===============================
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 472, Oct. 25, 2009
===============================
WHEN EXTREMELY PRESSED,
HOW WILL WE BEHAVE?
From Hitchcock to the new 'FlashForward,'
movies and TV series ask this question
By John Greenwald
"Is 'FlashForward' the new 'Lost'?"
That's the question bubbling through the blogosphere when "FlashForward" premiered in September. Of course, ABC, which broadcasts both shows, has described "FF" as a sort of creative successor to "Lost," which ends its run next May. Each program has large ensemble casts and characters with many intertwining storylines. Done right, drama series like these can hook intensely devoted fans.
Both shows have a patina of being reality based, yet soon enough it's clear they also have major sci-fi elements. But that's not what attracted me to them. Both expound on the concept of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstance.
This may be a well-trod dramatic path, but it still is one of the best to reveal the inner workings of characters. If those extraordinary circumstances are not too far beyond possibility, audiences can identify with the characters and emotionally participate in the drama.
For those who watch only PBS and Turner Classic Movies, here are brief summaries of "Lost" and "FF."
* "Lost" begins simply enough -- a Sydney to Los Angeles jetliner breaks in two and crashes on a richly forested, uninhabited Pacific island. The survivors work out ways to survive, and in the process we learn about them, especially in backstory flashbacks. For example, one character is being brought back to the U.S. to stand trial for murder. Another's a paraplegic who can walk after the crash.
With more than 25 major characters, "Lost" would not be an easy show to follow, except the producers and writers keep them all manageable. Quickly, however, weirder elements are added, including a killer cloud, polar bears and a hatch that leads to a underground world that once housed its own community. Complications ensue, including an aboveground compound on a nearby island somehow attached to the main island's underground one.
I was hooked for the first three seasons, but as the series dealt less and less with survival on a "lost" island, and more with sci-fi stuff, including time flash forwards, I lost interest. The last few seasons sit unwatched on my DVR, taking up valuable disc space. I'll need a three-day "Lost" weekend marathon to catch up. Still, even with its stranger elements, the show made for compelling viewing.
* "FlashForward" is only a few episodes old, not a few seasons, but it shows much promise. Unlike "Lost," which slipped in its surreal elements episode by episode, "FF" begins with a giant "what if." Everyone on the planet simultaneously loses consciousness for 137 seconds. They fall down, fall off, lose control. Some even die. Parts of L.A. are burning.
During their three-minute-plus comas, people imagine their futures in six months, on April 29 or April 30, 2010, depending on time zones. Some share the same "future" events. Some don't see a "future," leading them to fear they'll be dead in six months.
So far, "FF" focuses on a small group of people connected to an FBI team trying to figure out who or what caused the blackouts, and can another one be stopped. By the fourth episode, we learn that at least two people caused the blackouts and were awake during them.
What holds my interest is how people deal the blackouts and their visions of their "futures."
To the head of the FBI team, this is a problem to be solved. To his wife, a surgeon, the visions predict nothing, a stance that almost leads to the death of a patient. I'm fascinated by how these characters struggle to understand their blackouts and their new "futures."
How ordinary people deal with extraordinary circumstance is a common theme of both fiction and non-fiction. Currently, our combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan fit that non-fiction category, as does Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, who safely landed his jet on the Hudson River. Indeed, real life heroes make up an entire genre of publishing; Sullenberger has recently written a memoir, "My Search for What Really Matters."
In fiction, these stories are just as gripping, sometimes more so.
From 1963 to 1967, ABC aired "The Fugitive." Much of America was transfixed by this series about a doctor who comes home to find his wife brutally murdered by a man with one arm. Convicted of the crime, he escapes and begins his long search to find that one-armed man. As he crisscrosses the country, he meets different people somehow in need of his help. Each episode intermingled his story with theirs. "The Fugitive" was turned into a successful movie in 1993.
Alfred Hitchcock used the device of an innocent man running from the police while simultaneously pursuing the real killer in films like "The 39 Steps" (1935), "Saboteur" (1942) and "North by Northwest" (1959). My favorite Hitchcock film of this genre is his neorealistic drama "The Wrong Man" (1956), where Henry Fonda plays a real life victim of police mistaken identity. How Fonda and his wife survive this crises -- or don't -- is more instructive about human nature and our imperfect criminal justice system than most of his other pictures.
But all these movies and TV shows give us a measure to imagine our own possible conduct in such extraordinary circumstances.
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
-- 30 --
Friday, November 6, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Motion pictures as product lines
===============================
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 471, Oct. 18, 2009
===============================
MOVIES AREN'T MOVIES ANYMORE
-- THEY'RE PRODUCT LINES
Disney slices and dices its films and
TV shows into multiple media platforms
By John Greenwald
Betchya thought all the film industry wanted you to do was take in a half dozen movies a year; buy or rent a few DVDs; and see a couple of pay-per-view pictures on cable TV?
No way.
Ever since Walt Disney released "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937, Hollywood has been thinking of its movies as pies, slicing and dicing them into pieces, selling them to you, and hoping they would grow into new pies to sell all over again. (I know this metaphor sounds like a bad horror film, but Hollywood marketing often is a bad horror film.
Walt Disney himself was the first in Hollywood to turn movies, mainly their characters, into commemorative toys, dishes, lunch boxes, dolls, and even toy tea sets. (An original 1937 complete 23-piece "Snow White" China and porcelain tea set is for sale today on e-Bay for $499.99.)
Disney licensed his characters to toy and other manufacturers to cover the unanticipated high costs of making "Snow White." For decades this licensing and marketing was limited children's goods, but 40 years later in 1977 George Lucas changed that with "Star Wars." Aimed at both kids and adults, "Star Wars" accessories are profit-center universes unto their own. Today, licensing and marketing are a major part of show business.
A film is not just a film anymore but also a sequel, a series, a franchise, a TV show, and a made-for-TV-movie. It's a Broadway musical, a video game, an animated kids TV show, a bunch of comic book titles and a rack of novelizations.
It's also a CD, two dozen MP3 songs, a half-dozen iPod videos, a few Facebook and MySpace pages and Twitter accounts. The musicals generate star performers and their own live performances, concert tours and 3-D Imax movies of their concerts. Under correct management, a mere movie can become a many layered product line, with scores of spin-offs from more movies to Bobblehead dolls.
Disney is still the master of turning a single entertainment entity into a bunch of product lines.
