Soul sold

Though I've seen it many times, I just re-watched the 1958 film version of the Broadway musical Damn Yankees (I got a very good price on a DVD). The film settles a long-standing argument between Broadway and film aficionados, specifically the claim that the movies change Broadway shows too much and all that is needed is to take the Broadway script and cast and "open it up" a little and you have a good movie. Damn Yankees is proof positive that it ain't so. The film uses the entire original cast, save the exchange of one insignificant juvenile lead for another, one substituted number, another cut and some slight shuffling of the running order.

Yet despite the fidelity to a 1,000-performance Broadway show, the film feels flat. A little film history suggests exactly what went wrong. Production was rushing to beat the deadline of a threatened musicians' strike. The deadline was missed, so the actors lip-synched to the Broadway cast album. Later the film music was recorded in Rome (with the orchestrations almost identical to the originals--an unusual situation for music supervisor Ray Heindorf, who usually put his stamp on the scores he worked for), and the voice tracks recorded to fit (often badly) the lip movements already filmed. The result is that when the singers are performing, they cannot fully concentrate on the performance, but in both the filming and the recording process had technical procedures foremost in mind.

That rush to finish the film may explain why the scenes are often played in long takes and long shots with occasionally badly cut inserts. And of course, the actors are stuck with Abbott's strange text with the inept attempt at aping natural speech and all sorts of non-sequiturs that are meant to sound like breezy chatter. None of this explains why the dialogue scenes proceed at such a leisurely tempo. I suspect the actors were just reading the lines the way they had been for two-and-a-half years, but why couldn't Stanley Donen (who despite the co-directing credit, was the only person on the stage actually directing the film) have gotten the actors to pick up their cues, and even perhaps interrupt or overlap? The word "stilted" doesn't begin to describe the effect. (Walston, who later became a good movie and television actor is the worst offender here. You can almost see his eyes scanning the seats in the back of the orchestra.)

Nonetheless, no one is going to burn the negative, because the film is the best record we have of the great Gwen Verdon at her height. A lot of people feel that she didn't become a star because her performance was stagy. That's nonsense. First of all, as the clip below shows, Gwen is quite subtle and knowing in "A Little Brains, A Little Talent." Some people are upset that the movie powers insisted she omit her hip bumps, but I don't miss them -- they help to bring the tone of the number down to an appropriate level for the movies. "Whatever Lola Wants" is, of course, deliberately stagy, not only because the intent was to record Bob Fosse's original staging and Verdon's performance, but because the song is not meant to be actually arousing and sexy. It is a satire of sex appeal and the sirens who are supposed to have it. The whole sequence is deliberately ridiculous. To have Lola be actually sexy and desirable to Joe would complicate the entire story.

This viewing I really sat up for a number that I barely remembered from previous viewings. Here in, "Two Lost Souls" Fosse seems to be on his way to film directing in a way he hadn't before. Sure, the lighting and camera staging probably had contributions from Stanley Donen and cinematographer Harold Lipstein, but like no Fosse number before, this seems to have been designed for the camera. Not that it's all cuts and close-ups, but it has a fluidity of movement and of changes in scale and focus that recall the best work of Vincent Minelli, Chuck Walters and Donen and Kelly at MGM in the glory days.

But finally the film will be remembered and copies treasured by every dance fan and aspiring dancer for this next clip, which is the only color footage of Verdon and Fosse together in a typically irrelevant Adler & Ross specialty called "Who's Got The Pain?" (The joke, lost to pop culture history, is that the mambo seems to always incorporate strange vocalizations that sound like bird squawks or cries of gastic distress. Get an old Xavier Cugat or Perez Prado mambo record from the mid- to late-50s and you'll see what they mean.) On stage, Verdon had done the number with a company dancer named Eddie Phillips. But this was film and film lasts, so Bob Fosse (who had already appeared on film in Kiss Me Kate and Give A Girl A Break alongside later choreography-director rival Gower Champion) took the stage shoulder to shoulder in one of the most raucous love duets you'll ever see. Because that's what this is -- the love of two performers and artists for each other and their work. They married shortly after this was filmed, and although they didn't live together for the rest of their lives, they never really fell out of love. How could they have?

