Harrison Ford Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones
Harrison Ford
Famous Actors Harrison Ford Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
Brief Reviews
GUN CRAZY (1949) ***½
Film noir is one of my pet genres. I've been waiting years to see this one, a highly regarded work from the era when the genre reached its fullest expression, and it didn't disappoint me. Director Joseph H. Lewis spent years directing B-movies for various studios before gaining attention for a stylishly directed, noirish little thriller called My Name Is Julia Ross (1945). Gun Crazy was made the same year as Nicholas Ray's similar They Live by Night, and those two films were huge influences on Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which traces of each are plainly visible.
Gun Crazy is a crime-spree movie, the story of a young man (John Dall) and woman (Peggy Cummins) who throw off all societal inhibitions and go on an anarchic binge of bank and payroll robberies. The thing that first brings them together is a clearly erotic obsession with guns. The thing that distinguishes them from each other is his refusal to use his gun to kill, and her barely controlled impulses to use her gun for violence against others. Once they start on their spree, there is no turning back, and there is little doubt that they are ultimately doomed. It's no wonder Gun Crazy was such an influence on early films of the French New Wave like Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows and Godard's Breathless.
The photography by Russell Harlan is full of striking visual flourishes including asymmetrical compositions and unconventional camera placement. The numerous scenes shot from the back seat of the getaway car create a perceptible sense of heightened realism, especially one very long, unbroken take of a robbery in the middle of the movie, where Cummins gets out of the car to distract a policeman. The film's atmospheric finale, on a small island in a reedy, fog-shrouded marsh, is a model of achieving maximum effect with minimal means. The British Cummins—with her Bonnie Parker beret, full, sensuous lips, snub nose, insolent expression, and slightly lock-jawed speech—is the epitome of the alluring femme fatale, and Dall, as the maladjusted but sensitive young sharpshooter in sexual thrall to her, expresses just the right amount of internal conflict over their actions. The screenplay, co-credited to Millard Kaufmann, was actually co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using Kaufmann as a front. Highly recommended to all devotees of film noir.
DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) **
To make a truly terrible movie is not an easy thing to do. The movie must be intended to be taken seriously, made with reasonable care and an adequate budget, and involve respected and talented film artists. But for some reason, often a series of misguided artistic choices, it simply misses the mark completely, its only interest the mystery of how something with so much apparent potential turned out to be so dreadful.
Duel in the Sun, a Western directed by King Vidor and written and produced by David O. Selznick, is spectacularly bad. Its every element self-consciously inflated, the film is paradoxically both boring (as a narrative experience) and fascinating (as an example of cinematic awfulness). The unrelenting bombast of the movie is obvious as soon as it starts, with a seemingly interminable section titled "Prelude" that consists of a frozen image of a reddish desert landscape with symphonic music playing over it, followed by another section titled "Overture," consisting of another frozen image of a desert landscape with more music and a pompous voice-over by Orson Welles. The gaudy opening sequence, which takes place in a gambling den, is so lavish in its over-the-top decadence that it resembles a scene in a Roman epic by Cecil B. de Mille. It's all downhill for the next two hours until the movie reaches its labored and improbable conclusion.
So many normally capable performers (Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall) give such terrible performances in their one-dimensional roles that it must surely set a record of some kind. Only Walter Huston, chewing the scenery as a lascivious evangelist called The Sinkiller, seems to be having any fun. As the main character, a feral, sexually-charged, half-Caucasion, half-Mexican wench (there is no other word to describe her adequately), Jennifer Jones—with her absurd bronze makeup, wild, unkempt hair, lowcut peasant blouses, and bare feet—easily takes the bad acting prize in this marathon of terrible acting. Before Johnny Guitar, before Lonesome Cowboys, before Lust in the Dust, there was Duel in the Sun. If I had to use one word to sum up the overall effect of Duel in the Sun, that word would be camp (and not in the entertaining sense, because it is apparently wholly unintentional).
CROUPIER (1999) ***½
The British director Mike Hodges was in his late 60's when he made this film, but it doesn't seem like the work of a man of that age. The highly accomplished direction, unshowy and unfussy, is rightfully respectful of the taut, focused screenplay by Paul Mayersburg and has a hip sensibility that seems right in tune with the material. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a former croupier from South Africa now living in London, is a man at loose ends. Unemployed, he wants to be a writer but is not interested in the project his publisher proposes, a tale about soccer players with lots of sex. When his father calls from South Africa and says he has found Jack a job at a London casino, Jack accepts the offer because of the very large salary and because he immediately sees the job in terms of research for a novel about gamblers and gambling.
