There's also an air of pushing the "aren't we crazy" throughout, an inherent smugness that carries on throughout the movie. Usually, Cavill is the most visible culprit of this in whatever he plays, and, yes, in the film's first 45 minutes, he succumbs to that—Florence Pugh's line "What a poser..." kept coming to mind—but, eventually he settles down, stops grand-standing, and towards the end, is a welcoming commanding presence and then, towards the end, exquisitely delivers a good James Bond-ish line: "Marjorie! Over-dressed and under-dressed at the same time...as usual."
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Friday, April 26, 2024
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
There's also an air of pushing the "aren't we crazy" throughout, an inherent smugness that carries on throughout the movie. Usually, Cavill is the most visible culprit of this in whatever he plays, and, yes, in the film's first 45 minutes, he succumbs to that—Florence Pugh's line "What a poser..." kept coming to mind—but, eventually he settles down, stops grand-standing, and towards the end, is a welcoming commanding presence and then, towards the end, exquisitely delivers a good James Bond-ish line: "Marjorie! Over-dressed and under-dressed at the same time...as usual."
Thursday, April 25, 2024
The Formula
Written at the time of the film's release.
The Formula (John G. Avildsen, 1980) Fairly lousy movie, done in the clunky Avildsen style, of a police detective (George C. Scott) following a series of murders that involves the MacGuffin of a synthetic substitute for petroleum. Avildsen is the perfect director for thudding cartoons like the "Rocky" series and The Karate Kid. But when having to provide any subtlety or style, as he attempted to do with Slow Dancing in the Big City, it's a miserable failure. And one has to say that he didn't add anything to the thriller or detective genres (or even the "paranoid thrillers" established in the 70's) with The Formula.
There is one joy, however, and that is to see the meeting of two of the better actors of the American stage square off, and really, it's probably the only reason the film got made (except for a tenuous tie-in to the then-dissolving energy crisis). They have one scene together of any consequence. Both men are a bit over-weight—Marlon Brando playing the fattest of oil-cats—and the two meet for a semi-perfunctory sizing up of each other.* One anticipates sparks flying between two acting titans.
* Come to think of it, Brando's character would have been more effective if he were an insular baron.
** Apparently, the rueful shakes of Scott's head during the scene are his reaction to Brando doing a completely different "read" of his lines than previous takes.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Stand-Up Guys
"We're Still Here!"
or
"...End of Story"
Oh, man, it's painful, the first few minutes of Stand Up Guys, the new gangster-with-gags film directed by Fisher Stevens. Valentine (Al Pacino) is being released from prison after 28 years, for his part in a robbery that turned deadly. On the outside, waiting for him, is Doc (Christopher Walken), who was also part of that robbery but managed to stay out of the gray-bar hotel for reasons unknown and is now "retired," spending his free time being a diner habitué and painting landscapes.
Doc takes Val home to his apartment, which the ex-con compares unfavorably to the accouterments he has recently vacated. At this point in the movie, Val announces that he wants "to party," at which point I resisted an urge to get up and get popcorn. It wasn't going to be pretty, whichever way it was played, comedy, bathos, or weirdness. The obligatory visit to a whorehouse is somewhat lightened by Lucy Punch (a Brit actress playing a longish Island accent) as the daughter of the madam these guys used to know in their and her prime.
Things don't go well (nyuk, nyuk) so Doc and Val rob a drug store (very easily)—Val gets little blue pills and proceeds to take too many of them, and Doc has some expensive prescriptions he needs to supplement—complications arise, so to speak, which requires a trip to the hospital, where Julianna Margulies provides an "E.R." flashback and informs the two about her father, their former getaway driver, who's stuck in a nursing home.Alan Arkin plays that character, and it's at that point that the movie picks up with a couple quick chase sequences and a needed pivot point for the Pacino-Walken dynamic. The movie gets better with Arkin's presence, even though one can't say it improves. But Arkin's added energy manages to lift the movie over the speed-bumps that the script-cliché's drop in the path. Where Pacino is manic and Walken is passive, Arkin manages to bridge the gap (and their vocal pauses) with a complacent nervousness that bounces off both actors entertainingly.
It's unfortunate watching, really. To see these gold-standard actors (all Academy Award winners, not that that really matters) reduced to mining what they can out of a vein of tin is disheartening, no matter what smiles they can produce out of it. Something could have been done, recent examples of the story-form being In Bruges and Going in Style.* But just the casting of these young-now-aging turks can't make this one any more than it is, a faded half-hearted comedy about aging gangsters that might have been enough to re-team Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau back in the day.
