Innocence and Glory
I watch seven pictures. I read comics, fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
Super Mario Bros., directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, 1993. I first saw this movie as a Nintendo-obsessed child when it was new in theaters. The aesthetic of the legendary video game franchise on which this film is loosely based has had a fairly significant influence on my visual tastes and arguably even on the course of my life. The movie is a peculiar, wildly overcooked, tonally jarring adaptation in which Nintendo’s beloved Italian plumber-brother characters Mario and Luigi are played respectively by Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. Each man is a great actor in his own right and they are fairly well-utilized by the casting department in Super Mario Bros. Leguizamo has publicly admitted to drinking whiskey with Hoskins on set, which might partly explain why they don’t seem as demoralized on camera as one might expect the lead actors to be in a production as notoriously troubled as this one. Dennis Hopper also does his usual oddball-menace shtick with a respectable degree of enthusiasm in a pseudepigraphical interpretation of the game series’s primary antagonist Bowser.
Actually though the performances aren’t the only thing that’s intriguingly, pleasantly halfway-not-super-shitty about this critical and financial kamikaze mission. The end result certainly doesn’t cohere into a functioning movie and everyone seems to be on a different page as to how seriously to take the material, and there are plenty of cringe choices from the direction down to the finest of design details. AND, in the same movie, there’s:
Numerous instances of crunchy, primitivist Nineties CGI, the good kind where they don’t try and fail to depict something visually believable and instead just make something weird and eye-gouging.
A repurposing of the urban-dystopian Blade Runner fashion (apparently Super Mario Bros. and Blade Runner shared a production designer in one David Snyder) which has nothing whatever to do with the original video games and mires the Super Mario Bros. movie in its own ineloquent strangeness. Super Mario Bros. gathers in its reappropriated Blade Runner accoutrements and spits a metallic-aftertaste aesthetic that appears to this writer to have in turn become a direct inspiration for the equally weird and far more ambitiously-CGI-driven science fiction epic The Fifth Element just several years later.
John Leguizamo, who, as I never tire of saying, only contributes positively to anything he’s in, from the very good of Carlito’s Way or Sisters to the not-altogether-so-good of Super Mario Bros. or, say, Spawn. Johnny Legs personifies an ideal combination of a performer’s raw talent, of which he has an irrepressible and brimming wellspring, and a journeyman’s interest in picking wildly diverse projects to work on, of which Super Mario Bros. was an early example. The ignominy of this particular fiasco could not dampen Leguizamo’s professional playfulness and career exploration for the ensuing three decades. The man is still putting in good performances in interesting pictures today and I keep stumbling upon them without specifically seeking them out.
The Age of Innocence, directed by Martin Scorsese, 1993. As with Super Mario Bros. as well as the third, fifth and sixth films on this list, this was my second viewing of The Age of Innocence and my first viewing in quite a long time. Oddly this is one of two occasions on which Martin Scorsese made a film set in mid-nineteenth century New York City and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. While Day-Lewis’s indelible and ingenious screen performance in the later Gangs of New York is more fun to watch than his restrained presence as the emotionally constipated protagonist in The Age of Innocence, this earlier picture is much better overall.
It’s based on the work of Edith Wharton, a writer I may or may not have read (I have a dim memory of actually doing the assigned reading for once when we were studying Ethan Frome in school) and concerns life among the professional and upper-class elites of New York in the 1870s when the arms race between constricting manners and intoxicating gossip has ratcheted up the tension of day-to-day life to a degree that becomes unbearable for Day-Lewis’s young lawyer protagonist. In dramatic terms this plays out with his feelings being divided between a dutiful fealty to his fiancee played by Winona Ryder and her dashing, scandalized, trouble-laced cousin played by Michelle Pfeiffer, both as well-cast as Day-Lewis (casting is one of the assets that elevates this picture over Gangs of New York, where Day-Lewis’s towering, predatory, scene-devouring character Bill the Butcher steamrolled right over the roles embarassingly populated by Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz).
