Eastwood report: Honkytonk Man
Honkytonk Man makes a nice companion piece to O Brother, Where Art Thou? Both tell stories about musicians making their way across the Depression-era South on their way to an important appointment, both are weak on plot yet high in thematically-resonant incident, both endeavor to reveal the character of a nation through an examination its music, and both feature 11th-hour graveside Negros who spontaneously burst into spirituals. The Depression-era South of Honkytonk Man is about 85% less kooky than the one in O Brother and its narrative aims to be about 75% quieter. Like many Eastwood movies, it ambles along at its unhurried pace as it scrutinizes its title character.
Blog fever — catch it!
Kriota Willberg, choreographer, anatomist and creator and co-director of The Bentfootes, now has a blog, in which she painstakingly analyzes movies from a medical perspective, with an accent on the fantastic. Could the events of Face/Off really happen? If so, how? What are the realities of the science of Fantastic Voyage, Young Frankenstein or Mr. Sardonicus? Only The Cinematologist knows.
Eastwood report: Any Which Way You Can
Pauline Kael, in her 1974 review of The Godfather Part II, remarked that the only sequels that are better than the originals are Huckleberry Finn and the New Testament. Ms. Kael, in her youthful ignorance, had of course not yet seen Any Which Way You Can, the sequel to Every Which Way But Loose that towers above its predecessor as Everest towers over Kilimanjaro.
Movie Night with Urbaniak: Dirty Harry
Somehow, urbaniak has gone all these years without seeing Dirty Harry. And I guess my recent enthusiasm for Things Eastwood is catching, because we’ve set aside our recent John Ford/John Wayne kick to watch Eastwood’s breakthrough 1971 detective thriller.
Here’s the funny part: in the "special features" part of the recent DVD set (which boasts a stunning transfer, by the way), Robert Urich (an actor whose work I’m familiar with primarily through Stuntman Mike’s discussion of it in Death Proof) hosts a little documentary on the Dirty Harry series where he paces the movies’ San Francisco locations and gingerly tries to provide the viewer with some social and cinematic history so that we can place Harry Callahan in his proper perspective as we watch the movie.
Eastwood report: Every Which Way But Loose
Every Which Way But Loose is a tender, human comedy of lost love and tarnished honor, and a penetrating study of domestic turmoil, painstakingly crafted and deeply felt.
Oh, wait, I’m sorry, that’s Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds. Every Which Way But Loose is the movie where Clint Eastwood knocks around with an orangutan.
Some thoughts on Watchmen
Well I liked it.
For those familiar with the book, it’s all in here, or all the parts that matter anyway. The director understands, and loves, the source material, but he hasn’t let it stand in the way of creating a cinematic narrative. A rather dense cinematic narrative at that.
For those unfamiliar with the book (and I maintain that one should never be familiar with a movie’s source material to enjoy the movie), as long as you keep in mind that Watchmen is, in essence, a detective story that pauses, often, for some very long digressions, I think you should be fine, but let me know. The people who really, really hate the movie I think get lost in its narrative ellipses, where the detective plot is put on hold for, say, a series of involved flashbacks or for a sub-plot involving a character’s sex life. Long digressions like this can make a story feel long, but I was never bored by Watchmen and was frequently thrilled, and even surprised, in spite of having re-read the book recently.
The problem with Watchmen, if it’s a problem, is that without the digressions, which are all thematically resonant and serve to deepen the story, if you cut all that stuff out, it’s just another superhero detective story. In a sense, the narrative digressions are the real "point" of the story, and the movie (like the book) uses the detective plot to deliver those digressions.
From a marketing standpoint, of course, the movie is a "tough sell" — it’s got multiple protagonists (four by my count), not a single character to "root for," a complicated plot that keeps looking backward to tell us about characters we barely know yet, a "meta" approach to its subject matter (it’s a superhero story that worries that having superheroes might not be such a good thing) and takes place in a weird alternate-universe 1985. All of which makes sense when you read the book (or it did when I first read it in 1986), but again, you tell me.
As for the learned critics who have screwed in their monocles, tucked in their ascots and sniffed in disdain at this rather ambitious piece of popular culture, describing it as trash and its audience as sociopaths, in time they will look like idiots, if they don’t already.
Saturday Morning Watchmen
If you can’t wait until tomorrow to see Watchmen, allow yourself to reminisce with the late-80s animated version of the tale (click on the flashing "Watch this movie" thing).
Boy, those were the days. I loved the episode where they tangled with the mummies, although I guess my favorite was the Transformers crossover.
Via, whom else, The Beat.
Eastwood report: Two Mules For Sister Sara
Whenever I watch an Elvis movie I wonder for a moment why the Elvis experiment has not been repeated. A series of movies, built around a pop-culture personality, where the performer is more or less playing the same character over and over again regardless of the situation (or even the period) and gets into wacky adventures. And the viewers’ enjoyment of the movies is based in part on their familiarity with the series, like on television, where we delight in watching Homer Simpson enter into a situation because we’ve seen him react so hilariously in similar situations. We laugh before he even acts.
