In honor of this movie's Blu-Ray release today, I thought I'd give a shout-out to one of my favorite love scenes of all time. George Clooney was still best known for being Dr. Ross on E.R. Jennifer Lopez was still an actress, and her "J.Lo" days were a few years away. And director Steven Soderbergh was still an indie guy, a few years away from the critical success of Traffic and the commercial successes of his Ocean's movies.
In the 1998 film Out of Sight, Clooney plays Jack Foley, a bank robber, and Lopez plays Karen Sisco, a U.S. Marshal. They have a connection while sharing the trunk of a car after one of Foley's escape attempts, and Sisco pursues Foley as a U.S. Marshal pursuing a criminal, but she may have other motives as well. Foley tracks her down in a Detroit hotel, and what follows is this scene, where they try and figure out how to explore their attraction to one another.
The editing in this scene is where the magic is, taking the scene in the bar and the scene in the bedroom and weaving them together. I compared it once to the love scene in Don't Look Now, and apparently Soderbergh did style his scene after that one. The sense I get from Foley and Sisco in this scene is that, despite the difficulties their prospective careers pose to any kind of relationship, there's an inevitability about their being together, however briefly. They're sitting there talking, but it's as if they're already in bed together.
I was in the middle of writing a post on Mike Leigh's new film, Another Year, when I suddenly came over all nostalgic for my all-time favorite movie of his.
I can't even tell you how much I adore this movie. It is practically perfect in every way, chock full of details of the Victorian era (love the description of eleven-year-old Winston Churchill as "covered in freckles, and has a total disdain for authority"), overflowing with witty period dialogue ("And now, sir, I am going in search of some Italian hokey-pokey, and I care not who knows it."), and positively teeming with the wonderful music of Arthur Sullivan (often accompanied by the clever words of W.S. Gilbert).
One of the things I love the most about this movie is the level of painstaking research, which a film about people and stories familiar to so many could hardly have done without. Almost all of the characters are (or were, rather) real people and many elements of the story are based on historical events. No doubt some artistic license was taken (for instance, I believe "The Lost Chord" was written several years before it is presented as debuting in the film), but I get the impression that it was not a large amount for this movie. Mostly just filling in a few blanks, I should think.
There are lots of familiar faces here, three of them from Harry Potter films - Jim Broadbent as W.S. Gilbert, Timothy Spall as Richard Temple, and Shirley Henderson as Leonora Braham. Kevin McKidd, of Grey's Anatomy fame (and Rome and the short-lived Journeyman) plays lead performer Durward Lely, who cannot sing without his corset. Martin Savage (perhaps known better to you Brits) is beyond wonderful as the famous George Grossmith. LOTR fans may or may not recognize Andy Serkis as choreographer John D'Auban. Ron Cook plays D'Oyly Carte, owner of the Savoy Theater. Jim Broadbent's Another Year co-star Lesley Manville here plays his wife, "Kitty" Gilbert. And those of you who revere, as I do, the classic BBC production of Pride and Prejudice will recognize Mrs. Bennett (a/k/a Alison Steadman) as Madame Leon, the costumer. Another interesting Potter connection is that Alan Corduner, pictured below as Arthur Sullivan, has provided voice work for almost all of the Harry Potter video games, doing voices for Filch, Snape, and Flitwick.
The plot is your average backstage drama. We meet both Gilbert and Sullivan at the height of their popularity, after the successes of most of their well-known productions - The Pirates of Penzance, The Sorcerer, HMS Pinafore, Patience, Iolanthe ... you know, all those ones about duty (they're all about duty). Due to Sullivan's ill health and subsequent trip abroad, combined with a an impasse with Gilbert over the "topsy-turvydom" that defined most of their past work together (including Gilbert's latest libretto, which employs the use of a magic lozenge, thought by Sullivan to be too similar to the magical device in The Sorcerer), the Savoy Theatre which puts on their operas faces a dilemma. Their latest Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Princess Ida, is not as successful as previous efforts, owing both to the repetitive nature of the story and an especially hot London summer which has kept many patrons away. And for the first time since the theater opened, they will have no new opera to replace Ida when it closes (again, this is all based on the actual events and circumstances). Producer Richard D'Oyly Carte revives The Sorcerer to buy some time, but says in no uncertain terms that his theater is not in the business of revivals and that some compromise must be reached soon.
