Foundas & Taylor on Film

Cyd Charisse, Dead at 86

2008-06-17 17:48:36

Cyd Charisse has died in Los Angeles.

This scene of her ~~as Fiona~~ with Gene Kelly from Singin' In The Rain gets to me every time.

As does this one...

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Her legs were famously insured for one million dollars, and her dancing on screen could put you in a trance.

She teamed up with Gene Kelly again in Brigadoon, with Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon and with Ricardo Montalban in On An Island With You. Cyd Charisse passed away Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Ella Taylor reacts to the reactions to her review of Sex and the City

2008-06-05 13:41:46

By Ella Taylor

I caught a lot of flack, most of it out of New York, for my negative review of Sex and the City. Outraged fans of the show and the movie accuse me variously of being “morbidly obese” (just pleasantly plump, I swear) and style-retarded (well, one does try); too young to appreciate the four shopaholics and a sexist, ageist cheap shooter for calling them middle-aged (I’m closer to assisted living than all four of them put together, as my comparisons to The Mary Tyler Moore Show will attest ); a bit angry (too right); and (did I dream it, ‘cause now I can’t find it?) a real bitch.

None of which has changed my assessment of the movie as a flabby shadow of its TV that reeks of disingenuous mixed message. Still, attention must be paid to the passion with which its fans defend SATC the show and the movie. I think one of the reasons is that, like Bridget Jones’s Diary (a movie I defended), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I loved as uncritically as today’s fans do SATC) and, in its retrograde way, Our Miss Brooks, SATC expresses the loneliness of urban single women, a potent contemporary theme in an age of hooking up. Only it glamorizes, and so trivializes that loneliness by gussying it up with endless partying and designer labels few of its audience can afford. That’s not cultural commentary — it’s pandering through advertising.

Read Ella Taylor's review of Sex and the City, with comments, here.

Her review also appeared in our sister paper, the Village Voice, with more comments, here.

Photo Craig Blankenhorn/New Line Cinema

Scott Foundas on Sydney Pollack's Early TV Work

2008-05-28 15:27:27

In 2007, LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas was asked to contribute an essay about Sydney Pollack's early television work to an Italian-language book about the director published in connection with a retrospective at the Alba Film Festival. That essay appears below, for the first time in English.

There is little outwardly remarkable about the 1961-66 American television series Ben Casey, unless you count novelty: It is one of the earliest models of that now-familiar TV staple known as the medical procedural, in which there is no health emergency too great for a team of brilliant doctors (here led by the eponymous, fresh-faced resident) to solve in an hour of screen time (save, of course, for the occasional two-part episode). But there are moments when Ben Casey transcends the ordinary and enters into a realm of deeply humanistic grace, and a great many of them can be found in the episodes — 15 of them — directed by Sydney Pollack. On this, you will have to trust me, for these shows are not easily seen, and indeed to consider Pollack’s TV career is to be reminded of how, even in this age of DVD saturation, so much from the early years of the medium remains trapped in limbo.

I am thinking, in particular, about the Ben Casey episode entitled “A Cardinal Act of Mercy” (1963), in which the great diva Kim Stanley delivers a searing performance as a morphine-addicted trial lawyer; another, “For the Ladybug…One Dozen Roses” (1962), where Cliff Robertson is a battle-scarred fighter pilot who has lost the ability to fly and, with it, the will to live; and the enormously moving “Monument to an Aged Hunter” (1962), in which Dr. Casey must choose which of two patients to save using an experimental antibiotic — a legendary writer and philanthropist (played by Wilfrid Hyde-White) or a younger man of no particular importance. These are hours of television in which the medical drama may be resolved by the time the credits roll, but the moral and ethical questions weigh heavy into the night.

]]> Like the good doctor Casey himself, Pollack was young and a tad impetuous — not quite 30 yet when he began in TV, he was eager to establish himself as a behind-the-camera talent after resolving that he was never going to make it as a movie star. But it may have been Pollack’s training as an actor and acting teacher (both at New York’s legendary Neighborhood Playhouse) that fostered his natural facility with other performers. To watch Stanley in “Mercy,” for example, is not merely to behold a great actress in a great role, but to witness a hospital room transformed into an arena for hothouse melodrama, especially the scenes of Stanley withdrawing from her addiction, slowly spiraling into mania and despair without ever grandstanding for the camera. And then there is Hyde-White in “Monument,” exuding such a regal air of resignation that it is as if King Lear himself had landed under Dr. Casey’s care. Perhaps most remarkable of all, there is a moment in that same episode where Pollack appears to draw something resembling a tear from that block of granite known as series star Vince Edwards.

