My Favorite Movies… This Week

We were having a small, fun family dinner last week and one of our nieces wanted to know the answer to a very simple question:

What’s your #1 film?

Being who I am I had to answer a question with a question before I could answer the question.

Ummm, well, do you mean the film that I think is the best film ever made or the film that I personally like the best?

It didn’t help at all when she answered:

How about both?

Of course at this point I began explaining that either way I couldn’t narrow it down to one. There are so many different types of movies I love and watch again and again but couldn’t claim were the best for anyone but me. There were also others that I would place in the top five or ten that wouldn’t be my personal favorite but….

At which point someone else said, The Wizard of Oz and my husband interjected Day for Night..

As I then began sputtering out in no particular order All About Eve, The Way We Were, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Postcards from the Edge and Annie Hall (Note: The latter with the disclaimer that it used to be but now, well, it’s hard to watch, which led to a discussion of why, which I don’t want to get into for various reasons and is the subject of another blog).

I then quickly explained Hitchcock was one of my favorite filmmakers and that despite it not being his most artsy I just love Psycho.

As well as most every Almodóvar movie, and many of the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. But that I couldn’t leave out….Billy Wilder or Scorsese and that even though Gone With The Wind is so problematic from a contemporary lens I loved the book and the film as a teenager, which is ironic because of how pissed I was that BlacKkKlansman didn’t win the best picture Oscar that year over what I judged to be the far more retro Green Book and…

Well, you get it.

I’m a parlor game buzzkill because nothing is simple in my brain. But as a lifelong movie fan, there is especially nothing is simple for me about the movies.

So much to love for so many reasons.

And damn, what kind of gay man would I be if I didn’t include the restored Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born and Jacque Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg?

See, I can’t stop.

Which is sort of the point.

There is something about the movies.

Plays are great, books are wonderful when they are and nothing is better these days than a great season of a streaming show. (Note: Yes, Baby Reindeer and Hacks were fantastic but this year I was riveted to Carmy’s existential crisis all through season three of The Bear and couldn’t care less how many stars his fakakta restaurant got – that wasn’t the point!).

Don’t even get me started on the Tina episode!

Not to mention music, museums and one of a kind events like Luna, Luna.

But if you’re a pop culture freak of nature of a certain age like I am, films are… well… forever.

Something immersive that’s eternally branded in your mind.

Perhaps it’s because the second golden age of 1970s cinema was where I came of age.

Maybe it’s that movies run such a gamut, or require brain power from totally passive to you better f’n pay attention or you’ll miss something.

It could also be the special kind of escape they provide for a prolonged period of time without anyone else around – at home or in a darkened theatre – the latter being a place you can easily pretend no one else is around as long as no one’s brought their crying kid. #ChildlessCatPeoplePower.

Or thinks it’s their living room. #ShutTheFUp

In the more than a week since my niece asked her question I only today realized none of this matters because left to my own devices (Note: A dangerous place to be) films are my unwinding mechanism.

And there are not just one type nor do they have to be on my aforementioned “favorites”:

I happened to turn on TCM a few days ago and there were the beginning credits of Silkwood. A bunch of friends worked on it and I hadn’t seen it in years. But I doubted I’d re-watch a story of radiation, friendship and corporate corruption even with the help of Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep and Cher because it’d been a trying week. But it had me. And kept me. Not only did it hold up all these years but I found the sheer unabashed chauvinistic anger at the power of a strong woman like the late Karen Silkwood to be strangely energizing because of how absolutely infuriating and relevant it remains.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t equally into the new feature-length documentary on MAX entitled, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, a few days before. It’s an actual movie about THE biggest movie star of the 20^th century which she narrates via numerous reels of “lost “tapes she recorded in the mid-late sixties for a planned biography that never came to be.

She’s bawdy, funny, smart and clever but what she is more than anything else is honest. It’s a treat to hear the dish on the movies, the life, the triumphs and the tragedies from the source but it’s even better to see it unfold in the filmic images and real-life footage put together in motion picture form by a director as creative as Nanette Burstein.

I was busy this week but in the last couple of days the air sucked and my sinuses swelled so I chose to stay inside and read once I caught up on some politics (Note: Idiot). At which point, I changed channels and there was another really great contemporary film that should have won the Oscar for best picture – The Social Network. (The King’s Speech? Seriously????).

