CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: SUCH FOL-DE-ROL AND FIDDLE-DEE-DEE

Discussions of the 1957 telefilm Cinderella tend to hinge on its role in the developing stardom of 21-year-old Julie Andrews; or build themselves around its screening history, nodding to the fact that it was considered lost for many years before the kinescope recording of its live broadcast on 31 March, 1957 was rediscovered. And they tend to do so in ways that make it mostly clear that the person doing the discussing would rather not have to take too close a look at the film itself. This is not unreasonable. It would be a lie to call Cinderella a poor piece of television, and there's some genuine ambition to its staging, given the circumstances of its production. But it's also the case that it's a bit snoozy and too light for its own good; the core story of Cinderella is already closer to a sustained anecdote than a narrative that can support a feature, and not much about this particular treatment addresses that problem.

We'll get to Andrews and the realities of live television production in '57 soon enough, I promise, but I'm not done complaining. Cinderella was the ninth musical by lyricist and book author Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rodgers; it was, moreover, only the second (and final) of their collaborations not to begin its life as a stage musical, after the 1945 theatrical film Stage Fair. It was not their plan to move to TV; they were approached by CBS, who had stared with great envy at NBC's great success in staging the 1954 musical Peter Pan live as part of their monthly series Producer's Showcase, once in 1955, once in '56 (neither of these is the "canonical" telefilm starring Mary Martin, though she played Peter Pan in both airings - that would be the live broadcast from 1960, which was recorded to videotape, and is thus now available in full color). Hoping to trump their rival network, CBS didn't merely want to show a live version of a popular show; they wanted a brand new musical created by the biggest names in musical theater. Rodgers & Hammerstein agreed, though it is generally said that they did so mostly to have a chance to work with Andrews, who was busy at that time with the original Broadway run of My Fair Lady. Regardless of their motivations, it worked out well for CBS: Cinderella is estimated to have had an audience of 107 million viewers, making it the most-watched program in the history of American television up to that point. Depending on whose number you trust, it still holds that record for a non-Super Bowl broadcast.

And because it was so popular on a level which cannot be conceived of in the current pop culture landscape - more individuals watched Cinderella than there were tickets sold to Avatar, and they all watched at the exact same time - it can surely survive my pointing out that it's really not a very good musical. I maintain - as do many others - that the career of Rodgers & Hammerstein is an exercise in diminishing returns: they peaked with their first two collaborations, Oklahoma! and Carousel, and following Cinderella, they only wrote Flower Drum Song, a show that has virtually no modern-day defenders, and The Sound of Music, whose positive reputation rests almost exclusively on the 1965 movie that did a hell of a lot of work to fix the show. By 1957, I mean to say, the gas had largely run out of the tank; the music in Cinderella is harmless and totally inoffensive, but it's light on memorable or particularly high-impact songs. "In My Own Little Corner", a largely typical "I Want" song, is the closest the show has to an iconic number, and it's not at all a triumph on par with "People Will Say We're in Love", or "I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy", or "Hello, Young Lovers". Or even the songs they wrote that don't have "love" in the title. Otherwise, the bulk of the music is brightly paced and pleasant, and the lyrics offer up some quips about which the nicest I can think to say is that they are more amusing than labored. Given that it is, at heart, a program for parents to watch with their children, innocuous songs aren't any kind of mortal sin. But given that this was the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical to premiere in the same calendar year that The Music Man and West Side Story opened, it's hard not to feel like it's lacking in ambition and depth.

The same is true, if not indeed truer, of the teleplay by Hammerstein, which largely replicates the standard beats of the story, while replacing any of its bitterness and sorrow with blowsy comedy. Then as now, the definitive Cinderella was the 1950 Disney film, which had the same slapstick ugly stepsisters that Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley play to such frivolous extremes (fair's fair: the conception of those characters is a little whiffy, but Ballard and Ghostley are absolutely terrific at executing what they've been tasked with doing), but paired with with a wicked stepmother of glacially still cruelty, a genuine threat to the long-term happiness of Cinderella and her dreams. Hammerstein makes her every bit as broad a caricature as her daughters, and things aren't helped by the one outright misstep of a generally posh assortment of costumes designed by Jean Eckhart, when the character is introduced with actor Ilka Chase gamely wearing what appears to be a flattened lampshade on her head.

This is all to say, this Cinderella has absolutely no bite: it's charming and achingly shallow. The story already trends in that direction (of all the major European fairy tales, it has the most limited stakes: "So this girl wants to marry a prince." "...And?" "And, well, she does. He finds her because she dropped a shoe."), and late-period Hammerstein readily gives into that.

Still and all, it's a charming enough thing to watch, in part because it is breathlessly short - 76 minutes once you take out the original commercial breaks. That leaves just enough time to marvel at the grace with which director Ralph Nelson uses visual flourishes that must have been damned complicated to execute in a fairly small studio filled with large sets and huge ensembles of extras. And all of it done totally live! It would have been forgivable if the whole thing had been at the blunt level of the dress transformation, carried off by the banal expedient of focusing the camera on Edie Adams's sly fairy godmother while Andrews quickly changed just off to the left. Instead, the film is full of gliding tracking shots, unexpected high and low angles, and some nuanced, shapely lighting that doesn't at all read as "1950s television", with its characteristic tendency towards bright flatness. It's a real pity that the only version of the show to survive is in black and white; as lavish as the camera is in floating through the big sets, I have to imagine that seeing them in full color must have been a real treat.

