Singin' in the Dog Day Afternoon

As I type this I am slick with sweat and praying for rain, glorious thunderstorm born heavy-pellet rain. (In the interim I will crank up the air conditioner --f*** that gargantuan electricity bill! -- and stay inside until I'm forced to scurry off to the next movie theater.) So it strikes me as perfect that the last two episodes of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" this season are Singin' in the Rain (Wednesday night) and Dog Day Afternoon (Wednesday night August 22nd... the day of the actual events in the film!). Won't you join us?

This is the last hard sell for this series but I'm all keyed up because I'm so heartened by the response these past few weeks and I feel like I learn so much just by reading other people's takes on the same movie I'm looking at; 48 eyeballs are better than 2! 

Once Season 3 is wrapped we're entering  fall film season, Oscar's pre-season and with only 156 days to go until Oscar nominations we know that that familiar naked gold man will consume more and more of our thoughts. OSCAR CHART UPDATES COMING VERY SOON...

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Sherlock Jr"

This week's "Best Shot" selection iss Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), a 44 minute silent comedy. Silent comedies were often so swoony with romantic plots that I always want to call them melodramedies or maybe romantic slapsticomedy. Rom-Slapstick? The film opens with a title card that warns us against multi-tasking. 

There is an old proverb which says: Don't try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both."

That's an awfully funny thing to warn us against in a Buster Keaton film. The innovative entertainer was equal parts director, actor, star, stuntman and screenwriter. And he excelled at all of them.

The movie projectionist hero of Sherlock Jr isn't the great detective he'd like to imagine himself to be -- the crime at the heart of the movie has to be solved by another -- but that's what the movies are for, providing him with sweet escape until real life does come to rescue him. In a way, Sherlock Jr, is like the inverse of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in that our movie lover hero enters the screen to fantasize about being his idol rather than a screen idol entering the real world for the heroine who fantasizes. 

It's impossible to imagine the craft we've lost nowadays given that everything is computerized and visual effects are easier than ever. I have no idea how Buster enters and exits the movie screen with such panache and believability but for perhaps a trick of lighting. And even more impressive is the elaborate stunt sequences. Though this is "Best Shot" rather than "Best Setpiece" old movies don't differentiate between the two as much since there are so fewer cuts. So for my Best Shot I had to select the sequence / shot that made me laugh the hardest, even though out of context it's completely terrifying:

The Projectionist has been riding on the handlebars of his friends bike and has yet to realize that his friend has long since been knocked off. After a series of hilariously close encounters and dangerous obstacles besetting a mostly obviously hero, we get a title card that can't possibly be actual dialogue (given that no other characters are in the frame) so I like to think of it as a projection of what we the audience are feeling.

I thought you'd never make it."

Immediately after that, Buster goes careening towards a moving train that never once looks like a rear projection and it's only then that he himself becomes terrified and covers his eyes. His long delayed terror is part of the joke as is the covering of his eyes (so heroic!) and the train is the coup de grâce. After the narrow miss (Did he really do this? If so he was certifiable!) he keeps on covering his eyes and finally realizes that no one is controlling the bike. A beautiful extended joke and a thrilling bit of cinema.

And the Projectionist is still not out of the woods because Buster Keaton never rests; the multi-hyphenate multi-tasking genius is too busy doing everything at once... and doing justice to all of them.

More 'Best Shot' entries for your reading pleasure. Support movie-loving blogs that care about movies beyond their opening weekends!

Coco Hits NY proves its tough to escape the debate of Chaplin vs. Keaton
The Family Berzurcher details why Keaton is so often compared to Jacques Tati and the heart and brains behind the gags
The Entertainment Junkie "it's a miracle Keaton's characters make it to the end of the films"
Awww, the Movies the black and white rose of ... sherlock?
Film Actually 'low key by today's standards' but it has everything: chase scenes, explosions, stunts, and more...

Antagony & Ecstasy once wrote about this in his film school days!
Okinawa Assault would anyone insure Keaton today with his daredevil stunts?
Pussy Goes Grrr  "Its slim 44 minutes lampoon the genre conventions of romance, melodrama, and detective fiction" 
Amiresque on Keaton's perfect movie face 
Against the Hype a choreographic delight... 
Encore's World Escapism! 
Armchair Audience it's hard to capture a best shot in this fast moving Keaton vehicle 

Next week on "Best Shot":
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952) on the cusp of Gene Kelly's Centennial Week. It'll be a biggie so please join us Wednesday night, August 15th and select your favorite shot in the film many believe is the greatest musical of all time.

