Cynical Cinema

Hollywood is shedding a few tears today.  Many people say Steve McQueen was the ultimate man’s man in the movies.  Others cast votes for John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood.  But not me.  As far as I’m concerned, the greatest man’s man in movie history passed away yesterday, September 26th, at the age of 83.  I must confess, although I have been a Newman fanatic for years, I didn’t expect this news to hit me so hard.  He had been battling cancer for years, and we all knew it was coming.  But even outside the movies, he still seemed like some kind of masculine, indestructible superman.  Even at the age of 80 he was still racing cars and living a very vital lifestyle.  Paul Newman can’t die!  He’s Cool Hand Luke, he’s a race car driver, he’s immortal!

And, in a very real way, the classy, genuine Paul Newman, like so many other great actors, is immortal.  John Wanye, Steve McQueen, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney - they will never be forgotten.  And neither will Newman.  Here are ten ways never to forget this incredible man, one of the greatest actors ever to appear on the silver screen:

10.    The Hudsucker Proxy:  The Coen Brothers’ first real attempt at screwball comedy.  A huge budget (for the Coens, at the time) and a terrific cast.  Tim Robbins is on his way upstairs to show Paul Newman, the corporate executive, his idea for a new children’s toy.  At the same time, Charles Durning, the company’s president, is flying out the boardroom window.  Newman sees an opportunity to install the dimwitted Robbins in Durning’s place, so he can take over the company.  Newman is delightful as the scheming, manipulative villain - the type Frank Capra could easily have created in the 40s.  Sidney J. Mussberger is one of Newman’s best roles.

9.    Road To Perdition:  Once again, Newman is a fairly bad guy in this one, playing an aging Irish crime boss.  His main hitman, Tom Hanks, has been his sort of surrogate son for many years.  But when Newman’s biological son, (Daniel Craig) decides to wipe out Hanks’ family, Hanks comes after them hard.  Jude Law also stars as a rival hitman sent to take out Hanks, and Newman is once again magnificent in a supporting role as the kindly yet dangerous John Rooney.

8.    The Color of Money:  The only Oscar Newman ever won.  Of course, he was really winning more for his entire body of work, and not specifically for this movie.  He is still tremendous, reprising his role as Fast Eddie Felson from the classic film The Hustler.  Taking young Tom Cruise under his wing, Newman manages to take the George C. Scott character from the original film, combine him with his own Felson character, and create an entirely new character.  He is going down the road toward becoming exactly the type of man who ruined him so many years earlier.  Newman conveys the seething turmoil within his character in a top-notch performance.

7.    The Towering Inferno:  Not the greatest movie of Newman’s career, but an excellent chance to see three of the greatest manly actors in history go toe-to-toe.  To toe.  Newman is the architect of a gigantic skyscraper, William Holden is the man who built that skyscraper, and Steve McQueen is the fire chief who gets called in when that skyscraper burns to the ground.  Fred Astaire and Faye Dunaway also star, but it’s the heroic men who make this movie resonate to this day.  McQueen, Holden, and of course Newman.  Doug Roberts belongs on a list of Newman’s great roles.

6.    Slap Shot:  Certainly one of Newman’s most beloved movies, and one of his most memorable roles.  The greatest sports movie of all time, Slap Shot is so much more than just the Hanson Brothers and Denis Lemieux and the play-by-play guys.  It is Newman, through and through.  Newman just oozes effortless charm as he sleeps with women, inspires his team, and does what he can to hold a failing hockey club together.  But there is something deeper going on within his character, a sort of resignation, sadness and pain that he balances perfectly with the humour of the hockey fighting.  Reggie Dunlop is the most memorable fictional character in the history of sports movies, thanks to Paul Newman.

5.    The Verdict:  An alcoholic loser of a lawyer (Newman) finds a case that could mean either his redemption or his destruction.  Frankly, there isn’t much difference between The Verdict and other, similar lawyer-and-courtroom dramas.  Erin Brockovich, or A Civil Action.  The biggest difference is Newman himself.  As the drunken bum lawyer, he is simply stunning.  A familiar story is elevated to greatness by not only one of the greatest performances of Newman’s career, but one of the greatest performances in movies.  Ever.  Paul Newman makes Frank Galvin an iconic figure.

