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Entries in "Films"
June 30, 2008
2001: A Space Odyssey
The American Film Institute recently ranked the top ten films in each of ten genres. All such 'best of' rankings are, of course, just for fun and meant to provoke vigorous debate about films that did not make the cut as well as the unworthy ones that did. They are not meant to be taken more seriously than that. I was puzzled, however, as to why comedies were not included as a separate genre, the closest category being the vaguer 'romantic comedies.' The omission of musicals as a genre was also puzzling. Maybe those lists will come out later.
I had only two major objections. I was shocked that Walt Disney's Jungle Book did not even make it into the list of best animations, even though to my mind it is easily the best of that genre, and one of my favorite films in any genre. That favorite of film critics Pulp Fiction of course made the list in the gangster category, although I hated the film, with its gratuitous violence and racially offensive language. I vowed never to see a Quentin Tarantino film again after that.
It turns out that I have seen a lot of the top 100 films (63), a sign of a happily wasted life. I recall one year when I was about 16 when I kept a log of the all the films I had seen that calendar year. I counted over one hundred, or on average one every three days, all in the movie theater. I was able to do this because the theater was walking distance from my home and the manager was a friend of my father and gave us a pass to see films free. Since my parents did not stop me from this indulgence as long as I was keeping up with my schoolwork, I saw almost every film that was shown. I have to admit that I saw a whole lot of lousy films. Time seems much more precious to me now and so I am much more choosy about what films I watch.
I have seen all ten of the top animations listed by the AFI. The other genres that I have seen most of were westerns (8), mystery (8), and courtroom dramas (7), while the least was fantasy (4).
I have seen all of the #1 ranked films except for The Searchers in the western category, which I plan to see soon, and City Lights in the romantic comedy category. I have always been a fan of good westerns, many of which had strong stories and characters and promoted values of honor and justice.
While one can quibble with the top rankings in each genre, the one film whose #1 will be unquestioned is 2001: A Space Odyssey in the science fiction category.
I recall seeing it in a wide-screen theater when it was first released in 1968 and it stunned me with its brilliance. My impression of it was so vivid that I did not want to see it again on the small screen using videotape or DVD. Instead I waited and waited for it to be re-released on the big screen, to capture again the awe of space that it inspired. There had been rumors of this being done in 2001 but that did not occur. I then thought that it might happen this year on its 40th anniversary but when that did not seem likely to happen, decided to give up and watch the DVD.
There is always danger in re-watching a film that one has fond memories of from the distant past, the fear that one will be disappointed. 2001 is not one of those films. Watching it again, even on a small screen, was a wonderfully rewarding experience. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke combined to make one of the truly great films of all time, something that lifted science fiction films from cliché-ridden, quasi-horror, gimmicky films with cartoon-like aliens creatures into a true work of art.
What impressed me is how well the film stood up 40 years later. Not only did the science still remain credible, the special effects were also wonderful, which is amazing when you consider that Kubrick did not have the benefit of computer graphics, and all the visual effects had to be captured directly on film.
The film may not appeal to modern filmgoers, jaded by the action fantasies of films like Star Wars. In 2001, the plot is simple and there is no frantic action, no explosions, no shoot outs with laser guns, no light sabers, no love story, no sex, not even human conflict. 2001 played down these traditional film staples. In fact, all the actors seemed to be deliberately underplaying their roles, leaving the enigmatic computer HAL 9000 that runs the spaceship as the most interesting character. And yet, all these things that sound like negatives actually combine to make the film utterly engrossing.
Although 2001 grabbed the imagination of two young boys George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as to the tremendous possibilities of science fiction film making, their own films in this genre went off in different, and in my view, inferior directions.
2001 is a highly visual film, almost ballet-like with its minimal dialogue. The first half-hour is totally word-free, leading up to one of the most memorable visual transitions in the history of filmmaking. The last half-hour is also wordless. Kubrick does not rush scenes or have frequent jump cuts, exploiting the seemingly slow pacing and the ambient sounds of breathing to capture the silence and immensity of space. The attention to detail of how things work in space (how people can walk when weightless, how to simulate weak gravity on a spaceship, how to eat and drink, the difficulty of using toilets, etc.) gives the film a scientific credibility and timelessness that will ensure that it remains the top film for the next hundred years.
The film was not well received when it first came out. Its measured pacing bored some who were used to the action clichés of the older films in this genre and the famous enigmatic ending confused the general public as to what was going on. But science fiction fans had hours of fun debating what it all meant.
I also recently watched another science fiction film that I had never heard of previously, and that was Colossus: The Forbin Project which also deals with a computer that decides to take control, this time on Earth. The film was interesting mainly because of its probing, like 2001, of what might result if a computer becomes a truly intelligent, self-aware, self-learning device, and raises the notion of the nature of consciousness and whether computers will be able to create it. The excellent website Machines Like Us probes just these issues and its editor was the one who tipped me off to the existence of this film.
Watching Colossus so soon after the re-watching of 2001 was perhaps a mistake. Although the ideas the former film explored were intriguing, the quality of the filmmaking was nowhere close to that of the latter. The execution of the idea needed the genius of a Kubrick to really do it justice.
If you have never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, you have missed a treat. It is a landmark in filmmaking.
POST SCRIPT: How to avoid discussing the election
October 19, 2007
Soaps and Soap
For a very brief time in my life, about one week actually, I got hooked on daytime TV soap operas.
It happened in December of 1978. I had received a phone call that my father had died suddenly of a heart attack back in Sri Lanka. I was in graduate school in the US, far away from my family, and thus away from the kinds of support networks and rituals that help one get through such times of grief. I could not concentrate on my studies or reading or other things to distract my mind so turned for solace to watching TV all day, as so many do in such situations when seeking escapism through mindless activity.
In those pre-internet and early cable days, your TV choices were largely limited to just the three networks CBS, NBC, and ABC and during the day all three served up a diet of talk shows, game shows, and soap operas. Although I wasn't at all interested at first, quite soon I was quite absorbed in the various stories that made up the soaps. For those not familiar with the genre, these daytime soap operas involve multiple intersecting story lines involving quite a large cast of characters of usually middle class or rich people, with a few low-lifes thrown in to spice things up. The tales involve love, jealousy, intrigue, adultery, murder, larceny, backstabbing, lying, cheating, and other strong human characteristics.
These programs can be quite addictive and develop faithful followings as can be seen from the longevity of soaps like Days of Our Lives, All My Children, The Young and the Restless and As the World Turns, all of which have lasted over three decades.
Although I stopped watching after a week, these shows gave me a greater appreciation for the riotously funny weekly prime-time sitcom Soap, which was a parody of the daytime soaps, and ran for four seasons during the years 1977-1981.
The basic story of Soap was that of the intersecting lives of two families, the Tates and the Campbells, where the two mothers Jessica Tate and Mary Campbell were sisters. The best way to describe Soap is as daytime soap opera on steroids. Where the daytime soaps stories proceeded excruciatingly slowly, with long pregnant pauses in the dialogue, lengthy meaningful looks, and dragged-out plot developments, Soap went at break-neck speed with plot twists occurring in rapid-fire succession. All the standard complex plotlines of the daytime soaps were present and then made even more extreme in Soap by adding outlandish things like UFOs, alien abductions, demon-possessions, guerillas, gangsters, blackmail, kidnappings, exorcisms, brainwashing by a religious cult (led by the Reverend Sun whose followers were called "the Sunnies"!) and so on. Storylines that would be sufficient for a full season on the regular soaps were crammed into just a few episodes of Soap. This breathless pace was compressed into weekly half-hour programs, each episode beginning in classic soap style with a voice-over announcer saying what had happened in previous episodes, and ending with a dramatic cliff-hanger, followed by the announcer hyping up the suspense for the episodes to come.
What really made Soap one of the funniest TV programs was clever writing coupled with one of the best ensemble casts ever put together, easily triumphing over those of the more-heralded Seinfeld or Friends casts. Katherine Helmond as the ditzy Jessica (whom men found irresistible) and Cathryn Damon as Mary were the anchors that held the two families (and the show) together as increasingly bizarre things happened all around them. Some of the funniest scenes were when the two were sitting around a kitchen table, each trying to bring the other up-to-date on the latest bizarre happenings in their families and, in a perverse way, competing to top each other's stories.
