The primary difference between Terrence Malick’s early work and his later work (i.e., post-20-year hiatus) is that both of his early films were immaculately-conceived, highly-engaging narratives, whereas all of his later films were only the former. And yet, you kind of get the sense that abstract expressionism has always been where Terrence Malick’s head was … that Hollywood and its big-budget demands were simply a means to an end, if not the overriding reason Malick went into self-imposed exile to begin with.

Whereas Malick’s first film, Badlands, was widely recognized – at least by critics – as a landmark piece of cinema, Days of Heaven struggled to find its footing early on. Rumor has it Malick originally wanted Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, or even John Travolta cast in the lead role; that when he and producer Bert Schneider eventually settled on a young Richard Gere, there were constant disagreements concerning how the character (Bill) should look, talk, and behave. Rumor has it that the production process was tedious; that the film ran well over budget; that Malick took more than a year and a half to complete the final editing process; that Paramount originally considered the finished product little more than a box-office flop. In time, that assessment would change.

The majority of location shoots for Days of Heaven were filmed in Alberta, Canada, during the early morning hours or much later in the day, toward twilight. Malick wanted to create a primrose effect, as if the horizon were perpetually on fire (cameras facing southeast during the morning and northwest at night). He blocked out almost every shot as if to avoid the sun entirely. Coincidentally, Days of Heaven became the first major motion picture to design its entire production schedule around the daylight hours (with rehearsals for subsequent scenes taking place throughout the afternoon).

Days of Heaven is the closest Terrence Malick has ever come to any type of Biblical homage. The film includes an honest man, who yields a wealthy harvest. It includes a band of sinners, who visit a plague upon the rich man’s house. It includes the Old Testament notion that Eden is burning. It includes the New Testament notion that he who lives by the sword shall die by it, as well. And yet, Days of Heaven also includes a storyline via which the poor are actually feeding off the rich and every mortal act of vengeance is rendered purely incidental.

Days of Heaven isn’t Malick’s best film (that honor will more than likely always belong to Badlands), but it’s easily better than anything he’s put out since then, which is saying something, really, given the critically-acclaimed body of work Malick has accumulated over the years. While the precise craftsmanship of Malick’s work has continued to evolve in time, the linear narrative and dialogue have pretty much withered away completely. In a sense, the modern movie-going public went one way, and Terrence Malick, the other. All of which renders Days of Heaven an even more important piece of cinema as time marches on.

(Days of Heaven is currently available for streaming via Netflix.)  Continue reading →

“By not revising what you’ve already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during the writing itself: you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way. Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rhythmic thought impact? If he pauses to blow his nose, isn’t he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn’t it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn’t he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, ‘forever holds his tongue’ on the subject, since he’s passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time? Incidentally, as for my bug against periods, that was for the prose in October in the Railroad Earth – very experimental, intended to clack along all the way like a steam engine pulling a one-hundred-car freight with a talky caboose at the end. That was my way at the time and it still can be done if the thinking during the swift writing is confessional and pure and all excited with the life of it. And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and it got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no feeling. Goddamn it, feeling is what I like in art; not craftiness and the hiding of feelings.”

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“There’s a perfectly good medium for directors, and it’s called film. TV is a writer’s medium. I am chauvinistic toward writing because that’s where I came from. And when executives get excited about getting a superstar movie director to direct the pilot of a new TV show, I think to myself, That’s all well and good, but what happens after that? That superstar director goes away, and you’ve still got 100 hours to fill. Who’s the first person on the ground making those 100 hours happen? It’s invariably the writer … I love movies, and I love TV. In TV, you have the time to get deeper into a character, but movies are a two-hour block of time in which we get transported to another place. We’ll always have Paris, and we’ll always have movies. But we’re going through a time, unfortunately, when the big movie studios are run by folks that are more obsessed than ever with the bottom line and who probably love movies less than any studio hierarchy that’s ever existed in my life. Back in the day, when the Irving Thalbergs and Louis B. Mayers ran the business, those guys could bite your head off. Those guys were tough sons of bitches, but they loved movies. They weren’t obsessed with counting beans. The problem with the movie business now is that it’s marketing-driven – driven by demographics, by spreadsheets and flowcharts and all this shit that has nothing to do with storytelling. But the movie itself, the structure of the movie, will always be with us. And occasionally a really great movie for grown-ups does sneak through.“

Baz Luhrmann certainly does know how to throw a party. And it is for this reason that the question on every critic’s lips leading up to the release of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby was whether the film would be all pomp, and no circumstance; all style, and no substance. The answer to that question is, well, mixed. Luhrmann’s Gatsby is the stuff that legends are made of. And by legends I mean absolute fairytales, like Cinderella or Snow White.

Luhrmann imagines a candy-colored dream of New York City that never actually existed. His interpretation is smooth and rhythmic and fluid, and there is a definite poetry about it. But it is the bombastic poetry of Luhrmann, not Fitzgerald – a heightened, kaleidoscopic reality in which the early model cars are super-charged, the music doesn’t match the era, and the costumes might as well be out of this year’s Fall collection.

