Spider-Man 3: The IMAX Experience

Spider-Man 3: The IMAX Experience

dir. Sam Raimi

James Franco and Neve Campbell in Robert Altman's The Company.
Kyle MacLachlan in Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
May 4, 2007 - 70mm/AMC Lincoln Square

My favorite scene in Robert Altman’s The Company is when a shirt-less (hot!) James Franco prepares an egg breakfast for Neve Campbell. This occurs in the morning, after what we can only assume was a night of passionate chef/ballerina-style lovemaking. The egg preparing is surprisingly very intimate, more so than a sex scene would have been, but more than intimate it is hilarious. He smiles that goofy million-dollar smile and all is right with the world. And, on top of the smiling, he’s a good cook! He’s making eggs! What a catch! Way to go, ballerina Neve!

My favorite scene in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 is when a fully clothed (hot!) James Franco prepares an egg brunch/dinner/snack for Kirsten Dunst. This occurs in the middle of the day, after and during dancing rather poorly to “The Twist”. The Spider-Man movies are full of musical montages, but this is hardly a montage. Mr. Raimi opts to treat this small, intimate scene with the frenetic “so much is happening and time is passing!” styling of a “‘love is in the air’ montage” by bringing archaic music, wild and crazy dancing and, most importantly, Mr. Franco’s priceless smile. A great chunk of this movie, when Mr. Smile loses his marbles, is very amusing. It all culminates in a scene with Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man/Peter Parker) and Mr. Franco (New Goblin/Harry Osborn) in a coffee shop.

The coffee shop scene is a serious one, but it ends comically with the young Osborn essentially commenting on the “damn good slice of pie” to his waitress. Mr. Franco’s insistence on the quality of the slice of pie echoes the work of Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s television show, Twin Peaks. This unhappy coffee shop meet between Parker and Osborn, in conjunction with some alien goo, leads to another series of over-the-top slapstick silliness. This time, Mr. Maguire plays the part of the wild and crazy guy, which leads us back to Kyle MacLachlan. As the alien goo and his newly acquired “single” status take hold, Peter Parker becomes a charming sleaze-ball. This sleaziness physically manifests itself in an altered hairstyle. The “sleazy-spidey” hairstyle happens to be another echo in the Kyle Maclachlan canon, reflecting his hair in Paul Verhoeven’s movie, Showgirls. In Showgirls, Mr. Maclachlan’s “sleaze” is represented through staring at girls, a lot of cocaine use and weird, body-flopping pool sex. In Spider-Man 3, Mr. Maguire’s “sleaze” is represented through staring at girls, a lot of cookie-eating and weird, body-flopping jazz club dancing.

Peter Parker dances at a jazz club with some new girl, Gwen Stacy (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), to get back at his recently fired ex and ex-Showgirl (Broadway, not Vegas), Mary Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst). Ms. Dunst does quite a bit of singing in Spider-Man 3, and all of it is very poor. Can any of the women in the Spider-Man universe do anything right or be the least bit independent or strong? Unlike the dancing in the movie, the singing is not funny. Not funny at all.

Almost none of Spider-Man 3 makes any sense, not in the classical sense of the word and not in the fantasy universe created in first two (successful) installments in the series. There is a sand-monster who can grow to exponential heights, a cross between the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters and Nick Nolte’s “water-father” monster from the end of Hulk. There is an old advice-giving manservant at the Osborn mansion that bequeaths pivotal knowledge to Harry at just the right narrative moment. There is an inexplicable vibrating desk. All of these oddball non-sequiturs, compounded with an overly complicated, yet very simple and stupid, story make for something that, if anything, is good for a few laughs. I have no intentions of elevating the first two Spider-Man movies to the levels of the to-be-mentioned series, but Spider-Man 3 fits snuggly in the Batman Forever or Return of the Jedi category of moviemaking. It has the totally bonkers nonsense feel of Batman Forever, combined with the performative (none of the actors care) feel of Return of the Jedi.

Spider-Man 3 is a bad movie.

