Tag: Throwback August

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Throwback August: Brokeback Mountain

To talk about Brokeback Mountain today is to bring up two separate things: Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning epic about forbidden love in the American West, and “gay cowboy movie” memes. It is unfortunate but not surprising that Brokeback Mountain is more memorable for its sound clips (who hasn’t said “I wish I knew how to quit you” to a slice of pizza?) than for its cinematic achievement.

Brokeback Mountain is a movie about gay cowboys, but that’s sort of like saying Titanic is a movie about boating hazards. Brokeback is a love story, told with the simultaneous drama and reserve of Annie Proulx’s original short story. Proulx describes the mountain where Jack and Ennis meet as “boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone.” Lee’s cinematography likewise describes the men’s love through focus on the natural; their entanglement as uncontrollable and unpredictable as a summer hail storm.

Heath Leger as Ennis Del Mar

Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway all brought incredible performances. This is a big reason that Brokeback stands out from the crowd of mid-2000s movies with gay storylines: Transamerica (2005), My Summer of Love (2004), Far From Heaven (2002), and Wild Tigers I Have Known (2006.) All good films with good actors, but none that carried the emotional heat of Ledger’s “Jack, I swear” or Gyllenhall yelling, “This is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.”

Politically speaking, we can see that Brokeback unquestionably presaged the current visibility and successes of the gay rights movement. But with visibility and political actualization, there is a loss of some specialness, the “otherwise” character of gay life. It is possible to read Brokeback Mountain simultaneously as a break-out moment for gay rights and a movie that said gayness was most palatable from straight-passing, white cowboys.

Jack Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist

Regardless, Brokeback is an incredible film, work of art deserving of the accolades it received. It did something important to undermine Ennis tragic mantra: “If you can’t fix it; you’ve got to stand it.” 10 years on we can say with more honesty than ever before: you do have to stand it, unless you don’t. 

Throwback August: Brokeback Mountain

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Throwback August: Casino

Robert De Niro as Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein

Casino (1995; dir. Martin Scorsese)—Heavily edited, poorly dubbed, grotesquely commercial-breaked TV versions of Casino sadden me. I’m happy that Scorsese’s best film continues to rumble across the basic cable landscape in various shapes and sizes at various times of day because exhibition and syndication play a major role in pop-cultural canon formation. But a sanitized version of Casino makes little sense because indiscretion and tastelessness are two of its cardinal virtues.

Trade secrets about the gaming industry and the workings of the Midwestern mob, violent confrontations involving power tools and baseball bats, an endless parade of pastel-colored custom suits so gaudy they threaten to burn out your rods and cones —there’s simply too much in this vulgar American epic to absorb in one sitting. Add in the dueling voiceover narrations, the hold-your-breath instances when the camera rushes at characters like an attack dog, and the car-bomb explosions of raunchy absurdist wit, and you’re likely to feel lost.

Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna

The soundtrack does its best to disorient you, too; Casino’s nonstop music (62 songs are listed in its closing credits) is analogous to the constant electronic chatter of slots and video poker machines cluttering nearly every real casino floors. Given so many opportunities to choreograph miniature music videos within the frame of his story, Scorsese engineers perhaps his greatest pop epiphany—a long sequence where a pair of card cheats get taken down as Jeff Beck’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” wails in the background.

But give the movie the time and attention it needs and you’ll start to get it. Then you might start to love it. Casino is Scorsese’s Physical Graffiti, his 2666, his three-hour, thirty-course tasting menu that will set you back an entire paycheck if you add the beverage pairings, which you might as well because you’ve come this far. It is also a vision of craps-table capitalism unfolding in a multicultural American frontier where mobsters, bookies, cowboys, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Irishmen and anyone else who wants a piece of the pie can get in on the action if they’re willing to play.

Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro

Although the three principal characters—gambler/casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), mobster/hellspawn Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and hustler/addict Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone)—are assholes, their long, painful falls from grace matter because their bosses are much, much worse. Which is why Casino now plays as an apt and timeless statement about the apparently untouchable gangsters responsible for the current (and no doubt future) financial crises bilking us out of our money whether we like it or not. “It’s a pity in this state that we have such hypocrisy,” says Rothstein late in the film. “Some people can do whatever they want; other people have to pay through the nose. But such is life.”

Grade: A+

Throwback August: Casino

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Throwback August: Friday

We’re up to 1995 in our Throwback August series, and that means it’s Friday.

The current king of the multiplex is Straight Outta Compton, the story of hip hop pioneers NWA. See this week’s Memphis Flyer for a full review of the movie that has smashed box office expectations at every turn. That film was produced, in part, by NWA founding member Ice Cube, and directed by F. Gary Gray. When we last see Cube, he’s writing on a hilariously out-of-date laptop on the screenplay of Friday, the project that launched both of their film careers.

Friday is often referred to as a cult classic, but I’m not sure that’s accurate, because that cult would extend to virtually everyone who has had a DVD player in the last twenty years. It did 9 times its $3.5 million budget at the box office, and made a whole lot more than that on home video. There’s no doubt, however, that it is an under recognized classic of the 90s indie film revolution.

