Moving the Mountain

Film: Fitzcarraldo
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There’s something about film as a medium that lends it to the depictions of extremes. When it comes to obsessions revealed on film, I have a tendency to think of Klaus Kinski, since he seemed to have a penchant for playing extreme characters. While certainly Aguirre from Aguirre: Der Zorn Gottes comes to mind, my thoughts first go to Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, the title character from Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Our title character, so named because the natives in South America are unable to pronounce “Fitzgerald” is a man on a singular mission, a man with a unique dream. We first encounter him as he and his paramour Molly (Claudia Cardinale) arrive from a thousand-plus mile boat trip down the Amazon to hear Caruso sing. This moment becomes one of obsession for him. He determines then and there to build an opera house in Iquitos, Peru, and to have it open with a Caruso performance.

Of course, that takes enormous wealth, and nothing he has tried yet has worked. His first attempt at wealth was building a trans-Andean railroad. His current plan is the production of ice. However, he realizes that this will not get him the money he needs, so he decides to do what everyone around him is doing—farm rubber. However, all of the good lands are taken. Studying a map, he comes to the realization that there is a great deal of rubber tree land that is currently inaccessible thanks to a series of ferocious and difficult rapids that threaten to destroy any ship that crosses them.

But this will not stop him. Using that same map, he realizes that there is a spot where the navigable river and the inaccessible river are separated by a narrow piece of land. His idea, then, is to buy a huge boat, sail it up river, and then drag the ship over the mountain, allowing access to the rich rubber trees and bypassing the rapids. It’s a bold plan, especially considering that they’ll need to rely on hostile natives for the labor and because the ship itself weighs a good 300 tons.

Fitzcarraldo’s quest is further hampered by the desertion of his crew. When he does finally encounter the natives, he’s down to just himself, his captain (Paul Hittscher), Cholo the engineer (Miguel Angel Fuentes), and Huerequeque the drunk cook (Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez). But it turns out that the natives are impressed with the ship as well as Fitzcarraldo’s impressive shock of yellow hair, and they agree to help drag the ship over the top of the mountain.

It surprising just how long Herzog drags this out before we really get to this important plot point. Fitzcarraldo doesn’t let on that that is his plan until a good 90 minutes of the film have passed. And yet it’s surprisingly effective and entertaining up to that point. This is not a slow movie despite the fact that it reveals its secrets at such a sedate pace.

Kinski’s performance is central to the film, of course, and as is usually the case, or at least in my experience, it is a great one. Kinski never so much looked like he was acting, but like he was channeling the character he was set to play. Fitzgerald is an entirely believable creation not despite his obsession with Caruso and building an opera house but because of it. He has the single-minded determination of this goal that gives it a ring of truth. Fitzcarraldo is a true believer, using the power of his victrola and his Carruso records to placate the natives and get them to work for his cause. And so it works. This last hour of the movie, which involves the literal moving of the ship over the mountain between the rivers is perhaps what is most memorable from the film. It’s worth noting, though, that this portion of the film takes up only the last section. Even when we discover Fitzcarraldo’s plan, there is a significant passage of time before the boat leaves the water.

I know little of the story of the creation of this film, but I do know that it is evidently the stuff of legend. Herzog and Kinski had a notoriously stormy relationship, but films like this one indicate that the two also brought out the best in each other. Fitzcarraldo requires some focus to watch in that there’s an immediate disconnect here because the bulk of the film is in German. It just feels like it should be in a different language. It’s essentially the same problem I had with Aguirre: Der Zorn Gottes. It’s also fortunately a problem that is easily forgotten after the first ten minutes or so.

Why to watch Fitzcarraldo: A tale of magnificent obsession.
Why not to watch: Klaus Kinski is a scary looking mo-fo.

Top of the World

Film: An Affair to Remember
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

There’s a distinct difference between the idea of a romantic comedy and a romance. Romantic comedies have a tendency to focus quite a bit on the comedy, and the comedy tends to be of the improbably, wacky kind. For me, a rom-com is a known quantity—we know that the girl is going to end up with the guy we want her to, because that’s the way they work. The guy we don’t want her to be with will be the sort of person who treats her badly, or ignores her, or is stupid. The film requires that we dislike him so that when she ends up with the other guy, we’re happy about it. Or it requires that the guy change dramatically so that he’s no longer a jerk by the end of the film. There aren’t a ton of exceptions.

