Ars On The Ides Of Mars

This month on Netflix I happened to watch two biopics about two artists, both based on novels, produced ten years apart, depicting men who lived roughly 300 years apart and who made two different types of art.  I hadn't actually intended to do this but once I watched both I started to draw some parallels and make some comparisons - as well as think about how one could be so good and one could basically suck.  Today I give you a short, badly written essay on a comparison and contrast of Magic Fire and The Agony And The Ecstasy, or "How To and How Not To Do a Biographical Movie About An Artist".

Magic Fire is about the life of Richard Wagner (whose bicentennial is this year, incidentally) made in 1955 by Republic Pictures, which by that time was on its last legs as a viable film studio.  The Agony and The Ecstasy is a film about Michelangelo Buonarroti and his painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling produced in 1965 and starring Charlton Heston as the tortured artist and Rex Harrison as the warrior pope who commissions him to create the great work.

The difference between the two is like night and day.  Magic Fire is a cheesy biopic which tries to compress the entire life of the most important and influential composer of music next to Bach and Beethoven down into two hours and achieves in telling us nothing about the man or how monumental his work is and how it affected all of the art of the nineteenth century and beyond.  To director William Dieterle, the whole thing is just an exercise in showing how Wagner could be something of a vain egotist while making some pretty music and pining after a series of women, instead of showing how truly radical his ideas were, while maybe even showing some of the man's truly dark tendencies and his genuinely complex relationships with the other human beings in his life.  This movie could have been an opportunity to show the paradox of the artist and the dichotomy between what a man is and the art that he can produce.  But alas, Dieterle just gives us a shallow, melodramatic two hours of nothing.  There is no dramatic point to this massive cheese-beast.  The film zooms along from one point in Wagner's life to another - it all feels so scatter-shot.  The actors don't look like the historical personages that they are supposed to portray.  There are historical inaccuracies (a given in any historical picture).  Even the music, which should of course be a highlight is arranged by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in a choppy "best of" manner which never even lets us hear a whole selection before it's off into another cornily played bit from another opera. Oh well, at least it was filmed on location in Europe so some of the backgrounds are accurate (and pretty).

The Agony And The Ecstasy attempts to do the opposite - give us just one incident in the life of Michelangelo and build a dramatic conflict and exploration of an artist around it.  Directed by Carol Reed, this movie accomplishes what the last film does not.  We are presented with real questions - what drives an artist to create?  How far will he go to do it?  How does one find one's purpose in life?  How does the relationship of one person to another affect their work or vice versa?  What is the true impact of our lives on this world?  What the answers to some of these questions are of course will be up to the viewer which is the beauty of this movie - everything is not laid out on a platter and the viewer must find their own meaning.  The direction and the acting are better, too.  Charlton Heston gives a great account as Michelangelo, making him both sympathetic and infuriating, sometimes all at he same time.  Rex Harrison is of course basically Rex Harrison for the duration of the movie but manages to portray both Pope Julius' violent arrogance and surprising humility in the face of true art and beauty.  The interplay between the two is classic - this film works as a character study in itself in addition to the qualities I have mentioned.  They even manage the illusion of the Sistine Chapel being in the process of being painted, which must have been truly challenging.  The only things I didn't like were the tacked-on semi-romantic subplot (standard in movies of the 1950s and 60s but thankfully not overdone here) and the twelve minute art history lesson in the beginning.  It's rather clunky and unnecessary - I know who Michelangelo was and what his major works were, thanks.

In the end the recommendation is obvious - The Agony And The Ecstasy is a classic film worthy of any Netflix queue, whilst Magic Fire should be viewed by die-hard Wagner fans only, and only if they feel slightly masochistic... while getting a few chuckles from it over how corny it is.  And to all the directors out there not reading this I say:  when making a bio film of a great artist, try to focus on one work or point in their life and how it affected them and the world and try to give us some real drama out of it, instead of trying to cram the totality of their life and work into a short time-span, making everything empty and pointless.  

Ah, who am I kiddin'. 

