The Aviator
On the way home from the Christmas movie, H.'s mom turned around and said, apropos of the final scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio's
Howard Hughes declares jet travel to be "the way of the future" and finds himself compulsively trapped in those words, "I remember when the switch from prop planes to jets." It took me by surprise, and I realized that I'd just seen a history of the present.
The best thing about The Aviator is Leonardo DiCaprio's performance, which is convincing throughout, contrary to my low expectations. Using as his masks a Texan accent and an eyebrow crease possibly borrowed from Ethan Hawke in
Before Sunset, Leo immediately overcame my fear that he would look too young and supple, too damn Leo, to represent a character who must not only be given a life of his own but rescued from some degree of
caricature. But he was there, all along, from cockpit to toenails.
Scorcese has a considerable back of tricks, too; the color process for many—but not all—of the scenes are supersaturated and tweaked, so that the grass on the golf course where Hughes woos Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn is a pale blue, and many other scenes have Technicolor hues. Indeed, the movie never seems to resolve whether Hughes' movies were shot in black and white or saturated color—even
Hell's Angels, a film Hughes released in 1930, acquires a brilliant blue when its fiery air crashes are projected against Hughes' fits of addled rage. The Cocoanut Grove scenes are fervid and sensual, with three different Wainwrights singing to the smart set. And while
Blanchett's Hepburn makes so deliberate a note that it falls into an uncanny territory between mimicry and parody, Kate Beckinsale's Ava Gardner comes off as a humane, intelligent sexpot, an uncommon bird in movieland.
But all these parts don't make a whole. The Aviator, or at least Hughes' life story, has a great list of ingredients: Hollywood, sex, madness, invention, fast planes crashing, government and industrial intrigue and the technological march of the twentieth century are all his to play with. But after the first hour and a half, the movie turns stagnant. It doesn't know what to do with all this jazz, and settles for a reliable (and in the thick of it, enjoyable) cliche: the brave turning of the table during a confrontational
Congressional hearing. (Alan Alda gets
all the good senator parts). As much as everybody likes to hate Alec Baldwin (playing Pan Am's senator-buying president), Hughes' victory doesn't seem that hard-earned.
I left thinking that
Kinsey's accomplishment, which seems like the minimum for a biopic, was to show how the world changed. The movie contains a good argument that Howard Hughes changed the world. But it doesn't make it.
Manohla Dargis also thinks it fell apart in the middle, and has perceptive things to say about breasts, clouds, big planes and milk.
Movies of the Year part ii
New York Magazine has posted its Top Ten. I would put under consideration
Sideways,
The Incredibles,
Collateral,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and
Kill Bill.
Farenheit 9/11 I would thank and excuse. Lord knows I like its politics better than The Incredibles, about which more later; it seemed to perform a similar service as the too-many blog-hours I put in, but it didn't make me think you could do anything with film differently than I already knew. Yes, it was an independent social phenomenon; but if you want a special award for that, you have to win me an election. As they say, if you shoot at the king, you have to aim for his head to get an Oscar.
Also via the
List of 2004 Bests at
Fimoculous,
John Patterson praises
Before Sunset for its presentation of an American and a Frenchwoman calmly conversing about the fate of the world in a year when the public discourse was not nearly as edifying.
He then goes on to make a similar, or at least converse, point about Farenheit 9/11, writing that after the film did $250 million in business at which Uncle Walt turned up his mousy nose, we still lost the election.
I'm ready for cultural politics to mean more than red-state vs. blue-state again. It seems that may take a generation.
What narrative film at the most interesting politics of the year? The most subversive? The most humane?
It's a Wonderful Life
Amanda at Mousewords has an
insightful post comparing It's a Wonderful Life to John Huston's The Dead. I have words to write in defense of 80% of It's a Wonderful Life, but since I just resusictated this from the Draft pile and Christmas is over, I'll condense it to this and maybe expand next year: Sexy romantic comedy good; vision of mid-twentieth-century dislocations due to rapacious capitalism great; Clarence gets his wings freakin' stupid.
Ocean's Twelve
This could be
much, much worse. It suffers mainly by comparison to Soderbergh's two equally singular feats of dazzle:
Ocean's 11, a gold-standard for caper movies, and
Out of Sight, a gold-standard for sex. And possibly caper movies. Certainly for crime thrillers. On any given day, I would rather be watching Out of Sight than writing blogs, let alone reading them. Ocean's 12 prevails in the intersection of sex, line readings, and timing, which is to say, in the use of its stars. It falters in the abuse of same.
