Over at Huffington Post, a member calling himself Squeezed wrote the following about the rush of GOPers like Paul Ryan to embrace Randism as the answer to our economic woes: “These conservatives need to get off their Ayn Rand bandwagon. There were no children in Rand’s books. No elderly, no disabled, no unemployed, no poor and no veterans. In Rand’s world, there were no recessions, no wars, no disease, no ignorance, and no poverty. In other words, Rand was a victim of her own fevered imagination.” Viewing Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, the first thing the audience notices is how the movie makers include the unemployed and the homeless in the opening minutes, as if they too might have read Squeezed’s concise slam and decided to defuse the potential criticism. For the record, the movie was already nearing the end of its theatrical run when the comments appeared but certainly the makers perceived the novelist’s lack of acknowledging capitalism’s collateral damage when it moves into downer mode. In the books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Rand pits the super-charged defenders of self and creators against the greedy parasites that are big government and corporate conformity. The joke of Atlas Shrugged is that all the conspiracies against individualism Rand rages about become a single conspiracy to form her one big idea—that John Galt plots to stop the machinery of world commerce to force a return to the use of “man’s mind” to pooh-pooh social morality (culprits like religion, regulations and welfare). Galt’s nearly 56 page rant is Rand attempting to refine her philosophy of self-serving as an anti-Communism/anti-God manifesto; it’s the loftiest extension imaginable of Howard Roark’s defense but much more rigged in that Rand allows Galt to control the world’s radio waves and pontificate as if he’s the pope exercising infallibility. The climatic propaganda is not in the 2011 movie, of course, and given the dismal box office receipts (less than $5 million), it’s improbable that Galt’s orgasmic grievances as vox populi will be seen in what would be “Part Three.” But as a miniseries it might have. Ten to twenty million was spent to make the first part which is, essentially, a 96 minute trailer. Compare its budget to the $45 million effectively spent to make Showtime’s “The Borgias” and you understand the wrongheadedness of elevating the novel beyond the more efficacious conveyance of television. And, supporting the argument, A.S.: Part 1 looks like letterboxed TV. Lovely to gaze at—Ross Berryman gives the melodrama a friendly, expensive-looking gloss in much the same way he did for “Ugly Betty”—and the musical score by Elia Cmiral is very decent, and Taylor Schilling’s ball-busting Dagny more Sharon Stone than fevered bitch Ayn. The New Zealand-born Grant Bowler glides on his studzie looks as Henry Rearden, though how his physicality settled for Mrs. Rearden, dripping with edge by the homely but always watchable Rebecca Wisocky, is unanswered. (Who could ever forget Wisocky as the scratching drug-addicted, murderous, incestuous mother on an episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”?) Rand’s one of those screed-bent harridans who never openly reconciled her solipsism with real needs; Roark and Galt might have rejected government assistance in their last years but in her own life she depended on Social Security and Medicare. The Randies of current politics would be the first to strip her of them. And now audiences are likely to be stripped of continuity with the very recent announcement that production on Atlas Shrugged Part II will commence in April with a new director and cast. Seems the movie makers didn’t seek contractual commitments from them. But here’s the “man’s mind” intent: squeezing in casting, filming, post prodction and theatrical bookings by October, the Randies hope to sway the November election.
The high critical response to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life has a direct relationship to 2011’s re-infantilization of movies. If Tree isn’t about buffed up comic book heroes or faggish vampires or another outbreak of chickflickitis, then it’s got to be profound “cinema.” And there is something reassuring about Malick taking his sweet time to get Brad Pitt and Sean Penn to do what he wants, even if the audience isn’t too sure what the hell that is. Movies about the connective meanings of our existence are criticized as pretentious and polarizing because they usually are and the extra burden here is that the quasi spiritual encounters are of the Quaaludian kind. Technically the movie seems applaudably Spic & Span—we’d be safe in eating off the plates that are Emmanuel Lubezki’s celluloid images—but as the “cinema” photography advances we’re feeling more and more groggy and occasionally nonplussed when getting caught up in a memory machine, recalling similar pictorial successions in The Bible...in the beginning, 2001, a few Star Treks and any number of Hubble slide shows off the Internet. Reeking with prestige as a journey from the big bang to the discovery of the processes that give us universal linkage, The Tree of Life sheds not the leaves of spiritual, mental and emotional contemplation but those of spectral emanations. Is there anyone in this movie with a pulse?
Piñero weaves, bobs, swerves, bounces as bad movie school technique by director-writer Leon Ichaso to tell the depressing and blessedly brief bio of the Puerto Rican-born poet-playwright who was also a boozing drug addict felon with a bum liver slowly killing him. Without Benjamin Bratt’s Dramamine-loaded balance as the author of Short Eyes, we’d all end up dead from the overdose of the motion sickness formula. And he’s just about great in spite of being physically miscast: of Peruvian-German descent, with a singularity of masculine Teutonic-tinged Hispanic face, he’s anything but the real skinny little runt Miguel from the island—Marc Anthony is a much closer facsimile. We can see not just Bratt’s willingness to get into the seedy street theatre that was Piñero’s life, to which he gives a toughened up dignity, but also an actor’s liberation in always being on. The surprise is that he never tips over. With the horribly conspicuous camera never letting up, Bratt can hardly stop moving; he seems to want to run away from it and so do the rest of us. Ichaso reverses the direction movie lovers want to go in.
