Sunday, November 27, 2011
Coppola's Vietnam
"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." — Francis Ford Coppola
By Damian Arlyn
Apocalypse Now is one of my all-time favorite movies. In adapting Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness for the big screen, but setting it in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, director Francis Ford Coppola created one of the most ambitious, absorbing and awe-inspiring examples of what I refer to as "immersive" (and sometimes "meditative") cinema I've ever seen. Some call it the greatest war film ever made but I think, like all masterpieces, it transcends the genre in which it resides and becomes something wholly other: something deeper, more profound. It is about a man surrounded by madness, trying to hold onto his sanity as he goes to kill another man who has lost his. The protagonist's journey into the depths of the jungle actually is a journey into the darker regions of his own soul. Coppola's film was a landmark in motion picture history (winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes and receiving multiple Oscar and Golden Globe nominations) and his achievement is all the more impressive when one learns of what really was involved to make it. Although newspapers reported many of the difficulties encountered in shooting Apocalypse Now in the latter half of the '70s, it wasn't until 1991, when the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, was released, that the full story behind Coppola's Vietnam film became known. I actually watched the doc before I ever saw Apocalypse Now and it gave me an appreciation for the film that I doubt I would have had otherwise. To this day no other documentary (besides perhaps Burden of Dreams) more compellingly chronicles the aspirations, obsessions, insecurities and ultimate triumph of a young filmmaker tackling his biggest and most challenging project.
Hearts of Darkness was directed by George Hickenlooper (who died late last year) and Fax Bahr, but the majority of its footage was shot by Coppola's wife Eleanor during the filming of Apocalypse Now. As the director's wife, Eleanor had access to the troubled filmmaker that few other documentarians would. In addition to recording candid interviews with her husband as well as on-set interactions between him and his crew and actors, Eleanor recorded talks that they had alone in which Coppola revealed his fears about the project as well as his own career. After Eleanor turned her footage over to Bahr and Hickenlooper, they shot new interviews with Coppola, Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, writer John Milius and even George Lucas. They then enlisted Eleanor to provide the film's narration (except for some passages from Conrad's novella Orson Welles read on an old radio broadcast) and premiered it at Cannes to great critical acclaim. In the U.S., it premiered on Showtime before being released theatrically 20 years ago today.
The film depicts Apocalypse Now's tumultuous shoot in a very honest and forthright manner. It didn't escape Coppola's notice, as he said in the now famous quote shown above this post, how much the story being filmed mirrored his own experience trying to tell it. Originally, Harvey Keitel was cast in the lead role of Capt. Ben Willard, but after seeing the dailies, Coppola was dissatisfied and replaced him with Martin Sheen. During the shooting of the now iconic "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter scene, several copters suddenly were pulled away by the Philippines government to battle rebels. At one point, Martin Sheen had a heart attack and needed to be flown out of the country in order to have surgery. Marlon Brando, who was being paid the astronomical sum of a million dollars a week, showed up severely overweight and not having read the Conrad novella as Coppola had requested. Dennis Hopper's brain was so fried from drugs that he couldn't remember his lines. Eventually, Coppola was forced to abandon the script and make up a lot of it (including the ending) as he went along. What initially was slated as a five-month shoot lasted more than two years and the budget ballooned from $14 million to more than $30 million. In some very revealing audio tracks, Coppola confesses to his wife that he's certain the film is awful, will fail, that he'll become a laughingstock, etc. It is somewhat ironic that Coppola was correct that his career has fallen way short of its early promise while his contemporaries (Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese) have, for the most part, continued to create films that are financially and/or critical successes. It did not, however, have anything to do with Apocalypse Now which, in spite of the incredible trials and tribulations faced during its production, was (and still is) considered one of his great accomplishments.
In an era where "making-of" documentaries are common features on DVDs (the best ones usually made by Laurent Bouzerau), it's difficult to appreciate what a rare glimpse behind the curtain Hearts of Darkness provided. Even today, most "behind-the-scenes" specials are puff pieces where the actors all are "thrilled" to be on the project, the director "couldn't be happier" with the work being done and the producer "loves everyone involved." Occasionally you get one like the Dangerous Days doc on the Blade Runner DVD/Blu-ray that has the courage to admit that the director wasn't easy to work with, that the studio was making things much harder than it had to be and the overall shoot was a bitch. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse put all of that out there. Although the film's place in cinematic history is secure, one almost wouldn't be surprised to see Coppola characterizing his experience working on the film by uttering the immortal last words of Kurtz as he lay dying, in both Coppola's film and Conrad's novella:
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Labels: 90s, Awards, Brando, Coppola, Documentary, Duvall, Fiction, Fishburne, Hopper, Keitel, Lucas, M. Sheen, Movie Tributes, Scorsese, Spielberg, Welles
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Monday, September 12, 2011
Technology as Savior and Curse
By J.D.
