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Opening Shots: Quiz 2: 10 Easy Pieces (+2)

Jim Emerson

Set your timers — it’ll be a blast!

OK, I know the Opening Shots Pop Quiz is difficult — mainly because, even though many of the movies are famous (or by famous directors), they’re very personal favorites of mine that most people wouldn’t necessarily think of right off the bat.

So, I thought I’d do another one that didn’t require so much detective work. It’s also a kind of companion to my 101 102 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, in that these are 10 11 of the most celebrated films, and most famous opening shots, ever (plus one relatively obscure one by a favorite director of mine who also has a shot on the OS Pop Quiz — a little extra hint. Another clue about that one [BONUS #2] here).

So, not only should you have seen all these movies (and you probably have), I hope you won’t have too much difficulty remembering these classic opening shots, and why they’re great. Feel free to send in your answers via the e-mail link above — along with your comments. I’ll publish the first correct answer, and any of the interesting comments you have about the shots themselves. Just click the link below and start the clock ticking…

Frost/Nixon/Milk: Get Real

Jim Emerson

Michael Sheen and Frank Langella are swell as David Frost and Richard Nixon in the adapted-from-the-stage-adaptation movie, but I feel — and I believe the above clips demonstrate — that these five minutes provide more compelling drama and suspense (and adrenaline) than the entire feature film. Frost presents himself as a much stronger, more flamboyant “prosecutor” than he is in the movie. And watch the incredible range and focus of Nixon’s performance: the deliberate rhetorical emphases and repetitions; the flashes of steely anger and startling shifts into unctuousness/condescension when he seems like he could burst into inappropriate laugher or tears or flames; the (strategic?) digressions and circumlocutions; the hand-gestures, head-shakes, eye-blinks; the splintered syntax and mispronunciations-under-pressure when he gets flustered… At least you can tell (unlike certain modern politicians one could name) that he’s actually thinking as he talks, sifting through evidence and debate tactics and talking points in his head, not just going blank and letting his lips flap. THIS is an endlessly fascinating character in peak performance mode…

* * * *

“Frost/Nixon” and “Milk” are glossy products of the Hollywood awards season, prestige pictures in the grand red-carpet tradition of fashioning uplifting, larger-than-life entertainments out of semi-fictionalized semi-recent historical events. The thing is, both have been treated far more thrillingly on documentaries that are available on DVD. Think “Frost/Nioxon” provided compelling drama, suspense and astoundingly rich performances? It can’t approach the actual interviews , which have just been released as “Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews.” Think “Milk” was a moving look at a charismatic public figure and a key period in American civil rights? You have not begun to be moved until you see Rob Epstein’s Oscar-winning “The Times of Harvey Milk” (clips after the jump), which is also a more complex, less hagiographic portrait of the man and his heady times.

“I criticize you back — again!”

Jim Emerson

From an interview with “Transformers: ROTFL” director Michael Bay at Wall Street Journal Online:

Megan Fox, one of the leads in “Transformers” has criticized your films for being special-effects-driven and not offering so many acting opportunities. Do you agree?

Well, that’s Megan Fox for you. She says some very ridiculous things because she’s 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do. You roll your eyes when you see statements like that and think, “Okay Megan, you can do whatever you want. I got it.” But I 100% disagree with her. Nick Cage wasn’t a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in “Armageddon.” Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did “Transformers” — and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from “Bad Boys.” Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in “Transformers.” I like to think that I’ve had some luck in building actors’ careers with my films.

So there! But what did Fox actually say about being in “Transformers”? Here are some excerpts from her cover interview in Entertainment Weekly:

First-Shot Bordwell

Jim Emerson

View image Establishing shot: The first image of Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece, “Tokyo Story.” Ozu tends to begin with a series of static shots (say, three to five) that set the location and mood.

David Bordwell (recently returned from Easter Island!), has a swell historical overview of first shots (and the Opening Shots Project) here. David notes that many classic films begin with fairly routine establishing shots and wonders:

Was there a moment when directors started to feel that they had to weight the first shot heavily, to treat it as a dense moment that the viewer should savor? The first shot of a film could be as vivid and bristling with implication as the first sentence of a novel. When might directors have begun to think along these lines?He then surveys several of your (and my) Scanners favorites, and mentions a number of his own (from films by Harold Lloyd, Yasojiro Ozu, D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein and others):Fairly far back in film history, directors seem to have realized that first shots should be freighted with implication. There probably isn’t only one moment when this strategy arises, but I’d suggest looking first at the period when synchronized sound comes in. Most films at the time were pretty static and theatrical in their reliance on dialogue, so a flashy opening shot or sequence could reassert “This is cinema.��? The bravura tracking shot was a common way directors chose to draw the viewer into the film’s world, as at the start of “Threepenny Opera” or of “Scarface.” Maybe this is a key moment in which filmmakers began to realize that the opening shot of a film should grab or puzzle the viewer and let us reflect a little on the fact that it’s doing so.

