films

As the Tides Turned: Hollywood in 1967 Through the Lens of Five Films ["The Graduate," "In the Heat of the Night," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and "Dr. Doolittle"--all Oscar best pic nominees for that year]

This article in today's New York Times about the above-titled, recently published book by Mark Harris makes very little sense--don't know if it's bad writing or too-heavy editorial redaction. Wrote some paragraphs (in boldface) to try to shore up what seem rather significant gaps or flaws in Janet Maslin's story published online today. The addendum is completely invented, but that's what happens when newspapers don't tell proper stories--people fill in their own facts.

The movies' new eagerness to push the envelope in 1967 is illustrated in different ways by "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate." In tribute to that spirit of change, "Pictures at a Revolution" begins as an aficionado of the French New Wave, Robert Benton, stole away from his job as Esquire's art director to watch "Jules and Jim" on an afternoon in 1963. Intrigued by a sense of wide-open opportunity, and working on the four- to five-year development process that seems par for the course, Mr. Benton and his partner, David Newman, were inspired to write "Bonnie and Clyde" in hopes of persuading François Truffaut to direct it.

They came reasonably close.

After two years of effort, miscommunications, and scheduling conflicts, Truffaut agreed to direct the picture. But star Warren Beatty, described by one of Harris' interviewees, Robert Evans, as a "towering Hollywood ego," wanted American Arthur Penn to direct. As an attempt at compromise, Mr. Benton also interviewed Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, and other continental heavyweights for the director slot, but ultimately Beatty prevailed.

Even Mr. Penn thought he was the wrong choice, and initially he sided with Mr. Benton against Beatty. With the years has come a change in perspective, and he now says, "Warren was right, the movie needed an American director. A French auteur would always have too much irony about these trashy American bandits."

Nevertheless it was a learning process for the fledgling writer and Mr. Benton acknowledges to Harris that "I'm glad I went through it."

And when the flirtation of "Bonnie and Clyde" with New Wave directors brought Mr. Truffaut and his friend Jean-Luc Godard together for a screening of a crime-spree film from the late '40s, Mr. Benton remembers thinking he was as close to heaven on earth as he would ever be.

"He now believes I was right?" Warren Beatty, the film’s star and producer, asks Mr. Harris about Arthur Penn, who directed "Bonnie and Clyde." "That’s funny, because I now believe I was wrong." Here and throughout "Pictures at a Revolution," there is a sense of reassessment and new perspective, with Mr. Harris as a thoughtful, unobtrusive catalyst for his interviewees' reflections.

Maslin also claims "Mr. Harris has his share of hair-raising particulars about, say, Rex Harrison (whose unhinged and abusive Dr. Dolittle seemed in need of his own doctor)" without telling us what any of them are--that's journalistic malpractice, right there.

girish on Joseph Cornell's films. This is a good summation of what's good about the films. (These movie blogs--boy--art geeks will never, ever, be this thorough.)

Still thinking about the films and their connection to Richard Prince, whose retrospective I saw a couple of days after Anthology screened the Cornell. The connection is the throwaway quality of the images, the deep investment in something trivial.

In Cornell's the case it was returning to the same images again and again, so they become fixations. The audience comes to love and be haunted by these meaningless filmic ephemera purchased by the foot in junk stores.

In Prince's case it's the investment of the "art aura" in advertising photos through careful cropping, enlargement, framing, and tony gallery-style presentation. All that for a dumb cosmetics ad. Yet one doesn't imagine he has the same longing that Cornell does--he's more of a hater.

When talking about Prince I just mean the early re-photography. The bile yielded something smart and profound, but then art world success necessitated rolling out a new product line every couple of years (or so it seems from the retrospective) and the time to obsess and be haunted from the perspective of total rejected loser-dom was lost.

Cornell made money off his boxes but rarely showed the films. One surmises that lack of exposure kept them pure somehow, maybe that's just being overly romantic. The boxes are ultra-romantic and I don't like them much.

His movie Charlie Wilson's War omits that the mujahadeen Wilson armed to fight the Soviets eventually came after the US with a spate of attacks culminating in the World Trade Center collapse. The movie is banned in Afghanistan. Yet most American movie reviewers thought it was wonderful.