The other reason to watch, of course, is Julie Andrews. Her movie debut was (inexplicably) seven years in the future, but she'd already enjoyed two major stage successes, with The Boy Friend and My Fair Lady, and in this role which was written expressly to show off her talents, she scored an absolute triumph. Everything that anyone ever loved about her is fully-formed: the upbeat optimism, but also the twisted internal wistfulness. Without her, "In My Own Little Corner" could easily fly off into insipid cheeriness; and she is solely responsible for anchoring the love duet "Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" not merely from the songwriters' sentimentality, but from her watery Prince, played by Jon Cypher (an eerily prophetic surname). Her voice is strong and penetrating enough to break through the hissy limitations of '50s TV sound recording, but she never sacrifices the delicacy of any individual moment. The solitary problem with her performance isn't even her fault: she was hit with too much pancake makeup and has a tendency to look a bit waxy in the earlier scenes. Ignore that (and it's only polite that you should), and what remains is a tremendously confident performance of quiet, shy yearning, as perfect a star-is-born moment as you could ever hope to find, except that she was kind of a star already. Cinderella is, throughout, a little empty-headed and gossamer-thin, but the presence of Andrews makes it... not essential, no, I can't go that far. But it is certainly worth anybody's time.

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SOMETHING WILD

A review requested by Scott D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I say this as someone born 12 years later, but it's probably not possible for anyone who wasn't around in 1969 to genuinely grasp the enormity of The Wild Bunch upon its initial release. We can bone up on the state of the Western and Hollywood filmmaking generally prior to that, and appreciate what a massive gap there is between that tradition and this film, but we can't truly appreciate what an unprecedented step forward it was. Thanks in great part to this very film, the "Death of the Wild West" genre sprouted up all over the 1970s up to the point where most Westerns made in the last 45 years explicitly or implicitly make that their subject, so we can't be quite as amazed by this film's angry and full-blooded commitment to what was, at the time, a fairly unexplored time period; screen violence has gone beyond even the maddest excesses of director Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked career.

And yet, even as a spectacular victim of its own success, The Wild Bunch retains a primitive, raw, vulgarly masculine power that leaves it powerful in all the right ways, and surprisingly un-dated. But then, that's not necessarily a coincidence. One of the most important developments in the history of American film was the abandonment, in 1968, of the old Production Code in favor of the MPAA rating system. It was the end point of an evolution that stretched from Otto Preminger provocatively stuffing that filthy word "virgin" into" 1953's The Moon Is Blue, through Alfred Hitchcock's structurally audacious murder of Janet Leigh in a show in 1960's Psycho, up to the storm of bullets that closed Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. In the wake of that film, the MPAA basically gave up and conceded that adults would make films for other adults no matter what the censors had to say about it. Exactly where we set the line that divides "modern cinema" from "classic cinema", assuming we want to be that arbitrary, is debatable, but the first wave of films to fully take advantage of this previously unimaginable freedom in 1969 are fully and truly Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. And The Wild Bunch was not merely part of this wave, it was arguably at the vanguard of it; it was the sacred avatar of Movie Violence, even as Midnight Cowboy, released in the same summer, was the avatar of Movie Sex.

That is to say, we have in The Wild Bunch the film that taught the American film industry how to depict violence. And oh! oh! the skill and intensity and creativity of that violence cannot possibly be overstated. It is as bold and radical an expansion of the climax of Bonnie and Clyde as that film was from a Three Stooges skit. Gunshots beller on the soundtrack with confusing, hectic rage; editor Lou Lombardo dashes from shot to shot in some of the most feverish editing that had been seen anywhere in the world up to that point, cutting between images with no clear intention, passing by exploding squibs so quickly that all we can register is the bluntness of the red, barely allowing us to get a sense of which characters are where. The film practically opens with one such scene, and it effectively closes with another; the second is still a jaw-dropping sequence even generations later, going on for what seems like an eternity of noise and visual chaos and death. In later years, as the film became a lightning rod for controversy, Peckinpah clarified that he'd intended for the sheer volume and intensity of the violence to be a disorienting turn-off, his way of re-acquainting an audience that watched Vietnam on the nightly news with the fleshy, bloody hell of gunshots and killing; he also conceded that he plainly had failed in that goal, given the widespread adoration of the action in The Wild Bunch as exhilarating by those who loved it, and condemnation as exploitative by those who didn't. But this is, I think, an example of the audience failing the film and not the other way around - the way that the gun battles are slashed together, with the fury of a whirlwind and an angry focus on explosive moments of death and suffering, is nothing so much as the film itself twisting and writing, trying to rip itself into pieces before our eyes. Obviously it is possible to find all of this exciting: people have been since 1969. But for myself, I can only find it hellish and brutal.

