Self-Sabotage for Success - CASINO

Summer is a time for living dangerously and nowhere is life more dangerous than in the movies about gambling.  Moviemaking is a recklessly expensive venture to begin with (CASINO cost $50 million, enough to build a casino in itself) and no investor/producer ever knows for sure that the film won't bomb and they'll lose it all, baby. It's a roll of the dice. And the mob's been associated one way or another with Hollywood since the beginning, from Al Capone's boys acting as technical advisors on the 1932 original SCARFACE to "this is the girl" in MULHOLLAND DR. Wherever there's big money and trade unions, the mob is there, and Hollywood has both, so rolling the dice on a film about the mob rolling dice on a plan to lure ducats out of America's pockets is so meta it can't fail... it's a sure thing baby, a hot tip, a combo blackjack table and funhouse room of mirrors. 

And thanks to the internet, gambling isn't just limited to Vegas, as online poker lets you live the giddy rush of Vegas from your own home. Things are changing, and the criminal element can't keep up, which is why Scorsese's film looks back to the mobster version of Vegas' heyday, a tangent moment to the Rat Pack's OCEAN'S ELEVEN, which played up the glamour, drunkenness and class, but kept it light. If it's meant as a lark, perpetrated by attractive people, robbing a casino is far less evil, somehow, than the actual operation of one. CASINO is way different: Scorsese knows that to be a big winner in gambling is to  keep your tells in check and your calculation of odds on point, ideally without cheating.

In other words, to be lucky at cards you must be unlucky at love--for love makes those things impossible. No one knows why except that some karmic law of averages is involved. Heartbreak and misery on the other hand, increases your luck. "You don't have a girl pining for you somewhere," a sharpie consoles William Demarest after winning all his schmeckles in LADY EVE, "that often explains it." He does (remember "So long, Lula - I'll send you a postcard.")

It's just the karmic law of averages, baby. So what in the end, is a priority for a wise guy? To keep his love life ever in shambles, intentionally (albeit unconsciously). Thus the career gambler invariably has to continually sabotage his chances at a happy love life, as Robert De Niro's character does in CASINO--marrying a hottie hustler who says up front she doesn't love him--in order to preserve his luck at cards. One hopes it's not just that he's too blind to his own lack of self-awareness, or compassion for others in the process. One hopes in vain. He really seems to think he'll change her feelings, will come around, but all he's doing is buying her off.

I've already covered the delights of Robert Altman's 1974 underseen CALIFORNIA SPLIT (here) but those were happy gamblers - in love with the thrill of riding a streak - and falling into despair as soon as they cash out. CASINO is the opposite, the view from the other side of the one-way mirror -- and the danger and exaltation of living in a 'paradise' designed by shady guys who think comped cocktails, air conditioning, prostitutes in tail feathers and Sinatra nightly constitutes real class. For them, Vegas is a playground where a regular guy can live the gangster arc of winning the world only to lose one's shirt, but on a small manageable scale (without jail or death at the end). Who wouldn't want that kind of rush, even if it's on a scale suited to their small potatoes lifestyle? Why else do we watch films about gangsters, if not for the vicarious thrills, the vicarious paranoia and the final dislodging from vicariousness--when the gangster dies, the credits roll, and we go scurrying out into the light and back to our daily grinds and loved ones, grateful to not be so lucky at cards after all? We're the gangster's fair-weather friends - there to share his glory, gone when it's time to face the music.

Giddy rushes aside, CASINO is fraught with problems, none more glaring than the shadow of its predecessor, GOODFELLAS. From the punchy wiseguy narration to the long tracking shots packed with period rock music and beautiful-ugly old Italian faces, the Scorsese aesthetic we all fell in love with is back, but there's been so many imitations in the interim it seems like Scorsese is just another schmuck imitating himself. Now Joe Pesci is now so typecast as the rabid animal the only way he can outdo his legendary role as Joey (see one of my very first-ever posts on Acidemic, 'That Joey, he's a wild one) is to up the shocking violence ante. Pesci doesn't drop the ball here so much as hold it so tight it deflates. He looks older and stockier, his make-up more orange (to indicate a desert tan?), his belly paunchier, his sneer flash frozen, like a Madame Tussaud piece swollen from being left too long in the vat. When he throws his massive tantrums he's not scary-fun like he was in GOODFELLAS, just alarming. He's as trapped by the irresistible momentum of Scorsese's period gangster rhythm as a fly on an express train. The force of the forward movement broadens him around the edges until he splats.

The Orangeman

With the critics primed to dutifully if joylessly adore her all the while, Sharon Stone takes over the last chunk of the action, turning a sad vixen's shaking the bars of her cage marriage into a shrill and humorless bid for Oscar respectability. She's intense but the whole thing smacks of effort. Do you think Barbara Stanwyck ever 'tried' to blow us away with her raw force? She merely released what was always inside her, the tigress. Stanwyck knew that before she unleashed her raw tigress force her audience needed modulation, dynamics, some wit and warmth amidst the rock formations. Stone just wants us to see how Joan Crawfordianly hard she's trying. But hardness without softness, darkness without lightness, what is that? It might be Great Acting, but it's not riveting, more like watching a strange couple fighting at a restaurant -feeling only a mix of embarrassment, weariness and concern.

Whatever she's supposed to be conveying, it doesn't deserve the acres of tantrum space Scorsese carves out for it in the final act of CASINO. Verhoeven in BASIC INSTINCT and TOTAL RECALL knew how to use Stone's Bette Davis imperiousness and Jane Fonda insecurity combo as part of a comic book tapestry. He knew she was a delicious villainess rather than an 'identifiable' heroine. A director like Sidney Lumet or Nicholas Ray, or George Cukor might have helped Stone reign in some of her less successful ideas and enable her to win an Oscar, but without a genius who loves and can direct powerful women (and Scorsese is about as far from that as a great director can get), Stone falls into the same morass that snared Annette Bening in AMERICAN BEAUTY, the morass wherein female rage against the patriarchal machine comes out as abrasive, ineffectual spite, all while the infantile, unconsciously misogynistic director smiles and nods.

But it's no secret- everyone knows romance and female characters (ALICE aside) aren't Scorsese's strong point. He lives and breathes cigar smoke from the boys in the back room. His films about dangerous hoods work because he truly 'feels' the threat of violence, knows the texture of the mean streets, hires actual Little Italy characters (including his own mother) and makes effective, occasionally sickening, use of cattle prods, spittle, baseball bats and beatings. In the lengthy kinetic montage wherein De Niro's narration takes us through the process of the skim we're off into the blissful realm of pure cinema, and a solid hour of running time evaporates like crack, but we still have two hours to go and by the home stretch of the film, the woman has landed.

Try as I might I can never really give a shit about the fate of her marriage with De Niro's obsessive casino boss, so I spend these scenes admiring the elaborately gaudy outfits she wears, the fringe jacket and smoky blonde hair cuts as she angrily packs her suitcase and calls her old pimp (James Woods, 'lighting up' the screen) for emotional support. We only see the happy Sharon Stone in an initial slow mo montage of her strolling through the casino, tossing chips and duking parking attendants. The rest of the film she's moping by the phone, sobbing hysterically or otherwise chewing all available scenery in coke/booze-amped despair. Scorsese might have allowed us to see her happy and jubilant within the marriage itself once or twice, as opposed to merely doing her job posing like a trophy in public before collapsing into tantrums at home. Instead De Niro's schmuck of a casino manager doesn't even get the wan smile a legitimate john might earn, i.e. she won't even fake liking him. As one who makes a living on gambling, it's kind of odd that--even knowing the outcome from the start--he bets everything he has on Ginger to change her mind, and seems genuinely shocked when she doesn't like him any better even after having a kid.

