Tag: movies

Video review: Singin’ in the Rain

After noting in this blog that I had not seen the 1952 film in its entirety, it was total coincidence that The Wife decided the family ought to watch together Singin’ In the Rain.

I did not know this until watching the extras, but the film was MGM producer Arthur Freed’s plan to use his catalog of songs, written with Nacio Herb Brown, and used in previous MGM musical films, mostly from the 1930s. It became the job of screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green to create a script that would make sense. They decided that making a film that shows one studio’s foray into talking pictures in response to the real game changing film, 1927’s The Jazz Singer. Hollywood is usually good at showing Hollywood.

Singin’ In the Rain is mostly marvelous. Gene Kelly not only plays Don Lockwood, “a popular silent film star with humble roots as a singer, dancer and stunt man, ” he also co-directed it with Stanley Donen. He performs the iconic title song sequence, which I had seen often, but it works so much better once seen in context.

Don’s leading lady in the silent films is Lina Lamont, played by Jean Hagen, doing her best Judy Holliday routine. She has a voice made for silent films.

Donald O’Connor, as Don’s best friend Cosmo, is marvelous dancing with Kelly, particularly in Moses Supposes, a Roger Edens/Comden and Green piece new for the film. But O’Connor is most extraordinary in his solo stint, Make ‘Em Laugh.

Debbie Reynolds, not yet 20, plays Kathy Selden. Don, avoiding his fans, accidentally lands in Kathy’s car. She feigns disinterest in his “undignified” film career, but later Don discovers she is not a stage actress but a chorus girl. Eventually, romance is kindled.

After the disastrous preview of The Dueling Cavalier, Don, Kathy and Cosmo come up with the idea to change it into a musical called The Dancing Cavalier. It’s at this point the marvelous dance Good Morning with those three characters takes place, up and down a flight of stairs, among other tricks. Reynolds, a gymnast but not previously a dancer, managed to keep up with Kelly and O’Connor.

I understand it from a historic context, but the one part of the movie I wish were a bit shorter was the flashy Broadway Melody Ballet. Not sure what I would have cut out, although it would NOT have been the parts with Cyd Charisse as Kelly’s dance partner. Incidentally, Reynolds’ rendition of You Are My Lucky Star, sung to a billboard showing an image of Don, was cut; nicely performed yet unnecessary in advancing the plot.

All in all, Singin’ in the Rain is a quite enjoyable film, and a cultural icon to boot, referenced in everything from A Clockwork Orange to Glee. The extras, showing where the songs had been used in previous films, was entertaining, as was Debbie Reynolds’ recollections of the filmmaking.

Civil War cards

At least a plurality of the cards had someone dying by being impaled by something, and the pained eyes of the soon-to-be deceased I always found haunting.


In a discussion on the website of SamuraiFrog, I wrote: “Yeah, just the frickin’ trailer of [the Quentin Tarantino film] Kill Bill 1 put me on edge; I can only imagine how it actually plays out.” To which, somewhere, Mr. Frog asked if it was because of the violence. Well, yeah, but it’s more specific than that.

Of all the forms of fictionalized violence in movies, the type I hate the most involves people getting stabbed or, worse, run through with a bayonet or sword. And I know why.

There were these Civil War Trading Cards that came out in 1962 from Topps, the folks that made the baseball cards. I bought them because they were history, and I was interested in that, but I don’t know why – except for some bizarre sense of completeness – I KEPT buying them.

While there were soldiers shot and run over on some cards, I swear that at least a plurality of them had someone dying by being impaled by something, and the pained eyes of the soon-to-be deceased I always found haunting. The card above is a good, not great, example of this.

So even in PG-13 movie violence, I often instinctively turn away when swordplay is involved.

You know what comic book I found yucky? It was a Daredevil, somewhere in the #160s, I think, drawn and written by Frank Miller, in which Elektra stabs some guy through a seat in a movie theater; that guy, and the terrified guy next to him, had THAT look, too.

In my dorm in college, two guys were sword fighting once; I left right away because I was afraid that someone would accidentally spill blood.

Race and casting for films

Some groups believe that minority actors are still underrepresented in film

SamuraiFrog wrote: “A lot of people have expressed the sentiment that casting Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness is whitewashing; taking an ethnic character and casting a white actor in the role. My question, though: is it, actually?”

I had some thoughts even before addressing the core question. One is that I feel really lucky that I don’t read whatever sites go on kvetching about this stuff. Not that it’s not a legitimate source of conversation, but that too many of the participants, I’ve discovered, are REALLY ANNOYING.

More substantially, one can’t really talk about the specific example without talking at least briefly about the broader topic.

Most European and American movies from the beginning, featured white folks, often in roles that, arguably could have been played by a black man (Orson Welles as Othello in the 1952 iteration) or Asian (various roles in the Charlie Chan movies). When I saw Rita Moreno on CBS Sunday Morning a few months ago, she talked about being typecast as that fiery ethnic.

