Ever since I moved here in 2006, NZIFF has been a highlight of the calendar year, a time when Auckland gets to pretend it’s the centre of the cinematic universe for a week or so and enjoy the buzziest hits from Cannes, amazing revival classics and hidden gems that change your brain. I’ve watched dozens and dozens of NZIFF movies over the last 16 years, and I missed it dearly in these Covid days.
This year’s festival isn’t quite up to full speed compared with the before times – it is shorter and smaller – but I still managed to catch several great films this week mostly at Auckland’s legendarily awesome Civic Theatre, the best place in New Zealand to watch a movie.
I love my Marvel cinematic universe and all that jazz, but a well-curated film fest is a whole different vibe, one that engages new parts of the brain. It celebrates the communal joys of art, too – at a time when doing anything as a community feels a bit fraught, it’s good to be reminded there are benefits to it.
I would’ve liked to fit more in my schedule, but only four movies made the cut for me this year. I watched an intimate and witty documentary on the late great author, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time; South Korean icon Park Chan-Wook’s exquisitely crafted twisty romantic detective thriller Decision To Leave; the harrowing and weirdly life-affirming documentary about two married volcanologists Fire Of Love, and this year’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner, the scabrously funny, filthy Swedish satire Triangle of Sadness.
Triangle of Sadness is a divisive movieamong the critics but in a packed gorgeous old cinema, this barbed attack on influencer culture and the privilege of the wealthy felt like a perfect film festival experience. A story of two young and vapid gorgeous people who end up on a cruise ship that turns into a Lord of the Flies-esque fiasco complete with plentiful vomiting and even worse, it’s not subtle. It’s not a deep satire, and it might be a little long. Yet its outraged, shouty and impotent tone somehow seems to mirror the weirdness that is life in 2022. It’s the movie for the moment, as we’re all a little bit stuck in our own personal cruise ship voyages from hell. In the end, you have to laugh about how absurd everything is, don’t you?
Without a film festival to gather up all the visions of the world, from South Korean noir to Swedish ennui, it’d be a bit harder to see these things, these perspectives. To be in a crowded cinema (mostly mask-wearing, thankfully) and laughing and gasping over the world together seems a bit naughty, a bit daring these days.
I missed that vibe, and even if the crises roiling the world are hardly over, it feels good to laugh together, for a moment, at a film festival.
Like any child in the pre-internet era, I spent an awful lot of time watching cartoons. I watched the good, the bad and the ugly.
I’d watch Flintstones and Jetsons, Woody Woodpecker and G.I. Joe, Super Friends and Yogi Bear. A lot of the worst featured sub-par animation where only characters’ mouths moved jerkily, or backgrounds that appeared to be made on a rusty photocopier.
Always in the top tier, of course, were Disney and Warner Brothers. Disney made some ground-breaking, amazing animation, and set the standard. But when it comes to the best – the toons that make you feel glad to be on this planet, the ones you’d watch again and again – I’m a Looney Tunes man through and through.
Even as a kid, I knew that the half-hour or so of vintage Looney Tunes cartoons that played weekday afternoons were something special.
As I limp my way into mid-middle age, I still find comfort in binging a handful of Warner Bros’ seven-minute gems, still as hilarious and free-wheeling as they were decades ago. Time has rubbed some of that rebellious edge off the Looney Tunes – I know there have been cartoons starring them since the original run ended in 1969, but watching Bugs play basketball with NBA stars just ain’t the same to me as having him run rings around Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck in the “rabbit season” trilogy. The originals remain the peak of the animation form and a showcase for sheer mad creativity.
Bugs is always funny, Daffy is reliably explosive, Porky amiably daft, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner Shakespearean in their eternal struggle, and even Foghorn Leghorn’s blowhard act raises a chuckle from me. (Let’s not talk too much about Speedy Gonzales or Pepe Le Pew, though.) There’s a lot of formula and a few bucketloads of caffeinated frenzy over the 900 or so Looney Tunes, of course, and I heartily recommend only watching a half-dozen or so in one sitting lest all the ACME equipment and carrot-chewing permanently liquify your brain.
But watching some of these cartoons for the 10th or 20th time in my life, I’m struck the most these days by the sheer hand-hewn artistry of them all. Pixar and its computer-generated toon spawn have entertained and delighted us all too, but there is something tangible and awe-inspiring about watching the OG toons, where every single line was drawn by a probably chain-smoking, squinting human being.
Animation is a form where innovation led to an explosion of energy, Reid Mitenbuler writes in his highly entertaining recent history of the early years of the form, Wild Minds.