I'm Back, Bitches

After three months of straight applying and interviewing with no time for anything else – including this blog – I am out of my crappy retail job. I could go on about how shitty my last job was and how much I wanted to murder the management (and some of the customers), etc. but that’s not what this blog is for. Let me just say this and then we will never speak of the subject again: I worked for a chain bookstore and I fully predict that *all* of the physical retail bookstores will go the way of Borders by 2015. They cannot for the life of them figure out how to compete with Amazon and just plod along, hoping to do the same thing that is not working anymore over and over again until they magically succeed (isn’t that the definition of stupidity?) and then punish their minimum-wage employees when their half-brained schemes to make money do nothing.

Anywho, enough about that.  I’m SO glad to be out my old shithole of a retail job (new office job – 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, yay!) that I’m booting up this blog again like I promised last post (when I knew that I was getting my next job). And in celebration I’m ALSO deciding to give this month a theme, AND I’m going to try to post once a week, just like the good old days! And in TRIPLE celebration I’m going to post a review for a movie from Charlton Heston, the Patron Saint of this site!

Verily, thy ask, what doth be mine own blog’s theme o’ th’ month? Why, ‘tis the beloved bard who bringeth drama most rich and language most bonny and fair, loved by all except the teenaged students of our fair tongue in the schools public. Yep, I’m talking about Shakespeare, and no, I’m not going to conduct the entire review like that. This month is Shakespeare September, and we’ll be looking at some movie adaptations of some of the Bard’s plays. And to kick off Shakespearetember we’ll look, as promised, at a movie from everyone’s favorite gun-totin’ monkey punchin’ man’s man as he dons a toga, yells at a lot of people and gropes a lot of boob in 

Film, 1972 

Director: Charlton Heston(!) 

Story 

Mark Antony (guess who?) waffles back and forth between his duty to Rome and his lust, er, love for Egyptian Queen Cleopatra (Hildegard Neil). He yells at a lot of people, acts like a douche and fucks up his life over the course of two-and-a-half hours, then kills himself. Cleopatra acts whiny, crazy and vain for two-and-a-half hours, then kills herself. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not spoiling anything; go pick up a history textbook. And on an anticipatory note: I’m not going to worry about spoiling any other Shakespeare plays this month either, because they have been around for four hundred-plus years and you should know all this already.

Review 

I wasn’t lying when I said that this adaptation of a Shakespeare play was from Charlton Heston, was I? Not only did he star in it, he directed it – and adapted it as well. You know what that means, kiddies.

Charlton Heston Ego Alert!

This movie was Heston’s directorial debut, too (and he only directed two minor movies after this one). Surprisingly it actually holds together as a film and doesn’t fly apart at the seams (although it does drag a little at times). There are a few weird moments though, such as when Antony and Octavian make their truce near the beginning of the story. Heston sets it in a mini Gladiator ampitheatre, and the characters have their dialogue while a pair of duelists put on a private performance. Heston shows the two gladiators trying to kill each other while flashing almost subliminal images of Octavian against a black background. It’s very weird and very clumsy. It’s almost like Heston is saying, “This is what directors do, right? Look, people, I’m directing! I’m being artsy!” Then there’s the image of the fat, sweaty hortator in the galley beating the drums and looking completely dead and soulless that will creep you the fuck out. The writer/actor/director (“Look at me! I’m Laurence Olivier!”) also makes some odd choices when adapting and trimming the play (which you have to do, otherwise you are looking at a four hour plus movie). The oddest choice for me was retaining the character of Iras (a servant of Cleopatra) but only letting her keep about two lines from the play. This also has unfortunate implications as the role is played by the only black performer who’s not an extra in the movie. I guess Heston just wanted her around to show her naked butt (because you know how Chuck loves the sistahs).

Whoa, whoa, we're not filming that kind of movie, Chuck!

Speaking of which, Heston takes the opportunity as Boss Of The Show to indulge in copping as many feels as he can, and not just with the actress playing the other half of the title. Seriously, check this out:

It's good to be the king.

Also, I (and a lot of other people) have noticed that about 75% of the sea battle footage is taken from Cleopatra and Ben-Hur. You can see the ships change from shot to shot. Speaking of Ben-Hur: while watching these scenes I almost expected to see Heston playing Mark Antony up on the top deck then see him rowing down below. Hell, why stop there? We can have a ship crewed with nothing but Charlton Hestons. Actually I would pay money to see that.

