Review: The Producers (1968)
“The Producers” is about a Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and a frustrated accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) who conspire together to stage the worst play in the world, so they can pocket a bunch of old ladies’ money and live the good life. As Bialystock sees it, this is a no brainer, he’s been staging flops for years, only this time he’ll actually get paid for it, and can be redeemed (though that’s a poor word choice, one doesn’t think Bialystock is too interested in being redeemed from anything) from a life of sleeping with woman old enough to be his dead grandmother. All he has to do, Bloom tells him, is sell much more stock in the play than available, produce a horrendous flop at a tenth the budget that closes in a night, and sprint to an island of your choosing. Of course, it doesn’t go this way, because, as my father is fond of saying, if it did there would be no movie.
“The Producers”’s set up sounds like a comic noir, the sort of thing that we sometimes get from the Coen Brothers, but this is the legendary debut comedy from writer-director Mel Brooks, who went on to become an institution in the genre with films such as “Blazing Saddles”, “Young Frankenstein” and, for people closer to my generation, the Star Wars spoof “Spaceballs”. Brooks is hit or miss, and “The Producers” encapsulates everything we’d see in his future in just under ninety minutes.
The first third is shrill, loud, screeching, dreadful, think the worst of Billy Wilder’s comedy work (”One, Two, Three”, perhaps) crossed with a Neil Simon annoyance of your choice. Brooks mistakes loud for funny in this section, and you may find yourself tempted to turn the volume down or turn the damn thing off entirely. Turn it down, but don’t turn it off, because, at about minute forty, Bialystock and Bloom, after finding their suitably atrocious play (the now legendary “Springtime for Hitler”) knock on the door of fruity, clueless theatre director, Roger De Bris (played by a pre-Mr. Belevedere Christopher Hewitt, a precursor to Christopher Guest’s Corky St. Clair) and the whole thing shakes loose of the stagey grip Brooks has had on the proceedings up until this point. “The Producers” becomes funny, real funny, with more classic lines in a five minute clip than I could keep up with. (My favorite has to be De Bris’s “I never realized the Third Reich meant Germany! This is filled with historical goodies like that!)
Bialystock, Bloom, and De Bris then find their Fuhrer in a fellow named L.S.D (Dick Shawn, who’s performance is like The Fonz if he dropped the ’50s thing for a more ’60s “its cool daddy yo” vibe) and “The Producers jumps the rails, drops a tab that’s probably in L.S.D.’s back pocket and becomes something more free form, organic and surreal. The awkward set ups of the long, nearly laughless first third begin to clash and bang against one another like billiard balls, and reconfigure into something delightful weird, just a dash off from what you expected, culminating in a set piece of zonked out brilliance, the performance of “Springtime for Hitler”, which is like Grease crossed with Triumph of the Will as restaged by Busby Berkeley.
The performances are largely good, but take some getting used to, the film is so over the top you have to a take a nip, process, and then move on. Zero Mostel powers the first third, and invests his lines with an animal vulgarity that’s hard to shake; when he addresses his secretary as a “Swedish tease” you think he’s saying something truly dirty. Gene Wilder, overall, is disappointingly underused, but he invests the character with a pathos, a rumpled lonely dignity, that can be found in even his most bizarre characterizations. Wilder does get the one real laugh that occurs in the first act, a hissy fit over his valued childhood blanket, and another memorable non-sequitir in the third, when Bloom, realizing that Bialystock and himself are doomed to a successful play, screams at Bialystock: “Fatty! You Fatty! Fat! Fat! Your Fat!”
Brooks doesn’t know how to end his film. “The Producers” doesn’t so much conclude as stop, but by this point you’ve witnessed so much nearly hallicinatory comic snap that it hardly matters.
Review: The Roaring Twenties (1939)
There’s a scene, justifiably revered, in the James Cagney headlined-Raoul Walsh directed gangster classic “White Heat”, where power-hungry criminal Cody Jarrett (Cagney), in jail on purpose to avoid a bigger come down, hears that his mother has died, and worse, at the hands of people he was aligned with. Jarrett launches into a slow boil psychopathic rage that continues to trump your expectations as it continues to get worse, and worse and worse. It’s not hammy, it’s not Cagney showboating for an Oscar, he’s MEANS it, and its one of the great bits of unexpected humanity in a villian in the movies. (Perhaps DePalma or screenwriter David Mamet was thinking of this as they shot the scene where vicious kingpin Al Capone cries at the opera , even as he’s ordering good guy Sean Connery to his death.) “White Heat” is considered a classic, and its a sacred lamb that I’m more than happy to stand beside.
