Adventures in Netflix #6-Gabriel Ricard
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008Adventures in Netflix #6
By Gabriel Ricard
Editor’s Note-The author is well aware that by the time this article rolls onto the scene, Heath Ledger will have been dead for well over a month, his body committed to the James Dean Cemetery. To that end, the author asks for your patience as he gives his thoughts on the matter anyway, on the man and his work.
When the hysterical disbelief broke through on roughly a million different television channels and other news sources that actor Heath Ledger was dead, the first reaction I remember having was being surprised at how young he had been. Twenty-eight, and he had already been nominated for an Academy Award.
I’m twenty-two, and I can’t even get a woman to stop shrieking with laughter long enough to give me her phone number.
I know as a movie geek, I’m going to miss the hell out of the guy. Heath was one of those actors you probably didn’t think much of when he started getting attention with 10 Things I Hate About You. Competent as an actor, good-looking, rolling on the kind of charisma that makes the whole thing look easy. Not much more than that, and the idea seemed to be emphasized with movies like A Knight’s Tale. Basically, decent films that went down easy and didn’t go out of their way to challenge a whole lot of perceptions.
It was obvious the guy had a future, but at first, in the early days of his stardom and arrival on the teenage wet dream scene, it was hard to get a grip on what that future would be. Then the flickers of something more started to shine through with films like Monster’s Ball and hell, even in The Patriot.
It started to become more and more obvious that there was something to this guy. The word “potential” became more and more attached to his name, even with missteps like The Order and Ned Kelly, flawed films that still succeeded as a means to prove he was capable of carrying a film and still bring a good performance that you could pick out over a less-than-stellar project. He was getting better and better, proving it even more by being what was probably the only memorable thing in Four Feathers. It was only a matter of time before he would be given the chance to break through with something big. Something that would push him into the realm of being a contender for the kind of actor in the 2000’s that Pacino and De Niro were in the 70’s. It was entirely up in the air as to what he would do with that chance, whether or not he could pull it off, but it seemed as though it was coming.
The chance came in 2005, with the release of Brokeback Mountain.
He was already a star by that point, but this was the film that changed the entire scope of what people thought he could do as an actor. For a film with the kind of the story that could have become mired in overwrought drama and heavy-handed performances (and indeed, this is one of the biggest flaws in the movie), Ledger brought a incredible combination of restraint and intensity to his character. No one in the movie embodied the love affair and subsequent tragedy that engulfed it better than Ledger’s character. He was a powerhouse from start to finish, and he commanded virtually ever scene he was in.
The movie earned him his first Academy Aware nomination and rightfully so. To see Heath Ledger in something like 10 Things I Hate About You or First Knight and then go straight to Brokeback Mountain is to witness an incredible transformation and progression. The difference in approach and performance in what was roughly a six-year period is staggering. It proved his versatility, and it brought a new kind of attention to what he might do next.
He continued the trend in Casanova¸ once again tearing down the house with a performance that covered everything you could expect out of an actor who was quickly becoming capable of anything. He made this even more clear with brilliant work in Candy.
This past year, he stood out yet again as one of the seven actors playing the legendary Bob Dylan in the surreal biopic I’m Not There. Like the others in different versions of the same role, Ledger succeeded impressively in capturing the one aspect of Dylan’s life and personality that he was aiming to capture. It was yet another standout bit of work. And then there were his upcoming roles in The Dark Knight and in the new Terry Gilliam (with whom he had previously worked with to good effect in The Brothers Grimm) film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
And then he died in what will probably be one of the most shocking and unexpected Hollywood stories of the year.
Possibly, even longer than that.
And when The Dark Knight comes out, that’s going to be it (it’s been said that he didn’t complete nearly enough of the shooting for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for the film to see a release. The rest of his role will apparently be filled by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law). The question of his legacy as an actor will be left up to the small but impressive body of work he left behind. Going on the strength of the trailer, it looks as though there’s a distinct possibility that The Dark Knight might be his best performance to date.
But the tragedy beyond his untimely death and the fact that he has left a young daughter behind to deal with the stigma of a having a famous, troubled father who may or may not have committed suicide, is that when you really get down to it, we still didn’t see what he was truly capable of. Since breaking through in 1999, he had made extraordinary leaps and bounds as an actor. But at twenty-eight it was still apparent that he had a lot more to show us. Or maybe not.
