William Friedkin's The French Connection, about ruthless cops chasing ruthless drug smugglers, is a sensationally effective and vastly overrated movie, and I doubt I'll ever want or need to see it again. Even on first viewing -- as a movie-crazed teenager in 1986, courtesy of VHS -- its slot in the pantheon of great '70s movies struck me as unearned. I dug its unglamorous violence, grubby locations, energetic camerawork and superb lead performances (by Gene Hackman as volatile NYPD detective Popeye Doyle, Roy Scheider as his level-headed partner, Frederic de Pasquale as the chief smuggler and Tony Lo Bianco as his Brooklyn contact). But the film -- now playing in a new 35mm print August 31-Sept. 6 at Film Forum -- struck me as very calculating, not in a Hitchcock/Spielberg way (i.e., perfectionist, hermetic, mechanical) but in the manner of a street hood who stages a distraction so his partner can snatch a purse. The average Adam Sandler comedy has more integrity than Friedkin's Oscar winner, which lovingly protracted scenes of police brutality for left-wingers, pre-Miranda-ruling nostalgia and tangible law enforcement results for right-wingers, and an ending that makes hash of both positions -- not to complicate viewers' reactions, but to provide rhetorical cover to the filmmakers no matter who gripes. How could such a pandering film be described as uncompromising?
Adapted by Ernest Tidyman (Shaft) from Robin Moore's book about New York cops seizing $32 million in heroin from a French smuggling ring, The French Connection was widely hailed as an aesthetically fresh, socially relevant new entry in the cops-and-robbers genre. It was lumped together with two other 1971 touchstones, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs, as an example of the new fascist populism -- a subgenre that combined studio production values and exploitation tactics. Friedkin's film is the least of the three because it's got almost nothing on its mind but rattling the audience. It's a roller coaster ride posing as something more substantial -- or, God forbid, Important -- but doesn't have the stones to be that thing. The Siegel and Peckinpah films remain morally, politically and aesthetically problematic, but they aim higher than The French Connection; they're explorations of the attraction-repulsion principle, at once seductive and self-examining. There's a context for the movies' viciousness; they are fully thought-out and fully felt. To quote The Big Lebowski's Walter Sobchak, "I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." That's more than can be said for The French Connection, the movie equivalent of a bad cop who exits an interview room with blood on his shirt, crowing about his keen interrogation skills.
Straw Dogs -- starring Dustin Hoffman as a mathematician named David who moves to his wife's Cornish hometown only to be harassed by local goons, one of whom is his wife's former lover -- is about man's quest to identify himself as masculine through the self-actualizing power of violence. It's half full of shit; Peckinpah was incapable of mounting a sustained critique of machismo because he couldn't resist kissing its feet. But its self-aware aspects complicate and justify the rest. Peckinpah reveals the primitive fantasies buried within supposedly civilized people -- the intellectual man's deep-down fear that he's not really a man until he's spilled blood to defend women and property (practically the same thing in Peckinpah's universe). Peckinpah's honesty comes through in the way he implicates himself in David's bloodlust. The movie doesn't say, "Here's the dirty truth about you people," but rather, "Look into my eyes, then tell me you don't see yourself" -- a distinction that separates hacks from artists. The movie's ultimate endorsement of purification-through-savagery (boldfaced in a climactic close-up of a home invader's leg getting chomped by one of David's bear traps) is questionable to laughable; but it's visualized without evasions or qualifiers, and the film's characters are more psychologically complex than their thumbnail descriptions might suggest. (The still-notorious rape of David's wife Amy, played by Susan George, does in fact depict a woman resisting a rapist and then succumbing to pleasure; but the rapist is her ex-lover, and when he's done, and his friend assaults her, too, she is utterly horrified.) All these qualities make Straw Dogs disturbing and still worth arguing about. 
Dirty Harry is slicker and and more simplistic, but it has a crude honesty that Friedkin's film rarely musters. The movie's straightforward, pre-Miranda definition of good police work is laid out in the scene where its snarling martyr hero explains the origin of his nickname: "Any dirty job that comes along." He's the police department's pit bull; one Harry poster's tag line promised, "You don't assign him to murder cases...You just turn him loose!" The iconic image of Harry tossing his police ID in the mud after killing Scorpio was interpreted by many critics (and later, film historians) as a kind of mea culpa -- an admission that Harry has besmirched his sworn duty to uphold the law but has enough self-awareness to realize it and enough decency to admit it in a gesture. I used to buy that reading, but I don't anymore; it's fundamentally at odds not just with Harry's character, but with the movie, which ennobles and validates Harry at every turn. The film's script stacks the deck in Harry's favor whenever his tactics are called into question. When a superior reminds him that he was disciplined for shooting a rape suspect without first proving his intent, Harry says, "When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross." There is not now, and never has been, a city or town anywhere in America where a cop would be disciplined for shooting someone fitting that description. That scene's straw-man approach to vindicating Harry's moral certitude is replicated on a grander scale in any scene that involves Scorpio, a cackling, effete, ransom-seeking beast who shoots citizens at random (but especially hates cops, blacks and priests -- a trifecta of targets designed to make him loathsome to pretty much everyone). 
Scorpio has a knack for political jiu-jitsu, a trait that raises him above a standard-issue psycho and makes him a law-and-order bogeyman. He turns society's relatively recent commitment to protecting suspects' constitutional rights (U.S. vs. Miranda was handed down in 1966) against it; and he carries out his campaign of terror in a left-leaning U.S. city that Nixon-era heartland conservatives considered even more deviant and debauched than New York. (Just desserts.) In the script's lefty-baiting show-stopper, Scorpio hires a black thug to beat him up, then goes on the local news claiming Harry did it. Message: criminals don't just deserve to be beaten by cops, they expect it, and since they're going to falsely claim police brutality anyway, they can be roughed up with a clear conscience. ("I didn't beat him up," Harry snarls. "He looks too good.") Harry's lonely quest for true justice (pursued even after his superiors take him off the case) defines social liberals as enablers of bug-eyed mass murderers. The movie is asking, "Do you really want to protect this scumbag's rights?" -- a question that has to be answered "No" because we've seen objective proof that Scorpio is a sniveling, hateful freak, a bug fit for squashing. There's no way that Harry wouldn't believe he did the right and necessary thing. When he chucks his police ID, he's not censuring himself, he's divorcing himself from the compromised institutions he once was proud to represent. His sullen walk-out (magically erased in the sequels) expressed Vietnam-era conservatives' overpowering feelings of alienation and despair -- their pervasive fear that the country they called the United States been taken over by bureaucrats and sissies who prized hippie idealism over common sense. Its cartoon fervor is rooted in political reality. By the film's logic, Harry hasn't failed society; society has failed him.
