Tuesday, October 01, 2013
From the Vault: Natural Born Killers
BLOGGER'S NOTE: I originally wrote this review (with some additions for this event) upon Natural Born Killers' original 1994 release. I'm re-posting it for The Oliver Stone Blogathon concluding Oct. 6 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
Forget The Doors. This film from the ever-controversial and increasingly dull (in all senses of the word) director marks the most extreme example yet of Stone spanking the monkey perpetually perched on his back. Quentin Tarantino* originally wrote the screenplay for Natural Born Killers, but Stone and co-conspirators David Veloz and Richard Rutowski butchered Tarantino's script to the point that he's now credited only with its story.
The film contains two halves: The first hour deals with a murder spree that companions Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis) undertake; the second chronicles the duo's incarceration and a live TV interview with Mickey by the host (Robert Downey Jr.) of a fictional tabloid TV series. The problems with Natural Born Killers accumulate at such a rapid pace that a thorough dissection of the film could end up as a thesis instead of a review. Stone, using what I assume must be either black magic, hypnotism or extortion, still manages to keep many film writers in his thrall to the point that they can't admit what a botch he's produced with Natural Born Killers. It's not that Stone can't be effective. He even made the silliness in the three-hour plus JFK entertaining despite the absurd claim that Kennedy was killed in order to stop the president from preventing the Vietnam War and, by extension, the need for Oliver Stone's film career. Stone's point-of-view concerning Natural Born Killers doesn't register anywhere near the realm of coherence.
The real subject — and I'm merely guessing — of Stone's awful opus aims at media obsession with sensationalism, certainly as timely as ever in the age of Tonya and Lorena, O.J. and the Menendez brothers. The number of usually reliable film fans who praise Natural Born Killers as original and fresh when no original idea resides in its empty little head amazes me. As usual, Stone proves as subtle as an 8.0 earthquake and twice as shaky (Exhibit A: See film still above). All the movie's points have been made before and better, from films dating back at least to 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, 1976's Network and even through the looking glass to 1931's The Front Page, which itself has been remade three times, the greatest being 1940's His Girl Friday
Stone also experiments more with film styles, alternating as he did in JFK between color, black and white, 16 millimeter, Super 8, video and even adds animation akin to graphic novels. Unlike JFK, these switches serve
no purpose other than to distract the audience. He also trots out other weird devices such as treating scenes with Mallory's monster of a father (Rodney Dangerfield) as if they exist in a TV sitcom, complete with laugh track and bleeped profanity — except for some reason some cuss words get bleeped and others don't. Of course, he can't resist tossing in some mystical Native Americans, just for good measure. It's hard to fault the performers (except for Tommy Lee Jones' inexplicable decision to play a prison warden as if he's imitating Reginald Van Gleason) since saving this mess would have been impossible for the greatest of actors, but at least Downey's wry performance injects some much-needed levity into this often tedious film. Downey appears to be the only actor aware that he's — in theory — signed on to the satire Stone believes he's making, but it's never a good idea to place a satire in the hands of someone without a sense of humor. In the end, it's ironic that Natural Born Killers stars former Cheers regular Harrelson since a paraphrase of a question Frasier once asked Cliff on that show immediately sprang to my mind while watching this mess: "Hello in there, Oliver. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?"
*BLOGGER'S NOTE: Shortly after seeing Natural Born Killers, I had the opportunity to interview Quentin Tarantino who was promoting Pulp Fiction. He shared his thoughts about how Stone changed his screenplay.
"Actually, to give the devil his due, he was very cool when I said I wanted to take my name off the screenplay. He facilitated that to happen. He could have caused a big problem, but he didn't. When it comes to Natural Born Killers, more or less the final word on it is that it has nothing to do with me. One of the reasons I wanted just a story credit was I wanted that to get across. If you like the movie, it's Oliver. If you don't like the movie, it's Oliver."
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Labels: 90s, Harrelson, Oliver Stone, Robert Downey Jr., Tarantino, Tommy Lee Jones
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Monday, September 16, 2013
From the Vault: JFK
BLOGGER'S NOTE: I'm re-posting this review, originally written when JFK opened in 1991, as part of The Oliver Stone Blogathon occurring through Oct. 6 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
Seldom has reviewing a film proved as problematic as Oliver Stone's JFK. So much has been written about what is — and isn't — accurate in this film that I went in desperately trying to view solely on a cinematic basis, ignoring the fact that it concerns that fateful November day in Dallas in 1963. That sort of objectivity ends up being impossible because JFK demands evaluation and analysis and obliterates any chance of passive viewing with its strange hybrid of thriller, murder mystery and documentary.
Kevin Costner plays the lead in Stone's story as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who launched a full-fledged investigation into the conspiracy he believed left both John F. Kennedy and the country mortally wounded. "Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth," Donald Sutherland's Deep Throat-type character tells Garrison at one point in the film. While it remains to be seen whether Stone's version contains more truth than the preposterous idea that Lee Harvey Oswald (played well by Gary Oldman, part of the film's gargantuan, excellent ensemble) acted alone, fascination with the assassination keeps this three-hour film compulsively watchable.
Problems plague the film other than the ones that spark so much debate. Despite allegations that the film comes off as homophobic (I see why that charge has been leveled) or exists as nothing more than propaganda (could be), it fares fairly well. Stone keeps the pace speeding along most of the time except for a middle section that lags. His editing and jump-cuts that mix real footage, re-creations and original material triumph, especially in the film's very good opening segments. The movie stumbles the most when it presents scenes of Garrison's domestic life with his wife Liz (a thankless task given to the usually reliable Sissy Spacek, saddled with dialogue along the lines of "I think you care more about John Kennedy than your own family!") It also doesn't help that Garrison's son (played by Stone's own 7-year-old son Sean) never ages though the film covers more than half a decade.
Other demerits include John Williams' score, which nearly overpowers important scenes such as Sutherland's magnetic spinning of key elements of the "conspiracy" so that it makes sense as he's sharing it, and, it should really go without saying, Costner himself. While he manages to be fairly consistent with his Southern accent, he still can't emote effectively. He's a star, not an actor. Much of the popular opinion about the real Garrison refers to him either as someone seeking publicity or a crackpot. Regardless, Costner can't convey his obsession or possibly unstable nature. In his overrated Dances With Wolves, his lack of acting skills presented a similar problem. Both JFK and Dances would have been better served if they'd cast a performer capable of portraying people losing control. Lt. Dunbar tries to commit suicide and then asks to be placed on the frontier, but Costner couldn't pull off that conflict any more convincingly than he pulls off Garrison's drive for the truth.
Thankfully, able supporting performers abound to pick up the slack, even if they appear for a single scene. Actors deserving particular praise include Ed Asner, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Joe Pesci, Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones, who gives a good performance despite the possible perception of his character as an offensive stereotype. Structurally, the film weakens in its final act by climaxing with Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw (Jones). While this conclusion comes naturally to a film focused on Garrison, it seems anticlimactic to the film's real subject — dealing with the demons of the past. Stone's obsession with the Vietnam era equals Garrison's with Kennedy's murder. Methods separate Garrison's obsession from Stone's. Stone uses cinema as his rosary to drag the audience kicking and screaming into his personal confessional. With JFK, that's not altogether inappropriate. Even people born since the assassination grew up with the myths and the facts of Nov. 22, 1963, as part of their lives, though for most of the younger of us, Jim Garrison and his actual prosecution of Clay Shaw was something few of us knew about until Stone's movie.
Growing up though with the history of the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations ingrained in our brains shortened our attention span of shock when John Lennon, Reagan and Pope John Paul II encountered bullets in a period of just a few months. The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger seemed to affect us for only an hour or two instead of the lifelong effect JFK's assassination had on an earlier generation.