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika

One of the hallmarks of 80's cinema was the well-meaning drama scolding South Africa about what terrible and unjust meanies they were with their bad apartheid. As if the US had never fostered racially-based injustice. It was a good thing we had limited communications with the old South Africa, or they would probably have jumped up and punched us in the nose for lecturing them.

Now that the new South Africa is almost 20 years old, it does seem to make sense to assess what has been happening there. (I had to look this up, but although Mandela was released in 1990, he did not become president until 1994.)

Disgrace (2008) has, at least, a partially South African perspective, although the filmmakers are Australian and the star is American. It is a very dark, perhaps pessimistic work. I choose to read it as a metaphor for the position of minority whites in the new South Africa. Malkovich is morally compromised (he sexually abuses a black student--sort of colonialism in minature), and retreats from the city to land he owns in the country, to become, literally, a Boer, the Dutch word for farmer which is the black South African word for "white" or specifically "white oppressor." He is at the mercy of his black neighbor, Petrus, who begins as a tenant and eventually becomes the owner. His daughter Lucy, is sexually assaulted by three black ruffians while he is helplessly locked in the bathroom (and briefly set on fire). She will not report the assault, and Petrus turns out to be the patron of the principal villain. Lucy even decides to go ahead and bear the child conceived in the assault. The only useful work Malkovich can find is to help the local shelter euthanize unwanted animals. As Malkovich holds one poor dog as its life ebbs away, one can't help wondering if he doesn't seem himself fading away and becoming nothing in this South Africa.

It seems there is nothing left for the whites but acquiescence, due to their pre-existing guilt. I have read various places that the film ends on a note of tentative hope, but I don't see it. It seems to be muddling-through, South-Africa style.

The filmmaking is similarly bleak. South Africa looks bleached and parched, the countryside a barely habitable desert, the city a collection of walled-in spaces. Malkovich's accent is very insecure, but his arrogance and lack of empathy is solidly in place. As usual he asks neither for pity nor sympathy. Is there an American star who cares less about whether the audience likes him? That attitude pays off at the end, since one can grudgingly admire his fortitude at carrying on in spite of his trials.

Disgrace is a hard movie to watch It is uncompromising, unsentimental, unsparing to its characters and its audience. But it is never dull and it is often rewarding.

Invictus (2009) comes off as a feel-good picture by contrast. Much of it is of the "sports overcomes racism" vein, like Remember The Titans and going back all the way to The Jackie Robinson Story. It frequently takes time to repeat its ideas (Mandela is a healer--he wants to preserve white dignity to ensure their participation in the new South Africa) and to congratulate itself for its noble mindedness. I am left with these questions as I watch it?

1. Why Clint Eastwood to direct and why was Eastwood's work so anonymous? On the plus side, it omitted some of the langours of Eastwood's personal projects, but it never gave much scope to the acting, which is Eastwood's hallmark. There were really only two pieces of virtuoso filmmaking, and I wonder to what extent they were scripted. One comes in the sequence when Damon's rugby team visits the prison Mandela inhabited for more than 20 years, and we see the ghosts of the former inmates. This is particularly moving as it is coupled with the words of "Invictus," a poem for which I have a soft spot. (I have recommended it to many students, especially athletes, as a credo, and it is never not been embraced by them.)

The other striking sequence is the one picture here, in which the predominantly white players conduct a rugby clinic in a township, where the game is not familiar, and we literally see the spirit of play transcend other human boundaries. There was nothing new, but it was exhilarating all the same, especially in contrast with the noble talk.

2. Why Matt Damon if he was not going to be given a character to play? If wonder if the plan wasn't, "Hey, there's no character here! No problem--we'll get a well-liked American star and nobody will notice!"