Romance, on the other hand, offers us mystery. Most of the truly great romances end with our two lovers apart, or dead, or at the very least unhappy and aching to return to those days they had together. But there are a few that end with the couple together. The success of a romance is not in bringing laughs, but in tears, either tears of sorrow when the lovers are forced apart permanently or tears of joy when it is finally revealed that they will be together. Such a film is the classic romance An Affair to Remember.

Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) is an internationally known playboy who has broken the hearts of hundreds of society’s best women. He’s crossing the Atlantic on a cruise ship, because waiting for him in New York is Lois Clark (Neva Patterson), an heiress to a whopping fortune. It seems that Lois has finally snared Nickie, and he’s prepared to tie the knot. Also on the ship is Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr), a former nightclub singer turned socialite thanks to the attentions of businessman Ken Bradley (Richard Denning).

Of course, Nickie and Terry meet cute on the ship. There’s an instant chemistry between them that is tempered by her wanting to keep him at arm’s length. But they keep running into each other until it becomes something of a joke. When the ship makes a stop in a French port, he invites her to join him. He tells her that he’s going to visit his grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt). She doesn’t believe him, but she goes along anyway, and it is here that the relationship changes. Grandma Janou is real, and she’s quite the charming old lady. She instantly takes to Terry, and hints very much that she’d like to see the two of them together. It is here that our two characters truly start to fall for each other. Back on the ship, they share a long kiss, and then decide that it would be better for the both of them if they didn’t spend time together.

Of course, everyone else on the ship has them paired off, and everyone else on the ship knows who he is at the least. On the last night of the voyage, they decide to throw caution to the wind and be seen together. The also make a bold decision. In six months’ time, if neither of them have been married, they will meet at the top of the Empire State Building and pick up from there. Nickie is determined that he will make a living for himself to be worthy of her. And the two go their separate ways. Terry goes back into singing and Nickie attempts to start a new career as a painter.

Of course, tragedy strikes. On her way to the top of the Empire State Building and running late, Terry runs across the street and is struck. Nickie, of course, knows nothing of this and believes that she has stood him up and left him at the romantic equivalent of the altar. She, on the other hand, is too proud to let him know what has happened, and avoids all contact with him. And thus the two pine for each other. He is unable to find her and she is unwilling to find him until she can walk again and find him on her own terms.

Let me be the first to say that An Affair to Remember is not without its problems. There’s no reason, for instance, for Nickie to be world famous as a playboy if he’s as poor as he’s made out to be at the end. See, he wants to be worthy of Terry, and throws himself into his painting as a way to make money, but he’s not that great at it. Terry, on the other hand, is forced into a job as a musical director for a group of street kids, and so both live in reduced circumstances. But if he’s this poor, what is Nickie famous for? Where is his hidden wealth? We never find this out.

Additionally, Terry is unrealistically stubborn. There’s a streak of perfectionism in her a mile wide. She can’t return to Nickie until she is able to walk. If she never fully recovers, that event might never happen. She’s pretty blasé about this, too.

So let’s talk about some of the good stuff. I love the relationship between the two main characters. There’s real chemistry there. It helps immensely that I like all of the characters in this film. Everyone is, for the most part, a decent human being who I like. This is particularly true of Ken and Terry.. It’s easy to make the abandoned lover a creep who we actively route against. Making that character sympathetic as well makes for a deeper, richer film. We certainly want Terry and Nickie to end up with each other, but we can’t root against Ken because that doesn’t seem right, either.

This is a difficult film to dislike completely. An Affair to Remember is sweet and heartfelt even if Terry is stubborn and a bit dense. Hell, pride is sort of its own reward.

Why to watch An Affair to Remember: Achingly sweet
Why not to watch: You’ll spend at least a part of the movie yelling at the screen because the characters are either rock stupid or stubborn beyond all measure.

Breaking the Costner Rule

Films: JFK; The Untouchables
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library (JFK) and personal collection (The Untouchables) on kick-ass portable DVD player.

So what’s the Costner rule? Simple. Kevin Costner films that are Westerns (Dances With Wolves, Silverado) or sports movies (Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, Tin Cup) are good. Other Costner films (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Postman, Waterworld), not so much. Today’s films break the mold—Costner doing something other than swinging a bat or riding a horse (kind of), but still producing a vastly entertaining piece of cinema.

