable in film circles. I have never seen an article or even a part of the article commenting on the fact that we are supposed to be rooting for slavery here. Yes, I know it seems like Johnny is only trying to enlist because he’s trying to impress Annabelle. And yes, I know there are more racist films in the era (“Birth of a Nation” anyone?) and after (the pre-code musical “Wonder Bar” featured a chorus of a hundred men in blackface going to heaven to frolic in, among other things, a forest of pork chops. Seriously.) And I know it’s supposed to be a lighthearted comedy. But my gut doesn’t care…when Johnny wins a big battle for the Confederates and is appointed a Lieutenant, it just doesn’t feel right. Even though the film is based on a true story, how difficult would it have been to switch Johnny’s affiliations to the Union? Hollywood makes much bigger changes to reality than that without blinking.

Moving away from my gut and back to the film…many of the comedy beats within the two chase sequences are close to perfection. As written previously, the stunts and intricate gags are jaw-dropping, as when we see Keaton, who is seated on the front of the moving train, throw a perfectly aimed gigantic railroad tie at another one lying on the rails blocking the train’s progress. The tie hits the other and both fall from the rails. If it missed, both ties would have inevitably hit the front of the train and probably crushed Keaton. In this stunt and every other, it’s perfectly obvious it’s Keaton doing all the work, which just adds to the coolness factor.

You would think that the fact that this is a train chase would limit the creativity of the action, but the opposite is true. In fact, I’d venture to say that just about everything that can be done with trains is done in “The General.” The trains switch tracks numerous times like toys on a track, ram one another, come apart, push flaming cars, race forward and backward…and that list barely scratches the surface. My favorite gag comes when Johnny lights a canon his train is pulling, aiming it to fire past his train and hit the Union train in front of his. As he finishes and crawls away, the canon begins to shift because of the movement and aims itself directly at Keaton. And then, of course, there is the phenomenal image of one of the trains (a real train, not a miniature) falling from a bridge into a river below.

Keaton manages to do all of this with a straight face. He never overreacts, which underlines the moments subtly instead of lessening their impact by spotlighting them. It’s a shame the person Johnny is doing all this for is such a loser. Annabelle is nothing more a wet rag, non-entity for the entire film. We aren’t given any reason to believe in Johnny’s love for her, and then when he rescues her from Union forces she does nothing but screw up and almost get Johnny killed over and over. First she gets caught in a bear-trap (one of the only comedic misfires in the film), then drives the General away before Johnny can get back on it on multiple occasions. You want to cheer when Johnny finally has his fill and throws a log at her while they are trying to set a booby-trap. This is a major hurdle that the film cannot cross—when the couple gets together at the end you don’t feel like cheering: You wish Johnny would drop the dead weight and find a real woman.

It’s almost unfair to compare Keaton with Charlie Chaplin (even though it’s done all the time) because their comedy styles are so different. It’s not the comedy that’s missing from “The General,” but the soul, and that’s what every major Chaplin film has in spades. Annabelle can’t even come close to competing with the Blind Girl from “City Lights” or the Gamin from “Modern Times.” With the heart of the film missing, all you have is a comedy of really astonishing moments with little underneath them.

My Score (out of 5): ***1/2

Spartacus

2011-02-21T00:38:00.001-08:00

Year: 1960
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 81
Writer: Dalton Trumbo (adaptation), Howard Fast (novel)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Star: Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov

The problem with the “spectacle” films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when studios saw running time and Cinemascope as the answer to the problem of television, is that the actual spectacle lasts about twenty minutes or less in the films’ usually three-and-a-half-hour-plus running time. Over-actors fill the rest of the reels with overblown, stodgy dialogue while looking generally hilarious in bad costumes and worse hair styles. “Spartacus” separates itself by actually having something to say in those long passages between the crackerjack “spectacle” sequences.

