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Archive for the ‘FAMILY FILM’ Category

The Shape Of Water

14 Jan

The Shape Of Water – written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Thriller Fairy Tale. 123 minutes Color 2017.
★★★★★
The Story: An Amazon river god is imprisoned in a U.S. research installation, where he is tortured and threatened with dismemberment until a cleaning woman nurses and rescues him.
~
Of course, fairy stories are true. Myths are true. Allegory is true. That’s how come they last and carry weight in the spirits of children and indigenes. What “true” means is that fairy tales and myths and allegory mimic the inner procedures of the human psyche. The reason fairy tale and myth and allegory endure is that their method of communicating the most important human truths has never been supplanted.

So we see the kindness of the cleaning woman to be the real food she offers the creature, along with hard-boiled eggs.

But what use has this scary creature? The use is, as with all gods, that they never die. What goes with that territory is that they can heal death in others. Mercury, the god of thieves, medicine, tricks, and messages, is the winged avatar of this still, but Hindu religion is crammed with others. In all cases, they heal.

Not always in the way you might want, and in this case the healing teeters perilously before it is revealed. For the god has taken the shape of a merman, and his aspect is daunting. He is played by 57-year-old Doug Jones, lithe, sensual, sudden.

I can’t think of an actor who might have better played the cleaning woman who becomes his mate. Sally Hawkins as Elisa Esposito (which in English means “exposed” or “transparent”) opens her character up not just to him but to her colleague played by Octavia Spencer whose every word one always believes and so it is here. Over a movie house which seems to be playing forever the same B-Toga epic, Hawkins lives in generous neighborly conjunction with with a commercial illustrator whose style has dated him.

Richard Jenkins does him perfectly. He is the artist who cannot make a difference, the old fool, The Failed Father Figure Of Fairy Tale. Rather like the sad king with the unmarriageable daughter whom you find all the time in those stories. Either she herself or someone beyond unusual must rescue her from the doldrums of the kingdom. And in this case, the doldrums are enforced by a vicious tyrant played with his usual perfection by the handsome, hard Michael Shannon.

Mortal stupidity swirls them around – by the American military bureaucracy typified by Nick Searcy as the general in charge of everything – and by the Russians who want to steal the merman, and whose plans are foxed by Michael Stuhlbarg, who who plays a scientist/spy bent on saving the merman.

So you see, you have a full complement of forces, modern and fantastical, to urge our attention and our loyalties on.

The film is beautifully filmed and imagined. Just what you want for such a tale.

And what is it that you want?

What you don’t want is to be told. So both the merman and the cleaning woman are mute and must, nonetheless, make themselves perfectly understandable to themselves and to us. We see that it is not hard to do.

What you really want is resurrection.

And that’s what the picture provides.

Enjoy yourself. See it.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, FAIRY TALE, FAMILY FILM, FANTASY, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Michael Shannon, MUST SEE, Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins ACTING GOD, Sally Hawkins, SERIOUS FAIRY TALE

 

Sing & Moana

29 Jan

 

Sing – directed by Garth Jennings. Animated feature. 110 minutes Color 2016.

★★★★★

Moana – directed by Ron Clements and John Musker. Animated Feature. 110 minutes Color 2016.

★★★★★

Stories: Both stories deal with ambitions thwarted and then triumphed.

~

Both films are perfectly suited to adults. And where I sat, the children were as quietly attentive as the adults that accompanied them. Why is that?

A maximum of surprises, movement, angles, colors.

An amplitude of wit.

And they supply – worse than any live action film can – horrendous catastrophe. In Sing it’s a catastrophic flood. In Moana it’s deified lava.

But the young hero and heroine surmount all difficulties. Not without unlikely escapes and rescues and a sentimentality that would crush a nun dressed as a dragon. (Neither of these feature such a creature.)

In Sing, to save his theatre, the young Koala Bear owner must put on a talent show. In Moana, a young woman must bring back a talisman to save her island people.

I enjoyed myself no end. I simply wandering in to sample them while waiting for the feature I’d paid for to start. Remained riveted to my seat.

In the watching, these films dwell on nothing. Remarkable individual beauties and Voltaire-like coups of imagination flit by in sumptuous plentitude. I wish they’d wait for me – I was reared on Pinocchio.

 My favorite character of all was played, in Sing, by the director Garth Jennings as Mrs Crawly, a superannuated loyal iguana secretary with a wandering glass eye. Every time the old woman meandered on in her well-meaning way, I rejoiced.

Such films are rightly called “animated.” For they animate the variety and particularity of the truth and comedy of human gesture in a way that no straight film actor can achieve – because animators are more daring than actors. Because more shameless.

In animation, we expect over-acting. Which means more acting than is necessary. Animation cannot achieve depth of performance, which is what human screen acting can, but it can achieve breadth of performance, which is what human screen acting avoids like Swiss cheese.

In Sing the characters are animals; in Moana, humans. I notice the animals in Sing are more human than the humans in Moana. But I quibble not.

I loved them, and you won’t waste your time, nor is time wasted on you, should you drag your inner or outer child to either or both.

 
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Posted in ACTION ADVENTURE, FAMILY FILM, MAGNIFICENT FEAT DRAMA, MUSICAL NUMBERS, SERIOUS FAIRY TALE, SINGING MUSICAL, SURVIVAL DRAMA, Variety Show

 

Parental Guidance

29 Jan

Parental Guidance – directed by Andy Fickman. Family Comedy. The grandparents babysit the weekend while the children’s parents travel to Miami, and things become raucous. 104 minutes Color 2012.
★★★★★
Bette Midler is a national treasure.

Is she Yellowstone? Or, I know, she’s Mount Rushmore! (She certainly isn’t Grant’s Tomb.) Would it be too much to say that she is The Smithsonian? Yes, it would.

And Billy Crystal is up there with her. For never have two such big-hearted comedians been so paired so rightly. I hope they make many more films together, for neither one has made many movies, and Our National Health does require that we see them more often. I believe we have constitutional amendment going forward on the matter.

In any case, here they are abetted by the entrancing Marisa Tomei. She’s so good. She’s so appealing. She is never wrong. So you see, we have three reasons to go to this picture.

As a comedy it is made up of the usual clumsy Hollywood plastic. Which means that audience participation in the proceedings is cut off by the failure to admit by the writers that what we are witnessing is not real. The seduction of the unreal is everything. Extreme situations and the implausible are all right, but they don’t, in and of themselves, seduce. Cling-wrap is not a crystal mirror.

Where do we fit in?

I’ll tell you where we fit in: on the only island there is: the persons and playing of Tomei, Crystal, and Midler with all this, their response to it, and their talent with dialogue.

Crystal plays a baseball announcer from a provincial California city who wants to announce for The San Francisco Giants, and his riffs are really wonderful as he does his announcer’s shtick. Tomei is the rather uptight modern mother raising her kids on the strict leash of leashlessness. When the grandparents show up, a conflict of parenting styles arises, and Midler particularly shows a robust leashlessness of a quite different order.

I had a great time with the three of them. I hope you will too. I wish they never part. They could be the Rogers and Astaire of Twenty First Century comedy.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Bette Midler: GODDESS, Billy Crystal, BROAD COMEDY, FAMILY FILM, Marisa Tomei, Middle Class Comedy

 

The Thin Man Goes Home

18 Jan

The Thin Man Goes Home – directed by Richard Thorpe. Who-Dun-It. The city sophisticates in a small town offer murder and detection to it. 100 minutes. Black and White 1945.
★★★★★
This series was not really murder mysteries. but pleasing charades in which the audience colluded – which is why they were so enormously popular. The murders are inconsequential. But the poise of Myrna Loy carries everything forward. Or you might say that the terror-tone of the pictures was really determined by Asta, the faithful trick dog of William Powell. Or it might be set by Powell’s cavalier suits.

Or it might be that we are always reminded that we are watching a movie. Which is really what we came to the Bijou to do. We are in on the joke of Nick and Nora Charles. Flippancy was the comedy of the age.

Anyhow, we the audience certainly feel we are part of a marriage which is sexy and affectionate. And we also feel, although she rags him something fierce, that the wife really supports the husband’s work to a degree that she becomes really part of it. But everyone keeps his temper, until the wrap-up, when the dastardly killer is unwrapped in a series of explanations impossible and not even desirable to grasp. And we are all part of that too.

As we are part of the banter between Loy and Powell, here written by Dwight Taylor (son of the great Laurette Taylor), so we always feel part of the party. Yes, these two are New York Sophisticates; and we are not; yes, they drink more than regulation allows, and we do not (although not here; here, only cider), but we go along with their ride as to the manner born. MGM let’s one peek into a world that never existed. That is the MGM style in its heyday, which this is.

And MGM’s huge stable of fine actors is corralled into this piece to give it depth of talent if not of profundity. Harry Davenport, Edward Brophy, Lucile Watson. Minor Watson, Anne Revere, Leon Ames, Gloria DeHaven, Lloyd Corrigan, Donald MacBride, and that tiny mushroom of bashfulness, Donald (O rightly named) Meek. I look upon him with wonder. Year after year, in film after film, he played exactly the same part. Fumbling, uncertain, apologetic, timid. With his appealing Jiminy Cricket face, he performed perfectly, an actor whose skill we enjoy but do not explore. A cartoon. I wonder what his life was like. He could not possibly have been the thing he portrayed. But what? He died the following year, but not before having made three more films.

Along with the movie, on the extras, is an MGM cartoon. I only remember Warner Brothers Cartoons at that time, but here is a brilliant one (the Warners manner, true), so good it has the imaginative power of a nightmare, if a nightmare could be very very funny. It is The Type For Cartoons. Don’t miss it..

It affords a pleasing chaser to our visit with the Charles, in this their penultimate of seven excursions in the form.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Anne Revere, Donald MacBride, Donald Meek, Edward Brophy, FAMILY FILM, Gloria DeHaven, Harry Davenport, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Leon Ames, Lloyd Corrigan, Lucile Watson, Myrna Loy, WHO-DUN-IT, William Powell

 

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

08 Dec

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo – directed by Mervyn LeRoy. WWII Drama. Four months after Pearl Harbor, Jimmy Dootlittle’s B-25 squadron mounts the daring bomb attack for which the airmen know they do not have sufficient return fuel. 138 minutes Black and White 1944.
★★★★★
What you have is a script by Dalton Trumbo who hypothesizes every scene into what he ideologically wishes it to be, so the script always floats slightly above the actors’ heads. They have to reach back into their Sunday School pageants to play it. But it does give Trumbo leeway for the scene where two men discuss whether they actually hate the Japanese and what it feels like to kill civilians. It’s good the scene is there at all, since it would have been a matter of discussion among troops. So “Anti-American” though; so Dalton Trumbo; so HUAC. After all a War is on! Loose lips sink ships! As usual with Trumbo, it feels at once startling and pat. An honestly acted liberal rant.

