Comedy, in any age, is too often based on fart jokes and the incongruities of sex, enough so that we have an entire genre (the romantic comedy, of course) that’s based on the two. That being so, it’s a refreshing and unusual change to see the standard gags turned to timely and mordant commentary on real issues in the life of the world. And, in the character of a buffoonish dictator, that is precisely what one of our great comedians has done: use laughter to point out the absurdities of a system while also offering a deep humanist plea to his audience. I am referring, of course, to Charles Chaplin, whose 1940 film The Great Dictator lampooned the fascist dictatorships of Germany in Italy before the United States was at war with them and which, despite veering into some unfortunate socialist territory at times, is marked most of all in its optimism about the potential of man’s generosity to man.
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Last weekend, being wholly uninspired by the selection of new movies available to me (how excited did you really expect me to get about Dark Shadows, A Tim Burton Film?), I was pleased to discover that the ArcLight Hollywood was doing a set of screenings of classic movies. I found out about it too late to go to Doctor Zhivago, which would have been my first choice, but was happy enough to make it to a 5pm screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket. It was my sixth of Kubrick’s movies, but only the first that I’d seen on the big screen.
It wouldn’t be accurate or fair to say that, having seen it on the big screen, I now can’t imagine seeing it any other way; great movies are great wherever and however you see them, be it in the theater or, now, perhaps even on the screen of your iPhone, whatever David Lynch has to say about it. Nonetheless, it was a distinct pleasure and privilege to experience it that way, and it’s hard to imagine, for instance, the vividness and clarity of its final set piece, when Private Joker’s squad is trying to track down a sniper in the hell of a bombed-out Vietnamese town, coming across nearly so powerfully from my television set.
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Or, The AFI List Project, #42: Bonnie and Clyde
It’s a kind of heresy for a student of film to admit, but I’ve never been particularly inspired by French New Wave cinema. Outside of Jean-Pierre Melville’s obscure, abstruse masterpiece Bob le Flambeur, which is one of those movies that doesn’t strike you as anything special until the credits roll and you realize ex post facto how cool it was, the landmarks of the New Wave haven’t really done anything for me. The 400 Blows? I could take it or leave it – and, really, ending a movie with a freeze frame like that? Breathless, meanwhile, may have one of my favorite lines that I’ve seen in the movies (“What is your greatest ambition in life?” “To become immortal, and then die”), but do Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg really have to spend so much time having interminable conversations in bed?
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The big movie story of last week, as fans of The Avengers (apparently every person on the planet, based on how hard it was to get a ticket for 11am on a Sunday) will already know, was Samuel L Jackson’s vitriolic response to AO Scott’s ambivalent review of the movie. It’s not surprising that Scott’s review wasn’t glowing – he’s as good as openly admitted to having little tolerance for Supers – but Jackson’s response seemed out of proportion, and, perhaps, in its mild air of entitlement, a depressing exclamation point on the seeming irrelevance with these movies, not of critics and criticism, exactly, so much as the very idea of ‘good’ or ‘bad.’
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Back in 2000, 20th Century Fox took a gamble on the idea that taking Marvel’s campy superhero properties and cinematizing them with high production value and top talent would pay off at the box office. They hired a hot young director, to whom they gave significant creative control, and recruited two highly-acclaimed veteran actors to headline the cast. The result was X-Men, which was critically well-received, which, with a gross of just under $300 million, was one of the top ten earners of the year, and which set off the ongoing trend of giving every possible superhero franchise the screen treatment.
With today’s release of The Avengers and the upcoming July premiere of The Dark Knight Rises – not to mention the surely-misguided reboot of the Spider-Man franchise and February’s superhero-subversive Chronicle – 2012 may well prove to be the pinnacle of that trend. Both movies should finish among the year’s top movies, and if Rises is anywhere near as good as prequel The Dark Knight, it’ll probably have the inside track to the genre’s first Best Picture nomination. While there’s no such thing as a sure bet in this industry, the modern superhero movie may be the closest thing to it; even Bryan Singer’s mediocre Superman Returns made almost $400 million.
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Cults, it seems, have made a comeback these last couple of years: after Martha Marcy May Marlene got Elizabeth Olsen some under-the-radar awards buzz last year, 2012 sees the high-profile release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, his first since instant classic There Will Be Blood came out in 2007. In the same vein is the smaller-sized Sound Of My Voice, an indy co-written by rising star Brit Marling and director Zal Batmanglij that premiered at SXSW. Like Martha Marcy, it’s driven by the charisma of its cult leader (John Hawkes in Martha, Marling here) and by its spinning top of an ending. With these movies, as with the cults that they emulate, success is a game of teasing and ambiguity, giving you just enough to begin to believe but not so much that your doubts are assuaged.