Straw Dogs is morally and philosophically suspect from frame one, Dirty Harry even more so -- Pauline Kael's infamous one-line summary of Straw Dogs, "the first fascist masterpiece" actually fits Siegel's film better -- but like John Milius' right-wing militia fantasy Red Dawn, both movies are brilliant works of provocation. They have incendiary viewpoints and articulate them with panache. The French Connection says close to nothing while pretending to tell us every manner of harsh truth -- which probably explains why it's the most influential panel in 1971's caveman triptych. 
On on this point, it's impossible to ignore Kael's review of the movie, titled "Urban Gothic." After an introductory section describing how New York lured Hollywood filmmakers with tax breaks, and how Vietnam-and-riot-era filmmakers responded by cranking out exploitation-influenced movies that fed off of the city's then-ominous seediness, Kael writes that audience were no longer going to "shock and horror films because of a need to exorcise their fears; that's probably a fable...I think they're going for entertainment, and I don't see how one can ignore the fact that the kind of entertainment that attracts them now is often irrational and horrifyingly brutal. A few years ago, The Dirty Dozen turned the audience on so high that there was yelling in the theater and kicking at the seats. And now an extraordinarily well-made thriller gets the audience sky-high and keeps it there -- The French Connection, directed by William Friedkin, which is one of the most 'New York' of all the recent New York movies. it's also probably the best-made example of what trade reporters sometimes refer to as 'the cinema du zap.'"
Kael was right to call out Friedkin for having no purpose beyond goosing the audience; her coup de grace is her citation of the scene where Popeye and his partner talk to colleagues at an accident scene that's in the movie mainly so that the director can show us a close-up of the accident victims' blood-smeared faces. Although she didn't give Friedkin enough credit for craftsmanship -- besides the car chase and the scene where Devereaux evades Popeye on the subway platform, the film is filled with absorbing lesser setpieces, including the cops' early information-gathering visit to a nightclub, the first part of which plays out in documentary-style observational shots, without audible dialogue -- she identified the essence of his filmmaking, which was to shock the eyes and ears rather than engage the imagination. "You don't have to be original or ingenious to work on the audience in this way," Kael wrote, "you just have to be smart and brutal. The high-pressure methods that one could possibly accept in Z because they were tools used to try to show the audience how a fascist conspiracy works are used as ends in themselves. Despite the dubious methods, the purpose of the brutality in Z was moral--it was to make you hate brutality. Here you love it, you wait for it--that's all there is."
Nat Segaloff's Friedkin biography, Hurricane Billy -- excerpted in Film Forum's press notes -- quotes the director recounting his original meeting with Popeye's real-life inspiration, NYPD detective Eddie Egan, who went on to become a technical adviser for movies and TV shows. "The first week I met Egan, he said to me, 'No matter how long you stay with me or how well you get to know me, you'll find there's only three things about me that you need to know: I drink beer, I fuck broads, and I break heads,'" Friedkin said. "He was right. There's very little else to the guy.'" That Friedkin's movie adopts the thickheaded mentality of its lead character ultimately seems less clever than underachieving. The movie doesn't connect Popeye's viciousness to the culture or the time, or even to the immediate setting, nor does it look beneath Popeye's hard shell in order to figure out what drove him and tease it out on screen. Siegel and Clint Eastwood did all of these things with Harry Callahan, whose wry sense of humor and widower's isolation humanize him even as his lethal temperament connects him to a long line of mythic movie gunfighters, detectives and psychopaths. (Like Popeye, Harry is a casual racist, but the emphasis is on "casual" -- it's just a part of his character, and the movie doesn't use Harry's bigotry to shock and titillate the audience, as Friedkin does throughout The French Connection.) Siegel's movie has a person at its center rather than a furious abstraction; that's part of the reason it can withstand repeat viewings.
"I remember going to Italy when [The French Connection] opened and being told by a group of journalists that it was the most pro-fascist film they'd ever seen," Friedkin told Nat Segaloff. "That certainly wasn't my intention. Then I'd come back to America and hear from people like the American Civil Liberties Union that it was really showing the cops for what they were: a bunch of thugs who shouldn't be let loose with guns, breaking heads. And I thought the film was even-handed." Being even-handed isn't the same thing as having no discernible opinion on anything, but the movie doesn't make that distinction. 
Popeye is only worth watching to see what crazy, hateful thing he'll do next. The movie invites us along on his petty power trips, and it frames his antisocial tendencies -- signified by his cruddy little bachelor pad in a housing project, his set-'em-up-and-lay-'em-down attitude towards his casually objectified one-night stand, and his apparent lack of any human warmth -- as signs of a Spartan mindset and fodder for male viewers' fantasy identification. (How much do you want to bet that the women that the real Eddie Egan nailed weren't one-tenth as young and gorgeous as the one Popeye brings home in the movie?) Popeye is a potentially tragic, fascinating character, but the movie just follows him around as if he were a carnivore in a wildlife documentary. Hackman is a magnetic goon, to be sure, but his Best Actor Oscar seems in retrospect like a poor choice, because the movie gives us no insight into Doyle and Hackman doesn't really do anything to mitigate that. Michael Mann's closed-off macho men are much more expressive; so are Peckinpah's heroes. Another famous Kael putdown, her description of Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rainman as the equivalent of a musician humping one note on a piano for two hours, could easily apply to Hackman here. He's one of American movies' most durable character leads, but I can think of few Hackman performances that are less interesting than his work as Popeye, which consists mainly of scowling, yelling, smirking and chewing gum. (Scheider, playing nursemaid to Hackman's drama queen manliness, is subtler and more recognizably human; he plays Buddy like a prisoner who got stuck with a crazy cell mate and resolved to make the best of it.)
