M(ovie)ad Men: Bob Peak

An internet pastime of mine is perusing various movie poster websites with updates on recently released posters of upcoming films and international versions of old films. While I imagine one day becoming rich enough to purchase my favorites to line the walls of my home theater, for now, I settle for saving the images on my hard drive and rotate hanging them on my Desktop. I’ve always wanted to know the masterminds behind the designs of my favorite posters and this is an opportunity to highlight, outside of the Key Art Awards and other industry celebrations, the works of individuals and companies. Though I don’t know if I can keep this series up as much as my colleague Joie with TGIFF, the reward of having a single place to look at a series of pretty pictures does fit my low attention span.

M(ovie)ad Men 1: Bob Peak

Born in Colorado and raised in Kansas, Bob Peak rose to the scene in the 1960s as a commercial illustrator. Like many ad men of the time, at least as told by a certain popular television show, Peak entered the scene after serving for the military during the Korean War. Starting of as an artist of an ad agency creating illustrations for Old Hickory Whiskey and covers for Sports Illustrated, he later was called upon by United Artists to do artwork for West Side Story. Though the signature poster for the film was done by Saul Bass, Peak work was still used for album covers and other smaller ads for the film. Enough talking – let the pretty pictures begin.

Breaking the Waves

Minister: Can you tell me about anything of real value that the outsiders have brought with them?

Bess McNeill: Uh… their music?

As The Dark Knight continues to dominate the box office numbers even a month after its release, another film that shared the same opening weekend and an accomplishment for breaking records is being brushed underneath the bed. Despite its all star cast and its former life as a successful musical, Mamma Mia! is still being categorized as an underdog against the unstoppable Goliath of The Dark Knight. Though the numbers are not unexpected nor does The Dark Knight not deserve the accolades it is receiving, but Mamma Mia! deserves a little boasting itself.

There is a single line that is being said by both the yay and nay-sayers for the film: “Mamma Mia! is pure fun.” On one side, you have the positive interpretation of the line in that the film is a return to the escapist roots of cinema. On the other side, you have the negative understanding where “pure fun” means candy-coated rainbows/”lollipops vomitting Skittles onto the screen” a la the negative reviews of the big screen version of Speed Racer. It is a little too easy to de-merit a film by equating “fun” with lack of substance or lack of societal purpose. In all its glory, Mamma Mia!, as Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, “isn’t a movie. It’s vacation.” As my dad points out immediately after his viewing of the film, Mamma Mia! in every essence is both a film about escape and one that provokes its audience to escape. The film is align with the films of the 1930s such as those by Busby Berkeley that were products of a country undergoing economic downturn. Meryl Streep et al. provide a nice cinema experience as well as the cheapest way to travel to the Greek Isles.

Perhaps the most off-putting/criticized parts of the film are the performances displayed by the seasoned actors of the cast. It’s one thing to see Tony-Award winning actress Christine Baranski in a musical, but it’s a whole new thing to see Mr. Darcy and Chuck/Jan Nyman singing in spandex suits. I, too, at parts had a hard time immersing into this new world actors who have played lowly suitors or violent townsmen can be happy people seeking a good time. However, it is this reaction to the film that I found the most interesting about Mamma Mia! Not so much a film illustrating the struggle of a dramatic actor’s entrance into the musical world, but an fascinating display on how trained actors translate the form of acting they have been known for into a subcategory of cinema that requires a different type of acting language.

The Winner Takes It All

The “The Winner Takes It All” number marks a pivotal moment in the film where Donna (Meryl Streep) and Sam (Pierce Brosnon) discuss their former life together and the harboring feelings that still remain. It is THE scene where “actor” must come out. The Kramer vs. Kramer Oscar-type acting and musical acting both require an overt, exaggerated form of emotional expression, the two modes still have a little bit of variation between the two. With every emotional lyric, you see Meryl Streep translate her mode of acting we’ve become used to into the mode necessary in a musical as she is singing. Instead of focusing all her energy on creating subtle facial expressions of pain and joy to be captured in extreme close-ups, Streep moves around on the cliff with arms flaring around, an action that is exaggerated by a red pashmina at hand.