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It’s now been almost two months since Disney held its nose and released John Carter, investing everything it could in trying to draw audiences even as they knew that it was probably going to end up being the biggest write-down of all time. And, though it hasn’t come close to wreaking the kind of havoc that Heaven’s Gate did when it bankrupted United Artists back in 1980, it’s still proved a colossal disappointment, pulling in just $69 million domestically (barely breaking even on its $250 million budget on the back of stronger overseas performance) and leading to a $200 million operating loss for Disney. Strangely, though, it hasn’t been all that poorly received – its 51% score on RottenTomatoes, though objectively low, isn’t that far off the 57% scored by the first Transformers movie, and my unscientific survey of people I knew who’d seen it produced none of the out-and-out disdain that I would expect out of such a colossal misfire.
Now that we’re a bit further removed from the histrionics and hand-wringing of the release, I’d like to circle back around to John Carter as the starting point for examining the importance of a movie’s ‘texture,’ which is sort of my fancy way of describing the overall effect that production design, for good or ill, has on film and television viewership.
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Apologies for the unintentional hiatus at JFJ. I’ll be posting regularly again starting with this one, though the frequency of posts may be a bit more erratic given my schedule. Thanks as always for reading.
One oft-quoted statistic that I’ve seen tossed around over the past six or seven months is the observation that 2011 saw the release of more sequels, representing a higher proportion of theatrically distributed movies, than any other year on record. Others decry the decline of original cinematic properties, with original releases (especially major releases) being pushed out of the way for adaptations deriving from sources as far-flung and unlikely as games of chance. Collectively, all of this is pointed to as proof of an ongoing decline in American filmmaking, where creativity is being routinely stifled in favor of sucking every last dollar out of whatever odds and ends are lying around. And, to be fair, I myself have been a part of that chorus; one of the earliest articles that was published here at Jentleman Film Journal was an examination of why studios were shying away from original properties.
Today, though, I’d like to approach that question from a different angle. Yes, it’s true that 2011 was a mildly dismal year at the movies, offering us nothing great and a pu pu platter of good, unambitious movies mixed in with a few ambitious, deeply flawed ones. Yet audiences more or less rejected that level of mediocrity, and 2012 has already seen a pretty significant bounce back from it, with box office revenues up a very healthy 21% from this point last year and what has been so far been a surprisingly satisfying crop of movies.
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This week, James Cameron’s box-office colussus Titanic was re-released in theaters, fully converted to 3-D. Cameron, the maven of the movie event, has been a subject of fascination for me for a long time, since I’m not sure what it is about his work touches people so deeply. For the re-release of Titanic, I present “Comprehending Cameron,” a little-seen article on what makes Cameron’s films tick that appeared almost a full year ago in the early days of Jentleman Film Journal.
15 April 2011
Comprehending Cameron
The other day, I watched Titanic for what was, incredibly, only the first time – I was a little too young for it when it came out in theaters, and I guess I’ve avoided it since then because I was convinced that it couldn’t possibly be all that good. However, following my negative feelings about Avatar, and being sick and tired of being constantly told that I justhad to see Titanic, I thought it was time to give it a shot.
Surprisingly, I didn’t hate it, though I have a feeling that I could pretty easily talk myself into hating it if I spent a couple solid hours thinking about it. More interesting than any review of the film, though (because, really, what is there to say about it that hasn’t already been said?) is how it reflects, and is reflected by, Avatar, which shares fundamentally the same preoccupations. That in turn reflects the interests and efforts of writer / director Cameron, and – maybe – can tell us something about what about these fundamentally mediocre efforts so connected with audiences.
Read the full essay
Sports movies are their own subgenre in American filmmaking, but the relative popularity of a sport doesn’t seem to have much correlation with how much it resonates on the big screen. Probably no sport has produced as many genuinely good movies as baseball, which would seem unsurprising given that game’s history and enduring appeal to the general public, yet football, the most popular sport in the country by a healthy margin, has given us only Rudy, Brian’s Song, and… what? The Blind Side? As a nation, we ignore boxing but we love boxing movies; Hoosiers is about the only feature film about basketball worth watching; and Match Point remains perhaps the only good tennis movie ever, and it is emphatically not about tennis.
Hockey, with its violence, its speed, its subcultures of drinking and militant nationalism (the latter two being frequently combined), seems to offer fertile thematic ground for filmmakers, but, outside of 2004’s Miracle and of course the Holy Trilogy of the Mighty Ducks, has been largely ignored by Hollywood. (One wonders if that’s to some degree because the American film industry is held hostage by the warm, endless pavement of Los Angeles.) That makes Goon, not just a hockey movie but a surprisingly good and heartfelt one as well, a welcome presence at our multiplexes.
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