Now that we are in a more presumably enlightened age, when films are cast, there is an attempt to make the canvas more diverse. This, BTW, is not just fairer, it’s good economics, with minority kids having characters they might relate to. Marvel Comics universe in the 1960s was mostly white, so when they make films of their franchise players, some supporting characters that had been white aren’t anymore. A black Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan), the villain in the Daredevil film, e.g.

Indeed, as I’ve mentioned, my old blogging buddy Greg Burgas used to play this recast movie game. I was often finding women or minorities to play roles historically associated with white men, to correct the historical institutional racism and sexism.

Still, some groups believe that minority actors are still underrepresented in film. When a clearly ethnic role is cast with a white actor (Johnny Depp as the American Indian role of Tonto in the 2013 Lone Ranger movie, e.g.), the charge of “whitewashing” comes up.

The character Khan Noonien Singh, played by the late, great Ricardo Montalbán was not specifically a Hispanic character. Arguably, it’s an Asian name, though, with all the interracial (and interspecies) marriages in the future, the look may have changed by then.

I’m always willing to note when things are wrong, yet I’m just not feeling this as a real issue. Still, I really appreciate Mr. Frog actually thinking about these issues in an insightful way.

Please don’t sue me, Mr. Faulkner!

The court interpreted the inclusion of the paraphrased quote in Midnight in Paris as actually helping Faulkner and the market value of Requiem if it had any effect at all.

From 1949; per Wikipedia description, image is in the public domain

I missed this initially, but a few months ago, a federal judge in Mississippi nixed a lawsuit brought by the heirs of William Faulkner. In dispute was the claim that “Woody Allen’s 2011 film ‘Midnight in Paris’ [had] improperly used one of William Faulkner’s most famous lines.” The librarian in me was pleased with the outcome but ticked that the suit was filed in the first place.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in the book, ‘Requiem for a Nun.’ “In the movie, actor Owen Wilson, says: ‘The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. I met him too. I ran into him at a dinner party.'”

Read the judge’s ruling. The Faulkner heirs claimed violation of copyright law but SONY Pictures, the defendant, claimed the Fair Use provision in the law, and, “alternatively, argued that the use of a quote was non-infringing under the de minimis doctrine (essentially a taking too small to rise to the level of infringement).”

Factor 1: Purpose and Character. These were considered quite different media and intent (comic film v. serious book).

Factor 2: Nature of the Copyrighted Work. While the book is subject to copyright protection, the movie was “transformative,” i.e., significantly altered from the original.

Factor 3: Substantiality of the Portion Used in Relation to the Copyrighted Work as a Whole. “At issue, in this case, is whether a single line from a full-length novel singly paraphrased and attributed to the original author in a full-length Hollywood film can be considered a copyright infringement. In this case, it cannot.”

Factor 4: Effect of the Use Upon the Potential Market for or Value of the Copyrighted Work. “[The court] interpreted the inclusion of the paraphrased quote in Midnight as actually helping Faulkner and ‘the market value of Requiem if it had any effect at all.’ The court also stated ‘how Hollywood’s flattering and artful use of literary allusion is a point of litigation, not celebration, is beyond this court’s comprehension.'”

The lawyer for the Faulkner literary estate, Lee Caplin, had also argued something called The Lanham Act, suggesting that the dialogue could confuse viewers “as to a perceived affiliation, connection or association” between Faulkner and Sony; the judge rejected this as well.

Caplin groused that the ruling “‘is problematic for authors throughout the United States” and “it’s going to be damaging to creative people everywhere.” If anything, had the ruling gone the other way, THAT would have created a chilling effect on everyone who might use a soupçon of copyrighted material.

Movie review: The Spectacular Now

But then a road trip really crystalized the narrative for me, making what has come before much more significant.

Last Friday, the Daughter was still with the neighbor, the Wife and I were back in Albany, and it’s HOT out. Let’s go to the movies at the Spectrum in Albany to see the 1 pm showing of The Spectacular Now. We’d recently seen the previews, and I knew it had reviewed well. It was directed by James Ponsoldt, and written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, based on some young adult novel by Tim Tharp I had never heard of.

Sutter (Miles Teller) and Cassidy (Brie Larson) are that popular couple in high school, a fun, hard-partying duo. She breaks up with him, though, for reasons he doesn’t initially understand. He crashes into the orbit of Aimee (Shailene Woodley), a nice girl, who he befriends, somewhat out of pity, and ends up in a rebound romance with her.

Sutter believes in the spectacular now, that growing up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. His mom won’t even tell him where his dad is, and he thinks that geometry stuff that Aimee is trying to tutor him in is useless anyway. Yet he has an interesting streak of honesty and integrity that disarms people around him.

Telling more would probably give away too much. The coming of age movie went along, interesting and pleasant enough. But then a road trip really crystalized the narrative for me, making what has come before much more significant.

The performances are great. Miles Teller I had never heard of, but Shailene Woodley was wonderful in The Descendants. Also strong were Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sutter’s mother (a long way from Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Kyle Chandler. Halfway through, I didn’t think the movie was spectacular, but by the end, I thought it was at least very good.

Ramblin' with Roger
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