Pandemic Picks from January 2021

Oops. My May 2020 resolution to send out a monthly Tiny Letter didn't really stick. That's one less email clogging up your boxes, I suppose. But I was back! in January, with lots of movie related thoughts.

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In 2021, I’m reclaiming my love of going to the movies. So what if every cinema I loved in this city is dead or in mortal peril? I’m stuck at Cinema du Living Room and I know I’m happier when it’s screening more than Star Trek re-runs seven days a week. Time to start programming the hell out of this place. 
 
I finally gave in to the hype and watched Mank, David Fincher’s period drama about Herman J. Mankiewicz and how he came to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane. I didn’t hate Mank like I expected, which is something. But… I wasn’t exactly blown away. So, instead of telling you to watch Mank, I have a couple more worthy recommendations.
 
First, an actual Orson Welles movie: 1946’s criminally underhyped noir, The Stranger. Welles directed, and he and his mustache play Franz Kindler, a former Nazi hiding out in a small town bastion of Connecticut bluebloods. A war crimes investigator, Edward G. Robinson, is hot on Kindler's trail. Will he be able to get the evidence to nab the monster?
 
While The Stranger isn’t a masterpiece (and deserves its B movie status), it’s more than worth your time. The cinematography ranges from good to the shadowy sublime. Edward G. Robinson  is wonderfully understated, playing against type. Short, chubby, with the “face of a depraved angel,” Robinson serves up exactly the kind of cinematic comfort food I’m craving. (As the kids say, we stan a short king.) Almost a year into the never-ending staycation, I realize I need more than a giant plushy. I need a gruff but gruff teddy bear, someone in the cuddly zone between Edward G. Robinson and Simon Oakland.
 
And if you’ll allow me to be serious for a moment, The Stranger is a great movie to screen for International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army.) According to its Wikipedia entry, “The Stranger was the first commercial film to use documentary footage from the Nazi concentration camps.” The bits of documentary film reels seen in the movie were used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Welles had seen the film in the course of his participation in the United Nations Conference on International Organization, a post-war meeting of allied nations in late spring 1945. Welles was clearly deeply affected by what he saw at the Conference. The Stranger’s plot reads as both metaphor for the urgent task of de-Nazification, as well as the difficulty of convincing the world to care about Nazi crimes.
 
I imagine playing a Nazi hunter was a meaningful role for Edward G. Robinson (b. Bucharest, 1893). His brother was gravely injured by an antisemitic mob in Bucharest, after which his family emigrated to America. The Stranger deals frankly with the destruction of European Jewry, at a time when the scale of the Nazi’s crime was still not entirely accepted. 
 
My next film recommendation is a bit further afield. If you’re missing the experience of live theater, allow me to point you to Netflix and the superb new adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It tells the story of real-life blues pioneer Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey. She and her band have left their tour of the American south for a one-day Chicago recording session with a white recording studio. Even the blues was a just another commodity to be exploited and transformed by its encounter with white supremacy. August Wilson’s genius was to imagine what it felt like for the people caught up in that encounter, and he had two Pulitzer Prizes to prove it. 
 
This latest adaptation is brilliant, avoiding stage to screen pitfalls. Wilson’s words sing, brought to life by a stellar ensemble, including the final film performance from Chadwick Boseman. Ma Rainey isn't exactly a light evening’s entertainment, but it's eminently worth your time.
 
I must also mention the passing of a quiet legend at the beginning of this new year, Crossing Delancey director Joan Micklin Silver, koved ir ondenk. Though Hollywood had almost no interest in her unique vision, Micklin Silver still managed to leave an impressive body of work, produced mostly from the margins. Of greatest interest to Yiddishists is Hester Street, her adaptation of Ab. Cahan’s Yekl, starring a luminous 21 year old Carol Kane as the rejected greenhorn wife, Gitl. 
 
Micklin Silver excelled at literary adaptations and she had an eye for material in which women could shine. Take her 1976 short film based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, Bernice Bobs Her Hair. It’s a delicious slow burn, in which a mousy young woman is Pygmalioned by her fickle cousin. If you can relax into the film’s easy pace and lo-fi aesthetic, you’ll be rewarded by a shocker of a climax that had me gasping out loud, and an ending that will make you cheer. With excellent performances by Shelly Duvall and Veronica Cartwright, it’s available on Youtube and you should watch it now.

