Reviving The Muppets

Sifting through the hype about Jason Segel’s full-frontal performance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I came across a piece of news from March that I’d missed: Segel is working on a new Muppet movie. Details are slim at this point, but a story on MTV’s Movies Blog suggests that the plot of the Muppet project has been outlined and that Segel “hopes to dive in to the flick after his soon-to-shoot movie I Love You, Man.” The blog also reports that Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig and Paul Rudd have been approached about making cameos in the movie, which Segel says will attempt to conjure the magic of The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), while moving away from “all those weird concept movies” like the literature-inspired The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), Muppet Treasure Island (1996) and TV’s The Muppets’ Wizard Of Oz (2005), etcetera.

As a still-passionate fan of the Muppets (Season 3 of The Muppet Show can’t hit DVD fast enough), this comes as great news: not just that another Muppet movie is in the works but also that Segel will try to bring the Muppets back to heart-warming, knee-slapping basics. Then again, I’m more than a little concerned about how the R-rated-and-proud-of-it humor of the Judd Apatow clan will translate into the Muppet universe. I’d like to think that Segel & Friends have enough class and creativity to keep the Muppets G-rated, but I’m not willing to bet on it. For the moment, I’ll hesitantly give them the benefit of my massive doubt. That Segel identifies how and when the Muppets drifted off course (Jim Henson’s death had a lot to do with it) bodes well for his attempt at revitalization. But beyond the obvious requirement for the upcoming flick that Kermit shouldn’t bare his green genitalia or resort to making jokes about giving it to Miss Piggy “amphibian style,” here are 10 suggestions to make the new Muppet movie a must-see.

1) Put Kermit in the spotlight. Look, I know that Steve Whitmire’s Kermit doesn’t compare to Henson’s, but the character is iconic. After Henson’s death in 1990, the Muppet creative team (including Henson’s son Brian) wisely and respectfully tried to move away from Kermit as the focal point rather than pretend that Kermit’s heart and Henson’s weren’t one and the same. But Kermit is essential. M*A*S*H wouldn’t have worked without Hawkeye. Cheers wouldn’t have worked without Sam. The Muppets can’t work without Kermit. Henson used to be the axis upon which the Muppet world spun. Now the show must rely on Henson’s most famous character.

2) Pass on newer characters. In short, if the character was introduced to the public in the era of Muppets Tonight, the short-lived attempt at reinventing The Muppet Show in the mid-90s, don’t bother. Since only die-hard Muppet fans were watching Muppets Tonight, only die-hards could identify Clifford, Pepe, Bobo, Johnny Fiama and Sal, and most of us wouldn’t want to. Kids coming to the Muppets to the first time will fall in love with entertaining characters, period. Thus the new film would be wise to entice the nostalgia of lapsed fans by relying on the characters that powered five Muppet Show seasons and the Jim Henson-made movies, not to mention seven seasons of the animated Muppet Babies.

3) Use human actors for villains or brief cameos only. The Henson films rely on the personality of the Muppets themselves. Human actors have made great villains – Charles Durning as Doc Hopper, Charles Grodin as Nicky Holiday and even Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge – but otherwise they have been best utilized in crisp, cherishable cameos, such as Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, James Coburn and Orson Welles (among others) in Movie. Only John Cleese in Caper stands out as making a comparatively extended cameo without souring the Muppet spirit.

4) Use actual stars for the cameos. Just look at that list of names from No. 3. Sorry, but Rogan, Hill, Wiig and Rudd don’t compare, just like David Arquette, Kathy Griffin, Ray Liotta and Rob Schneider didn’t suffice in Muppets From Space (1999). If Jimmy Kimmel can draw Don Cheadle, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt and Robin Williams for a YouTube-minded song about fucking Ben Affleck, the Muppets should be able to draw A-listers.


5) Songs, goddammit, songs! Kermit’s mission in Movie is to sing, dance and make people happy. That’s what the Muppets do. To have them try to win over audiences doing something else is to miss the point. Movie and Caper remain the best two Muppet films because they have the best songs: “Rainbow Connection,” “Movin’ Right Along,” “I Hope That Something Better Comes Along,” “Hey, A Movie,” “Happiness Hotel,” and “The First Time It Happens,” to name a few. If you don’t have music, you don’t have Muppets.

6) Put the Muppets in the real world. Though Jim Henson’s movies put the Muppets in the spotlight, they also put the Muppets into human-dominated surroundings. It’s the juxtaposition of the Muppets against their human counterparts that makes them special. It’s the sincerity with which the Muppets are treated in these human settings that makes them real. And by putting mostly vertically-challenged Muppets next to humans, Henson shows the world though the eyes of children. Watching Kermit walk into the loud, chaotic El Sleezo at the start of Movie, we sense his vulnerability, only to be won over by his determination. This is why we love the Muppets.


