The Director's Chair

The Director’s Chair – Quentin Tarantino

In the years following Hollywood’s Golden Age, a new crop of filmmakers rose up that not only possessed the skills to make movies of their own, but were also keen on the importance and historical significance of the movies that had influenced them.  For the first time, a generation of filmmakers were making movies that were reflective of the movies that had come a generation prior.  Many new filmmakers not only sought to replicate the kinds of movies that they had grown up with, but they also began to deconstruct them as well, viewing old tropes through newer sensibilities.  You can see this through the works of French New Wave auteurs like Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut as their early films took heavy inspiration from pre and post-War film noir. And then there are the many directors like Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone who breathed new life into the Western, with far more attention paid to the horrific violence that really did mark the Old West.  You can also see how  old sci-fi serials of the past were reimagined by a filmmaker like George Lucas into a groundbreaking gamechanger called Star Wars (1977).  It was a generation that made a profound impact on cinema for several decades, and brought the industry into a whole different identity than where it started.  Even still, there is a consistent line of new filmmakers standing on the shoulders of those that had come before them, and using their influence to inspire what was to come next.  So, it’s interesting to see what kind of new generation would follow in the footsteps of the first generation fully influenced by the cinema of the past.  It turns out that the cycle keeps moving along, as each new generation strives to replicate the kinds of movies that left a deep impression on them.  Particularly with a generation as rebellious and experimental as those that had risen up in the 60’s and 70’s, it was going to be interesting to many scholars of cinema how the next generation would develop in it’s wake.  Indeed, beginning within the early 90’s, a new crop of filmmakers did begin to emerge and change the face of cinema again, and one of the most noteworthy of those new voices was a fresh young rebel named Quentin Tarantino.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee but raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Tarantino seemed born destined to be a filmmaker.  Spending much of his early years going to movie theaters in the heart of Hollywood, Tarantino not only grew an appreciation for the movies that the studio system was putting out, but also the ones that were being made on the fringes as well.  Tarantino is an unashamed fan of what has been deemed over time as “grindhouse” cinema.  These were movies made on the slimmest of budgets, often dealing with taboo subjects and containing many button pushing elements, and were almost always showing in cheap seat theaters that were not always well kept.  These were movies that challenged the mainstream, and Tarantino ate them up with pride.  Whether they were Spaghetti Westerns, Blaxploitation, or just the average raunchy comedy, these movies spoke to the still developing mind of Tarantino during these formative years.  Before embarking on a filmmaking career, Tarantino worked in a video store, where his deep knowledge of cinema made him a natural source of recommendations to customers.  Through the encouragement of some industry friends, Quentin began working on screenplays that he hoped to one day sell and help him break into the film industry that he had such an affinity for.  In those early days, he would craft the stories that eventually formed the foundations of True Romance (1993) and From Dusk ’til Dawn (1994).  In the meantime, he earned a little extra money as a part time actor, including playing an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls.  The residuals for that gig alone help him secure enough money to start development on his first feature as a director, Reservoir Dogs (1991).  Though modest in budget and scope, Dogs nevertheless revealed Tarantino’s unique voice and it immediately put him in the spotlight.  The meteoric rise continued with his second feature, Pulp Fiction, which won the Palm d’Or at Cannes and helped Tarantino earn his first Oscar for the Screenplay.  Since then, he has remained a Hollywood fixture, and without a doubt the most influential filmmaker of his generation.  In this article, I’m going to examine all the noteworthy things about his movies that stand out and define him as a filmmaker.  And no, feet will not be one of the filmmaker trademarks I’m going to spotlight.  So, let’s put Quentin Tarantino in the Director’s chair and see what makes his movies both noteworthy and entirely unique.

1.     

UNFLINCHING VIOLENCE

Even in his earliest movies, it’s readily apparent that Tarantino is not one to sugarcoat onscreen violence.  Throughout the entirety of Reservoir Dogs, actor Tim Roth’s character is bleeding out from a gunshot to his gut, the result of a botched robbery he played a part of.  And that’s one of the least gruesome acts committed in the movie.  Another character, Mr. Blonde (played memorably by Michael Madsen) cuts the ear off of a hostage he has taken.  Tarantino drifts the camera away when the gruesome act is committed, but you do see the aftermath, grotesque ear cavity and all.  This unflinching look at violent acts extends all the way through his filmography.  Even the movies he wrote and didn’t direct (True Detective, From Dusk ’til Dawn and 1994’s Natural Born Killers) have the same focus on violence.  But at the same time, it isn’t violence without reason or purpose.  Tarantino purposely wants you to feel something viscerally when you see it on screen.  A lot of the reason he puts it in is movies is due to the influence he took from the grindhouse movies of the past.  Just like how those movies pushed the envelope with their depictions of on screen violence, making liberal use of blood packs and gory make-up to drive home the fact that these movies were outside of the mainstream and proud of it.  Some would see it as exploitive and there have been complaints from some that Tarantino glorifies violence.  But he has pushed back on that claim many times, stating how essential the violence is in his movies.  One of the things that you commonly see in his movies is how the violence usually erupts when you least expect it.  The ending of Once Upon a Time ..in Hollywood (2019) for instance is a particularly shocking outburst of violence, that’s both uneasy and hilariously abrupt.  The montage of a gory car wreck in Death Proof (2007) also showcases how Tarantino pushes the envelope to get a reaction out of his audience.  Other films that aren’t quite as gory, like Inglorious Basterds  (2009) or Django Unchained (2012) still have a fair share of their movie centered around acts of violence, so it’s something that is present throughout his work.  He’ll agree, these movies aren’t for everybody, but at the same time, he holds true to the fact that violence in his movies should never be done as a compromise.

2.

GREAT, QUOTABLE DIALOGUE

Tarantino by trade is a film director, but he will probably tell you that his foremost talent is in screenwriting.  There is no doubt that the thing that most people take away from his movies is just how fresh and memorable the dialogue in it is.  Quentin’s voice really is what distinguishes him the most, and it’s what has set him apart from most of his contemporaries.  There have been many independent filmmakers in his wake that have tried to imitate the Tarantino style, but almost all of them have failed.  No one writes like Tarantino, and I think that it’s because he puts so much of his own mind into the things he writes.  Quentin’s special talent is his use of non-sequiturs in his dialogue, which is the characters talking about stuff that means nothing to the overall plot, but at the same time, reveals so much about the characters themselves.  The back and forth discussion about McDonald’s menu items in France between Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules and John Travolta’s Vincent in Pulp Fiction is a perfect example.  Talking about the “Royale with Cheese” ultimately is just two old colleagues wasting time on a way to a job, but from that discussion, we learn so much about who these two are.  Tarantino loves his character building monologues, and it’s especially fulfilling for him when he can base so much of his character interactions on film nerd discussions that he’s probably had with his own friends over the years.  The opening of Reservoir Dogs I almost guarnatee is based on a real discussion he’s had at parties over the meaning of Madonna’s discography, and it makes it all the more interesting that this is how Tarantino chooses to introduce these characters to us.  It’s not all pop culture though.  Quentin has often said one of his most favorite things he has ever written is the opening scene of Inglorious Basterds, which introduces the fearsome Colonel Hans Landa (played spectacularly by Christoph Waltz), and it’s easy to see why.  It’s one of the most unnerving introductions of a villain in cinema history, and Quentin brilliantly conveys the true menace of the character not through actions but through words alone.  Even the way Tarantino structures his movies, often in a non-linear way, is done only in the way that makes sense when he does it.  There have been so many copycats, but Tarantino the writer is still an unmatched original.

3.

UNFORGETTABLE NEEDLE-DROP SOUNDTRACKS

On top of Tarantino’s cinema influences, it’s also easy to see what kinds of music left a deep impression on him as he grew up.  No doubt, listening to the top 40 radio stations in the Los Angeles area stuck with him as throughout all of his movies, he likes to underscore his scenes with a carefully chosen selection of classic hits.  Sometimes he’ll include a universally known song, or he may use a deep cut.  Part of the fun of watching his movies is not knowing what you’ll hear next, and being surprised by the ingenious selection.  Even more interesting is when he subverts a scene by setting the mood with an unexpected track.  The already mentioned ear slicing torture scene in Reservoir Dogs is made all the more noteworthy by the fact that Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” plays through it all; with Michael Madsen dancing unnervingly to the beat.  Even when working in a bygone time period, Quentin will throw in an anachronistic choice like David Bowie’s “Cat People” into Inglorious Basterds or Jim Croce’s ” I Got a Name” into Django Unchained, and it will still make complete sense to the story he’s telling.  The man just has an ear for music, and knowing which popular songs work best in the stories that he’s telling.  Some music that otherwise had fallen into obscurity over the years sometimes have been revived thanks to it’s placement in one of his movies.  The now iconic use of Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” for the opening credits of Pulp Fiction cemented that guitar heavy instrumental in pop culture, and is often used whenever anyone does a parody of Pulp Fiction in any other medium.  He doesn’t just use any kind of pop music; it’s music from a specific period in time that was influential to Tarantino in his formative years.  It’s another part of his own character that he injects into his movies and helps to make them uniquely his own.  We are listening to the soundtrack that he himself would hear if he were living in the world of these characters.

4.

DEEPLY, DEEPLY FLAWED CHARACTERS

There is definitely one thing to say about the characters in Tarantino movies and that’s for the most part nearly all of them should be judged on a morally relevant scale.  Because his movies often deal with characters living in a violent, crime ridden world, it’s often hard to say if there truly is a pure soul in any of his movies.  This is definitely true with movies like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.  Because of Pulp Fiction’s non-linear, anthology style plot, you’ll actually find instances where characters that are heroes in one plot thread turn out to be villains in another.  Another example of judging characters based with moral ambiguity is with the Basterds brigade in Inglorious Basterds.  In normal circumstances, we would be looking at these characters, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), as war criminals, but their atrocities are painted in a favorable light because they are committing them against the Nazis.  It’s probably the only movie in history where we are actually rooting for suicide bombers.  Even still, Tarantino makes sure that there are characters with righteous intentions behind their acts of violence.  This includes the Bride (Uma Thurman) in the Kill Bill duology, or Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) in Inglorious Basterds, or Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) in Jackie Brown (1997).  Just as violence is a part of the fabric within all of Tarantino’s movies, so is the impact it has on the characters, and it asks us the audience to consider the moral implications along the way.  Yes, in many cases, these are bad people doing bad things, but in the context of these stories, it asks us to question if there is a morally justified reason to use violence in order to seek justice.  It could be that, or sometimes it’s just Tarantino showing how messed up a world we live in, like putting a sympathetic spin on a character named Cliff Booth (Pitt again) in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood who probably, almost certainly killed his own wife.

5.

CINEMA ON A PEDASTAL

It’s an almost unmistakable fact in watching Tarantino’s movies that he is a man who is in love with the art of cinema.  Whether it’s referencing movies throughout his different films, or actually incorporating them as an element of the plot, the movies are always a fixture of his filmography.  You can see the Tarantino’s cinephile side come out strong in moments like the Jackrabbit’s Diner scene in Pulp Fiction, where the waiters and waitresses are all dressed like 50’s pop culture icons, and John Travolta’s Vincent Vega knows the difference between Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe.  Cinema also plays a key role in the plot of Inglorious Basterds, as the big climatic finale is set within a movie premiere.  More recently, Quentin devoted an entire movie as an ode to a bygone era in the dream factory itself with Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, even going so far as to actually recreate the look of Hollywood Boulevard in the 1960 by redressing the facades of the real place to make them exactly as they word decades before.  Even apart from that, Tarantino loves to honor past generations who were a major influence on him by including them in his movies.  He helped to bring back long overlooked actors like Laurence Tierney, Robert Forester, and Pam Grier and gave them important roles that helped to revitalize their long dormant careers.  And even outside of his films, Tarantino has been a passionate champion for traditional cinema.  He refuses to work with digital cameras, working exclusively with good old fashioned film stock, and he even has experimented with using long out of use film formats, like the ultra wide Panavision 70 on his movie The Hateful Eight (2015), a format that hadn’t been used in over 50 years.  He only is so adamant about the kinds of equipment he uses on set because it’s his way of honoring the history of filmmaking that means so much to him, and he wants to preserve it as much as he can.  His passion for physical film media even extends to presentation, as he became the owner of the New Beverly Cinema, a single screen venue south of Hollywood, where movies are shown solely with actual film stock.  Just this year, Tarantino added the legendary Vista Theater in the Los Feliz neighborhood to his collection, which shows that his commitment to preserving the theatrical experience, with a strong emphasis on real, physical film, remains strong to this day.

There is little doubt that years from now the name Quentin Tarantino will remain a prominent one in the annals of film history.  Carving out his own, uncompromised niche in the Hollywood community, he has become one of the rare, unvarnished talents in the whole of the industry.  Very few filmmakers have the kind of creative freedom that he has managed to secure for himself, and that’s mainly because Tarantino has been especially effective in endearing audiences to his unique style and consistently managing to bring people back to the cinemas solely based on his own brand alone.  Everyone now knows what they are getting with each new Tarantino movie, and he hasn’t failed to deliver yet.  In fact the only thing that may get in his way is his own self.  For years, Tarantino has stated that he is quitting directing after his 10th film, which should be the one that comes next.  It seems like a premature time to hang things up, but Quentin insists that he’s rather go out at ten films, than continue on and lose his edge like he’s seen happen to so many other directors that he loves.  I personally don’t buy that, and I think he’s being a tad too hard on himself thinking that mediocrity is his ultimate destiny if he continues to make movies into his twilight years.  It’s where his obsession with movie history ultimately becomes a hinderance on his own self worth.  I hope that Tarantino sees it a different way in his later years, and I believe that a premature retirement are not in the cards for him.  He’s too talented, and I for one don’t believe that talented people just stop cold turkey.  The creative bug will catch him again and he’ll make more than 10 movies in his career.  As for now, we have a pretty eclectic body of work to appreciate from the last 30 years, and most of them have stood the test of time and can still be viewed just as well today.  What will be interesting is if another Tarantino like individual will rise up in the years ahead whose style owes itself in part to that of Quentin Tarantino.  Like how Quentin has used his movies to honor the ones who came before him, I’m sure that some future filmmaker will do the same, and Quentin will see that as it’s own reward.  He knows he stands on the shoulders of giants of the past, and I’m sure that the greatest joy in his life is knowing that the next generation that will redefine cinema will be the ones that stand upon his.

Movie Reviews

Black Widow – Review

It is pretty remarkable to look back and see where Marvel had managed to get to in 2019.  It was closing out the Phase Three era with the conclusion of it’s Infinity Stone storyline that had crossed over nearly two dozen films over 10 years.  With the double whammy releases of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), Marvel Studios claimed the crown as the ultimate kings of the box office.  But they weren’t done yet.  Even as Endgame put a nice button on all the events that had led up to it, Marvel was still setting the stage for what was going to come next.  On the horizon was Phase Four, which looked to be even more ambitious than what Marvel had done before, expanding their cinematic universe even further (and even into a multiverse).  The ambitious plan not only called for continued stories on the big screen, but also mini-series releases streaming on Disney+, the platform of Marvel’s parent company.  Given how huge a year Marvel had in 2019, with an extra assist from Captain Marvel (2019) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), it only looked like the next year was going to be even grander.  Cue global pandemic.  The Covid-19 virus outbreak ground everything to a halt, including Marvel’s plans for the year 2020.  Every planned release in that year had to be pushed back, including the ones that were done and in the can.  For the first time since 2009, we had a year without anything new from Marvel Studios.  After a decade long run of dominance, this was an unusual sight.  But, as the pandemic has thankfully waned, those delayed projects are also finally making their way to audiences, although done in a way that none of the team at Marvel likely intended.  Instead of relying on cinemas, which are still recovering, Marvel launched Phase Four instead on Disney+ with Wandavision, and continued through the Spring and Summer with The Falcon and Winter Soldier and Loki series; none of which were supposed to lead the charge originally.  Instead, that distinction was originally intended for a movie that finally gives the spotlight to one of the founding members of the Avengers: Black Widow (2021).

Black Widow’s history in the MCU goes almost all the way back to it’s very beginning.  She made her first appearance in Iron Man 2 (2010) played by Scarlett Johansson, who would continue on through the next ten years, playing the character in several crossover events during that time.  Though not given much to do in her first outing, Black Widow’s presence grew over time in the MCU, eventually becoming one of the six original Avengers.  And though Scarlett Johansson brought a great amount of strength to her performance, there has been an unfortunate aspect to Black Widow’s place within the MCU.  She essentially was there in the beginning to be eye candy for the male centric audiences that Super Hero movies originally catered to, especially when you take notice of the skin tight costumes she used to wear and the provocative hero stances she would pose in the movies.  Not only that, but there was an element of tokenism with her placement in the team.  But, thanks to Scarlett’s influence over the character, she was able to rise above these controversial aspects of the character, and helped to make Black Widow not only a standout in the Avengers team, but also an essential member who takes on leadership, even over those more physically powerful than her.  And in turn, Black Widow became a positive role model for young girls who over the last ten years have become the most rapidly growing segment of comic book fandom.  Not only that, women were now pushing to tell their own stories their own way within the genre.  She was the trendsetter in proving that these movies were not just for teenage boys anymore; they were for everyone.  So, over time, demand grew higher for Black Widow to get a movie of her own, which Marvel eventually agreed to.  Despite the long wait that resulted from the 2020 pandemic, we are now finally able to see Black Widow take to the big screen in her own story.  The only question is, is it a story worth telling or is it one that doesn’t do justice to a character we’ve grown to love over the last 10 years.

