Decline and fall

I just cancelled my subscription to Empire magazine. Here is the email that I sent them:

Hi Empire

I have been an Empire reader since 1995 and subscriber since 1997. But today I cancelled my direct debit.

My reasons:

1. You blur the lines between reviews and paid-for advertorials. It's difficult to know what sentiments are your own and what sentiments are included because they complement your advertisers' branding.
2. You want to be the world's biggest movie mag so badly that more editorial space is given to films that people want to read than films that are actually worth seeing. It's fine, of course, that you give your customers what they want, but your nine-page Fantastic Four features and multi-issue War of the Worlds extravaganzas compromise your credibility and isolate many of your readers.
3. You fancy yourself. Some of your writers are exceptionally good, but it troubles me that you write about them so often, and that you invent a reality TV-style competition where the ultimate reward is to join their hallowed ranks. I buy Empire to read about creative talent in the film industry, not to read about creative talent in journalism.
4. You tried to make Empire an interactive community-type thing, inviting and publishing readers' views for features like DVD Club. If you're unfamiliar with a director's work, hire some writers who know what they're talking about. Don't just tell us what we've told you -- why would we want to pay for that?

Best of luck for the future. I hope the Lord of the Rings nerds keep your magazine running for many years to come.

Kind regards

Robert Hayward

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Royal flush

Before Casino Royale, I was of the opinion that the Bond franchise had run its course and was just retreading a very tired formula. Die Another Day was just a greatest hits compilation, a film so intent on celebrating itself that it forgot about story and character. It had all of the gadgets, catchphrases and gimmicks that we have come to associate with Bond and none of the personality upon which the franchise was originally built.



Connery’s Bond benefited greatly from being the first. He could do as he wished and was not constrained by the audience’s preconceptions of the character. Although some people had read the books, few were so purist as to complain about Connery’s portrayal. He made the role his and he was a success. Then Roger Moore turned Bond into a light-hearted gadabout, Dalton was saddled with the cynical 80s and the Brosnan starred in a series of films that were more about explosions than espionage.

Neither Dalton nor Brosnan, despite his popularity, innovated with the character. Dalton was trying to play the hard-edged Bond from the novels and Brosnan, while he nailed the essence of the English gentleman spy, was essentially a boring character, just a vessel in which to carry and consolidate the baggage loaded upon him by the previous incarnations of 007. This failure is not the fault of the actors; it’s the fault of a studio that lacked inspiration and wanted to maintain a cash cow.

So it is good news that with Casino Royale, the suits saw that their Bond brand was waning and took a gamble with the franchise – appropriately perhaps, given the title of the film. Here, at last, is a Bond film with a talented leading actor, a good director and an great script that cares to look at our hero in some depth while regarding the familiar elements of Bond as inconsequential – there are no ridiculous gadgets, no naked dancers and no stupid one-liners. Casino Royale respects your willing suspension of disbelief right until the film’s climax, but even the money shot is fairly tasteful.

Once again, there is a reason for 007 to exist. He isn’t necessarily more exciting than Jack Bauer, or more mysterious than Jason Bourne, but Daniel Craig has a knack of making his characters seem real: his Bond makes Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt look like one of those old school Action Man dolls with the switch in the back of its head that makes its eyes move. The franchise is reborn; I look forward to Bond 22 with great interest.

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The rewatchables

The DVDs in my collection, and I suspect most people’s, fall into three main categories: 1) classics, 2) rewatchables and 3) classic rewatchables.

Classics
A film in category 1 isn’t really worth buying unless you’ve never seen it and it’s on sale for the cost of a rental disc. Citizen Kane and Raging Bull are awe-inspiring, but although you admire the way they are put together and you enjoy the story, the acting and the director and/or screenwriter’s vision, unless you study film they just don’t cut it as rewatchables. So rent them once and you’re done.



Few films, regardless of how masterful their creation, manage to escape the trappings of plot formula, and so they slip into familiarity and the high that they deliver dwindles by the fifth viewing, so the disc just sits forsaken on your shelf as an intimation of your good taste.

