The Gabeur Theory

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!



Mother Gabber

Wise: Well, Werth. Sunday is Mother's Day and it's time for us to honor our mothers.

Werth: Of course. Here's to Mildred Pierce, Margaret White, and Mrs. Bates! 

Wise: And let's not forget Debbie Reynolds.

Werth: Let's not. She might make us jazzercise.

Wise: One mother of a movie movie I'm awfully fond of is Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (2007).  The film follows three brothers—Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman)—as they journey across India by train, ostensibly in search of spiritual enlightenment, although the ulterior motive of Francis, who planned the trip, is to find their mother (Anjelica Huston) who absconded to a remote Himalayan convent after the death of their father.  

Werth: She should have checked out Black Narcissus (1947) before packing her bags.  

Wise: Along the way they bicker, get drunk, smuggle a cobra into their compartment, smoke, indulge in fisticuffs, and are eventually thrown off the train.  When they eventually do find their mother, she is both everything they hoped and everything they feared. 

Werth: What else could you expect when Anjelica Huston is your mother?

Wise: Anderson's style is heavily influenced by his cinematic heroes from the French New Wave and 1960's Italian cinema, but The Darjeeling Limited emerged from his admiration for Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, to whom the film is dedicated.  

Ray's films inspired Anderson to travel to India with his co-writers Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, and the resulting screenplay, though still full of his stylistic tics, feels more inquisitive about life, the characters more open to chance entering their hermetically sealed lives.  

Werth: And cobras.

Wise: Even the mise en scène feels much less restrained as Anderson and his longtime cinematographer Robert Yeoman forgo his typically muted palette in favor of dynamic combinations of azure and lime, amber and indigo, cerulean and gold.  The vividness added to Anderson's careful compositions reflects his characters' dawning realization that their dogged myopia has only hindered the search for their mother and prevented them from appreciating life. 

Werth: One of my all-time favorite flicks has not one, but two mothers. Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) is a masterwork of excess. Already well-known for his overly dramatic romances with tragic turns like Magnificent Obsession (1954), All The Heaven Allows (1955), and Written on the Wind (1956), Sirk really went to town on this story about a pair of mothers—one white and one black who raise their daughters together. 

Lora Meredith (glamor puss Lana Turner) is a poor single mother trying to start an acting career and Annie Johnson (the beatific Juanita Moore) offers to be a live-in maid for her so Annie and her daughter Sarah Jane can have somewhere to stay.

 Wise: Being a maid for an out-of-work actress sounds like a bad career move.

Werth: It actually turns out pretty well for Annie, because Lora is ambitious and is soon the toast of Broadway, fighting for respect, good scripts and fabulous furs.

Wise: So, Annie moved up to being a maid for a diva.

Werth: The movie has long been a source for racial equality discussions. Some have even posited that the 1934 William Wellman directed version was less racist. 

But what I've always found fascinating about this movie is that underneath the unnaturally vibrant colors, the stylish gowns, glittering jewels and grandiose sets is a story of two people who really don't see race. Lora and Annie crawl up the ladder of fame together—and even if Annie isn't on the same social rung, Lora never forgets who she owes it all to. And Annie is eternally grateful to Lora for what she's done for her. The two main characters are oblivious to the racial issues that cause such a stir in the audience. 

Grown-up Sarah Jane (played with sizzling animosity by Susan Kohner) embodies the racial tension by "passing" as white, desiring all the same things that Lora's daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) has, only to find out tragically that pretending to be someone you're not is the real sin.

Wise: Tell that to C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man. 

Werth: All the great face-slaps, two-timings and passionate embraces build-up to an ending that's a true tearjerker—guaranteed to make you pick up the phone and call your mother.

Wise: Werth & I would like to wish all you Mothers out there the happiest of Mother's Days.

Werth: And remember, you only have one mother... but you have TWO Film Gabbers.

A Bit of Burton

Video artist Kees van Dijkhuizen has created a lovely video montage of the films of Tim Burton. Sure there are lots of people who make favorite director videos on the internets, but Dijkhuizen takes particular pleasure in artistically linking a director's work instead of just showing everyone's favorite one-liners. It's a fun way to look at a director's career- so much fun that Dijikhuizen has also given the montage treatment to Baz Luhrman, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher and Wes Anderson.

Gabbers Aweigh!

Wise: Ahoy, Werth!  

Werth: Um, hi, Wise.  What's with the yachtsman's cap?  

Wise: I went sailing with my parents last week and I've been feeling pretty nautical ever since.  

