2011 has already been hotting up as the year of the superhero film, with some of the biggest names in the business set for a remake, reboot or sequel. Indeed, it’s only February, and we’ve already had one blockbuster comic book adaptation in the form of Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet. As we saw from the Super Bowl commercials last week, the battle will continue throughout the year as Captain America: The First Avenger fights for freedom, the Green Lantern polices the galaxy and Thor brings down the mighty hammer of Odin. With so many to see, how are our anticipation levels reading for these fabulous films of 2011?
X-Men: First Class
Today, Twentieth Century Fox released the first trailer for the highly anticipated X-Men: First Class. Although this will be the fourth film in the franchise to date – following X-Men, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand and the atrocious Wolverine – this prequel has got fans in an uncanny buzz. Director Matthew Vaughn, who has already popped his comic cherry on Kick-Ass and its forthcoming sequel, should bring back the sense of frenetic energy that X-fans have been craving since Bryan Singer’s high-octane second installment in 2003.
Then there’s the cast: James McAvoy (Gnomeo & Juliet) takes on the role of a young Professor Charles Xavier, a role made famous by the venerable Patrick Stewart. Meanwhile, Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) has his own big shoes to fill replacing Sir Ian McKellen as Magneto. The awarded actors are certainly up to the task, and boy are they accompanied by a terrific cast: Kevin Bacon, January Jones, Australia’s Rose Byrne, Nicholas Hoult (A Single Man), Jennifer Lawrence and Oliver Platt just to name a few. If that’s not enough to convince you, then script is co-written by Kick-Ass scribe Jane Goldman. You will be seeing this film.
As you can see from the trailer itself, this is an origin of the famous team set during the Cold War era of the 1960s, complete with Cuban Missile Crisis, younger versions of familiar characters and a few new ones to boot. Most notably, Golden-Globe nominee January Jones (Mad Men) joins the cast as Emma Frost, another telepath with the ability to create thought projections. There also seems to be some kind of fairy creature that Charles and Erik visit in what can only be described as a David Lynch-style red room. If Michael J. Anderson turns up, it could be the greatest film ever made. (X-Men: First Class is out in Australia on 2 June, 2011 from Twentieth Century Fox).
Green Lantern
Will ‘Green Lantern’ shine at the box office?
One of Warner Bros./DC’s great hopes for the year didn’t run a spot during the Super Bowl, possibly saving themselves the $3 million price tag that goes along with it. As was the case with the Facebook-launched X-Men: First Class trailer, when the Green Lantern trailer launched online in November last year, it caused quite the fanboy stir.
Although never a major mainstream player on the superhero front, Green Lantern has managed to get some good marketing from DC and its parent company Warner Bros. thanks to appearances in the popular Justice League animated series, and his very own direct-to-DVD animated film, Green Lantern: First Flight. The trailer to the first live-action film for the character managed to elicit a few laughs – both intentional and the unfortunate kind – thanks to the all-CGI costume the character was wearing. This has the fanboys already crying outrage, but let’s see if the company can keep the goodwill built by Batman Begins and The Dark Knight going. Fingers crossed! (Green Lantern is out in Australia from Warner Bros. on 16 June 2011).
Thor
Potentially the silliest of all the films to date, Thor is a character that traces back to Norse mythology, but Marvel adapted into a comic book back in the 1960s under Stan Lee.
The new trailer that Paramount debuted at the Super Bowl this year amps up the hammer wielding and the muscly action, but the extended version – showing much poncing about in capes with Anthony Hopkins demonstrating why he should have stayed retired – has the potential to be one of the biggest giggle-fests of 2011. Lest we forget: for every Spider-man and Iron Man, there is an Elektra or Ghost Rider. Let’s pray to mighty Odin that with seasoned thesp Kenneth Branagh behind the camera, Thor will be the former. (Thor is out in Australia from Paramount on 28 April 2011).
Captain America: The First Avenger
Marvel’s plan is to bring together most of their film characters to date – Hulk (now played by Mark Ruffalo, replacing Edward Norton, who in turn usurped Eric Bana), Thor, Iron Man and a few bit players from the respective movies – and team them all up as The Avengers in 2012. First the team needs a captain, so in the Hollywood tradition of explaining everything before it happens, we get the origin story of Steve Rogers (aka Captain America). As such, the ‘First Avenger’ bit has been strategically stuck into the title to evoke a sense of…franchising?
The first footage we saw was (you guessed it) at the 2011 Super Bowl, and we witnessed the transformation of Chris Evans (who was last seen in superhero mode in the woeful Fantastic Four sequel The Rise of the Silver Surfer), from skinny private to super soldier as part of US government experimentation in the Second World War. As with X-Men: First Class, this looks to be a period piece (rather than the Cap on Ice modern storylines), and a very cool one at that. In the short 32 second teaser, we get to see his nemesis the Red Skull, the famous US flag shield and Tommy Lee Jones. Is that not cool, or what? (Captain America: The First Avenger is out in Australia on 28 July 2011).
The Reel Bits: It’s going to be spandex city this year, with a plethora of heroes vying for your coin. Based on what we’ve seen so far, our money is on X-Men: First Class and Captain America: The First Avenger being the must-see superhero titles of 2011.
A spy walks into view, framed by the barrel of a gun. He is underscored by a distinctively familiar tune, a few bars of strings at first, foreshadowing something big. The spy swings and fires, and the screen is filled with red as the brass band kicks in. This is, of course, the opening to the James Bond films, instantly recognisable to audiences since Dr. No in 1962. Although for years it was Monty Norman’s name that appeared on-screen, it was John Barry’s arrangement of the “James Bond Theme” with its jazzy leanings that captured the hearts and minds of audiences across the world. Composer John Barry OBE, who also went on to compose 11 James Bond films – not to mention Born Free and Dances with Wolves – died on the weekend at age 77.
John Barry Prendergast was born into a family in the cinema business, but it was not until his time in the National Service that he began has career as a musician. He got his first break while working for the BBC, arranging songs for artists such as Adam Faith, graduating to film scores when Faith made his film debut with Beat Girl (1960). Barry’s soundtrack became the first soundtrack available on an LP in the UK, and Barry subsequently had a short career with record label EMI arranging orchestral scores for label artists.
Undoubtedly, Barry’s most significant career move was agreeing to the producers of Dr. No to come on board their new spy film in 1962 and in many ways, the rest is history. For From Russia with Love (1963), Barry would create an alternative Bond theme called “007”, a refrain that would be heard throughout the next few films. Barry would go on to be involved in the scores for 11 James Bond films, all the way up to Timothy Dalton’s The Living Daylights (1987), although his arrangements heavily influenced David Arnold who followed him. By the time Barry reached Goldfinger (1964), he had perfected the ‘Bond sound’ with the large brass band and jazzy score that would compliment Shirley Bassey’s iconic title tune. Indeed, this was so indelibly linked with the Bond series that years later, it was these themes that would be parodied in such films as Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002).
