The Rake Magazine

The things I do for this job: contractual obligations force me to sit inside air-conditioning and watch the brainless Talladega Nights. But if you're wise, you will wander down to Loring Park to endure brain-melting temperatures to enjoy Howard Hawks' witty and wonderful His Girl Friday, part of the Walker's Summer Movies and Music.

I like heat and I love His Girl Friday. If I had my druthers, I'd bring a cooler and some wheat beer, beer glasses to drink them from, and my wife would have a armload of comestibles that would include her homemade chutney and summer corn relish.

Now I sound like a poor-man's Stephanie Marsh. His Girl Friday is simply the happiest, hippest film to come along this summer, and that's saying a lot considering we've already seen Sullivan's Travels. Girl Friday involves divorce, capital punishment, the press, slapstick, rekindled love affairs at the expense of witless sad-sacks, with the charming Cary Grant and the equally charming but much more sexy Rosalind Russell.

Hot off the wire! David Thomson, one of my favorite film critics, writes in the British broadsheet The Independent of a new film on the life of Truman Capote, called Infamous. This one is based on George Plimpton's Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Unlike Capote, Infamous details Truman's triumphs and tragedies in writing the masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

No, wait, that is exactly what the last film was about.

So this is pretty freakin' bizarre. Thomson claims that Infamous is far superior to Capote, a film the irascible bastard actually admires. He writes that "if you thought it was too soon for another Capote, think again!" Well, I didn't think it was too soon, I simply didn't think anyone would make this story ever again... it's not as if people are clamoring to remake these silly biopics.

Infamous boasts a supreme cast, which includes Daniel Craig (the new Bond), Jeff Daniels, Peter Bogdonovich, Hope Davis, Sandra Bullock (yes, that's not a supreme actress, but a popular one), Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rosellini and Sigourney Weaver, with relative newcomer Toby Jones playnig our favorite screechy writer (I'm only partially tongue-in-cheek as I truly adore his work). Thomson claims that Jones is Capote, whereas Phil S. Hoffman was merely a mimic. Though I liked Capote, I didn't think P. S. Hoffman was deserving of an Oscar, or the unanimous praise. Then again, I get sick of all this mimickry.

In any case, this could make for an interesting film, a rousing success, or a case of bad timing, much like Valmont following on the heels of Dangerous Liaisons a good decade back. Right now, I don't have any clue when this will hit the states, if it will hit our shores on the big screen, or die a quiet death and head straight to DVD. I'll keep you posted.

Scoop and Miami Vice

Scoop, 2006. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Allen, Hugh Jackman, and Ian McShane.

Now showing in theaters around town.

Used to be that you could spot a Woody Allen fan wherever they could be found sulking. Nebbishes to an extreme, they often were seen in oversized corduroy jackets with leather patches, didn't care that their glasses were out of touch with the trendsetters, and could be heard in the arcades and K-marts debating the merits of Stardust Memories against Manhattan with their Allen-loving friends. Too often they would steal away from their high school dances to watch Hannah and Her Sisters, marveling at their own intellectual superiority, returning home at night dreaming their dreams of New York City and how much more superior it was to lousy Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

But that's just me. In the years since I've come to wish that I had gone to more dances and seen less of Zelig and Radio Days, decent films but no match for the girls I passed up because they actually enjoyed Night Ranger and St. Elmo's Fire.

Still, there is some part of me that yearns for the old Woody Allen. I miss the guy who used to cast his muse/lover (Lasser, Keaton, Farrow) and gather his flock of fantastic supporting actors to wrestle with his humor and angst. And all this in the fantasyland of Manhattan, my personal Oz. For Manhattan in Woody Allen is so much more reasonable than Manhattan in real life.

Woody isn't haunting New York these days, having moved his shrunken frame to the upper class apartments and country estates of London. For whatever reason, this has seemed to resuscitate him. For although Scoop is not a very original film, it is a very funny film, more enjoyable than his very good Match Point. Scoop has no weight or meaning, and doesn't address moral and philosophical issues. It has plot fashioned from cotton candy, a cast that includes Allen doing his stand-up shtick from start to finish, and a fairly predictable ending. I loved it.

