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Marvel's The Avengers - a movie review
Sep. 13th, 2012 07:55 pmWaringing – SPOILERS all over the place. This is written from the assumption that everyone who reads it will have seen the film
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Disney and infantilism
Oct. 16th, 2011 10:34 pmThere can be no doubt that FANTASIA is one of the most beautiful movies ever done. At the same time, one visual image in the central "Sorcerer's Apprentice" episode struck me intensely. The movie was produced in 1940, when the world war - begun in 1935 in Africa, in 1937 in East Asia, in in 1939 in Europe - was lapping dangerously at the shores of the United States. Well, the repeated images of those murderous enchanted brooms marching in line, violently lit in a very strong contrast of light and shadow, brought forcibly to my mind the idea of armies on the march. I certainly don't say that Disney or his employees intended "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" for an allegory of contemporary politics; its point, if any, is far more general and quite timeless. But I don't think there is any doubt that the images they used carried those overtones. Such images at such a time could not but carry a very strong message of concern and danger - real, immediate danger, fear that was a daily affair. World War Two is history to us; it was a direct concern in their lives to them.
So how does Disney resolve this frightening image of the violence then seizing the world, of the wave of destruction which is lapping even at Mickey Mouse's calm suburban America? Why, Daddy comes home. The Sorcerer had simply been gone a while; he comes back, takes in, in an instant, what had happened, and puts an end to it with no more than three dramatic gesture. And to complete the parallel with the life and mind of a child, Mickey does Bambi eyes at him to try and charm his way out of a well-deserved punishment, and gets his bottom warmed for his pains. A splendid sequence; but a sequence that expresses, to my mind, nothing so much as a desire to regress from the difficulties and fears of the contemporary adult world into a safe, familiar world where Daddy takes care of everything - even if Daddy takes care of spanking your botty, too.
This is in effect infantilism, an attempt to transform the real world into a nursery. Several years earlier, Disney had been guilty, in another masterpiece (THE THREE LITTLE PIGS) of a distortion nearly as bad and even more heartless. This cartoon is indubitably about the great depression, and, unlike that FANTASIA scene, nobody can doubt that the point is conscious and deliberate. Not only is "to have the wolf at your door" an ancient expression for being dangerously in debt or poor, but the wise pig insists on the concept. If you build your house of bricks, you'll be safe and not be sorry when the wolf comes to your door. The problem with the other two pigs is that they could not be bothered to build their houses solidly enough first, before running off to have fun. Now this is not really a very good account of what went wrong with US and international economy in the late twenties, but it is particularly bad when you realize that it is aimed not at the societal leadership but at the common man. There is no evidence whatever that the average American of the twenties had been any less hard-working or any more of a wastrel than that of any other time; and to suggest that the catastrophe was caused by improvidence is not only wrong, it is positively insulting. It is a slap in the face of all those Americans who, throughout the twenties, had effectively worked, saved and invested - done the real-life equivalent of building their house of brick - only to see their life savings destroyed by the collapse of the whole banking system. The Great Depression actually punished saving and sensible investment, rewarding those who had either stuffed their dollars in their mattresses or spent them as they made them. To preach, in 1934 or so, the virtues of thrift and hard work, as a panacea to "keep the wolf away from your door," is utterly beside the point.
It may be that the Great Depression was Disney's original sin. He did very well out of it, and naturally did not want to look too hard into what had caused it. It was only because of the Depression that he was able to hire hundreds of the best artists in America when word went round that one man in Burbank was in fact hiring. People came from all the forty-eight states, and Disney could pick the best. And mind you, he was a good employer, paid well, rewarded effort and talent, and made people feel as though they were part of something important. Certainly nobody in Hollywood at the time could be remotely so certain that what they were doing would go down in history, as those who took part in, say, the creation of SNOW-WHITE. But, at the same time, he had taken advantage of something that had ruined his countrymen. I wonder whether he was running away from this.
So there you have it. A great artist, indubitably; but also a dangerous infantilist, whose view is time and time again over-simplified and damaging. How do we look at him?