This is a minor, minor, minor film with major talent in it that eventually makes the most of the material, but can't elevate it into something worthwhile or even makes a statement. And, frankly, I'm getting too old for movies like this.
* Martin Brest's 1979 comedy-drama about over-the-hill retired thieves trying to supplement their meager Social Security—Pacino surely knew about it, as it starred his mentor, Lee Strasberg.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Never Let Me Go
Written at the time of the film's release...
"Ménage à Triage"
or
"My Clone Sleeps Alone"
So, the mixed signals sent by the film of the book, and its clumsy way of revealing the particulars of the plot, do no service to its source, merely revealing the surface highlights, and not delving into more meaty psychological or motivational matters, turning the film into merely a digest, a palimpsest, or more appropriately, a cadaver of the book.
It focuses on a trio of children—Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield)—raised in a private boarding school, one of many that is, in fact, more of a farm. The children attending know nothing of the outside world, raised in a bubble of perfect manners, good health, docility, and fear of what lies beyond the fence surrounding the grounds. There is no need to prepare them for life as we know it, because they won't be participating in it. Only contributing to it.
They are carefully groomed and kept in the dark about their purpose, and within the cliques that inevitably occur there, rumors and speculation swirl among the kids about what happens when you go outside the fence (nothing good), and eventually, about ways to get deferments from donor status by proving their worth by displaying artistic skill...or, cruelly, falling in love.
They cling to these beliefs, like rosaries, with no basis in fact, but only the strength of their hopes, and in the absence of all evidence. Kathy and Tommy grow close, become empathetic friends, but as they grow older, Ruth becomes the object of Tommy's affections, and Kathy goes her own path, choosing to become a "carer," in service of the donors on the short path of their careers, delaying her fate, watching as those less fortunate are taken away from her, piece by piece.
It's frustrating watching. Oh, the actors are fine, and actually more than fine, given the material. Mulligan's crooked half-smile speaks volumes of a life only partially lived, and Knightley is completely unafraid of looking sadly decrepit. But, it is still painful to watch these clueless kids, marginalized and compartmentalized, pursuing fruitless hopes in an effort to live a full life. One would feel more sympathy if they would just be a bit more their own advocates, or even a bit more revolutionary. It is extraordinarily facile to compare this one to other "low shelf-life" movies on the order of The Island, or Logan's Run, sci-fi action films on the theme. Never Let Me Go has the same built-in planned obsolescence of adolescents conundrum—given the acquisition of some knowledge, wouldn't some of them choose to fight it? It doesn't have to be with space-guns and chase scenes, but...something. And despite their role in the food-chain, don't the administrators of these schools (Charlotte Rampling plays the main one here), especially the ones portrayed here, have some sort of empathetic identification with their charges, especially given the revelations they profess (rather hollowly)? That these questions pop up during the viewing of the film, when one should be riveted to the screen and it's reflected situations, only points out that the film-makers haven't done their work perfecting their illusions, in pursuit of their allusions.
To further extrapolate the somewhat cruel comparison of the film to a cadaver of the original piece, the spirit of the thing is missing, however ardently it is played. Ultimately, one's appreciation of the film lies in its performances in the service of a flawed interpretation and one's own interest in the players, which is as superficial as this film feels.
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Don't Make a Scene (Redux): Lawrence of Arabia
I've got a couple scenes in the works—well, one's done but I'm not ready to publish it yet—so here's a scene from Lawrence of Arabia, one of those movies that has to be seen on the big screen. The TCM Film Festival is doing that this weekend. I've seen it that way in 70mm at the Cinerama (it's now called the SIFF Cinema Downtown) and, really, it's the only way to really SEE it.
"The film academic" I mentioned here is David Bordwell, who, sadly, passed away February 29 this year. Despite my dismissing his point about There Will Be Blood, his writing was always entertaining and enlightening.
Tosh.
While it is true that far too many directors these days are seemingly relying on the craft of montage (editing) as opposed to mise en scene (camera placement),* I would submit that it is not that special an achievement, but, rather "Directing 101." Any director worth his view-finder knows the importance of "blocking," or the arranging of actors in a scene. It establishes relationships, points-of-view, all sorts of sub-conscious signals to the audience about the participants of a scene. And it allows the actors to do what is their natural inclination to do: act in an unbroken line with their fellow-actors, playing off of each other, without the technical interruptions of setting-up for another angle.
