“Listen, son. You and I are professionals. If the manager says `Sacrifice,’ we lay down the bunt and let somebody else hit the home run. Our job is to lay down that sacrifice. That’s what we were trained for and that’s what we’ll do.”– Admiral to Lt. John Brickley (Robert Montgomery)
Truth is, I have never been much of an envelope-pusher. When the chips tumble in the wrong direction, I take refuge in genre. And to me, as a fan of classic filmmakers like Howard Hawks and John Ford or modern ones such as Michael Mann, nothing gives me more pleasure than a well-crafted genre piece. It’s a critical weakness, I know. And strangely, I am more forgiving of it with film than I am with literature. I can’t remember the last time I read an airport potboiler, but I’ll defend a film that never breaks convention to the last breath.
The trick is, naturally, smarts. Polanski can make Chinatown or Frantic and give a new spin on Hammett and Hitchcock. Eastwood can update the western with Unforgiven. Tarantino can take a World War II film in a new direction with Inglourious Basterds. It’s like a cover of a pop song. The interpretation is the attraction; the artist filtering the material through his or her own sensibilities. I have probably always found that more interesting than the avant-guardians who are the true pioneers. I won’t succumb to electronic music, splatters on a canvas , or Joycian narratives. But again, that’s my problem.
It’s done. How can summer be on its way out already? But then, an August that gave us here in Washington an earthquake and a hurricane perhaps deserves to be given the bum’s rush. (And as I write this, it’s almost 80 degrees and sunny in Washington, so maybe it’s not so far gone after all.)
Never gave much thought to Melanie Griffith. In the height of her career, the late 1980s/early 90s, I dismissed her as a dollar-store Marilyn Monroe, with the Michelin body and the boop-a-doop voice. (See also: Jennifer Tilly.) She seemed insubstantial, especially compared to leading actresses of her time, such as Glenn Close, Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver.
But I’ve been forced to reassess, watching Griffith back-to-back in two films, Stormy Monday (Mike Figgis, 1987) and Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986), and realizing that she has a quality, one that may have been better appreciated in the days of classic Hollywood, an ability to shift from light drama to comedy effortlessly.
I’m not what you would call an early adopter. For one reason, I can’t afford the lifestyle. But even I am hard-pressed to explain why, exactly, I waited years to buy a Blu-ray player.
Of course, those who weren’t in a hurry to embrace hi-def had to await the format shakeout between Blu-ray and HD/DVD. After that, however, even after I bought my first hi-def TV a few years ago, I resisted. At bottom, I thought, how much better, truly, could the presentation be? And as someone who endured the VHS to DVD shift, I was not eager for another regime change.
I had a girlfriend once–hm, maybe I should stop there.These days, that alone seems like an accomplishment. Anyway, I clearly recall this woman becoming almost physically ill as she watched Nic Cage commit suicide-by-drink in Leaving Las Vegas (1995). She simply couldn’t watch someone purposefully abuse themselves so thoroughly.
But then, she wasn’t in love with Cage’s character (or me, as it happened) and so perhaps didn’t quite understand the capacity a spouse or partner can develop for witnessing the self-mandated destruction of an intimate.
Post-war is hell in both Tokyo (above) and New Mexico.
War–and service–in these two very different films are things to be exploited.
In Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo, GIs who defeated Japan in the Big One want to do it again, from the inside out. Acting from a sense of superiority and entitlement, they seek to dominate the country in a criminal sense in the way just a decade earlier they did so militarily.
In Karl Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain, the Vietnam vets at the center of the story want nothing to do with the country they left behind, but they’ll use its riches–in this case, heroin–to profit in the same manner as Fuller’s ex-Army men.
So you set out to identify 25 films that, to your mind, provide the definitive Los Angeles experience. That means you have to watch a lot of movies that don’t make the grade.
Here’s a progress report on those so far that have fallen short:
Take the Monet and run?
A lot of critics are praising Midnight in Paris as a return to form for Woody Allen, but it’s hard for me to get behind that assessment. The new release, which I saw last week in New York, is a flight of fancy about an American who journeys back to the Paris of the 1920s. The film was enjoyable enough, but only reinforced in my mind how far Allen’s stature has fallen.
As with many, my entry point with Allen was first Annie Hall, a film I used to show to prospective girlfriends as sort of a test (this may partially explain why I am single), and then Manhattan. By those lights, Midnight in Paris is a minor work, a toss-off. From what I have read, Allen would likely disagree, but mainly because his view of his process, and of his films themselves, comes off as rather workmanlike.
Both of these films rely on the chemistry between Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. Physically, they were larger, more exaggerated, more, er, robust, than any pair of actors on the screen at the time. Both conveyed a sense of insolence, even ambivalence to the proceedings at hand.
Macao is easily the more conventional of the two films–with a story that was designed to be out of your head a few minutes after you left the theater. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the New York Times’ famous grouch, Bosley Crowther, who wrote: “Macao a flimflam and no more—a flimflam designed for but one purpose and that is to mesh the two stars. The story itself is pedestrian—a routine and standardized account of a guy getting caught in the middle of a cops-and-robbers thing.” Sounds like just about every Ryan Reynolds/Sandra Bullock movie at the multiplex, right?
