Filed under: Academy Awards, Commentary | Tags: Gus Van Sant, Milk, Sean Penn, The Times of Harvey Milk
[Elliot]
I will say, this is a movie that gets better and better the more I think of it (as opposed to Slumdog, which is just getting a little worse and worse). The problem with the first half, I think, was the lack of a clear antagonist and a clear goal. Once those came into play (as Dan White and the defeat of Prop 6, respectively), everything got better. For me, it was specifically the scene in the dark living room where Harvey and Cleve rally the troops and whatsisname decides to call his dad to come out of the closet where things picked up.
I do disagree with this assertion about how great the timing of the release was. Releasing this movie three weeks after the defeat of Prop 8 is like releasing Fahrenheit 9/11 on November 5th. The soonest this will have any impact is in two years, and given our president-elect’s feelings on gay marriage, more like four. And to say it’s the only movie to be released in direct conjunction with modern political events is just silly. More than “W.”? More than Fahrenheit 9/11? More than “The China Syndrome”? Come ON.
Sean Penn was fantastic, and in a year that’s been ho-hum for great leading male performances anyhow, he’s far and away my favorite of the year. This would all be more notable if Sean Penn wasn’t ALWAYS incredible, but he deserves all the awards attention and wins he’ll surely receive.
In the end, what made this movie so good when it WAS good and so powerful all-in-all was that the crew behind it clearly recognized what I’ve always found to be the most emotionally gripping part of the story. Even during The Times of Harvey Milk, I was never moved by the man himself or by his tragic assassination. What always hit me was that candlelight vigil, and the stories of how many gay men (and, I imagine, a handful of women) were emboldened by Harvey’s election and public image to come out of the closet themselves and actually take pride in something that had once been the darkest of taboos. Dustin Black and Gus Van Sant GOT this. They opened their movie with footage of gay men covering their faces and their shame as police raided their gay bars, and closed it with footage, both staged and actual, of gays–probably some of the same ones–proudly walking Frisco streets in that candlelight vigil. And the choice to use stock footage of the actual event was brilliant. It’s easy to look out at a Hollywood re-enactment of those lights stretched out for blocks and blocks and say “Okay, but it probably wasn’t REALLY that big”. And then we cut wide to the stock shot and go “Holy shit. It WAS that big”. What that procession showed is the REAL significance of Harvey Milk–he was no messiah, not a perfect guy, but in his too-short life he helped get American homosexuality started on a path from shame to Pride. The message was a bit too overblown at times (in a WHEELCHAIR? Seriously?!?) but I’m glad it was there.
[Eitan]
I loved the film, not necessarily because it was flawless cinema, but because of the emotions and political passions in me that it so obviously appealed to. I would never include Milk among the best films I’ve seen this year in terms of artistry or innovation or even purely on the grounds of “great narrative.” But it’s definitely a rousing film that no one I know would deem unwatchable. It will probably end up in my top five because it’s a perfect film for the person it’s about, even if it’s a little rough around the edges and a little overcooked in some places.
It was a fitting tribute for Harvey. In artistic tone and pacing, it hit all the right notes of his own life and career — sometimes he was the mundane, low key establishment figure, and sometimes he was the flamboyant, over-the-top rabblerouser; appropriately, the movie was a pretty typical political procedural sometimes and an almost surprisingly ambitious visual take on Milk’s life in other stretches. And Sean Penn’s performance, thank god, was not mere imitation. On the scale from Foxx to Hoffman, it was very, very close to Hoffman. A soulful, FUN, and very real performance that I think should be the prohibitive frontrunner for Best Actor.
I think it will make the final five, and I would give it decent odds for a win — given the POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES, if not necessarily the particular merits of the film itself. If Hollywood wants to come back from three bleak, bloody years with a rousing, inspired vote for a film that matches both the optimism of the Obama election and the utter disbelief that many are feeling over the passage of Prop 8, Milk is basically tailor made. I cannot think of a single film in recent memory whose subject, themes, and artistic vision (even though this seems like it was a somewhat hands-off project) were so closely attuned to the exact political climate of the day.
Can you name any prominent, awards-bound films in the last, say, ten years whose release circumstances were as conducive to winning as Milk’s — if we’re going to be cynical but honest and view AMPAS as a temperamental voting bloc who usually care about things other than pure artistic merit? Maybe Good Night and Good Luck, but that’s a pretty universal morality play. Maybe Munich. But really, nothing comes to mind.
