THE WOMEN, PART I: Reviews of Sex and the City 2, Mother and Child, Please Give and The Father of My Children

According to traditional wisdom, movies about women and starring women are few and far between. This is, and always has been, complete hogwash. While it is true that studio, tent pole films are often devoid of actresses or female characters of any import, independent and foreign films have more than taken up the slack. And now even the studios have slowly begun to realize that women are willing to spend money on movies so that at last, but not least, we are finally getting a few films from those Mounts of Olympus aimed at the distaff part of the population. All is not right in the world, but it’s not, nor has it ever been, as bad as people have painted it.

In Sex and the City 2, there is one scene that basically sums up the problems with the movie. Carrie Bradshaw (played, of course, by Sarah Jessica Parker) is in Dubai talking to a valet who has been assigned to serve her every need. When she asks him if he is married, he tells her that his wife is in India and they only see each other every few months if they can afford it. Does Carrie think, “OMG, there are people in the world so bad off financially, they can’t even live with their spouse?” Of course not. She thinks, “Hm, if this person can have a successful relationship with his wife though he only sees her every three months, maybe my husband’s request for a couple of days off a week from our marriage might not be as unreasonable as I thought”. Sex in the City is about four women who got to Dubai, see a country, experience a different culture, interact with a whole new ethnic group…and don’t learn a damn thing. I went with my friend R. (name changed to protect the innocent, or at least his profession in the industry) and he called it vulgar. I’m not sure I can disagree. The four friends end up in Dubai when Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), the sexual adventurer of the foursome, gets a potential job offer from a businessman who wants to hire Samantha to do PR and sell his country as a tourist attraction. Now you would think that someone who made a name for herself doing PR would know that it’s probably unwise to insult the country of the businessman who wishes to hire you, but from the moment Samantha steps off the plane, she does nothing but act in, as suggested by my friend, the most vulgar manner imaginable. This might be all right if she had done it for political reasons, in response to the way Dubai treats their female citizens, say; but no, she does it because, well, she’s kinda (again, as my friend suggested) vulgar, which in certain circumstances is empowering and funny, but in others, it’s just, well…vulgar. In fact, she acts like Edina Muldoon in Absolutely Fabulous and there are times when the whole movie seems like a parody of the episode where Edina and Patsy went to Morocco. For a movie about women’s liberation (the quartet even does a karaoki version of “I Am Woman”), the writer/director Michael Patrick King seems to have trouble seeing the women of Dubai as little more than an occasion for a joke. I’m sure that for King the second class citizens of Dubai are little more than a punch line, but I’m not sure they would quite see it the same way. After a few adventures, and when all the requisite character arcs of a formulaic tent pole film have been covered, all four characters return to the city a little older. If only they had returned a little wiser.

In Sex and the City 2, four women go to Dubai and never experience anything more than their own backyard. In Mother and Child, the latest from writer/director Rodrigo Garcia, three women never leave their own back yard, but experience the whole universe. The three women are Karen (Annette Bening, who seems to be having a good year, what with The Kids Are All Right coming out soon); Elizabeth (Naomi Watts); and Lucy (Kerry Washington). Exactly how these three people fit into each other’s universes is not revealed at first, though it quickly becomes clear that Elizabeth is the daughter that Karen gave up when she got pregnant at age fourteen. This revelation also gives the plot a bit of grounding, since we know that eventually the two will somehow connect again; but how exactly does Lucy fit into all this? Well, she in turns adopts the baby Elizabeth has when Elizabeth dies in childbirth; but that’s not the end of it, not by a long shot. During the film, there is a lot of discussion as to whether God exists or if He brings meaning and order to the universe. At times, these conversations seem a little forced. But they are necessary, because in a deeply moving and surprising ending, Karen, a woman with a chip on her shoulder who does all she can to alienate those around her, realizes that everyone, chip or no chip, is actually connected, that there is a spiritual unity to the universe and that she is part of it and the proof is closer than she would have ever thought. This is a movie you watch to see actors really dig into characters that have meat and bones. Jerry, my best friend in Chicago, who also loved the movie, said that in Annette Bening he now has his first strong possibility for his list of the best of 2010. He also predicts an Oscar nomination. I’m not so sure. As wonderful as she is, it’s still an independent film opening rather early in the year. She may have a better chance with The Kids Are All Right. Naomi Watts has the most difficult role to play, mainly because her character starts out with all the clinical characteristics of a sociopath; she manipulates people in quite evil ways at time and with not one whit of a guilty conscience about it. Then when she gets pregnant, she suddenly reverses herself and leaves all the sociopathology behind (the hormones, maybe?). To a certain degree, one of the themes of the movie is that a woman has to connect with their child in some way in order to fully become themselves; but to change from a sociopath to a human being when you get a bun in the oven is really going there thematically. I’m not sure I bought it, but Watts made it damn entertaining. Last but not least Washington keeps up with her co-stars; annoying and off putting at times, like all the others, she more than earns your empathy by movie’s end. This is an ensemble movie in which the characters never really interact. It’s also a deeply moving film about the need for people to connect, to find meaning in their lives by reaching out to each other, even if they do never meet. Sort of a contradiction in terms, but that’s the universe for you.

