Will This Season Never End?

Kurosawa and Nighy! Together for the First Time!

Living (2022. Screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, based on the film Ikiru [1952], written by Akira Kurosawa & Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni. 102 minutes)

The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is perhaps best known for his Samurai movies, such as Seven Samurai (1954, remade as The Magnificent Seven [1960]), Yojimbo (1961, remade as A Fistful of Dollars [1964]), and The Hidden Fortress (1958, remade as Star Wars: A New Hero [1977]). But he also made films set in the present, such as Stray Dog (1949, remade as, oh, never mind), the great thriller High and Low (1963, not remade yet by anybody), and Ikiru (1952), now remade as Living.

If you are only familiar with Kurosawa’s Samurai films or their English-language remakes, you will be amazed how quiet a film Ikiru is when you see it. Watanabe is a quiet, older bureaucrat who learns he only has a few months to live. He has a semi-wild night on the town with a novelist, then a small flirtation with a young woman he works with. He realizes that he will only die happily if he leaves something behind him. He pushes through a small neighborhood playground before he passes away. It is incredibly moving and rightly considered one of Kurosawa’s best films.

The idea of doing an English remake has been floating around for a while. The screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan in 1945, but moved with his family to England in 1960. He grew up very bi-cultural. His family spoke Japanese and taught him about Japanese culture, but he also grew to understand English culture as well. He writes short stories and novels. His novel Remains of the Day (1989) was made into an acclaimed film in 1993, directed by James Ivory, but with a script by Ivory’s regular collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Ishiguro also wrote screenplays for television and film, including for another James Ivory film The White Countess (2005) although it was not as well received as the film of Remains of the Day.

Given his experiences and background, Ishiguro was the perfect writer to adapt  Kurosawa’s film. He understands the emotional restraint of both Japanese and English cultures, and how to transfer the story from one culture into another. The basic storyline is the same. Now the bureaucrat is named Williams, and we get wonderful sly scenes about the inefficiency of the bureaucracy and the people who, well, supposedly, work there.

Ishiguro has changed the novelist into just a young man Williams meets in a restaurant near the sea. We know what is on Williams’s mind when the man asks him if he has any sleeping pills. Watch what Williams does. The wild night out they have is a very British one.

Two things had always bothered me about Ikiru, as much as I love it, and Ishigruo has fixed both. Kurosawa’s film is overlong (143 minutes), since Kurosawa has a tendency to overdo things. For example, look at how many shots of men riding through the fog in the beginning of Throne of Blood (1957). Someone once asked him why he included so many of those shots. He replied that he just liked them. Living is forty minutes shorter and the better for it. Ishiguro keeps the story moving.

The other problem I had with Ikiru is that about 2/3 of the way through, the film jumps ahead and then goes into flashbacks. Ishiguro does the same thing, but he makes it work more smoothly. I would have to look at Ikiru again, which I have not seen in several decades, to tell you why that jump does not work and Ishiguro’s does. It may work because Ishiguro keeps the story moving quicker than Kurosawa and his writers did, so we are busy trying to keep up.

If you have read reviews of Living, you may be wondering why I have not yet mentioned Bill Nighy, who plays Williams. Well, yes, I am saving the best to near the last, but I also wanted to set up how the script works before I got to him. I admire Takashi Shimura’s performance in the original, but it is a little more one-note than Nighy’s is. I don’t think it was just that the theatre was so crowded when I saw it that I had to sit in the second row, but Nighy shows an extraordinary amount of nuance to his acting. If you only know him as Billy Mack, the aging rocker in Love, Actually (2003), you will be surprised what he can do as an actor. Look at him in the 2018 film The Book Shop.

My late wife and I had a running joke about British actors. So many are so good that she and I decided they must breed them on a farm down in Kent. When we saw an actor we had not seen before, one of us would say “That’s another one from the farm.” I was not familiar with any of the supporting actors in Living, but I think they all came from a great harvest year on the farm.

As I have often said, when you write great parts, you get great actors. That is obviously true of Nighy here, but all the other actors hold their own with him, a very neat trick. Ishiguro has written the supporting roles as well as he has the lead, so you get a superbly balanced film, not always true with star vehicles. The casting director was Kathleen Crawford, who has been casting British film and television since 2004. She has put together a great cast who do justice to Ishiguro’s writing. We should also mention the director Oliver Hermanus for using the cast so consistently. See, I do appreciate directors when they do it right.

