Monday, February 27, 2012

I'll Just Read the List, Thanks

The Oscars are on tonight, you know. I love movies, but I can't watch the ego brigade. I'll just check the interweb tomorrow and see who won what. But I do have a few random movie thoughts for the occasion:

Thank God John Williams is up for two films for "best score," because he is the only real score writer left, since Jerry Goldsmith (god of all film composers) died, may he rest in peace. Howard Shore is okay. Michael Giacchino is the only score-writer who gives me any glimmer of hope for movie music's future. But the days of Goldsmith, Steiner, Hermann and their ilk are over. If I have to hear one more tom-tom-heavy, three-chord, French horn melodied film score, I might gnash my own teeth to dust. I have spoken.



Manly Heston: Planet of the Apes
  Another thing is that I am tired of is movies that try to be important. My taste in movies over the years has steadily gone toward what my friend (and the only guy ever to let me score one of his movies), director and writer Kevin DiNovis, used to always call (with no disdain for them) "spectacle" films. I want movies to be big and exciting. Let's face it: if I want a glimpse into the depths of the human heart, I'll read novels or poetry. I'll go see an Arthur Miller play. On film, give me Indiana Jones. Give me Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which made me giddily happy, having been a sci-fi-hungry boy when Heston first hurtled -- his impossibly square, white teeth clenched as tight as Mayan stones -- into the future of apely dominance). Give me Tin-Tin. Sure, there is the occasional profound film (Twelve Angry Men, for instance) but they are usually more like plays on celluloid -- so I'd rather experience the immediacy of a play, for depth... "Serious" films seem pretentious to me, while films of the Spielbergian type wind up being profound in their own, genre-aligned way.

Boyish James Franco: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
 And while we're at it, does anyone think actors look way younger than they used to? We watched Jaws again last night. (We're digging out the old favorites to watch on our new HDTV [the epic tale of whose introduction into our household you can read about here].) Roy Scheider (Brody) was supposed to have two kids in the flick -- maybe six and eleven years old. He looked old. So did Ellen, his wife. Did people just look older back then? Or am I imprinted by having seen these actors when I was eight? Speaking of Planet of the Apes, Heston, for instance. He looks like a man. Why do actors in movies now look more like kids? I don't think they are actually being cast much younger... I know -- I know. I'm older now. But when I look back at the movies with past actors -- they just look more grown-up to me: Gregory Peck; Jimmy Stewart; Bogart -- even beauties like Grace Kelly... they all look so much more adult than actors today. I'm puzzled. Any ideas?

I'll stop now. I do love movies, but I can't sit and watch the Oscars. That said, if John Williams doesn't win tonight, the end of an art form is nigh. I have no faith in a world that can't see that he writes circles around everyone else...

(Day-after addendum: Ludovic Bource won for "The Artist," apparently. I haven't heard it, but I won't have a breakdown until I do -- the guy might be great. Come on, music messiah...)

7 comments:

  1. I think you're right that people do, in general, look younger now. Watch reruns of dramas from the '70s and early '80s and you'll find that the men and women simply look more grown-up, and I don't think it's because of Hollywood's current emphasis on youthfulness through plastic surgery. Maybe it has something to do with trends in grooming, diet, even the greater comfort of life these days? I don't know, but I do know that a 32-year-old actor on, say, an old episode of Hill Street Blues or Ryan's Home seems oddly mature-looking to us now.

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    1. I'm glad you agree, Jeff -- makes me feel like I might be at least marginally sane... I like the "greater comfort of life these days" observation, especially.

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  2. Yeah, I think you're definitely on to something, Chris.

    And Jeff, you may be right that it has something to do with the "greater comfort of life," but I think it's also a symptom of a greater ambivalence about adulthood.

    I look at Cary Grant in that suit in North by Northwest, and I think . . . there really isn't any contemporary film star who comes close to portraying a "grown-up" in the way that Grant (and Bogart, and Grace Kelly, and Barbra Stanwyk, and Jimmy Stewart, etc.) did. Grant seems so entirely comfortable being a grown-up, and he seems to embrace the idea that being a grown-up means looking like a grown-up; there's also the sense, with Grant and with other movie stars of an older era, that being manly and being civilized are not mutually incompatible.

    I wrote a brief blog post about these new "toddler men" at my old blog: http://whatstherumpus.blogspot.com/2005/11/rise-of-toddler-men.html

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    1. Thanks for stopping by again, Kate Marie. Great points. I was trying to think of actors who might fit the old bill of "adultness". How about Russell Crowe? And Harrison Ford, though it might be time to start thinking of him as one of the actors of a past era... As for women... I got no one. Angelina Jolie? If I had seen neither her nor Crowe before, I could be tricked into thinking a film with them was an old film noire, or something...

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  3. Hi, Chris. I agree that Russell Crowe is definitely not one of the "toddler men," and I can think of few performances I've liked better in the last twenty years than Crowe's performance in L.A. Confidential, but while Crowe certainly doesn't lack manliness, it's harder for me to see him as "civilized" in the Cary Grantian sense -- the one exception being his performance as Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander.

    Come to think of it, many of the performances that seem to have attained some level of "adultness" come from period movies like Master and Commander or Pride and Prejudice (it's a chick-flick cliche, but I love Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy) or fantasy films like The Lord of the Rings. And that makes sense if part of the problem is that the modern world is ambivalent about adulthood.

    As for actresses . . . Kate Winslet? I dunno, maybe I'm just a hopeless Anglophile. :)

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    1. I love Winslet -- a good choice, for sure. I was just thinking: could it have to do with a more natural approach to acting? Even if you look at the pictures above, Heston (a decidedly marginal actor) is interacting more with the camera than with his fellow actors. Franco seems to be only conscious of Caesar (who, during shooting, was Andy Sirkis, I suppose). Maybe the more "manly" performers came off as such because they were more "personalities" than "actors." Not sure, but it occurred to me while driving today...

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    2. That sounded harsh: I meant more "personalities" than "characters."

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