Welcome to Celluloid Jungle.
This blog is here for me to air and share my thoughts on film. I tend to watch all sorts of films. Even when I find a genre I dislike, I explore it until I learn to appreciate it. Some films, of course, are unlovable, but sometimes it’s necessary to watch them to remind oneself of how good other films are by comparison.
What films do I watch most? The number of times I’ve seen the original Star Wars trilogy is probably in triple figures by now. I realise this is by no means extraordinary given how many young imaginations were claimed by Lucas’s space epic, but the effect this has had on my psyche should be taken into account when reading my blog.
Like most eighties children, I grew up also liking Indiana Jones and Back to the Future. I think directors like Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis are successful because they try to appeal to their audiences on a very simple level. They know the recipe for simple happiness and they keep stirring in the main ingredients – familiar characters, extraordinary events, a sense of good and bad, a sense of adventure – until the credits roll. (I think that approach is fine, providing that the audience comprises children, but I hate films like Chocolat (Hallstrom, 2000) and The Green Mile (Darabont, 1999) that speak to adults like they’re a bit slow in the head.)
A lot of filmmakers have tried and failed to mimic the formula. Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) is a good example, but I’m not even sure that would have been a great film even if the script had been more than just a flurry of ‘witty’ one-liners.
I think it was the (overrated?) screenwriter William Goldman who once said in an interview that Spielberg knew a secret to storytelling that nobody else does. For some unspecified reason, he didn’t let on what it was. But we could do with some more confidants: there’s too much faux sentimentality preying on the Academy these days. While I don’t think this stifles originality (if someone has a great idea, it will find an audience), I do think it is a shame when creative genius passes us by unrewarded by the big boys. An Oscar can do so much for a career, and for self-esteem.
The widely touted possibility of Martin Scorsese winning Best Director for The Aviator (2004) annoys me intensely. I’ve seen 15 of his films and hold him in very high regard as a director, but the Oscar should go to Alexander Payne for Sideways (2004) because it’s a better film. Marty shouldn’t be upset by the Academy’s poor judgement in the past, nor should he allow them to placate him this year with an Oscar for a project that doesn’t deserve it.
I have tried to enjoy eighties Hollywood film as an adult, but on the whole I find that the high concept decade failed to deliver the goods. Rain Man (1988) and Amadeus (1984) are notable exceptions, the former because it has good characters and acting, and the latter because it’s a serious Milos Forman biopic set in another century.
Instead, I have become obsessed with the Hollywood of the seventies. Like most people who read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Peter Biskind), I already had a predisposition to gritty character films like The Godfather (1972), Taxi Driver (1976), and The French Connection (1971), but when I started looking closer I was alarmed at how much better the ‘last golden age of cinema’ was than anything we’ve seen before or since.
It is rare that I watch a film from seventies Hollywood that I do not enjoy. From the irrepressible futility portrayed in Five Easy Pieces (1970) to the sparkling ingenuity of Being There (1979), the decade is one shaped by people who can reasonably claim to be auteurs, who care about telling meaningful stories, who understand the importance of intelligent writing.
What I like most about seventies film is that it provided the unpretentious soil which this meaning and intelligence needed in order to grow. Old Hollywood always seems larger than life, desperate to show the audience something glamorous and dramatic, with all its screen divas and orchestral flourishes, and while people like that from time to time, I am more impressed by a filmmaker who creates a genuine character and gives insight into something that feels real than I am by a filmmaker who creates a snapshot image to be replicated Guevara-style for all eternity. Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth – I love you, you can act, and you have style, but on the whole your roles were pretty shallow.
Outside the US studios output, I have seen more than the average Joe, but probably less than the average critic. I’m crazy about Ingmar Bergman. Autumn Sonata (1978) is the best of the 23 Bergman films I’ve seen thus far. Although it is probably no coincidence that this, more than any of his other films, has a seventies counterculture feel to it, I am impressed at how Bergman’s films remain socially relevant and intriguing across the five decades they span. To Joy (1950) is a beautiful and delicate reward for those who suffered some of the melodramatic pulp offered in the forties, and The Silence (1953) is endlessly watchable and artistic without pretension.
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