Megalomania and Anonymity: Three New Books on Disney
6/1/2007 4:14:05 PM
Walt Disney is arguably the most influential film figure of the 20th century. Though his '40s and '50 feature films often live better in the memory of long ago child viewing than they do in adult revisits, that memory or mental mood is important. Spielberg and Lucas, for example, have been trying to recreate it ever since. Yet Disney is an animator who, after a certain time, never picked up a pencil. He was the filmmaker as producer, following his hunch about what America wanted to think about itself, while promulgating slyly violent fantasies. He was id and superego at the same time. As I've said elsewhere, Disney was the crazy mirror twin of that other '50s cartoonist with the Satanic mustache who create whole casts of exaggerated bodies and over-reactions — Russ Meyer. Both had an almost unerring ability to tap into their audience's subconscious and conscience at the same time.
Now come three new books about Walt Disney in whole or in part, Walt Disney: The Biography, by Neal Gabler, a massive bio from Knopf, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney by comic book and animation expert Michael Barrier, from the University of California Press, and Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson , which focuses on the union woes suffered by Disney and other firms, written by Tom Sito for the University of Kentucky Press. A review by Mark Greif of the trio is available to non-subscribers at the London Review of Books web site.
Greif starts off by noting that early in Disney's career, he "lost the ability to draw what he wanted his cartoon characters to look like or his animations to do. So he began to act his cartoons out." His masterpiece of "pitching" is his three hour enactment of Snow White before all his animators in an otherwise bare sound stage. This occurred over three years before the movie was finished. Grief quotes Gabler quoting an animator who said, "That one performance lasted us three years," one animator claimed. "Whenever we'd get stuck, we'd remember how Walt did it on that night." Greif links him thus to fellow talker outers Brian Wilson and Jeff Koons.
He also praises the fact that Disney "strove for perfection in what was often an art form of speed and sloppiness" and that "technical ambition rather than an interest in money seems to have dominated even his business successes," concluding "Disney now seems most to resemble those later West Coast inventor-artists, the computer technologists, who started out writing code in basements and garages and wound up with massive software companies, their names attached to operating systems whose nuts and bolts they gradually ceased to know and could no longer fix or change, though the direction and achievements of those systems were inconceivable without them."
Of the two bios at hand, Greif says that the Gabler is "remarkably readable" while the Barrier is "hagiographic, certainly, but never dishonest, and it marshals a truly enormous quantity of detail." Sito's book "contains the best account yet of the 1941 Walt Disney strike, with documentation of the union side," in which "Disney didn't understand the emotional and pragmatic realities beyond his own wounded sense of self." It's a well-observed review.
— D. K. Holm
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Bookish Movies
6/1/2007 3:01:52 PM
Bookforum’s latest issue (full disclosure: I do a regular column for them) has a particular focus on “Fiction Into Film,” with a slew of contributions, including shorter essays by writers and filmmakers like Alexander Payne, James Ivory, Elmore Leonard, and Frederic Raphael detailing their experiences with adaptation. My favorite bit, though, comes from Barry Gifford, discussing how an errant line from one of his works wound up inspiring David Lynch’s Lost Highway, which he co-wrote with Lynch:
”David once explained the effect he was after: ‘You know that feeling you get when you’ve just gotten back from the dry cleaners a pair of slacks, Dacron slacks, and you reach your hand in a pocket, and you feel those fuzzy sandwiches with your fingers? Well, that’s the feeling I’m looking for.’ I just nodded and replied, ‘OK, Dave, I know exactly what you mean.’ I kept this incident in mind while he and I sat across from each other and puzzled out the scenario for Lost Highway, which I like to call Orpheus and Eurydice Meet Double Indemnity. We made it work — at least for each other — and I love the result, fuzzy sandwiches and all.”
Another thing Bookforum asked a bunch of us to do, and which serves as good discussion fodder: Lists of our favorite film adaptations. The list of critics and writers providing titles is a pretty impressive one: Francine Prose, Stephanie Zacharek, Robert Polito, Luc Sante, Armond White (!). My list, which will come as no surprise to anyone who's met me (I have several sentences on each in the actual article):
The Conformist
Barry Lyndon
The Leopard
The Chocolate War
Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet
I also considered Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and I should have considered Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (checked by Drake Stutesman in his list). But I wonder what are other titles people would think are great adaptations.
