Interview with Brian Crewe, Part 2

On Tuesday, I posted the first part of an interview with Brian Crewe, who’s been working in editing in Hollywood since the late ’90s. 

Here’s part two:

You note that it’s very hard to guage the quality of an editor’s work. Do you think the DVD era is changing that, what with director’s cuts, deleted scenes, alternate endings, making-of docs, etc., etc.?

I think DVD has changed a lot about how much the public knows about the process of filmmaking. I think the documentaries and commentary tracks offer a great insight into the process of filmmaking.

Take the Ridley Scott film, Kingdom of Heaven. He and editor Dody Dorn had to take what was supposed to be a four hour film and cut it down to under three hours because the studio wanted to make sure theaters could get an extra screening time. The result was a film that was reviewed some what poorly and flopped at the box office.

On DVD you can now watch the four hour director approved edition and by all reports it’s magnificent.

That’s really more film business related, the new Mallrats DVD offers a great window into the creative process. Admittedly, the film by writer /director Kevin Smith is not exactly high brow cinema but it is something of a cult classic. Smith and producer Scott Mossier have cut all of their film except for Mallrats, which was their first studio film.

Despite the film costing seven million dollars Smith chose to shoot the film in wide shots, rarely shooting any close-ups. He had done this on Clerks for budget reasons and picked it up as a style. For the 10th Anniversary DVD he and Mossier decided they would try to take a crack at reediting the film to restore some deleted material and offer fans a look at what might have if they had been the editors.

Now seasoned filmmakers with six features to their credit they discovered to their horror that there was nothing they could do. Because everything was shot in those wide shots the choices made by the original editor were the only ones to be made. So while the DVD does contain a new cut of the film, that cut is essential all those really long master shots strung together.

By watching the two cuts you can start to see what a good editor brings to the table. The longer cut meanders along with no pacing or purpose, while the original has a fun brisk pace.

Also could you go into more detail, if it’s possible, what makes someone like Walter Murch or Michael Kahn so good? Do they have signature styles, like directors and actors? Can you tell the work of a particular editor just by watching some footage?

Alas, you can’t, or at least I find it very hard. I think being a good editor is like being a great musician in an orchestra. They have to be able to play their instrument in a variety of different ways depending on what the composer and the conductor demand. For an editor the story will dictate a pace and momentum that has to followed.

Someone like Michael Kahn is interesting because he’s worked almost exclusively with Steven Spielberg since Close Encounters of The Third Kind in 1977. As Spielberg’s style has evolved, I think you are also watching his chemistry with his editor evolve. The more they know about each other, the bolder choices they can make. Watch the first scene of Minority Report, which is an amazing piece of editing cutting between a murder that hasn’t happened yet and the Cruise simultaneously reviewing the future evidence. That kind of scene can only be executed by people who have been working together for years and have a great understanding of what they are capable of.

Walter Murch, if anyone has read his book, In the Blink of Eye, you know that he is some thing of film philosopher.

I know he’s not credited as the editor on The Godfather but I believe he did some of the sound design. I could be mistaken but I believe it was his idea to cross cut the murders of the five families with the baptism of Michael’s niece. Coppola had shot each of the scenes as separate elements but hadn’t any idea of how they went together. It was in the edit room that the idea came to have Michael taking these vows renouncing Satan and his works as we watch the murders he ordered play out.

Think about the impact of watching those scenes as separate elements rather than all inter-cut. Different movie.

Editor’s note: Wow.

And how much of good editing is piecing together a series of quick shots, knowing exactly when to start a shot and when to end it, pacing and sequencing, etc. and how much of it is just taking a whole pile of film and remaking the narrative?

Good editing is as much about knowing when to make a series of quick cuts and when not to make any edits at all.

This is why many people are harsh with filmmakers like Michael Bay or Simon West who started in music videos. They use numerous quick shots in nearly every scene, never holding in an image for more than a few seconds. They do this in the action scenes and in the more intimate dialog scenes. Critics say this constant rapid fire approach robs a film of any pacing because the edits are always on ten and the audience never gets a chance to slow down and take in the characters.

In his book, Walter Murch says you should think of an edit as the conclusion of a thought. A shot should have a beginning, middle, and end, basically its own mini-story. If someone picks something up, their hand will enter the frame, grab the object in question, and leave a frame, that’s a quick shot.

Let’s take a long shot from Good Will Hunting. Robin Williams and Mat Damon are sitting on the side of the river. Williams has a long speech to give. Rather than cutting to Matt Damon to get a reaction the editor stays on Williams. Because there are no edits the audience stays in the same headspace as Williams. Every word he says takes on added meaning because we are holding on the shot for so long never finishing the line of thought that has been started. It even becomes more engrossing as the camera slowly pushes into a close-up; all that great energy would have been lost if the editor had chosen to cut to Damon’s reaction mid-speech.

You can even give an edit a literary comparison (although with my spelling and grammar I may not be the best at it).

Think of a long edit as a big run on sentence that just keeps going and going never coming to the point but just being drawn out by the author never giving the audience the satisfaction of pointing a period at the end of the sentence to give the audience the satisfaction of moving on to a new topic.

Of course, some edits are short. The editor doesn’t linger on a shot.

Hopefully, that all makes sense.

You brought up the much-maligned music video style, but you seemed to take a neutral stand on it. Do you have a strong feeling about this style of constant cuts? I feel like it gets a bad name, but some of the best movies of the last decade or so have come from former video directors: Seven and Fight Club by David Fincher, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation by Spike Jonze and especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry, which I consider one of the greatest movies ever made. Granted, some terrible hacks like McG have come out of the music video business, but just those five movies I mentioned are a pretty impressive collection of some of the most daring and interesting Hollywood movies of the last 10 years. (With the caveat that Charlie Kauffman wrote three of them.) I’m not sure if I really have a question so much as a general curiosity about your thoughts on the music video style and if there are things that that style can do that the more lingering style of a previous era cannot (besides give you more shots of boobs and explosions in 30 seconds than you ever could before).