The acting in this movie is a mixed bag. Hildegard Neil is adequate if not great as Cleopatra. She gets the petulance and back-stabbery down but ultimately fails to make Cleopatra a sympathetic character (although whether she is supposed to be one in the first place or not is debatable). Oh, speaking of petulance, looking at IMDb, I see that Ms. Neil is married to Brian Blessed, which makes this scene utterly hilarious:

"I LIKE NOT THIS NEWS!  BRING ME SOME OTHER NEWS!"

Heston is typical Heston: doing a good job at ACTING! But reminding you that it is Charlton Heston acting all of the time instead of simply being the character. Actually, Heston seems to want to make Antony an even more unsympathetic character than he is in the play. For example, in the play, Antony has an emissary from Octavian whipped, which is both a breach of diplomatic protocol and an assholish thing to do, even if you are mad at the dude. In the movie, Heston’s Antony beats the guy up a little beforehand – and afterwards too.  Oh, and then he smacks Cleopatra for good measure.

What a dickweed.

The best performances in this movie are from the supporting players. My favorite acting job in this film is from Roger Delgado as the soothsayer. Quietly intense, wise, soft-spoken and spooky, Delgado gives the best performance in the show. But what else do you expect from the Master?

"You will obey me."

Speaking of Doctor Who, Julian Glover is also in this (he’s actually the first character you see on screen) and he is also very good. The other players are great as well, including John Castle as Octavian and Freddie Jones as Pompey.


The thing I liked the most about this movie was the epic-ness of it, the scenery with all of the locations and the sets. The original play Antony and Cleopatra is supposed to be grandiose; there lots of scene changes and some of the scenes only have about three lines of dialogue in them. One has to wonder how they were performed back in the day with the pace of the thing. It’s very appropriate for this play that Heston went the epic route and chose to shoot Antony and Cleopatra as an epic film (even if he does splice in the aforementioned battle footage).

In the end though Antony and Cleopatra is just a middling effort: while the scenery and some of the acting is great, the leads are just not that engaging or believable – I had a hard time believing that this was one of the greatest pairs of lovers in history and not just a pair of squabbling, backstabbing politicians who were just in it together for the sex and power. If Heston had ceded the directing duties to someone better and more experienced this could have been a truly great film. While I do recommend seeing it once for the aforementioned qualities, I think that only the dedicated Shakespeare or Charlton Heston lover needs to have it in their video library.

A Note On The DVD: The DVD of Antony and Cleopatra has the worst audio of any legitimate commercial DVD I have ever heard. There is a very loud hiss present in the movie from beginning to end, and some of the dialogue is very hard to make out – you may want to turn on the subtitles for this one. Also, on a side note I found it odd that there are no production company logos or credits at the beginning of the movie – it’s just straight into the title. This isn’t a bad thing but it makes the whole thing look like one of those old public domain VHS tapes that I would get as a kid, which actually kind of amuses me.


Next Week:  Shakespearetember continues.

Easter Ham

Today is Easter Sunday, and when I think Easter, I naturally think of Charlton Heston.  Besides his Religious Epics of the 1950s and his right-wing gun-nut political activism for the NRA in the 1990s Heston is probably best known for his Science Fiction films of the 1960s and 70s (and Khartoum - how could I forget Khartoum?).  So today, to commemorate a holiday about bunnies and candy (and something about some guy named Yeshua ben Yosef, I'm not sure though) I’m going to tackle a trio of dystopian films starring one of the greatest chewers of scenery ever and give you the

Charlton Heston Triple Sci-Fi Movie Extravaganza

Let’s go in chronological order, shall we?

And let’s dispense with the spoiler alert straight off because just about everyone knows the endings and surprise twists to these films.

"Yeah, kid, I thought he was great in El Cid too."

Planet of the Apes (1968) – A team of astronauts in hibernation crash on a distant planet hundreds of years after traveling through the galaxy near the speed of light.  The three surviving travelers explore the world they’ve arrived on and discover that on this planet intelligent apes rule while mute, savage humans are treated like despised animals.  After being separated from his companions and captured Taylor –  the leader of the group – now has to find a way to convince his simian captors that he is not only intelligent but also not worthy of extermination.

Where's Rod?

