Rushfield Babylon

You guys, I talked to Gene Hackman.  Legend and now mystery novelist.  My two favorite things for someone to be.  He’s disappeared from our lives for 11 years now since his last film role.

We spoke of his novel, the mystery genre, and I asked the big question: when might we see him on the screen again.  

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STARCRASH!

If there were any truth to the notion that the good rises in the internet age, this movie would be 1000 times better known than Star Wars.  If JJ Abrams cared at all about art, this is what he’d be rebooting now. As if you can reboot perfection.

! And before you give me trouble: Only trilogies! Three film stand alones. Not the first three films of a longer series! And also I tried to balance how good a film is in an algorhythm with who much it carries the weight of its trilogy. 

And where does your current favorite, The Destination of Smaugs, fit in? (Hint: 21st). Find out!

I spent far too long on this and so should you.

Read it all at Yahoo!

Our Top Five Films, Our Selves

In the interest of re-checking the obvious, I was inspired by that Alan Moore quote, wherein he touched upon this blog’s great theme - the infantalization of our culture (with the superhero film era as Exhibit C of supporting evidence) to take a quick peek and see, was it really ever not so.  After 15 minutes of research, you be the judge.

I’ve looked at the Top 5 films of every year ending with a 3 going back 90 years including 2013 to date. I’m sure there’s a case to be made that this year’s crop are in fact as sophisticated any decades winners and the fact that these are the top grossing films compared to years past says nothing about the general state of our culture. You go ahead and make it.  I’ll let the lists speak for themselves.

1923
The Covered Wagon, The Ten Commandments, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Safety Last, Daddy

1933
Queen Christina, I’m No Angel, King Kong, 42nd Street, She Done Him Wrong

1943
For Whom the Bell Tolls, This is the Army, The Song of Bernadette, Hitler’s Children, Star Spangled Rhythm

1953
Peter Pan, The Robe, From Here to Eternity, House of Wax, Shane

1963
Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tom Jones, Irma la Douce

1973
The Sting, The Exorcist, American Graffitti, Papillion, The Way We Were

1983
Return of the Jedi, Terms of Endearment, Flashdance, Trading Places, War Games

1993
Jurassic Park, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Fugitive, Schindler’s List, The Firm

2003
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Finding Nemo, Matrix Reloaded, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, Bruce Almighty

2013:
Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2, Hunger Games 2: Catching FIre,Man of Steel, Monsters University

You can go ahead and quibble with the implications of this list (even though I didn’t say a word, just laid out the facts) because the internet is a place for quibblers and nitpickers, myself included.

You can say - and I wouldn’t disagree - that Despicable Me 2 is as good a movie as The Robe, How the West Was Won. or any number of these supposed Golden Age films.  You can say, we’re in the golden age of animation which is just a different genre - a case made by many I have great respect for.  You can point out that amidst the heavy handed dramas and the urbane comedies, there are plenty of action movies sprinkled about.  To that I’d respond: yes, there have always been some action and kids movies at the tops of the list. But that wasn’t all of the list.

Rather than laying out the differences any further, I’ll just put it to you:  if you can say we, as a culture, are what we watch. And I would say all in all, if you look at the top films of a year, that’s about as good a temperature taking of the ethos of the day as you’ll find - so looking at those lists, if you had to make a choice: which audience would you want watching your house while you’re out of town, babysitting your kids, educating your kids, remembering to feed your pets,managing your assets, choosing your government, cooking the food you put in your mouth - which audience would you choose?

Addendum: One can see pretty clearly where the thing goes off the rails and its no coincidence I’m sure that the bottom starts to fall out in maturity the exact moment the baby boom grows up and takes control of our culture.

For those who would say the audience of 2013, I suppose that’s a defensible choice on some level and I say, good luck finding your place un-burned to the ground when you come back from vacation.

