Manhattan (1979)

 

Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. Oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be. 42-year old TV comedy writer Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) is involved with high school student Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) and freaking out about his Lesbian ex-wife Jill’s (Meryl Streep) forthcoming memoir of their marriage breakup; while his best friend, University professor Yale Pollack (Michael Murphy) is cheating on his wonderful wife Emily (Anne Byrne) with cerebral egotist book editor Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton). Isaac quits his job in a fit of pique which he instantly regrets and has to downsize in order to finance a year when he will try to write a book. Yale breaks up with Mary so when Tracy says she wants to go to London to study acting Isaac and Mary get together … I’m dating a girl who does homework. Elaine’s, the Empire Diner, The Russian Tea Room, Central Park, the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Bloomingdale’s, Dean and Deluca, the Lincoln Center, Rizzoli’s bookstore, Zabar’s, the now-demolished Cinema Studio, this is the one where Allen fully expresses his love of his native city and it’s more than a Valentine as the story inspired by George Gershwin’s music, starting with Rhapsody in Blue, transports us into the inner workings of the characters and their preposterous lifestyle problems. The script by Allen and Marshall Brickman gives Keaton absurdly self-aggrandising dialogue protesting the burden of her beauty, Allen jokes about his castrating Zionist mother and jibes about Lesbian fathers, and everyone bar 17-year old Tracy is fairly ridiculous but even she is a serious sexpot who wants to go to London to train as an actor (supposedly based on Allen’s relationship with Stacy Nelkin). A gorgeous, funny, satirical film about silly people whose therapists call them, weeping, and they carry on doing stupid things, risking their relationships and their careers on a romantic whim in a disposable culture. (That’s Mia Farrow’s sister Tisa talking about the wrong kind of orgasm, BTW.)  It’s all told with love and humour and shot in ridiculously beautiful widescreen monochrome by Gordon Willis because of course the real unadulterated love spoken of here is for New York City and it gives the writer his voice.  Of the two of us I wasn’t the amoral psychotic promiscuous one  MM #2,600

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

I just met a wonderful new man. He’s fictional but you can’t have everything. New Jersey in the 1930s. Unhappily married Depression-era waitress Cecilia (Mia Farrow) earns the money while her inattentive husband, Monk (Danny Aiello), blows their measly income on getting drunk and gambling. To deal with her loneliness, Cecilia escapes to the cinema and becomes transfixed with the RKO movie The Purple Rose of Cairo and especially its lead character, archaeologist Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels). When Tom notices this is her fifth time to see it he literally steps out of the black and white screen and into her life in full colour.  Both of their realities are thrown into chaos as he is confused by his actor’s identity of Gil Shepherd and the character he plays onscreen where he is indulged by Manhattan high society. Cecilia has to choose between Tom and Gil. Then the film’s producers discover that other Tom Baxters are attempting to leave the screen in other movie theatres ... You make love without fading out? Perfectly capturing the fantasy life of a moviegoer at the height of Thirties Hollywood, Allen blends Depression-era realism with the escape valve of Deco cinema against the backdrop of marital discord and domestic violence. The real ones want their lives fiction and the fictional ones want their lives real. The performances are pitch-perfect and the tone admirably sustained, Farrow enormously touching in capturing the bittersweet situation of a woman caught between what she has and what she wants:  When you kissed me, I felt like my heart faded out. I closed my eyes, and I was in some private place. In a role originally played by Michael Keaton until he and Allen agreed it wasn’t working ten days into production, Daniels has an existential crisis at the centre of his performance:  I don’t get hurt or bleed, hair doesn’t muss; it’s one of the advantages of being imaginary. The conceit is brilliant and it’s intelligently played out in one of Allen’s best screenplays with the film within the film wonderfully imagined and Gil’s belief that he created the character of Tom is an arrow across the parapet for screenwriters. I don’t wanna talk any more about what’s real and what’s illusion. Life’s too short to spend time thinking about life. Let’s just live it! Shot in shades of wistfulness and regret by Gordon Willis, this remains a classic interrogation of cinema’s power. I want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week; otherwise, what’s life all about anyway?

