The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

While much of the U.S. has been shivering through snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk, not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now, and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.

 In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.

 Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the National  Film Registry, I’ve concluded that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era; sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.

  What do I mean? Well, let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list. They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both, curiously, have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters, while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High Society is a musical throwback to 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love to experience.

 There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989) is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.

 We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how we (or our children) loved The Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

Fighting Off Sleep During “Wake Up Dead Man”

A word of warning: don’t watch Rian Johnson’s new mystery (now screening on Netflix) if you’re feeling the least bit groggy. I aired this film, following a long day and a good dinner, at a time when I hadn’t managed to have a good night’s sleep for quite a while. Sure enough, I got drowsy—which meant that some of the film’s many twists and turns eluded me completely, and I was forced to consult Wikipedia for a complete run-down on who did what to whom.

 Rian Johnson’s trademark, as writer and director, is crafting murder mysteries in which an innocent seems to be responsible for a brutal murder, until magnolia-scented sleuth Benoit Blanc (an always amusing Daniel Craig) shows up and unmasks the real killers. There’s a canvas crowded with famous faces, and we can be sure that most of them are up to no good. (You just know that Glenn Close—as an apparently sweet but also quite shrill church lady with her hair in a bun—is not as innocent as she seems . . . and I suspect that this much-admired thespian is having a ball playing such a prim role.) 

 Johnson always features a touch of social commentary, and in this film (the third and most complex in the Knives Out series) he takes on formal religion with a vengeance. He himself comes from an evangelical background, but as a filmmaker he can’t resist the baroque trappings beloved by the Roman Catholic Church. At the center of this drama are a good priest and a bad one, though both are certainly flawed individuals. Josh O’Connor (whom I last saw as a veddy British Prince Charles in The Crown) stars as a former teen boxer who once killed a man in the ring, and is still desperately trying (despite his genuine love of Christ’s teachings) to keep a raging temper in check. For a recent transgression, he’s been sent to an upstate New York town where a veteran priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, presides over an ever-smaller congregation. Msgr. Wicks (Josh Brolin) is a fierce defender of his own power over the souls of the locals: in short, he’s not very nice. But this doesn’t stop him from being surrounded by a small circle of apparently hyper-loyal congregants, who all share his anger at the world outside the church’s walls.

 Following a sudden and dramatic murder in the cathedral, the young priest played by O’Connor seems the obvious suspect. But, needless to say, matters get quite twisty from there, involving all sorts of mistaken identities, not to mention something of a divine resurrection. (As you might expect, there WILL be blood.) Thank heavens for Benoit Blanc, whose sleuthing sorts out the guilty from the innocent, even as he makes quite clear his own discomfort with organized religion. And thank heavens for the Wikipedia plot summary that fills in the cracks of my own understanding. I recall having had something of the same problem with the first two Knives Out mysteries, even after watching the first one twice. It’s always clear who’s Naughty and who’s Nice, but the interplay between them is generally so tricky that viewers need all the help they can get.

 So, is this new edition of the Knives Out series worth seeing? It is if you like celebrity-driven mysteries and the chance to untangle an elaborate puzzle. No need to look for much depth in the film’s characterizations. But if you can stay alert—and if blood is your thing—the film’s many conundrums will give you much to ponder.

 

 

Physically and Emotionally Naked: Remembering Sally Kirkland

So, I’m sorry to say, Sally Kirkland is no longer with us.  If, that is, she ever was. My personal feeling is that Sally came from another  planet, and only visited earth occasionally. She was, in any case, one of a kind.

 The highlight of Sally’s acting career was Anna, a 1987 indie in which she played the title role, that of a Slavic actress who has survived political persecution. The showy part won her a Golden Globe, and she was even nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. (Her competition included Glenn Close for Fatal Attraction, Holly Hunter for Broadcast News, Meryl Streep for Ironweed, and the winner, Cher, for Moonstruck.)

 But I knew Sally before all that, when she was one of the many aspiring movie people hanging around the Sunset Strip offices of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. An Actors Studio alumna who had also spent time among Andy Warhol’s The Factory crazies, she helped out with casting, and also played small but flamboyant roles like “Barney’s woman” in Big Bad Mama. She performed in some major studio films too, like The Sting, Private Benjamin, and JFK, mostly in parts that called for big emotions and very few clothes.

 Sally, you see, had a thing for nudity. A former model, she was tall and lean, with augmented breasts. (Years later, she was to become a very public crusader against breast implants.) When I was researching my former boss for the biography that evolved into Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, she told me that on screen she had a gift for appearing both physically and emotionally undressed: “Combining the emotional nakedness with the physical nakedness—that’s something that Roger’s always loved about my work.” 

