Silver Linings Playbook

Silver Linings Playbook
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY
12.27.12

It's been a long time since I was a regular, passionate sports fan, so I don't recall what, if any, superstitions I may have had while watching a Mets game. I doubt I had many; I was a teenager and probably too young to even be aware of the concept within the context of sports. My father certainly never had any that I knew of. He was a very practical man and wouldn't have believed in that stuff.

The idea is certainly a strange one - that one's actions can have an indirect yet positive effect on one's favorite team. We know athletes believe in it. For example, when a pitcher has a no-hitter going, his teammates will almost always refuse to talk about it, for fear that bringing it up will make the pitcher self-conscious and break his concentration somehow. Perhaps fans picked up on such behavior and applied it to their own experience of watching a game.

There's no scientific basis for it, but fans and athletes alike continue to do it. I'm no psychologist, but if I were to take a guess as to why, I'd say it provides an illusion of control. For the athlete, it's different. The other eight ballplayers behind the pitcher can control, to a certain extent, how long that no-hitter lasts by making the defensive plays they're supposed to and scoring runs. The pitcher may still end up throwing the wrong pitch to a certain batter and give up a base hit, but at least his teammates know they did their part.

Not so with the fans. All they can do is root for their team, whether at the ballpark or in front of the TV, so they may feel like they can impart some positive energy, good vibes, or "juju," whatever you wanna call it, to their team. It's irrational, but it's a comfort, and if it appears to work, they'd be loath to give it up unless they were absolutely convinced it didn't work, which may take awhile.

I just finished re-reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, an account of his lifelong love affair with soccer. The lengths he goes to in order to support his team, Arsenal, defy rational behavior to, frankly, a disturbing degree - the things he can and can't do in order to watch a game, who he can watch a game with and how, the degree of possessiveness he feels towards his team - and yet he's able to clinically analyze his obsession, look at himself, and admit that yes, his self-imposed superstitions make no sense.

But he still believes in them.

I'm sure this sort of thing is not limited to just sports. It's a type of behavior that betrays our most primal roots, back in the days when we knew nothing about the way the world worked and invented rituals to explain, and perhaps control, our fear of the unknown. It's peculiar that even in this so-called "enlightened" age of science and reason, we still can't shake such habits...

...habits practiced by Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro's characters in Silver Linings Playbook (the lack of a "the" in that title still irks me). In their case, we're led to believe that their superstitions, in aid of their favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, are an aspect of their generally anti-social behavior, especially in Cooper's case, since his character, Pat, just got out of a mental institution. Still, I didn't necessarily feel that the movie was making the case that all sports fans, or at least all Eagles fans, were mental.

I was dubious about Playbook prior to seeing it. I had read all about the positive buzz around it, of course; how it was a great crowd-pleaser everywhere it played on the festival circuit. Still, the trailer left me somewhat unmoved: two mentally unhinged people bond through dancing? I was expecting a subpar cross between As Good As It Gets and Dirty Dancing.

I liked it, though. Director David O. Russell proves once again, as he did with The Fighter and other films in his repertoire, that he has a knack for getting outstanding performances out of his actors, especially Cooper and DeNiro and Jennifer Lawrence, who continues to astonish me. I don't think she's had a bad performance yet in her career - and she's so young!

Two Jews sing their 'Les Mis' review

Mostly, anyway. These two are so damn awesome and if you've never seen their show before, this video is a perfect example of why you should. Here's their YouTube channel.

That's it for me in 2012. I'll be back January 2. Don't forget, my new weekly comic strip, "City Mouse Makes a Movie," debuts January 5 and will run on Saturdays throughout the year. Look for a sneak preview on my Twitter page next Thursday!

Have a happy new year!

Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty
seen @ AMC Lincoln Center 13, New York, NY
12.24.12

I once wrote a short story about a superhero team in which the wife of one of their number is murdered, and they go off on the trail of the killer. (It was inspired by a superhero mini-series with a similar premise, one which I did not like and thought I could improve on.) One of their allies in the search is a former hero who tortures a man whom he believes can lead them to the killer. The former hero was a soldier before he got his powers. When his crime-fighting partner died saving lives, he retired in order to protect his partner's secret identity from exposure. He justifies his use of torture, something he had never done before, by citing loyalty to one's comrades above all else.

