Theaters try to compete with living rooms
Jim Emerson
View image If only the “theatrical experience” could be as good as your living room…
An architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Landmark multiplex at the Westside Pavilion:
… [It is] designed to compete directly with your living room — with your sofa, your flat screen and your ability to pause, rewind, turn on the lights or just give up on the movie idea altogether and switch over to “The Daily Show.”
As if to acknowledge how tough it’s becoming to drag people out of their houses for a night at the movies, with home-theater technology getting better and traffic getting worse, the Landmark includes a number of domestic architectural touches. The most striking are three “Living Room” theaters on the top floor that hold between 30 and 50 people each. They include sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset. […]
All of the Landmark’s larger auditoriums are pleasingly steep and feature extra-wide seats with cup holders that will accommodate your Chardonnay as well as a Big Gulp-sized soda. They are served by top-of-the-line Sony digital projectors, which construction crews were moving carefully into place last week.
But those rooms offer a variation on an architectural experience we all know well: the big movie auditorium with cushy seats and teeth-rattling sound. What’s new at the Landmark, at least for a first-run theater, are those Living Rooms — not just for their furniture but for what they reveal about the industry’s attitude toward architectural space in a digital era. […]
This time around Hollywood is openly admitting the extent to which the public now associates the movie-watching experience with the comforts of home.
Well, why should a theater be less comfortable or less aesthetically satisfying than your average big-screen TV home set-up? This kind of thing has been done for years (the beanbags or sofas and ottomans in the front row and such), but what I’ll be interested in seeing is whether cozy 30- to 50-seat auditoria can bring in enough revenue to justify building them.
December 14, 2012
How do you solve a problem like the Oscars?
Jim Emerson
Academy Award-winning Cher in her “serious actress” Oscar ensemble.
Almost every year for the last 20 or so I’ve had to think seriously about that question. I mean, what is there to write about the Oscars that hasn’t already been done? I had a great time with my recent piece for MSN Movies (“Your Oscar speech: How not to blow it”), but I was fully aware I wasn’t the first (or even, probably, the 1,000th) to write something similar in approach.
So, let’s recap the angles: We can look at it as a horserace [check] and place bets on the odds [check]; as an election or popularity contest [check]; as a poker game [check — I did that for MSN one year, with each nominee holding a “hand” based on previous awards-season honors]; as the “Gay Super Bowl” [check]; as a fashion show [check]; as Hollywood’s version of “American Idol” [check]…
Some people would probably like watching the Academy Awards broadcast better if all the nominees gave speeches and the winner was decided by who gave the best one. (Maybe Academy members could call 900 numbers to vote for their favorites or there could be an Academy-approved panel of judges: say, Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Roger Moore.) I find the speeches to be generally excruciating. (But, then, I thought the best Oscars ever was the Allan “Can’t Stop the Music” Carr-produced one with Rob Lowe and Snow White because it was so astoundingly grotesque that I laughed so hard I cried. The Academy has tried to deep-six all evidence of that one, and Disney even threatened to sue over the use of Snow White. C’mon, YouTube!)
Here’s another idea: A former resident of Mexico wrote to me with the following proposal:
In Older Mexican Award Shows, the recipient of the award was not allowed to speak. Each nominee was presented along with a few seconds of their song (or movie clip) and then the winner was named. The winner would walk on stage, accept the award, wave or blow kisses at the audience and then walk off stage. It was fantastic.
The newer Mexican award shows are becoming more “Americanized” now unfortunately. Most now allow the winners to speak which just makes me long for the good old days. So I say Don’t Let Them Speak. We don’t care who you have to thank, who allowed this moment to happen, how much you love God, or how inspiring your parents were. All we care about is that you won…. And what you’re wearing. But that’s it!I kinda like that. They could stretch out the Red Carpet Walk of Shame if they want, or even require that the major nominees do interviews afterwards, with Rosie O’Donnell or Dr. Phil or Chris Matthews. Sort of like the publicity clauses in actors’ contracts that stipulate they must do a certain amount of promotion in exchange for their salary on a given film: If you want an award, you’re going to have to submit to a sit-down with Brit Hume or someone similarly slimy and daft (and, preferably, as humorless).
And if they need to make the show itself longer (to sell commercial time), they could make “In Memoriam” last ten minutes or so (more clips!) and do even bigger, more vapid and elaborate musical numbers — not for the best songs, but for ALL the top nominees!