From my interview with director Philip Kaufman on the 30th anniversary of his film “The Right Stuff”

Do you think our culture produces people with the Right Stuff anymore?
PK: Oh, boy. That is a really profound question for me to…and in some ways, disturbing. I mean, you wonder about people, why they want to take risks and how they prepare themselves for the risks. You wonder if we’ve lost something. We’ve lost a flavoring, a seasoning or the recipe is missing something nowadays, and back then, certainly at the beginning of the film, you could trace that Western Gary Cooper on a horseback, things that my generation sort of grew up on, the lonely, laconic man. You didn’t talk about it, you did it. And as Yeager says at the beginning, he’s going to do it, really, for nothing. The idea of pushing the outside of the envelope was a challenge and it was you did it without thinking about public recognition. It was just something that you did it for yourself or your fellow man and race for your country. It’s a story of great adventure. An incredible number of men died, and there’s nobody killing anyone else.  Men dying in noble battle with the heavens, and that kind of thing of the exploration of the outside of the envelope, of doing something because you had the urge to push the frontier. We have different frontiers now, and unfortunately now,…well, I mean, some of the people who are brilliant who push the frontiers don’t do it in a physical way. There’s another great kind of heroism, but unfortunately, a lot of the heroism is meant to translate into money, into a kind of lifestyle that really wasn’t what Yeager, at the time in “The Right Stuff” was meant to convey.

(Chuck Yeager pictured above)

of my heroes, John Carpenter, on the making of Halloween as it turns 35. An excerpt:

You composed and played the music to this famed score all yourself. How did you coming up with such a spooky score?

JC: Well, the reason I became a composer was that I’m cheap and I’m fast. We didn’t have any money to hire a composer and an orchestra or anything like that. So, the main theme, the theme that everybody’s familiar with, was something my father taught me. He taught me five-four time on a bongo: ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. He taught me how to pound it out, and so I just adapted it to piano with octaves: Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, and went up a half step. I had played around with that for years, just as – what could this be? On “Assault on Precinct 13,” I had one day to do the music. On “Halloween,” I had a total of three days. So, a lot of it was just different mood pieces. I didn’t score it from top to bottom. It was just a few pieces here and there of different moods and different feeling. So, I just banged it out, and it’s all improv. All this is just improvisation.

(Source: Spotify)

CRITERION CARAVAN #20: A Story of Floating Weeds
Dir: Yashijuro Ozu  (1934)

Here I am at last, making my way chronologically through all the Criterions available streaming online for some insane reason, and finally I have come to the end of the silent era. I said that once before, but it turned out there was still one more waiting for me, but this time, this is it.

So Ozu we know is perhaps the greatest humanist director of all time. He takes these very just mundane stories and you’re sitting there and watching it and saying, well, this seems a lot of fuss about a couple going to visit their kids for a weekend,  and you get fed up and start saying, can we get on with it already, and then all of a sudden you’re bawling like a two-year old because its so sad, these people are just longing for this human connection and just want to be with their family and they can’t for all sorts of dumb reasons.

ASOFW is one of those too. The ne'er do well head of a touring kabuki troop comes back to the town where he left behind his mistress and son, who thinks he’s just an uncle. Kabuki masters are a fickle lot. They can’t be tied down you know, being artists and subject to so much temptation you know. But now he sees his son has grown into a fine young man and feels left out, even if he gets to take him fishing now and then.  He doesn’t seem to miss the mistress much, but it’s hard to go around with your son thinking you’re his uncle.

That’s pretty much it and it ambles along a little tediously until it becomes incredibly poignant and heartbreaking. The stuff of workaday tragedy and all.

Ozu liked the story so much that he remade it 20 years later as a talkie. You might like that one better.  I can’t say because it will probably be 20 years at this pace until I get there on my Criterion Caravan. But if you’re in the mood to go silent, frankly, it’s such a touching, simple film that you won’t even remember that they weren’t talking during it. Besides that they wouldn’t’ve been speaking english anyway.

Over at Yahoo Movies, to Killing/World War Z star Mirelle Enos including:

Q: Would you be a zombie for Halloween?
A: I don’t think I can go there, but it would be funny to dress my baby as a zombie. Although she has her heart set on being a bunny, so maybe we can make her a baby zombie bunny.

Q: Detective Linden was noted for her loyalty to sweaters. What is your favorite sweater?
A: I love a cardigan, a big bulky button down cardigan. My poor husband every time he buys a sweater, I end up wearing it so he finally bought me a whole bunch of men’s sweaters. Everybody makes fun of the Sarah wardrobe, but it’s so comfortable. It’s the most comfortable thing I’ve ever worn. Big old boots, jeans and a sweater, especially in that cold Vancouver weather.

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I know this is a silly stunt and I’m three decades past my Catcher in the Rye period, but somehow the idea of a BIG JD Salinger documentary that has some secret twist excites me more than any other movie news out there right now.

