“Of course people like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson are engaging in a rational exercise to maximize their wealth. Their contributions will come back manifold in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and exclusive franchises. The primary purpose of the GOP these days is to provide tax breaks and other financial advantages (such as not regulating pollution and other socially costly externalities) to their wealthy donor base. All the rest of their platform, all the culture wars stuff, is simply rube bait.
“One cannot get a majority of voters who are decidedly non-rich to knowingly pull the lever for a party that nakedly says ‘our platform is further enrichment of the wealthy, and, oh, by the way, we’re also going to make your retirement benefits take a hit.’ That’s where deep psychological insight comes into play. Most people, even when they have a sneaking suspicion that they are being shafted economically, are not well attuned to the complexities of credit default swaps, the London Interbank Offered Rate, or quantitative easing. And the media are definitely not interested in wising them up, especially when they can instead supply celebrity interviews, singing contests, or commercialized orgies like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.
“Since the GOP is loath to tell the public in straightforward terms what their economic agenda is, and the media are not exactly forcing the GOP’s hand, and, finally, the people are operating in a knowledge deficit, Republicans respond by sleight of hand: ‘We’re more American than that Kenyan socialist in the White House!’ Or ‘The Obama administration is riddled with Muslim extremists.’ Or ‘Planned Parenthood is taxpayer-subsidized murder.’ Or ‘Obama wants to take away your guns.’ Even ‘Obama raised your taxes” when in fact he lowered them.
“Stuff, in other words, that is not terribly persuasive to well-informed people, but a lot of people are surprisingly ill-informed, and very few institutions — the corporate media least of all — have any interest in their being well-informed.” — “The Party Is Over” author Mike Lofgren in am 8.3 Truthout interview.
I’ve had that freedom all my life and I know one thing, and that’s if you’re going to play around on the side you have to follow Moscow Rules. You have to become a CIA double-agent in East Germany in the early ’60s. Cheating should never be embarked upon with the idea that you’re probably going to get caught…unless, of course, you’re cheating with that precise idea in mind. Women do this. I’ve seen it first-hand. They feel suffocated and their subconscious is screaming and so they secretly want to get busted so something will change. Or at the very least so they’ll be “heard.”
I’ve been “the other guy” in two long-term cheating relationships — one with a fellow journalist who was married, another with a woman who was living with a guy — and both times les femme infideles handled themselves like Kim Philby, and I’m saying that with respect. You can’t be a casual cheater. You really, really have to watch your back and cover your tracks. You have to be brilliant.
How could Stewart have met up with Sanders without knowing deep down that she stood an excellent chance of being busted by the paparazzi? That’s what I think is fascinating here. This isn’t just a messy emotional drama, but one containing a metaphor about the hungry, sometimes unruly heart. It’s about how unfulfilled, frustrated artists (however gifted or un-gifted they may actually be) are like kindling ready to ignite at the drop of a hat. It’s about how some people can’t cope with those vague feelings of imprisonment that simmer beneath almost all healthy relationships. And it’s obviously about Stewart (and cheers to her for this) expressing a flash of intense anger and/or revulsion for the Twilight franchise. She got a taste of what being in a real movie was like when she took a supporting role in Walter Salles‘ On The Road and then she looked at her own creations and said “what the fuck am I doing?” and started to go crazy.
Maybe she realized b.f. Rob Pattinson has nowhere to go but down after seeing him in David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis. It’s possible she said to herself as she sat in that screening room and said, “I love Rob but he’s going to need more and more support as things gradually start to collapse for him over the years, and I don’t want to be Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester…I want to be Isadora Duncan!”
I don’t believe her apology statement, which her publicist sent to People today. Okay, she probably is feeling “sorry,” but who wouldn’t be after they’ve been totally busted? It’s what you say or do on your own before you’ve been caught that counts. I think she was pushed into apologizing by her handlers. She shouldn’t have to say “I’m sorry” to anyone except RPatz.
A couple of months ago Stewart toldElle‘s Holly Millea that “you can learn so much from bad things. I feel boring. I feel like, Why is everything so easy for me? I can’t wait for something crazy to fucking happen to me. Just life. I want someone to fuck me over! Do you know what I mean?”
Fuck the Twihards and their dipshit fantasies. Grow up, little girls. The world is a much richer and stranger place than you have so far imagined in your philosophies.
