On Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire…

Posted on by Mick McAloon

…Something in the clash of acting styles (Vivien Leigh’s theatricality, Brando’s immediacy) suited the material and brought out the conflict in Williams’s drama: the old world versus the new. Stanley Kowalski may have been a brute, and Brando had access to all his uncouthness and vulgarity, but there was something about Brando’s presence—deeply masculine, strangely feminine, a poetic delicacy always beneath the surface—that seemed if not to subvert the archetype then to co-exist within it. Perhaps it was simply a matter of Brando’s extraordinary physiognomy, combined with casting that was simultaneously ideal and contradictory. For Brando made Stanley interesting and not just physically alluring, which ran counter to the playwright’s intentions. Williams envisaged Stanley as a meathead, comfortable in his own skin, but without a trace of sensitivity or a flicker of poetry in his soul—qualities that Brando had in abundance. And it was these qualities and contradictions that coalesced around Brando’s film appearances in the early 1950s. In his own way, Brando opened the door for a subsequent generation of rebels—James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan. But those genuine American firebrands could never be confused with the biker rebels in The Wild One (1953). Laslo Benedek’s film was dated even before the cameras rolled…

—MM

 

INHERENT VICE: “Think’s he’s hallucinating.”

Posted on by Mick McAloon

 

We didn’t get a chance to talk about Inherent Vice. How could we at ten-to one in the morning, as we stumbled out of the Prince Charles Cinema, at the back of Leicester Square, and made our way, appropriately as it turns out, through Chinatown? I don’t know if I was any clearer the next day. Even my morning swim couldn’t integrate the night’s images.  The movie was all jumbled up — in my head, I mean — and still is to some extent. That’s surely by design. Paul Thomas Anderson has cited The Big Sleep as an influence on how he approached Thomas Pynchon’s novel and the vagaries of its plot. In other words, confusion reigns. Trailing a decade’s worth of morning-afters in its wake, we might need at least another decade before we can get a clear perspective on it. Either that or repeated viewings. One thing is clear: Inherent Vice is already assured of cult status, it is its own all-nighter, destined for late shows and flea pits the world over — if either of the latter still exists. Anderson’s film suggests they do, or makes it imperative that they are brought back. For he treats the medium of film — celluloid, be it 35mm or 70mm — as though it were a missing person: what happened to it? What happens if we follow the money? What would it take to revive it, to turn a tantalising flicker into a flame? And what are we supposed to do with all this longing? All of which is a good place to start if we want to get a handle on Inherent Vice.

—Mick McAloon

A MOBILE CINEMA: NOTES TOWARDS A SEASON—PART ONE

Posted on by Mick McAloon

I’d like to propose a season of films—The City, the Country, the River & the Road.  The title is unashamedly poetic, and if I’m honest I’m not quite sure where it came from, or how it suggested itself.  Was I influenced by the fact that I was coming to Dublin?  I think I was.  But I was also thinking about cinema itself and its capacity for taking us to all of these places—often within the course of a single narrative.  Think of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups, which starts in a grey and overcast Paris and ends as its young truant embarks on one of the great runs in all of cinema, his momentum halted only by the sight of the ocean. Truffaut’s film was auto-biographical, his truancy redeemed by his discovery of cinema and by his befriending Andre Bazin. Well, not everyone can call upon such a friend, though we all should have access to the cinema and its treasures.

This started me thinking about the role of your organization—its mission, its goals—with its roots in Dublin but its remit to travel far and wide.  So I wanted to propose a season that might on one level enact this very goal, this on-going journey—or at least try to: a season that begins in the city—about the city, about what movies mean to the city, and cities to the movies—and then moves out to the regions, to the country, with films that reflect this movement, picking up passengers along the way.  And so I have selected some films that not only live up to the rich possibilities of my title but that might talk to one another in some way, if that is not too abstract a notion.  (I wonder how much I was influenced by my own beginnings: when I was younger, we took movies to the people: Consett Mobile Cinema.)

