146. Life Is Sweet

Song - Wonderful Tonight (Eric Clapton)

Movie: Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1990)

Shortly after seeing this film, I discovered the debut album of Sophie Straat, an artist satirising the gentrification of Amsterdam through the 'Levenslied', the music genre most well known thanks to Andre Hazes, who sang songs about love and life in Amsterdam. 'Levenslied' is considered an authentic Amsterdam genre, especially because of its sincerity and its great attention to detail. Levenslied songs paint vivid pictures of even the most unknown corner of the city. Straat brings the same attention to detail and her music equally lends itself for drunk singalongs in Amsterdam bars. But her lyrics are jokey, and make use of irony and sarcasm to criticize the 'yuppy' transformation of the city. 

Sophie Straat (translating to Sophie Street) is the stage name of Sophie Schwartz, a British-American woman who appears to not be born in Amsterdam, but who has only grown up there. In her songs she often sings with an obviously exaggerated Amsterdam accent to make her appear more authentic. This turns her songs into more than just sincere and (righteous) criticisms of the widening inequalities in Amsterdam, and the way the city obfuscates these by marketing itself as a global center of (green) progressiveness. They are also parodies (she teases, because she loves) of the Levenslied, and all the connotations and memories associated with it. These connotations and memories are sometimes infused with a conservative and reactionary nostalgia to an idealised version of an old 'authentic' Amsterdam and criticisms about the gentrification, globalisation and transformation of Amsterdam are just as often rooted in this conservative nostalgia as they are in genuine progressive causes. This contradiction is quite wonderfully expressed in Straat's songs. 

Most of these ideas also feature in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet, which took me by surprise a bit. I had expected it to be somewhat similar to Another Year, a gentle look at the lives of a British working class family. Instead, it's a detailed look at the misery of its characters and their inability to alter their lives, containing several scenes of visceral, sustained ugliness. At the same time it's an often very funny film which understands that you don't need to sanitise working class people to sympathise with them. It's really very good and further proof that Mike Leigh is one of the greatest contemporary British filmmakers. But the aesthetic experimentation of Straat and the way she mixes and plays around with different genres, styles and modes, highlighted why I may never fully fall for artists like Leigh. I like the artificiality and the 'constructed' subjectivity of art. I miss that in Leigh's films, though it is more visible here than in Another Year and Mr. Turner. Timothy Spall's character for example is a wonderful creation, and his introductory scene in particular is a great example of how stylistic exaggerations of reality can provide more truthful insights than sober depictions aiming for authenticity and verisimilitude.  

145. Atlantic City

Song - Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen)

Movie: Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

All around Atlantic City billboards promising the city's renaissance pop up, casino's are opening and buildings are being built, renovated or torn down. If the renaissance is not here yet, the promise of one is enough to lure many in search of a better life. Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon) from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan is one of those many hopefuls. She is a croupier in training, studying French in the hope that Atlantic City will be her springboard to Monte Carlo. I don't know if any hopeful documentarians arrived around the same time as Sally, but I would imagine they left after seeing this film. In 1976 New Jersey legalsied gambling in an attempt to return Atlantic City - a Prohibition-era hotspot in decline - to its former glory. This film finds the city in the midst of that transition and records incredibly well how it hovers between hope and uncertainty. Sally is of course entirely fictional and so is the story built around her. But the spaces she and the other characters here inhabit feel so unmediated and naturalistic you feel you could almost smell the ocean and the fish markets. 

It's hard to capture the atmosphere, mood and authenticity of a place any better than Malle does here. It's quite a shame he didn't get to return to it, say in 1990, to see whether the promises of a renaissance had been fulfilled. Especially because of his skepticism. Many films have been made about how a city's expansion serves to fill the pockets of corrupt developers and politicians, often from the point of view of either these developers and politicians or from the point of view of the journalists, detectives and other moral crusaders trying to expose them. It's much rarer to get the view from the ground, as you do here, of the citizens whose lives will be affected by these plans. And it's a rather cynical view. The same forces that lured Sally to the Atlantic Ocean are also responsible for her potential homelessness in the city; her building may be demolished to make room for a casino. In the film's best scene she finds herself in a hospital to identify her killed husband (who had run away with, and impregnated, her sister), while around her the big honcho's are celebrating another casino opening, completely oblivious to her plight. They do so in a hospital wing named after, and donated by, Frank Sinatra. The revitalisation of Atlantic City is presented here as an elite prestige project, selling an illusion to the working people to make the rich richer. 