A Wedding

A Wedding

dir. Robert Altman

Muffin wears braces like a bird on a wire.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 22, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

A Wedding subscribes to the “let’s throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks” philosophy of Altmanic moviemaking. In this case the “bunchashit” are people and the “wall” is a lavish wedding party. The result is a dead grandmother of the groom, a sister of the bride pregnant with the groom’s child, some more deaths, an entire relationship arc of the “cheating” mother of the bride, Leonard Cohen covers, an old fashioned brotherly beating by the father of the groom and so on and so forth. A Wedding is, of course, a comedy, and a quite funny one. Wait, did somebody say a comedy with dead grandparent hijinks?! Where have we seen that before? Hmmm, possibly in National Lampoon’s Vacation or the uncomedy in the most serious movie ever made, The Grapes of Wrath? Nope, can’t think of anything else. I digress.

Somehow a movie with 48 speaking parts is able to go down easy and feel light, despite its reflective, serious moments. This is the big-budget action extravaganza (the Independence Day) of situation ensemble comedy. Like Gosford Park, the best of Altman’s “situation” movies (the only other being A Prairie Home Comapanion), there’s as much fun to be had with trying to keep characters straight as there is with the rich content. The most daunting task is following a flock of lovely redheaded ladies, many of whom are the spawn of mother of the bride, the very funny Carol Burnett. Her daffy country charm extends to her daughters; the bride (Muffin) is innocent and ignorant, whilst her sister (Buffy), played by Mia Farrow, acts the innocent country charm, but is quite the promiscuous girl. Ms. Farrow is something to behold, as she barely speaks a word and manages to steal most of her scenes with just a shrug.

On the male side there are many more redheads from both sides of the aisle including a rather large man who does his best to romance the married Ms. Burnett. Other than he and an Owen Wilsonish (wedding crasher!) college roommate of the groom, the men are far less interesting than the women. Luckily the women get the bulk of the attention as the mother and aunts of the groom scheme for the opportunity to tell everyone that their mother has died, but the men are mostly boring. Luckily, with 48 characters and chaos piled upon chaos, a little weakness only goes so far to be a minor annoyance.

A Wedding is regrettably underseen due to its lack of star power and being from that obscure post-Nashville pre-The Player portion of his career, when he continued making great movies. A Wedding makes a stellar pair with Nashville, acting as its less serious bridesmaid. Currently it is only available as part of a box set, but sometime soon it is due out on its own, hopefully with the incredibly informative (hopefully larger) movie poster.

Brewster McCloud

Brewster McCloud

dir. Robert Altman

Harry Potter and the Pantsless Eyelashes

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 18, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Brewster McCloud is the motion picture debut of the talented and sexy Shelley Duvall. Brewster McCloud is the first motion picture featuring Bud Cort as the titular character; his next would be Harold of Harold and Maude. Brewster McCloud is likely to be (cannot be too sure about this) the only movie where a serial killer leaves bird shit on the bodies. Brewster McCloud is often incredibly funny and irreverent. Brewster McCloud is like M*A*S*H in that an incredibly long action/sporting scene cuts the movie’s sails and brings it to a rather tedious dead halt. Unlike M*A*S*H, this scene is not the climax of the story or the humor, and the movie is forced to struggle to recover (in M*A*S*H, the movie ends). This is a tricky situation that only occurs when a movie is actually genuinely funny, filled to the brim with sillybilly belly laughs. The laughter becomes the norm, and in this case, a long sequence that is unfunny feels far worse than an unfunny scene in a marginally funny movie. The tragedy I speak of is a very long “funny” car chase sequence, shot in characteristic Altman fashion, meaning long shots zooming in and out at a whim, which cause the life-size cars to appear almost like match-box cars. The hyper-kinetic energy of the rest of the movie is reduced to watching a four-year-old play with toys. It is frustrating, because otherwise, Brewster McCloud is classic Altman and a comedy classic. Instead it has been reduced to a mere oddity, but it is so much more, so so much more.