In his critical review of the film, Chris Wisniewski of Reverse Shot writes:

But what does it say about our collective moviegoing habits that the same audiences who mostly spurned Chris Columbus’s Rent (admittedly, no masterpiece) and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd have turned out in droves for Hairspray and Mamma Mia!? Columbus and Burton take their stories and characters—and the genre—seriously. They use the medium to their advantage, staging their numbers with and for the camera; through framing, camera movement, editing, choreography, or production design, they craft rousing, sometimes resonant cinematic spectacle out of their theatrical raw material. Hairspray and Mamma Mia!, by contrast, are clearly products of a post-musical era, in which the genre itself is treated like a joke, where musical numbers are less displays of technical virtuosity than extended gags, sometimes at the expense of the performers themselves (in Hairspray, John Travolta’s pseudo-drag performance becomes a running punchline; Mamma Mia!’s male leads are made equally ridiculous without the aid of dresses or fat suits).

What Chris Wisniewski chooses to gloss over are moments like the “Winner Takes It All” number where acting, a part of the “medium” he doesn’t include in his list, highlights the great use of film in translating a stage musical. In the “post-musical era,” everything is not simply a “joke.” Rather jokes are another opening to the understanding of how a craft can delve into a story that has already been told in another form before.

What did Sky and Sophie do after they left the island? Become a recording duo!

G is for Godard, S is for Sartorialist

Michelle Williams in Boy collection (Band of Outsiders)

While the verbal wildfires continue to ravage the intelligentsia quarters of the blogosphere, sparked by our beloved Stephanie Zacharek’s recent NYT rant of Richard Brody’s new book, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, we would like to extend the olive branch to both sides of the debate, and save Ms. Zacharek time from googling her own name (you brought us a year’s worth of hits, thanks). As you may have guessed, the man in the middle of it all isn’t Brody, but his subject matter, Godard—French filmmaker, born-again Maoist, bitter recluse—and even more decidedly, between his early versus late works. I haven’t read Brody’s extensive study myself, but from reading the reviews and meta-reviews, the exchange has now veered off into the realm of subjective preferences, a game of defending my likes and dislikes, with critics lambasting each other for taking too seriously or too lightly Godard’s post-1967 period, and this is the dividing year, sharing his detractors’ sentiment, that the music died (and how slowly!).

Penn Badgley in Band of Outsiders

Reasonable enough, an artist tends to escape the lingering success of his meager beginnings, not surrendering to the whims of popular opinion but to grow and develop as a person, who sheds away prior interests in hopes of cultivating future passions. In this sense, Godard doesn’t want to be overshadowed by his own creations, to be remembered only in the annals of history as the critic-turned-auteur who lead a string of dazzling revolutions in cinematic architecture, or what he would now deemed to be frivolous, amateurish, and infantile, the fever dreams of Hollow Men. Yet, cultural consensus always dictate otherwise, and the fond memory of the Nouvelle Vague movement has made the term nostalgia obselete, bereft of pain and politics, Godard’s name only recalls the playfulness of that tumultuous era: the way how Anna Karina smiles with her eyes, the saccharine primary colors and murmuring musical cues fading in and out of scenes, and those pesky and exhilarating jump cuts. A few months ago, I attended a screening of La Chinoise (a precursor to the 1968 hoopla), alarmed by the number of hipsters in the audience, who even as they’re watching a parody of their lifestyle, knew that after this exhausting experience, they will finally earn their street creds and identify the shade of tangerine on a similar looking mod blouse from Haight Street as Godardian in nature.

She & Him in Band of Outsiders

The branding of a filmmaker’s fashion choices may seem like an informal practice, but American Express merely made it more explicit and accessible to the elitist consumer. If anything else, Godard will not be forgotten, only superficially invoked, and if we are supposed to extrapolate any residual sense of meaning from Haynes’s experimental biopic I’m Not There, the artist will forever be elusive, his imprints scattered among the shards of his career, a life worth knowing in halfs, quarters and eighths. And what a legacy of fanboys to commemorate that emblematic Godard of the 60s, which includes card-carrying members like Wong Kar Wai to the oh-so-obvious Tarantino (his production company A Band Part a direct reference to Bande a Part)!

