' ' Cinema Romantico

Monday, March 11, 2024

96th Academy Awards: Back to the Basics

After several years of chaos, woebegone makeover attempts, and Pandemic-related alterations, the Oscars finally returned to their true form as a big dumb show. They were entertaining, and eye-rolling, and enervating, and out of touch, and sporadically sincere, and sometimes stupid. There was plenty to complain about, of course, and that’s good! Complaining is part of the show! The 96th Academy Awards were, in other words, an inspired, in manner of speaking, version of a classic dish with Steven Spielberg, on hand to present Best Director, assuming the old Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep role of unofficial Academy mascot, a sort of pomp and circumstance win for Auteur Theory. The show started an hour earlier (7 PM ET, 4 PM PT) even as it hilariously, literally, started several minutes behind schedule, yet never felt overlong despite, as it always does, running long, because by starting earlier it effected a nifty mental sleight of hand and still felt shorter. Maybe that’s a trick you can only manage once, so best enjoy it this year, whiners. 


Hosting for the fourth time, Jimmy Kimmel was mostly harmless, echoing a mostly harmless show, working best, it turned out, as a straight man. Like when John Cena was enlisted to present Best Costume Design via a bit, uh, honoring the 50th Anniversary of the infamous Oscar streaker that really, truly worked, impeccably timed and, this is crucial, not stepping on the toes of the ensuing winners, evocative of a smartly coordinated bevy of presenters that amusingly kept the train rolling. The “Twins” reunion of Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger was a welcome homage to all of us old fogeys who rented that 1988 comedy from the Roadshow Video in West Des Moines; John Mulaney won this year’s coveted Why Doesn’t He Host Award? with an unlikely variation on the old observation that he could be funny just by reading in the phonebook by being funny in just recounting the plot of “Field of Dreams.” Maybe next year Mulaney could recount the plot of “Meet Joe Black?”

The most memorable moment of Kimmel’s opening monologue wasn’t even a joke, it was his honoring Hollywood as a union town by bringing out “the truck drivers, Teamsters, and IATSE union members” who supported the WGA and SAG-AFTRA during their strikes, the only moment all night that referenced the industry’s year of significant and righteous upheaval. Hollywood might be at a tipping point, but most everyone pulled their punches on that topic, save for Cord Jefferson who in winning Best Adapted screenplay for “American Fiction” decreed “Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making twenty $10 million movies.” Hear! Hear!

After an early run of downline awards for “Poor Things,” the evening was dominated as the Oscar fortune tellers predicted by Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” winning Best Editing and Cinematography and Original Score and Actor and Supporting Actor and Director and, yes, Best Picture, too. The latter was announced by living legend Al Pacino who, whether by some sort of ill-conceived comedy bit or going off the cuff going wrong, inadvertently underlined the moment’s lack of suspense by opening the envelope and essentially just sort of muttering something like, oh, hey, “Oppenheimer,” again. Kimmel, however, opened the evening by addressing “Barbie” first, the movie that shared a release date with “Oppenheimer,” creating a summer box office bonanza between them and forever linking the two in the public’s mind, an idea the Oscars only enhanced. “Oppenheimer” won seven, “Barbie” only one, but the latter won the show in spirit just as much. Ryan Gosling knocked his performance of “Barbie’s” Best Original Song nominee “I’m Just Ken” out of the park, and then he appeared onstage with “Oppenheimer” star and nominee Emily Blunt (see above) to comically address the ostensible Barbenheimer feud, my favorite moment of the whole night. More than anything, the 2023 year in Hollywood was defined by Barbenheimer phenomenon, and this moment hilariously lived it. 

Hollywood’s insistence that the show must go on, alas, has rarely felt as embarrassingly true as it did when ABC followed Ukranian director Mstyslav Chernov in winning Best Feature Documentary for “20 Days in Mariupol” saying he would rather have no Oscar and no war with an image of all the “I’m Just Ken” performers waiting in the wings. In fact, the Blunt and Gosling bit followed Jonathan Glazer winning for Best International Feature for “The Zone of Interest” and being the one person all evening to openly condemn the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, denouncing “the holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” In its way, so many attendees sporting ceasefire lapel pins as their method of silent solidarity put into perspective the potential cost of saying something aloud, and in the image of Glazer’s hands clearly shaking as he read his statement from a sheet of paper, you could see the weight of his words in real time. Courage.


