MOVIES

Hello again, and welcome to the part of my blog for Movies Saved My Life – little teaser excerpts from a book I recently finished writing.

This, I think, is an introduction that would be much better short. So, I’ll add just a couple more things by way of explanation. Through the course of 100 ‘reviews,’ Movies Saved My Life is all about the experience of watching films. I’d say it’s a celebration of film, but that would be corny. It is, though, and that’s why I mostly managed to avoid writing anything mean. (For Michael Bay, I happily made an exception.)

I’ve no clue whatsoever if I’ll succeed in getting published – but I will certainly try. Just as soon as I motivate myself to do the many things required (so much baseball to watch and such little time…). But that’s all for another day. Tonight it’s just you and me – and it’s a real honest pleasure to share some of what I have. Writing without reading is like that old broken pencil. Pointless.

> First up, a passionate case against bad summer blockbusters – and why cinema deserves so much better… <

500 (DAYS OF SUMMER)

Comedy/Romance   95 min   USA   2009

d, Marc Webb; w, Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber

An offbeat, freewheeling rom-com with a beginning, a middle and an end, but rarely in that order. With Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the sometimes compatible, sometimes less so, maybe meant for each other, maybe not, couple. A lively, tender glance at young love, all good, the ecstatic highs and the devastating lows…

MOON

Science Fiction   97 min   UK   2009

d, Duncan Jones; w, Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker

Smart, atmospheric and suspenseful, that increasingly rare thing: a straight-up piece of science fiction more about ideas than special effects. Stationed alone on a distant lunar base, an astronaut (Sam Rockwell) is coming to the end of a lonely three-year shift, when a near-fatal accident throws his whole world into total disarray. With his satellite link back to earth broken, and only an intelligent computer for company (voiced by Kevin Spacey), can he keep from going mad?

In the most recent of our ‘phone dates,’ my good friend Rob took some obvious delight in telling me that he quite liked Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, sure in the knowledge that I didn’t. True to form, we both exaggerated our contrary perspectives, him trying to paint me as all too predictable a snob, and me countering with the claim that anyone whose favorite film is Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai knows better really and doth protest otherwise too much. Not for the first time, there was hardly any danger of us switching sides. We didn’t get very far but, as is reliably the case, the getting there was fun. Rob did, though, I must admit, ask one question that nudged me to regard Michael Bay’s career from, if not a different angle altogether, at least a slight head-tilt to the side.

Where’s the harm?

If you start by ignoring Bay’s flagrant and leering objectification of women, misogyny by any other name, it’s a question that can prop itself up a little too sturdily for comfort. At least, that is, until you regain your senses, realize that the objectification of women is a stupid thing to ignore, and stop needlessly second-guessing what wasn’t even a guess in the first place. No: sorry, but if you genuinely believe that the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen of this world have nothing harmful in their blackened soul, then either you’re a friend winding me up for kicks, overwhelmed by good graces I know nothing of, or are part of that thing we usefully call ‘the problem.’ If this makes me sound like a frightful snob, then so be it; opinions are nothing to be overly enamored with, I agree, but some leave only crushing voids behind when tossed too lightly off.

Movies deserve better. The less that we accept, the more impoverished we become. And, as far as younger people go, the more we excuse a Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen by saying ‘it’s simply what they want,’ the less we value their capacity for outpacing us, the measure of their imaginations, their quickness and cunning. Film is special, and if we treat it any differently, we diminish it. It can carry tremendous weight, and lightly at that. It can stretch our attention far, high and wide, yet still keep such a firm hold over it that the world beyond the screen can disappear completely. It can make us care, deep down to our very bones, about storylines and characters, though we know these are written and performed. It can compel us, in a room full of strangers, to laugh, scream, shudder, shake, whoop, cry, and cheer. It can upset, even change altogether, lifelong beliefs, or else reinvigorate, with redoubling intensity, half-forgotten fancies and cherished enthusiasms alike. All of this it can do without us even pausing to think it remarkable.

