Another little temporary series here. Nothing too fancy – mostly an excuse for me to catch up on some films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. We’ll be looking at three classical Hollywood filmmakers over time: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Billy Wilder, visiting each once in the annus mirabilis of classical cinema, 1939, when they were all still (relatively) young, again in the late ’40s and early ’50s at the middle of their careers (and the middle of classical Hollywood’s career), and finally when things were waning for each director and for classical Hollywood in general in the early ’60s, before the new school American New Wave would wreck up the joint.
By director standards, Howard Hawks is a peculiar case. By auteur standards, we only mount the confusion further still (and Hawks, by matter of fact, is definitionally one of the great auteurs, as he was one of the test-case directors used for the formation of the auteur theory by the French New Wave). Then again, an auteurist approach is perhaps best for Howard Hawks, a man who would have probably bemoaned auteur theory down to the core, owing primarily to his studio workhorse demeanor as a person. He was a man who made films sharply and quickly, a director who preferred to do as he was told while also quietly tackling his personal fixations within the bounds of the studio film. Continue reading
In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 
In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 
The trouble with Minions, the third film in the abnormally successful and assumedly long-living franchise from Illumination Entertainment, is that it kind of works. Moments of whimsy abound, from a charmingly amateurish claymation fable to a breathless opening act as the family of ruler-less assistants, the Minions, hurtle from evil owner to evil owner and helplessly (and accidentally) murder them all. There is a scabrous anti-Disney (and, admittedly, anti-Southern United States) dig that paints Orlando, Florida (home of Disneyland) as a crumbling, lateral murk of weeping swampland sans human activity. 
Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man is a surprisingly fleet-footed, dexterous little film when it wants to be. The troubled production, with the film written by British screwballs Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End, Scott Pilgrim) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) with Wright planned to direct, ended with Wright leaving the film over concerns about its need to fit in with the Marvel universe. Adam McKay and star Paul Rudd rewrote the screenplay to make it more accessible, and the journeyman Reed took over directing. The film leaves no doubt that Wright’s version would have prevailed (not spectacularly so, but still more than your average Marvel film) but enough of that manic British deadpan is retained to cheer the film up a little beyond the usually grim, dour Marvel attempts (see Avengers 2) to layer self-serious gravity onto their flicks. Comparatively, Ant-Man is a chipper, domestic, even lightweight affair that benefits from never raising the stakes too high. 
Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was a film with a, well, impossible mission (I couldn’t resist), but like the franchise’s main-man Ethan Hunt (always played by the charismatic and respectably committed Tom Cruise), it approached the mission like a challenge and went so far as to bask in the impossibility of it. Before 2011, the franchise had two outright duds and one competent action film, all vehicles for their respective director’s chosen style. Certainly, Brian De Palma was the most interesting of those directors, but his cynical stylistic demeanor was a poor, compromised fit for a fluffy action pic uninterested in seriously enveloping De Palma’s darker tendencies. The resulting film was a mess, and the two action-first follow-ups were hamstrung by general idiocy (the first sequel) and questionable directing (the second follow-up). 
There’s a secretive, furtive film of superior quality lying in wait within Dope, but I’m not sure that discovering it would be a unilateral good. The current film’s capricious, mercurial demeanor and generally fractious tonal imbalances are as much a selling point as a weakness. The essence of the primary flaw – the film’s deliberately adolescent, unformed habit of rushing from spot to spot whilst only backhandedly debating with the depths of its implication of adulthood – is itself a restive encapsulation of the mindset of its teenage characters. Like those teenagers, it isn’t really invested in the darker caverns of its material, and it often errantly wanders into regions of interest before jogging off into more fleeting segments of comedy that are, if rough, cheerfully so at the least. It benefits from a learning-the-ropes abandon that necessarily implies a better film lies waiting within, desperate to get out and never really finding the limelight. But Rick Famuyiwa’s film is operating on its own wavelength, which happens to be tripping back and forth between every wavelength it can find, and that freefloating, jejune quality is not without its own charms. 
Directed by David Wain and written by Wain and Michael Showalter, 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer is one of the few legitimate “cult classics” to have emerged post-2000. Sure, we’re always discovering new “old” films from the gutters and cemeteries of cinema history, some via revelatory re-releases or the increasingly miniscule parade of independent theaters pining for midnight screening success to fight the corporate behemoths of Big Theater. But a modern film that has emerged as a cult classic? Now that is a rarity, largely because most of the modern films we identify as cult classics don’t meaningfully fit the term. People can introduce the likes of Anchorman and The Big Lebowski within the halls of “cult classics” all they want, but that doesn’t change the obvious box office success of both films relative to their budgets. Calling them “cult” films only applies if “seemingly all Americans between the ages of 18 and 35” meaningfully qualifies as a “cult”. 
If Orson Welles truly did pine for the spotlight, he was nevertheless often at his best devouring all-comers while occupying the fringes. Maybe it was his passive-aggressive drive that forced him into a corner. Maybe having to struggle for his reputation was purifying for him. Maybe having his own little corner of cinema fed his ego and controlling belligerence. Maybe he needed to be left out in the cold, so he could burn even more dangerously. Whatever the case, whether Welles actively retreated into the nether realms of independent cinema or was coerced to hibernate there, Welles never let go of his dream. Becoming a Hollywood outsider, if anything, only made him angrier and more loathsome, and loathsome Welles was Welles at his most playful. His self-serving grandeur and operatic diction could take on a pompous hue when he was already at the top, but when he was picking his battles from the outside, as with Mr. Arkadin, his directorial bravura actually seemed carnivorous and challenging, even combative. Working from the outside gave Welles something to fight for, and Welles with fangs drawn ready to pounce is the only real Welles in my book. 
As beautiful and scandalously masterful as it is, nothing about Blow-Up will ever be able to trump the sheer bafflement of its existence. In the mid ’60s, at the height of all that was swinging and buoyant and laconic about the decade’s concept of effortless cool and before that cool would curdle into something nasty and paranoid by the late ’60s, someone thought Michelangelo Antonioni, a film director even more cruel and formally intellectual and difficult than Fellini or even Godard, should direct a chipper, sex bombshell of a motion picture. I have no idea what promoted this happenstance, although I assume the swinging ’60s were just so off-kilter, the drugs so hazy and befuddling, that a movie producer just heard about that Antonioni guy who made “modernist” films and said “yes him, we need him to direct our ode to all that is chic about the mid-’60s”. Needless to say, they probably didn’t get the film they were expecting, but it made a cool 20 million anyway (huge in those days), and the producers were probably happy in the end. 
The Long Take 