More Movies, More Life
“Every great film should seem new every time you see it.”
- Roger Ebert
I wrote about how much I love watching and rewatching movies earlier this month:
I hope you had a chance to watch a few of these films in and around episodes of Ted Lasso and Succession. We tend to favor the current, and we should. There is a lot of great art coming from many great people, and we are living in a golden age of online streaming. Great work is coming from all over: Apple TV, Amazon Prime, HBO, Hulu, Netflix, just to name a few. Great work. Last week’s episode of Ted Lasso, for example, was damned near perfect. The quality and the quantity of the visual arts right now are remarkable.
Still, we mustn't let a sea of the now wash away masterpieces. And so, this week, I want to add a couple more movies to the queue, movies that I found meet Roger Ebert’s criteria in the quote above.
I. The French Dispatch (2021)
Let’s start with something recent. The French Dispatch, by filmmaker Wes Anderson, is a perfect movie. It is one of only three movies that I would call perfect, the others being The Third Man (from 1949) and The Passion of Joan of Arc (from 1928). I mentioned The Third Man in the edition from three weeks ago, and I wrote about The Passion of Joan of Arc two years ago.
When I say these are “perfect movies,” what do I mean? What I mean is that the film is compelling. The story of the movie pulls you in. The story is well told. It means the film is stunningly beautiful. The cinematography is pure art. Any frame of the movie is a masterpiece. The film visually washes over you and you revel in the beauty as it pours on and around you. It means, the characters are exactly who they should be. There are no extraneous roles. Every character matters, and you know these characters. You love the characters you should love, and you despise the characters you should despise. It means the acting is astounding. There are no flaws, each actor is perfectly cast and plays their character in exactly the right way. It means that the rhythm of the film draws you through the movie. The edits are perfectly timed, the sequences flow. If there is music, it perfectly matches the movie. And it means, all these perfect pieces are not really pieces, but are aspects of a perfect whole, this perfect movie.
The French Dispatch is that.
The film is about a magazine based in a fictional French town named “Ennui-sur-Blasé.” The magazine, The French Dispatch, is the Sunday supplement to the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The supplement was the idea of the son of the Evening Sun’s owner, who visited France in 1925 and decided to stay. The son, played by Bill Murray, became The French Dispatch’s publisher, publishing the magazine for 50 years. He died, and in his will, he determined that the magazine be closed down. The movie tells the story of the publication of the last edition.
The film is an homage to The New Yorker magazine, its quirky style and writers and editors. What is interesting to me is the choice of setting it in France, and having the magazine be the supplement of a newspaper from Liberty, Kansas. Kansas?
One of my favorite pieces of writing was written by William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia Gazette, based in Emporia, Kansas. Emporia currently has less than 25,000 people, but over 100 years ago, White and the paper won the Pulitzer Prize and was respected nation-wide. My favorite piece by him was the obituary he wrote for his daughter Mary White, who died in an accident while riding her horse through town. It is an amazing piece of writing, a profound celebration of life. He published it in May of 1921, and I read it in an anthology edited by Alexander Woolcott and published in 1936. Alexander Woollcott was the literary critic and a writer for The New Yorker.
As soon as I saw the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun, I thought, “ah! The Emporia Gazette!” Having it based in Kansas is not far-fetched, after all.
The film is set up like a magazine, with an opening vignette with Owen Wilson as the writer-about-town of the interesting and odd side of Ennui-sur-Blasé. The film continues with three beautiful feature stories.
The film is just beautiful. The cinematography is perfect. Anderson sets up visuals that are mind bogglingly gorgeous. The story lines are quirky, funny, and brilliant. The filming is non-linear, but perfectly and rhythmically paced. His use of music is astounding and perfectly fits the mood and the pace. In the middle of one feature, there is an animated chase scene. The movie is in color, but has black and white shots. And it’s in black and white, with brilliant shots of color. You will not see everything that is going on with this movie the first time you watch it, but it will affect you. It’s perfect.
II. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
A classic Film Noir, and a classic Hollywood-on-Hollywood movie. You’ve heard the line, “I’m ready for my close-up.” This is it.
Norma Desmond: “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.”
If you want to talk about youth culture, here’s something to think about: the movie was set in 1950. It was only 20 years before when Hollywood made the seismic shift from Silents to sound. You talk about youth culture, Norma Desmond looks and acts like an ancient lady, but she’s only 51. Just yesterday, a company called the National Research Group ranked the top 100 current audience-drawing movie stars, and only 13 our of the 100 were younger than 40. Only 1 of the top 20 is under 40, and he turns 40 this year. Fourteen of the top 20 are older than Norma Desmond, but in 1950, she is a has-been.
Things were different in 1950. The change from Silents to sound was brutal and it sidelined swaths of actors. As Norma says in the movie, “we didn’t need lines, we had faces!” This is something you definitely see in The Passion of Joan of Arc, mentioned above. Norma Desmond is played by Gloria Swanson, who was a huge star in the Silent Era, but made few movies after the change to sound. William Holden plays a screen-writer trying to make it in Hollywood, and he stumbles onto the decaying mansion of Norma Desmond, who wants him to help her make her come-back. He needs the dough, and goes for it, and things take a turn.
The movie is fun to watch, and it’s a required movie, like Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon. Norma Desmond is one of great tragic figures of cinema. You need to see it.
If you’ve seen any of these movies, let me know what you think! And please like, share, and if you haven’t already, subscribe.
P.S. This morning I woke up to the news that Harry Belafonte passed away. I have always loved his music and admired his fierce advocacy for civil rights. He was 97 and had a full and rich life, but, this world is lesser without him. Rest in peace.