When, however, a director is so bored by his characters talking that he dumbly whirls his camera round them in ever-growing circles, the only thing to stop and note is a bar being lowered about as far as it can go. These are not merely characters lazily drawn, they’re an inconvenience – in the same precious real estate that Lawrence of Arabia used to roam, where Holly Golightly finally fell in love, where Dirty Harry raised ‘the most powerful handgun in the world,’ and Mrs. Robinson Benjamin Braddock’s blood pressure, with black stocking over leg. Where’s the harm, indeed? It’s in getting to a point where filmmakers have only the paltriest of expectations to exceed, and the boundless possibilities of the medium become so debased that we settle, like such a lot of idiot robots, for stuff exploding nowhere in particular and for no apparent reason. A flabby, putrefying prick in the future where feelings count for naught, a sorry squirt out of which 150 minutes of CGI ‘action’ is held to be a fair substitute for storytelling, and not the desperate endgame it actually is: a leveling of the Himalayas, a draining of the oceans. Cancer is the harm. Cancer of the mind, cancer of the heart. After all, when your film’s loftiest aim is a marketing campaign at Burger King, you may as well as just stuff us full of cigarettes and lead.

Ah, but as far as I can see, the most depressing thing about a bad summer blockbuster is only readily apparent when the end credits roll. Especially for those that are special effects heavy, the nine out of every ten: just look at the veritable phonebook of names! So many people, so much time, and so much money that could – if only wishing made it so – have been more gainfully employed. Even for a film as vacuous as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, you can’t doubt the expertise that must have gone into parts of its construction, the technicians involved, the craftsman, the programmers, the interns scrambling for attention. Everyone doing what they do, at length, not for the greater good of cinema but in the service of a lifeless script and a hack who seemingly couldn’t care less either way.

Where’s the harm? It’s in the increasingly corporate belief that throwing money at a film makes up for a deficit of competence at the top. That what you can do on a computer is more important than the contents of a script. That box office takings either indicate or safeguard longer-term affection (what price a ticket stub in the trash next to a memory we hold tight forever?). Not only do movies deserve better, then, but so too do the people who are actually good at making them, who don’t treat filmmaking with cynical indifference but delight, instead, in the warmth of its embrace. Answer this: wouldn’t it be wonderful if Hollywood were more of a meritocracy? Or, at minimum, if everyone working there had talent commensurate with the great privilege of filling worldwide auditoriums with images and sound?

The shame, I suspect, is that this isn’t far from being true – just that a rotten few spoil it for the rest. Might we dare still imagine, though, what films go unmade, what new stories never make it further than a handwritten note, and what reservoirs of time, money and skill are willfully diverted, as every juggernaut of junk goes its sorry way. If life’s too short, God only knows that cinema’s too small – for anyone to fritter.

How much more agreeable, then, to celebrate the other movies made that give and go, that offer plenty in return for their time in the sun, and which eloquently prove that imagination is a far richer resource than any bucket load of cash. In my last week of movie-going alone, two debut features: Moon, a little sci-fi gem from director Duncan Jones, and (500) Days of Summer from Marc Webb. The former a triumph of a powerful, central idea executed with impeccable judgment, the latter of a great many smaller ones motoring smartly and zestfully along (even, for example, in a vertical split screen before the opening credits are done, a dandelion ‘blowing’ into bubbles). Let’s celebrate their directorial flourishes and flair; their chemistry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel); vigor (a performance from Sam Rockwell better seen than described); jump-cuts; moonscapes; music; romance, its pleasures, impossible to forget, and its pains, impossible to ignore. Let’s hope, too, that Jones and Webb find a way of having long careers still to come, and continue to be as thoughtful and as buoyant. Because if they do cinema will likely show, once again, the best of itself, less expensive and less aggressive but many times more appealing – an aspect so alluring it cannot help but glorify, incidentally, an often unbecoming whole.

