25 Nisan 2014 Cuma
When I was a kid in the ‘70s I first became aware of writer/director John Milius when I read that he was the inspiration for the character of John Milner, the drag racing greaser played by Paul Le Mat, in George Lucas’ 1973 classic AMERICAN GRAFFITI. The fact that that piece of trivia isn’t even mentioned in Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson’s 2013 biodoc MILIUS, currently streaming on Netflix Instant, just attests to what a richly layered life the mythical maverick filmmaker has led.
From coming up with Dirty Harry’s best known dialogue (the “‘Do do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” speech) to crafting the Oscar nominated screenplay for APOCALYPSE NOW to upsetting liberal Hollywood with his cold war opus RED DAWN - just to name a few highlights - the ultra manly Milius's contributions to modern cinema form a colossal career, in which as THE GODFATHER producer Al Ruddy tells us in the intro, the man “had more movies made than any other writer in the history of Hollywood.”
It all began in the ‘60s shortly after Milius was crushed by being rejected by the Marine Corps because of his asthma (“I missed, you know, going to my war”), he wandered into a theater showing a week of the films of Akira Kurosawa. The Japanese filmmaker’s work made Milius realize that being a director was the “next best thing” to a military career.
Then he was off to USC (University of Southern California) where his classmates included George Lucas, Caleb Deschanel (father of Zoey Deschanel), Donald F. Glut, and Randall Kleiser (GREASE) - most of whom appear to provide interview soundbites throughout the film.
Milius was the first of these film-minded folk to achieve success when he was hired by AIP (American International Pictures), a studio that specialized in cheapie “teensploitation” productions. His first screenplay credit was on a rip-off of THE DIRTY DOZEN called THE DEVIL'S 8 (“they didn’t have enough money for a full dozen”).
Following that, Milius worked on the scripts of EVIL KNIEVEL (1971), DIRTY HARRY (1971), JEREMIAH JOHNSON (1972), THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN (1972), and his feature length directorial debut DILLINGER (1973).
Milius’ second movie, the 1975 adventure epic THE WIND AND THE LION, starring Sean Connery and Candice Bergen, garnered a few Academy Award nominations, but his third film, the 1978 coming-of-age surfing picture, BIG WEDNESDAY, flopped big-time (of course, it became a cult classic later).
Much more notable during that time were his iconic contributions to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 shark attack classic JAWS (Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis monologue), and Coppola’s massive 1979 mash-up of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and the Vietnam war, APOCALYPSE NOW. Can you get any more quotable than “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning,” or “Charlie don’t Surf”? I don’t think so.
“Everything memorable in APOCALYPSE NOW was invented by John Milius,” Coppola stresses.
Milius’ fourth film as director, the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger fantasy epic CONAN THE BARBARIAN (co-written by Oliver Stone) was a hit, but it was with his next film that things got pretty hairy.
1984’s RED DAWN, about a Russian invasion on American soil, polarized critics and got Milius ostracized from Hollywood for its pro-war stance. “Right-wing jingoism,” more than one critic called it.
There’s no getting around that the big beefy bearded gun nut - there are more photos here of Milius with machine guns, rifles, whatever firearm than you can count - rubbed a lot of people wrong. His following projects, FAREWELL TO THE KING, FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER, and the TV movie ROUGH RIDERS, were barely blips on the pop culture radar.
Figueroa and Knutson’s film gets a bit muddled around this point of the narrative, but regroups with the revelation that Milius suffered a stroke that left him unable to talk or write. A condition that Spielberg says was “the worst thing to happen to any of my friends.”
This obviously explains why there’s so much footage of Milius doing interviews from the ‘80s and ‘90s – a 1984 sit down is the most prominently featured. MILIUS left me feeling like every larger than life tough guy character of the modern film era was based on his powerful persona. Especially when his son Ethan and daughter Amanda talk about how much John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak in THE BIG LEBOWSKI reminded them of their father.
Hell, the man’s influence even stretched as far as inspiring the military code name of the U.S. Army’s capture of Sadam Hussein in 2003: “Operation Red Dawn.”