So how does Disney resolve this frightening image of the violence then seizing the world, of the wave of destruction which is lapping even at Mickey Mouse's calm suburban America? Why, Daddy comes home. The Sorcerer had simply been gone a while; he comes back, takes in, in an instant, what had happened, and puts an end to it with no more than three dramatic gesture. And to complete the parallel with the life and mind of a child, Mickey does Bambi eyes at him to try and charm his way out of a well-deserved punishment, and gets his bottom warmed for his pains. A splendid sequence; but a sequence that expresses, to my mind, nothing so much as a desire to regress from the difficulties and fears of the contemporary adult world into a safe, familiar world where Daddy takes care of everything - even if Daddy takes care of spanking your botty, too.
This is in effect infantilism, an attempt to transform the real world into a nursery. Several years earlier, Disney had been guilty, in another masterpiece (THE THREE LITTLE PIGS) of a distortion nearly as bad and even more heartless. This cartoon is indubitably about the great depression, and, unlike that FANTASIA scene, nobody can doubt that the point is conscious and deliberate. Not only is "to have the wolf at your door" an ancient expression for being dangerously in debt or poor, but the wise pig insists on the concept. If you build your house of bricks, you'll be safe and not be sorry when the wolf comes to your door. The problem with the other two pigs is that they could not be bothered to build their houses solidly enough first, before running off to have fun. Now this is not really a very good account of what went wrong with US and international economy in the late twenties, but it is particularly bad when you realize that it is aimed not at the societal leadership but at the common man. There is no evidence whatever that the average American of the twenties had been any less hard-working or any more of a wastrel than that of any other time; and to suggest that the catastrophe was caused by improvidence is not only wrong, it is positively insulting. It is a slap in the face of all those Americans who, throughout the twenties, had effectively worked, saved and invested - done the real-life equivalent of building their house of brick - only to see their life savings destroyed by the collapse of the whole banking system. The Great Depression actually punished saving and sensible investment, rewarding those who had either stuffed their dollars in their mattresses or spent them as they made them. To preach, in 1934 or so, the virtues of thrift and hard work, as a panacea to "keep the wolf away from your door," is utterly beside the point.
It may be that the Great Depression was Disney's original sin. He did very well out of it, and naturally did not want to look too hard into what had caused it. It was only because of the Depression that he was able to hire hundreds of the best artists in America when word went round that one man in Burbank was in fact hiring. People came from all the forty-eight states, and Disney could pick the best. And mind you, he was a good employer, paid well, rewarded effort and talent, and made people feel as though they were part of something important. Certainly nobody in Hollywood at the time could be remotely so certain that what they were doing would go down in history, as those who took part in, say, the creation of SNOW-WHITE. But, at the same time, he had taken advantage of something that had ruined his countrymen. I wonder whether he was running away from this.
So there you have it. A great artist, indubitably; but also a dangerous infantilist, whose view is time and time again over-simplified and damaging. How do we look at him?
(no subject)
Jan. 3rd, 2011 12:50 amFor a considerable part of my life, I worked - unpaid - as a reviewer and critic, especially but not exclusively of comics. Amazon, too, bears the scars of my activities in the field. ( Read more... )
A film I love
Sep. 28th, 2009 09:00 amI think I have seen a good part of all the animation and live action superhero films and TV series ever made, from the beautiful old Superman cartoons of forties to some Smallville and all of Buffy. And with due respect to all the others, I do not think that anyone will ever do anything better than Tim Burton's first Batman movie. Already by the second they had lost the plot, but the first is the perfect superhero film. The reasons are manifold. First, the soundtrack is not only among the musically finest ever composed for any film, but one that evokes from beginning to end all the imaginative content of the superhero genre - the passion, the pursuit and fight, the drama and the darkness. Second, the costume designs - both the Joker's and Batman's. The designers understood that for live action, superhero costumes need to be redesigned from top to bottom, since what looks good in four-colour comics most often looks tacky and pointless in live-action (a bad flaw in all the Superman movies and TV serials, and even worse in the old Wonder Woman serial). They had, however, the sense of keeping the Joker pretty much as he is in the comics; in his case, tackiness actually adds to the sinister hilarity of the character. And there is the heart-stopping moment when Jack Nicholson's face paint slips off and we realize that he is no longer even the thug - a thug, but still human - that he had been so far. The build-up in the Nicholson Joker character is an amazing piece of work: already as Jack Palance's treacherous and half-mad enforcer he is sufficiently scary, but we are progressively shown worse and worse insanity, till he becomes a thing of genuine horror - a conception, to my mind, more subtle and effective than Heath Ledger's. And this leads us to the actors. Nicholson is magnificent in a surprisingly demanding role, developing further and further layers of insanity with a sense of timing and artistic insight that make this one of his best performances ever. Kim Basinger is simply radiant; in a sense, it is not very important whether she can act or not (although her acting is not at all bad, in my view) because her luminous beauty keeps our eyes on the screen in and of itself. Michael Keaton and Robert Wuhl are quite good as two different - and yet oddly similar - kinds of good guy character, and all the minor figures (with the exception of an oddly elderly and lumbering Commissioner Gordon) are beautifully cast and rendered. Anton Furst's urban gothic designs have been universally praised. But at the heart of it, in my view, lies the vision. It is what holds everything else together. Realistically speaking, the story makes no sense; but Tim Burton has allowed the archetypal power of the images to control the narrative, and the result is not only exciting but profoundly convincing. No wonder that the music plays such a large part. This is a story that appeals more to our unconscious, indeed to our collective imaginative heritage, than to our commonsense reason. If you insist on keeping things sensible, or if you have a defensive reaction against the experience of being swept away, you will never get this movie.