> Ok, here’s a piece combining film with two of my other favorite things, football and baseball… <

THE DAMNED UNITED

Biography/Sport     98 min     UK/USA     2009

d, Tom Hooper; w, Peter Morgan (based on a novel by David Peace)

Soccer rivalries in 1970s England: upon becoming the new manager of the England national side, local favorite Don Revie is replaced as manager of league champions Leeds United by a brash younger man who can hardly stand the sight of him – the one-in-a-million, now legendary Brian Clough (Michael Sheen). Can the new kid in town ever escape his predecessor’s giant shadow? More to the point, will his new team ever let him? A true story, as filtered through an adaption of a best selling novel.

I got into Fenway Park with a $15 standing-only ticket, but sat, in the roof terrace section and next to my friend Rob (Sidcup), in a $90 seat, both of us giddy getting away with it and not in the least bit desirous of being any other place in the world. There was, in the parlance of such affairs, ‘rain in the air,’ yet not enough of it to keep the game in front of us from rattling along, or the waves of watching fans from chattering and thundering, settling back and fidgeting, penciling in the box score or scuttling back and forth for pretzels, sodas or a smoke. Behind our backs, there was a chill wind whistling around, and yet so many bodies unwittingly gave each other a little touch of warmth. In any case, high above our heads giant floodlights were crowding out the night still more assertively, thousands of filaments resolute, like the rest of us, that for the playing of this game it’s not the wrong time of year, or the wrong time of day, and that even inclement weather can’t hold us back from caring, and cheering, and hoping the away team will go home unhappy.

I don’t remember who the other team were, mind you. Or the score for that matter, or any of the pitchers on the mound (three years worth of swings, hits and misses later, whoever would?). At some point that night, however, somewhere between the top of the 1^st and the bottom of the 9^th, we all witnessed a single play I expect never to forget, no matter how many times the instant replay reel fizzes through my head… Someone hit a double, and David Ortiz ran from first base to third.

***

After very much enjoying the book upon which The Damned United is based, a good few months ago, I went to see it with high hopes, especially after liking every bit as much the last film to bring the abundant talents of Peter Morgan and Michael Sheen together, Frost/Nixon. Happily, in the manner of a favorite team winning in the cup, it delivered. Principally, I’m still more glad to note, by capturing a little something of a little something countless other sport films make even a dreadful hash of finding: the difficult to grapple, harder yet to explain, elusive appeal of sport. The rugged edge of rational thinking that forever teeters, at least for those of us who cannot help but care, on knee-jerk devotion.

First, second, and third, The Damned United recognizes with unusual clarity that a liking for sport is seldom ever predicated on winning. Yes, we probably all have in common the desire to be there when our team does eventually win, but only the shallowest, stupidest, or most green-around-the-ears sports fan fails to see that anticipating victory is fine in theory, madness in practice. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the home run isn’t hit, the last-minute goal refuses to come, the other guy doesn’t miss. We hope for the best simply because it hardly ever happens. So it is that The Damned United welcomes, even relishes, the flip-side of glory: disappointment, overreaching, failure, coming close but falling short. The brute facts, indeed, that would likely make us weary were they not, instead, the true traces of lifelong allegiance. If respite from suffering is rare, you better stick around awhile (though equally, of course, if your team wins too often, it gets to be less satisfying).

Unlike so many sport films, therefore, The Damned United does not simply regard sport as a convenient hook upon which to hang a narrative. It’s not an upward rising curve, though victory remains a part of the whole, and nor does it set its sights on overcoming odds or a grandstanding finish. Rather, The Damned United looks at sport, football in particular, through a much wider lens, and so ascertains a part of ‘playing’ movies typically choose to ignore: that because fortunes, no matter what, always ebb and flow, there’s something else many times more likely to keep us turning up, through good times and bad. Incorporating those of us following along and everyone actually involved: the ‘players.’ A great mass of people who rely upon each other, as The Damned United knows, to make something intrinsically meaningless meaningful. Whose silent pact provides a crucible for characters and solid ground for dreaming, a special place where sliding through mud and shouting in the rain isn’t lunacy but acceptable behavior.

