The Handsome Camel

In 1976, John Cassavetes had his first real commercial failure with one of his independent pictures. While his early, rougher-hewn independent features like Shadows and Faces had drawn eager, curious crowds among the cognescenti, and 1974's A Woman Under the Influence had attracted Oscar nominations for Cassavetes (Best Director) and Gena Rowlands, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie struggled with harsh reviews and probably also the overwhelming dominance, in the '70s, of The Godfather as the "model" gangster film. (To me, writing 30-odd years later, The Godfather now seems unwatchably operatic, while Cassavetes' film retains its firm grip on the textures of real life and the miseries of real crime.) Here's Variety's unsurprising but needlessly snide lead from its 1976 review:

True to form, John Cassavetes challenges a Hollywood cliche: that technology is so advanced even the worst films usually look good. With ease, he proves that an awful film can look even worse.

And here's Vincent Canby's equally ludicrous attack on Chinese Bookie's climactic set-piece:

My suspicion is that either the film has been sloppily edited or that the director has no firm idea on how to film the sort of sequences in which one actor with a gun stalks another actor with a gun in a dark garage. In the trade this is known as an action sequence and it quickly becomes rather too existential if you can't figure out who is stalking whom, or why.

That last sentence, whose fundamental premise has long since been overturned even in Hollywood (see, for example, the Sopranos episode "Pine Barrens," in which Paulie and Christopher are stalked by their own supposed victim), is I think typical of what Philip Lopate means when he says, in his very fine appraisal of the film included with the Criterion DVD set,

Today the film seems a model of narrative clarity and lucidity: either our eyes have caught up to Cassavetes, or the reigning aesthetic has evolved steadily in the direction of his personal cinematic style. Now we are more accustomed to hanging out and listening in on the comic banality of low-life small talk; to a semi-documentary, handheld camera, ambient-sound approach; to morally divided or not entirely sympathetic characters, dollops of "dead time," and subversions of traditional genre expectations.

In other words, once you've sat through endless Tarantino monologues about pot and burger joints and old cop shows, suddenly Cassavetes' supposed "ramblings" seem incredibly urgent and to-the-point.

Narratively and visually, too, we've become accustomed, at least in the "film community" but also among the general public, to different things. Today, nine out of ten film students would recognize the brilliant economy of a shot like the one that opens this film. A cab turns a corner through traffic and abruptly pulls up onto the sidewalk outside a cafe; Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) gets out, walks through the patio area, sits down at a table, has a conversation, and sits talking to someone off-camera. Finally the off-camera guy gets up and walks away -- we still haven't seen his face at this point, but his distinctive checked shirt helps us track him through the scene that follows. All of this is a single shot. More happens in the cafe, but the scene ends with a reversal of the opening camera move: Vitelli stands up from the table and walks back out to his cab, and we move with him (practically into the backseat) in an incredibly slick follow-focus dolly-move.

So what does Variety object to in this? Nothing that would strike today's viewers as odd, but it should be remembered that in 1976 the mainstream was still getting comfortable with blown-out skies, lens flare, murky interiors that drape blackly around their characters, and harsh overhead fluorescents in their movies. Then again, maybe viewers were fine with it, and it's only the industry that had to catch up.

There are legitimate criticisms of the film. The story, of a small-time strip-club operator in L.A. who gets in over his head to the mob and has to assassinate a Chinese gangster to pay down the debt, at times does get lost in Cassavetes' fecund inventiveness when it comes to character. Early in the film we spend several minutes discussing New York neighborhoods with a cabbie (in a film not even set in New York!), and later on there's a long sequence about auditioning a new girl that is fascinating but hardly necessary. Moreover, certain elements are too obvious (do we really need to hear his bookie muttering, "Stupid son of a bitch, hasn't learned yet..." about Cosmo in the opening scene?) or not obvious enough (I couldn't figure out, the first time several times I watched the film, what connection the line "I want to reduce the debt, but not pay it off" had to do with the scene that followed it). And the Variety article notes, fairly, that Cosmo's bullet wound seems to increase or lessen in severity depending on dramatic need. (On the other hand, nobody seems to object when John McClane runs around on shredded feet for two-thirds of Die Hard, and I'm almost inclined to see this as a little parody on Cassavetes' part of similar contrivances in Hollywood action pictures.)