Brewster McCloud bolts out of the gate with a false start and then gets chugging along at a relentless pace. It beings with a woman singing a dreadful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner in the Houston Astrodome. The credits roll over the thing, but the arrogant woman stops singing, berates the band for being out of key and then both the song and the credits start over again (false start). Soon we’re jettisoned to Stacey Keach in old man make-up. He is collecting money from nursing homes. Eventually, Mr. Keach goes careening down a hill in his wheelchair. He hollers quite a bit, very much like (or exactly like) Spike Jonze in the below clip from Jackass: The Movie.

It comes after Wee-Man in the Cone

These scenes are intercut with scenes that are even more non-sequitor. Rene Auberjonois plays a high=strung, hypo-allergenic ornithologist. He lectures fun and not-so-fun facts about birds to the camera, which are always funny (sadly, the frequency of his appearances slow as the movie moves forward). Very quickly a detective is brought in from San Francisco to investigate the bird shit murders. This detective specializes in turtleneck sweaters, and is played by Michael Murphy, who wears piercing ocean blue contact lenses (this is all introduced in the midst of the relentless pace part).

All of this overkill funny leads to what? Does it need to lead to anything? Part of the beauty of Brewster McCloud is the amount of clutter in every frame, clutter or detail, something fans of Wes Anderson may find familiar and comforting. Altman also embraces something that has since become something of a Wes Anderson fixture, which is framing a person or action in the center of widescreen frame, while a cluttered background or oddball action surrounds.

Robert Altman started making movies not as a young man, but as an adult, yet Brewster feels the work of a young, enthused director. The anarchic sunshine that is this picture has a twang of melancholy, but it is first and foremost a whacky comedy. The cherub-faced Mr. Cort is building wings to fly away and become something of a true cherub. Wearing a pair of skimpy briefs, Brewster, with an uncherub-like, sweaty, muscular body does chip-ups. A friend, who works at the local health food store, delivers his order of human bird food, if you can imagine what that is. This girl is just overcome with sexual attraction to this to-be-winged man. Sex is the last thing on Mr. McCloud’s mind, but the gal is willing to take care of things herself. It is one of the funnier scenes in the movie as the girl writhes under covers on Brewster’s bed and he is ardently oblivious. Shelley Duvall is more successful in her seduction, shifting Brewster’s focus just a tiny bit away from flying. His idealist passion to fly away is discovered to be malleable, making Brewster McCloud a coming-of-age story. It is not about sexual awakening, but about dreams and youthful idealism quietly breaking with the influence of the real world and human frailty. Sex is presented as something frail and human, not corrupting. Though Brewster builds himself to be an organic flying machine, like a bird, his avian ideology stumbles a bit with every touch of humanity. Though the movie is not sad and human frailty is celebrated, despite the lost idealism. It would take a man of Altman’s history and stature to communicate this, particularly through comedy, and with its flaws and humanity, Brewster McCloud will be rediscovered and cherished.

Countdown

Countdown
dir. Robert Altman

No images of Countdown anywhere on world wide web.
This movie is lost in space.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 18, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Worth noting in the Robert Altman canon is the 2nd half of this otherwise typical astronaut movie. The first half is a very calm, cool, collected character drama. Robert Duvall is frustrated (though in a rather subdued manner) that James Caan is picked for a solo mission to the moon. Jealousy runs rampant, though with the restraint you would expect from astronauts and their families. The way the families of astronauts were forced to become politicians, and thus look the cleanest of clean cut is fairly interesting. Moving from The Right Stuff to Apollo 13 to Countdown, every astronaut, their kids, their wives seem more or less physically interchangeable. Serious acting chops carry Caan, Duvall and Altman regular Michael Murphy through the first half with class, despite its rather uneventful nature.

Countdown opens with a Star Trek 2 “fake-out” featuring the aforementioned three leads. They’re prepping for one of the Apollo missions. News comes down the wire that the Soviets are on their way to the moon. The race is on. Countdown was released in 1968, a year before the United States won that leg of the space race and set foot on the rock. The Soviet vs. United States race was very real, but it did not reach the heights of this movie. The race in Countdown is a simple footrace through the stars, though the competition is nowhere in sight.

