Wednesday, June 19, 2013
James Gandolfini (1961-2013)
Sometimes, when the greatest of our artists mark the upper reaches of their golden years or they've announced an ominous health prognosis, I plan in advance what type of appreciation to write. However, when an unexpected death such as James Gandolfini's occurs at the age of 51, the task proves harder — I expected a lot more to come from this gifted actor, not this sudden, cruel punctuation mark of finality stamped on a career that promised us so much more.
Some of the films Gandolfini made during his time on the show weren't always the best, but he seldom failed to deliver whether it was his military prison warden in The Last Castle, his philandering husband in the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There or, most especially, his gay hit man in The Mexican. Perhaps his finest screen work came in In the Loop, the satire about an attempt by D.C. insiders to stop hawks from starting a war. He also did a fine turn in the HBO movie Cinema Verite about the making of the landmark TV documentary on the Loud family in the 1970s that could be called the first reality show. His voice also proved perfect in Spike Jonze's film of Where the Wild Things Are. Among recent films, he and David Chase reunited in Chase's feature directing debut Not Fade Away, and he appeared in Zero Dark Thirty.
I wish I could have seen Gandolfini's Tony-nominated performance in Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage. Gandolfini also didn't limit himself to acting, serving as producer and interviewer for two great HBO documentaries related to war: Alive Day Memories and Wartorn: 1861-2010.
Several works lay in various stages of production, so I expect we have some more James Gandolfini performances to anticipate, but not remotely as many as we should. RIP Mr. Gandolfini.
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Labels: Alec Baldwin, Coens, David Chase, Gandolfini, Geena Davis, HBO, J. Lange, Obituary, T. Scott, Television, The Sopranos, Travolta
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Monday, May 20, 2013
Prison of My Dreams
By Edward Copeland
As I snap the cuffs on Will Smith's wrists, I try to look stern and sympathetic simultaneously. "I take no pleasure in having to do this, Mr. Smith, but it's for your own good as well as the good of the public. Hopefully, your stay will be a short one." I'm taking Smith to serve his sentence in the Copeland Penitentiary for Bad Film Ideas. The actor received a summary conviction with the recent announcement of his interest of remaking Sam Peckinpah's classic Western The Wild Bunch. We had no choice. Trying to do a new version of such a revered film would be bad enough, but when you read the details that explain it would be a modern version involving the DEA and drug cartels, it sounds as if it's only stealing the title. We couldn't risk this debacle-in-development from getting to pre-production. Smith needed to be jailed until he regained his senses.
Now, if Smith breaks quickly, his sentence should be short since this idea didn't originate with him. Warner Bros. has toyed with the idea of a remake for more than a decade with various names such as the late director Tony Scott and stars such as Tom Cruise mentioned. If it were possible to put an entire studio into permanent solitary confinement, I would do it. Johnny Depp, pictured above being taken the prison to serve his time, had a longer time behind bars when he announced his intention to make a new version of The Thin Man and to take on William Powell's trademark role of Nick Charles. Thankfully, that talk disappeared once we locked up Depp for awhile and he hasn't mentioned it since. It's great that Depp loves The Thin Man — but the original remains and people should watch it. (If only the prison existed before Gus Van Sant got his cuckoo idea of doing a shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho in color.)
Look at the case of something that happened before the Copeland Penitentiary opened when Russell Brand remade Arthur with Brand in the Dudley Moore role and Helen Mirren taking over for John Gielgud. It sounded like a bad idea on paper, looked more horrendous when commercials and trailers appeared and received mostly bad reviews. (I did enjoy that the original in 1981 grossed more than the remake's budget which flopped badly.) What disturbed me was that the original Arthur never received a DVD release in the proper ratio and when the remake came out, they released a Blu-ray that forced you to get it with its awful sequel Arthur 2: On the Rocks.
Therein lies the dangers of remakes of great films. With technology constantly changing and money always an issue, at some point they'll start leaving us with the fresher versions, assuming that younger audiences won't know or care to see the classics. I'd try to talk them into how much money they'd save if they just re-released older films to theaters without having to spend all that money on new movies, but they won't go for it. Besides, making movies cost WAY too much to make and see today and the best stuff gets made on television anyway.
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Labels: 10s, Cruise, Depp, Gielgud, Hitchcock, Mirren, Peckinpah, Remakes, T. Scott, Television, Van Sant, W. Smith, William Powell
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Monday, May 16, 2011
Twenty-Five Years and Still Climbing
On March 3, 1969 the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to ensure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world.