Few events in American history have had the sort of lasting impact and caused more controversy than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was inevitable that Oliver Stone would eventually give us his take on the assassination. That take is JFK, in many ways the definitive artistic statement on Kennedy’s death and the several years afterward. JFK details the only time in American history that charges were brought to trial in the Kennedy case.

But before discussing this film, I need to include a bit of disclaimer. A number of years ago, I worked as a freelance copy editor. I was subcontracted to do the final copy edit and proofread for a book on the Kennedy assassination that came out under the imprint of the Library of Congress. The intent of the book was to give a (sorry to use this phrase) fair and balanced look at all of the evidence on every side. It was a glossary of sorts, an encyclopedia of the assassination. And I read every last entry multiple times. Because of this, because I saw both biased and unbiased information, opinion, and detailed facts on the assassination, I have a fairly informed (I think) opinion.

Essentially, I think Oswald acted alone. However, Oswald had connections to the Soviet Union, the marines, the CIA, communists, the mob, and people on both sides of Cuba. And when it turned out that Oswald was the guy, all of those groups with connections to him panicked and started covering up their involvement with him. So the cover up and conspiracies happened after the fact from what I see. Anyway…

Knowing that, it’s very much my opinion that Stone’s film is filled with vague notions, innuendo, half truths, and whole cloth. So rather than look at the film in terms of historical accuracy or its reflection on reality, it makes more sense to judge it as a film. Even this isn’t that easy to do. Stone’s film is necessarily long for the sole reason that a great deal of the film is exposition, repeated exposition, and new exposition and versions of the truth.

What this means is that in many ways, JFK plays like a pseudo-documentary. Standing at the center is not Kennedy, but Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), the District Attorney of New Orleans. Several years after the assassination of Kennedy, Garrison begins to see a connection between some local people in New Orleans and everything that happened in Dallas. Using this as a starting point, Garrison begins to investigate and discovers an unending web of deceit, betrayal, and deeper and deeper intrigues. Watching the film, it is difficult not to consider the truth of Stone’s vision.

JFK is blessed with one of the deepest casts around. In addition to Costner, the film features Sissy Spacek, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Vincent D’Onofrio, Gary Oldman, Brian Doyle Murray, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Laurie Metcalf, Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Walter Matthau, John Candy, and Donald Sutherland. Seriously, wow. In fact, the actual Jim Garrison shows up in the film as Earl Warren.

Throughout, Garrison is painted as an underdog and the victim of the same sort of conspiracy that he claims killed Kennedy. It’s an interesting idea when a District Attorney is viewed as the heroic loner working against the system.

Stone’s style is interesting here. He goes on long tangents that in any other film would kill the narrative, but here becomes something that spirals the audience in deeper. The scene with Mr. X (Sutherland), for instance, is nothing more than an extended piece of conspiratorial background and fancy. The closing courtroom speech seems eternal; it goes on and on, but is a masterstroke of scripting in that it never gets dull. It builds and builds, creating a case that is both compelling and built on a foundation of sand and conjecture.

What it also is, though, is proof that Costner can do more than sports films and Westerns. Hell of a film, even if it is all conjecture, conspiracy theory, and Stone’s paranoia.

Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables is a similar film in many ways. Both films essentially deal with a small group fighting against long odds and people who want them dead, and, of course, both feature Kevin Costner in the role of main fly in the ointment. The Untouchables is a hyper-violent, completely non-historical and totally Hollywood-ized version of Eliot Ness and his band of treasury men going after Al Capone in 1920s Chicago.

Ness’s team was called “untouchable” because they couldn’t be bribed. This, of course, was in a time when anyone in Chicago could be bought and anything could be had for the right price. Ness’s job was to find a way to take down Al Capone. Ness, of course is played here by Kevin Costner, and his rival, Al “Scarface” Capone, is none other than Robert De Niro.

Capone’s first foray into the life of trying to bust bad guys doesn’t go over well, but it does help him assemble a team for himself. He gets Agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) from the FBI. Wallace isn’t a field agent, but an accountant, and it is he who first puts the idea of getting Capone for tax evasion into Ness’s head. He also recruits long-time beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery), who has the knowledge and street smarts to be a real asset. Rounding out the team is George Stone (Andy Garcia), a dead shot with a pistol.