For more than two decades, director Steven Soderbergh has gone back and forth from independent to studio films with personal, experimental efforts such as Schizopolis (1996) and big budget crowd pleasers such as Erin Brockovich (2000). He’s fashioned himself something of a journeyman director trying his hand at a variety of genres over the years, from period history (King of the Hill) to the heist film (Ocean’s Eleven) to the war movie (Che), adopting a distinctive style for each one. With Contagion (2011), he can now add the disaster movie to the list. This film deals specifically with the deadly virus subgenre as he tracks an infectious disease that affects the entire world with alarming speed.
Would Soderbergh go the high road with thought-provoking science fiction a la The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Twelve Monkeys (1995), or would he go the low-budget horror B-movie route like The Crazies (1973) and Warning Sign (1985)? Whereas most of these rely on horror and science fiction tropes, Soderbergh eschews them for a more realistic take, albeit with a sly wink to the master of disaster, Irwin Allen, by populating Contagion with a star-studded cast of A-listers (many of whom have either won or been nominated for Academy Awards) only to kill some of them off. However, this is where the similarities begin and end as Soderbergh applies the Traffic (2000) aesthetic, juggling multiple characters and storylines to show how technology not only helps identify the threat quickly but also helps it spread rapidly thanks to globalization.
The film starts off on Day 2 of the outbreak with infected people in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong where we meet Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) on a business trip. She comes home to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and family in Minneapolis suffering from what seems like flu-like symptoms. She assumes that it is nothing more than jet lag but within a day she and her son are dead. The doctors can’t tell Mitch why they died and he’s left to take care of his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron).
The World Health Organization begins to identify all the cities where victims of the virus are appearing and trying in vain to contain it. They send Dr. Lenora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) to Hong Kong in an attempt to track down the origins of the virus. Meanwhile, muckraking blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) posts a clip of a man collapsing on a train in Japan and tries to peddle it to a newspaper in San Francisco but they aren’t interested. However, he soon assembles an impressive global readership that hangs on his every opinion and conspiracy theories, which not only spreads disinformation but also draws the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is leading an investigation into the outbreak in the United States and enlists the help of Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), who travels to Minneapolis and investigates Beth Emhoff’s death.
Soderbergh shows how the CDC interacts with local and national governing bodies to identify and deal with the virus while also taking us inside their laboratories where Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) is working hard to find an antidote. Soon, Homeland Security steps in and their representative (Bryan Cranston) meets with Cheever to raise concerns that the virus could be weaponized and used by terrorists to attack the United States. However, it soon becomes apparent that the problem is much more serious, affecting a large portion of the world. Soderbergh inserts all kinds of shots of people’s hands interacting with objects and other people. Every time someone coughs you wonder, "Is this person sick and are they spreading the virus to others?"
The always-reliable Matt Damon is Contagion’s emotional core, playing the character we get to know best and care about the most. He is heartbreaking early on as Mitch watches both his wife and son die and then finds out that his spouse also was cheating on him. He then has to pull it together and take care of his daughter. Damon is given moments to show how the strain is taking its toll on Mitch and the actor really grounds the film in something tangible for the audience to hold onto. Think of him as the equivalent to Benicio del Toro’s soulful border cop in Traffic. Damon is so good as the relatable everyman trying to deal with things as best he can. Without him, Contagion would come across as a little too cold and clinical.
With the help of Cliff Martinez’s brooding, atmospheric electronic score, Soderbergh gradually cranks up the dread as the virus spreads and the situation gets increasingly worse as order breaks down — bureaucratically and then everything else follows in a domino effect with looting and rioting as people think about protecting themselves. Soon, we are hit with sobering apocalyptic imagery that starts off with deserted city streets filled with garbage and abandoned cars to government officials filling mass graves with scores of dead bodies.
Soderbergh is clearly drawing a parallel between the virus and technology, both of which cover great distances in very little time thanks to cell phones and the Internet. The film matches this speed by maintaining a brisk pace but does allow for the occasional moment where key characters reflect on what’s happening and how it affects not only them but their loved ones, co-workers and so on. It is these moments where Scott Z. Burns' smart, ambitious screenplay shines, allowing archetypes, such as Laurence Fishburne’s no-nonsense executive, to show their human frailties. Burns has clearly done his homework as he presents a scarily plausible viral outbreak and how we would react to it on a personal level with Mitch and his daughter while also showing its global impact. This is important because the film throws around a lot of technical jargon and dispenses a lot of facts but Soderbergh wisely has enlisted an all-star cast to make it more palatable. Contagion is not the horror film Soderbergh has suggested it might be but rather a slick, sophisticated disaster movie that should provide the director with his first substantial commercial hit in years.
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Labels: 10s, Cotillard, Cranston, Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Soderbergh, Winslet
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
How to Survive in South Central
By Jonathan Pacheco
South Central Los Angeles, 1991. It’s not a neighborhood or a district, but rather a demon, a sadistic, permeating creature with a fierce grip on homes, boulevards and parks. Precious few slip from its grasp to find life and liberation while those who can’t find themselves possessed by rage, violence and misunderstanding. When we meet them in Boyz N the Hood, Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his childhood friends Doughboy (Ice Cube), Ricky (Morris Chestnut) and Chris (Regi Green) all find themselves in the clutches of South Central L.A., desperate to be free from the self-destruction it inspires within the black community.
