MADness—the Blog

Great news.  I’ll be watching.

Christy Lemire of The Associated Press and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of Mubi.com will be the co-hosts of “Ebert Presents at the Movies.” The two experienced and respected critics will also introduce special segments featuring other contributors and the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert.
 
The new weekly program debuts Jan. 21 on public television stations in 48 of the top 50 markets, representing more than 90% national coverage. It will be produced in Chicago at WTTW, where Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert began taping “Sneak Previews” some 35 years ago.

“It was pretty emotional for me, walking down the same corridors, into the same studios, even meeting some of the same camera operators, editors and stagehands we worked with,” Ebert said.

‘Tis the season to look back at films of 2010.  Here are links to a couple of discussions worth checking out.

• Best Scenes of the Year:  Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon picks his favorites and tells us why, with some great clips
• The Movie Club:  Slate this week runs its annual Movie Club, with host Dana Stevens and critics Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Stephanie Zacharek 

Once upon a time people smoked in movies.  Everybody had a cigarette dangling from their lips, a waft of smoke circling overhead, and a match ready for a pretty girl.  Then Hollywood went cold turkey, kicked the habit.  Seems that nobody ever lights up onscreen anymore.  Except, notably, in the movies below.  The films don’t have much in common except that they’re all new and all worth seeing—and in each one people are smoking like it’s 1943.

That incidental note aside, with the end of the year approaching, I wanted to add some thoughts about new movies.  The Movie Minutes theme on the front page this week also features recent releases, and I’ll be adding some more mini-reviews as time goes on, probably through awards season.  Sometime, I will have a Top 10 (or other number, if appropriate) for 2010, but for now I’m still catching up on the glut of good films now playing.

About three months ago, I had said the crop of 2010 films was not particularly memorable.  That was true at the time, and the end-of-year films, as always, are a world apart.  As grateful as I am for the many good movies out lately, I’d like to see Hollywood serve a few more tasty treats earlier in the year.  I’d bet it would even be better for business.  No reason we should have to starve for nine months before we stuff ourselves at the feast.

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Somewhere (2010)
Sofia Coppola, writer-director
Harris Savides, cinematographer
Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning
MAD Preview

Sofia Coppola’s new film is a meditation on celebrity.  Stephen Dorff stars as Johnny Marco, a modern-day movie star living a pampered, empty existence at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard.  At his level of fame he never has to comb his hair or grow up.  Elle Fanning, in a wonderfully wise and soulful performance, plays his daughter, Cleo, who comes to live with him for a while, until she’s sent off to camp.  At eleven years old, Cleo is the most adult character in the film, and the solitary figure whose spirit seems intact.

Johnny has many women in his life, and some of them he even remembers their name.  But women and men alike want Johnny for what they can get, which is not much, for he is someone with little to give.  Only Cleo shows any true concern for Johnny.  She cares for her father, and she needs him.  She is, we later learn, just a short distance from desperation herself.  She is a talented girl—she figure skates and she cooks (though at Guitar Hero, Johnny outscores her while playing the Police hit So Lonely)—but her biggest gift is the look she gives her dad the morning after he spends the night with an acquaintance in Italy.  That moment is the beginning of the end of the way he has been living.

Somewhere is a quiet film, one that invites you to listen and to see in ways unlike many American movies.  It may, in fact, draw more from Italian film, borrowing from Fellini thematically, and from Antonioni stylistically.  Of course, growing up in the Coppola family probably helped the director understand this particular father-and-daughter relationship, and to her credit it is depicted onscreen with a great deal of tenderness and insight.

