The real Hepburn.
From Howard Hawks’s The Philadelphia Story.
Category Archives: Movies
Steve Jobs – the movie
Oscar night.
Steve Jobs, the movie, is recommended viewing. While Michael Fassbender in the starring rôle may resemble Jobs solely in his emaciated build, you can disregard all the carping directed at this beautifully scripted Aaron Sorkin piece of cinema. Fassbender does an excellent job of showing the dysfunctional nature of the man, best illustrated toward the end when his ever complaining daughter Lisa asks why he is the way he is, to which he replies “I am not well made”. As regards parenting skills that may have been true but when it came to bringing a singular focus to making outstanding products Steve Jobs was very well made indeed.
After a second plea from Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen in a perfect characterization as the bearded engineer) to recognize the Apple ][ team during his iMac rollout Jobs replies that he will not do so, for that team of has-beens are B players. Just like the people running Apple today, who prefer to waste executive time on legal wrangling with the government in some sort of amoral marketing thrust, rather than crafting innovative products.
Fassbender is unlikely to get the Best Actor Oscar. He should.
Peter Sellers
Amateur snapper, famous name.
Those who grew up with Peter Sellers’s comedy saw the early surreal radio work with Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan (‘The Goons’) for the BBC gestate into the dark comedy of Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and later into the slapstick money maker that was the Inspector Clouseau series of movies made by Blake Edwards.
His performance in Kubrick’s masterpiece (Kubrick only made masterpieces) is notable for the fact that Sellers acted three rôles – the US President, the RAF officer and, most memorably, the crazy German scientist, Dr. Strangelove, modeled on the no less crazy real life clone, Edward Teller, the proponent of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Sellers was also set to play the bomber pilot charged with nuking Moscow, but evaded the part claiming injury to an ankle. There are many versions of this story, but that seems to be the most credible, for you could not possibly have two personalities more different than those of Sellers and Kubrick. The one spontaneous, with a quicksilver wit which dictated that one take was all his short attention span could tolerate. The other cerebral, plodding, intense, leaving nothing to chance and thinking a dozen takes par for the course. Sellers simply wanted out, so feigned the injury. Quite how these two collaborated to craft the greatest black comedy made is a mystery, but we should all be grateful they did. At the conclusion Kubrick remarked that “Sellers is the only actor you pay for four parts and get three”.
Sellers as Strangelove.
Strangelove’s prescription for surviving the coming holocaust, in the obligatory heavy German accent:
The last few minutes of Strangelove contain some of the greatest tragicomedy ever put on the screen in a movie with great performances all round. The closing line “Mein Führer, I can walk!” constitutes a perfect ending to a perfect movie.
Sellers, like many of his ilk, suffered the curse of the comedian, forever insecure and worried that his fame might fade along with his wit. He really should not have worried, having a genius for self reinvention. Once as a kid I recall him on a BBC consumer show where he called in for a job interview affecting an Indian accent – he was roundly turned down – then seconds later called again, this time in perfect BBC English (like they used to speak until populism reared its ugly head), and got the interview. This debunking of bigotry has stayed with me all these years. No-one has equalled Sellers’s genius for mimicry.
There’s an excellent documentary on Sellers’s interest in photography where much of the content was provided by his burgeoning archives, for Sellers was a committed snapper and movie maker from the earliest days of his success. He invariably had the latest in gear and such was the man’s character that he gave generous gifts of hardware to many friends. Now a UK web magazine named Creative Review has published an interesting piece on his photography and you can see more by clicking the image below.
Click the image for the article.
Blow Up
Polish poster genius.
Other than a history of dying heroically on horseback in the face of better equipped enemies, there really is not much to be said about Polish culture. Neither the greatness of Russia or the brute efficiency of Germany, which Poland has the misfortune to call its neighbors, distinguishes the nation’s meagre accomplishments. OK, Chopin excepted, but you might argue he really was French.
Indeed it is with some gratitude that I look at my parents’ history, first with their Polish lands occupied by the brute Germans whose first act was to shoot our two Great Danes. That was probably logical given that the Danes have as much love for the Hun as do the Poles. The dachshunds survived, needless to add. The Wehrmacht was replaced in 1945 by Ivan, and these serial invaders saw to it that commonsense finally prevailed as my folks hightailed it in 1947 via Sweden and Ireland to London, where I grew up. Sadly they did not think of crossing the Atlantic which would have given me the opportunity of graduating at the top of my Harvard class rather than from University College, London, which is OK I suppose, but my son will make up for that.
However, now and then something special comes from the land of potato vodka and herrings in cream and in this case it is an absolutely stunningly original poster for Michelangelo Antonioni’s mythical movie Blow Up. That’s PowiÄ™kszenie to you. Blow Up is a good test of any photographers level of interest in his craft. The next time you encounter a snapper ask what he thinks of the movie. If met with a blank stare walk away for you are speaking to yet another mindless equipment fetishist, from whom you will learn nothing.