In the end, what does the movie stand for, and what, if anything, is it saying about cops, drugs, New York, masculinity, movies or anything else? Not much. It's a hustle. The off-screen gunshot that ends the movie -- literally capping the moment where Popeye accidentally and needlessly shoots one of his own colleagues and then keeps going as if he had merely stubbed his toe -- epitomizes the film's smash-and-grab attitude toward film technique.
"If they're talking about what something means in a movie, usually you've got a movie that people will want to see," Segaloff quotes Friedkin telling the American Film Institute in 1974. "Example: the obelisk in 2001. People went around for years sitting around McDonald's, cocktail parties in Bel Air, saying, 'What the hell is the obelisk?' And that's why I put the gunshot at the end of The French Connection. It simply means that the movie ends with a bang. That's all. It wasn't in any script and I did it in the dubbing room on the day before I left as a kind of a joke. I said, 'Let's put a gunshot in the exchange.' So we stuck it in there and just let it go."
This is an astonishing quote. Friedkin comes right out and admits that he aped the conventions of ambiguous '60s and '70s movies (including intentionally muddled plotting, a tactic that led Mad magazine to title its parody of the movie, What's the Connection??!?) not because they necessarily suited the material, but because that's what was fashionable at the time. It's the sort of film that doesn't say to the audience, "Draw your own conclusions," but rather, "What would you like me to be saying?" The French Connection's transparent wish to be all things to all people, at such pace and volume that you don't notice that the director is a one-man focus group, makes it one of the most influential movies of the '70s -- and not in a good way.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Caveman valentines: The French Connection, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs
Mad Men Fridays: Season 1, Episode 7 "Red in the Face"
By Andrew Johnston
Mad Men continues to bring the funny with an episode that furthers the exploration of Roger Sterling’s personality that began last week in addition to showing us a previously unseen side of Don Draper. His possessive, macho reaction to Roger’s drunken pass at Betty is consistent with the Don of previous episodes, but his revenge prank reveals a more playful sense of humor than the tendency toward dry, dark wit with which we’ve become familiar.
But while Roger is used as a source of comedy more than once (the scene where Don provides him with driving tips from the doorway is one of the series’ funniest), there are just as many scenes—if not more—that present him as a fairly pathetic figure. His unsuccessful attempt to schedule a last-minute tryst with Joan shows him longing for his youth (“I could put on my whites and we can pretend it’s V-J Day”), but even then his youth probably wasn’t all that—his naval heroism in the Pacific, revealed this week, falls short of his father’s WWI exploits, and he apparently went through childhood with the demeaning nickname “Peanut” (a nickname Bert Cooper still uses on occasion). No wonder, then, that he takes comfort in the privileges that come with having one’s name on the building.
Status and privilege play a big role in the episode. Even notwithstanding the era’s more permissive attitude toward driving under the influence, I’m sure some people will be disappointed in Don’s failure to keep Roger from getting behind the wheel after their massive binge, but Don has a zillion reasons to let Roger get behind the wheel. Above and beyond the being angry at Roger for putting the moves on Betty, there’s the simple fact that Roger’s his boss—an imperious one, as we see when he takes pleasure in yanking Pete Campbell’s chain by calling him “Paul”—and Roger wouldn’t have taken kindly to any attempt to keep him from driving. Then there’s the spite motive: Because Roger cozied up to Betty, there’s a level at which Don couldn’t care less if Roger has an accident.
Don’s actions against Pete Campbell in “New Amsterdam” showed him to be a very rash guy when angered, so the subtlety of his plot against Roger is a little bit unexpected but very, very impressive. All Don did was adopt the same deferential position he did at the beginning of the episode and the rest took care of itself (well, yeah, he bribed the elevator operator and then had to walk up all those stairs himself, but still). The dividends are significant: In addition to punishing Roger for scammig on Betty, the prank will presumably spare Don from working on the Nixon campaign (something he obviously wasn’t eager to do) and, by extension, spare him from having to work closely with Pete Cooper. Roger becomes the only conceivable scapegoat for the loss of the Nixon campaign, but he’s also the one person Bert Cooper is least likely to punish. It’s really kind of brilliant.
Pete Campbell’s subplot about the chip and dip raises the intriguing possibility that Pete is basically the guy Roger was 20 years ago. Yes, Pete tried to get proactive about manipulating Trudy in "5G", but here, he’s back to the thoroughly emasculated position he was in at the end of “New Amsterdam”, and her offscreen hectoring of him very much evokes what we can infer about the marriage of Roger and Mona Sterling (at least before the war made Roger more resigned and cynical). After “New Amsterdam”, there was a fair amount of fan speculation that Pete would try to turn his premarital one-nighter with Peggy into an ongoing affair as a means of compesating for his emasculation at home. After last week, talk turned to the possibility that this would be accompanied by Pete taking credit for her copywriting. Pete and Peggy’s first scene certainly seems to suggest this, but I think it’s a little too obvious a development. The odd bonding between them that we see in their last scene together made me think of another possibility: What if they join forces to advance each others’ position at the agency? Now that we’ve passed the halfway point of the season (sad but true), it seems pretty obvious that the narrative momentium will increase and the connections between characters will get tighter and more complicated by the week. In more concise terms, we’ll find out soon enough.
Miscellaneous points:
Pete’s acquisition of the rifle and his horsing around with it makes a nice callback to the hunting theme of the story that wound up in Boy’s Life back in “5G”. It’s a nicely metaphorical obsession for him to have, since hunting is regarded in so many cultures as a means of proving one’s manhood, and being his own man is obviously Pete’s most burning desire. It’s a goal that means so much to him that he’ll happily take shortcuts to achieve it, and ths, I suspect, will be his undoing on more than one occasion in the episodes (and seasons—I wish!) to come.