So laugh or sneer all you want, but Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing) or the late Harold Pinter (Betrayal) could take this
Olive Films’ forthcoming Bluray of the 315-minute cut of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (called Novacento in Europe) is an absolute essential. It’s a sprawling big-canvas movie in spades, a Marxist-erotic epic with several colorful performances from a big international cast (Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden), and abundant with painterly passion and political feeling. It’s a helluva grand-scale history pageant.
1900 is too pedantic and lecture-y at the end (or so I’ve always felt), but Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography includes several complex extended tracking shots delivering special heavenly highs, and it has a couple of very upfront sex scenes and an unforgettable presentation of Italy’s old-world class division scheme and the horrors of 1920s and ’30 Italian fascism (vividly represented by Sutherland’s Attila character, a demonic perv for the ages). Ennio Morricone‘s score is a rapture in itself.
The five-hour version is a bear, but those great scenes are necessary to have and hold.
I’ve never forgotten a scene depicting a high-class party in Rome, set in the 1920s or ’30s, in which a white horse named Cocaine — a birthday gift, as I recall — is led right into the middle of the main room. That’s Bertolucci’s sensualism for you, as well as the drug culture of the mid ’70s.
I remember interviewing Hayden in 1978 at the Plaza hotel, and his telling me about his death scene in 1900 and how he wrote his final line — “I’ve always loved the wind.” But I knew it from memory and repeated it before Hayden had a chance to, and I remember his delight and his patting my knee in appreciation.
Novacento streets on 5.15, or a little more than two weeks hence.
Jeffrey Kaufman‘s 4.28 Bluray.com review is a good read, but I was immediately brought down by the announcement that Olive, a respectable boutique outfit, is presenting 1900/Novacento with a 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio. Not only are there many sources and indications that the film was shot and presented at 1.66 to 1, but I saw 1900 at the N.Y. Film Festival in September 1976 and can all but conclusively state that it was projected at 1.66. So bad on Olive for bending to the fascists on this point.
It takes years to really understand some films, and in a certain sense to stand up to them. Particularly those made by world-class filmmakers — films with lots of style and jazz up their sleeves. If you ask me the Chicago critics in this early ’99 video clip — Roger Ebert, Michael Wilmington, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ray Pride and Dann Gire — were so swayed by Stanley Kubrick‘s reputation as a genius-level director that they couldn’t quite bring themselves to just look at Eyes Wide Shut for what it really was and just say that.
Last night I re-watched the Eyes Wide Shut Bluray, and of course, as usual, I was sucked in start to finish. But I’m even more convinced now than ever before that this is one of the most soulless wanks (in terms of actual content as opposed to the look and mood of it) ever created by a major director.
You really need to listen to McDowell in this clip. He worked with Kubrick, knew him well, obviously saw through to the bottom of him. Once you’ve done that, read on.
Here’s how I put it way back when:
“I once referred to Eyes Wide Shut as a ‘perfectly white tablecloth.’ That implies purity of content and purpose, which it clearly has. But Eyes Wide Shut is also a tablecloth that feels stiff and unnatural from too much starch.
“Stanley Kubrick was one of the great cinematic geniuses of the 20th century, but on a personal level he wound up isolating himself, I feel, to the detriment of his art. The beloved, bearded hermit so admired by Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg (both of whom give great interviews on the Eyes Wide Shut DVD) had become, to a certain extent, an old fogey who didn’t really get the world anymore.
“Not that he wanted or needed to. He created in his films worlds that were poetically whole and self-balancing on their own aesthetic terms. But as time went on, they became more and more porcelain and pristine, and less flesh-and-blood. Eyes Wide Shut is probably the most porcelain of them all.
“I remember writing two or three pieces in ’99 and ’00 about how Eyes Wide Shut was a fascinating stiff that essentially portrayed of the decline of Stanley Kubrick. I remember bully-boy David Poland unloading ridicule in my direction because of this. All to say that it gave me comfort to come upon a similar judgment in David Thomson‘s re-review of Kubrick’s final film, which is found on page 273 of Have You Seen…?.
Here’s the first paragraph and two sentences at the article’s end:
“This is the last film of Stanley Kubrick — indeed, he died so soon after delivery of his cut that the legend quickly grew that he intended doing more things to his movie. But it’s hard at the end not to see the substantial gulf between the man who knew ‘everything’ about filmmaking but not nearly enough about life or love or sex (somehow, over the years those subjects did get left out).