Some action films provide the adrenaline needed to endure repeat viewing, to give audiences a kick, but when much of the kick is dependent on suspense, something that is lost upon second viewing because the outcome of each moment of jeopardy is already known, the expertly choreographed sequences quickly lose their grip on our imaginations.

Rewatchables
Many of the films in category 2 – the truly rewatchable – are comedies. I think that humour is the thing that characterises the films that I most like to rewatch. Sure, some jokes quickly get old, but on the other hand there are many comic moments whose potency increases because they are anticipated. There are so many 'wait for it...' moments in the films that I like to rewatch.



I think this goes a long way to explaining why Shrek is such a world-beating DVD. It’s not the film as a whole that people like; it’s the funny little parts that make up the whole. It’s a rollercoaster comprised of funny episodes. I’m not a huge Shrek fan, but I understand its mass appeal in the DVD marketplace. My own favourites in this category include Kung Fu Hustle, the first Austin Powers, The Big Lebowski, the South Park movie, Airplane! and Shanghai Noon. These are not films that I would list to impress film geeks, but these are the discs that I reach for when I need a quick fix of home entertainment.

Classic Rewatchables
So what about category 3, the classic rewatchable? It’s difficult to assign films to this elite set; anything you put on that sacred podium is liable to be knocked off. Awards bodies dismiss films with prevalent rewatchable humour as ‘comedies’, implying that they’re not ‘proper film’. The films that do get a nod are those that are consistently amusing but where the humour is secondary to something more ‘meaningful’, whatever that means.

What do you think? Please leave a comment if any special movies spring to mind that are deserving of category 3 status.

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All mood and tone

I recently watched two films that are exceptional in that they are far better appreciated for their exquisite cinematography than for their slow-paced stories.

I had waited a long time for the chance to see each of the films. The wait for Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) was partly imposed on me by the film’s star, my personal hero Jack Nicholson, who selfishly sat on the Italian auteur’s masterpiece for decades but rereleased it in cinemas last year. But, as with the other film, Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005), The Passenger forced my cineaste mouth to water longer than anticipated for an additional reason: it wasn’t released in UK cinemas. (I had to import the Region 1 disc.)



Actually, as far as The New World is concerned, that’s not quite true. It found its way onto a few screens in the UK. But, if I remember correctly, I was unable to catch it on its release in Birmingham because Cineworld’s one and only screening took place at 10.00am. Who do they imagine has the time or inclination to watch a film at that time of day?

The New World, which tells the Pocahontas story with considerably more passion than Disney’s 1995 pukefest, was directed by the genius behind Badlands (1973) and The Thin Red Line (1998). It is Malick’s third film in as many decades. Emmanuel Lubezki was Oscar-nominated for its cinematography, which in itself is worth the audience’s time and money.

The film did not receive a nod from the Academy in any other category. Many of those who watched it would have you believe that it is a boring film in which drama is scarce. This, supposedly, is why I was the only person in the auditorium, watching a film that I would not have seen at all had I not stumbled across it at a cinema in Sweden.

But I think the reason for The New World’s commercial failure is more that it is brave enough to be what it wants to be: all mood and tone, instead of being tailored to any easily defined market segment. It has action scenes, but not enough to satisfy Bruce Willis fans. It has romantic scenes, but not enough to satisfy Meg Ryan fans. There are no laugh-out-loud comedy moments for Jack Black fans. It looks, sounds and feels historically accurate, but there is not enough dialogue to stimulate commentary from historians.



Some films have something for everybody; The New World doesn’t at all, but it has a very special peaceful tone and it is a remarkable feast for the eyes. The same can be said – more so, in fact – of The Passenger, a film about a man who tries to escape the confines of being himself by assuming the identity of a newly croaked lookalike. Despite this intriguing premise, the film is in no hurry to weave any formulaic yarns, and instead allocates plenty of time for its delicious lingering shots of Spanish hills and Saharan dunes. The characters are almost incidental. The film isn’t even accompanied by music. It finishes on an ambiguous note, but while the viewer is invited, by all means, to interpret its final scene in any way he or she chooses, the real point of the film is its visual tone. And it’s beautiful.

