“The Artist” (2011): how to fall in love

The scene: an old 1920s theater with Art Deco designs and original (i.e., uncomfortable) chairs. Most of the audience is over age 65. They show us some previews and then the curtains on either side of the screen scoot in a bit, narrowing the view, because The Artist was filmed in the aspect ratio of 1.37:1, just like old movies were. That very shape of that screen — virtually unseen in my lifetime except to watch old movies on TVs that used to be shaped like this (still are, for us old-school types) — makes me feel warm and happy, as if someone has handed me a down duvet to curl up in.

I have trouble understanding the rumblings from anti-Artist critics. This is a post about why.

I giggled from the film’s very earliest silly moments. I found myself so attached to Uggie, the dog, that I considered getting a dog. And I cried: the big melodramatic moment came and I was truly moved, with big affectionate tears running down my face. What a relief: after watching the trailer approximately 30 times, I had fretted the full-length film couldn’t live up.

That’s the thing, you see: director Michel Hazanavicius has created a primer for audiences unfamiliar with classic film, and what he teaches is how to fall in love with cinéma. For the rest of us who already love those early films, it’s a love letter. A very different love letter than the one Martin Scorcese created with Hugo, and one that’s more affecting.

For me, the key to the film is that it understands the central, simple brilliance of early film: The Artist asks only that you to fall in love with the two main characters, and especially to enjoy their falling in love. Peppy Miller (Bejo) lands a role in the new big film starring George Valentin (Dujardin), and she winds up as an extra in a silly scene in which he must dance with her briefly as he makes his way across the room. But as we see in a series of takes, he keeps flirting with her, joking, each time requiring a new take — and each time it’s a little harder for him to get back into character to start the scene again for a clean take.

In short: director Michel Hazanavicius isn’t pedantically telling us about the history of cinema. (I found Hugo delightful but a bit pedantic.) Rather, he’s given us a way to connect emotionally with cinema that most of us aren’t familiar with, and which gives unexpectedly pure delight. Some filmgoing pleasures are old ones, with a few sight gags tossed in.

Hazanavicius’s interviews have been great to read in part because it’s clear he feels his love for old film so passionately. Asked by a reporter for Chicago’s The Score Card about the differences between this and his earlier OSS 117 film, he explains:

The most important change was the absence of irony. There’s no irony in this movie. Quick into writing this movie, I watched a hundred silent movies. The ones who aged the best were melodramas and romances. And even the issue with Charlie Chaplin is that people think he is a comic, but his films are melodramas. Pure melodramas, nineteenth century dramas.

There’s no winking at you. The film isn’t saying, I know that you know that I know this is all stupid, even if it’s sweet. This is a 21st-century version of a classic silent film.

The closest it comes to a wink is when the film plays with sound. There are a couple of early scenes, designed to get us to laugh, that introduce us to the experience of watching a film with no sound. The subject of sound becomes a prominent theme — whether films will use it, whether audiences prefer it, whether Valentin might be right about resisting the big transition to talking film. Sometimes it’s used initially to prompt laughter, like at the beginning of a dream sequence.

But that sequence quickly turns to eerie nightmare, showing us what Valentin really fears: irrelevance. And somehow that scene is resonant beyond the gag at the center of it — making us viewers feel the threat of sound, and the safety of silence, at least in Valentin’s eyes.

The best melodramas always have dark elements, characteristics that ring true. One of these is Valentin’s hubris. I don’t want to oversell the film’s story — it’s determined to remain light melodrama — but nevertheless I found it surprisingly touching to see how Valentin wrestles with his pride and growing public insignificance.

What made that story so appealing, I think, was the paired tale of Peppy Miller’s rise to stardom and how she experiences her own expanding success as being related to Valentin’s fall — that is, the fall of a man she loves without disguise. Her need for him is something that you almost feel corporeally from those scenes of her very long arms. Again, I don’t want to oversell this story; maybe my appreciation for it is predicated on hearing so many critics accuse Hazanavicius of creating a mere pastiche. Suffice it to say that I believe some critics have underestimated the story’s resonance.

Of course I can see that director Hazanavicius creates a number of scenes by quoting from all manner of earlier movies — Astaire and Rogers, James Whale’s Frankenstein, The Thin Man, even Citizen Kane. Yet again to fly to his defense, I see those quotes as being done out of an abiding love of film and a consciousness of the way film is always quoting from itself. (Remember The Ides of March and Moneyball? Constant references to other films!) If you watch movies purely out of a desire to see something new, you’re depriving yourself of some of the joys of cinema.

So, what’s the difference between “quoting from” other films and “creating a pastiche”? Again, I’d say it has to do with whether the film ultimately seems self-conscious, ironic, winking at us. Maybe some viewers see The Artist as an amalgam of other things, but that wasn’t my experience, and nor was it Hazanavicius’s intention, according to his interviews.

