I work with someone from Guinea, a country that has just been taken over by its military. The NYT referred to the new government as a "junta" and Alpha - that's just his cool nickname as, like me, he doesn't want to deal with people mispronouncing his real name all the time - asked me, just last week, what a junta is. I realized that everything I know about juntas - militarized governments - I know from "Z".
"Z" was one of the "must-see" movies of the 60's: you had to see it to be "educated". Otherwise you were ignorant. Even though the movie is about Greece, we all saw it the same way, as a cautionary tale: "it could happen here."
Like "Battle of Algiers", "Z" owed quite a bit to Italian Neo-Realism and it had a sense of immediacy about it because (I think) the Greek junta was still in power.
Costa-Gavras became one of the symbols of 60's High Seriousness, which unfairly pigeon-holed him, but he's a living link to those too-too serious artists of the 50's and 60's that Fellini made fun of in "8-1/2". The fact that Americans never saw any other movies by him probably says more about our movie distribution system than it does about Costa-Gavras as a film maker.
My bet is that he's now a very interesting speaker, funny and relaxed, and worth the trip.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Inglourious Basterds vs. Rudolf Arnheim
Spoil the ending of a summer movie in October? Sounds OK to me.
A little ironic, isn't it? That the ending of IB is the worst part of the movie precisely because it breaks with movie convention, yet the director and distributor count on the conventions of the media machine, the TV and print reviewers, not to "spoil" the movie by talking about the ending. Well, now that the big money has been made, let's talk:
American movie conventions are very simple and they must be understandable to a 12-year old boy. (Comic book conventions cover much of the same storytelling ground, although they seem to be more complex. I'm not qualified to cover them, but here's a relevant question: "Why couldn't Superman kill Hitler?")
From Buster Keaton's "The General" (1924) through Victor Fleming's "Gone with the Wind" (1939) to Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) the convention remains the same: your fictional characters can do whatever they want, except change the course of history.
That's it: it's basically the "War and Peace" model, wherein the fictional characters always seem to be at the right place at the right time. This is the model that Woody Allen lampooned in "Zelig" (1983).
Tarantino is the only writer credited with the script for IB, so I cannot even lay the blame elsewhere. The set up is one big red herring: you've got two simultaneous plots to kill Hitler at about the same time in the same place. The movie convention would dictate that they cancel each other out in a way that could be, in turns, suspenseful, frustrating, comical, but in the end, satisfying. But what did we get? This reverse-holocaust thing that was neither suspenseful nor satisfying. As someone else said in a different context: "overwrought and under thought."
Hitchcock would go over scripts with his writer day after day after day, just to eliminate silly stuff (the leader of the Third Reich is in the house and a black man just wanders around backstage, not a soldier in sight, until he's ready to burn the place down) and make some pretty far-fetched events seem plausible.
In film school they made us read Rudolf Arnheim's "Film as Art" which was very, very old-fashioned, but which had a solid basic premise: it's the limitations of a medium which make it art. (For him, the opposite of art would not be reality, it would be communication: think film vs TV). I cannot make the full Arnheim case here, but I can say that the movie convention to stay within historical bounds makes "The Dirty Dozen" a great movie and IB an unsatisfying 2-1/2 hour mess with a bunch of good scenes.
American movie conventions are very simple and they must be understandable to a 12-year old boy. (Comic book conventions cover much of the same storytelling ground, although they seem to be more complex. I'm not qualified to cover them, but here's a relevant question: "Why couldn't Superman kill Hitler?")
From Buster Keaton's "The General" (1924) through Victor Fleming's "Gone with the Wind" (1939) to Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) the convention remains the same: your fictional characters can do whatever they want, except change the course of history.
That's it: it's basically the "War and Peace" model, wherein the fictional characters always seem to be at the right place at the right time. This is the model that Woody Allen lampooned in "Zelig" (1983).