Personally, I don't know if I buy the revamped Garrison theory that Stone offers. I don't see how anyone can believe Oswald acted alone or all the shots came from behind — watching the Zapruder film enlarged on the big screen makes the "back and to the left" motion of Kennedy's head unmistakable. However, Stone can't quite pull off the idea that the reason Kennedy was killed was so the Vietnam War could happen.
In that respect, JFK plays like a murder trial where only the prosecution presents its case. I'm certainly no apologist for Oliver Stone and I think most of his films grow weaker on subsequent viewings. Indeed, his tendency to pass off fabrication as fact can be troubling when most viewers can't tell the difference. Reservations aside, JFK holds one's attention firmly and deserves a look.
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Labels: 90s, Costner, D. Sutherland, John Williams, Kevin Bacon, Lemmon, Matthau, Oldman, Oliver Stone, Pesci, Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones
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Tuesday, December 20, 2011
A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma
By Damian Arlyn
While some might be of the opinion that Oliver Stone’s most archetypal movie is Wall Street or Platoon, I happen to think the film which holds that particular distinction is JFK (which celebrates its 20th anniversary today). It is not necessarily his greatest movie, but it is his most significant in a number of ways. In a career littered with provocative, politically charged works, it has proved to be arguably his most controversial. It marked the beginning of a stylistic period in Stone’s filmmaking (a fast, in-your-face approach to storytelling which culminated in Stone’s outrageously anarchic Natural Born Killers). Finally, it was (and still seems to be) one of Stone’s most personal projects: the result of years of research, overwhelming passion and righteous indignation. Indeed, of all Stone’s protagonists, the man at the center of JFK (who is, somewhat ironically, not the titular character) serves as perhaps the best representative of the ideals and opinions of Oliver himself. In reality, the motives and actions of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (the only prosecutor ever to go to trial in the assassination of President Kennedy) are not entirely clear nor always seem purely honorable, but in the film, Garrison — wonderfully played by Kevin Costner — is a man on a crusade, a courageous hero of the highest intentions and noblest stature crying, “Let the truth be told though the heavens fall!” He is the director's alter ego, a lone wolf fighting the establishment in the name of truth, justice and, yes, the American way.
JFK was my first Oliver Stone picture. My dad took me to see it in the theater when I was a sophomore in high school and I was, as the expression goes, blown away by it. Incidentally, he was (and still is to some degree) a major expert on the Kennedy conspiracy, so he was able to lean over and tell me at various junctures "That's true" or "That's not true" which helped orient me in the somewhat overwhelming
deluge of faces, names, dates and theories with which I was being bludgeoned. My dad once owned the largest collection of books, magazines, videos and even vintage newspaper articles about that specific event which I have ever seen. After watching the film and concluding that there definitely was a conspiracy and a cover-up, I even read a few of them myself, including the screenplay to the film which contained a footnoted source for every piece of information that Stone wrote into the expository dialogue and/or imagery of the film. It gave me a whole new appreciation for a movie's potential to tell a story which, if not "true" or "historically accurate," is at least "factual." Eventually I became somewhat of an expert myself and years later, after getting married and moving to Dallas, I finally visited the sixth floor museum and Dealey Plaza (the latter of which, I was shocked to discover, is a very small, and intimately contained space). Now, however, having read multiple accounts from different writers arguing for both sides of the conspiracy debate — including this very compelling website run by Dave Reitzes, whose experience with the film is remarkably similar to my own — I have no idea what really happened on that day in Dallas (though I still think there is more to the story than we are being told). However, one thing that has not changed, is that JFK remains a seminal film in my development as a cinephile.
Much can be said about the movie's many stellar qualities, such as the performances from its immense cast (a dizzying collection of such familiar faces as Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Gary Oldman, Donald Sutherland, etc). In a nice bit of subversive casting, Stone even got the real Jim Garrison to portray Judge Earl Warren of the Warren Commission. Much could also be said about John Williams' suspenseful and emotional Oscar-nominated music score, but the main element of the film which captivated me upon my first viewing (and which I studied very carefully upon numerous subsequent viewings) was its visual aesthetic. In order to make a film which was heavy on talk into an arresting experience, Stone deftly employed various cinematic techniques that until that time had never been employed with such enthusiastic exuberance nor wild abandon in a historical epic.
His approach to shooting and editing the film was considered confusing and indulgent by some and incredibly powerful and innovative by others. I personally fell into the latter camp. Jumping back and forth (sometimes in a seemingly random manner) from authentic to recreated footage, from color to black-and-white and from 35 to 16mm, JFK creates such an apparently chaotic product that people didn't know what to make of it. The more one delves deeper into it though, the more one discovers that there is indeed "method in the madness." Stone's is a stream-of-consciousness approach to examining history, a process that makes no distinction between past and present, between what has happened and what is happening and, perhaps most controversially, between theory and fact. To Stone, history is in the eye of the beholder and he presents so many different perspectives, ideas and judgments that he was essentially, as film critic Roger Ebert proposed, fighting the official establishment myth by "weaving a counter-myth." Not surprisingly, Stone's effort garnered a great deal of criticism from various esteemed news sources. It did not help their case that they were attacking the film well before it had come out and anyone, including them, had even seen it, their zeal and hostility seemingly inspired more by fear of losing their privileged authoritative status than by supposed journalistic integrity and objectivity.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) JFK's notoriety, it was very well-received upon its release in December 1991. The film grossed more than $50 million worldwide, which was impressive considering that the film was more than three hours long, and ended up receiving eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture, best director and best supporting actor for Tommy Lee Jones. It ended up winning two of those awards for the experimental cinematography and editing. It also, much to Stone's delight no doubt, incited a whole media discussion about the Kennedy assassination. Much like the media circus that surrounded the release of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, all you could see and hear on the news for several months was talk of what actually occurred on Nov. 22, 1963. In point of fact, we probably will never know what occurred. As Pesci's nervous David Ferrie quotes Winston Churchill in the film, "It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Still, perhaps whether we ever know the truth (or, to be more precise, know THAT we know the truth since we may already know it) isn't as important as that we never give up looking for it. Maybe the real message behind the film is that the pursuit of truth is more important then the possession of it.
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Labels: 90s, Costner, D. Sutherland, Ebert, John Williams, Kevin Bacon, Lemmon, Matthau, Mel Gibson, Movie Tributes, Oldman, Oliver Stone, Oscars, Pesci, Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones
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Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Retro feel avenges previous bad Caps
By J.D.
The popular comic book superhero Captain America had his debut in March 1941 courtesy of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby who created him as a patriotic symbol in response to the actions of Nazi Germany leading up to the United States’ involvement in World War II. Like any enduring comic book icon, Cap has undergone all kinds of changes over the years but has had few cinematic incarnations. He first appeared on film in a 1944 serial and then in a 1990 film that was so ill-conceived that it was released direct to home video in North America. One problem with the character is that his costume did not translate well to a live-action film. It didn’t help that at the time of the 1990 version, Marvel Comics, which owned the character, had little interest in cinematic adaptations of its titles until X-Men (2000) proved to be a surprise hit.
Since then, they’ve had a spotty track record with their properties. The Blade and Iron Man series were very successful but both Daredevil (2003) and Ghost Rider (2007) were box office and critical failures respectively. Part of the problem is the talent attached to these films. Getting the right director and cast that understand the characters and the worlds they inhabit is crucial and explains why the first two X-Men films were so good. For Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), the powers that be wisely hired Joe Johnston to direct. Since it was decided to set the film during World War II, who better to recapture that old school action/adventure vibe then the man who helmed The Rocketeer (1991) and Hidalgo (2004)? For the pivotal role of Captain America, Chris Evans was cast. He already had experience with superhero films playing the Human Torch in the awful Fantastic Four films and, as a result, was understandably reluctant to take on another comic book adaptation. The question remained, how would such an earnest, idealistic character translate in our cynical times and would moviegoing audiences be able to relate to him? Judging by its opening weekend box office haul, quite well indeed.
Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a skinny weakling who just wants to do his part for his country during wartime but he’s wracked with too many health problems to join the Army. So, he volunteers for a risky top-secret experimental program known as Project Rebirth run by Col. Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones at his crusty, ornery best) and Peggy Carter (charmingly played by Hayley Atwell). Rogers may not be physically strong but he’s brave, determined and willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) and Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) conduct the actual procedure that transforms Rogers into the perfect physical specimen, a Super Soldier complete with superior strength and agility.
Instead of putting him on the front lines where he wants to be, Rogers dons a corny costume (that pokes fun at previous cinematic incarnations), gets dubbed Captain America and is ordered to sell war bonds to the American public in a lame dog and pony show. While entertaining American troops in Italy, he hears that his best friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has been captured by Hydra, a research wing of the Nazis that is so ambitious that it split from the Germans for playing it too safe. With Peggy and Stark’s help, Rogers disobeys orders to rescue his friend and 400 prisoners of war. Meanwhile, Hydra leaders Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones) and Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) have discovered the Tesseract, a cosmic cube endowed with powerful magical energy that they harness so that it can be used to not only win the war but also take over the world. Schmidt was the first recipient of the Super Soldier formula and it transformed him into the Red Skull, a hideous-looking evil genius.
Hugo Weaving brings a suitably creepy menace to the role of the power hungry Red Skull aided in large part by the impressive and appropriately garish makeup job. Hayley Atwell is downright delightful as the brassy dame Peggy Carter who is more than capable of taking care of herself. The chemistry between her character and Rogers is nicely realized with snappy, slyly flirty dialogue reminiscent of a Howard Hawks film. The screenplay, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, does a nice job of developing their relationship over time, keeping their romance simmering just beneath the surface for most of the film until its tragic conclusion that carries a surprising emotional resonance because we’ve become invested in them. After all kinds of supporting roles over the years, Chris Evans finally gets to prove that he has the chops to carry a big budget blockbuster. He brings a no-nonsense charisma to the role and conveys Cap’s idealism without coming across as forced or phony.
Joe Johnston brings the same old school classic Hollywood vibe he brought to The Rocketeer complete with a refreshing lack of cynicism and irony as he delivers a straight-forward action/adventure tale. And like with that previous film, he includes all sorts of nice comic book touches, such as the introduction of the Howling Commandos, a ragtag group of soldiers that fought alongside Nick Fury in the comics and fight with Cap in the film. In particular, the actors who play Dum Dum Dugan (Neal McDonough) and Gabe Jones (Derek Luke) bear an uncanny resemblance to their comic book counterparts right down to how they look and act. Unlike Zack Snyder (Watchmen), who imposes too much of his personal style, Johnston understands that the film’s style should service the story — anything else is a distraction. He even employs Snyder’s trademark “speed-ramping” technique but in a way that fits seamlessly with the action sequences, which are exciting and expertly choreographed, devoid of schizophrenic editing. You always know who is fighting whom and where. Captain America is quite simply a flat-out entertaining film.
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Labels: 10s, Hawks, Tommy Lee Jones, Tucci
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Sunday, July 10, 2011
The Next 60 Seconds Are All That Matter
By J.D.
John Carpenter is one of those rare filmmakers that entertains while also trying to say something about the society in which we live in. It is a tough balancing act that few can maintain but Carpenter's films make it look easy. From the special effects opus/remake drenched in paranoia of The Thing (1982) to the two-fisted diatribe against Reaganomics of They Live (1988), he hasn't been afraid to sandwich a thought-provoking message in between action sequences. In this respect, his films are much more than genre pictures; rather they critique the problems of contemporary society. And for its time, Escape From New York(1981) was no different. Carpenter's film examined the validity of the presidency and the increase of crime and disguised it as a slick, futuristic race against time that was very prescient, going on to influence similarly minded and looking films for years, including a fascinating subgenre of Italian rip-offs.
Escape From New York is set in 1997 (?!) and crime in the United States has grown so bad that Manhattan Island in New York has become a maximum security prison with one simple rule: "Once you go in, you don't come out." One night, the president's plane is taken over by terrorists who crash it into the prison. The president (Donald Pleasence) escapes but quickly becomes a prisoner of the inmates led by the Duke (Isaac Hayes). It seems that the president is carrying a vital piece of information that is to be delivered to a historical summit in Hartford. Enter Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive who has been captured by the government and is scheduled to be transferred into the prison. Instead, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) offers him a deal: go into the prison, find the president, and bring him and the information back in exchange for a full pardon. Sounds easy, right? There's a catch: Snake only has 22 hours to do all this because by then the conference will be over and the world will be thrown into chaos. As an incentive he has two explosive charges lodged in his neck to keep him focused on the task at hand. With this enticing opening, the film kicks into high gear as Snake enters the world's most dangerous prison to find the president and save the world.
Carpenter had just made Dark Star (1974) and no one wanted to hire him as a director so he shifted his focus to screenwriting. Inspired by the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay in 1974. He didn’t agree with the film’s philosophy but liked how it conveyed “the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines. He was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it" because the general feeling was that “It was too violent, too scary, too weird.” And so the director went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the successes of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), Carpenter was in a position to make a motion picture with a big budget. He decided to revive his Escape script, but something seemed to be missing. "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." So, he brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) character and came up with the film's humorous conclusion that offset the bleak tone of the film with a skewed sense of satire.
The film's setting proved to be another potential problem for Carpenter. It is apocalyptic in tone: a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York. How could Carpenter create this world on only a budget of $6 million (his biggest at the time)? As fate would have it, in 1977 there was a big fire in St. Louis that burned out several blocks of the downtown area. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to these blocks at night and then proceeded to transform the remains into a New York of the future. They even found an exact replica of Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot that Carpenter had never experienced before. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 a.m. and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 p.m., depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going the sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." This approach paid off, creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere of a futuristic film noir.
In addition, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles and New York. He and his film company were the first ones ever to be allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let Carpenter have free run of the entire island. He remembers, “We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble.” With Escape, the director created two distinct looks: “one is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England.”
The heart of Escape From New York lies in its main character: Snake Plissken. His cynical, world-weary attitude flies in the face of the earnest authorities who send him off to the save the world. Snake could care less. All that matters to him is "the next 60 seconds," as Kurt Russell commented in an interview. "Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." It is this kind of intensity that makes Snake such an interesting
character. He is the ideal antihero — intent on getting the job done and content on being left alone. Snake doesn't need anyone. Russell's performance clearly echoes Clint Eastwood's style of acting — the strong, silent type. Snake is a clever hybrid of The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. It is an amusing riff on Eastwood's two most famous characters, which is only reinforced by the appearance of Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in a few films opposite Eastwood). It is to Russell's credit that he makes Snake a character you want to root for, that you want to see win at the end. There is something charismatic about Snake that makes you automatically want to like him. What is so great about the character is that Carpenter and co-screenwriter Nick Castle remain true to him throughout. They don’t saddle him with a love interest or dilute his intensity by having him crack the occasional joke. Snake remains an unrepentant badass, the proverbial fly in the ointment with a surly disregard for authority right up to the last shot of the film.
And to think that the studio did not want Carpenter to cast Russell in the role. Up until then the actor had done a string of Disney films as a youth and worked with Carpenter on a TV movie about Elvis Presley. The studio did not see Russell as a tough action hero. In fact, Charles Bronson expressed an interest in playing Snake (Tommy Lee Jones also was considered). However, by Carpenter’s own admission, “I was afraid of working with him. He was a big star and I was this little-shit nobody.” Fortunately, the filmmaker had faith in Russell and Escape From New York continued a long-standing relationship between the two men — both personal and professional — that continues to this day.
