Scorsese Dabbles in Genre

For Adam, Grove, and Hayes.

It is a great day for a film-lover when he gets the chance to see and then discuss a new Martin Scorsese film. This is especially true when that lover of cinema is as big a fan of Scorsese as I am. Considered by many within the industry as a one of the greatest American film directors of all time (I raise my hand in enthusiastic agreement), Martin Scorsese releasing a new movie is almost of itself an historical event. For me, it is without a doubt reason enough to leave the comfort and preferred movie-viewing setting of my home theater, and venture out to the multiplexes on an opening weekend.

To paraphrase Roger Ebert, the best Scorsese films are not great because of what they are about. They are great because of how they are about what they are about. Martin Scorsese is an unparalleled master of vision and style, who, for the past forty-plus years has used his innumerable skills to tell stories that unveil the vast complications that drive men to do what they do. And during each of those four decades, he created a film that I am not at all alone in regarding a masterpiece. In 1976, we were given Taxi Driver. In 1980, it was the powerful Raging Bull. 1990 saw the arrival of Scorsese’s best film to date, Goodfellas. And in 2006, The Departed brought the director his long overdue Academy Award.

Martin Scorsese is the antithesis to the pedestrian director. When watching one of his movies, you can see that every scene was set up and filmed with an exacting purpose. There is a reason behind each angle shot; the length of time between cuts; how close up to an actor’s face the camera is placed. Every decision he makes is made in the spirit of purest creativity and a supreme enthusiasm for the medium of film and its ability to tell a story. And because he approaches each new project with the eagerness of a first-timer and the passion of an old pro, every Martin Scorsese movie is a film-lover’s pleasure to see at least once.

For his newest opus, Scorsese has filmed the third successful adaptation (following Clint Eastwood's Mystic River and Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone) of a Dennis Lehane novel. Shutter Island is not great Scorsese, but it is very good Scorsese. The difference between great Scorsese and good Scorsese is a meticulous attention to character versus a strict adherence to an easily discernible plot. All of Scorsese’s great films favor the former over the latter. That is not the case with Shutter Island, a dark and mysterious tale of a federal marshal, who ventures to a remote island insane asylum to search for a patient who has inexplicably vanished. A throwback to the old John Huston film noirs and Alfred Hitchcock thrillers of the 40’s and 50’s, Shutter Island is Scorsese’s tribute, and he is clearly having a lot of fun showing what he learned from his predecessors.

To give away any of the plot, however, would completely spoil your experience watching it and discovering the film’s multitude of surprises, red herrings, and twists all for yourself. Suffice it to say that absolutely nothing is as it seems. Leonardo DiCaprio, in his fourth collaboration with Scorsese, gives a terrific performance as the lead marshal investigating the case; a man whose loosening grip on reality greatly affects the way we the viewers observe key events throughout the story. Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, and the awesome Max von Sydow are all excellent in supporting roles.

Watching this movie is one hell of a good time. And Scorsese’s touch throughout raises the bar considerably on the quality of the final vision. It is my hope, however, that for his next film, Scorsese returns to the brilliant character studies of his greatest works. He has just entered his fifth decade as a film director. Another masterpiece is surely on the way.

Until next week, here is my hope that we all find our Shangri-La.

Life in Acrylic and Oils

“What [is] any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”

~ Willa Cather

For those of my readers who tend to notice the buried detail, you probably have spotted the subtitle I gave my blog. The rationale behind this subtitlery was not that I believed when I named it that “Movie Musings” could not stand on its own, nor was it a mere fling with poetic license. Rather this dabbling in mild excess stands behind two purposes. The first is that it excuses me on occasion to stray slightly from my primary topic with no need to explain my decision to do so. The other is to act, like Carol Burnett’s tug-of-the-ear, as a very subtle acknowledgement to someone who has affected me throughout my life, and imbued many of my undertakings with encouragement and inspiration.

On September 30, 1995, my grandfather gave me a gift. A book of children’s short stories entitled Round About Rambles. The book had belonged to him ever since he was a child and, based on a Christmas inscription to a Charles Wilder dated 1874, had been in my family for more than a hundred and twenty years. Below this inscription, my grandfather added one of his own:

To Paul Bedlan Wilder

from Carlton Bedlan Wilder

No words of inspiration. No perfect quotation or brief anecdote. Just our two names and the date. And yet with the inclusion of our shared middle name, he let me know better than any cleverly chosen words ever could that the two of us are linked. I gave this book a special shelf above my desk at home, where I sit writing this right now, and each time I look up from my computer screen and see it, I am reminded of who I am and of where I came from. And now I hope he, and you my readers, will permit me one of my own round about rambles.

