Welcome to Week Twenty of “Monday at the Movies.”
On tap this week:
a few threequels, nostalgia, and Gary Cooper’s
Cinema King debut.
The Godfather: Part
III (1990) –
Part III has become
a kind of punchline, shorthand for the unnecessary and subpar sequel.
Even Francis Ford Coppola has tried to
distance himself by labeling this merely an “epilogue.”
To be sure,
Part III has its flaws – first, it is not the brilliance of
The Godfather, nor does it enhance the
original as
Part II did.
Second, Robert Duvall is absent, courtesy of
a contract dispute.
Third, Sofia Coppola
as Michael’s daughter... well, you’ve heard all the jokes, and they’re all
accurate.
But the film has its
positives, too, often neglected in the dead faint to insult the film.
Seeing Michael make good on his promises to
legitimize is satisfying, and Andy Garcia’s role as Vincent Mancini (the
illegitimate son of Sonny Corleone) ought to have been a star-making one, since
his work is compelling and entertaining with a respectful dash of James Caan
thrown in for appropriate measure.
I had
said that
Part II was a sequel to a
film that didn’t need one, but
Part III
is a sequel – pardon, epilogue – that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the
franchise.
Al Pacino in particular,
genius that he was in the earlier films, seems inconsistent; he’s more bluster
a la
Devil’s Advocate than the quiet
man we last saw on the park bench at the end of
Part II.
Where Talia Shire
successfully navigates the interim to portray Connie as, at last, her father’s
daughter, it’s difficult to see a more happy-go-lucky Michael with only
glimpses of how tortured he ought to be.
Part III isn’t enjoyable in
the way that the first two are, although it’s fun to see the way that it
reflects and refracts its predecessors; we have a mass execution of the dons, a
romantic confession in a kitchen, a trip to Italy, a passing of the torch
complete with ring kissing, and Diane Keaton still left in the doorframe, but
they mean different things here and serve as fun nods to those in the
know.
Ultimately, the film concludes as
every
Godfather film ought to – a
bloody settling of accounts – and Pacino all but redeems himself at the tragic
opera finale.
Forget Fredo – it was you,
Al; you broke my heart.
Required
viewing, if only to conclude the saga, but there’s a reason it never stands
shoulder to shoulder with its older, more sophisticated brothers.
Midnight in Paris
(2011) – It surprises me that this is the first Woody Allen film I’ve
reviewed on this blog, since I’ve practically lived the movie
Annie Hall (right down to the awkward
primary school education of a precocious bespectacled redhead) and love a whole
host of his other films (especially
Play
It Again, Sam;
The Purple Rose of Cairo;
and
Match Point).
And on the advice of so many of my colleagues
who know literature like I do, I checked out
Midnight in Paris on the strength of the premise:
Owen Wilson plays the stock Woody Allen
character who roams the streets of Paris and slips through time into the 1920s
to meet literary icons like F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom “Loki” Hiddleston), Ernest
Hemingway (a spot-on Corey Stoll), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates).
Unfortunately,
Midnight in Paris is a film that never quite lives up to its
conceit; it’s a fantastic idea, don’t get me wrong, but it’s mismanaged and
underutilized.
I’d much rather see a
Hiddleston/Stoll buddy biopic of Fitzgerald and Hemingway than the Owen Wilson
movie we get.
Premise aside, there’s not
much original here:
Wilson plays the
same Woody Allen character we’ve seen a million times, Rachel McAdams is Regina
George, all grown up; Michael Sheen plays the cuckolding academic, another
Allen-trope; and Wilson’s life-changing revelation is as plain as... well, the
nose on his face.
The best parts of the
movie are the scenes when the writers take center stage, but these moments are
not frequent enough, and indeed not all of them work (although Adrien Brody as
Salvador Dalí is quite entertaining); all told,
Midnight in Paris is a bit like an episode of
Saturday Night Live – a few good sketches worth rewatching but
overall less than enjoyable.
Mr. Deeds Goes to
Town (1936) – The combination of Frank Capra and Gary Cooper is enough to
get my butt in the seat.
I’ve long been
nostalgic for the simpler world Capra’s films present, and I’ve made holiday
traditions out of
It’s a Wonderful Life
and
Arsenic and Old Lace.
And after
High
Noon and especially
The Fountainhead,
Gary Cooper can do no wrong in my eyes.
Here
Cooper plays simple man Longfellow Deeds, an aspirant poet who inherits $20
million (upwards of $311 million today) and finds that all that glitters isn’t
quite golden.
Like later Capra/Cooper
joint
Meet John Doe (1941), Deeds becomes
the center of a media frenzy, courtesy of romantic interest and newspaper spy
Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur).
In the final
analysis,
Mr. Deeds isn’t my favorite
Capra film (
Arsenic and Old Lace
takes that cake, meaning I should probably get around to reviewing it on here).
There are parts that take a bit too long for
anything to happen, and the slapstick comedy isn’t as prevalent here as I might
have liked on a Sunday evening.