Those are the two best adjectives to describe the bulk of The Wild Bunch, which notwithstanding its reputation as the movie with the violence, is mostly a character study of an old gunslinger, Pike Bishop (William Holden), the gang he's working with on the One Last Job they pick up while hiding out in Mexico, and his former partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), hired by the railroads to track Pike's wild bunch down and bring them back. Preferably dead. Antiheroes being the hot new thing in 1969, it's not surprising that Pike is a rather bleak and nasty fellow, without even the charisma that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway brought to Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker; Holden was more than capable of playing a vicious bastard when he had to; it was maybe even what he was best at, going as far back as his coming-out year in 1950, with the sardonic asshole he played in Sunset Blvd. registering far more deeply than his charming newspaperman in Born Yesterday. Here in The Wild Bunch, he barks and snaps, fixing his leathery face in a perpetual grimace - when he laughs giddily in one scene, it's stunning and almost grotesque, even in its warmth - and asks for none of our sympathy. He even rejects it, perhaps, when he takes glee in musing about how money is more important than family, or when he treats the usual Western topics of being true to your word and having dignity as a man by shouting the words out in a bullying rage.

There are other great performances in the film that persuasively argue that it's an indictment of the era whose death it depicts, and nervous condemnation of the kind of men who drove it; Ernest Borgnine, as Pike's second-in-command Dutch Engstrom, seems congenitally incapable of wearing a non-threatening expression for virtually all of the film. But Holden is the film's heart; its flinty, curdled, black heart. He is our Great Western Hero, with a fixed moral code and a thousand-yard stare of haunted nobility, and no matter how clearly Peckinpah prefers his killers to have a strong sense of duty, instead of the randomly violent gangs that implicitly take over (the film begins with children in an act of capricious, needless cruelty - animals were harmed in the making of this movie - and that sense that the Old West is giving way to a generation given to more barbarism, not less, echoes over the whole thing); no matter how much depth and nuance is granted to Pike and Deke in the flashback scenes that were cut after the film's premiere and not restored until 2002; through it all, Peckinpah remains clear-eyed about the basic brutality of his protagonists and the lives they lead. He sympathises with them as men without forgiving them their sins.

The overriding sense of The Wild Bunch is not, however, nihilism; nor moral outrage. It is a sense of profound weariness. The longueurs between action, the drooping faces of the cast, the sand-blasted color palette in Lucien Ballard's cinematography, all of these contribute to that sense. This is a film about something old and exhausted collapsing and passing away, presented objectively and without sentiment in either direction. Some Westerns eulogise this passing as a sorry loss of a braver and more manly sensibility; some sweep away the old order as the savagery that had to be abandoned if civilisation was to take over. The Wild Bunch does neither: it bluntly supposes that the violent nature of men continues to perpetuate itself, even as one generation's particular form of violence gives way to the next. It's not a comforting film in the least, nor is it hopeful. But it reflects a society that hadn't all that much reason to hope, and it does so with a potency that still hits hard almost a half-century later.

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THE DEVIL'S MUSIC

A review requested by Travis Neeley, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

By 1974, Brian De Palma had seven features under his belt, with the seventh, 1973's Sisters, having kicked off his legendary run of Hitchcock riffs. So we cannot possibly call Phantom of the Paradise, the director's eighth feature, made when he was 33, the work of a fresh and untried voice. But that's kind of exactly the way it feels: like an explosive volley from the id of some mad, unfocused genius who wanted to puke up some kind of incredibly personal and idiosyncratic new cinema onto the screen without formal training or any sense what he could and couldn't get away with. When that kind of untrammeled creativity meets with the relative classicism and polish of someone with De Palma's professional background, the results are formidable indeed: it's one of those miraculous "only in the '70s" movies that required the full faith and backing of a major studio despite how transparently the massively strange product was going to be a flop. Which it was, everywhere, except for the city of Winnipeg.

The title clues us in that this is to be, at some level, a dressed-up adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera; it's also clear within minutes of the film's start that it's going to combine that story with the evergreen Faust legend (and this is does fairly well, though there's a stretch in the second act where the Phantom elements feel rather indifferently tacked-on). We are told in an opening narration by none other than Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame that the music world, circa 1974, is totally dominated by the machinations of Swan (Paul Williams), a genius label owner and manager with the power to create or destroy any music artist he wants. His current favorites are the immensely popular '50s throwback boy band the Juicy Fruits, whom he plans to use as the main act at the opening of his extraordinary new club, the Paradise. And one day after a Juicy Fruits rehearsal, he hears exactly the piece of music he wants them to play at that most august event: an ambitious cantata adapting the Faust legend into the modern day, written by earnest nerd Winslow Leach (William Finley). Swan has his hatchet man, Philbin (George Memmoli) promise a recording contract to Winslow, in order to acquire the music, but this is a fake-out; when Winslow shows up demanding an audience with Swan, he's framed as a drug dealer and sent to Sing Sing.

