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Tuesday, August 19, 2014

"Boyhood" and Robin Williams Essays at RogerEbert.Com

Hello, dear readers, wherever you are. Just a little update. I've been fortunate enough in the past to have some pieces linked by RogerEbert.com, Slant, the House Next Door, and the Dissolve, and in the past month even more fortunate by having the fine folks at Ebert publish my work on their website, a thrilling honor. 

Richard Linklater's Divine Comedy: "Boyhood"

 The first is an essay about Richard Linklater's Boyhood, probably the best film of this summer, about which I draw some parallels with Dante's Comedy. It's admittedly a little book report-ish, or Lit major-y/Religion minor-y, but fans of The Tree of Life stuff from the past might find worthwhile stuff in it. Please click here to read and share with friends throughout your social media outlets.


The second was sparked by the tragic death of Robin Williams last week. I look at my favorite Williams movie, Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991), written by Richard LaGravenese, and its relationship to trauma, mental illness, and the healing power of storytelling. Click here to read and, again, share. 

Retrieving the Grail: Robin Williams and "The Fisher King"
I will continue to post material at L'etoile Magazine out of Minneapolis. I recently got a bad haircut, which should be keeping me indoors. 

In other news, my friend Tommy Mischke has a new podcast up and running, and I hope you give it a try. The Mischke Roadshow is now several episodes in and has Tommy back in action and form. 

Thanks for visiting,

Remembrances of Matinees Past

We’ve been reminded this week of how Tim Burton’s Batman, the Jack Nicholson/Michael Keaton box office smash that altered how a generation of moviegoers responded to hype and marketing, just turned 25. Discussing the Burton Batman has been quelled in recent years, thanks in part to Christopher Nolan’s trilogy with Christian Bale as the caped crusader, to say nothing of the campy and dreadful Joel Schumacher sequels (the first of which credited Burton as a producer) from the decade before that. Suddenly, this Batman is news again, and very much appreciated. In 1989 it inaugurated a renewed interest in comic books, the silly old Adam West TV series from the ’60s was suddenly back in syndication, and Hollywood studios had a fresh orchard of published ideas and characters from which to pluck and plant new franchises (the Superman series with Christopher Reeve had by this time died; and we don’t have time to discuss Howard the Duck).

Batman

Of course when we compare Batman‘s impact to how novelty characters have worked in the last 10 years, it’s a fairly limp resurgence. The first comic book movie, as I recall, to follow up was a straight-to-video Captain America. There was also a tedious television series of The Flash which could never get its pace in order and was soon canceled. Burton’s hotly anticipated all-star sequel, Batman Returns, had the indelible mark of its director, but the Wagnerian noir of the first film was replaced by fetishistic Gothic indulgences (personified by Burton’s grotesque–and doubtlessly personal–rendering of Danny DeVito’s Penguin) that could not excite the movie fanboys as much–in fact, it repelled some of them. Then you had The Shadow, The Phantom, Batman Forever, and finally Batman and Robin, which kind of crapped on everything, with a cherry on top. Batman did change hype and blockbusting (even in a summer when it was one of the few big releases that wasn’t a sequel–Ghostbusters II, Lethal Weapon 2, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were all released around this time), and Burton’s touch broke out of the MTV music video style that became trendy with Rocky III and Flashdance. But its impact is not as powerful as Jurassic Park would be four years later, Steven Spielberg once again (as he had with Jaws in 1975 and E.T. in 1982) setting summer movies on a whole new trajectory. Whereas Batman‘s environs are somewhat retro, an artful futurism groomed with the fabric of German Expressionism, with two loudly dressed men at its center, Jurassic Park heralds the future with new creations that quite literally gobble up the human caretakers, the filmmakers, to quote Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond, “sparing no expense” in the spectacle, or as 1993′s other Spielbergian hero, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), says, it’s less about the work than “the presentation.” The tumult within Gotham City is rather intimate when set against the non-stop propulsion of Speed, tornado touchdowns in TwisterIndependence Day‘s alien invasion, and Armageddon‘s catastrophic asteroid. The popular notion of the journeying hero–like Rocky, Luke Skywalker, Tom Cruise in Top Gun or Days of Thunder, Indiana Jones, or Batman–was, for a time (Harry Potter and Frodo arrived in 2001), replaced by extreme sound and fury (which is still here, yes, though at a kind of Ludicrous Speed kind of sound and fury).

Caught in a Loop: Tom Cruise

The lumbering thesis here could be, “Whatever, you guys, Tom Cruise is great and has always been great.” Every so often we hear about how lame Cruise is from our friends and in the press, followed by two weeks of forgiveness as whatever film being released turns out to be, at the very least, not bad, often with Cruise impressing with his indomitable movie star charm. And then, like in Groundhog Day–or Cruise’s latest, the comic sci-fi actioneer Edge of Tomorrow–the same sequence begins with everyone, save for the valiant if out-of-breath Cruise defenders, back to their original dismissals.

Edge of Tomorrow

Cruise was able to carry a large movie on his name for about 20 years, slipping between genres–action (Mission: Impossible), romance (Jerry Maguire), thriller (The Firm), and character-driven drama (Magnolia)–while, like a classic movie star, always maintaining his Cruise-ness, his Cruise-osity, his Cruisoise: the indelible grin and charm underwritten with a kind of basic Cruise character arc detailing a cocksure guy whose world is crumbling. This week the overheard banter at a neighborhood coffee shop, as relates to Edge of Tomorrow, featured some guy complaining about Cruise (in the manner of Clint Eastwood to the Chair), “You have no talent and you play the same boring guy over and over again.”