The acceptance speeches are generally a good barometer of the evening and last night, they trended up. The team that won Best Visual Effects for “Godzilla Minus One” joyfully took the stage together, all holding toy kaijus in their hands, and Takaski Yamakazi gave a loving, halting speech that might have technically got lost a little bit in translation but emotionally still shone through. Robert Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor for “Oppenheimer” in vintage RDJ fashion, refusing to take it too seriously in a way that still suggested just how thankful he was to be up there at all. Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s speech in winning Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers” acknowledged both the importance of representation and its limits, drawing a line all the way back to Hattie McDaniel in 1940, heartbreakingly noting “I pray to God I get to do this more than once.” Then there was Emma Stone. In winning Best Actress for “Poor Things,” her second Oscar, she defeated Lily Gladstone for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” who would have become the first Native American Academy Award winner. It was a difficult truth that seemed to emerge in Stone’s reaction, not overwhelmed, exactly, but overcome, I think, in manifestly grasping what had been denied in her victory. She acknowledged all her fellow nominees, but she singled out Gladstone, sharing it with her, she said, a sentiment that can sometimes ring hollow, though not here, because you would see the wrenching complication of it on their both faces. Stone has already gotten to do this twice, you might say, and she recognized it, and thread an impossible needle. She deserved it, but she also didn’t, and she expressed both those truths at once. 

That denying of history with Gladstone underlined the Academy’s ongoing, oddly strained relationship with its own. Academy President Janet Yang’s cursory mention of the Governors Awards winners, lifetime achievement recipients all of whom were merely glimpsed in images beamed to a backstage wall, was bad enough. It was improbably made worse when it was accidentally interrupted, through absolutely no fault of her own, by Billie Eilish who had just won Best Original Song with her brother Fineas O’Connell, because in a baffling move, the producers chose to have Yang address the camera in the wings where the winners walk through. The In Memoriam segment, meanwhile, the one thing that should be impossible to screw up but always is, was screwed up yet again, by thoughtlessly reducing the screen recounting the deceased to the background and emphasizing an interpretive dance and Italian tenor Andrea Boccelli and his son Matteo performing in the foreground. It’s an In Memoriam segment, not a concert, and every single person the movies lost in 2023 deserved better.


Then again, the Oscars resurrected a bit from the 2009 ceremony in which 5 Best Acting winners from the past returned to highlight the 5 nominees in each Best Acting category. The scripts there could have occasionally had more oomph, and they worked best when there was a true cosmic connection between the presenter and the actor, like Sam Rockwell speaking to Robert Downey Jr., or Lupita Nyong'o speaking to Da'Vine Joy Randolph, or Nic Cage to Paul Giamatti, but I appreciated them for illustrating a historical through-line. I loved the shot of Cillian Murphy winning Best Actor for Oppenheimer as he ascended the stage and into a sort of polite scrum of his peers congratulating him, the new member of a highly eccentric lodge. No one, though, seemed to get the historical perspective better than Christopher Nolan. 

“To the Academy, movies are just a little bit over 100 years old,” he said in winning Best Director for Oppenheimer. “We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here. But to know that you think I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.” Whatever I think of his movies, I admire Nolan for his commitment to creating experiences for the big screen, the biggest, these days, it seems, even if in those lines, he humbly saw himself as merely one ripple in the rain. 

Friday, March 08, 2024

Book Review: Oscar Wars

At the end of the 89th Academy Awards ceremony on February 26, 2017, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway took the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to announce the winner for Best Picture. Beatty opened the envelope, hemmed, and hawed, and held the card inside the envelope out to Dunaway as one might hold a menu at a roadside diner in the middle of the night upon realizing they do not, alas, serve breakfast all day. Seeming to think Beatty was being a card himself, Dunaway chuckled, glanced at the card in his hand, and announced the winner, or what she thought was the winner, “La La Land.” But the winner was not “La La Land.” They had the wrong envelope. The winner was “Moonlight.” The kind of mishap typically relegated to the realm of urban legend had happened, and even if people behind the scenes of the Oscar ceremony were scrambling in real time to set things right, it was essentially left to not victorious “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz to explain what had occurred, summoning the real victors from “Moonlight” to the stage.