Not to be missed are terribly acted romantic scenes of Phyllis Thaxter who grinds every scene to a halt by her sparkle; she narrows her eyes and just glimmers away. You want to slap her. It’s a wonder Van Johnson can perform opposite her at all. You look at him being convincing and crown him with a halo: that he could act opposite Phyllis Thaxter and not gnashed his teeth once.

Spencer Tracy walks through the Doolittle role with his commanding presence merely. When you see him in the cockpit of his bomber in leather flight jacket, you want to laugh, and put him back in his suburban easy chair where he belongs and never left, not once, to do a little research about how it feels being a pilot.

But he has little to do, save deliver a few gritty speeches, and the film is well worth watching for the actual bomber training of these men, at the actual airdrome they did it in, and the tiny practice runs they performed of those huge wretched bombers in preparation for taking off from the minute flight deck of the U.S.S. Hornet. So quickly after Pearl Harbor too!

And we see the actual takeoffs on that day, for it was filmed at the time. They’d been spotted by a fishing boat and had to leave many hours too soon and farther from their targets, thus reducing the return gas in their tanks. We see the actual approach to Japan. We see them see Fujiyama. We see them skim low over the paddies. We see the actual bombing raid. All of this is thrilling and valid. For we are seeing the actual footage of it

Then we see how they had to fly to a base in China, which only one of them actually made. China was Japanese occupied at the time, so when the bombers landed or crashed, their crews were either taken by the Japs or hidden by the Chinese and spirited away to secret airfields where lovely and ever-resourceful DC3s flew them off in the nick of time.

The story focuses mainly on Van Johnson’s crew, among whom we find the refreshing face of Robert Walker, a terrific actor here and elsewhere. A big team of Oriental and American actors ably acts it, including Don DeFore, Robert Mitchum, Leon Ames, Benson Fong, Hsin Kung, Ching Wah Lee, Ann Shoemaker, Stephen McNally, Bill Williams, Scott McKay, Selena Royle, Alan Napier. Most of these appear in the adventure and escape in China. Harold Rosson and the great Robert Surtees filmed it. It is action/adventure as its most documentarian and thrilling.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Ann Shoemaker, Benson Fong, DOCUDRAMA, Don DeFore, ESCAPE DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, FILMED BY: Robert Surtees, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Leon Ames, MAGNIFICENT FEAT DRAMA, MILITARY, Phyllis Thaxter, Robert Mitchum, Robert Walker, Selena Royle, Spencer Tracy, Stephen McNally, Van Johnson, War Story, World War II

 

The Color Of Paradise

30 Oct

The Color Of Paradise – written and directed by Majid Majidi. Drama. A blind boy is abused by his father who is ashamed of him. 90 minutes Color 1999.
★★★★★
This is a wonderful picture, difficult for me at first, which is the customary strategy of this director, and then eventually and wholly to be surrendered to. Both the freakishness of the boy’s blindness and the dire hatred of him by the father are so off-putting that I knew I must stick with it for the good that might be arrived at — and it sure did come. I cannot imagine where the green countryside exists once this film leaves Tehran. I cannot imagine how they found that boy. I cannot imagine how they found an actor great enough to play that father so thoroughgoingingly. It is beyond my comprehension that this film, in its extraordinary extremes, came to exist at all. The whole thing is a mystery to me, and one that I am grateful for. Of course, watching it, don’t expect a walk in the park. But do expect that your capacity for compassion will be engaged to a fullness wider than wide. Expect a spaciousness in yourself to appear to hold this remarkable simple tale in your being.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, DIRECTED BY Majid Majidi, FAMILY DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in Iran in Farsi with English Subtitles, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, MUST SEE

 

The Ladykillers

26 Aug

The Ladykillers – directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Gangster Comedy. 91 minutes Color 1955.

★★★★★

You gather your friends about you, and you set them up with some shortbread and whisky or a spot of brandy or something convivial, and you watch this gooseberry pie of a comedy together, for you don’t want your neighbors to hear you guffaw alone. It stars Katie Johnson, a tiny little actress who steals every scene she appears in with Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Jack Warner, Peter Sellers, and Alex Guinness. They don’t have a chance, because she keeps everything she does as small as toast and jam. If you watch her analytically, you see a performance of such subtlety, experience, and skill that it forces you to eat out its hand handily. She’d been acting since 1894. She is 77 years old and pretty and her cheeks are pink as a rose teacup. She is well spoken and has beautiful manners. She presents her character as perfectly intelligent and considerate to a fault. But she is more than beautifully cast. She plays the part as a miniature Napoleon hiding in a rose. Not one of these gangsters dare disobey her. The story is beautifully set up by the writer and director with scenes in her local police station, whose chief pacifies her reports of a friend’s sightings of alien invaders, and she goes back to her lopsided house and rents out one of its rooms to a weird lodger played by Alec Guinness, who is clearly doing an imitation of Alastair Sim. This is disconcertingly funny at first because of the match of Sim’s buck teeth, watery eyes, sleazy hair, and drooling, delirious starvation, but Guinness’s performance fades somewhat as the film progresses because it is an imposture facing off against the real thing, Katie Johnson’s Mrs Wilberforce. The same is true of the others, who tend toward the cartoon. They are all entertaining, of course, except perhaps for Peter Sellers, an actor who was not inherently funny, whose comedy depended upon prop gags. You’d rather watch Katie Johnson sleep than watch him fumble with a gun. The only one who matches Johnson shot for shot is Danny Green as One-Round, the ignorant palooka strongman, because what he is doing as an actor is real. The look on Katie Johnson’s face as it dawns with the truth of what these bums are up to in her house is a sight to rejoice in. So gather your friends around like a tea cozy. You will all be pleased to be pleased. This film is vacation from the crude, a recess from the explicit. And when it is over you will have a discussion on what the word “entertainment” actually means. Although, of course, you don’t have to, because as with this film, entertainment frees us for a time into Liberty Hall, where, as Sean Kelly once told me, nothing is forbidden and nothing is required.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH COMEDIC, Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Crime Comedy, FAMILY FILM, Gangster Comedy, Herbert Lom, Katie Johnson, Light Comedy, Peter Sellers, SCREWBALL COMEDY

 

Snow White And The Huntsman

17 Jun

Snow White And The Huntsman – directed by Rupert Sanders. Fairy Tale Escape Action Adventure. A ghoulish queen strives to eat her fleeing stepdaughter alive. 127 minutes Color 2012.

★★★

The problem with live-action fairy tales is that they sink under the specious particularity of the naturalistic, to which by temperament they are alien. A fairy tale is like a very important dream. It is an external narration of an internal contraption. It is parsed out into characters, such as the queen, the witch, the dumb third son, the cunning daughter, the dragon in the gold, the prince, and so forth. Reading them or listening to them we know we ourselves are these things. Even though not externally, our identification is absolute and therefore hypnotic. These are the inner paths, the inner adventures and floorplan of the psyche. They are wise and cautionary stories, and they are absolutely true in the largest sense of the word, since they must be embarked upon and lived out, but they have nothing to do with realism as a style – and realism is a style which live-action cannot avoid. That is why the true film medium for all fairy tales is animated cartoon. In this picture, for instance, which is very well done, beautifully cast, expensively made, very well played, directed, edited, filmed, and scored, we at one point witness Snow White with dirty fingernails, a completely unnecessary and, in fact, counter-productive detail for the meaning and carriage of the fairy tale of Snow White, but inevitable since she has been slogging through the wilds and falling down in mud before our eyes. So there is a sense when watching such films of a remoteness forced upon us by an incorrect medium. When there camera rises high above her collapse in The Dark Woods, we see her lying screened behind the tall branches of the trees far below, and we see that, despite their cruelty, her vicissitudes protect her. That is because we are at that moment witnessing the scheme of cartoon. With fairy tales, live-action rules out identification. There’s too much unelectable detail. Disney’s version was correct. The theater would also be correct. Opera would be correct. Aside from this failure which is nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault, the pictures is beautiful in every scene and sense, rare in its display of nature and anti-nature, by which I mean the queen’s costumes. Charlize Theron plays her, and her character is given many scenes. Set before the days of face-lifts, her step-queen’s political and magical powers depend upon the retention of her looks. With her oceanic beauty, Charlize Theron really is the fairest of them all. But she is also the older sister of a brother who is clearly in his fifties, while she herself is Charlize Theron. She’s wonderful in the part, and her playing of her death scene is imaginative and unusual. The film never fails to interest and never succeeds to fully interest. It is extremely intelligent and completely obtuse. But it is not a waste of time. And as set forth it certainly supports the activism and the vitality and the cunning and the stamina of the female of the species, right along with the males who help her escape and eventually come to follow her.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, Bob Hoskins, Charlize Theron, COSTUME DRAMA, ESCAPE DRAMA, FAIRY TALE, FAMILY FILM, PERIOD, SURVIVAL DRAMA, TEEN DRAMA

 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

12 Jun

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – directed by John Madden. Comedy/Drama. A group of retirees seek economic comfort at a Jaipur hotel, which they find also to be a retiree. 124 minutes Color 2012.

★★★★★

If by some merry chance you should be gulled into seeing this piece, relax then and wander for a time with this bunch of expatriates and be one of them, for in each of us at some time and place is each of the characters we find before us here, and are just as we would be should we find ourselves here. We first of all are the impecuniously retired. We are also the one so fearful of going out of doors in Jaipur India that we miss the fun of the color and assault of the stench and the poverty and the endless wealth and variety of life. Then we are also the one who betrayed a love long ago. We are no less the one who must cling to her safety blanket of familiar foods, never daring to nibble a dainty. We are the racially prejudiced. We are the brash strider venturing forth into the escape of a world both opposite to his own and also unavoidable. The mad and kindly proprietor of this old hotel is a young man who has just inherited it, and his enthusiasm is as boundless as his promises and equally unfulfillable. Never was a film so perfectly, so justly filmed and edited. Never was one so fortunately cast. The balance of the scenes is exquisite as played off against one another for length, tone, plot, and color. Tom Wilkinson plays the lover in search of his once lost love. My favorite, Maggie Smith, who is the most physical actor of her generation, plays the lower-class foodie, and gives to us, once again, that rare gift of an actor, embodiment. Richard Nighy is the fellow who ventures out into the wilds of the city. Which brings us to Judi Dench. I have always thought that to act opposite Judi Dench would be to act opposite a rock. I don’t like her. There is no give in her. Instead an adamantine quality in her chooses the moment for “sympathy,” as by a schoolmarm’s ferule.  She is an actress of advanced calculations, always an instant ahead of the moment. She’s mean. She irritates me. Usually. For this is not one of those times. Here she is given to play the part of a woman entirely opposite to all that, one naive to the world, a woman whose dead husband took care of everything, with the exception of providing for her in the event of his death. She plays it freshly. She appeals. All of them do, but the one who really appeals most is the young actor playing the delirious proprietor of the hotel. What a wonderful voice and face and energy. What a sense of humor. What a darling guy. He is Dev Patel of fond memory of Slumdog Millionaire. And the movie is directed by John Madden of fond memory of Shakespeare In Love. So you see. Whatever age you are, you cannot go wrong with this movie, for whatever age you are you too are a retiree from something, waking up in a new place and, just like our friends here, just like a newborn baby, comically disoriented. Catch it at once.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH REALISTIC, Bill Nighy, COMEDY/DRAMA, Dev Patel, DIRECTED BY: John Madden, FAMILY FILM, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Includes Some Gay Characters, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson

 

We Bought A Zoo!

