Marlon Brando, in Elia Kazan's iconic "On the Waterfront."
By Joe Bendel. No director portrayed the immigrant experience or the struggles of the common man with greater sensitivity than Elia Kazan – but to this day, he remains widely reviled on the left. Even a figure of Martin Scorsese’s stature took heat for presenting Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar at the 71st Academy Awards. Yet for Scorsese, Kazan’s influence extended far beyond his early stylistic debt to the great filmmaker. Scorsese explains Kazan’s significance both to cinematic history in general and himself personally in Letter to Elia, an hour-long documentary he co-directed with Kent Jones, which screened with Kazan’s epic America, America at the 48th New York Film Festival.
Director Elia Kazan.
Regardless of political controversies, Kazan’s reputation as an actor’s director is without peer. A co-founder of the Actor’s Studio, Kazan began his career on the boards before finding his calling as a theater director. Letter reminds us that it was Kazan who helmed the Broadway premieres of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Of course, he would revisit Streetcar on film with original cast-member and frequent collaborator Marlon Brando, one of several legitimate masterpieces he crafted. However, for Scorsese, East of Eden stands out first and foremost in his consciousness, claiming to have “stalked” the film through second-run cinemas as a boy.
Looking straight into the camera, Scorsese forcefully and lucidly describes Kazan’s contributions to stage and screen, with the help of generous clips from the director’s filmography. While Eden and the best picture nominee America, America capture the most screen time, Scorsese and Jones duly include Kazan’s arguably single most famous scene, Brando’s “could have been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront, the classic tale of union corruption.
In contrast, they are clearly uncomfortable addressing Kazan’s testimony to the HUAC committee. Kazan was a former Communist who became disillusioned after the Stalin-Hitler (Molotov-Ribbentrop) non-aggression pact came to light. Considering Communism a severely flawed ideology, Kazan defended his decision in an op-ed piece, but Scorsese and Jones largely ignore his motivations, preferring to gloss over the incident with vague language of “difficult choices,” which does little to serve Kazan’s memory.
Of course, Scorsese is on solid ground when celebrating movie history. Letter is definitely an effective commercial for Kazan’s rich body of work, which really speaks for itself throughout the documentary. However, if any of his masterworks is under-represented, it would be Gentleman’s Agreement, a powerful examination of anti-Semitism that won Kazan his first Oscar.
Truly, Kazan is due for a critical renaissance, unblinkered by partisan score-settling. Letter is a well intentioned, mostly well executed effort to spur just that. Due to be included in a forthcoming Kazan boxset, Scorsese and Jones’ film screened yesterday (9/27) with a rare big screen presentation of America, America at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of the 2010 NYFF.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Actress Gloria Stuart of Titanic fame has died, several months after her 100th birthday. Govindini and I had the pleasure of meeting this elegant star from Hollywood’s Golden Age twice. On each occasion she was the picture of elegance and grace, and she will certainly be missed.
• Wall Street 2 took top prize at the weekend box office, with a haul of about $19 million. That’s not surprising; I think Oliver Stone crafted an entertaining and emotionally compelling film, the politics of which were relatively muted compared with what one might otherwise expect from him these days. [See my review of the film here.] One can only imagine how much better business the film might’ve done if Stone had only kept off the talk show circuit over the past week; the man truly does himself no favors.
For directors, you will never be a great director if you don’t read. I run my own film school — I call it a traveling circus, a rogue film school — and I have a mandatory reading list for those who apply. It starts with Virgil’s “Georgics.” Read it in Latin if possible. I have a short story by Hemingway; old Icelandic poetry; and, among others, the Warren Commission Report. It’s a fantastic piece of reading.
• On the Sci-Fi/Alien Invasion front, the 1962 Brit sci-fi thriller Day of the Triffids (based on the 1951 novel) is getting a remake, and in 3D. Day of the Triffids?! Of all the sci-fi classics from that era, they’re remaking Day of the Triffids?! So we’re going to get marauding, carnivorous plants coming at us in 3D. And you thought Piranha 3D was campy? Imagine Riley Steele getting devoured by a fern. In other news, Guillermo del Toro talks here and here about his forthcoming adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness that he’s doing with James Cameron. An early, highly unflattering script review of that project has already frightened me off, and nothing del Toro is saying now is making me feel like he won’t botch this – which is a shame.