The film has lots of philosophical voice-over narration by Jack about being a participant in events and at the same time a detached observer gathering material for his book. In these internal monologues Jack also ruminates on how gambling and odds permeate so much of life. Although adamant that he is not himself a gambler, he obsessively calculates the odds on his every action, seeing all of life as one gamble after another. Later an attractive woman (Alex Kingston) who comes to the casino fascinates Jack. When she says she is deeply in debt to dangerous people and proposes that Jack be the inside-man in a robbery of the casino, he reluctantly agrees.
The movie is above all a character study and thus relies heavily on Owen's brilliant performance for its success. Looking leaner and hungrier than in Gosford Park or Children of Men, he makes Jack aloof but fascinating. Beneath a still, calm, nonreactive exterior, this is a complex man in constant thought, a silent internal observer and interpreter of external events. It is because Owen projects this aspect of Jack's character so thoroughly that the large amount of voice-over narration with its almost Dostoyevskian slant works so well. The movie builds to a tense outcome that results in several unexpected turns, an ending consistent with the film's theme that the outcome of a bet cannot be accurately predicted in advance and is by its nature the result of randomness.
ADAPTATION (2002) **½
In the late 1990's, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean wrote a series of articles about the Florida wild orchid collector John Laroche, published in 1998 as the book The Orchid Thief. For some reason the book, which is more a profile than a narrative, was bought for adaptation as a movie and assigned to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose sensibility would seem wholly unsuited to such a project. The resulting movie is a real curiosity.
The first two-thirds are divided unevenly between two interwoven plots—Kaufmann's (Nicholas Cage) personal insecurities and his professional struggles writing the screenplay (the predominant thread), and a straight account of Orlean's (Meryl Streep) experiences with Laroche (Chris Cooper) while writing the book (the secondary thread). The latter plot line is fascinating. The other part, about Kaufmann, is not. As Kaufmann himself says of this narrative strategy, "It's self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic." Not content to transform the film into his own personal vanity project by making himself the main character, Kaufmann even gives himself an alter ego, a fictitious twin brother (also Cage). The most embarrassing scene in the movie: the one in which Kaufmann masturbates to a photo of Orlean on the dust jacket of the book. One can only wonder how anyone connected with this movie, having read the script, agreed to participate. The last third or so of Adaptation veers in an altogether different direction as a response to the suggestion of a screenwriting guru (Brian Cox) who advises Kaufmann to write a knockout "last act" to disguise the flaws of the rest of the film. This preposterous last act has Laroche deriving a psychoactive substance that looks like green cocaine from his orchids and mailing some to Streep, who snorts it, has a psychedelic experience, then rushes off to Florida for a tryst with Laroche. The Kaufmann brothers follow, and the movie becomes an outlandish crime thriller with Orlean and Laroche trying to murder the Kaufmanns.
Adaptation received rave reviews from many critics as well as numerous nominations and awards from critics' groups, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars. More than 50,000 users of IMDb give it a very high 7.8/10 rating. I can sum up my reaction to the movie in two words: pretentious rubbish. Nearly everything in it seems a contrived, attention-seeking stunt. If the acting weren't so good, I would give it an even lower rating.
Film noir is one of my pet genres. I've been waiting years to see this one, a highly regarded work from the era when the genre reached its fullest expression, and it didn't disappoint me. Director Joseph H. Lewis spent years directing B-movies for various studios before gaining attention for a stylishly directed, noirish little thriller called My Name Is Julia Ross (1945). Gun Crazy was made the same year as Nicholas Ray's similar They Live by Night, and those two films were huge influences on Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which traces of each are plainly visible.
Gun Crazy is a crime-spree movie, the story of a young man (John Dall) and woman (Peggy Cummins) who throw off all societal inhibitions and go on an anarchic binge of bank and payroll robberies. The thing that first brings them together is a clearly erotic obsession with guns. The thing that distinguishes them from each other is his refusal to use his gun to kill, and her barely controlled impulses to use her gun for violence against others. Once they start on their spree, there is no turning back, and there is little doubt that they are ultimately doomed. It's no wonder Gun Crazy was such an influence on early films of the French New Wave like Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows and Godard's Breathless.