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

We’re the Avengers not the Prevengers. Twenty-three days after Thanos (Josh Brolin) used the Infinity Gauntlet to disintegrate half of all life in the universe, Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) rescues Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) from deep space and returns them to Earth, where they reunite with the remaining Avengers – Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and James Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle) – and Rocket (Bradley Cooper). Locating Thanos on an otherwise uninhabited planet, they plan to retake and use the Infinity Stones to reverse ‘the Snap” but Thanos reveals he destroyed the Stones to prevent their further use. Enraged, Thor decapitates Thanos. Five years later: Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) escapes from the quantum realm and at the Avengers compound, he explains to Romanoff and Rogers that he experienced only five hours while trapped, instead of years. Theorising that the quantum realm could allow time travel the three ask Stark to help them retrieve the Stones from the past to reverse Thanos’s actions in the present… He did what he said he would. Thanos wiped out 50% of all living creatures.  After the devastating events of Infinity War the Avengers reassemble to reverse Thanos’ actions and restore balance to the universe. With Thor drunk and disorderly doing a Lebowski among refugees in New Asgard, Tony Stark happily married to Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and father to a daughter, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) has to deal with the loss of his own family, Nebula has seen the light and turned to the bright side, the Guardians of the Galaxy crew are incorporated into the vast narrative, etc etc, the gang has moved on and grown up in varying states of development. Along with every single character from every Marvel franchise movie making an appearance there’s the first gay man (played by co-director Joe Russo) and Stan Lee’s final (and digitally ‘de-aged’) appearance, in a scene from the 1970 time heist sequence, as a cab driver in New Jersey. Some of the films have been too long, some of them have been a real blast but it’s finally over in a seriocosmic epic that justifies the hype in a thrilling blend of action, comedy, tragedy, daddy (and mommy) issues and pathos with loves lost and regained and noble sacrifices and sad leavetakings. It’s satisfying enough to fill that space-time continuum hole in the comics universe. Not only is resistance futile, it’s no longer necessary, at least for this viewer. The screenplay is by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely who are indebted to the 14 others who preceded them. Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo. I am inevitable

On the Waterfront (1954)

Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. They better wise up! Hoboken dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) had been an up-and-coming prize-fighting boxer until powerful local mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) persuaded him to throw a fight. His older brother Charley (Rod Steiger) is Friendly’s right hand man and lawyer. When longshoreman Joey Doyle is murdered before he can testify about Friendly’s control of the Hoboken waterfront, Terry teams up with the dead man’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) and the streetwise priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) to do something about the violent gangsters controlling the dock. Terry finally figures out it was Charley getting him to throw a fight at Madison Square Garden that put him in this jam. He decides to go against his advice and testify … Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts. This classic film can never be separated from its origins:  Arthur Miller wanted to write about the infiltration of the dockers’ unions by the Mafia and his project The Hook was brought to Columbia with Elia Kazan as director but Harry Cohn insisted the criminals be called communists instead. Sam Spiegel took it on and Frank Sinatra was tapped to play Terry initially. Miller gave up on it completely when Kazan testified and named names at the HUAC (if he hadn’t his career was dead, he named people whose names were already known); and fellow friendly witness Budd Schulberg’s screenplay could be partly attributed to a series of articles based on a true story about a longshoreman who tried to do something about union corruption. It didn’t work. (A series of lawsuits arose with the studio because Schulberg had talked to a number of individuals about racketeering and they recognised their story onscreen).  The original ending was rejected because of the censors:  crime could not win. So there is a brutal fight.  Brando’s was not the only influential acting in this film, which is a hymn to mid-century Method style, a kind of heightened reality with actors finding ‘business,’ like the accidentally dropped glove that Brando picked up and stroked, an unplanned incident that adds to the film’s text. And that legendary taxi scene between Brando and Steiger? Brando was a soft guy. He hated the cold. He wanted to be back in his hotel all the time when they were on the docks. This particular scene was shot in the studio and he wouldn’t do the decent thing and do the reverses for Rod Steiger after Steiger had acted his ass off for Brando’s shots. Steiger had to emote to a stage hand reading the script. Brando won the Academy Award and the film got Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Supporting Actress (for Saint), Art Direction, Editing and Cinematography (for Boris Kaufman.) Leonard Bernstein should have won for Best Score because he makes the big dialogue scenes work with his innovative composition. Turns out you can justify anything.  I’m standing over here now. I was rattin’ on myself all those years. I didn’t even know it

Cheaper by the Dozen (1950)

They come cheaper by the dozen you know! Frank Gilbreth (Clifton Webb) and his wife Lillian (Myrna Loy) are efficiency experts – they would need to be with their enormous family – two are born in the course of the story, adapted from the biographical book by their son and daughter Frank and Ernestine by writer/producer Lamar Trotti. It’s a sweet, episodic narrative about the trials and tribulations of a good-natured family dealing with a house move, Father’s desire for recognition (talk of an invitation to a conference in Prague) and Mother (a psychologist) manfully giving birth to the twelfth child, a son, on father’s orders. The main drama is one boy’s desire for a dog and eldest daughter Ann (Jeanne Crain, who was 25 playing a teen) and her desire to be a flapper and cut her hair to stop being a freak.  Father believes in improving all his brood and amongst other things wants them to be great musicians but secretly knows they’re tuneless. There’s a very good scene when it turns out a fed up neighbour has suggested Mother be the local rep for Planned Parenthood. This was made at the height of Webb’s fame as Mr Belvedere and he’s terrific as the dad who is full of surprises – just watch him show the kids’ new headmistress how to bathe in seconds flat! – with Loy her usually sharp self. It looks lovely courtesy of legendary cinematographer Leon Shamroy and is nicely put together by director Walter Lang with thoroughly charming performances in a comic drama which uniquely for the Americana being produced at the time is finally tinged with tragedy.