4.    The Sting:  A far more lighthearted entry than The Verdict or even Slap Shot, The Sting is the ultimate, well, sting movie.  Newman’s second brilliant pairing with Robert Redford, he manages to infuse his character with more than just light comedic silliness as he and Redford set up the ultimate sting to nail the local racketeer, Doyle Donnegan (played by Robert Shaw).  Newman once again plays a drunk, dragging himself out of his stupor to get Donnegan.  Henry Gondorff is one of Paul Newman’s greatest characters.

3.    Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid:  Newman’s first magnificent collaboration with Redford and director George Roy Hill (who later directed The Sting as well).  One of the greatest western movies ever made, Redford and Newman once again inject humanity and pathos into some pretty light fare.  And is there a greater final image than the two of them bursting out of that doorway, guns raised?  Paul Newman, for ever more, will be Butch Cassidy.

2.    The Hustler:  Again, Newman puts in one of the greatest performances in movie history.  A young pool hustler taken under the wing of the malicious and sadistic George C. Scott (also one of the great performances in history), Newman creates memorable moment after memorable moment.  There may be no greater scene in his entire career than the one where he takes on Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), in a marathon pool game.  There is no one else on earth who could have done what Newman did in this movie with the character of Fast Eddie Felson.

1.    Cool Hand Luke:  The ultimate guy movie.  The ultimate prison movie.  The ultimate fight-the-system movie.  And the ultimate Paul Newman movie.  This is one of my all-time favourites, I watch it at least once every six months.  There has never been a better tough-guy movie made, and I include all of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood’s oeuvre in that sentence.  This is Newman’s best film, his best performance, and Luke Jackson is one of the top five characters ever created by anyone, in any movie, ever.  If you want to remember Paul Newman, watch this movie today.  And then once every six months for the rest of your life.

Hollywood has lost one of it’s great icons, one of it’s genuinely good people, and one of the greatest method actors who ever lived.  RIP, Paul Newman.

In 2002, there was a wonderful documentary called Lost In La Mancha, that chronicled Terry Gilliam’s disastrous attempt to make the movie he’s always wanted to make, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  It’s a fascinting and poignant documentary about a movie shoot where everything that can go wrong does go wrong.  There are many disasters in Lost In La Mancha.  The star of the film, the fantastic French actor Jean Rochefort, suffers a serious back injury and can’t continue.  There are unsigned contracts, disputes, and the Spanish Air Force ruins a whole day of shooting by performing manouevers overhead.  Then the entire set, and all the equipment, gets washed away in a flash flood.

Of course, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote never got made.  The project was shut down after five days of production and shelved in 2001.  Gilliam has re-acquired the rights to the script, however, and he is going to make another run at it.  He still has his Big Star on board, Johnny Depp, and that is apparently the biggest reason the film is going ahead.  Depp, you see, was just not big enough a star in 2001 to convince the financiers to stay on board when all hell broke loose.  Although in fact it was his other commitments, and the fact that he couldn’t stay on with the film behind schedule, that led to the film losing it’s backing in the end.  But now, since Pirates of the Caribbean, the opportunity to make a film starring Depp is too lucrative an idea to pass up.  So The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will move forward.

Gilliam has re-acquired the script rights from the insurers who took control after the failed attempt at making the film.  The filming of a Don Quixote-themed movie has come to be sort of a cinema-world equivalent of staging a production of Macbeth, in that it seems to carry with it a substantial amount of bad luck.  As we see toward the end of Lost In La Mancha, Gilliam has become basically a Quixote figure himself.

The plot of Don Quixote, one of my favourite books of all time, basically concerns an old man who imagines himself to be something he isn’t - that is, a knight-errant.  One of those fictional characters that rides around on a horse, defeating evil, rescuing damsels, and fighting giants and dragons.  But he lives about 100 years too late.  The days of the knight-errant are long past, but that does not stop him.  He carries out his delusions to the fullest, and in the most famous scene in the book, he attacks a series of windmills, imagining them to be some kind of evil giants.

