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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Sunday, July 24, 2011
A Good Scream
By Damian Arlyn
Brian De Palma is one my favorite directors. Very few other filmmakers (with the possible exception of Dario Argento) are able to fashion products of such sinister, surreal beauty filled with such colorful, hallucinatory imagery and captured by such gracefully balletic camerawork. De Palma's films create a reality that is uniquely theirs. The environments, characters and events depicted in them might resemble our own, but there is always something missing; some subtle, intangible quality that prevents them from sharing our own existence and instead ensnares them in the realm of dreams (which often prove to be nightmares). The places — be they famously celebrated or exceedingly ordinary — seem strangely distant, the characters are more like projections of people rather than flesh-and-blood human beings and the events that transpire always seem like impeccably choreographed and flawlessly executed dance routines rather than the messy, chaotic incidents to which we are so accustomed. De Palma's stories do not take place in the real world. They take place in a world of breath and shadow, where everything appears just slightly out of reach. Many have criticized his work for these characteristics, but I revel in it. De Palma's films are pure cinema and one of his most archetypal creations (not only because it IS cinema but because it is ABOUT cinema) is the exquisite paranoid suspense-thriller Blow Out, which celebrates its 30th anniversary today.
It is far too dismissive of Blow Out to call it an homage to Antonioni's similarly-themed (and similarly-titled) Blow-Up or a tribute to that master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock (of whom De Palma is often accused not only of imitating but of blatantly ripping off). It's also too easy to attribute the film's inspiration to other paranoid-conspiracy films from that era (such as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation or Alan J. Pakula's Parallax View) as well as various references to the JFK assassination, Watergate scandal and Chappaquiddick. Yes, those influences are clearly there but Blow Out uses these sources as a springboard from which it can
launch into its own distinct, visionary manifestation of the director's own fears, passions and prejudices. A perfect example of this is the film's first five minutes. Blow Out opens with an extended hand-held shot of a psychotic killer stalking the scantily clad members of a typical horror movie sorority. As ominous heavy breathing (and quintessentially cheesy, dated "scary" music) pounds away on the soundtrack, the murderer pulls back a shower curtain to reveal a beautiful young girl who looks into the camera and screams…very badly. A sudden cut reveals John Travolta sitting in a screening room laughing as he lights a cigarette and remarks "God, that scream is terrible." Thus we discover, in a very entertaining manner, that the movie we've been watching is actually a movie within a movie. What was perceived as reality is, in fact, a lie. It is the first in a series of deceptions that the film will throw at us. Furthermore, by shooting the entire opening sequence in POV, De Palma cleverly implicates the audience in an act of voyeurism, another major subject of the film (and many of his films). Finally, Jack's first line of dialogue, in which he derisively comments on the scream in the picture he's watching, carries special significance as it will parallel his last line of dialogue in the film. The credits haven't started and already the movie has introduced several of its major themes. It is also our initial introduction to the film's main character, the sympathetic but complex Jack Terry (played by John Travolta in one if his best performances). Jack is depicted as a very competent soundman who, because of a guilty conscience, has wasted his skills on a series of low-budget exploitation films since a mistake of his cost an undercover police officer his life several years earlier. Jack may be courageous and heroic in his attempts do good and see justice happen, but his cynical distrust of the state and his borderline obsessive desire to see truth come out causes him to make some serious errors in judgment. It was a brilliant decision on De Palma's part to make Jack a filmmaking technician because not only does it serve a storytelling purpose (namely, providing him with a plausible reason to witness and record the car accident of which he has the expertise to recognize as an assassination), but it provides De Palma an opportunity to engage in some artful meta-cinema. More than perhaps any other of De Palma's protagonists, Jack seems to embody the cinematic alter-ego of the director himself.
Joining Travolta is an impressive array of actors, many of whom would become De Palma regulars. The lovely Nancy Allen plays Sally, the call girl who was in the car with the governor when it went off the road. Despite the fact that she was married to De Palma at the time and had already acted in two of his previous films, her
casting was actually a recommendation by John Travolta (who had worked with her and liked her in De Palma's Carrie). Though her character is hopelessly — almost unbelievably — naive, Allen plays her with such an endearing sweetness that her eventual fate is heartbreakingly tragic. As the film's primary villain — a ruthless, sociopathic killer named Burke — John Lithgow (Obsession, Raising Cain) is frighteningly menacing and leaves a strong, lasting impression on the viewer. In fact, Lithgow tells a funny story of how a woman from the apartment building he was living in at the time the movie came out saw him getting out of an elevator one night and immediately turned white as a sheet. Finally, Dennis Franz — who also appeared in The Fury and Dressed to Kill — has a small but amusing role as a sleazy, cowardly photographer who works with the Sally character to blackmail unfaithful husbands.De Palma films are usually technically flawless and Blow Out is no exception, but in this particular effort the style does not, as it has a tendency to do sometimes, overshadow the content. It only elevates it. The cinematography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond is stunning. The visual flourishes that are used (360's, split-diopters, overheard shots, low-angles shots, split-screens, slow-mo, etc.) positively captivated me when I first saw it. Though I would later learn that these were common tricks employed by De Palma, to this day they never fail to excite me when I see them in a movie. Also, the score by frequent De Palma-collobrator Pino Donaggio is quite evocative. The theme Donaggio wrote for Jack and Sally's relationship is a memorably haunting, sweet and sad piece of music. In fact, Quentin Tarantino (an admitted fan of the film and De Palma in general) used it briefly in a scene in Death Proof.
When it was released in 1981 Blow Out received generally positive reviews. Some critics (including Roger Ebert and the always-supportive-of-De Palma Pauline Kael) even wrote some enthusiastic ones. However, the film failed to perform at the box office. Fortunately, over the years Blow Out has gained far more respect and appreciation. It was even recently added to the immortal Criterion Collection. Personally speaking, I love Blow Out and always have. I consider it to be Brian De Palma's most perfect film. I had never seen a De Palma movie at the time I first watched it as a teenager, so I not only found its story engaging, suspenseful and moving but I was absolutely entranced by its style. What I also didn't appreciate at the time was how the visual language of a film could not only be used to tell a story imaginatively, but actually communicate specific ideas/concepts to the audience. I remember getting a book from the library shortly thereafter on the films of Brian De Palma and reading in the chapter on Blow Out about one specific shot where the characters Jack and Sally are standing in the foreground conversing while two train station marques are positioned in the background directly over their heads. On each marquee a destination is written: "Crusader" is behind Jack and "Wall Street" is behind Sally. The book was proposing that these destinations each represented the characters' personalities and function within the story. That idea just blew my mind. It revealed a whole new realm of possibilities to me in the art of film analysis and criticism. I became far more aware of what I was actually seeing on screen whenever I watched a movie from that point on. Blow Out was a seminal work in my development as a cinephile. Along with a handful of other films (including Star Wars and Schindler's List), Blow Out opened my eyes to the incredible potential of cinema.