British and other TV networks have a pleasant habit of broadcasting old and famous movies on early Sunday afternoon slots. Today ITV scheduled the legendary Western Red River, which, as it happens, I had never seen.
I switched the TV on. I saw what was being shown. I was horrified. I tried to hold on for a few minutes, but I was forced - literally forced - to turn the horror off, with bitter curses at the filth who had allowed such debauched filth to be broadcast.
It was colorized.
I have no words to describe the visual ghastliness of this obscenity. The best way I can hint at it is to think of an old, cheap postcard, of the kind in which blotches of violent colours have been cheaply overlain on a black-and-white photograph; and then imagine it stretching on in time, minute after undendurable minute.
It is not just that it looked wrong: that the sky, the grass, the flesh of the protagonists, their jeans and shirts and Stetson hats, wore tinges that no sky or grass or human flesh (except, perhaps, one in the advanced stages of some foul disease) is capable of wearing. It is that it wholly destroyed the work. One does not have to be a competent artist to know that black-and-white cinematography is worked differently from colour; for one thing, it lays greater emphasis on contrast, which the colorization simply murdered. The work of the best that Hollywood had to offer at the time, an outstanding director (Howard Hawks) and his equally brilliant cinematographer, not to mention poor old John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, have been butchered, mangled beyond description and repair. And for what reason? Is there any movie or TV executive with brains so feeble - however feeble the average of brains in that world may be - as to seriously believe that a person who would not watch a black-and-white movie could be convinced to watch this pasty, cancerous horror instead?
I am still not settled down. I wish there were words in the English language, or in any, to say just how furious I am. I could vomit, I really could.
I switched the TV on. I saw what was being shown. I was horrified. I tried to hold on for a few minutes, but I was forced - literally forced - to turn the horror off, with bitter curses at the filth who had allowed such debauched filth to be broadcast.
It was colorized.
I have no words to describe the visual ghastliness of this obscenity. The best way I can hint at it is to think of an old, cheap postcard, of the kind in which blotches of violent colours have been cheaply overlain on a black-and-white photograph; and then imagine it stretching on in time, minute after undendurable minute.
It is not just that it looked wrong: that the sky, the grass, the flesh of the protagonists, their jeans and shirts and Stetson hats, wore tinges that no sky or grass or human flesh (except, perhaps, one in the advanced stages of some foul disease) is capable of wearing. It is that it wholly destroyed the work. One does not have to be a competent artist to know that black-and-white cinematography is worked differently from colour; for one thing, it lays greater emphasis on contrast, which the colorization simply murdered. The work of the best that Hollywood had to offer at the time, an outstanding director (Howard Hawks) and his equally brilliant cinematographer, not to mention poor old John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, have been butchered, mangled beyond description and repair. And for what reason? Is there any movie or TV executive with brains so feeble - however feeble the average of brains in that world may be - as to seriously believe that a person who would not watch a black-and-white movie could be convinced to watch this pasty, cancerous horror instead?
I am still not settled down. I wish there were words in the English language, or in any, to say just how furious I am. I could vomit, I really could.
