Everyone hated Arthur Penn‘s The Missouri Breaks when it first came out in May 1976 — it was a critical and commercial wipeout — and nobody I know or read talks about it with any particular affection today, and to my knowledge no big-hearted F.X. Feeney type has come along to try and rescue its reputation. And yet it has seemed to linger in the shared consciousness of serious movie fandom.
I personally think of it as a half-good film. It doesn’t tell anything close to an intriguing story, or even one that adds up. At best it’s about interesting dabs of paint rather than the canvas as a whole. And yet every so often I watch it and for whatever reason, stay with it to the end. Why is that?
Jack Nicholson‘s performance is subdued and affected and close to dull, and Marlon Brando‘s Lee Clayton is solely about acting for a paycheck, boredom on the set and brazen showboating — he’s not really in the film. (“Here‘s an interesting little scene in which their characters first meet.) And I depise that harmonica cue signalling that the climax of the train-robbery sequence is supposed to be funny.
And yet The Missouri Breaks has a decent amount of flavor and aroma, ironically, in part, due to Brando’s half-fascinating, half-infuritating locoweed behavior. And due to those two hanging scenes, that Nicholson-Brando “I just slit your throat” scene, that quick scene when John Ryan meets the farmer’s wife behind the barn after dinner for a quickie, that horse-rustling scene in Canada and so on.
After one horse drowned and several others were injured, including one by an American Humane Association-prohibited tripwire, The Missouri Breaks was placed on the AHA’s “unacceptable” list.
The reason Glenn Beck connects with his audience is not just his bulldog attitudes but that he blurts them out without editing. But when asked by Katie Couric to define what he meant by the term “white culture,” Beck had no choice but to shimmy all over the place.
If I were Beck in that moment I would have tried humorous deflection by referring Couric to a 1972 National Lampoon article called “Our White Heritage,” by Henry Beard, Michael O’Donoghue and George W. S. Trow. It appeared in issue #30.
Beck: “I’m not going to get into your sound byte gotcha game, which we already are. We already are.”
Katie: “No, actually, this is completely unedited, so if you felt like you wanted to explain it, you have all the time in the world.”
Beck: “Uhm-hmm.”
Katie: “No? Don’t want to go there? But basically, you stand behind your assertion, that in your view, President Obama is a racist?”
Beck: “I believe that Americans should ask themselves tough, tough questions. Americans should turn over all the rocks, and make their own decisions.”
Samuel Moaz‘s heavily-hyped Lebanon screened for the New York Film Festival press early this afternoon, and my sense of the reaction in the room was…well, a little subdued. A bit of sneering going on. A “disappointment,” one guy declared. “Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it…it’s okay.” Who was it who wrote the seminal rave review of this?, I asked another fellow. He wasn’t sure, he said, but he’d “like to find him and beat him up.”
The problem, I suspect, is that people had it in their heads that Lebanon was going to be some kind of Israeli Hurt Locker. But as Cinemascopian‘s Yair Raveh explained in an HE reader response post a few days ago, it ain’t that. He called it a “visually striking think-piece” and “a haunting memory poem that’s more Bela Tarr then Katherine Bigelow.”
The Lebanon hook is that it’s an allegedly riveting experiment since no one, to my knowledge, has ever shot a war film completely from inside a tank. The result, based on Moaz’s personal experience during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, is a grim, occasionally poignant and extremely claustrophobic rendering of an Israel tank crew’s 24 hour ordeal during this conflict. The idea is to make you feel stuck and trapped and very afraid, and to feel the grease and the oil against your skin and the smoke in your lungs and smell the rank urine. And you do feel and sense these things.
But I think Lebanon is finally limited by the claustrophobic scheme. After an hour or so you start saying to yourself, “How long is this again? It’s 92 minutes but it feels like 110 or more. You’re supposed to feel the discomfort — I get that — but the conceit eventually begins to overwhelm and diminish the human element. In the same way, now that I think of it, that Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope (’48) began to feel constrained by Hitchcock’s decision to shoot and compose without edits in a series of unbroken takes.
But before the “lemme outta here” feeling kicks in, Lebanon disturbs and provokes in a fairly striking way. There’s something undeniably arresting about watching various victims of the Israeli and Christian Phalangist carnage, including a dying donkey and a mother who’s just lost her five year-old daughter in a shelling, entirely through a tank lens without sound. And the disputes between the tank crew members — Yoav Donat, Itay Tiran, Oshri Cohen, Michael Moshonov, Zohar Strauss — certainly increases the tension and desperation..
