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Archive for the ‘ACTING STYLE: IMPROV’ Category

A Dirty Shame

16 Nov

A Dirty Shame – directed by John Waters. Farce. The prudes against the profligates in a war of the sexing. 89 minutes. Color 2004.

★★

And so it is!

For if you are not, as I am not, familiar with the works of John Waters on film (I much admire his writings and his interviews), you would have to scratch your head in dumb wonderment as to how this galumfrey might have issued from his rare mind.

What it looks like is a beautifully paced picture with no consistency of style, which is all right, but its also shows no consistency in the quality of the performing of it.

The main thrust is camp. Or supposed camp – camp being the mockery of emotion by the person to whom it is at that moment happening. Chris Isaak as the priapan Pan does well with the style, as do Selma Blair and Johnny Knoxville.

However, Susan Shepherd and Mink Stole, as raging, raving puritans, play in a vein of positive realism, and are a little bit better at it than are the others are at camp – camp, which takes the physical finesse of a Betty Grable. So that’s two styles.

The third style is that of Tracey Ullman, who is the focal figure of this farce, but who seems to be playing in the vein of silent film gesticulation. She throws herself around. She is never as a loss for a grimace. At this she is not very good. She never seems lodged in either her prude or her profligate. She mugs like a chimpanzee but, oh, I wish she were as funny as a chimpanzee. It’s a case of an actor dancing Swan Lake on one roller skate. It’s too outlandish at bottom to be enjoyable. Your sense of humor is swallowed by your pity for the performer and terror at her failing of invention.

We do have in this piece a custard pie in the face for SAA and other sexual recovery groups. We do have everyone in town running around screwing, but no sense that anyone actually does screw. It is as though the entire film, in its desire to deride and overthrow priggishness, is more sexually repressed than the icecap. To laugh at sex addiction as a treatable condition is, after all, a sacrilege against the robust sexual health 12 Step Sexual Recovery Programs strive for.

One senses a certain monkishness in the director, no?

For the corollary of sex for everyone is sex for no one. Sex meaning in these frames the same as going to the bathroom in any toilet you find. As though sexual need were impartial. If it is, it is therefore zero.

 

 

Beyond Therapy

01 Apr

 

Beyond Therapy –– directed by Robert Altman. Lampoon. A bisexual dish blinds dates a ninny in a French restaurant in New York. 93 minutes Color 1987.

I should only give it half a star because I only watched half of it. Altman claims it failed because AIDS emerged at that time, but AIDS emerged five years before, and he is deluding himself. It fails because he has no bone interest in the material.

Julie Hagerty is too vapid to alert our interest, much less that of  the improbable goof played by Jeff Goldblum. All the characters are in therapy including the therapists, I guess, but I didn’t stay around to find out. My hour was up.

The trouble with the film is that a fundamental strand of Altman’s nature was exactly like that of the big studio hirelings he made it his business not to become. That is to say, he is exactly like Michael Curtiz or Allan Dwan if in nothing else than that he would like nothing better than to end one production at 5 PM and start another at 6. There are people who like working in a productiont, and Altman was one of them. He says so himself. So he would take up any project that ripened before him. If one withered before it fruited, he would seize on the next one lying around. He wasn’t a studio hack; he was his own hack.

In his case, however, this crap shoot way of working popped up some fine and entertaining pictures. The Company, his next to last film, emerged like that, and, when he took on Gosford Park, he admits he never thought it would come to pass. One way he was a master-film-maker was simply that he was so productive. He liked to work on all sorts of different genres. I don’t know what genre he thought he was working in here.

At any rate, sometimes he executes a film and sometimes he executes a film. This one is crushed by slapdash improvisations by bit players, and not quite rescued by the entertainment value of supporting players: Tom Conti is spot on as a bored therapist, and Glenda Jackson really knows her stock in trade as a therapist more balmy than her clients.

The fallacy of improvisation is this: improvisation is supposed to generate natural honest behavior in actors, but when actors are let to improves, they tend to fall into their personal schtick, which is no more honest than the falsity they are supposed to evade. The actual matter is that actors often go into acting to cut through their own schtick, their personality, to delve a truth deeper than the strip mining of improvisation ever can reach.