Above all what makes The Age of Innocence pleasurable to watch is something I failed to pick up on the first time I saw it. It’s plain to observe that the look and design of the movie is conscientious, meticulous, professional and all-around exquisite, particularly in the costumes, frame compositions, balletic movements, painterly lighting and historically-convincing props and sets. But in every single scene there are particular, finely-attuned choices being made in those areas which embellish and sometimes directly comment upon what is playing out in the dialogue and performances — outfits, backgrounds, paintings, locales and so on are constantly helping the characters to communicate to the attentive viewer what the characters themselves are prohibited by the constraining moral code of their painfully uptight society from expressing directly to one another. To me this is really what The Age of Innocence is about as a movie (besides the irony of the title in reference to an age that was never innocent but merely half-pretended to be), and it’s brilliant: messy, unplanned and sometimes uncontrollable human passions simply must be curtailed for the sake of propriety and social advancement in this environment lest a significant price be accounted. For Pfeiffer’s character it’s scandal, for Day-Lewis’s it’s heartbreak and for Ryder’s it’s settling for the understanding of being her husband’s second choice. Since the same society in which these characters are desperate to advance or at least subsist won’t let them just say what’s on their minds, Scorsese and his team of world-class collaborators have found ways to evocatively and yet subtly express these sentiments visually. Basically, one might say, exercising the whole purpose of thoughtful film design.
Really the only thing holding this picture back from being an uncontroversial home-run is the dour and overlong coda. A movie just can’t hold together if the weakest part is also the last, which regrettably is the case here. Still, this is a thrilling achievement and a very good movie overall. Well worth a close and patient look.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, directed by Wes Anderson, 2014. I have deeply mixed feelings about Anderson’s oeuvre and his whole aesthetic gestalt. The guy is a genius and visionary with film language but his finished results can often be annoying, emotionally confused, smug and vomit-inducingly twee.
I’ve seen most of his movies and will say that The Grand Budapest Hotel is the only one I currently view as an unqualified success. Anderson deploys a nesting-doll narrative structure whereby the viewer is watching someone reading an author’s retelling of a hotel-owner’s recounting of the life, career and death of an old-world European concierge, a goodhearted, self-serious fop whose professional life is organized around making others feel comfortable, respected and loved. This marvelously-conceived character is brilliantly enlivened by the genius actor Ralph Fiennes in a fanciful tragicomic performance to rival Chaplin or Sellers. But unlike other great acting jobs in other Anderson pictures this Fiennes one has a coherent, fully-functioning and never-boring movie built around it.
This film is about a lot of things but the most salient one to me seems to be this (pretty much stated as the moral in the closing moments): Fiennes’s character and the hotel he manages represent an island of traditional midcontinental warmth, pride and dignity that ultimately got swept under the riptide of the competing totalitarianisms from east and west, but worth memorializing all the way back up the stack — by the friend/protege/hotelier, by the author to whom he recounts his memories, to the young reader imbibing the author’s retelling and the fortunate movie-viewer who gets to see Anderson weave all of this into a fun, entertaining, poignant, funny and beautifully-designed movie. (Seriously beautifully-designed; Anderson’s fun shoebox-diorama aesthetic is cranked up to super-Brechtian levels here, which actually works perfectly for a narrative with so many layers of regressive memory baked into it.) This probably comprises a never-better performance by Fiennes, which is quite saying something for a master thespian of his stature and ability.
The Game, directed by David Fincher, 1997. I saw this once, maybe twice when it was out in theaters. I also owned a VHS copy for a while thereafter, so I’ve probably seen this movie about five times or so. It occupies an interesting spot in Fincher’s development as a unique creative voice, nestled in between his breakout hit Seven and his outstanding, culture-altering and genre-confounding accomplishment Fight Club. I wrote a while back about what I see as one of the pillars of Fincher’s signature look, a fascination with smooth, hard surfaces made of steel, cement, chrome, marble or wood and intersecting at interesting angles. These are everywhere in The Game, more so I reckon than in any of his other pictures, and are almost uniformly dourly-colored except for instances of bright red which serve as red herrings, or white rabbits, or red pills, or white herrings. It helps that in The Game this trope is instantiated in the form of a red bra that adorns an opulent rack of breasts in a Polaroid photo that is meant to be a diverting non-clue for Michael Douglas’s wealthy and desperate protagonist as he tries to make sense of the circumstances that overtake his life for several days in the form of an elaborate game in the guise of a conspiratorial long-con in the guise of an elaborate game. (This is a movie full of diverting non-clues, most of them more menacing or headache-inducing than sexy.)
The movie is very slickly-made, looks good, has a lot of great people in it, including a fine turn from the distinguished character actor James Rebhorn and some solid work from a simmering actor named Deborah Kara Unger whom I thought was just about the sexiest thing in show business when I saw this as a teenager back in ‘97. But ultimately the shaggy dog premise and plot action of The Game are just too silly and implausible to be taken seriously; these storytellers aren’t playing fair with us. This disharmony could potentially have been averted if the picture’s aesthetic sensibility had been less high-toned and self-serious and its setup and payoff less outlandish.
