So Bad It Will Probably Win

I am not referring to Donald Trump's campaign. I am referring to a film that has been nominated for the Academy Award "Best Picture" which could actually be almost as bad as last year's horrible Birdman, a film mentioned on this blog some months before.

The horrid film in question is called The Revenant.

It’s too bad it’s not: That would have made for a more interesting movie. The Revenant is better than morose Iñárritu dreck like 21 Grams and Biutiful, and it’s certainly better than last year’s Birdman, a preening, petulant mess about how difficult it is to make great art (as though Iñárritu’s own filmography wasn’t testament to this). Even the best thing about The Revenant is maddening: It is one of the most visually stunning studio films in recent memory, with long takes winding through dusk-dappled woods, seemingly impossible shots of men floating through whitewater rapids and horses falling off cliffs. (The extraordinary Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is poised to make history by winning his third straight Academy Award for this film, and the honor would be deserved.) All this useless beauty, in service of obscuring a lazy screenplay and aggressively dimensionless characters.

I am not sure I am going to rent it. I may decide to take a pass on this one.

Love and Mercy

I finally got around to watching the film based on the psychological struggles of Brian Wilson, the creative backbone of the Beach Boys, called Love and Mercy. My sister enjoyed the film when she saw it in the theaters this past summer, so when it came out on DVD, I decided to rent a copy.

In some ways the film was confusing as it went back and forth from around the time Wilson and band were recording the album Pet Sounds, an album that is slightly overrated in my view because it was one of those "concept" albums trying to compete with the Beatles' equally overrated Sgt. Pepper, and the period of the 1980s, when Wilson was under the clutches of one Dr. Eugene Landy, one of the biggest assholes of the twentieth century. He was a complete and total quack. The Beach Boys tended to attract a lot of assholes--some would argue they even HAD assholes in the band meaning Mike Love, who doesn't come off all that great in the movie, but people know he has a tendency toward liking money and being weird. Since Brian Wilson and his current wife Melinda were involved with this film, the information in it is pretty much on the mark about Wilson's story. It is Wilson's story about his mental breakdown and his trying to get his life on track--this is not a movie about the Beach Boys. The other brothers and bandmate Al Jardine hardly register a blip in the story.

In defense of Mike Love, he was involved in collaborating with Wilson, and therefore he was due a share of the royalties of many of their hits. He had to sue Brian because the real asshole responsible for screwing him over--and all of the Beach Boys, for that matter--Murry Wilson, father of the Wilson boys--was long dead. Apparently Brian has no ill will toward Love, and vice versa. In fact, I don't think Wilson has a mean bone in his body. I think he might even be too forgiving of people who wronged him like his father and Landy, or maybe he feels there is no point now that they are long dead to hold a grudge. The fact Brian Wilson is such a good person is why he was so screwed over and so troubled so much of his life. I am glad he is on track now. His wife Melinda has a lot to do with it.

Anyway, the actors in the film look nothing like the real people. I was willing to suspend disbelief in that. The depiction of Melinda Ledbetter Wilson was more along the lines of Teresa Wright in the 1942 film classic Pride of the Yankees than the real Melinda, who is VERY no-nonsense in interviews. It is clear who is in charge in the Wilson household, and it ain't Brian. Melinda in the film is much more passive, more patient and understanding, where the real one I don't believe puts up with any b.s.

Anyway, I enjoyed the picture although there was almost nothing in the film I didn't already know. I say "almost" because I didn't know Murry Wilson had gotten revenge of sorts when the Beach Boys had fired him, and he turned around and had a Beach Boy knockoff hit with a Beach Boy knockoff group called The Sunrays. The song was "I Live For the Sun," a record I remember well but had forgotten about it for years until it appeared in this film. It sounds more Jan and Dean-like or Four Seasons-like than Beach Boys, but it is still good after all these years:



The group had only a couple of hits then they went their separate ways.

Anyway, the film merits a three-and-a-half out of five stars. The music is worth it, much of it from actual Beach Boys tapes.

Worst Film to Ever Win "Best Picture" Oscar?

Watching this year's Oscar winner Birdman was a waste of two hours of my precious life, but it wasn't a total waste because I was working out on the kettlebells, resistance bands, and free weights while trying to endure it.