The details we get about Roger's father's WWI service are sketchy, but I'm inclined to think the elder Sterling survived the incident in the trenches, which--here's where the chronology gets tricky again--presumably took place before Roger was born (because let's face it, I can't see a rich guy with a kid being drafted to serve in the war--or, rather, I can't see a guy like that not being able to get out of the draft, unless of course he was as eager to get away from his wife as Roger is from Mona.
Being against smoking doesn’t usually make someone seem Machiavellian and evil, but so it is with Bert Cooper, whose chiding of Roger weirdly makes Sterling Cooper’s seniou namesake seem that much more slimy. His anecdote about Hitler and Chamberlain is absolutely brilliant, however, and while it’s probably too good to be true, I really wish it was. I’ve attempted to verify it on Google, but without success. If any readers know more about this, I’d appreciate it if you could lay out the details in a comment below, and I suspect others would be just as grateful as I.
Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.
Links for the Day (August 31st, 2007)
1. "Crowded House": Anthony Kaufman's Village Voice article on the indie-film distribution scene; his blog follow-up to the piece; and Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale's response.
["Gotham may be famous for its indie films, but the exhibition landscape is an increasingly contentious and competitive space, with too many movies struggling to stay alive on too few screens."]
2. "No End in Sight": Godfrey Cheshire on Charles Ferguson's Iraq documentary.
["There's been a small flood of documentaries about the Iraq war in the last two years, and movie-industry pundits have ruminated over why they've largely failed to click at the box office. Besieged with depressing war news at every turn, American filmgoers, it is said, would rather see something else. That may be, but Charles Ferguson's superlative No End in Sight begs to be considered the electrifying exception—the Iraq movie everyone should see, and surely the one to see if you're only going to see one."]
3. "One Sunday with Wilder, Ulmer, Zinnemann, Schüfftan and the Siodmak Brothers": Filmbrain on People on Sunday.
["Germany, 1929 – a period of relative calm and prosperity in the Weimar Republic. That brief period between the wars, when the market had not yet crashed, and the Nazis had captured less than 3% of the votes in the last election. Five young filmmakers, unknowns at the time, but who would go on to have illustrious careers in Hollywood, collaborate on an experimental feature – part documentary, part narrative, and starring a cast of five Berliners playing themselves. Dubbed "A film without actors", People On Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) is a surprisingly modern work that is a major document in the history of German avant-garde cinema. "]
4. "Monster spider web spun": Deep in the heart of Texas.
[""At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas. "Now it's filled with so many mosquitoes that it's turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs.""]
5. "Fisted -- Without the Crisco!": House contributor Ed Gonzalez blogs on William Friedkin's Cruising.
["Both on a conceptual level and in practice, Cruising buys into and advances some of the most dangerous myths about homosexuality and the homosexual lifestyle—and you don't need Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet to tell you that. Before today, I only knew William Friedkin's film, an adaptation of New York Times editor Gerald Walker's 1970 novel of the same name, as That Film We Don't Speak Of, and my first exposure to its skuzzy, admittedly transfixing audio-visual atmosphere was through the two featurettes (from the upcoming Warner Home Video DVD release) we were told we should preview prior to press screenings for the film here in New York City. Walking out at the end of yesterday's screening, still suffering from a rather nasty cold, I felt as if I had been fisted—without the Crisco!"]
Quote of the Day: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "The Crowd"; Forty Shades of Blue (2005)
Clip of the Day: Theme Song Sondheim, Day Final: James Bond
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Gunslingers in Macau: Johnnie To's Exiled
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Johnnie To is a bloodthirsty showman, but he loves people. Exhibit A is his latest film, Exiled. This tale of childhood buddies turned hit men squaring off against a malevolent gang boss in 1998 Macau — on the eve of that former Portuguese colony’s absorption by China — is the kind of film where flames roar, waves crash and dropped bullets thud like bowling balls.
Mannered as it is, however, Exiled is a tonic — a film that delivers all the visceral satisfactions of a super-macho action picture (close-quarters gun battles; slow-motion Wild Bunch-style side-by-side struts) and unabashedly sentimental depictions of loyalty and tenderness as well as plot twists that are surprising, often bizarre, yet feel just right.
Death Sentence: Violence in the Name of Justice
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Based on Brian Garfield’s novel — a sequel to the book that spawned the 1974 film Death Wish — James Wan’s latest film is a middle-class white man’s payback fantasy, leavened with phony references to class difference.
From the editor
By Matt Zoller Seitz
This is the 1000th post since The House Next Door began publication January 1, 2006. I'm using it to thank everyone who reads us, links to us, quotes us and takes issue with us. I'd also like to express my deep gratitude to my co-editor, Keith Uhlich; my art director and technical troubleshooter, Jeffrey Hill; the good Samaritan known as Ed Copeland, who has stepped in during many a crisis and saved my bacon; my treasured sounding board, Sars; my wonderful roster of contributors, all of whom I'm proud to call friends; and last but not least, Hannah and James, the most patient children who ever walked the earth.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
5 for the Day: Underdog Sports Movies
By Alan Sepinwall
Of the many addictions that rule my life, none has more controlling power than my chemical devotion to underdog sports movies. You give me a plucky loser trying to overcome the odds at any athletic endeavor, and I'm there. Doesn't matter if the movie is unfathomably stupid. If I stumble across The Air Up There (Kevin Bacon teaching basketball to Africans) or The Replacements (a movie that tries to make scab players sympathetic), I can't change the channel until it's over. Doesn't matter if I don't know or care about the sport in question. I have repeatedly Netflix'ed a four-hour Bollywood musical about cricket (Lagaan) and spent money to rent a comedy about curling (Men with Brooms). Curling.
My unfortunate condition dates back to the late '70s, when my father purchased our first VCR, a bulky monstrosity that didn't even have a wireless remote (it attached to the unit with a cord that was so short you were guaranteed to lose your eyesight using it long-term). We only had a couple of cable channels (HBO didn't program 24/7 back then) and the over-the-air stations were too full of news and soap operas and other shows that catered to grown-ups, so the idea of being able to record shows I liked and watching them over and over and over again was the bestest thing ever.