The facts: Joe Strombel (gravely-voiced Ian McShane) is an ace reporter who has just recently died. Lolling along on Charon's barge, still baffled at his sudden demise, he meets a woman who claims to have found herself in the underworld due to poisoning. This poor lady was offed because she knew a dastardly secret: she discovered evidence that her employer, Peter Lyman, wealthy son of Lord Lyman, is the Tarot Card Killer. Lyman overheard, she had afternoon tea, now she's dead. The math is simple.

Strombol still has his reporter's wits about him, so he jumps into the river hoping to escape Death just long enough to get the news back to the living. Enter Sondra Pransky (Ms. Johansson), a student reporter on vacation with some friends in London. She and her girlfriend take in a magic show by Sid Waterman (Woody), aka Splendini!, and, while making Sondra disappear into his 'dematerializer', she comes across Strombel's ghost. He reveals his scoop: Peter Lyman is the killer, and Sondra has to investigate. With Woody Allen in tow, they meet the dashing young Mr. Lyman (Hugh Jackman), and hijinks ensue.

And boy do they ensue. My wife loathes Woody Allen, and anyone who is of the same mind would do themselves a favor by staying away. Perhaps I'm reacting to a summer's worth of virtually brainless fare, and am hungering for drawing rooms and jokes that equate Anthony Trollope with 'trollop'. But I loved Allen's shtick here, which is rolled on thick as wallpaper paste--it's a nice reprieve from the jokes of You, Me and Dupree and the newest Pirates film, at least. I haven't seen Allen do his thing for a good long time, and here he's going for straight stand-up. His magic act is wonderful and spot-on (and I should know, my pop's a magician), a combination of tics and stutters designed, like all great slight of hand, to distract.

Woody seems to have found a new muse in Scarlett Johansson, who pushes him around and exchanges rapid-fire banter without blinking an eye. Forced to act like father and daughter, they dig at one another throughout, but manage to stir up a winning chemistry that is never discomforting sexually (though my wife, without having seen the film or any preview, shouted 'pedophile!' when I mentioned this). Hugh Jackman is light on his feet, and the love affair between him and Scarlett could almost be the heart of a Gene Kelly musical, it's so breezy. Allen remains perhaps the best director of women in America--in fact, he is perhaps only surpassed internationally by Almodovar.

Scoop flags a bit toward the middle, but then rights itself with a goofy ending that ties up its loose ends with magic tricks on the River Styx. There are some weird touches in the film, most notably the Diane Arbus-like characters wandering in the background, dwarves and hideously made up women. And I give kudos to a guy who wants to make his silly plots twist and turn on the word of ghosts. Hardly a masterpiece, Scoop is nonetheless a film whose maker cares about the people he's written about, cast actors who can fill the roles with wit and energy, who's still got his comic timing, and believes his audience has at least half a brain. The other night, that was more than enough for me.

Miami Vice, 2006. Written and directed by Michael Mann. Starring Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Li Gong, Luis Tosar, Naomie Harris, John Ortiz, Ciarin Hinds and Barry Shabaka Henley.

For God's sake, this is playing everywhere...

I was never keen on Miami Vice back in the day--as mentioned above, I was too busy checking out Woody Allen to care about Crockett and Tubbs. The pastel tales of the Miami PD, not to mention that grating theme song that played everywhere, got on my nerves. I hear tell that the show had its fair share of humor and cool, that it left an influence on Miami even today, but there was always something about Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas... I think it was the fact that they both can't act their way out of a dry cleaning bag. That's a problem in a pair of leading men.

For whatever reason, Michael Mann has decided to resuscitate the TV show, but he's changed the look and the style, and replaced two easily identifiable hams with two overpraised actors who are also easily identifiable hams. Sure, everyone knows Foxx and Farrell. But Foxx's ill-deserved Oscar has sent him to the top of a heap he doesn't deserve; Farrell is just plain lousy. Li Gong stands out as the lone actress trying desperately to give this soulless film some heart. And Michael Mann? Well, I have to wonder if ever a director has assembled such a daring collection of arresting images and visceral moments to support such a hollow plot?

