Mamma Mia

I will never again watch a film involving middle aged women in the Greek Isles, middle aged women getting drunk enough to cackle, middle aged women cackling over their promiscuous pasts, a character who turns gay late in life for comic value, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, produced by Judy Craymer or Gary Goetzman, executive produced by Benny Andersson or Bjorn Ulvaeus or Tom Hanks, or starring Meryl Streep, Julie Walters, Christine Baranski, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, or Stellan Skarsgard. Amanda Seyfried is cute enough for an exemption.

The film's only saving grace is that there is no Fernando.

PS - Bill Lee sang for Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music. It is most regrettable he was unavailable to perform the same service for Pierce Brosnan.

Apes and Butterflies

What colossal arrogance for Otto Preminger to think that Jean Seberg caused the failure of Saint Joan (1957)!

Saint Joan was always going to fail commercially, because, quite simply, nobody going to the cinema wants to see George Bernard Shaw! And that includes his most popular piece: nobody wants to see Pygmalion - everybody wants to see My Fair Lady.

A. Rose & a Slash

A leading actor and an auteur are like a conductor and his first violinist, a singer and his lead guitarist, a bonehead and his edge.

John Wayne and John Ford,

Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini,

Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder,

(or Jack Lemmon and Richard Quine),

Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock,

(or James Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock),

Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin,

Woody Allen and Woody Allen,

Kyle Machlachlan and David Lynch,

Bill Murray and Harold Ramis,

Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson,

Jim Carrey and Tom Shadyac (well, times being what they are)

and now... Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.

Who is Adam Mckay? Only the genius writer/director behind Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and The Other Guys.

Whoever said the auteur theory was dead?

The MacGuffin in the Room

Could it be that the murder in Rear Window is the greatest of Hitchcock's MacGuffins? Does anyone really care whether Perry Mason murdered his wife, or is the question will James Stewart man up and marry Grace Kelly?

The Sycophant in the Room

Or, Just what is it about Seth Rogen that is so appealing, and so unappealing?

I keep watching Seth Rogen, and hoping. One who could be a great character actor got lost somewhere along the way, and found himself in leading roles. It is as if Walter Matthau got all the roles Cary Grant turned down. I keep watching, and hoping: any minute now he will turn into a leading man.

As a romantic lead, his flirtations are at times wonderful, especially in The Green Hornet. And looking over his career, there is enough rapport between these aspects of his roles to suggest he improvises something of himself into the dialogue.

But outside of these repartees, he is too friendly, too supportive. Infusing every Seth Rogen role is a kind of support, congeniality, agreeability, amiability. He compliments characters. He offers retractions. And this overall amiability is Seth Rogen’s weakness in leading roles. One would love to walk beside him, but not to follow him.

A leading man cannot be agreeable. He can agree, but not be agreeable. A leading man cannot ask questions. He knows. A leading man must not seek approval. He must offer it. A leading man leads, supporting actors support. 

A leading man cannot smile like a sycophant.

A Mouthful of Banana Peels

To those of you phonies who shun the magical alchemy that is Hollywood’s ability to transform base studio mettle into philosophical gold, I say again, Shallow Hal is a great film! A keener insight into the romantic facility of the desiring machine that is a male human has not been offered for public scrutiny since Nabokov published Lolita.

The great charm of narrative film is knowing what one character is thinking that the other characters do not know, of which this film makes a kaleidoscope.

For now, I will mention one delicious encounter in a film full of gorgeous moments and emotional peaks (those phonies who deny the heartbreak in Hal-boy’s second visit to the hospital are Tin Men every one of them!).

Hal-boy enters an elevator with the helpful giant without, Anthony Robbins, and recognising him does a little starfucking, to the effect of marvelling aloud at Mr Robbins' impressive scale - to shake his hand is like grabbing a bunch of bananas. This lovely metaphor sets up a beautiful line later, delivered by Hal-boy with the freshness of an improvisation and recieved by Mr Robbins with a genuine chuckle, like papa laughing at the neighbour’s children.