There are some small spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t seen Captain America: Civil War (2016) or Avengers: Infinity War, as this story takes place in between the two.  Following the events of Civil War, which saw the break-up of the Avengers and leading the likes of Captain America, The Falcon, and Ant-Man to become fugitives of the law, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) aka Black Widow, also finds herself on the run, after she helped the others escape by attacking Black Panther.  Now a fugitive herself, she is having to escape General Ross (William Hurt) and his forces, who are in hot pursuit.  With the help of her tech engineer Mason (O-T Fagbenle), she manages to find a safe haven off the grid, but the peace and quiet doesn’t last long.  After receiving a mysterious package from an unknown sender, she is immediately attacked by a masked assassin known as Taskmaster, who has the special ability to mimic any fight move against an opponent.  After evading Taskmaster, Natasha follows some clues to that leads her to another safe house in Budapest.  There she meets up with the one who sent the package, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), another Widow assassin who shares a history with Natasha, as they were pretend sisters in a sleeper cell family cover set up by the Russians 30 years ago in rural America.  Yelena thought she could trust Natasha with the package, which contains vials of a mysterious red liquid, because of her Avengers connections, but Taskmaster and other Widow agents have caught up to them.  After nearly escaping, Yelena tells Natasha that the Red Room where both of them received their training is still operational, and under the stewardship of notorious Russian criminal Dreykov (Ray Winstone), who Natasha thought she had already assassinated years ago in a mission that granted her a place in S.H.I.E.L.D.  They resolve to take Dreykov and the Red Room down, and to do that, they need the help of the two people who pretended to be their parents all those year ago; Alexei (David Harbour) who was Red Guardian (Russia’s answer to Captain America), and Melina (Rachel Weisz) who is still Dreykov’s chemical expert.  With the “family” back together, will they be able to take down the mighty machine that is the Red Room, as well as their ultimate weapon, the Taskmaster.

Part of the excitement surrounding the release of Black Widow is the fact that we had to wait so long for it to happen.  In addition to the tragic consequences of what the pandemic did to the theatrical industry, it was also just strange not having anything from Marvel for over a year after they had been so omnipresent in the years before.  There were several worries over that time that Marvel was going to just end up skipping theaters overall and release Black Widow on streaming, which would’ve been a devastating blow for the theaters.  But, thankfully Marvel and Disney remained resolute in giving Black Widow the big screen treatment, though they did have to compromise with a hybrid Disney+ Premiere Access release as well.  After multiple date shifts, we now are able to see the movie that we’ve long been waiting for.  But after a year of delays, how does the movie play today after all that has gone down.  To be honest, I think the delay may have actually favored Black Widow in the long run, because had it come out in the summer of 2020 right on the heels of what we got from Avengers: Endgame, I think audiences might have been a little underwhelmed by this movie.  Black Widow is a serviceable movie, but not a big game-changer like many of the more recent Marvel movies we’ve been seeing.  It’s giving us more or less a Marvel version of a Jason Bourne movie.  It does fit with the character of Black Widow, but there’s not a whole lot beyond that as something that fits within a larger Marvel narrative.  Essentially, we are just seeing a stand alone side story focused on Black Widow  and nothing more.  It might be satisfying to many, and there is plenty within the movie that does satsify long time fans; but anyone expecting huge earth-shattering twists and turns should probably look elsewhere.  It’s hard to say how that would’ve played out in 2020 with Endgame so fresh in people’s minds.  With a little extra distance from that monumental achievement, a more standard film like Black Widow plays a little bit better, and removed from it’s original intention of launching Phase Four also helps the movie out as well.  It’s a movie that in many ways feels like an obligation, but even still, it works on it’s own merits.

The one nagging aspect of the movie is the question of whether it was a story that needed to be told.  It’s kind of strange watching this movie after having seen Endgame because (spoilers), Natasha ends up sacrificing her life to see the mission to it’s end.  Knowing that, it takes away some of the drama surrounding her character in this movie.  We know she’s going to live by the end of this story so that she could be a part of Infinity War and Endgame, and we also know that beyond that she no longer will be a part of the cinematic universe due to her death in Endgame.  So, Black Widow is a story very much out of place in the continuing Marvel storyline.  It’s like Marvel intended this story to be made way back in Phase Three, but the train had already left the station and they couldn’t make any more room for Black Widow’s story, so this movie is a make-up for having missed the stop before.  Honestly, I wish there was more to this movie, because a character like Black Widow and her actress Scarlett Johansson deserves a better sendoff than just a basic spy thriller.  She’s one of the original Avengers; a character that has done so much to increase female representation in Comic Book movies.  The movie Black Widow just assumes that audiences will accept it’s awkward placement in the timeline, which I’m sure that many will, but a character like her should have been given a more monumental sendoff.  Still, Marvel isn’t delivering a bad movie by any means.  There is still plenty to enjoy in the movie, with the usual slick balance between action, comedy, and suspense that Marvel has excelled at.  As a swan song, it falls short, but as an action packed spy thriller, it is definitely better than most.  You just have to go in with tempered expectations, because this movie is just going to deliver enough to warrant your time, but not enough to place it within the all time greatness of Marvel at it’s peak.

One troubling thing you’ll notice while watching the movie is that Black Widow is the least interesting character in the movie.  True, most of her character development has been spread out over the ten years that she was a part of the Avengers team, but even still, it’s a shame that she doesn’t command an even greater presence in her own movie.  The more meaty character development here belongs to the members of her “family,” which really belies the true intention of this movie; it’s here to pass the baton to the next generation.  It’s very clear that Florence Pugh’s Yelena is being set up as Scarlett Johansson’s successor in the Black Widow role in future Marvel projects.  And in that regard, the movie does do a very good job establishing her.  Yelena is great character, which Pugh plays to perfection.  She’s tough, funny, and more than holds her own in any conflict.  Her future is going to be pretty bright in the MCU, and I’m happy that she makes the obvious changing of the guard aspect of this movie feel earned.  David Harbour’s Alexei is also a great addition, as he provides a lot of the comic relief in this movie, as well as a genuine bit of charming vulnerability that makes his a character worth rooting for.  I especially love his fixation on how he stacks up against Captain America, with him at one point asking Natasha straight up, “Does he talk about me much?” much to her annoyance.  Rachel Weisz has much less of a presence in the movie, but she does use it well.  Indeed the best part of the movie is seeing this dysfunctional faux family come together and work off each other.  It does offer a little insight into Natasha’s character as well, and why protecting family is important to her.  Being an orphan who had her childhood stolen from her, she would do anything to protect any semblance of family that she had, and in time, she managed to become a part of two families of her own choosing; the one in this film and the Avengers.  Sadly the biggest letdown in the cast are the villains.  Ray Winstone is a great actor but here he is just a stock villain, which is disappointing after a string of strong Marvel baddies like Thanos, Killmonger, and Hela just to name a few.  And though Taskmaster looks pretty badass, there isn’t a whole lot beyond that, and the mystery of who is behind the mask is easily pieced together.  It’s a mixed bag, but thankfully the best characters in the movie are going to be the ones that have a future in the long run with Marvel.

As far as the action goes, the movie lacks the grandiosity of Marvel’s more out-there projects, but that’s kind of the point.  Black Widow is a much more grounded film, taking it’s visual cues from the likes of the previously mentioned Jason Bourne movies, as well as some James Bond and a little sprinkling of Mission: Impossible.  Director Cate Shortland proves to be perfectly capable of making these big set pieces work, but what I find she does best with are the more intimate action beats in the movie.  My favorite fight is actually one between Natasha and Yelena early in the movie.  It’s a scene that shows you don’t have to rely upon a bunch of CGI tech wizardry to pull a suspenseful scene off.  Sometimes you just need two really skilled stunt women throwing each other against the walls.  There’s also a really solid car chase through the streets of Budapest that rivals any that I’ve seen in other spy thrillers.  It’s at the point where CGI becomes ever more present that I think Shortland begins to lose her grasp of the action, and unfortunately that’s what makes up the final act of the movie.  The finale is honestly one of the messiest and least affecting that I have ever seen from Marvel, and it’s one of the main reasons why it knocked the movie down a peg for me with regards to other Marvel films.  Marvel, especially in recent years, has done a stellar job with building their movies up to satisfying resolutions, especially in the last two Avengers flicks.  But the finale to Black Widow is just loud and dumb, and so far removed from the grounded reality that made the rest of the movie work as well as it did.  It makes it even less effective when the movie just wraps everything up in a pat resolution, like the writers realized they needed to quickly wrap things up, and the audience is left wondering, “was that it?”  Overall, it is pleasing to see this kind of genre made through the guidance of women behind the camera just as much as in front of it.  Shortland, despite her lack of long term experience with action thrillers, does actually deliver some tense scenes that are on par with the genre.  But, given the way the movie ends, the whole thing turns out to be a mixed bag.

So, fair warning, don’t go into this movie expecting another Avengers level event.  It’s a perfectly serviceable movie in the Marvel canon, but nothing truly spectacular.  Like I mentioned before, the delay may have done the movie a service, because the pressure to follow up on Endgame was taken off of it’s shoulders.  Because of Marvel’s stellar track record, I think it’s at the point where we have to judge these movies on a curve compared to other Hollywood movies, much like what we do with Pixar now.  Compared to other spy thrillers out there, Black Widow is certainly a cut above, and especially groundbreaking in the fact that it shows this genre through a female perspective.  But, as a Marvel movie, I’m sorry to say that it actually falls into the bottom half.  It’s not bad by any means, but it falls short of the high bar that Marvel has set for itself.  It’s especially disappointing in the fact that it is the last we’ll ever see of Natasha Romanoff in the MCU.  What Scarlett Johansson has brought to the character over the last ten years should not be understated.  She transformed a sexist old trope into a genuine positive role model that has transformed the Marvel fandom for the better and opened the door for so many more female super heroes in her wake.  Marvel should have honestly given us a little more to digest than a “look what she was doing after Civil War” storyline.  I would’ve liked to have seen more of her backstory with regards to how she left the Red Room and joined S.H.I.E.L.D.  There’s so much to be mined there like what made her turn and how did she befriend Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner).  They could have also done a soul-searching story about how she learned to cope with the tragedy that took place at the end of Infinity War.  Overall, I feel like there were better stories to tell than the one we got in this movie.  Natasha deserved better.  Even still, as a set-up for the future Black Widow adventures for Yelena, it does the job well enough.  Of course, there’s a not to be missed end credits scene that does indeed set up the next chapter.  Despite it’s disappointing elements, it is satisfying to see Marvel return to the cinemas once again after such a trying period.  And with exciting things on the horizon like Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao’s Eternals and sequels to Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and Thor in the near future, along with all the Disney+ projects upcoming, Marvel is going to do just fine regardless how this movie performs.  As of now, it should be noted that despite it’s shortcomings, Black Widow magnificently sends off Scarlett Johansson’s decade long legacy as Natasha Romanoff with a movie that firmly establishes all the great changes she brought to the character that made her an icon for a generation.  It was perhaps a little too late, but better now than never and hopefully it’s the start of greater things down the road for Black Widow in the MCU.

Rating: 7.5/10

Editorials

Flight of the Rocketeer – The Making of a Cult Classic that Laid the Foundation for Today’s Super Heroes

The transition between the 80’s and 90’s in cinema is often not a widely examined period of time.  But it does offer some interesting insight into what would happen in the decades that followed.  Building off a decade that marked the rise of the blockbuster, the major movie studios began to change dramatically from how it operated in the past.  The primary drive of this new phase of Hollywood had less to do with the star power of movie stars and filmmakers and more to do with franchises.  It was the decade of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Robocop, Rocky, and Back to the Future.  People were less interested in watching a movie based on who was in it; they now were just interested in something that would show them a good time.  The problem for Hollywood though was what constituted a certifiable franchise.  Oftentimes a blockbuster might blossom out of nowhere like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Back to the Future (1985), and the many attempts to chase after those successes ended up falling way short.  There was a lot of major attempts at building a bone fide Hollywood blockbuster, but very few actually succeeded.  All that Hollywood knew was that movies needed to be bigger and larger than life, but there were so few trends that lasted that actually panned out like people thought they would.  That’s why in addition to the mega-blockbusters that made the 80’s noteworthy, there was also a healthy handful of cult favorites that emerged; movies that were perhaps too ambitious or bizarre to be appreciated in their time, but have over the years grown in esteem.  It leaves just as much of a handprint on the blockbuster decade as the big blockbusters, and those movies contribute just as much to the identity of Hollywood at that time.   For every Star Wars, there was a Blade Runner; for every Ghostbusters, there was a Fletch; and for every The Little Mermaid, there was a Secret of NIMH.  And unbeknownst to Hollywood at the time, the movies that often relegated on the trash heap in their time would over the years end up laying the groundwork for the blockbusters of the future.

As the nineties began to go into full swing, a new tool began to redefine the blockbuster once again; computer animation.  If the 1990’s had a defining aspect of it’s cinematic impact, it was the proliferation of this new technology; going from the lifelike dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993) to the bullet time of The Matrix (1999) in just six short years.  But what CGI also enabled Hollywood to do was stabilize the productivity of their franchise output.  There was less risk-taking because now people were packing the theaters to just marvel in the technical wizardry of the movies, regardless of the quality of the story (1996’s Twister, for example).   But in addition to that, Hollywood power players were also branching out as a new generation was pushing for different kinds of movies being made.  That was certainly what was happening to Disney at the time.  The new regime under Michael Eisner in the mid-80’s began to shift the entire culture at the legendary studio, moving away from the mentality of “what would Walt do?” to the mindset of “what are we doing right now?”  This meant a renewed investment by the company in live action films (as the animation side had been in decline for years) which would help fuel better box office returns to reinvest throughout the rest of the company.  Eisner and company knew that Disney needed to tap into a different, adult market, which led to the creation of Touchstone Pictures.  A steady stream of successes like the movies Splash (1984) and Three Men and a Baby (1987) helped revitalize the fledgling studio, and even gave them the capital to renew the troubled animation studio that was core to their identity.  But what also followed at the end of the decade was a string of more ambitious, envelope pushing movies that not only gave Disney more identity in Hollywood, but would also endear them to a generation of movie-goers who like Disney’s new mix of the gritty and the fantastic.  This included the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Dick Tracy (1990) and a movie that has especially withstood the test of time, The Rocketeer (1991).

Disney’s The Rocketeer was based on a small but beloved series of comics from the early eighties, which were themselves homages to the Golden Age of DC and Marvel from the 50’s and 60’s.  The Rocketeer focuses on a stunt pilot named Cliff Secord who stumbles upon a rocket pack that enables the wearer the ability to fly.  Using the pack on himself, he begins to master the aerodynamics of the device, and decides to use the gift as a means of helping others.  Over the course of the comics, he does battle with many adversaries, including secret Nazi spies, given that it’s a war time set story.  What really made the character distinguishable was his slick, art deco inspired design, with the flight pants, letter jack, and iconic helmet all creating an unforgettable profile.  It’s wholesome, idealistic nature also made the character an appealing choice for cinematic interpretation.  With the likes of Michael Eisner at the helm, The Rocketeer seemed like a perfect choice to build a new franchise upon that could give Disney their own Indiana Jones style franchise figurehead.  Given the task of adapting the comic books to the big screen was director Joe Johnston, a former special effects wizard that rose through the ranks of Industrial Light and Magic, working on films such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark before making the switch to directing.  Only a couple years prior, Johnston had delivered a surprise hit for Disney with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which many praised Johnston for with his command of the movie’s complex visual effects.  The hope was that he would likewise give The Rocketeer the same, effective steady hand that could help launch it into franchise territory.  And the situation could not be more fortunate for The Rocketeer as well.  Only two years prior, Tim Burton broke box office records with his mega-hit adaptation of Batman (1989), proving that there was indeed a viable market for comic book movies.  And so, The Rocketeer was positioned by Disney for a mid-Summer release with a lot of expectations.  With a proven director, a solid, promising source material, and a studio that was eager to flex it’s wings as a major player, everything seemed perfectly set up for The Rocketeer to big the next big Hollywood franchise.

And then of course, it turned out not to be.  In the words of Joe Johnston himself at an anniversary screening years back, “The movie opened on June 21st 1991.  There was a lot of sequel talk on June 20th, and almost none on June 22nd.  After the first day box office returns came in, it was clear to Disney that The Rocketeer was  a non-starter for the company.  It opened in 4th place behind Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, City Slickers, and Dying Young, and tough it managed to recoup it’s modest budget of $35 million, it did not turn a profit thereafter, and quickly faded from theaters.  It was disheartening for a studio like Disney which put so much hope that this would be the next big franchise.  The truth is, it’s not the movie’s fault that it underperformed at the box office.  It was well received by critics, who likened it to past blockbusters like Indiana Jones.  And when viewing the movie now, it’s remarkable how perfectly paced and expertly crafted it is.  Most people who watch it outside of it’s original release have nothing but good things to say about it.  What really was behind the failure of The Rocketeer in 1991 was the fact that it was the wrong kind of comic book movie for that time.  Tim Burton’s Batman had dramatically altered audience expectations of the genre, as it spotlighted a much more dark and gritty angle.  The Rocketeer’s more earnest and colorful style was in stark contrast with Batman’s brooding nature.  And indeed, over the course of the next several years, we would see more comic book movies that followed the Tim Burton formula rather than what was seen in The Rocketeer.  But despite it’s initial failure, The Rocketeer did not disappear entirely.  Though Disney had largely abandoned it, a small but growing audience held the movie in high esteem and would carry it’s torch even through the multiple fluctuations of the comic book movie genre over the next twenty years, making it a bona fide cult classic.  And, to the movie’s benefit over time, some of those cult fans would themselves be in charge of redefining the comic book genre once again.