“Not that the film lacks intrigue or suggestiveness. Mastery can be felt. It is just that the master seems to have forgotten, or given up on figuring out, why mastery should be any more valuable than supremacy at chess or French polishing.”
The last two lines of Thomson’s review: “It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison.”
From my March 2000 review: “If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.
“Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early ’60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.
“Kubrick’s movies were always impressively detailed and beautifully realized. They’ve always imposed a certain trance-like spell — an altogetherness and aesthetic unity common to the work of any major artist.
“What Kubrick chose to create is not being questioned here. On their own terms, his films are masterful. But choosing to isolate yourself from the unruly push-pull of life can have a calcifying effect upon your art.
“Kubrick was less Olympian and more loosey-goosey when he made his early films in the `50s (Fear and Desire, The Killing, Paths of Glory) and early `60s (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove). I’m not saying his ultra-arty period that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey and continued until his death with A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, resulted in lesser films. The opposite is probably true.
“I’m saying that however beautiful and mesmerizing they were on their own terms, these last six films of Kubrick’s were more and more unto themselves, lacking that reflective, straight-from-the-hurlyburly quality that makes any work of expression seem more vital and alive.
“So many things about Eyes Wide Shut irritate me. Don’t get me started. So many others have riffed on this.
“The stiff, phoney-baloney way everyone talks to one another. The unmistakable feeling that the world it presents is much closer to 1920s Vienna (where the original Arthur Schnitzler novel was set) than modern-day Manhattan. The babysitter calling Cruise and Nicole Kidman ‘Mr. Harford’ and ‘Mrs. Harford.’ (If there is one teenaged Manhattan babysitter who has ever expressed herself like a finishing school graduate of 1952 and addressed a modern Manhattan couple in their early 30s as ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’ I will eat the throw rug in David Poland‘s apartment.) The trite cliches that constitute 85% of Cruise’s dialogue. The agonizingly stilted delivery that Kidman gives to her lines in the sequence in which she’s smoking pot and arguing with Cruise in their bedroom. That absolutely hateful piano chord that keeps banging away in Act Three.
“The ultimate proof that Kubrick was off his game in his final days? He was so wrong in his judgment that the MPAA wouldn’t hit him with an NC-17 rating for the orgy scene that he didn’t even shoot alternative footage he could use in the event he might be forced to prune the overt nudity. He was instead caught with his pants down and forced to resort to a ridiculous CGI cover-up that makes no sense in the context of the film. (Would Cruise’s sexually curious character be content with just seeing the shoulders and legs of the sexual performers as he walks through the mansion? Wouldn’t he make a point of actually seeing the real action?)
“No one has been blunt enough to say it, but Kubrick obviously played his cards like no one who had any serious understanding of the moral leanings of the culture, let alone a good poker player’s sense of the film business, would have. He played them like an old man whose instincts were failing him, and thereby put himself and Warner Brothers into an embarrassing position. I wish things hadn’t ended this way for him, but they did.
“I hope what I’ve written here isn’t misread. I’ll always be grateful to have lived in a world that included the films of Stanley Kubrick. He’s now in the company of Griffith, Lubitsch, Chaplin, Eisenstein and the rest. Prolific or spare, rich or struggling, lauded or derided as their artistic strivings may have been, they are all equal now.”
Having read and seriously pondered the thoughts of Rush Limbaugh and particularly HE commenters “Moo Type” and “Duluoz Gray” in response to yesterday’s “First Draft,” I’ve come to realize that perhaps lefty liberals do look the other way while wanton sluts disrobe and hyperventilate and moan with pleasure as they writhe on top of men they’re not married to. But deep down what angers the right is that the p.c. left has condoned slutty behavior to the extent that it’s not slutty anymore.
“Is sex dirty?” Woody Allen was once asked. “It is if you do it right,” he replied. This, I suspect, is what the right longs for more than anything else. They miss having genuinely dirty sex, which can only be enjoyed with an actual slut (as opposed to, say, your wife pretending to be a loose woman as part of a role-playing thing that some couples do to spice things up). They miss the scent of sordid atmospheres and the taste of forbidden pleasures. They want their sex lives to resemble a 1958 Samuel Fuller film.
As Limbaugh indicated when he said Sandra Fluke should provide video sex tapes if her contraception is going to be paid for by the government and/or taxpayers, what these righties are really saying is that they miss the time when sluts actually walked the streets in see-through blouses and gave them hard-ons like they’ve never known since, before liberals spoiled everything by giving sluts a hug and telling them there’s no such thing as slutty behavior and “you go, girl…have a contraceptive.”