Kirk Douglas is the title character, a slave who trains to be a gladiator before leading a revolution, first against his captors and later against all of Rome. He seeks freedom for himself and the ever-growing group of slaves that march through Italy toward a group of pirate ships on the coast. There’s more, of course, three hours of more.

The driving force is no more or less inventive than any other film of this type. It’s all about the execution. The “villains” of the film are genuinely engaging, three-dimensional characters who do not shy away from having ethical discussions.

First and foremost is Peter Ustinov as the owner of the Gladatorial school Spartacus trains at. Ustinov’s performance is the best in a film of great supporting performances, and he is so gleeful in his one-track-mind that he earns our love despite his unabashedly-underhanded behavior.

Next up is Charles Laughton, who could have easily walked through the role but injects his Roman Senator with a surprising amount of decency. In the film’s final moments, when he procures safe passage for Spartacus’ wife (Jean Simmons), he surprises both us and himself with the humanity he displays. Usually overlooked is John Gavin, who is just aces as a young, cocky Julius Caesar, whose loyalties are always in flux.

Laurence Olivier plays Crassus, who becomes the ultimate villain of the film even though he only has one scene with Spartacus, and even his motivations come off as more thought-provoking than evil, despite the fact that he crucifies 6,000 slaves and oversees the slaughter of thousands of others. Olivier is one of those rare actors who always seems to be thinking, even when he isn’t speaking in a scene, and the film’s writer, Dalton Trumbo, gives him some of the best dialogue in the movie.

Crassus’ villainy is oddly approached in the film. He’s the villain because the movie seems to insist that he has to be the villain, and some of his actions in the second and third act seem out of character with the intriguing, multi-dimensional person that had been set up before. It’s difficult, because the real thing Spartacus and his army fights for here isn’t a person…it’s an idea: Slavery. All the Romans in the film keep slaves, and in theory are all just as evil as the next character. Of course they were never going to “beat” slavery or end the idea, so it needed a face, and that was where Olivier came in.

Alas, in comparison to these fascinating, great villains, Spartacus comes off as horribly two-dimensional. He wants freedom…he wants freedom now! Oh, and he loves his woman. You don’t get much more than that, but Douglas does well with what he’s given, and manages to give quite a good performance despite little dialogue of any depth or interesting characteristics.

Of course, since this is a “spectacle” film the costumes are, unsurprisingly, atrocious and I highly doubt Roman women had the hairspray and conditioner to create such perfectly sculpted over-the-top hairstyles that they have here. Poor Simmons tries to act through horribly overdone make-up and over-touched hair, which almost always manages to be present even though she’s merely a slave. Then again, what else are we to expect?

Of course, there are things to treasure about movies of this type as well. Alex North’s brilliant score is both intimate and suitably epic when it needs to be, and its melodies linger long after the film ends. And there’s something so special about looking at those wide, beautifully shot scenes and sequences where you know you are actually looking at hundreds of soldiers slowly marching toward you. Needless to say, the bloody battle scenes do not disappoint, and the aftermath, where soldiers wander through what appears to be thousands of dead bodies, is rightly unsettling.

The writing is good, though shockingly unbalanced at times. It’s hard to believe the same writer crafted the carefully worded monologues about belief and the sloppy, horrible lines of exposition like “It’s Spartacus again? This time he dies!” And I have to wonder who allowed that atrocious voice-over at the beginning of the film that explains nothing that we need to know.

“Spartacus” doesn’t feel like a Kubrick film, though it has all the technical mastery one would expect from his work. The whole is much too emotional, and there’s too much heart here for it to be real Kubrick. I don’t mean this as a negative, I only mean to say that if I did not already know that he was involved going in, I would not have been able to tell you who was the director when walking out.