We're celebrating Gene Kelly from now through the end of August. 100th anniversaries for all time favorite movie stars don't come around so often, you know, so we Gotta Dance! Gotta Dance! Gottttaaaa Dannnccce! ♫

The Future of "Hit Me..."

Breaking: Hit Me With Your Best Shot has been renewed for a Fourth Season. The response to the last few episodes was warm enough to suggest that it'd be worth one more year. It might never be as widely participatory as I'd hoped but the people who are into it are really into it, so we continue. It's like one of those critical darling tv series that the diehard fans keep alive.

THREE EPISODES LEFT IN SEASON 3. Don't be shy, join the party!

Wed August 8th, SHERLOCK JR (1924)
Buster Keaton's silent comedy is only 45 minutes long so you've got time to watch it. Don't pretend you don't! And it's available to instant watch on Netflix so join us in choosing a favorite, er, best shot. 

Wed August 15th, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)
The Sight & Sound Poll clearly wasn't in the mood to celebrate Gene Kelly's crowning achievement and dropped the film by 10 places just in time for our favorite song & dance man's Centennial --  Rude! Singin' in the Rain is like a shot of undistilled joy. Can't wait to see it again for the nth time.

Wed August 22nd, DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)
Confession: I've never seen this movie and blog projects are often the best way to finally get around to something. This sweltering bank robbery drama was inspired by real life events which took place on this very day 40 years ago.

poll by twiigs.com

Best Shot: "How to Marry a Millionaire"

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, our series in which all participating movielovers argue for what is a particular movie's best shot, just keeps on surprising me. I've learned so much about the movies by doing it: what I personally respond to, how often a single image is dependent on the editing around it or the scenes preceding it for its punch, and that the most brilliant images tend to either define an entire movie OR illuminate a very particular piece of its identity. Best of all, I've learned things I couldn't have learned without an extra set of eyeballs... yours. Last week, for example, I came to appreciate The Royal Tenenbaums, in whole new ways via the posts on other blogs. Which is why I'm super anxious to read this week's entries. Because this week's movie, the romantic comedy How To Marry a Millionaire (1953) which was a favorite of mine as a teenager, left me very uninspired. I hadn't remembered how unambitious the visuals were, lazily trusting that Cinemascope would provide us with terrific images.

Which is, come to think of it, what many filmmakers did in the early days of Cinemascope. I've joked before that rectangles > squares but shapes are neutral. It's up to the filmmaker to know what to use a movie's shape for, be that square or rectangular or circle (should the movies ever get round)

So my choice for best shot makes good use of the Cinemascope. The Cinemascope allows this image above to be expansive while the blocking reveals a tight trap. The moment  comes early in the movie when the three golddiggers (Marilyn Monroe as "Pola", Betty Grable as "Loco", and Lauren Bacall as "Shatze"-- delicious character names!) think they've snared their first 'bear', a millionaire by the name of J.D. (William Powell, extremely well cast). The girls aren't greedy *cough* and have already agreed that even just one millionaire will do.

You only need one!

For a brief flash with all their backs are turned to the camera, it's easy to imagine a much creepier movie wherein the ladies pounce in for the kill. They're essentially predators, after all, sexy spiders slinking around their phony web (Manhattan condo with terrace) for billionaire flies.

While How to Marry is good popcorn fun, especially for Monroe's adorkable blind as a bat insecurities and Bacall's elegant snobbery as she looks down her nose at everyone and everything (including herself!), it's not much more than that. It feels padded even at only an hour and a half (is it the weirdly sleepy editing?) and the visuals are the least interesting thing about it. This is the only film we've covered where I had absolutely zero indecision about which shot to use. I'm a sucker for a continuous shot and if How to Marry's collection of them didn't feel so much like a filmed stage play (I actually wanted more cutting; that's so weird for me) they'd be a lot more exciting. But this one is a keeper. The middle 'backs to the camera' bit when the ladies pander to and coo at the squirming millionaire is perfect. The cherry on top is that the shot (and scene) ends with a delicious triple diva walk to the camera, all three stars really giving it to the camera... in character no less!

I think this is it kids, a great big room filled with nothing but rich millionaires. And us."

How To Discover Great Blogs (2012)
[Hint: click on them] 
Against the Hype Monroe, Gable and Bacall existing in the same universe?
Amiresque gets dreamy with Betty Grable 
Antagony & Ecstacy a passing of the sex goddess torch
Armchair Audience Bacall sure can move across a screen. But does she choose the right man?
Dial P For Popcorn moments that stick with you
Encore's World in most intrigued by the revealing shots of the threesome.
Film Actually Best Shot = Best Comic Timing
Movies Kick Ass 'there's no business like men business'

Final Three Episodes of Season Three:
Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr (August 8th), Singin' in the Rain (August 15th), and Dog Day Afternoon (August 22nd). JOIN US. WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE AS BEST SHOT?