Righties are always…okay, often about “golly gee gosh” and pretending to follow Christian white-bread tradition on the surface (i.e., offering lip-surface loyalty to same), but indulging in dark, creepy, cum-stainy behavior in back alleys and cheap motels when no one’s looking. They can’t get themselves off in an open-hearted liberal way — they need to feel guilty about it or it’s no good. The righties long for the days when sluts were sluts and guys like Dulouz Gray and Moo Type occasionally knew the foul, perverted pleasure of coveting sluts and sometimes flirting with them and taking them out to dinner and then taking them back to their rundown apartments and doing things that their straightlaced, God-fearing wives would never consider, much less condone.
Righty males are too screwed up and twisted around to admit it (or even realize it) but that’s what they really want. They want sluts back to be part of the culture again (along with Confidential and Police Gazette magazine) and they hate the left for taking sluttiness away.
The Artist dominated the BAFTA awards this evening — Best Picture, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Original Screenplay (Hazanavicius), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Music. With each successive award I felt number and number. I am berefet of all feeling…nothing. I’m a cypher sitting in a leather chair.
Previous Update (1:32 pm Pacific): Nobody with their mind and feet half-planted in the real, non-movie-blogging world (like me) gives a damn about the BAFTA awards. The BBC America broadcast is delayed until this evening, and you can’t even watch a live feed online. There’s Twitter, of course, and the blow-by-blows on various film fanatic sites (like In Contention) but who cares anyway? It’s already turning into a celebration of Artist and Hugo love.
All right, I can support the BAFTA guys giving Tyrannosaur director Paddy Considine their Best British Debut award…fine.
Wait…the BAFTAs gave Best Foreign Language Film to Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin I Live In? Almodovar never makes a bad film and I enjoyed Skin as far as it went, but c’mon — it’s unmistakably one of his lesser efforts. And they blew off A Separation to do this?
Guillaume Schiffman‘s black-and-white cinematography for The Artist was won a BAFTA award. But it didn’t offer a scrupulous recreation of a late 1920s film, which is what The Artist is all about (revisitings, film styles, getting it right) and what it should have been. It looks a little too glossy and fluid. 1920s films were much more static and antiquated looking.
THE WINNERS:
Best Film: The Artist.
Best Actor: Jean Dujardin, The Artist. Wells response: Sigh..whatever.
Best Actress: Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady. Wells response: Maybe this isn’t such a shocker. The Brits voted for a story that portrayed, or at least reflected, their own history and culture. A vot efor Viola Davis would have obviously been a vote portraying or reflecting American culture, so there you are,
Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist. Wells response: Why not a BAFTA award for director of most widely-liked default consensus film of 2011?
Best Animated Film: Rango. Wells response: I understood and appreicated of what Rango was up to, but I was bored.
Best Adapted Screenplay: Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Wells response: Brits standing up for their own.
Best Documentary: Senna. Wells response: Why not?
Rising Star Award: Adam Deacon. Wells response: Who’s Adam Deacon?
Best Original Screenplay: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist. Wells response: Better than the original screenplays of Midnight in Paris or A Separation? This is lunacy.
Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, The Help. Wells response: This means Meryl’s not winning Best Actress…right?
Best British Film: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners. Wells response: Fine.
Best Production Design: Hugo
Best British Debut: Paddy Considine, Tyrannosaur
Best Foreign Language Film: The Skin I Live In. Wells response: They’re serious?
Best Makeup: The Iron Lady.
Best Costume Design: The Artist. Wells response: Those 1920s outfits were wonderful! I loved them! So accurate!
Best Cinematography: The Artist. Wells response: Not that special, certainly not deserved.
Best Film Editing: Senna.
Best Sound: Hugo.
Best Music: The Artist. Wells response: Give me a break!
Best Visual Effects: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
Nobody cares!
The BAFTAs are not even being broadcast live in the UK. They take the raw footage and edit it all into a two-hour package — and then the show is broadcast a couple of hours later.
“It’s no mere coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most Tea Party representatives in the House are all former members of the Confederacy,” says Robert Reich in a 12.21 Alternet column piece. “Of the Tea Party caucus, twelve hail from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, and five from Georgia, and three each from South Carolina, Tennessee, and border-state Missouri.
“Others are from border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. The four Californians in the caucus are from the inland part of the state or Orange County, whose political culture has was shaped by Oklahomans and Southerners who migrated there during the Great Depression.
