Philomena

Philomena
seen @ City Cinemas Paris Theater, New York NY
12.15.13

As biopics go - and this year has had absolutely no shortage of them - Philomena wasn't bad. I wasn't gonna see it at first, but the unabashed charm of Judi Dench in the trailer, which I saw repeatedly this fall, eventually won me over. I'm glad to say that the trailer didn't reveal as much of the story as I thought it did, however, it did spoil most of the funny lines.

I wanna talk about one aspect of the story which caught me by surprise, and which, I assume, reflects the attitude of the real Philomena Lee. The premise is that she had a baby out of wedlock as a young woman, and in heavily Catholic Ireland, that's a big no-no, so she had to give her baby up to a convent of nuns, where she had to do hard time for several years as compensation. Now, as an old woman, she wants to know what happened to her kid.

Thing is, though, Philomena, also being Catholic, recognizes that what she did was considered sinful in her faith, yet at the same time, she never apologizes for it. She talks frankly about not only how much in love she was at the time, but how much she enjoyed the sex.

This aspect of her character impressed me. Even here in America, a slightly more secular country than Ireland, there's a... not a stigma, exactly, but certainly something of a prudishness in certain circles, whenever a woman is open about her sexuality. For centuries, women have never been allowed to have the same desires as men, and whenever they tried to, they got slapped down hard.

Religion has mostly been to blame for that, especially Catholicism. Religion is most insidious when it's used as a means of control, when a privileged few wield their power over a majority like a club and decide how one should worship the deity of their choice. As a result, basic human impulses, like sexual desire, are oppressed - though if the oppressors want to bend the rules in their favor every once in awhile, well, who's gonna stop them? Philomena - and this isn't really a spoiler - is able to forgive the nuns who gave away her child, an act of true Christian charity which is way more than they deserve. 

Steve Coogan's character, however, raises a point which the movie never provides an adequate answer to (not that I expected one): to paraphrase, if sex is a sin, why does it feel good? If you believe in God, then you believe that man was created in His image. If that's the case, then shouldn't that mean that human sexuality comes from Him as well? I would think that this is something to be celebrated, not denied - at least as long as consenting parties are involved. It's no wonder that we've been as screwed up as we have been for so long.

From a filmmaking point of view, I loved how director Stephen Frears' camera lingers on Dench's marvelous face. In my post on Dark Victory last week, I talked about actresses who have aged gracefully, and Dench is one of them. It takes a certain amount of vanity, I imagine, to be a Hollywood actor, so to let oneself be seen on a big screen in old age, unglamorously, can be seen as an act of bravery, in a way. By being able to study every wrinkle and sag on her face, we're made that much more aware of Philomena as a real woman whose long years have weighed on her.

I saw Philomena at the Paris, a tiny one-screen theater in midtown Manhattan a stone's throw from Central Park. It's a very simple, cozy kind of place; not as glitzy as its name implies, though it does have a balcony (which I didn't sit in). I saw Life is Beautiful there as well as the 90s Roman Polanski movie Death and the Maiden. That might have been the first time I'd been to the Paris, in fact. As I recall, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, back in the days when I didn't follow movies as closely as I do now. 

EDIT 12.18: I almost forgot - before the movie, the Paris played, for no particular reason that I can think of, a Paul McCartney video. A YouTube search reveals that the song is called "Queenie Eye," and I assume it's from his most recent album. It's nothing special as a song; I mean, it sounds like typical late-career solo McCartney. What's notable is the all-star roster of guest stars in his video: Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep, Sean Penn, to name a few. It seemed very strange to watch a music video before a movie, especially one by McCartney (this was after a commercial featuring David Bowie!), but the more I think about it, the more I think it's not necessarily a bad idea to show a video before a movie, as long as it's demographic-appropriate. I wouldn't expect to go to a movie like Philomena and see a video by, say, Nicki Minaj, for example.