By Patricia Ducey.Gone with the Wind it’s not. Heck, it’s not even My Best Friend’s Wedding. But You Again is a pleasant enough production from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, with some truly funny moments – and a lot of real heart. It’s the kind of family movie that the broadcast networks used to make before TV was handed over to reality show contestants and serial killers. You Again is a chick flick perfect for a tween or teen (but maybe not the boys), or anyone who can remember the sting of high school bullies.
Director Andy Frickman casts his New York stage pal Kristen Bell as Marni, an ugly duckling outsider in high school who has grown into a successful and beautiful career woman. She handles her PR firm duties with grace and aplomb. But her hard won self-confidence starts to crumble when her Mom announces that Marni’s beloved brother Will (James Wolk) is to marry, and the bride-to-be is none other than Marni’s high school nemesis, Joanna (Odette Yustman). Joanna was the head cheerleader, the gorgeous Alpha Girl, who led the torment against acne-ridden dweeb Marni. When the wary Marni returns home for the wedding weekend, however, she finds a new Joanna -someone who may or may not remember her at all, and who may or may not have morphed into an angel. Soon Joanna reveals the cause of her life change: she lost both of her parents in a car crash, and decided to dedicate the rest of her life to something that would make them proud.
Mom Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis) and father (Victor Garber) and even the family pooch clearly adore Joanna, but Marni can’t help herself; her jealousy resurfaces once again. She tries to accept the new Joanna, but Marni still hasn’t tamed her inner loser. Ever suspicious, she eventually uncovers some evidence to justify some sweet, sweet revenge. We watch as Marni regresses, physically and emotionally, back to her high school days as her resentment overwhelms her mature career woman persona.
Kristen Bell and Odette Yustman in "You Again."
In that one improbable coincidence allowed any plot line, Joanna’s only surviving relative, Aunt Mona (Sigourney Weaver), arrives for the wedding weekend and turns out to be none other than Gail’s former high school nemesis. Gail soon learns that giving advice about jealousy is a lot easier than living it. So, on two levels, all these women will have to confront the green eyed-monsters still lurking in their hearts if they are to survive as a family. You Again is otherwise full of pratfalls and silliness, as well as drama, as it meanders toward the climactic rehearsal dinner.
You Again stands in stark contrast to the summer romantic comedy hit Easy A, which the critics loved, in that it doesn’t despise its audience. The family in You Again loves, and likes, each other. They’re human, though, and fall victim to their human foibles. These characters are surprised and disheartened by their own weaknesses – and do their best to conquer them. Sometimes they do make old grudges right, and the movie actually tells you why this is important. So if your daughter or niece wants to see a movie, steer her to You Again – not Easy A.
I chuckled when I checked the reviews of You Again—90% of the critics hated it, so I figured I would like it. The movie been called trite and sit-com-ish – and in some ways, that’s true. Marni’s family is intact, affectionate, and practically snark-free. Characters do tussle and fall into swimming pools. More than once. [By the way, Odette Yustman might just give Megan Fox a run for her money with her brunette good looks and mad rapping skills. Betty White also handles the Grandma Bunny duties well—and keep your eyes peeled for a few other cameos by ‘80s stars.] The dreaded patriarchy rears its head when Dad finally lays down the law and tells his squabbling women “enough.” Meh. I liked it. It may seem trite to jaded movie critics – but judging from the laughter in my theater, audiences liked it too.
By Joe Bendel. There were more righteous gentiles from Poland than any other country. No strangers to suffering, three million Poles also died under National Socialism, while the Polish resistance forces were the only organized underground with a division specifically dedicated to saving Jewish lives. Yet, the Nazis were grimly successful cleaving apart Polish and Jewish culture, though they had been closely intertwined for centuries. In an effort to mend that breach, a group of 72 cantors made an emotional tour of Poland last June, fortuitously captured in Danny Gold and Matthew Asner’s documentary 100 Voices: A Journey Home, which began a limited engagement in New York and Los Angeles last Wednesday, following a special nationwide one-night event-screening this past Tuesday.
Tuesday’s special screening was presented under the auspices of NCM Fathom, the in-theater event specialists, which is particularly apt considering their specialty simulcasting opera. Indeed, there is a strong affinity between opera and the cantorial music of Voices. In fact, the father of two tour participants probably saved his life during the Holocaust by convincing the Nazis he was an opera singer rather than a cantor. While their music is liturgical, most cantors’ delivery is expressive and dramatic, bearing a strong stylistic resemblance to full-voiced opera singing.