About the only thing notable about this film is in the technique director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu used, and that is to use the camera in such a way that the film looks like it was shot in a single take. However, this technique is nothing new. Alfred Hitchcock employed it in 1948 in the far-superior  Rope, which unlike Birdman took place in real time.

I guess the plot of this lousy picture is that a one-time successful actor tries to revive his career and his life by putting on a Broadway play or some damned thing. It's hard to make heads or tails out of it because the thing tries to go in all kinds of different directions and goes absolutely nowhere. You get a lesbian scene out of nowhere, you get an attempted rape onstage for no reason at all, and obscenities are spewed all over the place I suppose to try and pad this pic to 119 minutes.

Some have said this picture was created for art houses, where artsy-fartsy filmmakers get their masterpieces seen by artsy-fartsy film critics, who in turn try and con the general public into thinking these artsy-fartsy pictures are worth paying out major bucks to see. That's probably why Birdman won the Oscar, to try and get the public to see it and get it to make money.

What a waste of talented actors like Michael Keaton. What a waste of film.

Many people think that 1952's The Greatest Show on Earth, a film I have seen and have on DVD,   is the worst ever to win Best Picture, but I am afraid Birdman  deserves that distinction.  There may be worse films that won Best Picture, for I haven't seen all of them, only most of them, but this is far worse than any of them I have seen so far. It isn't one of those movies that is so bad it's good.  There is not one redeemable feature about it.   It is pure torture.

One-half star out of five.

"Boyhood"

Every now and then on this blog I will review a book or a film or a television program, regardless of when it was made or written. Last night I rented a video of the 2014 film Boyhood, which had been nominated for a few Oscars last month.

It is a simple coming-of-age story, tracing the life a boy from age 6 to age 18, when he graduates from high school and begins college. The main draw for this film is the rather novel approach of the director, Richard Linklater, to film it over a period of a dozen years with the same actors, beginning in 2002, thus the characters age naturally. In almost all other films, if there are child characters who later age to adulthood in the film, two or more sets of actors have to be employed, while any adult actors who are supposed to age during the course of the film are simply made up to look older. I like this technique in this movie even though it risks the film being somewhat disjointed.

Boyhood is well-acted and well-made. I also enjoyed the Texas locations.

The only objections I have to it are too many obscenities spouted by the actors--not everybody uses the "f" word in casual conversation--and that the film was at least 45 minutes too long.

VERY few films should ever run much over two hours in length. At that point, as a filmmaker, you should shit or get off the pot, to use a casual obscenity. Unless the film is Gone With the Wind or a handful of other epics, don't do it.

In the old days of film, back in the 1930s and 1940s, most feature films ran about 90 minutes in length, give or take. That was to enable theater owners to run double features. Furthermore, within the shorter length, the films were paced much faster than they are today. A college instructor I had for a film class called it the "meter" of the film. Even and especially GWTW moved very quickly so that people stayed with it until the end of the nearly four-hour film. The pacing of motion pictures 70 or 80 years ago is yet another reason I think they were better overall than the films of today.

As for Boyhood, I give it three-and-a-half stars out of five.

I Don't Know Why "Serious" Biographers Peddle Urban Legends

One of the five books--real books, not downloads on Kindle, since I love to skip around on non-fiction titles and read out of sequence--I am reading is a biography I got the other day about the Hollywood star and dancer Vera-Ellen (1921-1981). The title of the book is called Vera Ellen: The Magic and the Mystery. Since I started the book near the end which talked about her tragic final years of losing her baby to SIDS and living a life of seclusion as a result, I am not sure where the mystery about her is. Everybody who knew her never had a bad word to say about her and remembered her as a very kind, thoughtful person. Onscreen she always had a impish quality about her and was cute as a button. Of course she was an extremely talented, extremely dedicated dancer almost and perhaps to the point of being downright anal about it. She pushed herself so hard she likely ruined her health because of the weird eating habits she supposedly had (and to this day are still common among dancers) to keep her weight low and most likely suffered from anorexia in the years before it was commonly known to the public. She died of cancer in 1981, aged only 60.