The Sixth Man: A Corleone Family Mystery

Jim Emerson

View image A family meeting: Who is that sixth man (on the far right)? Hint: It’s not Kevin Spacey.

Longtime Scanners commenter and Ebert correspondent Ali Arikan, in Istanbul (one of my favorite cities), solves the mystery of The Sixth Man in “The Godfather” (or “One,” as they say in the Sopranos family) and “The Godfather, Part II” in Roger Ebert’s latest Answer Man column. The unidentified man in question is present during the meeting in which the Corleones plan the killing of a New York police captain. And his name is…

… Rocco Lampone… [whom you may remember from] the earlier scene in the film where Rocco executes Paulie in the car as Clemenza urinates outside (the “leave the gun, take the cannoli” scene).

… He eventually becomes one of Michael’s two caporegimes (Al Neri is the other one). Incidentally, it is Rocco who, in the second film, assassinates Hyman Roth at the airport, only to be shot in the back by a police officer as he tries to flee the scene.

Read the full item here and last week’s original question here.

TIFF: Death and the Madre

Jim Emerson

View image Three Women of “Volver”: Sister, niece/daughter, sister.

The dry east wind that howls through the little village in La Mancha where Pedro Almodovar was born, and where his latest film “Volver” begins, brings with it unease, fire and insanity. In the opening shot, it blows crisp dead leaves across marble graves, while women dust and polish the stones. Sometimes, they even come by to clean their own graves. It’s just another housekeeping chore.

Free at last, free at last? Thank Xenu Almighty!

Jim Emerson

Don’t forget to set your TiVo, Tom.

I just love a Xenu joke. But, seriously, this just in from reader Ali Nagib:

I just noticed on my TiVo that it claims that Comedy Central will air “Trapped in the Closet” on July 19, in their usual “new” episode timeslot, at 10 and 12 PM Eastern. Go, Freedom! (I think)Great news, Ali! I went to Comedy Central’s web site and it confirms your TiVo. The episode is scheduled for the 19th (immediately following “Casa Bonita,” another great one), with a repeat the next day. Will Viacom and Comedy Central have the intestinal fortitude to follow through this time? Or will they cave again at the last minute and whisk the Emmy-nominated episode back into the Comedy Closet, along with Tom Cruise, John Travolta and R. Kelly? We shall see, we shall see… Meanwhile, set your TiVos!

UPDATE (07/12/06):Check out this story at E!Online, “Airwaves Again Safe for ‘South Park’ Scientology Spoof”:

“If they hadn’t put this episode back on the air, we’d have had serious issues, and we wouldn’t be doing anything else with them,” cocreator Matt Stone tells Variety….

While Comedy Central failed to publicly disclose its reasons for yanking the program (which is also credited for leading Scientologist Isaac Hayes to jump ship as the longtime voice of Chef), creators Stone and Trey Parker didn’t shy away from broadcasting what they claimed was the network-sanctioned reason.

As the conspiracy theory goes, the Cruise’s camp had a hand in deep-sixing the episode, with the litigious actor reportedly threatening threatened to pull out of promotional duties for “Mission: Impossible III.” (Viacom is the parent company for both Comedy Central and Paramount, the studio that was releasing Cruise’s film.)

Cruise’s reps vehemently denied such allegations, but the “South Park” brain trust stuck by its guns.

“I only know what we were told, that people involved with ‘M:I:III’ wanted the episode off the air and that is why Comedy Central had to do it,” Stone says in Variety. “I don’t know why else it would have been pulled.”

Now, Cruise’s saturation-level publicity tour is over (and proved fairly ineffective, with the sequel grossing a disappointing $133 million domestically) and he is apparently in hiding with his new baby.

Have the evildoers been vanquished? Here’s hoping…

Letter: Intelligence and religion are not incompatible

Jim Emerson

From Sam Vicchrilli, Salt Lake City, UT:

As much as I typically despise letters to the editor, I would like to write a few words to you about your blog on “The Da Vinci Code.”

I have not read Brown’s book. I read the first several chapters and thought the writing was pedestrian and the mystery too obviously teased out. There is a stack of books I wish to read before returning to that bit of fiction. But I have heard about the book endlessly from my mother who adores it. We are Mormon.