Eventually he escapes, and in an attempt to disrupt Swan's plans, he falls afoul of a record press, mangling his face and vocal cords. This doesn't slow down his attempts to stop the Paradise from opening; he steals a costume and skulks around, sabotaging whatever he can from the shadows. Swan quickly assumes it's easier to join forces than fight this phantom, and offers Winslow a contract, larded up with curiously Satanic passages about the ownership of souls. Given the chance to regain control of his Faust, Winslow leaps for it, and also uses it as an opportunity to give the pretty back-up singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper) a chance to have her wonderful voice give life to his music. But Swan, being the Devil, has plenty of double-crosses left to play, and the opening of the Paradise will still be on his terms, no matter what control Winslow thinks he has.

Recasting Phantom - or at least the 1943 Universal pictures adaptation of the book - as a satire of the 1970s music industry is already a bit batty, and it's the most levelheaded thing that De Palma's film ever does. Phantom of the Paradise is equal parts compendium of the director's interests as a cinephile - Touch of Evil and (naturally) Psycho are among the classics to be explicitly referenced - and showcase for the young Turk's visual flair. That same Touch of Evil homage doubles-down on Orson Welles by including two long tracking shots, presented side-by-side in split-screen, and occasionally showing the same action from different angles; it's the moment that most expressly looks forward to the De Palma of the future in a film that otherwise feels more like some unimaginable combination of Ken Russell and Peter Bogdanovich. Throughout, the director and cinematographer Larry Pizer favor extravagantly wide lenses, giving even the most innocuous moments a bulbous exaggeration that leaves the whole thing feeling utterly demented.

It doesn't take camera trickery to make Phantom of the Paradise look demented, though; the film's design is, as a whole, thoroughly crazed, creating a world of weird interior spaces that have one foot in reality and one foot in an acid trip, populated by some dazzlingly colorful make-up and costume designs slapped onto the game actors. And some of the actors don't even need that: in the central roles, Finley and Williams look like caricatures come to life, with the former's wild-eyed expressions and the latter's compact build and scrunched-up facial features (not to mention his snake-baby voice) making instant, profound impressions even before the plot kicks in.

The oddball imagery fits perfectly with the loopy sense of humor that De Palma uses to bring his unclassifiable hybrid of horror, parody, satire, and head comedy to life. It's probably not fair to say that Phantom of the Paradise is as-such funny; the closest it comes to outright jokes are the songs generously scattered throughout it, all of them written by Williams in a series of pastiches on '50s dead boyfriend anthems, surf rock tributes to cars, theatrical glam rock, and moony singer-songwriter ballads (and then there's the matter of the end-credits tune, "The Hell of It", a menacing combination of acerbic character assassination and jaunty piano riffs from out of the Old West) - a delightful soundtrack all told, one that's proudly campy and sly.

But I was about to talk about the comedy in the film, or anyway the lack of it. Phantom of the Paradise isn't really comic; but it's unstintingly absurd, far too random and lighthearted to function as any sort of horror, no matter how hard the images and plot nudge us in that direction. It's impossible to pin it down to genre, so even as the plot clicks out in exactly the way you assume it will (until it goes Surrealist in the last third), there's never a chance to get out ahead of the film. It always darts in its own direction, and watching it is a constant effort to keep up with its inventive insanity.

It's bravura cinematic spectacle with just enough literary antecedent and social commentary that it doesn't come across as shallow as the word "spectacle" implies. But the spectacle is still pretty wonderful: it's as wild and yet consistent in its aesthetics as anything I've seen of De Palma's (which is, to be fair, not very much), and certainly more exhilarating than some of his more iconic but also more containable efforts. It is silly and stylish in exactly the right measures, a hugely fun exercise in demented excess that launches acidic critiques at everything it can, without ever feeling the slightest bit sour. If it sometimes allows its twitchy weirdness to serve as its own justification, well, it works hard to earn that weirdness, and it's enormously satisfying to watch it sprawl out over the film's unrelenting 92 minutes.

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BEST SHOT: PARIS IS BURNING

My favorite episodes of Hit Me with Your Best Shot are invariably those where Nathaniel throws the widest curveball, and this week's subject is certainly that. For the first time in six seasons, he's assigned a documentary: the critically acclaimed, groundbreaking Paris Is Burning, a 1990 film about the drag ball culture in New York in the late 1980s. It's been on my must-watch list for ages, and it deserves every inch of its reputation. The subculture it depicts hasn't really become any better-known in the intervening quarter of a century, even though elements of it have become damn near mainstream, so the documentary's mission of exploring the very unique behavior and vocabulary of its chosen subject, in considerably detail and with zealous ethnographic objectivity, remains fresh and interesting; meanwhile, the film has also taken on the quality of a time capsule, bringing life back into a long-dead portion of New York. It has aged as well as a documentary possibly can, all the more so since its trenchant depiction of the pressure points in America along racial, economic, and gender-identity lines applies every bit as well to life in 2015 as in 1990, sadly.