And so the team immediately starts trying to mess with Capone’s business, and they do so with various success. They score a major coup when Capone attempts to bring in a shipment from Canada. This also gives us a good look at the men who make up The Untouchables. Stone and Ness are relatively cool under fire. Wallace, though, has never been shot at before. When Stone takes a round, Wallace becomes mildly unhinged. But the true moment belongs to Jim Malone. With one of Capone’s bookkeepers captured, Malone threatens him. Then, to get him to talk, he puts his gun in the mouth of an already dead Capone soldier and pulls the trigger. It’s a moment of pure, brutal genius.

Naturally, Capone fights back, knocking off two of Ness’s men, both in brutal and painful ways. By this time, though Ness has agreed that tax evasion, while not very sexy, is a way that Capone can be had. And Capone knows it, too. This means that Capone is moving his accountant out of town, leaving Ness and Stone to capture the guy in a train station. While the train station scene is not the end of the film, it is in many ways the most key scene. De Palma took this scene in no small part from Eisenstein’s Brononosets Potyomkin, and the influence is evident. It is one of the great scenes of its decade. Ness and Stone draw weapons on the accountant’s bodyguard, who draws a weapon as well. And as gunplay goes off in slow motion, a baby carriage tetters through the melee down a set of marble steps. It is nearly damn perfect, and made all the better by being almost entirely in slow motion.

Of course, that isn’t the actual end, which happens in court with Capone, and which ends in something cinematically awesome but completely illegal. But so what, right? It’s a movie.

I would be remiss without bringing up a couple more characters. The first is Ness’s wife, Catherine (Patricia Clarkson). She’s not in the film much, but she brings a nice bit of warmth to the film that is otherwise almost nothing but violence. The second is Billy Drago, who plays Capone’s go-to hitman, Frank Nitti. Drago is blessed or cursed with a face that gives him a feral look that makes him perfect to play villains. And that’s exactly what he does here—there’s nothing nice or pleasant about Frank Nitti.

The Untouchables is hardly historically accurate, but it also doesn’t pretend to be. What it is is almost pure action, and it’s damn good at being that. It had been a long time since I had watched The Untouchables, and I had forgotten just how good it really is. It’s worth a watch. Really.

Why to watch JFK: Oliver Stone at his conspiratorial best.
Why not to watch: As compelling as it might be, it’s mostly hokum.

Why to watch The Untouchables: This is what we like to think the Roaring ‘20s were like.
Why not to watch: The reality almost certainly wasn’t this cool.

Tick Tock

Film: Ni Na Bien Ji Dian (What Time is it There?)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

One of the things I like about this project is that it forces me into watching a number of films that I would otherwise have no contact with. There isn’t much of a chance I would normally select a film like Ni Na Bien Ji Dian (What Time is it There?, sometimes known as What Time is it Over There?). It’s not that this film isn’t something typically in my wheelhouse, but that there would be nothing specific about it that would cause me to select it. I don’t dislike quirky romances from other countries (after all, I dearly love Amelie), but seeing the description of the film on NetFlix wouldn’t normally cause me to put it at the top of my queue.

And it is an odd little romance. Hsaio-kang (Kang-sheng Lee) sells watches on a street corner in Taipei. He’s also recently experienced the loss of this father, an event that has caused his mother (Yi-ching Lu) to retreat into spirituality and mysticism. She is convinced that her late husband will reincarnate and return to the home, and thus much of what she does is predicated on that idea. This includes leaving out bowls of yin-yang water (half cold, half boiled) for him to drink and setting a place for him at meals.

One day, Hsaio-kang encounters Shiang-chyi (Shiang-chyi Chen) who is on her way to Paris. She wants a watch that tells dual time, and only likes the one that Hsaio-kang has on his wrist. Eventually, he agrees to sell it to her. From this moment on, things enter the realm of quirk. Feeling some connection with Shiang-chyi, Hsaio-kang decides to set every clock and watch he encounters to Paris time to create some sort of connection between them.

Naturally, this causes some problems for him. Setting the clocks in his own home to Paris time causes his mother to believe that her husband has returned, for instance, which further causes her to set her own schedule by her husband’s new time. Later, she determines that her reincarnated husband is afraid of light, so she shuts off the power and boards up the apartment, taping any slivers of light shut. Meanwhile, in Paris, we find that the lives of our two protagonists are strangely intertwined. While Hsaio-kang watches The 400 Blows, Shiang-chyi meets Jean-Pierre Leaud, the star of the film.