WHO DUN IT?: Reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Secret in Their Eyes

Lately, there has been something of a revitalization of the “who done it” murder mystery in film, a genre that in many ways, like screwball comedies, had found its way to television series and didn’t seem to want to come back. My feeling is that this recent influx started with Tell No One, the very successful French mystery that opened here a couple of years ago. Why this is, is hard to say. It could be cyclical. It could be coincidence. But don’t be surprised if we see more of them, because once something makes money, then all bets are off the table. Two more opened very close to each other this year, both doing well enough at the box office that they are going to be remade, like Tell No One, in the U.S.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish mystery based on a wildly successful series of books written by Stieg Larson. I have read that the success of mysteries in Sweden, especially extremely violent ones, are something of a mystery in itself since the Scandinavian countries have some of the lowest murder rates in the world. And whatever else one might say about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it is extremely violent. I went with a friend who had no idea what he was getting into and his first response was how intense it was. No argument there. At the same time, though there was much I enjoyed in the film, especially once the mystery itself got going, the intensity often seemed to have no real purpose. As a result, the screenplay, by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, seemed a bit clunky to me. It starts off with two separate plot lines. Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nygvist) is an investigative reporter sued for libel. When he loses, he not only has to pay damages, he also has to serve six months in prison. Since he has some time to get his affairs in order before entering the clink, he is approached by the oldest member of a very wealthy family, Henrik Vanger, to investigate the murder of his niece from forty years ago. This is where this section of the mystery never really made a lot of sense to me. His niece disappeared and her body was never found, so it’s a little unclear why he thinks she was killed. He believes that one of his relatives, rapacious capitalists, some with ties to Nazism, did it, but he can’t provide a motive other than that they’re rapacious capitalists, some with ties to Nazism—which makes them assholes, but not murderers. Every year, Vanger receives a framed flower on his birthday. He thinks it’s from the murderer to torment him about his niece. But if that is true, and the murderer is one of the family, wouldn’t all he have to do is figure out which of his relatives were out of town in the location of where the flowers were sent from in order to solve the mystery? Actually, everything…everything…suggests that the niece is still alive, but the screenplay skips over this lack of logic. It also skips over why Vanger waited so long to look into the murder; if he hired any detectives earlier, it’s not mentioned; and Blomkvist would be smart enough to have asked. The set up is just clumsy and, well, clunky, as has already been said. There is also a second plot unfolding at this time concerning Lisbeth Salander, a troubled young woman who is a brilliant hacker. Well, troubled is only the tip of the iceberg. Though of age, she has to have her expenses and the way she spends her money overseen by a government appointee; the reasons are vague, though they may make sense to someone who is Scandinavian (a friend of mine said that in the book, Lisbeth has some form of Asperger’s or something like that, which to a degree suggests the need for a guardian, but still makes one wonder). She’s also mercilessly raped and sexually abused by this appointee. What this has to do with the murder itself is unclear; actually, in one way, it’s very clear: it has nothing to do with the murder, but still, there you have it. Lisbeth becomes involved because she did some hacking work for Vanger and became interested in Blomkvist and decided to help him solve the murder. Once all this is over (an hour perhaps into the movie), the mystery itself starts in and the plotline becomes much more involving. It all starts with a rather brilliant observation by Blomkvist that he makes while looking at old newspaper photos and from there on in, it becomes one of those Miss Marple/Hercule Poirot mysteries with all sorts of clever twists and turns. It’s all somewhat convoluted, though at the same time, it all does come together and make sense. It’s hard to say it ever rises above an Agatha Christie mystery, but the raw looking cinematography that makes everything feel dark and gloomy even in broad daylight, and the demytholizing of Swedish sympathies with Nazism are a plus, as is Noomi Rapace’s intense (that word again, though here somewhat of an understatement) portrayal of Lisbeth. The final ending, of Lisbeth going off somewhere and being rich and glamorous is supposed to mean something, but what exactly is vague and may ultimately reveal the problem with the movie (which may or may not go back to the book). The story is more about Lisbeth than about Blomkvist; in fact, Blomkvist at times is more along for the ride. But the screenwriters weren’t able to quite able to focus the story around her the way it probably needs to be.

