Underrated Movie #41: Junebug

Title: Junebug
Year: 2005
Director: Phil Morrison
Writer: Angus MacLachlan
Stars: Amy Adams (Enchanted), Embeth Davidtz (“Mad Men”), Alessandro Nivolla, Ben McKenzie (“Southland”)

The Story: A chic Chicago gallery owner marries a hunky transplant from North Carolina. When she wants to do business with an untrained painter who lives near his hometown, she quickly gets wrapped up in the ups and downs of his family, especially his effervescent sister-in-law.

How it Came to be Underrated: This seemed like a breakout hit at the time, and it justifiably rocketed Adams to stardom, but it's been five years and neither Morrison nor MacLachlan have gotten their names on any more movies. That’s a real shame, because this is one of the best American films of the last decade.

This will be an unusually long “Why It’s Great” because I can’t get over how SMART this movie is:

1. The supposed “red state / blue state divide” has so thoroughly poisoned the American dialogue that it’s now shocking to see a movie that's equally sympathetic towards both big city art-dealers and their small-town religious kin. Davidtz refuses to understand the attitudes of her husband’s family and they do no better with her, but we soon realize that the conflicts across that divide are nothing compared to the long-simmering conflicts within each half of the family, which are the real problem. The cultural debates are just a sideshow.
   
2. The direction and the acting tease a lot of meaning out of the understated script. With each line, we understand instantly (a) what the person is trying to say, (b) what they’re unintentionally revealing about themselves, and (c) how the other person is hearing something completely different. And yet, while we’re acutely aware of everyone’s failings, we remain sympathetic to them all.
   
3. The movie incisively re-creates the humorous little passive-aggressive slights that families inflict on each other when they visit, like “accidentally” turning off the light when somebody’s down in the basement, or offering to help somebody do something that they won't admit they're doing.
4. The movie resists the urge to present the uneducated artist as a saintly child of the earth –the same rawness that makes him a valuable artist also makes him bigoted— but when he shows his nightmarishly crude canvases and says, “My job here is to make the invisible visible,” the line is unironic. That's exactly what each one of them, whether sophisticated or unsophisticated, is desperately trying to do.
   
5. We’ve had so many underwhelming prefab movie stars foisted on us in recent years, so it’s a rare joy to watch someone become a star onscreen the old-fashioned way. I walked into the movie having no idea who Amy Adams was and walked out thinking “She is so damned good that I will watch her in anything!” That’s how you make a star.
   
6. I love how people who watch this movie wildly disagree about who’s to blame for these misunderstandings. Some get furious at the wife, some at the husband, some at the mom, but no two people ever seem to feel quite the same way.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Director David Gordon Green also did a great job bringing small-town North Carolina life to arthouse audiences with George Washington and All the Real Girls.

How Available Is It?: Curiously, the dvd has a commentary with Adams and Davidtz, but nothing from Morrison and MacLachlan. Had they already faded off into the mist by the time the dvd came out?

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: I Didn’t Notice That Crazy Looking Painter!

Underrated Movie #40: Killer of Sheep

Title: Killer of Sheep
Year: 1977
Director: Charles Burnett (To Sleep With Anger)
Writer: Charles Burnett
Stars: Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett

The Story: A worn-out sheep butcher in the dirt-poor Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles tries to put on a happy face for his family. Meanwhile, we get to see the struggles, failures, and occasional victories of his close-knit community.

How it Came to be Underrated: This was a student film, never intended for wide release, so Burnett didn’t secure the music rights. That kept it off vhs and dvd for 30 years, while rumors of its greatness kept its reputation alive. Finally, in 2007, new distributors secured the rights to all of the original songs except one and the movie had a triumphant re-release. (To replace the missing song, they re-used one of the other songs, and it works just fine.)

