Hiatus

As of today, Balta Street will be taking a break so that Mrs. Balta and I can pack all our earthly belongings and our two cats and move across the state to the other side. It's going to be a busy few weeks but we're eager to get going. And I'm curious about what the movie theaters will be like there...

In the meantime, I'm going to be thinking a bit about where, if anywhere, to take the blog afterward. It's been great fun writing this but it's also been extremely time-consuming, and I'm not sure it hasn't changed the way I see movies and I'm not sure that's something I'm happy about. Also, since I started getting into cinema again, and writing about it so much, the number of books I read has gone from two or three a week to one or two every few weeks. And that's just no good.

I was saying to a friend the other day that movies, somewhat perniciously, will take up as much of your brain as you allow them to. He said sure, but that can be true of anything: baseball, the stock market, whatever you're interested in. Maybe, but I think it's more true of movies, partly because of how seeing one, for me at least, always seems to create nine more reasons to see nine more movies: you see an actress in this one and you think, I really liked her in that other thing, so you see that other thing and find it was written by this other guy and you think, I should see more movies written by that other guy, so you watch one of those and it was directed by still another guy and you really like it, so you immediately want to see more by him. And then before you know it, a few months go by and you pick up a novel and realize the part of your brain that translates language into thought is feeling a bit sluggish, and you wonder if it's maybe all those images you've been throwing at it for weeks and weeks and weeks.

As a kid I had one association with the word "hiatus," and that was when a television network would announce it was putting one of my favorite shows on one. The word means a pause or gap, and sometimes it meant that back then; sometimes the show would be back a little while later, picking up where it left off. And sometimes the hiatus would turn into a cancellation and you'd never hear from it again.

I'm grateful to all of you for reading up till now. I have no idea which kind of a hiatus this will be.

Wise Man From Winchester

I'm still thinking a lot about the two posts on "invisible style" I wrote a few weeks ago, and why I had some trouble articulating what I meant in them, and I've concluded that part of the problem is that I was conflating two separate issues: first, whether a director is a visual storyteller, and to what extent his technique is self-disguising as opposed to overt; and second, whether a director has a consistent and recognizable and identifiable style across all or most of his pictures.  I gathered from the Mike Nichols article that Nora Ephron was claiming both for Nichols, and I tried to make the case that I don't see either one as being true of him--but that I didn't particularly mind.  But I think the conflation made the whole argument more confused, and this became clearer to me in the last few weeks as I've become reengaged with a filmmaker who is absolutely the first--the pinnacle, maybe, of invisible style--and mostly not the second, which is part of why I love his work so much.

Robert Wise was born in Winchester, Indiana in 1914, and went to high school in Connersville, which I tell you because I think it is important and because I don't think it's a coincidence that his particular kind of greatness--unassuming, modest, not flashy or self-regarding--came from Indiana.  He began as a film editor, cutting among other films no less than Citizen Kane, and became a director under the supervision of RKO horror producer Val Lewton.  Wise's first film as a director was The Curse of the Cat People (1944), and don't let the title fool you because the movie is actually one of cinema's most serious and beguiling examinations of childhood imagination.  He went on to make such masterpieces (there's no other word for them) as the boxing film The Set-Up (1949); the boardroom drama Executive Suite (1954); the heist picture Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), also one of the very best films about racism, and I mean one of the two or three very best; a little musical film called West Side Story (1961); and what is to my mind the single scariest motion picture ever made, The Haunting (1963).  If The Sound of Music (1965) is more your thing, well, he made that too.  And the seminal science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).  And Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956).  And I Want to Live! (1958).  And The Andromeda Strain (1971).  And did I mention he's the guy who put Citizen Kane together?  I suppose I did, yes.

Those years of experience as an editor can be felt in his films, which are expertly cut, which have a rhythm that is really enthralling.  His shots are perfectly composed.  He is in every sense a visual storyteller, as much as anyone who ever stood behind a camera, and more than all but a handful of them.  But as he says on his commentary track for the DVD of The Set-Up, "You don't want to make the audience conscious of the camera.  They shouldn't be conscious of the camera.  They should be into the film."  Everything in a Robert Wise picture is dictated by the needs of its own particular story, and that includes the Robert Wise style, to the extent that there is one.  He doesn't impose himself on his pictures; rather, he meets independently the demands of each movie and each scene and each shot as it comes.  His style emerges organically from the needs of the material--and from his budget, which early on in his career was likely to be very low--and he finds whatever is the most precise and evocative way of unfolding that narrative.  The caliber of the screenplays he worked from was often very, very high, and a lot of his movies have extremely effective and memorable dialogue, but what I'm telling you is that Robert Wise was one of the great visual storytellers of the twentieth century, and he is what people talk about when they talk about directorial style.  Or if he isn't, then he should be.

