-
Chaplin (1992, Richard Attenborough)
Just today, I met someone who recently watched The Postman and thought it was a good film. She’s probably the third or fourth person (I think the third) who I’ve met–since 1997–who agreed it was a good film. Though Chaplin has five years on that one, I’ve never met anyone else who thinks it’s good. Or great, I suppose. Chaplin is great.
I absolutely dreaded watching this film. As I recall, I had the VHS–I bought it used from a video store and it was one of the early single tape releases for 130+ minute features–and then I got the laserdisc on remainder in the early days of the Internet shopping boom, back when there were laserdisc stores online and laserdiscs being pressed. So, I haven’t seen it in eight years (I was a slow converter to DVD and, even after I did, I still never tried upgrade my entire laserdisc collection–still haven’t). I rented it a long time ago when I was trying to keep my Blockbuster Online queue going and just never got around to it. I’ve been actively avoiding it for about two weeks now, when I cracked down and said I had to get it watched. My fear being–well, like I said, I’ve never heard a good word said about the film.
Immediately–within seconds–that fear, that apprehension, disappeared. The John Barry music comes up and I remembered the emotional sensation the film produces in me. These sensations being the goal of art–back when I last saw this film, I worried about my “taste.” It never occurred to me someone else’s wiring was wrong. Back to the film. The music comes up and there’s Robert Downey Jr., back when he was the finest working actor. It’s impossible to think of Chaplin as a Downey film because he’s not Robert Downey Jr. He creates this character named Charlie Chaplin. While the make-up work is good, it wouldn’t do its job with Downey. The viewer expects this character to age over time and so he has to–because there are title cards telling the viewer time is passing. Aging and time passing, they go together. Downey being an actor in latex make-up is beside the point. Downey never exists as an actor in the film and neither does anyone else. The only person who stretches that boundary is Dan Aykroyd–as I’d forgotten he was good.
The success isn’t all Downey or John Barry’s score–Chaplin has the most indispensable score since 2001–it’s Attenbourgh’s whole conception of the film. It’s a biopic, but it’s independent of the actual reality of Charlie Chaplin. Attenborough creates a character and creates a sense of nostalgia–for future events, this achievement is particularly visible in the creation of the Tramp scene–without requiring the audience to know anything real. Having experienced any Chaplin films is not a requirement for Chaplin. I, for example, didn’t see a Chaplin film until 1999 or 2000. It’s a brilliant approach to the “non-fiction” film, one not often done anymore. Today, authentic and historical accuracy are watchwords; they have nothing to do with good storytelling, fictional or non-fictional.
As a quiet aside–for any Keaton fans out there (I prefer Keaton)–there’s a great homage to Our Hospitality in Chaplin, when we see Hollywood before it was Hollywood, right under the titles identifying it. Our Hospitality, for those who don’t know, did with New York City, giving an intersection and a date in the middle of nineteenth century. It’s a cute touch.
The Chaplin supporting cast is superior. Primarily, the film shows how excellent Moira Kelly is–Chaplin’s her first and only great film and it’s a shame. I mean, she was already done by 1998. Also fantastic and less known is Paul Rhys as Chaplin’s brother. He didn’t disappear, he just didn’t stay in Hollywood. The relationship between Chaplin and his brother is one of the film’s strongest elements. I’m going to go through the rest faster–Marisa Tomei’s good, Kevin Kline as Douglas Fairbanks (he and Chaplin’s relationship being another cornerstone), Penelope Ann Miller’s decent–if only in a scene really–Kevin Dunn is a frightening J. Edgar Hoover. Geraldine Chaplin playing Chaplin’s insane mother, she’s really good. Also, one of my favorite forgotten actors, Maria Pitillo (Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla ended her career) is in the film as Mary Pickford. She’s great in the film, credited far too late. She’s wonderful–Chaplin’s calling her a bitch while she and Downey have the second-best onscreen chemistry between he and female actor in the film. I suppose I need to mention it–though it doesn’t come up often at The Stop Button, I do despise Anthony Hopkins–Hopkins is great as the made-up book editor whose editing session with Chaplin frames the film.
I honestly don’t remember the last time I recommended something here. It looks like it would have been Black Narcissus. And now it’s Chaplin.
Posted on
Posted in
Tagged
-
Charley Varrick (1973, Don Siegel)
Walter Matthau hated Charley Varrick. He must have been stuck in a contract or something. It’s understandable why he did, however. Matthau’s whole image is one of the likable curmudgeons. Varrick casts him as a gum-chewing (for that Matthau effect) bank robber… who doesn’t do it because he needs the money, but because crop dusting has been taken over by big corporations. He loses his wife (the driver in his bank robbing crew) in the first few minutes of the film–it’s impossible to like her or particularly care, since she just got done shooting two people–and then, with the character’s only possible sympathy coming from his recent widowing, Matthau beds a woman a couple days later (after threatening to kill her). I can imagine Matthau had some problems with the film–it’s the most amoral thing I’ve ever seen. There are no good people in this film, with the exception of a few law enforcement personnel (who the film doesn’t want the audience to sympathize with) and a black family (who, interestingly enough, the film does want the audience to sympathize with). It’s unbelievable.
