6. Feelies and Movies: Reviews of New Films by Pippa Hammet.
Critically speaking, think of me as the cinematic love child of Parker Tyler and Manny Farber -- Tyler for his interest in archetypal narrative pattern and Farber in an aestheticism of caught detail. Other classic American film writers were either trapped in sentimentalisms or ersatz sociology, and/or they wanted a piece of the action, as with Agee and Kael. Both Tyler and Farber examined popular expression in the mass arts, what is now known in the movie trade as “hit films,” as well as hard-to-find entertainments, currently referred to as “niche product”. I, Philippa Hammet, remain the perennial graduate student of Popular Culture, even though A.P.A. (American Popular Art) may have come to its end throughout our terminally fragmented multi-culture. (Television critics have almost given up regular coverage because there is now too much product on the home screen to review around the clock. Life is too short, streaming too long.) Even the New York Times has intuited that something is going on music-at-the-close-wise, that there is a difference between yesterday’s Aretha Franklin and today’s BTS. Who would have thought it all would end not with a bang from Punk or Hip-Hop but with an echoing whimper from all too accessible K-Pop?
I must acknowledge my core influences for this essay. Farber’s comments -- not on something he called “male truth” (whatever) but on the physical comedy of Cary Grant -- were primary. I may also have listened to my original cast album of Your Own Thing one too many times as a child in San Diego. My dear current boss Louise Ebersdorf is an expert on Broadway theater and on her famous friends from New York and Hollywood over the decades. Such personal anecdotes! For example, my beloved employer went out ballroom dancing regularly with George Abbott and his wife. Or late afternoon drinks with Joan Blondell on West 23rd. Louise has always urged me to write on dance and staged movement in films since I became her personal assistant in 2010, following the closing of the Ebersdorf Ballet. Her friend Florian is also an expert source whom I consult when in doubt and always with delight. And Master Raro, Louise’s versatile handyman (he was a lead danseur in her company and now assists as her chauffeur, bodyguard, and sometime emergency butler), is an encyclopedia of movie lore, especially foreign films. He and I make a concerted fuss over Louise in her advanced years.
The great L.E. calls me the daughter she never had, and I regard her as my inspiration and spiritual guide. I have accompanied my boss to many screenings and live performances over this decade, but now that Louise is engrossed in what she refers to as her “Dr. Moreau” research, she sends me (and sometimes the trusty M.R.) to preview theatrical events in her name. We give her tips on what she might enjoy since the two of us know her tastes (they are often ours, too), and she trusts our critical recommendations and early warnings. Louise encouraged me to write this current posting amid my many duties on her behalf.
Onward, if not immediately upward. Mary Poppins Returns is now showing in Dolby theaters around the country. Disney has spent real money on the property this time (a reported $150 million) but to perhaps too much effect. When the Admiral’s cannon booms throughout the film, you register the blast in your very own reclining theater seat thanks to the Dolby Atmos manipulation of low frequency sounds travelling around the house and into your vulnerable person. Aldous Huxley’s “feelies” have thereby arrived in your local multiplex. When Dolby advertising refers to its “target” audience, the word is accurately chosen. I don’t think I have ever encountered such an abject movie crowd, cowering before the sensory onslaught. Pummeled is not the word. Pre-teen tykes look literally shaken as they stagger out of the theater. Samuel Fuller’s description of an accurate cinematic depiction of warfare consisting ideally of the film audience being strafed with firepower from behind the screen is approximated thanks to advanced sound technology. And this in a movie musical for children! As Farber once predicted: “A good businessman believes that any article can be sold if presented with eardrum-smashing loudness and brain-numbing certitude.”
Rob Marshall’s film direction here is (as usual) heavy handed to a fault, and he is assisted by a team of choreographers who work in broad, predictable strokes, including gymnastic back-flips for the London lamplighters. Why was Lin-Manuel Miranda cast in a dance role? He is not a dancer. The man can barely carry a tune and has about as much charm on camera as your local con artist with an eye for the main chance. His close-ups are scary: sensitive children will be disturbed by those empty, opportunistic eyes and that near-permanent sneer. The next Disney version of Returns (as in box office) will undoubtedly be in animated form, followed by the inevitable live musical version on Broadway. Money must be made. Perhaps Miranda can supervise that further stage incarnation, with added hip-hop lyrics to bring things up-to-date.
In the original Mary Poppins Julie Andrews had a breathless music hall desperation over her wards that was mildly charming. Marshall’s close-ups of Emily Blunt as the magical nanny are too indicative, as in wink-wink. No charm, no hint of human vulnerability at all. One of my favorite actors, Ben Whishaw, is burdened as the father with a too-bushy moustache. The film appears to be tanking already at the American box office, and this is sad because we would like to see one good movie musical before the lights go out, especially after the disappointment of La La Land. A big fat flop will dissuade potential future investors. Too bad, because dance movement is a perfect subject for the big 8K RED camera. Where is the Degas of digital? And I was personally disappointed because I have always identified with nannies.