Along the way, another beautiful line from this wonderful elevator encounter: Hal-boy's researches into sexual power and superficial beauty leads him to the conclusion that a man of Mr Robbins' scale and fame must do alright with the ladies, those bananas must shake their share of lady fingers, as it were. He checks his reasoning with the primary source, Mr Robbins, who replies only to say that there is one lady in his life. Hal-boy’s reaction: “She sounds hot”. This serves to pique the good natured Mr Robbins’ professional interest in curing the emfeebled deluded, and when the elevator gets stuck, as so many movie elevators are wont to do, he sets to work on Hal-boy.

In doing so he gives Hal-boy a little startle, to which Hal-boy overreacts and delivers a line rich with hard, angry American “a” sounds, that gets me laughing just to remember it: “Wha' the hell’re ya doin’, banana-hands!?”

How to Murder Your Mise en Scene

How to Murder your Wife is a quite ordinary but oh-what-might-have-been film from Richard Quine, if we want to believe in directors as auteurs. Richard Quine's career only ever got out of the ordinary in patches. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but every film is just lacking something, and I can’t help but wonder what might have been, in every film he made, if Billy Wilder had directed it.

(But of course auteur theory is a ridiculous concept. Film authorship is spread over many people involved in the film’s making, more like a band than an author. It is just as ridiculous to talk of “John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever” as “Hitchcock’s Rear Window”.)

If How to Murder Your Wife works it is certainly not for the script or the auteur, or even its main star, Jack Lemmon, but the contributions of its supporting stars. Virna Lisi gives the film life, with way too much spark and presence for a character without a first name, besides offering textbook visual pleasure - what glamour shots! The camera crew certainly rise to the challenge of a beautiful starlet and in so doing undermine the script - what man would curse his luck on the very morning he wakes up married to such a gorgeous and "affectionate little thing" (as his lawyer urges, "at least try it"). Terry Thomas has some great Terry Thomas moments, but is generally disappointing due to the demands the script asks of him - narrating a film to camera is always problematic.

But the best of them is Eddie Mayehoff, who plays his cartoon character perfectly. Rolling his mouth around in his cheeks, laughing at his own jokes, adding information nobody wants, telling stories that go nowhere, and forever demonstrating his belly - the screen isn't big enough to contain his twitches, and a lot of time is courteously given to his pointless digressions. Even his background acting can be admired.

And of course the moment of the film, aside from Miss Lisi’s glamour shots, is a wonderful reversal by Eddie.

Throughout, Claire Trevor, his wife, pecks at him and puts him down, always in front of others, and he always gives a feeble excuse or obediently withdraws. Except for one beautiful moment in which Eddie comes as close as anyone to achieving the film's title, and proves that sometimes the best defence is an own goal.

Eddie’s had a few too many pre-dinner cocktails and is obviously drunk. In front of Virna, Claire puts Eddie down with something like, “What’s the point of Virna cooking all day if you’re too drunk to enjoy it?” To Virna's astonishment, Eddie, knowing he’s too drunk to argue, sways back and forth and replies, “Yeah she’s right”.

COME BACK MILLY!

To be a cinephile means to be overwhelmed by the overlooked details in moving pictures, to probe with obsessive concentration, searching for heartbreak in the background. To get over definitions quickly, Wikipedia will do in this case:

As described by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Fremaux, the "definitive essence of cinephila" is a "culture of the discarded" that prefers "to find intellectual coherence where none is evident" and to "eulogize the non-standard and the minor." (Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and history, or, The wind in the trees. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005.)

And so, watching the revisionist The Beatles Anthology, I was suddenly overwhelmed during the most satisfying colourisation I've yet seen, the clip for All you need is love, featured at the start of Episode 7.