The Secret in Their Eyes is the Argentine winner of the Best Foreign Language Film of 2010 for the Oscars. What’s often interesting in watching foreign films is to notice the differences in the way certain things are done than in the U.S. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it is surprising that libel is a criminal matter whereas in the U.S. it’s only a civil one and that there are government guardians appointed for people who suffer from such problems as Asperger’s (both of which might make it difficult for the screenwriters of the American remake). In The Secret of Their Eyes, the central character, Benjamin Esposito, is a federal justice agent, a position that one doesn’t find on such shows as Law & Order. It seems to be a job (not even requiring a high school diploma) in which someone prepares a case for prosecution, something between police detective and District Attorney (you can also add here that Judges also serve as lawyers and investigators and some government officials have the ability to pardon criminals in secret). There is an odd similarity between this movie and …Dragon Tattoo. Both mysteries began to unravel based on an observation made in looking at old photographs. It’s as if both screenwriters (here Eduardo Sacheri, who also wrote the book, and Juan Jose Campanella, who also directed) had channeled the screenplay of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, in which a fashion photographer captures something suspicious while taking snaps of a couple cootchi-cooing in a park. There’s also a similarity in that both have brutal rapes as part of their plots, but I’m not sure what that says and I’m not sure I want to know. It’s not easy to write about a rape and show empathy for the victim while not exploiting the situation and I’m not sure either writer or director succeeded with that here. The Secret of Their Eyes also has a certain clunkiness to its plotting as well in that there are actually two through lines. One is the solution of a brutal rape and murder of a beautiful young woman married to a mild mannered young man who never gives up hope of finding the real killer; the second is the romance between Benjamin and a Judge, Irene. The romance is the least satisfactory aspect of the script. It’s one of those unrequited affairs where Irene is so out of Benjamin’s league he can’t bring himself to court her and Irene, as a woman, can’t make the first step and tell Benjamin how she feels (you know, like in those films by John Hughes). It’s something of a cliché and the two actors (Ricardo Darin and Soledad Villamil) never generate much heat. The love story never feels that closely connected to the mystery either, and the ending where Benjamin decides to go for it and declare his feelings feel a bit unsatisfactory, as if the real reason for the woman’s rape and murder was to eventually bring these two characters together. The investigation of the death is much more intriguing and comes with some nifty detective work and leads to the best performance in the movie, Javier Godnio as the murderer, one of those people driven to become a fascist due to feelings of sexual inadequacy (like The Conformist). You can feel the rage and evil sweating from his body and he has a wonderful smirk when he realizes he has all the power. The surprise ending is truly a surprise and provides a satisfactory emotional resolution to the story.

IS THERE A DOC IN THE HOUSE: Reviews of It Came From Kuchar and Casino Jack and the United States of Money