Musicals could offer our youngsters an alternative to what Farber once called the “sedulous realism” of commercial films – including that eventual style of confrontational reality to be found in today’s multi-part television series that are supposed to take the place of old-style movies, but which exploit generic dramatic precepts and mostly performer-defined parameters for potential expression. Such works deserve a small screen. Film and today’s big-screen digital can sponsor other, more interesting possibilities.
In The Favourite there is a royal ball with dancing choreographed by Constanza Macras of Argentina, plus two assistants. (Why again so many helpers for a single ensemble dance?) The film is a burlesque set in Queen Anne’s court, so do not expect period authenticity in either the dance or the depiction of court life. Or all that many laughs. The dancing leads are given patty cake hand-play. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, once again has trouble with tonal coherence and endings (as in his The Lobster). EuroArch is now everywhere, as well as coy attempts at Lesbianism as a serious theme. The best things in the film are the floral arrangements along the palace walls: beautiful, fresh still-lives. No interesting movement.
Vox Lux has choreography by Benjamin Millepied, the husband of the film’s lead actress, Natalie Portman. As usual, Millepied’s work is markedly undistinguished, although here the dance sequences are at least shorter than his painful equivalents at the Joyce Theater, where the choreographer’s California-based dance company attempts something it calls “ballets”. I enjoyed the director’s The Childhood of a Leader and expected Brady Corbet to provide a fresh approach to evoking an entertainment milieu, something happily different from the egregiously dour version in the recent A Star Is Born. Corbet’s film starts with a high school massacre and ends with a frenzied rock concert. Overblown and old hat. In between we get tiresome domestic scenes of star-performer crackup. Our Master Raro hated this one.
Notice that today’s films try to deal with magical creatures, royalty, and semi-divine rock artists. Is there a Parker Tyler pattern here? The films I am about to discuss feature con-artists who look death square in the face, a Mexican dea ex machina, and comic book and fairy tale godlings. Northrup Frye’s anagogic action that is all action, apocalyptically, with the desiring poet-artist as near-religious seer, is very close to the chorus luminis found throughout my examples of contemporary cinema. The adolescent males who now constitute the movie audience are in quest of some sort of belief. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what belief. Or maybe their commitment is a collective pop instinct toward box office buzz. Tyler would be engaged with the question were he here, and Farber would blanch at what his beloved B-movie actioner has become through CGI mutation and budgets of hundreds of millions. Some call this decadence.
On the other hand, the Coen brothers have produced their masterpiece, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. A six-part anthology of short stories set in the old West, the best segment (“All Gold Canyon”) is based on a Jack London story, but my favorite is the opening Scruggs narrative, which is a miniature musical black comedy. There, the brothers Coen manage staging and editing that successfully mimic George Abbott on Broadway and Charles Walters in Hollywood. Their editing is crisp and rhythmic, and the digital photography by Bruno Delbonnet is eloquent. The team really should do a full-length film musical soon, if only a good score could be found. I was unable to locate a choreographic credit for the brief saloon dance number. Did the brothers stage it themselves? I wouldn’t put it past them. (They use a pseudonym for their united role as film editor.) If you want a more traditional Western drama, I can recommend The Sisters Brothers, directed by the French auteur Jacques Audiard. It came and went quickly, as good movies tend to do these days, many destined almost immediately for the small screen at home or in hand.
This is becoming a problem since Netflix allows its productions a theatrical venue only if they are slotted into festivals or are being considered for upcoming awards. As we now know, certain visual qualities require the big, wide screen for full audience registration. (I believe Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy Like Lazzaro played for just one week at the IFC in Manhattan.) Why doesn’t Netflix, now reportedly successful in the range of billions of dollars, open a flagship theater of its own in NYC so that a certain audience (me and my friends) can see its movies in all their effulgent details? It’s not just a matter of size: some visual effects depend on relative scale; your distance from a large image is what makes certain details register. Cinematographers know all about this and calculate accordingly. But we’ve been wondering for decades why Scorsese, Spielberg and Allen (natives all) have no such handy local flagship for premieres and retrospectives of their own works and those of their respected fellows.
A good example of why some Netflix movies deserve theatrical exposure is Roma, where Alfonso Cuarón uses the edges of his 65mm image to create a sense of simultaneous action with sustained panning and blocking. The model here is wide screen Otto Preminger, that master of cinematic ensemble. Cuarón so trains the audience to look actively at the peripheries of the screen that he is able to create a unique sense of unease and suspense in the ultimate beach segment. (Just how many children may be lost in those waters?) If you haven’t seen Roma in a theater, there is a sense in which you haven’t seen it. The movie also has a nude martial arts sequence that approaches dance movement, for those who enjoy nudity and/or martial arts. It’s amazing what directors will do to get some skin on the screen. Louise might enjoy.
