It's the morning after the upset of Moonlight winning the Best Picture Oscar, after a flub by some idiot stage managers, duplicate envelopes, and Faye Dunaway just willing to read whatever film title was on the card in front of her. No, I don't believe it was a conspiracy plot or Russian hack. Save that for Trump's win last November.
Barry Jenkins' Moonlight was one of my favorite movies from last year (along with 20th Century Women, Arrival, among a few others) and well-deserving of its win, not as some kind of token Oscar nod but as a fierce and deep, but also hypnotically calming film full of strong messages.
LaLa Land was a fluffy, candy-colored, puddle deep film that was technically lush and well-made, but more or less an escapist rom-com. You can read my original thoughts on it here.
Moonlight's deserved Oscar win for Best Picture was the first for a film centered around a gay character and most certainly the first, or one of the firsts, to feature a cast entirely of people of color. It's also one of the smallest-budgeted films to win the prize. All of these firsts are important, and important to document for reflection. They would seem like just statistics if the film itself wasn't filled with outstanding performances, beautiful cinematography, and a haunting score.
The quiet, meditative tone and slow pace of the movie is in such contrast to much if not most of the films up for Oscars this or any year. It had the glacial movement of a European art film but a steadfastly American modern location and situation.
Having a young, gay man of color be the center of a small independent film pushed into the mainstream, catching on, then exploding all the way up to the pinnacle Oscar win is something to be remembered. Will next year's Best Picture winner be back to business as usual? Does this change anything for Hollywood in terms of reflection or visibility?
When seeing Moonlight for the first time, I was reminded of a film that felt like a precursor to it, almost. A small, critically praised but little-seen movie called Pariah (2011)by Dee Rees, about a black lesbian teenager in NYC and making her way through the resistance to her truly being herself. I hope people who loved and praised Moonlight discover this film.
When most people speak of cults today, it seems to be in the past tense, relics of a previous era that seemed foolish, naive, hippie-dippie, and dated.
You also could argue that the heyday for cults was the 1970s - post-'60s hippie but pre-'80s greedy Reagan years. The 1970s were the self-reflective/self-indulgent 'Me Decade' after all (or so the easy tag-line says). Escaping the Vietnam and Watergate aftermaths, some people went off the grid. But that was in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone, pre-GPS era. Can people really disappear nowadays?
The 2011 psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marleneis a smart, sad half-answer to this question. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the former kiddie actors Mary-Kate and Ashley) escapes from the upstate NY farm/compound of an unnamed cult of young people early one morning. She calls her older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) to come get her at a roadside diner and then ends up recuperating at Lucy and her husband Ted's (Hugh Dancy) vacation home, also in upstate NY.
The film is a flip-flop between Martha's flashbacks and her current silent, closed-off emotional state while at her sister's home. The plot is a bit aimless (much like Martha) but is based around a series of increasingly paranoid visions and memories of disturbing things she did and/or witnessed during her two-year sojourn with the cult.
One of the smart and scary things that director Sean Durkin did is make the cult nameless and directionless, not a political or anti-establishment drive but a incestuous group of n'er-do-wells who survive by any means necessary, including violence.
So, now that it's harder than ever to officially "vanish" from society because of the aforementioned reasons, is it still possible and desirable for young people to be seduced by the idea of technological rejection, of "back-to-the-land" emphasis of lifestyle?
And is "living off the grid" now more of an escape from Trump American chaos in 2017, then a mere nostalgic hippie fantasy or a seductive escape from the boredom of bourgeoisie life, like when this movie was released in 2011 in Obama's America?
Are people ready to "escape to the forest to survive," en masse, and pretend The Walking Dead is real now?
The last blog post was about LaLa Land and the chase for glowing, radiant film stardom. What happens when you become a star - even a sort of mid-level, hyped underground star like Edie Sedgwick - and that star crashes and burns?
I first came across Edie when borrowing my older sister's paperback copy of Edie: An American Biography, by George Plimpton and Jean Stein, in high school. This oral biography (my favorite type of biography, organized as interview passages with dozens of people) was all too glamorous for a teenage, Minnesotan Catholic school student.
Edie, a socialite/heiress/actress/model, met Andy Warhol at the right time to become mutual muses (at least for a year or two). Appearing in many shorts by Warhol, Edie was a wanna-be actress waiting for a real Hollywood role to push her out of the underground NYC milieu and into legitimacy; sadly that never happened.
