Wise: Hello, Werth.
Werth: Bonjour, mon gabber. Comment ça va?
Wise: I think you have some croissant stuck in your teeth.
Werth: No, I just saw Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.
Wise: In French?
Werth: I was just struck by how stylistic Wes Anderson's work is, and how he could be considered a modern auteur director.
Wise: And since French critics like Francois Truffaut came up with the auteur theory in the 1950's, you started speaking Gallic-ly.
Werth: Très bien. While not everyone buys into the auteur theory (yes, Pauline Kael, I'm talking about you), what Truffaut and his ilk sought to do was to discuss certain directors' bodies of work by highlighting the visual and stylistic similarities in their films. Originally they used the auteur theory to define Hitchcock, Hawks, Kurosawa and others.
Wise: But the theory works equally well with contemporary directors, many of whom were just as influenced by the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd as they were the films they discussed.
For instance, Ang Lee who has genre-jumped memorably throughout his career— the domestic drama of The Ice Storm (1997); screwball mix-ups in The Wedding Banquet (1993); martial arts thrills in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); and even superhero blockbuster Hulk (2003)—still puts his stylistic stamp on everything he does.
Werth: I'm just glad he got Heath and Jake naked in Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Wise: While Lee's films are all deeply interested in character, I'd say that his style is most evident in the careful way he uses image to communicate the delicate balance between reason and emotion. And nowhere is that more evident than in his adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1995). Working from an Oscar-winning script written by his star Emma Thompson, Lee takes Austen's premise of two sisters and their very different love affairs and uses it to explore his own fascination with estrangement and constraint and the ways in which they both can be shattered by passion.
Werth: And bonnets. Lots of bonnets.
Wise: Banished from their home by the vagaries of British entitlement, sisters Elinor (Thompson) and Marianne (Kate Winslet) Dashwood retire to a remote cottage with their mother and younger sister Margaret. The seclusion only heightens the sisters' natural tendencies—Elinor to circumspection; Marianne to passion—and colors their interactions with potential suitors.
Werth: Although sadly there is no gravity-defying, kung fu swordplay.
Wise: The film is full of dualities: will Marianne choose the dashing Willoughby (a very sexy Greg Wise) or the more restrained Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman)?; will Elinor rely on decorum or will she toss it aside in pursuit of true love (a remarkably stutter-free Hugh Grant)? Lee delights in these choices and dramatizes them onscreen.
He and cinematographer Michael Coulter carefully compose each shot, but often disrupt the harmony with turbulence, whether with a fluttering curtain, a jagged hedgerow, or Marianne's frantic dash across the hillside. While seeming unobtrusive, his camera moves pointedly reveal character, confining Elinor's suffering to a corner of the frame while Marianne's theatrics devour the screen.
But perhaps most characteristic of Lee's work is his use of the sky—rumor persists that he insisted on expensive CGI clouds to perfect a single shot—to express his characters' aspirations and to signal the emotional tenor of a scene. His sensitivity, tempered by rationality, infuses each of his films with not only a distinctive look, but also a set of themes that makes his work instantly recognizable and deeply personal.
Werth: A director that many consider to be a good candidate for auteur status is Stanley Kubrick. Throughout a wide range of film genres, Kubrick's films have a distinct visual style and viewpoint that make his work unmistakeable. One of his most popular films is 1964's long-titled Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Originally conceived as a thriller based on Peter George's Red Alert, Kubrick's re-writes of the script kept getting funnier and funnier. So he decided that the best way to communicate his dark theme of nuclear detente was through satire, and, with writer Terry Southern's help, he soon had a hilarious dark comedy script to shoot.
Wise: I wonder if Battleship began as a thoughtful examination of nuclear responsibility?
Werth: A crazed general trips an alarm sending U.S. bombers to drop nukes on Russia starting a domino effect that insures the destruction of both countries and the world. Now just reading the plot, it's hard to find anything funny about it, but all one has to do is look at some of the character names to know that this movie has a wicked sense of humor.
Peter Sellers masterfully improvises three characters: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and the ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove. George C. Scott chews up the scenery in the War Room as gum-chewing General Buck Turgidson. Sterling Hayden is the body fluid-obsessed commander of Burpelson Airbase, General Jack Ripper. Slim Pickens drawls his way onto a nuclear warhead as Major '"King" Kong. But Keenan Wynn really tips the comedy name scales as Colonel "Bat" Guano.
Wise: Clearly Kubrick should not name children.
Werth: Kubrick's genius with his dramatic material (like Full Metal Jacket (1987) and A Clockwork Orange (1971)) was to wrap his real world themes in dark, ridiculous comedy. He worked this idea of overlapping real and unreal into how he shot his films as well. The opening scene is visual poetry with the credits appearing over stock footage of a mid-air plane re-fueling that winds up looking like plane sex to the tune of "Try a Little Tenderness."
Fantastical sets like the War Room are shot under high, focused, overhead lighting to give a sense of realism (much like his use of candlelight in Barry Lyndon (1975)).