“This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, Southern or rural Republicans — only that these characteristics define the epicenter of Tea Party Land.
“America has had a long history of white Southern radicals who will stop at nothing to get their way — seceding from the Union in 1861, refusing to obey Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, shutting the government in 1995, and risking the full faith and credit of the United States in 2010.
“Newt Gingrich‘s recent assertion that public officials aren’t bound to follow the decisions of federal courts derives from the same tradition.
“This stop-at-nothing radicalism is dangerous for the GOP because most Americans recoil from it. Gingrich himself became an object of ridicule in the late 1990s, and many Republicans today worry that if he heads the ticket the Party will suffer large losses.
“It’s also dangerous for America. We need two political parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. Our democracy can’t work any other way.”
Part of the curious power of John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that it overrides its own stoppers. Average Joes look at this thing and go, “Wait…a black-and-white western partly shot on sound stages costarring a couple of guys in their 50s pretending to be in their 30s?” John Wayne, James Stewart and Lee Marvin are straight and steady, but the other actors deliver in the usual Ford cornball style. Andy Devine‘s fat pushover sheriff is ludicrous.
But it has an underlying sadness and resignation, and the story sticks to your ribs and the themes resonate above and beyond what “happens,” and thus the classic stamp.
In any event N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written a column that analogizes Barack Obama with Stewart’s “Rance” Stoddard and Gov. Rick Perry with Wayne’s Tom Doniphon. Her point is more or less that Perry is an intellectual primitive. Abundant evidence exists to support that observation. But while Doniphon saw and responded to the world in relatively simplistic terms, he was arguably a kind of realist…at least in terms of what the rough-and-tumble culture of Shinbone was in the early days. No one would call Perry a realist. He perceives through the prism of secular wackazoid sights. Evolution “is a theory that’s out there,” etc.
If Perry resembles anyone in Ford’s 1962 film, it’s Marvin’s Liberty Valance — a guy who basically says “I do what I do because I’m tough and snarly enough…get outta my way.” And who tried, remember, to nominate himself for higher office in Act Three.
Most good lefties are “beyond borders” in their thinking. They’re citizens of the civilized world who instinctively recoil when they hear the phrase “We’re number one!” (an ESPN barroom American-ism if there ever was one), and who relate as much to Italians and Welsh-people and Argentinians and Qaddafi-hating Libyans and Lithuanians as they would to Middle Americans of any region. They’re not into “American exceptionalism” or anything that smacks of xenophobia of Palinism or Gov. Rick Perry or Arizonian thinking or DuluozGray-ism.
I love American culture in many respects and am very happy I live here as a citizen, but I haven’t felt “patriotic” in ages…please. Okay, I felt a twinge when Bin Laden took a bullet in the face and I felt as shattered as everyone else on 9/11. But I also knew on that day that we’d been anything but innocent lambs, foreign-policy-wise, and that our karma had basically turned around and bitten us in the ass. We’ve been the marauding Romans of our time since the 1950s, and we’re hated worldwide for that. (As well as, okay, envied in a weird sense.) So the idea of compiling a list of “patriotic films” seems kind of odd, but Bilge Ebiri‘s choices are…well, thoughtful. I mean, I’ve never thought of Manhattan as a patriotic film.
I feel proud of the achievements of the great American artists, writers, thinkers and doers. That’s my kind of patriotism. I feel immensely proud that I come from the same country as Mark Twain and Hoyt Wilhelm and Allen Ginsberg and Woody Allen and Walt Whitman and Frank Sinatra. But we’re not the country of George M. Cohan or FDR or George S. Patton or Audie Murphy or Woody Guthrie or Chief Sitting Bull any more. We’ve been taken over by corporations. There’s only the international dominion of dollars. We’re on the way down and everyone knows it, and it’s mainly because of the corporate-fellating right and the Rick Perrys and Sarah Palins and the Tea Party morons who cherish their inalienable right to burn fossil fuels and eat super-fatty foods and own 60″ LED flat-screens more than anything else.
So you can have the Uncle Sam, red-white-and-blue stuff with tanks and soldiers marching down Main Street. In my mind that’s pageant-code for “we’re beyond arrogant and we love it!”
You think Naom Chomsky gets all misty-eyed on the 4th of July?
