the cinéphilic circle jerk

Anthony Minghella's "The English Patient," Sam Mendes' "American Beauty," Rob Marshall's "Chicago," John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love," Paul Haggis' "Crash" and Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire."

These estimable films, all Oscar winners, have something else in common.  They've all been the easy targets of the members of what I call "The Cinéphilic Circle Jerk" (CCJ).  Much like the late, unlamented Mr. Blackwell, these guys - and, yes, they are all male - used to materialize only during the movies' awards season, coming out of their parents' basements or childhood bedrooms to attack those films that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had foolishly honored with Oscars.

The very thought of this offended them, and although none of these grown men was ever employed as a working professional critic, each one found an online forum, many forums, on which to express their utter outrage.

Those films singled out for extermination by The Cinéphilic Circle Jerk are subjected to ridicule so intense that the way these guys carry on, one would think the group was declaring war on something the approximate size of the United States. They behave like schoolyard bullies - perhaps because they were once the victims of schoolyard bullies themselves.

Frankly, there's nothing much wrong with the films singled out, but The CCJ members become so inconsolably angry about whatever regard these titles receive that they lose all sense of magnitude and rationale.

The movie that best represents a CCJ's target is Haggis' "Crash" - the worst!, according to its panick-y members.

The Cinéphilic Circle Jerk isn't exactly new.

It's been around for ages (I just never had a name for it), although its members seem to have multiplied like rabbits in the past decade or so. Its beginnings can be charted back to the advent of Siskel and Ebert who, for better or worse, brought film criticism out of the closet, so to speak.

Before Gene and Roger hit it big on television, only a rare breed of moviegoer actually read reviews and even fewer thought about critics.  And those thoughts were usually negative and hostile:  A movie critic was a mean-spirited, miserable human being deserving of his/her misery.

But Siskel and Ebert popularized the form and indirectly inspired their viewers to become armchair critics.  Like that famous Marshall McLuhan sequence from Woody Allen's "Annie Hall," these days, one can no longer go anywhere without hearing some guy (again, it's always a guy) proudly, arrogantly pontificating his uneducated, mundane view of movies.
 
And as they've multiplied, they've also highjacked a few estimable and essential movie sites. Suddenly, the CCJ had an audience - an audience of other Js - to soak up their lame pontifications.  To demonstrate their credentials, they often self-consciously invoke the names of Kael, Sarris, Agee and Thomson, while also demonstrating (inadvertently) they have learned absolutely nothing from Kael, Sarris, Agee and Thomson.  They've simply read the same critiques that many of us have read.

Lately, some CCJ's members who have never worked as critics or had a single byline in a newspaper or a magazine, identify themselves as film historians which, I guess, gives the desired impression of credibility.

And, please, don't get me started on the creepy narcissism that has infested many movie sites and the CCJ members who patronize them. 

façade: charlton heston, farceur?

 
"On screen, Mr. Heston parted the Red Sea in 'The Ten Commandments,' drove the Moors from Spain in 'El Cid,' painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' baptized Jesus in 'The Greatest Story Ever Told,' and gave him a drink of water in 'Ben-Hur.'

"And on the seventh day, Mr. Heston did not rest."

-Carrie Rickey

I can't top that. Frankly, I have nothing to add to what Carrie wrote.

Except for one observation.

In his long, 50-year Hollywood career, Heston made a lot of films, close to 100 (not counting his television appearances), but they were heavily dramatic and most of them period/costume pieces - Biblical epics, Westerns and such.


But to the best of my knowledge, Heston has only only two - count 'em - two comedies on his resumé: Jerry Hopper's "The Private War of Major Benson" (1955) and Melville Shavelson's "The Pigeon That Took Rome" (1962) and, in both, he played military men.

In "The Private War of Major Benson," he's a career soldier given a choice after mouthing off once too often to higher-ups: He will be drummed out of the Army, or he can keep his stripes if he takes command of - and shapes up - the ROTC program at a boys' academy. The Universal film, which was remade as Damon Wayan's "Major Payne" in 1995, would have been better suited to the talents of Glenn Ford.


"The Pigeon That Took Rome" cast Heston as another American soldier, this one behind Italian lines in World War II, who uses carrier pigeons fitted with messages to communicate the movements of the Germans - and who grows more and more in love with the daughter of the local family with which he's residing.