Eitan
Filed under: Academy Awards, Commentary | Tags: Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon, Richard Nixon, Sam Rockwell
[Elliot]
Because I’m a masochist, I walked straight down the hall after my 3-hours-and-change screenwriting class tonight to catch the 2-hours-and-change “Frost/Nixon”.
Overall, it doesn’t strike me as being a serious Oscar contender. It’s roughly what you’d expect from the Ron Howard/Peter Morgan pedigree: a very capably-made film that covers all the basics but fails to really hit home on the emotional level that’s really required for a BP nom.
What works:
Frank Langella, whose Nixon starts out as just a good impression, but in the second half he really has the opportunity to explore this character and get at what makes him tick.
The basic story, which is interesting enough to more than hold our interest; the film never dragged, kept you on your toes and all that good stuff.
What doesn’t:
Most of the supporting performances and characters, which are not only painted too thinly in relation to the eponymous Two, but are also pretty universally ho-hum in terms of performances. The usually-great Michael Sheen is on autopilot, Sam Rockwell gives the worst of the three performances I’ve seen him give this year, and Kevin Bacon and “Vicky Cristina”’s Rebecca Hall get throwaway roles.
There’s a really lame expository technique used here that I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen in any other movie, probably because it’s so inherently stupid. During the first act, we are treated to a series of talking head interviews with key players in the story in which they set the historical scene. Only, instead of an actual interview with Frost researcher James Reston, Jr., we get a mock interview with Sam Rockwell, who plays him in the film. The interviews are shot like a real interview, with dialogue made to sound ad-libbed and with care even taken to make the film look like typical 1970s stock, so it’s disorienting to see Sam Rockwell claim to BE the character even in an interview setting, particularly considering Reston is still alive. Howard ought to have taken a page from George Clooney’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and interviewed the actual figures. It’s hard to explain why this technique feels so wrong, but it really does–there were audible titters in the theater the first time Rockwell came up. This stopped after the first 15 minutes or so, so I was ready to move on, figuring that our long opening credits nightmare was over, but they came back to it several more times over the course of the film.
The treatment of Nixon himself was nuanced, and allowed the man a chance to give us his side of the story, but I would have liked more. The problem is that for the story to work, Nixon has to be the antagonist, so for dramatic purposes, Morgan COULDN’T have written him too sympathetically, but after seeing how sympathetically Oliver Stone was able to portray W in “W.” (and because I’m just a big Nixon apologist) I would have liked to see the man as something more than just the Face of Watergate.
Overall, it’s a fascinating film for the raw information it gives you and for Langella’s work, but don’t expect to see more than a nom or two at this year’s awards. I give it a Metacritic 70.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Animal Movies, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Dog Movies
No, I do not care even for an instant to defend the Dog Movie genre. In fact, I’m more than happy to throw out the Animal Movie genre altogether. As far as I can tell, the rare animal-movie successes (Babe, Duma) are such only because the human story is interesting enough that the animal story is forgivable. And I’ll concede the quality of the charming–if overused–talking animal animated film (I’m a big fan of The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and Madagascar in varying degrees). But I think you’re missing the ball on the appeal of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Eitan. Pathetic though it may be, BHC is the first film in my memory with a wide release that has a leading cast of all-Hispanic characters. Okay, granted, they’re dogs, but bear with me here. It’s a distinction that would have been lost on me had I not seen the trailer in a densely Latino-populated Los Angeles neighborhood (so much so that at this particular theater major releases were shown at select times with Spanish subtitles!). I rolled my eyes like a good film nerd, but the audience was laughing at all the right moments. BHC won’t break any box-office records, but look for it to do very well among a usually-untargeted Hispanic population. Just my two pesos.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Charles Grodin, Dog Movies, Milo and Otis, Movie Studios, Norman Mailer, The Shaggy Dog
Every day, while on the bus on my way to work, I pass by a bus stop that — without a single exception — touts a particularly heinous upcoming release. At the beginning of the summer, it was Space Chimps. Then, it was Swing Vote, a film with a concept so vomit-worthy I actually had to email Elliot to make sure it actually existed. Now, the benevolent MetroBus team has replaced Kevin Costner’s smug mug with — well, isn’t that precious — Beverly Hills Chihuahua. First, I would like to find out who exactly is selecting the movies for street-side advertising. Is there something particularly awful about College Park that we don’t deserve a poster for, I don’t know, the (almost-) SECOND HIGHEST GROSSING FILM OF ALL TIME? Is there some guy in an office somewhere with a rubber stamp, chewing on a cigar, saying things, like, “College Park? FUCK EM. Those assholes get Costner and a tiny dog for all of August!”
