August 6, 2013 On Film Don’t You Forget About Me By Jason Diamond Some people revere Jean-Luc Godard, others obsess over finding subliminal messages in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Much as I love the work of these masters, the filmmaker whose work I tend to think the most about is John Hughes. From the iconic films he both wrote and directed (The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) to those he wrote and produced (Home Alone) the movies Hughes helped create between 1984 and 1991 are all classics in my eyes. (Even I will admit that after that his work gets really iffy: 101 Dalmatians, anybody?) I grew up laughing at his films, and when I eventually found myself homesick for the Chicagoland area I knew growing up, I’d revisit the copies of his films that I still watch on a monthly basis. Eventually I’d come to the realization that while David Kamp rightfully called Hughes the “Sweet Bard of Youth” in his 2010 Vanity Fair piece on the late director, I came to realize—thanks in large part to the distance between me and the place where I grew up—that Hughes was something even more; that he was to Chicago and its northern suburbs what Woody Allen was to Manhattan in the seventies and eighties. He made being from those bland suburbs seem more interesting than I recalled. Read More
August 1, 2013 On Film Hollywood Indian By Katie Ryder Image from D. W. Griffith’s film The Squaw’s Love, 1911 At the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, a young Abanaki Native American woman named Margaret “Soaring Dove” “Dark Eyes” Tahamont moved from her home in the Adirondacks across the country to Los Angeles to play in the moving pictures. She was born in Indian Lake, New York, where her extended family—a mixed group of Abanaki, Oneida, and Anglo ancestry—had been well established since the town’s founding, owning substantial land, running an inn for visitors to the region from New York City, and employing many town residents as laborers. Margaret, born Camp, judging from all photographs of her Indian Lake family, was raised in the costume of any white northerner. Her cousin Emma, near Margaret’s age, can be seen wearing a high loose bun, plush woven hats, and carefully tailored dresses covering from the high neck to the wrist, puffed at the sleeves, pintucked across the bodice, and lightly trimmed with lace. But Margaret moved to Los Angeles to perform as an Indian in plays, Indian hobby societies, and early silent films. She now wore long braids, leather, beaded headbands, moccasins, and performed under the name Dove Eye. Her husband Elijah Tahamont, or Dark Cloud (also Abanaki, from Quebec), had been acting in silent films made in the Adirondack region—what would later be known as the “eastern Westerns”—including at least a few with soon-to-be famed director D. W. Griffith, and when eastern production companies began to move west to join nascent Hollywood corporations, the Tahamonts went along. Elijah, as Dark Cloud, played in over thirty titles; Margaret in at least five silent shorts, and likely more—the idea of preserving film and film records still lying a bit ahead on the horizon. Read More
July 1, 2013 On Film Thomas Crown’s Global Vision By Jason Z. Resnikoff June 19, 2013, marked the forty-fifth anniversary of the release of The Thomas Crown Affair—the original version, directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan Trustman. While for most of us the anniversary of a film might not seem like cause for celebration, I find that birthdays ending in zeros or fives have a momentous quality that welcomes grave rumination. And as we enter blockbuster season, a time of rich and disposable spectacle, it is amazing to revisit this high-gloss 1968 potboiler—what once passed for a summer blockbuster—and discover that not only is it still fresh, but, in the context of some of our most pressing contemporary anxieties, it is disconcertingly prophetic. In short, The Thomas Crown Affair is a paeon to the forces of globalization. In The Thomas Crown Affair, globalization takes the literal form of a blank globe. Whenever I look at this production still—Steve McQueen in business attire resting a proprietary hand on this sphere of power, this atom of capital—I have the same reaction that Ralph Waldo Emerson had when he read Shakespeare: “I actually shade my eyes.” In this photograph, we see a perfect articulation of a deep, ideological commitment to the tenets of globalization: the world reduced to a single, borderless place; a compressed rendering of a new world order. Read More
June 24, 2013 On Film Notes on Comedy, My Own and Others’ By Pedro Almodóvar Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Although we associate comedy with spontaneity, the comedies I’ve made to date—including this new one, I’m So Excited!