In 2012, I resolve to:
- Exercise. Eat less. Eat healthier. Lose weight.
- Read more books, and read more widely.
- Watch more movies.
- Not neglect this blog so much.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Resolutions
Okay, let's see how long these last.
In 2012, I resolve to:
In 2012, I resolve to:
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
The Horror, the Horror
It's funny, but it also makes you want to cry. In her NY Times column today, the ever-irrepressible Maureen Dowd uses a string of horror-movie analogies to describe the recent congressional battle over the debt ceiling. From the great Universal Pictures franchises (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, et al.) to Vincent Price and William Castle flicks to The Exorcist, Jaws, Halloween, and Alien, Dowd manages to work in witty references to just about every cinematic shocker from the 1930s through the late '70s that you can imagine. She doesn't allude to the more recent subgenre of torture porn (Saw and its offspring), but she easily could have, given how torturous the sad, sorry spectacle in D.C. was to watch as it played out in the media. I thought of zombies—yes, Dowd does mention them—because the image of brain-devouring ghouls jibes neatly in my mind with the Tea Party crowd and what they've done to intelligent political discourse.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
This and That
I've been away for a bit, but that doesn't mean that movie-related stuff has been far from my mind. Random musings follow.
Notable Passings
The recent deaths of playwright/screenwriter Arthur Laurents (on May 5) and actor Farley Granger (on March 27) make for an interesting coincidence in that the two had been romantically linked in the late 1940s. They met and became lovers while working on Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), a film loosely inspired by the Loeb-Leopold "thrill murder" of the twenties. That movie, for which Laurents received his first Hollywood credit, is not, in my humble view, one of Hitchcock's more successful efforts: among its problems, it never quite transcends its origins as a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, and by its closing moments it veers pretty sharply into heavy-handed sermonizing. However, its use of long takes and disguised cuts to create an illusion of unbroken action certainly makes it an intriguing experiment in framing, camera movement, and spatial/temporal unity; but that, of course, was Hitchcock's doing, not the writer's. Laurents—and, to a lesser extent, Granger—may well have contributed something to the film's homoerotic subtext, though you could also say that element was built into the material.
Laurents remains best known for his work in musical theater, particularly West Side Story and Gypsy, as well as his scripts for the '70s films The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack) and The Turning Point (dir. Herbert Ross), which were both big hits in their day though neither is a favorite of mine. I'm insufficiently familiar with Laurents's other work to offer an informed opinion on his career as a whole, and while what I have seen of it doesn't impress me that much, I'm sure he was a fascinating dinner companion.
As for Granger, he went on to work for Hitchcock again, this time in a much better film, 1951's Strangers on a Train (which also had a strong homoerotic subtext). Unfortunately, his bland performance in the lead role of tennis player Guy Haines paled alongside costar Robert Walker's brilliant portrayal of the villainous psychopath Bruno Anthony. (Hitchcock, never one to spare actors' feelings, told interviewers he would have preferred William Holden in the Guy Haines role.) Regarding Granger's overall career, I again must plead virtual ignorance. He was good, I thought, as a sympathetic Depression-era bank robber in Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), but I believe that's the only other Granger performance I've seen. (In fact, Granger didn't make that many movies. Like Laurents, he preferred the stage.)
I can claim more familiarity with the oeuvre of director Sidney Lumet, who died on April 9. From Twelve Angry Men (1957) to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), he turned out around fifty films in a variety of genres; I've seen about half of them. Lumet was known as the quintessential New York director, and in his best work—Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Prince of the City get my votes—his felt-in-the-bones familiarity with the grittier corners of Manhattan and the outer boroughs resulted in some exemplary social realism. But he also directed a fair number of clunkers (The Wiz, Guilty as Sin), and even some of the films that won him praise, notably The Pawnbroker and Network, struck me as overwrought. Still, I've always admired Lumet's overall seriousness of purpose: he was devoted to film, he was good with actors (even if he wasn't a great visual stylist), and provoking thought remained central among his concerns. With so much trivial junk on today's screens (as in yet another Pirates of the Caribbean installment!), that last attribute is not to be sneezed at.