It was front-page news Tuesday when the New York Times reported that Disney was investing $1 million to expand each of its 340 Disney Stores worldwide, and add a new store in Times Square. Disney's goal in the next five years is to convert their stores into mini-theme parks, with a theater and computer chip-enhanced interactive displays and toys. Disney is negotiating right now for more space with mall owners. These new Disney stores might be rebranded Imagination Parks, the Times reports. They "will become more akin to cozy entertainment hubs" than just "row after row of toys and apparel geared to Disney franchises."
Of course, you'll still be able to buy from row after row of toys and apparel amid all this electronic theatricality.
At these new Disney Whatevers, you'll also be able to book reservations to Disney Resorts or Cruises while your kids watch Disney film clips they've picked out, or sing in karaoke contests, or talk live with Disney Channel stars via satellite, the Times reports.
Many of these ideas come from Disney board member Steve Jobs, head of Apple, which has its own chain of highly successful Apple stores. "Apple is king of the mall," the Times says. Its stores had sales of about $4,700 a square foot last year, the most for any retail chain. By comparison, Best Buy's sells about $1,000 a square foot. All this Disney business from a bunch of squiggly little drawings made during the last 70 years.
"Dream bigger -- that was Steve's message," Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products, told the Times. Dream Disney did, which is remarkable given how many retailers -- and movie companies, too -- are Dreaming of ways just to stay in business during the Great Recession of 2008. Disney expansion goes against retailing tends.
Disney is also making changes in its movie business -- to better slice and griow that product pie.
Last month, the head of its movie studio abruptly quit, replaced by the head of the Disney Channel. The main difference between the two is the TV guy, Rich Ross, had more hits than the movie guy. Ross' hits spanned more product levels than bleachers have rows.
Under Ross, the Disney Channel became a franchise-generating machine, says the Times. It created TV shows and their movie spin offs like "Hannah Montana" and "High School Musical." In the pipeline is the animated TV show "Handy Manny," for preschool-age children, and "Wizards of Waverly Place," starring yet another young teen Disney star, Selena Gomez. "Keenly attuned to the so-called tween audience, aged 6 to 14, Ross has also played a significant role in the rise of the Jonas Brothers," highly popular and profitable teen songsters.
From a single tune to a giant cruise ship, Disney creates new products and new versions of old ones to generate more cash flow and profits. It's not alone, as 20th Century Fox does the same with its "Star Wars" franchise, and Warner Bros. similarly uses its Bugs Bunny/Road Runner characters in various media.
All to cleverly separate us from our money -- whether we're children or adults.
-- 30 --
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 471, Oct. 18, 2009
===============================
MOVIES AREN'T MOVIES ANYMORE
-- THEY'RE PRODUCT LINES
Disney slices and dices its films and
TV shows into multiple media platforms
By John Greenwald
Betchya thought all the film industry wanted you to do was take in a half dozen movies a year; buy or rent a few DVDs; and see a couple of pay-per-view pictures on cable TV?
No way.
Ever since Walt Disney released "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937, Hollywood has been thinking of its movies as pies, slicing and dicing them into pieces, selling them to you, and hoping they would grow into new pies to sell all over again. (I know this metaphor sounds like a bad horror film, but Hollywood marketing often is a bad horror film.
Walt Disney himself was the first in Hollywood to turn movies, mainly their characters, into commemorative toys, dishes, lunch boxes, dolls, and even toy tea sets. (An original 1937 complete 23-piece "Snow White" China and porcelain tea set is for sale today on e-Bay for $499.99.)
Disney licensed his characters to toy and other manufacturers to cover the unanticipated high costs of making "Snow White." For decades this licensing and marketing was limited children's goods, but 40 years later in 1977 George Lucas changed that with "Star Wars." Aimed at both kids and adults, "Star Wars" accessories are profit-center universes unto their own. Today, licensing and marketing are a major part of show business.
A film is not just a film anymore but also a sequel, a series, a franchise, a TV show, and a made-for-TV-movie. It's a Broadway musical, a video game, an animated kids TV show, a bunch of comic book titles and a rack of novelizations.
It's also a CD, two dozen MP3 songs, a half-dozen iPod videos, a few Facebook and MySpace pages and Twitter accounts. The musicals generate star performers and their own live performances, concert tours and 3-D Imax movies of their concerts. Under correct management, a mere movie can become a many layered product line, with scores of spin-offs from more movies to Bobblehead dolls.
Disney is still the master of turning a single entertainment entity into a bunch of product lines.
It was front-page news Tuesday when the New York Times reported that Disney was investing $1 million to expand each of its 340 Disney Stores worldwide, and add a new store in Times Square. Disney's goal in the next five years is to convert their stores into mini-theme parks, with a theater and computer chip-enhanced interactive displays and toys. Disney is negotiating right now for more space with mall owners. These new Disney stores might be rebranded Imagination Parks, the Times reports. They "will become more akin to cozy entertainment hubs" than just "row after row of toys and apparel geared to Disney franchises."
Of course, you'll still be able to buy from row after row of toys and apparel amid all this electronic theatricality.
At these new Disney Whatevers, you'll also be able to book reservations to Disney Resorts or Cruises while your kids watch Disney film clips they've picked out, or sing in karaoke contests, or talk live with Disney Channel stars via satellite, the Times reports.
Many of these ideas come from Disney board member Steve Jobs, head of Apple, which has its own chain of highly successful Apple stores. "Apple is king of the mall," the Times says. Its stores had sales of about $4,700 a square foot last year, the most for any retail chain. By comparison, Best Buy's sells about $1,000 a square foot. All this Disney business from a bunch of squiggly little drawings made during the last 70 years.
"Dream bigger -- that was Steve's message," Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products, told the Times. Dream Disney did, which is remarkable given how many retailers -- and movie companies, too -- are Dreaming of ways just to stay in business during the Great Recession of 2008. Disney expansion goes against retailing tends.
Disney is also making changes in its movie business -- to better slice and griow that product pie.
Last month, the head of its movie studio abruptly quit, replaced by the head of the Disney Channel. The main difference between the two is the TV guy, Rich Ross, had more hits than the movie guy. Ross' hits spanned more product levels than bleachers have rows.
Under Ross, the Disney Channel became a franchise-generating machine, says the Times. It created TV shows and their movie spin offs like "Hannah Montana" and "High School Musical." In the pipeline is the animated TV show "Handy Manny," for preschool-age children, and "Wizards of Waverly Place," starring yet another young teen Disney star, Selena Gomez. "Keenly attuned to the so-called tween audience, aged 6 to 14, Ross has also played a significant role in the rise of the Jonas Brothers," highly popular and profitable teen songsters.