Though writer/director John Singleton’s debut film makes its message perfectly clear to us from the opening moments (feeling a bit like a Spike Lee joint as it opens with statistics of black-on-black murder rates followed by a none-too-subtle camera push into a “STOP” sign), it does so with deft skill and trust in its audience to watch and understand what it’s trying to present. Singleton’s storytelling, while personal and timely when it was released, remains universal 20 years later not only in its call to end same-race violence, but in its promotion of the importance of father figures — the key, Singleton argues, to surviving the South Central demon.
The journeys of Tre, Doughboy and Ricky are ones we’ve seen many times by now, so a newcomer to Boyz N the Hood might have an easy time foreseeing what ends these characters will meet, but Singleton still handles the material better than most because he stays true to the world he’s depicting, never attempting to exaggerate or overdramatize for the benefit of his message. Unfortunate events don’t come as a surprise, as there’s a tension and sense of foreboding that comes across in every scene, even in moments of hope; you can feel the dark presence of South Central hovering over these lives — unrelenting and heartless.
But being shot on your way to the grocery store or finding yourself in the middle of a gang rivalry while hanging in Crenshaw isn’t the only thing these boys fear. When Tre confides to Ricky that he’s still a virgin, he explains that it’s out of fear — not of the sexual act, but of the possibility of becoming a father. He leaves his confession at that, but we can see that his worry stems from more than the usual difficulties of teenage fatherhood. We’ve seen Tre’s interaction with his own dad, Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne, at that time billed as “Larry”), and we know he and everyone else respects him as a “real man.” At one point Tre teases his father, calling him an old man despite his mid-30s age, but we know he’s only half joking; he does see his father as an old man, just not in literal years. Furious has seen a lot and read even more. Equal parts wisdom and charisma, he’s a powerful, authoritative, but endearing presence. He knows people. More importantly, he knows his people, displaying the ability to relate to his teenage son, the dangerous hoodlums of Compton and a bitter, finger-pointing old-timer all with the same speech, each of them walking away feeling as if they just listened to Malcolm Farrakhan (as Doughboy puts it). How could Tre, if he were to become a father before getting out of high school, live up to the example of the one and only Furious Styles, who once spoke the proverb, “Any fool with a dick can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children”?
The film reminds us repeatedly that a boy needs a true father to learn how to be a true man, which is why Ricky — an all-around good kid in contrast to his pistol-wielding brother — despite his mother Mrs. Baker (Tyra Ferrell) doing a fine job in raising at least one of her sons, is still missing some key lessons on the path to manhood. Singleton makes the point that if Mrs. Baker’s boys had a strong male presence during their formative years, not only would Doughboy have avoided the critical, crippling mistakes of his life, but Ricky may have avoided the few that have held him back as well (namely, becoming a young father and naively choosing to join the “white man’s army” to find his life purpose). When we first come upon Tre after the incidents of his childhood, he’s walking into a “Welcome Home” barbecue following Doughboy’s release from prison, and Mrs. Baker stops him at the entrance, asking him to spend more time with her son in hopes that the intangibles Tre possesses, the ones that seemingly protect him from the plaguing issues of South Central L.A., will rub off on her troubled son. But what Tre has isn’t entirely intangible, is it? He’s the only kid on the street with a real father hanging around; neither Doughboy nor Ricky nor Chris can claim the same, and it shows.
And yet, as written by Singleton and as pitch-perfectly played by Fishburne (who leads an excellent and exciting group of performances by Gooding, Ice Cube, and Chestnut), Furious isn’t beyond questioning. As Tre’s mother (Angela Bassett) points out, the man deserves credit for stepping up and raising his child, but that doesn’t make him special, especially when some of his parenting techniques can be questioned (like his surprisingly relaxed policy regarding his son’s sex life, which simply calls for protection from unwanted children and unwanted disease). While his eloquent views on eliminating black-on-black murder inspires his own race, his views on the white government — a government that supposedly encourages the elimination of blacks and whose army has no place for people of his color, as he tells his son — can only be dangerous to goals of interracial harmony. The important thing, however, is that Furious is there — flaws and all — and he cares, and that’s ultimately what enables Tre to survive that which his friends could not.
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Labels: 90s, Fishburne, Movie Tributes, Spike Lee
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Saturday, November 06, 2010
From the Vault: The Hughes Brothers
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCT. 6, 1995
Allen and Albert Hughes, known collectively as the Hughes Brothers, earned wide acclaim as directors for their first film, 1993's Menace II Society. Two years later, their sophomore effort, Dead Presidents, is coming out and the twins also have their own record label, Underground Records, which is releasing the film's soundtrack. The Hughes Brothers have accomplished all this by age 23.
Dead Presidents tells the story of Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate, who played the memorable O-Dog in Menace II Society), a young man growing up in the late '60s who joins the Marines, journeys to Vietnam and finds a hostile world when he returns to his home in Brooklyn. His disenfranchisement leads him to join a group of similarly disaffected men in planning an armored car heist. The film marks a heftier budget for the brothers, whose $3.4 million budget on Menace II Society increased to more than $10 million on Dead Presidents, a situation that allowed the filmmakers more discretion when filming.
