One of the most charming films I've seen in the last decade is this bittersweet look at adulthood and adolescence by Wes Anderson. Like one of his other popular films, "Rushmore" (1996), this one is centered around a bright young boy (Sam) who is highly creative and doesn't quite fit in with others. Anderson's penchant for eccentric characters and slightly off-kilter views of adults interacting with kids while dealing with their own latent immaturity has only improved since that film. Edward Norton steals all the scenes he's in as a scout leader who only considers his full-time work as a middle school math teacher to be ancillary to his Khaki Scout life is a particular standout.
He is currently on a Summer Camp outing as a Khaki Scout, which is a send up of the boy's groups which try and emulate the spirit of military and Native American culture with a pastiche of both.
Sam is an orphaned eleven year old boy who has exhausted the good graces of his foster parents and his fellow Khaki scouts. In particular a nasty boy named "Redford" who wants to track him down apparently dead or alive.
The film has a flashback that explains the situation. Months earlier, while attending a church play depicting the story of Noah and the Ark, Sam is smitten by Suzy, a girl of the same age. Her parents do not approve of their associating.
They write letters back and forth to their respective boarding schools. Both see in each other a kindred and rebellious spirit. So they decide to run away to another part of the island they are situated on, away from parents, teachers, sheriffs, scout masters and any posse of young toughs who want to track them down.
The small New England island town in the film seems not quite tethered to reality, rather like a later Fellini film such as "Amacord" (1973) or Ethan and Joel Coen's "O Brother, Where Art Thou" (2000) where magical things just happen and nobody really needs to stop the fun to explain why.
The adults (Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand) all play characters who have own personal problems to sort through--adultery being a major distraction, but it's not treated in a melodramatic way-- so there is a good deal going on here all at once.
The main events of the story happen just as a sudden storm is about to hit the coastal islands.
The film is set in 1965, but it is decidedly not a work of nostalgia . I believe it is placed in this time because they were still using rather primitive psychological methods on children who didn't fit in well with groups. Electro-shock methods are mentioned. A highly-regimented orphanage seems to be in his future.
The movie works well because it is both fantastic about the little woodland small town world this is created and knowing that there is a larger world out there that these children in a few years will have to "run away" towards rather than from in becoming adults. A few days hiding out, reading and swimming and exploring the first tender feelings of attraction to the opposite sex just might be the highlight of their lives.
Bruce Willis ... Captain Sharp Edward Norton ... Scout Master Ward Bill Murray ... Walt Bishop Kara Hayward ... Suzy Jared Gilman ... Sam Jason Schwartzman ... Cousin Ben Tilda Swinton ... Social Services Frances McDormand ... Laura Bishop
"Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year! They oughta have 'em, too."-- rogue atomic scientist J. Frank Parnell, assuring Otto, his young hitch-hiking friend, that atomic energy is actually quite safe. From "Repo Man"
When one talks about counter-culture films of the 1980's, it;s not really a long list. But somewhere near the top has to be this film. "Repo Man" came out smack dab in the middle of Reagan's America: much of the nation was trying to recapture a pre- Vietnam War America, devoid of doubt for those who could find a comfortable current to float down the Mainstream with.
By 1984, I was 24 and I knew this America of my early youth was long, long gone. It was replaced by a light bulb salesman with is finger on the nucear trigger and a bunch of smug suburbanites waiting for the folks in the wastelands of inner-city America to kill each other with drugs and guns. Thinking people maintained a healthy distrust of authority, and expected less then did the peace niks and the Woodstock generation. That culture fight was over and in America and the conservatives were very sore winners.
The Underground was now in charge in defining the zeitgeist of places like east Los Angeles, where most of this film is set. The sense of confidence once held dear is now only a mirage outside of the campaign slogans and mass market sods pop jingles on television. You could smell the paranoia coming out of the pores of a lot of people, and nobody was immune in my experience.
This movie captures a lot of that feeling. We used to say among my friends that if somebody didn't "get" the angst-driven humor of "Repo Man", they were either lucky or stupid. Both perhaps.
The film follows an aimless young man named Otto (Emilio Estavez) who is walking into the minefield of young adulthood. His parents (television-addled burn- outs) are barely aware he exists. They have taken the money they saved to send him to college to give to a television Evangelist to send Bibles to the already Catholic and war-torn people of El Salvador.
Otto leaves his dead-end job in a grocery store and hooks up with a "Repo Man" named Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) who lives by a a cynical philosophy of life. Frank is an equal opportunity nihilist who will allow neither Communists nor Christians to be his partner in his "repo" work. Here Bud explains the code to Otto. (Warning: this clip contains foul language.)
He's a throwback to "The Man Who Knows Indians" from the older Western genre, a loner out to do a dirty job who relies on himself and will take in a partner to keep his personal ethos going after he's gone. It also makes it easier for him to repossess cars to have a partner.
The streets in "Repo Man" are unremitting slums; the gritty underworld of criminals, street punks who seem lost in old "Dead End Kids" movie but with cooler hair, angry ex-car owners, a girlfriend who is in to defining her "relationship" with Otto even after she inadvertently tortures him in a lab test gone VERY wrong, and a renegade atomic scientist from Los Alamos who is driving a ' 64 Chevy Malibu into the heart of L.A....with something wicked in the trunk.
"Repo Man" is about the emptiness of American commercial society and also the end of American idealism. The jarring sounds of Punk Rock have replaced the romantic (or at least idealistic) tempos of rock and folk tunes.
The 60's are truly dead and the future is no longer anything but a vacuum waiting to be filled by who knows what?
All in all "Repo Man" is both outrageous and honest, a movie that tells the truth about a lot of people's daily lives and makes it's points with a dark humor and wit.
"Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist’s fate in the 20th Century both in her revolutionary artistic vision and in her political blindness and infatuation. No one would deny that with her talent she developed cinematic methods that have since become part of an aesthetic canon. Her career also shows that one cannot lead an honest life in service of the false, and that art is never apolitical."--Stephen Bach (page 297)
"Shortly after he came to power Hitler called me to see him and explained that he wanted a film about a Party Congress, and wanted me to make it. My first reaction was to say that I did not know anything about the way such a thing worked or the organization of the Party, so that I would obviously photograph all the wrong things and please nobody - even supposing that I could make a documentary, which I had never yet done. Hitler said that this was exactly why he wanted me to do it:."— Leni Riefenstahl, her own memoirs. (1992)
Stephen Bach (1938-1909) was an American film executive who wrote this extensive biography of one of the most talented and controversial film actor/director/documentarians of the 20th Century, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003).
I remember seeing both "Triumph of the Will" (1935) and "Olympia" (1938) in the 1980's, the latter film--a documentary on the first great Nuremberg Rally of Hitler and his mass forces of "race and blood". One senses the real ominous terror of those times and how aesthetics like this added so much to the Nazi mystique. It is a chilling two hours to witness, especially on a big screen as I did in a college auditorium. The film "Olympia" is over three hours long--depending on what print of the film you see--is not quite as ominous (at least in the English language versions) but still blends together Riefenstahl's ability to blend art in the motion of bodies and the adulation of mass crowds.
Here's a famous scene from "Olympia" (1938): the diving competition:
It is these two films (and a feature film see did in 1941 called "Tiefland") which were her most famous and notorious works on screen. Gypsy extras used in the latter film were later taken to a death camp to be murdered. I haven't that one in complete but I would recommend anyone intersted in this subject should see a documentary called "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl", (1993) a film which she participated in and tried to obfuscate (as she does in the quote above) her role in making The Third Reich look all polished and perfect on screen. The film-makers did not thankfully give Leni the final cut or the final say in the film so it's worth seeing.
Bach's book explores how Leni went from being a provincial girl interested in art to great fame. It was summarized well by Simon Callow in his review of the book for The Guardian:
"Her background was perfectly ordinary. She was born in 1902 in a working-class suburb of Berlin (a city which Bach evokes, as he does everything else in the book, with vivid economy) to a severe father and a stage-struck mother. She and her mum were a team, secretly visiting cinemas and gate-crashing fancy-dress balls. By sheer willpower and the generosity of a lover who longed to marry her, she became a successful solo dancer in the avant-garde style of Mary Wigman, but, said a critic, "She lacks the highest, most important quality: soul." Her life found its focus when she saw Arnold Fanck's location-shot film The Mountain of Destiny. "I have to meet that man," she told her still adoring, still matrimonially hopeful lover. It was, he said, the refrain of her life. She uttered it for the last time when Hitler appeared on her horizon, with momentous consequences for them both.
"Struck by her vitality and beauty, Fanck wrote Holy Mountain for her, shooting it in Alpine locations over a gruelling two years. In what would become a familiar pattern, she took her co-star, Luis Trenker, into her bed, and then worked her way round the crew and cast, unleashing erotic mayhem in the isolated location. All her life, she changed men regularly, like the paintings on the wall. Many, if not most of them, were mountaineers, athletes and cameramen; quite a number were all three. Her essentially masculine sexual behaviour is almost exhilarating. When, for once, one left her - rather than her dismissing him - she slashed her arms, legs, hips.
"She became a director by default. After failing to secure the Marlene Dietrich role in The Blue Angel, she determined to direct a vehicle for herself: The Blue Light. The experienced scenarist Béla Balázs wrote and co-directed with her; one of her former lovers shot it. Unschooled in film technique, she invented and experimented, eagerly accepting suggestions from her partners. This was her Citizen Kane: she empowered her colleagues, who rose to greater heights for her than they had ever previously managed. Her rough cut, none the less, was a catastrophe; Fanck rapidly re-edited it, saving the movie, which was highly successful, despite poor reviews in the largely leftwing Berlin press. For these Riefenstahl blamed the Jews, even though her two chief collaborators were Jewish."
Later when Hitler was coming to power she read "Mein Kampf" and said "I have to meet this man." How far she and he got together is a source of speculation, but it's clear that Riefenstahl is lying when she says she was coy about making "Triumph of the Will" or, later, that she didn't know about the atrocities committed by the Third Reich. She knew about them sooner than most Germans in fact since she covered Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw in October of 1939 and photographic evidence shows her present at the slaughter of Jews in a near-by town.
It's clear that Leni was more than a little attracted to power and a career and, despite her post-war obfuscation and attempts to soft-pedal herself as a naive camera operator, she was in the inner recesses of Hitler's enclave up to her collarbone.
After the war ended, Riefenstahl was detained first by the Americans and then by the French. Upon release she was found not culpable for any sentencing due in part to her ability to put on a good act--according to the book--and the fact that she never joined the Nazi Party. (A hedging of bets?) Most of the rest of her life she spent in her apartment in Munich--restored to her in 1953--where she managed to make several journeys to Africa to film and photograph a tribe of people called the Nuba, a group of people who prided themselves in aesthetic glorification of the human body. In a way, Leni was right at home!
She was still making films at age 99 in the Sudan region, and was also scuba diving into her 90's.
The most interesting parts of the book for me were reading about how Leni went to Hollywood intending to make a film. She had garnered some interest by Universal Studios in her pre-Nazi days but her German "Alpine" films (one of which was shot in Greenland) generated less interest due to her limitations as an actress. Petitions by anti-Nazi artists and business-people in Hollywood (some of whom were refugees of Hitler and almost all know friends who were) gave her cause to return to her fatherland.
She later visited America again as a guest of Andy Warhol, and was reportedly involved in a photo shoot of Mick and Bianca Jagger--a meeting of art and commerce that I would rather not have read about. Bach's book is very interesting in refuting a lot of lies this woman told and is extensively researched with hundreds of interviews and citations.
A clip from a 1926 film featuring Leni as a actress: "The Holy Mountain".
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." -All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 10” ― Erich Maria Remarque
"All Quiet on the Western Front" was a major best -selling novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), focusing on the young (and older) men who are wounded or killed literally due to mechanized warfare. Many were also wounded in the psyche from experiences that seared into them for the rest of their lives. In many ways it is timeless--all the realities of modern "post-traumatic stress" for the returning veterans, for instance, seems totally honest and believable both in the book and the film.