Once when I was a child, ten or eleven (maybe older; maybe younger), Carl gave me an art lesson. You see, in my life, I have had the incomparable honor of being the grandson of a great artist. And early on, members in my family began to recognize, I suppose, that I had inherited a small fraction of his talent, which they frequently chose to tell me. So in an effort to catch his attention one day while visiting, I gathered together a drawing pad and some colored pencils, packed them into a small rowboat and anchored myself fifty yards offshore, where I began, for the next hour or so, to sketch the shoreline. It worked. A couple of days later my mom received a call from my grandmother that Carl had seen me sketching out in the river and was wondering if I’d be interested in a private art lesson.

For the next couple of weeks, on Sundays, my dad drove me to the “little lot” on Jack Wright Island Road, where, after a waffle breakfast, Carl and I would go off together and talk about art. I remember sitting out on the deck and being shown the way the color of a tree trunk changes as it curves around each side, represented in art by shadow and shading and variations in color tone. A few weeks into the lessons, Carl set up a second easel in his studio, and for the remainder of our time together as master and pupil, we stood side by side and painted. Every now and then, I would receive direction, but for the most part, we just painted.

The lessons ended after not too long a period of time. The story goes that Carl, after a hiatus from painting in order to work on the house he built for my grandmother and him to live in, caught the bug during our lessons and decided it was time to pick up the brush again. I guess I did a little inspiring of my own. Our friendship has far outlasted the time we spent in the studio together. But I have never forgotten what it feels like to paint beside a great artist like Carlton Wilder. And I never will.

Today, when I look at one of Carl’s paintings, my thoughts are immediately whisked away to some distant memory from my past. A poker game boisterously playing out late into the night. Or the sound the water makes as two wooden oars work in unison to propel a small rowboat across the St. Johns. Or the haunting flavors of a perfectly mixed Manhattan, sipped while watching the sun make its daily exit from the sky. People like to pontificate the defining boundaries of a qualified blessed life. Well consider this. My life has been illustrated by Carlton Wilder paintings.

Until next week, here’s my hope that we all find our Shangri-La. Good night.

Only Have Ayes for Kathryn

In 1997, James Cameron released into theaters what would become the most successful movie of all time. Following the triumph of Titanic, Cameron spent the next seven years developing and perfecting the most advanced, state-of-the-art digital 3D and performance capture technology ever utilized in the production of motion pictures.

In 2005, members of Cameron’s marketing team announced that he was currently working on a movie, at the time, being called Project 880, with an estimated budget somewhere in the vicinity of $300 million. Between that announcement and December 18, 2009, James Cameron created Avatar, which has gone on, over the past two months, to eclipse Titanic and become the most successful movie of all time (not taking into consideration inflation or ticket price adjustment).

On June 26, 2009, a considerably smaller film with an estimated budget of $11 million experienced a limited release across the United States, before finishing a relatively minor run on November 15, 2009 with a respectable-enough box office take of $12,647,089 (USA only). During the two months in which Avatar has been earning its $595,752,416 (USA only), The Hurt Locker has won the Producers Guild of America Award for best picture of the year, the top Directors Guild of America Award for its director, Kathryn Bigelow, as well as nine Academy Award nominations, including ones for best picture and best director (only the fourth woman ever nominated in this category).

The Hurt Locker follows three members of a US Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team throughout Iraq on various missions to find and disarm bombs. Each new call to the site of a newly discovered explosive device is set-up and filmed as its own mini suspense thriller, directed and acted in such a way as to take full advantage of every possible moment of tension.

Alfred Hitchcock used to define the difference between mystery and suspense in this way: Show two people sit down at a table in a restaurant and start talking. A bomb explodes. That’s mystery. For the alternate scenario, however, begin by first showing the bomb ticking away time under the table. Then have the same couple come in and sit down at the table and start talking. That’s suspense. Maybe you even show the two start to leave when the husband suggests he might just like some desert after all. Now that’s even better suspense.

Bombs by their very nature are perfect elements of suspense. We know what they are supposed to do. We know what happens to anybody or anything in their presence when they do what they are supposed to do. And unless they have one of those giant red digital timers (which I really can’t imagine a skilled bomb maker including on a real bomb, unless it is his intention to help the person trying to disarm it), we just don’t know when or by what means they will be triggered to do what they are supposed to do.