Most of all, I believe Hazanavicius chose silent film, specifically, for a good reason: to teach us something we’ve collectively forgotten. He wants to show what film could do when we had to use our eyes so searchingly. Within a few days of seeing the film — and reading a few more reviewers who called this a gimmick or a form of pandering — I became more convinced that the director may not be a pedagogue, but he certainly wants us to learn something in the course of watching this film.

To wit: in my theater, you could hear the viewers gradually starting to laugh more, to intuit the internal logic of a silent film. Even though most of them were 65+years old, it’s hard to imagine any of them had ever seen a silent film on the screen while they were growing up. They started vocalizing non-words more — with silent film, you don’t need an audience to be silent — so you could hear people uttering things like, “ahh,” “oh!” and “wow” (especially when Jean Dujardin tap-danced). That low-level, unobjectionable audience murmuring enhanced the experience of watching, contributed to the communal pleasure. But it’s something we had to learn in the course of watching it.

I have the teensiest of complaints about ‘s The Artist – that some scenes felt like a mishmash of 1920s, 30s, and 40s influences, and that however charming she is, Bérénice Bejo seemed too tall and twiggy for the era — but my full range of emotions during the course of the film shows the limitations of my small criticisms. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I just burbled with the unmitigated pleasure of watching film, like when I saw the pitch-perfect grizzled face of Malcolm McDowell in a bit part (below). Oh, hang on, I experienced the same when I re-watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the frothy Top Hat (1935) on New Year’s Eve.

And oh, Jean Dujardin! He can look beefy during his Douglas Fairbanks scenes, “who, me?” disarming during his William Powell scenes, and fantastically light on his feet during his Gene Kelly scenes; egotistic early on, depressive later. And when he gets himself into a love scene with Bejo … well, he has a gravity, and a genuine sense of surprise and feeling, that makes us feel as if we’re falling in love, too. (In a way, we are.)

It’s strange that I loved the film this much and yet it took so long to express it here — I saw it nearly a month ago. It seems so horribly stereotypical that I, as an academic, would formulate a pile of tedious words to analyze something that’s like a visual soufflé. But there you have it — academics are bound to try to deflate the beautifully, improbably fluffy in order to understand how it works.

Should it win Best Picture and Best Actor at the Oscars? I think its only serious competition is Hugo and, as I’ve indicated, there’s no question for me that The Artist is better. I’ll also have to see Demián Bichir in A Better Life before I weigh in on Question #2. It’s my opinion that the Oscars put up a weak list this year (where is Poetry? where is Higher Ground? why are Moneyball and The Help up there?), and that given those lists, I’m rooting for The Artist. What can I say? Michel Hazanavicius shows us how to fall in love with cinema, and in love with a love story — and I went there with him. I hope you do, too.

A film critic’s guidebook: how to trash “New Year’s Eve” (2011)

From the Guardian‘s podcast, Film Weekly, in a conversation between Jason Solomons and Xan Brooks (I believe their dryness and Englishness come through in the transcription):

JS:    New Year’s Eve was brought to you by the people who gave us Valentine’s Day only last year…

XB:   Yes it was, wasn’t it…

JS:    So successful was that that they thought they’d do it again with another kind of yearly, uh, event. Does it work?

XB:   Well it’s got the ticking time code, hasn’t it, which makes it look like an old-school disaster movie.

JS:    What, the race against the clock?

XB:   The race against the clock, the all-star cast. But what they’re racing up to is the dropping of the ball. The ball drop of New Year’s Eve. They probably should have called this Ball Drop, shouldn’t they? That would’ve been fun. And you’ve got all the intersecting lives, and there are connections that maybe we don’t know about but it’ll turn out that these characters know each other more than we think they do…

JS:    Should we explain for our non-US resident listeners that the ball drop is what happens in Times Square every midnight. I think a big glittery ball seems to drop down on the countdown to midnight. It’s a big deal, apparently.

XB:   It is, and they always have the prior year underneath the ball to get squashed. New York tradition.

JS:    That’d be great, wouldn’t it?

XB:   It would. I’d like to put some of the cast under that as well.

JS:    The whole cast, really, and the director.

XB:   Yeah. It’s sort of Magnolia on Prozac for morons, isn’t it?

JS:    Is it the worst film ever made?

XB:   It’s one of them. I almost think it’s not a film. It’s a hydra-headed beast of corporate evil.

JS:    Isn’t it? Because the product placement is everywhere.

XB:   Everywhere! And it’s a lifestyle commercial in the guise of a festive film full of product placements, full of absolutely empty, vapid characters…

JS:    …and Jon Bon Jovi!

XB:   …and Jon Bon Jovi. Who’s obviously there for the youth kind of audience, isn’t he.