No question about it: the 45-minute Chicago finale of Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (Paramount, now playing) is absolutely jump-off-a-skyscraper insane. It’s astonishing, exhilarating, relentless, pulverizing…and yes, finally exhausting. Even if you’re a confirmed Michael Bay hater you have to give the guy credit for shooting this stunningly energized and visually giddy CG symphony of madness out of a shotgun and right through your 3D glasses. And none of it amounts to anything more than motion and chaos and fury designed entirely to sell tickets.
I didn’t even see the extra-bright Platinum version (which I’m going to try and see later today) and my mouth was hanging open. I’ve never seen a battle scene that went on this long and with this level of sustained blow-it-to-pieces energy, and in 3D yet…it’s furious, crazybeautiful and a little diseased. And stupefyingly superficial. No thought whatsoever has been put into this film other than Bay saying to his crew, “Push it, faster, crazier …c’mon!” He’s delivering levels of destruction to downtown Chicago that are like 100 9/11 attacks rolled into one. (His cameras naturally ignore the hundreds if not thousands of civilian deaths that would inevitably result from this level of mayhem.) Either way the Chicago finale is one for the books and surely worth the price in itself.
What does the sequence mean? Nothing. It means that Bay had the money to shoot it. What does it tell us about ourselves? That we’re a shallow culture that enjoys seeing shit destroyed and blown up and shattered and splattered all to hell. What emotions does it arouse? None, unless you consider Magic Mountain-level excitement to be an emotion.
That said, some observations and complaints:
(a) The 155-minute Transformers 3 is basically two movies — 100 to 110 minutes of set-up, dialogue, character conflict, action-fortified exposition and blah-dee-blah, much of which is too busy or emphatic and in any case plowed right through me (or around me or over-my-head or whatever) without sticking to my brain or my ribs, and then the 45-minute Chicago payoff. I didn’t care about the first 110 minutes. The movie should have been shorter. 60 or 70 minutes to cover Part One plus Chicago, which would be 105 to 115 minutes, tops.
(b) The dialogue for the various Autobots and Decepticons has always been dreadful; ditto the voice-acting of this. The movie stops dead with every line these guys say to humans and to each other.
(c) John Turturro gives the best supporting performance. That is to say, he seems to be genuinely enjoying himself as opposed to just collecting a paycheck.
(d) Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (i.e., Megan Fox‘s replacement) is relatively okay, but she wears tall heels all through the film. Running like hell and climbing and falling down the side of a teetering glass building and scrambling for dear life over rock and rubble…in heels! Bay production assistant: “Michael, I know you like actresses to wear heels but c’mon, this is absurd, man…having Rosie wear heels through all this actionis like making her wear a formal gown with a diamond tiara. Why not make her wear a bikini while you’re at it?” Bay: “You wanna get fired? I like her in heels, she’s an incredibly hot ass-babe and she’s not wearing footwear that doesn’t look hot…end of discussion.”
(e) On top of which Huntington-Whiteley towers over Shia LaBeouf with her big heels on, and that…oh, that’s right, I’m not supposed to say that women standing taller than their boyfriends doesn’t work as well as being the same height or being slightly shorter.
Chris Weitz‘s A Better Life (Summit, 6.24) is a simple, earnest, bare-bones drama. It has dignity and humanity and, for me, across-the-board believability. It’s a solid, honest film that deserves patronage and respect and year-end tributes. Particularly because of strong co-lead performances from Damian Bichir and newcomer Jose Julian. I can’t put it any plainer than that.
A Better Life is basically an LA Latino riff on Vittorio De Sica ‘s The Bicycle Thieves (whether it was intended to be seen in this light or not) and as such is genuinely moving, if a little too grim and deflating at times.
I’m not setting A Better Life up for a fall by comparing it to De Sica’s 1948 classic. It’s not a beat-for-beat remake (the screenplay was apparently based on a true-life L.A. story) but it does use the basic Bicycle bones by being largely about a poor, illegal-alien Latino father (Bichir) struggling to reclaim a recently purchased pickup truck that’s been stolen by another poor man, and with the help of his teenage son (Julian).
It’s basically a tale of a tough, persistent, hard-luck mouse. And in our wildly egoistic me-me bing culture I’m wondering who outside of guilty westside liberals has the patience and humility to tough it out with a sad-sack S.A. who can’t catch a break? Life keeps jabbing and slugging Bichir’s character — bitchslapping him, kicking him in the shins and delivering one form or another of trial and humiliation…but he keeps on plugging and holds onto his dignity and humanity. In the end he wins your respect and affection.
