Fort Apache (1948)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Rio Grande (1950)

Directed by John Ford

I am frequently reminded that I may know quite a bit about movies, but I know very little about cinema. Which is to say, when it comes to film, it’s easy to enjoy, harder to appreciate.

That’s what brings me to John Ford. Years ago, when I fancied myself an aspiring cineaste, it was easy to bypass someone as old-school and mainstream as Ford, a director who mainly made westerns and war movies and who was most closely associated with John Wayne. Give me, I thought then, La Dolce Vita– or in a more modern context, Run Lola Run.

John Ford, were he around today, would find the sort of pretension I espoused in the above paragraph to be a great pile of horseshit.* I gave up on the cineaste idea, but I still treasure movies. And I still find myself a student of them.

If you’re a singer, or a songwriter, you can learn a great deal from standards, even as you may discount them. Inevitably, what’s you’ll find is that if you begin to study them closely, their simplicity vanishes. The pure economy of the form has obscured the complexity of the work.

And so it has always been with Ford. Sure, I probably bought a copy of The Searchers on DVD more than 10 years ago, but largely because I had read that it was iconic, that it was an integral part of American film and pop culture.

But there is a mountain’s worth of difference between obtaining a pop collectible for the sake of it and comprehending its sheer power. Again, this is as true in music as it is in film. You may have heard one particular song for 20 years and one night it may strike you as, in its own way, something perfect. You’ll unearth a depth you’ve never found before. And you’ll notice something in yourself that’s new.

This, I am sure, is also a product of aging. Experience forces you to confront assumptions about the utility of the past that before you’ve stored away as simply accepted wisdom. Again, that brings us to Ford. For while I have owned that copy of The Searchers for years–and even made my own pilgrimage to Monument Valley, I had largely dismissed Ford (and Wayne, but that’s another post) as a relic, someone who held no currency in my more modern, sophisticated life, someone a cut below other American directors of his time such as Hawks, Sturges or Wilder who seemed to have something cuttingly relevant to offer.

Ford’s films, however, have their own confident, steady rhythm, one that suggests that the viewer, almost any viewer, will eventually come around to his point of view. He doesn’t rush, doesn’t pander, doesn’t go for the throat out of the gate. Like his beloved Monument Valley, his films almost seems to simply exist, slowly overcoming you with a silent authority.

I spent much of the first half of Fort Apache waiting for almost anything to happen. For a 21st century moviegoer, the film almost stands still. We are painstakingly introduced to the inflexible Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda), his headstrong daughter (Shirley Temple) and the cavalry officer (John Wayne) with whom Thursday will inevitably butt heads. Danger and tragedy lurk.

But first there’s a romance, and domesticity, and scenes of troops being trained, of drunken camaraderie, of broad humor. There are dances and serenades. Ford has dropped us, mid-stream, in a world that, while it never really existed, has an inescapable definition, a weight. It is more than marked by ritual; the ritual, in fact, sustains it. If it is not real, it is at least consistent.

This won’t come as news to anyone who has seen a Ford Western, from Stagecoach (1939) to My Darling Clementine (1947). Or movies beyond that genre, such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) or The Quiet Man (1952). I have since seen She Wore a Yellow Ribbon described as a sort of day-in-the-life-of-the-cavalry picture and it’s true. Great attention is paid to how horses are cared for. How proper reports are given. How the job is done.

These three films aren’t true Westerns. The cavalry film was itself a hybrid: A marriage of the war and Western–and for Ford it seemed to create the opportunity to inject some measure of institutional order into the chaos of the open West, as well as examine the nature of war in a hostile land. (He had served in the Navy, in the Pacific Theater, during World War II.) All three films are set in the forts, which were literally erected with walls to keep the dangers of the frontier at bay.

They were contained communities. While some have more cynically interpreted this is as Ford’s unswerving belief in the triumph of Western (the other kind) civilization over the wilderness (and, of course, Native Americans), it also can be considered as clinging to the familiar in the midst of an overpower and encompassing storm.

