Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join us, leave your field to flower - just pick three movies that fit the week's theme and write a bit about them! All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts
-William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.vii
It's true, and in my time I have played many parts. Ever since I was an infant, I loved putting on a show for people. I would climb up on top of chairs or stools and perform, even before I could speak intelligibly, if my mother is to be believed. I didn't REALLY get into theater until middle school, right around the time I first saw Singin' in the Rain and told my Mom that I wanted to be Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, prompting her to sign me up for tap dancing lessons. Suddenly, I was a triple threat - good singer, good dancer, good actor - and got cast in shows I auditioned for outside of school plays. My love affair with the stage continues to this day, even though my last stage performance (playing Professor Bhaer in the musical version of Little Women, and making my mother cry) was in February of 2014. Living in NYC means an abundance of professional theater but a scarcity of truly amateur opportunities - everyone's trying to make it here - so I haven't tried. But once you're bitten by the bug, the itch to perform on stage in front of an audience never really goes away, and I'll be back performing soon. Just you wait.
These are three of my favorite movies about life on the stage (minus Shakespeare in Love, which I've picked for these things WAY too many times, and Birdman, which I expect will be picked a lot today).
To Be Or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942/Alan Johnson, 1983) Pick your flavor, the elegant Lubitsch touch or the Brooks-ian Borscht Belt. To my mind, they're both great. The story in both versions is the same: A husband and wife team are stars of the Warsaw theater scene of 1939 (Jack Benny/Mel Brooks and Carole Lombard/Anne Bancroft). Every night while the husband is performing Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be..." speech, a young Lieutenant pilot (Robert Stack/Tim Matheson) leaves the audience... to go backstage to romance the wife! She keeps seeing him because she likes the attention, but has no intention of actually leaving her husband. Eventually, the Nazis invade and our intrepid young Lieutenant becomes aware of a spy in the ranks. Mistaken identities, cross purposes, and lots and LOTS of hilarious scenes ensue as the theater troupe works together to fight the Nazis in whatever way they can. The plot is WAY too complicated to attempt to explain here, but in both versions it provides for ample comedy of all kinds, and tremendous performances from the stars. Since each version is essentially the same story tailored to the talents of its stars, they're just different enough to be good in their own way. I honestly can't choose which one I prefer. All I can say is they're both hilarious and worth a watch, especially in the current moment.
The Last Metro (Francois Truffaut, 1980) During the Nazi occupation of Paris, a Gentile actress (Catherine Deneuve) struggles to keep her Jewish husband (Heinz Bennent) hidden in the theater's basement, while both acting and directing (for him) a new play. Gerard Depardieu plays the leading actor in the play, who is also a member of the resistance. The title refers to the last train of the evening, which all Parisians had to catch because of a Nazi curfew. Like many of Truffaut's films, there's a lot here that's a bit dull, but the moments when it comes alive are truly thrilling, and the combined star power of French Cinema Gods Deneuve and Depardieu is just amazing to watch. As with all of Truffaut's best films, this feels personal, and it was: Both his father and uncle were members of the French resistance, and were once caught passing messages (a scene he recreated in this film - one of its best sequences).
Being Julia (Istvan Szabo, 2004) Julia Lambert is the greatest stage actress of her day. But being a woman of a certain age, she is starting to be pushed out for younger, prettier actresses. An affair with a young American reinvigorates her lust for life, but when she realizes he is using her to advance his career and social standing AND ALSO sleeping with a rival ingenue, Julia begins to plot her revenge. Annette Bening is delicious as Julia, tearing into the juicy part with the energy of a hungry lioness, and she receives great support from Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambon, Juliet Stevenson, and especially Lucy Punch as her rival. I could watch the scene where Julia hijacks the play to get revenge on Avice on a loop forever and be perfectly satisfied.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come along and join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and saying a little something about them!
I'll get straight to the point. There is only one film with a female ensemble that matters, really. Every single one since is just a pale imitation. So let it be known that if you love movies at all, and especially if you love actresses, then you owe it to yourself to watch my first pick.
The rest are good, too, but they're not at all a patch on...
The Women (George Cukor, 1939) Yes, from Hollywood's annus mirabilis comes the greatest all-female ensemble ever assembled, getting to act one of its wittiest screenplays. When Norma Shearer's husband starts sleeping around with that hussy Joan Crawford, she goes out to a ranch in Reno so they can get a divorce.... and once that's done, she comes back to get revenge! The Women is an utter delight from start to finish. The only bad part is picking a favorite: Crawford, whose haughtiness makes it clear she's never anything but the lead in anything? Shearer, the all-too-human anchor who sends all her feelings straight through the screen directly to us? Paulette Goddard, the spitfire Shearer meets in Reno who could go toe-to-toe with any man? Mary Boland, delightful as the many-times divorced Countess who ALMOST puts over that she really does believe in "l'amour! l'amour"? Or the queen bee of fast-talkers, Rosalind Russell, whose gossipy gadfly may just be the true villain of the picture? I can't possibly choose. Can you?
8 Women (François Ozon, 2002) Only some of the greatest actresses in the world come from France, and somehow 90% of those are in this movie (the only biggie I can think of that's missing? Isabelle Adjani). Ozon's classic murder mystery setup (a man is murdered by someone he knows in his mansion in the middle of a snowstorm, everyone else tries to figure out which one of them did it) gets two twists: The first is that all the suspects are women. And what women! Deneuve! Ardant! Huppert! Béart! Darrieux! All cast perfectly to type and clearly having a blast with it. 8 Women is such a blast if only to get to watch these great actresses play off each other. What's that? The other twist? OH. It's a musical. Each of the titular eight women gets a character song to sing when the spotlight of the investigation falls on them. Not all of the ladies are good singers, but it doesn't matter; they know how to cover for their lesser abilities and perform the heck out of them anyway. It's stuff like that that make 8 Women such a joy.
Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007) BEFORE YOU START! Technically, this is NOT cheating. Yes, Death Proof was originally released as one-half of the Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse, but it also received a berth of its own at the Cannes Film Festival and was released on DVD as a solo feature (albeit both in a longer cut than in Grindhouse). And I'll be honest, the shorter Grindhouse cut is INFINITELY better than the longer "Director's Cut" version. But either way, Death Proof still has one of the greatest car chases ever committed to film, thanks to the brilliant casting of the great stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Uma Thurman's stuntwoman on Kill Bill) as one of a group of ladies who fall into the clutches of Kurt Russell's maniacal Stuntman Mike, who likes to crash his "death proof" stunt car into cars full of pretty ladies. Russell is at his magnetic best in the role, but it's really all about the two groups of women who fall victim to Mike (including the scorching hot Sidney Tamiia Poitier and Vanessa Ferlito) and who fight back (Bell, Tracie Thoms, and Rosario Dawson). The car chase that takes up almost an entire third of Death Proof is killer, but what's even better is what the ladies do once they catch up to the twisted Mike, the most cleverly edited scene of Tarantino's career, culminating in one of cinema's greatest finale freeze-frames.
Way to pick an easy one this week! Musicals are only my favorite kind of movie, so I only have about a hundred different movies I could choose to write up for this. Therefore, I had to come up with an extra criterion to even begin writing. Therefore, here are three Non-Hollywood Musicals.
1. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964) I'm not going to lie, this may be my favorite musical of all time. The key to getting into musicals is accepting the very heightened reality in which they exist, one which allows for people to spontaneously burst into song when they're feeling too much to simply speak. In Demy's vision of war-era France, people primarily communicate through singing (yes, very near the whole thing is sung-through), and the mise-en-scene is even color-coded to match their emotions (and outfits), so it helps you along this path. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is also one of the most swoon-worthy romances in screen history, as teenagers Catherine Deneuve (in her film debut) and Nino Castelnuovo fall madly in love right before he gets drafted to serve in the army, all to Michel Legrand's gorgeous, Oscar-winning score. Will they ever get reunited? All I'll say is that Demy's Palme d'Or-winning film (one of three musicals to claim cinema's most prestigious honor) contains one of the finest ending scenes of all time.
Hey! If you like this one, why don't you try: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Even more candy-colored fun from Demy and Deneuve, with Gene Kelly for extra flavor!
2. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001, Ashutosh Gowariker) Even for people who love musicals, Bollywood films can be a bit daunting: At least three hours long, with unbelievably (necessarily) complicated plots, and expensive, expansive musical numbers that often sound like they're sung by particularly nasal children - and all in a foreign language! But what they have in their corner is unrivaled spectacle. My freshman roommate in college was of Indian heritage, and every once in a while he would pop in a Bollywood movie to watch when he was bored, and I would tag along. Thankfully, they had subtitles. Lagaan was the one that stood out to me the most, probably because it's very atypical. Epic even by Bollywood standards, it's an historical drama set during India's colonial British Raj (and thus lacks the sparkle and pizazz of most Bollywood films). The residents of a small, poor village are oppressed by the high taxes imposed on them by the crown, so one of the more arrogant British officers makes a wager: The villagers will not have to pay the tax (the "lagaan" of the title) if they can beat the Brits at a game of cricket. Problem is, the villagers don't know how to play. Can they overcome all the odds and win? The result is a lot more fun than it sounds. Unlike most Bollywood musicals, the songs aren't modern-sounding at all, using period instrumentation. Plus, instead of stopping the action dead in its tracks, they are integrated into the story almost seamlessly. They also tend to enliven scenes that would otherwise be standard clichés (a training sequence, a "let's show those outsiders we have culture, too!" party). At three hours and forty minutes, Lagaan may sound like torture to anyone who doesn't like musicals, but I'm telling you: This is entertainment of the highest order, even if it doesn't sound like it. (BONUS: the film's score was composed by A.R. Rahman, later of Slumdog Millionaire fame.)
Hey! If you like this one, why don't you try: Devdas (2002) Aishwarya Rai is only one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the musical numbers truly have to be seen to be believed.
3. Dancer in the Dark (2000, Lars von Trier) Either you like Bjork or you don't. Either you like Lars von Trier or you don't. But Dancer in the Dark is an undeniable triumph for the both of them. Bjork is simply remarkable as the poor factory worker Selma, who has a genetic degenerative disease which is slowly stealing her eyesight. She saves every penny she can in in the hopes of getting her son an operation that will prevent him from suffering the same fate. Will she be able to do so? In a sort of middle ground between the classic musicals Selma loves to watch with her co-worker Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and a more naturalistic musical like John Carney's miraculous Once, the musical numbers here come from what Selma hears around her, be it the factory machines, a flag flapping in the breeze, or a train rushing past. And the songs are rather gorgeous - "I've Seen It All" was even nominated for an Oscar (yes, this is where we got Bjork's infamous swan dress). Deeply felt but also typically von Trier in the way it toys with, interrogates, and alienates the audience, Dancer in the Dark is quite divisive despite it's Palme d'Or win. I love the film's subtle stylistic flourishes (the musical numbers are filmed with static cameras with brighter colors than the rest of the film, which used handheld cameras) and incredible performances. Bjork has said she found the filming of this to be so nightmarish that she would never make another film ever again. Whatever von Trier did to her (and I hate to say this), it was probably worth it for this sublime film.
Hey! If you like this one, why don't you try: ...yeah, there really isn't anything like this one. The closest you'd get is probably the aforementioned Once (2007), which is a truly perfect film.
