Films – Salt Sweet Bitter

Friday Fave: Dirty Dancing

This week in oh hell I feel old now: Dirty Dancing celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in a scene from the film ‘Dirty Dancing’, 1987. (Photo by Vestron/Getty Images)

Are there any women who have seen this film and don’t like it? I don’t think I’ve met them. There used to be a time when I was certain that a few of my friends wouldn’t like it, so I never asked; I later found that they did like it, very much so. There are very few films of which this is true–maybe The Princess Bride and Labyrinth? (Which also both turn 30 this year, as does Some Kind of Wonderful. 1987 was a hella good year for films.)

I was nine when the film came out, but I don’t think I was allowed to see it until I was 11; I spent a few weeks in England with family that summer, and remember practicing dance steps on a short brick wall in my grandparents’ garden, in imitation of the scene where they dance on the tree that had fallen across the river. (It may have been that I just hadn’t had the chance to see it until then–I can’t remember when we got our first VHS player, and it was usually 18 months between a film appearing in the theatre and being shown on tv back then.)

I will never get bored of this film. It’s an awesome love story, but for a simple storyline there’s so much more going on. I love that as a coming-of-age story, Baby spends very little time agonizing over her choices; she has her moral convictions and they stand her in good stead. As a love story it is in some ways the quintessential fairy tale romance, but it abandons the usual narrative of one partner on an active campaign to win the other’s heart. Baby is smitten the moment she sees Johnny, but she does not set out on a campaign to win his heart, first being convinced that she doesn’t have a chance and second because, having found a cause that she can help, she’s too busy learning to dance. In between being refreshingly, honestly awkward. It is Johnny whom we get to see falling in love, a la Pride and Prejudice but with the social roles reversed, with a woman who irritates the hell out of him until he recognizes that she isn’t just another spoiled brat who thinks she can have whatever she sets her eyes on.

I think the quality of the acting in much of the film is stellar, and often overlooked because it isn’t a heavy drama. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze had worked together on a film before, and weren’t overly impressed with one another; halfway through filming Dirty Dancing, they were finding it so hard to work together that the director had to sit them down and show them their screen tests to make them see what they were capable of. The only hint of this evident in the finished film fits perfectly to the characters’ personalities and frustrations when Baby is trying to master the Mambo to exhibition level–there is no trace of it in the last third of the film. Their chemistry is electric all the way through. Jane Brucker also deserves notice for playing Baby’s jealous, shallow older sister Lisa to perfection.

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The politics in the film remain relevant, thirty years on. It focuses on class divisions that U.S. public discourse has often preferred to pretend don’t exist, and portrays female sexuality and the consequences of making abortion illegal without shaming Baby and Penny for their actions. I particularly like that a story dealing with themes that are as serious as it gets, particularly in today’s political climate, ends with sheer, uncomplicated joy. Baby’s father apologizes to Johnny and reaffirms his love for Baby, Baby’s mother demonstrates that she does indeed get both her talent and her good sense from her, and Baby and Johnny get to walk, if not ride, off into the sunset. I have often wondered if Johnny would have moved down to Massachusetts to stay close to her, and if Baby would have given up joining the Peace Corps for him. Or convinced him to go with her.

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The thought of doing remakes of films like this usually fills me with dread–surely there are new stories to be told without wasting the money on rehashing a story that has already been told to perfection. The sequel (prequel? companion piece? almost entirely unrelated film about dancing that they just tacked the name on to and gave Patrick Swayze a cameo in?) they did about ten years ago was entirely forgettable, which is quite an achievement for a film starring Diego Luna and Romola Garai. In this case, however, I would honestly like to see an updated version of the story, focusing on race and/or LGBTQ equality in addition to class issues, particularly given the current attempts to reverse Roe v Wade. It would be interesting to hear how many people would decry a classic film being “politicized”.

Friday Fave: Last of the Mohicans (1992)

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Whenever you see a film made from a book, the standard response is “the book was better.” This is usually true, to be fair; the problem is that it’s such an automatic response these days I often wonder if the person telling me that has actually read the book. (These are usually strangers who are unaware that reading novels is about as vital as eating to me.) However, it isn’t invariably true. There are some perfectly good films that have remarkably little to do with the book that supposedly inspired them (Easy A, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless) and some excellent films that alter the story they are based on in minor or sometimes drastic ways but turn out to be so good that I can’t bring myself to care (The English Patient, The Princess Bride). And then there are films that are so, so much better than the book, such as Body of Lies (2008), The Assassination Bureau (1969), and most of all Last of the Mohicans (1992).