Secondly, I would like to take this lemon and make some lemonade from it. The lemonade I speak of, of course, is an unflinching critique of the dog movie. Looking at Beverly Hills Chihuahua, it has a mildly acceptable pedigree (haw haw). Directed by Raja Gosnell, editor of almost a dozen B.O. heavy-hitters from the late 80’s/early 90’s (Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone, Rookie of the Year, Pretty Woman) and director of a handful of truly awful B.O. heavy-hitters from the late 90’s/early 00’s (Never Been Kissed, Big Momma’s House, BOTH Scooby Doo movies, etc.), and starring Drew Barrymore, Salma Hayek, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cheech Marin (!!!), and P.T. Anderson mainstay Luis Guzman, you can imagine why a studio executive would throw some cash at this flick. “It’s like Homeward Bound meets Delta Farce,” Gosnell must have insisted. “Can I pay you in pastries?” Roy Disney must have asked. (This is how Hollywood works, I assume.)
On IMDB, the top question in the FAQ is, “Is this based on a novel?” I shudder to think that I live in the same country as someone who genuinely wants to know if there is a Beverly Hills Chihuaha novel available. (If there is, though, I bet Norman Mailer wrote it.)
What I wonder is how live-action family-dog movies keep getting made, year after year, flop after flop. The recent high point, all things considered, was Beethoven (I don’t include Benji, which one IMDB user calls “The Best Dog Movie Ever Made,” simply because it came out 20 years before the dog-movie renaissance, and I don’t include Eight Below, which is an expertly made survival film that just so happens to feature dogs). When the pinnacle film of a particular genre stars Charles Grodin, you know there’s a serious problem. Since that film (which I still, for some reason, hold near and dear, despite the fact that I probably haven’t seen it since I was six), we have been treated to a nonstop parade of lowest-common-denominator crap that get the greenlight if for no other reason than just the fact that they tend to break even and fill out the studio’s calendar during sluggish B.O. months.
They come in several different flavors — sports dogs, buddy dogs, intergalactic pilot dogs. You name a profession, and there is almost certainly a film dog who held down that job. The stories are all seemingly rooted in the formula made famous by Lassie, Benji, and Cujo. These aren’t great films, but they speak to the fundamental and mysterious relationships that humans — especially children — feel with their canine companions. Watching them, you’re reminded of a long-ago era when boys were boys and dogs were dogs; the chemistry they shared was based in real family experience and categorically eschewed supernatural gimmicks (the dog can dunk! the dog is a superhero! the dog can tolerate Cuba Gooding, Jr.!).
The modern family-dog movies are all founded in the crass assumption that if a dog is doing something that a dog should not be physically able to do, like be the president or answer the phones in a high-powered law firm or be married to Kristin Davis, kids will eat it up. Regrettably, the assumption is almost always true, which is why adorable gems like Milo and Otis — arguably the masterpiece of the genre, not only because of the iconic Dudley Moore narration, but because it is simply about animals acting in a manner befitting them — get thrown under the bus, and The Shaggy Dog makes $16 million its opening weekend.
There is seemingly nothing stopping the dog-movie genre from continuing to be an classless, artless juggernaut. Beverly Hills Chihuahua will get rave reviews from the only audience that counts: obnoxious kids and the wallets of their sad, suburban, Vicodin-chomping moms.
Care to defend the family-dog movie?
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Celebrity Run-ins, Richard Linklater, Speed Levitch, Waking Life
I’ve always meant to pick up a copy of The Cruise, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Funny story about Speed Levitch, though. I went to a Weezer concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion in the summer of 2002, and a bunch of bands I liked then even though I knew deep in my heart that they sucked (Sparta, Dashboard Confessional) were opening. I was mulling around on the grass, waiting for friends, when I spotted someone drinking a beer and checking out all the lame mix of hipsters, frat guys and HFS kids stomping all over the fairgrounds. It was Brian Bell — guitarist from Weezer — and no one was approaching him! “Holy shit,” I thought, “this might be as close as I’ll ever get to this band!” (I did not know then, of course, that they would later release “Beverly Hills” and “Pork and Beans.” Had I known, I would have marked my distance with a 50 foot pole.)
