The Fly

In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum, playing a scientist named Seth Brundle, slowly transforms into a bug, and the make-up effects of Chris Walas are utterly horrifying. The first half of the movie is actually kind of sweet: it's about an eccentric but lovable scientist, working on a teleportation device--who falls in love with a journalist played by Geena Davis. Their chemistry together is believable, and both of them have presence on the screen, real presence that commands our attention. But as Seth transforms into this hideous bug, the film itself turns into nothing more than a spectacle, as though director David Cronenberg is saying: "Hey look at this crazy shit right here!" Perhaps I wouldn't complain if the spectacle were more interesting. As much as Cronenberg seems to want to be the lit theory horror filmmaker par excellence, conjuring up allusions to Kafka's Metamorphosis and turning The Fly into a blank canvas on which can be read quite a few metaphors, from the AIDS crisis to the cocaine crisis to our growing anxieties about science--The Fly lost me. The effects were more than I could take, and that's saying something. But more than just gag-inducing make-up effects, The Fly essentially has too little going on in it once the romance dissolves and it becomes Geena Davis watching helplessly as her tortured, brilliant lover turns into a hideous creature. With John Getz. Written by Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue, from the George Langelaan novel. (And of course, it's a remake of a 1958 sci-fi shocker starring Vincent Price.)

The Right Stuff

As three-hour-long epics go, The Right Stuff (1983) is a pretty good one, bolstered by the humanized performances of a slew of talented actors portraying the men and women involved in America's race against the Russians to get outer space. The film--which was written and directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted from Tom Wolfe's best-selling book--finds a surprising balance in a story so charged with cultish nationalism. I've never been particularly interested in planes or pilots, and when I lived in Orlando, was always blasé about the goings-on at NASA just forty-five minutes away at Cape Canaveral. When people would talk excitedly about the latest rocket launch, I felt bored. This film shows exactly how exciting and meaningful it was to be a part of the space race.

As a director, Kaufman is one of the best to come out of the 70s, and The Right Stuff should probably have been his piéce de résistance, except that it wasn't successful at the box office, barely breaking even (or not) depending on which budget calculation you go with. (It was made for around 20 million, and grossed around 20 million.) Kaufman had already established himself as a fine director with the impressive 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Right Stuff isn't as canny as that film, but it's certainly as well-made and well-acted, and tries very hard to show us the many perspectives at play during this little chunk of big history. And it has a sense of humor. The grandiosity that Kaufman puts on the screen is always accompanied by a wink.

The film begins in 1947 at a military air base in the California desert, where Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) determines to break the "sound barrier," a phrase that essentially meant doom for an aircraft once it reached a certain altitude. Yeager's accomplishment (spoiler alert: he breaks it) sets in motion the events of the film which take place into the 1960s when the seven "chosen" astronauts make their various orbits into space. One of Kaufman's most adept accomplishments as director is his seamless merging of actual documentary footage of news coverage with fictionalized footage of the actors. In that sense, The Right Stuff often feels like a plucky documentary about the space age. It would have been propaganda in the hands of a less literate filmmaker. 

One of Kaufman's best instincts as director is to consider the point-of-view of the pilot's wives. On one hand, this story is every bit a tale of male achievement in a very traditional power structure, but Kaufman has a sense of realism--not to mention compassion--for the "women behind the men." Is the film accurate in its portrayal of the men and their wives? That isn't for me to say. But as a piece of narrative, The Right Stuff succeeds in multitudinous ways at being both honest and insightful about marital relations in the military and the American obsession with a kind of mythologized machismo. What's so genius is that the film mixes its criticism with its reverence in a way that feels genuine. And yet it's always sure-footed. Kaufman wants to give us a ra-ra American epic, but he wants us to think about it too, and layers his criticisms in subtle ways that allow us to come across them on our own. Otherwise it would be preachy or condescending.