Ian Curtis, uh-hum, Sam Riley in Band of Outsiders

I would also add Scott Sternberg to the inspirational wishlist, whose fashion line, Band of Outsiders, is more than a cheap nod piggybacking on the cool mystique. Like Godard, Sternberg was irritated by the constraints of tradition granted upon menswear, so in 2004, he returned to the hardboiled pulp fiction of the 40s and 50s, tweaked and restitched past sensibilities for a slimmer and awkward fit, accentuating the disportions and jutted angles, and eliminating the reigning dishoveled look of the grunge rockstar or free-spirited surfer. With his new Boy collection, a Preppy girl complement to the original mensline, Sternberg further brings back that masculin femininity to the women’s body, with alternating pinches of tightness and looseness, see Michelle William’s tweed version of the Timberland lumberjack. It also doesn’t hurt to know what all the kids are raging about these days and outfit their idols with your clothes.

Submitted for your approval: a pair of tribute videos.

Band of Outsiders Fashion Show

The Famous Dance Sequence from Bande A Part

WHY SO SCARY?

I know that listing is best left to Jack Black and Nick Hornby. But, it’s fun sometimes. The urge to canonize is essential to understanding a medium- or at least, to the fetishization of it- so I thought, with a healthy sense of irony, I could get away with a little play on the classic Top 10 as a weekly feature here at the leh repertwarr. Plus, I’m just too impatient to write things of substance here. Does anyone read this either way?

Believe me, I hate the AFI just as much as you do. So you will never hear me use the words greatest (or American, hopefully) in any of these features. And additionally, I’m going to resist ranking any of the films that I discuss under the headings I come to every week. WHATS MORE! I’m going to try to thread these things together, to have a common factor between each group of films week to week. So, like, if I happen to have included Naomi Watts in my list of the Top 5 Most Obnoxious Australians in Film, I might use the actress and her Lynchian bygones as my TANGENT for the next week’s list: the Top 10 Movies For Which Knowing What Is Going On Is Not Necessary. Get it?

Commence!

I’m a genre film fan. This is a resoundingly annoying statement, I know. But it’s a fact- I love when cinema finds a way to commute its pretensions to terms of genre, color, and style. I really do think that the greatest (oops!) instances of “high art” have a definite relationship to the opposite end of the spectrum, and that “trash” is an interminably versatile word. But, who the fuck wants to see another discussion of the best Sci-Fi films? Or even of the most interesting instances of exploitation?

That type of list would most certainly get me in trouble, so here’s my alternative: Isn’t it fascinating when genre films disguise themselves as the most serious fare? The system of sensation and spectacle can be so drastically manipulated, and hidden under layer after layer of the high art aesthetic. Because of this, the most exciting trait of the horror genre is, to me, that the monster truly can take any form. A horror film certainly doesn’t need to have a physical villain to cause abject terror, it can draw affect from setting, theme, or mood and cause plenty of skin-crawling:

TOP 5 SCARIEST NOT-HORROR FILMS

AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)

Doesn’t than name have just the most amazing catastrophe to it? Werner Herzog is amazing, sure. German, definitely. His philosophies are so dark and virile that his films ooze tropes of the horror genre. Sturm und drang seem to compose every bit of his somewhat fucked up string of virtuoso film exercises. DER ZORN GOTTES is no exception.

THE MONSTER: The Amazon. The S. American jungle in this film is utterly horrifying. From the first frame it begins to devour the human capability of it’s conquistador prey. Just like in a slasher film, the supporting characters are unceremoniously taken out by wild aspects of the setting and their own blunders. Klaus Kinski’s slow descent into evil ravings, culminating in the film’s spectacular final scene (monkeys fucking EAT him!), is egged on by the Amazon, and finally succumbs to his insanity and the seething environment the very film’s last dregs of humanity are defeated by nature.