— Bilge Ebiri
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TAKE FIVE: Pregnancy Comedies
6/1/2007 1:39:50 PM
We usually try and take as unique an angle as we can find for these Take Fives. Nobody's really that interested in a generic list of sci-fi films, or romantic comedies. But sometimes, no matter how hard we dig, we just can’t get a good hook in. For example, this week, we really wanted Take Five to be a thematic tie-in to the fascinating and bizarre documentary Crazy Love — a compelling 'documentary romance' about Burt and Linda Pugach — but we honestly couldn't find five other films about women who end up marrying the guy who threw acid in their faces. [Clearly, someone hasn’t watched many Turkish films —ed.] So instead, we took the cheap way out: if you enjoy Knocked Up (and you will), which opens wide this Friday, here are five other childbirth comedies you can kill time with while waiting for the stick to turn pink.
RABBIT TEST (1978)
In the life of every young cineaste, there comes a period when, after seeing as many of the greatest movies of all time, you decide to tackle the all-time worst. Rabbit Test is a perennial contender for any such list, a movie so witless and half-assed that you wonder how it got made. At least, you wonder that until you see Edgar Rosenberg's name in the credits: he paid for this woeful vanity project, the first (and, mercifully, last) movie directed by comedienne Joan Rivers. It was likewise the first (though, lamentably, not last) movie to star Billy Crystal, as the world's first pregnant man; this is a low moment for all involved, even Paul Lynde.
PATTI ROCKS (1988)
A little-seen independent comedy from Loose Ends director David Burton Morris, Patti Rocks would be noteworthy enough just for the fact that it's one of the few films of its time to feature honest laughter that comes from working-class characters and not at their expense. But the movie, involving a mechanic who shanghais his buddy on a road trip to visit his knocked-up ex-girlfriend, is also extremely worthwhile for its frank exploration of sexuality, which is told from a decidedly more female-centered viewpoint than that of most sex comedies. It almost received an X rating for language on its release, although nowadays, there's nothing in it you wouldn't hear in a stand-up comedy performance; but it's original, daring, and with a terrific performance by co-writer Karen Landry as Patti.
SHE'S HAVING A BABY (1988)
We'll be honest with you: There's really not that much to recommend this mid-period John Hughes suburban dramedy. If you've seen one upper-middle-class white dude (played by Kevin Bacon when he was still an actor and not a punchline) fretting that imminent fatherhood will cause his libido to flatline, you've seen them all, and Elizabeth McGovern is a yawn in the cardboard-flat female lead. But fast forward to the end credits and you'll get the biggest laugh we've gotten out of John Hughes since, well, since this movie came out: Hughes recruits his usual gang of idiots to improv names for the title baby, with hilarious results, including some gems from an unusually animated Dan Aykroyd.
JUNIOR (1994)
Apparently, no one involved in the production of this crashingly dumb male-pregnancy goof ever saw Rabbit Test, since they failed to capture the exact same magic Joan Rivers had failed to capture fifteen years earlier. Hoping to re-ignite the spark that had made Twins a hit in 1988, director Ivan Reitman re-teamed the duo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in hopes that the sight of seeing the Terminator in a family way would be inherently laugh-packed. It wasn't; a bunch of tired sexist jokes and Emma Thompson slumming it didn't do much to offset a disturbing central role by Arnold in which he discusses becoming sexually excited by fruit.
CROSSROADS (2002)
Okay, so Britney Spears's star vehicle isn't just a pregnancy comedy. It's more. More! Oh, so much more! In fact, it's not really a comedy, either — it was intended to be a gritty post-adolescent drama, and ended up as a bloated, whoozy just-us-girl-bonding road movie completely dominated by superstar Spears in the days before she had kids of her own. But in the few scenes that focus on soon-to-be single mother Mimi (Taryn Manning), we're treated to some of the most preachy perils-of-sex scenes since the days of A Summer Place. Overshadowed in its day by the hallucinatory Glitter, Crossroads deserves its own place in the bad pop movies Hall of Shame.
— Leonard Pierce
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Sundance Comes To Brooklyn
6/1/2007 12:17:08 PM
For the second consecutive year the Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting the Sundance Institute at BAM series. Twelve award winners from the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and twelve New York premieres will be featured within the program. There are also a related series of panel discussions along with screenwriting, theater and music programs.