From a single tune to a giant cruise ship, Disney creates new products and new versions of old ones to generate more cash flow and profits. It's not alone, as 20th Century Fox does the same with its "Star Wars" franchise, and Warner Bros. similarly uses its Bugs Bunny/Road Runner characters in various media.
All to cleverly separate us from our money -- whether we're children or adults.
-- 30 --
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
How good sci-fi works
===============================
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 470, Oct. 4, 2009
===============================
FROM PEOPLE TO 'PRAWNS':
HOW GOOD SCI-FI WORKS
'9' and 'District 9' reveal science fiction
at its subtle best and its most obvious
By John Greenwald
In truth, science fiction has little to do with the future or the past, or with spaceships, or time travel or alien monsters. Science fiction, like most other fiction, has everything to do with us, the human species, in the here and now. For all their special effects and fancy gizmos, science fiction stories boil down to human drama.
Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" (2005) was not about an army of tall, three-legged monsters shooting nasty fireball bombs. It was about a shallow, lazy father (Tom Cruise) giving of himself to protect his children.
J.J. Abrams's "Star Trek" (2009) examines the crew of the USS Enterprise before its members became such a well-oiled machine, when they were fresh out of the Starfleet Academy and strangers to each other, and how they became a team and a family.
Indeed, both the "War of the Worlds" and "Star Trek" at heart are family dramas, with added sci-fi action.
But that's what science fiction does, it illuminates people and their times. It lets us care about its characters, even gross-out-ugly aliens, as does any good fiction. The best sci-fi makes us think about our times and the issues and ideas that conflict and propel them.
Which brings us to two sci-fi films that opened late this summer.
* "9" takes place in a post-apocalypse future where mad killing machines have destroyed just about everything except nine newly created life forms. They're the size of forearms and have human-like personalities.
* In "District 9," a South African drama set in the present, an alien mother ship, having accidentally run out of fuel, food and water, suspends itself over Johannesburg, South Africa, causing all sorts of tribulations to the humans below.
These films don't have much in common except brilliant use of computer graphics and the number 9 in their titles. They illustrate how science fiction can reveal much about human life today, even though we don't have an alien space ship hovering over, say, New Jersey, or our "descendants" are struggling to survive amid humanity's ruins.
As "9" is the lesser of these two, let's deal with it first.
Scientists have created machines for humanity's benefit, but they've been taken over by militarists for their own benefit. Since computer artists and their technologies aren't very good at creating human beings, these humans look like comic book exaggerations. When the machines take over and destroy all (including the generals), the last scientist builds nine burlap-skinned creatures. Each looks to be 18 inches tall and is imbued with a set of human attributes.
The first critter the scientist made is 1, the leader who's old, tired and without new ideas to fight the machines. The latest, and last, is 9, fresh, full of courage, and ready to fight back. There may be nine of them, but together they don't add up to the kind of fully rounded character that we might see in a decent actioner.
More interesting are the machines, headed by the Beast, computer marvels of clicking, clacking, fire-spewing brutality. Think of giant, erector-set insects with multiple Edward Scissorhands arms and legs.
"9's" plot, characters and ideas are far less engaging than its visuals. Director Shane Acker metalicizes insects to a fearful, fascinating degree.
Computer graphics also make "District 9" possible -- first in the giant spaceship floating over Johannesburg, and soon after in the hundreds of thousands of its passengers and crew disgorged to the ground. Starving, they survive minimally in a giant, ever-growing shantytown on the edge of Johannesburg.
The film never mentions South Africa's real shantytowns, much less its 45-year history of separating human races and putting blacks in "townships" (shantytowns) of their own. Though this kind of legal segregation ended nearly 20 years ago, its effects still exist. "District 9" revolves around how one culture, race, nationality, religious sect, etc., will stick to it's own but separate, segregate and discriminate against the "other."
In "District 9," the "others" are oddly passive aliens that look like a cross between a seven-foot lobster and a slimy, black grasshopper. They talk in a gurgle that a few South Africans understand. Humans derisively call them "prawns."
The government, having contained the aliens for two decades, now wants to move them to a larger settlement, far away from Johannesburg. A bureaucrat knocks on the aliens' junkyard doors asking their permission to be moved. If that doesn't work, they're rousted by a private, Blackhawk-like army, violently if necessary.
We see this story from two angles, that of a white government official leading the aliens' resettlement and one alien and his son who fight to stay where they are. The film echoes with modern examples: from Nazi concentration camps, to American internment camps for Japanese during World War II, to Apartheid, to France's recent uprooting of its illegal, Muslim immigrants. It displays the two ways humans separate themselves from the "others" -- with vicious force and with legal chicanery. Whatever works.
The documentary story-telling style is dramatic and effective: We relate to people and prawns alike. The chase and shoot-'em-up ending is suspenseful, but 10-minutes too long. Above all, "District 9" captures our emotions while making us think.
That's good science fiction!
-- 30 --
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 470, Oct. 4, 2009
===============================
FROM PEOPLE TO 'PRAWNS':
HOW GOOD SCI-FI WORKS
'9' and 'District 9' reveal science fiction
at its subtle best and its most obvious
By John Greenwald
In truth, science fiction has little to do with the future or the past, or with spaceships, or time travel or alien monsters. Science fiction, like most other fiction, has everything to do with us, the human species, in the here and now. For all their special effects and fancy gizmos, science fiction stories boil down to human drama.
Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" (2005) was not about an army of tall, three-legged monsters shooting nasty fireball bombs. It was about a shallow, lazy father (Tom Cruise) giving of himself to protect his children.
J.J. Abrams's "Star Trek" (2009) examines the crew of the USS Enterprise before its members became such a well-oiled machine, when they were fresh out of the Starfleet Academy and strangers to each other, and how they became a team and a family.
Indeed, both the "War of the Worlds" and "Star Trek" at heart are family dramas, with added sci-fi action.
But that's what science fiction does, it illuminates people and their times. It lets us care about its characters, even gross-out-ugly aliens, as does any good fiction. The best sci-fi makes us think about our times and the issues and ideas that conflict and propel them.
Which brings us to two sci-fi films that opened late this summer.
* "9" takes place in a post-apocalypse future where mad killing machines have destroyed just about everything except nine newly created life forms. They're the size of forearms and have human-like personalities.
* In "District 9," a South African drama set in the present, an alien mother ship, having accidentally run out of fuel, food and water, suspends itself over Johannesburg, South Africa, causing all sorts of tribulations to the humans below.