All that being said, this is not "Hit Me with Your Best Short-Form Review". And selecting a documentary for this game makes for an unusual challenge. Watching a documentary with an eye towards picking a single image from it proved to be a revelatory experience: it reveals how much this particular documentary, anyway, thrives less on the narrative within the frame than the narrative that comes in the pairing of image and words - director Jennie Livingston's approach to constructing the film rather conventionally combines a wide range of narrators, over images of the things they're describing, mostly. Or sometimes the connection between speech and visual is more abstract, which is when it's at its most potent. Either way, the film works beautifully. But many of the best and most penetrating moments are too reliant on the words being spoken under the image to make their full impact.

Paris Is Burning, among a surprisingly large number of thematic strands for such a short little film (the agreed-upon running time is 71 minutes; confusingly, the version streaming on Netflix is five minutes longer), spends a great deal of time discussing appropriation as an extension of fantasy: that the drag balls provide a space for the participants to perform an identity that they don't possess, in a place where there is no judgment or danger about doing so. This includes performances of straightness, wealth, and white-collar employment in addition to performances of femininity, and my fascination with the film's class-based argument almost sent me to select a shot about how the poverty-wracked black, gay artists in the film mimic white businessmen, except that Conrado at Coco Hits New York already picked basically the exact shot I'd have used, for almost exactly the same reason.

So on to my runner-up:

There's enough of a touch of irony here that I'm pretty sure the moment was staged to a degree that most of the highly observational film isn't but then, we know from Herzog that truth is more important than scrupulous fact in the making of documentary. We have here Octavia Saint Laurent, bright shining star of the House of Saint Laurent, one of the most competitive families in the ball scene; and she is staring through the store windows at a dress by that other Saint Laurent. With one fluid pan, Livingston shows both Octavia's view of that dress, and then separates her from it through a pane of glass, a clear cage that silently reminds her and us that in the nice high class rich white people world of Yves Saint Laurent, people like Octavia and her family don't count, and indeed don't exist.

And thus, appropriation; thus the alternate reality of the balls, where the people marginalised for a kaleidoscopic array of reasons could insist on their right to be, and to live out the identity that the power structure of society at large blandly denied to them. The film discusses empowerment openly and repeatedly, but mostly only alludes to the kind of repression that the balls seek to redress; it's in a handful of individual shots and montages that mainstream culture and its normalising straightness is depicted with explicit force. And none of those moments are so persuasive and effect as this, where the simple elegance of the visuals and the look of hopeful longing on Octavia's face make it clear how much she wants what's just out of her grasp. All of Paris Is Burning argues strongly for how the balls matter; this moment is the most direct argument why they matter, and for that reason it gets my vote for the best shot of a film that's made up of almost nothing but memorable moments.

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WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?

It's clear long before Maps to the Stars reaches its conclusion that whatever it finds there is going to be unfulfilling. The film thrives far too much on a shaggy, wandering tone of mystified bitterness that flares up regularly into hilarious, but pitch black comedy; it finds interesting and unexpected echoes and overlaps between scenes, some of them adjacent, some of them separated by half the movie, but its most distinctive strengths are exactly those which come about because of its momentum-free shuffling of tones, perspectives, and plot elements, and which exist in the particular absence of a clear narrative drive. It is the sort of movie which plainly announces, by the midway point, that it's going to roll to a stop somewhere, rather than build to a pointed conclusion.

So if that's the sort of thing that sounds horrible to you, it's absolutely the case that Maps to the Stars will feel like an endless slog. It certainly does not do much to avoid triggering that reaction. But on the other hand, if one can approach the film without needing it to build and build towards a fiery conclusion, there's a whole hell of a lot going on here that's absolutely terrific. The film offers its own possible framework in the form of Paul Éluard's 1942 poem Liberté, which appears here in a new translation, and is broken up and recited in chunks, repeated in no clear order, throughout the film's running time. So let us think of it thus: as a poem. It is structured not as a story, but as series of refrains and rhymes, a collection of anecdote-like scenes that are all constructed like perfect little stanzas - all with unusually clear beginnings, middles, and ends -and which draw upon a shared pool of images, concepts, and language. Themes are woven throughout, subdued and barely noticeable in some passages, foregrounded in others with the implicit invitation to compare and contrast the way those themes are developed and how they change based on context. So maybe like a symphony, in addition to a poem.

Whatever the case, it's one of the most unusual films in director David Cronenberg's highly unusual career. It feels very much like the proper follow-up to his last film, 2012's Cosmopolis, though I couldn't honestly speak to a single element of aesthetic, performance, or story where the two films actually seem to meet. Maybe it's that both of them feel like they're using literary technique bent to the very different needs of cinema. Maps to the Stars perhaps fits more snugly into the general notion of what a Cronenberg film is: it has rampant psychotic behavior, incest both accidental and deliberate, and a fixation on the way people's bodies announce who they are to the world, without necessarily doing so with any accuracy. But little flickers of Cronenbergian madness certainly feel strangely out of place in a character-driven satiric comedy soaked through with snarky inside jokes about the state of modern Hollywood - Bruce Wagner's strange and somewhat terrific screenplay (that would be the Bruce Wagner whose erratic career includes A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, the best horror sequel of the 1980s) has the smug insider vocabulary of a particularly insipid Oscar telecast, only strung along a spine of disconcerting anti-realism that makes idle comments about Anne Hathaway, Garry Marshall, and "Harvey" feel like a bad acid trip that followed a day spent devouring back issues of Entertainment Weekly.

