The Man in the Moon

Back when I had a video store, I got a copy of this and my mother recommended it, but I never watched it. But now it was worth picking up as Reese Witherspoon’s debut, and she was really good from the get-go, as the 14-year-old tomboy with an Elvis passion in Fifties Louisiana, who falls hard for an older boy, only to lose him first to her older sister, and then to a farm accident. Robert Mulligan, as the veteran of To Kill a Mockingbird and Summer of ’42, knows how to direct this borderline schmaltz. Sam Waterston and Tess Harper make for an appealing and believable pair of parents. But when the teen romantic comedy turns to tragedy, the energy just leaks right out of the enterprise. Reese, however, is a star in the making. (cf. Scarlett Johansson in Manny & Lo.) (1991, dvd, n.) *7-*

Umberto D.

When you’ve analyzed a film as closely as I have this, even decades later it’s hard to give it a fresh viewing. The closest I came to a really new perspective was immediately recognizing that the scene with Umberto trying to beg and then getting Flike to stand on his hind legs with a hat in his mouth takes place before the portico of the Pantheon in Rome, a subtlety I would have missed if I had not been standing on the same spot two weeks ago. Another thing I noticed was that this paragon of Neorealism was not reticent at all with the emotion-coercing music, but since it’s Italian I suppose you expect it to be melodramatic, if not operatic. The De Sica celebration offered as an extra on the new Criterion Collection DVD makes plain that our Vittorio is really a suave, silver-haired showman, an entertainer, an actor himself in spite of his use of nonactors in his early films, mixing lots of sentiment with the social consciousness, closer to Charlie Chaplin than strict neorealism. Umberto D does indeed offer a convincing and compelling portrait of a dignified, poor old man boxed into a post-war dead-end situation, as well as a young servant girl similarly boxed in. While not exactly chaste, its tearjerking is not promiscuous. And yet I cannot see it as a towering masterpiece. It suffers by comparison to Kurosawa’s Ikiru, for example. You have to see it if you haven’t already, but if you have seen it you probably don’t need to see it again. (1952, dvd, r.) *8*

1 of 10 Under 50: Sofia Coppola

1971: Born in New York City.
2000: The Virgin Suicides.
2004: Lost in Translation.
2006?: Marie-Antoinette.


Going into the family business has its good points and its bad. Sofia Coppola experienced the bad right off, when her dad, Francis, inserted her as a last-minute replacement for Winona Ryder in Godfather III. (She had made her film debut as a infant being baptized in the original Godfather.) Her performance was mercilessly panned, but just as director’s daughter Anjelica Huston did in a similar situation, she recovered from horrendous initial reviews, to establish herself as an independent force in Hollywood.

Cousin to Nicholas Cage and Jason Schwartzman, married to director Spike Jonze for some years, Sofia Coppola certainly is a filmmaking insider, but she has established an individual voice and vision at a very young age, working on her own terms at her own pace and process.

Recoiling from her critical drubbing, Sofia Coppola enrolled at Cal Arts and took up photography and fashion design. She began work on her first film at the same time then-husband Jonze was making Being John Malkovich. She had loved Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, The Virgin Suicides, and began adapting it into a screenplay even though another version was in the works. Eventually her labor of love won out and she was also hired to direct her own script.

With the release of her first film as writer/director, Ms. Coppola went from punching-bag to critical darling in one sweeping gesture. She immediately established herself as an original artist with a unique sensibility: open-ended, spontaneous, true to the moment and not to some preconceived story arc. A problematic narrative of five teenaged sisters -- beloved collectively and retrospectively by the neighborhood boys -- who kill themselves in succession, the book and film deal with sex and death in a delicate and light-hearted manner. Kirsten Dunst and other teen heart-throbs appear memorably, and James Woods and Kathleen Turner perform admirably against type as the girls’ baffled parents.

With her second film, Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola established herself as a major filmmaker in her own right. Nominated for Best Director, she also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and apart from the blockbuster Lord of the Rings, this was generally considered the best film of the year. Eliciting extremely natural and appealing performances from Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson as two isolated individuals who happen to connect at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Tokyo, for a tender but unexpected romance in transit, Coppola and her cinematographer do a marvelous job of capturing the dislocating feel of the older-than-old, newer-than-new Japan. In all respects, the film displays a love too true to be false, too genuine to pander.