Why It’s Great:

1. There had already been a handful of well-made independent films about the black underclass by white directors (one of which I’ll cover next week), but those films inevitably boil down to one question: What is to be done about this? Burnett, one of the first major black independent filmmakers, is more interested in listening to the rhythms of everyday life that persist even in seemingly untenable conditions. The question here is not “what is to be done?” but simply “what’s going on?"
2. This material could have easily become too bleak, but, like his hero Jean Renoir, Burnett finds passing joys where he can in little vignettes... Two guys try to carry an engine that’s too heavy for them out of a house. A man puts on a record to slow-dance with his wife. Kids gather to enjoy the show as a different husband, caught cheating, hides from his pistol-wielding wife. Each moment tells a story of its own, but those moments also resonate with each other to form a complex group portrait of a neighborhood.
   
3. The movie has a marvelous sense of deadpan. I love the scene where some guys sit talking in a parked car, and we don’t realize that there’s no windshield until one of them reaches out to get a can of Schlitz off the hood.
   
4. Burnett comes across as a soft-spoken, thoughtful guy in the wide-ranging dvd commentary. Burnett and film historian Richard Pena (my old prof) lament that this once-shocking portrait of poverty in Watts now feels like the calm before the storm. In the '80s, things would really get bad. At least in the '70s, they could still count on each other, before the sense of community fell apart.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Before Burnett, the most prominent black independent filmmaker was Melvin Van Peebles. Check out Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song for a much more proactive take on the problems of inner city L.A.

How Available Is It?: In addition to the commentary, the beautifully restored dvd has a cast reunion doc and more student films by Burnett.

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Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #1

It’s time for our first edition of Special Guest Picks. I’ve solicited the opinions of various esteemed (by me anyway) movie opinion muckety-mucks, in order to include some other voices and fire up the level of discourse here at “Cockeyed Caravan”. Let me know what you think of our new feature. Here are the picks of our first guest, Geoff Betts:

The Comedian (1957)
Directed by: John Frankenheimer
Written by: Rod Serling and Ernest Lehman

The Playhouse 90 anthology series, which ran on CBS from 1956 to 1961, truly helped to anchor the “Golden Age of Television” era. These 90-minute films tended to be incredibly well written, directed, and acted. Perhaps most impressive though is that they were mainly filmed live (not an easy feat at all). One of the best of these films was The Comedian.

Starring Mickey Rooney and Edmund O’Brien, the film is all about the behind the scenes business of television, and especially the comedy/variety programs that ruled the airwaves in early ‘50s (Your Show of Shows, The Texaco Star Theater, The Colgate Comedy Hour, etc.).

Rooney gives a tremendous performance as the talented, yet cruel and demanding Sammy Hogarth, who is the star of his own comedy series and thrives on exerting dominance over his staff in a way that makes them feel constantly on edge. O’Brien is his burnt-out head writer who finds himself out of fresh ideas, which leads him to make a morally dubious decision in order to keep his job. The film is also helped by an excellent supporting cast, including Kim Hunter, Constance Ford, and especially Mel Torme (yes -The Velvet Fog) who plays Sammy’s beaten down brother, Lester.

Serling and Frankenheimer would both go on to lucrative careers in film and television. However, the writing and directing in The Comedian remains some of their best and most innovative work. The Comedian is on DVD and you can find it on Netflix.

Melvin and Howard (1980)
Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Written by: Bo Goldman

Even though this film was released in 1980, I tend to refer to it as one of the last great films of the 1970s. Loosely based on a true story, this is an in depth character study of a working class guy named Melvin Dummar (brilliantly played by Paul Le Mat) who finds himself catching a series of bad breaks in life, including the ultimate disappointment of not being able to claim the inheritance allegedly left to him by Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) – a reward for supposedly finding Mr. Hughes on the side of the road in the Nevada dessert after a motorcycle crash and taking him home safely.

The film is not about a relationship between these two men though, but rather about Melvin who is an average Joe just trying to do his best to get by. Yet all of his efforts to get a piece of the American Dream just seem to fall a little short. Melvin’s situation of course serves as a direct contrast to Howard Hughes who was born into a very wealthy family, which allowed him to pursue any number of expensive, creative endeavors during his life – some with more success than others.

Melvin and Howard is by far my favorite film directed by Jonathan Demme (and I am fan of many of this movies). It is on DVD and you can get it on Netflix.