Richard Mulligan as Bert Campbell (Mary's working class husband) was superb in his physical comedy, his body and face seemingly made of rubber, responding spasmodically to his nervous energy. Billy Crystal (a newcomer then) appeared as Jodie (Mary's son) in what may be the first portrayal of a gay person on TV that got laughs out of being gay while remaining a sympathetic character and avoiding becoming a caricature. Robert Guillaume as Benson, the sardonic back-talking butler for the rich Tates, was another actor who managed to take what might have become a stereotypical role (black servant of a rich white family) and infuse it with dignity and humor. In fact Crystal and Guillaume were perhaps the most sensible (or at least the least eccentric) of the entire Tate-Campbell menagerie.
Perhaps the most eccentric character was Bert's son Chuck who always went around with his ventriloquist dummy Bob. Chuck acted like Bob was a real person and would hold conversations with him while Bob would insult everyone and leer at women. The humor arose because other members of the family also sometimes ended up treating Bob as a real person and speak and argue and get angry with him, while not holding Chuck responsible for Bob's words. (It is an interesting thing to speculate as to what you would do if someone you knew acted like Chuck did. In order to spare his feelings, wouldn't you also treat his dummy like a real person, even if you felt ridiculous doing so?) In one such scene, Chuck plans to go out on a date leaving Bob behind but Bob harangues him until Chuck agrees to take him along. When they both finally leave, Mary asks Bert (who have both been watching this) whether they shouldn’t get professional help for Chuck, to which Bert replies, "Chuck doesn't need professional help, he should just learn to discipline Bob more."
The reason for these fond reminiscences is that I just discovered that these old programs are now available on DVD and I have been watching them again. There is always a danger in doing these kinds of trips down nostalgia lane because one's memories of old books, films and TV programs often make them seem better than they actually were. I was a little fearful that Soap would disappoint were but it passed the test handily. It is still laugh-out-loud funny.
The added bonus to watching on DVD is the absence of commercials. I also noticed how the opening and closing credits were more leisurely than they are now, allowing one to actually read the names of the actors and crew without distracting sidebar promos for other shows. The running time of each half-hour episode then was also 24 minutes and 30 seconds. I suspect that nowadays this has been reduced to allow for more commercial breaks.
There were other good TV comedies at that time, like M*A*S*H and Newhart, but I would not seek out DVDs of them the way I did with Soap.
Soap was a comedy classic and if you get the chance you should see it. And make sure you watch it in sequence.
POST SCRIPT: Class politics
Here's another provocative clip from the 1998 film Bulworth (strong language advisory).
October 17, 2007
Film shorts
There are some things that really annoy me when watching a film (or play).
The most annoying are when people act idiotically, not at all the way that normal people would. I described one such annoying plot device case earlier when I pleaded for no more daft women!
Another example is the absurd miscommunication device, where one person misunderstands the actions or motives of another person and because of this, endless complications ensue. This occurs in two versions. In one the person trying to explain some very important thing that would clarify everything has, for some reason, only a limited time to do so and either babbles incoherently or digresses so much or is so unclear that the other person goes off with the wrong impression. In the other, one person is trying to explain but the listener is so impatient or exasperated or in such a snit that she (I have noticed that it is usually a woman who does this) refuses to listen, either walking away or banging down the phone.
In both cases, a few moments of calm speaking and listening would have cleared up everything satisfactorily, but this does not happen because of these people's irritating mannerisms. My question is: Do real people ever behave like this? Have any of you ever been in such a situation? I cannot conceive of not even listening when someone is trying to explain something to me, especially if it is important. I may not agree with what is said but I cannot imagine slamming the phone down or otherwise closing the door on such communications before that person can even begin to speak.
Another plot device that annoys me is when people jump to idiotic conclusions. Although I like Shakespeare in general, two plays that really bug me are among those that are considered his greatest, Othello and King Lear. Whenever I read Othello, I always think that the title character acted like an idiot. How could he not see that Desdemona was a wonderful and faithful wife and that there must be something wrong in what Iago was implying? Why didn't he ask her a few simple questions that would have cleared up everything? I understand that Shakespeare was trying to show that jealousy can overcome love and reason and even sanity, but this just wasn't plausible. Sorry, Will, we need a rewrite.
Lear also strikes me as an idiot, so easily misled by flattery that he makes a series of disastrous decisions that lead to death and misery all round. What is amazing was that the three main people he misunderstood were his own daughters, people whose characters he would have been able to observe over many years. And yet, on the basis of a few statements, he dumps the nicest and most loyal daughter in favor of the two schemers. Was he some kind of absent father that he had no sense of the characters of his own children?
Jurassic Park has to be one of the most absurd films ever made. I don't mean the central scientific concept of someone finding a way to recreate dinosaurs from their DNA trapped in amber. That part if fine. Writers and filmmakers have to be allowed to be able to stretch the bounds of reality so that they can create a workable premise. And the special effects with dinosaurs were very well done. What really annoyed me about that film was how the characters behaved, completely at odds with any normal person's behavior.
For example, what does the person who has made an amazing, Nobel-prize winning quality scientific discovery by creating dinosaurs do? Announce in a press conference his spectacular result? No, he decides to build a dinosaur theme park in secret!. And despite hundreds of scientists and technicians and construction workers going in and out of the facility being built, it remains a secret. But that's not all. The owner then sends his fond niece and nephew on an unprotected train ride through the region where the deadly animals roam and sure enough, they get terrorized by the some vicious specimens. Wait, there's more! After making their escape and managing to get some rest by sleeping in a treetop, the children wake up to find a dinosaur at their head level looking at them. After their previous night's experience, you would think they would freak out. Instead, they calmly pat it on the head, somehow knowing that these particular animals are friendly. I cannot begin to list all the other things about Jurassic Park that really annoyed me.
And while I am on the topic of annoying things in films, I hate it when the credits continue well into the films. You get absorbed in the story and then they still break into it with more credits. One of the nice things about very old films is that they open with the credits, get them done in about thirty seconds, and then get on with the story.
Then there are actors who simply annoy me simply by their very presence. I cannot really explain why. Off the top of my head, here are a few: Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, the later John Wayne when he stopped being an actor and became merely a macho symbol, Nicholas Cage, Renee Zellweger, and Tom Cruise. Seeing such people in the cast is enough to make me try and avoid the film.
There are other actors who I think are over-rated such as Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Scarlett Johansson. (I think I am in a distinct minority on this one!)
But there are also actors whom I like, whose names on the credits are enough to make me seriously consider watching a film even if I don't know much else about it: Burt Lancaster, Alec Guinness, Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Peter Sellers, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, Susan Sarandon, Cary Grant, John Cusack, Peter O'Toole, Michael Caine, Tom Hanks, Catherine Keener, Gregory Peck, Julie Christie, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Paul Newman, Peter Sellers, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Charlotte Rampling, Kevin Spacey, and Kevin Bacon.
All these lists are off the top of my head and I am sure I can add to them as other names strike me.
Those who like political films should see the excellent Warren Beatty film Bulworth (1998). The main plotline is far-fetched and the best parts of the film are the scenes about the underside of the political process, the powerful role of money, and how politicians pander to their various target audiences. Here's a nice clip from it.
Another good political film I saw recently was the fascinating documentary Street Fight (2005). Made by first-time filmmaker Marshall Curry, it tells the story of 32-year old Cory Booker's attempt in 2002 to unseat four-term incumbent Sharpe James as mayor of Newark, New Jersey. It is raw, bare-knuckle, down and dirty, street-level politics, with the 66-year old incumbent using all the power of the city against his young challenger. As a city council member, Booker had tried to tackle the serious issues of city hall corruption, crime, and drugs and in the process angered many powerful people who were benefiting from those things.
While the filmmaker's sympathies are clearly with Booker, James does not help his cause by deliberately shutting him out and very roughly too. If you see the film on DVD, make sure you watch the extra interview with the director as he discusses what happened in the years following that election.
The influential The Black Commentator website has strongly criticized Booker, arguing that he is completely in the pockets of rich, right-wing, white, power brokers who are pushing school vouchers and seeking to co-opt the next generation of black leadership to serve their needs. Whatever the merits of that charge, watch out for the name Cory Booker in national politics. I think we are going to hear a lot about him in the next 5-10 years.
October 15, 2007
In praise of parodies
I like comedies. And within that genre of films, I particularly like parodies. The best ones are those that are based on clichés of particular genres or specific stories that are well known, since a successful parody depends crucially on the ability of the audience to immediately recognize allusions to the original
A parody idea is not hard to come up with. What is hard is to be able to sustain the conceit over the length of a film. Even in the written form, short article parodies are difficult (I know because I have tried and failed miserably) and only a skilled writer can pull it off. I often come across attempts at parodies that seemed to have started out as a single good idea but the writer could not sustain the conceit and it soon becomes painful to read. The ability to maintain a light tough and not to belabor the point is a skill that only a few seem to be able to master. Stephen Leacock and S. J. Perelman are two writers who were good at it. As a very young boy I read Perelman's Somewhere a Roscoe, a parody of the hard-boiled detective story, and I was hooked for life.