These films don't have much in common except brilliant use of computer graphics and the number 9 in their titles. They illustrate how science fiction can reveal much about human life today, even though we don't have an alien space ship hovering over, say, New Jersey, or our "descendants" are struggling to survive amid humanity's ruins.
As "9" is the lesser of these two, let's deal with it first.
Scientists have created machines for humanity's benefit, but they've been taken over by militarists for their own benefit. Since computer artists and their technologies aren't very good at creating human beings, these humans look like comic book exaggerations. When the machines take over and destroy all (including the generals), the last scientist builds nine burlap-skinned creatures. Each looks to be 18 inches tall and is imbued with a set of human attributes.
The first critter the scientist made is 1, the leader who's old, tired and without new ideas to fight the machines. The latest, and last, is 9, fresh, full of courage, and ready to fight back. There may be nine of them, but together they don't add up to the kind of fully rounded character that we might see in a decent actioner.
More interesting are the machines, headed by the Beast, computer marvels of clicking, clacking, fire-spewing brutality. Think of giant, erector-set insects with multiple Edward Scissorhands arms and legs.
"9's" plot, characters and ideas are far less engaging than its visuals. Director Shane Acker metalicizes insects to a fearful, fascinating degree.
Computer graphics also make "District 9" possible -- first in the giant spaceship floating over Johannesburg, and soon after in the hundreds of thousands of its passengers and crew disgorged to the ground. Starving, they survive minimally in a giant, ever-growing shantytown on the edge of Johannesburg.
The film never mentions South Africa's real shantytowns, much less its 45-year history of separating human races and putting blacks in "townships" (shantytowns) of their own. Though this kind of legal segregation ended nearly 20 years ago, its effects still exist. "District 9" revolves around how one culture, race, nationality, religious sect, etc., will stick to it's own but separate, segregate and discriminate against the "other."
In "District 9," the "others" are oddly passive aliens that look like a cross between a seven-foot lobster and a slimy, black grasshopper. They talk in a gurgle that a few South Africans understand. Humans derisively call them "prawns."
The government, having contained the aliens for two decades, now wants to move them to a larger settlement, far away from Johannesburg. A bureaucrat knocks on the aliens' junkyard doors asking their permission to be moved. If that doesn't work, they're rousted by a private, Blackhawk-like army, violently if necessary.
We see this story from two angles, that of a white government official leading the aliens' resettlement and one alien and his son who fight to stay where they are. The film echoes with modern examples: from Nazi concentration camps, to American internment camps for Japanese during World War II, to Apartheid, to France's recent uprooting of its illegal, Muslim immigrants. It displays the two ways humans separate themselves from the "others" -- with vicious force and with legal chicanery. Whatever works.
The documentary story-telling style is dramatic and effective: We relate to people and prawns alike. The chase and shoot-'em-up ending is suspenseful, but 10-minutes too long. Above all, "District 9" captures our emotions while making us think.
That's good science fiction!
-- 30 --
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
The Variety Show, from Ancient Rome to Jay Leno
===============================
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 469, Sept. 22, 2009
==============================
THE VARIETY SHOW, FROM
ANCIENT ROME TO JAY LENO
TV's version of vaudeville has been a staple,
in either prime time or late night
By John Greenwald
Variety shows have always been part of popular entertainment, at least since Roman times. What went on in its amphitheaters were variety shows on a colossal scale: animal acts, gladiators and chariot races. One colosseum in Rome was even flooded for naval battles. Now that's entertainment!
Today, variety shows still exist, though maybe not as large as Rome's. There's the circus, with its animal, acrobatic and clown acts. Las Vegas has its own circus (" ... du Soleil"), animal acts, music and dance (plus showgirls in costumes galore). On a much smaller scale, elementary and middle schools have their "pageants."
In America of the 1850s and '60s, variety shows played in western saloons, and small town "opera houses" and urban beer halls. Many shows were aimed at men and got pretty racy. By the late 1800s, they all merged into family entertainment -- vaudeville: groups of acts put together by booking agents to travel the country. The shows went to hundreds of theaters -- from small towns to big cities. Many acts built a national following, with performers like juggler and comedian W.C. Fields and the cowboy comic Will Rogers becoming stars in the new media of film and radio.
But vaudeville flourished only a few decades before being overcome by radio and movies. Radio took much of the talent, the singers and comics; and movies took the venues, as vaudeville houses became movie houses. As early as 1896, vaudeville bookers were using short films as an extra added attraction, and to clear theaters between shows. By the late 1920s, movies dominated the programs and vaudeville acts were the fillers. After World War II, vaudeville was dead.
Still, there were plenty of talented performers out there. Those who could sing, dance and be funny found work, if not fame, in radio, movies and even in television. A New York Daily News Broadway columnist, Ed Sullivan, hosted a CBS television variety show from 1948 through 1971. If you were anyone of talent or fame in the performing arts, you appeared on his "shew," from opera singers to, most famously of all, Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
Like vaudeville, there was something for everyone on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Scenes from Broadway musicals. Magicians and jugglers (remember the old English gentleman with the spinning plates?). Dancing bears, dogs and chimps. Borscht Belt comics like Alan King, Sam Levenson and Joan Rivers. Sullivan had a newsman's instinct for what was new and what the public wanted or would like, regardless of his own personal tastes. He was the ultimate vaudeville booking agent.
And, his choices affected not only performers' careers, but the public's taste.
By the mid-'50s, television was into its own mid-50s: In 1955, half of all U.S. households had a TV set (today, it's 99 percent). Rock 'n' roll, had been confined to the teen lifestyle of radio, touring shows and state fairs. Thanks to television variety show, rock was going into America's living rooms for all to see and hear.
Of course, Sullivan's wasn't the only TV variety show. The format had become a mainstay of television for half of its history -- from the late 1940s through the 1970s. Variety shows were hosted by singers (Dean Martin, Perry Como), comedians (Carol Burnett, Jackie Gleason) and "personalities" (Steve Allen, Jack Parr).
But during the 1970s, the nation's tastes changed. Variety shows went out of favor. TV was exposing the public to something less pleasant than mild-mannered vaudeville: the news. From the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, television was filled with strong doses of life's struggles and violence, its heartbreaks and terrors. By contrast, an hour of singing, dancing and light-hearted comedy seemed irrelevant.
Drama shows took over much of each broadcast network's schedule. Series like NBC's "L.A. Law" (1986 to 1994) went beyond simple crime drama to reflect the day's news. With episodes about such subjects as domestic violence, racism, abortion and gay rights, it personalized the headlines.
Efforts in tbe '80s and '90s to revive the variety show on prime time failed, most recently with "The Wayne Brady Show" in 2002.