This movie is the best of the lot, and no wonder… it was co-written by Rod Serling, the genius writer behind The Twilight Zone.  In fact, this movie sometimes feels like an extended episode of that show and could be considered the first Twilight Zone movie (there was an actual TZ movie made in ’83 but I haven’t seen it).  The twist ending, of course, is pure Serling.  So is the dialogue.  So is the overall message and theme of the whole thing, which ties into the ending.

The United States Government at work.

And it’s the ending that makes this thing truly gripping and downright different, too.  The shocking revelation that Taylor was really on Earth the whole time completely flips the movie’s moral conflict upside down.   Dr. Zaius – the film’s main antagonist and source of anti-human vitriol – is *right*.  Man really is a savage, violent beast.  Look at the final result of what humanity did to wipe itself out at the end of the movie.  But at the same time the apes are not much better; in fact they are almost like (gasp) humans with all of the same prejudices, societal stratification and the corrupt suppression of truth in the name of order.  Yes, humans really are as bad as Dr. Zaius says they are – but is that a good  justification for the way they are treated?

The direction by Franklin Schaffner is superb.  The music score by Jerry Goldsmith is both awesome and revolutionary.  The special effects and ape makeup are great and mostly convincing.  And yes, the acting by Heston can go over the top, but it doesn’t happen that often and when it does it’s an asset to the movie.  Planet of the Apes is a science fiction classic, and is easily the best film of the three reviewed here.

Yeah, this is how I play too.  It's the only way I can win.

The Omega Man (1971) – Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth.  However, he is not alone.  A plague has wiped out most of humanity and turned the remaining few survivors into insane, nocturnal, zombie-like killers.  These infected mutants, calling themselves The Family continually try to kill Neville as he is the last reminder of the world that existed before the catastrophe.  But the “last man alive” is about to discover something that may give humanity –and himself – hope and the means to go on living in a hell of a world.

Hmm, Pasty skin, facial sores... so kinda like me as a teenager.

 From the best of the lot we go to the worst.  That doesn’t make this a horrible movie though, just a painfully mediocre one and definitely the least of Heston’s sci-fi efforts.  The moral conflict this time *tries* to be complex with Neville being given some flawed attributes and Matthias (the leader of The Family) being portrayed as not completely evil, but in the end we know who we’re supposed to root for.  The story has plotholes.  Characters do really stupid things for almost no reason at all.  

We all know the sistahs can't resist Chuck Heston.

The romance between Neville and Lisa is sudden and not developed that well – remember what I said about Charlton Heston and leading ladies (although to be fair Heston and Rosalind Cash have a lot more chemistry than Heston and Sophia Loren or… that chick what’shername… from Ben-Hur)?   I mean, I know that they’re two of the last people on Earth and that they have to start breeding, but I think I would give it a little more time between “get up against the wall and spread ‘em or I’ll blow your head off” and “I want to have your babies right now.”  And we’re never given a reason as to what the last woman on Earth finds attractive in Charlton Heston, except for the fact that he is Charlton Heston. 

I think this may be where his obsession with guns started.

The direction is tepid.  The music score is also pretty bland, which is a shame considering that it’s by Ron Grainer who gave us the themes for Doctor Who and The Prisoner, for crying out loud.  In addition The Omega Man is horribly dated – which is something I forgot to mention about the last film, by the way:  because of the setting and the fact that most of the actors in it are wearing ape masks, Planet of the Apes doesn’t date itself too badly (except for the “don’t trust anyone over 30” line).  The Omega Man is obviously a product of the early Seventies, which isn’t in itself a bad thing but the film throws it in your face all the time.  In all fairness though the movie is pretty cool for the first third when it’s just Heston trying to survive in a deserted downtown LA against undead plague zombies.  You can just tune out though once the love interest and the kiddies come in.

"Says here my library books are overdue.  Fine: $500,000."

Soylent Green (1973) – In a future where overpopulation overwhelms the globe and starvation is a very real threat the Soylent Corporation supplies half of the world’s food supply in the form of small, nutritious wafers called Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow.  Robert Thorn is a police detective in New York City in the year 2022.  Along with his partner Sol Roth he investigates the murder of a Soylent Corporation bigwig, which leads to government cover-ups, further assassination attempts and a shocking discovery about Soylent’s newest food product, Soylent Green.