During her 1966-67 heyday of semi-fame, drug exploration, and partying, filmmakers John Palmer and David Weisman created a semi-biographical film around her experiences. Shot in steely black and white, Ciao Manhattan is an oddball but captivating, sometimes fascinating, tedious, shrill, and hypnotic film all rolled into one.
Set up as a Sunset Boulevard-ish story of a faded star looking back and confiding in a captive audience, this time in the form of a southern hick hippie teenager (the irritating Wesley Hayes) who stumbles on Edie (renamed "Susan" in the film, even though it is pretty much straight biography) living in the bottom of an empty swimming pool on a dilapidated California ranch home. She lounges incessantly in a mess of pillows, clothes strewn, magazines, and blow-up photos of her glamorous NYC past.
The "present-day" (1970-71) version of the story is filmed in color, while the "flashbacks" show Palmer and Weisman's previously shot, and superior, black and white footage. Trying to bookend her past of debauchery, failed affairs, heavy drugs, and mental illness, a truly zonked out Edie comes off as a haunted, fragile mess.
The movie is not stellar when it comes to plot and coherence, but is fantastic when it comes to documenting the days of Warhol's Factory, and the cavalier, fashionable escapades of a poor little rich girl. An indoor pool party of drugged out Factory kooks, a night time convertible ride through Manhattan with fellow Warhol actor, the hunky Paul America, it all plays out like proto-music videos. The bubbling Moog synth score by Gino Piserchio adds to the otherworldly vibe.
Plentiful audio clips of Edie rambling become the disembodied narration of her onscreen misadventures. Like the final audio recordings of a late career Judy Garland before she overdosed (two years before Edie), the narration comes of bitter and sad (more the latter for Edie). In Ciao Manhattan, Edie sounds more like a bewildered child, along for the ride, with a bubble of high hopes being popped repeatedly - glittering and tragic.
We're less than a week away from the annual Oscars award show and La La Land is poised to nab many awards, presumably the highlight of the night, 'Best Picture.' The film has tied Titanic for the title of most nominated film in Oscar's 89-year history, with 14 nominations. Quite impressive numbers, but I wasn't quite impressed with the film.
Watching the much talked about traffic jam/flash mob-style musical opening number, I was doubtful of this film immediately. It didn't seem like West Side Story but more like that terrible Coke commercial I see every time in the multiplex theater before the trailers start. I was worried. No, I don't want your passed-around, bird flu-infected popcorn and soda.
Director Damien Chazelle's film is an ode to old Hollywood Technicolor musicals of the mid-20th century (An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, to name a few) with a dash of '60s French Jacques Demy musicals like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in all of its candy-colored glory.
And that was one of the main problems I had with LaLa Land. Its "odes" and "valentines" were a bit too homage-y, too assemblage-y to hold any emotional weight for me or be wowed by its lack of originality. The big, lushly backdropped dance sequences between the two lovers Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (in the Griffith Park Observatory, for example) were quite beautiful and technically well shot but they were gem moments adrift in a lackluster romance.
The film lack's the bite and grit of his previous feature Whiplash (about a teenage drumming prodigy) that could have made this film even richer. My main disappointment with LaLa Land was that it didn't push the extremes of each situation enough. The hum-drum lives of Gosling and Stone as they pursue their dreams, didn't seem tough and dreary enough to make the fantasy sequences of breaking into song pop. The stakes didn't seem high enough.
She works as a barista but owns a brand-new Prius (huh?) and he works some nights playing piano in a middle-brow restaurant but has his own large apartment in L.A.? It seems nitpicky but I wanted their "suffering" to have a bit more reality to make their dreams and romance a bit more epic. In a movie about movies, it should have been elevated.
I kept thinking of two possible directorial choices that could have upped the epic feel of this Oscar-contender.
What if all of the non-musical moments were shot in black and white (or at least very sun-bleached, desaturated color)? Wouldn't that make the grand peaks of the Gosling/Stone song and dance sequences shine even more? That Wizard of Oz trick of escaping the humdrum would have made their fanciful wishes really sing. Instead we get a CW network meet-cute that we could have seen on TV.
And the moderate, but not memorable, singing and dancing of the two leads? What if Chazelle would have upped the idea of these two wanna-be stars in L.A. trying to "make it" by actually casting two unknown, up-and-comers in the roles? Two whiz-bang singers and dancers that would run circles around Gosling/Stone and beat them at their own game, instead of "falling for" two established, big-name stars.
