A.P. at the Movies

"A Glorious Dawn"

2009-10-07T02:47:00.000-07:00

The best thing I've seen in weeks.

Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

Year in Review: 2000

2009-09-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

With the end of the first ten years of the 21st century fast approaching, "best movies of the decade" lists are sure to start appearing. Rather than simply naming ten or so movies off the top of my head, I'm going to attempt to review the decade, year-by-year, offering commentary and, hopefully, sifting out "list of the decade"-worthy movies. We'll see how it goes. I'm bound to overlook certain, important pictures, so if you feel compelled to do so please leave a comment. Also, I may want to expand on certain movies, so may eventually add an addendum or two (as separate posts).

A final note: I'll mostly be focusing on American movies. Not because I don't watch "foreign" films, but because, well, I mostly see American movies, and like them best. Because they are the best. But that's a topic for a future post.

So let's set the WABAC machine to the year 2000, when the world didn't end! Thank goodness for that.

BOX OFFICE

According to Box Office Mojo, the year's box office champ was How the Grinch Stole Christmas. No joke. It came in about $30 million ahead of Cast Away. Yep. Rounding out the top ten were Mission: Impossible II, Gladiator, What Women Want, The Perfect Storm, Meet the Parents, X-Men, Scary Movie and What Lies Beneath.

An interesting mix, to say the least. It strikes me as a little light on typical blockbuster fare -- that is, high-concept, effects-driven sci-fi/action pictures -- but, as a number of writers have noted, every year's most successful releases include some unexpected hits, so we shouldn't be surprised if any given year's most popular films include a variety of genres, both big and small.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas as number one? I thought director Ron Howard's live-action take on Dr. Suess's beloved children's tale stunk. That it came in at number one owes to a couple of factors, I guess. For one, the original story, and TV special, are ubiquitous around the holiday season. Also, family pictures aimed at multiple demographics tend to do well. That said -- and this is me remembering from nine years ago -- The Grinch of 2000 decided to take the easy route when it came to its cross-demographic comedy appeal: that is, lots of gross-out physical humor for the kiddies, and thinly-veiled sexual innuendo for the adults. (As an aside, I usually think of this as a key distinction between Pixar's movies and those of, well, nearly every other CG animation studio [in particular Shrek at Dreamworks]). I've only seen The Grinch once, in cinemas, and what I remember most clearly is a brief bit at a party scene, where the attendees each drop their car keys in a large bowl at the door. Funny how I don't remember wife-swapping in the original Suess story.

Cast Away strikes me as odd movie to do so well, even if it did feature Tom Hanks when he was at the height of his powers. For those who don't remember, Hanks plays a FedEx employee who ends up stranded on a tropical island for five years, with no-one but a volleyball to talk to.

I own this movie on DVD, but hadn't watched it for years -- maybe since the year I bought it.

Nine years later, I found the movie a little frustrating. Some of it works well, and the many of the scenes on the island are particularly engaging. There, director Robert Zemeckis adopts a detached, observational style, with many long takes that follow Hanks' character Chuck Noland as he explores and adapts to his new environs. The movie is at its best when it confronts the viewer with scenarios that forces us to ask, "What the heck would I do if that were me?"

In a few cases, however, Zemeckis doesn't know where to draw the line and things become tedious. A sequence of Chuck's repeated, pained attempts to make fire are one of the movie's high-points, but the film gilds the lily by following this up with a scene of Chuck dancing around a bonfire at night, singing "Come On Baby, Light My Fire." The movie's ending also falls a little flat, as it attempts to append philosophical meaning to Chuck's five-year ordeal.

Helen Hunt, who has a small role in Cast Away, stars opposite Mel Gibson in the funny What Women Want. Zemeckis managed the impressive feat of having two pictures crack the top ten, the second being What Lies Beneath -- in which the Hitchcockian touches are a little much at times, but is nevertheless an effective thriller with a strong turn by Michelle Pfeiffer.

X-Men has to be one of, if not the most influential movie released in 2000. I can remember a time when superhero movies, despite what would seem to be obvious appeal, were few and far between, and clearly viewed as far from a safe bet by Hollywood studios. To my mind, the movie that changed all of this is director Bryan Singer's serious, spirited, coherent take on the mythology of Marvel Comics' merry mutants. Nowadays every major (and not-so-major) comic book hero has either made it to the silver screen or will arrive there shortly. And if the adaptation doesn't work, then try and try again (e.g. the Hulk, Punisher, and what will surely happen to Superman).

Scary Movie. The film that gave us Anna Faris, a talented comedienne whose time has yet to come.

CRITICS, AWARDS AND SUCH

According to Rotten Tomatoes, the best-reviewed movie of 2000 was Chicken Run. According to MetaCritic, the best-reviewed movie was...a limited re-release of The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel, 1972). Huh. The second-best-reviewed movie was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Other widely-released pictures appearing near the top of both sites' lists include Yi Yi (A One and a Two), You Can Count on Me, Almost Famous and Traffic.

At the Academy Awards, Gladiator won Best Picture over Chocolat, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich and Traffic. Ridley Scott's Roman epic also won Best Movie at the MTV Movie Awards (over Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich, Hannibal [odd, as it was released in 2001] and X-Men) and Best Drama at the Golden Globes (over Billy Elliot, Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Wonder Boys).

Gladiator was clearly a big deal, combining strong box office performance with lots of awards -- which, as we know, don't usually go hand in hand.

As cliché as this may sound, Gladiator is a film very much in the epic tradition of Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959) and Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), combining thrilling battle sequences, engaging characters, political intrigue and a pace that belies the longish running time. In addition to Russell Crowe's star turn as general-turned-slave-turned-gladiator Maximus, the picture offered choice roles to wily veterans Richard Harris and Oliver Reed (who passed away during shooting).

I haven't seen Almost Famous. Not interested. Sorry.

2000 marked Steven Soderbergh's second coming out as an important filmmaker. Personally, I prefer Erin Brockovich to Traffic.

Chicken Run was part of a series of strong animated pictures released throughout 1990s. AMPAS introduced Best Animated picture category for 2001.

WORST PICTURES

2000 was the year of the universally-panned Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000. Fittingly, the movie cleaned up at the Razzies, winning nearly every category. Other Worst Picture nominees were Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (not a documentary this time!), Little Nicky (Adam Sandler plays Satan's son!), The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (it's a prequel!) and The Next Best Thing (Madonna is impregnated by her gay best friend!).

Of these, I've seen Battlefield Earth and Flintstones, but only once each. In cinemas. I remember the former as being bad, but not as bad as the critical overkill would indicate, and the latter as being enjoyable.

Finally, no list of worst movies of 2000 would be complete without How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

ODDS AND ENDS

The 6th Day. Having finally faced off against Satan in 1999's End of Days, there was no-one left for "Ahnold" to fight but...himself!

An entertaining sci-fi yarn that with PG-13 violence whose topicality -- it's about human cloning -- dates it somewhat.

The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Yes, the live-action adaptation of everyone's favorite moose and squirrel, co-starring Robert DeNiro (who, as we see in the trailer, gamely parodies Travis Bickel) and...Kenan & Kel. Remember them? Like 1999's live-action Dudley Do-Right, this attempt to bring Jay Ward's cartoon creations to the big screen fell flat with critics and audiences. Which is a shame, really, because The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle is a good movie that capably captures the tenor of the original animated series.

As in the series, the movie brings us a nonsensical plot, punning wordplay, and sly cultural references. Yet it is in this final aspect that we find the largest change. Back in the 1960s, those references were to geopolitics, as chipper Yanks Rocky and Bullwinkle were constantly foiling the plans of Boris and Natasha, evil secret agents from Potsylvania (presumably a Soviet satellite). With the Cold War long since thawed, the movie turns its attention mainly to consumerism and television.

Most of the gags work -- one of my favorite being Bullwinkle repeatedly commenting on the series of identical fast food/gas station/motel complexes the heroes encounter on their journey -- but somehow a subtext of people being brainwashed by mindless television and advertising lacks the punch of mutual assured destruction.

As the FBI agent charged with chaperoning our animated heroes -- named Karen Sympathy, of course -- Piper Perabo is likable and funny. She was also the lead in Coyote Ugly in 2000, but didn't break out as a star. She's kept working, though.

Dinosaur. Disney's (non-Pixar) attempt at a CG feature, placing photo-realistic CG dinosaurs in real environments, with a story that channels The Land Before Time (the original, not the direct-to-video sequels). As I recall, there was something more than a little uncanny about seeing realistic dinosaurs talk. At least they didn't sing.

Mission to Mars and Red Planet. First volcanoes. Then asteroids. Finally, Mars!

The Patriot. One year before Michael Bay decided to try his hand at a "serious" movie with Pearl Harbor (2001), his main rival in the "what can we blow up next?" club, Roland Emmerich (whom I wrote a bit about here), made this American Revolution epic, starring Mel Gibson. After his drunken, post-arrest ramblings about "the Jews," its easy to forget that Gibson is, or was, a good actor.

In contrast to the Civil War, WWII or Vietnam, the Revolutionary War hasn't inspired many movies. Why is an interesting question, but one on which I can only speculate. The success of the recent John Adams miniseries seems to prove that there is an audience for depictions of the period of America's founding.

Space Cowboys. Escapist fare from director Clint Eastwood -- who, by the time I'm finished this trip down memory lane, may emerge as the most interesting filmmaker of the decade.

Unbreakable. Director M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up to The Sixth Sense is probably his best film -- which may or may not be saying much, depending on your perspective. Personally, I've found most of his pictures entertaining and formally interesting, even if they tend to bend under the exposition required by his trademark twist endings

Unbreakable reunites Shyamalan with star Bruce Willis, who gives a quiet, thoughtful performance as a man who may or may not be the real-world equivalent of a comic book superhuman. Samuel L. Jackson is effectively restrained as a comic gallery proprietor with a rare genetic disorder that makes his bones exceedingly fragile.

On the back of these two performances, the picture works well as a somber, pensive take on the nature of heroism and villainy. An interesting counter-point to the ascendant superhero genre.

Other notable releases from 2000 include American Psycho; Best in Show; Bring It On; The Cell; Charlie's Angels; Final Destination (inaugurating a respectable horror franchise that keeps on giving); Hollow Man (Kevin Bacon turns invisible and goes crazy); Requiem for a Dream (don't do drugs); Road Trip; Scream 3 (a convoluted ending to the saga of Sidney Prescott that awkwardly reveals a "mastermind" was behind the events from day one); Shaft; and Pollock.

CONTENDERS
(Films I'll return to, God willing, in my concluding post in four or five months time)

In 2000, I was film critic for my high school newspaper. Humble beginnings. Back then, I was so in tune to the cinema zeitgeist that I was able to correctly prognosticate the winners of the four major Oscar categories. Amazing, I know.

Anyway, my personal selection for favorite/best -- I don't recall which term I used -- movie of 2000 was the Cohen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Nine years later, I still find the film's episodic narrative, rich visuals, old-timey music thoroughly charming.

X-Men and Gladiator, for the reasons above.

Miss Congeniality. Sandra Bullock's FBI agent goes undercover as a beauty pageant contestant, with hi-larious results. Seriously, this film is darn good. Stay tuned for reasons why.

Pitch Black. Director David Twohy's taut, atmospheric sci-fi actioner with Vin Diesel as anti-hero Riddick.

R.I.P. John Hughes

2009-08-07T00:33:00.000-07:00

Sad news his morning. Filmmaker John Hughes has passed away.

Hughes will be remembered most for writing and directing a string of successful, teen-oriented comedies in the 1980s that launched the careers of a new generation of young actors, dubbed "the brat pack," and established the themes and conventions that persist in teenpics to this day. Hughes is also often credited with giving a voice to the concerns of a generation of teenagers -- which is a little odd, if we consider that Hughes was in his mid- and late-30s at the time.

