So why is it difficult to make movies about happy marriages? Because if you’ve got one, you don’t need to pay to see one. If you don’t, you really don’t want to watch it. So here are five of the best of those uncommon movie relationships.
1) Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man series) – Obviously. Was there ever a married couple that made it look easier? William Douglas and Myrna Loy seem like the cool, wisecracking couple that everyone hangs around at the party. And they solve crimes, too. Have another drink, Nora.
2) Chuck and Glennis Yeager (The Right Stuff) – Riding horses. Chasing each other through the high desert. Throwing the ball around with the kids in the yard. Getting toasted at Pancho’s after the kids are put to bed. Agonizing through death-defying flights. They ain’t got much, but they got each other, Flyboy.
3) Bart Tare and Annie Laurie Starr (Gun Crazy) – Sure, they’re sociopathic gun nuts on the run from Johnny Law. But who says nutjobs can’t have love, too? I mean, besides psychiatrists. These two fit each other like hand in glove, or, as Bart notes, “gun and ammunition.” The moment when they try to split in separate cars but cannot is one of the most romantic moments I’ve seen on film.
4) George and Mary Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life) – Well, come on.
5) The Constant Gardener (Justin and Tessa Quayle) – Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are not in an untroubled marriage, but a loving and passionate one. And few films capture the currencies of marriage for the shy partner as well as Fernando Mireilles’ African political potboiler.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Sex and the City: Shoot me now
I watched ten minutes of one episode of Sex and the City at one time. And I never wanted to go back. Therefore, I have zippo desire to see the big screen version, and I hope it reveals the show for what it is - a middling cult hit for the type of women who write for the lifestyle section at major newspapers. I expect that screening to be Bataan for me. And what's with the "Get Carried Away" tagline? I guess I shouldn't expect any more creativity than that.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Mamet and Spitzer
About David Mamet's much-discussed essay on his acceptance of his right-wing thinking found in today's Village Voice, I thought I would isolate one thing and talk a bit about it. He quotes a line from Mark Twain saying that if you want to know about human nature, you should run a country paper. Having worked at small newspapers, I can say that I know what he is talking about, and I know that he is basically correct.
Take this week's hot political topic - the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal and his wife Silda Wall's reaction to it. So many people chimed in to express their sympathy for his wife. In such situations, I hold off that sympathetic impulse, until it is proven justified. Why? If you have ground-level experience with the power-hungry or the skulduggerous (or in other cases, the evil) you know that their mates are rarely complete angels in their own right. Generally, saints don't marry the lowliest sinners. Even if Mrs. Spitzer is a wonderful mom who's the first person you call to trade car-pooling days, it wouldn't surprise me if, as reported, she was the only advisor telling him to not to resign. People seem shocked by this report, but it didn't surprise me at all. People tend to assume and accept the victimized wife scenario in these stories, but I always assume that the wife is not that different from the husband, and at a minimum, the wife knows that the husband is capable of something like this.
Take this week's hot political topic - the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal and his wife Silda Wall's reaction to it. So many people chimed in to express their sympathy for his wife. In such situations, I hold off that sympathetic impulse, until it is proven justified. Why? If you have ground-level experience with the power-hungry or the skulduggerous (or in other cases, the evil) you know that their mates are rarely complete angels in their own right. Generally, saints don't marry the lowliest sinners. Even if Mrs. Spitzer is a wonderful mom who's the first person you call to trade car-pooling days, it wouldn't surprise me if, as reported, she was the only advisor telling him to not to resign. People seem shocked by this report, but it didn't surprise me at all. People tend to assume and accept the victimized wife scenario in these stories, but I always assume that the wife is not that different from the husband, and at a minimum, the wife knows that the husband is capable of something like this.
On another board ....
On a message board that I hang out on, we're doing a movie scene draft. So far, in the first two rounds, I've chosen the race across the bridge in Jules and Jim and the "clop, clop" montage starting in LAX in Point Blank. I'll keep you updated.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Nothing funny
With reviews of Michael Haneke's remake of Funny Games flying left and right, I think I should take a minute to explain why I do not wish to see it. Actually, I don't think it will take a half-minute. I simply don't want to sit around for two hours watching Naomi Watts slowly and cruelly tortured to death. If that makes me a filmgoing wuss, so be it.
I understand that people believe that Haneke's violent film has artistic merit. Yet I suspect that it must be fairly blunt. I prefer my indict-the-audience-for-basking-in-violence film to be more subtle. I think Tony Scott's Man on Fire is a brilliant film that does the same drill with layering and a great deal of subtlety.
So that's my explanation in a nutshell. I never said it would be brilliant. Or long.
I understand that people believe that Haneke's violent film has artistic merit. Yet I suspect that it must be fairly blunt. I prefer my indict-the-audience-for-basking-in-violence film to be more subtle. I think Tony Scott's Man on Fire is a brilliant film that does the same drill with layering and a great deal of subtlety.
So that's my explanation in a nutshell. I never said it would be brilliant. Or long.
Monday, March 10, 2008
No dry run (The Bank Job)
The Bank Job [R]
Grade: B
From one look at the title, The Bank Job doesn’t promise much of a novel experience.