Wouldn't it be more effective, more exciting to root for these John and Jane Does who haven't made it yet actually "make it"? Watching winners win isn't very exciting. Where's the fire inside?
What a perfect time in American history to look back and remember (if you're old enough; no I'm not) or imagine when two intelligent, but diametrically opposed speakers and their viewpoints would be a national major network's idea of prime time entertainment. Why watch The Big Bang Theory when you can watch two effete, middle-aged men (one gay, one straight-ish) discuss conservatism and liberalism on camera in front of millions.
Best of Enemies a 2015 documentary feature about the ten televised debates that took place on the ABC network in the summer of 1968, both during the milquetoast Republican National Convention in Miami and the riot-strewn, contentious Democratic National Convention in Chicago,all featuring conservative National Review magazine founder William F. Buckley Jr. versus liberal author and historian Gore Vidal.
Pontificating American white men spouting ten-dollar words in faux British accents sounds dry, huh? Give it a try. This is the birthplace of pundit TV political commentary. Watch the atheist vs. right wing Catholic, the gay disaffected aesthete vs. the belligerent, wealthy straight snob in an intellectual boxing match. Sitting in swivel chairs, throwing out verbal darts; it's snotty, eye-rolling fun...if that's your sort of thing.
It's not all just five-syllable words and comparing Ivy League credentials though. The heat of the debates climaxes with Vidal calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley calling Vidal a "queer" in return and threatening to sock Vidal "in the goddamn face." For 1968 prime time TV programs, it was quite racy. I can't imagine what the equivalent words would be in this day and age.
That's what makes this more than some quaint time capsule doc. With TV political news poured over every hour as I write this in February 2017, I'm saddened to note that intellectual debates (minus the name-calling) still are not placed back on prime time TV for the masses, but relegated to cable channels with small viewerships. Can you imagine debates on prime time TV (outside of the Presidential debates) that interrupt CSI orThe Celebrity Apprenticefor actual real-life discussions about American society and politics and where we're headed?
As our current unstable climate matches that of America in the summer of 1968, threatening to surpass it even in the protests and outrage over Trump's flailing, scandal-riddled administration, isn't it about time for this sort of program again?
You don't come to actress Isabelle Huppert's films expecting warmth. And she doesn't fail to deliver her own signature brand of ice-cold stares, chilly conversations, and an almost bored looking sense of dismissal in Elle, the latest film by provocateur director Paul Verhoeven.
Huppert has played shades of this type of role before: the brutal, desperate title character in The Piano Teacher, and the off-kilter, incestuous widow in Ma Mere; she almost begs you to try and like her heroines while simultaneously not caring one bit if you don't.
The oddness of the role of Michele, the titular character in Elle, is the universal praise the role is getting this award season. She has played remote, damaged women before in film, with the usual critical darling praise, but now her hard work is finally showing in the big leagues of American mainstream award recognition, in spots usually saved for Natalie Portman and Jennifer Lawrence.
Huppert won the Golden Globe award last month for Best Actress for this role, and now has an Oscar nomination (her first) for the same. Winning the Golden Globe was the only time I've ever seen Huppert onscreen seem happy, smiley, and sweet.
So, the main question: Is she deserving of the award? Simple answer: Yes. Is the movie any good? Complex answer: Kind of. Verhoeven is known for his black humor, wink-wink naughty side (Showgirls, Basic Instinct) and his political satire/shoot-em-up action side (Robocop, Starship Troopers). This movie might oddly fall somewhere in between, a crime thriller with some gratuitous titillation.
I don't want to reveal a lot of the plot because it all seems to be spoiler-centric, but Huppert's Michele plays a wealthy video game company CEO who is raped/attacked in a home invasion. She's trying to find out the identity of the attacker, and seek revenge, through her own means. Verhoeven tends to overlay his movies with too many characters and subplots, and red herring, go-nowhere twists. Elle is no exception.
Verhoeven also loves his non sequiturs and over-the-top, deliciously crass dialogue. Though not a rip-roaring, quotefest like Showgirls, I caughtmyself rolling my eyes more than once through the film and the silly and trashy lines that pepper the film.