Does This Actually Pass the Bechdel Test?

Women Talking (2022. Screenplay by Sarah Polley and Miriam Toews, based on the novel by Miriam Toews. 104 minutes)

Since you are now reading something about movies on the Internet, you are most likely familiar with the Bechdel test. It was a test invented by cartoonist Alison Bechdel to determine whether a movie was sexist or not. To pass the test, the film had to have two women characters who actually had names, they had to talk to each other, and they had to talk about something other than men.

On the surface, Women Talking would seem to be an obvious pass.

It is based on the Toews novel, which was in turn based on a true event. In a reclusive Mennonite community, the men have been accused of raping the women and even the little girls. Previously the men have convinced the women that it was Satan or evil spirits who were harming them. Then some were caught in the act and taken to jail. As the film starts, the rest of the men have gone off to town to try to raise bail.

A group of women get together in the barn to try to decide what to do. The three options are 1) do nothing, 2) stay and fight, or 3) leave. The heart of the movie is the group talking about their options. None of the women are in favor of #1. Some are in favor of each of the other two. The discussion is lively because the writing brilliantly lays out the differences in the personalities of the women and how it affects which position they take. It certainly helps that Polley, who also directed, has a murderer’s row of actresses to play the main characters: Judith Ivey, Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Sheila McCarthy, and in a small in size but powerful role, Frances McDormand, who was also one of the producers. You won’t see that cast together in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And all of them are bringing their A games. Well, wouldn’t you if you were acting with them?

[Still That Freaking Season]

Now you may think this sounds like a filmed play, but Polley makes it into a movie. Polley is smart enough and experienced enough as a director to shoot a lot of reaction shots of each of the women reacting to what another woman is saying. We also frequently go outside the barn, particularly to see the children play, but also to see some of the main characters in other activities.

So the movie lives up to its title, but does it pass the Bechdel test? Well, maybe and maybe not. We do not see the men, and we do not get any full flashbacks to any of the attacks, although they are briefly suggested in a few shots. But the women are talking mostly about the men in the community. To be fair, they do talk about other things, but mostly the discussion is about men and what to do about them. See the film and make up your own mind as to whether it passes or not.

There is one male character in the film. August is a young man in the community who has gone off to college and come back to the community (it won’t take you long to figure out why). Since the women are illiterate, they ask August to take the minutes of their meeting.

Now here is where I begin to have trouble with the film. If the women are illiterate, how do they know about taking minutes of a meeting? Polley and Toews probably should have used another term.

That’s not the only problem with the dialogue. It generally sounds too literate to come from illiterate people. Sometimes the talk turns so philosophical you would think you are at a graduate seminar at a women’s college. The great actors here make it as convincing as they can, but a lot of the dialogue fell badly on my ears. You may not have that problem, and if so, then the film will work better for you than it did for me. And it worked very well for me in spite of that flaw.

Watch Intolerance Instead.

Babylon (2022. Written by Damien Chazelle. 189 minutes)

You may remember that when I reviewed Mank (2020, you can read the review here) I gave its makers a hard time for not including the punch lines to several great Mank anecdotes.

Damien Chazelle, who also directs, has done exactly the same thing in the opening scene here, only this time with an elephant instead of Mank. Manny Torres, a Latino new to 1926 Hollywood, is trying to get an elephant up to a mansion in Bel Air (shot in a geographical area that does not look at all like Bel Air) for a wild Hollywood party. The elephant poops all over a guy helping him (and all over the camera, i.e., on us). And then they say…nothing.

The elephant poop is the set-up for one of the classic show business jokes, and Chazelle does not pay it off. The joke, in case you have never heard it, is about a guy who goes to see his friend who works in the circus. The guy discovers his friend shoveling up elephant poop. The friend admits it is a dirty job. The guy asks him why he does not quit. The friend says, “What, and leave show business?” Now Damien, would it have been that hard to get some variation of that in there?

Chazelle has opened himself up to criticism by bragging about how much research he did on Hollywood and the Twenties. What he seems to have done is watch a bunch of movies, some of them accurate, some of them not, about the time period. There is very little fresh or new here.