Baby Doll, written expressly for director Elia Kazan by Tennessee Williams, is highly touted for its sun-drenched rural naturalism; photographed by Boris Kaufman and with a production design by Richard Sylbert (both would also do The Fugitive Kind), its decrepit physicality is doubtlessly different
from any other Williams-play-into-movie. While mostly a real Mississippi setting, it’s nevertheless profusely theatrical; it’s Williams’ “wanton hilarity” as choreographed subversiveness. With the principal actors hardly staying still, it’s a miracle no one was injured while performing the dances of sexual evasion and seduction in that deteriorating house. But coming out of it unscathed as well as the movie’s one astonishment is Carroll Baker. Back in 1956 that huge billboard with her sprawled out on a crib and
sucking her thumb that so riled up the moralists (who initially never saw the picture) exemplified a stag movie sleaziness, and though audiences understood it was intended as adult comedy, they were expecting it to be “dirty.” How disappointed they must have been: Baker’s calculated intrigues are unexpectedly restrained and as the camera closes in on her face, as she’s sitting with Eli Wallach on a swing in dangerous disrepair, she reaches almost breathtaking nuances of quick thinking in the midst of probable
panty wetting. More than fifty five years after the movie opened, hers is still a wonder of a performance. Karl Malden as Baby Doll’s sex-starved husband is another of his long line of agitated repulsives and Wallach’s greasy wop uses his hand in what may be the tingliest neck petting ever on the American screen. Kazan claimed to have been dissatisfied with the ending, and some critics write that Williams didn’t supply one. Incorrect—Williams had Baby Doll fall into the wop’s arms. But we’re talking the 50s and
other cuts were forced on Kazan before the movie could open.
Rarely ever got into Doris Day. She was pleasant enough most of the time, though at some point she always turned into an automat. In her comedies and musicals, she was the virginal Jane Lynch you cracked jokes about. It’s of course true that she was miscast as
Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me and when she sang “Ten Cents a Dance,” you weren’t sure for whom she was so mesomorphically shimming in her flashy dress. But the asexual overtones were compelling, like an Amazon on an urbanizing drip. In the popular Pillow Talk, she and Rock Hudson had a good time in what looked to be a party for two but don’t we all wish they hadn’t made those two follow ups? The only time I’ve really countenanced her is in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, a comedy based on Jean Kerr’s best seller about the escapades associated with being married to the famous theatre critic Walter Kerr. With names changed and the idiocy rather mild, it’s an unnecessary family picture that doesn’t cloy too much because the critic David Niven and wife Doris have kids as pranksters who get laughs in the background. It’s Doris’s nonchalant responses to the kids that surprise; she’s not frantic,
she’s nearly natural in ignoring the fact that one of the brats is locked up in a cage or sitting on a barred up window sill of the cramped high rise apartment dropping water bombs. If not a likely choice to be a Niven costar, she matches up with him far better than she does with stiffmeister Cary Grant. The dilemma of critics interacting with the stars they review is given minimal wit, similar to Bob Hope in Critic’s Choice, the juicier possibilities sacrificed for a broader audience. In her last
movie role, Spring Byington lobs off a few good ones and the zingiest is aimed at derrière diva Janis Paige. Customary for Hollywood back then to give Doris a few songs to sing and the two full numbers provided are bummers. With Doris’s clout, couldn’t she have put her foot down and refuse to sing those few bars of “Whatever Will Be”?