While it has not deterred our religiosity (rather it drove us to the bible for clarification on doctrinal points), I can understand why Christians around the world are questioning themselves due to this piece of pulp fiction. I think part of it is that they are unaware of what the bible says and how it was put together, as you have suggested. Moreover, I think most people are not very bright to begin with.

Shmashmortion in the age of Bush

Jim Emerson

View image Is the “a-word” still mentionable?

In A.O. Scott’s review of “Knocked Up” in the New York Times, he expressed admiration for “a funny, knowing riff on the reluctance of movies and television shows even to use the word ‘abortion.'” I thought that was one of the most brilliant bits in the movie, and not just because it emphasized the entertainment industry’s squeamishness about the “a-word,” but because it also captured men’s unwillingness to interfere with (or face up to) “a woman’s right to choose,” and the way abortion has been swept under the carpet by the new right-wing Political Correctness. No longer is abortion considered a difficult and regrettable personal choice; the new PC has restored the shame and guilt from the old Scarlet Letter days of back alleys and coat hangers. That’s one of the things I think “Knocked Up” was satirizing: Don’t mention abortion! (The Bush administration cuts funding to any family planning counseling facility, in Africa and elsewhere, that acknowledges abortion as an option for women.)

In the Genuine Canadian Magazine (says so right on the cover) cinema scope, Associate Editor Jessica Winter offers this take:

As funny and endearing as Judd Apatow’s proudly vulgar new comedy can be, it may give the viewer nostalgia for the sequence in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982) when Jennifer Jason Leigh falls pregnant by a guy she shouldn’t be with, promptly gets an abortion, and rides back from the clinic with her brother, who takes her out for a cheeseburger. And that’s it: no apparent self-torment, no post-facto breakdown, no further discussion. Twenty-five years later—plus a nationwide swing to the right, the founding of Operation Rescue, and that deathless Ben Folds Five song—”Knocked Up” presents us with a similarly unpromising scenario: smart twentysomething who just got a big career break has inadvertently fruitful one-night stand with unemployed shlub. Yet in this case, abortion is only briefly suggested by third parties and dismissed out of hand. That’s not to say that the outcome is unrealistic: When Allison (Katherine Heigl) bursts into tears at the sight of the heartbeat on the sonogram, it’s obvious that ending the pregnancy simply isn’t an option for her—just as bearing a child simply isn’t an option for Leigh’s teenage character in “Fast Times.” Still, when the closest a movie like Knocked Up comes to even saying the word is “rhymes with shmashmortion,” it’s clear that we’re considering less a depiction of life as actual people live it but rather a pop-culture product that embodies the squeamish contradictions of the mainstream moment a little too accurately. This is a movie, after all, in which Allison always has sex with her bra on but we get an extreme close-up of the baby’s head inching through Mom’s conspicuously bald vagina. Who knew the miracle of childbirth could be liberated from the dark shame of pubic hair?Winter says that we can “blame the MPAA” for the missing pubic hair.

How will the movies handle — or avoid mentioning — abortion once the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, I wonder?

Shocking! Attend the hair of Sweeney Todd

Jim Emerson

View image Johnny Depp as Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

“[Director Tim Burton] saw the picture as an homage to old Universal horror flicks (‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Black Cat’), creepy silent-film melodramas (any number of Lon Chaney spine-tinglers), and Hammer horror films (pulpy fare from the ’50s and ’60s). Both Burton and Depp say there are major nods to Peter Lorre’s ‘Mad Love’ performance in Sweeney. Oh, and that shock of white in Depp’s hair? A sign of Todd’s trauma — and possibly a nod to Humphrey Bogart’s skunk stripe in his lone horror picture, ‘The Return of Dr. X.,’ a Burton favorite. (Plus Depp says he’s got a nephew with a white streak.)”

— Entertainment Weekly (November 9, 2007)

“Mr. Depp’s Sweeney isn’t a regular guy either. With a Susan Sontag patch of white streaking his pompadour, ghostly skin and distraught eyes, this Sweeney is both wretched and mad.”

— The New York Times (November 4, 2007)

View image Humphrey Bogart in “The Return of Dr. X” looks more like Edward Scissorhands to me. It’s the lips.

Bulletin: Johnny Depp plays the title role in a Tim Burton film version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” — and he’s not a regular guy! In fact, he’s “both wretched and mad,” which (from the way the Times reports it) must be an entirely new take on the character. The Demon Barber, that is. Bet Sondheim wishes he’d thought of that.

