Some Came Running

"2016: Obama's America"

Never get out of the boat: Dinesh D'Souza searches for the roots of Obama's "rage."

Last night, while many of you were watching what Badass Digest writer Devin Faraci, invoking The Simpsons, aptly characterized as "Old Man Yells At Chair," I was succumbing to what I can only call a morbid curiousity and checking out 2016: Obama's America, the documentary that made box office news last weekend by taking in sufficient millions of dollars that prior skeptics were compelled to sit up and take notice. I wish I had read a little more about the movie before I gave in to that curiousity; had I known that it's essentially Dinesh D'Souza pressing harder on the pedal to get more mileage out of the fumes of his 2010 Forbes article "How Obama Thinks" and its offshoot book The Roots of Obama's Rage, I could've saved myself twelve bucks. 

"Obama's rage," I love that. During what appeared to be an ad-libbed section of his speech at the Republican National Convention last night, Clint Eastwood said to a chair that was supposed to represent the President, "don't tell me to shut up." The general equanimity of Obama's public bearing may confound Eastwood into seeing things, but it doesn't in any way fool D'Souza, who finds much in Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father with which to damn his subject, including a passage in which Obama describes teaching himself how to be "nice." This is, indeed, a frank admission that a to-the-bone-politician would be too too savvy to make—that is, admitting that one learned how to be a politician. For the crime of having deigned to attempt something like literature, Barack has earned the most malevolent interpreter/deconstructor possible. Certain conservatives tend to sneer or smirk at psychological models used to explain behavior or inclination, but for the screen version of his thesis D'Souza applies a sort-of inverted Ordinary People/Good Will Hunting model and enlists a psychologist to explain how a largely ABSENT father can be an even stronger influence on a child than one who regularly participates in his child's upbringing.

I gotta tell you: aside from being somewhat ill-qualified to speak with absolute authority about some of the policy wonkery in this movie, I also have to admit that 2016: Obama's America really filled me in on some things about Obama's background. For one thing, I had NO IDEA that Barack's dad got around so much. On a journey to Kenya, D'Souza seeks out an Obama grandmother, or rather not REALLY an Obama grandmother: "just one of [Obama's] grandfather's five wives." As Dave Weigel astutely points out in his account of the film for Slate, D'Souza's thesis deftly avoids such obvious traps as going full birther. This doesn't mean it's not ridiculous, though.

Of course, with production value courtesy, at least in part, of Schindler's List co-producer Gerald Molen, D'Souza knits the various threads of ridiculousness together rather deftly. After an introductory section in which conservative pundit D'Souza limns all of the personal similarities between himself and Obama—it's like that whole Constantine angel-devil thing I guess—he starts in on naming all of the horrible things the anti-colonialist Obama is doing to transform Our Great Nation into an America So Weakened That It Cannot Lead. And his first item of busines is...wait for it...that stupid crap about Obama returning a bust of Winston Churchill to Great Britain. Talk about these-guys-are-from-England-and-who-gives-a-shit, literally! (See Jake Tapper's amusing unraveling of this bogus controversy here.) But wait. Did you know that Obama's also on Argentina's side in the conflict over the Falklands? And that he once sang "Shipbuilding" at a karaoke bar? (Okay, I made that last bit up, but it coulda happened.) Cinema allows co-director D'Souza to make connections in a more uniquely immediate fashion than print does, and in this section he takes advantage of this capability by inserting a soundbite from Obama describing one of his grandparents as "a domestic servant to the British." THOSE FUCKING LIMEYS I'LL SHOW THEM. No, D'Souza doesn't extrapolate EXACTLY that from his researches, but it's pretty close. Just as his depiction of Hawaii spares no rhetorical turn to paint that state as so mired in its own native "oppression studies" so as not to be a part of the U.S. of A. at all. 

