DVD Review: Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms’ leading-man debut is a funnier movie than The Hangover Part 2. It’s smarter, too.

Dying is easy and comedy is hard, as the famous adage goes, and by extension of that same logic it’s virtually impossible to get dark comedy right. The wreckage of failed attempts includes the best and the brightest artists of every comedy era, and not a few dramatic creators as well. Dark comedy – black comedy, gallows humor, cringe humor – carries its own additional pitfalls besides the usual minefield of problems awaiting its gentler cousin. And when dark comedy fails, too often the results land with a resounding thud, victims of creative overreach or slipshod understandings of tone.

Cedar Rapids, the often pitch-dark new effort from indie mainstay Miguel Arteta, walks its dark comedy tightrope constantly in danger of falling one way or the other. Though ultimately it succeeds, the suspense of waiting for it to collapse under its own ambitious weight suffuses virtually every scene. You almost come to care about the movie itself as much as its conventional story or oddball characters, wondering when at any second its whole artifice will come crashing down. It never does, thanks largely to its cast.

A star is brown: Helms

Small-town man-child Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is sent by his boss (Stephen Root) at Brownstar Insurance to a regional convention after the agency’s alpha dog (Tom Lennon) dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Lippe isn’t ready for the responsibility, let alone the pressure of bringing home the convention’s “Two Diamond” award that the agency has secured several years in a row. But he goes anyway, propelled by his boss’ bullying. His wide-eyed, gawky enthusiasm, mixed with rustic suspicion for the dangers and promises of the titular “big city,” provide some of the film’s most unguarded moments.

The convention’s hotel (as uniformly cheerless, and cheerlessly uniform, as any of a million such places in America) and the people Lippe encounters there of course compel him to grow up emotionally and sexually. In particular, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of hard-partying, foul-mouthed policy “poacher” Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), comparatively straight-laced Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the sultry, melancholy Joan (Anne Heche.) The quartet goof their way through the three-day conference while Tim readies his presentation to convention patriarch Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith). Moral fortitude and honesty count for a lot in winning the “prestigious” Two Diamond trophy, and in assenting to his new friends’ temptations – including a fling with Joan – Lippe risks costing his company the award.

Artete works well within the small confines of the hotel, showing the confines of each blandly friendly space and how, especially given the inhospitable winter outside, even such slim diversions as hotel bar margaritas and overheated pools can offer a welcome distraction. It helps a lot that Phil Johnston’s script does right by its main character, shrewdly demonstrating Lippe’s fish out of water ups and downs: his new friends are a welcoming, non-judgmental bunch, a distant cry from the McJesus snobbery of his home town co-workers and neighbors – the same people, Lippe is decent enough to remember, that depend on him. Of course everything works out in the end, but not before plenty of debauchery and clean, if slightly mean-spirited, fun.

As a comic leading man, Helms’ strengths center on the same aw, shucks likability that’s served him more or less unwaveringly since his tenure on The Daily Show. Lippe is similar to The Office‘s Andy Bernard, more naive but less obtuse, with a greater vulnerability as a result. It’s tempting to thumbnail Lippe as Bernard freed of The Office‘s self-conscious repetition of character and story beats, but there’s more – a little more – to him than that. Helms makes him sympathetic but stops short of making him pitiable or charismatic.

He’s backed by, well, a dream supporting cast for this type of project. Reilly is a leading man trapped in the body of a character actor, and every one of his scenes tends to upset the tenuous balance Artete strikes between Lippe and his surroundings. In fact for much of the film’s first hour, the energy level rises palpably whenever Reilly’s motor- and foul-mouthed party animal comes onscreen. Comedies often rise or fall on the quotability of their dialogue; Reilly has most of the lines you’ll want to repeat to your friends.

The surprise performance, however, belongs to Heche as the otherwise content soccer mom who uses insurance conventions as a vacation from the staid security of her normal life. Heche is sexy, sad, and smart all at the same time, without resorting to vamping or overheated line readings to achieve said results. Her confession to Lippe about the normalcy of her life and the release of Cedar Rapids carries some of the film’s best writing, and her well-modulated delivery of the scene works as an oasis to the dark shenanigans displayed almost everywhere else. Heche’s career was swallowed years ago by the media’s provincial fascination with her sexuality; this performance earns her a shot at a larger comeback vehicle.