As John Glenn, Ed Harris--plucked from cameo roles and TV by George Romero in the 1981 knights-on-motorcycles indie film Knightriders--shows what he's made of as an actor here. Harris is the kind of all-American actor who's very easy to root for, and his performance as Glenn paints him as a thoughtful man who took very seriously his unexpected new role as a public figure. The equally fine supporting cast includes: Dennis Quaid, Lance Henriksen, Barbara Hershey, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed, Charles Frank (as Scott Carpenter), David Clennon, and Donald Moffat (as Lyndon Johnson).

Identity Mongering: 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' and 'Divergent'

I've been lost in a whirlwind of books. It's as though the crippling pall of academia has finally been lifted and I am struggling to keep up with my newfound desire to just read, read, read. Yes, I was an English major and an English graduate student who hated being forced to read books. It took me about a year and a half to get into the discipline of reading for pleasure. Since January, I've finished eight books, including John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, and Tab Hunter's autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential. I also gave up on one: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which was truly the definition of dismal reading.

The movie watching has suffered as a result I'm afraid. I've been thinking about this blog and what it means. Whether or not I want to continue it, whether or not I want to be a film critic. I've been thinking about this whole internet life we lead, and how it's not working for me. This need to put myself out into the online world for all to dissect and consume. It doesn't satisfy. So, dear readers, I don't know what that means for Panned Review. I'm not going to make any big statements because I'm likely to change my mind in two weeks. But there is a stirring in me to leave this big technological monstrosity behind, or at least, to take a few steps back and get to know the person who doesn't need to stare at a screen for some semblance of an identity.

For now, let's talk about the two movies I did see in theaters this month, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Divergent. As for Grand Budapest Hotel: I'm not in any way a Wes Anderson fan. I remember watching The Life Aquatic with my good friend Neal in pure agony. He was laughing at it, I wasn't. I didn't, I don't, I probably never will, get it. Moonrise Kingdom only reinforced this feeling about Wes Anderson movies for me. I fell asleep. The reason Wes Anderson annoys me is the reason he annoys everyone else who finds him annoying: His movies are just so precious, so cutesy, so meticulously storybook, as though Anderson had stumbled across a myriad of dollhouses and toys in his attic and breathed some kind of pompous auteur's life into them. He's the puppeteer who can't decide if he finds puppets amusing in a sentimental or an ironic way. He probably wants it to be both.

That being said, I enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel. At first, there was the same cutesy-ness and the same stultifying flawless-beauty aesthetic that permeates his other work. But then the story grabbed my attention, and the film's quick adventurous tale transcended all the obviousness of Wes Anderson-land. The story is about a hotel clerk in-training who becomes the protegee of Liam Neeson, a wise and seasoned concierge at the titular hotel. Neeson's character is named Gustave H., and he maintains emotional and sexual relationships with many of the hotel's elderly female guests. One of them (played by Tilda Swinton, entombed in aging make-up so that she looks like poor, shriveled Bette Davis did in the late 1980s) croaks and leaves him a priceless work of art which her son (Adrian Brody) tries to keep for himself. He employs a murderous thug to aid him in this endeavor. Eventually, Gustave is arrested when the angry son accuses him of murdering his mother. Thus the young hotel clerk (Tony Revolori) is enlisted to help bust Gustave out of jail.

Grand Budapest moves with verve and comic charm, and even when I rolled my eyes at Wes Anderson laying his usual bag of tricks out on the table and then parading them around the room with the kind of hipster-reverie that only Wes Anderson can exhibit, I couldn't help liking it. It was fun. Maybe he's just worn me down and my defenses are so low that I'll take anything remotely enjoyable. I think this may be the Wes Anderson film that the non-initiated can finally get behind. (It may also be our last.) With Saoirse Ronan. Featuring cameo appearances by Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton, F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Bob Balaban.