It takes a peculiar kind of audience to be interested in both strands of this story -- the dumpy, pathetic theatre family of the the strip club, and Cosmo's personal night odyssey as he first carries out the assassination and then deals with the aftermath. The nightclub side of the story is sad, heart-breaking. Cosmo arranges all the numbers -- and what dreary, painful numbers they are! His singer and MC, "Mr. Sophistication" (Meade Roberts), is a balding sad sack with sweat-streaked make-up, and while his girls are large-breasted and without question beautiful (Cassavetes used real strippers and models in the roles), there's something odd about them, too: one girl has a squeaky voice, while another is only 5'2", which she notes is a couple of inches "under the limit" for dancers at other clubs. This theatre is a last stop for all kinds of failures, and their shows, which weirdly blend titillation with desperate stabs at art, are almost certainly Cassavetes' funhouse mirror view of his own not-quite-good-enough but completely personal showmanship. If you can watch the "Paris" show and not want to turn off your DVD player, you're a better man than I. (The hipster look of the crowd, too, suggests that the patrons come here more for irony and amusement than sexual excitement.) But Cosmo's passionate devotion to the nightclub family drives the whole film, in the way that a man's love for his nuclear family would drive the action in a more conventional man-against-the-mob thriller. He's always protecting them (at one point he sends the doorman inside when the mobsters show up on the sidewalk in front of the club), and it's unlikely that, without that motivation, he would have found the strength to finally meet the gangsters on their own ground.

Cassavetes' response to the financial failure of the film belies the notion that he was a mulish "artist" type, stubbornly and selfishly pursuing his own "vision." He spent two years re-editing the film and re-released it in 1978 as a significantly slicker, speedier thriller. My guess is that he was willing to do so because, while he was completely unwilling to bend to studio demands, he always idealistically believed that audiences wanted to see challenging, interesting pictures, and if a film failed it must have earned its failure. (He similarly re-edited his first film, Shadows, after its opening night, when according to legend it drove everyone except avant-garde critic Jonas Mekas out of the theatre.)

The 1978 release loses a lot of the richness of the opening scenes, which show life backstage at the club as well as explaining how Cosmo came to be involved with Seymour Cassel's unctious, heartless gangster (the 1976 version suggests the gangster targeted him from the beginning). Little scenes that establish Cosmo's class anxiety, such as one in which the family of one of his strippers pointedly ask him to wait outside when he comes to pick her up, or another in which he fruitlessly tries to impress a girl with Dom Perignon, have been deleted. On the other hand, he adds new material that makes the assassination plot much clearer. Not only do we get a better taste of how dangerous and ruthless the gangsters are (in a short, brutal scene, a woman negotiates to pay off her clueless husband's gambling debt), but the scene at the diner, where the gangsters try to intimate to Cosmo what they want him to do, has been vastly expanded, helping us understand their demands better -- but also, surprisingly, giving us a sense of their delicacy, their light touch. It helps us believe these guys as serious operators to see both the fist and the finesse.