So here are some of my favorite film parodies. If you haven't seen any of them, you should check them out.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is a parody classic of Camelot. There are so many good scenes in it that it is hard to choose, so I went with the killer rabbit.
Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) is a superb parody of life in the time of Jesus. Here is one of the funniest scenes in it.
And since you can never have too much of Monty Python, here is another one from that same film.
Mel Brooks is undoubtedly the master of the film parody and has produced some of its finest examples. Brooks has the ability to insert a parody of one genre into a parody of another. In Robin Hood, Men in Tights (1993), one of the funniest scenes is where comedian Dom de Luise does a dead-on parody of the Marlon Brando role in The Godfather. Unfortunately, the only clip I could find of it was in German, so here is a different scene involving the title song.
In Spaceballs (1987), Mel Brooks took on the mighty Star Wars franchise.
In Blazing Saddles (1974), Brooks turned his attention to the western and showed his ability to use anachronisms to good comedy effect.
And of course, the monster horror film genre was ripe for Brooks' plucking with Young Frankenstein (1974).
Woody Allen scored a direct hit on the epic Russian psychological novel style of writers like Dostoyevsky with his wonderful Love and Death (1975), which to my mind is his best film.
A little-known but funny parody that I heard about just a month or so ago is Zorro, the Gay Blade (1981), in which George Hamilton stars as both Don Diego (the canonical Zorro) and Bunny Wigglesworth, his twin brother who was sent to England as a child and returns home just in time to substitute for his injured twin. Bunny has, shall we say, a more discerning taste in clothes than his brother and disdains the simple black outfits that he favors. In this scene, Ron Leibman playing the despotic Alcalde, starts hearing reports of Bunny/Zorro's exploits.
I had not thought of George Hamilton as a comedic actor, or even much of an actor at all and was pleasantly surprised at his ability to pull off camp comedy. I knew him as merely the famed possessor of the most perfect year-round tan, which made him a surprise choice to star as a creature of the night, the vampire Dracula in the parody Love at First Bite (1979), which was unfortunately rather uneven in quality.
I have not as yet come across good parodies of the James Bond series. Austin Powers seemed strained to me, too annoyingly caricatured, and I only watched the first one. The original Casino Royale (1967) brought together a whole series of famous actors and was a disaster. Even Peter Sellers and Woody Allen could not salvage a truly ghastly script. The only reason to watch this film is to see a colossal train wreck of a film, and the immense waste of talent.
Another genre that I have not seen a good parody of is the gangster film. It seems like The Godfather series needs a parody of its own, more than just a brief scene in Robin Hood, Men in Tights
Any suggestions for good parodies that I might have missed?
June 22, 2007
Film reviews: Network and Matewan
Here are two more reviews of old films that are worth seeing.
Network (1976)
This film is a brutal satire on the TV news business and, sad as it is to say and even harder to believe, the kinds of attitudes it satirized in 1976 has only gotten far worse in the subsequent three decades.
Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky uses the story of Howard Beale, a network news anchor who has a mental breakdown when he is told that he is being fired because of his low ratings, to show what really drives TV news. When Beale starts saying the truth on air about how things really work in the news world and the contempt that the people in TV have for the intelligence of their viewers, he starts getting audience attention and his ratings start going up again. He starts to pick up steam by voicing the frustration and sense of powerlessness that people feel.
The people in the entertainment division of the network see the chance to gain huge ratings by converting the news into a kind of entertainment, complete with segments involving soothsayers and the like, the whole thing showcased by Beale, now nicknamed 'the mad prophet of the airwaves', ranting on some topic, as can be seen in this clip, where he denounces the dangerous control that TV has on the minds of the public.
(Nowadays, nowhere is this film's critique of how 'news' has become trivialized more apparent than in the ridiculous amount of coverage given to Paris Hilton. The best commentary on the media frenzy about the non-event that was her recent jailing was that given by Tommy Chong in an interview with Stephen Colbert.)
The film is immensely helped by the performances of two wonderful actors (William Holden and Peter Finch) in the twilight of their careers, aided by two other fine actors Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall who were at their peak. Finch won an Academy Award for his performance but died before he could accept it.
Although Chayevsky a tendency has sometimes to give his characters (especially the one played by Holden) set-piece speeches on life and love and death that give the film a somewhat stagey-look, his writing is so good that he gets away with it. There are some interesting side-plots involving urban guerrilla chic and radical black activists of that time. The film shows how, in the end, everyone is corrupted by the allure of fame and money that TV exposure brings, and are willing to be manipulated by the TV executives to achieve that goal.
Network is one of those films that I saw when it first came out and is still good after all these years. It is a film that has become a cultural touchstone, with the line "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" familiar to people who may not know from where it originated.
Matewan (1987)
Matewan is another fine film by independent filmmaker John Sayles. It is based on the true story of the struggle of coal miners in the West Virginia town of Matewan to obtain better condition by forming a union, and the fierce attempts by the mine owners and their thugs and goons to prevent it. Seeing films like this makes me appreciate so much more the efforts of the early efforts at unionization, fought by workers and their families at great cost and danger to themselves, which now give us the kinds of working conditions and safety that we take for granted.
Sayles's first film was The Return of the Secausus Seven (1980), the story of a group of high school friends who reunite for a vacation ten years after graduation. It was shot on a low budget with an unknown and almost amateur cast. The much better-known The Big Chill (1983), which has almost the same story, looks like an unacknowledged remake of Sayles's film.
Sayles has since gone on to make more commercially successful films (you can see a list of the films he as made here) and has been able to attract better known actors along the way, with some of them, such as Chris Cooper and David Strathairn, appearing repeatedly.
Sayles epitomizes the true independent. Many filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh who began as independents went the big budget Hollywood route after they achieved commercial success. Sayles refuses to do so. Even after he has shown himself to be a critical and commercially successful filmmaker, he refuses to seek funding from the big studios because they would require him to relinquish control over the final product. He says:
I want to direct films that no one else is going to make. I know if I don't make them, I'm never going to see them. Of course, I hope some people will want to see my movies as well, but I won't pander to the public. I won't try to second guess what a Hollywood studio would like to see in a low-budget film, so that they will hire me the next time around. I know I will always do better work if I do projects in which I really believe. And if I never get to direct again, I will have made some movies I can feel proud of.
Sayles is very good at capturing the mood of a time and an event, and does not shrink away from showing the politics of race and class. For him, what a film says is more important than how it looks. As he said, "I'm interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I'm not interested enough to lie. . .[A movie] may not look the way we'd like it to look or sound the way we'd like it to sound or get seen by as many people as we'd like to have see it but at least it will say the stuff we want it to say."
June 20, 2007
Film reviews: Hearts and Minds and Medium Cool
Film reviews are usually about films that have been newly released. Since I am almost never the first to see any film, my reviews deal with very old but good or interesting films that people may have not seen the first time around but can do so now, thanks to the easy availability tapes and DVDs. I see these reviews as pointing out films to those who may not know what they are missing.
Here are reviews of two old films that I saw recently that dealt with the time during the Vietnam war.
Hearts and Minds (1974)
This has to be one of the best war documentaries ever, winning an Academy Award in 1975. It was filmed during 1972 and 1973, at a time when American combat troops had been largely withdrawn from the battlefield and 'Vietnamization', the process by which the South Vietnamese army was being built up and trained by the US to replace it in fighting against the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army, was well underway. The editing of the film was completed in 1974, just before the complete collapse of that US-trained army began, and was released late in 1975, the year in which South Vietnam was completely overrun, Saigon captured, and the country unified under the government in Hanoi.
At the time the film was being made, US public opinion had turned against the war and the US was clearly facing defeat. Director Peter Davis said that he set out to address three questions: "Why did we invade Vietnam? What did we do there? What did the war do to us?"
The director deliberately omitted a voice-over narration, to avoid the 'voice of god' effect common to documentaries As a result, there is little explanatory filler material and this might make the sequence of events a little hard to follow for people for whom the Vietnam war is ancient history and the people interviewed (such as Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Daniel Ellsberg, William Westmoreland) are unfamiliar. This would have not been a problem when the film was released since the events were fresh. But since the film is largely about the effects of war rather than a historical analysis, this lack of detailed information does not affect the film's power.