Certainly, Hughes had forerunners. The 1930s, 40s and 50s each saw cycles of pictures about juvenile delinquents. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney had countless teenage trysts in the guise of comedic misadventures in the 30s and 40s. In the 50s and 60s, Sandra Dee and other teens took the beach. And so on. As much as the increasingly youth-focused nature of Hollywood moviemaking complicates boundaries between "teen" and "adult" fare (as Thomas Doherty comprehensively details in Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s), movies explicitly aimed at teenagers continue to be produced (the American Pie movies and their countless imitators, Road Trip, etc.).

The nature of filmmaking as a business run by experienced professionals means adults making films for teenagers. As the cursory history I just laid out indicates, and as much as things change over the years, there have been definite continuities in representation of youths since the category "teenager" emerged in the 1920s. Hollywood has always made pictures about distressed youths (and the parents who just don't understand them). This isn't to say that Hughes wasn't "in tune" the youth culture of the 80s -- he undoubtedly was. But simply being sympathetic to the concerns of young people doesn't necessarily translate to being able to make good movies. What we shouldn't overlook, then, is Hughes's skill as a storyteller, and his ability to use contemporary trappings -- popular music, in particular -- in service of thematic ends.

It must be noted that Hughes's comedic range, particularly as a writer, extended beyond the confines of suburban Illinois high schools. Hughes wrote and directed two of late comedian John Candy's best pictures, Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) and Uncle Buck (1989), wrote the first three National Lampoon "Vacation" pictures. In the 1990s, Hughes turned his focus to younger viewers, penning the screenplay for the phenomenally successful, comically violent Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990) and two sequels, as well as updated takes on Dennis the Menace (Nick Castle, 1993), Miracle on 34th Street (Les Mayfield, 1994) and The Absentminded Professor (as Flubber [Mayfield, 1997]).

I make a point to watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation every December. It holds up beautifully. I was crazy about Home Alone when it was released, but haven't seen it in years. I must look it up.

Of Hughes's "brat pack" features, it seems The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) have emerged as favorites. My preference, as much as I have a soft spot for Weird Science (1985), is Sixteen Candles (1984). A remarkably accomplished directorial debut, and a showcase for the budding talents of the incomparable Molly Ringwald, the tale of Samantha Baker's forgotten 16th birthday is one of my favorite movies.

Unlike Home Alone, which I saw when I was roughly the same age as its protagonist, I have no nostalgic attachment to Sixteen Candles. I wasn't yet two years old when it was released in cinemas, and I can't even recall when I first saw it. Maybe on TBS when I was in my teens. I dunno.

As much as part of me is uneasy with the valorization of youth -- consider the movie's tagline, "It's the time of your life that may last a lifetime" -- or the fact that the heroine ends up with a guy whom both she, and we, know very little about, the movie still works as amiable teenage fantasy, and I appreciate that the movie makes has no pretensions to be otherwise.

"Well, hang in there, Samantha. The day’s not over yet. You may still get your wish."

Why Netflix doesn't stink

2009-08-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

Time magazine's Richard Corliss has written a piece titled "Why Netflix Stinks: A Critic's Complaint." While Corliss acknowledges that Netflix is a good resource, particularly for hard-to-find and foreign titles, he nevertheless has reservations. Indeed, not only does Corliss have "misgivings about the service's usefulness, especially compared with that of a real, well-stocked video store," he's also worried about "the possibly harmful effect that Netflix and other online retail outfits may have on American society."

American society? Netflix?

According to Corliss, Netflix "stinks" because A) it is killing off video rental establishments, B) it makes you wait for your movies, a slave to the whims of Netflix's distribution system and the postal service, and C) customers "miss out on a face-to-face with a knowledgeable cinephile." This final point has the society-threatening ramifications. Internet commerce risks turning us into a "society of shut-ins" akin to the bulbous humans in WALL*E (which, incidentally, was Corliss's #1 movie of 2008), all because we are denied "the random epiphanies of human contact."

This argument strikes me as decidedly boilerplate, applicable to any form of Internet commerce. Indeed, it's not a far cry from the arguments used against big-box retailers like Wal-Mart that run "mom-and-pop" stores out of business.

Corliss acknowledges that Netflix is, or hopes to be, a stage between video rental and streaming video. But video-on-demand means giving into an evil greater evil: "So, O.K., soon there will be no more waiting for DVDs. But it'll come at a price. You'll be what the online corporate culture wants you to be: a passive, inert receptacle for its products."

Give me a break. What Corliss, and the countless others who make similar claims, never consider is that Netflix, Amazon, Wal-Mart et al are meeting the demands of customers. People like large selection and low prices. That vendors respond to those demands is a good thing.

I've been a member of the kind of specialty video stores lauded by some cinephiles, with massive collections of obscure and foreign titles. You may find that rare title but, in my experience, you pay a premium in the form of higher rental charges and shorter rental periods. As you should, because specialty vendors catering to a very small clientèle need to charge higher prices to stay in business. What folks tend to object to, rightly, is being charged specialty prices (by mom and pop, say) for general goods and services.

What Netflix and the like do is take the specialty out of these transactions. That's the wonderful thing about online commerce: what was once a specialty item, potentially out of reach for many consumers either because of cost, or because they don't live in a city with a specialist vendor, is now easily accessible. No brick-and-mortor vendor will ever be as "well-stocked" as an operation like Amazon or Netflix. On Zip, the Canadian equivalent of Netflix, I was able to rent literally hundreds of foreign movies that Ottawa's "elite" video renters didn't have. What's more, I could keep those titles for as long as I wanted, at a fraction of the cost. How is this a bad thing? Yes, I occasionally had to wait to receive them, but this was a cost I was willing to incur. At the end of the day, I won.

What is admittedly missing from the on-line experience is the element of human interaction that Corliss so prizes, the "face-to-face with a knowledgeable cinephile." Now, in my experience, the average video rental employee knows about as much about movies as the kid who takes my order at McDonald's knows about hamburgers. But that knowledge isn't a prerequisite for serving me a delicious Big Mac, just as it isn't for renting me Legally Blonde. Both activities can be done effectively and efficiently without, again, specialist knowledge. Hiring specialists means higher prices. Corliss is skeptical of the "you may also like" recommendations on Netflix -- which are likely generated automatically based on criteria like titles rented by the same user -- but I'd be equally skeptical of the recommendation of any Blockbuster employee.

For me, one of the biggest fallacies perpetuated about on-line commerce -- or on-line activity in general, really -- is that it is passive, with consumers nothing more than "inert receptacles." Internet activity is anything but passive, hence the ubiquity of the term "browsing." Shopping on-line is admittedly not the same as wandering around a store looking for books or DVDs, but it is still an exploratory activity. One title may lead you to dozens of others if you click on the link for the director's name, or the actor's, or the genre, or the release year. What's more, shopping on-line means you have ready access to the opinions of hundreds of others, ranging from professional evaluations to consumer feedback. Far from being denied "the random epiphanies of human contact," interaction and exchange is multiplied. The vibrant, thriving community of film blogging is surely a testament to that.

It strikes me that many people, Corliss included, want to have it both ways. They want to reap the benefits of a Netflix (or Amazon, or Wal-Mart), while still enjoying the luxury of sauntering down to the corner video store (or bookseller, or grocer) for some good ol' human contact. That's fine. It needn't be either/or. But don't begin complaining about how evil corporations have left us with no other choice than to use Netflix, or lamenting about how this portends the downfall of civilization. First of all, what does it say about "society" if human interaction is largely predicated not on, say, friendship but commerce? Is it not possible that on-line commerce, like the supermarket and department store before, frees up time for us to spend with our families and friends, rather than with the butcher, baker and candlestick maker? Corliss himself notes that cinema attendance is up 8% this year. Second, many independent vendors are able to compete successfully with larger chains by offering unique products and services, even at higher prices. A question I often ask people who lament the closure of a local business is whether they actually shopped at that store -- not as a child, but recently. The answer is almost always no.

Thanks to services like Netflix, on-line merchants, and increasingly on-line distribution, the average person, let alone a student of film, has access to a wealth of cinema unimaginable even ten years ago. Nostalgia for the past should not blind us to the fact that, for movie lovers especially, things are better now than they ever have been.

Updated: Stereoscopes west

2009-08-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

Click here.

Centered, and yet not

2009-07-31T02:03:00.000-07:00

In the Spring, I taught a romantic comedy unit for an upper-year course on film comedy. Lots of fun. The last week, on "the new romance," gave students the choice of selecting, as a group, a movie to watch in addition to When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989). The class chose Garden State (Zach Braff, 2004). Which I hadn't seen, but who was I to oppose the will of the group? Fortunately, the film worked rather well -- particularly because it invoked one of the oldest romcom scenarios: the maladjusted man being transformed by the eccentric woman. In a reciprocal way, on this point the film also turned out to be more formally interesting than I might have expected.

Garden State is about a depressed Hollywood actor, Andrew (Braff), who returns home to New Jersey for his estranged mother's funeral. Shortly thereafter, he meets the kooky Sam (Natalie Portman). The two have adventures whilst falling in love. And so on. Some of the "indie" touches try to be a little too clever, and a general aloofness pervades that doesn't always work in the movie's favor. But, on the whole, I'd say Garden State is worth checking out.

This is the first shot in which we see Sam. Andrew's in the center, and she's at far screen left. As the scene develops we get closer views of Sam, as she and Andrew begin a conversation, but her introduction in this manner -- on the periphery of both the frame and, by extension, Andrew's world -- is significant.

Up to this point, the film has presented numerous centrally-framed shots of Andrew, most of which are obviously symbolic.

Like I said, pretty obvious.

There is a contradiction here between form and content. Though centrally framed, Andrew is barely aware of the world around him. He's been medicated to oblivion. The point of these repeated framings, then, is to reinforce the idea that Andrew is at the center of a world over which he has little control. (These stills may give the impression that the movie belabors this point, but it actually works rather nicely.)

After Andrew's initial contact with Sam -- after meeting in the doctor's office, he offers her a ride home, meets her equally eccentric family, gets to know her better, and becomes interested -- he becomes de-centered, representationally, yet thematically he is more aware.

In the scene above, Andrew is initially framed at screen left -- a more traditional framing for this kind of close-up. As the camera holds on him, the other diegetic sounds -- his friends talking -- begin to fade out until their are low and muffled. A comparable effect was used in some of "centered" shots from above, only here it becomes apparent that the diminishing sound doesn't represent Andrew zoning out, but rather tuning in. The reverse shot confirms that Andrew is focusing on something very specific (and, as you might imagine, narratively significant).

Subsequently, Andrew is again centrally-framed in certain scenes. In each case, the emphasis is on him paying attention, noticing things, becoming increasingly aware.

For her part, Sam is also transformed through her interaction with Andrew. In the movie's concluding shot, she joins him in the center of what is now their world.

What we have, then, is the tried-and-true romantic comedy plot about the transformative power of love actually rendered at a formal level in a consistent, sophisticated way. Nice.

Ghostbusters...of 1954.

2009-07-30T03:51:00.000-07:00

Very, very clever.

Ostensibly, a review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

2009-07-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Dan North has a good round-up of the critical invective that has been launched against Michael "Awesome" Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Having seen the movie, I have to agree that most of the condemnation is deserved. As much as parts of me -- the part with a youthful attachment to the original Transformers cartoon, in particular (but also the part that prompts me to write things like this, or this) -- really, really wants to launch a spirited defense of the movie, there just isn't much to defend.

Not that a record-breaking movie that earned $200 million in 5-days needs much defense by a lowly graduate student. The phenomenal box office success Transformers 2 has reignited the age-old debate about, as ScriptGirl eloquently puts it in her most recent report, "whether Michael Bay is an accomplished journeyman with impressive technical skills, a unique visual style and a finger firmly on the pulse of youthful moviegoers, or just a total douche."

