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ryanscoolnesschronicles · 5 years ago

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WEEK 5: MONEY TO BURN – Surrendering to Streaming

I don’t sleep. Why? A noxious combination of dangerous sleep apnea, a brain that never shuts the fuck up, and some other factors that I do not actually comprehend. Even if I am exhausted at the end of the day (which would be every one of the damn days), I require two prescription medications, melatonin gummies and at least one Tylenol PM. Even then, it is at least three hours before my body surrenders whatever struggle it is putting up and I drift off to Forced Slumberland.

For normal people those three hours are spent in stark silence, but that makes my brain even more anxious, so I rely on television in the background as active white noise (which I acknowledge is not really a thing). For years, “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and RiffTrax were on an AppleTV playlist and a constant companion every night. But my fool mind just had to decide to do this 2020 Project, so I needed to branch out and find new, reliable shows. For the first month of the Project, I had the new option of “Green Acres” and other soothing ‘60s sitcoms on Amazon Prime, and then Month 2 started, during which I restricted myself to Netflix (not counting my weekly AMC A-List trips to the cinema).

There are no such options on Netflix. Netflix is for the hip kids, millennials who regard stuff like “Friends” as the new ancient throwbacks, and if a streaming service considers 1990’s television (which I had to receive permission to watch as a kid) as the new nostalgia, I give up. I need something sincere and reliable, almost tranquil. Sure, Netflix has gobs of original programming, but you try to fall asleep to “BoJack Horseman”, a show that gives me anxiety attacks.

In terms of my days, which as you know, focus on the moving picture, Netflix is much better than I had ever given them credit for. Yes, they spend far too much money on original films that are technically proficient but probably would not hold your interest if you had to leave your house to view them. Yes, their approach to scheduling and release dates is chaotic and demonstrates a clear lack of direction. Yes, if you want to see a movie made before 2000, you are most likely shit out of luck. But they also have a surprising amount of independent selections—from the likes of A24 and iFC—and traffic in niche genres and films that would be rejected by most studios for a lack of broad mainstream appeal.

WHAT I SAW: “Dolemite Is My Name” (2019), d. Craig Brewer

“Marriage Story” (2019), d. Noah Baumbach

“Moonlight” (2016), d. Barry Jenkins

“El Camino” (2019), d. Vince Gilligan

“Between Two Ferns: The Movie” (2019), d. Scott Aukerman

“Frances Ha” (2012), d. Noah Baumbach

“Anima” (2019), d. Paul Thomas Anderson

“Betty White: First Lady of Television” (2018), d. Steve Boettcher

“Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened” (2016), d. Lonny Price

“Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock” (2017), d. Barnaby Clay

“Gender Revolution: A Journey with Katie Couric” (2017)

“Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story” (2015), d. Daniel Raim

“The Two Popes” (2019), d. Fernando Meirelles

“Velvet Buzzsaw” (2019), d. Dan Gilroy

“The Other Side of the Wind” (2018), d. Orson Welles

”They'll Love Me When I'm Dead" (2018), d. Morgan Neville

“The Rhythm Section” (2020), d. Reed Morano

“Gretel & Hansel” (2020), d. Oz Perkins

"Paris Is Burning" (1990), d. Jennie Livingston

"The Blackcoat's Daughter" (2015), d. Oz Perkins

"The Invitation" (2015), d. Karyn Kusama

"I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore" (2017), d. Macon Blair.

Tomorrow, we’ll start the biggest highlights of the week’s selections. The way I’m hoping to structure these journals going forward are short daily columns that cover one film each (or two, depending on the theming). Fridays will be the assessment of the week, every other day a follow-up. See you tomorrow.

