jentleman film journal.

Talking Titles

At work, we’re deep in post on our latest project, and the last thing to polish off before it’s more or less in the can is the title sequence. That means that we’ve been knee deep in archival footage, font choices, and crawl edits, all towards figuring out what our sequence is going to say about the movie. For me, it’s also been a rare opportunity to reflect on an element of the movie narrative that stands outside of its normal rules but that can be used to great effect in enhancing helping the audience to understand what they’re seeing.

If you’re not aware, there’s a significant body of work done towards examining the motivations and processes of individual title sequences; in particular, I highly recommend taking a look at the work published at The Art of the Title, which first gave me the inkling that there might be more going on in these sequences than a simple announcement of who the Executive Producers of the movie were. My goal in this space is more general than anything there: to use the next thousand or so words to sketch out a couple of different ways that the title sequence can be used to enhance the movie that we’re watching.

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The Best Lack All Conviction: “The Avengers,” “Snow White and the Huntsman,” and Crafting the Cinematic Villain

Blockbuster season is the time in the cinematic calendar when studios and directors are given the freest license to paint with broad, unsubtle strokes, and 2012, so far, has been no different: if we leave aside the refreshing ambivalence of The Hunger Games, this summer’s fare has offered up plenty of stark, dualistic storylines pitting the forces of good against those of evil. None of them, however, have quite managed to hit. The Avengers, despite its record-shattering march into the rarified air of box office history, relies far more on pageantry and witty squabbling to entertain than on any genuine sense of peril. Snow White and the Huntsman, meanwhile, tries to complicate its fairy tale villain by giving Charlize Theron lots of space to monologue about how men mistreat women, even as the movie sticks to a conventional fairy tale structure of good overcoming evil. Prometheus, out this past weekend, doesn’t even have a recognizable antagonist, unless one wants to shoehorn the huge pale aliens that apparently created its creepy-crawlies into that box.

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Concerning “John Carter” and the Texture of a Movie

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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“The Hunger Games” In Review: Movie Magic, the Midnight Show, and Me

I knew that I was going to see The Hunger Games this weekend, because there was nothing else coming out and perhaps also because I wanted to see what the world was suddenly so excited about, but I had no thought of going to a midnight showing. Why would I? To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never so much as touched a copy of one of the books; if you’d asked me about the movie a month ago, I probably would’ve guessed that ‘hunger game’ was the proper anthropological term for those offers at restaurants where your meal is free if you can eat an entire three-pound hamburger.

Then a friend from work suggested that a group of us go to see it at midnight at the Arclight Hollywood, and, well, why the hell not? So it was that five of us found ourselves rushing to our seats at 12:20 in the morning, fully aware that we had to get up to be at work at 9 the next day, surrounded by teenage girls and middle-aged fantasy fans, not sure what to expect.

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Why The Oscars Matter

Whether it’s the new voting rules, or tastes affected by the dismal state of affairs at home or abroad, or Harvey Weinstein’s best efforts to rig the system, it’s hard to look at this year’s Oscar ballot and not feel like something went horribly wrong somewhere along the line. Drive, the best movie of the year, got almost completely shut out – it was always a hard sell for Best Picture, but omitting Albert Brooks from the list of Supporting Actor nominees amounted to a slap in the face – while War Horse and, most especially (or offensively, if you want to be extreme), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close were tapped for the top prize. Hugo, meanwhile, pulled in eleven nominations, which is pretty significant when you consider, first, the general apathy of the public to a film that should have been a blockbuster, and second, that the movie was merely decent.

Clearly, it wouldn’t be that hard for me to turn this piece into a litany of the Academy’s sins. I don’t want to do that, though, for two main reasons. First of all, to do so would be to overlook the things they did get right: Gary Oldman’s nomination for Best Actor, for instance, was richly deserved and at least a small acknowledgment of a film that, though among the best of the year, was probably a bit too dark and a bit too British to register in a year when voters just wanted to feel good. More importantly, though, it’s because contrary to the reams of paper that will be produced this week on the injustices perpetrated and how AMPAS has lost its way, I believe that the Oscars do matter, more than any of the other awards shows and committees that dot the prestige season landscape.

