Tag Archives: Wizard of Oz

05.26.24
by

It’s the Movies for Me

Sometimes I’m astounded at the impact movies have made on my life and the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent watching them.

This is particularly surprising to me because as I kid I watched a lot more TV than films and in my early teen years certainly spent more time obsessing about singer-songwriters and their relentless existential introspections. (Note: I came of age in the early seventies when this was all the rage).

Just me and Joni hanging in Topanga Canyon

Ditto Broadway musicals. 

I am not going to once again write about my Dad telling me he would get us tickets to see anything I chose for my 11th birthday as my first experience at the theatre (Note: A rarity since my family went practically nowhere as a group and my Dad and I had even less than that in common). 

Or that somehow I chose Mame.  Ahem.

Ang was my spirit animal

I will only comment to future 11 year olds that my father likely knew me better than I thought.  Or, at least was trying.

Yet somehow this all shifted as I became an adult.  Sure, I remember having my life changed when I saw Mary Poppins as a kid on the big screen or how I looked forward to the then only once-a-year showing of The Wizard of Oz on TV (Note: Yeah, that was also a thing).

OK but it didn’t look THIS good

Or the time young teenage me found Lana Turner’s Madame X on NYC’s Million Dollar Movie (Note: Channel 9 or Channel 11, I can only recall they showed it all day and night) and I obsessively watched it four times in a row.

Ahem.  

Times 12.    

Even the poster is DRAMA

And let’s hear it for the sensitive, overly-theatrical lads. 

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

There was some moment where movies began speaking to me most personally.  A time when the immersive experience of sitting alone in your thoughts at a movie theatre, yet surrounded by people who for me, most of the time, might not as well have been there but luckily were there, supplanted everything.

How it felt

Part of it might have been the waiting in line (Note: I can still remember three plus hours in freezing cold Manhattan waiting for tickets to The Exorcist and bonding with a ton of waaay cooler people than myself also desperate to be scared “to death.”).

But more likely it was that films had a way of making everything bigger and more important than anything else in the world because they were literally HUGE. 

So I learned pretty quickly that movies could address your fears, your hurts and your yearning for happiness, albeit in a somewhat ironic, funny yet loving way and SUPERSIZE your personal concerns in a way that you KNEW they deserved to be.

Almost like they’d come out and bite ya

Films were way better than real life.  They BECAME real life.  Or real life experiences, at any rate.  I often found that for those who didn’t understand me fully, I could simply recommend a film that dealt with my “issues” and refer it to them to watch if they wanted to know in a very real sense what truly concerned me.

It wasn’t the be all or end all.  But at least it was a starting point.

I’d forgotten about this because in the last few decades movies, as a whole, have changed a lot.  Oh, of course there are still great films, meaningful films, and every year there are more than a handful that speak to me personally.

but otherwise..

But it wasn’t until my friend Ray Morton reached out to me via Facebook in a challenge where you have to publicly post ONE MOVIE IMAGE per day for 10 straight days with NO COMMENT (Note: The latter being the toughest part for moi), that I began to once again recognize the impact of the films I chose.

Maybe impact is not the correct word because it wasn’t so much that I was shaped by them.  It was that I felt they represented me or that somehow they saw me or read my mind at a particular place in time.  I didn’t plan ANY of my picks, I just posted what came to me that day.  But as I peruse the list on this final day of the assignment I’m astounded by the personal resonance of the list.

duh!

It’s not that these are the best movies I’ve ever seen (Note: Though they are pretty great), that I couldn’t name ten more that were ever better, or more sophisticated, or more dramatic, or funnier, or more….more, more, more. 

I could.   And you could.

But I stand by my list because in a purely knee jerk, visceral sense they are there for a reason.  They are, or were, ME.

The Way We Were finally made me realize it is not enough to love someone, or for them to love you, for a relationship to survive.  (Note: And it only took me eight viewings over 20 years to get that).

Strangers On A Train showed me that I was not as crazy I thought and that if I thought my family was really crazy, well, think again.

Blue Velvet taught me you can write serious movies and be as sick and funny and twisted as you like as long as you’re committed to your world and your characters.

… and all it took was a severed ear

Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the newly humorless and bereft me laugh for the first time in a long time amid all the death and condemnation and destruction at the height of the AIDS crisis.

The Godfather provided the gold standard of storytelling for an aspiring storyteller and made me confident that my obsession with dysfunctional family dynamics had nothing to do with being Jewish and gay.

add in unforgettable lines too

Brokeback Mountain allowed me to cry (A LOT) and appreciate what I had and was likely in peril of taking for granted.

BlacKkKlansman made me angrier than I’ve been since the eighties about how f-cked up the U.S is; showed the absolute default privilege you get (Note: I got) for being white; and reinforced my constant desire to waterboard (Note: But not kill, that would be too nice) every person supporting the orange sh-t stain.

Rosemary’s Baby brings back just how much I still  love the visuals of the sixties and why, deep down, I was right to be suspicious of almost everybody.

This is evergreen

Harold and Maude told me your teachers and lovers always appear when you least expect it and in the strangest of ways.

and

La La Land is an endless, dizzying, constantly morphing dream of too many things to count, many of which you are likely not to achieve in the way you thought, certainly not in Hollywood.  But that there are far worse things than being a dreamer.  And nothing better.

Cass Elliot – “Dream A Little Dream of Me”

08.26.18
by

Same Old Song?