Since the novel was written, “tilting at windmills” has come to mean something a little different than just plain old-fashioned hilarious lunacy.  The phrase is now used to describe people who wholeheartedly pursue impossible dreams, and in this way Gilliam certainly fits the bill.  The Monty Python alum has created some of the most bizarre but fantastic films of the last twenty years, including Twelve Monkeys and Brazil. 

But he has also participated in some of the least successful movie projects of all time.  Not just the one chronicled in Lost In La Mancha, but also the uber-bomb The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which was a terrific film that no one wanted to see.  It cost 45 million dollars and made virtually no money.  But it really was great.  People should see it.  In fact, go out and rent Baron Munchausen right now.  And rent Lost In La Mancha too.  And go read Don Quixote.  Then you will be as excited for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as I am.

I cam across an interesting bunch of statistics today.  Every year, there is a list of “highest paid movie stars”.  And the usual suspects are on the list, and it’s a boring list.  For my purposes here though, I will reprint that list for 2007:

1.  Will Smith (80 million bucks)
2.  Johnny Depp (75 million)
3.  Mike Myers (55)
4.  Eddie Murphy (55)
5.  Cameron Diaz (50)
6.  Leonardo DiCaprio (45)
7.  Bruce Willis (41)
8.  Ben Stiller (40)
9.  Nicholas Cage (38)
10.  Keira Knightley (32)
11.  Will Ferrell (31)
12.  Adam Sandler (30)
13.  Jennifer Aniston (27)

OK.  Boring list.  I know it.  Only Will Smith, however, seems worth the money.  He is the only actor in history to have 8 straight movies earn more than 100 million dollars each.  Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley are coasting off the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and Nicholas Cage seems to be there solely by virtue of National Treasure.  But several others are odd.  Eddie Murphy?  Mike Myers?  Their latest films are dreadful, and Meet Dave and The Love Guru will be lucky to earn 55 million dollars combined!  Whic brings us to the actually interesting list.  Here is a list of actors who are worth the money they are paid.  (For example:  if the number is 14.73 for Vince Vaughn, that means that for every dollar he is paid, he brings in fourteen dollars and seventy-three cents of gross income.)

1.  Vince Vaughn (14.73)
2.  Tobey Maguire (13.44)
3.  Julia Roberts (13.19)
4.  Brad Pitt (12.73)
5.  Naomi Watts (12.16)
6.  Matt Damon (12.16)
7.  George Clooney (11.56)
8.  Jennifer Aniston (10.48)
9.  Hugh Jackman (9.90)
10.  Ben Stiller (9.50)

I note that only Jennifer Aniston and Ben Stiller make both lists, indicating that perhaps they are paid based on their talents, which are considerable, but that their mass appeal outweighs their talent.  Which is entirely believable.  Pitt, Clooney and Julia Roberts appear here because they all took big pay cuts to appear in the Oceans Seventy-Eight series of movies, which all did major bank.  Julia Roberts paid back $32.50 for every dollar she made on Oceans Twelve.  Now a quick rundown of some of the other big, bankable stars:

Will Smith - $5.64
Jim Carrey - $4.11
Tom Cruise - $3.99

AND…

Nicole Kidman - $1.01

That means that for every dollar Nicole Kidman is paid, the studios make one dollar and one cent.  ONE CENT PROFIT.  Perhaps it’s time for a pay cut?  This is the second year in a row Kidman has been the worst earner in Hollywood.  Mostly because she demands a huge payday for movies that flop.  The Invasion actually cost the studios $2.70 for every dollar they paid Kidman.  You would think that for that kind of money, she would have at least put a little effort into the role.

