DVD Review | Women He's Undressed

After a Fashion

by Thomas Delapa

In today’s dressed-down, flip-flops and uber-casual world, we seldom hear that “clothes make the man” anymore. But in classic Hollywood, fashion not only made the man—and the woman—but it made the movies too.

Where would The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale be without her ruby slippers, Joan Crawford sans her shoulder pads, Marilyn Monroe less (ahem) her skin-tight gowns or Cary Grant minus those impeccably tailored suits?

Like other low-profile collaborators, especially in our grandiose age of the director as auteur, motion-picture costume directors rarely grab the spotlight and even less the microphone. Classic film fans may be familiar with the celebrated career of Edith Head, but otherwise public knowledge of Hollywood’s leading costume designers is skimpy if not threadbare.

Despite its odd-fitting title, Women He’s Undressed means to makeover that legacy, taking the measure of Australian-born Orry-Kelly, who for three decades was one of Hollywood’s larger-than-life, A-list designers. His career included a long, tempestuous stint at the Warner Bros. studio, dressing such stars as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Olivia de Havilland, and was crowned by three Oscars for costume design, the last for Some Like It Hot in 1959.

An Australian-made documentary directed by the veteran Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, My Brilliant Career), Undressed won’t win ribbons for opulence, but it does stitch together the life and times of Orry-Kelly, born Orry George Kelly in New South Wales. Armstrong’s style clashes in spots, starting with the fanciful inclusion of her subject (Darren Gilshenan) addressing the camera while paddling in a rowboat. As an allegory of his roiling ups and downs it is, well, a bit out to sea.

As a gay man in Hollywood who rarely hid in the closet—at least among his friends— "Jack" Orry-Kelly was renowned for his talents, tart tongue and artistic tantrums. He could be difficult and demanding, but he managed to navigate the treacherous shores of the studio-system fiefdoms. While most found his boss Jack Warner a tight-fisted, crass (and macho) tyrant, Orry-Kelly formed an uneasy alliance, smoothed over by his long friendship with Warner’s wife, Ann. Undoubtedly his most famous work was with the notoriously prickly Bette Davis, including the brazen “red” ball dress her character flitted about in the 1938’s black-and-white Jezebel. 

Except for that foundering rowboat, Undressed is outfitted in a conventional style, embroidered with interviews (among them, Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury), newsreel footage and photos. But it’s also spangled with fascinating tidbits about fashion design in Hollywood’s bygone Golden Age. Especially revealing are the sleight-of-hand tricks Orry-Kelly used to transform diva Davis (she of a large but “limp” bosom) that showed off the positive while cloaking the negative.

Glamour, illusion and fantasy were Orry-Kelly’s stock in trade, but his private life was bold as brass, despite begin hemmed in by a homophobic culture that threatened exposure for anyone—especially men—daring to tip-toe out of the closet. Armstrong and her writer Katherine Thomson sew the villain badge on Englishman Cary Grant (né Archibald Leach), who turned his back on Orry-Kelly once he became a matinee idol. While it is now well-known that Grant and Western star Randolph Scott lived together as roommates and more, the film speciously suggests that Grant’s subsequent marriages were strictly a cover for his homosexuality.

What’s most durable in Armstrong’s material is the flamboyant character of Orry-Kelly as both artist and survivor. Fired from Warners in 1944, he hit the bottle hard, successfully chased by rehab (“sanatoriums” back then) and surfacing in a wave of comebacks in the 1950s, culminating in the sparkling triumph of Some Like It Hot. Not only did he outfit Marilyn Monroe in those diaphanous, barely-there gowns that seared the screen, but he also dragged cross-dressing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis into hilarious movie history.

Orry-Kelly was also a brash and oft-catty wit who was loath to keep his mouth zipped—he famously quipped that “Hell must be filled with beautiful women and no mirrors.” In old Hollywood’s bright firmament, you can still see Orry-Kelly’s twinkling reflection in the timelessly elegant fashions he created. 

 ---------------------------------

8/5/16

DVD Review | Stories We Tell

Capturing the Polleys

by Thomas Delapa

For critics and serious filmgoers who’ve given up on the Academy Awards, especially after last year's Seth MacFarlane fatuous hosting fiasco, here’s another reason to shrug and say "I told you so": Despite being one of the best and most talked-about documentaries of 2013, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell was shockingly shut out of the Oscar nominations.

The Canadian actress/director may take cold comfort in the fact that the Oscars have regularly been on the wrong side of cinema history. Leading the nominations for worst Oscar snubs: Alfred Hitchcock (nil directing awards), Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather (loser to Cabaret’s Bob Fosse), and the snub of all snubs, Orson Welles’ nonpareil Citizen Kane bested by How Green Was My Valley. Vice versa, does anyone outside of Robert Osborne remember the lachrymose Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back best actress Oscars in the 1930s? And post Y2K, let’s just fugetabout The Departed, the noxious 2006 best picture winner that should be left to sleep with the fishes.

