Weekly Top 1020: The Most Unforgettable Death Scenes of All Time, Part 2 (Spoiler Alert!)
5/23/2007 5:00:00 PM
Bambi’s Mother, BAMBI
Do you remember it? The shock of Bambi’s mother shot. Her body slumped at the edge of the meadow, half-buried in snow? Her blood turning the snow around her red? No? You’re right, it didn’t happen like that. That was the version in our heads; we were impressionable kids. Bambi, released in 1942, contained the first death scene in a Disney film, coming on the heels of Snow White. In fact, you never see Bambi’s mother shot. You only hear it happen, and then you watch Bambi stumble around in a blizzard, calling for her. One of the DVD’s special features is an audio re-enactment of Bambi story meeting transcripts from 1936-1942. When Walt decides the audience doesn’t need to see Bambi’s mother fall, much less actually die in the snow, he says memorably, “It’ll tear their hearts out — when the guy comes back yelling ‘Mother!’” And he was right. It does.
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, BONNIE & CLYDE
Arthur Penn's belated response to the French New Wave redefined violence in American movies — what it looked like, the range of emotions and meanings it communicated, even the ways in which it could throw an audience off balance. Slapstick routines end with blood spilled; a man is killed and, in the same instant, turned into a pop homage to an image from an Eisenstein film; and the heartiest, most affable character on the screen, Gene Hackman's Buck Barrow, is reduced to a bewildered, dying animal spending its last moments on Earth on all fours in a field, surrounded by a posse of hick toreadors. Along the way, Penn & co. pretty much defined the term “hail of gunfire”: The movie's concluding moments, with the innocently destructive lovers caught in a blizzard of bullets that shreds their jerking, tumbling bodies, obliterates all that's come before it. Then the movie's over. Nothing more to say. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Dominique Sanda, THE CONFORMIST
Anticipating Adriana (Drea de Matteo) and her hopeless run through the woods years later in The Sopranos, the death of Anna Quadri (Dominique Sanda) in Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece The Conformist (1970) is an excruciating blend of political necessity and interpersonal betrayal. The set up is extravagantly set up in the film's script. Newlywed Marcello Clerici (Jean Louis Trintignant) has traveled to Paris on his honeymoon with a double mission, to contact and help expose Professor Quadri, an Italian intellectual in exile, an anti-fascist who needs silencing. Clerici hopes to get into the good graces of his admired Fascist masters, but his flirtation (and his wife's) with the intellectual's companion, Anna, dilutes his mission. Clerici and his confederates follow Anna on a trip into the country, where they will be ambushed (this brief summary can only hint at the sequences cumulative complexities). There is no fiercer indictment of cowardice, of sexual repression, and of personal betrayal, in all of Bertolucci's films, or indeed of all films, than in the shot of Clerici sitting frozen in his car seat as Anna pounds on his window, screaming, before she runs with decreasing energy and hope through the snow-covered woods.
Jon Voight, THE CHAMP
The generally accepted, ethical way to make a film is that when you have a big, overly emotional scene, you want to pull back a little. A well-placed cut can do wonders, as can moving the camera away from a character in the midst of wrenching agony. In other words, understatement is your friend. Unless you’re Italian. In which case, please, by all means, rub our faces in it: When the operatically inclined Franco Zeffirelli took on a Hollywood remake of the tear-jerking boxing classic The Champ, he evidently decided that the sight of a young boy watching his desperate boxer dad die wasn’t gut-wrenching enough, and that what this scene really needed was the camera right on the kid’s face, watching him plead with everyone around him, for an excruciating length of time. To his credit, young Ricky Schroeder (yes, that Ricky Schroeder) did a marvelous job. And Voight was always good at these sorts of melodramatic parts. (He was on the receiving end of one at the end of Midnight Cowboy.) It’s one of the most excruciating death scenes ever, enough to give any kid nightmares for eternity. And Zeffirelli. Shamelessly. Milks. Every. Single. Minute. Of. It.
Brad Pitt, MEET JOE BLACK
Before Martin Brest brought us the national punchline that was Gigli, he directed this lovingly photographed three-hour narcotic disguised as a remake of Death Takes a Holiday. But maybe his molasses-drip pacing contributed to the sucker-punch effectiveness of the scene in which Brad Pitt’s character dies, allowing him to become the shell body for Death’s earthly excursion. After a meet-cute with Claire Forlani, the cheery Pitt wanders into traffic — where he is promptly blasted by an oncoming car, tossed into the air like a sea lion by a killer whale, and plowed again by another oncoming car. Cinema’s best guy-hit-by-a-car moment ever was almost enough of an adrenaline jolt to keep a viewer awake through the rest of the movie — almost.
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, DK Holm, Phil Nugent, Scott Renshaw, Vern, Bryan Whitefield
Parts 3 & 4 will appear tomorrow.