Made in 1959, filmed in black and white CinemaScope, Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion wants to disturb us about the infamous 1920s Leopold and Loeb “thrill kill” case
and its societal implications but can’t quite get at the snob aestheticism enshrouding all the sensations. A serious Hollywood movie suggesting that a socially elite super-smart twosome with alleged homosexual tendencies can proclaim the license to terminate someone’s life on the basis of class wouldn’t have easily passed many local censor boards, so for every inference of degeneracy there’s Godless education to blame—the handy Nietzsche and his super man philosophy—or, equally reliable standbies, an over-protecting
mother or a remote father or difficulties with relationships with the opposite sex. And the justly famous two-day defense of the killers by Clarence Darrow has been reduced to about twelve minutes of highlights that often add incoherency to an otherwise effectual strategy. According to Barbara Leaming in her bio Orson Welles, Fleischer decided not to film the Darrow speech in sequence or single takes, choosing instead to jump from one part for this camera angle to another part out of chronology
for that angle and so forth. With Welles available for ten days of shooting, the decision was based on believing the camera setups and cutting process would be easier. The method doesn’t work; Welles has almost no lawyer momentum, his hefty legal deity is a lackluster version of himself, a tiredness in the dispersed defense. There are alarm bell moments of the psychosexual—Bradford Dillman’s Loeb as master hovering over Dean Stockwell’s slavish Leopold who fades into a dissolve, and Stockwell’s
muddled “murder and rape” utterance to Diane Varsi—and there’s one very scary view as photographer William C. Mellor scans the impaneled jury Welles assumes has already booked seats at the hangings. Only a few established facts are missing—for one, the hydrochloric acid poured on the victim to make identification difficult—and, as with the real murder and trial, we don’t (and still don’t) know who actually did the physical kill with a chisel. With yet another nose job and in bad makeup Welles manages to grab his
moments at the rigged news conference and in his wry punch at Dean Stockwell’s Leopold about the dooming pair of glasses. Dillman has some jaunty daringness in the early part and at times Charlton Heston seems to emerge from him as if an unsolicited spirit. Stockwell has always known how to play scenes to the max and trump other actors in them, as he does here, but when the character goes wobbly of intent, so does he. The obvious kicker is that for all the months-long planning Loeb and Leopold engaged
to commit the perfect “thrill of the kill” crime, the transgression itself was a bungle by amateurs extraordinaire. Darrow’s marathon oratory, with the strange inclusion of the word “love” as a pardon from the death penalty when the killers are clearly absent of any associated emotion, had marginal impact on the judge, who spared the boys to life imprisonment because they were under the then-legal age of 21 at the time of the crime. (Leopold was 19 and Loeb 18.) Loeb died in prison after an inmate slashed
him roughly fifty times with a razor blade; Leopold was released after 33 years and moved to and married a widow in Puerto Rico. The causation of the horrific by inexplicable compulsiveness is the murky terrain of psychology but, according to Leopold, it’s also the exclusive property right of the criminal and worthy of legal action. He tried to stop the making of Compulsion as an invasion of privacy, as defamation, as an attempt
to make money from his life story. Amoral snoots never get it.
Ridley Scott’s “director’s cut” of Kingdom of Heaven is such a vast improvement over the original theatrical botch that in just about every way it’s a new movie.
Not a great one but indisputably a great roadshow and that may matter more to the intended audience. Just as Gladiator plagiarizes The Fall of the Roman Empire, Kingdom steals from El Cid and though it would have been a badge of decency for Scott to acknowledge the lifts, lovers of Sam Bronston’s epics recognize the covert tributes. There are enough roadshow highs—grandeur, music, romance, villainy, action, a deeply moving finale—in Gladiator to forgive its atrocious editing and crappy CGI. In Kingdom, changing
the Spanish locales of El Cid to Jerusalem and the Crusades, it’s of course still Christians vs. Muslims and still a companion story about a piece of ass rivals fight over. The appreciated difference is that religious zealotry is supplanted by agnosticism. It’s a safety net for us, a welcomed relief we aren’t going to be propagandized—the reluctant knight (Orlando Bloom) fights to save Jerusalem as an open city for all faiths while his equally worthy opponent Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) fights to
take back the city as punishment after a band of Christian infidels instigated a bloodbath to break the uneasy peace between the faiths. The ultimate battle’s ferocity becomes mutual admiration made honorable after the two adversaries survey the obscene carnage. And why the movie is despised by mostly white Christian bigots—Scott and first-time screenwriter William Monahan refuse to take sides. (Though they aren’t remiss in giving us characters who, via Monohan’s prescient dialogue, comment
about the forever folly of whose God is better.) But foremost, Kingdom of Heaven is both great watching—the screen fills with imagery by John Mathieson that satisfies hunger for spectacle and its beauty with becalming blue and tan hues—and extraordinary listening, with Harry Gregson-Williams’ eclectic score infusing the atmosphere with original composition and borrowings from Bach, Luis Delgado, Raimon de Miraval, Jerry Goldsmith,
the blends of which spark remembrances of celestial Roman Catholic nunnery chorals and far away moody Arabic incantations without the xenophobia. The scenic warfare is intelligible, too, something not fully defendable in Stone’s otherwise involving Alexander. When Saladin’s first onslaught begins, the fireballs slam and explode in the night as deadly fireworks yet Jerusalem holds; when his multistory
ramps then move to the city’s walls, they’re like Lucas’s Imperial Walkers, until the knight unleashes his counter punch and the rolling stacks are neutralized, with Saladin cracking a Mona Lisa expression in deference to his foe’s efficiency. Because Bloom’s Cidish knight can not go into battle without a woman’s love, Scott restores all of the romance Bloom has with Eva Green as an eventual Sophia-like queen that was cut under orders from 20th Century Fox executives. (Those shitheads contended
viewers wouldn't want to watch that stuff, the removal of which makes the execs responsible for the initial release's ambivalence.) Green, the classiest and brainiest of Bond lays, is given a series of long and medium shots and close ups that take viewers back to Loren’s Chimene, and while also calling forth French sisterhood lovelies Isabelle Adjani and Sophie Marceau, she’s a stunner in her own right, an exotic mongrel with Algerian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish blood lines. She supplies the angst Bloom
intentionally lacks, since Scott and Monahan want to keep their movie’s major character stable. With a marvelous monotoned voice only occasionally wavering, Bloom’s lengthy 12th Century hair needs a wash but that doesn’t negate a growing amativeness when, in a loosely fitting white tunic, he swaggers on his way to give Eva a good leveling. Ghassan Massoud is magnificent facial casting as Saladin, balancing the peculiarity of his missing chest. Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons (who sure knows how
to growl a command) and Edward Norton as leprous King Baldwin provide ace support. Almost all epics, including those mentioned here, never quite deliver accurate history. Directors and writers are habitually unable to marry their expensive and often lunatic indulgences with cold facts that are far more worthy—it’s the permanent scourge of the specific medium and what helped doom Bronston. But makers and lovers of roadshows seem intrinsically overtaken by the sheer madness
of spectacular epoch and mega thrilling blast of effects; at the expense of truer biography, they’re into the visceral experience of responding to what we can never experience in our own time. And the simpler the story the better the response: Alexander, for example, is too Gordian-knotted in its non-linear structure to appeal to those who got their jollies from Gladiator and Russell Crowe’s foxy calibration, just as the complicated tribal and geo politics of Lawrence of Arabia don't move general audiences nearly as much as the triumph of good over evil culminating with the chariot race of Ben Hur or the struggle for freedom from oppression in Spartacus. Kingdom of Heaven is somewhere in the middle—gruesome enough to sate blood thirst for decapitations and war hammers slammed into heads, lavish enough for reserved seat addicts to feel the resurrection of Bronston and sufficiently unafraid to remind viewers of the murderous infantilism of religion.
