The Cpt. James T. Kirk created by Chris Pine, director JJ Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman in Star Trek (’09) is obviously back in Star Trek Into Darkness (Paamount, 5.17). Basically the same cocky, rule-defying guy played by Taylor Kitsch in Battleship, Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor, James Cagney in The Fighting 69th — brash and brave, resists authority, always waits until the last second to save the day.
Wait…”punch it”? That’s what Han Solo said 32 and 1/2 years ago before throwing the switch for sending the Millenium Falcon into light speed. Who wrote that line? Orci or Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof? Or is it an improv? Oh, and tipping the ship sideways in order to speed through a narrow crevasse? That’s another Han Solo maneuver.
Kevin Hart standing before a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden and being adored like God…they love me! Hart’s narration says Let Me Explain is about the joy of making people laugh. The footage, on the other hand, shows how deeply insecure he is, and how much he needs to fortify his ego. The cheers, the crowds, the adulation…Ceasar!
A press release announces that Hart’s 2012 “Let Me Explain” concert tour made $32 million. Leapin’ lizards…that’s a lot of money! I’ll bet Kevin can afford to buy a shitload of stuff now, right? Nice clothes and shit? Let Me Explain must therefore be really funny. After watching this trailer I wouldn’t see Let Me Explain if Hart personally paid me $100 to do so.
I’m ready and willing to ease up on my John Fordtakedowns and I could really and truly go the rest of my life without writing another word (much less another article) on The Searchers.
But yesterday the Hollywood Reporter posted a Martin Scorsese essay on The Searchers — mostly a praise piece — and I feel obliged to respond, dammit. But really, this is the end.
Scorsese’s basic thought is that while The Searchers has some unfortunate or irritating aspects, it’s nonetheless a great film and has seemed deeper, more troubling and more layered the older he’s become.
My basic view of The Searchers, as I wrote three of four years ago, is that “for a great film it takes an awful lot of work to get through it.”
I don’t know how to enjoy The Searchers any more except by wearing aesthetic blinders — by ignoring all the stuff that drives me up the wall in order to savor the beautiful heartbreaking stuff (the opening and closing shot, Wayne’s look of fear when he senses danger for his brother’s family, his picking up Wood at the finale and saying, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie’). That said I can’t help but worship Winston C. Hoch‘s photography for its own virtues.
Scorsese’s wisest observation is that John Ford personally related to John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, the gruff, scowling, racist-minded loner at the heart of this 1956 film.
Ford “was at his lowest ebb” when he made The Searchers, Scorsese writes. “Ford’s participation in the screen version of Mister Roberts had ended disastrously soon after a violent encounter between the filmmaker and his star Henry Fonda.
“For Ford, The Searchers was more than just another picture: It was his opportunity to prove that he was still in control. Did he pour more of himself into the movie? It does seem reasonable to assume that Ford recognized something of his own loneliness in Ethan Edwards and that the character sparked something in him. It’s interesting to see how it dovetails with another troubled character from the same period. Like James Stewart‘s Scotty in Vertigo, Edwards’ obsessive quest ends in madness.”
Jeffrey Hunter, John Wayne
Film lovers know The Searchers “by heart,” Scorsese writes, “but what about average movie watchers? What place does John Ford’s masterpiece occupy in our national consciousness?”
Wells to Scorsese: In terms of the consciousness of the general public, close to zilch. In terms of the big-city Film Catholic community (industry aficionados, entertainment journalists, film academics and devoted students, educated and well-heeled film buffs, obsessive film bums), there is certainly respect for The Searchers but true passionate love? The numbers of those who feel as strongly as you, most of whom grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, are, I imagine, relatively small and dwindling as we speak.
I’m pleased to note that some of my complaints about Ford have at least been acknowledged by Scorsese. “A few years ago I watched it with my wife,” he writes, “and I will admit that it gave me pause. Many people have problems with Ford’s Irish humor, which is almost always alcohol-related. For some, the frontier-comedy scenes with Ken Curtis are tough to take.
“For me, the problem was with the scenes involving a plump Comanche woman (Beulah Archuletta) that the Hunter character inadvertently takes as a wife. There is some low comedy in these scenes: Hunter kicks her down a small hill, and Max Steiner’s score amplifies the moment with a comic flourish. Then the tone shifts dramatically, and Wayne and Hunter both become ruthless and bullying, scaring her away. Later, they find her body in a Comanche camp that has been wiped out by American soldiers, and you can feel their sense of loss. All the same, this passage seemed unnecessarily cruel to me.”
Here’s what I wrote way back when:
“John Ford‘s movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life. A first-rate visual composer and one of Hollywood’s most economical story-tellers bar none, Ford made films that were always rich with complexity, understatements and undercurrents that refused to run in one simple direction.
“Ford’s films are always what they seem to be…until you watch them again and re-reflect, and then they always seem to be about something more. But the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of them can be oppressive, and the older Ford got the more he ladled it on.