MILIUS is for the most part a fascinating and thoughtful look at the life of a macho force that can still be felt in the fantasy realm from Game of Thrones to THOR, and the amped-up egos of the overblown action movie genre. As his encouraging rehabilitation continues, I sure hope the man can finish his long gestating GENGHIS KHAN project. That would give his legend the satisfying epilogue that this biodoc only hints at.
More later...
7 Nisan 2014 Pazartesi
Now that Full Frame is over, I leap back into the world of mainstream movies with what's now the #1 movie at the box office:
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER
(Dirs. Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2014)
So apparently we’re now well into Phase 2 in the building of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The second phase began strongly last summer with IRON MAN 3, continued with the lackluster THOR: THE DARK WORLD, and now hits its highest point with CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, a sequel which surpasses the 2011 original (CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER).
The iconic comic book character’s latest adventure is now in the hands of Anthony and Joe Russo, who are better known for their television work (Arrested Development, Community) than their film output (WELCOME TO COLINWOOD, YOU, ME & DUPREE). Working from a screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who wrote the first installment, the Russo brothers confidently take control with a soaring action film that actually has a compelling politically driven plot-line.
Chris Evans dons the red, white, and blue uniform and shield for his third appearance as the iconic super hero (fourth if you count his cameo in the THOR sequel last year) in this adventure that is set two years after the events of THE AVENGERS. We catch up with Evan’s Steve Rogers/Captain America working for S.H.I.E.LD. in Washington D.C. and trying to catch up with modern culture (he carries a notebook with a list of things he missed while he was in a cryogenic sleep state for 70 years that includes Moon Landing, Nirvana, Star Trek, Thai food, etc.).
In a stunning opening involving taking on French/Algerian pirates with on a hijacked naval vessel, Captain America catches Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) extracting electronic files from the ship’s computers, which disturbingly means S.H.I.E.L.D. Commander Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) had an ulterior motive for the mission.
Back at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, Fury debriefs Captain America about Project: Insight, which will send into space three huge “Helicarriers,” that are linked to spy satellites and have the capabilities to preemptively take out potential threats.
The project has been spearheaded by a cold calculating Robert Redford as World Security head Alexander Pierce, who it’s no Spoiler to say turns out to be the central villain – an agent of HYDRA, the terrorist organization Captain America fought in the first film.
An incredibly jolting car-chase sequence through the streets of D.C. ends with Fury being gunned down by a shadowy assassin, the Winter Soldier, whose face we can’t see. With Fury presumed dead to the world, our hero is left to protect the film’s MacGuffin, the USB flash drive that contains the encrypted data Johansson previously retrieved.
The ins and outs of the plot get a bit too complicated from here, but with its ginormous set piece scenes of explosive destruction (the mammoth annihilation of Tony Stark’s Malibu fortress in IRON MAN 3 has nothing on the climatic CGI spectacle here), you won’t care about keeping up with the twists.
As Captain America, Evans contributes a sharp stoically charming portrayal, one in which statuesque stiffness is a requirement of the job. Evans’ banter with Johansson is fun to watch, but his easy-going chemistry with charismatic newcomer Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson/Falcon (an old Marvel character making its first appearance in the franchise), is where his performance pops.
The film is enhanced by expanded roles for Jackson and Johansson, and Frank Grillo as a HYDRA henchman is an effective baddie (another Spoiler?), but Redford, probably ecstatic to have so much exposition after ALL IS LOST, is the real scene stealer. His part obviously pays homage to his role in Sydney Pollack’s 1975 political thriller THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, as does the movie’s dark themes of techno-paranoia, updated for our current climate.
It’s a testament to Markus and McFeely’s tight screenplay that these themes are crucial to the narrative and aren’t treated as background fodder. Its layered depth helps it transcend the standard super hero storyline structure, while still holding on the fun we’ve come to expect from the formula (on-the-nose one-liners, cross references, Stan Lee cameo, etc.).
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER is one of the best Marvel movies, with just the right amount of humor, thrills, and clever character interaction to keep both fans and casual movie-goers highly invested, right through to the signature stinger at the end of the credits.
