Mank, Women and Context

After viewing the new David Fincher film Mank last weekend, I texted this to my buddy:

“The thing that bothered me was the drastic age differential between the men and the women.  I didn’t believe for one second that Mank was in his forties or even in his thirties in the flashbacks.  And his wife looked like she was about 22 years old, so when she talked about them having been married for 20 years, I almost chuckled.”

I may have almost chuckled, but it’s no laughing matter, as highlighted in the Andrea Towers article for The Wrap.  To take nothing away from the fine acting performances of Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins or Amanda Seyfried, there is a legitimate complaint against Hollywood casting younger women in roles that would be more appropriately acted by older women.  Gary Oldman is thirty years older than Middleton, despite their characters having been the same age in real life.  Why not have Sara Mankowitz played by a 40-something actress?  It harkens back to 1950s Hollywood, when Audrey Hepburn was cast as a love interest alongside actors like Cary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart (ew!), what I imagine was the result of older male casting directors projecting their own desires.  Hollywood may have taken a few steps toward a more egalitarian industry, but it still has a long way to go.

Mank also inspired a discussion with my adult children, and we took opposite sides of the argument.  I argued that while I enjoyed Mank, it was the very helpful to have the context of having seen Citizen Kane and knowing some of the background of the players involved.  My son argued that if you need context to enjoy and understand a movie, then it’s not a good movie; that it fails in its essential role of being a stand-alone piece of art.  Yes, context may enhance a film’s enjoyment and understanding, but it shouldn’t be required.

But I wonder about this.  After all, could one really understand a Civil War drama like Glory without having some knowledge of American history and the role that slavery has played in shaping it?  Or more recently, I wonder how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood played to young people who knew nothing of the Manson murders.  They must have been moderately baffled when the film focused so long on Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, only to have it lead absolutely nowhere.  For me, knowing the real life tragedy had my stomach knotting up at the film’s climax.  For others, it must have seemed like a trifle, a comic thriller.  This perhaps strengthens my son’s argument, because context may have helped the film, but it wasn’t required.  But I have to believe that Tarantino made the film fully expecting his audience to be informed about the Manson murders.

Even non-historical movies benefit from some measure of context, and it’s why cross-dressing comedies like Tootsie or Some Like it Hot might not play as well today as they did at the time.  Or why today John Wayne’s character in The Searchers seems outrageously cruel, though at the time his treatment of an American Indian woman was treated as comedy.  Or circling back to women and how they’ve been portrayed in Hollywood, many comedies of yesterday fall flat today unless you have some acceptance of the more subservient role women played in decades past.

As for Mank, it gets off on its name-dropping moments, and I think without some knowledge of the past the film must be a rather laborious affair. Some of the name-drops are offered more as a wink to a knowing audience than as necessary ingredients to the film’s storytelling, but they tend to unnecessarily muddy the waters. This is in contract to, say, the way music references enhance character in High Fidelity rather than bogging the film down.  Mank falls short for this reason.  It’s a good film.  It is not a great film.

Logging Films and Music

Early on in the film High Fidelity, the character Rob says, “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”  I laughed out loud when I first heard this quote because for many of us there’s a grain of truth to it.  How many times has your opinion of someone shifted based on their collection of books, music or sports memorabilia?  Does someone’s comprehensive Bob Dylan collection impress you or turn you off?  Does a person’s room decked out in green and gold as a sort of shrine to the Green Bay Packers repulse you or enthrall you?  Have you ever started to fall in love with someone, only to learn that her favorite books are romance novels?  Or that his are comic books?  Or vice versa?  Sure, judging someone on what they like is shallow, but really, if you were to quickly sum up who I am to a stranger, you could do worse than providing him with a list of my top twenty books, movies and albums.

With this in mind, I was excited to learn about a couple of apps that help nutjobs like me log the art they consume.   I was even more excited after I learned that I’d be more-or-less housebound for three months during the pandemic.  Finding fun ways to kill time has been paramount.

Enter Letterboxd and Discogs.