Thus the only explanation for putting all his eggs in such a shitty basket might be that De Niro unconsciously figures being unlucky in love means being lucky at cards, so deliberately sabotaging any chance at happiness in his personal life ensures continued winning streaks.

Maybe he's right. 

While Scorsese too is on a winning streak, for that great opening hour or two, in the end it's his do-no-wrong reputation that brings him low. Like the master gunfighter in the western where every hotshot snotnose with an iron on his hip wants to challenge him in order to build their own legends, every young punk out there imitates Scorsese, and as a result he's as insecure and second-guessing about his own genius as Malick or Kubrick, slowly losing touch with his nitty gritty acumen through  the thick fog of his adoring legions, none of whom would dare point out when a scene is going to hell.

That's why CASINO is De Niro's last brilliant film, as well as the first of his bad ones. You can feel the gambler's luck turning halfway through, right around the time De Niro fires Joe Bob Briggs, nephew of a Nevada gaming commission bigwig, and refuses to even hire him back "somewhere farther down the trough," though the politician makes it clear De Niro's going to wind up losing his license if he doesn't comply.  How did someone so smart get suddenly so stupid... twice? Why would De Niro fuck up a good thing with the gaming commission just by insisting on firing a dopey relative of a high end Nevada politician? De Niro then seems surprised when he loses his license appeal, just as he's surprised when Ginger tries to run away. It just doesn't fit that a schmuck this dumb would be smart enough to get so far in the first half of the film. He been takin' stoopid pills? He go to Vegas to get stupid? 

By the same token, why did Marty think his next project after GOODFELLAS (and before CASINO) should be AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)? I'm not saying one should never wander from his own back yard (though technically I guess he didn't), but if you can't find anything new to talk about within it, maybe your just not looking hard enough. The man who found Shakespeare within the language of a Brooklyn gangster movie doesn't need to do actual Shakespeare. What does he find, then, except that his fan base can be pushed just so fur and no further?

For a director who suddenly could do any project he wanted to decide to film some creaky Edith Wharton tale in a Merchant Ivory-just-with-more-elaborate-tracking-shots style is telling of Marty's deep-rooted insecurity and doomed drive for bourgeois respectability. Sure the film is great in its way, Daniel Day Lewis rocks it, but why not let the Brits do that posh shit?  What made the clans of mobsters in early Scorsese so fun was their boorish blue collar philistinism version of wealth and power. Imagine if the first thing Henry Hill did with his newfound success was buy a box at the opera, a polo pony, and a subscription to The New York Times? Yuck. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an artist of the streets is success amongst the hoi polloi, resulting in the sudden ill-advised need to break into the one class of people who momentarily welcome you into their inner circle the way gangsters might a flush chump to their upstairs poker game. Like Sinatra angling for the slumming rich girl virgin instead of the adoring floozy in SOME CAME RUNNING, his grass-is-greener class envy is showing.

I can only presume that karmic law is still at work, sometimes the worst that can happen to a gambler is to win so big that no future jackpot can ever measure up. Surrounded by imitators trying to duplicate your winning formula, you eventually wind up imitating them and your comfort zone shrinks around you like a soaking wet straitjacket. Soon even the moon looks like just another cracked poker chip, and the electric pop style you invented through hard work and termite art genius seems as derivative as hell. CASINO is the proof Marty can't go home again. I can't even watch my old GOODFELLAS DVD anymore as it seems derivative and played to death (not unlike SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) thanks to BLOW, SNATCH, MASTER OF WAR, TRAINSPOTTING, AMERICAN GANGSTER, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, MIDDLE MEN (see "Gotta get the papez, get the papez" or Johnny Two TImes, Because He Said Everything Twice)

And that's that.

Are You Lonesome, Automaton: Terminator and Halloween vs. HUGO / or Woman is the Father of Horror

I am a mechanical man

And I do the best I can

Because I have my Family

   -- Charles Manson ("Mechanical Man")

Was it chance I saw Hugo (2011) and The Terminator (1984) in the same day and Halloween (1978) the next? Three tales of automatons... one amok and one clockwork and one clockwork amok, all about going into the past, as it were, to either repair or destroy icons, be they girls or auteurs.

First the first two: with amazing actors glassening up their eyes and amazing photographers capturing the play of light therein, you don't have much of a chance to stay unmoved on an emotional Sunday afternoon watching Hugo, but the clockwork momentum and awe and everything coming synchroniciously true was much more machine-like than the pre-CGI Terminator; in other words the science fiction film seems ancient and primitive while the nostalgic look back to the silent film era is futuristic slick --the true 'tech noir'.

Like Scorsese, I know there's no getting past the space-time conundrum of my own memories, and like any film critic / theorist I love to dredge long lost celluloid from beneath the skittering heels of post-industrial society. The resurfaced and belatedly lauded (within Hugo) Méliès is just perhaps the latest/first example of a reflexive Cine-Lazarus resurrection in cinematic memory (his films were melted down to make shoe heels during ze war). Alas such resurrections are subject to an unspoken bourgeois law that says ahead-of-their-time 'underground' artists must lie buried for not less than one and ideally not more than seven decades before being exhumed and wept over by the wonderful wizard of film curation, who gives them something better than life: a retrospective! But Hugo's tin man's heart-shaped key can't compete with its own clockwork orange-hued enshrinement in the perma-pantheon as far as shiny tokens. Though the artist's work has not changed its essential form, the world has tick-tocked so many times around the orb that old is new, quaint is revolutionary; whimsical antiquation is post-modern; cheap drive-in fodder and newsprint comic books are hundred million dollar box office business; and night table films about film preservation are filled with enough clocks you'll never have to reach very far to smash the snooze button on the industrial age for another two hours of hand color-tinted dreams...

The problems in Hugo lie with the heart-shaped key (as Sarah's answering machine puts it, "machines need love too"), indication someone convinced old Marty that we need a catchy symbol to recognize a film, and the Méliès 'brand' of that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye must be recognized as iconic (ever try to watch Trip to the Moon in one sitting? Sure it's imaginative but it's also boring - all static long shots), and the douche-chilled bouts of bouncily orchestrated whimsy in the cutaways to the budding romance between old dude and the old lady who sits at the cafe, --oui, monsieur, but she has, 'ow you say, the bitey dog?-- So he gets a dog of opposite gender for to woo said old lady. This contrasts in cakey layers with the plucky orphan film lover's Dickensian bouts with the evil stationmaster (Borat); and in the station works a flower girl (Emily Mortimer) who lost a brother the way the stationmaster lost his leg, and Méliès lost his negatives... in zee Great War! Ze Jews made shoes mit dem. It all must be recognized and underlined and sugar-flecked for easy patenting. Sure, I cried. But I felt cheap for doing so. I felt like someone was trying to be Ron Howard, and that's a bad thing when that someone is already Martin Scorsese.


Then there's The Terminator, a film that makes me want to rescue from obscurity that old James Cameron, not the Titanic control freak, the Pirhana 2 protege.  I remember seeing the trailer for The Terminator at the Montgomeryville Drive-In (the main feature was C.H.U.D!) Shuffled in with about six other similar-looking indie sci fi-ish titles, The Terminator looked cheap, sleazy and we in the car, all Conan fans, loudly mourned how far Arnold had fallen since 1982. Focusing on the sad-eyed New Wave disco Tech Noir, with its tacky neon and Arnold dressed like  the kind of guy who usually has Rutger Hauer or a naked screaming woman reflecting in his Gucci sunglasses.

