Embracing the Melodrama Part II #113: Gran Torino (dir by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a grumpy man. And by that, I mean that he’s extremely grumpy. Remember how grumpy Bill Murray was in St. Vincent? He’s got nothing on Walt Kowalski.

Walt served in the Korean War and, five decades later, his experiences still haunt him. After the war, he lived in Detroit and he worked on an assembly line. He’s since retired but he still loves his old Ford Gran Torino, a car that he could very well have helped to build. His wife has recently passed away and his children are eager to move him into a nursing home. Walt is slowly smoking himself to death and the only person who visits him regularly is an earnest young priest (Christopher Carley, playing the ideal priest).

Just as Walt’s life has changed as he’s gotten older, so has his neighborhood. The neighborhood is now dominated by Hmong immigrants. When Walt catches Thao Vang Lor, a 16 year-old Hmong, attempting to steal his car, it leads to an unlikely friendship between Walt, Thao, and Thao’s sister, Sue. When the same local gang that put Thao up to stealing Walt’s car subsequently attacks Sue, Thao wants revenge but Walt says that if Thao kills a man, it’s something that he’ll never recover from. After locking Thao in his house, Walt goes off to confront the gang on his own…

And, since Walt is played by Clint Eastwood, you’d be justified in thinking that Walt’s confrontation would amount to a lot of quips and violence. But actually, it’s the exact opposite. Gran Torino does not find Eastwood in the mood to celebrate violence. Instead, the film is a meditation on both the cost of violence and the impossibility of escaping one’s own mortality.

Whenever people talk about the 2008 Oscar race, the focus always seems to be on the snubbing of The Dark Knight. However, I would say that Gran Torino (among other films) was snubbed even more than The Dark Knight. After all, The Dark Knight may have missed out on best picture but it still received 8 nominations and won an Oscar for Heath Ledger. Gran Torino, on the other hand, received not a single nomination.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing that Gran Torino deserved a best picture nomination. It’s a fairly predictable film and some of the symbolism, particularly during Walt’s final confrontation with the gang, gets a bit too heavy-handed. (Any time a character spontaneously strikes a crucifixion pose in a movie, you know that things are starting to get out of hand.) But I would argue that Clint Eastwood definitely deserved a nomination for best actor. In many ways, Walt is a typical Eastwood character but, right at the moment when we’re expecting him to behave like every other Eastwood character that we’ve ever seen, Walt surprises us by doing something completely different. As a director, Eastwood subverts our expectations of Clint Eastwood as both an actor and a character. As a result, the audience is taken by surprise by Walt, if not by the film’s plot.

I remember, at the time the film was released, there was some speculation that Gran Torino would be the last time we ever saw Clint Eastwood onscreen. That proved to be false, as he subsequently starred in Trouble With The Curve. However, even if it wasn’t his final acting role, Gran Torino still serves as the perfect monument to Eastwood’s unique screen presence.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #112: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (dir by David Fincher)

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2010 will always be considered, by many of us, to be the year that Oscar journalism first jumped the shark. That was the year that a group of self-styled award divas (which Awards Daily’s Sasha Stone being the most obnoxious culprit) went batshit crazy over a film called The Social Network.

From the minute that David Fincher-directed film premiered, the Sasha Stones in the world not only declared it to be the greatest film ever made but also insinuated that anyone who disagreed had to be stupid, crazy, and evil. It actually got rather silly after a while. That is until The Social Network lost best picture to The King’s Speech. Suddenly, what was once merely enthusiastic advocacy transformed into fascistic fanaticism. Suddenly, these people started to view the 2010 Oscar race (and each subsequent Oscar race) as a rather tedious battle between good and evil. For these people, David Fincher represented the forces of good. And Tom Hooper, the director of The King’s Speech, represented all that was evil. They took this to such an absurd extreme that they not only subsequently heaped undeserved praise on Fincher’s bastardization of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo but also unnecessary scorn on Hooper’s Les Miserables.

Of course, what was forgotten in all of that drama was that — before Hooper and The King’s Speech came along, the 2010 Oscar race was predicted be some to be a rematch between Fincher and Danny Boyle (whose 2010 film, 127 Hours, was indeed nominated for best picture, alongside The Social Network, King’s Speech, and Black Swan). When Fincher and Boyle previously competed during the 2008 Oscar race, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire defeated Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

And indeed, the case of Benjamin Button was curious one!

Loosely based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button told the story of a man who aged in reverse. When Benjamin is a baby, he has the wrinkled face of an elderly man. When he’s a teenager, he’s walking with a cane. When he’s middle-aged, he looks like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall. (In that regard, it helps that Benjamin is played by Brad Pitt.) And when he’s an old man, he’s a baby. Though the film, wisely, refrains from offering up a definite reason why Benjamin ages in reverse, it hints that it could have something to do with a clock that was built to run backwards as an anti-war statement.

Benjamin is born in New Orleans in 1918 and raised in a nursing home by Queenie (Oscar nominee and future Empire star Taraji P. Henson). The love of Benjamin’s life is Daisy Fuller (Elle Fanning when young, Cate Blanchett as an adult), a dancer who also loves Benjamin but who, unlike him, is not aging in reverse. For this reason, Benjamin and Daisy cannot be together. That’s the way tragic love works.