Published in the late 20's it was first set to be made into a silent film by Universal Studios in Hollywood. The popularity of sound films changed that strategy and it was reset for sound. Seeing the film again, one is struck by how raw it all seems--the sound is not smooth as it is in today;s films, and the scenes of battle are not computer-generated but look more real for being depicted by real men in conditions that, while staged, look as one could only imagine they MUST have felt at times to those on the actual front.
Many people who saw this film when it first was released must have wondered how, in less than ten years, Europe would be drawn into another disaster involving even worse death tolls.
The film centers on a young German named Paul who goes to the front in 1916 after getting a patriotic pep-talk to his class by a professor. Germany needs "Iron Men", the teacher tells the class with a bravado that is all ballyhoo and no reality. Many then rush to the recruiting office even before they are to be conscripted.
Some months pass at The front. The optimism of a quick war that had been believed by many on both sides is long over. The front lines are an endless horror. Gas attacks. Futile charges against machine guns. The life among the dead and the shell-shocked and the blinded and suffering. Only with his fellow soldiers in short lulls in the war--where they talk of putting all the leaders of the nations in a ring and letting them fight the war they are stuck in--provide some brief respite for the young man.
On leave, Paul realizes he cannot talk about war to his family or friends in his home town. They have no concept. In the book by Remarque, Paul returns home to his room and the books he read and was inspired by as a young man. They have lost their significance in a world that is torn apart by the reality of war.
In one of the best scenes in the film, Paul later returns on leave to the class with the same teacher and tells the students what war is really like. The film has many great scenes like this, and, thanks to the lax censorship of the times there is a maturity to the film about matters such as sexuality in wartime which are not graphic but refreshingly without prudery.
In a world where leaders on all sides talk rather easily of preparing for conflicts, this material (as a book or a film) is both a relevant and poignant testimony of a human folly that cannot seem to stop.
John LaCarre's 1975 book was first translated as a six-hour miniseries starring Sir Alec Guinness. Guinness was a great actor and all the coiled intensity and intelligent deduction he brought to a rather boring and ordinary-looking man made the show remarkable and a notch or three above the "Cocktails, Sex and Berettas" skulduggery that was typical fodder for the Cold War drama series. It seemed like La Carre must have known what was going on inside British Intelligence even though he denied he was using much fwcknew at how the top echelon of the British spy organization ("The Circus") starts to unravel on itself as it more than his imagination for years until it was revealed he had been a spy himself during the 1950's when Britain espionage services had its share of high-ranking"fifth columnists" like Donald Burgess, MacLean and Kim Philby.
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" takes place after the revelations of double-agents have put "The Circus" back on its heels. The head of intelligence, "Control" (John Hurt) believes a new mole has cropped up inside the agency, but he dies before being able to carry out a internal affairs investigation. The last of control's Old Guard, George Smiley (here played compellingly by Gary Oldman) is brought out of forced retirement to track down the mole; there are four main key figures he has to investigate and ferret out the one rotten apple before his own agents are shut down by the mole or "Moscow Center" further compromises his old agency, and everytrhing he and his cadre of spy recruits in "The Nursery" training center worked to build up since the end of World War II.
The politics around the story hardly matters as much as the threat of suspicion, betrayal and distrust. Smiley knows something about all this in his private life as his beloved wife, Ann, has been sexually involved with one of his suspects and the rest of his peers in the Circus know full well he is a wounded cuckold. Oldman imparts a weary but stoic and dogged portrayal of a man not home in his own home or his old agency.
He is driven to finish a job and its only at the end--for those who haven't read the book-- that we realize his work is far from over. Hanging over the whole story like a haunting specter is Karla, a Stalin-era Soviet super-agent who somehow survived the purges of Krushchev's de-Stalinization programs at the Kremlin. He's a true believer that Smiley once tried to turn to the West in a meeting in New Delhi, and who wouldn't even flinch despite the desperate situation he faced back in Moscow.
He has more up his sleeve than the mole Smiley is trying to take down, hence the need for LaCarre's next two books in this series, "The Honourable Schoolboy" and his next masterpiece "Smileys People", later a 1982 television series that one hopes will become the next movie with these writers, director and fine cast.
Hugo is a rare holiday movie of which it can truly be said can appeal to both adults and children. The fact that it's plot revolves around a child's accidental rediscovery of a link to the early history of French cinema and the rehabilitation of one of the great early "imagineers" make it all the more delightful.
The film, set in the bustle of Paris, circa 1935, revolves around a poor boy of eleven or twelve named Hugo. His father (Jude Law) , a former part-time inventor and factory worker, one day brought home a robot (called an "automaton") from a museum which discards it. The father is a master of designing and fixing things mechanical. When he dies in an industrial accident, Hugo's nasty uncle takes him in to help him keep the clocks going in a Paris train station. Soon the uncle, a heavy drinker, disappears. Forced to live by his wits in a railway station and keep one step ahead of a policeman (Sasha Baron Cohen), Hugo happens open a girl his own age whose father Georges (Ben Kingsley) owns a small toy shop in the rail station arcade. To Georges, a once-popular filmmaker turned into a forgotten man, this scruffy boy seems to be nothing but a thief, but in reality Hugo's crimes against the toy seller--stealing little gears and springs --are to complete the automaton. Slowly, a trust develops.
By completing the magic figure, the boy not only honors his father and finds the first steps on his own path in the world, but he lets the older man --formally his nemesis--embrace and stop denying his past as a magician and purveyor of dreams in the then-new medium of film.
Scorcese makes great use of the atmosphere you'd expect in a cosmopolitan train station, as well as the cemeteries, churches, and back alleys of a between-the-wars Paris. There's even cameos for the likes of author James Joyce and jazz guitarist Django Rinehart.
Hugo is definitely worth seeing if you love movies and compelling storytelling where imagination is celebrated and the master technologists and storytellers of one age salute their earlier peers.