18 Jan

We Bought A Zoo — directed by Cameron Crowe. Family Drama. A widowered adventure writer takes his kids and his inheritance and buys a small zoo on its uppers. 124 minutes Color 2011.

* * * *

As soon as Thomas Haden Church appears on the screen we know we are in for a forgone conclusion: it’s going to be a dogmatically sentimental tale plotted-up so’s everything ends hunky-dory at the credits. Mr. Church is wonderfully amusing as the character of the narrow-minded older brother trying to convince his younger brother not to jump into the swamp of zoo-purchase. The problems lie not with the actor but the role. It is the role of a false antagonist, unneeded because we have a real antagonist in the person of the stickler zoo inspector played with equal comic skill by John Michael Higgins. Up until the older brother, we are sailing along quite nicely in the company of Matt Damon and his two children, a darling little girl played by Maggie Jones who never missteps into the poo of child actorishness, and by Colin Ford, playing the 14 year-old sullen son. For as soon as Church does appear his performance is our gain and the story’s loss, for we instantly know the film is going to be devoured whole by massive plot contrivances. The conflict in this film is really simple, and does not need either a contrivance or a plotty plot: it is whether Matt Damon can kill an old suffering tiger. In favor of its putting-down is Scarlett Johansson. She is a plain girl, and it is good to see her out of the sequins of her seductivity and instead where she truly belongs, in rude jeans and scraggly hair. She plays an experienced and devoted zoo professional, and is perfectly convincing in the role. But we are eventually given her hair set more glamorously in order, one supposes, to validate an attraction between her and Damon, an attraction which is completely disconsonnant with all we are told about his devotion to his recently dead wife. Along with this we are bombarded with a standard conflict between the father and son, a romance with the son and a local 12 year-old, the zoo inspection impending then occurring, running out of money, inclement weather on opening day, and even the misadventure of a fallen tree keeping customers out, and the older brother. What is lost by all of this?  What’s lost is Matt Damon’s performance. All this pulls the rug out from under it by doing all the work for him – whereas, good actor that he is, he might have compassed it all which we would have been glad to see him do. But Cameron Crowe does not seem to have the common sense to keep things simple. Moreover, we are wrung dry by the score which crowds us out more and more as the film goes on. Crowe doesn’t allow us to participate; he rams it down our throats instead of letting us swallow it on our own. He doesn’t allow us to do our job; he doesn’t trust his audience. Fortunately, his actors trust themselves and it is them that we bide our time with, with a certain satisfaction, even though none of them are given close relations with the animals themselves, save with the tiger, whose demise, the only real dramatic action natural to the material, we are, unfortunately, spared. There are a couple of good arguments and a couple of cunning one-liners, true. But I am not a robot. And I do not need controlling.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, FAMILY FILM, John Michael Higgins, Matt Damon, Scarlett Johannson, Thomas Haden Church

 

I Remember Mama

13 Jan

I Remember Mama — directed by George Stevens. Comedy/Drama.  The love of a mother for her family forges a life for them in pre-WW I San Francisco. 134 minutes Black and White 1948

* * * * *

Stevens had been a cameraman all during the 20s and his technical grasp of filmmaking is unparalleled by any American director of his time, so just watch how he gives what he gives you – if you can, for his scenic power is so engrossing one cannot detach from the gift itself to pay attention to the wrappings which are an integral part of it. He will make you a voyeur by making you listen through a window. He will make you an eavesdropper by allowing you to hear what two characters standing on a street with their back to you are saying. He will hold you at the distance respect requires as a woman retreats across a barnyard and fades into the unapproachable solitude of widowhood. Or he will bring you so close up into the face of two characters that you are actually a part of the speechless energy between them. He will allow you in. He will keep you at bay. He will let you watch something in the corner. He is always aware of you, always wanting your participation and understanding, but he won’t hammer it home. He will often catch you in with the unexpected. He always has something for you, but he let’s you do your part by yourself. I saw this when it came out and it presents the ideal mother. She is played by an actress I don’t ordinarily like, Irene Dunne, but here I not only admire the actress I admire the character. The film is divided in chapters, each one recounting an episode of heroic devotion to her children. None of them are cloying, although the number of them might be said to be. Dunne’s playing is impeccable, and so is her accent, as are all of the Norwegian accents. She wore padding and no make-up. She was nominated for an Oscar for this. Nicolas Musuraca, famed “master of light,” filmed it. He was nominated for an Oscar for this. Barbara Bel Geddes played the elder daughter and narrator. I identify with this character because were I a female I would be her type, and because, like me, she is a writer. She was nominated for an Oscar for this. When Jessica Tandy turned down the role of the shy aunt, Stevens said, “Let the script girl play her,” so the script girl did, and a long career was born. Ellen Corby was nominated for an Oscar for this. Oskar Homolka had played Uncle Chris on the stage with Mady Christians and Marlon Brando, and when he is on camera Stevens gives him full sway in bringing to life this crusty, rude, frightening character. He was nominated for an Oscar for this. Save for Bel Geddes, the children in the film tend to be little Hollywood child actors, but it would be not before long that Stevens found Brandon de Wilde. Barbara O’Neil, Florence Bates, Edgar Bergen, Rudy Vallee, Cedric Hardwick, Philip Dorn fill out and give depth to the cast.

After The War, Stevens came home shell-shocked and did nothing, but eventually formed a company with Frank Capra and William Wyler. A great post WW II trilogy emerged. Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life is about the home-front. Wyler’s The Best Years Of Our Lives is about home-coming. Stevens’ I Remember Mama is about home, the thing fought for and the values that made the fight prevail, set even before WW I, in the city George Stevens grew up in at the time he grew up in it.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Barbara Bel Geddes, Barbara O'Neil, Cedric Hardwick, COMING OF AGE DRAMA, Directed by George Stevens, ENSEMBLE DRAMA, FAMILY DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, FILMED BY: Nicolas Musuraca, Florence Bates, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Irene Dunne, Oskar Homolka, Period: 1910-1914, Rudy Vallee

 

Hugo

11 Dec

Hugo — Directed by Martin Scorsese. Drama. An orphaned boy winds the clocks of a huge Paris railway station as he seeks his true parentage. 127 minutes Color 2011.

* * * *

Asa Butterworth plays the 12 year-old and hits a homer. His performance is simple and ingratiating, for he lets his impression of his situation carry him, and Martin Scorsese lets Asa’s fine blue eyes carry him the rest. He is mated with another 12-year-old well played by Chloë Grace Moretz. The two of them take us along on their adventures in early 1930s Paris, adventures which are imperiled by the train station guard, a victim de la guerre, played with a crazy Martin Short accent which is supposed to be comic but is not, by Sacha Baron Cohen. The problem with the material lies not with them but with the special effects which clog and over-lengthen their tale. These effects which are 3-D and which at first impress and amaze, fade in power as they supplant the story and the human interest of it. For instance, two of the greatest actors alive, Richard Griffiths and Frances de La Tour (remember them in The History Boys), are sidelined, while the sequences in the towering stacks of a bookshop owned by Christopher Lee displace the narrative with a plot device that could have been handled more briskly another way. Virtuosoism will attack narration every time. For the entire film is manufactured by computer. All we see, save the actors themselves, is fabricated with the doomed magic of an application. It even opens the picture carrying a character moving through a maze, duplicating a famous opening sequence in another Scorsese film of years ago. But these elaborate and highly detailed fabrications steal breath. What first impressed now fails to. The forgotten passages of the huge old station bring us into the power of the secret mischief of the Hunchback Of Notre Dame and The Phantom Of The Opera, but with them the special effects of the station itself eventually cannot compete. The film almost loses heart – but not quite, for the heart is that of Martin Scorsese, and the story is that of the Ben Kingsley character, an old great silent film fantancist/magician/inventor, Georges Méliès, now superannuated and inutile and running a toy store in the train station. We hope our Master Scorsese does not fear to become like this director, outdated, his work lost and forgotten. The old director is restored to praise, and, when I saw it, the audience applauded Hugo, as I did myself. A good whole-family picture.

 

 
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Posted in 1930s, ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, Asa Butterworth, Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Lee, DIRECTED BY: Martin Scorsese, FAMILY FILM, Frances de la Tour, Interesting Special Effects, Jude Law, Richard Griffiths, Sacha Baron Cohen, YOUTH DRAMA

 

It’s A Wonderful Life

06 Dec

It’s A Wonderful Life – Directed by Frank Capra. Comedy/Drama. A home-town man teeters suicidally rather than bankrupting himself and his fellow townsfolk. 130 minutes Black and White 1946.

* * * * *

Clint Eastwood remarked how violent James Stewart was in the Anthony Mann Westerns he made in his late middle age. But they are nothing to compare with the rudeness, insolence, insult, and threat he delivers in this supposedly down-home performance of a would-be suicide learning about the life he has lived before it is too late. The insanity with which he throttles the foolish Thomas Mitchell is terrifying. He is violently mean to his children (as indeed one must be at Christmas to have a really meaningful Yule.) But the picture as a Christmas Classic probably looms as large as it does for the same reason that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol does – because of the Scrooginess of Stewart, as George Bailey, followed by the ghastly death-threat visions before he mends his ways. Jimmy Stewart is remarkable in the role, and except for the final scene of the sanctimonious, Deus ex-macchina rescue by the townsfolk of Bedford Falls, where there is something wrong with his singing and his smile, we have a great performance by a master of his craft. It is said that the film was not successful in its day, but I’m not so sure. I saw it when it came out, and I remember it vividly. And both it and Stewart and Capra were nominated for Oscars that year. Or perhaps there is not something wrong with that final smile. Perhaps what I see behind it is a hangover of his own nasty brush with the afterlife. Stewart had been away at war, one of the first big stars to enlist, and he bravely piloted more bombing missions over Europe than was good for any mortal man. Everyone was changed by The War, and what changed most in Hollywood was the virtual inability of its male stars to play comedy any more. Tyrone Power had been marvelous in light comedy; so had Henry Fonda; so had Stewart; George Stevens never directed another one, and screwball comedy never really returned. They came back from The War changed men. Solutions now weren’t so easy as they once were in Capra’s great, good-hearted comedies of the 30s. Capra never made a convincing comedy after World War II, and his career petered out. Here however he is in the last chapter of his topmost form. Every scene is beautifully written, every scene is perfectly begun, played, ended, and edited. Like Normal Rockwell’s paintings, what is illustrated here – and It’s A Wonderful Life is essentially a genre painting and an illustration – is the value of the truth of American community, which is that we must get along with people quite different from ourselves in personal style, race, and national derivation, and that to do so is to survive by the only means possible for survival: love. Love is what needs to survive. And love is what survives us. To make the illustration clear Capra does exactly what Rockwell does: he makes his humans almost caricatures. Like Rockwell, Capra’s characters live in gawky motion, and their gesture is strategized in the direction of endearing folly. All this is still true of America and Americans. Forgetting love’s survival through cooperation and public service and remembering it again is our national drama. This is what makes It’s A Wonderful Life the one film of Capra’s that will not date. To force the illustration, Capra has cast the story perfectly: first with Lionel Barrymore, the perennial Scrooge of radio in those days, as the meanie Mr. Potts, and he eats the role alive. Then with Ward Bond as the cop, Beulah Bondi as the mom, Donna Reed as the feisty wife, Gloria Graham as the town gal of questionable morals, Henry Travers as The Angel Clarence, Frank Faylen as the cabbie, Sheldon Leonard as the bartender, and a huge heterogeneous cast of townsfolk. It’s A Wonderful Life is a wonderful movie.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Beulah Bondi, Directed by Frank Capra, Donna Reed, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Frank Faylen, Gloria Graham, Henry Travers, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jimmy Stewart: ACTING GOD, Lionel Barrymore, Middle Class Comedy, MIDDLE-CLASS DRAMA, MUST SEE, PERSONAL DRAMA, Sheldon Leonard, Thomas Mitchell