And then there's Divergent (directed by Neil Burger) the latest trend in pop young adult dystopian story-telling. It's based on the book series by Veronica Roth. I liked it, but are we ever going to be released from the prison of dystopian craptacularness that permeates popular movies and literature? This kind of gook is somehow highlighted as the catalyst to a reading revolution among young people. I recently read in the book The Dumbest Generation that what's actually happening--with successful book series such as Harry Potter and the like--is that most kids who read them read nothing else. They read these books to be in on the cultural event that they perceive is taking place and dare not do so without them on board.  The author, Mark Bauerlein, points out how many people under 30 are proud of their anti-literate sensibilities. They're too worried about pop culture, too obsessed with engaging social media to keep their social lives alive. This may be cynical, but it's certainly compelling. I imagine that there are plenty of people who read widely. They're the ones who aren't on social media 24/7. That's why we think they're non-existent. They aren't making any noise because they're reading. Right now. Let's join them, shall we?

Okay, back to Divergent. The basic structure of Veronica Roth's futuristic, post-apocalyptic world had me laughing inwardly. Everyone is divided into one of five factions, according to their gifts and personalities. Once adolescents come of age (i.e. when they become old enough to theoretically figure out who they are), they are allowed to choose one of these identities. The trouble is when someone doesn't fit in just one box. That's where Beatrice Prior (played by Lindsay Lohan-ish looking Shailene Woodley, a compelling young actress who impressed me in The Descendants) finds herself. She fits into multiple categories. The community has a word for people like her. (Any guesses?): Divergent. Divergents are seen as a threat to the stability of the community, so the villainous Kate Winslet, head of the faction of smarties known as Erudite, has basically issued death warrants for any Divergents who might be wandering around. It's kind of Blade Runner mixed with The Hunger Games mixed with The Giver mixed with Every Other Futuristic Movie/Book Ever Made.

On the plus side, Divergent is an interesting movie, once you get past the inane set-up and the inevitable message of "being yourself" and "not letting people put you in a box." (These two slogans comprise the messages of 97% of all high school yearbook inscriptions.) The whole training program that Beatrice undergoes when she makes her choice is quite absorbing. (She's pretending to be one of the athletic, super-energetic, comically over-the-top Dauntless people, who are basically like a bunch of hot young things on steroids who protect the city from danger.) There's a little romance between Beatrice and one of the Dauntless trainers, a guy who's imaginatively named "Four" and played by hunky Theo James. (He manages to keep his shirt on most of the time, and even when he removes it, it's not gratuitous ala Taylor Lautner in Twilight.)

Also, it's somehow very gratifying to see Kate Winslet play the heavy. Has she ever played the heavy before? Her performance was cool and collected, smoothly and elegantly evil. She reminded me of Jodie Foster in the wretched Elysium. Foster was the wicked wasp queen keeping the dregs of society away from the privileged. And while Foster's performance didn't really work for me, the general idea is the same: a revered screen actress taking on the part of a couth, clean, polished Cruella Deville. Winslet's quite a natural at it. And Shailene Woodley holds her own.

With Ashley Judd, Zoe Kravitz, Mekhi Phifer, and Miles Teller.

Nashville

Readers familiar with Christopher Guest's mock documentary A Mighty Wind (2003) will find a kindred spirit in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), a sort of character mosaic of Nashville life. It has more guts and honesty than A Mighty Wind, though. It's ironic and funny, but it also treats its subjects with a much deeper care for the  tragic futility of their pursuits. Altman depicts the city as an eclectic--or maybe just eccentric--mixture of a countrified Hollywood and a evangelicized D.C. It's the kind of place where its celebrities exercise their vices on Saturday and sing solos in church on Sunday. The cast, which is gargantuan, reportedly did a lot of its own musical material, lending an improvisational quality to the movie. But it goes on forever.

The movie doesn't wallow in the despair of its characters, all of whom are pretty depressed (subconsciously if not openly), it just forces us to watch as they collapse in front of fans or put on a happy face to make it through another performance or interview or party, or whatever the occasion is. Nashville might not feel as relevant to today's reality TV audience. The has-been celebrities with their narcissism on constant display make complete buffoons of themselves on a regular basis. In Nashville, no one is trying to look foolish. Everyone's hanging on to their dignity like it's a tattered old coat, the only one they have left.