The Last American Hero (1973)
Directed by: Lamont Johnson
Written by: William Roberts (based on an essay by Tom Wolfe)

If you liked Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, The Big Lebowski, Cutter’s Way, or anything else, I would highly recommend The Last American Hero, which is just a great underrated film. It features Bridges as a talented racecar driver from a small, rural town in the North Carolina.

Based on an essay by Tom Wolfe about NASCAR racing legend Junior Johnson (originally published in Esquire in 1963), Bridges plays Junior Jackson, an unassuming, tough SOB who learned to drive by running moonshine for his father as a kid. After his father is arrested though, he becomes a professional racecar driver as a way to earn some extra cash to get his daddy out of jail. His natural ability on the track does not go unnoticed by the owners and business sponsors, who see in him a potential star that they can use to promote their entire industry.

This is not only a great ‘70s film but it also an excellent depiction of stock car racing in its early days. It is small scale, regionally based, and just flat out dangerous. The racing scenes are raw and breathtaking, and truly convey the risks these drivers take when they get behind the wheel.

Bridges, who had already been in four great films preceding this one (The Last Picture Show, Bad Company, Fat City, and The Iceman Cometh) is incredibly convincing as the honest and focused Jackson. And while he does take advantage of some of the inevitable benefits of his racing success, he also remains uneasy with his newfound celebrity throughout the film.

The Last American Hero also has a great supporting cast, featuring Ned Beatty, Valerie Perrine, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Gary Busey. It is on DVD and available on Netflix.

Payday (1973)
Directed by: Darryl Duke
Written by: Don Carpenter

Rip Torn, the great American character actor and more recently infamously known as the 79 year-old drunk who broke into a Connecticut bank after he mistook it for his own home, is amazing as a past-his-prime country singer who makes a series of selfish and short sighted decisions over the course of a few days that all contribute to his inevitable downfall.

Torn is tremendous as Maury Dann, a supreme narcissist whose sense of self worth is very much out of step with reality. This remains one of Torn’s best performances, and given his nearly 60-year career in films and television that’s saying a lot.

Payday, which still remains a virtually unknown movie even amongst people who are bona fide film fans, is a must-see underrated film starring a great underrated actor. It is on DVD and you can get it on Netflix.

Geoff Betts has a Masters degree in Film Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He also produced a movie I made, and he now works as an organizer for the Writers Guild. I had to pick him first, since we’ve been watching movies together since we were thirteen. He intentionally chose four movies I hadn’t seen, just to show me up, (but then he ruined his own shut-out game by showing me The Comedian this weekend, which was great).

Underrated Movie #39: Hero

Title: Hero
Year: 2002
Director: Zhang Yimou
Writers: Zhang Yimou, Feng Li, Bin Wang
Stars: Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Ziyi Zhang, Donnie Yen

The Story: 2000 years ago, at the birth of imperial China. A local prefect decides to eliminate the three assassins that threaten his new emperor. But when he is invited to the palace to explain how he did it, the emperor quickly becomes suspicious of his story, and his motives…

How it Came to be Underrated: Yimou, the greatest Chinese arthouse director of his generation, achieved unprecedented financial success with this all-star action epic, but that only increased the grumbling among serious critics that he had “sold out”. That’s a shame, since the movie has as much art and smarts as Yimou's straight dramas.

Why It’s Great:

1. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, a lot of action films, especially Asian action films, were marketed as “balletic” or “poetic”. In most cases, this was an insult to the arts of ballet and poetry. It does a director like John Woo (Yimou's contemporary from neighboring Hong Kong) no favors to ascribe high-minded aspirations to his movies. He shows exquisite craft, but he has very little to say. Yimou, on the other hand, takes this challenge seriously. This is one of the few movies that actually attempts to incorporate the formal beauty and intellectual ambiguity of poetry into the action genre.
   
