Sunday, November 22, 2020

TOM JONES


By Rich Gold

It’s been a long wait for Albert Finney’s film follow-up to “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.” And though “Tom Jones” is a period piece and very different it has the same lustiness and boisterous content with which to protect the star. It should breeze its way cheerfully through the boxoffice figures. It has sex, Eastmancolor, some prime performers and plenty of action. Tony Richardson has directed John Osborne’s screenplay with verve, though, occasionally, he falls back on camera tricks and editing which are disconcerting.

Based on Henry Fielding’s enduring novel, story is set in Somerset, a West Country lush county, and in London during the 18th century. Hero is Tom Jones (Albert Finney), born in suspicious circumstances, with a maidservant dismissed because she is suspected of being his unwed mother. He is brought up by Squire Allworthy (George Devine) and leads a rollicking life in which women play a prominent part before he finally escapes the gallows after a frame-up. He finds a presumably happy ending in the arms of a neighborhood daughter, Sophie, played in rather over-genteel style by Susannah York.

Ramifications of the plot, which enables Finney to indulge in some considerable sexual activity with a variety of delectable dames, are too complicated to need discussion. But the somewhat sprawling, bawdy and vivid screenplay of John Osborne’s provides some meaty acting opportunities and the thesps grasp their chances with vigorous zest.

Finney is big league. He slips through his adventures with an ebullient gusto that keeps the overlong film on its toes for most of the time. Hugh Griffith and Edith Evans as Squire Western and his sister ham disarmingly. Miss Evans has some of the choicer cameos in the film. Joan Greenwood, George Devine and Wilfrid Lawson are others who get top credits for their work. Angela Baddeley, Rosalind Knight, Rachel Kampson, Jack MacGowran, Freda Jackson and Joyce Redman are others and rate benevolent nods. David Tomlinson with a brief but effective comedy appearance in a guest role as an aristocratic heel, and Diana Cilanto have limited roles but nevertheless prove that it makes sense to bring stars with knowhow to do brief jobs.

Eastmancolor captures some good location and period stuff, lensed well by Walter Lassally, particularly in the Newgate Prison sequence as well as a fox hunting episode.

Director Richardson has occasionally pressed his luck with some over-deliberate arty camera bits. The music of John Addison is a trifle obtrusive and lacking in period style. However, “Tom Jones” measures up as a genial energetic comedy, with an added bonus is Micheal MacLiammoir putting over occasional narration with smooth wit and perception.

Rich.

1963: Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Original Music Score.
Nominations: Best Actor (Albert Finney), Supp. Actor (Hugh Griffith), Supp. Actress (Diane Cilento, Dame Edith Evans, Joyce Redman), Color Art Direction

Tom Jones

UK

  • Production: Woodfall. Director Tony Richardson; Producer Tony Richardson; Screenplay John Osborne; Camera Walter Lassally; Editor Antony Gibbs; Music John Addison; Art Director Ralph Brinton. At London Pavilion.
  • Crew: (Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Original review text from 1963. Running time: 128 MIN.
  • With: Tom Jones - Albert Finney Sophie Western - Susannah York Squire Western - Hugh Griffith Miss Western - Edith Evans Lady Bellaston - Joan Greenwood Molly Seagrim - Diane Cilento Squire Allworthy - George Devine Lord Fellamar - David Tomlinson Mrs. Miller - Rosalind Atkinson Black George - Wilfrid Lawson Mrs. Fitzpatrick - Rosalind Knight Partridge - Jack MacGowran Mrs. Seagrim - Freda Jackson Blifil - David Warner Mrs. Waters (Jenny Jones) - Joyce Redman Parson Supple - James Cairnososs Bridget Allworthy - Rachel Kempson Thwackum - Peter Bull Mrs. Wilkins - Angela Baddeley
  • Music By: JohnAdison

https://variety.com/1963/film/reviews/tom-jones-2-1200420461/


Sunday, November 1, 2020

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO - DISCOVERING JAMES BALDWIN

Devastatingly eloquent … James Baldwin. Photograph: Allstar/Brittany House Pictures 
 

 Raoul Peck dramatises the author’s memoir of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers, in this vivid and vital documentary.

Raoul Peck’s outstanding, Oscar-nominated documentary is about the African American activist and author James Baldwin, author of Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. Peck dramatises Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House, his personal memoir of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and civil rights activist Medgar Evers, murdered by a segregationist in 1963. Baldwin re-emerges as a devastatingly eloquent speaker and public intellectual; a figure who deserves his place alongside Edward Said, Frantz Fanon or Gore Vidal.

Peck puts Samuel L Jackson’s steely narration of Baldwin’s words up against a punchy montage of footage from the Jim Crow to the Ferguson eras, and a fierce soundtrack. (It’s incidentally a great use of Buddy Guy’s Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues, which never sounded so angry or political.) There is a marvellous clip of Baldwin speaking at the Cambridge Union Society, and another on the Dick Cavett Show – the host looking sick with nerves, perhaps because he was about to bring on a conservative intellectual for balance, whom Baldwin would politely trounce.

Baldwin has a compelling analysis of a traumatised “mirror stage” of culture that black people went through in 20th-century America. As kids, they would cheer and identify with the white heroes and heroines of Hollywood culture; then they would see themselves in the mirror and realise they were different from the white stars, and in fact more resembled the baddies and “Indians” they’d been booing.

