Posted on 03/10/2004 10:23:14 AM PST by Villain
It was a night of triumph for British film. Well, okay, it wasn’t. “UK Overlooked By Oscar Voters” was the BBC headline. “Whatever Happened To The Brit Pack?” wondered The Scotsman. “Ring Of Failure,” declared a gloomy Birmingham Post, waking up to the bleak realization that the only Tolkien tourism boom was going to be the stampede to New Zealand to see the actual Shire where the great Kiwi author wrote his famous fantasy.
So it was a crummy night for British film. But it was a great night for British Commonwealth film – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, even Britain (the third of the Best Song written by Annie Lennox, plus make-up man Peter King and set designer Alan Lee, all three sharing in the hobbit spoils); even my own decayed Dominion picked up Best Foreign-Language Film for Les Invasions Barbares. If the Eurocentric British press weren’t so parochial, it would hail the Oscars as a grand triumph for what the Queen calls “our Commonwealth family”: if you were a nominee who had the good fortune to be a subject of the Crown, you had a much better chance of taking home a statuette than those poor souls cursed to be free-born citizens of the United States.
Indeed, the Oscars are a much better – or, at any rate, less feeble - advertisement for the Imperial family than the Commonwealth Conference. If I were Her Majesty, I’d make it the theme of this year’s Christmas message: start with one of those sappy Oscar-intro things about movies bringing the world together to sit in the dark and dare to dream our dreams, blah, blah, and then put her next to an Alberta key grip and a New South Wales gaffer showing her how to grip and gaff (“Really? How interesting”) and end with her asking Charlize Theron’s mum about the night she shot Charlize’s dad (“Really? How interesting”).
Billy Crystal had some cute cracks about down under: “It’s official,” he announced halfway through the night. “There’s now no-one left to thank in New Zealand.” But an opening reference to the Great White North was more pointed: “All of Hollywood is here. It’s like the Canadian Oscars.” Hollywood is the only place on the planet frightened of Canada. New Zealand is still an exotic, remote location, but Vancouver and Montreal are the default locations. When Clint Eastwood insisted Mystic River, set in Boston, actually be filmed in Boston, it was considered as radical a move as when Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen insisted on filming On The Town in New York. In those days, if they wanted Manhattan or the mid-west or the Rockies or darkest Africa they built it on the back-lot. Now they just do it in Canada: “New York” is Toronto, “Philadelphia” is Calgary… The film unions, from the carpenters to the bit-players, are sick of it.
On the campaign trail, John Kerry keeps hammering corporations about “outsourcing” and “exporting” American jobs. But you’d be hard put to find as outsourced an industry as Hollywood, except maybe children’s toys. The only difference is that, unlike the toy makers, the guys making the big decisions at head office in LA seem to have forgotten the basic business rule: KYC – Know Your Customers. All last week, Oscar types were whining that Mel Gibson was stealing their buzz. That’s true to the extent that it was a buzz-less Oscars, and on the big night even the frocks were dull, with a pronounced lack of cleavage, save for game gals of a certain age like Jamie Lee Curtis and Susan Sarandon. But the buzz about Mel’s movie came from the Hollywooden liberals in the big media who’ve spent the best part of a year warning that The Passion Of The Christ was going to be the biggest thing on the anti-semitic scene since The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. All those liberal columnists who champion the necessity of brave transgressive artists when it comes to giving us a horny Jesus (The Last Temptation Of Christ), a gay Jesus (the Broadway play Corpus Christi) or a Jesus floating in the artist’s urine ("Piss Christ") have finally discovered a Jesus it would be grossly irresponsible to show to the public.
But what’s really hilarious is Hollywood’s failure to get it as a business proposition. Until a month ago, the line from the studio execs was that Mel Gibson had blown well over 30 million bucks of his own money on a vanity project for him and and a few other Jesus freaks. Last week, it racked up the biggest mid-week opening – not just of any film in Aramaic but of any non-sequel movie ever; the only bigger opening gross was The Return Of The King. Now the new rap on Mel is that he claims to be a Christian but he’s making gazillions off his Saviour’s suffering. Well, one reason he’s making so much is because he doesn’t have to share it with any of the big Hollywood muscle who were convinced the fundamentalist weirdo was out of his tree. Unlike all that Miramax pseudo-art-house stuff, The Passion is a genuine independent film: the system wasn’t interested, so Mel bypassed it, and he’s cleaning up.
How did they get it so wrong? Until 40 years ago, religious movies were a staple of Hollywood. The audience didn’t change, Hollywood did. A couple of years back, I was at a conference at Paramount on American values and someone asked why they didn’t make more religious pictures. Carmine Zozsora, producer of the Die Hard movies, replied in all seriousness: “Well, we tried that with The Last Temptation Of Christ, and it didn’t work out too well.”
That’s the reality behind all that Oscar-night blather about how movies bind us together in stories of our common humanity, etc, etc. In fact, Hollywood defines our common humanity ever more narrowly. Nobody was in the mood for big anti-Bush speeches on Sunday night, and even Sean Penn contented himself with a mere subordinate clause about how actors had known there were no WMDs. But that’s all you need. Like Billy Crystal’s crack about Bush’s National Guard service, it’s the celebrity equivalent of a Masonic handshake – a way of signaling that you’re in the club. But the club excludes too many people, and, if it carries on like that, the movie biz will be in as much trouble as the music biz.
