Saturday, August 27, 2011

A Summer of Movies

After being on a schedule of more or less a movie a day, I was, due primarily to the painfully slow internet speed of the Republic of Georgia, only able to watch three movies ("Ajosshi/The Man From Nowhere," "Waltz with Bashir," and "Amadeus") in the months of March through mid June. I was volunteering in a program similar to the Peace Corps, living with a wonderful family and teaching English to children who had never met an American, not even a foreigner. My time was mostly exceptional, though I deeply missed the movies. Like an addict back on addiction, I delved into motion pictures.

Upon returning home, the first film I watched was Charles Chaplin's "The Gold Rush" from 1925. It was enjoyable, but the Chaplin film I really want to write about is his lesser known "Limelight" from 1952. The last film before he was essentially exiled from America due to McCarthyism (he remarked that he wouldn't return to America even if Jesus Christ was president, though he later did to receive an honorary Academy Award in 1972), the movie is sort of an ode to his earlier days as the world's most famous tramp. It's a bit too emotional and preachy at times, but Chaplin films work well when they preach and play to emotions because of how fairy tale-like they are. This one is more realistic than say "Modern Times" or "The Great Dictator," his two best, but his star from "Limelight" Claire Bloom noted that it was a "fairy godfather" story, and indeed it feels somewhat majestic, like a lighter form of a ballet story than last year's "Black Swan." (This was also the first and only time that Chaplin worked with another legend of the Silent Era, Buster Keaton.)

Next on the list was Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon" and later on his son Brandon Lee's "The Crow." Both films don't take themselves too seriously--with the dialogue of the former and in the latter the fact that the main character can take a break from acting out his revenge to play the electric guitar--and they require a bit of patience, but eventually they both become enjoyable. "The Crow" is similar to later films like "Dark City," "Sin City," and "The Dark Knight" (those titles sound similar, don't they?), and it's not as good as any of the three, but maybe their style was inspired by it; I don't know. The climatic fight scene in "Enter the Dragon" is one of the best ever filmed.

A slight disappointment was "Runaway Jury" from 2003. I say "slight" because I wasn't expecting much. By now almost everyone knows that the stars from the film, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, were classmates at an acting school in the 1960s, and supposedly were voted the two least likely to succeed. That was before they both won two Academy Awards. They play opposing attorneys, one "good" and one "bad," and they share only one scene together. One gets the sense that the scene was added only to allow the two to finally act across each other in their first and only film together. They both overdo it a bit: Hackman snickers about, combing his hair like the devil; Hoffman paces back and forth and almost looks as if he's improvising. There's a large cast, with John Cusack and Rachel Weisz as two characters controlling the jury, Bruce McGill as the judge, Bruce Davison as an attorney with Hackman representing the gun lobby, and Jeremy Piven as a character assisting Hoffman's character. The jury is made up of Bill Nunn, Nora Dunn, Luis Guzman, Cliff Curtis and others. But all of them are not as entertaining to watch as Hackman and Hoffman, even if the two are giving less than their usual stellar performances.

Alan Pakula's "Presumed Innocent" from 1990 with Harrison Ford, Paul Winfield, Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia and John Spencer was considerably better. While being far more confusing than the average court room drama and a bit of a disappointment for a twist, it was still terrific, especially with its dark and sexy nature. But what struck me most was the similarities to this summer's Casey Anthony court house drama. The similarities are obvious: In both the film and this case, the prosecution was lacking evidence and instead relied on a substantial amount of speculation. But regardless of the fact that most Americans believe Ms. Anthony murdered her young daughter, we, the United States of America, do not sentence people to the death chair on suspicion. As Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Western society insists that it is better for ten guilty men to escape justice than for one wrongly accused man to be wrongfully convicted. "Scientists search for truth," he wrote. "A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt."

(See the documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" for similar themes.)

Another similar-themed film is Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" with Angelina Jolie. I can't think of another movie that has an entertaining hour and a half of good acting, stylish cinematography, and captivating scenes, and then concludes with a forty-five minute epilogue that was terribly unnecessary. Imagine if at the end of "Harry Potter and the Deathly-Hallows: Part 2," during that silly epilogue scene at the train station, instead of getting three minutes of our three grown-up characters, we got forty-five minutes of them. The forty-five minute conclusion of "Changeling" prevented it from being considered a great film.

Unarguably the worst film I watched was Edward Zwick's "Defiance." While both Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber have definite presences in the film, both, among virtually everyone else in the film, have perhaps the worst accents in cinematic history. The film's actors have produced good performances before (Craig in "Casino Royale" and Jaime Bell in "Billy Elliot," for example), but this film is not one of them. Zwick's much better "Glory"was on TV this summer, as was the AFI tribute to its star Morgan Freeman, which I missed due to my time in Georgia. Freeman made "Glory," "Lean on Me," and "Driving Miss Daisy" all in 1989.

