Here at Film Gab we are a little obsessed with Classic Hollywood birthdays, and today, July 26th is such a goldmine of cake and ice cream, we couldn't stand to leave any star out. So put on your party hats and get ready to gab!
Blake Edwards- This wise-cracking director started off with comedies like Operation Petticoat (1959), but moved on to direct more complex films like Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962). He's most remembered for the goofball Pink Panther series (he directed 6 of them, 7 if you count A Shot in the Dark (1964)) but Victor Victoria (1982) will always hold a special place in Werth's little drag heart.
Stanley Kubrick- One of the greatest filmmakers of all-time (without winning a single directing Oscar) this native New Yorker turned ex-pat took the art of film iconography to new heights in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and The Shining (1980). We here at Film Gab also think you should check out some of his less quotable works like The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), and Barry Lyndon (1975).
Kevin Spacey- Whether on the big screen or in the middle of the night in a London park, Kevin Spacey is the consummate actor. Starting with his breakthrough role in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) Spacey has crafted complex male characters who are damaged goods, fighting to get ahead in this ratrace we call life. He got gold statues for his roles in The Usual Suspects (1995) and American Beauty (1999), but he's also worth checking out in Swimming With Sharks (1994), Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997). While it didn't fly with audiences, his Lex Luthor in Superman Returns (2006) has the necessary camp and toupee chops.
Helen Mirren- While she happily displays her sex-bomb figure in the tabloids, Helen Mirren began her career doing serious theater, first in Britain's National Youth Theatre and then in the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has continued her theater work on both Broadway and the West End, while also appearing in films from kicky, teenage junk like Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999) to the Oscar-winning The Queen (2006). Other film roles include Gosford Park (2001), The Madness of King George (1994), Hitchcock (2012), and senior citizen spy series RED (2010) and RED II (in theaters now).
Sandra Bullock- Perhaps one of Hollywood's busiest actresses, Bullock shot to stardom in Speed (1994) playing a woman trapped on a bus rigged to explode by terrorists. Building on that success and on her girl-next-door persona, Bullock has played a wide variety of roles, from romantic comedies—While You Were Sleeping (1995), Miss Congeniality (2000) and Two Weeks Notice (2002)—to indies—Crash (2004) and Infamous (2006)—to her Oscar-winning role in The Blind Side (2009). Never one to allow glamour to get in the way of a good role, Bullock has managed to keep her relatable charm while becoming one of the most powerful women in Hollywood.
That should be enough Hollywood birthday cake for one post, but we'll be back next week for more cinema celebration here at Film Gab.
Werth: Domo arigato, Wise.
Wise: Oh, dear. I hope we're not about to descend into some Paula Deen-style racial hijinks.
Werth: I'm just making a reference to the 1980's pop tune as a way of nodding to the giant robots in Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim which opens today.
Robots found their way into films fairly early on in outings like 1919's The Master Mystery starring Harry Houdini and, of course who could forget the robot-chick in Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece, Metropolis (1927)?
Wise: It's like the best opium dream I've never had.
Werth: If you prefer your robots on the more comely side, you couldn't ask for more shapely automatons than the ones in the 1975 camp classic, The Stepford Wives. Based on a book by Ira Levin (the same guy who wrote Rosemary's Baby) Stepford opens on the Eberhart family escaping New York City for a new home in the quaint town of Stepford, Connecticut. Joanna (Katherine Ross) is reluctant from the start, but accedes to her husband Walter's (Peter Masterson) desires to start a new life free of the stresses and acid rain of the big city.
Wise: And probably to get away from Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, too.
Werth: It doesn't take long, however, for Joanna to realize that something isn't quite right in this picturesque town. The perfectly groomed, compliant wives of Stepford creep her out with their empty smiles and rejection of even the most basic of feminist stances.
Her new friend Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) and she begin to suspect the husbands of Stepford are doing something to their wives to make them the perfect models of Eisenhower-Era wifery, but that sounds crazy, right?
Wise: If mechanization worked for Swanson TV dinners, why not for the old ball and chain?