This comedy-drama charts the struggle of one Rita O'Grady (Sally Hawkins) a working-class wife and mother who leads 157 women workers at a Ford Motor plant in Dagenham, England, out on strike when their jobs sewing upholstery on car seats is threatened by the Ford with being declassified as "unskilled labor". The personal difficulties the women face: from their husbands, from the unsympathetic union leadership and, of course, the company brass are all woven together well.
The film is based on a real event and employs television news footage of the time that documents how far working class men, professional board-room types and even supposedly socialist and liberal politicians in general were from accepting the concept of "equal pay for equal work" between the sexes --and how far it still has to go.
The film has an excellent cast and a good feel for the period. Bob Hoskins is especially good in a sympathetic role as a shop steward whose mother had to support her family when he was a kid and there was absolutely no pay equality in the workplace. Rita gets some encourgement from him but in the end its her own voice and personal mettle that comes to the fore when the all-male union bosses try to put the issue on a back burner.
Miranda Richardson appears as Barbara Castle, a powerful Labour Party official of the time who has her own "old boys network" to deal with, headed by the out-of-touch Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who thinks the women can be put off with pie-in-the-sky promises.
I hope a good deal of this film is actually factual, because it really does show how courage and convictions can change things for the better, even if its only a small initial victory .
One oddity for me is seeing so many people working at a car plant taking bicycles to work. Either that's "veddy British", or Ford was a lousy company to work for there at the time.
Doubtless a great deal has been said and will be said about the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, a actress frequently cited as "The Last Movie Star".
I think of Ms. Taylor as two major public figures in one person---as a female screen goddess in the time of Hollywood's "Studio System" from the 1940's to the late fifties where it was a giant group of factories turning out proven products, and into the era of independent productions where it took the improvization of talent coming together on one project--preferably a few well-known ones in front of the camera -- to get a film a wide release.
She made many critically successful and big-draw movies in both eras, and just as many unsuccessful ones and critical flops. Her most famous work has been recounted in the last 48 hours many times on television and the newspapers. "Giant", "A Place in the Sun", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", and the notorious "Cleopatra" a film that probably did more to break a crumbling studio system than any other due to cost overruns. (right, a 1952 coloring book featuring the 20 year old starlet)
And yet it created the most popular screen couple of the 20th Century. Wonderfully paradoxical I think.
Liz Taylor was both a superstar of the studio era and also a more post-modern figure as it were, larger than life and then some. A movie star who didn't need to even make movies to be treated as if she were still the biggest name on a marquee.
Consider just two things about her----that she had a long association with diamonds and remarkably expensive jewelery. That's very old school, very chic by mid 20th century standards of conspicuous celebrity glamour. And really shallow. What serious actress today would want to be known as "Miss Diamonds"?
Throw in the yachts and the husbands and the glam outfits; in that way she epitomized the film star who lived like a wandering Queen of Sheba.
But there was also a down-to-earth quality to her, best exemplified in the way she came across in interviews as a no-bulls*** lady who said what exactly was on her mind and in her groundbreaking (by celebrity standards, or perhaps any standard ) work on behalf on bringing awareness about the AIDS epidemic to the forefront in the 1980's and beyond. She occupied a place of high distinction with two separate personas. Not bad for one lifetime. (Below, A tribute from the amFAR organization, narrated by Vanessa Redgrave).
If I had to choose one film that had the most impact on me that she did I would pick 1967's "The Comedians", a quite good adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about foreigners pretending that all is according to Hoyle and straight in the hellhole of authoritarian violence and squalor that was the Haiti of Papa Doc Duvalier. I doubt this film would have reached the audience it did without Burton and Taylor and I have to credit this film getting me interested in Greene's novels and short stories and eye-opening takes on how the world works, especially how people sometimes have to lie to each other and themselves when the truth all around them is the mirror opposite of what they say.
In this scene Richard Burton is a writer who is having a long affair with the wife of a diplomat in Port-Au-Prince. For obvious reasons the film was shot not in Haiti, but in the small nation of Dahomey, now called Benin, in West Africa. It says a lot about their commitment to making this movie that it was shot in a very hot and technically primitive place. It is a story that needed to be told and I give both these actors credit for their social and artistic efforts.
I hope in the afterlife Elizabeth Taylor has a chance to catch up with all those fellow spirits from her life in both these personas (and her private self of course). She was a rare creation in many ways!
Mike: Wait, wait, wait. What is this? What are you gonna do to me? What are you fronting off about? And if I'm this bad dude, why don't I just take out some gun, blow you to a billion parts? Dr. Margaret Ford: I'll tell you why. Cuz I think you're just a bully. Mike: [chuckles] Just a bully? What, you're not gonna let me carry your books? Aren't you a caution. Dr. Margaret Ford: Let's talk turkey, pal.
This movie was the first that playwright David Mamet directed ,an adaptation of his own screenplay. The story pits a psychiatrist with a best-selling book who butts up against a steely con man named Mike (Joe Mantegna) in a seedy bar and gaming club to help one of her patients, a desperate young man who appears on the verge of suicide.
The shrink Margaret Ford (Lindsey Crouse) becomes attracted to the world of con artists and how they conduct their con games,all the bluffs and "tells" and signals and elaborate schemes which set up "marks" to turn over large amounts of money with deceptions that are tightly coordinated and on the knife edge of danger. Margaret is intrigued by both this underworld of confidence men Mike has assembled to make his illicit living, and the obvious chemistry she and Mike have as a team in this dangerous demimonde world of dark streets and dangerous situations.
The film has a group of engaging characters and enough twists and turns to keep one guessing who will come out ahead (or at least alive) in this smart highly charged suspense film.
"The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out."
—Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)
(to right: the cover of prolific science-fiction author Fred Saberhagen's "After the Fact", one of two "Pilgrim" novels concerning time travel. In this one the "Flying Dutchman of Time"--Jerry Flint-- has to try and save Abraham Lincoln from assassination at the climax of the Civil War. Other good good time travel novels I recommend include "The Book of Kells" by R A McAvoy (a story of Viking marauders versus the early Celtic Christian civilization in medieval Ireland, and the modern young man and woman who find themselves in a time portal to the midst of the trouble) and "Time Frame" by Michael Creighton (concerning a American billionaire who creates a way to travel back in time and how difficult it is for a group of young people to get out of the forests, castles and battlegrounds of 14th Century France alive) These books are entertaining because they are also good history.