Walt Disney became the biggest household name, but the likes of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Mel Blanc, Frank Tashlin and many more shaped the anarchic spirit of animation and shook up Disney’s tendency for stuffiness. The Looney Tunes may have been repetitive – coyote chases road runner, hunter chases duck, cat chases bird – but it was the ceaseless creative invention around the margins of these blueprints that still amuses today.
To get a real feeling for the artistry of these gents, watch some of a Looney Tunes cartoon some time frame by frame. (You can pull one up on YouTube and pause it, then press the “.” key to do just that.)
It’s astonishing to watch the carefully hand-drawn antic life in these drawings, more than 50 years on. No short-cuts, none of that partial animation that made my childhood “Super Friends” toons seem so static. In motion, these moments sometimes pass so quickly they’re as zippy as the Tasmanian Devil.
That didn’t stop the geniuses from labouring over every single line and contorted facial expression. Frozen in time, you see the craft that went into it all. That’s what makes them art.
What is it: Foxy Brown is one of a series of blaxsploitation films starring Pam Grier in the early 1970s, which directly inspired her being cast as the star in Quentin Tarantino’s excellent noir, 1997’s Jackie Brown. Grier is Foxy, who’s got a cop boyfriend and a drug dealer brother. When the brother snitches out her boyfriend to the gangs, Foxy sets out for revenge in top blaxsploitation style. Foxy goes undercover with a prostitution ring (!) to avenge her losses, but things go south and she’s captured and brutalised. But when Foxy makes her move to escape, things get very bloody very quickly as the bodies pile up.
Why I never saw it: Blaxsploitation is a tricky genre to watch in 2022. You either roll with it, enjoy some of the camp/kitsch value and accept it as a portrait of the times, or you’re kind of horrified by the casual racism, sexism and violence. I do love a gritty, sleazy ‘70s crime movie, though, and where blaxsploitation stood out from more mainstream fare like The French Connection is in casting Black actors in the leading roles, making stars out of previously marginalised figures like Shaft’s Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson or Jim Brown. Grier was the star of several of several major movies of the era, and Tarantino himself called her cinema’s first female action star. On the other hand, I’m a middle-aged American-born white guy, so it’s not quite my place to wade too deeply into the ambiguities of what blaxsploitation meant. It provided some strong Black heroic figures on screen, but also saddled them in crime- and drug-drenched movies that wallowed in a lot of stereotypes.
Does it measure up to its rep? Grier’s Foxy is a typical Death Wish-styled exploitation movie archetype – the gentle person who turns into a murderous killer. Unfortunately, that means in Foxy Brown the lead suffers some horrendous abuse, including being injected with heroin and raped by thugs. The queasy hardcore intensity of those scenes viewed in modern times linger and make it a bit harder to enjoy when Foxy tears loose and has her revenge. And trust me – she gets her revenge, notably in a remarkably gory bit of retribution upon the leading white male villain at the climax. You don’t see this kind of revenge in Tom Cruise movies!
There’s a groovy aesthetic to Foxy Brown I can’t help but dig, from the James Bond-style opening credits to the way Grier shifts from demure girlfriend to striking leather-clad figure of vengeance, dazzling along the way with some very hip ‘70s fashion. Remember, in 1974, a Black woman fighting back on screen and taking vengeance against white men (at one point, mocking the genital size of a slimy white authority figure she entraps!) was a novelty. Grier dominates, but she’s helped by a cast including Antonio Fargas as her jittery backstabbing brother and a weirdly so-bad-its-good over-the-top turn by Kathryn Loder as the preening, sadistic leader of the drug syndicate. Foxy Brown is the better-remembered of Grier’s movies today, but it’s actually a quasi-sequel to a slightly less exploitive and rapey film, 1973’s Coffy.
Worth seeing? Remembering this almost-50-year-old movie is utterly an artefact of its time, sure. It’ll offend some viewers coming to it cold but it’s hard to imagine anyone not finishing this being a little bit impressed by Grier’s kick-ass warrior, even if you’re put off by the sleazier side of the storytelling. Coffy is the better movie, but perhaps Foxy Brown better sums up the messy, yet empowering allure of blaxsploitation even now – with Grier’s powerhouse performance, despite all the violence, rape and sexism, it’s still at its heart a movie about standing up for yourself in a crappy world and sticking it to the man – whoever and whatever that may be.
Look, I’m a New Zealander and a comics geek, so you better believe I’m excited to see homegrown talent Taika Waititi’s new Thor: Love And Thunder come out this week. And it looks set to expand the Marvel pantheon to the Greek gods, with Russell Crowe’s Zeus prominent in the trailers.