I have such mixed feelings about the false hope manufactured by the ending. Yes, the filmmakers should be given a lot of credit for ending the movie without your typical happy ending, and watching Spartacus slaughter his best friend (Tony Curtis) and then be crucified is a pretty ballsy move. And I did feel like having Laughton’s character freeing Simmons and the baby was a beautiful, touching beat…but then she found Spartacus up on that cross. Simmons holds up her baby and declares the child “free.” Well, yes, but so what? How is that supposed to make up feel better? The only reason she and the baby are free is because of Laughton. Every other person who was part of the rebellion is dead. Every. Other. Person. And slavery is still there, and would be there for another two-thousand years. Having the filmmakers try to make it feel like a positive when it really isn’t feels convoluted and doesn’t ring true.

“Spartacus” is a mixed bag, distinguished and great in some respects but tired and overblown in others. It’s the best “spectacle” film to come out of Hollywood in that time period, but is that really saying all that much? I’ll remember it more for the four brilliant performances at the center than anything else about it, but that alone is more than enough to make it worthwhile viewing.

My Score (out of 5): ***

Network

2011-02-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

Year: 1976
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 64
Writer: Paddy Chayefsky
Director: Sidney Lumet
Star: Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, William Holden

“Network” has managed to be one of the only films to pull of the seemingly impossible task of “de-aging” since its release in 1976. It certainly must have seemed like outlandish satire in its first year of release, but today the movie seems like a pointed, subversive send-up of currently broadcasting channels like Fox News, E! and many others. How many other films can claim that they are more topical today then when they were released? I’d argue for “In Cold Blood,” “All About Eve” and the original version of “The Manchurian Candidate,” but very few, if any, others.

Well-respected-but-aging UBS national news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) was recently fired and appears to have reacted to the news by having something like a nervous breakdown. How can we tell? The next day he announces on air that he will be committing suicide on his final episode. He’s pulled immediately, but the next day convinces network executive Max (William Holden) to let him say a goodbye on air. Instead, he launches into either another insane tirade or perhaps his only lucid moment in the film when he laments that he just got sick and tired of life’s “bullshit.” Ratings skyrocket and executives over Max’s head decide to keep Beale on the air, just to see what happens next and if the 18-49 year old audience sticks around.

We are introduced to more studio executives, all soulless and conniving to one degree or another. Robert Duvall plays the none-too-subtly named Frank Hackett, who is obsessed with making the fiscally irresponsible news segment profitable, whatever the means. Faye Dunaway is most memorable as Diana Christensen, who provides Hackett with those means, which involve giving Beale his own spin-off series and greenlighting a series about a terrorist sect called the Ecumenical Liberation Army. Diana gets Hackett to fire Max, and Max is so shaken up that he immediately falls into bed with her, despite the pesky fact that he is married.

At some point we realize that all of the characters in the film are also having their own nervous breakdowns, but no one questions them because they have big offices, expensive suits and control the bottom line.

The first hour of the film doesn’t seem to last more than a minute or two because it is so witty, fast-paced and subversively funny. Beale’s threat of suicide seems to be inspired by the mostly-forgotten-except-among-newspeople (of which I’m one) on-air suicide of news anchor Christine Chubbuck. The Ecumenical Liberation Army is a spoof of the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst and at one point “The Mao Tse-Tung Hour” is greenlit. Of course these news stories have faded from most of the public’s memory, but the inspiration remains the same. We laugh, but the subject matter really not that funny, is it? Writer Paddy Chayefsky wants to get us as angry as we are entertained.

The high point of the film comes when Beale wanders on his stage during a live broadcast wearing a raincoat and pajamas and declares that “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” The camera follows him as he continues to rage and encourages his audience to scream the same thing. All across the country we see windows flung open as people scream the same phrase into the streets. It’s the pure, undiluted anger of a country allowed only to create a wider profit margin for UBS.

After this, the film begins to stumble a bit, awkwardly trying to instill emotions and feeling into a story that loathes such a sentiment. Beale disappears from camera for long periods of time, and he is missed. Chayefsky seems to be surrendering to the necessity to have human feeling in his film but, even then, mocks it and make it seem languid. Take the scene where Max and Diana take a romantic holiday weekend together. Director Sidney Lumet shoots it in soft focus, giving us all the clichés we expect from such scenes, but Chayefsky inserts dry, television-related dialogue from Diana throughout. The result is an odd, unbalanced second and third act that has several astonishingly powerful, funny moments but other uncomfortable missteps.

