Category Archives: Movies

Hollywood is wholly incapable of making this movie

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The band 2

The Fleur Theater comes through once again, the only chance in central Iowa to see the indie of the year, Sing Street [A Dublin band whose name makes a play on their Synge Street School]. The story of the new kid at school Cosmo. Being smitten by the molten Raphina, he tells her he is in a non-existent band.  Through a very entertaining series of events we see the need-based band he creates grow in music and image.

In real life Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is a trained opera singer, even though other than this movie his bio is blank. The musicianship is great throughout the film. So is the femme fatale Lucy Boynton, her resume has more heft. Director John Carney did well casting the bandmates. About 15 minutes in you realize Hollywood could never have made this movie. It is original and creative to the core.

The latest examples of the sum total of Hollywood’s creativity, the remakes of The Exorcist and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yeah. Hollywood are like artists who keep painting the same picture time and again. No matter how great the Mona Lisa and Starry Night were, you need to move on. The craft kind of stops otherwise, doesn’t it? There’s no progression of the art. They are simply repeating what’s already been done.

The budget for Carney’s 2007 Once, was $200,000, the budget for this one couldn’t have been much more. Shot at a high school, a couple of houses, a couple of flats, the beach, what could that have cost?

In order to be good, a film either needs to have a great story, great cinematography or someone in the cast you care about. A great film has all 3 of these, and Sing Street did. One example of the cinematography was when they were coming home at night under this canopy of trees over the lane. Both leads were attractive. And the storyline of being true to oneself and realizing your dreams was a good one. This Irish film with no budget did something Hollywood could never be in a thousand years: creative.

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Chuck & Jim juk

“A Charlie Brown Christmas for 50 years and counting”

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Patrick Ryan for USA Today had a fun little piece about my favorite Christmas special. The music, the animation, the voices, it all came together for a wonderful bit of nostalgia. Ryan notes that:

“An overt religious message from the blanket-carrying Linus, who quotes the Bible…”

I was taken aback by that line. Christmas concerns the birth of Jesus. That “birthed” Christianity, so I would imagine there would be an overtly religious message. Christmas is a religious holiday, or more precisely, a Christian holiday. Putting Christ in Christmas so to speak. Secondly, it therefore follows that “quoting from the bible” would be a good fit as the bible is the revealing of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, to man. The bible tells us what He is thinking. And, through Christmas, God revealed himself to us in person for 33 years. In fact, I would be so bold as to say the Charlie Brown Christmas, is the only special that does convey that message.

The better question might be, shouldn’t the other specials be called “holiday” specials?

 

Viola Davis picks up Emmy first

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Viola Davis Emmy

Viola Davis had an Emmy first last night, winning Best Actress in a Drama for How to Get Away with Murder. That seemed somewhat odd. 65 years of television, and she is the first black actress to get the nod? Hmm. Maybe Hollywood is not as progressive as they like to think. Do as they say, not as they do.

Harry Truman was President when television started. WWII had ended, and the Korean War hadn’t started yet. Jackie Robinson was starting his third year after integrating baseball with the Dodgers. Martin Luther King’s ‘March on Washington’ was 15 years away.

The social upheaval of the civil right’s movement integrating schools and lunch counters and public transportation was years and years away. Peggy on Mannix (1967) would have been one of the few black women on TV at all. Julia a year later was the first to put a black woman in a starring role. That was 1968. In 1971 it was back to a bit part with Birdie on The Walton’s.

Co-starring roles came about with Louise Jefferson and Florida Evans, a decade later came Clair Huxtable. My memory goes kind of blank after that. So we have one series that ran for three years that starred a black woman. In 1968. I’m sure there were loads and loads and loads of others, my memory just fails me.

Just 65 years later in 2015 a black woman wins the first Emmy. Kind of staggering isn’t it? Just look at all the shows today starring black women. Good old Hollywood. Julia was the first to have a black woman in a starring role, was it also the only one?

‘Me and Earl and the dying girl’

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Me and Earl & the Dying Girl

Okay, so a budget of $8 million sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. Location shooting, a fresh script and new faces went a long way. That and a little creative ability. This film won the 2 awards at Sundance that pretty much guarantee more recognition, the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award. This film furthered the craft.

Switch to what has been playing on the silver screen since. I’m not making this up. A series of sequels and remakes centered on ’60’s spy flicks, I’m not kidding. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible ? Then you have Vacation. Don’t forget your comic book flicks! Ant Man and Fantastic Four. They had budgets of $75 million, $150 million, $31 million, $130 million and $120 million respectively.

It’s rather obvious who got the most bang for their buck. Unless you are 12-years-old.

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

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GETT THE TRIAL (2)

Viviane: “I want a divorce.”
Elisha: “No, you can’t have one.”
Viviane, shouting: “I want a divorce!”
Elisha: “No, you can’t have one.”

6 months later-

Viviane: “I want a divorce.”
Elisha: No, you can’t have one.”

1 year later-

Viviane: “I want a divorce.”
Elisha: “No, you can’t have one.”
Viviane, really shouting: “I want a divorce!!”
Elisha: “No, you can’t have one.”

3 years later-

Viviane: “I want a divorce.”
Elisha: “No, you can’t have one.”

5 years later-

Viviane: “I want a divorce.”
Elisha: “Okay, you can have one.”
(Elisha at last minute changes mind) “No, you can’t have one.”

5 years 6 months later-

Viviane: “I want a divorce.”
Elisha: “Okay, if you agree to never have another man.”
Viviane: “Okay.”

The end of one of the dumbest movies ever made, topped only by Halloween III.