The New World was written in – and is the precious residue of – the 1970s, the decade in which audiences’ taste for arty European films like The Passenger both grew and subsided. It is a shame that the zeitgeist that cultivated films like these is long gone. For now, there does not seem to be a significant audience for films where tone is valued over story. I hope that younger filmmakers like Sofia Coppola can succeed in showing us on a grander scale what we have been missing.

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Cinemas vs cellphones

If they can get permission, US cinemas will start jamming cellphone reception during screenings. Read the full story here.



The implications for impudent teenagers? At present they don't go to the cinema because there's a film they want to see; they go to the cinema because have nothing else to do. They get bored quickly and they have no manners, so they call or text their friends after five minutes or so. They do this regardless of whether they paid to see the film or just snuck in halfway through it from another auditorium. Then, because they missed the start, and don’t care about the film anyway, they keep talking until the credits roll. So phone jamming would mean that impudent teenagers may stop ruining movies for everybody else. They may choose to go elsewhere to talk to their impudent friends.

The implications for film lovers? At present, they don’t often go to the cinema because impudent teenagers talk when they’re trying to concentrate on the film. If the impudent teenagers are elsewhere, they can return to cinemas and enjoy the big screens and sound systems they may not have at home. And it is possible that mature audiences will ask for mature programming – could this spell more intelligent drama and less remakes, sequels and films based on comic books and Disney theme park rides?

And the implications for cinemas and studios? With paying audiences returning to cinemas, they would start making some money. Not much, but some. Good luck to them.

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PR demystified

My latest piece of film yak is written specifically for people who work in technology marketing, so few Celluloid Jungle visitors are likely to find it of interest. I'm really sorry about the hiatus - I'll try to write something with a broader appeal sometime soon.



If, by happenstance, you work in B2B tech marketing, and Hollywood's portrayal of public relations consultants is exactly what you were hoping to read about at this very moment, then you are in luck. (And you astonish me.)

Read 'PR Demystified: Shattering Silver Screen Myths'

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Channel your quirk

We are treated to a lot of quirky cinema these days. There are directors who go out of their way to be peculiar, unpredictable, unconventional… And with good reason too, probably. "What," they probably ask themselves, "is the point in being a filmmaker if I do not bring something new to the world of cinema?" All the stories have been told before, so the only scope for originality lies in the way you tell them. You can’t escape the confines of your love story, your conflict story, your chase story, your trial story or your journey story, so instead you differentiate with weird images and weird actors behaving weirdly.



There is something not quite right about some of the quirky films churned out by the indie studios (excuse the oxymoron). The bone I have to pick is not with mainstream comedy; I can vent my frustration with Mike Myers and/or the Frat Pack another time. No – right now I have a problem with student-friendly quirkmongers Wes Anderson, Zach Braff (who wrote and directed himself in the lead role of Garden State), and David O Russell (who made I ♥ Huckabees).

Some pioneers of weird have entertained us wonderfully. Some of the most memorable moments in cinema are memorable because they are quirky. The frog storm in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) is a prime example. Other good quirk includes Napoleon’s day at the chicken farm in Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004) and pretty much the whole of Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971).

But, while some films use choice moments of quirkiness to sublime effect, others are saturated with quirk and serve only to confuse and irritate. Very little of the Huckabees script contributes to character or to story. As a political film, it doesn’t make (or even seem to try to make) a coherent argument, and as a philosophical piece it has very little to offer, barely scratching the surface of existentialism, which is supposedly the central topic of the film. In fact, most of Huckabees is redundant unless viewed as an exercise in redundancy.