Where Zeus goes, will Hercules follow? Marvel Comics’ version of Hercules has always been simmering somewhere around the B-list, and while the demigod Hercules has been around for eons as mythology and heroic TV and movie character, the Marvel-fied version of him has yet to debut in the MCU.
I always kind of dug Marvel’s Hercules, who was a lot more relatable than Thor in the comics. He was a hard-drinking brawler who loved to share “the gift” (of combat!) with everyone he met.
It’s easy to forget now with Chris Hemsworth’s winningly loose performance as the God of Thunder, but Thor was a lot less bro-tastic in the comics at first. When he debuted, Thor spoke a lofty, faux-Shakespearean prose, and even had a secret identity of sorts, a human named Don Blake he was cursed to transform into regularly. Thor began to loosen up in the comics after decades, but for years he was kind of a dull stiff. I’ve grown to appreciate the epic scope of those early Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Thor adventures more, but when I first came to comics, Thor often seemed a boring straight man. It took the energy of creators like Walt Simonson, Dan Jurgens and Jason Aaron to give him some much-needed life.
To be honest, the MCU’s Thor owes a lot more of his character to Marvel’s Hercules. Thor’s stiffness was once a counterpoint to Hercules’ looseness, but if you squint now the characters are pretty similar.
Now, Hercules – he was a slightly dopey bro-god from the start, impulsive and always with a flagon of ale nearby, right from his first appearance wrestling with Thor. But there’s only so many roles for god/superhero characters even somewhere as big as the Marvel universe, so Hercules was mostly related to supporting turns in Thor as a frenemy pal, some memorable runs in The Avengers and even the awesomely odd mix of characters in the short-lived 1970s Champions superteam. He’s had a few brief solo series of his own, including an excellent relatively recent run by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lante.
But the first exposure I ever had to Marvel’s Hercules was Bob Layton’s superb 1982 miniseries, an offbeat comic odyssey that wasn’t quite like anything else Marvel was putting out at the time. Hercules: Prince of Power took place in the distant future, where a still-carousing Hercules is once again banished from Olympus by his angry father Zeus, and ends up heading to the stars and having galactic adventures. Liberated from the bonds of regular continuity, Hercules could have universe-changing escapades and there was a goofy freedom to it all. Palling around with robots and Skrulls, Herc showed that being a god was kind of fun.
Hercules: The Prince of Power was side-splittingly funny (name another comic that features Galactus getting drunk), but it also treated the demigod seriously. Perpetually immature, Hercules is still burdened by the weight of the years and his feats. In several sequel miniseries and graphic novels, Bob Layton proved one of Hercules’ finest chroniclers. At its heart the Hercules miniseries by Layton addressed the central question of godhood – what would it really be like to live forever? Would you learn anything or keep making the same mistakes over and over?
Marvel’s Hercules may or may not get a shot at wide cinematic universe fame at some point – hell, when She-Hulk, Rocket Raccoon and Ant-Man have all become household names, who knows? But I’d like to think he’s already had his impact, behind the scenes, by inspiring Thor to loosen the hell up.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a delirious, caffeinated roller-coaster of a music biopic, taking the essence of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and shaking it up like a jug of Mountain Dew. It isn’t entirely true, nor does it try to be, but for much of its epic 159-minute running time, it’s vastly entertaining.
Like the director’s Moulin Rouge and Great Gatsby, Elvis is all about style and razzle-dazzle. It’s bold, loud and occasionally bad but it captures the kinetic shock of Elvis’ impact on pop culture better than any other biopic of the man has done. It’s about Elvis as legend, really, a fable imagining the life of the boy from Tupelo.
Luhrmann does cast an eye over the scope of Elvis’ brief 42 years on Earth, but in a fragmented, kaleidoscopic fashion. Like his Gatsby, Baz mixes in modern hip-hop and rock sounds to attempt to show a through-line from Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” to Doja Cat and Diplo. We flash back to Elvis’ impoverished boyhood, his love for Black music and his devil’s bargain with Colonel Tom Parker, the man who would guide – and some say crush the creativity out of – his career. We’ve seen Elvis slowly get reclaimed from the land of fat jokes the past decade or two, and Baz takes him seriously.