I don’t mean to say by this that winning an Oscar, or even being nominated, necessarily means that a film or performance or technical achievement is the best of the year, or even among the best: film aficionados can always point to instances where a deserving film or performance was overlooked. Again, we live in a world where Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close could be nominated for Best Picture and where The Artist, this year’s front-runner, was nominated for Best Original Screenplay despite having only two lines of dialogue. Should Roberto Benigni really have won Best Actor in 1998? Of course he shouldn’t. Is it embarrassing that Titanic, Crash, and Chicago are among our recent Best Picture winners? Of course it is. But all of that is beside the point: while it’s nice to see great movies and great performances receive validation in the moment, the stuff that’s really good will still be around in twenty years, when The Artist is a historical footnote. (I’m not sure what the shelf life is of a black-and-white silent made in 2011, but my money is on ‘brief.’)

What I do mean to say is that the existence of AMPAS, and of the Academy Awards that are its calling card, is important in establishing and maintaining the idea of film as an art form, that can be good or bad and that must be addressed on its own merits. In theory, that’s a role that film criticism should play. But criticism, especially in this country, is a marginal and self-marginalizing field, restricted to one of two avenues: either you get the sorts of weekly reviews that emerge in daily papers, where films are broken down into component parts and a verdict is ultimately given (‘the actors are great, I didn’t like the story,’ etc), or one finds highly academic articles that talk about such-and-such director’s importance as an explorer of social themes of the 1970s without any consideration for why or how that director’s films are any good. Critics also sometimes seem to be almost willfully uninterested in film as a storytelling medium: keep in mind, as one friend of mine pointed out, that American film critics thought that Melancholia was the best movie of the year. (Readers of this blog, of course, are aware that it was in fact the worst.)

There is not, in other words, a real and developed dialogue in this country about movies, either as our most significant shared cultural experience or as a legitimate form of art. What the Oscars above all, and the awards season in general, do is to create a context in which people can actually talk about the movies in a context beyond “I liked it.” What else is a statement about what should win Best Picture, or what should have been nominated, or what a travesty it is that such-and-such a picture won some award or another, than a realized aesthetic judgment? We go to movies to be entertained, to be moved, to be told something, to be surprised, but rarely do we have an obvious reason to think about what makes one film better than another.

When Oscar nominations came out on Tuesday, however, the Internet was ablaze with, alternately, rage and delight over how things had gone. If nothing else, the Oscars create a cultural moment in which it is in some way necessary to have an opinion about the movies, in the same way that the Super Bowl creates a moment in which you’re almost not allowed to not have an opinion about football. Even if that opinion doesn’t go beyond, “Oh, I don’t care for it,” you’re still forced to acknowledge what it is and how it’s culturally significant, how you have in some way chosen a point of view that runs counter to the ongoing discourse. Similarly, when my friend tells me that he enjoyed The Artist more than any other movie this year and that it should win Best Picture, the fact that I know that he’s wrong isn’t enough: I have to justify why he’s wrong. By forcing us to compare films against one another, we also have to ask questions about what a movie should do and why one is more successful than another.

Even more important than that, though, is the fact that the Oscars – and only the Oscars, since all those other shows only matter because of what they tell us about the shape of the Oscar race – legitimate the pursuit of excellence in filmmaking. For most of the year, the success of a movie is defined not by how good it is but by how much it made: Michael Bay will continue to get work because, no matter how spectacularly uninteresting Transformers 3 might have been, his movies can be relied on to make bucketloads of cash. The Academy Awards, however, are dedicated to recognizing and rewarding excellence in cinema: for one night, at least, cinema culture is centered on the question of what is the best. In making that kind of excellence mean something, the Oscars give filmmakers – producers, directors, writers, actors – legitimacy in pursuing projects not because they think they’ll be big hits but because they want to make good movies.