Let’s all race out to see it, shall we?

“Broken English” (2007): suck this, suckers

Neurotic woman (Parker Posey), late 30s, is desperate for love. She’s so pretty and has such a great wardrobe but she’s just so pathetic. That’s just the way women are in their late 30s, right? desperate and overly high-strung, till they find a guy?

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before. Also: stop reading if you’re already gagging a bit in your mouth. On Feminéma’s patented Vomit-O-Meter®, this ranks at Red Zone/Full Ralph. Oh yeah, then she meets the Magical Frenchman of the titular Broken English. (Magical Frenchman is not to be confused with the Magical Negro trope; pathetic female protagonists get Magical Men to have sex with and cure all their issues, while troubled male protagonists do not sleep with the Magical Negros who help them discover the true meaning of life. For clarification, thanks to TVtropes.com). Et voilà! Let’s hold hands in the Métro!

You know what I need, folks? Some kind of mental eraser so I will forget that Parker Posey was so much of a sucker as to say yes to a script this lame. Also: some kind of feminist brickbat to use on director Zoe Cassavetes for using such an array of talent (Gena Rowlands! Peter Bogdanovich! Drea de Matteo!) in such an insulting tale.

(Also need: an image of Vomit-O-Meter®. Tried with a Sharpie and a scanner but I now cannot make my computer recognize the scanner. Do any of you have skillz? For a reward, just say Vomit-O-Meter several times in a row and feel the joy!)

Because that’s what this is: an offensive film for female suckers. Isn’t it bad enough that director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Red Riding Hood, etc.) has sold her soul to make that drivel? I’m sorry, but with a film pedigree that might even outdo Sofia Coppola’s, surely Cassavetes can do better. If not then please, Zoe, just turn producer for Dee Rees or Maryam Keshavarz. In the meantime, I’ve got to get this nasty taste out of my mouth.

Summer movie amuse-bouche: “Midnight in Paris” (2011)

Midnight in Paris (2011): Woody Allen’s surprisingly delightful film is the perfect way to enter into Summer Movie Mind: that mental state in which one doesn’t ask much from the movies except to cool down in that delicious air-conditioned dark and laugh at jokes that feel neither too challenging nor too cheap. To look at pretty people onscreen and receive a narrative resolution that works well enough. In short, this film is an amuse-bouche for summer movie watching.

There’s a line somewhere in the middle of Midnight in Paris in which our hero, Gil (Owen Wilson: why didn’t I ever notice what a good, better-looking Woody Allen he is?) tries to explain his love of cities. They’re better than stories, better than films, he explains — because they’re alive. In every neighborhood, around every corner you find something new, alive. He’s so exactly right on this score, and so reminiscent of Allen at his much-missed best, that the film does double duty: it also makes you want to schedule in a week in a great international city.

In this case he’s trying to explain his love of Paris — and if there’s anyone capable of convincing you to love a city, it’s Woody Allen. Those of us who forget everything that was annoying about Manhattan (by which I mean Woody Allen dating the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway) do so because of the way it’s a love story to the city of New York. This one is even more delightful — because Allen and his Gil stand-in are both outsiders to the city of Paris, thereby drawing all of us in as compatriots. Whereas his New York movies always give me the teeniest barb, as if they’re trying to tell me I can never truly understand the city like a native, this one is just like the most perfect European vacation you can imagine.

The film is really a tale of how Gil finds himself — and the minute he meets Marion Cotillard as Adriana, we know that things have got to get better. She’s a beautiful woman who’s just as prone to romanticizing the past as Gil is — now Cotillard is one of those female actors who make me fall in love with them the minute they appear. But  the whole cast of bit characters are pitch-perfect delight, not least of whom is Adrien Brody in a short part.

I don’t know about you, but I have a feast of summer movies ahead of me: there’s the new X-Men: First Class, and then Harry Potter and Mike Mills’ Beginners (when, oh when, will this arrive at my local theater??), Larry Crowne (JustMeMike and I are planning another long conversation about it!), and Captain America, which I’m only going to see because my Dear Friend has been pumping up enthusiasm so effectively. And there are the weightier films — I’m so excited about Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life that I can barely speak; and then there’s the possibility I’ll get access to some of those other films we heard about via the Cannes Film Festival, such as The Artist and We Need to Talk About Kevin. In short, our movie waistlines will engorge with empty calories. Why not start with the perfect amuse-bouche: Woody Allen at his best in years.