The film, and particularly Hsaio-kang and his mother represent a sort of private obsession, something that approaches insanity but doesn’t quite get there. It is a reveal into their personal and private lives, making explicit their desperate strangeness. In a sense they reveal the sort of thing that an outsider would call strange, manic, even crazy, but that to them makes a real sense. It’s my guess that most of us have these sorts of private oddities that we rarely wish to reveal to anyone else. Here, they are laid bare.

Where many viewers will have a problem, and in fact where I had a problem, is in the film’s pacing. It is monumentally slow. At times, this is not an issue. The film unfolds at its own sedate rate. At times, this is strikingly beautiful, allowing us to see our characters as they exist both in the world and in their own little world. At other times, though, it feels oppressive, as if the film has stopped and we are merely watching people go through their everyday routine. Others may well have more patience for this than I—there were several times in the film that I simply wished for it to move on to the next scene or to at least change the shot so that I wasn’t continually watching the same actions from the same perspective.

Ultimately, this is a film about loss and separation. Hsaio-kang deals with his separation from this idealized fantasy woman, his customer, by attempting to move his world to the one she lives in. She, on the other hand, retreats into herself as she exists in a place unlike anything she has known in her life. Hsaio-kang’s mother retreats further, back into the past when her husband was alive. How each person deals with his or her loss, then, becomes the function of the film.

I’m not sure if I liked this film or not. I appreciate it for what it is, and am confident in saying that if nothing else, it is beautifully filmed. It simply may be too slow overall to be truly engaging. What could well have been delightful, odd, and quirky instead becomes simply odd.

Why to watch Ni Na Bien Ji Dian: There’s a real bittersweetness to the narrative.
Why not to watch: The pacing may be off-putting for many.

Ugly World, Ugly Truth

Film: Los Olvidados (The Forgotten; The Young and the Damned)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

A message picture is one that attempts to show a problem to the world, raise awareness, and often to suggest a possible solution to the problem either in the main or in a specific case. That’s the typical message picture, at least. Of course Luis Bunuel was never a typical filmmaker. Los Olvidados (known as either The Forgotten or more commonly The Young and the Damned) is a film that walks like a message picture and talks like a message picture, but does something different entirely. Bunuel isn’t concerned here with finding a solution. It could even be argued that he’s not interested in highlighting a problem. Instead, he’s just showing life as it happens to some of the poorest people in Mexico, a world that we will naturally interpret as being filled with problems. He offers no solutions and no real commentary; instead, he just shows us this slice of possible reality and leaves it to us to judge it.

We spend our time with a group of street kids, boys who may or may not have a home, don’t go to school or have anything like an education, sometimes look for work, and general cause problems and commit minor crimes. A few of these boys will become central to the narrative. The first is Pedro (Alfonso Mejia), a young criminal who feels (rightfully) that his mother doesn’t care about him and that there is nothing for him in his family. Pedro wishes to improve, to please his mother, but can do nothing to make her happy, or much to notice him except negatively. The bad influence comes in the form of Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), who has escaped from reform school. Jaibo is unrepentant, vicious, and feral.

In truth, Jaibo is as sociopathic a character as you are likely to find in a film. His first action when he returns from reform school is to seek out Julian (Javier Amezcua), who he is certain turned him in. Julian’s denial means nothing; when his back is turned, Jaibo beats him over the head with a rock and then a large stick, killing him. Pedro is witness to this, and Jaibo gives him a portion of Julian’s money, swearing him to silence. It is this event that causes Pedro to really want to change for the better, and he gets a job at a blacksmith’s. But Jaibo ruins this as well, stealing a knife, setting it up so that Pedro is accused and sent off to reform school. Meanwhile, Jaibo does what he can to put himself in good with Pedro’s mother (Estela Inda). It’s soon evident that Jaibo isn’t looking for a mother, though.

Los Olvidados pulls no punches, and deals with the reality of the lives of these children. And they are children. Pedro is maybe in his early teens, but he deals throughout with the sorts of cares and concerns that many adults would be hard pressed to understand or work through. These are not kids playing at being criminals, but kids who are fully realized criminals. It’s easy to forget when we see their youth that Jaibo might be all of 14 or 15, not really a child but in no way a man. He is, after all, a murderer within the first half hour or so of the film.