Watching Two Mules For Sister Sara, it occurred to me that Clint Eastwood, a contemporary of Presley, not only took the "Elvis Movie" concept to heart but applied to it an intelligence and sensitivity that has created a corpus pretty much unparalleled in American cinema (except maybe for Chaplin, and Eastwood’s East-Coast nemesis Woody Allen) — for 45 years now, Eastwood has revisited this "Clint Eastwood" character he created, put him into this or that situation (revolutionary-era Mexico, post-Civil-War Montana, modern-day Detroit) and let the plot do its job, confident that the audience will want to check in with "Clint Eastwood" and see how he’s feeling these days. The difference between Elvis and Eastwood is that Elvis was a hapless pawn in the grip of cynical chicanery, and Eastwood is a born cinematic artist, which means that the "Elvis" character never developed, but Eastwood’s has: he’s grown, and grown older, he’s embraced and resisted change, he’s matured and mellowed, he’s become haunted and regretful. One can watch Eastwood from A Fistful of Dollars to Gran Torino and come away with a kind of cinematic biography of a character.
Eastwood report: Joe Kidd
The two hats of Joe Kidd.
The other day I noted the sheer number of Clint Eastwood movies I hadn’t seen, an odd lapse for me regarding a filmmaker I admire so much. So I harnessed the power of the internet and bought an abnormally large number of Clint Eastwood movies. I set my budget at no more than $3 per movie and had no trouble keeping it through Amazon.com. As I stroll through this forest of Eastwoodness, I will report in to my loyal readers.
Joe Kidd hits at an odd place for Eastwood — it’s in between Dirty Harry and High Plains Drifter. The Outlaw Josey Wales, which I think of as Eastwood’s first inarguable masterpiece, is still four years off. It’s directed by John Sturges, but it’s produced by Eastwood and is obviously tailored to fit his established persona — it all but winks at us as it sets up its Eastwoody goodness. It has an "Old Hollywood" Technicolor look about it, with bright, saturated colors (the blood looks like tempura paint) and only occasionally pays attention to light in the way I associate with Eastwood. It’s got Robert Duvall in it (concurrent with The Godfather but after his bad-guy part in the John Wayne vehicle True Grit) as a rich white guy, which makes it feel very modern, and John Saxon as a Mexican, which makes it feel very old-fashioned. It’s got a screenplay by Elmore Leonard, and even bears signs of his leanness of narrative — little is explained in Joe Kidd, and the story is extremely simple.
The State of the Art
On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I’m not crazy. On the other hand, man, I hate being right.
There was a panel discussion at the WGA Theater, where a couple of screenwriters, a couple of producers and a couple of studio executives gathered to talk about development. Ace screenwriter John August reports. Over the years, I’d figured out on my own a lot of the things that were talked about, but it was both bracing and a little scary to hear my own doom-and-gloom suspicions reflected back at me.
The headlines:
Fewer movies are being developed, which means there are more writers competing for each job, which means that the very few people in Hollywood who actually pay money to writers for writing screenplays pretty much get to ask for whatever they want to: free development, multiple free treatments, free screenplay drafts. The screenwriter who objects to working for weeks, or months, or years for free (my record is two years on one project) is labeled "difficult" and is out of the running. The great screenwriter who isn’t "good in the room" is passed over for the mediocre screenwriter who makes everyone laugh at the pitch meeting.
The studios are in the control of the marketing folk. That means that any movie idea that can’t be summed up in five words is suspect and anything that takes more than a sentence is rejected outright. Italso means that screenwriter’s "ideas" are less valuable than ever, since they haven’t been "pre-sold." (My favorite story from the discussion is from Jonathan Hensleigh, who had an idea for a movie he couldn’t sell, so he bought the rights to a comic book that had a similar idea, because "the fucking idiots need a pre-branded thing to look at."
One would think that the success of Slumdog Millionaire would mean that every studio is out looking for the next Slumdog Millionaire, right? Wrong. Slumdog Millionaire has, if I’m not mistaken, four different studios and production companies’ names at the front of it — it’s obviously a movie that had a very hard time finding its financing. That was true when it was made and it would still be true tomorrow. Because, as successful as it is, there was no way to predict that. If the producer walked into a studio executive’s office, x years ago, with the script for Slumdog Millionaire in his hand and a report from the future that it would make over $100 million and win the Best Picture Oscar, complete with Variety reports and video footage, the executive would still turn it down: it has no stars (which is bad for international sales), is mostly a grim story about the difficult lives of Mumbai orphans, is a hard sell, and can’t be summed up in five words. "Mumbai Orphan Wins Game Show Through Miracle" is the shortest I could compact the story, and that’s two words too many, sorry, what about a movie based on Shamwow?