Even now, it’s surreal to watch, the show’s host, a crestfallen, almost visibly ill Jimmy Kimmel, trying to intercede, and Beatty explaining himself as in the background various people hand the Oscar statues they did not win to the people who did. (Dunaway, at some point, disappears backstage before flitting out for the Governor’s Party, as if quietly suggesting the shindig’s overriding frivolity no matter who wins, or that maybe the ceremony is just a vessel for the afterparties.) This is where New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman concludes his sensational 2023 book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears. After all, in recounting the nine decades of Academy Awards, the author finds an institution mired in perpetual crisis, where the line between winners and losers is often blurred, and the line between Black and White is not, and a ceremony that tends to be most rememberable when something goes wrong.


What are the Oscars, and who, exactly, are they for? This is the broad query regularly put forth by the inimitable collective “people” in advance of the Academy Awards, and then after them, especially if the TV ratings were bad. As Schulman’s intro suggests, however, the Oscars are essentially anything for everyone. They are for the pundits, some of whom have regrettably transformed Oscar prognosticating into a full-time job, an enervating year-round activity a la equally enervating never-ending NFL mock drafts. They are for fashionistas, the red carpet just one more runway. They are fodder for opinion columnists, and culture writers. They are the enemies of art, judging it rather than considering it, even if they are what force an industry to view their commercial products as art in the first place. They are as much a scapegoat for the industry’s flaws as they are a symbol. They are for you, and they are for me, and so, they are for all of us and none of us, which is why, as Schulman wryly notes in his first sentence, the Oscars are always getting it wrong. But more than anything, Schulman reckons, the Oscars are about power, “who has it, who’s straining to keep it...perpetually redrawing the bounds of the Hollywood establishment.”

Through this light, the colloquial and existential adage that Awards Don’t Matter has never rung hollower. They do matter, a lot, an industry talisman, and Schulman proves it again and again in eleven rollicking chapters spotlighting Oscar season altercations between management and labor, between Old and New Hollywood, between independents and studios, between rival producers, and rival actors. And they mattered, Schulman illustrates, almost immediately, long before they possessed a historical footprint, highlighting not just the ambitious nature of Hollywood but the innate magnetism of awards. Echoing Carey Mulligan, who recently told The Hollywood Reporter that any actor claiming not to care about winning an Oscar is lying, Schulman evokes the cravings of the silver screen’s biggest, from Frank Capra to Bette Davis to Joan Fontaine to Olivia de Havilland. When the latter lost to Hattie McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress in 1940, she told Entertainment Weekly years later that she “ceased to believe in (God).” For one night, at least. 


Yet, the scope of Oscar Wars simultaneously puts into perspective how so often these awards season scuffles are rendered immaterial by the ultimate agent of indifference, time. William Randolph Hearst and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper might have worked to kibosh Orson Welles winning Best Picture for “Citizen Kane,” or maybe, as Schulman also submits, that was the studio system putting the kibosh on an uppity auteur, but either way, “Citizen Kane” has essentially gone down in the record as the greatest movie of all time, rendering its lack of Oscar love as laughable. The yawning 62-year gap, meanwhile, between McDaniel becoming the first African American to win an Oscar in 1940 and Halle Berry becoming the first African American to win Best Actress for “Monster’s Ball” in 2002 demonstrates the overriding inadequacy of the victories. Like Sidney Poitier, who became the first Black man to win Best Actor in-between in 1964 but whose career ultimately became stuck between a rock and a hard place, the passage of time exposed McDaniel and Berry’s awards as Potemkin Oscars, mere emblematic offerings, a way for Hollywood to claim progress even as everything continued like normal (a new normal, you might say), and the winners were cruelly left twisting in the wind. The book’s most heartbreaking moment is Berry recalling how returning home in the aftermath of her historic victory, she was already sensing how nothing was going to change. The Oscar might lead your obit, as William Goldman said, but so often their real value proves fleeting. 

Given such recurring narrow-mindedness, it almost beggars belief that the Academy Awards could have lasted a century. It’s not just their homogeny, but their cowardice during the 1950s blacklist, and the anti-labor sentiment rooted in their very conception. Yet, while it might be a stretch to deem the Academy adaptable, more like grudgingly reactive, Oscar Wars also illustrates how it has proved itself to be a wily survivor. Unions threatened the existence of the Oscars almost before they got rolling, yet they wound up co-existing instead, and when the Academy became old and out of touch in the 1960s and was revealed as too old and white in the 2010s, voter purges and infusions of diversity from Academy presidents, respectively, Gregory Peck and Cheryl Boone Isaacs, managed to keep the ship on course. They even survived the infamous opening number of 1989 starring Rob Lowe and Snow White, though show producer Allan Carr did not. You begin the chapter thinking Carr made his own bed; you end it feeling as if Hollywood metaphorically slit his throat, an appeasement to the public so that next year, the show could go on.