Making the most of smaller roles, Whitlock makes a charming straight man for the others, especially in a late scene in which he gets to spoof his role on The Wire. The prolific Root is hilarious as Lippe’s boss, and Smith brings the same imperial menace to Helgesson that he brought to all those years as That 70s Show‘s Red Foreman. Arrested Development fans may find themselves a little shocked to see Alia Shawkat, Maeby Funke herself, playing the hotel’s prostitute; the role allows her to say filthy things and look sultry, which for a career transition vehicle is possibly as good as it gets right now.

Cedar Rapids shouldn’t be confused for a great film, but it achieves its difficult ambitions while remaining entertaining, and it has the rare gift of growing in your memory after you leave the theatre. If its raunchy gags and sometimes awkward staging keep it from really developing into something approaching a classic modern dark comedy – Rushmore, to make a contemporary example, or Ruthless People - it’s trying for something riskier than the pot and potty humor that dominates too many modern “comedies” (Not least of which, obviously, The Hangover Part II.) It’s also, admittedly, refreshing to encounter a comedy that doesn’t bear Judd Apatow’s factory-pressed mixture of bittersweet nostalgia and stunted male growth.

Dying is easy, dark comedy is hardest, and ultimately Cedar Rapids is a damned funny movie with a cast full of people who should appear more than they do. Given a small release in the theatres last winter, it’s unmissable home video entertainment.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms strikes off on his own, into darker territory than you might expect.

Dying is easy and comedy is hard, as the famous adage goes, and by extension of that same logic it’s virtually impossible to get dark comedy right. The wreckage of failed attempts includes the best and the brightest artists of every comedy era, and not a few dramatic creators as well. Dark comedy – black comedy, gallows humor, cringe humor – carries its own additional pitfalls besides the usual minefield of problems awaiting its gentler cousin. And when dark comedy fails, too often the results land with a resounding thud, victims of creative overreach or slipshod understandings of tone.

Cedar Rapids, the at-times pitch-dark new effort from indie mainstay Miguel Arteta, walks its dark comedy tightrope constantly in danger of falling one way or the other. Though ultimately it succeeds, the suspense of waiting for it to collapse under its own ambitious weight suffuses almost every scene. You almost come to care about the movie itself as much as its conventional story or oddball characters, wondering when at any second its whole artifice will come crashing down. It never does, thanks largely to its cast.

A star is brown: Helms

Small-town man-child Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is sent by his boss (Stephen Root) at Brownstar Insurance to a regional convention after the agency’s alpha dog (Tom Lennon) dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Lippe isn’t ready for the responsibility, let alone the pressure of bringing home the convention’s “Two Diamond” award that the agency has secured several years in a row. But he goes anyway, propelled by his boss’ bullying. His wide-eyed, gawky enthusiasm, mixed with rustic suspicion, for the dangers and promises of the titular “big city” provide some of the film’s most unguarded moments.

The convention’s hotel (as uniformly cheerless, and cheerlessly uniform, as any of a million such places in America) and the people Lippe encounters there of course compel him to grow up emotionally and sexually. In particular, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of  hard-partying, foul-mouthed policy “poacher” Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), comparatively straight-laced Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the sultry, melancholy Joan (Anne Heche.) The quartet goof their way through the three-day conference while Tim readies his presentation to convention patriarch Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith). Moral fortitude and honesty count for a lot in winning the “prestigious” Two Diamond trophy, and in assenting to the group’s temptations – including a fling with Joan – Lippe risks costing his company the award.

Artete works well within the small confines of the hotel, showing the confines of each blandly friendly space and how, especially given the inhospitable winter outside, even such slim diversions as hotel bar margaritas and overheated pools can offer a welcome distraction. It helps a lot that Phil Johnston’s script does right by its main character, shrewdly demonstrating Lippe’s fish out of water ups and downs: his new friends are a welcoming, non-judgmental bunch, a distant cry from the McJesus snobbery of his home town co-workers and neighbors – the same people, Lippe is decent enough to remember, that depend on him. Of course everything works out in the end, but not before plenty of debauchery and clean, if slightly mean-spirited, fun.

As a comic leading man, Helms’ strengths center on the same aw, shucks likability that’s served him more or less unwaveringly since his tenure on The Daily Show.  Lippe is similar to The Office‘s Andy Bernard, more naive but less obtuse, with a greater vulnerability as a result. It’s tempting to thumbnail Lippe as Bernard freed of The Office‘s self-conscious repetition of character and story beats, but there’s more – a little more – to him than that. Helms makes him sympathetic but stops short of making him pitiable or charismatic.