Cynics will point out that the Oscars are used as another marketing ploy, that the notion of campaigning for awards – as all the studios do – negates the idea that the Academy Awards are really about honoring excellence, and that there is a discernible formula for what an ‘Academy Award nominee’ looks like. But however tempting it is to complain about how out-of-step the Academy is with contemporary taste, it’s worth pointing out that some of the greatest and most commercially successful films of all time were multiple Oscar nominees. Star Wars, The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Shakespeare in Love – all were big hits, all were great films, and all were Oscar winners (okay, Star Wars only won an Oscar in my revisionist imaginary history, I admit). As much as we like to point to the omission of The Dark Knight from the list of nominees in 2008 as an example of voter snobbery (and justly so – does anyone really believe that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a better movie?), the fact is that the Academy has historically been pretty open to popular movies – really, to movies of all types – as long as they’re actually good. Even Avatar, which I didn’t really like, got a nod back in 2009. Dispiriting as it is that Bridesmaids couldn’t pick up a Best Picture nomination this year, it says something negative about the state of popular filmmaking in this country that, beyond that film, the best blockbuster that anyone could offer up for awards consideration was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.

There’s no denying, also, that the Oscars are used as a marketing tool, and that one reason that they’re so coveted by studio types is that they bring a certain bump in box office receipts and DVD sales. The only reason that works, though, is that we accept that winning an Oscar means that a movie is good: Oscars and Oscar nominations raise our interest in a movie because we have some voucher for its quality, from people who should know. And while it’s true that the Oscar ‘formula’ exists – it’s the reason that War Horse and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close could be nominated for Best Picture – the Academy also found room on its slate for The Tree of Life, a movie that couldn’t be further from any sort of formula whatsoever.

I didn’t love that film, but for once that’s not the point. The point is that there is a place for movies like it, just as there is a place for movies like The Artist and The Descendants and Drive, and just as there is a place for that enormous, great movie that didn’t get made this year but which we will see again. The point is that it matters whether or not a movie is any good – and that though not every story will be good, there’s a good story to be told in every style and genre. Without the Oscars, we’re a bunch of cinephiles moaning about how no one tries to make good movies anymore. With them, we get to moan instead about how no one’s paying attention to the movies that are actually good. That may not seem like a very significant difference — but it is.

Let’s All Feel Good About Race: “The Help” as a Critical Problem

When The Help grossed $170,000,000 domestically and became a surprise Oscar contender on its release in mid-August, studio executives at Dreamworks could be forgiven for chortling and patting themselves on the back. Less attractive was the fact that the film was immediately assailed by African American groups – notably the Association of Black Women Historians – for its facile representation of race relations.

A quick glance at the story of the movie should demonstrate why that was. The main character of The Help is a young woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), who is the only member of her cohort of upper-class white women in Jackson, Mississippi to have gone to college; recently arrived back home, she wants to pursue a career in journalism, and decides that the way to do it will be to put together a book of interviews with the town’s black maids. These are women who have their own households but who spend their lives working in white homes taking care of white children, and, at least as the film portrays it, have more of a hand in raising those children than their own parents do.

This is, in other words, a movie about black women achieving some sort of self-actualization by way of a white woman, and more grandly about how we should all be able to get along, gosh-darn-it. Transparently, that makes it the sort of film that a thinking moviegoer would disdain. The thing is – and the reason that The Help becomes the year’s thorniest critical problem – that the movie is so well put-together, and so goddamn winning. It’s well-shot and the production design, recreating a saturated, visually sumptuous 1960s Jackson where Skeeter gets to drive around a navy Thunderbird and everyone lives in beautiful old Southern manses, is Oscar-worthy. Over and above everything else, though, is the fact that the cast is exceptional. It’s hard to say that The Help gives its black characters short shrift when Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer keep stealing the spotlight from Stone, the movie’s ostensible star, and somehow make themselves into the soul of the movie. Though the movie hits its sentimental notes as hard as it possibly can, I’d be hard-pressed to name more than five or six movies from this year that were as purely enjoyable as this one. It’s the sort of movie that grudging cynics such as myself like even as they hate themselves for liking it.

