Stephen Rowley

377 posts

Stone Face

Film Film Reviews

The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1927)

If you’re going to introduce somebody to silent films – and what a good, true friend that would make you – then there is no better place to start than with the works of Buster Keaton. While Charlie Chaplin was always much more admired in his lifetime, and managed a vastly more successful career after the introduction of sound, Keaton’s work has probably aged better. He’s more cinematic, less sentimental, and simply more fun. Chaplin was considered at the time the pre-eminent comic artist of silent film, but as much as I like his work, to modern audiences I think he is too obviously striving for greatness. Looking back, now that neither has a point to prove – we take it as a given that both were seminal film artists – Keaton’s lack of pretension is more appealing. The General isn’t quite his best work (Sherlock Junior is even better) but it is the best of his films available on DVD in this country.

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Putting the Hustle into Kung Fu

Film Film Reviews

Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)

It used to be possible to split martial arts films roughly into two broad categories: those that featured largely unassisted physical feats, such as the films of Jackie Chan; and those reliant on more over-the-top, heavily faked wire-work, such as Once Upon a Time in China or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The last few years, however, have seen the emergence of a variant of the latter: computer assisted martial arts, as seen prominently in the fight with many Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded. Here the computer fakery moves beyond just the digital removal of wires, and starts creating digital stunt men and props. Once a fight is at least partially animated inside a computer, anything is possible. In unassisted martial arts, a kick might knock someone over. With wire-work, it might send them flying across a room. With digital martial arts, however, it can send them over the horizon.

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Busted

Film

Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Tom Shone, Simon & Shuster, 2004)

Click to purchase through Amazon

Tom Shone’s Blockbuster, which charts the rise of blockbuster filmmaking in Hollywood over nearly three decades (starting from the wild success of Jaws in 1975), echoes Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls in a number of ways. Just picking it up, you can tell the publishers must be hoping it can replicate the runaway success of Biskind’s book. It even replicates the insert of photos, each captioned with the snappiest, most appealing quotes that can be found in the text.

The most important link, however, is subject matter. Biskind’s book concluded with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas drawing an end to the “New Hollywood” era of the seventies, and Shone picks the story up at that point. Yet Blockbuster is also a reply to Biskind. For Biskind, the coming of the blockbuster was the triumph of barbarism over art: the death of good filmmaking, but Shone’s take is much more receptive to the way in which Spielberg and Lucas did things than Biskind. The beauty of his approach, however, is that he can embrace the pleasures of the blockbuster without giving up his critical faculties. Regular readers will know I’m sympathetic to the point of view Shone espouses here, but it is always a struggle to articulate a critical framework that allows appreciation of such films on their own terms, while still maintaining a distinction between art and trash.

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My Body May Belong to You, But My Soul Belongs to Warner Bros.

Film


Note: this post has been updated; see the bottom for more details.

When the Australian division of Warner Bros split the four disk Looney Tunes Golden Collection released in the United States into three separate collections (two single disks and a double disk), I was fairly philosophical. Even allowing for the fact that we missed out on some of the extra features the Americans got – notably The Boys From Termite Terrace, a documentary about the studio – I was just happy to be getting any release of these wonderful cartoons at all. It did cross my mind that the format of the release, and its cheap-looking cover art, would lead to poor sales for the DVDs. But I could enjoy great cartoons like Rabbit Seasoning, Rabbit of Seville, and Hair-Raising Hare on DVD at last. And there would be more to come, I told myself. So I have waited calmly ever since that release, in March 2004, expecting that the next volume would follow.

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Wartime Filmmaking

Film

I finally caught up with Batman Begins last weekend. I don’t plan to do a full review, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s too late in its run to be worthwhile; secondly, the guys at Hoopla pretty much covered all the points I would make about it. I didn’t like it as much as they did: I thought as soon as it moved in to action film mode it was pretty poorly made, and that its take on vigilante justice was fairly confused (I actually think the deceptively light and frothy Spiderman films, particularly the second one, balanced substance and action with considerably more finesse). But they got it right about the political undertones of the film, and I certainly found the film much more interesting than its predecessors. This is the other reason I don’t want to write a full review, however: having written so much about the political undertones of Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds I didn’t really want to wade too deeply into those waters again.

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Seduced

Film

The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)

There are few films that are so associated with a particular moment in time as The Graduate. It’s the definitive Hollywood inter-generational sex comedy, but it’s also one of the most important youth pictures of an era defined by the actions of its university-age population. The Graduate was a defining film for the emerging late-sixties youth movement, and the virtues of the film remain clearly apparent nearly forty years later: while it might be dated, its palpable sense of period is also one of its great virtues. (Its wall-to-wall use of Simon & Garfunkel songs as score, for example, is extremely evocative). Yet it remains an intriguing movie precisely because of its association with the political turmoil of the late sixties. It is, ultimately, a deeply cynical film that was adopted by an idealistic generation. Why a film that sees youthful rebellion as futile was so heartily adopted by the late-sixties college crowd remains deeply puzzling.