The Oscars are about the show. It’s entertainment, loosely defined. Nominees, it is not about you. It’s about we, the millions (not billions) who watch the satellite-cast on TV and have parties with our friends and laugh and cry and sigh and gasp and ridicule. (If we don’t have to work.) That’s the only approach that matters.
December 14, 2012
30th Anniversary Poll: What’s your favorite Star War(s)?
Jim Emerson
Closed 6/11/07
December 14, 2012
What makes a movie bulletproof?
Jim Emerson
OK, who’s ready to see the new movie about a gastroenterologist named Joe?
One of my favorite tree-based movie critics, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, explains why you won’t be seeing many reviews of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” before it opens (Paramount isn’t pre-screening it for critics) and wonders who cares — about the movie or what critics think of it?
Movie critics are put on earth first to alert you to good movies you might otherwise miss, then to cut through the PR fog and consider the actual worth of a given film (depending on what, exactly, it hopes to achieve). With certain types of movie — typically smaller, more ambitious fare attended by people who regularly read reviews — a critic can mean the difference between a successful run and an early DVD release. But blockbusters? In most cases, we’re BBs bouncing off the hide of an elephant….
December 14, 2012
Finding ‘The Fall’
Jim Emerson
My friend Alley Rutzel was so mesmerized by Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” (premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, but released in the US only this summer), that she put together this index of breathtaking images and locations from the film. She writes: “Watching this movie was incredibly inspiring (I kept saying “I want to go there, and I want to go there…”) so I made a game of trying to figure out all the filming locations.” She still doesn’t have ’em all, so please take a look and let her know if you can identify them…
December 14, 2012
The color of scent
Jim Emerson
In the few sentences that I’ve posted about Tom Tykwer’s “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (just blurbs on my Best of 2006 and Double-Bills lists), I mentioned that the movie was a striking feat of “cine-sthesia,” as it were, and that the murders themselves reminded me of Hannibal Lecter’s analysis of Jame Gumb in “Silence of the Lambs”: The killing is incidental. What does he seek? (In this sense it reminded me of Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” too — voyeurism as a form of possession through the senses — sight or smell.) And, of course, Grenouille (the scentless apprentice) kills because he covets. Jame Gumb wants to possess a woman’s skin; Grenouille wants her scent — and, by extension, all women’s scents.
I wonder if one reason I was so enthralled by Tykwer’s film (it’s gotten mixed reviews: a 54 on RottenTomatoes) is that I’m told I have mild synesthesia, where senses bleed together a bit so that, for example (from the American Heritage Dictionary definition of the word), “the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.” That’s very much like what the movie does, with color, shape, texture and sound orchestrated to express odors. But doesn’t everybody experience this to some degree? My sensations have mostly to do with color, shape, texture and brightness. Sounds, particularly music (and to a lesser extent tastes, smells, even tactile feelings), are always accompanied by colors and shapes. Doesn’t everybody know that trumpets are round and red? That violins are long and yellow? That pianos are (generally speaking) ovoid and green? Snare drums are light grey, short and thin and flat, like em-dashes, while cymbals are silvery, shimmery and round-ish but with no distinct edges, like a spray. Those are some of the things I always see in my head when I listen to music. Also: The number two is green, just as surely as the number five is red and seven is blue. (And the funny thing is, that’s true for Roman numerals as well as Arabic ones, though the colors aren’t all as strong.) I don’t know where these associations come from — if I’ve always had them or if I made them when I was a kid.
Do you have these experiences? Care to describe them?
Getting back to my first paragraph, I wanted to refer you to a splendid (and splendidly titled) piece by Stephen Romer in the Times Literary Supplement called “Distilled, bottled, and bewildered” that is a combined discussion of Tykwer’s film, Patrick Süskind’s original 1985 novel, and a book of historical research and analysis of the “olfactory arts” by Richard Stamelman called “Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin.” An excerpt that I thought was exceptionally perceptive (beware of spoilers):
December 14, 2012
The structure of Inception: Viewing from the inside out
Jim Emerson
Imagine a film in which all the characters are manifestations of a single consciousness, and the main way they communicate is by telling each other (and the movie audience) the story in which they, as characters, are participating — while they are actively in that story. In other words, what if the driving consciousness of the picture belonged to… Basil Exposition!?!? That’s my tongue-in-cheek take on a typically brilliant and enlightening shared dream post by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell on “Inception” at Observations on Film Art.
KT says that the first time she saw Christopher Nolan’s multi-leveled narrative she didn’t particularly enjoy it until about the last 36 minutes, when the van started falling into the water — the section that “marks the end of what we’ve called the Development portion of the film and the beginning of the Climax.”
