Hi, everyone! Just letting you know about an interview I did for James Curnow’s wonderful, cinema-oriented CURNBLOG with former Saturday Night Live writer Ferris Butler (yes, that Ferris Butler) and legendary songwriter Beverly Ross, she of “Lollipop” fame. Incidentally, Ferris and Beverly are also my uncle and aunt and were gracious enough to field my questions. If you’d like to read it, the interview (which covers everything from their careers in the entertainment industry to the story behind Ferris being the inspiration for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) may be found on this CURNBLOG page:
http://curnblog.com/2014/01/28/interviewing-beverly-ross-ferris-butler-skits-films-rock-n-roll/
Enjoy!
I must be remiss. Very remiss.
I hadn’t seen Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie until a few days ago. Bad, bad me.
It was terrific. Not the greatest comedy ever made, but this witty farce, concerning an injured cameraman and his lawyer brother-in-law’s scheme to collect a fraudulent insurance windfall, was as smooth and quick on its feet as Walter Matthau’s sleazy attorney. I think I put off viewing it for so long because it was about insurance. Amazing how so dry a subject can make such froth.
I confess there are still a lot of fine films I haven’t seen. But I can now check this Cookie off my list. Thank goodness.
I
s there a better car chase in the movies than the one in The French Connection?
The subway-centric scene even beats the famous San Francisco-set sequence in Bullitt, in my opinion, and though the riveting desert ride in Raiders of the Lost Ark comes close, the originality of the shots in Connection makes it tops. A camera mounted on the hood so you can see where the car is speeding—superb, risky work.
And to think it was all done without CGI, huh? How did we live?
Well, I think, is the answer, with scenes such as these.
Raise your hand if you thought The Artist would usher in a new era of silent, black-and-white movies.
OK, I didn’t, either. But I can’t say I wasn’t hoping. We need a little dose of the past to get us schlepping toward the future, and a retro attitude toward the cinema wouldn’t hurt. It certainly didn’t for M. Truffaut and other members of la Nouvelle Vague.
True, The Artist was a standout—not perfect, but clever and entertaining … like some of the best silent movies. The worst, however, are akin to any other lousy film: awful. Just because something’s silent doesn’t mean it’s good. Or vice versa.
Still, the film showed that the genre could be revitalized for a new audience, with a novelty value transcended by a smart script and direction. The question is, will a few more irises and wipes make for self-conscious cinema? They’d have to be incorporated organically to avoid affectation, and that’s a tall order. Skilled directors need apply.
I’d suggest starting a dialogue about this, but I think I need a title card.
No film is perfect, and even great movies have scenes or lines that could be better.
I was thinking about this recently while watching Ghostbusters on TV. It’s hardly a masterpiece, yet it remains a terrific comedy and has held up well nearly 30 years after its debut. Still, despite a sharp, hilarious script, it contains a line toward the end that disappoints me to this day: “I love this town,” shouted by Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddmore after the ‘busters save New York City from a supernatural catastrophe.
Blah. Surely there was a funnier way to express triumph than a maudlin acknowledgement of Gotham’s greatness.
Of course, it’s not a movie-breaker, but it brings to mind other frustrating lines from the cinema’s greatest flicks. For instance: the immortal “leave me alone” in Lawrence of Arabia, spoken with great self-pity by Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in a dialogue with Jack Hawkins’ General Allenby—who, as if in recognition of this pathetic order, notes that it’s a “feeble thing to say.” I guess it’s hard to count this in the annals of bad lines completely, as it’s followed up in an organic way, though it still rings overdone. So does a much-revered scene in the otherwise extraordinary film The Seven Samurai where Toshiro Mifune’s Kikuchiyo, charged by a dying woman with saving her baby, collapses into the stream surrounding the village and cries along with the infant, lamenting how the same thing happened to him. It’s just a bit too much in a movie noted for its tight script, though it does give some insight into the reckless character’s origins.
These are just a few examples. They don’t ruin the films overall. Yet it’s interesting to see how high our estimation is of them … if we can carp about lesser lines within. Further proof of the merits of these justly praised pictures.
Time-travel movies are risky. Repeated situations and scenes can go nowhere unless they’re tweaked enough to convey something new. And you need an urgency informing the proceedings; if you’re going on a temporal journey of any length with a character—main or otherwise—it’s got to matter.
Richard Curtis’ latest flick About Time misses on all of those fronts.
The story of Tim, a young man (played by Domhnall Gleeson) who uses his ability to travel backward in time to foster romantic adventures and generally change things for the better in his life, this insufferably dull, mawkish film makes Rashomon look cursory in its depiction of the same story told in various ways. Yet temporal adjustments can’t explain the duration of a scene in which Tim’s wife (Rachel McAdams) asks for his opinion on an endless stream of outfits, nor can it shed light on the woefully underwritten characters peppering the film in an attempt to infuse it with charm and humor. (Tim’s obnoxiously free-spirited sister Kit Kat and bitter playwright landlord are two such examples, providing full servings of eccentricity without definition or context.)