Unfortunately, the film doesn't entirely work for me. Especially in its second half, the characters' motivations and actions become quite unbelievable, which is only exacerbated by the film's authentic portrayal of the city surrounding them. Especially in its depiction of Lou the film seemed way more interested in calculating the right audience reaction than in creating a credible character. Lou is just the right amount of criminal, just the right amount of delusional and just the right amount of heroic to make him a lovable anti-hero. I can imagine that to audiences in 1980 this didn't matter and that they mostly cared that Low was just the right amount of Burt Lancaster (the only other Lancaster film I've seen is the great Sweet Smell of Success), who in one of his last major roles clearly relates to a character looking for one final chance to be who he always wanted, and pretended, to be.  

144. Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Song - The Lady In Red (Chris De Burgh)

Movie: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)

Most of the time special effects are used to visualise something supernatural or extraordinary that cannot exist in the real world, in films that take place in a world unlike ours or in a disrupted version of our world. Robert Zemeckis, in his best films, uses special effects to make our ordinary world seem weirder by bringing together recognisable elements which would otherwise not be able to exist next to each other. The scene in Back to the Future Part II, where Marty goes back to the past to see himself playing Chuck Berry at the prom (one of my favorite moments in any film) is a great example of this. So are the scenes where Forrest Gump meets Elvis and Nixon. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Zemeckis combines these two approaches to special effects. A hard-boiled 'live-action' detective in 1940's Los Angeles interacts with animated, hand-drawn, cartoons from 'Toontown'. Some of these 'toons' such as Roger Rabbit and his wife Jessica are created especially for the film, others are the familiar characters from Disney's earliest films and from The Looney Tunes. In Toontown Daffy Duck and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny interact with each other. Both the live-action and the animated elements are 'recognisable' on their own, but by combining them together the film presents a world that's completely unlike ours.

The effect is often quite spectacular. The idea here is that these animated characters are drawn to be directed by 'real' film directors. In of the first scenes we see a 'real' film set in which the camera is pointed towards an animated stage on which Roger Rabbit, one of the biggest stars of Toontown, is climbing out of a fridge that has fallen on him with little birds circling around his head. The director is mad at him, because the script called for stars to circle around his head. The animated stage and the film set (of course the scene makes sure to show both elements as much as possible together in the same frame) are so well integrated with each other that you never get the impression that these are two separate spaces or two different worlds. In a later scene, Zemeckis adds another element to the proceedings when he brings detective Valiant to a bar where he is served drinks by the penguins from Mary Poppins, while he watches Daffy and Donald have a piano duel. There he meets Betty Boop, who is drawn in black and white, while all the the other animated characters are in color and Valiant is played by the 'real' Bob Hoskins. 

What makes the achievement of Who Framed Roger Rabbit even more impressive is that it, to my knowledge, has inspired very few copycats. Space Jam would be the most obvious example, but even that made a much clearer distinction between the animated parts and the live action parts (and was far less funny). Of course, it didn't help that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was apparently the most expensive film of the 1980's and that it came out only 7 years before Pixar released Toy Story, accelerating the transition towards computer drawn animation. That is not necessarily progress. I would take almost any Looney Tunes short over almost any Pixar film. In fact, I would also take the Looney Tunes over Who Framed Roger Rabbit. 

What makes the Looney Tunes, the early Disney shorts, Tom & Jerry, etc so great is their directness and their simplicity. They are defined by Bugs Bunny nonchalantly eating a carrot, while his hunters are powerless to catch him. Or by Tom repeatedly hitting himself with a rake. Or by Road Runner humiliating the coyote only with a "Meep Meep". Most of the magic is in how slight and uncomplicated the 'stories' and drawings are. The technical virtuosity of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, no matter how impressive, is ultimately in opposition to that nonchalant, casual quality and the film never truly manages to capture the effortless cool of Bugs and co. It tries a bit too hard, best exemplified by Bob Hoskins' dance scene near the end of the film. It's also filled with many (often genuinely funny) sexual innuendos, double entendres, film references and inside jokes, trading the universal appeal of these cartoons for the love of a highly specific group of film nerds.   