As you might imagine, the Paris draws a more upscale clientele than your average multiplex, and yesterday's crowd skewed way older, including the company I was with. This was a movie Vija proposed as part of her semi-regular movie-going club. (I almost didn't go because it was snowing like crazy on Saturday, but yesterday turned out to be nicer.) Her boyfriend Franz was there, along with this woman named Susan, a friend of Vija's who I met at one of her fabulous parties a year or two ago. Franz and I got into a heated debate afterwards at this Turkish restaurant about whether or not documentaries count as film. He actually tried to make the case that they weren't, which boggled my mind.

I talked Vija into coming out to Queens for a movie next week, so I'm happy about that. It'll be nice to not have to pay Manhattan prices again!

Dame Judi with the real Philomena Lee.

Guys and Dolls

Guys and Dolls
seen on TV @ TCM
12.12.13

I totally wanted to write this post about Guys and Dolls in the style of the movie dialogue, which is to say, the style of Damon Runyon, whose characters were the inspiration for the musical, but I quickly realized it wouldn't be as easy as I thought it might. Also, it's one thing to read that style, another thing to hear it spoken, especially when spoken by such great actors as Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. It would be quite a challenge, I must admit, but the fact of the matter is I wanted to get this post up as soon as possible, so there you are. Maybe another time.

But I do wanna talk about Damon Runyon, and I don't need to write like him to do that. He was a writer, obviously; a journalist, to be more precise, during the first half of the 20th century. Sports was his forte, and he wrote primarily about baseball and boxing - in fact, he was known for writing about the odd and peculiar goings-on in baseball games, which no one had done before. In his life he was friends with people like former gunslinger-turned-sportswriter Bat Masterson, Mexican general Pancho Villa, and pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, among many others.

Guys and Dolls was an adaptation of some of Runyon's short stories, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling & Abe Burrows, made after Runyon's death in 1946. Runyon's stories were also adapted for radio and television. The Damon Runyon Theater was syndicated on the radio throughout 1949 with reruns into the early 50s, while the television version ran on CBS from 1955-56. Other films based on Runyon stories include Frank Capra's Lady For a Day (remade as Pocketful of Miracles); Little Miss Marker, Shirley Temple's breakthrough role; The Lemon Drop Kid, which included the Christmas song "Silver Bells"; and A Slight Case of Murder, with Edward G. Robinson.

What was it about Runyon's writing that was so special? Well, I suppose one reason is that it's so distinctive. Imagine if Shakespeare lived in 1920s New York or Chicago and you'll get the beginnings of the idea. Runyon specialized in writing about gangsters, gamblers, hustlers and other working class, crooked, shady types, but by using the pompous, bombastic language that he did, mixed in with street slang, they gained a larger-than-life, almost mythic status, I think. They're at a slight remove from reality, because no one talks like Nathan Detroit or Sky Masterson, but you can still relate to them as characters.

A comparable example (though I wouldn't put him on the same level as Runyon) might be Kevin Smith. Go back and look at Clerks again and listen to the excessively wordy dialogue he gives to his characters and you'll see what I mean. Smith is obviously much more crass than Runyon, but that same contrast between somewhat lofty dialogue spoken by urbane, diamond-in-the-rough types, is still there. (What, you don't think Jay and Silent Bob are diamonds in the rough?)

The sports world honored Runyon long after his death from throat cancer. He is in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the International Boxing Hall of Fame. A horse race at Aqueduct Race Track is called the Damon Runyon Stakes. Yankee Stadium hosts a Damon Runyon 5K run and walk to benefit cancer research. He was even partially responsible for developing roller derby into a sport. Quite a career.

"Nothing ever ends."

Simon Kinberg and his Genre Films banner have signed a new three-year first-look deal at 20th Century Fox. Kinberg is heavily involved with next summer's X-Men: Days of Future Past and the studio's upcoming Fantastic Four reboot as both writer and producer. The new deal will allow him to expand those franchises into full-blown universes, with the hope of creating for Fox something akin to the Marvel model of interlocking movies. 