For those with a perverse journalistic/historical bent, I will aver that All you need is love comes towards the end of six month run of absolute perfection for The Beatles, beginning with Strawberry Fields Forever (in my opinion the absolute high watermark of Beatles' creativity), through Sgt Pepper's and on into the Magical Mystery Tour project.

The song and clip functions as a kind of a valedictorian statement for The Beatles (being commissioned and performed to represent England to the World) and the hippie movement (being televised right in the middle of the "summer of love").

We are repeatedly told in The Beatles Anthology that love was the central theme of The Beatles oeuvre. Perhaps so, but let us not be too revisionist: this theme began as (and remained) sexual desire, but sometimes along the way morphed into universal, spiritual love. The maturation of sexual desire into love may be the central narrative in The Beatles' writing. This is made explicit in All you need is love: the "yeah, yeah, yeah" of She Loves You becoming "love, love, love" (and so that no one could miss the connection, John sings She Loves You during the fade out).

Of course it's a great song and the clip is a lot of fun, especially colourised. The close-ups give the impression the whole world is there involved in the hippie love movement, but the wide shots show a lot of empty space around a central, overly crowded area. As well as Mick Jagger clapping along, a beautiful image for cinephiles is a man sitting alone (and quite bored!) behind the scenes, glimpsed through the set. But the punctum is towards the end of the clip. As loved up hippie revellers spread the love in sandwich boards covered in love slogans in various languages, one hippie cannot lose their personal concerns in the universal message and holds up a very tangential message: a sign reading "COME BACK MILLY".

Heartbreak!

One heartbroken hippie is unable to get into the spirit of universal love, and holds up a call from the heart for the TV cameras and the satellites to beam around the world in the vain hope that Milly will see them and the sign, be moved as I was moved, and come home.

Here is the deliberate imperfection, the wabi-sabi of the clip. The other signs will live on, but Milly will either come back or not. One timely, personal dot amidst all these universal, timeless messages makes one question all of them. In hindsight, perhaps unfortunately, the 60s' imperative to "love" looks as dated as "Come back Milly", as if the whole hippie movement made a sign of the imperative tense of "to love" and based an ideology around it.

The "Come back Milly" sign, in context, points more accurately to central themes of The Beatles: personal love amidst universal love, the relationship between selfish and selfless selves.

Universal love is meaningless without personal connections, it is built from the ground to the stars and not the other way, which may be why being told "God loves you" by people you don't like and who don't like you, makes one shudder. From one person to another love can be abstracted to all humanity. But to love humanity and not love any person is misanthropy.

The phrase "come back" also doubles as a plaintive for anything lost, from a lover, to time, to the lost object, and these yearning feelings are evoked by the sign. Grammatically it may be a command, but it always sounds like a helpless beg. In attempting its valedictorian, sweeping statement, All you need is love makes reference to many songs, by and not by The Beatles. But the sign doing its own thing, with its "come back", evokes memories of several Beatles' lyrics, and particularly resonates one song not referenced in All you need is love, a song one hopes Milly will sing:

It's been a long time

Now I'm coming back home

I've been away now

Oh how I've been alone

Wait til I come back to your side

We'll forget the tears we've cried

- Wait, The Beatles, 1965

cause and affect

Being a good cinephile also means being a dutiful scholar, and anyway we all have a perverse journalistic/historical bent, so in preparing this piece I was foolish enough to Google "beatles all you need is love come back milly", only to discover what seems to be the true purpose of the sign, and though there is a cheeky poetry to its pragmatism, I won't ruin it for you.

So often it is more satisfying to find your own meanings and indulge possibilities rather than find the "right" (historical) one. The true purpose of the sign is the historical cause of its being there. But causes only create effects, they do not create affects. Meaning is what happens inside you when you experience something. It may or may not have anything to do with the cause that created the effect that affects you.

Meanings and causes are different countries, they do things differently. This is why cinephiles take such pleasure in the details: they are unchartered territory. And this is the manifesto of the cinephile: create your own meanings.