It was one of those things that could have easily gone either way. He could have moved even further along, building his name to stand alongside the great ones, or he could have peaked and crashed in a blaze of bad decisions and the same old thing over and over again. No one can say which direction it would have gone, though the smart money seems to be on the belief that he would have continued to do well and would have continued to knock us on our collective asses.
We’ll never know for sure. There’s no choice now but to make up our minds on what he’s done so far, with The Dark Knight being the final mark on where we ought to place him in history. Where he fits in the clip shows we create in our minds when it comes time to point to the films and actors who keep us watching movies to begin with.
Personally, I’m going to put him in the first category.
The other question now is how he’s going to be remembered. The call is between what he did as an actor or what happened to him in a whirlwind of last-minute misfortune and troubling circumstances. The same aura that now surrounds the phantoms who stand a thousand feet tall, like James Dean and Kurt Cobain.
I sincerely hope it’s the first category. But I’m somewhat inclined to doubt it.
But that’s a late-night rant for another time.
Apologies across the board for mumbling a little too much on this subject.
Let’s get into the heart of this thing.
Early Summer (1951)
Directed by: Yasujiro Ozu
Written by: Kogo Noda and Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Setsuko Hora, Cishu Ryu, and Chikage Awashima
Since most of the average filmgoers today demand a little more punch in their drama, it’s sadly hard to imagine Ozu’s brilliant, low-key Early Summer (Bakushu) finding the kind of audience it deserves.
Which is a shame, since very few films have ever done as brilliant a job as this one does with the presenting the concept of family life and drama with a sense of reality and honesty that gives it far more presence than any overdramatic score or over-the-top monologue. But the film’s real strength is that it goes deeper than that. As a moving snapshot of post-war Japan and, to a lesser extent, the state of the Japanese film industry in the early years following the war, it is one of the most compelling and fascinating films to ever come out of Japan.
Setsuko Hora gives one of the greatest performances of her career as Norkio, a twenty-eight-year-old secretary and perennial bridesmaid. But that part is by choice, as Norkio seems indifferent to the idea of settling down and getting married, often dismissing the concept with a smile and a casual joke–Much to the dismay of her family, brother Koichi, sister-in-law Aya, and parents Shukichi and Shige. Tradition, which seems to take hold of even the most socially enlightened Japanese woman during a time when the idea of the woman’s place in the world was beginning to rapidly change in Japan, doesn’t seem to concern Noriko at all. Her family takes it upon themselves to find a suitable husband, and the resulting chain of events creates problems that threaten to cause serious damage to the fragile world the family has carved out for itself in the dawn of what would eventually lead Japan from post-war ruin to one of the economic superpowers of the world.
Again, the word to remember here is “Low-key.” A good way to look at this film is to compare it to a stage play. The camera almost never moves, save for couple of critical scenes. The film instead focuses on the story and the characters, leaving everything to either occur naturally (the social-political implications) or just stay out of the way. Very few films have that kind of trust, and the danger of being boring has often done in like-minded efforts.
But thanks to the incredible array of performances from a truly inspired cast and a wonderful screenplay (which Ozu co-wrote) and direction, the end result is perfect. It’s just important to remember that this is a very slow-paced affair. A story that doesn’t rush itself when it comes to building what comes out to be very strong, deep character relationships between the family members as well their friends, neighbors, and co-workers.
One-dimensional is not something you’re going to attach to even the smallest character in the film. Ozu, who also directed the brilliant Tokyo Story, is in no hurry to get to the heart of the story. In a way, it’s there as soon as the first scene opens. He builds the plot up to its conclusion carefully, trusting his characters to develop into people we’re going to be completely wrapped up in by the end.
He succeeds flawlessly. Early Summer is not going to bash you over the head with overwrought intensity and Hollywood-typical high drama you’ve probably come to expect from a family story. In 1951, it had much higher aspirations than that. Fifty-one years later, it still comes off perfectly.