So, okay.  That's one issue.  The other issue is identifiability, and here things get more complicated.  There are things we can say are part of Robert Wise's cinema; say, his use of sound and music, which is sometimes no music at all, as in The Set-Up and Executive Suite.  In those pictures, ambient noise takes the place of a score, bringing a naturalism to the settings that creates a very particular feeling in them. But overall there is no such thing as a Robert Wise world, not the kind of cohesive and unified world of a Ford or a Cukor or a Lubitsch.  Film scholars hold up the latter as examples of the pinnacle of the art, and they're not necessarily wrong, but I do think that approach is somewhat too narrow, that it places too high a premium on that cohesion, on that unique signature.  The liability of such a signature is the risk of repetitiveness, which is one thing you'll never find across Wise's pictures.  Each film is new, a world unto itself, with its own rules and expectations and requirements, and a system of composition and camera movement and cutting that is ideally and perfectly suited to it.

How many filmmakers can really be said, provably, to have a signature style, a world that is fundamentally and clearly their own? Thirty?  Forty?  Most great cinema is made not by the Minnellis of the business but by the Wises: directors who can move easily among genres, directing any story exceptionally well, telling each tale as it needs to be told.  (Another director of this stripe, Mervyn LeRoy, once wrote, "My films were all so different that there was never a LeRoy trademark."  I'm not sure if he meant that as a boast, but if he did, he was entitled to--it's a legitimate one.)  I have no trouble believing the same man made The Philadelphia Story and The Actress, or that the same man made The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not To Be, or that the same man made Sunrise and City Girl.  What I find harder to believe is that Robert Wise made West Side Story and then after that he made The Haunting.  As career juxtapositions go, that one is a doozy.  

For much of Wise's career he got to choose his own projects, and though probably one could draw conclusions about the man from the stories he chose to put on the screen, what I find so valuable in a director like Wise is how the man is not the point.  With a John Ford movie--and I love John Ford movies--the name "John Ford" hangs over everything, like a scrim in front of every frame, and sometimes after a while it can feel a bit cramped, like you've moved into the apartment over his garage and you're sharing a bathroom with him.  With a Robert Wise movie the story's the thing, the story begets the style, and if you're interested in parsing the style then you'd better look closely and carefully because he's trying pretty hard not to let you see it.  And the style of this film won't necessarily be anything like the style of the next one, or the last one, and that's okay by him. 

Like two other great Hoosier directors, Howard Hawks and Sydney Pollack, Robert Wise, who died in 2005 at age 91, made just about every kind of movie there is to make.  He made thrillers and comedies, musicals and horror, social-issue dramas and big-budget spectacles.  I get the sense from his commentary tracks that he's very proud of the work he did--he'll point out a shot and say how nice it looks--but at the same time he's not a filmmaker who is desperate for you to admire his meticulous craftsmanship.  I get the sense he just showed up for work and did his job, lent his artistry to the cause of getting the audience "into the film," and only when you really look, and listen, when you really examine the thing, do you see how much is there.  This is what we might call invisible style, and it's what American movies are made of, and it is what Robert Wise practiced for over four decades, and it represents a humble Midwest-meets-Hollywood sensibility of which certain people and events in my own life have served to make me only more aware, and more appreciative, and more conscious.

In Which 20th Century-Fox Has Learned Absolutely Nothing From This Blog

Readers, you will be shocked and dismayed to know that 20th Century-Fox has yet to respond to my list of polite questions from way back in February, inquiring as to what system if any their home video division has for ensuring, on their DVD cases, the correct spellings of the names of key creative personnel.  Needless to say, the problem persists: our recently purchased copy of Lowell Sherman's Born to Be Bad (1934), a present for my wife, whose affection for Loretta Young is boundless, revealed an interesting new spelling of the director's name: "Sheerman."  Oh, they finally got Darryl F. Zanuck's name right.  They just spelled the director's name "Sheerman."

Now, with regard to his importance to the studio's history, Lowell Sherman is no Darryl F. Zanuck.  I understand that.  But he's no slouch.  He directed Katharine Hepburn to her first Academy Award, for pete's sake (or, as Fox would have it, peete's sake), in 1933's Morning Glory, a terrific film I wrote about here.  He directed Mae West's most well-known film, She Done Him Wrong, also 1933.  And then there's Born to Be Bad, one of the best and most enjoyable pictures of pre-Code Hollywood.  The man deserves to have his name spelled right on his own movie.  And also: Sheerman?  What kind of a word is Sheerman?  Is that even a name?