The film Friday most closely resembles is Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which made its way to theaters in 1994. Cube stars as Craig Jones, a young Los Angeles man who just lost his job, despite it being his day off—shades of Dante Hicks’s complaint that “I’m not even supposed to be here!” in Clerks. Inspired by Smith, Cube and Gray use a loose, episodic structure to create what is essentially a comedy of manners. Craig and his friend Smokey (Chris Tucker) hang out on his front porch and watch the neighborhood go by, painting a finely observed portrait of a predominantly black Los Angeles neighborhood. Like the underemployed slackers in Clerks, Craig and Smokey are lovable, lower-class losers. But since they live in the hood, the stakes are higher for them than for Dante, Jay, and Silent Bob. The Clerks are trying to get a date and find meaning in shit jobs. Between stoner gags, Craig and Smokey are dodging murderous drug dealers and trying not to get killed.

The other film influence bubbling up in Friday is Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. There’s a not-so-subtle anti-gun violence message in Cube’s script, but when it veers from observational humor into full on Mookie should-he or shouldn’t-he start the riot territory in the end, it seems forced and lacks Lee’s gravitas. Twenty years later, in Straight Outta Compton, Cube’s attempts at social commentary are much more effective.

Cube is a natural actor, completely confident on screen and not afraid to show vulnerability. Chris Tucker’s deliciously over-the-top performance is somewhere between pantomime and break dancing. By the time Rush Hour rolled around in 1998, his schtick would become tiresome, but here, he’s exactly the hyperactive friend Craig needs.

Throwback August: Friday (2)

There are some other great performances, such as the late Bernie Mac as the jive talking Pastor Clever and John Witherspoon’s immortal take as the Craig’s vulgar, food-obsessed father. But besides Anna May Horsford as Craig’s mother, female roles are thin—a fault Straight Outta Compton shares.

The heart of the indie movement is that the art of filmmaking should not and can not be contained by access to capital. Cube took that emerging ethos and ran with it hard. If you can scrounge up a camera, a light kit, and some friends, there’s nothing stopping you from making your own version of Friday right now. Since the digital revolution, which would begin to be felt three years after Friday, you’ll even have it easier than Cube and Gray. But don’t be surprised if your movie isn’t as good as Friday, because hey, you’re not Ice Cube. 

Throwback August: Friday

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Throwback August: Back To The Future

I’ll preface this by saying that I had never seen Back to the Future before last night (I know, I know.) I loved it. I am basking in its glow. I wish that every movie made in 2015 was erased from time with the help of a flux capacitor and replaced with Back to the Future.

Usually in time travel movies, funny or serious, the characters return to their own time with some sort of overarching moral lesson gained from the time where they have been. It is an annoying failing of most time travel-y fictions that they are basically nine parts “A Christmas Carol” and one part science fiction. “Wow,” says every character ever, “my harrowing trip back to the Middle Ages sure did teach me the true JOY of life.” Gross.

Down with moralizing and Dickensian visions of time travel! Up with fun! Up with Christopher Lloyd! I was cautioned, going into my first ever viewing of Back to the Future that it is “a perfect movie.” I agree. It feels remarkably new, probably because no one has yet figured out how to make fun of 1985 better than Back to the Future did in 1985. When is that ever true? Have we learned nothing from Back to the Future? How do movies like The Lake House, the magic time-bending mailbox movie from 2006, even get made?

National treasure Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in Back To The Future

Maybe it holds up so well because we never tire of a good Oedipus story. Or maybe it is because Christopher Lloyd is an alien genius sent to earth to help us all. But probably it is just because of the moment when Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) asks Doc Brown, incredulously, “You made a time machine out of a DeLorean?” (Doc Brown responds “If you’re going to build a time machine out of a car why not do it with some style?”)

The most stylish time machine ever built.

I love the vision of the dopey, middle American family who bakes a parole cake for their uncle. I love how, when Marty returns to 1985 from 1955, he immediately runs into a bum and an erotic cinema and exclaims, “Great! Everything looks great!” Back to the Future gets the formula right: to make a movie that is both funny and heartfelt, you need not waste your time figuring out characters transformative emotional journeys or any of that yada yada. You just need 1.21 gigawatts of honest-to-god Christopher Lloydian imagination, and you will be good. 

Throwback August: Back To The Future

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Throwback August: Ran

Ran (1985; dir. Akira Kurosawa)—Kurosawa’s final samurai epic is a furious, inarticulate howl of anguish that builds for nearly three hours until its irrefutable argument is finally given voice by an angry soldier: “Men prefer sorrow over peace. They revel in pain and bloodshed. They celebrate murder.”