It is quite amusing that, in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Anderson, 2004), the crew all wear the same bright red hats and blue uniform, but it strikes me that Wes Anderson is more interested in the concept of matching clothes (see also Bottle Rocket’s yellow overalls and The Royal Tenenbaums’ red tracksuits) than he is interested in telling us a story. Too much attention is paid to the micro and not enough to the macro. While I enjoyed the weird imagery in his latest film, that’s practically all that I can remember about it. The audience doesn’t take away anything substantial – just some interesting shots and some peculiar dialogue. You get the feeling that the Portuguese-singing David Bowie-playing acoustic guitarist is a gimmick to distract you from the realisation that the whole movie is empty of truth or meaning.

Please don’t get me wrong… While I think meaning is important, I don’t need it spoon-fed to me. Every filmgoer can bring and take away something to and from a movie that is different to what another filmgoer brings and takes away. There is a difference between ambiguity, where there are different interpretations of meaning, and empty quirk, where there is no meaning at all.



It’s difficult to criticise quirkiness without seeming like a conservative bore, but I genuinely feel that a lot of the quirkiness in modern film is misplaced, and displaces the creative thinking that the filmmaker could otherwise have conceived. In some ways, the ambition to make something quirky stifles the creative process, rather than stimulating it.

Is creativity the process of unleashing the imagination to present a montage of randomness? Or is it the process of viewing situations from different perspectives and connecting ideas to make them whole? I think the argument for the latter is stronger. Creativity needs a framework. It needs to be harnessed, and the results of creative thinking need to be relevant to something. If you let your imagination run loose, it is possible that you will explore some interesting ideas, and maybe even some absurd ones, and while that’s probably good for your brain, and might lead somewhere, it’s easy to lose sight of what you were trying to achieve in the first place.

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Tea and popcorn

A perennial of film journalism here in Britain is the special feature evaluating the success of home-grown talent in the movies. At least once a year, every British film magazine and broadsheet culture supplement has a ‘special’ issue wherein they list the biggest British stars and/or discuss the most successful British films, perhaps with a Ewan McGregor interview somewhere and a few ‘hot new talent’ profiles thrown in for good measure.



The results are invariably depressing for us ‘plucky’ Brits, leaving the reader to conclude that the British film industry is in decline and has been for many years. As a matter of fact, in a recent interview with Empire magazine, The Office star Ricky Gervais cited that all British films are “shit” as his reason for turning them down.

Officially, a British film is one made with British money. Of the few major feature films that are funded with British money, most are filmed in Britain with predominantly British casts and tell stories about British characters. Using this definition, Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996) is probably Britain’s greatest critical success of the last decade. But while Trainspotting was a good film, it’s only life-changing if you’re a reformed junkie or you desperately liked the soundtrack and poster.

Because our little island is often clouded over, our architecture and landscapes far from exotic, and our road infrastructure littered with the graffiti-like excess of our government’s road markings, there isn’t much artistic scope for films made with British money. So we settle for gloomy realism and Mike Leigh films. In the last ten years, we have endured a glut of rags-to-riches tales, usually set in the North of England, which follow a painfully familiar and worn formula: Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000), Little Voice (Herman, 1998), Brassed Off (Herman, 1996), The Full Monty (Cattaneo, 1997). Perhaps the optimism in these stories is necessary to deter audiences from suicide. When tripe like Love Actually (Curtis, 2003) is considered a British triumph, and Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004), an amusing but unremarkable zombie comedy, wins Best British Film at the Empire Awards, it’s easy to see where Ricky Gervais is coming from. British films really are shit.

However, when examining the extent of Britain’s contribution to film, it is a big mistake to overlook how heavily British talent is involved in films that aren’t made with British money and don’t focus on British characters. There is a distinction to be made between screen personalities who are famous for being British (the bumbling Hugh Grant, for example) and versatile screen personalities who just happen to be British (like Helena Bonham Carter and the underappreciated Minnie Driver). Playing American characters, Hugh Laurie – of all people – is striking US television ratings gold in House, and Damian Lewis was the standout of the Band of Brothers cast.