TRENDS IN MOVIES 2013: HALF TIME REPORT

I sat down this evening,  as movie summer lurches to a close, planning to rank all the movies I’ve seen so far this year from best to worst. And then when I saw how few contenders there were for the “best” slot, I decided against that. But then before I sank into depression about it - depression which leads to the “TV has eclipsed film” bugbear, I looked deeper and saw there are at least two (2) trends at work in cinema that give one cause for hope. Two causes for hope! That’s not zero causes for hope. So I decided instead to lay out my trends in cinema, slightly past halftime report for 2013. 

TREND ONE: THE RETURN OF COMEDY

I had the experience of seeing a horrible, not at all funny, too loud, bleakly bawdy comedy this week (We’re The Millers), and the interesting thing about the experience was as I walked out of the theater, cursing the floor and muttering at the crowds, wondering how I would find my way in this, the worst of all possible worlds - I realized, Hey, wait a minute.  I haven’t felt depressed like this in at least a year.  

There was a time - somewhere between Hangover and Horrible Bosses - when one would walk out of the theater every week having been bludgeoned by these nihilistic pieces of contempt for humanity which sought to throttle laughs out of their audiences and leave them for dead. That sense of having been assaulted by your film entertainment came up so regularly that you didn’t even need a film to summon it. Cinematic Dread was like Walking Pneumonia, something that you just lived with day in and out.  I don’t think I liked a single comedy all of last year and I violently hated quite a few. 

But lo and behold, checking the records, until The Millers, I hadn’t hated one yet this year. I’d even liked a few quite a bit - This is the End, The Heat and The World’s End come to mind.

To what do we owe this salvation?  Well, I’d like to think the rise of the female comedy cancelled out the bromance era, and that certainly plays some role; although 2 of the 3 listed in the paragraph above technically qualify as the Bromance genre. I think its more a question of the most noxious elements of that genre having just played themselves out. The Todd Phillips train gives all signs of having run out of steam (see Hangover 3). Pressure from both sides, I think we can say, that made the contempt of We’re the Millers just feel like a museum piece from another age.  It was actually kind of nice to feel that sort of hatred for a film again. Like an old familiar lung condition coming for a brief relapse.

TREND TWO: THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE SUPERHERO TUNNEL

Yes, I know, coming up in 2014 and 2015 are the biggest superhero films in the history of superheroedom and the fanboys are already collapsing of the vapors at the thought of Superman vs. Batman and Aquaman vs the Flash and Moon Knight takes the Teen Titans to Mini-Golf, or whatever else they are planning.  

And they should be excited. And the studios should keep making movies for teenage boys and the men they never grow up to be. But for the rest of us, having sat through a few dozen of these origin stories in the past few years, having slogged through hundreds of hours of CGI aliens throwing office buildings at Thor, for those of us who haven’t spent a few decades nursing the feeling the high school yearning to acquire superpowers so you can show all these people what’s what - for us, it’s time to get on with life. I think we can all say, we’ve gotten the idea. The dark version, the light version, the somewhere in between version, the retro version, the futuristic, hunky, nerdy, something borrowed, something blue - we get it.

And although these movies will continue to unfurl and some of them will shatter all kinds of six and a half day gross records, there is every sign that the non-ideologically committed sector of the audience is moving on. Iron Man 3 made a ton of money; everyone, now everyone, knows how crushingly dull that last hour of fighting was. Is there anyone still nursing any interest in seeing this character again?  Superman- it’s like it never happened.

As I say, these are just the first murmurs of discontent and we have a long way to go before we can free ourselves of the superhero addiction, but the signs are promising.

And looking forward to the releases, it does seem that superhero films are on the familiar entertainment trajectory from greatness to self-satire and oblivion.  It’s the road that was taken by sitcoms from the 1960’s through to the 1990’s which saw the end of the family-based comedy.  First you had the traditional nuclear family (Leave it to Beaver). Then to keep things interesting, you had to get bigger familys (Bradys, Partridges). Then when giant families became humdrum, we went into the realm of impossibly complicated families. Who was the boss?  Why was Charles in charge? And from there, it only took the lightest shove from Roseanne to bring the whole thing crashing down. 

Likewise, superhero films of late have evolved from the traditional hero (Spiderman, Iron Man) to the big superhero family (X Men, Avengers) and are now headed to the incomprehensible phases, where Batman and Superman are fighting each other, no one can keep track of who belongs under one roof.

Grabbing at straws? Maybe!  But at least I’ve got some straws to grab at after a long dark summer.