A libertarian-minded #MeToo pushback essay appeared in today’s (1.8.18) Le Monde, and the headline is a grabber — “We defend a freedom to annoy, [which is] indispensable to sexual freedom.”
Written by clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Sarah Chiche and supported by more than 100 “prominent” French women including Catherine Denueve and Catherine Robbe-Grillet, it basically says that the #MeToo movement is attacking sexual freedom and “binding women to a status of eternal victims”, and is becoming more or less Stalinist (my term, not theirs), and has thereby overstepped and made social and cyber life feel oppressive in some respects.
Here is the essence of the essay: “The philosopher Ruwen Ogien defended a freedom to offend essential to artistic creation. In the same way, we defend a freedom to annoy, indispensable to sexual freedom. We are now sufficiently warned to admit that the sexual drive is by nature offensive and savage, but we are also sufficiently clairvoyant not to confuse clumsy [attempts at flirtation with] sexual assault.”
Four words automatically come to mind when I think of senior Indiewire critic David Ehrlich — “brilliant if occasionally deranged.” I will never forgive Ehrlich for praising Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight as “a national treasure” and “The Thing meets an early John Ford movie”…never! He is, however, a skilled editor with a talent for artful finessing of film clips, and so kudos to this 25 Best Films of 2017 reel. There are some choices that I deeply disagree with (Okja, Wonderstruck, Good Time), but at least Ehrlich’s picks aren’t as wackjobby as Esquire‘s Nick Schager. One comment: Too many Baby Driver clips?
Ehrlich picks (HE commentary when warranted): 1. Call Me by Your Name, 2. Dunkirk, 3. A Ghost Story, 4. Personal Shopper, 5. The Florida Project, 6. Columbus (haven’t seen it), 7. Lady Bird, 8. Faces Places (haven’t seen it — apologies), 9. The Post, 10. Phantom Thread, 11. A Quiet Passion (haven’t seen it), 12. Okja (“dreadful, cliche-ridden, odiously endearing”), 13. Wonderstruck (“tediously passionate”), 14. Good Time (“the punchiest and craziest film to play during the [2017 Cannes Film Festival], but I can’t abide stupidity, and after 40 minutes of watching these simpletons hold up a bank and run around and ruthlessly use people to duck the heat I was praying that at least one of them would get shot or arrested”), 15. The Beguiled, 16. Get Out, 17. Thelma (didn’t see it), 18. The Big Sick, 19. Foxtrot, 20. A Fantastic Woman, 21. Lady Macbeth, 22. mother!, 23. Baby Driver, 24. The Lure (didn’t see it), 25. All These Sleepless Nights (didn’t see it).
In other words, the 1.33:1 aspect ratio used for two previous DVD versions (Optimum Classics, Criterion) was slightly incorrect. Tooze’s declaration reminded me that I’ve been suppressing my confusion over the exact dimensions of “boxy” aspect ratios for years. I know that 1.37 is correct by today’s understanding (ask any dp) but I used to think that 1.33 was slightly more correct when it came to older films (i.e., those made in the 1950s and before).
I’ve been a film journalist for nearly 40 years, and I must have typed “1.33” at least a couple of thousand times. Was 1.33 always a myth? Has it been 1.37 all along? I can’t believe that I’m still not entirely sure about this.
I haven’t read Annette Insdorf‘s “Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes,” but I can guess what’s in it. I’ve always been more affected by great closing scenes, to be honest, but give me an hour or so and I can come up with several great opening scenes. Or great opening shots, for that matter. Like that baroque steambath shot in the beginning of Arthur Penn‘s Mickey One, for example.
What’s my favorite opening scene or montage? The longish opener of Apocalypse Now is near the top of the list, followed by the dialogue-free beginning of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window, and then the eight-minute opening of Robert Altman‘s The Player. Right now I’m having trouble thinking beyond these three. No, I don’t have a big sentimental thing about the beginning of John Ford‘s The Searchers.
Assess any chapter in 20th Century cinema and it’s easy to point to this or that great film. It’s a little trickier to figure out which great films were honestly and artfully reflecting basic truths about their times. John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath, Howard Hawks‘ Scarface, William Wyler‘s The Best Years of Our Lives — that line of country. As opposed to films that shovelled wish-fulfillment bullshit, which, I realize, can deliver a certain kind of roundabout truth.
For me the most lasting and resonant trait of any world-class film is a manifest reflection of the times and culture from whence it came, and almost always in some kind of profound light, or at least with a modest dose of spiritual nourishment or realignment, even if it’s bitter. I’ve always regarded The French Connection as a tangy, highly charged capturing of early ’70s New York City, when things weren’t so great economically or infrastucturally but when pugnacious street attitude and flavor were abundant. Anything but heart-warming, but a great urban film.
