This is a bunch of movie reviews and mini-essays by a favourite critic of mine who almost always agrees with me (or is it the other way around) exceptThis is a bunch of movie reviews and mini-essays by a favourite critic of mine who almost always agrees with me (or is it the other way around) except he sometimes inexplicably likes the wrong thing. The idea (it’s a bit cutesy) is that each chapter is about The Films That Made Me….feel or ponder various things – for what it’s worth (very little no doubt) here’s how it pans out.
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME FEEL GOOD
He doesn’t mean feel-good movies, he means movies that made him feel good because they are good movies. What kind of linguistic legerdemain is this! In fact some of them are actually feel-bad movies, but they made him feel good because they are good movies. His choice includes
Juno Margaret Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Under the Skin
I agree with those – but not
Synecdoche, New York – Pete, you got to be kidding - that is a pour gasoline over yourself and light a match movie
Recentish ones for me :
A Thursday Boiling Point 7 Prisoners ( a feel bad one!) Red Rocket Wild Men The Innocents Mid-August Lunch
[image]
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME FEEL BAD
Likewise he thinks these are bad movies so they made him feel bad. Well, they were mostly a lot of obvious dreck that he had to watch because he’s paid to. But he included Babel on this list. WTF?
Some recent ones I saw that some people think are good but really were bad
Licorice Pizza The Invisible Man Mary Poppins Returns Mandy Me Before You
That list is practically endless. Let’s move on.
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME LAUGH
His list includes some good ones –
Being John Malkovich 2 Days in Paris This is 40 The Wolf of Wall Street What we do in the Shadows Toni Erdmann
But really, Peter, not Borat it’s eurrrghhhhh.
Good comedies are difficult to make. I don’t have many favourite comedies. So I’ll stick with
The Gentlemen The Death of Stalin The Happiest Days of Your Life (an old one - Alistair Sim and Margaret Rutherford)
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME CRY
I can’t disagree with
Toy Story 2 ET Still Alice
And I would add
The Father The Assistant Stan and Ollie Your Name
[image]
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME SCARED
Peter says (amongst many others)
Audition Paranormal Activity Threads Get Out
No problem, but then he adds
Suspiria (why does everybody like this brightly coloured nonsense) It Follows The Cabin in the Woods
Instead, try these
Capture kill Release Be my Cat You’re Next Eden Lake Martyrs
If they don’t scare you nothing will.
[image]
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME REFLECT ON CHILDHOOD
He picks out some good ones including
Persepolis Toy Story 3 When Marnie was There
I would like to add the following and say that modern movies feature many wonderful performances by kids
Eighth Grade Capernaum The Quiet Girl Leave no Trace The Florida Project The Golden Dream Tomboy Nobody Knows
There are five other categories but that’s enough for one review.
This is a great idea for a book, choose your favourite year in movies and write three chatty funny undull pages about 100 movies from your favourite yThis is a great idea for a book, choose your favourite year in movies and write three chatty funny undull pages about 100 movies from your favourite year stuffed with anecdotes from original interviews with players or crew on these movies. When I checked my own detailed records, I found that I almost agreed with Robert Sellers, 1971 WAS far and away the best year in movies up to then. Truly! (It was later beaten (imho) by 1994 and 1995.) But 14 of my favourite movies were made in this remarkable year*. That’s a lot for me.
In total I have seen 54 of his 100 movies. I must say that as well as the good stuff (Vanishing Point, The Panic in Needle Park, Klute) he loves to include ultra cheesy horror (The Abominable Dr Phibes, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Hands of the Ripper - not my thing) and some off the wall weird stuff (200 Motels, WR Mysteries of the Organism, Johnny Got his Gun) so all in all it’s a great selection.
*Walkabout [image]
Harold and Maude The Beguiled Wake in Fright [image]
A Clockwork Orange Straw Dogs The Devils Dirty Harry Blanche [image] Get Carter The Last Picture Show The Decameron The French Connection 10 Rillington Place
This is all about Hollywood directors, so don’t look for Kiarostami, Kielowski or Herzog; also missing are Spike Lee, Richard Linklater and the Coen BThis is all about Hollywood directors, so don’t look for Kiarostami, Kielowski or Herzog; also missing are Spike Lee, Richard Linklater and the Coen Brothers. But what we do have in here is a parade of fabulous filmmakers, each of whom get a 5 or 6 page whistlestop career summary and a checklist of Must See movies plus lotsa great pix.
Sloan de Forest’s heart is in the right place. She ticks Hollywood off for excluding women and Black directors mostly, she shudders at the well-known Woody Allen and Polanski scandals, and she points out great forgotten gems made by all these directors.
But man, she is a bland writer. She can spot a tedious uninformative quote at 50 yards :
Upon Mervn LeRoy’s death in 1987, critic Charles Champlin identified the common thread found in all of the producer/director’s films : “They were meant to move audiences strongly – to tears, laughter, pride, fear, satisfaction. And most of them did.”
The New York Times in 1942 praised Casablanca as “a highly entertaining and even inspiring film that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap”
Biographer George Mast on Howard Hawks : “Hawks’ stories might be seen as complicated webs of causality in which each of the parts functions efficiently and effortlessly in producing the whole.”