All this wonderful information was put together by Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/07/22/star-salary-roi-biz-media-cz_dp_ph_0722payback.html and they had a specific method to rank each star.  It was all about their last three movies, and they had to earn at least 5 million dollars to appear in one of those three.  Which means that people like Seth Rogen, who would surely be tops on the list, did not make it based on these criteria.  Go to that link to see exactly how they came up with the rankings.  For those of you who just want to see the rankings, here are the rest:

11.  Renee Zellwegger (9.49)
12.  Kate Winslett (9.48)
13.  Reese Witherspoon (8.91)
14.  Jodie Foster (8.59)
15.  Robert DeNiro (8.34)
16.  Denzel Washington (7.95)
17.  Angelina Jolie (7.16)
18.  Russell Crowe (6.88)
19.  Bruce Willis (6.68)
20.  Johnny Depp (6.51)
21.  Will Smith (5.64)
22.  Sandra Bullock (5.59)
23.  Tom Hanks (5.51)
24.  Leonardo DiCaprio (5.46)
25.  Adam Sandler (5.08)
26.  Cate Blanchett (4.97)
27.  Will Ferrell (4.67)
28.  Drew Barrymore (4.38)
29.  Nicolas Cage (4.16)
30.  Jim Carrey (4.11)
31.  Jennifer Lopez (4.10)
32.  Cameron Diaz (4.03)
33.  Tom Cruise (3.99)
34.  Jennifer Garner (3.62)
35.  Nicole Kidman (1.01)

Just a few weeks after the amazing biopic Control was released on DVD, about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, his gravestone has been stolen in Macclesfield Cemetery in England.  The inscription on the gravestone read “Ian Curtis 18 - 5- 80 ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’”.  Curtis was found hanging in his home May 18th, 1980, at the age of 23.  For my review of the film, type “Control” into the search feature.

This could be big.  This could be REALLY big.  I have always hated it when classic movies get remade.  Only occasionally does this serve a worthwhile purpose, and the remake has to be an absolute classic itself to warrant the process at all.  Witness King Kong and Poseidon, both of which came out in the same summer blockbuster season.  King Kong was a classic that made sense to remake.  After all, the special effects in 1933 were not quite up to the standards they are today, and that really was what the update was all about.  The same great story, the same well-drawn characters, the same sense of loss and anguish and pathos at the end.  A good director (Peter Jackson), good actors (Naomi Watts especially) and fantastic special effects made that a worthwhile remake.

Poseidon, however, was not a worthwhile remake.  The original Poseidon Adventure was a classic.  The special effects in that movie were already terrific.  The only real difference now is that they would be cheaper, because they could be computer-generated.  So apparently, all the producers and director needed to do was to hire good computer guys and then wash their hands of the whole thing.  And Poseidon sucked.  It abysmally, horribly, staggeringly and spectacularly sucked.  The same goes for All The Kings Men, The Truth About Charlie, The Fog, D.O.A., and countless others.

So, as I cross my fingers that there will not be a run of “Casablanca 2008″, or “Citizen Kane in the New Millenium”, there is actually a remake in the works that makes me happy.  No, more than that - it makes me ecstatic.  THIS is the classic that needs to be redone.  Here it is:  Plan 9 From Outer Space.  THIS is the reason film makers are allowed to redo films.  Some just really, really, really, really need it.  For those of you unfamiliar with the glorious Plan 9 From Outer Space, here is a brief synopsis of what makes it fantastic:

It is fantastic because it is dreadful.  You know that when people call Poison or Air Supply or Insane Clown Posse the worst bands of all time, it isn’t true.  There are worse bands out there, playing in someone’s garage, or at the local underage punk club.  No one will ever hear those bands, outside their family and neighbours, but they are worse.  Plan 9 From Outer Space is one of those garage bands that could be the worst of all time actually making it to international distribution.  It is the equivalent of a bunch of no-talent friends with a video camera running around and making their own movie on their recess in Grade Six.  The acting is atrocious, the plot makes absolutely no sense, the special effects are stupendously awful, and the dialogue is worse than any you might find in even the most low-budget porn.