From the launch of the one-way solo spacecraft to the very last frame of the movie Altman fashions a deliberately paced and tense stretch of drama. As Jimmy Caan goes streaming through space, his communication (and lack of) with the base is just about all we get for 40 minutes. In 1968, all this switch flipping and technospeak must have sounded like nonsense. It still does today, but like all the grounded scenes in United 93 and the engineering babble in Primer the drama takes precedence over understanding what anybody is talking about. The banter between Duvall and Caan is so constant that when it is cut off, due to technical problems, the silence is deafening. All this is well and fine, but totally uninteresting.

Fatalism overtakes the rest of the story as Caan embarks on a suicide mission, and for what? For pride. For manliness. For poetry. Obvious parallels can be drawn between what happens toward the end of this movie and the overreaching themes of the far superior in every way, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was release mere weeks apart from Countdown. In part, I’m sure 2001 is responsible for the failure of Countdown. The final landing on the moon, in all of its loneliness and silence is shocking. Earth has lost communication and Caan is in the desert. He then embarks on a journey to find a small space station the U.S. landed on the moon not long before. In there he will live awaiting rescue. He has no idea where the station is. Along the way, as time and oxygen starts slipping away he comes across the spacesuited corpses of Soviet astronauts. This scene makes the movie worth watching. It is very, very simple, very quiet, and politically charged. There may be a space-race on Earth, but up there on the moon, there are no countries, no politics, no race. There is only cold loneliness. Mission accomplished.

Cookie's Fortune

Cookie's Fortune

dir. Robert Altman

Just another holiday in the "clink."

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 16, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Anne Rapp wrote back-to-back Robert Altman pictures. In 1999 came Cookie’s Fortune. In 2000 came Dr. T and the Women. Both movies are failures. With that said, Dr. T boasts a positively bonkers and somewhat daring ending, which almost makes it worth seeing. Cookie’s Fortune boasts Charles S. Dutton. Needless to say, Ms. Rapp has nary written a picture since.

Anne Rapp wrote Cookie’s Fortune through a looking glass into 1930's Hollywood. An update on the screwball comedy, Robert Altman is the perfect man to pervert such a genre, dead or otherwise. Yet, there is no subversion or perversion in sight, it simply borrows from the least the genre has to offer. Rapp’s script could easily have been tossed aside in the heyday of Cary Grant’s goofy glasses and dead aunts. Frank Capra would have yawned at Ms. Rapp’s hijinks and opted for Clark Gable erecting the Walls of Jericho instead.

In order to “update” the genre, the stage is set in Mississippi, The South, where people are dumber and more gullible, right? Their funny accents allow for screwballiness of epic proportions. Glenn Close buzzes around a house quickly eating a suicide note. Liv Tyler parks up on the sidewalk enough to the point she has a dashboard coated with hundreds of parking tickets. Later on she exclaims she has something like $264 in tickets overdue. Only $264?! This must be 1938, when parking tickets were a nickel! What is this movie?! Where is Robert Altman through all of this?

The actors play the comedy straight, and by straight, I mean stiff. Altman’s comedy must have come by way of his son, Stephen Altman, the production designer. Set around the Easter holiday, the movie is an April shower, or torrential downpour, of pastels. Glenn Close and Julianne Moore are just buried in pink and powder blue light, blossomy fabric. Yes, Julianne Moore is in this picture. It was the same year she gave two of the best performances of the year, with The End of the Affair and Magnolia. In Cookie’s Fortune she plays the half-wit sister to Glenn Close’s maniacal playwriting cupcake face.

The two sisters happen upon the dead body of their aunt, Cookie (when living she is played by the marvelous Patricia Neal). In order to avoid the shame of a suicide in their family, Camille (Glenn Close) decides to cover it up by making it look like a robbery-homicide. This results in Cookie’s best friend, Willis, being tossed in prison. Willis is played by powerhouse Charles S. Dutton. For this role, S. Dutton deflates into a sweet as pie seemingly sexless neighbor, and he manages quite well. I say “sexless,” because while every character seems to have had a spouse or other, Dutton seems blissfully sterile. Now there’s something from 30’s comedy, a sexless, non-threatening, wise, kindly southern black man. Huzzah Ms. Rapp, you captured the 30’s spirit there, right? (wrong!). Still, Dutton shines, a breath of fresh air, as he manages to be the least buffoonish of the bunch. He makes for a strong base as the straight man, and his banter with Ned Beatty is actually quite fun when you cut out every time Beatty is forced to express Willis’ innocence by saying, “I know he’s innocent. We go fishing together.”