The ever-reliable Harry Guardino co-starred, handling most of the film's comedy, and Elsa Martinelli was Heston's love interest, whose father (Salvatore Baccaloni) fouls things up by cooking the pigeons for a family dinner.

The film is a little reminiscent of the military comedy that Jack Lemmon made with Richard Quine in 1957, "Operation Mad Ball," and in fact would have been a better fit with Lemmon.

That's not an original opinion. At the time of the release of "The Pigeon That Took Rome," Heston himself opined that it would have been better with Lemmon.

cronenberg's brilliant mash-up...

credit: moveorama magazine

At the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards, where she won the Best Actress award for her performance in "Still Alice," Julianne Moore referenced some of the unorthodox films she's made in her acceptance/thank-you speech.

"I also wish to thank my professional partners  - the people who have supported every weird choice I’ve ever made,” she smiled.

The audience laughed, thinking she was joking.  After all, at first glance, Moore seems to have exhibited unstinting good taste in her choice of roles, films and directors. But that's not entirely true.  And she wasn't kidding.

Moore has made quite a few curious career decisions, appearing in titles that one would not readily associate with her but that, from where I sit, have made her a stronger, more interesting, more complete actress.

I'll detail some of these choices in a bit, but first, her latest curiosity commands too much attention to be kept waiting: David Cronenberg's brilliant (but difficult-to-recommend) "Maps to the Stars," a delirious mash-up of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and "All About Eve" in its delineation of show business in general and moviemaking in particular.

Coming on the heels of "Still Alice" (one of those inspirational art-house films lacquered in good taste but essentially "trivial," as The New Yorker's Richard Brody nailed it), "Maps to the Stars" diabolically creates a shot of culture shock and calls on Moore to give her bravest performance.

Cronenberg is in full enfant terrible mode here, with his game star doing a delicious variation on Bette Davis' Baby Jane Hudson as Havana Segrand, a desperate, washed-up film actress whose frustration with her moribund career has left her a bit more than unhinged and without any boundaries.

While Robert Aldrich's Jane Hudson, a forgotten film star (by way of the Orpheum circuit) built up a competitive resentment of her more successful sister, Blanche, Havana is obsessed with her iconic mother, Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon, in flashbacks) - and with starring in a sort of remake of one of the mother's beloved classics.

Both Jane and Havana have tired of living in the shadow of a more talented relative. In Havana's case, the "remake" is actually a movie about the making of her mother's hit - with Havana playing her mother.

 credit: focus world

"Maps to the Stars" veers into "All About Eve" territory when Havana decides she needs a "chore whore" and hires the weirdly innocent Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), who gets the job after "meeting" Carrie Fisher on Twitter.  Weiss' Eve Harrington ultimately unleashes Havana's vindictive Margo Channing personality, prompting bad behavior that Moore plays to the hilt. Moore is nothing less than complicit with Cronenberg's deranged vision here and plays one particularly memorable sequence atop a toilet where Havana is battling constipation (replete with the usual rude sounds) as she barks a list of needs (including a laxative) to Agatha.

The scene ends with Moore, fanning the air: "It smells in here!"

                                                                                                
As if this much toxicity isn't enough, Cronenberg ups the ante by introducing Agatha's estranged - and very strange - family.  There's her younger brother, Benjie (Evan Bird), the beastly 13-year-old star of the franchised “Bad Babysitter” sensation; their father, Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack, extraordinarily creepy), a self-help healer/quack, and his sister-wife, Christina (Olivia Williams).  Yes, Stafford and Christina are indeed siblings.  This gruesome twosome, along with Havana's long-gone mother who sexually abused her as a child, symbolize the insidious incestuousness, in its many forms, that permeates the movie biz.

The representatives of show business that loiter in "Maps to the Stars" are decidedly not as lovable as the flawed denizens of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Birdman" - and it's become rather apparent that neither movie people nor movie critics are ready to accept Cronenberg's film, which was designed to provoke discomfort, as easily as they embraced Iñárritu's. 

Much like Paul Thomas Anderson's willfully quirky "Inherent Vice" of last year, "Maps to the Stars" is not for the middlebrow, meaning the majority of moviegoers and movie critics among us.  But who cares about the majority?  These are two of the most exciting and vital movies in ages.

credit: nicole rivelli/cinedigm © 2013

Now, back to the singular Julianne Moore and those "weird" choices she referenced at the SAG awards. Starting with the most recent, they are...

• "Seventh Son" - Nonsense about a line of seven sons whose fate is to protect their hamlet from evil spirits.  It reunited Moore with her "Big Lebowski" co-star, Jeff Bridges
• "The Hungar Games: Mockingjay (Part One) -  In which Moore plays the President.  Part two is imminent.
• "Non-Stop" - One of Liam Neeson's old-guy avenger flicks.
• "Carrie" - Kimberly Pierce's bizarrely bad remake of the Brian DePalma classic.  With Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz in the leads, it seemed perfect - on paper.
• "The English Teacher" - A fine, if minor, little film about Moore's educator in an uneasy relationship with a former student, a failed playwright. The ace supporting cast includes reliable Greg Kinnear (above with Moore), Nathan Lane, Jessica Hecht, John Hodgman and Norbert Leo Butz.
• "6 Souls" - Moore as a psychologist tending to a patient with multiple personalities, some of whom have been murder victims. Directed by Mårlind & Stein.
• "Next"- A Nicolas Cage vehicle with the star as a Las Vegas magician-physic who teams with the FBI to prevent a terrorist attack.
• "Freedomland" - An actioner that teams Moore with Samuel L. Jackson.
• "Hannibal" - A "class" horror film, given its pedigree (star Anthony Hopkins, director Ridley Scott, writers David Mamet and Steve Zallian), that made barely a blip.
• "Assassins" - In which director Richard Donner wedged Moore between Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas.
• "Nine Months" - A John Hughes remake (directed by Chris Colombus) of a French comedy which pairs Moore with Hugh Grant.
• "Roommates" - With an aged Peter Falk as an irascible old coot.
• "The Ladies Man." A Tim Meadows comedy.
• "Body of Evidence" - The Madonna film.

Weird choices?  Perhaps.  But no one can accuse Julianne Moore of being an elitist. And then there are those estimable titles which, for whatever reason, don't bring Julianne Moore to mind -"Don Jon,"  "The Fugitive," "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee," "I'm Not There," "Laws of Attraction," "Surviving Picasso" and "An Ideal Husband."

The films that we do associate with Moore - and there are dozens - far outweigh those that the star herself describes as "weird."

Weird?  No, the word to use is "adventurous." 

cherbourg vs. les miz

When Tom Hooper’s film of the cult pop opera, ”Les Misérables,”opened in 2012, much was made of the fact that all the singing was done "live," no pre-recording or subsequent lip-syncing by his game cast.

But Hooper really had no other option.  Except for a few lines of dialogue here and there, the film was near-literally all-singing.  His movie - or rather its players - could not withstand 158 minutes of lip-syncing.

Hooper's decision to have his cast sing everything "live" was praised not only as gutsy, but also as a first.  Not true.  Film musicals in the 1930s routinely had "live" singing, and as late as 1975, Peter Bogdanovich had his ”At Long Last Love” cast do the same thing for the film's entirety.

Doris Day sang all her songs live in 1957's "The Pajama Game" and, in 1962, Mervyn LeRoy shot two back-to-back ”Gypsy” numbers "live" - Rosalind Russell's "Mr. Goldstone, I Love You" (one of the few songs in the film in which Russell did her own singing) and Natalie Wood's "Little Lamb" (a song that was later recorded for the film's soundtrack album).

As impressive as this is, more awesome is what director Jacques Demy achieved in 1964 with "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" ("Les parapluies de Cherbourg"). Like "Les Miz," Demy's film is all-singing.  But none of it was done "live."  The songs were all pre-recorded, which meant that Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo and company had to lip-sync every scene. I can't imagine the process being anything less than arch and cumbersome.

Of course, Demy's film isn't bloated.  It runs a trim 91 minutes. Perhaps also at 91 minutes, "Les Miz" would have been pre-recorded, too.

Demy passed in 1990 and I've no idea if his approach to filming "Cherbourg" has ever been documented in an interview.  Perhaps this information is buried in some old edition of Cahiers du cinema. 

It's something I'd like to read.

"Cherbourg."  "Les Miz."   Both are all-singing features (with scattered dialogue) and classic movies. But which one was more difficult to film?

Any opinions?