PREVIOUS WEEKLY TOP TENS:
- May 17, 2007: Cinema’s Greatest Offscreen Feuds
- May 10, 2007: The Worst Mothers in Movie History
- May 3, 2007: The Greatest Remakes
- April 26, 2007: Nude Scenes We Could Really Have Done Without
- April 19, 2007: The Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made
- April 11, 2007: Cinema's Greatest No-Sex Sex Scenes
- April 4, 2007: Chicks with Guns
- March 29, 2007: The Most Important Nude Scenes of All Time
- March 22, 2007: The Worst Accents in Movie History
- March 14, 2007: The Kinkiest Films Ever Made
- March 7, 2007: The Most Dangerous Films of All Time
- February 27, 2007: The Best Nude Scenes of 2006
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11685#11685 |
Weekly Top 1020: The Most Unforgettable Death Scenes of All Time, Part 1 (Spoiler Alert!)
5/23/2007 4:09:43 PM
They’re morbid, they’re melancholy, they’re shocking, they’re awful, they’re hilarious, they’re unwatchable. What makes a death scene unforgettable? It could be its sheer effectiveness: We’ve got some on this list that are scarring in their intensity. It could be unique: Did you ever think you’d cry at the death of a homicidal computer? It could be ridiculous: Why couldn’t Steven Seagal just kill Screwface once? But you know it when you see it: It’s the kind of scene that you just won’t be able to shake, even if you wanted to. We suppose that there’s something kinda sadistic about throwing all this cinematic mortality at you — by the way, this is a four parter, with ten scenes today, and ten tomorrow, plus honorable mentions — but we’ve tried to balance it out. For every Mark Lamos in Longtime Companion, there’s a Yaphet Kotto in Live and Let Die. Also, while a list like this by definition requires plenty of spoilers, we’ve tried to limit the films to those made before 2002, for the simple fact that we didn’t want to start giving away the endings to recent movies. So that’s why you’re not going to find [NAME REDACTED]’s shocking death in last year’s [TITLE REDACTED] here. But for those of you who haven’t seen Psycho or The Godfather yet — well, you’re shit out of luck. Sorry.
James Caan, THE GODFATHER
It seems almost arbitrary to select one specific example from Francis Ford Coppola’s saga, considering you could practically make a Top 10 list from the Godfather films alone: Moe Greene through the eyeball, Don Vito collapsing in his tomato garden, etc. There was, however, something particularly visceral and startling about the assassination of hot-headed Sonny Corleone. Playing on Sonny’s impulsiveness, rival bosses Barzini and Tattaglia set the perfect trap by enlisting his brother-in-law Carlo to beat up his sister Connie. As Sonny races for revenge — and finds himself ambushed at a tollbooth — he finds out in a hail of submachine-gun bullets that you sometimes have to pay some pretty steep tolls on New York roads.
James Cagney, WHITE HEAT
The mother-fixated sociopath Cody Jarrett was Cagney's last gangster role, and the star, who was pushing fifty at the time, must have decided that he didn't feel like leaving behind anything but scraps for any young punks who might feel like picking up where he'd left off. Whether he's ventilating a rat in a car trunk while munching a hot dog or reacting to news of mom's death by beating up the entire prison guard population while making a sound no human being should be able to make unless suffering from radiation poisoning, Cagney swings from one big moment to the next until the movie's title seems to be underselling things. As the story hurtles towards its conclusion, it faces the problem of living up to and surpassing the great exit scenes from earlier in his career, like the spectacular hissy fit he throws on his way to the electric chair in Angels with Dirty Faces, so that the Dead End Kids won't make the mistake of idolizing him. Characteristically, he opted to go out with something splashy. Armed with his gun, a fiery set wired to explode, and the line, "Made it Ma — top of the world!", he blows himself sky high, all the way to pulp Heaven.
Mark Lamos, LONGTIME COMPANION
The deathbed scene is to drama as a kick in the nuts is to comedy: It takes no imagination, and it’s still almost guaranteed to pay off with your audience. And then there are examples like this one, in the 1990 film adaptation of Craig Lucas’ seminal stage play about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. After watching his lover Sean (Lamos) disintegrate from the effects of the disease, David (Bruce Davison) sits at his bedside and gives him permission to give up the excruciatingly painful fight for his life. “Let go,” David repeats, calmly and persistently, offering Sean an escort across the threshold. Unlike so many deathbed scenes that allow a star to slip away with dark circles under her eyes, this one offered a glimpse into both the agony of the dying and the burden shouldered by those left behind.