Yet examined more critically it’s hard to stay so enthusiastic, because The Help isn’t about race relations, or about the black experience of the 1960s, or even the risks of breaking with a closed system in the face of injustice, so much as it is a Hollywood fantasy that caters to letting white intellectuals feel good about themselves. Stone’s Skeeter is a stand-in for every do-gooding liberal who likes to think about how they would have held themselves if they’d lived in that era; the movie assures us that her differences come from being educated, but it’s hard to see how she emerged from this milieu at all, given how thoroughly she rejects any commonality that she may have with the rest of her social group. Meanwhile, the film’s black characters, all of whom are colorful, saintly personalities just waiting to be saved, seem constructed out of that same white Hollywood imagination of segregation. I’ve never seen a Spike Lee movie that I really liked – but I have no doubt that his most minor ‘joint’ has more to say about the black experience in America than does The Help.

Generally, in my essays for this blog, I’ve focused on deconstructing what makes good movies good, pointing out where films succeed, and trying to understand how they fail. The Help, however, is a thornier issue, because it works so well even when we know that we should know better than to be taken in. It’s not quite a Faker, because its agenda is so transparent; at no point does it hide what it is. Yet its ultimate point, which seems to be, more or less, that black people had a rough time of it in the ‘60s and that white intellectuals should feel good about being outraged by that, is as unenlightening – okay, we can say offensive – as anything in V for Vendetta.

Once again, a side of the issue comes back down to the question of historical representation: with a movie about as loaded a topic as race, how much do we need the representation of that subject to be absolutely truthful to historical record? (Indeed, how much do we in some way need it to not be absolutely truthful?) How much responsibility do the filmmakers have to recalibrate their stories to answer the complexities of historical reality?

In the end, the controversy over The Help isn’t so much over what the movie has to say as it is over whether such a loaded subject doesn’t demand a radically different aesthetic approach. Here, director Tate Taylor has fashioned a melodrama about race relations and segregation, and like all melodramas he’s painted in broad strokes: we have our irredeemable villain, in the abominable, bitchy Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard); our on-the-margins, sassy heroine (Stone, of course); and the group of misfits seeking to achieve justice (Davis, Spencer, and the marvelous Jessica Chastain). The Help is as much about monomyth and the contest of good against evil as is Star Wars. It’s just transposed into a more familiar, if no less fantastic, setting.

The difference is that, in a space opera, it’s possible – perhaps even necessary – to make a movie that is about monolithic good and evil and to still have it mean something real, because we don’t have a stake in that meaning beyond our affection or distaste for the respective characters. With the almost sole exception of movies involving Germany’s national bout of temporary insanity in the 1930s and ‘40s, that isn’t really possible with stories that are ostensibly historic. Partly, that’s because politics will get in the way of enjoying a good story every time: what movie about race in America doesn’t offend somebody? But it’s also because movies about history must also be about real people, and real people can’t be dealt with as archetypes. The Help isn’t totally guilty of this, mostly because Davis, Spencer, and Chastain are so good that against all odds their characters become real to us, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge as well how much the film tries to manipulate us into liking those characters from the get-go.

Returning to our original conundrum – the question of whether The Help is a good movie or a bad movie – I’m not sure, with all this in mind, that I could give a definitive answer one way or another. It is well-produced, and it is entertaining, and the acting is excellent; if I had to recommend a melodrama about race relations in the United States, this would at least make the list.

Before I gave that answer, though, I would have to look at you quite seriously and ask, “Why on earth do you want to watch a melodrama about race?”