When I first saw the film (in 1976, I think) it made a huge impact on me. The immense tragedy of the wanton destruction of a people and a country and the passionless cruelty of the bombing and the napalming showed an ugliness to war that left a searing impression. During the Vietnam war, news crews were free to roam the battlefield and so you had plenty of footage of the effects of the bombing and the shattered lives and property of the people at the receiving end of it. You also saw the casual brutality of the occupying forces towards the people of Vietnam.
The US military learned from that experience not to allow journalists such free access in future wars and nowadays, with 'embedded' journalists, one gets largely the sanitized point of view of the military, boasting about the sophistication of its weaponry, and avoiding showing what a devastating effect war has on ordinary people, killing people, destroying homes, and tearing apart entire communities.
I was doubtful if the film would have the same impact on me thirty years later but it did. The interviews with villagers whose family members had been killed, their mud and thatch homes set on fire or brought to rubble by high altitude bombings were heartbreaking. The sequence near the end of a little boy's grief during the funeral of his father, a South Vietnamese soldier, was almost unwatchable because of the naked emotion on display. The interviews with the US soldiers and bomber pilots who fought in the war, some now sad and angry and bitter at what they had done, what they had become, and what had happened to them, others still gung-ho, showed the effects of war on those who carry out the orders to fight.
In the end, the film provides answers to the questions "What did we do there? What did the war do to us?" but the first question "Why did we invade Vietnam?" remains unanswered, even to this day, just like the question "Why did the US invade Iraq?"
In fact, the parallels with Iraq are eerie. By 1968 or so, it was clear that US policy makers had realized that Vietnam was 'lost.' But rather than admit it and stop the war, they hoped to create some distance from the looming defeat by withdrawing US combat troops and replacing them with South Vietnamese forces so that when the end came, the US might avoid being seen as the loser. But in order to provide cover for the withdrawal, they unleashed a massive bombing campaign (including the infamous 'Christmas bombing' of Hanoi that destroyed hospitals and other civilians targets) that created enormous additional casualties and destruction. The film argues that this bombing was largely meant for US domestic consumption, to signify that the US retained muscular power, although the US the government had already accepted the fact that the forces opposed to them would never give up until they achieved full victory.
We can see the same thing happening in Iraq now. I suspect that the US government has realized that Iraq is 'lost' and is desperately seeking a way to disengage from the fighting while still maintaining a significant military presence in the massive permanent bases it is building there. The training of the Iraqi forces and the "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down" mantra are the equivalent of 'Vietnamization'. There is also currently a escalation of the bombing campaign in Iraq, largely unreported in the US, creating an increasing number of civilian deaths. Even railway stations are being bombed. As William S. Lind observes, increased bombing is usually a sign of failure: "Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the "surge" is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: it isn't."
Hearts and Minds is a landmark film and should be seen by everyone. I was so startled that it could provoke such strong emotions in me after so many years that I did something I never do, which is watch the film yet again, this time with the director's commentary on, to see what went into the making of it.
Medium Cool (1969)
The other film that dealt, although not directly, with the Vietnam war was Medium Cool. This film tells a Chicago TV newsman's story in the turbulent year 1968, which saw the Tet offensive in Vietnam, massive antiwar protests in the US that led to President Johnson's decision not to seek re-election, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Chicago's mayor Richard Daley essentially created a police state during the Democratic Party convention, complete with tanks and armored carriers patrolling the streets, and riot police clashing with demonstrators. The film captures the contrast between what was going on in the convention hall with balloons and streamers and party hats and speeches, and the pandemonium and mayhem in the streets just outside.
The film tries to capture the mood of the times, when TV was becoming ubiquitous in people's lives. Its director was Haskell Wexler, the acclaimed cinematographer, and it was natural for him to try to portray the events of that time through the eyes of a TV journalist.
Like most cinematographers, Haskell Wexler's name is largely unknown to the general public but he has been behind the camera of so many high-quality and well-known films that he has to be ranked among the best at his craft.
I would not call this is a great film. But it captures a slice of life during a very turbulent time in the US.
March 15, 2007
The Power of Film
Films can have an enormous emotional impact on a viewer, swaying them emotionally in ways that their intellect would oppose. I was reminded of this recently when I watched two films from the silent era, Buster Keaton's The General (1927) and D. W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation (1915). The latter was one of the earliest American feature films (the first being made in 1912) with the very first being made in Australia in 1906.
It was purely a coincidence that I happened to watch two films from the silent era so close to each other because the reasons were quite different. I had always wanted to see a Buster Keaton film because I had read that he was a pioneering genius of the silent film comedy genre. I watched Griffiths' film as part of the College Scholars Program that I help teach.
Coincidentally, both films involved the Civil War and were told from a viewpoint that was sympathetic to the Confederacy. The first thing that struck me about both was how modern they were in the way they told their stories. They did have obvious signs of being old, such as the lack of sound and color and special effects, and poor quality film stock. But apart from these purely physical factors, the narrative structure was surprisingly familiar with flashbacks being the only modern feature of films that was missing.
Because of the lack of spoken dialogue, the actors had to exaggerate their gestures a little in order for the viewer to get a sense of their emotions and what they were saying, but apart from that, these were both films that kept the viewer engrossed in their respective stories. Despite the fact that the films had no spoken words (or because of it?), they were both fast-moving and kept the viewer engaged.
But there the similarities ended.
The General is a comedy in which the two warring sides were just a backdrop for a simple story of a train engineer (Buster Keaton) whose girl friend and train (named The General) were captured by the other side. The entire film dealt with the engineer's foray into enemy territory to get them both back home.
This is not a political film. The entire film could have been done with the two sides interchanged and all that would have been necessary would have been to switch the army uniforms. The fact that it was the Civil War was also immaterial. Any two warring factions would have served equally well. In fact there was not a single black person in the whole film (at least as I recall). The fact that the engineer and girl were from the South was seemingly due to the idea for the film coming from an actual incident in the war. This film is worth watching, if only to see how well Keaton did all the stunts himself.
Birth of a Nation, on the other hand, is a very political film, determined to drive home a very specific message. I had heard of the film before and the comments were of two kinds: (1) that it was a landmark in the development of modern film; and (2) that it was terribly racist. After seeing the film, I have to agree with both judgments.
The film (which runs a little over three hours, surprisingly long for that period) consists really of two parts. The first part starts just prior to the Civil War and deals with events leading up to its end and Lincoln's assassination. The second part deals with the period of Reconstruction in the south immediately afterwards.
The first part starts with an idyllic portrayal of life before the Civil War, with the stories of two large happy white families - one from the north, the other from the south – who are friends and visit one another, and the budding romances of one son and daughter from one family with son and daughter from the other. The war then pits the boys against each other in battle and produces deaths in each family.
This first part of the film is not too offensive and if the film had ended at this point there would not have been much controversy. The chief criticism that would have been leveled at it would have been the portrayal of all blacks as 'happy slaves,' either cheerfully loyal to their masters as house servants or happily working in the cotton fields and waving to the masters as they walk by. Lincoln is portrayed as a good man who did not want to seek vengeance in the South after the North's victory.
But the second part is set entirely in the south and deals with the Reconstruction following Lincoln's death. This is where the film's highly disturbing treatment of race becomes manifest. This period is portrayed as a time when blacks took complete control of life in the South, shutting out white voters in elections and thus getting majorities in the legislatures. The southern whites are portrayed as a horribly oppressed people, being pushed aside by blacks in the streets and suffering various other indignities. The blacks are entirely caricatured, with white actors in blackface portraying them as lazy and drunken and evil, shuffle-dancing in the streets, lecherously leering at the demure white women, and always rubbing it in to the whites that they were now the bosses. Only the faithful house slaves stayed loyal to the whites, to the extent of rescuing them from black mobs at great peril to themselves.
The first part of the film, by showing scenes of these two loving, courteous families, with children playing and puppies and kittens frolicking, suffering the tragedies of their family members being killed in the war, etc., had already created sympathy for them in the minds of the viewer. The only black people who emerged as recognizable characters appeared in the second part, and were two-dimensional portrayals of evil so that the viewer had no sympathy for them at all.
But the real shocker is that the film portrays the creation of the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction as a response by these decent, law-abiding whites to the lawlessness created by black rule. It is started by one of the family members we have already identified with, who is appalled by the breakdown of order and merely seeking to right wrongs. The KKK's reign of terror is also not portrayed. Only one black person is shown being 'tried' and found guilty by the KKK and has his body later dumped at the home of the evil black leader. Instead the people of the KKK were protrayed like comic-book heroes, 'respectable' citizens who adopt secret identities to fight crime and injustice. Only in this case the costumes that hide their identities are the notorious white sheets.