143. The Doors

Song - Light My Fire (The Doors)

Movie: The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991)

In one of the film's early scenes we see Jim Morisson (Val Kilmer) screening one of his student films at UCLA. Clearly influenced by the French New Wave, it's some narrative juxtaposing the rise of Hitler with 60's California youth culture. His class mostly hates it, but Morisson is encouraged by his teacher, played in a cameo by Oliver Stone himself. In the film's final scenes the camera glides along Pere Lachaise, past the graves of the likes of Frederic Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and Moliere only to end up at Morisson's stone, presented as the grandest of them all. If you'd accidentally forgotten that you were watching an Oliver Stone film about The Doors, these scenes would remind you that you are indeed watching an Oliver Stone film about The Doors. I loved it.

It's not very fashionable these days to like Oliver Stone or The Doors. That's partly for bad reasons - we demand art be modest and are suspicious of self-indulgent artists. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that there is a bit of a douchey, chauvinist undercurrent behind their pompous pretentiousness. I am less of a 'Doors' fan than I was when I named this blog, but it's undeniable that at least Riders on the Storm and L.A. Woman are absolute bangers. As for Stone, it's rather disappointing that he is now one of the main proponents of what I've seen wonderfully described as the 'anti-imperialism of idiots'  - being pro Russian, Chinese and other non-western dictators just because they are anti-America. But his manic, no-holds-barred style of filmmaking, unafraid to occasionally descend into irrational lunacy in both form and content, is sorely missing in contemporary (American) film. He is both an extremely obvious choice to make a film about The Doors, and the last person you'd want in charge of such a project. It's easy to imagine this film becoming Scarface on steroids. In actual fact, it's an often surprisingly melancholic and warm film that fully achieves the surreal vibe of an actual Doors song.

It's also a film that fully concedes that most of The Doors' lyrics are rather meaningless gibberish. At the same time, it understands that this meaningless gibberish is what makes them work so well. Stone presents Morrison as someone who aspires to be a great poet, but who deep in his heart knows that he isn't. And that the best he can do is write provocative, mysterious rock lyrics, most of which he seems to make up as he goes along. His lyrics are just smart enough to make you curious and interested, but not intelligent enough to really constitute coherent thoughts grounded in reality. Accidentally or not, that does create a surreal, absurdist effect, especially in combination with Ray Manzarek's arcane keyboard sound. Stone most clearly shows this when during the first half of The End we see the band hallucinating in the desert, while during its second half we hear them playing the song to an entranced audience. The rambling incoherence of the song, combined with Morrison's languid delivery, is what keeps the audience on its feet. They are hearing something they can't quite place, that doesn't quite make sense. That makes the eventual sudden aggressive proclamations only more surprisin and more excitingly dangerous. They wouldn't have the same effect if Morisson was building up to them logically and coherently. 

The film mostly consists of similar large set pieces which aim to recreate this surreal offbeat absurdism  and it does so incredibly well. It often plays as if it's a biopic about a fictional band in a world that looks like ours, but is a just a little skewy in a way you can't quite define. The moon is just a bit too bright, Pam (Meg Ryan) becomes Jim's love of his life the moment he enters her home through her window, and we sometimes hear a Doors song non-diegetically while Morrison and co play another one in the film. As always, Stone mixes film styles and stocks, overlays images upon images, edits across time and space, and accentuates every aural and visual choice he makes. He is also fortunate in casting Kyle MacLachlan as Manzarek, whose dialogue sometimes seems to come straight out of Twin Peaks.

One of the oddest scenes takes place halfway through when Morrison meets Andy Warhol at a party organised by the latter. Warhol is shown to philosophise in much the same way as Morrison does, yet the film seems to have utter contempt for the former. The difference is in the way they present themselves towards the world. Warhol uses his pretension to build himself up as a great artist, while Morrison uses it to create a connection with the audience and to have fun. Stone is probably one of the few filmmakers who would even think to include a scene to explore the various shades of pretentiousness and their morality, and the scene is probably unfair towards Warhol. But the scene's is interesting for its attitude towards Morrison's art, one that is reinforced throughout the rest of the film. The Doors is a full-throttled defense of making art for its own sake, to indulge in meaninglessness. And Stone would not be Stone if he wouldn't try to make the larger point that this freedom to make art that's about nothing but your own whims is not only what makes America great, but also a representation of America at its best. I don't know if that's really true, but it's a wonderful fantasy to have.         