He also manages to win the respect and love of his son, who’s regarded him with mostly pity and contempt throughout most of the film. This achievement is pretty much what the film is about. Like De Sica’s film, A Better Life is not about winning or beating the system or lucking out.
Bichir (who played Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh‘s Che films) and Julian’s performances are as solid and open-pored as it gets. They share an emotional confession scene near the very end that pretty much ties the whole film together.
A Better Lifetrailerprompted an early suspicion that it was basically a white man’s (i.e., director Chris Weitz‘s) take on a Latino situation. Well, it doesn’t play that way. Yes, English is spoken but when it happens it feels right. Ethnically speaking A Better Life felt nearly as genuine and real-deal to me as Carey Fukanaga‘s Sin Nombre. The cast is almost entirely Latino, and over half of the dialogue is in Spanish, and…well, there’s just no “white guy” thing I could detect. Weitz is partly Spanish, it turns out. Maybe a Latino critic will come along and call me blind.
It’s clearly one of the truest and sturdiest films I’ve seen so far this year. It may turn out to be more of a Spirit Awards winner than an Oscar contender but let’s see where it goes.
I saw A Better Life last night at Santa Moncia’s Aero theatre, under the aegis of Pete Hammond‘s KCET screening series. Seitz and producer Christian McLaughlin answered questions following the showing.
For what it’s worth I used to work as a tree-trimmer in Los Angeles. I used to climb up palm trees with spikes and a belt chain and use pole saws and do ornamental pruning and remove dead leaders and limbs and install cables…the whole shot. It’s brutal work and it doesn’t pay all that well either, but I learned how to pull myself up with ropes and swing around with a leather saddle and a half-hitch knot and handle a chain saw and sharpen the blades with a file, etc. I could tell you stories.
The great Sidney Lumet — a gifted and tenacious explorer of urban crime-and-punishment realms, and easily the most New York City-steeped director of the 20th and early 21st Century — died this morning in Manhattan at age 86. This is a tough one for me. All my adult life I’ve felt a special kinship with Lumet, who not only understood good gritty drama but especially (given my New Jersey, Connecticut and Manhattan background) what it is to grapple with and bathe in New York City moods, currents, aromas and atmospheres.
Sidney Lumet on set of Dog Day Afternoon with Al Pacino.
Armond White used to trash Lumet, but what a boxer he was! A fast shooter who portrayed the moralistic urban landscape like few others, and what a great finale to a long and storied career that two of Lumet’s best films — Find Me Guilty and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead — were his last two, released in ’06 and ’07 when he was 82 and 83.
What can you say about a guy who directed 12 Angry Men (’57), The Fugitive Kind (’59), A View From The Bridge (’61), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (’62), The Pawnbroker (’63), Fail-Safe (’64 — eclipsed by Dr. Strangelove but certainly an above-average nuclear-war thriller), Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (’70 — noteworthy for including the first unmistakable off-screen blowjob in motion picture history, and an inter-racial one at that), Serpico (’73 — a legendary Al Pacino performance in Lumet’s first seriously-steeped-in-New York’s-law-and-order-culture film), Dog Day Afternoon (’75), Network (’76), Just Tell me What You Want (’80 — a personal guilty pleasure), Prince of the City (’81), The Verdict (’82), The Morning After (’86), Q & A (’90 — a memorable scuzzy-grizzled Nick Nolte performance), Find Me Guilty and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead.
Michael Caine, Lumet, Treat Williams — sometime around ’81 or thereabouts.
The late ’50s and early ’60s were Lumet’s break-out years, and then he really roared into his prime in the ’70s and early ’80s — five classics in an eight-year period. He held on with distinction in the late ’80s and early ’90s, kind of went into a slumber mode for a decade or so and then flared back into action with his final two films.
To me Lumet’s masterpiece is Prince of the City (’81) — a nearly three-hour-long drama about the morality of finking out your friends in order to find your morality, and entirely about New York cops and mob guys and district attorneys and junkies, most of it set in the offices of this or that prosecutor with guys dressed in suits and shirtsleeves with cold takeout food and tepid coffee on the desk. For 30 years I’ve worshipped and fed off memories of Jerry Orbach ‘s performance as Gus Levy in that film.
Here’s a Lumet interview I did in Toronto four years ago, primarily discussing Devil but also Guilty.
Lumet, Marlon Brando on the set of The Fugitive Kind (’60).