The Shining

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

 

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

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"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

* All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Olde Review: McCabe and Mrs. Miller

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a bit of a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1973) It is very rare when two examples of great artistic achievement can be combined to make something greater than the sum of the parts--where the two complement each other, instead of distracting from each other. But in the first sequence of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, director Robert Altman achieves such a moment. While Altman and master cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond float their camera onto the form of John McCabe (Warren Beatty) riding through a wintry landscape, Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger Song"* mystically describes the scene and the man. You know when you see this inspired piece of film that Altman has a special kind of vision as regards this project and he pursues this vision throughout with the result that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is Altman's finest film. I'm adamant about this, despite the number of Nashville fanatics who try to convince me otherwise.*

After doing the frenetic M*A*S*H, Altman felt that he was financially secure enough to try artistic projects. McCabe... was his first.** It is a slowly paced, beautifully photographed, acted and edited film about the formation of a western town, a town whose foundations are two rather dubious persons: McCabe, a gambler by trade, and Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a madam. It is their vision that gives birth to the town and turns it into a self-sustaining community, a town that will soon displace their once-prevalent position and grow over them, just as surely as the snows accumulate over time. 

But if Altman were to show the growth of the town as that, the growth of a town, what sort of movie would that be?*** So, as it does with more traditional westerns (a term I'm not too comfortable with), the interest of the story falls on the people, in this case, the cornerstones of the community, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. And like most Altman films, there are many characters, many occurrences, but all in the whole of the community--it's a very satisfying film, by a sometimes exciting, sometimes exasperating, but certainly the most innovative of current directors, Robert Altman.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on Novermber 19th and 20th, 1975.

Altman would continue to be innovative and sometimes exasperating, but never less than assured in the tricks he'd play with the camera and with the perspective he allowed us to see, right up to his final film. And McCabe and Mrs. Miller continues to be (after a recent re-viewing) a wonderfully dreamy frontier film, despite the usurping of some of Altman's strategies in various TV shows since its debut in 1971. Certainly, it feels like a more realistic film about building a community—the town of Presbyterian Church, its most prominent structure, in isolation in the West than most Western films would have you believe. And Vilmos Zsigmond's innovative cinematography set a high standard that most film-makers can only achieve with CGI and post-gradation.

I find it amusing that this movie didn't find that much of an audience, especially in the West, where the story probably mirrors the origins of every town out in these parts. It certainly does Seattle, where larceny and luck...and women imported from the East Coast...were part and parcel of the city's foundation.

But, as in this review, is it his best film? That would be hard to say. Altman was an iconoclast and rebellious, attempting to subvert film genres and even the organized standards for making films, being more free-wheeling and improvisational, even with a script that was as focused as, say, The Player or Gosford Park.

* And yet I just found a glowing "Olde Review" of Nashville that I'll be putting up in a couple weeks. Nashville certainly has more reach and is a more ambitious project than McCabe... But I did love the dreamy aspect of this revisionist western. Thinking about it the last few minutes I'd be hard pressed to pick "the best" Altman film, or even to a lesser degree, my favorite. How can you compare such disparate films as M*A*S*H, McCabe..., Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, The Player, and on and on right up to A Prairie Home Companion? Like comparing apples to sweet potatoes.

** I think I might have forgotten the quirky Brewster McCloud in there, and who's to say that M*A*S*H or that film aren't artistic?

*** "Deadwood," frankly...

*

Time Bandits

Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981) As a filmmaker, Terry Gilliam grew up with the making of Time Bandits, while still maintaining the childish sense of fun and menace that permeated his work before and during his days with the Monty Python flying circus. Time Bandits is a work of pure imagination, a four-ring freak show that just might kill you, where time is the scene of the crime, and even God and Satan are susceptible to the charms of a precocious little boy with a taste for adventure and the voracious team of avaricious little people that he happens to partner up with. One's tempted to say it's Gilliam's version of Snow White or a flipped version of The Wizard of Oz, but that would be taking the piss and anarchy out of it. Those others would not have the temerity or the audacity of just leaving their tween with a heart-warming life-lesson, but actually challenge him to apply it without the benefit of having a safety net. But, in Gilliam's mind, his hero's fate is unarguably better than the unquestioning materialistic zombie-hood that he would be subjected to with his parents.

11 year old Kevin (Craig Warnock) is fascinated with Ancient Greece, which some parents might find a sign of a curious intellect but inspires nothing but neglect in his parents. One night, the wardrobe in his bedroom is shattered by a horse-bound knight who bursts through it and gallops down a forest road that has suddenly appeared—clearly something is amiss in the space-time continuum! The next night, Kevin wants to go to bed early, but instead of a knight-errant, he's visited by a crush of six thieving "little people." They're demoted employees of The Supreme Being (voiced by Tony Jay, but will appear later as a doddering Ralph Richardson)—seems their previous job of designing trees and bushes was sub-par and they're now tasked with fixing rends in the fabric of space-time. But, being particularly (how should we say?) "entrepreneurial" they've seen that their map of black holes can take them to other Earth-eras, from which they can pillage whatever they can carry in a necessarily brief time. 

"Necessarily" because they're being pursued by extremes of Good and Evil (aren't we all?), with T.S.B. wanting his map back and the personification of Evil (David Warner, clearly relishing the role) coveting the map, so that he can fix T.S.B.'s mistakes and make the Universe more to his liking.

Gilliam's film then hops and darts and falls into an episodic structure, where the diminutive fugitives "crash" various eras, including Sherwood Forest in the era of Robin Hood (John Cleese, doing a hilarious version of Prince Charles), a campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte's (a nearly incomprehensible Ian Holm), who is obsessed with puppet shows (because they're smaller than him), the HMS Titanic (served "neat"), and, to Kevin's delight, Ancient Greece, where he befriends King Agamemnon (Sean Connery*), who is first seen battling a Minotaur. 

Most of it works and works hilariously, even when Gilliam veers into the surreal...and the budgetarily spare. Still, the low-tech miracles Guillam pulls off with limited resources (5 mil' financed by George Harrison's Handmade Films) are awe-inspiring, not only for their realization on film, but also for the sheer visual splendor—and squalor—Gilliam's considerable imagination envisioned (and still does). It's an amazing spectacle, and if the film stutters a bit pace-wise (especially during the Napoleon segment), the delights to the eye tend to gloss over any story-telling problems. Gilliam's pictorial eye would become bolder and his subject matter richer, but Time Bandits was the transition-point between a sketch-comedian/animator and a true film-maker and visionary.

What all the fuss is about

* The script (by Palin and Gilliam) reads: "The warrior takes off his helmet, revealing someone that looks exactly like Sean Connery, or an actor of equal but cheaper stature." Gilliam was shocked that not only had Connery read the script, he wanted the part, and even suggested a disconcerting cameo at the end.

** Northumbrian Tin Soldiers has made sculpts of the bandits, listed as "Dwarf Robbers:"