7) No special effects. In Movie, Kermit rides a bicycle. At the end of Caper, Henson ups the ante by putting the entire Muppet cast on bikes. These moments are special in part because they are almost impossible to do while remaining faithful to the laws of puppetry. CGI, by making anything possible, takes the magic out of it. The classic homage to High Noon at the end of the Movie, featuring a skinny-legged Kermit in cowboy boots, would be pedestrian if done digitally. Puppetry must prevail.

8) Pay homage. How about tipping the cap back to some of the old Muppet films? I’d pay good money to see Martin back in that tie-and-shorts ensemble as the “insolent waiter” from Movie. What’s Grodin doing these days? And throw in some allusions to non-Muppets cinema. Why can’t John Cusack appear as Being John Malkovich’s Craig Schwartz? So long as Kermit isn’t drinking anyone’s milkshake, I’m for it.


9) Keep it loose. “Good grief, it’s a running gag,” Kermit says to the camera in Movie when the waitress with a lisp keeps answering to the word “myth.” “Your voice was dubbed,” Miss Piggy screams at Grodin’s Nicky in Caper. As in those moments and others, Henson was never afraid to let his characters remind us that we’re only watching a movie. No joke was ever too foolish for his pun-happy Muppets, and no one loved to revel in the foolishness more than Henson. So throw some penguins in the air and have fun with it.

10) Have Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl write it. Oh, well. Nine out of 10 ain’t bad.

Uncut But Edited

In his book of interviews with Walter Murch, The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje notes Murch’s penchant for quoting French filmmaker Robert Bresson’s observation that a film is born three times: once when it is written, once again when it is shot and once more when it is edited. That’s a natural quote for an editor to carry in his back pocket, as it suggests the power of an editor in a potentially positive light. As movies are debated and celebrated, the contributions of editors are at best overlooked: glory-hungry directors never want to share the credit, and we in the audience have no good way of figuring out if an editor made a da Vinci out of a Pollack or just followed the paint-by-number conclusions dictated by the available footage. Yet when a film fails, editors – rightfully or wrongfully – are often cast as the scapegoat.

For all the directors with “final cut,” and despite those like Alfred Hitchcock who more or less edit in camera, it’s my hunch that editors’ contributions are drastically under-appreciated. That’s why I try to be mindful of the Bresson quote before I rush to canonize a director, and that’s why I found myself thinking of Murch and Bresson last weekend as I was enjoying my second viewing of Ratatouille, last year’s Pixar sensation, which common sense suggests is an exception to the three-lives rule.

Because animated pictures are extensively storyboarded and are entirely within the control of CGI artists (there are no “happy accidents” in digital moviemaking), an editor would seem of as little use on a Pixar “set” as a stuntman or prop master. Pixar artists would no sooner painstakingly render superfluous footage than an architect would add toilets to a room without plumbing. Or would they? Once all the digital cells are drawn, what is there to edit when it comes to an animated movie’s visual construction?

These were the questions running through my head Sunday night when I caught up on my blog reading and found that, just my luck, David Bordwell covered this very topic just a few weeks ago. It’s a fascinating and fast read and I highly recommend it. But before you leave this post for that one, a quick thought on Ratatouille:

One of the joys of the movie is that it embraces the opportunities provided by its digital format without ever becoming a movie about its technology. Last year many critics went ga-ga over the long, uncut tracking shot in Atonement showing the apocalyptic panorama of Dunkirk. But while that sequence is technically impressive, it achieves little emotionally beyond stimulating the cinematic hormones of movie geeks like me. So far as I can tell, the primary motivation for the scene’s design is to draw attention to its construction.

By contrast, Ratatouille avoids the temptation to go for ooo-ahhh technical flare for flare’s sake, because there’s no camera stunt work to be performed by a movie that isn’t captured by a camera. Ostensibly, an unbroken tracking shot is no greater an achievement for CGI artists than a series of alternate digital views “spliced together.” However, that doesn’t mean a tracking shot isn’t worth doing, or that it can’t have an astonishing effect.

Which brings us to the sequence in which Remy runs through a labyrinth of studs and pipes in his ascent from a sewer to the roof of a building overlooking Paris. The sequence isn’t an unbroken tracking shot, but it does provide views that would be difficult to pull off in a typical live-action shoot. We follow Remy behind a wall, scamper with him through rat-sized holes, pass through beams and floors and watch him race toward us within a pipe. These shots bring a tingle of excitement not for their technical expertise but for their ability to let us see the world through a rat’s eyes, which of course should be the goal.

Unlike films that dazzle just to dazzle, Ratatouille has its priorities straight. C’est fantastique!