 

Zoolander 2 (2016)

Adam, Eve and … Steve. It’s a long time since we first met Derek and tried Blue Steel and social media appears to have radically filtered our narcissistic reality in the interim but this isn’t exactly Chanel No. 5 no matter how you cut the advertising. Justin Bieber never did anything to me but a lot of people enjoyed watching him getting machine gunned to death in the first few minutes. The setting in Rome is delectable. The cast are game. It’s a supremely silly satire about fashion vanity and everyone you have ever heard of is in it. YOU are probably in it. The story is about Fashion Interpol – run by Penelope Cruz – who get Derek and Hansel to help uncover the villain behind the assassination of pop stars. Derek finds his son in an orphanage and is horrified by his obesity. Hansel has fathered a bunch of children in Malibu (presumably an in-joke). Sting meets the irrelevant pair at St Peter’s and tells them an alternative tale of models’ origins which has a vague similarity to Christianity. Mugatu is back attempting world domination. Funny, daft, utterly inane. What did you expect?! Written by John Hamburg, Nicholas Stoller, Justin Theroux and Ben Stiller, who also directed.

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

This is just too cool for school. Much heralded for starring Madonna, it’s a brilliant study of female friendship and a treasure hunt and small ads and being a magician’s assistant and a bored New Jersey housewife! Susan Seidelman’s sophomore outing hit all sorts of buttons but mostly it was the trendsetting pop star’s clothing that made people sit up and take notice of this loose take on Celine and Julie Go Boating (not that the fans realised this was what it was). Writer Leora Barish (Craig Bolotin did uncredited additions) turns it into an American genre piece, with magician’s assistant Susan (Madonna) making off with some valuable Egyptian earrings from her criminal boyfriend and keeps up with her friend Jim with notices in the newspaper which alert wealthy Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) to their meeting in Battery Park. She follows the engaging kook not realising when she acquires her cool jacket from a thrift store that she is now on the hook for witnessing something she knows nothing about and the key in the pocket could literally unlock a Pandora’s box of problems and murder … Engagingly written, performed and staged, with Aidan Quinn providing love interest and Laurie Metcalf some rich quips, this tale of girl power seems like a movie from another planet nowadays. And that’s not a bad thing! Get Into The Groove! Watch out for the great comic Steven Wright, John Turturro, Richard Hell, Ann Magnuson, John Lurie and Shirley Stoler. What a cast from the NYC underground/alt scene! And what a prophetic title this is:  where has the director disappeared? Seriously, The Hot Flashes? Desperately Seeking Susan Seidelman!

Danny Collins (2015)

Danny Collins is a promising singer-songwriter in the early Seventies. After a difficult first album he turns to schlocky romantic songs and becomes a big hit with the ladies. Forty years on his manager buys him a letter from his hero John Lennon which was written following an interview in which Collins talked about his hero. It was sent to a magazine and withheld for its sales value. He is simultaneously devastated and re-invigorated and re-evaluates life from his coke-addled perspective in a mansion in LA where he’s shacked up with a decades-younger tramp who has sex with other men. He wants to go back to Year Zero and write his own songs again and find the son a groupie had by him back in New Jersey. The wondrous Al Pacino is of course Collins, Christopher Plummer is the manager who wants him back on track for a moneymaker tour and Bobby Cannavale is the son, now married to Jennifer Garner and a father himself, of an autistic daughter. And Annette Bening is the manageress of the hotel where Danny holes up to re-examine his life:  a safe space, except when reality barges in on occasion. He freezes when it comes to playing new material and returns to his old ways. His son regrets exposing his medical problems. Danny tries to do over everything with money. It’s a pretty great premise, written and directed by Dan Fogelman and based on a true story about a Welsh singer. It’s conventional stuff but the nuanced performances raise the bar and the quasi-romance with Bening is realistically effected even within the generic framework. They somehow managed to get the rights to a whole raft of John Lennon’s life-changing songs (not that I’m prejudiced) but Al also sings some originals. He can act. That’s all I’m saying. An overlooked gem.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

It doesn’t have huge stars or an immediate sense of a masterpiece. However the influence of the Gothic and what would come to be called film noir is all over this skewed tale of Americana made in 1942, directly after the United States entered World War 2.  Hitchcock was finally in the process of settling down and buying property, and he was making a film on location in a small Californian town, the epitome of Andy Hardy-ness.  Until Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) comes to town and his namesake niece (Teresa Wright) begins to suspect that there’s a serial killer of wealthy widows in their midst … The constant sense of threat, the overwhelming fear that something bad will happen, is built into every scintilla of the film’s design.  Our sympathy for Uncle Charlie is cunningly transferred to his niece as his psychopathy is revealed.  Long thought to be the maestro’s favourite film (he demurred when asked to confirm) this was Hitchcock’s earliest sign of an interest in the double, a preoccupation that would herald Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and the noirest noir of them all – Psycho. I have written a book about this film and you can get it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Girl-Who-Knew-Too-Much-ebook/dp/B01KTWF08U/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1476297954&sr=8-5&keywords=elaine+lennon.