Mr. Altman has a way of blending humor and melancholy unlike any other filmmaker. When it works, enough praise cannot be pig-piled any higher. In this case, he is crippled by a script written in a genre that bakes melancholy and despair in an oven of crazy. When screwball comedy worked, it worked from the inside out. Plagued by The Depression and War, Cookie’s Fortune is not. By taking the screwy and attempting to layer in some brand of seriousness this picture mostly falls flat in the mud. Only Charles S. Dutton remains afoot, slowly but surely, rounding the bend, Wild Turkey in hand.

Vincent and Theo

Vincent and Theo

dir. Robert Altman

Another pipe dream from Robert Altman. Tim Roth as Vincent van Gogh.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 10, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Martin Scorsese’s return to form, The Departed, has finally arrived. After two blundering Oscar-chasing failures, Mr. Scorsese delivers what he does best, blood, action and machismo. Let me draw a parallel between The Departed, and how it signaled a career resurgence for a director, who lately, has been dwindling into insignificance. Robert Altman experienced a career resurgence, a return to form and what he does best in 1992, with The Player. An ensemble movie full of famous stars, filled with the angry wit and satire that made him a famous director, like in M*A*S*H, that movie with Alan Alda, or that movie Nashville, where he makes fun of southern people and country music.

With a little bit of embellishment, the above is more or less the boldly moronic attitude I syphon from movie critics and journalists the nation wide. I hear it regurgitated at parties, at the office and from cinematic pundits all over the interweb. Nevermind that he aforementioned Mr. Scorsese’s previous narrative feature, The Aviator, was released to mountains of acclaim from critics, a domestic gross over 100 million dollars and a slew of awards from various places, including a well-deserved Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio at the Golden Globes. What a monumental failure. Also, in 2005, Mr. Scorsese made an epic documentary about Bob Dylan called No Direction Home. That was also met with universal acclaim. Good to have you back, Marty.

Now, onto Robert Altman and the task at hand. Before the screening of Thieves Like Us, Christian Science Monitor movie critic and former associate of Mr. Altman, Peter Rainer, made reference to Altman’s revitalization that occurred with The Player. He’s not alone with this popular opinion. Yes, Altman became more commercially viable after The Player, but critics, please.

Vincent and Theo is to be regarded as one of the landmarks of Altman’s varied, prolific and always ambitious movie career. Released theatrically in 1990, Vincent and Theo was conceived and made as a four-hour miniseries for the BBC. I have heard rumors and read that there is a 204-minute cut running around somewhere on a Spanish DVD, and I would love to see it, but for the time being I’ll try sticking to discussion of the 138-minute theatrical cut rather than what could be. Briefly, the removing of whatever footage was shot surely only added to the impressiveness of the performances in a shorter cut, adding a depth, reality and history to every word exchanged. Motivation for certain things may be more explicit in a longer cut, though the conviction with which scenes play out is nothing short of remarkable and believable.

An artist biopic unlike any other, Vincent and Theo succeeds because Vincent van Gogh does not. As his painting is not commercially successful, in no way does it propel the narrative. The narrative is propelled by character, action, choice, sickness, disease and love. Vincent may have painted the pictures, but does this make his brother Theo any less valuable? No. For a large portion of the movie Vincent leaves Paris and spends time with another painter, Paul Gauguin (also still famous). Vincent misses his brother Theo dearly, and it is easy to feel his pain. Theo struggles to conquer syphilis and the mental anguish that accompanies the physical ailment. He courts Jo Bonger, played by an unassuming Dutch actress, Johanna ter Steege. Even though we get to observe both Vincent and Theo throughout their separation, a feeling of longing overwhelms. Their fraternity is split, and it’s hard on them both.

