My Fair Lady (USA, 1964, George Cukor) AKA Isn't She Loverly?
Another one I’ll be taking a more substantive swipe at over on Apollo Guide, it’s probably no accident that I watched this the day after catching all that French comedy of manners material and embarking on some sorta misguided rant on the theatrical slant of mid-20th Century French film. Based, of course, of Bernard Shaw’s clever social critique Pygmalion, My Fair Lady gives us director George Cukor as he nears the end of an illustrious career, and boy does it show. The film is sometimes tortuously slow, and suffers from a real plodding direction; Cukor rarely uses the camera to help him do the storytelling. At nearly 3 hours in length, I think the film might be best enjoyed in 60 or at most 90 minute chunks. Otherwise, I fear that yer going to find yerself nodding off. But, still and all despite these complaints, the film is pretty fun, and certainly boasts some great music by Lerner an Loewe. Oddly enough, two non-singers (Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn) were chosen to play the leads in this musical (Hepburn’s vocals were dubbed, Harrison did his talking-singing thang), but the sparring between the urbane Rex Harrison and the ever-gorgeous Audrey Hepburn is so genuinely funny, and Harrison’s eventual comeuppance in a well-choreographed character diminution so satisfying that this complaint pretty much fades into the background by film’s end. Visually the film doesn’t stand the test of time particularly well, but the charisma of the leads, the gratifying (if poorly paced) story arc and the hummable tunes allow us to get past some of the film’s cinematic weaknesses. Academy voters are real suckers for this brand of dully prestigious moviemaking (see also Roman Holiday, starring a younger version of this very same Audrey Hepburn), though, and the film went on to win 8 Academy Awards, including one for Cukor as best director, which seems ridiculous in retrospect, but what the hell do I know? (btw, that’s what we call a "rhetorical question" so keep yer wise-ass remarks to yerself, ok?)
Score: 72/100
Wherein bon vivant Ben Livant and I (Dan Jardine) speak our minds about movies, mostly.
Friday, February 20, 2004
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Cinema Français AKA Les Twits Gallic
To be discussed:
Beauty and the Beast (France, 1946, Cocteau)
Les Dames du Bois Boulougne (France, 1945, Bresson)
Drole de Drame (France, 1937, Carne)
Well, I’ve just spent the day with some of the best that mid-20th Century French cinema has to offer, and with a renewed sense of joie de vivre, feeling ever so the bon vivant, but mixed with a curious sense of je ne sais crois, it’s all, in the words of the late and near-great 70s Canuck band The Stampeders, "Bon ci, bon, bon ci, bon, bon, bon ci, bon, bon, bon, bon, bon." Now before I exhaust my entire arsenal of high school French bon mots, let’s get down to the business at hand.
Yesterday I whiled away the hours re-watching Cocteau’s magical Beauty and the Beast, and catching for the first time Robert Bresson’s sophomore film, the melodramatic Le Dames du Bois Boulogne as well as Michel Carne’s wacky farce Drole de Drame. I’ll be publishing some slightly more serious, full-length reviews on the films for Apollo Guide in the very near future, but for now I just wanna offer up a few vague comments on the overall general aesthetic at work in these here flicks.
On the surface these three very different films would seem to have very little in common, as they vary in tone and intent from modern fairy tale to barbed turgid melodrama to old fashioned screwball satire, but it only takes a tiny scratch beneath the surface to see that each shares a common interest in studying social artifice; each film shares some pithy commentary on people’s external attributes such as clothing, dialect and bearing which we often use to identify with and/or separate and distinguish ourselves from each other. This is in many ways a theatrical concern, as what we look like, how we dress and carry ourselves and how we speak is the business of directors and actors, who often pick these sortsa things apart in the most picayune detail in the course of doing their jobs as entertainers. All three filmmakers (Cocteau, Bresson, Carne) had extensive backgrounds in the theatre, and this certainly must have helped make them particularly effective commentators on the kinds of social distinctions that are the scaffolding of society. To continue the metaphor, while these directors understand that these types of external differences contribute virtually nothing to the vital infrastructure which bind us and around which we build our society, such as the common values and basic humanity, these final facades of society’s architecture are the first things we notice about, and employ to judge, each other.