It just so happened that a couple of the movie’s fans wound up working for Marvel towards the end of the 2000’s.  And one of them happened to be head honcho, Kevin Feige, the man behind the creation of Marvel Studios.  After nearly 20 years of the comic book genre defining itself with gritty, action oriented adaptations, Marvel wanted to take things in a different direction; moving away from the tendencies of past super hero movies that tried to distance themselves from their pulpy comic book origins.  Feige and the Marvel creative trust wanted the genre to return to the earnest, character driven super hero movies of the past, without ever feeling ashamed of the cheesy elements that often gave the comic books so much enjoyable flavor.  Iron Man (2008) was the first attempt at this, which was a nice bridge between that idea and still keeping the genre relatively close to what people were familiar with.  But, for Feige and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, they had a particular movie in mind when they were looking for a style to define the cinematic premiere of one of their most important comic book heroes: Captain America.  The imprint of The Rocketeer is unmistakable in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), with it’s unashamed retro style, and it’s earnest depiction of super heroes origin free from any cynicism.  It’s easy to see that when the movie was set in motion that The Rocketeer was the movie they were trying to emulate; so much so that Joe Johnston himself was given the task of directing it.  Though the characters are wildly different, the style of the movie is unmistakably in line with Joe Johnston’s work on The Rocketeer.  It’s refreshing to see that even after 20 years, Johnston still had the ability to pull this kind of style off and make it work in a whole different franchise.  In many respects, Captain America is the spiritual successor to The Rocketeer, and it’s impact would even extend beyond just that one film.  Captain America set the tone for the remainder of the Marvel Cinematic Universe just as much as Iron Man by helping Marvel fully embrace the more pulpy side of their stories; in a sense, being unafraid of reminding audience that yes, indeed, this is from a comic book.  The combo of Iron Man and Captain America would eventually lay the foundation out for the decade of classics that followed, but the people behind the Marvel empire will tell you that the have movies like The Rocketeer to thank for showing them how it could be done.

So what is it within The Rocketeer that helped modern comic book movies find that right tone and style that has connected with audiences around the world.  For one thing, it’s a movie that doesn’t try to deconstruct it’s origins.  A large part of the comic book genre in the 90’s and 2000’s was based around grounding the heroes in reality and examining what exactly makes them tick.  Sometimes it would work, but other times it just dragged some comic book movies into needless melodrama.  The Rocketeer on the other hand is not about all that.  It’s less about what is at issue with the main character and more about what he has to do to save the day.  The character of Cliff Secord (played by Billy Campbell) is not a flawed, brooding anti-hero; he’s just a good guy wanting to do the right thing.  His character flaws are more about his clumsiness rather than anything psychological, and that makes him far more appealing than if he was a scoundrel that got his act together, which was an overused trope in the genre for many years.   The stakes are also pretty clearly defined in the film, with Cliff going up against Nazi spies who have their eyes on the jet pack as well.  They are led by a spy operating in plain sight as a movie star named Neville Sinclair (based on a real life rumor of Robin Hood leading man Errol Flynn being an allege Nazi sympathizer).  I should add that Sinclair is played by actor Timothy Dalton in a deliciously hammy and entertaining villainous turn for the former 007.  The movie is also unafraid to lean into it’s corniness from time to time, without trying to apologize to the audience about it later.  This is especially the case with a very on the nose patriotic streak found in the movie, with the Rocketeer literally taking to the skies next to a waving American flag at one point; an image that has been countlessly imitated in other super hero films like those of Superman and Spider-Man.  It’s colorful supporting cast, including two future Oscar winners (Jennifer Connelly and Alan Arkin), Paul Sorvino, and future Lost castaway Terry O’Quinn playing Howard Hughes, all would themselves continue to set the standard with which future comic book movies would cast their films.  Overall, the reason why it continues to inspire the comic book movies of today is because it fulfills the fundamental rule that all movies must follow; it’s just a fun ride from beginning to end.

Is it a movie that directly inspired all modern day comic book movies?  Of course not, but it was certainly one that provided the blueprint in which it could work.  If it was made today by the likes of Marvel or DC, would The Rocketeer have managed to be a major hit.  The conditions of the market certainly would favor it now, but The Rocketeer is a property that doesn’t have the longevity of say a Superman or Batman.  The Rocketeer has only been around as a character for the last almost 40 years, itself being a throwback to the comic books of the past.  It’s tricky to expect such a franchise to emerge out of those conditions, because despite acting like a story from a different era, it at the same time won’t carry over the legacy of that era.  Superman already had a 50 year head start on it.  So while a Batman movie can open to enormous success thanks to a built in audience that spans multiple generations, the Rocketeer must hold out hope that enough people are attracted to it’s unique concept in order to compete.  Sadly it wasn’t the case in 1991, when it was asked to perform in Batman’s shadow.  It was also another in a string of disappointing returns for movies that tried to copy Batman’s formula, including Disney/Touchstone’s own Dick Tracy, which tried way to hard to be just like a Tim Burton Batman movie (down to the Danny Elfman score).  What has helped The Rocketeer endure was that it went in a different direction than those others, expelling the broodiness of the Tim Burton’s style and instead embracing the colorful cheesiness of 1940’s pop serials.  So, even though it failed to find an audience initially, it managed to attract more people over time thanks to it’s earnest retro style, very similar in a way to another cult hit of the 90’s, The Iron Giant (1999), which by the way had a title character designed by Joe Johnston (seriously this guy’s an underground legend in cinema).  It’s a testament to good movies that never fade into obscurity and over time have a more profound impact on the history of cinema than we initially realized.

For me myself, it’s extremely satisfying to see a movie like The Rocketeer grow in esteem over the years.  I remember seeing it in the theater upon it’s original release when I was a month shy of 10 years old and loving it immediately.  I even went to school that next fall with a Rocketeer lunchbox in my backpack.  In my childhood photos, I have even found a picture of me and my brothers getting our picture taken with a Rocketeer walk-around character at Disneyland from that same summer;  and by the way, all three of us really loved the movie too.  Unfortunately, Disney was in a period of time where box office mattered the most, and they tended to bury their failures for the longest time.  That made The Rocketeer extremely hard to find for a while on home video.  And even when the movie did get a release, it was minor one; such as a DVD or Blu-ray with no bonus features.  Thanks to a streaming service like Disney+, The Rocketeer is readily available to anyone who is curious to watch it, and thanks to the site’s algorithm, it even offers it as a recommendation to anyone who’s been consuming multiple Marvel titles that are also available on the platform.  Even still, Disney still can’t quite figure out what to make of the property that they still hold onto.  Hopes for a direct sequel are still pretty slim as it’s been 30 years, and the original cast is much older today.  There are hopes for reboots in the future, as it’s apparent that Disney is aware of the cult status of the property.  Marvel Studios themselves can’t do anything with the character, as The Rocketeer rights belongs to a different publisher, but Disney could maybe pull one of Marvel’s creatives to work independently on a new project, since it’s all under the same roof now.  And there certainly have been attempts, like animated cartoons, in the past.  However, The Rocketeer’s cult status is still pretty limited to that cult following.  It’s not anywhere near MCU level in esteem, but it’s big enough now to where it can’t be ignored either.  In any sense, we at least have the original movie itself, which has aged like a fine wine these last 30 years.  And perhaps the greatest impact that it left behind was that it changed the expectations of the super hero genre.  Over time, it’s fanbase grew and demanded a different kind of comic book movie; one that was unafraid to call itself a comic book movie.  And eventually, that fanbase would spawn the people who would end up making comic book movies themselves, thereby delivering on that promise made by The Rocketeer.  The Rocketeer in many ways is the grandfather of our current comic book movie dominated culture, and its a satisfying end to see this little movie that could turn into the touchstone that it is for so many other hit movies in it’s wake.  Marvel and DC’s current status is carried on The Rocketeer’s broad shoulders, and it is rocketing off sky high.

Editorials

Bad and Fabulous – How Hollywood Queer Coding Turned Disney Villains into Gay Icons

It’s Pride Month again, and each year we begin to marvel more and more at the lessening resistance to devoting a whole month to celebrating queer rights and the achievements of the LGBTQ community.  While resistance to queer rights still exists out there in the larger culture, those roadblocks are growing fainter, and the rights of the Queer community becomes more and more affirmed with each successive generation.  We are thankfully in a turning point in our culture where queer representation is no longer a taboo, as many fields that were closed off to gay people for years are now no longer off limits, and are in fact becoming more inclusive than anyone ever thought that they’d be.  This has been especially true with fields that were distinctively defined in the past by outdated notions of gender norms.  It was believed in the past that in order to be a part of something like the armed services or professional sports, you had to adhere to the strict masculine ideals that were perpetuated in the culture, and that anyone who had a same sex attraction would be breaking that norm.  For years, homosexuals were barred from military service, or were threatened with expulsion if they made their sexuality public (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell).  And the idea of anyone gay playing things like professional football would’ve been laughed at.  And yet today, LGBTQ service members now serve openly with the full support and approval of top brass, and just this week a Defensive Lineman for the Las Vegas Raiders came out of the closet, with the NFL, sports media, and fans almost unanimously embracing it.  So what’s changed?  For the most part, the outdated notions of masculine and feminine ideals have fallen away as people, particularly young people, are finding more fluidity in what it means to be a fully rounded individual.  A football jock can be gay and masculine; a straight man can enjoy typically feminine things; a woman can do any job a man can do, and deserves an equal amount of pay in return.  The old norms that used to unfairly marginalized queer people are thankfully receding into the background and as a result, representation that was impossible years ago is becoming more and more the norm in our society.  But what is interesting about the societal norms that had previously existed is that they were perpetuated through the filter of Hollywood, long believed to be a safe haven for the queer community.

Hollywood, in general, has an interesting place in the long struggle for gay rights in America and around the world.  For decades, even as the gay community was being harassed, marginalized and terrorized in other parts of the country, Hollywood itself was for the most part a place of refuge, as long as it remained hidden.  People still lived in the closet in Tinseltown, but the threat of violence and even imprisonment for living as your true self was much less of a problem.  Internally, the Hollywood community treated the homosexual community as an open secret, as many queer artists thrived and became part of the framework within the industry, while at the same time having to still live by the hetero-normative standards that their industry was helping to perpetuate.  The reason why Hollywood couldn’t allow for full queer representation in the greater society despite the flourishing of it behind the scenes is because of a long standing roadblock called the Hays Code.  Enacted as a pact between church leaders, government officials, and movie executives as a means of regulating morality in the movies, the Hays Code restricted anything coming out of Hollywood that was seen as an affront to the “moral decency” in American culture, which included among other things any mention or support of homosexuality on screen.  Though Hollywood was hush about it before, the Hays Code made it all but impossible for there to be any mention of homosexual behavior in movies, and if there was, it had to be condemned wholeheartedly; otherwise, the Code would allow for more government crackdowns on Hollywood.  For a lot of queer people who worked and lived in Hollywood, it became a tight rope of having to conform to industry standards, while at the same time trying to be honest with one’s self.  For many in Hollywood in the Code years, this had the unbelievable effect of making queer entertainers and filmmakers work on films that perpetuated gender norms and moral standards that increasingly forced them further into the closet.  But, even with all the limitations that many of them worked under, some queer filmmakers found ways to work around the Code restrictions by hiding representation under a different guise, through something that we now view today as queer-coding.

Queer-coding is a practice in different types of media where characteristics of a LGBTQ individual is placed within the persona of a character without ever explicitly stating whether or not that character is definitively queer or not.  It’s using subtext to get a general sense of an individual’s possible queer identity, without ever stating explicitly that it’s the case.  This was a trick that queer filmmakers used to allow some representation within their movies while still adhering to the Code’s guidelines.  The only problem is that in order to make it work, the portrayals of characters with queer-coded traits were often ones of two types; a sissy comic relief or a sadist, morally deviant villain.  Primarily, these characters had to stand out against the idealized, confidently heterosexual main hero, and their contrary, deviant traits had to always fall behind those of the protagonist.  But, even as filmmakers had to sustain the status quo set by the Hays Code, they often managed to cleverly work around that by making these “deviant” queer coded characters more interesting than the hero himself.  Even hetero filmmakers who bristled at the restrictions under the Code embraced these subtle little subversions.  One of the earliest clear examples of a queer coded character leaving an impression in a Hollywood movie is the character of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941), played by Peter Lorre.  The character, through today’s eyes, is unmistakably queer coded (with an odd oral fixation around his walking cane), but as presented in the movie by writer/ director John Huston, it never overtly states him as so, which gives the filmmaker deniability under the Code guidelines.  Hitchcock also utilized this trope in his movies, like with the two murderers in Rope (1948), Ms. Danvers in Rebecca (1940), and less subtly with Norman Bates in Psycho (1960).  Though intended to be negative, these queer coded characters often took on a life of their own beyond their place in the film, and remarkably found a following in a community that they were meant to deride in the first place; among LGBTQ audiences.

So, why would the gay community embrace coded characters that were meant to demean them in the larger culture.  Because, it’s all that the gay community had for decades.  For a community that silenced for so long by society at large, any representation, even negative, was better than no representation.  Whether they were stereotypes set up for ridicule, or deviant villains hell bent on causing chaos and challenging norms, the queer community celebrated these characters, because it was the only way they could see themselves presented on film.  Once the Hays code finally dropped in the mid 1960’s, and counter-culture finally blossomed, subtext about sexuality also was cast aside and we were finally allowed to see movies made that more honestly dealt with queer representation.  However, because of the long standing restrictions of the Hays Code, expectations of the queer community remained entrenched even during this period of sexual awakening.  Because many queer people grew up with their community represented on film through these reductive stereotypes, most of them ended up just adhering to how society viewed them already without actually challenging it.  That’s why for many years after, queer men were still portrayed as effeminate queens while queer women were relegated to tom boys or aggressive predators.  So while homosexuals were no longer invisible, they were also still being pigeon-holed as an “other” in the culture.  Queer coding continued to persist even as the Gay Rights Movement began to march in the streets demanding to be heard.  It was by this point too entrenched in the make-up of Hollywood, and movie studios were not quite ready to shake away the homophobic audiences that they were catering to.  So even as the counter-culture gave way to the regressive Reagan Era and the queer community was decimated by the AIDS epidemic, the only way representation could be possible in American culture was by still leaning into the stereotypes that had defined them prior.

But by embracing even negative queer coded characters, the LGBTQ community was at that same time also showing a bit of defiance in the face of oppression.  To them, it was not about embracing the crimes committed by queer-coded villains in the movies, but instead it was about embracing how these villains defied the moral standards that the heterosexual “morality police” were trying to force upon them.  In a sense, it was about disobedience in the face of what people, particularly those with power, define as “normal.”  If society saw them as monsters, then they’ll act like the monsters they see in the movies.  But it wasn’t any kind of movie villain that the queer community embraced; it had to be the operatic, over-the-top kind that demanded that the world recognize them for who they are.  And there was no better place to find a strong queer coded villain than in the world of Disney Animation.  Even going back to the Walt Disney years, you could see queer elements baked into the villainous character of their movies.  The Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) displayed some subtle queer vibes in her operatic, commanding personality, leaning very much into the domineering female stereotype of that period.  There’s also the foppishness of Captain Hook in Peter Pan (1953), or the butch aggressiveness of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1951).  Some of these character traits probably flew right over the heads of us when we were little, but are easily identifiable to us as adults, and it is surprising how frequently it reoccurs in Disney movies.  I never really see it as Disney purposely pegging their villains with negative queer traits, but more so relying on them because they make the villains far more entertaining and memorable.  And indeed, the formula works because you will honestly find a no bigger fanbase for the Disney rogues gallery than the LGBTQ community.  I’ve been to the conventions and the Pride events; you’d be amazed by how much Disney villains are represented at both equally and proudly.  And it’s something that overall is a positive despite the fact that it’s an embrace of characters who are meant to be the villains.

For one thing, part of the reason why the queer community has turned these Disney villains into icons is because in some cases, they were authored to be so.  This was the case in the Disney Renaissance period, when the studio began to rev up again with new classics like The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991).  At the forefront of the creation of these movies was an out and proud gay man named Howard Ashman, who as a multitalented songwriter and producer began to push Disney in a direction that embraced the glory of it’s past while still having a eye towards the future.  Along with his writing partner Alan Menken, he crafted some of the most beloved songs ever in the Disney canon, including “Under the Sea,” “Be Our Guest,” and “Friend Like Me,” just to name a few.  But in addition, Ashman pushed the studio to create stories and characters that embraced more contemporary themes of tolerance and acceptance, and living the way that you choose to live.  Even if it still conforms to certain hetero norms of the day, many queer audience members can still recognize themselves in Ariel’s desire to “part of that world,” or Belle refusing to conform to feminine norms in her “poor provincial town.”  But even more so, Ashman wanted to make villains that were unapologetically confident in who they were, and that meant not only leaning into villainous queer-coding, but full heartedly embracing it.  You can definitely see it with characters like Jafar from Aladdin (1992) and Scar from The Lion King (1994), who seem to relish in their own flamboyance.  And with Ursula from The Little Mermaid, her inspiration actually came from a real life inspiration out of the gay community; the drag queen Divine, who was part of the Baltimore counter-culture scene that spawned filmmaker John Waters, as well as Ashman and Menken.  And the Ursula/Divine connection is less a caricature and more of a tribute in the long run, because it’s clear that Ashman knew the unapologetically trashy Divine would’ve embraced that persona too.  It showed queer authors turning something that had long been a weapon against them into something they could call their own, and that in turn made these Disney villains icons for a whole new generation.  Indeed, the best Disney Villains known today came out of this period in Animation, and it was because more often than not they were better characters than the main heroes they were facing.