The kids at this Weezer show were the kind of monumentally stupid fans who really liked “Island in the Sun” and that video with the Muppets, so it was no surprise that they didn’t recognize Rivers Cuomo’s right-hand-man. As I approached Brian Bell, however, I noticed that he was standing and chatting with a friend. I instantly recognized him as the dude with the crazy hair from Waking Life. Yes, it was Speed Levitch himself. A million thoughts rushed through my head — should I tell him how much his last movie sucked? Should I chide him for tossing around Kierkegaard’s name like it was Danielle Steel’s? Should I ask him what the fuck he meant by “the ongoing WOW is happening right NOW?” Should I yell, “Salsa dance with this confusion, motherfucker!” and then punch him in the face and run off? The guy may be great in The Cruise, but his animated self is far less appealing to me.
Anyway, I ended up going up to the two of them and, to Brian Bell’s surprise, I started making small talk with Speed about working with Richard Linklater and what it was like to see his cartoon self, and complimenting him about the innovative movies he chose to star in. Then he signed the red Converse All-Stars I still have in my closet. I gave Brian Bell a knowing nod, something akin to, “Thank me later for not doing the lame ‘I’m your biggest fan’ bullshit and embarrassing you.” In a way, though, talking to Speed Levitch was probably the best way — in my 9th grader brain — to show the guitarist from Weezer that I was a cool guy. Some pathetic part of me still hopes to this day that Brian Bell thought it was cool that I actually knew who his weirdo friend was.
So that’s the story of how I almost insulted Speed Levitch to his face, and ended up with his John Hancock on a pair of sneakers. Come to think of it, it’s a story that Speed Levitch would probably love.
Filed under: Classic Cinema, Commentary, Directors | Tags: Annie Hall, Manhattan, New York movies, The Cruise
Manhattan’s opening is of course wonderful, though as you said the film that follows leaves much to be desired. And thank you for mentioning Annie Hall! When I was thinking of my response to your Best Openings post, Annie Hall came immediately to mind, but when I went to type it up it somehow got lost. Woody’s monologue perfectly sets the stage for the personal, bittersweet story to follow, one that isn’t afraid to break all the rules of filmic storytelling (the fourth wall being just the first). I flipped through a draft of the Annie Hall screenplay a couple of years ago, and was surprised to see that the opening monologue had been written just as a series of ideas, some of which made it into the final cut and some of which didn’t. My impression is that at least part of that opening scene was improvised. As far as New York movies go, however, I think Annie Hall captures L.A. far better than it does the Big Apple.
Your “New York Movies” list is a pretty solid one, but for my money the movie that captures New York City the best is one that neither you nor most people have ever seen. The Cruise has been making the rounds on the film-geek circuit for years now.
The Cruise (1998)
A documentary directed by Bennett Miller, who went on to an Oscar nomination for his sophomore effort, Capote, The Cruise follows New York City tour guide and Manhattan island celebrity Timothy “Speed” Levitch as he leads tours of the mythical city by day, and lives the grungier life of a typical New Yorker by night. Shot in Manhattan’s black and white (albeit on a digital camera), The Cruise finds moments in the city, through Speed’s eyes, that no tourist ever could. On his tour bus, Speed points out the Chrysler Building (he sardonically quotes Lewis Mumford’s description of its crest as “uninspired voluptuousness”) and other classic landmarks (“if architecture is the history of all phallic emotion, the Empire State Building is utter catharsis”). At night, a mere man-on-the-street, he gestures toward the jail where he did a brief stint for some civil disobedience, and guides us through the friend’s apartment where he has been sleeping for lack of a home. I first watched The Cruise last summer after my third week or so of living in Manhattan, and already I suspected it was the most accurate portrait of the city imaginable. As the months went on, every experience I had in the city only confirmed my suspicion. Manhattan and Do the Right Thing may top every top-ten list, but for me The Cruise is unbeatable.
Filed under: Classic Cinema, Commentary, Directors | Tags: Annie Hall, Manhattan, New York City, Opening Scenes, Woody Allen
Interestingly enough, one of my all-time favorite opening scenes comes from a movie whose antecedent 90 minutes are among my all-time least favorite: Manhattan.
