Tag Archives: cinema

Are there 25 good movies about American politics?

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Here is Vanity Fair’s list of the 25 best movies about American politics.  But… but…

All the President’s Men, sure. The Candidate, fine.  Dr. Strangelove?  It’s not exactly about politics, but OK.  All the King’s Men, A Face in the Crowd?  Of course.

But, um, The Queen?  Isn’t that sort of, you know, about British politics?  (The same folks brought us Frost/Nixon, which isn’t on the list, and probably should be.)  The same goes for In the Loop.

The American President is about American politics, of course, but really, it’s not that good a movie — it’s Aaron Sorkin clearing his throat before embarking on The West Wing.  If we want throat-clearing, what about including The Ides of March, which seems to be Beau Willimon’s warm-up for House of Cards?

Another omission from the list: the charming Dave, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver.  Also, was I the only one who liked Primary Colors, with John Travolta and Emma Thompson portraying the fictional equivalent of the Clintons?

I’ve seen most of the movies on the list.  One that I’d never even heard of is Gabriel Over the White House, a 1933 fantasy produced by William Randolph Hearst. VF says:

Walter Huston plays a hack president-elect who gets into an automobile crack-up shortly after he’s sworn in. He is subsequently possessed by a spirit (see title) who guides his actions, which include staging firing squads on Ellis Island and bullying the world into submission by brandishing a super-secret military weapon. Quasi-fascism: it gets things done!

Sounds like it’s worth watching!

Writers in movies: Young Cassidy

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In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, here’s an Irish writer in this occasional series. This time it’s Young Cassidy, the 1965 biopic of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey starring Rod Taylor, Maggie Smith, and Julie Christie.

As you can see from the poster, the movie doesn’t emphasize his writing. OK, it doesn’t mention it at all.  But boy, do we get an idea of what his soaring male senses are up to.The writing does show up in the actual movie, of course.  But they aren’t able to do much with it.  We just get a peek at him now and then staring with grim determination at a blank sheet of paper or a typewriter, in between his brawls and his romances.  (The young, gorgeous Julie Christie only has a few couple of scenes, but she makes, um, quite an impression.)

The movie really isn’t very good — and it was a flop at the box office.  Mostly it’s just a bunch of more or less disconnected episodes from O’Casey’s autobiography, never building to much of anything.  But we do see Rod Taylor betraying his best friend by making him a character in The Plough and the Stars — that’s a nice writerly touch.  And (spoiler alert) the ever-faithful Maggie Smith finally dumps him, realizing she isn’t cut out to be the wife of a famous writer.  Another nice touch.

Anyway, if you want to experience more of Rod Taylor’s soaring male senses, here is the the trailer (assuming I can get the embedding to work):

What a difference 97 years makes!

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Back in 1917 Arab forces, including British Colonel T. E. Lawrence, defeated the Ottomans in a surprise land-based attack on the sleepy port town of Aqaba.  The battle probably looked nothing like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lChJz2DSpsE

Today my son called me from his hotel room in the bustling resort city of Aqaba to give an exhilarated, sleep-deprived account of his participation in the “Dead2Red” relay race from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea in Jordan.  The distance is about 240 kilometers, and his segments of the race amounted to the equivalent of about a half-marathon.  He was particularly pleased that he and his team of college study-abroad students overtook a U.N. team in the final few kilometers inside the city.

Should this give us all hope for the future of humanity?  Let’s check back in another 97 years.

Writers in movies: Stuck in Love

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Another in a random series.

Stuck in Love is a pleasant indie movie from 2012 starring Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Connelly.  Here’s the IMDB summary:

An acclaimed writer, his ex-wife, and their teenaged children come to terms with the complexities of love in all its forms over the course of one tumultuous year.

What the summary leaves out is that both the kids are writers (or would-be writers) as well — the father (Kinnear) is determined to make them novelists like him.  So we’re given a whole family full of writers, which is a recipe for dysfunction and angst if I ever heard one.

The writer/director, Josh Boone, drops quotes from Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor into the script and clearly has a sympathetic sense of the writing life.  Here’s something he gets right: The movie begins with Kinnear preparing Thanksgiving dinner for his son, who is in high school, and daughter, who home from college.  At dinner the daughter drops the news that her novel has been accepted by a major publisher.  The predictable result is that dinner is ruined.  The father is upset that she abandoned the novel he has helped edit and written an entirely different book over the summer; the brother is so jealous of her success that he can’t be at the same table with her.  Writers are just awful!