It also has a really good scream.
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Labels: 80s, Antonioni, Coppola, De Palma, Ebert, Hitchcock, Kael, Lithgow, Movie Tributes, Star Wars, Tarantino, Travolta
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Sunday, June 27, 2010
From the Vault: Pulp Fiction
As a filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino works like a crafty pickpocket, approaching strangers and diverting their attention with entertaining conversation. It's only later that the victim realizes something more serious has transpired. This is definitely the case with Tarantino's second film, Pulp Fiction. There is so much energy and joy overflowing in Pulp Fiction that the viewer has too much fun to realize there is a deeper film at work. It takes awhile for the film's full wallop to register.
Like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction is a true ensemble work with a brilliant cast. Pulp Fiction builds on the unique structural technique Tarantino utilized in Reservoir Dogs and takes it several steps further, telling disparate stories out of chronological order. To tell too much of the story would diminish the visceral and comic impact of the film, which Tarantino also wrote from stories he and Roger Avary conjured up.
From the tale of a prize fighter (Bruce Willis) paid to take a dive to the amazing speech that Christopher Walken gives that lurches from the reverent to the absurd, Tarantino's words are almost quicker than the ear's ability to catch them. The performances are all top notch, with special notice given to Walken, John Travolta, Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth. Samuel L. Jackson, who gives one great performance after another, paints perhaps his most vivid portrait as Jules, a verbose hit man considering a career change.
Harvey Keitel, one of the most intrinsically interesting actors around, pops up late in the film, steals his scenes and makes a hasty exit. In a vengeful mobster's drug-taking wife, Uma Thurman finally finds a role that capitalizes on the potential she's shown. The actors are able to perform well thanks to the script itself. No one writes dialogue like Tarantino. Every word sounds as if it came from the same mouth, yet every character has humanity and individuality.
Tarantino's direction has grown more polished. He's got a great eye. His gift isn't really an animalistic passion like Martin Scorsese, but a biting comic brilliance rarely seen. What's so fascinating about Tarantino is as much what he takes out as what he leaves in. He tells a boxing story without showing a fight, makes the contents of a briefcase important without revealing them.
In fact, Tarantino's method is reminiscent of a passage from U and I, novelist Nicholson Baker's autobiographical essay about his imagined relationship with John Updike. Baker talks about his fascination with the "narrative clogs" of fiction, the passages that give a work its flavor even though they might be extraneous. He writes: "... the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for-seepage points of passage."
In the end, that's where Pulp Fiction excels, showing the passage of time and of various criminal lowlifes in a sometimes disturbing but consistently comic way.
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Labels: 90s, Keitel, Samuel L. Jackson, Scorsese, Tarantino, Travolta, Updike, Walken, Willis
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From the Vault: Quentin Tarantino
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCT. 14, 1994
NEW YORK (September 1994) — Quentin Tarantino moves at a pace even faster than his movies, if that's possible. The energy that drives his stories at warp speed comes straight from the joy he gets from talking about film. With the tone that discussions about or with Tarantino take, it would seem as if he were a veteran filmmaker, but Pulp Fiction is only his second directing effort. Two of his screenplays have been made by other hands, the fairly faithful True Romance and the Oliver Stone-ified Natural Born Killers, a film Tarantino has yet to see.
"I was kind of interested in seeing (Natural Born Killers) for awhile, with all the pre-release hype around it ... and kind of got caught up in that, but then I ended up leaving the country when it opened. I was doing press in Japan. Then I came back, and went and saw Color of Night instead."
Pulp Fiction, however, has been a much more satisfying experience. Following his impressive debut writing, directing and acting in 1992's Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has created a whirlwind movie ride with a great cast including John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman and Harvey Keitel, among others. The reaction to Pulp Fiction has been almost universally positive. The movie won the coveted top prize, the Palme d'Or, at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Like Reservoir Dogs before it, Pulp Fiction will likely draw controversy over its violent content, though it's at a much lower level than in Tarantino's first work.
"The only thing I don't like about motion picture violence is talking about motion picture violence. The only danger is that you could die of boredom talking about it."
What bothers the 31-year-old filmmaker the most is how violence can be used to dismiss a film without seeing its context.
"It's a drag being rejected out of hand, pigeonholed or misunderstood just because of one element of my film. It gets to be a real drag when I think I've tried to put many elements in my movie, having one magnified. Just talking about it analytically gives a false impression that I'm thinking about it that way, but I'm not — I'm telling stories. I never think in terms of violence in my stories, it's just what happens, where the characters go."
He also dismisses the notion that violence in movies and television fiction desensitizes viewers to violence in real life.
"I've never bought that argument about desensitizing ... did the reign of the Borgias desensitize the peasants in Italy? It's one of those things that happens through the decades — 'There's crime in the streets, There's blood in the streets, murder — blame the playmakers.'"
As Pulp Fiction co-star Willis said during interviews for the film:
"I don't think anyone in Rwanda has seen my films, yet 500,000 people were macheted to death."
He might not like the violence tag, but that's the way the game is played.
"That's just the price you pay. If sex is part of your deal, or violence is part of what you do or things of a political nature are part of what you do. If you have one of those three elements in your movie, you know going in that everything else you are doing is going to be talked to secondarily compared to those three volatile things."
The political aspect certainly drives and affects Stone, who was the first person in Hollywood to buy a Tarantino script, but then made Natural Born Killers completely his own. Though Tarantino has been fairly candid about his dissatisfaction with Natural Born Killers, it wasn't the pain of seeing his script changed dramatically that kept him from seeing it.
"(It was) more just lack of interest. It's been quite painful for awhile and now it's not painful, it's just kind of there."
As for the writer-director-actor and his relationship with Stone now, Tarantino admits, "He's not inviting me over to his house for tea and crumpets. I think I've gotten my position very clear that I've distanced myself from the film."
"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: Interview, Keitel, Oliver Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Tarantino, Travolta, Willis
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Monday, December 10, 2007
Dragging down the party
By Edward Copeland
As Odienator expressed so well a while back, John Waters' original Hairspray in 1988 was quite fun. I never got to see its stage incarnation, though I've listened to the original cast album numerous times and seen several clips of production numbers. Now, I've seen the film version of the musical version of the original movie and it's mostly a charming affair, though it's sunk frequently by the grotesque miscasting better known as John Travolta as Edna Turnblad.