More
later…
25 Mart 2014 Salı
Martin Scorsese's THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is definitely the biggest new release on Blu ray and DVD today. Sadly, the terrifically excessive story of New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), is only packaged with one Special Feature: a 17 minute featurette entitled “The Wolf Pack.” I understand not including the 2-part, 4-hour cut that was mentioned in many interviews as it was a rough version never intended to be the final vision, but some deleted scenes from it would've been nice. Read my review from last December.
As WOLF was one of Scorsese's funniest films, it's fitting that his 1982 comic commentary on fame, THE KING OF COMEDY, is also hitting Blu ray today in a 30th Anniversary Edition (just two years late!). The film, starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis, is one of my all-time favorites, so I'm glad to see that, unlike WOLF, is outfitted with such bonus material as nearly 40 minutes of Deleted and Extended Scenes, the 30 minute featurette “Tribeca Film Festival: A Conversation with Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis,” the 19 minute mini-doc “A Shot at the Top: The Making of THE KING OF COMEDY,” and original Theatrical Trailer.
Another great 2013 film, Paolo Sorrentino's THE GREAT BEAUTY, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film earlier this month, also releases today courtesy of the Criterion Collection. As with all Deluxe Criterion Editions, there is a plethora of Extras including a 13 minute video interview with star Toni Servillo, a 38 minute conversation with Italian film scholar Antonio Monda and Director Sorrentino, a 12 minute interview with screenwriter Umberto Contarello, 6 minutes of Deleted Scenes, the Trailer, and an illustrated booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Lopate.
Criterion is also dropping two undeniable classics on the popular Blu ray format this week: Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor's 1925 Harold Lloyd comedy THE FRESHMAN, and Igmar Bergman's 1966 psychological drama PERSONA.
Also out today on Blu ray and DVD: Sini Anderson's documentary about “riot grrl” Kathleen Hanna, THE PUNK SINGER, Ken Scott's lame Vince Vaughn comedy DELIVERY MAN; Larry Fessenden's horror flick BENEATH, Joe Massot's 1968 curiosity WONDERWALL (featuring music by George Harrison), Abel Ferrara's 1981 thriller MS. 45, and Asghar Farhadi's fascinating follow-up to his excellent 2011 Oscar winner A SEPARATION, THE PAST (my review).
More later...
24 Şubat 2014 Pazartesi
Now playing at an art house near you, in my case the Colony Theater in Raleigh:
IN SECRET (Dir. Charlie Stratton, 2013)
Charlie Stratton’s adaptation of Neal Bell’s stage play, which was based on the 1867 novel “Therese Racquin” by Émile Zola, is such an overwrought exercise with simplistic soap opera dialogue that it sometimes plays like a parody of an Victorian era romantic thriller. A very bad parody, that is.
Set in France in the 1860s, the story sets up Elizabeth Olsen as a woman trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage to a sickly Tom Felton (best known as Draco Malfoy in the HARRY POTTER films), that was arranged by Jessica Lange as Malfoy’s, I mean Felton’s cold evil-eyed mother. Lange is also Olsen’s aunt so there’s that.
I’ve often thought that Lange sometimes brings a mental instability to characters that don’t necessarily call for it, but this one sure does. The power she wields over Olsen is unexplained as I kept wondering why doesn’t the girl just run away when told she has to marry Felton? Olsen in an aside says she didn’t think she had the strength to make it on her own, but I’m not buying it.
Shortly after the couple and matriarch Lange move to Paris to open up a some sort of fabric shop (that never has any customers), while Felton works in an office, Oscar Isaac (currently starring as the title character in the Coen brothers’ INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS) pops up as a childhood friend of Felton’s. Isaac is a suave charming aspiring artist who Olsen falls madly in love with in a series of overly artsy soft focus sex scenes (one even has the light through a window glaring on the lens). Imagine gruff movie trailer announcer’s voice: “The love they had could only be shared…In Secret.”
Because of the times or whatever, Olsen and Isaac can’t just run away together so the word “accident” comes up regarding Felton, which is a shame because he’s the only one here with the appropriate accent. The three go on a boat trip that ends in murder as Isaac drowns Felton. We don’t see this happen except for fleeting flashbacks later in the film, but we get what happened when Olsen and Isaac come back wet and screaming, claiming that Felton was standing, dancing I think, and tipped the boat over.