Is “The Roaring Twenties”, made ten years prior, also starring Cagney and also directed by Walsh, as good? The answer is no, it lacks the originality of the above scene, but expressing disappointment would be churlish, because, on its own terms, “The Roaring Twenties” is a fabulous, well polished genre picture. The plot isn’t worth rehashing, its a rise and fall gangster morality story. Nowadays, with cynicism a little more chic, there is some possible suspense as to how these things will play out, but in the time of these movies, Hollywood was required to have the bad guy either die or go to jail, crime was not allowed to pay, and “The Roaring Twenties” is a little laughable in the insistance that crime went out with the repent of Prohibition.
But that couldn’t matter less in this case, Cagney’s a remarkable bad guy that you can’t help but root for, and it’s not just because his movies constantly stacks the deck in his favor (always providing a rival you hate more), but more because he seems to be getting into crime to ease a raging case of little man’s syndrome. Cagney’s squat, funny looking, has a higher voice than you would normally require from your villian, is always messing with a more attractive woman than you’d expect, and there’s a reason, because she always screws him over for a better looking patsy on the periphery. Cagney isn’t Tony Soprano, and he’s not even allowed the vulgar grace of a hood in a Martin Scorsese movie, he’s truly the avenging little man, with an id and a tommy gun that will square the odds in a hurry.
The treat of The Roaring Twenties is that the target of his vengeance, after a sluggish first half, eventually becomes Humphrey Bogart, two year before Sam Spade made him a legend. Like “The Maltese Falcon”, Bogart seems hungry here, Cagney doesn’t treat him with the respect he feels he deserves, so he defects from the gang, and with more success than you’d expect. Bogart’s contempt for the Cagney character perhaps mirrors the frustration he felt at the time in real life, for having not quite broken through the industry, not enjoying the success he deserved. Either way, Bogart is unchecked, feral, wonderful, with a look on his face that constantly signals frustration for yet another person he hasn’t gotten to kill. The final confrontation, between the little man who’s down in the shitter again, and the contemptious thug upstart, who’s tux seems to be mocking his unchecked fury, is explosive. For a few minutes, “The Roaring Twenties” previews the brilliance that would come ten years later in “White Heat.”
-Bowen
Review: Brick (2006)
Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a brooding high school student with problems that I imagine a majority of teenagers can relate to at some point or another. His girlfriend, Emily (Emilie De Raven) resenting him for being so closed of, has recently ditched him for another clique. To retaliate, Brendan rats Emily’s new boyfriend out to the VP (Richard Roundtree, welcome in any film), who as a result, now views him as his own personal stool pigeon and whipping boy.
Perhaps unavoidably, Emily’s new clique also hates him, he feels detached from everyone else and eats alone, and, at least over the course of the film, only converses with one character who doesn’t resent or want to hurt him, and that would be the Brain (Matt O’Leary), who’s more comfortable watching and reading than doing (screw being a teen I can relate to that now) but, fortunately, as a result can be depended on for dirt on just about everyone else, probably because nobody notices him, which is at least preferred to the more malicious attention that Brendan receives.
Brenden’s other major crisis, and one that I hope most teens can’t relate to, is that Emily, is, at the start of the film, dead. Her vitality and livelihood, as well as Brendan’s hopes of ever again having her, seemingly washing away in the drain pipe she was either killed or deposited in. This opening, with Brendan discovering Emily in the drain pipe, the most we see of her being the strange blue bracelet she wore, is jarringly beautiful and melancholy. It has an erotic dread that instantly recalls the dead Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks , the genre bending, culture defining noir TV series from the early 1990s. Brick is a genre bender too, a surprising hybrid of noir and high school melodrama, a film where dodging class, and solving the murder of your ex-girlfriend carry not entirely unequal weight.
Brendan, like many a P.I. and love lorn sucker before him, sets out to solve and avenge Emily’s murder, and over the course of his investigation, he brushes up against the kinds of oddballs and eccentrics that you can depend on a noir to provide. I won’t go through all of them, discovery is half the fun in a film like this, but I will say that, besides Levitt’s compelling, grounded lead performance (following his implosive, brilliant turn in last year’s under looked Mysterious Skin), the characters that most impressed me were “The Pin” (Lukas Haas) a slightly older drug dealing string puller who dresses like a German Expressionist’s version of a vampire bat, limps on a cane and lives with his mother, Tugger (Noah Fleiss), The Pin’s henchman, a hot head who engages (in one of Brick’s best scenes) Brendan in a game of chicken in a parking lot, and, the sirens of the film, Laura (Nora Zehetner), who’s playing one of the Pin’s best dealers, and Kara (Meagan Good), a drama guru who, as Brendan puts it, “picks her teeth with freshman.”