I gotta hand it to D'Souza: his dog whistle is a really finely tuned instrument. Speaking of the relationship between Obama's mother and his stepfather Lolo Soetero, he says, "What attracted Ann to Lolo was that he was a Third World man, like [Barack Sr.]," which, let's face it, is much nicer than saying, for instance, that she had jungle fever. (Or saying something else, for that matter.) When interviewing  Obama's half-brother George, D'Souza, who mostly comports himself throughout in a soft-spoken, civil, considered manner, lets the mask drop a bit, coming on like a real condescending prick as he presses the blissed-out-looking Kenyan about how things really WERE better under colonialism. The phrase "White man's burden" is not uttered, and even if it had been, D'Souza has what he considers an automatic out: "I'm the same color as Obama" he demonstrates in a side-by-side forearm comparison. 

The elephant in the room, if you'll excuse the phrase, is the fact that the radical Obama has not, as his first term approaches its close, transformed the country into some kind of Stalinist-Sharia mashup. BUT THAT IS ONLY BECAUSE HE NEEDS MORE TIME. After invoking "the card-carrying Communist" Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers, and after Shelby Steele tells D'Souza via cell-phone conversation (you know shit's getting real in this movie when it cross-cuts between D'Souza and his interview subject speaking via phone) that Obama "was naturally born to bargaining" (just like, again, most competent politicians might be, only with Kenya-boy it's SINISTER), D'Souza explains that the problem is he needs more TIME. He then drags out arched-eyebrow pundit Daniel Pipes to complain that, sure, Obama DID commit more troops to the war in Afghanistan, but he wasn't SUFFICIENTLY ENTHUSIASTIC about doing so. The movie cuts away from the intense Pipes before he can discuss the fact that he saw an Islamist peeping out of his wife's blouse. 

The movie was showing in a theater in the rafters of a 25-house Times Square multiplex, number 23 it was; I think 24 and 25 were showing Kansas City Bomber and Trog respectively. Going down one of the fifty or so escalators to the street exit, I heard a short, buff bulletheaded man in his 30s explaining to his howitzer-busted Euro date that the movie's most salient point was that Obama got himself elected "while nobody was looking." For better or worse, I myself recall the dustups involving Obama's associations with Wright and Ayers playing out in a fair amount of detail prior to Obama's winning the 2008 election and/or taking office. Just like the closing of that GM plant in Jamestown Janesville did. 

A girl and a gun or maybe a grapefruit

From William Wellman's The Public Enemy, which is one of the Fifty Great Gangster Movies I chose for a gallery at MSN Movies. Apologies for the navigation and loading issues, as ever. 

The gallery's peg, or one of them, is John Hillcoat's Lawless, a bootlegging actioner that doesn't entirely transcend its Shia LaBeouf Problem but still provides a decent amount of bang, as I argue in my review.

Almost too easy

At the end of a post for Indie/CriticWire chronicling some "awkward moviegoing experiences," the ever-game Matt Singer asks readers if they  can "top" his anecdote about how he ill-advisedly brought his future in-laws to see Knocked Up. My answer is, yes, in a walk. Frenzy with my grandmother. When I'm twelve. I told the whole terrifying story here.  

Born 100 years ago today: Mr. Gene Kelly

From top: Summer Stock, Charles Walters, 1950; The Pirate, with Judy Garland, Vincente Minnelli, 1948; Words and Music, with Vera-Ellen, 1948, Norman Taurog and Robert Alton; It's Always Fair Weather, Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1955.

Imagine my relief

So I kind of liked Hit And Run. I'd say "So sue me," but it's not actionable. So there! My review for MSN Movies. 

The wrong man: Billy Wilder, "The Seven Year Itch," and Frank Tashlin (Updated)

I'm not really one for speculative film criticism, or concocting alternative histories of cinema, but I have to own up to a thought that hit me while checking out the new Blu-ray disc of The Seven Year Itch, the 1955 comedy directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. Which was that the film really would have been better off having been directed by Frank Tashlin than Billy Wilder. 