Turner Classic Movies had Judy Garland Day last week and, being a gay man of a certain age, I couldn’t resist tuning in at one point to this 24-hour Judy film fest.

Don’t judge me.

But of all of the choices available who knew that it would be a 1961 dour melodrama about four German judges being tried before a postwar military tribunal for their collaboration with Hitler and the Third Reich, Judgment at Nuremberg, that would hit me like a ton of bricks.

I can think of at least five other Judy films that would have been more enjoyable. (Note: Okay — A Star Is Born, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me In St. Louis, Easter Parade and I Could Go On Singing). Though none that could be more timely.

Realistically, this is how I wish I felt about today’s political climate.

In hindsight I should have predicted it. Like the currently much lauded, breakthrough post apocalyptic Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale (which is about to once again become a multi Emmy winner for its superb second season), you can’t go wrong in 2018 watching a story about a country of people who enable a rabid white nationalist political regime to persecute, maim and/or kill anyone they deem to be a subversive OTHER.

Unless all you want to do is escape and put your _____ in the sand.   In which case, you are not only wrong but veering towards the same sheep-like behavior portrayed by some of your fellow countrymen in that movie, that series and no doubt countless other ____________s about to come out on other platforms that will be, at least thematically, very much like them.

Whether we call it the Nazis, the power brokers of Gilead or simply Trumpism – it’s all the same thing. A regime that wants to demonize anyone outside of a select group of people they don’t judge ‘ideal’ – whether they be Jews, the non-religious or Mexican/Middle Eastern immigrants – in order to rouse a base of loyal voters whose lives they promise to improve and whose country they vow to protect and/or rebuild.

I’m gonna go ahead and add “Crippling Insecurity” to the YES column #tinyhands

This strategy is always advanced with promises to put the people of said country FIRST, declarations that said country is GREAT and proclamations that the rest of the world is NO BETTER morally than they are and usually quite INFERIOR.

Yeah, I don’t like comparing any regime, especially America’s current regime, to the Nazis. But the argument being advanced is not how successful the regime is at achieving their goals or to what ends they will get to go in order to achieve them. Instead, it’s the philosophy and the strategy.

The degree to how far they get to go – well, this is up to their subjects… er….citizenry. In other words – THIS IS UP TO US.

BRB

Again, the comparison seemed a bit reach-y. Until too many lines from Judy’s Nazi film, for which she was nominated as Oscar’s best supporting actress that year along with several other cast members in their own categories, began to ring a bell.

— It started when Marlene Dietrich’s upper crust German woman says of Hitler:

He was in awe of nobility but he hated it.

— Then it continued when Montgomery Clift’s ordinary German man recalled the times he was MOCKED by LEADERS of the power class for speaking in a way that seemed slow even when he demonstrated the ability to understand logic.

I’m with Meryl — this still makes my blood boil

— It continued when Judy’s youngish German woman recalled how her best friend, a 65 year old Jewish man, was laughed at and held up to mockery by the PUBLIC at his trial simply because he was A JEW. The charges were violating the new law outlawing A JEW having sex with A GERMAN ARYAN (Judy), a charge he was found guilty of and put to death for even though, as it turned out, it never happened.

–Then there was Marlene’s defense of herself and the German people over Americans condemning her after the war:

Listen to me, there are things that happenedon BOTH SIDES.

ummmm… WHAT?

— Which all finally led to one of the four judges on trial, eloquently played by Burt Lancaster, exposing the lies he and his fellow Germans told themselves about Hitler and the Third Reich:

We say – what difference does it make – our country is at stake – Hitler (He) will be gone after a while. Things denied to US as a democracy are open to us now…. And then one day we looked around and saw what was going to be a passing phase had become a way of life.

Yes, all of these lines were indeed written – by the great screenwriter Abby Mann – but they were based on actual transcripts and stories he culled from the real Nuremberg trials right after the end of WWII.

.. and with a cast like this to make it come to life.

They were not his thoughts he put into his characters’ mouths so much as a distillation of real sentences and opinions and ideas of the time.

Though perhaps knowing there would be a portion of their audience that still might think they were being too polemic or had gone a bit too far, the filmmakers’ “movie trial” included 5-10 minutes of REAL NEWSREEL FOOTAGE of thousands of actual naked Jewish corpses – as well as others barely alive and starving – to back up their words.

This along with clips and still photos of the real crematoriums, featuring close ups of the popular German oven manufacturer that built them. In addition to historical maps indicating the dozens of specific towns with concentration camps hidden among a significant percentage of German citizenry who either supported Hitler because he was doing some good things or because it was easier to turn a blind eye to the whole ugly mess just because.

It’s difficult to face the truths, or potential truths, of any world, especially our own, but in the end it’s far uglier not to.

or you know, truth becomes relative. #stillcantbelievethishappened

As Spencer Tracy’s presiding American judge lets us know at the end of Judgment at Nuremberg in a way only a presiding American judge played by Spencer Tracy could truly make work:

A country is what it stands for – when it’s the most difficult. We stand for justice, truth and the value of a single human being.

Or to put it in 2018 parlance: There’s a reason why Sen. John McCain, who died on Saturday, chose Barack Obama and George W. Bush, a former Democratic president and a former Republican president, to deliver the eulogies at his Capitol Hill memorial service this week rather than the current sitting President of Trumpism.