The film shows Baldwin refusing to be drawn into the violence/non-violence difference of opinion between King and Malcolm X that mainstream commentators leaped on, and steadily maintaining his own critique – although I feel that Peck’s juxtaposition of Doris Day’s mooning and crooning with a lynch victim is a flourish that approximates Baldwin’s anger but not his elegance. There is a compelling section on Baldwin’s discussion of dramatist Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. It is vivid, nutritious film-making.

 

 

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Welcome to Intro Film & CinemaVIEW for Fall 2020

 

This course provides an introduction to the development of film forms, styles, and theories providing a basic aesthetic and social understanding of film as both a mode of communication and a means of artistic expression. It explores the interrelationship of the diegesis, visual design, motion, editing, and thematic significance, helping students develop the foundational skills with which to interpret and articulate the myriad ways in which films create meaning, and elicit responses within viewers.

 

The ultimate objective of the course is for students to become acquainted with a variety of film forms/styles, while developing the basic skills necessary to analyze and evaluate the cinematic presentations. 

 

Fulfills a course requirement in the FILM STUDIES minor and CORE CONCENTRATION.

Friday, February 28, 2020

PARASITE


 

It’s so clichéd at this point in the critical conversation during the hot take season of festivals to say, “You’ve never seen a movie quite like X.” Such a statement has become overused to such a degree that it’s impossible to be taken seriously, like how too many major new movies are gifted the m-word: masterpiece. So how do critics convey when a film truly is unexpectedly, brilliantly unpredictable in ways that feel revelatory? And what do we do when we see an actual “masterpiece” in this era of critics crying wolf? Especially one with so many twists and turns that the best writing about it will be long after spoiler warnings aren’t needed? I’ll do my best because Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” is unquestionably one of the best films of the year. Just trust me on this one.


Bong has made several films about class (including "Snowpiercer" and "Okja"), but “Parasite” may be his most daring examination of the structural inequity that has come to define the world. It is a tonal juggling act that first feels like a satire—a comedy of manners that bounces a group of lovable con artists off a very wealthy family of awkward eccentrics. And then Bong takes a hard right turn that asks us what we’re watching and sends us hurtling to bloodshed. Can the poor really just step into the world of the rich? The second half of “Parasite” is one of the most daring things I’ve seen in years narratively. The film constantly threatens to come apart—to take one convoluted turn too many in ways that sink the project—but Bong holds it all together, and the result is breathtaking.

Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) and his family live on the edge of poverty. They fold pizza boxes for a delivery company to make some cash, steal wi-fi from the coffee shop nearby, and leave the windows open when the neighborhood is being fumigated to deal with their own infestation. Kim Ki-woo’s life changes when a friend offers to recommend him as an English tutor for a girl he’s been working with as the friend has to go out of the country for a while. The friend is in love with the young girl and doesn’t want another tutor “slavering” over her. Why he trusts Kim Ki-woo given what we know and learn about him is a valid question.

The young man changes his name to Kevin and begins tutoring Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), who immediately falls for him, of course. Kevin has a much deeper plan. He’s going to get his whole family into this house. He quickly convinces the mother Yeon-kyo, the excellent Jo Yeo-jeong, that the son of the house needs an art tutor, which allows Kevin’s sister “Jessica” (Park So-dam) to enter the picture. Before long, mom and dad are in the Park house too, and it seems like everything is going perfectly for the Kim family. The Parks seem to be happy too. And then everything changes.

The script for “Parasite” will get a ton of attention as it’s one of those clever twisting and turning tales for which the screenwriter gets the most credit (Bong and Han Jin-won, in this case), but this is very much an exercise in visual language that reaffirms Bong as a master. Working with the incredible cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong (“Burning,” “Snowpiercer”) and an A-list design team, Bong's film is captivating with every single composition. The clean, empty spaces of the Park home contrasted against the tight quarters of the Kim living arrangement isn’t just symbolic, it’s visually stimulating without ever calling attention to itself. And there’s a reason the Kim apartment is halfway underground—they’re caught between worlds, stuck in the growing chasm between the haves and the have nots.

"Parasite" is a marvelously entertaining film in terms of narrative, but there’s also so much going on underneath about how the rich use the poor to survive in ways that I can’t completely spoil here (the best writing about this movie will likely come after it’s released). Suffice to say, the wealthy in any country survive on the labor of the poor, whether it’s the housekeepers, tutors, and drivers they employ, or something much darker. Kim's family will be reminded of that chasm and the cruelty of inequity in ways you couldn’t possibly predict.

The social commentary of "Parasite" leads to chaos, but it never feels like a didactic message movie. It is somehow, and I’m still not even really sure how, both joyous and depressing at the same time. Stick with me here. "Parasite" is so perfectly calibrated that there’s joy to be had in just experiencing every confident frame of it, but then that’s tempered by thinking about what Bong is unpacking here and saying about society, especially with the perfect, absolutely haunting final scenes. It’s a conversation starter in ways we only get a few times a year, and further reminder that Bong Joon-ho is one of the best filmmakers working today. You’ve never seen a movie quite like “Parasite.” Dammit. I tried to avoid it. This time it's true.

This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7th.