Sean Redmond's comment on the "motif" of time travel does go a long way I think to explaining its hold on many millions of people. No matter what we believe about how and why we are existing at this time on this planet, we all strive at some points in our lives to matter, hopefully to matter in a way to make our family/friends/society better for our being here.
There is always the question of "what if?" Whole religions like Buddhism are focused on resolving that which is flawed within us and getting us off the wheel of existence. But many simply would prefer some more time with a lost loved one or a chance to rectify an old problem and redress it now that we as individuals have the wisdom to do so.
To travel back in time to fix a bad situation or cure a longing for something the modern world doesn't provide can be seen in two of the most memorable time travel movies I recall. The first is a crime story within the time-travel motif called "Frequency" (2000). The story is explained by the movie trailer below. There is no time travel in the film per se, but there is communication between father and son in 1969 up and back to 1999. Thanks to a flare-up of sun spots and an old ham radio link-up, a serial killer might be stopped and a family life altered for the better. This film is a good suspense yarn also.
One of the best things about the movie to me is how the character of the Son in 1999 gets his father to realize this is not a hoax is by giving him the details of the New York Mets improbable "cinderella" victory in the 1969 World Series over the juggernaut Amercian League favorites, the Baltimore Orioles: a shared passion for some great moments in sports unite a family for a larger purpose!
Twenty years before "Frequency" came "Somewhere In Time" (1980) starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer. Based on a Richard Matheson short story, the film followed a young man who meets an older lady at a theatre party and longs to discover how she ever knew him. This film became a true "cult film" in the best sense of the word, and even today generates a fan base that makes a pilgrimage to the grand resort hotel in Marinac, Michigan, where the film was shot. Whereas most time travel stories concerned crime or spectacle, this one has a story which penetrates the heart, a unique film that even I, not exactly an arch-romantic, nevertheless find this little film somehow more moving each time I've viewed it. John Barry's marvelous score---featured on the clip--is just one of the many great compositions he has done in cinema.
My own version of a time travel novel was something I finished about ten years back and redacted it a bit in 2007. I flogged about the agencies and book conventions for awhile.It never got a publisher so I did it myself with a great measure of help from Shirley
It's something of what I liked best in all these novels and films and concerns a detective investigating his friends' murder, a task which takes into the world of modern theater and, later, to the time of Shakespeare's London. "Cursed Spite" is the name of the work and if you like stories of history and imagination, I'll be happy to send you a copy, gratis, since my wife would love to get more of these copies we printed out of our garage :-)
I also think personally it's a good tale. You can get "Cursed Spite" by contacting me and leaving a mailing address at my e-mail: dnoakes@charter.net
"The 400 Blows" is one of the great films of the French New Wave, a film I wished I had seen as a teenager because it captures so well that period in a boy's life when he is suspended between being effectively still a child and entering adolescence.
It is also a unique story of one youngster who lives a life of desperation, caught up in a small Paris apartment with a hostile mother and an indifferent father, and knocked about in school by teachers who are pompous martinets, quick to humiliate their pupils and slow to inspire.
There is a documentary feel to this film, as if we are prying into the life of the youngster, Antoine Doinel, played by the amazing Jean-Pierre Léaud, not seeing it acted out. When life at home becomes unbearable for him, he runs away to play hooky at the cinemas, or steals about with a friend, getting involved in the petty theft that will send him first to a police jail (in scenes inspired I believe by Alfred Hitchcock's 1957 crime drama "The Wrong Man") and then the reform school--and the final heartbreaking rejection by the mother who never wanted him born in the first place.
What could have been a tragic or melodramatic film is simply a powerful 99 minute personal statement by a director destined for other great films like "Jules and Jim"(1961), "Day for Night"(1973), and another excellent film about the unique (and soon all-too lost) world of childhood, "Small Change" (1976).
It's a matter-of-fact slice of life involving an intelligent and sensitive young boy who reads Balzac novels, smokes cigarettes, has the spunk of three ordinary kids and is equiped with a desire to live and enjoy a bit of freedom before being drafted into the military and/or the banality and conformity of the adult world.
One look at this film (I saw it first at 24 ) and you know without knowing much about writer-director Francois Truffaut that this had to be based on his own life, or someone close to him. The story is extremely intimate and the boy breathes life into a role that seems all too real. Nothing here suggests its drawn from a sociological study or the hyped 1950's "message" movie in the Hollywood tradition of Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) or "The Blackboard Jungle" (1956) and other lesser B-films of that era that lean toward exploiting the youth movement from a safe and decidedly adult perspective.
This is a singular vision of childhood without sentiment or hyper-dramatization. A must-see.
If one took an Ealing Studios comedy from the 1950's and mixed it up with a cliche-ridden violent American cop drama you would have something akin to "Hot Fuzz". Simon Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a super Type-A London policeman who gets transferred to a small country town in Gloucestershire to get him to decompress (and stop making the rest of "The Met" look bad by his overzealousness in catching and booking bad guys. )
Once exiled, he is teamed up with bumbling PC Dan Butterman (Nick Frost) a small town flatfoot whose main knowledge of police work comes from an absurdly extensive DVD collection of action movies in his closet. At first it looks as if our big city copper will die from boredom.
But something is amiss in quaint little Stamford.
The big wheels in town have secrets, secrets that get people knocked off in grisly fashion. And the local Chamber of Commerce group wants their cute little burg to be named "The Best Village in England" badly. Really badly.
The film is funny enough that you don't have seen all the "Dirty Harry"-type police melodramas to enjoy this one. Jim Broadbent plays the local top constable, and Timothy Dalton looks twice as comfortable playing the sinister over-the-top bad guy in this one then he ever did as James Bond.
Honore Balzac is credited with having written "Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime." In the case of Mark Zuckerberg and the disputes over who came up with the biggest social network on the planet, well, maybe not a great crime, but a lot of big fat lawsuits. $600 million bucks worth to be more exact.