Escape From New York also features a strong supporting cast of character actors such as veteran thespian Harry Dean Stanton as Brain, the smartest man in the prison, and Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, a hack who stayed in New York even after it changed into a prison. Let’s not forget Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain’s girlfriend Maggie and yet she is anything but that, as the talented actress plays her character as the tough-minded female equivalent of Snake. The film contains an eccentric assortment of characters each of who get their moment to shine and this only enhances the enjoyment of watching Escape. One of the best things about it is how these characters interact with Snake and how he views them. The supporting cast also fleshes out more of this fascinating world. They continually offer all sorts of tantalizing tidbits that allude to Snake's colorful past, to conditions in the prison and how the inmates have created their own world.
Escape from New York received mostly positive reviews when it was released. Newsweek magazine felt that Carpenter had a “deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility — which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "[The film] is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season." However, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr felt that the film, “fails to satisfy — it gives us too little of too much.”
First and foremost Escape From New York is a fast-paced action film that is never dull to watch. However, the film also contains a dark, satirical edge that never falters, even right up to the film's conclusion. One the most frustrating problems of most films is how they end. No one seems to know how to end a film without relying on tried and true clichés. Carpenter's film does not fall into this trap. Escape may be an action film but it also makes some very interesting comments about crime in the United States that are still relevant even today. One could argue that Carpenter's film is almost intended to be a warning. That if things get any worse, the world that is depicted in this film isn't that far off. It is these sobering thoughts that make Escape From New York as powerful and entertaining today as it was when it first hit the screens in 1981.
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Labels: 80s, Borgnine, Eastwood, Elvis, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Movie Tributes, Pleasence, Tommy Lee Jones
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Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Fight Fiercely, Harvard
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
The subject of the most engaging documentaries I’ve watched recently…is a football game. Organized (and for that matter, unorganized) sports isn’t really a passion of mine — football, basketball, hockey, etc., I don’t have much use for that kind of gamesmanship; though I do make an exception in the case of baseball (there’s just something about “America’s national pastime” that stirs my sports-cynical heart). So I was genuinely surprised when I found my spirits lifted by director Kevin Rafferty’s Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (2008), which chronicles one of the most phenomenal gridiron contests in Ivy League history. But even as many of the former players who participated acknowledge in the end that “it’s just a football game” you’ve no doubt probably guessed by now…the film is a little bit more than that.
For many, Nov. 23, 1968 was just another “Football Saturday” but for longtime Ivy League rivals Harvard and Yale, “The Game” that afternoon at Harvard Stadium was shaping up to be a real contest. Both schools were undefeated at the time of the final game of the season, the first time such an event had occurred since 1909. As to who would dominate the proceedings…the smart money was on the Bulldogs; ranked 16th and featuring the double-threat combination of senior quarterback Brian Dowling (a superb athlete who had never played in a losing football game since seventh grade) and halfback Calvin Hill, the No. 1 draft pick of the Dallas Cowboys. The scrappy Harvard team was being beat like a rented mule by their Yale competitors, trailing 22-0 near the end of the second quarter until Harvard coach John Yovicsin decided that quarterback George Lalich wasn’t getting the job done and replaced him with backup QB Frank Champi. Things improved only slightly for Team Crimson as they ended the half with a score of 22-6.
By the start of the third quarter, it looked as if it was all over but the crying for Harvard as the Bulldogs continued to dominate, leading 29-13 with only two minutes left in the game. What happened after that — described by one Yale player as “a slow-motion nightmare” — was a comedy of errors that allowed the Crimson to end up tying a game they had been expected to lose and provided both the Yale players and their supporters a textbook example of hubris, demonstrating that if a Supreme Being does exist s/he has one hell of a sense of humor.
The outcome of what many have called “the most famous game in Ivy League history” is never in doubt — the title of the documentary (inspired by a headline in the Harvard Crimson) is a giveaway for anyone not familiar with the events recorded in the film. But the genius of Rafferty’s documentary is that Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 makes the game’s foregone conclusion surprisingly nail-bitingly suspenseful and unabashedly entertaining; intercutting video of the 1968 match-up (with play-by-play by sportscasting veteran Don Gillis) with interviews from nearly fifty of the surviving players on both teams. Spending an hour and forty-five minutes listening to athletes ruminate about a long-forgotten football game wouldn’t be my ideal way of spending an evening, but the individuals interviewed in the movie are funny, engaging and charmingly philosophical about a contest that for many defined their collegiate experience and shaped their various worldviews of life beyond graduation.
The most famous face among the football players in Harvard Beats Yale undoubtedly belongs to Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, a Crimson guard who demonstrates that adorable unflappability on camera (“I
remember telling myself to stay cool and be smooth”) with wry observations about the game…and about his equally famous college roommate, former Vice President Al Gore — who Jones recalls learned to play “Dixie” on their touch-tone phone (which were just replacing rotary-dial phones at that time) and once helped him prepare a Thanksgiving turkey in a fireplace. Gore’s GOP nemesis in 2000, President George W. Bush, was also around at that time (though he matriculated on the Yale campus as a roommate of Bulldog tackle Ted Livingston; another player admits that the team played a small role in Bush’s being arrested for tearing down goalposts at a November 1967 game) and so was a Vassar student who, like Jones, also later eked out a successful career in films (winning two Academy Awards for her thespic emoting): Meryl Streep. (A teammate of Yale fullback Bob Levin, who was dating Streep, remarks that he’s really been surprised by Meryl’s cinematic accomplishments because in those days she’s was a bit on the quiet side, “saying virtually nothing.”)
Yale quarterback Brian Dowling has also registered in the pop culture consciousness, though not in the way he probably expected. During his heyday at the college, the Bulldog’s captain (who was nicknamed “God” by his fellow players and classmates; a Yale Daily News headline even once read “God Plays Quarterback for Yale”) and his team were frequently parodied in a comic strip that ran in the campus paper entitled Bull Tales, drawn by an underclassman named Garry Trudeau. Trudeau added the character of “B.D.” to his dramatis personae of Doonesbury, his Pulitzer Prize-winning creation.
The main character of Mike “the Man” Doonesbury is speculated by one player to have been based on Yale’s defensive captain, linebacker Mike Bouscaren, who is nothing like his illustrated counterpart is that he’s not quite as likable at certain times. He’s also a good example of how athletes have a tendency to embellish their
gridiron exploits in a revealing segment when he boasts of “taking out” Harvard halfback Ray Hornblower, dealing Hornblower an injury to his ankle that sidelined him for the rest of the game. (According to Bouscaren, he held a grudge against Ray when the Harvard player left Mike’s jockstrap on the ten-yard-line in a junior year game.) As the risk of using the old cliché “let’s go to the videotape,” an analysis of the video playback shows that Bouscaren wasn’t anywhere near Hornblower when the injury occurred. Nostalgia often has a way of clouding important events: John Waldman, a Yale player who got in the game for one play but whose pass interference penalty was just one of the many chinks in the Bulldog armor during the contest’s final crucial minutes, says he’s watched the video “4,000 times” and is pretty sure he “never touched” Harvard’s Pete Varney. (I watched it only once and it’s obvious the ref made the right call. Facts are stubborn things.)