HAL 9000, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
It is an exquisite element of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece that the most heartrending death in the film is that of a machine. The HAL 9000 turns out to be a computer so human it is also neurotic: In a paranoid fit, thinking that the crew is conspiring against him (in fact, they are), HAL (vocalized by Douglas Rain) tries to eliminate them, both those in suspended animation and those unsuspended. In a now famous sequence, the lone surviving crew member, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), who, in Kubrick's cunning reversal of expectations, has been rendered by evolution and scientific progress to be less "human" than HAL, navigates his way deep into the computer's memory and reduces him to his purely automatic faculties. HAL's repeated, neutral yet curiously imploring chant of "Dave ... Dave ... Stop, Dave ... Dave, please stop," has gone down in history. As he does so, HAL regresses, singing the song "Bicycle Built for Two" that his inventor taught him for the unveiling of HAL's AI capabilities to other scientists. It is a measure of Kubrick's mastery that, to new viewers, this lengthy sequence is utterly fascinating, even though all he shows is a guy turning keys so that small plastic blocks move, like the rods in a nuclear reactor.
Yaphet Kotto, LIVE AND LET DIE
Last we checked, Live and Let Die was not a student film. It starred Roger Moore and was a well-budgeted entry in the lucrative James Bond franchise. It was released by a major studio. It even had Jane Seymour in it. There was a screenplay, for which someone(s) got paid. All sorts of professionals crowded the cast and crew. Presumably they even had catered meals, decent craft services, a unit publicist, lawyers, an insurance bond guarantee. Executives probably took a look at a rough cut of the film at some point. Maybe even twice. An editor — a real editor — cut the film. And they even had — we know this may be hard to believe — someone paid to do the special effects on the film. (And paid pretty well, most likely.) Professionals all over the place, presumably there to make sure nothing goes wrong. So how in the living motherfuck do they explain this?!?!? It is perhaps the single most unforgettable, and by “unforgettable” here we actually mean soul-destroyingly awful, death scene ever. Bond villains have been done off in quirky ways before, but this…this…we can’t even go on. We’re too busy watching that damned clip over, and over, and over again.
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, DK Holm, Phil Nugent, Scott Renshaw, Vern, Bryan Whitefield
Part 2 will appear later today. Parts 3 & 4 will appear tomorrow.
PREVIOUS WEEKLY TOP TENS:
- May 17, 2007: Cinema’s Greatest Offscreen Feuds
- May 10, 2007: The Worst Mothers in Movie History
- May 3, 2007: The Greatest Remakes
- April 26, 2007: Nude Scenes We Could Really Have Done Without
- April 19, 2007: The Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made
- April 11, 2007: Cinema's Greatest No-Sex Sex Scenes
- April 4, 2007: Chicks with Guns
- March 29, 2007: The Most Important Nude Scenes of All Time
- March 22, 2007: The Worst Accents in Movie History
- March 14, 2007: The Kinkiest Films Ever Made
- March 7, 2007: The Most Dangerous Films of All Time
- February 27, 2007: The Best Nude Scenes of 2006
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11684#11684 |
Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Bela Tarr’s The Man from London
5/23/2007 3:15:00 PM
Four years in the making, Béla Tarr's typically lugubrious The Man from London opens with a series of tracking shots so intricate that they alone might well have required three of those years to get just right. What we dimly see, mostly via circular pools of light thrown by wall-mounted lamps, kicks something off unprecedented in Tarr's oeuvre — namely, a plot. In fact, it's roughly the same plot that drives No Country for Old Men: Laconic dude stumbles onto briefcase full of stolen money, must elude both criminals and cops.
Except, of course, that nothing gets "driven" in a Béla Tarr picture — save for the impatient viewer, who will surely be driven mad. (I haven't seen this many walkouts at a Cannes press screening since The Brown Bunny.) Moving their camera one baleful centimeter at a time, Tarr and his D.P., Fred Kelemen (an accomplished director himself), take events that might occupy a single page of text, or even less, and transform them into slow-motion symphonies of light and shadow, movement and stasis. The Man from London was based on a novel by famed French mystery novelist Georges Simenon, but it evinces no interest in narrative, character or psychology. Instead, it's a virtuoso exercise in cinematography, using Simenon's story (said to be very internal) as a pretext for a series of expertly composed b&w images.
That'll probably be more than enough to satisfy Tarr's small but loyal cadre of fans, who've endured a seven-year wait since his last feature, Werckmeister Harmonies. Personally, I run hot and cold on the guy — his legendary 7.5-hour Sátántangó, for examples, strikes me as about four hours of masterpiece and 3.5 hours of deadly self-indulgence. Since then, his self-indulgent side seems to have taken over. Several of Man from London's few dozen shots left me breathless, but the film as a whole feels oddly mummified; it's almost as if Tarr filmed his idea for the movie rather than the movie itself, if that makes any sense. If you've longed to see Tilda Swinton badly dubbed into Hungarian, however, you may never have another chance.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Star Wars As Art Film?
5/23/2007 2:15:00 PM
An interesting discussion has been going on over at Matt Zoller Seitz’s blog The House Next Door about Star Wars, specifically regarding the prequel trilogy, and in particular Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. It’s all part of a Star Wars blog-a-thon (sigh…nobody ever freaking tells me these things) launched in honor of the first film’s 30th anniversary.