 

Boys Town and Men Of Boys Town

11 Nov

Boys Town and Men Of Boys Town — Directed by Norman Taurog. A Catholic priest in establishing a boarding school for delinquents in the middle of Nebraska comes up against his financial and personal nemeses. 96 minutes Black and White 1938.

* * * * *

The male movie stars of the 1930s were more beautiful than the female stars, and also more homely, and there is a good reason for it: the Great Depression.  Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney wore Common Man faces and had the common touch. The very plebian Irish mug of Spencer Tracey was Metros answer to the trend, and one wonders what Boys Town would have been like made at its obvious place, Warner Brothers, home of the gangster film. For Boys town is about proto-gangsters whom a well meaning Catholic Priest Father Flanagan took under his wing and for them established a series of farms cum schools which prosper and protect young males to this day, irrespective of race, religion, or ancestry. Warners had some tough crooks, but here the JDs are turned into gutter roses by a shoulder pat. They are played by group of Hollywood child actors so vicious in their technique that they can burst into tears at the drop of clapper. Never have so many cried so much for so few reels. They should have put glycerin on the camera lens and have done with it. Perfectly cast as a solid priest, Spencer Tracy won his second Oscar in a row, and you can see why. Tracy never oversteps the mark by emotionalizing his ideals or sentimentalizing the trites he has to utter.  Fascinating to watch, he is an actor who has carefully compartmentalized himself and gives everything short of the mawkish. His authority derives from the fact that his body is well grounded, and his performance depends upon his responsiveness, rather than his aggressiveness, such that we somehow believe it when others get their Irish up and all he has to do is repeat a request three times in a row for opponents to flutter to the ground as wild leaves before the mighty blast of October. Both movies are on one disc and both were made on the campus of Boys Town and both are worth seeing. Not least for the performance of Mickey Rooney as his enemy in the first and his ally in the second. Rooney has two qualities, one, confidence, and two, a quality so rare that few great artists possess it – Eddie Murphy, Bugs Bunny, Johann Sebastian Bach – drive. So potent is Rooney as a screen presence that for the second film his role of brat gangster must be divided in two. The older he got and the more his status as a star diminished, the greater the actor Rooney became.  He and Olivia de Havilland are the only surviving movie stars of the 1930s, she the ideal Hermia in Max Reinhardt’s A Mid Summer Nights’ Dream, and he, “Oh what fools these mortals be!” naked in a tree, the Puck of Pucks.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, FAMILY FILM, Henry Hull, Lee J. Cobb, MELODRAMA, Mickey Rooney: ACTING GOD, PERSONAL DRAMA, Spencer Tracy

 

The Rookie

07 Aug

The Rookie – Directed by John Lee Hancock. Sports Drama. A 40-year-old baseball coach keeps his promise to God. 127 minutes Color 2002.

* * * * *

Carter Burwell’s score draws a line under every scene with the same color as the scene, making the obvious unmistakable. This is exactly the way to score a film such as this, a Disney sermon, which is inspirational and important. Important for people to see who have not fulfilled their promise. Because it’s never too late. When you consider a film like this, it’s easy to see what’s there: story, yes; situation, yes; talented actors, yes; competent direction; yes, proper filming, yes; clear roles, yes. Script, no; characters, no. It’s not that people say what people would never say under the circumstances, so much as it is that they do not say enough and that what they do say lacks the power of personal verbal flavor. This means, with too little dialogue, the actors must fall back on their personal eccentricity, which Rachel Griffiths wisely does, or that actors must fall back on acting, which makes them look ridiculous in the case of that wonderful actor Brian Cox in his final scene (watch him grasp for straws) or like a ham, which is the case with Dennis Quaid. Quaid, always well cast, is an actor of great charm and application. Good looking, with a grin and a smile almost as endearing as Brando’s, and with a winning way about him. He is a terrific male physical specimen and an ideal sort of all-American type (don’t put him costume drama, though; don’t ask him to play a European of any kind).  But over time, he has gotten to be very technical actor, and you can see it in his mouth. He makes faces. (And you rally have to be Greta Garbo to know how to do that.) So he gives less of a gutsy or eccentric or innocent performance than one which fulfills the routines of the script. Still he is a lovable cuss, and has his moments here. The film promulgates bourgeois American virtues and feelings. Why not? That’s Disney’s job always. Someone has to do it. And I need it from time to time. What makes the whole thing work is that the baseball stuff  works like blazes and that it is cast bottom-heavy with superb senior actors who give foundation and validity to the message without spelling it out in any bigger letters than Carter Burwell uses. This clarity makes it possible to turn elsewhere without disgust. Good family fare, to be sure.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Brian Cox, Dennis Quaid, FAMILY FILM, Rachel Griffiths, SPORTS DRAMA

 

Tin Pan Alley

04 Jul

Tin Pan Alley – Directed by Walter Lang. Musical. An inconsiderate song plugger looses his mate who runs off to become a stage star with her sister. 94 minutes Black and White 1940.

* * * * *

Alice Faye has the most seductive upper eyelids God ever thought of. She is sultry, easy, withdrawn, and has a magnificent bust. It is interesting to see her paired with Betty Grable who is the opposite. Grable is outgoing, open, eager, and everything is in perfect physical proportion. Actually, neither of these fine ladies is the focal character of this picture. That falls to John Payne, who it is difficult not to look at with wonder and amazement. For he is the most beautiful male imaginable. He first appears in the boxing ring dressed in so little that one can see what a strapping physique he had, broad shouldered, slim, and muscular. In this picture he remains clothed for most of it, and looks good in his suits, which work better than the Edwardian rigs worn by the ladies. (His face resembles that of Lee Pace.) Payne is about 27 years old here and at the peak of his masculinity. He has the perfect patined hair of the era. He has a sensual and flexible mouth, with dimples when he smiles. A wonderful nose. A beautifully shaped head. And so forth and so on, but the reason one cannot take one’s eyes off him is that all of this is backed up by a technique that is fluid, full of fun, and highly responsive. Watch him and Faye and Oakie sing a trio, to see what I mean. The show looks really well rehearsed, and that counts for a lot with this sort of backstage musical. Billy Gilbert sings the Sheik of Araby while the Nicholas Brothers do another of their stupendous dance routines. Jack Oakie in his pie-in-the-face style of acting brings the elan of the died-in-the-wool vaudevillian to the scene, and it’s most welcome in all its silliness. Boy, can he put over a bad song well! I have a strong fondness for Fox musicals. I like their color, and their emotional values, and I rejoice in Betty Grable, who was shortly to replace Alice Faye, to become the top box office movie star for 10 consecutive years. Gosh, was she engaging! There is a certain energetic vulgarity to Fox musicals that I appreciate, so different from RKO’s white telephone musicals and the family-value musicals at MGM. Anyhow this is a good example of the Fox genre. A good film to watch with the whole family.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Alice Faye: SCREEN GODDESS, Backstage Musical, Betty Grable: screen goddess, FAMILY FILM, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Oakie, John Payne, MATING, Period: 1910-1914, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

The Chumscrubber

21 Apr

The Chumscrubber — Directed by Arie Posin. Community Satire. Teenagers create their own adventures among oblivious parents. 108 minutes Color 2005.

* * * * *

It unreels like a perfect film and maybe it is. 19 year old Jamie Belle, who beguiled us dancing through Billy Elliot, is the driving force of this picture, no particular of whose story shall I reveal to you. The perfection of the film can be accounted for by excellent direction, a marvelous screenplay, and by the playing of its senior actors, each one of whom seizes on the tone of the screenplay and plays each part brilliantly. I’ll simply name them: the great-hearted Allison Janney, the virtuoso actress Glenn Close, William Fitcher, Ralph Fiennes, John Heard, Carrie-Anne Moss, Rita Wilson — all of them, some of them acting scenes with one another without even seeing one another, carry the satire all the way to the store and back — each one playing a present but distant parent, in this film in which everyone, parents and children alike, are all slightly mad. The director/writer Arie Posin and Zack Stanford had beginner‘s mind and luck. And with James Horner, they even had a great musical score On the small screen, the Chumscrubber leitmotif is lost, as are other details, but it does not matter because the script is so strong. Here the utopian suburbia becomes a dystopia in which justice cannot be done and whose poison pellet is a certain boy madder than the others, but the dystopia of the post apocalyptic world of The Chumscrubber TV cartoon, which everyone watches to the exclusion of everything else, actually presents a utopian dystopia, where justice is done instinctually. Never mind that. Just see it. You’ll rejoice.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Allison Janney: ACTING GODDESS, FAMILY FILM, Glenn Close, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Jamie Bell, John Heard, Ralph Fiennes, SATIRE

 

Father’s Little Dividend

11 Apr

Father’s Little Dividend – Directed by Vincent Minnelli. Family Comedy. A young married couple gets pregnant and the to-be grandfather struggles with the responsibility. 81 minutes Black and White 1951

* * * * *

We grew up with this beautiful girl, now dead in old age. One saw her entire life on screen. When she appeared in children’s films, I was a child. And here is an example of the girl when she was still the girl next door whom one might fall in love with, a teenager, here playing a young married woman in a light comedy. Light comedy was a genre Elizabeth Taylor did not appear in after she, still a teenager, became a mother, but her touch is deft and masterful, and the result endearing and touching. She was a skilled actress from the start. The picture is a sequel to Father Of The Bride and might better have been called The Grandfather Of The Bride. Once again filmed by the talented John Alton who would concurrently do the ballet sequences for Minnelli in American In Paris. Joan Bennett not only has Taylor’s coloring (and in fact once played Taylor’s part in Little Women), but she is swift and easy and right on the money with Spencer Tracy whose picture this is and who commands it without seeming to. It’s hard to analyze Tracy’s talent. It seems to find its foundation in a certain immigrant toughness, here at ease with the lowly tasks of realistic middle-class comedy. Tracy always plays a character without neuroses. Hepburn called him an Irish potato, and it’s as good a likeness as any for the humor of a person who always plays the difficult, painful, sometimes undignified yet necessary position of someone useful. His comedy seems to arise out of a natural grudge, and the comic situation to develop around that grudge,  irony being the last resort of the situation his character itself has created. None of what I am saying here does justice to his gift. Like some great screen humorists, the comedy arises not from what he does, so much as from his doing what he is, and he is not so much funny in himself as he is someone around whom humor naturally arises. There ought to be a word to describe this skill. Comedian doesn’t do it. Humoran is awkward. But that’s what it is, and why this film and its prequel were such enormous hits and are still worth our time.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Billie Burke, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor: SCREEN GODDESS, ACTING GODDESS, FAMILY FILM, Joan Bennett, MASTER CINEMA PHOTOGRAPHER: John Alton, Middle Class Comedy, Spencer Tracy

 

Shattered City:The Halifax Explosion

31 Mar

Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion — Directed by Bruce Pittman — TV Docudrama Miniseries. A shipment of high explosives converges with an out-of-line Belgian vessel in Halifax Harbor during World War I, and creates the greatest man-made explosion in the history of the world, and blows apart many local individuals’ lives. 3 hours Color 2003.