Was worth watching again to be reminded of why and how much I find Unger-97 to be so sexy and cool. Wish she had done more work in better pictures.
Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1957. Michael’s father Kirk Douglas does great work in this excellent film from the budding auteur genius Kubrick who would subsequently proceed to scale the heights of the film industry and vastly expand the possibilities of the medium. Compared to his later work on some of the greatest films ever made, Paths of Glory is relatively conservative and restrained in form and content, an uncompromisingly economical and succinct eighty-eight minutes of movie-watching that enfolds deep ruminations on the trivialities and hypocrisies of command hierarchy, moral indifference and personal animus amidst the fog of war (the front-line French trenches of World War I in this particular setting). Ultimately this film is about an honest officer getting stuck in between the demands of a system run by untrustworthy careerist brass and the needs of soldiers under his command who get crushed into rubble by the machinations of the structure in which they operate.
The film starts by narrowly demonstrating the ghastly unpleasantness of World War I trench life, quickly expands out to make a point about the stresses and horrors of war generally, and finally has some profound comments to make about the human condition when it is revealed that the greatest insult and injustice to the brave and honest grunts in this story come not from the enemy but from their own comrades and countrymen. After this unsettling moral conclusion is reached, Kubrick provides a catharsis and elegy with the film’s haunting final scene and sole female character; the only slowing in momentum we get is the picture’s closing moments, where we are encouraged along with the soldiers onscreen to let it all out and break down crying. In contrast to the kind of cross-fading I’m used to in Fifties pictures, Kubrick throughout Paths of Glory demonstrates his foresighted fluency with film language and presages his later stylistic development with the use of jarring hard cuts to end scenes with precision and spring-loaded momentum that pushes the action along.
The only thing I have against this movie is that I have never liked in pictures when characters played by English-speaking actors are all speaking English but we’re all just meant to pretend through context that they are speaking another language, in this case French. It’s a conceit that makes sense for example in literary translation when so much is left to the reader’s imagination in any language, but it always prevents my full suspension of disbelief in movies when everything else onscreen aside from the correct and realistic use of language has been imagined for me. (When I watch Paths of Glory for example, I don’t just pretend that the main character doesn’t look like Kirk Douglas or that the film is set in World War II instead of World War I. But I’m expected to pretend that they are speaking French when they’re not.) Still, this is a great movie with a correct structure, incredible monochromatic photography, convincing use of set and setting and a fine leading turn from Douglas, playing that kind of self-righteous, wise-cracking, quietly courageous, strained and exhausted everyman archetype at which he excelled.
Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, 1993. The writing of this movie was credited to Kevin Jarre, who earlier wrote one of my favorite movies Glory. Tombstone is an enduring classic of the Western genre but I think in most ways it’s actually a pretty insipid and often downright boring picture, clunkily written and unimaginatively directed. What really elevates it is the all-star cast, which includes good work from tough-guy character actors like Powers Boothe, Stephen Lang and Michael Biehn, well-poised depictions of Wyatt Earp and his brothers by Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton and, most noteworthily and memorably, a transcendently weird and deliciously watchable performance by the great Val Kilmer as the consumptive troublemaker Doc Holliday.
Basically Jarre has grafted the old-school Western movie structure on to the true story of Holliday and the Earps at the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The Western mythos in literature and film traditionally involves a lethal but decent man who tries to resolve his inner conflict by abdicating the use his talents because he doesn’t trust the tough and dangerous parts of himself, but ultimately finds balance and reconciliation by being absorbed into the higher calling of confronting an unavoidable evil in the form of outlaws terrorizing innocent people. Along the way he is tempted, distracted and finally supported by 1) his girl, a wild and free-spirited woman who shows him what it means to forgive himself and live life to the fullest, and 2) his best friend, a morally ambiguous trickster who relieves tension and seriousness through humor and whose amorality helps usher trouble to the doorstep of the protagonist, hastening the approach of the protagonist’s decision point and moral reckoning. When the protagonist finds the courage to align his true nature with his moral aims, those around him get integrated into, or sacrifice themselves in the service of, this emergent goodness. I see this is the explicit project of Tombstone — to take this specific narrative structure and all of its component parts and use them to tell a fictionalized version of the true history of the Earps and Holliday and their girlfriends and enemies. The movie’s concluding narration actually closes this circle cleanly, pointing out that Wyatt Earp’s funeral was attended by “early Western stars,” in other words that Earp lived more than long enough to see his own legend fully absorbed into the mass market popular culture of the Hollywood century.