I know, who wants to see the Mark Zuckerberg story at this point, right? But I’d forgotten how much of an even-handed anti-hero Aaron Sorkin’s script made him and how well David Fincher’s frenetic filmmaking captured what, from our current rear view mirror, seems like a very strangely naïve era we couldn’t quite appreciate at the time. #MoviesCanDoThat.

Not knowing I’d be writing about movies but still staying hermetically sealed at home I continued, checking out the much maligned recent film The Bikeriders starring Austin Butler and Jodie Comer. Dismissed by many top critics and a few friends, it was bizarre, fascinating, funny and sort of touching. I’m not into 1960’s motorcycle culture and I never imagined an English actress like Comer could so convincingly pull off working class Chicago (Note: Though why not after what she did on “Killing Eve?”) yet it was fascinating. And Mr. Butler is just so much more enjoyable on a motorcycle than slithering his way through sand in Dune 2.

I guess now is the time where I admit that before I gave in and went outside on a walk/run this afternoon I spent two hours rewatching the critical and audience drubbed film version of Jersey Boys, directed by Clint Eastwood. Yeah, it’s sort of schmaltzy, a little cartoony and was definitely shot on the Warner Bros. backlot.

But jeez, it’s a movie fantasy musical melodrama. And the soooonnnggggs.

Sherry, Walk Like A Man, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Let’s Hang On, Working My Way Back to You… And the Italian guys from the neighborhood I grew up with that I seldom hung out with but loved from afar. Fuggedaboudit….

It was a time capsule back to an imagined version of the life of a real-life singer (Frankie Valli, of The Four Seasons) with movie mobsters, movie people and melodramatic movie heartbreak played against a purposely and infectiously nostalgic movie soundtrack.

It’s not Elizabeth Taylor, nor does it address corporate malfeasance, social media or the evolution of pop culture movements. We have those, as well as many other films, for that.

And for a lot more.

Jersey Boys – “Sherry” (at the White House)

10.03.22

by notesfromachair

The Chair’s Review: Bros

Who knew that Bros, the first gay romantic comedy released by a major studio, would be as good and sweet and touching as it is?

I certainly didn’t.

Oh, also, it’s pretty damn funny.

And Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane make a really convincing couple falling in love.

It might not seem that way in the poster, which features only the backsides of two unidentified men, each with a hand on the other one’s ass.

But, hey, you can’t have everything.

Sadly, one thing Bros didn’t have this opening weekend was box-office success.

It received almost universally glowing reviews and scored 97% on Rotten Tomatoes’ audience meter. But grossing approximately $4.8 million domestically on 3350 screens makes it a huge financial disappointment in light of the $10 million plus it was expected to earn.

Not to mention the $22 million it cost to make and the $30-$40 million above that Universal Pictures spent to market it.

Box-office numbers are a strange indicator of what is good, bad or indifferent about a movie. Trust me, I know whereof I speak. In the eighties, I started the first weekly national box-office column for Daily Variety, which in turn popularized the international trend of reporting the grosses each weekend as if movies were racehorses in the Kentucky Derby.

But what seemed a good idea at the time for a business publication inundated with inflated numbers of seeming profit provided by their corporate-entity makers (Note: There is often little correlation between box-office grosses and actual profit, since it depends how much the damn thing cost to make and promote) promptly became nothing more than another way to measure a film’s VALUE.

In turn, it too often was the barometer for it being dubbed a SUCCESS or a FAILURE.

Yes, we live in a capitalist society and who doesn’t like making money? This is especially the case for corporate entities.

But as far as the measure of worth is concerned, the numbers a moviemaker’s film pulls in on opening weekend at the box-office in 2022 couldn’t be less-related to its artistic, and, yeah, even its ultimate financial worth.

This is not 1980, when Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder’s bro comedy Stir Crazy was lighting up the box-office coffers in one of the first Daily Variety stories I ever wrote. And Bros is certainly not Annie Hall (1977), a film about another neurotic Jewish New Yorker who falls in love with a gorgeous person from the planet SHIKSA/SHAYGETZ (Note: Look it up!) much the way Mr. Eichner does here.

As a young gay man who loved Annie Hall when it was released and had not yet come out, I could NEVER have imagined in my WILDEST, WEIRDEST dream that any movie studio, much less a major one, could make a gay male love story starring a much too talkative, know-it-all Semitic boy from Queens, like Billy AND myself, with any other boy boy from any other PLANET.