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Bay had this to say about the chasm between critical and audience opinion:

"I think they reviewed the wrong movie. They just don't understand the movie and its audience. It's silly fun," Bay said over the weekend of the many "Transformers" critical detractors. "I am convinced that they are born with the anti-fun gene. The reviews are just so vicious. A lot of them are more personal than anything else."

To be fair to Bay, much of the highbrow criticism of Revenge of the Fallen is decidedly over-the-top and hyperbolic -- which is more than a little ironic, given the grounds on which his movie is being criticized.

I think my favorite headline comes from an Associate Press article: "'Transformers': Worst-reviewed $400 million hit?" Cuts right to the heart of the matter, yes?

While much has been made about the critical/commercial divide since the movie premiered, the AP article does point out that the majority of top-grossing movies, including summer blockbusters, are well-liked by critics. Last summer's The Dark Knight being a case in point -- although, interestingly, the resulting controversy there was how the movie was snubbed for award nominations. Even top-grossing movies that garnered mixed reviews like Star Wars: Episode One (1999) and Pirates the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) were still much better liked by critics than the Transformers sequel.

All of which would seem to indicate that, when it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, critics and audiences actually are in step most of the time.

Linda Holmes makes a similar point at NPR in "'Transformers' Opens Big: Does That Mean Critics Are Clueless?" She notes that a number of recent "pure-entertainment" movies has received good reviews, including Up, The Hangover and Drag Me to Hell.

There's a big difference between audiences thinking critics don't know what they're talking about — which goes to whether criticism itself is considered credible — and audiences thinking they simply aren't looking for critical quality — which goes to whether criticism is, as regards a particular movie, relevant....
Criticism is there to comment on the subjective things about the movie; some people are going because of the objective things: what it is, as opposed to how it is. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it seems like a leap to turn that old, old truth into a new chasm yawning between audiences and critics. In a world where critics gave hugely positive reviews to Borat, it's nonsense to argue that they hated your robot movie because it wasn't Shakespeare.

Fair enough.

Holmes' piece is worth reading in its entirety. Even though some aspects of her argument are questionable -- the idea of the "pure-entertainment" movie, for one -- she makes a number of good points. Yet, lurking beneath her commentary (and the larger issues at hand) there is a thorny question no one seems to be asking.

Jim Emmerson approaches it when he asks, "[W]hat good do reviews of a "Transformers" sequel do, besides providing a few million readers with some pretty energetic and entertaining copy?" Not quite the question I'm thinking of, but a good one nonetheless. The widespread acknowledgment that Revenge of the Fallen was going to be, and is, "critic-proof" might account for the turgid quality of much of the popular criticism -- reviewers know that people will see the picture regardless of what they say, so they take the opportunity to indulge themselves and argue that the vapidity of a nevertheless hot movie somehow portends the apocalypse.

Does it not stand to reason, though, that if certain films are "critic-proof" other are not? Do some films -- those without the benefit of giant robots or superheroes, maybe -- succeed or fail, then, based on critical opinion?

Doubtful.

As Holmes notes, the "pure-entertainment" horror picture Drag Me to Hell got great notices. But those notices weren't enough to save the picture from disappointing box-office. Was it critical opinion that put The Hangover over the top, financially? Or was it a good marketing campaign and very funny trailer? Certainly, critical opinion may -- may -- have something to do with whether a particular film is nominated for an award, but it doesn't seem to drive attendance. Likewise, top film critics may travel the globe seeing and extolling the most wonderful and original movies the world has to offer, but that doesn't mean those movies will ever play in a cinema near you.

Could it be, then, that all movies are "critic-proof"? If that's the case -- even to a degree -- the question to ask is: what is the point of popular film criticism? What does it do?

In a post last year, on year-end "best" and "top" lists, I wrote:

More so than in film scholarship or analysis, perhaps unfortunately, there appears to be an expectation in film criticism that the personality of the reviewer will come through in his or her writing -- which would imply that, as much as the reviewer's solemn duty is to help you decide whether or not to fork over your hard earned cash to see a particular movie, a degree of their personal taste is part of the equation.

Could it be that I got that middle part wrong? That popular film criticism is not about, even in part, helping moviegoers make informed decisions? Some critics seem to see it that way. The critic Dann Gire responds to Michael Bay et al:

If film critics were designed to be mere consumer advisers, then we really screwed up by kicking the lug nuts out of Michael Bay's screechy, populist piece of pandering pablum "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." But we didn't screw up, because we're not consumer advisers. Our job is not to say if a movie will be a big box office hit and everyone should go see it because it's a big box office hit. Our job is simple and direct: to assess the quality of a motion picture.

Gire goes on to stress that entertainment value is but one criteria that a critic will use in assessing a movie's quality, concluding:

What business people like Rob Moore [VP at Paramount] don't get is that critics consider a great many more elements to a movie than how diverting it might be and how much money it makes.

There's nothing wrong with the American public supporting a motion picture that the critics have taken to the firing squad. The two camps are not bound by the same criteria for what makes a successful movie. As it should be.

So, like Holmes above, Gire arrives at an "it's okay that audiences and critics disagree" conclusion. Film criticism only expresses an opinion -- an informed one, mind you, but still an opinion, with which anyone is free to disagree on their own subjective grounds.

To which I really want to ask: is that the best you can do? Millions of people the world over have just thrown your reviews back in your faces, and this is your reply?

Neither acknowledging that movie is "critic-proof" nor an after-the-fact "we're all free to disagree" alibi do much to strengthen or legitimize the field of film criticism. Is either not admitting, basically, that what you say doesn't matter? Of course, if you've appraised Revenge of the Fallen as nothing less than the harbinger of Satan -- or, for argument's sake, just a really bad movie -- what does that say, implicitly, about the millions of people who go to see it? Not an issue I foresee many critics willing to wade into!

So what about that there Transformers movie, then?

I suppose there isn't much to say that hasn't already been said. What I personally find most frustrating is that a franchise with such a rich mythology has twice yielded such poor cinematic results. A parallel could be drawn here to J.J. Abram's Star Trek reboot, which effectively drew upon an even larger, more complex mythology to fashion an exciting, new narrative out of familiar characters and conventions. Oddly enough, the screenwriters for Star Trek, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, contributed to the screenplay for Revenge of the Fallen. Talk about uneven results. Of course, the Transformers sequel was conceived during the recent WGA strike, which may account for why the movie feels like a series of pre-conceived special effects sequences loosely strung together by a weak, largely incoherent narrative.

"...the way it should have been"

2009-06-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston, 1972) begins with an overhead shot of a map of Texas -- a map presumably from around the turn of the last century -- which promptly zooms in on the Pecos River. The Pecos, as the ensuring title crawl informs us, "marked the boundaries of civilization in western Texas. West of the Pecos there was no law, no order, and only bad men and rattlesnakes lived there."

Unto this, the infamous Judge Roy Bean (played by Paul Newman), self-appointed "law west of the Pecos."

If rank in the pantheon of American frontier heroes is to be judged by appearances in theatrical Westerns, Bean, despite being a colorful character, falls somewhere towards the bottom. Aside from the film in question, the notorious hanging judge of Vinegaroon features in two other movies of note: The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940), where the Judge, played by Walter Brennan, matches wits with Gary Cooper, and A Time for Dying (Budd Boetticher, 1969), played by Victor Jory. In both films, Bean is played mostly for laughs -- although the character's unrequited love for the actress Lillie Langtry lends a particularly tragic note to Brennan's performance.

Perhaps the best-remembered aspect of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is this bit of text, from the opening credits:

"The way it should have been."

At the site of these words, viewers even vaguely familiar with the Western are likely to think of newsman Maxwell Scott's famous refusal in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) to print "the truth" about hero-turned-politician Ransom Stoddard: "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

The sentiment is similar, only now the semantics are clearer.

It's admittedly tempting to make a giant rhetorical leap to claiming that this sentiment should be appropriately applied to the genre as a whole; that Westerns -- despite the countless claims to veracity made over the years -- have in fact always been in the business of presenting an (honestly) idealized representation of the past, nay-saying historians and their inaccuracies be damned.

Tempting, but not that tempting, if only because the consideration of the "the way it should have been" sentiment in light of both the specific movie it precedes and that movie's historical context is more productive than any rhetorical gloss that might be applied to the genre as a whole. Consider, first, that this statement introduces a movie produced during a period of the Western's development popularly referred to as "revisionist." At the time when the Western was -- supposedly -- self-consciously criticizing its own conventions (and their ideological implications), here we have a movie that is openly embracing an idealized (and, on balance, comic) presentation of history. Not only does the movie play fast and loose with history, it grafts the story of its protagonist onto a conventional plot seen countless times before in earlier Westerns.

As he was not a gunman of any renown -- in contrast to most top-flight Western heroes -- it is perhaps understandable that Bean did not find himself the subject of more Westerns. As far as heroics goes, the judicial branch isn't particularly exciting. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean attempts to strike a balance between earlier comedic portrayals and a more conventional frontier narrative. Here Bean is presented as an agent of change: the man who brings law to the wilderness, but whose brand of justice quickly places him at odds with emerging civilization around him. This is a common scenario in the later Western, with variations used in True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969), Death of a Gunfighter (Alan Smithee, 1969), The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (Burt Kennedy, 1969), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and other pictures.

In a way, then, this is the way it was -- or at least the way it has been.

As evidenced by the number of Westerns that draw on it, the story of the the unwanted gunfighter is clearly a productive and versatile narrative. Moreover, in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean the plot -- as with the majority of the other conventions drawn upon -- is used in earnest, often played for comedy, but without a hint of self-consciousness. This calls into question Ted Sennett's remark, quoted on the back of the DVD case, that the movie is "playful and wickedly irreverent." Playful? Yes. Irreverent? Not so much.

Ersatz Earps

2009-04-29T01:48:00.000-07:00

Countless Westerns are based upon the lives and legends of a select list of American historical figures associated with the annexation, migration and expansion west of the Mississippi River that followed the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865. Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, "Wild Bill" Hickok, "Buffalo Bill" Cody and General George Armstrong Custer are among the men in this group. Yet the exact number of films each figure has appeared in is harder to gauge than you might think, owing to a number of factors. These include the less than perfect record of movies made during cinema’s early and transitional periods, as well as the contentious issue of movies that feature fictional characters based on historical personages. “Based on” is a slippery conception, as it can encompass “obviously based on,” “loosely based on,” “arguably based on,” and so on. Henry Fonda’s character in Fort Apache (1948), an arrogant Lt. Col. from the east with a blind hatred for Indians who leads his men on a suicidal charge that wipes out him and his entire force, is clearly modeled on Custer. The movie’s displacement of both the historical figure and his last charge onto an ostensibly fictional scenario is understood as the filmmakers not wanting to outright villainize a man still regarded by many as a national hero. Yet for every Custer-by-another-name, there are at least a half-dozen ersatz Wyatt Earps: "town tamers" who ride into gunplay-ridden towns and only don the sheriff or marshal’s badge as a means of avenging a personal loss.

Earp has, of course, received countless big screen treatments. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) established in the character of Earp the prototypical frontier lawman, while eleven years later the phenomenally successful Gunfight at OK Corral (Sturges, 1957) helped reinvigorate the genre during a brief spell of commercial decline (1). Earp also appears "as Earp" in Frontier Marshal (Dwan, 1939), often neglected in discussions of the genre's flowering in 1939-40; Wichita (Tourneur, 1955), starring Joel McRae; the infamous interlude in Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), with James Stewart playing the white-clad Earp role for laughs; Hour of the Gun (1967), Sturges' attempt at a a more historically-accurate and serious version of the legend, with James Garner in the lead; Doc (Perry, 1971), a dust-caked debunking of the Earp legend with Holliday (played by Stacy Keach) as the main character; and two late entries, the entertaining Tombstone (Cosmatos, 1993) and the lumbering Wyatt Earp (Kasdan, 1994).

