Tag: movies

I try and stay away from stupid internet controversies, because they’re usually stupid internet controversies. This year’s king so far is the whole “Martin Scorsese vs. Marvel Movies” stoush. 

I believe you can be a fan of both – and arguing about what’s “real” movies is kind of pointless. Scorsese is entitled to his view, and god only knows the internet will share its own views. The art stands by itself.

And while I adore the Marvel movies and will never stop being thrilled by seeing Thor or the Black Panther fly across the screen, I don’t think I’ve ever been left haunted by a Marvel movie in the same way that Scorsese’s best films affect me. 

I’ve been on a big Scorsese binge the last few weeks, after watching his epic The Irishman unfold gloriously over 3 1/2 hours on a big screen (thanks Hollywood Cinema!), which is the only way to really appreciate a movie like this.

Watching The Irishman at home on a laptop between checking your Facebook feed and feeding the dog isn’t the same thing at all. It’s the antithesis of binge, binge, binge multitasking culture, a contemplative, mournful coda to Scorsese’s career of misguided men lashing out in their hunt for the American dream. 

Returning to movies such as The Wolf Of Wall Street (a glorious monument to hedonistic excess that just gets better with each viewing), The King of Comedy or Goodfellas, we can see how Scorsese has been weaving this tapestry his entire career, all the way back to Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Toxic masculinity, if you want to call it that, has always been his biggest theme. For those who superficially watched Goodfellas and thought, wow, the gangster life sure looks glamorous, The Irishman is Scorsese’s final damning rebuttal.

The haunting final half hour or so of The Irishman sticks with me, as a damning indictment of a life full of regrets and passive evildoing. While watching The Irishman requires a commitment, it’s worth it. Robert DeNiro hasn’t been so good in years, Al Pacino tones down his “hoo-ha” overplaying to good effect, and it’s a real treat to see Joe Pesci on screen again after far too long. 

The true test for a movie’s greatness to me is how often I find myself turning it over and over in my head after seeing it, thinking about what it showed me. By that standard, The Irishman is one of the best films of the year. 

I think you can have superhero movies and you can have what Scorsese calls “cinema,” and they’re all different yet related animals. But when it comes down to it, one is a roller-coaster ride and one is a lingering meal of fine dining. Scorsese’s entire argument was that films that aren’t big-budget franchises are in danger of disappearing from the table entirely, and that would be a shame.

The Irishman is Scorsese’s feast after a lifetime of serving up thoughtful dishes, and sprawling and deliberate as it is, it is a masterpiece. 

It’s not easy being a legend in their autumn. Billy Wilder was easily one of the best film directors of all time, a storyteller without peer who managed to balance comedy and drama perfectly in all-time classics like Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Stalag 17 and many more. 

But by the time the 1970s rolled around, Billy Wilder had been making pictures for nearly 50 years. He wasn’t “hip” anymore. He made several films before his final movie, Buddy Buddy in 1981, but few of them are remembered well today. He died at 95 in 2002, but his peak was decades before. 

Wilder’s final four films aren’t quite up there with the classics that made his name, but there’s something interesting in all of them. 

1972’s Avanti! is the underrated gem of Wilder’s later period, with a terrific Jack Lemmon performance. A harried businessmen learns his father has died in Italy, and has to retrieve his body. He learns his father had been having an affair when he meets the daughter (Juliet Mills) of his late mistress. The best of Wilder’s late work tackles ageing and death head-on, and Avanti! is a solid example of that “successful men having a mid-life spiritual crisis” genre that’s been done to death over the years.  The charming, free-spirited Mills is a nice foil to Lemmon’s bitter cynicism. It’s not a perfect movie – it’s way too long at nearly 2 1/2 hours, and there’s a bit of a crime plot thread that doesn’t work, but there’s something resonant in Lemmon trying to make peace with his father’s memory and his bittersweet midlife tryst. Wilder’s ‘70s films up the swearing and nudity content, with mixed success (Buddy Buddy, below, just seems foulmouthed), but Avanti! is a mature, witty work. 

The Front Page (1974) is a team-up of Walter Matthau and Lemmon, in one of many remakes of the screwball ‘30s comedy about feuding journalists. The material’s good, but you can’t really top the perfection of Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (another adaptation), and there’s something about watching a screwball comedy remade in the ‘70s that feels forced and inauthentic. While Matthau and Lemmon are always worth watching, a miscast Carol Burnett throws the whole thing off kilter and The Front Page is a trifle for Wilder that never feels essential or particularly bold. 