At that turning point, it dawned on me that Nolan has elevated exposition of new premises to the main form of communication among characters. Discussion of their personal relationships, hopes, and doubts largely drops out. As the Russian Formalists would say, exposition, usually given early on and at wide intervals later in a plot, becomes the dominant here. That’s an unusual enough tactic to warrant a closer look.
December 14, 2012
Steve Park: A funny man, serious and significant
Jim Emerson
Meet Steve Park. You may know him as Sonny, the Korean store owner in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989) — or perhaps as a regular on “In Living Color” during the 1991-1992 season. While recently going through the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” (2009) with an audience for a week during the Ebert Cinema Interruptus at the Conference on World Affairs, I came to the startling realization that the Steve Park who played Japanese-American Mike Yanagita in “Fargo” (1996) and the Stephen Park who played Korean-American Mr. Park 13 years later in “A Serious Man” were one and the same.
The Coens sometimes give a single-scene appearance to a relatively minor character who provides the key to understanding (or at least defining) the film’s mysteries. In “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) it’s Mink (Steve Buscemi) who, in a rapid-fire exchange with Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) at the Shenandoah Club lays out the movie’s convoluted map of relationships before we can take in everything that’s being thrown at us.
In “No Country for Old Men” it’s Ellis (Barry Corbin), cousin of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who, in the quiet scene that begins the last movement of the picture, spells out the harsh realities of the past, present and future for the retiring lawman who feels overmatched in the modern world and wants to opt out of it: “You can’t stop what’s comin’. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.”
Park has the honor of appearing in two such key scenes for the Coens, years apart. His Mike Yanagita is funny, with a delectable Minnesota accent to bounce off Marge Gunderson’s, but he’s also a disturbing and even tragic figure. Mr. Park (Clive’s father) is one of many forces buffeting Larry Gopnick. And, unlike Larry, he’s a man who knows exactly what he wants, even if Larry’s rationalist worldview can’t comprehend him. (Watch the video, above.)
December 14, 2012
Mad Men: Modern Compartmentalization
Jim Emerson
“Mad Men” has always been about compartmentalization: personal and professional, past and present, city and suburbia, accounts and creative… At first I didn’t much like the new, glass and monochrome office spaces, about which silver fox Roger Sterling (John Slattery) remarked: “I feel like with my hair you can’t even see me in here.” Leave it to director Slattery to make the most out of these spaces in one of the finest episodes of the series (and leading contender for my favorite movie of 2010), “The Rejected” (Season 4, Episode 4). I put together this little wordless video essay about doors, windows, mirrors, transoms, hallways, pillars, screens, reflections… and I’m working on a frame-grab photo essay that gets into more detail about the exquisite direction and composition.
I’ve deliberately left out huge, important chunks of the episode that don’t take place in the office — but had to include Pete’s magnificent shrug (with mirror, bar, decorative screen, and the unseen room down the hall), to contrast his apartment with his office, and the small framed mirror with the wall-sized observation mirror at work. The episode is mostly about Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) going in different directions, discovering new ways to open or close doors between their work and personal lives, contrasted with Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who begins the episode chain-smoking and drinking during a four-way phone call, his office a tangled web of coiled cords. Notice all the cross-sight-lines communication going on (horizontal, vertical, diagonal) — people watching other people, exchanging glances or sight-unseen, through various frames in their separate compartments — culminating in Don’s seduced-and-ignored secretary Allison (Alexa Alemanni) staring the wrong way through the two-way mirror and looking Don right in the eye, unsettling him by seeing him for who he really is.
Both Pete and Peggy find themselves banging their heads against work surfaces in frustration/resignation, but the episode gives them a moment of grace, through glass doors in the reception area, in a brief, wordless coda I’ve included almost in its entirety. Peggy is leaving for lunch with some of her new boho friends; Pete is standing around with some suits (“new” clients, including his father-in-law), waiting for Don so they can have a business lunch. (BTW, I couldn’t squeeze it in, but the shot of Pete knocking his forehead against the post in his office is followed by a shot of Peggy getting into the elevator — much like the last shot here — in which she first meets the LIFE photo editor who introduces her to the Village crowd who come by to get her at the end.) Man, what a terrific movie this is!