* * * *

This is a solid historical reconstruction of the events leading up to and trailing in the wake of the Halifax disaster. It’s a good piece of historical dramaturgy, based as it is on actual lives and deeds and on the memory of them by those who lived long after, such as the young Connie Collins, who lived until 2003. Arrogance at the helm brought ruin to the lives of 11,000 people that day. Many of the parts are beautifully played, particularly Ted Dykstra, the jolly pilot whose orders were remanded by the dazed captain, and by Lynn Griffin who is one bitching actress as Millicent Collins, the loving mother of all the children, who was permanently blinded, as were hundreds of others by the flash. Shauna Macdonald, a lovely actress, is perfectly cast for the intelligence and reserve which makes her successful as a visiting doctor, and the very handsome Vincent Walsh provides the necessary earnestness as the focal figure of the Royal Canadian Army Captain who takes charge.  Clara Stone plays Connie just fine. And the great Pete Postlethwaite turns up in the last part of this two part series to cause serious doubt as to whether the Captain will win his case. For, as the ship captain, the harbor master, and the pilot are all put on trial, it is worth waiting for the outcome. I found it interesting and informative and easy to take. The whole family could watch it together.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: TV MINISERIES MANNER, DOCUDRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in Canada, HISTORICAL DRAMA, MADE FOR TV, PERIOD: WWI, Pete Postlethwaite: ACTING GOD, War Story

 

Holiday Inn

26 Mar

Holiday Inn — directed by Mark Sandrich — a songwriter starts up a country inn open only on holidays. To it comes a lovely young lady and his old vaudeville dancing chum and competitor for females. 1942 black and white 101 minutes.

* * * * *

With one exception, there is not a single dance in this piece which Astaire performs up to his standard, partly because his female partners are not on his level and partly because the dances are ill conceived. The firecracker dance is raggedly choreographed, and the dance in 18th Century wigs would have been better performed by Bob Hope. The one outstanding dance is the drunk dance, in which he is not so much partnered as accompanied by the lovely Marjorie Reynolds. This is to be watched, studied, and prayed before. The cast is top-heavy because the Paramount superstar Bing Crosby is in it. (They wanted Rita Hayworth to play the girl, but, with Astaire, that would have cost too much.) Crosby is a remarkable actor: everything he does and says looks improvised: nothing is: he is following the script to the letter. He had a droll insouciance and the amiability of the perpetual fraternity boy. He was a truly humorous person. And very cool. However when he sings, all this is cunningly wrenched into a song-style, and all the songs become subordinated to that style. So he never really sings to the actor or actress opposite him. Instead he produces this style and sings to that — out to the camera — out to his popular front. This means he is never really singing the words to the song: he is only singing to his way of singing a song; he sings renditions. Still, he is truly pleasing company, and the renditions are indeed winning and meritoriously skillful. The film is very well directed by Mark Sandrich, a really fine director of musicals, who had directed five of Astaire’s best RKO films with Rogers. Irving Berlin wrote or revived all the many songs — all barely serviceable — with three exceptions: Easter Parade, Careful, It’s My Heart, White Christmas. This where they come from and first appeared.

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Posted in Bing Crosby, Classic Movie Musical, FAMILY FILM, Fred Astaire: Screen God, Light Comedy, MATING

 

Alice In Wonderland

16 Mar

Alice In Wonderland – Directed by Nick Willing – Fantasy Live Action TV production. A Victorian 10 year old girl doesn’t want to sing at a party and runs off into the garden and down a rabbit hole and so forth. 133 minutes Color 1999.

* * *

A labored telling of a dream, oh dear, and we all know what that means. Lewis Carroll’s original, of course, is the most revolutionary work of English literature since Shakespeare. But here everything is literal and old mad hat. Here is a work that should work with the speed of film and works with the speed of high Victorian taffy. Film would be ideal for the material. But the sequences go on at great length and to no good. A director’s collision. Poor Martin Short who must endure himself straining through the same grimace reel after reel. Pete Postlethwaite in a sub-supporting role as The  Carpenter who duets with Peter Ustinov’s The Walrus, but, boy, is it clunkilly staged. Whoopie Goldberg alone survives because she really does have the smile of a Cheshire Cat, and because she is so knowing. And the great Elizabeth Spriggs triumphs as the Duchess. Otherwise the whole farrago is a Caucus Race. Gene Wilder as The Mock Turtle and Donald Sinden as The Gryphon were missing from the version I saw, so perhaps they, with a sigh of relief, are well out of it. Alice In Wonderland could satire anything around that is there to be satirized and allegory anything around to be allegorized. This version has wonderful costumes, true, but consists of  encounters with a series of very rude bad tempered personages indeed, and, alas, that is all it is. It just won’t join the dance.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH FUSTIAN, Ben Kingsley, Donald Sinden, Elizabeth Spriggs, FAMILY FILM, FANTASY, Gene Wilder, Joanna Lumley:ACTING GODDESS, Martin Short, Miranda Richarson, Period: 19th Century, Pete Postlethwaite: ACTING GOD, Peter Ustinov, Whoopi Goldberg

 

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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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: IMPROV, Big Business Comedy, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in Greece, Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Molly Ringwald, Raul Julia, Vittorio Gassman

 

All Or Nothing

28 Feb

All Or Nothing – directed by Mike Leigh – Drama. Neighbors in a London project come to grips with their futures. 2 hours 8 minutes Color 2002.

* * * *

Don’t you love Mike Leigh’s films? Such a storyteller, isn’t he? In this one we have Timothy Spall and Ruth Sheen and Lesley Manville and a bunch of other fine actors giving us full value in a beautifully directed story. It’s the story of a group of people stupefied by their circumstances. It’s one of those pictures you cannot put down – until … Until the crucial event which takes it into the realm of the lachrymose. Of course, Leigh has great tolerance for sobbing women. Brenda Blethyn was the champ sobber. And in this film he lets Lesley Manville start to cry in the last reel and never stop.  There’s two things wrong with that decision. The first is that weeping is quite out of character for the woman we have watched for an hour and half, a woman absolutely dumbstruck by the barriers of her life, a woman staring into desolation; she’s in a state too deep for tears. Her instinct might be to grow ruthless; her instinct would not be to drench everyone in sight.  To dissolve into the piteous, is not the way she would go. The second thing wrong with it is that Timothy Spall has a crying scene at the same time, and you can’t have two people crying at once; they cancel one another out. But there’s a missing washer in Manville’s tap; she never stops dripping, and it fouls Spall’s scene. She can be a great actress and is so in the early part of the film, but it’s an example of an actress turning on her technique and losing her character. It’s really the director’s fault for allowing it. The scene also is badly edited. It should not be edited at all; the camera should remain entirely on Spall, and then let’s take a look at the wife’s response. I think Leigh loses his way with this material; he wanders into a sentimental rapprochement, and somehow I don’t think that’s the road to trudge here. But until then it is a heavenly picture, a cast beautifully rehearsed and free. Spall is Humpty-Dumpty after the fall, a wonderful performance of a brained man. The extraordinary Sally Hawkins is also fully present as the locale slattern, and what could be better than what Ruth Sheen has to offer? Nothing that I can think of. See it. Make it part of your Mike Leigh collection.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in England, Kitchen Sink Drama, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall

 

The Man Who Cried

18 Feb

The Man Who Cried – directed by Michael Whyte – a man leaves a vicious wife and takes his son to seek his fortune. He finds love on the way. 2 hours and 31 minutes color 1993.

* * * * *

We ask for a movie to adhere to our moral biases in peril of bigotry. The man shown here is perfectly understandable. He is of a high moral character, for he knows that the effect his nature and appearance has on women may lead them to wish he was theirs, and he reserves himself. Ciaran Hinds is perfectly cast in the part, therefore. His masculinity lies deep, and so does the character’s. For his character, Abel, it is like a doom. Abel is honest and modest and true to himself; his beauty has not made him cold. He loves as deep as tears. Honoring the depth a male can love tells  the story. And it is a most human story, not the story of a philanderer or a bigamist, but the story of fidelity to love. This love is for his son as for a woman, and his tragedy is that he trades one for the other. This is a beautifully directed picture, in that its pace is at one with its narrative needs, clear, simple, and true. Kate Buffery is tops as one of the women. And as her sister we have Amanda Root, an actor of the first rank, here committed to all the harpy, Hilda Maxwell, is. It is a brave performance. Hinds and Root costarred in Persuasion, in a very different relation and as quite differently played characters.  The dvd is in two full-length parts and is well worth your patience.

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Posted in 1930s, Amanda Root: acting goddess, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in England, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, MATING, World War II

 

Bathhouse

04 Feb
 
Comments Off on Bathhouse

Posted in Directed by Yang Zhang, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in China, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, In Chinese with subtitles, Middle Class Comedy, MUST SEE, Zhu Xu: ACTING GOD

 

The King Of Masks

04 Feb

The King Of Masks – Directed by Tian-Ming=Wu– Comedy Drama. An old street performer and master of quick-change masks, wants to pass on his skill, but can only do so with a male heir. 101 minutes Color 1999.

