Are leading men allergic to rom-coms?

Wilder's 'Sabrina', w/two of H'wood's great leading
men, Bogart and Holden (w/Audrey Hepburn)

I just finished reading the book Conversations with Wilder, Cameron Crowe's one-on-one series of interviews with Billy Wilder from 1999. It's a book I've coveted for many years, and I recently found it in a used bookstore in Brooklyn for only ten bucks! Needless to say, I was pretty thrilled. It's a rare look into the mind of one of the all-time great film directors, reflecting on his career and his life. It's an absolute treasure.

I wanna talk about one section of the book, where they talk about romantic comedies, something Wilder was no stranger to. Crowe puts forth a theory (not his) which postulates that because there are fewer racial and class distinctions these days, it's harder to find obstacles to keep couples separate. Wilder says that people are still essentially the same; it just takes a sharp writer to come up with those obstacles. He goes on to lament the lack of true leading men today like there were in his day. Then there's this exchange:

CC: In my experience, it has often been difficult to talk a leading man into playing pure romantic comedy. It's hard today to find actors who want to say "I love you" on film. They're afraid of looking foolish. They'd rather have a gun. Was it similar in your day? 

BW: It was not that way. (A) We had leading men and leading ladies; we had them by the dozens. (B) We didn't think in terms of "That's a comedy, that's a light picture." It was just a picture, and you made a lot of them. It's very different now, to have something with three thousand car crashes, or actors always looking up at the dinosaur.... The popular pictures are a little heavier, a little more masculine.

Cruise hasn't made a rom-com in over fifteen years,
not since Crowe's 'Jerry Maguire' (w/Renee Zellweger)

I doubt anyone could dispute the inescapable facts that movies are more masculine these days and that there are fewer true stars. But is it really so that actors are avoiding rom-coms for the most part? I suspected that it was, but I still wanted to see for myself.

I took the ten Hollywood actors that could reasonably be considered the biggest and most popular in the business right now - George Clooney, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, Will Smith and Denzel Washington - and looked at their movies over the past ten years, 2003-12, to see what percentage of them are rom-coms. I counted feature films only and not shorts or television. Their last rom-com is listed in parentheses, along with the year. Boldface titles are outside the ten-year span:

Clooney           1/16 (Intolerable Cruelty, 2003)
Cruise              0/11 (Jerry Maguire, 1996)
Damon             2/25 (Jersey Girl, 2004)
Depp                1/20 (...And They Lived Happily Ever After, 2004)
DiCaprio          0/9 (Celebrity, 1998)
Hanks               1/13 (Larry Crowne, 2011)
Pitt                     0/14 (The Favor, 1994)
Sandler             3/17 (Just Go With It, 2011)
Smith                 1/9 (Hitch, 2005)
Washington       0/12 (The Preacher's Wife, 1996)

Does anyone even remember seeing Pitt (in glasses,
no less!) in this pre-'Seven' flick 'The Favor'?

A few notable items: in some of these rom-coms, these stars are not pivotal characters. For instance, Damon has what amounts to a cameo appearance in Jersey Girl, while DiCaprio's screen time in Celebrity is just over ten minutes total. Washington's the star in The Preacher's Wife, but he's basically a matchmaker. Sandler is the only pure comedic actor on this list (though Hanks started out in comedy long ago), so he has had more opportunities to do rom-coms than most. I wasn't sure whether or not to count I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, since he's only pretending to be gay in that movie, but apparently he ends up falling for a girl, so I included it as well.

One thing I find remarkable about this list is that many of these stars - Depp, DiCaprio, Pitt - are notable as "heartthrobs," guys that women go ga-ga for - in fact, six of these ten are former People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" winners. I have no doubt that they're aware of their sex appeal, but as far as the movies go, they leave rom-coms to the likes of guys like Paul Rudd or Ryan Reynolds. (They have, however, done romantic dramas, like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, or romantic thrillers, like The Tourist.)

Who today could share screen time with a leopard the way Grant does
in 'Bringing  Up Baby' (with Katharine Hepburn)?

I trust Crowe's rationalization for this deficit in rom-coms from the superstars, since he's actually part of Hollywood, but if it's true that they're afraid of looking silly in a rom-com, that's quite unfortunate, especially when one considers the leading men of yesteryear. Cary Grant, for example, is probably the poster boy for male heartthrobs who alternated between screwball rom-coms and serious drama, and perhaps part of the reason why goes back to what Wilder said: genre distinctions were less relevant back then.