Every detail of the Travolta Edna is wrong. Why does it always seem that when film makeup goes bad, it goes horribly bad, as it does here. The latex and body suit harnessed to Travolta creates something that not only looks fake and rips you violently from the 1962 Baltimore that the film is trying to create, sometimes it repulses you.
Unfortunately, all the blame for why Travolta just does not work doesn't lie with what he's wearing, it's with the performance itself. Not only did Divine and, in what I've seen of Harvey Fierstein, make Edna a real woman with minimal makeup tricks, they also created actual characters. Travolta for some reason has chosen to adopt a fake Southernish accent that seems like a bad parody of Dustin Hoffman's voice as his Dorothy Michaels character in Tootsie, another case where a man in drag created a plausible female character.
Fortunately though, Travolta's screen time is limited to some extent and when he is off, it truly allows the others in the cast to shine, especially newcomer Nikki Blonsky as Tracy. The rest of the ensemble also is mostly fine across the board, including Christopher Walken (though imagine how good he could have been doing his number with someone other than Travolta as his partner), Amanda Bynes, James Marsden, Queen Latifah, Elijah Kelley and and Taylor Parks, to name but a few.
Michelle Pfeiffer does get to have more fun than she's had in a long time as the film's villainous Velma von Tussle, though the story change of making her the station manager and trying to seduce Walken, dowsn't really work. (Also, I have to admit, that I regret not giving her a husband as co-conspirator and a climax involving a time bomb hidden in a bouffant hairdo.)
With all the digital wizardry out there at talented people's fingers these days, maybe someone can alter the film and somehow insert Divine back into the role and let Fierstein do a Marni Nixon for the late actor.
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As Odienator expressed so well a while back, John Waters' original Hairspray in 1988 was quite fun. I never got to see its stage incarnation, though I've listened to the original cast album numerous times and seen several clips of production numbers. Now, I've seen the film version of the musical version of the original movie and it's mostly a charming affair, though it's sunk frequently by the grotesque miscasting better known as John Travolta as Edna Turnblad.
Every detail of the Travolta Edna is wrong. Why does it always seem that when film makeup goes bad, it goes horribly bad, as it does here. The latex and body suit harnessed to Travolta creates something that not only looks fake and rips you violently from the 1962 Baltimore that the film is trying to create, sometimes it repulses you.
Unfortunately, all the blame for why Travolta just does not work doesn't lie with what he's wearing, it's with the performance itself. Not only did Divine and, in what I've seen of Harvey Fierstein, make Edna a real woman with minimal makeup tricks, they also created actual characters. Travolta for some reason has chosen to adopt a fake Southernish accent that seems like a bad parody of Dustin Hoffman's voice as his Dorothy Michaels character in Tootsie, another case where a man in drag created a plausible female character.
Fortunately though, Travolta's screen time is limited to some extent and when he is off, it truly allows the others in the cast to shine, especially newcomer Nikki Blonsky as Tracy. The rest of the ensemble also is mostly fine across the board, including Christopher Walken (though imagine how good he could have been doing his number with someone other than Travolta as his partner), Amanda Bynes, James Marsden, Queen Latifah, Elijah Kelley and and Taylor Parks, to name but a few.
Michelle Pfeiffer does get to have more fun than she's had in a long time as the film's villainous Velma von Tussle, though the story change of making her the station manager and trying to seduce Walken, dowsn't really work. (Also, I have to admit, that I regret not giving her a husband as co-conspirator and a climax involving a time bomb hidden in a bouffant hairdo.)
With all the digital wizardry out there at talented people's fingers these days, maybe someone can alter the film and somehow insert Divine back into the role and let Fierstein do a Marni Nixon for the late actor.
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Labels: 00s, Dustin Hoffman, Musicals, Pfeiffer, Remakes, Travolta, Walken
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Monday, August 27, 2007
The Southerners Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down Philosophers
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the BIZARRO Blog-a-Thon being hosted by Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre.
By Edward Copeland
Terrence Malick's version of James Jones' The Thin Red Line opens with the ominous image of a
crocodile slowly entering the muck of a pond. Of course, crocodiles are used to this sort of environment, which won't be the case with the American soldiers who find themselves trying to take the island of Guadalcanal from the Japanese during World War II. It also sets up Malick's point-of-view of not just this locale but everywhere: Man does not belong, if for no other reason that he keeps getting in the way of us being able to see nature in its purity, constantly interrupting with war and narratives. Malick's adaptation of the World War II novel taught me something I didn't realize: Apparently the vast majority of Americans who fought in the South Pacific were from the South. Of course, Malick carefully instructs his actor not to distract from the reverent, dreamlike reverie of nature he creates by insisting that most of them employ the worst attempts at Southern accents they can muster. At times though, the damn actors still get in the way such as Sean Penn, whose accent seems legit at times, and Tim Blake Nelson who uses his real voice. Of course, the actors are an
impediment in general since they keep getting in the way of the scenery. Malick's vision is about nature's vengeance and inner ability for self-preservation, and too often the actors get in the way. Fortunately, he remedies this by using odd, rambling voiceovers, assembled in such a haphazard way, that you can never quite be certain which character is speaking. This is good, because this film is not about people and doesn't stoop to humanizing the conflict but allowing its actors to add dimensions to their roles and allow sentimentality to seep in as Steven Spielberg allowed in Saving Private Ryan. The first American we see in the film
is the one played by Jim Cavaziel, giving off a holy vibe as if he's preparing for his later title role in Mel Gibson's Jesus Chainsaw Massacre. When we first see Cavaziel's character, he is AWOL, romping on an island paradise with natives that seems as if it's out of Mutiny on the Bounty. That's not the only reference to other sources that Malick makes throughout the film: When we first see Cavaziel standing over the beach over the natives working with primitive tools, he's unmistakably supposed to be the equivalent of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cavaziel also gets the bulk of the dreamy monologues with fake drawls, as his internal conversation reflects on immortality and his dying mother. Unfortunately, the war intrudes on his peace in the form of a Naval vessel bearing his commanding officer (Penn) who plunges him back into the muck of the war. 