ALBERT: "It just made things a little more easier as far as getting things done. Having three armored cars to blow up instead of just one," though he added that the scene was accomplished with only one destroyed armored car.
Originally, Dead Presidents was to be released this past summer, but it was delayed until now, the more prestigious fall season.
ALBERT: "We were happy with the switch, because it gave us more time to edit and more time to look for music for the movie — more time for everything all the way around. Also, more time to plan the marketing strategy. It wouldn't have floated too well in the summer because there was too much bullshit out there."
The film, which began shooting Oct. 31, 1994, shares some violent content with the Hugheses' previous movie. Dead Presidents even contains some particularly gruesome war footage.
ALBERT: "We didn't feel we'd seen the one-on-one graphicness of war. We definitely went looking for things — violent incidences or gruesome visuals — that hadn't been filmed before."
Dead Presidents takes place in the early '70s, an era also depicted in the early scenes of Menace II Society. The time period is particularly attractive to the twins.
ALLEN: "We have a fascination with that decade. The music and the look is what we like, mostly with the cars. The '80s and '90s got more conservative and more bland and it's not exciting to make a movie nowadays with contemporary settings."
The '70s figure into what Albert and Allen hope will be their next project — a biography of rock legend Jimi Hendrix. The Hugheses' lawyers are negotiating with Hendrix's estate about the project, which would star an unknown and is not connected to the movie that actor Laurence Fishburne has long wanted to star in.
The brothers work as a team on the set with Allen in charge of the actors and Albert behind the camera. This routine has evolved since their childhood, when the twins began making movies with a video camera around 12 years of age.
ALBERT: "It gradually moved that way over the years. He used to act in front of the camera and I'd do camera and then I'd act in front of the camera he'd do camera. It's like when we were kids, who's going to pull the wagon and who's going to sit in it. After awhile, he liked pulling it and I liked sitting in it. We both are qualified to do both jobs."
For now, the brothers are content to continue working as a team.
ALBERT: "We're not opposed to working separately on small projects right now but as far as features go, we still have a career to build as the Hughes Brothers and then we'll think about whatever else after that. We still have to get slammed by everyone out here before that."
If the Hendrix project doesn't pan out or ends up taking some time, the Hughes Brothers plan to work next on a "noirish type of action movie," Allen said. Until then, the young men plan to enjoy their burgeoning careers.
ALBERT: "We're just having fun doing what we're doing. We're not politically tied to anything or whatever, just have our own views on things and pretty much not be persuaded by anybody telling us any other story than what we're interested in."
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Labels: Fishburne, Hughes Brothers, Interview
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Sunday, October 24, 2010
From the Vault: Higher Learning
In big red letters, the word "unlearn" appears at the end of Higher Learning. It's ironic given that a movie whose message in thinking for one's self has spent more than two hours making broad, predictable opinions. Despite its lack of subtlety, writer-director John Singleton's third feature is an ambitious film with engaging performances that still manages to hold the viewer's interest in spite of its shortcomings.
The speechifying, the main drawback to Singleton's Boyz N the Hood, infects this film at an even higher rate as it attempts to portray the disparate elements of college life in the age of political correctness.
Higher Learning builds its American microcosm on campus through three freshmen at Columbus University: Malik (Omar Epps), an up-and-coming track star; Kristen (Kristy Swanson), a naive girl from Orange County; and Remy (Michael Rapaport, a lonely son-of-a-survivalist who falls in with the local hatemongers.
The elements firmly in place for a provocative look at college life, Singleton instead becomes so intent on making each character a symbol that he neglects to make them human beings. Swanson provides sweet, likable charm as Kristen, even when her story gets lost in the film's third act, and Epps does fine as the easily influenced Malik.
The film's best performance belongs to the great Laurence Fishburne, who plays a West Indian professor who believes in the antiquated notion that a person should be judged on his or her merits. Even though Fishburne's character, much like his one in Boyz, serves more as a philosophical platform than a flesh-and-blood person, his character here seems more well-rounded and rises above the messages he has to deliver.
The underwritten script ill-serves Rapaport, presenting Remy as over the top from the get-go and leaving him nowhere to go except over the edge. Similarly, one of his idiot skinhead mentors (Cole Hauser), with his bald pate and mannered style, seems as if he's parodying Brando in Apocalypse Now. It proves an inappropriate laugh-inducer in what should be terrifying scenes.
As a director, Singleton, unfortunately, grows less interesting with each new film. He does best here ratcheting up tensions, even predictable ones. His biggest problem stems from the need to underline every point, preventing him from being a more economical filmmaker. In one early scene, the white Kristen unconsciously grabs her purse tighter while riding in an elevator with Malik. Singleton undermines what could be a memorable scene with a clumsy setup and extended moments that steal it of its power. He compounds the error later, when he makes a point of emphasizing the earlier scene's importance as if the viewer already had forgotten.