I mean, we would hope you could say all these things about every movie ever made. Well, maybe you couldn’t say them about Spider Baby. That one is pure batshit.
[image]
One thing this book reminded me of was how very many of the great Hollywood directors were German : Fritz Lang Erich von Stroheim Ernst Lubitsch Josef von Sternberg William Wyler Otto Preminger Douglas Sirk Billy Wilder Fred Zinnemann
Well, however colourlessly Sloan writes about these 56 directors she cannot help but enthuse and excite the film fan reader, because on every page you are thinking “oh yeah, I gotta see that one again!” or “hey, I never heard of that one, sounds great”; and after all she crams such a vast amount of information into 300 pages, so I should stop being so mean – this is a nice book! Recommended!...more
Checking my list of favourite films from the 60s I see Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey, Whistle Down the Wind, ViChecking my list of favourite films from the 60s I see Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey, Whistle Down the Wind, Victim all from 1960 and 61… and all the way along to Deep End and Performance in 1969/70. Lots of great British movies. What happened in the 70s? Hardly any at all! Poof! Vanished.
These 60s movies had a whole narrative arc of their own, starting off in black and white and ending in psychedelical colour, starting off in the gritty working-class wastelands of The North in all those Kitchen Sink grumpy-but-poetic dramas (Billy Liar, This Sporting Life) and migrating in 1965 to Swinging London ™ (Georgy Girl, Wonderwall). En route heaps of brand new stars were discovered (Albert Finney, David Hemmings, Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave) along with directors like Lindsay Anderson, Ken Russell and John Boorman. There was a lot going on.
[image]
(Some of these movies do not pass the test of time.)
Robert Murphy astounded me by 1) having apparently been able to watch every good and terrible 60s British movie (he complains in the introduction that he couldn’t get to see The Mark (1961) or The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963) but that’s about all he missed); and 2) being able to write such a splendid encyclopedic book of dense factpacked pages in a brisk style which entirely avoids the gruesome here-comes-another-migraine filmcriticspeak that turns so many books on film into a form of torture.
[image]
So we bowl merrily along, and all these movies throw up many intriguing ideas as they clash and blend with each other. Well of course, movies are about the stuff that’s going on when they’re made, they’re making all kinds of statements even if they think they’re just simple comedies or heist pictures. In your detailed survey of a decade of films you are therefore writing a social history too.
[image]
The 60s only lasted for ten years (in common with many other decades) and what happened to British film after 1970 is a tangled and not very edifying tale but heck, this is what happens to countries and their arts, they flourish and then they fade like flowers; French cinema up to the 1970s was stuffed with greatness – now? Not so much. Italians had at least 20 years of wonderful stuff but now? I don’t know. Now we have Korean cinema, a thing of wonder. It won’t last forever either. Greatness strikes where it pleases....more
First off, this is the perfect Christmas present for the old squinty eyed grizzled taciturn grouchy male relative in your life, who is bound to love CFirst off, this is the perfect Christmas present for the old squinty eyed grizzled taciturn grouchy male relative in your life, who is bound to love Clint Eastwood. This is an extremely lovingly produced book and it comes in a cool slipcase and looks a treat. There are lots of big pix of Clint looking sour and disgusted, all old geezers will love this.
Many thoughts run through your mind when you read through the amazing long and brilliant film career of Clint. At the age of 84 he directed American Sniper (2014) and that became his biggest hit. Now he’s 93 and there’s a new movie in production. It will be number 47. Like Bob Dylan he will not stop and is proving that ancient guys can still do more than just complain. Like Bob Dylan he can say
I go right to the edge, I go right to the end I go right where all things lost are made good again I sing the songs of experience like William Blake I have no apologies to make I drive fast cars, and I eat fast foods I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods I contain multitudes
Clint directs movies at a furious pace, he brings them in under schedule and under budget, he knows what the crowd likes (badass cops, weird Western epics, real life stories) and some of those are great (Unforgiven, Mystic River, A Perfect World) and some are boring and predictable (The Rookie, Absolute Power, Blood Work) but then he throws in eccentric unexpected stuff too (High Plains Drifter, Honkytonk Man, Bird, Letters from Iwo Jima). Sometimes his more eccentric movies are total flops. He just moves onto the next thing.
The only film director I can compare with Clint is Woody Allen who also cranks ‘em out and is officially ancient but still cranking (latest movie directed at age 88). But Woody has only made one decent movie (Blue Jasmine) since the 1990s; he likes to make pretty tourist movies like To Rome with Love and Midnight in Paris which his regular fans seem to lap up but would have to agree that the soup is reheated, and it’s always parsnip, the range is very narrow. So there’s no comparison.
If there is a thread running through many, maybe most, of Clint’s movies (the good ones that is) it would be scrutinised masculinity – the male heroes are often not heroic, their values shown to be dubious at best, their actions questionable. In Unforgiven there is this bit of dialogue
Bystander: You just shot an unarmed man!
William Munny : Well he shoulda armed hisself.
This assessment of nearly 60 years of movies is solid, very readable, with no fancypants film critic-speak. When Ian Nathan thinks a movie is a dud he will say so. He perhaps doesn’t spend enough time discussing the controversial ones, such as American Sniper, but this is not a long book and there are so damn many movies to cover, so he races on.