1968 was a year of tremendous social and political upheaval, and as such it’s interesting to hear many of the interviewees cogitate on how those events influenced their actions and thinking at the time. The insular and isolated Yale campus (where the Young Americans for Freedom maintained a larger presence than Students for a Democratic Society) was nevertheless unable to divert its attention from hot-button topics like the Vietnam War and the sexual resolution (viewers need to be reminded that, as Bulldog safety J.P. Goldsmith cracks, “women hadn’t been invented yet”—the Yale campus was still an all-male preserve at the time) and Harvard, long considered a “hotbed of liberalism,” sometimes experienced conflict between anti- and pro-Vietnam war players (such as defensive back Pat Conway, who animatedly recalls how he’d defiantly walk through picket lines situated outside the Yard’s buildings, monitored by politically-motivated students). But at a time when, as Goldsmith puts it, “everybody had a mad on,” hippies and brown shoes put aside their differences every Saturday in New Haven for football…and in Cambridge, any potential political knockdown/drag-outs took a back seat as those opposed and supportive of the U.S. overseas suited up for the sake of The Game.
Director Kevin Rafferty, who’s perhaps best known for his hilarious 1982 nuclear propaganda pastiche The Atomic Cafe (not to mention mentoring Michael Moore), has created a classic true story-narrative that
resonates with viewers because it’s a timeless tale of the triumph of the underdog. You can’t help but identify with the Harvard players who were astonished at how they were able to stave off an almost certain defeat even when they were “getting their butts kicked” and suffering jeers from the Yale supporters in the stadium (taunting the team with cries of “We’re Number 1” and “You’re Number 2”). But the beauty of Harvard Beats Yale is that the opposing team didn’t lose perspective as a result of their “defeat” and that concept remains the underlining impression throughout the film. “I’m glad that we lost,” Bouscaren muses as the film nudges toward its conclusion. “Because if we had won I’d probably have more difficulty becoming just a regular person…becoming a person who understands that all in life is not fair — that you can’t win all the time, and it’s good to be humble.”“If it wasn’t for that game they wouldn’t be remembered today,” adds Harvard’s Frank Champi, referring to his gridiron competitors and their win-some, lose-some outlook on the final results. “It’s a win-win for everybody.” Precisely the sentiment I would beg, borrow and steal to describe my experience watching this exceptional film.
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Labels: 00s, Documentary, Streep, Tommy Lee Jones
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Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The long and dying road
By Edward Copeland
Javier Bardem carries the weight of Biutiful upon his shoulders as if it's a crucifix — and with its excessive length and the multitude of burdens placed upon his character, it's a heavy cross to bear indeed.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Biutiful is not a particularly illuminating or enjoyable ride. My first exposure to the director was the great Amores Perros, but ever since he's seemed compelled to produce sado-masochistic viewing exercises for the moviegoer, usually in a jumbled chronology which worked magnificently in Amores Perros but did nothing in the way of aiding 21 Grams or, especially, that monument to ridiculousness, Babel, whose more than four-year-old review on these virtual pages by Josh R, much like Mary Richards, still can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.
González Iñárritu's usual collaborator, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, didn't work on Biutiful. While Arriaga's touch was crucial to Amores Perros as well to Tommy Lee Jones' neglected directing debut The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (though Arriaga did write 21 Grams and the nonsensical Babel), perhaps his input would have clarified Biutiful.
For Biutiful, González Iñárritu handles writing duties himself along with Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone. For the most part, he tells its story chronologically for a change but like Babel (not in the sense of absurdity) it's overburdened with just too much plot. Call it kitchen sink filmmaking, because he includes everything.
Bardem plays Uxbal, a small-time criminal in Barcelona using illegal Chinese immigrants for his bosses to help make counterfeit high-end goods such as fake Gucci purses, but Uxbal cares and tries to find better living arrangements and work for the Chinese in a construction project he and his brother Tito (Eduard Fernández) are involved in. On top of that, they are selling the plot meant to bury the father they never knew, choosing to cremate him so they can take the cash.
Uxbal also has an estranged bipolar wife Marambra (Maricel Álvarez) who can't be depended on to take care of his son and daughter, especially his son who always is being punished as a bedwetter. Besides, she tends to sleep with Tito on the side. There's also some side business where Uxbal claims to read the thoughts of the recently passed and deliver it to their grieving relatives.
When his good intentions toward the Chinese go terribly awry and turn into a national, televised scandal, he has even more guilt on his plate and oh, I almost forgot, that blood Uxbal keeps pissing happens to because he's secretly dying of cancer, undergoing chemo on the sly and not losing a bit of that glorious mane of hair. Despite all these strains, Uxbal's No. 1 priority is securing the future of his children after he's gone.
Are you exhausted just reading a brief summary of the plot (and I left out quite a bit)? Imagine trying to sit through it. Bardem truly is the film's only saving grace, conveying more through his eyes and his face as to what Uxbal is going through than any of the overwrought plot mechanics ever could. We watch him go through the motions of all the other nonsense as we just bide time to his inevitable deathbed scene and it takes nearly two-and-a-half hours to get there, yet Bardem makes all the moments ring true for his character. It's just a chore getting there as good as he is.
When Uxbal breathes his last breaths, it came as a relief because I knew that both his suffering and mine had reached its end.
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Labels: 10s, Bardem, Foreign, Tommy Lee Jones
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Thursday, February 03, 2011
When you go from well-off to jobless
By Edward Copeland
One side of the economic meltdown that the media didn't cover very well (Who am I kidding? The media didn't cover any of it well.) was the plight of a certain segment of the newly unemployed, namely those making six-figure salaries and above who found themselves suddenly jobless. Sure, some Americans couldn't pay for prescriptions and groceries, but other victims weren't able to pay dues at country clubs and had to give up golf! Now, I may sound as if I'm mocking them, but the film that tells their story, The Company Men, does evoke some sympathy for its upper class characters occasionally, but it never leaves your mind that there were and remain people much worse off than these men lamenting the loss of expensive meals and fancy toys.
The Company Men marks the feature writing-directing debut of John Wells, best known for his television work as executive producer on such hits as ER and The West Wing, and the movie does have a bit of that efficient set-it-up and wrap-it-up flavor of those series about it.
The movie focuses on three executives at GTX, a giant transportation corporation: Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), a 37-year-old v.p. account executive; Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), a 30-year veteran of the company who started there when it was just a small shipbuilding operation and he was one of the builders; and Tommy Lee Jones as Gene McClary, one of the very top executives, but no longer the one who makes final decisions despite the fact he started GTX in the first place.
The film opens with the ultraconfident Bobby bouncing into work one morning, expecting to find a usual day only to feel some tension and a request to see a higher-ranking exec, Sally Wilcox (Maria Bello), right away. When he gets to the meeting room where she's waiting, he learns she's there to present him with his severance package — he's one of 200 getting the axe that day. They also are closing shipbuilding operations in two cities.
This news does not go over well with Gene when he returns from a trip where he's given blunt answers when asked about the outlook for GTX's future earnings prospects. When he's back in the Boston headquarters, he learns of these developments from a worried Phil, who fears he'll be on the chopping block soon and he's too old to start over. Gene demands to see Sally immediately and finds her in a meeting with other top executives, including the chairman and CEO and supposedly Gene's "best friend" James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson).
Salinger takes Gene out to talk privately and harangues him for making such a public scene, especially since he needs to accept that shipbuilding may have launched GTX, but it's a losing proposition now and they have to concentrate on their divisions that make money such as health care (how a transportation company expanded into having a health care arm seems odd and goes unexplained) to please shareholders. Gene feels betrayed, because he felt Salinger was his friend and waited purposely until he was out of town to make these moves.
Bobby doesn't take his firing well and acts with quite a bit of arrogance in the beginning when he's not immediately in the running for jobs with similar salaries and he's not ready to give up his lifestyle, until his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) basically forces him to face that reality. Early on, it's hard to have much sympathy for Bobby as he yells and whines with indignation about how he has an MBA. Later, when he lashes out at his son and tells him he's busy and to go play on his XBox, I almost had to stifle a laugh when his wife informs him that boy returned the video game machine because he knew they were having money problems. Hope he kept that receipt. How long had they had it? It felt like a scene got cut somewhere, but still...oh, the sacrifice.