The article in question is by Ryland Walker Knight, wherein he argues that we’d be better able to appreciate Episode III (and perhaps to a lesser extent the other films in the series) if they were subtitled:
”Here is where I think the subtitles would help Episode III. Lucas' film does not have the visual rigor of, say, Zhang Yimou's Hero or House of Flying Daggers, but that is not quite a problem: it still dazzles the eye frame to frame. Here, the camera conveys the affect. True, it is not the same as Bresson or Antonioni or Tarkovsky or whichever foreign formal master you choose &mfdash; but why can we not appreciate the camera and its emotional weight in Episode III?…Were there subtitles onscreen in Episode III, the dialogue would be on the same plane (the screen) as the visual, a part of the visual world, and it would not be harped on as much; it might, in fact, be read as generously as the images are read. And in the lack of inflection in certain actors' speech, the audience can attribute more to the weight of the dialogue. Watching a subtitled film, one is lulled into a reverie of the images playing over the subtitles.”
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This is potentially true. (But maybe not really: As another critic friend has pointed out, the prequels’ US and non-US imdb user ratings are virtually identical, although that sample does not account for the fact that most non-US imdb users are probably still fluent in English.) But to what extent is it a good thing? Dialogue is, after all, one of the elements of a film. If Star Wars is better appreciated as a silent film, then perhaps it should have been one. While we sometimes overlook, say, technical flaws in a rough and ragged ultra-low-budget indie film, and even sometimes poor English dialogue in a film made by a foreign filmmaker, last time I checked George Lucas was neither foreign nor poor. With legions of screenwriters and dollars at his disposal, I’m not inclined to cut him too much slack when it comes to poor dialogue.
That said, there’s a part of this arguent that does appeal to me, which is that it draws our attention to what a beautiful dreamscape of imagery Revenge of the Sith presents. It was something that shocked me when I saw it (and I do like the film a great deal): It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous film, and its color schemes go from elegant grandiosity, to harrowing garishness (as the Jedi are slaughtered) to grim lifelessness over the course of the film. After the stagy, stodgy Phantom Menace, I was convinced that George Lucas had pretty much given up on any kind of expressive use of the camera, and there were moments in Sith of remarkable visual power — a reminder that the original Star Wars was actually an homage not (as advertised) to Saturday morning serials, but to Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.
Anyway, you should check out the article. And be sure to check out the lengthy discussion in the feedback section. (Hey, imagine that: Feedback! What a novel concept…)
— Bilge Ebiri
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven
5/23/2007 1:30:00 PM
Sometimes it's just too easy. In my post about Paranoid Park the other day, I forgot to mention that I correctly guessed it was a new Gus Van Sant movie before it even started, simply because the screen's aspect ratio was set at 1.33:1 — the squarish, old-Hollywood shape that only Van Sant uses nowadays. This morning's Competition film, The Edge of Heaven, had no opening credits, but it did have various folks speaking Turkish in Germany, and there's only one Turkish-German filmmaker of any note at the moment.
Like his previous dramatic feature, the Berlin prizewinner Head-On, Fatih Akin's new effort explores the increasingly porous borders between East and West, shuttling characters back and forth between Hamburg and Istanbul and observing their rootless confusion. Akin divides the film into three chapters, two of which sport titles that announce the impending death of a major character — a structural device that lends even ostensibly mundane scenes a certain uneasy tension. Part One focuses on a cantankerous Turkish émigré and the hooker (also Turkish) he hires to be his live-in girlfriend, to the consternation of his bookish son; Part Two follows the hooker's daughter, a student radical in Istanbul who hightails it to Germany following a demonstration gone wrong and falls into a relationship with a young woman she hits up for spare change, to the consternation of the woman's stern mother (Fassbinder vet Hanna Schygulla, the only recognizable cast member for most Americans). Part Three shifts the focus again in ways better left unrevealed.
Those expecting the punkish, masochistic energy of Head-On, with its car-crashing and wrist-cutting and club-hopping, may be a bit surprised by this new film's more measured and contemplative tone. All the same, Akin's keen intelligence, his sensitivity to cultural dislocation and his skill with actors are all still very much in evidence. Scene by scene, The Edge of Heaven (which sounds like a Majid Majidi film; the German title translates as From the Other Side) is an assured and disarmingly inquisitive picture, creating a mosaic of unsettled lives in which the pieces never fit quite where you expect them to. What keeps it from being more than just "solid" is Akin's unfortunate reliance on what I'll call Stupid Writer Tricks — implausible coincidences, chance almost-meetings between characters who don't realize their hidden connection, etc. If someone spends the entire movie plastering HAVE YOU SEEN HER? posters all over town, you can be sure he'll take the last one down just before Someone Who's Seen Her walks in the door, at which point the camera will even pan over to the empty space where the poster used to be. In another kind of movie, that might not be a big deal; in one that's otherwise so scrupulously naturalistic, it feels, well, a little cheap. Fortunately, the ending, with its touching air of forgiveness, will have you in a generous frame of mind.