2. If it’s an action movie, then action must resolve the conflict, right? Not really. Yimou fills his movie with thrilling swordplay, but he never lets us forget that the violence is tragic. As with Leone’s westerns, we get swept up in the action without ever really believing that it will solve anything.
3. CGI has been such so miserably misused by American directors that it’s tempting to see it as nothing but a curse upon the artform. But rather than pretend that computer graphics look “real”, Yimou reinvigorates CGI by embracing its two-dimensionality, creating a unworldly, painterly effect that’s beautiful and often delightfully absurd.
   
4. So who’s the hero? That question remains unanswered at the end. This is ultimately not a war of swords, but a war of dueling stories. History belongs not to those with military might, but to those who can best exploit the people's foolish longing to believe in heroic narratives.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: The two early masterworks that made Yimou's reputation were Raise the Red Lantern and To Live. They're pretty great.

How Available Is It?: It’s on dvd and it plays often on the Independent Film Channel.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: "I Rather Think I'll Give You a Karate Death Chop, Mr. President!"

Underrated Movie #38: Next Stop, Greenwich Village

Title: Next Stop, Greenwich Village
Year: 1976
Director: Paul Mazursky
Writer: Paul Mazursky
Stars: Lenny Baker, Shelly Winters, Ellen Greene, Lois Smith, Chris Walken

The Story: A jokey would-be actor leaves his smothering mother behind in Brooklyn and makes a life for himself in the burgeoning bohemia of 1953 Greenwich Village. (His rent? $25 a month.)

How it Came to be Underrated: I have no idea why Mazursky is no longer a household name, or how his half-dozen masterpieces have come to be forgotten. Discovering his work is like finding a lost treasure trove of collaborations between Woody Allen and Robert Altman.

Why It’s Great:

1. Mazursky is lovingly recreating his own coming-of-age here. People are wary of autobiographical films with good reason. Most filmmakers can’t resist the temptation to settle old scores and/or live out their fantasies of what should have happened. Mazursky does nothing of the sort. Baker-as-Mazursky is portrayed neither as a heroic martyr nor a misunderstood genius, just a sympathetic schmuck learning his lessons in the school of hard knocks.
2. The movie is fueled by a star-making lead performance from the great Lenny Baker. Unfortunately, he died a few years later from cancer without ever reaping the benefits. Every performance is great, including a very young-looking Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum.
   
3. The period art direction is all-enveloping and sumptuous. This is a very believable lost world of coffeehouses, rent parties, and method-acting workshops. Adding to the hundreds of period details is a great jazz score largely lifted from Dave Brubeck records.
   
4. Mazursky’s comedy is so sly that it almost slips by you. He quietly gets away with some outrageous things, like when Baker, at his deli job, finds out his girlfriend is pregnant while he’s cramming a carrot into a juicer.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Mazursky wrote and directed a lot of great movies during this period. You can’t go wrong with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice or Harry and Tonto.

How Available Is It?: It’s on dvd and available to Watch Instantly, though the instant version seems slightly distorted.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Oh Bruce. I’m So Happy.

Comics I Love Even Though I've Only Seen the Covers #6: Wings

You ladies are the most daring pilots America has, so you should look your best! From now on, we expect you to wear 4-inch heels while smashing America's enemies. Will that be a problem?

Ones That Got Away...

As you folks might imagine, I have a big list of underrated movies to cover. I re-watch the movies in order to write them up, so that means I either have to own them, download them, or rent the dvds through Netflix. Unfortunately, a lot of movies I’d love to cover aren’t available through Netflix at all, and I haven't yet found them for download. Some have never been released on any form of home video. Others were once available on dvd but they’ve have fallen mysteriously out of print. Film Noir Week was especially hard hit. Instead of doing so many hit-man movies, I’d wanted to spotlight some noirs told from a woman’s perspective, but I couldn’t get my hands on them.

Here’s a list of eight examples just through 1950. I throw out an appeal to you, my loyal readers. Are there vast untapped reserves of downloadable or rentable movies out where I could find any of these?

Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928). Buster gets a job shooting newsreel footage on the mean streets of New York. People assume that Buster lost his shine once he had his director’s hat taken away, but you can still see his steady hand here.