Elvis, a god-fearing mama’s boy, was also a precursor of punk rock – shaking up the system and terrifying the powers that be with his hip-shaking, lip-curling presence. Austin Butler at first seems a bit too pretty and polished to be Elvis, but he really grows on you, especially when he hits the stage for some utterly dynamic numbers. From his first appearances on the Louisiana Hayride to his comeback special to his final sad, dazed shows in Vegas, Luhrmann delivers astonishingly visceral recreations. There are moments when Butler’s on stage miming the King that I honestly couldn’t tell him and Presley apart.
Tom Hanks’s scenery-chewing Colonel is a love-it or hate-it creation, speaking in a strange whispery, sing-songy carny barker’s tone and draped in a distracting fat suit. And yet, I liked Hanks, because he understands that to play this character you’ve got to go campy and broad, to embrace the Mephistophelean hold that Parker had on Elvis. Whispering promises and lies like an Iago to Elvis’ Othello, in real life Parker was actually a Dutch native who fled to America under a cloud of scandal and reinvented himself as a huckster. (The excellent biography The Colonel by Alanna Nash goes far more into depth about who Parker really was, which the movie only really alludes to.)
If Elvis peaks during the astounding recreations of his musical numbers, it falters a bit during sappy family drama, and despite its length it tends to zip through the life story, dispatching his time in the Army and movie career in about five minutes. Nobody other than Elvis and the Colonel is given much depth in the movie (Priscilla Presley suffers particularly) and for all the gloss the rise-and-fall-and-rise drama of Elvis apes a million other cinematic biographies.
And this is a fable, make no mistake – Elvis painted as a victim and the less savoury parts of his character brushed aside. The movie leans into his appreciation and inspirations from Black music (which he did have, although the movie exaggerates that a little too much) and ignores questioning the questions that raises about authenticity. It acts as if he wasn’t also a huge fan of white country and gospel artists. I don’t think Elvis was a fierce racist as some do, but he was also very much a product of his time, dirt-poor Mississippi.
There’s a lot of fun-house distortion of history here, but I don’t think this film is trying to ape, say, the thoroughness of the definitive Elvis biography by Peter Guralnick. It’s all about the spectacle in the end, and that’s where Elvis truly delivers. I wouldn’t point this movie at anyone who wants a high-fidelity biography of the man, but if you want to imagine the impact he had, the seismic force of those wiggles and moans on stage almost 70 years ago now and why it still matters today, it’s not a bad place to start.
What is it: Today, of all days, you know who this guy is. He’s the hockey mask-wearing serial killer who starred in about a jillion gory movies between 1980 and 2003 or so (to be precise, 10 Friday the 13th movies, one reboot, and one “team-up” with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger). The sixth instalment, Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, is the charmingly low-key story of a boy with a dream … a dream which involves killing lots of teenagers.
Why I never saw it: To be blunt, Jason scared me. I was an ‘80s horror movie buff – I loved Nightmare On Elm Street, even the awful ones, and it’s not unfair to say that David Cronenberg’s The Flychanged my life. I grooved on The Lost Boysand The Thing.Yet, for years, I was repelled and a little freaked out by the Jason movies, which were culturally everywhere in the ‘80s – parodied in Mad magazine, homaged by other movies, et cetera. Jason was of course a bit of a rip-off of John Carpenter’s Halloween and its own stalking silent killer Michael Myers, but there was something even more bleak and disturbing about his hockey-masked visage – a blank white canvas with staring eye-holes where a soul might be. He lacked the elegance of a Dracula or the pathos of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. All he did was kill. I even remember seeing the paperback adaptation of Jason Lives sitting on the racks in our local Kmart as a kid, where I’d flip through the pages each time I saw it – figuring it was less horrifying than seeing the movies themselves. These movies seemed more terror than horror to me – I like my horror movies with a dollop of wit in there, and sight unseen, the reputation of the Jason movies is that they were brutal, nihilistic gore-fests without the cheesy parody that made Freddy Krueger or Evil Dead II a bit more, well, loveable.
Does it measure up to its rep? Do the Friday the 13th movies have a rep, outside of horror aficionados? It turns out, years later, some of them aren’t really all that bad, although I’ve still only seen a handful of them – and I’m fond of the weirder later entries like the insanely over-the-top Freddy Vs Jason monster mash, or the absurdist “let’s just send the serial killer into space in the future, then” comedy of Jason X. But to see Jason in his pure, summer camp ghoul element, you’ve got to go back a bit. The Friday The 13th series has a weird chronology – Jason himself barely appears in the first one and doesn’t don that iconic hockey mask until Part III. For the next several sequels, the pattern was set – Jason returns, kills a lot, is defeated by some spunky teenager. By the time Part VI rolled around in ’86, the series was evolving from a creepy, somewhat human knife killer and the rather unstoppable demonic figure that Jason became by Jason X. If you’re imagining what a Friday the 13th movie might be like, then starting with Part VI isn’t actually a bad place to go.