Now, I don't want to leave readers with the impression that The Thin Red Line is a pretentious, dull, humorless affair. Believe it or not, there is comedy to be found, laughs similar to those in the works of the Coen brothers with their dimwitted characters with overblown accents speaking in flowery prose. I have to wonder though: Who influenced whom? Did Malick pick up the Coens' tricks by watching films such as Raising Arizona or were the Coens inspired by earlier works such as Badlands and Days of Heaven which contained similar attributes? One scene for certain had to be inspired by Raising
Arizona: When Woody Harrelson accidentally blows "his butt off" with a grenade, there is no mistaking that the expression on his face is an homage to Randall "Tex" Cobb when his bounty hunter in Raising Arizona realizes he's in possession of an activated grenade. Of course, Harrelson's presence is one of many notable cameos that makes The Thin Red Line play as if it's a World War II-variation on Robert Altman's The Player. Quick: There's John Travolta. Over there, it's George Clooney. John Cusack just showed up. I kept waiting to see Cher. Without a doubt though the funniest cameo is given by John Savage, who checks his dog tags to try to find out who his character is and make certain that somehow he didn't get teleported through time back to the set of The Deer Hunter. The character who makes the strongest impression, and therefore breaks the mood Malick is creating, is Nick Nolte as Lt. Col. Tall, outwardly a Nixon-like creature, but inside as reflective as all the soldiers, commenting on how he's degrading himself, that someone is always watching him like a hawk, regretting all he might have given for love and acknowledging that he is dying slowly, like a tree. Then, philosophy seems to be what all the Americans have in mind. Ben Chaplin's character is
preoccupied with the wife he left at home, insisting he'll be waiting for her on "the other side of dark waters" only later to get a "Dear Jack" letter. When I first saw The Thin Red Line in 1998, I kept getting the characters played by Chaplin and Adrien Brody confused because of their similar facial features, distinguished only by Brody's slightly bigger nose. On my most recent viewing, the distinctions are clearer as you realize that Brody never says a word and that Malick must be making another film allusion, this time to Jean-Louis Barrault's character of the mime Baptiste in Children of Paradise. Malick excels at summoning his drowsy, trance-like Zentropa feel, but he does undermine his own movie with the sequence involving the storming of the beach and the taking of the hill. It doesn't belong and proves to be a true distraction, shocking the viewer out of his easy-listening mode. Even the character played by Elias Koteas seems to admit this in these sequences, stopping to check his watch as an audience surrogate impatient to end the action and get back to the existential. One thing that struck me
on my recent viewing is his portrayal of the Japanese soldiers. They seem to be shrieking stereotypes with no humanity. One narrator even goes so far as to ask, "Who is this evil, robbing us of light and life?" At first, I was offended by this portrayal, then I realized that this must be Malick making a statement about the racist South, especially when you see the Japanese soldiers disguised as trees, showing they are much more in tune with nature than their American counterparts. "War don't ennoble man," Penn's character says at one point. "Turns them into dogs." Thoughts such as these preoccupy the troops, some who die, new soldiers who arrive and some who abruptly disappear from the film's canvas. They ask questions about the courage of a contented heart and the darkness beneath the earth that allows the sun to shine and which may dwell within us all. Penn also acts as a Malick surrogate to some extent, commenting that he's only lonely when he's around people and that every man should make an island for himself. While certainly flawed, The Thin Red Line has much bigger fish to fry than just war. However, Malick reveals his true target audience with one of his final shots. These two are who The Thin Red Line is really for.
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Labels: 90s, Altman, Blog-a-thons, Coens, George Clooney, Harrelson, Malick, Mel Gibson, Nolte, Sean Penn, Spielberg, Travolta
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007
That Magic Potion in a 12-oz Can
By Odienator
My aunt once told me of a popular dance in my grandfather's day called "The Dog." People crawled around on all fours to the music, cocking their heads like a dog. Occasionally, the dancers would lift their legs up as if they were peeing on a fire hydrant. "I don't know if they sniffed each other's asses too," she informed me. "Daddy didn't tell us that."
I recalled that story while watching John Waters' Hairspray on the big screen in 1988. Waters' shockingly PG-rated musical featured a plethora of '60s dances, most of which I'd heard of before. However, there was one dance that blew me away, and it was almost as crazy as The Dog. Late in the film, villainess Amber von Tussle (Colleen Fitzpatrick) dedicates a dance at the Auto Show Hop to her nemesis, Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) who, for reasons too complicated to reveal right now, is rotting away in reform school. "It's a brand new dance that I'm sure you'll know how to do," Amber says snidely. "It's called The Roach." Judging from the picture above, Tracy certainly knew something about roaches.
Nothing could prepare me for what happened next. As a catchy R&B number blared from the speakers, Amber proceeded to squash imaginary roaches on the dance floor, and, to add insult to their injury, pantomimed spraying them with an exterminator can. I laughed so hard that I choked on my popcorn. If you lived in the neighborhood I grew up in, this was an activity with which you could identify. It was pure John Waters, a mix of absurdity and social commentary. Here was the rich snob girl from Baltimore stomping roaches and shaking her ass while the lyrics commanded her to "squish, squash, kill dat roach!"
Despite its family friendly rating, Hairspray is still a John Waters movie. It may be a kinder John Waters, but it's certainly not a gentler one. All the things that make a John Waters movie are still there, just muted. There's still a love for the underdog, a penchant for making the surreal seem normal, and an unhealthy attraction to bad fashion. There's still vomit and assholes as well, but it's PG-rated vomit and PG-rated assholes. (You have to look real hard to find the latter, but it's there.) And of course, there's Divine, in and out of drag, reuniting with Waters for the first time in seven years.
Stripped of X-rated shock tactics, Waters crafts his satire into a cute toy poodle with the bite of a pit bull. He takes Bye Bye Birdie and crosses it with a movie about race relations and acceptance of the pleasantly plump. It's Stanley Kramer's Beach Blanket Bingo, filled with so many dance numbers that making a movie musical out of it seems out of the question (and currently playing at a theater near you). Waters' soundtrack, and the real dances he uses, evoke a realistic feeling of time and place missing from both the Broadway musical and its movie incarnation. They are both enjoyable for different reasons, but neither of them is as ballsy nor as sharply mean as their predecessor. The lovers of movies such as Female Trouble (and I admit I'm one of them) may protest when I say this, but Hairspray is John Waters' masterpiece.
In American culture, beauty is personified by blondes. Blondes have more fun, the saying goes. Big and beautiful are rarely seen in the same sentence if the subject is women. Hairspray presents us a protagonist who, at film's opening, is big but not blonde, and the film is out to convince us she's beautiful. Tracy Turnblad is the daughter of Edna (Divine) and Wilbur Turnblad (Jerry Stiller). She's, as Mr. Pinky calls her later, a "big-boned gal." But boy, can she dance! She and her partner in alliterative names Penny Pingleton (Lesley Anne Powers) rush home every day to watch "The Corny Collins Show," the Baltimore version of American Bandstand. All the cool kids from school appear on the show every day — unless you're a Black kid. Black kids only appeared on the once a month airing of Negro Day. Integration of any sort is prohibited on WZZT, so long as the station owner Arvin Hodgepile (Divine again, as a man) has anything to do with it.