While it was the Bond films that Barry may always be associated with, the “other half” of his film career was perhaps where he met with the most critical success. Barry won five Academy Awards for his film scores, including both Best Original Song and Best Original Musical Score for Born Free. Barry would win the latter category an additional three times – for The Lion in Winter (1969), Out of Africa (1986) and Dances with Wolves (1991), the latter of which would also win a Grammy and a BAFTA. Yet his film career was not confined to these award-winning compositions. With over 100 screen credits to his name, Barry tunes and arrangements would be found on Midnight Cowboy (1969), Zulu (1964), Walkabout (1971), King Kong (1976), The Black Hole (1980) and his last screen credit, Enigma (2001).
Barry would enjoy a successful career outside of cinema, including the theme to the popular 1970s TV series The Persuaders! and a recent musical version of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (2004) with lyricist Don Black. In 1999, he was awarded the O.B.E. (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List for his services to music. For fans of music and film around the work, it is certainly a great loss to the community but his distinctive and genre-defining themes will continue to please fans for generations to come.
In The Evolution of the Western – Part 1: The Last Gunslingers, we discussed the changing nature of the cowboy over the first half of the 20th century. From the earliest days of cinema through to John Ford’s The Searchers (1954), the gunslinger turned from hero of legend to “a figure of pathos, not tragedy” and in films such as Shane, the “disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gunfighters, who were simply legal killers under the frontier code”. Yet the tin star was fading in the Hollywood limelight by the beginning of the 1960s, in favour of more realistic and gritty depictions of human violence.
This three-part series explores just how much that contribution has changed over the years, and how it has influenced and been influenced by other films around the world. In this part, we’ll take a look at the turning of the tide as filmmakers rebel against not only the old world ways of telling a story, but in the very values of the United States. Europeans begin to spin their own version of the western myth as it is revised, and gets a little bloodier. We also take a journey into the surreal and the Man With No Name drifts into town.
A new dawn
We we last saw our gunslinging heroes, the sun was setting on them as they rode off towards it. Yet the traditional western hero wasn’t going to go down without getting a few shots off. 1960 kicked off with a the star-studded western The Magnificent Seven, directly influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. The influence of Kurosawa would be vital to the western in the 1960s, in much the same way that the Japanese master was influenced by John Ford’s westerns in his own works. Indeed, Trifonova refers to the “intertextual relationship between Westerns and Japanese samurai films”. After more than half a decade of defining an all-American genre, the rest of the world was starting to show their love for the genre, and show the US how it was done in the process.
The early 1960s saw the genre trying to establish itself in the new dawn of filmmaking, where the Hollywood studio fare was losing favour with the public. The Alamo (1960), produced, directed by and starring John Wayne (as who else but Davy Crockett?), was an incredibly expensive (approximately $12 million) and long (202 minutes in the roadshow cut, eventually trimmed to 167 minutes) film met with mixed critical and box-office response. Contemporary westerns began to make more of an impact, also indicating changing audience tastes, with The Misfits (1961) from the legendary John Huston and Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) starring Paul Newman being stand-outs of the era. The latter foreshadowed the cynicism that was creeping into not only westerns, but many popular Hollywood films made for an audience embittered by war and McCarthyism. Newman’s Hud expresses it best: “You take the sinners away from the saints, you’re lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln”.
Marlo Brando’s directorial debut, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), not only proved that the star of films such as On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire could act, he was also a fine helmsman. It was significant for other reasons too, as marked another turning point for the direction of the western genre. Garrett Chaffin-Quiray notes it was “important in connecting Western classics of the 1950s with genre experimentation of the 1970s” (2005, p.395). Unfortunately for the film world, it was Brando’s only effort behind the camera. How the West Was Won (1962) – utilising the directing talents of John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and an uncredited Richard Thorpe (last ‘epic’ western?) – is one of the last great epic westerns. Split into five segments, it was one of the few films shot using the three-strip Cinerama process, and was projected using three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a large screen more deeply-curved than other formats. The expensive process meant it was rarely used for features of this kind, not least of which because its 2.89:1 aspect ratio meant difficulties in reformatting it for more traditional screens.
Yet the early 1960s saw a mad scramble to try and identify the western with a more modern and sophisticated audience. There were a stack of B-westerns in this period, typically starring someone like war-hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy, complete with titles along the lines of Seven Ways from Sundown (1960), The Broken Land (1962) and Posse from Hell (1961). An exception in this period is John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), starring both John Wayne and James Stewart. Sergio Leone, who will be discussed in the next section in greater detail, described it as his favourite John Ford film because “it was the only film where he (Ford) learned about something called pessimism.” Leone was certainly influenced by these pictures in the making of his series of Spaghetti westerns, with the long duster coats definitely inspired by Ford’s late masterpiece. Yet audiences were searching for a new kind of hero, one that shared their cynicism and more cavalier attitudes to heroism.
Uomo senza nome: The Man with No Name
In 1964, everything changed. Italian director Sergio Leone released A Fistful of Dollars, based on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. The first of a loose trilogy of films from the director to star Clint Eastwood, then virtually unknown internationally beyond his word in the TV show Rawhide, it launched the actor into the stratosphere. While it was not the first so-called Spaghetti Western, with that honour going to Michael Carreras’ Tierra brutal a.k.a Savage Guns (1961), it was certainly the most influential. Yet, as noted film scholar Sir Christopher Frayling (1981, p.121) notes that upon release the films “were almost invariably panned by reviewers” because the Italian films had “no ‘cultural roots’ in American history or folklore, they were likely to be cheap, opportunistic imitations”. By the time For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (1966) were released – along with Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) – audiences knew exactly what they were getting into and the slick editing, iconic costumes and extreme close-ups were like nothing being done in the US. Eastwood was a new kind of hero, no in it for the honour or glory, but for the money. He was a cynical hero for a jaded audience. Just the ticket.
On the Blu-ray supplements to the 2010 release of A Fistful of Dollars, Frayling enthusiastically states “Sergio Leone not only reinvented the Italian western…he reinvented the western as well, and in the process re-energised a genre that had run out of steam, not just in Italy but in America as well”. In the same year as A Fistful of Dollars, Martin Ritt adapted The Outrage (also from a Kurosawa film, Rashomon). By way of comparison, its contemporary major studio efforts like Universal’s Bullet for a Badman (1964), another Audie Murphy B-western, seemed antiquated by comparison. In striking contrast to Leone’s punchy opening and score, R.G. Springsteen – a veteran of around 100 film and television western outings – played it very safe in the Universal backlot. A Fistful of Dollars, on the other hand, used Spanish and Italian vistas to full effect in Leone’s widescreen film that punch audiences in the face with its uniqueness.