Also the film was made in Paris, which is supposed to stand-in for New York, which is just silly. It also accounts for the casting of Conti and Jackson, jetting in from across the channel. to play parts requiring Alan Arkin and Lily Tomlin. Pierre Mignot filmed it, of course, beautifully.

If you find 52-Pick-Up a riveting card game you might be taken with this picture. Otherwise, graduate to Go-Fish. This is by comparison a Doctorate.

 

 
 

Intervista

25 Aug

Intervista – Directed by Federico Fellini. Back Soundstage Movie Comedy. The comic story of shooting a film by Felinni about the first time Felinni came to a movie set when he was young. 102 minutes Color 1987.

* * * * *

Fellini is the Alexander Calder of film. Enchanting. Surprising. Fun. Here he gives us a film about how humans delight in what is made-up, artificial, fabricated. Not just but also in being those things. In being what is created, devised, imagined. In making themselves into those things. Not made up just by themselves but by someone else as well. Not just alone but as a group. And how they will endure folly, delay, uncertainty, rejection, and having their whole parade rained on in order that they have this privilege of concoction. Sacred and Exalted. Thrilling. Unifying. Hilarious. Natural. And forgiving.

And so we have one of the greatest and most unusual statements of human soul-reality ever made. And made how? Without ever coming out and saying so. It’s all done with a lot of people talking, shouting, carrying on, in the midst of every distraction and vituperation. And in all of this a story emerges which is coherent and which is told solely in film terms, in the rubric of film. Not just in narrative and entrancement but in felt content.

Emerging into this as though from the sky we have Marcello Mastroianni as a seedy magician. The crew all traipse in little cars to the villa of whom? She won’t let them in. She doesn’t believe it’s Felinni. When she does she sets her dogs on them. Anita Ekberg in orange towels. And this glorious Vercingetorix continues to appear in towels as though she had never quite dried off from that fountain all those years ago. Her reunion here takes my breath away, not because I am sentimental about the famous scene but because she and Mastroianni are 25 years older and look it and are beautiful and it’s just wonderful.

It’s a beautifully shaped picture. Like Singing In The Rain, it is a picture about pictures about pictures. Our happiness with fraud. Our envy of the freedom it confers. About the human energy it releases and the curious democracy which is its milieu and profound and delightful artifact.

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Love & Distrust

29 Apr

Love & Distrust – Directed by Eric Kimetz. Anthology. Variations on misbegotten relationships with the world and the self. 93 minutes Color 2010.

*

Scuzzy stories all. With one exception, the acting is Improvisation At Its Worst. The problem with Improvisation is that it does not fall into the category of Acting but that of Performance Art. Performance art includes Preaching and Public Speaking and Stand Up Comedy. Stand Up Comics cannot really act. Bob Hope, Robin WIlliams, Jim Carrey, Martha Rae, Carole Burnett  all  possess and are posssessed by the Entertainers Virus, which pushes them over-the-top or to one side of acting a part. Improvisation means that the actor takes a situation and on the spot makes up a script around it. This turns the actors into fast-food playwrights, and it reduces their acting skills to everyday schtick. None of the actors here are Performance Artists, but straight actors, and, being asked to be what they are not, we don’t really see good acting either, and none of them are good playwrights. The one exception is Allison Janney, who, in a huge limo, white as a baby coffin, bemoans the loss of her lover and then picks up a teen age hustler on the corner. She is excruciatingly funny. She gets the star here. The rest of them should hang their heads in shame and stick to their craft.

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Triggermen

18 Mar

Triggermen – directed by John Bradshaw – Crime Comedy. A hit misses the target and a whole bunch of people get jumbled up in a fancy hotel. 93 minutes Color 2010.

* * * * *

Everyone in this hit comedy is superb, and one wonders how the director got these performances before the camera. They look improvised, but they are far more telling than most improvisations. Amanda Plummer is top notch as the girlfriend in England of one of two clueless ninnies who have travelled to the States to score some easy dough, but instead they are locked in their sleazy hotel room for want of rent. One of them escapes and scores a briefcase with a stash inside, meant for two hit men. The great Pete Postlethwaite plays the target of the bullets, and he is the only one who sustains a straight face during the kaleidoscope of mistaken identities which follows. Donnie Wahlberg and the extraordinarily seductive Claire Forlani play the cooing duo hoping for reprieve from  gangsterdom. The piece is brilliantly written, as a ruthless drollery. If professional crime is this inept, we are safe in our beds. The film is beautifully edited and shot. Everyone is very funny. Every thing is very funny. Snuff said.