What stands out most for a director in her early thirties is Coppola’s mastery of tone and lightness of touch. Her films are gentle, winsome, and evanescent, but weighty in retrospect. From her we can expect the unexpected, and her next film, now said to be in post-production but to be released in her own good time, will be an eagerly-anticipated Marie-Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst.)

Me and You and Everyone We Know

I am finding it strangely difficult to get back into the flow of blogging, so permit me to be a trifle garrulous, as a way of easing back in. My keyboard time for the past week has been spent pounding out a 12,000-word “what I did on my vacation” essay called “Italy for One Dummy.” I will not inflict it on Cinema Salon readers, and don’t look for it on your newstands anytime soon, but for me it was one more step in a late-blooming conviction that I can be a professional writer -- give me a topic and I can churn out the words. This despite the Doonesbury comic panel that I keep by my computer, that asks the telling question, “Isn’t blogging basically for angry, semi-employed losers who are too untalented or too lazy to get real jobs in journalism?”

So, anyway, you wanted to hear about Me & You & Yada-Yada. Well, I liked it. It was different, and easy to see how it became a Sundance fave. But it also irritated and discomforted me, which was no doubt part of the maker’s intent. Miranda July opens up her solo performance pieces to the construction of a tight little world that centers on her sensibility, indeed on her personality, somewhat plaintive and quizzical, seemingly flighty but with a whim of iron, attractive but assertively plain, friendly but scary. (I'd have to fine myself if I called her "quirky," but the word keeps buzzing around.) She’s a would-be performance artist daylighting as an ElderCab driver, who falls for a sadsack shoe salesman, with two adorable caramel-skinned boys by the stunning black woman who has booted him out. Though funny even when it takes horrifying peeks at ordinary life, the film is resolute in its exploration of the theme of loneliness and the longing for connection. Its air of unshockable naivete will either charm or annoy you, probably both. (2005, Images, n.) *6+* (MC-76, RT-82.)

It was nice to be back at Images, a cinema that wasn’t chiuso for August, and I have to thank Janet Curran for how well her “Spotlight” interview with me came out in the new issue of their Focus Arts Monthly.

It was also nice to be back showing films in the Clark auditorium. Last Friday’s screening of Lukas Moodysson’s Together in my “10 Under 50” film series confirmed it as one of my favorite films ever, certainly among the Top 25. And I’m looking forward to re-seeing Sofia Coppola’s debut, The Virgin Suicides, today.

The only dvd I watched all week, what with the Tribe surging to the front of the wildcard race, was Leave Her to Heaven. I was under the misapprehension that this 1946 Gene Tierney vehicle was a film noir, but while she played a memorable femme fatale, it was really a sprawling technicolor melodrama. Director John M. Stahl is no Douglas Sirk, however. This film comes across as utterly artificial, and predictably unpredictable. The swelling music, the eye-popping color scheme both indoors and out, the posing of the unnaturally smooth-faced stars, could be taken as a hoot, but has no Sirkian dimension of believable psychodrama. Cornel Wilde is wooden as the author hero entrapped by the obsessively possessive Tierney, but Jeanne Crain is pleasant if one-dimensional as the virtuous other woman. Vincent Price surprises with a bravura performance as a relentless D.A. in a ludicrous courtroom scene. If you’re keep score at home, I would give this a *4* and Together a *9+*. Watching them on the same day highlighted the different approaches to directing. Moodysson keeps his teeming canvas together, and his story relentlessly moving in place, by focussing on only the key moments of each scene, eliding the transitional moments, always going straight for the jugular, up close and very personal, while Stahl is stagebound in the manner that characters always walk on to the scene and then laboriously cross the widescreen before they begin their interaction, scripted with phony literariness.

While waiting for the Indians game to begin one evening this week, I tuned in for a stretch of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, to catch a contrasting glimpse of Gene Tierney. With Rex Harrison as the ship captain ghost, this will be worth watching through at some point.

Best Directors Redux

Buon giorno! I'm just back from Italy and will be resuming my "10 Under 50" film series today at the Clark. I'm a few weeks behind in my director profiles, but will catch up soon.

Today's film is the delightful Together by Lukas Moodysson, of whom you may not have heard, but he ranks #11 on The Guardian's critics poll of the "40 Best Directors," and highest of those under the age of 50. Since I'm not prepared to make the case for him today, I refer you to the link for the Guardian's list: http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/page/0,11456,1082823,00.html

I look forward to seeing my first movie in several weeks, and to resuming regular posting on Cinema Salon.