All three directors also understand the potentially debilitating result of placing too much importance on, for lack of a better word, appearances, and all three present us with visions of a social and personal dysfunction that are largely a result of an over-reliance on surface matters to determine what is valuable. In Cocteau’s film, Belle must learn to love the beauty inside the beast in order to find true happiness, while in Bresson’s film, Jean has to get past his beloved’s past if he is going to find the bliss he seeks, and in Carne’s film, which was released the same year as Jean Renoir's similar, though more incisive and cutting indictment of aristocratic twit-dom The Rules of the Game, the upper classes are pretty much doomed to live in comic self-annihilation because of their pre-eminent desire to keep up appearances and avoid scandal, regardless of the cost. Also cutting across all three films is a clear indictment of a class-based system that uses such banal and superficial ways to evaluate people’s worth, and condemns as largely irrelevant the upper classes who merely skate across the surface of life and, in the words of Oscar Wilde, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
While Cocteau’s film is easily the class of the bunch, aesthetically speaking, Carne’s film is a mostly successful attempt to do something atypical (he’s more of a tragedian) and Bresson’s film, while one of his lesser efforts, still has great value. It’s interesting that they appeared on the scene just before, during and after the Second World War as France, like much of Europe, struggled to find its feet in a modernizing world that was leaving behind the old world of privilege and entering a brave new world driven by the economic engine of capitalism.
Or, as some of us might view it, leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
To be discussed:
Beauty and the Beast (France, 1946, Cocteau)
Les Dames du Bois Boulougne (France, 1945, Bresson)
Drole de Drame (France, 1937, Carne)
Well, I’ve just spent the day with some of the best that mid-20th Century French cinema has to offer, and with a renewed sense of joie de vivre, feeling ever so the bon vivant, but mixed with a curious sense of je ne sais crois, it’s all, in the words of the late and near-great 70s Canuck band The Stampeders, "Bon ci, bon, bon ci, bon, bon, bon ci, bon, bon, bon, bon, bon." Now before I exhaust my entire arsenal of high school French bon mots, let’s get down to the business at hand.
Yesterday I whiled away the hours re-watching Cocteau’s magical Beauty and the Beast, and catching for the first time Robert Bresson’s sophomore film, the melodramatic Le Dames du Bois Boulogne as well as Michel Carne’s wacky farce Drole de Drame. I’ll be publishing some slightly more serious, full-length reviews on the films for Apollo Guide in the very near future, but for now I just wanna offer up a few vague comments on the overall general aesthetic at work in these here flicks.
On the surface these three very different films would seem to have very little in common, as they vary in tone and intent from modern fairy tale to barbed turgid melodrama to old fashioned screwball satire, but it only takes a tiny scratch beneath the surface to see that each shares a common interest in studying social artifice; each film shares some pithy commentary on people’s external attributes such as clothing, dialect and bearing which we often use to identify with and/or separate and distinguish ourselves from each other. This is in many ways a theatrical concern, as what we look like, how we dress and carry ourselves and how we speak is the business of directors and actors, who often pick these sortsa things apart in the most picayune detail in the course of doing their jobs as entertainers. All three filmmakers (Cocteau, Bresson, Carne) had extensive backgrounds in the theatre, and this certainly must have helped make them particularly effective commentators on the kinds of social distinctions that are the scaffolding of society. To continue the metaphor, while these directors understand that these types of external differences contribute virtually nothing to the vital infrastructure which bind us and around which we build our society, such as the common values and basic humanity, these final facades of society’s architecture are the first things we notice about, and employ to judge, each other.
All three directors also understand the potentially debilitating result of placing too much importance on, for lack of a better word, appearances, and all three present us with visions of a social and personal dysfunction that are largely a result of an over-reliance on surface matters to determine what is valuable. In Cocteau’s film, Belle must learn to love the beauty inside the beast in order to find true happiness, while in Bresson’s film, Jean has to get past his beloved’s past if he is going to find the bliss he seeks, and in Carne’s film, which was released the same year as Jean Renoir's similar, though more incisive and cutting indictment of aristocratic twit-dom The Rules of the Game, the upper classes are pretty much doomed to live in comic self-annihilation because of their pre-eminent desire to keep up appearances and avoid scandal, regardless of the cost. Also cutting across all three films is a clear indictment of a class-based system that uses such banal and superficial ways to evaluate people’s worth, and condemns as largely irrelevant the upper classes who merely skate across the surface of life and, in the words of Oscar Wilde, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
While Cocteau’s film is easily the class of the bunch, aesthetically speaking, Carne’s film is a mostly successful attempt to do something atypical (he’s more of a tragedian) and Bresson’s film, while one of his lesser efforts, still has great value. It’s interesting that they appeared on the scene just before, during and after the Second World War as France, like much of Europe, struggled to find its feet in a modernizing world that was leaving behind the old world of privilege and entering a brave new world driven by the economic engine of capitalism.