The first two movies I remember recording were Meatballs and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. You may not think of Meatballs as an underdog sports movie, but it climaxes with Bill Murray's awkward kid sidekick winning a four-mile run against one of the meanies from Camp Mohawk. And, of course, Breaking Training is the only Bad News Bears movie where the team is any good. ("Let them play! Let them play! Let them play!") Channel 11 almost never showed the original because it was too dirty to be properly edited for broadcast, so when I finally got to see it, I was stunned to see the Bears lose the big game.
As I've grown older, I've learned to accept that my fake sports heroes aren't always going to win (and, in a movie like Tin Cup, the miracle win would've been pretty lame), but I find myself enjoying the fake sports a lot more than the real thing these days. Maybe it's because two of the three teams I follow, the NY Giants and Knicks, have made winning ugly into an artform, but it's nice to be guaranteed a victory in scripted form (even if it's just a moral one, like in Rocky). As I wrote in my first review of the Friday Night Lights TV show, the thrill of victory may be sweeter if you risk the agony of defeat, but sometimes we just don't want to suffer, do we?
In keeping with the "5 For The Day" tradition of avoiding the most obvious choices, I'm not going to include Hoosiers (a masterpiece, other than the fact that they cut the scene explaining how Buddy rejoins the team), Rocky, Breaking Away, or even Rudy (a movie I adore, even though it may be the most polarizing example of the genre). I also won't be including sports movies that don't follow the formula (i.e., no Bull Durham or Field of Dreams) or documentaries (not even When We Were Kings, which couldn't be better if it was scripted). I couldn't in good conscience consider chess a sport, or else Searching for Bobby Fischer would be on there. In no particular order...
1. Miracle: In my definitive list of the top 5, this movie would be in the mix with Rocky and the three aforementioned movies set in Indiana. But because it's one in a long run of factory-produced Disney movies in the genre (Father's Day gift gimmes each year), I don't think it gets the credit it deserves. (Not even on this blog.) It's a really superb movie, a great example of how it doesn't matter how familiar the tune is if you sing the hell out of it.
A lot of the credit for that goes to Kurt Russell as "miracle on ice" coach Herb Brooks. The Disney factory sports movies generally get strong lead performances (Denzel in Remember the Titans, Dennis Quaid in The Rookie), but Russell is a cut above in his dedication to portraying the flintiness of Brooks, who was the last man cut from the last U.S. Olympic hockey team to win the gold, and who spent the ensuing 20 years obsessing on a way to get the gold medal he was deprived of. The sequence immediately after the U.S. team pulls off the stunning win over the the Soviets is a masterclass in silent acting: Brooks first looks to the devastated Soviet coach, then to his adoring wife, completely at a loss of what to say to either one; then, as the crowd keeps cheering and/or running onto the ice, Brooks pushes himself out into the hallway, squats down in a deserted corner and simultaneously celebrates the improbable victory while grieving over everything he gave up in the last two decades to make it happen. The best moment of a really underrated acting career.
Russell has to dominate the movie in part because director Gavin O'Connor chose to fill the cast with hockey players who could be taught to act a little, rather than the other way around. (Eddie Cahill is the exception as goalie Jim Craig, since the mask meant he could be easily replaced with a stunt goalie for the game sequences.) Still, Eric Guggenheim's screenplay gives at least as strong a sense of the players as, say, we got in Hoosiers (where I still have no idea why the players stand up to Gene Hackman in the final huddle), with a handful -- sensitive Craig, cocky Jack O'Callahan (Michael Mantenuto) and team captain Mike Eruzione (Patrick O'Brien Demsey) -- becoming genuine characters. And by prizing hockey skill first, O'Connor (along with cinematographer Daniel Stoloff and editor John Gilroy) are able to do an astonishing 20 minute-plus recreation of the miracle on ice game, one of the rare occasions where scripted sports action is as exciting and easy to follow as the real thing.
There are the usual flaws you get in virtually all these movies (Patricia Clarkson is wasted as Mrs. Brooks, the attempts at putting the game in a bigger sociological picture don't really work), but I could watch the movie's final hour every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of it.
2. Slap Shot: One of my favorite comedies ever, one of my favorite Paul Newman movies ever (it's this or Nobody's Fool), and just a delightfully profane, cynical, fun sports flick. Newman, who was past 50 at the time and finally decided it was okay to move away from the handsome thing, is Reg Dunlop, the never-was player-coach of a minor league hockey team in a dying factory town. Faced with news that the Chiefs' mysterious owner plans to fold the team, Dunlop decides to drum up interest in a potential sale -- or, failing that, to land himself a job with another team -- by turning the Chiefs into an outlaw squad of goons, inspired by the acquisition of the cheerfully violent Hanson brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and Dave Hanson, who've been milking the characters for the last 30 years).
The movie is as anti-rah-rah as it gets. Even by today's standards, it's almost shockingly crude (go read some of the memorable quotes on its IMDb page, with Dunlop and Braden's exchange about underlining my favorite), The players -- with the exception of college-educated Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who resists Dunlop's carnival goonery -- are depicted as uniformly dumb, interested in hockey not out of any love for the game but a desire to either beat other guys' brains in or get laid (or, preferably, both). The local sportswriter (M. Emmet Walsh) has no problem fabricating stories as a favor for Reg. The owner is selling the team for tax purposes. And just when it looks like we're headed for some uplifting ending where Reg realizes it's better to lose playing the right way than win through cheap violence, the general manager mentions during intermission that there are scouts in the building, leading to one of the great one-two comedy edits of all-time: the wheels turning furiously in Dunlop's brain as he says "Scouts?," followed by a shot of the entire team brawling with their opponents while Braden looks on in disgust.
One warning: depending on which version of the DVD you get, you may not be able to get Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From" out of your head for at least a month.