You could argue, of course, that television is fundamentally a writer’s medium and that Pollack was only as good as the scripts he was given, and Pollack himself might be the first to agree. When asked in interviews about this period of his career, Pollack is usually terse, saying that TV was the equivalent of film school for him and that it is difficult for him to watch those early programs without focusing on all the mistakes that he made. That’s partly true, I suppose, and even I would not suggest that all of Pollack’s TV programs (there are nearly 100, including episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Fugitive and the Kraft Suspense Theatre) are deserving of further study. But to look at these shows purely in terms of direction is to discover ample evidence of a bright young talent itching to paint on a bigger canvas. This was television just after the end of the live era, when shooting and cutting on film enabled directors to think more “cinematically,” if you will, than was possible before. And Pollack helped to lead the charge. In “Ladybug,” for example, there is a dazzling sequence in which Pollack uses a cubistic montage of bustling street scenes to suggest the disorientation felt by a timid Native American boy ill at ease in the big city. Even more notably, in “Something About Lee Wiley” (1963) — an episode of the anthology series Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre and an early collaboration between Pollack and his longtime writing partner David Rayfiel — there is an air of dreamy fatalism and a jagged use of flashbacks that directly anticipates They Shoot Horses Don’t They?

“Lee Wiley” is a story about the corrosive power of money, with Piper Laurie as a jazz chanteuse blinded (literally and metaphorically) in a horse-riding accident who finds herself approached by a wealthy industrialist (Claude Rains, in one of his final performances) who wishes to buy her as a trophy bride for his playboy son. It is a theme Pollack would revisit to more striking effect two years later in another Chrysler production called “The Game,” which unfolds entirely within the confines of a high-stakes Chemin de Fer room at a posh Riviera casino. Cliff Robertson (again) is the naïve American salesman bitten by the gambling bug and blessed with an astonishing case of beginner’s luck; but the more he wins, the closer he edges to a psychological breakdown.

Written by S. Lee Pogostin and directed by Pollack with blistering, edge-of-your-seat intensity (he was deservedly rewarded with an Emmy), “The Game” is, I think, one of the small screen’s finest hours — a ruthless morality play that might have been co-authored by Ian Fleming and Karl Marx, and proof that its director could hold an audience rapt as well or better than most of his big-screen counterparts. It is also early evidence of Pollack’s affinity for exploring controversial and/or provocative subject matter not head-on, but through the relationships that play out between ordinary men and women. Or, as Pollack himself has said: “I don’t set out to make political films, though relationships are nothing if not political. If a guy’s sitting in a room and a woman comes in and lights a cigarette, it’s a political situation.”

Lest it seem I’m giving Pollack’s writers short shrift, I should note that he had the good fortune, in these years, to work with some of the best around — not just Rayfiel, but Abraham Polonsky (on the Kraft Suspense Theatre episode “The Last Clear Chance” [1965]) and Sterling Silliphant (on Chrysler’s “Murder in the First” [1964]) too. It was Silliphant who then provided the script for Pollack’s first theatrical feature, The Slender Thread (1965) — a movie that draws much from Pollack’s television work. Here, the sweaty claustrophobia of “The Game” is transferred over to the small office of a college crisis center, where a student volunteer (Sidney Poitier) takes the call of a suicidal suburban housewife (Anne Bancroft) and then must keep her on the line until help arrives. It is a potentially crass suspense scenario executed with enormous sensitivity and tact and a fleet understanding of how to turn two people talking on a phone into a gripping entertainment. It is also, not incidentally, a sly commentary on race relations, for the Bancroft character does not realize that Poitier is black. Since then, Pollack has returned to TV only as an actor; but now it is so common for people to say that TV is as good as or better than the movies, whereas back in the ‘60s it was the cinema the reigned supreme. And it may be that, in Pollack, one finds a key link in the small screen’s progressive evolution.

Sydney Pollack in LA Weekly

2008-05-27 10:52:20

Sydney Pollack died over the weekend at age 73. Three years ago, Pollack spoke to LA Weekly's Scott Foundas about his career, the costs of making films, and his production company Mirage, which recently put out Michael Clayton, nominated for seven Oscars.