I was taking a more academic approach to my answer. Besides I find it hard to be overly critical of films in a public setting, there are so many opinions being expressed on web pages these days and it’s so easy to be negative and ignore what good is present in a work. I’m not trying to present myself as the end all be all expert of the editing world and I’d rather the audience go with their own opinion than take mine as gospel.

Having said that, I think the music video style is great when used to service the story. I think something like The Rock is a fantastic movie. Now take that same style and put it into a film like Pearl Harbor and you have some major problems!

And yeah there are filmmakers like McG who to date has shown no understanding of the balance between style and story.

I really don’t think the style is as inventive as it’s been given credit for. The concept of a quick montage is decades old. Look at Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925). The film is practically the birth place of montage.

Flash forward to A Hard’s Night by Richard Lester. The movie is everything MTV was trying to do in the 1980s.

The only difference is the modern directors have the ability to pull off what used to be impossible shots and cut them a little faster. However, I find they often they are so focused on the style and trying to do shots that will make the audience go, “How did they do that?” That they forget the story they are telling.

I do like much of David Fincher’s films but you can’t tell me he was thinking about the story when he decide to move the camera through the handle of the coffee pot in Panic Room! That’s just a filmmaker jerking off.

Once you finish this question, I’d be awfully interested to see your list of the top 10 flicks from 2005, and then, maybe if you’re feeling ambitious, your top 10 movies ever. Since it’s such a ridiculous request, I’ll get the ball rolling with my top 10 of all-time*, which I will spend no more than the next five minutes coming up with:

1) The Godfather

2) Pulp Fiction

3) Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind

4) Vertigo

5) Casablanca

6) Dr. Strangelove

7) Citizen Kane

Kundun

9) Unforgiven

10) Dog Day Afternoon

*This list subject to change on a daily basis.

You know I’ve been so busy with various projects that I don’t think I saw enough films to do a good top 10 of 2005, so how about a top 5 of films I enjoyed.

1. Munich

2. Capote

3. Good Night and Good Luck

4. Sin City

5. Batman Begins

As for a top 10 of all time, well, like you, my list changes; honestly, let’s call it a list of the 10 films that have had the greatest impact on me. Top 10 of all time is very hard to qualify. However, these are 10 films that I saw that inspired me and made me want to make movies.

1. Star Wars (original edition)

2. Clerks

3. Highlander

4. Pulp Fiction

5. Trainspotting

6. Superman The Movie

7. Raiders of The Lost Ark

8. Apocalypse Now (original edition)

9. Star Trek II

10. American Graffiti

Brian, thank you so much for your time. I really have found your answers insightful and interesting. So I have one last question for you, which you can answer any you want: what would be your dream project? (Oh yes, and if you want to plug anything you’re working on now, plug, plug away!)

Thanks for the interview, I really enjoyed it! Great questions. Sorry it took so long for my answers to come in. I hope you got everything you wanted and I’d happy to answer any questions you might have in the future.

My goal for my career is to make films that have can an impact beyond the cinema.

My immediate dream project is “Sara’s Song.” Its a film I wrote with Natalie Plant. We are co-producing for her to play the lead and myself to direct. As you can tell from this interview I’m all about a great story and great characters, I think we’ve got both in this film.

Also, because the film deals with a childhood sexual abuse survivor we’ve decided to dedicate a portion of proceeds to charities that support rape and abuse survivors.

I’m so lucky to have been blessed with the skills to work in a medium I love; I feel its important to use my abilities to send a message of hope and understanding to those who need it.

To learn more about “Sara’s Song” please visit www.FilmCreweProductions.com.

Interview with Brian Crewe, former video store clerk, current TV editor and future Oscar-winning filmmaker (Part I)

In the coming months, I’m going to be doing some occasional Q&As with people in show biz, illuminating some aspects of how movies are made, and giving some insight into what the experts–as opposed to opinionated know-it-alls like myself–think about different movies.

My first Q&A is with Brian Crewe, an editor and filmmaker. As an editor, he’s worked on a variety of shows on VH1, E! and ESPN. As a filmmaker, he directed Learning to Fly, a short that will play at the San Diego Comic Con on July 21. (He’s also the brother of friend of My Own Worst Critic, fellow Georgetown University alum Kathy Crewe.)

Handsome devil, isn’t he?

I’ll be posting bits of the Q&A in installments. I’d love to hear what you think about these kinds of dialogues, and if you have any questions you’d like to ask Brian, please post them as comments.

MOWC: So I checked out your website and your IMDB profile. Bridezillas, very impressive.

Brian Crewe: Thanks. I’ve only been on the show for three weeks and my material won’t start to air until September 2006. Not how I was planning to spend the summer but fun.

Can you tell me a little about your background, what you’re doing now and where you’d like to be in the film industry?

I was born and raised in Minneapolis MN. After high school, I worked in a video store for 4 years. During two of those years I earned an AA in Film Production from Minneapolis Community College. I moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and received my Bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California in Film Production in 1999.

Since then I’ve been working in the industry. Editing has been my primary form of employment since about 2002. I enjoy it because it really is all about storytelling. Its fantastic to watch the work of an entire staff come together.

