Streets of Fire (Walter Hill, 1984)

I watched Streets of Fire because I'm going through yet another hardcore Steinman phase after his recent death. He wrote the songs for the film so I foolishly assumed it would be a full-blown kitsch musical. Turns out he wrote only two songs for it and he thought the screenplay was terrible, strong words from a man taken to writing about women who offer their throats to the wolf with the red roses. "Terrible" is putting it too lightly; this unholy meld of The Wild One and Flashdance and Escape from New York is an abomination.

One need only compare it to another 1984 film, Voyage of the Rock Aliens, to discover what went wrong. Voyage is an abomination too but it's a fun one. De facto music videos are jammed into the narrative at such a frequent rate that you have little clue what the story is about. But you don't care because you get peppy numbers featuring spacemen, cute boys, and Pia Zadora in a Union Jack half shirt. Streets of Fire halts the narrative with a bunch of stillborn fight scenes of indeterminate import. The viewer is not even certain when and where the action takes place, a postmodern escape clause Hill and co-screenwriter Larry Gross allow themselves with the opening title "Another Time, Another Place." Nothing is at stake and there are no spontaneous outbursts of song to compensate. Instead, we get soundtrack silage from The Fixx, Ry Cooder, Maria McKee, Greg Phillinganes (a quintessential session musician in a solo role), Stevie Nicks (sung by Marilyn Martin), ugh. The big hit from the film, Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" (actually, a damn solid song), is not sung by Hartman in the climactic scene. The Blasters appear in two scenes, sweaty and confused. Hill was obviously in way over his head with this "rock & roll fable," a barely musical musical the likes of which he wisely never attempted again. 

Even the two good aspects of the film wind up as disappointments. The first number, Steinman's "Nowhere Fast," is a peppy burner that fails to deliver on its promise of a feature-length sugar rush. And while the film doesn't end with the formation of a heterosexual couple, the optics are still present as butch McCoy (Amy Madigan) drives off with the hero Tom Cody (Michael Paré, a prettier, more vacant Sylvester Stallone). Add in a lost Willem Dafoe (looking like a fugitive from a Depeche Mode video), thankless cameos from Ed Begley Jr., Bill Paxton, E.G. Daily, Robert Townsend, and Lee Ving, and Voyage of the Rock Aliens starts to take on Criterion proportions.

Grade: D

The 2021 Oscars Telecast Was Great! They're Always Great!

The Oscars just can't win. Two upsets in the Best Actress and Best Actor categories followed by the shock of presenting Best Picture earlier and pundits still claim that the 2021 Oscars telecast was long and boring. I'm not sure how that makes this year any different since "long and boring" is the perennial Oscars complaint. It might be my training in art/avant-garde cinema speaking here but I think the Oscars are always too short. They should run five hours minimum. And I'm being 100% serious. My favorite film of 2020, Cristi Puiu's magisterial Malmkrog, runs six minutes longer than last night's telecast (and that's with commercials!). As a veteran of Empire and Out 1 and La Flor and Oliveira's Amor de Perdição and Visconti's Ludwig (the latter two without potty breaks), etc., I can easily swallow 3.25 hours. 

So I'm not sympathetic to gripes about the lack of film clips (go watch them on YouTube!) or that everyone talked too long. Malmkrog is nothing but people jibber-jabbering for three-and-a-half hours. How often do we get an extended chunk of network time devoted to cinema? Pay attention! (Another bit of training that might help me in this endeavor - learning how to pay attention at cinema conferences like my beloved SCMS.) Or better yet, throw a party (which we can hopefully do in 2022) so that you can talk throughout and throw popcorn at the screen and make fun of the presenters, etc. Would that so much disdain could be heaped upon the Super Bowl which drones on almost as long and can make thirty seconds last an hour.