Ford eschewed closeups, often preferring to shoot his subject against the massive backdrop of the horizon, emphasizing the smallness of man in contrast to nature. Community served as the only defense to the degrading effect of the outside. Hence, barn dances, sing-alongs, gatherings. Ignore those external forces, however, at your peril. Titual isn’t all. The land teaches and the observant one adapt. That was the lesson of Fort Apache–with its Custer-like overtones. (And, ultimately, your close-knit shelter is useless when true chaos reigns. That is the lesson of The Searchers.)

When examined in that light, all three cavalry pictures end in a strikingly similar way. The continuity of community is celebrated, more than any individual. Even Fonda’s character at the end of Ford Apache is, in a sense, returned to the community by a generous act of myth-making on Wayne’s part. For Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, there is no life, no home, outside the fort. The rituals of the army are his only comfort. Retirement means explusion and ostracism.  Finally, in Rio Grande, a unity of family is celebrated at the close of the picture–but it is the unity of family within the larger family, the cavalry.

Here, Ford’s preference to utilize many of the same supporting actors again and again–but in different roles–serves that motif well. Victor McLaghlen plays an irascible Irish sergeant named Mulcahy in one movie and Quincannon the next. John Wayne is a character named Kirby York in one film and Kirby Yorke in another. Different names, but the same kind of men. But this was no comment on the slippery nature of identity. For someone such as Ford, who was concerned with larger themes of duty, honor and ritual in the face of the uncontrollable wild, identities were secondary. His characters were representations, if not quite archetypes. It reminds me of writers such as Lee K. Abbott who switch around the names of characters in short stories, mixing and matching them over and again. The familiarity creates the illusion of intimacy, of a shared past.

Accusing Ford of rank Irish sentimentality is a fair criticism–and yet it is likely a reason why I find his films more affecting now than I did 10 years ago. As the forces of entropy (spurred largely by technology and mobility) continue to erode our own sense of community, his films evoke a pang of wistfulness for a time that was never truly real but once existed in our collective sense of what it meant to be an American. For better or worse–and each side has its points–that sense is fading, consumed by larger, uncontrollable forces.  To me, it makes Ford’s work less relevant and more poignant than ever.

* Check out Peter Bogdanovich’s interview of Ford in his documentary Directed by John Ford (1971) to discover how little Ford enjoyed analyzing his own work.

Replaying Season 1 of Californication, gearing up to screen Season 2…..

Hank Moody: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber, you know? I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically 4 figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratise us but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. You know, people …. they don’t write anymore, they blog; instead of talking they text, no punctuation, no grammar, LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me that it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo- communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a protolanguage that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.”

Rollins: Yet you’re part of the problem. I mean, you’re out there blogging with the best of them

Hank: Hence my self-loathing.

She said she was just going to the mall and would be back by 1o.

Taken is the first film I’ve rented using Redbox. There’s one around the corner at the Harris Teeter.

Redbox is the service that lets you pick a DVD from a kiosk and rent it the next day. And it lives up to its initial impression as a vending machine, where you’ll always find a Reese’s Cup but rarely a Zagnut. So, don’t expect to be taking home The Bicycle Thief for your evening’s entertainment. In fact, I think going forward the terms “Redbox” should be synonymous with mainstream, multiplex offerings, offering cheap thrills with a minimum of thought. (As in “I saw the new Redbox with Anne Hathaway.”)

On that score, Taken delivers. It’s actually a strange little action film, made in France a while back and starring, of all people, Liam Neeson, taking a break from his mopey, hang-dog dramatic personage to play a mopey, hang-dog former CIA agent.

In doing so, Neeson may have established a new subgenre: The Divorced Dad’s Action Fantasy Movie. In more traditional settings, these kinds of movies had their day as families split in the 1980s and 90s. Then, Dads would do crazy things to get their kids to like them again, such as dress up as a woman, or be reincarnated as a talking snowman.

That won’t work in these more ruthless, desperate times. In Taken, Neeson, in order to just spend some time with his teenage daughter, has to travel to Paris and rescue her from Albanian sex traffickers. You can’t do brunch at Ruby Tuesday like the rest of the divorced dads?