The Best Movie on DVD I've Seen Recently
That would be Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours (2008). The two slightly kinky thrillers Demonlover and Boarding Gate, the extent of my previous knowledge of Assayas's work, didn't prepare me for this delicate study of the role that a summer house and the precious art and antiques it contains play in the lives of a French family whose ties are dissolving in the face of the mother's impending death and her children's far-flung careers. It's rare that a work dealing with such themes as loss, regret, and dissolution does so without being depressing. Indeed, in its quiet artistry and avoidance of melodrama, Summer Hours is exhilarating.
Obviously, Assayas is a versatile man. He also directed Carlos (2010), a film about the terrorist Carlos the Jackal that topped a lot of recent ten-best lists. Originally conceived as a miniseries for French television, with a shorter theatrical version released on this side of the pond, it's high on my next-to-see list—if only it would come out on DVD.
The Best Book on Film I've Read Recently
I've praised University of Delaware film scholar Thomas Leitch on this blog before; let me now praise him again. His 2007 book Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Johns Hopkins University Press) offers a refreshingly new take on the problems involved in literature-to-film transformation. Leitch doesn't give us the usual close readings of particular adaptations, the approach pioneered by George Bluestone in what Leitch calls the "founding text of adaptation studies," Novels into Film (1957); rather, he ranges widely over a number of broader issues, from the shaky relations between religious inspiration and entertainment value evidenced in adaptations of the gospels (such as, most recently, Mel Gibson's bloody Passion of the Christ), to attempts at "exceptional fidelity" (e.g., Gone with the Wind and Lord of the Rings), in which filmmakers feel particularly obliged to satisfy the expectations of a much-loved literary source's readership.
Especially fascinating to me were the chapters on the countless versions of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Arthur Conan Doyle's venerable sleuth Sherlock Holmes. In the former, Leitch explores the idea that adaptations of A Christmas Carol, whether reconfiguring it as a cartoon, a western, a musical, or a comedy, serve as a kind of beginner's introduction to Dickens and the cultural traditions and moral lessons that the great Victorian novelist and his Yuletide classic embody. In the Holmes chapter, Leitch surveys an array of texts—cinematic and otherwise—that has become so dizzying in number as to prompt this query: "Why should Holmes and not other impossible heroes such as Superman or James Bond or Tarzan or Frankenstein's monster assume an aura of historical actuality that allowed him to survive the death of his author, spin off half a dozen fictional series starring his supporting characters, spawn hundreds of fan clubs in every corner of the globe, and provoke reams of commentary seeking to reconcile apparent factual inconsistencies in his adventures?"
The answers Leitch proposes to that and other questions are never less than provocative. But what impresses me most about this book is the author's command of his sources. My comment earlier about Leitch's Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock—that he writes "with the authority of someone who has seen every film and read everything of relevance"—applies equally to this volume.
Notable Passings
The recent deaths of playwright/screenwriter Arthur Laurents (on May 5) and actor Farley Granger (on March 27) make for an interesting coincidence in that the two had been romantically linked in the late 1940s. They met and became lovers while working on Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), a film loosely inspired by the Loeb-Leopold "thrill murder" of the twenties. That movie, for which Laurents received his first Hollywood credit, is not, in my humble view, one of Hitchcock's more successful efforts: among its problems, it never quite transcends its origins as a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, and by its closing moments it veers pretty sharply into heavy-handed sermonizing. However, its use of long takes and disguised cuts to create an illusion of unbroken action certainly makes it an intriguing experiment in framing, camera movement, and spatial/temporal unity; but that, of course, was Hitchcock's doing, not the writer's. Laurents—and, to a lesser extent, Granger—may well have contributed something to the film's homoerotic subtext, though you could also say that element was built into the material.
Laurents remains best known for his work in musical theater, particularly West Side Story and Gypsy, as well as his scripts for the '70s films The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack) and The Turning Point (dir. Herbert Ross), which were both big hits in their day though neither is a favorite of mine. I'm insufficiently familiar with Laurents's other work to offer an informed opinion on his career as a whole, and while what I have seen of it doesn't impress me that much, I'm sure he was a fascinating dinner companion.
As for Granger, he went on to work for Hitchcock again, this time in a much better film, 1951's Strangers on a Train (which also had a strong homoerotic subtext). Unfortunately, his bland performance in the lead role of tennis player Guy Haines paled alongside costar Robert Walker's brilliant portrayal of the villainous psychopath Bruno Anthony. (Hitchcock, never one to spare actors' feelings, told interviewers he would have preferred William Holden in the Guy Haines role.) Regarding Granger's overall career, I again must plead virtual ignorance. He was good, I thought, as a sympathetic Depression-era bank robber in Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), but I believe that's the only other Granger performance I've seen. (In fact, Granger didn't make that many movies. Like Laurents, he preferred the stage.)