Wilder, who'd later direct Monroe much more effectively (albeit under much tougher circumstances for the star) in Some Like It Hot, allowed to Cameron Crowe that he did not number Itch among his favorites. He didn't go into much detail, but admitted that he was under loan to Fox at the time. And Fox was Daryl Zanuck's house, and Zanuck was, among other things, all about the Cinemascope. As much as I admire Rudy Behlmer's essential book Memo From David O. Selznick, I rather wish that he had been able to do an equally exhaustive job with his similar book on Zanuck, then maybe I'd able to formulate a more supportable theory pertaining to the executive's ideas concerning comedy and Cinemascope. But it seems to me that just as early non-comedic Cinemascope pictures were all about Biblical pageants and historical drama (a cursory look at the largely abysmal 1954 Desiree, with Marlon Brando a Napoleon, reveals that, aside from snakes and trains and funerals, Cinemascope was a natural for coronation sequences), even to the extent that Zanuck himself got sick of it (writing to Elia Kazan with respect to some pitches the director had been obliged to send Fox, Zanuck passed on Oedipus Rex and allowed that he was "personally" "fed up with material of this sort"), Cinemascope comedy (and to a lesser extent, musicals) for Zanuck spelled S-E-X. Which of course seemed a natural fit for Wilder, except, let's say, for those capital letters. 

Reviewing the Monroe Blu-ray set for the New York Times recently, Dave Kehr, never what you'd call a Wilder man, calls The Seven Year Itch "ugly and shallow" and notes disdainfully that Wilder "doesn't even bother to give her a name." This is not quite fair to Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with George Axelrod, adapting Axelrod's hit play. Itch came after two problematic pictures, Stalag 17 and Sabrina, and doesn't seem like a comfortable next step when looking at Wilder's filmography from an auteurist bent. Wilder told Crowe: "I was angry there." One wants to read a little more into that, but it turns out he was angry for a specific reason: he wanted a young actor named Walter Matthau for the part of the would-be errant husband, and Fox made him go with Tom Ewell, who, by Wilder's lights, "wasn't a bad actor[...][h]e was Tom Ewell." Wilder also wanted a scene that would make clear that the infidelity flirted with was actually committed. But no.

But there's also the matter of the broad allusiveness of Axelrod's farce, which, cinematically, Wilder approaches from a huge remove. The picture opens with a mock history of Manhattan which posits the "hunting season" for Native Americans once inhabiting the island was taken up by, um, squaw-hunting. The treatment of the "joke" is studio-flat:

Similarly, as Ewell is later reflecting on his own imagined magnetism, a reminiscence of a beachside tryst is rendered as a spoof of the then-infamous legs-together passion-in-the sand scene in 1953's From Here To Eternity; the most amusing visual signifier here is Ewell's Mack-Sennett-era swimsuit.

Wilder never made any bones of the fact that he became a director so that he could protect the integrity of his own scripts, and the visual interest of his films is inextricably tied to whatever cinematographer he was working with at the time. Some might argue that John Seitz deserved a co-director credit for Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Five Graves To Cairo, films he lensed for Wilder that happen to be among the director's most visually arresting. The Seven Year Itch was shot by Milton Krasner, hardly a slouch, but also someone who seemed to take his cues from the director, doing his best work with guys who were generally strong visually (Minnelli, Ray, Preminger). In any event, it's telling that the one pastiche scene that takes off is more of an overt character transformation than a pop-culture spoof. When Ewell's character imagines the effect that Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto will have on his potential conquest (it is an interesting sociological note that the petit bourgeois middlebrow of '50s NYC is painted as being conversant with classical music to the extent that it's a lingua franca, and that mainstream audiences are expected not to be alienated by this) the room darkens and Ewell turns into a gray-templed longhair while Monroe becomes a vamp whose vampiness is hammered into helplessness by the swoony notes. 

Later, when Ewell's character is confronted, in his paranoid fantasy world by gun-brandishing wife Evelyn Keyes (rather cruelly frumped up a mere four years after driving Van Heflin crazy with lust-rage in Losey's The Prowler), it seems as even the idea of giving the sequence some noir styling never even occured to Wilder and company. That sort of thing was just not his kind of comedy. Even the nudges togangster-picture genre conventions in Some Like It Hot were incorporated in an almost anti-pomo way. And when Wilder deploys some Vidor-quoting quasi-expressionism in the opening scenes of the widescreen black-and-white The Apartment, it's in the service of a pretty specific idea.