Lost: Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

The danger of falling in love with the sound of your own voice is that you might cease considering the words coming out of your mouth. This is the downfall of documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who in his latest “investigative” film, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, seems intent on documenting his preexisting understanding of the universe rather than discovering anything new. Basing his picture around a tongue-in-cheek attempt to locate the globe’s most-wanted terrorist, Spurlock spends 95 minutes interviewing his way through the Middle East in an effort to show how inhabitants of those countries are different from Americans, except when they’re the same. Despite the titular premise, the film’s true thesis is hard to determine. The only thing that’s clear is that Spurlock wants to be in front of the camera in the event it comes across anything worth filming.

Spurlock isn’t the first documentary filmmaker to act as the star of his own show, of course. With the notable exception of Sicko, Michael Moore muckrakes his way into almost every shot of his documentaries. Yet the notable difference between the two filmmakers is that Moore knows what his presence is worth. In his films, Moore plays the guy with a beef. You can debate his expertise, his honesty and his tactics, but from opening titles to closing credits you can’t debate his relevance because Moore’s doggedness won’t allow it. Spurlock, however, has no such axe to grind. He begins his hunt for “OBL,” he says, because the upcoming birth of his first child prompts him to do some soul-searching about the world’s great dangers. But that’s bullshit, and Spurlock knows it. To Moore’s genuine finger-waving anger, Spurlock provides shrugged shoulders of ambivalence. For all his supposed daring, he’s less a man on a mission than an employee trying to justify an expense account.

The reality, it’s clear, is that Spurlock wanted to do a movie on terrorism, and so he backtracked until he found a reason why he should or could. That’s fine in theory, but the trouble with that approach is that it undermines the film’s importance: By going so far out on such a flimsy limb in order to validate all that follows, Spurlock gives the impression that his mission requires justification, as if a filmmaker can’t make a film just because. When at the end of the movie Spurlock is calling his adventure a success because he has narrowed down Osama’s location to probably-Pakistan – even though news footage used within the documentary confirms that this was already a common theory – the desperate grab at relevance turns Spurlock into the awkward punchline of a joke he forgot he was telling.

If Spurlock can’t find a compelling reason why we should watch his film, it’s only right to wonder what we’re doing staring up at the screen. All too often, Where in the World feels like nothing more than a goofy travelogue with a lame “Where’s Osama?” running gag that at one point has Spurlock yelling “Yoooo-hooooo…” into a cave in Tora Bora. The exotic locations and Spurlock’s general cheer keep the experience watchable, but that’s a far cry from making the film worthwhile. With its cornball country music ditties and CGI sequences featuring Spurlock squaring off with bin Laden as characters in a video game, this is a documentary so focused on its spoonful of sugar that it forgets the part about making the medicine go down. Spurlock doesn’t have anything to say or any logic to impart, he just wants to talk.

Occasionally, he does talk to the right people, such as when Spurlock has a fascinating non-discussion with two 18-year-old students in Saudi Arabia who profess not to have a single opinion on America, lest they give the wrong answer in front of their onlooking principal. But more often than not, Spurlock’s whims fail to bear fruit. His most common mistake is forcing everything through his expectant-father prism, as if he’s the first man about to have a child. When Spurlock walks through the wreckage of a classroom near the Gaza Strip that had been shelled only hours before, he refuses to let the images speak for themselves and instead contemplates aloud how frightening it would be to send his child to school on such hazardous terrain. Calls home to his pregnant wife, Alexandra Jamieson, come off as either pathetic attempts to justify his absence or delusions of grandeur over the significance of his mission. Usually both.

It’s a shame to see Spurlock misfire to this degree, because his debut film, Super Size Me, was a surprise hit of 2004. In that documentary, in which Spurlock acts as lab rat by eating nothing but McDonald’s cuisine for a month to test the effects of fast food, the filmmaker was no more surprised by the end result than he is here, when he fails to locate bin Laden. But whereas Super Size Me began from a small idea (30 days of Big Macs) and grew into a surprisingly diverse and in-depth analysis of the fast food industry, Where in the World has nothing beyond its premise, which – comic though it is supposed to be – still causes Spurlock to overdraw from his creative account as he tries to make good on it. Spurlock’s “decision” at the end of the film to return home to his family rather than risk his life by traveling into a Taliban-controlled area of Pakistan reveals a filmmaker who has lost his way. If pursuing bin Laden isn’t “worth it,” the entire “search” wasn’t worth it. And thus the film tastes like time wasted, for everyone.

By the Book: Smart People

When you’re watching a movie and a grown-up character is constantly reminding the people around him that his visiting brother is adopted, you can be sure of at least one of two things: either the character is a major boner or the screenwriter is sadly unimaginative when it comes to conveying the scars of fractured brotherhood. In Smart People, it’s both. The boner is a college professor of Victorian literature played by a bearded and frumpy Dennis Quaid. The unimaginative screenwriter is Mark Poirier, a novelist making his screenwriting debut. The adopted brother is a jobless drifter played by an unkempt, mustachioed Thomas Haden Church. And in this movie everything is as it seems.