Many of the stories we tell, and have told, throughout human history, involve one of the oldest and most basic maxims: an eye for an eye. Someone does you wrong, you balance the scales and get them back. Most of the time, when we see or hear those stories, we don't particularly care too much how payback is achieved. After all, these are only characters in a story. It's not real. I'm certainly no different; I don't think about degrees of morality when I see Batman toss the Joker around a room in order to get him to reveal where Harvey Dent is.

The Cable Guy

The Cable Guy
seen on TV @ Comedy Central
12.23.12

My parents first got cable television when I was in high school. Of course, it was a big deal at the time, but I don't recall ever marveling at this relatively new advance in home entertainment technology. I knew about MTV, of course, and I was eager to watch plenty of that, as well as the less hip (but still watchable) VH1. Plus, I could see more Mets games.

My sister had already moved out by this time, so I didn't have to worry about sharing the cable with her, and my parents, if I recall correctly, didn't make as much use of cable as they would in later years (though I could be misremembering). My father definitely watched more sports, at least.

I don't think I watched that much more television growing up than others of my generation. Oddly enough, even with cable, most of the shows I watched were still on free TV, but then cable networks like HBO didn't start excelling in original programming yet. Like I said, for me, cable mostly meant videos and sports...

...especially the latter. One could still see Mets and Y-nk--s games on local networks as well as cable back then, but that number was dwindling, so I was grateful to see the Mets more often, as well as basketball and hockey and the occasional boxing match. Cable definitely fed my sports jones growing up, and even sparked interest in other sports, like tennis. (It always amused me whenever my father would mute the sound when watching a baseball game; he'd say that the announcers weren't saying anything new to him. My mother didn't seem to care for them, either. I remember she hated ESPN's Chris Berman in particular.)

These days, I don't watch as much TV as I used to, but I've definitely watched more ever since I got into TCM (thank you, classic movie bloggers). I have basic cable, not the pay channels; no HBO for me. Still, most of the time, I've found TCM to be enough. Still, that doesn't stop me from checking out other channels, obviously. I saw The Cable Guy on Comedy Central, which I don't watch much of apart from the intermittent episode of The Daily Show.

I first saw The Cable Guy on video. I've always liked it, and it's a bit of a shame it didn't do better at the box office than it did. Audiences at the time weren't ready yet to see Jim Carrey as a slightly more nuanced character than Ace Ventura, I guess. It was directed by Ben Stiller, who, like Carrey, came to film from television, and while it's not on the level of something as vivid and prophetic as Carrey's later film The Truman Show, I think both movies would make for an excellent twin bill, as they both examine the power of television culture from both the audience and the entertainer's sides - the watcher and the watched. (One could even throw in Man on the Moon as well; a real-life TV star who subverted his audience's viewing experience.)

Yuletide links

I should have a post for you about this movie next week.

What a surprise - the world didn't end after all! Just like it didn't end a year and a half ago when everybody was screaming about the rapture, just like it didn't end when the Y2K bug had everyone in a panic, just like it hasn't ended for what, billions of years now? And still people fall for this crap. Why do people wanna believe in the end of the world so much? Seriously, it bugs me so much because it keeps people afraid and ignorant. I saw a link on Twitter yesterday to an article about a bunch of schools in Michigan that closed because they were afraid of the apocalypse. (Residual paranoia as a result of the Newtown massacre was also cited as a cause, but still.) The gullibility of some people really angers me.

But I don't want this to be a downer post. After all, it is the holiday season, and even if that means zip-a-dee-doo-dah to you, even I'm willing to quit grinding my axe for a little while. This was indeed a crap year overall, but not for movies! It was a pretty awesome year for movies in fact, even though I still haven't seen all the ones I wanna see yet - but then, that's what January is for.

I even have an announcement! Earlier this year, I had said something about starting a new Saturday feature, but life kinda got in the way and I put it on hold. Now, though, it's almost ready to go. Beginning January 5, I'll have for you a new, serialized City Mouse strip that will (fingers crossed) run throughout 2013! This will be the longest City Mouse story I've ever worked on, and it'll feature characters from the original series as well as new ones in a story about movies, so you'll wanna be here for that!