Tracy dances better than any of the girls on the show, but the queen bee of the telecast is Amber von Tussle. Amber is blonde and beautiful like her Mom (Debbie Harry). Also like her Mom, she's another b-word: a bitch. Amber is wearing the ring of Link (Michael St. Gerard), the handsomest hunk to ever get a close-up on Tracy's black and white TV. When Tracy decides to try out for the show, Amber states "the show is not shot in CinemaScope!" Tracy dances her ass off, and when she is selected as a member of the Corny Collins Council, she sets out to prove to the world that Big Girls Don't Cry, They Dance.
Amber's terrible behavior gets her banned from the Ladies Choice Dance, and from home she watches Tracy choose Link to dance with on the show. Amber is so angry she throws Link's ring across the room. She's comforted by her Mom and Dad (Sonny Bono), two angry and supremely racist people. "She's White Trash!" screams Dad about Tracy. Mom says "for all you know, that girl could be high yellow!"
About the only thing that's high and yellow is Tracy's hair. She comes home with a blonde two-toned 'do that looks like the hairdresser ran out of peroxide mid-dye job. "I want all of Baltimore to know that I'm Big, Blonde, and Beautiful!" Tracy exclaims to Edna and Wilbur. "And I'm in love!" You would be too if you took one look at Link. John Waters certainly was; he gives Link a loving closeup, his "Joan Crawford moment," and the highest honor bestowed in a John Waters flick.
Motormouth Maybelle (Ruth Brown) is big and blonde. She's also another b-word: Black. Maybelle runs Negro Day and is far from pleased that such a thing exists. She goes with the flow, but has her own side hustle of a party at the record store that probably supplies WZZT with the R&B music Tracy and her council members dance to on Corny Collins. After Tracy sees a young, talented Black teenager humiliated during her audition for Corny Collins (Mink Stole asks her "can you relate to Shelley Fabares" and she responds "I'll dance to Lawrence Welk if I have to!"), Tracy realizes Negro Day is not fair. After all, if they allowed her, someone far from the council norm to be on the show, why not these Black kids who can do the dances better than their Corny Collins counterparts? Tracy is not only in love, she's into integration! She and Link make their way to Maybelle's for the kind of dancing you can't do on whitebread TV.
Also into integration, or perhaps just merely miscegenation, is Tracy's pal Penny Pingleton. Penny wears a big P on her sweater, like Letterman on The Electric Company, because according to her paranoid, high strung mother Prudence (Joanna Havrilla), "Penny Pingleton is permanently, positively punished!" Penny purposefully pretends she's not punished and presents herself at the premises of Motormouth Maybelle so she may press her parts against Maybelle's progeny, Seaweed (Clayton Prince). Meanwhile, Prudence catches her daughter sneaking on the ghetto bus and gets a cab to the Black part of Baltimore. Once she gets there, Prudence acts like a damn fool, freaking out at every single Black person she encounters, even the cops. She catches her daughter dirty dancing with Seaweed and has a Dolly Parton-size titty attack. She forbids Penny from seeing Seaweed, but you know how that sort of thing goes. Prudence eventually resorts to more drastic measures after finding Penny getting to second base with Seaweed during Negro Day: She has her strait-jacketed and subjected to an electric cattle prod wielded by John Waters himself.
"You only want nice, White boys!" he says in a crazed voice as he shocks her repeatedly. "It's a shame for those kids to be dancing to that colored music!" snaps one of Edna's customers earlier in the film. Making out to it gets you sent over the cuckoo's nest.
The Corny Collins Council is a brilliant microcosm of high school Hell. They're the can-do's who convince the have nots that they can't do. The interview process for the council is brutal. The candidates are insulted, laughed at and held up to ridicule — and that's just by Mink Stole! The kids on the council are equally brutal. Amber can't resist attempting to make Tracy feel like she's not entitled to shake a tail feather on the same line as the thin kids. The candidates are dismissed with the line "please wait outside while the council discusses your flaws and shortcomings."
Even the kids who make it on the council are concerned about looking good and staying in the council's good graces. If your popularity wanes, out the door you go. One girl stuffs her bra with stockings during a commercial break, leading Stole to deviate from her usual "APPLAUSE" cue card to call her out.
Waters makes every attempt to show the cattiness of his teenagers. It feels as if he is exorcising some demons of his own high school experience. Amber spreads horrible rumors, telling anyone who listens that Tracy has roaches in her coif and passing notes that say "She's adopted!!!!" During a dance scene, Amber mouths the word "WHORE" in Tracy's direction. When Link hooks up with Tracy despite her being the spokesgirl for Hefty Hideaway ("clothes for the ample woman"), Amber is as mad as a wet hen on the set of Pink Flamingos. She sets out to destroy Tracy, no matter what the cost.
Tracy suffers humiliation at school, being sent to Special Ed because her hair is too high. ("You're a hair hopper!" people keep telling her, even her mother.) She finds that all the Black kids are also in Special Ed because their skin is too tan. Waters plays Special Ed as a serious joke on the school system, not its inhabitants. It's where his idea of the cool people are, the outcasts who deserve to be in the in crowd. Despite all this, Tracy's optimism never wanes and she becomes the most popular girl on the Council, much to Amber's horror.
Harris Glen Milstead was the government name of Divine, a transvestite performer usually saddled with doing the most memorably shocking things in John Waters' oeuvre. In Hairspray, Divine shocks us again by giving a fine, subtle performance. We actually believe this larger than life performer is a mother saddled in the '50s, with old fashioned values and genuine concern for her daughter. John Travolta is a gimmick; Divine is the real deal. Delivering some real zingers with an underplayed wit, Divine finds some heretofore unexplored nuances in her performance. Waters loves Divine and in his movies, he wants us to love her too. But this is the first time I actually felt for a character inhabited by Divine. My favorite moment is when Tracy introduces Edna to the '60s by getting her a ridiculously high hairdo to go with the new dress she received for negotiating Tracy's contract with the Hefty Hideaway. Divine comes out of the salon and touches her hair, which admittedly looks absurd. There is such pride in the moment, as if this woman had been reborn. This is the best performance Divine ever gave, and it is wonderful.
Unlike the 2007 Hairspray, the segregation subplot is played as a normal part of the plot. Motormouth Maybelle is just a regular person who's tired of being relegated to Negro Day. (Why didn't Waters call it "Colored Day On The Corny Collins Show?" Probably because this movie already has more alliteration than The Raven.) Hairspray 2007 makes it seem like Queen Latifah's Motormouth Maybelle IS the Civil Rights movement. The Queen sings wonderfully, but her character is written as if she's got Rosa Parks' bus on her back as she crawls toward the March on Washington. She is beyond noble while Ruth Brown is beyond nutty.