The traditional western kept alive through The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), several sequels to The Magnificent Seven (The Return of the Seven (1966), The Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), and continued on int the 1970s with The Magnificent Seven Ride (1972)). Yet perhaps the crowning achievement of the Spaghetti western movement in the decade was Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West (1968), the western to end all westerns! Showing “little concern for the Western’s traditional code…Leone’s version of the West is total anarchy with scarcely any room for heroism” (Frayling, 1981, p.281). Casting Henry Fonda as the villain was a masterstroke, his trademark piercing blue eyes not working against the character as one might expect, but cutting through his lackeys and viewers alike. Duck, You Sucker! (1971), also known as A Fistful of Dynamite, would be Leone’s final fully credited western – aside from some involvement with My Name is Nobody (1973) and A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975) and he would not get back behind the camera for almost 15 years for the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Stop, Drop, Revise
Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969)
After the cancellation of his TV series The Westerners, director Sam Peckinpah made his directorial debut with The Deadly Companions (1961), and followed it with the critically successful (at least in Europe) Ride the High Country (1962). Yet 1969 was another one of those turning points, with Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch aiming to put the nail in the coffin of the western forever. Bloody and violent, and set at the very bitter end of the frontier period in 1913, the film is just as much about the death western as it is about the death of the cowboy. A similarly bloody end came to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and True Grit (currently seen in remake mode from the Coen Brothers) gave John Wayne a late career boost with his Golden Globe winning performance as the eye-patch wearing Rooster Cogburn, a role he would reprise for one of his last on-screen performances in Rooster Cogburn (1975). The less said about Paint Your Wagon (1969) the better, but as a response to these more hard-hitting westerns, it was a sign that Hollywood was completely out of touch with the kinds of heroes that would appeal to audiences.
The 1970s still saw a number of westerns, but they were declining in influence and their traditionalism. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970), a surrealist ‘Acid Western’, influenced everyone from David Lynch, through John Lennon to The Mighty Boosh. Peckinpah’s Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), a noir western, peppered the decade. Robert Altman’s less conventional McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) joined Don Siegal’s Two Mules For Sister Sara (1970), with Clint Eastwood, the sci-fi Westworld (1973), Australia’s Mad Dog Morgan (1976), the revisionist The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976, Clint Eastwood), Elliot Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse (1970), the kiddie-comedy The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979) and the Robert Aldrich comedy The Frisco Kid (1979). On the small screen, Alias Smith & Jones entertained audiences, but generally it was a confused and uncertain decade for the western and its heroes, having broken free of the pre-1950s archetypes, but not entirely understanding their place in the second half of the 20th century.
Heaven’s Gate (1980) began the Decade of Shame with a gigantic flop and the expensive almost single-handed killed not only the western, but the large and unchecked budgets that maverick directors like Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin in the 1970s. Indeed, with the exception of Fred Schepisi’s Barbarosa (1982), Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985) – essentially a revisionist version of Shane – Silverado (1985), very few serious westerns were made during the decade. Lighthearted fodder such as ¡Three Amigos! (1986) and the slick but fun Young Guns (1988) were the only things keeping the genre alive at the box office. Indeed, it was really only on television that more traditional westerns could be found. Lonesome Dove (1989), a mini-series based on Larry McMurty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, was an accurate and epic piece that did much to restore the image of the western in the public eye. Meanwhile, Little House on the Prairie – which had been running since 1974 – ended its run in 1982.
Was the western finally dead and buried, or was it ready to saddle up for a new adventure? The latter would prove to be true, but it wasn’t until the genre (and America) could examine itself from the inside-out that a new kind of western hero would emerge.
Final shots
In the next and final part of this series, we’ll take a look at the revival of the western beginning with Dances with Wolves and going through to today. We also ask the question: “When is a western not a western?”
References:
Chaffin-Quiray, G. (2005) One-Eyed Jacks (1961). In S.J. Schneider (Ed). 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. (Revised Edition, p.195). Sydney: ABC Books.
Frayling, C. (1981) Spaghetti Westerns. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
With the release of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, a remake of Henry Hathaway’s 1969 John Wayne late-vehicle, the American western has been brought back into focus. Set to become the second highest grossing western of all time, behind Kevin Costner’s revisionist western Dances with Wolves, True Grit may be just the blockbuster the genre needs to put gunslingers back on the map. Yet this revival doesn’t just hark back to the 1960s, but back to the birth of cinema itself.
In literature and in film, the western genre is one of the truly original contributions of the United States to the canon. Coming out of the stories that are as timeless as the land itself, the genre has evolved and grown over the years, with as many peaks and troughs as the great state of Arizona. New generations of filmmakers rebelled against what had come before, and styles influenced by European filmmakers and Japanese samurai films invariably changed the genre forever. Yet there is something timeless about the cowboys of old that draws audiences back again and again.
Join us for the first of a three-part retrospective on the American West. This series hopes to cover some of the trends in westerns over the last 100 years, and highlight some of the major (and minor) films in the canon. In this part we explore the earliest days of western film through to the changing of the old guard in the middle of the 20th century.
The first shot
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Some of the first films ever made were tales of the old west, although it wasn’t quite as old then. Of the earliest bits of celluloid to come out of the states were shorts containing Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley themselves, by which stage the Old West had already become a piece of popular entertainment. One of the earliest seminal American films is Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). Not only did the film effectively launch the western genre to cinema audiences, it was one of the first examples of narrative storytelling on film. Prior to that, film had largely been used to simply record life in all of its banality. The film shows a surprising amount of sophistication in this regard, containing one of the most famous shots in motion picture history as of the robbers points his pistol directly at the screen and fires. This level of audience involvement was the start of so many things to coming century of filmmaking.
A few notable westerns were made in the years afterwards, and G.M. Anderson of The Great Train Robbery would star in over a hundred films as Bronco Billy from 1907 onwards. Serials such as The Santa Fe Trail (1923) and features such as Victor Fleming’s The Virginian (1929) and even Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) peppered the silent years of cinema. However, it wasn’t until the late 1930s that the Western would be elevated to almost mythical status thanks to two men who went by the name of John.
The two Johns on the horizon
Born Marion Robert Morrison, better known to the world as John Wayne or simply “The Duke”, the man who would go on to define ‘cowboy’ for many had a rather inauspicious start to his career. A former football player, Wayne got bit parts in early John Ford films, a director whose partnership with Wayne would define both of their destinies, and forever establish them as benchmarks for many westerns that were to come. Wayne’s first starring role was in The Big Trail (1930), one of the earliest widescreen movies shot on both 35mm and 70mm by Raoul Walsh, who would become a well-established western director and one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The casting of the then unknown Wayne may be one of Walsh’s crowning achievements, but The Big Trail was significant for a number of other reasons. The clothing worn by the actors, especially Tyrone Power, was far more authentic and gritty, and shooting on location across five states (including California, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming and Oregon) for stunning vistas was bold, especially in the economic slump of the Depression. It truly marked a turning point for the genre, but it would be almost a decade before another truly seminal piece of western filmmaking would come along.
Stagecoach (1939) is often considered to be one of the finest examples of the western in the first half of the 20th century, and marked one of the great collaborations between Wayne and Ford. J.A. Place (1974, p.32) notes that “it is often regarded as the standard against which others of the genre are measured”. The superficially simple story of nine people taking the stagecoach journey between Tonto and Lordsburg, where there has been “Indian trouble” afoot, can be described as a morality play of the clearest order. Transplanting theatre archetypes to the screen, each character is a representative of a human frailty or strength. Wayne’s Ringo is perfect, “appearing like a god out of the desert (Place, 1974, p.34).