However, at the end of the day my editing jobs are just a way to pay the bills while I develop my own projects. I’m currently preparing to direct my first feature “Sara’s Song,” which is the story of a childhood sexual abuse survivor who learns to heal herself through music.

My goal is to be a good story teller and to do that in the film industry I think you have to understand writing, producing, directing, and editing. I see myself continuing to pursue all four of those jobs in the future.

I feel like the role of the editor–that is, the importance of the editor–in the creative process of a movie is often underestimated. How important (if there is any way you can quantify it) is having a good editor on a movie?

Well I think the best expression I’ve heard is that you write a movie three times. Once as a screenplay, once as you are shooting it, and once in the edit room. When you realize that the edit room is the last step in the process you realize how important it is.

During production the director and their crew shoot a scene. They cover the same action from many angles, wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, and insert shots (which are close-ups of specific actions like figures typing on a key pad).

The editor’s job is to craft the coverage into a watchable scene. All those different angles could have different meanings depending on when they are used in the scene. A close-up implies something very different from a wide shot.

Now two things make it very hard for an outsider to gage how good the editor is.

1. An editor is only as good as the footage they are given. For many reasons the production team might not of gotten all the angles that the editor needed, so the choices are limited.

2. While an editor has an opportunity to turn in their own cut of the film. The producers, director and even the studio have final say as to what we watch in the theater or at home.

That’s not to say this is a bad thing. Film is ultimately about the director’s vision of the story and a good editor will collaborate with the rest of the creative team to make that happen.

Like every job on a film the editor has to be subservient to the story being told.

Who are some of the best in the business, and what have they done?

I always have to go with the classics:

• Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now)
• Verna Fields (Jaws)
• Michael Kahn (Spielberg’s editor for the last thirty years)
• Thelma Schoonmaker (just about every Martin Scorsese film)
• Sally Menke (Quentin Tarantino)

You might notice that all these editors work with very strong directors. I think the goal of any collaboration is for the people working together to elevate the other. These editors have been given amazing footage and have found ways to make it even better.

That’s all very interesting, and there are a couple things I want to get at. You note that it’s very hard to guage the quality of an editor’s work. Do you think the DVD era is changing that, what with director’s cuts, deleted scenes, alternate endings, making-of docs, etc., etc.? Also could you go into more detail, if it’s possible, what makes someone like Walter Murch or Michael Kahn so good? Do they have signature styles, like directors and actors? Can you tell the work of a particular editor just by watching some footage?

And how much of good editing is piecing together a series of quick shots, knowing exactly when to start a shot and when to end it, pacing and sequencing, etc. and how much of it is just taking a whole pile of film and remaking the narrative?

(And feel free to correct me–or call me a bonehead–if I am revealing how little I really know about the details of the process.)

For Part II, click here.

Not a good Harvest this year, I’m afraid.

I didn’t realize this until I read his IMDB profile, but Harold Ramis, the director of The Ice Harvest, has written or directed some of the best non-spoof comedies of the last 30 years: Animal House, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day. I’ll take that résumé against Woody Allen’s or Mel Brooks’ any day of the week.

In many ways, his movies–especially Animal House and Ghostbusters–have served as the template for the modern mainstream comedy film: a wise-cracking protagonist, usually accompanied by a ragtag group of sidekicks, goes on an absurd quest, gets the girl and is involved in a ludicrous spectacle of a climax. Usually, although not always, the third reel is not nearly as funny as the first two, as the demands of tying up an outrageous plot leave little time for jokes.

The critics have deridden this formula–and I admit that in its lesser forms, like most Adam Sandler movies, I find it tiring–but it’s so common now that a comedy without this framework, like Ramis’ own masterwork Groundhog Day, seems downright revolutionary. And because the laughs are so good in the first two-thirds, and we find the wiseacre hero so endearing, we’re willing to let the film coast through the denouement with nary a chuckle.

This formula is again on display in The Ice Harvest, only there’s one problem: The Ice Harvest is a noir, not a comedy. And unlike comedies, good noirs need to do in the third act what they do in the first two acts, only better. The vision of humanity needs to get darker, the twists need to get twistier and the humor needs to gets more shocking. Indeed, the endings of noirs–The Usual Suspects, for example–are often the best part. The Ice Harvest, unfortunately, is at its most interesting in the first half-hour and seems to slowly thaw as the story progresses.

On the surface, The Ice Harvest has all the makings of a tasty little noir like The Last Seduction or A Simple Plan. It’s got two lead actors, Jon Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, who can effortlessly slide between humor and pathos. Its setting, a rainy Christmas eve in Wichita, Kansas, is suitably depressing. And it’s got a promising standard-issue noir premise: two guys steal $2 million from a mob boss. (Like Westerns, the more familiar the set-up for a noir is, the better.)

Cusack’s character, Charlie Arglist, is the protagonist, which means he’s the least despicable of the film’s many degenerates. He’s a mob lawyer and a shitty father, but at least he values loyalty. Vic Cavanaugh (Thornton, who can do sleazy characters like this in a coma) possesses not the faintest scent of morality; he has no hesitation about splitting town and leaving his obese wife forever. A few shades lighter on the spectrum of human debauchery is Pete Van Heuten (Oliver Platt), an alcoholic architect who’s doing everything he can to destroy his marriage to Chris’ ex-wife. Also joining in the fun is the woman Chris pines for, Renata, a strip-club owner played by Connie Nielsen with such breathy incompetence that she’s more femme banal than femme fatale.

So far, so good enough. In the opening scenes, the screenplay, by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, based on the novel by Scott Phillips, beautifully plays off the comic tension between Charlie, who’s anxiety-ridden over the possibility of getting caught, and Vic, who’s so hopeless about his life that he doesn’t seem to give a shit one way or the other. There’s a wonderfully ironic scene right after they’ve committed the crime where Vic and Charlie argue over who’s going to hold onto the bag of cash–only to overcompensate for their complete lack of trust in each other, each says the other guy really should take it.