But TV always had another place for the variety show: late night television. In 1950, the local New York NBC station began broadcasting "Broadway Open House," which became the full NBC network's "The Tonight Show" in 1954. The show's long-time host, Jay Leno, left earlier this year in favor of a younger, more "hip" Conan O'Brien.
But mainly for economic reasons, Leno reappeared two weeks ago hosting a daily prime time variety program, "The Jay Leno Show." (A week of Leno is cheaper to produce than a week of dramas, five times cheaper.)
Leno may have been a late-night leader, but his new series is so much like the old one, it's not ready for prime time. Leno's middle-of-the-road humor and style may be audience-friendly but it lacks the energy and wit prime time requires. There's too much low-budget shtick compared to the talented acts that marked TV's best vaudeville shows in the past.
Luckily, Leno has a few years to upgrade his program, assuming NBC wants to spend the money and audiences want to see a variety show during prime time.
-- 30 --
Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved. Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 469, Sept. 22, 2009
==============================
THE VARIETY SHOW, FROM
ANCIENT ROME TO JAY LENO
TV's version of vaudeville has been a staple,
in either prime time or late night
By John Greenwald
Variety shows have always been part of popular entertainment, at least since Roman times. What went on in its amphitheaters were variety shows on a colossal scale: animal acts, gladiators and chariot races. One colosseum in Rome was even flooded for naval battles. Now that's entertainment!
Today, variety shows still exist, though maybe not as large as Rome's. There's the circus, with its animal, acrobatic and clown acts. Las Vegas has its own circus (" ... du Soleil"), animal acts, music and dance (plus showgirls in costumes galore). On a much smaller scale, elementary and middle schools have their "pageants."
In America of the 1850s and '60s, variety shows played in western saloons, and small town "opera houses" and urban beer halls. Many shows were aimed at men and got pretty racy. By the late 1800s, they all merged into family entertainment -- vaudeville: groups of acts put together by booking agents to travel the country. The shows went to hundreds of theaters -- from small towns to big cities. Many acts built a national following, with performers like juggler and comedian W.C. Fields and the cowboy comic Will Rogers becoming stars in the new media of film and radio.
But vaudeville flourished only a few decades before being overcome by radio and movies. Radio took much of the talent, the singers and comics; and movies took the venues, as vaudeville houses became movie houses. As early as 1896, vaudeville bookers were using short films as an extra added attraction, and to clear theaters between shows. By the late 1920s, movies dominated the programs and vaudeville acts were the fillers. After World War II, vaudeville was dead.
Still, there were plenty of talented performers out there. Those who could sing, dance and be funny found work, if not fame, in radio, movies and even in television. A New York Daily News Broadway columnist, Ed Sullivan, hosted a CBS television variety show from 1948 through 1971. If you were anyone of talent or fame in the performing arts, you appeared on his "shew," from opera singers to, most famously of all, Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
Like vaudeville, there was something for everyone on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Scenes from Broadway musicals. Magicians and jugglers (remember the old English gentleman with the spinning plates?). Dancing bears, dogs and chimps. Borscht Belt comics like Alan King, Sam Levenson and Joan Rivers. Sullivan had a newsman's instinct for what was new and what the public wanted or would like, regardless of his own personal tastes. He was the ultimate vaudeville booking agent.
And, his choices affected not only performers' careers, but the public's taste.
By the mid-'50s, television was into its own mid-50s: In 1955, half of all U.S. households had a TV set (today, it's 99 percent). Rock 'n' roll, had been confined to the teen lifestyle of radio, touring shows and state fairs. Thanks to television variety show, rock was going into America's living rooms for all to see and hear.
Of course, Sullivan's wasn't the only TV variety show. The format had become a mainstay of television for half of its history -- from the late 1940s through the 1970s. Variety shows were hosted by singers (Dean Martin, Perry Como), comedians (Carol Burnett, Jackie Gleason) and "personalities" (Steve Allen, Jack Parr).
But during the 1970s, the nation's tastes changed. Variety shows went out of favor. TV was exposing the public to something less pleasant than mild-mannered vaudeville: the news. From the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, television was filled with strong doses of life's struggles and violence, its heartbreaks and terrors. By contrast, an hour of singing, dancing and light-hearted comedy seemed irrelevant.
Drama shows took over much of each broadcast network's schedule. Series like NBC's "L.A. Law" (1986 to 1994) went beyond simple crime drama to reflect the day's news. With episodes about such subjects as domestic violence, racism, abortion and gay rights, it personalized the headlines.
Efforts in tbe '80s and '90s to revive the variety show on prime time failed, most recently with "The Wayne Brady Show" in 2002.
But TV always had another place for the variety show: late night television. In 1950, the local New York NBC station began broadcasting "Broadway Open House," which became the full NBC network's "The Tonight Show" in 1954. The show's long-time host, Jay Leno, left earlier this year in favor of a younger, more "hip" Conan O'Brien.
But mainly for economic reasons, Leno reappeared two weeks ago hosting a daily prime time variety program, "The Jay Leno Show." (A week of Leno is cheaper to produce than a week of dramas, five times cheaper.)
Leno may have been a late-night leader, but his new series is so much like the old one, it's not ready for prime time. Leno's middle-of-the-road humor and style may be audience-friendly but it lacks the energy and wit prime time requires. There's too much low-budget shtick compared to the talented acts that marked TV's best vaudeville shows in the past.
Luckily, Leno has a few years to upgrade his program, assuming NBC wants to spend the money and audiences want to see a variety show during prime time.
-- 30 --
Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved. Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.
Elia Kazan: A Great Filmmaker Re-Emerges
===============================
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 468, Sept. 6, 2009
===============================
ELIA KAZAN: RE-EMERGING
AS A GREAT FILMMAKER
Once a powerhouse on Broadway and Hollywood,
his reputation is being restored
By John Greenwald
Today, Elia Kazan is remembered for two, maybe three, movies: "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), "On the Waterfront" (1954) and "East of Eden" (1955). He also introduced two of America's greatest actors in those films, Marlon Brando and James Dean. (They were in other films, stage productions, and even TV, but not with this acclamation.)
For a man who began in the New York theater, where he acted a bit and directed a lot, Kazan (1909-2003) easily made the transition to film, taking many of his New York actors with him to Hollywood.
Kazan was a great man of the performing arts, a powerhouse of creativity who's half-forgotten today. Let's thank Wesleyan University for showing some of his well known and lesser-known pictures. He deserves this. Wesleyan is presenting most, but not all, of my favorite Kazan films.