Alas, there were other disappointments. Freeman's "Driving Miss Daisy" is enjoyable for about the first half-hour, but then becomes riddled with annoying conversations by Freeman and Jessica Tandy and the wooden accent by Dan Aykroyd, as well as a less interesting (and more eyebrow-raising) race relations story than "Glory" or "Do the Right Thing." ("Driving Miss Daisy won the Best Picture Award for 1989; the other two weren't even nominated.) "About A Boy" is a rare film where its actors--Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette--are more enjoyable than the film itself, which is just full of romantic comedy cliches. Brian DePalma's "Carlito's Way" has two strong elements to it--Sean Penn's performance and the exciting chase scene at the end--but other than that, it is dull.

I journeyed onto Netflix instant viewing to watch parts of "Rated X: An Inside Look at the Porn Industry" and became a bit bored by it, so I switched to the PBS series "American Experience" on Ronald Reagan and LBJ. (Switching between documentaries on porn and the presidents is a bit challenging to explain.) I do recall, however, showing bits of the clips of the Johnson documentary (not the porn one) to my students during my student teaching two years ago. The film is narrated by historian David McCullough, author of "John Adams," which I read this summer.

Speaking of, on July 4, I watched "1776," the highly entertaining musical starring William Daniels as John Adams. The film is remarkably accurate (except for the arbitrary singing frequently found in musicals) , though there are some inaccuracies: Adams (according to McCullough's biography) was actually highly respected in the Continental Congress; it was only after his presidency, which saw a higher amount of partisanship than Washington's, that his memory was likely blurred, and he wrote in his autobiography that people thought he was "obnoxious" and "disliked." Jefferson is portrayed more kindly than perhaps he deserves. He is accurately noted of avoiding arguments, but no mention of his later partisanship is given (rightfully, I suppose, as this is about Representative Jefferson and not Vice President Jefferson), and we see him strongly support the abolition of slavery, though he died so much in debt that he could not free any of his slaves (except for the ones he fathered with his slave, Sally Hemmings). John Dickinson's role as opposing the Declaration of Independence is exaggerated, and the number he leads ("Cool, Cool Considerate Men") was originally taken out of the film due to the objections of President Richard Nixon. (The song contained lyrics such as "to the right, ever to the right, never to the left--forever to the right" and has been restored in the Director's Cut.)

A man who as a College Republican worked to get Nixon elected president was Lee Atwater, and a brilliant 2008 documentary about him is called "Boogie Man." Director Stefan Forbes uses the cliche of a Greek tragedy but uses it effectively, to the point that it hardly feels hackneyed. Atwater's rise is detailed: his work for Nixon and Strom Thurmond and later Ronald Reagan. Atwater, of course, was George H.W. Bush's campaign manager in 1988, and he managed to make his candidate--a Connecticut-born, Yale-educated son of a senator--look like the working-class, rags-to-riches one against Michael Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants. Atwater did so undoubtedly through racist ads, most infamous among them the "revolving door" ad and the "Willie Horton" ad. But with Atwater's fall to cancer we see that individuals like him aren't two-dimensional. Indeed, those featured in the documentary (the Bushes, Dukakis, Ed Rollins, etc.) all feel like something from a soap opera. Whereas some films of this nature attempt to schism the mythological from the real, "Boogie Man" embraces the blurring of them without fault; I can't imagine Forbes' film being any more mesmerizing if it had been more "myth-busting."

I was pleased to find Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" to be his best since "Match Point" five years ago. Not knowing anything of the plot of the film, I was a bit turned off at first by the fantastical way in which the characters were speaking, thinking this dialogue was the stuff of fantasy films, like his wonderful "The Purple Rose of Cairo." Happy I was then when Owen Wilson's character found himself in 1920s Paris, conversing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, and other influences on Allen's work. Wilson also is terrific; his "aww, shucks" personality is fitting, as he continually is surprised at what he's finding in the past ("Is that really so-and-so?"). He is supported by Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Michael Sheen, Adrien Brody, and French First Lady Carla Bruni.

There are too many films to write about. Some were good ("Source Code"), some were disappointing (Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion," Christopher Nolan's "Following" and especially John Frankenheimer's "Ronin"), some were quite funny ("Zombieland" and "The Other Guys").

Last, there was "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." As Kevin Carr said, where else are you going to see General Zod, Agent Smith, and the guy from "Momento" in drag in the Australian outback? (For 90s nostalgia fans, actress Julia Cortez of the famous/infamous "ping pong ball" scene played the villain Rita in "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie.")

Soon I will be heading to Saudi Arabia, a country where the cinema is literally banned. I will be there for at least nine months, and I hope I shall be successful in viewing films. Wish me luck.

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