I’m not sure if Siegel knew what was going on while he was making it–I kind of doubt it, given how virtuously he defended it in his autobiography–but I think, reflexively, the filmmaker knew… In many ways, Charley Varrick is Siegel’s worst film, just because there’s no excuse for the badness. He had a good screenwriter (Dean Riesner) and a fantastic supporting cast. Andy Robinson and John Vernon are both excellent. Joe Don Baker–who Siegel knew the audience would like more than Matthau–plays a redneck Mafia hit man, who’s a complete piece of shit (but revels in it) and is the most entertaining part of the movie. Women are inexplicably drawn to Matthau, but, for whatever reason, one can believe they’d go for Baker. Oh, and the hit man’s name is Molly. So, obviously, Reiser and Siegel spent more time on that character. Robinson, who played the psycho in Dirty Harry for Siegel, showed a lot of promise as a comedic leading man (which, regrettably, never happened). It doesn’t help when the film spends fifteen minutes making him appealing, only to turn him into another pat bad guy. The disconnection may come from Riesner’s writing style on Siegel’s films–he and Siegel would lay out all the scripts (by various writers) and cut paste what they liked. I have no idea whether or not they did it on Charley Varrick (my copy of Siegel’s autobiography is in storage somewhere) but it feels like they did.
Some of this film–the beginning–features some excellent work from Siegel. Beautiful camera movements, a great crane shot… but it all disappears by the middle of the film. Actually, once the film stops centering on Matthau, it gets a lot better. When Universal released Varrick on DVD a couple years ago, they did it as part of their pan and scan classics of the 1970s series–a bunch of eclectic releases no one would want pan and scan. I had the laserdisc so I didn’t get upset, but Varrick’s got a really good reputation and I think a decent DVD release would have led to a (deserving) critical reevaluation of this film. It’s rather offensive and pretty lousy. The supporting cast (and the bland, not-badness of the scenic writing) make it watchable, but I can’t imagine a reason to watch the film again.
Posted on
Posted in
Tagged
-
The Big Bus (1976, James Frawley)
Maybe I just don’t like absurdist comedies. I can’t remember why I wanted to see The Big Bus originally–it just came up again last week–maybe because of director James Frawley (who directed The Muppet Movie), but I doubt it. I’ve seen a couple IMDb comments comparing the film to Airplane!, which came out four years after The Big Bus and aped its style. A lot about the two films are the same… except The Big Bus has better acting.
It has a great 1970s cast–Sally Kellerman, Richard Mulligan, Ruth Gordon and Ned Beatty. Linking through the filmographies, one could find many great–but relatively (if Harold and Maude still qualifies) obscure 1970s films. The lead, Joseph Bologna, I have seen in other films, but I don’t remember him. He’s good in Bus, giving an appealing performance while understanding the absurd humor. Stockard Channing plays the love interest and is weak. She gets it, but the part isn’t right for her.
The best performances are the small ones. Besides Mulligan and Kellerman as an arguing married couple, Rene Auberjonois is great as an atheist, sex-starved priest. He’s probably the best in the film, but there’s also Beatty and Howard Hesseman, who play bickering co-workers. Stuart Margolin’s got a really small part, but he’s really funny… basically playing Angel (from “The Rockford Files”) again.
The writers, Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman, make amusing observations about film stereotypes (the graveyard full of people talking to their deceased relatives), but they let the film get too long. Of eighty-eight minutes, only the last twenty didn’t drag, since there’s a half-hour before the bus even appears. That idea, of a nuclear-powered Greyhound, is a funny idea… but, like The Big Bus, it’s not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a pun. There are a lot of puns in The Big Bus.
Still, the cast makes it interesting (and entertaining), if not worth seeing.
Posted on
Posted in
Tagged
-
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005, Liam Lynch)
There are a few things I try not to do with these posts. First, I try not to use too many adjectives. I used to be better at this one. For fun, just go back and do a search for “incredibly.” I was using it twice a post, which is two times too many. Second, I try not to write the post before I even start reading or watching the text. With Jesus is Magic, since it’s a comedy concert with musical discretions, I had something I could say before I watched it. I could say, I had no idea how to write up a concert film. I’ve only seen a few (HBO comedy specials don’t count and neither does Comedian) and they were all music concerts and I had nothing to say about them after watching them (even though it was long before The Stop Button). So, I didn’t think I’d have anything to say about Jesus is Magic.
Luckily, Jesus is Magic isn’t good, so I can easily say quite a few things about it.
I was never a standup comic guy… I’ve never seen one live and between watching Comic Relief tapes in the late 1980s, I didn’t see any actual standup until Seinfeld’s I’m Telling You for the Last Time on DVD in 1999–so probably ten years, but maybe nine. I heard some (Chris Rock’s Bigger & Blacker) in 1999, actually, as well. The fiancée, however, loves standup (she thinks Seinfeld’s standup bits are funnier than the episodes of “Seinfeld”). She’s reintroduced me to Carlin and we’ve watched all the Chris Rock HBO specials. I’m somewhat familiar with standup now and–especially after Comedian–I have a real appreciate for good standup. Sarah Silverman is not a good standup comic. She’s also not a good singer and songwriter, but I’ll get to that part in a paragraph or two.