Recommended for all Clint fans. You don’t have to be old and grumpy.
The introduction explains that the purpose of this book is to illustrate the history of film using only movies that pass the Bechdel Test which as I’mThe introduction explains that the purpose of this book is to illustrate the history of film using only movies that pass the Bechdel Test which as I’m sure you know is a movie that a) features at least two women who b) talk to each other c) about something other than a man.
It stretches from “The Patsy” (1928) to “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar” (2021) and from such household names as “Thelma and Louise" and “Clueless” to such obscurities as “Black Girl” (Senegal 1966) and “Only Yesterday” (Japan 1991). And there is no flinching away from difficult films either – “Celine and Julie Go Boating” (3 hours 15 minutes of whimsy) and “Jeanne Dielman” (3 hours 20 minutes of minimalist agony) are included along with the crowdpleasers. I have seen 59 of the 100 films listed here. I added a bunch of titles to my own Must Watch list.
As always, there are a few buts.
- It would have been much lovelier to have photos & stills from the movies instead of only graphic illustrations (apologies to Bea Crespo) but I guess there were budgetary considerations.
- several of these movies have very low imdb ratings, if that’s a consideration at all (some people put a lot of weight on imdb ratings).
- Mallory Andrews doesn’t seem to be 100% enthusiastic about some of these movies! Take “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”. I’m not myself clear how this movie passes the Bechdel test given that the leads are all male (and played by straight actors). I liked this movie well enough when I saw it way back when, can’t think how it stands up now. Mallory says it was a landmark in LGBT filmmaking, and that has got to be right. She adds “which isn’t to say that the movie doesn’t have some issues…Terence Stamp’s portrayal of a transperson…would especially not sit right today”. Then she adds that “the absolute worst of the film’s flaws is a totally useless subplot involving a Filipino mail-order bride that strays into out-and-out racism”. I’m thinking why include such a problem movie in a best feminist films list at all?
But heck - It’s a pretty neat book and is Recommended for all film fans.
95% of this book is Quentin’s vastly knowledgeable vastly excitable helter-skelter through the film decade they call THE SEVENTIES, and when we say TH95% of this book is Quentin’s vastly knowledgeable vastly excitable helter-skelter through the film decade they call THE SEVENTIES, and when we say THE SEVENTIES we mean here a whole ton of violent movies made in America very often about revenge in the 70s. Other types of film do not get a look in. Do not come here expecting a consideration of the romcom or a finely balanced critique of the works of Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda or Walerian Borowcyk.
And it is very entertaining to follow Quentin’s mind moving fast, finding what is real about this or that movie, and always you will be arguing with him.
(Note – before we proceed any further, let the record show that Quentin is a very foulmouthed film critic who can hardly let a paragraph go by without a generous helping of f words. This will annoy some of the straighter-laced.)
[image]
HUGELY INAPPROPRIATE
Now, Quentin was born in 1963, so it came as something of a shock to read about the movies he saw at the age of 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 – stuff like Dirty Harry, Deliverance, The Wild Bunch, Carnal Knowledge and Joe – he makes a great point of how lucky he was to hoover up all these movies at such a young age:
At the age of seven, I first attended a show at the Tiffany when my mother and my stepfather took me to see a double feature: John G Avildsen’s Joe and Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa?
Wait a minute, you saw a double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa at seven?
You bet I did.
You may not know Joe (I saw it only recently) it’s all about a drunken factory worker named Joe, who hates hippies, Black people, and is continually ranting and raving about them and fantasizing about killing a hippy or a black person. There is unadulterated racism through the whole movie which ends with a gun massacre. It’s not a comedy. Peter Boyle’s performance as the vile Joe is terrifying and unforgettable.
Quentin says
At the time I saw Joe it was easily the ugliest movie I’d ever (a spot it held till four years later when I saw The Last House on the Left)
Wait! He saw that famous video nasty which the wimpy British Board of Film Classification banned until 2008 at the age of 11! One critic said :
Last House on the Left is a sick, disgusting and unrelenting dirge of a horror film. If you enjoy watching women being raped and tortured to the most inappropriate music imaginable, this is for you.
I imagine that would make both the 11 year old Quentin and the current 59 year old Quentin lol till they could lol no more.
So the very young Quentin saw all these R rated movies because you could do that IF accompanied by an adult, which was either his mother or his mother’s boyfriend, or both. He had a very irresponsible mother. We should be grateful, he surely was.
I didn’t see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre when it was first released in 1974 [he was 11]. Then, I was still dependent on an adult taking me to see something like that. It wasn’t like my mother forbade me to see it. It’s just that she wasn’t interested in going out and seeing something called The Texas chain Saw Massacre… I did see it about two years later [when he was 13]
[image]
WHAT WE SEE WHEN WE SEE A MOVIE
I remember once Quentin said that he didn’t want Reservoir Dogs to be remembered as “you know, the one where the guy cuts his ear off” but as we read these rollicking assessments of some of his (frequently obscure) favourites we find that a movie can indeed be great for only one thing – for instance Steve McQueen’s ineffable cool in Bullitt
Bullit does have a story. But it’s not a memorable story, nor does it have anything to do with what you respond to in the movie…. Nobody in the history of movies did nothing like Steve McQueen
In Supervixens there’s a “bathtub murder scene” and Quentin loves the movie for that one single scene. Movies can be great for a single scene, a single actor, an opening sequence, the script, a soundtrack, the cinematography, when the rest of the movie is junk. A great performance in a movie with a ridiculous script. A wonderful sequence in a throwaway thriller. Of course some rare times everything comes together in a perfect movie. Example of a perfect movie for Quentin : The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (Example of a perfect movie for me : City of Lost Children).