Vera-Ellen made very few films in her career, a total of 14 in all. Her best known films remain 1949's On the Town and 1954's White Christmas. Unfortunately for her, the Hollywood musical declined by the end of the fifties, and here she was still in her thirties and could still dance up a mean streak. There just wasn't enough for her to do, so she married a second time to a Rothschild (who wasn't all that rich) and had a baby daughter when she was 42 (old back then) who unfortunately died at three months of age.

She was as talented a dancer as anybody who ever appeared in films. There is no question of it. She could dance any type of dance and could easily keep up with the likes of Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. The sad thing is she is little remembered today, but she should be.

Anyway, getting to the urban legend. This biographer, David Soren, still peddles the easily debunked story of Vera-Ellen's neck. The legend goes that Vera-Ellen always kept her neck covered once she started displaying signs of anorexia because she had basically what is known as a turkey neck. The neck covering was most noticeable in White Christmas where it was obvious she was extremely thin and frail. The story goes that if a woman suffers from the effects of anorexia, it prematurely ages the body, especially the neck. Vera-Ellen was so self-conscious about it, the story goes, she had all of her costumes and clothes designed to hide this hideous deformity or always wore chokers or necklaces to somehow deflect attention away from it. Of course one of the reasons women wear chokers or necklaces is to ATTRACT attention to the neck, but why get in the way of a good story?

Unfortunately for the urban legend, there are pictures and film footage of her taken around the time of White Christmas that plainly show her neck was normal. Now she might have had a tiny scar on her neck she wanted to hide, or she thought her neck was too skinny, or perhaps she liked high collars, but whatever the reason, the turkey neck explanation ain't it.

I still think the book is okay, but if you are going to be a serious biographer, you can't be peddling urban legends. He probably shouldn't try to psychoanalyze her, either.

In case there are readers who don't know who I am talking about, here's Vera-Ellen in one of her most famous numbers, "Naughty But Nice" from the 1952 film The Belle of New York:

Thinking About Pre-Code Films

One of the reasons I haven't blogged much around here in recent days, other than there not being much in the way of news during the holiday season, is because I have been downloading to flash drive or watching DVDs I have bought of vintage "pre-code" (1929-1934) films of which I am a huge fan. There are a lot of films out there, literally hundreds, if not thousands, of them. The movies tackled topics that would be barred when the silly Hays Code took effect later in 1934. Not that films during the studio era weren't good AFTER the code was put in, as it did force filmmakers to be more clever in order to evade the censors. However, before that time they didn't have to work too hard to put in adult or controversial themes.

I have a ton of DVDs bookmarked for purchase (provided I ever get out of poverty) from Jeff Bezos's site that cover the pre-code era. I have managed to buy a few in recent months. One I just received a few days ago was one from Universal, and the print quality of all of the films is so good, the films look like they were made yesterday. I started watching them the other day, watching them in bed, so it may take one or two days to get through each of them.

The first one I started with was one with Tallulah Bankhead in the remake of the 1915 DeMille film, The Cheat, the latter which made villain Sessue Hayakawa a major star. That film still holds up despite some racial stereotypes common back then (remember this film is almost 100 years old--hard to believe). The original also starred Fannie Ward and her real-life husband, Jack Dean, who played her husband in the film. I don't know how true it is, but Ward apparently was quite the diva in real life. She was already in her early forties when she made this film, but she looked quite a bit younger. Her ability to have held onto her looks before modern cosmetic surgery was one of her major claims to fame. Because Ward was quite the bitch in real life, Hayakawa evidently couldn't stand her. Maybe that's why they played off each other so well; the branding scene looked pretty damned realistic. Hayakawa may have wanted to shove that branding iron or whatever it was down her throat.

Anyway, here is the upload of the original. I had this film on VHS, but I will have to get around to getting the DVD of it one of these times:




The plot was too dated by 1931 to work as a remake, but Universal gave it a shot. Bankhead was and is always worth watching. She played a spoiled rich woman whose excesses spell trouble and did it well, but her co-star Irving Pichel, who looked a bit like Paul Muni (and at first I thought it WAS him), was too colorless to play the villain. Moreover, the plot just didn't ring true with the villain now being an art dealer obsessed with Japanese culture to the point he wanted Bankhead dressed like a Japanese woman to fulfill some sick fantasy of his. At least in the original you had a Asian actor play the part of an Asian (though the character went from a Japanese ivory merchant in the original release to a Burmese one in the 1918 reissue after the Japanese community complained about stereotyping). It just didn't come off quite as well in the remake. Still, it is worth seeing for Bankhead, and the print is absolutely fabulous. It must have been struck from an original negative. The print quality is in brand-new condition; you'd never know the film was made 83 years ago.