Bobby has to make a bigger sacrifice than his son when he finally drops his pride and goes to work for his brother-in-law Jack at his small construction company. It's not the huge drop in pay and the manual labor that puts Bobby to the test, it's that Kevin Costner plays Jack, using the same awful New England accent he couldn't pull off in 13 Days and that still sucks now. Why does Costner insist on trying to do accents and, more importantly, why do directors let him ruin even small parts of their movies by letting him do it? It isn't as if Costner's status as s superstar remains what it once was, so surely they can no to him. Hell, since he doen't have that pull anymore, why are they hiring him in the first place, accent or no accent?
The usually reliable Cooper really gets the most thankless role (actually the second most thankless after Bello) in the film. From the moment Phil Woodward appears on screen, you can predict his entire story arc. Wells' dialogue telegraphs Phil's journey so obviously that Cooper really can't do much with his part and that's a shame for this great actor. He deserves so much better. He got more out of his single scene in Affleck's The Town than he gets in this entire movie.
Jones comes off best, since Gene's position differs from the other two men. When he inevitably gets his walking papers, he still owns a lot of stock options and can maintain his lifestyle to some extent, though they sort of gloss over the fact that he's having an affair with Bello's character and leaves his wife for her after he's fired (by Bello's character no less). He gets a couple of good speeches when he shows Affleck's character what the company was like in the beginning and when he admits that he got used to having expensive meals and flying on corporate jets.
Nelson has been cast as the villain of the piece, but he's a particularly one-dimensional villain whose suits might as well have been made out of cardboard, but then Wells' script doesn't try to go too deep on anything. Again, it goes back to the way his TV series were: They aimed neither for complexity nor gray areas and The Company Men doesn't make that attempt either. Slick and simple remains Wells' modus operandi in film as it does on series television.
To make matters worse, The Company Men even tries to tack on its version of a happy ending, or at least a promising one. The whole movie seems to undermine itself at every turn. It would have been an interesting idea to examine another side of the fallout of the economic crisis, but this movie doesn't present that story, at least not well.
Charles Ferguson's documentary on the financial collapse, Inside Job, ends up containing more information, more drama and more entertainment than The Company Men.
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Labels: 10s, B. Affleck, Chris Cooper, Costner, Maria Bello, Television, Tommy Lee Jones
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Friday, December 12, 2008
A serious loss
By Edward Copeland
Something strange happens to me when I see a new film featuring a contemporary performer who has died. When I saw the ads for Soul Men with Bernie Mac, it was jarring and this happens to me a lot. However, when seeing The Dark Knight for the first time, I didn't get this feeling because Heath Ledger's work as the Joker is brazenly, brilliantly alive.
I think the fact that Ledger is unrecognizable beneath his makeup and with his voice that I didn't have my usual reaction to watching a recently deceased actor and was able to concentrate on the phenomenal performance instead.
As for The Dark Knight itself, it is even better than Batman Begins and Christopher Nolan continues his streak of proving himself to be a true cinematic find.
It's not that the film is flawless; it's overlong and Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face seemed tacked on and rushed in a way that short-changes Aaron Eckhart's chances to do anything with the character.
The Nolan Batman films are much darker, almost humorless, when compared to the series of films that Tim Burton started and Joel Schumacher destroyed, but the funnyman in me still wanted to see when Eckhart's face gets disfigured, an African-American actor take over the role to make up for Billy Dee Williams somehow turning into Tommy Lee Jones in the other series of films.
Despite all the good things The Dark Knight has going for it, Heath Ledger really makes the movie work. When all the initial Oscar buzz began about him, I suspected it might have been people caught up in grief over the talented young actor's untimely death. Now that I've seen it, I'm a believer. I loved Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's Batman, with his ability to be both funny and scary but I always knew it was Jack. I never knew it was Ledger: His Joker is as enigmatic at the end of the film as he is at the beginning. No explanation. No back story. Just a uniquely insane criminal force.
Ledger's creation and the way Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote the Joker in the screenplay is brilliant. The best bad guys almost always are the ones that we don't get an explanation for why they are the way they are. What we do know about Ledger though was he had great potential and wide range and his loss feels even deeper now than when the news first broke.
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Labels: 00s, Christopher Nolan, Nicholson, Sequels, Tim Burton, Tommy Lee Jones
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Saturday, February 23, 2008
The weight of the world on his shoulders
By Edward Copeland
There's a stillness, a rigidity in Tommy Lee Jones' portrait of Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah, a seeming paralysis that makes any time Hank actually moves, whether it's rocking during a phone call or revealing a bottle of booze, mesmerizing. Unfortunately, one great performance does not a good movie make and as spellbinding as Jones is here, his talent alone can't support the film's inner flimsiness.
Writer-director Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah strives to be both personal and profound as it tells the story of a father's search for answers when his soldier son ends up slain following his unit's return from Iraq.
I was not one of the many who reacted so violently against Haggis' Oscar-winning directing debut Crash, but in Elah, Haggis' attempt at "being important" comes off as hamhanded and awkward. It doesn't help that while the story wanders through the desert, most moviegoers will be far ahead of where it's going.
The film doesn't really have anything new to say about war, Iraq or post-traumatic stress that hasn't been said better in other countless works. In fact, when it gets to the "revelation" at the end, the first thing I thought of was not the horrors of the Iraq war but the finale of TV's M*A*S*H, where you ask yourself how, after all the terrible things Hawkeye had seen over the years, that is what finally pushes him over the edge.
Haggis also loads down the film with a by-the-numbers "woman struggles in a man's world" subplot involving Charlize Theron as a police detective whose male colleagues assume slept her way to her position. At times, if Theron weren't brunette in Valley of Elah, you might think you were watching deleted scenes from North Country.
All of this is a shame because Tommy Lee Jones is so damn good in this film. When his name was called on Oscar nomination day, I was surprised since In the Valley of Elah had seemed to sink like a rock. Now that I've seen it, I shouldn't have been, because Jones delivers one of his very best performances here. Unfortunately, it comes in a movie that really doesn't deserve it.
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There's a stillness, a rigidity in Tommy Lee Jones' portrait of Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah, a seeming paralysis that makes any time Hank actually moves, whether it's rocking during a phone call or revealing a bottle of booze, mesmerizing. Unfortunately, one great performance does not a good movie make and as spellbinding as Jones is here, his talent alone can't support the film's inner flimsiness.
Writer-director Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah strives to be both personal and profound as it tells the story of a father's search for answers when his soldier son ends up slain following his unit's return from Iraq.
I was not one of the many who reacted so violently against Haggis' Oscar-winning directing debut Crash, but in Elah, Haggis' attempt at "being important" comes off as hamhanded and awkward. It doesn't help that while the story wanders through the desert, most moviegoers will be far ahead of where it's going.
The film doesn't really have anything new to say about war, Iraq or post-traumatic stress that hasn't been said better in other countless works. In fact, when it gets to the "revelation" at the end, the first thing I thought of was not the horrors of the Iraq war but the finale of TV's M*A*S*H, where you ask yourself how, after all the terrible things Hawkeye had seen over the years, that is what finally pushes him over the edge.
Haggis also loads down the film with a by-the-numbers "woman struggles in a man's world" subplot involving Charlize Theron as a police detective whose male colleagues assume slept her way to her position. At times, if Theron weren't brunette in Valley of Elah, you might think you were watching deleted scenes from North Country.
All of this is a shame because Tommy Lee Jones is so damn good in this film. When his name was called on Oscar nomination day, I was surprised since In the Valley of Elah had seemed to sink like a rock. Now that I've seen it, I shouldn't have been, because Jones delivers one of his very best performances here. Unfortunately, it comes in a movie that really doesn't deserve it.