You do feel for some of the characters, and when you're not feeling very involved, which is about half of the time. (The movie is 160 minutes), there's always the music to pull you back in. Somehow, the music makes the movie make sense. One of Altman's earlier films, The Long Goodbye, had a wonderfully distant, decayed mood to it, but it also seemed rambling and at times uninvolving. It captured the sort of ugly truth of 1940's film noir, which may have been cynical, but carried a sort of mythology about it that being a private eye was glamorous. Altman got through to audiences the reality of the job, via Elliott Gould's deadpan, madly dogged Phillip Marlowe.

Gould shows up here in a cameo as himself, schmoozing with a country music star named Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), who's like a much shorter combination of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. He's absolutely ridiculous, and yet he's worshiped by his devoted fans as though he's the King of Nashville. His wife (played well by Barbara Baxley) is a shriveled up booze-bag with a booming, wailing, siren of a voice. She's hysterically funny. She's so obsessed with the Kennedys that she goes to mass on Sundays, and her boozing seems to be rooted in a sense of loss for the "Camelot" dynasty.

Nashville was highly praised when it came out in 1975, and perhaps the exciting promise of the actors involved with it, and the hipness that was associated with liking Robert Altman's films, contributed to its success with critics. As a musical--much of the film features original country songs performed by many of the actors playing musicians--it's one of the most authentic of its genre. In fact, this might be the truest sense of what a musical is, realistically. The realism of the music business is a picture of diminishing ideals and increasing profits.

I think Altman comes close to importing into the 1970s the mood that F. Scott Fitzgerald created about the 1920s. Fitzgerald wrote about how the American Dream was really something corrupt, decayed, and desperate. This is a movie about trying to please the world in the midst of corruption, decay, and death. Physical death to be sure, but also a kind of inner personal destruction. Ronee Blakley comes off very well as Barbara Jean, a beautiful country singer, genuinely in love with her fans, who's losing it and can't accept the reality. She keeps having mysterious health scares in public, and Altman paints her as a tragic figure. She's absolutely beautiful when she sings.

Another character, a reporter for the BBC named Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), is truly voyeuristic in her fascination with America (she's apparently doing research for a documentary on Nashville's music scene). Opal makes a frighteningly funny observation about a car crash that happens early in the movie: that crash, she says, is inherently American. It's fast, violent, brutal, and deadening. Altman underlines this later with a scene of the reporter talking into a recorder while she wanders about a demolition center. The cars are mangled and in some cases unrecognizable, and she even compares the reddening rust to dried blood stains.

Lily Tomlin also makes an impression as a mild-mannered housewife who sings in the choir of a black church. Tomlin has such a wonderful comic energy. When she laughs, it seems to erupt out of her and fill up the room. We see this in a movie she did several years later called The Late Show. It's here too, but mitigated by her character's sense of unhappiness. There's a wonderful scene where she watches Keith Carradine's character perform the song, "I'm Easy." Paul Lohmann's camera closes in on her sad face, which seems torn between the guilt of following her desires and the guilt of letting them slip away for morality's sake. Quite a wonderful paradox of inner-conflict. Tomlin was nominated for an Oscar.

The music is admittedly wonderful--even though I'm not crazy about country music. It's very much alive, and I guess that's why Nashville was so celebrated. It's surely a movie about that seemingly brief, magical moment of vitality in a person's sad march toward unhappiness, corruption, and death. It may be the most readily accessible theme in Altman's work as a director, too. As an epic, it's much more honest and heartfelt than a Gone With the Wind or a Giant. As a character study, the movie is pulled in so many different directions you feel at a loss to identify with many of them. It's a testament to the acting and the editing (credited to Dennis Hill and Sidney Levin) that the characters do come through most of the time.