Charlie has the kind of great bad luck moments that noirs have trained us to expect; his cellphone breaks on a slip on the ice, his car spins out of control and draws the attention of a police cruiser, Pete pukes in his passenger seat after a night of self-annihilation by inebriation. Charlie says to Pete, “An entire parking lot and you had to puke in my car?”

But when The Ice Harvest starts migrating away from its comic premise and into the actual plot, which is necessarily darker, the plot holes start to grow and the twists, well, they never materialize. A key plot point revolves around Vic stuffing the mob boss’ henchman into a metal trunk. Leaving aside the practical difficulties of fitting a six-foot-tall man into a three-foot-long trunk, Vic’s reason for leaving the henchman alive is never adequately explained. It makes for some funny moments, like when the henchman tells Charlie he’s going to kill him, and then asks Charlie to free him. “You just said you’d kill me. Why should I free you?” Charlie asks. “I didn’t mean it,” he responds.

But the scene also makes not a lick of sense, as we soon learn that Vic has already killed somebody else that night. If the motive is torture, I don’t buy it; everything we’ve learned about Vic up to this point demonstrates that he’s amoral, not immoral. He’s simply too practical about his own preservation to waste time drawing out his enemy’s death.

The narrative gets more incredible (in the worst sense of the word) from there. The film’s finale takes place at the strip club that Renata manages. When Charlie arrives to pick her up so they can leave Wichita with the money, he sees the mob boss’ car out front. But he walks in anyway. I wasn’t sure what to make of it: Does he have a deathwish? Does he love Renata so much that he wants to save her? Has he now become a hero? The movie wants us to believe the answer is (B) he loves Renata so much, which is fine, but why wouldn’t he take some precautions like, I don’t know, not walking in the front door unarmed?

When Charlie enters Renata’s office, he finds her tied to her chair. Luckily for them, the mob boss, Bill Guerrard (played by Randy Quaid, doing a lackluster J.T. Walsh impression), is in the can. To buy time so Charlie can get the shotgun under the bar, Renata convinces Guerrard to relax for a nice blow job. Umm, dude, you tied her to a chair because you didn’t trust her, remember?

Then, after Charlie fails to kill Guerrard, Guerrard not only doesn’t immediately kill Charlie but he decides to take his sweet-ass time before killing Renata. Unsurprisingly, this buys enough time for Charlie to find his courage, get off the floor, grab the gun and blow Guerrard’s head off. That’s not an ending; that’s a screenwriter’s cry for help. Both Benton (who co-wrote Superman and Bonnie and Clyde) and Russo (who wrote HBO’s Empire Falls) should know better. Perhaps Benton’s and Russo’s friends should stage an intervention and have them take a personal inventory of their missteps. “Hi, my name is Robert Benton, and I’ve been a hack for seven years…”

The movie isn’t bad really, only mediocre, which is worse–at least really bad movies are entertaining. Ramis has a rare talent–translating the comic gifts of SNL stars to the big screen–and maybe The Ice Harvest’s failure will lead him to return to his roots. There hasn’t been a decent comedy starring an SNL castmember since Anchorman in 2004; it’s about time for another.

Revised Top 10 from 2005

Here is my revised top 10 movies from 2005, post-Murderball.

1. Kung Fu Hustle
2. Walk the Line
3. King Kong
4. Good Night, and Good Luck
5. Hustle and Flow
6. Murderball
7. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
8. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
9. Brokeback Mountain
10. Munich

Sorry, Capote.

Murderball: A Masterpiece

MTV gets a bad reputation for its reality shows. First they merely distorted reality through out-of-sequence editing and extreme mood music; now they fabricate it altogether by shooting scripted shows in "reality" style. You didn't think The Hills was legit, did you?

But MTV gets a lot less attention for its socially responsible documentaries and reality series, like True Life and its specials on sex. These Peabody-winning shows bring the MTV style–rapid-fire editing, pop soundtracks, slo-mo, extreme closeups, all the fix-ins–to documentary filmmaking, and turn potentially dry educational videos into interesting, enlightening, often moving studies of modern society.

This approach reaches new aesthetic heights with ThinkFilm/MTV Films' Murderball, a simply amazing documentary about the coolest sport you've never heard of, wheelchair rugby. The quadriplegic men who play wheelchair rugby explode every stereotype about the disabled: they fight, they drink, they drive, they fuck, they play a brutally competitive sport. And they don't want your help getting into the car at the grocery store.

In wheelchair rugby, or quad rugby, two teams of four guys square off on a basketball court and pass or bounce-pass a volleyball to each other, with the objective of riding the ball over the goal line at the far end of the court. When players have a more severe disability that makes gripping the ball difficult, they often wear gloves slathered in glue. Everyone rides in armor-laden wheelchairs, which they crash into opponents to stall their movement or disrupt their throws. The crash produces the predictably painful screech of metal-on-metal, and players often topple over head-first onto the floor with only their atrophied limbs to break the fall. Hence the nickname murderball.

If that premise isn't juicy enough, the filmmakers, Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry Alex Rubin, found an incredible narrative hook in Joe Soares, a former all-star American quad player who, after getting cut by the American paralympic team, picked up his wheels and became the head coach of the Canadian national team. A narcissistic Robert Duvall lookalike, he's been wheelchair-bound since contracting polio as a child, and between his screaming, boasting and thinly veiled disappointment in his unathletic son, he makes a perfect villain. On an anniversary dinner with his wife, she offers a toast to him. He offers a toast to Team Canada.

