Distant Relatives: Limelight and Hugo

Robert here with my second Distant Relatives of the week, making sure the series covers the major Oscar contenders before the big day (sorry The Help). Plus, Hugo arrives on DVD Tuesday for those of you who haven't yet seen it.

Two weeks ago I compared The Artist to Sunset Blvd delighting in the contrasts between the inspirational modern film and the cynical classic. Hugo might have been an even better point of comparison to Sunset Blvd since both are about young men discovering titans of the silent era whom time has forgotten but a film has many fathers and I'm intrigued by the relationship between Hugo and a film like Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Like Hugo, Limelight is a film about a rediscovered artist, that's really a film about love of silent cinema that may really really be about the filmmaker himself.
 
There must have been several things compelling Martin Scorsese to adapt the book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret": Scorsese's legendary love of cinema, his passion for the cause of film restoration and preservation, and as his story goes, a desire to make a children's film that his own child could watch. But might the tale of an underappreciated filmmaker from years past held more personal resonance? In Hugo our hero Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) discovers the presence of Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) through a series of adventures in the train station in which he lives. Through further adventures the young boy attempts to bring about Méliès rediscovery.

 

In the age of the home viewing and the internet it's pleasant to believe (however optimistically) that we don't forget such brilliant filmmakers. But how often must Scorsese have heard in recent years that his best, most productive years and most influential films were behind him. In fact, any of his contemporaries from the 1970's, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, have heard the same from time to time or quite often. And while we may not forget their seminal works as the world forgot the work of Méliès, how quick are we to dismiss them as great artists of the past or bores of the present.
 
Speaking of which, Charlie Chaplin made Limelight in 1952, almost twenty-five years after the arrival of talkies forever changed his canvas. Of course he hung on as long as he could, making silent films or semi-silents until the late thirties and then scoring a couple of talkie hits. But by the time the fifties came around, Chaplin was most definitely yesterday's news. It's not surprising that he wrote a film about a long forgotten clown named Calvero (Chaplin) rediscovered by a beautiful ballerina (Claire Bloom) and eventually given the tribute he deserves. Of course the film isn't about the art of the clown as much as it is the art of the silent comedian, punctuated by final performance by Calvero and his old partner (played by Buster Keaton). And of course the film isn't about anything as much as the lost prestige of Chaplin who was being banned from the US for his "communist sympathies" just as Limelight was being released.

In these films about young characters who discover old artists, it's entirely possible that Scorsese and Chaplin feel a kinship with the characters of both generations. While it's debatable that Scorsese sees similarities between himself and Méliès, I don't doubt that he knows what it's like to be Hugo, the young boy whose life is defined by the magic of movies. And Chaplin may not be an exact match with the ballerina who falls in love with a clown, but he certainly has an understanding of being a performer whose life is altered after discovering the brilliance and art of real clowns.

What's further telling is how the young people in both films lead sad, dreary, almost hopeless lives until they discover the magic that the rest of the world has forgotten. For Chaplin and Scorsese, these films are a look back at their pivotal moments and a look forward at those who may very well be discovering them, and perhaps a plea for our own lives and our own sakes, not to forget the magic. In an odd way they're both true stories too, however embellished. Méliès was re-discovered and re-appreciated in his life. And the real-life counterpoint for Calvero the clown had his moment too.

Yet More Hardware For... The Help, The Descendants, The Artist

ACE and IMAGE statues. Why are trophies always nude men? Is Emmy the only girl among trophies?It's the last exhausting stretch of awards season and the mantles of everyone involved with The Help, The Descendants, and The Artist are about to collapse even before they take home their respective Oscars.

The ACE Awards which is short for American Cinema Editors has four film prizes each year for features and the winners this year were

Drama: The Descendants
Comedy: The Artist
Documentary: Freedom Riders*
Animation: Rango

* I mistakenly read this as Freedom Writers when I saw the release and momentarily panicked that the Hilary Swank teaching drama had resurfaced in non-fiction form. The Making Of... Now With More Swank.

The Drama winner at the Eddies generally goes on to win Best Picture, but this year may prove a semi rare exception since The Artist is expected to take home the Oscar. In the hoopla over The Artist being a silent film people keep forgetting that it's also a comedy and if it wins, we have our first comedy winner since Chicago (2002). They're all too rare on the big night.