They succeeded.
Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School.
The flyers call it:
TOP GUN
By le0pard13
If you were born during the 1980s (and a good number of you reading this were), congratulations. You entered this world when action movies really came into their own in Hollywood — I also have ties older than many of you, but that's besides the point. Apparently, actor Tom Cruise began his meteoric rise on screen at the same time. And pretty much both coalesced in one breakthrough film, for better or for worse. 1986's Top Gun, released 25 years ago today, was that development, and we've been living with its effects ever since.
If the 1970s offered up the rise of the antihero in cinema (The French Connection, Get Carter, Taxi Driver, etc.), then the '80s were the reflexive kickback. The Me Decade presented us with the last of the Vietnam War, Watergate and more than one oil crisis for good measure. A dim aftermath in people's lives was to be expected. Of course, film folk seized upon the lethargy and the economic repercussions with an unmatched creative gusto in that same period (still and all, let's just agree here and now to not discuss disco). Whatever doldrums and cynicism the '70s decade left behind, however, films of that subsequent period seemed to relish in jolting that out of moviegoers.
(web definition)
Action film is a film genre where one or more heroes is thrust into a series of challenges that require physical feats, extended fights and frenetic chases. Story and character development are generally secondary to explosions, fist fights, gunplay and car chases.
Top Gun is likely the slickest exercise in both '80s reverie and taking the action movie up a big notch. Who cares if they were empty calories? I mean, Reagan was president, tax cuts and military spending went way up and all was well in the world (even if we became more of a debtor nation during this time and the threat of the Cold War going hot still hung in a precarious balance). We were back, baby! Nothing was going to dispel that notion with this film, at least for two years until John Carpenter let the cat of the bag with They Live, but I digress. And the All-American producer tandem of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer assembled a mighty force to deliver a film worthy of that unique period of time.
MAVERICK: I feel the need...
MAVERICK, GOOSE: ...the need for speed!
You may think the conglomeration of Tom Cruise, a young Tony Scott serving as director and a cast of the best groomed man flesh in Hollywood at the time achieved box office greatness by their mere presence on the set. I mean was there ever a handsomer lot than Tom, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards (with hair no less), Rick Rossovich (who offered the best beach pose ever in a movie), and young faced Adrian Pasdar, Tim Robbins and other magazine model wannabes sprinkled among the cast of movie aviators? You'd think all of that made it auspicious, but you'd be wrong. The single most important thing Don and Jerry ever did to make this film a success (and it was the top-grossing movie for 1986) was bringing the Department of Defense into the gig.
Without the DoD's involvement, none of the best parts in the film would have ever made it to celluloid. Period. Want to nest your camera operators on a aircraft carrier or have real Top Gun instructors execute wicked dog fights around Miramar Naval Air Station or perform split-S maneuvers with abandon in real aircraft before your cinematographer's lenses? Just ain't happening without the Pentagon's OK. I give credit to director Scott's commercial television experience in framing it slickly though (along with the film's wonderfully iconic '80s soundtrack matched across its scenes) but none of the following would be half as good without access to the real Naval hardware:
The story of Maverick (Cruise) and Goose (Edwards) making their way to Fighter Weapons School is not the best example of story or Hollywood screenwriting [*cough* stupid... my wife's mutter), but then again, audiences don't come to summer action movies for character development, yet there has to be some dialogue with a little snap ("You live your life between your legs, Mav."). Still, there were enough crowd-pleasing and predictable moments to keep scenes moving along till we got to the next F-14 aerial sequence. Though it should be noted, even with the beautiful Kelly McGillis and the cute-as-a-button Meg Ryan in the cast, the spotlight here is on the men throughout this film. The macho vibe in evidence is at a Spinal Tap eleven.
"The plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies room."
Additionally, Tony Scott imbued Top Gun with a MTV-like flash which naturally drew a younger audience into the mix. That, along with his penchant for saturated colors and neon lighting (but before his more frenetic camera style and editing extremes manifested themselves), countered the grim and grit of the previous decade's film fare. It was dazzling by comparison. Plus, he had at his disposal a young Tom Cruise cresting in popularity. Although, I can't say his on-screen chemistry with McGillis matched anything close to that of his chumming around with his Radar Intercept Officer Goose or sparking up against his nemesis aviator Ice Man (Kilmer).