The film also marked Ford’s first use of Utah’s Monument Valley as a backdrop, the first of ten times he would use the location. (So much so, there is a popular tourist area called John Ford Point in the Valley). In Stagecoach, it is a location, rather than the icon it would become from at least My Darling Clementine (1946) onwards. In that film, Ford’s casting of the landscape in his distinctive lights and shadows definitely has a quality to it that makes it a silent, albeit highly visible, tertiary character. He expands the legendary tale of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to legendary proportions, far more so than the George P. Cosmatos’ later Tombstone (1993) or Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp (1994). Henry Fonda as Earp is as clean-cut as they come, but almost paralysed by fatal indecision. Indeed, Hamlet is directly referenced in the narrative. (It would be the stark antithesis to a character he would play almost a quarter of a century later in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West). Yet we also witness here an evolution of the character of the west, from merely a backdrop for a fight between the ‘bad’ Indians and the ‘good’ settlers. The landscape was becoming as legendary as the characters themselves, and perhaps it was simply because it too was disappearing into history.
Don’t get your guns
Ford’s collaboration with both Fonda and Wayne would see some terrific collaborations in the genre over the years, yet they weren’t the only gunslingers in town. In Destry Rides Again (1939), James Stewart is directed by George Marshall (How the West Was Won) as a deputy sheriff who refuses to wear a gun. Sticking to the letter of the law, he manages to keep peace in the town with words, perhaps making him one of the more unconventional heroes of the era, in an excellent piece of cinema (despite the presence of Marlene Dietrich as a singing barmaid). By way of comparison, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – another Henry Fonda vehicle, this time directed by William A. Wellman – follows Destry Rides Again‘s call for the rule of law over the power of the gun, an argument that holds incredible significance when one considers this film was released while the United States was in the middle of a war.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1946)
The Ox-Bow Incident sees a formation of a lynch-mob based on the rumour that a local rancher has been killed by a group of rustlers. Some passing strangers are thought to be the rustlers, and only one man – the fighting saloon barfly Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) – is willing to stand up for them. Eventually, the strangers are hanged by the mob, before they find out that not only have the rustlers been caught, but the local rancher is still alive. Buscombe (2005, p.195) describes this as “a key film in the history of the Western, one of many that showed that the Western – previously a genre with low cultural prestige – could take on important issues”. It was a significant departure from the ‘might makes right’ attitude of the earlier films, and like Howard Hawks/Arthur Rosson’s Red River (1948) it consciously pushed against the old guard, quite literally in the case of the latter by casting Montgomery Clift as the son who doesn’t want to follow his father’s (John Wayne) ways.
The first half of the 20th century would end with a pair of highly regarded Westerns: Rio Grande, the third part of the Ford/Wayne “Cavalry Trilogy” (along with Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)) and Winchester ’73 (both 1950). The latter was the first of eight collaborations between James Stewart and director Anthony Mann, who would also give us strong Western entries Naked Spur (1953) and The Man from Laramie (1955). Like Destry Rides Again and The Ox-Bow Incident before it, Winchester ’73 speaks to the power of the gun, and more specifically the power of the titular gun that changed the fortunes of all who came into its possession. It would be the powerful shot that would signal the need for a number of gunslingers to hang up their colts, with a number of heroes riding out into the sunset in the years that followed.
Sunset on an era
Keller (2001, p.27) talks of the pre-1980 westerns as roughly falling into two categories. The “affirmative” type of western, such as My Darling Clementine and Red River, through which there is a kind of “regeneration through violence”, and the “critical” kind. To this last category we may add High Noon (1952), where we saw a “lessening of the hero’s stature, making him a figure of pathos, not tragedy…” (Pye, 1996, p.19). Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) stands alone against a posse of outlaws bent not only on his demise, but on ruling the town as well. In a stark contrast to The Ox-Bow Incident almost a decade before it, the mob refuses to stand up with Kane, forcing him to race against the ticking-clock to prepare for the arrival of the villain on the noon train. The ticking clock throughout the film heightens the tension and reminds us of the inevitable, but the clock could almost be ticking down to the demise of the traditional western hero.
Shane (1953) may well give us this symbolic death on-screen, in “sure the most iconic…Western that burns itself into our memory, the Western no one who sees it will ever forget” (Pomerance, 2005, p.294). Stranger Shane (Alan Ladd) settles in with a family of homesteaders, deciding to help protect them from the cattlemen who want to move in on their land. Drawn to the homesteader’s wife, and developing a mentor relationship with the young son of the couple. Noted New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther commented at the time that Shane “contains a disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gunfighters, who were simply legal killers under the frontier code”. The young boy of the film loses his innocence with the audience, and as Shane rides off into the sunset through a graveyard, we are left to ponder the fate of our hero. Yet most will know on some level that there is really only one fate for the likes of Shane.
The Searchers (1956)
Named the Greatest American Western of all time by the American Film Institute (AFI) in 2008, The Searchers (1956) was not even nominated for an Academy Award in its day. Perhaps this was indicative that the tin stars were fading in the popular spotlight, with the likes of pseudo rape-fantasy musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) winning the popular and critical votes of the time. Yet there was far more to The Searchers than just the sum of all the parts of both Ford and Wayne’s careers. Noted critic Roger Ebert comments “In The Searchers I think Ford was trying, imperfectly, even nervously, to depict racism that justified genocide; the comic relief may be an unconscious attempt to soften the message.” It may not have been the first time racism was depicted on-screen, but it was another sign of the turning of the tide. The days of cowboys versus ‘Indians’ were numbered, and the revisionist view of the western myth was just beginning…
In Part 2 of my exploration of the Old West on Film, we’ll take a look at the turning of the tide as filmmakers rebel against not only the old world ways of telling a story, but in the very values of the United States. The western myth is revised, and gets a little bloodier, we take a journey into the surreal and the Man With No Name drifts into town.
References
Buscombe, E. (2005). The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). In S.J. Schneider (Ed). 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. (Revised Edition, p.195). Sydney: ABC Books.
Keller, A. (2001). Generic subversion as counterhistory: Mario van Peeble’s posse. In J. Walker (Ed). Westerns: films through history. (pp. 27-46). New York and London: Routledge.
Place, J. A. (1974). The Western Films of John Ford. Secaucus: The Citadel Press.
Pomerance, M. (2005). Shane (1953). In S.J. Schneider (Ed). 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. (Revised Edition, p.294). Sydney: ABC Books.
Pye, D. (1996). Introduction: Criticism and the Western. In I. Cameron and D. Pye (Eds) The Movie Book of the Western. (pp.9-21). London: Studio Vista.
The history of film can be told in lists. At least, that is what you’d be forgiven for thinking if you were a regular buyer of popular film magazines or were to wander the aisles of any book store’s collection of tomes on film. The American Film Institute has an entire section dedicated to lists on their website, following their 100 Years…100 Movies series. If lists ever had significance, much of this has been diminished by the promotional nature of the device, largely used to sell magazines or promote campaigns. Regular readers of popular film magazines may have seen The 500 Greatest Films of All Time on several passes now, or wonder if there are any genres left to tackle. Indeed, every month Empire lists a new Top 10 of something, with the most recent Australian edition barrel-scraping by listing the Top 10 Most Superficial Characters. We too are guilty of this, devoting a section of The Reel Bits’ articles to Lists as well. Perhaps a Top Ten Lists of All Time is in order?