Not sure why they felt it was necessary to show us a ghastly shot of Felton's corpse - it creeped me out more than it did Isaac when he went to the morgue to identify the body.
The lovers have to wait to get together or else they’ll be suspected for murder, and guess what, the heat has died off for some reason. The plotting gets more and more ludicrous in the last third, with Lange developing some disease that causes her to lose her voice so she’s unable to point out to anyone that Olsen and Isaac murdered her son. Lange even goes to the length to spell it out in messy ink on the store’s floor.
The swelling strings of Gabriel Yared's (THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, COLD MOUNTAIN) score try to intensify the events but come off as laughably bad as everything else.
When I’m watching a film that I know is an adaptation of a book I haven’t read, I sometimes find myself thinking ‘oh, this is probably a lot more compelling or plausible on the page.’ I thought that a lot during this film, but folks who’ve read the original novel may get a lot more out of it than me - I'm fairly certain Zola's text wasn't the trashy romance novel that this film makes it look like.
Stratton's full length feature directorial debut, IN SECRET is a dreadful melodrama, that wastes the energy of talented actors (for some reason they cast Mackenzie Crook, best known as Gareth from The Office UK, to just stand around and make obvious observations), while its contrivances waste the time of the audience. For sure, one of the first of the worst movies of the year.
More later...
10 Ocak 2014 Cuma
Opening today at a indie art house near you:
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
(Dirs. Ethan & Joen Coen, 2013)
We first meet the protagonist of the Coen brothers' 16th film performing at the Gaslight Cafe in the Greenwich Village of the early '60s. Bathed in white light, Oscar Isaacs' Llewyn Davis beautifully sings the traditional folk song “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” on the same stage that artists such as Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, and Bob Dylan cut their musical teeth.
The film sets out to capture the moment right before Dylan exploded on the scene; before the '60s really became the '60s and there were only faint whiffs of the revolution to come in the air.
Davis is caught in a shaky place in his crumbling career - his partner in a folk singing duo (Timlin and Davis) commited suicide, his solo album (also named “Inside Llewyn Davis”) isn't selling, and he has no fixed abode or even a winter coat. Davis also gets the news that he got his friend Jim's (Justin Timberlake) wife Jean (Carey Mulligan) pregnant so he has to come up with the money for an abortion.
Oh, and there's a cat he's saddled with because he accidentally let it loose from the last place he crashed.
Yep, it looks like Llewyn's life is getting dumped on in the same 'what does it all mean' manner that previous Coen character Minnesotan physics professor Larry Gobnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) had to contend with in their next to last film A SERIOUS MAN (2008).
At least Davis has his music to help get him through, but even that seems to be less and less comfort during these dour days. Especially as the music others are making seem to be catching on much more - in one scene a despondent Davis watches disgusted as a Gaslight audience starts singing along with Mulligan, Timberlake, and Stark Sands as a clean cut military man/folksinger on Hedy West's “500 Miles.”
Seeking new management in the form of F. Murray Abraham as Bud Grossman (based on Dylan manager Albert Grossman), Davis goes on a road trip with a spaced out beat poet (Garret Hedlund) and a surly jazz musician (John Goodman).
It's a gas to see Goodman back in a Coen brothers film after well over a decade (his last was O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? in 2000) amusingly berating Davis, his music, and cat (“Is that part of your act? Every time you play a C major he pukes a hairball?”) from the back seat.
The film takes some troubling turns which I won't spoil in this extended side trip, but nothing that I grew weary of like I'm hearing in some other critics' grumblings.
I'm incredibly biased both because I'm a big Coen brothers fan and can follow them down just about any tangent no matter how seemingly meaningless, and because I'm a huge fan of the era they're meticulously depicting here.
The Coens and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who they previously worked with on their segment for the short film anthology PARIS JE T' AIME (2006), used the iconic album cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan as an aesthetic reference point. The slightly faded blue and yellowish tint adds to the film authenticity in the exterior show covered street scenes, while the interior atmospheric lighting in the Gaslight bits made me feel like I was there at that historic time and place.