The fact is, the movie lags. I didn’t care about the protagonists. And despite the addition of some by-the-book weeper ingredients—a devastating illness for Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) and alcoholism for his sister—the picture comes off as disingenuous, with manipulation being the takeaway. That it’s derivative is a lesser issue, though films such as Run Lola Run and Groundhog Day, which used the same idea more judiciously, can’t be blamed for AT‘s faults. This movie made all its miscues on its own.
Curtis, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, has done sparkling work before, and every director produces a dud once in a while. But flicks such as About Time get me worried about the cinema. They suggest, in my opinion, that a touch of unreality can make up for other issues—script, direction, performances and the like—yet it’s not an effective substitute. The best time-travel (or any) movies take you back with them and make you want to come along. They move quickly and economically … like time itself.
And you don’t check your watch while viewing them. About Time, sadly, waits for everyone.
The last thing we need is another movie based on the story of the 47 ronin.
But now we have one … starring Keanu Reeves, no less. And seemingly reimagined, with all sorts of supernatural goings-on.
I think we should reimagine the Declaration of Independence, while we’re at it. And maybe the signing of the Magna Carta.
Yes, it’s a famous story, and famous stories deserve to be retold. But we’ve already had perfectly good movies made of this tale, helmed by directors ranging from Kenji Mizoguchi to Hiroshi Inagaki. Do we really need another version—especially one that appears to meld the stylized grotesquerie of 300 with the tiresome posturing of The Matrix?
Someone please give me a nice Zeami Noh play to immerse my brain in.
Hollywood has always tweaked history to make it more cinematically palatable. Movies have to be entertainment, and that sometimes means the events transpiring onscreen don’t quite match those in real life. Yet there’s a distressing trend nowadays to completely overhaul venerated stories from our past while adding extraneous details—such as over-the-top violence—to get the desired audience.
The point is being missed. And as that’s happening, the films lose their value.
A strong director can help make this bitter medicine go down. Quentin Tarantino certainly worked wonders with Inglourious Basterds, as flawed as that movie was. But these films are cinematic fantasies, merely “inspired by” rather than “informed by,” and any attention to historical detail, I feel, is irrelevant. They’re to authenticity as reality TV shows are to life.
Hopefully, one day, we’ll have a based-on-true-events film come out without the trappings of revisionism. Perhaps we need a story so hallowed that any adjustments would be taboo.
I can’t think of any, however. I already know nothing’s sacred.
Could the greatest invention in the history of film be the subtitle?
I’m only kind of kidding. Where would we be without this wondrous tool, which has allowed those of us (including me) lacking fluency in various languages to enjoy works by Bergman, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, et al., without the burden of dubbing?
But that’s not its only benefit. Remember the time—not so long ago—when it seemed like all of the characters in movies set in countries outside the U.S. spoke accented English? Sometimes it appeared as if the accents didn’t need to be authentic … just unplaceably exotic.
We’ve evolved greatly since then, with subtitles informing a host of popular films—including those taking place in galaxies far, far away. That’s a positive step, though it doesn’t negate the continued bizarreness of time passing long enough in just a few scenes for any given protagonist to learn a native tongue quicker than a linguist devours alphabets.
I guess we’ll still have to take some things for granted. The language of the cinema almost makes me expect time to pass with a wipe in real life … or maybe with an iris. That it doesn’t isn’t disappointing; I just chalk it up to movie magic. Like I do the great subtitle—the silver screen’s own Babel fish—which has translated innumerable tongues for us, and in doing so, has improved the world. The folks behind this sadly unheralded art should be thanked.
We’d all be listening to forced, ambiguous accents without them.
I don’t know about you, but every time I see an action movie these days, I expect the gore to pepper the screen with pixels.
It’s hard to run away from computer-generated imagery. It’s all over TV–from commercials to ongoing series. And it pervades the cinema, where it has become, in some cases, the main reason to see certain pictures.
Yes, filmmakers can do things with CGI that couldn’t have been achieved 40 years ago. But is that always a positive? Are we relying too much on high rather than low technology?
I worried about this recently while watching Life of Pi, whose CGI animals—especially the growling, boat-hogging tiger—had a gloss and fluidity of movement that seemed slightly off. It was a solid technical achievement, surely, and the cinematography was often stunning. Yet the animals seemed less “real” than the fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. The tiger showed its stripes.
That doesn’t mean I think we should go back to adjusting models frame by frame and discarding all cinematic developments … though the process of creating CGI creatures may only be slightly less onerous. But I do think something’s missing from most of the computer-crafted images used today, whether it’s a tiger or a snowflake. It’s not just naturalness; it’s essence. Those battling skeletons—ludicrous as they may be—draw me in. That smooth-purring tiger doesn’t.
Somewhere Bruce the shark is rolling his dead eyes.
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