There is no surer way of gaining an audience's sympathy than setting up a scene in which a plucky little band of good people (including the elderly, women, children, and pets) heroically fight overwhelming odds against an evil and faceless enemy. This is a time-tested method of swaying the viewer's sympathies and is a staple of cowboy films. Griffiths heavily exploits this towards the end of Birth of a Nation. So powerfully had the deck been emotionally stacked in favor of the white families that in the climactic scene, when the tiny group of white people is trapped in a small house and surrounded by a large number of advancing hostile black Union soldiers, I found myself rooting for their rescue, even though the rescue was going to be by the KKK.
The spell cast by Griffiths was broken whenever the scene cuts to show the KKK riding in to save this group because the sight of people covered in white sheets now has an overwhelmingly negative emotional impact. But one can imagine how in 1915, just fifty years after the Civil War ended, this film could be seen a huge propaganda coup for the KKK, showing them in an entirely positive light. Although the KKK had been dormant for some time, 1915 saw the second resurgence of this group and the timing of that had to have something to do with the release of this film.
The fact that Griffith was able to portray a group like the KKK in such a sympathetic light is a warning about the dangerous power that films can have in shaping attitudes and sympathies. It illustrates the importance of having people realize that films and other forms of video can never be taken as the only source of knowledge. We cannot avoid the hard work of reading about and around important events, both historical and contemporary, if we are to piece together a reasonably accurate understanding of events.
POST SCRIPT: Mr. Deity returns
Mr. Deity is taken on a tour of hell by Lucifer.
For all the Mr. Deity clips, see here.
March 08, 2007
A low-brow view of films
Although I watch a lot of films, I realized a long time ago that my appreciation of films (or plays or books or concerts) was decidedly at a 'low brow' level. To explain what I mean, it seems to me that there are four levels in which one can appreciate a film (or play). At the lowest level is just the story or narrative. The next level above that is some message that the writer or director is trying to convey and which is usually fairly obvious. People whose appreciation does not get beyond these two levels are those I call low-brow. And I am one of them.
But I am aware there are higher levels of appreciation and criticism that can be scaled. The third level is that of technique, such as the quality of writing and things like acting and directing and cinematography and sound and lighting. And then there is the fourth and highest level, which I call deep meaning or significance, where there is a hidden message which, unlike the message at the second level, is not at all obvious but which has to be unearthed (or even invented) by scholars in the field or people who have a keen sensitivity to such things.
I almost never get beyond the first two levels. In fact, if the first level does not appeal to me, then no level of technique or profundity will rescue the experience. This does not mean that the items in the third level do not matter. They obviously are central to the enjoyment of the experience. It is just that I rarely notice the third level items unless they are so bad that it ruins the storytelling aspect. If the dialogue or acting (for example) is really rotten, then I will notice it but if I don't notice these things at all, then it means that they were good.
But I don't even consider these things unless the first two levels are satisfactory. If the first two levels are bad, nothing at the higher levels can salvage the experience for me. I never leave a film saying things like "The story was awful but the camerawork was excellent."
As an example, I really enjoy Alfred Hitchcock's films and have seen nearly all of them, many multiple times. But I just enjoy the way he tells the stories. Since I enjoy reading about films after I have watched them, I often find people pointing out subtle effects of technique such as how he uses lighting or sets up a camera angle or how he creates a mood, and so on. While I enjoy having these things pointed out to me, I would never notice them on my own.
The same thing holds with the music soundtrack. When friends tell me that they enjoyed the soundtrack of a film that is not a musical, my usual response is "what soundtrack?" The only films in which I notice the soundtrack are those in which there are obvious songs, such as in (say) The Graduate or Midnight Cowboy, the latter having a wonderful theme song Everybody's Talkin' by Harry Nillson and a beautifully haunting harmonica score that so pervades the film that even I noticed it.
The same happens with the fourth level of analysis, which is even more inaccessible to me. Just recently I read that in several of Hitchcock's films, he was exploring homosexual themes. I had no idea and would never have figured that out on my own. While I have no talent for exploring these deeper levels of meaning, I appreciate the fact that there are people who can do so and are willing to share that knowledge. Reading them and talking about films with such knowledgeable and keenly observant people is a real pleasure.
I once had pretensions to 'higher criticism' (which deals with the third and fourth levels) myself but that ended one day when it became dramatically obvious that I had no clue how to do it. It was in 1975 when I watched the film If. . . (1968) by director Lindsay Anderson. I like Anderson's films a lot. He creates strange and quirky films that deal with class politics in Britain, such as This Sporting Life (1963) and O Lucky Man (1973). The last one has an absolutely brilliant soundtrack and I noticed it because it consists of songs sung by British rocker Alan Price and he and his group periodically appear in the film to sing them, so you can't miss the music. It is one of the rare CDs I bought of a film soundtrack, it was so good.
Anyway, my friends and I watched If. . . and we noticed that while most of the film was in color, some of the scenes were in black and white. We spent a long time afterwards trying to determine the significance of this, with me coming up with more and more elaborate explanations for the director's intent, trying to make my theories fit the narrative. By an odd coincidence, soon after that I read an article that explained everything. It said that while making the film, Anderson had run low on money and had had to complete shooting with cheaper black and white film. Since films are shot out of sequence, the final product had this mix of color and black and white footage. That was it, the whole explanation, making laughable my elaborate theories about directorial intent. It was then that I gave up on the higher criticism, realizing that I would simply be making a fool of myself.
There are some films that are self-consciously technique-oriented, and I can appreciate them as such. For example Memento and Mulholland Drive are films that are clearly designed by the director to have the viewer try and figure out what is going on. They are like puzzles and I can enjoy them because they are essentially mystery stories (one of my favorite genres) in which the goal is to determine the director's intent and methods used. Both films were a lot of fun to watch and grapple with.
But except in those special cases, I leave 'higher criticism' to those better equipped to do so. That is the nice thing about creative works of art. One can appreciate and enjoy them at so many different levels and each viewer or reader can select the level that best suits them.
Next: A low-brow view of books.
February 20, 2007
Peter O'Toole
Seeing as I have been spending my time watching old films, for the first time in some years I have not seen any of the films that have been nominated for this year's Academy Awards. But that does not mean that I don't have a preference in at least one category, and that is for best actor. At the risk of offending purists who believe that the awards should be based strictly on the performance in the film for which the person has been nominated, I hope, for purely sentimental reasons, that Peter O'Toole wins the best actor award this coming Sunday for Venus, just because he is one of the greatest actors ever.
I have been a big fan of Peter O'Toole ever since I saw him in the stunning Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which was his big break as a star. I watched the film again recently when it was re-released as a DVD in the 'director's cut' version. The power of the film can be measured by the fact that it runs almost four hours long and for some reason I started watching it at about nine at night, thinking I would stop halfway and continue the next day, since I usually am in bed before 11:00pm. But once I had started, I just could not tear myself away and had to see it through to the end, hardly noticing the time. It is undoubtedly director David Lean's masterpiece, and O'Toole's performance was amazing. I wish it could be shown on the big screen again (perhaps at the Cleveland Cinematheque?) because Lean's panoramic sweeps in the magnificent desert scenes really deserve to be seen in their full splendor.
After that, there were other fine performances from O'Toole in dramas such as Becket (1964), The Lion in Winter (1968), and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969). And if you want to see an absolutely brilliant satire of the hypocrisy and decadence of the British upper classes, The Ruling Class (1972) cannot be beaten.
O'Toole also showed a deft touch in light comedies like How to Steal a Million (1966), and that very silly and funny film What's New, Pussycat (1965).
After a period of decline, partly due to his heavy drinking, he returned to give an acclaimed performance in The Stunt Man (1980) (which is one of the few good films of his that I have not seen yet but will soon) and a wonderful performance in My Favorite Year (1982) where he played an aging, drunken, erratic, womanizing, fading star of swashbuckling films (supposed to be based on the life of actor Errol Flynn) who is invited to appear on a live TV variety show in the 1954. The show's producers assign a young writer to watch him like a hawk to make sure that he arrives on the set sober and on time and his desperate attempts to rein in the star's penchant to get into trouble forms the basis of the film. O'Toole clearly relished playing a caricature of himself and this made for a very endearing film.
When his old drinking friend Richard Harris died, O'Toole was considered to take over his role of Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. He was eventually passed over for Michael Gambon and although Gambon is a fine actor, I think O'Toole would have been better suited. O'Toole brings with him an air of frailty and yet wiry strength, sternness and yet with a mischievous gleam in his eyes, and a voice that can be soft and yet commanding. When I read the Potter books, the mental image I had of Dumbledore matched O'Toole almost exactly. Gambon seems just a little too vigorous and robust for my tastes.