Despite the Academy’s instinct for self-preservation, in his epilogue, Schulman nevertheless leaves us with the unmistakable impression that the Oscars are at a crossroads. True, they have benefitted from the most recent membership makeover engineered by Boone Isaacs, apparent in this year’s nominations, and there has always been a push and pull between the public’s taste and that of the Academy. But the divide has never seemed bigger, provoking questions not just about Oscar taste but relevance, reflected in dwindling ratings that has led to all sorts of desperate attempts to rope in a broader viewing audience, exasperating the motion picture lifers, a real lose-lose. And that’s to say nothing of the larger existential questions like streaming, and supply chain issues affected by the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. In another time, Will Smith’s Best Actor win in 2022 might have been held up as a happy moment, but instead his slapping Chris Rock mid-ceremony became a symbol of something else, an Academy on the verge of coming undone. Schulman ends his book by describing the image of Smith dancing at the Oscar afterparties, a man Gettin’ Jiggy wit it as Hollywood burns.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

1993 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt’s “I’m Just Ken” and Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For” from “Barbie” marked the 18th time two tunes from the same movie were nominated for the Best Original Song Academy Award, the most recent being “La La Land” in 2016, the first being “Fame” in 1980. The tenth came 30 years ago when both Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” and Neil Young’s “Philadelphia” from Jonathan Demme’s Best Picture winner of the same city’s name earned nods. Bruce won the Oscar, and though revisiting this category given my being a widely known Springsteen devotee would seem pointless, well, hey, don’t forget, I’m mad at Bruce, our 1-percent blue collar hero whose obscene ticket prices are just a reflection of the market, man, so what if you have to sell your house up in Fairview to be able to afford to go see him. Maybe he won’t win our retroactive category! You never know! TBD.


1993 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees & Winner (in bold):

“Again” from “Poetic Justice” – Music and Lyrics by Janet Jackson and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis
“The Day I Fall in Love” from “Beethoven’s 2nd” – Music and Lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager, James Ingram, and Clif Magness 
“Philadelphia” from “Philadelphia” – Music and Lyrics by Neil Young 
“Streets of Philadelphia” from “Philadelphia” – Music and Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen
“A Wink and a Smile” from “Sleepless in Seattle” – Music by Marc Shaiman; Lyrics by Ramsey McLean

We are required to remember right up front that this category, as the name implies, is strictly limited to Original Songs, in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means “I’ve Got You, Babe” by Sonny & Cher in “Groundhog Day,” as evocative a deployment of pop music in cinema as you will ever get, is verboten, as is a personal favorite, “I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Louis Prima in Mad Dog and Glory.” Add “Blue Moon Revisited (A Song For Elvis)” by Cowboy Junkies in “Untamed Heart,” “Slow Ride” by Foghat in “Dazed and Confused,” and “Saturday Night” by The Bay City Rollers in “So I Married an Axe Murderer” and, once again, my God, what a category. Alas. 


It’s true that the “Sleepless in Seattle” soundtrack was ubiquitous in 1993, going all the way to the top of the Billboard chart, but do you what soundtrack went to #17 on the Billboard chart that same year? “Judgement Night,” that’s what, a forgettable movie I think I might have watched at someone’s birthday party but with a soundtrack that featured hip-hop and rock artists collaborating and that was destined to appeal much more to a rap-obsessed central Iowa teen. So, “A Wink and a Smile” gets the heave-ho, and though a lot of other “Judgement Night” soundtrack fans might disagree, remember, I’m the sole judge and jury in this category revisitation, and “Missing Link” by Del tha Funky Homosapien and Dinosaur Jr. gets the nod by a mile.

I am tempted, really tempted, to nominate a deep cut in the form of “Don’t Waste My Time” by Lisa Taylor from “The Meteor Man” soundtrack in place of “Again”...but then I listened to “Again,” well, again, and I can’t do Janet like that. That song is still dope. It stays. 

Delbert McClinton’s “Weatherman” sort of sounds like something the quirky singer-songwriter might have come up with on his own, but no, it was recorded specifically for “Groundhog Day,” and as such, gives “Philadelphia” the boot, no disrespect to Neil Young. 