Brown's Maybelle shows up at the Tilted Acres amusement park (actually Dorney Park in Allentown, PA) to protest her dancers not being allowed to attend the Corny Collins broadcast there. A riot breaks out, and Waters plays it rather straight—for him. A crazed woman swinging a mad pocketbook ("she was really hitting people hard," Waters says on the DVD commentary) breaks Link's knees while Blacks and Whites tussle. Tracy gets arrested while Link has that aforementioned "Joan Crawford moment" where he stares into the camera and overacts, calling out for his beloved Tracy while crawling on the broken knees the film will conveniently forget about 15 minutes later.
The riot is the moment that always surprises me in the film. There is a subtle tension building behind the jokes and the satire, and it logically led to some form of altercation. While a milder riot than, say, Do the Right Thing, it's still a riot and our heroine, in standing up for what she believes in, winds up in yet another cool place for Waters: reform school.
This is where you came in. Tracy's in reform school and Amber is crushing cucarachas. Penny Pingleton is getting the Jungle Fever shocked out of her in a botched attempt to remove the "checkerboard chick" status crazed beatnik Pia Zadora (in the best thing she ever did) bestowed upon her. And Motormouth Maybelle and her kids Seaweed and Little Inez are about to do something drastic to save Tracy. I'm not going to tell you what they do — you just need to see it — but they get Tracy out of jail just in time to upstage Amber with a dress with large roaches on it. Not since Rita Hayworth is Gilda has an actress made such a brilliant, lasting impression with an entrance (and poor Rita had to do it sans roaches).
Of course, "The Corny Collins Show" gets integrated at film's end, but the movie doesn't make as big a deal out of it as its remake. It spends more time with an exploding bomb in somebody's wig. In the integration scene, Divine dances like someone who weighs that much while Travolta's character goes all Tina Turner and should have had a heart attack for dancing that hard at that weight. This sums up the main difference between the two features. As fun as the new Hairspray is, it never feels real nor lived in.
Speaking of dances, Hairspray's choreographer Edward Love deserves mention here. He crams the movie full of dances, including the Madison, the Waddle, the Bug and a dance I still can't do despite 30 years of trying, the Mashed Potato. All the kids in the film look far too young to remember any of these, so Love had to teach them all to them. It's seamless, and the dance numbers have an energy like the musical version, but they also have a nostalgia factor the musical can only attempt to recreate. The dances, and the songs that instructed us how to do them, were really done by people like my aunt and John Waters, whose commentary on the DVD has the right mix of information and bitchy gay sensibility.
Speaking of my aunt, she and my mother watched this movie with me and my siblings when it came out on VHS, and then treated us to a recreation of every dance in the movie, including the Madison, which looks like the Electric Slide for people who can do more than four steps. I also learned that John Waters didn't invent The Roach; it was a hit dance song for Gene and Wendell. I just wish I'd known about it when I was doing it for real.
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Labels: 80s, Crawford, Movie Tributes, Remakes, Travolta
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Monday, June 11, 2007
Hope he's proud of what he's done
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is for the Grease 2 25th anniversary blog-a-thon being coordinated at The Moviezzz Blog.
By Edward Copeland
Grease 2 was an awful movie and I didn't want to admit it when it opened back in 1982. Its screenplay was written by Ken Finkleman, who also wrote and directed another awful 1982 sequel: Airplane II: The Sequel and would later go on to write one of the many Madonna movie disasters, 1987's Who's That Girl?
I had a minor obsession with the movie Grease that almost equaled my obsession with Star Wars (I actually sat through Grease in a movie theater more times than any of the Star Wars films). So I was there on opening day for Grease 2, even though inside I knew it couldn't really be a true sequel without John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
I bought the soundtrack before the film even opened and, really, the songs are the film's saving grace. I've never set through the movie a second time, but I did buy the album when it came out on DVD and have been known to listen to it from time to time.
Sure, even the songs don't equal the ones from Grease, but they contain charm and flair that Grease 2 itself lacked and I feel no shame for still owning that CD. The movie and the soundtrack actually gets off to a strong start with The Four Tops performing "Back to School Again" with a huge production number that definitely shows the sign of first-time director Patricia Birch's work as a choreographer.
Spending my vacation in the summer sun
Getting lots of action and lots of fun
Scoring like a bandit until the bubble burst
Suddenly it got to be September First
Woe is me
All summer long I was happy and free
Save my soul
The board of education took away my parole
I've got to go back, back, back to school again
Even in the second line of the very first song, it sets the stage for the preponderance of double entendres and straight-forward sex talk that would pervade Grease 2. (As I side note, since I saw the original Grease in elementary school, it was years until I learned what Kenickie really meant about his "25 cent insurance policy.)
Just look at the lineup of songs for the sequel: "Score Tonight" (ostensibly about "bowling"), "Do It for Our Country" (faking a draft call to get laid), "Prowlin'" and what can really be said about "Reproduction," which sets sex education to music. Honestly, do you think abstinence-only education could ever produce such a catchy tune?
Since I knew this blog-a-thon was imminent, I pulled out my CD and listened to it again multiple times, to make certain my memories weren't overly rosy, but while the songs certainly won't make Stephen Sondheim blush (or Leiber and Stoller for that matter), most of them retain their charm, especially if removed from the context of the lame movie in which they exist. Really, the only two songs I frequently skip are the "Girl for All Seasons" number and "Rock-a-Hula-Luau (Summer Is Coming)."
In addition to the opening song, "Cool Rider" "(Love Will) Turn Back the Hands of Time" and "We'll Be Together" especially hold up well. Still, if there's only one song to be remembered from this unnecessary sequel, it always will be "Reproduction." 25 years later, it still retains a degree of audacity.
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Labels: 80s, Blog-a-thons, Leiber and Stoller, Music, Musicals, Sequels, Sondheim, Travolta
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Sunday, April 08, 2007
Gangs for the memories
This post is running as part of the Mob-a-Thon being conducted by The Boob Tubers to mark the return of The Sopranos for its final nine episodes.
By Edward Copeland
To mark the return and final stand (at least as we've been led to believe) of The Sopranos, the folks at The Boob Tubers have called for a Mob-a-Thon today on mobsters and gangsters in general. So, I've tossed together a list of 10 of my favorite movie gangsters, in no particular order, to mark the occasion. Inevitably, many good ones have been omitted such as the various Corleones and Duke Mantee. I've also limited myself to one role per actor, so people such as James Cagney won't be doubling up.
Not just top of the world ma, but top of the heap. Cagney's triumphant return to the genre that made him famous in 1949 marked one of the greatest criminal creations ever put on screen. How on earth he failed to get an Oscar nomination for Raoul Walsh's classic is mind-boggling. I haven't seen Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart, but I'd rank Cagney's Jarrett higher than Broderick Crawford's winning Willie Stark in All the King's Men, Kirk Douglas in Champion, Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High and John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. Jarrett beats them all — and would probably do it literally if given the chance. Jarrett's mental instability makes Tommy in Goodfellas seem well adjusted. He has mother issues that almost rival Norman Bates' and can be particularly detached from his killings. When the henchman of a rival asks if Cody can really kill him in cold blood, Jarrett replies, "No, I'll let ya warm up a little."
