Hairspray (2007)

Written at the time of the film's release...

Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2007) I'm not big on musicals. Rarely are they better than their source material and the songs, more often than not, are filler with "Moon/June" lyrics that fail to impress. My idea of clever musicals are "Guys and Dolls" and "The Music Man" that carry their music fantasies with a little bit of arrogant panache, daring you to not take it as seriously as regular dialog. My expectations of musicals are pretty low (which is good, I think, as it gves them more of a chance), and my expectations of "Hairspray"—despite rave reviews of the stage version that debuted *huzzah* in Seattle—were quite low. You just knew that a musical of "Hairspray" wouldn't be as edgy as the John Waters original. It was going to have to be neutered to be made "safe."

Plus, it has John Travolta in it. I can't remember a John Travolta* movie where I was impressed with him. I was probably going in with the wrong attitude.

Because I enjoyed the Hell out of it. Word is that the movie version is a bit more stream-lined and a lot less camp than its stage-version. That may have helped, because "Hairspray" (the musical; the movie) is joyously anarchic, popping balloons gleefully as it goes—maybe laying it on a bit thick, as it goes—but as an expression of the freeing power of rock n' roll, few movies can top it. Especially the serious ones.

The year: 1962, pre-Kennedy assassination (it would have to be) in segregated Baltimore. For Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky—this girl needs to work more), life is surviving school in time to get home to watch "The Corny Collins Show" (with James Marsden, going full-wattage cheese), a dance party television show, featuring her dancing dreamboat Link Larkin (Zac Efron, not quite legitimizing the hysteria over him). Her dreams come true when one of the teen-dancers takes a leave of absence ("Nine months," she doesn't need to explain) giving Tracy and her blond twig girlfriend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes) a chance to audition. She has many obstacles: station owner Velma von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer, whom my wife described as "voluptuously hideous"—yes, indeed**), and her parents, Wilbur and Edna Turnblad (Christopher Walken and John Travolta).

Now, here I must stop. Christopher Walken rarely fails to please, but it's a too-rare treat to see him sing-and-dance, which he obviously loves. And Travolta, in drag and dressed in a fat suit with a raspy ovah-the-"twop" Maryland accent?

He's great. Except for his accent slipping during the songs, he's damned near pitch-perfect, doing dance moves weighed down in prosthetics (and in high-heels no less), and providing a sympathetic life-force to the proceedings. Everybody's terrific in it, including old guys Paul Dooley and Jerry Stiller (who played Tracy's dad in Waters' original). 

Then there's Queen Latifah, who plays the "fill-in" host on Corny Collins' once-a-month "Negro Day"—the black dancers cordoned off from the white dancers by a rope partition—proving once again she is the Rock n' Roll Renaissance woman, who can rise above bad material, and soars with the good.

But it'd all be naught if not for the songs (well-staged with choreography-friendly directing by Shankman that recalls past movie musicals) by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman. Shaiman's ear for 60's rock styles is flawless and the words by Wittman and Shaiman are clever and sassy and occasionally downright rude.

Original "Hairspray" auteur John Waters even shows up (in an early cameo as a flasher) and there are quick appearances by the director, Shaiman and Stillman and the original's star Ricki Lake. Word is that he's working on a screenplay for a sequel.*** If the product is half as fun as this singing step-child of his work, it will be a must-see.

* Since writing this, I remember I thought he did an extraordinary job of carrying Nicolas Cage's tic's in Face/Off.

** Pfeiffer has a torchy song—"Miss Baltimore Crabs"—that she vamps though in such high-style that it catches one off-guard...until one remembers "Oh yeah...Susie Diamond."

 

 

*** Hairspray 2: White Lipstick was in the planning stages with a screenplay written by Waters, and preliminary cast mentioned , but in the words of director Adam Shankman "it got scrapped" and added “It's ok, I was so happy with the first one; let's leave well enough alone.”

Flow

Time and Tide

or

"Never Get Outta the Boat!"
 

It's a late entry, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Oscar for Best Animated Film goes to an obscure little film from Latvia, instead of the very well-funded projects out of Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks or other cartoon shops. Considering that it's been a very strong year for animation with Inside Out 2, Moana 2, The Wild Robot, and Robot Dreams, Flow, that film from Latvia stands a good chance of blowing those other films to pixelated smithereens.

 

One may initially be confused about the film because it begins with an almost ludicrous number of producing logos, which is more of a statement of how difficult it is to get a movie of this type funded (certainly harder than the other films mentioned above!). But the movie proper begins with a quiet image—a sable cat looks in a pool of water at its own reflection and ponders. One doesn't know how old the cat is—it looks and frequently acts young, but it has the instincts of a slightly more experienced older cat. It certainly doesn't stick around when it perceives a threat. But, here, it is looking and...reflecting.