That combination of gossipy name-dropping, parodic broadsides about how those Hollywood fuckers live, and the steady drone of Lovecraftian madness that never quite lets the film go end up making Maps to the Stars one of the indisputably oddest pop culture satires in living memory, and to my mind, a staggeringly effective one. No film has better depicted Hollywood as a fever swamp of insecurity driving people to be their worst selves, all within a slippery structure of irrationality and subjective editing, since at least Full Frontal, and I realise that invoking that film as a comparison - and particularly a positive one - says more about me than about either movie. But they're working in similar territory, trying to explode the idea of stardom with the righteous rage of outsiders attempting to break cinematic language as a way of demonstrating the vapidity of the people who construct cinema.

I've gone a long way without even hinting at the plot, though that's at least in part because Maps to the Stars resists a plot synopsis. But here goes anyway: the film presents interrelated stories of Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an aging movie star trying to land the part her dead, (maybe) sexually abusive mother played in a movie that's going to be remade; her massage therapist and TV self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), husband to Christina (Olivia Williams), the surly manager of their 13-year-old son Benjie (Evan Bird), a foul-mouthed narcissist who's just leaving rehab. Slashing across these lives is Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a recent transplant to Los Angeles, covered in burn scars, who lands a job as Havana's new personal assistant, and has connections to the Weisses that the film smartly doesn't try to pretend should be a shocking revelation, but simply runs with as soon as enough evidence has piled up that we can start to put things together.

The film touches on themes about how acting can serve to knock one's sense of self out of order, and not just the acting that's done by professionals in front of cameras; but the more rewarding elements are those related to the insistence of the past in interfering with the present, with people having a difficult time grasping the reality of death, with how movies and the movie industry serve as a giant machine for trying to enable people to pretend that death doesn't exist, that stars are ageless, and so on and so forth. The best way it builds its ideas is through that poetic repetition; the way that things like burning, visitations from ghosts, specific lines of dialogue and images, all keep repeating in different places. It's complex without being terribly confusing, though the effect is more impressionistic than movies tend to be.

None of which should be meant to imply that Maps to the Stars is up its own ass, though I guess it probably is. On top of everything, it's frequently hilarious - there are multiple lines of dialogue so crude, absurd, or frequently both, that they're likely to hold on as some of the funniest things said in American theaters in 2015 - and brilliantly acted: Moore, who won the Best Actress award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, is the clear stand-out, plunging fearlessly into a desperately pathetic shell of a person, raging and awful but also so helpless that even at her most hateful, we feel sorry for her. Wasikowska is miraculously enigmatic without feeling inhuman, and Cusack mixes smarmy hucksterism, outbursts of violence, and sweaty terror in perfect balance, to achieve one of the best performances of his career. But the whole cast is great, with Bird being perhaps understandably swamped by his powerhouse co-stars.

It's not a film for everybody, though I suspect it's for more people than are likely to encounter it. Cronenberg and Wagner are up to some very peculiar things here, but the film offers plenty of entry points (its comedy, its relatively obvious and straightforward symbolism, the almighty Moore in her most commending and grabby performance since... Christ, a long time, The Hours at least) that make it rather surprisingly entertaining for something so rabidly artsy and anti-commercial. At any rate, you're not going to bump into anything else this year that resembles it much at all, and for that, I can only offer praise.

9/10

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THE LOVE OF GOD

A review requested by Bryan L, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

To begin with, it's a biopic - and does any genre so reliably connote "this is a well-polished and achingly handsome lump of Serious Art that's not terribly artistic and even less entertaining" than the biopic? And not just any biopic - it's part of maybe the most diabolically prestigious and inert subgenre, the biopic of an important classical musician, which has produced such ever-forgettable lead weights as The Great Waltz (Johann Strauss) and A Song to Remember (Frédéric Chopin), and has stretched all the way into the 21st Century with the likes of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Besides, it's a powerfully murky biopic: the incredibly famous title character isn't actually the subject or the protagonist, but in deference to his fame, the movie keeps ceding huge chunks of attention to him that leave it damned confusing what the actual story is that the filmmakers aimed to tell.

And yet, Amadeus is one of the best American films of the 1980s. So it just goes to show, never prejudge.

The 1984 film is based on the 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who did a rather thorough job of re-imagining the material for its journey into cinemas, but either way, the core is the same: the relationship of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), between Mozart's 1781 arrival in Vienna, where Salieri served as artistic director for the Italian operas of the Hapsburg court, and the former's death in that city in 1791, at the age of 35. It is an enormously fictionalised version of that story, though it should be pointed out that the single biggest lie that Amadeus has popularised - that a jealous Salieri murdered Mozart with poison - is one that the film very specifically and as a key element of its plot doesn't depict (it also doesn't, technically, indicate that Salieri was a mediocre hack, only that he perceived himself as such relative to Mozart. And so these two unfair characterisations of Salieri - the talentless murderer - are the film's great popular legacies through no fault of its own).