* * * * *

Many many folks praise this piece, and it is understandable. It has everything except an unhappy ending. It has an interesting master actor Zhu Xuas who plays the old man and a charming child actor who plays a hand opposite him. It gives us a simple and important tale about calling. It hands us brilliant renditions of China of the 30s with  buildings and people wonderful to look at. It imparts a story that grips one through every turn; a piece indeed of Dickensan richness and complexity and coincidence. And it reveals the ancient and inexplicable art of  quick change masks. Amazing. One wants these characters to win through and who knows whether they will? An Idyll. A tale for all time. And also a serious movie that can be watched by all, including children, with great attention and recognition, six and over, I would say. Don’t miss it.

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Posted in Artist's Career, Backstage Drama, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in China, HUMAN COMEDY, In Chinese with subtitles, MUST SEE, Zhu Xu: ACTING GOD

 

O’Henry’s Full House

03 Feb

O’Henry’s Full House – directed by Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Henry Koster, Howark Hawkes, Jean Negulesco  — Comedy. Five of the master’s tales. 117 minutes, black and white 1952.

* * * * *

Marilyn Monroe — there she for a full two minutes, yet for all time — with that figure and the air of a dream-mistress and the hurt of a molested 12 year old asking for more and asking for no more at the same time. She is child-like appealing in the moment when she says, “He called me a lady,” after she listens to Charles Laughton. He is tip top as the grandiose bum who seeks to spend the winter in a cosy jail rather than on a desolate park bench. David Wayne does a terrific crazy derelict with just the right hat. Richard Widmark  reprises his Johnny Udo from Kiss of Death, which is super to see again. He was never a subtle actor, so this is perfect for him, and I place you in his competent evil hands. I saw this picture when it came out, and was bored, but that was the era when Marlon Brando was emerging, so I found it old fashioned. But now I enjoy that it is old fashioned, for that was its intention, and I ask: would these costume stories work in modern dress? I think not. For their entertainment value is high, but their value is the entertainment of antiques. Put this in your Antiques Film Road Show and enjoy — O’Henry really knew how to tell a story: The Gift of the Magi, The Ransom of Red Chief, The Clarion Call, The Cop and the Anthem, The Last Leaf.

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Posted in Anne Baxter, Charles Laughton: ACTING GOD, Dale Robertson, David Wayne, Directed by Henry Hathaway, Directed by Jean Negulesco, FAMILY FILM, Farley Granger, Fred Allen, Gregory Ratoff, Howard Hawks, HUMAN COMEDY, Jean Peters, Jeanne Crain, Joe Macdonald: Master Photographer, Marilyn Monroe: SCREEN GODDESS, Oscar Levant, Sig Ruman, Turn of the 19th Century

 

Amarilly Of Clothes-Line Alley & The Dream

25 Jan

Amarilly Of Clothes-Line Alley & The Dream – Broad Comedy. In the first, a laundress and her family is invited into the parlor of the upper-crust. In the second, a devoted housewife is mistaken for a raving tart by her drunkard husband. 67 minutes. black and white, silent.1918 & 1911.

* * * * *

She was a charming actress, understated, quick, responsive, and not so pretty as a picture as to give offense. America’s Sweetheart was not readily cast as a vamp, but in the second of these two films, the 10 minute The Dream, she turns from the dutiful wife to the flagrant babe, kicking over the traces. Amarilly is a story that remained with us right through Pretty Woman, and was played out by Laurette Taylor, Joan Crawford, Jean Arthur, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, and any actress who could convey the lower classes moving into the upper classes. These stories always have an immigrant settling, for they were made in the day when many Americans were just arrived or first generation. Nowadays, for the most part, we no longer have that background. This one is Irish-American, and it’s a comedy played in broad strokes. It is interesting to see how the acting style resulted from the fact that the camera did not move and the action was played against a single set. This seduced the actors to move a lot, as in The Dream. Pickford wisely remains restrained. It also drove the actors into necessary improvisation, and they were very good at it. I admire their gusto and willingness. I think you will too. Just don’t judge it by today’s standards — except for Pickford, who is as modern an actress as one could hope for. Don’t confuse the role with the actress. See her. It’s likable to like someone as likeable as Pickford, and you’ll like yourself for it. It’s the secret of her vast and still valid success.

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Posted in BROAD COMEDY, FAMILY FILM, Mary Pickford: SCREEN SUPERSTAR; ACTING GODDESS, SILENT PICTURE

 

The Overture

04 Jan

The Overture – directed by Itthi-sunthorn Wichailak – a drama recounting the career of a fable Thai musician, through the conflicts caused by him radical style and his fears of public competition — 103 minutes color 2005.

* * * * *

Rocky with xylophones!  The film is set in Thailand, where the playing of the rand-ek rises to national bouts, along the lines of the Rose Bowl. In this case, the Rose bowl is the imperial court, where the most accomplished players come to fence. They are the pets and patronees of the princes of the realm, much as our football games are the patronees of brewers. I only realized at the end that the old man was the same person as the child, the boy, and the young man, and that there were two parallel stories afoot. But this was probably due to me, rather than to the director who tells the story carefully and honorably and entertainingly. Apart from the tension of the competitions, the picture shows a world of Thai life, the homes, canals, slums, farms, palaces, and people. I loved seeing all this. It also does depict, loosely it admits, the story of the Babe Ruth of rand-ek xylophone players, the Lionel Hampton of his day, Luang Prodit Pairoh who was a daring innovator on the rand-ek, and whose daring we see still in place when the Japanese interlope Thailand in the 30s. Be careful watching this: you may come to love the rand-ek. This is a film the family will enjoy together –– at least those old enough to read the subtitles, which are as excellent as the film itself.

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Posted in 1930s, Artist's Career, Backstage Drama, Backstage Musical, BIO-PIC, DOCUDRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in Thailand, FOREIGN LANGUAGE WITH SUBTITLES:

 

Story Theater

04 Dec

Story Theatre – directed by Paul Sills – a theater documentary of comedies of folk and fairy tales played out by grown-up actors.

90 minutes color 1969

* * * * *

This piece was a fill-in during a union strike at Yale. Paul Sills was then developing a form of theatre in which folk tales and short stories would be partly enacted and partly told. It was worked up quickly and it is presented with high professional finesse. I actually saw it in New Haven at the Yale Theatre, and it was a lot of fun. Mildred Dunnock is a master of her craft. It was once said of her that she knew so much about acting that it had become innocent again. She plays a wiley teenager, Clever Gretchen, and of course she is in her 70s when she does this. In any case her physical touch on the part is entrancing – light, deft, completely malicious, crafty, real. Interviews with the cast interlace the stories, and what Mildred Dunnock has to say about how to play a witch is worth millions to any actor called upon to play anything. A fascinating creature, who got sexier as she got older – as both Warren Beatty and Marlon Brando said of her. This is a  good clean light film suitable for the whole family.

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Posted in DOCUMENT OF THEATER PERFORMANCE, FAMILY FILM, Light Comedy, Mildred Dunnock: acting goddess

 

A Brand New Life

04 Dec

A Brand New Life – directed by Sam O’Steen – drama of a middle-aged couple and a baby – 74 minutes, color, 1973

* * * *

This picture brings together the great Mildred Dunnock, the wonderful Wilfred Hyde-White, and Cloris Leachman and Martin Balsam who are perfectly beautiful as the principal players of two middle aged careerists who find themselves surprisingly pregnant. This film is modest and economic in its telling. Mildred Dunnock’s big scene is done as a master shot without a single close-up. She doesn’t need one. You cannot take your eyes off her. Cloris Leachman and Martin Balsam are master actors at the peak of their powers in roles you wouldn’t associate them with. Both are absolutely ingratiating in everything they do. It’s a pleasure to behold them. The picture is simple and affecting. It accomplishes what it sets out to do. What more can you ask?

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Posted in Cloris Leachman: acting goddess, FAMILY FILM, Martin Balsam, MIDDLE-CLASS DRAMA, Mildred Dunnock: acting goddess

 

Surrender, Dorothy

02 Dec

Surrender, Dorothy – directed by Charles McDougall – a middle class drama about a middle-aged mother hounding the ghost of her daughter – 86 minutes color 2006.

* * * * *

Well, an actress has to work, and when a highly professional big star like Diane Keaton is given full rein in a 20-day, low budget TV drama, watch out. This part should have been played by a Jewish or Mediterranean actress whose grieving style might make this story swallowable. But Keaton, an actress of genius, has, without rehearsal, only the liberty to quirk things up; forgive her, it is her only recourse, since she is miscast. The direction makes one suppose the director is a dullard, which he proves himself to be as he is involved in, count them, two commentaries, one side by side with Keaton, who has the decency to say little, although she does give some interesting clues as to her method, and the other with one of the greatest cinema-photographers in the world, Vilmos Zsigmond, who shot this picture. Anyone interested in how films are shot must dwell upon this interview. Because of the strength of his Hungarian accent, he is often difficult to understand, but don’t let that stand in your way. Do let Keaton’s costuming stand in your way, though. She descends on the summer cottage which her daughter has rented with friends, and, to the horror of those friends, she moves in and proceeds to put on her daughter’s clothes. But are they her daughter’s clothes? The wee bowler hat lets me know they are rather the costumer’s foolish submission to the Keaton sartorial style — the clothes the movie star Keaton would look, at the age of 60, cute in., and so the grotesqueness of the character’s impersonation is lost. All the scenes are beautifully shot and badly directed. The other actors are reduced to their default routines, and Keaton sometimes overacts, or turns things comic that are not. And what we are left with is a new mode of drama invented here for the first time: Cute Tragedy. But, if you can’t stomach the picture, check out the five-star commentaries.

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Posted in Diane Keaton: acting goddess, FAMILY FILM, Includes Some Gay Characters, MATING, MIDDLE-CLASS DRAMA, Vilmos Zsigmond: Cinema-Photographer

 

Mad Love

19 Nov

Mad Love –– directed by Antonia Bird –– a young man falls for a nutcase –– 96 minutes 1995.

**

You cannot pick the lice of this picture fast enough to outstrip their replacements. The script is the first louse in that it depicts what no human would do under the circumstances. The second louse is that the script gives us no characters, only premises conterfeiting characters: the girl is mad and the boy falls madly in love: this does not constitute character. For the third louse, we have lines no human would say. For the fourth, we have direction aimed to slant us to forgiving what is unforgivable and to finding dear what is reprehensible. We also have a director who allows the principal actor to fake it. Which brings us to the fifth and sixth louse, Chris O’Donnell and Drew Barrymore, neither of whom have enough substance as humans to hold our interest. Chris O’Donnell is not a bad actor, but he stands with Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey as unwatchable because the corners of his mouth naturally turn up in a perpetual smug self-satisfied smirk. It’s not his fault, but I can’t bear to look at him. Finally, we come back to the sixth louse, Drew Barrymore who gives a performance which she will live to be ashamed of if she lives to be as old as her grand-aunt, whose jaw line and chin she inherited, along with the high bridge of the Barrymore nose, and the family toleration for hackwork. Her performance here is infested with cheap choices, for she loads every scene she plays with a pitch for our sympathy. She was 20, and her behavior is cute beyond human recognition. Her miscalculation is to play pained innocence, which, of course, must come across as self-pity, whereas she would have been smarter to play ugly out-and-out fury, which would have produced sympathy. She has become a better actor since. This brings us to the un-lice, Joan Allen as the mother. She has but one tiny acting scene, in a school psychologist’s office, with her husband, well-played by Robert Nadir. Allen gives him a look in which an entire family history is lodged. But this is but a great actress, untouched amid an infestation.