At their most basic level, these apps allow you to log the films you’ve seen (Letterboxd) and what music you own (Discogs), and that’s essentially the level I’ve chosen to engage in.  If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but for me just logging things was a lot of fun, as it helped me to remember that small 1988 movie starring Joe Mantegna and Don Ameche (Things Change) or that I shouldn’t buy a copy of Pretzel Logic, but rather it’s successor, Katy Lied.  Any app that helps jog my aging memory is a tool worth considering.

First, Letterboxd.  This couldn’t be easier to use, though I’ve found the desktop version superior to the phone app.  You can look up films by director, actor, year, decade, genre, title – you name it – and a click or two will allow you to choose “watched” “like” and “watchlist,” the latter a list of movies that you want to view.  You can also create lists of films, as my kids and I did when we chose the best twenty movies of the 2010s (note: the only film to make all four of our lists was Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World).  Rather than go through the trouble of reviewing or ranking the films I’ve seen, I chose to use the “like” button more as a “love” button.  I only included movies that truly resonated with me a significant way.  Case in point, this month I watched two movies that were both were very good, but only one really got to me.  Molly’s Game didn’t get checked as a “like,” but Doubt did.   As of today I’ve logged 1388 films watched, and I’ve “liked” 260 of them, some probably unwarrantedly so, others probably overlooked.  Love of art can be a finicky thing.

For Discogs, I avoided logging my records for a long time because I felt overwhelmed with the process. For example, when searching for Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, 308 different versions of the album appear, based on format, country, pressing, release date, etc.  It’s enough to make even a devoted logger give up.  I didn’t particularly care about what pressing I owned for each album – only that I owned some version of the album – and I didn’t want to work hard at this endeavor, pandemic or not.  To make things far easier and far more enjoyable, the only three categories I worried about were format (obviously), country and the unlikelihood that I owned an original pressing for most of my records.  When narrowing down the aforementioned Supertramp album using the above filters, I was left with a more manageable 33 versions to choose from, and I simply picked one at random.  Of course, if you’re a very serious collector who’s buying and selling, you may need to go the extra mile, and for that you have my sympathy.

I currently own 823 albums and I’ve compiled a list of another 122 that I’m actively looking for.  Discogs includes a rough estimate of your collection’s worth, averaging the last ten sales of each album you own.  What I’ve learned is this: record collecting is an enjoyable and relatively inexpensive hobby, and that all of my records wouldn’t pay for even two months of my son’s college education.  Oh well.

Of course, all of these records need to be stored somewhere, and this leads me nicely into next week’s blog post, about building functional and attractive record racks for your collection.  Stay tuned, and in the meantime, have some fun with Letterboxd and Discogs.

Screens, Streams and Creativity

In my last post I posed the question, “Is creativity in jeopardy of diminishing or dying altogether?”  It was inspired by Amy Nicholson’s comments on the Raiders of the Lost Ark episode of Unspooled, a podcast devoted to discussing the AFI’s top 100 American films of all-time.  She remarked, “I feel like something in us is just stuck because we’re not using our imaginations anymore, we’re just hitting rewind.”

While few would claim that there aren’t still amazingly creative things happening in the arts, if recent successful films are any indication Amy’s observation isn’t entirely unwarranted.  One need look no further than Disney’s recent output to conclude that original content isn’t always a major priority of film studios.  According to film critic William Bibbiani of @WilliamBibbiani, “35 of the top 50 films domestically (in 2019) were sequels, remakes, reboots, spinoffs or other films based on pre-existing blockbuster multimedia franchises.” 

That’s a staggering statistic.  Gone are the days when the most celebrated films were also the most-watched (think Forrest Gump, Silence of the Lambs, Rain Man, etc.).  Broadway has also fallen into the reboot trap.  I wrote about this seven years ago, and its sorry state certainly hasn’t improved in the ensuing years (think Mean Girls, Frozen, Moulin Rouge, Shrek, Tootsie, Dirty Dancing, and on and on…)

So why the devotion to reboots?  For film, the obvious game-changer has been streaming, which has dropped the average theatrical run to only four weeks.  Given this, it’s no wonder that studios are devoting fewer funds to riskier ventures.  But just when you think that all is lost, you hear the flip side of the same coin.  Yes, streaming may have shortened theatrical runs which has directly led to studios relying on well-established franchises, but it’s also opened up a world that heretofore was difficult to enter. 