The result is too brutally violent for children and too stupid and corny for adults, fit (and perhaps intended) almost solely for adolescents. Kinda like Gangs of New York, it’s one of those pictures where I wish they would just cut out every scene that doesn’t have the most interesting and well-played character in it, which would make for a shorter and more fun movie. Tombstone would have been something else entirely, and I imagine something much better, if it had focused more on the strong central performances by Russell and Kilmer and inverted the hierarchy of who was the leading and supporting character. Indeed, Kilmer’s take on Holliday is pretty much the only reason people still can’t get enough of this mediocrity almost thirty years after its release.
Moonstruck, directed by Norman Jewison, 1987. I finally got around to seeing this much-ballyhooed romantic comedy and I really enjoyed it. Cher plays the protagonist Loretta, the center of a bustling Italian American New York family and community, and it is easy to see why she won some prestigious awards for this role.
Like Kilmer in Tombstone or Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel she’s too captivating to avert your eyes from, and her performance is buttressed by the nearly-equally-strong other components of the picture, most significantly in the other performances, in Jewison’s professional and calmly uninflected direction and in the quirky, offbeat, intelligent and playful writing by John Patrick Shanley. I cite in particular the hilarious, aggressive, elegant and slightly over-the-top dialogue Shanley wrote for Loretta’s lust interest Ronny and the skillfully-realized Nicolas Cage performance that brings the character to life. (This is one of those sexy, earthy, manly, slightly unhinged and ultimately lovable and empathetic roles that no one can do as well as Cage. It’s not insignificant that Ronny’s passion is for attending the Metropolitan Opera; witness the batshit opera-ness with which, in one of the film’s funniest moments on his first meeting with Loretta, he exclaims “I LOST MY HAND! I LOST MY BRIDE! JOHNNY HAS HIS HAND! JOHNNY HAS HIS BRIDE!” One of those great movie moments where a wonderfully-written line of dialogue comes out of the mouth of the actor most perfectly destined to immortalize it.)
Something I loved about Moonstruck was that it’s the gold standard for what would become a subgenre unto itself, the quirky-ethnic-family-love-and-wisdom-and-acceptance dramatic comedy — but with only adult characters. All nine of the main characters - the brothers played by Cage and Danny Aiello, Loretta and several members of her family and a courtly but slightly sleazy playboy bachelor played by John Mahoney - are fully-formed, mature adults ranging from jaded-if-optimistic thirties to floundering midlife questions to wise and contented old age. There are various moral infractions and steppingstones of self-discovery that they make throughout the picture, but they are all grownups with mature concerns.
Let me interrupt myself here to clarify and simplify what I’m saying: I basically just think it’s nifty that there are literally no children in this movie. It says something quite positive to me about the movie that I think most children would be unable to find it interesting or funny while most adults would be unable to find it uninteresting and non-funny. Regardless of the particular ethnic and urban context of Moonstruck, any grownup with a few romances, regrets and personal failings in the rear-view mirror who still has hope for a happy future and can still fall in love by the light of the moon will find something relatable in this picture. And will likely laugh aloud even if watching alone, as I did.
I finished the Anne Applebaum book that I mentioned in the previous entry. It’s a succinct and surprisingly personal sidelong glance at the fault lines opening in liberal democratic institutions and international norms that have for too long been carelessly neglected and sometimes intentionally undermined. (Applebaum was writing this book before the onset of the war in Ukraine and is currently one of the most reliable voices to follow for forthright and sober analysis and commentary thereon.) On the last page of Twilight of Democracy she writes that “the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson or Václav Havel never promised anything permanent” and that “liberal democracies always demanded things from citizens: participation, argument, effort, struggle.” But she makes no reassurances that we will avert “failure — a failure that would change plans, alter lives, break up families.” We behold these very phenomena in Europe today as we peer into that widening chasm between democracy and autocracy.
I agree (what choice do I have?) that active participation in our free societies is literally the least we can and should do to try to limit the damage we’re doing to ourselves and inviting others to render upon us. But like anyone I ponder if any attempt on the part of a normal citizen to strengthen the heart and soul of liberal democracy in the good ol’ U.S. of A. is nowadays too little, too late, too parochial, too self-involved, too myopic, too short-sighted, driven too much by reassuring narrative and not enough by an uneasy, clear-eyed and ongoing engagement with the challenges of approaching a functional and amendable model of ground truth.