A steady canon
The idea of a film canon, a set of films by which all other films should be benchmarked, is the underlying ideology behind the plethora of lists that emerge from various film societies, critics and publishing houses. Attacked as elitist by some, writers/filmmakers such as Paul Schrader (perhaps best known for his Taxi Driver script) defends the need for a canon in his musing on the state of film writing in 2006 article for Film Comment entitled Canon Fodder. Excluding documentaries, non-narrative films and repeat entries from the same director, Schrader lists 20 films in his canon, with an additional forty runners-up. His idea was to “counter the proliferation of popularity-driven lists”. This argument, however, tends to be based on film as a singular kind of medium. So how important is a film canon in 2011, when the world of film is constantly evolving with new production and delivery methods, with major directors shooting films on iPhones or delivering them via online platforms such as MUBI?
This debate is nothing new. Back in 2002, Dan Sallitt wrote (on Slate) about the prestigious Sight & Sound list, The Greatest Ten Films of All Time, that appears once a decade. Sallitt argued that while the list purports to be “a snapshot of the evolving film canon” that even with “a few shifts and substitutions” very little had changed in the ten years since the last poll. Indeed, Citizen Kane had been the top film in 1962, and remained that way forty years later. “Unfortunately”, he added “for the foreseeable future…major directors of today’s cinema are likely to appear in the Sight & Sound polls only as commentators”.
‘Citizen Kane’ – still the greatest?
Indeed, this is true of so many lists. On the AFI’s 2007 edition of 100 Years…100 Movies, the two most recent films in the Top 10 were from 1972 (The Godfather) and 1980 (Raging Bull). All other film in the Top 10 had been released prior to 1965. Of the 23 “new” films added to the list, only two had been released since the creation of the previous list in 1997. One of the new entries, coming in like a rocket at #18, was 1927’s The General, a cracker of a film to be sure: but did it really need a 2007 list to remind us of that? Surely there had been some seminal pieces of cinema in the previous decade that demanded more widespread attention? Is it not the duty of organisations such as the AFI to promote all cinema to the world, especially those that don’t make the mainstream, rather than dust off the same Citizen Kane-centric lists once a decade?
New ammunition
Yet currency doesn’t seem to be the only solution either, with recent editions of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die controversially dropping classics in favour of the occasional flash-in-the-pan hit. The latest edition has added Todd Phillip’s The Hangover and James Cameron’s Avatar, yet dropped Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie. Why? Film is a constantly evolving medium, in a state of flux because it is one of the newest in the overall history of art. Yet to use Schrader again, his definition of a canon is that a film must be “by definition, based on criteria that transcend taste, personal and popular”. (For the record, his own Taxi Driver comes in at 36). Some of the more recent entries on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list certainly fail on that last count. If a film does not stand the test of time, as some would argue is the case with Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind or more recently The Return of the King or Avatar, should it be stricken from the record? Is it no longer “good film”, or is it simply a case of pandering to changes in taste? Both are perfectly valid responses, and there is no reason they need to be mutually exclusive.
So lists are full of problems, and often represent the subjective interests of a handful of (possibly) elitist critics? Yes, and no. As mentioned, Schrader’s own list contains a film he penned, but does this mean it is not objectively an ‘essential’ film? Of course not, and countless other critics will testify to the power of Martin Scorsese’s urban nightmare, while others may dismiss it as mindless violence. The point is that film criticism is necessarily a subjective pursuit, often as much about crafting one’s own clever language around someone else’s work. Yet it is through this critical engagement that a deeper appreciation of film is achieved, with personal canons created almost every day. The act of watching is reviewing: it is comparing with what has come before and what will potentially come. To restrict the canon to an agreed upon set of films – to set the bar too highly as it were – even if those films have been selected by a society (or group of societies), is to narrow the view too much. In this light, a canon restricts the effervescent imaginations of critics around the world, but it is the same ‘old school’ thinking that causes filmmakers to rebel and create something entirely new every generation or so.
You may fire when ready
No matter what it is called – a film canon, a ‘best of’ list or the ‘Top Films of All Time’ – they all serve a similar function as a starting point. To think of them as the base by which other films are measured has its uses, but with hundreds of worthy titles released around the world every decade, it is far too limiting to tie ourselves to old-guard notions of what constitutes good film. Rather, we (both critics and audiences alike) should use each and every list as a place to discover new and exciting films from around the world, in the hope that we will one day have a personal list of films that defines each of us and our personal journey through cinema.
As 2010 comes to a close, and we have our Top 10 in 2010 done and dusted, we here at The Reel Bits are looking to the future. Every year, hundreds of films are released to the cinemas, and we probably see more of them than we are willing to admit. The good, the bad and the outright ugly are all in a day’s work for lovers of cinema. Yet there are always a few that stand out from the rest, the ones that you’d sell a vital body part to see if it wasn’t likely to make you keel over in discomfort before the release date. 2011 is set to have us all sitting in bathtubs full of ice, peddling organs on eBay.
Cowboys, aliens (sometimes both), superheroes, plenty of nostalgia and masters of cinema returning to the silver screen – and that’s not to mention the 2010 releases that haven’t made it to Australia yet. So let’s set the DeLorean and/or hot tub for 2011 get into it.
My picks are an eclectic mix to be sure, and perhaps leaning towards the mainstream a little (I’m still a sucker for a good blockbuster), but before we get into the hows and whys, let’s talk about the bloody great elephant in the room: the 2010 releases that we haven’t seen. Not the few dozen films we don’t get around to seeing each year due to lack to time or inclination, but all those terrific films already released in the US and UK that still haven’t made it out here to our Antipodean shores. Don’t even get me started on foreign language films, where we often have to rely on film festivals or import DVDs/Blu-ray to provide our fix. A stack of my highly anticipated films – not least of which are the Coen Brothers’ western True Grit, the Oscar contender Black Swan, critical favourite Rabbit Hole, David O’Russell’s intimate boxing epic The Fighter, Disney’s Tangled, Studio Ghibli’s Kari-Gurashi no Arrietty and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go – have still not reached Australian screens by very late 2010. Indeed, one of the most nominated films of the awards season – Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours – is not released in Australia until 10 February, almost a month after the Golden Globe Awards. I was lucky enough to see this earlier this month, and will bring you that review in early 2011. Yet no discussion of 2011 can really commence until about late-February for most Australians, by which stage we have finally put 2010 to bed.
Without a doubt, one of the most highly anticipated films for cinema lovers in 2011 is going to be Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, only his fifth film since 1973 and his first since 2005’s underrated The New World. Starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain, if the early trailers are anything to go by, it should rank up there with Malick’s lyrical masterpieces Badlands and Days of Heaven. Opportunities to see Malick’s films on the big screen are few and far between these days, and as a recent screening of Badlands at Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema demonstrated, Malick is a master of the American landscape. Viewers should run to see what will no doubt be a limited run on the big screen, and easily makes it to the #1 most anticipated slot on my personal list. The only thing that could challenge this is a new film from Martin Scorsese. Oh, hang about…
1930s mystery Hugo Cabret from master filmmaker Martin Scorsese is a ‘must see’ list for its odd collection of cast members ranging from Chloe Moretz (Kick Ass, Let Me In) to Sacha Baron Cohen (Bruno), with Christopher Lee, Ben Kinglsey, Ray Winstone and Emily Mortimer in between. Despite the lack of Leonardo Di Caprio, Scorsese’s first effort without him in nine years, this may be a return to form after the disappointing and predictable (yet critically acclaimed in some circles) Shutter Island. Scorsese has recently excelled at the period piece – including the beautifully shot The Aviator, the brutal Gangs of New York and the majesty of Raging Bull, so I’ve definitely got high hopes for his latest creation.