The diner scene also reveals that Cosmo has killed before -- albeit during war. But much more importantly, it's a sly lampoon of a business meeting; in the 1978 edit, it opens with the almost-hilarious line from one of the gangsters, "I, uh, have Xerox copies, John." All along Cosmo's relationship with these men has been a back-slapping, fraternity-of-businessmen bonhomie, and throughout the first half of the film Cosmo consistently acts in accordance with a certain etiquette of business relations that seems drawn directly from the mid-twentieth-century capitalist manual for a "successful" life. Dale Carnegie suggested that this kind of behavior would lead to fortune and happiness, while Arthur Miller saw it as lead inexorably toward alienation and tragedy. But Cassavetes sees it as largely comical -- albeit not without serious consequences. Cosmo is led down the trail to murder, step by step, because he submits himself to certain "rules of the game" -- when he gets into debt, he thanks the loan sharks who surround him and humiliate him in front of the girls, shaking each one's hand; he submits meekly to a beating when he fails in his first attempt to "reduce the debt," and, most amusingly, he seems to accept the "official" nature of papers signed over to gangsters. The paper copies of his marker take on exaggerated importance in his transactions with the mobsters, to the point that when he finally relents and agrees to the assassination, they solemnly hand him his "contract" and allow him to tear it up -- as though it's the "legal" document, and not the threat of brute force, that they hold over him.

Strikingly, and this seems a direct rebuff to Mr. Canby's criticisms, the back end hardly changes at all in the 1978 edit; once Cosmo is committed to the murder, it follows the original almost shot-for-shot. In other words, while Cassavetes may have re-evaluated the audience's willingness to follow him through his meandering set-up, he doesn't seem to have doubted his action sequences at all. Nor should he have. From the comic tire-blowout that forces Cosmo to take a cab to the assassination, to the awesome, suspended-in-time moment of recognition and acceptance on the part of the Chinese gangster (Soto Joe Hugh), to the agonizingly tense (and, yes, ambiguous) climax in the parking garage, the whole "crime picture" segment works just fine in both films.

I wish I could say that one version or the other was the "definitive version" -- the one you absolutely must see. If you're unwilling to commit 4-plus hours to seeing both versions, then I suppose I would recommend the second edit -- it's sleek and relatively fast-paced, and it's a clearer, more concise narrative. But frustratingly, perversely, each has something to offer that the other lacks. If it's true that Cosmo's big problem is that he's bought into certain ideals of the gentleman entrepreneur that cause him follow rules of social intercourse that don't work to his favor (and in this, he's basically like most of us who work for a living), then it would be helpful to see both the 1976 version's early scenes of class uncertainty as well as the 1978 picture's extended "business meeting" scene.

But both films ultimately end up at the same place. Because it's when Cosmo stops acting according to his artificial code of etiquette and starts addressing these gangsters as human beings that he's finally able to confront them. Tellingly, he's different with each man who comes to kill him in that parking garage -- gentle with the looming, tragic Timothy Carey character, ruthless and quick with Seymour Cassel's slippery Mort, cautious and predatory with the third and perhaps most dangerous killer. When Cosmo stops worrying about how he's supposed to act, and acts according to his relationships with individuals, he's suddenly not a loser or a sucker anymore, but a very capable man. Call this romanticism if you will, but it's goddamned appealing.

The remainder of the film (the part after the "crime film" sequence) is devoted to exploring how well Cosmo can maintain his humanness and honesty in the aftermath of what's happened to him. Almost immediately, when he returns to his girlfriend's house and has it out with her mother, he lapses into salesmanship again, and the mother, as honest and human as they come, skewers him easily and sends him away. When he returns to the club, his home of last resort, the results are mixed, if somewhat optimistic. Attempting to rally Mr. Sophistication and the girls when they've fallen to arguing, he opens himself up, admitting that he's only happy "when i can be what people want me to be rather than be myself." But he also stuffs his speech with seeming tautologies ("the only people who are happy are the people who are comfortable") and cliches ("What's your truth is my falsehood. What's my falsehood is your truth and vice versa"), and ultimately he resorts, literally, to a song to get Mr. Sophistication motivated.

There are breasts. So many breasts. Not prim, these-breasts-are-necessary-to-the-plot breasts, either, but great big gratuitous boobs.

Mr. Sophistication, in a moment of mingled pride and self-pity, puts it this way:

I don't want to pull a big star bit... but people do come here because i'm... well, some unique kind of personality, I suppose. A bit far out, a bit freakish maybe. But unique in my own way. And when things go badly, who gets the booing? I do. But when things go well... they... they, they, they get the applause and all the cheers -- because they flash their tits.