— Mike D’Angelo
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New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hacks: Richard Schickel on Bloggers — Yet Again
5/23/2007 12:45:00 PM
Time reviewer Richard Schickel has done again what he does best: squatted down and evacuated another blast of undigested bullshit. This week his latrine is the Los Angeles Times , whose pages he has befouled yet again, this time with an unlettered diatribe against the universal threat of bloggers:
”Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.”
Mr. Schickel, who on the one hand slavers over old conservative filmmakers such as Clint Eastwood in oversized, insight-free books, and with the other, still fights the Red Menace in Hollywood on behalf of the Dies Committee, has of late taken to commenting on another topic of which he knows nothing, the Internet. An earlier soliloquy was well covered by his opponents , but Mr. Schickel, who, it appears, doesn't actually read blogs, visit websites, and perhaps even own a computer, is still gnawed by the WWW's refusal to obey his dismissals, and now has allowed his peristaltic system to void yet another screed.
Every other week, the British satirical magazine Private Eye publishes a column of media misfires, illustrated with a drawing of a soused reporter asleep over a newspaper bearing the headline, "New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hacks." Of no one could this be better said than Schickel, whose recent ex cloacal pontifications about bloggers are an embarrassment.
Trembling in his outhouse, his schickel puckering with each explosion of ignorance, the critic in extremis obviously fears for his job. Who is going to read Time or his crappy books if perfectly good, coherent, insightful writers are giving it away free in blogs? In the film Other People's Money , Danny DeVito stands before a group of stockholders and holds up a buggy whip. His subsequent speech is a brilliant summation of how something, even an item that is beautiful in itself, can be rendered hopelessly outdated by new technology. Mr. Schickel is that buggy whip, or more appropriately the out-of-date overhead toilet flushing chain.
Kim Morgan was the first to issue a retort at her MSN film news and comment blog Movies Filter against Schickel’s attack on "mere yammering," and her ribbing of the man’s short-sightedness says it all. Personally, I hope that Mr. Schickel keeps at it, for with each foul cloud of toxic "criticism," he — to mix metaphors in a typically amateurish blogger sort of way — pounds another nail in the coffin of his bovine, elite, New York, smug "reputation."
— D. K. Holm
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Ethan Hawke Still Has Good Taste
5/23/2007 12:01:00 PM
Ethan Hawke pretty much epitomized the "I listen to all the bands you should listen to" hipster more than a decade ago in Reality Bites, and it turns out he still knows how to put together a very impressive mix tape. Hawke's directorial debut Chelsea Walls featured a soundtrack of original material by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy. And now M.Ward, Feist, Cat Power, The Black Keys and Willie Nelson >will all give life to original songs written by Jesse Harris (Norah Jones' boyfriend and collaborator) for the soundtrack to Hawke's latest feature, based on his novel The Hottest State. Harris, a long-time friend of Hawke's, also co-produced the movie and has a small role in the film.
The film opened to a warm reception at last year's Venice Film Festival and features a hip, young cast including Mark Webber (playing the fictional Ethan), Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) and Michelle Williams. The story revolves around a struggling actor and his tumultuous relationship with a samurai sword wielding beauty in a yellow jumpsuit young singer/songwriter, so it only makes sense that music would play a prominent role.
— Bryan Whitefield
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Checking in with Keith Gordon
5/23/2007 10:45:00 AM
Anyone who has read Screengrab with any kind of regularity over the past year has probably discovered that it’s a bit of a refuge for Keith Gordon fanboys. And why shouldn’t it? Gordon, best known probably as the director of the 1992 war drama A Midnight Clear (starring Ethan Hawke and Gary Sinise) and 2003’s The Singing Detective (starring Robert Downey, Jr., and Mel Gibson), is one of the finest American fillmakers working today. Of course, some will also remember him as a young actor from the 70s and 80s, when he appeared in films as diverse as Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, John Carpenter’s Christine, and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. But he turned to directing full time in 1988 with his first feature, the acclaimed, haunting prep-school drama The Chocolate War (which we championed in a Forgotten Films feature last year). The film recently made its long-delayed debut on DVD (go here for Nerve’s review.), which also gave us an opportunity to interview the celebrated indie director — about his first film, about the peculiarities of being a young actor directing other young actors, and also about his 1996 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation, Mother Night, much on our minds recently with the passing of the legendary novelist.
Despite the staggering number of great performances from young actors in The Chocolate War, I was surprised to discover recently that a lot of them gave up acting.
It’s sort of sad, but not surprising. When you think about it, a lot of people stop acting. We tend not to think of it, because most actors we know are the ones who are very successful, the people at the very top. But a lot of people in the middle ranges often give up, because it’s such a grinding, cruel, harsh life. People get burned out. Unless the rewards are really great — either financially, or through awards, or just being able to consistently do great work — people do it for a while, and then decide they want to be happy and be able to pay their rents. But The Chocolate War maybe had more than its share of talented actors who gave up acting. A lot of those kids were local actors, though — people who had never been in a movie, had only done high school plays — so it’s understandable that many of them didn’t keep with it. Some of them did try to go and get more parts. But talent is only one small part of why people succeed. And a lot of people with lots of talent don’t succeed.