The heat, in any event, has now been turned down on Moaz’s film, which was recently acquired by Sony Classics after winning the Golden Lion at the 66th Venice Film Festival. It’s also a possible Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, assuming that Israrel submits it (although this is far from assured).
After wining the Golden Lion Maoz reportedly dedicated the award “to the thousands of people all over the world who, like me, come back from war safe and sound.Apparently they are fine, they work, get married, have children. But inside, the memory will remain stabbed in their soul.”
A couple of hours ago I did about 13 minutes with Joel and Ethan Coen, the director-writers of the irrefutably brilliant A Serious Man, at Toronto’s Park Hyatt.
A Serious Man‘s Ethan and Joel Coen.
The talk was loose, amiable, amusing. It always is when you speak to them. As long as you talk their language, I mean. Their personalities are so low-key and unaggressive that they could both die from this, and that’s cool. I hate the word “genius” because Hollywood phonies use it all the time, but that’s what these guys have. And I really love it when they laugh.
The mp3 speaks for itself but I started by repeating a remark from a producer friend that the film’s dark view of life being a non- stop gauntlet of misfortune and cruel fate is “dishonest” given that the Coens’ lives are so creative and productive and successful. They guys didn’t really answer this one but the semi-biographical A Serious Man is about their teenaged years and the staunchly Jewish Minnesota community they grew up with, and not their filmmaking lives.
I complimented them about the beautiful CG tornado that appears at the end, adding my general opinion that invisible CG is the best. They agreed. The visual effects maestros were Oliver Arnold, Andy Burmeister and Alexandre Cancado of Luma Pictures.
I asked them if they agreed with my belief that the philosophy of A Serious Man can be summed up by that kiki joke I mentioned in my review. They weren’t sure what I meant so I went into the shpiel and Joel went, “Oh, you mean roo-roo?” The joke has been told with many names over the years. Not only did they not disagree with the analogy but got a good laugh from it.
The movie is basically saying, I said, that your friends can’t help you, your family can’t helpo and your community can’t help you when it comes to God’s cruel humor. You’re alone, basically, and there’s no real comfort to be had, but the film delivers this in such a quietly hilarious way. And that’s the art of it. Ethan said he’s completely comfortable with that assessment.
What’s the point of describing the conversation? Just give it a listen. I expressed hope that they’ll make another out-and-out comedy before too long, and Ethan said that their next, an adaptation of True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn/John Wayne role, is fairly funny. Not overtly but…well, you know.
Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man is a brilliant LQTM black comedy that out-misanthropes Woody Allen by a country mile and positively seethes with contempt for complacent religious culture (in this case ’60s era Minnesota Judaism). I was knocked flat in the best way imaginable and have put it right at the top of my Coen-best list. God, it’s such a pleasure to take in something this acidic and well-scalpeled. The Coens are fearless at this kind of artful diamond-cutting.
A Serious Man star Michael Stuhlbarg on phone; Adam Arkin is the out-of-focus guy (i.e., an attorney) behind him.
The wickedly acidic and funereal tone and lack of stars means it isn’t going to make a dime, but it’s a high-calibre achievement by the most gifted filmmaking brothers of our time, and it absolutely must rank as one of the year’s ten Best Picture nominees when all is said and done. The Academy fudgies will not be permitted to brush this one aside, and if they do there will be torches and pitchforks such as James Whale never imagined at the corner of Wilshire and La Peer.
The worldview of this maliciously wicked film (which isn’t “no-laugh funny” as much as wicked-bitter-toxic funny, which I personally prize above all other kinds) is black as night, black as a damp and sealed-off cellar. Scene after scene tells us that life is drip-drip torture, betrayal and muted hostility are constants, all manner of bad things (including tornadoes) are just around the corner, your family and neighbors will cluck-cluck as you sink into quicksand, etc.
This is the stuff that true laughter is made of, and this is a genuinely wonderful film to sit through because of it. It’s so refined and compressed and jewel-cut, so precisely calibrated and cold as nitrogen, and yet hilarious as Hades. Literally. I can’t wait to catch it a second time.
Only a couple of tough Jewish filmmakers could make a film this despising and contemptuous of their own. And what a way to spur the sales of Jefferson Airplane CDs!