The film itself features a framing device. Daisy, now an elderly woman, is dying and gives her estranged daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), the diary of Benjamin Button. As Caroline reads, Hurricane Katrina rages outside. I’ve never really been comfortable with the way that the film uses Katrina as a plot point, for much the same reason that it bothered me when Hereafter used the real-life Thailand typhoon and London terrorist bombings to tell its story. The real-life tragedy of Katrina feels out-of-place in a story about Brad Pitt aging backwards.

As for the rest of the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is … well, it’s a curious film. Visually, it’s definitely a David Fincher film but, at the same time, there’s something curiously impersonal about it. You almost get the feeling that this was Fincher’s attempt to show that he was capable of making a standard big budget Hollywood film without getting too Fincheresque about it. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett have chemistry and they look good together but Fincher has never been a sentimental director and his heart never truly seems to be in their love story. (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl feel more like a natural couple than Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett do in this film.) There’s only a few scenes, mostly dealing with the more morbid aspects of Benjamin’s odd condition, towards which Fincher really seems to feel any commitment.

As a result, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button becomes a curious misfire. It’s a film that struggles with the big picture but is occasionally redeemed by some of its smaller moments. (The scenes with the elderly Benjamin as a dementia-stricken baby are haunting and unforgettable.) Ultimately, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is probably the weakest of the five 2008 films nominated for best picture but it’s still an interesting film to watch.

Christopher Lee, R.I.P.

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The picture above is Christopher Lee in the 1998 film Jinnah. In this epic biopic, Lee played Muhammad Ali Jinniah, the founder of modern Pakistan. Up until yesterday, I had never heard of Jinnah but, after news of Lee’s death broke, Jinnah was frequently cited as being Lee’s personal favorite of his many roles and films.

Consider that. Christopher Lee began his film career in the 1940s and he worked steadily up until his death. He played Dracula. He played The Man with the Golden Gun. Christopher Lee appeared, with his future best friend Peter Cushing, in Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning Hamlet. He played Seurat in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. He appeared in both The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit trilogies. He appeared in several films for Tim Burton. He even had a small role in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. He appeared in two Star Wars prequels. He appeared in the original Wicker Man (and reportedly considered it to be his favorite of his many horror films). He appeared in Oscar winners and box office hits. And, out of all that, Christopher Lee’s personal favorite was Jinnah, a film that most people have never heard about.

Unless, of course, you live in Pakistan. When I did a google search on Christopher Lee, I came across several Pakistani news sources that announced: “Christopher Lee, star of Jinnah, has died.”

And really, that somehow seems appropriate. Christopher Lee was the epitome of an international film star. He worked for Hammer in the UK. He worked with Jess Franco in Spain and Mario Bava in Italy. He appeared in several movies in the United States. And, in Pakistan, he played Jinnah. And I haven’t seen Jinnah but I imagine he was probably as great in that role as he was in every other role that I saw him play. Over the course of his long career, Christopher Lee appeared in many good films but he also appeared in his share of bad ones. But Christopher Lee was always great.

It really is hard to know where to begin with Christopher Lee. Though his death was announced on Thursday, I haven’t gotten around to writing this tribute until Friday. Admittedly, when I first heard that Lee had passed away, I was on a romantic mini-vacation and had promised myself that I would avoid, as much as possible, getting online for two days. But, even more than for those personal reasons, I hesitated because I just did not know where to start when it came to talking about Christopher Lee. He was one of those figures who overwhelmed by his very existence.

We all know that Christopher Lee was a great and iconic actor. And I imagine that a lot of our readers know that Lee had a wonderfully idiosyncratic musical career, releasing his first heavy metal album when he was in his 80s. Did you know that Lee also served heroically during World War II and, after the war ended, helped to track down fleeing Nazi war criminals? Did you know that it has been speculated that Lee may have served as one of the role models for James Bond? (Ian Fleming was a cousin of Lee’s and even tried to convince Lee to play Dr. No in the first Bond film.) Christopher Lee lived an amazing life, both on and off the screen.

But, whenever one reads about Christopher Lee and his career or watches an interview with the man, the thing that always comes across is that, for someone who played so many evil characters, Christopher Lee appeared to be one the nicest men that you could ever hope to meet. Somehow, it was never a shock to learn that his best friend was his frequent screen nemesis, Peter Cushing.

Christopher Lee is one of those great actors who we assumed would always be here. The world of cinema will be a sadder world without him.

Legends together

Here is a list of Christopher Lee films that we’ve reviewed here on the Shattered Lens. Admittedly, not all of these reviews focus on Lee but they do provide a hint of the man’s versatility:

Sir Christopher Lee was 93 years old and he lived those 9 decades in the best way possible. As long as there are film lovers, he will never be forgotten.

In Memory of Ornette Coleman

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Jedadiah Leland

On Thursday morning, jazz legend Ornette Coleman died. He was 85.

My father loves jazz and I grew up listening to a soundtrack that included Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. Out of all of them, Coleman was his favorite. As he would always say, no one else sounded like Ornette Coleman.

Ornette Coleman spent a lifetime reinventing both himself and jazz. A tireless innovator and a fearless experimenter, Ornette Coleman returned jazz to its improvisational roots. With his 1961 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, he not only popularized a new approach to jazz but gave it a name as well. As Coleman himself once said, “For me, being an innovator doesn’t mean being more intelligent, more rich, it’s not a word, it’s an action.”

Rest in peace, good gentleman.