From an acting standpoint, I don't doubt that comedy in general is tough, rom-coms more so. It requires a degree of vulnerability and risk that's harder to convincingly pull off than drama (take it from one who has studied acting). Then again, one could say the same thing about action movies, yet that doesn't stop Cruise, Damon, Depp and Smith from headlining action movie franchises.

I suspect no one knows how to write a really good rom-com anymore. Maybe a lack of racial and class distinctions has something to do with that, I dunno, but so many Hollywood rom-coms today look uninspired and derivative when compared to the stuff made by Wilder, or George Cukor or Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges. And if that's the case, one can't blame the superstar actors for not wanting to be in them.

Do you wanna see more rom-coms from Hollywood's leading men?

Top 5 movie-going moments of 2012

I did this last year, so I think I'll try it again this year. My top ten movies list won't be ready for another month at least, so in lieu of that, I'm presenting a different list, one more relevant to this blog in particular. Movie-going can sometimes lead to a surprise or two, or a distinctive moment that lingers in the memory for months or years afterward, and that's what this top five list is devoted to. If nothing else, consider it an incentive to continue seeing movies in theaters and/or other people. It's an act that, regrettably, was a little less safe this year, but I doubt it'll ever fully go away.

5. Salim Akil makes fun of my cell phone camera at Urbanworld. He wasn't cruel about it, and he laughed and shook my hand afterward, so I hold no grudge. Maybe next year, I'll stop trying to do two jobs at once and just focus on writing about the films at the festival. Hell, I'll bet I could even wrangle an interview or two instead. What do you think - would you rather see pictures or read interviews from a festival? In addition to reviews, of course.

4. The director and cast of Wet Hot American Summer makes a surprise appearance at a screening of their movie. It was the first time I had seen the movie, so it wasn't like I had any great attachment to it, or any of the stars, but the crowd at Brooklyn Bridge Park sure did - and boy, were they thrilled when this happened! It was quite a moment, and I'm glad I was there for it.

3. Halloween at the Loews Jersey City. I originally had a different theme for Halloween this year, but between the William Castle-inspired gimmicks for Homicidal, the "haunted house" section of the second floor, the costumes, and the movies themselves, I knew I couldn't miss going to the Loews the weekend before Halloween (and before Hurricane Sandy, too - talk about trick or treat). There were even more movies than the ones I ended up writing about, and I wish I could've seen them all. Side-note: I spent that Saturday afternoon up in City Island dropping off my artwork for my gallery show, which would've been the following weekend if not for Sandy, so I ended up covering a tremendous amount of ground: from eastern Queens through Manhattan up into the Bronx and City Island, then back down into Manhattan and over into Jersey City, then back into Manhattan and ultimately home to Queens. All in one day!

2. Seeing Battle for Brooklyn on the night the Barclays Center opened. You gotta understand - I, like many New Yorkers, had been reading about the impending opening of the new sports arena in downtown Brooklyn for months, and about what it'll mean for the borough in general - and lost in all the shuffle was the hard reality that a number of neighborhood residents were displaced from their homes in order for this to happen. While watching this compelling documentary, the Barclays was literally right down the street, laser lights flashing into the sky. It felt a bit surreal... and yet quintessentially New York also, in this time where the 99 percent are making their voices heard.

1. Opening day for The Avengers. I've said it before, but if you haven't been reading superhero comics most of your life, I doubt you can fully comprehend what this day meant to people like me, and in Astoria/LIC, where I saw the movie, there was a certain atmosphere floating outside the theater. From the Applebee's across the street where the waiters were dressed in superhero outfits, to the sidewalk comics dealer selling comics and posters, to the kids running around the hallway of the theater giddy with anticipation, this was what going to the movies should feel like. Lots of high-falutin' film critics love to cite movies like Avengers as heralding the death knell of "real" cinema, and I've admitted that I'm beginning to get a little burned out by effects-driven spectacle movies all the time, but I'm proud I was part of this. My inner child wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

Banjo On My Knee/Remember the Night

Barbara Stanwyck is the Star of the Month this month on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), and because she's my favorite actress, I'll talk about some of the airing movies throughout this month - notably the ones I've never seen before. To see other posts about Stanwyck, type her name into the search bar or click on the "movie stars" label.

The recent biography Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman by Dan Callahan briefly goes into her period as a New York chorus girl. She followed in the footsteps of her older sister Millie, having learned how to dance from Millie's vaudevillian boyfriend. A gig at the Strand Hotel as a teenager led to Broadway revues and nightclubs, and eventually, the Ziegfeld Follies in 1922. Callahan runs a quote attributed to Stanwyck, in which she says of her Broadway period, "How my memories of those three years sparkle! My chorine days may not have seemed perfect to anyone else, but they did to me."