Besides directing at least a dozen unforgettable movies and even more extraordinary Broadway plays, Kazan co-founded the Actors Studio in New York, which trained some of America's finest actors.
Kazan collaborated with a Who's Who of America's best known writers of the 1950s and 1960s: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck and Budd Schulberg. The plays and movies he directed were described as searing, powerful, revealing, socially conscious and devastating. Especially in the timid '50 and '60s, Kazan was not afraid to go after taboo subjects.
In "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947), Gregory Peck plays a magazine writer who posses as a Jew to try to get into restricted hotels. A brave picture for the time, it received Oscars for best picture, best director (Kazan) and best supporting actress (Celeste Holm). It only was Kazan's fifth Hollywood film. (Though not playing at the Wesleyan Kazan festival, it's well worth seeing).
Equally controversial was "Pinky" (1949), where Jeanne Crain plays a light-skinned black woman. She had been passing for white in the north, but when she returns to her home in the south, she has to confront racism. It was nominated for three acting Oscars: Crain (leading actress) and Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Water (supporting actresses). (It's not in the festival but worth seeing if only for the performances.)
"Panic in the Streets" (1950) is Kazan's film noir. Shot in New Orleans' waterfront and back streets, it follows a U.S. Public Health officer (Richard Widmark) searching for two hoods with pneumonic plague before they create a catastrophic epidemic. Think of "House" as an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Nominated for a screen-writing Oscar, it plays at Wesleyan Sept. 24.
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) first appeared on Broadway in 1950, also directed by Kazan. Brando's visceral, sexual performance stunned New York. The film received three acting Oscars, including one for Vivien Leigh. Brando shared Oscar nominations with Kazan and six others. Kazan unforgettably brought Tennessee Williams' play to the screen and made Brando a star. For all his New York theater roots, Kazan was now an A-list Hollywood director. (Plays Oct. 1)
"Viva Zapata!", about the Mexican revolution, today is considered a second-tier Kazan film, but it's energized by a cast of superb supporting character actors. One, Anthony Quinn, received an Oscar. (Oct. 8)
In 1954 came Kazan's masterpiece, "On the Waterfront." Brando played the young longshoreman and boxer caught up in the double corruption of the fight game and the union-run docks. Schulberg wrote the intense script; Leonard Bernstein composed the jazzy, discordant score. Shot on location, it captured the docks' grubby streets, toughened faces and broken spirits, but without excessive melodrama. Brando delivered on "Streetcar's" promise, and more. "Waterfront" received eight Oscars, including best picture, best director (Kazan) and best actor (Brando), plus four nominations. (Plays Oct. 15)
Equally intense is "East of Eden" (1955), John Steinbeck's updated Cain and Abel story. It was James Dean's first staring movie, after scores of TV appearances in the early '50s. His Actors Studio's Method training paid off in an Oscar. (Nov. 5)
"A Face in the Crowd" (1957) is my favorite Kazan picture. Also written by Schulberg, it has Kazan's familiar qualities of intense acting along with a prescient point of view about the power of television that's frighten and relevant a half-century after it was made.
Andy Griffith plays "Lonesome" Rhodes, hillbilly bumpkin with little more to his name than a guitar, lots of small town patter and tall tales, and a flask in his back pocket. Patricia Neal's the newly minted college grad who puts him on her family's local radio station, and falls for him too.
Griffith's ingratiating line of down-home yarns wins over the women. Soon sponsors flock to him, his radio show goes national, then becomes a national TV show. There, he dispenses small-town wisdom and right-wing politics. Madison Avenue execs and politicians sit at his feet to learn how countrified demagoguery is done.
Griffith soon thinks: Why work for senators, when he can become one?
This chilling notion is echoed in today's radio and cable TV talkmeisters, say when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann calls Fox's Glenn Beck "Lonesome" Rhodes Beck.
By the end of his career, Kazan had received nine Tonys and five Oscars for best director, plus an honorary Oscar for his life's work -- an unsurpassed record. Thank goodness, we're not burying this man's work any longer.
-- 30 --
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 468, Sept. 6, 2009
===============================
ELIA KAZAN: RE-EMERGING
AS A GREAT FILMMAKER
Once a powerhouse on Broadway and Hollywood,
his reputation is being restored
By John Greenwald
Today, Elia Kazan is remembered for two, maybe three, movies: "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), "On the Waterfront" (1954) and "East of Eden" (1955). He also introduced two of America's greatest actors in those films, Marlon Brando and James Dean. (They were in other films, stage productions, and even TV, but not with this acclamation.)
For a man who began in the New York theater, where he acted a bit and directed a lot, Kazan (1909-2003) easily made the transition to film, taking many of his New York actors with him to Hollywood.
Kazan was a great man of the performing arts, a powerhouse of creativity who's half-forgotten today. Let's thank Wesleyan University for showing some of his well known and lesser-known pictures. He deserves this. Wesleyan is presenting most, but not all, of my favorite Kazan films.
Besides directing at least a dozen unforgettable movies and even more extraordinary Broadway plays, Kazan co-founded the Actors Studio in New York, which trained some of America's finest actors.
Kazan collaborated with a Who's Who of America's best known writers of the 1950s and 1960s: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck and Budd Schulberg. The plays and movies he directed were described as searing, powerful, revealing, socially conscious and devastating. Especially in the timid '50 and '60s, Kazan was not afraid to go after taboo subjects.
In "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947), Gregory Peck plays a magazine writer who posses as a Jew to try to get into restricted hotels. A brave picture for the time, it received Oscars for best picture, best director (Kazan) and best supporting actress (Celeste Holm). It only was Kazan's fifth Hollywood film. (Though not playing at the Wesleyan Kazan festival, it's well worth seeing).
Equally controversial was "Pinky" (1949), where Jeanne Crain plays a light-skinned black woman. She had been passing for white in the north, but when she returns to her home in the south, she has to confront racism. It was nominated for three acting Oscars: Crain (leading actress) and Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Water (supporting actresses). (It's not in the festival but worth seeing if only for the performances.)
"Panic in the Streets" (1950) is Kazan's film noir. Shot in New Orleans' waterfront and back streets, it follows a U.S. Public Health officer (Richard Widmark) searching for two hoods with pneumonic plague before they create a catastrophic epidemic. Think of "House" as an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Nominated for a screen-writing Oscar, it plays at Wesleyan Sept. 24.