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ryanscoolnesschronicles · 5 years ago

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WEEKS 3-4: HITCHCOCK-A-PALOOZA – Still the Master

Okay, exposition time. Alfred Hitchcock has been my favorite director since I could fully comprehend what a director actually did aside from snagging the last slot in the opening credits. Though his nickname was (and still is) the Master of Suspense, he was the Master of many other things; construction, theme, and tone are just the first that instantly come to mind. I had already watched the vast majority of his heralded classics, like “Vertigo”, “Rear Window”, “Psycho” and “North by Northwest” (the films traditionally most associated with everything his name entails), but seeing as how he directed more than fifty films over the course of 51 years, there were countless gaps in my knowledge of the true breadth of his career. In acknowledgment of this, I charted a daunting course: at least twenty-seven films in less than two weeks, ranging from the silent era (including his first finished movie as a director, “The Pleasure Garden”, from 1925) to his penultimate effort “Frenzy” (in 1972).

As it turns out, there were plenty of masterworks that I had not yet incorporated into my film vocabulary, but probably just as many compromised or bungled affairs. But through it all, I developed a clearer picture of the man behind the camera. His peculiarities, his obsessions, his fetishes, his failings. It was a process of discovery, both remarkable and unsavory, and if you’d care to join my thought process on two whirlwind weeks, please read on.

HITCHCOCK WATCHED IN WEEKS 3-4: “The Pleasure Garden” (1925); “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog” (1927); “Blackmail” (1929); “Murder!” (1930); “Rich and Strange” (1931); “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934); “The 39 Steps” (1935); “Sabotage” (1936); “Young and Innocent” (1937); “Foreign Correspondent” (1940); “Rebecca” (1940);“Secret Agent” (1936); “Jamaica Inn” (1939); “The Lady Vanishes” (1938); “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (1941); “Suspicion” (1941); “Lifeboat” (1944); “Spellbound” (1945); “Stage Fright” (1950); “I Confess” (1953); “The Wrong Man” (1955); “Frenzy” (1972); “Under Capricorn” (1949); “The Paradine Case” (1947); “Marnie” (1964); “Torn Curtain” (1966); and “Topaz” (1969).

OTHER STUFF: “Play It Again, Sam” (1972), d. Herbert Ross; “Chillerama” (2011), d. Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin and Tim Sullivan; “What Did Jack Do?” (2017), d. David Lynch; “Underwater” (2020), d. William Eubank; “Bad Boys for Life” (2020), d. Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi; “The Gentlemen” (2019), d. Guy Ritchie; and the Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Circuit (2019).

–THE PICK OF THE WEEK(S)–

“Foreign Correspondent”

Hitchcock hated the physical production process. He would intricately storyboard, structure and design every single inch beforehand, and that was where he derived the most satisfaction from his occupation. But when it came to actually work with actors and executing his grand intentions, it became an obligation. A chore. Much has been made of this disdain, often blown out of proportion, but in my unimportant opinion, this actually makes him a more impressive artist. Having such a driving unstoppable vision that he could walk onto a set and dictate all the necessary moving parts needed (ambitious moving parts at that), finish on time and on budget and effortlessly assembled without getting caught up in or absorbed by the process? I couldn’t do that. I don’t think that most filmmakers would be capable of it, then or now.

“Foreign Correspondent” was Hitchcock’s second release of 1940 (allow me to reiterate: SECOND release, the other winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards for whatever that’s worth), and contains any number of mind-boggling feats of spectacle. One of the opening scenes depicts an assassination in the middle of a crowd at a political conference after which the murderer disappears into the ether surrounded by hundreds of umbrella-wielding civilians, which brings to mind elements of Busby Berkley production numbers. Another features lead actor Joel McCrea traveling to the Amsterdam countryside in the shadows of massive windmills, accomplished using remarkable miniatures, impeccably integrated matte paintings, and expansive practical sets. These are each impressive and worthy of awe, but I really want to talk about is what I consider to be the single most impressive set piece in his entire career: the plane crash. Move over, crop duster. Step aside, shower murder. In a four-minute sequence, a flying boat is shelled by a German destroyer and crashes into the ocean, forcing the passengers aboard to evacuate amidst the threat of drowning, eventually making their way onto the collapsed left-wing, and having to attract the attention of a nearby ally boat for rescue. It incorporated every single production technique developed at the time (and even contributed a few new tricks to boot), all without the benefit of pre-visualization or digital assistance of any kind, before the advent of video playback (and includes a shot that is the forefather of the modern “dolly through a window” overused CGI effect). If something went wrong or didn’t work convincingly, neither the director nor his crew would know until they had the time to surveil their footage in a screening room. One particular shot involved the illusion of seawater flooding in through and obliterating the windshield of the cockpit, accomplished by rear projecting shots of the windshield onto rice paper positioned in front of a chute connected to multiple water tanks. (The rear projection shots were captured before principal photography by a stunt pilot who deliberately flew towards the ocean at a downwards angle and pulled up at the last second, which is terribly dangerous.) When cued, the water burst through the projection screen with a ferocity that approximated the breaking of glass without having to cut between multiple angles.