It’s interesting to see just how much the gay community today continues to cling onto the classic Disney villains of yesteryear.  Whether it is in art, fashion, or just role-playing for fun at events, there is a strong presence of Disney villains being celebrated in the queer community.  It even goes back to the early days of the queer cinema.  The aforementioned John Waters has included multiple references to Disney villains in his movies, with Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty (1959) being an especially noticeable inspiration for some of Divine’s more outrageous looks.  But, what is interesting is that as Disney villains began to move away from these obvious queer-coded stereotypes, they also became more boring.  The later Renaissance Disney movies featured more villains that fell more in the toxic masculine side, like Clayton from Tarzan (1999), or Shan-Yu from Mulan (1998); villains who felt like an afterthought instead of integral to the story.  Remember Rourke from Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)?  Of course you don’t, because there was nothing interesting about him, or anything in that movie to be honest.  And why is this the case with these villains rather than the ones everyone loves.  Because there was something about the push back against norms that the queer community loved about the classic Disney villains, and likewise identified with.  The boring, toxic masculine villains of later Disney films represent more of the power structure that the gay community was trying to fight against, and in turn, found nothing to self-identify with them.  What is disheartening now is that Disney is seeing their flamboyant villainous characters as something that they shouldn’t be embracing anymore.  In the live action remakes that have come out these last few years, the villains have either seen their flamboyance downplayed, like Jafar and Scar in their respective movies, or they are being rewritten as misunderstood anti-heroes, like with Maleficent (2014) and Cruella (2021).  It shouldn’t be that surprising, but none of the changes to these characters have made them any better, and in turn, they are not being well-received by queer audiences either.  These characters that were unashamedly flamboyant in the past seem to be getting neutered for no other reason than the possibility of Disney viewing them as problematic, or more dubiously, self-censoring them so they can play better in homophobic international markets.  If so, it’s a betrayal for an audience that has reliably embraced what Disney has created over the years, and even more so for the queer artists that have been responsible for taking Disney to where it is today.  The queer community’s embrace of Disney villains is not a sign of a problematic connection between gay audiences and their villain’s bad behavior, but instead a loving recognition that Disney has long been inspiring a generation of out and proud fans who wouldn’t have been so comfortable to be themselves had it not been for the confidence that they saw in their villains.

Queer coding has a long, often problematic history in Hollywood, but it’s one that has allowed queer artists and audience members to be able to subvert the institutional roadblocks that have been held them back for so long.  Now as times are changing for the better in fields that were almost unheard of only a short few years ago for members of the LGBTQ community, we are starting to see even the use of queer coding evolve with it.  Now, it’s not just the villains that are coded as queer in animated movies, but the heroes as well.  One clear example of this is Elsa from Frozen (2013) who has been very heavily hinted at being a lesbian in both movies from the franchise.  In fact, Disney faced backlash for not fully committing one way or the other with stating Elsa’s sexuality, with the queer community especially voicing their frustration.  Another Disney heroine, whose sexuality is also ambiguous in the movie, Raya from Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) received a bit more confirmation when her voice actress (Kelly Marie Tran) just outright stated that she viewed her character as queer when she voiced her.  It’s weird that Disney is actually at the point now where they are both queer baiting and denying queer coding at the same time.  They want you to pay attention to these inconsequential openly queer characters in the background, while at the same time ignoring possible queer mains, even though the actors playing them are clearly leaning towards that in their portrayals (see Finn and Poe in Star Wars).  Eventually, as attitudes change with each new generation, this kind of non-committal strategy is not going to work anymore, and we’ll get that unapologetic queer lead in one of their movies.  In the meantime, Disney should really revel in the fact that their Villains have taken on a life of their own in the queer community.  There’s a camp appeal to these characters that is irresistible, and can be enjoyed by anyone gay or straight.  The gay community found it’s way into the culture through the flamboyance of Disney villains, so it’s only natural that they are embraced so wholeheartedly within the community.  That’s why you’ll see the likes of Maleficent, Cruella, Scar, Jafar, the Evil Queen, and many more represented at Pride events and sprinkled within the everyday identity of so many LGBTQ people.  When the world has forced hardship on you in the name of a moral “good,” why not find pride in yourself by embracing a little good-natured “evil.”

Movie Reviews

Luca – Review

It’s been a rough pandemic year for the Pixar Animation studios.  The Emeryville, California based animation giant has set a high bar for the industry over the past quarter century, and 2020 was set to be a big year for them.  They had two highly anticipated animated features lined up that were set to continue their hot streak at the box office.  The first of the two, Onward, made it to cinemas in early March of 2020.  And then the whole world came crashing down.  Movie theaters were shut for an indeterminable amount of time, which would end up being over a year in the end, and every movie playing immediately before the shut down suddenly had their box office returns cut short.  Onward, the last major studio film released before the shutdown, wound up with the lowest box office totals of any Pixar movie to date, but it was clear that it was not the films fault.  Like everything else in the 14 months that followed, Hollywood had to gauge a whole new way to measure success under the new pandemic affected conditions.  Would Onward had performed better if the pandemic hadn’t gotten in the way?  We’ll never know.  However, once the pandemic hit, parent company Disney made the controversial decision to accelerate Onward’s  streaming debut on Disney+, foregoing the usual 3 month exclusive theatrical window, just so that people who missed out on seeing it in the theater would have a chance to watch it at home.  Though the movie theaters were worried that this would change the dynamic of the exhibition market, they at the same time had little say in the matter.  Onward made it’s debut and for all accounts it performed well enough for Disney to do the same with a couple other films waiting in the wings.  Frozen II (2019) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) saw their streaming premieres also accelerated, though they benefitted from full box office performances beforehand.  And movies that Disney didn’t mind skipping theaters all together with (Artemis Fowl and The One and Only Ivan) were also brought directly to Disney+.  But the question remained, what was Disney going to do with the other highly anticipated Pixar animated film for the year 2020; that being the Pete Doctor-directed Soul.

Soul was undoubtedly the more ambitious of the two 2020 movies, dealing with heavier themes than Onward and with a more ethereal canvas of design and concept.  It’s also clear having seen it that Soul was a movie made for the big screen, with it’s widescreen presentation and ambitious scale.  But, with the pandemic shutdowns extending well beyond what anyone thought was possible, Disney and Pixar needed to make a hard choice.  Do they continue to keep pushing Soul back on the calendar, or do they skip theaters all together.  Soul did move a couple times off it’s original June 2020 release date.  It first landed in late August, and then again moving to Thanksgiving weekend.  With theaters still closed all the way to the holidays, Pixar ultimately made the tough choice to put Soul out exclusively on Disney+, without a premium fee to offset lost box office.  It was determined that Disney would benefit with the extra boost in subscriptions by having a Pixar title premiere on their platform, and given the previous success over the year with other premieres, and the fact that any more delays would work against other movies in the pipeline, the tough choice had to be made.  It must had been hard especially for Pixar head Pete Doctor, since Soul was his own baby.  But, despite missing out in theaters, Soul still found it’s audience, and led to Doctor winning a record third Oscar for Best Animated Feature.  But, the precedent set by putting Soul out on streaming led to Disney feeling more comfortable with the model, and it was announced soon after that the next Pixar movie in line, Luca, would also be skipping a theatrical release in favor of streaming.  This left a lot of people at Pixar rightfully upset, especially by the fact that it was not getting the hybrid streaming/theatrical release that Disney’s own Raya and the Last Dragon received.  And with movie theaters finally reopening, and showing signs of a quick recovery, it seemed like Disney was making a shortsighted choice, robbing a movie that would play magnificently on the big screen a chance to prove itself.  But, as it stands, Luca is making it’s debut this weekend in living rooms across the world rather than the cinema, and now we can determine for ourselves whether or not Disney’s choice was a sound one or the wrong one.

Luca takes place on the picturesque Italian Riviera, near and within a small little fishing village called Portorusso.  Unbeknownst to the fishermen who sail the coastline of the their village, there is a whole other community beneath the waves; one made entirely of sea monsters.  In this community, we find Luca Paguro (Jacob Tremblay), a timid young sea monster who is afraid of what lies beyond the water’s surface.  However, curiosity leads him to discover a bunch of artifacts from the human world, which he discovers are being collected by another young sea monster named Alberto Scorfano (Jack Dylan Grazer).  To Luca’s surprise and amazement, he watches Alberto carefreeingly leaving the ocean and walking on land.  Alberto forces Luca up with him and the newcomer soon discovers that his scale-ly skin transforms on land to human like skin when it’s dry.  Alberto helps Luca learn more about the human world and the two form a friendship, though it’s kept secret from Luca’s protective mother Daniela (Maya Rudolph) and father Lorenzo (Jim Gaffigan).  When Luca’s parents learn of his deception and threaten to send him to live with his deep sea Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen), Luca runs away and convinces Alberto that they should pursue their shared dream; riding across the world on a Vespa scooter.  They make their way to Portorusso, in the hopes of getting a Vespa of their own.  There they meet a young human girl named  Giulia (Emma Berman), who is obsessed with winning the Portorusso Cup challenge, especially if it means besting the town bully, Ercole Visconti (Servio Raimondo).  Giulia takes the two in with the hopes of helping them train as a team.  At Giulia’s home, they meet her father Massimo, a one-armed fisherman and cook who’s got his eye on slaying the rumored sea monsters in the area, as does his suspecting cat Machiavelli, whose got his keen eye on the two outsiders.  Meanwhile Daniela and Lorenzo search the town for their lost son.  For Luca and Alberto, the challenge becomes whether or not they can keep their secret safe and achieve their dream in the human world, and more crucially, can they keep themselves dry in a town where water is literally all around them.

Regardless of how it makes it’s way to the audience, there is no doubt that the bar is always high when it comes to Pixar.  They are one of the standard bearers in Animation, in a class that is only matched with sister studio Disney and few others; possibly smaller players like Laika and Studio Ghibli.  Especially coming off the heals of a beloved movie like Soul, there is a lot of expectations about what Pixar can bring to the table next with a movie like Luca.  So it is with great relief that Pixar not only clears the high bar with Luca, it does so in spectacular fashion.  Luca is an all around triumph from beginning to end.  The movie was directed by Enrico Casarosa, a long time story artist at Pixar making his directorial debut.  Luca clearly is a love letter to the director’s native homeland, where he spent his childhood growing up in the coastal city of Genoa on Italy’s majestic Portofino coastline.  Though not the first time that Pixar has infused such a cultural presence into one of their stories (see also 2012’s Brave and 2017’s Coco), Luca takes on an especially personal touch, with so much attention to detail put into the world of this story.  The movie is set in a particular time and place, that being Italy in the late 50’s and early 60’s, which I’m sure is a very intentional choice on Casarosa’s part.  The movie is heavily inspired by Italian New Wave cinema, and in particular, the movies of Federico Fellini.  You can feel the influence of Fellini throughout the movie, from the colorful characters to the lush coastal setting, to even the music choices.  Casarosa even throws in some charming Easter eggs for cinephiles out there, like movie posters for Roman Holiday (1953) and La Starda (1953) plastered on the walls.  Other cinematic influences are plentiful as well, like Machiavelli the Cat who I swear is designed exactly to be nod to the animation style of Hayao Miyazaki.  Suffice to say, the movie is a feast for the senses in the best way that Pixar knows how to do.

But on top of that, it also features a wonderful story built upon an intriguing concept.  Essentially, it’s a story about breaking free of barriers, both internal and external.  Luca begins his journey unaware of the larger world around, and the potential for adventures that he may have.  One of the crucial things that he picks up with his experiences with Alberto is to push against those inhibitions that cause him to be fearful of the world.  In a funny explanation, Alberto calls that inner voice that tells Luca “no” about everything Bruno, and he instructs Luca to repeat to himself, “Silencio Bruno” as a way of moving past his fears.  Over time, “Silencio Bruno” becomes a mantra for the two boys and it enables them to grow bolder over the course of the movie.  It’s a very uplifting element to the story, and as we see, Luca is far more brave than he ever thought he would be, which enables him to move beyond the limits that others have forced upon him.  Though Enrico Casarossa insists it was never intended this in his original story, and perhaps it might be my own self reading too much into the movie as well, but I sensed a subtle queer subtext in Luca’s story.  Trust me, the friendship between Luca and Alberto is strictly platonic, but there is something very familiar in how both of the boys overcome societies barriers in order to find acceptance for who they really are, especially in a town that views them first and foremost as monsters.  It’s also a story about Luca discovery his true self by finding friends who encourage his adventurous side, and help him to break free from a sheltered life where he might not have known what he was really capable of.  To many LGBTQ people in the audience, this will ring true with many coming out journeys that each of them have had.  Though it wasn’t intended to be the message, I still think Pixar wouldn’t dismiss such a reading either, as Disney has at times leaned into the many different queer readings of their own films like The Little Mermaid (1989) or Frozen (2013), without ever discouraging it.  It’s not quite a PG-rated  Call Me By Your Name (2017), but I think there might be something worthwhile there that many queer people, especially the youngest one, will find uplifting in Luca’s story.

The movie’s characters are also uniformly excellent.  Luca is an especially endearing lead, as his curiosity to discover new things is delightfully entertaining.  Jacob Tremblay brings an especially exuberant vocal performance to the character, bringing out all the different angles of the character in a joyful, heartwarming way.  He deftly manages to capture Luca’s timidness perfectly early one and as he grows more bolder, we feel that growth within the character  through that performance.  His vocal work is also equally matched by Jack Dylan Grazer’s Alberto, where he perfectly embodies that identity of that kind of older “bad influence” kid that we all know.  Like Jacob, Jack also perfectly finds that fully fleshed out character inside, managing to make the character hilarious but also vulnerable when he needs to be.  Emma Berman’s Giulia rounds out the trio with a wonderfully exuberant performance as well.  I especially like how she slips into Italian frequently whenever she grows frustrated, like she’s using it as a substitute for cursing.  Her tomboyish personality really works well off of the personalities of Luca and Alberto, especially with the fact that the two often don’t know how to respond around her sometimes  unexpected personality quirks.  The always reliable Maya Rudolph is perfect here in the role of the mother, and Jim Gaffigan is hilariously subdued in his role as the father.  We also get a quick but hilariously demented cameo from Sacha Baron Cohen as Luca’s bottom feeding Uncle.  If the movie has a weak link, it’s the villainous Ercole, who in many ways is just an afterthought in the story, as the filmmakers believed that the movie needed a more definable antagonist.  He’s serviceable, but not much else; a far cry from some of Pixar’s more memorable baddies like Syndrome from The Incredibles (2004) and Lotso from Toy Story 3 (2010).  I also want to specially point out the cat Machiavelli, who is a straight-up scene stealer in Luca.  Some of the biggest laughs I had were the glaring stares he gives to Luca and Alberto in the movie.  Overall, another beautiful cast of characters to add to the growing Pixar family.

It should also be said that this is one of the most absolutely beautiful movies that Pixar has ever made, and that’s saying a lot.  The real life influence of the Italian coastal setting was no doubt instrumental in creating the world of this film.  It evokes a definitive time and place, but also imbues it with a storybook like feel.  That is also true with the designs of the characters as well.  These character models are far more stylized that what we see with most Pixar characters.  The character’s features are fare less contoured and more rounded out, with Luca’s head almost taking on a tomato-like shape.  It perfectly mixes with the different designs that Luca and Alberto go through as they transform between sea creature and human, allowing the audience to never get confused about who they are seeing on screen at any time.  I also like that the quirky character designs extend to the humans as well, like they are pulled out of a story book as well.  The way that everyone is animated is also more cartoonish and stylized than the average Pixar movie, which more often tries to go for realism in their character movement.  Even so, this movie is still unmistakably Pixar to it’s very core.  You’ll especially find it in how they still manage to convey deep emotion, even through the exaggerated character models.  Though it doesn’t quite tug on the heartstrings as hard as say Up (2009) or Coco (2017), there are still some beautifully emotional moments in this movie, especially in the closing moments.  It may not be a tear-jerker, but it will make you feel especially warm inside as you see the characters find their place in the larger world, and in some cases, find that they must leave something behind.  It pretty much delivers everything that you want from a Pixar movie, but it does so in a way you don’t quite expect.  I wouldn’t be surprised if more Pixar movies in the future adopt a more stylized look like what we see in Luca, because this movie certainly showed that the studio can still deliver no matter how much one of their movies breaks the mold.