As for the complaint that the end of the ceremony deflated because Anthony Hopkins won and wasn't present to accept the award, that's just more art cinema for ya - a moment straight out of The American Friend or, if you will, "like the ending from a New Hollywood film from 1973" in Ashley Clark's contention screenshot below. In short, I loved it all - the train station (I hope some of the celebrities took advantage of Wetzel's Pretzels being open after the ceremony), the trivia contest, the longer times at the mic, Questlove's DJing, Riz Ahmed, always Riz Ahmed, etc. I just wish it were longer!

Simon & Garfunkel: Bookends (Columbia, 1968)

Simon & Garfunkel: Bookends (Columbia, 1968):

1. "Bookends Theme" - Who cares?
2. "Save the Life of My Child" - Unlistenable. I always thought folkies dug these guys because of their crystalline harmonies/production. But this is messy as muck, a Whimsy Suite in desperate need of a sweeping. Why didn't Yes cover this one? Too close to the prog edge?
3. "America" - I already forgot this one and I'm writing this in the middle of side two. I'm sure it's crappy, though.
4. "Overs" - The musical equivalent of a run-on sentence. Or a paragraph that goes on for almost two pages. I don't care if it's only 2:14. Edit, dude! Get to the point!
5. "Voices of Old People" - Really? When I want bullshit musique concrète, I'll take Yaz(oo)'s "I Before E Except After C." P. S. I had to listen to Upstairs at Eric's to cleanse myself after listening to this very bad album.
6. "Old Friends" - Aw ok this is pretty. Could work as an Eno-esque tangential listening experience. Modest strings. Modest Paul. Alright, Paul, pull back a bit. You're making your presence felt a bit too much. And pull back on those strings too. And now you're amping up the strings?!? ARGH!
7. "Bookends" - Who cares even less?
8. "Fakin' It" - Ooh strong start. Mildly rockin'. Aw you had to go wuss it all up by singing! Oh gawd, more whimsy. Can't you leave a good song alone?
9. "Punky's Dilemma" - Best thing about this one is that Streisand recorded it and Xgau got an amazing article out of it.
10. "Mrs. Robinson" - The best American feature-length film of the 1960s is not The Graduate.
11. "A Hazy Shade of Winter" - Best song here, duh. But The Bangles own it now. Sorry 'bout it.
12. "At the Zoo" - You did NOT just say "somebody told me it's all happening at the zoo."

Grade C+. The plus is for the fact that's it's under 30 mins. That's pretty remarkable, actually. Even I can swallow whimsy at that length. 

2020 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

This is actually a strong year for the Best Picture Oscar category. Nothing even remotely approaching a great film but nothing too hideous either. Here are my rankings in roughly preferential order:

Minari - Comes perilously close to the cute line. But something about it continues to haunt me, probably its episodic structure, its unpredictable characters, its quizzical ending, etc. Grade: A-minus

Promising Young Woman - Consistently surprising (although I knew precisely who would turn out to be a pig) bleak comedy that reminded me of such 1940s melodramas as Leave Her to Heaven or Siren of Atlantis where women exact their revenge/wield the most power from beyond. Maybe a bit of Ruby Gentry in there too. Grade: A-minus

Nomadland - Loved the discontinuous editing that underscored the nomadic life; rued how much it left Amazon off the hook to portray the nomadic life as a personal quest. Grade: A-minus

Sound of Metal - Devastating. And the penultimate scene (usually the point where a film shits the bed) was handled with impressive ambiguity. Riz Ahmed = husband material. Best cameo: A Rudimentary Peni t-shirt. Grade: A-minus

The Father - A mainstream Celine & Julie Go Boating! Keeps you on your time-and-space-determining toes. But the narrative games get dreary since they're tied so conventionally to the father's deteriorating condition. Grade: B

Judas and the Black Messiah - In the Oscar tradition: yet another felt, well-meaning, terrifically acted (I think - I don't know from acting), style-neutral biopic. Grade: B

The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Purely as a zippy, vacuous entertainment, figure about an A-minus. As a grotesque Sorkinization of 1960s American leftism, especially in its appalling portrait of assistant federal prosecutor Richard Schultz as a conflicted sympathizer, a D+. So let's say....Grade: B-minus

Mank - I already ripped on it here. I'm not a betting man. But I predict it will win solely because it's my least favorite here.