After providing viewers an essential grounding in cantorial music and great cantors past (including the jazz-influenced Moishe Oysher), Voices follows the cantors on their eventful tour, organized by the forceful Cantor Nathan Lam of the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles. Adding additional tragic significance, Polish President Lech Kaczyński was in attendance for their tour-opening command performance at Warsaw’s National Opera House mere weeks before his fatal plane-crash. It was a heavy program featuring an original composition penned by Charles Fox (probably best known for “Killing Me Softly”) inspired by Pope John Paul II’s simple prayer left at the Western Wall.
Yet, the next performances were probably even more personally moving for the cantors, including memorial performances at Warsaw’s only surviving synagogue and at the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp. However, the tour ended on a hopefully note, culminating with an open-air concert at the Krakow Jewish Cultural Festival, organized by the Catholic Janusz Makuch. Embracing the term “Shabbos goy” Makuch has worked to foster an appreciation of Poland’s Jewish heritage since 1988 (an effort greatly aided by the fall of Communism in 1989).
While the music of Voices may not be to all tastes, precisely for its operatic quality, there is no denying its power. Beautifully recorded and presented by directors Gold and Asner with cinematographers Jeff Alred and Anthony Melfi, it should lead to a deeper and wider appreciative of cantorial music, certainly outside Judaism and perhaps within the faith as well.
Indeed, Cantor Lam’s project was notable not just for the size of the tour, but the noble intent. Recently, many religious leaders have acted provocatively, even insensitively, while claiming the mantle of intolerance (yes, I definitely mean the organizers of the World Trade Center mosque here). However, the Voices tour really was undertaken in the spirit of tolerance, seeking to strengthen ties and understanding between faiths and people. A well intentioned film executed with grace and dignity, Voices deserves an audience well past Oscar season. It plays in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles through September 28th.
Albert Speer's proposed "Volkshalle" for the Nazi capitol.
By David Ross. Nazism was history’s most despicable moral perversion and criminal conspiracy, but too often the examination of Nazism goes no farther than moral condemnation. This posture is perfectly understandable, but it does nothing to further the understanding of Nazism as a philosophy and historical development. The difficult thing is temporarily to relax the impulse to condemn and to bring a degree of detachment to the analysis of Nazism as a system of thought. As one who frequently teaches literary modernism – Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis – I must constantly address a certain kind of romantic conservatism, and this naturally raises questions about fascism and Nazism. I tell my students something like this: “Its not enough to call Nazism evil, though certainly it is evil. You have to consider the nature and logic of its evil. You have to engage its ideas.” At this point, I usually insert that I am myself Jewish, which lowers eyebrows somewhat. Two deeply thoughtful documentaries, one German, one American, attempt just this kind of work and make for important lessons in the history ideas.
Peter Cohen’s The Architecture of Doom (1991) examines Nazi aesthetic theory and the Nazi obsession with art generally. Nazi artistic taste (a mélange of alpine-oriented romanticism and grandiose neo-classicism) was often kitschy and crass, but the Nazi cult of beauty was remarkably passionate and central. Hitler began as an artist, as everybody knows, but it’s less well known that he remained the most extraordinarily obsessed aesthete, buying and stealing works of art by the thousands and involving himself at every level with what may have been his greatest dream: the architectural recreation of Germany on a scale of classical magnificence to rival ancient Rome. The film’s crucial recognition is that Nazism’s aesthetic program partially or even largely drove its political and military program. Nazism did not conceive its program of conquest as an end in itself, but as a means of implementing the cultural and aesthetic renaissance that was Hitler’s chief fantasy. Likewise, the film clarifies the connection between Nazism’s aesthetic program and its campaign of hygiene, eugenics, euthanasia and genocide. Adulating the classical ideal suggested by the sculpture of antiquity, the Nazis conceived their murderous activities as a program of ‘beautification’ in the literal sense. The goal, according to Cohen’s film, was less to create a pure race than a physically beautiful race. The Nazis considered racial purity an indispensible basis of this beauty, but they did not necessarily consider this purity an end in itself.
From Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia" (1936).