On the ersatz side, we find a number of notable examples, including Dodge City (Curtiz, 1939), with Eroll Flynn as an Earp-inspired lawman charged with getting the riffraff outta Dodge; Law and Order (Juran, 1953), a solid programmer featuring Ronald Reagan as a lawman bent on retiring but who finds himself facing the prospect of yet another town to clean up; Man with the Gun (Wilson, 1955), starring Robert Mitchum as notorious "town tamer" Clint Tollinger (a great handle!); Warlock (Dmytryk, 1959), a smart, self-conscious re-working of the Earp myth with Henry Fonda as the gun-for-hire and Anthony Quinn as his gambler right-hand man; Young Billy Young (Kennedy, 1969), with Mitchum again in the law man role; and Lawman (Winner, 1971), starring Burt Lancaster.

It bears emphasizing how even this cursory survey of the various representations of Earp speaks to the heterogeneity of the genre. We need not wait until the 1960s or 70s for narratives that scrutinize or offer an alternative to the representation of valor found in My Darling Clementine (2). While Law and Order and Wichita present comparably noble accounts of the life and times of Earp, both Man with a Gun and Warlock present less flattering views of both the burgeoning frontier community and the gunman that community enlists to eradicate its more undesirable elements. To be sure, uncharitable depictions of Western communities -- cowardly citizenry, in particular -- are a common feature of the genre after High Noon (Zimmerman, 1952), yet we can find many examples in earlier pictures: the town of Tonto in Stagecoach (Ford, 1939), or the wrongheaded collective action in The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman, 1943)(3).

----------------------------------------
Notes

1. The latter movie also placed a greater emphasis on masculine camaraderie, a feature that would be elaborated in Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959) and continue to feature prominently in Westerns of the 1960s in pictures like The Magnificent Seven (also Sturges, 1960), The Sons of Katie Elder (Hathaway, 1965), The Professionals (Brooks, 1966), El Dorado (also Hawks, 1967) and The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969). For a number of critics, a focus on frontier fraternity is a defining feature of the 1960s Western. As detailed most notably by Will Wright in his structural study of the genre Sixguns & Society, during this time Western movie narratives increasingly centered on groups of “professionals” who defend society only as a job they accept for pay, for love of fighting or out of friendship. Becoming less common were solitary heroes purely committed to the ideas of law and justice.

2. Tag Gallagher has questioned, rightly, the degree to which that representation of Earp was so upright in the first place. See his article “Shoot-out at the Genre Coral: Problems in the ‘Evolution’ of the Western" in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant.

3. In Stagecoach, it is the town's leading ladies who most characterize Tonto as inhospitable as they parade Dallas out of town. The "ladies league" as prudish meddlers becomes a recurring convention of the genre, dependably representing the temperate, intolerant aspects of a given town. The Gunfighter (King, 1950) features a notable appearance, as the ladies league is taken aback when the kind gentleman they have been speaking with is revealed as the notorious gunman Ringo.

Stereoscopes west

2009-04-14T02:17:00.000-07:00

Updates: One More Train to Rob (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1971) [8/4/09]

Over the past few years I've watched hundreds of Westerns as part of my research. This kind of saturation viewing has both benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, what we might call the transtextual dimension of the genre comes vividly to life. Not only do larger narrative and thematic links emerge, transcending decades, studios and directors, but more minor connections -- lines of dialogue, pieces of mise-en-scène -- materialize. On the other hand, watching Western after Western after Western means that these links, both large and small, can evade even the most attentive analyst -- or if not the most attentive analyst, at least this analyst. There were a couple of stretches last year where I was screening between 15 and 20 Westerns per week. On paper, the prospect of watching this many Westerns is, of course, awesome. In practice, however, it became a little trying. Despite my best efforts at note taking, I often reached a point where my day's, or week's, screenings confusingly coalesced in my mind into one epic frontier narrative. I eventually settled into a less ambitious routine, but was still able to retain a number of interesting linkages -- many of which I explore in my in-progress dissertation.

One interesting strain of observation that may but most likely will not find a place in said dissertation, falling to the small side of the dichotomy I've just sketched, is the recurring appearance of stereoscopes in Westerns. This has only really just struck me, meaning I've probably overlooked the presence of this motion toy in umpteen pictures.

What I'd like to do in this post is document when these optical marvels appear in Westerns, and their possible significance. I've started with a few instances, and shall endeavor to update this post as new examples come to me.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, 2007) and The True Story of Jesse James (Ray, 1957)

The Assassination of Jesse James is punctuated by an intermittent voiceover narration, from an unseen, unknown source. These passages include shots in which the image is slightly distorted; the center of the frame is in focus, yet the edges are warped and blurred.

The meaning of these dysmorphic shots becomes clear following Jesse’s murder, when the narrator informs us that a photo of the outlaw’s corpse was taken to be viewed in a stereoscope, alongside such wonders as the Sphinx and the Taj Mahal.

In a sense, our knowledge of James has been doubly mediated throughout the movie, through an apparently omniscient narration and through the distorting lens of the stereoscope.

Interestingly enough, in The True Story of Jesse James, Robert Ford is playing with a stereoscope just prior to carrying out the murder of James.

Unlike in The Assassination of Jesse James, here the stereoscope serves no thematic or stylistic purpose. While The True Story of Jesse James does consider the role of (what we now call) media in the creation of heroes -- particularly through the the reflexive device of Jesse’s awareness that a measure of his fame owes to exaggerated, dime novel accounts of his exploits -- the stereoscope does not figure into this. Nor is it seen at any other point in the movie. Ford is simply shown reclining in a chair in James' house, looking through it. We aren't told or shown what the slide is. Is the point to add period detail? Maybe. The image of the prostrate Ford looking casually through the stereoscope's lenses is a striking one in the context of the heinous act he and his brother are about to perpetrate.

Dirty Little Billy (Dragoti, 1972)

At the start of Dragoti's decidedly grimy interpretation of the Billy the Kid legend, young Billy (Michael J. Pollard), his mother and step-father descend from a smoke-spewing locomotive into the muddy streets of Coffeyville, Kansas. "Jesus" is all the New York-bred Billy can say at the sight of the dirty, backwater town.

As he struggles down out of the train, we see that he is carrying a canvas duffel bag and a stereoscope. The device is seen at frame left in the capture below, after Billy has tumbled backward into the mud on his walk into town.

Dirty Little Billy plays up the east-west dichotomy from the get go. Along with his clothing and conspicuous bowler, the stereoscope helps to mark Billy as out-of-place in his new environs.

Yet while the device remains in view in the subsequent scene, where Billy and family are shown their new house, at no point is our direction drawn to the stereoscope by means of a close-up. Nor is Billy ever seen using it, like Robert Ford in The True Story of Jesse James. As such, positing much function beyond serving to mark Billy as out-of-place (and also, again, being period detail) would be a stretch.

One More Train to Rob (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1971)
[added 8/4/09]
A largely forgotten Western helmed by veteran Andrew V. McLaglen, One More Train to Rob is about charismatic train robber Harker Fleet (George Peppard) seeking revenge against the partner who double-crossed him (John Vernon) and stole his woman (Diana Muldaur), only to end up helping the members of a Chinese mining camp trying to get a shipment of gold safely to San Francisco. As Roger Greenspun aptly noted in his review in the New York Times, "The plot, built out of these elements, is more than usually complex, and the characters who act it out are more than usually complete."

The stereoscope pops up in a single scene. It isn't so much as looked at by any of the characters, but it's there.

On the table. (Apologies for the quality of the image -- the only copy of the movie I've been able to find was taped from TV). I'm assuming that the device detaches from its base, enabling the user to hold it up. Also on the table are three stacks of stereo cards.

As I indicated above, the stereoscope here serves no other function than as a part of the decor. Yet, compared to the other examples encountered thus far, this appears to be an up-market device -- something the wealthy use to appoint a living room, a perfect complement to the silverware and the porcelain figurines. As an element of mise en scène, then, is the stereoscope the equivalent of, say, the radio or, later, the television? That is, an appliance we can expect to find owned by rich and poor alike, albeit in according models? Maybe.

Barbara Stanwyck, Cowboy Queen

2009-04-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

This is (more or less) the text of a presentation I gave at the 2009 conference of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association, held at the National Media Museum in Bradford in January. Some of this material makes up a small section of my doctoral dissertation. I'm hoping to (eventually) expand the whole thing into a proper article, but for the time being I figure I might as well share it with the world. Feedback appreciated, as always.

Following the critical and commercial success of Dances with Wolves (Costner, 1990) and Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992) – and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Back to the Future Part III (Zemeckis, 1990) – the mid-1990s witnessed a small resurgence in the production of movie Westerns. Between 1993 and 1996, fourteen Westerns were released theatrically in the United States, a level of output not experienced since the 1970s, and certainly not experienced again at any point thereafter. This cycle of Western production is notable for its diversity, with films ranging from updated takes on mythical Western heroes Wyatt Earp, Jesse James and Wild Bill Hickok to narratives that privileged groups the genre had historically been inclined to marginalize, including Native Americans, blacks, and women.

Notably, female protagonists came to the fore in three pictures: The Ballad of Little Jo (Greenwald, 1993), Bad Girls (Kaplan, 1994) and The Quick and the Dead (Raimi, 1995). Of these movies, it is The Ballad of Little Jo – director Maggie Greenwald’s saga of an eastern society woman who, to avoid disgrace after bearing a child out of wedlock, heads west disguised as a man – that has garnered the most attention. Although not as high profile a movie as Bad Girls or The Quick and the Dead, upon release the picture received positive notices from the likes of Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin, and has since received critical consideration from scholars ranging from B. Ruby Rich to Jim Kitses, whose monograph Horizons West remains the most influential study of the Western genre.

Critical examinations of the representation of women in the Western genre have largely limited themselves to the stereotypes prevalent in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Indeed, the conventional woman characters found in the Western are so well known that they are invoked by the advertising for The Ballad of Little Jo as a point of product differentiation. To quote the movie’s tagline: "In 1866, a woman had two choices…she could be a wife or she could be a whore. Josephine Monaghan made the boldest choice of all. She chose to be a man."

Yet not all Western women were maternal schoolmarms or deviant saloon girls, and gun-totting female screen heroes appeared long before the 1990s. Greenwald acknowledged as much in a 1995 interview with Tania Modleski published in the Winter issue of Film Quarterly. Questioned about what motivated her to make a Western, Greenwald says that the “few [Western] stories that have women as main characters were not interesting” to her (7). When asked which films she’s referring to, Greenwald responds: “The woman in High Noon – not very interesting…. Barbara Stanwyck as a land baron – not interesting” (7).

The premise of The Ballad of Little Jo is drawn from the work of new western historians – namely, the discovery that the practice of cross-dressing was more prevalent in the “Old West” than earlier scholars could have imagined, or were willing to admit. (The same is true of homosexuality, I might add.) Yet it is clear from the Film Quarterly interview that Greenwald’s knowledge of the Western movie genre is rather limited, her interest in it being largely iconographic. This is apparent in the movie. To use Rick Altman’s terminology, the syntax of The Ballad of Little Jo is not one common to the genre; instead, Western semantic elements are grafted onto the kind of “passing” narrative more common to melodrama or the women’s film that sees a female protagonist forced to conceal her true status – economic, racial or cultural – in order to “pass” for a member of another social group.