This unflinching look is what makes the film. But unlike most message films, Los Olvidados offers us no respite and nothing to make us feel good at the end. We are left only with the lives of these kids and the hell of their existence, the fact that nothing good happens to them, and that even their best intentions are turned against them. The film is a mere shade away from ending up with the audience watching with a gun in its collective mouth.

That’s the point, of course. To give this a happy ending (more on this in a moment) would be to destroy everything that Bunuel wants to accomplish with this film, which is to show both the poverty and the desperation as realistically as he can. It takes something from Italian Neo-Realism, although Bunuel can’t get completely over his surrealist roots, giving the film an interesting dream sequence. It’s harsh and brutal, and it should be. It’s not interested in telling us how to solve problems like Pedro and Jaibo, but simply to show us that they exist.

There was a happy ending created and tacked on in some versions. Even the idea of it destroys the entire function of the film. It was created because Mexican authorities wanted a more positive image of the country. Fortunately, the original ending is available, and is the one to watch. The tragedy here is that when he is sent to the reform school, it appears that Pedro will turn everything around. That he tries speaks to the human spirit, and what happens when he does speaks to the human experience.

Why to watch Los Olvidados: Brutal and unflinching.
Why not to watch: Bunuel offers only the depiction, not a solution.

Comeuppance

Film: The Magnificent Ambersons
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Films, particularly older films, have a tendency to deal with the problems of rich white people. I think there’s a reason for that. In many senses, when our characters are divorced from dealing with the realities of everyday life, it allows them (and thus us) to focus on whatever the main theme of the story is. The Magnificent Ambersons is a film that is entirely tied up in the money of its characters, but is not really about the money at all.

The film, as the name implies, concerns the Amberson family roughly around the turn of the last century. In their unnamed town, they are by far the leading family and live in the grandest house. The Ambersons throw actual cotillions, dress for dinner, and are every bit the aristocratic family. It makes them both admired and resented, and thus ripe for any possible hint of a scandal. Most attuned to this is the youngest of the clan, George Amberson Minafer (Tim Holt), roughly college-aged and spoiled beyond measure. We see a glimpse of his boyhood and learn that his mother Isabel (Dolores Costello) has never really disciplined him. And so George grows up doing what he wants when he wants and saying what he wants.

The film opens with the return to town of Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), who has built an automobile factory on the outskirts of town. Morgan used to live in town and was one of the leading suitors for George’s mother’s hand. Now a widower, Morgan has returned with his daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) in tow. It is evident immediately that there are sparks. George and Lucy quickly become a matched pair, and there is evidently still a good deal of attraction between Eugene Morgan and Isabel Amberson-Minafer.

All of this comes to a head when Wilbur Minafer, Isabel’s husband, dies suddenly. Suddenly, the path is open for Eugene to resume his courtship of Isabel, mourning or not. And they two are frequently spotted together, something that George is made aware of by his spinster Aunt Fanny (the underappreciated Agnes Moorehead). And this sends George off on a tear, spinning through the town to discover how much damage this “scandal” has done to the good name of his family. He refuses entry to his house to Morgan and essentially demands that his mother no longer see him. Instead, he and his mother plan a trip and leave the town. Of course, all of this has damaged George’s plans for his life with Lucy, who is still sweet and is smart enough to play dumb about exactly what George is doing, finally and flatly and refusing his declaration of love and proposal of marriage. Genuinely, this is one of the best scenes not only in the film, but of its decade. Lucy plays this throughout and at the finish as we dream of doing in the moments after we are mistreated by someone in our life.

More than anything, The Magnificent Ambersons is a story of pride and the cost of pride. For George Amberson Minafer, pride in his family name is more important than anything else. It is more important to him than his mother’s happiness and more important than his own. And, eventually, he pays the price for this time and time again. Pride is the sin that destroys the family in the end, and destroys George in particular.

The tragedy of The Magnificent Ambersons, of course, is that it was badly mistreated by the studio, with a third or more of its original length removed. Additionally, director Robert Wise was instructed to make these edits and tack on a false happy ending against the wishes (and without the knowledge) of Welles. The action caused a rift between the two men for years, in part because the editing destroyed the original vision of his film. But that’s very much Welles. He’s the kind of director I hate to love, but love anyway. He very much comes across as someone who knows precisely how talented he could be, and never let a moment go when he didn’t put that in front of other people. But he’s hard to dislike because he was so damnably talented. His complaining seems half like whining and half like justifiable anger at the destruction of what could have been his greatest film.