With Ned Beatty, David Arkin, Timothy Brown, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan Nichols, Dave Peel, Gwen Welles,

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is a re-imagining of the 1956 cult classic directed by Don Seigel. In the 1950's version, people read into it a social commentary on the communist scare that seemed to be gripping the nation. Ultimately, it was a fear of becoming un-American. Identity was so wrapped up in nationalism that to lose your Americanism might have felt like the ultimate displacement. It was set within the banal landscape of suburban America, where everyone was already a conformist anyway. The aliens, unseen except in the form of seemingly harmless pods with little flowers on them, are making duplicates of the townspeople so that they can take over their world.

Twenty years later, Philip Kaufman retells this weird story (originally conceived by Jack Finney in his novel, The Body Snatchers) in San Francisco, hardly a foe to the non-conformist. The movie uses its racially and ethnically diverse, politically liberal and liberated city as a wonderfully ironic backdrop: besides the fact that it's a crowded city, it's a modern, hip city, and so how can you really tell that people are suddenly acting out of the ordinary? There is no ordinary there.

Brooke Adams plays Elizabeth, a lab analyst for the public health department. Her boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) wakes up acting rather different from his usual demeanor, and it starts to freak her out. When she tells her colleague and confidant Matthew (Donald Sutherland), he suggests a consultation with his shrink-friend Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy). The movie mocks our increasing reliance on therapy as a panacea for unhappiness and discontentment, and in Body Snatchers, Dr. Kibner is proffered up as some kind of 20th century Messiah. We meet him at a book signing, where he's being inundated with fans/readers in need of counseling. His calm, emotionless persona (which probably served him well as Dr. Spock in the Star Trek movies) is already so much like one of those pod people that you're immediately suspicious of him. He seems to care about finding solutions, and yet he doesn't seem to listen to people. He's condescending, as though he's aware of some supreme joke that his needy patients couldn't possibly get.

Matthew's friends, Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright), have their own pod person encounter when something that looks like a duplicate of Jack begins growing in their massage parlor. Jack notes how the features resemble his, but that the thing is unformed, lacking such recognizably human features as fingerprints or respiration. As the pods progress throughout the city, Elizabeth, Matthew, Jack, and Nancy become increasingly alienated in their conviction that something is terribly awry in their world.

There has yet to be a better version of this story. Kaufman injects into it a really kooky atmosphere. The cinematography, by Michael Chapman, is first-rate. He uses lots of off-kilter angles to give the movie a distorted look (this, coupled with the setting of hilly, already distorted looking San Francisco, makes you feel like nothing is very grounded or "sane" to begin with). The music by Denny Zeitlin is at times like something from John Williams, but then he infuses it with pulsating synthesizers that zing at just the right moments, reminding you of the corny period of movie-making from which this movie hails, the 1950s. It was an era obsessed with half-human monsters and apocalyptic alien invasions. The 1970s, up until the tail-end of the decade, was much more interested in lighter space fare. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was about the beauty and mystery and mutual admiration of an alien encounter. And then there was Star Wars, which wasn't really about alien encounters, but certainly took away the anxiety about them that people have so often worked out in movies.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 joins the ranks of the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the decade, from Klute to The Conversation to All the President's Men. It channels the vibe going through a country that was freaked out and frustrated by the government, politicians, public leaders in general, institutions, crime. I kept thinking about David Fincher's 2007 movie Zodiac, which is about the Zodiac Killer who terrorized San Francisco in the early 70s. Invasion of the Body Snatchers puts the city into an altogether different state of panic, but the fear of losing one's identity is a fear that can be transmuted to serve the needs of any genre, be it science fiction, horror, drama, or documentary. The pod people are soulless drones like George Romero's zombies in Dawn of the Dead (1979), or the brain-dead Barbie doll women in The Stepford Wives (1975). The only difference is that in Body Snatchers, the pod people are masterful survivalists. They're adapting to our world and our human forms. The drones in Dawn of the Dead are just reanimated corpses, and the drones in The Stepford Wives are robots. They're not surviving.

