GET SHORTY – “Taxi to Hollywood”

Get Shorty  –  Barry Sonnenfeld, director, 1905

JOHN: There’s something about Elmore Leonard that makes you want to read rather than watch this one. Perhaps the story is overly complex–too many characters, or too quirky and a little too creative. Don’t get me wrong, I love movies about movies especially about the one I am watching and this story seems as authentic as you get, but in the end I am left asking, “What? Could you go back over that again?”

GO, GO, GO, (3 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: You should be saying, “Look me in the eye.” like everyone else did after John Travolta’s superb performance (I think matching Pulp Fiction). Isn’t the problem, we’re too dumb to keep up. Hackman, Travolta and Taxi’s DeVito are at their best, and the twist at the end should leave us all thinking about what we see and what we get. I think Get Shorty wears its guts on its sleeve.

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK(4 BARKs out of 4)

CHICAGO – “My Kind of Film Musical”

Chicago  – Rob Marshall , director, 2002

JOHN: Ever wonder why a Broadway show is better than the movie, than local productions of the same play, than just about anything outside of the theater that night? Good songs, fast pacing and a clever plot help, as do great actors, but it’s more than that. I would have said that it’s because you only get to go to one every ten years or that the actors have to prove themselves at each live performance, but watching movies like this and Moulin Rouge, even at home, even for the fourth or fifth time, make me feel it’s because everything is right. The story, the songs speak to us watching as audience who wants to participate. We’re cheering for ourselves.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: Roxie (Renee Zelwiger) sees her life through musical sequences—like we do—and why wouldn’t some lawyer (Richard Gere) take advantage of this—like we do—or Catherine Zeta Jones resent the attention Roxie gets instead of her—like we do? And let me mention the sequence in which John C. Reilly sings “Cellophane.” It is Bergman and  Fellini. A moment that encapsulates the people sitting out there alone in the dark. Sure, everything has become show business (he criminal justice system, news reporting, fake reality shows on TV), but how many pieces of art take that on as a theme in such a way that we are caught up in it? “Chicago”! Watch it again and again and again.

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK(4 BARKs out of 4)

THE PLAYER – “You’re the Movie”

Altman at the 1992 Cannes Festival

THE Player  – Robert Altman , director, 2011

JOHN: Fun to revisit  one of Altman’s best, and see it stand up so well. Tim Robbins is fantastic. And a couple scenes, real classics: he asks a table full of hangers-on if they can talk about anything but Hollywood (they can’t), the murder itself and his cold blooded look as he sits on a couch dressed in black and tells his girlfriend (Bonnie Sharon), she has been replaced—in a way that brings out the smarmy side in all of us.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: Don’t forget the ending which cleverly brings this full circle (we are watching the movie Graham Mill is blackmailed to make). And the opening 7 minute, 47 second tracking shot—an homage to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.  Almost as much fun are the guest appearances of famous people playing themselves—Angelica Huston, Elliot Gould, Steve Allen, Jack Lemmon, Jeff Goldblume, Joel Grey, Sidney Pollack, etc. It’s almost like being in Hollywood and spotting these people on a street corner yourself. Then there’s the irony of Bruce Williams and Julia Roberts starring in the movie within a movie of how the rich (and we know that’s the Robbins’ character) never get prosecuted. Wow!

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK(4 BARKs out of 4)

In November 2000, Altman claimed that he would move to Paris if Geroge W. Bush were elected, but joked that he had meant Paris, Texas when it came to pass. He noted that “the state would be better off if he (Bush) is out of it.”

THE ARTIST – “Beyond Golden”

The Artist, directed by Michael Hazanavicius, 2012

SPANKY: John, you seemed to like this movie a lot more than I did. It started out well, then began to drag (except for the RCA Victor dog) only to pull around at the end. I think if we are judging a film on its worth, not on the meaning we can attribute to it or our personal film-going history, this one is, at best, an oddball that slipped into the Oscar mainstream because it ostensibly had something to do with the development of cinema.

2 Barks out of 4

JOHN: I saw this after the reviews were in and the film won “best picture,” but I think most people, including the Academy, missed its point.  Sure  the advent of talkies was a convenient metaphor, but this is about an artist who can’t communicate directly with the man on the street. An artist who doesn’t want the pity or support of those who can.  And, literally, the French director lets us in the audience experience this silence. We feel this disappointment (that is the let-down in interest you complain about, Spanky). The solution, is not to give up, or become a crowd pleasing talker. He is an “Artist.” The answer is to adapt his art to the times and be new and fresh all over again.  He and his love do this through tap dancing (with sound) and we feel the joy. We can’t dance, but he can for us.

In 2010r, a brilliant film that spoke to who we are and what our world has become, Social Network, was just a little too edgy for an Academy Award. This film succeeds because it is subtle and misleading. But its message is particularly meaningful for the floundering movie/television industry. And as a writer, I found it more real, more touching, more meaningful to me than any “entertainment” has been for a long, long time.

PS. Words on the page don’t talk either. Or do they?

4 GOs out of 4

THE HELP – “What Went Wrong”

The Help – Tate Taylor, director, 2011

JOHN: The first half made me sick to my stomach. Even though I lived during the period depicted in the film, I didn’t know that the help in Southern homes were required to use separate bathrooms (of course I did know public facilities were segregated). What were people thinking. And the women dressed like mannequins, what was that all about (what would Freud have made of them and their treatment of women of a different color). We must never forget, even if it is difficult to watch.

GO, GO, GO (3 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: I agree about the beginning, but the second half of the movie turns this into a Lifetime Channel feature, with that soupy music and its pointing a finger at the especially contemptible women, which sort of lets the white audience off the hook. The “poop pie” is a nice ironic twist, but having the “Help” book be well received and the black maid going off at the end to be a writer like the white girl—all seem self-serving to make the early message more palatable for today’s viewers.

BARK (1 BARK out of 4)

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS – “Always Closing”

Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley, director, 2002

"And the third place prize in our contest is, you're fired!"

SPANKY: I loved the Reservoir Dogs previews on this old VHS (John, are we down to this; not a movie, not even a DVD, but a VHS cassette, for gods sake! What’s next? Reviewing old-time radio programs?)  And this film/play is actors being actors in a competition for their lives: both in terms of the characters’ jobs and the perfumers vying with each other for the audience’s attention.

MANHATTAN – “Rhapsody in Black & White”

Manhattan, Woody Allen, 1979

SPANKY: You probably remember the stark panarama shots of the New York skyline against a lush George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”  But wait. Looking at this movie with John all these years later, things aren’t quite what is remembered. The movie voice-over is of the central character writing a novel and several times reworking the first chapter–each version expressing a different emotion.

When the movie first came out