Joel and Ethan Coen
Set in 1969 or ’71 (to judge by the music), A Serious Man is about a decent but fatally passive and acquiescent college (High school?) physics teacher named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his family, along with his extended family of neighbors, synagogue members, rabbis, attorneys and whatnot who live in St. Louis Park, Minnesota — a suburb of Minneapolis.
The story is about Gopnik grappling with one horrific threat and misfortune after another. His wife Judith (Sari Wagner Lennick, who looks like Mrs. Shrek minus the green skin) is planning to leave him for a 50ish grotesque named Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). The father of a South Korean student looking for a better grade tries to bribe Gopnik and then sue him for defamation when he won’t accept it. His application for tenure appears threatened. His no-account brother Arthur is living on the couch, and is being investigated by police for indecent behavior. There’s a slim and foxy next-door neighbor who sunbathes nude in hetr back yard.
Every character in this film except for the teenage kids and the next-door nudist is an appalling Jewish grotesque. The grotesques in Mike Leigh’s films have nothing on this bunch. The thought of actually being inside the head and the skin of one of these characters …eewww! In a certain light A Serious Man is almost a kind of companion piece to Todd Browning‘s Freaks, except that Browning’s film is greatly compassionate and caring and A Serious Man is anything but.
You know what this film philosophically is in a nutshell? That kiki joke I passed along a couple of years ago. The one about two anthropologists captured by cannibals in New Guinea, etc.? Chief to anthropologhists: “Death or kiki?” Anthropologist #1 chooses kiki and is beaten, tortured, whipped, flayed and eaten by crocodiles. The chief asks Anthropologist #2 the same question, and he says, “I’m not a brave man so I’ll choose death.” And the chief goes, “Very well, death…but first, kiki!”
Last May 21st the Toronto Int’l Film Festival announced a City- to-City Spotlight promotion with Tel Aviv, of all cities. A little more than three months later — i.e., last Friday, 8.27 — Toronto filmmaker John Greyson sent a letter to TIFF honcho Piers Handling announcing his decision to withdraw his short doc, Covered, from the festival in protest over TIFF’s celebration of Tel Aviv ‘s “brand.
Greyson essentially feels that Tel Aviv and the Israeli government have too much blood and militaristic aggression and kad karma on their plate to warrant partnership with a forward-thinking film festival like Toronto’s. And he’s arguing that TIFF’s Tel Aviv promotion flies in the face of an economic boycott against Israel that he and anti-Israel voices would like to see enforced in order to get Israel to be more reasonable and less belligerent in its dealings with the Palestinians.
At the end of his email he wrote, “”Isn’t such an uncritical celebration of Tel Aviv right now akin to celebrating Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestles infant formula in 1984, or South African fruit in 1991?
“To my mind, this isn’t the right year to celebrate Brand Israel, or to demonstrate an ostrich-like indifference to the realities (cinematic and otherwise) of the region, or to pointedly ignore the international economic boycott campaign against Israel. Launched by Palestinian NGO’s in 2005, and since joined by thousands inside and outside Israel, the campaign is seen as the last hope for forcing Israel to comply with international law. By ignoring this boycott, TIFF has emphatically taken sides — and in the process, forced every filmmaker and audience member who opposes the occupation to cross a type of picket line.”
Early in the letter Greyson noted that “this past year has seen (a) the devastating Gaza massacre of eight months ago, resulting in over 1000 civilian deaths; (b) the election of a Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) accused of war crimes; (c) the aggressive extension of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; (d) the accelerated destruction of Palestinian homes and orchards; (e) the viral growth of the totalitarian security wall, and (f) the further enshrining of the check-point system.
“Such state policies have led diverse figures such as John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Bishop Desmond Tutu to characterize this ‘brand’ as apartheid. Your TIFF program book may describe Tel Aviv as a ‘vibrant young city… of beaches, cafes and cultural ferment… that celebrates its diversity,’ but it’s also been called ‘a kind of alter-Gaza, the smiling face of Israeli apartheid‘ (Naomi Klein) and’tthe only city in the west without Arab residents” (Tel Aviv filmmaker Udi Aloni).
“Let’s be clear: my protest isn’t against the films or filmmakers you’ve chosen. I’ve seen brilliant works of Israeli and Palestinian cinema at past TIFFs, and will again in coming years. My protest is against the Spotlight itself, and the smug business-as-usual aura it promotes.”