Woody Allen has always been the king of the pitch-perfect opening scene. Witness Annie Hall’s stark, self-deprecating minimalism:
On one hand, it’s a flawless and instant introduction to Alvy Singer, but it also performs another important task by establishing a sort of table of contents for the film that is to follow. The structure of the entire film is dictated by these first 90 seconds or so, and you can already map out the way the conflicts and ideas are going to play out. People often criticize Woody Allen for always playing himself, but ironically enough, the film in which he plays himself with the greatest transparency and precision is also by far his best film and his best performance.
As an opening scene, this works because it is measures out the distance we need to use to separate ourselves from the action of the film: he breaks the fourth wall and invites us in, but we mustn’t come too close because we should constantly be aware that this is an artifice so clever that we can hardly tell the difference between the storyteller on one side of the camera and the storyteller on the other side.
The opening scene in Manhattan is charmingly self-referential. Allen pokes fun at the idealization of black and white Manhattan, while giving us the transcendently beautiful Konigsburg images and Gershwin score that so effortlessly convey the essence of New York City’s floating metropolis. He starts off the film as though he were writing a book, but the theme drops off right at the end of the opening credits, which is, I suppose, just another charming mobius-strip element of the opener — he wishes he could write the definitive romantic New York novel and then is too overwhelmed by the mere idea to even continue. Maybe that excuses the lackluster (and unrightfully worshipped) film to follow; it’s hardly a great film about Manhattan itself and a lot more like his weak squabbling-couples films than his great odes to the mysteries and romance of his hometown. As an opener, though, this scene works perfectly. It’s perfectly post-modern, perfectly romantic, and perfectly cued and scored to suggest the bumbling work in progress of a writer who should know better than to try to capture the whole of New York in a single film.
Not to mention the fact that Annie Hall is probably the definitive film about New York, followed by Do the Right Thing, Once Upon a Time in America, Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver. Any I’m forgetting?
Filed under: Commentary
[Eitan]
After watching American Movie with my cult film workshop tonight, I finally got a chance to watch the full-length version of Coven, which is the project Mark Borchardt slaves over for most of the documentary. The first thing I noticed was how little of the film’s tone and content is actually telegraphed into Chris Smith and Sarah Price’s mostly effective documentary. Coven is clearly not as good a film as American Movie, which is about as good an investigation of independent filmmaking as there is out there. But seeing it in full, I began to be a bit suspicious of Price and Smith’s methods and wondered what ended up on the cutting room floor of their Sundance smash hit film.
There are a lot of folks who accuse Smith and Price of mocking Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank through selective editing. Honestly, I can’t imagine what kind of material the ridiculous filmmaker and his even more ridiculous friend could provide for the documentarians that wouldn’t make them look like psychotic hicks on a fool’s errand. But I tend to think that Smith and Price do their best with Borchardt, and portray him as warmly as possible, given the person they were dealing with. Yes, he spends a ton of money on what appears to be a dead-end slasher project, and yes, he is clearly shown to be a loner and an alcoholic. But there is also some great footage of him doing the heavy lifting, both literally and figuratively, on his project — getting glass smashed all over him, being dragged through the mud, and camping out in the University of Wisconsin film editing suite with family and friends who love him enough to help him splice for hours and hours and hours.
What surprised me upon watching Coven, though, was that it bears little resemblance to the film we think Borchardt is making while watching American Movie. Coven is predictably awful, but Borchardt makes use of a shockingly immersive and inventive visual vocabulary. Many of the iconic shots from the short film end up in the documentary, but a lot is left out, namely the entire plot about Borchardt’s character joining a self-help group which, according to him, “isn’t very helpful.” Looking back on American Movie, I appreciate that Smith and Price go to great lengths to humanize the process of DIY fimmaking, giving shape to Borchardt’s personal life through several scenes, for example, where he’s watching the Packers on TV. But the documentary ultimately misses the forest for the trees; I would rather have a more in-depth look at the location shooting for Coven than a charming, holistic look at the filmmaker’s home life. Ultimately, the documentary falls extremely short of giving us a complete idea behind the motivations for making Coven and the actual process of creating it. The fact that several of the main actors and actresses in Borchardt’s film, including female lead Miriam Frost, are completely left out of the documentary is very telling. Smith and Price may have set out to make a film about filmmaking, but the tangents far outflank the good intentions.
Below the cut, I’ve posted some excellent frames from Coven. If the film was tidied up a bit, it would look positively gorgeous in 16mm black and white. As it is, the stock is generally muddy, but it’s not hard to get the sense that Borchardt actually does know what he’s doing. It’s too bad that Northwestern was never finished.
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