Okay, so is this New York or LA?

Mmmm, Soylent Green....

This movie is infamous for its ending (“Soylent Green is PEOPLE!”) but its impact should be that it shows how horrible a world in which the few haves have so much and the many have-nots have so little really would be – that it would result in such a reprehensible method of feeding a massive population.  And that is the heart of all of the problems in the world, according to Soylent Green, and the film’s main message – the evils of overpopulation.  And we see this problem in the world today, although not quite to the level of this dystopian yarn (yet).  With populations of over one billion each it will be interesting to see how China and India deal with this issue.  China of course has instituted the One Child Policy, but they still have the question of how to feed all of their people (perhaps with… PEOPLE?).  India as far as I know has no method or plan for controlling their population.  Interestingly enough the United States does not have a hideous overpopulation problem right now and probably won’t (I hope) by 2022.  You never know, though… China and India could send us some of their surplus….

Why limit yourself to one woman?  This is the 70s, man.

Soylent Green falls square between the two preceding movies in the Heston Trifecta, being more serious, moving and intelligent than The Omega Man but less intelligent and more dated than Planet of the Apes.  In fact, it comes close to that film in terms of quality except for two things: the first is that it is more dated (apparently personal computers and cellphones no longer exist in 2022) and also that, once again we have a clunky romantic subplot forced into a movie that doesn’t need it.  The worst thing about it is that it’s even worse than the one for Omega Man… at least in that movie the love scenes served some purpose for the overall story.  Here they are completely superfluous.  And don't tell me it has something to do with feminism because that angle isn't developed at all.  Thorn has sex with glorified prostitute, Thorn leaves glorified prostitute.  What, did Heston have it in all of his contracts by the 70s that he have at least one nude scene in every movie with a woman at least half his age?

Where the film truly shines is in both its environmentalist and political social commentary (yes, try to wrap your head around that one – Charlton Heston in a socially progressive liberal movie) and in the interaction between Heston and Edward G. Robinson, who plays Roth.  It’s a pretty well-known fact that this was Robinson’s last film – he died soon after it was completed.  This makes all of their scenes together very poignant, and that’s even before learning that only Heston knew at the time about his colleague’s terminal cancer.  Therefore the tears shed in Roth’s death scene are real and just about moved me to tears.  Hearing two men profess their love for each other can be a beautiful thing.  Richard Fleischer’s direction is good but not awe inspiring, making Soylent Green a minor science fiction classic and an interesting product of a decade that gave us a lot of dystopian environmentalist warnings in celluloid form.

Well there’s your Charlton Heston Super Special.  I hope you liked it.

And you thought I would do The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur just because today is Easter and I talked about Charlton Heston.

Sigh.  Okay.  I’ll give you a religious Charlton Heston movie image so we can go out on a pious note.

Charlton Heston died for your sins.

Hollywood Historical Hooey

Wow, I hope that this isn’t inauspicious.  For my first mainstream Hollywood film to review for this blog I had to go and choose El Cid, which ended up being a disappointment, to say the least.  This limp 1960s historical epic isn’t hideous by any means, it just did not live up to my expectations.  Well anyway, here’s my first Hollywood review, and since I felt neither strong love nor burning hate for this movie it’s not gonna be a long one.

Theatrical Film, 1961

Director: Anthony Mann

The Story

Hollywood Historical Revisionism strikes again!  It’s the Eleventh Century.  Spain is torn in a war between the Christian Spaniards and the Moslem Moors.  After being charged with treason for sparing the lives of some Moorish Emirs, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (Charlton Heston) kills his fiancée’s father in a duel over his father’s honor.  Awk-ward!  For some reason she now suddenly wants to kill him.  Huh.  For some reason he still loves her, even after she admits to hiring a rival suitor to ambush and kill him.  Pft.  The games those lovers play, eh?  Anyway, after “proving” his innocence – ahh, I love medieval “justice” – in a jousting match (TO THE DEATH!  Cue Star Trek music!)  Don Rodrigo, or “El Cid” as he is now known marries the fiancée that still hates him – double AWK-WARD! – and becomes embroiled in petty sibling bickering after the King of Castile dies and wills his kingdom to his three children (when will monarchs learn that dividing their kingdom amongst their children will never work, especially when there’s three of them?  You’d think they’d remember King Lear).  To make a long (very long) story short, El Cid is exiled after a royal hissy fit, is reunited with his wife who suddenly decides that she loves him after all (haha, those silly women and their mood swings!) and fights to keep Spain from being invaded by a tyrannical North African despot.  There are lots of battles, lots of blood, lots of tears and I really didn’t care that much because it was all very, very dull.