Citizens of 20th Century-Fox, I implore you: get your act together. You're embarrassing yourselves.

Happy Birthday To Me

This week as a birthday present from one of my best friends I received something I had only dreamed of ever holding in my hands: 20th Century-Fox's boxed set Murnau, Borzage, and Fox.  Released last year, the set features twelve movies made by F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage for Fox from 1925 through 1932 (this was before the merger with 20th Century Pictures in 1935), in addition to a feature-length documentary, two books, and two recreations, via stills and other footage, of lost films, one by each director.  It is a thing of beauty--to say nothing of the pictures themselves.  I had already watched a few of the discs via Netflix, and since seeing Murnau's Sunrise (1929) and City Girl (1930), I've felt a palpable hunger to own them and watch them repeatedly.  I'd also seen Borzage's splendid Young America and After Tomorrow (both 1932), and I'm very excited to now be able to get fully caught up on my early Borzage.  In the past few days I've already sat down with Lazybones (1925), Seventh Heaven (1927) and Liliom (1930), and these five, along with his film Mannequin (1937), newly out from the Warner Archive project, and The Mortal Storm (1940), which I've seen several times but which isn't available on DVD, compose my knowledge of this most empathic filmmaker.

With many directors, even the great ones, you sense some distance between them and the material--the director's job being, of course, to observe--but with Borzage you feel like he's right in there with his characters, feeling their pain (and it's often pain they feel) even as he renders it for us.  The men, women, and children populating his films, at least those I've seen, are constantly yearning--for love, for peace, for freedom, for success, for self-definition.  Borzage's movies follow them as they try to realize whatever dream it is they have, but Borzage doesn't merely follow them; he lives with them.  And his pictures are luminously photographed, with his characters carefully and very specifically situated in their surroundings--which, crucially, often dominate or impede them.  Watching each of these pictures, without exception I felt completely immersed in what the characters were enduring.  And there's nothing cloying or corny here, either, though Borzage films often depict tragedy and sentiment: his work is mature, textured, and deeply sensitive.

As for Murnau, well, I'm still a little scared to try to write about Murnau. He's that great.  There's this stereotype, I think, that silent movies are more static, less energized, than those with dialogue, but with Murnau the opposite was true.  Murnau emancipated the camera in exhilarating ways, and his pictures from the 1920s feel electric, especially compared with the early talkies, in which the camera and the actors had to remain much more frequently still, in order to stay near the stationary microphones.  In 1928 he wrote, "No one really knows how to make pictures yet.  I do not know how to make pictures."  The key word there is "yet": what he meant was that pictures were still new, that nothing was codified or formalized, that there was still so much to try for the first time.  And though he did of course know how to make pictures, in his movies you get this sense of restless experimentation and discovery, of him charting what the whole art form could be, and would be.

Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) is one of the creepiest movies ever made, and these two Fox films, which I am resisting the urge to carry with me everywhere just to keep proving to myself that they're really mine, are two of cinema's most profound, aching, fully realized depictions of love.  They are also both fascinating depictions of the tension between urban America and rural America--an overt subject of both pictures--from one of the great German filmmakers, and there's a sort of ethereal otherworldliness to Murnau's America that I find intensely beautiful and powerful.  And I also have to mention the new score composed for City Girl by Christopher Caliendo for this DVD release (Sunrise retains its original Movietone score), a reminder of the significance of music to silent cinema and of the indescribable ways in which a good score elevates and enriches a movie.

As you can see I am very excited about this whole enterprise.  I can't quite believe it's really in my house.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

Well, I did it again, and so did they: I journeyed back to the Doubt theater, the Adventureland theater, to see another movie, and they botched it but good.  This time, the film in question had an aspect ratio (height to width) of 1:1.85.  The theater projected it on a screen with a ratio of 1:2.35, which is considerably wider, and they didn't bother to take a minute to mask the portions of the screen that had no film on them--sides and bottom--so the picture was surrounded by a void of black space.  The image was also pushed right up against the top of the screen, and since obviously I hadn't seen the movie before, I can't tell you for certain whether its director decided to frame everyone with the tops of their heads missing, or whether this was just projected incorrectly.  But I have my suspicions.

Many times when you see things in the frame that you shouldn't, or when you don't see things you should, the fault isn't with the film but with the projection.  If you see a boom mike in the top of the frame, the director wasn't blind but the projectionist might be: the film image is bigger than what you're supposed to actually see, and the filmmakers count on the theater to mask the image properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff.  Silly filmmakers, counting on the movie theater for anything!  When will they learn?