Constance Bennett, who made it work

The thing about Hollywood stars is the real-life unhappiness that contrasts with the on-screen glamor.  You read a few biographies and you see the pattern of multiple marriages, suicides, institutionalization, loss of riches, miserable children.  Constance Bennett seems to have been a striking exception.  Somewhat forgotten now, she was a terrific comic actress best known for Topper (1937) but she appeared in many more delightful 1930s romantic comedies.  Sure, she married five times — but I want to celebrate her for being a smart businesswoman, canny poker player, and — apparently — a happy woman, a woman who was interested in what she did.Bennett earned a lot of money, but unlike the rest she knew how to manage it.  “She’s the shrewdest woman in the picture industry,” her investment adviser had said of her, according to her 1965 New York Times obituary.  “She knows the earning power and dividend record behind every bond and every share of stock she owns.”  Between her high salary (by the late 20s she was making $30,000 a week, possibly more than any other star) and her business sense, she cultivated a persona of the amused outsider — a persona you can see in so many of her films and photographs, in which she seems to cast a knowing, rolling-her-eyes look at us.  Are we in on the joke?  Probably not, as she was a far better poker player than we are, and who knows what she was really doing with that look?  By the end of her life, married to an Air Force colonel and installed in Colorado Springs, she “joined in card table sessions that lasted through the night and past sunrise.”  The notion of this late-fifties star at a card table at an Air Force base, wearing her trademark gold barrette in her hair and waving the matching cigarette holder, delights me to no end.

Bennett (right) with Loretta Young

“If there’s a secret to it, it’s working like a beaver to be happy,” Bennett said before her death, during a time when she’d begun to reappear in a few films, drawing notices for her hard work and surprisingly youthful appearance.  “What I mean is I’ve always been interested in everything I did, or else I wouldn’t do it.  When you’re that interested in anything you’re happy.”

Words to the wise, Connie.  Time to balance the checkbook — and then remind myself that I share her voracious interest in what I do.

The delights of “The Good Fairy” (1935)

I complained a couple of months ago about the un-Lubitsch-like “Heaven Can Wait” (1943), and fretted secretly that I might have already seen all the magical light comedies of the 30s and 40s. But I’ve rediscovered my old-movie faith after watching “The Good Fairy,” written by the pitch-perfect Preston Sturges (adapted from a Hungarian play by Ferenc Molnár) and starring the effervescent Margaret Sullavan — she of “The Shop Around the Corner” fame.  Whereas in “Shop” she could be ever-so-slightly grating, an actorly move that made the conclusion even more satisfying, in this earlier film Sullavan is nothing but lovely.  She plays a quintessential naïf:  Luisa Ginglebusher, a girl who leaves the orphanage where she’s spent her whole life to work as an usherette in a grand Budapest movie theater.  As she leaves, the orphanage’s matron reminds her to continue to do a good deed every single day, an imperative that combines inextricably in Luisa’s mind with the tales she’s been telling the orphanage’s younger girls about the good fairy who does good deeds and helps the weak.  Luisa wants to be the good fairy.  Despite all that innocence, Sullavan manages to exude a kind of gravitas that makes this film very Lubitsch-like (it was actually directed by William Wyler) — that is, it always manifests a sweet melancholy just a little bit below the surface of the movie’s antics.

Sullavan has a great face, but not one you immediately categorize as beautiful.  As David Thomson puts it, nailing it as usual, ”One realized that she was beautiful when her face lit up in response to the events of the film.  Above all, she seemed vulnerable, haboring her strength and the chance of happiness.”  That’s certainly the case here, made even more clear by the director’s use of glowing closeups to accentuate her face — we watch her weep a little as she watches a sad scene in a movie, or as she beams in response to good news.  Luisa is so innocent that every single emotion washes over her face for us to comprehend.  We may not exactly understand one so naïve, but we love her.

apologies for the watermark; it was the best copy I could find.

“The Good Fairy” is a post-Hays Code kind of sex comedy — that is, it pivots on the question of sex and female chastity without ever seeming risqué.  The plot really starts to cook in the theater, where her innocence proves to be catnip for men.  Approached by a dark-looking Cesar Romero who offers her beer and sandwiches, clearly as a first gambit to get into her knickers, she flails desperately to get away from him and succeeds only by announcing that she’s married — then races into the arms of a grouchy theater patron named Detlaff (Reginald Owen, with the bowler above).  Detlaff takes a paternal liking to Luisa and invites her out for a fancy evening at the elegant hotel where he works as a waiter; little does he realize that her catnip qualities will only attract more dangerous attention there.  The most persistent is the simultaneously dapper and bumbling Konrad (Frank Morgan, who later did the same routine as the Wizard of Oz), the millionaire president of a South American meat-packing concern, who sweeps her into a private dining room and promises her furs, baubles, and lovely dresses.  The vigilant Detlaff recognizes the risk of such a sugar daddy, and warns her to put Konrad off; yet again, she gets out of a jam by pronouncing that she’s married.  Unperturbed, Konrad declares that he’ll win her heart by making her husband rich enough to buy her lovely things — that way, when she wears them she’ll know they’re really from him.  Luisa decides that this is her opportunity to do someone a good deed, so she opens the phone book, randomly chooses a name, and tells Konrad that this is her husband.