Even in that first moment of story, the image impresses. Not so much photo-realistic, it gives the impression of reality with multiple planes of image—the water, what's under its surface, the reflection of the cat, and the canopy of foliage above it, slightly fading away with distance. It's impressive. One will get used to this level of detail, but every so often, one shakes one's head at the enormity of the world-building, complicated and verdant, that is going on by the animators.

The story is simple, conveyed with images and no anthropomorphized dialogue or clarifying narration, of a collection of animals trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth (or is it?) as it convulses with tidal shifts and unsure landscapes, with no clear goals other than existence. Maybe there's a shared understanding among the denizens of "we're all in this together" but it's of varying degree depending on the species and its instincts. There is not a human being to be seen, except in what they've left behind—like an abandoned house that the cat takes shelter in, drawn by the many carved cat statues that stand mid-caper in the yard.

There are other animals, of course. The river is teaming with fish. There are dogs of various breeds roaming in packs, wild deer—which the cat associates with impending disaster—birds, lemurs, capybaras. And a very large, almost prehistoric whale, which figures significantly. The cat has encounters with them—being a cat it has more to do with choice and tolerance than anything—and the wider scope of the story involves a journey, but one without any ultimate, agreed-upon destination, on a boat—another indication of previous human activity.

The boat provides some stability, the land and water being in a state of flux, and something of a safe harbor from the surrounding convulsions, and the encounters along the way with other animals, whether fellow passengers or fellow travelers, are new experiences which reveal character but makes no judgments. They are what they are, just as the landscape is what it is, which, in the animators' tools, is beautiful and wondrous, whether adhering to a slightly impressionistic realism or, as it does once, bordering on the surreal.

If one was crossing their arms and harrumphing about plausibilities, one might grump about an animal's (or bird's) ability to navigate with a rudder or figure out a life-saving mechanical maneuver, but for all the overwhelming evidence of behavioral realism, this is negligible. Nor is the messaging so precious that it can be seen as "Animal House"-lite; when the cat hurks up a hair-ball in front of an acquisitive lemur, I don't think of it as an anti-capitalist statement.

No, the story is pushed by behavior in the moment, simply, delicately, and subtley, reactive to the challenges of close-quarters and an evolving landscape.

I don't want to get too "The Theory of Everything" about this movie—everything does not need to be explained away or justified—however it's also a movie about learning, about process, about inter-connectedness, and ultimately, it's a picture about you and your reactions to it. How you respond and what story you see and what you take away from it (as such, I should say that to get the complete picture—literally—you need to stay through the credits as there's a last scene at the very tail end). Is there a journey's end? Not really. Not one that we're privy to, anyway.

 

As such, it's a film that makes you reflect and ponder.

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

A Canterbury Tale (The Archers, 1944) Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (known collectively as "The Archers") begin their tale where Chaucer did in his "The Canterbury Tales" (their lines only slightly different in translation than the text):

WHEN APRIL with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein  with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)—
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.

They're setting place, showing ancient maps, and then—at the appropriate verse—show us the pilgrimage as it was, with ox-carts and donkeys, and peasantry making their ways over the hills, then the close-up of a nobleman who sees a falcon high in flight. And—cut! (24 years before Kubrick did something similar)—the falcon is replaced by a fighter-plane that zooms towards us and over the head—cut!—of a British soldier circa 1944 who watches it (in the same frame composition and is probably the same actor, now in modern military dress) and the narration begins again...with another verse over landscapes not too far afield from what we saw before:

600 years have passed. What would they see, 

Dan Chaucer and his goodly company today? 

The hills and valleys are the same.

Gone are the forests since the enclosures came.

Hedgerows have sprung. The land is under plow, 

and orchards bloom with blossoms on the bow.

Sussex and Kent are like a garden fair,

but sheep still graze upon the ridges there.

The pilgrims still wends above the wield,

through wood and break and many a fertile field.

But, though so little has changed since Chaucer's day.

Another sort of pilgrim walks the way.

 

And a tank heaves into the frame and a line of those mechanized vehicles starts to wend its their own way along the pilgrim's trail on the way to Canterbury. As subtle and artistic as The Archers could be, they could also be brutal in how they juxtaposed for contrast, sometimes uncomfortably so, even for modern audiences thinking that sophistication can only be found in late-model movies. But, with A Canterbury Tale, the filmmakers linked the past and the present, while also acknowledging the omnipresence of change. For no matter whether its war or peace, or what happens to the landscape, the one constant are the pilgrims in need of hope and maybe a miracle.