But when they consider the movie as a whole, instead of disassembling it into its parts, movie fans like Quentin see metaphor everywhere, I mean like everywhere. Taxi Driver is a paraphrase of John Ford’s The Searchers, which is itself a giant metaphor about American racism. And what about Carrie?
What’s the bucket of pig blood scene but an assassination scene? Carrie White and Tommy Ross win an election (king and queen of the prom). The victorious candidates are brought on stage where they’re applauded by their cheering constituency.
And then
The filled-to-the-brim bucket of pig blood, falling with its full weight onto Carrie White’s face, is like Jackie getting JFK’s brains blown in her face.
Is this fanciful? It’s up to you, but movie fans love to do this kind of thing. [image]
PEOPLE ARE STRANGE…. ACTUALLY, THE DOORS WERE WRONG, PEOPLE ARE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
Quentin describes the 1977 movie Rolling Thunder directed by John Flynn :
When I first saw Rolling Thunder with my mother and her boyfriend Marco in 1977 on the film’s opening night in Los Angeles it blew my fucking mind. …. I loved Rolling Thunder so much that…for a period of ten years…I followed it all over Los Angeles, whenever and wherever it played… it was the best combination of character study and action film ever made. And it still is.
So, excited by this, I watched Rolling Thunder for the first time, and discovered it to be a routine revenge flick with a shootout at the end you have seen a million times, neanderthal villains dialled up from central casting, and a passive adoring girlfriend tagging along in the middle of it all who the hero drops like a hot potato when he goes off to do what a man’s gotta do and gun down the lowlives who slaughtered his family. What part of this is original? No part.
Quentin loves this movie, just loves it, and I thought it was tiresomely predictable with all the action picture cliches in place. Who can figure people’s taste? Hell is other people’s music, and other people’s movies. Quentin is not a fool, he is a smart cookie but he loves some very bad movies and he thinks they are good. And he would say the same about me. And I would say the same thing about him.
[image]
TAXI DRIVER
Is this movie a movie about a racist, or is it a racist movie?
Such a great question, QT. And can be asked many times about movies and books.
Is this a movie about a misogynist or is this a misogynist movie? Is another variation. Maybe it depends on who’s making the movie or book.
But I digress. Paul Schrader the scriptwriter gave the (old) script to Brian DePalma; he liked it but he was busy; so the director was going to be Robert Mulligan (Summer of 42); and Travis Bickle was going to be played by Jeff Bridges; and Harvey Keitel’s role was going to be black. Imagine that version! A movie starts out as one thing then mutates as it slides unpleasantly through the alimentary canal of the movie business.
Example : Quentin reads the script of one of his fave movies Rolling Thunder, featuring a monosyllabic back-from-Vietnam damaged guy, and in the script there are pages of dialogue spoken by this character. After reading one page of monologue Quentin yelps “Who the fuck is this guy? I mean, Jesus Christ, that’s more dialogue than Charlie says in the whole fucking movie!” Then he explains:
Well, it turned out the final author of the character of Charlie Rane was not the screenwriters but the actor playing the role….
Yeah, the actor, William Devane, who the studio loved at the time, just said “I’m not gonna say all this” and threw out the dialogue. This is like the opposite of the scene in Taxi Driver you all remember, with Travis in front of the mirror and he says “You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?” etc and the screenplay just says Travis talks to himself in the mirror.
BOOK VERSUS FILM : A DIGRESSION
Quentin is not bothered about books, only movies, but he made the difference between the two crystal clear. In a movie your experience is not pure, it’s always crisscrossed with multidimensional readings. Inhabiting every character there is the actor who you already know (and who may overwhelm the character they are playing) and behind the actor is the director and behind the director is the producer. There’s a lot going on. In a book there’s the author, the characters, and you.
QUENTIN SEES HIS FAVOURITE MOVIES MORE THAN ONCE
I’ve watched The Getaway many times with theatre audiences… What comes across very strongly in this book is the joys of seeing a movie at the cinema with an audience, the experience that dwindled away as fast as people could start watching movies at home. For instance Quentin is ticking someone off for badmouthing Halloween and he remembers when he saw Halloween
not in a practically empty screening room but in a packed cinema of teenagers hooting, hollering, screaming, laughing, and basically having the time of their lives
And later
Trust me, I’ve seen Rolling Thunder with every type of audience imaginable. So Quentin watches his favourite movies MANY times…. I never do that. Three times, max. Man, life is too short!
[image]
QUENTIN!
Yeah I know he’s annoying. He started with a huge bang with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and then for me went off the rails. But this is the best version of QT, joyful, rambunctious and unapologetic, the opposite of quiet and contemplative, the opposite of an old fart. If he likes violent movies from a violent decade, if he thinks movies from the 50s and the 80s sucked, if he knows he comes across as the teenage movie freak who never grew up, that’s okay, it’s your problem, certainly isn’t his.