Like most of Mann's films, the facts don't amount to a hill of beans: The film opens with Crockett and Tubbs involved in a big mess. A pair of FBI agents is brutally murdered by some kind of informer leak (I didn't really get what was going on for all the confusion), shot to death by what appeared to be anti-tank guns in a parking lot by the Miami piers, disrupting no one (large booms and explosions are obviously the norm in South Florida). The boys go undercover to take down a giant drug cartel. They are, of course, dressed in the finest clothes, surrounded by other cops equally sharp, who stand around our heroes looking like the gangs from the novels of S. E. Hinton. Once undercover, Crockett and Tubbs meet a number of hoods with greasy hair, have the usual tough-guy standoffs, get betrayed, get smacked around, fall in love, and in the end there's a big, Saving Private Ryan-style gunfight (spot-on sound effects, verite camera work). The pair are shown making love to their women and falling for them, which, as reliable as Chekov's gun, means that the girls will get kidnapped and/or beaten.

Miami Vice is a gorgeous movie to look at. Mann's cinematographer captured the sullen beauty of the Miami summers, with its endless thunderstorms creeping in from the ocean, the wide expanses of water that criminals can run and hide in like a jungle, and the highways stretching out to nowhere. But although Mann clearly seeks to make his film stand out above the rest of the usual action fare, Miami Vice isn't worth caring about. What do the characters want from life? Is there even a society to protect? Their primary concern seems to revolve around lovemaking, shooting things, and keeping their Armani's pressed. What is this movie if not a string of the usual cliches with a great score and top-notch costume design? But it doesn't mean anything and moves too slow to be mindless entertainment.

Even worse, there is no chemistry whatsoever between the actors. "I trust you," Tubbs says to Crockett, an obviously important statement since we don't see it for ourselves. Everyone here seems to exist in a narcissistic bubble, staring ahead, looking grim, flexing their muscles as they walk.

Miami Vice is moderately entertaining--"Not as bad as I thought it would be", my colleague admitted--but you could do better with a dozen other films in the theaters or on DVD. With its supercops and their superduds, Miami Vice says nothing about Miami, nothing about crime, nothing, even, about people. Failing all that, what's the point?

The Conversation, 1974. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Gene Hackman, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Cindy Williams, Michael Higgins, and some of the finest character actors of the 70s: John Cazale, Frederick Forrest, Teri Garr, and Allen Garfield.

Shows Wednesday night, July 26, at 9:00pm and Sunday, August 6 at 5:00pm on Turner Classic Movies.

I was all of six years old when Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned. Too young to understand the full implications, too young not to keep pestering my mother and grandparents as they gaped at the television set, too young to do anything but make fun of the sweaty, pasty-faced fellow on the tv screen. This was Los Angeles in 1974, to me a world of Disneyland and Dodger Stadium; to my mom, no doubt it was a place where the sun was burning hot on a world that seemed to come unraveled.

So, too, was I unable to appreciate the wealth of great films that year: 1974 was a feast of paranoid filmmaking, from Chinatown to The Godfather, Part II to The Parallax View to Francis Ford Coppola's underrated The Conversation. Granted, the innocuous Sting made more than the lot put together, but it was a great year to exercise your frustrations onscreen.

Sometimes it's hard to for me to imagine how pervasive the Watergate scandal was back then. Nixon resigned, you may or may not recall because he was certain to be impeached, and that impeachment would likely result in a verdict of removal. Today, when we go into the details of Watergate to those who are too young to have experienced or remembered, there is often a look of bafflement: that is what got Nixon kicked out? Knowingly supporting the Watergate break-in? Add to this his secret bombings of Cambodia, the enemies list, and etc., and the youth of today probably think of the 70s as a simpler time.