Of course that's not the way it panned out; the reviews glowed and the box office soared, and my jaw dropped in pleased amazement. I remember seeing Terminator by myself up in Woodbridge to get away from my family Thanksgiving day in 1984 and lord knows I felt pretty wowed. The trouble was that it became too popular. Overnight Cameron became an auteur, the most recognized newly minted wunderkind to emerge from the exploitation genre since John Carpenter in 1978 with Halloween. And if you meshed Hugo and Halloween together, wouldn't you have The Terminator? Look at the resemblance of the 'shape' and the mechanical man in the below shots, so many similarities to with the Sarah's roommate and her boyfriend and PJ Soles and hers, right down to the getting killed going for a post-sex snack, the annoying rock headphone-wearing, the presumption--as with so many modern cell phone users--that being myopically absorbed makes you invulnerable, etc.

 

1. Automaton!: The idea of the automaton goes back to the 1890s (see below right) and was forgotten by the 1920s, but the automaton killer thing began again with Halloween (or maybe the 1940s Mummy sequels). Of course I'm talking about the slow moving but unstoppable variety, the shambling shapes who can't be killed yet are not alive, and are already slowed yet won't be stopped. And like The Terminator, Halloween was a scrappy independent low budget ($6 million; Halloween was $320K) thriller that wound up being iconic and inspiring many much bigger-budgeted imitations, all of which corresponds to the figure of the forgotten auteur and his lost gem 'automaton.' The filmmaker's own alienation from the actual machinations of projection, of the mechanism of screening and seeing the film with an audience (aside from the premiere), anxiety about the cross-country marketing and promotion, and the obsessive need to tinker, to keep taking things in and out of the final cut until the last possible moment. What does it all deconstruct to?

"Draughtsman-Writer" by Henri Maillardet c. 1800

The surrealist concept of 'automatic writing' is probably at the farthest extreme of big budget Hollywood moviemaking: the first is unadulterated raw unconscious, the second has been tooled by a team to wring maximum suspense and greatness, with dozens of unionized voices pitching in and every creative decision having to eventually boil down to entries in a budget ledger. The whole mission becomes capturing the blazing brilliance of the automatic writing session inside the carefully constructed and staggeringly complicated mechanism of filmmaking. It's what occurred to me watching the mechanical man in Hugo start to draw... we don't know what the metal hand will write or create, but neither do we know what our own hand will write during automatic writing... it becomes the opposite end of the Hugo spectrum, the mechanical voice, SKYNET's distant cousin, reaching from beyond the well-guarded door to hopefully scribble something accessible and profound: "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that." or "we think of the key, each in his prison / thinking of the key, each confirms a prison."

2. Women are the fathers of Horror - And now, gender controversy comes into the mix, because creating mechanical people and automaton killers is a man thing, his approximation of the birth giving experience. The mad scientist is the classic Apollonian archetype, attempting to replace the chthonic madness of woman's birth canal with living tissue over titanium endoskeleton... or big fat cogs. The man rejects reality and creates his own, either a shape, a tower, an automaton, a poem, a science fiction or horror film...

So wouldn't it follow that women, then, are perhaps the 'fathers' of these creations, the automatons, and therefore of all the best science fiction and horror films? Look over the roster and you see women right behind the scenes, letting the man take the director credit, and instead working as producer and writer, script supervisor, and sometimes star

Consider yet another Halloween-Terminator similarity: in both films the target of the monster is a normal, good-hearted girl who locates her true heroic self in the course of events, and both films transcend cheap boy's club sexuality and feel more assured about gender than a genre picture had seemed capable of prior to. And a look at the credits reveals why: women were actively involved, as writers and/or producers, in both productions: Debra Hill in Halloween and Gale Ann Hurd in Terminator, and though their contributions tend to go unrecognized in the rush to canonize directors like Carpenter and Cameron, looking at the later works of each lady you see a lot of the same wit and charm that made both these early films so successful, a wit and charm lacking in the director's work without them. For example Hill also worked with Carpenter on The Fog and Escape from New York and Hurd worked on Cameron's Terminator 2, Aliens, and The Abyss. These films all have a spark and wit and self-effacing deadpan soul that is lacking in later work by the men (unfertilized eggs, if you will). The trick of course is to find and then honor the woman creative voice who understands the masculine psyche without being contemptuous of it (the genius of this being Katheryn Bigelow, below w/ Oscars).

Debra Hill, left

Within the context of Hugo we have the female character played by Chloe Grace-Moritz who, in the end, finds her own groove by deciding to write the book whose adaptation you have just seen. So in a way she's also a female 'producer' helping a male's automated vision make it to the screen, filtering the material through feminine perspective, watching from on high as a man expresses through art his own weird gender-fucked procreation. Like Hurd and Hill, Moritz is participating in the rearing of a film--through support and input the way a husband would in the rearing of the child. Just as a dad helped conceive the actual child, and may help raise it, he will never get the auteur credit for the child's existence, that credit belongs to the woman, no matter what part dad had in it. So it is that great sci-fi and horror films seem to depends on women like Hurd and Hill, who become, in a way, the fathers (Scorsese of course has genius editor Thelma Schoonmaker;  Argento had Nicolodi, even George Lucas had Marcia, the list goes on, and the dip in quality after their split is always noticeable. (Hitchcock stayed the course with wife Alma, so his work stayed good),

Blue Meanies: (from top) Terminator, Halloween, Hugo

3. The Gears: In the end, our 'submission' to the process of entering a film 'dream state' is an interface with a machine - our brains becoming clockwork, revolving with the turning reels of film, the gears and wattage of the projector.  The actual movie may have cost millions to make; it may have been made by talented craftsman tinkering for months, years or it may have cost just a few hundred thousand, shot and edited in a few weeks, but the final result is always the same (as is ticket price): it all boils down to a machine spitting encoded light and shadow out onto a white screen in some suburban multiplex. We enter collective hypnosis willingly - leaving our necks and heads exposed to the person in the row behind us who just might stick a knife through the base of our skull. Sex and sleep may leave you vulnerable to killers onscreen, but film watching is to actually invite them in. 

But it's okay, they're not human - just electromagnetic waves.  We've invited in the machine. Hopefully it's not, you know, become sentient. 

Man Ray - Rayograph

We repress or ignore this cinematic mechanism element when surrendering to a movie (unless it's out of focus, or too quiet, or the sound is out of sync, or the theater is too hot or cold) as easily as we forget that we--personally and finally-- could become raw meat in the blink of an eye on the highway, or that 80% of the voices we hear tend to be electronically reproduced, that we barely speak anymore except to order food... on the phone. The automaton then comes as an eruption of the mechanism even further into consciousness, a black hole opening up in the center of the film, fixing to turn us all into mecha-aberrations, like Chaplin threading through the machine in Modern Times, or Sarah Connor in the crushing metal compactor in the Terminator climax.

To avoid this we like to keep a respectful distance from the mechanism itself, we hide the wires behind the walls, but as we prepare for 2012 it becomes pretty terrifying to realize how hopelessly addicted we are to electricity. One magnetic pulse and we will be totally lost--everything digital wiped blank in the blink of an eye. The tactile will survive, like celluloid, there just wont be any way to project it. 

The Terminator and the mechanical man in Hugo are both examples of machines that don't use electricity, that would survive the pulse - one just needs to be wound up, the other is nuclear-powered. Neither needs an outlet. 

They, alone, are truly independent. Autonomous, far freer than ourselves.

blood and gears (from top: Hugo, Modern Times, Terminator)

4. False Nostalgia Syndrome - Like a suspicious number of films nominated for a 2011 Oscar, Hugo bathes in nostalgia for pre-WWI silent film whimsy, recalling Modern Times if it was remembered by the film scholar who managed to find its lost reel in a mislabeled can and won a prize, and Scorsese is certainly a major savior of film preservation, but is his nostalgia enough to warrant the 'greatness' label for Méliès? Is the subject even a worthy entry in the oeuvre of the man who made Raging Bull and Goodfellas? When dealing with the working class Italian neighborhood of Little Italy or Brooklyn, Scorsese gives us 'real' nostalgia, as in he 'really' witnessed it. For an escapist like myself, Hugo seems as suspiciously self-indulgent as Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. These are the fantasias of pampered rich kids who have been able to spend their lives tinkering with sound and image and now wonder if maybe, if they could travel back in time, then even Earnest Hemingway would call them geniuses. They'd be able to recognize themselves in work by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and get to drink 'real' absinthe. It works as their fantasy, but it can't work as ours because they've inhaled the fun out of it, and left us nothing but a shrine to their own desire, nothing but the act of showing us something that meant something to them when they were young and dumb like they think we are now. 