The authors may be discussing cannibals and necrophilia but they keep a very even keel throughout this careful, engrossing history until Chapter SevenThe authors may be discussing cannibals and necrophilia but they keep a very even keel throughout this careful, engrossing history until Chapter Seven, “The Big Influence”, and suddenly BLAMM! The gloves are OFF! Now they are finally gonna have THEIR say.
The arguments go like this : Horror films in the 1980s and 90s regularly upset people and were just as regularly blamed by the press for inspiring violence. Critics said well, obviously these dreadful films influence their viewers, just look at the amount of money spent on television advertising – if it had no effect they wouldn’t be throwing their money away. The authors say RUBBISH! Ads on tv make people aware of products they might like – they don’t make people rush out to buy stuff they have no use for. If you haven’t got a cat you will never buy cat food no matter how many cat food adverts you see. And if you aren’t a violent man you won’t be raping and killing women no matter how many times you see Cannibal Holocaust or The Last House on the Left. Whereas football fans get all riled up watching their team lose, then they go on the rampage. (Well, they used to, in Britain.) And nobody says football should be banned.
In Chapter Eight they list rather wearyingly several prominent British murder cases where the press just loved to say IT WAS THE VIDEO THAT DONE IT! Headlines like
I HEARD VOICE OF VIDEO MICHAEL (from Halloween)
THE FOX’S RAPE VIDEO IS STILL ON SALE (It was Sex Wishes)
JUDGE BLAMES VIDEO NASTIES FOR MURDER (It was The Evil Dead)
HELL RAISER : HORROR MOVIE DROVE NAZI BOMBER TO KILL
And so on. The most famous of these press freakouts was after the murder of a toddler James Bulger by two ten year old boys in 1993. Reporters found that one of the murderers’ fathers had rented Childs Play 3 and that was that – it was Chucky made them do it. In fact they had never seen Childs Play 3.
[image]
The British press love to overstate their case wildly and this kind of buffalos our authors into overstating their film-never-influences-anyone argument. But that’s okay.
Because this is a great book for film history fans and is the definitive account of the Video Nasty phenomenon from the 1980s. All the notorious banned films get a detailed description and discussion in the longest (217 pages) chapter. The rise of the whole concept of the home video is explored at length too, and a very odd story it is too,
Anyone who already read this should also get the following two documentaries, which are essential. And anyone who’s got the documentaries should get this book! Works both ways.
This is a very heavy book. I just checked and it weighs the same as eleven paperback novels. So if you know any frail film enthusiasts, don’t give theThis is a very heavy book. I just checked and it weighs the same as eleven paperback novels. So if you know any frail film enthusiasts, don’t give them this as a present, they will keel over to the ground. Could do serious damage.
I first encountered this book as a documentary series and thought – great, that is exactly what I want. When I got hold of a copy I was flabbergasted. It was impossible to watch. Not because it was bad, far from it. It’s because Mark Cousins decided to do his own narration. Well, it’s his 15 hour documentary, so why not? Critic Cole Smithy tells us why not :
Cousins’s insanely repetitive delivery of every sentence sadly renders the documentary unwatchable — or at least unlistenable. Cousins has the incredibly annoying habit of ending every phrase like a question. Torturous. Valley Girls have nothing on Mark Cousins. Perhaps, Cousins will eventually realize the colossal error, and hire a proper voiceover talent to replace the atrocious narration track.
When Cole says Mark ends every phrase of his slow, steady narration as if it’s a question, he means every single phrase. It’s called upspeak or high rising inflection and it’s rooted in his Northern Irish accent but it drove me quite crazy.
So got the book instead and it’s pretty good although I did come to the conclusion that a one volume history of cinema is a lunatic concept and will tend towards my-favourite-films-with-commentary, especially as Mr Cousins is trying to be more global and inclusive than any previous history.
Also, he saddles himself with a terribly clunky term he appears to have invented to describe the dominant mainstream style of Hollywood film-making : closed romantic realism. This is mentioned many many times. Ugh. “Closed” because the film appears to take place in a “parallel universe” in which the actors never break the fourth wall, and open endings of the stories are avoided. “Romantic” because emotions are heightened and protagonists are heroic. “Realism” because the characters and situations are recognisably similar to those we know.
Mr Cousins’ confidence is dizzying. He makes very specific generalisations about directors. Miklos Jancso “made exactitude of camera moves central to his work”. (But, you know, what director wouldn’t care how his camera moved?)
Polanski had already taken the aesthetics of triangles, of strain, of isolation further than any other director... His human theme - the discomfort of closeness
And he can make statements about African cinema in the 1980s or the post-Soviet films of Hungary that less bold critics would flinch from. (One chapter heading : Triumphant beginnings in Iran and Senegal) But all that can be quite exhilarating. He does convince you that he knows what he's talking about!
So this is a pretty good book, and there’s no better time to read it. Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but we are living in a golden age of film viewing. There are so many free movie sites around on the internet that you can see almost all the movies recommended by Mark within a few clicks. Fans can set up their own private Almodovar or Bresson retrospectives. Or schlocky horror! Your choice! And this is for everyone, not just for the lucky people who live in a city with a couple of good art houses, like it used to be.