So disinterested is Shaffer in actual sober history, in fact, that to call Amadeus a biography, in either medium, is something of an inaccuracy. It's more of a psychological fable told using real historical figures to give it an imposing weight; that, and to celebrate in front of the widest available audience the peerless sophistication and beauty of Mozart's music, lengthy passages of which are played all throughout the rather long movie as Shaffer hands enormous blocks of dialogue to Abraham to elucidate using only somewhat dumbed-down musicology exactly what it is about Mozart that should cause all of us to regard him as one of the half-dozen greatest composers of music in the history of European culture.

And that's a great and worthy goal, one that Amadeus only slightly muffs by handing off all of its music cues to the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, who generally leans on an annoying tendency to rush through the music like he's terrified of losing his dinner reservation. But ultimately, "provide a showcase for Mozart's Greatest Hits" isn't remotely the reason that Amadeus is great drama and great cinema (many a tepid workaday biopic has also been a splendid Greatest Hits showcase).

For that, we turn instead to the excellent performances and cutting characterisations in the script, as well as the vivid and fleshy production overseen by director Miloš Forman, in what I will happily identify as his best work in English. The film is not the first nor the last, but among the most successful of all attempts to revivify a culture dead for 200 years using sharp contemporary style; the vast majority of costume dramas have a marked tendency to look poised, stuffed, and mounted, but in the hands of Forman, who came of age in the raw, direct naturalism of the Czech New Wave, 18th Century Vienna is full of sarcasm and ass-kissing and bitterness and flustered movement just like the contemporary world. It's a period film that was shot as though it took place in modern-day Los Angeles; Forman and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (who'd worked with the director, on and off, from the beginning of both their careers) don't both with painterly lighting or compositions, in some desperate attempt to ape Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (which perfected that style and has never been remotely equaled); they dive right in and capture the color, line, and texture of the dressed-up Prague locations, and of Theodor Pištěk's costumes (rather more fanciful than accurate) with the same intention to find the blunt reality of things that served them as young Czechs attempting to tear holes in the fabric of Communism.

This unsentimental way of film interiors and exteriors alike with a kind of blank-faced present-ness is perfectly matched by the two most important performances, Abraham's and Hulce's - the cast as a whole is wildly inconsistent, ranging from Jeffrey Jones's marvelously and perfectly unfocused Emperor Joseph II, to Elizabeth Berridge's whingey, breathy take on Mozart's wife, but it's essentially a two-hander with a lot of people standing on the sidelines cheering. It's not always subtle acting that's going on: theater actor Hulce's only meaningfully visible film role to that point was in the low-brow comedy Animal House, and he brings a lot of that exact energy to his manic, filthy Mozart, with an unavoidably irritating laugh. Abraham is a bit more nuanced, mostly because the character he's playing is a facile liar, who does his level best to seem pleasant when he is scheming and wrathful. What matters about both of them, mostly, is their resolute modernism: the very conscious layering of psychology and the small physical gestures (Abraham's performance as an old man recounting the story to an increasingly horrified priest is full of some absurdly wonderful facial expressions and gestures - his inward-looking smugness on "Everybody liked me. I liked myself" is my favorite beat in the entire film) that speak to fussy stage-trained acting, and that fills this very old-fashioned mise en scène with very hard contemporary attitude that goes beyond such things as the evocation of punk rockers in Hulce's wigs. It is a study of 20th Century attitudes towards jealousy and faith that places 20th Century men, incongruously but effectively, into 1780s Vienna and does not comment on it.

But in that very lack of commentary, Amadeus comes alive. It's not the kind costume drama that brings a long-dead place back to life; while the film's Vienna is persuasive, and Twyla Tharp's staging of several Mozart operas winningly looks back the poshest stagecraft of a long-dead era, and the film-long obsession with food of the Viennese upper classes (which serves more as a character detail for Salieri than a piece of world-building) is lavish, if not always totally appetizing, it would be difficult to argue for Amadeus the merit of scrupulous historical accuracy. The dialogue doesn't support that; the general indifference to verifiable facts in the matter of its subjects' lives certainly doesn't support that. The film triumphs above all things as a character study, played by two remarkably fine actors in peak form, providing a chance for its very modern audience to reflect on very recognisable feelings of envy towards people we know damn good and well to be more capable than ourselves, "fairness" be damned; the period trappings are, as much as they are anything, a way of heightening those feelings by making them seem weird and fresh.

Or even more simply: the thing Amadeus primarily depicts, biopically-speaking, is the writing of operas - a dramatic form in which strong emotions are presented in a heavily artificial matrix of absurd plot and florid singing. And because of that artifice, the emotions are more immediately accessible. And that's basically the exact same thing Amadeus is doing: the mechanism of the artifice is different, but the intensity, lack of subtlety, and thus the accessibility, they're all the same. It's a prose opera. Form and content meet and seamlessly blend. Terrific stuff.

N.B. I: To prove that I can be at least a little bit critical, take a gander at that tagline. "The man... The music... The madness... The murder... The motion picture". Is that not literally the worst copy in the history of film advertising?