In this interview from April 2005, Pollack talked to Foundas about his latest directing effort, The Interpreter, in which he also acted. Pollack's production partner in Mirage, Anthony Minghella, died in March.

Declaration of Independents
Sydney Pollack is all for lowering costs, raising IQs
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Thursday, April 21, 2005

The company is called Mirage Enterprises, but there is nothing illusory about the career of its CEO. For 40 years now, Sydney Pollack has been making movies in Hollywood, and for the past two decades Mirage has been the base from which he’s overseen production of his own films, as well as those of a Who’s Who of distinguished peers (including Anthony Minghella, Pollack’s partner in the company since 2000). It’s also been a launching pad for auspicious young talent like Steven Zaillian (Searching for Bobby Fischer), Steve Kloves (The Fabulous Baker Boys) and Ira Sachs (whose Mirage-produced Forty Shades of Blue won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year). All told, movies produced and/or directed by Pollack have earned some 80 Oscar nominations, with Pollack himself collecting Best Picture and Best Director statuettes for Out of Africa (1985). Not bad for a kid from Lafayette, Indiana, who started out wanting to become an actor and, in his spare time, has managed to work in that capacity for the likes of Robert Altman, Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick.

Read the rest of the Foundas' article on Pollack here.

Also, LA Weekly contributor Chuck Wilson has a nice appreciation of Sydney Pollack on his own blog Flickers. Click here to read Wilson's piece.

A Necessarily Incomplete Guide to Godard

2008-05-02 09:53:51

A to Z and Everything in between as Film Forum celebrates the living legend
By Scott Foundas

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Godard's Pierrot le Fou (see: C, K)
Film Forum/Janus Films

Given that a mere six months ago, J. Hoberman wrote in (the Village Voice), "From Breathless (1959) through Weekend (1968), [Jean-Luc] Godard reinvented cinema," what more is there to say about a retrospective devoted to precisely those 10 years from the work of the most analyzed, debated, effused-over, and influential filmmaker in the history of cinema? The short answer: Everything and nothing. Herewith, a hopefully handy index to Film Forum's five-week series, "Godard's '60s":

]]> A is for Alphaville, that prescient sci-fi noir set in a world where emotion is a capital offense and technology is the new religion. In 1965, this may have seemed a fanciful work of knee-jerk anti-futurism. Today, it is close to documentary.

B is for Breathless — a title, but also a philosophy; it is the speed at which Godard moves through a film, and arguably through life, devouring art, cultural ephemera, philosophy, politics, sex, sport.

C is for... well, let this one be the reader's choice: It could be Cahiers (du Cinéma), where Godard first espoused his adoration for the Hollywood cinema of the 1950s; or Coutard (Raoul), the brilliant cameraman who shot all but three of the features in this series, from the black-and-white, catch-as-catch-can location work of Breathless, Le Petit Soldat, and Les Carabiniers to the snazzy Pop Art formalism of Pierrot le Fou, La Chinoise, and Weekend; or Contempt, the Godard movie cherished even by people who claim not to "get" Godard—the unmaking of a marriage set against the making of a movie, one inseparable from the other.

E is for everything—what Godard said a movie ought to include, and the partial title of a new "working biography" of the filmmaker, Everything Is Cinema, that will be on sale at Film Forum throughout the series. Another Godard book—just what we need, right? But this one, written by New Yorker critic Richard Brody, is enthralling, exhaustive, and, above all, unwilling to swallow the mass opiate that says Godard's post-1960s work is somehow less than what came before. Indeed, Brody argues, repeatedly and with great conviction, that Godard is still big; it's just the pictures that got smaller.

K is for Anna Karina, the Danish muse, the most enduring of the Nouvelle Vague's new women, whether shimmering like a rainbow lollipop amid the Technicolor glory of A Woman Is a Woman, blowing smoke as the laissez-faire moll in Band of Outsiders, or meeting her ineluctably tragic fate in Vivre Sa Vie (which Film Forum presents for a full week's run in a restored 35mm print).

L is for love, the most fragile commodity in Godard's films—and always the first casualty of greater causes.

M is for Masculin Féminin — this critic's personal favorite; a movie about "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola," but for anyone who has ever stirred with the restless fervor and fatal arrogance of youth.

P is for prostitution—not a bad way to make a living if you're une jeune fille in the new capitalism. Besides, the films imply, we're all selling ourselves one way or another.