There is fiction and non-fiction.  From the latter I have chosen a particular strand—the essay film.  This is partly due to my love of the essay form itself; it also stems from my interest in the idea of the flaneur.  The essay-films that I would like to play are notable not only for the metaphorical stroll each director takes around their city but for the quality of the words as well as the images: Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.  To this short list I have added Kieran Hickey’s documentary about James Joyce’s Dublin, Faithful Departed (1967), and a programme the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik wrote and presented for the BBC—Lighting Up New York.  The reason for choosing Hickey’s film is in some ways because it is a bridge to one of my fiction choices—Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.  (And where there are rivers and roads there should be bridges.)  Before Sunrise is set in Vienna, but its narrative unfolds over twenty-four hours on the 16th June—or Bloomsday as it is otherwise known.  Thematically, both films play on the idea of absence, or the eventual absence of the protagonists, while absence—“What happened to my city?—is surely the defining characteristic, and lament, of the other films I’ve already mentioned.  This is certainly true of the Davies, the Maddin, and the Gopnik.

But there is another, more recent film about New York that I have included: James Marsh’s Man On Wire.  One, I think it makes a perfect companion to Lighting Up New York.  But I also like the way it deliberately withholds—yet somehow redeems—a city’s overwhelming absence.  And nothing gets absence, or transience, like the cinema.  One only has to think of Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers & Tides, Wenders’ Alice in the Cities, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and another Linklater film, Before Sunset.  Even Chris Petit’s Radio On, which began as an Englishman’s attempt at a Wenders-like road movie, now seems like an historical document of how certain parts of England used to be.

(To be continued…)

—MM

 

 

Boyhood: Richard Linklater’s Ongoing Moment

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Unfolding like one of Frederick Wiseman’s longitudinal portraits, and with the same cumulative force, Boyhood enacts a miracle. Over the course of its duration, a leisurely 166 minutes, we see a boy age from six to eighteen. There is no CGI or digital manipulation, as there was in, say, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Fincher used motion capture, as well as prosthetics, to render the effects of age over time. Richard Linklater went about things in true Linklater fashion: he shot the film over a twelve year period with the same cast, including Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, who play the boy’s parents. Hawke has likened the process and the resulting film to time-lapse photography, though it’s time-lapse without dissolves. Chapters begin and end without fanfare. Change is registered by a hair-cut or a growth spurt: inches for years, if you like; while revolutions in technology or the swell of a new cultural moment—yet more revolutions—provides us with further evidence that time has passed. Rich in feeling and ravishing to look at, Boyhood is both universal in its themes and distinctly American: it could easily have been called Family or Motherhood or This American Life.

How many films leave you truly satisfied? And how many contemporary filmmakers attempt what Linklater does here: to show you a person grow and change so that not only do you feel altered in some immeasurable way but actually feel concerned about that person’s future? At the end of Boyhood, which is as full and as rich as a great novel, yet as delicate as a poem, I wondered: what will become of Mason Evans? He doesn’t exist, of course. But our investment in Mason’s progress is deep, while our feelings are surely influenced by the knowledge that the young actor who plays him, Ellar Coltrane, has put in the hours. To paraphrase Godard, talking about Jean Rouch’s Gare du Nord: years reinforce years; when they really pile up, they begin to be impressive…

http://anosamoursblog.weebly.com/blog/boyhood-richard-linklaters-ongoing-moment-by-mick-mcaloon

 

Book Review: Five Came Back

Posted on by Mick McAloon

At the height of their respective careers, five Hollywood directors—John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens—went to war. Their patriotism never in question, their motives for enlisting were not entirely altruistic. Capra claimed to have been bored with his success. Ford was not without vainglory and enjoyed the trappings of naval life. Like a character in a picaresque novel, Huston seemed predisposed to adventure from the day he was born. Only Wyler and Stevens seemed to have faced some kind of existential crisis in the run-up to war: Wyler had left family behind in Europe; while Steven’s melancholy temperament was at odds with his showbiz beginnings. A maker of “champagne” comedies and Laurel and Hardy two-reelers, Stevens filmed the liberation of Dachau. That’s one hell of a journey in itself, but Mark Harris gives us the equivalent of five biographies in one, as well as a history of Hollywood over a tumultuous decade (1938 – 1947). Impeccably researched, beautifully written, and organised with great narrative economy, Five Came Back plays like a studio-era best picture nominee: Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives comes to mind.