Gabriel Yared’s score is the best of the Altman scores and in one sequence of particular virtuosity a lonely Vincent is overcome by a haunting field of sunflowers. He likes the color yellow, you see? Altman sweeps the camera in and out of the flowers, zooming uncontrollably as Yared’s score churns and churns wildly with bassy orchestration. It is exhilarating.

Tim Roth and Paul Rhys play the titular characters, respectively. Roth certainly looks the part, but as he is not afforded the option of mimicry he instead builds this legendary character from the inside out. There is a quiet to both his soul and his on-screen brother’s. They are the artistic complements to Scorsese’s brutish Jake and Joey LaMotta in Raging Bull. Like Raging Bull, Vincent and Theo plays out with a similarly poetic, simple beauty. Vincent’s painting sequences are not gratuitous. They are sparse, varied and powerful, like Jake LaMotta’s boxing matches. While van Gogh painted a whole hell of a lot more than Jake boxed, they certainly shared a passion for self-destruction and mutilation. So there is an Altman/Scorsese comparison out there that makes sense, and it has nothing to do with fictitious creative slumps.

There is no huge ensemble cast and only a few scenes of overlapping dialogue. The subtler more effective Altman touches are very present here. The characters eat in this movie. Their homes need tidying up. The mise-en-scene does not feel created, but lived in. Vincent looks hungry and thirsty. If there is a scene at a dinner table, the characters act with their mouth full. In one particular scene Johanna ter Steege attempts to one-up Julie Christie’s appetite in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. There is something enormously refreshing about watching characters eat and watching Theo struggle to clean up his flat when Jo first enters. Also refreshing is Altman’s willingness to have his actor’s speak in whatever accent is comfortable. Rather than worrying about someone speaking English with a French accent properly (which makes no sense), the cast and crew worried about what made these human beings tick and how did they live. It is transporting and comforting, and it would be worth it to spend a couple more hours in that world.

Thieves Like Us

Thieves Like Us

dir. Robert Altman

Young love. Keechie and Bowie.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 9, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

They’re like us! Three bank robbers escape from a Depression era Mississippi prison to continue robbing banks. Thieves Like Us is a bank robber movie without very much bank robbing. Every once and a while we see a stack of cash and, if we’re good, we see the inside of a bank. For the most part, we see the kitchen, bedroom, porch and dining room. When any number of these rooms are occupied by a young actress named Shelley Duvall all thoughts of gun fighting, car chases and Bonnie and Clyde banjo hijinks take a back seat. Ms. Duvall plays Keechie (the movie is peppered with such names as Bowie, Chicamaw and T-Dub), a virginal farm gal.

In a typical crime narrative, Keechie falls for a roughneck youth, turned on by his recklessness. In Thieves Like Us, Keechie falls for Bowie, another simpleton, who just happens to make ends by robbing banks. For those who remember Keith Carradine as the smiling cowpoke who meets a chilly demise in McCabe in Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us acts as a smiley spin-off (what happened to this smiling goofball between this movie and Nashville that turned him into the man’s man that would go on to play Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok is beyond me). Neither Carradine nor Duvall can keep an elated smile off their face when together. This device matched with Duvall’s commanding physical presence and enormous star-filled eyes make for some serious chemistry. Bowie smiles aw shucks and Keechie returns the smile one hundred bushels over. Shelley Duvall is sexy.

Shelley Duvall is not he the only woman in this picture who delivers a star-making performance and eventually gives a career best performance opposite Jack Nicholson, only to have typecasting effectively ruin the rest of her career. Enter Louise Fletcher, who plays Mattie, the sister-in-law of one of the trio of crooks. Like Nurse Ratched, Mattie is a rock. With a husband in prison and a couple rambunctious youngsters, she has the presence of a high school principal, exuding a maturity that is silencing to adults and children alike. At the same time, unlike Nurse Ratched, she is compassionate and loved and respected. In the final scenes, when Thieves Like Us, when it gives in to its genre conventions and makes a bombastic exit, Fletcher and Duvall share numerous scenes together and it becomes clear what Milos Forman and Stanley Kubrick saw in these fantastic actresses.

