The 1930s and 40s were a great time for film noir. This genre basically dealt with hardboiled men living in corrupt times and places, often corrupt themselves, the women who tempt them and the odds they face to even begin to do the right thing. It's not a genre that sees a lot of usage today. The most recent, popular example I can think of is 2005's Sin City, though that one comes across as more cartoon than anything else, even with the stylish flashes of color and the highly hardboiled dialogue spoken by, oh, every character onscreen. Perhaps there is simply too much trust in various institutions in this day and age, along with the predominance of the idea that most private detectives these days are hired to find evidence of adultery or something much less glamorous, and its no small wonder why this style of film seems to have disappeared.
Maybe this is why 1974's Chinatown works so well. First, the movie's private eye, Jake Gittes, specializes in the aforementioned divorce cases. Second, the time period puts it squarely about the time of the Watergate scandal forcing an American president to resign for the first and to date only time in our history, making it easier to believe our institutions might be corrupt. Third, even with all this, the movie is set in the same time period the best and best-remembered film noirs were produced, the 30s.
Chinatown is actually one of my favorite movies. The only movie I love more than Chinatown is the Japanese samurai/unsolved murder mystery Roshomon. It turns out my grandfather's favorite movie was The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, so for all I know this is genetic (it probably isn't). But for all that at least one friend of mine can't watch this movie in light of both director Roman Polanski's personal scandals and the big reveal about Faye Dunaway's character near the end of the movie, I still find this a compelling film that holds up to mutliple viewings.
The movie opens with one poor, working class slob finding out his wife has been cheating on him, as he suspected. Had he not, he wouldn't have hired Jake "J.J." Gittes to look into it. From the second Gittes, played to perfection by Jack Nicholson back in the days when he didn't just ham it up onscreen most of the time, enters the frame and begins talking he pretty much never leaves our sight for more than a few seconds at a time. Even when we don't see him, he's just off-frame somewhere. This accomplishes something for the audience worth noting: the first time viewer only ever knows as much as Gittes does at any given moment in the movie. The clues come out, slowly and surely, parceled out bit-by-bit as needed.
And what a mystery! Two, actually. The more obvious one is who killed the honest water company engineer, and former owner, Hollis Mulwray. The second, tied to it, is who was the young girl Hollis was hanging out with, and why do so many people seem so interested in her.
The answers point to the standard for noir films: corruption in the higher ranks of society. Dishonest cops on the take are one thing. Downright evil public works executives, who apparently can never have enough money, are something else.
The Chinatown of the title barely features in the movie. Instead, the place is more symbolic, a place where corruption happens and there isn't anything an honest person can do about it. It's the reason Gittes went from being a cop to a private eye. Gittes, unlike Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, actually is a moral person, and his righteous indignation can only be calmed with an associate's reminder of where he is when the climactic showdown goes down. Like any good noir, good doesn't really triumph here. The best any noir hero can hope for is for a slight improvement in the world around him, and Chinatown doesn't even offer that much.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Hugo (2011)
CGI is, above all else, a tool. Overuse it, or use it the wrong way, and it can affect your movie in only a negative way. Use it correctly, and there's even a chance your audience won't even notice it's been done. Sometimes, this particular tool has been used to create entire worlds from scratch, which no doubt save filmmakers money in trying to recreate sets. Done right, this worldbuilding can be incredibly impressive and dazzling. George Lucas has perhaps been the most famous of moviemakers to take advantage of this technology, with the various Star Wars prequels showcasing vast alien landscapes instead of more remote parts of Tunisia or Norway filling in for various planets.
Why then did I feel the opening few minutes of Martin Scorsese's 2011 movie Hugo far outstripped anything Lucas' production company has ever done along those lines? Especially since all Scorsese was trying to do was recreate 1920s Paris?
Possibly because audiences don't expect this sort of razzle-dazzle from the man who directed gritty movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, or even more recent, fairly low-tech all-told features like The Departed and Shutter Island. There probably has been some CGI in a few of Scorsese's films, but nothing on the scale of the zooming around of the Paris train station that opens what would be Scorsese's foray into family films.
It's more than that, of course. The story of a young orphan boy, living in the train station and keeping the clocks running and happens to find former magician/filmmaker Georges Melies reduced to near poverty selling wind-up toys out of the station isn't the sort of thing that attracts the kids these days. Maybe if a few of those automatons talked, but even the robo-man Hugo's been trying to rebuild only draws a very elaborate picture. This movie is a celebration of the movies, what they do for people and the wonder that can come from just being transported to another world. This is a movie where the closest we have to a villain is Sacha Baron Cohen's nameless station inspector, and even he is painted in a sympathetic way with his creaky knee brace and unrequited love for a flower vendor.