Just Imagine (1930) One of the weirdest movies ever made. A man wakes up in the far future—1980, where everyone has a number, not a name. Did I mention that it’s a zany (and racy) musical?

Red Dust (1932) Jean Harlow steams up Clark Gable on a rubber plantation, from the co-director of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

Tales of Manhattan (1942) Director Julien Duvivier follows one tail coat through five different stories, representing different genres and different levels of wealth. One of my all-time top ten!

The Window (1949) Little Bobby Driscoll, sleeping on the fire escape of his dirt-poor tenement, becomes a witness to murder, then has to avoid the killers himself.

My Name is Julia Ross (1945) A madman expects his secretary to become his wife, and then his prisoner. This harrowing noir could have been written by Betty Friedan.

Caught (1949) Max Ophuls directed this one about a woman who marries a possessive millionaire. Check out that cast!

Quicksand (1950) Mickey Rooney’s all grown up and ready to do a hold-up or two for a femme fatale!

Underrated Movie #37: Antz

Title: Antz
Year: 1998
Directors: Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson
Writers: Todd Alcott, Chris and Paul Weitz
Stars: Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Christopher Walken, Danny Glover

The Story: A worker-ant is determined to win the love of the next queen, even if it means shattering the rigid caste system of his colony. Unfortunately, she’s engaged to a hard-charging army-ant with a genocidal agenda.

How it Came to be Underrated: This movie went head-to-head with a very similar movie, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. At the time, critics preferred this one, but since Dreamworks' subsequent CGI output has been weak, and Pixar has become a masterpiece-making-machine, there’s a tendency to assume that, in retrospect, the critics must have been wrong. They weren’t. Not only does this one have superior animation, but the story is about a thousand times stronger --in both the comedy and the drama.

Why It’s Great:

1. Anthropomorphism is very tricky. You have to be willing to abandon certain realities (letting the ants stand up right, for instance) but if you discard too many real-world details, the setting becomes pointless (see: A Bug’s Life). The filmmakers never stop finding ways to integrate actual details of the ant world that cleverly contrast with human behavior. The more detailed and believable the world is, the stronger the metaphor becomes.
2. Both Allen and Stone are great actors whose subtleties tend to get overshadowed by their physical presence, albeit for very different reasons. It’s nice to hear them each get a chance to do some pure character work. Jane Curtain and Dan Akroyd also stand out as Chip and Muffy, the wasp-y wasps.
   
3. What happens when you combine elements of Ayn Rand’s libertarian novel Anthem with Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film Potemkin? You’d think the world would explode, right? Instead you get Antz. Amazingly, it all works. If the characters talked about juggling these ideologies, we’d laugh them out of the theater, but the movie instead creates an elegant allegory that shows us how these apparently conflicting value systems might be reconcilable. It’s a beautifully structured, wildly ambitious story.
4. Writer Todd Alcott now has a fun, smart blog. He’s always interesting, but I don’t always agree with everything he has to say. He did a post recently dismissing political readings of the movie. Really? Have you seen your movie?
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: The primary model for this movie seems to have been Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi fable Metropolis. (Interestingly, that movie was written by a proto-fascist and directed by an occasional-socialist.) They would make a great double feature.

How Available Is It?: There’s a dvd with a lively directors’ commentary.

Today's Post Was Brought To You By: Why Wouldn't You Believe Me, Miles Cabot?

Underrated Movie #36: Funny Ha Ha

Title: Funny Ha Ha
Year: 2005
Director: Andrew Bujalski
Writer: Andrew Bujalski
Stars: Kate Dollenmayer, Andrew Bujalski, Justin Rice

The Story: A 23 year old woman hangs out with friends, works lousy temp jobs and drinks too much. After some humiliating realizations, she finally tries to pull her life together.

How it Came to be Underrated: Are you ready to mumble?? This was the movie that launched the whole “mumblecore” genre of ultra-low-budget, affectless, plotless comedy/dramas about downwardly-mobile gen-y slackers. These movies are not aimed at broad audiences, and they make about $10 at the box office, but they inoculate themselves by only costing $5 to make in the first place.