The hero, or anti-hero, would be a cliché if he weren't real. Mark Zupan was a hard-partying soccer player who was tossed out of the bed of his best friend's pickup truck after a night of drinking. After spending 13 hours stuck in a stream off the side of the highway, he was one pissed-off cripple. He'd call his best friend any time of day or night to help him get out of bed. Now he's still parties and fucks and fights and swears, but he's one of the best players on the American team–and he says he wouldn't piss on Joe Soares if he were on fire.

The narrative thrust is provided by the teams' path to the Paralympics in Athens, and the filmmakers shamelessly–and beautifully–milk the rivalry for all its worth. It is not only a clever way to imbue a documentary with suspense, but it also vividly demonstrates how quadriplegic people can have a purpose in what able-bodied people like myself often assume are purposeless lives.

Shapiro and Rubin avoid the stylistic traps of documentaries that can make moist subjects dry by studying MTV and Michael Moore. They vividly show the extent of people's spinal injuries by overlaying animation over their necks and switching between computer representations of their skeleton and footage of the player. To introduce the American and Canadian teams, they line up the teams on the side of the court and simultaneously zoom and track in, so the lineups appear to explode into the foreground. When the teams take the court, they jack up the grunts and crashes and film the finest moves in slo-mo. As in all good MTV products, the soundtrack plays a big role: early on, the angry rattle of Ministry plays up the toughness of the players; later, after a tough loss for the U.S. team, a delicate White Stripes-ish ballad amps up the emotion. It's all quite manipulative, and I loved every minute of it.

Some of the footage is impossible to fuck up. It's impossible not to be mesmerized by Bob Lujano, a tiny stub of a man who lost his legs and most of his arms to a rare form of meningitis. By manipulating the muscles where his elbows should be, he signs autographs, gets dressed, opens the refrigerator–in short, he does shit that most of us find difficult when we have a bad cold. He even has a great sense of humor about his disability; he plays a practical joke on some friends by hiding inside a small box.

I hate getting into my emotional response to a movie–I feel like it's the lazy man's way of avoiding real critical analysis–but I'll do it anyway, 'cuz I'm feeling a little lazy myself. I was variously inspired, moved, shocked, excited and disgusted by these men.

My only quibble, and it's a small one, is I got the sense that Shapiro and Evans didn't quite trust the sports scenes to deliver enough drama on their own. I'm a sucker for slo-mo and montages, but there's barely a murderball scene that's not shot in slow motion. I also suspect the relationships between Zupan and his best friend wasn't as fraught as they want us to think; they suspiciously never show the ever-talkative Zupan saying that he doesn't get along with his supposed one-time best friend. When the movie's epilogue tells us that Zupan and his old buddy now talk everyday, I wasn't convinced they weren't already doing that.

But these are all minor flaws in what is one of the most masterful, riveting documentaries I've ever seen. Perhaps the filmmakers' greatest achievement is that they make spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair seem like fun.

Mr. Roberts and His Children

I have seen the past of comedy, and its name is Mr. Roberts.

Mr. Roberts is set during the waning days of World War II, on a military cargo ship far away from the action in the Pacific. At the time of the film's release in 1955, its résumé was impeccable. It was based on a smash Broadway play that had swept the Tonies. Its directors, writers and stars had been nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six. None of this changes the fact that it plays like Police Academy on a boat.

In Mister Roberts, Henry Fonda plays the Steve Guttenberg part, James Cagney is Lt. Harris and Jack Lemmon is the functional equivalent of the black guy who makes cool sounds. As in so many similar comedies to follow–Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Ski School–a charismatic man leads a gang of lovable losers against an imcompetent, and often impotent, comic villain. Practical jokes, drunken stupidity and raunchy humor abound. Moreover, as the first American movie to show World War II in a humorous light, Mr. Roberts paved the way for Hogan's Heroes and M.A.S.H. For better or worse, Mr. Roberts is one of the most influential comedies ever made.

For a 51-year-old movie, the film's humor holds up remarkably well. Like many of its successors, Mr. Roberts derives its charm–and hence, its laughs–from its harmlessness. Ridiculous events happen and consequences are minimal. Sailors get drunk, put on tiki dresses and wreak havoc on an Army officer's house. Move on to the next scene. Jack Lemmon, a gas as Ensign Pulver, one of his first film roles, blows up the ship's laundry room, sending a tidal wave of soapy suds through the lower decks. Move on to the next scene. James Cagney, as the crazed captain, threatens to court-martial Henry Fonda. Move on to the next scene. Like the wrench-throwing session in Dodgeball, very little in Mr. Roberts is meant to be taken seriously.

Mr. Roberts is also a movie that uses its stars smartly. James Cagney plays an even more cartoonish version of himself, if that's possible, and William Powell is eternally charming as the ship doctor who's happiest sharing a bottle of orange juice and grain alcohol with a good friend. The only seeming misfit is Fonda, whose perfume of nobility cannot be masked by the stench of low-brow comedy.

But Fonda is actually perfectly cast as Mister Roberts. We need little convincing that the man who was Tom Joad would be an inspiration to his fellow men. And Fonda's apparent discomfort with comedy is an essential part of Mister Roberts' character; unlike the other bums on the ship, Mister Roberts wants to be on the frontlines of the war with the Japanese. As my college screenwriting teacher would say, the character of Mr. Roberts is arguing for another genre. Mr. Roberts doesn't want to be in a comedy, he wants to be in a heroic war movie.