"I have a lot of ideas on how to built those brands and do what everybody is thinking of these days: Be like Marvel," Kinberg tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I want to be able to build stories over multiple movies."

I first started reading comic books around the time that crossovers began to take off. At the time I didn't question it, and besides, comics were cheaper then (50-60 cents), so I could afford to buy a bunch of them all at once every week. In the early 80s, Marvel had a mini-series called Secret Wars, which starred the major heroes and villains and instituted "major" (at the time) changes, so if you wanted to know how such-and-such and so-and-so happened, you had to read the mini-series to find out. At DC you had Crisis on Infinite Earths and the same principle applied, though I didn't read DC back then.

But then crossovers became commonplace, first in the X-Men titles and then the Spider-Man titles and so on and so forth. After Superman "died," there was a big long arc about his funeral, and then there was an even longer arc involving the "replacement" Supermen that lost me completely after awhile. I got tired of trying to figure out which story comes after which and who was where doing what, so I dropped it. Over time, this trend expanded into other media, like television and books, and I went through the same cycle: liked it at first, grew tired of it after awhile, dropped it.

I still wanna see this though.

And now look where we are: the Marvel movie model of crossovers is catching on elsewhere (I should've seen this coming, I really should have), and once again, I find myself going through the same cycle: liked it at first, have grown tired of it, now dropping it. It used to be that arcs were the exception rather than the rule: Empire leading into Jedi was mind-blowing at the time, as was Wrath of Khan leading into Search For Spock and The Voyage Home. Most of the time a sequel meant a brand new story with the same characters, but not anymore - and I totally understand the appeal. I really do. 

But you know, not everything has to be an ongoing, serialized mega-story. There's value in doing a "one-and-done." When I took part in NaNoWriMo last month, I saw lots of writers who claimed their work-in-progress was one in a series, because, y'know, ongoing series are the way to go in books now, especially genre books. Some people claimed to have plans for as many as four or five books in their series, and I would look at them and wonder, well, that's great and all, but shouldn't you worry about getting this one book done first before you plan your Tolkien-like epic? As I have learned, and am learning, writing a single novel is hard enough on its own without planning a whole bunch of them - especially when you have no guarantee that your first book will sell well enough to justify sequels.

With genre movies, though, it's different, particularly those that are made from pre-existing source material, like comics and young adult novels. They have built-in audiences who will lap these movies up regardless of quality (though, to be fair, the quality has been decent overall - so far). As a kid, I would've freaked out at the prospect of an ongoing series of movies based on Marvel comics with continuing stories. I would've thought it was pure heaven. However, like the kid who loves ice cream and pigs out on gallons of the stuff all at once, there can be too much of a good thing, especially when these movies come out on a regular basis every year.

So the more I think about it, the more I think my genre movie burnout has as much to do with fatigue as with apathy (though that's definitely a big part too). I see now, as I write this out, that this is a cycle that I've gone through in the past, and while I did enjoy Avengers, and I may see the second movie when it comes out, as well as this new Fantastic Four movie (because they've always been my favorite super-team), I find it harder and harder to justify investing in ongoing arcs anymore, even if the rest of Fandom Assembled is loving it. It's too much for me.

Thoughts? (A cookie if you know where this post's title comes from.)

Dark Victory

Dark Victory
seen on TV @ TCM
12.10.13

At some point in our lives, we have to come face to face with the hard truth that someday, we're gonna die. I've certainly given it my fair share of thought. I made peace with the inevitability of my father's death before he actually went, and I'm in the process of doing the same with my mother. As for myself, well, it's certainly not a topic I dwell on often, but once you hit middle age, it is something that starts to reside in the back of your mind.