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Blue Valentine (2010)
Derek Cianfrance, director
Joey Curtis, Cami Delavigne, Derek Cianfrance, writers
Andrij Parekh, cinematographer
Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams

“A Love Story” is the tagline you’ll find on the Blue Valentine poster.  Don’t be fooled by the title or the billing and take your date on February 14.  It’s not that kind of love story.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star as Dean and Cindy, a young married couple who have experienced the mystery of love in all its wonderment and pain.  As the film opens, we see their daughter, Frankie (Faith Wladyka), standing in a field screaming for her dog who had run away.  Like that dog, the love that had given birth to their family is sadly missing.  A sense of desperation grips the parents, and we see them try to find what it was they once had, or to find a way out.  We also get to see, in flashback, who they were when they met, and how they got to the point where it doesn’t work for them anymore.

Blue Valentine is a raw and intimate film, brought to life by the brave and touching performances of Gosling and Williams.  Moments between them are often memorable, and at times, unforgettable.  A song-and-dance one night in a doorway of a shop is one highlight (see the trailer below), when the spark of romance is in the air.  At another time Dean tells Cindy to tell him a joke, and she has one ready, the funniest unfunny joke I’ve heard in a long while.

The movie can be blunt.  I found some moments difficult to watch, and the end, when it came, left me feeling, oddly, unmoved.  I thought perhaps I should be heartbroken, but instead I felt glad it was over.  Is that a failure of the movie, or just the expected reaction to the marriage witnessed onscreen?  I’m still digesting what I took in.  In any case, it is a film worth seeing, though one time may be enough.

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The Fighter (2010)
David O. Russell, director
Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Keith Dorrington (story); Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson (screenplay); writers
Hoyte Van Hoytema, cinematographer
Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo

The Fighter is one of the most conventionally enjoyable films of the year, and it’s the most accessible of the three movies here.  (It would have been a good fit for the Movie Minutes theme linked above, but I hadn’t seen it at the time.)  Set and filmed in Lowell, Massachusetts, the film is based on the real-life story of boxer Micky Ward, with nearly equal time given to his brother, Dicky Ecklund, who hopes to make a comeback in the ring.  Both are local celebs in their working-class neighborhood, though within the family, it’s Dicky who’s the star.

Ward is played by Mark Wahlberg, who still has the boyish looks for the part of an up-and-coming fighter though he’s almost 40.  Christian Bale plays Dicky, nine years older in the film, though in real life Bale is three years younger than Wahlberg.  The family matriarch is Alice, played by Melissa Leo, the iron lady whose sons and daughters dare not cross her.  Rounding out the lead cast is Amy Adams as Charlene, a tough-talking bartender who stirs up the family when she stands up for Micky, her boyfriend.

Dicky is the wild one and attention-getter, and Bale’s performance is a welcome change of pace for him (his Bruce Wayne/Batman persona seems quite the stiff in comparison).  Bale’s uncorkable energy gives the film plenty of lift, especially in the first half-hour.  Leo’s work, as well, is memorable and affecting, and if not always subtle, surprisingly funny.  Adams, too, gives as well as she gets.  It’s Wahlberg’s Ward who’s the quiet one, absorbing the blows of his family and girlfriend, just as he does the blows in the ring.  Ward doesn’t want to choose sides, and he doesn’t want to fight back.  But that’s what he must do, and it’s where the film inevitably leads.  You might say you saw it coming, but it’s still remarkably satisfying when the moment arrives.

Google’s Ngram Viewer made news this week.  You may have heard about it, or perhaps even played around at the site.  As noted elsewhere, it’s not only fun, it can be addictive.

I did a few queries to see how some big names in movies have fared over the years*.  Some of the results are in the charts below.  The first two compare actors and actresses who all began their careers before 1940.  The third compares some Best Picture winners from different decades, starting in the ’30s.

I can’t say there were big surprises—I expected John Wayne and Bette Davis to top the charts, so to speak—but the fascinating thing is to see how the names compare in ways that weren’t available before.