For better or worse, Top Gun set a standard 25 years ago in the '80s for star power, action formula, and box office results, especially for those not named George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Blockbuster thrillers such as Jaws and sci-fi fantasies (Star Wars) from the previous era would have another genre vying for summer movie glory from here on out (though it could be argued the debut of Raiders of the Lost Ark really heralded it all five years earlier). Yet Top Gun 's heavy-duty use of real military apparatus brought another distinct aspect all of those films lacked. From this point forward, because of Top Gun 's success, studios and the military got even more buddy-buddy. Each had something the other wanted.
Our armed forces didn't begin a liaison with Hollywood with this film (that goes back to World War I), but it did reach a new level. From this point, filmmakers who wanted greater access to the same toys Paramount got to use, and could boast of an authenticity they were selling to the movie public (who now had more of an appetite for such things since Vietnam was so "last decade"), did so. And in exchange for more influence in film production, the Pentagon (who received more favorable light during the Decade of Excess) got an indirect boost to recruiting efforts whenever they became more involved. According to the Navy, aviator recruitment went up 500% after Top Gun was released. You still see all of this in play today, in fact (the latest being Battle: Los Angeles).
Top Gun arrived at a perfect time and place that guaranteed success. It fed into the public's need to rebound from a decade most of that generation wanted to forget ever happened. And it did so in an escapist style that studios continue to emulate (hint: combat accuracy needn't apply, if you've got the hardware to back you up). It could be just me, but did I spot a Pete "Maverick" Mitchell-like swagger to Chris Pine's James T. Kirk (right down to the bike he rides) from the recent Star Trek reboot? Hmm... The film's jet wash is still making waves two and a half decades later. Of course, all of this context is mute, if you happen to believe Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary's subversive take of Top Gun in the film Sleep With Me. Makes that last shot of those two F-14s flying off toward the sunset together something else entirely.
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Labels: 80s, Cruise, John Carpenter, Lucas, Meg Ryan, Movie Tributes, Spielberg, Star Wars, T. Scott, Tarantino, Tim Robbins, Val Kilmer
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Saturday, August 14, 2010
From the Vault: Pauline Kael (1919-2001)
Even though it's been 10 years since Pauline Kael wrote a review for The New Yorker, her death Monday at 82 still leaves a gaping hole for lovers of movies, writing and criticism. She might not have shared her thoughts regularly anymore, but knowing that someone with her insight, talent and tough-love of the film medium existed was oddly comforting. Kael, arguably the best and most influential film critic of all time, became so revered in her retirement that film buffs everywhere would leap on any rare interview with her, hoping they'd get a witty, dead-on take at some of the movies released after she put down her pen. I always longed for her opinion of Fargo.
"Movies are made, criticism is written by the use of intelligence, talent, taste, emotion, education, imagination and discrimination. There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of 'if-you-know-so much-about-the-art-of-the-film, why-don't-you-make-movies?' You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good."
In a 1998 interview with Modern Maturity magazine, Kael said she was aware of her influence on other film writers.
"I think my influence was largely in style, not substance. Other critics sound like me because my writing has influenced them. They've rarely agreed with me about movies."
In the same interview, she also dodged whether her influence extended to filmmakers as well as critics.
"I'd rather not say. If I say yes, I'm an egotist, and if I say no, I've wasted my life."
Part of the power of Kael's work was that she could be admired and appreciated, even when you disagreed with her. A reader had a great time reading her, even if he or she felt her underlying opinion was completely misguided.
She earned that power because it was always clear that she loved movies and the opinion she offered belonged to no one else. Her singular voice was unmistakable.
What made Kael even greater was that she wasn't someone who gave a rubber stamp of approval to every art house offering or hated every mainstream crowd-pleaser.
Her 1969 essay "Trash, Art and the Movies" for Harper's magazine ranked No. 42 on a New York University survey of the best journalism of the century. In it, she summed up this philosophy when she wrote, "Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them."
She knew how to keep us interested. A few of my favorite examples:
On Dances With Wolves: "(Kevin) Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. ... There's nothing affected about Costner's acting or directing. You hear his laid-back, surfer accent; you see his deliberately goofy faints and falls, and all the close-ups of his handsomeness. This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.)"
On Top Gun: "What is this commercial selling? It's just selling, because that's what the producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director, Tony (Make It Glow) Scott, know how to do. Selling is what they think moviemaking is about.... Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn't concerned with recruiting but with being a poster."
On The Godfather Part II: "This film wouldn't have been made if the first hadn't been a hit.... When you see this new picture, you wonder how (Francis Ford) Coppola won the fights. Maybe the answer is that they knew they couldn't make it without him. After you see it, you feel they can't make any picture without him."