Helped along enormously by its wonderful cast, The Damned United works so well because it makes room for people. Most of all, the charismatic figure Michael Sheen is given the hard task of capturing, the one and only Brian Clough – but equally the other men (for, as depicted, it’s very much a male world) who, variously, he relied upon and hated, was beholden to and jealous of. As in football, as in life, personalities that sometimes clash, sometimes coalesce. The domineering leaders. The natural lieutenants. The old guard and the new. The strutting and the nervous. Rivalries and cliques, insecurities and fears.

Vividly, then, with humor and with heart, here’s a film that has a whole lot of life coursing through it. Yes, as with David Peace’s original book, it may be difficult to gauge how ‘accurately’ so, and there may well be gaps and biases either unduly injurious or flattering, but such things needn’t keep the forest from the trees. Especially with actors as talented as Sheen, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Spall involved, The Damned United is, I suggest, that most precious thing, a sports film worthy of the name.

***

Doesn’t sound like much on the page, does it? A double, followed by a routine piece of base-running; it’s the kind of thing you might see a dozen times in a game. What’s missing from this picture, though, is the real reason I remember it, the reason it remains impossible to think about without my lips darting up to meet said thought with a big, stupid grin. You see, it wasn’t just anyone running into third, it was David ‘Big Papi’ Ortiz, the fearsome slugger whose shear bulk and force of personality entreaties to be the sun about which we mere satellites rotate. The man whose mood always shows, barometer-like, the fortunes of the team. By inclination jolly and noted for his ‘bigness,’ he can start to shrink before your eyes when all isn’t well, is a colossus capable of hunching. Beware the booming stride that falters: the Red Sox are slipping. And keep a close watch on those eyes – after a home run they always look up to the heavens; through a lean spell of form, they’re likely downward cast, unwilling to be met.

Nor, most important of all, was it any kind of base-running. Instead, Ortiz charged around second base with all the furious effort a body not made for running could ever hope to muster, his great hulking frame as determined as it was ungainly. Narrowing in on his target, third base oblivious and empty, his every footfall stripped away the contest that carried them, as though it were their business alone that gathered the rest of us together, 35,000 fans and two sets of players. Even, for the span of a thrilling second, maybe two at most, the very whereabouts of the baseball itself, in a sport where its whereabouts is all, become utterly irrelevant. Had he cared to glance behind, Ortiz might have seen how far away it was, how, with it still bumbling about by the warning track in right field, he had all the time in the world to journey at his leisure. But no. Some wicked mix of momentum and adrenaline had obviously seized him, had fixed upon the need for a crowd-pleasing dive. At full speed, head-first, arms out, like Superman himself.

You’ll never persuade me the earth didn’t shake. Or, that back to his feet at last and brushing off the dirt, Big Papi’s beaming smile didn’t fleetingly become the epicenter of a world where only good things are possible.

> Next up: Hollywood, by way of your local farm… <

TROPIC THUNDER

Comedy/Action     107 min     USA/Germany     2008

d, Ben Stiller; w, Etan Cohen, Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux

A certain brand of Hollywood distilled: big budget, star-studded, high-concept, promoted to the hilt, overblown, and restless. What happens to a troupe of actors shooting a war film in the jungle when suddenly, unbeknown to them, the gun shots are real?

Let’s say I have a son (no reason not to, this keyboard doesn’t mind). Let’s call him Dylan (after Bob, of course). Now, let’s say we’re enjoying an afternoon together at the local farm – a chance for the young lad to pat small animals and hand-feed them chunky vegetables. It’s a little wet and chilly out, the kind of day where you need to have a coat on, at least until you’ve done a fair amount of walking, and mom’s off shopping with grandma… But the two of us are doing just fine, with our Wellington boots on and carrots at the ready.

“Papi” (this what I’ve persuaded Dylan to call me, as a discrete tribute to Red Sox slugger David ‘Big Papi’ Ortiz).

“Yes, son.”

“What is Hollywood?”

Damn, that’s a good question (even if it is hard to figure what on earth made him think of it). More than that, I realize, it’s the kind of opening a young dad mustn’t spurn, a chance to furnish precious curiosity with information. Not wisdom, exactly – that would be a quite a stretch – but an answer, if I get it right, that might just be another useful rung on his ladder up to manhood.