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Posted in DRAMA, Drew Barrymore, FAMILY FILM, Joan Allen: screen and acting goddess, MATING

 

Day Of Wrath

13 Nov

Day Of Wrath –– Carl Dryer –– a young bride, a young son in law, an old preacher husband –– 1943 black and white.

* * * * *

Another version of Desire Under The Elms, aka Phaedra, aka Hippolytus, and so forth. In this version we have a powerful puritanical early 17th Century village minister and his good looking young wife and grown son back from college. Watch out! Here the chorus is supplied by the old minister’s mean even older mother very ably played by Sigrid Neiiendaman. As in The Passion of Joan Of Arc, Dryer offers up immolation as the fear point of it all. And that immediately gets the ball rolling, as a stout old lady is condemned, tracked down, tortured, tried, and burned to death as a witch by the corrupt minister. A very great actress plays this part, Anna Svierkkier, and it is delightful to realize that an artist of completely modern temperament, skill, talent, and urge was already an old woman in Denmark; I thought we’d have to wait for Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley for the naturalness of this level of approach. Dryer’s layout in the piece is curious, as all the men suffer the torments of the damned and are weakened by it, while all the women are completely without conscience or guilt of any kind, and are strengthened by it. The Day Of Wrath when it comes sure aint going to bother these dames. Made in Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1944, the Teutonic (puritanical) brutality is shrouded in the severe ruffs of the age of Rembrandt. But what we are drawn to here is Dryer’s various story-telling manias, the long, long tracking shot, the devastating close-up, the molded lighting, the leisure he afford his actors and the tale, the dire solemnity of treatment, and the sense you are watching a silent picture when you are not. Do not, I say do not, lest you suffer That Wrath When The Day Comes, buy a bag of popcorn to eat this one by.

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Posted in BROAD TRAGEDY, Directed by Carl Dreyer, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in Denmark, FOREIGN LANGUAGE WITH SUBTITLES:, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, MATING, MURDER

 

La Vie Promise

08 Nov

La Vie Promise –– directed by Olivier Dahan –– drama of a prostitute and her estranged daughter on the lam –– 93 minutes 2002

* * * *

This is a beautifully cast and directed piece – though neither well photographed nor well edited. However, the content of the story is strong, convincing, well worked out, true, and inspiring. At the center of it is the character played by Isabelle Huppert, an actress of incomparable femininity, who understands herself as a woman and an actress on screen to the full. Her performance, and the performances of all the actors, adhere to the French school, which spurns virtuosoism and big effects, for un-actorish stillness and smallness of detail. Remember, when watching it, that French wines tend to be dry. The result is a sense of reality completely at odds with the TV-acting so frequently to be seen nowadays, a skirting of emotionalism that in terms of expected histrionics might seem unreal, but in terms of the material and the story at hand is realism incarnate.  It’s an acquired taste; you have to get used to it a bit. Huppert embodies this school, and she is in all ways wonderful. I won’t even describe the scenes where she achieves great things, because I don’t want to give anything away. She is touching, and so is everyone in it, and so is the picture. The subtitles are good –– and , since the dialogue is leisurely, they are easy to read. This is not a run-of-the-mill piece.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, CRIME, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, FOREIGN LANGUAGE WITH SUBTITLES:, French Subtitles, Isabelle Huppert

 

Searching For Bobby Fischer

08 Nov

Searching For Bobby Fischer –– directed by Steven Zaillian –– family drama about a boy turned into a chess champion –– 109 minutes color 1993.

* * * * *

A fine picture, beautifully acted and filmed, with a story that skirts all the sentimental pitfalls and ends up full of authentic feeling. The boy Max Pomeranc is wonderful. He makes the whole thing happen. Its putative subject, chess, which put me off when I first heard of it, I found to be by no means a barrier to its interest. Joe Mantegna plays the father who pushes the boy forward. Lawrence Fishburne is the chess master who takes him on. Joan Allen is the mother, and very good indeed, as are Ben Kingsley, William H. Macy, and Laura Linney. I highly recommend it.

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Posted in DOCUDRAMA, FAMILY FILM, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Joan Allen: screen and acting goddess, Joe Mantegnna, Laura Linney, William H. Macy

 

Hanging Up

05 Nov

Hanging Up –– directed by Diane Keaton –– light comedy in which three sisters swirl around the decline of their unpredictable father –– 95 minutes color 2000

* * * * *

Diane Keaton is 54 when she acts in and directs this piece. By this time she is certainly the world’s greatest master of comic finesse. The peril for her is that this can decline into the candy of mere charm. For she has a smile the devil himself could not resist. Here, however she plays in support of Meg Ryan, whose movie this is, and which Ryan carries with a stride of certainty. A comic master herself, Ryan is 39 when she does this, and while she has mistakenly had something done to her lips that disconcerts somewhat, she still is an extraordinary artist: the most naturally appealing actress of her era. Lisa Kudrow rounds out the trio, and three more expert artists of light comedy can scarcely be imagined. The Ephron sisters wrote it, evidently on some autobiographical inspiration generated by their father, an Uproar Man, here played with daring and startling twists by Walter Matthau, probably at the very end of his career but not of his experience. Wow! The story wanders and wobbles indecisively at the end searching for a wrap-up, so don’t plan for it not to. The direction is sound, if the writing always isn’t. Asking Ryan to fall off the bed answering the phone is not what any human being would do, and therefore past the point of funny, and there are other excesses pressing for a laugh which fail, but never mind: be grateful for these three ladies, a quite interesting and eccentric comedy, and another useful challenge to our expectation of perfection.

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Posted in Diane Keaton: acting goddess, FAMILY FILM, Light Comedy, Meg Ryan: SCREEN GODDESS

 

Lovers And Other Strangers

05 Nov

Lovers And Other Strangers –– directed by Cy Howard –– broad comedy in which marriage itself is put on the barbeque as a young couple prepares their wedding. 104 minutes Color 1970.

* * * * *

Renee Taylor and Joe Bologna wrote the play and with David Zelag Goodman adapted it very successfully for the screen. It holds up real well because the script’s gags are inherent to the material and reveal its subject, which is the unromantic structure of mating itself, lustfully sexual on one side and tedious beyond belief on the other. And everyone is superb in playing it. No one steps out of the script to roll their eyes and comment, but goes for it as is. So its lines and situations, which are sketch-like, are very funny and surprising as they arise and mature and vanish. Harry Guardino and Anne Meara are horrifyingly daring as the married couple gone dead in the bed. Gig Young is wonderful as the man who must have it every uncommitted way there is. Bea Arthur and Richard S. Castellano are super as the parents of the groom, doomed to one another and adapting to it. Bob Dishy as the masher who no one wants is marvelous, blowing ridiculously on girls’ hair, arms, ears in an attempt to arouse them. The truth of love and marriage and courting and divorce is struck over and over, winningly, movingly, if with all the subtlety of a cartoon mallet. We even have a young Diane Keaton as the to-be-ex. She is pre-emergent as an actor. But she fiddles with Arthur’s dress while Arthur lectures her; she learns her craft. Almost unrecognizable without her dazzling smile, we wait 40 years for her to come forth, as she still does. Keaton has never played a dowdy woman. Jill Clayburg has. Sartorial finesse is a dark cloak which reveals Keaton. Without it she would be framed and bound. With it, she explores freedom. Curious, no?

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Posted in BROAD COMEDY, Diane Keaton: acting goddess, FAMILY FILM, Gig Young, MATING

 

The Other Sister

29 Oct

The Other Sister –– directed by Gary Marshall –– drama about the coming –of-age of a retarded young woman –– 129 minutes color 1999

* * * * *

Diane Keaton plays the rueful, rule-full mother underestimating her daughter’s capacity to live a normal life. Watch her play this person. Set aside the notion that Keaton plays everything the same, always with the same wide belt. (The belt is not in view, although the orphan-hat is.) Keaton does play everything the same way, and she doesn’t play characters either. Not a character actress, but one who can find the strain in herself that matches the inner key for the story to be told by that character, here she finds the nastiness of the authoritarian to make us shudder at the situation which she alone brings into being by it and which, in fact, is the story. Keaton is not pretty in this part; she is excellent. She moves the story deeper by strata out of the feel-good chic flick this movie actually is. The same is true of Tom Skerritt, as the father more willing to give his daughter her head. He does not do The Nice Guy Father. His scenes with Keaton are tough and rude. His love of his daughter has breadth beyond sentiment. And then, of course, we come to the remarkable Juliette Lewis. She performs a scene of public shaming in this picture that is one of the most remarkable scenes of acting ever filmed. You must see it for this reason. Lewis is not actually a sympathetic actress by temperament, because the temperament inherent in her is never one that places a value on, or even knows about, social balance. Patience, consideration, contemplation –– the want of these qualities are very useful to her in playing characters of extreme passion, and they hold her in good stead here. Has she ever played a character that didn’t say the first thing that came into her head? It’s a quality necessary for such a role as this and for all the roles she has ever played. Her roles are those of a social unconsciousness so blind it is dim-witted. She can be very funny playing them, as she moves from one spontaneous self-indulgent enthusiasm to the next. She’s a remarkable actress, never likable, often lovable, and never less than daring. An ancient rule of acting is demonstrated here for all to see: if it isn’t fearsome, it isn’t funny. Honor her. See her .

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Posted in Diane Keaton: acting goddess, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Juliette Lewis: acting goddess, MATING

 

Last Chance Harvey

27 Oct

Last Chance Harvey –– directed by Joel Hopkins –– comedy: two losers win. 93 minutes color 2008

* * * * *

This film has a certain winsomeness in its removal from passion, as love finds its way into the affections of its two characters. Both these folks are over 50, so you are in for a very pleasant journey indeed, one more comical and charming than the Deborah Kerr/Cary Grant An Affair To Remember, which it in some ways resembles, this time with the man as the invalid. Kathy Bates has a grand small scene as the former wife of Hoffman, and Richard Schiff and Eileen Atkins carry their parts as far their parts allow them. What we are faced with is the two leads, and no two individuals could be more disparate. Dustin Hoffman is a squirt, and this is “used” consciously by the actor, who is shorter than Thompson. It is at one with the highly controlled sort of acting he always done; his “method”. There is much talk about his “detail” and his “preparation,” but I never see the results on the screen. What I see is banal, shallow, and routine. Besides which, I suppose he is one of the most unpleasant movie stars I have ever seen. His face is uninteresting, but setting that aside, he is an actor who often smiles, but perfunctorily always; he smiles but he never smiles. His voice has an excellent timbre, but it monotonizes everything he says. But what is worst, it and his entire physical manifestation exude self-pity. The note of its pitch is in every noise he makes. It is a bid for a sympathy he does not have the gift or the grace to naturally inspire. And one does feel sorry for him for that. Only once does he appear real: towards the end of the film there is a shot of him in which he looks very very old, and it occurred to me that he has always been old and that that was his forte. Opposite him is the infallible Emma Thompson, and how it comes about that these two play together so well, or are able at least to perform their own roles with separate excellence is a mystery to me. She has true wit, openness, smarts, readiness, openness, grace, womanliness, openness. Anyhow, I recommend the piece. It is a film for grown-ups, the story of older people who, not supposing they ever could, do begin to love someone again.