The real question is not whether Luhrmann is playing fast and loose with the Roaring 20s here (He is). It is whether – as a moviegoer – that happens to be your primary concern. If it is, you’ll more than likely spend the majority of The Great Gatsby rolling your eyes.

Luhrmann takes tremendous liberties throughout, this despite remaining true to most of Fitzgerald’s original story. Along those lines, anyone who has seen Jack Clayton’s 1974 Gatsby will find it difficult to watch Luhrman’s version without comparing the two – most notably, Luhrmann’s decision to cast Carrey Mulligan as the well-to-do Daisy Buchanan. Mulligan, who is usually magnificent, seems wildly out of place here. Her weak attempts at elitism fall flat, especially in deference to the spot-on casting of Mia Farrow in Clayton’s original. To that end, Sam Waterston actually represents a much more believable Nick Carraway, and Bruce Dern, a more indignant Tom Buchanan. Leonardo DiCaprio, on the other hand, holds his own here. He is as good as Robert Redford ever was at portraying Jay Gatsby, if not infinitely more fractured beneath the surface.

In terms of sheer spectacle, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is absolutely remarkable. Your eye is constantly drawn to something – if not several somethings – bouncing back and forth across the frame. This movie makes you long for summer lawn parties and rue the empty pang of early autumn. It’s a bright and shimmering epic, which may very well be the reason it does not hold up well throughout the long-term. For, as Daisy Buchanan very astutely points out during the early going of Mr. Luhrmann’s film, “All the bright, precious things fade fast, and they don’t ever come back.”

Daisy Buchanan never actually said that during Fitzgerald’s original novel, of course.

The real Daisy Buchanan wouldn’t ever have said that, Old Sport.

(The Great Gatsby opens nationwide today.)

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If 1969 was the height of counterculture revolution in this country, then 1963 was the year when matters began shifting into high gear. This was the year when The Beatles released their first album and Bob Dylan released his second; when Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi and all hell was breaking loose in Birmingham; when the situation in Vietnam was escalating and Buddhist monks took to setting themselves on fire; when Martin Luther King was taken to jail for “parading without a permit” and 250,000 African-Americans carried out their March on Washington. It was the year when JFK was taken out in Dealey Plaza – an assassination Malcolm X subsequently referred to as “chickens coming home to roost”. Simply put, 1963 was the year when every sociopolitical issue in this country was turned completely upside down. A full half-century down the line, the 1963 exhibition of black and white photographs at Howard Greenberg Gallery captures a great deal of that emotion, serving as a necessary reminder of just how far this country has come over the past 50 years, and just how very far it still has to go.

(1963 debuts today at Howard Greenberg Gallery and continues through July 6th. Free, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406)

Five More For The Offing: 

• Punk: Chaos to Couture @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Free with suggested donation, through 7/7, Gallery 773, 82nd Street at 5th Avenue)
• New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Show @ Pier 36/Basketball City (Free, 5/10-5/12, 299 South Street)
• Entre Deux Mondes by Phillipe Charles Jacquet @ Axelle Fine Arts Galerie (Free, through 5/26, 472 West Broadway)
• Piero della Francesca in America @ The Frick Collection ($18 general admission, through 5/19, 1 East 70th Street)
• Outside Inside Sensibility by Stewart Uoo and Jana Euler ($20 general admission, 5/10-8/11, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street)

It’s an age-old premise, the notion that all’s the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. But it’s earned increased relevance given the transparent zeitgeist we live in, driven – in large part – by an unprecedented insistence upon instant gratification. In many ways, evolution has had its way with us, transforming life, love and the pursuit of happiness into a petty, fleeting game of one-ups-man-ship.

I mean, it’s all so goddamn easy, right? You meet someone, you fall in love, you get married, have a couple of children, and then you systematically begin dumping on each other until the mutual respect has given way to mass defiance. This is what it means to hurt the ones you love the most. This is also the incidental essence of Sarah Polley’s semi-fascinating documentary, Stories We Tell.

Stories chronicles Polley’s exhaustive investigation into her deceased mother’s past, revealing – among other things – the secret identity of Sarah’s biological father. The drama unfolds in real time (interspersed with Super-8 footage of hand-picked actors reenacting past events), as translated by close family members and friends, each of whom were either privy to or effected by the sequence of events leading up to Sarah’s birth.

Sarah’s mother, Diane, was a small-time Canadian actress – a textbook extrovert who felt the need to dominate every conversation, if for no better reason than to keep the focus from turning to her. And the beauty of Stories We Tell is that it feeds moviegoers the truth about Diane in tiny bite-sized morsels (i.e., backstory, commentary, revelation … backstory, commentary, revelation, etc.). There’s a sense of intimacy here, not unlike the voyeuristic feeling one gets from uncovering a long-lost reel of home videos. The only problem being that – much like the majority of home videos – the allure of this one wears off long before the show is actually over.