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio recently appeared on Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF, and they both discussed how as producers they are being given the green light to make films that wouldn’t have gotten financed years ago.  Streaming services are now making smaller films viable options (to hear this particular segment of the interview, go to the one-hour mark, though the whole interview is worth a listen). DiCaprio goes on to say that in the past these films would have to win an Academy Award to get any viewership at all, but now “millions and millions of people watch these documentaries as opposed to having to go through a theatrical system.”

Isn’t this exciting? 

And from my limited experience DiCaprio is correct.  I’ve watched more documentaries in the last ten years than in the previous forty years combined, and more and more of my friends are recommending documentaries, small films, and of course dozens and dozens of TV shows (some of them even worth watching).  Add to this the accessibility of short films that would never have been viewable prior to the Age of Streaming, and we’ve got so much wonderful output right at our fingertips, no one will ever be able to check the box that says, “All caught up.”

So it’s not all doom and gloom.  Creativity is alive and well, but like much of art these days, it may be fragmented.  You may not be hearing about a film or a book or a TV show by viewing the best-seller or highest-grossing lists, but with a little word-of-mouth and targeted searches you can find the original content that appears to be lacking in mainstream theaters.  I would argue that even theatrical runs have shown signs of life recently.  I’ve watched eight out of the nine Best Picture nominees and there’s not a dud among them.  2019 may be one of the best years of film in recently memory.  And it’s very likely that films like Roma and The Irishman, both of which appeared in theaters just long enough to qualify for the Oscars, have done far better with the new business model than they would have with the old one.

Yes, things are changing.  I imagine Walt Disney himself would be disappointed in his company if he were alive today.  But others are taking that creative torch and carrying it boldly in this century. Some things may be lost along the way, but creativity and human originality won’t be among them.

The "Best" Movies of the Decade

There were over 6000 movies released in U.S. theaters in the last decade – a staggering number – and anyone claiming to list the “best” of the decade first has to provide a disclaimer that they can only rate what they’ve seen.  For me, I watched approximately 240 films released within the last ten years, and I’ll undoubtedly add another 20 or so soon as I catch up on movies I’ve missed.  Case in point: I haven’t yet seen “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the Paddington movies because they’re not yet available for rental on Prime, so there they sit in my watchlist.  I’ll get to them eventually.

In the meantime, I’d like to share what I think are the best movies of the decade out of the 240 I’ve seen.  The word “best” is open to interpretation, of course.  Do we mean the movies we enjoyed the most?  Those films that moved us the most?  Those that we consider the most important?  For my list, I chose films from all three categories.  Some I just enjoyed the hell out of, some brought me to tears or gave me chills, and others resonated with me for days or weeks or months as I pondered their impact.  All are worthy movie-going experiences.  As a society, we tend not to reward the first category enough and tend to reward the middle category too much.  We’re suckers for sentimentality.  I’ve tried not to lean too far forward in any one direction.

First, my top ten, in order of release date:

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Beginners
Searching for Sugar Man
Silver Linings Playbook
Argo
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Birdman
The Big Short
Arrival
First Reformed

“Beginners” gets my favorite film of the decade vote.  I’ve already watched it four times, and for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I love everything about it: the characters, the pacing, the dry wit, the melancholic aura, and of course the inimitable Christopher Plummer’s first Oscar-winning performance.  But if I have to pick one film as the best of the decade, I’ll go with “The Big Short.”  It exposes the insanity of capitalism and human behavior in such an entertaining way, and it’s one of those films that I think we’ll look back on in decades to come as an unheeded warning sign for the future.  (The same could be said of “First Reformed,” but this is a tougher movie to watch.)  It’s worth noting that when my three children and I made our choices independent of each other and compared notes, only one film made all of our top-ten lists: “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”  It’s a rip-roaring good time with such humor and creativity, along with a good heart, that it’s tough not to like.

Of course, there were a helluva lot more than ten great movies in the 2010s.  Here are another 28 that were in contention for me: The Social Network, The Tree of Life, The Descendants, Moneyball, Hugo, The Impossible, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Zero Dark Thirty, Drinking Buddies, Bad Words, Chef, Spotlight, Bridge of Spies, Manchester by the Sea, Hail Caesar!, Zootopia, Hell or High Water, La La Land, Lion, Wind River, Get Out, The Florida Project, I Tonya, All the Money in the World, Searching, Vice, Parasite, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  

These movies would serve me very well were I to be sent to a desert island with only one decade of movies to choose from.  The last ten years were certainly a source of disruption in the way we view entertainment, but one can’t argue that the quality (and certainly the quantity) suffered as a result.