Despite the dead-on look of the film, and the wealth of great songs and performances throughout, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS may still be a tough sell to some folks because its title subject can be a bit of a dick who doesn't seem to be going anywhere. There is a definite humanity to him as he tries to do the right thing whether its dealing with the angry Mulligan's pregnancy or taking care of the cat, but neither approaches real redemption.
There's a lot to the fact that the film begins and ends with the same scene, but from different angles and a notably different addition to the soundtrack the second time around, involving Davis getting beaten up by a mysterious stranger in an alley behind the Gaslight.
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS may not be one of their all-time greats, but it's still one of the best films of year because the Coen brothers keenly capture the times right before they really went a-changin,' and their week in the life of a failing troubadour premise explains precisely why somebody would want to beat up a folksinger.
More later...
21 Kasım 2013 Perşembe
As today is the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Film Babble Blog looks back at the cinematic legacy of the history changing event:
I’m 44 years old, so I wasn’t alive when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But since the events of that tragic day in November of 1963, 50 years ago today, have been so thoroughly covered from every conceivable angle in countless movies, TV shows, and documentaries, not only do I feel like I was alive then; I feel as if I had actually been there smack dab in the middle of Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, on that fateful date with a better view of the historic hit than Abraham Zapruder had.
Oliver Stone’s 1991 conspiracy theory epic, JFK is largely to blame for planting such vivid yet false memories in my psyche, but it was an obscure film that I saw on television when I was a kid that laid the foundation. It was David Miller’s 1973 political thriller EXECUTIVE ACTION, the first film * produced about the assassination.
Told from the point of view of the evil men in power, including Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan as shadowy co-conspirators who plot Kennedy’s killing right down to the last detail, the low budget docudrama postulates many of the same theories, mostly having to do with alleged murderer Lee Harvey Oswald being a patsy, that Stone would later do up with higher production values in JFK.
EXECUTIVE ACTION largely drew upon the work of New York Legislator Mark Lane, whose 1966 bestselling book “Rush To Judgement” heavily criticized the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Throughout the ‘70s, the consensus that something much more sinister was up than what the public record allowed, was evident all over pop culture.
Alan J. Pakula's THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) defined the label “paranoid thriller” (see also Sydney Pollack's THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, 1975) by building upon assassination theories with a premise about an evil company (the Parallax Corporation) that's behind pivotal political plots. Warren Beatty plays a reporter that tries to unravel the conspiracy, but ends up being unwittingly trained to be an assassin himself. A scene in which Beatty is brainwashed by a recruiting film, satirized in Ben Stiller's ZOOLANDER, gives a good idea of the movie's sinister tone:
In Woody Allen’s Oscar winning 1977 comedy ANNIE HALL, comedian protagonist Alvy Singer obsesses over the possibility that there was a second assassin to the point that a girl he briefly dates (Carol Kane) states bluntly the he’s “using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid having sex” with her. This surely received a lot of laughter from hip in-the-know audiences at the time, since post Watergate distrust of the government was at an all time high.
That same year, John Landis' KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, the first film to feature the comedy stylings of ZAZ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) of AIRPLANE! and NAKED GUN fame included a commercial parody for a fictitious Parker Brothers' board game called Scot Free. A four member family is seated around a kitchen table playing the game, made up of a miniature mock-up of Dealey Plaza, as a voice-over announcer sets up the premise: “Your team has just assassinated the President - can you get away scot free? Shake the dice and see...”
A few years later, a surreal and somewhat comical take on the cluster of conspiracy theories came along: William Richert’s WINTER KILLS (1979), starring Jeff Bridges as Nick Keegan, the brother of a slain President, of course, the victim of secret forces. The controversial film didn’t get much of a theatrical run, VHS copies of it were rare, and its out of print now on DVD (a 2003 edition of it can be found on eBay) so it’s a bit of obscure title that few people have heard of, but it’s well worth seeking out.
Bridges’ very “un-Dude” performance as the Robert Kennedy-ish hero neatly heads an impressive cast including John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Sterling Hayden, Elizabeth Taylor and Toshirô Mifune in an outlandish scenario yet again involving evil men pulling the strings from behind the scenes. The usual suspects of mobsters, the military, and power hungry oil barons are trotted out, as Bridges investigates the wide-ranging suspected cover-up.