On Nashville: "At Robert Altman's new, almost-three-hour film, Nashville, you don't get drunk on images, you're not overpowered — you get elated. ... It's a pure emotional high, and you don't come down when the picture is over; you take it with you."
Given her amazing career output, one could go on quoting her forever, but better to read her and discover (or rediscover) her best moments for yourself. Kael's passion makes every review she wrote seem current, even if the film is decades old.
Kael once said about her work, "I was a film critic the way somebody might write poetry, for fun or love." It showed.
Reviewing Kael's work in The New York Review of Books in 1995, Louis Menand may best have summed up Kael's appeal.
"Kael was the most brilliantly ad hoc critic of her time, and she made it possible to care about movies without feeling pompous or giddy by showing that what comes first in everyone's experience of a movie isn't the form or the idea, but the sensation, and that this is just as true for moviegoers who have been taught to intellectualize their responses to art as it is for everyone else."
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Labels: Altman, Coppola, Costner, Criticism, Kael, Obituary, T. Scott
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Saturday, May 29, 2010
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)
How many odd turns can one man's life and career take? There's probably no limit, but Dennis Hopper, who died at 74 after a long battle with cancer, took a lot of them: From young actor of film and TV in the 1950s to counterculture icon of the 1960s and '70s (while adding director to his resume and still working with the likes of John Wayne); from nearly unemployable because of drugs to a career comeback in the mid-1980s before frequent returns to TV. On the side, he managed to find time to be a prolific photographer, painter and sculptor. His later years also brought the strangest twist for the hippie hero: he became a Republican. Still, it's his film and TV work that will be his legacy.
An interest in acting led Hopper to the fabled Actors Studio in New York where he studied under Lee Strasberg for five years. As was the case with many of the studio's actors, much of his early work was on 1950s television, but he made his film debut with friend and fellow student James Dean in 1955's Rebel Without a
Cause. He worked again with Dean in the last of Dean's three films, Giant, in 1956. Much of his early work both on television and on film was spent in westerns including 1957's Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as Billy Clanton opposite Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. The same year, Hopper got to be an emperor, Napoleon no less, in Irwin Allen's The Story of Mankind. For the next several years, his work was restricted mainly to television, including The Twilight Zone and The Defenders. His first crossover toward the counterculture might have occurred in 1964, when he played the title role in an episode of Petticoat Junction titled "Bobbie Jo and the Beatnik." Hopper still did plenty of westerns, appearing opposite John Wayne for the first time in 1965's The Sons of Katie Elder. Two years later brought Hopper's first full-fledged entrance into the drug culture as far as movies were concerned as he co-starred with Peter Fonda in The Trip, which was directed by Roger Corman and written by Jack Nicholson. That same year, he appeared in Cool Hand Luke. In 1968, Hopper appeared in Clint Eastwood's Hang 'Em High.With 1969, Hopper embarked on his first directing project: starring with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson in the counterculture classic Easy Rider. The same year, he also got to be one of the bad guys opposite Wayne's Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Two years later, he starred and directed again (and provided the story) in The
Last Movie, which even featured an acting turn by director Samuel Fuller. Following a few other films, he became the second of many actors to put their stamp on Patricia Highsmith's famed serial killer Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders' 1977 The American Friend. During his days of heavy real life drug use, Hopper danced through the role of a photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Despite his out-of-control private life, Hopper still managed to snag roles, though nothing of real significance either on film or television, despite small roles for major directors such as Coppola's Rumble Fish, Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend and Robert Altman's O.C. and Stiggs. Then came 1986 and Hopper's huge comeback. Two roles brought him back on the radar and earned him respect. First, came what may end up being his most memorable role as Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Booth was one of the most bizarre villains ever dreamed up for a movie, frightening and funny, prone to use nitrous oxide as he assaults the woman he's obsessed with and seldom producing a sentence without at least one use of the F word. The second film was far more conventional. Hoosiers, the tale of an Indiana high school basketball team, gave Hopper the role of an alcoholic assistant coach opposite Gene Hackman. Both movies were the stuff of Oscar buzz and come nomination day, Entertainment Tonight even set up cameras and watched with Hopper as the nominations were announced on TV. "They went with Hoosiers," he said as his name was announced. You could tell he was happy to be nominated but at the same time slightly disappointed that the Academy went with the safer choice. There was a third 1986 film, one which Hopper publicly disowned, but which I think he shouldn't be ashamed of. He gave an over-the-top turn in an over-the-top and absolutely great satire Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. He should be proud of the avenging Texas ranger, venturing through caves with mini-chainsaws in a holster while he sang, "Bringing in the Sheaves."After that, he worked steadily, though often as the broadest of villains. There were still textured performances to be found such as the hermit with the blowup doll in 1987's River's Edge. He got to be one of Theresa Russell's wealthy victims in Black Widow. In 1988, he returned to the director's chair with Colors, a police vs. gang drama starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. When Penn took his first try at directing, Hopper snagged a role in Penn's The Indian Runner. One of his most enjoyable later turns comes in the very
underrated 1990 film Flashback, where he played a long-on-the-lam '60s activist who is being taken back to jail by FBI agent Kiefer Sutherland. The movie is funny and full of fresh twists and deserves a better reputation than it has — hell, it deserves a reputation, period. In 1993, he was a truly busy man with a mix of good and goofy performances in films that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He was charming in the so-so Boiling Point, part of the solid ensemble in John Dahl's Red Rock West and the evil King Koopa in Super Mario Bros. His finest 1993 moment though came in a superb acting duet with Christopher Walken in the Quentin Tarantino-scripted, Tony Scott-directed True Romance, really the best part of the entire film.