“Well, it’s a place in California where most American movies get made – by a handful of film studios that were mostly started up, over a hundred years ago, by shrewd Jewish businessmen from Europe.”

Nothing doing.

“It’s a place where too much money is spent on too many films for too many people, and where only a few great films also get made, by really smart people, for other people who can have a good time at the movie theater without popcorn and soda.”

Great; it’s not even a disappointed romantic that I’m helping to shape, but a cynic through and through. Still, though, probably for the best that he doesn’t learn the hard way (whatever that would be). So time for a convoluted analogy… let’s see if I can’t rescue a spark from the frown.

“Here,” I venture, handing Dylan a five foot stretch of rope that’s lying handily on the grass, “put those carrots down a second, and take a hold of this. Nice and tight, right at the very end.”

“Ok, Papi.”

“Now – and don’t tell mom I let you do this – while dragging this rope behind you the whole time, go run through that muddy field where the pigs are… Just make sure that you keep holding it at the top. Then come back to me when you’re done.”

“Can I run through all the poop?”

“Sure you can. There’s a hose over there, and I’ll wash your boots off when you’re done.”

Much better. He’s loving this, and I think the ‘bit’ I’ve got to follow is a good one. That’s my boy! You churn that slop and kick up the filth, the pigs don’t seem to care. That’s right, one last dash, extra fast, splash, splosh, wallop.

“Excellent, Dylan.” Well worth a pat on the back. “Now hand your Papi the rope. Clean end, please!” So far, so good; he’s got that look on his face like the first time he ever saw a washing machine mid-cycle. Just keep his gaze on the rope and away from those carrots. And hold it like it has to be an arm’s length away.

“This is Hollywood.”

Perfect: a pregnant pause, and two big eyes staring at pig-shit at the end of a rope. “See, now, let’s say that every inch of this rope, from one end to the other, equals ten films that Hollywood makes every year… And depending on how clean the rope is, that’s how good the movies are.”

“…”

“So, look. This end here, the bit you were really pulling through the mud, is…”

“Really poopy.”

“Exactly! A good couple of feet absolutely smothered in horrible brown pig-muck and thick, sloppy mud… Hollywood makes all those films, but none of them are any good at all. Not even a little bit. But see this stretch in the middle? Kind of splattery, right – but getting nicer closer to where my hand is. All those films are what?”

“Less poopy.”

“That’s right, son. Less poopy but still a little poopy… Wait, though. There’s one last bit of rope. Here – the bit that you were holding on to. See how clean that is?”

“Uh huh.”

“This tiny bunch of films are what make Hollywood so important. And – promise you don’t tell mom I used a rude word today – no matter how much shit on the rope there is, there’s always a wonderful clean bit at the end.”

Good lad, he’s taking it all in, storing this like a squirrel nuts in the winter.

“Can we get some lunch now?”

Ha. “Ok. But none of that yellow cheese sauce with your fries.”

Who knows, maybe someday he’ll be lucky enough to live in a world where there’s no such thing.

***

And Tropic Thunder? An easy film to agree on watching with family over the Holidays in New Jersey, but thoroughly middle of the rope, toward the end that whiffs of what was only pig food once upon a time. Of course it could have been so much better, but try telling the people who made it. No, please do. Tell them a dizzy budget dulls the edge of satire. Tell them that in-jokes about actors farting in fat suits is something less than satire. Tell them how Jack Black’s witless gurning is no substitute for jokes. Tell them, for the sake of my unborn child who will one day, if the stars may twinkle so, love the movies like his father does now, that a good idea is always and forever a good script away from being a good film. That even a short flick can sag some without support enough in the middle. That being a popular sort in Hollywood might secure a decent cameo or two, but ultimately, if you want your work to outlast the short moment of its immediate reception, you’re better off having friends in front of the screen than on it. Even if a little spark here and there – an on-form Downey Jr., Steve Coogan and Tom Cruise having a ball – gets you, just an inch or so, above the lowly mass. Tell them; someone should.