A couple of items caught my eye.  One is the surge for many of the names beginning in the 1960s.  I’d attribute that to a rise in interest in film across the culture more than to the individual stars.  You also see a more gradual, across-the-board dropoff during the past decade.  I’m not sure if there’s a single reason that accounts for that.  In part, the generation that knew the old names best is not here to buy books as they did before.  The internet, no doubt, has had an effect, with more writing online leading to perhaps less in print.  Another thing, it seems we had a spate of movie retrospectives around the centennial of film in 1995, and at the end of the century a few years later, and we may be witnessing a natural ebb of that kind of interest.

THE ACTORS
10 stars, all of whom started before 1940
Charlie Chaplin is the earliest and most enduring name.  Wayne remains the biggest name, though he appears to have peaked about a dozen years ago.  Jimmy Stewart seems to have the latest gain in fame (though it may be that we know him more as Jimmy now and he was more often James back then).

THE ACTRESSES
10 stars, all of whom started before 1940
You can see the huge interest in the early days for Greta Garbo and Shirley Temple, and it’s a tribute to them that they remain big names many decades after their short careers.  But Bette Davis, with a much longer career, is the big name among this group.  She ranks higher than all the men except for Wayne and Chaplin.  But if you add Marilyn Monroe to the query, you see who’s the biggest actress of them all.

THE BEST PICTURE WINNERS
8 Oscar-winning films, one from each decade since the 1930s
The films here are Oscar favorites but not necessarily the most popular ones.  The database doesn’t give good results for some Best Picture winners.  Casablanca and Chicago happen to be names of cities, too.  Who knew?  Hamlet is more than what’s dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.  Lawrence of Arabia is not just a movie about a man, but a man, and the name begins its spike 40 years before the film was made.  That said, for several of the films the chart shows a consistent pattern:  a sudden rise, a dip, a leveling-off.  Not the case, though, for the latest two films.  Schindler’s List hardly gets out of the starting gate, for reasons I can’t explain.  Million Dollar Baby (also a film title from 1941, and a song title, or partial title, for hits from Bing Crosby to Lil Wayne) is still on the rise.  In any case, the top film among this group is On the Waterfront.  It coulda been just a contender—but it’s the champ!

* Caveat querier:  The Google database is big, with more than 500 billion words from 5.2 million books, and it offers one measure of popularity over time.  But like any metric (e.g., box office results), it’s hardly definitive.  For one thing, it’s a work in progress (the database contains 4 percent of the corpus of published books).  And there’s this:  what people talk about is often not the same as what people write about, and what people write about in newspapers, in magazines, and now on the internet, is often not what people write about in books.

UPDATE:
This just in.  Well, from the summer of ’09, actually.  A discussion at the Language Log blog took issue with the accuracy of the Google Books endeavor, and Jon Orwant of Google provided this insight into the project.  Some interesting technical background and another reason to not take results as gospel truth.

UPDATE 2:
The Schindler’s List anomaly is due to punctuation.

The Black List (not the blacklist) is a new Hollywood tradition, and a commendable one.  It’s a list of the Top 10 unproduced screenplays.  Today’s L.A. Times features a story on studio exec Franklin Leonard, the creator of the list who tallies votes from 300 Hollywood insiders to compile the rankings.

In a few short years—the first Black List came out in 2005—the list has become an important way for some overlooked writers to get attention.  Not to mention, some of the scripts go on to become movies.

Topping this year’s Top 10 Black List:

49 votes: “College Republicans” by Wes Jones.  Aspiring politician Karl Rove leads a dirty campaign for College Republican chairman under the guidance of Lee Atwater.

The art of the movies is not just what you find onscreen.  It includes those images that may have lured you to the theater in the first place.  If you’re like me and have a soft spot for great movie posters, you may be interested in Bill Gold:  PosterWorks, a new retrospective featuring one of the masters of the art.

In 1942, a young man at Warner Bros. art department created a poster for Casablanca. Over the next sixty-three years, posters for A Streetcar Named Desire, Dial M For Murder, Bonnie and Clyde, Bullitt, My Fair Lady, Get Carter, Dirty Harry, The Untouchables and Unforgiven became coveted items, cherished by movie-goers all over the world.