She chose well:  Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall) is indeed poor and deserving, a lawyer who adheres strictly to a code of ethics and assists the poor, though he’s perhaps a little too serious.  Konrad bestows him with a crazily lucrative contract, a wad of spending money, and instructions to replace all his shabby office furniture.  In fact, he’s in the middle of admiring his new purchases — most of all the mechanical pencil sharpener, in a mini-moment custom-made for movie-watching delight — when the curious Luisa walks in to meet the object of her good-fairy magic.  Sure, Max is a bit forbidding with his sanctimony and a beard that ages him badly, but she decides he could use more of her help — to start with, in finding a new suit and a shave.  So in good 1930s movie fashion, they go shopping together with his newly fat wallet, during which she convinces him to take off his dreary beard (“Never let it be said that a Sporum ever refused the request of a Ginglebusher,” he says as he complies), transforming him into a much more dashing young man.  To thank her, he buys her a “genuine foxine” wrap, an item she loves better than any sable coat from Konrad — and she poses with her new “fur” in front of one of those infinite mirrors, secretly doing a little dance.  But because Konrad is bound to believe the foxine is far too cheap for the lovely Luisa, her budding romance with Max is heading quickly for the rapids — and for a happy conclusion.

Considering how quickly these studios were pushing out the films during the 30s, we should feel especially blessed when we find one that doesn’t feel utterly dated.  But “The Good Fairy” is so much better than that.  Between Sturges’ crisp dialogue, Sullavan’s utter watchability, and director Wyler’s choice of great shots (Wyler later married Sullavan, making me wonder whether he was just a little bit in love already with her glowing, unusual face), the film sparkles.  Isn’t it the season to rediscover our faith in sparkling old movies?

Movies as therapy: “Holiday” (1938)

I can’t describe this evening as gracefully as my Dear Friend does here, but let’s just say that sometimes a night of comfort food (baked ziti), a bottle of red, lots of conversation, and a great old movie comprise the panacea for those mid-semester doldrums.  But this is no ordinary doldrum.  She and I spend a lot of our time fretting about integrating work and our intellectual lives in ways that feel true and honest.  Sometimes it seems my Dear Friend is the only person who hasn’t become one of the Pod People – one of those unblinking Panglosses who claims that our university is the best of all possible worlds.  How perfect, then, that our mostly accidental choice of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in “Holiday” would discover likeminded souls. 

Johnny Case (Grant) has fallen in love overnight with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) while on a ski vacation, and has returned to New York to meet her family and whisk her off to be married.  He’s surprised to learn, then, that she hails from that Seton family — owners of a mansion and a social reputation and a whole lotta stultification.  This is bad news for Johnny, because he’s ready to take a holiday from work — and the only person in the Seton family who really gets it is Julia’s older sister Linda (Hepburn), who loves her sister so much that she’s willing to grill Johnny to make sure he’s a good man:

Linda:  “How does your garden grow, Case?  Is life wonderful where you are?” 

Johnny:  “It can be.”

Linda:  “But it hasn’t been?”

Johnny:  “Well, I don’t call what I’ve been doing living.”

Linda:  “And what do you recommend for yourself, doctor?”

Johnny:  “A holiday!”

Linda:  “For how long?”

Johnny:  “As long as I need.”

Linda:  “You mean just to play?”

Johnny:  “No.  No, I’ve been working since I was 10.  I want to find out why I’m working.  The answer can’t just be to pay bills, to pile up more money. …”

Linda:  “Yes, but what is the answer?”

Johnny:  “Well I don’t know.  That’s what I intend to find out.  The world’s changing out there.  …I want to find out where I stand, how I fit into the picture, what it’s all going to mean to me.  I can’t find that out sitting behind some desk in an office, so as soon as I’ve got some money together I’m going to knock off for a while.”

Linda:  “Quit?”

Johnny:  “Quit!  I want to save part of my life for myself.  There’s a catch to it, though: it’s got to be part of the young part — you know, retire young, work old.  Come back to work when I know what I’m working for.  Does that make sense to you?

Linda:  “That makes a lot of sense.”

It does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it?  Such that it doesn’t really matter that the movie feels a bit stage-y at times (it was based on a stage play).  The action — i.e., the talking — takes place mostly in a few rooms.  But it’s not all talking.  Grant shows off the physical aplomb that initially brought him to the U.S. as a tumbler with a troupe of acrobats:  he flips furniture, does a tumbling run with a backflip, and charms us just as utterly as he does Katharine Hepburn’s Linda — and in bad suits, too.  His charm is all the more impressive when we meet the full Seton family, most grimly realized in Linda and Julia’s louche, drunken brother Ned (Lew Ayres), who drinks to blot out the tedium.  No wonder Linda is so disgusted when her sister proves herself to be too much a Seton to deserve Johnny:  Julia refuses to marry him unless he abandons his cockeyed ideas about a holiday from work, for she wants him to be a “success” just like her long line of business tycoons.