Pandemic Picks from May 2020

Starting last spring, I decided I would get more disciplined about sending out Tiny Letters on a regular basis. That didn't happen, but the letters I did send out have a lot of movie-related content. Since I know most people reading here aren't subscribers, I thought I'd share here, too.

The May 2020 letter featured a bunch of streaming picks:

The Outrageous Sophie Tucker: I honestly didn’t know that much about Sophie Tucker before I wrote about her for the Mothers Day edition of my column.  So when I saw that there was a fairly new documentary about her, I clicked immediately. Though Sophie built her career on (presumably) heterosexual innuendo, one of the revelations of the movie was her lifelong romantic relationships with women. Alongside her unconventional lovelife, her defense of African-American showbiz colleagues, and her flagrant Jewishness, was her close friendship with J. Edgar Hoover. Sophie lived a life full of verve, and contradictions. All hail the red hot Yidishe mama.
 
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (PBS or Netflix) An absolutely riveting story of an American icon. Even if you don’t listen to jazz, you will learn something about American history, and music.   
 
Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage Again, you don’t need to be a fan to enjoy the documentary, this one about the Canadian rock band Rush. The movie explores a different kind of rock and roll story- three young guys who made it big with their band while holding on to their families and their health. Rush’s success was always a fan phenomenon. Critics generally looked down their noses at the band. Existing between categories, the band fearlessly grew their musical vision and it makes for a fascinating story about the nature of artistic growth. 
 
AKA Doc Pomus: How a Jewish boy named Jerome Felder became the internationally beloved songwriter Doc Pomus, writer of Viva Las Vegas, Lonely Avenue, This Magic Moment and a million other hits. There’s so much to love about this documentary, but one thing makes it feel particularly timely. Felder contracted polio as a child and was disabled for the rest of his life. Living in a disabled body colored the way he moved through the world and shaped his lyrics, consequently shaping American pop music. I promise you'll hear these songs in a whole new way.
 
The Green Girl  Susan Oliver appeared on a million TV shows over the decades. But perhaps her most famous role was as the ‘Green Girl’ in the credits to the original Star Trek. But there was much more to Oliver than her career as the consummate Hollywood day player. Among other things, she was an accomplished amateur aviator. The Green Girl is a terrific, and heartbreaking, story about sexism in Hollywood and how talented women dealt with its frustrations. 

Streets of Fire

Have you seen The Warriors (1979)? I consider it one of the finest American films of the last fifty years, and not just because director Walter Hill had the audacity to make a movie about New York gangs and dressed them like this.

Anyway, this isn’t about that. Sorry. 

After The Warriors, Walter Hill had an odd career trajectory, with huge hits like 48 Hours (1982), and daring flops, like Streets of Fire (1984). You can see flashes of The Warriors in Streets of Fire: the heroes fight to make it across a city, there’s an epic gang battle, and the camera lovingly returns to lonely train station after lonely train station. But none of it can possibly add up to the gripping sweep of The Warriors. 

 

In 2017, after decades lingering forgotten on the outskirts of pop culture, Shout Factory reissued Streets of Fire on Blu-Ray. The film is now undergoing a bit of a reconsideration, quietly going from neglected flop to cult classic, especially among viewers who weren’t even alive in the 1980s. If you check Twitter, it seems someone is always discovering and subsequently flipping their wig over its many virtues: the bangin’ soundtrack, Ry Cooder score, Hill’s odd fixation on suspenders, and the amazing cast, including an extremely young and hot Willem Dafoe. What’s not to love?

LOL what the fuck?

Well, it turns out, a lot. What’s so fascinating, and ultimately disappointing, about Streets of Fire, is that despite the insane amount of talent both behind and in front of the camera, it’s painfully clear what made the movie flop in the first place. The script simply stinks. The dialogue sounds like a first draft and the characters are forced to say witless, obvious things, over and over. The inane dialogue is in stark contrast to the movie’s gorgeously rendered visuals. Streets of Fire immerses you in its darkly sexy, gritty world, where even the puddles are full of sex and neon. I understand why so many want to claim the film for a neglected masterpiece. If only the human beings in it had more depth than the puddles!   