Speaking of Tommy, he did win an Oscar for Martin Scorsese's mob masterpiece which really should get the bulk of credit for The Sopranos. Sure, no one went to a shrink here, but the depiction of "normal" family life among mobsters wasn't really portrayed until this movie. (Let's face — it the Corleones were upper class all the way.) I had to laugh when in the series finale of HBO's Rome, the by-then barking mad Marc Antony starts ranting, "Am I a clown? Do I amuse you?" Pesci's Oscar was most deserved. His ability to change moods on a dime truly frightens. He's laughing one second, killing the next, but in all of the movie's minutes with him, he's riveting.
"Mother of Mercy. Could this be the end of Rico?" Not as long as prints of Mervyn LeRoy's landmark gangster film exist and keep being preserved and transferred to whatever new media arrive. It was hard to pick just one Robinson performance for this list, but I settled on the most famous. Part of me wanted to go with John Ford's delightful The Whole Town's Talking from 1935 where Eddie G. got to play both an ordinary schmuck and the vicious gangster he's mistaken for. Another part wanted to single out Rocco in John Huston's Key Largo. Honestly, both of those other films are better ones than Little Caesar, but it's hard to argue with a character and a performance this iconic.
I had to go with a tag team on this one because Hoskins and Gwynne as Owney Madden and his invaluable lieutenant Frenchy Demange in Francis Ford Coppola's underrated Cotton Club simply are inseparable. Sure, the real gangster of the piece is James Remar's menacing Dutch Schultz, but Hoskins as club owner Madden and Gwynne, miles removed from Herman Munster, really highlight the film with their loving, fractious platonic relationship. The bond between the two is exemplified by the scene where Frenchy returns to Owney, battered and bruised after being held hostage by some young thugs. He conceals his anger at Madden's handling of the crisis before asking to see Owney's beloved pocketwatch and smashing it to smithereens. As Owney is ready to explode, Frenchy pulls a wrapped box out of his coat pocket and Madden sees that Frenchy already had a replacement pocketwatch at the ready. The duo hug. The viewer shouldn't be worried about the romantic fates of Richard Gere and Diane Lane or Gregory Hines and Lonette McKee — Hoskins and Gwynne are the couple we couldn't bear to see part ways.
"This killing of the police captain's wife is costing us ... all ... too ... much." Don't let Corrado Prizzi's decrepit and near-death demeanor deceive you: This don is still sharp as a tack and able to manipulate those around him like a pro. The iconoclastic Hickey earned an Oscar nomination for this great role, but lost to the sympathy vote for Don Ameche in Cocoon who, let's be frank, wasn't even the best supporting actor in Cocoon. Decades from now, when people no longer know what breakdancing even is, John Huston's great comic mob tale should stand the test of time and Hickey will be one of its strongest assets in a great cast that includes Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Robert Loggia and Anjelica Huston. Have another cookie, my dear? I certainly will if it's Don Corrado offering the treat. It's a snack you can't refuse.
Bill Murray as one of the great movie gangsters? You wouldn't be puzzled if you'd seen his work in John MacNaughton's Mad Dog & Glory. The movie itself is a mixed bag, telling the story of a shy police photographer (Robert De Niro) who unwittingly saves the life of the mobster and would-be stand up comic who rewards him by giving him one of "his girls" (Uma Thurman). Murray has been justly praised in recent years for his acting chops, but truly 1993 may have marked the turning point. Not only did Murray create a complete original with Frank Milo, smooth and scary simultaneously, it also was the year he starred in Groundhog Day, so really the Academy snubbed him in two categories that year, though that was a particularly fruitful year for male performances. If you'd never seen Bill Murray before and Mad Dog & Glory were your introduction, you'd ask in amazement: Where has this guy been hiding? It would have made him a star if not for the fact he already was one.
When you think of conflicted movie mobsters, most people leap to poor Michael Corleone, pulled into the family business he never sought but becoming as ruthless as he needs to be. Do we know why Michael is conflicted? Does he ever say that he recognizes that the path he goes on is the wrong one? No. He just wants to stay rich but become legit. Jules Winfield however, a gangster of a different kind, decides to change his ways because of what he considers divine intervention. Samuel L. Jackson has never really been able to equal the greatness he was able to display in his role in Pulp Fiction. While the film is filled with great lines and performances, no one quite puts the brilliant spin on Tarantino's words the way Jackson did as Jules. To watch his transformation from ruthless killer to reformed criminal in gestation, even within the fractured narrative, is a wonder to behold. Jules tells his partner Vincent (John Travolta) that he considers himself retired and plans to "walk the earth" like Cain in Kung Fu. I hope Jules got his wish and got out and no one pulled him back in.
Who knew that Gandhi could be so frightening? When Ben Kingsley arrives on the screen in Sexy Beast, he unleashes such ferocity and heat that you fear that the celluloid will melt as it runs through the projector (if anyone still gets to see films that way). He should have won that supporting actor Oscar that year. To think that one man could give performances for the ages as the epitome of nonviolence and the embodiment of brutality truly amazes. Kingsley even got to do a sardonic take on himself on an episode of The Sopranos when last we saw them and he was really the only highlight of one of the series' weakest episodes.
Here's another recent case of a past Oscar-winning best actor who comes back with a memorable supporting turn as a bad guy. Hurt, sometimes criticized for coldness and who the late Spy magazine once labeled "the thinking man's asshole," uses that reputation to his advantage here in David Cronenberg's most accessible film. He enters the film late, after Ed Harris has already given a memorable appearance as a villain, and proceeds to steal the entire film. While Hurt does have scary moments, what really makes Hurt's Richie so memorable is that he's so damn funny. Some complained that his appearance in the film was so brief that he didn't deserve a nomination. It's not the size of the role, it's the impression it leaves afterward.
It's hard when you've been called "the most vile gangster in the galaxy" to leave you off a list of memorable gangsters, even if that galaxy is far, far away. Jabba's appearance in Return of the Jedi was a great payoff for a character who'd been mentioned but not seen in two previous films (until George Lucas had to go back and ruin things by inserting him unnecessarily in Star Wars). Tony Soprano often is noted for his girth, but he's got nothing on the Hutt, who outshines the New Jersey boss in his lust for money, power and pleasure. He was a truly unique creation but thanks to Leia's strength with chains (though I still don't see how she'd be strong enough, Jedi blood or not, to pull off strangling him to death), Jabba is bantha fodder now.