 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/parasite-movie-review-2019

Friday, February 21, 2020

George Roy Hill's Visualization of "Slaughterhouse-Five"


Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1972 science fiction film based on Kurt Vonnegut's novel of the same name about a writer who tells a story in random order of how he was a soldier in World War II and was abducted by aliens. The screenplay is by Stephen Geller and the film was directed by George Roy Hill. It stars Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman, and Valerie Perrine, and features Eugene Roche, Sharon Gans, Holly Near, and Perry King. The scenes set in Dresden were filmed in Prague.[1] The other scenes were filmed in Minnesota.

Vonnegut wrote about the film soon after its release, in his preface to Between Time and Timbuktu:

"I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen ... I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book."
Plot The film follows the novel in presenting a first-person narrative from the point of view of Billy Pilgrim (Sacks), who becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences the events of his life in a seemingly random order, including a period spent on the alien planet of Tralfamadore. Emphasis is placed on his experiences during World War II, including the firebombing of Dresden, as well as time spent with fellow prisoners of war Edgar Derby (Roche) and the psychopathic Paul Lazzaro (Leibman). His life as a husband to Valencia (Gans) and father to Barbara (Near) and Robert (King) are also depicted, as they live and sometimes even enjoy their life of affluence in Ilium, New York. A "sink-or-swim" scene with Pilgrim's father is also featured. The scenes of extraterrestrial life on Tralfamadore feature Hollywood starlet Montana Wildhack (Perrine).

Cast
Music
Slaughterhouse-Five is the first of two feature films for which Glenn Gould supplied the music; Bach Concerto #5 in F Minor, BWV 1056, and Concerto #3 in D Major, BWV 1054 were recorded at Columbia Studios with the Columbia Symphony orchestra; some selections came from existing recordings, and two featured other artists, including Rudolph Serkin, piano, with Casals conducting Brandenburg Concerto #4 in G Major, BWV 1049, III Presto. The film used such a small amount of music that the soundtrack album added atmospheric excerpts from Douglas Leedy's synthesized triple album Entropical Paradise.

The prolonged rendition of the final movement of Bach's fourth Brandenburg concerto accompanies a cinematic montage as the main character first encounters the city of Dresden.

Awards The film won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival,[2] as well as a Hugo Award and Saturn Award. Both Hill and Geller were nominated for awards by their respective guilds. Sacks was nominated for a Golden Globe.

See also
References
  1. Canby, Vincent. "New York Times movies pages". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-23.
  2. "Festival de Cannes: Slaughterhouse-Five". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-04-13.
External links
https://www.revolvy.com/page/Slaughterhouse%252DFive-%28film%29?cr=1


Sunday, February 16, 2020

The Joker - a Fresh Take on a DC Legend

Love it or hate it, the Joker movie presents a tempting fantasy

It’s a persecution complex turned into a wish-fulfillment power trip




Todd Phillips’ standalone supervillain origin story Joker is arriving in theaters amid so much controversy and concern about the potential for copycat violence that the debate has largely overwhelmed the film itself. It’s been fascinating to watch the discussion around the movie shift from “Do we really need another Joker story so soon after Suicide Squad?” to “Is Joker full of dangerous ideas that will spur its worst fans to murder?” The initial worries around Joker assumed the movie would be unnecessary, its impact negligible. The current questions ascribe it with too much importance, as if it might incite full-blown anarchy just by existing.

As usual in a case where people leap to extremes, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Joker may make some people who feel marginalized feel more seen and more powerful, and they may act out in response. There are some ugly, self-serving messages in the movie, which is incongruously bent on creating sympathy for Batman’s worst enemy and one of DC Comics’ most notoriously callous mass murderers and atrocity architects. But love it or hate it, the film does spin up a tempting fantasy of persecution and relief, of embracing nihilism as a means of complete escape from a terrible world.

It’s a self-pitying fantasy, certainly. Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver follow in the footsteps of Joel Schumacher’s 1993 drama Falling Down in portraying the world as a cartoonishly dark and uncaring place, an almost comically vile carnival where the protagonist can’t find a hint of comfort or relief. In a thoroughly immersed performance that’s being seen as a guaranteed awards-season attention magnet, Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a part-time rent-a-clown working for a seedy talent agency full of exaggerated grotesques. Arthur is mentally ill and coping via meds and court-ordered therapy, which don’t offer comfort or represent caring. He’s devoted to his sick mother Penny (Frances Conroy), who’s encouraged him to see himself as a joyous light in the world, bringing laughter to the people.

The problem is that he isn’t particularly funny. He’s painfully awkward, the kind of twitchy, social incompetence people shy away from in public because his erratic behavior feels like it could turn dangerous — or at least uncomfortable for them. It’s easy for viewers to empathize with his desire to be loved, without necessarily loving him. When he says he feels invisible, it’s clear why: he’s the kind of person people look away from on the street, out of apathy or active discomfort.


That tension between sympathy and revulsion is one of the most honest things about Joker, which mostly goes out of its way to make the world awful. While working as a sign-twirler, Arthur is randomly beaten by a handful of kids, who steal his sign and then break it over his head. His boss not only doesn’t believe his story, he demands Arthur pay for the missing sign. The dramatic ironies and injustices compound throughout the film, until it’s clear that Arthur isn’t paranoid, the world really is out to get him. And then he takes violent, irrevocable action.