R is for revolution—the cinematic one ignited by Breathless; the social one that swirls in the coffee cup of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and breaks out in an abandoned apartment in La Chinoise. R is also for red, the chosen color of revolutions, and of the blood spilled therein—or perhaps, as Godard himself once told an interviewer, just a color.

V is for violence—physical, intellectual, emotional; the chief cultural currency of the 20th century. Violence is everywhere in these films, even as Godard recoils from it. They are movies that seem to take place in the ever-narrower space between the "shooting" done with a camera and that done with a gun.

W is for Weekend—the end of the world (and, according to the final title card, of cinema) as one epic, epochal traffic jam. In fact, it was merely the end of the beginning, of a single period of a career that, like those of so many great artists, has been marked by constant reinvention.

Z is for zero—where the characters in the TV studio of Le Gai Savoir (and Godard himself) seek to return, and the starting point for the second phase of a career that has included the heavily Marxist films made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin, experiments in video and other new media, and an increasingly circumspect look at the buying and selling of history (in the late masterpieces In Praise of Love and Notre Musique). In those 40 years, Godard has rarely done what was expected of him, which has alienated some supporters, narrowed his audience, and continued to blaze new cinematic horizons.

The index is incomplete, but then so are the films, with their Brechtian interruptions, sonic dropouts, major events consigned to passages of on-screen text, and other tacit acknowledgments that, while everything is cinema and cinema should aspire to be everything, such ideals—like most in art and life—remain just out of reach.

This article originally appeared in the Village Voice.

The Todds and I'm Not There

2008-04-30 10:41:50

To Scott Foundas:

I'm Not There is such a knock off of Palindromes and Palindromes is a much better film. I'm Not There is so often called original and I'm so surprised that no one, especially L.A. Weekly, ever stated anything about Palindromes or Todd Solondz's truly original filmmaking.

This paper was too busy making a huge cover story hailing I'm Not There and Todd Haynes, when in fact his so called originality was stolen from a film that didn't have as much money put into it. I find it hard to believe that no one within L.A. Weekly, especially the film reviewers, ever made this connection as the Todd Solondz film was only released in 2004, so it couldn't be considered an homage.

Give credit where credit's due and Todd Haynes' horrible film should certainly be excluded.

-Reggie, Venice

Dear Reggie:

Actually, it could be argued that both Todds—Haynes and Solondz—”stole” their approach from Luis Bunuel, who used two actresses interchangeably to play the same character in his 1977 film THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE. Beyond which, Haynes widely acknowledged both this precedent, and that of Solondz’s film, in interviews while promoting I’M NOT THERE.

The novelty of Haynes’ film is that he uses this technique in the context of a biography, rather than a work of fiction. But just because someone has used an aesthetic device once, twice, or ten times before doesn’t mean it can’t—or shouldn’t—be used again. Novelty and originality are overrated (and lazy) evaluative criteria where films, books, plays are concerned anyway. Something can just as easily be unoriginal and good as it can be original and bad.

Kind regards,
Scott Foundas

Got a film question? Email askfilm@laweekly.com

Pathology Review

2008-04-18 18:14:09

GO PATHOLOGY Crank creators Neveldine and Taylor — who apparently no longer require the luxury of first names — scripted this tale of deranged young doctors in the L.A. coroner’s office who test each other to come up with ever more elaborate murders in hopes of stumping their colleagues as to the cause of death. The duo bring their crazed, anything-goes sensibility to the table, but they aren’t a perfect match with German director Marc Schoelermann, who seems to like his horror more brooding and artsy. So while our main characters engage in plenty of gratuitous sex, violence, and combinations of both, Schoelermann will be damned if he lets the rather obviously named Dr. Grey (Milo Ventimiglia) look like he’s enjoying a second of it. As the new kid who gets swept up in all the madness, Ventimiglia is morose from the start, and not exactly the portrait of seduced innocence this story really needs. Nonetheless, when a movie opens with the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally as performed by cadavers, and later proceeds to sex scenes involving scalpels and needles, the actual plot is inconsequential. Fans of hard-R exploitation will love this; everyone else will likely be appalled. Screw ’em. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)

Click here for the rest of this week's reviews.