The Good Thief (2002)
Directed by: Neil Jordan
Written by: Neil Jordan
Starring: Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, and Nutsa Kukhianidze
Writer-director Neil Jordan’s films seem to have a common theme throughout virtually all of them. They may not always work, but they’re almost never boring. Check out The Brave One, The Crying Game, Interview With A Vampire, or The Company of Wolves for more on this. Here, he tries his hand at a remake of one of the all-time great heist films, Jean Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur. The result is yet another inferior remake, but one that survives on the strength of being pretty damn fun to watch anyway.
A lot of that has to do with Nick Nolte, who turns in one of the best performances of his career as Bob, a junkie and terminal gambler/loser who has one more strike on his name and career as an art-thief left before he stands to get sent up the river for good. So, of course, when the opportunity for a major heist involving a collection of valuable paintings at a French casino comes up, our guy gives up the heroin and goes to work.
If there were any actor who’s capable of playing a skid-row phantom coming back from the dead to show everyone how it’s done to brilliant effect, Nick Nolte would be near the top of the list. A lot of people think Nolte’s been off the radar, opting instead to drink himself stupid and let people make their judgments of him based on the work he did in past decades. Not so. Over the last few years, Nolte has turned in some of the best work of his career with powerful performances in Clean, Off The Black¸ The Peaceful Warrior, and especially here in The Good Thief.
Nolte was pushing sixty in 2002, but you wouldn’t know it if you went on his energy alone. He moves and acts with the same battered charm and flawed tough-guy panache that he’s been known for doing better than just about anyone else in this day and age with stuff like 48 Hours and Mohalland Falls. There’s nothing especially deep to it this time around, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. Most of all when he’s playing off of the excellent Tcheky Karyo as a police inspector who has had a long love/hate relationship with Bob and the beautiful, underrated Nutsa Kukhianidze as the young prostitute Bob takes under his wing.
That’s really the key to why this comes off as such a good time in the face of uneven pacing (with a particularly anti-climactic ending that still manages to be pleasing) and a cast beyond the three principal actors that doesn’t really offer anything on their own (though Ralph Fiennes shows up for a very nicely done cameo). The chemistry here between Nolte and most of the supporting cast is dead-on and reveals the strength of the script’s dialogue.
It’s everything the film tries to be and occasionally fails at – sharp, funny, and very easy to get into most of the time. One of the trademarks of Jordan’s career is being aware of when it’s time to sit back and let the actors take precedence over everything else. He relies on that a little more than usual here, but with some great cinematography from Chris Menges and editing by Tony Lawson making for a good, steady background, it’s nothing that ever hurts The Good Thief’s strengths.
But this is still first and foremost Nolte’s film. He steals every scene he’s in so effortlessly that you have to wonder why he didn’t get the same credit Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis have been getting for proving that age should have nothing to do with whether or not they can still be commanding leading men. With two other great actors to play off of, Nolte is all class and full talent here, showing that his best qualities have not been damaged in the least by binge drinking and old age.
Frasier: The Complete First Season on DVD (1993)
Directed by: David Lee, James Burrows, and others
Written by: David Angell, Peter Casey, and others
Starring: Kelsey Grammar, David Hyde Pierce, and Peri Gilpin
Spin-offs have always been a hit and miss business in the strongest sense of the word. They either break free of the show that spawned it and go on to powerhouse success that stands on its own merit, or they disappear so quickly that you have to wonder if the thing you just saw on your TV screen was real or just a bad acid flashback. Frasier was thankfully in the first category.
Thankfully, because as far as ensemble casts go and as far as the key idea that a sitcom’s greatest strength lies in its relationships between the characters, Frasier is quite possibly one of the best sitcoms we’ve ever gotten. Most of us know the story.
The show picks up in the aftermath of Cheers, with Frasier Crane (the wonderful Kelsey Grammar) separating from his wife and moving to Seattle to reconnect with his family. He starts a job working as a radio psychiatrist, and just generally get his life back on track. Though because this is a sitcom, the journey to get to these things doesn’t quite move the way Frasier planned.
Again, most of us know the story. The set-up is basic, and that’s fine. What made this show work so well, which is apparent as early as this first season, was the cast. Everyone already knew Frasier from being on Cheers for nine years. The trick to getting his own show off the ground was to surround him with people he could bounce off of in terms of dialogue and relationships. Some of the best episodes of the first season come this strength rather than an outside force.