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Labels: Cagney, Coppola, Cronenberg, De Niro, Edward G., Gregory Peck, Huston, Kingsley, Lucas, Murray, Nicholson, Pesci, Samuel L. Jackson, Scorsese, Star Wars, Tarantino, Travolta, Walsh, William Hurt, Zemeckis
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Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Does this look inanimate to you?
On the 19th day in the month of December in a decade not too long before our own, the human race suddenly encountered a very entertaining treat to its very existence. This hysterically funny joy came, as such joys often do, in the local movie theater…
By Edward Copeland
Twenty years ago today, one of the most enjoyable films of my moviegoing life was released and while movie musicals have seen somewhat of a resurgence of late, for me, none hold a candle to Frank Oz's great film version of Little Shop of Horrors.
Chicago was fun. Moulin Rouge was designed for viewers with the attention spans of gnats. The Phantom of the Opera was a bore. I could never bring myself to see Rent, because I loved the stage version too much and could see that Chris Columbus was going to blow its transfer to the screen. Dreamgirls had good performances but turned out to be an overlong botch and Nine — that sounded like a terrible idea for turning from a musical to a movie when I first heard about it and then the film managed to be even worse than my low expectations. The two best attempts at stage adaptations were undermined by bad casting — Helena Bonham Carter in Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd and John Travolta's horrid drag performance in the film version of the musical Hairspray. Really, of the three best recent attempts at movie musicals one was animated — 1999's South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut — and the other two barely got seen — 2001's Hedwig and the Angry Inch and 2003's Camp.
However, re-watching Little Shop of Horrors , the movie still holds up as one of the best movie musicals to come out in the post-death-of-movie-musicals era. To think that a Roger Corman 1960 quickie filmed in a little more than two days could decades later inspire such a winning musical still astounds me. Granted, my exposure to Little Shop of Horrors came during my formative years in high school, I was pleased to see how much I still enjoyed the film when I sat down to watch it again for the first time in years, though it did produce a bit of sadness in me that Howard Ashman isn't here anymore to keep producing work such as this. His great book and lyrics teamed with Alan Menken's music are infectious and launched the team's work on the resurgence of Disney animation with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast before Ashman's death from AIDS during the production of Aladdin, when Tim Rice was brought in and future Disney animated scores lost all of Ashman's wit and subversive qualities and became Disneyfied, saccharine and hackneyed. Still, we should be grateful for the Ashman lyrics we did manage to hear, especially his infectious score for Little Shop of Horrors, often sung through the Greek chorus of Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks and Tisha Campbell.
One thing that really struck me upon re-visiting the movie is how great that set is to behold. It simultaneously seems like a stage show transferred to the big screen while opening up with its wonderfully artificial yet three-dimensional rendering of Skid Row thanks to the imaginative and magnificent production design by Roy Walker (who served the same role on Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining) aided by art director Stephen Spence and set decorator Tessa Davies. Putting some of the finishing touches on the film's canvas are the spot-on costumes designed by Marit Allen, John Jympson's editing and Robert Paynter's cinematography. Director Frank Oz (the Muppeteer best known as the voice of Yoda and Miss Piggy) never directed a movie better than this and Little Shop shows an astounding display of cinematic gifts on his part that he's unfortunately never come close to matching. Of course, what really makes this movie soar are the many great performances, led by Rick Moranis as Seymour Krelborn who discovers the mysterious plant with a hidden agenda.
Moranis' lovesick nebbish is a delight (and his singing isn't half bad either) as he longs for the delightfully daffy Audrey (Ellen Greene, repeating her stage triumph) and finds that his way to her heart could involve murder and world domination at the behest of a plant from outer space. Seymour even goes so far as to name the plant Audrey II after his unrequited love interest, who unfortunately is embroiled in an abusive relationship with one Orin Scrivello (Steve Martin in one of his greatest performances). Greene gets some of the show's best numbers such as "Somewhere That's Green," where she longs for a domestic life similar to those that look so perfect on TV, and "Suddenly Seymour," her duet with Moranis where they declare their feelings for one another once Scrivello is no longer in the picture, though of course a bigger villain stands in the way of their happiness. We still get to see Greene from time to time. IMDb list her most recent credit as a role on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, but it's a shame that she wasn't able to turn this star turn into bigger and better things either in theater or the movies.
Martin's Scrivello manages to be funny and scary. His scenes turn out so superbly they almost threaten to take over the entire movie. His set pieces within Orin's dental office (Did I forget to mention that he's a dentist? Relax! Want some nitrous oxide? Suit yourself.) are priceless. His sadistic dentist could prove just a one-note joke (with one great song) if it weren't for the scenes here, most especially when he encounters the world's most masochistic patient in Bill Murray, playing the role that a young Jack Nicholson had in the original 1960 nonmusical version. It's not often that you can say that someone plays a part better than Jack did, but Murray pulls it off here. Then again, has anyone else ever tried to play a Nicholson part on film after he's put his stamp on it other than Murray? (Of course, since I originally wrote this piece five years ago, we had the late Heath Ledger take on The Joker and win a posthumous Oscar for it.) This brilliant comic duet — where the sadist finds a masochist offensive — remains laugh-out-loud funny to this very day.
However, of all the great cast members, none prove more important that one who only appears as a voice — the great Levi Stubbs of Four Tops fame (who, alas, left us since I originally wrote this) giving voice to Audrey II. From the moment Audrey II begins to speak in Stubbs'
great baritone, seducing Seymour with his plead to "Feed Me," to his climactic showstopper "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space" (the coolest Oscar-nominated song until "Blame Canada" from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut usurped the title), Stubbs owns this movie. I'd also be neglectful not to mention the great work of the late Vincent Gardenia as the owner of the flower shop where Seymour and Audrey work and cameos by the likes of the late John Candy, Christopher Guest and Joe Flaherty. Of course, I know purists of the stage show will regret that test audiences made Oz and the studio relent and nix the more pessimistic ending where Audrey II wins and everyone ends up as plant food, but the movie entertains so thoroughly, I'm prepared to forgive it. So here's to those integral to the film who have left us in the past quarter-century since its release: Levi Stubbs, Howard Ashman, Vincent Gardenia, John Candy, producer Denis Holt, associate producer David Orton, composer Miles Goodman, director of photography Robert Paynter, film editor Jim Jympson, set decorator Tessa Davies, costume designer Marit Allen and any other members of the cast and crew who might have left us that I missed and to the ones still with us on the Tweet
Labels: 80s, Animation, Corman, Disney, H.B. Carter, Kubrick, Movie Tributes, Murray, Musicals, Nicholson, Remakes, South Park, Steve Martin, Tim Burton, Travolta
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