What made these entirely unsurprisingly events even more fun this time around was that the slideshow before the movie featured, in addition to the usual ads for local restaurants and such, a feature called "We Know Great Cinema..."  This consisted of a slide reading "We Know Great Cinema...," followed by stills from a few great movies, as if to reassure us that we were in good hands, the hands of knowledgeable movie fans who get it, whose understanding of the medium qualifies them not only to run a motion picture theater, but to actively boast about their wisdom right there on the screen itself.  No unproven, untested amateurs, they.  But the films given as examples included such as Citizen Kane and Bonnie and Clyde, and you know what?  No one, least of all a movie theater, gets extra points for knowing Citizen Kane and Bonnie and Clyde are great movies.  As calls go, those are pretty basic ones.  It's like an accountant telling you he can do your taxes because he knows what five times four is.

 

And the idea that we should breathe easy, we should calm down, relax, because don't worry, the people running this show can tell you Bonnie and Clyde is great cinema--notice they didn't choose a still from, say, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes!  No, they get it!--would be a little easier to digest if there were any evidence they gave any kind of a crap about doing the one thing we want from them, which is to show a movie properly.  I continue to be baffled that anyone this clearly uninterested in showing movies would bother opening and running a movie theater.  Movie theaters are notoriously unprofitable. The only reason to do it is if you love showing movies to people. Otherwise why not just stand out on the street and sell Junior Mints at outrageous markups?

The movie was good, by the way: I saw I Love You, Man.  It was sweet.  It made me laugh.  It features nothing that feels at all authentically human--its people are movie-people, not people-people--but it was sweet and it made me laugh, which was OK enough for an afternoon's entertainment, and someday I might even see it on DVD and find out what the top of Jason Segel's head looks like.

Songs and Stories, or "Why Every Musical Remake Needs an Indiana Songwriter"

Watching The Actress a few weeks ago put me in the mood for some additional Cukor, so I watched and rewatched a few more of his films, including Les Girls (1957), a Gene Kelly musical with songs by Cole Porter.  I hadn't seen it before, and to be honest the movie didn't do much for me; I found it kind of dull and overlong.  But to repeat: it's got songs by Cole Porter, and movies have been built on a lot less than that.  Porter was pretty much the best songwriter of the 20th century, or at least the first sixty years or so of it--and I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that he hailed from the great state of Indiana, whence all good things and most of the really good people come.  Les Girls, which features five original Porter songs, wasn't Cukor's first work with the composer: Porter had written "Farewell, Amanda" for Adam's Rib (1949), in which Hepburn and Tracy's neighbor, also a composer, writes and performs the song for Hepburn's character.  But Les Girls is the only full-length collaboration between Cukor and Porter, which frankly makes me wish I liked it more.

But Porter was very well-served by Hollywood overall.  For example, there were film adaptations of several of his stage musicals--including George Sidney's Kiss Me Kate (MGM, 1953), Walter Lang's Can-Can (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1960), and one of the great sequences in any Astaire/Rogers picture, the "Night and Day" scene from Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee (RKO, 1934).  Porter had written the songs for the stage version but most of them were cut for the film, which was also retitled from The Gay Divorce because censors were very skittish about any indication that a divorce could potentially be a happy event.  Still, "Night and Day" remains, and it's so good that it's enough.

Porter's stage musical Anything Goes has a particularly sordid history in film, with a 1936 version by Lewis Milestone, for Paramount, that removed all but four of Porter's songs and added in several by other songwriters (sure, one of them was by that other great Hoosier songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, but still).  Then in 1956 Paramount tried it again, this time with director Robert Lewis and a completely rewritten plot.  This version also cut a lot of the show's lesser-known songs and replaced them with new songs by still more different composers.  I know I write a lot on this blog about how great the studio system was and how smart were the people who ran it, but honestly for a studio to own the rights to Anything Goes and manage to royally screw it up twice in twenty years makes me hope the Paramount bosses were drunk, because if they weren't drunk then they were sufficiently stupid not to know that even if you put just halfway decent actor/singers on a bare set and had them do the original show, and you had sense enough to turn the camera on, the result would be at the very least a pretty watchable movie.  Who does Anything Goes and throws out the songs?  The songs are the only great thing about that show.

