Some movies of the 1980s

These days I usually don't feel like shelling out 11 or 12 dollars to see a movie, and going out to the movies somehow seems more of a project than it used to.  In the 1980s, though, I saw a fair number of movies, as a recent USIH post about an 'ad hoc canon for the '80s' reminded me.  I mentioned in a comment there a few that I recall seeing (these are all by American directors, because the post's focus is U.S.-specific): Dressed to Kill and The Untouchables (both directed by Brian De Palma, the latter with a pram-down-the-steps scene paying homage to Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin); David Lynch's Blue Velvet; and Rob Reiner's Stand By Me, which -- although I remember none of it in a plot or a scene sense -- I recall as striking emotional chords in such a way that one walked out of the theater feeling warm, uplifted, and convinced, if only fleetingly, that everything was right with the world.

Sunstein is writing about what?

P. Campos at the LGM blog:

How did Star Wars become such a big deal, culturally speaking? Why does the franchise...  have such a vast and fanatical following? Why, for example, is Cass Sunstein, of all people, writing a book about Star Wars?

Oh, I know the answer to this one: it's the natural outgrowth of Sunstein's Harvard senior thesis on Samuel Beckett, written in 1975.

You're welcome. Next question. ;-)

ETA: Some blathering by me on the question of Star Wars and 'empire' can be found here.

Dueling mandarins: Vidal & Buckley in 1968

One of the better moments in The Best of Enemies, the currently playing documentary about the TV encounters between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968, is a three-minute side-by-side comparison of the two men's origins.  Both came from privileged if not especially 'old money' backgrounds, both went to elite prep schools, both rode horses well as teenagers, or so the photographs on the screen indicate.  Both were intellectuals.  Both spoke with the sort of upper-class accent that has now almost vanished.  Both ran for office (Vidal more than once).  A Marxist -- or anyone else, really -- from another planet might wonder how in the world these two men ended up calling each other names on prime-time TV during the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions in That Year, 1968.

Class is not always destiny, would be a five-word answer to that question.  And yet, as one of the many (too many) interviewees in this movie suggests, it is possible that each man saw a bit of himself in the other, maybe just enough to nudge dislike over the boundary into loathing.  Despite -- or, who knows, perhaps because of? -- his utterly despicable political and ideological stances, it is Buckley whose charm and air of insouciance (for lack of a better phrase) are more evident when the two square off in front of the ABC-TV camera.  Vidal was, as the person with whom I saw the movie remarked, more self-contained, his gestural, non-verbal language a bit less naturally suited to TV.  There was nothing shabby about Vidal's verbal performance, however, even if, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out with reference to the most infamous exchange, it was not actually true that Buckley was a crypto-Nazi, though he was unquestionably a reactionary.  Still, it's not difficult to see why Vidal, responding to a somewhat loaded question from moderator Howard K. Smith and faced with an annoyingly interrupting Buckley, reached for an insult.

The Best of Enemies is a thesis movie, i.e. it has an argument, and that argument is that the Buckley-Vidal encounter was the ur-moment that shaped TV punditry as it came to exist in the U.S. in the ensuing decades.  Maybe, though I think the argument is pressed a bit too hard.  I have no recollection of watching the Buckley-Vidal encounter at the time: my memories of 1968, somewhat sketchy in general given my age then, are not primarily televisual, though I do have a couple of memories of the Democratic convention that I think must derive from having watched some of it.

In the end, despite this movie's best efforts to convince one otherwise, the Vidal-Buckley debates must be considered, I think, basically an interesting footnote to a tumultuous, historic year -- even if it was a footnote that generated subsequent essays and lawsuits by the protagonists -- rather than a central event.  However, as many of us know, footnotes are not necessarily unimportant; and The Best of Enemies, despite its flaws as a movie, will help ensure that this particular footnote will continue to be remembered.

A Most Wanted Man

I saw the movie A Most Wanted Man last night, having just read the LeCarré novel on which it's based. Among my several criticisms of the movie, the main one is that it considerably tones down the political edge of the book, which was published in 2008 and is a strong critique of certain facets of the 'war on terror'. The political message is not absent from the movie, but it is muted. Philip Seymour Hoffman is good in his last major role and there are a couple of other good performances, but on the whole I found the film disappointing.