Fans of golden age Hollywood (30s to 50s) who can reel off names like Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur AND name three movies Fans of golden age Hollywood (30s to 50s) who can reel off names like Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur AND name three movies each one starred in will probably already have a copy of this massive beast of a book. For those obsessives this will be like heaven. For less fixated film fans it will be TOO MUCH.
It begins with 100 (large) pages on the studio star-making machinery itself, the system which could take 13 year old Frances Gumm and turned her into Judy Garland. But then the great bulk of the book, 300 pages, is taken up with very detailed – some might say eyeglazingly so – investigations into the lives and careers of ten stars who didn’t conform to the system in one way or another, either because they got sick of their own stupid movies and quit (Deanna Durbin) or because they became ungovernable and wayward (Erroll Flynn, Lana Turner) or because they were never that jazzed with being a star in the first place (Charles Boyer). (The first one, all about Tyrone Power, makes it clear over the course of 40 (large) pages that Tyrone Power is Professor Basinger’s number one celebrity crush.)
These dense biographical essays are kind of interesting, to an extent, but seem to me to make a point that isn’t worth making. Sure, out of the galaxy of movie stars summoned up by the studios, some of them went off the rails, some of them were neurotic and diffident about the whole thing, and quite understandably because if ever there were human beings imprisoned in golden cages it was them, they had almost no time to enjoy all their dough. When they did get the odd hour to themselves they would immediately marry some dreadfully inappropriate person. And divorce them when they got the next free afternoon. Is this any kind of surprise? No, not at all.
Professor Basinger ends with a thirty page epilogue about stars without the machine, i.e. from the 1960s onward, when there weren’t any studios and they therefore had to manage their careers by themselves. Well, you know, they seem to have done all right. There were stars then and there are still stars now. There were scandals then (in 1958 Lana Turner’s 15 year old daughter stabbed her mother’s latest boyfriend to death) and scandals now (Kevin Spacey, Mel Gibson). Whoever’s running the store the merchandise is pretty much the same.
In conclusion : Even though I really liked the breezy non-hifalutin style, I thought this was gonna be more interesting than it actually was.
It’s one thing to get a brilliant idea for a book – I’m sure we’ve all had one or two – but it’s a whole other thing to transform your brilliant idea It’s one thing to get a brilliant idea for a book – I’m sure we’ve all had one or two – but it’s a whole other thing to transform your brilliant idea into an unceasingly gripping factcrammed anecdote-rammed endlessly entertaining 420 page book which everybody that has ever loved a movie will find gobsmacking, eye-opening and maybe the best book on movies they will ever read.
The brilliant idea was that the five 1968 Oscar best picture nominees captured perfectly a moment of cultural shift, when Old Hollywood gave way to New Hollywood, when the oppressive morality imposed on movies since the 1930s was abandoned, when everything changed.
The five movies were Dr Dolittle Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner In the Heat of the Night The Graduate Bonnie and Clyde
At one extreme, representing the oldest of Old Hollywood, is Dr Dolittle. This was a bloated unloved failure created in the wake of the ridiculous success of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. Because of those two, the studios thought Ah! Giant two and a half hour musicals! That will save us! and they all rolled into production big ones like Thoroughly Modern Millie, Sweet Charity, Hello Dolly and so on. This craze became a waking nightmare because it turned out that Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were the last big fat musicals anyone wanted to see for a very long time.
[image]
At the other end of the spectrum was Bonnie and Clyde – you remember the tag line : “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people.” This was low level low budget scuffling and hustling movie making. The two scriptwriters had been fixated on getting one of their French heroes to direct – maybe Godard! Maybe Truffaut! But they finally found Warren Beatty and he got hooked. But he wasn’t then the big name he became, because it was Bonnie and Clyde that made him into what he became, so he was just a pretty boy with a spotty resume, no real big hits, (Time magazine : “an on-again off-again actor who moonlighted as a global escort”) so when he became the producer-star he still had to rush around and keep the plates spinning and fielding phone calls – and even when the damn picture was made the studio was so lukewarm about it they didn’t release it properly and he then had to run around like a clockwork mouse to prove that whenever it was shown audiences (young ones) loved it, so that finally the studio rereleased it and THEN it was a monster hit.
[image]
In between these two extremes was Sidney Poitier – what a strange an uneasy story that is. This is what Sidney had been doing up to then. Mark Harris is describing his character in a movie called No Way Out:
The character was a young professional surrounded by white bigots, a so-called credit to his race who achieved what white America was comfortable labelling “dignity” by at once demonstrating that he could feel anger and proving he was evolved enough to restrain himself from expressing it.
One further comment :
He had no competition, since in the 1950s the movie industry had room for exactly one black actor.
We see from the list of 1968 best picture nominee that Sidney was the star of two of them. And he’d also had a monster hit in 1967 in To Sir with Love. So he was a very big star.
Mark Harris :
His drawing power was a shock to an industry that had, until recently, treated his employment in movies as something akin to an act of charity, and Hollywood greeted his new popularity with an orgy of self-congratulation.
The burden on Sidney Poitier’ shoulders was immense. He was horribly aware that as Mark Harris puts it his career, his status was as an exception to the rule.