Almost as myopic in Oscar oversights have been the erratic, often obscure choices over the decades in the Best Foreign Film category. Since the Academy only allows one entry per country each year, voters are forced to dole out the nominations in globally “let’s all share” fashion, not so unlike ribbons handed out to all the kiddies on Field Day. While films from major directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Japan's Yasujiro Ozu have never been nominated, most of the nominees—and more than a few winners— have faded out in movie memory. 

Polley can also take some solace in her own award for Best Canadian Film (and the $100,000 prize that went with it), while U.S. audiences can now see her extraordinary narrative recounted on DVD. In our era of one-sided, deceptively manipulated “docu-fictions,” Polley lyrically reconstructs (and deconstructs) an extremely personal story, generously bringing in a kaleidoscope of disparate, sometimes contradictory viewpoints.

In a near oedipal odyssey, Polley documents her search to uncover a maternal secret that lay hidden in her family's closet for 28 years. The main character in the mystery is Polley’s mother Diane, a onetime Toronto casting director and actress. While not literally present to tell her own story, Polley mere nostalgically appears in a series of glowing home movies (some actually recreated). At the other end of the Freudian spectrum is Polley’s dad Michael, a British-born actor who settled in Toronto in the 1950s to marry and raise a family.

A la Charles Foster Kane, the life of Diane Polley is reconstructed, in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by those who knew her best as well as by those only on the family’s borders. Vivacious and rebellious, Diane was a woman before her time, unhappy with the rigid roles of middle-class marriage and family, yet also, by most accounts, a loving if mercurial wife and mother.

A clever raconteur, Polley reveals key facts of her chronicle in measured doses, never letting us know too much of this remarkable, often touching saga at once. A 3-D puzzle of sorts (without those silly glasses), the film is skillfully glued together with a complex array of stylistic devices, from competing voice-overs (one from a prepared script read by Michael Polley) and disjunctive dubbed dialogue to standard talking-heads interviews, punctuated with lingering close-ups that speak volumes.

Polley is also smart enough to realize that “truth” is often, um, relative, particularly when people have something to gain or hide—Rashomon told us that. But in this meta-home movie that continually examines its own assumptions (sometimes to a fault), Polley unveils not simply the small story of one woman’s family secret, but by extension poignantly leads us to bigger, roomier stories about marriage, motherhood, love and life itself.  

----------------------

2/4/14

Film Review | Argo

Watch your back, Lincoln.  After Golden Globes upsets, Argo just may be the smart-money candidate for the Oscar Best Picture award....


Praise, Don’t Blame, Canada 
by Thomas Delapa

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives.

Just a couple years ago, after a cluster of bombs like Gigli and Jersey Girl, it was almost curtains for Ben Affleck’s Hollywood career. But since he's taken a bow in his new role as director starting with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, the jeers have been disappearing. His taut, true-life espionage thriller Argo is a movie for grown-ups, and may even garner him Oscar applause.

If all you remember of the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis is bad news, ABC’s Nightline and Ted Koppel's hair, then Argo is just the ticket for prime-time counter-programming. This isn’t the story of the 52 Americans held hostage in the U.S. embassy by Islamic revolutionaries for over a year. Rather, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio switch the focus to six other Americans who fled the Tehran embassy and hid out in the house of the Canadian ambassador, and their daring run for freedom.

Argo unfolds like a fact-based Mission: Impossible—and, yes, it does all sound too absurdly impossible to be true. Low-key, if thoughtfully stolid, Affleck is Tony Mendez, the CIA undercover agent who dreams up a fantastic plot that could only happen in the movies: Create new identities for the six as Canadians scouting Iranian locations for a phony Hollywood sci-fi fantasy, called Argo, and then spirit them out of the country.

It’s a screwball pitch, but Mendez’s superiors in Washington (including Bryan Cranston from TV’s Breaking Bad) reluctantly take a swing, as do a profane Hollywood producer (Alan Arkin) and a make-up artist (John Goodman), who agree to create a fake production to lend cover to the ruse. The pretext is Affleck’s cue to take a flurry of roundhouse punches at Hollywood, and even himself. (“You can teach a rhesus monkey to direct in a day,” Arkin snorts.)