Worth seeing? “Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment,” the town drunk mutters at one point, just before he gets murdered. Jason Lives is the platonic ideal of the ‘80s slasher horror movie in its mainstream moment – lifting from everything from Frankenstein to James Bond to Rambo, with beloved period cliches like the perpetually angry cops, ripped-jean and pastel fashions, synth-driven pop music, the teenagers who run around rutting every chance they get. The movie starts with a thoroughly dead Jason being accidentally resurrected by one of his teenager enemies and given new superhuman endurance, and escalates from there. You can’t expect part six of a series to bring much new to the table, but with Jason Lives the execution is glossily polished to a Tupperware shine. It’s schlock, but in the right mood it’s massively entertaining schlock, really, and less sadistic than one might expect (sure, teens die, but nobody is really tortured here – Jason is quite efficient). There’s a fair bit of humour and in-jokes here, but not enough to push it into Scream meta territory. It’s simply an effective scare-fest which isn’t trying to be clever. Sometimes, on a Friday the 13th, that’s all you really want. “It’s over. It’s finally over,” we’re told at the end. Spoiler warning: It wasn’t over.
Spoiler warnings are serious business, even if it’s harder and harder to avoid finding out things in this 24-7 endlessly scrolling world we live in without seriously muting your social media diet. But decades ago, one of the biggest movies of my lifetime got seriously spoiled by… a storybook.
Nearly 40 years on, I’m still a little annoyed about how Return Of The Jedi worked out for me.
The year 1983 was a long time before the idea of “spoiler culture” developed. Culture was typically more rooted in time. You saw a TV show when it aired, or you didn’t. You saw a movie like everyone else did during the few weeks it ran, or you didn’t and waited years for it to air on TV. If someone told you who shot JR, you just nodded. We didn’t really worry about spoilers so much then, or ponder the damage they could do.
But I’ll never forgive the Return of the Jedi Storybook which, mystifyingly, spoiled George Lucas’ sequel and quite possibly the biggest cliffhanger ending in recorded history for me weeks before the movie came out.
Let me tell you, there were few bigger dramas in the life of 12-year-old Nik and his friends than imagining for years what might have happened next after the incredibly downbeat, traumatising final scenes of Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Luke’s hand cut off! Vader his father? Han Solo locked in a block of whatever the heck carbonite was, hauled off to Jabba the Hutt?
Kids today can literally not imagine how stressful this all was. It made Avengers: Endgame seem like a cool sea breeze by comparison.
I remember watching the first trailer for Return of the Jedi with a fanboy’s anticipation. But when it came time to actually see the movie itself, I already knew what was going to happen.
I got the storybook as part of one of those nifty “school book clubs” that were all the rage back in the day, and I was kind of astonished to see that this Return of the Jedi Storybook wasn’t some fanboy collection of images and interviews, but the ENTIRE STORY of the movie, weeks before it opened. Why did I get it so early? Why did they reveal the whole story? These days, there would be media blackouts and embargoes galore, but in 1983, I guess a kid’s tie-in book wasn’t seen as a state secret.
(According to the “Wookiepedia,” which has to be authoritative with a name like that, the Jedi storybook was published May 12, 1983, about two weeks before Jedi hit theatres around May 25. In my hazy pre-teen memories, it felt like it came out months before Jedi.)
In my memory I flipped through the pages, astonished to see pictures of Luke Skywalker in stark black clothing, Jabba the Hutt, the Emperor, Leia in a fetishy slave outfit that awakened all young Nik’s carnal rumblings, and more, and the plot of the entire movie laid out in simplified easy-reader prose. The storybook was meant as a flimsy souvenir for young padawan like myself, to re-read and savour… after seeing the damned movie! I do remember feeling vaguely let down… was this the story I had hoped for the past three years? Or was I just not really enjoying seeing it in pantomime storybook form? The merits of Jedi have been argued for the past 39 years, but wherever you stand I’d argue it’s best to have actually seen the movie instead of just reading about it first.
I can’t recall clearly now if I shared the Jedi plot revelations with my friends at the time, but I probably did. I was the kind of kid who ate too much at Halloween, who sometimes snuck looks at Christmas presents. If older me had been there to Marley’s ghost himself, I’d have warned about the perils of giving in to temptation. I should have put the book in a locked safe once I realised what it was. It would’ve been a lot cooler to be surprised by the twists and turns of Return of the Jedi. It would’ve been nice.