His use of handheld cameras for the assault on Burpelson gives a documentary style to the action, but his very long takes and static, often dramatic, camera angles for other scenes create a striking cinematic effect (much like his long tracking shots using a Steadicam in The Shining (1981) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)).
His attention to details like cockpit checklists and phone conversations is so precise in its grasp of reality, that it makes a viewer wonder why the "boring stuff" wasn't cut-out of the movie.
That dual quality of being aware and at the same time not aware that you are watching a movie is a cohesive theme that resonates through all of Kubrick's films, making him an arguable example of the visual and thematic auteur director.
Wise: I wonder if Truffaut would think Film Gab was an auteur blog.
Werth: Tune in to Film Gab next week when we use a Ouija board and a French phrasebook to find out!
Werth: Ho! Ho! Ho! Wise!
Wise: And a very Merry Christmas to you too, Werth. Are you getting your usual Holiday buzz on?
Werth: I sure am! Especially since it's time for our annual Film Gab Holiday Movie Spectacular!
Wise: Nothing makes the holidays sweeter than a good Christmas flick.
Werth: This year, my cinematic Christmas treat is sweet and tart. Based on the successful Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman Broadway play, The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) is a raucous, witty Christmas stocking full of laughs. Famed radio personality, critic, and bon vivant Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) is forced to make a press stop at the Mesalia, Ohio home of "Midwestern barbarians" Mr. & Mrs. Stanley (Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke). "Sherry's" well-bred annoyance turns to horror as he slips on their icy doorstep and is forced to convalesce in their home for a whole month.
Wise: It could be fun depending on how good the food is.
Werth: Sherry turns the whole house upside-down making it the central office of his massive media empire driving the Stanleys, his long-suffering assistant Maggie (Bette Davis), and his oft-abused nurse Miss Preen (Mary Wickes) to mental breakdowns.
In between phone calls from Winston Churchill, meetings with Chinese diplomats, receiving gifts of penguins sent by Admiral Byrd, and preparing for his live Christmas Eve Broadcast from the Stanley's living room, Sherry finds the time to disrupt his assistant's new corn-fed romance with handsome journalist Bert Jefferson (Richard Travis) and even to convince the Stanley's nearly adult children to fly the coop for better lives outside Mesalia, OH.
Wise: I'm exhausted just reading that.
Werth: That's part of the fun of this film. Something new is always popping up, and I haven't even gotten to Ann Sheridan and Jimmy Durante. The Man Who Came to Dinner is laugh-out-loud funny with Woolley's portrayal of the Alexander Woollcott-inspired Sherry stealing the show.
Honed by performing the role on Broadway, Woolley makes Sherry's acid tongue and literate insults charmingly endearing—all the while rattling off a veritable encyclopedia of 1940's pop culture references. The supporting cast is magnificent with Billie Burke fluttering, Sheridan slinking, and Davis smoking through a holiday film that looked like oodles of fun to make—almost as much fun as it is to watch.
Wise: Also packed with a full roster of stars and character actors, Love Actually (2003), is actually a compilation of ten different love stories woven together to highlight how they intersect, how they diverge, and how romance and ordinary life can make such a potent combination, especially during the countdown to Christmas. While it certainly wasn't the first film to cobble together a multiplicity of plots, it does seem to have brought the idea to the romantic comedy genre, producing such star-studded holiday trifles as New Year's Eve (2011) and Valentine's Day (2010).
Werth: I don't know if we should thank or slap Love Actually for that...
Wise: I'd agree that the descendants of the film have tended toward treacle, but Love Actually itself is a more nourishing bit of cinema with real complications and real sorrows that only leaven the stories that end up happily.
Werth: Because not all of them do?
Wise: There's a great, sad storyline between Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman playing a stolid married couple whose relationship is suddenly upended when she discovers that he's having an affair with a shopgirl.
Werth: It sounds like The Women (1939). Does the shopgirl look like Joan Crawford?
Wise: No, she doesn't, but it's not the only story that was probably cribbed from another source because these multi-thread films rely on viewer expectations: offering familiar film tropes and either subverting or succumbing to them. Hugh Grant plays a lonely Prime Minister, but he's really a prince searching for Cinderella; Andrew Lincoln has a beautiful moment expressing his unrequited love to Keira Knightly; and Liam Neeson's cinematic stepson Sam (Thomas Sangster) gets to indulge in the biggest movie cliché of them all: a declaration of love and a final kiss at the airport.
Cramming all this into a single movie could have been a disaster, but veteran British writer/director Richard Curtis keeps the action moving, refusing to get bogged down in either sadness or joy. And the final film—full of bittersweet moments and intense pleasures—feels a bit like the holidays themselves: happy, bewildering, a little sad, but always full of life.
Werth: I don't know about you, Wise, but I'm so full of holiday movie cheer that I may bust open like a Christmas pinata.
Wise: As long as there is candy inside. Happy Holidays to all our Film Gab Readers!
Wise: Hello, Werth!
Werth: Howdy, Wise!
Wise: Do you have your wand, cape and broom ready?
Werth: Are you referring to the premiere of the final Harry Potter movie, or a janitorial drag show?