Fedora (1978), on the other hand, is Wilder’s last grand creative statement, and even if it’s an imperfect film, it’s not quite like anything else he did. A spiritual sequel to Sunset Boulevard, it also stars the great William Holden seeking the truth about a revered reclusive Hollywood actress, the great diva Fedora. Placed in a sun-basked European setting, much like Avanti!, it’s got an autumnal, valedictory feel. Holden was only in his late 50s at the time of filming, but seems at least 10 years older (he’d sadly die at just 63 a few years later after a fall). There’s a mystery wrapped at the heart of Fedora, which is a bit far-fetched but still proves to be a fascinating rumination on the cost of fame, ageing, and celebrity, and the cost people are willing to pay. It’s unfortunate that Fedora isn’t quite as good as it could’ve been. Some of the acting is rather suspect (the lead two actresses were dubbed, which was a bad call), and Holden, who’s always captivating, basically vanishes for much of the second half. But Fedora is a movie by a man who still had something to say, and it wouldn’t have been a half-bad last work by Wilder. As it is, it’s a rough gem. 

1981’s Buddy Buddy, unfortunately, is a bit of a stinker to go out on. Wilder was 75 when it came out, and it’s clearly the product of an old man running on empty. The traditional Wilder cynicism is there but shoehorned in an overwrought “wacky” comedy – it’s the story of a hitman (Walter Matthau) whose work keeps getting interrupted by a suicidal loser (Jack Lemmon, in full “Gil” from The Simpsons mode). There’s a few funny morbid moments – Lemmon pauses in the act of hanging himself in a bathroom to use the toilet to take a leak, for example. But the plot is all over the place, incorporating Lemmon’s battle to win back his wife (a deeply unpleasant character played by Paula Prentiss), some groan-worthy hippie satire, and topping the list in sheer weirdness, a sex clinic run by a bizarre Klaus Kinski (!) who seems to have wandered in from a different movie altogether. Lemmon’s too broad in his role and the suicide jokes seem a bit icky in 2019, but Matthau is admittedly pretty great as a cynical hitman. It’s a shame he’s not in a better movie. You’d barely recognise Wilder’s distinctive touch in it. 

The great unrealised ambition of Wilder in his later years was to direct Schindler’s List. Of course, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was a great film as well, but as a Jewish man who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, including his mother, Wilder’s take could’ve been remarkable.

Then again, Billy Wilder’s entire career was a pretty remarkable thing. There’s been few storytellers who showed us more about human nature in Hollywood’s history. 

“You’re afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren’t you? You’re afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren’t you?” – Seth Brundle

It’s gory, grotesque and disturbing, yet in my personal time capsule of favourite movies of all time, Jeff Goldblum and David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” sticks with me. 

Despite having watched it more than a dozen times since 1986, I’d never seen it on the big screen until the other night, when I caught a gorgeous 35mm screening. There’s nothing quite like seeing “The Fly” on a big screen, with an audience screaming along in synchronicity. 

Like most of Cronenberg’s movies, “The Fly” hasn’t dated at its core, except for Goldblum and Geena Davis’ big ‘80s hair. The gore is still horrifying, the emotions still tight, and the movie’s fundamental core of a man grasping for knowledge and being burned by its power is as old as Icarus. 

It’s a horror movie, with some of the most intensely disturbing mutations and goop of Cronenberg’s visceral career, but it’s also a doomed love story, brought to life by Goldblum and Davis’ immense chemistry (they were a couple at the time). 

When I first saw “The Fly,” it was on a battered VHS dub tape someone made for me back in high school. I watched that tape so many times that whenever I see the movie now I expect to see the same tracking glitches the tape had. It was my first Cronenberg, which will screw you up for life. 

“I’m saying I’m an insect… who dreamt he was a man… and loved it. But now the insect is awake.” – Seth Brundle

There’s a speech Goldblum gives towards the end, covered in latex and deformed, about insect politics. It and the movie as a whole are Goldblum’s finest hour as an actor. 

Everybody loves Jeff Goldblum these days, and heck, I do too, but he’s become kind of a cartoony eccentric version of himself. “The Fly” shows what happens when Goldblum actually acts instead of quirks, and it’s still revelatory to watch Seth Brundle’s horrible transformation and mutations. 

As a teenager, I saw a lot of myself in Seth Brundle’s horrific transformation into a human/fly hybrid. Golbum’s face breaks out, his body changes, he doesn’t recognise himself when he looks in the mirror. That’s every teenager in the world for you. 

I see it now, I see darker metaphors – as a middle-aged dude, your body continues changing, not always in great ways. At one point in the movie Goldblum worries that he’s developed some hideous form of cancer (spoiler: it’s way worse than that). Now I see “The Fly” as a parable about anyone who’s ever felt trapped in a body that’s a stranger to them. 

“I’ll bet you think that you woke me up about the flesh, don’t you? But you only know society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick, gray, fear of the flesh.” – Seth Brundle

I’ve had my share of health woes the last few years and I have to admit that watching Goldblum go from a dazzling shirtless golden god to a deteriorating, disintegrating wreck of a man hits home hard. We are all transforming, every day, in ways big and small. Sometimes it’s wonderful. Sometimes it’s horrible. The question is how we endure it. 

“The Fly” is still a movie I return to every few years, and each time I see something a little different in it. It’s dark and down, sure, but yet I also feel a weird glimmer of optimism in parts of it too. We never stop wanting to better ourselves, no matter the cost. We are all swimming in the plasma pool. 

“It wants to… turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.” – Seth Brundle