It Came From Kuchar is a documentary about twin underground filmmaker brothers, George and Mike Kuchar, who began their careers in the 1950’s and are still making films today. Never heard of them? Well neither have I, which probably says more about me than it does about them. But after seeing the film, I’m not sure how to feel about the Kuchars or their prodigious output. Their movies seem to have grown out of the same aesthetic that brought the world the films of Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol and their subject matter seems to have been reactions to the soap operic melodramas and horror/sci fi films of the 1950’s. I say “seems” because, as I said, I have never seen a Kuchar film. But from what I can glean from the clips shown in this movie, they have taken a camp approach similar to such stage writers as Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch and combined them with the outrageous vulgar approach of John Waters’ earlier endeavors (and Waters is one of the many talking heads who comments on the importance of these cinematic siblings). So far, so good, these sound like just the sorts of movies I live for. And many of the reviews claim that seeing this movie would make one want to see films by the Kuchars. But I’m afraid it didn’t for me. I wanted it to, but the clips left me a bit cold and all they did was make me curious enough to add them to the bottom of my Netflix queue (which now concludes with Sins of the Fleshapoids). Their films look cheap, amateurish and the sort of things my friends made when they were in high school. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it can be a very, very good thing. But in the end, my reaction to their cinematic endeavors was more a jury is out sort of thing. The filmmaker here, Jennifer M. Kroot, seemed to be having as much fun in making this film as the Kuchars did in making theirs. George, especially, came across as one of those oversized personalities that would either attract people (like the Pied Piper) or send them screaming from the room (and he has become a popular teacher). At the same time, I felt like Kroot was somewhat holding back. It seems obvious from statements here and there that both brothers are gay, yet, from my memory (which isn’t always the most reliable), the documentary never comes out and says that they are. And toward the end, the filmmakers block parts of the screen that show an actress’s vagina. Why isn’t clear; it’s not as if Kroot’s target audience are going to be offended. But it just seems strange in a movie about filmmakers who never seemed to worry about what people thought about them or their films. Kroot also fails in my opinion in one of her main thesis: that these two filmmakers were important and influential in the film world. When it comes to talking heads, she has nobody who is at the forefront of what is happening in movies today. There are no Martin Scorseses, Steven Spielbergs, Quentin Tarantinos, and none of the filmmakers who are more cutting edge like Gus Van Sant, David Lynch, Hal Hartley or Todd Haynes. Instead, they have people like Wayne Wang, Atom Egoyan, Buck Henry, etc. Talented filmmakers all, but hardly the A-list.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money is the story of Jack Abramoff, a man who turned the job of lobbyist into a fine art of the evil kind. The documentary, by Alex Gibney, is quite fascinating in the way that Shakespeare’s Richard III is fascinating: you may hate the central character, but you do find yourself sitting in guilty awe, amazed at just how brilliant the man was at lying, cheating, scamming, conning (quick, does someone have a thesaurus) and how audacious he was at getting what he wanted. Gibney is skilled at telling his story. It’s very complicated at times and Gibney keeps it all straight and understandable. At the same time he uses those contemporary stylistic flourishes of recreating fictional scenes that I find annoying myself and he also has an odd habit of suddenly focusing the camera on various body parts of the talking heads, to no real effect. The story itself has the usual moral: Abramoff started out as a true believer in the libertarian doctrine of a hands off government, but at some point, as he gained more power, he became more corrupted and replaced his original beliefs with playing the game for the game’s sake, with winning and gaining more power becoming the ultimate goal, not creating a government that would work better than the government already in existence (you know, power corrupts, absolutely power, etc.). At the same time, as intriguing as the movie is, it also fell a bit short for me. Once it was over, I felt that in many ways I had watched Citizen Kane, a movie about a man who also fell from grace. The theme of Citizen Kane is that ultimately one can never understand what makes a human being tick. I also never felt I understood what made Abramoff tick. It was one thing to preach libertarianism, it’s another thing to become a lying, cheating, greedy bastard. The one area Gibney doesn’t grapple with is the one area I really wanted explored. While growing up (apparently while watching Fiddler on the Roof, according to Gibney), Abramoff had a crisis of faith and converted to a more orthodox Judaism. This somehow led to his libertarianism. So far, so good. If the connection between Orthodox Judaism and libertarianism is a bit vague and Gibney doesn’t really make much of a logical connection, at the same time, the two beliefs are not mutually exclusive. But what Gibney doesn’t explore or ask is how Abramoff reconciled his Orthodox beliefs with his lying, cheating and lust for money. Abramoff is the sort of person that God sent the prophets in the Old Testament to chastise, to preach against. It’s the reason why Jonah ended up in the whale, because he was too scared to preach from street corners about people like Abramoff. It’s the same for Ralph Reed, a born again Christian who joined Abramoff in his schemes to rake in money; Reed is the sort of Pharisee Jesus preached against and threw out of the temple for money changing. It’s as if Gibney not only thinks the two ways of thinking are not mutually exclusive, it’s as if he believes that one logically leads to another. But they don’t. So like the reporter in Citizen Kane searching for the meaning of the word “Rosebud”, I also kept waiting for Gibney to discover Abramoff’s MacGuffin, the thing that drove him from Orthodoxy to greedy asshole. But it never appeared.

