Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: sex, lies and videotape

Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood said in a discussion of “War Horse” that films look less and less like Spielberg and more like Soderbergh, implying an attention to realism in cinematography over gorgeous, unnatural lighting and landscapes.

Could Steven Soderbergh and his debut feature “sex, lies and videotape” really revolutionized cinematography in the last 20 years of filmmaking?

Although his film came before the advent of digital, Soderbergh adheres to the same principles in 1989 as he does today. He said in an interview with the A.V. Club (a must read for directors) that if he can help it, he won’t use things like establishing shots that clutter the film’s tight editing and cinematic language. And here in “sex, lies and videotape,” we see hardly any establishing shots, no pretty “money shots,” (the first image is of a gravel road for God’s sake) and if he can tell us about two simultaneous moments with only showing us one, he does.

The film’s opening scene is a great example, in which Ann (Andie MacDowell) speaks to her therapist about how her husband John (Peter Gallagher) is distant from her just as he’s having an affair with her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo).

And throughout the film Soderbergh plays with these dual meanings and conflicts. Ann is a woman of simple pleasures, innocent behavior and self-conscious attitudes, and she’s the polar opposite of her forthright, one-dimensional husband. John is more drawn to Cynthia, who is equally demanding and arrogant, going as far as to be openly vindictive of her sister.

The balancing force, strange as that may seem considering his character, is Graham (James Spader), John’s old college roommate who now seems dark and introverted (I’ll point out that John criticizes his clothing choice as though he were in a funeral, and he’s merely wearing a black shirt and blue jeans, for anyone looking for a way in which this film is horribly dated). His sexual fetish is to videotape women just talking about sex, a blunt metaphor for how something like a perverse confessional can be more deeply intimate than anything sex can accomplish.

The last key then, now that sex and videotape are out of the way in the story, is lying. John never overcomes his one-dimensionality, but by the end he’ll realize that his entire existence has forced him to lie to himself. As for Graham and Ann, the two share their personal problems honestly in a way that seems Earth shattering. The scene in which this occurs has John watching the pair on tape, but we realize that honesty goes both ways in getting at what’s behind and around the camera, which for film buffs like me, is a nerdy, meta statement about what’s outside the frame is as important as what’s inside it.

“sex, lies and videotape” won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1989, beating out titles like “Do the Right Thing,” “A Cry in the Dark” and “Cinema Paradiso,” and James Spader went on to not only win Best Actor but win the right to star in more complex roles than he had previously been given credit for. One could say that his creepy turn in Soderbergh’s film led him to his creepy turn on “The Office,” but that Soderbergh’s character obviously has more depth and is less awful.

Rapid Response: The Odd Couple (1968)

There’s always an issue today with watching movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s that later turned into TV shows. People like my Mom and others have greater memories and penchants for the spin-offs than they do the actual source material, and this is true of “MASH,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and now I learn “The Odd Couple.”

The whole pitch for the TV show “The Odd Couple” was that it was a pairing of two men, one a slob and the other a neat freak. HOW WILL THEY EVER GET ALONG?!? (sitcom hilarity ensues) I’m sure there were some homosexual undertones in there as well.

But the film, which is strikingly faithful to the Neil Simon play of the same name, is really about more than opposites attracting. Simon calls up the problems that can arise in marriage through people who know each other too well and grow to hate each other’s quirks. The simple difference here is that the woman’s role is switched.

And Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau know each other all too well. The slovenly nature of Oscar’s (Matthau) apartment is exactly what makes their weekly poker games fun and Felix’s (Lemmon) oddities are exactly what make him a likeable lug (even if he does wear his seatbelt at a drive-in movie).

This “optimistic sarcasm” between friends feels very natural, and the screenplay, also by Simon, is wonderfully written. Oscar and Felix thrive as friends purely because of Simon’s witty and self-deprecating back and forth.

Points can also be awarded to the film over the show for simply having two comic actors with wonderful chemistry, Lemmon and Matthau. They were a common screen-pairing going well into the ‘90s, and together they made some good and not very good movies.