To which Cosmo, momentarily caught between his conception of himself as an artist and his duties as an entertainer, replies uncertainly, "What's wrong with tits?"

If Cassavetes' earlier films were uncompromisingly works of "art," whose pleasures were entirely emotional and cerebral, the director here, for the first time, flirts with feeding us those R-complex pleasures that cinema is so good at. At times he seems to be offering us a pure macho entertainment, a world of strong, confident men and cheerful, half-naked women. To his credit, Cassavetes is never contemptuous of his audience, and indeed he seems to be having a pretty good time himself, which is part of what makes this film one of his most accessible and most amenable to frequent viewing. More surprisingly, as noted above, Cassavetes seems never to have doubted his ability to deliver the "tits," but substantially reworked and second-guessed the "unique kind of personality" of the film's first half-hour.

At the same time, he's not entirely willing to let himself off the hook as an artist and just deliver up a straight thriller, and the whole strip-club thread of the film allows him to comment on his own role as an artist. Cosmo, of course, is a stand-in for Cassavetes himself, the "padrone" who takes full responsibility for both the art and his artists:

I'm the owner of this joint. I, uh, choose the numbers... I direct them, I arrange them. You have any, uh, complaints, you just come to me, and I'll throw you right out on your ass.

Most of the film could serve as some kind of metaphor for Cassavetes' willingness to do morally questionable hackwork for the studios in order to independently finance (i.e., protect) his own projects. But the character of Mr. Sophistication calls into question whether this Faustian bargain is even worthwhile, because the "artwork" that Cosmo/Cassavetes is protecting is so profoundly unpleasant and alienating that he risks humiliating his performers. If the girls are giving us the tits, the easy pleasures, Mr. Sophistication is both bravely attempting to take the high road and sneering at his audience for hoping to enjoy the performance. (In the performance that closes the film, he sings sweetly as a heartbroken angel, then snarls at the crowd, "Grovel for it. Grovel.") His anger, obviously, is a cover for the horrible embarrassment that self-expression always involves, the more so when it's obvious that no one really wants to hear it.

You know, uh, they say everything is sex. Uh, sex is everything. Here at the Crazy Horse West, we give you a lot more than that.

The undermining of "hotness," and the reclaiming of the gross-out aesthetic for women, goes on throughout the film. Throughout the film, McCarthy interrogates the process by which she and her girlfriends achieve hotness, spending inordinate amounts of time on things like waxing, facial masks, hair, etc. She goes to some phenomenal lengths to neutralize her own sexual allure -- my personal favorite is an extended bit in which her date, a Woody Allen doppelganger, vomits into her cleavage at a fashion show. She runs out of the club and has a complete shit-fit on the sidewalk outside, during which her breast falls out of her dress. When she notices (the Carmen Electra character helpfully points out, "Girl, your big ole titty's hangin' out!"), she just gives in to the situation, takes out her other vomit-covered breast, and shakes them furiously in the faces of all the looky-loos, shrieking at them in contempt and irritation, "They're just fucking gobs of FAT!" This is not, trust me, sexy. And it's the only time you see those famous boobs, or any boobs, which is quite an accomplishment in this kind of film.

Click to read more ...

Cassavetes is willing to present characters who are so, as he says, socially and emotionally inept that it's impossible to be around them, and we retreat from them instinctively. And we'd like to put them into more comfortable or familiar categories, even if that makes them more loathsome than they really are. For us, as the audience, it would be easier if these characters were somehow so immoral or beyond acceptability that we could hate them. So, for example, this review at culturevulture.net seems to me very much to miss the emotional and philosophical tensions at play in the film, and to reduce them to easy moral/judgemental categories. The author, Dan Schneider, calls Mabel a "deranged cocktease" and "clinically insane" and a "flaming nut case," and sees Nick as a "clueless, bigoted bastard," while unaccountably referring to the children as "bratty." There's a real anger to that kind of phrasing that suggests a total alienation from these characters. And they are alienating, but no more so than many essentially harmless but inept people are alienating. They are unable to make others comfortable or to do the right thing -- they are terrible at soothing, at the little gliding movements that make social intercourse possible.