I can claim more familiarity with the oeuvre of director Sidney Lumet, who died on April 9. From Twelve Angry Men (1957) to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), he turned out around fifty films in a variety of genres; I've seen about half of them. Lumet was known as the quintessential New York director, and in his best work—Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Prince of the City get my votes—his felt-in-the-bones familiarity with the grittier corners of Manhattan and the outer boroughs resulted in some exemplary social realism. But he also directed a fair number of clunkers (The Wiz, Guilty as Sin), and even some of the films that won him praise, notably The Pawnbroker and Network, struck me as overwrought. Still, I've always admired Lumet's overall seriousness of purpose: he was devoted to film, he was good with actors (even if he wasn't a great visual stylist), and provoking thought remained central among his concerns. With so much trivial junk on today's screens (as in yet another Pirates of the Caribbean installment!), that last attribute is not to be sneezed at.
The Best Movie on DVD I've Seen Recently
That would be Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours (2008). The two slightly kinky thrillers Demonlover and Boarding Gate, the extent of my previous knowledge of Assayas's work, didn't prepare me for this delicate study of the role that a summer house and the precious art and antiques it contains play in the lives of a French family whose ties are dissolving in the face of the mother's impending death and her children's far-flung careers. It's rare that a work dealing with such themes as loss, regret, and dissolution does so without being depressing. Indeed, in its quiet artistry and avoidance of melodrama, Summer Hours is exhilarating.
Obviously, Assayas is a versatile man. He also directed Carlos (2010), a film about the terrorist Carlos the Jackal that topped a lot of recent ten-best lists. Originally conceived as a miniseries for French television, with a shorter theatrical version released on this side of the pond, it's high on my next-to-see list—if only it would come out on DVD.
The Best Book on Film I've Read Recently
I've praised University of Delaware film scholar Thomas Leitch on this blog before; let me now praise him again. His 2007 book Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Johns Hopkins University Press) offers a refreshingly new take on the problems involved in literature-to-film transformation. Leitch doesn't give us the usual close readings of particular adaptations, the approach pioneered by George Bluestone in what Leitch calls the "founding text of adaptation studies," Novels into Film (1957); rather, he ranges widely over a number of broader issues, from the shaky relations between religious inspiration and entertainment value evidenced in adaptations of the gospels (such as, most recently, Mel Gibson's bloody Passion of the Christ), to attempts at "exceptional fidelity" (e.g., Gone with the Wind and Lord of the Rings), in which filmmakers feel particularly obliged to satisfy the expectations of a much-loved literary source's readership.
Especially fascinating to me were the chapters on the countless versions of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Arthur Conan Doyle's venerable sleuth Sherlock Holmes. In the former, Leitch explores the idea that adaptations of A Christmas Carol, whether reconfiguring it as a cartoon, a western, a musical, or a comedy, serve as a kind of beginner's introduction to Dickens and the cultural traditions and moral lessons that the great Victorian novelist and his Yuletide classic embody. In the Holmes chapter, Leitch surveys an array of texts—cinematic and otherwise—that has become so dizzying in number as to prompt this query: "Why should Holmes and not other impossible heroes such as Superman or James Bond or Tarzan or Frankenstein's monster assume an aura of historical actuality that allowed him to survive the death of his author, spin off half a dozen fictional series starring his supporting characters, spawn hundreds of fan clubs in every corner of the globe, and provoke reams of commentary seeking to reconcile apparent factual inconsistencies in his adventures?"
The answers Leitch proposes to that and other questions are never less than provocative. But what impresses me most about this book is the author's command of his sources. My comment earlier about Leitch's Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock—that he writes "with the authority of someone who has seen every film and read everything of relevance"—applies equally to this volume.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Farewell to the Lady with the Violet Eyes
The NY Times's obituary of Elizabeth Taylor ends on what I think is a perfect note: "Late in life, when she had one of many offers to write her memoirs, she refused, saying with characteristic panache, 'Hell no, I'm still living my memoirs.'" It's sad that she's living them no more. Now there was a movie star.
Monday, February 28, 2011
The Less Said . . .