Although O'Toole has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actor seven times before (Lawrence of Arabia, Becket, The Lion in Winter, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man, and My Favorite Year) he has never won.
It is time for him to get his due.
POST SCRIPT: And now, awards for the Bush Administration
Meanwhile, on the subject of awards, there is no question that the current Bush Administration can sweep the historical awards for politics. I think that there can be no doubt that members of the current administration are the clear winners in the following categories:
Worst President Ever: George W. Bush
Worst Vice-President Ever: Dick Cheney
Worst Secretary of Defense Ever: Donald Rumsfeld
Worst Secretary of State Ever: Condoleeza Rice
Worst National Security Advisor Ever: Condoleeza Rice
Rice winning in two separate categories is a record unlikely to be ever broken.
Perhaps these awards should be called the Bushies in their honor.
How low Bush has sunk in the public esteem can be seen in the most recent results of the Pew poll (scroll down) that asks people (without prompts or a list of options) to suggest one word that they feel describes Bush. It seems like a free-association test.
The general dissatisfaction with the president also is reflected in the single-word descriptions that people use to describe their impression of the president. While the public has consistently offered a mix of positive and negative terms to describe Bush, the tone of the words used turned more negative in early 2006 and remains the case today. In the current survey, nearly half (47%) describe Bush in negative terms, such as "arrogant," "idiot," and "ignorant." Just 27% use words that are clearly positive, such as "honest," "good," "integrity," and "leader."
As was the case a year ago, the word mentioned more frequently than any other is "incompetent." By comparison, from 2000 through 2005 "honest" was the word most frequently volunteered description of the president.
The detailed results of the poll over the period 2004-2006 can be seen here. One thing that I noticed was that the description 'Christian,' which usually had a fairly good showing in the past, has disappeared completely in the latest list. I am not sure what that means.
February 14, 2007
The Western and the Courtroom
In my pursuit of seeing all the old classic films, I recently watched Stagecoach, the 1939 film directed by John Ford that catapulted John Wayne from B-movie actor to a major star. This film signaled the beginning of the glory days of the western film, a period that lasted until the 50s, though the 'spaghetti westerns' of Sergio Leone gave them a brief resurgence in the 1960s.
I have long had a soft spot for westerns, and even now two of my favorite films of all time are High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953). Both these films were made at the height of the McCarthy-era witch hunts in which many people were hounded by the government and lost their jobs or were sent to prison or forced into exile (or sometimes all three) purely because of their beliefs and associations. These two films, and especially High Noon, with their themes of individuals standing up to powerful and evil forces in the face of public apathy and cowardice, can be seen as allegories for the situation at that time.
My affection for westerns may seem strange since I grew up in Sri Lanka and TV did not come to that country until the late 1970s. (The country skipped entirely the black-and-white TV era and went straight to color.) But as a young boy, I lived in England for three years at the end of the 1950s and that was a time in which it seemed like the TV schedules there featured one western after another. I would come home from school and watch all of them – Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Hopalong Cassidy, Wagon Train, The Cisco Kid, Rawhide, The Lone Ranger, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, Roy Rogers, and Rin Tin Tin. Such was my faithful devotion to these shows that to this day I know the words to those theme songs (the ones that had lyrics) and can still sing them though, alas, there are not many requests for this particular talent of mine.
Stagecoach had many features that have since become western clichés - the prostitute with a heart of gold, the drunken and dissolute doctor who can still retrieve his skills in an emergency, the pompous and officious dignitary with an unsavory secret, the sharply dressed and smooth talking gambler with a shady past, the climactic showdown between the good and bad guys, the outlaw who was unjustly accused, the impassive and menacing Indians who swoop down from the hills in an attack, and the sound of bugles signaling the arrival of the US cavalry to the rescue.
Given my addiction to this genre and my deep familiarity with it, I could see all these plot turns coming a mile off. But the film was still absorbing, mainly because the focus of Ford's film is less on action, apart from a long single attack sequence, and more on the characters and the changing relationships among them as the nine of them are confined to a stagecoach as it traverses the isolated and beautiful and dangerous country.
It says something about the quality of John Ford's work that despite the fact that the themes he introduced have sincee been so over-worked, I still found the film well worth watching.
Another old film that I had long wanted to see was Anatomy of a Murder (1959) starring James Stewart and directed by Otto Preminger. It deals with another favorite genre of mine, the courtroom drama. As longtime readers of this blog would have guessed, the law has always fascinated me and if for some reason my first love (physics) had been impossible for me as a career, I would probably have gone into law.
The film is surprisingly long for that time (2 hours, 40 mins), such lengths being reserved for certifiable Charlton Heston epics like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. But the film is engrossing and one does not feel the time passing. For me the best part was that about two thirds of the film took place in the courtroom as the opposing lawyers sparred with each other and the witnesses.
James Stewart, who is one of the most likeable of actors and always a pleasure to watch on the screen, plays a small-time lawyer who is retained to defend an army lieutenant who has shot and killed the person who is alleged to have raped his wife. The screenplay managed to avoid setting up a simple good-bad tension. While one always wants to see James Stewart win, this film complicated things by making his client (the army officer) an arrogant and sneering and thoroughly dislikable person, the client's wife as a beautiful but highly flirtatious woman, and the rapist also as a complex person. The prosecutors are also not caricatured as evil people out to get a conviction at all costs. As a result, one's sympathies continuously shift, from wanting Stewart to win, then wanting to smack his client for his insufferable smugness, liking his wife and wanting to believe her story but then not quite sure if she was actually raped or was falsely claiming it, and so on. It was this shifting of loyalties due to the complexity of the characters that made the film so gripping.
There were a few surprises in the film. Duke Ellington composed the score for the soundtrack and had a cameo appearance in a bar, and there is an extremely cute little dog.
An interesting bit of trivia about the film. The judge in the trial was portrayed as an old-school, avuncular type, politely appealing for decorum from the lawyers and gently chiding them when they overstepped their bounds. He was so courtly in his manner that he had a private conference with the lawyers to see if they could find an alternative to the word 'panties' during the rape testimony, thinking that it would be too indelicate.
There was something vaguely familiar about the actor playing the judge that I could not quite pin down so afterwards I went to the IMDb website to see who it was. It turns out that the judge was played by Joseph Welch who was the lawyer retained by the Army during the Joseph McCarthy Senate hearings on Communists in the Army and who in 1954 delivered the famous rebuke to McCarthy that I had seen and heard before in film and audio clips.
The famous exchange happened when McCarthy gratuitously exposed, on national TV, a young lawyer in Welch's firm named Fred Fisher as having been a member in the Lawyer's Guild, an organization that was alleged to be a Communist front, something that was not relevant to the proceedings. McCarthy's public revelation of Fisher's past was an act of spite against Welch.
At which point, Welch, in his distinctive voice, delivered these famous lines in a tone of sorrow and quiet anger which were seen and heard by millions, and were what triggered the memory in me as I watched the film. (Go here to hear the exchange.)
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. When I decided to work for this Committee, I asked Jim St. Clair, who sits on my right, to be my first assistant. I said to Jim, "Pick somebody in the firm to work under you that you would like." He chose Fred Fisher, and they came down on an afternoon plane. That night, when we had taken a little stab at trying to see what the case is about, Fred Fisher and Jim St. Clair and I went to dinner together. I then said to these two young men, "Boys, I don't know anything about you, except I've always liked you, but if there's anything funny in the life of either one of you that would hurt anybody in this case, you speak up quick."
And Fred Fisher said, "Mr. Welch, when I was in the law school, and for a period of months after, I belonged to the Lawyers' Guild," as you have suggested, Senator. He went on to say, "I am Secretary of the Young Republican's League in Newton with the son of [the] Massachusetts governor, and I have the respect and admiration of my community, and I'm sure I have the respect and admiration of the twenty-five lawyers or so in Hale & Dorr." And I said, "Fred, I just don't think I'm going to ask you to work on the case. If I do, one of these days that will come out, and go over national television, and it will just hurt like the dickens." And so, Senator, I asked him to go back to Boston.
Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I'm a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
. . .
Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. . .You've done enough.
And then he spoke the words that were the coup de grace: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
This shocking public rebuke to a US Senator, delivered by Welch in his sad and gentle voice, was a pivotal event that exposed McCarthy to the whole nation as an overbearing, reckless, and lying bully and started his rapid decline. The Senate censured him in December of that year and he began to be avoided by his colleagues and the press. His alcoholism increased and he died in 1957 of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 48.