The 1970s on screen

A couple of months ago Nils Gilman had a post on best movies of the 1970s.

For reasons that (1) I'm not altogether sure about, and (2) even if I were, might well be too lazy to spell out, I think the movie from this period that sticks with me the most is Apocalypse Now. I also remember some of the era-defining blockbusters, such as Jaws and Star Wars (the 1977 one), quite well. In the case of Apocalypse, in more recent years I saw 'the director's cut' that was released in theaters, with several scenes restored that were not in the version originally shown.

It just occurred to me, writing this post, that there are several movies from the '70s (early in the decade) that I recall that don't show up on N. Gilman's lists: Patton (1970), MASH (1970), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Cabaret (1972), The Day of the Jackal (1973).

(The Andromeda Strain has a sort of special meaning for me, not because I remember it esp. well -- I don't -- and not because it was a great movie -- it may or may not have been, at this remove I can't say -- but for reasons quite extraneous to the movie that I don't want to get into. Sorry to be cryptic. It's not 'first date' or anything like that.)

Misc. notes

-- Kirkpatrick on Egypt: David Kirkpatrick (of the NYT) interviewed by Terri Gross.

-- Saw the movie Before Midnight last night. The poignant opening scene, whose background would take too long to describe but which has the Ethan Hawke character putting his 14-year-old son on a plane to return home, gets the film off to a strong start. It's not exactly downhill all the way from there, and Hawke and Julie Delpy do turn in good performances, but the screenplay lurches from the near-brilliant to the pedestrian and back again -- a problem in a film which is mostly conversation of one kind or another. Still, several cuts above most summer movies. Also recently saw M. von Trotta's very good Hannah Arendt.  

Cannes note

No, I'm not there, more's the pity; but here's Ann Hornaday on Redford:

Another of the festival’s strongest offerings — J.C. Chandor’s astonishing “All Is Lost” — addresses time’s passing more obliquely, with 76-year-old Robert Redford delivering a bravura performance as a man alone at sea on a sinking sailboat. A magnificent if harrowing example of cinema at its purest, “All Is Lost” contains almost no dialogue; instead, Redford communicates his character through action as he methodically battles the elements. The movie might be about one man against a world he can’t control but, as Chandor noted at a press conference, it’s also about a cinematic icon embodying his own generation’s turbulent passage into a treacherous next phase. “All Is Lost” is an exceptional achievement in every emotional, artistic and technical sense, and it represents a career-redefining moment for Redford. For some reason, it was passed over for competition in favor of far less impressive fare.

Probably good that Redford is doing this now as opposed to playing characters who are twenty years younger, which is what he did in his film The Company You Keep. (He pulled it off, for the most part, and so did Julie Christie, but maybe not entirely.) 

Reading notes, with movie postscript

Having embarrassed myself the other day on Crooked Timber (if indeed it's even possible to embarrass oneself in the blogosphere) by revealing that I'd never read The Social Contract, I've now picked up a used copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Rousseau's Political Writings. As an undergraduate I never took the standard course in the history of political thought because (1) I was stupid and (2) the course wasn't required by the program I was in, though it should have been. Consequently there are several canonical works of Western political theory I've never read.

Before I can get to Social Contract, however, I have to finish Iain Banks's Matter which, despite some witty moments and lovely descriptive passages, has turned into something of a chore. Which may explain, I suppose, why I don't read much science fiction.

Movie postscript: I see from the front page of WaPo online that a version of The Great Gatsby, with Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming this summer. It can't possibly turn out to be worse than the early 1970s version with Sam Waterston and Mia Farrow, which is on my worst-movies-ever-seen list.

Update: Have now ordered the recent Penguin ed. of Social Contract, trans. Q. Hoare, ed. C. Bertram. 