I’ve never understood why James Fenimore Cooper is still taught in schools–a book having been a bestseller during a certain period is not the same thing as it actually being a great novel. (Imagine Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer being taught in high schools.) (Actually, don’t. If that ever comes to pass, please don’t tell me.) Cooper apparently felt no burning need to write or create stories, nor demonstrated any particular talent for it at an early age; he was reading a novel one day and decided it was no great challenge, so he sat down to write his own. His lack of any inherent genius for the form shows in the inconsistency of his characterizations and many other flaws. I tried to read The Last of the Mohicans when I was fourteen, found the female characters unbearable, and gave up. Later, the year I studied American Lit in high school, on the one day my English teacher devoted to Cooper and the other early American writers we would not cover (we read Hawthorne and several poets from the time instead), he explained that Cooper’s novels contained a number of lovely descriptions of the long-vanished New England wilderness, but not much else worthwhile, and referred us to Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” (Very much worth reading, if you haven’t already.)

I can’t think of any other instance where so poor a novel has been made into so compelling a film. I have a feeling that the film of The Last of the Mohicans is variously dismissed by critics and adored by some fans solely as a visually stunning romantic adventure (emphasis on the romance), due mostly if not entirely to the famous scene of Daniel Day-Lewis shouting at Madeline Stowe “No matter how long it takes, no matter how far–I will find you!” I’ve always found this to be decidedly unfair; there’s a lot more to the film than Hawkeye and Cora’s undying love, dramatic and gorgeous as it is. It is about the reasons that the American colonies rebelled against Britain, without being about the revolution itself; it also offers a wealth of detail about people lived in the 18th century, and particularly attitudes towards women during that time, again without being preachy or even intentionally feminist. I have no idea whether Cooper had any intention of earnestly mourning the loss of the indigenous American cultures that European settlers wiped out, but those who made the 1992 film evidently did. Alongside the love stories and the conflict between settlers and the military, the film dramatizes some of the more subtle methods used eradicating native cultures and populations. Most people know about the smallpox blankets, the Trail of Tears, and the massacre at Wounded Knee, but the damage done by alcoholism, the exploitation of native populations as servants and cat’s-paws, the co-opting and whitewashing of indigenous traditions aren’t common knowledge in the same way. The titular Last of the Mohicans at the end of the story is a man mourning his only son, and the end of his tribe with him, but the grief is simply personal; it is the loss of a culture. It feels wrong to me to say I like this, but in the same way I treasure Dark Hour of Noon and the film Wit, I find it valuable–it is beautifully done and important to revisit, even when it is hard to do so.

There are a thousand other things to like about the film. The sharp little glints of sarcasm in the dialogue, particularly those between Hawkeye and Cora; Jodhi May’s excellent turn as Alice, making what could have been an insipid and useless character compelling and heartbreaking; Eric Schweig, just because; the soundtrack; the locations where the filming took place. Seriously, you could watch solely for the views of the Blue Ridge mountains and you wouldn’t be wasting your time.

One of the more unusual, though certainly not unique, problems afflicting fans of the film is that when it was released on dvd, for some reason it was decided to release a different cut of the film. Then, when the blu-ray came out, a definitive director’s cut was released (because apparently Michael Mann hadn’t made up his mind when he did the first director’s cut…). There are at least three (possibly four) versions of the film; the second, the first dvd version, cuts some of the best lines. (They did the same thing with the new Ghostbusters. It’s quite maddening.) The differences between three of the versions are discussed in detail here, if anyone is interested; if you can get the original theatrical release, I recommend that one, at least to watch first. After that, the Definitive Director’s Cut restores some of the missing lines, if not all. The first Director’s Cut is still the film, still plenty to see and enjoy, but definitely the worst of the three.

Friday Fave: Vampire Films

the-hunger — The Hunger (1983), starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, and David Bowie

Vampires actually aren’t my favourite paranormal theme: I much prefer ghost stories. The trouble is that ghost stories made into films are usually rubbish, in my experience; there are a few notable exceptions, such as The Others, but on the whole they’re a disappointment unless done tongue-in-cheek. I’ve never found werewolves a particularly appealing theme either, again with the occasional exception such as An American Werewolf in London. Vampires are the reverse–often (although not invariably) dull in fiction, but frequently excellent as subjects for film stories. As supernatural/paranormal type films go. When I was a teenager, The Lost Boys (1987), (Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) were the best recent offerings of the genre; after that the focus seemed to shift to ghosts and all the horror films inspired by The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Saw (2004). There were the Underworld and Blade franchises, and the occasional silly or incredibly dark vampire film (Van Helsing, 2004; 30 Days of Night, 2007), but while Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel were going strong on television, there was a bit of a dip in production of films about vampires.