And did I mention the hats?  Okay, this movie doesn’t crackle as pristinely as “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) would a couple of years later, but that film has the same cooks in the kitchen:  director George Cukor with screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, based on plays by Philip Barry — but who cares if a movie proves to balm your nerves the way “Holiday” does on a Friday night?  And with that, my grading woes were forgotten.

“Easy A” (2010) and high school perversity

Here’s what I like about this movie:  it’s funny; Emma Stone makes an adorable, smart, eminently watchable star; and it sneaks in a literary tie-in to Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (what can I say? I’m a geek).  About a year from now when it appears in heavy rotation on Sunday afternoon cable TV, I’ll watch it and laugh all over again.  But don’t get me wrong:  this is not a great high school sex comedy in the vein of “Clueless” or “Say Anything” — it just doesn’t quite hold together, especially after about the midway point.  Watching it made me realize two things about this genre:  that these films rely on perversity to explain the absurdity of high school, but that viewers’ credulity can only be stretched so far.  

Oh, it starts so well.  Olive (Stone) is smart, overachieving, and pretty, but invisible in her Ojai, CA high school.  Smart in a good way, that is:  when her English class is assigned The Scarlet Letter, she rants to us that all her peers have rented the Demi Moore adaptation — which, she explains, isn’t just unfaithful to the book but a bad movie, especially compared with the original film, a 1926 silent with Lillian Gish.  (You see how much this was working for me?)  But this isn’t a geekfest, it’s a sex comedy:  she then proceeds to tell us, both to her webcam and in a series of flashbacks, how everything changed.

One day in the girls’ bathroom, Olive finds herself making up an elaborate tale about having sex with a college guy rather than admit she just didn’t want to go camping with her best friend, Rhiannon, and her nudist parents.  It convinces Rhi, but is overheard by the school’s sanctimonious queen of the super-Christians (Amanda Bynes) — and soon the word is out, as the camera pans to find everyone on campus whispering and texting furiously.  First misstep:  who ever heard of a high school where no one is having sex, much less in Ojai, CA?

But for the moment I suspended disbelief because this is where high school sex comedies invariably take us:  they explain for us the perverse and surreal internal logic of its cliques, unspoken rules, hopeless crushes, humiliations.  Whether it’s John Cusack trying to kill himself over and over in “Better Off Dead” (1985) or Winona Ryder hooking up with a Jack Nicholson-esque Christian Slater to kill their high school’s douchebags in “Heathers” (1989), these stories work because high school is so bizarre on its own.  It makes sense in “Easy A” that Olive not only shoulders her new reputation, but uses it to poke her fellow students in the eye when her friend Brandon, who’s tired of being harassed for being gay, begs her to pretend to be his girlfriend.  (Again, in Ojai?  Why not set the story in Idaho if you need an anti-sex, homophobic locale?)  She agrees, but ratchets it up a notch:  they show up to a big party, lock themselves in a bedroom, and pretend to have the noisiest, most raucous sex they can muster.  She’s saved Brandon’s reputation by turning herself into a full-fledged school slut — so, being a wry, irreverent, smartypants type, she buys a bunch of naughty bustiers, pins on a big red A, and wears them to school.

Okay, so the literary tie-in doesn’t work, because it’s not possible to translate The Scarlet Letter into a high school sex comedy, especially when our heroine hasn’t had sex at all.  This is no “Clueless” (1995), for which director Amy Heckerling translated Jane Austen’s Emma; nor is it ”10 Things I Hate About You” (1999), a movie that improved on Shakespeare’s misogynistic Taming of the Shrew, if you ask me.  But the movie goes beyond high-school perversity when all manner of overweight, acne-scarred, hopeless boys at school ask Olive to work her fake-slut magic on their reputations — and she agrees, but only if they’ll give her gift cards.  That is, in exchange for a $50 gift card from Beds-n-Things, she’ll say she made out with you; for a $100 card for Macaroni Garden, she’ll say you had sex.  Why gift cards?  Because it somehow keeps it outside of the formal definition of “sex work”?  The movie doesn’t know what to do with this, and neither do we — it’s a bad, weird mistake.  If the movie is so eager to tell us that Olive is a virgin, why does it turn her into a prostitute by having her demand gift cards from eager johns?