Note on Argo

I saw the movie Argo recently. It was good (apart from a couple of fairly minor things). In a nice symmetry, the movie is as smart as the fake movie-within-the-movie is silly. Argo is suspenseful and never boring, the prologue properly sets the historical context (noting the CIA-engineered coup against Mossadegh), and it's also hard to complain about a screenplay that includes, toward the end, a reference to the opening of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. And the cast, led by Ben Affleck (who also directed), is excellent.

Nuclear insanity to the nth degree

The U.S. is set to spend billions on refurbishing the B-61 gravity nuclear bomb, the kind of thing Slim Pickens rode in the closing frames of Dr. Strangelove. Would that this were only a movie. A WaPo editorial observes that about half of the refurbished B-61s would replace ones that are currently deployed as 'tactical' weapons in Europe. The U.S. nuclear arsenal as a whole has to be maintained, I suppose, in some reasonable state of non-decrepitude but the notion of spending billions of dollars to refurbish tactical nuclear weapons in Europe is insane.

(note: edited slightly after first posting)

LeCarré note

I saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy about a week ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was in a packed theater and everyone seemed mesmerized. There was no whispering, no coughing, barely, or so it seemed at times, any breathing. I think people are perhaps just starved for old-fashioned (in the best sense) movies that are well-acted, intelligently scripted, suspenseful, and (at least to an extent) emotionally involving.

That the Cold War is long over turns out not to make much difference in how one takes in -- or I guess I should say, in how I take in -- Cold War espionage tales. They are, in essence, morality plays, however layered over by ambiguities, and morality plays are a very old genre. Their appeal doesn't depend on the contemporaneity of the factual setting.

The absence in Tinker of the sorts of 'action' scenes (car chases, explosions, etc.) that a Bond or a Bourne movie contains is an advantage in several ways; for one thing, the tension is heightened gradually, incrementally, rather than being interrupted periodically by gigantic pieces of metal being blown up (or whatever). The focus is on humans and what they are saying and doing, rather than on gadgets, things, and special effects. (There is a gun fired in one scene at the beginning and in one at the end, and that's it as far as on-screen discharges of a weapon are concerned.) This movie is, to get very pretentious (but only for a second), an unalienated spy movie, one that has not been estranged from the genre's essence.

Apart from The Russia House, which I don't remember too well, I haven't read much LeCarré. This afternoon (I'm writing this on Sunday evening) I picked up a paperback of Tinker, Tailor. Yes, the movie tie-in edition, but what can you do? It was the only one on the bookstore's shelf.

P.s. For another and somewhat more -- how shall I put it? -- baroque take on the movie, see here. That post has, among other things, the near-mandatory historical allusions (e.g., the Cambridge spies) that I've omitted here.

Hollywood and the military (continued)

I promised a bit more on the history of relations between Hollywood and the U.S. military. Some may be familiar with the series of films Why We Fight, produced during World War II under the auspices of the War Department (as it was then called) and directed by Frank Capra, but I knew little or nothing about it until I read part of Benjamin Alpers's Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture (Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 2003).

Alpers writes that the U.S. government "saw knowledge of the facts as essential to the morale of U.S. troops in a war against fanatical belief systems" (p.175), and the Why We Fight series was thus "built around the notion that factual knowledge about the war was the best basis for troop morale" (p.178). However, the films were "ultimately more factitious than factual" (p.179).

Much of the footage was...not what it claimed to be. Following a cinematic tradition established long before by newsreels, the Why We Fight series included footage from Hollywood features passed off as actual battle footage, staged scenes of life in the Axis countries, and captured footage taken entirely out of context.... Capra defended [this], maintaining that it was simply the most effective way to package fact. (p.179)

However, subsequent research on the films' impact on soldiers showed that "although the films did impart greater factual information about the war, this information had...no effect whatsoever on morale or combat motivation." (p.180)

As Alpers's discussion in the same chapter (called "This is the Army") suggests, the impact of Hollywood during WW2 was probably greater on civilians, as movies deployed the convention of the multi-ethnic combat unit as a symbol of American democracy and pluralism. Of course, this ran up against the awkward fact of racial segregation, both in the army and at home. Hollywood, not surprisingly, found it difficult to square this circle (see p. 170).