For much of its runtime, Joker is a consciously ugly film, visually and emotionally. Arthur starts with close to nothing, and loses it all incrementally, in ways designed to hurt empathetic viewers. Phillips and cinematographer Lawrence Sher (who also DP’d for all three of Phillips’ Hangover movies) give the film a sickeningly grungy, underlit, David Fincher-esque look, especially in Arthur’s squalid home. Everything about the storytelling — the ominous, booming score; the gritty darkness; the invasive sound design — is designed to be oppressive, and to push the audience toward Arthur’s point of view as the primary victim of all the oppression. It’s hypnotic just how horrifying Arthur’s existence is, just as Phoenix’s performance is hypnotic as he spirals from fragile hope into increasingly outsized and confident acts of destruction.

And then he escapes it all, by learning not to care — not about how or whether other people see him, not about whether he hurts or frightens or kills them, not about whether his final-act manifesto makes any sort of coherent sense. The important part of Arthur’s story — and the cause for so much of the concern around Joker — is that when he embraces his most nihilistic and destructive impulses, he suddenly earns the praise and attention he’s been lacking. That may not fully motivate him, but it’s meant as a message for the segment of the audience that feels closest to Arthur, those who feel most unseen and unloved: plenty of people agree with you that the world is unfair and ugly, and if you did something about it, they’d back your play.
 
Like Falling Down — and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which Phillips openly emulates and references — Joker suggests that when the leading man loses his mind, it’s an understandable, even natural reaction to an equally mad world. Viewers who aren’t already inclined to see humanity as a seething cesspit may not resonate with that level of cynicism. But to viewers who feel as abused and overlooked as Arthur Fleck, or even who harbor smaller, more rational resentments about society, Joker is a deliberate and fine-tuned provocation and promise: you aren’t alone, the people you hate really are awful, and it would be okay to act against them in any way you want.

Phillips has made it clear that he doesn’t believe Joker is anything as small and dismissible as a mere comic-book movie. But while his film is grimmer and more harrowing than anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s offering up a fantasy just as clearly as any superhero wish-fulfillment power trip: the fantasy of being a hero to some, of going from powerlessness to power, of being feared and beloved at the same time. Phillips delivers that message in a self-congratulatory way, largely by setting the film in a world where Arthur has no choice but violence, and no escape but madness. He’s portrayed as a kind of dark truth-teller because he’s learned that the world is a joke and nothing matters.

That’s a fairly adolescent outlook, which Phillips embraces in the same persecution-complex spirit that recently led him to complain that he had to make Joker because the world is now too sensitive and woke for his previous brand of destructive-bro comedy. But Joker would probably be raising much less social concern if it wasn’t such a technically compelling movie, if its final moments weren’t so outsized and joyous and purposefully insane.

Because Joker does play — not just to its most put-upon, angry, repressed viewers — but to the entire audience’s darkest hearts. It shows someone suffering when he lets society have its way with him, and freed when he has his way with society. It shows him weeping alone when he plays by the rules, and dancing wildly in public when he decides to break those rules. The story hurts and harms him, but Phillips suggests in the end that everything he went through was necessary to bring him the power and recognition he deserves. It’s a tempting fantasy, crafted with utter conviction. 

Many critics and early viewers have responded to Joker with loathing, because that fantasy is so selfish and solipsistic. By dismissing the world as imbalanced at best, outright malicious at worst, Phillips is enabling his viewers’ worst and most destructive impulses. “I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore,” Arthur says plaintively at one point. He’s a relatable kind of villain, harmless and sad — not an Everyman, but an audience avatar for the downtrodden. And then he models a way to not be harmless anymore. That doesn’t necessarily make Joker a call to action, or an invitation to real-life violence. But it does represent a horrifying form of invitation — not just a call to sympathize with the devil, but a full-blown justification for the hell he creates.


Sunday, February 9, 2020

"Searching" and the Future of Film


https://www.indiewire.com/2018/12/john-cho-searching-colorblind-casting-1202026901/

John Cho Sees the Future of Film in ‘Searching’ and Its Colorblind Casting
The Indie Spirit nominee is still taken with Aneesh Chaganty's clever screen-centric thriller, but its forward-thinking goes beyond just cool technology. 

Dec 13, 2018 2:00 pm

The technological demands of Aneesh Chaganty’s feature directorial debut “Searching” were profound. A computer-screen thriller that unfolds on various displays, zinging from laptop to laptop and back again, Chaganty’s film required a canny handle on technology and the way it looks and moves, but it also needed an actor able to root the family-centric film in emotion and humanity.

That came from the inspired casting of the always-reliable John Cho as David Kim, a recent widower who must use all his smarts (and a ton of literal screen time) to find his missing teenage daughter Margot. The “Star Trek” and “Columbus” actor delivered, turning in a nuanced performance in a film that could have been dominated by on-screen wizardry.

While a film like “Searching” could impress by virtue of craftsmanship and technology that makes it feel so contemporary and true-to-life — this is the rare internet-centric film that utilizes existing apps and websites, no weird “Facebook” knockoffs here — the casting of Cho allowed Chaganty’s feature to tap into modern sensibilities in another way. Cho, a Korean-American actor, has always mixed up his roles, from those that hinge on his cultural background (from the “Harold and Kumar” films to Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow”) and those that don’t (like Kogonada’s “Columbus” and his early supporting work in the “American Pie” series).

“Searching” fell under the latter categorization, a film in which Cho’s race wasn’t baked into the narrative and a colorblind casting that he’s hoping to see more of in Hollywood.