It's also worth noting that Patton Oswalt hosted the ACE Eddie Awards, his third awards hosting gig of the season. This Just In (Inside My Head): Patton Oswalt To Host The 13th Annual Film Bitch Awards in January 2013! (Well, he does says "yes" a lot. Maybe I should ask?)

USC Scripter goes to an adapted screenplay and the book it rode in on each year and The Descendants won for what we assume was arduous carpel tunnel syndrome-laden man hours of copying and pasting the book's prose into onscreen voiceover. Yeesh. (I'm tired. I don't like The Descendants. Forgive me. Soon we'll be able to move on.) I'd feel worse for Moneyball, a far more graceful screenplay, if Aaron Sorkin hadn't just had a big year with The Social Network.

NAACP Image Awards were almost certain to fall in The Help's win column given its blockbuster status. But it was interesting to see it happen so soon after watching Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress winners Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer have it out with Tavis Smiley about trophies going to black women playing maids in 2011. [Rant: When this Oscar season is over I think we need to have a long discussion in this country about class rather than race for a change. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a maid. It's honest legal work and why should someone feel ashamed about having a job and doing it? Maybe it's because I used to work in the hotel industry and knew a lot of people who struggled with people looking down on them because of the job they performed. These conversations about The Help feel very tone deaf to one particular fact: there are actual maids in the world and there always will be. These conversations always seem to be saying 'oh god. could there be anything more demeaning than being a maid?' and I'm just not sure how cleaning people's houses or hotel rooms is horrible work you should feel ashamed of but you know, it's fine if you're a white collar person destroying entire swaths of people's livelihoods with shady business practices or pension-fund robbing or lobbying the government for horribly unfair tax codes. I really wish we could over the deeply embedded notion that you're somehow a better person if you have money. The actual quality of a person's character has zero to do with the amount of dollars on their paycheck. The only thing a lot of dollars on the paycheck does, in terms of character, is make it more visible. You can do a lot of evil or a lot of good in the world when you have money but the money itself isn't the determining factor on which you'll choose. /Rant]

Ahem. Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. Speaking of...

Damn, Viola! She's proud of hers, apparently.

So...  The Help took Best Picture. Off the Oscar track, Pariah won best independent movie and Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey won best foreign film. Laz Alonso and Mike Epps took home the actor prizes for the wedding drama Jumping the Broom which also won Best Director. LL Cool J and Regina King won the top TV acting honors for their procedurals, one of those NCIS's and Southland respectively.

"Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter". Have You Read It?

Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly offered up a new batch of photos for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter starring Benjamin Walker (aka Meryl Streep's brand new son-in-law, recently married to Mamie Gummer).

For those who aren't familiar with him, his star making role (of sorts) was a lead on Broadway as "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson"... so this will be his second consecutive blood-splattered US President. What an odd odd start to a career.

Stage and screen require different scales of acting. Charisma and skill in one doesn't always transfer to the other so you never know. But on stage he just popped. He unarguably had "it" and a lot of "it", too. He turned down the role of Beast in X-Men First Class -- a potentially lucrative franchise gig -- to stay with his minor hit stage show which reveals either true devotion to the theater, strict contractual ethics or real confidence in his gift. Or all three. It didn't take long for another opportunity to present itself. 

Out of accidental curiousity I recently picked up the book at the library. I wonderd about its content and if I could pick up any clues as to why this one didn't have any trouble getting off the ground while his first fiction novel Pride & Prejudice & Zombies can't seem to get out out of development hell. 

The thing that surprised me the most and I'm not sure bodes well for the movie is how earnest it was. I was expecting comedy or at least satire but it read very much like a straightforward entry into the subgenre of historical fiction that twists history with supernatural elements. It's basically Lincoln the younger years only with a backstory that involves hunting super evil bloodsucking creatures. In the book the vampires are quite powerful in the south (though their nature is a secret from most) and they're all entangled financially and socially with plantation owners which gives them a neverending supply of defenseless prey (the slaves) that no one will miss. And here is where I had the problem. I actually found the book a little offensive. No one, least of all Abraham Lincoln, should need an overlay of supernatural bloodsucking to give them an epiphany about how cruel and unfair and irredeemably evil slavery is/was.