The provocative hook of Limitless is the use of a drug that unleashes our access to the ability of the brain, which scientists claim we exercise maybe ten per cent on average. (If weighed by what’s observed in politicians, it’s
substantially less.) More intriguing is that it’s also a pill permitting recovery of our buried memories and vast storage of data we’d likely never otherwise use, something in real time the pharmaceutical companies are already developing. The movie pill’s additional benefit is that its powers come on at an accelerated pace—within a few minutes after taking it. So if you’re in a situation in which you’re endangered, the pill’s advantages come on fast enough to be able to outsmart or outfight your foes.
Bradley Cooper’s the pill popper who goes on quite the ride and for a while he and the gimmick keep the movie speeding along and it’s rather enjoyable when super rich Robert De Niro shows up and turns dirty by trying to blackmail Brad when his yo yo behavior warns that he’s been taking too much of a good thing. But people on this type of drug don’t want rehab while realizing success, so Brad’s got to figure out solutions to replenish his coveted magic potion and consume it with an acquired
discipline. The rest of the story’s about whether he’ll succeed or crash. Cooper doesn’t have, yet, the face of a male trophy; he’s sometimes ill-favored in profile, with a weak reversed pyramidic chin and glassy eyes that seem detached—they don't make full contact with the people he’s in scenes with. From afar he’s compelling; when the camera moves in, he disappears as a droopy shouldered caricature. Like Javier Bardem he needs good hair real bad. When cut short or given a splash of highlights,
he’s a spread out of Will Arnett for Dummies; when it’s greasy and messy, he’s a repellant Barry Mannilow, suffice for stupid actioners and comedic sloppers about boozing but not enough for convincing romantic lead or drugless intelligent adult. As with Ryan Reynolds, Cooper is limiting himself to the junk of bogus flattery. At this stage, Ryan Gosling is the more justified of the new Three Kings of Hollywood.
The Merchant Ivory movies are banquets of good taste that often don’t taste all that good. We ingest all the stellar acting, directing, high fidelity to original source material and all the lush fixings but we leave undernourished. After The Bostonians, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, Jefferson in Paris and The Golden Bowl, we ask ourselves if we’ve missed the main course. Merchant and Ivory are sometimes too gentlemenly as movie makers; they’re resolute
in being as “literary” as the novels they adapt and in doing so they often miss the elements of drama and surprise in the central themes—that is, the differences in expectations and emotional responses we derive from the word and the kinds we get from a movie. Two examples: the audience doesn’t perceive any punch when Emma finds out she was willed Howards End—it’s like “Oh, really?” as she slides her arm through Anthony’s—and in Remains the audience is robbed way too early of the irony
of the new owner of Darlington Hall. But with E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Merchant and Ivory are really connecting, we can feel this is material they feel through the flush of experience and they know where they’re going with it. They’ve found the heat in Forster in much the same fearless way director Iain Softley found it in James with The Wings of the Dove. (Even if the duo take a lot longer.) The fright for Maurice and his ilk in Edwardian England is that their closeted sexuality might be discovered and what would await them: social ruination, prison, even corporal punishment. In the age of Wilde, blackmail and entrapment are seemingly around every darkened corner. Yet love in the time of “obscene imaginings” is only mildly abated and in the long of painful celibacy there can be ladders to explosive orgasms. When Maurice is at just
about the end of his hold on his own mental well-being, he sees in his bedroom window the object of consummation. What man in his virginal state hasn’t come close to premature ejaculation when he’s in the throes of his first lustful embrace? If in Maurice Ivory gives us a case of claustrophobia with so many confining fussy settings, he never narrows the scope of what’s going on in them—his actors relish the chances to
keep in perpetually ruminative character—and he finally delivers a dream wet with satisfaction.