 

Godzilla vs. Kong (Adam Wingard, 2021)

Have you seen Jurassic Park? Or War of the Worlds? Or San Andreas? Or The Day After Tomorrow? Ya have? Well, then, you've seen Godzilla vs. Kong too because all of these films tell the same damn story. The dinosaurs and aliens and earthquakes and global cooling are just an ideological smokescreen because the uncreatives behind these behemoths can imagine only one narrative path - that which ends in the reunification of the nuclear family. The slight difference with Godzilla Vs. Kong is that it takes this dictate of the Spielbergian concept film to hyperbolic depths. Brian Tyree Henry's wife is dead. Alexander Skarsgård's brother is dead. Shun Oguri's father is dead. Kaylee Hottle's entire family is (presumably) dead and Rebecca Hall has adopted her. Millie Bobby Brown is estranged and eventually separated from her father Kyle Chandler. Even Kong has a family he can get back to through some sort of portal in the Antarctic although, typical for such a shoddy screenplay, that idea is abandoned with no explanation. In this climate, evil father and daughter capitalists Demián Bichir and Eiza González are the villains precisely because their familial unit is intact. 

Fret not. Those two are dispatched and it's incumbent upon Skarsgård to make good on his kissing Hall early in the film (in front of a witness as all formations of the heterosexual couple must be) to form a de facto family at the end as the optics repeatedly demonstrate (see the final screen shot). As always, there's nothing inherently wrong with this narrative gambit. It's just an excruciatingly creaky one. Why can't Godzilla and Kong visit destruction on an artist collective? A cult? An apartment complex? Or if Hollywood drones cannot write human characters, then just get rid of them. Kong knows sign language now. He can teach it to Godzilla and bypass humans altogether. 

Grade: C (docked a notch for a sympathetic portrait of a podcaster espousing conspiracy theories)

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Robert Zemeckis, 1978)

I watched this comedy about Jersey teens trying to score tickets to see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show immediately after Some Like It Hot and it's the far more raucous film. And far more violent too! Zemeckis' teens are Merrie Melodies characters tossed about like so much cel animation. They fall off cars, jump from moving cars, jump into moving cars, crash into other cars, pile drive through other teens, tumble down stairs, get electrocuted, crash through glass, etc. I yelled out in horror several times, just like I did in the putative comedy The Long, Long Trailer (Vincente Minnelli, 1954). Much of this activity comes from the great physical comedian Wendie Jo Sperber and it's enough to mourn the richer career she deserved.

And there's something to the proceedings of the delirious irrational enlargement practiced by the Surrealists. This isn't just a function of inserting fictional characters into a real event but having one of those characters try to prevent that event from ever happening. Just imagine how history might have changed had a crazed greaseball managed to destroy the CBS transmitter thereby depriving millions of screaming to the Fab Four. Well, not much; the mania had long since conquered the USA and the Fab Four's appearance was meant to consecrate it. Nevertheless, I Wanna Hold Your Hand never takes a breath and, as such, is one of the most accurate representations of fandom on film. 

Grade: A

Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

I doubt I'd seen it since the 1980s so I couldn't even recall that it takes place in 1929. I definitely forgot how violent it is. And after the absurdly hilarious train berth scene (matching Preston Sturges in zaniness if not import), it's not all that funny. In fact, I assume Wilder moved beyond cross-dressing gags into a meditation on gender/sexual fluidity with the express purpose of getting under the skin of a mainstream 1959 audience. Osgood's (Joe E. Brown) classic final line is one thing but consider Joe (Tony Curtis) in full Josephine drag while wearing his Shell Oil Junior hat and glasses (itself a "false" costume) or Daphne (or is that Gerald?) (Jack Lemmon) almost imperceptibly growing affectionate toward Osgood. And consider that Psycho was just a year way. After all these years, still an exceedingly odd, disturbing film. 