Click to read more ...

When I was on the independent scene in Atlanta, I heard people speak with reverence about a guy who had shot an entire film in a single day, using a single location and breathtaking logistical finesse, shooting several scenes at once on the same location and hopping around so he could shoot one while changing setups on another. I also once heard a guy bragging that he would shoot at a ratio of 1.5 or 2 to 1, never allowing himself more than two takes per setup.

There's an astrigent virtue to this kind of exacting planning and control, and I sometimes used similar methods in my own video work. I was able to shoot movies for less than $100 a minute, and the exercise was useful in teaching me to go in with a plan and think things through, especially on the technical side. But there was another kind of filmmaking that I think we in the Atlanta scene didn't do enough of (I only remember it happening once in my group), the kind where on Monday somebody says, "We should make a movie," and on Wednesday somebody throws out a scenario and on Saturday afternoon you're making props and on Saturday night you're shooting in somebody's apartment, and you don't have a schedule -- you just have an idea of some things you want to see on screen. Sometimes planning a film too completely can kill it, and sometimes giving it some space can bring out some surprising things.

Welles once said that "a director is someone who presides over accidents." Cassavetes' great virtue, apart from the cooperative, familial atmosphere he seemed to generate with his cast and crew, was that he knew how to get out of the way of the accidents.

Click to read more ...

It's not that the film turns out not to be about race. But race is only one thread in this meandering but compelling story, albeit the most electric and painful thread. It's also about bored young men getting around town, the brutality of show business, the fascination and the superficiality of art culture in New York in the 50s, how men seduce women, violence in ordinary life, and the garish beauty of Times Square. And by branching out into all these other threads, it avoids the numbing single-mindedness of other "race" films of the period. Rather than laboring awkwardly to prove that black people are human, too!, it takes this rather bland point as the obvious fact that it is, and proceeds to examine how racism poisons our collective human nature. Yet Cassavetes is not remotely pessimistic about the effects of racism -- both black and white characters in this film are capable of rich, full, hilarious, fascinating lives. The film bursts with life, with weird and unexpected moments, with sheer enthusiasm.

Click to read more ...

Lost is, before anything, an amazing spectacle, on the order of the greatest tall tale ever told, a nonstop act of invention that just keeps topping itself, layering whopper onto astounding whopper, keeping us laughing with delight at its endless novelty, the sheer bravado of its impossibly complex plotting.

But all that manic plate-juggling serves a purpose beyond the sheer wonder of it. The constant switchbacks in Lost, the reversals of polarity in relationships between characters, the undermining of previous givens, the seemingly limitless reassignment of meaning to events, phrases, symbols, and objects, the expansion into every corner of experience -- past, present, and future -- of an ever more finely meshed web of interconnection -- these are not mere rococo elaborations of a straightforward plot. They serve to create in the viewer all the hallmarks of paranoia -- a sense that the common reality can't be trusted, that people can never be fully known, that whatever "reality" you think you've discovered is at best a contingent one, to be undermined by the next set of connections and unmaskings.

Click to read more ...

There's nothing in this season -- at least the first two discs, which is as far as I've gotten and may be as far as I ever go -- that came even close to making me laugh as hard as the collective guy-dumbness of Peter, Chris, Brian, and Stewie drinking ipecac for the hell of it, or Stewie's "Doing a little writing, huh?" taunting of Brian (both, I think, from the previous season). But more crucially, nothing in this "volume" has disturbed me like the Golden Turd mini-film from American Dad or Peter's ongoing fight with the giant chicken or Herbert the pervert's heartbreaking musical paean to Chris (delivered from a ladder outside Chris's bedroom window). Horror has always lain side-by-side with the humor on Family Guy; that Herbert has become a colorful, almost genial minor character who raises not one goose bump is just the most obvious example of the loss of real electricity in the show. What used to be unsettling, creepy, or at least giddily disorienting has become comfortable, almost predictable. At this point, the "This is worse than the time I..." setup is so hoary and worn-out that I almost find myself looking away when the inevitable wacky flashback comes.