The mini-festival began its ten day run last night inside BAM’s beautiful opera house with a screening of Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow, the follow-up to his 2005 debut The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Rambow was the buzz movie at Sundance this year after selling for a reported $8M to Paramount Vantage and immediately being dubbed “the next Little Miss Sunshine.” A curse title some (un)lucky film coming out of the Festival is sure to carry for years to come after that movie’s overwhelming critical and commercial success. It’s hard to say if Son of Rambow will be the runaway juggernaut that Sunshine was, but it has much of the same feel-good laughs and easy crossover audience appeal. It is also a fitting film to kick off the series as its central storyline celebrates the youthful exuberance and joy of making a movie. (You can read Mike D’Angelo’s Sundance review of the film for Screengrab here.)
It’s an easy film to like and should be a good example of the potential for commercial success within the parameters of independent film, a point referenced specifically by Sundance founder and President Robert Redford in his opening statement. (Redford received a warm welcome from the audience, after a brief but spirited introduction from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.) Redford spoke about the continued need to develop, embrace and showcase what he called the more humanistic side of filmmaking. He also spoke about creating an alternative to what’s being presented on the mainstream menu as well as talking about the dangers of film becoming increasingly focused on business with the potential for distribution, specifically for smaller films, continuing to shrink. Indeed many of the films featured in the series are still seeking distributors themselves.
The screening was followed by a multi-level reception with free beer supplied by Brooklyn Brewery and an almost constant buzz of movie reviews and gossip to be overheard from the well-informed crowd.
Among those also featured in this series are JJ Lask’s On the Road with Judas and Jason Kohn’s Manda Bala. I was lucky enough to see both of these highly inventive films and speak to their directors at Sundance this year. (Go here for the interview with Kohn, and here for Lask.) Kohn was at the reception and seemed in good spirits after his film, which was this year’s Documentary Award Winner, was recently picked up by City Lights; it will start a fifteen city run in the near future. Other program highlights include David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels and The Great World of Sound, which was well received at both Sundance and the New Directors/New Films series earlier this year in New York.
BAM and Sundance seem to be a near perfect cross-programming match as their audiences and intentions run along very similar lines. The series is also an important showcase that gives films a second chance at being seen by not only a wider audience but also potential buyers. Robert Redford remarked that he hoped it would be a partnership that continues for many years to come, and I certainly hope he’s right.
— Bryan Whitefield
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If the Heat Doesn’t Get to You, the Movies Certainly Will
6/1/2007 11:30:00 AM
”You know what's really interesting? Those specials they do on cable TV about summer blockbusters where all the actors talk about how long it took them to get into their makeup. Oh man, that is so interesting, I could watch something like that for, say, twenty-three seconds.”
From Adam Boyle’s hilarious “29 Thoughts About Summer Blockbusters,” now up at the Nerve Film Lounge. Where, incidentally, you’ll also find new reviews of Knocked Up, Ten Canoes, and Day Watch.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Lee and Guy: The May-June Issue of Film Comment
6/1/2007 10:45:00 AM
The new issue of Film Comment arrives and as I do every two months I try to figure out what it is really saying about cinema. I have some kind of weird problem with the magazine. Back in the 1970s, in the Richard Corliss days it was great. The Richard T. Jameson years were OK, but that phase's efforts to invoke the quality of the Corliss years butted up against Jameson's inevitable quirkiness and the private clubbiness evinced by a small set of writers (a tone carried over from his previous magazine Movietone News). Today, as its slow re-design reaches back to the Corliss look, the magazine instead increasingly reads like ArtForum.
Only a few of the May - June issue's items are on line. Among them are Brynn White's celebration of Lee Marvin, keyed to a retrospective at the Walter Reade held in mid-May. White cleverly charts Marvin's transition from '50s villain to '60s icon. Hollywood, he writes, gave Marvin "a playground within which he could wage internal battles with himself over his cowardice, failure, masculinity, violent inclinations, and quest for a reason to crawl out of bed every morning," adding that "If he had been our villain in the Fifties, he was our hero (not to mention the new ugly-beautiful) in the Sixties, when the Good and the Bad were less superficially differentiated." In addition, Chris Darke has a consideration of the late Jean-Daniel Pollet, whom Cahiers du Cinema once compared to Vigo. To my way of thinking, Chris Chang does not make a case for Woman on the Beach as a distributor-worthy film in that column, making reference with typical FC opacity to this tedious film's "organic breeziness that makes things feel spontaneous and improvised." There is also a retrospective review of Radio On and a current review of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone .
Not on line are Guy Maddin's palsy paean to Kenneth Anger (which comes with a glossary), timely career surveys of Apichatpong Weerasethakul by Nathan Lee and Judd Apatow by Mark Olsen, a terrific account of Anthony Mann by Richard Combs, and a surprisingly vicious review of Zoo by Gary Indiana.
— DK Holm
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Morning Deal Report: Ratner Hearts Hil, Pompeii Casting Rumors, and Lindsay Agonistes
6/1/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Brett Ratner gets the party girls out of the pool long enough to host a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.
- The New York Times feels Lindsay Lohan’s pain.
- Is Roman Polanski’s Pompeii going to star Orlando Bloom and Scarlett Johansson? And if so, is it going to suck?
- Don’t say you didn’t see it coming…. a Harry Potter theme park, called “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter”(!), will open in Florida in 2009.
- Todd McFarlane is working on Spawn 2 — only he’s going to call it Spawn and hope you’ll forget the first one ever existed.
- In case anyone cares, here’s Speed Racer’s car.
- The LA Times reports that more and more advertisers are investing seriously — as in, millions — in low-budget indie films.
— Bilge Ebiri
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The Movie Moment: TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (dir. William Friedkin, 1985)
5/31/2007 3:00:00 PM
(WARNING: BIG TIME SPOILER ALERT! If you have not seen To Live and Die in L.A. and have any intentions to in the future, do not read this piece!)
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me how I choose my weekly Movie Moment. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to answer him, mostly because I don’t really have a method- mostly I just pick scenes I like a lot. When he offered a few examples of Moments he might choose, my answer became clear — the only deciding factor for my Movie Moments is whether I think I’ll be able to write extensively about them. In selecting scenes for my weekly column, I find that I need to choose scenes that will allow me to write about more than simply the scene itself. Sometimes the scene will give me the chance to expound on an actor I love (as in my piece on A Fish Called Wanda) and other times on my own personal experience (like my post on La Belle Noiseuse). But most of the time, a great Movie Moment is one that illustrates the greatness of the movie around it, and occasionally, it will transform an otherwise good movie into a pretty great one.
In many ways, To Live and Die in L.A. plays like an 80s West Coast counterpart to Friedkin’s earlier The French Connection (a film I love, as you may recall). But while Connection’s Popeye Doyle was single-minded in his pursuit of criminals, the role was also full of sardonic humor and goofball asides, as when he would ask questions like “do you like to pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” to disorient a suspect. On the other hand, U.S. Secret Service Agent Richard Chance (William L. Petersen) is all business. He’s as much of a hotshot as Popeye, but he takes himself completely seriously, and his work is more or less his life.
Consider the scene where Chance visits his girlfriend Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel) after a long day of work. They have sex, but afterwards the conversation turns to work. It turns out that Ruth is a paroled ex-con who Chance is pumping for information. When she asks him for more money in return for her services, he coldly responds, “Uncle Sam don’t care about your expenses. You want bread, fuck a baker.” Later, when she asks what he would do if she stopped giving him tips, he pauses a second, then says, “I’d have your parole revoked.”
It’s kind of strange to watch a straight-faced cop movie like To Live and Die in L.A. in our post-Shane Black age. For one thing, much of the storyline feels pretty formulaic. First, Chance’s partner and best friend, three days shy of retirement, gets killed in a botched bust. Then Chance resolves to solve the case and find the killer by any means necessary. After that, Chance is reluctantly paired with a new partner named Vukovich (John Pankow), who seems too green to keep up with him. It seems like the screenplay hardly misses a cliché — the weirdo villain (a counterfeiter named Masters and played by Willem Dafoe), the sleazeball lawyer, the shady procurement of funds, the chief who dresses down his agents. Even the big chase scene (one of the greats, as it happens) seemingly comes right on cue.
But then something happens that we hadn’t anticipated. Just as Chance and Vukovich are thiiiiiiiiis close to finally busting Masters, Masters’ bodyguard pulls out a shotgun and shoots Chance in the face. I remember the first time I saw To Live and Die in L.A., this scene shocked the hell out of me. In fact, I had considered submitting this scene for last week’s list of Memorable Death Scenes. When watching the film again, I decided against it because the death itself wasn’t especially memorable by itself. But in the context of the film, it’s a bravura moment. For one thing, normally at this point in the story, we would expect the big bust to go haywire, with Masters escaping the scene of the crime and Chance and Vukovich giving pursuit, perhaps calling for some backup. But there’s none of that here.