The Farmboy, the Princess, and the Hooligan: Reclaiming “Star Wars”

Or, The AFI List Project #13: Star Wars

What is there to say about Star Wars that has not already been said? It’s probably the most famous movie ever made, and its parade of creatures, spaceships, and quotes have permeated the cultural consciousness to the point that to hear that someone hasn’t seen it arouses not so much surprise as confusion.

Amidst the avalanche of toys, sequels, prequels, novelizations, lunch boxes, comic books, card games, and whatever other merchandise this 1977 space opera has engendered, however, the original films have become closer to a reference point than a living cinematic object. For most of us — those of us who don’t dress up as Jedi and attend conventions — we use them as an ideal to stress just how bad the prequel trilogy was, but they occupy a deeply embedded space in the consciousness, something familiar and known, but only half-remembered.

I say this because, when you watch Star Wars again — and I am referring to THE Star Wars, the 1977 film that started it all — it doesn’t read quite like a ‘Star Wars movie’ as that has come to mean in 2011. Darth Vader isn’t even a true villain yet: he’s bad, sure, but he comes off more as the right-hand man of the coldly villainous Grand Moff Tarkin. The Jedi are referred to as a defunct religion, the power of the Force is only hinted at, the cast is small, and the plot is remarkably simple.

Indeed, watching this movie again, I was most struck by how unexpectedly intimate the story is. When I think of this series, I think of sprawling, complex storylines stretching across vast regions of interstellar space. Yet, outside of a few asides so that we can follow what’s happening to Princess Leia on the Death Star, this first movie maintains a simple structure and a single thruline: Luke Skywalker encounters the two droids and transports them to Obi-Wan Kenobi; they fly to Alderaan and must escape the Death Star, rescuing Leia in the process; they take part in the final battle. There are three cleanly delineated acts: one on Luke’s desert planet, culminating in their escape on Han Solo’s ship; one in the depths of space, first on the Millennium Falcon and then on the Death Star; and finally the climactic battle scene.

A simple story, then, but one that somehow manages to capture the imagination in a way that has only been equaled in my lifetime by the Harry Potter novels. And, as I look at that sentence, it occurs to me that the two have more in common with each other — and less than with, say, Transformers and Twilight, which may on the surface seem to be more in their respective traditions — than anyone has yet acknowledged.

Transparently, the two are similar because of their success at creating separate universes, which seem so real that you can almost believe them to be true. The trick in Harry Potter is the way that Rowling succeeded in so brilliantly blending aspects of common folktales into a single, comprehensive world. In the case of Star Wars, the success of its world creation in part comes from the highly touted ‘used future’ aesthetic that has become such an integral part of analyses of the film’s production design: the way that Luke’s landspeeder (a sort of hovering car) is banged up and dusty, or the way that the Falcon is always falling apart, rather than everything being shiny and bright and perfectly made. Just as important, though, is that the ‘used future’ aesthetic doesn’t extend through the entire film. Why does no one ever remember the fascistic beauty of the scenes shot on the Death Star, where everything is as dark, clean, and crisp as the other elements are battered? The contrast between Empire and rebels is stylistic as well as ideological (if ‘good’ and ‘evil’ can be thought of as ideologies).

Still, there is a more fundamental way in which Harry Potter and Star Wars are related, and it is in the deceptive simplicity of their stories. Neither is interested in revealing psychological truths or exploring complex motivations: their driving forces are elemental, and their morals simple. This has led to a general conception that their appeal is based on something that critics call ‘pure narrative’ or ‘pure storytelling’ — the same way that critics justified liking 2008’s eventual Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire. And, really, it is a justification, because it rests on the undying idea that things that are simple and popular and entertaining somehow can’t possibly be ‘really good,’ or qualify as ‘real art.’ It’s the same reason that you never see comedies winning Oscars. There’s a belief that quality — or at least ‘artistic’ quality, which is not quite the same thing — can only come from dramatic heft, and therefore that dramas are ipso facto better than comedies and action movies. ‘Pure narrative’ is nothing more than critical code for ‘I enjoyed this movie and thought it was better than most others, even though I usually dislike movies in this genre and even though it may lack the psychological depth of many of the movies that I prefer it to.’