Best Shot: "The Royal Tenenbaums"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series anything with a webspace is invited to join us in choosing a single "best" shot from pre-selected films.

When I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, I loved it but wondered quietly if it didn't lose a little steam as it went. That'd be a bittersweet but fitting artistic fate for a movie that's about a family of child prodigies who can't escape the long shadows of their early promise and exist in a kind of static bewilderment at their present emotional state(s). As it turns out The Royal Tenenbaums, unlike the Tenenbaum children, only improves with age. It's looking more and more like Wes Anderson's indisputable masterpiece.

Still, it's easy to see where my initial feeling sprang from. The movie opens so well, with unimproveable voiceover work by Alec Baldwin (clinically observant but never unfeeling) detailing the overachieving childhoods of Chas (Ben Stiller), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Richie (Luke Wilson), followed by endearingly deadpan "22 years later" character cards that it just has to be downhill from there? 

Not so.

The movie keeps reintroducing us this eccentric troubled clan. I don't normally choose iconic familiar shots as "best" both out of fear of cliché and out of the archaeological instincts of the cinephile -- always looking for new things to admire in a beloved film. But I give up here. Whenever I think of The Royal Tenenbaums, I think of Margot and the greenline bus.

We've already met Margot twice: Once as a precocious unhappy child playwright. Then as a beautiful miserable adult in a brilliant two-part scene wherein Anderson invites us to compare the omniscient narrator's observations about Margot with her detached relationship to her husband (Bill Murray, besotted and baffled and hilarious) and her instant regression with her endlessly supportive mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston, perfect throughout). "Why does he get to do that?" Margot whines about her brother moving back home.

This, my choice for Best Shot is our third major introduction.

With each introduction Anderson gives us not just more character details, but reenforcing self-referential humor (how great is the "no smoking" sign on the bus in a scene that at first feels devoid of the usual cluttered wit of the Anderson frame?), and fresh ways of thinking about these indelible characters. In our third introduction, though we're already as baffled by her as Raleigh and as worried for her as Etheline, we're suddenly seeing her through Richie's eyes; her sad-eyed beauty is intact but she's lit up by sunshine and meant to be loved obsessively... or even incestuoustly. Who can blame Richie? 

The movie's obsessive accumulation of introductions, its front loaded feeling, are a gorgeous almost spiritual mirror to the Tenenbaums own experience, continual promise trapped in static adolescent pain. It takes something as jarring as weddings and deaths to nudge them forward.

These are the other two shots I considered, both of them because of Margot. In truth when I'm watching the movie it feels perfectly balanced as an ensemble piece (and I love every character... especially Pagoda and Etheline) but outside of the actual experience of watching it, Margot tends to absorb my imagination.

Wes Anderson understands, as too few modern directors do, that two, three, four and even five-shots can sometimes give you more information about a single character than a closeup of that same character can; you need to see how they fit into the world they live in. Margot internalizes her otherness as the adopted child and the movie beautifully finds its way in to this girl's notoriously secretive headspace.

This view of Margot apart from her family is repeated in the hospital scene where she leans against a door while the other characters huddle near Richie's bed, barraging him with questions about his suicide attempt. She's inside the "Recovery Room" but she's not healing.

Of course it's dark, it's a suicide note."

This time Wes Anderson and his cinematographer Robert Yeoman move the camera in for a heartbreak closeup. Margot is further away from Richie than anyone in the room but she's the closest to him. They're just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that.

Armchair Audience [Best Shot First Timer. Welcome!]
For Your Speculation [Best Shot First Timer. Welcome !]
Intifada "died tragically rescuing his family..."
Serious Film "wounded zebra"
Antagony & Ecstasy "in all honesty, my second favorite shot"
Amiresque 
Low Resolution "...well, it can't be very good for your eyes anyway"
Okinawa Assault
Film Actually [Royal Tenenbaums Virgin!]
Pussy Goes Grrr "Wes Anderson never wastes a frame." 
Movies Kick Ass "group hug"
Against the Hype [Welcome him back!]  
Encore Entertainment ...

Final 4 of "Hit Me" Season 3 (Join us!)
August 1st How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
August 8th Sherlock Jr (1924)... only 44 minutes long and available on Netflix Instant Watch. 
August 15th Singin in the Rain (1952) for Gene Kelly's centennial month!
August 22nd Dog Day Afternoon (SEASON 3 FINALE - 40 years ago this very day the events in the film take place)