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) was released in pre-war France in 1939 and met with protests and bans. About an Upstairs/Downstairs flock of empty-headed romancing adulterers who gather for a hunt and surprise masquerade party to relieve their mounting boredom, the Jean Renior-directed classic romp is as
much of a mirror of class privilege today as what was reflected then. Because, let’s face it, we haven’t changed; the class-separated money-hungry amoralists, for the most part, are still getting away with crimes paid for by everyone else. Fresh eyes to this work probably will not be as impressed as many previous viewers and critics were; we’ve had and probably have had it with the movie's “sophisticated” influence in endless refills of upper/lower class dramas—remember The Shooting Party?—and only last season the world went nuts for “Downton Abbey.” What’s very impressive about Renoir’s movie isn’t only the flowing camera or editing but also, maybe primarily, the aphoristic dialogue, both smartly and hurriedly spoken—we really need to be fast absorbers of loaded subtitles. The lead actress Nora Gregor, as Christine, doesn’t
quite emerge as singular a presence as the others in the cast and hardly her fault: for seasoned British and American audiences, she’s a conflation of Sonja Henie, Judith Anderson, Celia Johnson and Pat Nixon (Richard’s wife). The apparent ease with which her Christine jumps from one man to another to corpse and then arrogantly assume protective excuse is lasting barometer. If moralists back then were outraged that rules of retribution weren’t abided by, it’s not known outside of art houses if audiences actually
laughed at the lack of them. The new Criterion Blu-ray edition has a cover inviting titters but don’t be too shocked if our atlas of twittering twats merely shrugs.
Viewed through the eyes of eight year old Bill (Sabastian Rice Edwards), who is director John Boorman’s childhood, the German blitz of England is a comedy of catastrophe entitled Hope and Glory. Homes are bombed and burned and neighbors killed during the night, yet the next morning the kids are playing in the ruins, collecting bomb fragments as souvenirs, forming clubs requiring the utterance of dirty words for entry into, daring the girls to pull their panties down. War is devastating but it’s also fun. The children’s glee isn’t exclusive to them; the teenagers and adults get caught up in the turmoil and moral restraints almost vanish: giddy frankness and sex become the antidotes
to war and death. Though Bill’s our child guide (and adult narrator) who’s more interested in childhood adventure than the war or the woes of adults, the adults keep intruding and augment the social block-party atmosphere. Bill’s mother (Sarah Miles) and his older sister Dawn (Sammi Davis) fight over Dawn’s emerging sluttishness, adding piquancy to the chaos. So does this: When a German plane’s downed and the pilot (played by Boorman’s son Charley) glides down on his parachute and is arrested by the local bobbies,
he spots Dawn and as he marches off he flirts with her. What seems illogical—after all, the Germans are bombing the hell out of England—and yet is so magically right is Dawn’s response. The kids get dandy deadpan lines and reaction shots to the sex and family frays, and we see the loving pains Boorman’s taken to ensure their awareness is never falsely precocious. (In the ruins of bombed houses the kids transcend acting—they’re in a world ruled by innocence.) Miles redeems herself after all those unmentionable
roles in equally unmentionable movies. And what a great whacker! The standout is Davis as irrepressible Dawn—a cross between Amy Carter and Mia Farrow as vamp. Older Americans and Englishmen who wax nostalgia about the last “good war” will savor the movie as memory piece. It’s also evocative for those who don’t have WWII memories but other, more universally shared ones: the kids’ scenes are so encompassing of rite of passage that parts of our own lives flash before us. Boorman’s quite a craftsman: Hope and Glory does loving restoration on all kinds of memories.
Only in delusive puritan America would James Stewart’s best movie (as well as his best performance) in the 50s be the target of wrath from his own father, who tried to stop Anatomy of a Murder from being played in his home town. Even took out an ad condemning it. In Chicago, the first Mayor Richard Daley demanded that the local censor board ban the movie over its “obscenities,” and it did with a lot of hypocritical hoopla from the now-defunct Chicago American newspaper until a federal court very quickly overruled the nonsense. (Those living in Chicago weren't surprised when some years later Daley's Catholic fascist tactics were employed against demonstrators
at the Democratic National Convention, marking the beginning of the end of his rule and the start of Nixon's presidency.) Of course, all the dirty word hysteria boosted the box office, which was a good thing—Anatomy was/still is Otto’s most satisfying movie. The subject (was hothead Ben Gazzara’s murder of the alleged rapist of slutty Lee Remick exonerative?), the “trash talk,” the actors’ characterizations, music
and photography make for a more realistic “snapshot” of who we were than, say, Peyton Place with all of its moral infractions melodramatically played out in bucolic settings. Otto’s Hitlarian style may have been employed but not felt. Maybe it would have if Lana played the Remick part. (She ditched the project in a huff over a lack of glam costumes, similar to the stunt Crawford pulled regarding From
Here to Eternity.) Doubt, however, that Otto would get away with goose stepping over a cast filled with so many seasoned pros. You can’t imagine someone like Eve Arden taking any of his crap. Then again, perhaps the threat of Adolf rising infused Stewart because he’s in splendid form in what is, unfortunately, his last adult role. Anatomy of a Murder gets better with each viewing.