About this time, the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge opens, taking advantage of English fascination with Japan following the opening of trade between the countries. Gilbert reluctantly accompanies his wife to the exhibit in Humphreys' Hall, and after a katana sword he purchased there falls off its hanging place in his study, he is struck with inspiration. I love this scene in the movie, by the way. Broadbent takes the sword and play-acts the part of a samurai for a bit before setting it on the desk to be rehung later. The camera closes in on his face as he looks at the sword, and we hear the faint opening strains of "Behold the Lord, High Executioner" as the light of inspiration fills his eyes, followed by a peek at a song he is about to write from what will be his most successful collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, The Mikado.
Over the course of the rest of the film, we're introduced to various performers in the D'Oyly Carte company, as well as people working backstage, and see various rehearsals and costume fittings, peppered with musical numbers from the opera itself. And these, combined with the struggles in the first part of the film, serve to really invest the viewer in the success of the performance. That's a difficult thing to pull off, but it works remarkably well here. I love how the musical numbers of woven throughout, instead of just a concert dump in the third act. For example, the scene pictured above is a performance of "Three Little Maids," which we see in rehearsal. Gilbert brings in three Japanese women to watch the original choreography, which is cute but not remotely Japanese. He then has the three women replace the actresses and move down the stage, which they do very timidly and gigglingly, and which inspires the eventual staging of the scene, which we see immediately after that rehearsal.
There are many standout scenes, but two in particular that I'm even more fond of than the rest. First is the scene where the ladies and gentlemen of the chorus persuade Gilbert to reinstate a previously cut solo, the only solo that had been written for the eponymous Mikado (who is played by Temple, a/k/a Timothy Spall). The second, and undoubtedly my favorite scene in the film, is very near the end, where Kitty Gilbert talks with her husband about the Mikado opening night and attempts to reach out and, well, woo her husband. The entire history of their marriage is written in this scene and on Lesley Manville's sad but hopeful face. Theirs is not a loveless marriage, but it is a childless and apparently a sexless one. They sleep in separate rooms, and presumably always have. Victorian propriety and probably personal awkwardness have kept them from any kind of intimacy, and what's strange is that you get the impression that each of them would like to have that kind of relationship, but they seem to have lived in polite frigidity so long that neither of them knows how to go about it. A beautiful scene, and a heartbreaking one.
This is getting a Criterion release this March with lots of tantalizing special features (*bounces*), but you can also see it for free on Hulu, if you don't mind the occasional commercial interruption. If you have ever been involved in any way with the theater or enjoy backstage tales like Shakespeare in Love or A Chorus Line, I would highly, highly recommend it. It is rated R, for "a scene of risque nudity" which isn't terribly essential to the story, but I think is a significant moment of character sketching.
I leave you with one of many brilliantly written and performed scenes from this delightful movie - and another example of how the songs are juxtaposed with the backstage moments. Watch how Kevin McKidd gets even Scottish-er at the peak of his anger. :P
Seven days into October and I'm finally getting with the program! I hope to do *something* spooktacular each day this month - probably not all (or even many) reviews, because those usually turn out to be quite time-consuming - but something.
Today, I offer one of the most awesome scenes in all of horror. For simplicity's sake, we'll call this film Zombie (though it goes by several others). This is an Italian horror film, made by one of the handful of great artists of gore to come out of Italia, Lucio Fulci. More specifically, though, this is an Italian zombie film, and those are a particular breed. Where most zombies are blue-faced or bloody or whatever, Italian zombies really give you the impression of having rotted in the earth a while. They're all oatmeal-faced and you can almost smell them coming. I mean, just look at this guy on the poster.