Is Huppert's performance award-winning? Let's just say (or pretend, rather) that the Golden Globe win and Oscar nom are for her entire multi-decade career of playing sullen, remote, troubled women and not just for Michele in Elle. Let's add Erika in The Piano Teacher, Augustine in 8 Women, Anne in Time of the Wolf, Maria in White Material. She plays 'fractured' like no one else.
I just attended a sold-out screening of the 1973 blaxsploitation classic Coffy with a post-film Q&A with the lead diva herself Pam Grier. We were treated to a sprawling conversation covering her late '60s LA days working receptionist jobs, trying to scrounge enough money together to afford UCLA Film School tuition and eventually, almost accidentally, falling in to being a leading lady in a long string of successful '70s crime thrillers as a tough-as-nails but sexy/sweet assortment of heroines (Coffy, Foxy Brown, Sheba, Friday Foster).
Grier said she really just wanted to be on a film crew working behind the scenes, but Roger Corman insisted she act in some of his early '70s "women in cages" style B-movies. She did, and by 1973 the hits kept coming for American International Pictures.
Paper-thin plots, over-the-top un-PC dialogue, and an overall campy vibe could have framed Coffy as a time-piece curio from the era of '70s new Hollywood B-movie exploitation. But, given the distance of nearly 45 years, the empowering image of a black woman with a shotgun, dealing with the drug-dealers who got her little sister hooked on smack, the two-faced corrupt politician boyfriend ready to sell her out, and every other scheming, sleazy man ready to use and abuse her, Coffy - an avenging black woman with a gun, seems revolutionary again onscreen in 2017. And not in a campy way.
Hearing Pam move from one era to the next, from driving a Jaguar with Richard Pryor and an ill miniature pony in the trunk to riding a horse on set in Italy and accidentally galloping towards Fellini on said horse, only to be invited to a feast prepared by the maestro director himself, was funny and delirious. She seemed to take it all in stride: hit action icon, forgotten actress, and smashing comeback in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown.
Live Q&A sessions after screenings can be a toss up. I've seen a few, recently, all sponsored by the magnificent Hollywood Theater here in Portland. Piper Laurie was charming if a bit befuddled during her onstage Q&A for Carrie, while Linda Blair seemed a bit curt and didactic when slinging out Exorcist stories while coldly pacing the stage with a mic, ready for the next comer.
Pam lounged in the onstage armchair alongside the moderator, a comic book writer, neither befuddled nor didactic. Warm, convivial, laughing, and talking about cooking up a big meal with plenty of wine in her kitchen was her example of making a great personal connection with people.
I wholeheartedly agree and want an invitation to that dinner table. I want first dibs on hearing all about her upcoming autobiographical movie (and musical!) apparently titled Foxy. This toast is to her.
Still in the realm of '70s films, this post moves the blog from the '70s paranoia thriller to a teen movie that could have only come out of '70s cinema, 1980s Little Darlings. Apart from the silly sport activity montages and food fights, this movie has a lot more depth and nuance than at first glance. I discovered it as a Saturday afternoon matinee on TV as a young teen (much the same age as the characters in the movie) and was hooked. I even own a bootleg Asian DVD since the film has never been released or shown past the VHS era.
The leads are Kristy McNichol as working-class tough girl Angel Bright (yes, that's the character's name) and Oscar-winner Tatum O'Neal as sheltered rich girl Ferris Whitney (that name too). Both are sent away to an all-girls summer camp in an era that was the opposite of helicopter parenting. When they meet their cabin-mates, mouthy mean girl Cinder (short for Cinderella?) whips up a challenge for our two leads: the first of these two to lose their virginity wins a cash prize. Let the betting commence.
Alliances between the cabin-mates form around Angel and Ferris, and both girls choose their targets. For Ferris, it's swarthy, sexy Mr. Callahan (Armand Assante) a thirty-something camp counselor. For Angel, she navigates towards the rival boys' camp's wanna-be tough guy Randy (Matt Dillon in his first major film role). The subtext of Angel/Kristy gravitating to a mirror image of an androgynous beauty like the teenage Dillon with his matching long feathered-hair and full lips is fascinating, when looking retroactively at this movie knowing that McNichol came out of the closet well after her acting career was over. It adds an interesting gay subtext throughout. The Cinder character even tells Angel: "I think you're into girls." And maybe that emboldens Angel to try even harder to bed a man. "I think guys are a pain in the ass," she states on the trip to camp.