Perhaps some of this comes from the miscasting of Holden. Holden is a very good actor, but this was over twenty years since he was so startlingly dark in “Sunset Blvd.”, and his persona had softened considerably. We want to like him, and we don’t buy him so dismissively leaving his wife and jumping into Diana’s bed. The persona he creates here can’t sell fourth-wall-breaking lines like, “And it's a happy ending: Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife, with whom he has established a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell; final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week's show,” no matter how great they read in the script. Perhaps someone like Kirk Douglas or Tony Curtis would have been a better choice.

Whatever the cause for the lack of balance in the film’s second half, it’s hard to argue that Chayefsky’s screenplay is anything but amazing. When Diana is introduced to one of the terrorist sect’s representatives, the following exchange takes place:

-“I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.”
-“I’m Lauren Hobbs, a badass commie nigger.”
-“Sounds like the basis of a firm friendship.”

There are so many small moments like that where Chayefsky gets it precisely right, and others, like when Hobbs is very vocal about her contract negotiations, where he purposely goes so over the top you are bursting with laughter. He’s the kind of once-in-a-generation writers, like Aaron Sorkin (who paid homage to Chayefsky’s “Mad as hell” speech in the fantastic pilot of his “Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip” series), who can successfully make the intricacies of politics not only digestible to a mass audience, but make them hugely enjoyable as well. Instead of getting a screenplay credit, he instead gets an “author” credit in the main titles: “Network By Paddy Chayefsky,” and that sounds about right.

This isn’t to say that we should not give Lumet the credit he deserves for keeping the ship upright and getting it successfully through the changes in tone. He also gets Dunaway to give the performance of her career here, and his casting for the smaller roles is flawless.

Despite how funny the film is, the truths beneath the humor ring almost frighteningly true today. I’m fairly Glenn Beck shouldn’t be worried about being executed on air during one of his tirades if his ratings go down…but then again, Beck actually managed to get a “hit” television show to spew his ramblings…so who knows?

My Score (out of 5): ****

Annie Hall

2011-01-22T17:24:00.000-08:00

Year: 1977
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 35
Writer: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Director: Woody Allen
Star: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Carol Kane

Thank God we have that screen separating us from Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), because if we had to be in a room with the guy for more than an hour we might think that first-degree murder might not be such a bad idea after all. But since we are observing Alvy from a distance, even when he addresses the camera directly, we can look past his so-damn-annoying nature, actually listen to what he has to say and, ultimately, get a lot of insight from what he tells us.

Alvy is probably the best incarnation of Allen’s sometimes-engaging, sometimes annoying “New York Neurotic” character that he played in countless films. Alvy freely admits all of his vices and neuroses but is too obsessed with himself to do anything about it, despite seeing a therapist for the past fifteen years. Like everyone else, he wants to be loved but can’t imagine a woman who meets his standards could ever want him. He quotes that great philosopher Groucho Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that accepts me as a member.” This is a man with deep problems, ones that the movie doesn’t exist to solve or admire, but to observe.

Because Alvy is so self-deprecating and lacks even the slightest bit of self-censorship we hear things from him and see things in the film that would otherwise go unheard. Other film stars were, and still are, too vain to have dealt with the material with the same sad-yet-humorous tone.

Many of Allen’s sequences were so inventive and pierces so closely to the truth of relationships and the way humans interact that they have been ripped off regularly in the decades since. How many times have we seen random animated interludes in romantic comedies? Or a device where both characters are in different conversations but addressing the same subject? Or how about when characters are saying one thing and their thoughts or emotions are subtitled below? My favorite moment is when Alvy is about to have sex, but his partner’s spirit seems to physically leave her body and go watch from a chair a few feet away.