As it turns out, 1993 was a heck of a year for material appearing on soundtracks that didn’t qualify for Best Song because of the Academy’s aforementioned byzantine rules, chief among them Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” That song won three Grammys but was ineligible at the Oscars. But there was also Boy George’s “The Crying Game,” which was a cover and therefore ineligible too, and even “Soul to Squeeze,” from “The Coneheads,” which I owned on cassingle, even though I never saw the movie, my second favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers track after “I Could Have Lied,” but recorded for the band’s celebrated fifth record “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” not the movie, and disqualified. 


As best I can tell, however, and I really did dig into it as much as I could without emailing director Jon Turtletaub, “Rise Above It” from the “Cool Runnings” soundtrack, credited to a band called Lock Stock & Barrell that I could not find much about, and featuring MC PC and Howard Chen, was an original specifically for the beloved (by me) movie about the Jamaican bobsledding team. (I remain available, free of charge, to write the essay for its Criterion edition.) And because the American version of the “Cool Runnings” soundtrack was egregiously released sans “Rise Above It,” and because this was 1993 and before the advent of every single song in the history of the world being a digital click away, and because “Rise Above It” was never going to appear on Q-102 in Des Moines so I could tape it to a mix, I was forced to record it by literally holding my boombox up to the television speaker during the montage featuring the song as it played on my rented VHS. I really did this! And unless we get a last-minute note before the faux restaging of the ceremony, we are including it over the elevator dross of “The Day I Fall in Love.” In fact, you know what, I have loved “Rise Above It” and “Cool Runnings” so much, for so long, that...

I was almost going to do it, I swear I was, but I can’t just because I’m mad at Bruce. I’ve written variations of this before, but in eschewing director Jonathan Demme’s request for a rock song to essentially write a hymn instead, Springsteen transformed the opening credits of “Philadelphia” into nothing less than a preamble of America itself. I watch it now, and I still get goosebumps. What’s more, in rewriting history, I don’t wish to erase Burce’s Oscar speech, “Back to the Future”-style. Have you seen that Oscar speech? Eloquent, thankful, and to the point. “The Line” is a model of the story song, and that is the model of an Oscar speech. “You do your best work and you hope that it pulls out the best in your audience and some piece of it spills over into the real world and into people's everyday lives, and it takes the edge off of fear and allows us to recognize each other through our veil of differences. I always thought that was one of the things popular art was supposed to be about, along with the merchandising and all the other stuff.” 

[Wipes away a tear.] Dammit, it’s almost enough to make me think I’m not mad at him anymore. 

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Let's Remember Some Early Paul Giamatti Roles


If the Oscar fortune tellers are to be believed, Cillian Murphy has emerged as the front-runner for Best Actor, meaning that it might well not yet be Paul Giamatti’s “time.” I can’t lie, it breaks my heart a little bit. Then again, if Giamatti does not win, perhaps it’s appropriate. Perhaps this isn’t the way Giamatti was meant to win. After all, twenty-ish years ago, when Giamatti was first blowing up, a New York Times article by the late David Carr wrestling with the actor’s unlikely leading man status, Giamatti said of himself: “I have the mentality of a supporting actor.” Indeed, Giamatti might have graduated from the illustrious Yale School of Drama, but there were no red carpets rolled out for the 56-year-old when he first showed up on the Hollywood. His father Bart might have been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, but in Hollywood, Paul was no golden boy, no Bryce Harper, no Adley Rutschman, he was just some guy; he was Steve Buechele, he was Tim Teufel, he was Mike LaValliere. 

His first official credit was in the 1991 thriller “Past Midnight,” which was also Quentin Tarantino’s first credit (he got one as producer after rewriting the script), and which I have never watched though the trailer kind of makes me want to? After that, it’s a bunch of itty-bitty bit parts, and then a step or two up from itty-bitty bit parts, and then some smaller supporting roles, even after his break in Howard Stern’s “Private Parts.” “I think those are the hardest,” Giamatti said of his early roles at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard Awards. And it’s why even though I wouldn’t mind discussing the actor’s prickly surprise in roles like “Win Win” and “Barney’s Version,” or even going long on his electrifying delivery of exposition in “San Andreas,” in seeking to celebrate Giamatti, I find myself thinking most about his earliest roles, when we didn’t even know it was him.