Stanley Clarke's intrusive score, which sounds like Bernard Herrmann having a really bad day, smothers much of the film and overemphasizes almost every point. Singleton does score with one well-done vignette following the aftermath of a rape that plays on the audience's hope and expectations about what will happen. It shows a brilliance and promise missing from the rest of the film.
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Labels: 90s, Brando, Fishburne
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Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Ill wind blows Coppola no good
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Ambitious Failure Blog-a-Thon being coordinated by William Speruzzi at This Savage Art.
By Edward Copeland
Having not seen The Cotton Club in more than 20 years (and remembering it fondly), I suspected that it might fit the bill for an "ambitious failure." Boy, was I right. It's hard now to see how I gave this film a pass in the first place except that I was young and naive and may have been giving Francis Ford Coppola (who for some reason dropped the Ford for this film) way too much credit.
In a way, I can excuse my initial exuberance: The Cotton Club had a helluva pedigree: The Godfather team of Coppola and Mario Puzo and produced by Robert Evans, who was Paramount Pictures' production head at the time of The Godfather. It also was co-written by William Kennedy, fresh off his Pulitzer Prize for the novel Ironweed. Music, mobsters, what could go wrong? Looking at it again now, just about everything. Perhaps if it had been a novel, it might have made some sense with its multitude of characters and storylines but in a barely over two-hour running time, the film sadly lacks focus. It also hurts that while there are some good performances, the cast doesn't come close to the talent assembled for The Godfather films. The movie overflows with atmosphere and great technical details but sorely lacks momentum. It starts out well with a great looking credit sequence (which notes something I forgot, that Richard Gere did his own cornet solos) before convincingly placing the viewer in 1928 Harlem, where Gere's musician gets more than he bargained for when he saves the life of Jewish gangster kingpin Dutch Schultz (James Remar, still menacing but a few miles removed from his bad guy in 48 Hrs.).
Rewatching it, it's interesting to compare the portrayals of Schultz and his numbers man Abbadaba Berman in this film and Billy Bathgate, the botched adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's good novel. I actually think Remar proves more interesting that Dustin Hoffman did in the later film but Allen Garfield's Berman here doesn't even seem like he's the same guy played so memorably by Steven Hill in the later movie. I digress: We're here to discuss the failures of The Cotton Club and there is no way around blaming it on its ambitions.
Here is a short laundry list that the film tries to encompass: racial discrimination where African Americans could perform in The Cotton Club, but not attend the shows; the waning influence of Jewish and Irish mobsters; tensions between Dutch's Jewish hoods trying to hone in on the action of African American crooks in Harlem; the approach of Lucky Luciano and Italian mobsters; light-skinned African Americans trying to pass for white; and the transition of silent films to sound. That's not even counting the tacked on plot strands of thwarted romance and brotherly conflict, among both Gere and Nicolas Cage as his aspiring hood brother and Gregory and Maurice Hines as a dancing team with different goals. That's a bit much for any movie to bear, especially without clocking in around four hours in length.
At times, Coppola does handle the transitions between his characters and story deftly, as in an early scene where we pass from Hines' storyline to Gere's simply by having the characters pass each other on the street. It doesn't help that the most interesting characters are the smallest ones while the leads come off as stiffs. There's a nice small role by Laurence Fishburne when he was still known as Larry who describes himself as a pimp, thief and gambler who only has two things to do: "One is to stay black and the other is to die." There's also interesting moments provided by Lisa Jane Persky as Dutch's angry wife, Gwen Verdon as Gere's former showgirl mom and Tom Waits as a manager at The Cotton Club. There's also the wonderfully droll performance of Julian Beck as Dutch's aging strongarm Sol, who is given to saying odd things such as when asked about his parents, saying he had no parents, "they found me in a garbage pail" and tossing nonsequiturs such as "I used to race rats as a kid."
Still, two actors alone probably deserve the credit for me liking The Cotton Club as much as I did then and providing what I like best about it today: Bob Hoskins as Owney Madden, the Irish gangster who owns the Cotton Club, and Fred Gwynne as Frenchie, his right-hand man. As he usually was in those days, Hoskins is a real spark plug as Madden. When Dutch bursts out in an act of violence, he declares that someone "needs to cut out your brain and pickle it." When he acts as a mediator between Dutch and a rival gangster, he forces them to seal the deal by shoving their hands together and declaring "Shake fucking hands." Ultimately, it's his comic, touching relationship with Gwynne that remains the best thing about the movie. Frenchie advises Owney never to trust anyone with a nickname. When Owney points out that Frenchie is a nickname, Frenchie replies, "That's different — I'm trustworthy." When Cage, desperate for cash abducts Frenchie, Gere is forced to deliver the ransom and tries to convince Frenchie he's not involved with his brother's scheme. "I see what I see, I hear what I hear, then I make up my mind," Frenchie replies. When Frenchie mistakenly believes that Owney only offered $500 for his release when Madden really coughed up $50,000, their reunion ends up with Frenchie smashing Madden's pocket watch to smithereens, then pulling out a wrapped box containing a platinum replacement. Truly, Frenchie and Owney are the only love story in The Cotton Club that works.