The thing is, though, dying is easy. It's living that's hard. Movies like Dark Victory, as entertaining as they are, tend to get it the wrong way around. Look at Bette Davis' life in that movie: she's young and rich, with a big beautiful house in the suburbs, servants at her beck and call, and horses that she can ride all day. Of course she's not gonna want to let go of all of that. Most of us are lucky if we've got a pot to piss in. 

Would I wanna know when I'm gonna die? Maybe. There are days when I honestly don't feel like living this life is worth all the trouble. There are things I'm grateful for, of course, but there are things I regret as well, which I can't do anything about. Plus, on a larger scale, the world in general doesn't provide a great deal in the way of things to be hopeful about. As a result, knowing the day of one's death might be liberating in the sense that I wouldn't feel bound by the everyday rules of life; the rationale being that consequences would matter much less. That's probably the reason why most of us don't carpe our diem: we worry too much about what the cost would be afterwards.

That's also probably why there's a certain glamor associated with dying young, as Davis eventually does in this movie: one doesn't have to worry about wrinkles, sagging guts, aches and pains, losing one's memory, all that crap associated with old age. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe loom larger in our consciousness, in large part, because they died young. These days, there's slightly less of a stigma associated with age. We celebrate actors who age gracefully, like Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren, but again, it's important to remember that most of us don't have the resources necessary to keep us looking as fit and youthful as celebrities do.

I'm reminded of the recent Robert Duvall movie Get Low, where he plans his own funeral in advance and attempts to settle long-standing issues. In theory, that's not such a bad idea if you know when you're gonna go. Most people would rather cling to life, I imagine, but is that always such a good idea? If someone's in such great physical and/or mental distress that the quality of their life is low or nil, shouldn't they be allowed to decide that they wanna go sooner instead of later? 

Remember Terri Schiavo, that woman who was on life support but wasn't allowed to die? People were going crazy over that because the state was trying to make life-and-death decisions in what should've been a private matter involving only her family and her doctors. Maybe that's an extreme example, but I can't get behind the idea of someone else telling me I have to live if I honestly and unequivocally believe I'd rather die. But that's a state of desperation you don't see in a Hollywood movie.

Like I said, dying's easy. It's living that's hard. Trying to find a reason to live is something a lot of people grapple with all the time, and if you can find something, anything to live for in this life, well, I reckon you should consider yourself lucky.

Smokey and the Bandit

Smokey and the Bandit
seen on TV @ AMC
12.5.13

I talk a lot about the livable streets movement and how toxic America's car-centric culture is, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm anti-car. I appreciate them; they're certainly important and they've helped me get around plenty of times in my life (when someone else is driving). I can appreciate a beautiful looking car. And a movie with a good car chase is always gonna be entertaining.

That said, I admit that I had never seen Smokey and the Bandit prior to yesterday. (Don't think I've ever seen Cannonball Run either.) No excuse other than that I just never got around to it... but damn if this isn't one helluva fun movie! It's the kind of film that I wish I could've seen - or been allowed to have seen - when I was much younger.

I used to watch The Dukes of Hazard as a kid, and I can see now that it was very directly inspired by this movie. If I were to watch it now, I imagine I'd be embarrassed by it, which is odd because I didn't feel that way about Smokey. (Well, I guess it was embarrassing enough to see that the beer of choice was Coors.) I guess context may have something to do with it; looking at the film as an adult as opposed to a kid.

I know CBs were a big deal in the 70s. My family never had one, so I never knew what that was like growing up, but seeing it here, it made me think that this must have been like a primitive version of Twitter: everyone's got an alias, there's a distinct vocabulary and language common to the medium, and there's a strong sense of community. I can see why CBs were as popular as they were.

I've only been in a truck once in my life, but unfortunately, I didn't go riding around in it much. I visited my friend Becky, who lives upstate, and she had a neighbor friend who drove a truck. The front part was parked outside his house, without the cargo part, and he took me for a brief ride up and down their rural street. I remember climbing into the seat and being intimidated by the size and the sheer power of the vehicle, and this was just the front part! Nothing quite like stepping into a bus.