He’s backed by, well, a dream supporting cast for this type of project. Reilly is a leading man trapped in the body of a character actor, and every one of his scenes tends to upset the tenuous balance Artete strikes between Lippe and his surroundings. In fact for much of the film’s first hour, the energy level rises palpably whenever Reilly’s motor- and foul-mouthed party animal comes onscreen. Comedies often rise or fall on the quotability of their dialogue; Reilly has most of the lines you’ll want to repeat to your friends.

The surprise performance, however, belongs to Heche as the otherwise happy soccer mom who uses insurance conventions as a vacation from the staid security of her normal life. Heche is sexy, sad, and smart all at the same time, without resorting to vamping or overheated line readings to achieve said results. Her confession to Lippe about the normalcy of her life and the release of Cedar Rapids carries some of the film’s best writing, and her well-modulated delivery of the scene works as an oasis to the dark shenanigans displayed almost everywhere else. Heche’s career was swallowed years ago by the media’s provincial fascination with her sexuality; this performance earns her a shot at a larger comeback vehicle.

Making the most of smaller roles, Whitlock makes a charming straight man for the others, especially in a late scene in which he gets to spoof his role on The Wire. The prolific Root is hilarious as Lippe’s boss, and Kurtwood Smith brings the same imperial menace to Helgesson that he brought to all those years as That 70s Show‘s Red Foreman. Arrested Development fans may find themselves a little shocked to see Alia Shawkat, Maeby Funke herself, playing the hotel’s prostitute; the role allows her to say filthy things and look sultry, which for a career transition vehicle is possibly as good as it gets right now.

Cedar Rapids shouldn’t be confused for a great film, but it achieves its difficult ambitions while remaining entertaining, and it has the rare gift of growing in your memory after you leave the theatre. If its raunchy gags and sometimes awkward staging keep it from really developing into something approaching a classic modern dark comedy – Rushmore, to make a contemporary example, or Ruthless People – it’s trying for something riskier than the pot and potty humor that dominates too many modern “comedies.” It’s also, admittedly, refreshing to encounter a comedy that doesn’t bear Judd Apatow’s factory-pressed mixture of bittersweet nostalgia and stunted male growth.

Dying is easy, dark comedy is hardest, and ultimately Cedar Rapids is a damned funny movie with a cast full of people who should appear more than they do.  See it  in the theatre if you can, but don’t miss it on home video.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, June 2010 Edition

Our monthly roundup of news, reviews and speculation that didn’t wind up with a full post.  

It's hot outside.

 The problem with movies is that they’re too often interrupted by the more meager demands and rewards of real life. We meant to go to the movies this weekend but never got around to it, busy instead with one dreary thing after another, and anyway there’s nothing playing at the local theatres that seems exciting (We’re not twelve years old, and as aging Whedonites we don’t care for Twilight).  

Actually, we’re taking the rest of this week off for the Fourth of July holiday weekend, returning Tuesday, July 6. In the meantime, here’s all the stuff we thought mostly worth discussing over the month of June, items that didn’t rate an entire blog post of their own but nevertheless seem noteworthy for one reason or another.  

1. Besides the ignominy of so many thuds, maybe the nastiest thing about this summer of woe for the box office isn’t the quantity of flops but rather the media’s glee in pronouncing several films as failures. We haven’t crunched the numbers, but we don’t imagine 2010 necessarily has more or bigger turkeys than most other summers; without a giant tentpole movie – like the kind Toy Story 3 is shaping up to become – the desperation at the box office has just seemed worse.  

If The A-Team, Prince of Persia, and a few others have underwhelmed, it’s not necessarily a comment on their quality or on the public’s shifting tastes. It means audiences ignored them for whatever reasons normally affect such things, not a little of which inevitably seems to have something to do with marketing. Actually, The A-Team has good word of mouth, as did Prince of Persia. Some of the bombs, admittedly, were odious: both Jonah Hex and Sex and The City 2 were answers to questions nobody asked, efforts apparently massaged into oblivion by studio meetings and conferences. Elsewhere the sharks have circled the Tom Cruise – Cameron Diaz vehicle Knight and Day for weeks; our guess is that the film will quietly make a modest profit.  