December 14, 2012
The Monthlies
Jim Emerson
I was watching Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 “Stray Dog” the other night, in which a nightclub owner said one of his chorus girls was “sick” with “her monthlies.” This is not something you could have heard in a Hollywood film in 1948. But it reminded me of several things I wanted to let you know about this particular month:
1) It’s Un Mumf de Odienator at Big Media Vandalism again — that is, the third annual Black History Mumf! Odie kicks things off with a stellar appreciation of “Boyz N the Hood,” capping it with a personal note:
Black History Mumf is all about my confessions, which I wrap up and hide in these pieces. Growing up, I was Tre minus the bad temper. I was the smartest kid most of my friends and family knew, and for that I was ostracized, beaten up, and ignored by the girls. They went for the guys I knew who sold drugs. It seemed like everybody I knew was up to that, or stealing cars, so I wanted to participate as well. I wanted to belong, to be popular, to have the girls like me too.
December 14, 2012
9/11: The Movie
Jim Emerson
The power of images: A conscious attempt was made to answer the indelible destructive images of 9/11/2001 with a healing one in this Ground Zero memorial that was seen all over the world via the media (and could actually be seen by satellites from space).
Following up on my posts about “Wag the Dog”/JonBenet/Iraq & 9/11 and modern propaganda films:
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the atrocities of 9/11, I still think one of the most important yet least explored aspects of the day’s attacks is how they were carefully designed and staged for the cameras. Deadly spectacles that everyone kept saying was “like a movie” actually were directed that way, as a horror/disaster movie with unforgettable psychological impact — because it wasn’t just a movie, it was real. The “terror” in “terrorism” is about spreading fear and panic, and the World Trade Center towers weren’t just chosen because they were symbols of American riches and hubris, but because they were visual symbols that would make for spectacular and terrifying footage. The first plane guaranteed that the second would come as an even greater shock — and would be caught by thousands of cameras. That was the way the perpetrators spread their murderous message: they intended to terrify not just the government but the population. And, initially, they succeeded. (Nobody looked more terrified on that day than Brave President Sir Robin, who bravely ran away, away, for most of the day: “When danger reared its ugly head / He bravely turned his tail and fled…”)
So, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who called the WTC attacks “the greatest work of art ever” — later changing it to “Lucifer’s greatest work of art”) was pilloried for being insensitive (and he was), while his larger point was ignored.
British artist/provocateur Damien Hirst elaborated a bit more in 2002, but it was still “too soon” for many, who thought his words sounded flip:
“The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually.”No matter what you think of his tone or his timing, I don’t see how one can contest that.
Lawrence Wright’s new book, “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” explores this in greater detail than any reporting or analysis that has come along so far. A piece in Salon.com cites Osama bin Laden’s role as “director”:
At the heart of Wright’s wide-ranging narrative is America’s arch nemesis. “One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it,” he says. “The answer is certainly not.” That’s why I’m skeptical that a plot to blow up airliners somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is really the biggest plan out there. It’s missing the visual aspect that is so effective at creating the fear and panic that lead to hysterical, reckless, wasteful, counter-productive and even self-destructive decision-making of the sort we’ve seen since 9/11. Politicians, no matter what their party affiliation (or lack of one), still haven’t come to their senses.
December 14, 2012
Yes, but is it art?
Jim Emerson
The phrase above was the name I gave to the arts section I edited at the University of Washington Daily. I thought (and still think) it was funny, while it also satirizes the central conceit of writing about culture, whether it’s “high culture” or “popular culture.” (If I made a Venn diagram of those categories they would significantly overlap.) I still have a rubber stamp that says, “This is not art.” I got it about 30 years ago. Sometimes I like to get it out and stamp it on things because I think it is absolutely hilarious — both as a comment on art and a comment on criticism. I laugh and laugh, even if it’s only on the inside.
December 14, 2012
Rehearsing your own prejudices
Jim Emerson
Spent last week in Boulder, CO, participating in the Conference on World Affairs — an event that gloriously celebrates the values and principles outlined in this video. It’s 9 minutes and 40 seconds that, I hope, illustrate the proposition upon which this blog is founded: critical thinking.
(tip: Andrew Sullivan, whose blog I plugged mercilessly)
December 14, 2012
Melancholia: This is The End
Jim Emerson
“Melancholia” is now available On Demand; in theaters November 7.
Of the Four Bodily Humours — sanguine (blood), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile) and phlegmatic (phlegm) — Lars von Trier has probably been most closely associated with the choleric, as expressed in angry, violent, inflammatory, irritating and caustic films such as “Breaking the Waves,” “The Idiots,” “Dancer in the Dark,” “Dogville,” “Manderlay,” “Antichrist”… The latter felt to me like a glossy fashion magazine’s idea of a horror movie (“Evil Vogue” — all it was missing were the scratch-n-sniff Odorama perfume ads), but von Trier¹ claimed it grew from deep inside a cocoon of depression.