Coppola does provide many nice set pieces, especially among the musical numbers such as Lonette McKee's rendition of "Ill Wind," the climax of all the stories in the train station and the nice followup to a scene of violence as blood drips onto Diane Lane's cheek before she realizes it's coming from the chandelier. However, he's also capable of creating some ridiculous scenes as well, such as when Gere and Lane start slapping each other as they dance and the people around them start aping the move, assuming it's a new dance. That worked well and with laughs years later, when Twin Peaks did a similar scene with a crazed Leland, but it seems completely out of place here. Also, some of his connections don't quite work. Gregory Hines' conflict with The Cotton Club's backstage enforcer (Ron Karabatsos) leads him to tell Fishburne that he's going to "kill him with his tap shoes" but when the sequence come that contrasts Hines' tap number with a death, it's not Karabatsos on the receiving end, but Remar, so it doesn't make sense. Overall, The Cotton Club had so much going for it, it's a shame that it didn't work out better. Hell, the making of the movie itself inspired a real-life murder among would-be movie producers. Even in real life, The Cotton Club proved to inspire failed ambitions.
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Labels: 80s, Blog-a-thons, Coppola, Dustin Hoffman, Fishburne, Nicolas Cage, Twin Peaks
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Saturday, December 16, 2006
Stranger than fact
By Edward Copeland
When filmmakers decide to tell true stories, they have a tendency to combine real people into composite characters and change facts to suit their dramatic purposes. Often, these things can be forgiven. Other times they cannot and that is the case with Emilio Estevez's Bobby, which creates a fictional world in the Ambassador Hotel, the site of Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 assassination, without apparent rhyme or reason, and burdens the movie with an ensemble where capable actors are an endangered species, not that there are any full-blooded characters worth wasting on performers with talent anyway.
The RFK assassination, while certainly well known and talked about, has never been given as much detail as other shootings of political leaders, so I was surprised to learn that five other people were wounded when Sirhan Sirhan opened fire on the presidential candidate in the hotel's kitchen. You always hear about John Connally being wounded when JFK was killed and while Tim McCarthy and Thomas Delahunty have faded from memory, everyone knows that James Brady also took a bullet when John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan. I've never seen anything that mentioned the other victims of the RFK shooting, which makes Bobby all the more infuriating because he gives their wounds to fictional creations instead of the real people who were shot. On top of the substituting of fiction for fact, Bobby also gets hampered by Estevez's frequent use of actual news footage of the time. The footage of RFK and other 1968 events are so compelling, I couldn't help but wish that he'd opted to make a full-fledged documentary instead. We keep being jerked away from the real footage to the manufactured one, overpopulated with a large cast of underwritten characters, many of whom are played by weak performers such as Demi Moore as a boozy singer, Ashton Kutcher giving perhaps the worst portrayal of an acid-dropping hippie since an episode of the 1960s Dragnet, Helen Hunt as — hell, I'm still not sure who she is supposed to be or why she's in this movie.
This doesn't even get to the subplot of Lindsay Lohan deciding to marry Elijah Wood so that he would be sent to Germany instead of Vietnam or Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty as would-be campaign volunteers who decide to spend the day of the California primary on a drug-induced excursion. Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte get some nice, quiet moments, but their story doesn't add up to much either and, surprisingly, the performer who comes off best is Sharon Stone as the hotel manicurist who is married to the hotel manager (William H. Macy), who is boinking switchboard operator Heather Graham on the side. Sound like a bit much? It is.
The only scenes that really seem to work with any sense of drama are those set in the kitchen with an all-too-brief appearance by Laurence Fishburne as the head chef and Freddy Rodriguez as a member of the staff obsessed with that night's Dodgers game. Rodriguez also serves the function as the man who first leaned down to the wounded RFK in that widely seen photo, though of course he's fictionalized and has no connection to the real person. Still, the kitchen scenes seem to be the only ones that come alive with any discussions of real issues as opposed to standard boilerplate melodrama that afflicts the rest of the pointless characters.
Estevez obviously aspires to make an Altmanesque portrait of a time and place. I met Robert Altman, I wish Robert Altman had been a friend of mine but Mr. Estevez, you're no Robert Altman. Hell, you aren't even Paul Thomas Anderson as far as pretenders to the Altman throne go. Estevez does have some nice moves and shots as a director but as a screenwriter, he sucks (and I'll be kind and not even mention his acting appearance as Moore's husband).
I keep coming back to the idea of how much better Bobby would have been if it had been an actual documentary. A cursory Internet search seems to indicate that many of the people who were really at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 are still alive and their stories certainly have to be more compelling than the silly ones Estevez has concocted. Many comparisons have been made to the late, great Altman and the parallels proliferate, only minus top caliber actors, a marginally interesting script or a sure hand behind the camera. Hell, Estevez even creates the character of a foreign journalist, only she's from Czechoslovakia instead of England and she's certainly no Geraldine Chaplin. He even swipes a bit of the Upstairs, Downstairs element from Gosford Park, only Robert Kennedy ends up being the murder victim instead of Michael Gambon.