The confidence and skill required to pull off just one aspect of the sequence is a cocktail of exacting composition and blind luck and I’m having a panic spiral just thinking about it. Beyond shooting it properly, the individual techniques utilized then had to be assembled in an analog edit, seamlessly cutting between the material Hitchcock shot and stock footage, audio recorded in different environments and different days mixed into a scene that takes place in real-time, merely one component of the overall two-hour runtime.

If that’s not the essence of directing, the essence of epic cinema, I don’t know what is.

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ryanscoolnesschronicles · 5 years ago

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WEEK 2: ALL OVER THE MAP – The Deuce

While the structure of these journals has basically taken shape as of the last entry, my viewing habits certainly didn’t truly form a spine until the very end of Week 2. Films were chosen in the morning completely at random and the order in which they were viewed even more so. Let’s get into it.

WATCHED IN WEEK 2: “It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie” (2002), d. Kirk Thatcher; “The Hustler” (1961), d. Robert Rossen; “Grand Prix” (1966), d. John Frankenheimer; “Wait Until Dark” (1967), d. Terence Young; “Phantom of the Opera” (1943), d. Arthur Lubin; “The Natural” (1984), d. Barry Levinson; “A League of Their Own” (1992), d. Penny Marshall; “Razorback” (1984), d. Russell Mulcahy; “CB4” (1993), d. Tamra Davis; “Just Mercy” (2019), d. Destin Daniel Cretton; “Foul Play” (1978), d. Colin Higgins; “Lady and the Tramp” (2019), d. Charlie Bean; “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954), d. Richard Fleischer; “The Black Hole” (1979), d. Gary Nelson; “Frank and Ollie” (1995), d. Theodore Thomas; “Summer of ’42” (1971), d. Robert Mulligan; “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), d. Ernst Lubitsch; “The Wages of Fear” (1953), d. Henri-Georges Clouzot; “Sorcerer” (1977), d. William Friedkin; “9 to 5” (1980), d. Colin Higgins; “1917” (2019), d. Sam Mendes; “Crawl” (2019), d. Alexandre Aja; “Five Fingers of Death” (1972), d. Jeong Chang-Hwa; “The Reluctant Dragon” (1941), d. Ub Iwerks, Hamilton Luske, Jack Kinney, Alfred L. Werker, and Jack Cutting; “Waking Sleeping Beauty” (2009), d. Don Hahn; and…

–THE PICK OF THE WEEK–

“Freebie and the Bean” (1974), d. Richard Rush.

I could debate the relative merits of the Buddy Cop sub genre until I am bereft of air. It’s the same formula done ad nauseam. It relies on tiresome cliches. It’s the same formula of tiresome cliches, et cetera. White guy mismatched with black guy on an action-oriented mission, at least one of them a cop, they don’t get along but they respect each other by the time the credits roll. But there was indeed a time when it was actually fresh and original, and that’s because the people who made it accidentally invented the tropes that now define it.

No, I’m not talking about Walter Hill’s “48 Hours”, although that film is more directly influential because people were consciously trying to recreate its comic alchemy. I’m talking about a film eight years its senior: “Freebie and the Bean”, starring Alan Arkin and James Caan.

You (the royal you, not anyone in particular) may ask how that duo is mismatched. There both white, you’re thinking. That thought is correct, although Arkin is regrettably playing a Latino gentleman and Valerie Harper (Rhoda herself) is his similarly Latina wife (who may very well be getting away with cheating on him constantly). You may ask how the duo respects each other in the end. Well, they technically don’t. In fact, they are liable to kill each other at any minute, but they also can’t function with anyone else in the opposing role. They’re a symbiotic platonically married couple, one organism with two heads trying to liberate the other from the body with force.