My contention is that Barbara Stanwyck’s association with the Western genre is significant and, indeed, interesting. Although perhaps best remembered as a femme fatale or screwball comedienne, Stanwyck’s involvement in the Western equaled that of many of the genre’s well-known male stars.

Over the course of her career, Stanwyck starred in eleven Western features, as well as the television series “The Big Valley” from 1965 to 1969. As her biography in the BFI Guide to the Western says, Stanwyck was “virtually without peer in her portrayal of tough, fearsome women of the West.” Not only do the majority of Stanwyck’s Western characters defy the wife/whore dichotomy, they invert the traditional scenario that has strong females nonetheless defined by their relationships with heroic cowboy characters.

After having made two Westerns in the thirties and two in the forties, Stanwyck starred in seven between 1950 and 1957, after which her career was largely confined to television. In the context of Stanwyck’s career, then, most of her Westerns came after her better-known movies from the 1930s and 40s, like Stella Dallas (1937), The Lady Eve (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). It was during that time that Stanwyck was the highest-paid woman in the United States.

I’ll touch on Stanwyck’s own thoughts on the Western shortly, but at this point it deserves mentioning that it was not uncommon for male stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age to favor the Western as they aged, as was the case with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrae, Gregory Peck and Burt Lancaster.

Today I’d like to focus on a particular screen persona – that of the “cattle queen” – that emerges in the latter half of Stanwyck’s career, concentrating on three pictures she made in the mid 1950s: Cattle Queen of Montana (Dwan, 1954), The Maverick Queen (Kane, 1956) and Forty Guns (Fuller, 1957). The description of her character in Forty Guns as a “high-ridin’ woman with a whip” captures nicely the sense of this persona: a strong-willed woman of independent means, riding tall in the saddle, cracking her whip at horse and man alike.

While there are elements of this persona in all of Stanwyck’s Western characters, it is over the three movies highlighted on the screen that it crystallizes, helping to lay the foundation for her starring role on “The Big Valley.”

Let me say here that anyone expecting these movies somehow not to be from the 1950s will be disappointed. Expectedly, Stanwyck’s characters all ultimately pay a price, as it were, for their agency and independence: death in the case of The Maverick Queen, and being relegated to one half of the good heterosexual couple in the other two pictures. But that these movies in the end conform to societal and industrial norms should not dissuade us from investigating how Stanwyck’s characters were able to stand up to and alongside their male counterparts.

While the Western may be, on balance, a “masculine” genre, we should not underestimate its longstanding appeal to female viewers. The initial resurgence of Western production in the 1930s was partly an attempt by the Hollywood studios to exploit the appeal of their male stars to what was then a predominantly female audience. Also, Peter Williams Evans has noted how the Western heroines of the late 1930s, like those in many other genres, often reflect significant advances in women’s emancipation. Yet Evans also says that, by the late 1940s and 1950s, the genre restores women to their more traditional roles of “decent and long-suffering matron or sexually-aggressive adventuress” (“Westward the Women” 211). The corollary to this purported change in the representation woman is the idea that, in the classic Western, women are ultimately a destructive influence on the independent cowboy hero, and so he must reject them. The iconic ending of John Ford’s 1946 movie My Darling Clementine comes to mind, where Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp rides out of Tombstone, telling Clementine that he might be back that way, some day – a doubtful proposition, if there ever was one. Never mind that Fonda’s lawman character in Anthony Mann’s The Tin Star, released in 1957, rides away with the woman in the end. Or that the majority of Westerns, like most classical Hollywood pictures, end with the formation of the couple.

Perhaps the most problematic tendency in scholarship on the Western is the continued use of reductive interpretive models based on a select canon of films. As a result, some films are homogenized in order to have them conform to those frameworks, while many others – including those of Barbara Stanwyck – are neglected altogether.

In truth, Westerns continued to be aggressively marketed towards women throughout the 1950s, as we see in this trailer for Two Flags West (Wise, 1950).

In fact, one of the most striking aspects of the promotional materials for Westerns of the 40s and 50s is the prevalence of the word “romance.” Cattle Queen of Montana is alternately described as a “romantic action drama” and “romantic adventure story.”

In this way, Stanwyck’s characters appear in a genre that had an imperative to attract woman viewers, and was thus quite receptive to strong female characters. This is not to say that “Cattle Queen” characters were at all common – they weren’t, a fact acknowledged both in the promotion of these pictures as well as in the movies themselves. As one character says in The Maverick Queen, “[She’s] supposed to be a big wheel in this town. That’s unusual for a lady.” The question then becomes how Stanwyck was able to pull off these kinds of roles while other actresses could not.

Over the course of her long career, Stanwyck never shied away from physical stunts – in contrast, it must be said, to many of her contemporaries. Describing herself on several occasions as a “frustrated stuntwoman,” Stanwyck grew up idolizing not Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish but Peal White, the “stunt queen” of early cinema best known as the star of the Perils of Pauline serial (1914). From 1931’s Night Nurse, where her character is pushed, shoved and punched out by a young Clark Gable, right up to “The Big Valley,” where, though nearing sixty years of age, she continued to insist on doing many of her own stunts, Stanwyck’s ability to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ always adds an interesting dimension to her performances. It is in her “Cattle Queen” roles that these qualities come to the fore, as her characters are required to ride, shoot, fight and even be drug along the ground repeatedly until director Sam Fuller is satisfied.

This “physically active” dimension of Stanwyck’s acting could support a paper of its own, but suffice it to say that her ability to lend physicality -- and a kind of authenticity -- to her performances without sacrificing her femininity made her particularly suited to the Western. Richard Dyer put it well when he writes, “When I see Barbara Stanwyck, I know that women are strong” (Stars 184-85).

As I noted earlier, Stanwyck’s “Cattle Queen” characters differ from other strong female characters found in the genre in that, unlike those women, her heroines are not defined by their relationship with a cowboy hero. Which begs the question of just what kind of men she found herself up against.

Extra-textually speaking, in these pictures Stanwyck found herself matched with actors from the genre’s second-tier. Barry Sullivan plays the male lead in both The Maverick Queen and Forty Guns, and Ronald Reagan is the cowboy hero in Cattle Queen of Montana – making that picture something of a right-winger’s dream, given Stanwyck’s own conservative politics.

While it is fair to wonder how the Cattle Queen would have fared if paired up with a higher caliber of male co-star, the fact is we’ll never know. Established Western stars like Gary Cooper and new ones like Robert Wagner weren’t making movies at the struggling Republic Pictures studio, or for director Sam Fuller. And Stanwyck was working with both actors in projects at the major studios.

Moreover, it would be would be wrong to simply equate actors of lower stature with weak or unbelievable performances. This is not a case of a female character only having strength in relation to weak males. Although Reagan’s acting may leave something to be desired, Sullivan is particularly good in both The Maverick Queen and Forty Guns. In the case of the former, his history of playing Western villains works in the film’s favor, as part of the intrigue is the question of where his character’s loyalties lie.

Unlike other actresses who turned to genre pictures out of necessity, Stanwyck genuinely loved the Western. “I’m crazy about westerns,” she said in a 1981 interview, “that’s why I’ve made so many of them. My one big frustration is that Duke Wayne never asked me to co-star with him.” “The Big Valley” came about after Stanwyck worked for nearly a decade to get a Western television series off the ground.

Fittingly, Stanwyck’s association with the Western – and awareness of this association – increased as time passed. In 1973, she was awarded the Wrangler Award for “Outstanding Contribution to the West through Motion Pictures” from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center and was the first woman inducted into its “Hall of Fame of Great Western Performers” – the only award, she said, that she wasn’t nervous to receive. Upon her death in 1990, obituaries referred to her as the “Queen of the Cowboys,” “Hollywood’s Queen of Westerns and Wisecracks” and the “Gorgeous Dame on the Horse.” Many of the accompanying photos depicted her in cowboy dress.

The Western, then, may be a genre with room for many kings, but only one queen.

Studies Beyond the Screen: aftermath

2009-04-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

A brief post to say that our little symposium went off without a hitch. The facilities were unlocked and ready for use, the food and drink arrived on time, and, most importantly, each speaker delivered a fascinating presentation. The response to the symposium was extremely positive, both from attendees on the day and in subsequent email correspondence. From this feedback, it is clear that the symposium offered attendees a unique insight into the methodological approaches of established scholars. A good deal of thanks are owed to both Screen and Exeter’s Department of English for helping to make this event
possible.

My intrepid co-organizer Lisa has a post up at her blog. For those interested, a complete report is available at the Screen website.

Waiting on a train

2009-03-29T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Train Robbers was filmed in the spring of 1972 under the direction of Burt Kennedy, who also wrote he movie’s screenplay. The movie stars John Wayne as Lane, a Civil War veteran who enlists the help of two old war buddies and three younger men to accompany a young widow, Mrs. Lowe (played by Ann-Margret), to recover and return a gold shipment stolen by her late husband so she can clear his name before a gang of the husband’s old partners beat them to the treasure. Despite the fact that both were identified principally with the Western, Wayne and Kennedy had worked together only once before: on the Kennedy-directed The War Wagon (1967), one of the Duke’s stronger pictures of the 1960s.

The movie opens with a striking series of shots that survey the desolate town of Liberty, Texas. The town is comprised of only five buildings – a livery, saloon, hotel, railway station and a water tower with windmill – situated in the middle of a barren, sun-scorched landscape. There is no non-diegetic music. Instead, the only sounds we hear are the blowing wind and whatever objects it animates. Signs creak back and forth. Saloon doors bat open and shut. Rocking chairs sway slowly forward and back. Seated at the railway station is Jesse (played by Ben Johnson), awaiting the arrival of the train. He is the only person visible in the entire town.

With its use of diegetic sound and the setting of a frontier whistle-stop, the sequence clearly brings to mind the opening sequence of another, recent Western: Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969).

Which begs the question: is this a rip off?

Let's do a little Western genre archeology.

As famous as the opening to Once Upon a Time in the West may be, it is itself an obvious and well-known play on High Noon (1952), where a gang of outlaws awaits the arrival of their leader Frank Miller at the town’s train station.

Leone’s Westerns are each famously packed with references like these. Christopher Frayling detects no less than 57 “explicit citations of American Westerns” in Once Upon a Time in the West alone (Once Upon A Time in Italy 59-63).

That said, Kennedy's choice of so recent a Western as "source" in The Train Robbers, coupled with a formal mimicry, mean that the motivation behind the reference could be taken as opportunism.

Some might add that Kennedy, genre veteran though he may be, was no Leone. Which is true, but misses the point.

In his book Wild West Movies, critic Kim Newman says of actor John Wayne's later Westerns: “[In the late 1960s and 70s] the Duke is just going through the motions in an era when the West was the province of Leone and Peckinpah not lazy comics like Andrew V. McLaglen and Burt Kennedy” (195).

Now, by "province" what Newman really means is the Westerns that scholarship on the genre has canonized as being of artistic worth, as opposed to either box office success or even sheer number of pictures made. The top-grossing Westerns of the era were not those of Peckinpah or Leone; they were, in general, Wayne's. Moreover, in the 1960s and 1970s, Leone made 5 Westerns and Peckinpah made 6. Kennedy made 12, McLaglen 11.

And that's not all.

As it turns out, the same year that Leone was drawing on High Noon to craft the striking opening to Once Upon a Time in the West, Kennedy was also looking back on Zimmerman's genre classic, albeit in a rather different fashion.

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969) features a similar instance of a group of outlaws awaiting the arrival of a train.

Kennedy's take on the scenario is perhaps less stylish, but equally knowing. The outlaw gang's patient anticipation is breached by the arrival of the entire town, ready to greet the train with an entirely different kind of fanfare.