The Ruins

2008-04-04 16:54:22

GO THE RUINS If you turn the first page of Scott Smith’s The Ruins, a friend said astutely, you won’t put it down — but if you know what it’s about beforehand, you won’t pick it up. So let’s just say that if this reworking never approximates the abandon-all-hope ferocity of Smith’s hair-whitening source novel, it’s still a superior shocker with a mood-altering edge of hallucinatory madness. In an absurdist set-up that resembles Beckett by way of EC Comics, five tourists (four American, one German) are forced atop a remote Mayan temple, where they face two options: a quick death from the armed villagers who’ve surrounded the site, or a slow death from the snaky, insatiable tendrils of the ruins’ entrenched resident. What follows is a study in situational ethics, destabilized group dynamics, and existential panic, as each new choice between the lesser of two evils only brings greater evils. Though Smith adapted his own book, the briskly paced, neatly telescoped movie is too short to recapture its grinding psychological devastation, leaving a gory but strangely slight allegory of America’s dependence on creature comforts. But first-time feature director Carter Smith, working with resourceful cinematographer Darius Khondji, pulls off the neat trick of using the wide screen to claustrophobic effect. And the actors give such a convincing display of starvation-fueled fear that they deserve their own private craft-service table. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)

Click here for reviews of the rest of this week's new releases.
Click here for L.A. area showtimes.

Shutter and Meet The Browns

2008-03-21 15:43:30

SHUTTER Toshio, that malicious, pale little boy from The Grudge, will follow you home with his pissed-off mother in tow and maybe rip your jaw off. Ringu’s watery witch Sadako will reach out from your TV set and paralyze you with her stare of doom. Megumi (Megumi Okina), the roving angry spirit at the center of Shutter, will shoot you icy looks from afar and ruin your wedding photos. Oh, and give you a shoulder cramp. Scared yet? Jane Shaw (Rachael Taylor, the blonde-bombshell hacker from Transformers) sure is — so terrified that she occasionally forgets she’s supposed to have an American accent. And yet, if the ghost never actually hurts her, why should we care? A newlywed in Japan alongside jet-setting photographer hubby Ben (Joshua Jackson), Jane first encounters Megumi on a lonely country road, and in several visions and blurred photos thereafter... but nothing really happens until about an hour into the movie, by which point it isn’t long before the inevitable series of fake-out endings and obvious “twists” kick in. Ostensibly a remake of a Thai film — by a Japanese director with a Hollywood cast — Shutter plays more like a video copy of The Ring that’s become so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)

GO TYLER PERRY’S MEET THE BROWNS Prolific filmmaker-mogul Tyler Perry’s fifth feature since 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman (his sixth is already scheduled for a September release) is surprisingly half-decent — surprising because Perry’s not about to switch up his hardly revelatory but consistently bankable box-office signature: African-American familial drama, complete with soapy romance, broadly farcical supporting roles, and motivational Christian principles. Finding a positive, progressive tone in what would ordinarily be played as woe-is-me melodrama, Meet the Browns is the story of single mother-of-three Brenda (Angela Bassett, the film’s soul and highlight), an inner-city Chicago woman of tireless integrity who remains strong even after being laid off: “One thing a black woman know how to do is make it.” Keeping her head up when she and the kids travel to Georgia to attend her long-estranged father’s funeral, Brenda makes earnest efforts to refuse handouts from the eccentric extended family she’s just gained — as well as romantic advances from the amateur b-ball scout (Rick Fox) who may or may not want to cash in on her talented son. Unlike Diary, the drama here is buoyant enough to handle the contrast of its too-silly slapstick; Perry’s pot-smoking granny Madea only turns up in cameo, fortunately, but David Mann’s leisure-suited buffoon Leroy may be too shrill for those Perry has yet to convert. (Citywide) (Aaron Hillis)

Click here to see the rest of this week's movie reviews including Drillbit Taylor and The Grand.

And click here for movie showtimes around L.A.

Heath Ledger remembered

2008-01-23 13:31:29

"A year and a half or so ago, I pulled up to a stop sign in Los Feliz, California, a neighborhood near my house, and had to sorta hit the brakes because I’d realized almost too late that someone was about to step out into the street. I stopped short and a beat later a young man in pretty funky clothes — knee-high red stripped socks — who looked like he’d just come in from Haight Asbury, circa 1967, walked in front of the car. As he passed he turned to me and nodded, firmly, and with a tight-lipped half smile, as if to say, 'Thanks for stoppin’, man.' It was Heath Ledger."

More from the Weekly's Chuck Wilson at his newly-launched blog, Flickers, aptly described as "One Man's Notes on Movies, TV & Other Life Obsessions."