The Terminator on the other hand is my experienced moment of childhood whimsy (well, teenagerdom - right at the time I was changing from comic book nerd to punk rocker)--and revisiting the film today it seems, at least on the surface, refreshingly trashy. With its pouffy hair, pastel clothing, Italian rock synthesizers, rear screen-projected stop motion animation, copious neon, pet iguana, and casual sex roommate getting killed off slasher-style, this pre-digital futuristic film is the 'real' wake-up to nostalgia that Hugo can only catch from a fleeting Parisian postcard, that is, unless Scorsese actually remembers going to films at the turn of the century, pinning that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye image on his bedroom door to anger his mama. (Mama, it's just-a la luna.) Because without that genuine connection, only an egoist would think he could deliver any real meaning... unless he admitted Méliès films lacked narrative thrust, and that--depending on how long it's been since we saw our favorite childhood films--our expectations are seldom met. 

Paradoxically, it's in not meeting expectations the actual magic occurs. It's the very gritty low budget tangibility, the tactile vividness, of the 1984 Terminator that somehow makes it seem more alive today than a CGI-sandblasted 2011 film like Hugo. No one knew at the time of Terminator's making that "I'll be back" would become such a catch phrase, to the point there was no way avoid its embarrassing repetition in the sequels. They became a slave to a tossaway line, doomed to repeat and repeat every time someone puts in a nickel and turns the crank.

The original Terminator is a movie free of that kind of presumption and reptition; it presumes it won't be loved any more than most sci-fi down-and-dirty action pics, which is why it's so indelible. Hugo all but tells us we have to let its magic symbols -- the rocket-in-the-moon's-eye, the heart key--into our hall of future golden memories, to make this an Xmas staple to get gooey with grandma over. But for me, even though I well-knew of Méliès beforehand, and I had his Trip to the Moon on super 8mm and we'd project it over our drummer in our band's light show in 1986-9, what that moon makes me think of all these decades later is "Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, another recreation that doesn't even bother with the rocket in the moon's eye shot... to its credit. Instead, the Pumpkins take the look and feel of Méliès' pre-modernist world's fair whimsicality and then update it to rock, speeding up the imagery and adding deep emotional hooks.

Scorsese instead tries to slow us all down into Méliès' level, to put the film in a shrine or museum and destroy its last link to the real world. If Hugo were truly to be worthy of the Scorsese canon it might end, for example, with the audience slowly realizing that the static long shots and endless flurries of spastic activity make Méliès' films kind of boring (except maybe on a huge screen so the actors seem approx the size they would be as actors on the stage). Though undeniably creative and elaborate, they're hung up on the magic celluloid provides at the cost of resonance and narrative cohesion. Instead we see a lot of things disappear and reappear as if that never gets old. Today these films only capture attention when used in a new context, a collage or lightshow. Scorsese would have been wiser to try and capture the chaotic making of the films, jilting Hugo altogether. And hey, he fixes the hand-tinting and slyly tweaks out the dullness through just showing a long Academy-style montage of highlights from the found Méliès oeuvre at the very end. There's too many train station vignettes to cover to go much farther.

Hugo's unthinking reverence for the great Méliès reminds me of the ending of the 1958 film Teacher's Pet: Clark Gable plays a scrappy self-taught city reporter butting heads and other parts with Doris Day as an over-educated journalism teacher with no real experience, whose father won a Pulitzer for his smalltown paper editorials. Love happens against their will, with Gable preferring to pick fights with Day's platonic pal Gig Young than make love. It's not until Gable finally reads Day's dad's old editorial clipping that he can proclaim "they stink" and come into his own as the confident uneducated lover of an educated gal. Call it reverence prior to investigation, or just bourgeois idolatry, but it takes him the entire film to learn to value his own opinion enough to make this claim, and until he does he's stranded behind this slab of journalistic integrity that he's expected to measure up to even though he's long since surpassed it. I wouldn't even bring it up if it wasn't so relevant to Marty.... Marty, come back to the 'hood! Stop puttin' on those fancy airs. 

I'm not knocking Hugo; I cried and thought Asa Butterfield was eerily perfect, but while I normally love Moretz she seemed ungainly and confused... 

Spielberg's Super 8, which was released the same year as Hugo but not nominated for an Oscar, is nostalgic for the era that I too was a a young super 8mm filmmaker in (the Terminator era), but also proactive about actually making movies instead of revering the makers or cleaning the projector. Scorsese has never really gone self-reflexive that way, to the point its suspect. There's no real salute to the creative energy of the moment in Hugo; it's all about preservation and repairmanship; it has to run all the way around the massive sets five times just to make us think the right hand doesn't know the left from a hole in the wall, through which it hopes to add some Amelie Rear-Window-Psycho insights without drawing attention to its own absurdly over-qualified self-awareness.

Eyes of Laura Mars... or Supergirl?

 Super 8 on the other hand is just as top heavy but it fights from its gut; it kicks and scratches and its orphans are only half-orphans and the pain and the bonding between Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney devastated me a lot more in a lot less time, and seems a more logical film to champion for a ballsy academy. But they weren't awake enough to realize Super 8 isn't about the alien or the evil government but about kids carving their own sacred space out of the lumpen absence of parents too dumb to know either their own beastliness or their kids' frail genius. The alien in Super 8 suggest what might have happened to ET if he'd not been able to phone home, or if we abducted the greys at the end of Close Encounters. In other words, he's pissed! He's the perfect reflection of the suburban teen forever denied any form of dangerous self-expression ala Over the Edge or Rise of the Planet of the Apes. No wonder, then, the old timer Academy dismissed Super 8, probably with the glint of fear in their eyes.

Super 8

Final anecdote: I had my own Hugo moment in 1997 whilst out of my mind on acid up at a friend's big weekend party at her Swiss chalet in the Catskills. It was gorgeous night under the stars and everyone spread out under a massive blanket on the ground, facing the blank white side of the house. Behind them I set up my old super 8 projector on a picnic table bench and projected on the wall an old clip reel from 1931's Dracula, unintentionally at the wrong (slower) speed setting, and since I was tripping I had no way of knowing. An already slow movie became dripping with poetry as that slowness was doubled into a total dream state. Is there a more indelible image of death at 12 frames a second than black-and-white Helen Chandler as Mina, her voice now almost manlike in its druggy depths, slowly explaining her dream of the room becoming filled with mist? As I crouched hallucinating into the weird gears and mechanisms of the projector, threading the machine like some old Rumpelstilskin out of time, shut out by choice and inclination from the orgy of physical warmth going on in front of me with my friends, who lay in a row under a huge zipped together sleeping bag, I felt like an outsider, yet in command. They were watching the films of course, but also doing physical stuff under the covers of which I knew not -- e they would be the last people to notice how... sloow David Manners was talking. He finally sounded like a man.

 

So there I I was alone, in front, in the cool damp of the night, threading my machine to dazzle them with slow motion vampires from 1931, and while most nights my feeling of disconnectedness would shatter me more than any constant drip of bourbon could repair, that night, under the stars, I accepted my role as 'projectionist' and gave up my hunger for the golden hair and sleeping bag sense of belonging. It all came into focus for me in that moment, and though my friends were all making more money than I was via advertising and computer network maintenance, and were basking in their ability to create human warmth and self-confidence, not all of us can turn down our genius enough to lapse into the tactile bonding of more socialized, less alcoholic peoples. But they accepted me, loved me, I knew that, and meanwhile I had Bela Lugosi... and I was running the films, and here in this Alpine heaven I had proven, despite my lumpen clay demonic self-consciousness, the gravity dragging me back to my level of cinematic isolation, that I belonged. 