“When you’re shooting, it’s all about, ‘Does this moment work? Will people understand this? Are we telling that story correctly?,'” said Cho. “But, particularly after Sundance, I began to think about what this movie meant. For me, it’s like the movie behaves as if we’re past all the firsts, you know what I mean? We’ve sort of had the discussion and we agreed that it’s okay for an Asian to be in any kind of movie and this is the movie that’s been made. To me, it’s like a movie from the future in that regard.”

The film premiered under the title “Search” at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it was quickly picked up by Sony’s Screen Gems arm. The studio released the indie in late August, where it went on to make more than $70 million worldwide. Not bad for a film that reportedly cost about $1 million to make. Cho’s recent Indie Spirit nomination for Best Male Lead, pitting him against contenders like Ethan Hawke and Joaquin Phoenix, took him by surprise, but it also reminded Cho of just how exceptional the film has proven to be.

“I didn’t know that I was in the mix, I didn’t know that was possible,” he said. “So that was a total surprise. I feel like it legitimized our film, which could be seen as sort of adjacent to horror, which I think is a completely legitimate genre but also sort of ignored by critics. Our movie is so unusual that it might not even look like a traditional independent film. It certainly doesn’t look like a traditional studio film, but it’s so unusual in its look that I didn’t think people would see it as what we’re supposed to expect of independent cinema.”

For Cho, who has long moved between indie films and studio pictures, the expectations that scared him about the role were rooted in the demands of making a film that takes place on computer screens. For the majority of the feature, his David is stuck staring into his and Margot’s laptop screens, only occasionally interacting with others through chats, emails, and “live” videos. It’s insular work.

“The problem was I didn’t have any people to look at for the most part, and that was extremely difficult for me, to feel like I was connected,” Cho said. “I think you rely on looking into another soul to verify that you’re connected with that person and make the scene authentic. … I felt like I had to develop a much more intimate relationship with the director. I had to rely on him for the geography of the screen, because they were all plot points and everything was all these micro movements that were so important. Whereas on a traditional set, I think my strongest relationships are with the actors, on this one my strongest relationship was with the director. We just had to become very close.”

Cho is eager to deflect praise to not only Chaganty, but also to the rest of the creative team that made his performance look so good inside a universe that was created and constructed long after he had filmed his scenes.

“There’s a world in which all of the graphics don’t look that good,” he said. “I was very happy when I saw the film, it was so thought out. I was really so deeply impressed the time put into those web pages and the depth of characterization. A really glancing scroll through Facebook represented so much thought, because you’ll see five profiles and each profile was a different photograph they had to take and they had to decide on a pose and different likes and dislikes and all that stuff. It just has a real respect for characters.”

While computer-screen films haven’t yet exploded as a singular genre, there have been other success stories, like the horror franchise “Unfriended” and Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller “Profile.” 

(Bekmambetov also produced “Searching” and has been vocal about his dedication to making a ton more screen films in the coming years.) For Cho, the recent uptick in such films has been a matter of not only technology catching up, but also the public understanding how it can all work as entertainment.

“I don’t think we could’ve made this movie even five years ago, because there was like the collective vocabulary of the public wasn’t there when it came to our computer literacy,” Cho said. “Now it’s there, but because we’re all caught up, you have to be sharp and you have to be real and you can’t do anything false. You can’t make false movements in that zone. … I feel like moving forward, there will be so many more screens presented in films. I think it’ll be a separate department.”

Cho also thinks the tide is turning when it comes to the other kind of on-screen representation that “Searching” so easily utilized. Recent blockbuster successes like “Black Panther,” “Get Out,” “Hidden Figures,” and “Wonder Woman” prove that diverse films can make a lot of money, while a 2017 study crunched the numbers and came to the same conclusion.

“I think it’s just the age, this is a guess, but it’s the age of the people who control the pursestrings,” he said. “I think with the fracturing of the film business’ economy, there’s not really an incentive to be false about representation. I think the incentive is to be more authentic, more real, and represent more accurately what’s happening in society. I’m kind of bullish on the future now in a way that I wasn’t even five to 10 years ago.”

With over 20 years of acting experience, Cho resists the idea that he’s gotten more picky as his star has risen. Instead, he offers that his success comes from something more personal, the kind of emotional intelligence that made his work in “Searching” so compelling.

“I feel like it’s more being older and being comfortable with leaning into my instincts and looking for things that speak to me on a personal level,” he said. “That’s what it is now. It’s not so much being choosy as it is following my heart on these things. Sounds false, but it really isn’t. I’m trying to be less strategic about things and not ask the question, ‘What should I be doing next?,’ but I find myself asking the question, ‘What connection do I have to this material? How can I contribute?’ “He added with a laugh, “I’m gratified to say that I feel like that not thinking about the career has paid off in the sense that it’s been good for my career.”


-->

"Searching" Fall 2019


Friday, January 31, 2020

Goldfinger

GREAT MOVIES





  
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-goldfinger-1964

Not every man would like to be James Bond, but every boy would. In one adventure after another, he saves the world, defeats bizarre villains, gets to play with neat gadgets and seduces, or is seduced by, stupendously sexy women (this last attribute appeals less to boys younger than 12).

He is a hero, but not a bore. Even faced with certain death, he can cheer himself by focusing instead on the possibility that first he might get lucky. He's obsessed with creature comforts, a trial to his superiors, a sophisticate in all material things and able to parachute into enemy territory and be wearing a tuxedo five minutes later. When it comes to movie spies, Agent 007 is full-service, one-stop shopping.

