Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Charade (1963)
Should You See It? How can you pass up Cary Grant romancing Audrey Hepburn?
What a surprising and delightful film. It is half 1930s screwball comedy – Cary Grant still dashing in the lead only this time the Hepburn is Audrey – and half Hitchcockian thriller. And the soundtrack! Usually the soundtrack is like a dream to me – I know it was there but I hardly remember it. Not Hentry Mancini’s soundtrack. It is memorably and very front and center, and is particularly good in the final chase sequence.
Hepburn and Grant are great together. Audrey has as much screen chemistry with Grant as any of Grant’s other amazing leading ladies. These 30+ years after Grant began in film he still has the on screen charisma and is the model for all of us who want to be dashing and distinguished. Audrey is wonderful playing her role romantically pursuing Grant. She mixes 1 part screwy innocence with 1 part schrewd sophiscation. Their backhanded romantic scenes are by far the best moments of the film. In fact without their chemistry you got nothing.
There are 2 stories running side by side. One asks will Audrey and Grant end up together? The other asks, where is Audrey’s dead husband’s stolen loot and who is killing everyone to try and get it? Well, she gets him, of course, and Grant figures out where the loot is and saves Audrey from the fake CIA agent who is really the killer.
There aren’t many great early 60’s films but this is one.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Should you see it? You haven’t already!?!
I’ve already written about this amazing film, one of my all time favorites, so I will just discuss one scene.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s contains a scene of cinematic grace.
Now, out there are works of art across all media that span the range from good to great (not to mention from bad to horrible), but a very small number are imbued with aesthetic grace, which I identify by the transcendent sensation of awe. For instance, in the high-art world Michelangelo’s David may be the most perfect object ever created by a human. Standing in Florence before David I first was enraptured with aesthetic awe. In addition to David, there are those damn amazing peaches by Cézanne in the Met which awe me each summer. I know next to nothing about art so I cannot tell you why these works are valued by those in the know. I can explain that standing before these works I am lost in a different consciousness. My aesthetic sense is awakened, takes possession of my consciousness and leaves me lost in awe. It is as if my inner truth is falling in love with the object’s beauty.
Now Billie Holliday’s Lover Man, one of the greatest tracks ever recorded, is an instance of aesthetic grace in music. Put on Lover Man, close your eyes, and listen to each word, each tone of her voice. You will lose your consciousness, your selfness, to the emotional immediacy. These moments are something like transcendent experience. Your selfness levitates from your body and the aesthetic experience, be it visual beauty or pure musical emotion enters and becomes your consciousness, if only for a few moments of grace.
So what the hell does this have to do with Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Well, there are also such transcendent moments in film; moments when you lose your selfness in cinematic delight. One such scene occurs in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the scene where Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard are trying to buy something for $10 from Tiffany’s. The moving images suddenly feel imbued, haunted, with actual living vitality and you as viewer have gone from being outside voyeur to in the presence of authentic vitality. You feel as if you are along side Holly and Paul with your arms up on the counter, and the delight is overwhelming. It is a scene incidental to the film narrative yet it is one of the most authentic and vital in film history.
See it if just for that.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Scoop (2006)
Should you see it? If you like Woody you'll like Scoop.
Woody is on a roll. He has made another fine film with the gorgeous Scarlett Johansson in the lead. This time Scarlett plays Allen’s side kick in a murder mystery caper – no, Woody is her (unwilling) side kick as Scarlett, playing Sondra, tries to uncover if Hugh Jackman’s Peter Lyman (Lord Lyman’s son), is a serial killer or if she should marry him. Sondra, a wide-eyed journalism student, gets a tip from the just dead star investigative reporter, Joe Strombel, after he escapes momentarily from Purgatory with a hot lead on the London serial killings. He wants to be a part of one more big scoop and instructs Sondra to investigate Peter Lyman. Sondra enlists Sid Waterman, the hack magician, (Allen) to play her father as they search for enough evidence of Lyman’s guilt to run the story. After her first encounter with Peter at the pool of an exclusive London club Peter is taken with Sondra and invites her (and she invites Sid as he father) into his upper-crust life as a Lord’s son.