The final half-hour of Stories is really little more than Sarah’s immediate cluster waxing eloquent about the film itself. And yet, despite that, there’s still an incredibly rich narrative here, told by everyday people, many of whom demonstrate a certain knack for being on-camera. In the final analysis, Stories We Tell proves a testament to the notion that both life and love are fleeting, at best, and too few us ever really take the time to examine either one until it’s already too late.

(Stories We Tell opens in New York City this coming Friday, with plans for a rollout in most major markets on May 17th.) 

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Here’s the thing about Chilean director Nicolas Lopez’s new movie, Aftershock – it commits to an integral twist about 35 minutes into the film, and – from that point forward – it does not back down from even the most extreme demonstrations of violence, gore, or violation.

Eli Roth, who co-wrote the screenplay, is actually the best thing about the movie (at least in terms of casting). And yet, he’s sandwiched between a lot of second-rate acting –  commandeered to some extent by constant, misplaced stabs at wholly adulterated content or humor.

But the real problem here is a major schism tearing straight down the middle of this thing. On the one hand, Aftershock feels like it wants to be a horror film. On the other, it feels like it wants to be a buddy picture. On the one hand, it feels like it wants to be a slasher film. On the other, it feels like it wants to be a natural disaster epic. On the one hand, it feels like it wants to be Chilean. On the other, it feels like it wants to be American. Meanwhile, all that middle ground limits the movie’s overall ability to cater to any particular demographic.

The bottom line: if you’re a fan of gratuitous violence, you’ll be bored out of your skull for the first 35 minutes of this film; if you’re a fan of well-crafted narrative, you’ll find yourself extremely irritated for the remaining 55. In the end, one cancels out the other, and what you’re left with is a schizophrenic screenplay that’s gravitating to an extremely limited audience. Assuming you’re a member of that niche, you’re in for one hell of a gruesome thrill ride. Assuming you’re not, you’d be much better served going to see The Great Gatsby this coming weekend.

(Aftershock arrives in limited release and via Video OnDemand this coming Friday.)

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“Is there a difference between cinema and movies? Yeah. If I were on Team America, I’d say, ‘Fuck, yeah.’ The simplest way I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the capture medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is – whether it’s in your bedroom or on your iPad – it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It can be a commercial, it can be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary. And the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form. So that means you can take a perfectly solid, successful, acclaimed movie, and it may not qualify as cinema. It also means you can take a piece of cinema, and it may not qualify as a movie. And it may actually be an unwatchable piece of shit. But, as long as you have filmmakers out there who have that specific point of view, then cinema’s never going to disappear completely, because it’s not about money. It’s about good ideas
followed up by a well-developed aesthetic.”

Enduring legends are not only immune to exaggeration, they actually draw increased power from the wide variance of every subsequent retelling. In that tradition, F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby continues to evolve nearly a full century down the line. What’s more, the novel’s central character (Jay Gatsby) remains the gold standard for every international man of mystery who has sprung up in his wake – Bruce Wayne, Charles Foster Kane, and even Donald Draper chief among them.

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

It’s a question for the ages, to be sure. For literary purists, the only real Gatsby is the one who was originally introduced via F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. For film geeks, on the other hand, there are a plethora of choices. There’s the silent-era Gatsby, the post-World-War-II Gatsby, the Jazz-age Gatsby, the made-for-TV Gatsby, and – as of this coming Friday – there’ll even be a kaleidoscopic Gatsby … a veritable feast for the eyes that looks and feels a lot more like Baz Luhrmann’s own personal Wizard of Oz.

And yet, the classic Gatsby – at least in terms of modern cinema – was, is, and probably always will be the 1974 Jack Clayton version, based on a screenplay adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola. This is the version that captures every subtle nuance from The Eyes to The Ashlands. It’s the version that includes location shoots in and around Morningside Heights, The Plaza Hotel and Trinity Church. It’s the version in which Sam Waterston appears to be a wide-eyed prep-school nerd and Mia Farrow showcases a voice that’s rife with money; in which Bruce Dern bounces back and forth between bull-headed bigot and brute; in which (Karen Black’s) Myrtle Wilson staggers drunk and desperate as a dime-store trollop. It’s the only movie version that manages to capture Gatsby without over- or under-doing the whole thing. And therein lies its undying charm.

At its core, Jack Clayton’s Gatsby succeeds because it emphasizes all the major literary themes – wealth, power, privilege, class, love, sex, god, intrigue, suspense, betrayal, violence, death, tragedy, comedy, mystery and drama. It’s the classic tale of a poor boy from the other side of the tracks, shot through with the unrivaled angst of every man who has ever had something he loved stolen away from him.

There are, of course, some dated sequences here – moments during which the pace and/or acting seems far too labored or severe. But on balance, Redford, Farrow, Waterston, Dern and Clayton combine to offer a cinematic Gatsby for the annals – the only film version that actually does justice to Fitzgerald’s original source material, despite the increased popularity Gatsby has experienced over the years, thanks – in large part – to the extreme variance of every subsequent retelling.

(Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby is currently streaming via Netflix.)

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