James Bond is the most durable of this century's movie heroes, and the one most likely to last well into the next--although Sherlock Holmes of course is also immortal, and Tarzan is probably good for a retread. (The "Star Wars" (1977) and "Star Trek" movies are disqualified because they do not have a single hero or a continuous time frame.)

One reason for Bond's longevity among series heroes is quality control; while almost all the Bond films have the same producing team, Tarzan has been the hero of films of wildly divergent quality. And while Holmes has inspired more revisionist interpretations than Hamlet, Bond is consistently Bond: He remains recognizably the same man he was in 1962, when "Dr. No" first brought Ian Fleming's spy to the screen. Even the crypto-Bonds, like the oddball David Niven hero of the maverick "Casino Royale" (1967), or the spoof Bonds, like Our Man Flint and Matt Helm, follow the general outlines of the Fleming legend. He is an archetype so persuasive that to change him would be sacrilegious.

Of all the Bonds, "Goldfinger" (1964) is the best, and can stand as a surrogate for the others. If it is not a great film, it is a great entertainment, and contains all the elements of the Bond formula that would work again and again. It's also interesting as the link between the more modest first two Bonds and the later big-budget extravaganzas; after this one, producers Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman could be certain that 007 was good for the long run.

At 111 minutes, "Goldfinger" ties with "Dr. No" as the shortest of the James Bond films, and yet it probably contains more durable images than any other title in the series: the young woman killed by being coated with gold paint; the steel-rimmed bowler of the mute Korean assassin Odd Job (Harold Sakata); the Aston-Martin tricked out with deadly gimmicks and an ejector seat; Bond's sexy karate match with Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman); the villain Goldfinger with his gold-plated Rolls-Royce, and of course the laser beam pointed at that portion of Bond's lower anatomy that he most required if he were to continue as hero of the series.

The Broccoli-Saltzman formula found its lasting form in the making of "Goldfinger." The outline was emerging in the first two films, and here it is complete. First, the title sequence, establishing Bond as a sex hound while linking him with a stunt sequence or a spectacular death. Then the summons by M, head of British Secret Service, and the briefing on a villain obsessed by global domination. The flirtation with Moneypenny. The demonstration by Q of new gimmicks invented especially for his next case. Then the introduction of the villain, his murderous and bizarre sidekick, and his female assistant/accomplice/mistress. Bond's discovery of the nature of the villain's evil scheme. Bond's capture and the certainty of death. Bond's seduction of the villain's woman. And so on, leading always to a final scene in which Bond is about to enjoy his victory reward: the sensuous fruits of his latest conquest.

"About to enjoy." An essential phrase. There are no extended sex scenes in the Bond pictures, only preludes and epilogues. "Bond sex is a special movie style," observes the critic Steve Rhodes. "It consists of a quick but intense kiss followed by a cutaway to later. The sex is hinted at with cute puns and sexual innuendo, but never discussed explicitly." Starting with the Venus-like appearance of Ursula Andress from the sea in "Dr. No," all of the Bond movies have featured beautiful women, but in a publicity tradition, they appear nude not in the movies, but in an issue of Playboy that hits the stands right before the premiere.

"Goldfinger" contains a classic example of the Talking Killer Syndrome, one of the entries in my Little Movie Glossary. Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) has captured Bond and has him under his complete control. Indeed, all he has to do is remain silent and the laser will slice Bond from stem to sternum. But Bond dissuades him with some quick thinking, and is released to become Goldfinger's prisoner.

Goldfinger, like many another Bond villain, seems to have the makings of a frustrated host: It must be galling to have the most elaborate secret hideaways on earth, and no way to show off. So Goldfinger flies Bond to his horse farm in Kentucky, where Bond is able to eavesdrop on the outlines of a Chinese-Goldfinger scheme to assault Fort Knox--making the gold baron Goldfinger the most powerful man in the world, while the Commies benefit from world chaos. Later, in a pleasant chat, Goldfinger foolishly answers all of Bond's remaining questions, such as, how he could possibly remove those tons of gold?

 This stretch of the film is founded on a fundamental absurdity. Goldfinger has assembled the heads of all the Mafia families of America at his Kentucky farm. He pushes buttons, and the most elaborate presentation in movie history unfolds. Screens descend from the ceiling. Film of Fort Knox is shown. The floor itself rolls back, and a vast scale model of the fort rises on hydraulic lifters (with Bond hidden inside). Goldfinger tells the mobsters what he plans to do, Bond listens in, and then shutters fall to lock the Mafioso in the room, and they are immediately killed with poison gas. My question: Why bother to show them that expensive presentation if you're only going to kill them afterward? My best guess: Goldfinger had workmen crawling all over the place for weeks, constructing that presentation, and he wanted to show it to somebody.

Bond is played in these early films, of course, by Sean Connery, who took the bloom off the role for all of his successors (George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan) while simultaneously sidetracking his own film career. For several years no one could think of Connery as anyone but Bond, and he left the series after "You Only Live Twice," in 1967, returning for "Diamonds Are Forever" after the Lazenby fiasco, and a last time in "Never Say Never Again" (because he owned the rights to that property). The other Bonds were not wrong in the role (even Lazenby has his defenders), but they were not Connery, and that was their cross to bear.