2. The idea that such older-skewing films as Knight and Day and Sex and The City 2 should fail echoes a topic that’s gone around for a couple of years now: the idea that the time of the movie for grownups is in its twilight. This summer the two biggest successes so far, The Karate Kid and now Toy Story 3 – are both distinctly kid-friendly. Not to over-simplify, but this is partly because children don’t go to school in the summertime and these two products – both reminders of beloved films from other eras – are likely irresistable to thirty-something parents who remember the one film from their teens and the other from their 20′s.  The films aren’t kids’ movies so much as entertainment that’s palatable all the way around the SUV.  

3. Steve Carrell says he’s leaving The Office at the end of the series’ upcoming seventh season in order to spend more time with his family. We lost interest in The Office a while back – the “Dwight always wins” story policy froze us out – but nevertheless we’re curious to see how they handle Carrell’s exodus. Meanwhile his animated feature Despicable Me opens next week, with his adult feature Dinner For Schmucks (in which he seems to combine his Michael Scott schtick with George Clooney’s haircut circa 1994) opening at the end of the month.  

4. Speaking of that film (and its vaguely amusing trailer below), it’s another project to co-star Zack Galifianakis, his fourth released since The Hangover last year. Nothing against him getting rich, but we’re thinking he might start to worry about over-exposure. The industry has made similar mistakes before: taking a promising character actor and throwing him into every project available at the time seldom turns out well, either for the audience or for the performer. For lack of a better term, we call this accelerated career half-life the Zahn Effect.  

  

Yelchin in Terminator Salvation

 5. With rumors that an announcement regarding the next actor to play Spider-Man just around the corner, we want to officially endorse Anton Yelchin for the role. The young Russian actor did great work in both Terminator Salvation and Star Trek, giving better performances than anyone expected. With the upcoming fourth film reportedly a reboot (goodbye, disco-dancing hipster Spidey), Yelchin is exactly the rising talent that a fresh take on the franchise needs. Now, who to play Mary Jane Watson? Hopefully, Easy A’s Emma Stone.  

6. Mad Men, the best show on TV, makes it season four debut in just under four weeks, on July 25. The sleek new preview poster started showing up online a couple of weeks or so ago, apparently hinting at the wide-open future that Don Draper and his fellow Sterling-Cooper refugees face now that they’ve struck out on their own. We’re also glad to learn, somewhat belatedly, that Jared Harris, who plays sensitive British executive Lane Pryce, has been promoted to regular cast member as of the upcoming season. Plot and story details still remain maddeningly elusive – series mastermind Matt Weiner could/should run the CIA – which makes the wait that much harder. Our own small wish is to see the return of schoolteacher/Barbara Hershey lookalike Suzanne Farrell (Abigail Spencer). 

7. A week later, AMC premieres (or re-premieres, following a June 13 sneak peek) its brainy new thriller Rubicon, starring James Badge Dale as a government intelligence analyst who realizes his bosses take part in a vast conspiracy pulling the strings of world events. Ostensibly a complex, cooly intelligent mind-bender of a serial – think The X-Files without the geeky weirdness – it’s as different from the network’s other two shows as Mad Men and Breaking Bad are from each other. Miranda Richardson, Arliss Howard, and Jessica Collins co-star, with the great Peter Gerety (Homicide: Life On The Street) in a crucial guest-starring role in the pilot. Expect something adrenalin-fueled, like 24 or Alias, and you’ll be disappointed. The show has moodier, slower-burning intentions in mind. 

8. Finally, we can’t think of a better way to celebrate America than with this clip from The Candidate, director Michael Ritchie’s still-topical skewering of politics and the otherwise good people who get drawn into its seductive vortex. Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, the activist running for a Senate seat against a folksy conservative incumbent with the awesome name Crocker Jarmon. Released in 1972, McKay’s exhausted meltdown into a gibberish of buzz words remains hilarious – and relevant – almost forty years later. 

Happy July 4, everybody. God bless America.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Cinema: The Great Gatsby

Star-packed adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel isn’t all that… well,…

Even the poster, suggesting Disco Gatsby, is wrong-headed.

Depending on when in your life you read it, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby was either a haunting, romantic indictment of the American Dream or the best sleep you got junior year. Considered by its admirers as a likely choice for Great American Novel if ever such a thing existed, it’s a timeless story that’s also the summation of its era, and a troubled love story by an author who lived most of his life in the grip of disappointing love.