But what of that mysterious shock of white hair that leaves the Times and EW writers stretching for an antecedent? Bogart in “Dr. X”? Sure, OK. Susan Sontag? Somebody needs to get out of New York more often. Hey, why not JoBeth Williams in the latter part of “Poltergeist”?

View image The late Susan Sontag, The Demonized Intellectual of 9/11.

You know there’s a pretty obvious one that a fan of James Whale’s “Frankenstein” and its sequel could not help but recognize, if only because it’s the most famous streak of white hair in all of movie history…

(All will be revealed after the jump…)

This week: Four 4-star reviews!

Jim Emerson

View image Sexy time for celebrate nice reviews! Borat like to disco dance with men from village. Also Greenwich Village. And City of Brotherly Love.

This doesn’t happen very often. On RogerEbert.com today we have four 4-star reviews in a row.

Roger Ebert reviews the latest installment in Michael Apted’s lifelong documentary series, “49 Up.’

I have reviews of:

“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” a documentary about a foreign journalist… NOT! (You will only understand this joke if you see movie film.)

“Old Joy,” a meditative journey into the backwoods of an old friendship.

“51 Birch Street,” a son’s quietly astonishing look at his parents’ “ordinary” marriage.

That ought to keep you busy this weekend.

Brokeback Jack and the gay “Departed”?

Jim Emerson

Nicholson’s gangster… in a straight jacket?

When I was in college, it was popular for English professors to insist that this character or that character in literature — or even the authors themselves — were what we used to call “latent homosexuals.” So, for example, Hamlet (who definitely had some mommy problems and daddy issues and treated Ophelia like an old dishrag) was maybe gay. And homoerotic undertones were found in novels (and private letters) by nearly everybody, but especially repressed Victorian writers.

So, when I received a comment from a Scanners reader suggesting that Jack Nicholson’s character, Frank Costello, in the (Oscar-winning) Martin Scorsese (Best) Picture, “The Departed,” might be read as gay, I thought: “Yeah, OK, sure.” And then I thought about it a little more and started laughing: “Well, yeah, of course!” Not that it’s any great revelation — especially for a director who’s known for displaying rampant homoeroticism (in his “gangster pictures,” especially) — but there it is. (You think the Academy was subconsciously trying to make up for last year’s surprise upset of “Brokeback Mountain”?) I mean, look at the guy’s wardrobe.

And consider the final (R-rated) scene between Costello and his girlfriend, Gwen, which struck me as having some negative sexual tension:

COSTELLOSweetheart, you’re giving me a hard-

on.

He starts to dial the phone.

GWEN

Are you sure it’s me or all that

talk about whiffin’ and crawlin’ up

asses?

COSTELLO

Hey, watch your f—king mouth.

GWEN

You watch it.

She rises and as she crosses:

GWEN (CONT’D)

Let me straighten you out.

Here’s part of the comment from Tam (and DVC mentioned it, too):

When critics get slashed & butchered

Jim Emerson

View image On the state of film criticism, yesterday… and today.

An open letter to the Seattle Weekly from Michael Seiwerath of the Northwest Film Forum (posted at GreenCine Daily) should remind us, on the one hand, what’s lost when local film critics are replaced by syndicated content, and, on the other, why we are so fortunate not to have to rely exclusively on pulp-and-ink-based movie criticism.

The Seattle Weekly ran a review of the acclaimed documentary “Our Daily Bread” that was credited to J. Hoberman, longtime critic at the Village Voice, another “alternative weekly” in the Voice/New Times chain. But anybody who’s ever worked at a newspaper knows what happens to “wire copy” — it’s sliced and diced to fit whatever hole you have to fill. Hoberman’s original review combined his takes on Richard Linklater’s similarly themed “Fast Food Nation” with “Our Daily Bread,” but only part of the latter segment ran in Seattle. The result? Seiwerath describes it as a “botched cut-and-paste truncation”:

What ran in the February 21 edition of the Weekly is a recombinant jumble, devoid of time or place. Hacked from the end of the original review, the Weekly piece contains unexplained, unintelligible references to “[Fast Food] Nation.” The reader is left confused, with a mess of an article that is only made clear by some internet research into what happened four months ago and 3000 miles away. More than simply an editorial production error, this virtual review is the systemic result of a flawed new business model.

The planned efficiencies of media consolidation by the New Times are failing. Without a film editor and consistent criticism written by local writers, the reviews often contain factual errors and obvious references to openings in other cities. This is a system that is no longer serving either the reader or the advertising base. Borrowing from J Hoberman’s description of a fast food hamburger, the individual review has become “the ground residue of many, many messily butchered animals.”