But the key to the movie's only scene of emotional power–when the crew gets a letter saying that Mr. Roberts has died outside Okinawa–is Jack Lemmon. Up until this penultimate scene, Ensign Pulver has been nothing more than a likeable clown. But as he wordlessly reads the letter, and his eyebrows shift from 10 o'clock to 11 o'clock, we immediately understand–and buy–his devastation. It's one of the earliest demonstrations of Lemmon's rare talent to slip effortlessly between comedy and drama.

Now, if you're not down with older movies and their stylized acting and Cro-Magnon sexual politics, Mr. Roberts isn't for you. But if you're willing to trade boob shots for construction worker whistles and don't mind white people playing Polynesians, then Mr. Roberts may just float your boat.

Raising the Bard

This review of The Merchant of Venice was first published in the January 2005 issue of the San Diego Jewish Journal. It was laid out with a rebuttal that was much more critical of the movie for distorting Shakespeare's play.

Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice is not a great film, but it is a responsible – and fascinating – one. He tackles the play’s anti-Semitism head-on, beginning the film with narration about the unfriendly situation for Jews in Renaissance-era Venice.

The first action in the film is found in no Folio. It is a milieu of anti-Jewish scenes, including moneylenders being thrown into the city’s canals. When Antonio (Jeremy Irons) first encounters Shylock (Al Pacino), he spits on him – a stage direction Shakespeare never imagined.

Director Michael Radford so drastically re-imagines the play that the screenplay credit is his, not Shakespeare’s. He removes any number of lines that would tend to make Shylock more villainous. Meanwhile, Pacino plays Shylock as a put-upon schlub who lives frugally while indebted gentiles live a life of frivolous luxury.

We are constantly shown scenes of foppish Venetians gorging themselves on food and women. In a traditional staging of the play, when a pair of Venetians recount Shylock’s speech about his missing daughter and his cries of “My daughter! My ducats!”, the audience is meant to believe Shylock is so penurious he doesn’t know which he misses more, his money or his daughter. But in Radford’s film, we are so skeptical of these decadent citizens that we simply assume they’re lying about the hated Jew.

But with this drastic rethinking of the play, is Radford guilty of not trusting the source material? Perhaps. But how much reverence should we show a play that vilifies and degrades Jews at every turn?

Rather, Radford sees “Merchant of Venice” for what it is: a play with much greatness in it, but a very flawed play nonetheless. He tackles those flaws by neutering the author’s anti-Semitism but not that of the Venetians’. Rather than being a justification for hating Jews, the play becomes a study of Jew-hatred.

It certainly becomes more difficult to sympathize with Shylock as the story progresses, when he insists on taking a pound of Antonio’s flesh to repay his defaulted loan. But who else is the viewer to identify with? Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes), with his lavish parties and his absurd quest to win the woman of his dreams by sticking his hand in a lead box? Portia (Lynn Collins), whose parallel comic plot is like a child’s puppet show compared to Shylock’s tragedy?

Ironically, the best candidate for our competing sympathies is Antonio himself, who despite his anti-Semitism is the only character in the play other than Shylock who appears to suffer. And Irons’ characterization of Antonio as a depressive who seems to care little whether he lives or dies is practically a statement of defiance against the corrupt, decadent Venice that surrounds him.

Even still, as I watched Shylock single-mindedly press the Duke of Venice for his pound of Antonio’s flesh, even as Shylock dismisses Bassanio’s offer to immediately repay twice the value of the debt, I could understand where Shylock was coming from. Seen from 21st-century eyes, a pound of one man’s flesh seems like a very modest bit of retribution for centuries of anti-Jewish oppression, expulsion and murder.

The Pianist & Interview with Adrien Brody

Since I’ll be away until Friday and unable to post, I’ll be posting one or two old reviews from my college or San Diego Jewish Journal days. The following is a review of The Pianist integrated with an interview with Adrien Brody and Thomas Kretschmann. This interview and review was done before the movie had seen a wide release, and well before it won all those Oscars. I should also note that Brody and Kretschmann couldn’t have been more dissimilar.

Kretschmann was jovial, friendly and admitted that one of the reasons he became an actor was to meet girls. Brody, on the other hand, was brooding and soft-spoken. When one of the other journalists in the roundtable interview asked to take some pictures with his digital camera, Brody said no, saying, “I’m not ready for that yet.”

This article was first published in the January 2003 issue of the San Diego Jewish Journal.

The Pianist is not a story of heroism. Its star, Adrien Brody (The Thin Red Line), is the first to admit that.

“It’s much more truthful if your protagonist isn’t a particular hero,” the soft-spoken, painfully serious young actor says. “We have to remain true to the original story, and this man [Wladyslaw Szpilman] wrote his memoirs four years after he went through it and didn’t make himself a hero. He just communicated what happened, omitting blame, omitting sentimentality.”

Ultimately, Szpilman’s straightforward communication of his survival as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw – and director Roman Polanski’s slavishly faithful recreation of it – is the film’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness.

Szpilman is one of the most talented and beloved pianists and composers in Polish history. He was musical director of the state radio station after World War II, and many of his songs became popular standards in Poland.
Before the war, he played piano on radio, and indeed the film opens with bombs falling just as he begins playing Chopin’s “Nocturne in C# Minor” on-air. After Germany took the city, Szpilman and his family were subject to the demeaning Nuremburg Laws, which seem downright enlightened relative to the Final Solution of the war’s latter days.