The 1974 film adaptation represented the third time Hollywood attempted to bring the story of doomed bootlegger Jay Gatsby to the screen. The first, in 1926, came immediately after its publication but has been lost to time. A 1949 version starred a well-cast Alan Ladd but is also unavailable. The 2000 A&E Network version, starring Mira Sorvino as Gatsby’s blue-blooded love Daisy Buchanan and Paul Rudd as his friend and celebrant Nick Carraway, is what it is. But the 74 model, with its script by Francis Ford Coppola and boasting an all-star cast for its period, is the version that towers over the others. That is a shame, because it seldom deserves such status.

At least it gets the setup right: Gatsby’s (Robert Redford) story takes place over the summer of 1922, in the tony Long Island neighborhoods of East and West Egg. The old-money aristocrats, including Daisy (Mia Farrow) and her troglodyte husband Tom (Bruce Dern), live on East Egg; the less fashionable, including Gatsby and Carraway (Sam Waterston), live across a narrow inlet on West Egg. As Carraway narrates, Gatsby has purchased an elaborate mansion directly across from the Buchanan house and devotes himself to throwing lavish parties, the better to attract Daisy’s attention. The two had loved each other years before but Gatsby’s poverty made marriage impossible. Now, thanks to a distinguished war career and the help of a gangster, he’s ready to win her love over again. But their reunion is short-lived, and an attempt at confronting Tom ends in the accidental killing of Tom’s mistress (Karen Black), the frowsy wife of a sad sack garage mechanic (Scott Wilson).

The cast does the Kansas City Shuffle.

Directed by Jack Clayton (Something Wicked This Way Comes), the film gets all the Jazz Age period details right but doesn’t have any idea how to translate the admittedly complex structure of Fitzgerald’s novel to screen. Instead, Clayton’s style is shapeless, almost indifferent, and at times the camera placement seems randomly selected: Gatsby and Carraway seem dwarfed by the indoor spaces around them, and the raucous parties often feel staged but lifeless, like tableaux. Scenes of intense emotional pitch play out in static close-ups that display the characters’ overheated faces but not much else.

Coppola’s script plays up the melodrama of Gatsby’s reckless and implacable passion for Daisy but misses the subtext of what she represented given his impoverished upbringing and his desire for upward social mobility. Instead, the film presents the plot’s events in more or less straightforward order, sacrificing the elliptical and foreboding layout that gave Fitzgerald’s narrative its poignancy but amplifying the screen time of minor characters to the point of distraction. Coppola has seldom understood subtlety and restraint in his long career, but that shortcoming is here especially stark in contrast to the felicities of the source material. Watching the events unfold is like hearing a delicate ballad played at stadium levels of noise.

The cast is hit and miss. Following turns in The Candidate and The Sting two years before, Redford must have seemed a slam dunk to play a maverick iconoclast in the Roaring Twenties. He looks the part, his glacial reserve seeming cool even while the other characters swelter – literally, for much of the film’s second half – while giving Gatsby periodic flashes of both innocence and anger. But his performance rarely gets beneath its lovely surface, so that opportunities to explain Gatsby’s obsession or to translate it to a larger point remain missed. Waterston fares somewhat better, giving the more expressive Carraway alternating degrees of wonder, haplessness, and everyman decency. In the novel it falls to Carraway to learn from Gatsby’s life and death; here he’s the center of the plot around which things spin.

The rest of the performances are problematic. Dern is miscast, lacking the athleticism and weapons-grade entitlement complex that made Tom blandly, casually evil. Wilson is affecting as the doomed garage owner with the same name, but too many repetitious images of him looking anguished make the third act ponderous. Worst of all is Farrow, a risky choice for her role under the best of circumstances. Her performance is terrible, as brittle as tinsel and with about as much depth; she often seems at a loss what to do except squeal or look overwhelmed.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and thirty-five years later it’s simple to second-guess or cherry pick the talent of the decade and speculate how they might have treated the material. Producer Robert Evans offered Robert Towne the screenwriting chores, but Towne turned the commission down in favor of writing Chinatown; Truman Capote submitted a script that wasn’t used. It’s difficult, too, not to wonder how Sydney Pollack, given his fascination with social outsiders - and his partnership with Redford, then at its zenith - would have treated the material. British director Clayton was an odd choice to direct, and the film’s critical failure contributed to his ensuing eight-year absence from the industry.