It’s at this point that Friedkin’s reliance on formula throughout the film begins to make a whole lot more sense. While Friedkin wasn’t the top-rank Hollywood director that he was during the 70s, he was still a top-notch action filmmaker. All of the formulaic plot points in To Live and Die in L.A. actually serve a rather unique purpose — they lull the audience into a comfort zone, to the point where we anticipate everything that’s going to happen next. Just when we’re sure how everything is going to turn out, he pulls the rug out from under us, no less masterfully than Hitchcock himself did forty-odd minutes into Psycho. After all, why would the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist make a by-the-book cop movie unless he had some trick up his sleeve? (Everyone who has seen Jade, please don’t answer that.)
However, this death scene is equally shocking because Chance isn’t the sort of cop-movie protagonist who we expect to get killed off. He’s more of an antihero than a flat-out hero, but his complexities make him interesting. Everything in his life revolves around his work, and although he sometimes bends or even breaks the rules, Petersen and Friedkin always show that he does so for the right reasons. Just as importantly, he always seems to be on the verge of something better — a more evenhanded relationship with Ruth, forging a bond with his new partner, or even solving the case. So much is left unfinished in Chance’s life that the suddenness of his death is as shocking as its brutality.
But of course, that’s the job, isn’t it? Early in the film, Jimmy asks Chance if he has any plans for retirement, and Chance says he doesn’t think about it. He’s so devoted to his work that he can’t imagine a life without it. So it is with the film itself. After a brief prologue, nearly everything in To Live and Die in L.A. is somehow related to the case at its center, and it’s a job that’s bigger than any one character, even its ostensible protagonist. In the film’s final scene, Vukovich pays a visit to Ruth and informs her of his death. But rather than consoling her on her loss, the two speak pragmatically, discussing her semi-professional relationship with Chance, up until Vukovich’s perfect final line:
“You’re working for me now.”
— Paul Clark
Previous Movie Moment columns:
- May 24, 2007 -- Freaks
- May 17, 2007 -- The Elephant Man
- May 10, 2007 -- Gilles’ Wife
- May 3, 2007 -- Babe: Pig in the City
- April 26, 2007 -- La Belle Noiseuse
- April 20, 2007 -- Phantom of the Paradise
- April 12, 2007 – Lolita
- April 5, 2007 -- Bus 174
- March 29, 2007 -- Belle de Jour
- March 22, 2007 –- Nashville
- March 15, 2007 -- A Fish Called Wanda
- March 8, 2007 -- 8 Women
- February 22, 2007 -- The Girl Can’t Help It
- March 1, 2007 -- Tree of Wooden Clogs
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Secret Talking: When Commentary Tracks Go Horribly Wrong
5/31/2007 2:00:00 PM
As most reader probably know, the Onion AV Club’s "Commentary Tracks of the Damned" feature is one of their funniest items, wherein their writers focus on filmmakers trying to fulfill their contractual obligations by waffling on about their latest films. Once upon a time, the commentary track was a useful and informative extra; now it has become another part of the marketing of the DVD, selling a film you've already regretted buying. (Yeah as if someone's really going to get something out of listening to the commentary track for Snow Day).
With this in mind, the British filmmaker Robert Thorn came up with this short film, “Secret Talking,” satirizing the concept of the commentary track and the bitchiness that should be erupting from it.
— Faisal Qureshi
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1939: No Longer Safe from Hollywood Remakes
5/31/2007 1:00:00 PM
Somebody, quick — hide Drums Along the Mohawk. Surely it’s pure coincidence, but let’s hope this does not spell the beginnings of an ominous new trend:
- Resse Witherspoon and Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt are coming together to remake the classic 1939 Mitchell Leisen comedy Midnight, starring “Claudette Colbert as a destitute young woman in Paris who becomes a pawn when a wealthy man tries to get rid of the gigolo wooing his wife.” The original was written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. (One rumor has it that Wilder decided to become a director after visiting the set and realizing that Leisen wasn’t really doing anything.)
- George Cukor’s 1939 melodrama of infidelity and deception, The Women, is also being remade, written and directed by Diane English and starring Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing and Candice Bergen.
— Bilge Ebiri
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