Then came Twilight. Love the series or hate it–I’m closer to the ‘hate it’ end of the spectrum, although I did read all of the books in a single binge during a fit of depression–Stephenie Meyer did bring vampires back to the forefront of pop culture. The first book in the series came out in 2005; in 2006 there was a sudden burst of vampire films, and the vogue has remained in effect since then, dominated, of course, by the film adaptations of the books. Lots of these films are dross, of course, but there have been a few gems in the flood.

Let the Right One In (2008) was in theatres at the same time as Twilight. Everyone I knew went to see Twilight; few people I spoke to had even heard of Let the Right One In, which I felt to be a crying shame, because it’s an excellent film regardless of genre, and so much more interesting than its more famous rival. Most vampire films incorporate some element of sexual attraction in their vampires, or else make them horrific, repellent creatures (Coppola’s Dracula manages to do both); Let the Right One In takes a different approach, telling the story of a lonely boy who befriends what he thinks at first another similarly lonely child; the sweetness of relationship between the two makes the child-vampire Eli’s predatory nature all the more eerie. The two kids in the lead roles, Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, are brilliant–Leandersson is currently studying theatre and seems intent on pursuing acting as a career, but Hedebrant seems to have abandoned acting for music, which is the film world’s loss but, I presume, music’s gain.

Byzantium (2012) flew even further under the radar than most of the artier vampire films. I remember reading a review of it and thinking I wanted to see it, but somehow I got it into my head that it was a tongue-in-cheek vampire story about a girl’s boarding school. (I have no clue where I got this idea. All I can think is that I was reading a preview or review of American Horror Story: Coven, which started at about the time Byzantium would have been released on dvd, and I conflated the two in my memory. It wouldn’t be the first time my mind has played such a trick on me.) I forgot about it until I noticed it playing on one of the film channels and recorded it; even then it took me a couple of weeks to get around to watching it. I particularly regret this–it’s one of those films that would look particularly good on a big screen.
Byzantium isn’t tongue-in-cheek in the slightest, but neither is it a blood-and-guts horror film. It’s a little like Twilight in being at its core a romance between a vampire and a human, but it’s also an engaging, if flawed, thriller. This time the tension isn’t between vampires and their human prey; it’s between the race of vampires, here a sort of eternal Victorian men’s club a la Boodles or The Athanaeum, and the only two female vampires in existence, who are being hunted down for violating the rule of the order (i.e. that only men should be vampires). It’s a feminist vampire story, something that, to my knowledge, is entirely new in the genre, unless you count Buffy. It isn’t perfect; Gemma Arterton’s and Sam Riley’s characters are well-acted but inconsistent in their aims, and their respective about-faces at the end of the story, though necessary for the conclusion, make little sense psychologically. Saoirse Ronan and Caleb Landry-Jones, on the other hand, are pretty much perfect. (Landry Jones, unprepossessing as Banshee in the X-Men franchise, is absolutely magnetic as the terminally ill Frank, and would be worth watching even if the rest of the film were terrible.) The film also features Thure Lindhardt and Jonny Lee Miller being evil and Tom Hollander and Maria Doyle Kennedy being cluelessly human. Its greatest weakness is its title–Byzantium is ostensibly the name of a bed-and-breakfast in a small coastal resort town in Britain, which presumably opened some time in the sixties or seventies. I can’t imagine an English family opening a B&B called Byzantium in any decade, even the swinging sixties. A bar, maybe, but not a B&B. Interesting and evocative as a title for a vampire film; completely at odds with the tone and locale of the story that the film unfolds.

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The best and most recent of my favourites of the genre is Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), which features Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as the eponymous lovers (Adam and Eve), Mia Wasikowska as Swinton’s wayward (well, possibly psychotic) younger sister, and John Hurt as Christopher Marlowe. (The Christopher Marlowe.) There is some existential angst and fear of a mysterious plague that is killing vampires, but mostly the story is a snapshot of what Adam and Eve experience during the course of one of their rare reunions, on this occasion interrupted by Eve’s younger sister Ava. There really isn’t much in the way of gore or terror in this one; it is instead littered with a wealth of cultural references and gorgeous cinematography. It is the most accessible of Jarmusch’s films, and the most elegant of Tom Hiddleston’s–well, except perhaps for his turn as Henry V in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown (swoon). I’d like to add a superlative for Tilda Swinton, but when is she not unheimlich and beautiful in a performance?