Well, Sondra falls for Peter and now she wants to clear Peter of her murder suspicions so she can safely love him. Woody plays, well Woody, and is funnier than he has been a while as Sondra’s father. He nervously warns Sondra against all of her investigative capers, he is hilarious pretending to be a wealth American oil millionaire at the upper class parties at the Lord’s mansion, and the film is littered with old-fashioned but hilarious one-liners and gags. It is a classic Allen performance coupled with classic Allen romantic comedy writing. The film ends not with Peter cleared of murder, a happy couple and a Cinderella ending for Sondra, but rather with a murder conviction and a death. Damn, I love Woody.
Scoop is a little puff of a film but delightfully Woody Allen, which is really all I ask.
My only concern is a few reviewers have been wondering if this will be Woody Allen’s last film. Do they know something? How awful to never have another Allen film to look forward to each year. And I fear it may be true as Scoop ends with a death of perfect irony for all the Woody Allen characters, and it is a wink to all of us who love Arvie Singer in Annie Hall. If he were to go out with a metaphoric on screen death this would be that ending. We can only hope that like the dead reporter in Scoop Allen will feel compelled to come back from Purgatory for at least one last production.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
The Great New Wonderful (2005)
Should Your See It? Please do. And do not be put-off because it is about the aftermath of September 11th. Leiner's work is subtle and significant.
Each summer since I began writing about movies I have stumbled upon a really terrific little film that lingers all year. Last year it was the singular charm of You, Me and Everyone We Know. A few years back it was the surprising sophistication of Tadpole. And this year it is the quiet, pensive The Great New Wonderful. Director Danny Leiner begins his films with a time stamp, September 2002. We then meet 5 disparate sets of characters – all ordinary people living in New York City. The film goes on to explore a simple scenario: show the subtle yet significant effects of September 11th's trauma on each set of characters.
I know, I know, my initial reaction was like yours. I film about 9/11? No thank you. But no, the actual events and the physical aftermath are never seen. This is a film about the subtle emotional impact looming in the background of each character’s life. No, not in the background but rather tucked just under the skin. Amazingly the events of 9/11, the motivating element of the entire film, are never directly spoken about by the characters. Yet the script and the acting are so good you can feel the horrible presence of that day lurking just behind the eyeballs, just out of reach of the finger-tips, in the back of the throat with each breathe, as the characters go on living, go on trying to be ordinary, trying to be the self they were in a life that isn’t any longer.
The lives of the five sets of characters never really intersect, so it is as much five short stories as a single film. Of the five stories I found Maggie Gyllenhaal’s most moving. She plays Emme, a high profile cake artist (receiving as much as $18,000 per cake) in competition with another cake artist, Safarah, for jobs, prestige and an upcoming gourmet prize. In one scene Emme’s ‘spies’ call her when her rival, Safarah, shows up for lunch. Emme arrives to try and find out what cake Safarah is submitting for the prize in hopes of finding some advantage. Instead of finding Safarah as ambitious and ruthless as herself, she is pensive and melancholy. “Sometimes I wonder why we go on with this frivolous work after what happened”. Safarah has been searching for something more meaningful, something to ease her depression, her disequilibrium since ‘what happened’. This little exchange is the core of Leiner’s film: what is the appropriate way to live, the appropriate way to feel after September 11th? How can I go back to my old life, my old self when the world I lived in is gone? Or is it: how do I live now that I see and feel everything differently? Safarah cannot figure it out and kills herself. Emme, who has been denying any change in herself, living as if she believed prestige and success were still what they once meant to her, is finally cast into a depressing melancholy after Safarah’s suicide. And when we leave Emme, having succeeding in winning a high profile (and lucrative) cake order, she is sitting alone, in tears wondering “how can I go on with this work after what happened?” So subtle, so beautiful, so significant.
And like Emme the other characters in The Great New Wonderful come to realize their worlds, their lives are not the same a year after ‘what happened’. Some, like Emme, are just beginning to accept they have permanently changed. Leiner captures that psychological moment of disequilibrium when these characters realize they have been denying the pain, the rage within themselves – when they realize the clique is true: everything did change on September 11th.
A quiet profound film.
