Stephen Rowley

377 posts

Paddy Chayefsky Hates TV

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

There is a school of thought that places Network, the 1976 collaboration between writer Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet, as the pinnacle of Hollywood media satires. The film is a blistering attack on the culture of television, scathing in its indictment of both the people who make it and the wider population who lap it up uncritically. As Greg Ng put it at Senses of Cinema:*

Lumet’s direction and Paddy Chayefsky’s script lambaste the ills of the modern world (couched within the fast-paced soliloquies delivered by the stellar cast of Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and William Holden) and are oft times prescient, predicting the rise of ‘reality television’, and the subsequent decline of both production and social values… Chayefsky’s script is simply much more ambitious, and verbose, than anything Hollywood offers up for contention these days.

Certainly it is difficult to come up with a recent film quite as bitter and vitriolic: the film’s setup only hints at the bleakness of its vision. It centres on the fallout from the on-air declaration by network anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) that he will kill himself on air in a week. At first he is pulled off air, but the network quickly realises it has a ratings bonanza on its hands and reinstates him. Beale becomes a broadcasting phenomenon, even as he becomes increasingly deranged. Meanwhile, his fellow veteran broadcaster Max Schumacher (William Holden) embarks on an affair with Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), the ambitious executive who thinks she can rise to the top by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

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Clampett vs Jones

Film

Noted animation historian Michael Barrier has posted a couple of pieces by his long time collaborator Milt Gray on his website. One is a piece on Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs which is merely okay (it gets too distracted by the whole argument about the film’s racism, or lack of it, while adding too little to that discussion), but the other is a fantastic essay about Bob Clampett, which you can read here. Gray’s essay – informed by his encounters with Clampett and other figures from animation’s golden age – is the most illuminating piece I’ve read about the long time feud between the two great Warner Bros. cartoon directors, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. (My own piece on Clampett is here).

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It’s My Movie, I’ll Destroy it if I Want To

Film

It should have been the decision that finally let George Lucas rebuild his relationship with his fans. For years he had said that he would never release the original versions of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD (or in any format, for that matter). The versions he released in 2004, which included two rounds of digital interventions and alterations (one from the theatrical re-release in 1997, and then another for the DVD release), would be the only ones we’d ever see. This has been the source of much angst among fandom, and has kept a cottage industry of bootleg DVDs operating for years. And yet, at the start of May, he relented. Lucasfilm announced that in September, we will indeed get the original original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. The press release even used the unpopularity of Lucas’ alterations as a selling point:

See the title crawl to Star Wars before it was known as Episode IV; see the pioneering, if dated, motion control model work on the attack on the Death Star; groove to Lapti Nek or the Ewok Celebration song like you did when you were a kid; and yes, see Han Solo shoot first.

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Kael

Film

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or a film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Pauline Kael, KPFA Broadcast, 1963

There aren’t many critics who could get away with a statement like that. They generally lack the cachet: criticism isn’t held in high esteem because it is seen as a by-product of art, rather than an expressive pursuit in itself. There is some justice in this, as even the best critics are there to serve the appreciation of the medium they are talking about, making it difficult to justify the consideration of their criticism as a piece of creative work with its own worth. As a result, critics are held in contempt by many, and writing about or discussing the quality of a critic’s work in any depth can be seen as a self-defeating exercise. What could be more of a redundant exercise than criticising critics, and thus putting yourself a level even further down in the hierarchy? To the extent they are thought about at all, then, critics tend to be seen as the bottom feeders of the artistic establishment. The general quality of film criticism has done little to change this perception: many media outlets take the view that basically anyone can review a movie, meaning that even the professional film reviewing sector has a very poor base standard. While the public’s interest in cinema ensures an audience for film criticism, most readers undoubtedly feel that if they were given the job they could write as good or better reviews themselves, and frequently they would be right. Against such a background, only a very assured and confident film critic could try to argue that criticism is an art in itself, rather than a subsidary pursuit. Yet if anyone could ever make such a claim, it was Pauline Kael.

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Get this to the Boys in Marketing

Film

This is old news, around on the net for ages, but Ain’t it Cool just ran a link to a pseudo-trailer for Samuel L. Jackson’s upcoming thriller, and I just had to mention it, because this film may have the best title ever. (Even better than Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small).

The concept of the film is that an assassin lets loose hundreds of snakes on a plane to kill a witness in a trial, causing the usual disaster movie thriller havoc. The title?