Hell, I wouldn’t have minded being surprised by an Ewok, even.
It’s been a week for movies and the media. I was part of the team live-blogging the Oscars over at RNZ this week which, um, took an interesting turn about 2/3 of the way into the show, you might have heard.
I love it when one of my favourite things, the movies, intersects with my profession for many years now, journalism. And after the Oscars live-blogging marathon Monday night, I had to unwind with one of my favourite movies about journalism (which one? scroll to the end*, my friend).
The art and craft of journalism has long fascinated filmmakers and resulted in some terrific movies – including that one many people regard as the best of all time, Citizen Kane. I sat down to write about 10 or so of my favourite journalism movies and ended with a sprawling list. I narrowed it down, and from the start I eliminated any documentaries (which are a form of journalism itself). Ever since I was a kid, the idea of journalism has appealed to me, even if in real life it’s not all glam and scoops.
This list of my Top 10 Journalism Movies includes ones that idealise the profession like crazy, ones that just use it as a prop for a comedy or a romance, and a few that really delve into the gritty hard yards that make a truly great story. Some of them really capture what it’s like to be a journo, and some of them really capture what we all wish it was like to be a journo.
In alphabetical order:
Ace In The Hole (1951) – The late great Kirk Douglas in his finest role, as a cartoonishly conniving tabloid journalist exiled to the rural sticks who stumbles on the “story of the century” when a local man gets trapped in a cave. Billy Wilder’s cynical noir takes us deep inside the media circus that ensues, and we watch in real time as Kirk’s Chuck Tatum slowly loses what’s left of his soul. We’ve had countless “boy stuck in a well” type media sensations in the decades since, but nothing has ever captured the dark side of journalism better.
All The President’s Men (1976) – There’s no way any list of journalism movies could ignore this one. Oh, for the days when Watergate was the biggest scandal a White House could imagine. There’s no movie that shows the painstaking, frustrating detective side of journalism better than this masterpiece, with Woodward and Bernstein’s investigations portrayed with stark realism despite glossy Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing their parts. The click of typewriters and hours on the landline phone, the endless cigarettes, the newsroom almost entirely run by white men wearing ties – this is a vanished world now, and journalism is probably better for leaving a lot of that behind, but nothing quite captures what it was like “back in the day” better than this film.
Almost Famous (2000) – The life that William Miller leads in Cameron Crowe’s gentle and bittersweet coming-of-age comedy is pretty much exactly the life I imagined I might have when I started scribbling as an entertainment journalist in the mid 1990s. Spoiler: I didn’t go on tour with Stillwater or fall in love with Penny Lane. Crowe’s movie is warmly sentimental, but in the best possible way. With the acerbic interjections of the much-missed Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs to balance things out, Almost Famous shows us a fairy-tale fantasy of journalism that I can’t help falling in love with every time I watch it.
Anchorman (2004) – Absurdly goofy? Sure! The gem in Will Ferrell’s run of wacky comedies is a spoof of journalism, but it’s also subtly a very accurate satire of the alpha-male mentality that existed in newsrooms for decades, one that was still quite rampant just as I was entering the industry. It’s only in the last few decades that newsrooms have become a bit more diverse, and in between all the gags Anchorman accurately captures what it’s like when journalists start to believe their own hype and let their ego take over. (See also: Any number of the ‘outrage merchants’ who chatter and moan daily on American news networks today.)
Broadcast News (1987) – The great journalism romantic comedy, even beating out Cary Grant’s His Girl Friday. The late William Hurt, Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks are a perfect trio of striving TV journalists in the 1980s, capturing the mix of solid professionalism, glossy vapid good looks and gender battles that defined the era. James L. Brooks carefully keeps all his characters human despite their foibles, and it’s a movie that’s as much in love with journalism and it gently mocks it. And for my money, the “Albert Brooks sweating” scene is one of the funniest journalism fails ever portrayed on screen.
Citizen Kane (1941) – The grandfather of all journalism movies, even if it’s perhaps more about the corruption of power than anything else. But Orson Welles captures the era when news publishers were almost kings in his very lightly fictionalised take on William Randolph Hearst, and how Kane uses the immense power of the press to build himself a perfect world – without ever really knowing what to do once he gets it.
The French Dispatch (2021) – The newest movie on this list, Wes Anderson’s kaleidoscopic anthology imagines a series of articles in a New Yorker-type magazine in its final issue. Anderson’s unique aesthetic has never been more pronounced than it is in this incredibly dense, ornate movie, which I immediately wanted to see a second time so I could go back and catch all the jokes and references I missed the first time around.