Set in 1937 during The American Depression, the soundtrack is jam-packed with radio waves. Believe it or not, Robert Altman was 12 years old in 1937, and he brings his first-person perspective by flooding scenes with the echoes of radio plays and news reports rumbling about "The New Deal,” rather than music. The effect is sometimes silly and distracting, particularly underscoring an intimate scene between Keechie and Bowie. This brand of “comedy” permeates the scenes between the three bank robbers, almost like a far, far less funny Raising Arizona. All the same, Thieves Like Us is not a comedy. It is a serious movie about young love and domesticity. There’s just a bit too much bank robbing in it, even though there isn’t much. It’s like buck shot, and only a few pellets hit the heart. The rest is just buried in your elbow and upper arm. That’s just annoying. Kill me Altman, like I know you can.

Dinner at Eight

Dinner at Eight

dir. George Cukor

Eight people in a frame of Dinner at Eight. Eight is great!

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 8, 2007 - DVD

Robert Altman recently passed away. Sometime last year I saw him speak at the Museum of the Moving Image, and he was rambunctious as ever, if not as physically nimble. It was prior to the release of his final movie, A Prairie Home Companion. The audience had yet to see the picture, but Mr. Altman assured the audience it was about death. That got a chuckle, and he assured everyone that he was serious. Upon its release, some critics hailed its profundity, often discussing the morbid and somehow optimistic themes. Upon the great Mr. Altman’s death, even more discussed its poignancy and timeliness. Nonetheless, A Prairie Home Companion is not a great movie, and though he would never speak lowly of any of his pictures, I cannot imagine how heart-wrenching and affecting Prairie would be if it were half the movie Dinner at Eight is.

Renowned as a comedy classic, Dinner at Eight is an ensemble picture about a time lost and the depression that accompanies loss, both metaphorical and literal. The American Depression looms heavy over every frame of the picture, which is fairly remarkable, considering the amount glitz and bling it also carries. A former silent movie star, played by John Barrymore, is penniless and drunk. A 3rd generation shipping tycoon, played by John’s brother Lionel Barrymore, is losing his business to the stockholders and his life to illness. An aging stage actress, played by Marie Dressler, is drowning in pelts and forced to sell out a friend to die with her lifestyle intact. These characters are not falling from working class to the bread line, but from extremely rich and famous, to not so rich and a bit infamous. Their young brides and children, groomed for high society in The Roaring 20s are the most worrisome. The older folks make unspoken reference to The Great War, whilst the young ones have no reference or fortitude, because seriousness goes unspoken.

Like A Prairie Home Companion, Dinner at Eight is about a bittersweet last hurrah. Again like Prairie, in preparation for the “hurrah,” the “unspoken” personal and impersonal boils to the surface. Dinner at Eight leisurely introduces its mammoth cast of characters two-by-two. Typically a third enters the scene and then we follow them until it all loops back into itself. The leisurely pace, scene-by-scene is no doubt due to the fact that it is adapted from a stage play, but the structure works wonders for keeping everyone straight, observing them initially in their natural state and then watching the bulldozers come through. Gradually the scenes get quicker and quicker as we get closer to Friday, 8:00PM, and the tension becomes almost unbearable. When the clock tolls seven times it seems as though these characters cannot take another emotional blow, but the quiet cool with which they receive each hit somehow makes it more devastating than crying and screaming. It seems in their nature to cry and scream, as the actors ham up the humor and trifling problems, but for the most part, the outbursts remain trivial and comic. As the serious overwhelms the dinner party, they raise their heads high, full of the knowledge that this Dinner at Eight will be their collective last supper.

A comedy classic? It logically can be regarded as such due to the overwritten theatricality of the script compounded with overacting and the discreetly charming portrayal of the dying bourgeoisie. The comic timing in some scenes is uncanny, and a scene where a distraught servant describes a shockingly bloody incident to the Mrs. of the house is one for the history books. It is clear Dinner at Eight is as well, and it lives on in the films of Robert Altman (most literally in the tagline of the masterpiece Gosford Park – “Tea at Four. Dinner at Eight. Murder at Midnight.”).