Apart from the TV miniseries “Kennedy” starring Martin Sheen, and various PBS documentaries, the ‘80s were relatively free of movie treatments of the mysteries surrounding the Kennedy assassination, but it’s funny to note that in Ron Shelton's BULL DURHAM (1988), Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis delivered a speech to Susan Sarandon listing his core beliefs, and one of them was “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”
A few years later, Costner would be speechifying the complete opposite at length as New Orleans investigator Jim Garrison in Stone’s before mentioned opus, which recently played at the Crossroads in Cary to mark the anniversary.
Stone’s movie is the biggest production to date dealing with the events of November 22nd, 1963, and definitely the most star studded. The film is largely accountable for the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon parlor game because Bacon appears alongside a cast that features seemingly everybody who was working in the early ‘90s including such A-listers as Tommy Lee Jones, John Candy, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Joe Pesci, Gary Oldman, Michael Rooker, Donald Sutherland, Ed Asner, Sissy Spacek, and so on.
These folks help distill the information Stone displays down to further his theory, informed by decades of other’s research and speculation, that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy that stretched through the military industrial complex, involving the CIA, and anti-Castro Cuban nationals. Newsweek welcomed Stone’s movie with a cover story that had the headline: “The Twisted Truth of ‘JFK’: Why Oliver Stone’s New Movie Can’t Be Trusted,” yet in the same issue had a very favorable review of the film by David Ansen. That sums it up neatly: JFK is an entertaining and thought provoking movie, but it’s just a movie, it shouldn’t be taken as historical record.
In the years after JFK, Danny Aiello played Jack Ruby, the Texas nightclub owner who shot and killed Oswald in RUBY, Clint Eastwood played a Secret Service agent who was in Kennedy’s detail that day in Dallas in IN THE LINE OF FIRE (1993), and the long running Fox television program The X-Files revealed that its chief antagonist, the Smoking Man played by William B. Davis, was the real gunman who shot the President from inside a sewer drain along the route of the motorcade.
Yep, JFK’s tagline, “The story that won’t go away,” really is truth in advertising.
More recently, Peter Landesman’s drama PARKLAND, concerning the aftermath of the assassination with another cast of big names (Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, Zac Effron) partly set at Parkland Hospital where Kennedy’s body was taken after the shooting, played briefly last September at the Raleigh Grande. The film effectively captures the chaos and confusion in the air on Nov. 22, 1963 and the days after, but it’s not concerned at all with conspiracy, and it doesn’t really add anything to the cinematic history of the world-changing events of that date.
Neither does the National Geographic Channel’s telefilm adaptation of Bill O’ Reilly’s best seller “Killing Kennedy,” which premiered earlier this month, though there’s some fun to be had watching Rob Lowe take on the President’s Boston accent. O’Reilly isn’t a fan of conspiracy theories so it’s a pretty dry run through the facts.
We may never get the answers to the questions about what really went down that day, but one thing’s for sure: whether it’s another feature film, a new documentary (there are tons of them on cable these days), or an episode of a ‘60s-set TV show (Mad Men did their Nov. 22, 1963 episode in their third season), we are destined to relive the JFK assassination again and again until we shuffle off this mortal coil.
* Mel Stuart's 1964 documentary FOUR DAYS IN NOVEMBER was technically the first film produced about the assassination, but this essay concerns the dramatizations of the event.
More later...
18 Kasım 2013 Pazartesi
Regular visitors to this blog (there must be a few, right?) may be aware that I have a bit of a thing for movie theater marquees. I regularly post pictures of local theaters like the Colony Theater and the Rialto Theater’s marquees here in Raleigh on the sidebar (in the old days it would be the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill when I lived there), and I have them collected on Facebook in the “Movie Theater Fun File!” section of my profile.
So since it’s been a while since I've put together a good ole Film Babble Blog list I thought I’d get back in the game with this top 10 of memorable marquees that have appeared in the movies throughout the years:
1. THE SORROW AND THE PITY in ANNIE HALL
It was a running gag throughout Woody Allen's 1977 Oscar winner ANNIE HALL that protagonist Alvy Singer (Allen) would drag his girlfriend (Diane Keaton in the title role) to see Marcel Ophüls' THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1969). The marquee shot above comes from the end of the film, after the couple has broken up, when Allen runs into Keaton coming out of a screening of the four hour documentary about Nazis at the Thalia Theater, which used to exist on 95th Street off Broadway (it's an apartment building now). It's a long shot so it's easy to miss that Allen's date is Sigourney Weaver, in her first film appearance. A bonus Woody Allen marquee appears at the top of this post.