EWWWWW, I SAY!
Italian horror films are also known for going all out in the departments that horror is best known for - blood & guts and T&A. Like almost all zombie films, including Italian ones, the plot of Zombie is incidental. People trapped in a blahblahblah, zombies come out of the ground and eat them, the end. Even Romero's zombie flicks, while rich in social subtext, follow this simple, fool-proof formula.
What sets zombie flicks apart from one another are the kills. It's amazing how creative filmmakers can get with a genre that could so easily be a one-note snorefest. Some of the best kills in the horror genre come from zombie flicks, and Zombie has two great ones. One is the famous splinter-meets-eyeball scene. The other is a zombie fighting a shark.
Yes, you read that right - ZOMBIE VS. SHARK. This is one of the most awesome things ever committed to celluloid. If you love Jaws and you love zombies, this scene is greater than anything else in the world, the end. Even if you don't love either of those things, it's still pretty awesome. You know what would make Shark Week the best thing ever? ZOMBIES.
Miranda July's wonderfully bizarre Me and You and Everyone We Know came up on one of the blogs I read as an example of great use of scatological humor in movies, and I almost did a post about the "poop back and forth" scene instead (Brandon Ratcliff is seriously one of the cutest kid actors in the History of Cute). But then I watched the Tyrone Street scene again. This is one of my favorite movies ever, and there are so many great, poetic scenes in it, but the Tyrone Street scene is perhaps the most special of all.
Christine (director and star July), is an elder-cab driver by day and video artist by night, and she takes one of her elder-cab clients to shop for shoes. Working at the store is a guy named Richard (John Hawkes, who Lost fans might recognize as Lennon from Season 6), and Richard is bummed because he's just separated from his wife, who doesn't seem to have loved him in quite the same way he loved her. He and Christine have a -- I don't want to call it meet-cute, but it's definitely a connection. Christine impulsively catches up to Richard as they both walk to their cars, and what follows is just plain magic. An entire lifetime together, lived in one block. The whole film is kind of about this moment, about the characters finding other people who speak their unique "language."
New York City is a great city to be in if you're a film lover, especially in the summer with all the outdoor venues that hold free movie screenings. Bryant Park has shown some pretty great stuff over the last several weeks, and last night was another great - The Magnificent Seven. I have an abnormal fondness for westerns, abnormal in the sense that I'm a little too young to have grown up in the golden age of westerns and don't come from an area of the country that's particularly steeped in cowboy culture. But I think my love affair with westerns began when I was a freshman in high school and our marching band did an "American West" show, using music from, among other things, the classic The Magnificent Seven and the new classic (well, it was fairly new when I was a freshman in 1989) Silverado. And I have long thought that The Magnificent Seven had the greatest film score ever written for a western. Elmer Bernstein, you are the Man.
And The Magnificent Seven is one of the great westerns. Of course, it doesn't hurt when you start with The Seven Samurai as your source material. But the Old West was an uncanny fit for the story, and kudos goes to John Sturges for recognizing the potential of the resetting.
This film does a lot of things exceptionally well, but one thing in particular that stands out is the introduction of the two main stars of the film, Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, who play the two members of the Seven that we're going to be the most closely concerned with. This could not be a more perfect setup for these characters. They see an injustice (a funeral cannot take place because the body once belonged to an Indian, and anyone who tries to bury him is going to meet the business end of a gun), and they man up and make it right, which sets up their stake in the conflict with Calvera on behalf of the village that hires them.
This is a great, great scene, and though the whole taking-the-body-to-Boot-Hill is awesomesauce, I think my favorite part is the first section with Whit Bissell, who plays the undertaker. Unwilling to take the body - and his expensive hearse - into potential gunfire, he explains that his driver quit. When it's suggested that the driver is prejudiced, he replies "Well, when it comes to a chance of getting his head blown off, he's downright bigoted." Best line in the whole dang film.
