News You Can Bruise for 2013 August

(1) Thu Aug 01 2013 11:59 July Film Roundup: Oh man. As promised last month, July was an epic month of moviewatching, and I decided to try a little epic experiment with this roundup, inspired by the "The Balcony is Closed" game on No More Whoppers. For every movie I saw in July, I came up with a nonobvious connection between that movie and every other movie I saw in July. For instance, if I saw both Die Hard and Live Free or Die Hard, the connection between them would of course be "fresh-faced hacker".

I saw nine movies over the course of the month (well, eight and a half), and by the end this exercise became kind of ridiculous, as I strained to remember obscure aspects of earlier movies. But I knew it would become ridiculous, so when it did, I had no standing to complain. Here we go:

• Citizen Kane (1941) For years I have searched for an answer to that unanswerable question, "What is the Citizen Kane of games of movies?" What movie is held up as an unattainable example for what movies could be if only moviemakers would get their acts together and make some proper art? Then, one day, it struck me: perhaps Citizen Kane was the Citizen Kane of games of movies.

  But I hadn't seen Citizen Kane in over ten years. I'd only seen it twice. The only solution was to go to the museum and SEE IT BIG. Only then would I know whether or not cinema was a worthy art form.

  And... it's not. Because how could it be, with those kind of expectations heaped upon it? But Citizen Kane is a great movie. Just one example of its greatness: I'm pretty sure the reel changes don't sync with scene changes. You'll see a reel change coming up and it will just cut from one camera angle to another angle on the same shot.

  I became acutely aware of reel changes ever since seeing a very metatextual episode of Columbo and I can't emphasize how bizarre this is. Movies made fifty years after Citizen Kane have abrupt scene changes at reel changes, but near as I can tell Citizen Kane just says "screw that, we're telling the story at its own pace and we trust people to not misplace an entire film canister." Or whatever the normal reason is for syncing scene changes to reel changes.

  But not all of Citizen Kane's experiments hold up. The newsreel at the beginning is a really clever way to do a huge infodump and set up a framing device, but back in the day watching two newsreels in quick succession would have been super annoying, and now that newsreels are extinct, it just feels like a huge infodump.

  So, tragically, Citizen Kane cannot be said to be the Citizen Kane of games of movies. But keep trying to meet those impossible, irrelevant expectations, filmmakers!

  This seems like a good time to reveal the secret I've been keeping for years: the Citizen Kane of video games is Legend of the Bystander from Constellation Games. That's the game you get when you translate Citizen Kane's dramatic structure—someone circling around the past in flashback, unable to change or understand anything—into game form. Is it a good game? No! It's a weird, confused, frustrating game. So stop searching for it.

  • Bonus connection with last month's No: dirty-tricks election.
• Sunrise (1927): A chilling tale of the cycle of domestic violence. This film starts out with the most crushing melodrama imaginable. Then there's a goofy series of skits about barbershop misunderstandings and piglets getting drunk and flappers' shoulder straps falling off. Then, back to the crushing melodrama! It's insane, but it works. (At least, the second and third acts work.) The goofy stuff makes you think the tension has been resolved, even though the movie's only half over. But you're a fool for thinking so! The first bit of tension was a ruse, and the goofy skits are secretly building up the real tension, which when it breaks has real emotional impact.
  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Man trying to buy back his wife's love.
• Greed (1924): The Breaking Bad of its time. If you wanted to see Samwise Gamgee as a dentist who sexually assaults his patients, this is your silent film. If you wanted to see vaudeville-era German stereotypes, or the Cliff House in its heyday, or Oakland back when it was just a train station... Greed has it all. Well, it doesn't have about 5 1/2 hours of footage which was cut by the studio, but you can find most of that stuff in the book.
  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Girl meets boy because she has a toothache.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Disastrous rainstorm.
• Do the Right Thing (1989): After we watched Ace in the Hole on Criterion DVD, we saw a special feature in which Spike Lee talked about his love for that film. I didn't make much of it at the time, because the only Spike Lee film I'd seen at the time was Malcolm X. But now it's clear. Spike Lee shares Billy Wilder's interest in comedy that turns to tragedy and farce that slips into fiasco. Do the Right Thing is the same kind of slow-burn catastrophe as Ace in the Hole.

  I have a few complaints: some stretches are boring, there's some exploitative boobs. But Mookie's strong through-line lets this movie avoid the "sketch comedy" feel you sometimes get when a movie has a whole lot of characters.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Something highly valued gets burned.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Commotion in a restaurant.
  • Connection with Greed: Heatstroke!
• Reds (1981): I really wasn't in the mood for a 3.5-hour movie so I left during intermission. What I should have done was come in at intermission, because right before intermission the film found its focus and got super interesting and spectacular. But it wasn't enough to get me to stay. The studio really should have gotten someone to butcher the first half to about 20 minutes, a la Greed, but I'm sure those contracts were ironclad. I'm thinking you could just show the scenes with Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill, and when Diane Keaton storms out of the house, show a title card saying "Such were the Reeds."

  So... I can't properly review this movie because I'm disappointed by the half I saw and I long for the half I didn't see. I will say that if for some reason you genuinely hate Ishtar, this can be your "Warren Beatty is a doofy American in over his head" movie instead.