Shattered Glass (2003) – For a while there in the pre-social media world, scandals about plagiarist journalists were all the rage. This tense and darkly funny under-seen gem looks at the curious Stephen Glass, who made up magazine scoops left and right until he was caught. Featuring a never-better performance by Hayden Christensen, who will wipe your memories entirely of his hammy Anakin Skywalker, and terrific work by Peter Sarsgaard as the editor who exposes him.
Spotlight (2015) – A solid companion to All The President’s Men, set at the twilight of a certain kind of journalism, before job cuts gutted newsrooms worldwide. This deserving Oscar winner showcases a Boston investigative journalists team and their stunning work uncovering sex abuse cover-ups within the Catholic Church. With an absolutely top-notch cast including Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Liev Schreiber, it’s another movie that patiently shows the hard, hard work that goes into breaking a massive story, and yet makes it exciting as any thriller.
Zodiac (2007) – When journalism turns into obsession. David Fincher’s sprawling, sinister epic about the hunt for San Francisco’s Zodiac killer avoids tidy serial murder movie cliches or easy closure, and somehow that makes it even more disturbing than any blood-soaked horror might. Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo are terrific as journalists who slowly lose their minds trying to find a killer, and Fincher masterfully escalates a sense of dread, which is inextricably tied to the one single question that drives almost every journalist’s career: I want to know.
Clustered together at #11: His Girl Friday, The Sweet Smell of Success, Fletch, The Paper, Good Night And Good Luck, The Philadelphia Story, Adaptation, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
(*So what did I watch after Oscars live-blogging? Well, after a night that hit the peaks of drama and absurdity, what else could I watch but Anchorman for the 458th time? What can I say … sometimes journalism really is like being trapped in a glass case of emotion.)
What is it: Long before she directed Wayne’s World, Penelope Spheeris was known as a pioneering documentary filmmaker for her chronicling of the gritty reality of LA’s music scenes. Over three films from 1981 to 1998, she covered punk and metal stars and never-weres, fans and bands with an unsparing eye. The first of her movies, 1981’s Decline of Western Civilization, looked at bands like Black Flag, Germs, X, the Circle Jerks and Fear in squalid, sweaty detail, and it’s widely regarded as one of the best music documentaries ever made.
Why I never saw it: Despite its cult status, Decline and its two sequels were barely released and almost impossible to watch for decades. Long ago, when I worked at video stores and paged through ink-stained fanzines, I’d hear about these movies a lot, but pre-YouTube or eBay, good luck ever actually watching them. Finally, a few years back, the entire series was released on DVD with a bunch of cool bonuses, and I finally sat down recently to watch them. Can punk still shock more than four decades on?
Does it measure up to its rep? Music documentaries are one of my favourite genres, whether they’re behind the scenes concert footage, making-of histories, birth-to-death storytelling or day-in-the-life voyeurism. Decline is a little bit of all of the above. These aren’t superstars – X and Black Flag are probably the best known of the bands here, and this is a pre-Henry Rollins Black Flag at that. Even by 1979 and 1980, punk was a bit past its first wave, and so you’ve got a variety of fiery young bands trying to figure out who they are – whether it’s the bludgeoning rage of Circle Jerks and Fear, the angst of Germs and Black Flag or the more arty, performative work of almost-forgotten bands like Catholic Discipline, this is a snapshot of a moment in time but an anger that’s still understandable today. We see heaps of roiling, brutal men in mosh pits, slamming against each other in an intimate way that seems even more invasive in a pandemic world. Spheeris has a knack for capturing the propulsive motion of punk, with a visceral touch that makes you feel like you’re back in these crowded, grotty rooms decades ago. We see the bands off stage – Black Flag in an insanely over-graffitied squalid crash pad, The Germs’ doomed, mumbly lead singer Darby Crash cooking eggs and playing with his pet tarantula. (Crash would be dead at 22 of a drug overdose suicide before this movie even came out.) There’s a tinge of hopelessness to Decline, especially when Spheeris talks to the fans like nihilistic skinhead Eugene, but that’s balanced out by some incredibly passionate performances, like young Black Flag singer Ron Reyes screaming out “Depression’s gonna kill me.” It’s strange to think that now, 40+ years on, most of these angry young men and women are either nearly senior citizens – or gone. Unlike slick, polished reality TV versions of life, the squalor and power of Decline never feels fake.