Wyler’s Academy Award winner drew on his experience overseas, as well as his return to civilian life. In fact, of the five men, only Capra was stationed at home for the duration of the war. Ford, renowned for his immaculate framing and elegiac myth-making, was present at the Battle of Midway, in 1942, and at Omaha Beach two years later. Framing and composition went out the window: what Ford (and his unit) captured with 16mm cameras ushered in a new era of war on film. There was nothing elegant or elegiac about it. But contemporary cinema still reverberates from the shudder and shake of Ford’s footage. Saving Private Ryan’s opening 25 minutes would not exist without the repository of images personally filmed or supervised by this self-proclaimed maker of Westerns. Ford, who could be boastful and belligerent (when drunk), had told the men working under him: “If you see it, shoot it.” George Stevens told his men to “never look away”. Leading by example, Stevens didn’t, though what he saw — and preserved on film — haunted him forever. Huston’s influence, meanwhile, can be felt in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master: the early scenes at a veterans’ hospital clearly drawing on Huston’s Let There Be Light, his documentary about returning traumatised soldiers. Huston’s film was banned by the US Government until 1980. Stevens’s footage of Dachau was also kept under lock and key, though the decision was personal rather than institutional – which perhaps tells you something about the sensitivity of the man: his attempt to shoulder the burden of what he had witnessed was ultimately too much.

I closed Harris’s book with a sigh, moved not only by the sad ending but by the author’s own considerable narrative gifts. Harris wraps up his story with the skill of an old Hollywood pro, something that all of these men, and the studio heads they worked for, would have appreciated. But he never lets us forget that some pictures — “best” or otherwise — came at a considerable cost.

—MM

A slightly different version of this review appeared in the Curzon Magazine dated September/October 2014.

http://www.curzoncinemas.com/news/all/curzon_magazine_issue_46.aspx

UNDER THE SKIN: Bowfinger in Glasgow

Posted on by Mick McAloon

 

It’s not a particularly English thing to do, but the last time I butted in on somebody else’s conversation was at my local coffee shop. I couldn’t help it. The subject up for discussion was Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. It was obvious that Anderson’s film had provoked and bewildered the people next to me—a party of three, spanning two generations—and I felt duty-bound to intervene. In this instance, my interjection—polite, respectful, hesitant though enthusiastic—was met with a look of suspicion. You could say that the response was closed-off, buttoned-up—as they buttoned up and left the café. But I am undeterred. I have always felt that movies, unlike, say, religion or politics, are a safe zone through which one should be able to move without causing offence: any difference of opinion should be welcomed, no matter how intemperate or plain wrongheaded. Movies can take it, and so can we. As the saying goes, “everyone’s a critic.”  But after another morning spent fumbling with loyalty cards and listening to table-talk, I’m beginning to waver. Perhaps movies can take it; but I can’t.

Once again I was at my local café. I’d barely finished my first cup of coffee when two men sitting opposite me started talking about movies. “What’s opening Friday—anything interesting?” The Spiderman reboot – or Spiderman 2:2 – had received an early rave in The Guardian.  There followed a brief discussion about Brendan Gleeson‘s new film Calvary and – here’s the kicker: “I’ve avoided Under the Skin on your lack of a recommendation.” Well, you could imagine how desperate I was to have my say. If it wasn’t for the woman breast-feeding next to me, I’d have thrown the pram—her pram—out the window. But I had learned my lesson: the conversation could keep, until now. Besides, I didn’t want to disrupt the infant’s feed. But why should I be so surprised at this bland and indifferent response? At my local cinema, where I saw Under the Skin, I heard a number of customers, who were still undecided about buying a ticket, say the same thing: “it’s had mixed reviews, hasn’t it?” Who’ve they been reading?

Films like Under the Skin do not come along too often. And when they do, what have they got to look forward to? Three stars apiece from The Sunday Times and The Observer respectively. Is it wrong to expect critical commentary that rises above the level of the man-on-the-street variety? (Even though Under the Skin has some worrying things to tell us about the man-on-the-street.)

But here’s the irony: if ever a film deserved a Star rating, in the same way that films are rated for sex and violence, it’s this one: Under the Skin contains real stardom, though the film is at pains, perhaps disingenuously, to render such distinctions worthless: it’s what under the skin that counts. Or another way of looking at it (and the film is all about looking): how do we humanise someone? On this matter the film has it every which way: it has its cake, eats its cake, and – in one funny scene late on – throws up its cake. One thing is clear: Under the Skin is unimaginable without its star: Scarlett Johansson.