Etc.

Obituary: Patty Heart's husband, Bernard Shaw, 68, has passed away after a long battle with cancer. They were married for 34 years.

"For three decades, Bernie served Hearst Corporation with loyalty and distinction," Steven R. Swartz, president and CEO of Hearst Corporation told Connecticut's NewsTimes. "All of us are grateful for his long tenure and friendship. He will be greatly missed."

It was no ordinary love for Shaw and the newspaper heiress-turned inmate, who is now 59. The pair met at San Francisco's Top of the Mark restaurant the day after Hearst was released on $1.5 million bail in 1976 for robbing a bank. She was convicted later that year, and Bernard drove 60 miles from his home near San Francisco four times a week to visit her in confinement in Pleasanton, Calif.

As I remember, he served as her bodyguard before the relationship turned romantic.

This coming February will mark the 40th anniversary (!) of Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
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Harlan Ellison shouldn't cast stones, I'm afraid. He still needs to answer for his work as a screenwriter for the 1966 turkey The Oscar.
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Etc.

A teacher reviews the worst picture of the year.
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Obituary: New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, 86, has died.

Mr. Sulzberger’s tenure, as publisher of the newspaper and as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Company, reached across 34 years, from the heyday of postwar America to the twilight of the 20th century, from the era of hot lead and Linotype machines to the birth of the digital world.

The paper he took over as publisher in 1963 was the paper it had been for decades: respected and influential, often setting the national agenda. But it was also in precarious financial condition and somewhat insular, having been a tightly held family operation since 1896, when it was bought by his grandfather Adolph S. Ochs.

By the 1990s, when Mr. Sulzberger passed the reins to his son, first as publisher in 1992 and then as chairman in 1997, the enterprise had been transformed. The Times was now national in scope, distributed from coast to coast, and it had become the heart of a diversified, multibillion-dollar media operation that came to encompass newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations and online ventures.

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Early presidential endorsement: The Dallas Morning News has come out in support of the beleaguered Mitt Romney with reservations:

Candidate Obama, an orator of great skill and cadence, might have overcome everything and put the U.S. on a brighter path. President Obama, unfortunately, fell short of the challenge. The wars have largely faded from headlines, but the economic struggles remain, along with an attendant worry about future federal spending, deficits and debt.

Obama’s Democratic supporters would argue that no one could have succeeded in what he inherited, that the nation’s problems were far more severe than anyone could handle in four years.

We respectfully disagree. On the central issue that will define his presidency — a stalled U.S. economy weighed down by crushing annual deficits and accumulated debt — Obama showed himself to be less leader than follower. While he expended his political capital on new government programs, unemployment stayed at debilitating heights.

For that reason, this newspaper recommends Republican challenger Mitt Romney for president.

Backing Over a Cliff

At least one reviewer sat through the anti-teacher propaganda film Won't Back Down so that the rest of us don't have to.

Of course he is being paid to review this fantasy film:

As presented in this script (written by Barnz and Brin Hill), the Pittsburgh teachers’ union has no goal beyond protecting the status quo at all costs, and no interest whatever – no altruistic interest, no self-interest and no public-relations interest — in improving the quality of public education. Most people still understand, I believe, that teachers work extremely hard for little pay and low social status in a thankless, no-win situation. But this is one of those areas where conservatives have been extremely successful in dividing the working class, which is precisely the agenda in “Won’t Back Down.” Breeding hostility to unions in themselves, and occasionally insinuating that unionized teachers are a protected caste of incompetents who get three damn months off every single year, has been an effective tactic in what we might call postmodern Republican populism, especially in recent battles over public employee contracts in Wisconsin and elsewhere. It works something like this: 1) Turn the resentment and frustration of people like Jamie – people with crappy service-sector jobs and few benefits, whose kids are stuck in failing schools – against the declining group of public employees who still have a decent deal. 2) Strip away job security and collective bargaining; hand out beer and ukuleles instead. 3) La la la la, tax cuts, tax cuts, I can’t hear you!