The judge portrayed in the film seemed to be exactly like the person who gave this speech in real life. Whether he was selected for this role because he so fitted the part or because of gratitude for helping end the force behind the blacklist that drove so much talent out of Hollywood, I do not know.
POST SCRIPT: Mr. Deity Super Bowl Extra
Mr. Deity reappears to hold a press conference just before the Super Bowl.
January 31, 2007
Film talk-3: The film ratings mystery
In watching Oh! Calcutta!, I started thinking about the effect on film quality of the abundance of sex, nudity, profanity, and violence in films that are released these days. I personally find violence the most distasteful of all of these things and will avoid films that are advertised to have excessive amounts of it. When judging a film, the question for me is always whether these elements are essential to the film or, if not and are just added to attract audiences, the film would still be worth watching without those elements, or at least a substantial part of them. A good judge of whether this is the case is what I remember about a film long after I have seen it. If I find it hard to remember if there was any sex or nudity or violence or profanity, it means that the film stands on its own.
This is one reason that I will not see another Quentin Tarantino film. Although Pulp Fiction was hailed by many as a masterpiece (which is why I watched it), all I can remember about it is the over-the-top gratuitous violence and profanity, and copious use of the n-word. That is reputed to be his trademark and it is enough for me to swear off watching any more of his output.
The ratings system also baffles me somewhat. I remember seeing a little gem of a film called The Castle, which had an R rating. This film is an absolutely delightful little low-budget comedy with an almost completely unknown cast from Australia. It features a slow-witted but earnest family that finds surprise and enjoyment in what the rest of us would consider mundane. They own a house right by the Melbourne airport, with the runway ending just across their garden fence. Unlike most people, this family sees this as a very desirable feature because they enjoy seeing planes taking off and landing and can walk to the airport when they need to take a flight or meet someone. When the airport wants to expand, they try to resist having their home taken by the state and that struggle forms the basis of the film.
So why did this film rate an R? There is absolutely no sex, nudity, or violence. As far as I can see, the only reason is because three times in the film, characters use the f-word. But even then they do not use it gratuitously or offensively out of anger, but out of frustration like when the photocopier gets jammed at a critical moment. This is exactly the kind of situation when most people swear, so it was perfectly understandable use. One character even apologizes for using it when he realizes that an elderly female neighbor is present. And yet this wonderful film gets the same rating as Pulp Fiction, which seems to glory in violence and profanity just for its own sake. It hardly seems fair. The Castle is a great film for family viewing but many people won't watch it because of the rating.
I am looking forward to seeing on DVD the documentary This film is not yet rated, which is an expose of the secretive group that rates films in the US and the mysterious criteria used by them to classify films.
One of my other peeves about films deals with the way they begin. I notice when watching very old films how briskly they run through the opening credits, which is something I appreciate. In the old films from the1940s like Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, the film begins with the opening credits which are quickly got out of the way in about a minute with just the main people (actors, producer, director, screenwriter, music director, cinematographer) listed, leaving the more detailed credits to the end. And even then, the number of people are far fewer than nowadays. This is one of my favorite things about old films, the fact that they get down to the business of telling the story so quickly and without fuss and pretentiousness.
In the 1960s with films like Fail Safe, they sometimes had a brief opening sequence before going to the quick credits and then getting back to the film proper. This is fine too.
What I can't stand nowadays are those films that drag out the opening credits interminably, interspersing each and every name (and there are many more names now) with a brief segment of the film, so that it seems as if by the time the director's name mercifully comes on, we might be ten minutes into the film. I find this annoying and distracting and wish film makers would stop this practice.
On the other hand, there are some modern films that have no opening credits at all or just the title of the film, leaving all the credits to the end. I think that both the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series were like this. You might think I would prefer this, but I don’t. The reason is that I tend to remember actors' faces and find it distracting when I see a character appear onscreen whom I know I have seen before somewhere and cannot remember the name. When I read the opening credits for actors and see a familiar name, that prepares me for when the actor appears and thus don't get distracted trying to remember what his or her name is or previous films were.
Sometimes the opening credits are like a short film in its own right and this can work, especially for comedies. For example, the Pink Panther or the Ice Age series opening animations are like cartoon shorts, and that's fine. My complaint is with what appears to be opening credits run amok, serving no purpose than to draw attention to the person creating the credits. The opening credits in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are a wonderful spoof of this mentality, where the credits creator inserts text about his sister being bitten by a moose, and gets fired.
I realize that not everyone will share my pet peeves but here is my appeal to film makers: Stop with the long and elaborate opening credit sequences that do not really add value to the film and get the main names out of the way as soon as possible. Thank you.
POST SCRIPT: Documentary on the dialogue about terrorism
What promises to be an intriguing documentary titled What is said about. . .Arabs and Terrorism is going to be shown in two parts on successive days at two different locations in Cleveland. Director Bassam Haddad will be available to answer questions after both screenings, which are free and open to the public.
Part I: Tuesday February 6th at 6:00pm in the Dively Community Seminar Room, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, UR 112,Cleveland State University, 1717 Euclid Avenue.
Part II: Wednesday February 7th at 5:00pm in Strosacker Auditorium, Case Western Reserve University, 2125 Adelbert Road.
Sponsoring organizations:
Case Western Reserve University: Center for Policy Studies, Share the Vision Committee, Case Democrats, Middle East Cultural Association, Muslim Student Association, Undergraduate Student Government,
Cleveland State University: Cultural Crossing, Dean of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences, Middle Eastern Studies Minor Program.
For more information, see the website for the film or contact Dr. Neda A. Zawahri 216-687-4544 or Dr. Pete Moore 216-368-5265.
January 30, 2007
Film talk-2: Beatty, Hitchcock, and Oh! Calcutta!
I have been using the Case film library to catch up on some old films that I had always meant to see but missed when they first came out, either because they were made before I was born or because they did not make it to Sri Lanka.
I saw two Warren Beatty films, the comedy Shampoo (1975) where he plays a Beverly Hills hairdresser who sleeps with all his clients, and the drama Reds (1981), based on the life of a radical and idealistic American journalist John Reed, whose eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution was told in the book Ten Days that Shook the World.
I like Warren Beatty and find his films always enjoyable, but as I watched these two older films it struck me that although the settings and stories of his films differ considerably, he is always pretty much playing the same character, an appealing and well-meaning person who is never quite in control of his own life's direction but instead is buffeted by the events and people around him. This is true whether he is playing a gangster in the drama Bonnie and Clyde (1967), an old West entrepreneur in the drama McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), a football quarterback in the comedy Heaven Can Wait, a disillusioned politician in the comedy Bulworth (1998), a hairdresser in Shampoo, or a World War I-era radical journalist in Reds.
Perhaps he stepped outside these characterizations in the films I have not seen but since these are his best-known films, his cinematic persona seems pretty much set. Of all these films, Heaven Can Wait is my favorite, a very good comedy that has, as a bonus, a fine turn by one of the great actors, James Mason.
I also watched the Alfred Hitchcock film Foreign Correspondent (1940). Although I am a fan of Hitchcock and have seen nearly all of his directorial works, I did not think this one of his better films. It may be that I am not a fan of overtly propagandistic films and this film had elements of that. It was filmed in 1940, after World War II had started in Europe and prior to the US entering it. The film clearly aimed at getting Americans to be more alarmed about the state of affairs in Europe but the way it did this was a little too ham-handed. The opening scene which is a paean to the work of foreign correspondents and the closing scene in which the correspondent in London appeals to Americans for action while the lights around him go dark because of the bombing, were both too obvious for my taste. And even the closing credits just after that scene had the Star-Spangled Banner as the soundtrack.
There is nothing wrong with art having a political message and one could argue that all art is political. In fact, I like political films a lot and have already written about my enjoyment of The Manchurian Candidate (the original one, not the ghastly remake) and V for Vendetta.
But the problem I had with Foreign Correspondent is that the politics is not well done. To be fair, though, it was only at the very end that Hitchcock got preachy but that was enough to leave a sour aftertaste.
The final film I watched recently in my old-films binge was Oh! Calcutta! (1972). This was a filmed version of a musical comedy sketch revue that featured a lot of nudity and sexual content and created a sensation when it was first staged in the late 60s. Of course, such plays and films would never be shown in Sri Lanka, which created a great sense of curiosity there about it, so I finally decided to see it.