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Posted in Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thomson: acting goddess, FAMILY FILM, Filmed in England, FOREIGN LANDS, Light Comedy, MATING, Middle Class Comedy

 

Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids

25 Oct

Born iInto Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids –– directed by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski –– The Oscar winning documentary about a photographer who meets the prostitutes’ children and teaches them photography.  85 minutes color 2004.

* * * * *

Just wonderful. Zina Briski, the producer and director, enters the dark world of the Calcutta brothels by offering to teach the prostitutes’ children how to take pictures with a camera. She gives the children cameras, and what her own camera discovers is wonderful to behold. We recognize these children as just like ourselves when children. How each of them turns out is the suspense of the piece, which is beautifully filmed and is itself in every way a work of camera art. Heartening and real.

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4 Comments

Posted in BIO-DOCUMENTARY, DOCUMENTARY, FAMILY FILM, FOREIGN LANDS, OSCAR WINNER

 

Those Calloways

24 Oct

Those Calloways –– directed by Norman Tokar –– a family film in which a nature-loving man and his son contrive to thwart developers. 132 minutes color 1965

* * *

I rented it to see Brandon De Wilde. He was an angel as a young man, an actor ready for whatever came up, the boy in Shane and The Member of the Wedding. Here he is a young trapper. He has the same honorable, even noble demeanor; it comes from within. Vera Miles (as his mom) shows herself a very good actor, and Brian Keith is excellent as the rapscallion father. The picture is a Disney milk and cookies sort of picture, thrusting upon us a view of America that has nothing to do with actual Americans. Somehow the milk is homogenized and the cookies store-bought.

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Posted in ADVENTURE, Brandon de WIlde, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, WESTERN

 

A Yank In The RAF

24 Oct

A Yank In The RAF – directed by Henry King – a WW II romantic adventure story in which an American joins up in England, competes for a pretty dame, and saves the day on a bombing mission in Europe. 98 minutes black and white 1941.

* * * *

The power of the personalities of Betty Grable and Tyrone Power makes for romantic suspense and super entertainment. He plays a rogue with a roving eye, and she plays, as she often did in films, the lady of talent who is a sucker for a cad. They’re both up against Bruce Cabot the actor whose eyes are as evil as his moustaches. Because it was made during the war and is a bit of a hodgepodge, the picture is endearing and fun. Betty Grable was the star I most identified with at the time. Like me, she was open, blond, big hearted, hard working, and not loved as much as she deserved. Power is especially fine as the gum-chewing flirt, a different take for the actor who in that era was the most beautiful male in films. Here he’s a rascal who never takes it back. Usually cast in romance, action-adventure, or drama, he’s up for the necessary finesses and impenitence of light comedy. I wish he had done more of them.

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Posted in ADVENTURE, Betty Grable: screen goddess, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Farce, FOREIGN LANDS, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Light Comedy, Middle Class Comedy, MILITARY, World War II

 

Secretariat

23 Oct

Secretariat –– directed by Randall Wallace –– a horse picture in which an unpromising horse meets an unpromising owner who hires an unpromising trainer to win three unpromising races, The Triple Crown. 116 minutes color 2010

* * * *

Every time Margo Martindale as Miss Ham appears, the screen comes alive. She plays the woman who named Secretariat, and the female “support” to Miss Chenery, Secretariat’s owner, played by Diane Lane, who is sadly miscast in this part because she cannot play middle-class women well. A technical actress, she consistently fudges and softens emotion with half-grins and moues. See her in The Perfect Storm to see how great she can be, opposite Mark Walberg, an actor perfectly suited to her range. It’s like casting Brad Pitt as a society boy. He is a great actor, but only in lower class parts, and the same holds true of Lane. Secretariat is a Disneyfication of the saga of this remarkable animal, meaning that it is story-telling by the numbers. Everything is spelled out three times, as though no one in the audience knew how to read. But still, it’s a horse-picture and I am always stirred by horse-pictures and I was stirred by this one all the way through. Of course, we all know how it turns out, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exciting or suspenseful. That doesn’t mean my heart isn’t filled by this horse’s nobility, pride, élan, and talent. John Malkovich brings his usual perversity of affect to the proceedings, which supplies the sort of low brow comic zest in the old days supplied by William Demarest or Mickey Rooney or someone. The races also are poorly filmed, which is odd, isn’t it, for one sees either the feet of the animal or the top of the animal. It must be very difficult to actually film a horse while it is racing, but I missed the beauty of the creatures in full flight. The actual Preakness, the second of the three races is shown, probably from old color footage of that race, as a television event watched by Miss Chenery’s husband and children, which would have been more interesting had one been able to see it up close. But that’s all right. It was proper to tokenize the second race as a build-up to the last, The Belmont, in which Secretariat created records still unbroken. All of the settings and particularly the costumes, are fine, and so is the acting. especially when Margo Martindale is on screen. Oh, just watch that wonderful face. How right she is, particularly next to the, alas, consistent wrongness of Lane.

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8 Comments

Posted in ACTION, ANIMAL LOVERS, BIO-PIC, Diane Lane, DOCUDRAMA, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, John Malkovich, NATURE LOVERS

 

You’ll Never Get Rich

19 Oct

You’ll Never Get Rich –– directed by Sidney Lanfield –– a musical in which a song and dance man escapes his boss’s wrongdoings by joining the Army and tangling with a lovely lady. 88 minutes black and white 1942

* * * * *

Rita Hayworth was Fred Astaire’s favorite dance partner and you can easily see why. She was a professional dancer since she was eight and had the true dancer’s carriage. Her elegant long arms and hands, held perfectly, moved like fronds. The torso, still or in motion, is proud and graceful. Technically there is nothing she cannot do within her range –– which is the same range as his. In addition, she brings to this a perfect and well earned confidence, great speed, ease of attack, humor, and, best of all, joy in the dance. Astaire is at his very best here –– imaginative, lithe, funny, and ready for anything. His dance in the Army jailhouse is a masterpiece. (There is a funny sequence of double-talk; if you’ve never seen one, this one is good.) The story is no more memorable than an ice cream cone, but it is just as diverting as one, and sometimes an ice cream cone is required. Astaire was brought in to Columbia to make this picture with Hayworth. It made Hayworth, aged 23, a star, and it was a huge hit, so they made another one –– You Were Never Lovelier –– equally as good. These two pictures contain the finest dancing of its kind ever put down on film. Watch her move –– you cannot take your eyes off her. Astaire was a very great dancer and never luckier than with Rita Hayworth as his partner.

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Posted in Classic Movie Musical, Dance & Dancing, Essential Musical, FAMILY FILM, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Light Comedy, Rita Hayworth: Screen Goddess

 

Carve Her Name With Pride

17 Oct

Carve Her Name With Pride — directed by Lewis GIlbert — a bio-pic in which a young WW II widow leaves her daughter and parents in London to risk great danger to help the French resistance. 1 hour 58 minutes black and white 1958.

* * * * *

A big star in her day, Virginia McKenna was not in possession of a great talent but rather of a popular one. Facially resembling Lizbeth Scott and with the vocal placement of Grace Kelly, in this piece she remains fixed within the virtues of its confines, and this serves the script very well. The story is told with cinematic economy and discretion, so doors close when they should, and the camera moves away from torture scenes better imagined than seen. Her steadfastness in the role is without neurosis or particularity, so it tells the story of a heroine rather than the story of an individual to whom these things happen. I do not complain. That is a legitimate mode of cinema acting-narration and, if not time-honored, certainly time-tested. Violette Szabo was a real English spy in France and did what we see, so when we witness her wipe out German after German, we have been well prepared by the fact that she was already a sharpshooter before she began, a veritable Annie Oakley. Her spy-partner is the redoubtable Paul Scofield. He had the most commanding presence of any actor on the English-speaking stage. And this is certainly in evidence here. Whether he was a great actor was obscured by his opacity and by his inveterate physical and especially vocal masculinity which carried all before it. I do not know whether he was a master actor because he was such a mysterious one. I saw him three times on the stage: King Lear in which he was effortfully boring; A Man For All Seasons in which he was effortlessly righteous; and Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing with John Gielgud, Diana Wynard, George Rose, Dorothy Tutin, in which, magnificent in furs, he dropped jaws of all beholders. Here he has already developed one trick of his personal trade: the secrete smile useful for passage work, such as getting across from the dance floor to the balcony. He has his moments: his face when she leaves;watch for it. Even when he is terrible he is just wonderful, and he’s far from terrible here in this simple, honest and well-told tale.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, BIO-PIC, DOCUDRAMA, FAMILY FILM, FOREIGN LANDS, MATING, MILITARY, Paul Scofield, SPY STORY, World War II

 

Marmaduke

12 Oct

Marmaduke — directed by Tom Dey — a comedy in which a young family man finds his doggedness and a young dog finds his manhood. 99 minutes color 2010.

* * * * *

It’s fascinating to watch the great Lee Pace, he of the immemorial eyebrows, play this white bread comedy to the limit of all it’s worth and not one grimace more. This extraordinary actor, the finest actor of his generation for all I know, is completely convincing, moment by moment, in the peanut butter and jelly of the genre, including all the considerable physical comedy the part requires. He is never too much, he is never too little. So much so that it’s virtually impossible to see how really good he is. To taste and compare, watch him in Soldier’s Girl, The Fall, Infamous, in which he plays Hickock the partner of Perry Smith of the Sutter murders, and the passionate romantic lead/pianist opposite Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day. Sit back and be amazed at the art of acting at its best. Pace at 6’4″ towers delightfully over William H. Macy who domineers over him as dog food boss. Macy, of course, looks like a basset, and, wonderful actor that he is, gives the film the bite required. But see how Pace embodies this impossible subjection. It’s parallel to what his own great Dane evinces until the end. The dogs all speak. Marmaduke himself speaks Owen Wilson, while the bully pooch speaks Kiefer Sutherland. Others speak others. It’s all quite nice and mindless. I believe it is a children’s movie. Probably for male children, since the principals principally are males, but I wouldn’t know. I myself am a male child and, therefore, limited in my perspective.

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3 Comments

Posted in ACTORS MALE, ANIMAL LOVERS, FAMILY FILM, FANTASY, Lee Pace: Screen God: Acting God, Low Comedy, Owen WIlson

 
 
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