I am one of those people who sit all the way through the credits, and in this case, I wanted to see who he had as technical or historical advisors. When Richard Attenborough made Chaplin (1992), he drafted Marc Wanamaker as his technical advisor. Wanamaker knows as much about silent film as almost anybody, and that film is a near-perfect reconstruction old Hollywood. Chazelle’s historical advisor is William Deverell, a USC professor whose specialty is not film but the sociology of Los Angeles. That most likely influenced the portrait of Manny and other Mexican-Americans in the film, but it did not help the portrayal of Hollywood.

Meanwhile, back at the elephant, Manny gets the elephant into the wild party. The party seems “inspired” by the Joseph Moncure March narrative poem called The Wild Party, which was filmed in 1975. Chazelle’s version is grosser than that film, as you would expect from a director who dropped a load of elephant poop on his audience in the opening scene. And it goes on way, way too long, as does the film itself.

In addition to Manny, we follow several other characters, some of them “inspired” by real people. Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is a big star in silent films, based partially on Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and John Gilbert. We are just at the arrival of sound in Hollywood, but Conrad’s career is ruined, as was Gilbert’s, by his first talkie, in which he repeats “I love you” several times to his leading lady. In Singin’ in the Rain (1952) this is handled more convincingly, since the dialogue comes in the middle of the picture in the movie, whereas in Babylon it comes in the final scene of the picture Conrad made. If it came at the end as an emotional highlight, the audience probably would not laugh at it as they do in Babylon.

Another character we follow is Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a wild child who wants to get into the movies in the worst way and does. Originally Chazelle wrote it with his star of La La Land (2016) Emma Stone in mind, but when she passed, he made the character more generic. It is clear Chazelle never read David Stenn’s biography of Clara Bow, the model for Nellie. When Babylon did not take off at the box office, the misogynist trolls who haunt the Internet insisted it was all Robbie’s fault this film and Amsterdam (2022) were not commercial successes. Bullshit (as long as we are in the poopy world of Damien Chazelle) - Robbie is terrific in both films. The flaws in both films are in the scripts. It’s the writing, stupid.

A supporting character that we see from time to time is Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist. The “Elinor” part of the name is from Elinor Glyn who wrote one of Clara Bow’s biggest hits, It (1927), and the “St. John” is from Adela Rogers St. Johns, a reporter who also wrote for the movies. Elinor St. John’s character seems based more on Louella Parsons than either Glyn or St. Johns. This Elinor is played by Jean Smart, and she gets one good scene where she tells Jack Conrad why his career is ending. It is an interesting scene, but like most of the rest of the movie, it is not very accurate. It is just a compilation of all the rumors as to why John Gilbert’s career was over, without really nailing down the real reason: the overly romantic movies he did simply did not work in sound as well as they had in silent films.

[From 'Greatest Girl Reporter' to ‘Mother Confessor of Hollywood’ Adela Rogers St. Johns Wrote Herself into the History of the 20th Century]

Elinor also befriends Nellie and tries to class her up by taking her to a party with some upper-class people, two of whom, if you listen closely, are William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. Nellie gets drunk and vomits all over the floor. Hmm, where have we seen that lately? Oh, yes, in Mank where he vomits on the dining table at Hearst’s San Simeon. And if you remember from that review, the vomiting did not happen in real life at San Simeon, but at home of Arthur Hornblow Jr.

In spite of what you may think of all my quibbling, I don’t mind Hollywood fooling around with history (I don’t care if Peter O’Toole was a good foot taller than T. E. Lawrence) if they do something interesting and entertaining with it. Here they do not.

The film is of course way, way too long. That is not helped by an interminable sequence that comes out of nowhere where Manny gets involved with an oddball played by Tobey Maguire, whom we have not seen before or after. Maguire takes Manny through what appears to be a dungeon with all kinds of bizarre people and activities. It should have been cut, but Maguire is on the credits as a producer so it probably could not have been.

In the final section of the film we are in 1952, and Manny, who has moved to New York, returns to Hollywood. He happens to go into a movie theatre playing, you guessed it, Singin’ in the Rain. He gets nostalgic about his past in those bygone days. He gets teary-eyed. But I could not help thinking that it was the actor (Diego Calva) crying because watching Rain he realizes he has spent his time being in a movie that is not one hundredth as good as Rain.