[image]
This book describes in fabulous detail the beginnings, the assembling, the production, the reception and the ultimate fate of these five movies. The research Mark Harris did must have been something else. How each movie got made, how the shape of a movie changes, how the script is really just the right kind of clay that the director, actors and cinematographer then mould and remould sometimes on a day by day basis, and how even after the thing is done even the star of the said movie (say Dustin Hoffman) could be quite unaware of whether the picture is any good…. all this and more, much more is laid out before our feasting eyes.
SOME HILARIOUS STUFF ABOUT DR DOLITTLE
Mark Harris on Rex Harrison :
Harrison could be explosive, impatient, capricious, and vain, but also charming, apologetic, and compliant, sometimes within the same conversation or at different points during the same stiff drink.
Mark Harrison on some production difficulties :
The smell, both of animal waste and the gallons of ammonia used to clean the sets, was unbearable, as was the nonstop noise.
The shoot in St Lucia turned out to be even more of a horror than the crew had anticipated, and not just because of the swarms of stinging insects, or the tropical storms that seemed to shut down production every second day, or the fleas that lived in the sand that the Dolittle crew had found on a remote part of the island and trucked to the set by the ton because they liked its pinkish colour.
Mark Harris on Rex and his wife Rachel Roberts who both had alcohol issues
The caretakers of the seals would come running out thinking the animals were making a noise but it was Rex and Rachel
WARNING FOR PAUL SIMON
The music fan in me cannot let one error in this great book pass by without comment. Mike Nicholls is talking Simon and Garfunkel into doing the score for The Graduate. Unfortunately our author refers to them as “the two singer-songwriters”. I hope Paul Simon is warned about this before he reads it! I could imagine that remark might spoil his morning.
All those great lines of dialogue in so many movies and it's never clear who wrote them.... the screenwriters, the rewrite guys, the last minute punchAll those great lines of dialogue in so many movies and it's never clear who wrote them.... the screenwriters, the rewrite guys, the last minute punch-up guys, could be anybody. Whole different thing to a book. When it says Graham Greene on the cover you're pretty sure he wrote all the stuff inside. It's not like that in Hollywood. So this is just a big anthology of hundreds of zingers and profound musings and so forth from all our favourite films.
Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time.
Were you always this stupid or did you take lessons?
How did you feel after you shot your husband? Hungry.
He couldn't find a prayer in the Bible.
You're never around when I need you. You never need me when I'm around.
Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
There are also tiny articles about all kinds of interesting things, like Taglines - you remember the famous ones -
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.
In space no one can hear you scream.
Houston, we have a problem.
But here we learn of some less successful taglines :
Today the pond. Tomorrow the world. (Frogs)
Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States. (The Day of the Dolphin)
The Only thing More Terrifying than the last 12 Minutes of this Film are the First 92. (Suspiria)
Titans will Clash. (Clash of the Titans)
so..... recommended for all movie fans. It's just another excellent timewasting thing to read while you should have been powering through The Brothers Karamazov.
Quotes from
Darling The Long Kiss Goodnight Adam's Rib Out of the Past Kiss Me Deadly and Mae West...more
Clint Eastwood : one of the most fantastic movie careers of anybody ever and a hero of mine for many years. I love his unusual pathway to greatness – Clint Eastwood : one of the most fantastic movie careers of anybody ever and a hero of mine for many years. I love his unusual pathway to greatness – from Rawhide on the tv for 6 years, then to Italy for the spaghetti westerns when Sergio Leone was looking for a reasonably-priced American actor – then excoriated by critics like Pauline Kael for the amoral violence of those movies – then parlaying his way into directing starting with Play Misty for Me and running an acting career and a directing career side by side – and never stopping for breath – 38 feature films in 47 years, that’s some going. I especially love the oddball uncommercial movies he did, like Honkytonk Man, Bird and Bronco Billy. And he’s pretty much the only guy who can make me enjoy Westerns. Out of 22 Eastwood directed movies I have seen, there were only two bad ones. For me that’s almost the best track record for any director.
This book : as with the seven others I’ve read in this series (Masters of Cinema), the art design and lavish pictures and detailed filmography at the end are all wonderful – such a shame that the text is some translated-from-the-French bollocks. I would quote some egregious nonsense for your delectation, but I would rather be reborn as a marmoset than have to peer through this thicket of unmeaning again.
THE MOVIES: THE GOOD
Play Misty for Me High Plains Drifter The Outlaw Josey Wales Honkytonk Man Pale Rider Bird Unforgiven A Perfect World Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Mystic River Million Dollar Baby Changeling Gran Torino American Sniper Sully
THE BAD
The Bridges of Madison County Invictus
THE DEBATABLE
Breezy Bronco Billy Flags of our Fathers Letters from Iwo Jima Jersey Boys...more
Early in movie history…. very early…in 1902! they were filming the first of what became known as newsreel. But sometimes the results weren’t impressivEarly in movie history…. very early…in 1902! they were filming the first of what became known as newsreel. But sometimes the results weren’t impressive enough when they got the film developed. So they just faked them in the studio.
A table-top “battle of Santiago Bay” complete with profuse cigarette and cigar smoke, explosions and cardboard ships going down in inch-deep water.