But, as usual, I digress.  Porter also wrote several original scores specifically for pictures, such as Roy Del Ruth's Born to Dance (MGM, 1936), Norman Taurog's Broadway Melody of 1940 (MGM, 1940, naturally), Sidney Lanfield's You'll Never Get Rich (Columbia, 1941), and Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate (MGM, 1948), starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland.  My favorite in this category is Charles Walters' High Society (MGM, 1956), a musical remake of Cukor's own The Philadelphia Story (MGM, 1940), with Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra in the roles played in the original by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart, respectively.  I'm sure there are people who are horrified by any attempt to gild the lily that is The Philadelphia Story with something as gauche as music, but for me both films can sit comfortably side by side with their own inimitable charms.  The Philadelphia Story doesn't need music, of course, but since High Society also has Louis Armstrong for good measure, and songs as great as "True Love," "Now You Has Jazz," "High Society Calypso," and "Well, Did You Evah!" (written originally for Porter's 1939 stage musical Du Barry Was a Lady), the film more than justifies its existence.

Porter's other great MGM musical wasn't original, but it was originally a movie, sort of: first there was Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (MGM, 1939), and then in 1955 Porter wrote the songs for a stage musical version called Silk Stockings, and then in 1957 Rouben Mamoulian directed the film version of the musical for MGM, thus completing the circle.  Ninotchka is just as great a film as The Philadelphia Story, and Silk Stockings earns its keep in much the same way High Society does: with great performers and great songs.  Sure, Garbo is Garbo, and I wouldn't trade Ninotchka for anything, but in Silk Stockings you get Fred Astaire (whom I've always preferred to Gene Kelly, by the way) and Cyd Charisse, and songs like "Fated to Be Mated" and "All of You" and "Stereophonic Sound" (a great song about the movies), and after all it's not like they confiscate your copy of Ninotchka if you buy the remake.  You can have both!  It's a wonderful world.

Not always, though.  Sometimes a studio takes a great movie, even a great movie by Ernst Lubitsch, and adds songs and color and new stars and the whole thing ends up depressing--as with, for example (and I'm literally feeling a little nauseous just thinking about this movie) In the Good Old Summertime, a musical remake of The Shop Around the Corner that MGM concocted in 1949, just nine years after its great, great predecessor had appeared in theaters.  Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, Summertime's dreadfulness stems in part from its misunderstanding of, and near-total indifference to, what Shop is actually about.  If Summertime were about something else, that might be one thing--in fact it's often even more interesting when a remake has something different on its mind than what its predecessor had, and I could respect a movie that took The Shop Around the Corner off in some entirely new direction.  But this one doesn't have anything on its mind, and its crime isn't that it added unnecessary and unexceptional songs to a great story, but that it doesn't add anything else, doesn't have any reason to exist except that the studio owned the property and wanted to reuse it.  

Judy Garland stars in it, with Van Johnson as her love-interest/hate-interest, and this brings to mind another good rule of thumb: the musical remake should feature actors who are at least as good at what they do as the original actors were at what they did.  (If you're making a musical, you could do a lot worse than stars like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, and Cyd Charisse--and I'm not sure you could do much better.)  I'll grant, of course, that Judy Garland is the equal of Margaret Sullavan, at least in general--in this movie she's no good--but Van Johnson is no James Stewart, not by a very long shot.  (It's true that no one is, but if Summertime had Gene Kelly instead of Johnson, that would at least have been something.)  But even with an ideal cast, this movie would still be something of a mess, and even if it weren't based on a far superior film, it would still be, on its own, a seriously obnoxious one.  I'm not even opposed to greed and lack of imagination being the starting points for a film project, as they are whenever a studio remakes its own movie in this sort of way, but without the right elements, all you see is the greed and lack of imagination, not as starting points but almost as the day-to-day motivation for everyone's having shown up on the set.  I don't think The Shop Around the Corner is untouchable, but if you're going to touch it with one hand, you'd better have a stack of Cole Porter songs in the other.

It also bothers me that people seem to make a habit of remaking this film without making any pretense of understanding it.  In fact one of the only movies I've seen that's as appalling than In the Good Old Summertime is Nora Ephron's 1998 (thankfully non-musical) remake You've Got Mail; both films labor under the impression that the only thing The Shop Around the Corner is about is two people who think they hate each other but really love each other.  That basic device is, in Lubitsch's film, a means of the film's engaging with ideas and emotions that are serious, complicated and, I would argue, profound; its remakes have only that device, nothing more, just the gimmick, and watching You've Got Mail you get the sense that Ephron thinks Lubitsch made his quaint little movie only so that she could make it "sophisticated" almost sixty years later.  (I would suspect that she never even saw Lubitsch's movie, were it not for the fact that she lifts the dialogue from one key scene verbatim.  I can't decide if her not having stolen more of Samson Raphaelson's screenplay than that one scene makes her noble or dumb.)  Ephron even pays Lubitsch what she probably thinks is a tribute by naming a bookstore in her film The Shop Around the Corner, but it feels less like an homage than like she's patting Lubitsch on the head and sending him to sit at the kids' table.  