Returning to The Train Robbers, I would also argue that the opening credits establish a stylistic and thematic minimalism that permeates the remainder of the film – a minimalism that actually risks a dearth of material (as evidenced by a conspicuous number visually striking yet increasingly redundant sequences of Lane and co. riding through the desert).

The frontier town of Liberty, as presented to us, has been in effect stripped down to its most basic elements. In one shot, as the camera tracks rightward following Jesse as he walks from the railway station to the water tower, we see the charred ruins of another building behind the saloon, suggesting the removal of a superfluous structure. The villains are not individuated in any way but are instead a faceless group of bad men characterized by a driving musical theme that contrasts with the more sweeping melodies that accompany the protagonists. Little is presented by the narrative to detract from its focus on the main characters, with the exception of a mysterious figure (played by Ricardo Montalban) who follows both the protagonists and their pursuers from a distance.

Studies Beyond the Screen

2009-02-12T03:11:00.000-08:00

Those of you in the U.K. might be interested in this symposium I'm organizing.

Studies Beyond the Screen
April 25, 2009 at the University of Exeter

Part of the journal Screen's ongoing 50th Anniversary celebration, "Studies Beyond the Screen" will be an engaging, one-day symposium featuring established cinema scholars speaking on their use of archival and extra-textual materials, focusing on the investigative procedures, methodologies and research activities that go into the production of academic work. Each presentation will contribute to an emerging sense of how these kinds of materials are used in the creation of theoretically informed screen studies scholarship.

The day will be of particular interest to graduate and postgraduate students making use of extra-textual resources in their own research, and will provide a forum for interaction and exchange between attendees and speakers. The event will also introduce attendees to some of the resources available in England's Southwest region including the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.

Confirmed speakers include:
Ian Christie (Birbeck)
Peter Jewell (Founder, The Bill Douglas Centre)
Steve Neale (Exeter)
Andrew Spicer (UWE)
Sarah Street (Bristol)

To register, please visit: http://www.sall.ex.ac.uk/content/view/2012/577/

If you have any questions, please contact Andrew Nelson (apn203@ex.ac.uk)

For more information about Screen's 50th Anniversary, visit: http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/50thanniversary/

The Andy Williams Christmas Album

2008-12-18T01:21:00.000-08:00

Let's switch both gears and media for a moment, shall we? Tis the season, after all...

Choosing the right Christmas album ain't easy. Sure, we all know the standard carols and hymns, but who sings them makes a lot of difference. If you're like me, you know that, when it comes to renditions of your holiday favorites, the standard set by the satin-voiced crooners and songstresses of the 40s, 50s and early 60s has yet to be surpassed. Singers like Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Ella Fitzgerald recorded some of the best-loved and -- dare I say? -- definitive versions of those Yuletide classics that bring to mind warm memories of holidays spent in the company of kith and kin.

Of course, today most folks aren't terribly familiar with these artists, and I'm no different. What I've always found frustrating is recognizing a particular recording of a carol but not knowing who sang it. Let's face it: they can't all be sung by Bing Crosby.

90%, sure, but not all.

The Andy Williams Christmas Album by Andy "Moon River" Williams.

Well-known recordings: "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," "Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season."

This record was released in the 1963, but I write about it first because it features my all-time favorite version of my all-time favorite song, "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year". Williams' high-energy take on this classic song is without question the definitive recording. This is the version you all know and love. If you don't, there's something wrong with you.

My other three favorites off this album are what you might call "non-standard" carols. This is a little difficult for me to admit, because I've always felt there was a certain futility in trying to come up with "new" Christmas carols. I can understand the commercial imperative to come up with new material, but in this case it's hard to top the old standbys. One of the low-points in my non-illustrious stint in junior high band was having to play a monstrosity called "Santa's Sleigh Ride" in the annual Christmas concert.

Anyway, I actually really like "Happy Holiday/The Holiday Season" and "Kay Thompson's Jingle Bells." Both are cheerful numbers in the vein of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." On a more sombre note, Williams' emotional rendition of "Sweet Little Jesus" is a great showcase for his range.

Standards "White Christmas," "The Christmas Song," "The First Noël" and "O Holy Night" are handled with class. A re-working of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" called "A Song and a Christmas Tree" is, well...different. Decide for yourself.

The only weak songs are "Away in a Manger," "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Silent Night, Holy Night." On each Williams is joined by a choir of children who couldn't sing in key if their lives depended on it.

There are a number of Andy Williams Christmas compilation CDs out there, but unless you're looking to cherry-pick songs off of iTunes, I'd recommended this album and Williams' follow-up record Merry Christmas. Both albums were huge hits and helped earn Williams the moniker of "Mr. Christmas."

None of the songs on the latter LP achieved the ubiquity of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," but it's still a solid collection of (mostly) standard carols delivered with the same laid-back exuberance as its predecessor. Williams' take on "My Favorite Things" is particularly good.

Kinney-era

2008-12-05T01:31:00.000-08:00

Neat-o-Rama has a short article up on the "stories behind Hollywood studio logos." The contextual information is actually rather brief, but there are images for the evolving logos of MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros. and other studios.

Pictured above is the "Kinney National" shield used by Warners between 1970-1972. (The screen capture is from Chisum [1970]). Call me sacrilegious, but I quite like the aesthetics of the Kinney shield.

Who, or what, was Kinney? you ask. A parking lot company done good. Seriously.

Kinney Parking Company was a parking lot business begun in New Jersey. The Company first expanded into rental cars and construction, then merged with another company to become Kinney National Services, Inc. KNS first bought National Periodical Publications (a.k.a. DC Comics) and the Ashley-Famous talent agency before setting its sights on the struggling Warner Bros.-Seven Arts studio. Under the direction of former Ashley-Famous head Ted Ashley, Warner Bros. re-established itself as a successful Hollywood studio.

Only in America, as they say.

What became of the Kinney shield? In 1972, Kinney renamed its entertainment business Warner Communications, Inc., and the Kinney shield was replaced with a more traditional WB shield.

Hortense

2008-12-01T23:55:00.000-08:00

Released December 10, 1937, Donald's Ostrich (directed by Jack King) finds our hero gainfully employed as the station master at Wahoo depot, forced to deal with a particularly pesky payload: an amorous, hungry ostrich named Hortense.

The toon revolves around Hortense eating nearly everything in sight, including an accordion, alarm clock, balloons and, finally, a radio, which changes stations when the ostrich hiccups.

As in Modern Inventions and Donald and Pluto, the action builds to a final, glorious set-piece -- here, Hortense is "tuned in" to an auto race, which causes her to race around the room -- that ends with Donald batter, bruised and embarrassed, but doesn't do anything to resolve his predicament.

Something to keep an eye on, then, is whether this is a trend that ultimately changes -- moving towards more linear, cause-and-effect narratives -- or is only one variety of narrative form the creators were using. Don Donald featured a brief coda that provided closure to the short's events.

Now I know my ABCs...

2008-11-26T23:13:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged by Dan North to participate in the "alphabet meme" that's burning up the cinema studies blogosphere like a California wildfire. The premise is to complete an alphabetical list of one's favorite films. The point of the exercise? Fun.

I posted a Westerns-only list in the comments at Dr. Mabuse's a couple of weeks ago. In doing so, I seem to have single-handedly killed that comment thread. Serves me right.

I'm tempted to make a go at another themed list -- John Wayne movies, maybe? -- but given how well the last one went over, and not wanting to kill my own blog, I'll stick to more general favorites. Off the top of my head...

Alice in Wonderland (Disney)
Big Jake
Conan the Barbarian
Double Indemnity
End of Days
Forty Guns
Ghostbusters
Halloween (78)
Intolerance
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080
Kontroll
The Long Riders
Mulholland Drive
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Once Upon a Time in the West
Passion of Joan of Arc
Quigley Down Under
Red Dawn
The Searchers
Tokyo Story
Unforgiven
Valley Girl
The Wizard of Oz
X-Files: Fight the Future
Yi yi
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession.

This is an interesting exercise, but I don't think it really reflects my favorite movies. While the structure did force me to think about well-liked movies that might normally be left off a standard favorites list, it still means including movies that would otherwise not be on my favorites radar. Certain letters -- G, O, S... -- could easily hold four or five movies, leaving others empty. That said, I'm well past the point of worrying about how poorly my taste in movies may reflect upon me (what with all this formal cinema studies edumakation under my belt), so the list shall remain unannotated.

Happy Birthday, Mickey

2008-11-18T23:48:00.000-08:00

Today is Mickey Mouse's 80th birthday. As this Time article notes, 80 is not 75 when it comes to celebrations, and most Hollywood celebrities of today are more likely to be heading over to Owen Wilson's place tonight rather than to the House of Mouse.

Yet 80 is still an impressive feat, and as countless articles today will note, Mickey's in pretty good shape for an octogenarian.

I've met Mickey on a couple of occasions, but the first was the most memorable. It was at Disneyland, many years ago now. It was my first visit to any Disney park, and I was in my late teens. Not the ideal age to visiting Disney for the first time, but I assure you that my advanced years in no way diminished my enjoyment. Nary a negative notion entered my mind the entire day, save for a tinge of sadness at having to depart come the evening.

After making my way down Main Street U.S.A. and taking in some of the attractions there, I proceeded northeast to Mickey's Toon Town. At the conclusion of one particular attraction -- I honestly can't remember which -- patrons emerge in large room mocked up to look like a movie set. And there he was, the Mouse himself: dressed in his red Sorcerer's Apprentice robe, minus the sorcerer's hat.

Disneyland staff were on hand to take photographs. I remarked to one of the photographers that I thought Mickey would be taller. The photographer replied that Mickey was actually pretty tall, "for a mouse" -- a well-rehearsed line if there ever was one.

I had my picture taken shaking Mickey's hand, thanked everyone in the room, and departed the studio to continue my day at the park.

What I wouldn't give for an old razor blade mangler

2008-11-11T05:03:00.000-08:00

Directed by Jack King, Modern Inventions was released on May 29, 1937. From Wikipedia:

Donald visits "The Museum of Modern Marvels", which showcases various futuristic electronic appliances and inventions. In the museum, Donald encounters and struggles with many strange and whimsical machines, all of which seem to be against him. A running gag throughout the picture has the Robot Butler appearing to take away Donald's hat, with the words "Your Hat, Sir." After encountering a robotic hitch-hiker, a wrapping machine and a fully-automated baby carriage, the short ends when Donald attempts to scam a robotic barber chair and winds up getting a haircut on his behind and a shoe-shined bill.

One thing that continually delights me about early Disney animation -- especially in contrast to the 1980s Saturday morning fare I was raised on -- is the attention to detail found in the backgrounds. As a case in point, in Modern Inventions Donald passes by a number of fully realized mechanical contraptions that he doesn't interact with.

In the cavernous main hall of the Museum of Modern Marvels stand a number of large mechanical wonders. We can make out the names of two: in the lower right, a mechanical pea splitter, and next to it a mechanical onion peeler.

After his first encounter with the robot butler, Donald passes by an "old razor blade mangler." Whatever that is.

The device in the background is a "mechanical pencil sharpener."

Peanut sheller.

Potato peeler.

Pneumatic pencil sharpener.

Something involving a giant magnifying glass and a giant magnet.

Here's another glimpse of the potato peeler in the top left. It's hydraulic.

Unlike the appliances Donald combats with -- robot butler, automatic bundle wrapper, robot nurse maid -- the gag with the invariably large and complicated background contraptions is that simple devices already exist to perform functions like sharpen pencils and peel potatoes (though perhaps not to mangle razor blades).

A Daisy by any other name...

2008-11-09T07:16:00.000-08:00

Released on January 9th, 1937, Donald's second solo cartoon, Don Donald (directed by Ben Sharpsteen), marked a couple of firsts for Disney's angry duck.