I wonder what the movie will do with the books framing device which is a modern discovery of Lincoln's private diaries. It seems like it might be an awful lot of wasted running time in a film version but we'll see.  I haven't read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and if its similar I can only assume it isn't filming already because Hollywood is so skittish about female leads, no matter how many hits feature them.

Have you read either of Seth Grahame-Smith's books?
Do you like the supernatural alternate history genre?

Review: "Albert Nobbs"

This review was previously published in my column at Towleroad.

Albert Nobbs is story of a woman living as a man in Ireland in the early 20th century. Albert (Oscar nominated Glenn Close) serves as a waiter at a little upscale hotel. His world is so small that he barely leaves the hotel and hardly ever utters full sentences to anyone but himself. Those private conversations generally involve the counting of shillings. Nobbs' inner life isn't quite as small. The waiter dreams of saving up enough to buy a small tobacco shop and run his own little business. When he meets a painter by the name of Mr. Hubert Page (Oscar nominated Janet McTeer) whose situation is not dissimilar but whose emotional life is obviously richer, his eyes are suddenly opened to new possibilities, including romance... or at least cohabitation.  But dreams aren't easy when a flea in your undergarments can give you away, when your career could be finished with one misstep around a wealthy patron, when a stroke of bad luck could put your employer out of business, or when the woman you set your sights on for companionship (Mia Wasikowska) might not have the purest of motives in returning your affection.

You know what's just as a hard as opening a tobacco shop when you're a woman living as a man in early 20th century Ireland? Getting your dream movie made when you're an actress of a certain age in the early 21st century... [More]

Click to read more ...

Cast This! Rob Marshall and "Into the Woods"

As frightening... as bewildering... as wrong as it is to say after a decade of breakthroughs (Moulin Rouge!), critical triumphs (Dancer in the Dark, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) and box office hits (Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hairspray) and problematic but Oscar nominated efforts (Nine, Sweeney Todd, Phantom of the Opera) ... the movie musical is still in trouble. It probably will be until another Vincente Minnelli or Bob Fosse arrives on the scene, someone who understands and breathes and trusts the very cinematic language of the musical. Until then we'll get bored directors detouring or novices who think it might be "fun" to try one... or Rob Marshall.

Will no young director challenge Rob Marshall as King of the Musicals?

Stage turned film director Rob Marshall was initially seen as something of a savior of the form when Chicago (2002) became a smash hit and Best Picture winner. It had been 34 years since a movie musical had had that honor. But his musical follow up Nine (2009) proved a massive flop and a target of critical derision. Though I thought it was better than it got credit for being (how could it not be given the vitriol?) in tandem with Chicago it revealed too little range and an inherent distrust of the form he had been handed, without competition, to rule; the music in both films emerged on sound stages as hallucinations or performative fantasy. His two subsequent non-musicals (Memoirs of a Geisha and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) were much worse, with listless dramatics and overstuffed weightless business for plot. Nevertheless, Hollywood logic prevails. Disney, looking at the colossal gross of On Stranger Tides, has obviously forgiven Marshall for Nine's red ink and rewarded him with the reigns of the film version of a bonafide masterpiece, Stephen Sondheim's twisted fairy tale classic Into the Woods. Never mind that I could have directed On Stranger Tides (it would have been all about the mermaids and they would have drowned Captain Jack in the first half hour) and it would still have been a top grosser. In Hollywood you get credit for blockbuster grosses even if you are obviously replaceable since anyone helming a long running franchise will produce a similar size hit. Audiences are lemmings when it comes to those big franchises. 

So though I weep that Into the Woods isn't getting a world class auteur, and I shudder most of all to think of those glorious songs sung by people who can't handle the intricacies of the music -- Marshall casts for stardom first even if they can't sing and Sondheim obviously writes only for great singers who can act -- we should try and stay positive. Let's play...

Bernadette Peters leads the cast of the original INTO THE WOODS (1987)

CAST THIS!

Click to read more ...