The photography by Russell Harlan is full of striking visual flourishes including asymmetrical compositions and unconventional camera placement. The numerous scenes shot from the back seat of the getaway car create a perceptible sense of heightened realism, especially one very long, unbroken take of a robbery in the middle of the movie, where Cummins gets out of the car to distract a policeman. The film's atmospheric finale, on a small island in a reedy, fog-shrouded marsh, is a model of achieving maximum effect with minimal means. The British Cummins—with her Bonnie Parker beret, full, sensuous lips, snub nose, insolent expression, and slightly lock-jawed speech—is the epitome of the alluring femme fatale, and Dall, as the maladjusted but sensitive young sharpshooter in sexual thrall to her, expresses just the right amount of internal conflict over their actions. The screenplay, co-credited to Millard Kaufmann, was actually co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using Kaufmann as a front. Highly recommended to all devotees of film noir.
DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) **
To make a truly terrible movie is not an easy thing to do. The movie must be intended to be taken seriously, made with reasonable care and an adequate budget, and involve respected and talented film artists. But for some reason, often a series of misguided artistic choices, it simply misses the mark completely, its only interest the mystery of how something with so much apparent potential turned out to be so dreadful.
Duel in the Sun, a Western directed by King Vidor and written and produced by David O. Selznick, is spectacularly bad. Its every element self-consciously inflated, the film is paradoxically both boring (as a narrative experience) and fascinating (as an example of cinematic awfulness). The unrelenting bombast of the movie is obvious as soon as it starts, with a seemingly interminable section titled "Prelude" that consists of a frozen image of a reddish desert landscape with symphonic music playing over it, followed by another section titled "Overture," consisting of another frozen image of a desert landscape with more music and a pompous voice-over by Orson Welles. The gaudy opening sequence, which takes place in a gambling den, is so lavish in its over-the-top decadence that it resembles a scene in a Roman epic by Cecil B. de Mille. It's all downhill for the next two hours until the movie reaches its labored and improbable conclusion.
So many normally capable performers (Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall) give such terrible performances in their one-dimensional roles that it must surely set a record of some kind. Only Walter Huston, chewing the scenery as a lascivious evangelist called The Sinkiller, seems to be having any fun. As the main character, a feral, sexually-charged, half-Caucasion, half-Mexican wench (there is no other word to describe her adequately), Jennifer Jones—with her absurd bronze makeup, wild, unkempt hair, lowcut peasant blouses, and bare feet—easily takes the bad acting prize in this marathon of terrible acting. Before Johnny Guitar, before Lonesome Cowboys, before Lust in the Dust, there was Duel in the Sun. If I had to use one word to sum up the overall effect of Duel in the Sun, that word would be camp (and not in the entertaining sense, because it is apparently wholly unintentional).
CROUPIER (1999) ***½
The British director Mike Hodges was in his late 60's when he made this film, but it doesn't seem like the work of a man of that age. The highly accomplished direction, unshowy and unfussy, is rightfully respectful of the taut, focused screenplay by Paul Mayersburg and has a hip sensibility that seems right in tune with the material. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a former croupier from South Africa now living in London, is a man at loose ends. Unemployed, he wants to be a writer but is not interested in the project his publisher proposes, a tale about soccer players with lots of sex. When his father calls from South Africa and says he has found Jack a job at a London casino, Jack accepts the offer because of the very large salary and because he immediately sees the job in terms of research for a novel about gamblers and gambling.
The film has lots of philosophical voice-over narration by Jack about being a participant in events and at the same time a detached observer gathering material for his book. In these internal monologues Jack also ruminates on how gambling and odds permeate so much of life. Although adamant that he is not himself a gambler, he obsessively calculates the odds on his every action, seeing all of life as one gamble after another. Later an attractive woman (Alex Kingston) who comes to the casino fascinates Jack. When she says she is deeply in debt to dangerous people and proposes that Jack be the inside-man in a robbery of the casino, he reluctantly agrees.
The movie is above all a character study and thus relies heavily on Owen's brilliant performance for its success. Looking leaner and hungrier than in Gosford Park or Children of Men, he makes Jack aloof but fascinating. Beneath a still, calm, nonreactive exterior, this is a complex man in constant thought, a silent internal observer and interpreter of external events. It is because Owen projects this aspect of Jack's character so thoroughly that the large amount of voice-over narration with its almost Dostoyevskian slant works so well. The movie builds to a tense outcome that results in several unexpected turns, an ending consistent with the film's theme that the outcome of a bet cannot be accurately predicted in advance and is by its nature the result of randomness.