Tarantino is the only writer credited with the script for IB, so I cannot even lay the blame elsewhere. The set up is one big red herring: you've got two simultaneous plots to kill Hitler at about the same time in the same place. The movie convention would dictate that they cancel each other out in a way that could be, in turns, suspenseful, frustrating, comical, but in the end, satisfying. But what did we get? This reverse-holocaust thing that was neither suspenseful nor satisfying. As someone else said in a different context: "overwrought and under thought."
Hitchcock would go over scripts with his writer day after day after day, just to eliminate silly stuff (the leader of the Third Reich is in the house and a black man just wanders around backstage, not a soldier in sight, until he's ready to burn the place down) and make some pretty far-fetched events seem plausible.
In film school they made us read Rudolf Arnheim's "Film as Art" which was very, very old-fashioned, but which had a solid basic premise: it's the limitations of a medium which make it art. (For him, the opposite of art would not be reality, it would be communication: think film vs TV). I cannot make the full Arnheim case here, but I can say that the movie convention to stay within historical bounds makes "The Dirty Dozen" a great movie and IB an unsatisfying 2-1/2 hour mess with a bunch of good scenes.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Back to Touch of Evil
1958 was a great year to work in Hollywood. I remember reading an interview with Orson Welles about his directing style: he said that the abilities of the crew allowed him to make "Touch of Evil". That the highly skilled camera operators allowed him to make those camera movements and that, after 1960, as the studios declined, he had to change his style to suit the decreased resources and talents available to him.
Having seen "Touch of Evil" again last night I can only describe this as an "expressive" style: that the camera not only moves to track and frame, but to "express" a feeling or idea. Certainly there's been a lot of head scratching about the point of some of these movements (the camera dollies upward as it's pointed at an almost motionless scene: the motel in the desert, with maybe a little sand swirling around behind it). It adds a "kinetic" element that adds a sense of imbalance and foreboding. It occured to me that this is the kind of movie that Martin Scorcese is always trying to make.
And I never noticed all that music before: the "teenager music" used to terrorize Janet Leigh in the motel, the "pianola" music from Marlene Dietrich's saloon, and the carefully changing music of the first shot: I think this is an element of the "restored" version of the movie, so perhaps that's why I never noticed it: as the camera moves along the street, the music changes every time we pass the front of a different bar. It's like we're stuck in Pottersville in "It's a Wonderful Life."
Having seen "Touch of Evil" again last night I can only describe this as an "expressive" style: that the camera not only moves to track and frame, but to "express" a feeling or idea. Certainly there's been a lot of head scratching about the point of some of these movements (the camera dollies upward as it's pointed at an almost motionless scene: the motel in the desert, with maybe a little sand swirling around behind it). It adds a "kinetic" element that adds a sense of imbalance and foreboding. It occured to me that this is the kind of movie that Martin Scorcese is always trying to make.
And I never noticed all that music before: the "teenager music" used to terrorize Janet Leigh in the motel, the "pianola" music from Marlene Dietrich's saloon, and the carefully changing music of the first shot: I think this is an element of the "restored" version of the movie, so perhaps that's why I never noticed it: as the camera moves along the street, the music changes every time we pass the front of a different bar. It's like we're stuck in Pottersville in "It's a Wonderful Life."
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Eternal Sunshine and back to the Auteur Theory
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - I'm a sucker for a movie with a good premise and so, apparently, is the director of this pretentious movie, a Frenchman named Michel Gondry. He also directed "Be Kind, Rewind", another movie with a really good premise that I wanted to see. Now I'm not so sure.
Here's the fun local angle: Jim Carrey lives in Rockville Centre and takes the train into Penn to go to work (we never find out what he does for a living). One day he decides to skip work and take the train to Montauk, so he runs around and barely catches the train in the other direction. We are forced to watch this action twice in the movie: so there was plenty of time for me to realize that he wasn't in Rockville Centre train station at all, but in Ronkonkoma. I guess you take your fun where you can get it...
