Tribute: Documentary Pioneer Albert Maysles

Posted on March 6, 2015 at 3:05 pm

We mourn the loss of film visionary Albert Maysles, who with his brother David, showed us a new way to see film and a new way to see the world. They were the first Americans to create intimate, unstructured documentary storytelling without experts talking from behind their desks or extended narration. This is “direct cinema,” the distinctly American version of French “cinema verité.” The Maysles brothers were the first to make non-fiction feature films where the drama of human life unfolds as is, without scripts, sets, or narration. In part, this was due to their way of looking at the world, which was open-hearted and non-judgemental. But it was also due to changes in technology since the very earliest days of documentary. In 1960, he said, “With the equipment we have today, which is directly descended from the equipment we made; you could go beyond the illustrated lecture for the first time. These innovations made it possible to get what was happening so clearly and directly that the person viewing the film would feel as though he was actually present at those events. For the first time, it was possible for someone watching a documentary to feel as though he was standing in the shoes of the person he was seeing onscreen.”

Maysles’ subjects had lives that were in some ways ordinary, like those of us in the audience. Salesman was about door-to-door Bible salesmen. He said, “There are daily acts of generosity and kindness and love that should be represented on film.”

But he also made extraordinary films about extraordinary lives. Perhaps his most famous was Grey Gardens, about “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who continued to live in their crumbling East Hampton mansion with no money and very little contact with the outside world. The movie was later adapted into a hit Broadway musical and a movie with Drew Barrymore.

He filmed Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Otis Redding, and the Mamas and the Papas.

He filmed the Rolling Stones.

He filmed Paul McCartney.

He said,

As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality. It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences – all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, the knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It’s my way of making the world a better place.

May his memory be a blessing.

A Tribute to Unlikeable Women in the Movies

Posted on March 4, 2015 at 3:50 pm

I really enjoyed the recent series on “Unlikeable Women” from the folks at Bitch Flicks. I remember a panel of women filmmakers at Comic-Con all agreeing that the code word for making female characters meek and pliable (and giving all the tough dialogue and action to the male characters) was “relatable.” So cheers to the unabashedly, sometimes proudly, “unlikeable” women of the movies, including those saluted in this series.

Of course there are many other great choices. Here are some of my other favorites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92kLpKuRJfo

The Breakfast Club — 30 Years Later

Posted on February 20, 2015 at 3:43 pm

“The Breakfast Club,” is one of the best of the John Hughes films about teenagers. No American filmmaker portrayed the lives of contemporary teenagers with as much affection, sensitivity, and understanding as Hughes, with Molly Ringwald the very best of his favorite group of actors. In The Breakfast Club, five high school kids spend a Saturday in detention. In the highly stratified world of high school, each of them is in a different group and no other circumstance would bring them together. There is the popular girl (Ringwald), the rebel (Judd Nelson), the jock (Emilio Estevez), the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), and the loner (Ally Sheedy). Forced to spend time in the same room, they argue, insult each other, and then confide in each other more honestly than they could feel comfortable doing with the people they think of as part of their group of friends. It has become such a classic that it played a crucial part in the recent hit “Pitch Perfect.” The cast of “Glee” paid tribute as well. And the movie is referred to in the opening moments of today’s new high school movie, “The DUFF.”

Molly Ringwald talked to Time Magazine about her thoughts three decades later.

There really hasn’t been anything to replace it. It’s kind of a classic because it all takes place in the one day, so there’s just one wardrobe. There were less chances for it to look incredibly dated. The theme is something that is still really relevant today, which is that no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, everyone kind of feels the same, which is that they don’t belong. And that’s a sort of powerful theme.

On the other hand, she notes, if the breakfast club met today, the kids would not talk to each other. They would be too busy texting.

E! has a list of “Breakfast Club” quotes that still ring true today. And critic Christy Lemire revisited the film and found it held up pretty well, even though she now sees it as a critic and a mother, rather than a contemporary of the characters.

I’m happy to report that, three decades later, “The Breakfast Club” remains timeless. It still reflects the narcissistic torment of teen angst: the feeling that nobody understands what you’re going through (certainly not your parents) and that your troubles are all-encompassing and insurmountable. It’s still consistently funny and endlessly quotable. Hughes had an unparalleled knack for writing teenagers — hyper-verbal characters full of self-aware, sharp humor who were also capable of making themselves vulnerable and revealing their hearts. It’s paced beautifully and moves seamlessly in tone from light moments to heavier ones.

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Film History School Stories about Teens

Two New Books About LOVING Movies

Posted on February 18, 2015 at 8:00 am

Actor/comedian Patton Oswalt (“Ratatouille”) has written a memoir about immersing himself in old movies. Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film is not just about the hundreds of movies he watched; it is about how he used what he saw as a kind of therapeutic education in life. Oswalt describes this period of his life as a four-year compulsion. At first, it helps him hide from some of the issues in his life, but then it helps him to understand and confront them.

Over at Last Seat on the Right, my friend Michał Oleszczyk reviews a compilation of answers to the question “What do you love about movies?” The book is What I Love About Movies: An Illustrated Compendium, with answers from egendary directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, the Coen brothers, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Pedro Almodovar, Darren Aronofsky, Quentin Tarantino, and Spike Jonze, and A-list acting icons such as Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender, Kristen Stewart, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tom Hardy, all collected over the years by film review and commentary magazine Little White Lies, as they conducted interviews. Oleszczyk writes:

The book’s opening response comes from Francis Ford Coppola, and it is appropriately grand: the maker of Apocalypse Now (1979) states simply that “the human race was waiting for cinema” (p. 21). Darren Aronofsky concurs, pointing to the close-up as “an overlooked great invention of the 20th century” (p. 161), while Viggo Mortensen lives up to his taciturn, if potent, screen persona by offering the single briefest response in the volume: “The places you will go” (p. 101). There’s no denying that there is no great revelation awaiting in the wings of the 50 answers we get (rather predictably, the word “transported” gets the biggest mileage), but it is the very difficulty with defining the central passion of their lives that is most telling in those filmmakers’ responses. Accompanied by lucid, often brilliant reading of their works by the “LWL” writers (the four-member team also incuses Adam Woodward and Sophie Monks Kaufman), the responses enter into exciting friction with the critical writing – as well as with the artwork, which is never less than lively (it is “LWL” tradition that every piece is credited both to the person responsible for the “words” and the one providing the “pictures”).

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Books Film History

The History of The Odd Couple

Posted on February 17, 2015 at 8:00 am

“The Odd Couple” is coming back to television, starring “Friends'” Matthew Perry as the slob and writer/actor Thomas Lennon as the neatnik. The long-running television series starred Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. There have also been versions with a black odd couple, a female odd couple, and even an animated cat and dog odd couple.

But before that, it was a Broadway play and then a movie starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. And before that, it was kind of a true story.

Neil Simon, the most successful comic playwright of the last half-century, wrote the play based on his brother, comedy writer Danny Simon, who moved in with a friend following his divorce. It may also have been inspired in part by Mel Brooks (who was a writer with both Simon brothers on Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows”). He also briefly lived with a friend following a divorce. Danny also inspired characters in his brother’s other plays, including “Plaza Suite,” “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

Matthau and Lemmon are ideal as Oscar and Felix, and the movie is well worth putting in your Netflix queue.

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Film History For Your Netflix Queue