I loved parts of this film and the high school noir fusion is gimmicky but reinvigorates both genres in surprising, rewarding ways. High school is a perfect backdrop for the inherent paranoia of the noir genre, and the setting seems to heighten the stakes of everything involved. He may talk like it, but Brendan isn’t Bogart, and he’s never able to totally hide his vulnerability. (Though, truthfully, neither was Bogart, and that’s part of the secret to his everlasting appeal. “You think no one notices you eating lunch by yourself”, Laura tells him, in a wonderful scene that I’m paraphrasing, “but they do.” Brick is a stunt, but it’s a stunt with a surprisingly deep current of teenage ache.
The film’s writer-director Rian Johnson (in his debut, he previously edited the overlooked horror film May) displays an intimidating, dazzling control of atmosphere and mood, but his ambitions sabotage him toward the end. In the second half, Brick becomes more obviously a contraption, playing the old incomprehensible plot game that so famously served The Big Sleep many years ago. Here it’s a fizzle, and by the time Brendan finds Emily’s killer he’s lost in so many other double crosses that he didn’t seem to care any more than I did. All’s forgiven though in the quiet, knockout final scene that underlines just how much was at stake.
- Bowen
Review: Night Moves (1975)
“Night Moves” is, like Altman’s superb “The Long Goodbye”, an example of the existential detective picture that was briefly popular in the 1970s. This is the type of movie where the story, which normally in this genre is dominant and rigoruously thought out, plays sometimes startling second banana to the eccentricities of the main character, who is allowed to be more anxious and less sure of himself than his 1940s noir counter part. The hyper macho conventions of the genre are usually satirized or frowned upon.
All of that said, the 1970s movies have their conventions too, and, while I agree that its probably the richest decade in American cinema, it wasn’t nearly as free-wheeling and “truthful” as we tend to make it out to be. The 1970s just had a more entertaining, refreshing pack of myths to sell us. The detective in the 1970s noir may be more of a realistic man in the sense that he’s not as fearless and always loaded with a Raymond Chandler quip, but he’s still a pretty suave, sexy in an unconvential way pseudo-hipster. Elliot Gould may not be Humphrey Bogart, but he isn’t you either. If you ARE Elliot Gould, my apologies.
Gene Hackman’s Harry Moseby, the PI of “Night Moves” is much closer to you than Humphrey Bogart or Elliot Gould, and this is the film’s greatest asset. Moseby isn’t hip, and we never really see him act particularly tough. He’s a troubled middle aged guy with a middling profession and a wife (Susan Clark) who cheats on him because she resents his emotional vacancy. Tellingly, Moseby doesn’t even confront his wife when he finds out, he confronts the other guy, and the man, knowing this was coming, precedes to lecture Moseby on insecurities he’s had to hear about second hand from the wife: his absent father, his lapsed promise as an athelete, etc. The man even asks Moseby if he’s gonna hit him like Sam Spade.
I’m making “Night Moves” sound like a pretentious slog, but I’ve only discussed about the first fifteen minutes of the picture. Harry is offered a new case (obviously) and he soon becomes enmeshed in a mystery involving a promiscious teenager, Delilah (Melanie Griffith, in a funny, wry little performance) and several older men working on the periphery of the movie industry that Delilah knows through her mother, a faded actress that has put Harry on the case.
As interesting as Harry Moseby is, the case, and the various symbolic allusions to it (the title is a pun, and Harry is obsessed with a famous missed opportunity in a chess tournament) are not as interesting or as well developed. You will probably walk out of the picture confused, as the resolution comes out of nowhere and is stuffed into the last ten minutes. This is intentional though and characteristic of the anti-genre stance of the decade, and especially director Arthur Penn, who made one of the most anti-genre movies of all time with “Bonnie and Clyde”. “Night Moves” is told completely from Harry’s point of view, and the sudden convergence of several surprises at once is meant to put us in Harry’s bewildered shoes, it works, but it bewilders us right out of the movie, and while one respects the intention, it doesn’t totally pay off.
But “Night Moves’ is worth seeing for a lead character a little off the beaten path of noir films, and for Hackman’s wonderful performance as that character. The film also has a pair of beautiful, creepy death scenes near its conclusion, and some memorable, cranky, wannabe tough guy dialogue. Be sure to note the distinction between wannabe tough guy and tough guy, that’s the kind of movie you’re walking into with “Night Moves”.