Do mediocre films reflect their culture? In some instances, yes. Alas, movie history focuses almost entirely only on the wheat and never on the chaff, and so mediocre stuff is usually forgotten while the great ones live on.
It’s probably too much to ask for a rundown of past films that didn’t reflect well on American culture and/or the film industry (or reflected American culture all too well), but what recent U.S. flicks might qualify in this regard? Films that historians will one day look back upon and go “Jesus God, who were these people? What were they thinking? Who were they deep down? Did they even have a ‘deep down’?”
“The people who will make Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 10.3) a hit when it opens are are not ‘bad,’ but their support of this film, which I see as a metaphor for the shopping-mall plasticity and icky phoniness that has taken over this country’s middle-class culture, will signify a kind of spiritual tragedy in this country.
“Just as you can look at, say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and say, yup, on some level that was America in 1937, Beverly Hills Chihuahua is a kind of reflection of us.
Last week I settled in with Don Siegel‘s The Beguiled (’71), which I’d seen in portions but never all in one session. This was necessary homework prior to the Cannes Film Festival showing of Sofia Coppola’s remake, which Focus Features will open stateside on 6.23. I’m presuming every Cannes-bound critic has done (or is doing) the same.
Honestly? I didn’t like it all that much. I was mildly intrigued by the perverse tangle of it all (repressed libidos, subtle hostilities, shifting alliances) but I didn’t care about the story or the characters, least of all Clint Eastwood‘s somewhat creepy Union army corporal. He’s mostly focused on which of the seminary women he wants to fool around with, except he’s indecisive or even lackadaisical about it, and after a while I was wondering “what does he want to do, fuck all of them?” Not to mention thoughtless. These women are giving him care and comfort, and all he can think about is Mr. Happy.
The seminary students and their headmistress, played by Geraldine Page, are all eccentric in one way or another, beset by erotic curiosity or stifled longing, but they’re so constricted and corseted that it all turns demented before long, and certainly by the final act. I just didn’t care for their company. After a while I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
Then I began to fantasize about the Union cavalry brigade from John Ford‘s The Horse Soldiers dropping by and saving Eastwood from himself. I wanted to see muddy John Wayne stride into that Confederate mansion and tell Eastwood to snap to attention and report for duty, or at least put him under the care of William Holden‘s Maj. Henry Kendall.
As noted in my Five Came Back review, Thomas Newman‘s main-title theme stands out like a sonuvabitch. It makes you think that John Ford, William Wyler, George Stevens, John Huston and Frank Capra were up to something more daring and dynamic than just shooting war footage, which of course they were. But the music announces this. It delivers an urgent, aggressive vibe along with a sense of “uh-oh, wait a minute…are we okay?”
Newman’s French horns or trombones or whatever aren’t Beethoven or Wagner-ish, but the notes aren’t as plain as they initially sound either. You could be hearing them in your head before a beach landing. Organized, aggressive, battalion-strength fanfare, but with the willies.
Jeremy Turner (A Birder’s Guide to Everything, A Year in Space, Trophy) wrote all the Five Came Back music that isn’t heard in the opening and closing credits.
Trust the buzz: Laurent Bouzereau and Mark Harris‘ Five Came Back (Netflix, 3.31), a three-hour doc based on Harris’s 2014 book of the same title, is a knockout. Or at least it was for me. Call it an incisive, emotionally stirring, highly insightful saga of World War II, or rather the filming of it but in a broader sense the bruising reality of it. Like any good film Five Came Back swirls down, under, all around.
It focuses on five big-name Hollywood directors — John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens and John Huston — who put their Hollywood careers on hold during World War II in order to make propaganda-like documentaries (or doc-like propaganda films) for the U.S. War Department.
But it didn’t turn out that simply. While Capra devoted himself to producing several gung-ho esprit de corps films under the title of Why We Fight, Stevens, Ford, Wyler and Huston wound up capturing (and in a couple of instances recreating) harrowing scenes of real-life battle and carnage that not only shook them personally but led to periods of post-war melancholia as well as re-assessments of who they were and what kind of cinema they wanted to make. It also led to the making of their finest films, particularly in the case of Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives), Capra (It’s A Wonderful Life) and Huston (Treasure of the Sierra Madre).
We’ve all have our impressions of World War II from this and that visual source (movies, docs, endless photos), but Millenials and perhaps even younger GenXers probably regard it as something that happened so long ago it’s in the same musty box as the Civil War. Five Came Back somehow makes this earth-shaking conflict seem more fierce and first-hand than it has since Saving Private Ryan (which is nearly 20 years old now, believe it or not).