Cowboys & Aliens may as well be a theme for 2011, with the film of the same name set to be one of the most genius combinations ever. Based on a comic of the same name, it’s directed by Iron Man helmer Jon Favreau and brings heavy-hitters Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, TRON: Legacy‘s Olivia Wilde and Sam Rockwell, this has the potential to be the biggest blockbuster of 2011. There will also be Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s (Shaun of the Dead) Paul, a comedy version of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and of course, DC Comics’ Green Lantern. I’m a little skeptical over the use of CGI in the film, especially on Lantern’s suit, but I’m hoping its success will lead to a Green Arrow film. Along with Green Lantern, it will be a big year for comic book heroes, although Thor looks like it may tip over into sillyville and Captain America: The First Avenger may need more than The Voyage of the Dawn Treaderscribes Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and Buffy creator Joss Whedon to stop it from tipping over into jingoistic nonsense. Rounding things out for comic fans is The Green Hornet, starring the unlikely action hero Seth Rogen and coming to us from the always interesting Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). At the very least, it should be visually interesting and with a media screening already booked in, we look forward to bringing you that review in early January.
Kids of all ages can look forward to Winnie the Pooh, the first theatrical Pooh story to be made by Walt Disney Feature Animation sine 1977’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I’m an unabashed Winnie the Pooh fan, as my Ultimate Guide to Pooh (written for Ultimate Disney back in 2005) will attest. Many boxes of tissues are already prepared for the tear-fest that this is likely to be for this old softy of a reviewer. Pixar, of course, is releasing Cars 2, but there is nothing about this film that looks like it will overcome the vanity-project leanings of John Lasseter’s original. On the other hand, The Muppets – starring…well, just about everybody – is just the fun comeback that Kermit and the gang have been deserving of for years. Nostalgia is powerful narcotic, especially when it comes to the box office.
Some of the outlying entries on the list are a bit of wishful thinking: Red Riding Hood looks visually interesting. Catherine Hardwick, director of the woeful yet bafflingly popular Twilight, previously brought us the much edgier Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, and this looks to be a much darker version of the classic tale from Orphan scribe David Johnson. Speaking of dark, the mad Love Exposure genius Sion Sono’s Cold Fish is due out in Japan next month, although with the possible exception of the 15th Japanese Film Festival in late 2011, it is unlikely Australians will see this film on our shores anytime soon. As a horror fan, I’m also looking forward to Kevin Smith’s Red State, potentially his most interesting creation in years, and of course, Wes Craven’s long-awaited sequel Scream 4. Given that the current horror revival is largely thanks to the non-stop thrills initiated by his 1996 original, this may be the commentary we need on the genre.
It will be interesting to see how many of these films end up on our ‘best of’ list at the end of 2011, as there are a few “little sleepers than might”, including the Mel Gibson puppet-vehicle The Beaver. More mainstream flicks like the Immortals, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, Hanna and, of course, The Hangover 2 may pull audiences back to the cinemas once again. Assuming Australia doesn’t have to wait too long to see them.
Another year has come and gone, and now that the two of us have had a chance to see most of the releases in Australia, it is a good time to stop and reflect on our favourites from 2010. It is no exaggeration to say that we saw hundreds of films this year. We’ve enjoyed them at cinema, on DVD and Blu-ray (on DVD Bits) and at festivals – including the Sydney Film Festival, the Brisbane International Film Festival, Reel Anime,KOFFIA and the Japanese Film Festival – so the task of whittling down that into a list of 10 films is an impossible task. So we cheated.
We’ve taken our favourite 10 films, listed them, and gone on to tell you about a chunk of other films that we would have put on our lists had we made this a Top 20. It’s our site, we probably could have done that, but Top 10 in 2010 is such a nice title for an article.
2010 was the year that renewed my love of the cinema. Naturally, I’ve always loved movies as far back as I can remember, but as the Editor in Chief of DVD Bits for the better part of the last decade, the home has been more of a cinema that the real kind out there in the ‘reel’ world. Yet a huge amount of must see titles were released this year. As such, it was particularly difficult to draw a Top 10, simply due to the sheer diversity and high quality of films from around the world released in Australia. Rather than pick an objective 10, I’ve gone for some personal favourites in alphabetical order. So we get the devastating highs of Blue Valentine and Winter’s Bone mixing freely with the genre-perfect gems like Macheteand The Princess and the Frog. Indeed, so strong was the list that I couldn’t include other favourites Easy A, Food Inc, Lebanon, The Town, Monsters, The Hedgehog (think of it as #11) and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work in my Top 10.
Yet reviewing favourites for 2010 also highlighted just how much doesn’t get released in Australia, and I hope all the readers of this site – along with my two humble portals – vote with their wallets in 2011. By the way, eagle-eyed readers may notice that the list above differs a little bit from the one I presented on Matt Riviera’s A Life in Film a week or so ago. Due to the deadlines on that blog, I was yet to see the gems Somewhere (another near-miss on this list) and the sublime The King’s Speech, which would easily make a Top 10 list in any year of release. I can cheat here, because it’s my blog this time.
American: The Bill Hicks Story: I reviewed this one in detail as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival back in September, so I won’t go into too much depth here. The documentary serves as an excellent and timely gateway into the world of Hicks. Sixteen years after his death, Hicks remains as angry and as relevant to modern audiences as he did back in his prime.
Blue Valentine: Another one getting a full review from me, Blue Valentine is a film to savour. The hidden beauty (and horror) of the film will only be revealed the more one contemplates the respective contributions to a relationship breakdown. It is rare that a film dubbed a romance is actually romantic, and a drama is all too often melodramatic. Yet Blue Valentine finds the hidden truths that lie between the moments of falling in and out of love.
Bunny And The Bull: What could have easily been The Mighty Boosh: The Movie is so much more. Touching, hilarious and visually innovative, it is safe to say that you will not see a film like this again in the very near future. For the newspaper world sequence alone, featuring a mad Julian Barrett suckling on the milk of dogs, this deserves to be on every Top 10 list this year.
Exit Through The Gift Shop: Possibly street artist Banksy’s most elaborate hoax to date, one that would have involved the showing and growing of artist Mr. Brainwash around the world (include in Sydney’s Newtown at the time of writing), Exit Through the Gift Shop is undoubtedly an important film. Even if it is all tongue-in-cheek, it gives us a snapshot of the mood of the moment and is a piece of art of its own. Long after all the walls of London have been scrubbed clean, this digital representation of street art will still be around.