Moreover, almost all of the characters in the film are extremely
unlikeable, even Bennett, who doesn’t atone for her sins until the very end of
the picture.
Fortunately, though, Cooper
is one of those actors who’s so charismatic that his hard work redeems many of
a film’s flaws; his performance here is consistently and satisfactorily
compelling, charmingly entertaining and touchingly empathetic.
To paraphrase former dean of American pop
culture Tony Soprano, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?”
Superman III (1983)
– First things first, this is not a Superman movie.
Unlike the
two films that preceded it,
Superman III doesn’t star Christopher
Reeve as the Man of Steel, even though he finally gets top billing.
Rather, this is a Richard Pryor movie in
which his character, Gus Gorman, attempts to pull one over on Superman by
manipulating computers, weather satellites, and giant foam cowboy hats.
The greatest compliment I paid
the RichardDonner cut of
Superman II was that it
excised a lot of Richard Lester’s slapstick inclinations; unfortunately, those
inclinations are given full rein here, most egregiously in the moment when
Pryor skis down the side of a skyscraper while wearing a pink tablecloth as a
cape.
It’s a real shame, because there’s
a great Superman movie in here somewhere.
Reeve is doing continually solid work as the Last Son of Krypton,
especially when defective Kryptonite transforms him into a dark reflection of
himself.
What’s more, his scenes
opposite Annette O’Toole as former flame Lana Lang are a fulfilling fill-in for
his relationship with the absent Lois Lane (a shame, since Margot Kidder’s
portrayal is definitive).
But Lester’s
priorities are clear; he’s more interested in Pryor’s twitchy brand of humor
than in superheroics, more in the villains than in the film’s ostensible hero.
Worse, the villains on which the film focuses
are nowhere near as interesting as the posthuman-converting computer, an
apparent riff on the comics’ Brainiac; I’d much rather have seen Superman
square off against an army of robot people than the would-be moguls
herein.
When the chips are down, color
me a Donner fan.
It’ll take a lot of
work out of Zack Snyder next year to make me a true believer.
That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the
Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!
And stay tuned, because later this week I’ll be bringing you a full
review of yet another threequel – this time, it’s Men In Black III!
Blue Jasmine (2013)
– Woody Allen is nothing if not prolific, but the sheer volume of his work
often means that every film can’t be a success.
Blue Jasmine – Allen’s
post-recession take on A Streetcar Named
Desire – is, however, a triumph; in fact, it’s probably his best in at
least a decade. In a powerhouse
performance, Cate Blanchett stars as the eponymous Jasmine, at wit’s end after
the imprisonment and death of her too-big-to-fail husband (Alec Baldwin). To cope with her fall from grace, Jasmine
lives part-time in a fantasy world while moving in with her sister Ginger
(Sally Hawkins) and her boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale). As this iteration’s Blanche Dubois, Blanchett
puts the “pathos” back into “pathetic” and more than earns her Oscar; her
Jasmine is scattered and schizophrenic, slipping between realities while never
failing to tell the audience which version of the world she’s actually experiencing
– her own or the real one. The
supporting cast, too, is very potent in this one; Louis CK turns up for a
bumbling note of levity, Baldwin as Jasmine’s husband is more important to the
story than Blanche’s ever was, and the decision to split the Stanley figure in
two – Cannavale’s Chili and Andrew Dice Clay’s Augie. This gives us a fuller sense of Ginger,
liberated from a reductionist “Stanley bad” approach that might be encouraged
by Brando’s thuggish performance. For
those who think the filmmaker has lost his touch, this is a fine example of
Allen’s late style, contemplative and sobered.
A Streetcar Named
Desire (1951) – Look, every now and again, I review a movie where all I can
do is point to the decades of preexisting critical consensus and add little
more to the discussion than to say, “Yeah, what they said.” Case in point: Elia Kazan’s adaptation of the Tennessee
Williams play is nothing short of iconic.
While watching this tour de force rendition of the fall of Blanche
Dubois (Vivien Leigh) in the home of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) and
Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), one feels distinctly that
one is in the presence of a greatness which more than lives up to its
reputation. Every note-perfect beat in
the film strikes a resonant chord with the audience, be it Leigh’s fragile
beauty or the frankly inspired decision to film in black-and-white. And when it comes to Brando’s mumbling hulk
Stanley, you’re talking nothing short of definitive; he performs as though
Williams’s pen had literally given birth to Stanley, fully formed like Athena
from the foamy scalp of Zeus. Readers of
the playscript will be forgiven for thinking this is anyone’s show but
Stanley’s, for he is everything you could want from a Stanley. Kazan’s direction cements the place of the
film in cinema history; his directorial sensibility lends a tragic
inevitability to the proceedings, such that Stanley’s line “We’ve had this date
with each other from the beginning” becomes the distressing centerpiece to the
play. But the film, subject to the Hays
Code, contains a slightly tweaked ending, a nuanced gesture toward a moral
universe, which makes the film a distinctly unique experience when compared to
the play. It’s not Williams’s ending,
that’s for sure – but it does make the film, in the final analysis, a
masterpiece by Kazan.