I certainly feel like Luca stands as one of the better Pixar movies overall.  It may not be in the top flight, but it is certainly not far behind and many lightyears beyond what most other studios are making.  It just really saddens me that most people are not going to be enjoying this movie on a big screen, which it should honestly be playing on right now.  Living in Los Angeles, I fortunately managed to see it the right way as one, and only one, theater in town has this playing on a big screen; that being the historic El Capitan on Hollywood Boulevard (owned and operated by Disney, of course).  Seeing the movie that way probably helped me to appreciate the movie even more, and it is absolutely worth the effort if you live near Hollywood and there are still tickets available for it’s lone, single week engagement.  For anyone else, please watch this movie on the largest television that you have.  Watching it on anything smaller or handheld will really rob you of the majesty of this beautiful film.  It’s just too bad that a worthy animated movie like Luca is being relegated to streaming while a mediocre film like Dreamworks’ Spirit Untamed is getting a wide theatrical release.  Yeah, sure, Spirit’s lackluster box office is not something to instill confidence on a box office that is still in recovery mode.  But had Luca been given a shot, it might have ignited the box office in ways that other movies have failed to.  This may end up being a tale of a missed opportunity on Pixar’s part, and I hope that this is not the preferred mode of release for all Pixar movies moving forward.  It was a hard pill to swallow for Soul too, but the conditions were understandable.  It makes less sense now as times are changing, and Disney has already proven success with movies already released through their hybrid model like Raya and Cruella (2021).  In any case, Luca should not be missed.  It’s another triumphant original for the legendary studio, with a heartwarming story, which may also resonate with subtly with LGBTQ audiences who recognize a coming out story when they see one, even if it’s young sea monsters leaving the ocean instead of a closet.  Regardless of it’s intended message, it’s a beautifully constructed crowd pleaser that everyone should see.  And given that it’s about venturing outside of the comforts of a sheltered life, it’s a story that gives us more hope in a post pandemic world.  Without a doubt, a certifiable win for Pixar and a movie that deserves more than the circumstances it’s been given.  Silencio Bruno!!!

Rating: 9/10

Movie Reviews

In the Heights – Review

It’s amazing to think how much the stage musical has had in forming the soundtrack of our culture over the last century.  You may be listening to or singing a song that is omnipresent in our everyday lives, and not even know that it had it’s beginnings on Broadway.  For many years, musical theater was the premiere form of entertainment until cinema came along.  After the advent of the talking picture, musicals found a new venue, and it wasn’t long before Hollywood began pooling in talent who normally would be writing music for the stage.  But, Broadway didn’t dissipate in the face of this change.  Instead, it evolved and became even more ambitious over the years.  And after a while, Hollywood began to take notice and spent millions to bring these blockbuster musicals to the big screen.  These lavish musicals brought out the best in Hollywood, as it turned out to be a good way to promote these new technological advancements like stereo sound and widescreen.  Through the 50’s and 60’s, it became a symbiotic relationship between these two coastal powers; Broadway would produce a certified hit on the stage and then Hollywood would bring it further to the masses on the big screen.  And it propelled the people who made these musicals for the stage into household names: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner & Lowe, Stephen Sondheim, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and many more.  Though the musical is resilient, it nevertheless has gone through many changes in order to survive the varying shifts in the culture.  Sometimes that even includes compromising between art and commerce, such as favoring something with a built in audience over something experimental for investment.  This has been the case when we see musicals brought to the stage that are either based on an already established franchise or are delivered by a major studio like Disney or Universal instead of an independent theater troupe.  But still, each generation does see a gamechanger rise out of the industry and pushes the artform to a whole different level.  And that man of the moment for the Broadway musical today happens to be a multi-talented performer named Lin-Manuel Miranda.

New York City native Miranda was raised in the shadow of Broadway all of his life and he’s certainly brought a lot of his own upbringing into his work.  The son of Puerto Rican Americans who emigrated from one island to another, he was raised in a culturally diverse setting that exposed him to a variety of sounds that he would over time fuse together in very interesting ways.  He was schooled in the melodies of the latin beat, hip hop, rap, and yes of course, Broadway show tunes.  And being the unashamed nerd that he is proud to proclaim he is, he even cites stuff like Star Wars and Saturday morning cartoons as inspirations for his art.  And all of it has made him one of the most exciting and innovate voices in the world of theater in a generation.  Thus far, he has written and starred only two musicals for the Broadway stage, but both have been blockbuster hits, making him two for two for Best Musical at the Tony Awards.  The latter of the two, Hamilton, in particular has been the show that has turned him into a household name.  It’s ingenious mix of music styles (with a strong emphasis on hip hop) infused into a story about the American Revolution, and in particular it’s central figure of founding father Alexander Hamilton, just blew everyone away when it first premiered on Broadway in 2015.  And even six years after it’s premiere, it is still a high in demand show, with post-Covid return dates already selling out fast.  Miranda, of course, has not slowed down since.  He immediately launched into a successful transition into Hollywood, gaining a strong collaborative relationship with Disney, writing new songs and even appearing on screen in stuff like Mary Poppins Returns (2018).  And just this year, he’s got a whole bunch of new projects lined up, including his directorial debut, Tick, Tick…Boom (2021) for Netflix, as well as musical scores for two animated films, Vivo for Sony Animation and Encanto for Disney.  But, what is eagerly anticipated right now is a big screen adaptation of the first musical that put him on the map, long before Hamilton.  It’s the semi-autobiographical In the Heights, and people are eager to see if Lin-Manuel Miranda can successfully bring something he made for the stage to the big screen without it loosing any of it’s original charm.

Like Miranda’s own life story, In the Heights is a story about the people who live in the closely knit neighborhood of Washington Heights.  The Heights as they call them sits at the very northern tip of the Island of Manhattan, across the Harlem River from the Bronx, and it has always been a traditionally immigrant neighborhood in New York City.  In the few square blocks of the Heights, you’ll find people who have emmigrated from or are descendents of people from all over Latin America; Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, etc., all hoping to achieve a piece of the American dream.  But despite all the differences between them, the community acts like a family, all looking out for each other.  At it’s heart is Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) a bodega merchant whose store is a hub of activity for the neighborhood.  His clientele, and extended quasi-family, includes his friend Benny (Corey Hawkins), a dispatcher for a local cab company; Mr. Rosario (Jimmy Smitts), Benny’s boss and father of Benny’s crush, Nina (Leslie Grace), who has returned home from attending college at Stanford; the salon girls Daniela, Carla and Cuca (Daphne Rubin-Vega, Stephanie Beritz, and Dascha Polanco) who work with Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who Usnavi has a crush on; and finally, “Abuela” Claudia (Olga Merediz) the neighborhood’s adopted matriarch.  Though each of them are there for each other, the characters also have their dreams of moving beyond their hard-knock lives in a neighborhood that is increasingly starting to price them out through gentrification.  For Usnavi, he is right on the verge of making his dream come true.  He’s secured a lease on the old bar that his father used to run in the Dominican Republic in the hopes of revitalizing it and upholding the legacy his family had to put on hold in order to live in America.  Within a matter of days, he’s moving out of the neighborhood and leaving the Heights behind.  But a confluence of events with the people he loves and lives around makes him start to question his future.  By the end, he must decide if El Suenito (or “Little Dream”) is more important to him than what he leaves behind in the Heights itself.

When watching In the Heights, you can definitely see the beginnings of what Lin-Manuel Miranda would later build upon in Hamilton.  His mix of traditional Broadway and hip hop is a style that is uniquely him, and it’s definitely a major part of the musical make-up of In the Heights.  The movie version of this releasing this year is certainly a wealth of riches for any Miranda fan out there, but it is interesting that it wasn’t originally set to release so close to everything else he has in the pipeline.  This was one of those 2020 exiles that had to be pushed back because of the pandemic, and surprisingly in it’s place, we got an unexpected Lin-Manuel placeholder in the middle of that summer season.  Disney+ pushed ahead a planned release of a filmed version of the Hamilton musical on stage to give everyone something exciting to watch while we were all stuck at home.  This was both a blessing and a negative for the uprooted Heights, because one the accessibility of Hamilton now increased awareness of Lin-Manuel’s artistry and made that musical even more popular, but at the same time, it was raising the bar higher for a movie that was supposed to be seen first.  Now that it is finally making it to theaters, in a hybrid release with HBO Max, does In the Heights hold up well to the hype.  I’d say so, though I do feel like it falls short of all-time greatness.  As an exercise in adapting a stage musical for the big screen, I’d say that it does it’s job spectacularly well.  Director Jon M. Chu, who cut his teeth making music videos and dance movies like Step Up (2006) certainly knows how to stage a musical number and with a lot of panache.  You can see inspirations from Busby Berkeley to Jerome Robbins throughout each show stopping musical number, which all works to the movie’s favor as it tries to translate what worked on the stage into something that will work on the screen (which is not as easy as it sounds).  What’s more important is that it compliments Miranda’s music perfectly, matching the energy of the melodies with the flourish of the visuals.  Even if there are things that the movie may fall short on, it at the very least remains entertaining.  And there are plenty of moments throughout where the movie really does soar and takes your breath away.

Unfortunately, the musical moments may be a little too good in this movie, because it ends up minimizing everything else in between.  Whenever the movie goes into dramatic, dialogue driven mode, it does kind of deflate, and you are just hoping that another musical number will bring it back to roaring life.  The non-musical moments are not necessarily bad; they have some genuinely nice moments of humanity strung about.  But, it becomes very clear that most of the effort in this movie went into the musical numbers.  The in between moments don’t have a visual bombast that the musical numbers do.  They are just filmed like a standard movie.  It probably derives from the fact that much of the movie is shot on location, which is a plus, but it also means that it takes on a basic feel whenever the music isn’t filling the scene.  It’s hard to know what they could have done better.  Musicals of the past benefitted from the stylized, closed environments of the movie studios, like Mary Poppins (1964) and My Fair Lady (1964), or an amazingly picturesque place like Salzburg, Austria in The Sound of Music (1965).  For In the Heights, whenever it’s not out in the streets, the movie is in the interior of someone’s rundown apartment, and it’s hard to bring visual excitement to that.  Not that it can’t be done, but when you see the effort put into the musical moments in this movie, those interior scenes really do come off as an afterthought.  It doesn’t ruin the movie as a whole, but it does seem to hold things back a bit. Overall, the movie is lively, but uneven.  At least the heavy duty work is performed by the musical numbers, and they do carry the movie.  Two numbers in particular, “96,000” and “Patience and Faith” may be some of the best musical sequences ever put to film. It’s in those musical numbers where you feel both Chu and Miranda really trying to match their cinematic predecessors and for the most part the movie does emulate the best of the movie musical. I really think that’s what most people are going to take away from this movie in the end, and they’ll be largely pleased by it.

It’s interesting how the movie chose to cast it’s characters as well. Lin-Manuel originated the role of Usnavi on Broadway, something he would later do as well when he played Alexander Hamilton at the center of his own musical, but for this movie, the part went to Hamilton alum Anthony Ramos. Clearly Ramos was someone who Miranda could trust in the role, and Ramos doesn’t disappoint. In fact he brings a little bit more to role than Lin-Manuel likely could’ve on film. Miranda is admittedly an okay singer, with his strength found more in rap. You can forgive him for being a little subpar in something since he excels in so many other fields. Ramos on the other hand not only carries every tune, he is accomplished at rapping and dancing as well. He may not spit fire with as much precision as Miranda, but he keeps up with the man’s complex beats pretty well. The movie’s ensemble is also perfectly suited in their roles as well. It even makes good use of Jimmy Smits, whose a bit of a novice to musicals. The general great chemistry with the entire cast particularly sells the idea of this community as a family, and you’ll find yourself hoping for all of them to find their happy endings. A special mention should go to Olga Merediz, whose Abuela Claudia is the musical’s beating heart. Her performance is absolutely going to knock people out in the theaters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she is shortlisted for a nomination at next year’s Oscars. Like the best Broadway musicals, it’s the strength of the ensemble that separates the great from the mediocre, and In the Heights has an excellent ensemble that does the musical justice. And those missing Lin-Manuel in the lead will be happy to know that he’s still present in the movie, playing the smaller role of Piraguero, who has his own pleasant story arc in the movie.

I also want to point out the incredible way that the neighborhood of Washington Heights becomes a character within the movie itself. Lin-Manuel, from the outset wanted to tell the story of his childhood home, and help the world discover this little slice of a New York that most people didn’t know that much about. Like I stated earlier, shooting this movie on location in the real Heights gives it this authenticity that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible on a studio lot. What is especially impressive is that the real locations are worked beautifully into the lavish musical numbers, and each helps to make the Heights feel like this special, magical place. The title number in the opening puts a chorus line of dancers in a busy intersection, “96,000” sets an epic dance routine in a community pool, and “Patience and Faith” in a subway car. You really do see an image of the world this neighborhood creates for itself that sprung from the childhood imagination of Lin-Manuel Miranda. And it does for on location shooting the same same kind of cinematic flourish that we saw in musicals like The Sound of Music and La La Land (2016). I’ve never seen the actual Washington Heights, and I’m sure that it’s probably not 100% like it is in this movie, but you can tell this is a story from someone who wants to give back to the place that reared him up, and it’s presented with a great amount of love. It pleases me that the effort to bring that to the big screen brought the filming right into the neighborhood itself, which I’m sure was a boon to the local economy. And in that respect, it does exactly what the best musicals always do, which is transport the audience into its own unique world.

The strengths of the musical, In the Heights, do outweigh the faults, but the shortcomings do bring the musical down a bit from all time heights. It is a long movie (2 1/2 hours) which is on par with most stage productions, but quite a lot for a cinematic experience. And the deflated dramatic moments do make you feel that length. At least when the musical numbers kick into gear the movie doesn’t disappoint. What I especially appreciate is the fact that director Chu was thinking about what would look best on the big screen when staging his musical numbers. Oftentimes, this is something that sinks most musical adaptations for the big screen, as the directors tend to think that you just shoot what worked on the stage. These are two different mediums entirely, and making musicals work for the big screen requires a different visual perspective. It’s something that other adaptations like The Phantom of the Opera (2004) and Les Miserables forgot and took for granted, and ultimately both of those musicals failed to live up to their stage bound counterparts. In the Heights thankfully understands what it’s supposed to be, and it even does a few things different to help it stand on it’s own. As a musical experience, it is interesting to see finally the musical that put Lin-Manuel Miranda on the map. It’s ambitious, but also a humble start, and something that he certainly would build upon when he moved on to his mammoth sophomore effort; the industry redefining Hamilton. I almost wish I had seen this one first last summer, so that I didn’t have Hamilton to judge it by. It’s a little unfair, considering Heights existed in a pre-Hamilton world and was never judged based on this before. Who knows, I may have been a little more forgiving of this movie. In any case, I’m happy this movie is finally out now, and it is very much well worth seeing, especially on a big screen. As Broadway and Hollywood begin to rebuild themselves in a post-COVID world together, it’s hopefully musicals like In the Heights that helps audiences remember what makes musicals so special in the world in the first place.

Rating: 8/10

What the Hell Was That?

What the Hell Was That? – Pearl Harbor (2001)

I remember hearing a quote somewhere about the extent that a healthy amount of religion and patriotism should be injected into our own personal lives, and the one who said the quote commented that both are great things to have in one’s life as long as they are done in good faith and with a sense of humor.  Essentially, it is not a negative thing in life to be religious and patriotic, just as long as you remain humble and respectful about it.  Unfortunately, in our culture, we do not live such subtle lives, and in many cases, people either show too much or too little of either, which are both corrosive to society at large.  Too much patriotism, for example, can lead to jingoistic and exclusionary nationalism, which has led to some dark periods in world history.  A severe lack of pride in one’s home and society can also achieve the opposite effect and lead an individual down a nihilistic route towards anarchy.  Both are dangerous, and it’s a fine line that our culture constantly has to balance in order to function for it’s citizens.  As is often the case, cinema has been an effective tool for pushing forward national agendas, with the intent of promoting exactly what the country expects of it’s citizenry.  Propaganda films have been a part of cinematic history ever since the invention of the medium itself, and has been used throughout the 20th and 21st century to drive national efforts that otherwise would have been hard to manage without the broad reach that movies can provide.  In many cases, propaganda has propelled some terrible political movements in the past, but not all of it’s applications have been negative.  During World War II for example, the combination of wartime propaganda and the talents of Hollywood actually helped the nation come together behind the war effort that eventually saw victory for the Allied forces; something that might have seen a different outcome if our nation had been more divided on the war.  There are good uses of propaganda, but there are also bad uses as well, particularly as the quote says above, when someone uses it in bad faith.