As for the performances, Brooke Adams gives probably her best, most believable one. She has a natural likeability that is so often hampered by the material of the movies she's in, or maybe the directors haven't had the ability to draw it out of her. She shines in this, as does Veronica Cartwright, who's sizzling with energy. Ridley Scott apparently wanted her to put a lid on that in Alien, but in Body Snatchers Kaufman lets her run wild. She's the ultimate eccentric in the land of eccentrics. Almost all of the actors in this movie have done notable work in the genre before or after Body Snatchers, with the possible exception of Donald Sutherland, who carries the film rather well. It was scripted by W.D. Richter.

Morning Glory

I'm sure that in retrospect the studio executives behind Morning Glory regret releasing it so close to the premiere of the latest Harry Potter installment. Morning Glory is slight and episodic, light and fluffy entertainment that doesn't have much umph to it: Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, an endlessly energetic but naive young producer who is handed the task of salvaging Daybreak, a morning talk show that no one watches.

It's sort of about how McAdams's character grows from being a career-obsessed single woman to a more well-rounded, on top of the game, mature woman who's willing to let a little romance (provided by Patrick Wilson) into her life. It's also sort of about her struggle with a grizzled, iconic anchorman (Harrison Ford, looking as lively as a corpse) who is forced to co-host Daybreak much to his chagrin. Ford's character, named Mike Pomeroy, feels that such trivial subject matter is beneath him, while his co-host (played by a marvelously funny Diane Keaton, who's given less than she deserves but does wonders with it) revels in seeing the beloved newsman taken down a notch.

McAdams has a very likable quality that sustains an uninteresting character. She's Mary Richards without the gutsy spunk that made her character grow from timid to tough. She's not sassy enough to be Murphy Brown, and she doesn't have the nerdy humanness of a Liz Lemon. (Notice that all these characters come from television.) I don't think we'd care a wit about Becky Fuller if someone less charming and sympathetic and likably idealistic were playing her. But McAdams pulls it off at least to a point, and we're willing to root for her, but the movie doesn't really give us much to root for. Becky's dream of being offered a job at NBC on The Today Show will clearly have to be sacrificed so that she can preserve the familial quality she facilitates when she takes over Daybreak, but there's so much squabbling and chaos between the crew and the personalities on the set that we never really see that growth: it's all bombastic lunacy fueled by angry jibes at each other until suddenly they're this big, warm, oozing family that needs each other and can't bear to part with each other, but the movie doesn't really bridge the gap between these two points. Call it laziness or a lack of focus on the part of the writers.

This is the kind of movie we go to to see good actors climb into juicy characters and take pot shots at each other. We get that to some degree, but Morning Glory never makes up its mind: is it a cute, romantic working comedy or something leaner and smarter or something preachier? It dabbles on all sides, and so the result, while passably entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud funny, is mixed, if not uneven. Jeff Goldblum does some wonderfully funny work as Becky's boss--he's got such a good deadpan delivery that you enjoy his character ragging on Becky -- it gives her something to fight against. Keaton and Ford have some enjoyable tension but it's like a less intense version of Walter Mathau and Jack Lemon squabbling and hurling insults at each other in Grumpy Old Men. ★★½

Transylvania 6-5000

Come to think of it, it was a bad movie. I rented Transylvania 6-5000. I had read the crummy reviews, but held out a tiny seed of hope that in spite of its critical scorn, the movie would hold some amusement. I tend to enjoy lame horror-comedies if they're at least entertaining (i.e. fall into the so-bad-it's-good category). One would expect at least a few laughs with a cast including Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley, Jr., Michael Richards, Geena Davis, and Carol Kane. However, one would expect in vain. The script by first-time director Rudy De Luca (of the Mel Brooks School of Comedy) was just awful. I am a fan of even Mel Brooks' mediocre efforts (with the exception of the abysmal Life Stinks), but it seems his proteges fail to rise to the level of even his least successful offerings. Something just doesn't work. You know a script is bad when you can imagine yourself writing it (unless you're Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The plot, about two reporters going to Transylvania to track down a wanna-be Frankenstein, is hair-brained enough, reduced to one of the most inept, unfunny attempts at schlock-comedy ever beheld on screen. ★