Thinking Like a Director.

Empire of Light (2022. Written by Sam Mendes. 115 minutes)

Sam Mendes started as a stage director in England, winning sever armfuls of Olivier awards for his directing. His first theatrical film as a director was American Beauty (1999), which won him his first Academy Award as a director. He was nominated for 1917 (2019) but did not win, and he was nominated as the co-writer of 1917 and did not win for that. He also directed the best of the Daniel Craig Bonds, Skyfall (2012), which I had a lot of fun reviewing here.

Empire is his first solo screenwriting credit, and like most directors when they try to write a screenplay, he is thinking in terms of scenes rather than overall structure. This has been a problem with directors ever since the Father of Documentary Film John Grierson pointed it out in his reviews of Alfred Hitchcock’s early thirties films.

The film opens on the Empire, a movie palace in a coastal town in England. The way Mendes introduces us to the theatre we are sure it is going to be the star of the film. It slips into a very important supporting role. Mendes could have written and directed the introduction to the theatre in a way that would have worked better for the whole of the film.

We are introduced to the assistant manager of the theatre, Hilary. We pretty much know she is the star of the film because she is played by Olivia Colman. As a director of actors, Mendes knows how to write a good part for a star. Hilary is a quiet middle-aged lady, but we suspect there is more to her than that. We get hints, but after mid-way in the film, Mendes gives Colman a flashy mad scene, which may be more than the film can handle. After her breakdown, she goes into rehab (not for the first time we come to understand), and when she gets out, she seems just like she was before and the movie continues as if nothing had happened.

Early in the film, Hilary develops a relationship that includes sex with a much younger Black man, Stephen. We do not learn a lot about Stephen. At one point Hilary sees him bullied by some white skinheads, but then the racial element of the film seems to be dropped. Until later in the film when a group of skinheads are rioting in the street, bust into the theatre, and beat up Stephen. As with Hilary, when he gets out of the hospital he seems perfectly fine (I don’t think the National Health Service in Britain helped finance the film, but it would not surprise me).

The cast of younger actors who work at the theatre are adequate, but they are not a patch on the supporting cast in Living. I guess not every harvest from the farm is a winner.

The two older supporting actors deliver better than the younger ones. Colin Firth is Donald, the manager of the theatre, who has quickies on his desk with Hilary. Firth uses his charm in a nice, sleazy way. Toby Jones is the projectionist, and he gets a good but out-of-nowhere scene in which he philosophizes about film to Stephen. I do not think it is a direct steal from Cinema Paradiso (1988), but it could have been.

Stephen goes off to college and has a nice farewell scene with Hilary, and then Hilary has the projectionist show her a movie, and for the first time, we see her entranced by a movie. The movie is Being There (1979). OK, but Mendes does not include the scene that he should have, in which Peter Sellars says, “I like to watch.”

Yet…

You may remember that in my December 14, 2021 column, I had a short item titled “Not Yet” about the new Motion Picture Academy Library that opened that September. I had not yet been, but I assumed I would get around to it. I finally did this past December. It was even more disappointing than I thought it was going to be.

One of the problems I had from what I had heard about it when it opened was its emphasis on diversity. As I wrote at the time, “That may seem odd to you since you may know that I taught at Los Angeles City College for forty years; LACC has the most diversified student body you can imagine: students from every continent except Antarctica; students ages from 14 to their seventies [and maybe in their eighties]; representatives of all five major sexual orientations and several of the minor ones. I love diversity, but I would have thought they might have included a white guy or two.”

That is still a problem. The biggest current exhibition is called “Regeneration: Black cinema 1898-1971.” It is about Black filmmakers in that period. It is a terrific exhibition. It was scheduled to run from August 21^st of last year to April 9^th. It has now been extended through June. It has been heavily promoted on the internet and elsewhere. Good for it. There was not a particularly large crowd for in on the Wednesday afternoon I saw it, but that may be because the rooms it is in were so large.

Meanwhile, down a dark hallway, there is an exhibition on The Godfather in two smaller rooms. They have a camera that was used in the making of the film, set pieces and costumes. And for those interested in screenwriting there is Coppola’s copy of the novel with his handwritten notes on it, outlines of some sections of the script, and drafts of the script. Unlike “Regeneration” it has not been heavily promoted, and mention of it is difficult to find on the museum website. I did notice in January that they have a few posters up on lamp posts in some parts of Hollywood.