Three people are in the town of Chillingbourne, Kent, a village on the train-track to Canterbury. Two are soldiers, one a Brit, one a Yank, and a "land-girl" who's taking part in helping farmers while men-folk are away to war. They are all "in-service" but beyond that they have nothing in common...except that they're stuck in Chillingbourne. They meet by happenstance when the Yank, Sgt. Bob Johnson (played by Sgt. John Sweet, chosen for "authenticity" rather than, initially, Burgess Meredith) gets off the train too early being lurched awake by the conductor's announcement of "Next stop...Canterbury." He's a stranger in a strange land at the wrong stop in the middle of the night and he recruits help from the other two, Sgt. Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) and Alison Smith (Sheila Sim) to find lodgings for the night.

One complication, however: while making their way through town to get their bearings, Alison is attacked from the shadows by a stranger who throws glue in her hair. Evidently, there's a lot of that going around as she's the eleventh victim of such an attack—she'll meet other such girls in her farm duties. While she goes through numerous shampooings to try to rinse out the gunk, Sgt. Johnson reports the attack to the local magistrate Thomas Colpepper (Eric Portman), who is curiously unmoved and suggests that women should not be out at night after a black-out curfew. After all, Canterbury itself has just been bombed by the Germans.

Johnson is convinced to stay the weekend and the three determine to investigate who the mysterious "glueman" in town could be. The town is full of potential suspects, clues abound, and it does help to take the minds off things like the war, one's part in it, and its consequences past and future. A little mystery can distract from things of great import, and yet, there's the countryside and its history and the current residents of that storied real estate, which managed to survive Kings, Queens, technologies and even the German war machine. Instead of being a mere stop-over, their encounters and walkabouts bring out a resonance and maybe even a communion with the past.

Bombed out buildings, but Canterbury remains untouched.

For, despite the distraction, these three are in need. Each is suffering a loss, a regret, a yearning that makes them incomplete, even as an indeterminate future threatens all of them. It may be coincidence that they are all there at that time and at that place, but without seeking it out—hell, they don't even know the history of it—for those acres and shrines to echo what they did in Chaucer's time for those who made their own pilgrimages in their time of need. It is Colpepper who clues them in to the storied land and serves as unofficial chaperone for the trio, and indirectly guides them to the path that they don't know they seek.

The Archers, of course, lean into Chaucer and the romance of the land and its past (and the value and benefit of the pastoral existence—which they would continue in the next year's I Know Where I'm Going!—Powell called these films their "anti-capitalist period"), but there's another influence, cinematically. A Canterbury Tale was made in 1944, 5 years after The Wizard of Oz and the story of strangers, bonded together, off on a heroes' quest traveling to a source for "reward or penance" is shared by both.*   

Of course, Wizard is fantasy, a fairy tale. A Canterbury Tale is fanciful. But, both have rich denouements that strike the heart and do so in quite different ways. Even though all the characters in both stories realize their hearts' desires, they come to them not knowing what they do not know. Oz and Canterbury provide the realization of their dreams, but Canterbury has no definite ending (despite an American-bound re-edit by Powell that has more of a conclusion—fortunately, I saw the original British version), the last act is open-ended, with hope for the future, if an uncertain one.

A Canterbury Tale is one of the best movie experiences I've seen this year. It left me completely enchanted.

 * The story even shares the element that both sets of heroes have already possessed what they lack—they just don't know it yet.

Don't Make a Scene: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

The Story: An old fashioned family dinner with a side-dish of cruelty passed around. That's what we're served in this scene from one of the un-altered sections of Orson Welles' tantalizing The Magnificent Ambersons, one of the great sacrifices to commerce and studio politics in the history of cinema. One day, we may get to see the original work-print edit of Ambersons, sent to Welles in Brazil (where he was making a film for the government to improve South American relationships—the also-legendary It's All True), the one unaltered print before a disastrous audience preview brought out the long knives at RKO Studios to butcher 45 minutes out of it. New sequences were filmed (without Welles' input) and the ending of the original picture was tossed out with the trash, destroyed as per studio policy.

 

It's an almost-appropriate fate for a movie about made with nostalgia about an old way of life, run over by the mechanisms of time and fortune and the Industrial Age, The Gilded Age being smudged and flaked by the exhaust and sulfates that emanated from it. Any niceties could only be crushed in the gears of it.

 

But, the Gilded Age wasn't 24 karat. Look at this scene. Although manners require that no elbows be on the table, that doesn't prevent sarcasm, sniping, and japes from darkening the conversation. Heaping scorn on one party at the table only encourages him to save face by heaping scorn on another, even if that party is an honored guest. The fact is, although young (spoiled) George Amberson actually may not like the automobile, what he truly doesn't like is one of the people involved in its development, an old flame of his mother's, who is now—now that she is widowed—back in the frame of her affections. This he will not countenance and so he attacks (although he denies it).

The fact is, whatever was golden about the Gilded Age is already corroded, and not so much from outside forces (although they are certainly present) but from within, when character is less valued than what one has on deposit.

And, as far as Eugene Morgan's little speech is concerned, one is nostalgic that society-changing entrepreneurs could not only be smart, but also wise.