Singles (1992). “I thought he was literally going to swallow her,” says Campbell Scott to Kyra Sedgwick after their date in Cameron Crowe’s comedy about the credited Kissing Man (Giamatti) slovenly making out with his lady friend across the way. And that’s how Giamatti plays it, committed to the bit, and even getting a one-word line, “What?,” which is not angry, or loud, just genuinely incredulous. Wasn’t everybody publicly making out in coffee shops in early-90s Seattle?


Mighty Aphrodite (1995). If his part in “Singles” was designed to stand out, his part as the Extra Guilds Researcher in Woody Allen’s 1995 comedy was designed as just the opposite. And he does what is asked, nothing more, a team player. If he didn’t turn out to be Paul Giamatti, would you have even remembered he was in it? I didn’t! And I once owned this movie on VHS!


Donnie Brasco (1997). As FBI Technician, Giamatti, and Tim Blake Nelson in one of his earliest roles too, are enlisted as the inherently geekier counterpoints to the cooler undercover Johnny Depp while he is giving his unforgettable monologue about what “forget about it” means. In fact, here Giamatti gets to take his own stab at “forget about it,” as if giving us an orange with none of the juice, and going to show, years before “Spy” (2015), that deep down, every technician wants to get on the field. 


My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997). Released the same year as “Private Parts,” you could make an argument that Giamatti’s walk off role here demonstrated his burgeoning excellence just as much. It’s one scene, but as Richard the Bellman, Giamatti effortlessly transitions from service industry schmo to guardian angel, the way his character shares a cigarette with the one played by Julia Roberts underlining not only how they share the scene but how so many little moments like this one go together to make something big.


Saving Private Ryan (1998). If in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” Giamatti winningly played off Julia Roberts, in “Saving Private Ryan,” he winningly played off Tom Hanks, or more accurately, winningly portrayed the loser spiritual opposite of Tom Hanks, no small thing. And in doing so, he renders it totally believable that this meathead would pull off his boots in the middle of a skirmish to try and get out a hitchhiker to trigger the sequence’s climax. 


The Truman Show (1998). If Steven Spielberg employed Giamatti as the spiritual opposite of Tom Hanks, then Peter Weir employed Giamatti as the spiritual opposite of Christof (Ed Harris), creator and executive producer of the eponymous reality television show, the schlemiel to Christof’s God. You need the guy who will lose track of “the world’s most recognizable face,” you call Paul Giamatti. 

Monday, March 04, 2024

American Fiction

I cannot rightly claim to have read Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure” on which “American Fiction” is based, and so I can’t say what is similar and how they differ, and which is best. But I have seen Spike Lee’s 2000 satire “Bamboozled” in which a Black television writer creates a Black minstrel television show out of anger at the medium’s misrepresentation that becomes a hit instead. It’s not an unfair comparison because the narrative is eerily reminiscent of the one in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s Best Picture-nominated adaptation of “American Fiction,” and it’s a useful one, too. Because whereas Lee’s satire is truly that, exaggerated, hyperbolic, Jefferson has virtually strained all his satire out, melding it with a domestic drama rendered in such a polite aesthetic that the caricature mostly just plays as regular old comedy. There’s an early scene when author and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is on his phone, detailing how racism doesn’t really exist while a cab drives right by him, picking up a white passenger instead. It’s a familiar joke that Chris Rock radically re-altered a quarter-century ago (!) in his Bigger & Blacker stand-up special, an inadvertently deft illustration of a movie that wants to comment on the times yet feels behind them, nonetheless. 


“American Fiction” begins with Monk being placed on temporary leave by his university after putting a problematic, in the parlance of our times, Flannery O’Connor quote on the markerboard. The presentation of this moment, however, in which an offended student walks out, is less provocation on the movie’s part than evocation of Monk as a man out of time. His terminal lack of place is underscored at a literary seminar where he leaves his poorly attended panel for a packed one with Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) who has become the toast of the publishing world with a book titled We’s Live in Da Ghetto, exploiting the sort of African American stereotypes that Monk detests, and are eaten up by white liberals with a spoon. Between the standing ovation that follows, and the blackened bar to which Monk repairs after, he is rendered as essentially invisible, a modern version of Ralph Ellison’s famous protagonist. 