If that doesn't make me a Hugo, I don't know what does, or a Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in The Terminator, who is also in his way, an archivist, going back in time to preserve some imperiled damsel in mid-bloom. Don't we all hope some Hugo is going to dig up our little forgotten super 8mm films up from some garage sale attic one day? Or some collector of my old hand-drawn comic books look me up in hushed awe? And I'll find out there's a whole cult around me, and they thought I was dead, and --oh wait. maybe I am?

"A mistake is made."

This is what non-family man artists do instead of having real human children of our own and wondering if they'll ever call us once they move out: we make them out of clay and wire and words and weird alchemical machinations, hoping some version of ourselves in a future generation will come along and figure out what we were trying to say. The Mechanical Man's reproductive organ is a camera but women don't need to have one since they can have real babies... Like Manson in the top quote, they have 'a family.' The camera is there already - the man brought it, because he does what he can. 

When will intelligent women stop writing about man's obsession with giving life to the dead, as if it's she who should be jealous?! Honey, why do you think we're doing it. 

We build it to impress you.

We use it to escape you.

We escape from it,

too late.

Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley (Bride of Frankenstein)

The Rutting Season: Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones

The new DVD set of Boardwalk Empire provides a chance for the HBO-less (like me) to finally see if Steve Buscemi can really pull off being a mob kingpin mayor (PS - he can't). Didn't anyone try and direct him? He looks and acts like a hermit crab bewildered at the loss of his shell. The real Nucky was presumably tough. Look at his shark eye stare (in pic below/left). There's only one or two actors in the whole series who seem genuinely menacing, who could ever convincingly threaten (naturally they're the unknowns): Stephen Graham, a terrifying but adorable Al Capone; Vincent Piazza, a poison breeze as Lucky Luciano; Michael Stuhlbarg, growing larger with every inhale as Arnold Rothstein ("ever since Rothstein 'cough' fixed the world series...'cough'")

the 'real' Nucky

 But the 'main' protagonists are a bore. Somewhere one of the show's creators felt there needed to be some moral lip service, so Nucky helps A poor widow and attends temperance meetings; dirty rat layabout Michael Pitt occasionally goes home to make idle promises to his wife and kids; obsessive fed Michael Shannon's bug-eyed mask of a face clamps down in self-righteous lock around his anti-booze assignment; self-appointed narc Kelly Macdonald (the Irish widow / temperance league member / all-around 'saint') flinches at every loud noise (she could use a freaking drink) and sleeps angelically with her two children instead of carnally with her lout husband, in such a icky faux-Fordian blarney way as we're forced to wonder what seedy motive is behind it all: is it male jealousy over the perfect bond between infant and mother or is she sanctifying herself in religiously sentimental poses to put the husband off his night's rutting?

And then, on the other side, the premature baby Buscemi, underloved, raised in an incubator, seeing in Macdonald a kind of moral mother he never had. So while Goodfellas was about brotherhood and Godfather was about becoming the Dark Father,  Boardwalk Empire is about being an infant all over again, i.e. gettin' boozed up at the teat whorehouse then feeling bad about it when mom drags you to church the next day. And that's all. 

Ah Margaret, and of course her husband beats her, for all saintly mothers are beaten by their drunk Irish laborer husbands in these sagas--so that Nucky can be saintly by thrashing him (via remote control) near to death-- and a whore gets cut up because Michael Pitt is sleeping with her (so his cocky idiocy is paid for by female suffering, as usual) and we're forced to behold concave Buscemi wheezing his way through doggy-style sex with La Huerta like he's Red Hot Ryder in 1944'a "Buckaroo Bugs." There are endless elaborate adult-themed strip shows in old theaters with far too little cigar smoke and talk of whores even when whores are not present. Just women. Who deserve more respect. Just for surviving and putting up with all these lout's infantile asses.

This is the kind of show HBO specializes in, giant violent grown male toddlers rutting via smash cuts that preclude all foreplay, delivering sudden tableaux of rough sex and domestic violence in attractive period settings, all but daring us not to wince in embarrassment as women are all either naked floppy-breasted prostitutes or floppy hat-wearing saints. Sure maybe that's how it was, in the post-code movies anyway, but these people's lives have lots of incidents they can pick from--why not go the Mad Men season one route and really get into the nuts and bolts of the business side of bootlegging? There is some of that, but none of it feels researched or lived-in, when you unwind the fancy ribbons, the non-sex incidents have no purpose other than to build up to brutal misogynist violence or more mutually demeaning rear guard rutting (which amounts to the same thing). An equal opportunity offender, if we meet a black bootlegger and see his operation, we can be sure it's only so he can be killed or tortured, his whiskey still burned down, in the next scene, in racially-motivated violence. Why else? Black characters exist for only this purpose in period HBO shows, Anything more complex would be too complicated.... But more complicated for whom, HBO? 'Adults?' They can't really say "adults only" for shows like this, now can they? Only "Parental discretion is advised" - and as HBO illustrates, they are nowhere near the same.

Marty Scorsese directs the first episode like he's still trying to capture that old Goodfella's momentum, but as usual of late he's mired in sumptuous period detail (what happens when you let your art director and cinematographer have too much input) and his insecure streak manifests in not one but TWO suspense-deadening multiple violent scene crosscut climaxes, the sort that were new and weird in the first two Godfather films, but have grown awfully trite since in the intervening dead horse kicking decade/s. Even if Scorsese scores these murders and gunfights to a vaudeville comedy routine replete with drum rolls or a tacky 20s novelty song instead of 60s rock, it's still old and overdone and doesn't work, just like it hasn't worked even for Coppola since he drew from the hell three times too many for Cotton Club.
 

Now, I only watched five episodes so far, but how much is enough?  I stopped because I hated freaking Margaret Schroder's smug decision to rat out the St. Patrick's green beer keg stash to the feds in E5. I subscribe to the Over the Edge credo that a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid, and so she should have been the one who should have got cut up, not that sweet-ass Pitt-lover. And then there's the Buscemi miscasting. He can be mildly impressive, but when he has to deliver lines like "I could have you killed!" he sounds like even he doesn't believe it.

In other HBO News, confirming my dark fears, Game of Thrones is just like Boardwalk Empire and Rome before it, existing in the murky realm where all the violent sexual ravishings that have occurred off-camera in every costume period movie made prior to 1970 finally explode from under their shaggy peat moss burial kilts and into their rutting medium shots. The go-to position in all these HBO series is doggy style, for maximum doggy-style shock-erotic value. On this dark channel, the strong survive and the strong don't woo --they bend their bride over and let fly while all their friends are still drooling in the corners like the no-good brothers in Ride the High Country). God knows how these women ever managed to become lubricated. And as Leonard Maltin notes of Watchmen: "deliberately extreme violence and sexuality seems pointless in this stylized but overly long comic book saga." That could surely apply to every show HBO ever made.

I know, I know: the missionary position is not friendly to the voyeur as the sexual displays occur sandwiched between two wall-like backs but the doggy style is very public and bawdy, and very much about power and submission: the man triumphantly ruts away from a kneeling position, both hands free so he can wave to the cheering throngs or sign important documents using her back as a writing surface; the woman, facing forward, all but paraded in chains down the streets of Carthage, head bowed in submission, the way sleazy HBO and misogynistic jack-o-napes like Scorsese and George R. Martin like it.