For the rest of us who aren’t Welles, the tragedy isn’t specifically that the film was edited, but that the footage was destroyed. The reason for destroying the footage was given as needing room for storage. It’s a better guess that it was destroyed to prevent Welles from reediting it. It is tragic. It’s tragic because even in this damaged version, this abridged runt of a complete film, it is an achievement.

I always liked Joseph Cotten because he’s my favorite part of Citizen Kane, but in the last two years, I’ve become a bigger and bigger fan of the man. And while Cotten is great as always, the real performance for me here is Agnes Moorehead who goes from depressed and lonely to vindictive to remorseful to insane in the course of this short film. I also like the narration of Welles over the top of the film. For whatever his personal foibles, Welles had a tremendous narrator voice.

As truncated as this film is, it’s still one of the best of its decade. It would be better in this version even more truncated without the tacked on three-minute feel-good, but it’s still very much worth your 90 minutes.

Why to watch The Magnificent Ambersons: Welles in his prime as a filmmaker.
Why not to watch: What would have made it truly great is been lost forever.

Growing Up

Films: Stand By Me; Hoop Dreams
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player (Stand By Me); Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen (Hoop Dreams).

I have long been of the opinion that coming-of-age movies come in two varieties. For girls, coming of age is all about sex and coming to terms with their role as those who can bring life into the world. It’s not so much about motherhood and more about the responsibility of what sex can and does represent. For boys, coming of age is all about encountering death and coming to grips with the idea of mortality, the knowledge that life is transitory. For boys, perhaps no film both embodies and breaks this cycle like Stand By Me.

The film follows four boys on the verge of junior high in what will ultimately be the weekend that turns them from boys into men. Each of the boys is different, and each one is dealing with something specific in his life. Gordie (Wil Wheaton) is in many ways the stand-out of the group, and it is he who narrates the story (with Richard Dreyfuss in the role as narrator), telling it from his memory. Gordie is bright and comes from a good family, but it is a family touched by tragedy. Four months earlier, his older brother Denny (John Cusack) was killed in a car accident, and since that time, Gordie feels like he has become invisible, and that both of his parents feel like they’d have rather lost him than his brother. It is Gordie who tells us the story, and so the events very much come from his perspective.

Gordie’s best friend in the world is Chris (River Phoenix), a kid from a bad family and someone who seems predestined to turn out bad. He’s a tough kid with a father who drinks and with an older brother with the nickname Eyeball (Bradley Gregg), who is constantly in trouble. Chris has already started to fit himself into the mold of bad kid, having been suspended from stealing lunch money at school. Also in the crew are Vern (Jerry O’Connell), the “fat” kid who is also naïve and a little thick. His brother Billy (Casey Siemaszko) is another rotten kid who hangs out with Eyeball. Rounding out the crew is Teddy (Corey Feldman), who is a little unhinged, filled with anger, and is saddled with a father currently in a mental institution.

The plot centers around Ray Brower (Kent Luttrell), a kid who has gone missing. One day, Vern overhears his brother and another member of his gang discussing the missing kid. Billy and his friend stole a car and went joyriding, and found the body of Ray Brower about 20 miles away from town, evidently hit by a passing train. Vern tells his friends and they decide that they will go find the body and report it, becoming heroes. To do this, they’ll have to walk the whole way and camp out, but they figure it’s worth it.

And that’s really the movie. The boys walk through the woods, encounter a junkman and his “vicious” dog, a train, leeches, and more. And along the way, Gordie and Chris discover quite a bit about themselves. Chris deals with the fact that he’s too smart to be a bad kid but no one believes in him and Gordie deals with the fact that he feels like his parents don’t love him.

Stand By Me trades on significant scenes that don’t specifically move the plot forward but instead give us additional insight into the characters of the four boys. We also deal with Ace Merrill (Kiefer Sutherland), the leader of the gang of older boys who terrorize Gordie and his friends. This is not pleasant terrorization—there is a real sense that Ace is not merely a criminal in training but a fully realized sociopath barely able to keep his sinister urges in check. All of this culminates in a showdown at the body of Ray Brower in which the younger boys (particularly Chris and Gordie) are forced to make a decision that will affect them and their friendship from that point forward.