 

The Set-up: The Ambersons and the Minafers and the Morgans. Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) loves Isabel Minafer (Dolores Costello), Aunt Fanny Amberson (Agnes Moorehead) loves Eugene, too, and is jealous of his affection for Isabel. Isabel's son, George (Tim Holt) loves Eugene's daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter). With so much love, it's inevitable that Cupid's a little too busy to aim straight and a couple of arrows miss their mark and cause some real damage.

 

Action.

 

INTERIOR – DINING ROOM – AMBERSON MANSION – DAY – (1905) 

The whole family is present, and Eugene is a guest. They are just finishing their dessert. 

MAJOR AMBERSON I miss my best girl.

ISABEL We all do. 

ISABEL Lucy’s on a visit, Father. She’s spending a week with a school friend. 

EUGENE She’ll be back Monday. 

FANNY George, how does it happen you didn’t tell us before? 

FANNY He never said a word to us about Lucy’s going away. 

MAJOR AMBERSON Probably afraid to. 

MAJOR AMBERSON Didn’t know but he might break down and cry if he tried to speak of it! 

MAJOR AMBERSON Isn’t that right, Georgie? 

The Major’s chuckle develops into laughter at George’s silence and embarrassment. 

FANNY (during this) Or didn’t Lucy tell you she was going? 

GEORGE (growls) She told me. 

MAJOR AMBERSON At any rate, Georgie didn’t approve. I suppose you two aren’t speaking again? 

Jack is nice enough to change the subject. 

JACK Eugene I hear somebody’s opened up another horseless carriage shop somewhere out in the suburbs. 

MAJOR AMBERSON I suppose they’ll either drive you out of the business, or else the two of you’ll drive all the rest of us off the streets. 

EUGENE Well, we’ll even things up by making the streets bigger. 

MAJOR AMBERSON How do you propose to do that? 

EUGENE It isn’t the distance from the center of a town that counts, it’s the time it takes to get there. This town’s already spreading; automobiles are going to carry city streets clear out to the county line. 

JACK (skeptically) I hope you’re wrong, because if people go to moving that far, real estate values here in the old residence part of town are going to be stretched pretty thin. 

MAJOR AMBERSON So your automobiles devilish machines 

MAJOR AMBERSON are going to ruin all your old friends, Eugene. 

MAJOR AMBERSON Do you really think they’re going to change the face of the land? 

EUGENE They’re already doing it, Major; and it can’t be stopped. Automobiles– 

GEORGE (in loud and peremptory voice) Automobiles are a useless nuisance. 

Silence 

MAJOR AMBERSON What did you say, George? 

GEORGE I said automobiles are a nuisance. 

GEORGE They’ll never amount to anything but a nuisance. They had no business to be invented. 

JACK Of course, you forget that Mr. Morgan makes them, 

JACK and also did his share in inventing them. 

JACK If you weren’t so thoughtless he might think you rather offensive. 

GEORGE (coolly) I don’t think I could survive it. 

EUGENE (laughs cheerfully) I’m not sure George is wrong about automobiles. 

EUGENE With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization. 

EUGENE It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. 

EUGENE But automobiles have come, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. 

EUGENE They’re going to alter war, and they’re going to alter peace.

EUGENE I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles. 

EUGENE And it may be that George is right. 

EUGENE It may be that ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, 

EUGENE I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him George

EUGENE that automobiles “had no business to be invented”

(looks at his watch) 

EUGENE Well, Major, 

EUGENE I hope you’ll excuse me — 

EUGENE Fanny

FANNY Oh, Eugene

EUGENE and Isabel — 

EUGENE I’ve got to get down to the shop and talk to the foreman. 

Murmured “good-byes” — 

MAJOR AMBERSON I’ll see you to the door. 

FANNY I’ll come, too, 

EUGENE Don’t bother, sir, I know the way. 

He goes out. 

Silence. 

ISABEL George, dear, what did you mean? 

GEORGE Just what I said. 

Takes one of the Major’s cigars. 

ISABEL (murmurs) Oh, he was hurt! 

GEORGE I don’t see why he should be. I didn’t say anything about him.

GEORGE He didn’t seem to me to be hurt — seemed perfectly cheerful. What made you think he was hurt? 

ISABEL (half­ whispering) I know him! 

JACK By Jove, Georgie, you’re a puzzle! 

GEORGE In what way, may I ask? 

JACK It’s a new style of courting a pretty girl, I must say, for a young fellow to go deliberately out of his way 

JACK to try and make an enemy of her father by attacking his business! 

JACK By Jove! That’s a new way of winning a woman. 

George slams out of the dining room. 

DISSOLVE:

 

The Magnificent Ambersons 

Words by Orson Welles (after Booth Tarkington)

Pictures by Stanley Cortez and Orson Welles

The Magnificent Ambersons is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from The Criterion Collection.