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Disney Saves Those Who Save Themselves

Film

I haven’t written in detail about the Disney corporation for a long time now, for a very simple reason: it’s just kind of depressing. That last time I touched on it was briefly when Joe Grant died (see here), but the only detailed post I wrote was way back in 2003, when Roy E. Disney had just resigned from his post with the company. As I wrote then:

I have no inside knowledge of the studio, so have no idea how effective Roy E. was as a board member. But even if his role was purely ceremonial, the symbolism of what’s occurred is bad enough. Roy E. Disney is Walt Disney’s nephew, and the son of studio co-founder Roy Disney. Given the elder Roy’s much larger then generally understood role in the studio’s operation (he ran the business end until after Walt’s death, and the studio was initially the “Disney Brothers” studio), Roy E. represented a direct, tangible link to the heritage of the company, which has always been its greatest asset. It’s long been easy – and largely accurate – to disparage Disney as just another soulless media conglomerate, but Roy E. was still there as a human link to the glory days of the thirties when Walt blazed his trails. (Sure Roy E. was just a kid at the time, but we’re talking symbolism here).

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Sixteen Years and Counting

Film

Ain’t It Cool News are carrying a small item that links over to The Indy Experience, which in turn links to an interview with Kathleen Kennedy at Now Playing Magazine. Kennedy, for those who don’t recall, has been one of Steven Spielberg’s chief lieutenants (usually as producer) since as long ago as E.T., and she provides the latest, most reliable update on Indiana Jones IV, which is now to be set in the late 1940s:

“We’re working on a screenplay,” says Kennedy, long-time producing partner of Steven Spielberg. “I know this sounds like something that we’ve been saying for 15 years, but I’m hoping that we’re going to see something in a couple of months. Jeff Nathanson is working on the script right now… I will say this: If it comes in and we’re all happy with it, it will be more than likely the next thing we do.”

Kennedy acknowledges that previous reports of Nathanson’s script being “approved” by Indy producer George Lucas and director Spielberg were true, but that doesn’t quite mean what it sounds like it does.

“It’s one thing to approve something, it’s another thing to say it’s greenlit and we’re shooting it. So we’re just in that sort of phase of finessing,” she says, before responding to a question about whether or not star Harrison Ford is too old for the part these days. “No, I don’t think so. Certainly we’re not writing the script as though he’s 20 years old. You know, Sean Connery spent a lot of time in the Bond role and whatnot. I think it’s great that we can go make another Indiana Jones movie and Indy can be a little older. I think playing with that is a good thing.”

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War Weary

Film Film Reviews

War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005)

It’s sort of amazing, really, that Steven Spielberg is still top of the Hollywood tree. Given the constant upping of the ante since his Jaws (along with Star Wars) basically invented the modern Hollywood blockbuster, you would think he might have fallen by the wayside. Yet with War of the Worlds he once again steps up to the plate and shows just why he continues to lead the pack of A-list directors. War of the Worlds is his take on familiar material: not only has H.G. Wells’ novel been filmed before (in a George Pal-produced 1953 version), but it was the source material for Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast that spooked America in 1938. And, of course, it was the unofficial jumping off point for Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day in 1996. It is a perfect choice of project for Spielberg, forming as it does a companion piece with his classic tale of benevolent aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If that film was kind of a sixties hangover, with its stirring finale of intergalactic peace, love, and harmony, then War of the Worlds is the grim, bitter and bleak counterpoint. It’s an extremely well made and effective film, but a feel-good thrill ride it certainly is not.

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Better than Ever

Film

Jim Schembri, the film critic for the EG section in The Age, published an interesting piece in that paper on Friday about Hollywood films. After apparently having an exceptionally unpleasant time with Mr & Mrs Smith – a movie I chose not to inflict on myself – he was moved to write a long piece on how Hollywood films really suck these days. (For the next few days it will be available here, although registration may be required.) The basic argument is that big “event” movies like Mr & Mrs Smith don’t actually need to be good: they open to enormous business based upon saturation marketing, and turn a profit before word gets out that they suck. The marketing media machine is, essentially, making quality irrelevant and thus making both Hollywood movies and their audiences dumber:

The intent is to blitz the eyes, rattle the ears and provide plenty of close-ups of those big, expensive stars. Pummel the audience with the package. Overwhelm them with starpower and firepower.

That’s what audiences are being sold now – not films, but deals.

This dumbing down of movies – it’s still very hard to believe that Miss Congeniality 2 actually does exist – has been accompanied by a dumbing down of audiences.