The small rooms the exhibition is in were packed with people. They may have been the same number of people that were in the rooms for “Regeneration,” but it seemed like there were more. I would have thought that an exhibition on such a classic film would have been in a bigger room and with more promotion.

In an email to members of the museum, it was announced that the total number of visitors in the first year was 700,000. I do not recall any number was given for how many visitors they hoped to have the first year, but I would guess they might have thought one million.

I think one reason they did not get more visitors is that the people running the museum seem to be mostly academics who are used to being able to force students in their required courses to watch what the academics want them to watch. (Hey gang, we’ve all done it.) The museum is more like a branch of show business: you gotta figure out how to get the rubes into the tent.

For example, to celebrate the first year of the Museum, they had a special screening. Now what would you pick for a film to celebrate the first year of the Academy Museum? The obvious choice would be a film that won a best picture Oscar. Instead, they picked The Wiz, the 1978 musical with an all-Black cast. It was nominated for four Oscars, but won none of them.

My choice would have been Lawrence of Arabia, the best picture winner for 1962. Every time I have seen it in a theatre in the last few decades, there has always been a full house. It would have been a perfect film to show off their big new theatre. Then each year they could have another best picture winner, although I would avoid The Great Ziegfeld (1936), which I have never been able to get through without pushing the fast forward button. A lot.

Meanwhile, back at the “Regeneration” exhibition, there is a wall with headshots of famous Black performers. Unless I missed it, the wall does not include Ethel Waters, who starred in Cabin in the Sky (1943), Pinky (1949, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award), and Member of the Wedding (1952). Needless to say, there is a photo of Hattie McDaniel, the first Black woman to win an Academy Award.

There is in another room a collection of clips of acceptance speeches at the Oscars, including Hattie McDaniel’s. Then there is another picture of McDaniel on a wall outside the galleries, along with other women of color. So that is three pictures of McDaniel.

As far as I can tell, there are no photos of John Ford, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Henry King or many other white male filmmakers. Nor are there any photos of the studio heads like Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, or Darryl F. Zanuck. In fairness, I should mention the museum if planning an exhibition of Jews in Hollywood, which lets out Zanuck, who was not Jewish. Giving that current description of the museum in the Jewish community is “the museum without the Jews,” the exhibition is probably a good idea. Meanwhile, you can make up your own list of white actresses who are not represented.

There are two photos of screenwriters, sort of. You remember that dark hallway I mentioned? That is the area on screenwriting, although for some reason the area is entitled “Story.” Does nobody connected with the museum know the difference between “story” and “script”? I am beginning to feel that my hard work of promoting screenwriting and screenwriters for the last fifty years may be more in vain than I thought. I am assuming the hall is so dark to prevent light from fading the ink on the pages of scripts on display. Fine, but it makes the scripts almost impossible to read. I hope they can work that out.

In addition to the typewriter that Joseph Stefano wrote Psycho (1960), there is a photo of one screenwriter in this area. The focus of the image is on the writer’s director, Charles Bennett’s Fat Little English Friend. We only see the back of Joan Harrison’s head. You may remember my review of the good biography of Harrison here.

[Most Hitchcock Films are Harrison Films]

In another area, there is a photograph of the founders of the Academy. The one you may recognize is Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Sitting next to him is Frank Woods, Griffith’s co-writer on The Birth of a Nation (1915). You have to already know them to recognize them, because there is no caption identifying any of them.

Now, this raises some interesting questions. Why did they not have a caption? OK, the people organizing the museum may not have recognized them. But why did they then not go over the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library and ask the librarians to identify them? I have been using the Herrick Library for over fifty years and the librarians there can find anything for you. Is it possible that the people running the museum do not know about the library, or are they so cocky they don’t think they need it? Or, if they don’t want to deal with the library, they could call up Marc Wanamaker or Anthony Slide, two experts on silent film, either one of whom could probably identify the people in the picture without breaking a sweat.

I have seen this happen before: film experts from out of town come in and do not take advantage of the facilities and people who are here. I am hoping the people running the museum do not continue to fall into that trap. I would like to believe there is hope for them…yet.