Worth seeing? Declineof Western Civilization isn’t for those with gentler musical tastes – while some of the bands like X are excellent musicians whose snappy tunes still hold up well today, all of them are loud and confrontational. The Germs are barely holding a tune, with the chaotic power of their only album turned into a muddy, jagged roar. Spheeris closes Decline with a terrifying, mesmerising set by Fear, whose lead singer is shown as a bare-chested, swaggering Johnny Rotten on steroids spitting out homophobic and sexist taunts as the kids in the mosh pit smash into each other. It’s like a vision of Dante’s inferno, and it’s awful, yet at the same time, it’s amazing – the power of punk at its most primal, with a chorus screaming “I don’t care about you / F— you!” Fear’s thundering, cruel set seems to sum up everything that’s come before it. Punk could be awesome and it could be ugly and it could often be both at the same time, and Spheeris’ magnificent documentary captures it in all its complicated sprawl. I’m definitely moving on next to check out 1988’s equally cult but slightly more absurd hair-metal saga Decline of Western Civilization II and the reportedly even darker street kids-focused Part III, but the first Decline movie still packs the punch of a brawl in a mosh pit. It isn’t meant to make you feel good, but like punk itself, it’s meant to make you feel something.
War, pestilence, disease, death and really annoying people on social media. Times like these call for the Marx Brothers.
It’s been nearly a century since Groucho, Chico, Harpo and sometimes Zeppo stormed cinema screens, and their surreal, multi-faceted anarchy is still very much the cure for what ails the spirit.
I got away from it all with a double-feature of Marx classics at one of our awesome local revival cinemas last weekend, and found that no matter how many times I’ve seen stuff like Duck Soup and Animal Crackers, they still lighten my mental load.
Of the classic early comedy teams I adore, from Chaplin to Keaton to Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello, the Marx Brothers stand out because they’re pure id … and just a little bit dangerous. Most comedy teams had a kind of smart one and a kind of dumb one, but in this trio, they’re all a little bit of both.
The Marxes weren’t quite as well served by the movies as Chaplin or Keaton – they didn’t creatively mastermind their own films, which were never as groundbreaking and perfectly sculpted as something like City Lights or The General. Their early movies are hilarious but also bogged down by cheesy romantic sidebars and interminable songs; their later movies often felt strained and tired as the brothers themselves entered their 50s and 60s and bowed to the whims of studio heads.
But for that sweet spot of four or five movies that hit the screens 90 years ago now, they were a whirling dervish of Groucho’s wit, Chico’s wordplay, Harpo’s pantomime acrobatics and Zeppo… well, Zeppo was there, too. There’s no filler in perhaps their greatest moment, 1933’s Duck Soup, a fast-moving war satire with no romantic subplots and even poor Harpo refused a chance to play his harp. While there’s funnier gags scattered throughout all their movies, there’s nothing quite as unrelenting. Duck Soup barely runs over an hour, but you can distill it even further by boiling it down to a mere three scenes that show the Marx Brothers at their very best.
The Marxes were unpredictable and a wee bit unhinged, breaking furniture, grabbing women (in rather un-#Metoo ways, I’ll admit), wrestling strangers, pushing the limits of social propriety. The Three Stooges were violent and chaotic, too, but very childlike. The Marx trio always felt vaguely adult, dada and surrealism given form in flesh, and I’d always picture them whipping out cards, dice and booze between scenes. This scene with Harpo and Chico is one of the Marxes’ intricately building symphonies of insanity, escalating from a shouting match with a lemonade vendor to beautifully choreographed, maddening brutal psych-warfare against the poor befuddled vendor:
…Meanwhile, while Groucho and Chico were masters at verbal japes and insults and malapropisms, one of the most beloved Marx routines is this elegantly simple, but endlessly comic “mirror gag.” All you need to know is that Harpo and Chico have both ended up disguised as Groucho, running around a wealthy lady’s house in a grand farce until they all end up combining in this one glorious scene:
But when it comes down to it, the number one thing I think of when I think of the Marx Brothers remains Groucho’s sardonic wit and raised eyebrows, able to cut to the chase and knock any windbag down to size. This astounding little monologue towards the climax of Duck Soup is particularly funny because it’s the rare case where Groucho, as the beleaguered President Rufus T. Firefly, manages to make himself the butt of the joke, and talk himself into going to war in the space of a few sentences. In a world where we’re still seeing madmen go to war for stupid reasons, there’s something vaguely comforting to me in this scene watching Groucho show how pointless and ego-feeding it all is, 89 years ago now.
The Marx Brothers have been gone for decades, but they’re still making me laugh nearly a century past their peak. Now when you think about it, that’s pretty funny.
Nik Dirga 