ADAPTATION (2002) **½
In the late 1990's, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean wrote a series of articles about the Florida wild orchid collector John Laroche, published in 1998 as the book The Orchid Thief. For some reason the book, which is more a profile than a narrative, was bought for adaptation as a movie and assigned to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose sensibility would seem wholly unsuited to such a project. The resulting movie is a real curiosity.
The first two-thirds are divided unevenly between two interwoven plots—Kaufmann's (Nicholas Cage) personal insecurities and his professional struggles writing the screenplay (the predominant thread), and a straight account of Orlean's (Meryl Streep) experiences with Laroche (Chris Cooper) while writing the book (the secondary thread). The latter plot line is fascinating. The other part, about Kaufmann, is not. As Kaufmann himself says of this narrative strategy, "It's self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic." Not content to transform the film into his own personal vanity project by making himself the main character, Kaufmann even gives himself an alter ego, a fictitious twin brother (also Cage). The most embarrassing scene in the movie: the one in which Kaufmann masturbates to a photo of Orlean on the dust jacket of the book. One can only wonder how anyone connected with this movie, having read the script, agreed to participate. The last third or so of Adaptation veers in an altogether different direction as a response to the suggestion of a screenwriting guru (Brian Cox) who advises Kaufmann to write a knockout "last act" to disguise the flaws of the rest of the film. This preposterous last act has Laroche deriving a psychoactive substance that looks like green cocaine from his orchids and mailing some to Streep, who snorts it, has a psychedelic experience, then rushes off to Florida for a tryst with Laroche. The Kaufmann brothers follow, and the movie becomes an outlandish crime thriller with Orlean and Laroche trying to murder the Kaufmanns.
Adaptation received rave reviews from many critics as well as numerous nominations and awards from critics' groups, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars. More than 50,000 users of IMDb give it a very high 7.8/10 rating. I can sum up my reaction to the movie in two words: pretentious rubbish. Nearly everything in it seems a contrived, attention-seeking stunt. If the acting weren't so good, I would give it an even lower rating.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Jessica Alba-2009 Campari Calendar
Jessica Alba gets h0t and tipsy in the 2009 Campari Calendar! Not only is Jessica the new face of company, but she replaces the older Eva Mendes, the face of Campari in 2008. So poor Eva, that has to sting just a little bit. You know, the whole being replaced by a younger, more vibrant female celebrity and all. But enough about the old, let’s get back to the new. There is no skirting the issue, Jessica just $izzles in these post-pregnancy photos! Which celebrity babe do you prefer, Jessica Alba or Eva Mendes?
Monday, December 22, 2008
A Cinematic Feast: Great Movie Dining Scenes, Part 2
This week I am continuing the post I began two weeks ago, about my favorite dining scenes in movies.
•Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson (1970). The scene in the diner where Jack Nicholson tries in vain to order a plain chicken salad sandwich is remembered by everyone who has seen this movie. The confrontation with the implacable waitress is used by the writer (Carol Eastman) and the director to reveal details about Robert Eroica Dupea's (Jack Nicholson) character: he's a fearless, obnoxious, rude, boorish, and frustrated loudmouth who isn't going to endure anyone's insolence. The scene also serves a larger purpose—to lambaste the conformist, one-size-fits-all, no-substitutions mentality of mainstream American society. The scene is an unforgettable blend of food and politics, a bitter jeremiad with Nicholson as the haranguing prophet.
•The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola (1972). Near the mid-point of this movie comes a crucial scene set in a small restaurant in Brooklyn. Deeply offended by the attempted assassination of his father and by his own mistreatment by a corrupt police official, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is to meet with the policeman and the head of the rival family responsible for the attempt on his father's life. The meeting will take place at the restaurant, where a pistol will be hidden in the bathroom. The plan is that Michael will retrieve the gun and shoot the two other men. We see Michael searching for the gun, but we do not see for sure if he finds it. He has been told to come out of the bathroom firing, but when he does come out, he walks quietly back to the table and sits down. Pacino's troubled facial expressions in the scene that follows are riveting. Is his obvious discomfort because there was no gun in the bathroom? Having been warned that the men will attempt to kill him at the meeting, is he now preparing himself to face certain death? Or did he indeed find the gun but is now having second thoughts about killing the men, an act that would be out of character for Michael as he has been presented in the earlier parts of the film?