Did having been a young actor yourself help you work with a youthful cast?
Anytime you’re empathetic to anyone you’re dealing with — actors in particular, but really anybody — you’ll be a better leader. Knowing the nervousness of it, knowing the ego, knowing the fear, knowing what helped me, what didn’t help me with different directors I worked with, that was an asset for sure. At the very least it helped me figure out how to make my actors feel that they were integral parts of the process. Remember, I had never directed much of anything before The Chocolate War — not even theater, really. My job as a director was to figure out what my actors needed more than to try to impose a way of working. The best directors I worked with as an actor were able to figure out what their actors needed.
 | | Keith Gordon in John Carpenter's Christine |
Did you show The Chocolate War to any of the directors you’d worked with?
I don’t think I ever screened it for any of them; there were none I was close to in that particular way. I know some of them did see it eventually. But I didn’t screen it for Brian De Palma or anything like that. I think I would have felt awkward and embarrassed calling to ask that. I did run into Brian later, and he mentioned that he saw it and liked it. But I was much more comfortable with the fact that he saw it on his own, and not because I called him and said, “Here, look at it, and tell me how wonderful you think I am.” Not that that’s what I would have been doing — but I worried that that’s what he would have thought I was doing.
You discuss in your commentary on the disc the sexual charge Wally Ward brought to the role of Archie Costello [one of the leaders of the Vigils, the secret society that recruits the film’s protagonist into refusing to participate in the school’s annual chocolate sale]. That’s definitely not in the book. Was that something you planned on initially?
I think it was something that I had already thought about that character. I hope I’m not giving myself more credit than I deserve, but I do remember thinking of it as I worked on the script. I remember putting in touches, throwaway lines in the script that weren’t in the book, like when he refers to “a pretty little freshman” — things that would have had a sexual connotation, especially for an American teenager. This wasn’t a guy who was dominating with physical prowess, so I thought of other ways people dominate. The book focuses on how smart he is. But I also thought of that creepy thing that can happen when an adolescent is more comfortable in his sexuality than other adolescents. When someone is confident in their sexuality that way, they can use that very powerfully.
But it was also developed a lot with Wally, during rehearsals and preparation. That element was something I looked for in casting, and there was an androgynous, bisexual David Bowie thing to what Wally brought to the reading. That confirmed to me that there was something about this approach that worked. And Wally knew that this was one of his weapons. For example when he sat in Jerry’s lap, I didn’t say to him, “Go sit in his lap.” I told him in rehearsal to try and make Jerry physically uncomfortable. So when he did it in rehearsal, we all went, “Ooh, that’s interesting!”
I have to confess something to you: I’ve only ever seen The Chocolate War on VHS. And watching the new DVD recently, I was surprised to discover that it’s a beautiful looking film. I’d never thought of it before as such a visually accomplished film.
One thing video never handled well, and really could not handle back in the late 1980s, was contrast. And this film was all based on contrast. I always hated looking at the videotape. People would ask me to borrow it for years, and I’d say you really don’t want to see it. It did improve — five or six years later, video transfers looked better, but we were stuck with our old transfer. The laser disc looks okay, but it was still the same transfer, and even there we struggled with contrast. And it was full screen, too. That was another big fight at the time. I remember trying to convince them that the only people buying a laser disc of The Chocolate War would want it letterboxed. But I couldn’t win that argument. Now, there’s a whole generation growing up with that. Half the videos on MTV are letterboxed. I’m just thrilled there’s now a 1:85 version of The Chocolate War that anyone, including me, can see.
Before making the DVD, when was the last time you yourself had seen The Chocolate War?
I’ve actually seen it a whole bunch of times recently, in different configurations. The American Cinematheque wanted to do a screening of it, so we dug up this old print, then I went and talked a bit at the College of Santa Fe, and they wanted to screen it, too. And obviously the process of doing the transfer took a number of tries. We actually struck a new print for it, a new interpositive off the negative. I saw it a lot as we went through the whole printing process, and the transfer process. They sent me an early test copy, which I was really unhappy with, so they let me tweak it. I’m now going through this with A Midnight Clear now, which is supposed to come out on DVD someday soon, when all the legal stuff gets finished. Nowadays, everything is transferred to HD, which is a great thing, but it’s also misleading: You sit in this perfectly darkened room with a $50,000 HD monitor, 15 inches from your face, and of course everything looks beautiful. But the contrast goes way down and the image does certain other things when it goes to regular DVD. And on a regular monitor, it does not necessarily look so good. And I’ve seen that on both films now. It’s a difficult process, and sometimes a bit misleading. You have to be really careful.
The music in the film is also really remarkable. A lot of films that use contemporary music tend to date quickly, but The Chocolate War features precisely the music from that era that people are still listening to — Yaz, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, etc.