3. Diggstown: Here's one that vanished without a trace about five minutes after it was released. Fortunately, during those five minutes me and some college friends were desperate for a movie to see on a rainy Friday night, and my sports movie addiction and loud voice drove us into that. Starts off as another rip-off of The Sting, with James Woods and Oliver Platt rolling into a boxing-crazy hick town to take down the local crimelord (Bruce Dern, enjoying himself beyond the legal limit) with a simple bet: that a retired semi-pro boxer (Lou Gossett Jr., allowed to be genuinely funny for one of the few times in his career) can knock out any 10 men in 24 hours.
The opening drags, there are a couple of murders that temporarily derail the light tone of the movie, and a very young Heather Graham pops up in an unfortunate supporting part as Woods' love interest (mercifully, we don't see anything more than him leering at her in Daisy Dukes), but the fight scenes are terrific, and when (not-so-spoiler alert) Lou won the inevitable impossible final bout against a younger, stronger foe, my friends and I all cheered -- until the movie revealed that there was another fight to go, and the climax of that one was so brilliant and unexpected that we gave it a standing O. Maybe not a great movie, but it deserved better.
4. Major League: I wrestled seriously with giving this slot to the criminally underrated Bang the Drum Slowly (featuring Michael Moriarty as an ace pitcher and a young DeNiro as a catcher whose losing battle with Hodgkin's brings a bickering team together in a completely non-schmaltzy way), but eventually decided that the actual baseball action takes too much of a back seat to all the off-field shenanigans. (It's the right choice for the movie, but the wrong one for this list.)
That leaves Major League -- in which the greedy new owner of the Cleveland Indians (Margaret Whitton, during the two and a half years when she was a bankable middle-aged sexpot) tries to put the worst team possible on the field so fans will stay away and she can move the team to Florida -- as my token baseball pick.
When the movie came out, I remember sheepishly trying to explain to my father how the Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger characters weren't wholesale rip-offs of Nuke LaLoosh and Crash Davis ("You see, the pitcher with the million dollar arm and the five cent head just needs glasses, and, um...."), but it's aged quite well. Sheen's barely-conscious deadpan has rarely been used better ("I look like a banker in this"), James Gammon gives new meaning to "crusty but benign" as the old warhorse manager, and Wesley Snipes (flashy speedster Willie Mays Hays), Dennis Haysbert (voodoo slugger Pedro Cerrano) and Chelcie Ross (over-the-hill junkballer Eddie Harris) steal the movie out from under bigger names (at the time) Berenger and Corbin Bernsen.
Bill Simmons, ESPN.com's The Sports Guy, likes to rate sports movies based on the number of "chill scenes," those moments that give you goosebumps every time, like Rocky getting up off the canvas and beckoning at Apollo Creed, or Shooter Flatch calling the picket fence play. I don't know how much of this speaks to writer-director David S. Ward's skill and how much to my weird predilections, but I consider the one-game playoff against the Yankees as one long chill scene. All of the earlier set-ups about players' struggles pay off (often in funny ways, like bible-thumping Harris doing his warm-up pitches with Cerrano's statue of Jobu at the base of the mound), with a series of quotes that I still toss out while watching tense actual game situations: "I say fuck you, Jobu. I do it myself." "Forget about the curve balls, Ricky. Give 'im the heater." "Going somewhere, meat?" "'Bout 90 feet." Etc. The sequels suck, but the repeatability factor on the original is enormous.
5. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India: Screw it. I'm going to include the four-hour Bollywood musical about cricket. After all, I've watched it two and a half times (the half time I fast-forwarded through all the romance subplots) and would have watched it many more if I actually understood Hindi. (As it is, I'm grateful for the presence of Paul Blackthorne in the Billy Zane role as the mustache-twirling aristocratic bad guy, just so there's an occasional hint of English. Reading? Bleh.) Not that I understand the rules of cricket, either, but that's the thing about underdog sports movies: the cliches make even the most alien sports perfectly relatable.
So, the basic plot: in 19th century India, an angry young farmer makes a cricket wager with the aforementioned British 'stache-twirler in charge of the province. If the farmers, who have never played cricket in their lives, can beat the Brits, then the traditional tax they pay will be suspended for three years; if they lose, then they have to pay triple tax for three years, a prospect that would ruin everyone. So our plucky would-be Burt Reynolds (Aamir Khan) recruits a power-hitting Sikh who used to soldier with the English, a palsied Untouchable with a wicked curveball, a mute drummer and the usual bunch of outcasts. Who do you think's gonna win? Just pure joy, from start to finish.
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Alan Sepinwall is a columnist for The Star-Ledger and publisher of the blog What's Alan Watching?
East-West, None Know Best: Balls of Fury
By Steven Boone
Balls of Fury looks like another sports-spoof throwaway, but it does have a piercing reason for being. American men love Eastern cultures in direct proportion to their staggering ignorance of same. They salivate over Asian women and cuisine; alternate between awe and mockery of the continent's ancient practices (religions, martial arts); snicker at their relatively petite, slender men (the same ones whose kung fu/jujitsu/karate they applaud); envy the wisdom, richness, efficiency, and industriousness of their societies. And so American fans kowtow and condescend in the same awkward motion. Charlie Chan. Kill Bill. Wax on, wax off. Balls of Fury is all about this phenomenon. It's a Chinese odyssey for people--men, especially--who call all Asians Chinese.
What makes it a men's picture? Well, aside from the dead-giveway title, the whole plot is about a white manchild who lost his mojo after a massive public humiliation/symbolic emasculation and goes on a quest to get it all back. (And so it is a white men's picture, too.) Twelve year old American champ Randy Daytona (Brett DelBuono) chokes during a pivotal ping-pong match at the '88 Olympics in front of the entire world, including Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who look plenty pissed (in a funny, old-fashioned bit of intercutting--no Zelig/Gump tricks here). 20 years later, he's a fat, disheveled has-been (Dan Fogler) doing ping-pong tricks as a dinner theater novelty act. When an FBI agent (George Lopez) enlists him to infiltrate an illegal ping-pong gambling ring run by the Chinese Triad, he must return to the sport. He trains with the legendary blind master Wong (James Hong) and his gorgeous niece Maggie (Maggie Q), a table tennis genius who can wipe out several fearsome male opponents at once--while taking phone orders for Wong's takeout restaurant.