Connery had the sleek self-assurance needed for the role, and a gift with deadpan double entendres. But he had something else that none of the others, save perhaps Dalton, could muster: Steely toughness. When his eyes narrowed and his body tensed up, you knew the playing was over and the bloodshed was about to begin.

Fleming's James Bond novels took off in the states only after it became known that they were President Kennedy's favorite recreational reading. Indeed, the more we learn about JFK, the more we see how he resembled Bond, or vice versa.

At a time when "Swinging London" was overtaking pop culture, the Bond series was perfectly positioned (although Bond makes a rare lapse of taste in "Goldfinger" when he recommends listening to the new Beatles with earmuffs on). But Swinging London has swung, and Bond stays on. He has reinvented himself now for 37 years, through all the changes in geopolitics and lifestyles, and a new Bond film just went into production: "The World Is Not Enough." If you count "Casino Royale," it is the 21st Bond film, not that 007 will ever really come of age.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Speedy: The Comic Figure of the Average Man

By Phillip Lopate 

(https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3826-speedy-the-comic-figure-of-the-average-man)


In his memoir, An American Comedy (cowritten with Wesley W. Stout), Harold Lloyd asserts that while growing up “I was average and typical of the time and place.” He continues: “Supposing Atlantic City had been holding Average American Boy contests, with beauty waived, I might have been Master America most any year between 1893 and 1910.” This insistence was not random; it suited someone who doggedly set out to create a type on-screen as close as he could make it to an average specimen—a mirror image of the American audience. The fact that the man who said this was anything but average, a brilliantly gifted physical performer with a genius for constructing comic gags, who moreover understood the film medium with greater sophistication than all but a handful of his peers, speaks to both his modesty and his vanity. It also approaches the mystery of why audiences today may find it harder to connect with Harold Lloyd than they do with, say, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. He embodied the spirit of the American dream that any average individual with gumption could attain success, an ideal that still seemed within reach in the twenties, before the Depression, Vietnam, and national disenchantment.

Chaplin flirted perennially with pathos, Keaton with melancholy, while Lloyd went his merry way, positive thinking and triumphant. “It’s the optimism,” wrote his defender Richard Griffith, “which chiefly sticks in the highbrow craw and accounts for the continued fundamental lack of interest in him and the continued rating of him below Chaplin, Keaton, and even [Harry] Langdon. Weltschmerz is hard to find in him . . .” And not just world-sorrow, but alienation of any sort. David Thomson gets it right, as usual: “Early clowns are all outsiders, men incapable of, or uninterested in, society’s scale of merit. Chaplin admits the scale but criticizes it. Langdon never notices it. Keaton is bewildered by it, the Marx Brothers know it is a lie, Laurel and Hardy believe it will never come their way. But Lloyd became the least deviant of comedians, a man who never dreamed of being out of the ordinary.” Still, this judgment needs to be complicated, because only a profoundly and uniquely imaginative artist—by definition, an outsider—can take on his shoulders the burden of synthesizing the entire society around him and fashioning an archetype from it that will play in Peoria. A lack of deviancy, moreover, does not account for the sheer inventiveness and pleasure that can still be found in abundance in Lloyd’s films, particularly his four best features, Grandma’s Boy (1922), Safety Last! (1923), The Freshman (1925), and Speedy (1928).

As good a place to start as any is Speedy. The title alone tips off Lloyd’s comic approach, which is to keep up a pace so rapid that no lingering sentimentality or sadness can attach. Fittingly, the film is set in New York City, where, the opening titles tell us, everyone is in such a rush. Whether or not the expression “a New York minute” was yet current, the idea that the city represented the forefront of hectic modernity already held sway. We see establishing shots of trains, tugboats, crowds all hurtling by. Eventually, we are brought to a slower neighborhood, where the most gradual and archaic of conveyances is introduced: a horse-drawn streetcar, driven by Pop Dillon (Bert Woodruff), the grandfather of Lloyd’s love interest, Jane (played winningly by Ann Christy).

At a very basic level, the film is about modes of transport, and its rhythm is largely dictated by many shots of people rushing via taxi, subway, streetcar, and motorcycle. It is also about an older way of being, a more traditionally communal, unhurried morality, in conflict with the new, headlong corporate capitalism that sprang up in the Gilded Age with the railroad barons and now seemed well-nigh unstoppable. The plot hinges, in fact, on a villainous railroad company that seeks to drive the old horsecar line out of business and take over its tracks.

The protagonist, also named Harold, and nicknamed Speedy, would appear to be in harmony with this burgeoning capitalist ethos: he is ambitious and in a hurry to succeed, the very prototype of “the aggressive bourgeois ego which George Santayana saw emerge in the industrializing U.S.—the go-getting American with no higher aim than diligent imitation of the rich . . .” (Pankaj Mishra). But because he is in love with Jane, and she with him, he ends up allying with Pop Dillon and his elderly neighbor-friends against the big shots. Lloyd’s character may be a go-getter, but he is also fundamentally decent and in sympathy with the little guys—his coworkers at the soda fountain and the small shopkeepers who come to his aid when the railroad company tries to seize the horsecar. A full-scale donnybrook occurs between the neighborhood geezers and the railroad thugs, and the point of it is that our hero needs all the help he can get from the People. A veteran uses a peg leg to his advantage. A Chinese laundryman applies his hot iron to the seats of the bad guys. (There is also a loyal dog that keeps coming to Speedy’s aid.) A sort of popular-front politics can be read into these scenes, which if nothing else celebrate the enduring values of neighborhood diversity and local community against the impersonal globalizing corporation.