Werth: Stepford is the '70's answer to the classic Female Gothic genre of the '40's. Like a Rebecca in hip-huggers, Joanna has to question her sanity and whether she is in grave danger from her own husband—and men as a whole. The film is fascinating in how it challenges the notion of the "good wife" in the midst of the Second Wave of feminism.
Feminist guru Betty Friedan famously decried the movie as a "rip-off" of the Feminist Movement, and perhaps that reaction came from the outlandishness of the story and the horrifying, yet strangely nostalgic ending. But director Bryan Forbes intended Stepford to be a reaction against the critics of feminism, and was surprised that the movie wasn't embraced by the feminist community.
Unfortunately, the camp aspects of the dialogue, fashion, and acting (Prentiss' performance is so perfectly '70's it feels like she just walked off the set of the Mike Douglas Show) overshadow the serious points Forbes was trying to make.
But when you have Tina Louise playing an over-sexed housewife (yes, that Tina Louise) and Carol Van Sant losing her shit over a recipe, you kind of forget about burning your bra.
Wise: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) is another film that speculates about the relationship between man and machine. In the early 1970's, Stanley Kubrick bought the film rights to Brian Aldiss's short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" and hired the author to write an adaptation, but delays and creative differences caused Kubrick to fire Aldiss, and the project lingered in development until Kubrick's death when Steven Spielberg, who had been attached to the film in various capacities for many years, was convinced to take on the project himself.
Spielberg attempted to take on as many of Kubrick's idiosyncrasies as possible during production—banning press from the set, releasing only portions of the script to the actors, and requiring confidentiality agreements—in an attempt to capture the flavor of the film his mentor might have made.
Werth: Did Spielberg yell at Shelley Duvall?
Wise: Haley Joel Osment plays David, a robot programmed to love, who comes to live with Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor) whose son Martin has been cryogenically frozen for many years until a cure is found for his rare ailment.
When Martin returns home, a rivalry develops between the robot and human boys. Tricked by Martin into performing threatening acts against Henry and Monica, it is decided that David must be returned to the factory and destroyed. But Monica has grown to love David, and instead she sends him away with his mechanical teddy bear in the hope that he will find companionship among the unregistered Mecha that live apart from humans.
Determined to become a real boy, David sets off to find the Blue Fairy from Pinnochio, helped along by the mechanical prostitute Gigolo Joe (Jude Law).
Werth: Traveling to see a mysterious being who grants wishes with a walking teddy bear and a metal hooker. All you need is some guy made out of straw and you have a trip to see the Wizard.
Wise: The film is incredibly beautiful, portraying a future Earth succumbed to global warming where sleek technology offers solace from the threatening natural world.
Haley Joel Osment, fresh off his eerie success in The Sixth Sense (1999), is both endearing and slightly creepy, capturing precisely both the appeal and the terror of ever more lifelike mechanical beings.
And Jude Law is incredibly magnetic, radiating not only his programmed sexual appeal, but also a growing tenderness toward David. This being Spielberg, the film hits hard on his usual themes of childhood longing and the tentative—and sometimes prickly—relationship between humans and outsiders, but unlike the usual Spielberg, the film doesn't build to a satisfying conclusion.
Perhaps burdened by his wish to be faithful to Kubrick's vision, the last third of the picture is increasingly messy, and instead of a rousing climax, he offers a wrenching metaphor about the perishability of love.
Werth: If love doesn't perish during a two and a half hour runtime, nothing can kill it. So admit it, Wise. You have the Styx song stuck in your head.
Wise: No, but I am thinking of a specific dance move. Tune in next week for more Film Gab you'll never forget.
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!
Wise: Happy Halloween, Werth!
Werth: Boo to you too, Wise. Any plans for the year's most haunted evening?
Wise: I thought I might curl up at home with a bowl of candy corn and a double feature of scary movies.
Werth: Vincent Price in House of Wax and Bette Davis in The Nanny?
Wise: Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses and The Ugly Truth.
Werth: Heigl is a special kind of terrifying, but when I think of movies that scare me, only one movie is a guaranteed nightmare-causer, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).
