Martin Scorsese Day Two

In order to prepare for the Scorsese marathon, I took a quick look at the films he's directed and decided to start with films I had not seen. I also felt it was prudent to look at the IMDB top 250 to see what films made it to the list. It's not surprising that an overwhelming number of the films that appear on the list were released after the invention of IMDB, and the rest of the list reads like a introduction to cinema class. This is no less true for Scorsese as The Departed (55) and Hugo (201) have made it to the list along with Goodfellas (15), Taxi Driver (43), Raging Bull (79), and Casino (165). The only reason I bring this list up is because The King of Comedy is definitely deserving of the same recognition as any one of these films.

It's perhaps trite to bring up that this film predicts the American future where people are unnaturally obsessed with celebrity and fame. Because of this, I will refrain from any further discussion about it even though the entire movie centers around one man's obsession with a late night talk show host. In many ways, I think it's unfortunate that this film isn't mentioned in the same breath as films 15, 43, and 79 as it is as good as anyone of them. I think it could be easily the greatest performance of De Niro in a Scorsese film, and I'd be hard pressed to find a film where Jerry Lewis is as impressive.

What's most impressive about this film is the way in which Scorsese is able to create a clear predator in Rupert Pupkin, but one that lacks any of the immediate intimidation of De Niro's more violent and aggressive characters. At times it's heartbreaking to watch Pupkin try to mold the reality in his head onto the world around him, yet it's also terrifying to watch a man so removed from reality ignore the clear markers of what is real. And did I mention that somehow all of this is funny?

And on top of all this, the film is absolutely beautiful and compelling from a cinematographic stand point. There are a number of moments in the film (Pupkin performing for his "studio audience," Sandra Bernhard having dinner with Jerry Lewis) that are striking when the film in no way needs to be visually compelling. Moreover, these moments of aesthetic achievement don't feel out of place because the film wonderfully complicates things by showing the reality of 1980s America with the reality that Rupert Pupkin is trying to create for himself. Without sure footing in either reality, the audience can just accept the film not just as either/or but as both/and. This film is both the world of 1980s America, and the world in which Rupert Pupkin is a star and a celebrity, and the audience does not have to make a choice.

What I loved most about this movie was the simple fact that at no point did I know what I was supposed to feel. It wasn't like the scenes in Raging Bull or Goodfellas when I knew I was supposed to feel horror or disgust. When Robert De Niro has taken Jerry Lewis hostage, I couldn't stop laughing and I couldn't stop feeling the overwhelming sense of anxiety that Rupert would always be a danger to himself.

Twelve Days of Scorsese

Lydia pointed out last week that this year marks the blog's second most prolific output since its inception. In honor of this, I've decided to adapt a philosophy of quantity over quality and try to make 2011 the most prolific year in the blog's history. In order to achieve what I hope will be enough to put us over the mark, I've decided to watch and review the bulk of Martin Scorses's canon starting with Hugo, and then working my way through the highlights as I am able to get a hold of them.

Now, instead of using this post as a freebie and just reporting what I plan to do, this will be the first post of the series.

I should begin by saying I hate 3D movies, and I feel that 3D is a marketing ploy to make unwatchable films interesting. In reality, my hatred stems from the release of Avatar and the style of the 3D glasses. At the time I was wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers as my normal prescription glasses, and somehow I was well ahead of the fashion curve. Sadly this would not last as the new world of 3D glasses would not be red and blue paper frames, but plastic frames modeled on the frames made famous by Jake and Elwood Blues. As I walked into the theater to see Avatar, some young pup proudly announced that my glasses were just like hers. I have yet to recover.

And as an aside, as someone who has to wear glasses regularly, the thought of wearing another pair of glasses over my glasses to watch a film is just awful.

All of this aside, Hugo is an absolutely brilliant film and a better argument for the transition from 2D to 3D than any film before it. As egregious a director as James Cameron can be, Avatar was a fine film and a great argument for 3D film making. However, the success of Hugo as a film stems from contextualizing the argument for 3D by showing the history of film making as one that constantly benefits from advances in technology.

In a flashback, Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) is on the set of a film choreographing a fight between four men and four skeletons. In order to show the defeat of the skeletons, Méliès stops the camera from rolling any further, has the actors pause and hold their position to allow for them to disappear from the frame. Now only a few moments before, there is a scene where Méliès watches the Lumiere Brothers' film of the train pulling into the station, and we begin to understand that technology in the right hands makes "dreams come true." The step from filming reality to creating it through technological means is the same thing that is happening now with the transition from 2D to 3D. We could continue to make films in one way, but if there is potential to use the medium to create then we should embrace it.