This is largely, I feel, because of five present-day helmers — Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Francis Coppola, Larry Kasdan and Paul Greengrass — passing along thoughts and musings about this great saga, each focusing on a specific director and storyline (Spielberg on Wyler, Kasdan on Stevens, Del Toro on Capra, Greengrass on Ford, Coppola on Huston). These guys sell the shit out of this thing, and you can only do that with conviction, intelligence and empathy.
All five of the WW II-era directors suffered wounds, bruises and traumas of one kind of another…nobody came out of it without some kind of limp.
Ford, who incurred the wrath of his military superiors after descending into a three-day alcoholic bender after witnessing the bloody D-Day slaughter (4000 Allied troops died on 6.6.44), became less of a Grapes of Wrath or Informer-styled social realist and increasingly devoted himself to Western myths, which could be seen as a kind of sentimental retreat.
Stevens, whose post-liberation footage of Dachau was used in Nuremberg war-crimes trials, wound up brooding for three or four years before finally getting back behind the camera to create his great American trilogy — A Place In The Sun (’51), Shane (’53) and Giant (’56) . He waited until the late ’50s to direct a WWII drama, The Diary of Anne Frank, that channeled or reflected his war experience.
Pete Hammond‘s Deadline review sold me on the Netflix doc Five Came Back (3.31). I just gained access to the Netflix press site and will watch later today or this evening. Based on Mark Harris‘s 2014 book, the three-part, three-hour series relates the sagas of five U.S. film directors (John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, George Stevens) and their frontline work during WWII, and uses commentary from Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass and Lawrence Kasdan to discuss the particular journeys of the five. Narrated by Meryl Streep.
Netflix’s three-part docuseries Five Came Back (debuting on 3.31), adapted from Mark Harris’ same-titled 2014 book and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, is about how five big-time Hollywood directors — John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra and George Stevens — not only captured front-line World War II footage for notable documentaries, but were partially inspired or re-charged by their war experiences, certainly in terms of Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. The talking heads include Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo Del Toro, Paul Greengrass and Lawrence Kasdan with narration by Meryl Streep. No info on the total running time but it sounds like three hours or thereabouts.
Hollywood Elsewhere has long been bothered by illogical elements in classic films. One is the whopping absurdity of 19th Century settlers living in the barren wilderness of John Ford‘s Monument Valley (no grass for cattle, no rich soil, no river, no nearby forest). Another is the natives of Skull Island having built a huge wall to prevent King Kong and the dinosaurs from invading their village, and yet having also constructed a super-sized gate that could only have been built to allow a beast invasion.
To these I’m adding a third head-scratcher: what the hell are the residents of Black Rock, California — the tiny hole-in-the-wall ghost town in John Sturges‘ Bad Day at Black Rock — doing there in the first place? No soil, no industry, no oil, no trees, no gold mine, not much groundwater except for the well that the late Kimoko discovered, no lake, no tourists — nothing but rocks and heat and nothing to do except sit around, play cards and scowl.
Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin are too dumb to realize what a blessing and godsend Spencer Tracy is because at least he’s given them something to do — i.e., prevent Tracy from learning what happened to poor Komoko. Without Tracy poking around their lives would revert to the usual paralyzing nothingness.
What are Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Anne Francis, Walter Brennan and the rest doing there? Are they all…what, living on government relief checks? Why is there a hotel in Black Rock? Who the hell would ever visit?
Another issue: Are you telling me that in the middle of this parched desert moonscape that Francis’s Liz, the 20something sister of John Ericson‘s Pete, isn’t married or “seeing” anyone in town? In a town this dead you know that someone would have stepped up and wooed his way in, and yet Liz could have been played by Thelma Ritter or Mildred Dunnock for all the action she’s getting.
I’ve long fancied myself as a reasonably decent, sometimes better-than-decent photographer. I’m not brilliant but I know how to make a shot look pretty good. My primary influencers in terms of framing and balance have been Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Gregg Toland, Conrad Hall, etc. So speaking as someone who knows a little something about the craft, I have to give it up today for film essayist and Sunset Gun blogger Kim Morgan, who posted a selfie today that’s way, way beyond my level. It’s on the level, in fact, of Gunnar Fischer‘s work for Ingmar Bergman‘s The Seventh Seal. Snapped along the Oregon coast.
5 pm Update: I speculated earlier today that this probably isn’t a selfie, and that a friend probably snapped it. Morgan just got in touch and said nope, she took it herself. “I did indeed take that photo,” she says. “My arm was in the right spot…I had to lean over far.”