So how is this the first Buddy Cop movie? Before this film, mismatched duos were screwball comedies (Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant are the first that come to mind) or stagy character pieces (see Lemmon, Jack and Matthau, Walter). There was no possibility that one might stab the other in their sleep. That feeling permeates every inch of “Freebie and the Bean”. The tone of earlier mismatched duos was hilarity with some dramatic interludes or silly with a dash of pathos. But in “Freebie and the Bean”, not only are Arkin and Caan bad cops, they’re corrupt cops. Both men open fire without warning when chasing a subject on the crowded streets of San Francisco, which was shocking but also darkly funny. In the middle of a car chase, Caan’s character plows through a marching band in the middle of a parade and it’s not funny, but the pace doesn’t skip a beat.

The action in this film feels legitimately violent and dangerous, like you’re going to see footage of someone accidentally mutilated at any minute. Stunts appear unrehearsed and potentially damaging. In lesser hands these moments would overpower the comedy or mute it, and that is not remotely the case here. Richard Rush somehow executed an unheralded balancing act of tones, with an overwhelming sense of unpredictability. There’s no way to know from scene to scene what kind of movie you’ll be watching, but not in a disjointed way, a quality that his next directorial effort, “The Stunt Man”, also possessed.

If you told me before I started this project that Richard Rush would have directed the first two Picks of the Week, I would have two follow-up questions:

1. Are you insane?

2. Who the hell is Richard Rush?

Now that I’m starting to grasp the answer to the second with clarity (the jury’s still out on the first), I’m ready to dive backwards with relish.

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ryanscoolnesschronicles · 5 years ago

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WEEK 1: ODDS & SODS – Introduction and Fake-Out

What am I doing?

A new film every day for 365 days, starting January 1, 2020. No films I’ve seen before are permitted (unless it’s absolutely necessary).

Why am I doing it?

I have given multiple reasons, but to be honest I don’t really know. Being bipolar, I frequently get sudden notions like clarion calls. It could be creative inspiration, it could be disastrous judgment. But in the moment, these notions feel like the only way to proceed with life. The project was spawned in this heightened state, and before I knew it, this was simply the most important thing. In the time since, I’ve rationalized it as a desire to grow as a moviegoer. Or a challenge to get me writing (outside of the podcast) regularly again. Or an excuse to clear my overstocked media shelves and clean up my collection. None of these reasons are wrong or overblown, but in terms of priority or intent, they overlap. They complement each other yet cannot be separated. Sometimes I’m not even sure which reason is taking precedence at any moment.

Still with me?

Though I’ve been planning this project since June of 2019, it was mostly broad strokes. Aspirational. I blocked out whole months to spend on certain streaming sites with large, varied libraries (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.) and cultivated titles for specific genres that I could use more experience with (Westerns, Musicals). I also wanted to have it feel improvisational, to keep the feeling of new adventures truly fresh.

But then December rolled around. My obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, a most heinous mistress, started looking at me with disdain. With mocking eyes that said without words “the fuck you are, little man.” For those unfamiliar with how OCD works, structure is key if I want to keep my wits about me. It’s not the end of the world to go without a safety net, but it goddamn sure feels like it. Merely (or not so merely) outlining something that will dominate my life for an entire year was bound to instigate daily panic attacks. (This is your first tip off that perhaps I was excessively cavalier in deciding to do any of this.)

So, as a result of this self-imposed uncertainty and seemingly needless stress, the first two weeks of these journals will be undisciplined in terms of theme and tone, hence the title of this week. Sometimes in the span of a day I managed to cram together disparate elements like dystopic science-fiction, brutal Muay Thai action, coming of age introspection circa-World War II, a psychosexual character study, and Israeli cop thriller black comedy. If that doesn’t give a casual appreciator of film tonal whiplash, I don’t know what will.