Things to Watch, Read and Listen

Keeping track of TV shows, movies and books used to be a fairly easy task, but with today’s segmentation of markets and the sheer volume of media being produced (just looking at TV, there were approximately 495 scripted original series in 2018), relying on word-of-mouth has never been more important or more overwhelming.  Each time someone recommends a show or book or whatever to me, I text it to myself and compile a list that I keep near the TV, but I’ll never get to most the recommendations;  there’s simply too much out there to wrap one’s arms around.  I have a list of twenty shows to watch, fifty movies to view, fifteen books to read, twenty-five bands to listen to, and another half a dozen podcasts to explore.  This is in addition to the pile of unread books I already own and the podcasts I listen to regularly. 

In the spirit of offering more than you can handle, I thought I’d share just a few things I’ve come across lately that might be worth your time. 

WATCH

• The loss of romantic comedies from movie theaters has been lamented for some time, though apparently not enough for Hollywood studios to actually produce them.  But there is hope for the hopeless romantic.  Amazon has released Season 1 (8 episodes) of Modern Love, an anthology series based on a column in The New York Times, and has already renewed the series for another season.  I can’t vouch for all eight episodes, but the first two were excellent, with smart writing and directing, mostly by John Carney of Once and Sing Street.  The episodes clock in at under half an hour, which might almost be too snappy to tell compelling tales consistently, but so far so good.

• If you haven’t already checked out Ken Burns’s latest documentary Country Music on PBS, I urge you to do so.  Like all of his material, it requires a degree of dedication you might not be accustomed to – the series runs about sixteen hours – but it’s a rewarding ride.  I’m not much of a country fan, but I’ve learned a lot during the first four episodes, and with Spotify at my side, I’ve been able to explore many of the artists even further.  There’s something to be said for technology.

READ

• As if there weren’t enough music rabbit holes to fall into, Tom Breihan of Stereogum has embarked on the monumental task of listening to and writing about every #1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 track hit from 1958 to the present.  Word-of-mouth failed me with this endeavor, because I just found out about it a month ago as a fluke, and Breihan is already into 1977, but that’s not a band place to start, as 1977-1982 is my sweet spot for music.  The first song I clicked on was Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light,” and I figured I’d read a few paragraphs about the track.  But no, Breihan writes extensively about each song, providing some history and context, offering links to other versions of the songs, and rating each song he covers, which makes this blog a little more thought-provoking than many.  When he mentioned how much he hates “Hotel California” the comments section went ballistic, but that to me is half the fun.  A great read.

LISTEN

Measured by time, I listen to podcasts more than any other medium – even music.  I have my usual suspects – WTF with Marc Maron, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Freakonomics, Radiolab – but here are two that I’ve added to my arsenal this year:

• Unspooled.  If you like movies, this is a fun podcast that covers one movie a week from the AFI list of Top 100 Films.  Hosted by actor Paul Scheer and critic Amy Nicholson, this weekly discussion has inspired me to fill in the gaps of some of my own viewing (my daughter Sarah has now watched 93 of the top 100 – I’m probably somewhere in the 60s). Paul and Amy are not the most eloquent speakers – I keep wanting them to live up to the standard that Siskel and Ebert set – but I like that they’re challenging the status quo and questioning whether the old boys club that supports mainly male-centric films from the 1970s needs to be upended (spoiler: it does).  They’ve also recommended some terrific books – most notably Making Movies by Sidney Lumet and Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Wilder.  Both brilliant.

• My friend Michael Stoller has produced a podcast called My Blueprint, an exploration of various issues pertaining to growing as a human being.  These are snappy episodes of under ten minutes, and the few I’ve listened to so far are terrific.  Stoller doesn’t shy away from providing specific examples from his own life and touching on topics that affect all of us, and I walk away with just a little something to ponder as I go about my day.

So there you are!  Add them to the list so you can feel just as overwhelmed as I do!