The most memorable thing about last night's Oscars show? For me, it wasn't Melissa Leo's use of the f-word during her acceptance speech, and it certainly wasn't who won and who didn't. It was the number of gown changes the producers put co-host Anne Hathaway through.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
House Plants
Anticipation of the upcoming Academy Awards telecast might explain why so many movie references were planted in this past Monday's installment of House, M.D. The episode, built around the premise of the misanthropic diagnostician addressing a fifth-grade career day, contains explicit references to Pulp Fiction, A Few Good Men, Ghostbusters, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Thomas Crown Affair ("the Steve McQueen version," it is pointedly noted), and the 1960 Jerry Lewis vehicle Cinderfella. Also, the episode's main narrative thread, an extended quid pro quo dialogue ("You tell me something; I'll tell you something") between House (Hugh Laurie) and a couple of kids sitting in a principal's office, might owe a bit to the Anthony Hopkins–Jodie Foster face-offs in Silence of the Lambs, but the connection, assuming there is one, isn't openly acknowledged. The movie most often cited on House, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (Singer is a producer of the series), seems to have gone missing here, although House's line "I ain't no snitch" does sort of echo one of Kevin Spacey's retorts in the 1995 film. But counting that one is probably a stretch.
Sucker that I am for movie trivia, I found it to be a fun episode overall, though one colleague of mine thought it too clever for its own good. Admittedly, it wasn't easy to follow on first viewing: the story is told in multiple-flashback form with a scrambled chronology that owes an obvious debt not just to Pulp Fiction but to the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino—nonlinear in the extreme, in other words. And when you consider how crammed Tarantino's work is with filmic and other pop cultural allusions and then consider the implications of another pop culture enterprise like House referencing and parodying Tarantino . . . well, the mind starts to reel.
I'm aware that this is all symptomatic of what some critics and theorists describe, indeed condemn, as postmodern decadence: here we have, they'd say, yet more evidence of a late capitalist culture that has nowhere to go but backward, feeding endlessly on itself. But I'm also aware of counterarguments which posit that in such self-consciousness and "hip" irony lie the seeds, at least, of progressive social critique. I'm inclined toward the latter position, but maybe I'm just rationalizing my enjoyment of TV shows like House and movies like Pulp Fiction.
P.S. I hear that an even more "postmodern" episode of House awaits us—one in which various genres from film and television are evoked in elaborate fantasy sequences. Hmm, maybe there is something to this whole decadence thing.
Sucker that I am for movie trivia, I found it to be a fun episode overall, though one colleague of mine thought it too clever for its own good. Admittedly, it wasn't easy to follow on first viewing: the story is told in multiple-flashback form with a scrambled chronology that owes an obvious debt not just to Pulp Fiction but to the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino—nonlinear in the extreme, in other words. And when you consider how crammed Tarantino's work is with filmic and other pop cultural allusions and then consider the implications of another pop culture enterprise like House referencing and parodying Tarantino . . . well, the mind starts to reel.
I'm aware that this is all symptomatic of what some critics and theorists describe, indeed condemn, as postmodern decadence: here we have, they'd say, yet more evidence of a late capitalist culture that has nowhere to go but backward, feeding endlessly on itself. But I'm also aware of counterarguments which posit that in such self-consciousness and "hip" irony lie the seeds, at least, of progressive social critique. I'm inclined toward the latter position, but maybe I'm just rationalizing my enjoyment of TV shows like House and movies like Pulp Fiction.
P.S. I hear that an even more "postmodern" episode of House awaits us—one in which various genres from film and television are evoked in elaborate fantasy sequences. Hmm, maybe there is something to this whole decadence thing.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Nominees Are In
No big surprises among the Oscar nominations—except that The King's Speech and True Grit (the latter having been ignored completely by the Golden Globes) garnered more nods than did the big Globes winner, The Social Network. It's nice that Hailee Steinfeld snagged a nomination, although, as I grumbled earlier, placing her in the supporting category is a gross injustice. But I guess there was room for only one teen-aged newcomer (Jennifer Lawrence of Winter's Bone) in the Best Actress lineup this year.
And, yes, I know the Oscars are silly, but they are now, and always have been, the only awards show I ever watch. So, it's a vacation day for me on February 28. I'm going to be up late the night before.
And, yes, I know the Oscars are silly, but they are now, and always have been, the only awards show I ever watch. So, it's a vacation day for me on February 28. I'm going to be up late the night before.
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