Oh and Joe as Josephine was gorgeous!

Grade: A-minus

The film maudit - my favorite film genre!

J. Hoberman has a (mostly) terrific new piece in Sight & Sound on the film maudit, my favorite film genre ever! Translated literally from the French as a "cursed film," a film maudit is one that is "widely panned even as it is staunchly defended by a devoted minority." My real-time example of the film maudit process is Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995) which, as I never tire of proclaiming, I saw on opening night and deemed a masterpiece within ten minutes. But Hoberman dives into the long history of the genre including its origin in the Festival du Film Maudit, a counter-Cannes organized in 1949 by André Bazin and Jean Cocteau to showcase those films that in “their indifference to censorship and the demands of exploitation were cursed like the books of certain poets," as per Cocteau.

The gambit worked since many of the titles shown at the festival have long since passed on to masterpiece status: L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940), Les Dames du Bois de Bologne (Robert Bresson, 1945). But I know of no maudit energy surrounding The Flame of New Orleans (René Clair, 1941) beyond a brief, warm mention in Henri Agel's 1950 Hollywood Quarterly piece "What is a Cursed Film?" And I'm intrigued by the inclusion of Mourning Becomes Electra (Dudley Andrew, 1947), a three-hour adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play that always seemed like a slog to me but has suddenly risen near the top of my must-watch list, especially since Bazin considered it “the film maudit par excellence.”

But here's where the messiness of generic boundaries seeps in because Hoberman loses me in trying to define this genre. To my mind, there must be something of the preposterous to a film maudit. Thus, Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) and Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977), both masterful but sober, don't count, not even as rehabilitated films maudits just because they "suffer[ed] all manner of indignities before being hailed as national treasures." And then there's the matter of determining both the panning and the defending necessary for a film to become maudit. Hoberman claims Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne, 1970) "remains unredeemed." But he should check out David Scott Diffrient's 2013 Cinema Journal article "'Hard to Handle': Camp Criticism, Trash-Film Reception, and the Transgressive Pleasures of Myra Breckinridge" which details the film's redemption. And I know a vocal minority who hail Cats (Tom Hopper, 2019) as a masterpiece and "not just a titanic flop," even one Hoberman calls "ridiculous" as if such a designation weren't central to the maudit process.

Weirdest of all, Hoberman claims the genre is no more, a situation he blames on social media. Wondering if Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) might be the last film maudit ever, he concludes that "the net has fostered a cinematic counterculture capable of embracing, defending and blessing nearly anything." But that's always been true even during the era which Hoberman perplexingly labels "the great age of cinephilia (1945-2000)" (huh?). From "Charlton Heston is an axiom" to the Gay Girls Riding Club to the Psychotronic encyclopedias, plenty of energy has been expended on blessing all manner of cinematic detritus and it will continue to happen. Cats is proof of that. Cameron Crowe's 2015 fiasco Aloha might be too although I've yet to see it. I imagine there's a candidate ripe for mauditation among the nominees and winners of the Golden Raspberry Awards (there was a Basic Instinct 2??). For sure, M. Night Shyamalan has enjoyed the most maudit career of any mainstream Hollywood director this century with at least two fabulous films maudits, my beloved Lady in the Water (2006) and The Happening (2008), and one irredeemably awful movie, The Last Airbender (2010), to his name. His gripping new Apple TV series, Servant, is suffused with maudit energy, continually threatening to jump the shark but never yet doing so over the course of two seasons. As a panning and defending machine, the internet will keep all this maudit energy alive. 

Still, Hoberman's essay is a fantastic repository for the cursed and the adored that put my mind in overdrive. I should finally get to that Shelley Winters/Liberace entry South Sea Sinner (Bruce Humberstone, 1950). Was Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah, 1965) really maudit? I've never even heard of Kid Blue (James Frawley, 1973). And I should really watch my beloved Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968) again sometime soon.