Fitzgerald himself famously said that there are no second acts in American life, that nobody gets a second chance at realizing their potential. Fans of all great novels feel an almost innate need to see their work successfully translated to film. Few American novelists understood disappointment quite with the same exquisite sorrow as Fitzgerald, and to see this most American of works mistranslated as the country looked towards its bicentennial must have seemed especially unfortunate. A book this beautiful and important deserves another chance – every chance it can get, until Hollywood gets it right.

- Michael Kabel

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Coming Down To Earth

Seven films to help you appreciate the world in which we live.

It's where you live.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”  While he wasn’t referring to the physical world itself, his words are certainly true in the modern context of environmentalism. That quote comes, by the way, from For Whom The Bell Tolls, which was also a very good film. One of movies’ great gifts is their ability to help us understand the world, and in that understanding we gain insight into why it’s important to keep the planet safe.

The following films suggest something important to remember about the Earth and/or the importance of acting now to preserve it. Some are noteworthy for their scenery and lush depictions of one or more regions of the planet. A couple are potent cautionary tales about the consequences we face if the problems confronting us now aren’t met with our best energies. We’ll reuse the usual caveats here and mention that they’re in no particular order, and the list is in no way conclusive. Feel free to post your “what abouts” in the comments section.

1. Days of Heaven: Terrence Malick’s 1978 melodrama is legendary for its lush photography of the Canadian prairie, which stands in for pre-World War I Texas. Cinematographers Nestor Almendros (Sophie’s Choice) and Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool) invest the movie with a glowing, almost ethereal light, so that even a grainfield at dusk becomes a gorgeous snapshot of a lost era. The story in fact sometimes takes second place to the setting, exactly as Malick intended. His two films since, 1998′s The Thin Red Line and 2005′s The New World, have almost but not quite equaled the visual excellence constantly on display here.

2. Dreams: Akira Kurosawa based this 1990 collection of eight vignettes on dreams he himself experienced at various points in his lifetime. The focus throughout is on imagery more than conventional storytelling, as the master director’s artistic eye covers terrain including blizzards, forests, the landscapes of Vincent Van Gogh, and even the speculative wastelands left after a nuclear war. The following clip, from the vignette “Village of the Watermills,” only hints at the almost-tangible depth of Kurosawa’s (along with cinematographers and frequent collaborators Takao Saito and Masaharu Ueda) vision of the world around him.

 

3. Jeremiah Johnson: Director Sydney Pollack is known chiefly for his character-driven work including Tootsie and Absence of Malice, but his 1972 collaboration with Robert Redford (one of seven films the two made together over 23 years) remains a minor classic of understatement. With a melancholy story based on a true-life mountain man in Frontier-era Utah, cinematographer Duke Callaghan’s attention to scenery is a brilliant example of the decade’s fascination with Western vistas. Warner Brothers’ straightforward DVD edition has been on shelves for years. It’s time for a new transfer re-release. (Note: clip contains low audio.)

 

4. Out of Africa: Among the first true epics to emerge from Hollywood after the Heaven’s Gate-led collapse of the artistic freedom that had led America through the 70s, Pollack’s 1985 adaptation of the Isak Dinesen memoir featured a vast story and starred Redford and Meryl Streep, arguably the era’s most respected movie stars. The script is long and rambling, with subplots and travails abounding, but David Watkin’s Academy Award-winning cinematography articulates Africa’s often-daunting beauty in much the same way Jeremiah Johnson captured the American West thirteen years before. Having said that, Out of Africa is the kind of movie you either see once or watch a hundred times, depending on your tastes in film.

5. At Play In The Fields of the Lord: Directed by Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spider Woman), this complicated 1991 epic offers a multi-faceted series of character studies radiating through and around the Niaruna tribe of the Amazon River Basin. Two hard-luck cargo pilots (Tom Berenger and Tom Waits) are hired by a local police commander to bomb the tribe, while freshly-arrived American missionaries (Aiden Quinn and Kathy Bates) want to save the villagers’ souls instead. The Amazon rain forest appears both inviting and destructive, with heavy loss of life and hope devastating the characters. Based on Peter Matthiessen’s novel, the film met with a mixed reception thanks to its dense plotting and sometimes overreaching script. It’s nonetheless built a steady following in recent years, and a DVD release is long overdue. (Note the following clip is from the soundtracking of the film)

6. Wall*E: There’s not much to say about Pixar’s 2008 film that hasn’t been said before, including here on this blog: it deserved a Best Picture nomination, the bold approach to storytelling makes it a classic of animation, while the intelligent storyline can satisfy grown-up tastes while entertaining children at the same time. Really, it’s just a modern classic.