Goebbels couldn't have done a better job making a movie.

There are ads all over the place trying to get the gullible to pay their hard-earned money to watch this swill.

Like Watching Paint Dry

In these times of being broke, I have checked out a few DVDs from the local libraries. One of them that I checked out was the 1973 film American Graffiti, which has to rank as one of the most overrated movies of all time. Not only is it overrated, but it is so out of whack in terms of cars, music, Wolfman Jack, and just about everything else. This movie drives me crazy because there is NOTHING that even approaches authenticity. It's like looking at a Revolutionary War movie and seeing the soldiers wearing wristwatches.

Granted, 1950s cars were still on the road in 1962 and driven by teens, but they weren't restored cars like these were, cars that could have appeared in Reno's Hot August Nights celebration or at Harrah's car collection. By the 1970s, collectors were getting interested in the classic fifties models, and so more and more these cars were being collected and restored. The cars should have looked far more worn in this movie to look realistic enough to be owned by high school students. There should have been more early sixties model cars in the flick to add to the realism.

And then there was the music. I heard only a couple of songs on the soundtrack that were actually recorded during the years of 1961-1962; the vast majority of them were strictly fifties numbers. Kids in 1962 were listening to the current hits and less on the oldies; in fact, there weren't actually oldies stations out there on the AM dial. Top 40 hits were the rule then. The least George Lucas could have done was write to Billboard (since there was no such thing as the internet at the time) for a list of the top hits of 1961 and 1962. For that matter, Wolfman Jack is out of place in this film, for he wasn't even on the West Coast, and nowhere near Modesto but near the California-Mexican border, until 1963. This was the beginning of his famous reign as the king of oldies radio at XERF, later XERB. I used to listen to him religiously in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which by then he was nationally and internationally known. Therefore, most of the music is out of place for the time depicted in the film. The early sixties was the era of the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys ("Surfin Safari" and "All Summer Long"--released in 1964--were used in the film), the girl groups, Chubby Checker, and many other acts that Lucas could have used for the soundtrack had he bothered to do his homework.

Didn't Lucas even bother to look at high school yearbooks from 1962? Most of the characters in this movie are dressed like Rebel Without a Cause rejects instead of wearing the types of clothes teens wore in the early sixties. They did NOT dress like they did in the fifties. The hairstyles are mostly off for both sexes.

I guess none of that matters when Lucas was trying to make some kind of sociological point in the film. To hell with authenticity when you're trying to make a point. I guess I am too picky when I watch films that are so brazenly unauthentic that I can barely stand to look at them. Not even the excellent performance by Mackenzie Phillips could save this dreck.

American Graffiti doesn't belong on ANY "top 100" list of great films.

News, Etc.

The El Paso school superintendent yesterday pleaded not guilty to federal charges.
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Part of a Hitchcock silent film believed to be lost has been found in New Zealand.

Misc

A new documentary on the Doors tries to make sense of lead singer Jim Morrison, which may be impossible, as far as I am concerned.

What a waste, a complete and total waste.
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Box Office Champs

Whenever somebody comes up with the films with the biggest box office sales, you KNOW there is plenty of question about the validity of the stats. When ticket sales are eight dollars or ten dollars or whatever apiece, the box office champions will ALWAYS be recent films.

No film will EVER have the popularity of 1939's Gone With the Wind. Movies were a more central part of people's lives than they are now, for people back then didn't have television or DVDs or iPods or the internet as alternatives to film. The only alternative to films back in the 1930s was radio, and of course people couldn't actually see the action--they had to visualize it in their minds. They had to go to movie theaters for that.

Although the writer of the piece doesn't mention it, D.W. Griffith's outrageously racist The Birth of a Nation (1915) probably ranks near the top of all time attendance records.

Anyway, attendance records may be more important. Ticket sales have been jacked up through the roof in order to compensate for fewer people attending movie theaters.

I Will Be

sure that when Sicko comes out on June 29 that I see it.

I suspect, however, Moore will insert himself into the documentary again. He has that habit, and it is irritating.

Two New Books

try to set the record straight on the life and work of director Leni Riefenstahl, a very thankless undertaking if you ask me.

Even if you don't, it's still thankless.

She was brilliant directing but an idiot politically.