The screenplay is by the same fellow who wrote "Adaptation" which Mike liked a lot and said I should see - and it's on the queue - and the screenplay is definately better than the movie. For instance, the Jim Carrey character keeps a journal, complete with cartoon drawings, but, for a movie supposedly about the interior life of it's main character, the director just doesn't know what to do with his character's journal writing which, you'd think, expresses his innermost thoughts.
And here's something else: he meets Kate Winslet out there in Montauk, and she's beautiful, kooky and has blue hair and she keeps pursuing him like he's the last man on earth, despite the fact that he says and does absolutely nothing interesting at all. Now, this is a screwball set-up that the script provides, but this 46-year-old director is tone-deaf: he just doesn't know what to do with it. Let me get into a little film history here:
"Screwball comedy" has come to mean any crazy, zany, madcap movie, but that's imprecise. A "screwball" is a scriptwriter's term for a woman who chases a man for no apparent reason. Two really good examples are "Bringing Up Baby" (1938 - Katherine Hepburn pursues Cary Grant) and "Ball of Fire" (1941 - Barbara Stanwyck pursues Gary Cooper). And they're both directed by Howard Hawks, a guy who, if he's known at all, is remembered for directing Westerns. The point is, Hawks was a director who could take a formula, a convention, and turn it into a great movie, time after time.
Which brings me back to the Auteur Theory, because after all this time, I can't think of a better predictor of whether a movie is going to be good or bad than who directed it.
PS - The exception to the rule is Victor Fleming. Mary was lucky enough to take a film making class with Ken Jacobs, one of the best comic directors who ever lived (there, I said it). Without mentioning the Auteur Theory at all, he pronounced during one class that "Gone with the Wind" was the worst Hollywood film ever made and that"The Wizard of Oz" was the best Hollywood film ever made, without saying (and without any students noticing) that they were both directed in 1939 by the same man, Victor Fleming.
Here's the fun local angle: Jim Carrey lives in Rockville Centre and takes the train into Penn to go to work (we never find out what he does for a living). One day he decides to skip work and take the train to Montauk, so he runs around and barely catches the train in the other direction. We are forced to watch this action twice in the movie: so there was plenty of time for me to realize that he wasn't in Rockville Centre train station at all, but in Ronkonkoma. I guess you take your fun where you can get it...
The screenplay is by the same fellow who wrote "Adaptation" which Mike liked a lot and said I should see - and it's on the queue - and the screenplay is definately better than the movie. For instance, the Jim Carrey character keeps a journal, complete with cartoon drawings, but, for a movie supposedly about the interior life of it's main character, the director just doesn't know what to do with his character's journal writing which, you'd think, expresses his innermost thoughts.
And here's something else: he meets Kate Winslet out there in Montauk, and she's beautiful, kooky and has blue hair and she keeps pursuing him like he's the last man on earth, despite the fact that he says and does absolutely nothing interesting at all. Now, this is a screwball set-up that the script provides, but this 46-year-old director is tone-deaf: he just doesn't know what to do with it. Let me get into a little film history here:
"Screwball comedy" has come to mean any crazy, zany, madcap movie, but that's imprecise. A "screwball" is a scriptwriter's term for a woman who chases a man for no apparent reason. Two really good examples are "Bringing Up Baby" (1938 - Katherine Hepburn pursues Cary Grant) and "Ball of Fire" (1941 - Barbara Stanwyck pursues Gary Cooper). And they're both directed by Howard Hawks, a guy who, if he's known at all, is remembered for directing Westerns. The point is, Hawks was a director who could take a formula, a convention, and turn it into a great movie, time after time.
Which brings me back to the Auteur Theory, because after all this time, I can't think of a better predictor of whether a movie is going to be good or bad than who directed it.
PS - The exception to the rule is Victor Fleming. Mary was lucky enough to take a film making class with Ken Jacobs, one of the best comic directors who ever lived (there, I said it). Without mentioning the Auteur Theory at all, he pronounced during one class that "Gone with the Wind" was the worst Hollywood film ever made and that"The Wizard of Oz" was the best Hollywood film ever made, without saying (and without any students noticing) that they were both directed in 1939 by the same man, Victor Fleming.
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