“What eventually determined my decision to pull out was the subject of Covered itself. It’s a doc about the 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival, which was cancelled due to brutal anti-gay violence. The film focuses on the bravery of the organizers and their supporters, and equally, on the ostriches, on those who remained silent, who refused to speak out: most notoriously, the Sarajevo International Film Festival and the Canadian Ambassador in Sarajevo.
“To stand in judgment of these ostriches before a TIFF audience, but then say nothing about this Tel Aviv spotlight — finally, I realized that that was a brand I couldn’t stomach.”
I’ve been as anxious as the next guy to see Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor Wood‘s biopic about the young John Lennon in Liverpool. I’ve written about it several times, praised Matt Greenhalgh‘s script (saying it “has the same concise, straight-from-the-shoulder British scruffiness that his Greenhalgh’s script for Control had”), expressed interest in Kristin Scott Thomas‘s portrayal of Aunt Mimi, etc. But I’m thinking the good vibes may be over.
(l.) Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy; (r.) ex-Beatle Pete Best sometimes around 1961 or ’62.
The reason is that after seeing the above still of Aaron Johnson playing Lennon (and presumably looking out upon Liverpool’s Mersey River), I experienced severe disappointment on three levels. Actually, make that four.
One, Lennon had light honey-brown hair and Johnson’s hair looks either dark brown or jet black. How many brain cells did it take for Wood to say to the movie’s hairdresser at the start of production, “Okay, Lennon’s hair was light brown so let’s make sure Aaron’s hair is as dark as Elvis Presley‘s was…perfect!” I warned Wood not to do this in a piece that ran last January (i.e., two months before Nowhere Boy began shooting), to wit: “They’d better get the hair color right — light honey-brown. If they screw this part up they’re dead.” And Wood screwed it up!
Two, this photo told me that Johnson doesn’t really resemble Lennon at all. You could sense Lennon’s impertinent and somewhat snippy personality in his features. Johnson looks like a doleful Italian longshoreman or short-order cook. If he resembles anyone, it’s ex-Beatle Pete Best — i.e., the drummer who got fired in 1962 to make way for Ringo Starr. Obviously Johnson’s performance could make all the difference. But I’m really steaming about the hair-color thing. You just don’t mess with hair when you’re trying to physically be someone as well as re-animate their spirit.
And three, Lennon had a somewhat large, distinctive and pointed British honker with a very pronounced bridge. Johnson’s nose looks nothing like this — it’s a thicker, rounded-off, slightly bent-to-the-right nose that isn’t the least bit Lennon-y. Wood could have told the makeup people to make it right, but she didn’t. Was the idea to make Johnson resemble Lennon as little as possible?
And look at the 19 year-old kid Wood chose to play Paul McCartney. His name is Thomas Sangster, and his hair color is wrong also — it’s too light. (Unless, of course, Wood had it darkened for the film.) Look at the picture below — does anyone think Sangster resembles McCartney even faintly? He doesn’t look like Macca — he looks like a chipmunk. Look at him! At best he could possibly play a 13 year-old version of George Harrison. Is Wood insane?
I have to be honest. The hair cock-ups suggest that all kinds of other things may be wrong with Nowhere Boy. If you get the hair-color wrong (something that’s easy to get right), the odds are you’re going to screw up in other ways. People tend to be consistent, I mean. If you have dishes stacked two feet high in your kitchen sink, you probably don’t brush your teeth or pay your bills on time. I’m feeling a little queasy about it now. This is a blade of grass that may tell the tale. I still like the script but all bets are off until further notice. I smell trouble.
I never felt that the story told by Terrence Malick‘s The New World really worked, particularly the last third, but I’ve always been in love with the primeval splendor of the thing. As I tried to explain in my initial review: “[During] those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora.”
Which is why I intend to purchase the forthcoming New World “Extended Cut” Blu-ray. For those first two thirds, I mean. It runs 172 minutes (despite the Amazon page stating otherwise) or 22 minutes longer than the 150-minute version that had a brief theatrical run in late ’05 before New Line Cinema honchos freaked and leaned on Malick to trim it back to 135 minutes for a somewhat wider release that began, as I recall, in late January.