In creating that code, though, the ‘pure narrative’ construction demeans these movies more than it praises them. Because, really, what makes the storylines of Star Wars or Harry Potter or even Slumdog Millionaire all that different from so many less accomplished plot-driven films? Star Wars isn’t a great story because of the Force or its deliberately mythological construction or even its spectacular special effects. Plenty of inferior films have those same elements. It is that the characters are so individual, and so memorable. The fact that Star Wars is completely uninterested in Han Solo’s psychology doesn’t change that he is more real, and more real to us, than any of those that inhabit, say, The Social Network — and that was both the best movie of 2010 and based on real life. Almost every character in Star Wars, and in Harry Potter as well, is a distinct, fully realized personality, down to R2D2, a robot who communicates entirely through beeps and whirs. Indeed, strangely enough, the least interesting character in the film is Darth Vader, who will of course grow into the most villainous creation in cinema in the latter two films. It is because its characters are so distinct that the ‘pure narrative’ has its power: we care about them, and so we care about whether or not they win through.

Han’s wisecracks, Leia’s sass, R2D2’s electronic raspberries, Luke’s longing and naivete: these are the things that we respond to, the living soul of this wondrous, imagined, ‘far, far away’ galaxy. The collective memory of Star Wars is trussed up in the trappings of everything that has come out of it, and perhaps that is to be expected. But let us recall for a moment that the reason we remember it, undiluted by merchandise, spin-offs, or sequels, is a simple, intimate story, made powerful by no more than a bunch of unforgettable characters and an indelible sense of wonder.

Film Favorites: The Other “The Three Musketeers”

First in an occasional series in which I’ll break down why I love some of my favorite movies.

A few weeks ago, I went to see Paul W. S. Anderson’s new version of The Three Musketeers, which was predictably loathsome. For me, its awfulness was a bit of a relief, because, as I mentioned in my review, my favorite movie of all time is probably the 1993 adaptation of the same story. In that rendition, D’Artagnan is played by early ‘90s It-boy Chris O’Donnell (currently doing this), Tim Curry takes on the role of the villainous Cardinal Richelieu, and the titular Musketeers get their swashes buckled by younger versions of Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Oliver Platt. Alexandre Dumas, meanwhile, gets forcibly rolled over in his grave: even Anderson’s awful retelling, if you subtract the airships, is more faithful to the original story than the script that David Loughery presented to director Stephen Herek.

Given that film’s not-particularly-sterling pedigree, however (it has a moldy 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) one may justly question what I find so appealing about it. What can I say? Sometimes you watch the perfect movie at the perfect time in your life and it seems to have been made entirely for you. That was The Three Musketeers to my eight-year-old-self, somehow such a perfect alchemy of mischief, humor, and derring-do that I could watch it until I knew every line by heart and still want to see it again. Even at that age, I was a sucker for the facts and trappings of history, so I was easily susceptible to the setting of eighteenth-century France, with its stylized swordplay and spectacular settings. And these Musketeers were easy to cheer for, both because, each in their own way, they had such panache, and because Tim Curry, milking lines like “All for one — and more for me” for all they were worth, made for such a perfect villain. Of course, I knew that I wasn’t watching a ‘great’ movie, in the way that Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather are great movies — but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any film that I thought was more entertaining.

If anything, this new edition has only made me appreciate the old one more. Anderson’s Musketeers tries to impress us by having the heroes take on forty opponents at a time, but there is never any genuine sense of peril. Herek’s protagonists, by contrast, are never quite out of danger, which makes their devil-may-care attitudes all the more appealing. There is the presence of death, and that itself makes every character — hero and villain both — more vital, more human. Herek also gives us meaningful relationships and rivalries between the principals. Say what you want about the idea that Rochefort killed D’Artagnan’s father, but it makes for good theatre. Anderson instead tries to get us to care about the final showdown between D’Artagnan and Rochefort by having the latter insult the former’s horse at the beginning of the movie. (Those who wish to point out that this episode occurs in the novel would do well to remember that Rochefort has quite a different role there than in the film.)