Side note: It should be said that in many ways the argument could also be made that with absolutely no digital support, Georges Méliès made more stylistically innovative and brilliant films than most of the people working in movies today. If I had seen the 2D version of this film, I might have had a different impression of the film.

With my pride firmly past my larynx and on the way to my stomach, I do want to point out that the film makes a few bizarre choices. Primarily, the film is set in Paris a city which appears to be wholly devoid of French speaking people. Sadly, the film for all of its innovation falls back on the cliched American device of casting British people to represent any group of foreigners (think Dr. Zhivago, etc.). At times it was extremely grating, even when the acting was amazing. As the French say, "That's Life."

summer movie double dactyls

Because I think everyone should be writing more double dactyls (aka higgledy piggledies), I'm sharing mine, left over from the summer. (It's harder to write silly poetry about the kind of movies I've seen lately.)


Captain America:
Higgledy-piggledy
Captain America
took on some nazis with
photoshop pecs.
After some cryo this
octogenarian
looks a lot better than
you might expect.


Xmen:
Higgledy-piggledy,
MacAvoy, Fassbender,
mind control, cameo,
decolletage.
Cameo, submarine,
psychoanalysis,
Fassbender, MacAvoy,
training montage.


That's the best I can do. Someone else's turn now.


(Note: with this post, 2011 is tied with 2008 as our second-postingest year! Total posts, not posts-per-month, which would be a ridiculous way to compare.)

awards season: handmade edition, 2011

For those of us who love to make things with our hands, there can be no better model of precision, piecework, and attention to detail than Antonio Banderas's Robert Ledgard, the mad scientist at the center of the newest Almodovar film, The Skin I Live In (La Qiel Que Habito). I am a quilter, and while my medium is usually calico and his is mostly human skin, I feel a certain kinship with him, as he struggles to match a corner.

my next quilt may be entirely taupe

previously on NTC, handmade movies: 2010 2008

Drive

Other people in the theater did not like Drive as much as I did.  I think I understand why--it's very slow and when it is not slow it is very brutal. If you went there to see Ryan Gosling looking pretty, and driving fast, you could reasonably feel disappointed. If your objection to the movie is that it lacks a moral center though, I think you have missed the point. I think the joke is on you, for thinking you could get your morals from the movies in the first place. Drive is an examination not just of violence, but of violence in the movies. It is a movie about movies.

Drive is all dressed up as an eighties movie. The music, the scribbly pink text of the credits, the costumes (especially Christina Hendricks in one particularly rad acid-washed tight gray hoodie), the way the romantic relationship develops mostly in eye contact and awkward silences--every scene that is not drenched in blood feels like it would be right at home in Some Kind of Wonderful or Pretty in Pink.

The main character, who does not have a name, is a stunt driver. When he puts on a mask and gets in a police car he will drive for the scene, then we see the car crash and flip over, it is impossible not to think about the other stunt driver, the guy who is really actually driving that car in that scene. I am not saying it is staggeringly original, but it is layered--there is Ryan Gosling, then there is the character he is playing ("driver"), who is wearing the face of another actor, but inside that costume is actually another actor, a real-life stunt driver. Albert Brooks (scary Albert Brooks!) plays a film producer/investor/criminal--he talks about the european action movies he used to produce—he thought they were shitty, in case you were wondering. In case you were wondering whether the movies are terrible and corrupt? Oh yes, they are.

There is a scene in an elevator. A bad guy, and Carey Mulligan, and Gosling is there to keep her safe, and she doesn't really know. Like the rest of the movie, this scene is mostly silent. Then in slow motion, Gosling moves the girl into the corner, in slow motion he kisses her, and the lights of the elevator obligingly dim to match the action of the scene. This is the sort of thing that happens in movies. The lights come back and the kiss ends, and Gosling beats the bad guy to death with his hands and feet, literally crushing his skull under his heel. The violence in this moment is astonishing, and as Carey Mulligan backs slowly out of the elevator, she seems to hold a lot of different emotions in balance on her face: shock, fear, disappointment, confusion, bewilderment. And maybe I'm overreaching here, but I think the reaction is sadness and regret, and also betrayal: he is thinking, What did you expect?

That's what the movie was saying, to those ladies behind me who groaned when Albert Brooks deocculated a guy with a fork, and giggled when Ron Perlman said "fuck" for the five-hundredth time. You came to the movies--you aren't here for a nonviolent resolution, or for complicated depthy characters. You came here for some cowboy violence and some fast driving. Careful what you wish for.