In a fit of rage, Monk pens his own version of the same sort of book under a pseudonym, My Pafology by Stagg R. Leigh. Intending it merely as a middle finger to his own industry, it becomes a best-seller, necessitating a cover story, that his pseudonym belongs to a wanted fugitive, meaning he cannot appear in person to promote the book. Even as the lie grows, Monk is forced to deal with more grave matters back home in Boston. His sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) dies of a sudden heart attack, leaving the distant son to negotiate his mother’s (Leslie Uggams) descent into Alzheimer’s while also struggling to corral the impulses of his newly divorced and gay brother (Sterling K. Brown). 

The more traditionally dramatic scenes at home begin well, especially in the chemistry that Wright and Ellis Ross achieve in their scenes together, movingly embodying two people who clearly have not seen one another for a long time yet share a history they can’t deny. It’s so good, in fact, that it’s unfortunate her character has to die to trigger the narrative, and that the history their characters share never feels as charged as it does with anyone else. Monk’s mother, his brother, especially his late father, the roots never go all the way down, these characters and relationships just skimming the surface, too obviously revealing this whole parallel narrative as an allegory for the sorts of Black stories that Monk would rather see in popular culture. The dueling storyline of Monk’s book success, meanwhile, feels like satire directed by, well, the dude directing the other half of the movie, gently humorous rather than humorously bracing, and oddly unimaginative. The one scene from My Pafology played out as fantasy comes across staged and deadened rather than an illustration of the imagination, and the worldwide phenomenon of his book never really comes through.

It would have been interesting to see Wright’s restrained performance contrasted against a truly explosive satire, a man who can’t put back in the box what he has unleashed, but as it is, he melds with the tamer impulses of this “American Fiction” anyway. It’s as if Monk is never entirely committed to playing Stagg R. Leigh in the first place, and as if the walls confining a Black artist in this world can’t really be breached. That’s what makes the end, of all things, the best element in the movie, which brings it to a conclusion though something apart from a true resolution, Wright playing his final act as a kind of weary sigh, resigned to sacrificing himself, in a manner of speaking, for nothing much at all.

Friday, March 01, 2024

Friday's Old Fashioned: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)


As part of its Settle In series, “six films that test the limits of runtimes,” the Gene Siskel Center here in Chicago recently screened “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” Based on the famous 1929 German novel by Alfred Döblin, the 1980 adaptation written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder was originally presented as a television miniseries in West Germany, 13 parts plus an epilogue running 902 minutes. That’s nine-hundred-and-two, a little over fifteen hours, if you’re keeping score, which I certainly was, and My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and our friend Chad with whom we went to see it were probably keeping score too. It was too long for the Gene Siskel Center to condense into a single day, in fact, prompting two showings on Saturday and Sunday, February 3rd and 4th. That was the day after Groundhog Day, of course, which in many respects has become as associated with living the same day of your life over and over thanks to the Harold Ramis 1993 movie borrowing the holiday’s name. And it was appropriate that our showing of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” coincided with Groundhog Day weekend since, honestly, Sunday felt a lot like Saturday. Our alarm went off at the same time, we caught the train downtown at the same time, the movie started at the same time (11 am), the three of us stood in the exact same place at each brief intermission, chatting and stretching as we geared up to go watch some more, we essentially ate popcorn (which was made free) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “I think I’m tripling down on the popcorn,” Chad said at the second intermission on our first day and My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I followed suit. It was only two days, I know, not the seeming lifetime that Phil Connors lived in “Groundhog Day.” But then, have you ever watched a 15-hour German movie about the doomed Weimar Republic over the course of two days? It feels endless.

I don’t mean this as a criticism. Rarely, if ever, has my experience watching a movie so effectively mirrored the movie itself, not just its immersive nature but the almost punishing emphasis on repetition and the habituating plight of its main character, Franz Bieberkopf (Günter Lamprecht). He is released from prison as the movie opens after serving four years in the murder of his girlfriend Ida and into a Berlin that is a mess of conflicting interests and ideologies, and Franz himself is nothing less than a walking, talking confliction, a hectoring brute, and a happy buffalo, in one astonishing sequence falling off the wagon by drinking three beers and cooing to each one like it’s his little newborn baby, as amusing as it is devastating as it is gripping, more gripping, in fact, than most movies these days in total (see photo above). As it demonstrates, Franz is determined to stay on the straight and narrow but can’t, swept along in the economic, political, and social maelstrom, and never quite smart enough to realize he’s stupid, making the same mistakes again and again. Fassbinder underlines this in ways as small as the relentlessly blinking neon light outside Franz’s apartment, or the roughly sixteen-thousand glasses of kummel he imbibes, and big, like the murder of Ida, seen in flashback over and over, and not just a flash but the whole gruesome thing, a sin for which he cannot atone. All this might call to mind the Biblical Job, but the real parallel is the Book of Ecclesiastes, which the narrator essentially quotes mid-movie, “Man’s fate is like that of the beasts,” adorned with images of a slaughterhouse, equating Franz Bieberkopf, and man in general, with animals biding time until they are butchered. 

