Movie Views from Seattle
[Written for Film.com]
The most authentic thing in The Perfect Storm is the fishing. The movie’s strong on process: the fixing of bait, the hauling up of lines, the stowing of gutted swordfish in ice. The detail in these sequences is briny and gunky, like the matted beards of the fishermen; it has a natural cinematic appeal, because movies excel at showing how things work.
Read More “2000 Eyes: The Perfect Storm”In the notes I jotted down while watching Paris Can Wait, I find these words scribbled: “Everything is off.” I don’t remember what specific scene or moment I was referring to, but I know what I meant. The timing is awkward, the camera doesn’t seem to know how to frame people for anything other than scenic effect, the actors sound uncertain. Odd shifts in tone are randomly distributed throughout the action. But wait, you might be asking, isn’t that “technical” stuff that only critics care about? To which I would say (if we can carry this imaginary conversation a little longer) that these shortcomings are not technical stuff, they are the movie itself, and they are the reason Paris Can Wait feels baggy and unoriginal. Everything is off, at the granular level.
Having said that, I get that Paris Can Wait might be liked by some viewers, in the same way you might like a bad painting of cheese because you just really love cheese.
Francis Ford Coppola described Rumble Fish (1983), his screen adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s young adult novel, as “an art film for teenagers.” He shot it right after making The Outsiders (1982), also adapted from a Hinton novel, but where that was a lush, operatic tale, Coppola made Rumble Fish in stylized black and white, like a teen noir seen through the eyes of a kid who has mythologized the idea of street gang chivalry to the point that he can’t see the reality through the idealization.
Matt Dillon is teenage tough guy Rusty James, a good looking, recklessly charming high school kid in the shadow of his brother The Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), trying to live up to a reputation that his brother wants only to live down. He’s an aspiring juvenile delinquent with a boozer dad (Dennis Hopper) and a nice girlfriend, Patty (Diane Lane), who attends Catholic School across town. Rusty James (always the two names, like a brand) is, of course, from the wrong side of the tracks in the industrial grit of a Tulsa that time left behind and this culture of bars and boozer and packs of kids who imagine themselves as real gangs is steeped in its own mythology, or rather Rusty is steeped in the mythology that no one else seems to revere.
How did I get here? By what pixilated logic do find myself in the position of defending Francis Coppola’s The Cotton Club?
Richard Gere and Diane Lane in the titular Cotton Club one very busy evening. All the shots Google-able just now are disappointingly fadey; Stephen Goldblatt’s cinematography was pretty gorgeous.
For years I’ve been pointing derisively at F.F. Crapola as a totem of pseudo-style who plunders the inspiration of better artists, and confuses art with state-of-the-art—seeking to make depth and resonance a function of how many layers he can mix on a soundtrack, how seamlessly he can bleed images together by adapting video technology to the cinema. I inveighed against reviewers who hailed the phantasmagorical bombast of Apocalypse Now as “visual power,” the chi-chi poster art of the Coppola-produced The Black Stallion as “visual poetry.” I complained that even in The Conversation (surely one of Coppola’s most respectable efforts), the central ambiguity was not only, in the last analysis, a cheat, but ambiguity by the numbers (“I could have shot this scene all these different ways” instead of “I shot it right the first time and locked everything in”). I likened the director to his sound-surveillance protagonist in that movie, who was capable of emotional involvement only with the phantoms evoked through his ultra-sophisticated sound system. And about the time One from the Heart emerged ice-cold from the dead air of Zoetrope Studios, most of the press had come to feel the same way.
It’s hard not to see the Zoetrope years as so much wandering in the wilderness of Coppola’s own studio “vineyard.” The best films to wear the Zoetrope logo have borne it as a letter of transit rather than a stamp of manufacture: Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut/La Vie, Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, Phillip Borsos’ The Grey Fox, the Kevin Brownlow reconstruction of Napoleon.