There’s a lot of corporate lip service about Earth Day this month, including the usual blizzard of PR from TV networks and others looking to profit from the observance. For educational value alone, show the kids this instead.

7. Soylent Green: The opposite of Wall*E in probably every significant way, Richard Fleischer’s (The Narrow Margin) 1973 adaptation of Harry Harrison’s dystopian novel remains chillingly prescient, thanks to an abundance of convincing flourishes and pitch-perfect turns by Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, and Edward G. Robinson (in his last screen appearance). Set in a 2022 New York where runaway population growth and global warming have stripped the world of practically all its resources, Heston’s police officer investigates the murder of an executive at the Soylent Corporation, the agricultural megalith with the new product ready to feed the world. The titular foodstuff’s actual ingredients are the stuff of movie legend.

IMDB lists a remake in production for a 2012 release, so at least the movie industry is definitely recycling something.

- Michael Kabel
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Seven Film Presidents Worth Voting For

Fictional chiefs of sates we wish could lead us through the real world.

With the end of the two major parties’ conventions last week, we got to thinking about fictitious presidents who, unfortunately for America, only exist in the movies in which they appear. By that we mean not actual presidents of the past played by actors but rather characters in movies that we’d “make real” if we could. We are cursed to live in interesting times, to quote the old Chinese expression, and we could use leaders with their kind of conviction and vision.

The usual caveats apply below, the same ones that are starting to sound like a stump speech: no particular order, purely subjective, blah blah blah… And to quote Richard Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear: this list is bipartisan, and intended as totally objective regarding its’ members’ political affiliation.

1. The President, Fail-Safe (1964) Played by: Henry Fonda. A great leader because: He makes the hardest decision of all time. When a computer error irretrievably sends a U.S. bomber squadron to drop atomic warheads on Moscow, Fonda’s nameless president sweats out the bombers’ approach in a bunker far underground, connected to the Kremlin via telephone and translator (Larry Hagman). Faced with all-out Soviet retaliation, he makes an unthinkable choice, one with a terrible logic that nonetheless carries a staggering cost. 20/20 Hindsight: The prospect of accidental nuclear war was absurdly plausible throughout the 1960s, and a favorite subject of books and cinema including Stanley’s Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. But here director Sidney Lumet loads on the realistic details and gradually building pace until the reality of such a mistake takes a palpable toll on the audience (spoiler warning):

2. James Marshall, Air Force One (1997) Played by: Harrison Ford. A great leader because: He’s a badass. From his opening speech declaring the U.S. will hunt down terrorists with impunity to his bravado defending the titular jet from hijackers, Ford’s Marhsall is basically President Han Solo. 20/20 Hindsight: Gritty and self-determined, this kind of presidential chest-thumping was likely more appealing eleven years ago, before the current president’s “Mission Accomplished” fiasco or the long years of Monica Lewinski and still before 9/11. Whatever, Ford as president was an idea for its time: posters read simply, “Harrison Ford is the president of the United States;” the film grossed $172 million. 

3. Dave Kovic, Dave (1993) Played by: Kevin Kline A great leader because: He’s a president of the people, for the people. Temp agency staffer Kovic gets installed into the Oval Office after the real president, whom he looks just like, is incapacitated during an indiscreet moment. But in sweetest film-fable form, Kovic starts running the country his own way, a way largely based on simple wisdom and populist optimism. Of course he has to stand up to a bevy of challenges, including a Karl Rove-like chief of staff (Frank Langella) as well as constant scrutiny from the media and suspicion from the real president’s wife (Sigourney Weaver) and a dour Secret Service agent (Ving Rhames). 20/20 Hindsight: Possibly superfluous among the “new day dawning” atmosphere of Clinton’s first year in office, this very Kapra-esque dramedy views today like a pretty bauble from another era, which is probably what director Ivan Reitman intended all along.