N.B. II: There exists a director's cut; it is far easier to see the film in that format now than its original theatrical version. I prefer the older, shorter cut; the extended version overexplains things that were perfectly clear without being laboriously spelled out, and it badly affects the flow of a 160-minute film that starts to feel puffy at three hours. One might say, of the theatrical cut, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall".

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LOVE IN THE TIME OF CON

Having thought about it for a couple of days now, I still haven't decided if Focus is particularly enjoyable and solidly-crafted for a bad movie, or if it's extremely inconsistent and frustrating for a good movie. I think I ultimately tend towards the latter, if only because no project that depends so successfully on movie star charisma to drive its everything can be truthfully called bad, not in these benighted days when our movie stars are abandoning us. And it is fair to point out that only one-half of the leads of Focus can rightfully be called a "movie star" - Will Smith, making his first movie for adults in seven years - Margot Robbie absolutely throws off the kind of casual, gorgeous, screen-grabbing performance that would immediately confirm her as a movie star if that's still the way things worked.

Smith plays Nicky Spurgeon, a legend in the world of con artists; Robbie plays Jess Barrett, a rank amateur who tries to play him one night in New York, with a sex-based con that she and her partner rush through, and which Nicky has figured out almost the second it starts. This lights enough of a fire under Jess that she chases Nicky to New Orleans, where he's leading a veritable army of grifters and conmen on a spree of pickpocketing and other minor tricks for extracting money from the clueless and ignorant. He takes her under his wing, teaches her the tricks of the trade, all while starting to fall in love with her, and she with him. Ah, but alas! this too is a con, and he's actually only been faking the whole thing so she'll better play her part in the mother of all cons, paying out beautifully for all concerned. And while Jess gets her fair share, the heartbreak isn't worth it. Three years later, their paths cross again in Buenos Aires, as Nicky finds himself selling his skills to a racing team owner, Rafael Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro), who wants to fix a race he's already likely to win. And this is a task the sullen, dead-eyed Nicky is fine to grind through, until he learns that Garriga happens to be Jess's new lover - and it turns out that he wasn't faking things with her after all, since having her thrust back into his life proves to throw him wildly off his game.

It's nice when things are simple, and the problem with Focus is such a thing: the first half of the film, in New Orleans, is delightful. The second half, in Buenos Aires, isn't. Not that the first half is flawless, any more than the second half is a wall-to-wall disaster, but the fact remains that Focus is basically two entirely self-contained movies wedged together, and rebooting into the second causes no end of problems for the filmmakers Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (who both write and direct). For one thing, the first half is told basically through Jess's perspective, while the second is through Nicky's; that's the kind of structural fancy-dancing that could easily result in a compelling mash-up of perspectives, but it's not what Focus is interested in, and the result is a confusion of focal points and anchors for the audience that leaves the film struggling to pick back up. It's easy to see what the film is aiming for, especially as it heads into its final twist, and the parallels between the halves start to strengthen themselves; it just doesn't get to where it wants to go.

The other big problem is almost as simple, though not quite as explicable. The best parts of the film, almost indisputably, I'm tempted to say, are those which center on the art of the con; when it is more concerned with the relationship between Nicky and Jess, it deflates badly (this is another reason why the second half is so much weaker than the first; the con involved with the race car trickery is not, to begin with, anywhere near as delightful in its complexity as the final reveals, or as the first half's litany of well-executed grifts). It's honestly kind of bizarre that this should be the case, since the film so persuasively argues that executing cons is how these two characters flirt, and the relaxed sexual chemistry between Robbie and Smith is certainly the strongest individual element in the film. But it only works when it's sublimated underneath sleek style and smooth patter; every time the film turns to focus on the flirting, sexiness, and attraction without filtering it, everything goes to hell. Part of this maybe can be blamed on Smith, who lets things get too serious (Robbie does a good job of keeping even the bleakest moments she has to play fizzy and tossed-off). Mostly, I suspect it's just that the film's lithe style works better when it stays at the level of shallow fun, and that Ficarra & Requa have a hard time recalibrating for actual emotions.

That all being true, when Focus works, it's absolutely splendid, a sugary sweet cocktail of glossy cinematography and editing that make all of the mechanics of conning hum and whir with expert cleanliness, while showing off the stars to absolute best effect. The pleasures of a movie that's willing to bask in having pretty people thrown up onto a huge screen should not be denied, and when those pretty people are so able to tap into the exact tonal register the film needs - in this case, peppy and confident dialogue mixed with a constant unspoken "I know more than you do and I am not going to rest till I prove it" tension that adds some quiet antagonism to the flirting - it can be an outright boon. The razzle-dazzle elements of Focus are terrific, and they exude a breezy refusal to be too serious that makes it easy to enjoy the small spectacle of watching professionals execute reasonably simple tasks flawlessly. A description that applies to the filmmakers and cast as much as to it does to the characters. The film bogs down, certainly, and it bogs down in some very damaging places. But it soars just enough to be, on balance, an enjoyable bit of fluff.

6/10

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