Werth: Does this mean that you've been making tuna noodle casserole for dinner?  

Wise: No, but it does mean that I'm itching for cinematic adventures on the high seas.  

Werth: Ooh! Set sail, Cap'n Wise! Set sail!  

Wise: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) emerged from Wes Anderson's deep affection for Jacques Cousteau's oceanic travelogues, and it follows the title character's (Bill Murray) faltering career as an undersea documentarian and the comic misadventures that unfold as he pursues both a relationship with the son he abandoned (Owen Wilson) years before and revenge upon the fabled jaguar shark that made a fricassee of his best friend.  

Werth: Is the jaguar shark part fish, part cat? 

Wise: The Life Aquatic is perhaps Anderson's most whimsical film.  Always a writer/director with a very specific point of view, Anderson allows his boyhood fancies to drive this film closer to fantasy than any of his other work.  Of course his usual preoccupations are on full display—strong mothers and absent fathers, the dreamer battered by experience, densely layered set and character design—and they mix with the outlandish elements with varying degrees of success.  

There's a marvelous image of Anjelica Huston lying dreaming in an underwater observation pod, while the final encounter with the elusive jaguar shark seems freighted with undecipherable meaning.  

Werth: It's totally undecipherable. How would a jaguar be able to hold its breath long enough to mate with a shark to make jaguar shark babies?

Wise: I have to admit that Aquatic isn't my favorite Anderson film, although it does reward repeated viewings.  It's always interesting to watch a filmmaker reach beyond his usual concerns, plus the shaggy nature of the movie allows for for some standout performances, including Cate Blanchett as the kind of tough-talking yet vulnerable girl reporter Katherine Hepburn might have played, and Michael Gambon as Zissou's silver-tongued producer on the lam.  

Also of note is the gorgeous undersea menagerie designed and animated by Henry Selick.  But it's the central performances from Murray and Wilson as the mountebank and his guileless offspring that really makes this movie set sail.  

Werth: Now that you've gotten me obsessed with sharks, I can't help but talk about the best shark/sailing movie ever, Jaws (1975).

Wise: If only The Poseidon Adventure had starred a Great White. 

Werth: Based on Peter Benchley's hit book, Steven Spielberg's Jaws swam into theaters June 20, 1975, and officially originated the Hollywood Summer Blockbuster. With nothing but a couple small films and TV under his belt, Speilberg created a national sensation with this movie about a lone shark rampage in the waters off sleepy Amity Island on Fourth of July Weekend. 

People all over the country mimicked John Williams' Oscar-winning, iconic main title and, "You'll never go into the water again," became a national catchphrase that caused as much H2O aversion as Hitchcock's shower scene in Psycho.

Wise: I haven't showered within sight of the shoreline since I could press "Play" on the Betamax. 

Werth: While its terror factor is off the charts, Jaws is also, at its heart, a male, sail-bonding adventure. Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), Sam Quint (Robert Shaw) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) hunt the killer shark in Quint's small boat, The Orca, and work together on the empty to ocean to destroy this awesome beast. It is through this shipboard interaction that their layered characters emerge—most profoundly with Quint's mesmerizing "USS Indinapolis" monologue. 

These scenes of camaraderie on the ocean make what could have been just a fishy monster film a much richer dramatic experience. It was a methodology that Spielberg would utilize on successive films to make popular movies and a boatload of money.

Wise: I wouldn't mind setting sail in just a dinghy full of cash from Spielberg's boatload.

Werth: Well, sailor, in the meantime you and our readers should just hoist the misenmast on the S.S. Film Gab!

Happy Gab-entine’s Day!

Werth: What up, Wise?

Wise: What up, Werth?

Werth: I’m just  putting the finishing touches on my Quaker Oats tub turned Valentine’s Day Card Box.

Wise: I like your use of red felt, crepe paper and pipe cleaners. Are you planning on spending Valentine’s Day in the second grade?

Werth: No. I just like getting back in touch with those special schoolyard feelings we all had about Valentine’s Day and love in general.

Wise: Do I smell a schoolyard romance edition of Film Gab?

Werth: The smeller’s the feller! Love was in the air—and at no time did it smell as sweet as when we were young, impressionable and trapped in high school. I think the cinematic high school love story that had the biggest impact on my youth was the 1988 cult classic Heathers.

Wise: I love Heathers—but would you call it a teen romance flick?