LORD OF THE FLIES (1963)

William Golding clearly had intentions very similar to those of a horror writer with his classic novel about boy castaways. The novel is a beautiful exploration of the way manhood looms in front of a child and, even in the most disastrous of situations, cannot always be achieved before due time. Peter Brooks’ film adaptation is simply one of the best examples of a movie that respects and expounds upon its source text, treating the story as not only a lyrical sort of eulogy for youth, but a terrifying study of boyhood pettiness.

THE MONSTER: KIDDIES! Kids are fucking creepy! Any horror buff knows this. The horrific child is one of the genre’s favorite icons. But, when the Children of the Corn are traded for innocent victims of happenstance, their development into little terrors is all the more affecting. The spectacle of these poor English schoolboys completely deteriorating into raving animals should be revered as an ultimate spectacle of horror.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975)

Peter Wier’s languorous study of summer (and girls) is a hypnotic and, eventually, wholly disturbing example of the effect of filmic tone on the viewing experience. The movie displays a haggle of girls from an Australian boarding school lounging in the haze of an afternoon, under the menacing crag that gives the work its name. When they suddenly disappear, the whole that this loss of characters and the angelic young woman at their lead, creates an empty space in the film that is absolutely haunting.

THE MONSTER: Time, Summer, and GIRLIES! In a sort of centrifugal Antonionian narrative weave, Wier terrorizes his viewer with brief pangs of loss that are felt in both the visual and aural tone of the film. When the girls go missing (have they been abducted? fallen to their deaths? spirited away to another world?), its as if the central binding figures of the film have been torn away. The effect is a severe, creeping sense of doom, and the suffocating heat that oozes off of the film’s gorgeous cinematography only accentuates this feeling.

[SAFE] (1995)

[SAFE]’s coyly bracketed title perfectly summarizes its affect. The walls begin to close in on Julianne Moore (brilliant, here) from the first frame of the film, and her slow suffocation is the stuff of classic horror.

THE MONSTER: Disease, Paranoia, Modernity. Todd Haynes is self-admittedly obsessed with exploring identity and its influences in a wide range of style. Here, in another slowly creeping horror exercise, he turns his questioning gaze to New Age medicine, pollution, and the generally suffocating aesthetic of smoggy Los Angeles. The protagonist in SAFE is worried that she’s being poisoned by her atmosphere, and it becomes clear that whether or not she’s actually afflicted, her environment is absolutely out to kill her. Her wan figure becomes more and more like a porcelain doll as her home life and the eventual trip to a New Age healing retreat conspire to break her completely. The film’s one rare moment of fresh air is a great example of its horror tropes: Moore’s character is wandering in a California field, thinking for a spare moment that she might actually be healing, and she stumbles on a highway. Modern progress, pollution, exhaust, and the general invasion of natural space by modern shapes is punctuated by the car that blasts by her. The audience definitely shares in her horror.

SALO, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Shortly before being brutally murdered, poet, playwright, homosexual, alleged nihilist and film master, Pier Paolo Pasolini completed what is surely the most revolting cinematic spectacle in the history of the medium. Salò is an impossible film to enjoy; a fable of awful violence, masochism, and torture and… well, it’s just a film that’s pretty hard to talk about pleasantly. But its is an absolutely astounding and necessary masterwork.

THE MONSTER: Spectacle. Salò is the ultimate exploitation film. Based loosely on the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, it features what is probably the most disgusting string of depictions possible outside of snuff cinema (this term is hardly inappropriate for the work itself). It trudges from rape to torture, fascist declarations and sick piques of comedy, and is truly, bodily disgusting. But, the film contains an absolutely destructive social commentary and a statement on the experience of cinema that it is impossible to shake. It’s genius and horror lies in the way Salò incriminates its viewer. It taunts the spectator, dares him to look away but keeps a brutal hold on the eye. It’s as if the film is Pasolini’s final fuck-you to the world that had named his heartfelt, poetic work, and his very nature as an artist, an abomination. It names and condemns the reflexive double-edge of cinema, and truly embodies the word horror!