The final link list of the year for you is a brief one:

Raquelle goes shopping for DVDs in a rare video post from her.

In the wake of the Newtown massacre, Hollywood's rethinking violence again (even as the NRA chastises them for it).

Here's a nice piece about the history of New York's Penn Station and its appearances in movies.

Hollywood cliches about holidays abound.

I'll be back on Wednesday the 26th. Enjoy your holiday.

Double Indemnity

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.

I wasn't gonna talk about Double Indemnity at first; so much has already been written and said about it already. Still, it was the first movie I ever saw Barbara Stanwyck in, so I figured I could probably talk about that much at least. I rushed home from Brooklyn to see this, but I still missed the first fifteen minutes. No big deal, though; I've seen this plenty of times.

The last time I saw it, if I'm not mistaken, was in Bryant Park during their annual summer movie series. That might have been the first time I had seen it on a big screen. What I remember most was the crowd laughing at what they thought was unintentionally funny, which irritated me, but what can you do?

Actually, I'm not certain where I first saw Double. I keep thinking it might have been in my college film class, which is possible, but I could just be associating it with Sunset Boulevard, which I know I saw in film class. If it wasn't there, then it would've been during my video retail job for sure.

Either way, I do recall with some clarity my first impressions of Stany. I didn't think anything about the blonde wig, after all, I didn't know that she looked like without it. I do recall that it took me awhile to get used to seeing her as a brunette in other movies. (Thank god she didn't start her career as a bleached blonde like sooooooooo many other actresses in the 30s!)

I'm fairly certain that this was the movie that started the debate between me and my friend Steve about her looks. He didn't think she was ugly, but he thought she looked unconventional at best. It's true, Stany was no Rita Hayworth, and the wig does her no favors, but I defy anyone to look at her in the first scene in only a towel and that honey of an anklet and not call her sexy!

In Dan Callahan's recent biography Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, he writes about how Stany was reluctant at first to take the part:

Stanwyck admired Double Indemnity as a script, but she was nonetheless uncertain about it. "I had never played an out-and-out killer," she remembered. "I had played medium heavies, but not an out-and-killer." (I love her term "medium heavy," which suggests there is a kind of human scale for perfidy). She went to see Wilder. "I was a little frightened of it and, when [I went] back to his office, I said, 'I love the script and I love you, but I am a little afraid after all these years of playing heroines to go into an out-and-out cold-blooded killer.' And Mr. Wilder—and rightly so—looked at me and he said, 'Well, are you a mouse or an actress?' And I said, 'Well, I hope I’m an actress.' He said, 'Then do the part.'"

I don't think I was familiar with the term "film noir" at the time I first saw it, but I had a basic awareness of some of the tropes, including the "femme fatale" - only I always saw them as parodies, cliches. Double may have been the first time I saw them for real - the hard-boiled dialogue, the speedy delivery of that dialogue, stuff like that. I could never imagine people talking that way in real life, yet on the screen, it seems more believable somehow.

In fact, there was a brief period where I tried getting into old crime novels. I read Cornell Woolrich and Raymond Chandler (who co-wrote Double with Billy Wilder), but that was about the extent of it. They didn't do much for me, though I was much younger when I read them.

Wilder talks about Chandler's writing style in Conversations With Wilder (yes, I'm still quoting from this book; what can I say, I like it). Wilder loved his dialogue but not his method of constructing a story:

... He was about sixty when we worked together. He was a dilettante. He did not like the structure of a screenplay, wasn't used to it. He was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence. "There is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool." That is a great line, a great one. After awhile I was able to write like Chandler.... I would take what he wrote, and structure it, and we would work on it. He hated James Cain [the author of the original Double novel]. I loved the story, but he did not care for Cain. I tried to get Cain, but he was busy making a movie.

Wilder's regular collaborator at the time, Charles Brackett, backed out from adapting Double, finding it too grim, according to Wilder.

That hard-boiled dialogue belongs to another era now, I think. Whenever I watch Double, I always try to imagine spouting it, but I know I'd only end up tongue-tied. I used to have trouble speaking publicly, and it was only with a conscious effort that I was able to overcome it - by talking slower. Studying acting helped in that regard. So I'd never choose to perform in roles like these. I look at someone like Edward G. Robinson in this film, and I marvel at his ability to make that dialogue simply crackle with life.