That’s not my main rap against Sean Penn, of course. Bill Murray was not only robbed but weirdly humiliated in his loss by Billy Crystal. As I said in my review of Mystic River, even as you're trying to follow the story, Penn and Tim Robbins seem to be “furiously tap-dancing for Oscar votes.” More fool the Academy for falling for it. The Spectator, March 6th 2004
THE MISSING
It probably wasn’t a good idea to call it The Missing, because in idle moments during this long film’s many longeurs you can’t help speculating on what it is that’s actually gone missing.
Plot-wise, it’s a teenage girl, Lily Gilkeson (played by Evan Rachel Wood). She lives in a cabin on a grim patch of prairie out in New Mexico Territory in the 1880s, and is a-hankerin’ for brighter lights. She’d break out into “Ev’rything’s Up To Date In Kansas City/They’ve gone about as fer as they can go” if only she knew someone who’d been there. But, if she wanted to travel, she’s about to get the chance. While out and about one day, she gets kidnapped by Apaches, who set off for Mexico in order to sell her into white slavery south of the border. It’s not exactly a weekend in Chicago, but at least she’s not moping about with cabin fever any more.
Mom (Cate Blanchett) sets off in pursuit, aided only by a conveniently available taciturn weatherbeaten loner who knows the ways of the red man. He happens to be her dad, but he skipped out and has spent the last 20 years living with the Apache, learning their customs, like how to grow your hair really long. This is Tommy Lee Jones, playing a man called Samuel Jones. If the hair had been any bigger, he could have played Paula Jones. Obviously, when you put one fiercely independent woman and a craggy geezer a little too fond of the firewater up against a brutal Injun gang, it’s no contest. So they take mom’s 10-year old daughter along with them to even up the score.
In other words, it’s The Searchers, but worse. Ron Howard doesn’t think of it that way, of course. He opens with Cate Blanchett on the privy, to tell us that this isn’t going to be the old-style head-‘em-off-at-the-pass western but the new gritty raw meanwhile-back-at-the-outhouse western. Miss Blanchett is so good and so versatile – she can do any accent, any period – that she seems just to pick her scripts blindfold out of a bran tub. Here she’s severe but good-hearted: she lets the hired man shag her but won’t let him sleep in the house. She’s got the look just right – the squint, the contortions of the mouth, the way a tough land and hard weather turn the face into a kind of protective crust. But the character seems an attitude rather than a living being. As for Tommy Lee Jones, the deadbeat dad gone native, he successfully avoids falling into parody, which is probably the most one can expect from the role.
But the big problem is Ron Howard, a nervous nellie of a director who spends so much time covering his politically correct bases that in the end the story goes missing. Howard is a foursquare dramatist, which on the right project (Apollo 13) can work perfectly well. But here it just seems ham-fisted. The bad guy, amazingly, is still an Injun, the baddest Injun you ever met, played by Eric Schweig with a face covered in prosthetic pock marks. Evidently he did a lot of drugs in the Sixties – the 1860s, that is. The white slavery thing is even more perplexing. There appears to be zero historical evidence that Indians were involved in any cross-border sex traffic, and you can’t help marveling at Howard’s saddling them with it. But then he includes a scene, right after the kidnapping, where it’s explained that the gang won’t rape the womenfolk or even slap ‘em around a little, in case they damage the goods before they get them to market. And you realize the whole white slavery gig’s a sham – a way of ensuring that Howard doesn’t have to show the Indians doing to young Lily what most abductors in that period would have done to her. And then he reveals that anyway they’re rogue Apaches who used to work with the US forces – ie, this is all the white man’s fault. Oh, and there’s palefaces in the Apache gang anyway, apparently “celebrating diversity” – just as the good guys also benefit from a couple of helpful Native Americans. It’s all a bit too self-conscious. Miss Blanchett plays a devout Christian and, whenever she starts praying to her God, Tommy Lee Jones starts chanting to his. The mystical shamanesque aspects seem more like a gloss of California New Age mumbo-jumbo than anything you’d be likely to find in New Mexico 120 years ago. By contrast, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House On The Prairie books have a refreshingly honest attitude to religion out west. But Howard is so busy covering himself he doesn’t seem to notice his characters are burdened by so many sensitivity requirements they never come to life.
To cut a long story show, they don’t cut a long story short. It goes on for hours. By about midway through I realised that, while the kidnapped Lily may no longer be suffering from cabin fever, I certainly was. The Spectator, February 28th 2004
This says almost all. The only part he left out is that the loss of business sense is a direct result of hardening ideology. Communism subordinates everything to the cause. It explains a lot of weirdness in American business these days.
But this was worth the entire article:
All those liberal columnists who champion the necessity of brave transgressive artists when it comes to giving us a horny Jesus (The Last Temptation Of Christ), a gay Jesus (the Broadway play Corpus Christi) or a Jesus floating in the artist’s urine ("Piss Christ") have finally discovered a Jesus it would be grossly irresponsible to show to the public.
Heh heh...
Depp's nomination
for a movie based on an
amusement park ride!
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