 The 1999 in-person interview I did with Sally for that book is something I’ll never, ever forget. We met at the Silver Spoon, a trendy West Hollywood coffee shop near her home. When I entered, she (fully dressed) was ensconced in a booth, beneath a large framed movie poster of herself in Anna. And she was not alone. There was a young male assistant sitting beside her, taking notes, and I realized I was expected to buy them both breakfast. She was also the only person I interviewed for the Corman book who required me to sign an agreement allowing her to check all her quotes and context before my book was published. (When I later complied, she kept tinkering with her own brief bio at the rear of the book to make sure pretty much every film she’d ever made was mentioned.)

 We were studying our menus when two very attractive young blondes walked through the door. They were wearing low-cut blouses and short-shorts, and they looked to be identical. Twins? They were, it turned out, Sally’s acting students, and she’d invited them along. And then . . . a third young lady arrived. Yes, triplets. Sally proudly told me that, like her, they’d been featured in a Playboy spread, and that they now—under her tutelage—were getting ready to pursue acting careers. And I discovered I’d be buying breakfast for myself and five other people. (The triplets sat, looking awestruck, as Sally praised Roger to the skies for encouraging her directing aspirations and for treating her like a member of his family.)

 Sally Kirkland was, among many other things, a crusader for a variety of causes. I of course have no way of knowing where she is now. But I’m sure of one thing: wherever she may have ended up, it’s where the action is.

 

 

 

When We Were Young: “Baby, It’s You” and “The Big Chill”

A funny thing about the year 1983: filmmakers who were not so young as they used to be were now looking back on their coming-of-age years, the tender and turbulent Sixties. John Sayles,  recently graduated from making horror flicks for Roger Corman, shot in 1983 his first studio movie, a coming-of-age romantic comedy called Baby, It’s You. Based on a memoir of sorts by Hollywood honcho Amy Robinson, it begins in 1966 in true Sayles territory: Trenton, New Jersey. Jill Rosen (an adorable Rosanna Arquette) is a smart and sassy high school senior who gets good grades and nabs the lead in the school play. Into her life comes Sheik (Vincent Spano), an Italian kid from the other side of the tracks who can’t exactly be called a greaser because he idolizes Frank Sinatra and dresses like a suave man about town. Opposites attract, but though Jill tempts fate by secretly dating this high school drop-out, she manages to move on when she gains admission to her dream school, the tony Sarah Lawrence.

Cut to the following year: Jill has traded in her short skirts and knee socks for hippie garb, discovered pot and the pill, and otherwise explored life beyond the purview of her solidly upper-middle-class parents. On a spring-break trip to Miami she rediscovers Sheik, now dreaming of a showbiz future but basically washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. The attraction is still there, though in other ways she’s evolved. We suspect there’s no future for their relationship, but a sweet ending (one that makes use of Sheik’s favorite song, “Strangers in the Night”) shows how much they continue to mean to one another, come what may.

It's an appealing film, though hardly a deep one, with its nostalgia element heightened by a soundtrack crammed with oldies like “Wooly Bully.” (I can’t resist mentioning that it was The Graduate that in 1967  began the trend of using pop music to establish the mood of an era.) 

After he left the Roger Corman fold, Sayles’ very first film was Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), a small but influential indie about a reunion of Sixties activists, all just turning thirty, a decade or so after their graduation from college. This low-budget gem (which Sayles himself described to me as using the low-budget Corman trick of making do with what you have on hand) was critically acclaimed for capturing the spirit of an era. It seemed to kick off a host of reunion movies, the most potent of which was Lawrence Kasdan’s hugely popular The Big Chill. Like Baby, It’s You, this film looks back on the politics and culture of the Sixties, but from the perspective of campus friends who are now older, but not necessarily wiser, than they were when they linked up at the University of Michigan. Within the framework of a weekend spent in a large house following the suicide of a close friend, The Big Chill examines successes, dreams, and particularly regrets, in a way that is sometimes poignant and sometimes funny. 

The cast of The Big Chill is part of its strength. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, coming off the huge success of his 1981 thriller Body Heat, had access to some of Hollywood’s brightest young talents. Among the film’s stars are William Hurt (who’d scored in Body Heat), Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close, in only her second film. The DVD version I watched includes a years-later interview with cast and crew, highlighting how the ensemble cast, isolated in a South Carolina town, found ways to strengthen their sense of longstanding camaraderie.  