1. Unlike Donald and Pluto, here the cartoon is credited as "a Donald Duck" rather than "a Mickey Mouse."

Between Donald and Pluto and Don Donald, Donald appeared in four Mickey Mouse cartoons (in addition to the eight he appeared in between his debut in The Wise Little Hen and his "solo" debut in Donald and Pluto). Fourteen appearances -- in addition to whatever indications of popularity the Disney team were reading -- was judged sufficient to warrant Donald's solo cartoons being branded as such. A comparison with Goofy's move to solo cartoons would be helpful here, but will have to wait for another day.

2. Don Donald marks the debut of Donald's female counterpart, Daisy Duck. Or does it?

Actually, no. As it turns out, the first subject of Donald's affectations was not Daisy but one Donna Duck.

It would be nearly three years before Daisy made her debut in 1940's Mr. Duck Steps Out. In contrast to the demure Daisy, Donna proves to be just as irascible as Donald, which provides much of the conflict in Don Donald. Also unlike the infinitely intelligble Daisy, Donna is given the distinct "duck voice" treatment by Clarence Nash.

The plot of Don Donald has our hero riding a burro to Donna's Mexican abode, where be proceeds to woo her. Donald's first pass is thwarted when the donkey disrupts Donna's rendition of the Mexican hat dance. A solution presents itself in the form of a red car, conviently available at the price of one burro at the local El Trading Post.

This leads to a timeless gag (and a reminder of the power of off-screen space and sound). We cut from a shot of the exterior of Donna's balcony to the interior, where she is tearing apart a painting of her and Donald. She hears the donkey's "hee-haw" coming from off-screen. She grabs a large vase and runs off screen left, emerging in the next shot on her balcony, prepared to launch. The music builds to this moment, punctuating the moment the vase reaches its highest point. Then, a split-second of silence as Donna sees what lies below. Her expression changes, the music becomes upbeat, and she lets out a loud "Oh, boy!"

On the ground below, Donald is shown behind the wheel of the sporty red automobile. He honks the horn a couple of times, its sound being nearly identical to the donkey's call from earlier in the short -- accounting for Daisy's (and, potentially, the viewer's) confusion.

The pair drive off, the car making a series of musical pops, sputters and whistles in time with the score. The best visual bit from the subsequent sequence has the pair driving by a series of anthropomorphic cacti, each brought to life in the wind generated by the velocity of Donald's car.

The first cactus is a simple, two-pronged specimen, which becomes entwined after the car circles it multiple times.

The second cactus is bent into the shape of a hitchhiker as Donald and Donna zoom past.

The third cactus is more intricate, being two entwined cacti. They resemble a dozing horse and rider beforehand, are "awoken" by the passing the vehicle, and end up "watching" the car's path into the distance.

The final cactus quite clearly resembles a snoozing human beforehand, complete with fingers and marks for eyes and a mouth. As the car whizzes past underneath, the eyes and gaping mouth become even more pronounced.

I find it interesting how this short gag builds upon itself, in a way, as each successive cactus is more noticeably lifelike -- both before and after Donald's intervention -- than the one preceding. This kind of order and progression is surely deliberate on the part of the animators. This raises the question of whether when inanimate objects "come to life" it needs to be motivated. This may depend on the animation studio. While I can't cite a specific example, I can recall numerous things simply coming to life in Fleisher cartoons. In the case of Disney, is it necessary to have the first cactus before the "gag" in the second can be executed, and the second before the third, and so on? Donald's car becomes more life-like as the cartoon progresses. When it breaks down, it is depicted as being ill: it goes blue in the face, coughs and wheezes, etc. It then recovers and turns on Donald, chasing him through the desert.

Whether or not there is some kind of "rule" in effect here is another question, and something to watch for in subsequent shorts.

(Too many) thoughts on Pasolini and The Hawks and the Sparrows, of all things

2008-11-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

To begin, a brief summary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 film The Hawks and the Sparrows (Uccellacci e Uccellini), painstakingly transcribed from A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice by Maurizio Viano:

Totò and Ninetto, father and son, are walking along a road on the outskirts of Rome. They stop for a coffee at a roadside café where Ninetto joins a group of kids who are practicing a new dance. Father and some resume their walk only to stop a little further on, where Ninetto goes to visit a girlfriend while Toto watches an ambulance taking away two corpses. Toto and Ninetto are then joined by a talking raven who says he comes from the land of ideology. The raven repeatedly asks them where they are going, without ever getting a clear answer. The raven tells Toto and Ninetto a medieval fable. It is the story of Brother Ciccillo and Brother Ninetto, two friars in the group led by Saint Francis. Francis orders them to preach love to the birds, in particular to the hawks and the sparrows, who hate each other. Although Ciccillo and Ninetto succeed in “talking” to both species, the war between hawks and sparrows goes on. Hearing of this, Saint Francis tells the friars that they should persevere in the attempt at converting the birds. Back to the present, where Toto and Ninetto, still followed by the raven, demand money from their distressed tenants and ignore their pleas. Resuming their walk, they first encounter a group of street actors and then go to their landlord’s house, where Toto is treated as cruelly as he treated his tenants. Outside the landlord’s house, the three encounter the funeral of Togliatti, the former head of the Italian Communist Party. Finally, after having sex with a whore, Toto and Ninetto kill and eat the raven. (46)

Viano’s synopsis would seem to indicate that we have here all the makings of an entertaining, absurdist comedy: talking animals, a fool-headed father and son duo (with the character of father played by a legendary Italian comedian), obstinate tenants, street actors, bizarre flashbacks, the death of a communist leader, and a whore.

The more scholarly evaluations of Pasolini and his film that I consulted point in a very different direction, though. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, addressing Pasolini’s film work as an example of political modernism in their Film History: An Introduction, write that the director “consistently teased a political critique out of his adaptations of classical myths and contemporary history” (651). Similarly, Peter Bondanella in Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present asserts that “The Hawks and the Sparrows is a parable: it has a moral, often embodies allegory, and demands exegesis just as scripture does" (185).

This is to say, of course, that all those seemingly nonsensical things in The Hawks and the Sparrows mentioned above are supposed to mean something. Or "mean something."

The Hawks and the Sparrows is ostensibly a meditation on what Pasolini saw as a crisis in Marxism in the mid-1960s. In the medieval fable, for example, the hawks and sparrows represent the bourgeoisie and proletariat, respectively. Toto and Ninetto themselves are alternately oppressors, as with their tenants, and oppressed, as with their own landlord. The film also addresses Marxist ‘issues of the day’ like Maoist China, represented by Toto’s suffering tenants, and the Third World, represented by the multi-racial and –ethnic theatrical troupe. (Fellow Marxist Godard also wrestled with the questions of Maoist China and the Third World in his films of the 1960s – although more overtly [and obsessively] than Pasolini). The talking raven, who continuously spouts Marxist doctrine, is an ironic stand-in for Pasolini himself. Toto and Ninetto’s consumption of the raven at the film’s conclusion represents the rejection of doctrinaire ideology, but also suggests the direction along which Pasolini felt Marxism needed to proceed in order to survive: it must be assimilated, or ‘digested,’ by those who would otherwise refuse it in its pure, overly-dogmatic form.

Fine.

And yet how these particular interpretations were arrived at bears some explanation.

The ever-present problem with allegory is – to put it plainly – that anything can mean anything. This, of course, makes for rather shaky theoretical ground upon which to base an analysis, no matter how symptomatic or oblique, of a given film. What on first pass may seem remarkable about existing scholarship on The Hawks and the Sparrows, then, is the near-unanimous agreement about what the film’s various scenarios are supposed to represent. Viano, Bondanella, Naomi Greene (in Pier Paolo Pasonlini: Cinema as Heresy) and others all reach comparable conclusions about just what the film is telling us. The question, then, is this critical consensus how this came to be.

First of all, as anyone who embarks on research about Pasolini quickly learns, the filmmaker was always more than willing to talk about himself and his movies, often at great length. Not unlike the case of Sirk, there is a tendency in existing scholarship to frequently reference – usually uncritically – Pasolini’s own comments about his films and what he was (supposedly) doing with/in them.

Yet this is really a minor point compared to the larger fact that the Marxist allegory of The Hawks and the Sparrows is blatantly obvious. This is not to say that existing analyses of the film are without merit; looking at the film today, they are particularly helpful (for me, at least!) in situating it historically and explaining many of its references to politics of the time (the state of the Italian Communist party in the mid-1960s, for example). Nonetheless, comprehension of the film’s larger message about class warfare – that is, the oppression of proletariat ‘sparrows’ by bourgeoisie ‘hawks’ – can easily be arrived at without recourse to filmic cryptanalysis.

Calling the film a parable as Bondanella does is appropriate (although ‘series of parables’ may be more appropriate), but to imply that the film requires some measure of sophisticated decipherment comparable to the exegesis of ancient religious texts is to overstate the matter. The Hawks and the Sparrows wants us to ‘get it,’ and goes to improbably lengths to ensure that no viewer is left behind. For example, following the raven’s recounting of the medieval tale, we are shown a (rather Brechtian) inter-title which reads: “For anyone in doubt, we would like to point out that the raven is a ‘left-wing intellectual’ of the era preceding Palmiro Togliatti’s death...”.

Writers like Viano, Bondanella and Greene devote pages and pages to teasing out the various meanings of The Hawks and the Sparrows, and yet the intended meaning is often so manifestly apparent in the film so as to be funny. In fact, the film is very funny – a point that is lost amidst serious considerations and explications of the film’s political ideology (although apparently not lost on U.S. critics, if we are to judge by the poster at right).

Could it be, then, that something about the film is being missed in these extant analyses? Could The Hawks and the Sparrows in fact be closer – in spirit, maybe – to the humor suggested (however unintentionally) by Viano’s rather dry synopsis of the film’s narrative?

Maybe. It would first be helpful to situate the film in the context of Pasolini's long and varied career.

Pasolini’s body of film work can be divided into two periods: the first, from 1961 to 1966, being clearly indebted to Italian neorealism and featuring characters from a subproletarian world (i.e. the Italian "borgate" seen in Accatone [1961] or Mamma Rosa [1962]); and the second, from 1967 onward, moving more towards an explicit concern with myth and ideology.

The Hawks and the Sparrows sits in this figuration as the point of transition between the two phases. Like the protagonists from Pasolini’s earlier films, Toto and Ninetto are still "cafoni" – of a lower-class, straddling the line between rural and urban – and although the film’s episodic narrative has the characters traversing, as visitors, socioeconomic boundaries, Pasolini has not yet arrived at a full examination (or excoriation) of the world of the idle rich (later seen in Teorema [1968] or Porcil [1969]).

The opening credits to The Hawks and the Sparrows announce Pasolini’s shift towards myth rather explicitly. As the credit titles appear on screen against the background of a full moon peering out from behind a cloudy sky, they are sung aloud to us in the style of a French chanson. By presenting the credits as a song from the Middle Ages, as if sung by a troubadour, the mundane and routine are elevated to the level of myth. The actor Toto is given monikers like those of a knight who has achieved glory from countless battles, becoming “The absurd Toto, the humane Toto, the crazy Toto, the sweet Toto.” Davoli Ninetto, Toto’s co-star, is called both “innocent and cunning.” Alfredo Bini is “a producer who risked his position,” and Pasolini is lauded self-consciously as a “director who risked his reputation.”

It would seem that much is at stake in The Hawks and the Sparrows, what with so many “risks” being taken!

Yet such an interpretation would serve as an illustration of how, on paper, a description of what is happening in the film fails to capture the full meaning of a scene. Stating that the credits are sung in a style of a chanson says nothing about the over-the-top vocals of the singer, or the typically eclectic score by Ennio Morricone. Or, most importantly, how hilariously clever the credit sequence is. In existing work on the film, questions of style are too often neglected in favor of, again, an explanation of the film’s allegorical meaning based solely on the film’s story events. This is an odd exclusion for a film that, as the credit sequence indicates and later examples will confirm, flaunts its style.

