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Writer-director Todd Haynes (I’m Not There, Safe) intended Velvet Goldmine to tell the story of David Bowie’s rise to fame, but Bowie refused his approval — and songs — when he realized the script focused on a largely-fictionalized account of his sexual exploits and public persona rather than his musical career.
Haynes made a virtue of necessity, rewriting and reframing the narrative. What could have been a mere bio-pic became instead a wider statement about the consuming nature of fame and power. Fittingly, the rewritten story follows the structure of Orson Welles’ notoriously not-a-bio-pic Citizen Kane: reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is tapped to investigate the disappearing act of former rock idol Brian Slade, the glammest of the glam, whose most outrageous stage act drove him into obscurity.
As in Kane, the reporter tries to divine the icon’s history at second-hand, struggling to assemble the glib or sorrowful gossip of Slade’s scattered coterie into a coherent history. Unlike Kane, Velvet Goldmine ties the reporter’s personal narrative to the subject’s, expressing the slippery way we can incorporate a celebrity’s persona into our own histories, consuming the energy of those we admire or emulate, eroding their identities in favor of our own projections.
It could have been dreary or didactic, but instead the film is a giddy tissue of visual tales, richly laced with a soundtrack of glam-rock’s greatest hits, original and reworked (and notably minus any David Bowie). Velvet Goldmine shows us the grime under a layer of glitter, the sordid soul-drain that fame can become.
Big doings are afoot (and afeather) at the Tweedy chicken farm. Ginger, a flighty hen who’s escaped and been recaptured several times, hopes to persuade the other chickens to fly the coop en masse. Meanwhile, the sinister Mrs. Tweedy has hatched a scheme to shift their production from eggs to — duh duh DUH — chicken pies.
Mind you, I’m not intentionally recommending Chicken Run as a secret plot to turn your kids abruptly vegetarian just in time for a big poultry-consuming (and big-poultry consuming) holiday — but, uh, there is that possibility. The characters and story of Chicken Run are as compelling as the classic films it alludes to so fluently (including such greats as Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and Raiders of the Lost Ark). As Roger Ebert remarks, “This movie about chickens is more human than many formula comedies.”
[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]
As Halloween creeps up on us, I suggest settling in with some movies to give yourself the chills — and nothing is better for that than a classic haunted-house story. Read the rest of this entry »
More movie free verse:
But not to last
I’m surprised you didn’t come here sooner.
It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.
And what can he do for you?
Can the maker repair what he makes?
Would you like to be modified?
Stay here.
I had in mind something a little more radical.
What
What seems to be the problem?
Death.
Death.
Well, I’m afraid that’s a little out of my jurisdiction, you —
I want more life, fucker.
Turns out, writing poems by recontextualizing movie quotes gets to be addictive.
I call this one:
I could tell you stories
You might say I sell peace of mind.
Insurance is my game.
Door-to-door.
Human contact’s the only way
to move merchandise.
In spite of what you might think,
I’m pretty good at it.
It doesn’t surprise me.
I believe in it.
Fire, theft, and casualty aren’t things
that only happen to other people.
Writing doesn’t work out,
you may want to look into it.
Providing basic needs
you could do worse.
I’ll keep that in mind.
My submission to the World Poetry Movement’s Bill Murray poetry contestis composed entirely of lines from Groundhog Day, in order and unaltered, recontextualized as an homage to the free verse of Frank O’Hara. I call it:
Meditations in a Celebrity Emergency
It’s your choice.
What’s it gonna be?
I’m thinking.
All the long-distance lines are down?
What about the satellite?
Is it snowing in space?
Don’t you have a line you keep open for emergencies
or for celebrities?
I’m both.
I’m a celebrity in an emergency.
Can you patch me through on that line, please?
Can I have one more with booze in it?
I like it here.
update: In the excitement of stumbling across such a lovely little piece of prose poetry, I didn’t notice that the WPM is probably operating a classic publishing scam. I fully expect to get a letter next month notifying me that I’m a semi-finalist and offering me a super-special author’s rate on the book.
Which is too bad, ’cause the accidental poem is a gem.
