There are few things that are less meaningful or interesting than news stories about mediocre films making tons of money. It really, really doesn’t matter to anyone of any depth or consequence. Obviously windfalls matter to certain people, of course, but they’re not the stuff of headlines. Or they shouldn’t be. They should be listed like stock prices and that’s all.
If anything, the massive success of The Hunger Games is a confirmation of a kind of cultural vapidity or failure. It says “look how malnourished and under-developed we are…look at the spiritual junk food we’re eating!”
Monster revenues can matter only to those directly benefitting in terms of payments and dividends, and even for them wealth isn’t all that interesting because they’ve been used to it for a long time, and if they’re young and new to having money (like Jennifer Lawrence) they have to learn how to keep themselves fresh and attuned despite the anesthetizing effect of being on easy street, and that’s more of a challenge than you might think.
In a July 2007 HE piece that explained how and why High Noon is a far greater film that Rio Bravo (one of the best essays I’ve ever posted on this site), I included a Jean-Luc Godard quote that argued against my viewpoint, but which I’ve always enjoyed on its own terms:
“The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game,” Godard said. “Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”
In 100 words or less, please name any 21st century filmmaker who has made such a film over the last decade or so — a film that works as unpretentious genre entertainment on one level but also offers a meaningful metaphoric journey of whatever kind if you want to dig deeper and look behind the curtain. A film in other words that doesn’t announce or insist upon its deeper, weightier content but which definitely has the “horses” if you do a little probing.
If you ask me Michael Clayton is such a film. Readers are advised that they’re not allowed to mention anything by Peter Jackson in this thread.
Last night I saw a TCM Classic Film Festival screening of Marathon Man at the Chinese. The first two-thirds are excellent and close to great…okay, I’ll go further and call it one of the best thrillers of the ’70s except for the last 10% to 15%. A lot of films are like this — superb in the opening phases, delightful applications of intrigue and curiosity…and then the payoff disappoints.
I only know that the more William Goldman‘s plot unfolds and the more we learn about the smallmindedness and the old-man desperation of Laurence Olivier‘s Dr. Christian Szell, the less intriguing it all becomes. Suggestions are more powerful than specifics.
I love the old Jew vs. old German road rage scene in midtown Manhattan. And the spooky Parisian sequences with Roy Scheider, culminating in that superb hotel room fight with the Asian guy with the creepy eyeball. Dustin Hoffman‘s grubby apartment and the Latinos across the street who taunt him and the anguish that he feels over his dead father are fine flavorings. And Olivier’s line about Americans: “They were always so confident that God was on their side. Now I think they are not so sure.”
Even hard-hearted Spielberg haters (there are others besides myself) must have felt a slight softening during the airing of this skit last night. Let no one say henceforth that Spielberg isn’t at least a good sport.
I don’t precisely know how many years ago Patrick Read Johnson began shooting 5.25.77, his autobiographical Star Wars-lore-in-suburban-Illinois film that has since been retitled ’77. But I think it was filmed in ’04…maybe. I know that I wrote in January 2008 (in a short piece called “Disappearing Fanboys“) that Johnson’s film “has been in post-production for three or four years without a release.” And that John Francis Daley, the guy who plays Johnson in the film, was born on 7.20.85 and was around 19 or 20 during filming.
In any event Johnson’s film, which I read in script form at least eight or nine years ago and which is mainly about how Johnson’s excitement with Star Wars and the mid ’70s fantasy fare of Steven Spielberg inspired him to make fantasy flicks of his own, has never been released. It’s been stalled in post so long that it looks like up to me.
But last night Variety‘s Jeff Sneidertweeted that “at long last, it looks like Patrick Read Johnson’s Star Wars-centric pic 5-25-77 is coming out this spring on that very day.” So I immediately tweeted Johnson (whom I last spoke to some six years ago when I was at a film festival in Libertyville, Illinois) and asked him what the poop is. His reply is below.
Johnson’s film has taken eons to be cobbled into shape. It’s been beset by money problems all along. I know there was a screening at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October of 2008, and that Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth reviewed it at the time. (But I can’t find the link.) In May 2009 Harry Knowlesbriefly sketched out its history, noting that he screened it “a long time ago” at the Alamo Drafthouse. That month Pajiba.com’s Dustin Rowlesoffered his own summary .
Teaser poster that has recently appeared on Patrick Read Johnson’s Facebook page.