Put a likeable character into a known-hostile environment and watch him handle an object created explicitly to blow his body into unrecognizable pieces, and you have the perfect setup for a scene of almost unbearable suspense. The Hurt Locker, constituted of scene after scene like this one, built to make you sit on the edge of your seat, white-knuckling your arm rest and holding your breath, is one of the most tightly-paced and expertly constructed thrillers I’ve seen in a long time. It is one of the best films of 2009.

It is also a unique war film. Often times war movies suffer as entertainments when they allow their message to bog down the story. That is not the case with The Hurt Locker. Despite the fact that the story is set in present day Iraq, Bigelow refreshingly has no political agenda here. This film is not a clinch-fisted rage against war, nor is it a flag-waving tribute to all things American. Rather what we get is a sharp-focused view of an unparalleled branch of the armed forces and a completely absorbing movie experience. If the director and her screenwriter, Mark Boal had an agenda, it was to visually express what it must be like to work in the job Bigelow has described in interviews as the most dangerous in the world. They succeeded.

Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties (1975). Jane Campion for The Piano (1993). Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (2003). And now Kathryn Bigelow. 81 years of Academy Awards, and never a female winner for best director. However, only six times since the Directors Guild of America Awards’ origin in 1948 has the winner not gone on to receive the Academy Award for best director. And for approximately three-quarters of Academy Award history, the best picture winner has been directed by the best director winner.

Come March 7, a woman who used to be married to “King of the World” James Cameron himself could find herself walking away from a podium with a little gold statue in hand for directing a terrific little movie that I highly recommend you see. Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker deserve this recognition.

Until next week, here's my hope that we all find our Shangri-La. Good night.

Best of the Aughts

The end of a decade necessitates a certain amount of reflection, and for movie critics, that reflection usually comes in the form of a list. Lists, by their very nature, are not very valuable creations. They are exclusive and subjective and argument-inducing, rarely meaning much to anybody beyond the person who creates them. I’ve tried to create several over the years, usually trying to group those rare and precious ten, under the impressive and capitalized title, All Time Favorites. I usually end up throwing in the towel after recognizing the very impossibility of reducing all of the great movies I have seen throughout my life down to a significant and finite number.

However, contradictorily, lists can be valuable during their creation as they act as reminders of all the wonderful movies you have seen over the years. And, even though superfluous, a challenge can be fun merely in its attempt. That’s why I made the subsequent list. Perhaps you, my readers, will also discover something here that sparks your interest, as well, and that is where lists gain the greatest value for me.

So the following are ten, not the ten, but ten movies that I consider to be great from the past decade. We’ll call it the Insignificant and yet, Despite how Trite, Still Rather Amusing Attempt at the Creation of a List of Great Movies from the Aughts. The only qualifier I used is that each movie meant something to me when I first saw it, and continues to mean something to me with each subsequent viewing. I have seen each of these at least twice, most more than that.

Other than the #1 spot, they are in no particular order.

10. Sideways (2004)

Directed by Alexander Payne, this is terrific movie, extremely funny and beautifully poignant, about two friends who travel to California wine country in the week leading up to one of them getting married.

Scene to Remember: Around the midway mark, the characters portrayed by Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen, sit in a small, screened-in porch and discuss why they both love wine so much. In my opinion, this is the best-acted scene of the decade. Watch each actor as he and she both convey a lifetime of feelings and emotions wrapped up in words that are not at all what they seem to be about. Absolutely perfect.

9. Minority Report (2002)

Directed by Steven Spielberg, this near-futuristic story of a man (Tom Cruise) who must go on the run from authorities to prove his innocence of a crime he has not yet committed but will in the future, is a stunningly created action thriller that shows why Spielberg is one of the best visual storytellers of all time.

Scene to Remember: Spielberg uses a mesmerizing, overhead tracking shot through a slum apartment complex to show tiny, spider-like robots (totally created using CGI technology) that are used by the police to search for a man on the run. We know the man they are looking for is inside one of the apartments, and that it is only a matter of time before he is discovered by one of these creepy little robots. Terrific suspense.

8. Cast Away (2000)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, this story of a man who spends years alone on a deserted island following a plane crash is a triumph thanks to two things. The creators, led by Zemeckis, do not succumb to any temptations for easy resolution. And Tom Hanks gives one of his best performances in a role that has him alone for over an hour of the movie.

Scene to Remember: The penultimate scene of the movie has Tom Hanks’ character speaking about what it was like to live on the island all those years by himself, and what it is now like that he is off. At one point his voice cracks when he mentions the simplicity of having ice in his glass. This is the kind of performance that the term bravura was invented for.