Chalmers Johnson:

My own view is that if Charlie Wilson's War is a comedy, it's the kind that goes over well with a roomful of louts in a college fraternity house. Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi's summing-up for Cinematical: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia."

Joe McKay emailed the following list of problems with the highly flawed "Will Smith's I Am Legend" (spoilers). My thoughts are in italics:

I came home to this story in the New York Times ["Scientists Weigh Stem Cells' Role as Cancer Cause"]. YIKES! I really liked the premise of the movie.

The part with Emma Thompson announcing the cancer cure was the scariest moment.

If the serum worked on the rat why not try it on doggie? What the heck right? No need to strangle Sam so quick I say.

Shit, I thought he did the use the serum on the dog.

Why exactly did [Neville] have to die? Couldn't he have tossed the grenade from the door of that cubby hole and closed it really quick?

Beats the crap out of me.

How did the lady and the kid get there if the island was sealed off? Did they swim?

See below.

The zombies seem to be exhibiting pretty sophisticated behavior. They have a system of hierarchy, and they use dogs and lay traps. They have not "stopped being human." Maybe they want to kill [Neville] cause he keeps trying to "cure" them like they are gay.

If Akiva "Utter Hack" Goldsman had stuck to the Matheson story the "smart zombies laying traps" would have made perfect sense. Matheson imagined the dumb zombies were a second, pitiful stage of human before a third stage appeared. The third stagers were intelligent and civilized and figured out how to cure themselves of the degenerating effects of the bacillus (while still remaining night dwellers). Unfortunately Neville didn't know this and was killing nests of healthy zombies. So the girl was bait--it was the only explanation for her sudden appearance. I thought that was where the movie was going until I realized "Shit--there's going to be a colony of human survivors just to prove Neville's downer prognosis wrong." I walked out seething.

Previous post on this topic.

Update: HP (in a three way email confab with Joe and me about the movie) says this, about the "human colony of survivors" added for the happy ending:

So, she drives to a colony in Bethel, VT. You see, I'm from Vermont. I'm there right now. And Vermont is a museum for wealthy people from Boston, New York, etc. Now, I have a problem with this, but not like I used to, and I can get around it, except that all the people who have turned Vermont into a museum don't want to be straight about it. I mean, it's a hard thing to own up to. I'm actually glad that Vermont is a museum, and not something worse. Museums are pretty nice places. But, even if you could find your way to saying something like, "Hey, better a museum than Albany," no one really wants to hear that. Anyhow, that final scene where they open the gates, and there's this quaint, L.L. Bean advertisement with one token black woman standing all alone, kinda off to the side, but still smiling . . . oh my, my. I'd take the fucking zombies any day.

If you can't get your ass to Mars (Schwarzenegger, 1990), at least get it to Southland Tales while it's in the theatres. (City Cinemas in the East Village still has it.) This is Richard "Donny Darko" Kelly's sophomore effort, booed at Cannes and trimmed down for American release. Gorgeous music (by Moby and others), the same gliding, swooping camera as in Darko (watch for the stunner tracking shot in the zeppelin party scene), and a surfeit of echt-Angeleno characters and atmosphere (shirtless men, Danskinned women with bad dye jobs, ubiquitous tattoos, partying at the beach even in a state of emergency). Reviewers have compared the film to Lynch's Mulholland Drive but one also detects traces of Brewster McCloud and even Nashville. One of the few current (un)popular movies that tackles our culture of omnipresent surveillance and non-stop bogus terror alerts (beach parties notwithstanding), with some strange science fiction overlays including a gigantic offshore perpetual motion machine that harnesses "fluid karma" from the ocean waves and has possibly upset the spacetime continuum. Starring The Rock, who keeps freaking out and tapping his fingertips together in a very spazzy, disturbing, un-Rock-like way. Also featuring Sarah Michelle Gellar as the porn star Krysta Now, Jon Lovitz as an affectless assassin-cop, Justin Timberlake as a soldier watching Venice beach with a telescope and shooting anyone who looks suspicious, and Wood Harris (The Wire's "Avon Barksdale") with an absurd putty nose.