 

Movies as the Splice of Life

Charles Jensen’s Splice of Life is not the first book I’ve ever read that tells a personal story by way of the films that have shaped the author’s life. I remember with affection John Manderino’s Crying at Movies. In that charming book Manderino admits learning how to kiss through watching the Swedish art film Elvira Madigan, and divulges that his apparent physical resemblance to The Graduate’s “rodent-like” Dustin Hoffman won him an unexpected bed partner. But Jensen’s new work, subtitled “A Memoir in 13 Film Genres,” is both the smartest and the most complex example of the genre that I’ve ever encountered.

 I know Charles Jensen as the highly dedicated director of the Writers’ Program, offered both “on-ground” and online through UCLA Extension. Before I read his new book, I was aware that he is a serious poet, as well as a man deeply committed to providing learning opportunities to students of every stripe. But Splice of Life has given me new insight into the fellow who oversees the screenwriting classes I offer twice a year. It’s a deeply personal look at Charlie’s in-depth fascination with movies, and how films intersect with the high and low points of his own sometimes complicated life. 

The early chapters detail Charlie’s awkward acknowledgment of his own sexual leanings by way of films like Mean Girls (which neatly parallels his high school years) and Fatal Attraction. I love his smart close reading of the latter film, in which he views not the sexy seductress Alex (Glenn Close) but the philandering husband Dan (Michael Douglas) as the villain of the piece. His take on Fatal Attraction led me to think hard about how the “victim” label in movies is sometimes used to excuse what he calls “peak male fuckery.” He has also taught me a new key term—“queer coding”—that indicates how (in popular films like Scream) gay subtext is partially concealed, except for those with eyes to see.

One of my favorite chapters goes back to classic Hitchcock: 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt.  Charlie’s analysis of this great film (in which the seemingly amiable Joseph Cotten secretly dispatches wealthy widows) uncovers more “queer coding,” but it also plays against the startling real-life story of a member of Charlie’s extended social circle, who was ultimately convicted of murder.

 As Charlie shows himself evolving into a relatively happy and productive Angeleno (following the awkward years in the upper Midwest and the formative ones in Arizona), his film pairings sometimes become more lighthearted. He matches Get Him to the Greek with the poignant but also rather wacky story of the burial of his grandmother’s cremains. We also, in various chapters, learn about his hair-loss anxiety, his body-image issues (he deals here with the obsessive ballerina in Black Swan), and—somewhat climactically—his semi-successful appearance on Jeopardy! To capture the emotion of his big moment on the tube, he writes about the raw competition spelled out in The Hunger Games. It all leaves me wondering how the UCLA Writers’ Program will figure in his next book, and what film he’ll choose to illustrate the complexities of his current job.

 Charlie opens Splice of Life with three wonderful quotes from master filmmakers. I can’t resist quoting them here, because they all figure into what he’s achieved between his book’s covers:

 Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves. —Alejandro González Iñárritu

 Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism. —Pedro Almodóvar

 A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. —Orson Welles

 Congratulations, Charlie!

 

 

#OscarsSoMeh

Now that the 93td Annual Academy Awards Ceremony, honoring  the best films of 2020, is in the books, it’s time to take a deep breath and think about what transpired Sunday evening at – of all places – L.A.’s venerable Union Station. Needless to say, the COVID pandemic had scrambled the usual plans for the festivities, along with rules requiring that all the nominated films debut in Southern California theatres before the close of the year in question.

 Ever since the Oscar ceremony was first shown on television, it has always been a major way to entice worldwide audiences into theatre seats. Some of that strategy was certainly present at this year’s ceremony: producers cut away from the Downtown L.A. event to showcase clips from upcoming would-be blockbusters In the Heights and the Steven Spielberg remake of West Side Story. Both of these ambitious musicals feature singing and dancing on the streets of New York. For those of us who would LOVE to be dancing on New York streets rather than quarantined in our own homes, the clips were a tantalizing prospect of better things to come.  Too bad they put to shame an Oscar ceremony with no singing, no dancing, and precious few clips of the nominees.

 Given the challenge of staging a ceremony in the age of COVID, producer Steven Soderbergh opted for an intimate tone, with the few attendees present spaced out, supper-club style, at banks of small tables. (No food was consumed, though, nor was alcohol – the event hardly took on the boozy chumminess of the Golden Globes.) The time saved in not having big musical numbers and film montages was used to allow winners to speak at length, and to  have hosts present cutesy facts about nominees’ first run-ins with Hollywood. (One had worked as a ticket-taker; another made popcorn in the lobby.) Sometimes this sense of intimacy worked nicely; elsewhere (as when participants traded in-jokes with their homies) we at home felt we were intruding on a private party. 