“Melancholia” strikes me as a more focused and harrowing portrait of clinical depression, a glowing, black-bile-on-velvet portrait of despair so bleak that it destroys the entire planet. Two planets, in fact: one is Earth and the other (quite similar looking but much, much larger) called Melancholia, a kind of massive-planet-sized anti-matter particle which we see collide with and engulf the Earth (from deep in space) in the opening montage… and again, from a terrestrial perspective, at the end.
If Terence Malick’s “Tree of Life” is, as I described it earlier in the year, “a movie about (and by) a guy who wants to create the universe around his own existence in an attempt to locate and/or stake out his place within it,” then “Melancholia,” by my reckoning, is a movie about (and by) a person whose depression is so inescapably great and soul-destroying that it envelops and annihilates the world. Because it has to. There’s nowhere else for it to go. Also, it’s important for the depressed character/filmmaker to firmly assert that the only life in the universe is on Earth, and that all of it is annihilated. Hope of any kind is not an option. Besides, anything less that than the obliteration of absolutely everything would spoil the perfection of the happy ending for von Trier and Justine (Kirsten Dunst), his Bride of Oblivion.
December 14, 2012
Milestones
Jim Emerson
My semi-trusty Amstrad, circa 1988.
Scanners is only a little over a year old. If I recall correctly, it began on RogerEbert.com shortly before the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival in the fall, then shifted over to the new Sun-Times/Moveable Type publishing platform a few months later in spring, at the beginning of the 2006 Overlooked Film Festival — 254 Moveable Type entries ago. It’s been almost exactly four months since I persuaded the Sun-Times that I really wanted to have Comments enabled, and they became available here for the first time in June. Last week, without my even noticing it, we passed 1,000 comments (almost 1,100 as of today) — and for that, I am extremely grateful to you!
Since June, I’ve instigated the Opening Shots Project — with many contributions from readers (and many still to be published, and many frame-grabs to be grabbed — I haven’t forgotten, I’m just overwhelmed) — and we’ve had some exceptionally terrific and rewarding discussions about “The Descent,” “The Departed,” all kinds of approaches to film criticism, and more other subjects than I can think of right now. Scanners is rapidly evolving into the very thing I hoped it would become, a place where people can have impassioned, intelligent, provocative (and funny) discussions about critical thinking in all its guises — beginning with “moving images” (film and video and TV) and extending in all directions into even the touchiest related (but unavoidable) subjects of sex, business, politics, race, religion, philosophy, mythology and art. How much fun is that?!?!
December 14, 2012
Hidden horrors: Four spine-tingling DVDs
Jim Emerson
Don’t look now, little girl, but the children of rage (mummy’s rage) are about to get you.
Los Dias de los Muertos begin today, October 31 (aka “Halloween day”) through November 2 (aka All Souls Day — and Tara Mulan Sweeney’s birthday). Time to recycle my appreciation of four critically undervalued horror movies from a few years back: David Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant,” Neil Jordan’s “In Dreams,” and John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness” (“The critics were horrified!!!!”):
Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It’s so easy — too easy, sometimes — to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels). But the horror films I like best are not the abundantly bloody shockers critics love to loathe (though George Romero’s extravagantly gory Grand Guignol “Dawn of the Dead” is a treasured favorite), but the ones that are the most atmospheric and creepy — that suggest far more than they depict.
Continue reading here…
December 14, 2012
The Entitled
Jim Emerson
View image
From The Onion, October 23, 2006:
“I’ve been making pictures for 40 years,” said the intense, fast-talking Scorsese in an excerpt from “The Entitled,” during which the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” can be heard in the background. “For 40 years, I’ve been making pictures. And I’ve always been fascinated with the struggles a man must endure when people don’t appreciate him. People say I’m the best. I didn’t say it, they did. I just do my work. But for years they’ve been talking and you know it. You do. I deserve that award, is all I’m saying.”
[…]
“For years I did the little pictures about the types of people I grew up with,” said a passionately gesturing Scorsese in another “Entitled” scene. “Then I did the prestige-y, historical stuff like ‘Last Temptation’ and ‘The Age Of Innocence’ because I related to the characters, you know, outsiders in repressive environments making fateful choices. Then I started making the big sweeping epics, like ‘Kundun’ and ‘The Aviator.’ I’ve made comedies and documentaries, even concert films. Ever heard of ‘The Last Waltz’? No? Okay. You should.”