When we look back on the experience of World War II, as we lose more and more people who experienced it first hand every progressive year, what we understand becomes more and more reliant on the artifacts that are left behind.  The personal accounts, as harrowing as they may, from the soldiers who lived it begin to not be as captivating as the propaganda that has endued beyond the war.  A soldier’s story presents the ugly side of war; the sleepless nights, the panic in the thick of battle, the wounds both external and internal, and the many, many defeats that made victory seem unreachable at times.  Propaganda presents the glory of victory, and for many people, including the soldiers who eventually came home, that’s the thing that they wanted to promote in a post-War world.  Unfortunately, it also had the effect of making the culture at large falsely believe that it was invincible, and that led to an unhealthy amount of patriotic fervor in the decades that followed.  It’s the kind of thinking that led to a proliferation in the armed forces despite being in peacetime, which then President Eisenhower decried as a “military industrial complex.”  This also led to a period called the Red Scare where people tried to use patriotic fervor to silence those whose ideologies didn’t line up their own agenda, and it prematurely ended the careers of many people, especially in Hollywood with the infamous Blacklist.  Over time, as attitudes shifted back the other way due to the quagmire of the Vietnam War, the wartime film began to fall out of favor because they were viewed as propaganda tools of a dangerous militaristic view of the past.  However, as the years past, and more soldiers who served in World War II were reaching their twilight years, many people wanted to find some way to respectfully honor the service they gave while not appearing to promote the necessity for armed conflict.  In 1998, Steven Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan, a movie that managed to bridge that gap, portraying an accurate picture of the atrocities of war while at the same time honoring the sacrifice of those who fought in it.  And with Private Ryan, Hollywood found that special movie that balanced patriotism and realism, revitalizing the war film with a modern sensibility.  But, as we know about Hollywood, once one movie succeeds at something, it’s only inevitable that someone else is going to try to replicate it.  And unfortunately, this is where the good faith patriotism of something like Saving Private Ryan gives way to the bad faith exploitation of a Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor’s production came about in a confluence of different factors at the turn of the millennium.  Like I previously mentioned, Saving Private Ryan was a major influence on getting the movie greenlit, but it had less so to do with the message behind the movie and more so to do with it’s substantial $217 million gross at the box office, as well as the 5 Oscars it picked up (including Best Director for Spielberg).  The movie was greenlit at Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, with uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer behind it.  Bruckheimer had brought his action movie centric sensibilities to Touchstone and produced two back to back hits for them with a rising star director named Michael Bay, which were The Rock (1996) and Armageddon (1998).  What Bruckheimer, and especially the executives at Disney, liked about Bay the most was that he could deliver big, expensive movies on time and on budget, which was valuable to bottom line conscious investors who wanted to get the most for their money.  Both The Rock and Armageddon, despite mixed to negative reviews, managed to make a healthy profit for the studio, and that gave the Bruckheimer/Bay team more sway over future projects.  When the success of Saving Private Ryan proved that their was an audience for gritty, R-rated war movies out there, it convinced Disney CEO Michael Eisner to jump on the bandwagon and approve development for a big wartime epic of their own.  Pearl Harbor was coming on the heels of a decade that saw a brief revival in the historical epic genre.  With movies like Private Ryan, as well as The English Patient (1996), Braveheart (1995) and the biggest of them all, Titanic (1997), Hollywood was suddenly finding that people were happily consuming big, large scale films that ran 3 hours long or more.  Up to this point, Disney was one of the few studios that had yet to have their own historical epic, and they were now poised to jump into the fray in a big way.  Unfortunately for them, the gamble would not pan out like they had hoped and instead, Pearl Harbor was one of the movies that effectively killed off the historical epic as a viable genre in Hollywood.

Though I have talked mostly about the influence that Saving Private Ryan had on Pearl Harbor’s development, I should also point out that it has a fair amount of influence it owes to the movie Titanic as well.  And in particular, the piggybacking of Titanic is where the movie really becomes an embarrassing misfire.  At the center of the film is a love triangle, between two hot shot pilots (played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) and the army nurse that they both have affection for (played by Kate Beckinsale).  To show just how uneven the movie is as a whole, the love story takes up the first 70 minutes of the 3 hour runtime before the attack on Pearl Harbor actually happens.  It’s roughly the same amount of time devoted to the build up to iceberg strike in Titanic, but there’s a huge difference between how the two movies use that time.  In Titanic, director James Cameron does devote the first half of the movie to bringing his two ill fated lovers together and endearing them to us as an audience.  But, their whirlwind romance also takes the audience on a tour of all parts of the ship itself, which itself is on an ill-fated collision course.  So, while the love story is central, it also functions to build the atmosphere, with scenes like the juxtaposition between the banquet on the upper decks and the party in the lower decks putting us on that ship with the characters themselves.  No such care is given with Pearl Harbor.  It is an achingly shallow love story that feels unconnected with anything of real importance with the actual event.  The characters of Rafe (Affleck) and Danny (Hartnett) do not go on a self-discovery journey like Kate Winslet’s Rose does in Titanic.  They are already pre-set archetypes just fighting over a girl, who herself is barely distinguishable as a character.  What makes this love story so insulting is that it takes precedence over the actual build up to the attack itself.  The movie keeps cutting to intelligence officers learning about advancements of the Japanese navy, with Dan Ackroyd (for some reason) cast in the role.  We also see brief glimpses of the Japanese themselves preparing for battle, in a half-hearted attempt to appear even-handed on their portrayal, which doesn’t work because again, they are merely archetypes.  But all this just seems like Michael Bay spinning plates for an hour so he can get to what he really wants to do; blowing shit up.

Truth be told, when the movie does get to the actual attack itself, it does finally start to come alive.  Michael Bay, for all his faults, is an expert craftsman, and he manages to depict the attack on Pearl Harbor with an impressive sense of scale.  But even here, the movie doesn’t work as well as it thinks it does.  While there are some really impressive moments captured on screen, including actual pyrotechnic explosions ignited on real battleships, it at times feels more exploitative of what happened than actually presenting a genuine portrayal of the day’s events.  In particular, the movie features one too many indulgent Bay moments, where the director just ends up showing off.  One of the most famous of these is the famous falling bomb shot that was featured heavily in the movie’s trailer.  Using heavy amounts of CGI, this shot in particular starts off from the sky showing one of the Japanese war planes releasing it’s payload.  Instead of cutting away, the camera then follows behind the bomb as it drops down to it’s target below, either the USS Arizona or the USS Oklahoma, one of the many that sank that day.  It’s a big epic shot that director’s like Michael Bay believes as a shining example of their talents as a filmmaker.  But the problem is, that shot shows an actual moment that happened in real life, and it just comes across as exploiting real tragedy for the sake of artistic indulgence.  Going back to Titanic, James Cameron makes you feel for the hundreds of unknown faces aboard the ship as it sinks, because we see the terror in their eyes, helping us to see the reality of their situation.  No such care is given to showing all the soldiers, pilots, and sailors coming under fire from the hailstorm of bullet fire in Pearl Harbor.  They are just pawns in greater scheme of things within the movie.

Though I don’t think it was the intention of Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer, but their lack of attention to the actual bravery of those who were there at Pearl Harbor in many ways is as disrespectful to the memory of the people who died that day than anything else.  In the movie, we get big swooping shots of the mayhem, but the people caught underneath the action are just faceless extras, that the movie almost seems to delight in slaughtering throughout.  Again, this is not what Bay intended and I’m sure he wanted to go in respectful of those who died.  But the fact is, his strengths as a director is ill-suited for this kind of movie.  He is best suited for escapist entertainment, where stakes are nowhere near as high.  But, when he applies his indulgences to a real tragedy, it belittles the true history in a way that just feels wrong.  It’s compounded by the fact that the movie really has no direction in it’s story.  The aforementioned love story really just hits pause so the attack scene can play out, and then the movie awkwardly tries to restart it again thereafter.  It also doesn’t help that the characters are so thinly drawn that you end up not caring who lives and who dies by the end.  And this includes a cast with a lot of actors who would go on to better things, like Michael Shannon in an early role and the future Mrs. Affleck, Jennifer Garner, in a blink and you’ll miss it supporting role.  Perhaps the most egregious example of wasted casting is in the inclusion of a real life hero named Dorie Miller, a low ranking African-American naval cook who broke ranks and commandeered artillery aboard his under siege battleship and managed to successfully shoot down a couple Japanese planes, saving countless of his fellow officers.  He was awarded the Navy Cross for his act of bravery, the first African-American to receive the honor.   Private Miller’s story is worthy of a movie on it’s own, and Pearl Harbor did cast the part well with Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr.  Unfortunately, his presence in the movie is miniscule, and it almost feels like Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer put it in there merely as window-dressing.  Pvt. Miller and many other soldiers like him deserved better than to have their true life heroism and sacrifice take a back seat to fictional love triangle that we care nothing about.

It goes back to the question of why exactly did this movie need to be made.  It doesn’t honor the people involved in the actual “day of infamy.”  It’s love story is shallow and unimaginative.  And it offers no real message about the nature of war itself and America’s role in fighting in it.  It’s not even good as a piece of propaganda.  Michael Bay, for one thing, sure is trying hard to connect his movie with some patriotic fervor.  I can’t tell you how many shots there are in this movie where the Stars and Stripes are clearly visible, but it’s a lot.  Granted, it takes place at a time when such a thing would have been normal, as patriotism was strongly connected with the war effort, with the Uncle Sam “I Want You” posters plastered seemingly on every wall.  But, Bay also throws in a lot of glory shots of the flags and the soldiers and the weapons of war throughout the movie, almost to the point of parody.  As the film goes along, these glory shots feel hollow, with a significant tendency towards pandering.  The reason why it doesn’t work as well as Michael Bay seems to think it does is because it’s just spotlighting the artifice of what the movie actually represents.  Even when the movie first came out 20 years ago, audiences immediately sniffed out what it was trying to be.  It was a major studio trying to capitalize on a trend and not understanding that it’s a formula you can’t replicate.  Titanic worked because it didn’t try to show off it’s artifice  to the audience and instead focused on bringing everything to life in stunning detail.  Saving Private Ryan worked because it put us in the life of a soldier without trying to sanitize a thing, and showed us the real graphic cost of war.  Touchstone, and by extension Disney, only saw the potential for profit with Pearl Harbor, and didn’t even consider how it would reflect on the legacy of the actual event.  Strangely enough, Pearl Harbor came at a time when such a brazen cash grab wouldn’t be viewed as something problematic.  It came out on Memorial Day weekend in 2001 to mild box office success and mostly poor reviews.  A couple of months later, the 9/11 attacks occurred, with carnage and horrific imagery eerily reminiscent of the Pearl Harbor attack.  Suddenly, America was reminded of what such an event feels like, and it ended up refocusing Hollywood on what the right approach is to depicting a horrific national tragedy on the big screen.  In particular, Pearl Harbor stood out in this new atmosphere as an example of how not to portray a tragedy on screen.

Overall, the biggest failure of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor is that it teaches no lessons about the events of that day, and instead just stands as another mindless action spectacle.  Like the case of Pvt. Dorie Miller, there are so many fascinating stories that could have been told about the events of Pearl Harbor, and instead, the movie just panders an easy to swallow story and message to it’s audience.  One thing that I am happy about in the long run is that Pearl Harbor is such a universally reviled movie that nobody is going out of their way to turn it into a propaganda tool for their own agenda.  I’m especially glad that the movie came out before the events of 9/11, because if it came out after, you might have had a lot of bad faith propagandists latch onto it and proclaim it falsely as a bright example of American patriotism, thereby using it as a tool in the ever increasingly vapid “culture wars.”  Imagine right wing pundits suddenly saying if we don’t like the movie (which most people don’t, left and right) than you hate America, like so many of them have done over the years to a variety of cultural hot buttons.  I often hear the claim that movies like Pearl Harbor recall back to a time when America had pride in itself, like the movies made during the war.  I’m not saying propaganda movies of the war era are not valid works of art (Casablanca for example).  It’s just that many reflected the times they were in and culture is not set in stone.  Pearl Harbor‘s jingoistic patriotism works as a detriment and not a positive, and it’s a clear example of how improperly patriotism can be used in the culture at large.  I think that it is interesting that in the same year that Pearl Harbor made it to the big screen that Jerry Bruckheimer made another war film starring Josh Hartnett that was more true to the wartime experience; that movie being Black Hawk Down (2001).  In that film, the movie focuses solely on the experience of soldiers caught in the middle of a losing battle (a little remembered skirmish in Somalia in 1993), and more accurately depicted the terror or war while at the same time honoring the fighters who were in it.  It probably helped that legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott was behind the camera on that one.  But like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down doesn’t revel in it’s cinematic indulgences, and instead presents what happened unvarnished.  Pearl Harbor failed because it was trying to please everyone with an easy to digest, PG-13 presentation, and in the end just ended up dishonoring the memory of those who lived through it.  Cinema is a powerful propaganda tool, but it’s only used at it’s best when it is built upon honesty and done in good faith.  Pearl Harbor was just a dud of a bomb that neither improved the world nor set it on fire.

Movie Reviews

Cruella – Review

There is just something about the Disney villains that has captured the imagination of audiences around the world.  You look around the web and you’ll find numerous devoted fans of the famous baddies, showing their love with everything from fan art to full blown cos-playing.  And why is that?  It’s not like any of these fans are endorsing any of the bad deeds that these villains enact in their individual films.  There are a number of factors that are the reason for this.  One thing is that when it comes to portraying these characters, Disney has always gone big.  The Disney villains are larger than life, often given voice by actors relishing their time in the character’s skin, and thanks to the animated medium, they are often distinctively designed as well.  You’ll often find that when people describe who the best character was in any given Disney movie, they’ll more than often say it’s the villain.  In many cases, the villain in a Disney movie is the most well drawn and interesting of the bunch, compounded even more when there is a rather weak protagonist at the center.  And for many actors and animators that work on these movies, most will even say that they will actively campaigned for the role of bringing these baddies to life.  Overall, there is a proud legacy of Disney creating memorable villains that we all love to hate, beginning with the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and extending all the way up to recent members of the club like Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog (2009).  The rogues gallery of Disney villains has become such a strong grouping of classic characters, that Disney has even begun giving them their own live action films putting them front and center in their own stories.  This was started back in 2014 when Disney reimagined the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty (1959) by putting the focus on the villainous Maleficent, and showing the story from her side in the movie bearing the same name.  Now, Disney is turning to another one of their classics, 101 Dalmatians (1961) and giving it’s legendary villain her own backstory with the new movie, Cruella (2021).

Cruella comes to us out of a long line of recent Disney remakes of their animated classics.  It makes sense that Disney would focus their attention on the thing that most people remember from the original film, being Cruella De Vil herself.  First imagined in the original 1956 children’s novel by Dodie Smith, Cruella instantly became an icon in her big screen debut in the Disney film.  Voiced with delicious glee by character actress Betty Lou Gerson (doing her best Tallulah Bankhead impression) and animated by one of Walt Disney’s celebrated Nine Old Men, Marc Davis, Cruella takes an already lovely story about the titular family of Dalmatians and makes it into an all time classic.  She also provided the template for a certain kind of Disney villain that isn’t motivated by a lust for power or pursuing a vendetta.  Her villainy is purely maniacal in nature and sadly all too real in our world; cruelty just for the sake of it.  She is motivated by nothing more than to wear a coat made from spotted Dalmatian skin, solely because she thinks it will look good on her.  Being both that demented and a larger than life figure has endeared her as one of the all time greats in the Disney canon.  In fact, long before Disney ever began their trend of remaking every one of their animated classics, they had already given 101 Dalmatians the live action treatment in a 1996 film starring Glenn Close as Cruella.  That remake itself proved to be so successful that it even spawned it’s own sequel with 102 Dalmatians (2000), with the focus increasingly on Cruella herself.  Given that these previous remakes adhered closely to the original, another remake today would’ve been a bit of overkill.  So, instead of rehashing the same story over again, Disney decided to wind the clock back more and reveal how Cruella became the villain that she is in a new origin story.  Thus, we get Cruella, which attempts to answer every question we have about Ms. De Vil, from how she got her iconic two tone hair to why she has a thing against Dalmatians in the first place.  The only question that remains is do we want those questions answered, or is it better to leave Cruella the enigmatic monster that she is?

The story begins all the way back in Cruella’s early childhood.  Young Estella (Tipper Seifert-Cleveland) has a hard time behaving in school, often getting into fights and disrespecting authority.  Her mother Catherine (Emily Beecham) calls this bad side of her daughter Cruella, and instructs her daughter to keep Cruella hidden away so that she doesn’t get into more trouble.  When the situation gets dire for the mother and child, Catherine hopes to get help from a wealthy benefactor.  Unfortunately, the wealthy benefactor’s pet Dalmatians send Catherine falling off a cliff, and Estella now finds herself orphaned and mourning her devoted mother.  Making her way eventually to London, she meets a pair of pick pockets named Jasper and Horace.  They reluctantly take her in and teach her the tricks of their trade.  10 years later, grown up Estella (Emma Stone) is finding her life of scamming and stealing with her two companions unfulfilling.  Luckily for her, Jasper (Joel Fry) has managed to secure a job position for her in one of the most elite fashion stores in London through the kindness of his own heart, though Horace (Paul Walter Hauser) still thinks there is an angle behind it.  Though happy to start a new, straight-laced life, Estella eventually finds her dream job is not what she hoped it would be, and soon she begins to let her bad side out.  Remarkably, an act of vandalism at the store garners the attention of The Baroness (Emma Thompson), the queen of the London fashion world, and she offers Estella a job on the spot.  Again, this turns out to be too good to be true, as the Baroness is revealed to be a nightmare of a boss.  And this ultimately leads Estella to give up any pretense of civility she has left and fully embrace the Cruella inside.  Through a series of bold stunts, given publicity assistance by former classmate and friend Anita Darling (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Cruella soon creates a name for herself as a new fashion icon, directly challenging the Baroness’ supremacy, but as she soon learns, the Baroness is not one to take things lying down.  What ensues is a test of whether or not Estella/Cruella can withstand the Baroness’ wrath, and ultimately determine once and for all if she needs to break bad in order to defeat someone who is even worse.