Having kept us on tenterhooks for several tense minutes, Coppola finally reveals the answer when Michael suddenly pulls the gun from his pocket, shoots the two men, and calmly walks out of the restaurant. The scene is pivotal in the development of the character of Michael in that from this point on, he changes from a static character who has distanced himself from the family's criminal activities ("That's my family, Kay. It's not me," he tells his girl friend in the very first sequence of the movie) to a character in transition. At the end of the movie, Michael is a very different person from the one he was at the beginning, and it is this scene in the restaurant that sets in motion the sequence of events that will cause the transformation in Michael's nature and eventually lead to his becoming the new godfather.
•You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan, (2000). Samantha Prescott (Laura Linney) and her brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) have been out of touch for several months, and Sammy doesn't understand why. When Terry finally contacts her and arranges to visit, she suggests they meet in a restaurant. At first the reuinion appears to be going well and the two siblings are getting pleasantly reacquainted. But Sammy is puzzled that her gentle but persistent probing about where Terry has been for the last few months is met with evasiveness.
Finally Terry reluctantly reveals that he has spent the last months in jail. At this the strait-laced Sammy quietly explodes, and in an instant the entire mood of the occasion changes. Sammy is barely able to conceal her suppressed anger from the other diners—this is a rather nice restaurant, and she and her brother are well-behaved middle-class adults—while Terry responds with abashed guilt and shame. The scene is a marvel both of controlling and expressing emotion and of character revelation, all achieved through brilliant dialogue, direction, and acting.
•Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (1983). Is there anyone who hasn't already guessed which scene I've chosen from this movie? It is, naturally, the one in which the grossly overweight Mr. Creosote (Terry Jones) eats himself to death in a very formal and rather snobbish restaurant. After consuming a huge amount of food and literally inflating with each successive course, he is reluctantly tempted by the waiter (John Cleese) to consume one last tidbit. This proves too much for Mr. Creosote, who explodes (literally), showering the restaurant and other diners with half-digested French cuisine, a sort of culinary version of John Hurt giving birth in Alien. Python sketches are always gloriously silly, but that silliness is generally used to make a point. The point here seems to be not just the gluttony of one person, but the fanatical addiction to consumerism—and the vulnerability to incessant inducements to comsume more, more, more—of Western culture. The scene is an illustration of suicide by overconsumption. Whether you find it funny or offensive, once you've seen it, you are not likely to forget it anytime soon.
•North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock (1959). This is not only my favorite Hitchcock film but my favorite movie of all time, so how could I not include it? The hero, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) first gets to know the heroine, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), during a meal in the dining car of a train to Chicago when he is seated at her table just as she finishes eating. The scene is filled with sexual badinage that clearly conveys the immediate sexual attraction between the two:
GRANT: The moment I meet an attractive woman I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
SAINT: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
SAINT: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.
GRANT: You've already eaten.
SAINT: But you haven't.
In truth, Hitchcock's movies are full of noteworthy meals (is this really so remarkable, given Hitchcock's considerable girth?), and I could have chosen a scene from any of a number of his movies. Memorable dining scenes occur in Sabotage, where Sylvia Sydney takes out her anger at her husband, who's responsible for the death of her young brother, with a carving knife ; in Shadow of a Doubt, where the wholesome family and adoring niece unwittingly share the family table with the Merry Widow Murderer; in To Catch a Thief, where Grace Kelly and Cary Grant share a picnic on the Riviera after a hair-raising ride in Kelly's sports car ("Breast or thigh?" asks Kelly mischievously, offering Grant some cold chicken); in Vertigo, when James Stewart takes the newly transformed Kim Novak to dinner at Ernie's restaurant; in Frenzy, when Vivien Merchant proudly whips away the large dome covering a platter to reveal a supper of minuscule proportions, Hitchcock's skewering of the then-fashionable cuisine minceur. And who can ever forget Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh eating those sandwiches in a shabby motel room overlooked by stuffed birds (and containing a concealed peephole into the bathroom of the adjoining cabin)?
•Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen (1986). Thanksgiving is the most American of all feast holidays, and it is the occasion Woody Allen chooses to open this film and, exactly one year later, to conclude it. The first meal serves to introduce us to the main characters, Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her family, and to Hannah's husband Elliot (Michael Caine) and his sexual obsession with her sister Lee (Barbara Hershey). At the second Thanksgiving meal we see how all the various plot elements have turned out. Most importantly, we see that Elliot's obsession with Lee has come to an end and that Hannah's other sister, the flaky Holly (Dianne Wiest), has taken up with the equally eccentric Mickey Sachs (Woody Allen). The two meals that bookend the movie are wonderfully detailed social occasions that also serve as the essential organizing elements of the narrative.
•Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman (1982). It seems appropriate to follow a movie that contains a notable celebration of Thanksgiving with one that contains a notable celebration of Christmas, and to follow a movie directed by Woody Allen with one directed by his idol, Ingmar Bergman. The sequence in question, which opens the movie, lasts nearly a full hour and must be one of the most richly detailed and lengthy meals in all cinema. The sequence begins with the preparations for a family Chistmas Eve dinner at the house of Helena Ekdahl, the matriarch of the family, where the housemaids are elaborately decorating the tree and placing presents for the children under it.
The scene then shifts to the theater that her son Oscar manages, as did his father before him. The end of a beautifully staged Nativity play is shown, followed by a festive backstage dinner for the theater staff given by Oscar. At one point he haltingly makes a speech to the staff about the importance of their work: "Perhaps we give the people who come here the chance to forget for a while...the world outside. Our theater is a little room of orderliness, routine, care, and love."
Back at Grandmother Ekdahl's house the guests begin to arrive. The dinner that follows is filled with unforgettable images: the candle-filled dining room, the copious feast set out on the tables, afterwards the guests and servants singing and dancing in procession through the house (an interesting counterpart to the danse macabre that concludes The Seventh Seal) while the children are being entertained by Uncle Carl's "fireworks show," which consists of him lowering his trousers and blowing out three candles in a candelabrum with a single fart. When the meal has ended, the children are sent to bed in the nursery, where they have a pillow fight with their young nursemaid. Later, after the lights are out, Alexander, unable to sleep, sets up and plays with his Christmas present, a magic lantern. After everyone else has gone to bed or gone home, Grandmother Ekdahl and her friend Isak stay up drinking cognac and reminiscing, during which she is stricken by a fit of melancholia and broods on the passing of time. "This happy, splendid life is over," she tells Isak, "and this horrible, dirty life engulfs us."
Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal: youth and old age, joy and sadness, reality and imagination, poverty (the chronically debt-ridden Uncle Carl) and prosperity (Oscar's financial success with the theater), sex (horny Uncle Gustav Adolf bedding the voluptuous nursemaid Maj) and death (Oscar, Alexander's father, is already showing signs of the fatigue and illness that will soon kill him.)
•The Dead, John Huston (1987). Based on the short story by James Joyce, probably the greatest work of short fiction in the English language, this movie takes place almost entirely during one meal, a dinner given by three sisters ("the three Graces of Dublin") to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. This is last day of the well-known twelve days of Christmas and in the Christian religion is observed to mark the adoration of the Magi and the presentation of their gifts to the Christ child. The dinner tells the viewer everything about an extended middle-class Dublin family, especially Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston).
But the real revelation—Gabriel's own epiphany—takes place after the meal, during the carriage ride home, just as Gabriel, emboldened by the intensely emotional mood of the dinner they have attended, is about to declare to his wife his love for her. Before he can speak, Gretta, also deeply moved by the dinner experience, confesses her first youthful love and its tragic outcome and quietly falls asleep in the carriage. Gabriel realizes that her feelings for him can never be as strong as those for her dead first love, nor as strong as his own for her. The movie ends with the "Snow is falling" voice-over read verbatim from the story, one of the most hauntingly melancholic passages in all literature, and equally moving here as the finale of the movie and of the long career of its director, John Huston.
•Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson (1970). The scene in the diner where Jack Nicholson tries in vain to order a plain chicken salad sandwich is remembered by everyone who has seen this movie. The confrontation with the implacable waitress is used by the writer (Carol Eastman) and the director to reveal details about Robert Eroica Dupea's (Jack Nicholson) character: he's a fearless, obnoxious, rude, boorish, and frustrated loudmouth who isn't going to endure anyone's insolence. The scene also serves a larger purpose—to lambaste the conformist, one-size-fits-all, no-substitutions mentality of mainstream American society. The scene is an unforgettable blend of food and politics, a bitter jeremiad with Nicholson as the haranguing prophet.•The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola (1972). Near the mid-point of this movie comes a crucial scene set in a small restaurant in Brooklyn. Deeply offended by the attempted assassination of his father and by his own mistreatment by a corrupt police official, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is to meet with the policeman and the head of the rival family responsible for the attempt on his father's life. The meeting will take place at the restaurant, where a pistol will be hidden in the bathroom. The plan is that Michael will retrieve the gun and shoot the two other men. We see Michael searching for the gun, but we do not see for sure if he finds it. He has been told to come out of the bathroom firing, but when he does come out, he walks quietly back to the table and sits down. Pacino's troubled facial expressions in the scene that follows are riveting. Is his obvious discomfort because there was no gun in the bathroom? Having been warned that the men will attempt to kill him at the meeting, is he now preparing himself to face certain death? Or did he indeed find the gun but is now having second thoughts about killing the men, an act that would be out of character for Michael as he has been presented in the earlier parts of the film?