This aestheticism does not in the least mitigate the Nazis’ vast crimes, but it does force us to move beyond the reassuring notion that Hitler was merely a maniacal sadist, a kind of Jeffrey Dahmer with a propaganda machine and vast army at his disposal. The scarier proposition is that aesthetic ideals we ourselves may share, or at least not entirely deplore, were mixed up in the vile stew of Nazism, and that ‘beauty’ itself may become a dangerous absolutism. Is our own culture implicated in this dynamic? Obviously we are not about to launch a racial genocide, but our popular culture may want to rethink its own extraordinary emphasis on physical perfection. Though this emphasis is not likely to lead to a renewal of the gas chambers, it may someday lead to a program of genetic selection and manipulation of the kind envisioned by a film like Gattaca. Mass-murdering the living is far worse than manipulating the unborn, but both programs share the dangerous premise that human beings are fundamentally stone to be carved, clay to be shaped. In this respect, The Architecture of Doom should give us pause.
Stephen Hicks’ Nietzsche and the Nazis (2006) delivers a whopping 166 minutes of philosophical disquisition in the attempt to explain the nature and impetus of Nazism. Unlike the graceful cinematic art of The Architecture of Doom, Nietzsche and the Nazis has the feel of a college lecture filmed on the cheap. It cuts between still photographs and Hicks himself speaking against a variety of nondescript backdrops, while the text itself is at best workmanlike. And yet Hicks, a philosopher at Rockford College in Illinois and author of a book likewise titled Nietzsche and the Nazis (2006), makes a lucid and thoroughly intelligent case that Nazism was not a function of economic conditions or social psychology or personal pathology – the usual notions – but of certain strands in the history of philosophy, and that it enacted ideas that were deeply embedded in the German culture and the German philosophic tradition. Hicks mentions Hegel, Fichte, and Marx, but gives primacy to Nietzsche, whom Hitler revered. Continue reading Lessons in Darkness
By Jason Apuzzo. Let me begin by saying that this review is written for people who have not already been irretrievably burned by Oliver Stone. To those of you out there who have been irretrievably burned by Stone, you have my sympathies and my understanding – and if you feel sufficiently put off by Stone’s behavior over the years never to watch another one of his films, I will not argue the point. Stone is to blame for that, not you. So if you wish to proceed to another post here at Libertas, you have my blessings.
You would, however, be missing out on what is actually quite an enjoyable film in Wall Street 2 – a film that, much like the original Wall Street, is weirdly at odds with its creator in creating such a compelling and seductive portrait of a system the filmmaker supposedly despises. In this, Wall Street 2 becomes the latest example of a film that actually appears savvier and more insightful – not to mention warmer and more sentimental – than the man who made it.
I must confess that I was not expecting Stone’s film to be enjoyable, for at least three reasons. One, Stone’s skills as a filmmaker have atrophied significantly over the years. What originally put Oliver Stone on the map, culturally speaking, were well-constructed (if obnoxious) entertainments like Platoon and JFK. Stone’s Alexander, however, was easily one of the worst films I’ve seen over the past decade – a mess on so many levels that I can’t even imagine how the film ever got made, let alone released. And Stone’s World Trade Center seemed to miss its moment; if you think no one remembers 9/11 any more, absolutely nobody remembers Oliver Stone’s film about it. World Trade Center was an anodyne, strangely uninteresting exercise for such a voluble director as Stone – a lugubrious, by-the-numbers drama that could easily have been a made-for-TV movie, and that disgracefully avoided the subject of terrorism altogether. That Stone would avoid the subject of terrorism was not only dishonest and ideologically loaded on his part, but at odds with the drama of the moment – like making a movie about Pearl Harbor without mentioning Imperial Japan.
The third reason, of course, has to do with Stone’s compulsive politicizing of everything he does – and the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 seemed altogether too ripe an opportunity for someone with his blunderbuss sensibility – a kind of smorgasbord of possibilities to take potshots at the capitalistic system that has, of course, made his own career possible.
Gekko.
What I will confess to have forgotten, however, was what a seductive portrait of Wall Street Stone’s original Wall Street film was. Stories of the guys who were lured into lives as stock traders by Stone’s film – and by the magnetism of Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko character – are legendary, and form part of the strange and contradictory afterlife of that film as a high-end cult phenomenon. Wall Street did for The Street in the 80s what Top Gun did for the military. What Stone’s original film captured was the drama, the adrenaline rush, the heat and speed of the Wall Street lifestyle as it’s lived on a daily basis. Personal note here: I was close to two guys at Yale who were obsessed with Gekko (and American Psycho), and who got swept right into that world in the early 90s – and I mean all of that world, with its giddy, steroidal highs and humiliating lows. A world of glitzy New York penthouses, weekends in the Caribbean, coke, endless women, media scandal … and ego. Greed? Yes, there was that as well – but I never really bought the idea that what drives the guys on The Street is greed, per se. It always seemed more like ego, the desire to win – or at least, survive. More on that subject below.
