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)

09.24.17

by notesfromachair

Oh, Mother!

Everyone who makes movies in Hollywood these days is an artist of some kind no matter what anyone thinks. Try working in any department on a film and you will see artistry at work. Sure, it might not be to your taste but it’s there.

Still, most people in the business would privately admit there is a very, very small group of writer-directors whose every movie – consistently and with dogged resolve – are always reaching for a lot more than commercial success or to tell a simple story with skill and creativity.

ahem

These are people who understand the economics and plot elements of the business but also aspire to do go out on a limb and add elements to their work that you not only never saw before but never in your wildest dreams imagined.

They seek to tell a story that will always blow you out of the water, that often can’t help at points to confound, offend and most importantly – despite your reaction –cause you to think about what they’ve presented whether you want to or not. Whether you like it or not.

These filmmakers are our current UBER artists and Darren Aronofsky is one of them.

OK.. maybe he’s not helping himself #scarvesfordays

A lot has been written about his just released Mother!, starring Jennifer Lawrence.

The fact that it got a record low F Cinemascore
The fact that it had a dismal opening at the box office and has rapidly trended downwards
The fact that Mr. Aronofsky’s last film, Noah, was a bit of a mess, wildly expensive and made for Paramount – the same studio that backed Mother!
The fact that Mr. Aronofsky is in career free-fall, has lost it, and will most certainly follow in the footsteps of many of our greatest filmmakers who ___________.

Well, you can fill in the blanks.

No please Chair, go on. #mnightknows

But the problem with all of the above is that they are irrelevant and beside the point.

And most especially, particularly in the case of the latter, are a whole lot of:

HORSESHIT

Yep… that’s what I smell

I saw Mother! at a screening at the WGA Friday night and for the first two thirds of it I often didn’t quite know where I was despite being thoroughly entertained, intrigued and often second-guessing just how crazy the rest of it could get. Eventually the threads of what held together filmmaking this audacious began to unravel and what I was left with, well, I’ll spare you the details.

Good, bad, and certainly not indifferent, I’m, yes, still thinking about quite a few images in Mother! — all in the muddled spaces of Mother logic that remains in my mind. (Note: And yes, make of that what you will.)

Roughly how I felt after I left the screening

This is a film where the less you know about it the better and the more you try to focus on plot and theme the less you seem to know. That is its greatest fault or most potent calling card depending on who you are and what you prefer to see. But one thing is for certain: Mother! never shies away from its aspirations and goes for them full throttle. It is comedy, drama, horror,and epic all sewn into a patchwork of crazy. But will you like it???

Hell if I know. I don’t even know if I did.

Horror you say? No, a different kind of MOTHER! #ohNorman

Anyone who has followed Mr. Aronofsky’s career as I have (Note: Full confession, he is one of my most preferred contemporary American filmmakers – and there aren’t many) shouldn’t be surprised at what they’re seeing here.

There are certain themes that pop up in all his work:

Fame

Artistry

Love and Sex (not necessarily in that order)

Family

Is it, Darren?

Look at his most enduring movies and you’ll see a guy who leaves it all on the screen and let’s the chips fall where they may.

I can recall sitting at a 1998 Academy screening of his film Pi unable to move out of my chair at the end, wondering: what the hell was that, how did he know what I was thinking about but never dared to tell anyone, and how can I immediately get more?

Two years later he made Requiem for A Dream and gave me existential nightmares that every so often creep back into my brain uninvited and, yet, sometimes also give me the impetus to strive for something even more daring in my own work.

Plus.. I’m gonna be on television!

Six years after that he made me love Mickey Rourke as an actor for the very first time, not to mention The Wrestler, while touching on some very personal family issues I didn’t even know I still carried with me.

When Black Swan came out two years later I believed he’d jumped to a whole new level of addressing the age old question of what is the price artistry and, given its box-office success on such a relatively low budget, fully expected to see a whole raft of ballet films of all genres in its wake. (Note: Clearly I was wrong on the latter and is one of the thousands of reasons why I am not a studio executive).

The closest we got was care of Miss Swift #shakeitoff

Sure, in between there were bigger budget, rambling confusions like The Fountain and Noah but in my mind even both of those were not without their moments. Mostly because I knew each of them were stepping stones to the next film and the next one and then the film after that.

This is what it REALLY takes to consistently produce work that is mold-breaking, thought-provoking and ORIGINAL. You have to disappoint, confuse and perhaps even offend your audience with too many misfired moments in order to get to where the most JUICE is.

I realize metaphors are not my strongest suit and I’m not sure why I use them. (Perhaps because one day I know I’ll find one that works?).

Just doing my part…

But one thing I am ABSOLUTELY certain of is that to en masse roast an uber artist like Mr. Aronofsky for what you or your friends or gang of social media cronies find to be his lessest work is to guarantee that you will never, ever get his future bestest work.

In between tweeting about the Orange Buffoon’s latest tirade against Black athletes and football, many have this week seen fit to take to our virtual Town Square and quite metaphorically (and then some) stone Mother! and Mr. Aronofsky to their virtual, spiritual and financial deaths.

Though usually Ms. Lawrence – one of our current America’s Sweethearts –is spared, they manage to go doubly, triply, even sextupley hard on the one principal artist who dared make that misfired, truly disgusting, stillborn thing that sullied her.

I’m pretty sure this is just how Katniss feels about that

Without ever appreciating this fact: that one principal artist is also, in a past or future work, the same uber talented filmmaker who will help make us fall in love with her – and people like her – in the first place.

Yes, I know Mr. Aronofsky doesn’t need my help. But dismissive, over-the-top reaction to films like Mother! really pisses me off.

Cee Lo Green – “Forget You”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: Psycho

Oh, Mother!