Which is not to say that Frank Tashlin's stylistic flourishes are empty. They are absolutely not, and in fact in a lot of cases they eventually serve the function of fleshing out the caricatures contained in his deliberately cartoonish movies. Kehr complains that Monroe is a "barely humanized set of body parts" in Itch, but then again, she's not a dislikable one. In any event, the one-dimensionality of Monroe's part can't be laid entirely at Axelrod's feet. Wilder told Crowe "the picture was good for the invention of that girl, The Girl who is always hot." In both The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? the oversized Jayne Mansfield is first made to serve that function in an exaggerated-beyond-credulity mode, AND revealed to be rather different from what he appearance suggests. It is no accident that both of those films represent the apex of the Fox Cinemascope-Technicolor comedies, which make it all the more frustrating that they don't figure in Behlmer's collection of Zanuck memos (Tashlin doesn't get a mention either.)  Where Wilder, as a default mode, kept character and dialogue at the forefront of his filmmaking, Tashlin's vision incorporated character and color and geometry in the same ball of energetically creative wax. The screen grabs from The Girl Can't Help It, in which an in-his-cups Ewell imagines ex-girlfriend (and client; he plays a music agent in the film) Julie London chastizing him with "Cry Me A River" will hint at the fluidity and vitality of what Wilder brought to his assignments. I certainly hope this film gets a Blu-ray treatment. (Speaking of which, the Itch screen caps are also from the standard-definition disc of the film; the new Blu-ray it quite an upgrade, and highly recommended). 

UPDATE: I was hoping these musings would kick up a good discussion, so I'm gratified that they have. I agree on the transcendent powers of Marilyn Monroe, and much else. I'm also glad to hear from my old friend Joseph Failla, who offers these thoughts:

For a better idea of how Tashlin might have tackled SEVEN YEAR ITCH,  why not take another look at SUSAN SLEPT HERE? Made a year before ITCH, SUSAN also incorporates the idea of an older man (Dick Powell) sharing his apartment with (in this case) a sexy teen (Debbie Reynolds), causing him endless frustration and turning his life upside down during her overnight stay. Although he's not married, he does have a sultry Anne Francis as his interfering girlfriend, adding even more pressure to his plight, rather than a non-present wife away on summer vacation as in Wilder's movie. 

I'm not unhappy with the way Wilder handled ITCH, although it may be a film that's better remembered than how it actually plays and the censors would have come down hard on anyone trying to make a film version of the original show. What I do like about it is how it clearly details what was really on most folk's minds regarding sex in the oppressive '50s. Everything seems to simmer in the summer heat, from the fans in motion, to the underwear placed in open ice boxes, until it spills over with Marilyn's more than suggestive bubble bath scene and the ever famous shot of her white dress billowing over the subway grating.

Incidentally, I did manage to see Walter Matthau's screen test for ITCH years ago on a television program promoting the film. As I remember, he was much more lively than Ewell, not sad or downhearted at all, if anything, he's overly giddy and self satisfied. Running up and down a staircase while managing a fair balancing act with a tray of items he's bringing to the girl waiting for him upstairs. He also worked that crick in his neck bit quite a lot, never missing a chance to bring attention to it. That said, this is one of those rare instances where Matthau can actually appear youthful in comparison to Ewell's droopy, wannabe rebel. 

Images of the day, 8/20/12

Meiko Kaji in Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Joshuu sasori: Dai-41 zakkyo-bô),Shunya Ito, 1972

Obey, oh boy

My review of Compliance for MSN Movies. 

Tony Scott, 1944-2012

The Hunger, 1982, with Ann Magnuson and David Bowie.