142. The Rules of the Game

Song - All Along The Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix)

Movie: The Rules of the Game - La règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)

The future is about to arrive when The Rules of the Game begins. A woman journalist dressed in work clothes reports live on the radio on the imminent landing of André Jurieux, the fastest man to fly solo across the Atlantic and the French answer to Charles Lindbergh. Upon landing, a disappointed André finds that the woman for which he risked his life isn't at the airfield waiting for him. Believing that he must win 'his' Catherine back from Marquis Robert de la Cheyniest he finds a way to attend the Marquis' hunting party at his private estate 'La Colliniere'. And so begins a "comedy of manners" involving lordships, aristocrats, servants, chambermaids, lavish gowns, costumes, palace intrigue, masquerades and mechanical music instruments. It's sometimes easy to forget and hard to imagine that this world of noblemen and their traditions, rules and hierarchies overlapped with the world of live radio and airplanes. In hindsight it may be rather obvious that the latter would mean the downfall of the former, but seeing it so clearly while living in the midst of that transition is much harder than Renoir makes it look here.

The Rules of the Game is above all a great farce that doesn't involve merely the three main characters mentioned in the paragraph above, but also Christine's chambermaid Lizette, Lizette's husband Schumacher, her lover Marceau, Robert's mistress Genevieve, Christine's niece Jackie who is in love with André, Octave (played by Renoir), who is a confidant of most of these people, and who may be smarter or more tragic than he lets on, and a whole lot of other aristocrats and servants. The efficiency with which Renoir introduces them is a masterclass in itself. Look at the opening scene at the airfield for example. André is greeted there by a jolly Octave, but can't hide his disappointment to the radio journalist. Renoir then cuts to an opulent room where Lisette and Christine talk about love and life, while the former helps her 'lady' dress to go out with her husband, the Maarquis. In the establishing shot, before we even know their names, we see them from behind the radio. Their relationship to the previous scene is immediately clear, especially when Christine teases Lisette about her affairs, including the one with Octave. In less than 5 minutes Renoir has established all the different ways in which these four people relate to one another, and to the Marquis, who we haven't even seen by then. As he introduces more and more characters, and as we get to know them better, it becomes increasingly fun to discover how entangled they all are with each other, and how much more entangled they can get. 

Once at La Colliniere, everything and everyone has been set up and the real fun starts, most of all for Renoir himself. He happily moves the camera around the estate to discover unexpected people in unexpected corners, and is equally happy to let his characters move around the estate. We see differents sets of people leave a room, their paths diverging, only for them to briefly meet up again in some other space of the estate, and then follow their own paths again. At other times, characters are frantically entering rooms, where others are already, equally frantically, going on about their business. In the process, unlikely alliances are formed and broken, identities are mistaken, punches are thrown and guns are fired. And the most exciting space is the corridor between the various bedrooms, where people constantly move around, get in and out of rooms, and the frame, often not even knowing for certain why they are there or whether they really want what they think they want. Sometimes we may see within a shot three different strands of action take place, such as the moment when the Marquis and Andre leave a room fighting, only to end up in the same space where Schumacher is shooting at Marceau, while in the background we see Genevieve fainting. And while all this is going on, some of the guests at La Colliniere are watching a 'masquerade show'. In one of the acts four Jewish stereotypes sing about how they cannot control their sexual desires. It's hard to make such a funny, lighthearted movie about a dying world. It's easier when you have such contempt for that world.

141. Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Song - Saturday Night (Herman Brood)

Movie: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)

Inadvertently, a great argument for not being a team player. Most of the cast here is wonderfully in tune with each other and with the sweet and endearing vibe of the film, letting the vulnerability, insecurity and excitement of their characters seep through in their performances. It's obvious that all these young actors, at the beginning of their careers, loved the film and loved working with each other to make the best of it. The exception is Sean Penn, who gives the least chill performance of a surfer dude ever. More annoyingly, he is so committed to showing that what he is doing is so special and unique that he completely stops the film in its tracks anytime he appears on screen. It's an utterly stupid and ill-conceived performance. In hindsight, it's hard to blame him. His Jeff Spiccoli could have, and perhaps should have, retired him from acting. Instead, Spiccoli became an iconic character and Penn went on to have the most successful career out of the entire Ridgemont cast.