The Review

For once I think I agree on something with Charlton Heston – this movie is pretty lousy.  Heston reportedly once said that El Cid would have been a better movie if William Wyler (the man who directed Heston in Ben-Hur) had made it instead of Anthony Mann.  And you know, I think he’s right.  This film is just mediocre.  The acting is mediocre, the music is mediocre, the cinematography is mediocre, and the direction is just, well, mediocre.  And this is a shame because the talent that went into this film should have made it much better than it was. 
Charlton Heston, while not being the greatest actor ever, was a pretty good one (when he wanted to be).  Here he is wooden and has zero chemistry with the female lead, Sophia Loren, who is even more wooden and looks like one of the living dead throughout the whole movie (on a side note,  I know I’m about to commit Hollywood Blasphemy here, but I’ve never considered Loren to be that good looking.  She’s always been trumpeted as one of the greatest beauties to grace the silver screen.  I think she’s always looked rather… creepy).  In fact, you know what I think Heston’s problem was?  I think he honestly wasn’t good at the romantic stuff.  I think he acted better opposite other men (an exception is The Three Musketeers but there the woman he interacts with is his employee and not his love interest).  It’s not just this movie, either.  In Ben-Hur the chemistry between him and Stephen Boyd is electric whether they are proclaiming their friendship or trying to kill each other, while the scenes between him and his love interest fall flat.  In El Cid the most sparks come in the title character’s relations with one of the Emirs he saves earlier in the film.  At a few points I honestly thought that Heston and Douglas Wilmer were going to start making out right there on film.  Ah, the friendship between MEN!   The other actors (it’s a cast of thousands!) are good character and bit actors but just go through the motions here.
Miklós Rózsa wrote one of the greatest film scores ever for Ben-Hur, and wrote many fantastic scores for many other great movies besides.  Here he’s basically ripping off his Ben-Hur soundtrack but making it less memorable and more limp.  In fact, I would call the film score for this movie Ben-Hur Lite.  You know what I think happened?  I think Rózsa blew his wad with the score for that 1959 classic and it took about a decade for him to get his creative juices flowing again, because just about every score of his from this period is Ben-Hur Lite (King of Kings along with this movie are the worst offenders).
The landscapes of Spain are gorgeous but aren’t really captured that well on camera most of the time.  You can photograph the most beautiful thing in the world, but the picture won’t be good if the photographer sucks.
And last but not least, the direction for this clunker is some of the most flaccid I’ve ever seen.  I don’t know that much about the director, Anthony Mann but I see by looking at his filmography that at the time he made this he was a respected director of Westerns.  The man was supposed to have some talent, so whether he just couldn’t handle this type of movie, or was having a bad day (month?  Year?), or just ended up being a middling director after all, it was disappointing to see such a movie with great potential but lifeless execution. El Cid is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

Actually, you know what?  I spent more time writing on this than I said I would.  Damn!

Well, if you actually read the monster paragraphs above then you basically know what my recommendation would be on this movie, but for the lazy amongst you – or those that want it beaten into your skulls – here is my advice:  don’t waste your time on this movie.  It’s not a good movie, but it’s also not bad enough to have fun with.  It’s just a middling effort from Hollywood in an era that had exhausted the Historical Epic format (thank God David Lean would revive it just a few short years later with Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago).

Screenshots

Even though this film is three hours long I’m not going to take up much space with pictures from it.

Charlton Heston as El Cid.  Note the wooden beaver-like expression.

"I'll swallow your soul!"

"Yeah, that's the stuff!"

Come on, just go ahead and kiss, already!

 

Obligatory Charlton Heston NRA joke:

"You can have my sword when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!"

Snark free caption:  Just a nice shot of the city of Valencia.

"oh EEE oh, ee OOH oh..."

"Follow the jeep!  Follow the jeep to VICTORY!"

 Next Week: Memories