The main plot has Hugo trying to repair a robot his clockmaker father brought home one day. His father (Jude Law) died suddenly in a fire, and Hugo was more or less adopted and subsequently abandoned by his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone). An orphan like himself would probably be sent away to an orphanage, and the station inspector is the kind of guy who will bust an orphan for going through a discarded bag looking for food, so he stays hidden and lets people think Uncle Claude is still running the clocks despite the fact the man's been gone for a very long time. He sees the toymaker from afar, and swipes little bits and pieces until he's caught, then does what he needs to to get his father's notebook back from the man he doesn't know is responsible for many a silent movie classic. Indeed, Hugo loves the movies and introduces the man's niece to them while rhapsodizing about his father's favorite, the famous Melies feature in which the man in the moon gets a rocket to the eye.
Will Hugo fix the machine, realize his new boss is the long-since-believed dead Melies, re-inspire the man, get out of poverty, and land on his feet? Of course he will. That's not the point, though. It's the journey in movies like this, not the destination.
A special note on Cohen's French policeman: as with here and his role in Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, he has a very nice way of doing a comedic French accent, on par with the one the late Peter Sellers had used as Inspector Clouseau. It's a bit of a shame the makers of the remake of that series didn't hire him instead of Steve Martin, a funny man in his own right, but not in the way Cohen inhabits his various foreign caricatures.
Why then did I feel the opening few minutes of Martin Scorsese's 2011 movie Hugo far outstripped anything Lucas' production company has ever done along those lines? Especially since all Scorsese was trying to do was recreate 1920s Paris?
Possibly because audiences don't expect this sort of razzle-dazzle from the man who directed gritty movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, or even more recent, fairly low-tech all-told features like The Departed and Shutter Island. There probably has been some CGI in a few of Scorsese's films, but nothing on the scale of the zooming around of the Paris train station that opens what would be Scorsese's foray into family films.
It's more than that, of course. The story of a young orphan boy, living in the train station and keeping the clocks running and happens to find former magician/filmmaker Georges Melies reduced to near poverty selling wind-up toys out of the station isn't the sort of thing that attracts the kids these days. Maybe if a few of those automatons talked, but even the robo-man Hugo's been trying to rebuild only draws a very elaborate picture. This movie is a celebration of the movies, what they do for people and the wonder that can come from just being transported to another world. This is a movie where the closest we have to a villain is Sacha Baron Cohen's nameless station inspector, and even he is painted in a sympathetic way with his creaky knee brace and unrequited love for a flower vendor.
The main plot has Hugo trying to repair a robot his clockmaker father brought home one day. His father (Jude Law) died suddenly in a fire, and Hugo was more or less adopted and subsequently abandoned by his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone). An orphan like himself would probably be sent away to an orphanage, and the station inspector is the kind of guy who will bust an orphan for going through a discarded bag looking for food, so he stays hidden and lets people think Uncle Claude is still running the clocks despite the fact the man's been gone for a very long time. He sees the toymaker from afar, and swipes little bits and pieces until he's caught, then does what he needs to to get his father's notebook back from the man he doesn't know is responsible for many a silent movie classic. Indeed, Hugo loves the movies and introduces the man's niece to them while rhapsodizing about his father's favorite, the famous Melies feature in which the man in the moon gets a rocket to the eye.
Will Hugo fix the machine, realize his new boss is the long-since-believed dead Melies, re-inspire the man, get out of poverty, and land on his feet? Of course he will. That's not the point, though. It's the journey in movies like this, not the destination.
A special note on Cohen's French policeman: as with here and his role in Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, he has a very nice way of doing a comedic French accent, on par with the one the late Peter Sellers had used as Inspector Clouseau. It's a bit of a shame the makers of the remake of that series didn't hire him instead of Steve Martin, a funny man in his own right, but not in the way Cohen inhabits his various foreign caricatures.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Almost Famous (2000)
Writer/director Cameron Crowe has a long, personal history with Rolling Stone magazine. He worked there as a teenager before deciding to strike out on his own, going undercover as a high school student, and later writing the book that would become the basis for the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, featuring a script by Crowe. Crowe's affections for that time in his life, and the music he covered, is highly evident in his 2000 film Almost Famous.