Even if you went into Bobby blind, odds are you'd guess that all these seemingly disconnected characters would somehow end up in that ballroom at the same time to see RFK just as all the characters gathered to see Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) sing at the climactic rally in Nashville. Now, how so many of them end up in the hotel's kitchen pantry to get fictionally shot in Bobby is beyond me. Because the fictional footage proves so boring, watching this movie ends up playing like it's "Waiting for Sirhan."
In a strange way, the story unfolds in such a mindnumbing fashion, you grow impatient waiting for RFK to get shot — not that Estevez offers anything illuminating there. Once it happens, the movie turns mostly into a musical montage of reaction shots, interspersed with some of RFK's speeches. He even is so imaginative to pick "The Sounds of Silence" for the soundtrack. I suppose I should be surprised that Harvey Weinstein suckered the waiters and the florists at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association into nominating Bobby for best drama, but I know better. Then again, maybe the focus on kitchen staff hits too close to home for the HFPA to ignore.
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Labels: 00s, Altman, Belafonte, Demi, Fishburne, Gambon, Hopkins, Sharon Stone
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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Fearing we are powerful beyond measure
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."
Marianne Williamson
By Edward Copeland
Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne) has young Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer) read the quote that he has framed on the wall of his home office as he tries to connect with the 11-year-old, a spelling prodigy from inner-city Los Angeles he's coaching for a hopeful trip to the national spelling bee in Washington. Akeelah and the Bee is a very good film that fails to make the leap to greatness only because of the cliches and formula turns that can be seen coming a mile away in writer-director Doug Atchison's screenplay (and about three musical montages too many).
Despite these handicaps though, Akeelah and the Bee still soars, thanks especially to young Palmer who really carries the entire film on her young shoulders.
Sure, there are many fine actors around her (Fishburne, Angela Bassett and Curtis Armstrong, to name a few), but the entire enterprise wouldn't prove as riveting and touching as it is if not for Keke Palmer. She's got the sass and the smarts of her character down pat and truly makes a viewer care for her plight even while the film's structure makes it clear how the beats of the story are going to play out.
Fishburne, who also was one of the film's producers, plays Larabee well, as you'd expect, but it's very reminiscent of characters he's played before. Bassett is good, though she's saddled with the role of the skeptical mom who predictably comes to cheer on her daughter's spelling quest.
For fans of HBO's great television series The Wire, there is much in Akeelah and the Bee that will play as if it's a companion piece to this season's story arc, with failing inner-city schools and even the presence of Julito McCullum (Namond on The Wire) as Akeelah's would-be gang-banger older brother.
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Labels: 00s, Fishburne, HBO, The Wire
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Friday, December 02, 2005
From the Vault: Boyz N the Hood
With Boyz N the Hood, writer-director John Singleton not only makes a stunning film debut but produces a movie whose urgency more than compensates for its flaws.
Singleton, a 23-year-old graduate of the USC film school, belongs to the burgeoning group of African-American filmmakers moving beyond the myths and stereotypes of their community and producing some of the best and most important films today.
In simple terms, Boyz stems from the genre of the coming-of-age film, focusing on four friends, much like Stand By Me. Boyz goes so far as to reference Rob Reiner's film by making a none-too-subtle visual nod to it.
Time and location set the boys in Boyz apart from the boys in Stand By Me. These young men live in South Central L.A. where the continuous sounds don't include bouncy tunes like "Lollipop" but instead sudden bursts of gunfire and the constant hum of police helicopters overhead.
The story begins in 1984 when 10-year-old Tre Stiles (Desi Arnez Hines II) gets in trouble at school for the umpteenth time and his frustrated single mom (Angela Bassett) sends him to live with his father Furious (Larry Fishburne). There, Tre gets to spend more time with his weekend friends Ricky, Doughboy and Chris, where even at this young age, their lives are being defined for the future.
Tre shows signs of turning around. Ricky pins his hopes on a football career. Doughboy and Chris get arrested for the first time. Singleton establishes the tone of the film with these early scenes, showing nostalgic looks back at childhood contrasted with the neighborhood's increasing violence.
Following the 1984 sequences, the film flashes forward seven years, showing all four kids following the same paths set for them at 10. Tre (now played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) has a steady girlfriend and plans to major in business at college. Ricky (Morris Chestnut) has already fathered a child, but still dreams of gridiron glory at USC. Doughboy and Chris (rap artist Ice Cube and Redge Green) still find trouble with the law but the relative innocence of shoplifting has been upgraded to drug dealing and gang violence.
Singleton makes his main message clear with a statistic that opens the film noting that one out of every 21 African-American men will be murdered, most at the hands of other black men. From those startling numbers come Singleton's central theme that the killing must stop and that if fathers took a more active role in their sons' lives, as Furious does with Tre, things would turn out differently and young men wouldn't turn to gangs for guidance.
Fishburne does well as the concerned father despite being saddled with the task of painting the broad strokes of the film's message in often stilted speeches.
