You couldn’t find a more idiosyncratic director in classic Hollywood than Robert Wise. Sweaty potboilers, abstracted populist science fiction, howling horror, atomic age message pictures, and gilded, gloriously melodramatic maxi-packed musicals. All bubbled under his domain. Plus, he contributed the insurmountably essential, firecracker editing for no less a picture than Citizen Kane back when he was still in his pre-directing days. He was something of the ultimate Hollywood jack of all trades, and it is true that he wasn’t the greatest master of any single genre. But he was more than a shadow passing through genres as a director-for-hire. He put his personal stamp on every film he ever touched, and he never gave a picture less than 100% of his charisma. Continue reading
Un-Cannes-y Valley: The Set-Up
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In 1945, Billy Wilder was still becoming himself, but he wasn’t a Hollywood newbie. The Lost Weekend, would win him two Academy Awards for writing and for directing (he would win again for writing in 1950 for Sunset Boulevard and become the first person to win separate Oscars for writing, directing, and producing in the same year with 1960’s The Apartment). It would firmly plant him in the big leagues of Hollywood, but the picture was made on the back of his supremely successful hard-boiled exercise in nihilism, Double Indemnity, from the year before. In this light, had it not been for Double Indemnity, it would be easy to claim that The Lost Weekend just wasn’t quite there yet, or that it was still the product of a director and a writer identifying their place in Hollywood. But then, Double Indemnity burns with Wilder’s patented fiery brand of ice, and The Lost Weekend is merely a sharp noir in full-on potboiler mode. Good Wilder, surely, but not Wilder at his best. 
Anyone familiar with Jacques Tourneur doesn’t need to read a review for evidence to the claim that Out of the Past is one of the best film noirs ever made. But that doesn’t mean establishing and specifying what is so undeniably great about it isn’t a worthwhile pleasure all the same. Cutting his teeth on Val Lewton’s near poverty-row horror unit for RKO, a team that single-handedly saved American horror in the 1940s by injecting a dose of the European, and a team which counted Tourneur as its most valuable member, Tourneur is one of the unheralded masters of the medium of cinema and one of the most poetic genre directors ever to grace the silver screen. Pairing him to noir like a fine wine to a slab of deliberately indelicate beef is too obvious to be a stroke of genius, but the results are no less marvelous for the “why didn’t they think of this earlier” nature of the film.
Because I reviewed the sequel…
If we are being honest, Ridley Scott is not a director worthy of his reputation. His 1970s were certainly pretty sterling; he entered the world with a very good, if inessential, period-piece parable in the under-seen The Duellists, and then down-tuned sci-fi to elemental levels of fear with the masterful Alien, one of the greatest genre films ever made. Not wanting to be type-cast at the turn of the ’80s, he upped himself through transposing his native science fiction into another genre, not quite as openly horrific, but with no less to say about humanity’s fears: the noir. The resulting film, Blade Runner, is his masterpiece. The ensuing three decades and more have seen him shoot sloppily back and forth between chasing former glories unsuccessfully and entering the bold, exciting new territory of … stripping the cinematic magic whole cloth from the period piece and turning the genre into a drab excuse for materialist rationalism. Again. And again. And again.
Yet 1995 was not simply a year of corporate indulgence; it was also a period where the rampant nihilist streak inherent to much of the cinema of the late ’90s and the 2000s and still running wild today came to fruition in the eyes of one music video director…
Long-time coming for the ever-hungry child-in-a-toy-store director that is Robert Zemeckis, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was his repayment for bringing the monstrous box office success of Back to the Future to the screen with pop and pizzaz aplenty. If Back to the Future was a delicious cotton-candy confection with a hidden rambunctiousness filtered into deconstructing space and time, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was Zemeckis’ ultimate tribute to cinema as a visual art form. It’s also the film he’d been building toward, Back to the Future having couched his clear dreamer’s eye technicality in a more subdued package. For, nowadays, when one thinks of Robert Zemeckis, one thinks of technology and advancement, in that order. He’s always been more interested in cinema as a plaything than anything else. It was a means to an end for him. If in recent years this has seen his reach exceed his grasp as he pursued avenues less filmically formed, he never achieved an “end” more loving and lovely than Who Framed Roger Rabbit, his 1988 dissection of genre and reality all curled up in just about the snuggest, most effervescent package you can find.
The significant resurgence of the Western genre since about 2005 (for reasons I’m not entirely sure of) is one of the few truly surprisingly revelations from the cinematic world to be found this past decade. It’s all the more notable particularly because the Westerns themselves have taken so many different forms, from pure, effervescent myth-making, to black-hearted heaving gasps of grimy moral decay, to slowly gliding, almost Impressionist location tapestries where characters serve merely as extensions of the environment, to plain ol’ rootin-tootin shoot em’ up character studies.
The Long Take 