4. Jackson Evans, The Contender (2000) Played by: Jeff Bridges A great leader because: Like Teddy Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy before him, Evans is a man of principle unafraid to play hardball to push real change through myopic government. His championing of atheist, pro-choice Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) as a replacement Vice President ignites a firestorm of controversy, until he steps in and shames Congress with an oratory pimp slap upside the head. 20/20 Hindsight: Bridges, who incredibly has never won an Oscar, was thought a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actor (Benicio Del Toro won for Traffic.) The film is sometimes criticized as dogmatic and partisan. Just the same, it was an overdue breakthrough for Allen and provoked plenty of debate upon its release, just three weeks before the 2000 presidential election.

5. Tom Beck, Deep Impact (1998) Played by: Morgan Freeman A great leader because: Serene and intelligent, Beck’s leadership helps America prepare for literally the end of the goddamned world. Even admitting the military had been preparing a nuclear counterstrike against the looming meteor for years doesn’t seem disingenuous once Beck reveals its purpose. 20/20 Hindsight: Pre-millennium tension was expressed via disaster movies throughout 90s cinema, and Deep Impact was an atypically intelligent approach to the Doomsday scenario. It also features a black president, while The Contender promises a female Vice President. Less than a decade later, one of these will be a reality this November.

6. Jordan Lyman, Seven Days In May (1964) Played by: Fredric March A great leader because: He does what’s right, not what’s popular or even safe for his own well-being. As President Lyman prepares to sign a bitterly controversial disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, his administration finds itself the target of a military coup d’etat led by Air Force Joint Chief of Staff General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster). Lyman resists Scott’s aggression the same way he refuses to buckle to partisan criticism – by staying true to what’s best for the Republic. More than a “let history judge me” autocrat, Lyman acts according to his own conscience, despite all consequences. 20/20 Hindsight: A military takeover of the government seems unlikely today, but consider how unpopular international diplomacy has become in favor of saber rattling and the film remains ahead of its time.

7. Bill McKay, The Candidate (1972) Played by: Robert Redford A great leader because: There’s got to be a better way! McKay tells it like it is with the simmering sarcasm Redford played so well throughout the 70s and early 80s. Every so often Mr. Sundance mentions doing a sequel depicting the last days of the McKay presidency. Bring it on, already! 20/20 Hindsight: Though technically detailing JFK-esque reform activist McKay’s run for the California Senate seat, this so-70s-it-hurts satire by director Michael Ritchie (Fletch, The Bad News Bears) has remained hilariously prescient thanks to the existence of would-be candidates like Gary Hart, Dan Quayle, John Edwards, et al - any young up and comer who grab at the mantle of Kennedy youth and glamour. McKay’s meltdown into senseless, jingo-heavy slogans – shown in the clip below – is a classic moment of political skewery.

Full disclosure: We’re aware this topic has been covered before – several times – by other sites. We saltue them for their inspiration, and for charting a course into this fascinating cinematic niche. Thank you, and may God bless America.

 - Michael Kabel 

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Sydney Pollack: 1934 – 2008

Legendary American filmmaker dies of cancer.

Sydney Pollack, the Oscar-winning American actor-producer-director whose work included Out of Africa, Absence of Malice, and Tootsie, died Monday at his Los Angeles home. He was 73.

Marked by an unobstrusive yet intelligent directing style, Pollack’s films were often meditative yet skeptical studies of the individual’s struggle against indifferent external forces. Born the child of Jewish Russian immigrants in Lafayette, Indiana, Pollack originally worked in New York as an actor before directing television shows including The Fugitive, The Defenders, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His second feature film, an adaptation of Tennesee Williams’ This Property Is Condemned, launched a fruitful collaborative partnership with then-relatively unknown actor Robert Redford. The two would make six more films together, including the classics Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, and Out of Africa. Co-starring Meryl Streep, Out of Africa won seven Academy Awards in 1986, including Best Director and Best Picture. 

Besides many of his own films, Pollack’s producer credits include The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Quiet American, and Bright Lights, Big City.

In addition to Redford, Pollack directed the most famous movie stars of three decades over more than thirty films, including Robert Mitchum, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and many others. Beginning in the 1990s he carved out a second career as a character actor, often playing the unflappable, slightly arrogant voice of Establishment authority in films including Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, his own The Interpreter and Random Hearts, and last year’s Michael Clayton. His most recent screen appearance was as Patrick Dempsey’s father in the romantic comedy Made of Honor.

By way of tribute, we’d like to present the following scene from Tootsie, in which Pollack plays Dustin Hoffman’s long-suffering acting agent. Legend has it Pollack took the part at the famously difficult Hoffman’s suggestion, after the two clashed repeatedly on set.