- Bowen
Review: “For Your Consideration” (2006)
For ten years and now four movies (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind being the prior three) director Christopher Guest, his co-writer Eugene Levy, and their inspired cast of improvisers have perfected a very personal, signature comedy. Let’s call it the 85 minute deflated sigh, the realization that you can’t have what you want, that the stars are most certainly NOT the limit. The luckiest characters in Guest’s universe never realize this, and continue to march along to their own inward tune of mediocrity.
Guest’s movies have become increasingly melancholy, culminating in “A Mighty Wind”, the most emotionally rounded, satisfying of the three. The comedy of the clueless was still present (though not as mean as Guffman) but there was, especially in Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara’s raw performances, a newfound empathy, a sense that this what Guest and Levy had been working toward all along.
“For Your Consideration”, a spoof of Oscar fever as seen through the cast and crew of a broadly inane movie, has the lamest premise of the four, and Guest himself covered similar ground in the non-improvised, not bad “The Big Picture” in the early 1990s. The first half of Consideration, detailing the making of said movie, is underwhelming. Guest’s routine, his rhythm, has gotten predictable, and, as talented as the cast is, they are disappointingly unstretched. Its especially disheartening to see Levy, so good in Wind, return to playing the clueless schmiel that he’s honed in paycheck pictures.
But then Oscar hope spreads through the project like insidious wildfire, and “For Your Consideration”, at that point a forgettable fourth trip to a familiar well, becomes the blackest, most unflinching thing Guest has ever made, epitomized in Catherine O’Hara’s brilliant, wax figure freak show variation of Gloria Swanson’s work in Sunset Blvd. O’Hara plays Marilyn Hack, the lead of the film, and the one most damaged by delusions of grandeur. Hack’s fall, and her chilling final line, bluntly brings to the forefront everything Guest has been up to for the last decade. Catherine O’Hara is worth seeing the movie for, and, while the film is largely uneven, this direction leaves one wondering what Guest and Levy will be up to next.
Review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
A funky, flaky, sensual little masterpiece. Its understandable that horror remakes have such a bad name but ironic that most of the really notable ones of the last 30 years have, in fact, been remakes. This transplants the 50s story and movie (a sturdy little number directed by Eastwood mentor Don Siegel) to San Francisco in the 1970s, and updates the original’s “the Reds are coming!” paranoia to the universal urge to be hip, to medicate one’s problems away, the it’s all cool baby generation. (The fact that one of the first pod people is played by Mr. Spock is a general indicator of the movie’s blitzed sense of humor).
Seldom has a filmmaker, upon intial inspection, been at greater odds with a picture’s sensibility than Philip Kauffman, who went on to be known for grand, sensual epics (The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Henry and June”). The divide pays off though, and you can sense his eventual interests and themes in, yes, this remake of a twenty year old alien invasion movie. The film has a beauty, a texture, a build that’s practically unheard of in the genre, and it culminates in an unbearably long, pod people invasion in a back yard that may make you queasy with its dreamy rape overtones.
The film does meander a bit in the final third, and it’s a bit disappointing that something so good turn into a more routine (though still effective) chase movie, but these are little problems, nitpicks. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the definitve treatment of this material, and one of the great horror movies of the last thirty years.
-Bowen
Review: The Fourth Man (1983)
“The Fourth Man” is one of controversial Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven’s (RoboCop, Basic Instinct, Showgirls) last movies before moving to America. It finds the director exploring a lot of his favorite pre-occupations: voyeurism, obsession, ambisexuality, and a possible blonde black widow. A writer (Jeroen Krabbe), struggling with hallicinations, alcoholism, and a relationship that seems to be souring, meets the widow in question, Christine, at a conference where he’s speaking. They hit it off, he’s not as interested as she, but then he stumbles upon a letter that implies she’s sleeping with a man he also yearns for. A few days later, he finds a few other things…
The film has an exceptional mood, it revels in that charged, erotic dread that is Verhoeven’s speciality. “The Fourth Man” is not quite as cruel as some of Verhoeven’s American work, there is a sympathy with the writer character, called Gerard (possibly a Verhoeven surrogate?) that surprised me. Where as Verhoeven’s American films are more explosive and blunt, “The Fourth Man” is dialed down, brooding, but still blackly funny. It’s neither a masterpiece (RoboCop) nor memorable as a total, abject, legendary failure (Showgirls). It’s a well directed little chiller, with very able performances by the leads, worth seeking out for fans of the director or the curious. I’m not sure how a film with a man dreaming of getting his penis severed by scissors manages to rate as “dialed down”, but, well, that’s Paul Verhoeven for you.
