A long, long time ago… April 30, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farFunny thing happened yesterday. It was my nephew’s birthday, “the big one-two”, as he called it. Twelve years old. I remember back when I was twelve, I told him, when his Dad and I bunked off school one February afternoon back in 1978. If I remember rightly it was my birthday week and my Dad took us both to the Odeon cinema in town to see STAR WARS. The Odeon was one of those big old cinemas with a huge lobby and foyers and a fantastic large screen, with the seats for Screen One being the balcony seats (Screens Two and Three being in what used to be the stalls down below). It may not have had digital surround sound like multiplexes today have, but boy did that place have character. It was a Picture Palace, a Dream Theatre. It’s been a Bingo Hall for the last twenty years.
And yeah, I loved STAR WARS. The rest, as they say, is history.
On the subject of STAR WARS, anyone else seen the new issue of Empire with the pictures from the new CLONE WARS animated feature? Dear God, Lucas, give it a rest. I may be proved wrong but it looks just awful. Back in 1978 I was transported to another galaxy, with real actors, real sets, great miniature effects, and now it’s just a computer cartoon. It’s very sad, and STAR WARS’ place in cinematic history (hell, the version I loved back in 1978 doesn’t even exist anymore according to Lucas) is being repeatedly tarnished by its own creator. Very sad indeed.
Everybody loves the ALIEN April 24, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 4 commentsI love ALIEN. I know its just a simple dumb ‘b’-movie sci-fi flick at heart, but I absolutely adore this film. As soon as it begins and that wonderful title sequence starts I’m lost in it’s dark, gothic world.
I actually think that ALIEN boasts perhaps the finest title sequence of all. It’s so subtle, so atmospheric- it’s just gorgeous, the ‘ALIEN’ logo slowly building on the screen as the credits roll, the screen a dark moody green as the camera passes over the planetoid, the music full of dread and forboding. Jerry Goldsmith hated using this music cue over the main titles (he composed a greatly different main title cue which was rejected), but I think he missed the point- ALIEN is all about mood, and the title music draws you in. It’s the perfect example of using main title graphics and music to set the tone of the film that follows. As soon as that credit sequence starts I’m gone. I recall a review at the time nailed it perfectly- it was as if instead of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods coming to Earth, we had gone to them. With Giger’s incredible creature designs looking like nothing on Earth (excepting perhaps the subtle pseudo-phallic tone of the imagery) the film was genuinely disturbing and remains so to this day, and no-one has equalled the film’s production design in a space movie.
When ALIENS arrived in 1986, I hated it. For me it seemed the Anti-ALIEN. Scotts film was slow, all about mood and tension, and the creature was an inhuman, indestructible killing machine. Camerons film was really a space-based Rambo movie that hijacked the Giger Alien. Incredibly tiresomegung-ho space marines against a horde of dumb soldier-aliens, Cameronintroduced the travesty of a Queen Alien that disposed of the alien-ness of the original, replacing it with a more familiar bee/ant-like Terran lifecycle. The original, even without the cocoon sequence, was unexplained, mysterious, beyond our understanding. . . Cameron’s movie was just too neat, explained too much. I detest the whole concept of the Alien Queen, all that mother/hive nonsense. It spoiled all the later films of the franchise and tainted the original. I still have a smouldering hatred of the film, and watch it very rarely. For me you could have subsituted the Alien for any other creature design and it would still be the same movie. I know many fans prefer ALIENS to the first film, but they are just plain wrong.
ALIEN 3 was a better effort. Much-maligned at the time, I really enjoyed the film even in its flawed original cinema version. There is much to admire here- that familiar sense of doom and dread, a return to the single, deadly Alien, brilliant production design and a simply magnificent score. The film would actually get improved by the eventual DVD recut (described as an’assembly cut’ while not officially a ‘directors cut’ as David Fincher pointedly kept his distance, still hurt by the making of and reaction to the film). This altered cut was more faithful to what Fincher originally envisaged, and was in my eyes a very superior version. ALIEN 3 in better circumstances could have been a classic but it was doomed from the start, as the making-of doc on the special edition DVD testifies.