Click to read more ...

I haven't seen Gilmore Girls since its first season, many years ago, back when I used to watch TV with my much-younger sister. She and I went cheerfully through Xena and Buffy and reruns of Pee-Wee's Playhouse together, though we squabbled over less hip and witty shows like 7th Heaven and Roswell. Gilmore I watched quite willingly, though I suspect that, as was the case with Xena, our motives were somewhat different. Gilmore Girls, as I noted in my blog at the time, was the first show I ever watched where I was more interested in the mom than the daughter.

Click to read more ...

But there's another reason I've always been hesitant to watch The Sopranos. I think I've always been secretly afraid that perhaps the critics are right -- that perhaps it is the best show on television. I wouldn't be surprised -- it's on cable, where most of the best shows are these days, and some very smart friends of mine love it. But I've been concerned because it appears to be a straight-ahead drama whose biggest twist is that it's about mobsters -- ER, but in the Mafia. This bothers me because I have great love for television as a medium, and if its flagship program, the best it has to offer, is a well-constructed but fairly conventional drama, then I'm frustrated and disappointed.

Click to read more ...

The dialogue is clean and sharp as cracked ice, and the writers nail three subtly different variations on rapid-fire patter: the acid-laced argot of Martin Blank (John Cusack) and his arch-rival (the Aykroyd character), the uneasy, searching wit of friendships rejoined after a long time (Jeremy Piven slips easily into the role of co-conspirator at the godawful reunion), and the magic and soreness of returning to a love long-lost but never abandoned. This is all very lightweight -- the moment you start to think about it, it floats away like a dream -- but that makes the elegant handling all the more impressive.

Click to read more ...

In the books, on the other hand, we frequently dawdle in Harry's thoughts -- and for the most part his thoughts reveal someone thoroughly unlikeable. Harry is quick to take offense and enjoys a good stew -- he stews about the Durzleys, which is understandable, but also about Ron and Hermione, about Sirius, and always, always, always about Dumbledore. He doesn't trust his friends a whit, assuming the worst of them whenever his feelings are chafed: when the other students don't write to him over the summer, he assumes they've snubbed him; when Dumbledore doesn't disclose every aspect of his plans to Harry or, at times, avoids contact with him, Harry immediately believes the old wizard is slighting him, although Dumbledore has shown time and again that he does nothing without good reason. Even when the reason for something has been thoroughly explained to him, as in the case of his occlumancy lessons, Harry can't help seeing it as a punishment and an oppression. Well into the seventh book, long after every major character has proven both smarter than Harry and doggedly devoted to him, he can't simply go with the flow and trust Dumbledore's plan or his friends' motives.

Click to read more ...

I almost didn't see Georgia Rule -- only the brutal heat of Iraqi summer and the boredom of waiting for flights at Balad Air Base chased me into the theater. I was anticipating the worst, a seriously bad time, treacle on the order of Thomas Kinkade; the trailer makes it look like the worst possible edition of the annual or semi-annual going-back-to-grandma's-makes-everything-better tradition in Hollywood. (What self-loathing there must be among screenwriters and producers, that they compulsively, repeatedly send recalcitrant teens -- their younger selves? their own obnoxious offspring? -- to the country to shed their urban, media-saturated ways and re-learn the good old-fashioned virtues of hard work, courtesy, and love for family!) From the trailer, one can see all the key elements aligned exactly as they must be in one of these self-flagellating pageants -- the brittle, wisecracking teen, the mom with problems of her own, the stern but patient grandma, the handsome love interests for both mom and daughter, the uptight townspeople who reject the girl, lessons learned, catchphrases used like hammers against the temples of both naughty adolescents and weary audience members.

Click to read more ...