The King’s Speech: Who would have thought an Australia speech therapist trained a King to inspire a country? A very late entry onto the 2010 film scene, at least for Australians who receive this film on Boxing Day, this one has perhaps earned the most awards buzz around the world, especially drawing the most nominations from the Golden Globes this year and practically every critic’s circle around the world. An impeccably acted piece from Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth, with a terrific supporting cast in the form of Guy Pearce, Helena Bonham Carter and Derek Jacobi, it is also surprisingly full of humour and touching pathos.
Machete: You may be forced to do a double-take at the inclusion of this exploitation Grindhouse spin-off from cult director Robert Rodriguez. It may not be receiving any advance Oscar buzz, nor likely to win any awards for that matter, it is a pitch-perfect example of how to make a crowd-pleasing genre entry. Aside from the fact that it is the best antidote to an increasingly disappointing series of bloated Michael Bay-style actioners at the cinemas, we may not get a line as good as “Machete don’t text” again this year. Or ever.
The Princess and the Frog: Perhaps easily forgotten in a year that has given us some great digital entries (Toy Story 3, also on this list) or big-scale international efforts (Ponyo), but The Princess and the Frog wins the prize for being the first film I saw in cinemas this year. It set the bar high, with a joyful return to a more traditional way of making animation that audiences had not enjoyed for some years from the House of Mouse. Disney’s 49th animated feature is a winner, from its jazz tunes down to its painted details. Genuinely a classic of the highest order, it is great to have the Disney of old back on board for the twenty-first century.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: Where the key word in The Princess and the Frog was ‘traditional’, Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is a celebration of all things ‘retro’. A pop-culture frenzy, some may say overload. From the 8-bit SNES-inspired Universal logo and theme at the start of the film, Scott Pilgrim is filled with wall-to-wall video game references. With visual cues of 1-Ups and fight screens, audiences will not leave without knowing why Pac-Man was named as such for the west. Like the original graphic novels, it is too cool for school. For all of this surface sheen, there is a beating heart to Scott Pilgrim (both the film and the character) and an essential sweetness behind its protestations of apathy. Edgar Wright brings all of his rapid editing superpowers to the table in the action sequences, and the net effect is that while you may not be entirely sure what hit you, it has left you in a good place with a strange desire to hit the video arcades.
Toy Story 3: It had been 11 years since Toy Story 2 hit theatres, so a much older crowd was pushing children aside to see this one. Pixar has rarely faltered in the 15 years following their first film, the original Toy Story, and if this is to be the end of the saga, there couldn’t be a more fitting end to the series. The Toy Story films have always been about mortality, posing the big questions of what use is someone when they are no longer needed for their primary function. Full of gorgeous animation, lively voice acting from all of the original cast members, this is one that will have you reaching for the tissue box and holding your splitting side in equal measure. Cinema audiences may never have to put them on the shelf for good, as we can always revisit them: after 15 years of playing with Woody and Buzz, these are as much our toys as they are Pixar’s.
Winter’s Bone: The seemingly simple story of a young single mother searching for her fugitive father in the physically and emotionally harsh environment of the Ozarks is a gripping and well-crafted tale. Featuring outstanding performances from Jennifer Lawrence and Deadwood‘s John Hawkes, this is definitely one to watch in the awards season. Already appearing in any number of critics lists across the world, the little ‘independent movie that could’ has every possibility of knocking some of the big guns around for six. You may never look at squirrels the same way again!
We all love seeing a good Aussie film. That’s what the anti-piracy lobby tells us at the start of every DVD, Blu-ray or cinema session we see. Yet since the start of 2010, only one Australian film – Tomorrow, When the War Began – has managed to reach the Number 1 spot in the box office charts, and it only did so for a week before making a total of $9.2 million.
Rounding up the Top 3 were Bran Nue Dae ($7.56 million) and the critically acclaimed Animal Kingdom ($5.2 million). Compare this with the $9.6 million Avatar made in its first week at the Australian box office (and well over $100 million total locally), and one starts to get a picture of just how much proportional love Australians have for a good Aussie film. Indeed, with the exception of the aforementioned Tomorrow, When the War Began, not a single film produced outside the United States topped the Australian box office in 2010, and it was a fabulous year for Aussie film.
As part of his Oz Film Blogathon, film journalist Scott Henderson has asked us to blog about the ‘Things We Think But Do Not Say’. Those who know me would ponder whether there is any thought that passes between my ears that isn’t verbalised, and when it comes to the state of the Australian film industry, there are few that haven’t weighed in with their two cents on the state of play of the Aussie film industry. Opinions range from “a thriving industry that need more promotion” to “Industry? WHAT industry?” The truth lies somewhere in between in reality, with Australian films clearly not getting the attention that it needs in the country that produces it. There has always been a cultural cringe in Australia towards our own product, and a perceived lack of adventure in terms of genre exploration, from the suburban angst of 2001’s Lantana to the angsty suburban couple in India for 2010’s The Waiting City or the ‘fish out of water dramas’ such as the bland The Tree and the paint-by-numbers South Solitary.
Yet with a few familiar films cropping up, this argument really doesn’t hold for 2010. We have had one of the most eclectic years on record, with such gems as the schlock-comedy The Loved Ones, the underrated western-cum-horror film Red Hill, musical Bran Nue Dae, the highly decorated (suburban) crime drama Animal Kingdom, romantic drama Summer Coda, ultra-violent revenge thriller The Horseman, comedy (*cough*) Wog Boy 2: The King of Mykonos, bromantic comedy I Love You Too, the ‘love story that breaks all the rules’ Matching Jack and World War I film Beneath Hill 60. Now, it will come as no surprise to observers of the industry that these films failed to make as much as their US cousins, but in the case of some films, the lack the box office was a particular disappointment. Let’s take The Loved Ones as an example. This is a film that appeared to have a ready-made cult audience, and a sense of humour and gore-levels to match the demands of said audience. I don’t know about the rest of the states, but you couldn’t turn around in Sydney without seeing the side of a bus that had a massive advertisement for the film splashed all of the side.
Getting back to the piracy question, it seems that it gets a chunk of the blame, with a list of crimes longer than Wikileaks‘ Julian Assange. Indeed, film piracy has been blamed for everything from robbing the industry of income to funding terrorism! It could be argued that film piracy robs the rightful profits of filmmakers and local distributors, and the perplexing Accidental Pirate spends a fair bit of time and effort pointing this out to us. However, I hate to break it to people, but the number of illegal bit-torrents for the US studio-produced Inceptiontakes over 11 pages of PirateBay, while a search for Tomorrow When the War Began fails to return any hits. Inception still seems to be doing well for itself at the box office and on DVD/Blu-ray despite this rampant piracy.
Now while I recognise that this is an over-simplistic analysis of the impact of film piracy, which may impact our smaller industry, it would be equally simplistic to solely place the blame on it for the declining distributor profits. Competing demands for consumer attention, a bigger global film industry than ever before, the rising cost of cinema tickets and shorter windows between cinema and home release are all contributing factors to the generally declining box office takings. Indeed, this entire argument lies on the assumption that if a punter can’t get something for free, they would pay for it. It’s not that simple, and there is no empirical evidence to suggest otherwise.
