Ed Wood

Oh dear Lord in Heaven. If you're tired of watching Johnny Depp play a wise-cracking pirate or a freaky candy factory owner or a cheeseball 18th-century vampire with lots of money or a wise-cracking freaky cheeseball something else, go back and watch Tim Burton's Ed Wood from 1994. (Also, if you feel Tim Burton has lost his touch, this movie may just perk up your mood.) Yes it's a weird movie, true to the Burton-Depp collaborations, but it's also a delightful one, a faux-morbid chronicle of the infamous career of cult filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., who's infamous as the director of some of the worst movies ever made, including the transvestite trash-gem Glen or Glenda? and the outer-space-invasion spectacular Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Ed Wood is probably one of the best movies about the movie-making business. It's certainly one of the only ones that doesn't genuflect with banal reverence toward Hollywood. Instead of getting some high-minded, self-congratulatory glamor parade, we're treated to the ersatz side of the movie-making business: the world of not just deferred dreams, but squandered dreams, where a guy with too much enthusiasm and too little talent will work his heart out and still struggle to pay the lab fees for his own films. (Thus one of Wood's movies, Night of the Ghouls, sat unreleased and virtually lost to curio-aficionados for years and years.) Somehow, Tim Burton prevents Ed Wood from being a tragic figure: the movie successfully walks the line of sympathy and ridicule, never partaking in either too carelessly. It revels in his sheer, exuberant love of the medium, and I feel like it wants Ed Wood to make a successful movie, even though he never does.

Leave it to Tim Burton to try and do justice to the man who was arguably the worst director in history. (John Waters is the only other director I'd like to see take a crack at the career of Ed Wood.) If you appreciate the deliciousness of failure, you'll find a kindred spirit in Ed Wood. Johnny Depp plays him with wide-eyed, gleeful aplomb, and taps into the intriguing inner-world of a man who loved two things: making shitty movies (although he didn't seem to think they were shitty) and wearing women's clothes, particularly argyle sweaters. (In the movie, Ed swears he isn't gay, just a really uninhibited hetero.) This has to be one of Depp's most engaging and fun performances. In so many of his more recent movies, he plays these cartoonish characters who stand in front of the camera and crack jokes. Luckily, Johnny Depp is still in great shape and can move around convincingly, or he'd really be in trouble. But if you've neglected to go back and re-visit some of his older work, I encourage you to do so. You'll see the Johnny Depp we all fell in love with: the actor who made the grotesque lovable and beautiful and funny.

Depp invests such heart into Edward D. Wood, Jr. that the movie's admittedly cynical (at times) tone is much easier to take. The movie does have a bitter side, much of it expressed through the brilliant performance of Martin Landau, as an aging Bela Lugosi. (Wood meets Lugosi by chance, and the two strike up a friendship that leads to collaborative work on several films, ultimately proving to be both the comeback and the swan song of the legendary ham.) With Bela we get a truly depressing window into the dark side of Hollywood, in which older stars have faded completely from view. Landau's performance (for which he earned an Oscar) recalls the mad pathos of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, and in fact Ed Wood lives on the same edges as Sunset: it's Hollywood in decay, black-and-white, vaguely noirish, out of money, and forgotten by audiences who have long ago moved onto the next big thing.

But ultimately Ed Wood is a loving, blissed-out tribute to sheer audacious zeal and the irony of failure. How could you not love a movie like that? The supporting cast is like a gaggle of amusing and uniquely scary figures in a wax museum or a carnival house of horrors. Ed Wood doesn't have the zany madness of Beetle Juice, but in a way, it is Tim Burton's Citizen Kane. (Orson Welles, incidentally, shows up in a chance meeting with Wood. He's played here by Vincent D'Onofrio.) With Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Juliet Landau, Jeffrey Jones, G.d. Spradlin, Lisa Marie, and Bill Murray.

The Godfather Part II

In the first Godfather, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) never believed he could be sucked into his father's way of doing things. And in The Godfather Part II (1974), he can't accept that he has. His corruption happens quickly but subtly. Under the guise of vengeance, of protecting family honor, Michael becomes a tragic fallen hero. Director Francis Ford Coppola and author Mario Puzo have created a sequel that fills in a lot of detail for us, simultaneously depicting Michael's rise as the new Don Corleone and the life of young Vito (played in flashback by Robert De Niro) as he leaves Sicily for America and gradually begins a life of crime.

There are moments of greatness in The Godfather Part II, and moments of great drama. Some of the images stay with you, and considering how much it attempts, much of this movie is a smashing success. The actors are exceedingly good: Pacino shines darkly. You can see the transformation he's undergone in his face, which was once innocent. Now it has a yellow patina of greed and an addiction to power. Diane Keaton gets some stronger material in this sequel as well. She's the good wife who's stuck by Michael for longer than she should have, who's looked the other way too many times now. De Niro is a solid Vito (it's no small feat filling the shoes of Marlon Brando), Talia Shire adds a new level of depth to Connie, Michael's sister, who was always getting roughed up by her sleazy husband Carlo in the first one. In Part II she's given herself over to money and things, at the expense of her family. But then she experiences something of a reversal of character, and she rises up to be the family's new matriarch. It's fascinating to watch all these performances and the depths to which the actors take them.

But it's lacking something. Many critics have proclaimed this an even better film than its predecessor. They praise it for deepening the material, for elevating it to a mythological status. It's just that in the process of demonstrating how far Michael has fallen, the movie too seems to lose its soul. Despite the fact that he had already been corrupted by the end of the first Godfather, that film left you with a sense of ambiguity. That perhaps things were going to be different. After all, Michael's involvement in murder had been about "vengeance" and "justice." But in the sequel, we start to see the consequences of that. It's beautiful and compelling yet bleak and depressing. And the powerful scenes are linked by many scenes that lumber along. (It's three hours and twenty minutes long, where the first was under three, a significant difference.) The tacked-on ending, a flashback of the days before WW2, when all the children were alive, but grown, feels too TV-movie-ish, like Coppola was already showing signs of the bad judgment that would taint his directing ever after. (It is nice to see James Caan reprising his role as Sonny, if ever so briefly. His absence is really felt--Sonny was such a presence, such an iconic character, and Caan turned him into a hot-headed bad boy who you liked because of his brashness and his macho love for his family.)

Part II deserves credit for what it does and what it is: a very good movie, and a compelling study of the soul-destroying power of an America that has built-in methods of abiding criminal activity. It also gets at the things which knit this family together, and the myriad forces which tear it apart. With Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Lee Strasberg, Michael Gazzo, G.D. Spradlin, Richard Bright, Bruno Kirby, Morgana King, and Gianni Russo.