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) first appeared on Broadway in 1950, also directed by Kazan. Brando's visceral, sexual performance stunned New York. The film received three acting Oscars, including one for Vivien Leigh. Brando shared Oscar nominations with Kazan and six others. Kazan unforgettably brought Tennessee Williams' play to the screen and made Brando a star. For all his New York theater roots, Kazan was now an A-list Hollywood director. (Plays Oct. 1)
"Viva Zapata!", about the Mexican revolution, today is considered a second-tier Kazan film, but it's energized by a cast of superb supporting character actors. One, Anthony Quinn, received an Oscar. (Oct. 8)
In 1954 came Kazan's masterpiece, "On the Waterfront." Brando played the young longshoreman and boxer caught up in the double corruption of the fight game and the union-run docks. Schulberg wrote the intense script; Leonard Bernstein composed the jazzy, discordant score. Shot on location, it captured the docks' grubby streets, toughened faces and broken spirits, but without excessive melodrama. Brando delivered on "Streetcar's" promise, and more. "Waterfront" received eight Oscars, including best picture, best director (Kazan) and best actor (Brando), plus four nominations. (Plays Oct. 15)
Equally intense is "East of Eden" (1955), John Steinbeck's updated Cain and Abel story. It was James Dean's first staring movie, after scores of TV appearances in the early '50s. His Actors Studio's Method training paid off in an Oscar. (Nov. 5)
"A Face in the Crowd" (1957) is my favorite Kazan picture. Also written by Schulberg, it has Kazan's familiar qualities of intense acting along with a prescient point of view about the power of television that's frighten and relevant a half-century after it was made.
Andy Griffith plays "Lonesome" Rhodes, hillbilly bumpkin with little more to his name than a guitar, lots of small town patter and tall tales, and a flask in his back pocket. Patricia Neal's the newly minted college grad who puts him on her family's local radio station, and falls for him too.
Griffith's ingratiating line of down-home yarns wins over the women. Soon sponsors flock to him, his radio show goes national, then becomes a national TV show. There, he dispenses small-town wisdom and right-wing politics. Madison Avenue execs and politicians sit at his feet to learn how countrified demagoguery is done.
Griffith soon thinks: Why work for senators, when he can become one?
This chilling notion is echoed in today's radio and cable TV talkmeisters, say when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann calls Fox's Glenn Beck "Lonesome" Rhodes Beck.
By the end of his career, Kazan had received nine Tonys and five Oscars for best director, plus an honorary Oscar for his life's work -- an unsurpassed record. Thank goodness, we're not burying this man's work any longer.
-- 30 --
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
True realism is impossible
===============================AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 467, Aug. 30, 2009
===============================
EVEN WHEN WE WANT REALISM, WE CAN'T GET IT
Everyone loves a good story. So what
that Tarantino's latest is preposterous
By John Greenwald
We've all probably given a movie a thumbs down because "it wasn't realist." I've done it, and I've been wrong. No film can be realistic. As I've written here before: If you want realism, watch a security camera tape.
What we mean by realistic is not really real, but as the American Heritage Dictionary says, "relating to the [begin ital] representation [end ital] of objects, actions, or social conditions as they actually are [my italics]." No film can be real; it just has to seem real. In essence, it has to fool us that it is real.
Fifty years ago, I saw a play, "The Connection," in Greenwich Village. In it, a bunch of heroin addicts hung around in an apartment on the stage waiting for their drug dealer, their "connection." During the intermission, the cast moved to the lobby, staying in character. One of the points of the play was that we in the audience weren't supposed to know if what we saw on stage (and in the lobby) were actors playing drug addicts or drug addicts playing actors playing drug addicts.
It worked.
I don't think we knew for sure. Of course, I doubt if any one even knew a real drug addict, this being 1959. At least "The Connection" could pull it off. It was set in real time: two hours on the stage were two hours in the lives of these people. It's easy for theater to do real time and appear realistic.
For movies, this real time business comes of as a stunt.
The entire art of the fiction film is designed to fool you into believing what you see and hear on screen, even when you're rolling your eyes in disbelief at the stupidity of filmmakers trying to pass a piece of nonsense. Still, we so much want to believe that we accept amazing foolishness as, in some way, tolerably believable. And I'm not just talking about "Harry Potter" or "Pirates of the Caribbean."
A 1994 academic study, which was the best I could find on the Web, reported these as the most popular film genres: romance, action-adventure, drama, science fiction and fantasy (I don't what happened comedy in this study). But with drama as number three, surrounded by genres heavy with make-believe, it's clear moviegoers clearly don't want reality.
But what they do want are movies that resemble the world they know, only exaggerated to one degree or another. Maybe it's not worlds they know, only worlds they might imagine (sci-fi or fantasy films), or maybe it's worlds they fear (horror films).
From childhood, we love the stories our parents read and told us. Those stories caused all those emotions to well up in us. We believed them no matter how little these tales conformed to our childhood reality because we trusted our parents.
And they were fun to read an hear.
As we grow up, we still accept these stories, even if only a few conform to our experience. We'll accept most any story as long as we can emotionally relate. We just need enough elements to hold our attention. Actors hold our attention because we share the same DNA. Put in emotionally familiar stories and we'll accept everything from robots, to wizards, to even meerkats.
No matter how silly, we still want a patina of realism, some touch of what looks like reality, a bit of "honesty."
Take writer-director Quentin Tarantino, whose World War II drama-actioner-comedy "Inglourious Basterds" is now playing. The farthest thing from his mind is realism, regardless of how much real-looking blood his characters spill, or how many scalps they remove from the enemy.
From his first feature, "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), Tarantino loved to make highly stylized pictures. In "Dogs," his main characters are thieves on a big heist. Dressed all in black suits, black ties and white shirts, they don't know each other's name except by the colors their leader has given them -- as in Mr. Orange or Mr. Black.
Is this a robbery film or kabuki theater?
"Basterds" is even more preposterous. A French teen escapes from a Nazi SS officer who loves to kill Jews. A few years later in Paris, she owns a little cinema where the Nazi high command is going to see a private review of Joseph Goebbels' latest propaganda epic. The woman, now a heart-stopping, Garbo-esque beauty, has plans for the show, including blowing up her theater and everyone inside it, all in a blaze of chilling German expressionist glory.
Meanwhile Brad Pitt plays an American lieutenant leading a squad of Jewish GIs whose mission is to torture, deface, scalp and kill as many Nazis as they can. (There's maybe a half-second close-up of scalping, but even if you quickly look away, the image lingers).
These two separate story lines converge in a tense, violent, sometimes funny and explosive extended sequence -- one that rewrites history. A revenge fantasy doesn't begin to describe the picture.