In my links post last week I mentioned Retrospace's new movie podcast and their first subject, the film Convoy. One of the points they bring up in discussing that film is that truckers were little different from hippies in the sense that the ones in Convoy, at least, were "stickin' it to the man," and Smokey has that same spirit, even though you'd never confuse Burt Reynolds for a hippie. I'd imagine that ties very deeply into the independent spirit that drivers and especially truckers had back then (and maybe still do; I dunno).

Also, Sally Field is totally hot.

Nebraska

Nebraska
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY
12.3.13

So last night, I had a Twitter conversation with my pal Page, who, as I've mentioned before, lives in Oklahoma City, a place so far out of my range of experience it might as well be Mars. I have this perpetual image, though I know it's not true, of her living out on the prairie, amidst coyotes and tumbleweeds - you know, where the buffalo roam. Where the deer and the antelope play. Last night I half-jokingly said that I keep thinking of where she lives as being like The Last Picture Show. (She said it was more like Texasville.)

"Flyover country," people call the territory between the two coasts, and with that nickname come a lot of ideas about what this part of America is like. I spent a year living in Ohio (a generally liberal and metropolitan part), but of course, the Midwest has a lot more wide open spaces to it.

I suspect that to be truly comfortable living in those wide open spaces, one likely needs to be born to it. Even when I was deciding on where I wanted to move, I knew I wanted to live someplace smaller than New York, but big enough that I wouldn't be bored. I need to live in a town with some kind of life to it, with different kinds of people. If I were in a small town with the same people every day, especially one that's reliant on cars to get around, I guarantee I wouldn't last long...

...which is not to say that it doesn't have its charms. The shots of the plains and farmlands in the film Nebraska were hypnotic and soothing to look at, especially with the gentle score accompanying it. It made me think of all the times I've traveled through the fields of states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Maryland by bus, when I've gotten tired of reading my book and I've finally settled into a state resembling comfort and I lean into the window and simply look out my window for awhile.

Nebraska is about an old dude, Woody, who thinks he won a million dollars, but it's actually one of those magazine subscription scams. Still, he's determined to collect what he thinks is his reward no matter what. I was reminded a little bit of one of my all-time favorite plays, Death of a Salesman: an old dude whose dreams interfere with his reality, and his family suffers the consequences. There's one scene in particular in which Woody's wife Kate has to defend him to the rest of the family, and it reminded me a lot of Linda's attitude toward Willy in Salesman. In both cases, the wives know their relationships with their husbands haven't been the strongest over the years, and that they aren't all there mentally now as a result of old age, but the love, despite the odds, is still there.

I liked this movie, but it took me awhile to really get into it. Director Alexander Payne is from Nebraska, so he has a natural affinity for this kind of setting and these kinds of people, and while it wasn't off-putting, I didn't get completely comfortable with it right away. In something like Fargo, the idiosyncrasies of the locals are played for broad laughs; not so much here. For example, there are scenes of Woody's family sitting in front of the TV blank-eyed, and they don't come across as funny. It's more like, this is how these people are; maybe you'll find them humorous, maybe you won't. That said, Kate, played by June Squibb, is genuinely funny and totally steals the movie from Bruce Dern.

Nebraska opened last Friday at the Kew Gardens, but Paramount has put some kind of restriction in place in which they don't want discount deals offered for the first two weeks of its release. The Kew normally offers discounts all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Of course, the film opened nationwide earlier than last Friday, but I don't know if that same restriction was in place. Does anybody know what that's all about? I've encountered similar studio restrictions on a more regular basis at other theaters in Queens, like the Kew Gardens Hills and the Sunnyside theaters, but the Kew Gardens rarely gets it. Maybe it's a demographic thing; I dunno.