Terrio’s wry, lean script (based on an 2007 Wired article by Josh Bearman) is a hairy balancing act, crossbred between Tinseltown satire and topical thriller. Affleck’s casting choices for the drama are boldly non-Hollywood, mostly unknowns who add grit to the life-and-death, documentary-like luster. Along with the shaggy hair and super-sized ‘70s glasses, you may also spy stealth jabs at Star Wars-era American escapism, standing in stark contrast to the dark times that found the U.S. empire at a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate low.

In Argo's sly “meta” metaphors, Affleck isn’t only the film's director, but acts as director of the six players who must pose as Canadians, drilling them for their roles. (Their motivation: um, to live). It will be his impossible mission to lead them through a dress rehearsal, into the airport and out of the country, negotiating a gauntlet of Iranian security agents, like Moses with a movie camera. Unlike the over-the-top special effects and superhuman feats of a Tom Cruise, Affleck and his Argo-nauts do something more improbable—dramatizing real, ordinary human beings forced to do the heroically extraordinary.

As director, Affleck also does something heroic, holding shots to organically draw out the tension and suspense. The conventional (i.e., stale) wisdom in the Hollywood action movie is for breakneck editing that holds the audience hostage, throttling them into submission. Affleck and editor William Goldenberg let the scenes play out, lending to the air of pulse-pounding realism. But Big Ben also gets bogged down in a Directing 101 trick, milking his crosscuts between parallel lines of action to juice up the pulpy intensity.

In a 2012 America seemingly desperate for a patriotic story—and in the midst of interminable Mideast turmoil—Argo reaches back into an ominous dark cloud to yank out a silver lining trimmed in red, white and blue. For Ben Affleck and company, that silver lining may also rain Oscar gold.

---------
10/21/12

DVD Review | The Departed

Old Jack City

by Thomas Delapa


Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and a cast of seven robbing hoods. The Boston underworld. Director Martin Scorsese. Now that you've seen the bad-ass ads for The Departed, I know what all youse wiseguys are thinking: a mob movie in the tradition of GoodFellas.

Well, you can fuhgetaboutit. Redolent of four-letter words, Scorsese's flatulent Boston massacre doesn't amount to hill of beans. Count me among those who wished to depart from The Departed before it was over.

Perhaps still smarting from The Aviator's Oscar snub, Scorsese has landed with bloody vengeance back on his home turf in the gangster flick. But this is easily his worst film since Cape Fear. How bad is GoodFellas Does Boston? So bad that even Jack Nicholson is a deadly bore.

When we first see Nicholson as sleazy gangland boss Frank Costello, he's slithering into a dark cafe, sporting a grizzled goatee and armed with insinuating sexual language. Nicholson's accompanied on the soundtrack by the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," helping to cue us in that Costello is, by golly, the devil. At least Scorsese mercifully delivers us from "Sympathy for the Devil."

In William Monahan's script—lifted from the 2002 Hong Kong hit, Infernal Affairs—Boston is a ratty hellhole where you can't tell the difference between the crooks and the cops. That's literally true when it comes to Billy Costigan (DiCaprio), a troubled rookie policeman who's assigned to infiltrate Costello's gang. Costigan's cop doppelganger is Colin Sullivan (Damon), who in actuality is Costello's top mole in the state police.

Scorsese and Monahan pile on the bodies and four-letter words with a nihilistic glee that might even cause Tony Soprano to run to confession. Somewhere among the scumbags, dickheads and fucksticks (that's a new one), Monahan's lamebrain script wants to connect the corpses in a study of how gangland crime is rooted in a perverse sense of family obligation. Gee, and I thought I was just watching a Scorsese snuff film.

Beginning with his miscasting in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio has let his own fixation with Scorsese as his screen daddy take him down a dark Steadicam path. With the exception of an admirably subdued Alec Baldwin, all the actors in this movie seem to be juiced on testosterone shots from Floyd Landis' doctor. The unwritten mobster dialogue here isn't "Top of world, Ma!" but rather, "Look how tough I am, Ma, I'm in a Scorsese movie!"

Not only is Scorsese repeating himself in self-parody, but even his usual flair for pop music sounds a death knell. Alongside "Gimme Shelter" (twice) and Patsy Cline's "Crazy" (twice), composer Howard Shore can only contribute a limp background score. Veteran cinematographer Michael Ballhaus' camera is as dead as Costello's numbing parade of victims, including one who falls splat from five stories up at DiCaprio's feet.

Buried within Monahan's script is a relevant 9/11-era theme about the absurd turf wars waging between city, state and federal crime agencies. In one attempt after another to collar Costello, the police bungle the arrest, looking like the Keystone Cops in plainclothes. That Costello may be an FBI informant further blurs the lines of cop and criminality, adding to the witches' brew.