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Oscars

Film

Some quick, unstructured thoughts on the Oscars and the broadcast (somewhat belatedly – stupid day job)…

– I was barracking for Brokeback and am disappointed that it didn’t win. However, I can’t really comment on the justice of the surprise decision, as Crash was the only one of the nominees I hadn’t seen. I didn’t think there was any point: while I made a point of seeing Capote last weekend, I wasn’t that fussed about getting a DVD of Crash out, as I assumed it wasn’t a real chance. Quite apart from anything else, when was the last time a film from that early in the year won the award? The main impression I had of it going into the awards was one of puzzlement that its makers thought it was okay to name their film Crash only nine years after David Cronenberg’s film of the same title.

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oscars

Non-Controversial

Film

Review – Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)

The first thing to get out of the way about Ang Lee’s wonderful Brokeback Mountain is this: it isn’t controversial. I don’t mean that there’s no controversy surrounding it, because unfortunately there is, but the film itself makes no point that should be contentious. It’s a love story that happens to be about two men in 1960s Wyoming, but it isn’t a political tract. Prejudice against homosexuals is a historical circumstance that the film acknowledges, but it’s not really the primary subject matter: it serves much the same plot function that the taboo of a Montague courting a Capulet did in Romeo and Juliet. The film doesn’t treat homosexuality as sensational or taboo; it isn’t overtly political; no politics are preached; and it doesn’t demonise any group or person. The controversy about the film arises purely from the prejudice audiences bring to it: those who have a problem with homosexuality will have a problem with Brokeback Mountain, but nobody else will. Indeed, as Phillipa Hawker pointed out in her review for The Age, it is perhaps the old-fashioned nature of the film that has actually most disturbed conservatives and homophobes. If Lee had treated his material as shocking, it would probably have passed with less comment. Instead, the film simply takes acceptance of its subject matter as a given, and aims clearly at mainstream audiences.

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Terrorised

Film Film Reviews

Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)

Some day soon, perhaps, Steven Spielberg may be able to make adult and dark movies without prompting raised eyebrows. The undertone of much recent writing about Spielberg seems to be that his recent films amount to some sort of con: deep down he is still that saccharine confectioner that he was pigeon-holed as in the early 1980s, and all these challenging and important films he has made are just a kind of veneer that hide the real director underneath. This attitude doesn’t seem to be dislodged by the fact that his exercises in pure cornball schmaltz (I’d nominate The Color Purple, Always, Hook, and The Terminal) are now massively outnumbered by films that bear little or no relationship to the cliché of Spielberg as a relentlessly cheery sentimentalist. At some point, however, his resume is going to have to stop being treated as a series of aberrant examples, and critics are going to have to roll up their sleeves and start the belated task of reappraising his work.

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Next Week, Charles M. Schulz vs Joseph McCarthy in “Good Night and Good Grief”

Film

George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck is now wrapping up its run in Australian cinemas: I saw it weeks ago, but didn’t write a review partly because I was busy with other things, and partly because I was a bit underwhelmed by it. After the rapturous reception it has been greeted with (notably the 5-star reviews of David Stratton and Margaret Pomerantz) I expected a lot more. There are a lot of good things about it – notably David Strathairn’s wonderful performance as Edward R. Murrow, and George Clooney’s direction – but it struck me as terribly written. The screenplay seems almost to deliberately downplay drama: there was never a feeling of just how all-encompassing the fear of McCarthy must have been, and Strathairn’s Murrow seemed to outplay McCarthy at every turn. The first serious consequences for Murrow and his colleagues don’t happen until the very end of the film.

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Steven Spielberg

Film

This article was originally published in the January-March 2006 issue of Senses of Cinema (here).

“You’re on to a much safer bet liking someone like Martin Scorsese, whose genius shows up in all the fully approved forms – plowing a lonely course outside the studio system, obsessively burrowing down into an identifiable subset of obsessions, tearing films from his breast like chunks of his own flesh – than you are liking someone like Spielberg: devoid of visible self-destructive impulses, alighting on film after film as if giving his imagination an aerobic workout, athletically slam-dunking one box office record after another… if that guy also turns out to have been the most talented filmmaker of his generation, then what, frankly, was the point? What was the point of all those hours passed in the dark confines of the art house, boning up on Ukrainian cinema, watching the unwatchable? But there you go. What can you do. If you have to point to any one director of the last twenty-five years in whose work the medium of film was most fully itself – where we found out what it does best when left to its own devices, it has to be that guy.”

Tom Shone, Blockbuster ¹

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