Plus, the HBO modus operandi for delivering these sex scenes is the genuinely ingenious use of 'uncanny Oedipal shock'. Instead of the long, tedious build-up to softcore action set to smooth, slow soulful muzak like we used to get in late night Cinemax, these HBO sex scenes do what I call the "smash cut rut" - where the boy and girl meet casually in some public space along the "Hey, Cheryl. How's things?" variety and then smash cut to anout five seconds before the man comes, from behind, camera forward, so we can see the nonplussed/exploited OR passionate/frustrated look in the eyes of the woman but not have to see the dead-eyed animal emptiness in the man's. The cut is so jarring, so contrary to our expectations, it takes a second or two for our objecting/objectifying defenses/senses have time to activate. The effect is jarring, like accidentally walking in on your parents, or accidentally opening the door on a massive coke-fueled orgy while trying to find your coat to leave a party, or being suddenly sexually groped on a bus stop or book store, where it takes a few seconds to realize even what just happened and for the shame and fury (or playa regret) doesn't have time to come roaring up before it's far too late to do anything about it. 

I don't mean to sound too militant feminist, but this raunchy HBO sudden shock sex stuff poses a problem for me because it is so well acted, so artfully and so skillfully rendered.  What on the page is a lewd fantasy imagined in the privacy of one's mind becomes a traumatizing 'adult' reality. It's not 'real' in a novel. I haven't read either the Game of Thrones's or Girl with a Dragon Tattoos, but I imagine they probably come off much less traumatic and degrading in the privacy of the printed page. The French know these things and as Acidemic's French correspondent Severine Benzimra writes:

Sexual scenes aren't supposed to, on this side of the ocean, attract the audience. They represent a part of the life of the character that it is necessary to represent. They aren't meant to excite. Sexual excitation is linked to imagination, which can't be provided by all-audience movies (meaning not the audience of pornographic/erotic movies). This is an idea on which French people wildly discuss and disagree. Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature.

I feel these kind of things should always be poorly acted, or narrated in an affectless tone by one woman to another in the privacy of a Fårö boudoir. Writ in vivid Blu-ray they are simultaneously indulgent and a reprisal against indulgence. They are where the consumerism's frenzied promise of bling and commodified sex and indentured bitches sippin' Cristal go-- not to die but to see the ugly traumatic exterior of such an ugly, antiquated macho fantasy. From the inside out it's all Playboy hot tub fantasy, from the outside in it's tawdry and mutually demeaning. 

This is why a good moral center is so essential for sports teams. We only have to look at the whole Joe Paterno situation to see how the hierarchy of a team mentality can obliterate the feeling of responsibility to the larger society... that's why I'm glad Eli Manning is such a good boy! He-a-writes-a home-a to-a his-momma! That's why I blame HBO. 

 Some things are better as dreams --this we know, we decadent shaggy artists. We know because we tried it all, every pose, every drug, and even when it led us nowhere but depression and despair we kept doing it, til the wheels fell off. And then, finally, we realized art was the only thing that didn't hurt someone else (or ourselves) and leave us feeling skeevy at the end of the day. Despite our libertine credo, our belief it was only social conditioning that made us feel cheap, feeling shitty about it five years too late is who we are. Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire (and even Mad Men) point to a deep-set oral fixation in our country... we're looking back into past for our lost sexual freedoms, because we sure can't find them in the world of today... and this allows us to forget that we lost them on purpose, and deliberately hid them so we couldn't just go back and find them during our later addict mood swings.

Now if a girl likes these sex/rape scenes in these HBO shows, that's fine, let them be turned on. They're allowed to. But I scoff at the argument that it's not sexist since later the girl gets even or rapes back or learns to control her lusty mate to win a kingdom. And we who haven't read the Throne books or seen more than one episode have a right to our shocked response. I liked this response from Carla DiOrio James on Think Progress:

Rather, holding the subject in a deeply personal space, I worry what good these images can do in the collective subconscious of American males. Since the spike in sexually violent images of our Hollywood culture in the 1980's, date rape has spiked accordingly. This spike has not been proven as dramatically in any other country as it has in the US, where male sexuality has become increasingly linked to hyper-violent images.

In some crappy Jess Franco or Jean Rollin movie, rape and sadistic torture can be titillating mainly because it is so fake-looking. In a 70s sex-horror movie, the whip bounces harmlessly off a girl's back leaving a slight trace of pinkish food coloring that's supposed to be blood. The scenes scan as liberating, even paradoxically joyous, because the trauma isn't 'real', and therefore a sense of play coheres - pain and death burlesqued to ease the anxieties of our age. As the great Joseph A. Ziemba of Bleeding Skull wrote in his review of The Possessed: "Blood and mean-spirited torment become instantly hilarious when the torturer can’t keep his wig on."  But etched so vivid by the expert and well-funded HBO craftsmen and acted by solid professionals giving it their all, the rough trade rutting and demeaning sexual servitude of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones are just sad signs that HBO has finally exhausted the stash of sleazy taboos it looted from its now destitute grindhouse neighbors, and it still / hasn't found / what it's looking for. God knows what it will overdo next. What else is even left, outside of being real, real gentle?

Hughes in 4 Hues: CAUGHT, THE CARPETBAGGERS, THE AVIATOR, ICE STATION ZEBRA

A recent rare screening of Max Ophul's Hollywood film CAUGHT (1948) on TCM reveals a Howard Hughes stand-in who's just about the coolest, most terrifying version of them all! Let's look at the way Howard Hughes depictions evolved, or devolved, over the years:

CAUGHT 
1948 - ***1/2
No doubt that Max Ophuls was "a woman's director" and it's through a woman's eyes--an awkward good-girl fotune hunter mix of uncertainty and antithesis played by Barbara Bel Geddes--that we get a load of  Robert Ryan as a sociopathic captain of industry named Smith Ohlrig. Here's a guy with suits so sharply pressed and perfectly tailored he seems like he could smash through a wall without getting them rumpled.  I dug the film and thought he came across as the real hero, especially compared to his rival, James Mason's befuddled Lower East Side doctor. Bel Geddes takes a job as receptionist in Mason's LES poor folk clinic after she finds the life of a trophy dull. Meanwhile she's rich enough to set up a women's shelter all her own if she wasn't such an insufferable martyr.

Ohlrig's the only one who seems to have an inkling of what is best in life: crush your enemies, see them ruined financially before you, and hear the whiny bored sighs of der wimmen. Whether waiting in the car, or at home, all but whinnying over jigsaw puzzles by the cavernous empty fireplace, Ohlrig's women are meant to freeze in place like plastic dolls when he's not around, then spring to life as perfect hostesses when he pops in with subordinates and movie cannisters in the wee hours of the night. Despite its cliche'd soap opera girl torn between money and love narrative, CAUGHT is cool enough to almost turn me around on Ophuls, whom I've long considered insufferably bourgeois. CAUGHT shows me I better simmer down and go look again.

THE CARPETBAGGERS
1961- ***
Great Harold Robbins-bitchy camp dialogue, and the guy from The A-Team, George Peppard, as zillionaire aviator and womanizer Jonas Cord.  As I wrote in an earlier post, Cord and his hot stepmom (Caroll Baker) are like Tony and Cesca in the last reel of SCARFACE ("I can't tell whether I love you or hate you"/ "Both"), while his socialite wife rots at home. Meanwhile, Alan Ladd hangs onto his hat as western hero Nevada Smith, and Leif Erikson is Joanas Sr., who rants at his tomcat progeny: "A man's judged by what's in his head, not in his bed!"

Like Robert Ryan's Hughes in CAUGHT, Peppard's is a taciturn, ruthless businessman workaholic - but unlike CAUGHT he's also highly sexed, and suffused with daddy issues. Such a role might warrant over-playing in less capable hands, but Dmytryk and Peppard are smart enough to never let Jonas smile or betray a hint of emotion other than simmering hatred and  Peppard's voice is marvelously tinged with nasal reverb, like he's always either freshly buzzed or really hungover.