In this poster, Waldemar Åšwierzy (OK, so his mother slept around a bit cross-culturally speaking; I mean, the Germans always had schnapps and chocolate, no?) has avoided the common western depiction of the priapic David Hemmings straddling a supplicant and writhing Veruschka, going instead for a neo-Seurat pointillism which at first glance is meaningless. Leave it on your computer screen and step back a dozen feet …. stunning. It captures the very mystery which the movie is all about. Did you see the body or did you not?
For the finest writing on this greatest of movies, click here.
At the Movies – 10 years
Nothing new here.
As with books, the movies which most inspire the visual senses were all made a long time ago. The modern obsession with the action/adventure genre, along with attention spans shortened by video games and the like, largely preclude the making of beautiful movies. There’s no money in them and the Hollywood system no longer has time for art house movies.
But go back a few years and choosing just five of the most beautiful movies is not at all easy, for there is so much great work out there especially from the 1960s and 1970s.
In no particular order, then, these are the five which have most stimulated my visual cortex this past decade.
1 – Death in Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde, directed by Luchino Visconti. 1971
Based on Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name, Death in Venice chronicles the last vacation and death of one Gustav von Aschenbach in fin de siècle Venice. Visconti’s work was always rich and lush with Italianate color and from Bogarde, a lightly regarded British comedic heart throb, he coaxed one of the very greatest performance on film. Never less than lovely to look at the movie is a treat for the ear, too, much of it set to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The movie demands attention and patience, both amply rewarded. I originally saw it on its first run in Mayfair as a young man of 18 and recall well stumbling out into the Belgravia streets simply dazed and overcome with emotion.
2 РStreets of Fire, starring Michael Par̩, directed by Walter Hill. 1984.
You could not find a visual masterpiece as culturally removed from Death in Venice as this rollicking good time. Set seemingly in 1950’s Chicago and filmed almost exclusively at night, the imagery – set to a raucous Ry Cooder rock track – is startling and attention getting. Even the video game generation will get this one. The youngest movie here.
3 – Barry Lyndon, starring Ryan O’Neal, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1975
This three hour long movie is not for those in a hurry, and visually it remains unsurpassed. Rather forgotten in a Kubrick oeuvre whose admirers prefer ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Shining’, this lushly filmed and costumed period piece is balm for the eyes. If your visual senses matter to you, this is probably the movie to see above all others. If nothing else, Marisa Berenson (the niece of that great Renaissance art expert and charlatan, Bernard Berenson) has never looked lovelier. Handel’s Sarabande dominates the sound track and could not be bettered.
My son, aged 13, had already watched it – all rapt attention – thrice, which tells you something about how you should bring up a kid in today’s world. He will be successful as a result of his attention span, not despite it.
4 – 2001: A Space Odyssey. The star is the English cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1968
In the previous column, one on photography books, I made mention of the adjective ‘breathtaking’ as one which is abused yet remains useful for lovers of good English. And ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is nothing if not breathtaking. It does not hurt that the movie includes simply the most stunning cut in world cinema, the moment when the monkey hurls the bone/weapon victoriously in the air and Kubrick and Unsworth cut to a space station set to Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. Breathtaking. And if you have never quite understood Varese’s music, this is a good place to start.
5 – Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, directed by David Lean. 1962.
Jackson Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?
T.E. Lawrence: It’s clean.
A rare moment of humor in a film which you should see, if at all possible, in a revival movie theater on a huge Cinemascope screen. I saw it thus twice when it played in the Carnegie Theater in Manhattan, close to my home on 8th Avenue and 56th Street in the mid-1980s and it really is the only way to do it justice. And speaking of great cuts, the one here is in the same class as Kubrick’s money with the femur. Lawrence, showing off his disdain for pain, snuffs out a match with his bare fingers and Lean cuts to the infinite vistas of the desert. That is special and Maurice Jarre’s music is the icing on the cake. One of O’Toole’s earliest movies and one for which he was cruelly denied the Oscar.
If there was ever a more physically perfect leading man than O’Toole, I cannot think of one and it’s lovely to hear him speak in the proper English of my youth, not the grammar school garbage emerging from the mouth of the average English speaker today.
With the exception of Barry Lyndon, made on Kodak film (Kubrick opting for the pastel rendering), all were made in Technicolor. No surprise there. ‘Death in Venice’ comes on an SD DVD only (a so-so print) as does ‘Streets of Fire’ (an excellent print). The others all come in Blu-Ray options and there really is no alternative but to get these.
You can see all my movie reviews here.