They were soon evicted from their homes and forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, where 600,000 Jews were forced into a few city blocks. Szpilman made a meager living, and supported his family, by playing piano at a bar where black marketers and collaborators gathered. Just as his family was about to board a train to the concentration camps, a Jewish policeman, Itzhak Heller, saved him from near-certain death.
He survived the rest of his days at first as one of a handful of Jewish laborers allowed to remain in the ghetto, then in hiding among the Poles and Germans, and finally as a starving, homeless shell of a man running from building to bombed-out building. In the war’s waning days, he was found by a German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who, for reasons the movie never makes clear, helped Szpilman hide and brought him food.

As with all Polanski movies, the craftsmanship and attention to detail are incredible. His recreation of the indignities suffered by Jews at the hands of Nazis is powerful. One scene in particular sticks in my mind: a desperately hungry man mugs an old woman for her pot of porridge, but in the ensuing struggle, she drops it. Seeing the porridge spilled on the street, the man pauses for a moment as if he’s going to run. Then he hits the ground and licks up the porridge off the filthy cobblestone street, as the old woman yanks at his jacket.

The first half of the movie, which tells of Szpilman’s and his family’s life in the ghetto, is full of these sharply defined, horrific set pieces. But we’ve seen these kinds of scenes done before, in movies like Schindler’s List and Sunshine. Because Szpilman is never more than a passive witness to what goes on, it is never clear why we’re watching his story over any other. Indeed, there is nothing remarkable about Szpilman: he is not brave, he is not indignant, he is not particularly Jewish – he is just sad and hungry, like everyone else.

It is only in the second half, when Szpilman is saved by the collaborator Itzhak, that the movie tells a unique, if not extraordinary, story of its own.

In the hour that follows this inexplicable stroke of luck, Szpilman is the ultimate survivor. To its credit, the movie never makes the claim that Szpilman’s wiles save him; if anything, he is presented as the luckiest man alive. In one scene, he is locked inside a “safehouse” apartment as a tank sets its sight directly on his building. Only because the tank fortuitously blows a hole in the wall between his apartment and his neighbors’ does he escape death.

Brody’s work in the second half is a powerful portrait of solitude. For nearly an hour, he doesn’t speak; he only watches, eats and runs.
Brody had to winnow himself down to 130 pounds, learn Chopin and nail a Polish dialect to play the part. He explains how he prepared: “The first thing that occurred to me was, ‘Why don’t you eliminate a lot of material things from your life, so you don’t have a safe place to go, even in your own mind?’ So before I left [New York], I sold my car, gave up my apartment, got rid of my phones.”

He says he didn’t draw from his Polish Jewish ancestry, but that his background gave him a “connection” to the material. “I feel it’s such a profound loss for so many people that if you’re remotely empathetic, and you do the preparation, then you don’t have to have any Jewish heritage to relate.”
His performance is mindful of Tom Hanks’s masterful turn in Cast Away, where the character’s only driving force is survival. In that sense, the film gives a full picture of survival, making sure the viewer understands that luck, good connections and simply not dying are far more important than resourcefulness. The film’s final act tells the story of Szpilman’s relationship with Hosenfeld, played by Thomas Kretschmann (U-571), a German himself. Their relationship is truly unlike anything we’ve seen before. When they meet, Szpilman is roaming about an abandoned house with what appears to be a can of canned watermelon, searching for something to open it with. When Hosenfeld sees him, he inspects him with his eyes and asks him who he is and what he does. “I am a pianist,” Szpilman says. Hosenfeld points him to a dusty grand piano in the well-appointed house, sits down, and commands him to play.

Szpilman’s hands hesitate to touch the keys, as if years of living like an animal have reduced them simply to tools of survival. But he proceeds to play a beautiful, and long, Chopin piece. As the camera luxuriously sweeps around Brody, it’s clear the scene is meant to be the emotional height of the film, and many in the crew cried while it was being filmed. But I didn’t find it particularly moving, perhaps because the film never does a great job of establishing Szpilman’s relationship to his piano-playing. Only the opening scene gives a hint of his emotional connection to music; just before his family moves to the ghetto, he is more willing than many in his family to part with his piano for money. While it may not be the movie’s intent, for Szpilman, his piano-playing seems to be little more than his job. Since we never know what he gained from playing the piano, we have little sense of what he’s lost by not playing it. So when he is finally reunited with the instrument, it seems less like the reconsummation of a deep love, and more like an employee returning from vacation (well not quite, but you get the idea.)

Hosenfeld’s reaction to Szpilman is fascinating, however. We never know if Hosenfeld is saving Szpilman because of his humanity, or simply because he plays a mean piano.

In that way, until the end, the movie’s world is not one of saviors and villains. It is about flawed, normal people trying to be good where they can – and sometimes taking what they can get. As Kretschmann says, “There is not just the good Jew and bad German, there’s the good Jew, and the mediocre Jew and the good German and the bad German, and the good Pole and the bad Pole.”

If “The Pianist” is intended to be a film about the transcendent and humanizing nature of music, then it fails. But on a different level, as really the first Holocaust drama to show Jews, Germans and Poles in all their moral ambivalence, then it is a qualified success.

Of Squids and Whales, cont.

I was thinking some more about The Squid and the Whale today and realized that my criticism of what I call the family horror film may have been a bit narrow-minded. Must all movies pair joy with pain? Isn’t there a place for filmmakers who want to share their unrelenting dark vision? If ruthless cynicism was good enough for Kafka, Nietzche and El Greco, isn’t it good enough for Todd Solondz? The answer, I realize, is yes.

As hard as I was on Solondz’s Happiness, the movie still sticks with me, for better or worse, seven years after first seeing it. There’s something to be said for that. While I may have been repulsed by his pitch-black vision of humanity, I can’t dispute that at least it was interesting. So this raises the question, what’s my problem with The Squid and the Whale then?