But if Cole Porter were still alive and wanted to score a new Shop Around the Corner, I'd definitely see it and I'd probably like it, at least well enough.  Because the thing about musicals is that if the songs are good enough, and the dancing (if there's dancing) is good enough, then the rest of the movie can just kind of hang there.  It's better if it doesn't, of course, and if it's done with some style and intelligence and care, then that's all the better.  But the lesson of High Society and Silk Stockings is that if you take a pretty good plot and add really great performers and really great songs, then everything is going to be okay. And the lesson of In the Good Old Summertime is that if you take only the really good plot, or just part of it, and add mediocre songs, then it won't look like moviemaking; it will look like theft.  

And theft is a crime.

Every Moviegoing Trip An Adventure

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in Greg Mottola's Adventureland

This weekend my wife and I returned to the scene of what I shall continue to call the Infamous Doubt Incident of 2008, partly to see Adventureland and partly to use the last of the free popcorn coupons we were given for our trouble on that fateful Christmas night.  You might recall that this is not the same theater at which occurred the "Is This the Beginning Or Is This the End of State of Play" debacle of just a couple of weeks ago, but I was somewhat relieved to discover that the Doubt theater has no plans to give up is Worst in the Area status without a fight.

More on that in a moment, though.  Adventureland, despite the circumstances of the viewing, turned out to be a wonderful picture--smart and sincere, funny and sweet.   It's really very charming, at times sad and frustrating--a good kind, as when the characters behave in ways I wanted to jump into the screen and fix for them, because they mean well and are just very confused--and has some real laughs. The screenplay is very strong; its characters' motivations and objectives are always clear to us, if not always to themselves, despite the film's having exactly, and blissfully, zero scenes in which anyone explains at length what they're thinking about or what kind of people they are. My only complaint about the movie is that it occasionally reminds us a little too heavy-handedly that it is set in 1987.  I remember 1987 well enough, and I'm not sure back then we were quite so stereotypically 1987-ish quite so often, as in one scene in the film when a family watches Reagan on television talking about arms-for-hostages while the mother is simultaneously reading The Bonfire of the Vanities.

But that is a minor issue, and most of the time Adventureland is much more modest about its setting, wearing it lightly and not finding the 1980s inherently hilarious in that way movies seem aggravatingly to do more often these days.   The film also really gave me a hankering for writer/director Greg Mottola's previous film, the nearly perfect The Daytrippers (1996), which was available on DVD for about five minutes years ago and which for some reason was put out of print.  This movie really needs to come back--it's one of those pictures a lot of people haven't heard of but everyone loves as soon as they see it.  Mottola also directed 2007's Superbad, though he didn't write it, and I wish he had, because I couldn't stand that movie and I can't imagine his writing wouldn't have improved it tenfold.  There's nothing all that original about Adventureland, fundamentally, but sometimes a story is all in the telling.

Okay, now back to the theater: the print was in focus, and no reels were missing or began showing upside down or in the wrong order.  I suppose I should be grateful for all of this.  But one side of the screen was sort of pushed inward: the right side seemed closer to us than the left side did, as though something were holding it in place at some weird angle.  Meanwhile the sound was barely audible at times, though the trailers were quite loud enough, and I can't figure out why this was. At one point I thought, "I can only hear the film coming through the front speakers; they really should turn up the volume on the side speakers," and then I looked up and realized the auditorium, which seats only seventy-five, had no side speakers.  I can't remember ever having been in a movie theater that didn't have side speakers.  Doesn't whoever builds movie theaters sort of throw those into the package automatically?

I am beginning to fear that our beautiful state, which offers so much in the way of culture, good food, unspoiled scenery, and progressive politics, has some sort of law on the books forbidding movie theaters from properly projecting motion pictures.  Could it be that, despite all the richness of this land, it is the place where cinema goes to die?

The Worst Movie Theater in the World

Last weekend I made the journey to the local cinema in the town to our north, which is slightly less rural than our own town insofar as it has a Main Street and some shops, and so it passes in these parts for a thriving metropolis.  The theater isn't fancy but you can't beat the price: $5 for a matinee ticket and a buck for popcorn.  All the films I've seen here before, including The Golden Compass, Juno, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Wall-E, have been in the largest of the theater's three auditoriums, and the conditions have been mostly OK.  This time, though, when I arrived to see State of Play, I found myself in what I hope is the smallest of the three, because if it's the medium-sized one, I'm not sure grownups can fit in the smallest.  Those of you who remember the screening room in the basement of the Art Workshops at Wesleyan University will have an idea of what I'm talking about here, as this theater bore a claustrophobic resemblance to that one--complete with exposed pipes along the ceiling.