We are used to characters showing up in action movies just to move the plot forward. Some are more interesting than others, but we accept their quirky behavior and improbable characteristics because, after all, somebody has to explain how you can get dinosaurs out of tree sap, and somebody has to get past all the computer locks in the Nakatomi building vault. What's interesting about Transformers is that Bay&Co. have gleefully jumped past that old architecture -- irrelevant, wacky characters as supports for the plot -- and into the brave new world -- characters and scenes which forward no plot, MacGuffins all, yet set adrift, Sam Witwicky no less than the cube, all equally pointless, all sewn together with the inarguable emotional logic of anime, where characters pose in absolute stillness for long seconds, then hack each other to bits, for reasons as fluid as loyalties in a dream. Do we need the 19-year-old Australian beauty who works for the NSA and is improbably also friends with Anthony Anderson? Do we need John Turturro hamming it up as the ultimate Man in Black? Do we need to know that Mikaela's dad had a criminal past? Indeed, is there anything in this film that could even reasonably be marked, "Point A" or "Point B" -- let alone actually lead from one to the other? Who cares? Each scene, each bit of business, succeeds or fails on its own. And a surprising number of them succeed.

Click to read more ...

To take a single example, throughout The Philadelphia Story people, especially the Katherine Hepburn character, constantly refer to the Cary Grant character by his full name, "C.K. Dexter-Haven." Hepburn rolls the name around in her mouth, "C.K. Dexter-Haven... C.K. Dexter-Haven..." for full comic effect -- and it is a funny name, but every time she says it, of course, it becomes a little less funny. The joke is reduced with repetition; it hasn't got the mass to carry it through a whole film.

In Bringing Up Baby, on the other hand, the two main characters are forever barking each other's perfectly ordinary first names -- "David!" "Susan!" Again, it can be argued that this is a maddening, irritating to the very hilt -- in that same Filmspotting episode, Sam van Hallgren did a very funny off-the-cuff parody of this seeming stylistic crutch. But, on the other hand, the very plainness of it, the simplicity of the repetition, the everydayness, makes me think that the irritation is perhaps a little intentional. David and Susan, though the time-frame of their relationship is compressed, come to frustrate and annoy one another just as much as if they had been married for 20 years already. Who hasn't experienced the annoyance of hearing one's own name again from the mouth of someone he loves? Bringing Up Baby is a carnival stuffed inside a clashing mechanical monkey, and it's not for everyone. But by many small details, director Howard Hawks and his writers anchor all the madness in a real piece of emotional earth.

Click to read more ...

What's fun here, as is so often the case with these kind of movies, are the action scenes, as a Rainbow Coalition of good guys unload ridiculous numbers of rounds into previously-loved ones, and the odd thumbnails of characterization that provide most of the humor -- the thermometer-chewing doctor, the color-coded anaesthetist, the stripper who loses a leg but gains a grenade-launcher. Rodriguez isn't afraid to go tasteless to get a laugh -- a sequence with a small child left alone in a car is brutally, horrifically funny -- and he makes no apologies for the story not holding together all that well. Instead, God bless him, he resurrects Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey to remind us that even B movies turn on the ability of good actors to sell tricky emotional textures.

Click to read more ...

There's a real disregard for not just the tactics, but the feel of real warfare in this film. The filmmakers seem to treat the mundane details of a warrior's life with some contempt, feeling, perhaps, that audiences will more readily identify with an oily superman than a real soldier. The film is thoroughly imagistic, all golden wheat fields and scorched cloudscapes, but its images tend to be recycled and less thrilling than the filmmakers think; and meanwhile they have abandoned any verisimilitude which might have lent richness to the bronzy picture-making. The "300" gather outside the city wearing only capes and loincloths and carrying only spears and shields. In what ought to be a catastrophic failure of military planning, not one of them has so much as a knapsack or a skin of water; neither is there any hint of a supply chain. Nonetheless, when the filmmakers want to show Leonidas as jaunty and confident, he strides among the piled-up corpses eating a fresh apple, although the landscape at Thermopylae is completely barren.

