Change Your Image
ebukh
Reviews
Boyz n the Hood (1991)
Ice cube's movie
I must say it amazes me that this film was made by a black man, because it is exactly the sort of fairy tale that "the man" would make to pacify the black folk. It repeatedly dilutes whatever subversiveness in its subject matter with inept editing and a lack of continuity until only its pathetic lessons resonate. Nothing that happens seems to follow from anything that happened before, and in the end the lives it depicts are not meaningful or important to us. And maybe this is the reality of life in the city, that it is trivialized to the point of disregard, but if that's the case this film is not successful in showing what that's like or how it got to be that way. Treading similar ground one year later, Menace to Society is almost incomparably better, not least because the Hughes brothers have some film-making instinct to draw on.
Watching this film, I felt like a lot of Americans must have felt when watching spaghetti westerns in the sixties. This movie feels as removed from the specifics of its time and place, as caught up in its director's fantasies and memories, and as hollow as some of those putative westerns. The difference is that on occasion the Italians at least had the film-making chops to mold their fantasies into great films, great visions, whereas Singleton's vision is either too hazy or too inconsistent to make any kind of an impression.
I don't want to completely discourage you from viewing this film, because it contains a great performance, by Ice cube as Doughboy. It was his film debut, and on the basis of it he is a major talent. He uses words so expressively and speaks his lines with such remarkable conviction and such quickness, that he has the power of Brando in his scenes. Physically, he is heavyset and unremarkable, but his words and his voice surprise us, and then his physical size only amplifies his anger, his hurt and his hate. Together with the boy who plays him in the early parts of the film, Ice cube takes hold of the film, grounds it, and gives it heart.
Quiz Show (1994)
propaganda
I watched this again recently, and I was struck by the movie's dislike for John Torturro's character. Watching this ten years ago, I thought the characterization was pat but not subversive, but based on this viewing I've changed my mind. What I find loathsome is how far the filmmakers would go to contrast the Jewish Stempel with the WASPy van Doren, to the point of completely dehumanizing the former. It may be true that the real Stempel possessed all those physical and verbal tics that the director burdens him with, but Torturro does not (or is not allowed to) imbue the character with an ounce of quiet dignity in the way Fiennes so obviously does, and that upset me. In the eyes of Goodwin, the protagonist, and therefore in our eyes, Stempel's sole character trait is his "jewishness." As stereotypes go, this may be the worst kind, a well-meaning one that seeks to illustrate a big truth at the expense of small truth. Overall the acting was just OK, and Ray Fiennes' crucial performance leaves one cold, although Hank Azaria and Paul Scofield were very good in smaller roles.
What this film exposes, yet again, is the toxicity of a certain kind of liberalism, dutifully espoused by Redford. In his heart, he wants nothing more than to be a van Doren, nothing less than to be a Stempel. In his wide-eyed buildup to the scene at the van Doren estate in Connecticut, where all those liberal lions gather, Redford is like a southern belle pining for the good old days; he likes things the way they were, and sees past (or rather embraces) the aloof ruthlessness with which they dismiss everything but their little games. Love for fellow man has been bred out of them along with all but the blue pigment out of their irises. Redford would do anything to be part of the clique up on that Olympus, and if mocking Stempel is what it takes, he'll do it.
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
the first in De Palma's streak
The unfortunate thing about Brian De Palma is that he started out as an omnivore but about to end as a cannibal. He used to borrow ideas at a prodigious pace in his movies, but he also lent them his unique visual and verbal wit. Now he's mostly doing imitations of his own biggest commercial successes, and he's not improving upon them either. Blow Out was his last great movie, and it was also the last time that he had made a marginal improvement on his previous work. If only he had gotten hold of the right project after that movie, I really think he could have become huge--bigger than Spielberg even. De Palma's ear, his sense of humor, was much more in tune with how America talked and thought, and his appeal is not nearly as sentimentality-dependent as Spielberg's. The middle De Palma is a cross between George Miller and the early Woody Allen.
It's amazing how different Phantom of the Paradise is from Blow Out, in virtually every aspect, and yet the movies have one trait in common--De Palma's ability to put together so many influences and make a very good narrative out of it. There is a weakness in Phantom in that De Palma had not yet learned to splice his ideas as seamlessly as he would in Blow Out, so the connecting work between some excellent scenes really drags. Probably the best scene in the movie is Swan, the Paul Williams character, sitting inside a round table and thinking of the best musical act to replace the just-incinerated band that was to headline the Paradise's opening. He rotates in his table and "samples" the acts as they are suddenly in the spotlight in the vast room. The trick is that the acts are not there; Swan is only thinking about them, and they're projected for us, a twinkle in the mind. It is the equivalent of the cartoon bubble, and it is surprisingly, almost frighteningly, effective. De Palma came up with something that is truly primal here, and there are other scenes that come close, like the staircase scene and the climactic musical number.
Sometimes its risky to recommend a movie too much because you risk overpraising, or at least raising the expectation to match what the movie is able to deliver. The peculiarity of Phantom is that it's impossible to overpraise--it's too big a movie, a huge sandwich of material. As someone once said about "Anna Karenina", it's not an idea, it's a soul; in this case, probably the soul of De Palma the intoxicated moviemaker.