There are certainly other excellent vampire films, but if I covered them all we’d be here all day. (If you haven’t seen The Hunger, do, because–well, David Bowie is in it, do you need another reason?) Also, if you’re looking for a novel dealing with vampires that is not modeled on either Anne Rice or Stephenie Meyer, I strongly recommend Lauren Owen’s The Quick–a bit steampunk, a bit literary, all kinds of awesome. And of course there is the original, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Happy Halloween!

Friday Fave: Ben Whishaw

I have a hard time narrowing down lists of favourites. I love questions such as “what are your desert island discs” or “name your seven favourite books” but I find them challenging to answer, because in my mind I have to run through a list of a dozen or two and then weigh them against one another–which ones do I think are qualitatively the best, and which do I find most appealing for personal reasons, some emotional significance or love of a particular character? Chopin is in every way a superior musician to Jeff Buckley (well, we don’t know what kind of voice Chopin had), but I would be just as grieved by not being able to listen to the latter as I would if all of Chopin’s music were suddenly taken from us.

I have lots of favourite actors, to the point that the appellation ‘favourite’ usually feels pointless–there are those I feel capable of excellent performances, who likely number a couple hundred or so, I haven’t counted, and then there’s everyone else. Awards for best acting nearly always go to deserving recipients, in my opinion; it’s just that there are so many fine performances in each year’s crop of films and television shows that which ones get noticed seems to be more like a lottery and less like a process of elimination, usually based on who’s prettiest. 2009 was a good year for film, and the nominees for the 2010 Oscars and Baftas were all worthy. The problem to me was that Jane Campion’s Bright Star, and its stars Abbie Cornish, Paul Schneider, and most particularly Ben Whishaw, weren’t among them.

There are good actors, and then there are the likes of Paul Newman, Michael K. Williams, Tilda Swinton, for whom every performance is compelling, even in poorly directed films, and flawless when paired with a good director. Ben Whishaw is this caliber of good, which seems to be widely agreed among film and theatre critics whose opinions make it into print, and yet he’s received a paltry number of nominations, let alone awards, considering his body of work. The man is living, breathing art; there were performances as good as his turn as John Keats (and I don’t feel that any of the awards won by The Hurt Locker), but Bright Star was every bit as good as An Education.

He is not your average box-office draw–he lacks the matinee idol looks of George Clooney or Tom Hiddleston–but he’s beautiful to watch. There is a grace and vulnerability to him that informs every character I’ve seen him play. Even in roles such as Grenouille in Perfume and Shakespeare’s Richard II, rather than undercutting the darkness of such characters, his slight frame and gentleness serve to make those characters more insidious. When he’s playing a character such as John Keats, Ben Coulter in Criminal Justice, or Freddie Lyon in The Hour, it can be devastatingly charming–or just devastating. He’s one of those actors for whom I will automatically buy everything he’s in just because it’s him and I know he’ll be worth watching, but I haven’t been able to watch Lilting yet, because it came out at about the time my mother died and until recently I’ve been quite sure I wasn’t able to handle revisiting that magnitude of grief. I’m almost there.

His stage performances are apparently almost legendary. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before–probably about Hamilton–but why isn’t releasing performances of plays and musicals on dvd/blu-ray/streaming a thing like it is for opera and ballet? I’m entirely sure people would be as happy to buy a recording of a stage play as they would a film or tv show featuring a favourite actor, and there are so very many film stars to who do stage performances on the side. (There is a series of very good recordings of Shakespeare and Marlowe plays staged at the Globe Theatre, but this series is a rarity.) Whishaw’s performance of Hamlet opposite Imogen Stubbs is recorded on film, but it’s locked away in a vault in somewhere in London and only available to view if you sign up for an appointed time. Surprisingly enough there aren’t many people who can hop on a plane to come visit.

His voice by itself is almost as compelling as his performances. Here is a rendition of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, which plays during the closing credits of Bright Star. The background music is arranged by Mark Bradshaw, now Whishaw’s husband. It is the perfect end to a perfect film.