There's nothing about "Basterds" that strikes me as approaching realism. Yet I fell into its wildly overstated world like it was the real thing thanks to Tarantino's great skill in mixing fantasy and his kind of reality. Few filmmakers do as well.
-- 30 --
Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Food flix
===============================
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 465, Aug. 16, 2009
===============================
A SMÖRGÅSBORD OF FOOD FLIX
TO SATISFY YOUR HUNGER
From Julia Child to Charlie Chaplin,
Hollywood dabbles in the culinary arts
By John Greenwald
"Food, glorious food!" -- From "Oliver!" (1968)
Early in my career of writing about movies, my editor gave me a list of adjectives, metaphors and other descriptive words appearing in my reviews. They all were about food. His message: Stop using all those food terms to describe movies. By that standard, this column is going to be difficult to write.
Last weekend's release of "Julie & Julia" gives film buffs and foodies a rare Hollywood experience, a film about food -- cooking it, eating it and obsessing about it. "J&J" is unusual because Hollywood releases few food-focused pictures, preferring instead a scene here or there: say in "The Godfather" (1972), when Clemenza tells Rocco, who has just killed another mobster, "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."
The film business is more in love with computer-generated explosions and teenage romance and sex than food. That's why movie reviewers, bloggers, and foodies come up with similar lists of their favorite food films. There aren't that many choices. Still, it's rewarding to think about those few dozen food movies worth savoring. It's like recalling the truly great meals you've had. Here's my taster's choice of the best food films, in no particular order.
-- 30 --
Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 465, Aug. 16, 2009
===============================
A SMÖRGÅSBORD OF FOOD FLIX
TO SATISFY YOUR HUNGER
From Julia Child to Charlie Chaplin,
Hollywood dabbles in the culinary arts
By John Greenwald
"Food, glorious food!" -- From "Oliver!" (1968)
Early in my career of writing about movies, my editor gave me a list of adjectives, metaphors and other descriptive words appearing in my reviews. They all were about food. His message: Stop using all those food terms to describe movies. By that standard, this column is going to be difficult to write.
Last weekend's release of "Julie & Julia" gives film buffs and foodies a rare Hollywood experience, a film about food -- cooking it, eating it and obsessing about it. "J&J" is unusual because Hollywood releases few food-focused pictures, preferring instead a scene here or there: say in "The Godfather" (1972), when Clemenza tells Rocco, who has just killed another mobster, "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."
The film business is more in love with computer-generated explosions and teenage romance and sex than food. That's why movie reviewers, bloggers, and foodies come up with similar lists of their favorite food films. There aren't that many choices. Still, it's rewarding to think about those few dozen food movies worth savoring. It's like recalling the truly great meals you've had. Here's my taster's choice of the best food films, in no particular order.
- "Julie & Julia" (2009): The delightful summer entertainment stars a groaning board of French cuisine (heavy on the butter) and Meryl Streep's uncanny, warmly hilarious performance as Julia. Child's book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and her PBS show, "The French Chef," changed how America cooked and ate. The Child story alternates with office-worker Julie Powell's efforts to cook "Mastering's" 524 recipes in 365 days, and blog about it. Amy Adam's whiny Julie can't match Streep's exuberant, uproariously eccentric Child. Stanley Tucci plays Child's calm, supportive husband.
- "Big Night" (1996): Stanley Tucci co-directs and stars in this intimate look at two immigrant brothers -- one a practical restaurateur, the other a food artiste -- trying to stay afloat despite themselves. Funny and touching, the film succeeds even as their restaurant struggles.
- "Ratatouille"(2007): Only Pixar animation could pull off a film about a rat becoming a master chef in Paris. The movie exults in the hard work and glory in running a fine restaurant. And the final scene reveals the powerful sensory experience of a simple, but superbly prepared, vegetable stew. "Ratatouille" captures the essence of creativity.
- "Eat Drink Man Woman"(1994): Director Ang Lee's gentle, poignant family comedy about a famed chef in Taipei burdened with three beautiful but rebellious daughters and his depleting taste buds. Every Sunday he prepares an exceptional meal for them, which they don't appreciate. The only way he can show his love is with food. Lee integrates its five major elements -- the father, his daughters and the food with remarkable skill.
- "Tortilla Soup" (2001): Hector Elizondo plays a widowed chef who's also losing his sense of taste and control over his three willful daughters. Further stirring this pot is Raquel Welch, the sexy widow. This Mexican remake of "Eat Drink Man Woman" succeeds in its own right, with sumptuous cuisine, much family comedy and drama, and lots of broken dishes.
- "Mostly Martha" (2001): The food we see in this German romantic comedy pleasures the senses more than plot. Martha's a regimented chef at a fancy restaurant, perhaps too regimented. Shaking up her life is her nine-year-old niece, whom she has to take in when her sister dies, and the new, much more spontaneous Italian co-chef she's forced to accommodate. Predictable complications ensure, but not before we see a dozen mouthwatering dishes being prepared. An American remake, "No Reservations" (2007), flopped.
- "Babette's Feast" (1987): In a stark Danish village, a French political refugee becomes a housekeeper to two Puritan sisters. After some years, Babette wins the lottery and prepares an exotic feast with food from the outside world. We may enjoy such mouth-watering opulence, but the villagers have their moral doubts.
- "Waitress" (2007): Keri Russell shines as a small-town waitress who sublimates her unsatisfied emotional and physical needs by baking pies, pies for every occasion, public and private. Totally wonderful.
- "The Gold Rush" (1925) features one of the most famous "food" scenes is film history. Charlie Chaplin and Mack Swain play prospectors stranded in an isolated cabin in he Yukon. They have no food. So Charlie's Tramp boils a boot. Charlie eats his portion as if it was a gourmet feast.
- "Le Grande Bouffe" (1973): Four middle-aged men tired of life decide to end it all gorging themselves to death with delicious food, exceptional hookers and French philosophy. Often mouthwatering, sometimes unpleasant, but it makes an impression.
- "Volver" (2006): Less about food than the spirit of restaurants. Penelope Cruz re-opens a failed little Spanish bistro, which rejuvenates the entire neighborhood. Directed by the Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar.
- "Eating Raoul" (1982): A way-offbeat comedy about disposing of a body culinarily. Not for all tastes, but a hoot anyway.
- "The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover" (1989): Director Peter Greenaway's intense, odd film about the inner workings of a British restaurant. Every night, there's depravity and gluttony. And one night, a gruesome murder. But the food's always good to look at.
- "Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?" (1978): The title of this entertaining film says it all. Silly but sumptuous.
-- 30 --
Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.
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