In "The Social Network" Mark Zuckerberg, billed as earth's youngest billionaire, is a math savant and computer geek with bad social skills who gets the lion's share of the credit for inventing global entity called Facebook, which today boasts 500 million members or about one in every twelve people on the planet. How much of this movie is true in details or not, it is an engaging story.
The first half of the movie takes place at Harvard University in 2003, which is a blink of an eye in the normal span of time but a epoch in this new age of portable computers and iPods and texting and social networks.
Zuckerberg discovers his girlfriend wants to break up with him at a Harvard Square pub one evening over a drink. "Dating you is like dating a stairmaster!" she exclaims. Dejected, he goes back to his dorm room and decides to get even by blogging about her in a very ungentlemanly way on the university website. Then on the same evening, the lad creates a forum where Harvard students and others can grade female coeds one-to-one based on their looks from yearbook pictures. College guys in frat houses jump on this "rate a girl" website like a bunch of CIA agents on the last chopper out of Saigon. The whole university Internet site crashes in an hour and a half in the middle of the night!
This makes Zuckerberg an overnight celebrity and he catches the attention of two identical twin Big Men on Campus, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who are on Harvard's rowing crew and whose father has international legal clout. The brothers Winkelvoss invite Mark into the super- private fraternity house (The Phoenix Club) and one sibling pitches an idea about a website so Harvard's elite student body can meet up for dates and friendships and such. (Translation: these Ivy League studs who want to meet pretty and smart girls in a more economical fashion.)
Will Mr. Zuckerberg, the smart outsider, mind doing the grunt work of creating such a site? But, and this the movie leaves open, is the brothers' idea for a Harvard University date site on a computer really the impetus or just an addition to an idea Mark already developed the night his girlfriend gave him his freedom?
If this were an earlier American movie, this would be about how well-heeled Anglo-Saxon Americans use envy to get Jewish-American friends to give them something (money, brain power) in exchange for access into their world of upper-class clubs and semi-secret societies. And at first Zuckerberg fits the role of the parvenu. Then he changes when he sees that the idea, whatever its inception, is huge.
The new Zuckerberg could care less about status, or money for that matter. He wants to create something of his own that everybody recognizes him for. How much he owes other people for the creation he spearheads is the central drama. Sometime a few weeks later "The Facebook" is launched by Zuckerberg and his friend, a Brazilian named Eduado Samarin, who becomes the business manager of the fledgling company--until he is forced out in a power play worthy of a David Mamet story. The movie takes us through the maze of claim and counterclaims on how "Facebook" (with its reported 500 million members) came to be. The viewer of the movie can choose their own heroes and anti-heroic rebels, as well as victim and victimizers. The deposition scenes in this film are quite interesting, which is a rarity in a movie of my memory. In the end the story travels to the Silicon Valley/Stanford University area in California and we see how the budding empire unravels and reforms. In the end, Mark Zuckerberg stands like Octavian at the end of Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra", not exactly a villan or a worthy character, but victorious in a battle that remakes the world.
"The Social Network" Directed by David Fincher Produced by David Fincher Scott Rudin Kevin Spacey Dana Brunetti Michael De Luca Ceán Chaffin Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin Based on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich Starring Jesse Eisenberg Andrew Garfield Justin Timberlake Music by Trent Reznor Atticus Ross Cinematography Jeff Cronenweth
Recently I re-saw "The Grapes of Wrath" on DVD. I was struck by a sense that this film was not just a great historic testament of the Great Depression with a strong director (John Ford) and accomplished and great actors (Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, et al ) but, uncomfortably, a movie made from times not as dissimilar to our own right now.
Yes, the clothes are different and the small American farm has gone away, but the economic desperation of the 1930's are upon places like Nevada, California, and Florida, places people used to go to find a better life when things went gunny-bags in the Rust Belt areas of the Middle West.
No question--bad times in many parts of America are here upon us again--chronic unemployment, foreclosures all over the country, banks who won't lend money, the investment giants of America hoarding what wealth there is instead of investing it, I could go on but you know this already.
Now many people, including a higher number of those with strong real-life skills, are out of work and willing to accept any job. (And this longest recession in decades incudes the more educated post-graduate groups that have never been so vulnerable.)
When I've previously seen "The Grapes of Wrath" and read it in high school, it was hard-hitting, but there was a comfort zone about it. I thought we were beyond this phase of desperation in American economics. And I am not a cockeyed optimist, as anybody who ever spent an hour talking to me could testify in court to and have no fear of perjuring themselves.
Yes, there were homeless families when I saw this in the 1980's , say, but it was not possible to say that millions would be two or three paychecks away from the same fate. Nor had union power ever eroded to the point of being a non-factor in saving jobs; nor was Wall Street capable of lobbying themselves so clean of regulations from the FDIC and the SEC and other regulatory components that a whole way of life could vanish for millions of middle-class families. Nor would anyone save a loony make a case that multi-millionaires were "small business" people and giving unemployment checks to job seekers was unConstitutional.
But here we are, at least in many parts of America.
I think "The Grapes of Wrath" is an important book and adapted movie that anyone who wants to understand America in the years before we entered World War II. That I can now almost recommend it as a parable to our own times makes it all the more urgent that one should acquaint themselves with John Steinbeck's fictional takes on matters he saw for himself and recorded for magazines along the dusty roads of Highway 66 in the American Southwest and California. His great prose can also be found in a volume called "The Harvest Gypsies", a non-fiction account from which the novel is drawn from.
This is a film that almost never got made. Not because of popularity concerns but because many conservative forces in Hollywood wanted to just buy the rights to the novel and put it on a shelf and forget about it. Major studios like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (under the reign of Louis B. Meyer, the highest paid executive in the USA) wanted to do just that. So hat's off to Darryl F. Zanuck for making this film and for John Steinbeck for telling a story that, all hyperbole aside, is as relevant now as it was seventy years ago.Warning--this review contains spoilers for those who haven't seen the film.