That was clearly meant to be the show’s key strength over the actual situations (although the storylines were generally strong as well). And the show’s creators couldn’t have done a better job in finding the best cast possible for this end. From David Hyde Pierce (brother, Niles) wonderfully combining some of Frasier’s character traits with a few his own, to John Mahoney (father, Martin) making for a perfect opposite as their father. This was essentially the core of the Crane family. And although the show boasts a great supporting cast in Peri Gilpin as Frasier’s producer Roz and Jane Leeves as Martin’s live-in nurse and Nile’s perennial obsession/love-interest Daphne, the show’s greatest strength in this first season and beyond is the chemistry between Grammar, Hyde-Piece, and Mahoney as the Crane men. From the first episode on, the ability to buy them as a family comes easily and stays firmly in place throughout.
The key to that success can be found just as much in the writing as in the performances. The material goes deep when creating their relationships with not only each other but also friends and co-workers like Daphne, Roz and the relentlessly hilarious Dan Butler as Bulldog. It’s not just a series of jokes on how different everyone is and how hilarious that can be at times. There was a real effort in this first season to create something with a little more depth than that. And because we’re dealing with such a talented cast capable of being more than walking punch lines, supported by strong scripts and veteran directors (many of whom worked on Cheers) it has almost no trouble working out.
Very few shows can claim to carve out such a strong, ambitious formula in the early going the way Frasier did in season one. The end result is a first season that’s as much essential viewing as the even stronger seasons that were soon to come.
Snakes On A Plane (2006)
Directed by: David R. Ellis
Written by: John Heffernan, Sebastian Gutierrez, and David Dalessandro
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Juliana Marqulies, and Nathan Phillips
The concept of the cult film is pretty well known. Generally, the title is given to movies that for whatever reason didn’t do well in their initial run, but went on later to find an audience through video/DVD or/and word-of-mouth. The Internet has only taken this phenomenon further. Although there are reasons, one constant for virtually all of them is that none of them set out to become a cult classic. It just worked out that way.
But with the Internet becoming the key factor in which movies attain this status and which ones fade off into the obscurity of the 5.50 bin at Wal-Mart, it was only a matter of time before someone made a serious go of trying to market something to the cult-film audience straight-away, rather than waiting for history to decide. It’s been attempted before. Generally, with horror movies clearly meant for the direct-to-video/midnight circuit the moment the last scene has been shot.
Nothing has ever been attempted on the ambitious scale New Line Cinema went for with Snakes On A Plane. Everything was carefully set up, from casting Samuel L. Jackson (who has a few cult movie appearances under his belt) to starting an Internet campaign looking to gain the support of people who consider books like Cult Flicks and Trash Pics to be their bibles and just build on from there. The result didn’t quite work out as planned at the box-office, although the film gained tremendous publicity for the effort.
So, what’s to make of it? Well, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from the story of a crime lord filling an airplane with crazed, poisonous snakes in order to kill off a witness set to testify against him. Stuntman-turned-director David R. Ellis (who had a hand in writing the screenplay), along with the film’s other writers, clearly went to great lengths to create the kind of movie you’d want to build a college drinking game around. Over-the-top characters, an absurd concept played with a straight face, and lines begging to be quoted well past their use are crammed so ruthlessly into every frame of the movie that there’s nothing it can really do but sit there and hope the ruse holds up until the end. It doesn’t.
The effort might work for people who don’t know any better, but for anyone who knows how these movies work, Snakes On A Plane crumbles quickly under the reality of being nothing more than the film equivalent of a loud, drunk guy at a party who’s trying way too hard to win you over. Because really, it shouldn’t take a film student to tell you that the harder a movie tries to be something the more likely it is to crash under the weight of its arrogant, near-sighted ambition. Beyond Samuel L. Jackson (who supposedly agreed to do the film on the strength of the title alone) putting in his usual good-day’s work, there’s nothing here that can’t be better found in films that earned their following the old-fashioned way.