Why It’s Great:

1. When mumblecore movies fail to connect, they are horrifically unpleasant, but when they work they seem so honest and accurate that they resonate deep down in your bones. Dollenmayer’s delicately-detailed characterization of this young woman can be alternately devastating and inspiring if you open yourself up to the movie’s awkward style.
   
2. Whenever I re-read dialogue I’ve written, I ask, “How can I make this sound more like how people actually talk?” But then I correct myself: “Well, not exactly like actual talk…” The art of dialogue is all about writing something realistic enough to provide a brief shock of recognition, but then, once your reader feels that you’re echoing real life, you flatter them by making everybody sound more and more clever. It’s only the most ambitious filmmakers who attempt to craft drama out of the stumbling, fumbling, mumbling give-and-take of truly realistic dialogue.
   
3. The easiest way to write a movie is to start with an active, driven protagonist who seeks out conflict. Audiences won’t want to care about those who doesn’t care about themselves, so we're told. But, if you’re willing to limit your audience to more hardcore filmgoers, then you can make a great movie about any type of person. We should be able to make movies about anything, right? This movie has the courage to explore the dramatic consequences of conflict avoidance, which is looking more and more like the curse of our age.
   
4. People who hate mumblecore like to complain about how bourgeois the whole concept is. They scream, “why should I care about mopey college grads whose only real problem is that they don’t know what to do with themselves??” But those critics are asking exactly what the filmmakers want them to ask. As the novelist Walker Percy put it, (paraphrasing here:) “our priests and psychiatrists have answered every possible question for us except for one: what are we supposed to do all day?”

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: The Puffy Chair is my other favorite example of the genre. Bujalski’s follow-up Mutual Appreciation was also amiably appealing.

How Available Is It?: The dvd has a bizarre, oddly hypnotic commentary by an unidentified “Russian film scholar” who may just be pulling our leg.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: The Day Bill Told Off His Boss!

Underrated Movie #35: Stage Door

Title: Stage Door
Year: 1937
Director: Gregory LaCava (My Man Godfrey)
Writers: Morrie Riskind and Anthony Veiller, based on the play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman
Stars: Katherine Hepburn (Holiday), Ginger Rogers (Swing Time), Adolphe Menjou (The Sniper), Andrea Leeds, Lucille Ball

The Story: Desperate, out-of-work actresses struggle together in a ladies’ boarding house on Broadway.

How it Came to be Underrated: The cycle of ensemble comedy/dramas that had started with Grand Hotel (1934) was already petering out in 1937 as screwball comedies burst onto the scene.

Why It’s Great:

1. My wife can always tell whether a “women’s picture” was written by a man or a woman because male writers won’t let sympathetic women be sarcastic. No worries here. Ferber was not exactly a feminist, but she gives everybody their due. These women rip, snort and tear each other up with glee.
   
2. Ginger Rogers had a wonderful career as a comedienne before she disappeared into Fred Astaire’s shadow. She’s so funny and sharp here that she makes the movie her own. Thankfully, she would get at least one more chance to show off her comedic skills in 1952’s Monkey Business.
3. The struggle to find work as an artist is hard enough, but these actresses find themselves facing a bigger challenge. They have to blur the distinction between "art" and "artiface". In order to get on stage once or twice a year, they first have to act the part of the nymphette-virgin-sophisticate all day and all night, offering up their bodies and souls to any shark with a half-interest in the stage. The horror of that situation is always threatening to break through the witty banter.
   
4. Adolphe Menjou is wonderful as usual. By all accounts he was one of most despicable human beings in Hollywood history (the man was quite literally a fascist), but he never hurt for work. It think he made his distasteful persona into an asset: directors knew they could trust him to play black-hearted gentlemen to the hilt without ever trying to slip in any redemptive qualities.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Rogers wowed as another out-of-work actress in Gold Diggers of 1933. Dinner at Eight was the other great ensemble dramady based on a Ferber/Kaufman play.

How Available Is It? It’s available on a well-made dvd.

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