Infact if the ALIEN 3 making-of doc is a lesson in how not to treat your franchise, describing how ALIEN 3 was doomed and suffered a painful gestation, then what happened after is a lesson in how to kill your franchise and trample it into the gutter. ALIEN RESURRECTION was a poorly conceived attempt to kickstart the franchise following the poorly received third film, and is really just a bloody mess that makes ALIENS look like a classic. The NewBorn Alien at the films’ end is perhaps the most ill-judged idea in the franchise, but that distinction is debatable considering the two ALIENS VERSUS PREDATOR films that followed. When the first AVP was mooted I honestly thought it was a joke, I could not believe the series could fall to such a low (but then I hadn’t banked on AVP:REQUIEM, for which the reviews have been so universally damning I don’t think I can ever bring myself to watch it).
But we’ll always have the first film. It shines as brightly as ever, and indeed, seems to get better with age as the years pass and more inferior films in the series get released. Any hope that the franchise would return to the grandeur of the first film vanished some years ago, when Ridley Scott and James Cameron got together to make another ALIEN film. In a typically smart move 20th Century Fox ditched it in favour of AVP. You got to love Hollywood. What a madhouse.
Jack Lemmon: Save The Tiger April 19, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farThere’s a wonderful story about SAVE THE TIGER, recounted by the film’s director, John Avildsen, on the DVD’s commentary track. It was 1972, and Paramount had left the film on the shelf, not sure what to do with it. It was a harrowing film, documenting 36 hours in the life of Harry Stoner and his nervous breakdown as his clothing business faces ruin and he contemplates turning to crime via arson to survive. It’s not easy viewing, and Paramount had doubts about its chances of success. So before Paramount took hold of the film and recut it, John and the films writer, Steve Shagan, thought that if they could show the finished film to Jack Lemmon, and if he liked it, then maybe he would carry enough clout to convince Paramount to leave it alone. So they took the film to Rome, where Jack and Billy Wilder were making AVANTI.
Just imagine it; it’s 1972 and Lemmon and Wilder are in Italy making that wonderful romantic comedy. Just imagine that moment in time, one of the best actor/director partnerships in Hollywood history working together on that sunny comedy and they sit down in a small theatre outside Rome to watch a troubled ‘little’ picture called SAVE THE TIGER.
So they watched the film and when it finished and the lights came up, there was silence for awhile, and then Billy Wilder said, “There’s only one thing wrong with this picture,” to which he could see Avildsen react in horror, and then he added, “I didn’t direct it.” Probably, John Avildsen recalls, the sweetest thing any director could say to another director. So SAVE THE TIGER was left alone by Paramount and Jack Lemmon went on to win an Academy Award (Best Actor, 1973).
When watching SAVE THE TIGER, I often find myself thinking about TAXI DRIVER. They are both seem to be about the American Dream turning to Nightmare, and both are such definitive examples of 1970s filmmaking. They are both low budget, both with excellent scripts, both graced with astonishing acting. Jack Lemmon’s performance is a tour de force, like watching THE APARTMENT’s CC Baxter in frustrated middle-age, his hopes and dreams of 1960 thwarted and his life ruined. America has changed.
Harry Stoner is facing a ruined business, a marriage on the rocks, a daughter in Europe, and he constantly thinks back to happier times, simpler times when everything made sense; Stoner’s reminisce falters, his voice trails off, his eyes wistful, elsewhere, seeing memories… and Lemmon carries it off. As his breakdown takes hold he thinks back to his Wartime days, the men who died there, the pointlessness of their sacrifice in the face of what America has become. Stoner starts seeing things, his dead wartime buddies, and is visibly falling apart, increasingly lost, much as Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s later film. The film’s end is so typically 1970s- there is no neat conclusion, and Stoner is probably more lost than ever. It is a very powerful movie, as relevant today as it ever was, and one of Lemmon’s finest.
Jack Lemmon: Avanti April 16, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 4 commentsWe all have our guilty pleasures, and AVANTI is one of mine. Released back in 1972, it appears now as a quaint time-capsule, an example of a forgotten kind of movie. They simply don’t make them like this anymore. Many will see that as a good thing… but not me.