Or, as some of us might view it, leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
TIME FOR SOME TELEVISUAL FEASTING
Six Feet Under (Season One) (2001, Alan Ball creator) AKA American Gothic Park
Okay, so I liked American Beauty well enough, despite some of the affectations of self-importance that threatened to sink the beast, to look forward to this here televisual feast. Of course, I wasn’t so eager to see it that I actually made a pt of catching it when it played on the tube. Still and all, I sat down with the entire first season on dvd to see what I’d missed out on first time ‘round, and found myself, much as I was with AB, pretty entertained most of the time, though occasionally distracted by some of the series concessions to TV conventions, like the belief that character’s stories hafta wrap up tidily, if not within a single show, certainly over the course of the season.
Still, I admit that the idea that you can learn a lot about life by watching people who must deal with death on a pretty much daily basis is something I can get behind as a premise, and something that Ball & Co. do a pretty decent job of making consistently compelling and engaging, even if (again) they sometimes bail out just as things are getting really interesting—which happens a few times w/ the series most interesting character, Dave the tightly-wound gay mortician, played so very well by Michael C. Hall, whose struggles to come to some peace w/ himself over his homosexuality while also trying to (a) run a "respectable" business (b) be a deacon in a conservative church give the series some of its best moments, such as Dave’s nighttime excursions into the some of the seedier aspects of life in the gay community which contrast mighty effectively w/ his uptight white guy routine during the day.
However, I hafta say that the show got off to a rocky start for me when it killed off my favourite cast member in the opening scene of episode one. That would be the great Richard Jenkins, who plays the family patriarch of the Fisher and Sons Funeral Home, gets pole-axed by a bus while cruising around in his hearse and lying to his wife on the phone about his smoking habit (spawns of Satan smoking AND cell phones are both equally to blame for the accident). Happily, Richard reappears throughout the rest of the season as a wisecracking ghostly version of Father Knows Best, so my mourning was brief. Also easing the pain was the sight of the gloriously gorgeous and whip smart Rachel Griffiths only a few scenes later. Her storyline isn’t all that fascinating, though—she’s brilliant but neurotic, due to the mishandling of her rich but cruelly exploitative parents (nice to see Joanna Cassidy still getting regular work. She just kicks ass here as Rachel’s sodden, flirtatious mom), who happens to be the only friend in the world of her very fucked up bipolar brother (Jeremy Sisto, who never met a piece of scenery he didn’t wanna chew) who seems to be just a little bit too comfortable with his near-naked male form while in her presence, at least according to her new "boyfriend," Nate Fisher (Dave’s brother), whose played with merely adequate charm and range by Peter Krause (whose resemblance to Max Headroom is consistently distracting) the guy she boinked in the airport, but whose name she didn’t quite catch at the time (do not try to write sentences like that w/o the aid of structural engineers and serious loads of duct tape). Ball tries hard to make their romance edgy and quirky, but it really comes off as warmed over soap opera material, which is a shame given the level of acting chops he’s got at his disposal with Rachel Griffiths (did I mention she’s not only really hot but smart as hell to boot?)
Lurking around the edges of the family is little sister Fisher, Claire (Lauren Ambrose) whose teenaged angst-riddled storyline might remind you just a little of Thora Birch’s character in AB. Now, Lauren is no Thora, but she IS cute, and does a reasonable job of imitating her for TV. Claire’s obviously much smarter and cooler than her peers, and what she’s doing with that Gabriel schmuck I’ll never know, but Claire’s a cool cat, and she’ll figure it all out. Gabriel, on the other hand, is on the fast track to Nowheresville, so it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine them together for more than the second it would take her to cut his sorry ass to ribbons, metaphorically speaking. The fussy Mom Fischer, played by the lovely Frances Conroy, has her own demons to conquer, as she seethes with guilt over the affair she had with her hairdresser, but hid from her hubby, who must surely be looking on in judgement, she fears. Soon, she’s balancing the attentions of two men (the hairdresser, played w/ predictable punctiliousness by Ed Begley Jr., and her virile and bear-like Russian boss, played with great warmth by Ed O’Ross), though it’s a pretty easy call from where I’m standing.
So anyways, that’s just some of the action of this here show, which lets us see that for some the daily reminder of death acts as a stimulant, challenging them to really grab the best out of each day, while for others it is a depressant, sapping them of the will to carry on in the face of the great yawning maw of mortality. Sometimes the show’s a bit too pat and sitcom-dramedy for my tastes, which may be a result of making above mentioned concessions to the reality of producing television series for mass consumption, I dunno. But when the show gets a little ragged, and drags issues across storylines, as it does particularly well with Dave’s character, that’s when it gets really interesting and starts kicking around ideas and issues that give the show heft. All in all, it has certainly whet my appetite for season two, and I’ll certainly make a pt of picking it up when it is released on dvd. Eventually.
