My Fair Lady
George Cukor, the director of this extraordinarily fun film, admitted: Give me a good script, and I’ll be a hundred times better as a director. My Fair Lady is based on the play Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw. The writer won the Nobel Prize in literature (1925) and later an Oscar for the film version of Pygmalion (1938). Shaw, who was also the co-founder of the London School of Economics, delivered to Cukor great material about a low class girl (Eliza Doolittle) and a professor (Higgins) who takes a wager that he can turn the impulsive, crude, uneducated flower girl into a lady. The professor’s goal is to use his scientific expertise in how people learn to speak language properly to teach Eliza and pass her off as an aristocrat at the Queen’s ball six months later.
Everything about the film is perfect. It represents Hollywood at its best. I don’t see how the remake of the film planned for 2012 can top the 1964 production.
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is a masterpiece. I mean both the BBC film adaptation of Flaubert’s famous novel as well as the story itself. First a few words about the film and then about the story. Especially in the first half, the director moves us quickly through the life of Emma Bovary. The 19th century setting is beautifully staged. Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 book, regarded by many as of the ten best novels ever written, operates on many levels. It is so rich that right after watching the film I am tempted to read the book itself to see how Flaubert communicated the psychological drama with words alone. On one level, Flaubert demolishes the idea so central in Western culture over the past centuries, namely, that romantic love of one other human being and the feelings it creates in our hearts is the only road to happiness. In her quest to feel the excitement of romantic feelings that she believes are required for meaning and happiness, Emma Bovary dedicates her entire life to escaping what she regards a boring relationship.
Apocalypse Now (Redux)
The first 10 minutes of Apocalypse Now are magnificent. My eyes were glued to every pixel on the screen. But following Captain Willard on his long journey from Saigon up a river to Cambodia where he is supposed to assassinate a U.S. general gone mad becomes tiring. The Redux version of the 1979 film is definitely too long. I have seen my share of Vietnam movies. This one is short on action and long on setting scenes like a painter would have. (I have never been to Vietnam and I found the landscape cinematography beautiful.) Apocalypse Now focuses on the psychological damage the war did on American soldiers. It does very little to explain why the American government got sucked into this war. The documentary The Fog of War is much better on this front. You can skip Apocalypse Now but not the The Fog of War.
The Darjeling Limited
This is Wes Anderson’s best film to date. It reaches the same depth of Rushmore, but instead of staying in the same Chicago suburb, the director takes us on a wonderful road trip to India. Unlike Life Aquatic, which also wanted to be an adventure film, The Darjeling Limited is never boring because even when the pace of film slows down, we learn to know more interesting bist about the characters. Three brothers have not seen each other for over a year after their father’s funeral. Their mother never had much of a motherly instinct and apparently spent much of her maternal career running away from the family. The oldest son, who just was in a teribble car accident, wants to recreate at least the strong bonds between brothers by going on a joint trip spirtiual trip. I know a number of people who went to India to fix their spirits, but returned unhealed. Will the brothers suffer the same fate? Go watch this film to find out.
The Social Network
When historians sit down to write the history of first decade of the 20th century, they would have likely used a few years ago labels such as the Rise of the Internet or Googlemania. If Facebook continues to grow and add functions at its current pace (email will soon be integrated with its message service), historians may simply refer to our time as the Age of Facebook. 500 million plus people have now signed on to Facebook. If you have a Facebook account, you will not want to miss the exquisite film about the beginnings of Facebook and its now 26-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who—just like Bill Gates—dropped out of Harvard to seize a rare business opportunity. The film is made by real pros who know how to create drama. Even if some stuff is invented to add more drama to the story, the film captures the heart the Facebook story and is a facinating watch. The ad for the film is one of the best promotional line I have ever read: You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
My Wes Anderson Film Festival continues. This week I screened his fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). While Anderson pushes the cinematography onto a higher plane than in Rushmore or Bottle Rocket, the characters here feel more constructed and synthetic. Owen Wilson co-wrote the first two Anderson films. Perhaps he brought greater depth to the characters. The motor driving The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is the imaginative power fueling the script and the love for constructing detailed sets for each scene. Think of a Jacque Costeau documentary, Finding Nemo, and All About Schmidt or Sideways rolled into one. The eye is enchanted. Yet at times the film felt slow because we never sense that something dramatic is about to happen with any of the characters.
Rushmore
Wes Anderson’s 2nd film, released in 1998, is an even bigger surprise than Bottle Rocket. The 15-year old hero, Max Fisher, loves his elite prep boarding school but he faces a pressing problem. Although he leads almost every extra-curricula club in the school and although he is a genius on many fronts, he is academically underperforming and on the verge of being expelled. Falling in love with a teacher does not help his cause. Anderson goes even further than in Bottle Rocket to drill deeply into the complexities of human relationships. Anderson places five other main characters into Max’s world and every single relationship is unique but deep. I enjoyed every minute of this extraordinary film. Go see it. And after you have watched it read a bit more about the fascinating back ground of the film on Wikipedia. Anderson’s 2nd film also lost money, proving that high art and commercial success often do not coincide.
Bottle Rocket
A few months ago I read a story about the director Wes Anderson in the New Yorker. Anderson was hailed as an innovative filmmaker with a peculiar style. I had seen his The Royal Tenenbaums when it came out and found the film different but not particularly compelling. It struck me as trying to take a different perspective for the sake of taking a different perspective, rather than trying to take a novel perspective to shed light the centrality and challenges of family in our lives. The portrait of Anderson in the New Yorker, however, made it apparent that there was more to this filmmaker that met the eye in the The Royal Tenenbaums. I just watched his first film ever, Bottle Rocket. It was a complete commercial failure, but boy is this film a charmer. I can fully understand why Martin Scorsese named Bottle Rocket one of his top-ten favorite movies of the 1990s. Bottle Rocket follows three losers in a rich Texas neighborhood who come to the conclusion that “crime does pay.”
A Single Man
If we don’t meet or if we lose the one person we are meant to be with, then our life is not worth living. Everything becomes meaningless. This is the key premise of the film. It is wrong. But if you suspend your critical faculties and assume this idea is correct for the duration of the film, A Single Man is a beautiful exploration of the premise. Fashion designer Tom Ford brings his aesthetic sensibilities and his 23-year experience of living with one and the same gay partner to direct a film that is nothing like what the enticing trailer made you believe. I want to live in the house of lead character, an Englishman (Colin Firth) who has taken up the teaching of literature in some LA college, calls his own. (I now wish more directors had studied interior design like Tom Ford!) Colin Firth delivers a spectacular performance. Aesthetically the film appealed to me more than its 1998 cousin, Gods and Monsters.
My Darling Clementine
When you visit Tombstone, Arizona, you will be struck by how small the town is yet how big a role it plays in the mythical version of American history. My Darling Clementine is the third movie I have seen about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the gunfight at the OK Corral (Tombstone, 1993, & Wyatt Earp, 1994, are the others). John Ford (director) gave this 1946 version a different look and sensiblity. Shooting landscapes for along time, he is trying to give you a sense what it felt like to live in the West in the 1880s. David Brooks identified correctly that the challenge in the Wild West was to build communities in the absence of a strong local governments (see his editorial). Wyatt Earp is even shyer with ladies (Clementine) than in the other films. There is a funny line when Wyatt has fallen in love with Clementine who by anyone’s standards is a stunning lady. Wyatt to the Bartender: “Have you never been in love.” Bartender: “No, I have been a bartender my entire life.”
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