As a beloved movie of my childhood, it’s impossible for me to watch the 1993 Three Musketeers with any kind of objectivity. Still, I’d argue that there is something important that separates it from Anderson’s update: it takes its characters, with the exception of comic relief Girard, seriously. Even Curry’s scene-chewing Richelieu, whose grins become ever more malevolent over the course of the movie, is in deadly earnest. He may be cartoonish in his malice, but it’s at least unfeigned. Anderson’s characters, by contrast, try to substitute intonation for emotion, and none of them are remotely likable.

Even today, I go back to The Three Musketeers at least once a year. Every time I watch it, I’m again reminded of how entirely popcorn it is; it’ll never pass muster as a ‘good’ film. Yet it still entertains me in a way that almost no other movie of my youth, except perhaps Star Wars, has managed to maintain, and if I had to choose between those two I would usually go with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. If it must be considered a guilty pleasure, so be it: there is still something wonderful about slipping into my eight-year-old self for two hours out of the year.

Changes in the Nest

Or, The AFI List Project #33: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Milos Forman may be one of the most obscure of all our directors: despite a career stretching from 1965 to today (his next film, The Ghosts of Munich, is expected in 2012), he has made only ten movies and is one of the great examples of the ‘oh, didn’t he direct…’ school. (Other notable members: Peter Weir, Wolfgang Petersen.) Yet he is also arguably one of our greatest filmmakers. He made two highly-acclaimed and culturally significant movies, Hair and The People vs. Larry Flint, in addition to two of the undisputed cinematic masterpieces of the twentieth century in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Those films, however, are more highly regarded than the man who made them.

Whatever the reasons for that, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is certainly deserving of all the praise that it receives: it’s one of only a very few movies about mental illness that successfully avoids turning mental illness into a gimmick, and it turns out that its setting in a mental hospital is, somehow surprisingly, an ideal laboratory for making a film about power. Why surprising? Well, I suppose because it takes advantage of our prejudices as an audience: it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that, because these characters are in the loony bin, they really need to have someone else taking care of them and telling them what to do. Not to take anything away from The Shawshank Redemption, but when we see prison guards abusing prisoners in that movie, it is – like too many movies set in prisons – driving home a point we have already seen so many times before. Cuckoo’s Nest, by contrast, is more of a challenge. Of course, we’ve all heard countless times about how the mentally ill were mistreated in the days before their ailments were understood to be what they were, but the subtle dynamics of power between Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) and McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) are a different kind of battle, and one uniquely suited to the film’s setting.

What really got me about the movie, though, was its understanding of the cinematic imperative of change in its characters. It is a commonplace of the creation of stories that your characters must change over the course of whatever story you are telling: that audiences will never care about a character who stays static over the course of a movie. (On a side note, this was the great sin of The Fighter, David O. Russell’s boxing flick released last year: Mark Wahlberg’s was the only character who had no noticeable character change from beginning to end.) Usually, this takes the form of a character struggling with some concept or skill, not being able to overcome, going through the various obstacles presented to him or her, and then finally breaking through in an ‘aha!’ moment in the climax. You know the sort: Luke Skywalker using the Force to guide his missiles down the shaft in Star Wars is an obvious example, as is Batman’s newfound resolution to become ‘whatever Gotham needs me to be’ at the end of The Dark Knight. For a less modern example, look no further than The Grapes of Wrath, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. In that movie, Tom Joad’s change comes when he breaks through and – basically – becomes a communist.

I don’t want to give too much away about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but it’s probably the first movie I’ve ever seen with a more realistic and honest understanding of change. For one, it rejects the idea of change that these other films represent – what we may term an ‘serpentine’ view of change, because it has characters who have had enough happen shedding their previous selves in the way a snake might shed its skin. There is a moment, in Cuckoo’s Nest, where it appears that this will happen – and then we find that the weight of history is too much, that change is not so easy. That moment is depressing, but also remarkably true. Moments and events can affect the lives of characters, just as they can affect us; but moments must be reinforced and cultivated and nurtured to truly change who a person or character is.