This comic movie--with a title appropriate for this sad anniversary for Americans and others of many nations-- was one of the first I remember seeing at a drive-in theater--and have enjoyed on television from time to time since. It was an overhyped extravaganza of a film, more popular with the general public than with most critics.
It affords not only a worthy and multitudinous cast of mainly American comedians in their prime, but also reaffirms that humanity's lust for money can make mild-mannered grown-ups into badly-behaved children.
The plot, from screenwriter William Rose ("The LadyKillers") is simple. A older hoodlum just one step ahead of the cops a serious accident with his car flying off the road on a desert highway. Before he literally "kicks the bucket", he tells eight good samaritans in four separate parties gathered around him that there is a cache of 350,000 bucks hidden "under a big W" in a near-by coastal California town---all they have to do is get there and dig it up!
The "samaritans" soon fall out and a two-and-a-half hour melee ensues for control of the treasure, all the while Police Captain Culpepper tracks the would-be criminals while his personal and professional world crashes and burns all around him. Will his own deep-seeded avarice get the better of him?
Stanley Kramer produced and directed, and Ernest Gold did the excellent score. Cast:
Spencer Tracy ... Capt. C. G. Culpepper
Milton Berle ... J. Russell Finch
Sid Caesar ... Melville Crump
Buddy Hackett ... Benjy Benjamin Ethel Merman ... Mrs. Marcus
Mickey Rooney ... Ding Bell Dick Shawn ... Sylvester Marcus
Phil Silvers ... Otto Meyer Terry-Thomas ... J. Algernon Hawthorne
This film, titled "Io sono l'amore" in Italian is a solid romantic-family drama, not the type of film I ordinarily go in for, but it delivers all the drama one would expect for a two hour investment.
It also features a great performance by Tilda Swinton as a Russian-born lady, Emma Recchi, who married early into a wealthy Italian family. She has spent her entire adult life in a secure place in a fashionable center of high society among the elite of Milan. But her daughter coming out as a lesbian ignites a personal search for her own inner being.
Swinton is the center of the film and she turns in quite a performance as a woman who has so assimilated into the haute bourgeoisie of Milan that she quite literally has lost her younger identity. Maybe it didn't matter so much when her kids were growing up but now they are grown and mature. She doesn't even use her original name, and her Russian past has been all but erased from her new life as the wife of a boring, but headstrong businessman.
Swinton reportedly learned Russian and Italian for the film, which took eleven years for her and the director and co-writer of the film, Luca Guadagnino, to being to the screen.
The story starts out slowly and confidently, with the family patriarch announcing over dinner that he has decided to retire the running of his business to both his son AND his grandson, a King Lear-like move that is just the beginning of the undoing of many family ties.
The film's main focus centers in the main around the relationship between Swinton's character and her grown son's best friend, a chef who is a decidedly good cook because he can seduce women with just the way he can saute a sea food entree or caramelize a dessert. Eroticism plays a major part of a couple key scenes, but the film itself also plays up the sterility of an older capitalistic society that has lost its drive.
Emma (a tip to Flaubert's famous literary heroine?) becomes obsessed with the younger man, and perhaps just as obsessed with finding a way out of her stifling life in the gilded cage of northern Italian high society.
The film climaxes to a tragedy, something you can feel coming all along. It's worthy of something out of Tennessee Williams or the two classic "Godfather" films of the seventies. The music score by John Adams, featured on the trailer below, is also outstanding.
Tilda Swinton fans, of course, and those who like seeing unflicnching family drama--with just as much dramatic punch and suspense as there are romantic interludes, will enjoy this one.
'Invictus" is a film that dramatizes a small part of the reinvention of South Africa from a pariah nation to a multi-cultural society. The center of the film is Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) who tries to forge links between his followers and the minority white population that resisted racial integration for decades. That a man could spend 27 years at hard labor in prison as an official "non-person" and come out with a strong sense of compassion over bitterness and longing for revenge is a great story in itself. Freeman carries a lot of gravity to this role and excels as he usually does in films of all varieties.
The inclusion of the story of South Africa's Springbok Rugby Club--a symbol of white repression for black citizens--and its improbable success in the 1995 World Cup provides a powerful parable of the power of sport and national pride turning out to be a force for unity. And perhaps a path for easing the burdens of remaking a nation (that now must be faced by black and white South Africans together) for decades to come.
While the film is not a film with a lot of surprises, it succeeds in showing us that in some cases the better side of human nature can come to the fore.
The title of the film comes from a poem by the Victorian writer William Ernest Henley.
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Writing credits:
Anthony Peckham (screenplay)
John Carlin(based on his book "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation")
Cast (in credits order)
Morgan Freeman ... Nelson Mandela
Matt Damon ... François Pienaar Tony Kgoroge ...Jason Tshabalala Patrick Mofokeng ... Linga Moonsamy Matt Stern ... Hendrick Booyens
(right) Former Prime Minister Andrew Lang (Pierce Brosnan) and his newest scribe (Ewan McGregor) have a bit of tense communication in a scene from "The Ghost Writer".
This adaptation of the Robert Harris novel "Ghost" marks Roman Polanski's return to the thriller films like "A Knife in the Water" (1962), "Repulsion" (1965) and "Chinatown" (1974) that he excels at. Although I certainly don't endorse Mr. Polanski's past behaviors with under age girls, it's undeniable he is one of the best living directors working in films today.
The film concerns a hired ghost writer of celebrity memoirs who agrees to shape up the biography of ex-British Prime Minister Andrew Lang. (The previous ghost-writer drowned accidentally in the waters off Massachusetts' cold Atlantic shore--or so that's the official story.)
The protagonist encounters a large bunker-like VIP beach house where Lang is holed up with his nervous and weary wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), a pack of security personnel, and his tough and alluring personal secretary Amelia (Kim Catrall) whom Ms. Lang strongly suspects of being Lang's mistress. The whole set-up crackles with personal tension.