I can't pin down just when the rather obnoxious mythical litmus test about politicians in a race, that is, "which candidate would you rather have a beer with?" came into being, but I can say I'm glad it hasn't made its way too far into the realms of aesthetic/critical discussion; it did however, spring to mind a few hours into thinking about the late Tony Scott, who took his own life yesterday at the age of 68. Scott's movies tend to resist, almost violently, the notion of sentimentalizing the man who made them; on the other hand, quite a few of them are movies of a guy that a certain kind of movie-loving guy might actually LOVE to have a beer with, or, more to the point, go ATV racing across the Baja desert while carrying a kilo of cocaine and trying to shake off a squadron of speeding law-enforcement officials AND the posse of the mobster you stole the cocaine from in the first place. His best, most effective movies were not just about the adrenaline rush and physical excitement of the action itself but also about the kickiness of doing the wrong thing (albeit maybe for the right reasons) and better still, getting away with it. The opening scene of his 1983 feature The Hunger, for all its spooky portent and jarring cuts, fairly revels in the fact that everyone in it—vampire David Bowie, victim Ann Magnuson, imperious rock singer Peter Murphy of Bauhaus, et. al.—is getting off. There will be consequences, of course; we shan't see Ms. Magnuson for the remainder of the movie, for instance; but in the heat of the moment the dangerous play is the thing. 

Scott's technical facility and specific cinematic aesthetic was of course often put to use in the service of evil, or, as some once called it, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. As someone who began in advertising, Scott was accustomed to selling, and in my own more concern-trollish day, I found it pernicious that Top Gun so convincingly sold its melange of jingoism, macho, inverted misogyny, militarism, and so on. As Quentin Tarantino's analysis of the movie demonstrated, those qualities were arguably oversold in the movie, which makes it in a sense laughable, and in a sense kind of deep. When the selling is less successful, as in Days of Thunder, the result diminishes in enjoyable absurdity and increases in hatefulness. Sometimes there would be a seemingly odd match that turned out to be utterly apposite. I'm not sure what a Tarantino-directed True Romance might have been like, but I have an idea of what a Roger Avary-directed True Romance would have been like; it's called Killing Zoe, and, for whatever other virtues it has, it makes the conceit of the gorgeous hooker who falls in love with the geeky screenwriter stand-in look as ridiculous as it is; in True Romance Scott makes it work, just as he makes work the notion of that dreadlocked drug pusher played by Gary Oldman. Scott's energy and technical virtuosity makes ALL of the multiple geek wish-fulfillments of True Romance register like direct injections to one's pleasure centers. 

Some might argue that Scott was more effective, more engaging, more involving, when working with scenarios that were less outlandish; that the tense standoff between two different kinds of military personnel in Crimson Tide is more nominally convincing than a professional football player pulling out a revolver and actually shooting an opposing player in the middle of a game in The Last Boy Scout. But is one REALLY more plausible than the other? I'll let you decide. But where I finally came down on Scott was that he was a supreme kinetic fantasist with an ostentatious, nose-thumbing love of a form of vulgar philistinism. Which facilities and inclinations enabled him, say, to overheat the winking comic-book pyrotechnics of the arguably meretricious scenario of Domino with a straight face. 

In other words, he was a formidable cinematic showman, regardless of how gratuitous/redundant any given project of his might have seemed. And as such he was able to earn some critical respect; the Times' Manohla Dargis was never shy about her enjoyment of his vision, and the Scott respect in more hermetic corners of cinephilia is exemplified, alas, by this sentence from a review of Unstoppable by "The Ferroni Brigade:" " 'Oh yeah, Tony Scott—he's good,' says even Lav Diaz, currently residing in Vienna's Ferronian headquarters [...]" The thinking behind that "even" could fill volumes, but too bad the Ferronians would never be caught dead in a Hooters, as they really can't appreciate the Hollywood idealization of the joint that Scott hilariously commits in his variant of the train movie, the last film of his to see release. 

The blithe exuberance of this and so many other Scott touches seems to fly rather directly in the face of his suicide yesterday. I don't have any more information about the end of Scott's life than you do, and even if I did I'm no kind of diagnostician. All I know is that, like so much else, it's pretty terribly sad. 

Music writing, not-so-slight return, or, perhaps, "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here"

I take a gander at, or, more accurately, audit, the first twelve of a proposed sixty reissues of the work of Frank Zappa, and the narrative they tell us today, for MSN Music, starting here.