The film’s cookie-cutter approach to character construction began before its actors made it into the makeup trailer: One brother is named Lawrence, the other goes by Chuck. I’ll let you guess which is which, but here’s some help: Have you ever met an uptight, unjustifiably arrogant English professor named Chuck? How about a slacker named Lawrence? Yeah, me neither. But take Quaid, stuff a lumpy pillow down his shirt and give him a limp and, wham, you’ve got yourself a Professor Lawrence Wetherhold! Then take Church and give him Ty Pennington’s hairdo and chin whiskers a porn star’s mustache and, bam, you’ve got yourself a slacking Chuck – rolled joint not necessary until Act 2. With microwave-ready clichés like these, why cook, right?

Actually, that is right. Smart People’s overall design may be uninspired, but it works to the degree that it does because it sticks to its formula. A knee-jerk knock on the film would note the characters’ lack of evolution, but that’s kind of what I like about it. To expect a Devil Wears Prada makeover within a college English department would be foolish, so it’s refreshing that Smart People stops short of providing one. This is a movie that only hints at the possibility of change, as if fully aware of how arduous change can be. And perhaps Proirier simply doesn’t know how to write metamorphosis any more than he knows how to write years of pent-up family hostility, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that, on some level, Smart People is attempting to keep it real.

In that regard, the film is more successful than it deserves to be. (Mild spoiler warning) The plot includes an unexpected pregnancy, an inappropriate kiss and an overdone yet incomplete running gag about car sickness, yet the characters remain surprisingly believable. For that, you can credit the acting. Quaid will never be confused with Daniel Day-Lewis, but his gruff performance here reminds that the main thing keeping him on the B-list is his habit of showing up in B-movies. Church, meanwhile, approaches Chuck with the ease of an actor who realizes that 95 percent of the part is to take it easy. Then there’s Ellen Page, who as Lawrence’s daughter Vanessa looks just as comfortable playing a brainy girl who always sits up straight as she did playing the whip-smart, slouching Juno MacGuff. Sarah Jessica Parker manages to convince us that her beautiful Janet, one of Lawrence’s former students, sees her former professor’s inner Dennis Quaid. And Ashton Holmes occupies space as Lawrence’s son James, which, unfortunately, is all the character is asked to do.

The similarities between this Noam Murro-directed film and Noah Baumbach’s latest dysfunctional portraits are obvious, right down to the facial-haired English department pretension and professional bitterness, and Smart People nestles somewhere between the two. It isn’t as ugly as the laxative of hopelessness that is Margot At The Wedding, yet it isn’t as entertaining (or as powerful) as The Squid And The Whale. If Squid, like an editorial cartoon, exaggerates ever so slightly in all the right places in order to find a deeper truth, Smart People is more akin to a scientific drawing in a biology textbook: realistic almost to the point of boredom. Jeff Daniels’ Bernard Berkman is so terrifically pompous that we actually enjoy spending time with him, whereas Quaid’s Lawrence is genuinely disagreeable, thanks in large part to the influence of his daughter, whose sole emotional nourishment comes from watching her father detach from the world to seek her elitist company instead.

With a plot that at best seems obligatory, Smart People doesn’t have any grand designs, but then most people don’t either. The picture merely gets by, laughing whenever the opportunity presents itself, usually thanks to Church’s enjoyable scene-stealing. These days, lots of dramedies come overstuffed with misfits, outcasts and fuck-ups, so it’s nice to find a movie that doesn’t confuse idiosyncrasy with cleverness. Then again, this is a movie that drifts in and out of its characters’ lives so effortlessly that it sometimes feels adrift. Smart People never invests our emotions enough to win us over as a drama, nor does it tickle our funny bone regularly enough to satisfy as a comedy. It just is, which is enough to hold our interest for 95 minutes, but not enough to make this a film worth holding on to.

Reason No. 919 Why I Love The Onion

What would life be like without The Onion? Oh, wait, I know the answer to that. It would be just as absurd as it is now, only not intentionally so.

When you’re done enjoying the above clip, I highly recommend this print piece from a month back. It has nothing whatsoever to do with movies – I mean, other than the fact that the author guest-starred in my favorite Bill Murray movie – but it makes me laugh.

As for the latest Iron Man trailer – the real trailer – it’s a groaner for me. Part of the problem is that I’m not a comic book fanboy, so Iron Man is just yet another dude in a funny outfit saving the world. (And Robert Downey Jr. as an ass-kicker? Really?)