Wise: It's hard not to get swept up in the Potter Hype that's going on.
Werth: The completion of the film series is a great accomplishment, but I have to say I'm a little perturbed at how some of the stars are "Hogwarting" the spotlight.
Wise: I know! Sure Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint are the stars of these films, but let's talk about the adult actors who invest J. K. Rowling's fantastical world with humor and life.
Werth: Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon—
Wise: Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, Gary Oldman—
Werth: Robbie Coltrane—
Wise: John Hurt—
Werth: Warwick Davis.
Wise: And let's not forget the man playing the biggest baddie of them all, Ralph Fiennes who brings a seductive serpentine malevolence to the role of Lord Voldemort.
Werth: Oops! You mean He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Wise: It's totally worth naming Fiennes' work in these films because the frigid menace of his characterization counterbalances the everyman nobility of Harry, Hermione and Ron. But Fiennes hasn't always played cold-blooded villains. In fact, his work in The English Patient is lush, romantic as well as deeply tragic.
Werth: And he gets to keep his nose.
Wise: But, oh, what a nose! Cinematographer John Seale photographs Fiennes' face with with all loving attention he also brings to the Italian hills and the golden terrain of the desert, finding in each a landscape of passion. Fiennes plays Count Lazlo de Almásy, a Polish geographer who travels to the Sahara only to fall in love with Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas), the wife of the expedition's sponsor, Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth). Their torrid romance leads first to sensuous heights, but eventually devolves into fights, plane crashes, and betrayal to the Nazis.
Werth: Nazis always ruin torrid romances.
Wise: Based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje and adapted for the screen and directed by Anthony Minghella, the film honors the slipstream poetry of Ondaatje's prose, but literalizes the action without destroying the book's eloquence. The film begins in Tuscany in the waning days of World War II with the Count confined to bed, scarred head to toe by fire and unable to remember his past life.
Under the care of his nurse Hana (Juliet Binoche in a luminous, Oscar-winning performance), his memories emerge in a series of flashbacks.
Werth: Flashbacks where his face isn't burned off, thankfully.
Wise: Woven into the narrative are a series of subplots including Hana's love affair with a bomb-diffusing Sikh (Lost's Naven Andrews) and the thief Caravaggio's (Willem Dafoe) hunt for those who double-crossed him. But it is Fiennes' romantic, otherworldly yet fully grounded performance that prevents the film from falling into an overblown mishmash and allows it to emerge as a beautiful tone poem of love, loss, regret and devotion.
Werth: The other Potter baddie who gets short-shrift at the red-carpet extravaganzas is the scrumptiously droll Alan Rickman.
Wise: His Professor Snape combines villainy with a soupçon of sexy.
Werth: Throughout his long career Rickman has used his haughty sneer and distinctly British disdain to create some of the screen's most lovable campy villains in films like Die Hard (1988), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007).
But one of my favorite Rickman performances allows him to be a hero instead of a ne'er do well, 1999's sci-fi comedy, Galaxy Quest. Now I know what you're thinking—
Wise: That watching any non-Pixar movie starring Tim Allen is like poking a dull, fiery stick into your eye over and over and over?
Werth: Normally, yes. But Galaxy Quest is different. Dreamed up at Dreamworks, Galaxy Quest poses a fun premise: What if aliens in a galaxy far, far away were getting re-runs of Star Trek, but thought it was a "historical document" instead of a TV broadcast?
Enter the cast of the hit show Galaxy Quest, washed-up and sold-out as they go to conventions to eternally re-play hackneyed sci-fi archetypes for a rabid, costumed fanbase.
Wise: Somebody needs to keep the geeks out of trouble on weekends.
Werth: When a strange group of bobbed, perma-smile groupies (look for a young Rainn Wilson) approaches them and tells them they need their help to fight off an alien invasion on their homeworld, the actors go along thinking they are going to wind up in yet another convention hall to collect another meager paycheck. Instead they are transported to a spaceship and a world where everything they've done on TV has been taken as gospel and created for reals.
Wise: But without all the duct tape and desperation basement-dwelling superfans most frequently use.
Werth: This premise could be milked for either geekery and/or preciousness, but with the superb cast, this movie goes beyond spoof to genuine fun. Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shaloub and Sam Rockwell have a field day playing bad actors who have to literally live their parts.
And leading the charge is Rickman who plays Alexander Dane, the Shakespearean actor who has become trapped by his Spock-like role of Dr. Lazarus, cringing and rolling his eyes at his prosthetic makeup and his catchphrase, "By Grapthar's Hammer!" Every look and gesture is pure derision and frustration, and it's marvelous.
Wise: How is Tim Allen?
Werth: They should have gotten William Shatner. But Galaxy Quest is an enjoyable cinematic send-up, both laughing at and paying tribute to a phenomenon that has become part of our culture's lexicon.
Wise: Speaking of cultural lexicons, we'd better go get in line if we want to see HP7P2.
Werth: Let me go get my broom. I might need to smack some wizards who can't keep quiet during the movie.
Wise: Tune in next week for more film magic at Film Gab!