This became the movie hit of the Spanish-American War. They were sly. They called some items "authentic reconstitutions”.
Memorable genuine footage came back from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but other footage of the event, contrived in table-top miniature, was equally applauded. Several volcanic eruptions were triumphantly faked, as in Biograph’s 1905 Eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Film companies did not want to ignore catastrophes or other headline events merely because their cameraman could not get there… In this spirit the British producer James Williamson shot his 1898 Attack on a Chinese Mission Station in his back yard, and some of his Boer War scenes on a golf course.
Film critics can be so clever and cute. I especially liked this :
Jean Arthur and John Lund are in the room used to store compromising archives. To preFilm critics can be so clever and cute. I especially liked this :
Jean Arthur and John Lund are in the room used to store compromising archives. To prevent the young woman from finding the file he wants to remain hidden, the man decides to seduce her. He opens the filing cabinets one by one, hemming her in until he has her completely imprisoned and can kiss her. The man opens the drawers he doesn’t want the woman to look into in order to prevent her exploring them. In so doing he obliges her to move her body rather than use her mind. So, with each drawer that’s opened, the woman gets further away from researching another woman’s compromising past and comes closer to a present moment in which her body will be offered to the man, who is using this trick to direct her while simultaneously making her the rival of the woman whose file she is looking for.
If I thought like that about movies I should probably be in a padded cell by now, so I will stick to a broad brush approach, thank you. Billy Wilder was great but he was not one of the always-mentioned big name Hollywood directors. He was very inconsistent. Some of his not good stuff is positively embarrassing. But hey, six masterpieces and nine worth-watching movies is a good score, and I’ve still got about five I haven’t seen. Lotta Billy Wilder movies.
THE GREAT
Double Indemnity The Lost Weekend Sunset Boulevard Ace In The Hole Some Like It Hot The Apartment
[image]
THE LESS GREAT
Sabrina Witness For The Prosecution One, Two, Three The Fortune Cookie The Front Page
THE CRINGE MAKING BUT STILL INTERESTING
The Seven-Year Itch Kiss Me, Stupid The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes Avanti!
Here is another cool Masters of Cinema book rammed with pix, a straightforwardly chronological account going up to True Grit. Ian Nathan, the author, has a little too much film critic hifalutinness about him for my tastes, but no matter, it’s the Coens that count, and with them you never know what you’re going to get next, they ricochet from two beyond-nonsense like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers to two stone classics and back again. You take what you need and you leave the rest....more
David Lynch is extraordinary, he’s a really major director with a unique style, and he’s only made ten movies in 40 years – plus Twin Peaks of which hDavid Lynch is extraordinary, he’s a really major director with a unique style, and he’s only made ten movies in 40 years – plus Twin Peaks of which he only directed 6 out of 30 episodes.
That said, I think he’s a bit of a fraud. Well, alright, a lot of a fraud! He’s made a career out of creating sumptuously, seductively, gorgeously filmed narratives that don’t make the least sense, that deliberately contain every non-sequitor, surrealistic cul-de-sac, meandering offshoot, curlicue and rococo dream sequence, and he has the utter gall to dump all this into the viewer’s lap and say here, make of this heap of fragments what you will, I’m done with it.
Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are the big examples of this.
And he gets away with this! And it's so easy to create a film that doesn't make any sense! Just rip out every fifth page of the script! And then get the editor high and get them to shove in some random bits from uncompleted projects you happen to have lying around! And people lap up this stuff! (It does help to have beautiful lesbians in your makes no sense movie though. I admit that was a smooth move.)
He can be beautifully uncomplicated, and this is the David Lynch I like best – Elephant Man, Straight Story, Wild at Heart.
His very first movie, made as a student film and surreptitiously expanded into a feature over six entire years, is the utterly strange and unmissable Eraserhead. That film done my brain in when I saw it years ago. Sometimes I think I’ve never recovered completely. The Lady in the Radiator when she squishes things on stage and sings about heaven! Aaargh! The roast chicken moving round on the plate and bleeding! Aaaaurgh! The baby – noooooooo, not THE BABY! Aaaaaarhhhhhhh…….
[image]
"Heaven is really fine You got your good thing and I got mine"...more
This is the fourth of this "Masters of Cinema" series I've read and by far the worst. You can't trust these cute series - there's a BFI Film Classics This is the fourth of this "Masters of Cinema" series I've read and by far the worst. You can't trust these cute series - there's a BFI Film Classics series and in music there's the tiny but perfectly formed 33 1/3 series. You get so you want to collect them all, so you can have a bookshelf that looks like this
[image]
but alas and alack, the authors of the individual volumes CANNOT BE TRUSTED to be as tiptop as each other, so you go from the crisp no nonsense excellence of this series' Martin Scorsese to the stodgy professorial ineffabilities of this series' Ingmar Bergman.
Typical sentence :
More than an avatar of his theatrical experience, Bergman's famous frontality is fully revealed here for what it is : an image that suggests the ontological separation of individuals, even when they are present in the same space and time.
So ignorant am I that I was completely unaware of Bergman's famous frontality. Actually, between you and me and the radiator, I don't know what a frontality is. Do you think they mean his nose? He did have quite a big hooter....more
Loading...