I have this feeling that more and more people are coming around to this point of view. That despite the disappointing last-third turn The New World is one of the greatest dive-in-and-live-in-the-realm movies of all time. A movie clearly uninterested for the most part in telling a gripping story but one that atmospherically mesmerizes in such a way that it feels like somebody put mescaline in your tea.
Gary Tooze‘s DVD Beaver review of the forthcoming Blu-ray puts it nicely:
“It is so refreshing to see such poetic images that can speak luminous volumes in a modern epically proportioned film. Based on the classic Pocahontas and John Smith legend, director Terrence Malick scripted this penetrating drama of conflict between Native Americans and English settlers in the 17th century ‘New World’. The heart of each film in Malick’s sporadic oeuvre must be cinematography. This is shot in Virginia by Emmanuel Lubezki, and continually overwhelms us with beauty, wild detail and washes us clean like a breath of mountain air. With organic precision [and] the grace of your senses, ‘masterpiece’ seems an understatement.”
What was wrong with the last third? I believed in the current between Colin Farrell and whatsername who played Pocahantas, and I felt betrayed when he suddenly bailed on her and went back to England. And I resented Christian Bale stepping in and trying to take Farrell’s place. And I couldn’t have cared less about all that royal court in England stuff. Pocahantas dying young didn’t seem to mean much. It’s what happened, yes, but it’s not what I wanted to see.
Some of us don’t remember how badly The New World was ripped by several big-name critics when it first opened.
Salon‘s Stephanie Zacaharek said Malick “may not care much for people, but he never met a tree he didn’t like.” (Somebody previously said this when The Thin Red Line came out, only they used “leaf” instead of “tree.”) Zacharek called it “so much atmospheric tootle” and said Malick’s “idea of using actors in a movie is straight out of ‘Where’s Waldo?'”
The L.A. Weekly‘s Scott Foundas calls it “suffocating…a movie less interested in expanding the boundaries of narrative cinema than in forsaking them.”
The hands-down funniest blurb was from Mike Clark’s USA Today review: “That sound you’re about to hear is the cracking of spines as Terrence Malick enthusiasts like me bend over backward trying to cut The New World a break.”
Second prize went to e-Film Critic’s Eric Childress: “Between the Smith-wanna-poke-a-hontas relationship, the seditious behavior back in Jamestown and the fear of the naturals that their kindness may be turned against them, a story as vast of The New World should serve as more than just a footnote in American history and a stain on the art of storytelling for all eternity.”
I wonder if any of these critics or anyone who dismissed The New World four and a half years ago have started to come around to it?
The big challenge with Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein‘s No Impact Man (Oscilloscope, 9.11, NY and LA) is not to fight it. You need to let it in and let it swim around and settle in of its own accord. Or not. But you have to at least give it a chance. Because if you do…well, no guarantees. But you may find yourself looking at your habits in a slightly more earth-friendly manner, and how can that not be a good thing?
I hated the idea of watching this damn thing. It was showing last Thursday night at a press screening on Hudson Street, and I was going “oh, crap.” What could be drearier, I muttered, than observing a year-long experiment by blogger Colin Beavan and his wife, Business Week staffer Michele Conlin, and their daughter to live for a year in their ninth-floor West Village apartment without contributing in any significant way to the pollution, global warming and general ruination of the planet?
Okay, nice idea but c’mon…don’t make me watch this. I get it but I don’t feel like going there. Really.
We can all reduce our carbon footprints if we choose, and there are obviously healthier ways of living than others. I’ll bet I contribute a lot less garbage to the world than tens of millions of bison-sized fast-food eaters and constant fossil-fuel burners out there. I could probably do better, okay, but the idea of living in such a monk-purist way that I’d have no impact whatsoever? C’mon…that’s excessive. That’s tedious. Get outta here. Or as one guy angrily tells Colin in an email, “I can’t wait to wipe my ass with the pages of your book.”
Oh, right…forgot about the book. It’s called “No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save The Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process.” (They handed out free copies at the screening.) And Colin’s No Impact Man blog is…well, here.
But what happens is that the film starts, the experiment begins and gradually the denial thing doesn’t seem so bad. Or at least it begins to seem tolerable. Colin and Michele get used to this and that deprivation, and so do we in a sense. They stop using their refrigerator. They give up electricity at the six-month point. They wash their clothes by stomping around barefoot in a bathtub filled with their dirties and I-forgot-what-kind-of-cleanser. They stop using toilet paper. (How does that work?) They ride their bikes around and start losing weight due to not eating take-out. They do without air-conditioning in the summer. (Good God!)