It would be lazy to say that it's enough to let Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and the rest of the crew riff off of each other for the better part of two hours. The first movie had that feel, but only in the interstitials; combining those with a thrilling, exquisitely and requisitely twisted heist, the movie combined icing with cake in a bid to top the genre. For 12, Soderbergh reportedly took an old project off the shelf and backed in the large cast. In the first movie he managed the expectations that came with his stable of stars by using a couple of wry asides; the scene where Pitt's Rusty and Clooney's Ocean teach as-themselves Joshua Jackson and Topher Grace to play poker stands out. Mostly, he succeeded by giving Julia, Brad and George the standing of
Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn: their somewhat down-and-out characters were portrayed with the extra heaping of glamour that comes from the discourse of stardom generated by a whole industry apart from the narrative itself.
In Ocean's Twelve, sadly, the problems of squeezing all those extra actors into a different project altogether seems to have reduced his brain to the lame neural firings of
Full Frontal, an abysmal filler movie that ranks as the worst of Soderbergh's mostly-disappointing experimental work. In
Full Frontal, Soderbergh mistook the ego- and assistant-addled lives of his new friends the stars for thorny issues of representation, of signified and signifier, for the stuff of
Pirandello. Inasmuch as the movie ended and could quickly be forgotten, it was forgiveable. But when the feeble antics resurface in Ocean's Twelve, the movie's suspension of disbelief deflates radically. Star power depends on the stars' transfer of their glamour to characters who could, with a little guts, be the audience. To depend on their resemblance to real stars—as a key second-act plot point does with Julia Roberts' character—is worse than deus ex machina (which most heist movies come around to at the end, but who's counting?). It mocks the audience for believing in movies at all.
That's my rant. The fact is, Soderbergh is a master of movie pleasure, and it's worth it just to see Soderbergh's ease with the mise en scene and the actors, Pitt and Clooney's homosocial clowning and the rest of the troupe's dirty-dozen interplay. Any ass can deflate the star system and the glamour of moviegoing. Soderbergh's one of the few directors who has mastered it. Perhaps there's a need for an always-qualifying, ever-undercutting,
Dave Eggers-type ironist of Hollywood. Steven Soderbergh shouldn't be that guy.
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Oh,
Bridget. How could you do this to me? I'm sure you even think you have some kind of surname this time out, like "Bridget Jones: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" or "Bridget Jones: X-treme Antix" but you don't, Bridget, to me you are just
2 and all of the shoddy, success-milking, cynical pleasure-laundering it implies.
Bridget, I believed in you. I believed that
your first movie was not just a guilty pleasure but a properly good romantic comedy, maybe not quite
His Girl Friday but possibly as good as anything
Janeane Garofalo ever did, maybe somewhat better. (No offense to Janeane, it's just that Coco has declared a Janeane Garofalo exception to the inherent badness of romantic comedies, which I of course reject.) Oh, Bridget, when you sang along to
"All By Myself" (or was it
another one?) I wept and giggled with you too. Granted, I had the same feeling when they all get in the car at the end of "Notting Hill", which everybody hated, but you told me I could defend that blatant, but not, here, cynical manipulation of great music in the service of comic heartstringpulling.
But here we are. To whomever allowed this drek to surface, and to myself, for succumbing to its lure when there was not, in fact, a 9:40 showing of
Alfie down in Sarasota: shame. Because if you're going to string together a series of barely motivated comic set pieces, each one either embarrassingly scant or regurgitated from your memories of the first one; if you're going to abuse Renee Zellwegger's amazing willingness to go along with whatever self-abuse you can throw at her; if you're going to deny that Hugh Grant is a little older looking (which needn't be so bad); THEN YOU MUST AT LEAST BE A LITTLE FUNNY.
And when you're not, it makes it harder for me to argue against Coco and his stupid bias.
Hugh Grant was very sexy on the plane ride over, though, I will admit.
Movies of the Year part i
I've seen about a dozen movies since I last posted, at least half of which I want, no, intend, no expect, no,
will write about. In the meantime, it's time to start thinking about end of the year lists. Unlike H. and Coco, I don't keep good track of the films I see, or of anything, for that matter. So I'm going to keep a running list of nominees based on other people's lists. Starting with
John Waters' Top Ten, found on the
Fimoculous List of Bests.
Of John's Top Ten, I liked Tarnation, The Mother, Kill Bill vol. 2, and Before Sunset and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are pretty much guaranteed places in the top ten.
The only other one on his list that I saw was The Dreamers, which had very pretty naked French people, and about which H. made a very good point regarding incest, but didn't tell me a story I was terribly interested in.
This is just the warmup.