This is a marvelous film, one that it had been too long since I’d seen. I had forgotten just how good it really is, and how good the four boys are in their roles. They are good enough that I can’t think of other people in the parts. Cory Feldman, so often relegated to ridiculous sequels and embarrassing roles showed here that could, once upon a time, pull off a real role. River Phoenix brings surprising maturity to the role of Chris, yet it’s a believable maturity, one that seems natural. Wil Wheaton has a sort of emotional and moral center that makes him bigger than his slight frame. And Jerry O’Connell is so natural that it seems like he’s not acting, but simply living the script.

Stand By Me is a piece of magic, a captured moment between childhood innocence and adult experience. It is as good a film about growing up as exists.

Hoop Dreams is a much different story about growing up, different in no small part because it is the real thing. The film follows the real lives of two Chicago high school athletes named Arthur Agee and William Gates. Both are inner city kids living in terrible conditions, but both kids have real ability on the basketball court. When the film opens, the boys are on the cusp of high school. As often happens in Chicago, the boys are recruited by area high schools, and both end up at St. Joseph.

What follows is their journey through four years of high school and the various troubles and problems they encounter as well as their triumphs. The goal of both boys, naturally, is to play in the NBA at a time (during the filming) when basketball was king in Chicago. And immediately, the two stories are as different as they are similar. Both boys attend St. Joseph on a scholarship for basketball. It’s determined that both boys are entering at about a fifth grade academic level, for instance.

But in terms of talent, it’s a very different story. Arthur ends up on the freshman team, and continues to struggle in school, not really progressing. He’s similarly immature on the basketball court. William plays on the varsity team as a freshman, and improves tremendously as a basketball player and as a student, but improves only enough to keep himself on the basketball court in many ways. A tuition increase before their sophomore year means a change in their lives. William’s family is unable to pay, but he gets assistance from a family near the school, allowing him to continue. Arthur, though, is removed from the school, which sets him back a half year, and he returns to the public school system.

And life goes on. Arthur’s homelife is turned upside down when his father leaves, and then returns a year later after spending seven months in prison. William’s father is not in his life, but he becomes a father himself. He also tears apart his knee, missing most of his junior year and reinjuring the knee in the last game of the season.

As the film continues, we the audience learn about the reality of life in the city, on the courts and in the schools. We learn, for instance, that many of the top high school players have their shoes and wardrobes essentially financed by drug pushers, who give the kids spending money. William learns at a Nike camp that college coaches aren’t as concerned with team play as they are with kids who can stand out.

Where Hoop Dreams succeeds is in making the lives of these kids real. It gives us a sense of the world they live in. Additionally, it shows us that the reality we all suspected all our lives is true. The kids who have the athletic talent are the ones who get special treatment. It becomes obvious at the start of sophomore year when the high school finds a way to keep William enrolled but cuts Arthur loose. The same thing happens at the Nike camp. The moment that William sustains a muscle injury, the interest in him fades. It reveals itself to be a meat market. The coaches essentially admit as much, realizing that these kids who throw themselves around the court are their meal ticket, and knowing that most of them will not make it to the pros.

It’s also evident that both of these kids have a lot of hopes and dreams riding on them as well as a lot of people who are looking to make a buck on them. It’s tragic in many ways. We see, for instance, William’s brother trying to live through him, and Arthur’s father pinning his hopes and dreams onto his son. It’s a deadly combination of expectation, pressure, and largesse from those around them. It’s a wonder any of them survive at all.

What Hoop Dreams shows us is that few of them do. The dream may survive in many kids, but for every one who makes it even to a major college program, let alone the NBA, there are hundreds who never make it past the playground and become just another person on the street. It’s noteworthy, though, that both of the young men in this film, at least as of a few years ago, have lived lives of service to their community and have dedicated themselves to providing opportunities for others.

Back in the days when I participated in sports, I was told that there would be character building and other tangible benefits of participation. Honestly, I didn’t learn anything, and I came from a high school that produced a few NFL players. Perhaps I wasn’t good enough and thus was not worth enough of the coaches’ time and effort for character building and lessons in determination. It seems, though, that William and Arthur were, and that they did learn something in spite of the crush of the meat market after all.

Why to watch Stand By Me: A bittersweet tale of childhood that sugarcoats nothing.
Why not to watch: It’s far more profane than you remember.

Why to watch Hoop Dreams: True human stories.
Why not to watch: You might not be prepared for scenes of actual knee surgery.