Most of all I wished I knew more about Olive’s motives.  We’re vaguely aware that she sort of likes Todd (Penn Badgley), the improbably hunky guy who humiliates himself publicly and frequently as the school’s woodchuck mascot.  Despite being characterized as sort of a lovable dweeb, Todd shows off his ridiculously beefy torso and huge biceps way too frequently (he hardly ever seems to have his shirt on) to pass as a high school student.  (I walked out of the theater spluttering that he looks like he’s 32 years old, but in fact the actor is not quite 24.  Still.  Remember “Grease,” in which all the actors look like the parents of high-school age kids?)  But Olive’s interest in Todd doesn’t really emerge clearly till the end.  Nor is it clear why all the adult characters (and what actors! Patricia Clarkson, Lisa Kudrow, Stanley Tucci…) in the film are living such happy sex lives, but their kids are so puritanical.  All of this strains credulity.

So yeah, it has its problems, but it makes you look back fondly on a lot of those earlier films.  If I were the “Filmspotting” guys, I’d host a marathon of great high school sex comedies to think more broadly and theoretically about what works — and with that in mind, let me tell you some of my favorites that lie just a little bit outside the genre but ultimately make it better:

• Flirting (Australia, 1991, with Noah Taylor and Thandie Newton as the luminous leads)
• Gregory’s Girl (Scotland, 1981, with John Gordon Sinclair as our bony, awkward hero)
• Dazed and Confused (Austin, TX, 1993:  ensemble cast of a generation)
• American Graffiti (Calif., 1973, a beautiful film)
• Rushmore (Houston, 1998, in which Max Fischer stole my heart)
• Saved! (middle America, 2004, in which the Christians learn to ease up on the dogma)

But maybe for the short term I’ll watch “Say Anything” again and relive my high school fantasies about John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler.  And then give myself a dose of “Clueless.”  As if!

“Rough Magic” and missed chances

I was compelled to see “Rough Magic” (1995) again last night — and not because I remembered it being terribly good.  There’s something haunting about it despite the fact that it’s just not a very good movie.  I think it’s so promising — and therefore disappointing — because the combination of magical realism and film noir is so full of possibility.  It’s truly too bad the film doesn’t manage to make it work.

It helps that Bridget Fonda channels such a terrific Lauren Bacall vibe playing Myra, a magician’s assistant, and that most of the film’s action takes place in a sunny postwar Mexico rather than the familiar darkened streets, alleys, and dives of Southern California.  Myra’s on the lam because back in LA, she saw her slick wannabe-politician fiancé murder her magician boss; and as she drives her gorgeous convertible into rural Mexico, her increasingly sinister fiancé arranges for a freelance private eye, Ross (Russell Crowe, using a ham-fisted New York accent in one of his earliest American roles) to find her and bring her back.  Instead, Ross falls for her and the two get caught up in the possibility that Myra might really possess magical abilities, skills that can be enhanced if she can find an ancient shaman woman. 

The movie has a terrific opening, which puts you exactly in the mood for what it’s about to sell you.  Dressed in a memorable stage outfit, Myra chases a white rabbit into an elevator filled with three businessmen.  Instead of picking up the rabbit right away, she extracts three little bunnies from the men’s suit coat pockets, pops them into her top hat, tips the hat onto her head (and Bridget Fonda looks fantastic in a top hat), and leaves while the men’s mouths are still open.  It’s a great movie opening: I was sold.

The two actors offered a lot of promise, too.  Fonda seemed to be a perpetual B actor, mostly memorable for being out-acted by Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Single White Female” (1992).  Still, she always had a kind of hopeful, nervous appeal — maybe even like Jean Arthur, one of my favorites — that made me watch for her.  And when I first saw this film, I’d only seen Crowe in the great Australian film “Proof” (1991); by 1995 he’d bulked up to a pugilist’s body, which seemed odd at the time and yet appears somehow endearing, even ideal for his version of a WWII vet-cum-private dick with more than just a layer of post-traumatic stress.  Neither seems wholly comfortable in his own skin, as if the director compiled the entire film with first takes.  This isn’t to say they do a bad job; the actors’ jitteriness, their slight discomfort with their tough-guy, wise-cracking lines … all this still made me hope the film would turn out to be one of those modest but magically sweet films.

But by the time Myra and Ross set off together on the run, the film takes a dive.  Although it was written and directed by the same woman, Clare Peploe, who apparently had experience in both fields, the film’s unevenness made me wonder if it had been made by two or three people who spent the production period at one another’s throats — perhaps a noir writer and a magical realism writer who ceased to get along at some point, or maybe there was a diva-like editor who chopped out all the parts of the story that might have given it smooth transitions and sustained the mood.  Even more disappointing is the fact that it comes up with a comical Latino (Paul Rodriguez) for no good reason at all (what happened to political correctness in the mid-90s?).  The film eventually loses track of its own tale and drops a few of the balls it has in the air, making it very rough magic indeed.  More than anything, by the end it’s merely become a farce, not entirely intentionally.