“No Impact Man” author Colin Beaven (r.) and wife Michele Conlin (l.), who are the “stars” (along with their daughter Isabella) of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s doc. Taken Thursday, 8.20 at 9:35 pm.
Colin’s basic point seems to be “if my wife and daughter and I could live this purely and monastically for an entire year and have a good happy life in the bargain, can’t you guys change your lives at least somewhat in order to save the planet?”
Is No Impact Man entertaining? Well, Michele is kind of fun to hang with (or at least a bit more fun than the pleasantly candid but glumly earnest Colin) but I can’t say the film actually “entertains.” Does it deliver emotional touchstone moments like a good Michael Moore doc? Uhn…not really. Is it tight and true in that it gets down to business and doesn’t meander and holds its focus? Yeah, for the most part, but at the same time it feels a tiny bit draggy in the final third. It runs 90 minutes. I wouldn’t have minded 75 or 80.
But overall it’s coming from a good and intelligent place and I’m glad I saw it. Really. It got me thinking about my bad habits and how I might erase or correct some of them.
Will the popcorn-munching, KFC-eating 20something Eloi ever pay No Impact Man the slightest heed? Yes — if their children show it to them on their deathbeds 50 or 60 years from now, and I mean if the kids strap them to their beds. inject them with some kind of wake-up drug and make them wear Clockwork Orange eyelid-clamps.
I asked Michele during the after-party how she and Colin and their daughter managed to avoid using toilet paper for a year. Michele went “no!” and kind of half-chuckled when I asked if they used some kind of re-usable cloth rag, but she never said what the actual trick was. (Some kind of sponge in a water pot, is my guess.) A disgusting topic, sure, but the movie is about alternatives, right?
The screening was attended by 85% women. Singles, couples, groups of three, etc. There were two or three boyfriends and a couple of stag guys but Jett and I were the only men who attended together. Why was that? Something to do with nest-tending instincts morphing into earth-tending meditations? That was my theory, at least. The bottom line? At the end of the day No Impact Man will probably settle into the public consciousness as a chick flick.
I haven’t been able to precisely feel one way about the drunk-driving tragedy that befell director-writer Roger Avary (Beowulf, Pulp Fiction) last year, and which killed a 34 year-old friend named Andreas Zini when Avary piled his car into a telephone pole in Ojai. Avary, a friend and a great spirit whom I’ve known since the Pulp Fiction/Killing Zoe days, pleaded guilty last Tuesday to DUI and manslaughter. He’ll face sentencing sometime next month.
My basic feeling is that after a certain interval of mourning and atonement, you have to move on and make the best of your life in the aftermath of such an event. A writer like Avary should write or create something. I only know that no single event defines a life and that the only way to deal with monumental tragedy is to say, “Yes, that happened and I’ll deal with it for the rest of my life, but we all need to turn the page and try to strike a match.”
I also think it’s fair to ask anyone who’s ever known Roger and worked with him if they’ve ever driven with a buzz-on or worse, God forbid. Let he/she who is without sin throw the first stone. I’m ashamed to admit that I drove stinko a couple of times in the early to mid ’90s when I had a vodka-and-lemonade problem. One of those times resulted in a banger, and I can only get down on my knees, look up and cross myself in thankfulness that nothing worse happened. (I faced my problem and dealt with it to my personal satisfaction in ’96. My inspiration was Pete Hamill‘s A Drinking Life: A Memoir.) I’m basically saying that I was lucky enough to wake up or be given a break by fate or what-have-you, and when I think of poor Roger I think, “There but for the grace of God…”
Most of us remember the pre-Titanic buzz during the spring and summer of ’97 — Jim Cameron‘s folly, a wipeout waiting to happen. But it ruled after it opened because it delivered something close to unique and, if you ask me, un-repeatable. Trash it all you want (and it’s an article of faith among most people I know that you must despise it), but Titanic didn’t became a worldwide megahit because it offered a highly believable depiction of a sinking luxury liner.