This is not nit-picking. I like an iconic clash of great warriors as well as the next person, and a movie about war doesn't have to be The Things They Carried to have merit. Despite the assertion attributed to Samuel Fuller that the only way to make a war movie "realistic" (and therefore not romanticize war) would be to fire a machine gun into the audience, war is not automatically off-limits as the subject of grand entertainment. War can be funny, or thrilling, or glorious, just like every other aspect of human experience. It baffles civilians and those of us who have yet to go there, but many soldiers re-enlist while in the combat zone; many report that they enjoy doing the work they were trained to do more than simply sitting around in garrison.

But war is a serious subject, and no one who makes films about it or writes about it can avoid the enormous stakes of it. There's nothing wrong with making warriors larger-than-life -- Homer, the great-grandfather of all Western war poets, certainly didn't write them small. Gary Payton-style trash-talking alone probably makes up a third of the bulk of the Iliad. But he also had respect for man's natural unwillingness to die for political causes, and he further had respect for the ordinary considerations of war planning -- ships, soldiers, carpenters, cattle -- precisely because it is those elements which generally determine the outcome of a war.

Click to read more ...

I'd also like to give a brief recognition to Cuarón's absolute mastery of sound editing; not only is his use of pop music (including a recurring cover of "Ruby Tuesday") brilliant and occasionally devastating, but by isolating or de-emphasizing sounds, he frequently challenges us to decide for ourselves what elements of the scene are most important. Is it the cry of the child in the foreground, or the man being shot in the background? When they are given equal weight in framing but unequal volume on the soundtrack, he seems to be asking us, "Are you going to accept my interpretation? Or will you decide for yourself which lives are important?" It's nice to be given that option.

Click to read more ...

I find myself of mixed feelings about this blatant appeal to old-fashioned capitalist striving as the key to happiness. The nearly-rags-to-rags-to-riches inverted arc is a potent myth, and there is, no doubt, something archetypal in it that goes beyond the purely material. One can recognize in Chris Gardner a deep passion to do something worthwhile, to reach for something seemingly beyond him, and if that passion happens to attach itself to something seemingly vulgar and materialistic, still, one can hardly blame a man for wanting to work hard and be rewarded for it, nor for wanting to provide for his family.

Click to read more ...

As usual, the credits sequence is the most visually exciting part of the film, but it may be the first such sequence since 1962's Dr. No not to feature nude or semi-nude women writhing in semi-silhouette. (And, indeed, even Dr. No features litho'ed female samba dancers, albeit disappointingly clothed.) The Bond credit sequences have always been a neat summary of what people like in the films -- the seamless, almost pornographic mix of violent spycraft and guilt-free sexual encounters. But in this clever, boldly graphical piece, the credits fly by over cartoon acts of violence, almost all of which are perpetrated using card suit symbols, or pieces of them. The sexual element has been completely removed, which at first suggests an interesting new direction for the series -- a chaster, more focused Bond, albeit one who may be a bit of a letdown to ten-year-olds for whom seeing an almost-naked woman is far more exciting than watching for obscure British brands of car and gun. (Allowing that such ten-year-olds still exist, some twenty-odd years after I saw my first Bond film.)

Click to read more ...

Film, of course, has certain advantages -- it can move the audience closer or further away in space; it can pretend to reveal a seamless 360-degreee area with no "backstage" or "wings"; it can rely much more heavily on "practical" lighting -- i.e., light from real sources; it can add, in a much more convincing fashion, background noise and atmosphere. But perhaps its main advantage is that we are quite conscious of the division between our own space and the space in which the story takes place. The action of the film is not happening in the room with us; it's not clear where it is happening, but I think it's fair to say that for most viewers the world of the film exists in a kind of psychological space, almost like memory or imagination. Since we are not being constantly reminded of the physical reality of the production (and its limitations), we are much more willing to accede to its claims on our credulity.

Click to read more ...