However good, bad or so-so ’77 turns out to be, there are four guaranteed problems with it. One, it’s a nostalgic time-warp film that’s now wrapped inside its own time warp due to its absurd post-production history. Two, it’s a ’70s nostalgia film about the heyday of Lucas-Spielberg when JJ Abrams‘ Super 8 delivered the same emotional visitation last summer. Three, the more the culture has moved along the more discredited the reputations of Spielberg and especially Lucas have become, and so there’s something vaguely hollow-sounding about the whole magilla. And four, ’77 is a shitty title — 5.25.77 at least sounds like a reference to something momentous or semi-significant.
As I wrote four-plus years ago, “Geek culture movies always seem to run into problems.” Fanboys was the most recent example at the time. I loved Rob Burnett‘s Free Enterprise but that too had its difficulties. Others?
Sidenote: What was the coolest and most legendary thing that happened on 5.25.77, at least in terms of individual achievement? For me it wasn’t the opening of Star Wars but toymaker George Willig‘s ascent of the south tower of the World Trade Center. In August 2008 I wrote two articles about Willig’s amazing feat, which arose out of my excitement at the time with Man on Wire. Here’s an 8.9.08 post and one I ran the following day that included some great photos.
In an interview with Damsels in Distress director Whit Stillman, Financial TimesLeo Robson notes the Stillman sensibility — “a mixture of irony and sincerity, affection and mocking, celebration and mourning” — along with the current success of director-writer Wes Anderson, whom Robson calls one of Stillman’s “followers.”
Stillman’s comment: “I haven’t really spoken to him so I can’t say for sure, but his name is Wes, which is presumably a contraction of Wesley, so I like to think of us as members of the tiny school of Methodist filmmakers.”
I wouldn’t have mentioned this otherwise, but Stillman’s remark tells me that either he or Anderson aren’t especially interested in saying hello or what have you. In late ’09 I met Stillman after a screening of Metropolitan at 92Y Tribeca, and then we talked a bit more and it occured to me that he and Anderson should at least exchange salutations. So I suggested this and gave Stillman Anderson’s e-mail address and vice versa, and that, apparently, was the last of it.
Numerous pieces of art inspired by Alfred Hitchcock films are included in this “gallows humor” selection, but this is my hands-down favorite — Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette lip-locked in a possibly deleted scene from The Birds, created by Kate Kelton.
The buzz on Armando Ianucci‘s Veep (HBO, 4.22) keeps building and building. Have I been industrious and aggressive enough to wangle a screener? Of course not. Why should I devote 30 to 45 minutes of concentrated calling and letter-writing, etc.? I’d much rather web-surf and daydream and meander my way through the day. Pleading eats up too much energy.
In his 4.13 review, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Goodman says that Julia Louis-Dreyfus‘s performance as former Sen. Selina Meyer is “perhaps her best post-Seinfeld role,” and that “she takes to it with such fervor — the constant swearing, the barely veiled desire to become president, the unhappy give-and-take with other politicians and a delightful disdain for average citizens — that you can’t help but applaud what is clearly an Emmy-worthy effort.
“Every actor nails their lines, which keeps Veep moving at a brisk pace. In fact, the episodes seem to end so quickly, you’ll wish they lasted an hour.
“Iannucci hasn’t quite created a character as momentously awesome as The Thick of It‘s angry, foul-mouthed buzzsaw Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), but Veep hits on all cylinders, even with small roles such as that of the senator who swats down a trial balloon from the veep’s office by saying, ‘I imagine I’d mix ape-shit with bat-shit, raise it to a whole new level of fury, and then I’d probably rip your face off and use your eye sockets as a sex toy.'”
30 or 31 years ago I was humiliated as a result of a night’s flirtation with Swedish actress Harriett Andersson. But on some curious level I’ve felt bonded to those 1950s films she made with Ingmar Bergman ever since. Plus I love this Bluray jacket. Criterion designers tend to go in the direction of dweeby oblique, but not this time. The Bluray streets on 5.29.
The fact that The Three Stooges is doing nicely at the box-office and that many of the hipper, more perceptive, free-of-spirit critics have given this Farrelly Bros. farce a thumbs-up tells me that naysayers aren’t seeing the forest for the trees. I think we’re going to see some 2001-style mea culpas down the road. Boston Herald critic James Vernierenotes that “hipsters are turning their noses up at this film…but these same poseurs think the Stooges ripoff Jackass is just brilliant.”