Portrait in Black is another of producer Ross Hunter’s inglorious vanities showcasing the only remaining exploitable asset Lana Turner had left—sleazing her way through histrionic sexcapades.
(The boys of Bad Movies We Love are a bit kinder—winking that she’s been processed like “a four-course Velveeta banquet.”) In her previous Hunter smörgåsbord, Imitation of Life, Lana pretended to be both a virtuous mother to Sandra Dee and an acclaimed theatre star hoping to nab the leading role in a faux Fellini picture. Her fraudulence, the expensive jewels and furs, the patented sticky blond globs and
slutty titlessness were thankfully overshadowed once Susan Kohner started to pass herself off as white, was beaten up by Troy Donahue and then suffered the most extravagantly humiliating sobbing ever by a daughter at her own mother’s funeral. Nothing comparably rank in Portrait but there are some pluses: despite its awfulness—the escalating badness of Anthony Quinn predominates—Lana on occasion looks healthy in a
Claire Trevor sort of way, gets amusingly slammed by her soon-to-air-bubbled-in-the-heart husband Lloyd Nolan who tells her that she needs “a vitamin shot for love deficiency,” fends off Richard Basehart’s advances and fireplace iron assault, drives for the very first time (after getting her driver’s permit) a finned-up chromed-to-the-max Chrysler at night in a downpour on California’s Highway 1 without knowing which button to push to use the windshield wipers and earns a mighty slap for her confederate efforts
by lover Quinn. Portrait is a flimsy redo of The Postman Always Rings Twice, allowing Lana to survive the original crash to duplicate all those sins of imbecility—even to receive two letters that have suspiciously timed arrivals. Hardly a moment when we didn’t fight the gag reflexes of her mother love to Dee in Imitation, but as extra plus here she’s Dee’s stepmother and it’s minor fun watching
Dee size her up. (When she comes into Quinn’s sights as the next victim, we’re not too sure if she should be saved.) The miscasting of Quinn as a husband murderer is too conspicuous; inference rules that his tall greasy darkishness is Johnny Stompanato camouflaged as a doctor smitten by the insanity Lana’s mysterious bewitchment causes in men. If her 1940s ripeness might pardon Garfield’s lunacy, it’s those original oil paintings on the walls of Quinn’s pad that are much more likely the culprit of his homicidal
tendencies. Though the abominations are provided a screen credit for the Martin Lowitz Gallery, the artists are not; the anonymity is the smartest move made in this enjoyably rattlebrained trash.
America, America never received much of an audience back in 1963 because director Elia Kazan didn’t seek one; he kept his vision of his uncle’s immigrant journey to this country very close to himself and in using Stathis Giallelis as his lead that introversion multiplied. Kazan found him sweeping floors in a fellow film director’s
office and liked him immediately. He didn’t speak much English but that he was, as Kazan wrote, “devoted, honest and loyal...all you had to do was look at him and you believed the story; he was too amateurish to contrive.” Pretty much explains the performance. And helps explain Haskell Wexler holding the camera on him as a smoldering blank, like a young thick black-haired Dirk Bogarde or Omar Sharif. (He would’ve been a decent choice for Yuri.) The movie isn’t bad, it just isn’t all that good: as a cornucopia
of scenes stuffed with “atmospheric realism” by Gene Callahan’s Oscar-winning art direction & set decoration and given a b & w vividness by Wexler, we’re carrying quite the load but we’re not sure why. For all of Kazan’s biographic pride, he doesn’t allow us to feel anything for his characters; he’s created an epic without a pulsing heart. There is, however, a very reserved moment when Stathis kisses the hand of matron Katharine Balfour and she responds by having something close to an orgasm—while her
husband’s napping right next to her. Knowing the origins of the rush come via an earlier scene, we're still startled by the calibrated boldness. Balfour isn’t handicapped by the hint of Ruth Warrick and she wears Anna Hill Johnstone’s costumes in a manner quite befitting. (If we wanted to see her act of remuneration as a one-on-one, we're accepting of why it's verboten.) In later years Kazan repeated ad nauseam that America, America was his favorite movie. As evidenced in Elia A Life, with its revisionist emotions and betrayals to those who weren't around to counter the abjections, the choice is more genealogical plume than an artist’s honest reassessment of his work.