“The Irish clannishness, the tributes to boozy male camaraderie, the relentless balladeering over the opening credits of 90% of his films, the old-school chauvinism, the racism, the thinly sketched women, the “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” (as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film) and so on.
The closing shot of John Ford’s The Searchers
“The treacliness is there but tolerable in Ford’s fine pre-1945 work — The Informer, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln , Drums Along the Mohawk, They Were Expendable , The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine .
“But it gets really thick starting with 1948’s Fort Apache and by the time you get to The Searchers, Ford’s undisputed masterpiece that came out in March of 1956, it’s enough to make you yank the reins and go ‘whoa, nelly.’
“Watch the breathtaking beautiful new DVD of The Searchers, and see if you can get through it without choking. Every shot is a visual jewel, but except for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, one of the most fascinating racist bastards of all time, every last character and just about every line in the film feels labored and ungenuine.
“The phoniness gets so pernicious after a while that it seems to nudge this admittedly spellbinding film toward self-parody. Younger people who don’t ‘get’ Ford (and every now and then I think I may be turning into one) have been known to laugh at it.
“Jeffrey Hunter‘s Martin Pawley does nothing but bug his eyes, overact and say stupid exasperating lines all through the damn thing. Nearly every male supporting character in the film does the same. No one has it in them to hold back or play it cool.
“Ken Curtis‘s Charlie McCorry, Harry Carey Jr.’s Brad Jorgensen, Hank Worden‘s Mose Harper…characters I’ve come to despise.
“You can do little else but sit and grimace through Natalie Wood‘s acting as Debbie (the kidnapped daughter of Ethan’s dead brother), Vera Miles‘ Laurie Jorgenson, and Beulah Archuletta‘s chubby Indian squaw (i.e., ‘Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky’)…utterly fake in each and every gesture and utterance.
“I realize there’s a powerful double-track element in the racism that seethes inside Ethan, but until he made Cheyenne Autumn Ford always portrayed Indians — Native Americans — as creepy, vaguely sadistic oddballs. The German-born, blue-eyed Henry Brandon as Scar, the Comanche baddie…’nuff said.
“That repulsive scene when Ethan and Martin look at four or five babbling Anglo women whose condition was caused, we’re informed, by having been raised by Indians, and some guy says, ‘Hard to believe they’re white’ and Ethan says, ‘They ain’t white!’
“I’ll always love the way Ford handles that brief bit when Ward Bond‘s Reverend Clayton sees Martha, the wife of Ethan’s brother, stroking Ethan’s overcoat and then barely reacts — perfect — but every time Bond opens his mouth to say something, he bellows like a bull moose.”
Final thought: The more I think about the stuff in Ford’s films that drives me crazy, the less I want to watch any Ford films, ever. Okay, that’s not true but the only ones I can stand at this point are The Horse Soldiers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, The Lost Patrol, The Last Hurrah and, believe it or not, Donovan’s Reef.
When I think of the right-wing guys I know and personally like or admire, John Milius is at the top of the list. I used to call Milius from time to time during my EW and L.A. Times reporting days in the ’90s. I think he regarded me as a kind of loyalist. Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa‘s Milius is playing Saturday, 3.9, at South by Southwest.
In an EW piece called “Romancing The Rhinestone” (included only in 3.15 print version), Adam Markowitz does a q & a with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, the costars of Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra (HBO, 5.26). Douglas plays the closeted Liberace and Damon his much-younger lover, Scott Thorson…but everyone knows that. The thing that got me in the interview has nothing to do with the film. Markowitz asks what Douglas and Damon “think of the possibility of somebody making a movie of your life?,” and Damon answers, “Movies will be dead by then.”
Are we all listening? The well-connected Damon sees and hears everything, and he honestly believes that 20 or 30 years hence movies as we know them will no longer exist.
Right now you can buy “Where Are We Now” from David Bowie‘s The Next Day (which streets on 3.12) but not “The Stars (Are Out Tonight).” The music video is so described by N.Y.Times profiler Simon Reynolds:
“In the video Mr. Bowie and Tilda Swinton play an elderly couple persecuted by a pair of vampiric stars, who stalk them, invade their house and manipulate them like marionettes. But the song itself is less literal. It portrays celebrities as members of an overlord class who ‘burn you with their radiant smiles‘ but also as faintly pitiable creatures, jealous of the quiet, grounded lives of ordinary folk. ‘But I hope they live forever,’ Mr. Bowie sings, a nod to the notion of fame as immortality, a compensation for all the damage and delusion that comes with the territory.”
This trailer for Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder isn’t too bad. It’s actually quite beautiful. And it does expertly convey what the film, which has many transporting passages, plays and feels like. You just have to imagine watching this kind of thing for 112 minutes with very little dialogue and a lot of whispering that you can’t understand and starting to feel your soul pour out of you like sand.