Seeing her in the quasi-musical Banjo On My Knee was a nice reminder of her showgirl days: she sings, she dances, she plays a little piano. She was no Ginger Rogers, but she could hold her own on a dance floor. As for her singing, again, it was nothing spectacular, but it was pleasant enough. She had a low singing voice, smoky and velvety, the kind you wouldn't hear on the radio today (unless you were listening to a jazz station, perhaps).

Movie musicals are not as in demand as they were back in the 30s, but when they pop up (like the current revival of Les Miserables), it's always interesting to see actors get the chance to sing - nobody seems to have their voices dubbed anymore. Stany has sung and/or danced in other movies, such as Ball of Fire, but her character in Banjo doesn't start out as an entertainer of any kind. I call it a quasi-musical because it's not wall-to-wall singing and dancing - there are long stretches without music - but at the same time, there are enough musical moments that it should probably still qualify as a musical.

Stany shares a duet with contemporary singer-turned actor Tony Martin.

It's set in the American South, but no attempt at an accent is made on the part of either Stany or Joel McCrea. Sometimes I wonder what she would've done with accents. Today we applaud actors who can sound English or Scottish or German or what have you, but back then, I suspect audiences weren't as interested in such thespian trickery. I thought the movie overall was okay, though I was uncomfortable with all the wife-beating jokes!

Remember the Night was written, though not directed, by Preston Sturges, one of the most prominent comedy writer/directors of the 30s and 40s, but this felt little like a comedy; indeed, I was genuinely surprised at how dramatic and moving it was. Stany plays a career petty thief who, when put on trial, is allowed out on bail for the Christmas holiday until her trial can continue in the new year. Fred MacMurray is the prosecuting attorney who bails her out, and seeing that she has nowhere else to go, opts to take her back to his mom's place in Indiana for the holidays. 

Sparks fly between the two, as you might expect, but the combination of the holidays, the small-town atmosphere, and MacMurray's loving family has a profound effect on her as well. This could've been cloying and overly sentimental, but I bought it - especially after seeing the decision she makes once she and MacMurray return to New York and the trial.

Sturges' script goes for some laughs in the beginning (including an unfortunate black manservant stereotype), but once the action moves to Indiana, the mood changes significantly. As a director, Sturges was known for his zany, fast-paced romps such as Sullivan's Travels and The Lady Eve (another Stanwyck film), and the deeper into the film I got, the more I kept waiting for a return to the funny stuff, but it never really happens; in fact, the movie ends on kind of a down note, but it had me hooked the whole way. Night came out in 1940, the same year Sturges would make his directorial debut with The Great McGinty.

Stany has a great pivotal scene with MacMurray's mom that's so heartfelt and emotional. You can see the change in her character as it happens. The mom is played by veteran character actress Beulah Bondi, who was terrific in the whole film. You may have seen her in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life.

Seeing Stanwyck and MacMurray together naturally made me think of Double Indemnity, though their relationship here is quite different. At one point I kept trying to think of ways to connect their roles in both movies, as if characters could be reincarnated from one movie to the next. In fact, I'm fairly certain I remember reading part of an article where the writer tries to draw a thematic line connecting the characters from Indemnity to the ones in the later flick There's Always Tomorrow, also starring the duo. I'd have to see that again to decide on my own.

Making the case for Frank Langella

The Making the Case blogathon is an event in which the purpose is to profile a movie from 2012 that deserves Oscar consideration, even though the odds on it getting a nomination are slim at best. It is hosted by Cinematic Paradox. For a complete list of participating blogs, please visit the host site.

So this is the time of the Oscar season when we start hearing from critics groups around the country, as well as some of the major film industry organizations, including the Screen Actors Guild and the Golden Globes this week alone. In the acting race, some names are definite shoo-ins, like Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence; others are less certain. One name I have yet to see is Frank Langella for his performance in the film Robot & Frank, and at the time I wrote about it I believed his performance was Oscar-worthy. I still believe it.

Between The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Hope Springs and Amour, among others, this has been an unusually strong year for movies featuring senior citizens, a highly unusual development given Hollywood's constant pursuit of the youth market. In these movies, seniors confront their own mortality in different ways: either through perking up their sex lives or coming to terms with their impending demise as best they can.

In the sci-fi flick Robot & Frank, Langella's character initially sees the presence of a robot home attendant not only as an intrusion but as an ever-present reminder of his own senility, until he uses the robot for a more sinister purpose. It's a great character, and Langella finds the right balance between pathos and laughs. He's not as showy as other potential Best Actor nominees, but he rarely is. It helps that the sci-fi elements in the movie never overwhelm the human factor; indeed, they're much more low-key than, say, your average Marvel superhero movie.