The part that annoys me though comes at the end of the preview, when the crimson C-3PO fires a rocket at a tank and then does the turn-around-and-walk-away-because-I’m-too-cool-to-watch-or-flinch-at-the-explosion bit. Is it just me, or has that become totally lame? I’d go so far as to say that move has jumped the shark, but nothing is as lame as arguing about when or if things have jumped the shark. So let’s just stick to debating lameness, okay?

(Oh, and here’s the original trailer – the one examined by The Onion – in case you care.)

Queue It Up: Deliver Us From Evil

A few weeks ago, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig called Washington, D.C.’s new Nationals Ballpark a “cathedral.” Tomorrow he’ll be right. As you no doubt know, the pope is in town here in the nation’s capital, with Mass at the ballpark to come tomorrow, leading to lots of inner-Beltway buzz and even more concern from local residents about how the man-in-white’s visit will affect auto and Metro commutes for the next few days.

But Pope Benedict XVI started making headlines before he reached American soil. Yesterday, from his Alitalia jet, the pope said he was “deeply ashamed” of the clergy sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the U.S. Catholic Church in recent years. “We will do what is possible that this cannot happen in the future,” he said, sounding like a guy who got Wi-Fi at the Vatican only last week and just learned of the atrocities that corrupt Church officials took pains to keep underground for decades.

Nice try, your pontiffness.

As someone who grew up going to Mass every Sunday and who attended a Catholic high school, I know firsthand that the Catholic Church isn’t entirely monstrous. But these sex-abuse scandals weren’t limited to a few black sheep. They were also the result of fraudulence at the shepherd-level, and there’s a big difference. Which brings us to today’s rental recommendation.

If all the news coverage of the past decade hasn’t convinced you that the Catholic Church knowingly ignored problem priests while attempting to avoid responsibility in these sex-abuse cases until it ran out of other options, I urge you to watch the documentary Deliver Us From Evil, which was one of my top-15 films of 2006.

At its most basic level, the documentary is a story of one flawed priest. But thanks in large part to some shocking deposition footage in which Church officials eagerly hide behind their lawyers – something tells me that’s not what Jesus would do – it’s also an unsettling glimpse under the hood of a broken organizational machine.

My original 2006 review follows:


Deliver Us From Evil
I believe it was comedian Damon Wayans who observed, “I like the idea of people, but people always ruin it for me.” For the past 15 years that’s the way I’ve felt about organized religion. It’s a wonderful idea, with the potential to bring out the best in humanity, but the price of unity is that such goodness can be tainted by a few Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells. And it can be completely undone by the likes of Oliver O’Grady and Roger Mahoney.

The latter two men are at the center of Amy Berg’s spellbinding documentary Deliver Us From Evil. O’Grady is a non-practicing former Roman Catholic priest living in Ireland, and Mahoney is the active Archbishop of Los Angeles. Twenty-five years ago, both men were in Stockton, Calif., where O’Grady did more preying than praying, abusing the trust of his position to sexually assault several children, while Mahoney, the local bishop in charge, overlooked his flock instead of overseeing it.

Berg doesn’t use these men to undermine Catholicism specifically or religion as a whole, but what she does do is explore their sins with more honesty and depth than the Catholic Church seems intent to employ. Relying on superb journalistic instincts, Berg uses an inside-out approach that in a mere 111 minutes goes from depicting O’Grady as a single, despicable falling star to demonstrating his place in a Catholic solar system filled with pedophilic meteors (shocking statistic: over the past decade, hundreds of abuse-against-minors charges have been issued against priests in California alone).

Berg accomplishes all of this without relying on sensationalism or grandstanding (minus perhaps the Vatican trip, which smells of Michael Moore). Her film is heartbreaking, revolting and sometimes – like when the oh-so-pleasant O’Grady reflects on his decades of abuse with a twinkle in his eye – just plain creepy. Yet all the while it’s respectful. And when O’Grady’s victims (including hoodwinked parents) detail their abuse, they do so willingly, bravely and, one hopes, cathartically – their trust in the filmmaker unmistakable.

That O’Grady served a paltry seven years for his abhorrent crimes, and that Mahoney has managed to avoid conviction, demonstrates how difficult it is to crack the Catholic ranks. Watching police interrogations in which Mahoney and other men of the cloth hide behind lawyers, it’s evident that many high-ranking Catholic officials may never be legally condemned. But it’s worth believing in heaven and hell just to imagine the sentence St. Peter will hand down when these wretches reach the Pearly gates.

Still, future damnation isn’t a substitute for action in the present. Thus, Berg’s film is a public service, forcing us to face the truth not only about O’Grady and Mahoney but religion as a whole. Watching the movie, I thought of Michael Caine’s memorable lines in The Prestige: “You’re looking for the secret,” he says, “but you won’t find it – because you want to be fooled.” Deliver Us From Evil reminds us that illusions can be dangerous.