But Scorsese lets his cast play everything at a fever pitch in overheated confrontations that boil over with random acts of brutality. Loosely based on the notorious mob exploits of "Whitey" Bulger, The Departed is no departure for Nicholson, who riffs on all his past Satanic-majesty roles, from The Witches of Eastwick to The Shining.

An ugly 2 1/2-hour whack-fest, The Departed left me hoping that Scorsese will never darken the screen with another gangster movie again.

--------
Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 10/12/06
[Postscript: The Departed won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for 2006.]

DVD Review | The Deer Hunter (1978)

Deer Diary

by Thomas Delapa


After only two movies, more than a few pronounced him a directorial genius. Two years later, he underwent one of the fastest fade-outs in Hollywood history.

Following 1978’s Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino was considered a sure shot to join the growing superstar ranks of Scorsese, Altman and Spielberg—led by top-dog Francis Ford Coppola. But not only did Cimino’s colossal follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, flop, his career quickly went to hell in a bamboo hand basket.

Nominated for nine Oscars and a winner of five, including Best Picture and Best Director, The Deer Hunter was one of those incendiary epics that divided audiences along political battle lines in the post-sixties hangover, a.k.a. the 1970s. Though the movie was victorious over Coming Home—and star/activist Jane Fonda—it didn’t win the hearts and minds of left-leaning audiences; while both dramas dealt with the Vietnam War, Cimino’s epic was, in Fonda’s acerbic, pre-aerobic words, “a racist, Pentagon version of the war.”

While many critics fulsomely declared Deer Hunter to be a masterpiece (“Surely one of the most powerful films of the seventies,” trumpeted Stephen Schiff in the Boston Phoenix), others were more circumspect, even derisive. Nearly 35 years later, contemporary audiences may draw a blank, given that it’s aged only somewhat better than leisure suits and disco. If The Godfather, Jaws, Chinatown and Star Wars are still bright in our memories, The Deer Hunter crouches languidly on the endangered classics list.

With only one directorial effort to his credit (the underrated buddy drama Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), the Yale-educated Cimino set his sights on the definitive story of America’s lost, pre-Vietnam War innocence—not so unlike George Lucas’s nostalgic American Graffiti five years previous. But whereas Lucas’ bittersweet comedy was fresh and unpretentious, screenwriter Deric Washburn seemed to cut and paste from The Godfather, Deliverance, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets—along with a few dusty plucks from The Four Feathers—for his meditation on male camaraderie and bravado in wartime.

Cimino took a bead on a band of blue-collar buddies in a flinty, Russian-American Pennsylvania steel town. Enlisting right after his searing success in Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro is Michael, the group’s stoic alpha male, with John Savage, John Cazale and newcomer Christopher Walken sturdily bringing up the rear. (Terminally ill with cancer during the shoot, Cazale died months after its completion.) In only her second movie role, Meryl Streep spryly plays Walken’s betrothed, one of the women left waiting on the home front.

In the 2005 Universal DVD release, the gifted Hungarian/American cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond talks about his part in creating Cimino’s striking widescreen visuals, from the fiery blast furnaces to the golden interiors of the Russian Orthodox church, where the signature wedding scene takes place. A la The Godfather’s ritualistic bookends, Cimino frames his three-hour saga with the ironic pairing of one wedding and a funeral.

Sandwiched between the over-praised naturalism (several of the scenes were improvised by the cast), Washburn and Cimino shoot for the heights, yet their aim is scattershot. The overarching metaphor is Michael’s cryptic Spartan philosophy to bag a deer with “one shot,” and one shot only. As embodied in De Niro’s stolid, goateed machismo, Michael stands head and shoulders above his less-than-steely friends, a heroic coupling of James Fenimore Cooper and Ayn Rand.

In one of cinema’s most shocking jump cuts, we’re lifted from the airy Pennsylvania (actually Washington) mountains instantly into the sweltering jungles of Vietnam. In the first of a load of dubious coincidences, De Niro, Walken and Savage meet up as soldiers in the middle of a battle, and just as quickly find themselves in riverfront tiger cages, imprisoned by the Viet Cong. There, in the film’s most controversial sequence, the trio is forced to take part in their captors’ depraved game of Russian roulette.

Embedded within Cimino and Zsigmond’s vivid realism, this harrowing, wholly fabricated sequence can be viewed, at best, as symbolic of America’s self-destructive death march in Vietnam. At worst, it’s pernicious, booby-trapped propaganda that points the blame for the American tragedy in Vietnam squarely at sadistic, jabbering (“Mao! Mao!”) monsters who have nothing better to do than torture and kill defenseless G.I.s.