-Bowen
Review: Factotum (2005)
The summary on the Netflix sleeve that accompanies “Factotum” says the following: “Based on Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical novel, this edgy drama centers on a rebel writer with absolutely no desire to live a conventional life. A rootless jack-of-all-trades, Henry Chinaski (Matt Dillon) works in the factories and warehouses of Los Angeles and gets by just fine as long as he can indulge in his four primary loves — women, drinking, gambling and writing. Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei and Fisher Stevens co-star.”
All of this is technically true, but its misleading, and implies that “Factotum” is another of those, glory of the sexy, drunk, unemployed writer movies, that, while an appealing fantasy, (especially for an unpublished writer) is generally bullshit. Most unpublished writers look more like the guy who works at the laundry mat down the street than Matt Dillon, and they aren’t drifting in and out of beds belonging to women who look like Marisa Tomei, they are probably living with their mothers. These films generally pretend to be about flying in the face of convention, rejecting the usual, the safe, the staid, in the pursuit of art, but they are really more about the fantasy of not having to work, getting laid, being on a perpetual vacation only with the self-congratulation that comes with being a “writer”.
“Factotum” is so much better because it acknowledges all of that hypocrisy, and because Chinaski is aware of it himself, he doesn’t ask for pity, and so we begin to root for him, and laugh (in a black comic way) at the ways he perpetually screws up. Matt Dillon is terrific, I’ve never gotten why he hasn’t become more of a force in the industry, though it may be because his looks come with a danger that feels legitimate, and may scare people off a little (he seems uncomfortable in studio fluff). The film has an appealing, rambling vibe that reminded me a bit of the even better Steve Buscemi movie “Trees Lounge”, which was equally honest about its lead character. Watch them both over the weekend and feel better about yourself. A little superiority can go a long way.
Review: 300 (2007)
Frank Miller’s nostalgic look back at a time when men were brainwashed by their government at an early age to think of nothing but dying in battle, and silly notions of free will and inner examination were rightly discarded as effeminate and weak. “300″ depicts a past time, a better time, where men with supernatural abs of marble chopped each other to pieces in the name of super-duper holier than though studliness, and said studliness was narrated over again in tedious, faux-Road Warrior mysticism. Hail Sparta!
Frank Miller is not untalented, his work (Sin City, The Dark Knight Returns) is largely steeped in ridiculous cliches most would discard before they’ve left adolescence, but there’s a fever to his work, a current of emasculated male outrage, pure, unchecked by anything sensible or PC, that is hard to forget or discount, he’s pure id.
Unfortunately the talented director, Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead 2004) feels the need to inflate this orgy to 2 hours with a lot of post-Braveheart, Gladiator, insert-your-favorite-beefcake-dies-for-his-right-to-be-beefy-tract-here hooey: the shots of wheat blowing in the wind, boring political intrigue on the home front, and that same lame orchestral score that’s been passed around these movies for five years. It’s dispiriting, and it pulls you away from 300’s one honest attribute: kinetic beheading of man and monster.
Review: Inland Empire (2006)
As prerequisite viewing for Inland Empire, I offer The Short Films of David Lynch and Eraserhead, and with those under your belt you’ll be best prepared for what Lynch is up to in his newest three hour, wildy non-linear fusion of Hollywood Babylon and women in peril picture. All of Lynch’s movies, even at their seemingly weirdest and most incomprehensible, have some sort of thematic through line, some emotional residue that connects the set pieces. Inland Empire, Lynch’s most ambitious and intentionally infuriating work, is no different, and it may be one of Lynch’s most compassionate films if you view it in a certain way. I had a very concrete view of what happens in Lynch’s prior film, Mulholland Dr., and most people I talked to had a similar theory.
This film will not be the same, it may intentionally be designed to have NO decoder ring. I’m not sure, I have a theory as to what it means personally, but you could view it in fifty other ways, or in no way at all. I will say, as some others have, that it is one of the very best, most convincing dream films ever made, and that it has one of the all time best Lynch performances in Laura Dern’s portryal of Nikki/Susan, a woman who either digs deep in herself to give the performance of a lifetime, or succumbs to insanity, or both, or neither.
Portions of this film are rapt and terrifying and beautiful as to be expected from Lynch but others are deeply tedious also, and it seems that the purpose of the running time is to intentionally make it an ordeal, a major thing that can’t be tossed off in between shopping and lunch. I didn’t love Inland Empire, the film may be unlovable, and I was mad walking out of it, but portions of it have stayed with me, and I admire the film’s stubborness, and its unshakable notion of an existence completely beyond one’s control.
Lynch’s decision to shoot in digital is jarring, but it rapidly becomes very integral to the work, and, as usual with Lynch, the sound design is astounding. If you can I suggest this be seen in a theatre, as I imagine most home systems will not do the film justice. I look forward to debating this film with Lynchheads over the coming years.
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