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Brad Renfro (1982-2008)
Another case of sad news to report from a member of young Hollywood. Brad Renfro made quite an impression as the young murder witness in The Client, holding his own against Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones.
He appeared in some good films after that, most notably Ghost World, flawed but interesting ones such as Apt Pupil, and major films such as Sleepers. He also appeared in one of Larry Clark's pseudo-kiddie porns, Bully.
Still, he never quite reached the promise he showed as a young teen, eventually getting more attention for his run-ins with the law and drug problems, problems that are apparently the cause of his untimely death at 25.
RIP Brad.
To read Matt Zoller Seitz's obit of Renfro in The New York Times, click here.
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Labels: Obituary, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones
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Monday, November 26, 2007
Welcome back boys
By Edward Copeland
For more than a decade now, I've lived in a critical wilderness when it comes to the Coen brothers. I was a huge fan of the siblings from the moment I saw Blood Simple back in 1985, through the great fun of Raising Arizona and the exquisite Miller's Crossing. I liked Barton Fink a lot, though something of their style was starting to strike me as repetitive.
When Fargo came and seemingly the entire critical world ravished it with hosannas, I felt as if I stood alone thinking the movie was overrated and the Coens were stuck in a rut, a feeling that only grew over the course of their next films, so much so that I skipped offerings such as the ill-advised remake of The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty. When No Country for Old Men started garnering raves, I was skeptical as I had been post-Hudsucker Proxy, partly as self-defense so as not to be disappointed. Now I've seen No Country for Old Men and no one is more delighted than I am to say that Joel, Ethan and I have met up again on the same path.
This isn't to say that some of the praise for No Country for Old Men isn't overselling the film's worth, but I think it's understandable since it plays like such a radical departure from the usual Coen outing. As Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff says at one point, "it's hard to take measure of something when you don't understand." Still, this film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel isn't really hard to grasp, it's just removed from most of the brothers' recent output in its coldness, straight-forward nature and relative lack of snark.
In a way, the Coen brothers film that No Country most closely resembles is their very first effort, Blood Simple, with its Western noir feel and Texas setting. Unlike Simple's great showiness, No Country resists all impulses to call attention to itself. It's as if the Coens, tired of two decades as the high school class clowns of American filmmaking, have finally matured to middle age.
The other Coen film that No Country parallels, albeit slightly, is Fargo since it really has no lead but instead three characters whose paths intersect at times. In addition to Jones' sheriff, who seems like a more reticent version of the character he played in his underrated directing debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, there is Josh Brolin's trailer park denizen who stumbles upon the scene of a drug deal gone bad and makes off with a briefcase full of cash.
The third, and most vivid, member of this trio is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a stoic killing machine with pasty skin and a Prince Valiant haircut, out to retrieve the money as well as slaughter anyone whose death meets his peculiar fancy.
What's most remarkable about the film to me is its pacing, which seems very deliberate yet delivers much momentum without ever feeling rushed. I also liked how it's a period piece, but one so subtle that unless you pay close attention, you might not realize it is set in 1980.
In fact, what No Country bubbles over with more than anything else is subtlety, not something I've come to expect from the Coens. The themes of what a tough country America can be and the futility of chasing things that have fallen far from your reach are there, but delivered with a velvet touch instead of a sledgehammer. The other thing that impressed me most is that really none of the characters are particularly dumb.
Sure, they make mistakes, sometime fatal ones, but the movie never mocks them and some of their ingenuity seems out of a script from MacGyver. Also, while this is a violent film, much of the bloodshed is only seen either in the aftermath or not at all.
The performances are great across the board, from Jones and Brolin to Kelly Macdonald as Brolin's wife and Garret Dillahunt (late of HBO's Deadwood and John from Cincinnati) as Jones' deputy as well as brief appearances from Woody Harrelson and Barry Corbin.
Still, No Country for Old Men belongs to Bardem, who has created a monster for the ages.
One criticism I heard from people leaving the theater when I left was frustration with the somewhat vague ending that denies the audience clear-cut payoffs. That didn't bother me, because it's all there if you pay attention and the Coens aren't rubbing anything in the audience's face as they've done in the past.
In a way, it somewhat resembles the reaction to the finale of The Sopranos, emphasizing what many of that HBO series' fans hit upon: the recurrence of the idea that some things you never see coming. I have to admit I didn't see this good a film coming from the Coens again, but I'm most grateful that it did.
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Labels: 00s, Bardem, Coens, Deadwood, Harrelson, HBO, Josh Brolin, The Sopranos, Tommy Lee Jones
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Monday, November 19, 2007
Oscar's rules for GLBT characters
By Edward Copeland
This post was for the Queer Blog-a-Thon hosted at Queering the Apprentice, which apparently no longer exists. Be warned: the words below will contain spoilers for a lot of films, too many to mention, so don't read it and whine later.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has been fairly generous in the past 20 or so years in nominating (and sometimes rewarding) actors and actresses who play gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters on screen. However, this does come with a price. Not to their careers, but in deciding whether or not the role gets nominated in the first place.
There seems to be only two types of gay roles that get deemed worthy of Oscar recognition: ones that are comicly broad or one where the gay character in question either ends up dead or alone. Look at just a couple of highly praised roles that got snubbed come Oscar time. Everyone thought Dennis Quaid was a lock for a nomination with his tortured married gay man in the 1950s in Far From Heaven, but he didn't make the cut. In the end of the film, his character has accepted his sexuality and found a boyfriend: no nomination for him.
Rupert Everett was a lot of fun as Julia Roberts' best gay friend in My Best Friend's Wedding, but his character was out, proud and presumably in a relationship. Strike him from your nominating ballot.
Now, here come the spoilers, as I look at all the performers who did get nominated or won an Oscar for playing a gay character. I'm only counting characters that are explicitly gay, not implied ones such as Clifton Webb in Laura For sake of simplicity, I'm going chronologically.
Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)
The first openly gay character that I can find with a nomination set one of the patterns: He's alone at the end.
Al Pacino and Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sarandon's character of Leon is already institutionalized (and wants nothing to do with Sonny) when we meet him. Sonny (Pacino) ends up alone and in prison.
James Coco in Only When I Laugh (1981)
The first instance (post Dog Day Afternoon) of Oscar nominating an openly gay character was for Coco's broad comic turn in this lesser Neil Simon outing.
John Lithgow in The World According to Garp
Robert Preston in Victor, Victoria (both 1982)
Preston's great turn definitely belongs more in the broad comic category, though he might also be an exception since he is allowed to have a boyfriend by film's end. Lithgow, as the NFL player turned transsexual in Garp, might be an exception. He's alive at the end, but his role is mostly played for laughs and the film never provides him with a significant other.
Cher in Silkwood (1983)
Another possible exception, though the film makes it unclear if she's alone at the end, though she certainly looks guilt-stricken over possible involvement in her friend Karen's death.
William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. While the movie was certainly a drama, Hurt does a lot of histrionic flouncing AND he ends up dead in the end, even after his straight cellmate (Raul Julia) gives him a mercy fuck.
Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion (1990)
It was five years before another gay character earned a nomination and Davison's character got the double whammy. First, he has to watch his lover die of AIDS, leaving him alone, and then he dies as well (and not even on screen).
Tommy Lee Jones in JFK (1991)
Here's another example of a broad performance in a drama and while Jones' character lives in the end, it is complicated by the fact that he is portrayed as a villain (and with some over-the-top gay orgy scenes that only Oliver Stone could dream up). In contrast, Joe Pesci playing the less showy gay character who does get killed, didn't earn Academy notice.
Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game (1992)
First, Dil's lover gets killed during an IRA kidnapping and then when he/she falls for his captor, Fergus (Stephen Rea) gets sent to prison and Dil waits patiently, even though Fergus shows no intention of abandoning his heterosexuality.
Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993)
Gay and dead takes home the prize again, though at least Hanks' portrayal wasn't a broad one, even if Denzel Washington gave the better lead role in the film.
Greg Kinnear in As Good As It Gets (1997)
I don't think Kinnear's character had a significant other by film's end, but I do remember he took a bad beating.
Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters (1998)
Here is an openly gay actor nominated for portraying a true-life openly gay director. Alas, James Whale dies in the end (as he did in real life) but the real travesty was that McKellen (and Nick Nolte and Edward Norton) lost to Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful).
Kathy Bates in Primary Colors (1998)
Bates was great as a take-no-prisoners political operative working on the campaign of a Bill Clinton-like candidate. Alas, her lesbian character had principles and ended up firing a gun into her head.
Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry (1999)
Swank won the first of her two Oscars for lead actress by playing the gender-confused Brandon Teena. It also was the first of two times that Swank made it to the winner's circle by getting beaten to death.
Javier Bardem in Before Night Falls (2000)
Based on a real person, Bardem's character has to fight problems in Cuba before getting to N.Y. for one of the longest death scenes (from AIDS) I've ever seen.
Ed Harris in The Hours (2002)
The same year that the Academy snubbed Dennis Quaid for his fine work in Far From Heaven, they nominated this awful performance by the usually fine Harris as an artist dying of AIDS.
Nicole Kidman in The Hours (2002)
If Virginia Woolf hadn't walked herself into the river, this nomination and win probably would have never happened.
Julianne Moore in The Hours (2002)
In a way, her character here is similar to the one Quaid plays in Moore's other 2002 film. She's married, but unable to accept her sexuality. By the film's end, she appears to be alone, so she gets a pass while Quaid got snubbed. It may also explain one of the rare occasions where Meryl Streep didn't get an Oscar nomination since her lesbian character in The Hours had a lover in the end and doesn't die.
Charlize Theron in Monster (2003)
Another win based on a true story. Theron took the executed lesbian serial killer right up to the winner's circle.
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005)
This may be the true exception to the rule. Based on a real life character, the story didn't follow Truman Capote to his death and he did have a longtime companion. The closest this comes is denying him his crush on the executed killer.
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Two nominated performances of gay character, so the Academy got to take one of each: Gyllenhaal's character ends up dead, Ledger's ends up alone.
Felicity Huffman in Transamerica (2005)
I'm not sure where to place this performance of an in-process transsexual. She doesn't die in the end.
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This post was for the Queer Blog-a-Thon hosted at Queering the Apprentice, which apparently no longer exists. Be warned: the words below will contain spoilers for a lot of films, too many to mention, so don't read it and whine later.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has been fairly generous in the past 20 or so years in nominating (and sometimes rewarding) actors and actresses who play gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters on screen. However, this does come with a price. Not to their careers, but in deciding whether or not the role gets nominated in the first place.
There seems to be only two types of gay roles that get deemed worthy of Oscar recognition: ones that are comicly broad or one where the gay character in question either ends up dead or alone. Look at just a couple of highly praised roles that got snubbed come Oscar time. Everyone thought Dennis Quaid was a lock for a nomination with his tortured married gay man in the 1950s in Far From Heaven, but he didn't make the cut. In the end of the film, his character has accepted his sexuality and found a boyfriend: no nomination for him.
Rupert Everett was a lot of fun as Julia Roberts' best gay friend in My Best Friend's Wedding, but his character was out, proud and presumably in a relationship. Strike him from your nominating ballot.
Now, here come the spoilers, as I look at all the performers who did get nominated or won an Oscar for playing a gay character. I'm only counting characters that are explicitly gay, not implied ones such as Clifton Webb in Laura For sake of simplicity, I'm going chronologically.
The first openly gay character that I can find with a nomination set one of the patterns: He's alone at the end.
Sarandon's character of Leon is already institutionalized (and wants nothing to do with Sonny) when we meet him. Sonny (Pacino) ends up alone and in prison.
The first instance (post Dog Day Afternoon) of Oscar nominating an openly gay character was for Coco's broad comic turn in this lesser Neil Simon outing.
Robert Preston in Victor, Victoria (both 1982)
Preston's great turn definitely belongs more in the broad comic category, though he might also be an exception since he is allowed to have a boyfriend by film's end. Lithgow, as the NFL player turned transsexual in Garp, might be an exception. He's alive at the end, but his role is mostly played for laughs and the film never provides him with a significant other.
Another possible exception, though the film makes it unclear if she's alone at the end, though she certainly looks guilt-stricken over possible involvement in her friend Karen's death.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. While the movie was certainly a drama, Hurt does a lot of histrionic flouncing AND he ends up dead in the end, even after his straight cellmate (Raul Julia) gives him a mercy fuck.
It was five years before another gay character earned a nomination and Davison's character got the double whammy. First, he has to watch his lover die of AIDS, leaving him alone, and then he dies as well (and not even on screen).
Here's another example of a broad performance in a drama and while Jones' character lives in the end, it is complicated by the fact that he is portrayed as a villain (and with some over-the-top gay orgy scenes that only Oliver Stone could dream up). In contrast, Joe Pesci playing the less showy gay character who does get killed, didn't earn Academy notice.
First, Dil's lover gets killed during an IRA kidnapping and then when he/she falls for his captor, Fergus (Stephen Rea) gets sent to prison and Dil waits patiently, even though Fergus shows no intention of abandoning his heterosexuality.
Gay and dead takes home the prize again, though at least Hanks' portrayal wasn't a broad one, even if Denzel Washington gave the better lead role in the film.
I don't think Kinnear's character had a significant other by film's end, but I do remember he took a bad beating.
Here is an openly gay actor nominated for portraying a true-life openly gay director. Alas, James Whale dies in the end (as he did in real life) but the real travesty was that McKellen (and Nick Nolte and Edward Norton) lost to Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful).
Bates was great as a take-no-prisoners political operative working on the campaign of a Bill Clinton-like candidate. Alas, her lesbian character had principles and ended up firing a gun into her head.
Swank won the first of her two Oscars for lead actress by playing the gender-confused Brandon Teena. It also was the first of two times that Swank made it to the winner's circle by getting beaten to death.
Based on a real person, Bardem's character has to fight problems in Cuba before getting to N.Y. for one of the longest death scenes (from AIDS) I've ever seen.
The same year that the Academy snubbed Dennis Quaid for his fine work in Far From Heaven, they nominated this awful performance by the usually fine Harris as an artist dying of AIDS.
If Virginia Woolf hadn't walked herself into the river, this nomination and win probably would have never happened.
In a way, her character here is similar to the one Quaid plays in Moore's other 2002 film. She's married, but unable to accept her sexuality. By the film's end, she appears to be alone, so she gets a pass while Quaid got snubbed. It may also explain one of the rare occasions where Meryl Streep didn't get an Oscar nomination since her lesbian character in The Hours had a lover in the end and doesn't die.
Another win based on a true story. Theron took the executed lesbian serial killer right up to the winner's circle.
This may be the true exception to the rule. Based on a real life character, the story didn't follow Truman Capote to his death and he did have a longtime companion. The closest this comes is denying him his crush on the executed killer.
Two nominated performances of gay character, so the Academy got to take one of each: Gyllenhaal's character ends up dead, Ledger's ends up alone.
I'm not sure where to place this performance of an in-process transsexual. She doesn't die in the end.
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Labels: Bardem, Capote, D. Quaid, Denzel, Hanks, J. Gyllenhaal, Julia Roberts, Julianne Moore, K. Bates, Lithgow, Neil Simon, Nicole Kidman, Oliver Stone, P.S. Hoffman, Pacino, Pesci, R. Preston, Tommy Lee Jones, Whale, William Hurt
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