So if the girl is that badasss, why doesn't the FBI agent swap out Randy for her? Well, that's the whole basis for Balls of Fury's comedy in its first half. The script is initially smart about Mystical Asian Others in American movies and their function as the white man's healers, redeemers and almost supernatural foes. Hong, who has played virtually every permutation of this figure in over 300 films (and who many Gen-Xers will remember as the fire-breathing villain Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, which, along with The Golden Child, is this film's spiritual godfather), delivers some suffocatingly funny Wise Master monologues ("Ping-pong is like a prostitute..." spirals into a tortured confession of his woman troubles). Co-writers Robert Ben Garant (who also directed) and Thomas Lennon are great at bringing a heightened movie moment crashing hilariously to earth, as when sinister martial music cuts off when a villain's henchman stops to ask, sheepishly, for directions to the highway. Later, when Maggie sends Randy off on his journey, she kisses him passionately. Cut to the wide shot, and her legs are coiled around his blubbery waist. Garant and Lennon seem to get it: Movies about the Far East by white males tend to sell the same kind of "happy ending" you get in a Korean massage parlor.
Too bad they don't take the satire all the way. Once Randy finally enters the lair of ping-pong supervillain Feng (Christopher Walken), the jokes are more scattershot and begin to gently ease Ho'wood's history of insipid Orientalism off the hook. Randy joins an Enter the Dragon-style tournament of ping-pong. He takes on the world's greatest pongers in literal death matches: The loser gets a poison dart to the neck, shot from a blow gun by comedienne Aisha Tyler, as a Grace Jonesy nubian amazon. (Among the clutter of weak gags in this section: a bunch of stale homo-panic jokes about Feng's stable of male sex slaves.) Even though the film is right to show even less concern for coherent plot or motivation as it goes along, it loses traction when the theme lapses into generic silliness rather than running down and assassinating every last Asian stereotype in the movies. Yeah, too bad, because the flick's first half feels in part like the Chinese Hollywood Shuffle.
Balls of Fury will be worth a DVD glance only because of what some of its performers have done with Garant and Lennon's sometimes-inspired script. The comedian Patton Oswalt has a grand entrance as a rival player who, when he fails to burst through a paper banner held by cheerleaders, neatly tears it and steps through instead. Terry Crews, the funniest Big Mean Black Man since Tiny Lister, does every big mean black thing except threaten to eat Randy's children. In a terrycloth headband. Fogler makes a spectacular and sympathetic slob-hero, but when his character's fortune turns for the better and he tries to throw on some rock star charm, he comes off as an air-guitaring theme park rendition of Jack Black (see the School of Rock Stunt Show!). Lopez mutters some ethnic jokes that probably weren't in the script, tearing little subversive holes in the process. Hong, meanwhile, seems to enjoy the hell out of trashing the cinematic plantation that's been his bread and butter all these years. The weakest link turns out to be co-creator Lennon, whose turn as Randy's lifelong nemesis, German ping-pong team captain Karl Wolfschtagg, is broad, flat, and desperate for laughs.
Finally, there's Walken. Christopher Walken in faux Mandarin getup and villainous pompadour, furiously playing Sudden Death ping-pong on a rope bridge -- shouldn't that be enough entertainment for a lifetime? Not quite, but watching him essay a Triad kingpin with the voice and attitude of a Vegas casino magnate does bring joy. When the movie's table tennis death matches get too drawn out, Walken cries from the sidelines, chop chop, people: "We're missing Antiques Roadshow!"
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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism.
Links for the Day (August 30th, 2007)
1. "Boudu": Tucker of PilgrimAkimbo on Renoir's classic film.
["For me, having just seen Boudu twice this past weekend was a revelation. It had been around 23 years since I last saw the film. The Criterion Collection DVD is a wonderfully produced copy of the film. But it is not the quality of the DVD that got to me. And it was not merely the incredible performance by Michel Simon as Boudu, as well as the rest of the cast. No, what got to me was the boldness of Renoir - both in terms of the story's subject matter and of his directorial choices."]
2. "A sad farewell to HBO": Edward Copeland loses his home box office.
["For nearly 30 years, aside from a gap here or there, HBO has been a part of my life. When my family first got it, it came through a strange little antenna placed on the roof of our house. Later of course, it came through cable TV. As of today, I don't have access to HBO anymore. I'm rejecting my local cable system's "friendly" blackmail of getting digital cable in order to keep HBO."]
3. "Swanberg on the Stairs": The latest episode of ReelerTV, featuring an interview with Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg.
["After a few weeks away, ReelerTV returns today with a busy episode full of news you can use. Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg joined me for a chat about his film's anchoring the ongoing Generation DIY series at IFC Center (not to mention a teaser of his forthcoming Web series, Butterknife), while Spout Blog's Karina Longworth dropped by the Pioneer Theater for to discuss some of the same series' lesser-known titles. We celebrated William Friedkin Week in NYC and mourned the untimely passing of IFC TV, hacked to death by stone-hearted marketers wielding euphemisms like machetes."]
4. "Look Who’s Talking: The New DIY": Jeff Reichert on that mumblecore thing, and one of its movies -- Quiet City. More from Michael Koresky and a one-line rebuttal (quoted below, from a review of The Nines) by the inimitable Armond White.
["It matters—or has Hollywood’s philosophical decline succumbed to the artistic wasteland of mumblecore?"]
5. "2007 TIFF—Eastern Promises": Michael Guillen on David Cronenberg's latest. Thanks to David Hudson and the indispensable GreenCine Daily for the link.
["Collaborating once more with his History of Violence leading man Viggo Mortensen, I had the chance to talk to both Cronenberg and Mortensen recently when they were in San Francisco on press junket and Greencine will be publishing that interview closer to the film’s distribution; but, for now, allow me to say that Eastern Promises delivers all it promises."]
Quote of the Day: Unknown
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "The Death of Chatterton"; Love and Death on Long Island (1997)
Clip of the Day: "Theme Song Sondheim" Round 4: Superman
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Links for the Day (August 29th, 2007)
1. "Virtual Gallery Opening!": Because Klaus Kinski must always occupy the top spot.
