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September 19, 2007 - Who Censors The Censors?
September 26, 2007
You Are What You Emulate
Truly original films are a rare commodity. They always were. But upon passing its hundredth birthday, the film industry is evolving in the way all the other arts have. There are plenty of remakes, but more interestingly, there are now more and more films that involve high quality talent, with high end aspirations, that can be tracked back to earlier film, particularly the early 70s era of independent minded studio magic.
There are two different forms of this phenomenon. The first form is film that flatters past greatness by Evolutionary Imitation. Those include:
Network + Erin Brockovich + Syriana = Michael Clayton
Days of Heaven + Heaven's Gate + McCabe & Mrs. Miller + Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid + The Long Riders = The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
In the first case, there is story subtext in the first act that is clearly reflective of Network. I completely believe Tony Gilroy when he admits he admires the film and when he says he wasn't cribbing. In the case of Jesse James, there are a variety of wildly familiar style points that Andrew Dominik has built into his own vision of this not unfamiliar story.
The other form, which I find more interesting, are the Completionist Films, such as:
Prince of The City + Superfly + Hoodlum + The French Connection + Mr. Untouchable = American Gangster
Hotel Rwanda + Shooting Dogs + Shake Hands With The Devil (the doc) = Shake Hands With The Devil
Obviously, the films involved here are films based on both real history and film history. Both have a great story foundation that various filmmakers have found interesting enough to make various films from. And now, years later, many films later, the overall tales are being told with flashes of the detailed stories of the other films turning up.
So is this is a lack of original thinking or does the work speak for its own place on the originality scale? I would argue the latter. Film is not inherently either original or painfully derivative. The artists and wannabe artists are capable of delivering the most original vision of the most hackneyed idea or the most grotesquely familiar take on the most original idea and all the variations in between.
Take for example, Julie Taymor's Across The Universe and Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. Both filmmakers are inspired to great chance taking that reflects art forms of all media. Both films are loaded with visions that you simply cannot find anywhere else. Yet at the same time, Taymor's vision for her Beatles film, as inspired as many of her visionary moments are, is limited by a structural conceit best exemplified by another Beatles catalog film, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. And even her passion for challenging imagery is not all so unlike the Cirque de Soleil show, Love.
Meanwhile, Haynes is doing a biopic without a character who carries the name of the focus, Bob Dylan, uses six characters to represent six sides of one man, tells his story out of time sequence though in emotional sequence, and lays out extremely familiar music and real-life characters (Dylan and otherwise), but manages to make it always feel like something more than a biopic.
Another flashback to the 70s era is Sean Penn's Into The Wild, which is in many ways a classic hippie-era road movie that happens to be attached to a true life story. Like predecessor Easy Rider, directed by Sean Penn comrade Dennis Hopper, the film does not fear exploring the darker side of human nature or life ... though by many standards, it is a feel good film.Is it unkind to call Ang Lee's Mandarin language dreamy epic Lust, Caution a combination of Wong Kar Wai's style and Verhoeven's Black Book. The Verhoeven film was called Showgirl's List by some of its greatest supporters.
Can I call Reservation Road 5 ¼ Grams while not a fan, while thinking of the much better Things We Lost In The Fire as 21 Grams meets Light Sleeper meets the very specific style of Suzanne Bier?
Is Disney's Dan In Real Life really Miss Sunshine's Uncle At The Wedding or a non-Christmasy, breast cancer-free remake of The Family Stone.
Enchanted is a very interesting spin through Disneyana, combining the animated empire with the empire's feel good Thanksgiving live action family hits, with some of the cynicism that touches Pixar films, with Susan Sarandon as this film's Cruella.
And the next film from Team Apatow (this time, with Jake Kasden co-writing and directing) is Walk Hard ... an amalgamation of every music biopic ever made, but again, trying to be something singular that stands on its own, not just a parody movie in the style of Scary Movie or Airplane.
Thing is, I'm sure than many of the filmmakers I am writing about here, asked about the connections between their work and prior works would be upset and a bit insulted. But the stigma associated with variations should be peeled back at this point. Sure, every once in a while there is a true original like Lars & The Real Girl. But even in discussing that film in any kind of depth, you can start to see a general theme in the movie waters about, in this case, the search for self at a moment when the meaning of being a man or a woman in this society is especially challenging.
The real question is how to empower audiences to express their interest in more complicated ideas. The WB ads for Michael Clayton are pretty great ... selling the sizzle in the movie instead of the complex ideas ... and God bless, because they will get more people into the theater to experience the quality adult filmmaking by narrowing that vision.
On the other hand, you have DreamAmount selling The Heartbreak Kid remake based on the wacky wife -- played in the original by Elaine May's daughter, the quirky Jeannie Berlin, while in this version supermodelesque Malin Akerman plays the newlywed gone wrong -- and completely leaving out the "other woman," played by supermodelesque Cybil Sheppard in the original (here by Michelle Monaghan). What's the big joke in the ads? Someday, Malin Akerman could become fat!!! No wonder he wants to leave her! (Oy!)
I will assume that the Farrellys find a sweet way to walk this very difficult tightrope. But how could you sell the tightrope instead of distracting audiences from its existence? And what will best free the artists to do the work, embrace their influences, and deliver films that say more than, "Buy a ticket, damn you!"
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