That fact that both the film and its maker broadly announce the allegorical nature of The Hawks and the Sparrows may go a long way towards accounting for the focus of current scholarship on the film, but the neglect of style is harder to explain on the same grounds. It may be that because the film does not ask us to construct the story (from the plot) but rather to interpret it that the critical lens has thus far veered away from style (even if such interpretation requires little in the way of mental gymnastics...).

To use Bordwell’s terminology, the narration of The Hawks and the Sparrows is knowledgeable, highly self-conscious and highly communicative – again, this is a film that wants us to get it. But because such emphasis is placed, rightly or wrongly, on the film’s story, the focus has perhaps shifted away from plot.

Yet questions of film style are inherent in most conceptions of plot, i.e. ones that emphasize plot being the events as they are presented, formally, by the film. What is needed, then, is a consideration of the film’s “technical” aspects.

As Pasolini’s film work becomes increasingly ‘mythical’ in nature, the importance of spatial and temporal specificity lessens. In this way, the transition away from the concerns of neorealism and towards myth is further evidenced in The Hawks and the Sparrows’ treatment of the landscape through which the (un)holy trinity of Toto, Ninetto and the raven travel.

The scenery often changes abruptly as conversation between the characters continues uninterrupted: in one shot, the trio is walking along a dirt road in the countryside, while in the next they are on an uncompleted freeway, but without any break in the dialogue. Street signs they pass point absurdly to far-off locals like Istanbul and Cuba. After the raven finishes relating his medieval fable, which runs for nearly thirty minutes of screen time, a high angle shot of the three protagonists reveals them to be in the exact same place on the road as when they began. And, most conspicuously, despite the fact that the characters are walking along a road we are never given any indication of where they may be going. The raven, shortly after joining Toto and Ninetto, asks several times where the duo is headed. Toto only gestures ahead and says, “Over there.”

In some respects, the structure of The Hawks and the Sparrows resembles that of a picaresque novel – a form well-suited to commenting, through parables, on society’s ills. What is significantly lacking from Pasolini’s adoption of this story structure is any kind of goal for the protagonists. We have heroes walking along a road, as if on quest, but with no stated destination. As a work of political modernism, then, The Hawks and the Sparrows can be seen as a break from and a criticism of both Italian neorealism – with its rejection of spatial specificity – and ‘classical’ narrative conventions.

We should bear in mind, however, that the picaresque is also a form which (traditionally) regulates meaning by imposing an obvious moral on story events. As we have seen, this is certainly what The Hawks and the Sparrows does. In this way, there is a clear correspondence between the film’s form and its content, which leads to questions about the film’s status as allegory. It is not really the case that anything can mean anything; instead, things mean things – which casts the energy devoted to decipherment and interpretation in existing critical work on the film in a somewhat ironic light.

The fact that Toto and Ninetto seem to be traveling on a road to (ultimately) nowhere is certainly suggestive. But while the sentiment that the journey is more important than the destination may sound like a nice life philosophy, the lack of a discernable narrative trajectory or goal-driven protagonists can make for boring films. Compensating for this in The Hawks and the Sparrows, while at the same time further undermining classical narrative convention, is an utter inconsistency – or perhaps malleability – on the part of the two main characters, Toto and Ninetto. As indicated above, sometimes the two heroes are the hawks, and sometimes they are the sparrows.

In the sequence where Toto and Ninetto deal with their tenants our heroes are depicted in a manner unlike anywhere else in the film, and this change in representation is signaled stylistically at the sequence’s opening. The first shot is a low-angle view which frames the tenants’ house between Toto’s legs, and is followed by a distant reverse shot of Toto and Ninetto standing stoically, side-by-side in the middle of a field. These shots are accompanied by an emphatic musical refrain. The scene is like something out of a Leone spaghetti western, especially Toto’s exaggerated, wide-legged stance and how Ninetto takes a slow, Eastwood-style draw on his cigarette. The overall effect is to present the duo, for the first time in the film, as powerful figures, but the style is so over-the-top – the contrasting shots, the ‘shootout at high noon’ music – that the scene is also comedic. Again, the film’s style undercuts any seriousness that might be attributed to a straightforward account of story events.

(And yes, I should have screen captures, given my emphasis on style. But I don't. Sorry).

The succession of shots that follow this opening provide a good illustration of how the film’s lack of spatial and temporal specificity plays out at the level of style by subverting the principles of analytical editing. After Toto calls out for his tenants we are given three successive shots of the house, of varying angle and distance, before a cut back to a close-up of Toto. The arrangement here – cutting from a person looking to the thing looked at and back to the person looking – would normally imply that the shots of the house are from Toto’s vantage point, but that the shots of the house abruptly change angle and distance contradicts this traditional logic.
Toto calls out again, and then glances up to his left. Cut to an extreme low-angle shot looking up a ladder at a woman. Cut back to a close-up of Toto, still looking up – presumably at the woman. Cut to a distant, telephoto shot of the woman on the ladder, which is leaning against the house. Cut back to Toto, who slowly lowers his head – presumably following the woman as she descends the ladder.

Again, the variation in angle and distance in the shots of what is being ‘seen’ is inconsistent with the point-of-view shot. Also noteworthy in this scene is the question of inconsistent screen direction. The initial shots of the scene and the shots of the woman indicate that the house is located slightly to Toto and Ninetto’s right, yet Toto looks to his left as he watches the woman. So while the basic principle of the eye-line match maintains a certain continuity across the shots – we see Toto looking and then what he sees – a closer examination of the scene reveals these discrepancies in spatial orientation.

What to say about this?

As noted above, the spatial discontinuity of the scene is representative of The Hawks and the Sparrows’ disruptive play with the fixity of space and place. Certainly significant is the fact that Toto is in this instance clearly the narrative agent – controlling the gaze, as it were, even if it is within a world where his left is also, apparently, our left. What is more, this is the only instance in the film where spatial confusion is realized through editing. Given that it occurs in the only scene where Toto and Ninetto are mockingly portrayed as hawks, a close detailing of the film’s style could be said to only further prove that the power they are exercising is illusory, or the construction of larger, shaping forces beyond their control.

The scene continues as Toto and Ninetto follow the woman into the house. Rather than presenting an establishing shot of the interior space, we are first shown a close-up of a man’s expressionless face. Although we soon learn that it is the face of the tenant woman’s husband, the image is initially very abstract, and quite unlike the kind of shot we would expect to establish a new filmic space (not unlike the first shot of the previous scene, shot from an extremely low angle from between Toto’s legs). Like the confusion in screen direction noted above, these plays of spatial discontinuity would seem to indicate that where the film is challenging the viewer is not at the level of story and plot but at the level of style.

Writing about Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” films, Patrick Rumble claims that Pasolini “subverts the models of subjectivity presumed by conventional cinematic codes, provoking a perceptual disorientation in a spectator forced to become an active participant in…the narration” (212). While Pasolini’s representational strategies may be not as refined in The Hawks and the Sparrows as in his later films – as noted, the convention of the eye-line match maintains legibility across the shot-reverse-shot arrangement, even if it contradicts other perceptual cues within the frame – the same logic appears to be in play here.

After the shot of the husband’s face, we watch in long shot as Toto and Ninetto enter the house and stand side-by-side. We are given a point-of-view shot from Toto’s perspective that surveys, through a tilt, the squalid dwelling (and reveals the husband seated in the corner). As the conversation begins, the emphasis is decidedly on our heroes, whose dispassionate reactions are filmed in close-up as they listen to the tenant woman’s pleas for mercy.

This portion of the scene in particular serves as an interesting contrast with Toto and Ninetto’s subsequent visit to their own landlord, “The Engineer.” Once more, the thematic shifts that we can note between episodes – and describe in purely narrative terms – are obvious. Whereas they were the hawks with their own tenants, now our heroes are the sparrows.

Opposed to their confident entrance into their own tenant’s house, here Toto and Ninetto are hesitant, clearly intimidated both by the specter of The Engineer’s wrath (and perhaps the intimidating intellectual milieu of the meeting of the Dentists for Dante, which is being hosted at The Engineer’s house). Rather than standing side-by-side, Ninetto cowers behind Toto – as he always does in scenes which feature any kind of confrontation. Throughout the film, Pasolini’s makes extensive use of the comedic potential of this arrangement, often showing Ninetto peeking out over the top of Toto’s bowler hat.

Unlike the full shot used in the earlier scene, here the pair is shown as they would be in a medium close-up, from the chest-up. But this framing is not achieved by moving the camera in closer, but by raising it up. Toto and Ninetto, standing single file in the center of the frame, are dwarfed by both their surroundings and the large frame. The image of their small stature and cowardly silence is juxtaposed with shots of a bearded Dante expert, filling the entire frame in a traditional medium-close up, speaking about the origins of James Bond (of all things).

So where does this leave me? For one, rather than outright contradicting or disproving existing analyses of The Hawks and the Sparrows, a consideration of the film’s more technical elements actually compliments those analyses by demonstrating how political meaning is conveyed at a the level of style. What an examination of style does have the potential to remedy is a mischaracterization of the tone of the film, which is plainly absurdist and ironic. Again, style complicates any weightiness that might be ascribed to the film based on a straightforward account of story events. In this way, the film is shown to be a far richer – and more humorous – text than narrative-based study might suggest, because we see how the film’s thematic concerns play out at the formal level. This is a film whose representational strategies change in conjunction with thematic shifts between episodes and corresponding changes noted in the two main characters – which enables Pasolini to subject his protagonists to so many unpleasantries and still have them innocently carry on to the next unfortunate event.

Open-access e-journals

2008-10-08T01:05:00.000-07:00

Prolific film blogger Dr. Catherine Grant has a great post on graduate student e-journals at her Film Studies for Free blog. In addition to providing a comprehensive list of e-journals, she spotlights three journals produced primarily by graduate students (including UBC's Cinephile).

Solo

2008-10-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

Goal may be the wrong word, for reasons that will become apparent in a second, but I'm going to use it regardless. In August, I achieved a goal I had been working towards for years. A decade, even.

That goal? Being the only person in the audience at a commercial movie screening.

The circumstances of my achievement? A 3:30PM matinee screening of Pineapple Express.

Let me be clear: there wasn't a single other soul in the entire auditorium. No one. Just me.

Now, calling this a "goal" is obviously misleading because there is little I could do to orchestrate the scenario's coming to fruition beyond attending weekday matinees of movies that have been in release for several weeks. While I never actively seek out movies I think will be empty, I've seen some pretty obscure stuff in the middle of the day in the middle of the week and still always found myself in the company of at least one other patron. I've been close a half-dozen times, only to have other come in during the trailers or opening credits (this happened during a matinee screening of The Condemned -- which, in my opinion, was a better B-movie than either half of Grindhouse, but that's a story for another day).

These past years haven't been easy, what with the aggravation of having friends and colleagues return from the cinema and casually say that they "were the only ones in there." Yes, I tend to believe they're exaggerating the emptiness of the auditorium, but to so glibly, so thoughtlessly toss out the "empty cinema" as a condition of their recent moviegoing experience when I've been striving, fruitlessly, for it for so many years just busts my buttons.

Or take this post by David Bordwell, where, describing his preference for matinee shows, he writes "Sometimes I’m the only person there." I swear I've also read something by Leonard Maltin to the same effect (though as a pretense to criticizing the poor projection at most mid-day screenings, if I'm recalling correctly).

Was I doing something wrong all those years? Was there something about the specific conditions of my Pineapple Express experience that led to my being the only viewer?

I doubt it. It's just dumb luck, I figure -- a blog-worthy conclusion, if there ever was one.