  I gotta say, though, I never got the feeling that I was watching the 1910s. Diane Keaton looked just like she did in Annie Hall, and Warren Beatty looked just like he would in Ishtar.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Wandering around an abandoned palace.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Domesticated animal running all over the place.
  • Connection with Greed: A wayward dentist's wife.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Directly addressing the camera.
  • Bonus Breaking Bad connection: epiphany upon seeing something inside a copy of Leaves of Grass.
• The Right Stuff (1983): The other half of my mashup, Do The Right Stuff. I've mentioned before how Tom Wolfe's book changed my perception of manned space travel. The movie isn't as good as the book, but it's very good, and it does a good job of exploring what I consider the book's primary topic: the adoption of the test pilot ethos as a model for nationalist heroism in an era where nuclear weapons have rendered traditional macho heroism irrelevant.

  What I didn't expect from this movie was that it would also show the simple, uncomplicated heroism that occurs when people stand up for each other. When the Mercury astronauts stand together against fake-Wernher von Braun and demand better treatment than the space program chimps. When John Glenn jeopardizes his career by refusing to pressure his wife to talk to LBJ, and the other astronauts have his back. And if you don't like that stuff and you wanna read the film as a celebration of Chuck Yeager stealing a plane and crashing it for no real reason, that's in there too.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Dive bar.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Man tempted by floozy.
  • Connection with Greed: The desert sucks.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Burning photos on the wall.
  • Connection with Reds: The Russians got there first.
• Apollo 13 (1995): I loved this movie when I saw it in the theater, and I think I love it even more now. It continues The Right Stuff's exploration of heroism by showing a space mission that produced nothing else. It shows what The Right Stuff didn't: people sticking together in a genuine life-threatening situation. (In real life there was even more sticking together than in the movie, which invented Fred Haise's pissy hatred of Jack Swigert. Or at least invented it coming out over a live comm; Sumana and I read over the transcript and we think they kept it pretty professional, all things considered.)

  Best of all, Apollo 13 brings the nerds into the loop. Max Grodénchik is a big hero as FIDO Gold (SYMBOLISM), and it's not played for laughs the way it always was on DS9. I think that's why they stunt-casted Ed Harris as chief nerd Gene Kranz; it sort of gives you a bridge from The Right Stuff.

  Oh, no, wait, best of all, the sainted Billy Wilder liked this movie! From poorly-worded IMDB trivia:

  Over the course of lunch with his idol Billy Wilder, Ron Howard has said that he was thrilled to learn that Wilder deemed this movie to be Howard's best work as a director because it was about a guy who did NOT realize his dream...

  That's our Billy!

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Cost? No man can say.
  • Connection with Sunrise: An unorthodox lifeboat.
  • Connection with Greed: I think we can all agree that Greed is also a movie about a guy who does not realize his dream.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Exposition broadcast over radio.
  • Connection with Reds: Old person doesn't remember famous person's name.
  • Connection with The Right Stuff: Can't think of one, sorry.
• Howdy, y'all. Joe Hills here, recording as I always do from Nashville (1975). I'd never seen an Altman film before, and this one plays out like a whole season of Arrested Development in one movie. There's a complicated network of relationships between self-absorbed characters that plays out in a funny, horrifying way. Perhaps the cleverest move is to give the knee-jerk Hollywood-liberal approach to 1970s Nashville ("these hicks are crazy") to the British reporter Opal, a clueless, snobbish foreigner around whom all red-blooded Americans can unite in mockery. The songs are always bad in just the right way.
  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Pretending that someone who can't sing, can.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Big city musical hooplah!
  • Connection with Greed: Awkward family dinner.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Exploitative use of boobs.
  • Connection with Reds: Foreign journalist has a poor grasp of what's going on.
  • Connection with The Right Stuff: Unexpected Jeff Goldblum.
  • Connection with Apollo 13: Flashy white clothing.
• There Will Be Blood (2007): I'd just like to state for the record that Kern County is exactly as depicted in this movie. Even though they filmed it in Texas.

  Uh, yeah, this was pretty good. Just your basic movie about men digging themselves into moral cesspools and foreclosing on any possibility of redemption, but better than its competitors thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis's amazing acting. I liked the passive-aggressive rivalry between his character and Paul Dano's. I'm really excited that director Paul Thomas Anderson is doing an adaptation of Inherent Vice. (Although I think that adaptation might be better if Wes Anderson did it.)

  I also want to point out what a great title this is. It's kind of cheesy. Other movie titles don't make explicit promises. And I can't imagine someone squirming on their theater seat at the two-hour mark thinking, "Well, I'd leave, but I was told there would be blood." But it works. The title sets up a tension that lasts the entire movie. There are all these moments of horrific violence and symbolic stand-ins for blood, but you never see literal blood until the very end.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Hey, there's oil on your property!
  • Connection with Sunrise: Wedding as act break.
  • Connection with Greed: The sordid true story of Minecraft.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Brother set against brother, because one of them is an asshole.
  • Connection with Reds: Poor labor conditions.
  • Connection with The Right Stuff: Something explodes before it should.
  • Connection with Apollo 13: Something explodes that shouldn't have exploded at all.
  • Connection with Nashville: Deaf kid.

This month the museum panders to me with a festival of classic crime and grime. New York in the 1970s: a lousy place to live, a great place to make a movie about. Looking forward to seeing films like Cotton Comes to Harlem, Serpico, Superfly, The French Connection, and Across 110th Street. We'll probably also catch some Wong Kar-Wai. I will not be repeating July's movie connection experiment.

Correction: "I'd never seen an Altman film before" is one of the least accurate claims I've ever made. I've seen Gosford Park, The Company, and A Prairie Home Companion. And I've probably seen M*A*S*H, given how often they showed it on Comedy Central back when I was in high school. But I came out of all those films thinking "that was good/terrible/okay", whereas I came out of Nashville thinking "No wonder this guy's a legend!" It was like watching a whole nother director.