---

Addendum:
In July 2007, Cardinal Roger Mahony issued an apology after 508 victims (508!) reached a deal worth a reported $660 million. "I have come to understand far more deeply than I ever could the impact of this terrible sin and crime that has affected their lives ... I apologize to anyone who has been offended, who has been abused ... It should not have happened and should not ever happen again."

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: The Naked Prey

One of my favorite film experiences of 2006 was Apocalypto, not always for the film itself but for the conversation it inspired. Critics loved it. Critics hated it. Often at the same time. Mel Gibson’s adrenaline-packed film was thematically inconsistent, historically inaccurate and lustfully bloody – and it came not too long after Gibson’s latest and lowest public embarrassment: his drunken anti-Semitic ranting. In sum, Apocalypto offered much to discuss. And yet the film’s biggest cinematic influence, Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey, was rarely mentioned beyond passing attribution – along with The Most Dangerous Game – as an ancestor on the man-hunting-man family tree. Few critics drew any deep comparisons and most didn’t seem to realize there were comparisons to be drawn. Gibson’s film, it turned out, had modeled itself after an Oscar-nominated movie that was as good as forgotten.

Why that surprised me, I’m not sure. I was lucky to know of The Naked Prey myself. I had seen the 1966 movie exactly once, as a middle schooler on a week-long visit to my uncle Ric’s in Cape Cod. We spent days doing things as a family and then at night Ric and I would hunker down to take in flicks from his VHS collection. We watched some then-recent releases ranging from The Abyss to Tremors, and we watched a lot of John Wayne (my uncle’s favorite), but we also picked through titles I would have otherwise struggled to discover: Zulu and Zulu Dawn, A Crack In The World and The Naked Prey. The latter movie fascinated me enough that my uncle created a board game modeled after its adventure in which players rolled dice to try to get from one end of the board to the other without landing on spaces that would result in a spear to the back or a snakebite to the leg or other fatal disasters. Looking back, that week (as well as others with Ric) was a huge part of my development as a movie fan, and yet I have to be careful when I mention it because people get the wrong idea if I say that as a preteen “I played The Naked Prey game with my uncle.”

But why wouldn’t they? When the average person hears The Naked Prey, they don’t hear the italics because they don’t know the movie exists. To this day, I’ve never had The Naked Prey recommended to me, nor have I ever suggested it for someone and found they’d already seen it. Other than in reviews of Apocalypto I’ve never seen The Naked Prey mentioned in print and I’ve never stumbled across it on TV. And yet TV might be responsible for the picture’s modicum of remaining recognition. Earlier this year, The Naked Prey was released on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection, and in its accompanying booklet Michael Atkinson theorizes that “probably more viewers saw the film while roving the local channels on cold Saturday afternoons during the seventies than ever saw it in a theater.” Earlier in the piece Atkinson is equally realistic about the film’s everyday anonymity: “Insofar as the movie is remembered at all, it remains the best known of Wilde’s lost filmography,” he says. Which must be the cinematic history equivalent of: “We’re lost but we’re making good time.”

I bought the Criterion release a few months ago for my birthday using, fittingly enough, a gift card from Uncle Ric. But I’d been waiting for the right rainy day to rediscover it, and I happily found that day a little over a week ago. Seeing the movie for the first time in almost 20 years I was amazed at how much of it I remembered: the Zulu tribe’s execution of one white hunter via cobra strike; the arrow fired into the distance to mark the head start provided for Wilde’s stripped-and-running character (called “Man” in the credits) before the Zulu hunters give chase; the cobra bite to the leg suffered by one of the “pursuers” that results in another tribesman attempting to suck the venom from the wound. Still, while the screenplay’s simple design – nominated for an Academy Award – cannot be forgotten, other elements of the film were like new to me.

The most thrilling (re)discovery was Wilde’s implementation of African wildlife footage. Even before “Man” goes on the run, we experience an elephant hunting expedition in which bulls stampede toward the camera before being felled by rifle shots. My first reaction was to laugh at the preposterousness of it … until I remembered that films didn’t use CGI in 1966 and that the only way to make a stampeding elephant collapse to the ground and stay there was probably to actually kill it. I have no idea if Wilde arranged a hunting expedition expressly for his film or merely tagged along with one, but there’s no doubt that such images wouldn’t fly today. Other images, however, seem right out of a National Geographic special: a lion dragging away a kill, a toad eating a smaller toad, a lizard deftly maneuvering from one branch to another. There’s even an extended clash between a baboon and a cheetah that’s no less thrilling than anything I saw on last year’s Planet Earth documentary series.