My own impressionistic sense -- not having researched this -- is that the relationship between Hollywood and the military began to turn a bit more adversarial during the first decades of the Cold War, with movies like Dr. Strangelove. By the Vietnam era, the splits in U.S. society were reflected in the movies, with John Wayne for instance continuing to make pro-war films while others made anti-war ones. (I think Apocalypse Now will probably be the most-viewed of these years from now, although there were a raft of them, including Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Born on the Fourth of July, and so on.)

As the Sirota piece linked in a previous post indicates, Top Gun represents a swing of the pendulum back toward celebration of militarism (not quite the right word, perhaps, but it will do). A trickle of dissent begins to return with the movies made after the first Gulf War (not that I saw any of them, I don't think), and this trickle becomes more of a stream with the movies of the current period that deal with the post-9/11 conflicts. Many of these (e.g., The Hurt Locker, In the Valley of Elah) I have not seen, but I did see Stop-Loss (2008) and Brothers (2009). I had to look up the titles of both of these on IMDB just now -- I remembered the actors but not the titles. (One of the joys of being middle-aged.) Stop-Loss was better than Brothers, as I recall, although the latter had its moments. I also saw (but on DVD not in a theater) a movie about Iraq with Matt Damon in it. Again, I don't remember the title and this time I'm not going to bother looking it up. Matt Damon fans will probably know the movie I'm talking about it and everyone else will probably not care too much. It was not great, but in terms of its politics definitely quite critical of the U.S. role, or at least of the military/occupation hierarchy.

P.s. There have also been, of course, documentaries on recent conflicts. E.g., on Afghanistan, 'Restrepo,' which I've mentioned before, and 'Armadillo,' which I haven't seen but which V. Yadav writes about here.

P.p.s. I've now seen The Hurt Locker. Worth watching.

Brief thoughts on 'The King's Speech'

I saw the movie last night. The climactic scene, for those few who may not have seen the movie or read about it, is the radio address George VI gave on Sept. 3, 1939. Colin Firth turns in an excellent performance, though he makes the address sound perhaps a bit less labored than it actually was in George VI's delivery: you can listen to the original here. Perhaps the most interesting clause in the speech is the remark or warning at the end that "war can no longer be confined to the battlefield," which of course turned out to be entirely and tragically accurate.

Documentary examines war's 'human terrain'

While looking for something else, I stumbled across an article about the new documentary Human Terrain (one of whose directors is James Der Derian, whose name will be known to some readers). Rather than quoting or taking the time to summarize, I'll just give the link: here.

Gentlemen never sue

The name of Theodore Roosevelt (class of 1880 at Harvard) is invoked at the very beginning of the movie The Social Network. The actor playing Mark Zuckerberg confidently, if a tad bizarrely, informs his girlfriend that TR’s membership in the Porcellian Club is what ensured his eventual accession to the presidency of the U.S.

Theodore Roosevelt – who as a Harvard undergraduate spent on club fees and clothes in two years a sum of money that would have sustained the average American family of the time for six years* -- is in some ways (but only some) a fitting patron saint for this movie, whose themes of money and class would not have been foreign to him. However, the only character in the movie that TR would really have understood is the rower who is reluctant to sue Zuckerberg because that’s not what “gentlemen of Harvard” do. The rest of the movie -- including the computers, the drugs, the parties, and the sexual situations – would have been, it is pretty safe to say, either incomprehensible or shocking (or both) to TR. That’s not a criticism of The Social Network, of course, but it is an indication of how much certain aspects of the world have changed in the last 125 years.

As for the movie on its own terms: it’s entertaining – especially the scene in which the actor playing Larry Summers appears – but I would take most of it with a few grains of salt.

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*Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (paperback ed., Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), p. 259. For TR's views on masculinity, race, etc., in historical context, see Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Vintage Bks., 2005), pp. 355ff.

Prince of shlock

We're approaching the summer movie season, when good actors embarrass themselves by appearing in bad movies. Case in point: Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The synopsis, which I take from IMDb, goes something like this: An adventurous prince teams up with a rival princess to stop a villain from destroying the world with a sandstorm.