Score: 77/100
Six Feet Under (Season One) (2001, Alan Ball creator) AKA American Gothic Park
Okay, so I liked American Beauty well enough, despite some of the affectations of self-importance that threatened to sink the beast, to look forward to this here televisual feast. Of course, I wasn’t so eager to see it that I actually made a pt of catching it when it played on the tube. Still and all, I sat down with the entire first season on dvd to see what I’d missed out on first time ‘round, and found myself, much as I was with AB, pretty entertained most of the time, though occasionally distracted by some of the series concessions to TV conventions, like the belief that character’s stories hafta wrap up tidily, if not within a single show, certainly over the course of the season.
Still, I admit that the idea that you can learn a lot about life by watching people who must deal with death on a pretty much daily basis is something I can get behind as a premise, and something that Ball & Co. do a pretty decent job of making consistently compelling and engaging, even if (again) they sometimes bail out just as things are getting really interesting—which happens a few times w/ the series most interesting character, Dave the tightly-wound gay mortician, played so very well by Michael C. Hall, whose struggles to come to some peace w/ himself over his homosexuality while also trying to (a) run a "respectable" business (b) be a deacon in a conservative church give the series some of its best moments, such as Dave’s nighttime excursions into the some of the seedier aspects of life in the gay community which contrast mighty effectively w/ his uptight white guy routine during the day.
However, I hafta say that the show got off to a rocky start for me when it killed off my favourite cast member in the opening scene of episode one. That would be the great Richard Jenkins, who plays the family patriarch of the Fisher and Sons Funeral Home, gets pole-axed by a bus while cruising around in his hearse and lying to his wife on the phone about his smoking habit (spawns of Satan smoking AND cell phones are both equally to blame for the accident). Happily, Richard reappears throughout the rest of the season as a wisecracking ghostly version of Father Knows Best, so my mourning was brief. Also easing the pain was the sight of the gloriously gorgeous and whip smart Rachel Griffiths only a few scenes later. Her storyline isn’t all that fascinating, though—she’s brilliant but neurotic, due to the mishandling of her rich but cruelly exploitative parents (nice to see Joanna Cassidy still getting regular work. She just kicks ass here as Rachel’s sodden, flirtatious mom), who happens to be the only friend in the world of her very fucked up bipolar brother (Jeremy Sisto, who never met a piece of scenery he didn’t wanna chew) who seems to be just a little bit too comfortable with his near-naked male form while in her presence, at least according to her new "boyfriend," Nate Fisher (Dave’s brother), whose played with merely adequate charm and range by Peter Krause (whose resemblance to Max Headroom is consistently distracting) the guy she boinked in the airport, but whose name she didn’t quite catch at the time (do not try to write sentences like that w/o the aid of structural engineers and serious loads of duct tape). Ball tries hard to make their romance edgy and quirky, but it really comes off as warmed over soap opera material, which is a shame given the level of acting chops he’s got at his disposal with Rachel Griffiths (did I mention she’s not only really hot but smart as hell to boot?)
Lurking around the edges of the family is little sister Fisher, Claire (Lauren Ambrose) whose teenaged angst-riddled storyline might remind you just a little of Thora Birch’s character in AB. Now, Lauren is no Thora, but she IS cute, and does a reasonable job of imitating her for TV. Claire’s obviously much smarter and cooler than her peers, and what she’s doing with that Gabriel schmuck I’ll never know, but Claire’s a cool cat, and she’ll figure it all out. Gabriel, on the other hand, is on the fast track to Nowheresville, so it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine them together for more than the second it would take her to cut his sorry ass to ribbons, metaphorically speaking. The fussy Mom Fischer, played by the lovely Frances Conroy, has her own demons to conquer, as she seethes with guilt over the affair she had with her hairdresser, but hid from her hubby, who must surely be looking on in judgement, she fears. Soon, she’s balancing the attentions of two men (the hairdresser, played w/ predictable punctiliousness by Ed Begley Jr., and her virile and bear-like Russian boss, played with great warmth by Ed O’Ross), though it’s a pretty easy call from where I’m standing.
So anyways, that’s just some of the action of this here show, which lets us see that for some the daily reminder of death acts as a stimulant, challenging them to really grab the best out of each day, while for others it is a depressant, sapping them of the will to carry on in the face of the great yawning maw of mortality. Sometimes the show’s a bit too pat and sitcom-dramedy for my tastes, which may be a result of making above mentioned concessions to the reality of producing television series for mass consumption, I dunno. But when the show gets a little ragged, and drags issues across storylines, as it does particularly well with Dave’s character, that’s when it gets really interesting and starts kicking around ideas and issues that give the show heft. All in all, it has certainly whet my appetite for season two, and I’ll certainly make a pt of picking it up when it is released on dvd. Eventually.
Score: 77/100
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