my a to zed of cinema: i-k

Inside Daisy Clover: (1965. dir: Robert Mulligan) Strictly speaking, you could describe this as a big-budget, star-studded musical and you wouldn't be lying. Shot largely on the Warner Brothers backlot during the waning days of the big studios, you don't have to scratch hard at the veneer to dig up a dark indictment of the studio system. It's about a gamine tomboy with a great set of pipes who gets Lana-Turner-at-the-soda-fountained into the movies, and every "Hollywood" character in the script is downright sinister -- if not at first, then as the plot unfolds: from studio boss Raymond Swan and his wife to Robert Redford as megacharmer movie-star Wade Louis and Roddy McDowell as a loathesome factotum. There's nothing convincingly 15-year-old about Natalie Wood, who was in her late twenties at the time, but her Daisy is likable, and the scene in which she's shanghaied by a nervous breakdown while in the overdubbing booth watching a huge, repeating image of herself doing a silent, grotesque musical number is eerily potent. Christopher Plummer is perfect as Swan, the black-garbed powerbroker and "prince of darkness", as he's known behind his back, who starts off creepy, fleshes out convincingly into three dimensions and, in the end, is even creepier. Each of the major characters gets at least one great scene in which to cut loose, including a doozy for Katharine Bard as Swan's damaged wife who glides through most of the movie in elegant gowns and frozen smiles and is almost terrifying when her emotions emerge.




Julia: (1977. dir: Fred Zinnemann) It's a movie shaped like memory, overlapping fragments unmoored from their proper temporal sequence, painted in rich, burnished, autumnal colors. There were two movies that formed my ideal of a writer's life: this one and Reds (which is in the running for my favorite movie ever). Those eastern beaches with their sloping sands and leaning fences, their eternal grey and windy skies, a secluded cottage, thick fishermans' sweaters, plenty of smokes and whiskey and an old Royal typewriter, the handsome and intrepid Jason Robards as lover and companion in the next room. That's a piece of paradise, my friend.

Part of the story's brilliance is that it's not based on memory at all, not the part about the character Julia, anyway: although Lillian Hellman published it as memoir, it was established later that she'd cut it from whole cloth, interweaving a fictional character and plot with true strands of her life with Dash Hammett and her early fame as a playwright. Doesn't matter: it reads well on the page and plays well here, although the less you know about Hellman, the easier it is to swallow. The idea of the kitteny-gorgeous Jane Fonda playing homely old Lillian draws the first smirk -- much of Hellman's toughness of character seems intimately tied up with her want of conventional pulchritude -- but the real howler is imagining Lillian Hellman torn up for more than a few hours' drunk over the disappearance of a child she'd never met. No... the REAL howler is the idea of anyone who knew Hellman trying to thrust an innocent child upon her to rear; if ever there was a couple unsuited to the nurturing of innocents, it was Hammett and Hellman.




Kicking and Screaming: (1995. dir: Noah Baumbach) I've written about it elsewhere so I'll keep it brief... Baumbach's debut (at age 25) is deadpan hilarious. What he hasn't yet learned -- in terms of character definition, for instance -- he makes up for in casting (Josh Hamilton from Outsourced, Chris Eigeman from the Whit Stillman trilogy, Carlos Jacott from Joss Whedon's stable of recurring actors, Olivia d'Abo in a performance so good I forgave her at last for Conan the Destroyer) and fantastic writing. It's an adept melange of merriment and exploration of youthful angst: the story of a tightly-knit group of boys graduating college but unready to enter the world. There are wonderful, poignant scenes amongst the funny: when Grover (Hamilton) finally listens to the message his ex-girlfriend (d'Abo), who left him to live in Prague, has left on his machine, or when he convinces a ticket agent to let him spontaneously onto an overseas flight in the name of destiny and true love. Even Elliott Gould, who usually makes me grumpy, enhances the work in a small role as Grover's dad.

Baumbach's later works (Squid and the Whale, Margo at the Wedding) are what you might call "better", and that's as it should be, but THIS is the movie that has his heart, and it's the one that's over-and-over watchable.