Speedy is an urban variant of the “boy with the glasses” character that Lloyd had been painstakingly refining for years (and that very nickname had been used earlier for The Freshman’s protagonist). Lloyd had stumbled on the idea of giving his character a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles (lensless, since glass would becloud the eyes’ expression). The glasses were meant to signify a nerdy milquetoast type, from whom one would not expect much derring-do, and who would therefore pleasantly surprise the audience when he rose to heroic challenges. Speedy is given a few other characteristics, such as being unable to hold down a job because he is so obsessed with the Yankees (the cameo featuring a game Babe Ruth, who gets bounced around in Speedy’s cab, is a nice little eye-opener). But in general, we are asked to accept that Speedy is simply Youth in its most healthy, energetic, and accident-prone form.

Lloyd divided his movies into “character pictures” and “gag pictures”: The former, like Grandma’s Boy, took longer to set up the plot and had more psychological shadings. Speedy is decidedly a gag picture: the pace alone, with its wealth of sight jokes, dictated that there would not be enough time for much character development. In various sections, such as the long taxi-driving sequence, the gags flow outrageously yet organically into each other. “Lloyd was outstanding even among the master craftsmen at setting up a gag clearly, culminating and getting out of it deftly, and linking it smoothly to the next,” wrote James Agee. One extended sequence, Speedy’s date with Jane at Coney Island, may suffice as example.

It begins in the subway, with much pushing and shoving. In his memoir, Lloyd quips: “The Subway is a comedy all by itself, except to those who have to ride in it.” Again, we are treated to an ethnically and physiognomically diverse batch of New York humanity. Speedy contrives to get seats for his girl and himself by a trick involving a dollar bill on a string, which he dangles before a seated passenger to entice him to stand, then pulls away. A bit shady, unfair, not entirely what you’d expect from the supposedly proper Speedy, but—entrepreneurial, shall we say. At Luna Park, Speedy is the height of fatuous self-content, with his loving girl beside him and a week’s wages in his pocket, and a new white suit that makes him feel dressed for success. It does not take long for the suit to be marred, first by an overfriendly dog whose paws deface his trousers, then by his leaning against a freshly painted fence. Passersby laugh at the black bars on his jacket, and he has no idea why until he turns around and sees the pattern in a fun-house mirror. Next he passes a fish stand, and a crab lands in his pocket, leading to a set of mishaps in which the crab pinches ladies’ behinds and, in one case, steals a nightgown from a handbag. The women slap Speedy, thinking him a deviant masher, and he reacts with astonishment and self-righteousness. The humor here flows from the Lloyd character’s thinking he is an utterly normal, upstanding citizen, while those in his vicinity view him as a pervert. Here I am making the case that Lloyd’s comedy derives precisely from challenging his character’s assumptions of being the quintessence of average and normal.

Lloyd was a veteran of one- and two-reel comedies made for producer Hal Roach (Mack Sennett’s rival). It was a school that taught him to brainstorm ideas with story and gag writers but never to work from finished scripts, instead trusting to improvisation and inspiration on location for building elaborations on a gag onto a comic bit. “Our lack of method is deplorable, but somehow it works,” he testified. While he often directed parts of his pictures, he omitted taking directorial credit, preferring to help out the ex–gag writer designated for that job and perhaps feeling it was sufficient that the public knew the film reflected his own comic vision. Ted Wilde is listed as the director of Speedy, but the whole notion of auteurism seems a little spurious when it comes to silent comedy. By whatever collaborations the film came about, the result hangs together as a fresh, kinetic, fast-moving affair. The Coney Island sequence, for instance, has some beautiful cutaways to the fairway at night, some surreal dream swirls when Speedy and Jane are trying out every punishing ride, and a hysterical fantasy shot of twin babies with Harold-like spectacles riding in the moving van driving the couple home, which they pretend is their future abode.

By the film’s conclusion, Speedy has gotten his girl by saving Pop Dillon’s horsecar business, and all ends happily. In an interview with Lloyd long after he retired (he did not self-destruct, like many other silent film stars, but was a business-shrewd steward of his heritage), he was asked to compare Chaplin’s Tramp to his boy with glasses. “Well, Charlie generally had to play the losing lover because his character was the Little Tramp—who was a little grotesque. If he won the girl, she generally had to be off beat, a little screwy . . . But with this boy-with-the-glasses character—that was one of his virtues: he wore ordinary clothes, the same as the boy next door. He was somebody you’d pass on the street—and therefore his romances were believable. And I would say that I got the girl most every time. Generally, in many of Charlie’s pictures, he walked down the road at the end, which had its own virtue.”

We see in this passage Lloyd’s evenhanded sense of perspective, though his penultimate statement about getting the girl might strike some nowadays as a little smug. Still, as he said, each—Chaplin’s final saddening aloneness and his own cheerful romantic triumph—has its place. And Lloyd had a purer sense than most of what it meant to keep audiences laughing. He was a profound student of the art of comedy, as well as one of its most ebullient practitioners.

Phillip Lopate’s most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head and To Show and to Tell. He directs the nonfiction program at Columbia University.