I’ve explained this before but I thought I’d do so again to answer those saying that Avatar might be another Titanic in terms of ticket sales. No, it almost certainly won’t be. Titanic tapped into a very primal emotional thing by expertly selling the idea that great love affairs never die in the hearts of those who’ve lived through them, and that they live, in fact, beyond death and into eternity. That’s obviously a very sentimental dream and an age-old fantasy (especially popular with supermarket-tabloid readers), the gist being that we all merge with our pasts and our memories and our loved ones at the moment of death.
So snicker and make fun if you want but it was brilliantly sold during the last 12 or so minutes of Titanic, and especially by that very last scene with old Rose (Gloria Stuart) dreaming her way into the sunken ship and coming upon all those who died when it sank, including — standing at the top of the first-class salon staircase — her young lover Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). And Stuart reverting back to her Kate Winslet self as she walks up the staircase to meet him.
Without these last 12 minutes Titanic most likely would have been a huge success, but with them it became a repeat-viewing phenomenon that just wouldn’t quit.
In terms of getting people where they lived it was probably the greatest happy ending ever devised. In part because it came out of nowhere — the ship had sunk, the story was over and the film seemed to be pretty much winding down — and because it sold an emotional moment that everyone very much wants to believe in.
I wouldn’t mind meeting up with dear ones in some afterrealm. I don’t fancy the idea of my death being equal to the experience of a vacuum cleaner that’s roaring along and sucking up dust until BRRrrrrrrr…someone pulls the plug out of the wall. Who likes the idea of “lights out” and that’s it?
Warren Beatty managed a somewhat similar thing with the ending of Heaven Can Wait. I recall his having once said that if you can persuade people to feel comforted or even serene about death, you’ve got a hit on your hands. The trick, of course, is to make a convincing case for this. Many have tried; very few have succeeded.
So get over the idea that Avatar might replicate this in some way and become as big as Titanic if not bigger. Okay, it might, but it would have to deliver an ending that moves people as much as Titanic‘s did. I just don’t think lightning strikes twice.
Cameron is a legendary filmmaker, but I don’t think he has a magical Midas touch that produces Titanic-level hits when he sets his mind to it, much less snaps his fingers. He’s obviously made super-popular, genre-altering films time and again (Terminator, Aliens, T2, The Abyss, etc.) and he’s probably looking at another hit with Avatar. But he was just lucky or open-pored enough to channel something really special when he wrote and filmed the final 12 minutes of Titanic, and that the odds are that he won’t ever quite do that again.
Did I believe disgraced football player Michael Vick‘s pre-scripted apology on 60 Minutes last night for running a sadistic dog-fight operation that landed him in jail and all but destroyed his career? Nobody did. The guy can’t act. Plus he never talked about his deep-down attitudes and feelings about dogs and how he could see them not as super-loyal friends to love and care for but as snarling gladiators good at killing and being killed. On top of which 60 Minutes interviewer James Brown was too scared to touch on the real cultural “why.”
Dog-fight culture is an ugly thing that stems, I believe, from a predatory, inner-city, watch-your-back vibe that its fans initially encountered in their growing-up neighborhoods. But Vick and Brown never even glanced at, much less alluded to, this. Because that would take them into the machismo thing that has obviously influenced African-American and Hispanic guys of a certain economic strata and their seeming preference (based on years of my own first-hand observation) for fearsome attack dogs. Too close to the bone so they dodged it entirely.
Vick revealed his true self with three lines. The first came when he began one his unconvincing run-on apologies with “whatever the reasons I did this.” (translation: “I probably know why but I sure as shit ain’t gettin’ into it on nationwide TV”). The second came when he said “I don’t know how many times I gotta say [I’m sorry].” (translation: “I’m gettin’ a little sick of apologizin’ over and over for this shit”). The third was his admission that “the first day I walked into that prison and he slammed that door…I knew the magnitude [and] the poor judgment that I allowed to happen to those animals” (translation: “Damn…gettin’ caught and being punished sucks!”)
“It’s wrong, man, ” Vick said. “I don’t know how many times I gotta say it. I feel tremendous hurt about what happened. I deserve to lose the $135 million [contract]. I feel disgusted because of what I allowed to happen to those animals. The first day I walked into that prison and he slammed that door…I knew the magnitude and the poor judgment that I allowed to happen to those animals…I cried over what I did, being away from my family, letting so many people down, letting myself down….being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk…that wasn’t my life, that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be…[and all] because of the so-called culture I thought was right and cool…I thought it was fun and exciting at the time.”