Jane Eyre

The first time I read Jane Eyre, I was just the right age to swoon over the romance of the whole thing. I liked Jane because she was just like me—she too had felt isolated! She had suffered injustice—adults had misunderstood and judged her. Like me, she read books. She was chock full of faith and morality, but she saw that there is hypocrisy in religion. We had everything in common. When Jane started crushing on the boss, I was right there with her.

Jane has intellectual reasons to like Rochester; unlike everyone else she has ever met, he treats her with a certain kind of respect, as a conversational sparring partner. He recognizes her intelligence. But she also likes him because he is a perfect bad boy. He is mean and unforgiving of people in general. He treats her differently, and it is very pleasant to be friends with a bully—to be one of the few people liked by a mean snob.

Rochester has a mysterious dark side. And he likes Jane not in spite of her nerdiness, but because of it. He likes her because she is bookish and smart and above all good. He thinks she can save him, and he warns her not to. Who could resist?

I read Jane Eyre again in college, and I hated it in the way you only hate things you are very interested in. That summer, I told Cindy I was so angry about the story, I wanted to rewrite it from the perspective of Bertha, the crazy wife in the attic. She said, “Um, have you heard of The Wide Sargasso Sea?” I had wanted the book before I knew it existed, which shows how necessary the book is; it is impossible to read Jane Eyre now without wanting to know more about the mad first wife.

To me in college, it seemed obvious that Rochester was a run-of-the-mill abusive spouse, first to Bertha and then to Jane. I thought Jane's only desire was to conform to a very conventional idea of heterosexual love. I had no time for Jane's “master” this and “sir” that. In this reading, she rejected St. John not because he was too pragmatic or too conventional, but because he was not brutal enough, and love—in all heterosexual relationships, in my world view, in 1996—is synonymous with masculine cruelty. I guess I thought Jane chose Rochester as the best of limited bad options. Now I see that I was wrong about that.

The thing is, Jane did not return to Rochester until she had better options on every front. She was financially independent. More important than the money, she had found in the Rivers siblings the one thing she had never had outside of Thornfield—a family of intelligent, good people who liked and respected her. Returning to Rochester was not a compromise—I'll take a little bullying in exchange for intellectual stimulation. No, she went back to him because he dominated her, not in spite of it. She chose to be mastered, freely and on her own terms. That's why Jane is a radical and difficult kind of feminist hero. There is this scene in Jane Eyre, when Rochester confesses that he loves Jane, and asks her to marry him. He insists that she call him by his Christian name, and she does, just once. She immediately reverts to “master” and “sir,” because she likes it that way.

None of this is about the latest Jane Eyre movie, or any of the other Jane Eyre movies. I have seen a lot of film versions of the story, and they never really get it right. Almost always they soften the relationship between Jane and Rochester. He is more likeable and younger than he should be, and Jane is older. Every film version I have seen simplifies (or completely erases—which makes for some very strange and confusing voiceover from Joan Fontaine in that version) the story of the Rivers family. I think the best Jane and Rochester are Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt, because she is odd-looking and he is over twenty years older than she is. But I think that is the worst movie, because it removes all the coincidences and the supernatural.

I do not know if it is possible to make a great movie version of this story, in part because it is long, and in part because it is subjective—for instance, Jane and Rochester both talk a lot about how unattractive they both are, and I like leaving the reliability of their judgment somewhat up to the imagination. I would like a movie version of Jane Eyre that is appropriately dark. It does not need to be six hours long, but it should be long enough to dedicate the necessary time to the story of the Rivers family, which is long and slow and, yes, ultimately, a little absurd. It should be totally sincere when it turns out that Jane and the Rivers siblings are long-lost cousins, and it should be equally sincere when Jane hears Rochester's voice from miles away, by magic. And in my version Jane loves Rochester in the end less because his transformation makes him humble than because it makes him into a sideshow freak.

Clarification on mothers and adult children of mothers in movies

Angela Lansbury was born in October of 1925, which means she was about 37 when The Manchurian Candidate came out in 1962, and Laurence Harvey, who played her son, was three years younger.

North by Northwest came out in 1959, which would make Cary Grant 55. Jessie Royce Landis, who played his mother, was eight years older than he was.

Amy Poehler talked (in some video I can't find) about the age difference between her and Rachel McAdams who played her daughter in Mean Girls. Poehler was 33 in 2004 and McAdams was 26.

Speaking of North by Northwest, the second half of this episode of Selected Shorts  is a pretty great story called Cary Grant's Suit.