Neeson’s character, whose name is so irrelevant to the story I can’t recall it, is indeed living in L.A., retired from the spook game and trying to ingratiate himself with his 17-year-old daughter (Maggie Grace, who seems to have reverse-aged  since she died on Lost. Go figure.) The kid lives in fabulous mansion with Neeson’s ex-wife (still-gorgeous Famke Janssen) and the rich, unctious Second Husband (the most overrused Hollywood villian since the Terrorist With a Nonspecific Accent  From A  Country That Won’t Be Named).

The girl wants to go to Paris for a few weeks with a friend. Neeson won’t hear of it because of, well, — he just doesn’t like France. Bad things happen there. Like omlettes that cost 15 dollars. She goes anyway and, wouldn’t you know, is immediately kidnapped.

Call this Permission Slip Porn. It’s every parent’s nightmare: The minute you let your child out of your sight, she’s sold into white slavery. This is exactly why I’m not going to let my daughter join Ski Club.

Does this look like an action hero to you?

The movie itself is a pastiche of so many other films that I had to take out a notebook and keep a running list. It’s obvious inspiration stems from the Bourne films, but, like Chex Mix, Taken contains a bevy of familiar elements. Start with Hardcore (1979), which features George C. Scott as a conservative Midwesterner trying to save his daughter from the porn industry–and which, by the way, is insane. Throw in, of course, Traffic (2000), with Michael Douglas yanking his kid from a Cincinnati drug den. (Is there any other kind?)

But neither of those fine actors had the mad kind of skills that Neeson has, you know, the ability to crush windpipes with the side of his hand, et cetera. The director, Pierre Morel, helps things along by speeding up the film every time Neeson fights, to make him look faster than he is. Still, how bad would it have been for Neeson’s 50-something character to pause, take a breath a few times, and say, this was a lot easier when I was 30–or Matt Damon. But there’s no time for Lethal Weapon-style humor when your daughter is about to be sold at private auction.

The film is even shameless enough to employ one of my favorite narrative devices, used whenever the protagonist sneaks into a closely guarded lair and begins subduing guards, who inevitably have walkie talkies. As the hero draws nearer, the chief baddie is always heard saying “Where are you, Number Three? Number Three, report!” But, you know, Number Three can’t answer.

In the end, you won’t be surprised to discover not only has Neeson saved his daughter and proved his worth to the snarky ex (“You thought I was no good, but that was before Muslims tried to make our little girl a prostitute.”), but he’s even preserved her virginity (!).

Divorced Dad’s Fantasy, indeed.

Son, in my day, all you needed was a cowboy hat and a smile and the audience was yours.

First things first, never write a post that says the hiatus is over and then go on an even longer hiatus.

But there is one defense. Last month, my HDTV went belly up after just three years. (A Toshiba 42HP66 if you are curious) leaving me with little incentive to watch movies, except on my computer–which I find sort of excruciating. TV programs are one thing, movies are another. Even TV shows I love, such as 3o Rock, go down easy on a monitor–but movies, especially now, demand a bigger screen, some panorama, and quality sound.

These days, however, when I go to a real movie theater, it’s usually for my 4-year-old daughter. During the holiday, I took her to see the third Ice Age movie. I had wanted to take her to see Up–Pixar can do little wrong in my eyes–, but reviews on the net suggested it was too violent and somber for her. (And yet the film is called “Up.”)

Now, after 80 minutes of listening to Ray Romano and Queen Latifah play two Woolly Mammoths, I wish I had gone ahead and gambled on Pixar.

But getting to the heart of the matter: The inescapable fact that big-studio pictures are marketing vehicles first. (And if you ever had any doubt, this article in the New Yorker will vaporize it.) And that I am even bother to restate such an obvious notion shows that I am well on my way to becoming the kind of old coot I was always fearful I would become. It’s irresistible to claim that “in my day” things were better–and a true sign of age is when you truly, with all your critical heart, believe it. You’re convinced of it and of the belief that any objective analysis would bear that out. (I can claim the 1970s and the 1990s as “my day” but never mind….)