Josh Logan wanted Liz to play Nellie in the big screen South Pacific. Eddie Fisher reported in one of his books (and not denied) that Liz wanted Eliza
in My Fair Lady. In How to Be a Movie Star, author William Mann says producer Ernest Lehman briefly considered her
for Hello, Dolly. One of those cut and paste bios about Liz claimed without attribute she was in the running for Mame, until Lucille Ball grabbed the rights—to prevent Angela Lansbury from duplicating her Broadway smash. Whatever else can be said about those musicals, it was decidedly in
Liz’s favor not to have done them. But in the egocentricity governing a movie star with no discernible musical talent, Liz got Desiree in A Little Night Music. The irony is, Desiree as a 50s something stage actress whose career has nose-dived into endless “shoddy tours of Camille” and who’s fucking “other women’s dimwitted husbands” is ideal for her; the role requires a personage who’s been around the world block a few times. Under the disciplined guidance of a movie maker who knew how to stage a musical, who knew how to maximize the limitations of a non-singing
actress—meaning she really wouldn’t have to “sing”—and who’d have insisted she drop ten to twenty pounds, or at least stop guzzling Jack Daniels for a month before shooting commenced, Liz might have pulled it off. She didn't get that kind of director; she got Hal Prince, royalty on Broadway as a full fledged movie incompetent. He came to the project with a moldy vision of an opera buffa, with Sondheim’s discordantly witty lyrics the central conveyance of the narrative. The next bad thing to happen to Liz was
photographer Arthur Ibbetson, whose experience with anything musical was Garland’s I Could Go on Singing and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The star’s and the movie makers’ codes of responsibility converge to fail miserably when the “You Must Meet My Wife” sequence begins with Liz opening her door to Len Cariou. The shock for the audience seeing her this boozed-bloated, so haggard that she looks like she’s been trying to sleep it off, and then to see the stained teeth needing
Crest Strips, the oculi that need extra strength Clear Eyes, and the wrinkle in her chin that can’t be hidden by all the dark shadows circling her face is too much. But there’s more: expanding the palpable fear of no recovery, she’s in some god awful robe de chambre and is left stranded like an idiot in the middle of a badly lit room holding Cariou’s dripping wet suit. A much-needed reprieve arrives when the musical’s only rhythmic splash—“A Weekend in the Country”—lifts us out of the stupor for a while, till
Liz returns to warble the show’s big melancholic hit “Send in the Clowns.” The song doesn’t demand a great voice and no one expects Liz to deliver a Judy Collins showstopper. Nevertheless she’s in trouble as soon as the cues come; mimicking musical gestures and responses as subs for emotions needed to be expressed in the lyrics, her flat little-girl voice nullifies them. Her limits excusable because she isn’t even a poor faker; what’s inexcusable is that once Prince and Sondheim heard the pre-recording they didn’t
change direction and allow her to “speak” the song. (During “You Must Meet My Wife” she speaks without singing, and while horrified by what we’re looking at, she’s not bad responding to Cariou.) Corseted to the max in that red dress, adorned with the La Peregrina Pearl, she almost makes up for all that has come before. Leslie Anne-Down echoes Haley Mills and Susannah York. Diana Rigg troupers like Eleanor Parker’s Countess from The Sound of Music—despite an inability to
put real sting into the ugly “Everyday A Little Death,” she’s the only one who belongs in the rickety story, dishing out bitchy amusement, wearing hats as if they’re new arrivals from the taxidermists.
Never felt good enough to see The Hurt Locker. My personal shortcomings were reinforced when Chicago’s Don Selle, whose reactions to movies are trustworthy, wrote
that after thirty minutes he walked out on it. A few months later Don updated, saying he felt pressured to see the movie again because people said he was missing out on something great and of course it was winning all those prizes. He wrote, “When I’m wrong, I’m dead wrong...THL destroyed me.” His change of mind convinced me to start the penance and sit through it. Well, Don’s initial response is, I think, more genuine. The Hurt Locker is by design a not-so-steady 16mm docudrama—gritty, informative, compelling for a while, performed about as well as you would expect given the narrowly defined script. But if its director had been male instead of Kathryn Bigelow, I doubt the movie world and the critics would have paid so much attention. It’s obvious they’ve given her a pass; they’ve excused her sloppy infractions of military procedures, the most glaring
discrepancy being an EOD expert going rogue. The pump of praise she got reminds us of the same high Oliver Stone got for Platoon—that their movies’ presumed emotional wallops are the stronger experiences of war, that they didn’t have to bother with the inconvenience of facts to support them. We’d all give Bigelow a pass on the implicit questions the movie raises from the start: how the hell did we ever get mired in all that religious insanity and why are we still there? (The first
is a political blame game, the second easier to answer: no draft. If we had one, we’d have exited Iraq and Afghanistan long ago.) Bigelow’s far less subtle message is that the American way of war has become a drug, and the addiction is fed not only by a political-industrial complex but also by a volunteer military force juiced up to view enemies as video kills—until reality explodes. The movie’s title refers to the personal physical damage inflicted within the boundary of explosives but Bigelow
establishes additional significance when we see a warehouse filled with lockers used for the personal affects of deceased soldiers. Enjoyed the brevity of the unobtrusive appearances by Guy Pearce and especially Ralph Fiennes, whose bounty-hunting mission covers the consequential security breach of a lone Humvee stranded out in the desert. At end, viewers wonder if Jeremy Renner’s steely EODer, as he's walking towards the next IED, ever mentally packs his locker. His job is enough to give us the heebie-jeebies;
it’s the illuminative production design and art direction, however, that give us the prejudicial creeps.