The new Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (terrible title) has some pretty color combinations in its animation (I loved the red and blue NYPD patrol car lights), but otherwise the digital technology appears to limit as much as it expands possibilities for graphic fantasy. The animators employ everything but taste. There are too many scenes of violence that fragment the drawn spectacle. Everything is tossed upon the screen. The adolescent Spidey is too lightweight a form to produce discriminated textures in his actions. No current animator is following up what the French artist Georges Abolin achieved for Disney in the 1999 Tarzan – a sensuous connection between muscular dynamics and resultant qualities of movement produced out of the silhouetted human figure. This would carry animation toward something like what a dance lover sees in trained performers, especially ballet dancers. Perhaps animators and CGI artists don’t go much to the ballet or look closely at bodily movement. I will admit that there is real humor here – even the self-referential asides (a mention of Comic-Con, for example) work. The movie labors too hard at physical comedy – at its best it’s a writers’ film.
I was interested in the Peter Parker figure, a mentor to the adolescent Spidey-in-training, because it is probably time for my very own Big Reveal. Born Philip Hammet in Hawaii but raised by my parents in California, I always dreamed of enjoying life in a feminine mode, and when I came to New York to study Popular Culture at the turn of the millennium, I investigated gender realignment. I was not bitten by a radioactive spider, but it was dear Louise (my Peter Parker) who encouraged me to go through with the transformative procedure, changing Philip to Philippa (Pip to Pippa) and also giving Louise what companionship and assistance she now requires, an advantageous arrangement for me through her generous funding of my surgical transition.
I indulge in such autobiographical info because it may partly explain certain emphases in my current writing, for example my utter dismay at the new Aquaman, as I sat there in the theater trying to resist a sexist reflex to a cinematic display of what young males are supposed to find appealing. (Not this former male.) So much was expected – underwater frolics, graceful swimfests, mermaids and mermen. The resultant film is currently the biggest money-maker on Earth. It has lovely color and many undersea kingdoms produced by thousands of hours of CGI magic. But it has a hero who is a witless lout and a narrative tendency to level those elaborated digital kingdoms with a kind of persistent malware malice, special-effect devastations accompanied with loud explosions and the flattest, most predictable variety of visual mayhem. It’s the lack of imagination that tires, not the decibels alone. The repetition is a turn-off, like watching a child deity – some infant Kali -- make and unmake sand castles on some mythic beach. When the actors “swim” in this film, they move in that frictionless bullet-like trajectory that you see in the Spider-Man spin-offs. Filming those sequences must have been torture for the performers. I don’t mind poster board art, but what is this poster advertising besides military preparedness? Surely “hit cinema” can be more than boys’ collections of toy soldiers? (There’s that damned reflex, so un-P.C. But then I’m enjoying my mature, new womanly 30s. I’m unnaturally prejudiced.)
Many years ago, the stage director Jonathan Miller (he of Beyond the Fringe) noted that the Stanley Kramer film It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World had a deconstructive genie in its narrative bonnet that said more about violent contemporary social realities than film aesthetics. There may be something like that at work in Aquaman, however boring a considered rationale. I have to report that I have seldom been so repelled at the movies. Master Raro, who is twenty-six years of age and a fully functional male (I can attest), says that Acquaman may be the most expensive experimental film since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe Parker Tyler would be able to locate the mythopoeic pulse. Perhaps some apocalyptic trial by fire and water? I couldn’t find a single mermaid to identify with. My recommendations? Don’t Go Near the Water and the poetic shoulders and back of Esther Williams.
I will end with the latest J. K. Rowling film effort for our boys and girls, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of the Grindelwald. Unless you buy the hardbound screenplay, available down the street at your local Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, you – as an adult – will be unable to follow the plot. I asked a fellow grownup (inevitably, a parent) in the lobby afterwards if she had been able to parse the storyline. She laughed and laughed. During the screening, children are sitting there wide awake, expectant, eager for the next fabulous CGI beast to appear. Their parents are sound asleep, having given up on any kind of narrative coherence. Can you see Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Newt underneath that immense forelock that covers his bashful eyes? No. (What is it about men and hair these days?) Is Dumbledore gay? Does it matter? Questions, so many questions. There is no genie at work here, just a deep cynicism and an endless desire to cash in with more and more sequels. Also, a proud incompetence at storytelling on the part of director David Yates. When a film director dies, he becomes a literary illustrator for hire.
Big mystery: guess who is listed as “choreographer” in the credits? Wayne McGregor, that relentless, resident all-purpose mad genius of the Royal Ballet. (If only he were really mad, there might be something of interest in his work.) Just try to find McGregor’s contribution to the film up there on the screen. Did he invent movement for the fantastic beasts, as Balanchine once advised on Disney’s Fantasia? Was he paid for his contribution? Did he take home a large paycheck? More and more questions. But somehow it all fits. Finding McGregor’s name in the small font of the endless end credits was that final touch of perfection amid the filmic fatuity. Always read the fine print.
I took my dear Florian to see the new Rowling. I asked him what he thought. His reply: “Magizoology? No, a lavish petting zoo in Hell.” That comes close.
P.H.
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