But at least in that screening room, for which I retain a good deal of nostalgic affection, the films were projected properly.  In this one, one side of the frame was slanted, as though the rectangular frame were trying to contort itself unsuccessfully into a parallelogram; whatever bulb was in the projector was a whole lot of watts too low, because the entire picture seemed like it was shot at 3:00 in the morning, which I'm pretty sure it wasn't; the movie remained ever so slightly out of focus throughout; and until somebody complained about it, the volume was so low that if I weren't sitting in the fifth row I wouldn't have heard a word.  Normally any one of these things would be enough for me to duck out of the theater and notify someone, but when they all happen simultaneously, at some point you figure this is just the kind of theater this is, and that complaining about it would be like going to Burger King and asking to see the manager about how the tomatoes aren't local and organic.

Now, bad projection, even this bad, is bad enough--and this theater isn't even the same one at which took place what we might call the now-infamous Doubt incident of 2008.  What brought these circumstances into the realm of the singularly bizarre was the timing of the shows: State of Play runs 127 minutes, but the show after the 2:00 screening was scheduled for 4:00.  I figured this was an error, so before I left for the movie I rechecked and then checked again, but no, that's what they were saying, 4:00.  Then I thought maybe my information about the running time was wrong.  I went to the 2 p.m. show, which started on time, with the picture beginning after a single trailer (one thing I like about this theater is you usually only have to sit through one trailer).  And then around 4:00 someone came into the theater, which I know because I heard them sit down and start whispering, but the movie wasn't over yet.  A few minutes later, it was, and the credits began rolling and after a while I got up and left, at which point I heard the newcomers asking was this the end of the movie?  Because they thought it was the beginning, and who could blame them, since they were told 4:00, and 4:00 it was.  And since State of Play is a movie whose credits, except for the production companies and the title, run only at the end, the end credits playing over the final minutes of the film looked like conventional opening credits.  The problem here, one that would have led to my demanding a refund were I in the 4:00 audience's shoes, is that the final few minutes of State of Play are a bit of a twist ending; I sure wouldn't want to go back and start at the beginning knowing already what I found out from minutes 122 through 127.

So, having gotten the running time of its film wrong, and scheduling a second show way too soon after the first even if they hadn't gotten it wrong, the theater personnel didn't even bother to stop people from entering the theater before the previous show had let out.  It is this fact more than any other that I can't quite wrap my head around.  It reveals a sort of willful contempt for the whole moviegoing experience, an aggressive indifference that gets a little more horrible the more I think about it.  Who runs a theater this way?  Why be in the movie exhibition business if you care this little?

My actual viewing experience aside, though, the picture itself is pretty good.  Not great, but good, and not stupid, at least; in fact it's pretty smart most of the time.  The final draft of the screenplay was written by Billy Ray, who has written and directed two of the best political films in recent memory: Shattered Glass (2003) and Breach (2007).  I will see a Billy Ray movie set in D.C. any day, even one directed by somebody else, in this case Kevin Macdonald.  State of Play, which is about the murder of an aide to a Congressman (Ben Affleck) holding hearings about a Blackwater-like company, and the reporter (Russell Crowe) trying to get to the bottom of things, isn't in a league with Ray's own two pictures, but it gets its job done efficiently enough and it isn't boring.  And the cast is terrific, especially Jeff Daniels and Jason Bateman in two small supporting roles.  The twist ending doesn't quite meet the old plausibility test, and I never really got that feeling of authenticity I have with great political films (I like to feel like I am in Congress, and here I felt mostly on a movie set), but as thrillers go, it isn't bad.

One more thing: I'm not sure of the degree to which Ben Affleck is still getting taken less than seriously for the string of less-than-stellar movies he made following Good Will Hunting (I hate to even bring them up, but I'm thinking mainly of Phantoms, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Daredevil, Gigli, Paycheck, and Surviving Christmas) and for the overexposure of his relationship with Jennifer Lopez, but if that's still happening, it needs to be knocked off.  Affleck was always a really good actor, always underrated, and he's climbed nicely out of that bad stretch with lower-profile roles in more interesting movies, like this one and Hollywoodland (2006).  The conventional wisdom that Matt Damon was the serious actor of the two, and Affleck just a glib wannabe star, was always wrong--and what's more, in 2007 Affleck co-wrote and directed his own movie, Gone Baby Gone, which just happened to be outstanding.  