I am quite fond of The Pledge, Into the Wild and Milk, but Judge Reinhold should have been the biggest star on the evidence of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Though if you want to be a star you probably shouldn't appear next to 80's Eddie Murphy. Can't really blame the audience for not paying much attention to you in that situation.) He plays Brad Hamilton, a teen who realises that he is less mature than he thinks he is, but doesn't realise that this makes him more mature than he thinks he is, to utter perfection. The scenes where he debates how to break up with his girlfriend are really glorious. He wants to explore seeing other people, knows that this is a perfectly normal response for a teen, but isn't 100% sure whether this knowledge is correct. And so he tries to come up with all kinds of reasons for breaking up, knowing that all those reasons are bullshit. His reaction when his girlfriend actually breaks up with him, because she wants to see other people, is a priceless combination of relief, regret, amusement and disappointment. He gets into more awkward situations in the rest of the film, similarly responding to them with both annoyance and a knowing bemusement, aware of the fact that these are the kind of situations teens sometimes end up in, and there is not much one can do about it. 

An early scene is key to the character and to the film as a whole. Washing his car with a grin on his face, his younger sister Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), having lost her virginity the previous night, comes up to him, asking him to hide from their parents the flowers she just received. He helps her without teasing her or making her in any way uncomfortable. That dynamic will be again visible when Stacy needs an abortion, a plot point that badly fits in with the rest of the film, but does again highlight Brad's goodness and comfort in his own skin, without ever turning him into a mature adult. It's really not the kind of character you usually see in these kinds of comedies, certainly not from that period. The rest of the film is quite good too, though it lacks big laughs and a certain manic energy that the best comedies of its ilk have. It makes up of for that with a sort of quiet wisdom, understanding that teens often fear getting what they want much more than not getting what they want. And that anxiety about asking a girl out, is often about the fear that she will actually say yes.  

140. Native Son

Song - In the Ghetto (Elvis Presley)

Movie: Native Son (Jerrold Freedman, 1986)

If Beale Street Could Talk is one of the best films of this century, but even if it had been crap, I would have been grateful to it for introducing me to James Baldwin. Unfortunately, the perspectives of black American leftist thinkers have almost completely passed me by. There are some obvious reasons for this. Emphasising that many of the heroes and intellectuals of the Civil Rights Movement had radical socialist ideals would be quite inconvenient for the stories Americans like to tell (about) themselves. Native Son, an adaptation of the 1940 novel by Richard Wright, is certainly not a great film, but it's interesting for trying to address this conundrum. 

I have not read Native Son, but I have read about Richard Wright on Wikipedia, which obviously makes me an expert! Apparently, Native Son was a highly controversial novel, criticized by Baldwin for presenting negative stereotypes of black Americans, the American literature world still feels uneasy about. It has been criticized for being violent, profane and sexually graphic communist propaganda, causing libraries and high schools to think long and hard about how to present it. Freedman's film doesn't really capture that provocative spirit and is a bit safe. But it must have been hard to adapt a novel by a devoted Marxist during the height of American anti-communist jingoism. When Bigger Thomas (Victor Love) drives Mary (Elizabeth McGovern) to meet her 'red' boyfriend Jan (Matt Dillon) in their socialist set-up/bar, we don't enter the establishment with her. Instead, the camera stays outside with Bigger, showing us shadowy figures behind windows adorned with communist slogans. 

The rest of the night Bigger drives Mary and Jan around town, while they use him as a prop to justify their beliefs and to explore black Chicago. These are among the film's best and most uncomfortable scenes - I would not be surprised if they influenced Jordan Peele when making Get Out, as they evoke similar feelings and ideas. This does so more successfully, as Mary and Jan truly believe they are benevolent do-gooders who will be of benefit to Bigger. They are completely oblivious to the fact that their shenanigans clearly make Bigger uncomfortable and put him in an anxious state of mind. In doing so they set in motion a chain of events leading to Bigger accidentally killing Mary. (As an aside, losing Elizabeth McGovern early is not a good strategy for a film.) The film emphasises that Jan and Mary, and their desire to show off how good socialism is/how good they are for being socialists, are to blame for Bigger's predicament. But when the trial against Bigger starts the film also emphasises that the communists are the only (white) people to care about him, who see his humanity and who help him regain some pride and self-respect. This nuanced approach also shows this to be a rare Hollywood film that seems aware that there are substantial differences between social democracy/socialism and communism. 

Unfortunately. the film does fail considerably in other regards. Bigger placing the dead Mary in the furnace would have been an iconic image if the scenes surrounding it were stronger. You can see how a description of the events leading up to Mary's death and their aftermath, could work well on page. To make them work on film, one has to embrace metaphor and artificiality. Freedman is too damn literal, and so most of it feels completely unbelievable and ridiculous. It doesn't help that Victor Love isn't a very good actor; you simply don't buy that he can successfully convince anyone of his innocence.