REFLECTIONS ON MOVIES: Viagra Needed

One sign that you are watching a foreign film is that during a sex scene, you will see an erect penis. I saw two foreign films this last week, The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina) and Alle Anderen (Everybody Else, Germany), both of which had no issue with showing a male member in all it's glory, so to speak. In the U.S., prudity still rules. The same week I saw Happiness Runs, which was about the children of hippies. For a movie that was suppose to be about a group of people who preach free love, the sex and nudity was very circumspect. And when frontal male nudity does make it into American films, the media makes such a big deal out of it like it's the second coming (the ridiculous stories on Jason Segal baring all for Forgetting Sarah Marshall immediately leap to mind). What is it about foreign cultures that allows their artists to look at sex from a more casual perspective while in America we still come across as terrified of it?

HANDSOME IS AS HANDSOME DOES: Reviews of Handsome Harry and City Island

Handsome Harry is the story of five sailors who beat up a sixth thirty years before the move starts, a somewhat ambiguous time line which only makes sense if the present day story takes place in the 1990’s. Why the five sailors beat up the sixth is not revealed for about a third of the way through, but if you don’t know right off, you really need to get out more. There are two additional secrets, one about the title character’s relationship with the sixth sailor, as well as who was the one responsible for dropping a weight on the sailor’s hand thereby stopping him from pursuing a promising career as a pianist. But again, if you can’t figure these out as well, you really, really, really need to get out more. This is often the problem with a movie whose emotional impact depends on unrevealed twists: the surprises are usually so obvious there’s often little else to do but wait around to see if you were right. It’s not just the plot turns that are obvious here; everything about it, the dialog, the acting, the directing (the screenplay is by Nicholas T. Proferes and the direction by Bette Gordon) all has that on the nose feel about it as if the film were made by a telegraph company. Proferes’ script is very since and his heart is in the right place, but neither he nor Gordon seem to demonstrate much skill, subtlety or deftness of touch in getting across their vision in a satisfactory way. The plot also lacks forward momentum. The story begins when Harry (played by Jamey Sheridan) gets a call from one of the other sailors, Thomas (played by the always reliable Steve Buscemi). Thomas is dying from cancer and is afraid of going to hell if he doesn’t get forgiveness from Kagan, the sixth sailor. Thomas asks Harry to bring Kagan to his deathbed, but instead Harry goes himself and Thomas dies without the peace he needs. Harry then takes it upon himself to search out the other three sailors as well as Kagan. Why? Well, now that Thomas’s dead, Harry doesn’t really have a very compelling reason. Proferes comes up with the idea that Harry now wants to find out who dropped the weight on Kagan’s hand, not a particularly convincing motivation, especially since the easiest way to find this out is to go directly to the horse’s mouth and ask Kagan. And with this, the forward momentum of the plot really comes to a halt as Harry pinballs from one of his old shipmates to another (and again, since the audience should already know the answer to Harry’s question, it feels more like waiting around just to see if we guessed right). The ex-shipmates are played by John Savage, Aidan Quinn and Titus Welliver, all of whom play people who have grown up well to do, but extremely unhappy and not because of what they did to Kagan, but just because that’s what happens to the bourgeoisie in movies. The real problem here, though, is that none of these characters are particularly interesting or tell us anything about anything. Because of this, it seems to take forever for Harry to get to Kagan. Kagan is played by Campbell Scott who gives the most compelling performance in the movie. He strides forth with an unnerving quiet that pulls one in. It would be nice if one could say these last few minutes could make up for the rest of the movie, but as good as Scott is, they really don’t.