Children of Paradise (1945)
Directed by: Marcel Carne
Written by: Jacques Prevert
Starring: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrult, and Pierre Brasseur
One of the small highlights on Criterion’s lovely two-disc edition of Children of Paradise is the introduction by legendary filmmaker and Monty Python alumni Terry Gilliam. In less than five minutes, Gilliam sums up his love for the film and the influence it had on his own career and approach to making movies. After watching this masterful epic of French cinema, an essential cornerstone for anyone looking to see what’s out there, it’s easy to see what he’s getting at.
Screen legend Arletty’s career was almost never anything less than impressive. But it’s here, playing Garance, a woman whose beauty and strange charm (not to mention the fact that she’s aware of her assets more than anyone else) commands the attention of nearly every man she meets, that we get the peak of her talent as something of France’s answer to Rita Hayworth or Bette Davis.
The story alone stands strong. Deftly blending comedy with romance, tragedy, and loss on a great stage of a thousand other emotions and situations describing the lives and relationships of a half-dozen different aspects of what the social and class structure of what France was in the 1820’s.
Children of Paradise is divided into two epochs. The first is “Crime Boulevard,” which introduces Garance and sets the tone for the different relationships she would have with the men who come across her path. The most important of which is with Baptiste, a mime who saves Garance from taking the fall in a theft performed by her on-again/off-again lover Pierre Francois (the terrifically sleazy Marcel Herrand), and almost immediately falls completely in love with her. A good man desperate to prove himself as a performer, Baptiste’s love for Garance is such that he barely recognizes the passion (INSERT NAME HERE) shows for him throughout the entire movie. The relationship between Garance and Baptiste is easily the most critical in the film, and the one Carne gives the most attention to.
A lot of that is thanks to the incredible chemistry between the two. It opens beautifully and holds our attention until the very end, causing us to get lost in the hope that it somehow works out for them. But that doesn’t mean the other men vying for Garance’s love don’t get their fair share of attention. Especially Louis Salou as the Edouard de Montray, an aristocrat who pursues Garance and her love the way he might go after a nice antique chair makes for a great threat to whatever Garance and Baptiste have as the story moves into its second chapter, “The Man in White.”
Also on the scene to lend even further depth is Pierre Brasseur as the arrogant young actor and self-absorbed womanizer Frederick Lemaitre, who knows Baptiste from their work together at the same theater during the early moments of the film.
One of the things about this movie that works so well and gives it so much strength in its characters and story is the way everything is given just the right amount of detail. Nothing is short-changed and nothing drags out longer than it should. It’s perfectly balanced by Carne’s assured, consistently wonderful direction, and the combination keeps itself together throughout. The situations and relationships established in first chapter carry over so strongly into the second one that you really don’t get a sense that you’re watching anything particularly. If anything, the movie breezes by its two and a half hour running time. So much so that, although the movie ends on a clear, definitive note, you almost wish that you could see just a little more, catch a small sliver of something that might lead you to draw even further conclusions of where the story is going to go when the end credits roll.
Far more than a great love story (which it is), the movie also shines as a fascinating look at the life of an actor and price of art before humanity. The city that Children of Paradise surrounds itself in is a chaotic one barely breathing under the weight of possibility. Much like Terry Gilliam’s own films, half the fun of this film is just being able to occasionally get lost in the spectacle and madness of the French theater and the million little things and characters running around inside of and around it. Made all the more effective by the fact that it never becomes more than just a beautiful backdrop to support the frames of what this makes this movie so wonderful some sixty-three years later. This is a story of loss and finding happiness in the moment and knowing that that moment is likely to end by circumstance whether you want it to or not. French films seem to be big on this philosophy.
That’s just my opinion though. And to that end, I can hardly think of anyone who knows this and shows it better than Carne in every single scene of this masterpiece. This is a landmark film that has not lost even an inch of the sharpness and beauty contained in its memorable characters, absorbing story, and witty, fantastic dialogue. Not to mention the firm belief the film carries that a person’s future is oftentimes only as good as how they react and survive against the tide of fate and ever-changing circumstances.
And that’s going to wrap things up for this half-year anniversary edition of Adventures in Netflix.
As always, thanks so much for stopping in, and I hope to hear any comments/criticisms you might have. Which can be sent along to magazine@feeltheword.net
Next month, I’ll explain why you should give me money to shoot one of my own film scripts.