A Note on Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights

I discovered Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices trilogy last year and fell head over heels for the steampunk London she created and the characters inhabiting it, so much so that I barely cared about the anachronisms and inconsistencies in details of the story that are supposed to be realistic–something that usually strikes me like nails on the proverbial chalkboard.

One detail of the story really did bother me, though, and it isn’t something Clare alone is guilty of. When the heroine, Tessa, is falling for the boy of her decidedly literary dreams, she envisions him more than once as Heathcliff, from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

When and how did Heathcliff get turned into a figure of romance and desire?

Wuthering Heights is a phenomenal novel, one of my personal favourites and one of the greats of English literature. If you haven’t read it, do, it’s amazing. The thing is, it’s not a romantic, bittersweet love story. It’s a story about a boy who is tormented by his adopted family who grows up into a violent, bitter sociopath. Heathcliff is not a nice man, and he is not written that way. I am endlessly confused as to where this idea that he belongs among the ranks of Mr. Darcy and Pip from Great Expectations came from; why it persists is less of a mystery, but it’s still frustrating.

It must have happened before the 1970s, for Heath Ledger’s parents to name him and his sister after Heathcliff and Cathy. Was the soppy 1939 film version responsible? Are people reading the Cliffs Notes version and skipping the actual book? I would love to start a conversation about this, because it isn’t the sort of thing one can find an answer to in any volume of criticism on Emily Bronte, and unless I know where to read for the answers I want I’ll be trailing around in the dark for who knows how long. If you have any insights, please please please feel free to leave a comment.

(P.S. if you’re looking for a more faithful adaptation of the story, the 1992 version with Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche and the 2011 version by Andrea Arnold are both excellent, although Arnold’s only covers part of the story. I love Tom Hardy and all, but the 2009 version was a disappointment–particularly because he would have made a brilliant Heathcliff if the script had been better. )

Friday Fave: Kate McKinnon

I wasn’t originally planning on seeing the new Ghostbusters, but when a friend wanted to get together one afternoon this was the only thing that appealed to both of us–everything else was too political or too heavy, and the films I really wanted to see weren’t out at the time. I was definitely looking forward to seeing something that pissed off Milo Yiannopoulos so badly; that alone made it worth it to me. I had witnessed his campaign of racist and misogynist abuse of Leslie Jones on Twitter (if witnessed is the word? I was online at the time and following some of the threads, but I had decided several months before not to follow Yiannopoulos himself), as well as the general whining about remaking an action film with all female leads, which also made me want to see it. All that said, I have not found previous Melissa McCarthy films especially entertaining, and was not expecting this one to be either, even if it did have Kristin Wiig in it.

Rarely am I so happy to be wrong. Leslie Jones was awesome, as was–somewhat unexpectedly–Chris Hemsworth. I had already settled on him as definitely the most talented of the Hemsworth brothers by miles (possibly the only talented one, at that), going by what I had seen him in previously. The cameos by the original cast members were cleverly and seamlessly worked in. I was also pleased to find that they used the original Ray Parker Jr. recording of the theme tune throughout, in addition to the new and distinctly worse version.

My favourite part of the film, though, was Kate McKinnon. I haven’t liked a performance in a comedy film so much since Emma Stone in Easy A (which I only started watching because I didn’t know what it was–literary snob that I am, I had been studiously avoiding it). Aside from the occasional Stefan sketch or “commercial”, I hadn’t watched Saturday Night Live since Amy Poehler and Tina Fey left, so I only knew who she was by process of elimination. That scene where Holtzmann starts dancing to “The Rhythm of the Night”, though? I’ve never felt the slightest doubt about my identity as heterosexual woman, but that was hot. Throughout the film, she and Leslie Jones are the funniest things in it. I came home, pre-ordered the blu-ray, and started looking up old clips of SNL.

Turned out I had seen her in a couple of skits, but hadn’t noticed her because the skits as a whole are so funny. (If you didn’t see The Day Beyonce Turned Black when it came out, you can find it here, and it’s hilarious.) She has a well-earned reputation for impressions–her versions of Justin Bieber and CNN’s Kate Bolduan are brilliant. My favourite CNN skits are almost always the ones where the cast themselves can’t keep from cracking up, and she also seems to have a knack for giving her co-stars fits of the giggles, as she does in this skit about alien abductions. She also has a cat named Nino, and talks about him probably as much as I do about my animals, so I’m sold.

And she’s Holtzmann, who is all kinds of awesome. If you haven’t seen Ghostbusters, go check it out, it’s well worth it.