After all, “bank job” is one of the essential services performed by Englishmen in the movie world. Right next to “dry humour, “sophisticated villain,” “plastered ruffian, “ and “sexless aristocrat.” And we can’t forget Rowan Atkinson or Benny Hill.
So yes, The Bank Job rolls off the line with standard features. Movie tough guy Jason Statham pisses a vinegar path through a city of smut kings, bent cops, crooked gents, dizzy dames, and various and sundry slimy buggers. One hint of an indecipherable accent and you’re sure that someone in the cast must be named Alistair. Yet with smarts, tension, and director Roger Donaldson’s gunfire-quick delivery, The Bank Job shapes its theivery into an engrossing piece of sexy entertainment.
The kick of The Bank Job is its unusual story, one that may be based on unrevealed details of the actual 1971 Baker Street bank robbery in London. Whether you believe what you see depends on your trust in the screenwriters, who say they unearthed new details of the unsolved crime from heretofore unknown participants.
They advance a juicy theory about the robbery – allegedly British intelligence commissioned the heist in order to snag compromising sexual photos of a royal. Allegedly, the photos were being held in the safe deposit box of a London drug dealer who has appointed himself a civil rights leader (played by Jeffrey Wright). They don't make for much family reunion fun, but they do work as blackmail insurance to keep him out of the slammer. To snatch them, Scotland Yard leverages a drug-trafficking suspect named Martine Love (Saffrom Burrows) to find criminals who won't be linked to the agency. She persuades ex-flame Terry Leather (Jason Statham), a pug-faced petty criminal tempted to step into the big league for one big haul.
The British gangster film has made its own British invasion. England is shoveling them into the United States like synth-pop in eighties or Beatles clones in the sixties. Its stars (Clive Owen, Daniel Craig, Colin Farrelll) have become our stars. You feel like there’s a stone ceiling over which they are unlikely to rise in quality, a limit to what they can achieve. Yet if every piece of entertainment were such brisk and sexy craft, we, as film critics, could all drop our pens.
Grade: B
From one look at the title, The Bank Job doesn’t promise much of a novel experience.
After all, “bank job” is one of the essential services performed by Englishmen in the movie world. Right next to “dry humour, “sophisticated villain,” “plastered ruffian, “ and “sexless aristocrat.” And we can’t forget Rowan Atkinson or Benny Hill.
So yes, The Bank Job rolls off the line with standard features. Movie tough guy Jason Statham pisses a vinegar path through a city of smut kings, bent cops, crooked gents, dizzy dames, and various and sundry slimy buggers. One hint of an indecipherable accent and you’re sure that someone in the cast must be named Alistair. Yet with smarts, tension, and director Roger Donaldson’s gunfire-quick delivery, The Bank Job shapes its theivery into an engrossing piece of sexy entertainment.
The kick of The Bank Job is its unusual story, one that may be based on unrevealed details of the actual 1971 Baker Street bank robbery in London. Whether you believe what you see depends on your trust in the screenwriters, who say they unearthed new details of the unsolved crime from heretofore unknown participants.
They advance a juicy theory about the robbery – allegedly British intelligence commissioned the heist in order to snag compromising sexual photos of a royal. Allegedly, the photos were being held in the safe deposit box of a London drug dealer who has appointed himself a civil rights leader (played by Jeffrey Wright). They don't make for much family reunion fun, but they do work as blackmail insurance to keep him out of the slammer. To snatch them, Scotland Yard leverages a drug-trafficking suspect named Martine Love (Saffrom Burrows) to find criminals who won't be linked to the agency. She persuades ex-flame Terry Leather (Jason Statham), a pug-faced petty criminal tempted to step into the big league for one big haul.
The British gangster film has made its own British invasion. England is shoveling them into the United States like synth-pop in eighties or Beatles clones in the sixties. Its stars (Clive Owen, Daniel Craig, Colin Farrelll) have become our stars. You feel like there’s a stone ceiling over which they are unlikely to rise in quality, a limit to what they can achieve. Yet if every piece of entertainment were such brisk and sexy craft, we, as film critics, could all drop our pens.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Obama is ....
Over on Hollywood-Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells has taken to using comparisons to classic film characters to describe the travails of his beloved Barack Obama. I think we need a pool. Choose the next character that he will compare Obama to, or Hilary Clinton to. I've got Harry Lime of The Third Man. Let me know who you have.
SxSW info
The Screening Room, the Dallas Morning News movie blog, is doing a thorough job covering films showing at Austin's South by Southwest festival. It's moving so quickly over there that you half-expect the blog to go "Tilt."
Oink.
Susan King of the Los Angeles Times does a nice job running down Hollywood's greatest pigs. But her lede fails to recognize an important truth. Only a single "oink" achieves irony. Two makes you seem like a PTA mother who wears Christmas tree sweaters in December.
David Gordon Green
A fast and loose interview with David Gordon Green, one of the best young directors in America, and a graduate of Richardson High School, I believe, for the Dallas folks. People who have seen George Washington or All the Real Girls know what I'm talking about. He has a big year coming up, first with the in-limited-release Snow Angels, followed by a Judd Apatow collaboration, The Pineapple Express. I'm sure he's hoping that that is his ticket into movies that actually have budgets.
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