The film is awful. I found the music uninspiring (even though the credits included John Lennon and Peter ("PDQ Bach") Schickele), the comedy was only mildly funny and that too in parts, and the dances were just ok. In short, it was clear to me that the claim to fame of this production was that it was pushing the envelope of sex and nudity of that time. Now, much of it comes off as just crude, and there is little sense of shock anymore.
POST SCRIPT: Battle in Najaf
The reports of the battle that took place over the weekend in Najaf have some strange aspects to it. Initial reports say that Iraqi forces supported by US tanks and helicopter gunships killed 250 militants in a fierce battle that lasted many hours. There seemed to be very few casualties on the US and Iraq side. Some Initial reports describe the dead as 'militants', members of a Sunni apocalyptic cult that was seeking to kill prominent Shiite clerics in that city. Others argue that it was a Shiite group. The invaluable Juan Cole tries to disentangle the conflicting narratives.
Why an armed militant group would take on the Iraqi military in a relatively open area as a date palm orchard where they could be easily picked off by the supporting helicopter gunships seems puzzling. There seems to be a whole lot of confusion about who the dead were and what they represented.
In any conflict, I tend to view with great suspicion any reports of 'fierce' long battles in which one side sustains huge numbers of casualties and the other side next to nothing. These kinds of lopsided death tolls usually are signs that the side with low casualties is hiding their losses or that mostly civilians were killed, even though there may have been actual militants also among them. Initial reports of battles almost always come from the official military, which has a vested interest in minimizing civilian deaths. I usually suspend judgment on such stories until reporters and medical personnel and human rights workers are able to reach the areas and provide independent and relatively unbiased reports.
Meanwhile, some idea of the methods used by the Iraqi security forces in patrolling Baghdad, and their relationship to the US forces, can be obtained from watching this British TV report. It contains some rough scenes but sadly we have become accustomed to seeing dead and wounded, and people being assaulted. (Thanks to Glenn Greenwald.)
January 29, 2007
Film talk-1: Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove
Despite the heading on this blog, I realized that I had not been writing about films for quite a while. The reason is simple: I had not been seeing films over the past few months. This was because I was reading a lot of books as part of serving on the Common Reading Book Selection Committee. This is Case's committee to select the book that will be sent to all incoming students in the summer of 2007 and the selected book also forms part of the basis for orientation, fall convocation, and the First seminars.
This is a great committee to serve on because you get together with other students, staff, and faculty, all of whom love to read and talk about books. In serving on this committee over the past few years, I have been introduced to a lot of great books that I might not have read otherwise. This year saw a particularly good selection which I will write about once the final choice is made. But because the books were so good, I found it hard to tear myself away to my other love: films.
But in the last two weeks I watched some old films that were worth writing about.
Fail Safe is a great 1964 film based on a book of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. I have never understood how two people can collaborate on a novel because a novel seems like such a personal creation. But I digress.
I had read the book back in the 70's but had never seen the film. Its premise is the same as that of the much-better known Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, which also came out the same year. I wonder how it came to be that two studios decided to make two films with such similar themes in the same year. It seems weird to me. But I digress again.
Both films deal with the situation that arises during the cold war when a US nuclear bomber squadron begins a mission to attack the Soviet Union. In Fail Safe the cause is malfunctioning equipment while in Dr. Strangelove the cause is a psychotic US General who wants to start a nuclear war. But in both cases, technical malfunctions and cold war paranoia (at least initially) between the US and Soviet political and military leaders hinder attempts to get the fleets called back, despite their joint frantic efforts once people realize the seriousness of what is going on.
They are both wonderful films, though quite different in their approach to the same scenario. Dr. Strangelove, which I have seen numerous times over many years, is the ultimate black comedy, getting laughs from a potential nuclear catastrophe, with director Stanley Kubrick getting brilliant performances out of Peter Sellers (in three roles, Dr. Strangelove being one), George C. Scott, and Sterling Hayden.
Fail Safe, on the other hand, plays it straight and there is not a laugh to be had in the whole film. Instead director Sidney Lumet, with a small cast, created a small, tight film that kept me completely absorbed throughout, even though I knew how it would end because I had heard that it was faithful to the novel. In the film, the US president (played by Henry Fonda) and his Soviet counterpart and their respective military and civilian advisors find that, even after overcoming their initial mutual suspicions and starting to cooperate, it is hard to reverse events that could lead to a nuclear catastrophe. Their machines of war have taken on a life of their own that relentlessly drives events.
Both films are anti-war in the best sense of the word. In Fail Safe, the US and Soviet leaders and most of their advisors are portrayed as thoughtful, humane, reasonable, and intelligent people, and yet they cannot control events. It made me think of the present. The current leadership in the US, Israel, Iraq and Iraq can none of them claim to have any of these desirable qualities and yet they are the ones we have to depend on to try and avert a catastrophe in the Middle East. It does not give one hope.
If any of you have not seen Fail Safe or Dr. Strangelove, you should check them out. They are true classics, in that they are timeless.
POST SCRIPT: The battle for Haifa Street
I wrote recently about how disturbing it was that nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq, US and Iraqi forces were still fighting pitched battles on a boulevard right in the capital Baghdad. According to Lara Logan of CBS News (who has done some terrific reporting), that battle raged for two weeks and may even still be going on. She appealed to her colleagues to spread the word about the video, which shows and important battle that is symptomatic of the stalemate that exists there. (You have to watch a commercial first.)
November 24, 2006
No more daft women!
(Because I am taking a break from blogging for the holiday, this is a repost from April 4, 2006, slightly edited.)
Evan Hunter, who was the screenwriter on Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds recalled an incident that occurred when he was discussing the screenplay with the director.
I don't know if you recall the movie. There's a scene where after this massive bird attack on the house Mitch, the male character, is asleep in a chair and Melanie hears something. She takes a flashlight and she goes up to investigate, and this leads to the big scene in the attic where all the birds attack her. I was telling [Hitchcock] about this scene and he was listening very intently, and then he said, "Let me see if I understand this correctly. There has been a massive attack on the house and they have boarded it up and Mitch is asleep and she hears a sound and she goes to investigate?'' I said, "Well, yes,'' and he said, "Is she daft? Why doesn't she wake him up?''
I remembered this story when I was watching the film The Interpreter with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. The Kidman character accidentally overhears something at the UN that puts her life at risk. After she complains to government agent Penn that no one seems to be bothered about protecting her from harm, Penn puts her on round-the-clock surveillance. So then what does Kidman do? She sneaks around, giving the slip to the very people assigned to protect her and refuses to tell Penn where she went and to whom she spoke and about what, causing herself and other people to be put at risk and even dying because of her actions. Hitchcock would have said, "Is she daft?"
This is one of my pet peeves about films, where the female character insists on doing something incredibly stupid that puts her and other people at peril. Surely in this day and age we have gone beyond the stale plot device of otherwise smart women behaving stupidly in order to create drama? Surely writers have more imagination than that? Do directors really think that viewers won't notice how absurd that is?
According to Hunter, Hitchcock was always exploring the motivations of characters, trying to make their actions plausible. Hunter says:
[Hitchcock] would ask surprising questions. I would be in the middle of telling the story so far and he would say, "Has she called her father yet?" I'd say, "What?'' "The girl, has she called her father?'' And I'd say, "No.'' "Well, she's been away from San Francisco overnight. Does he know where she is? Has she called to tell him she's staying in this town?'' I said, "No.'' And he said, "Don't you think she should call him?'' I said, "Yes." "You know it's not a difficult thing to have a person pick up the phone.'' Questions like that.
(Incidentally, the above link has three screenwriters Arthur Laurents, who wrote Rope (1948), Joseph Stefano, who wrote Psycho (1960), and Evan Hunter reminiscing about working with Hitchcock. It is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of how a great director envisages and sets about creating films. The last quote actually reads in the original: "Yes, you know it's not a difficult thing to have a person pick up the phone.'' I changed it because my version makes more sense, and the original is a verbatim transcript of a panel discussion, in which such kinds of punctuation errors can easily occur.)
More generally, I hate it when characters in films and books behave in ways that are unbelievable. The problem is not with an implausible premise, which is often necessary to create a central core for the story. I can even accept the violation of a few laws of physics. For example, I can accept the premise of Superman that a baby with super powers (but susceptible to kryptonite) arrives on Earth from another planet and is adopted by a family and needs to keep his identity secret. I can accept of Batman that a millionaire like Bruce Wayne adopts a secret identity in order to fight crime.
What I cannot stand is when they and the other people act implausibly, when the stories built on this premise have logical holes that you can drive a Batmobile through. The latter, for example, is a flashy vehicle, to say the least, easily picked out