Here’s what Boone gets wrong: The daughter writes a novel over the summer, sends it to her agent, who submits it anonymously and gets it accepted by a major publisher, and page proofs are ready by Thanksgiving?  Really?  In what universe?  (I’m into the fifteenth month of working on my current novel, so I may be feeling especially grumpy about this part.)

The father has written two successful literary novels, but has had writer’s block since his wife left him.  The writer’s block is reasonable; I’d be pretty upset if Jennifer Connelly dumped me.  But, with no other apparent income, he still manages to live in a gorgeous ocean-front house and pay his daughter’s tuition to college.  How does that work?

Later in the movie, the son writes an SF short story, which his sister gets hold of.  Then what?  Without telling the brother, the sister sends it to Stephen King, who loves it so much he gets it published in a major SF magazine and calls the kid to let him know.  Of course.  Happens all the time.  (I remember the stories I wrote when I was in high school; just thinking about them makes me cringe.)

In other words, this is a typical movie world, where success comes too easily and is rewarded too much; love is what’s hard.  It makes me appreciate the world of The Words, in which the writer is talented and hard-working, pours his soul into his novel, and gets exactly nowhere.  That’s a lot more like the real writing life.

Writers in movies: Their Own Desire

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Another in a series.

Their Own Desire is a 1929 movie starring Norma Shearer. Here’s the Wikipedia synopsis:

A young woman is upset by the knowledge that her father is divorcing her mother in order to marry another woman. Her own feelings change, however, when she falls in love with a young man who turns out to be the son of her father’s new love.

First thing’s first: this movie is terrible.  Norma Shearer chews enough scenery to get an Academy Award nomination (she lost to herself, for The Divorcee, so I guess she couldn’t feel too bad about the defeat).  But the plot is primitive, and everyone else in the case is pretty bad, particularly Robert Montgomery as her love interest, maybe because he has to say lines like this, at a moment of high drama:

I’ve got the little ol’ canoe down at the landing; let me run you over to the little ol’ love nest.

The writer in the movie is Norma Shearer’s father, who splits his time between writing novels and playing polo at his club.  Apparently those were the days when writers belonged to clubs, and polo was a thing they played there.

The only reason why Dad is a writer and doesn’t have some other high-class occupation is so that to movie can include a scene where he describes to Norma Shearer the plot of his latest novel, which involves a 45-year-old married man falling in love with another woman.  Our heroine’s response is to laugh at the very idea of an old man like that falling in love.  Little does she know that the novel is based on her father’s own life, and soon frumpy old Mom will be dumped for the glamorous Mrs. Cheevers.  Irony!

Their Own Desire is bad, but still I’d rather watch a bad movie from 1929 than a bad one from 2014.  The past is a different country, and it’s interesting to pay a visit now and then.

What should we do when an artist is a creep?

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It doesn’t get much creepier than this:

What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know: when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies. I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic. To this day, I find it difficult to look at toy trains.

It makes me happy when a writer (or anyone else)  I admire turns out to be a nice person — Stephen King, say, or Bobby Orr.  But ultimately it doesn’t matter.  As far as I can tell, John Updike was a much nicer human being than Philip Roth.  But I’d much rather read a Philip Roth novel.  The more you learn about Charles Dickens and the way he treated his wife and children, the less you’re going to like him.  Woody Allen apparently should be in prison, as should Roman Polanski.  And probably any number of other folks whose works I admire.  I don’t think Blue Jasmine or any other Woody Allen movie was worth Dylan Farrow’s happiness, and I won’t be rooting for Woody Allen at the Oscars. But ultimately we engage with the work of art, not the artist.

Writers in moves: Leave Her to Heaven

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This is my second offering in this series.

Leave Her to Heaven was a popular film noir (beautifully filmed in Technicolor, actually) from 1945.  Here is IMDB’s summary:

A writer meets a young socialite on board a train. The two fall in love and are married soon after, but her obsessive love for him threatens to be the undoing of both them and everyone else around them.

Gene Tierney is the psychopathic socialite; Cornel Wilde is the writer.  The premise is fine, and Gene Tierney is great (and gorgeous).  The problem I had with the movie was that the Cornell Wilde character is a complete drip, and Cornell Wilde isn’t enough of an actor to make us care about him.

The fact that the main character is a writer is of little significance to the plot.  It mainly allows Wilde and Tierney to meet cute — he sees her reading his novel on a train.  This lets him quote a line from the novel to her:

When I looked at you, exotic words drifted across the mirror of my mind like clouds across the summer sky.

Oh, dear.  I’m pretty sure it’s always a mistake to quote from a fictional writer’s work in a movie.