Would you pay ten dollars to see this? I think I might pay ten dollars not to have to know about it. Too late for that, unfortunately.

Those revolutionary Brillo boxes

I happened to pick up a copy of Arthur Danto's new book on Andy Warhol (called, surprisingly enough, Andy Warhol) in my local public library. Although it's a short book, I didn't and don't have the time or inclination to read it from cover to cover. I did dip into it, however.

For those who don't know, Danto is a philosopher and art critic who has written about the philosophy of art, among other things (see Louis Menand's piece in the current New Yorker). In a nutshell, Danto thinks Warhol was a revolutionary artist because he threw into question the definition of art more sharply than previous artists (such as Duchamp) had. If Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which consists of stacks of Brillo boxes, is art, the definition of art must involve something extra-visual or non-visual, since there is no significant difference between Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Brillo boxes that could have been found on any grocery store shelf. "What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye" (Danto, Andy Warhol, p.65).

Similarly, Warhol's 1964 movie Empire, consisting of "an uninterrupted view" of the Empire State Building and running for "just over eight hours" (p.77), throws into question the definition of a movie. Empire "showed...that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move" (p.79).

Danto's book also contains some humor. This R-rated passage (pp.76-77) is an example:

"In none of the silent, so-called minimalist films is there anything much to see, not even in the 1964 Blow Job, which shows the face of an attractive if anonymous young man who is being fellated off-screen. So the title seems like false or at least misleading advertising. It [i.e., the film] was too long, however short a time it lasted, and nearly caused a riot when shown at Columbia University...in 1966. The students were impatient and filled the air with boos, hisses, and jokey singing of 'He shall never come.' ... Andy was in the audience, planning to say a few words after the screening, but he left quietly when the furor started."

Gallenberger's John Rabe

Last night I saw Florian Gallenberger's film about John Rabe, the German businessman who was instrumental in saving the lives of more than 200,000 Chinese during the Japanese occupation of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1937 (a/k/a the Nanking Massacre). The movie premiered last February at the Berlin Film Festival (hat tip, Wikipedia) and has won German film awards. I almost didn't go but I'm glad I did, because it was absorbing, instructive, well-acted, and at times moving. Recommended, but not for those who are squeamish about graphic depictions of brutality.

Movies as a register of social change (also known as the cigarette post)

There are worse ways of getting an inkling of how certain aspects of daily life in the U.S. have changed in the last 60-odd years than to watch a "serious" movie from the 1940s. (Of course, another way is to have been alive yourself in the 1940s, but some of us weren't born yet.) In this case the movie happened to be "Mildred Pierce" (1945), for which Joan Crawford won an Oscar for best actress. First off, in this movie everyone smokes constantly. Second, the language has that kind of clipped, slightly stilted inflection that you also hear in, for example, Bogart movies of the period, and the actors seem to be boxed into a fairly narrow emotional range, even when the script calls for them to really emote. (Bogart and Bergman managed to break out of the box in "Casablanca," but if you've seen the movie and its famous last scene several times -- and who hasn't? -- you may well agree with me that that's mostly due to Bergman.)

Anyway, back to "Mildred Pierce": 1) as I said, everyone smokes all the time (and drinks); 2) the police don't read suspects their rights (because the Miranda decision was twenty years in the future); 3) the only African-American character given any substantial camera time (and not much at that) is a female servant with an artificially high voice; 4) the themes are pretty much timeless ones (love and money, basically) but they are handled in a way that shows, among other things, Hollywood's timidity at the time about depicting sex.

Interestingly, the war (I mean World War II of course) is only a very oblique presence in this movie: in one scene there are a few men in sailors' uniforms; in another there is a passing reference to manpower shortages; and that's about it. By Hollywood standards of the time, and notwithstanding Crawford's performance, I think this is probably no better than an average movie. A film like "Double Indemnity," for example, from I think roughly the same period, is quite a bit better.