My problem is that while The Squid and the Whale paints a relentlessly negative vision of human nature–all people are either jerks or victims–it doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. After going to extreme lengths to emulate his father (including dumping his girlfriend because his dad says he should have “options”) and alienate his mother, Walt suddenly realizes his father’s a jerk and his mother’s a saint in a single session of psychotherapy. Huh? After witnessing his repeated crimes of clueless arrogance, I’m supposed to buy that a kid who’s almost a pathological liar would let down his guard enough during a counseling session to reassess his view of the world? I ain’t buying it.

It’s a cheat, no different from the forced happy endings of movies in the ’30s and ’40s, but this time it’s not the studios giving the people what they want, it’s a filmmaker giving himself a gift. By making a quick U-turn from cynical satire (a genre that refutes the idea that people can change) to transformative drama, Noah Baumbach wants to trick viewers into thinking he’s more than a one-note dramatist. If you don’t give any hint of potential character transformation throughout the first two-thirds of a movie, don’t expect the audience to buy a transformation in the final third. Unfortunately, quite a few critics got sucked in by Baumbach’s seeming versatility. Just because a filmmaker has one really good visual notion and then doesn’t show it until the end doesn’t make him a great filmmaker. It just makes him a very clever hack.

Monster Movie

There’s a scene about two-thirds of the way through Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale that sums up everything that’s wrong with the movie, and everything that’s wrong with the emerging genre it’s part of, which I’ll call the family horror film.

It’s 1986, and Bernard Berkman (Jeff Bridges), a professor of literature, is taking his son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his student/boarder/co-ed sex object Lili (Anna Paquin) on a weekend trip to a small town university where Bernard will publicly read from his obscure novel. Up until this point, all we’ve seen of Bernard is that he’s a pretentious snot who’s casually cruel to everyone in his life, including Walt, his estranged wife Joan (Laura Linney) and his chronically masturbating younger son Frank (Kevin Owen); all we’ve seen of Walt is that he’s an aspiring jerk who parrots everything his father says; and all we’ve seen of Lili is that she’s a shock-poetry-writing tart.

Fudgie the Whale has nothing to do with this movie, but doesn’t he look yummy?

But on this roadtrip, Bernard, Walt and Lili are laughing and smiling, fiddling with the tapedeck, clearly having a good time together. There’s only one problem: we, as the audience, don’t know what they’re saying because it’s part of a montage set to twee falsetto rock (you know the kind I’m talking about; it’s all over Rushmore and it sounds like butterflies). It turns out it’s the one scene where these characters, where any characters, genuinely enjoy each other’s company in The Squid and the Whale, and Baumbach doesn’t show it to us. I don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t want to, which is bad, or if he doesn’t know how to, which is worse.

Either way, the scene–or lack thereof–is powerful evidence that Baumbach is uninterested in man’s redeeming features and only interested in his damning ones: anger, misery, resentment, self-deception, dysfunction. It’s the kind of cynical focus that gives art a bad name. But it’s not his unique vision. The Squid and the Whale is only the latest in a line of similar films featuring family members doing awful things to each other. Other, uh, highlights of this new genre include Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors, Burr Steers’ Igby Goes Down, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and anything by Todd Solondz, who’s practically the patron saint of the new theater of cruelty.

Eleven years ago, Solondz’s first movie, Welcome to the Dollhouse, about a dorky suburban girl who’s neglected by her parents for her cuter younger sister, came out. At the time, a ruthless portrait of dysfunctional family life was unlike anything we’d seen before. By reproducing the most squirm-inducing moments from other teen dramas and scrubbing away any trace of sentimentality, Solondz reimagined adolescence as the stuff of nightmares. It worked because it played like satire. But with each succeeding film of suburban depravity, it became clear Solondz wasn’t exxagerating dysfunction for humor’s sake; he genuinely thinks the world is full of dads who jerk off to Tiger Beat and lonely fat men who call random women in the phonebook to tell them he can smell their pussies. Only three years later, when his movie Happiness was released, satire had degenerated into shock art. And unless you’re GG Allin, I hate shock art.

None of the family horror films that followed went to Solondz’s extremes but they all share a similar rigid unwillingness to portray joy. The Squid and the Whale is a proud successor, centering around the pretentious and cheap Bernard, his delusional loser of an older son (Walt), his alcoholic younger son Frank and his ex-wife Joan, who cheated on Bernard for several years before the separation, but is the only significant character in the movie who’s not royally fucked up. (Which means we cheer when she slaps Walt and laugh along with her when Bernard makes a pathetic attempt to get back together.)

As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of these kind of movies. But in the rare cases when they do succeed, their success is almost solely dependent on the powers of the actor playing the protagonist. If the actor can figure out a way to make his character’s corruption sympathetic, then we watch the movie as we would tragedy, learning about the faint pulse at the heart of an unredeemable asshole. But if, as in The Squid and the Whale, our only response to the lead loser (Walt, not Bernard) is an overwhelming desire to throw a brick at his head, then obviously the movie’s failed. (Unless, like Rushmore, the sole intent is to make us want to throw a brick at the protagonist’s head.) I should note, however, that Jeff Daniels makes an exquisite bastard; if the movie had centered more on him than Walt, I could imagine being moved by a single scene of vulnerability.

And I guess that Jesse Eisenberg’s unlikeable performance, more than anything else, is the reason that The Squid and the Whale fails. By the time Walt returns to the Museum of Natural History for the first time since he was a child, and looks at the awesome and horrible model of a giant squid and a whale locked in underwater combat, we’re supposed to share Walt’s heartbreak over the realization that his hero, Bernard, is actually a loser. But all I could think was, “I wish I had a brick right now.”