So movies, at their most cynical, are transactional. You pay your (now considerable) money for a guaranteed experience–one that provides as few surprises as possible. Movies are franchises now, “tentpoles,” chain restaurants.

And frenetic. Absolutely frenetic. The top movie of the year is likely to be the new Transformers movie, which literally, from what I have read, never stops to take a breath, explain itself or refill its tank.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a depressing experience. There’s no way around that. My daughter, who, I will admit, was probably too young for it, hardly laughed. But throughout the packed theatre, few people laughed. Most of them who did were adults–chuckling at some double entendre aimed at them. The kids, who ranged from the very young to teenagers, were silent through much of the movie.

But that doesn’t mean the movie didn’t “work.” Because it didn’t base itself solely on comedy. There’s enough “action”– if you want to call it that–to make Jack Bauer reach for some Five-Hour Energy. At times, it bordered on the exhausting and all of it premised on the idea that you cannot, for any reason, give the audience any time to become fidgety.

This is not a fatal symptom of all movies aimed at small children. As I said, Pixar rarely missteps. And even a movie such as Bolt, which had its frantic episodes, found time for humor, characterization, warmth and a few appreciated life lessons. But this thing was rolled out as product for quick consumption. The packed house spoke as much to the paucity of G-rated movies as anything.

So why pair it with creaky old Murphy’s Romance, a film from the bygone era of the 1980s, starring old-school B-class leading man James Garner and Sally Field, still in her full spunky mode? For whatever reason, it was a movie I saw several times, likely on HBO, during its early life and always found its understated story affecting.

Field plays a divorcee with a young son starting a new life in a small town  out West (yeah, like TV’s Alice). Do they even make movies about divorced, older single women anymore? It was a genre all its own back in the day. Garner is the crusty old town druggist who takes a shine to Field and her son (Corey Haim! What, you haven’t seen License to Drive?). When Field’s no-good ex (Lance Kerwin) reappears, a low-scale competition takes place. But instead of a climatic confrontation where Big Jim teaches the punk a thing or two about being a man, wise old Garner simply lets the ex implode and picks up the pieces at the end.

There are men. And women. And horses. And blue skies and barn dances. And again, that’s how you know you are old, when those things begin to appeal to you.

But the point is this: Murphy’s Romance takes FOREVER. It is a meandering film, a character study that is almost absent of drama. (Even the plot points pass almost under the radar.) It is built entirely around the likeability of its leads. If you like them, you’ll stick around.

In that sense, it’s old-fashioned. I guess that was its own kind of marketing–relying on star power to sell films. That really doesn’t happen anymore, even with the biggest of stars. They aren’t enough. (I always think about the Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt film Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Such a wasted opportunity. Did it really need explosions every five minutes to keep us interested?)

Actually, there are commonalities between Ice Age and Murphy’s Romance. Both movies have at their core the message that unconventional families sometimes are preferable to standard ones. In the former case, it involves a sabre-tooth tiger and a sloth and in the latter, a 60-year-old liberal pharmacist.

And this is as far as I am going to go with that before the comparison crumbles beneath its own weight.

Now, the men here eat first, understand?

I can’t quit you. . .

What we have here are two sides of same coin. Or perhaps both sides of the coin share the same image, a device used in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings.

These are movies about men and the manly things they do. Angels is a about a ragtag group of commercial pilots on a rundown airstrip in South America. Dundee is a Civil War movie that features Native Americans, the French, Mexico, Confederates, swordfights on horseback, tequila, whiskey, brown skinned temptresses, questions of honor and, for sure over the top enjoyment, scenery chewers Charlton Heston and Richard Harris, who spend most of movie threatending to kill each other “when this is all over.”