Lemmon especially is terrific. He’s always been a wonderfully versatile actor, and his dramatic chops give the film an added dimension of darkness in the opening montage in which he tries to kill himself. The film’s first shot shows Lemmon wide, and yet we can easily tell how glum he looks. And then with one line to the hotel clerk, “Do you have anything higher,” we know precisely his intentions. He’s a master, and he follows through his neuroticism with a sheer pluck and confidence in his physical comedy.

“The Odd Couple” just expired on Netflix Instant, which is a shame, but I guess it’s possible some people would prefer to watch the TV show anyways.

Rapid Response: Adam’s Rib

I can’t think of too many courtroom comedies, so “Adam’s Rib” must be pretty special. It features one of the many pairings of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, both of whom are excellent here and have wonderful chemistry with one another.

And such a thing is absolutely necessary for this film to be worth much of anything today. It’s a comedy, but not a screwball or even a rom-com, and it has more amusing moments and character developments rather than big punch lines or sharp, quick dialogue. It is however the little details in George Cukor’s film that turn what could otherwise be a crime procedural into something cute, romantic and funny.

Tracy and Hepburn play two lawyers, Adam and Amanda Barron, both of whom have taken the same case, an attempted murder trial of a woman who shot her cheating husband as he was in the act.

Amanda takes up the cause on her principals of women’s rights and equality, which kind of makes the film dated today with its soapbox pandering and touting of successful women, one of whom can lift Spencer Tracy over her head and do flips.

Thankfully though, Tracy’s character is hardly prejudiced and doesn’t make the issue into more than it is. He also is on wonderful terms with his wife, which is exactly the opposite of how a contemporary rom-com would do this, with characters constantly at each others’ throats to get a laugh and having to redeem their love later.

“Adam’s Rib” also has a wonderful twist in its finale with Tracy proving just how wonderfully likeable of a trickster he can be as an actor. It’s one of those moments that could be a trainwreck if handled any other way than it is, and again something that a modern comedy would jump for in terms of shock value, but here is played safe to hilarious effect.

I’m just starting a kick of comedies after watching “The Odd Couple” a few days ago, which I haven’t written about yet. “The Odd Couple” landed at #17 on the AFI Top 100 Laughs list, and “Adam’s Rib” landed at #22. With that, I’ve now seen 1-23, amongst others, and the next highest I’ve missed is #24, “Born Yesterday.” Ironically enough, it’s also directed by George Cukor, so that should be fun I guess.

Rapid Response: Frenzy

Film critic David Thomson called “The Birds” Alfred Hitchcock’s “last unflawed film.” And because of that infamous criticism, most Hitchcock fans will look no further than it in his career.

In fact, neither did the general public around the time Hitchcock’s 1972 “Frenzy” was released. The director had experimented with political thrillers that alienated audiences and only just unified critics, and “Frenzy” was his return to form in the murder genre.

But Hitchcock was an Old Hollywood staple; a master of his time who struggled to find his footing in a new generation of filmmakers. “Frenzy” was lewd enough to warrant an R-rating, but if the movie was ultimately a lot like something he could’ve made in the ’40s, would you waste your time with it if you had just seen something like, say, “A Clockwork Orange” or “The Godfather?”

The difference is however, “Frenzy” holds up remarkably well. It’s still the filmmaker displaying technical perfection that is unrivaled in any age. It’s gripping, complex, darkly funny and deliciously twisted on a level that matches, if not surpasses, some of his more famous films. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Frenzy”

Rapid Response: Deliverance

 

“Deliverance” is the sort of chilling thriller that would today resonate with action fans, torture porn enthusiasts and even critics and liberals. It’s light on story but heavy on atmospheric tension, and some of its themes of inbred psychopaths using nature to battle invading city slickers would be mighty relevant in today’s film landscape.

Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight were already stars when this movie was released in 1972, and they’re rightfully bad ass in their roles. The image of a very young Reynolds is just awesome: ripped biceps, leather vest with no shirt, dark chest hair and of all things a bow and arrow. He encourages his three friends to canoe down a river set to become a lake, only to be harassed by sadistic, rapist hillbillies.

Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox on the other hand, were not stars. Beatty had his acting debut in ‘Deliverance,” and for him to be raped so gruesomely in such an intensely cinematic moment is a stark debut.