It's hard to imagine this movie getting produced today. Although there are raunchier topics in today's teen movies, maybe with less naivete than shown in Little Darlings, this kind of unsupervised, learning through trial and error (not with a Google search) and this emphasis on a natural, "normal" looking, young female cast that is not obsessing about Kardashians and cellphones, but still being teenagers, is rare. Cynthia Nixon, nearly two decades before Sex and the City plays Sunshine, a hippie girl camper who offers her cabin mates "Vitamin E and Niacin; it'll help you from freaking out." It's these sweet notes that make this film rise above basic, boring teen fluff.
"Did anybody see Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast?" one girl asks on the bus ride to camp. "Do you know what my favorite movie is? Last Tango in Paris. I saw it ten times," offers up another. A bit unrealistic dialogue from an adult screenwriter but refreshing in its off-the-cuff attempts at appearing "grown up," a running theme in the movie. Girls smoking cigarettes and saying they're engaged but their parents sent them to camp to "cool it off. They're so provincial." It's like a teen movie directed by Francois Truffaut.
The true heart and soul of the movie is Kristy's portrayal of Angel as a vulnerable loner who tries to impress. Her scene with Dillon in an empty boathouse as they attempt (and fail) to have sex for the first time shows a great talent at brash attitude covering up hurt. [Pardon the crappy YouTube rip]
In the second, and successful attempt to lose it to Dillon, the poignancy of the action actually changes the tone of the film from fun frolic to a more melancholy daze. It's a shame McNichol left acting by the time she hit 30. She pulls no punches in the final line of this second scene with Dillon in the boathouse. After a post-sex hug from Dillon, she pauses and utters to herself "God, I feel so lonesome."
Meanwhile, Ferris is attempting to seduce a much older counselor to no luck. I wonder in a 2017 remake they would allow a 15-year-old female character to lust after a thirty-something man, even if it was Armand Assante. It's odd this movie was originally rated R since most of the cast is all under 17 and it's oriented for a high-school audience. There's no nudity or violence, and the language would barely raise a PG eyebrow today.
Speaking of a remake, I picture Sofia Coppola or Mike Mills doing a bang-up job with the soft-focus, summer-faded glory and teens wise beyond their years (or at least trying to appear that way) that both directors excel in. Elle Fanning as Ferris maybe, and who would be a good Angel? Any ideas?
In a world of smart phones and the internet, could a "camp movie" exist like this that's not "camp" and have something deep to say to teenage girls? Do "teen movies" still do that?
"You people think that not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"
I titled this piece 'Endangered Species' because of the rarity of real, or should I say "real" (it's the movies after all) political thrillers that reflect society at large today.
The '70s seemed to be full of them: The Conversation, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, just to name a few. Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor can be added to the list. Released dead center of the '70s, after the end of Nixon /Watergate and Vietnam, Condor has the same paranoid, don't trust the government, conspiracy vibe as some of the best of this decade.
Robert Redford stars as Joe Turner, a low-level CIA researcher in NYC (code name: Condor) who comes back to his office after lunch to find that all his co-workers have been shot dead. He immediately escapes the office and is on the lam from mysterious assassins trying to kill him as well.
While on the run, Redford encounters Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) in a shop and forces her to provide him a hiding place in her apartment. During his short stay, they instantly fall in love. It's a bit of a silly plot point but with Redford and Dunaway in their beautiful primes, maybe it's believable?
An assassin (the always fantastic Max Von Sydow) is out on a CIA "clean-up" contract to kill Turner and protect info on a covert/rogue CIA operation to take over big oil in the Middle East. I won't go into the details here about the nefarious plot twists to silence the rogue plan but suffice to say it's all very believable 42 years later that the same thing could happen today.
I might semi-spoil the ending but suffice to say "going to the New York Times to leak the overarching CIA plot" may not be the happy ending that Turner is hoping for. It was the '70s and some of these new Hollywood films loved a freeze-framed, downer ending.
In 1975 when "news" meant newspapers, magazines, and three network TV channels and cynicism and distrusting the media was a bit less robust. But debunking lies and "fake news" conspiracies is racing back into the public eye in America, and with good reason.
Just in time for me to say this movie deserves a great reboot to modernize the storyline but still keep the paranoid tension and distrust that is the movie's core, there is a remakefilming this spring in Toronto for a ten-episode TV series.
Looking at the news, real and fake, I'm sure the writers have all the inspiration they need.