Spoiler Alert! ‘Walking Dead’ finale revealed!

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Through super-secret Hollywood contacts, Sunday’s season finale of Walking Dead can now be revealed! In this episode, they stick zombies in the head with various objects, then they break into an abandoned store! Never seen that one before, huh? How do those writers do it? Hope I didn’t ruin it for you. Yep, yessiree, sticking those ‘ol zombies right in the head! Squish! That never gets old, nosiree. Course, it helps to be 10-years-old. Squish! They could really save on production costs, now that they have killed several thousand zombies, just substitute footage of previous kills and no one would know the difference! Voila! One squished zombie looks just like another! Think of the savings! (“No zombies were harmed in the filming of this episode”.) This show may have run its course. Okay, it did years ago.

Letter to ‘Walking Dead’ producers

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Dear Sir:

As regards your Walking Dead show, a couple of weeks ago when the show went into the whole cannibalism thing, we said, “that’s enough, we’re done.”

We had noticed that it was supposed to be 4 or 5 years for the characters from when the thing started, and in all that time the best the human race can do is  ‘hand to mouth’ existence? Wandering aimlessly around being scavengers? That’s all you got?

Every week it was, “Hey, let’s stick zombie’s in the head and break into an abandoned store!” Let’s not restart civilization and rebuild, let’s live like cavemen from now on!

4 years and all you can come up with is the wandering nomad bit? And now cannibalism? That is a lack of imagination and not very inspiring for the human race. France would be a basket case, but this is America, we don’t do that crap here. Your show sucks.

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[BTW, with all the guns in America, those zombies would have been gone in a week. Especially in Georgia where the show is set. They would have looked like Swiss cheese. Good grief.]

(And what about shampoo? For God’s sake, do we throw away good grooming just because of a zombie apocalypse? That picture above is cleaned up, the people on the show look worse than homeless people. Let’s face it, Baywatch had ‘curb appeal’. Next time you break into a store, grab some Prell.)

{And besides, how do you make a post apocalyptic show boring?? I grew up on them, the original Planet of the Apes, The Day After, Red Dawn. How do you turn that genre into Bores-ville? It’s like time travel, war movies and the Swedish bikini team, how do you possibly make that boring? Your writing staff has to be dumber than a box of rocks.}

In the Heat of the Night

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Talk about your quality programming. Did I watch this show 25 years ago when it was first run? Noooo …. I generally “discover” an artist, movie or show long after it’s prime. Heat of the Night so clearly stands in contrast to today’s programming. KDMI Channel 19 in central Iowa plays 4 episodes straight on Sunday evening. One of tonight’s episodes, ‘Hello in There’, was a prime example of why it was such good TV.

Chief Gillespie (Carroll O’Connor) goes out to question the deceased’s grandfather Winston Tyler (played by Whitman Mayo, ‘Grady’ from Sanford and Son). They took nearly 5 minutes for a very nice scene with the Chief and Tyler. A couple of old actors who really knew their craft, and a director who was willing to spend a little time to impart something modern shows know little about- humanity.

As Mayo’s character is talking to O’Connor, you can see the emotions slowly come across his face as he turns away. The director does these nice tight close-up’s, and has the actors go slow and low-key, and ends up doing ‘more with less’.

In a way I would think this was O’Connor’s crown jewel of his career. The acting, scripts and production were so outstanding. At first I was going to say that All in the Family was more socially consequential, and it would have to be for the most part I suppose. But Heat was so immensely important for it’s exemplary diversity in casting. Few shows before or since did what it did to have women and minorities portrayed in healthy and realistic ways. Carroll O’Connor broke new ground in both his series.

The thing that set Heat apart was that the characters were the story, not the crime (it was ostensibly a police show after all). In today’s hyper sophisticated and technical crime shows, it is all about the wow! The forensic side of the crime. That’s great if you are a criminal justice major, not so much for a viewer.

That’s a lot of it I think. It wasn’t so much about how gruesome a crime the writers could come up with. It wasn’t about how good the hero was at shooting or fighting. It was about the storytelling and the human drama.

Carroll O’Connor was good and brought good people with him and made good people better. Shoot, the series had 30 directors. These are the directors that did more than 10 shows each: Harry Harris, Russ Mayberry, Vincent McEveety and Winrich Kolbe. So whatever it was that made this show great, it worked.

The other thing  a viewer noticed aside from close-ups, was the audio. (And from a ‘gunners’ perspective, I loved the way they had the criminal and the good guy go to the rifle so often as the weapon of choice. The rifle in reality is so much more powerful a weapon than the handgun. Except for when the Chief was shooting of course, he was ‘one shot’ Bill! I suppose for the modern pretty boy, it’s much more ‘sexy’ to have them dancing around with a pistol.) They don’t make TV like that no more.

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The Manhattan Short Film Festival is coming!

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Manhattan-Short-Film-Festival

The Manhattan Short Film Festival is coming to Des Moines September 26, 28 and October 2 at the Des Moines Art Center. They take all their entries (this year 589) and boil them down to ten finalists. Then you get to fill out a ballot and vote for the winner that day. About a week later you can go to their website and see if your tastes conform to those of everyone else around the world who voted! Another thing that separates them from other festivals (the festival comes to you) is that  you can purchase a DVD of past films.

My only disagreement with the whole deal is all you get to see are the ten finalists. Using this year as an example, that is 579 shorts you don’t get to see. If Obi-Wan chose correctly, all well and good. But otherwise, there are a lot of shorts you’ll never see. And in past years amongst the ten finalists were some very mediocre films.