And so the perverse truth of the matter is that Stone himself is as much to blame for today’s Wall Street as anybody else – which may be why he pops up occasionally in Wall Street 2, playing a cameo role an investor. [Which, incidentally, his own father was – his father having been a stock broker and a Republican who was broken by The Street and eventually went bankrupt.]
Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps brings this adrenaline-fueled world of Gordon Gekko back – with all its stratospheric highs and punishing lows – and updates it to the world of today, the world of the financial markets post-crash. And it attempts to incorporate what Stone has learned (if not necessarily what the rest of us have learned) from that calamity. Not surprisingly, what Stone has learned from the Meltdown is that greed was its driving force – not just the greed of the Wall Street guys (and they are depicted almost uniformly as guys in this film – there’s hardly a female in sight), but all of our greed. Greed here is defined as our current tendency to overreach, to live off little more than borrowed money and a prayer. For example: greed in the way we re-finance homes, based on … what? A desire to free up some cash without really doing anything. Or the way we leverage our other assets based on … what? Too often just a hope.
In the heat of the game.
There’s truth in Stone’s critique, of course – not nearly the whole truth about what brought down the market, but certainly enough truth to serve as a kind of moralistic backdrop to Stone’s real business, which is actually not political at all. Wall Street 2 is really about about something else altogether, which is: how to maintain one’s integrity not only in the high-pressure environment of finance, but in the ultimate high-pressure environment of one’s own family. In essence, how do you preserve your own ego – when even people you love may be putting your well being in jeopardy?
Wall Street 2 is essentially a kind of 2-hour, five-Act Shakespearean family drama that begins with Gordon Gekko leaving jail in 2001, being given back his few remaining momentos from the 80s. [This is the great scene from the trailer, when he poignantly gets his empty gold money clip back – and his gigantic, 80s-era mobile phone.] Gekko leaves the jail, walks outside into the sunlight to find … no one waiting for him. He’s become the quintessential forgotten man. Flash forward to 2008, and the central character of the film: Shia LaBeouf’s ‘Jake Moore’ character. LaBeouf is a young guy on The Street, making his way up, who has two things that define him: he’s got smarts and is street-savvy (more so than Charlie Sheen from the original film), yet he also has an ‘idealistic’ side to him that’s kept fully charged by his web-activist girlfriend (Carey Mulligan), who just happens to be Gordon Gekko’s estranged daughter, Winnie. Winnie is extremely wary of her father, blaming him for the (off-screen) drug-related death of her brother. Gekko himself by this point in 2008 has now become a ‘reformed’ man, a best-selling book author whose media jeremiads are designed to warn others off of his earlier ‘bad’ example.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Jake and the rest of Wall Street then undergo the 2008 meltdown, in which Jake’s financial house goes down – and Jake’s soft, humanistic mentor (Frank Langella) commits suicide. There’s something extremely dramatic about these early sequences of the film, because we get the sense of real history playing out – and Stone’s handling of these moments when the Feds are trying to decide who to bail out (or not) are handled nicely. One gets the sense of the arbitrariness, the messiness and – crucially – the egos involved in deciding who was to be saved, and who would walk the plank. We all like to feel that these were clean, impartial decisions – yet we know by now that they weren’t. [Why was Lehman allowed to go down, for example, but not AIG?] These decisions were as much a result of the personalities involved as the economics, or the politics for that matter.
Josh Brolin as an engaging villain, Bretton James.
Although Wall Street 2 is chock-full of politics – it’s an Oliver Stone film, so how could it not be? – Stone is to be commended for indulging in no Bush-bashing here, or elsewhere in this film. These tense early sequences play as I suspect they played out in real life – which is to say, on a knife-edge of suspense, as everybody – Republicans and Democrats – stared right into the abyss. Stone avoids political finger-pointing here, recognizing the gravity of the moment. In fact, the ‘reformed’ Gordon Gekko actually speaks up early in the film for the Bush Administration – admonishing people for rushing to blame Bush’s Administration for problems that were largely beyond their control. So if you’re expecting Wall Street 2 to roast Bush and Cheney over the coals – which Stone’s increasingly bizarre and erratic interviews seem to suggest – there’s none of it in the film. The bailout is presented as having essentially been the lesser of two evils: the ‘socialization’ of the market, in order to protect from 1929 Crash Redux (only worse). Continue reading LFM Review: Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps
