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August 24, 2005
OGIC: This won't hurt a bit
So I'm hatching this crazy scheme over here that just might work: to get six whole hours of sleep tonight. I've been working fifteen-hour days and am in a pretty pitiable state, so I'm going to make this quick. Here are a handful of my favorite skewerings from the recent Ebert-inspired open call--which doesn't mean I agree with them...necessarily. But there's an art to doing this swiftly and fatally, and these readers have it down.- Collateral. Oh God. Can we please just agree that it's time for the existential hit-man character to get two in the back of the head in a quiet Italian restaurant? Wised-up, amoral people don't decide to become hit-men because they don't see anything better to do, they become lawyers or lobbyists and make twice as much money without having to run from the police. Being a hit-man is necessarily an unpleasant and short life, and people who go into contract killing generally don't have a lot of other options, so let's just stop it with these Mephisto characters. And if you are going to use one, please don't have him be Tom Cruise talking about jazz.
- Eisenstein's October has been known to induce epileptic seizures in small children. They're the lucky ones.
- State and Main. OK, it's Vermont--get a couple old actors who've never been east of the Valley, put them in flannel shirts and rocking chairs and give them some really. stupid. lines. The part of this which was a send up of Hollywood types was funny, but the "real down home America" part was worse than painful and insulting. And I hate that ingenue with the squinty eyes, Julia Stiles.
- Rear Window. A man fears he may be a witness to a murder. Everyone else tells him he's nuts. They're wrong. That's a plot? Everything Jimmy Stewart's character thinks is happening IS happening. Not a single twist, surprise, or discovery. Dreadful. And the moment where he blinds the beefy murderous assailant with...a camera flash? Woeful. The only reason to watch: The glorious women. Thelma Ritter gives a perfect performance. And was anyone ever more beautiful than Grace Kelly is here? So gorgeous, it hurts.
- My sacred cow is "Reds," Warren Beatty's 1981 ode to John Reed. I saw it then and remember it like it was yesterday. Clocking in at 200 minutes, the movie just dragged, on and on and on. Around the 60 minute mark, people started stirring, heads bobbing and turning, the realization dawning that we're not even a third of the way through. After the intermission, fewer than half of my fellow theater-goers returned. I sat in an aisle seat, one foot wandering left to the aisle, the other uncertainly planted in front, as the seats around me continued to empty out, frustrated theater-goers muttering to themselves as they all but ran up the aisle. As the movie slowly ground its way into its third hour, I stopped debating whether to leave, the whole thing having become a weird sort of endurance contest, one of those things you do just to say you did it, no matter how excruciating the pain.
And then, of course, Beatty won an Oscar for best director.
Googling "Reds" just now I was heartened to note that no less an authority than Paul Schrader, the writer of "Taxi Driver," among many others, had a similar experience:
"Paul Schrader likes to talk. Fortunately for his listeners, he is a very good storyteller. 'I remember I was over at Paramount, and Warren Beatty and I had been fooling around, doing this Howard Hughes thing. He had made the film "Reds" and he was showing it on the lot, and he wanted me to come. I was so tired. I thought, "Well, I'll sit way in the corner, way in the back. If I fall asleep, I'll fall asleep, and nobody will know." Nobody told me there was an intermission. So the lights come up, everybody from Barry Diller on down is in the room, all of Warren's friends, and I am sound asleep. Afterward, one of Warren's minions came over to me and said that Warren had expressed his displeasure. And I said, "Look, I know it took Warren 10 years to make this movie, but it took me three hours to see it, and I can guarantee you that three hours of my life mean more to me than 10 years of Warren's.'"
Hee. More where these came from tomorrowish. Sleep well!
Posted August 24, 2005 1:56 AM