Langella has never been a marquee name actor, but he's always been around, quietly turning in quality work year in and year out on both the small and big screens, sometimes being the only noteworthy element in less than quality material. I recently mentioned here that he's always been my favorite cinematic Dracula. He's definitely been typecast as a bad guy most of the time, but I find it awesome that he's even able to take pride in something as cheesy as Skeletor in Masters of the Universe. 

His one and only Oscar nomination was for Frost/Nixon, playing Richard Nixon. I saw it on video and I honestly don't remember much about it, but I do remember liking Langella in it. His take on the former president was different from Anthony Hopkins' in Nixon, perhaps because of the story's theatrical roots. His Nixon felt more lived in, more familiar.

At this point it doesn't look like Langella will even get in the Oscar conversation this year, and that's unfortunate, but then it has been another highly competitive year in the Best Actor category.

------------------------------
Related:
The argument for Viola Davis
Weighing Serkis' Oscar chances
When will Meryl get her third Oscar?

In defense of A Christmas Story

...Many moments of the film seem quite superfluous to the central plot. Why the broken furnace? Why the bully? Why the Little Orphan Annie decoder pin? At a mere 94 minute [sic], all these extra scenes, that have not made quite the splash in pop culture, have come to feel like cheap padding. If it were just a story about being a kid, I'd understand but it's so specific to the holiday season, that these moments don't seem to really fit into the overall celebration of Christmas.

The first time I saw A Christmas Story was at a friend's house around the ol' Yuletide season. She couldn't believe I had never seen it before, so naturally I had to plunk down in front of the TV and watch it. I was pretty shocked to see that it was, in fact, running non-stop for 24 hours on TBS - I thought only The Yule Log got that treatment at Christmas time! Regardless, I liked the movie, though  I never gave it a hard look the way Rachel does in her post.

Don't get me wrong; I have no great attachment to the movie. I don't rush to the TV to watch it every Christmas Eve. My favorite holiday film has always been Miracle on 34th Street (THE ORIGINAL, thank you very much). Still, I think I can address the reason why this movie is as beloved as it is. Nostalgia is certainly a huge part of the equation, but I think it goes deeper than that.

A Christmas Story is what we used to call a "shaggy dog story" - the kind that has a tendency to ramble and go all over the place and is not in any great rush to get to the "point," such as it is. Such kinds of stories tend to be part of the oral tradition (A Christmas Story is narrated by Ralphie as an adult), so there's a much greater emphasis on storytelling rather than story. It should also be noted that director Bob Clark partly based this film on a volume of short stories. 

I admit, it never occurred to me that this approach might not appeal to everyone. I hesitate to suggest that it may be a generational thing, but I honestly find it next to impossible to imagine a movie quite like this enjoying the same level of success today. 

I would argue that A Christmas Story is very much about being a kid, and that Christmas is the vehicle for that theme. Kids may seem more sophisticated and savvy about the world around them today, but some things don't change, no matter what the era, and I believe the enduring popularity of this movie proves that.

Agree? Disagree?

Lincoln

Lincoln

seen @ Jamaica Multiplex Cinemas, Jamaica, Queens, NY

12.4.12

In Steven Spielberg's twelve-year odyssey

To bring the Lincoln story to the screen,

There must have been moments of great despair

And distractions that led him off the path.

My artistic ideas, they come and go

I tend to flit from one thing to the next.

Therefore I respect Spielberg for his faith

In his opus though fortunes rose and fell

'Cause inspiration is a tricky thing

One's ideas ne'er fully satisfy

How many drafts did Mr. Lincoln make

In his great plan to liberate the slaves?

If roles were switched, could I have persevered?

What, me, a filmmaker? That's pretty weird!

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas
seen @ Cinemart Cinemas, Forest Hills, Queens, NY
11.29.12

Awhile back, when I was still writing my online comics column, I did a piece about a woman named Hilda Terry. I met her late in her life - her career went all the way back to the 40s, when she did a newspaper strip named Teena. She was, in fact, one of the first prominent women cartoonists in America. She went on to other accomplishments in her long life, but one of the most significant aspects of her personality was her belief in past lives.

This was different from the Shirley MacLaine-variety belief. As far as I knew, Hilda herself did not truly believe she lived a previous life. Rather, she was convinced she was in communion with a past life, one outside herself, which inspired her to make her comics. According to her, it was a little girl from colonial times, whom she discovered during the 70s, when she made a concerted effort to discover what she firmly believed was the true source of her artistic inspiration.