7. The Dark Knight (2008)

Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his reboot of the Batman series in 2005 with Batman Begins is possibly the greatest comic book adaptation of all time. Nolan stripped away the majority of the over-the-top comic book features, leaving a hard, big-city, crime movie that considers the role of the hero and its influence over the existence of the villain. Heath Ledger gives a legendary performance as the Joker.

Scene to Remember: The interrogation room scene between Batman and the Joker. You’ll know when you see it.

6. Million Dollar Baby (2004)

He went from being an iconic movie star to one of the most important American directors in film. He’s won two Academy Awards for Best Director, both after his 60^th birthday. His movies are influential and set standards for what great American dramas should be. He is Clint Eastwood.

His second Academy Award winning film is the story of a poor, white-trash girl who fights her way to the top of the female lightweight boxing division, begrudgingly helped along the way by Eastwood’s grouchy trainer. What initially seems like a standard, bottom to top, sports movie, turns surprisingly into a deeply moving study of two people and the lengths they will go to heal one another.

Scene to Remember: A beautifully directed and subtly acted scene, has Eastwood and Hilary Swank’s characters talking in a car together. Watch as the light and shadow dance back and forth across the actors’ faces. American filmmaking at its finest.

5. Almost Famous (2000)

Directed by Cameron Crowe, this is a wonderful coming-of-age story about a young boy who talks his way into joining a 1970’s rock band tour as a reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine. Crowe wrote his script based on his own similar life experience, and he obviously feels very deeply about the time and the music around which he sets his story. Kate Hudson gives a star-making performance as one of the band’s groupies (or band-aids).

Scene to Remember: The band and the rest of the gang with the tour are leaving a city on their tour bus. It hasn’t been a good stop. Suddenly, an impromptu sing-a-long of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” begins and the mood completely shifts to one of pure joy. I dare you not to smile.

4. Juno (2007)

Jason Reitman directed this sweet and sour comedy about a precocious high school student who gets pregnant and the 9-month journey that such an experience takes her on. Instead of the expected abandonment, she finds support from her family and friends. Conflicts arise from the obvious difficulties involved with having such an adult thing happen to you at such a young age.

Scene to Remember: Juno runs into the adopted mother (Jennifer Garner) of her baby in a shopping mall one day. One of the most endearing moments of any movie I’ve seen follows as Juno gives the mother-to-be a chance to feel her baby kick. A moment of eye contact and character realization takes place that is simply perfect.

3. The Queen (2006)

Stephen Frears directs a remarkable script by Peter Morgan focusing on Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Tony Blair and the thrill ride of days immediately following the death of Princess Diana. Tensions arise throughout England as everyone tries to guess what the reaction from the crown will be regarding the death of such a profoundly loved woman. Helen Mirren is absolutely wonderful as the Queen who believes it is her God-given duty to act a very specific way; a specific way that simply does not include a public reaction to the death of a woman no longer an official part of the crown.

Scene to Remember: As the Queen is slowly coming to realize her decision to say nothing about Diana’s death is doing more harm to the country she loves than good, she takes a drive out into the country where her car breaks down. As she is waiting for someone to come with another car, she sees a large buck, standing proudly on a nearby hill. It is a simple moment that evolves into one of purest grandeur.

2. Once (2006)

While the past decade saw the resurrection of the big Hollywood musical, it was this uber small film from Ireland that had the sweetest music telling the most genuine of stories. This is the simple story of a boy and a girl, who come together briefly through their shared love of music, enrich each other’s lives for a mere moment in time, and manage to make a lasting connection to one another. This is a gem of a movie.

Scene to Remember: The boy and the girl go to a piano shop, so he can hear her play. He then teaches her one of his songs and they share a duet. It is one of the most magical moments of film I have seen.

1. The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

This may be seen as a bit of cheat, as this is technically three movies. But, however you choose to watch its individual parts, The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson’s perfectly brilliant realization of the spirit and themes behind Tolkien’s seminal opus, is a grand and epic movie that is one of the greatest landmarks in the history of cinema. Of all the movies I saw this past decade, The Lord of the Rings was far and away my favorite.

Scene to Remember: At the conclusion of The Two Towers (the second part of the trilogy), Sean Astin’s Sam explains to Elijah Wood’s Frodo why they have to keep going on their journey, despite the enormity of the odds against their success. They must go on because of the belief that the good in the world is worth fighting for. It is a wonderfully moving moment that perfectly captures the spirit of the entire movie.

And there the thing is. Come back next week for a discussion of one of the ten movies just nominated for 2009 Best Picture Academy Awards.

Until then, here’s my hope that we all find our Shangri-La. Goodnight.