Those posters were all the work of Bill Gold.  In a career spanning more than 2,000 films, Gold created the images for many of the great movies of the past.  He worked on campaigns for many top directors, including Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock.  The first of his seven posters for Hitchcock was for Rope.

“The whole trick here was showing Jimmy Stewart holding a piece of rope,” [Gold] explained. “What’s going to happen with that piece of rope? That’s me instigating the curiosity of the film idea. At first the lettering was very crisp and casual and typical. And then I felt it needed something to be more active, something to make it move more, so I added the lines.”

And about those red clouds? “They bring drama to the sky,” he said. “It’s not a settling sky. The red makes it more imposing.”

You can find more about Bill Gold in Sunday’s New York Times, including the story of how the gun ended up in Bogart’s hand for the poster of Casablanca.  The Times’s slide show features a number of Gold’s more memorable images.

The Thanksgiving holiday has been the setting and inspiration for a number of films.  Here are a few that may get you in the spirit.  Enjoy the day!

Addams Family Values (1993)
Barry Sonnenfeld, director
The First Thanksgiving

Home for the Holidays (1995)
Jodie Foster, director
Turkey Dinner

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
Woody Allen, director
Something to Be Thankful For

I’m not always on the same page with Patrick Goldstein, but in today’s L.A. Times he calls out the MPAA and I couldn’t agree more.

Two films:  one, the “heart-warming” British film The King’s Speech, an expected Oscar contender, the other, Saw 3D, the “final chapter” in the torture-porn series.  Goldstein:

If you’re a parent, as I am, which film would you want your 12-year-old to see? No contest, right? Yet according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s crackpot ratings system, both films are rated R — meaning no one under 17 allowed without a parent.

“Saw 3D,” which hit theaters last week, earned the designation for innumerable scenes of violence, torture and depravity; “The King’s Speech,” which will be released at Thanksgiving, got it for one brief scene where the future king of England, encouraged by his therapist, utters a volley of swear words to cure his stutter.

You don’t have to be a parent to find that crazy, but I’d say being a parent does alter your perspective.  I have a four-year-old son and I’m amazed at the level of violence that’s considered acceptable in entertainment in general, and especially entertainment deemed appropriate for children.  (My pet peeve of the week is the latest DirecTV ad campaign running during World Series games, which start in the afternoon where I live.  Violent, nasty, and not at all funny when your son is watching with a contorted face as a film projectionist falls to the floor, apparently killed by a thief’s dart gun.)

I support free speech and artistic license.  Violence is the ultimate conflict and conflict is the foundation of drama.  I get that.  But the level of violence—and more important, the treatment of violence—we see in everyday entertainment is remarkable.  What does it say about our culture, and how does it affect our society?  These are old questions, but worth asking.

Look at old movies and old TV shows and you see everybody smoking.  That doesn’t happen anymore.  Smoking seems quaint, old-fashioned.  Maybe someday we could say the same about violence.

Meanwhile, the idea that most high school students aren’t fit to hear swear words in a movie is god-damned ludicrous.

Roger Ebert vs. Roger Ebert.

Roger Ebert is a man who does not makes movie lists:  “No, I won’t be making out my list of the 10 Best Films for Halloween this year.”  (Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.)

Roger Ebert is a man who does make movie lists:  “Ten great films about horror.”  (Rogert Ebert’s Journal, a few days earlier.)

Granted, the list at his Journal has some films that are traditional Halloween fare (Frankenstein, Nosferatu) and some that are not (The Third Man, Detour).  (Check out his site not just for the list but for each movie in its entirety along with links to Ebert’s reviews.)  But it seems that Ebert is of two minds when it comes to lists.