Werth: I would. I mean, sure it’s about the dog-kill-dog world of high school popularity, but at its core Heathers is a love story. Veronica (Winona Ryder) is the only non-Heather member of the dominant chick clique at Westerberg High. As the uber-bitchy girls devour the self-esteem of the bottom-feeders in the cafeteria through lunchtime polls and vicious note-passing, Veronica has second thoughts about belonging to such a Machiavellian girl’s club. Enter James Dean meets Jack Nicholson bad boy, Jason Dean (Christian Slater). J.D. turns Veronica’s dark-curled head with acts of heroism like standing up to jock bullies Ram and Kurt who serve-up homophobia like a bad dessert on a plastic lunchtray.

Wise: Bad dessert is such a disappointment.

Werth: Steady, Wise. So romance blooms between V & J.D.—despite the fact that J.D. already shows a predisposition towards violence. After “jokingly” poisoning head Heather, Heather Chandler (played with beautiful bitchery by the late Kim Walker) with a bottle of drain cleaner, J.D. convinces Veronica that it was an accident—but an accident with a happy ending.

Wise: Ding dong the Heather’s dead.

Werth: Right. Except that Shannon Doherty as Heather Duke quickly steps in to fill the queen bee void. J.D. arranges another “they deserve it” prank on Kurt and Ram, using an issue of Stud Puppy Magazine, a Joan Crawford postcard and a tell-tale bottle of mineral water to insinuate that they share more than just a bromance.

Wise: Sometimes it’s best to keep the Pellegrino wrapped in brown paper.

Werth: It’s all fun and games until the “stun bullets” that Veronica and J.D. shoot Kurt & Ram with turn out to be real, and Veronica now realizes that J.D.’s sense of social justice might be a tad extreme.

Wise: Now she realizes?

Werth: Like many good romantic heroines she’s torn between the thrill and fulfillment of what at first appeared to be true love, and doing the right thing. The right thing in this case being to thwart  J.D.’s ultimate plan to make a social statement by blowing up the gym during a pep rally. Heathers is masterful in its handling of adolescent angst about society and love not by depicting it realistically, but by dressing it in an 80’s palette of shoulder pads, hair scrunchies and stylized one-liners like “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.” Heathers is a dark Valentine’s card, but Veronica and J.D. spoke so much more eloquently to me about the possibility of true love going horribly awry than Molly Ringwald and any of her suitors ever did. And trust me. With my dating history, I needed to know more about true love going horribly awry.

Wise: My movie about high school canoodling has a much lower bodycount: Wes Anderson’s Rushmore from 1998.

 Werth: Awwww, private school romance.

Wise: And there’s plenty, although it’s generally not of the boy meets girl variety.  Jason Schwartzman plays Max Fisher, a sophomore at prestigious Rushmore Academy who is so in love with attending high school that he spends more time founding clubs and participating in extracurricular activities than he spends in the classroom.  Things begin to change for Max when he strikes up a friendship with Herman Bloom, the father of a pair of thuggish twin classmates.  Played by Bill Murray with a droll mournfulness, Herman helps Max to begin to see the world beyond Rushmore. 

Unfortunately, they both catch sight of recently widowed Rosemary Cross (a glowing Olivia Williams), and their friendship turns acrimonious as they battle for her affections.  

Werth: Promise me we’ll never let a woman come between us.  

Wise: I don’t see how that’s possible, unless its Joan Crawford.  Anyway, Max gets expelled, Herman falls into depression, and the whole movie falls into chaos—

Werth: —all to the tune of Rushmore’s charmingly eclectic soundtrack.  

Wise: The whole movie is about obsession and in particular the kind of overwhelming single-mindedness of adolescent love.  Max isn’t really in love with Miss Cross, but he is in love with the feelings he gets while indulging in unrequited passions.  The same goes for his affair with Rushmore itself.  The school can’t return his affections, but Max is determined to express his feelings in the most dramatic ways possible.  Rushmore, in many ways, is about the passions that teenagers succumb to as they approach adulthood.  

Werth: Teenagers and Williamsburg hipsters.  

Wise: I know Wes Anderson has become sort of a darling of the hipster set, but I don’t think that’s fair to his talent.  Of course he’s stylized and occasionally ironic, but focusing on those two things misses the point because he uses them as a tart exterior to shield the extreme tenderness that lies just beneath the surface.

 Werth: Kind of like the tinfoil I’ve wrapped my Valentine’s Box with.

Wise: Alright, Craftmaster! I’ll put a Valentine’s card in your box.

Werth: I knew you would. Join us next week when Film Gab writes more love notes to great movies!