THE AVIATOR
2004 - **1/2
This was the second of the DiCaprio-Scorsese collaborations, and the character is actually supposed to be Hughes, and perhaps for that reason it's a lionization, a mythologizing, rather than a KANE-like expose of a man who owned the world but lost his girl, or something. Instead, we're supposed to swoon as Howard makes model airplanes and boffs chorus girls as his OCD blossoms over the course of a few hand-washing scenes. Also, the script cheats, such as showing Hughes, insane in his screening room, watching WINGS over and over (I guess they couldn't get the rights to ICE STAION ZEBRA!) and suddenly pulling it all together in time to head to D.C. and surmount the odds just by pointing out Alan Alda's investment in United Airlines. Cate Blanchett almost saves it as Hepburn, but the dialogue gives her little room to flourish as anything but a compendium of biography cliches now worn thin from overuse (the golf game, the night flying, the dinner with family, Spence).

For me it's all summed up in the opening scene showing Hughes as a child: his mom is washing him in an ole washtub, a stray light from a high window shining down, illuminating his little arms and chest. The orchestral score swells with import and we're clearly meant to see it as a kind of holy anointing, the boy and his female in pose of supplicated adoration. The scene 'reveals' nothing about the character other than he got spoiled early on with incestuous bathing rituals. Subtextually its an indication of artists like Marty and Leo, who've received way too much press and 'genius' labels, covering their insecurity in layers of money and period costumes and extras and a 'theme' that champions ego even as it seems to critique it (all these movies about the "one man"). Scorsese collides into a brick wall of closed-off persona in DiCaprio, and then tries to make a film around the idea of closed-off persona instead of opening Leo up like an unwilling oyster to the light of day. And so AVIATOR builds the kind of white elephant theme park that RAGING BULL used to kick down. What were the TAXI DRIVER termites for if not to collapse such weary bourgeois edifices?
----
The myth of Hughes endures because he was a rich weirdo who shunned all aspects of the bourgeois elite. He was the Donald Trump of his day but less charismatic and more genuinely introverted. His later germophobia led to a solitary life spent in a screening room, pissing into jars and watching one special film over and over -- a film that's well-known now because of said repeat viewings by Hughes more than any actual quality:

ICE STATION ZEBRA
1968 - ***
Ever since I was a kid I've been fascinated by one aspect of the Hughes legend, his repeat round-the-clock viewings of ICE STATION ZEBRA. Why that movie? Why not the one I once did the same thing with, a similarly arctic adventure, 1951's THE THING? Maybe now I have the answer. A) he didn't have a copy since he probably had a falling out with Howard Hawks, and B) the THING has no submarine, and it has a girl in it.

In the old days my friends--and their dads-- and I had a thing we called: 'waiting for mom to go to bed.' As soon as we heard that patter of feet stop as she boarded her bed, we could commence the real drinking. This cool captain of industry-type father of my friend developed a habit where--after the Mrs. retired-- he'd quietly drink cognac in a snifter and watch DAS BOOT, which is like ICE STATION ZEBRA (both are submarine war films with nary a woman in the cast) over and over. Hearing about this habit, I instantly thought of ZEBRA and Hughes, and the connection was made - submarines, the ocean. Over a long summer spent at their beach house the three of us watched MOBY DICK over six times!

The peculiar appeal of war movies for intelligent, successful men like Hughes and my friend's dad likely involves the fantasy of having clear cut goals, a uniformly competent workforce, a reliable chain of command, and freedom from the anxiety of being around women, of needing to shave or reign in your bad habits, freedom from the chaos of the public sphere (i.e. women) and the orbit of the earth around the sun (it's neither night nor day below the sea). It's comforting to think that, for all their influence and power, at the end of the day rich white dudes just want to get high and hang out somewhere that's flush with poker games, flasks, bonding,and no women to tell them what to do. DodoodooBumbumbum, oh what joy.

Johnny Two Times, because he said everything ad nauseum

That dumb-looking movie released this week, MIDDLE MEN (2010, above) is clearly--just from the preview which is all I ever want to see--modeled on the now-classic GOODFELLAS (1990), i.e. Rags to riches to rags with a male voiceover spoken in disaffected regular guy English ala "We were just a buncha regular guys, hustlin' to make a buck like everybody else." and "I mean we had 24/7 cocktail jet plane lunches, villas, private pools -- it was all there for the taking, and we f**ked it up." All this while period bling flies by in short overlapping crosscuts with slow-mo walking scored to rock or soul classics through nightclubs where everybody knows your name: "All Along the Watchtower" or "Superfly" depending on the race of the protagonist-- overlapped and smash-cut in one movie-length montage that indicates the editor considers this a crazy ass trip - but your mileage is bound to vary.

Off the top of my head, the Fella imitations include: BLOW (2001), LORD OF WAR (2004), to a lesser extent AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007), even 2005's DOMINO, though the last basically gets it right, probably thanks to its real-life subject acting as advisor. I'm sure there are others I haven't seen, like CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, which I also saw the preview for, and remember its use of the now horribly cliche'd "Watchtower" playing over a slow mo walk around a red-lit club as Tom Hanks narrates in the "It was a time when anything could happen... and often did" vein, at least in the preview.

The main ingredient missing, which most director copycats don't understand, is drug culture accuracy. You either know the culture and the effects--and I mean beyond casual using--or you get the details second hand from other films, and any hep person can see the difference a mile off. You don't even have to do the drugs depicted to feel high watching, real detail always shines through: TRAINSPOTTING (1996)  with heroin and GOODFELLAS with coke --you feel that shit, whether you've ever done either -- but most of these imitations forget about the veracity of the culture depicted or the druggy elements inherent in that sort of momentum-based editing and instead just copy the format- becoming like those college campus-sponsored parties where you can't smoke and they don't serve alcohol, and everyone pretends like it doesn't matter and that the party's not lame and they're not losers just acting a role of party goer for each others' illusory benefit. They prefer to ignore the minutiae of the drug world they long to depict, beyond what they read in Rolling Stone.  But boy they long to depict it.

To narrow it down, lets focus on two GOODFELLA-wannabes that I have seen (not always by choice, but by being a second string film critic): LORD OF WAR is "fiction based on true events" which means it's not even based on a true story, the way, say, GOODFELLAS was based on real life mobster Henry Hill's actual memoir (and he acted as 'trip' advisor). BLOW--based on a dealer's memoir written in minimum security prison--lacks any connection with the cocaine and marijuana dealing world it longs to depict. Its director clearly loves GOODFELLAS and proves the point that if you're an L.A. phony who never stepped outside the movie set bubble, your details are going to ring false no matter how many coke parties you've been to. And both BLOW and LORD OF WAR ring as false as loudly GOODFELLAS rings perennially true.

What makes Marty Scorsese's lower rung Italian mob films work so well because, for one reason, he grew up watching wiseguys across the street from his house while he convalesced with a string of respiratory illnesses as a child. When he strays from working class Italian New York, however, he strikes out as often as he connects, i.e. his last four films with his new life partner, Leo DiCaprio (THE DEPARTED excepted, of course, your highness). If he partners with Nicholas Pileggi or Jake La Motta or some tru-baller like that, Marty can make a film so authentic you go into a kind of swooning trance, but with a thug-lite like Leo it's just the Hollywood bubble filming itself through a reflection. The film Marty needs to make would be about Leo: a drama about a once-great actor squandering his romantic lead gifts in order to ape De Niro in roles that he's just too purty fer.