 Highlights? For me these included Best Supporting Actress winner Yuh-Jung Youn charmingly fawning over Brad Pitt as well as the truly inspiring tribute to Tyler Perry, who summed up the past year’s social discord with a ringing invitation to “Meet me in the middle . . . refuse hate!”  I also got a giggle out of Glenn Close responding to a totally pointless song trivia game by revealing her deep knowledge of  “Da Butt,” the hit dance tune written for Spike Lee’s 1988 School Daze, and then proceeding to shake her bootie in time to the music. (Was this bit planned in advance? It certainly might have been. If so, kudos to Close for being so good at projecting spontaneity.)

 Low points? The attempts to build suspense by scrambling the order of presentations, with Best Director given early in the evening, and Best Picture upstaged by the Best Actress and Best Actor awards that followed it. Clearly the categories were re-arranged to allow for the posthumous coronation of the late, lamented Chadwick Boseman as Best Actor. Except (remarkably, given the strength of his performance and the sadness of his early death) he didn’t win. And winner Anthony Hopkins—superb in The Father, though his film did not seem quite as timely as some others—wasn’t present either physically or virtually.

 Still the evening, such as it was, belonged to the austere and beautiful Nomadland. A salute to groundbreaking director/producer/writer/editor Chloë Zhao for her achievement and her pigtails. Amid a slew of beauties in slinky, boob-baring attire, her Princess Leia nightgown was elegant in its solemn simplicity.

 

Little Boys Blue: “Wildlife” and “Hillbilly Elegy”

There’s nothing especially fresh about stories in which a sensitive young boy watches in quiet dismay as his family disintegrates all around him. Over the years there’ve been films galore on this subject. Like, for instance, 1941’s How Green Was My Valley, in which the family unit is destroyed by social forces and the exploitation of the land. In other films, personal weaknesses outflank social issues as the chief cause of the family’s failure to thrive. I’ve just seen two of these, both made quite recently.

Hillbilly Elegy, based on J.D. Vance’s popular memoir, is the latest release in the long line of work from director Ron Howard. Howard’s sensitivity toward actors is well known, as is his interest in the rural South, stemming from his own childhood portrayal of Opie from Mayberry on TV’s classic The Andy Griffith Show. I have not read Vance’s memoir, which traces his journey from Appalachia to Yale Law, but it apparently has a strong (and controversial) political bent, playing up the forces that contribute to the dark side of the American Dream.  In Howard’s hands, though, this is chiefly a multi-generational saga in which loyalty to the family unit is overridden by drug abuse and other horrors. We know that young J.D.’s mother Bev, once a nurse, is hopelessly addicted to opioids, and has even ventured into heroin. We know that as J.D. grows up he’s appalled by her behavior, at the same time that he glorifies his feisty salt-of-the-earth granny, Mamaw. But Mamaw is no saint, particularly when she signals her fury by setting Papaw on fire (!). Frankly, I didn’t see much onscreen motivation for any of this, no particular reason why these people are in this kind of psychic pain.

 The screenplay cuts between the young J.D. and his grown-up self, courting a gorgeous Indian-American and trying to make a good impression on big-league Washington law firms. Drawn from a select dinner party (he worries over which fork to use) straight back to the old homestead, he has to confront his mother’s full-blown overdose. That hot mess of a mother is played by Amy Adams (still looking for her first Oscar win). And playing the indomitable Mamaw is a transformed version of Glenn Close (still looking for her first Oscar win). The usually elegant Close now shows off a dumpy figure, frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, a foul mouth, and an ever-present cigarette. Sounds like Oscar bait to me.

 A smaller, more delicate project is 2018’s Wildlife, based on a novel by Richard Ford. It was adapted for the screen by actors Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, with Dano making his directorial debut. The heartland family unit at the center of the drama consists of father Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), mother Jeanette (Carey Mulligan, spectacularly good), and son Joe. Jerry seems like a nice guy, but also someone who’s never grown up. Having lost yet another job, he gets it into his head to join a team of firefighters, risking their lives for a pittance to put out a stubborn mountain blaze nearby. In his absence, Jeanette evolves from a sweet, supportive wife into someone determined to make her own way in the world. This includes getting her own job, and then cozying up to a wealthy older man who adores her. Meanwhile poor young Joe stands by, trying desperately to keep his parents’ relationship intact.

 It’s a hugely sad but totally convincing portrait of a marriage splitting apart at the seams. Dano and Kazan, who starred together in another of their projects, the hilarious Ruby Sparks, deserve all the kudos they can get.