—are rehearsed exhaustively during preproduction and afterward during shooting. Spontaneity is always the product of rehearsal. A script isn’t finished until the film has opened. I rehearse a script as if it was a play. As it happens, both Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and I’m So Excited! are play-like, in the sense that the action takes place mainly on one set. I rehearse them like plays, but I don’t film them like plays (actually, I’ve never directed a play, so I don’t know what it’s like). They’re very verbal comedies: the action lies basically in the words and in the openness of the characters. I usually improvise a lot in rehearsals, then I rewrite the scenes and rehearse them again, and so on, to the point of obsession. With improvisations, the scenes usually grow longer, but it’s the best way I know to find nuances and parallel situations that I would never discover if we stuck rigidly to the script. After stretching the scenes out and blowing them up, I rewrite them again, trying to synthesize what has been improvised. And then we rehearse again. Some of the actors, especially Carlos Areces, can’t bear you to cut a single one of their jokes, even if it has come up while the scene is looking for itself and hasn’t yet gelled. Everything that comes up and involves his character belongs to him. If it were up to him, the film would last three hours. (At times I shoot two versions of the same scene, and I admit that at times I edit the “improvised” one.) Lola Dueñas is another one who immediately appropriates all the antics that occur to me during the first rehearsals. Afterward, it’s heartrending to tell her that it was just a game, a way of stretching, of being crazy, of probing, of losing all sense of the ridiculous—above all losing respect for the script—and that it was all just an exercise. When Lola sees me improvising a scene with her character, however exaggerated it may be, if she likes it, she grabs on to it and it’s impossible to convince her that I was just fooling around. I admit that at times she’s managed to get her own way. When I had the idea for the mise-en-scène of the first time she goes into a trance in the cockpit, looking for sensations while groping the two pilots’ bodies, all those involved laughed, but I never thought about editing the scene like that—and yet that’s how it turned out in the film. After much insistence, Lola asked me at least to look at how she did it and then decide. The point was, I had to give her the chance to play the scene that way. She did it, and after seeing it, I had no choice but to include it. Lola is capable of breathing such truth into the most insane situations that she manages to make any craziness plausible. Read More
May 23, 2013 On Film What We Wish We Were: On Biopic-Mania By Liz Brown Sometimes there are things you didn’t know you wanted to see. Like Michael Douglas, spangled and rouged, arms out in a white ostrich-trimmed cape, prancing sideways across a Vegas stage. This is barely two seconds of the trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, about the relationship between Liberace and his younger lover, Scott Thorson, but those are two seconds I want to see over and over. Usually I get cranky and snide about biopics. The last one I saw was Hitchcock. I went to have my prejudices against the genre affirmed, and they were. I kept watching Anthony Hopkins in his fat suit and thinking about his makeup, the boom just outside the frame, the camera rolling back on its track, the contrivance of the whole thing—and not in some provocative, Brechtian sense. I left full of scorn for the labored verisimilitude and regurgitated history—a petty way to go to the movies, but kind of satisfying, too, in the way that being petty can be. Maybe it’s a good film if you weren’t aware Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for so-called icy blonds and that he got creepily obsessive when it came to his leading ladies. And if that’s not clear from watching Hopkins/Hitchcock skulk around dressing rooms, Jessica Biel/Vera Miles explains it to Scarlett Johansson/Janet Leigh and us in a scene that feels more like a DVD featurette about the “making of” than dialogue between two people. Read More
February 6, 2013 On Film Cruise Control By Ben Parker Shortly before Christmas, New York moviegoers could choose between seeing two Tom Cruise films that were screening simultaneously: Jerry Maguire at Lincoln Center (as part of a retrospective celebrating him), and Eyes Wide Shut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (as part of a Christmas movie series). Sorry I could not watch both and be one viewer, I opted for Eyes Wide Shut. “You had me at hello” and “Show me the money!” would have to wait for another day. Surely I was taking the cultural high road, the Guermantes Way, if you will, one that would certainly never meet up with any quippy, Tom Petty–inflected sports romance. Since the bemused response to the release of Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, the film’s admirers have been increasingly winning out over its critics. But both camps agree that the film is a closed universe, meticulously arranged down to the smallest detail, the ne plus ultra of auteurist micromanagement. Kubrick was a famous hermit who refused to leave England to film Eyes Wide Shut, although it is set in New York. Instead he constructed an enormous studio replica of Greenwich Village, and everything was shot in this controlled environment. Tom Cruise, as though under Kubrick-ordered house arrest, didn’t make another movie for the entire duration of the project (from 1997 to 1999). If you didn’t like the movie, you saw the final product as hermetically sealed and emotionally sterile, a bad imitation of New York and the way that real people talk and feel. But if you liked the movie, it was because each of its frames could be subjected to exhaustive analysis in a thousand term papers, like a game of hidden pictures, mined for occult symbolism, motifs of consumerism, and every possible allegorical reading. Kubrick’s obsessively detailed vision seemed particularly to license a shot-by-shot deconstruction. (I invite you to google: “Eyes Wide Shut illuminati” for a good time.) Read More