Following the next year, he created another memorable screen villain in the surprise hit thriller Speed staring Keanu Reeves and boosting Sandra Bullock to stardom. His 1995 villain was not nearly something to be as proud of, but then neither was the movie as he got trapped in the Kevin Costner disaster
Waterworld. The next year, he got a smaller role as a bigwig in art in artist Julian Schnabel's directing debut, Basquiat. 1999 brought him parts in EdTV and the nearly forgotten Jesus' Son starring Billy Crudup. One of his last memorable villains came late in the run of the first season of television's 24, when the writers realized they had killed off all their villains too early and needed a big one to fill out the remaining hours in their first day. Hopper filled the part as Victor Drazen, a Serbian war criminal with a bad accent and a grudge against Jack Bauer. Most of his films after that were forgettable, though he did appear in another installment in George Romero's zombie series, Land of the Dead, a right-wing try at making a satire about a Michael Moore-type character called An American Carol, a short-lived TV series titled E-Ring and a part in a TV version of the movie Crash. Despite his late turn toward the GOP, Hopper did admit, as did many Republicans, that in the 2008 election that after voting for Bush twice, he was voting for Obama. During the long final months of his illness, Hopper did manage to make a public appearance March 26 looking very frail to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. According to IMDb, an unconfirmed report places him in a completed film and another one in post-production, so there may be some more Dennis Hopper to see. As prolific as he was though, I doubt anyone has seen all his work that's out there now. R.I.P. Mr. Hopper. In dreams, we walk, with you.
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Labels: Altman, Coppola, Corman, Duvall, Eastwood, Fuller, Hackman, James Dean, K. Douglas, K. Sutherland, Lancaster, Lynch, Nicholson, Obituary, Peckinpah, Sean Penn, T. Scott, Tarantino, Walken, Wayne
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Wednesday, April 21, 2010
From the Vault: True Romance
When Reservoir Dogs came out last year, some critics suggested writer-director Quentin Tarantino had spent too much time working in a video store. While I still admire Reservoir Dogs, those critics may have had a point based on Tarantino's screenplay for Tony Scott's film True Romance.
A strange puree of various genres and memorable plot devices, True Romance frequently is a likable though ultimately unsatisfying romp.
Christian Slater stars as Clarence, a young Detroit man who spends his life working in a comic book store until an apparent chance encounter with a woman named Alabama (Patricia Arquette) begins a strange chain reaction of events.
As the plot unfolds, so much deja vu washes over the audience that the viewer risks drowning in nostalgia. The script snatches bits from Easy Rider, bits from countless on-the-run films and a final result that plays like a poor man's Wild at Heart, including a dream Elvis (Val Kilmer) who offers Slater advice.
Scott downplays his usual glitzy style for this low-end road picture but as is usually the case, the Top Gun director fails to deliver anything substantial.
True Romance does have some merit. It contains some strong acting, especially a small role by Bronson Pinchot, James Gandolfini as a ruthless gangster named Virgil, and, in the film's most memorable scene, a memorable duet between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken.
On the whole, True Romance ends up being a quirky film whose positive factors can't overcome its negative attributes.
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Labels: 90s, Elvis, Gandolfini, Hopper, Meg Ryan, T. Scott, Tarantino, Val Kilmer, Walken
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