As the Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina segment of Coffee and Cigarettes (Jarmusch, 2003) highlights, the US – and not London – is the place to be for aspiring British actors. Surely it makes more sense to regard Hollywood as the film capital of the world than it does to regard it as the film capital of the US. Its key players come from all over the world. Its locations are international. Its stories span different times, cultures and places that often have nothing to do with the US and its brief history.

Having said that, it should be noted that Britain probably has more to be proud of as a movie nation than any other country. With about a fifth of the population size of the US, Britain has given the world what many would consider to be its greatest director (Alfred Hitchcock), its most prestigious actor (Laurence Olivier), its greatest screen hero (Cary Grant), its greatest performer (Charlie Chaplin), its most versatile actor (Gary Oldman), its greatest villain (Alan Rickman) and, well, Peter Sellers to boot.

We British people complain about Americans stealing our legends and making them American. There are two things that we are forgetting. Firstly, we should be flattered that our stories are the ones worth telling, and that our personalities are the ones worth hijacking. It is a compliment to Michael Caine that Alfie (Gilbert, 1966), The Italian Job (Collinson, 1969), and Get Carter (Hodges, 1971) all received a Hollywood makeover in the last five years, even if all three remakes were practically as feeble as the originals. Secondly, it is with smug self-satisfaction that we can watch this summer’s Batman film: aimed at resuscitating one of America’s greatest franchises, it is directed by a Brit (Christopher Nolan) and stars a Brit (Christian Bale) in the leading role.

Who cares if John Constantine, a virtually unknown British comic book hero, has been corrupted as a Keanu Reeves vehicle? Batman is British! And so are Gandalf, James Bond, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Hannibal Lecter. Who, one wonders, is the rest of the world left with?

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Chaplin on charlie

The other day I saw my very first Charlie Chaplin film. In my ignorance, I had never imagined that his films would appeal to anyone from my generation, or indeed the one that preceded it, so I was pleasantly surprised by the warmth, humour and intelligence that appeared before me on the screen.



I tend to avoid slapstick because most things that a human can do can be tuned to perfection or wildly exaggerated in cartoons or in computer animation. Unless a filmmaker is aiming for realism, or has actors whose faces portray the finest nuances of mood, there is no significant artistic reason – and budget isn’t artistic – why that filmmaker shouldn’t make an animated film. Perhaps an exception can be made for genuine stuntmen and martial artists like Jackie Chan, whose work astounds because he persistently stretches himself to physical extremes.

Most slapstick seems contrived. What’s Up, Doc? (Bogdanovich, 1972) didn’t bring a smile to my face, but then again, there would be cause for concern if a film starring Barbra Streisand did elicit that reaction. Home Alone (Columbus, 1990) was funny, but mainly because the viewer likes to see the bad guys getting punished for picking on a defenceless kid – the punishment was inventive, but the spectacle was fairly straightforward. The work of the Farrelly Brothers amuses me, but more because the dialogue is funny than because the characters do silly things or are put in farcical situations. It’s often best to leave slapstick for the lowbrow morons who sit down to watch home video compilation shows featuring people who hurt themselves accidentally.

But Chaplin can move. There is an elegance to his antics that is missing from most slapstick. In Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936), he roller-skates in a department store, prances balletically around a factory, and runs wild on a generous dose of cocaine (that he didn’t mean to take). The highlight of the film, however, is his famous ‘nonsense song’, the only time in Chaplin’s career that the audience is subjected to the Little Tramp’s voice. It isn’t a triumph for its novelty value alone: his singing voice is funny, the way he moves is funny, and his facial expressions are funny. There is a difference between a performer and a bumbling idiot. Chaplin was a performer, and we need more like him.

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Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson is my favourite actor. He might not be the best actor on the planet (De Niro, perhaps?), but he is colourful, he has integrity, and he is far more versatile than most people give him credit for. (Most people just see the eyebrows and the grin, and never explore his more interesting films.)



