Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week.

The Man with Two Brains (1983)

If I have a soft spot for Woody Allen’s earlier, funnier work (and I do, hell, I think we all do), then I REALLY have a soft spot for Steve Martin’s earlier, funnier work. Steve Martin’s career started going downhill for me when he started taking not especially comedic parts in more mainstream movies than the low budget masterpieces he made alongside Carl Reiner. Parenthood (1989) pretty much marks the beginning of the end and Martin has only every now and then been willing to demonstrate the comedy chops that brought him respect in the first place. For every Bowfinger (1999), there’s been five pieces of execrable garbage like Sgt. Bilko (1996), the kind of unforgiveable mistake that makes one hope Martin isn’t a Buddhist since he’s going to be paying for that one on the old karmic wheel for all eternity if he is. Brains comes from the earlier, funnier period of Martin’s film career, and is, if anything, even funnier today than it was in 1983.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

As is this, which is a screening inspired by my current reading of Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years. One of the reasons the film works is the authenticity of the medieval background, although even here there are differences of opinion. For instance, every cast member and extra has had their teeth blackened and yellowed in tribute to the years before dentistry, but they were also the years before sugar, and there is evidence that a lot of people in this period had perfectly good teeth. Whatever, the medieval background feels right and is taken seriously by the filmmakers, and this allows them to take nothing else seriously at all. It’s interesting to note that John Cleese, despite his great comedy brain, felt that all this emphasis on shit and discomfort and knitted chainmail was getting in the way of the comedy, when in fact these were precisely the details that made the comedy work.

Titanic (1997)

So here we are ten years later and despite all the absolute works of genius that have been released in the interim, this wretched and despised hulk of schmaltz and bad screenwriting sits irritatingly atop the all time box office charts in the majority of countries around the world, sneering at all the Lord of the Ringses and Star Warses that have followed in its wake and been unable to top it for all around audience appeal. Has any recent film been so despised by men of a certain age, and male media people, and male posters on the internet? Here is a film that is sneered at, regarded with contempt and dismissed as an aberration, as if making a film that appealed to me and men like me not afraid to let the film in, young women, women in general and people over fifty all around the world were some kind of gross sin. As someone who saw Titanic FOUR TIMES in the cinema when it was released in the UK in 1998 and has loved it ever since, I am annoyed by this male hate. Titanic is not a film without flaws, nor is it a work of great art, but it spoke to people worldwide, and in the kind of cinema attendance numbers not seen since Gone with the Wind (1939). David M Lubin has written a rather excellent BFI Modern Classic on the film that does a much better job of defending the film than I have here, and he’s as aware of the film’s shortcomings as anyone is. For me, the film only really ups gears when the iceberg hits around 90 minutes in, and becomes the No.1 blockbuster in its second half that it certainly didn’t promise to be in the first, which is still mired in hokey irony, the Picasso incident, and too many references to the unsinkable ship that rather inevitably attracted the satirists of The Onion: World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg, Titanic Representation Of Man’s Hubris Sinks In North Atlantic and 1,500 Dead In Symbolic Tragedy. And yet as I cringe through Titanic’s opening, I’m reminded that Aliens (1986) works in exactly the same way, where, for almost an hour, an unbearably tense atmosphere of fear and suspense is worked up. Titanic takes the time it needs to establish the world it’s going to tear apart later.