And when you factor in earlier roles in pictures like Chasing Amy (1997), Good Will Hunting (1997) of course, and Boiler Room (2000), as well as Changing Lanes (2002) and Jersey Girl (2004), two movies he made when the media seemed to be giving him a lot of crap and audiences seemed to follow suit, Affleck has nothing to apologize for. In fact Changing Lanes was one of my favorite films of that year and it's impressed me more and more each of the many times I've seen it since.  One of the things I like about Affleck is that he excels at playing verbal characters, men who talk their way out of or into moral dilemmas, or men who use language as a way of keeping intimacy at bay.  His ability to play thinking, conflicted characters lends them an authenticity that is the opposite of what his image was for a few years a while ago, and I'm glad he seems to be getting his good reputation back.  I'm also glad he married Jennifer Garner and that they seem not to actively want to be on the cover of US Weekly.  Both of those seem like good moves.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand.  I can't decide if I want to go back to this movie theater anymore.  The only thing really in its favor is its location, which is about fifteen minutes from home, versus the forty or so minutes it takes to get to any of the larger multiplexes in the area, where I've had almost uniformly good experiences.  But I think it might be worth the trip.  I'll pay an extra couple of dollars for the ticket and an extra dollar or so for the popcorn and add an hour to my travel time, but at least I won't risk accidentally seeing the endings first, and at least the screen won't look as though its most fervent dream is to twist itself into a trapezoid.

Factoid

According to Amazon.com, 2% of the people who visit the site's page for the DVD of George Cukor's The Women (1939) end up buying the DVD of Diane English's alleged remake of The Women from last year.

I would like to meet these people.  I have many questions for them.

Invisible Style, Part 2

After hearing today from a valued reader about yesterday's post, I thought it might be worth clarifying something about my intentions with it.  I didn't mean to suggest that I think a director's having a visual style is somehow irrelevant to judging the value of his work.  In fact one of the things I like to think this blog is about is the opposite of this: the importance, that is, of visual style and visual language.  But rereading my post from yesterday, I see how it could be interpreted as, "Sure, Mike Nichols doesn't really tell his stories visually, but that's OK because he makes good movies.  Just don't make any grand claims for his style, and we'll all be fine."

That isn't really what I meant, though.  What I meant was that one doesn't necessarily need to have such a style in order to be accomplished with a camera, to have a sense of when to move it and when not to, to have an idea of when to cut and when not to (or to work with editors who do), to think through how to frame a shot, how to block the people in it, how to light it.  Those elements need not be distinguished in order to be employed skillfully.  I might define this not so much as "telling a story visually" as, perhaps, "using the camera to put the thing across."  And that isn't nothing.  But it also isn't really full-blooded cinema, and I didn't mean to suggest that Nichols equals Hitchcock equals Minnelli--or, to choose more modern examples, equals Eastwood equals Demme--and that hey, whatever, they all made good movies so everything's jake.

I just think if you make movies for over forty years, as Nichols has done, and if through whatever means a lot of them turn out to be good, then a MoMA tribute seems perfectly in order to me.  Nichols might not be Minnelli but the fact that so many of his pictures are well-made isn't just circumstance.  What I tried to do yesterday was stake out a sort of middle ground, one that recognizes film's status as a visual medium and so recognizes those directors who make the best use of it as such, and which at the same time acknowledges that if you have a really good screenplay and really good actors and a director with some talent and proficiency, you'll probably get a good movie, for which the director deserves some credit, especially if he takes as active a role in script development and casting as Nichols seems to. And that directors like Mike Nichols, who have worked a long time and have a lot of good films to show for it, can be said to be good directors even if they aren't Fritz Lang when it comes to the motion picture camera.

Because the truth is nobody is Fritz Lang when it comes to the motion picture camera, which is why I winced to read the Times article that pretended to make a  case for Nichols' having a definable style when he really doesn't.  But to say his work isn't "definable" (read "personal," read "consistent," read "unique," even) is not to say he isn't "capable."  Nichols is very capable.  The vast majority of good movies are made by people who are, and who aren't necessarily much more.  And since I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about directors of that highest caliber, trying to do their work justice, I thought it worth saying yesterday that, granted, there's a difference between someone who fully integrates all the elements of cinema into one unified, cohesive whole--which is what the article claimed, falsely I think, about Nichols--and someone who is able to tell a good story, sometimes with the camera as the primary vehicle and sometimes not, but who basically knows what he's doing.  And that the fact that those in the first category have created work that's superior to the work done by those in the second, which in large part they have, doesn't mean those in the second should be summarily dismissed, or shouldn't be celebrated.

(I suddenly have this image in my mind of Fritz Lang on one of his sets, holding a megaphone into which he is screaming, "Nobody is Fritz Lang when it comes to the motion picture camera!"  I think that is as enjoyable a note as any on which to end this discussion.)