Some of that is just luck. And some of it may be — at the risk of flattering myself — that I had pretty decent musical tastes. I think interesting music from almost any era survives. Look at Scorsese’s films, and you’ll see that he uses all sorts of music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and he even does it in films that take place in totally different eras. Cool, interesting music is timeless. In fact, when we made the film, some of that music wasn’t exactly contemporary: Some of it was already four or five years old, so it’s not like those were the hip sounds on the radio at that time. The Yaz album I’d had for a few years already. The Joan Armatrading stuff was much earlier. I was going for music that spoke to me. Maybe that’s what it is. Not that I have this brilliant prowess for music [laughs] but that when filmmakers go for music that speaks emotionally it tends not to date. It’s there because it works with the material, not because we’re trying to make an album. The stuff that tends to date is music that’s put in just so you can have a hip soundtrack. Because then people are looking for that idea of hip, which inevitably is the thing a year later that isn’t so hip anymore.
It’s just like a performance, or anything else. If you look at John Garfield in a movie from the 1930s, it’s so honest that you can put that performance in a movie now and not be bothered by it. The same goes for cinematography: I use some cinematography tricks that may be dated. For example, I use zoom lenses, but nobody ever seems to comment on it negatively, because I try to do it in a way that’s integrated with the story, so that you’re not thinking about it. Film accoutrements, be they style, or lighting, or even acting, only really date when they feel self-conscious.
Is it true you wrote some of the songs and music cues into your script?
Yes. It was probably a big mistake, but I was young and naïve. But it was also ultimately a good thing, cause it helped me fight for those pieces of music, and it helped me get a little more money out of the financiers to put the soundtrack together. Our whole music budget was still ultimately pathetic — something like $15,000. But those were pieces of music that I had in my head when I wrote the script, and I took some of the music with me to the location, to have it around, so that it could remind me of the moods, the rhythms of it. I play music a lot when I’m writing — I try to select pieces that speak to the material in some way. I also play a lot of music on set, during rehearsal. I also like to give actors music, too — nowadays I like to make a tape, or CD, of pieces of music that make me think of the character, and I’ll give that to the actor. That wasn’t something I did during The Chocolate War, but it’s something I’ve learned to do over the years.
Of course, people in real life have music going on in their heads, too.
I think that’s a human tendency. We all grew up on movies, so we have soundtracks in our heads. I have tons of stuff, especially from my adolescence — some of it even music that I don’t like — that’s connected to powerful and important memories for me. Jerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” will always be tied to my first love affair, because it was playing on the radio when I was driving into New York with the first girl I was with on a regular basis. I remember the sun coming up when that song was blasting on the radio. Twenty years later, that song still has a tremendous emotional impact for me — even though, let’s face it, it’s kind of a silly song.
I know you’ve always been a big Stanley Kubrick fan. And you had Adam Baldwin in your cast, pretty soon after he got done playing “Animal Mother” in Full Metal Jacket. Did you find yourself geeking out around him?
I guess I did geek out to a certain extent, but for obvious reasons Adam didn’t want to talk about it endlessly. I think at that point he was sick and tired of people asking him about it. Also, of all the people on the cast, he was probably the person I was least close to; we got along fine, but he was a bit more of a hot up-and-coming young actor at that time, more of a Hollywood movie star type. I would ask him questions, and he would tell me a certain amount. Ultimately, I decided it was more important to protect our actor-director relationship than to find out what shooting Full Metal Jacket was like! [Laughs] The stuff that amazed me were his stories about how Kubrick would wait for the light to be right, and they could go for days like that without shooting a roll of film. Which made me really jealous, cause here we were on a 23-day schedule, trying to shoot like 5 pages of script a day. I eventually wound up talking more about Kubrick with Malcolm McDowell, when I directed something for TV later on that he was in. Malcolm is one of these old school British actors who love to grab a drink and tell stories, so I got my geek out much more with him.
What about with Kurt Vonnegut? Even before you directed Mother Night, you starred in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School with him. Being a big Vonnegut fan, was it strange being in a movie with him?
That was a very revealing experience for me. Now, I talk a lot and I was an actor a long time, but I was also pretty much an introvert. And I tend to be especially shy around people I really admire. So when Kurt came to set, I didn’t say much because I was so scared. I didn’t want to seem like an idiot. At one point, I babbled some things about how much his work had meant to me. Whereas Rodney, who I don’t think had ever read a Vonnegut book in his life, completely hit it off with Kurt, cause he was so relaxed with the guy! And Kurt if nothing liked totally unpretentious humor — so the two of them just hung out and told dirty jokes all day. Here I was thinking I need to talk to him about the meaning of life, and it was only later that I realized that Kurt really just wanted to kick back, have a beer and tell dirty jokes. He didn’t want to always be Serious Writer Guy.
Did you keep in touch with Vonnegut in the intervening years between Back to School and Mother Night?