Jonathan Glazer, the film’s director, shoots Johansson with purpose-built, multiple hidden cameras and as though she were a Louise Brooks for the 21st Century, which she might well be. “Am I keeping you?” she says to one unsuspecting passer-by. Johansson keeps us throughout. Whether it’s the way she swings her van through Celtic supporters outside Parkhead, or the strange walk she employs —part indignant child, part communist march— I was utterly transfixed. I also like the way she holds herself at the wheel: ramrod-straight, with a mannequin’s impassiveness, but that breaks into something approaching giddiness depending on who’s riding shotgun. Then there’s Johansson’s extraordinary presence. Glazer, like Sofia Coppola before him, exploits her gift for being, though here the mode is one of alertness rather than, say, the inertia that beset her character in Lost in Translation but that was so crucial to that film’s mood, it’s jet-lagged wooziness.

It’s all one sided of course. Johansson is in on the game. She is the game! Her passengers are only being themselves—rambling, inchoate, charisma-free. The film’s tension—its considerable charge—arises out of this imbalance. But throughout, I could not divorce my experience of watching the film from my knowledge of its making. In my head it plays like a version of Bowfinger—Bowfinger in Glasgow—with Glazer and his crew following Scarlett every time she dons her wig and grabs her fur. (Did Johansson even know she was in a Jonathan Glazer film?) In this respect the movie is a stunt. But not only is Glazer the leading exemplar of the Bowfinger school, he is the film director as a kind of CIA handler, which makes Johansson his operative out-in-the-field. But what is their mission? An excursion into Ballardian terrain: shopping malls, super markets, high rises and motorways—contemporary life in all its strangeness? Or to get all David Thomson on you: is it a report from the land of “movie” itself — a movie star falls to earth only to reaffirm her (heavenly) allure? (If that is the case, Johansson really is an operative out-in-the-field and proof that “movie” and stardom—deep, mysterious stardom—are still capable of magic.) Or is it simply an artist trusting his instincts and the hunch that he’s onto something that deserves more than the tepid response—“the lack of a recommendation”—that the film has elicited from certain quarters. Eyes Wide Shut is the title of another strange and mysterious film that deserved better than it got (and Under the Skin is not without moments of Kubrick-like grace and precision); Eyes Wide Shut also describes the critical malaise I’m talking about. Under the Skin has its eyes wide open. The world looks different now.

—Mick McAloon

BOOK REVIEW: DIFFICULT MEN

Posted on by Mick McAloon

News that Robert Towne has joined Mad Men’s writing staff would seem to confirm the premise of Brett Martin’s Difficult Men: that television—especially premium cable—is now more receptive than Hollywood to the kind of work that Towne and his contemporaries routinely produced between 1967 – 1980.  In Martin’s view, the programmes made during the “third Golden Age of television” are as challenging and ambitious as anything that came out of “the New Hollywood”; and that those “difficult men”—Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Omar Little, Walter White—are as compelling and as morally complex as the 1970’s anti-heroes. It’s not a new argument, but Martin’s is the first book to articulate the reasons—creative, sociological, financial, and technological—for such a seismic shift.

Martin frames his narrative as though it, too, was a long-form television series. He profiles the “showrunners”, that new breed of auteur, who can be as difficult and as driven as their creations. Each writer gets a clearly defined ark, and while the book favours the creators of The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood—David Chase, David Simon and David Milch respectively—and gives stand-alone episodes, or chapters, to Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), it is Chase who emerges as the book’s leading “difficult” man.  The Sopranos, after all, changed everything.  Martin cites the three Davids as examples of the writer as Trojan horse: they took well-established formats—the mob drama, the police procedural, the Western—and smuggled their dark dreams into our living rooms, and on to our laptops. For we’re part of this story too: our viewing habits—not only what we watch but the way we watch—have been crucial to the success of the “third Golden Age”: streaming, on-demand, the pleasures and convenience of the box set.  We’re all schedulers now.

But there are self-imposed limits to Martin’s argument, implicit in the book’s title, and which he acknowledges in his introduction: there is little or no room for women—Sex and the City and Girls get the briefest of walk-ons. And while comparisons with Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls are not unfounded—a tendency to dish the dirt, a fondness for macho grandstanding—Martin’s book is actually closer in spirit to Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution. That book, through its wonderful framing device, told the story of how Towne’s generation took advantage of the studio system’s decline; Martin tells a similar story, though one in which a “much maligned medium”—television—is now at the forefront of American filmmaking. The size of the screen and the means of delivery might have changed, but these “difficult men” have been making movies all along.

—MM