Wise: I hope that has nothing to do with my unfortunate, one-time comment about Noxzema and your T-zone.
Werth: Based on the Stephen King novel, The Shining stars Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a writer who packs up his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny (Danny Lloyd) to be the caretaker of a closed-for-the-season hotel in the snowbound Colorado mountains. But the Torrance family is not alone in the Overlook Hotel, and soon the dark spirits that haunt the halls give a whole new meaning to cabin fever.
The film is full of iconic horror images: REDRUM, Nicholson's face grinning through a hacked-open door, and those god-damned twins.
Wise: I assume you're not referring to the Olsens.
Werth: As with all of his films, Kubrick takes his time. The dread and fear of The Shining builds slowly with long tracking shots that follow Danny on his three-wheeler, holding us spellbound waiting for the horrors waiting around the next corner.
Kubrick uses the Overlook itself to put the audience on edge. The large ballrooms, hallways and rooms feel strangely claustrophobic, the emptiness of a normally bustling place causing an unease that leads to madness. And don't get me started on how uncomfortable the soundtrack makes me.
Wise: Let's not forget Jack O'Nicholson.
Werth: Let's not! Nicholson's angular eyebrows and wicked leer telegraph from the beginning that homicidal tendencies are not buried too deeply beneath his skin. While this makes his transformation less surprising, it is still, nonetheless, horrifying. Young Lloyd is ingenious, playing a kid's role that could be considered grounds for child abuse.
But my favorite performance is from Duvall. Her bug-eyed awkwardness is perfect as she struggles to save herself and her son from the monster her husband has become—or perhaps always was. Behind the scenes footage shot by Kubrick's wife shows Kubrick assailing poor Duvall about her acting, turning her into a weeping, nerve-wracked mess. Whether Kubrick intended to shape Duvall's perforamnce or was just being an a-hole, in the end, Duvall, pardon the pun, shines.
Wise: Perhaps I'll postpone my Heigl-fest and delve into Francis Ford Coppola's foray into the blood-sucking undead, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Werth: Because Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula wouldn't fit on the marquees.
Wise: It was an attempt to bring the character closer to Stoker's original novel and away from the sinister elegance of Bela Lugosi's iconic version from the 1930's.
Coppola begins the story in the 15th Century with a young and handsome Vlad Dracula (Gary Oldman) heading off to defend his castle and his bride from invading forces. He defeats his enemies, although their treachery has convinced his young wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) that he has died in battle and she flings herself from the castle tower.
Werth: Tragically ending her budding medieval shoplifting career.
Wise: Heartbroken, the Count renounces his faith and swears allegiance to the darkness. Skipping ahead 400 years, the film finds young lawyer Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) embarking on a business trip to Transylvania, but not before promising to marry his fiancée Mina (also Ryder) immediately upon his return.
Imprisoning Harker with his three succubus brides, the Count journeys to London where he recognizes Mina as the image of his lost love and hatches a plan to seduce her into his undead existence.
Werth: That's a lot of plot.
Wise: And there's a lot more involving Hungarian nuns, a ruined Abby, gypsies, escaped wolves, a nickelodeon theater, grave robbing, stormy sea crossings, and stage coach chases.
Werth: It's a grab bag of movie clichés.
Wise: The movie itself is a mélange of styles and images: 19th Century paintings mixed with Byzantine design, classic Hollywood cinematography with 1960's cinema psychedelia, and capped off with a cast list that looks like credits on the best slacker film never made: Ryder, Reeves, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Richard E. Grant, Tom Waits, plus Anthony Hopkins as grizzled vampire hunter Van Helsing.
Werth: Reality Bites Before Sunrise.
Wise: Something like that. It's a weird mix of compelling and preposterous, but filled with definite chills and a few blood-spurting scares.
Werth: Sounds like someone will be sleeping with a stake and a garlic necklace until Halloween is over.
Wise: Heck, I'll even pop Katherine Heigl in Killers into the DVD player to keep the undead away until next week's Film Gab.