["If I were a millionaire I’d open a gallery containing nothing but original paintings (made for posters and VHS boxes) of Klaus Kinski. But I’m not a millionaire… nor even a thousandaire. Luckily, here at Scarecrow I can browse the shelves, for free, with the hope of coming across a box cover graced with Kinski’s likeness. While I’m sure our collection is incomplete (many titles that come out on DVD drop the beautiful paintings used to promote the film theatrically in favor of floating heads or gaudy Photoshop jobs that have nothing to do with the movie), at least I can scan these covers and keep them in a virtual gallery for all to see. Welcome to the Virtual Gallery of Klaus Kinski Paintings!"]
2. "Top 11 Uses Of Classic Rock In Cinema": By Jordan Hoffmann of Underground Online.
["He started it and he killed it. You are looking at a photo of Martin Scorsese and he is the one responsible for the marriage of awesome movie sequence and classic rock tune. No, it wasn't Easy Rider because those songs were still new at the time. It was Mean Streets, really, with its slo-mo barroom intro to the Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash," a pool hall brawl to "Please Mr. Postman" and car chase shootout to "Steppin' Out" by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers that really blew the door open. It seems like a cliché now - from Nike and Cadillac ads to kiddie flicks (none better than James Brown's "I Feel Good" in Soccer Mummy) but at the time it was revolutionary. With fists in the air we roll the projector: here's our Top 11 Classic Rock Moments in Cinema."]
3. "Love as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold": Dennis Lim on Ang Lee's upcoming Lust, Caution.
["In “Brokeback Mountain,” the 2005 critical hit and cultural flashpoint that won Ang Lee an Academy Award for best director, love is a haunting, elusive ideal briefly attained but forever out of reach. Mr. Lee’s new movie, “Lust, Caution,” which will have its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival this week, is also a tragic melodrama, one in which the lovers are up against forces beyond their control, but it takes a harsher view of romance. This time love is a performance, a trap or, cruelest of all, an illusion."]
4. "Whatever Happened to the Whoopee Boys?": Blue Mag's Fred Schroeder posits the question.
["The other day I saw the rather forgettable new comedy “Hot Rod.” In the background of one scene appeared the poster for the 80s sex comedy “The Whoopee Boys,” another forgettable movie. For some unfathomable reason this juxtopositioning of two forgettable films within each other like the renderings of a medium-talent Escher caused me to become obsessed with “The Whoopee Boys” and more importantly its director John Byrum."]
5. "'Star Wars' lightsaber will fly aboard shuttle": May the g-force be with you.
["May the force be with shuttle Discovery and seven astronauts on an October mission to the International Space Station. Coming from a galaxy far, far away, the lightsaber wielded by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars will fly aboard the orbiter three decades after the classic movie opened."]
Quote of the Day: Robert Frost
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Hoppered Up"; Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Clip of the Day: The "Theme Song Sondheim" does Back to the Future
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Links for the Day (August 28th, 2007)
1. "Resignations and Assignations": Gonzales and Craig... TWO WILD AND CRAZY GUYS!!!!
["Dramatic enough in itself, the announcement Monday morning that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had resigned also set the stage for what may be one of most contentious confirmation hearings since the Senate rejected John Tower as defense secretary in 1989. ...
Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who has voted against gay marriage and opposes extending special protections to gay and lesbian crime victims, finds his political future in doubt after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from complaints of lewd conduct in a men's room."]
2. "Decompression in Action": The changed face of comics. With a response at Bubblegum Aesthetics.
["Over at Bully's comics blog, there's an interesting discussion thread on the relative merits/demerits of "decompressed" comics, i.e., those which contain relatively little dialogue per page, stretch their narratives out across an arc of several issues, and use the space of a monthly "floppy" comic to only delineate a small amount of time passing. It's initially very tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's a more serious point underlying it, which is: what do we expect from our entertainment (or, indeed, any form of communication)?"]
3. "Not so mad about AMC's 'Mad Men'": Diane Werts, contrariwise.
["This show looks like a million dollars (before inflation). Everything is oh sooo perfect. That's the problem."]
4. "10 Movie Moments That Broke The 4th Wall": ... and crashed heedlessly into the 5th dimension beyond Pluto! (Thanks to Todd VanDerWerff for the link.)
["Here I go again with another meta-movie list! The phrase “breaking the fourth wall” has been around for over a century. Though as a concept it's been around since before Shakespeare the phrase itself originates from the theater of Bertolt Brecht. It simply meant that a character makes an aside to the audience. Through the invisible wall those watching are addressed, acknowledged and made to feel a little more “in on the joke” so to speak. It’s a device used a lot more in television than on film. In the 80’s it even became fairly fashionable on such shows like Moonlighting and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show – a show that had as its entire premise comedian Shandling talking directly to the studio audience and the viewers at home. The Marx Brothers may have pioneered the concept in cinema with Groucho’s many knowing winks but Bob Hope really nailed it in the seminal road movies he made with Bing Crosby which is where we’ll begin.]
5. "As Best as I Can Define It": S.T. VanAirsdale interviews William Friedkin.
["In a way, 2007 is shaping up as the year of director William Friedkin. At least in New York, anyway: In addition to May's unsettling paranoiac melodrama Bug, the coming weeks promise theatrical revivals of his Oscar-winning 1971 cop thriller The French Connection (opening this Friday at Film Forum) and his controversial 1980 leather-bar detective epic Cruising (opening Sept. 7 before finally arriving on DVD Sept. 18). The turbulent backstories of each film -- the former shooting live car chases in front of unwitting passers-by in Brooklyn, the latter enduring the wrath of the city's gay community while filming in the West Village -- bespeak only a few of the legends accompanying Friedkin's work, a 40-year canon as rigorous, challenging and demanding of its viewers as its haunted inhabitants onscreen."]
Quote of the Day:
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Amour de Mère"; The Brood (1979) 
Clip of the Day: So it turns out the "Theme Song Sondheim" (see yesterday's Jaws parody) has quite the repertoire. The rest of this week's Clips of the Day are all his. Today: Batman.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
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