Dundee was an early effort from Sam Peckinpah, whose career was largely defined by establishing a new level of hyperrealistic violence in Westerns. The legendary (and loathed) Peckinpah was not a subtle filmmaker. His masculine code is telegraphed througout his body of work. Men drink, fight, and die, in that order, and maybe they’ll stop a moment for a pretty girl, but she had better not get in the way. And of course, the women will never, ever understand.

Hawks, on the other hand, is one of the most celebrated directors of all time, one who could work comfortably in any genre. But he, too, created worlds of masculine energy, where men set the rules in the strongest possible terms. Angels is certainly representative. In probably the film’s most famous scene, the pilots drink after one of their own, Joe (Noah Beery), goes down in a fiery crash. When the token female on the premises, Jean Arthur, expresses her horror at the cavalier attitude of the pilots, she is ridculed by Cary Grant. “Who’s Joe?” he snaps.

Like Dundee, Angels is a movie about the Responsibility of Sending Good Men to Die. Nobody complains. No one questions their lot. A coward in Angels must redeem himself in the end to be accepted by the lot. A coward in Dundee is shot in cold blood by Harris.

The difference? Hawks is lighter in touch. And his women, typically, are stronger foils for the men. After all, he was also the director of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, which created the cult of Bogart and Bacall.

This, regrettably, is less evident in Angels, where Arthur frets and worries so much you want to give her a triple dose of Lunesta. Grant can’t ever bring himself to tell her he wants her around, finally relying on that aformentioned double-sided coin.

Faring betterin the film is the incomparable Rita Hayworth in her first notable screen role.

A latecomer to Hayworth’s particular appeal, I will just say: Oh, boy.

I was familiar with her from the Orson Welles’ gotta-see-it-to-believe-it thriller The Lady From Shanghai, I caught her earlier this month in Gilda, the movie that she is probably now best known for.

And all I can say is, well: Woof.

If any modern actress can project this sort of sensuality, I would like to meet her. No seriously. Give her my email address.

Hayworth’s famous first appearence in Gilda:

I often find myself watching movies consecutively that share some sort of connection, even if it wasn’t my plan to begin with. So it was last evening when I screened the latest Coen comedy, Burn After Reading, and then simply flipped over to TCM, to find the Carol Reed film The Man Between. They, oddly enough, make natural companions.

(I only guessed it was a Reed film, because of its similarities to Reed’s The Third Man, especially the prominence of bombed-out Berlin as a backdrop. I was pleased to find myself correct.)

Burn After Reading took a lot of heat, so to speak, from critics who deemed it an unworthy followup to No Country For Old Men. And there’s no doubt the latter movie is superior–although frankly, I would be fine if I never saw it again. But the Coens’ high standards are frequently held against them. What struck me the most about the film was how comfortably it fit in the moment. While the Coens may populate their movies with exaggerated characters, they are undeniably inhabit the world around them. The Coens see the world as absurd and exaggerated. Their characters only follow suit.

So when a homicidal John Malkovich confronts a sheepish Richard Jenkins slinking around this basement and recognizes him from the local gym, all Jenkins can say is “I don’t represent Hardbodies,” even as he is still wearing his manager’s shirt from the place. Or witness Frances McDormand’s Linda Litzke trying to negotiate the voice-responsive customer service line for her insurance provider. George Clooney speaks the nonsense of federal law enforcement, all while building an elaborate sexual device in his basement, while his wife writes children’s books set in the least enchanted kingdom on Earth,  Capitol Hill.

It’s a farce, a send-up of somber, deadly serious movies about spying and government in the manner of The Hudsucker Proxy’s take on corporate America and consumer culture. (I also must add here that while I’m not a fan of Hudsucker, I’m partial to Intolerable Cruelty, the Coens’ attempt at screwball comedy, which most people found intolerable.)

Why bookend it with The Man Between? Because that 1953 film epitomizes the deadly earnestness with which the intelligence game is typically captured on screen. Intrigue. Code words. Tight moments. Will they be discovered? Who is working for whom? The Cold War produced few light moments, which was perhaps appropriate when nuclear death was foremost on the public mind.