After a cathartic, shoot-’em-up escape that would make Dirty Harry’s day, the trio parts ways, their roads home emblematic of the wildly different fates of returning veterans (and intriguingly resonant of the dilemmas of the three soldiers in William Wyler’s far less bombastic The Best Years of Our Lives three decades earlier). While Michael returns die-hardened, if tempered, his brothers-in-arms face grimmer prospects. In perhaps the movie’s most poignant and authentic section, De Niro tracks down Savage to a V.A. hospital, where their friendship is re-forged in the face of crippling tragedy.

But Cimino isn’t satisfied with subtlety or even naturalism. He’s after bigger game. Back in Saigon during its chaotic 1975 fall to the North Vietnamese, Walken’s Nick has gone bananas, plunging into his own heart of darkness. Lured by a decadent Frenchman, the traumatized Nick is now the chief combatant in high-stakes backroom games of Russian roulette.

Whatever the nationality, Cimino gambles on lurid sensationalism, and it doesn’t pay off—now or then. In place of a sharp focus on the war and its victims, he aims for xenophobic myth; in place of cathartic realism, he shoots for muddled pulp. In the ambiguous—or laughable—last scene, Cimino waves the flag to the tune of “God Bless America,” betting that Academy Award voters would stand up and salute. They did.

Armed with his Oscar trophy and a bloated $40 million budget, Cimino nearly broke the bank (and United Artists) in his elephantine western Heaven’s Gate, one of the biggest disasters in movie history, which was instrumental in killing off the “New Hollywood” halcyon days of experiment and artistic risk. Cimino’s career has never recovered, in hindsight perhaps another indirect casualty of the hellish Vietnam War.

-----------------
3/11/12

The 84th Academy Awards -- 2012

Midnight in Hollywood

by Thomas Delapa


And now, the envelope please for the best morning-after Oscar lead: Silent Night ... Silence Was Golden ... Let’s Hear it for The Artist. ... For Hugo, it was a basic Paint It Black.

Zut alors! The Artist, a loving Franco-American tribute to silent cinema, spoke the loudest at the 84th Academy Awards, winning gold in five categories, including Best Director and Best Picture. There were few surprises in Hollywood’s genial, but generally lackluster annual tribute to itself. The biggest winner might have been the worldwide audience, which at least didn’t have to endure a return performance from last year’s tinny Gen-X teaming of James Franco and Anne Hathaway.

Meryl Streep may have pulled off a small upset for her victory as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, besting Viola Davis in The Help, and Streep might have even won over the crowd for her disarming acceptance speech. “Streep fatigue”? After a record 17 nominations and three wins, you bet. Hollywood’s reigning grande dame (at the age of 62), Streep has steeped into the Starbucks of the movies—omnipresent, rich and creamy, and not without a bitter aftertaste.

Nostalgia, not Grease, was the word the long night, starting with Billy Crystal’s ninth role as host. Crystal was drafted when Eddie Murphy bowed out in allegiance to foot-in-mouth producer Brett Ratner, whose salacious and homophobic remarks last November got him the boot. In the 3-hour-plus event, Hollywood preferred to look back, not forward, focusing on its glittery past rather than its uncertain future in the age of thinning audiences and the multi-media challenges to its dominance—not unlike its slow fade in the made-for-TV 1950s.

With box-office attendance down significantly in 2011, the studios continue to bet on overstuffed technology and novelty, not talent, especially 3-D. Even New (now Old) Hollywood film purists Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg joined the 3-D parade in 2011, though not with big hits. While the $150 million-plus Hugo did grab the lion’s share of technical Oscars, it barely meowed in the major categories, which won’t much help its so far one-dimensional ticket sales.

In Hollywood’s own backyard at the sponsor-less (nee Kodak) theater, The Artist was masterful, leaving most American nominees French-fried and tongue-tied. Best Director Michel Hazanavicius thanked the late, great Billy Wilder three times, while gushing Best Actor Jean Dujardin said he loved our country and gave a shout-out to Douglas Fairbanks, one of his models for his role as silent star George Valentin. Among the hunky also-rans, George Clooney had to be content with statuesque supermodel Stacy Kiebler on his arm, while Brad Pitt seemed satisfied to be clutching Angelina Jolie, whose slit gown (and vampy podium pose) tied her with a full-breasted Jennifer Lopez for best (un)dressed star.

While Billy Crystal did yeoman’s work in a substitute lead role, ringing in with a few zingers ("Nothing can take the sting out of world economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with gold statues"), his schtick seemed a déjà vu rewind, sort of like the Oscars as whole. The Artist became the first silent movie since 1927-28 (and Wings) to win for Best Picture. The fact that a low-budget, nearly wordless, black-and-white movie stomped its well-heeled competition speaks volumes about how much loud, mainstream Hollywood has lost its way, if not its voice.

------------
2/27/12

Film Review | The Iron Lady

Rust Never Streeps

by Thomas Delapa


Don’t stop the presses: “Meryl Streep nominated for Oscar!”

You can look it up. Hollywood’s most famous female impersonator has garnered a record 17 Academy Award acting nominations, bringing home the gold once for Best Actress. The movies’ big-name answer to Rich Little, Streep is again favored to win for her flashy but tin-plated performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

The Vassar-educated empress has no new clothes, but don’t tell that to British Film Academy voters, who—hear, hear—bowed down before Streep and crowned her with their own best actress award. The only way to keep Streep from winning another Oscar might be to cast her in the Tower of London.

With all the sterling huzzahs for Streep, you’ll only hear a few murmurs of dissent from the critical backbench. As England’s formidable Tory Prime Minister who reigned from 1979 to 1990, Streep regales us with a prime example of her clinical acting style that stays firmly on the outside of her semi-regal subject. Her Thatcher is a stew of Julia Child and Mrs. Doubtfire, less a recipe for success than a bland biopic plate of bangers and mash.

Given Streep’s queen-bee status, one could hardly expect her frothy Mamma Mia! director, Phyllida Lloyd, to limit the star’s quasi-despotic power to rule. The brittle script, by Abi Morgan, sketches out Thatcher’s life and career from the 1940s to her precipitous mental decline in the last decade, but the focus is clearly on Streep’s mannered magic act, not Maggie’s momentous life as England’s first female prime minister.

For Streep, the eyes have it, unfortunately. Her method is to cock her head, stare sternly ahead (frequently right at the camera) and impeccably deliver her feisty, high-toned lines. That may be good enough for Madam Tussauds wax museum, but on film it drips with chilly artifice. There’s nothing behind those steely eyes, certainly no heart, except for a laser-guided aim for acting trophies.

Yes, audiences will learn about Maggie’s pearl-clad race to the top of the Parliamentary heap, accessorized by her doting husband, Denis Thatcher (Jim Broadbent). While the film presents Thatcher as a strong-willed woman struggling against one of the most entrenched of British male bastions (“I cannot die washing a teacup!”), she also is portrayed as an imperious figure who alienated and humiliated even her most trusted advisors. Lloyd and Morgan make scant attempt to dig into the historical background, except to drop in chintzy newsreel footage of the era, from labor riots to the short-lived 1982 Falklands War that was to Thatcher what the picayune Grenada invasion was to her conservative White House counterpart, Ronald Reagan.

Had, say, Judi Dench or Helen Mirren been elected for this plum part (if only), I doubt the press and the public would have acted like such peons as they’ve done for Meryl the Great. In The Queen, Mirren submerged herself in the role of Elizabeth II; Streep steadfastly clings to the surface for dear life, risking nothing, fabricating her performance with a cabinet of tics and mannerisms. Attention getting, to be sure, but a near-royal bore.

--------
2/17/12

Film Review | The Artist

Sounds of Silence

by Thomas Delapa


While Hollywood faded at the box office in 2011, three noteworthy movies took a long look back at cinema’s past—not in anger, but with love and nostalgia. The Artist, My Week with Marilyn and Hugo are all Oscar-nominated flashbacks that returned us to simpler times, well before the simpler minds of modern, Die-Hardened Hollywood.

If Martin Scorsese’s 3-D Hugo is deep on cinephile sentiment and short on depth, the Franco-American Artist paints a loving, lustrous portrait of Tinseltown in the late silent era. Few, if any, recent films have spoken with such eloquence on just how much the movies have lost by abandoning their roots in nuanced acting and pantomime.

Iris in on an ornate picture palace in 1927 Los Angeles. Onstage, suave matinee-idol George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) hams it up at the premiere of his latest flick before a packed house of smartly dressed Jazz Agers. In this cinematic love letter written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, Valentin’s character is sealed with a kiss blown back to such icons as Douglas Fairbanks as well as sound star Gene Kelly.

Despite Dujardin’s charming, nimble presence (he won Cannes’ Best Actor award), the real star of the show is the film itself, a jaunty black-and-white trip down the memory lane of the silver screen. Shot in the boxy 1.33 celluloid format of old, The Artist is anything but square; it looks so positively right that its negative might have been uncanned from the vaults of MGM, Paramount or Fox (pre-Murdoch) during the bygone studio years.

Whatever the vintage, Hazanavicius pays homage to a galaxy of Hollywood classics, from A Star Is Born and Sunset Boulevard to Singin’ in the Rain and Citizen Kane. The unkindest critical cut is that Hazanavicius excessively mimics his favorites, leaving us with a narrow, if crystal-clear, focus.