I mean, I barely realized those kind of love affairs were possible in real life on EARTH. And you might even substitute the world barely with I didn’t even know.

If only I had Bros way back when, I might have kissed (Note: And much more) A LOT less toads until I found my prince.

But I suspect that was partly Mr. Eichner’s story too, and at least a sliver of the reason he wanted to make this movie in the first place. It’s a laudable ambition and effort but practically a fool’s errand given the finicky nature of the way audiences watch new films in these pandemic and post-pandemic (Note: Ahem) days.

Personally, this is only the second time in more than two and a half years I’ve been to an actual public movie theatre as opposed to the at least 1-2 times PER WEEK that I used to attend pre-2020.

This might not be the case for most young people but, then again, we need to consider what everyone is now going to see publicly en masse.

Once you cut out Marvel movies, horror films and tent pole-type action flicks, how many big opening weekends for romantic comedies are left??

Bros director/co-writer Nick Stoller scored big with the pre-pandemic 2008 film Forgetting Sarah Marshall. And producer Judd Apatow directed the writer-star Amy Schumer to opening weekend success in 2015 in her big screen debut, Trainwreck.

But those might have been made and released a century ago as far as our current movie-watching habits are concerned.

Imagine a world where at least half of the new movies can be had opening weekend at home on your big ass screen with a click of a button from a service you pay a minimal amount of money to subscribe to.

You don’t have to. It exists.

… and you don’t even need to wear shoes (or get dressed!)

Or better yet, think about a life when any moviegoer can pay the price of a single ticket of admission plus a few more dollars and entertain as large a group of friends as they want to their house (Note: Or even a first date with someone they like) and together watch that new movie they’ve been dying to see, on their computer, in their living room, bedroom or, well, any room in or outside their house, apartment, or trailer home?

You don’t have to. You can merely open your eyes and fulfill that wish for 80% of the movies out there.

Universal and the other big four or five major studios (Note: Six? Seven? Three? How many are technically left?) might not want to recognize this fact. But it’s still a fact.

This is especially the case for a genre that’s always been close to this gay man’s heart – the romantic comedy.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll be proved wrong in a few weeks when the new George Clooney-Julia Roberts rom-com, Ticket to Paradise, debuts solely at movie theatres.

Yet is it fair to compare movie star royalty like the Clooney-Roberts combined billion-dollar box-office oeuvre with Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane?

Well, too bad. Who ever said life was fair?

See, that’s the gist of the argument. But the market doesn’t quite exist anymore to launch a new rom-com star, or stars, solely on the big screen. Even Julia Roberts did a TV series a few years ago and the last theatrical box-office success starring George Clooney was…… okay, Gravity (2013), where he didn’t even have the lead and which was certainly no rom-com.

Bros got the most difficult thing right in a movie of any genre, but most especially one that is a romance AND a comedy. It persuades us to care about its two leads by presenting them as real people rather than cardboard cutout movie types generated by a computer program, a list of old films and the shuffling of scenes written on a bunch of recycled index cards.

Sure, there are moments where what we are watching has so many LGBTQ plus references and people that you need a flow chart to be fluid, up to date, on trend and hip enough not to be left in the dust or mildly uncomfortable by some throwaway remark or too larger than life comic overstep or contemporary reference.

But that’s the exception rather than the rule here.

Bros is certainly not perfect but what is the last perfect movie you’ve seen in the pandemic, or post-pandemic present? (Note: Or ever?)

As rom-coms go, it far exceeds 2022’s Marry Me (starring J-Lo and Owen Wilson) and The Lost City (Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in the leads) any day of the week.

But that will not be the ruler against which the first gay romantic comedy released by a major studio will be measured against.

They’ll compare it to the Oscars won by Annie Hall (1977), the popularity of When Harry Met Sally (1989), the box-office mojo of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds’ in 2009’s The Proposal (Note: $163 million domestically) and the zeitgeist reaction to Crazy Rich Asians in pre-pandemic 2018.

… which in this case means, box office success

This is meaningless. And it takes away nothing from Bros being a very good, very smart and very entertaining film at a time when we need the very entertaining, the very smart and the very good.

By any true measure of anything worth measuring, that makes it a success.

Not to mention, historic.

Billy Eichner – “Love is Not Love” (from Bros)

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: Annie Hall

The Chair’s Review: Bros