In the film, eternally suave James Mason plays an East German who falls in love with a Westerner, an English woman played by the lovely-if-guileless Claire Bloom. Bloom becomes trapped across the border, which, in the  early 1950s consisted of a line of checkpoints. The wall itself had yet to be built.

That’s one reason alone to see the movie, to see Berlin in its early, divided years, with the ruins of the war still everywhere. The shattered city gives weight to a film that could be considered romantic puffery without it.

Mason, of course, must escort Bloom safely to the other side–and repudiate his Communist sympathies (although they are never explicity articulated).

Why do these movies work well together? Because, as I noted, the spy movie runs so close to self-parody that it takes a craftsman to make one from lapsing into somber predictability. The other problem, one hilariously pointed out in Burn, is that without the Cold War, the genre lacks juice. The new enemies are not easily defined. The old ones are second-rate. And the trade no longer carries the panache it once did.

Or maybe that is simply because actors like James Mason are no longer with us. Talk about style to burn.

Just get the byline right. The rest is automatic.

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Writers: William Goldman (and Bernstein and Woodward, naturally)

Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards

Didn’t so much create the concept of investigative journalism but canonize it. Still, nice to revisit a time when reporters were considered to be heroes, as opposed to craven opportunists or self-promoting prospective franchises. What struck me while watching this film again, however, is how much has changed. Woodward and Bernstein operated the old-fashioned way, with phone calls and shoe leather, largely because they were more sophisticated–and more committed–in their methods than those they were pursuing. This was a time when you could call government officials and politicos on the phone and they’d talk to you, not hide behind spokesmen and talking points and counter-information. Watergate, in part, gave rise to the modern public relations state, where every action is focus-grouped, field tested and downscaled for easy consumption.

With the current popularity of Frost/Nixon, is it finally a time for NixonMania? The historical reassessment he always craved?

I hope we don’t end up sleeping at the Port Authority.

Director: Victor Fleming

Writers: Noel Langley. Florence Ryerson

Starring: Judy Garland, Florence Hamilton, Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr, Frank Morgan

I don’t have much to say about this movie, except this. For something that is supposed to be a building block for every child’s cultural mythology, I realized while watching it that it’s entirely possible I never paid much attention to it before. And what I discovered (unsurprisingly I am sure to most) was a much more complex and emotionally engaging film that I ever remembered.

That’s part, I suppose, of the magic of reliving films with your children. You see them in new ways, as an adult, but  also through the eyes of the child. You can witness the wonder, the pure joy, that films like this can provide even in our jaded 21st Century. Since we watched it the first time, my daughter has watched it four or five more times, preferring it often to much more modern and sophisticated entertainments from the Disney/Pixar assembly line.

I need to know something. Can you pick up the check?

Director: Paul Haggis

Writer: Paul Haggis, Mark Boal

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron

A largely quiet meditation on the fractured nature of perception. Army vet Jones’s son goes AWOL upon returning home from Iraq and Jones takes it upon himself to investigate, with the help of taciturn police detective Theron. (These two together don’t produce heat, just the opposite; their lived-in resignation in the face of inalterable truth puts the entire film under a cloud.) There is something wonderful, if not novelistic, in the movie’s march toward its conclusion, one that refuses to tie anything up neatly, but has much to say about pressures soliders face. Jones knows more about himself, his son, and his country by the end of the movie. But to him, there isn’t much reassurance there.

I know this isn’t the time, but damn if you aren’t one fine FBI agent.

Director: Peter Berg

Writer: Matthew Michael Carnahan

Starring: Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman

There was real hope here for awhile. Director Peter Berg was responsible for the sublime (albeit still bombastic) Friday Night Lights. And in its early reel, the film takes some pains to detail the inacessible nature of Saudi society. And more hope in the form of supportings Chris Cooper, Jeremy Piven, and Jason Bateman (as an FBI agent? Really?). But all of that flies out the window as things begin to explode, rockets fire, and automatic weapons rattle. Syriana for Dummies. Black Hawk Down for, well, those who never tire of urban shoot-ups. I blame Jamie Foxx.