Having kept us on tenterhooks for several tense minutes, Coppola finally reveals the answer when Michael suddenly pulls the gun from his pocket, shoots the two men, and calmly walks out of the restaurant. The scene is pivotal in the development of the character of Michael in that from this point on, he changes from a static character who has distanced himself from the family's criminal activities ("That's my family, Kay. It's not me," he tells his girl friend in the very first sequence of the movie) to a character in transition. At the end of the movie, Michael is a very different person from the one he was at the beginning, and it is this scene in the restaurant that sets in motion the sequence of events that will cause the transformation in Michael's nature and eventually lead to his becoming the new godfather.
•You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan, (2000). Samantha Prescott (Laura Linney) and her brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) have been out of touch for several months, and Sammy doesn't understand why. When Terry finally contacts her and arranges to visit, she suggests they meet in a restaurant. At first the reuinion appears to be going well and the two siblings are getting pleasantly reacquainted. But Sammy is puzzled that her gentle but persistent probing about where Terry has been for the last few months is met with evasiveness.
Finally Terry reluctantly reveals that he has spent the last months in jail. At this the strait-laced Sammy quietly explodes, and in an instant the entire mood of the occasion changes. Sammy is barely able to conceal her suppressed anger from the other diners—this is a rather nice restaurant, and she and her brother are well-behaved middle-class adults—while Terry responds with abashed guilt and shame. The scene is a marvel both of controlling and expressing emotion and of character revelation, all achieved through brilliant dialogue, direction, and acting.
•Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (1983). Is there anyone who hasn't already guessed which scene I've chosen from this movie? It is, naturally, the one in which the grossly overweight Mr. Creosote (Terry Jones) eats himself to death in a very formal and rather snobbish restaurant. After consuming a huge amount of food and literally inflating with each successive course, he is reluctantly tempted by the waiter (John Cleese) to consume one last tidbit. This proves too much for Mr. Creosote, who explodes (literally), showering the restaurant and other diners with half-digested French cuisine, a sort of culinary version of John Hurt giving birth in Alien. Python sketches are always gloriously silly, but that silliness is generally used to make a point. The point here seems to be not just the gluttony of one person, but the fanatical addiction to consumerism—and the vulnerability to incessant inducements to comsume more, more, more—of Western culture. The scene is an illustration of suicide by overconsumption. Whether you find it funny or offensive, once you've seen it, you are not likely to forget it anytime soon.
•North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock (1959). This is not only my favorite Hitchcock film but my favorite movie of all time, so how could I not include it? The hero, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) first gets to know the heroine, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), during a meal in the dining car of a train to Chicago when he is seated at her table just as she finishes eating. The scene is filled with sexual badinage that clearly conveys the immediate sexual attraction between the two:
GRANT: The moment I meet an attractive woman I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
SAINT: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
SAINT: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.
GRANT: You've already eaten.
SAINT: But you haven't.
In truth, Hitchcock's movies are full of noteworthy meals (is this really so remarkable, given Hitchcock's considerable girth?), and I could have chosen a scene from any of a number of his movies. Memorable dining scenes occur in Sabotage, where Sylvia Sydney takes out her anger at her husband, who's responsible for the death of her young brother, with a carving knife ; in Shadow of a Doubt, where the wholesome family and adoring niece unwittingly share the family table with the Merry Widow Murderer; in To Catch a Thief, where Grace Kelly and Cary Grant share a picnic on the Riviera after a hair-raising ride in Kelly's sports car ("Breast or thigh?" asks Kelly mischievously, offering Grant some cold chicken); in Vertigo, when James Stewart takes the newly transformed Kim Novak to dinner at Ernie's restaurant; in Frenzy, when Vivien Merchant proudly whips away the large dome covering a platter to reveal a supper of minuscule proportions, Hitchcock's skewering of the then-fashionable cuisine minceur. And who can ever forget Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh eating those sandwiches in a shabby motel room overlooked by stuffed birds (and containing a concealed peephole into the bathroom of the adjoining cabin)?
•Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen (1986). Thanksgiving is the most American of all feast holidays, and it is the occasion Woody Allen chooses to open this film and, exactly one year later, to conclude it. The first meal serves to introduce us to the main characters, Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her family, and to Hannah's husband Elliot (Michael Caine) and his sexual obsession with her sister Lee (Barbara Hershey). At the second Thanksgiving meal we see how all the various plot elements have turned out. Most importantly, we see that Elliot's obsession with Lee has come to an end and that Hannah's other sister, the flaky Holly (Dianne Wiest), has taken up with the equally eccentric Mickey Sachs (Woody Allen). The two meals that bookend the movie are wonderfully detailed social occasions that also serve as the essential organizing elements of the narrative.
•Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman (1982). It seems appropriate to follow a movie that contains a notable celebration of Thanksgiving with one that contains a notable celebration of Christmas, and to follow a movie directed by Woody Allen with one directed by his idol, Ingmar Bergman. The sequence in question, which opens the movie, lasts nearly a full hour and must be one of the most richly detailed and lengthy meals in all cinema. The sequence begins with the preparations for a family Chistmas Eve dinner at the house of Helena Ekdahl, the matriarch of the family, where the housemaids are elaborately decorating the tree and placing presents for the children under it.
The scene then shifts to the theater that her son Oscar manages, as did his father before him. The end of a beautifully staged Nativity play is shown, followed by a festive backstage dinner for the theater staff given by Oscar. At one point he haltingly makes a speech to the staff about the importance of their work: "Perhaps we give the people who come here the chance to forget for a while...the world outside. Our theater is a little room of orderliness, routine, care, and love."
Back at Grandmother Ekdahl's house the guests begin to arrive. The dinner that follows is filled with unforgettable images: the candle-filled dining room, the copious feast set out on the tables, afterwards the guests and servants singing and dancing in procession through the house (an interesting counterpart to the danse macabre that concludes The Seventh Seal) while the children are being entertained by Uncle Carl's "fireworks show," which consists of him lowering his trousers and blowing out three candles in a candelabrum with a single fart. When the meal has ended, the children are sent to bed in the nursery, where they have a pillow fight with their young nursemaid. Later, after the lights are out, Alexander, unable to sleep, sets up and plays with his Christmas present, a magic lantern. After everyone else has gone to bed or gone home, Grandmother Ekdahl and her friend Isak stay up drinking cognac and reminiscing, during which she is stricken by a fit of melancholia and broods on the passing of time. "This happy, splendid life is over," she tells Isak, "and this horrible, dirty life engulfs us."
Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal: youth and old age, joy and sadness, reality and imagination, poverty (the chronically debt-ridden Uncle Carl) and prosperity (Oscar's financial success with the theater), sex (horny Uncle Gustav Adolf bedding the voluptuous nursemaid Maj) and death (Oscar, Alexander's father, is already showing signs of the fatigue and illness that will soon kill him.)
•The Dead, John Huston (1987). Based on the short story by James Joyce, probably the greatest work of short fiction in the English language, this movie takes place almost entirely during one meal, a dinner given by three sisters ("the three Graces of Dublin") to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. This is last day of the well-known twelve days of Christmas and in the Christian religion is observed to mark the adoration of the Magi and the presentation of their gifts to the Christ child. The dinner tells the viewer everything about an extended middle-class Dublin family, especially Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston).
But the real revelation—Gabriel's own epiphany—takes place after the meal, during the carriage ride home, just as Gabriel, emboldened by the intensely emotional mood of the dinner they have attended, is about to declare to his wife his love for her. Before he can speak, Gretta, also deeply moved by the dinner experience, confesses her first youthful love and its tragic outcome and quietly falls asleep in the carriage. Gabriel realizes that her feelings for him can never be as strong as those for her dead first love, nor as strong as his own for her. The movie ends with the "Snow is falling" voice-over read verbatim from the story, one of the most hauntingly melancholic passages in all literature, and equally moving here as the finale of the movie and of the long career of its director, John Huston.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Leonardo Dicaprio Pics
Leonardo Dicaprio
Leonardo Dicaprio
Leonardo Dicaprio
Leonardo Dicaprio
Famous Actors: Leonardo Dicaprio Friday, December 19, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Famous Actors : Arnold Schwarzenegger
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