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Somers Town

10 Mar

Somers Town – Directed by Shane Meadows – Comedy. Two 15 year-old boys, one a runaway scamp from Scotland, the other a shy Polish photographer, fall in with one another and fall in love with the same pretty waitress. 71 minutes Black and White and Color 2008.

* * * * *

This highly acclaimed film brought the work of this director to the pleasure of my attention, and I can do nothing but say, Check it out. The style is old-fashioned kitchen-sink, and at first I found it, as I do a lot of kitchen-sink drama, tedious. It also seemed to be played by two kids whom the director had dragged in off the street – we don’t want any more Andy Warhol in our lives, do we? But as soon as Perry Benson showed up as a scallywag street vendor and as soon Ireneusz Czop showed up as the father of the Polish boy, I had to revise my attention of the boys, for both older men are experienced actors of the first class, which is to say they are accomplished improvisationalists and, from the background of their own characters, can respond fully to the situation and persons around them. Thomas Turgoose plays the runaway as a lad of shrugging indifference to any feelings about his lost state, and Piotr Jagiello as the Polish boy is too ingrown to have any feelings. But is what is really true is that neither young actor is operating on a ground of back-story. They are simply operating on a ground of present being, which is why they appear flat and dull and apathetic at the start – which is exactly what they are supposed to be. When they join up, it is not their acting but the strangeness of their relationship at all that keeps one watching. How can these two people have a single thing to say to one another? Yet they do. For the plot dictates that they must. Their doings and their truancies become quite droll. And I soon realize that I am in the hands of a director who has considerable skill in achieving his ends. Improvisational acting usually dooms actors to falling back on their shtick. That simply means that in the long run the performers are too hardened in their response-capacity for anything actually to happen to them; they are not really playing characters; they are not really playing themselves, either; they are playing something that, in real life, is merely socially useful. And without imagination acting is useless, crass, and dull. Art, as always, lies in the imagination. What the director Shane Meadows has imagined is an arena in which imagination can take place, and that freedom grants the film its charm, its humor, and a place in which the audience can meet up with what is going on and respond. Elisa Lasowski as their light o’ love, and  Jane Dickie as a kindly acquaintance complete a perfectly cast and realized short film. Somers Town is a London ‘hood.  This is a tiny, telling vision of it.

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Tempest

10 Mar

Tempest – directed by Paul Mazursky – Drama. Modernization of Shakespeare’s play but without his dialogue. 2 hours 24 minutes Color 1882

* * *

For our sins, we sit through the inept longeurs of this piece, and wonder how temperaments so disaffiliated with the underlying dramaturgy and voice of the original could have ventured into this teapot. It now has to do with a famous architect, whose wife finds him, in middle age, inadequate. So he takes his teen-aged daughter off to an isolated Greek island. There he twiddles his thumbs while his new girlfriend lusts for his now chaste form. I say no more. No one in the piece seems to know exactly what to do next, and John Cassavetes as the lead flounders in the part, to which he brings neither the magic nor the authority necessary to it. His mind seems elsewhere. Mazursky has a gift for lower class comedy, which category this material cannot be dragged down to. Scenes are allowed to be improvised, one senses, as actors loose grip on their characters and fall back on their generic brand. Chaos is not the same thing as a tempest. The exception to this might be Gena Rowlands, but with no script, even she cannot get out alive. Susan Sarandon, as the Ariel character, now a nightclub chanteuse, plays her character as awkward, which is perhaps meant to etherealize her titties and big hot brown eyes. The performance looks uncertain. Raul Julia is the only fully experienced Shakespearean in the bunch, but even he, as Caliban, is only improvising  in a mop closet. Vittorio Gassman is, of course, famous for his Hamlet, but he is not welcome as a hyped-up, hypchondriacal magnate. Indeed, the whole venture is artistically undignified for the actors, with one exception.  It does bring to the screen for the first time Sam Robards, in a hair-do fatal for a debut, but Mollie Ringwold alone holds her own in this sea of tripe. I don’t know whether she is in character, but she sure has character. She was to have a huge film career, and judging by this performance, she well deserved it, by way of retaliation.

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