Naturally there will be many comparisons between this and Disney’s Maleficent, as they are both revisionist takes on these iconic villains.  While the film Maleficent did have a decent performance from Angelina Jolie in the title role, the movie otherwise failed because it sugar-coated the things that made Maleficent such an iconic villain to begin with, and ultimately resulted in an underwhelming movie as a whole.  It was a movie that missed the point of what made the character great in the first place.  Now, I will say that as a movie, Cruella is far better than Maleficent, but it unfortunately falls into some of the same pitfalls that undermines it’s overall effectiveness.  Cruella’s main fault is that it ends up defanging what would have otherwise been an interesting descent into darkness for the character, just so it could still appeal to family audiences.  By pulling it’s punches, Disney just ends up making another product pandering to the masses, rather than exploring the authenticity of the origins of evil.  What is frustrating is that there does seem to be a really good movie in there trying to break free of it’s genre constraints.  Brought to the screen by director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) and screenwriters Tony McNamara (The Favourite) and Dana Fox (Isn’t it Romantic), the movie can be really summed up like this; hokey first act, strong engaging second act, and underwhelming final act.  The middle section of this movie, where most other films usually struggle with, is actually where the movie finds it’s voice and begins to sing.  It’s pretty much when Emma Thompson enters the picture that the movie finally begins to pick up, because it’s when the movie is able to pit our main character against an adversary, and with it, sparks begin to fly.  All the ways Cruella manages to thwart and outsmart the Baroness really are fun to watch and it actually helps you to forget that you are watching a remake of a Disney movie overall.  But, whenever the movie reminds you that you are indeed watching a movie based on an animated classic,  (with numerous Easter eggs and inside jokes) it undermines the story that is being told.  Had the movie stuck with the more interesting angle of how bad people often turn bad through a cycle of abuse by the people in their lives, it might have made the movie far more interesting than it ultimately ends up being.

That’s why a movie like Joker works where Maleficent and Cruella do not.  Joker did go all the way with their title character’s full arc into villainy.  Though the movie did portray moments where you empathize with the Joker upon seeing the hardships in his life, it still did not pull back and turn him into something of an anti-hero.  That’s why his arc was so harrowing, because we see the full destruction of a person’s humanity as we watch him become more and more villainous.  The Disney movies don’t really seem to know what they want their villains to be; hero, anti-hero, villain, misunderstood monster, who knows?  Like I stated before, had the movie gone all the way, we could see an interesting arc play out for Cruella, as she embraces more of her darker side.  Or they could’ve dispensed that entirely and showed her to be a misunderstood anti-hero.  This uneasy middle ground the movie opts ultimately makes the end result feel like a cheat.  Either go all the way bad, or don’t.  The unevenness of the movie comes really in the late second act turn.  I won’t spoil it, but there is a secret revealed at the close of the second act that unfortunately undercuts all the goodwill that led up to it, and sets up a lame, predictable climax.  Up to that point, the movie had an interesting battle of wits going, but then it suddenly turns cliché as it tries to stick a landing.  Even worse, it tries to tie things together where it begins to set up the events of the original story of the 101 Dalmatians, which seems antithetical to the story that this movie was trying to tell in the first place.  I feel like the filmmakers initially had a vision of what they wanted to do with the character of Cruella, and then through executive interference, ultimately had to compromise along the way.  As a result, Disney just ends up reinforcing how much these movies are inferior to the originals, instead of actually taking advantage of these titles and doing something bold and new with them.

Though the plot is ultimately a let down in the long run, there are some saving graces in the movie’s favor that does help to elevate it over some of Disney’s other remakes.  For one thing, I found the performances in this movie to be incredibly strong, especially for a live action Disney movie.  Emma Stone in particular commands in the title role.  I like the fact that she doesn’t simply try to impersonate the character that we all know.  This is her own spin on Cruella, and she manages to give her a surprising amount of character depth that otherwise isn’t there on the page.  Apart from getting the accent down perfect and looking good in all those lavish costumes, there is some amazing subtle work that Stone does with Cruella throughout the movie.  In particular, she gets a lot across with her eyes.  She creates this sinister glare that really defines a lot for the character, showing just how much she is relishing being bad.  She also runs the gamut of emotions pretty well too, never going fully over the top which helps to center the tone of the movie pretty well.  Had she gone full cartoonish like Glenn Close did in her turn as the character, the performance would have seriously clashed with the rest of the movie.  Close’s performance as Cruella was perfect for her more light-heated movie, and Emma Stone is perfectly attuned to what her film asks of her.  Not to be outdone, but Emma Thompson also delivers the goods as the Baroness.  She turns what could have been a one-note villain into an interesting examination of extreme narcissism run amok, and in turn makes the Baroness a villain you love to hate.  The movie really does shine with both Emma’s on screen together, and thankfully we get a whole lot of them working off each other.  I also especially like the extra character development that they give Jasper and Horace, two buffoonish goons from the original movie that actually are given much more to do here, acting as Cruella’s de facto family.  Both Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser give the characters far more depth than we’ve ever seen from these characters in prior iterations, and that’s a welcome change.

One thing that I’m sure is going to be celebrated about this movie are the lavish costumes and production design.  I’ll definitely credit the movie for capturing the feeling of it’s era, which is mid-1970’s London.  Especially with the fashion world, the movie does capture that punk rock evolution influence that defined the setting from that era, and that’s especially reflected in the movie’s costuming.  Created by Oscar-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan (Mad Max: Fury Road), the costumes are creative and memorable, including a stunning red dress that is revealed after Cruella set’s her flash paper robe alight.  While there is a lot of punk rock influence in all of Cruella’s outfits, it still does feel in character with her as a whole.  I’m actually happy that Disney didn’t try to force in the iconic fur coat from the previous movie, and instead defined this Cruella as something different (albeit still with the salt and pepper hairstyle).  Director Gillespie does also get the visual style authentic, drawing inspiration from British New Wave icons like John Schlesinger and Nicholas Roeg in his direction.  The music choices also put the movie in a definitive setting, with needle drops that include the likes of the Rolling Stones, Nina Simone, the Zombies, Deep Purple, and even ELO, though sometimes the choices are a little too on the nose.  It all helps to put the movie in it’s rightful tonal setting.  An anti-authoritarian trouble maker like Cruella would flourish in this era of culture, particularly in the fashion world.  Which is why there are quite a lot of things to like about this movie in a visual sense.  Often times, I feel like the Disney remakes have run into the trouble of being over-produced; putting way too much attention into the ornate production design and not enough into the story and characters themselves.  Here, it actually works in the movie’s favor, and more importantly feels authentic.  Cruella isn’t trying to do too much eye candy, but when it does, it’s used appropriately.

Ultimately, Cruella is a frustrating movie.  It is better than the average Disney remake, but I still felt like it missed the mark as a whole.  Had the movie actually not played it safe and challenged it’s audience with a more authentic origin of it’s iconic villain, than I think the movie could have stood out more as a triumph.  Sadly, it feels like a compromise in the end, with some at Disney not willing to alienate any audiences who had any qualms about rooting for a villain.  In a frustrating way, I can see the points where this movie could have broken out and really show us something interesting.  I like what the movie initially was trying to say, that villainy comes out through experience and learning all the wrong lessons in life.  But, by the end, Cruella doesn’t learn any lessons that may have pushed her off the edge of true villainy nor does it show the breaking bad moment that culminates her journey towards the dark side.  It just neatly wraps everything up in the end, giving Cruella the reward she wants, with no real indication that she’s all good or bad in the end.  For Maleficent, the failure of that movie was that it made a hero out of someone who was more interesting as a villain in the most nonsensical way possible.  With Cruella, the movie could’ve gone either way and it would have worked for the character, instead of this ambiguous middle ground that the movie opts for.  Still, it does feature much better performances than what we’ve seen from the average Disney remake, as well as a better visual aesthetic overall.  I just wish Disney would not be so afraid to give these movies a little more bite.  The reason why Cruella has endured so much over the years is because she is a distinctive personality; hilariously over the top in the way she presents herself, but still menacingly hard edged to be viewed as a threat.  That’s why Cruella has often been used as a shorthand in our culture to describe a vain, egomaniacal person in society, usually one from a center of celebrity or power.  Disney’s Cruella has a lot of things going for it, but it ultimately can’t rise above the shortcomings that it unfortunately has inherited from other remakes.  Honestly, they should just let their villains remain rotten to the core and not have us start to see the softer side, allowing us to see what evil looks like and how people can be turned bad.  Because like the song about Cruella De Vil tells us, “If she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.”

Rating: 7/10

Editorials

Fresh New Talent – Lessons Learned 10 Years Out From Film School

It’s a dream for every storyteller who has that spark of creativity that makes them want to go out there and make the movies that they want to make.  Hollywood, the dream factory where all the magic happens.  The glitz and glamour of the industry inspires many people to come out to sunny Southern California in the hopes of making it, but the sad reality is, very few actually do. That’s not to say that a dream here is impossible; it’s just the fact that the road to success through Hollywood has a very narrow passage.  Sure, the explosion of streaming content has helped to broaden the field a bit, but even still, there is only enough money to go around to finance so many projects.  And with people from all over the world and from all walks of life trying to get their own foot in the door in competition with so many others, inevitably there are going to be some people out there that may never make their dream come true.  So, is it even worth it to try to break into the movie industry.  That’s a question that every aspiring filmmaker or actor must ask at some point.  I myself have had to consider my options many times.  But, even with so many obstacles in the way, I have found that perseverance does bring about rewards eventually.  And I believe that in many ways, one of the best moves I made was to take a shot in the first place.  It hasn’t been easy, but I believe that there are many things that I have learned through adversity that have made me better equipped to navigate the precarious world of Hollywood and overcome the numerous road blocks in the way.  Now, looking back on the 10-12 years that I have been embarking on this journey, I recognize that there are lessons that were important in shaping the person that I am today and how that will keep me going as I continue chasing that dream of Hollywood.

This week marks 10 years since I graduated from film school and made my move to a new home in Los Angeles.  One thing that I do remember from those days is just how uncertain everything was for me in that moment.  For the first time ever, there was no guarantee of what was about to come next.  This was the end of the road for my education; no more returning for classes next year, no more homework and no more planning ahead.  I was about to be set loose and I didn’t have a clue what I was about to get into.  I had just secured a lease on an apartment in North Hollywood (an apartment that I still currently live in), but I had yet to secure a job to support myself.  Living off savings for a while, I finally got some work from a local retail store (which did not survive during the 2020 pandemic) as well as a second gig doing part time work at a visual effects company that I interned for.  And all the while, I tried to continue doing the thing that I started out to be from the very beginning hoping to become; working as a writer.  I began this blog two years into my time post graduate life, in the hopes that I could gain a devoted following of readers as well as keep refining my writing skills.  Whenever I had the time, I also continued to write screenplays, in the hopes of having something to send off to competitions and fellowships as a way of getting noticed.  Over ten years, there are points where I felt that things were moving forward fairly well, and other times where I felt myself slipping backward.  This last year in particular was rough, as I spent many months unemployed.  It’s turned around finally in the last few weeks with a new job, but for a while, I was worried that my fragile time within reach of Hollywood was all going to come to an end because of the pandemic.  But even as things looked bleak, I was determined not to give up hope.  I managed to finish long in development screenplays that I’ve been putting off finishing for years and I used the opportunity to try for job positions that I normally would’ve had second thoughts over.  And luckily, I managed to get a job that is film related, even if it isn’t quite filmmaking just yet.  Perseverance and good luck go hand in hand in becoming something in this town, and ten years of experience has helped me learn a lot about what it takes to navigate one’s way in this town.

One thing that was important from the very beginning was that I didn’t foolishly make a go at breaking into the industry with nothing but my own ideas on hand.  What I set out to do first was apply and get accepted into film school.  Film programs are offered in higher education across the country, but for the most elite programs that train the most promising new talent of tomorrow, the best ones are almost exclusively in the Los Angeles area.  There are outliers on the east coast like NYU or Wesleyan, but when you look at the most storied film schools in both the United States and even the world, they are usually USC, UCLA, the American FIlm Institute, Loyala Marymount University, and the one I ended up attending, Chapman University.  All of these are accredited institutions with close access to the heart of Hollywood, and are often staffed with faculty made up of industry insiders.  And when you look at many of the names currently working within the industry, most of them probably claim at least one of these schools as their alma mater.  There were numerous reasons that I chose Chapman University as my ideal institution (and yeah, it’s close proximity to Disneyland was one of them).  It had a much higher acceptance rate for one, and it’s more intimate, smaller capacity made it possible to have more one on one interactions with my instructors.  It had the perfect blend of offering all the same perks of the bigger schools, but with smaller class sizes where you wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle.  One of the things I loved most about my time there was the first hand experience that I was able to have in all fields of filmmaking.  Though I was in the screenwriting program, us writers were still encouraged to participate in the making of film projects by our fellow students.  I managed to volunteer on two midterm film projects, with no added credits earned and mainly just for the experience itself.  So even as I was studying to be a writer, I gained additional experience in editing, set work, and even some on screen time in front of the camera.  Overall, Chapman delivered exactly the film school experience that I wanted.

There is a caveat to attending film school however: the cost.  Film school is not cheap, especially the ones here in California.  Those attending film school, like many world class institutions, usually enter it under three different circumstances; they are either coming from deep pocketed families where money is not an issue, they have been blessed with multiple scholarships to help them along the way, or like me they are willing to take the risk of accumulating substantial student loan debt after graduating.  Now, I attended as a graduate student after already earning my bachelor’s degree at the University of Oregon, with no outstanding debt, so the financial risk seemed reasonable enough for me to still make a go at it.  Even still, it’s a lot of student debt that I carry with me, and for some the cost doesn’t seem worth it in the end, especially with job markets not always being reliable once the diploma is in hand.  So, what makes going to an elite program like Chapman worth the risk over say just participating in the Audio/Visual program at your local Community College.  One of the important advantages is the networking.  At schools like Chapman, you are likely to have a class taught by or being attended along with someone who has connections in the business.  Never try to be a lone wolf in film school; make friends and ask questions constantly.  The teachers and faculty may not be able to give you a job right out of school, but they can steer you in the right direction and can offer some really sound advice on how to sell yourself to the industry.  Also, it’s important to open oneself up to collaboration as well.  At Chapman, we had certain projects called Cycles that involved each writer pairing up with a director to work on a film in the second year together.  It was a valuable lesson in understanding what goes into the development of a film from script to screen, but what it was also doing was getting us bonded as a team and allowing us to make new connections that helped to enhance the collaborative process.  I still remain in contact with many of the people I worked on student films with, and I know may of my fellow classmates are even working together on projects over a decade later in the real field of filmmaking.

If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t network well enough.  I spent most of my time in the screenwriting circles, but rarely introduced myself to fellow students in other departments.  There are a couple of directors, editors, cinematographers, and producers that I did manage to make friends out of during my time there, but I feel like I could have made more.  At least I didn’t make any enemies.  It’s one of the things that’s part of the film school experience that doesn’t exactly fall within the curriculum.  How you present yourself and endear yourself to others isn’t something anyone can teach in a school setting.  Film school is there to equip you with the knowledge and the skills set that will make you ready for a career in filmmaking, but the actual ability to pitch yourself and your work is one you in the end.  My professors offer their advice, but the strength of my chances in Hollywood depends solely on my ability to genuinely put myself out there.  It’s not easy when you still have yet decided on the person that you want to be.  Honestly, one of my mistakes was believing that film school would be the only thing I needed to pitch myself as a worthy addition to the film industry.  Unfortunately, I didn’t consider what kind of voice I wanted to have.  I tried so many different styles of writing during my time in the writing classes, leaning more in the comedy lane mostly.  But, as I was trying so many different things, I was finding that none of it really stood out.  It was just me trying to get the work done.  I wasn’t finding my voice, or a purpose to motivate me to continue writing.  And as a result, after graduating, I wasn’t able to make myself stand out as a writer.  I was just putting out generic, crowd-pleasing stuff, when I should have been doing something more bold and truer to what I wanted to make.  Starting this blog after the fact has helped me to refine my skills over time, and in particular, has helped put into focus the things that mean the most to me and what I do indeed want to write about.  I was always a movie obsessed kid, and in my blog writing, I could give voice to my opinions with a film centered focus, and over time it even opened me up to talking about social issues and insider happenings as it relates to film.  Had I allowed myself to open up earlier while I was at Chapman, I think I could have done a bit more immediately after graduating than I did.

Another important aspect of using film school as a means of breaking into the film industry is showing that you are a hard worker, both in the classroom and also in the internships that you will be working while you are in school.  It helps that you also go into the internship field with a better knowledge of what openings are available to you.  For one thing, this was another area where I felt that I could have shown better judgment with.  I was too narrowly focused on getting an internship at a place where I could have seen a lot of movies actually being made.  I should have known that this is not the best avenue for writers to take with their internships.  I did get interviews with some exciting film companies across town, founded by some of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers, but nothing came of it.  In the end, as I was worried that I wouldn’t find an internship at all, I ultimately was given a spot at a visual effects company in Santa Monica; a field of filmmaking that I knew absolutely nothing about.  It was tough, exhausting work, but I did earn my credits in the end.  Even still, after talking with fellow classmates, I learned that they had been working at agencies instead of production offices, spending their days reading scripts and writing coverage for agents.  This seemed like something that felt more in line with what I was looking for, and as I learned, it’s another great networking opportunity as some of the agent’s assistants that you’d be working directly with would eventually becomes agents themselves, and be a valuable contact within your own network.  It was an opportunity missed, and it’s mainly due to my own failure to actually take a better look at all the options that were laid out before me.  My internship did lead to some post graduate work, but it was freelance, part-time, and ultimately became a dead end position that I probably shouldn’t have stayed in as long as I did.  It really taught me to know what you’re getting yourself into before you say yes to anything.  Especially when it comes to being a writer, do the hard work that helps you get seen much faster, and not get lost in a field that you are ill-equipped for.