The wildlife footage isn’t there just for show. It all goes along with Wilde’s meditation on man as beast and the savagery exhibited by humankind. But it is generally striking on its own. Watching I thought, “This is Malick before Malick.” And maybe it really is. Badlands came out in 1973, to be followed by Days Of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005), and Terrence Malick’s metaphoric use of nature in those films is so similar to what’s displayed here that it’s difficult to believe he wasn’t inspired by Wilde. Was one reclusive auteur shaped by an overlooked and forgotten one? Somehow that would be fitting, though unless Malick begins to ramble about film like Martin Scorsese we’ll be able to do no more than speculate. My guess though is that Apocalypto’s release didn’t mark the first time that The Naked Prey’s influence went almost unnoticed. And with the Criterion release I’m hoping that a long lost movie will deservedly be found again by an audience.

[This “Queue It Up” post marks the first in what will be a series of sporadic recommendations for your Netflix queue.]

Still Rolling (& Rocking): Shine A Light

The Rolling Stones-Martin Scorsese rockumentary Shine A Light provides what for me were two jaw-dropping surprises. The first is that the Rolling Stones still bring it. These rockers who formed a legendary band in the 1960s and now are performing in their 60s are as good as ever, at least to my untrained ears and eyes. They are showcased here playing at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre in the fall of 2006 as captured by what Scorsese called “the best cameramen in the world” and as edited by David Tedeschi, who worked with Scorsese on the Bob Dylan documentary No Way Home. Yet there seems to be little benefit to Scorsese’s expertise or the contributions of four Oscar-winning cinematographers (Robert The Aviator Richardson, John Braveheart Toll, Andrew Lord Of The Rings Lesnie and Robert There Will Be Blood Elswit) as well as three cinematographers waiting for their Oscar just due (Stuart The Piano Dryburgh, Emmanuel The New World Lubezki and Ellen Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Kuras). And that’s the second surprise: Scorsese & Co. are freeloaders here.

At least that’s my view. The way I see it, you can conclude that the Rolling Stones’ musical act is as decrepit as Keith Richards’ face and thus is resurrected to Adonis-like perfection by movie magic, or you can decide, as I did, that the Stones just plain rock and that all Scorsese brought to the party were some really big cameras that made the concert’s footage fit for IMAX. I mean, really: other than injecting himself into the opening and closing of the film, what is Scorsese doing here? Bear in mind, I’m not questioning his pedigree. The guy edited Woodstock for crying out loud. But here Scorsese and his team of all-star cinematographers are a flamethrower being used to light a match. The Stones would have burned plenty fine on their own, thank you.

And they do. Though playing a slate dominated by know-‘em-by-heart hits from the 60s and 70s, the Rolling Stones aren’t remotely a shadow of glory past. They tear up the Beacon like a band ready to make it today. Sure, Richards looks like a dizzy gypsy, the skin of his face resembling wide-wale corduroy. Sure, drummer Charlie Watts looks a lot like Bob Simon, the silver-haired reporter on 60 Minutes. Sure, Ronnie Wood looks like he’s trying to cling to his youth by wearing a haircut from the 1980s. Sure, Mick Jagger looks a bit ridiculous shaking his ass at women young enough to be his granddaughters. So what? It takes all of one song to get over one’s skepticism that these guys are washed up. By two songs you’ll be fully convinced they legitimately rock. And by three songs you’ll realize that Mick Jagger is in much better shape than you are and that the Stones aren’t just one of the greatest music acts ever but one of the greatest acts on the planet right now.

But the Stones do that on their own. They don’t need Scorsese’s help. And sometimes the director is a hindrance. For starters, he’s Jagger-obsessed. Solo artists spend less time under the spotlight than Mick does here; there were moments watching Shine A Light when I thought my only hope of seeing Richards or Wood was to have Jagger walk by them. Meanwhile, Scorsese – generous in his screen time for a pair of unknown backup singers (one of them busty, no surprise) – often forgets to check in on Watts. I’d need to see the film again to be sure, but in my memory entire songs go by without a decent glimpse of the drummer, even though he’s an established figure of the band. Regardless of whatever else is going on, when Mick moves, Marty is there. And Mick moves a hell of a lot. His recognizable yet indescribable strut – something like that of an electrocuted rooster – is no less absurd than it was in the Stones’ heyday, but then it’s no more absurd either. It’s just Mick.

And, to be sure, Jagger’s passionate performing demands attention. His energy dominates the room – and that’s indeed what the Beacon feels like when hosting the Stones: a modest room. The following expressions are clichéd, but at times it’s as if the Stones really might raise the roof or blow the doors off the 2,600-seat theater. The lucky few to catch the show (Bill Clinton on his 60th birthday, pretty young blonds and, hey, is that Bruce Willis standing in front of the stage wearing a yellow cap?), witnessed the arena-packing Stones in about as intimate a venue as one could imagine. But while Scorsese and his team do well to capture the festive mood, the theater’s limited square footage might be to the film’s detriment. How else to explain why the vast majority of shots – varied by angle, though they are – capture the action from a mid-range depth that forgets the performers have legs, or even navels?