Starting with A Star Is Born (pick a version), Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guilliaume Schiffman shine a spotlight on Valentin as he’s eclipsed by Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a bob-haired flapper who ascends to stardom during the revolutionary switch from silent to sound. Stuck in a freeze-frame, Valentin does a Charlie Chaplin and refuses to talk on screen, insisting that the silents are still golden. Our hero’s downfall is what might have happened to Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood had he stayed indoors and sulked instead of singin’ (and dancin’) in the rain.

Despite the 90 or so minutes of silent pictures, they’re not at all hard to hear, thanks to a colorful and atmospheric score by Ludovic Bource that sometimes echoes too loudly with Bernard Herrmann melodies. As Gloria Swanson famously said in Sunset Boulevard, the silent stars didn’t need words, they “had faces”; Dujardin and company say what they need through a delicate dance of gesture and facial expression—as well as a sprinkling of intertitles. A Jack Russell terrier channeling Rin Tin Tin, Valentin’s faithful dog (Uggie) is one of the movie’s best friends.

Audiences may be amazed and delighted by Hazanavicius’s adoring attention to period detail, from Murphy beds and "Pickfair"-era Hollywood mansions to such quaint screen punctuations as wipes, irises and slow fades. While The Artist borrows too much to be an artistic masterpiece in its own right, it deserves a joyful exclamation—aloud—for its heart.


-----------
1/29/12

Do Oscars Need an Additional Music Category?

Music Oscars

By Steven Rosen

Crazy Heart features a powerful, evocative composition that seems likely to be recognized during movie awards season – its “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart),” by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett, is a strong candidate for an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

But, really, the whole mix of music assembled for the film’s soundtrack by Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton is effective. It uses, for instance, Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You,” Sam Phillips’ “Reflecting Light” – even a snatch of co-star/producer Robert Duvall singing Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever.”

So why not Oscar consideration for its overall soundtrack? Actually, there are those who actively work in finding existing pop songs – source material – for movies wish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would do so with a new Oscar category.

The Academy has three Oscar music categories – Original Song, Original Score and Original Musical. In the past, it has had other categories – Prince won an Original Song Score Oscar for 1984’s Purple Rain – but they have all honored music made with the film in mind.

Yet The Graduate, way back in 1967, changed movie music forever by using pre-existing Simon & Garfunkel songs. One of the classics of modern American cinema, it has a traditional score of sorts – Dave Grusin wrote instrumental passages that evoke the lifestyle of the upper-middle-class California adults young Benjamin Braddock was rebelling against.

But Grusin isn’t thought of as the film’s primary musical auteur. That honor has always gone to Paul Simon, who allowed director Mike Nichols to evocatively use several existing songs in the film, especially “Sounds of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair.” But Simon wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar. (While The Graduate was the origin of “Mrs. Robinson,” only snatches were actually used in the film – Simon hadn’t written the verses yet.)

But ever since, movies have used source material – especially older rock and pop songs – to help convey the emotional tenor of individual scenes.

“Most of us hear source music and it already has power from how its been assimilated into our lives,” says Joe Henry, the singer-songwriter who has worked on music for movies in several different capacities, from producing cover versions of Bob Dylan songs for I’m Not There and writing for Knocked Up with Loudon Wainwright III, to composing the score for the upcoming film Motherhood.

“It’s like hiring a particular actor, say Jimmy Stewart,” Henry says. “You didn’t have to do a lot of work to prove your character was a good guy. It’s telegraphed instantly by his presence.

“Music wasn’t used that way in the early days of the Academy,” he says. “But it has slowly found purpose as a significant way to aid storytelling. To not have a way of acknowledging that when appropriate is like not acknowledging an editor or a light designer.”

It’s an interesting question, concedes Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy. But he doesn’t expect a change anytime soon. “It is undeniable that preexisting music has made very effective contributions to many pictures over the years, but that’s not what we do at the Academy,” he explains.

“The Oscars are about the creating of stuff,” he says. “I know a score completely made up of preexisting music has a creative aspect to it, but there’s nobody writing the music and that’s what we focus on.”

Randall Poster, who supervised the selection of Dylan covers for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, believes the work deserves award consideration. “It was a monumental task because we were dealing with one of the greatest icons in pop culture,” Poster says. “It would be nice if somehow, someway, there was an acknowledgement of the best musical element in a movie,” he says.

Crazy Heart’s Burnett, who produced the soundtrack of mostly new recordings of American traditional music for O Brother Where Art Thou? that garnered five Grammys, is more cautious. He says he understands that the Academy needs first and foremost to keep the Oscar for Best Score “pure” – meaning it’s a “substantial body of music that serves as original dramatic underscoring,” according to Academy regulations.