The epilogue, then, when it arrives, is as discombobulating as it is refreshing, in a sense. Driven to madness, and into a mental asylum, much of the concluding Part XIV is a trip into Franz Bieberkopf’s psyche. There is so much happening here, and it is all ripe for literary study, but as movies in this vein often are, it’s best just to let yourself go and feel your way through the aesthetic punchbowl. What has very much been in a movie set during 1929 suddenly feels of its own time in the hairdos and disco balls and angels that are like less glam versions of Ziggy Stardust, as My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife noted, yet not of its time either, with Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen and Velvet Underground on the soundtrack. Released in 1980, it was a year ahead of MTV, and if you told me Fassbinder’s epilogue inspired a legion of confounding Bonnie Tyler-like MTV music videos, that reading would be as good as any. Whatever it is, it’s what I was in the mood for, whether I knew it or not, having been in a movie theater for virtually two days straight, my knees and back beginning to ache, filled to burst with popcorn, my mind swimming from a Voodoo Ranger IPA, ready to leave but still needing to stick it out, I felt like I was starting to hallucinate and so does the movie, two moods merging as one. When we came to, Franz Bieberkopf seemed not found, though not quite lost either, more like the fleshy antithesis of “2001’s” Star Child, reconciled, and without thought, sleepwalking toward, well, 1929 Germany, you know what.

Afterward, standing on the sidewalk outside the Siskel Center in the darkness, the weekend somehow going by in the blink of an eye despite spending it watching a 15-hour movie, Chad, who had proposed the idea in the first place, thanked us for accompanying him on the journey, before noting, circumspect but not necessarily critically, “I probably wouldn’t do it again.”

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Lessons in Darkness (cont.)


In a Best Picture race that is all but over, Werner Herzog at least threw a little more flour into the dying flame with his controversial, or maybe just confusing, remarks on Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Talking to noted horse’s ass Piers Morgan, the eccentric and esoteric German director was asked to weigh in on the Barbenheimer phenomenon that in so many ways defined moviegoing in 2023. Herzog confessed he had yet to see “Oppenheimer,” likely Best Picture winner, but of “‘Barbie,’” he said, “I managed to see the first half-hour. I was curious and I wanted to watch it because I was curious. And I still don’t have an answer, but I have a suspicion – could it be that the world of ‘Barbie’ is sheer hell?” Of course, Herzog also admitted he had only watched the first 30 minutes of “Barbie,” which perhaps ruled his view out of order, though plenty seemed to suggest he was just out of order in the first place. 

Though like most takes on “Barbie,” if not most takes in general, this one could stand to just be laughed off and ignored, I feel somewhat qualified to weigh in, nevertheless. After all, astute readers might note that this blog’s banner deploys a phrase - The Ecstatic Truth - of one Werner Herzog. What is The Ecstatic Truth? That can be hard to pin down. He sort of laid it out many years ago in a 12-page speech in Milano, Italy, translated by Moira Weigel, describing The Ecstatic Truth as “the enemy of the merely factual.” In his discursive manner, he eventually arrives at another explanation, describing “a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.” He submitted another version of that same sentence in 1999 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, transcribed by the late Roger Ebert who deemed it the “‘Minnesota Declaration’ of (the director’s) principles.” “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema,” Herzog explained, “and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”     

Fabrication, and imagination, and stylization? Werner, baby, that’s “Barbie.” But then, as some on social media suggested, was Herzog even really insulting “Barbie,” or was he complimenting it in his own enigmatical way? After all, the final point of his 12-point Minnesota Declaration is this: 

“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”


I mean, could one not argue that is “Barbie?” Barbieland is life in a pink-hued ocean of artificial hell, and in traveling out of Barbieland to the real world, and eventually passing from plastic doll to human, Barbie herself has evolved, crawled, and fled, with a conclusion suggesting nothing if not the Lessons of Darkness continuing. “Oppenheimer” can have Best Picture, mate, no worries; “Barbie,” on the other hand, found something deeper, the poetic, ecstatic truth.