I don’t feel like I wasted my time going through it though.  Film school was never going to be a cake walk.  It’s what you go to film school for anyway; to be better prepared for what lies ahead.  Had I just stumbled into Hollywood on my own without an absolute clue what to do, and knowing not a single person in town, I would have been chewed up and spit out pretty quickly.  Even with the diploma, and the knowledge and the skill set acquired from film school, it’s still an uphill struggle.  I know of a couple of classmates that even chose a different career path afterwards, choosing to leave Hollywood behind.  And I don’t blame them either.  Their talents are well used in their new career paths; some that even utilize their film school training pretty well too.  For me though, I am still swimming upriver and not giving up on the dream yet.  Chapman’s track record of success has improved over the last decade, with Netflix being an especially good place for talent from the school, with alumnus from before my time like the Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things) and Justin Simien (Dear White People) landing big hits over there.  A couple of my classmates have even placed as finalists in prestigious screenwriting competitions, and gotten representation out of it.  So success isn’t impossible; it’s just on me to try even harder to achieve it.  One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is to keep writing.  I need to get over my fear of failure and just keep writing stuff down no matter if it’s good or not.  Nobody writes a masterpiece on the first draft.  Nor even the second.  Especially in screenwriting, I have found that the more I rewrite, the better a script gets.  One thing that I have also done is offer my own input into the writing of my friends and former classmates.  It’s important to keep that network open, and show that other writers can trust me to offer constructive criticism of their work in the hopes of making their script better.  Always be helpful, and never dismissive.  Also, I just like to read other people’s work, and see the formulation of their new ideas while it’s still in it’s infancy.  That ultimately is the most important thing that I have learned in my ten years outside of film school; being able to show that you are trustworthy and good at what you do.

So, despite the hardships and struggles put in the way, I would say that I would still do it all over again if given the choice.  I am determined to eventually be a filmmaker one day, and the dream has not faded yet.  If anything, the struggles of the last decade has helped to shape me even more than what I got out of film school.  I learned perseverance, patience, and even have managed to open myself up a little more and not be so guarded and afraid.  Film school was still pretty valuable, as it gave me the knowledge and tools to make a go at a filmmaking career.  What’s been nice about reminiscing about the last 10 years is that it’s helped me recognize all the things that I have managed to accomplish in that time, rather than lamenting on what I still don’t have.  Sure, I’m still not any closer to having that dream job, but I was lucky enough to attend a prestigious film school, which not everyone manages to do.  I have been able to somehow continue to live in Los Angeles, California, where I am only a stone’s throw away from some of the most historic and important movie studios in the world.  I also am able to watch movies in some of the best theaters in the world, including the Chinese Theater, the Cinerama Dome, and other world-class venues that are just a short drive away.  Also the weather here is perfect year round, and there’s also Universal Studio and Disneyland that I can spend my days off at.  Not to mention I’ve been to incredible events like the D23 Expo and the Turner Classic Movies festival, which I’ve written about on this blog.  The fact that I have a blog to share all these moments and thoughts with you on a weekly basis is another thing that I feel proud of having done in the last decade.  Through it all, film school and life in Southern California, I believe that it has shaped me into a better person who I think is better prepared to become a part of Hollywood now than I was when I graduated.  It’s been a long time, and there are regrets along the way, but I feel like the lessons I’ve learned through adversity are going to be a positive for me in the end.  I’m still holding onto that Hollywood dream, and hopefully, the next ten years will find me closer to my goals than ever before.

Collecting Criterion

Collecting Criterion – The Graduate (1967)

One of the things that the Criterion Collection spotlights within it’s library are all the various different movements that sparked a change in cinema throughout the years.  These movements, largely sparked by European innovators that broke all the rules of normality in filmmaking, would go on to become part of the mainstream in the years after, and today many filmgoers wouldn’t even know how much the language of film was so drastically changed by the movies of that era.  These included the Italian Neorealism movement and the French New Wave, both of which redefined the kind of stories that you could tell on film and how we are able to put them together through unorthodox photography and editing.  Over time, audiences began to really respond to this change in cinema, and before long, these rule-breakers were beginning to change the rules of the industry as a whole.  This change was also spurned on by a point in cinema history where the old Hollywood system was starting to lose it’s mojo.  The catastrophic runaway productions of movies like Cleopatra (1963) were breaking the bank for the major studios, and they were finding out audiences no longer were interested in the big, lavish productions of the past.  The times were a changing, and with a younger, Baby Boomer generation wanting to see movies that felt truer to their counter culture tastes, the industry had no other choice than to pivot and embrace the new wave that was already prospering across the pond in Europe.  Thus, American cinema experienced it’s own New Wave movement, which would go on to define the next half century of cinema, and also bring to the forefront some of the greatest filmmakers ever to ever work on a movie set.  There are quite a few movies that many can pinpoint as being the film that sparked the American New Wave, and Criterion has a few of them in their library, like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969, Spine #545) or John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969, #925).  But, I think the movie that really stands out as the true spark of the New Wave Hollywood is the classic Mike Nichols film, The Graduate (1967, #800).

The Graduate was a watershed moment in Hollywood history.  While there were many rule-breakers made outside of Hollywood beforehand, The Graduate was the first time that a major movie studio actually invested in it themselves.  United Artists saw the opportunity to redefine their output of films for a newer generation and they found the ideal choice in a screenplay written by humorist Buck Henry and co-writer Calder Willingham.  Taking full advantage of the end of the Hays Code restrictions that limited free expression in the Hollywood system for decades, Henry and Willingham’s script was one of the frankest, and fearless explorations of sexuality ever to cross the desks of a major Hollywood executive, and it was even not afraid to make fun of itself either.  It was a story about an married older woman grooming a younger man into having an affair with her, and that younger man later finding himself in love with the daughter of the woman he’s having the affair with.  Suffice to say, this would never have made it off the page and onto the screen in the old Hollywood system, so it’s arrival came at just the right time.  The United Artists executives, seizing on this boundaries pushing screenplay, tapped Broadway wunderkind Mike Nichols to bring The Graduate to the big screen.  Nichols was already an acclaimed stage director and had successfully adapted the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) to the big screen a year prior in his filmmaking debut.  The Graduate was going to be a gamble even under the changing audience tastes, because no film prior had put people’s sexual activities to the forefront of the narrative.  Though there were no actual sex scenes in the movie, the film still was pretty frank about what was going on, and in contrast with old Hollywood, it didn’t cast any prejudgment on people’s sexual lives.  There are consequences of course, but the way The Graduate handles the touchy subject of sex in it’s movie feels more in tune with a changing world that was trying to shrug off the repressed standards of the previous generation.

The movie focuses on, you guessed it, a recent college graduate named Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, in his  first leading role) who has returned home without knowing what to do next with his life.  His father (William Daniels) and mother (Elizabeth Wilson) throw a party to celebrate his accomplishment, with a lot of their friends and neighbors in attendance.  One of the guests at the party is Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who towards the end of the night needs someone to drive her back home.  Benjamin, wanting to escape the party that he’s not quite enjoying, offers to drive her himself.  Once at the Robinson home, Mrs. Robinson offers Benjamin a drink and asks him to stay a while.  It dawns on Benjamin pretty quickly what Mrs. Robinson is trying to do, saying very frankly, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.”  He tries as politely as possible to leave her unfulfilled and heads home.  However, after a few aimless days of post-graduate life weighs down on him, Benjamin calls Mrs. Robinson and takes her up on her offer.  Though he awkwardly sets up an initial hotel hookup with Mrs. Robinson in the beginning, the two continue their secret affair for weeks, unbeknownst to Benjamin’s parents and Mr. Robinson (Murray Hamilton).  However, complications arise when Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Kathrine Ross) returns home from college.  It becomes increasingly harder for Benjamin to keep his affair secret and complications arise as he begins to have feelings for Elaine.  In addition, Mrs. Robinson becomes increasingly possessive of Benjamin, and refuses to let him get any closer to her daughter, threatening to expose what both of them have been doing as payback.  Things do go south pretty soon, and Benjamin finds himself alone and wayward once again, but after a while, he finds that pursuing the love of Elaine is worth the risk and he sets out to declare his love.  The only question is, can he overcome his own inadequacies to make it possible.

When The Graduate premiered in 1967, it really became a watershed moment in cinema.  The movie went on to become a box office smash and firmly cemented in the New Wave in Hollywood.  And that’s largely because for the first time, the Boomer generation was seeing themselves finally represented on the screen.  It was a movie that finally ushered in themes that were considered a generation ago to be too taboo for the big screen, like male fragility, women taking charge of their own sexuality, the consequences of adultery, predatory sexual behavior, and even just the frank discussion of sex in general.  The movie was also about breaking out of barriers set up by society and encouraging rebellion against unjust standards, which really spoke to the younger audiences of the day.  For one thing, the movie puts men and women on an equal footing when it comes to sexual activity, with the women of the movie having just as much of an authority over their wants and needs in a relationship as the men do.  Mrs. Robinson is certainly the antagonist of the movie in many ways, in the way that she manipulates Benjamin to get what she desires, but the movie also posits that Benjamin is just as flawed in allowing Mrs. Robinson to go as far as she has, and that his own warped sexual awakening has the potential to be toxic towards any other woman, including Elaine, who rightfully sees the potential danger of letting Benjamin to deeply into her life.  And while there are some heavy themes throughout the movie, it is surprising to find that there is a lot of humor involved as well.  This is, after all, a script co-written by Buck Henry, one of the most celebrated comedic writers of his era.  Making fun of sex itself was also a refreshing thing for audiences at that time, because it was also honest.  There’s a perfect moment that illustrates just how well the movie balances it’s tone: when Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are alone in their hotel room, she lifts off her blouse and he reaches to feel her breast.  However, she doesn’t even notice and instead tries to rub out a stain on her collar, which Benjamin instantly recognizes as something his own mother would do.  Suddenly he becomes self conscious and embarrassed and begins banging his head on the wall.  It’s that awkwardness that perfectly sums up what The Graduate  represented, and it’s part of what has made it an enduring classic ever since.

It was an especially monumental film for all involved.  Mike Nichols would go on to win an Oscar for his direction, becoming at the time the youngest winner ever in that category, and it led to a decades long successful film career thereafter.  Dustin Hoffman would of course continue to excel as a leading man, and over the next decade he would become one of the most in demand stars of the 1970’s and 80’s, as well as a beloved character actor ever since.  One of the groundbreaking things about Dustin Hoffman’s performance as Benjamin was the fact that he was atypical as a Hollywood leading man.  He was short stature and not exactly a pretty boy matinee idol either.  But, for the story to make sense, you had to believe that Benjamin had an awkwardness around women.  Initially, the studio wanted Robert Redford for the part, but Mike Nichols rightfully argued that it would be far less believable in the movie to have a guy like Redford play the part, because it’s unrealistic that a pretty boy like him would ever have a hard time having women find him attractive.  The movie also changed things dramatically for Anne Bancroft.  She was already a well established star of the stage and screen, and an Oscar winner to boot for The Miracle Worker (1962), but after The Graduate, she could add sex symbol to her long list of accolades.  Mrs. Robinson was an iconic performance for her, and one that allowed her to flaunt her beauty as well as her finely crafted acting skills.  One of her most memorable moments is the first scene where she seduces Benjamin, and the shot under her outstretched leg framing Dustin in the background is as iconic as it gets.  And of course, you can’t talk about the movie without mentioning the now legendary Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack.  The folk music duo’s songs are forever tied to this movie and they were indeed one of the things that helped to turn this film into the box office hit that it is.  Whether it’s the haunting refrain of “The Sound of Silence” which becomes the heartbeat of the movie, or the bouncy melody of “Here’s to You Mrs. Robinson,” the soundtrack brings extra weight to the story that in many ways elevates the movie to an almost mythic status.  Sure, a lot of this does make the movie a relic of it’s time, clearly cementing it as a late 60’s film, but it’s a portrait of another time that itself has grown more beautiful with age.

The Criterion Collection certainly benefits when it is able to add a well known, beloved classic to it’s collection, and given that this is coming straight from the archives of a major Hollywood studio, it helps them considerably in their ability to deliver a beautiful looking presentation.  Criterion was able to source their transfer from a brand new 4K master from the original 35mm camera negative completed by the MGM/UA archives, allowing them to the ability to work with an image as close to the original as possible.  The restoration was conducted under the guidance of Mike Nichols, who signed off on the color timing of the movie before his passing in 2014.  Given the fact that the movie comes straight from the negative itself, the new transfer looks absolutely immaculate and clean of all the wear and tear of 50 years of aging.  In particular, the colors really pop out in this high definition transfer.  Mike Nichols, working with color film for the first time in this movie, really takes advantage of the color scheme of the era.  The Southern California locales in particular shine in this transfer, with the widescreen format really taking advantage of the wide open vistas, especially in the driving scenes of Benjamin on the coastal highway as he sets out to halt a wedding in the climax.  Even the subdued night time scenes have their own sense of beauty to them.  Nichols also gave approval to the new surround sound mix for the movie.  The original film, given it’s tight budget for the time, was never able to have a dynamic sound mix to them, and the Criterion transfer retains a fully restored, uncompressed recreation of that original monoaural soundtrack.  But, the 5.1 surround mix is absolutely worth listening to as well, and nothing benefits from it more than the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack.  The surround mix just gives the songs so much more presence in the presentation.  It’s one of the changes that adds to the film rather than takes away, and I think it’s the preferred mode to watch the movie, given that Mike Nichols signed off on it himself.  With a beautiful looking restoration, and an even more dynamic sound, The Graduate arrives into the Criterion Collection with a presentation that lives up to their high standards.

Of course, Criterion doesn’t hold back on the extra features as well.  Some of them are welcome holdovers from previous DVD editions of the movie released through MGM Home Entertainment.  Two of these holdovers are audio commentary tracks that are definitely worth a listen.  One is from 2007 and it features Mike Nichols in conversation with another acclaimed filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh.  The two discuss the making of the movie, with Mike giving some very interesting first hand insight into what went on during filming.  The second track comes from an earlier Laser Disc release of the movie from 1987, featuring film scholar Howard Suber, who goes into more detail about the movie’s lasting legacy, which at the time of recording was only 20 years after the fact.  It’s interesting hearing a Reagan era perspective on a movie crafted during the Vietnam era.  There are a couple of documentaries also carried over from the previous DVD extras, like a short documentary called “Students of The Graduate” which looks at all the filmmakers influenced by the movie over the years, as well as another making-of documentary called “The Graduate at 25″ which was produced in 1992 to commemorate the movie’s anniversary.  There are also some vintage features that also put the movie in context within it’s era.  These include a 1966 interview between Mike Nichols and Barbara Walters for the Today show, as Nichols was beginning development on the film, as well as an appearance by songwriter Paul Simon on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970, discussing the hit music he and Garfunkel wrote for the film.  Criterion did create some new features exclusive to their edition, including brand new interviews with Dustin Hoffman, Buck Henry, producer Lawrence Turman, as well as film historian Bobbie O’Steen, talking about the work of her late husband Sam O’Steen as the film’s editor.  Rounding things out, the Criterion edition also includes an original film trailer, as well as screen tests of the cast.  Overall, it’s a nice, robust blend of bonus features both old and new, and it meets exactly what you would expect an iconic title like The Graduate would get under the care of the Criterion Collection.

Fifty years and change on from it’s original release, it may be hard to see why The Graduate was such a revolutionary movie for it’s time.  Attitudes towards sex and sexuality on the big screen has certainly changed since then, and to some modern day audiences, the movie may even seem quaint in retrospect.  But for it’s time, The Graduate was a revelation for audiences that was tired of the repressive moralization of Old Hollywood.  If this movie wasn’t the spark of sexual awakening in the counter culture movement of the sixties and seventies, it certainly got the conversation started.  In many ways, what really spoke to the audiences of that era was the disillusionment of Benjamin’s place in the world post-graduation.  Distrust erupted across America against institutions that were perceived to be limiting opportunity.  Counter culture was a response to the whitewashed view of civil post-War American culture, something that Hollywood had a hand in propping up over the last couple decades.  With movies like The Graduate, the old barriers began to come down, and people were now finally able to address issues on topics like sexuality, race, and political ideology that they were not able to in the past.  And Mike Nichols was the first of many new voices that would help shape the New Hollywood that emerged out of this change in the culture.  He may not have been the most outrageous voice in the room, but he was certainly one of the most skilled, delivering a story as groundbreaking as The Graduate with such a grounded, humane sensibility.  Seen today, the sexual politics may not be as shocking, but the story itself resonates.  In this #MeToo era, we are still coping with the complexities of sexual relationships, and the lasting effects that a toxic sexual awakening can drive people to do.  What I think is the most poignant thing about The Graduate is it’s final haunting moment.  The movie ends with Benjamin and Elaine running off together, escaping her family in a triumphant moment of rebellion as they ride off in the back of a bus.  But, instead of cutting on that triumphant note, Nichols makes the daring choice to hold on that moment and keeps rolling the scene further.  Suddenly, the tone changes, and becomes less hopeful and more introspective.  It’s in that moment that Mike Nichols brilliantly posits the “What Now?” question into the audiences’ mind.  Is it really happily ever after for these two?  By being vague in that final moment, Mike Nichols asks that question to the audience; what responsibility do we carry after we’ve turned the world upside down.  And it’s in that where the movie finds it’s ultimate poignancy.  The Graduate is a revolutionary story that at the same time asks it’s audience to think a little deeper, and because of that, it is rightfully celebrated as one of the greatest, and most influential movies ever made.  Here’s to you Mrs. Robinson.

 

https://www.criterion.com/films/28578-the-graduate

 

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