Sadly, since these tropes, once so original, have been ripped off in lesser form so often, they can’t help but have lost some of their original power. The animated sequence in particular, sticks out like a sore thumb today. In 1977, I’m guessing just cutting to an animated sequence was enough to make viewers laugh back then, but today the viewer needs sharper dialogue and a better tag in the sequence to really make you laugh. I feel the same way, to a lesser extent, about the subtitled thoughts, but the dual dialogue sequence remains as sharp today as ever.

At the center of all this emotional turmoil and trauma (almost all of which is created by Alvy) is the title character, played with a great balance of charm and eccentricity by Diane Keaton. And how great is it that Annie is actually a “character” in a romantic comedy? Not only does she have opinions on books, films and culture, but she also has interests and real motivations. Filmmakers have become so damn lazy in recent years in their treatment of women. Even if she’s the main character in a film she often lacks any distinguishable trait. Screenwriters think that merely making her “busy” and “wrapped up in work” give her interests and enough characterization to get by. They don’t. And an even lazier subset of writers time and again make heroines obsessed with “finding the right guy” or “getting married” because it simplifies their goals and makes it easier to paint in broad strokes. Here, we understand Annie and why she is acting the way she does.

We also understand the relationship and why it breaks down. There are no romantic comedy clichés to be found here—things happen because the characters are fated to behave in certain ways. Alvy falls in love with Annie because she isn’t a parrot and has her own personality and opinions. Annie falls out of love with Alvy because of that exact reason: She’s too strong of a personality to put up with his constant need for focus and attention, however humorous his self-deprecation may seem.

Both of these characters are smart, and that’s something else modern films have forgotten about. The characters talk about Proust, Fellini, Balzac, Kafka and McLuhan, to name a few, and not in a way that talks down to the viewers. If we get it, we get it. If not, they’ve already moved on. I miss when movies were this literate and even the Muppet films could make references to Bronte or Kafka without being censored. Any script with these references today would be marked with red pen immediately—what if someone doesn’t understand it!? God forbid. The movies have long forgotten this, but luckily television is beginning to rediscover it thanks to the work of such writers as Amy Sherman-Palladino and David E. Kelley.

Allen takes his time. There’s no quick cutting to ensure a joke has landed or hurried dialogue to make things seem funnier than they are. The shots are long and the characters inhabit the screen as if they are normal people congregated in a room together. Early in the film, a noisy filmgoer launches into an attack on Fellini that gets his films and their meanings precisely wrong, and I think that wasn’t random. A lot of this movie reminds me of Fellini in its emotion and with the patience the filmmaker shows in the various scenes and sequences.

Like any comedy, there are some misses, but “Annie Hall” hits the mark most of the time, and has a few gags and insights that linger long after the film is over. It’s the movie where Allen says just about everything he has to say about relationships, and has spent the rest of his career saying it over and over again, but with fewer laughs each time.

My Score (out of 5): ****1/2

Swing Time

2011-01-17T22:08:00.001-08:00

Year: 1936
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 90
Writer: Howard Lindsay, Allan Scott (adaptation), Erwin Gelsey (story)
Director: George Stevens
Star: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Victor Moore

Ugh, why can’t they just shut up and dance?

“Swing Time” is preposterous, stupid, at time unwatchable…and yet its dance numbers are some kind of perfect. Though they look effortless, I’m sure endless hours were spent creating these three-and-four minute magical sequences. If only a fraction of that time had been spent on the screenplay…

The plot…well…I think I understood a little bit of it. Fred Astaire portrays a gambler/dancer named Lucky, who misses out on his wedding because his brothers convince him his pants aren’t up to snuff (seriously). His fiancé tells him that she won’t marry him unless he goes to New York City and make $30,000 (seriously), so Lucky goes and meets Penny (Ginger Rogers). From there things get muddy.