Going back to Miracle Worker, Callahan examines the theory, which I've seen elsewhere, that Robinson and MacMurray's characters are secretly gay, particularly the former. I briefly thought of this while watching the movie, but I still don't buy it. The relationship between Keyes and Neff strikes me as much more surrogate father-son than anything else. I do agree with Callahan, however, in thinking that Keyes is probably misogynistic, though that doesn't make him any less of a great character to me.

Did you know that there was an alternate ending to Double where we see Neff executed? From Conversations again:

... It was a close-up of Robinson and a close-up of MacMurray. The looks. There was a connection with his heart. The doctor was standing there listening to the heartbeat when the heartbeat stopped. I had it all, a wonderful look between the two, and then MacMurray was filled with gas. Robinson comes out, and the other witnesses are there. And he took a cigar, opened the cigar case, and struck the match. It was moving - but the other scene, the previous scene, was moving in itself. You didn't know if it was the police siren in the background or the hospital sending the doctor. What the hell do we need to see him die for?

I'm glad he chose to drop it, though I wouldn't mind seeing this scene sometime.

-----------------------------
Previously:
Banjo on My  Knee/Remember the Night

The Shop Around the Corner

The Shop Around the Corner
seen on TV @ TCM
12.16.12

In Cameron Crowe's book Conversations With Wilder, which I mentioned yesterday, director Billy Wilder talks at great length about his idol, Ernst Lubitsch. It's only recently that I've taken a good look at his films. Wilder was, and has remained, my favorite director for so long - it never occurred to me before to ever wonder who he was influenced by. In this section from the book, Wilder attempts to define what makes Lubitsch distinctive:

CC: It's been analyzed quite a bit by others, but what was "the Lubitsch touch" to you? 

BW: It was the elegant use of the Superjoke. You had a joke, and you felt satisfied, and there was one more big joke on top of it. The joke you didn't expect. That was the Lubitsch touch. To think as he did, that is a goal worth having. Collaborating with him, he would have many questions. "What are you going to do with this story point?" "Let's find some way to say this differently." 

CC: How can one contemporize the Lubitsch style? 

BW: Find some new way to tell your story. That was the magic of Lubitsch. He is eternally essential to me.

Wilder cites as an example the silly little dress hat in Ninotchka. The first time Greta Garbo sees it, she hates it because, coming from Russia as her character does, to her it's a symbol of capitalism at its worst. The second time she just tsk-tsks at it. The third time, after she begins to fall for Melvyn Douglas, she buys it and wears it, no longer beholden to the things she'd been taught all her life about the world.

I knew about the movie The Shop Around the Corner before, primarily because it was remade as You've Got Mail, but I had never seen it, and it still managed to surprise me in places because Lubitsch found different ways to tell his story. Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are clerks in a gift shop who, unbeknownst to each other, are also secret pen pals in love with each other. The irony, of course, is that they can't stand each other while they're working together. 

Jimbo finds out who Sullavan really is before she discovers his true identity, but instead of confronting her with it, like I expected, he strings her along for awhile, even going so far as to build up his alter ego as an actual person, just to get a better sense of her, to see her as a woman and not just as a co-worker.

The only thing I didn't like about this delightful movie is that I didn't believe for one minute that it's supposed to be set in Budapest. Stewart and Sullavan make no attempt at Hungarian accents. If their characters were American, that'd be different, but they weren't. You just have to accept the artifice, but I think Wilder would've agreed with me about the odd-ness of it, if this passage from Conversations, about his film Irma la Douce, is any indication:

... There is always something wrong about people not speaking the language of the foreign country where the picture takes place. And you could not stand a [Jack] Lemmon or a [Shirley] MacLaine speaking English with an accent, either. It's false. It just does not work.

On that last part I tend to differ with the master in that learning a foreign accent is something we expect now, whenever an actor does a movie in a country not his or her own. Heck, Meryl Streep does it almost every time she makes a movie! However, as I speculated earlier this month when I wrote about Barbara Stanwyck in Banjo On My Knee, perhaps the audiences of the day didn't hold their stars to such high standards. Maybe they wanted someone like Stewart to be recognizable as Stewart from one film to the next.