Which, in a way, they were. Somewhere it is written, by David Thomson (I think--I'm not going to look it up, either), that the films of the 1970s are so deeply cynical because the nation as a whole, the movie-going audience, was at its heart optimistic. Seeing a film like The Conversation was meant to anger and inspire, to make us understand that we didn't necessarily have to have crooks in the White House. Today, I think, we're pretty much resigned to having crooks in the White House, men who are more than willing to lie and plunder at will. And the crimes have become so abundant that you could not make The Conversation without its seeming deeply partisan at best, or, the stuff of crackpots at worst.

But The Conversation still stirs your conscience, and it's a sly and subtle masterpiece by a filmmaker who was in-between making two of the most highly regarded films in history. It still boggles my mind that Francis Ford Coppola followed up The Godfather with this nearly-forgotten film about a professional eavesdropper.

The facts: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman, never better) is a professional surveillance man who is hired by the Director (Robert Duvall) of a giant conglomerate to listen in on the conversation between his wife and her suitor. Harry is the consummate professional with a crack staff and eavesdropping equipment that his competitors would give their eyeteeth to possess. With a great deal of finagling, Harry is able to piece together the details of this couple's discussion. But now, Harry is concerned: in the past, his efforts to capture a secret meeting of a union official resulted in the brutal murder of a family. A shy, retiring, and paranoid man, who never indulges his secrets to anyone, Harry slowly begins to think that his recent work might result in this pair being killed as well.

Like the aforementioned films, especially Parallax View and Chinatown, our hero ends up the victim, powerless against the forces of capitalism, Big Brother, and just plain evil. Like Jake Gittes in Chinatown (also nominated for Best Picture that year--it could have been the strongest Oscar year in history were it not for Towering Inferno), Harry slowly becomes obsessed with protecting this couple, but, like Gittes, is utterly incapable of protecting even himself. Unlike Gittes, however, Harry is a loner, who refuses to trust even his assistant, his girlfriend, and a man whose occupation is subject to spying even by his competitors. Cloaked in a gauzy trenchcoat or seen through shower curtains and glass blocks, (like the caul of his last name) Harry tries to remain at a distance, usually muttering that he's "not responsible" for the results of his surveillance, but knowing full well that's a lie. Eventually, in an interesting nod to Psycho, there is a brutal murder, and not the least what he expected. In the now-famous denouement, he realizes that, in spite of his extreme efforts, he, too, is under surveillance and rips his apartment to shreds looking for a bug.

Whenever I watch The Conversation, I get quite uneasy. The plot is not necessarily brilliant, and, in fact, repeated viewings show off a few of its rusty spots. But Coppola and Hackman work in tandem to give us the plight of an everyman slowly drowning in the realization that his actions, whether intended or not, have ramifications that are unpleasant to say the least, and that the world is no longer an innocent place. This, from a movie that is over thirty years old. In the day, did my mother and grandparents still think the government was capable of the high standards that seem to exist only in myth today? In a time when the government admits to bugging millions of its people, and does so with impunity, Harry's travails seem slight. After all, the film is about murder and corporations, not terrorism and the government, about which we are supremely concerned.

So now do we look at The Conversation as nostalgia, a time when one man would still sacrifice his life and career, when his defeat was a rallying cry, when we still cared that people were bugged and destroyed by a reckless government. Or is it as earnest and silly as John Wayne's World War II films? A relic from lost time, a lost attitude?

I still hope that, like Harry, we cannot deny responsibility forever.

The Lady Eve, 1941. Written and directed by lipstick-magnate Preston Sturges. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Hank Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette and Sturges stalwarts William Demarest, Eric Blore and Robert Greig.

Playing in Loring Park with Fat Kid Wednesdays; part of the Walker's Summer Music and Movies.

Briefly: tonight, the Walker Art Center is bestowing us unworthies with oddball jazz and and an even more oddball movie in beautiful Loring Park at sunset. The Lady Eve, the story of Ale-brewing and snake-loving Hank Fonda's run-in with con-lady Barb Stanwyck, is hilarious and quite sexy to boot. If you have anything else to do, you must be dead, at least from the neck up.