Jesus is Magic is funny–the title line comes from a funny joke about Silverman and her Catholic boyfriend having kids (“Mommy is one of the Chosen People and Daddy believes Jesus is magic”)–but not really… Silverman has outrageous setups and awful closes. She’s faithful to her shtik above all–she’s an egocentric Jewish girl who talks about race and sex and smokes pot–but her observations about race and sex are old hat. I’ve seen all of Silverman’s jokes on “Family Guy,” except maybe some of the Jewish ones, and they work better on “Family Guy” because it does visual presentation of comedy. Most of the glowing reviews I read online–I was excited for Jesus is Magic from the great preview, but from the first three minutes I could tell how it was going to go–most of the reviewers hung out with Silverman after the screening, before they wrote their reviews. I hate using they. English needs a male plural. Besides men. I need a masculine form of reviewers dammit. I think I should brush up on my French and start publishing The Stop Button in French. Not a fan of the contractions, but it’s a nice language. Anyway, I didn’t hang with Silverman. I wouldn’t like her, I don’t think. We wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Liking her standup is buying into it–you’ve got to part of the group. Silverman only tells jokes she knows her audience will find funny. She plays only to her demographic. In other words, you’ve got to be the white person who thinks he or she isn’t racist so you can laugh at Silverman’s race jokes. It might work better in the film if there were any Asian people visible in the audience. I think I saw a black guy, but I might be wrong. Or maybe Silverman really is funny and the joke is white people laughing about racism….
Then it would be funny. Instead, it’s “Family Guy,” only not good.
But Silverman’s set is only about forty-minutes out of the seventy minute movie. The rest are either scene–the terrible opening five minutes–or musical numbers. The musical numbers are well-produced, the songs just aren’t any good. It’s some of the jokes in the songs. It’s not funny. Especially when Silverman does a song recounting material she just did… They’re superfluous. Though the editing is nice. The editing is about the only technical aspect of Jesus is Magic I can find something nice to say about. The direction is bad. It alternates between an overhead long shot, close-up, and a torso shot. Silverman doesn’t move very much and I kept thinking the director should have been watching some HBO specials. There’s also no transparency about the making of the film. There’s a dumb story and dumb song about she throws it all together in one day, but there are four or five cameras on her. That grandiose camera setup is not part of jokey agreement of the film. It’s slick and the film never says it’s going to be slick.
When the film actually came out last fall (all the glowing fanboy reviews were from festival screenings), Jesus is Magic did not get good reviews. The critics were offended, in particular, by 9/11 jokes. They should have been offended by the film, not those jokes. Those jokes were pretty damn funny… but the film isn’t.
Posted on
Posted in
Tagged
-
An Affair (1998, Lee Je-yong)
After Asako in Ruby Shoes, I had high hopes for An Affair, Lee’s first film. Seeing one film, then going back and watching earlier films from the same director can be odd. You’re watching the blossoming in reverse. I’m trying to think of someone whose first films aren’t good. An Affair is good, it’s just not as good as Asako. It came really close to being… close to Asako, but Lee’s powerful visualization isn’t fully realized in An Affair. He has wonderful framing–there’s one particular scene, when the two people having the affair are walking along a lake and their motion pulls the camera… until the end the shot, they’re in control of the camera, not the director. The sound design is the most striking. Every one in the film works to create the mood. The music’s also important, but the sound design is more masterful. Everything hasn’t come together yet. He doesn’t understand just how important he make his shots.
More, however, the film’s problems come from the screenplay. For the first half of the film, the cuckold is poorly defined. He’s a successful architect… he works too much… blah blah blah. In the second half, of course, we learn he’s harboring deep feelings for a coworker (and has been for years) and suppresses them to keep his marriage together. He reacts to his suspicions in wonderful ways… ways the character in the first half wasn’t capable of realizing. The boyfriend, played by Lee Jung-Jae, who’s usually great, is an enigma for the first half of the film. It could have been a stalker movie during the seduction. Lee (the actor), in all of his other films, realizes these conflicted characters, and here he’s got his armed tied behind his back… (by Lee, the director). The film hides the character and his intentions from the audience, which is not a good thing to do.
Lee Mi-suk, the wife, gives the film’s best performance because it’s her film. She’s quiet and her performance is a perfect performance for (the director) Lee’s style–it synthesizes with the rest of An Affair. Lee Jung-Jae’s doesn’t (again, not all his fault), but it needed to do so. Together, however, the two leads are wonderful. They play very well off each other and, in the early scenes, the ominous air about the boyfriend begins to make one wary of the film. You can’t trust the film and a film like this one–(it’s long… it’s boring… it’s that good boring I love so much… it’s a lengthy 108 minutes)–you need to be able to trust it.
An Affair is a good film, made by a great director who wasn’t quite ready on the writing. But, he had a co-writer, so… who knows….
Posted on
Posted in
Tagged