3. If South Africa has a bright future, why does the film look blasted and whitened like a post-apocalyptic film?

4. Why cast Leleti Kuhmalo (the original Sarafina on stage and screen) and not give her a chance to shine? It was lovely to see her again, and she is lit from within, like she swallowed a small star, but it is way past due to feature her in another film.

5. Why the whole subplot about integrating the white and black bodyguard teams? The problem was stated in seconds, and then they kept repeating the trope over and over. It never even really resolved. It was all okay at the end, but not a real resolution.

6. Why no twists or turns after the first 45 minutes or so, when the move to abolish white rugby is turned back by Mandela and he sets the course to win the World Cup? We know they're going to win, or there is no movie, but they seemed to win by becoming the Little Rugby Team That Could.

7. Why not an African music score? Somewhere after the one-hour mark we got a little taste of African music, but up until then, we had the standard generic Hollywood movie cues. (Hint--the first composer listed is named Kyle Eastwood. I don't mind hiring family--it's good to work with people you are familiar with, it saves time and you are often sympatico, but Kyle's imdb page indicates he has not worked for Any Other Director Ever. Might make you think that the rest of the industry doesn't think he can cut it.

8. Why not teach us something about rugby? All games look slightly ridiculous to everyone who doesn't know how they work--there's always some arbitrary and irrational element that looks silly. One could have gotten past that by creating a character who provides a

9. Point of view! There are so many foreign and historical elements to the backstory of this movie than an American journalist or attache or some such character would have been much more useful to the story than the boring security detail subplot. They could have been our eyes, our explainer.

The result is a kind of uncommitted, detached feeling to the film, as if to tip us off at the outset that everything is going to turn out fine, so there's no reason to get worried or upset.

All it needed was Bobby McFerrin singing, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." (And that would have been better music than what was on the track...)

Whip it good

I have tried to keep this blog intelligent and analytical--I don't even attempt to write reviews of the films I see, but make observations that I hope are a bit unique, since there are millions of other places on the Interwebs to read all sorts of bollocks about movies. But then there's Ellen Page.

How can I put this? William Goldman once wrote that Willie Mays came along to justify all the hours of terrible, boring baseball that had come before: "I was waiting for Willie because in my head there was a notion of the way things ought to happen but never quite do. Not until Willie came along and did his demonstration and I could finally sit there and say to myself, "Oh sure, that's it."

Whip It (2009) began as a novel (which is odd, given the number of sports movies cliche the novelist incorporated in the screenplay), so Ellen Page could not have been in mind. And sure, it's conceivable there would be other young women who could have been very charming and entertaining in the part.

Billy Joel could have made a record of "Glory Days" and it could have been a fun, peppy little thing. Maybe Stephanie Meyer could have written The Shining and maybe Normal Rockwell could have painted Munch's "The Scream." But none of them would be landmarks.

Unfortunately, in her first big vehicle since Juno, the producers have tried to fit Page's energy and wit into a pretty conventional structure. (Plucky girl from stodgy small town bucks Mom's expectations, pursues her passion, finds success and wins her parents over. *Yawn*) Luckily director Drew Barrymore has energy of her own to pump into the project, especially with the help of cast members Kristen Wiig, Jimmy Fallon, the awesome Zoe Bell (Deathproof), Juliette Lewis and Andrew Wilson. But there are those dreary and evidently obligatory parent scenes and even the talents of Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern can't get them to see like much more than a trip to the dentist to be endured until we get to the fun stuff.

Great flourish which should be mandatory in all movies which are not Art--final sequence just before the official credits with full-screen cards and credits for the principal actors--it's like a victory lap for fun movies.

The only thing that makes me sad is that I will probably die before Ellen Page (I am 32 years older than her), and I will never get to see all the brilliant performances she is going to give. Come to think of it, being dead will probably suck generally. Is there something else to watch now?