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I meant to get to this a couple weeks ago when The BFG was failing to tear up the box office, but with the Spielberg-loving Stranger Things tearing up Netflix, now is as good a time as any.
Past the mid-way point in Jaws, we arrive at a scene where three men of different class backgrounds on a shark hunt break down barriers by sharing their virility not through sexual conquest but through trading battle scars in a perverse, comic interlude of a dick-waving machismo contest. In the throes of crisis, the scene is a marvel of male confusion and interpersonal dynamics with male bonding across class lines codified in giddily but pointedly masculine ways; the only outlet these men believe they have to get along is through exploring past crisis, as though their worth as men is enshrined in the physical markers of previous battles they’ve won.
Little gestures of discrepancy, like the eagerness of the three men respectively to show off their damaged wares or how they each place their limbs in the frame differently, reflects a dialectic between grotesque male harmony and the punchy, almost subliminal class differences that separate their mentalities even amidst crisis. In the battle over the screenplay by Peter Benchley (writer of the hoary book upon which the story is based) and Carl Gottlieb (TV comedy writer), both win out in a film that is as willing to thrust us into shark hunting terror as it is to stop and linger on little moments like these, scenes of human frailty that personify the daily dance of comedic human interaction that the terror interrupts in the first place. Continue reading
David Lynch’s Dune opens with a blissfully presentational monologue, a female face plastered onto the screen as she intones about spices like some intergalactic trade princess as her head glints in and out in a tease of a disappearing magic act that implicitly asks us whether we really care about anything she’s saying. It’s a dose of post-Star Wars and anti-Star Wars nonsense, a mocking of a genre by a director who had in 1977, the same year as that genre’s entrance into the mainstream, blasted a cavern out of the crevice in cinema left in the wake of Luis Buñuel’s quasi-retirement. Actually offered Return of the Jedi, Lynch accepted mega-producer and mega-trend-jumper Dino De Laurentiis’ offer to throw down with Frank Herbert’s story of space drugs and sand worms instead, and what came out of that unholy matrimony was one of the most famous misfires in cinema history. 
Woody Allen is back at bat with Cafe Society, another story of a writer and the spaces that inspire and threaten him. Obviously, we’re not at a loss for opportunities in Woody Allen’s back catalogue to examine the director in exactly this mode; the very sense of a fictive past that has tormented his characters for decades has come home to roost, with Allen’s films doomed to repeat themselves much like the work of his characters. That doesn’t mean they can’t repeat in style, but it is unlikely that they will be more stylish than the exemplary peak of Allen’s evolution as a serious artist throughout the ’70s. 
Glimpsed in light of Bob Rafelson’s youthful Head, released in the same year and theoretically covering the same territory, Otto Preminger’s gloriously screw-loose screw-up Skidoo is frankly mortifying, but it’s embarrassment with a purpose. While the former film burrows headfirst into a subterranean bebop of drug-crazed hyperbole with an editing rhythm like deranged improvisational jazz band and a mind ready to explode like the decade the film concluded, Skidoo is an improbable parade of Old Hollywood leftovers struggling on a voyage to The Way Things Are Now without a clue in the world how to chart their way. Head rushed around picking up the pieces of the world collapsing around it, while Skidoo is already in free-fall. An air of malfeasance and curiosity hovering overhead, Skidoo suggests a collection of trapped animals trying to figure out what the hell got them there. While the youths of Head are searching for an escape from an oncoming apocalypse they clearly see coming, the cadavers in Skidoo look about ready to enter a mausoleum. 
After resurrecting Hollywood from the stench of indulgent grotesque fantasias of the ‘60s that suggested only that everyone in LA had lost touch with reality, the rage and the recalcitrance that epitomized the American directors of the ‘70s swamped the nation with the renewed vigor of a country that was terrified about its own future. By The Deer Hunter’s release in 1978, the pandemonium of the decade had infested the films about the decade as well. The Deer Hunter, along with its even more improbable, free-wheeling follow-up Heaven’s Gate and Francis Ford Coppola’s fever dream Apocalypse Now, is among the most torridly unhinged films of the decade, an operatic dementia conclusion to the slow-burn of a decade, and a decade’s cinema, losing its mind. Something like the Great American Tall Tale of the 20th Century, The Deer Hunter is precisely the mess that the Vietnam Generation was. And, as an explosion of unmitigated, almost uncontrolled filmmaking that pursues the New Hollywood ambition to its limits, Michael Cimino’s most famous film is the perfect work to serve as the last bow on the New Hollywood style of filmmaking. 
After the gargantuan, epoch-defining success of The Kid, Charlie Chaplin’s superstar status obviously moved him to illustrate his adventurousness and not rest on his laurels. His follow-up film, 1923’s A Woman of Paris, was rewarded with commercial confusion, owing primarily to Chaplin’s temporary rejection of his on-screen persona (he appears only in a Hitchcockian cameo). Advancing his tenure as a behind-the-scenes artist, Chaplin was perhaps tormented by the belief that audiences only appreciated him for the cane, the mustache, and the bowler hat and not for his visual wit or mastery of cinematic form (but of course, the accouterments of Chaplin’s Tramp character were among the defining features of his mastery of the cinematic form none the less). Indeed, in A Woman of Paris, Chaplin allows himself, temporarily, the sin of the title card (which he usually disdained) to explicitly remind the audience that he does not appear in corporeal form in the film, and that we should not request that he do so in order to value his art. 
A behemoth even at the baby-faced age of 31, Charles Chaplin released his first feature film in 1921 to uproarious public applause, effectively constructing (and with Chaplin, an auteur before auteurism, it was undoubtedly him constructing it) the second highest grossing film of all time by that point. Having already ushered in a flurry of short films that established his plucky Tramp character and co-founded a production company (United Artists) with the other American name-brands of nascent Hollywood (Griffith, Fairbanks, Pickford), he took to his new company not only as a factory for increasing his self-worth but as his paintbrush. Affording him near authoritarian control of his films (funded by his company after all), he would write, direct, star, and answer to no one but himself. 
The only thing mesmerizing about 47 Ronin is the thought experiment wherein Japanese master visualist Kenji Mizoguchi, directing a film of the same title and based on the same classic Japanese myth in 1941, imagines that 70 years of the Hollywood machine threshing at full force will result in a new version of the film fronted by actor of actors Keanu Reeves, starring opposite a rough approximation of a horse demon and a witch dragon. Proof that it’s the simple things in life that get you through, imagining how Mizoguchi might react to this film is vastly more compelling than the film in front of us.
In hopes that box office failures are among the more wonderfully drugged-out and anti-social blockbusters released in the world, I’ve decided to look at a cabal of the most significant box office failures in history. I’m first going to dip my toes in with a pair of very modern films, this one ceremoniously coincidental considering that this summer’s The Legend of Tarzan is yet another Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation that is good and bad, much like John Carter, exclusively as a function of its willingness to consider itself as pulp fiction rather than proper narrative.
Released two years after the New Wave volcano of Easy Rider, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop visualizes the tattered remains of America encroaching on its own emptiness after the acid-freakout of ’69 disrupted the old ways and left the scattered ashes of the American populace reaching for new ones. Following two desecrated human carcasses played by James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as they coarse through the crucible of the American road, they search for the contours of a narrative or a life that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. We watch in vain as they grasp onto the only hope they have left: a desperate, disheveled odyssey to find compatriot-combatants to race cars with them into oblivion. Each character wanders around like a James Dean simulacrum searching – literally – for a semblance of the youthful confrontation and auto-shop phallus-comparing that they see as the embodiment of the renegade American Dream. 
The Long Take 