Only Jagger gets a regular full-body checkup. Richards, perplexingly, is often caught from behind, as if the chords for “Shattered” are still a tightly kept secret. If not for the guest appearances of Jack White, Buddy Guy and Christina Aguilera, plus Jagger’s occasional wardrobe changes, Shine A Light’s tableau would have grown stale in a hurry. In some ways it does anyway. And Scorsese’s use of archival interview footage – enjoyable though it is – is so fleeting that it’s inconsequential at best and a frustrating tease at worst. Shine A Light isn’t a documentary, it’s a concert caught on film, which is to say that it’s closer to a coffee table book than a biography. And that’s fine. But we didn’t need Scorsese, 16 cameras and about as many award-winning cameramen to be thrilled by the spectacle.

With strobe-lit cuts and a forced dramatic episode about the unpredictability of the show’s playlist (as if there hadn’t been rehearsals, as if there weren’t enough cameras on hand to cover just about anything), Scorsese is a director trying to justify his position at the helm of a ship that sails itself. That said, Shine A Light includes one filmmaking decision that’s absolutely brilliant: When the camera leaves Mick to find another performer, the sound level of the element in the foreground is often lifted ever so slightly so that we can appreciate its contribution to the aural mosaic. That means we get to experience Watts on the drums, or the guys in the horns section, or the busty backup singer’s pipes or even the electronic "click" of a digital camera held aloft by a fan. Impressively, the quality of the song being played is never compromised by these modest enhancements of the often overlooked. And so for that – and for a goose-bumps worthy close-up of Buddy Guy gazing into the distance – the filmmakers deserve kudos. What they don’t deserve is equal billing. Shine A Light is a Stones movie, period. Anyone who suggests otherwise needs to lay off the champagne and reefer.

Charlton Heston: 1923-2008

The obituary in the L.A. Times states that Charlton Heston’s “big break” was a 1949 role in a CBS production of Julius Caesar. That hardly comes as a surprise. Heston’s booming, emphatic acting style was perfect for stage work, even if it was stage work on TV. Throughout his entire career, in roles noble, outrageous and somewhere in between, Heston always played to the back row. He was meant for the Theatre of Dionysus but was born too late. Yesterday, Heston died at 84.

Over his career, he parted the Red Sea, he acted opposite some damn, dirty apes and he figured out what Soylent Green was made out of. But Heston’s greatest role, for which he won an Oscar (his only such nomination), came in the titular part of 1959’s Ben-Hur. As the obits note, Heston wasn’t the first choice for the role (Burt Lancaster, who certainly would have been up for the task, turned it down, as did Paul Newman and Rock Hudson). But it was Heston’s dedication to his craft that made Judah Ben-Hur so memorable and that made Ben-Hur the grand film it remains today.

Where the movie itself ranks is up for debate. For what it’s worth, Ben-Hur placed 72nd in the American Film Institute’s inaugural “100 Years…100 Movies” rankings in 1998 and fell to 100th for the 10th Anniversary re-ranking. Regardless of the results of such quasi-scientific analysis, it’s a tremendous film certainly, though at 212 minutes it has plenty of time for imperfection.

What is flawless, however, is the legendary chariot race sequence, which I believe still stands as the most remarkable achievement in cinema history. The statistics alone are impressive: an 18-acre set, thousands of extras, plus horses and stunt men and urban legends, oh my! One shudders to imagine how the same sequence would be achieved today in the digital effects era. The set would be CGI, as would be the crowd, the horses, the chariots and sometimes even the actors. Not to mention that you can bet your bottom dollar that screenwriters would find a way to work in some play-by-play commentary. Yet I challenge you to watch Ben-Hur and tell me how digital effects could enhance the existing product.

Tremendously edited, using a wide array of camera angles, the chariot race captures the enormity of its arena without losing the intimacy of Judah’s duel with Messala (Stephen Boyd). And here is where Heston’s work ethic comes in, because while stuntman Joe Canutt stood in for the actor for several portions of the race (including the famous flip over the front of the chariot), that’s Heston doing most of the riding. Heston’s athleticism in the chariot enabled Andrew Marton (credited with directing the sequence, though the film’s director was William Wyler) to get close enough to Judah to capture Heston’s expressions while still picking up the genuine racing action unfolding around him in the picture’s super-wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio.

At 6-foot-2, Heston’s physical stature made Judah Ben-Hur the heroic presence the epic demanded. Though Heston wasn’t the most unaffected of actors, his power of spirit was alluring. The Cooler pays tribute to the cinema legend with shots from the chariot race.