(As an aside, on a plane once I sat across from a woman  who was reading something I had written — not one of my novels, alas, but a work-for-hire I had perpetrated for a high-tech company.  When I mentioned the coincidence to her as we deplaned, she was signally uninterested.  At least she wasn’t a psychopath.  I think.)

After the train scene, we just see Wilde occasionally pecking away at an old-fashioned manual typewriter, always wearing a writerly jacket and tie. There is no discussion of the creative process; there is no angst over deadlines; he finishes the book, and one day a copy arrives in the mail.  Writing novels is just what he does, because he comes from Boston, don’t you know, and went to Harvard.

I’ll just add that the trial sequence, featuring Vincent Price as the DA who was also Gene Tierney’s scorned lover, is about as over-the-top ridiculous as anything I’ve seen recently.

Writers in movies: Love Actually

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It seems as if I’ve been seeing a lot of writers portrayed in movies lately.  Here I mentioned the difficulty of portraying the writing life on film: it’s just too boring.  But that doesn’t keep screenwriters from trying.  Screenwriters should at least get the details right, but those details generally seem to escape them as well.

Let’s start with Love Actually, which features Colin Firth as a hack novelist falling in love with his Portuguese house cleaner.  (This comes in eighth out of the nine plot lines in the movie, according to this post; I’d rate it a little higher.)  In the plot, very little is made out of his being a writer — it just seems to be there to set up the scene in which a gust of wind blows his manuscript pages into a pond, forcing him and the maid to strip to their underwear and hop into the pond to rescue them.  This of course makes them fall in love.

Fair enough — the maid looks pretty good in her underwear.  But the setup is stupid.  I suppose we can believe that a hack writer in 2003 wouldn’t be using a computer.  But apparently we’re also supposed to believe that he wouldn’t be making daily copies of his manuscript pages, in an era of cheap home photocopiers.  And that’s just idiotic beyond words.  This isn’t something he’s doing for creative expression; it’s his job.  I haven’t seen anyone remark on this scene; Love Actually offers far easier targets for criticism.  But this one never fails to irk me when I’m forced to endure our annual holiday viewing.

Want to see a Shakespeare play in ten minutes?

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. . . without all the annoying Shakespearean verbiage that slows down most productions of his plays?

Of course you do.  So you want to see early silent movies of Shakespeare plays.  Here is an 11-minute Tempest from 1908 that features special effects like Ariel disappearing:

And here is a hand-tinted King Lear from Italy in 1910:

It lasts 16 minutes, but King Lear is pretty complicated (even without the Edmund/Edgar subplot).

If you’re like me (and who isn’t?) you love this kind of stuff.  And you probably also love the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which gets Shakespeare done quickly, even if they have to use words.

“The Words”: What would you do to become a successful novelist?

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The Words is a movie about writers and writing.  Not a very good one, alas.  The basic plot is straightforward: an unsuccessful writer comes across a manuscript in an old briefcase he buys in Paris.  The manuscript is brilliant.  He passes it off as his own and becomes famous.  Then the real author confronts him, and complications ensue.

Except they don’t, really. The complications are actually in the narrative structure.  The unsuccessful writer (played by Bradley Cooper, of all people) is just a character in a novel written by a successful novelist (played by Dennis Quaid, of all people), who is narrating the story to a rapt audience.  By the end we are made to wonder if the successful novelist is really writing about an episode in his own writing career–did he, too, get his start by stealing someone else’s work?  The writers seem to think it’s sufficient to hint at this possibility without resolving the question.  I guess they deserve some credit for not going in for cheap melodrama.  But the plot is filled with so many holes and absurdities that it doesn’t really matter.  I lost interest early on.

Part of the problem is that it’s really difficult to dramatize a writer on screen.  Writers, and the writing life, are just too boring.  The only interesting portrayal I can recall is in The Wonder Boys.  Let me know if I’ve missed any.

But I did find the movie’s central premise poignant. In this post I pondered Oliver Sacks’s self-threat to commit suicide if he didn’t finish a book in ten days, and I felt a twinge of sympathy. Here I pondered a young writer who evidently plagiarized parts of her first novel, and I felt a twinge of sympathy.  In the movie, the unsuccessful writer has poured three years of his life into a novel that is supposedly pretty good but completely unsaleable.  Now he risks his career, his self-respect and, ultimately, his marriage to achieve what he has always dreamed of–to win the awards, to be on the front page of the Times book review, to be something more than just another unsuccessful writer with a boring job at a publishing house, his nose pressed up against the window as he gazed in at the powerful and the talented and the just plain lucky.  And I suppose yet again I felt a twinge of sympathy.  If only the movie had made more of that . . .