I don’t blame him.  He’s been doing it longer than just about anybody, and I imagine every critic doesn’t at some point gets sick of making lists.  Lists at best are a snapshot in time, subject to change, and from another angle are reflections as much about the people making the lists as the films themselves.  The usefulness of movie lists is inversely proportionate to their number, and that’s part of the problem today.  Movies lists are out of control.  Their count has metastasized beyond what anyone would consider a healthy number useful for intelligent discourse about movies.  In fact, I’d say they’ve contributed to a lot of lazy thinking about film. 

I had done a post on movie lists a few months ago, contrasting the lists at two popular sites.  It’s mind-boggling.  I am a fan of They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (and their approach with the TSPDT list of 1,000 Greatest Films).  On the other hand, the IMDb 250 list is pretty silly.  (IMDb pretends to be democratic but the cross-section of voters must not be like any cross-section of moviegoers that I know, and the results are highly skewed.  The same could be said for our so-called political democracy.)

Here’s Ebert on the IMDb list:

“Citizen Kane” is only No. 37, and some critics suspect that’s because some online fanboys won’t watch black-and-white movies. (Anyone who will not watch black and white should be locked in a closet with mice, but that’s another subject.)

(Ebert also gets in a much-deserved dig at websites that require ten clicks to view their lists of ten movies.  I thought the idea of the web was to make it easier for people to get information.  Some sites must have missed the memo.)

One old item about movie lists  that I had intended to write some time ago:  the big one.  As movie lists have proliferated, the lists have grown longer and longer.  Top Ten lists don’t seem adequate, even for end-of-year recaps (again, see Ebert).  Lists of a hundred or a thousand movies are not uncommon.  How about a list of 10,000 movies?

That’s been the quest of a modern-day Quixote named Brad Bourland.  This June the indefatigable Mr. Bourland topped the 10,000 mark on his ultimate ranking of films.  He calls it ”THE MOVIE LIST—THE FINAL CUT:  The 10,000 Best, Most Beloved and the Most Important English Language Films of the 20th Century, In Order.”  You can get all 219 pages of it at his site, themovielistonline.com.  (A New York Times profile of Bourland is here.)

I wouldn’t normally quibble with a monumental effort like that, but he’s got Patch Adams (1998) at #5681, several spots ahead of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957), at #5695.  What the hell was Bourland thinking?

Stirling Newberry writes about the new, “final” chapter to the Saw franchise and finds parallels between the torture porn genre of horror films and the torture porn politics of the right.  (The MAD front-page feature this week was on horror franchises, and on Thursday, the Saw films in particular.)

The cresting of the torture porn wave in popular culture is underlined by the rise of torture porn politics, exemplified by the tea party, but echoing across the political spectrum. The viciousness of cuts in social programs in the United Kingdom, and across Europe, compounded with a Franco-German backed initiative to clamp down on social spending even more, are torture porn economics. The reason for demanding repayment now, is not because that repayment is economically productive, but because those demanding repayment now hope that bankruptcy or insolvency is the result, which give’s them the lector’s license to slowly pull the intestines out of the victim. Say Ireland, Iceland, or Greece.

The last act of the movie saga of the Jigsaw cult, signals, clearly, to those who are listening, that both the patience of the ordinary population is exhausted, and the energy of the torturing class is also exhausted.

Not sure if I agree with all the points Newberry goes on to make, but I would say that horror films can’t be understood without understanding the culture and politics of the times.  The torture porn films of recent years wouldn’t have been made—or caught on, at least—if not for the dangerous rightward shift in our politics.

Will things get better now?  Not so fast.

However, that is precisely why the danger is growing, because a movement that knows it is not actually entitled to power on support, is far more likely to push through laws quickly, in the limited time it has.

If predictions of a Republican resurgence in Tuesday’s elections are right, I don’t expect much in the way of new laws from either side anytime soon.  But we may be headed for an especially ugly period in our politics.  As Paul Krugman says:  “Be afraid.  Be very afraid.”

What can you do?  For one thing, vote.