The following is from a collection of Teena strips, essays and short stories Hilda co-authored called The Baby Sitter's Magic Mouse Storybook:

In my 65th year I began to realize SOME one was HELPING me [with my cartoons]. And it wasn't God.... In 1979 I was doing the kooky things trying to reach my invisible collaborator. I wound up with a child crying MA-MA for a woman being tried for witchcraft. [When I] asked if she was my guardian angel, the tangled hair shook. Negative. A dirty hand gestured back and forth indicating she and I were one. Hey! A past life? [When I] asked her name, she lifted her tunic and MOONED me. 

[When I] asked how she happened to be me, she said "Rebecca." Actually, we never spoke. She pulled words out of my head and highlighted them. "Rebecca your mother?" I asked. Shaking her head "no" again, she brought up 3 words, Grandmother, Rebecca, Nurse. MY grandmother's name was Rivka, Russian for Rebecca. And I had lived with her through my first years. You could say she nursed me. I assumed she was naming MY grandmother. It didn't make sense. My grandmother was alive in 1914. 

Clearly, my head was playing games with me. Still???

Further research led Hilda to discover a real child from that era that she believed was her mystery spirit: Dorcas Good, an alleged witch from the late 17th century, along with a grandmother named Rebecca Nurse, another alleged witch who, Hilda believed, somehow facilitated their meeting.

Hilda goes on to say that she was convinced Dorcas not only helped her create her Teena strips, but was the unconscious inspiration for a supporting character within the strip. Still, Hilda made it clear that she is distinct from Dorcas:

I have had my OWN life. I have a whole raft of friends of my own in the next world. I don't know if Dorcas Good is my past life, but she HAS been something in my PRESENT life.... Through me, she has had a life that made up for the last one. To the extent that we share one mind, she learns what I learn. And what she knows, I know... so many things I have no way of knowing otherwise.

Having interviewed her and spoken casually with her on several other occasions before her death in 2006, I'm convinced she believed all this stuff, even as she was aware of how crazy it all sounded. Her strips are very good, and they still hold up today, and as a cartoonist, I've certainly used a variety of real-life people as inspiration for my stories (maybe even unconsciously in one or two cases), but I've never heard a story like Hilda's, before or since.

All of which leads me to the movie Cloud Atlas, a story about reincarnation, which made me think of Hilda and wonder what she would've made of it. I think she would've appreciated the overall message about how humanity is connected to each other in ways we can't begin to fully comprehend. Hilda was a very spiritual person, and though the movie is completely secular, I doubt that would've made a difference to her.

Personally, I found the film breathtaking in its scope. As with many of the great stories, love lies at the heart of it all, and even if you don't quite grok everything that goes on in the story, I think that much is clear. It's certainly a movie that invites repeat viewing, if for no other reason than to see it knowing who played what. I imagine this was an actor's dream, to play not only multiple roles in the same film, but different races and genders in some cases.

The multiple timeline-jumping was disorienting, no doubt, and not easy to get used to. What it reminded me most of was channel surfing. You know how it is, going from watching, say, A Game of Thrones on HBO to a college basketball game on ESPN to Spongebob Squarepants on Nickelodeon to some reality show on E! to a Bogart movie on TCM and back again. Do it long enough and a pattern may emerge, or at least you may think you perceive one.

I remember seeing the book Cloud Atlas several times at my favorite bookstore and being tempted to try it, but the format was very off-putting. Now that I've seen the movie, I may try the book at some point, though my understanding is that the movie takes a few liberties, format-wise.

The Cinemart is a neighborhood theater on a commercial stretch of Metropolitan Avenue in Forest Hills. It probably wasn't always a second-run theater, but it is now, and as such, it's relatively simple and no-frills. It's hung on for a long time in the face of digital screens and 3D movies and other such changes. I can't ever remember seeing it attracting large audiences, not that I've gone there all that often, but it fills a need for me, and when it finally goes to that great multiplex in the sky, I'll miss it, if for no other reason than it's local.

Metropolitan Avenue runs from southern Queens all the way to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. This section is nice and cozy, with lots of different restaurants that stay open long after the rest of the area closes for the day. There's an awesome ice cream and candy shop across the street from the Cinemart that's straight out of the 1950s; one step inside and you'll be eight years old all over again. Further down the street, there's a comics and collectibles shop - not as good as the ones in Manhattan; I've only been in there once - and a Trader Joe's, right before you hit a major cross street and a cemetery beyond that. I like coming to this part of town a lot.