Perhaps I’ll have more to say about this some other time, and maybe in a different format, but for the moment I can confidently recommend Twilight of Democracy. And I’d still like to dig into some of Applebaum’s other work at some point.
I read A Brave and Startling Truth, a book-length poem, or rather poem-length book, reproducing the short piece of work written by Maya Angelou that she read publicly here in San Francisco in 1995 for a ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter. After that I read a smattering of children’s books that were all recommended by a librarian in the children’s section whom I told of my affection for Shawn Harris’s book Have You Ever Seen a Flower? They were all quite good, particularly the ones so well-illustrated by my main man Harris:
High Five by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri.
Doing Business by Shawn Harris.
Dragons Love Tacos 2: The Sequel by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri.
Everyone's Awake by Colin Meloy, illustrated by Shawn Harris.
I also finished the collection of Seventies Doonesbury strips I found in a Little Free Library a while back and read a 1995 edition of The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln (a piece of oratory I adore and can recite from memory), illustrated by someone named Michael McCurdy whose great-grandfather fought at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Perhaps most interestingly, I read the 2021 comics biography by Philippe Girard Leonard Cohen: On a Wire. I’m an admirer of much of Cohen’s work, especially his later stuff when his reedy young man’s voice had been flattened and leather-tanned by decades of nicotine and alcohol and he perfected his lifelong project of using his skills as a writer of poems and simple songs to intertwine and fuse lyrics about passionate, lustful, interpersonal love with wise and profound meditations on spiritual and religious love — that is to say, to unite love songs and prayers into one medium. But I’ve never read a book about him before.
Girard is a good comics illustrator with a confident, ebullient, unrefined line. Every panel feels like a first draft, and I don’t mean this in a bad way — Girard, like Cohen, strikes me as the kind of artist who, if he struggles to get his work right, doesn’t let the audience perceive the sweat and toil behind the scenes. His simple but evocative drawings convey just enough visual information to give a clear sense of where in Cohen’s life and personal geography we are without overloading or slowing a reader. This thing covers ground and moves briskly without stopping to dig in much.
A fair criticism of this piece, and perhaps of the whole idea of a succinct graphic bio of a renowned figure who lived a long, varied, complicated and deeply human life, is that it can’t help but be overly reductive. I imagine someone who had never heard of Cohen or his work would have an odd time making sense of Girard’s text, since so much has been simplified into cartoon language. On a Wire amounts to Girard curating an array of the most well-known bullet points from Cohen’s life - particular relationships, incidents, locales and accomplishments - and assembling them into a simple and straightforward comic that to some extent could be accused of lacking in depth of insight.
However this is interestingly compounded, and for me quite pleasantly offset, by the fact that the Canadian Girard originally wrote this graphic biography of the Canadian Cohen in French, and the slightly clunky translation into English of punchy distillations of what in real life had to have been longer conversations and statements gives all of the words in On a Wire a kind of happily childlike matter-of-factness, even when the parts of Cohen’s life under examination are grim, depressing or distasteful. Emblematic of this are the panels depicting a run-in with Nico, who in this version of the story Cohen tries unsuccessfully to bed and who is funnily rendered in Girard’s aggressive and angular strokes as an unhinged, violent and vicious racist. Since part of Cohen’s stock-in-trade as a craftsman was to take weighty themes and subjects and wrap them in concise, elegant and (sometimes) hummable song-prayers, Girard’s format in On a Wire is oddly, pleasantly, quietly fitting.
This won’t be the last book about Cohen I read, because I’m keenly looking forward, when the public library gets a copy, to digging into the brand-new Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman. In the meantime I’m working on other things, including my long-threatened siege on the final installment in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I’ve been procrastinating for years on finally reading The Return of the King but I’ve finally cracked into a copy I found some months back in a Little Free Library (the cover of this paperback edition assures me that “an epic motion picture trilogy” is “coming soon from New Line Cinema”). I don’t love Tolkien’s way with language and often find that I can really only envision Peter Jackson’s brilliantly-filmed realization of these characters and settings, even when they differ from what Tolkien originally wrote. But it’s interesting to observe those differences and it will feel good to chalk The Return of the King up on the big board and be able to say that I have read, in its entirety, the The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Will let you know what else I have to say about it in due course.