Out of sheer fanaticism, I have sat through 35 of Jack's films. Of the 22 that I haven't seen, there are very few titles that the layman will recognise. So, with pretension to being something of an expert, I thought I'd list ten that I think everyone should see:

Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Jack’s best role, and because I like Jack so much, it’s my favourite Jack movie, even if the story of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest has a more obvious appeal. Jack plays the man who doesn’t belong, better than he does in any other film.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
McMurphy vs. Ratched is the greatest character conflict of any film ever made. This is a wild and unpredictable Jack, but also one who acts well and brings forth emotional flavour from the source material.

Chinatown (1974)
Intricate plot, cool noir-ish style, attention to detail, Jack being cool and vulnerable at the same time in a serious movie… this is as good as it gets, not that phoney James L Brooks trash he made with Helen Hunt.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)
For hardcore Jack fans only, this isn’t crowd-pleasing iconic ‘Here’s Johnny’ hysteria. This is a thought-provoking character-driven art house film that deserves far more recognition than it has received.

The Last Detail (1973)
Combine the wild and unpredictable Jack with a razor sharp Robert Towne (Chinatown) screenplay and this is what you get. Jack is almost as funny and vociferous as he is in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

About Schmidt (2002)
Character deviation for the great man here, proving he can play an old loser as well as he plays a young rascal. Career-wise, this was a step in the right direction.

The Pledge (2001)
Another good recent role. A solid thriller without any superficial nonsense, this film focuses on Jack in a darker and more subdued role than those to which he is accustomed.

Anger Management (2003)
Stupid and contrived, but extremely funny. Jack lets rip in this one, working his inventive lexicon and facial quirks to full effect. Jack owns this movie: Sandler looks bland by comparison.

Carnal Knowledge (1971)
Male chauvinist slimeball Jack in its infancy. (For more of that, see pretty much any of his eighties movies.) While his character is entertaining on the surface, a sad emptiness lurks beneath. A strong early performance.

The Shining (1980)
The film is as good a showcase of Kubrick’s imagery as any, but it’s not as scary as people make out. The blood in the elevator, the crumbling old woman, and other bizarre images are frightening. Jack is good at being insane, but he’s Jack, so it’s more funny than scary.

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Lame Academy

While I am not surprised that Million Dollar Baby (2004) took Best Directing and Best Picture at the Oscars this year, I can’t conceal my disappointment at Sideways (2004) having to settle for Best Adapted Screenplay, or indeed at Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) having to settle for Best Original Screenplay.

To me, there is no logic behind the Academy’s voting. A screenplay is a blueprint for a film, a set of instructions that, if followed properly, reap the visual reward imagined by the screenwriter. Any director worth his salt – and without exception, all directors who are given millions of dollars to make a Hollywood movie – are capable of using actors, cameras, and editing to execute these instructions, of realising the screenwriter’s vision.

Therefore, for the Best Picture award and the Best Writing award to be won by different movies, the message to the world is that, for better or for worse, the director of either movie did something out of the ordinary with the blueprint. Now, if Best Picture had been won by a film with remarkable special effects, camerawork, and acting beyond the scope of the screenplay, I would be able to follow such a judgement. I would understand, for example, if a Star Wars film ever won Best Picture but failed to win Best Writing. Lucas’s contributions to the visual art of filmmaking are quite astonishing, and should be recognised in this way in spite of his awful dialogue.

But when Best Picture is won by a film that isn’t a spectacular feast for the eyes, where the (admittedly very capable) director was just going through the motions of a character drama, it becomes apparent that logic has escaped the Academy. Of course, Million Dollar Baby is a very good film, but it is no better a specimen of a film than its screenplay is a specimen of a screenplay. It is an insult to Alexander Payne’s ability as a director that Sideways failed to win Best Picture despite having the best blueprint from which to make a picture. It is a huge compliment that Clint Eastwood’s film was considered the better of the two, despite being worked from a blueprint that the Academy considers inferior. Neither the magnitude of Payne’s insult, nor that of Eastwood’s compliment, is logical or deserved.

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Introduction

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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