When the spirit is upon N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, whether in positive or negative mode, it’s always a great read. So I love her disemboweling of Sam Raimi‘s Oz The Great and Powerful, and especially this graph:
“Oz the Great and Powerful is exactly the kind of extravagant misfire that professional pessimists offer as proof that ‘they’ — as in the big studios and that amorphous easy target called Hollywood — don’t make movies like they used to. One of the delightful things about the original Wizard of Oz film is that it turns a girl’s reverie, specifically her dream of escape and her own imagination, into a beautiful metaphor for movies. When Dorothy opens her front door onto a Technicolor wonderland, the moment evokes what a 1930s moviegoer might have experienced when watching a color film for the first time. Come into this magical place, the filmmakers and, by extension, Hollywood itself seemed to be telling the audience, and share in this dream — a dream called Oz that we also call the movies.
“The studios sometimes still gamble on fantasies that sweep audiences up and away, though often the biggest-budgeted releases are war movies in superhero drag or cartoons about characters whose adventures, much like that of Oz in this telling, track like therapeutic journeys (follow your dream of self-actualization) instead of transcendent excursions (just dream!). Loaded with special effects, big bangs and generic narrative beats, these movies nonetheless sometimes take you where you’ve never been before. Mostly, though, like Oz the Great and Powerful, these fantasies drag you back to the same dreary, heavily trod destination, to the same exhausted formulas, gender stereotypes, general idiocy and a mind-set that values special effects over storytelling. Yes, companies make movies for shareholders; they have for decades. But who is the audience for the numbly mistitled Oz the Great and Powerful?”
You could be cruel and unfair and say that Taylor Swift‘s comments in a just-published Vanity Fair interview indicate that the 23 year-old singer is (a) a bit of a hair-trigger personality and (b) not exactly an embodiment of the phrase “still water runs deep.” One look at those shopping-mall eyes and you know she has a long way to go. But then so do most 23 year-olds.
I was reminded that the folks behind the reportedly forthcoming musical biopic Girls Like Us — director-producer Katie Jacobs, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Sony’s Amy Pascal and Elisabeth Cantillon — are (let’s be polite) greatly mistaken if, as I’ve read, they’ve actually cast Swift to play Joni Mitchell, of all people.
The idea of choosing a notoriously shallow lightweight to play one of the most gifted and influential poet-musicians of the 20th Century almost feels like some kind of sarcastic “fuck you” to the culture of the ’60s and ’70s that produced Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon. These legends (an overworked term except here it actually applies) are the subjects of the film as well as Sheila Weller‘s 2008 book, which is the basis of John Sayles‘ screenplay.
What would be analogous to the Swift-Mitchell casting? Tony Curtis being chosen in 1952 or ’53 to star in a biopic of John Barrymore in his theatrical heyday? Early ’90s Pauly Shore being cast as Will Rogers or Groucho Marx? The mind reels, flops around like a flounder.
This animated doodle, assembled by Hyejin June Hong and Ori Kleiner and recently linked to by Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet, is the lamest Stanley Kubrick tribute I’ve ever seen in my life. For perspective compare it to Krishna Senoi‘s recently-posted Spielberg tribute. No contest.
Los Angeles Kubrick-philes will be attending a 3.22 DGA screening of David Spodak‘s Anatomy of a Film, a 125-minute doc that analyzes the “structure, methodology and themes” of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory by way of “scripted narration, production stills, documents, slow motion, freeze frame and image comparison.” It sounds a little dweeby and classroom-y, but it was produced in cooperation with Team Kubrick and POG‘s star-producer Kirk Douglas.
Pic features an introduction from Douglas and interactive commentary from producer James Harris and supporting player Richard Anderson. Spodak says he’s “planning to distribute the documentary to universities, film schools and museums and hoping to create awareness for it and gather feedback from potential users.” The screening is happening under the auspieces of the DGA’s Directors Finder Series.
This trailer for Todd Phillips‘ The Hangover Part III (Warner Bros., 5.24) along with the one-sheet suggests it’s less of an ensemble piece (i.e., Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifiniaki, Justin Bartha going back to Vegas) than about the travails of Galifiniakis’s Alan character. A 6.4.12 story by Robin Leach said the plot begis with an attempt to rescue Alan from a mental hospital.
I was planning on hating this movie (which will apparently be the last and final installment) regardless, but I reallydespise Galifiniakis. And I stopped being a Ken Jeong fan after he revealed his cashew-sized dick in Hangover II. Listen, I see my own small dick every day. I don’t need to see one in a movie. That joke is played, OK guys?
Wells to Phillips and co-screenwriter Craig Mazin: That highway bit in which Galifiniakis murders a giraffe by decapitation is really funny! Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah! I can see why you didn’t show the giraffe’s head being shattered or his neck being severed and split open and the blood and guts splattering all over the road. That would interfere with the joke. Comedy is hard to pull off. You guys know your stuff.
I can remember a bit in a Laurel & Hardy movie in which a gorilla and a piano fall off a cliff and land hundreds of feet down. You can hear the faint sound of piano chords crashing into the earth and rock. So I guess animal cruelty is part of the history of Hollywood comedy.