The writer has just a few weeks to make a workable product out of Lang's verbal ramblings and boring political anecdotes. He is a one time Cambridge University actor who took a sudden interest in politics and rose quickly to the leadership of the Labour Party in the 80's and 90's. Brosnan and the writers do a good job here creating a PM who is at times charming, easy-going and a little superficial (good qualities for an American leader to project as well) but quick-tempered and a tight-lipped person once the doors close. Lang is a man who has been following a script long after he ceased being an actor. The question at the center of the film is: Who is writing that script? Lang himself, or the CIA?
(I personally have found it hard to get through modern politicians memoirs, and pretty much have given them a pass in the last few years. It seems the more powerful someone was, the less likely it is he or she can be candid about what actually happened while they were in office. And all memoirs written by future candidates are inevitably guarded and coy.)
The tension ratchets up nicely when the writer discovers that Lang has been charged with being a war criminal by human rights groups and by his ex-foreign minister for allowing four British citizens to be seized by the CIA and taken to a "black ops" site where one of them died in custody. There is also the question of Lang stretching the "special relationship" between Her Majesty's government and the Americans to a point where he was all too eager in the past to do what Washington wanted in matters of war and national security . (Does any of this sound familiar?)
The films has enough twists and red herrings to satisfy not only political types but also those who enjoy a good tale of intrigue and underhandedness told with intelligence and wit. The film works well in part because right up to the end you are not sure what to make of Andrew Lang or those closest to him and the writer, like any good writer, is overcome with a searing desire to simply tell the truth--if he can only live long enough to find out what it is.
The whole cast of this film does an excellent job. Both Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall make the most of their supporting roles. I had my doubts about the fetching former "Sex and the City" star playing such a steely power player, having only seen her in comic roles heretofore, but she obviously can handle more subtle dramatic roles than she has ever found in Hollywood assignments.
The Cast
Ewan McGregor The Ghost Kim Cattrall Amelia Bly Olivia Williams Ruth Lang Pierce Brosnan Adam Lang Timothy Hutton Sidney Kroll Tom Wilkinson Paul Emmett Robert Pugh Richard Rycart James Belushi John Maddox Eli Wallach Old Man Jon Bernthal Rick Ricardelli
"They may turn their backs on me now, but you wait and see, darling girl...they're going to love me when I'm dead."--Orson Welles to his daughter Christina shortly before his death in 1985.
Welles was a great prognosticator of his own reputation. He was indeed snubbed by a multitude of producers and younger filmmakers (One famous producer-director, who praised Welles to the skies after he died and even bought one of the sleds used as "Rosebud" in "Citizen Kane", refused to help lend any help to the man who inspired him to make his own version of a film based on a famous radio play, according to a book called "Citizen Welles" by Frank Brady.
According to Brady, "The young multi-millionaire even left him to pay the tab at the restaurant they dined in!"
But it might be wrong to blame Mr. Steven Spielberg too much or that--much lesser Hollywood producers did pretty much the same thing. That's why the man who made the greatest film of the 20th Century couldn't direct a film in America after "Touch of Evil" was finished in 1958.
In my first part of this blog, I wrote that I considered Orson Welles, arguably the greatest artist-performer Ameirca produced in the mid-20 Century, was a one man double-act. The American Da Vinci and The Old Fat Man.
The first Welles was the man who was revered as a maverick film director and showman, a tireless entertainer who wrote his own screenplays and television scripts, worked on his own films whenever he made enough money to get a crew together in some location (usually in Europe or Morocco) and financed his work mainly by appearing in commercials and in cameo roles in other director's work.
Then there was the other part of the act: Orson Welles the celebrity Old Fat Man, a sort of sideshow Sir John Falstaff, ironically one of his greatest roles from the movie "Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight" (1965): the man who had to sell everything from frozen peas to photocopiers to cheap domestic wine to make ends meet. He was also the rotund man who did magic tricks on talk shows and seemed to be a walking relic; he was also the butt of jokes by lesser talents like those great American chat show hacks Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder of NBC. It is the second public Welles, I would argue, that was a strange disservice to a man who should have been given more honor in his own land.
Here's Welles hawking wine in what became his most famous endorsement. It would be good to say this work--which he undertook in part to keep his name before the public--earned him a plum job directing a major feature film or at least a part in a film worthy of his stature. But it was not to be.
The second clip is a CBC interview. Although the interviewer is too critical to suit my taste, he does illicit from Welles a frank assessment of his career as he was reaching his older years. What the older man says about his critics is in the main true: he was a prophet without honor in his own country and often in England as well.
The third clip is where "they'll love me when I'm dead" comes true, as he predicted. In 1995, Universal spent a lot of money to restore Welles film noir classic, "Touch of Evil", to the original way he intended it to open, as well as restoring many of his editorial suggestions he made after the film was taken away from him by the original studio bosses.
The clip is a stunning three-minute one-take masterpiece!
It actually made money on its re-release, the first Welles movie to get a decent release in America in forty years. But why couldn't they have done it in 1975 or 1980?
I thought I'd celebrate Ms. Elizabeth Taylor's apparently successful recent heart surgery by showing a clip from my favorite of the several films she made with her most famous past husband, Richard Burton.
This clip from the 1967 film (directed by Franco Zefferelli) features part of one of the most famous and funniest scenes (Act II, Scene I) of Shakespeare's play, written in 1594.
Katharina is an ill-tempered woman but the conceited nobleman, Petruchio, takes on the challenge of taming and marrying her. After a bad start, the suitor with his work cut out for him redoubles his efforts and uses some reverse psychology to win her heart. If you watch this scene carefully, you'll notice she at least starts to entertain the idea that he's a match for her.
I think this is one of Shakespeare's great "battle of the sexes" plays, right up with Beatrice and Benedict's verbal sparring from the comedy "Much Ado About Noting" and the heavy emoting and power-playing of Anthony and Cleopatra written about a decade after this work.
The film is sumptuous to look at, and has a great supporting cast, including Michael York as a young swain, Michael Horden as a befuddled father, and Victor Spinetti doing a fine comic turn as a harassed music tutor. However, if you want a more faithful adaptation of the play, I'd recommend looking for a DVD copy of the 1980 BBC version of the play with John Cleese and Sarah Badel, directed by Jonathan Miller.