Despite the missed chances of “Rough Magic,” I hope someone else tries this formula.  The magical realism makes for such a great twist on the cynical, fast-talking noir trope.  I love the idea that, rather than simply find again that a grisly crime was motivated by sex and greed, our hard-bitten protagonist might find love and/or transformation at work in the universe.

It’s just too bad.  We could use some magic at this point.  At my university we’re staggering and yet are still a few weeks away from the end of the semester, and I seem to be surrounded by cynicism and exhaustion.  At least I know better why this film has haunted me — and why we could use a film that dilutes gritty noir with hope.

Querulous sex and screwball comedy

It’s simply wrong to remember the screwball and romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s as wholly innocent or de-sexed.  Sure, the Hollywood Production Code eliminated a lot of the open sexuality of the earlier era, forbidding all on-screen representations of sexual contact.  Yet those rules led screenwriters to create a host of scenarios that nominally adhered to the rules yet found ways to make them erotically charged and even risky. 

I can’t think of a better example than Jean Arthur in my favorite film of hers, “The More the Merrier” (1943).  To use an apt phrase of David Thomson’s, Arthur had a “rare querulous quality” onscreen that, he suggests, resulted from her ambivalence about acting and Hollywood more generally.  After serving as a forgettable ingénue in several dozen silents and early talkies, she remade herself in the mid-30s by bleaching her brunette hair and utilizing that distinctively froggy voice to great effect in films such as “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take It With You,” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”  By that time, her unique combination of innocent idealism and worldly wisecracking seemed perfectly pitched for the era’s films.   

“The More the Merrier” has a slow start, but viewers shouldn’t give up: the film really starts to jell after a somewhat belabored first twenty minutes of antics.  Premised on the wartime housing shortage in Washington, D.C., young working girl Arthur rents her spare room to the elderly Charles Coburn, who presumptuously determines to improve her love life by finding her a “high-type, clean-cut, nice young fella.”  Coburn promptly rents half of his room to the wry, laconic, tall and handsome GI Joel McCrea, who beautifully underplays his part.  The film starts to cook as soon as McCrea appears onscreen, and is propelled by the tensions over sexual propriety between the two roommates—highlighting Arthur’s delicate querulousness.  It consistently returns us to its favorite image: a scene shot through the windows of the apartment’s two adjoining bedrooms, with each room’s bed sharing the same wall, showing us how close Arthur is to McCrea as they lie in bed—even as the wall assures us they’ll behave themselves.  

The best scene comes when Arthur and McCrea are wandering slowly back to the apartment one night after a night of cocktails and dancing, passing through what appears to be a sea of couples necking on stoops and sidled up against trees.  Nervous, she natters on with questions about his previous girlfriends and transparently false assertions of confidence in her engagement to the awful Mr. Pendergast.  McCrea responds only in the most cursory way, fixing his attention on getting some small touch of her skin—what amounts to small physical battle between them.  It’s a scene equivalent to those choreographed Fred and Ginger dances enacting the pleasurable friction of resistance.  McCrea doggedly tries to put his arm around her, touch her arms, run his hand along her neck; Arthur dodges.  His arm snakes underneath her cloak; Arthur evades, yet positions herself for more.  When they finally clunk down on the steps to her apartment building, McCrea’s offensive begins in earnest.  Now offering mere grunts for responses, he insistently caresses her arms, her shoulders, her back.  

In a perfect movie moment, Arthur succumbs.  Her chatter is interrupted by the pleasure she takes in his increasingly successful kisses—and when he hits the sweetest spot on her neck, she simply has to pause mid-sentence:  her eyes close, her neck extends, and her chin lifts as she concentrates fully on the kiss’s delight.  At the end of the kiss, her eyes widen, her absurdly long false eyelashes bat a few times with brilliant comic disconcertion, and she stutters as she completes her meaningless sentence.  The die is cast: she reaches for his face and indulges in a long, passionate kiss on the lips.  Arthur’s great knack here is to remind us that we’re watching a comedy, yet still leave no question about the passion between them.  As they slowly walk upstairs to the apartment—that dangerously private, intimate space, where only a wall separates their beds—the tension continues to rise, and the film must create a crisis to relieve it. 

Post-Code films attain their delicious tension all the more because they could show such delimited physical contact.  Considered in that context, the motif of the wall between the two beds becomes all the more sexy, enhancing desire while demanding physical separation.  McCrea and Arthur whisper pillow talk to one another through the wall and display to us in highly intimate closeups that all the boundaries between them have crumbled; only the wall sustains their chastity.  Even at the height of the Code’s influence, writers and actors undermined it with images of erotic intimacies all the more effective for the walls that fell, Jericho-style, only after these movies ended and the theater lights came back on.