I’m also still figuring out exactly what I’m trying to convey with these journals. I know what I don’t want to do, though. I don’t want to write formal reviews. I don’t want to recount plot synopses. I don’t want to just organize anecdotes or bullet points, though I’m not averse to employing either in moderation. Bear with me here. I’ve been so stuck in Coolness Land that sometimes I feel like I haven’t written anything else ever before, like I’m riding a bicycle and discovering that also has hidden brakes and handlebars under the seat. Similes are fun.

WATCHED IN WEEK 1: "Who's Harry Crumb?" (1989), d. Paul Flaherty; "Babe: Pig in the City" (1998), d. George Miller; "Phantom Thread" (2017), d. Paul Thomas Anderson; "The Witches" (1990), d. Nicholas Roeg; "My Favorite Year" (1982), d. Richard Benjamin; "Revenge" (1990), d. Tony Scott; "The Sugarland Express" (1974), d. Steven Spielberg; "Love and Death" (1975), d. Woody Allen; "Tenebrae" (1982), d. Dario Argento; "The Punisher" (1989), d. Mark Goldblatt; "High-Rise" (2015), d. Ben Wheatley; "Big Bad Wolves" (2013), d. Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado; "Lore" (2012), d. Cate Shortland; "Possession" (1981), d. Andrzej Żuławski; "Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior" (2003), d. Tony Jaa & Panna Rittikrai; "Get Carter" (1971), d. Mike Hodges; "The Quiller Memorandum" (1966), d. Michael Anderson; "Robbery" (1967), d. Peter Yates; and...

--THE PICK OF THE WEEK--

“The Stunt Man” (1980), d. Richard Rush.

One of my biggest pet peeves of the movie-within-a-movie sub-genre (yes, I have sub-genre pet peeves, I’m odd) is the attempted fake-out. Where you’re watching a scene that for all intents and purposes is canon to the film in which it’s featured, but suddenly something shocking or incongruous happens. A key character is suddenly killed, or a plot development breaks the previously established tone, or a story shortly unfolds that doesn’t line up with your prior knowledge.

But then, just as you’re convinced the film has taken a turn for the bizarre, someone yells “cut” and the shot pulls back to reveal a film camera photographing actors on a set. You needn’t worry about anything you’ve just seen because it’s all movie magic. It bugs the hell out of me because as a device it was probably clever the first few times someone did it, but after years of exhausting new ways to hoodwink and mislead audiences, tendencies get more outlandish.

It becomes a pet peeve through little details. For instance: a fake scene will have multiple angles or optical effects, but when we pull back and see the camera, it implies that everything you’ve just seen was shot in one take. (There are variants to this, the most successful of which is pulling back to reveal not a camera but a movie screen, because you’re watching something projected in a production suite. For the best example, see Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out”.)

All this shoe leather is a long winded way of saying that “The Stunt Man” pulls this prank multiple times within the first thirty minutes. Although this was initially disconcerting for me, every single time it’s employed is on message. Director Richard Rush is using this naked deception to comment on what we perceive as objective reality and how fleeting and easy to confound that perception is. Peter O’Toole’s character, Eli Cross, is a megalomaniacal auteur who believes it is his job to convince his actors and crew members that they are in actual danger in order to get the perfect shot, the perfect reaction. As the film progresses, one begins to wonder if the audience that watches his finished film could even possibly tell between a traditional reaction and the one he chooses to elicit.

Steve Railsback’s ostensible protagonist is a fugitive roped into replacing a key stunt man on a contentious movie set in exchange for the director’s tenuous cooperation in helping him evade the cops. As Cross puts him through his psychological paces, we the audience are forced to start looking for the artifice in legitimate experience as well as the legitimate weight in an artificial experience, because either one could literally kill. It’s the cinematic analogue of cognitive imbalance, telling you to your face “you can trust me” before showing that statement to be a lie. And done poorly, it would be infuriating. In Rush’s hands, it’s thrilling, funny, insidious, challenging, and above all unorthodox.

Until a few weeks ago, I had always said that “The Empire Strikes Back” (my favorite movie of all time) was the most interesting film released in 1980. I now stand corrected. If this is how unpredictable the rest of this experiment… I mean project is going to be, perhaps my fractured consciousness made the right impulsive decision for once.

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