LORD OF WAR on the other hand rests on the conceit that it's a dark political satire. It's important! 60 Minutes-style important. But I left the theater feeling ripped off. Even the little details--Cage laying out a line of coke on the leather car seat each time he drops brother Leto off at rehab; the Darfur-type arms dealer halving a payment of blood diamonds with a machete after conscience-stricken Leto blows up half the arms delivery; the hot models at the Chelsea Piers 'arms convention', winding up in bed with them--ring false and poorly thought out, like writer-director Andrew Nicol is 'trying' to come up with funny little details to mesh into his skeleton framework, like he's quietly sneaking peaks at Robert Mckee's Story while trying to be 'true' to half-remembered facts from some article in Time magazine story he read at the doctor's office. They could have filmed Brecht's Mother Courage and been much better off, or even used it as a reference! Compared to LORD, Mother Courage is a bedrock of gritty authenticity. I know, that's like saying Godard's re-enactment of Vietnam in PIERROT LE FOU is more gritty and authentic than PLATOON.

To lay out the LORD premise: Nic Cage is a Brooklyn Russian-American diner worker who decides he wants to get into arms-dealing. Knowing nothing about it, he goes to an armory convention with his better-looking younger brother (Jordan Catelano, above). The first thing they spy are two hot convention models posing by a big tank, wearing camouflage short shorts. Cage goes up and tries to worm his way into a conversation with someone he recognizes as a top flight arms dealer. Next scene - Cage and brother wake up sleeping next to the hot models in their hotel room. Ta-Daa! Not only does it seem Nicol knows nothing about arms dealing, he doesn't even know anything about conventions, or at any rate, being at a convention when you're just a working class Ukrainian-American shlub trying to break into the big time weapons dealing with no capital instead of just being the guy who made GATTACA (1997). Instead wasting all his money on what are assuredly very expensive ladies. It's important to Nicol that our two Latvian brothers wake up next to these broads to prove they are two wild and crazy guys... but we know the truth - the writer is incapable of penning believable seduction scene or even a prostitute monetary negotiation, let alone fathoming how some connection-less schlub might con his way into arms dealing.

What does it matter? Cage is now "officially" an arms dealer. Later he magically has a Ukraine military General uncle anxious to unload a bunch of discontinued Russian tanks and armaments. How fortunate! If this had been the first step to Cage's rise to power it would make sense. But even this opportunity is blown. Nowhere is there that kind of authentic "shop talk" you would find in, say, THE GODFATHER or THE FRENCH CONNECTION or THERE WILL BE BLOOD or any movie by Robert Altman, Howard Hawks, or Sam Peckinpah, where you soak up the strange lexicon of a particular lifestyle. Going in to see LORD you know just as much about the international arms trade as you do coming out. Hell, IRON MAN tells you more about the international arms trade.

In the end, the GOODFELLAS difference is that Marty knows the minutiae personally - he has a keen eye for authentic Italian detail: the thin slicing of garlic for the sauce while in jail; the way a coked-up Henry gets obsessive about stirring the sauce and breading the veal: "I'm gonna cook all this... I'm gonna cook all this meat!"; the slow peripheral way his own wife becomes a coke head; the snotty babysitter drug mule cutting vegetables; or how each of the mob cronies is a unique character unto himself, like "Johnny Two Times, because he said everything two times."

In Hollywood's GOODFELLA-ripoff cycle, it's now Johnny 20x, who says less each time, but with more money and a voiceover that doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's borrowing even the inflection of words from Ray Liotta. Any good writer would be smart enough to embed him or herself into the sleazy milieu they wish to write about, or interview--in depth--someone who lived through this kind of stuff. (Howard Hawks famously had real mobsters from Al Capone's gang on hand during the shooting of SCARFACE.) But any smug trust fund idiot who saw GOODFELLAS (200x!) thinks he can "do a movie like that" even if he doesn't have a mom like Tommy's, who makes paintings (at right), where "one dog's looking one way, one dog's looking the other way, and this guy's goin; "Whadda ya want from me?"

Another way you can always tell when the filmmakers aren't Marty Scorsese is because all the mobster's clothes look like they're fresh out of the costume department: pure black, ironed and empty of lived-in detail. Nobody smokes or drinks, unless it's 'crucial' for character development, and then it's just one scene, one cigarette, held onto like a kid holds onto the candy version, or one sip of a drink which is then left behind, half-full. A Scorsese character meanwhile smokes until his fucking fingers are yellowed, his curtains dingy, his ashtrays scratched by careless maids.

You can tell even in bar scenes: a guy in a bar in a Scorsese film orders a drink the way a real man orders a drink, "A Cutty and watta" = a Cutty Sark (a scotch) cut with water; "gimme a seven and seven" - that's a Seagram's Seven (blended whiskey) and 7-UP, on the rocks. A guy in a movie like LORD OF WAR says: "Gimme a drink," and the bartender magically knows what that means. In real life, even "Gimme a beer" is total bullshit. Dude, you can't just order 'a beer' at a bar. Be specific! Has anyone ever gotten away with being so vague? Do you want a pint or a half pint, a bottle or a draft? A Bud or a Heineken? We also have 150 microbrews on tap... and if you can't answer her because all you do is watch movies in a plastic bubble, well now you're looking like a grade-A idiot, the kind all the liquor ads pitch to, the young man of means stepping into the post-21 bar tourist class. And how come after drinking a whole drink of presumably straight liquor your face is not flushed, your voice not slurred? Where is the music on the jukebox that makes you have to shout to be heard by the person next to you? Scorsese wouldn't let details like that slide. Scorsese must have actually been to a bar at least once in his life. Imagine that.

As for BLOW (left, 2001), I don't remember hating it quite as much, but I still felt like I was watching someone try to tell the same story as GOODFELLAS without any of the skill, expertise, experience, or patience. I realized early on it would be too weird for my date to suggest we sneak out and duck into something else, so I just made the best of it and marveled that anyone as dumb as the protagonist played by Johnny Depp could even survive one drug run, let alone dozens, before getting busted. The only real part for me was when he's fighting with his bratty-hot Latina wife (Penelope Cruz) while being pulled over for speeding, and in a blind rage she tells the cops he's holding. I had a chill because I could have easily imagined my then-wife, a high-strung but very statuesque Argentine filmmaker, doing just that! Luckily by then I was safely embedded in AA and long since out of 'the biz.' Dude, they should hire me as a drunk/druggie technical advisor. I'd demand everyone finish their drinks and have to talk loud over the jukebox. And no one would get away with ordering "a drink." La putre madre forro! 

You can look all over these other films and you'll never find another moment that even approaches the giddy highs of GOODFELLAS. Even CASINO--Scorsese's own ripoff of GOODFELLAS--never really brought it home (though it's still compulsively re-watchable and hypnotic). So there it is, the way Hollywood steals the thunder but ignores the rain, then wonders why their version of the storm rings so false and no one goes home soaked. We asked for spaghetti and we got cold noodles and ketchup.

 Now you can't even smoke in bars. Or dance (in NYC). Next up, volume limits. Cops with decibel measurers, next a guy going around making sure the ice isn't too cold that it might hurt your widdow toof.

Perhaps part of this horrible sanitizing is the curse of the information age - computer screens take the place of night clubs and all conversations aren't at bars but on IMs. In short, as filmmakers struggle to make stories about the internet into films, we can relax and know that, at least in this decade, being stuck at home in witness protection may not be so bad. We didn't have the internet when GOODFELLAS came out --a lot has changed. Marty now has Leo and screenwriter William Monahan to steer him away from his Italian neighborhood and into the uncharted terrain of Boston accents and shadowy conspiracy, so he's out of "real" details himself. And Johnny Two Times will never get "the papez, the papez" because he hangs frozen on a hook in a meat truck for all our sins. Johnny Two Times! Thank god you never lived to see the papez replaced by the kindles... the kindles.


NOTES:
This post is dedicated to my dear buddy, David Maxwell, who introduced me to Goodfellas and thus changed my life forever - he tried to introduce me to Kindle, but I gots to hold out a little longer.