Director Darren Aronofsky remarked, “It’s a very hard line, as a filmmaker, to know when is too much. And I’m usually on the wrong side of it.” Black Swan is full testament to losing his bearings on a study of the psychosis of obsession. As a
cultish haven for anorexics, ballet is an ideal art form to project a dark fantasy about a dancer going bonkers in pursuit of perfecting what America’s reigning dean of dance critics Arlene Croce calls “the greatest unstageable ballet ever written.” To achieve this, sly Aronofsky violates the numero uno rule of a ballet master—that the principal ballerina have the emotional well-being to lead the repertory in Swan Lake. Stacking a ton of wacko baggage onto Natalie Portman, manifesting in the
forms of stealing, self-harming, bleeding fingers, beaver munching, webbed feet, wishful vengeance and the sprouting of feathers and wings, we’re watching not a dancer’s rendering of metamorphosis as much as voodoo pyrotechnics. Doesn’t jive with the hide and seek schizophrenia. If Black Swan isn’t in trouble from the start, as an unconscious lift from one of Angela Lansbury’s “Murder, She Wrote” episodes, it’s certainly in
deep doodoo when Portman’s mother Barbara Hershey comes into view. One of the original collagen lip guinea pigs, she now looks like the distaff version of the freak show that is Mickey Rourke in Aronosky's The Wrestler and the longer the (smartly infrequent) chance to stare at her the more we want to upchuck. Still, we think we might know who shares blame for Natalie’s bizarre hallucinatory behavior. The movie can’t disguise what appears to lay people to be mediocre dancing; the swan waves
have some delicacy and grace but a dearth of both in the legs and the perfunctory movements don’t advance the tale—on stage only the costumes, makeup and facial expressions do that—and while Portman’s admittedly no dance pro and irrespective of the months-long training for persuasion's sake she remains persuasively inadequate. (Whiner Sarah Lane needn’t be too eager to divulge her contributions, either.) The adagio is excused as secondary to Portman’s characterization when in point of fact
she doesn’t have a character who expands understanding of what’s going on inside her. Much like Glenn Close’s psycho bitch in Fatal Attraction, the character here seems to contract; just as we think that one or another mini-climax will finally reveal a clue, that maybe even Hershey’s behind that door as delayed justice (which would've been pleasing), a nothingness smacks us down. Portman’s all symptoms
leading every which way; we have to settle for a menstruation horror
out of Carrie as diagnosis that only further alienates us. Unlike Close, looking chicly fried and taking the psychotics seriously enough to seek advice from specialists on how to play them (and got robbed of her efforts by an audience-demanded revenge), Portman lacks the prep or range as actress to carry the dementia. In defense she can’t be expected to internalize burgeoning insanity when the script’s this warped of intellection. Don’t want the tommyrot dumbed down but we need something.
Maybe it’s all in what Portman told gaga George Stephanopoulos on GMA sometime back: Black Swan is “a conversation piece.” Did anyone else notice that in one of the posters inside the movie, Portman resembles Tamara Toumanova, the ballerina in Torn Curtain? Now there's one determined bulging-eyed sickie.
Contrarian Christopher Hitchens seldom disappoints: at Slate.com, he writes a few good words about The King’s Speech before spewing his objections to the script
giving Winston Churchill words he apparently never spoke. (Has to do with whether he kissed the despicable ass of Edward VIII and not Bertie’s, when in all likelihood he kissed both.) Hitch did a second piece going at screenwriter David Seidler for daring to question him and for glossing over or fouling up other facts. Valuable energy wasted for Hitch’s recovery because the intelligent viewers he’s writing to aren’t watching the movie for spot-on accuracy, they’re watching the acting duet that is Colin Firth
as George VI and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel the speech therapist. I’d posit the history on the periphery is too condensed to be bugged by; if there’s a more valid bitch it’s that the highlights interfere with our immense enjoyment and involvement with the future and brief king and his presumed interloping friend. (Lionel wasn’t an intruder but the envious snots despised him as one.) All we really want to do is to get back to Firth and Rush who create genuine exhilaration out of their miniature class warfare. The
genteel grenades lobbed at each other are at first breaches of and demands for proprieties and rules, graduating to weapons of inferiority—inflicting insults for one’s weaknesses, for the other’s lack of social status. When apologies are called for, a rebuff leads to introspective regret and eventual mutual respect. Firth’s evocation of George’s impedimenta—not just in speech but also in the emotional triggers and stress factors—is bona fide art, just as Derek Jacobi’s “I, Claudius” and Glenda Jackson’s “Elizabeth R” are the real thing. These are portrayals as avouchment of life despite the curses. And Firth eclipses both in one regard—he’s heartbreaking, real with audience-empathizing fears from his very first scene to his nearly last, without us
feeling compelled to well up. And if there are drips, add that to Firth’s triumph. One of the blurbs for Rush says he “chows down on...a feast of a role” and while I’d hesitate to use that verb, suggesting less than what he achieves, the banquet he consumes is equal to what he serves. Helena Bonham Carter’s royal “ma’am as in ham” is another of the actress’s sneaky winks at egalitarianism. Director Tom Hooper is no stranger to blue bloods, having guided Helen Mirren to deserving acclaim in “Elizabeth I.”
The squawks from partisans for The Social Network are that Hooper’s Oscar and DGA honors were safe conformist choices, but a movie about the honor and trust in friendship is preferable to one embracing theft, betrayal and greed as Randian values.
Text COPYRIGHT ©2011/2012 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.