As is mentioned in other areas of this blog, I make a living reading scripts for a production company and a few contests. I am always on the lookout for that oddly compelling script that is quirky and different, that is its own thing. These sorts of screenplays quickly stand out, mainly because the characters are so interesting and compelling, but a bit off, and the situations they find themselves in are also interesting and compelling, but a bit off. Let’s hear it for movies that are a bit off. City Island, written by the director Raymond De Felitta, is just that sort of screenplay, the one that often makes it worthwhile wading through the tons of other screenplays that barely rise above being mediocre. The basic set up is winning in itself. Andy Garcia plays Vince Rizzo, a prison guard (excuse me, corrections officer) who is taking an acting class, but is so embarrassed about it that he tells his wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies, looking like she’s having the time of her life playing someone straight out of Goodfellas) that he’s at a poker game. Vince is given an exercise where he must reveal his most embarrassing secret to an acting partner, here Molly (played luminously by the always superb and eponymous Emily Morton, who if she wasn’t in it, Emily Watson, Kelly McDonald or Samantha Morton would have been, thank god for actresses who have humility and don’t feel they need to be the lead in everything they do). His secret is that the newest prisoner at his job is actually his son, though his son doesn’t know it because Vince left his mother before he was even born. Vince then takes the son Tony (played with great pecs and arms by Steven Straight) into his home without telling him or Joyce what is really going on. Add to this a daughter Tanya, who is secretly stripping in order to earn enough money to go back to college because she lost her scholarship when pot was found in her dorm room, and a son Vince, Jr., an adolescent just discovering that he is really, really, really, I mean, really turned on by hefty women (a situation that is dealt with refreshingly because De Felitta doesn’t exploit it for fat jokes, but mines humor from the situation without passing judgment), and you have the makings of a fun farce and, indeed, this a plot in which every time the story takes a turn you find yourself going “oh, this can’t be good”, or “Uh oh”, or “that can’t turn out well”. Once Tony moves into the house, the movie becomes basically a variation on the classic film Boudu Saved From Drowning in which a homeless person is saved and taken in by the head of a middle class family (you may remember it as the enjoyable remake Down and Out in Beverly Hills). Boudu thereupon upends the bourgeois pretensions of the household. This perhaps betrays the main weakness of City Island. Tony is never a threat to the pretensions of the Rizzo family; he is in fact, their savior (you know De Felitta is going to play it safe when he doesn’t have Joyce and Tony have sex and doesn’t even entertain the notion of Tony and Tanya getting it on). So though the script is quirky, fun and a rollicking good time, it’s also a bit safe, a bit sitcomy. It flirts with really saying something dangerous, but in the end settles for the old saw, honesty is the best policy. But don’t let that stop you from seeing it. Maybe the movie does pull its punches, but it’s still having a quirky, odd good time.

REFLECTIONS ON MOVIES: Getting to Know You

I only recently finished reading the great book Oblomov, by the Russian writer Ivan Goncharov, a sprawling novel about a particularly type of Russian character. It was one of those books that when I laid it down I was extremely sad that I would never be visiting with these people again. I felt sort of like I was saying goodbye to someone I had really come to know and become emotionally involved with. It's the same sort of feeling I have when I read novels by Dickens (and other Victorians), Proust, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, etc., stories that are large in concept. It struck me after thinking about this, that this is one of the main differences between movies and novels. I love movies and they can have a great emotional impact on me, but I almost never, if ever, come away feeling like I'm saying goodbye to a good friend, to someone I have really come to know and become deeply and emotionally involved with. This is not the fault of movies. Every art form has its advantages and disadvantages and this perhaps is just one of the inherent limitations in film. It's the same for plays as well; there just isn't enough time to really get to know the people a writer presents to you in the same way one comes to know them in novels. In fact, about the only other art form where this happens for me is in TV where one can get to know characters over a longer period of time, even a number of years, characters like Mary Richards, Archie Bunker, the servants of Upstairs, Downstairs, or even in mini-series like Bridesheard Revisited or Queer as Folk, so that one feels a great loss in leaving them (or more accurately, in their leaving you). It's one of the reasons why I read novels and watch TV, to get that feeling that is almost impossible to get in movies. In fact, the only exception one might find in films is The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which takes place over almost nine hours (like a TV mini-series) or something like watching all the Thin Man movies in one sitting.

REFLECTIONS ON MOVIES: Being Cool

Last week I caught the Thomas Crown Affair on TCM on demand. The Thomas Crown Affair is that chic movie about a bored businessman who in an existential crisis decides to rob a bank because nothing else amuses him. Hey, it could be worse. He could have done what Goldman Sachs did. At any rate, though I don't think the film really holds up that well, mainly because the characters played by McQueen and Dunaway aren't that vibrant or interesting (Jack Weston makes the most memorable appearance in the movie), I did enjoy the split screen techniques (cinematography by Haskell Wexler, one of the greats, and editing by, among others, Hal Ashby) and hearing Windmills of Your Mind again (a sort of Jacques Brel like song of despair that was very popular at the time). But after seeing the movie, I was talking about it with my friend Beriau. I remarked that at this time, the Hollywood Production Code was pretty much gone and people were getting away with crime now in movies like Oceans 11 (they didn't get the money, but didn't get caught) , The Sting and the Hot Rock. Beriau said it best when he said that that was because they were cool. It was the period in movies when being cool was all. It didn't matter what you did, as long as you looked good while doing it, you could get away with anything. It was the period when appearance trumped morality.