That kind of change – a truer vision of change, I would argue – forms an integral part of the story of another character in Cuckoo’s Nest, and culminates in a scene that somehow accomplishes the near-impossible task of being triumphant at the same moment that it is impossibly sad.

Intellectually, then, this treatment of change is impressive and rarely seen, a major accomplishment by Forman. But the more important fact is this: that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a genuinely moving film, and there are very few of those.

The AFI List Project, #35: ‘Annie Hall’

A short post this week - I don’t have much to say about this one.

We’re mixing it up a little bit as we get back into the AFI project, skipping four films in the rankings that I haven’t seen yet to go to #35, the 1977 Woody Allen comedy Annie Hall.

Annie Hall was one of very few comedies to win Best Picture since its release, and one of only two out-and-out romantic comedies (the other was Shakespeare in Love). Contrasting it with the sorts of comedies that we get today, it’s easy to see why. Romantic comedies today are strictly juvenile affairs, playing games of far-fetched wish fulfillment with varying twists on a standard theme. Films like 2010’s Love and Other Drugs, How Do You Know, Letters to Juliet, and Going the Distance are all, by every account that I’ve encountered, insipid entertainments following the usual love-overcomes-every-farfetched-obstacle storyline.

That comes off as perjorative, and on some level it is. What redeems such films is the fact that everyone has already agreed that they’re not seeing them to be edified or indeed to be impressed. Like almost every summer blockbuster, these movies exist only to be light entertainments that are easy on the eyes. That doesn’t make them bad, but it does make them shallow. What set Annie Hall apart is that it dared to try to be about something real. By avoiding the showy editing, the swelling, sappy scores, the exotic locations, and the increasingly tenuous premises of what we may term the ‘modern romcom,’ Allen succeeded in making a comedy that didn’t need to be funny to be good. Indeed, I didn’t laugh very much at all while watching Annie Hall, so if we’re judging it as a comedy I suppose it wasn’t all that successful. As a love story, though, it was one of those few films that asked its audience to consider something not quite so tidy as we’re used to finding in the movies, but which is no less a real part of people’s relationships.

I don’t want to overstate this case, because it runs the risk of reducing truth in narrative to unhappy endings, and it’s far too tempting already to label stories as being true-to-life simply because they end unhappily. (This phenomenon, I think, is part of what propelled (500) Days of Summer to becoming the hip date movie a couple of summers ago.) That being said, when we consider Annie Hall as being about trying to understand those strange occasions when things don’t work out simply because they don’t work out, rather than being about some more grandiose and absurd claim about the impossibility of love, what makes the film successful comes into focus. In the end, after following the romance between Alvy and Annie for an hour and a half, the couple separates. There is no dramatic scene of reconnection, no running Annie down to breathlessly profess love – only a quiet coffee shared after months of no contact. So what did it all mean? If Alvy’s final words are to be believed, it’s all just a little absurd and ridiculous. But the film’s coda belies that somewhat trite moral, playing to the audience’s desire to believe that it surely meant something.

It is precisely those last three minutes, then, that validate the entire movie. We don’t get an answer – and, more crucially, it’s clear that whatever Alvy has told himself, he doesn’t really have one to give. Did it mean anything? Who knows? It certainly happened, but we’re left just as confused about it as Alvy is, and just as tempted to draw facile and clear-cut conclusions. In other words, we empathize with him – yes, even with this neurotic, narcissistic pseudo-intellectual who sees anti-Semites everywhere. It’s not often that a movie is able to do that.

All of this being said, there is no way that this movie is better than Star Wars.

We have no Gentleman of the Day today, because Woody Allen’s marriage to his ex-wife’s adopted daughter makes him distinctly not a gentleman.