 

Sure, the movie is supposed to be stylized. I can get down with stylized. But there’s stylized and then there’s just undercooked. If you only watched the first few minutes, though, you’d have a very different impression of the film. The opening is a killer; a breathless set piece which drops us right into the movie’s brilliantly conceived nether-world, amping up the excitement with a nightclub number and introducing us to the story's beautiful damsel in distress, Ellen Aim (Diane Lane). But where The Warriors told a story almost without words, seamlessly melding action and immersive visuals, Streets of Fire is weighed down by its dreadful script, punctuated by exciting musical moments. I’m sure that at the time, Streets of Fire was dismissed as a symptom of the MTV-ification of the movies. 

 

I was alive during the '80s. I remember well the panic about music videos and what destruction they were wreaking on our culture. There was moral panic (over, of all things, a Duran Duran video FFS) as well as aesthetic panic. We were warned that fast paced ‘MTV style’ cutting was going to be the death of all things right and good with cinema, as if Sergei Eisenstein himself hadn’t died for all our sins right there on the rapid-cut Odessa Steps sixty years earlier. But, really. C’mon. Rapid cutting can be good! Music videos can be good! The problem is not the pernicious influence of music videos. And not every music-video inspired movie need be as bad as something like Flashdance (which, curiously, like Streets of Fire, also feaures Lee Ving in a supporting role…anyway…). If Walter Hill had wanted to make long form music videos, then he should have had the courage of his convictions and just done that. It worked for Jon Landis and Thriller! Streets of Fire would work a lot better if you think of it as a bunch of spectacular, high production value music videos, vaguely connected by a cartoonish storyline.   

 

The script isn’t the only problem with Streets of Fire. Walter Hill made the fatal mistake of hanging the movie on Michael Pare, who plays Tom, the roguish anti-hero called home to rescue his ex-girlfriend. Standing still, Pare looks like a GQ model. In motion, he’s got all the sizzle of wet firewood. His lack of screen appeal is all the more apparent because he’s up against Willem Dafoe, playing the villainous gang leader who kidnaps Ellen. It’s Dafoe’s first real starring role and he’s magnetic. You see him and think, yup, that’s what a movie star looks like.  You see Michael Pare and you think, yup, that’s what a sub-par hunk looks like, the type Menachem Golan might pick up in the duty-free on his way home from Cannes if they’re all out of Dudikoff.  Pare never exhibits the slightest bit of humor or self-awareness, a pre-requisite for any good anti-hero. Pretty much everyone in the movie is dour and unnecessarily mean.

 

Perhaps most unforgivably, Hill cast Rick Moranis as Billy Fish, Ellen Aim’s obnoxious manager-cum-boyfriend. Just as Moranis was sliding into his golden era of comic triumphs in the 1980s, Hill handed him this absolute turd of a role, though he does his best with the material at hand. I dare say, a less talented, and less lucky, performer would have had his career utterly derailed by such an unfortunate turn. 

In a film where most of the dialogue is clunky and the characters are underwritten, Billy Fish is the clunkiest and flattest. Was it a coincidence that the one Jewish-coded character in the movie is a greedy little shit who can’t stop talking about money? He’s constantly berated for being short, which gets really tired after about the tenth time. Hill might as well have placed a Kick Me sign on him and called it a day for character development. 

 

Hill came so close to stumbling onto what would’ve been a brilliant casting choice. No director or writer has yet spotted the untapped potential in casting Moranis in a really juicy bad-guy role. If you go all the way back to SCTV, you see the range of his personas, far beyond the cliche nerds, and Moranis can rage hard like nobody else. 

Larry Siegel is just one of my favorites.

Having Moranis play a psychopathic gang leader would’ve been utterly unexpected, and absolutely delicious. I still hold out hope that in one of the endless pieces of licensed Marvel garbage now keeping the movie industry afloat, someone somewhere will understand this and convince Moranis to make a big comeback as a Marvel villain. I'm asking you, Where is the villainous short king we deserve???? 

Of course people are obsessed

Willem Dafoe has said that playing the Green Goblin in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies was one of his all-time favorite roles. It was both a critical and fan favorite and even I, a person who hates comic book movies, I have to agree that it was a very good thing. I will (happily) eat my comic book hating hat if it’s Marvel which ends up finally giving us the nerd-to-America's dad-to-anti-hero character arc for which we've already waited too damn long.