But the most obvious thing, and the one to which I keep returning, is the cigarettes, because they are ubiquitous in the movie and because I happen to hate cigarette smoke. Even within my own lifetime, this is one aspect of daily life that has changed quite dramatically. When my parents had company over when I was a child, there were at least a couple of ashtrays in the living room; not only did my father smoke, but it was assumed that at least a couple (maybe more) of the guests would be smoking. Nowadays one can still see people smoking in bars, on the street, or occasionally in their cars -- and soldiers in the field often smoke, or so media images suggest -- but when was the last time you were in someone's house for a social occasion and saw someone smoking? It really has become, to a large extent, unusual and frowned-upon behavior (to which I say: thank goodness).

Well, I seem to have diverged somewhat from my original intentions in this post, but hey, this a blog, man. Deal with it. Oh, and put out that cigarette, do you mind? Thanks.

Stand-up comedy and our reptile brains

Note: HC wrote this guest post; LFC furnished the title. The post contains some language that certain readers may find offensive.
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Bro (that’s me) and LFC went to a comedy club (actually a cinema-'n-draft-house doubling as a comedy club) on Saturday night. We originally set out to see a movie but got lost in Arlington (Va.) because I had jotted down the Google directions without looking at the Google map (always a mistake); so, in a decision that would have made André Breton proud, we gave up hope of making the movie (Doubt) and pulled up at a random movie house whose marquis advertised something starting at exactly the time it then was (9:45).

Turned out the thing advertised, Doug Benson, was not a movie at all but a stand-up comic best known for his jokes about pot and his movie about smoking too much of it (Super High Me). We had traded Doubt for Doug, exchanged a highbrow film with some capital-a acting for jokes about jacking off and gays. Whee! Plus everyone was smoking (cigarettes), there was no noticeable ventilation, and it was one of those bars where they had the contract with Heineken not Becks, which is almost as bad as Pepsi not Coke.

Doug himself was highbrow compared to the warm-up acts, which I don’t really remember, but I’ll try. Each guy had his schtick. The black guy talked about sex. Funniest bit was about getting old, which was not affecting his sex drive but was affecting his drive to do the stuff it took to get sex. First white guy talked about sex too, starting off with a joke designed to trigger/allay the anxieties of the guys in the audience. (Does size matter? Of course it does. You gals need to stay small and tight. I don’t want to be f---ing an open car door.) He also made jokes about his weight even though he was not really fat, just as the black guy was not really old. Second white guy did physical comedy about how he was a yellow belt in karate and how those karate moves (like the palm strike) were so gay.

Then came third white guy and main act of the evening, Doug, who seemed smart enough to know the audience, for the most part, probably wasn’t. He acted high, shuffling around the stage and reading jokes from napkins, then putting them either in the right (“yes”) pocket or the left (“no”) pocket of his vinyl windbreaker depending on crowd reaction. He had a patrician manner and occasionally used some big words and even made one joke about politics: McDonald's is a democracy because you get a choice of bacon or sausage on your McGriddles, unlike Florida and Michigan, where you don’t have a vote.

Doug was a method actor inhabiting a role. He probably rubbed his eyes a lot just to make them look bloodshot. Probably not that far from Philip Seymour Hoffmann in Doubt after all. The role allowed Doug to get away with some sophisticated stuff, because among your average kids today (by “kids” I mean anyone under 40 taking a date to a comedy club) being stoned seems to excuse all kinds of things, like word play and caring about politics, that would otherwise just be gay.

All in all it was pretty depressing but I admire any kind of public performance and I also admired the way the comics stood in the lobby afterward next to their CDs and t-shirts (their “merch” as Doug said) while the crowd avoided eye contact and filed by into the drizzly night.

Postscript. Did you see the piece in the NY Times the other day about how it’s hard to remember puns because the act of getting them resolves them so thoroughly that they are wiped out of our memory banks? I wonder if that’s true for jokes in general. Which would mean that comedians are bards, keeping alive an oral tradition that we can’t lodge in our heads. (Have you heard the one about x? Maybe, but tell us again, we can’t remember.) To put it another way, comedians are the collective memory of our reptile brains. Another Heineken please. I like the red star on the label.

-- HC