“Maybe there could be a couple more music categories, but it doesn’t feel like the Oscars are short of categories,” he says. “The reality is you write these songs and people carry them in their hearts. That’s about as far as you can go with it.”

(This ran in the March, 2010, issue of American Songwriter)

(Photo of T-Bone Burnett)

Oscars on Second Thought: Back to Five Best-Pictures Nominees

By Steven Rosen
(From Cincinnati CityBeat 3-10-2010)

Here’s an early prediction on the Best Pictures nominees for next year’s Academy Awards: There will only be five.

The great experiment in “widening the playing field” — expanding the number of nominees to 10 this year — turned out to be a complete dud. It dragged down the three-plus-hour telecast. At times, when clips of the nominated films were introduced, it felt like a surreal intrusion on the plain hard truths of Oscars.

For instance, I liked District 9, a visceral science-fiction film/political parable about extraterrestrials confined by force to a South African slum. But the clip shown of monsters kicking earthling butt (and vice versa) made it clear this isn't the kind of film the Oscars are about. Not unless James Cameron directed it, and there was already one of his films in the running. It was embarrassing to watch everyone in attendance pretend to take the nomination seriously.

By the same token, the introduction of hopeless Best Picture nominee Up came after it had already won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Everyone knew that was as good as it was going to get for the Pixar film. The pretension of it being a bona fide Best Picture nominee was anticlimactic. And boring.

For the record, the 10 nominees were: winner The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Up in the Air, Precious: Based on a the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, Inglourious Basterds, The Blind Side, An Education, Up, District 9 and A Serious Man.

But anyone interested enough in the Oscars to get as far as Sunday knew there were only five legitimate nominees — the Final Five, the ones that had also been nominated for Best Director — the first five in the paragraph above. Those two categories correlate so highly that expanding the nominees in one but not the other was doomed to be perceived as insincere. And the Academy’s director members, who nominate the Best Director candidates, would never have stood for their very important award to be watered down with 10 nominees.

Really, the Academy was fighting the Information Age in pretending it could sell the American public on the 10-nominee Best Picture category. Back when the Academy last had 10 nominees, from 1936 through 1943, the category was still in its formative years — the Oscars only started in 1927-28.

In this era of cable television and the Internet, the Oscars have been thoroughly demystified. We're all insiders. Nobody views them as High Artistic Pronouncements anymore.

Instead they're the result of a political-like campaigning process that we can watch evolve and develop. They are more like Congress than the Supreme Court.

Cable networks show important precursors like the Screen Actors Guild awards; the Internet lets us know on an hourly basis which nominees are gaining or losing traction. It’s hard enough for the Academy to maintain public interest in five serious nominees these days, so well informed is the public on the frontrunners by the time Oscar night comes around.

So rather than increasing Oscar-night excitement, having to sit through a telecast that treats films like An Education or A Serious Man as legitimate Best Picture nominees decreases it. Everyone knows these are films that, for whatever reason, weren’t able to make the real cut.

So why did the Academy do this? I like the term that Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara used in criticizing the telecast: a “crisis in confidence.” Broadcast television has been fretting about the loss of a mass audience in this age of new media sources. In particular, it’s worried young people don’t have the reverence that Boomers had for the big awards shows — they’d rather text message or whatever.

Not helping things is that Academy voters have become more sophisticated in their tastes in nominated films, choosing auteurist indie productions with dark, troubling themes that aren’t really meant to be $100 million-plus blockbusters. The 2008 telecast, when the Best Picture competition primarily was between two such dark films, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, drew an all-time low of 32 million viewers, according to Variety. (The 1998 one, riding high on Cameron’s Titanic, drew 55 million.)

The idea of 10 Best Picture nominees, then, was a way to get some of the better popcorn movies — including an animated film and a feel-good populist hit or two — into the running. I’m sure the Academy also wished films like Star Trek or The Hangover would get in there. (It can’t control the actual nominations, which are voted on by its membership.)

The greatest irony, ultimately, is the Academy didn’t even need to embarrass itself. The balance issue took care of itself in the Top Five this year.

Cameron’s Avatar, his first feature since Titanic, became the biggest film of all time, revitalizing the 3-D process. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was also a sizeable hit, a fantastical war movie with enough violence to satisfy action fans as well as art-house-level dialogue. The Final Five’s three other titles all had some degree of contemporary relevancy both on and off screen — winner The Hurt Locker, also a pretty riveting war film, had a female director, Kathryn Bigalow, aiming to become the first woman ever to direct a Best Picture.

Early indications are the Oscars attracted an audience of 41 million, according to Reuters the biggest audience in five years. It’s safe to say the balance and appeal of the real nominees were the reason. People watched despite the time taken up with the Bogus Five.