Other points touched upon by the film include the use of sports as an escape hatch from the hood and the mistreatment of women as nothing more than sex objects, though the latter is more hinted at than explored.
The film finished shooting long before the Rodney King incident, but it raises questions about the L.A.P.D. Interestingly, the "bad" cop is black, suggesting the problem might be less about racism and more about something systemically wrong in the department.
The other actors perform fairly well, especially Ice Cube, who in many ways becomes the film's most important character. It's clear, even as a youngster, that Doughboy is doomed, but Singleton paints a sympathetic portrait of the character without glorifying or condoning his criminality.
Singleton keeps the film moving at a solid clip, creating an atmosphere where growing up goes on even in a neighborhood that often resembles a war zone. He portrays the troublemakers as people who commit heinous acts but have no moral grounding to recognize their actions are wrong.
It doesn't give away much to say that tragedy strikes the close-knit group. Singleton foreshadows drive-by shootings constantly. After the incident happens, the remaining friends eagerly seek revenge.
Admittedly, the vengeance provides catharsis for the audience who cheered it on, but Singleton is smart enough to show the "bad guys" sitting around eating and talking the same way the protagonists do before the payback is delivered. These young men aren't evil villains but are kids raised in a near-impossible situation where few survive and even fewer succeed.
Singleton has made an impressive debut and it will be interesting to watch where he goes from here. Still, future films don't matter now because Boyz N the Hood not only needs to be seen, it had to be made.
Tweet
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Singleton, a 23-year-old graduate of the USC film school, belongs to the burgeoning group of African-American filmmakers moving beyond the myths and stereotypes of their community and producing some of the best and most important films today.
In simple terms, Boyz stems from the genre of the coming-of-age film, focusing on four friends, much like Stand By Me. Boyz goes so far as to reference Rob Reiner's film by making a none-too-subtle visual nod to it.
Time and location set the boys in Boyz apart from the boys in Stand By Me. These young men live in South Central L.A. where the continuous sounds don't include bouncy tunes like "Lollipop" but instead sudden bursts of gunfire and the constant hum of police helicopters overhead.
The story begins in 1984 when 10-year-old Tre Stiles (Desi Arnez Hines II) gets in trouble at school for the umpteenth time and his frustrated single mom (Angela Bassett) sends him to live with his father Furious (Larry Fishburne). There, Tre gets to spend more time with his weekend friends Ricky, Doughboy and Chris, where even at this young age, their lives are being defined for the future.
Tre shows signs of turning around. Ricky pins his hopes on a football career. Doughboy and Chris get arrested for the first time. Singleton establishes the tone of the film with these early scenes, showing nostalgic looks back at childhood contrasted with the neighborhood's increasing violence.
Following the 1984 sequences, the film flashes forward seven years, showing all four kids following the same paths set for them at 10. Tre (now played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) has a steady girlfriend and plans to major in business at college. Ricky (Morris Chestnut) has already fathered a child, but still dreams of gridiron glory at USC. Doughboy and Chris (rap artist Ice Cube and Redge Green) still find trouble with the law but the relative innocence of shoplifting has been upgraded to drug dealing and gang violence.
Singleton makes his main message clear with a statistic that opens the film noting that one out of every 21 African-American men will be murdered, most at the hands of other black men. From those startling numbers come Singleton's central theme that the killing must stop and that if fathers took a more active role in their sons' lives, as Furious does with Tre, things would turn out differently and young men wouldn't turn to gangs for guidance.
Fishburne does well as the concerned father despite being saddled with the task of painting the broad strokes of the film's message in often stilted speeches.
Other points touched upon by the film include the use of sports as an escape hatch from the hood and the mistreatment of women as nothing more than sex objects, though the latter is more hinted at than explored.
The film finished shooting long before the Rodney King incident, but it raises questions about the L.A.P.D. Interestingly, the "bad" cop is black, suggesting the problem might be less about racism and more about something systemically wrong in the department.
The other actors perform fairly well, especially Ice Cube, who in many ways becomes the film's most important character. It's clear, even as a youngster, that Doughboy is doomed, but Singleton paints a sympathetic portrait of the character without glorifying or condoning his criminality.
Singleton keeps the film moving at a solid clip, creating an atmosphere where growing up goes on even in a neighborhood that often resembles a war zone. He portrays the troublemakers as people who commit heinous acts but have no moral grounding to recognize their actions are wrong.
It doesn't give away much to say that tragedy strikes the close-knit group. Singleton foreshadows drive-by shootings constantly. After the incident happens, the remaining friends eagerly seek revenge.
Admittedly, the vengeance provides catharsis for the audience who cheered it on, but Singleton is smart enough to show the "bad guys" sitting around eating and talking the same way the protagonists do before the payback is delivered. These young men aren't evil villains but are kids raised in a near-impossible situation where few survive and even fewer succeed.
Singleton has made an impressive debut and it will be interesting to watch where he goes from here. Still, future films don't matter now because Boyz N the Hood not only needs to be seen, it had to be made.
Tweet
Labels: 90s, Fishburne, R. Reiner
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