A competent director knows when to get out of the way of his actors (just as a competent studio should know when to get out of the way of the director). But to praise a director for letting a scene play out in one shot without cutting? Only understandable from someone who's never been exposed to the process, I guess. Or someone who's just griping on the over-reliance of editing in today's movies (given the dependence on editing to create "energy," especially the false kind as pioneered by the hackers at MTV) and is doing it in a back-handed kind of way.
Anyway, the point is—a director who pathologically doesn't let a scene play out without editing, "couldn't direct traffic if given white gloves and a whistle" (in the words of one disgruntled writer I've met).
Or...are directing for the limited band-width of television. Or...are insecure in the material to keep interest. Or...are being told what to do, as in someone's directing the director (so what does that make him? An employee, not an auteur).
Here's one of many scenes I've found lately, that, with the exception of the opening three establishing POV shots, is done in one shot/one take, and it's one of my favorites. It's the "introduction" to the titular hero of Lawrence of Arabia, and it contains two of my favorite lines in this movie, full of great ones.
The Story: Aside from a sequence dramatising T.E. Lawrence's*** (Peter O'Toole) death in a motorcycle accident, and the subsequent funeral at which we hear many opinions of the man, this is the first sequence in the long flash-back of the tumultuous events of his life presented in the film. The first image shows him as we will soon come to know him: dissatisfied with his station, and re-drawing the map of the Middle East.
Action!
T.E. Lawrence: Michael George Hartley, this is a nasty, dark. little room.
M.G. Hartley: That's right.
Hartley: I am. It's better than a nasty, dark little trench.
Lawrence: Then you're an ignoble fellow.
Hartley: That's right.
Lawrence: Ah! Here is William Potter with my newspaper.
W.Potter: Here you are, Tosh.
Lawrence: Thanks. (Potter waits)
Lawrence: Would you care for one of Cpl. Hartley's cigarettes?
Potter: Ah! (Potter grandly takes one)
Hartley: Is it there?
Lawrence: Of course. Headlines. But I bet it isn't mentioned in The Times. "Bedouin tribes attack Turkish stronghold."
Lawrence: And I'll bet no one in this whole headquarters even knows it happened. Or would care if it did.
Lawrence: Allow me to ignite your cigarette.
Potter: Sir...
Adjutant: Mr. Lawrence?
Lawrence: Yes?
Adjutant: Flimsy, sir.
Lawrence: Thank you.
(Lawrence takes the burning match and working his fingers up it, extinguishing it while the others watch)
Hartley: You'll do that once too often! It's only flesh and blood.
Lawrence: Michael George Hartley, you're a philosopher.
Potter: And you're balmy!
(Adjutant leaves. Lawrence reads. Potter lights a match tries to put it out with his fingers while Lawrence watches.)
Potter: OH! It hurts!
Lawrence: Certainly, it hurts.
Potter: Well, what's the trick, then?
Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
Lawrence: Oh! By the way, should Col. Gibbon enquire for me, tell him I've gone for a chat with the General.
Potter: He's balmy!
Hartley (laughs): He's alright.
Lawrence of Arabia
Words by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson
Pictures by Freddie Young and David Lean
Lawrence of Arabia is available on DVD from Sony Home Video.**
* I attribute this to studio insistence on "coverage"--over-shooting a scene from different angles to ensure that the film will "cut" (edit in a way that isn't "jarring" to the viewer), and, by the way, gives the studio enough material to work with in case they want to fire the director if he isn't amenable enough to cut it the way the studio insists. It's why having the "final cut" in a director's contract is so cherished a clause (Would you like a list of the names of great directors who've had their movies re-cut against their wishes? We don't have time, but I can make a rough estimate---almost all of them!)
** Movie theater advocate Roger Ebert has written that "Lawrence of Arabia" on video "crouches inside its box like a tall man in a low room." That's a wonderful description. He continues "You can view it on video and get an idea of its story and a hint of its majesty, but to get the feeling of Lean's masterpiece you need to somehow, somewhere, see it in 70mm on a big screen. This experience is on the short list of things that must be done during the lifetime of every lover of film." In Seattle, it happens infrequently at the Cinerama. Next time you see it mentioned, go.
*** That link leads to the general Wikipedia entry, for a better site on the man who's the subject of the movie, go here.