No, that was really just coincidence. Mother Night’s screenwriter, Bob Weide, who was an old friend of mine, had known Vonnegut for years, and had been working on a documentary about Vonnegut (which I imagine that with Kurt’s death he’ll be finishing soon). Bob knew I was a big Vonnegut fan, and suggested that we pick one of the books, and that he’d then go to Kurt and tell him we didn’t have the money to pay him upfront for the rights.
When Vonnegut died recently, there was some discussion, here and elsewhere, about how much he liked the film version of Mother Night. Did he express that to you at the time?
Definitely. Kurt was very expressive of how happy he was, which made me very happy. When you’re making a film of a book by one of your favorite authors, it would be crushing if they were upset with it, or disappointed by it in some way. Kurt was nothing if not honest — the funniest, nicest guy in the world, but he wasn’t going to bullshit you. He was very supportive throughout — he loved the script Bob Weide wrote, and he really felt Nick Nolte captured that character for him. He had been very disappointed in so many adaptations of his films, so it was wonderful to have made a film that he was so happy with.
Watching The Chocolate War and Mother Night back-to-back recently, I was struck by many of the thematic similarities between the two films, even though on the surface their stories seem to be very different. Both films focus on somewhat alienated characters who are co-opted by a system that they’re somewhat wary of, and then wind up hanging on to that system long after it’s been abandoned. They become prisoners of their own creations.
I think that’s accurate, but it was not something I thought about at the time. It’s also been noted, for example, that I seem to prefer somewhat passive, male central characters who have some kind of moral crisis, and are trying to make the system they’re in work in some way. I think it really boils down to what I’m drawn to, which for me tends to happen on an intuitive level. It’s only later that people point these things out to me, and I think, “Hey, that’s interesting.” A lot of stuff comes from my gut and not from my head.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Morning Deal Report: RR To Do Barbarella, MM To Do Walter Mitty
5/23/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Jumping from fake grindhouse fare to real grindhouse fare, Robert Rodriguez has agreed to direct the new Barbarella. Please tell me this wasn't the live-action Jetsons movie he's been talking about.
- Mike Myers will star in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a remake of the Danny Kaye comedy, which itself was based on the famous James Thurber short story. Astute readers may recall that this film was once supposed to star Jim Carrey. We’ll see how far this new incarnation gets.
- Cannes sounds great and all, but the Venice Film Festival’s lineup this year is looking mighty fine, with Robert Zemekis' 3-D Beowulf, Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There, Ang Lee's spy thriller Lust, Caution, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Ken Loach's These Times, and Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon all tipped to debut there.
- Martin Scorsese has announced “a foundation to find and restore neglected treasures of world cinema,” with an advisory board that includes Guillermo Del Toro, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Wong Kar-wai, and Stephen Frears.
- Quentin Tarantino’s longer version of Death Proof has now screened at Cannes, and everybody’s saying it’s…well, actually, not all that much different from the shorter version that opened in the US.
- Viacom is partnering up with the Indian conglomerate TV18 Group for a variety of film and TV projects. Oh please oh please let it mean more Bollywood versions of popular American TV shows and movies.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Michael Wood on Spider-Man 3 in the new LRB
5/22/2007 5:00:00 PM
Michael Wood, the house movie reviewer for the London Review of Books, has just issued his report on Spider-Man 3, which begins, "Money talks, but it doesn’t write all that well, and it can scarcely direct a movie at all."
As you may guess, Mr. Wood doesn't like Spider-Man 3 all that much, but his reasoning is nuanced. Speaking of the contrast between Peter Parker and his alter ego, Wood writes, "We might feel sorry for him if he weren’t so jovially expert at feeling sorry for himself, and we don’t really connect the athletic figure swinging through the city streets at great heights with the abstracted and uncertain Peter Parker on his underpowered motorbike." Later in the review, in an attempt to reconcile this, and reconcile his high regard with the first two films with the new one, summarizes the unmasking scene in the subway car in 2 and the vow of secrecy that PP elicits from the crowd, concluding, "This is loyal of them, and they think they are being loyal to the boy. In reality they are being loyal to the myth. Spider-Man has to be nobody. That’s why he is no real help to Peter Parker."
Wood says that No. 3 is "more of a mess than you can quite believe. Pieces of plot float in from nowhere, supernatural characters develop new sets of powers in mid-scene, all the most soppy and obvious scenes are played as if they were Ibsen and all the jokes have been replaced by weary memories of what the movies used to be like."
As intellectuals often do, Wood turns to the disparity between money and quality, with the masses throwing their money at bad things. "Spider-Man performed well at the box office, but Spider-Man 2, by far the most interesting of the three, did poorly. Why do I wish the critical lessons of history were not so obvious?" Spider-Man became, at least for the moment, "the most successful new film release in history," and Wood concludes that "Sam Raimi, the director of all three Spider-Man movies, can rest on his financial laurels, especially since in this case he and his writers did scarcely any work to earn them."
— DK Holm
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