Continued Scorsese, “What happens? Nothing. Nothing for the versatile visionary who lives and breathes pictures.”
December 14, 2012
1 Julianne Moore + 1 Mark Ruffalo + 1 movie:Putting them all together
Jim Emerson
View image Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness.”
To supplement the discussion below about acting on film (“Bardem, Ledger and the truth about movie acting”), here’s a translated excerpt from the blog of Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (“City of God,” “The Constant Gardener”) about the editing of his new film “Blindness,” starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover and Sandra Oh.
This is as concise and valuable a primer on editing and acting as I’ve seen anywhere.
First Meirelles explains the rough assembly, the loose draft of the film that’s usually put together by the editor while the film is still shooting: “This kind of assembly is just putting all the scenes together as they were written in the script. Even if a certain scene did not work out as we planned when we shot it, it will still appear in this rough assembly. (This does not include the scenes that were embarrassing beyond all doubt; some things are better off forgotten.)”
Note that Meirelles is not saying that his actors have flat-out failed, but that certain scenes just don’t work and should be tossed right away, if possible. Eventually, after whittling down an assembly of three or four hours (or more) into, say, a 160-minute cut, the challenge may become one of reducing that to around two hours:
And at this stage, when you succeed in diagnosing and locating where are the exact problems in the script or its cinematic interpretation, you can… change the design of certain characters, to make the acting more precise and logical than it was in the actual filming of the movie. (That’s why the best advise I can give an actor who wants to develop his career: suck up to the editor. Bring him chocolate, or flowers – if it is a woman editor. Even expensive wine, if your acting was exceptionally weak this time).
December 14, 2012
Flamers
Jim Emerson
View image Rob Schneider in “yellowface”, playing Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.”
“Flamers” was the title of a screenplay by Barry Fanaro (“The Golden Girls,” “Kingpin,” “Men in Black II”) that had been re-written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (“Citizen Ruth,” “Election,” “About Schmidt,” “Sideways”). Once Adam Sandler decided to star in the movie, this script was serially re-written some more by Sandler, his friends, and various others. The result opened this weekend as “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” directed by Dennis Dugan (“Happy Gilmore,” “Big Daddy,” “The Benchwarmers”).
The film has not been well-received by critics (14% at Rottentomatoes.com at this writing). Manohla Dargis, in the New York Times, wrote:
Fear of a gay planet fuels plenty of American movies; it’s as de rigueur in comedy as in macho action. But what’s mildly different about “Chuck & Larry” is how sincerely it tries to have its rainbow cake and eat it too. In structural terms, the movie resembles a game of Mother May I, in that for every tiny step it takes forward in the name of enlightenment (gay people can be as boring as heterosexuals), it takes three giant steps back, often by piling on more jokes about gay sex (some involving a priceless Ving Rhames). Into this mix add the stunningly unfunny Rob Schneider, who pops up brandishing buckteeth, glasses and an odious accent in apparent homage to Mickey Rooney’s painful, misguided turn as the Japanese neighbor in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
“I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry” has been deemed safe for conscientious viewing by a representative of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog group. Given the movie’s contempt for women, who mainly just smile, sigh and wiggle their backdoors at the camera, it’s too bad that some lesbian (and Asian) Glaad members didn’t toss in their two cents about the movie. If Mr. Sandler dares speak in favor of gay love in “Chuck & Larry” — at least when it’s legally sanctioned, tucked behind closed doors and not remotely feminine — it’s only because hom*osexuality represents one type of love among men. Here, boys can be boys, together in bed and not, but heaven forbid that any of them look or behave like women.
But there’s a little more to this one than the usual Sandler vehicle. New York Magazine explains some of the backstory in “A Peek at the Movie ‘Chuck & Larry’ Could Have Been”:And in the dramatic conclusion of Payne and Taylor’s script, Chuck and Larry kiss on the courthouse steps — “not just a timid exchange,” the stage notes add, “but the long, passionate melting together of soul-mates. Tongues and everything. Hot. Wow.” Needless to say, this scene never made it into the final version.I believe that ending was already perfomed by Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen in “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”
December 14, 2012
Shirley MacLaine’s review of that Joaquin Phoenix documentary
Jim Emerson
It’s all here, courtesy of Stephen Sondheim, Mike Nichols and MacLaine:
Then you career from career to career…
I got through all of last year
And I’m here.
December 14, 2012