Such a truth would hardly be worth thinking about unless the world was worth saving. And it is; there is a great, severe beauty suffusing the hills, meadows and treeless plains where Kurosawa sets his version of King Lear. These serene visions of nature only heighten the tragedy that unfolds when elderly Lord Hidetoro (Tatsuya Nakadai) declares his wish to divide his kingdom and live out the rest of his days in peace. As one of Hidetoro’s sons points out, this dream is incompatible with the kingdom his father forged by spilling “measureless blood.” Yet Hidetoro continues to believe that his delusional dreams will become reality. He will live long enough to see the ramifications of his foolishness.

Nakadai’s barking, wildly expressionist performance as Hidetoro (who grows more gray and spectral as Ran death-marches on) is contrasted with Mieko Harada’s scarily erotic turn as the scheming Lady Kaede, who sees her father-in-law’s dotage as an opportunity to enact her long-simmering revenge. She drops into Ran like a hawk that finally catches its prey in an unguarded moment, yet the only instance of wit in the entire film comes when she squashes a moth during a fake crying jag.

Throwback August: Ran (2)

There are two major battles in Ran, and the first one is worth every fight scene in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a dozen Fury Road sequels. As Hidetoro and his guards are ambushed by two of his three sons, the whirr of insects, the swish of robes and the thunder of horses’ hooves that have dappled the soundtrack so far are silenced. Toro Takemitsu’s score takes over; Kurosawa assembles a montage of blood, dismemberment and devastation punctuated by shots of the sun visible through an ocean of smoke. After nearly six minutes, the sounds of the real world return with a gunshot that uselessly takes another life.

I was fortunate enough to see the 25th anniversary revival of Ran when it played select theaters in 2010. But even if you could see it on a screen wider than the sky, you that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Grade: A+

Throwback August: Ran

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Throwback August: Brazil

This week we’re tackling films from 1985 on Throwback August, which means I get an opportunity to write about one of my favorite films of all times, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

The production of Brazil is one of the most infamous and convoluted stories in all of Hollywood lore. Gilliam, Monty Python’s resident animator, had embarked on a solo directing career as the legendary comedy troupe went their separate ways. With the Python cache and the 1981 sci fi/fantasy hit Time Bandits under his belt, betting on Gilliam’s fevered imagination seemed reasonable to Twentieth Century Fox. It was 1984, so naturally Orwell was in the air. What would be the most successful screen adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian classic was already in production, and Gilliam promised a modernized take on the themes of surveillance and oppression with the trademark Python satirical bent. He delivered all that and more—it’s also a Christmas movie.

Johnathon Pryce as Sam Lowery in one of Brazil’s dream sequences.

Costs ballooned during filming, as Gilliam added elaborate dream sequences and fussed over the details of the production design. The final tally was three times as much as Time Bandits, and when the producers saw Gilliam’s cut, they belatedly remembered the old Broadway saw “satire closes on Saturday night.” The epic pissing match over the the final cut and the release are detailed in the book The Battle Of Brazil, but Gilliam found himself facing every director’s worst nightmare, and not for the last time in his career.

Pryce and Michael Palin as Jack Lint in Brazil‘s climactic torture scene.

The film, hurt by the bad publicity and buried by the petulant studio, lost money on its initial release, but it quickly established a cult audience, and has had an enormous impact on filmmaking for the last 30 years. During a recent screening at the Brooks Museum, the story of daydreaming bureaucratic lackey Sam Lowery’s (Jonathan Pryce) struggle to keep his identity, do the right thing, and find the woman of his dreams still resonates in strongly in 2015. Particularly prescient are the themes of the unnamed society’s information economy as a means of both financial exploitation and social control— a banner in the Ministry Of Information offices reads “Information The Key To Prosperity”.

Gilliam used production design to convey thematic information.

Lowery and the other hero, the mysterious, rogue HVAC repairman Harry Tuttle (an unrecognizable Robert DeNiro), are both tech whizzes disdained and manipulated by the privileged ruling class. A seemingly senseless and endless War on Terror provides the low hum of paranoia that pervades the film’s action and gives gentleman torturer Jack Lint (Python Michael Palin, in his best film role) his wealth and status. Terrorist bombings are just part of the background of life in this dystopian society, like we now routinely make a public show of getting upset about the latest mass shooting but then go on about our business.

Robert DeNiro as revolutionary HVAC repairman Harry Tuttle.

The notion that the terrorist attacks might all be faked as a way to keep the ruling class in power is also present. When truck driver and Lowery’s object of affection Jill Layton (Kim Griest) asks, “How many terrorists have you actually met?”, she could be speaking to us. That, and the scene where Information Retrieval shock troops arrest Sam and Jill in mid-tryst are two of the many direct allusions to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Kim Greist as Jill Layton

But Brazil has bigger fish to fry. In its final act, it becomes a inquiry into the nature of reality itself. Gilliam takes his endgame from the Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge”, where much of the action presented as real in the story turns out to be hallucinations of the dying protagonist. It’s one of my most hated fictional gambits, because it’s usually a cheap trick on the part of an author who has written himself into a corner. And yet, Gilliam makes it work in Brazil because it serves his bigger themes: As the elites gain increasing power to work their will on the individual, the mind is the only preserve of freedom we have left. 

Throwback August: Brazil