So much of the film is shockingly and carefully paced and photographed by John Boorman. From the opening shots we get a sense of some oddly unsettling natural landscapes. The famous dueling banjos scene sounds peaceful, but the disturbing framing is anything but. The camera loves to frame all four characters in the shot at once, and we get a sense of how this unified party will quickly be at odds with one another. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Deliverance”

Rapid Response: Dracula (1931)

Bela Lugosi, as iconic as he is in the role of Dracula, has not helped this early ’30s film age any better than its horror counterparts.

Tod Browning’s “Dracula” from 1931 is a classic and leaves a much needed legacy of Old Hollywood horror as the basis of the myths and lore we carry about some of popular culture’s most favorite monsters. What’s more, Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula still remains the template image for the way people envision the classic vampire (none of that “Twilight” shit) and Dracula himself, in the same way Boris Karloff still is the model for the Frankenstein monster.

And yet the film is horribly dated and overrated. It’s a much maligned classic that is beyond cheesy and feels long even at 75 minutes.

The opening scene is riddled with a bad sense of spatial continuity and painfully thick foreshadowing. The character Renfield (Dwight Frye) hardly even gives a reason for venturing to Dracula’s decrepit castle before blatantly accepting the fact that its riddled with cobwebs and phantom stagecoach drivers. And Lugosi’s iconic line, “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make,” which still remains chilling, comes so soon in the movie I was tempted to turn it off right then. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Dracula (1931)”

Rapid Response: The Dirty Dozen

Only in a movie with Lee Marvin (and maybe Henry Fonda) could Charles Bronson look like less of a bad ass.

That’s kind of the appeal of “The Dirty Dozen,” a movie with a ridiculously famous cast of already massive and would-be massive stars (Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, John Cassavetes) that was not only a shockingly violent war film but one that defined a generation of war films for years to come.

In many ways, “The Dirty Dozen’s” legacy is more interesting than the movie itself. Mark Harris’s book “Pictures at a Revolution” describes how Robert Aldrich’s film became the biggest box office hit of the year by celebrating a black man killing Germans, by appealing to a counter-culture, anti-establishment movement and by being the first war movie to outwardly call attention to the Vietnam War. Harris writes that the film reached an audience of war fans bored with the genre and craving to see some gritty, tough guy action and teens who disliked the war movies their parents did.

“It would have made a very good, very acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don’t think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture,” Aldrich was quoted in Harris’s book. And in that way, it was one of the many films that year that revolutionized filmmaking.

The problem is, the film remains a clumsy, long action movie that doesn’t really get interesting until the two big battles in the last hour. It spends a lot of time developing at least half of the dozen war criminals assigned to Major Reisman’s (Marvin) command, but the writing doesn’t have the sharp tenacity or wit to make it truly compelling.

Exploitation films and similar, even more polarizing fare like Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” merely two years later would surpass it in the violence department, and New Wave Hollywood directors were not far away from making less than oblique statements about the Vietnam War.

Still, it’s influence is obvious. Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” is intentionally lifted from this film’s concept, not to mention the copycat Enzo Castellari version only years after “Dirty Dozen.”

But what bugged me was how almost hokey the film felt. I think the whole construction montage for instance is time that could easily be trimmed from the film, and the score really Mickey Mouse’s it in these moments as well. More time should’ve been spent highlighting the film’s theme of authority and power dynamics to make this an outwardly counter cultural film. That would’ve made it more timeless as well.

“Dirty Dozen” does aim to have fun, plain and simple, and that’s its appeal. But there are better ways to spend your time.

Rapid Response: Picnic at Hanging Rock

 

I don’t know anything about the Australian New Wave. I assume that if your country did not eventually have a New Wave, perhaps your country’s cinema is not worth discussing (although even that’s not true).

But what I did notice upon seeing “Picnic at Hanging Rock” as part of the IU Cinema’s Australia in the ’70s series was that many of the directors emerging in this period are modern day staples and C-list directors at worst. Nicolas Roeg, Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford and this film’s director Peter Weir are amongst the talents emerging from this period.

