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)

11.20.23

by notesfromachair

Conduct Becoming

I spent my birthday this weekend with Bradley Cooper and it was more than I could have hoped for.

He spoke after the screening of Maestro, a film he directed, co-wrote and stars in which I will happily tell everyone is original, riveting and at times even brilliant.

There, I said, it – the B word. It no longer means Bradley or Bernstein. And it’s not a word that I throw around lightly or, really, very much at all.

Brilliant literally means radiant, excellent or intelligent and the film is alternately all of those three, sometimes even at once.

You may quote me.

Maestro is a sort of biopic of famed conductor, composer, musician and teacher Leonard Bernstein, told through the lens of his long and complicated marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre. It was a marriage of two people who were turned on by creativity and creativity energy, which are not necessarily the same thing.

To say the pair loved each other would not be an over-exaggeration. But, as the movie so ably demonstrates, the dynamism of people like Bernstein, whose personalities and creativity and egos burn so bright on everything and everyone they touch becomes crushing, to both themselves and the people around them.

Somewhere down the line, in a partnership or a marriage, the latter being the ultimate partnership, someone cedes center stage publicly and privately and, in this case, it was the unique and charismatic Ms. Montealegre.

Until it wasn’t.

The strength of the film is that as riveting as the unexpected magical realism of the first half is – aka the rise of Bernstein the show biz “star” and the his courtship of love and life – it’s the second half that gives the movie it’s weight. That happens because of the storytelling ability of Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer and the qualities and actions of Ms. Montealegre herself, which are brought sharply into focus by the depth of the performances of Carey Mulligan and Cooper and the dynamic shifts they employ as a flesh and blood, and even occasionally pretentious, couple onscreen.

It’s an unexpected and truly original mix of drama, comedy and subtexts all played out to a series of carefully chosen musical cues of some of the composer’s best-known and perhaps not as well-known music.

So much so that once Cooper and his co-writer, Josh Singer, were introduced at the Writers Guild Theatre for a talk back post-screening, they received a spontaneous and quite unexpected standing ovation.

Side Note: The Writers Guild Theatre audience is a notoriously TOUGH crowd. I’ve been going to these screening for years and there is seldom, if ever, a standing O. As the recent WGA strike demonstrated, scribes DO NOT give it up for just anyone or anything. Nor are we a crowd of star f-ckers. As a group, writers are singularly unimpressed with movie stars in person unless it’s one-on-one and we think they might like something we wrote. But in an en masse group directly after a screening, the work has to really put out, as they say, in order to receive anything more than professional, polite, or even mildly enthusiastic applause.

In the case of Maestro, I think it’s the mere risk taking and audacity the film traffics in that the crowd admired. And once its two writers started answering questions from writer-director/moderator Rian Johnson (Note: Yeah him, you could tell he liked it too), it became apparent why.

The pair explained they spent almost five years writing the screenplay, immersed in research and determined to dig out some sort of narrative structure to tell a pretty unwieldy story. They also clocked interminable hours figuring out how to relate the composer’s vast music library to what was going on in the moments of his life they chose to dramatize; or chose to leave out when it wasn’t pertinent. Until finally, it miraculously became some sort of seamless, inevitable and occasionally tough to take story with a relatable beginning, middle and end.

It takes a room of ink-stained wretches (Note: That would be EVERYONE in the WGA) to know just how nearly impossible it is to get all of the above right on paper, much less in a final edited film.

In fact, at one point Singer, who won an Oscar in 2015 for writing Spotlight, verbalized what was likely on every writer’s mind. None of that would have been possible were he not co-writing and conceiving all of this with the person who would be directing the script AND starring as the title character. Or had both Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese not been producers.

Nevertheless, the rest of us wretches can still dream, can’t we?

There is one more element to Maestro that allows it to soar in a way that movies during the period Bernstein and his crowd existed in never could.

His homosexuality — or, I guess, bisexuality. It’s hard to tell what’s what for men of certain tastes who were young adults in the forties, fifties and early sixties.

Yeah, there have been a lot of films with gay characters in the last thirty years. But, well, not ALL that many compared to how many stories there are. The fact that Maestro makes Bernstein’s continuous and clearly insatiable hookups, relationships or whatever you want to call them with men an integral part of the narrative unlocks an essential element of conflict, compromise, respect and more than a little self-loathing from both members of this couple’s perspectives.

And as a bonus one of them is Matt Bomer!

Their keen awareness yet simultaneous lack of self-awareness when it came to themselves and their partnership occurred in a delicate dance of acceptance and denial that a gay person like myself couldn’t help but feel was at the center of so much of this story. It likely would not have even been possible to have employed it with so much deliberate casualness in a big budget studio feature as recently as, say, 10 years ago. You’d have seen it but it would have been skewed or soft-pedaled to one side or the other. As Maestro portrays Bernstein, it was a major moment, or shall we say a major series of moments, of a major life, which had so many more the film chose NOT to go into.

All of which contributed to earning Leonard Bernstein and this re-telling of his life the title of Maestro, and the movie all of the inevitable praise it so richly deserves.

Okay, now cue the detractors – because certainly they are coming too.

But whoever they are, and misguided as I might say they will be, watch it yourself, preferably on a big screen, stay with it, and decide on your own.

As we should all be doing about so many things that matter these days.

Candide Overture – Leonard Bernstein conducting

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: Martin Scorsese

Conduct Becoming