Procedural thrillers tend to have a few things in common: they have a well-defined stable of characters, they take place over a reasonably brief stretch of time, and they… y’know, resolve. If a procedural presents a whodunnit, the end will reveal who, in fact, dunnit, and usually why.
David Fincher’s Zodiac necessarily throws these rules out. The Zodiac case covered many, many years of active police inquiry — and so does the film, showing us fourteen years of investigation, both by the police detectives (Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards) and by a journalist (Robert Downey, Jr.)
But the film really centers around Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhall), a cartoonist who became engrossed by the coded messages that the Zodiac Killer’s sent in to San Francisco’s newspapers. Zodiac follows Graysmith through the years as he studies, decodes, and researches the messages, trying to tie them to any of the suspects — and there are plenty of suspects.
Zodiac is a sprawling endeavor, trying to make sense out of a tangled mass of evidence. “Sprawling” isn’t usually something I look for in a movie, but Fincher makes it work with one simple, demanding choice: every single role is written and cast thoughtfully, intelligently, carefully, with the sense that these people are real, not vehicles for moving the plot along.
This is also true of the very difficult scenes of the Zodiac attacks. In the most vivid and disturbing depiction, which takes place during a picnic, Fincher uses close-ups and POV shots to narrow our focus: the entire outdoor scene shrinks down to a frantic, tight few feet. He forces us to identify in the most heartbreaking way with the terror and tension of the victims.
The A.V. Club recently inducted David Fincher’s Zodiac into their New Cult Canon, and with good reason. It’s a modern classic, a resonant story of obsession and uncertainty circling endlessly around a series of senseless tragedies.
[This review was cross-posted to The Video RePort.]
After the smash success of Talking Heads’ legendary performance film Stop Making Sense, the studio gave David Byrne a huge measure of control over his next film project, True Stories. What an odd movie they got.
Written by Byrne, Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart), and Stephen Tobolowsky (Now don’t tell me you don’t remember him because he sure as heckfire remembers you! Needle-nose Ned? Ned the Head? He dated your sister Mary Pat a coupla times until you told him not to? Bing!), True Stories takes us on a tour of a fictional town — Virgil, Texas — gearing up for its sesquicentennial celebration by staging “A Celebration of Specialness.”
It’s as gee-whiz as a 1960s picture postcard: bright, dated, and absolutely flat. The establishing shots are carefully square-on, keeping the focal point dead-center, never oblique or slanted. And the film’s attitude is just as surprisingly direct. Where we might cynically expect glancing sarcasm or viciousness, Byrne instead gives us refreshing sweetness.
This is a small-town character study — Our Town by way of Weekly World News. We meet a spinner of endless tall tales, a man who claims he can grab your nose and read your mind, a lady who never gets out of bed (our narrator enthuses: “She has enough money, she doesn’t need to. Wouldn’t you?”), a husband and wife who lead the community but haven’t spoken directly to each other in years, and a preacher who sermonizes about vast conspiracies controlling everything from our political structure to the rate at which we run out of toilet paper.
As the name implies, True Stories is more a collection of tales than a single story. The musical numbers help to tie the whole series together, but movie’s real heart is Louis Fyne (John Goodman, incredibly winning in his first major role), a big bear of a man unabashedly and doggedly looking for love. We first meet him at work (in the computer assembly’s clean room, where the world can’t touch him), then follow him on a series of unsuccessful dates and outings. In less kind hands, Louis could be a joke or a figure of fun, but Goodman’s earnestness and humor make him a remarkable character, a simple man with a complex soul.
The strength of the film comes from the same place. It doesn’t shy from the absurdities of everyday life, and in fact it exaggerates them to the point of hyperbole… but it never, ever diminishes them. Rather than jeering at the mundanities of Americana, True Stories amplifies them with equal parts affection and irony.
About half-way through the movie, our guide takes us on a driving tour through a new (and mostly uninhabited) suburban development, a banal expanse of tract housing against the barren backdrop of the Texas plains. And in this flat, blank landscape, he says — with startling sincerity — what might well be the film’s motto: “Look at this. Who can say it isn’t beautiful?”
[cross-posted to The Video RePort]
Elli
Elsa