It’s an oddly charming movie, perhaps it’s the thirty+ years between then and now. The music is wonderful, the setting gorgeous, the acting a delight… it’s magical. Like a fairytale from thirty years ago. You watch thinking it doesn’t work, and yet by movies end you are in love. Well, that’s how it caught me anyway. I think I smiled all the way through the film. I don’t think, even in 1972, that it would have been considered a realistic adult comedy-drama… it’s pure romantic fantasy, and now, in 2008, distanced by time, it appears more fantasy than ever. It’s timeless now.
Jack Lemmon plays a self-centered, all-business American, Wendell Armbruster, who arrives in the idyllic Mediteranean to collect the body of his late father in order to return it to America in time for a huge society funeral. Armbuster’s father was in the Big League, head of a huge business with big political connections. It turns out however that his father was not alone when he died in a car crash- he was with a lover, a woman whose daughter, Pamela Piggot, played by Juliet Mills, has also arrived to see to her mothers funeral. The illicit romance is no surprise to her, and it becomes apparent that the affair had been going on for years, much to Armbruster’s shock and disgust. His father, it seemed, led a double-life. A consumate father, husband and business mogul in America, every year for a month he retired to the Med where he led a romantic affair with an Englishwoman, the two of them treated like Royalty by the islanders.
The beauty of the film is in how Lemmon handles his characters arc, as he arrives one man and departs another. Armbruster completely transforms before our eyes, emulating his father just as Pamela emulates her mother, the two of them falling in love with each other amidst the peaceful sun-drenched idyll of the island. It is so subtle you hardly notice as his cold heart melts away, but you are suddenly aware, as the film ends, that this is not the same man who arrived at the film’s start.
The script is warm and whimsical, the comedy light, the music bewitching… the film is a guilty joy. It’s a film to return to on any wet, grey, afternoon/evening, just as the island is a place for the two characters to return to every summer. You won’t see AVANTI on many peoples lists of favourite Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon films. Thats understandable- this is no THE APARTMENT or SOME LIKE IT HOT. It is somewhat overlong, some of the humour can fall flat, it is dated to a degree… but neverthess there is a romantic warmth to this film that is hypnotic. I could sit down and take it all in again already.
Jack Lemmon: The Out Of Towners April 12, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentFive years before THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE, Jack Lemmon appeared in another Neil Simon-penned movie, THE OUT OF TOWNERS. It would share, with the later film, the setting of New York, but from a different perspective, as the title suggests. Whereas in the superior 1975 film Lemmon and Bancroft played a New york couple who stay in the city in the face of crisis, in THE OUT OF TOWNERS the protaganists are the Kellermans, outsiders from Ohio for whom New York simply is the crisis. Jack Lemmon plays George Kellerman, due for a life-changing job interview in New York whose plans unravel into a chaos of diverted airflights, lost luggage, being mugged, losing their Hotel room, getting soaked in a rainstorm, caught in the midst of a robbery… It’s one of those days/nights in which everything goes wrong.
Although it is one of his lesser films, Lemmon nevertheless shines with a comic timing that is typically natural and seemingly effortless. He had a gift for comedy so great that he would perhaps always be frustrated, as an actor, that he was famous as being first a comedy actor above all else. This was unfortunate and patently untrue, as other films so greatly demonstrated, but in the case of very average films like THE OUT OF TOWNERS, that great comedic talent could save a film from mediocrity. In truth, the Neil Simon screenplay is basically one joke stretched over the length of the film, but it is saved by Lemmon’s performance. I really can’t imagine anyone but Lemmon succeeding in the role of George Kellerman - compare the flawed original to the vastly inferior 1999 remake starring Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn and you’ll appreciate what Lemmon brings to the original.
Lemmon had been in far better films before and would many times after, but THE OUT OF TOWNERS stands as a testament to his talent at comedy and ability to raise material above it’s own limitations. Even a poor Jack Lemmon film is still a good way to pass away a few hours, and the film guarantees a good few laughs. The DVD is predictably poor, since we’ll never see a Special Edition for a film like this, but on the whole the picture is fair and the widescreen format makes it superior to the usual pan-and-scan television airing.