2. FAMILY PLOT in DAZED AND CONFUSED
This is one of hundreds of well chosen details that helped Richard Linklater's 1993 cult comedy drama classic DAZED AND CONFUSED so convincingly recreate a day from May of 1976. Hitchcock's final film, released a month earlier, appears in a few early shots on a standing marquee for a drive-in in the background of the film mostly set in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. It works as both a piece of a time capsule capture, and a shout-out to the master of suspense.
3. PLAY MISTY FOR ME in DIRTY HARRY
This, and #4, are inside-jokes. In Don Siegel's 1971 cop classic DIRTY HARRY, Clint Eastwood's iconic Harry Callahan character enters a San Francisco burger joint in one shot in which a marquee advertising Eastwood's previous film, PLAY MISTY FOR ME (also '71) can be seen around the corner. Nice plug, Clint!
The same type of thing happens in David O. Russell's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK from last year. While leads Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are arguing in front of a theater midway through the film, a marquee advertising Ryûhei Kitamura's little seen 2008 thriller THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, which starred Cooper, is fairly visible - partially obscured but still obvious.
5. PLATOON in THE NAKED GUN
During a very funny falling-in-love montage set to Herman Hermit's “I’m into Something Good” in David Zucker's 1988 comedy classic THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD, Leslie Neilsen and Priscilla Presley exit a Los Angeles movie theater laughing their asses off. The camera pans up to the marquee:
It's a cheap laugh, but still always gets me.
6. A double feature of A BOY'S LIFE and WATCH THE SKIES in GREMLINS
The fictitious film titles on this marquee seen in Joe Dante's 1984 classic GREMLINS are Spielbergian in-jokes. A BOY'S LIFE was the original title of E.T. and WATCH THE SKIES was the early working title of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, so the fake double bill presents a double nod to the film's executive producer. This marquee has been mentioned before on this blog as has:
7. SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY in KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE
This marquee for the phony film SEE YOU NEXT WEDNESDAY (previously covered in “Film Within Film Follow-up Fun” 7/13/07), seen in the 1977 ZAZ sketch comedy movie THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE is part of a running gag through many of the films of John Landis. It comes from a line from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the director liked enough to feature in the form of billboards, posters, and more than one marquee.
8. A double bill of DEEP THROAT and MEATBALL in SLAP SHOT
This marquee glimpsed in the background of a parade shot on the streets of Jonestown, Pennsylvania in George Roy Hill's classic 1977 hockey comedy SLAP SHOT proudly displays a double feature of Gerard Damiano's 1972 pornos DEEP THROAT (possibly the most famous porn film ever) and his lesser known, but presumably just as filthy MEATBALL.
9. JAWS 19 in BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II
I also featured this one before (“10 Self Referential Or Crossover Moments In The Films Of Lucas And Spielberg” 5/20/08), but couldn't resist including the marquee of JAWS 19 that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) encountered in the future in Robert Zemeckis' BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (executive produced by Spielberg) here because, you know, hologram shark! Also the fact that the director of the 19th film in the JAWS franchise is credited to Spielberg's son Max Spielberg (born in 1985) is a nice touch.
I'm including this one because I used to climb up a ladder and change the marquee a lot at the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill when I worked there from 2004-2009. So I appreciated that Quentin Tarantino's and Eli Roth's revisionist World War II romp, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, included a scene in which Mélanie Laurent's character Shoshanna is taking down the lengthy line of letters that spell out “German Night Leni Riefernstahl in Pabst's THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU.” Thankfully, I rarely had to put up that many letters.
Post note: I should definitely note the cool blog Marquees in Movies, which houses a collection of screenshots from movies showing movie theater marquees. I, ahem, borrowed that great screenshot of SLAP SHOT from them.
More later...
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