Almost Famous tells the semi-autobiographical story of William Miller, a 15 year-old writing prodigy who manages to get a job over the phone for Rolling Stone. His initial job, getting an interview from Black Sabbath, fails miserably, but he manages to get in to see the opening act, up-and-coming band Stillwater, thanks to help from a few groupies who call themselves "Band-Aids". The "leader" of these girls, played by Kate Hudson in what may be her best role to date, goes by the name Penny Lane and has a special attraction to Stillwater's lead guitarist, Russell Hammond (played by Bill Crudup). William, as played by newcomer Patrick Fugit, seems to bond with Penny too, and she may be looking out for him more than anyone else on the tour, though not as much as she is fooling around with the very spoken-for Russell.
Crowe's script created Stillwater as a composite of many of the various bands he used to cover, so the pressures to perform and the pleasures of the flesh all seem to be most of what the band wants. Petty jealousy from the lead singer (Jason Lee) clashes with the aloofness of Russell on more than one occasion, as drinks and drugs are consumed and the Band-Aids are used as unknowing chips in various poker games. There's still a great love for the music itself, as William tries to stay out of whatever is going on (mostly successfully), something that would have been a great relief to his overbearing mother (Frances McDormand) who is both a prude and a forward-thinker at the same time (she thinks Christmas is too commercialized and pushes her son to excellence and her daughter out the door, but still thinks rock music is all about drugs and sex). It's this outsider, forever getting his interviews with Russell put off, who can see that Penny Lane is an actual person, can lecture the band on its failings to its own fans, and come out of the whole experience somehow making all involved better people, and not in a way that comes across as corny or contrived.
Early in the movie, William meets real-life figure Lester Bangs, as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Lester takes the role of a professional guardian angel, always advising William on how to keep ahead of his deadlines and keep his Rolling Stone editors happy, all while not letting those self-same editors know he's a juvenile. Lester predicts that rock'n'roll is a dying form of music. He may be right on that. Glam rock, disco, hair metal, and the rise of pop are all on the horizon for the fans like William and the bands like Stillwater. As such, its very nice to be able to see the (minor all told) warts-and-all story from the days where rock was the music of the young as seen through the eyes of someone who saw it up close.
Almost Famous tells the semi-autobiographical story of William Miller, a 15 year-old writing prodigy who manages to get a job over the phone for Rolling Stone. His initial job, getting an interview from Black Sabbath, fails miserably, but he manages to get in to see the opening act, up-and-coming band Stillwater, thanks to help from a few groupies who call themselves "Band-Aids". The "leader" of these girls, played by Kate Hudson in what may be her best role to date, goes by the name Penny Lane and has a special attraction to Stillwater's lead guitarist, Russell Hammond (played by Bill Crudup). William, as played by newcomer Patrick Fugit, seems to bond with Penny too, and she may be looking out for him more than anyone else on the tour, though not as much as she is fooling around with the very spoken-for Russell.
Crowe's script created Stillwater as a composite of many of the various bands he used to cover, so the pressures to perform and the pleasures of the flesh all seem to be most of what the band wants. Petty jealousy from the lead singer (Jason Lee) clashes with the aloofness of Russell on more than one occasion, as drinks and drugs are consumed and the Band-Aids are used as unknowing chips in various poker games. There's still a great love for the music itself, as William tries to stay out of whatever is going on (mostly successfully), something that would have been a great relief to his overbearing mother (Frances McDormand) who is both a prude and a forward-thinker at the same time (she thinks Christmas is too commercialized and pushes her son to excellence and her daughter out the door, but still thinks rock music is all about drugs and sex). It's this outsider, forever getting his interviews with Russell put off, who can see that Penny Lane is an actual person, can lecture the band on its failings to its own fans, and come out of the whole experience somehow making all involved better people, and not in a way that comes across as corny or contrived.
Early in the movie, William meets real-life figure Lester Bangs, as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Lester takes the role of a professional guardian angel, always advising William on how to keep ahead of his deadlines and keep his Rolling Stone editors happy, all while not letting those self-same editors know he's a juvenile. Lester predicts that rock'n'roll is a dying form of music. He may be right on that. Glam rock, disco, hair metal, and the rise of pop are all on the horizon for the fans like William and the bands like Stillwater. As such, its very nice to be able to see the (minor all told) warts-and-all story from the days where rock was the music of the young as seen through the eyes of someone who saw it up close.
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