The characters change their motivations and make decisions that make The Idiot Plot from romantic comedies seem inspired. The Lucky character is originally portrayed as a gullible pushover in the first two reels, but is suddenly ballsy enough to begin betting big bucks and telling off the wrong people once he gets to New York. He also basically destroys Penny’s life a piece at a time for a half hour after he meets her, and then suddenly we are supposed to believe they are a dancing team? I’d say looking anywhere below the surface would reveal huge plot holes, but they are often right there onscreen.

Penny and Lucky’s romance is one of the most convoluted in any romantic comedy I’ve ever seen. He’s engaged to another woman but apparently can’t simply cut it off even though he’s falling in love with Penny, but then again she doesn’t seem to like him at all, except for the fact that she lets him follow her around everywhere. I finally threw up my hands and gave up trying to keep track during a beautifully shot sequence in the woods just north of the City, where Astaire and his father (Victor Moore) talk about the plot. The father doesn’t want Lucky gambling because he might win the $30,000 (because the fiancé will figure that out by telepathy, apparently) and he wants Lucky to stay with Penny, but then Lucky pleads with his Father to not let him get near Penny. I don’t know why, either. The father seems to be rooting for them to get together, but later, when they are about to kiss, throws a snowball at them to stop them. Yeah, I don’t understand it either. Oh, and in the background of all this Penny has another handsome suitor (who’s a nice guy to boot) champing at the bit to marry her.

If none of that made sense, it’s because of the plot, not my writing.

If the romance doesn’t make sense, then plot mechanics make even less. Lucky has a phenomenal dance number on the “reopening” night of a popular nightclub, but later when he and Penny lose control of the orchestra (seriously) they throw their hands up that they are finished, apparently forgetting that the audience would surely clamor for more of their dancing after seeing Lucky’s first performance that night, and then it would be quite simple to find another place to dance in. They are, after all, in New York City. By the final scene, the writers seem to give up entirely and just have the characters all simultaneously cackle until the movie fades to black.

Sections like those are nearly unwatchable, filmed with tepid dialogue in boring medium shots with actors apparently unaware of what the word “subtlety” means (Astaire’s shocked face is so overdone it might as well have come from a silent film).

Ah, but when “Swing Time” lets its characters sing and dance, everything else falls away. There’s more emotion in half a minute of Astaire and Rogers dancing than all the excess trash surrounding it. There are rarely cuts during the musical numbers, and the film is all the better for it, because it gives the scenes a grandeur and reality missing from the rest of the movie. Their final dance number, “Never Gonna Dance” is breathtaking. Here we can see the pain they feel at their imminent separation and the idea that they may never be able to dance with one another again. It’s as sensual as if they were making love to one another.

Astaire has a “solo” number, “Bojangles of Harlem” that is filled with the kind of creativity and high energy modern musicals have long forgotten. At one point he’s leading a line of twenty dancers in what appears to be a waltz effortlessly. Later in the number, he dances before three of his shadows, perfectly in sync at first until the real Astaire begins to out-dance the shadows. Moments like that can leave you cheering.

If not for the dancing, “Swing Time” would have been long forgotten. Sure, there are a few things about the film outside the dance that are passable, but those are details, not the meat and bones. The aforementioned scene in the snow is kind of wonderful to look at, and makes me wish more romantic comedies filmed in the snow. The club has some great set design going for it, with a staircase that goes on for an eternity and a floor finished with a great painting of the city. Its tables all appear to use cling wrap as tablecloths, but the less said about that the better.

The director, George Stevens, gives the musical numbers a lush, full quality missing from everywhere else. Stevens is a great actor’s director (he had recently directed “Alice Adams,” which is quite possibly Katherine Hepburn’s best performance in a career of best performances), so it’s shocking to see the abysmal acting moments coming from almost the entire cast. The exception is Rogers, who never quite gets bogged down in her character’s stupidity and remains elegant and appealing throughout. I just don’t understand why Stevens couldn’t have taken the time the actors needed to create interesting characters, or why he didn’t insist on a comprehensible, witty script instead of the dreadful thing he shot.

My Score (out of five): **