So how does the Australia industry, which largely relies on government subsidies to exist, avoid making costly flops on the taxpayer dime? Back in 2005, Disney CEO Bob Iger suggested that their monolith was “spending too much time chasing box office (dollars) and we are waiting too long to enter the next window where a movie has the most value”. He added to this that “a deal where the exhibitor would sell the DVD of a Disney movie playing in the theater – while it’s still fresh in audience members mind – and cut the theater owner in for a piece of the sale”. Here we are in 2010, and it remains a wonderful and revolutionary and completely untapped idea five years on. Imagine applying this to the Australian film industry? Australians walking out of a cinema, buoyed by the buzz of a country bridge being blown up or a cold-blooded gangland retribution to find the very film they’ve just seen available to them on DVD or Blu-ray in the lobby.
How about getting even more radical on this? Lobby the same bodies that fund the films to subsidies the tickets as well. Ticket prices are now, on average, between $15 and $22 (more for the Aussie-voiced 3D IMAX Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole) for a full price, making it a very expensive proposition to see a local film. On a limited budget, one will inevitably choose the big budget brain candy from the US, because the advertising has been so constant on all forms of media. Yet what if the ticket prices were more attractive? What if some of the government funding that went into supporting the local industry subsidised cheaper tickets for Australian films? Get the schools in on mass-discount to see films like Samson and Delilah, and offer an educational program to go with it. Offer combos: ticket and DVD for $30, for example. Once again, it may be overly simplistic, but perhaps it is this kind of thinking that will lead Australians to choose Australian cinema first at the box office. Who knows, they might find a movie they’d love seeing…again and again.
Earlier this year, Back to the Future celebrated its 25th anniversary of taking audiences through time. Topping the box-office for 11 weeks in 1985, the film spawned two back-to-back sequels, an animated series and even a theme park ride. Last night saw a charity screening to not only celebrate the anniversary and the release of the films on Blu-ray, but to raise awareness and money for people with Parkinson’s disease, their carers and their families. As readers will probably know, Back to the Future star Michael J. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s while filming Spin City, and was forced to leave production of that television show.
Of course a very special guest was in attendance tonight: the biggest star of all three films, the time machine itself: the DeLorean. Long before hot tubs were used to traverse the confines of the space-time continuum, this very 1980s sports car was used to break free of linear bonds. They figured if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style? Besides, the stainless steel construction makes the flux dispersal…well, you get the idea. The special guest can be seen in the gallery below:
We reviewed Back to the Future quite recently (for the Popcorn Taxi screening), and concluded that the film “remains fresh and exciting after a quarter of a century largely thanks to its inherent simplicity”. Watching it again for about the third time in the last month (and indeed, may have seen this film in excess of 100 times since it came out in 1985, when I was the tender age of 6), nothing has happened to change that opinion. When the climactic scenes still remain fresh and armrest gripping after 25 years, you know you are on to a winning formula. Plus, with the exception of some neat effects at the very beginning and conclusion, it is all done with stylish set design and period simplicity.
This was an excellent night out, and certainly a fun way to wind down after the brilliant but exhausting marathon of films as part of the 14th Japanese Film Festival. It was also all for a good cause: with money raised going to Parkinson’s research. Possibly the only problem was the sheer number of people it attracted, with a sold-out session of well over 800 people willing to cosplay, air guitar and cheer on the adventures of Doc and Marty. Let’s hope a theatrical outing for the entire trilogy is due soon!
Back to the Movies has more details on this special event on their website.
When the USSR was officially dissolved at the end of 1991, a Cold War that had existed between the true and just United States and the Evil Communists since the end of the Second World War. For cinema fans, this gave us all sorts of brilliant films from North By Northwest, through Dr. Strangelove and all of the James Bond films from Sean Connery through Timothy Dalton. More recently, there has been a run of great pieces coming out of Europe that look back on the Cold War years and the extreme (the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others) or the legacies they leave for (the comic brilliance of Goodbye Lenin!). Joining this canon is the French film Farewell, from director Christian Carion (Joyeux Noël).
As it turns out, the French had far more to do with the downfall of the Soviets than we had previously realised. Apparently “based on a true story” (a line that can always be used liberally), the film follows the events surrounding the disenchanted Soviet General Colonel Grigoriev (Emir Kusturica) and the effects of his trading Soviet secrets with a French engineer working in Moscow. His codename was Farewell. The secrets trade-off begins an international event that has massive consequences for both men, and according to the publicity for the film, helped bring about the end of the Cold War.
At times Farewell is heavy-handed attempt to slap down the arrogance of the United States and any past ‘special relationships’ the French may have had with the Lords of Democracy, painting the French in an almost innocent light. Indeed, throughout most of the film we are expected to believe that the French amateur spy is above suspicion simply because he is disobeying all the traditional rules of spyhood (spydom?) and acting in plain sight. Although never as hard-hitting or emotionally engaging as the intimate portrait that excellent The Lives of Others painted, the film attempts to bring the human face behind the Iron Curtain to light. However, this is equally obvious, with unnecessary elements of an affair and a Queen-obsessed son back in Russia that don’t come anywhere near to the level of intimacy observed in that Oscar-winning German film.
Farewell is a cold film about the Cold War, with vast white landscapes isolating us physically from gaining any real insight into this period. We do know one thing though: the French are masters of duplicity.
Top 5 Cold War Films
The Lives of Others (2006): This superior film takes us back to East Germany in 1984. An agent conducting surveillance on a journalist and his wife becomes increasingly involved in their lives. Winner of Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards, and the equivalent of the BAFTAs and a number of other ceremonies. Deservedly so, as this taut thriller turned in some terrific performances from Ulrich Mühe.
North By Northwest (1959): It is difficult to do any list of spy thrillers without including Hitchcock’s Cold War thriller, unsurpassed to this day. Hapless New York advertising executive (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a spy and chased across the country. Memorable scenes involving a crop-duster and Mount Rushmore will live on in film history forever. Hitchcock’s later Cold Ward piece, Topaz (1969), was a late-career disappointment.
Dr. Strangelove (1964): Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. As the extended title would imply, this takes a satirical jab at the Cold War antics which were at their height in the 1960s. Peter Sellers outdoes himself as the titular Dr. Strangelove, desperately trying to keep a Nazi salute under wraps, President Merklin Muffley and the timid Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. An insane general tries to start a war that everyone in the War Room is trying to stop. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room”.
Dr. No (1962): Just about any James Bond film up until the end of the 1980s could easily be included on here, with the exception of Moonraker of course, and From Russia with Love is an obvious choice too. The scene in which Ursula Andress (as the first wacky-named Bond Girl Honeychile ‘Honey’ Ryder) emerges from the ocean has been imitated countless times, not least of which was a gender-reversed tribute in the Bond reboot Casino Royale (2006). Before Bond had countless and increasingly ridiculous gadgets, this was a straightforward and sexy spy story that started a series which now numbers 22 films!
Goodbye Lenin (2003): Devoted son (Daniel Brühl) must convince his politically active mother, who slipped into a coma prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the Eastern Bloc is still going strong and nothing has changed. Hiding the proliferation of Western commercialisation from someone leads to great comic moments, but is also incredibly touching as well.