Links and a NaNoWriMo recap

So as I mentioned back in the end of October, I spent the month of November participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), in which the goal is to write a manuscript for a novel in thirty days with a minimum of 50,000 words. I feel I should stress the fact that the goal is to make a manuscript, a first draft. There's absolutely no way that what I wrote is ready to be sent to a publisher right now. That would be way too embarrassing, to say the least.

Nonetheless, I did make it to the 50,000 mark. I reached my goal last Monday. It wasn't easy; during the first week, the adapter for my laptop computer died on me. It was awhile before I could afford to buy a new one, so I had to switch to handwriting in a notebook for a long stretch. Plus, I had accidentally lost an early chapter of my story. I'm fairly certain I deleted it by mistake, though I'm not positive about that. Rather than go back and do it over, I chose to plug onward. It wasn't a large chapter, so I didn't feel like I missed a great deal, and besides, at the time I was more concerned with cranking out the words more than anything else...

... and make no mistake, NaNoWriMo is all about cranking out words. You can't think too much about quality; that's what I learned late in the game. I felt fairly certain that I would reach my goal, but I needed to have time to spare, because the NaNo website requires you to copy and paste your novel in order to get an official word count, which meant that after I bought a new adapter, which I did, I'd have to type the whole story out on my computer, which I also did - in two days. So to make sure I'd be safely over the 50,000 goal, I had to stop editing - which is what the NaNo experts tell you to do, but I didn't listen! I used strikethrough on entire paragraphs that I didn't like, but kept anyway, because the words still count towards your goal.

I, like every other NaNo writer, I imagine, had to fight boredom, fatigue, and indifference to get this done, and while that may not sound as daunting as what, say, a decathlete goes through, it did make me more aware of what professional novelists go through. We take writing for granted because it's an everyday task, something the average person with a high school education can do, but to put together a story good enough to be sold on the market? I don't care whether you're the hackiest hack writer that ever owned a typewriter or Stephen King, it ain't as easy as it looks, and I have new respect for anyone who does it on a regular basis.

Of course, now that my first draft is done - it's a baseball story - next comes editing and revision, and that's a horse of a different color. Ideas that I thought were great at first turned out to be crap by the end, or at least, they weren't as well executed as I had hoped they would be. I have a fair idea of where I went wrong, storytelling-wise. Scenes that I loved, I now know, will probably have to get the ax in order to make it a stronger story. I won't start this process until the new year, however; NaNo experts also recommend that you take a little time to step back from your manuscript in order to be able to look at it more objectively.

Would I do this again? Don't know. Depends on a lot of things, not the least of which is how the story I just wrote will turn out. I have no serious dreams that this will be a national bestseller. Indeed, seeing how Jacqueline approaches her novels makes me think self-publishing might not be a bad idea, at least in the short term. But I might, if I think it's worth the time and effort to do it again. The point is that I now know that writing a novel is not as insurmountable a goal as I might have thought - not that I ever had any great dreams of being a novelist. The only reason I tried this was to see if I could do it. And now I know. My thanks to my friends here, on Twitter and especially on Facebook for supporting me through this insane endeavor.

Your links for this month:

One of the new friends I made during NaNoWriMo is a young lady named Erica, who does a literary blog called NYC Bookworm. She also likes old movies. One night we took a break from writing our novels to live-tweet the Burt Lancaster movie Come Back Little Sheba (yes, I know what I said about live-tweeting; it was her idea). She liked it more than I did.

The one day I took off from NaNoWriMo was to attend a party held by the Queens World Film Festival in Long Island City. They've got an Indiegogo fundraising thing up right now in which the goal is to support their free programs which play around Queens. Check it out, and if you can, throw a few bucks their way, because they do good work.

Ivan writes about funny ladies from the silent era.

Jacqueline looks at the kinds of movies playing around the time of the JFK assassination.

Danny has a fascinating post about a film about Native Americans... even if the lead was played by a white guy in redface.

Retrospace has a movie podcast! The first episode is about the 70s flick Convoy.

(One final note: the content from the LAMB page has been moved to the 'Themes' page.)