Their films carried one theme above all: “beautiful cinematography and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home,” as Roger Ebert describes in his Great Movies piece on “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”

And maybe it’s my lack of familiarity or that I watched “The Tree of Life” recently, but “Picnic at Hanging Rock” struck me as a largely spiritual film. It’s lack of narrative clarity and a stunning sense of still life cinematography make the entire film seem other worldly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Picnic at Hanging Rock”

Rapid Response: Once Upon a Time in America

What’s funny about “Once Upon a Time in America” is that 1984 Robert De Niro made up to look 35 years older doesn’t look all that different from the way Robert De Niro actually looks today only 28 years later.

But what is noticeably different is the fantastically storybook world of early 20th Century America in comparison to the bleak present. Maybe blame Steven Soderbergh, but it’s hard to imagine a fairy tale set in the 2000s. Sergio Leone however takes pleasure out of envisioning a picturesque America as it once was, with orchestral elegance and lilting pan flutes filling the city streets and with lively color and sound paired with every romance and every knife fight.

There’s a scene nearly two-thirds through Leone’s nearly four hour gangster fantasy where Noodles (De Niro) takes the lovely Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) to dinner on the seaside. The dining room is sparkling white, expansive and occupied only by handsome waiters and a full string ensemble. Only in America can you have something so schmaltzy, so over the top and so gaudy and still be touched by the magic of it all. That’s the not so subtle beauty of this great nation.

Much has been made about the film’s length and complexity reaching over 50 years with dozens of characters and intricate plot layers all building to a twist in modern day 1967. It has been reasoned that the last shot in which Noodles is seen smoking opium and is left with a big stupid grin on his face indicates that the entire fairy tale was nothing but a pipe dream, and this wasn’t helped when the movie was butchered in America by 90 minutes into an incomprehensible mess when it was theatrically released in 1984.

But I think it hardly matters. In its essence, “Once Upon a Time in America” is a simple film between two friends about nostalgia and loss. The film begins at the end of Prohibition with a few scenes of ruthless violence because it signals the end of a period of true decadence.

The rest of the film recalls that period through flashback in a surprisingly touching coming of age story of a few gangster hoods in New York. Between the antics of trying to get laid by the village whore Peggy and pulling their first jobs, the film has a goofy innocence, and every moment is treated as an elegiac fantasy through the shimmering bright cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s swimmingly saccharine score that recalls Old Hollywood. Not even “The Godfather” is this romanticized.

And when we flash forward to the ’60s, the world is not nearly as pretty, and the scene is underscored twice by what other than The Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Noodles has lost the past and been wandering in the future for over 35 years, and Max, as we will learn, has been desperately clinging to that lost decadence from the days after Prohibition.

There’s certainly a lot more to be analyzed here, and that’s why this is a somewhat shorter and faster response to such a long, epic film. I’m curious for instance to understand why each of Noodles’s sexual encounters breaks the film’s element of fantasy, with him taking advantage of Peggy and raping Carol and Deborah. I also didn’t really get why Joe Pesci wasn’t in the movie more. I was sure that little kid that got shot early on would grow up to be him.

But if there’s a real answer to the film’s complex riddle, I think the truth is nothing more than a beautiful and unreal time has passed us by, never to return, but even if it takes smoking opium, there is still some giddy joy of that lost time frozen forever in our memory.

Rapid Response: The Trouble With Harry

“The Trouble With Harry” has to be the damnedest film Alfred Hitchcock ever made. Although all of his films have witty elements in their carefully constructed and orchestrated screenplays, this is one of his few movies that is a straight comedy.

Of course it is not without Hitchcockian elements, but it is at times a maddening film with the plot of a screwball and the dry delivery of an Ealing comedy.

As the tagline goes, the trouble with Harry is that he’s dead. A little boy (Jerry Mathers, before he was in “Leave it to Beaver.” Did the Beaver ever trade a dead rabbit for a frog and two blueberry muffins?) stumbles across a dead body in the lovely and idyllic Vermont forest. It’s poor Harry Wolp, and Capt. Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) believes he shot him while hunting for rabbits. He’s about to move the body, but person after person walks by before the Captain can hide it, including the boy with his mother, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine, in her debut film role). Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Trouble With Harry”