It starred Bela Lugosi, who was so addled by drugs at this late time in his life that he showed up in director Ed Wood’s productions simply because he had nothing better to do, and he was too out of it to know any better.  Now, Lugosi had died before filming on Plan 9 began, but that didn’t stop Ed Wood.  Either as a misguided and crazy tribute to Lugosi, or as a way of getting him into the movie simply because Wood knew that Lugosi’s name was the only way to get the film distributed and to get anyone to see it, Lugosi appears via file footage that Wood had shot some years earlier.  And since that footage was merely a series of shots of Lugosi walking out of a forest like a zombie, the plot of the movie had to somehow revolve around that.

And it does.  I think.  You see aliens are here, and they are returning the dead to life in a plan to take over the world…plan 9, as it were…the rest is sort of a jumble.  Even the title of the film is magnificent.  Plan Nine From Outer Space makes no sense on it’s own, but what’s even better is that after watching the movie itself, the title makes even LESS sense.  Or, at least, seems even more stupid.  The movie, it’s stars, and most of all the director, were made famous in the terrific Johnny Depp movie “Ed Wood”, but even for those who have not seen that masterpiece, it’s worth a watch.  Movies just don’t get this bad.  Ever.  (In fact, even worse than Plan 9 might be Wood’s first directorial effort, the wonderfully chaotic and insane Glen or Glenda, about cross dressers and so forth, that features some truly nonsensical file footage discovered somewhere in a pile of used newsreels.)

To remake a movie like this, it can’t help but get better.  There is simply nowhere else to go with it.  Even a budget of several hundred dollars will ensure a superior product on the screen.  But here’s where it gets great - this remake wants to do a real movie!  It won’t be an attempt at camp, or an intentionally bad film.  A guy named John Johnson (a director whose existence is news to me) is saying he wants to make the movie Ed Wood intended to make - that is, an actually scary, sci-fi horror film.  It will, of course, pay homage to the original, but the real attempt here is to make it into a good movie!

This works for so many reasons.  First of all, it pays homage to Ed Wood and his moviemaking dream, which was a genuine if misguided attempt to create real cinema.  And in some twisted way, it could legitimize Wood as the visionary he always wanted to be.  Or, if the new movie follows the story line of the old one closely enough, this could end up being yet another in the so-bad-it’s-great category of films that so many of us love.  Either way, this is a project well worth holding our collective breaths for.

The new film is scheduled to be completed to coincide with the release of the 50th anniversary DVD of the original, out later this year.  For those of you who have never seen the original, and who won’t be making the effort to find it just to watch something so dreadful, here is a link to youtube, that collects some of the most bonkers and insane moments from that original disastrous masterpiece, Plan Nine From Outer Space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRq80QNnJM

This coming Tuesday, June 17th, there is a movie event worth checking out.  The Cold War Film Club meets one Tuesday a month in the bowels of the Diefenbunker in Ottawa’s west end.  They run cold-war themed films, like The Manchurian Candidate or even Top Gun.  And this coming Tuesday, they’re running a movie that got missed by many people the first time out in 2006.  One of the best films of that year, Good Night And Good Luck is just a wonderful film starring David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow, the renowned journalist who entered into an epic battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was on a gigantic communist witch hunt at the time.  (The real Murrow can be seen as the face of Breaking Rock News on that scrolling-thing at the top of the CHEZ 106 web page.)  Historically accurate and brilliantly acted, this will likely be the only chance you have to see Good Night And Good Luck outside home DVD.  Well worth it.

I have always found the phrase “popcorn movie” to be perplexing.  Why are certain movies referred to as “popcorn movies”?  It seems as though the phrase has come to mean big, massive-budget, mostly brainless summer-blockbuster-type films.  I think the people who came up with the name had this idea:  People who go to these movies shut off their brain for two hours.  And people who shut off their brains eat popcorn.  Ergo, people who go to these movies eat more popcorn.  This must be the path of the logic that goes into the name “popcorn movies”.

But then you have to think - why do people who turn off their brains eat more popcorn?  Does temporary stupidity cause you to want popcorn?  And perhaps it does.  After all, nothing in the world gets a bigger price markup than movie popcorn.  It costs the movie theatre about 10 cents to make a large bag of popcorn, which they sell for seven dollars.  That is a 7,000% markup.  Does anything else get marked up that much?  Other than movie theatre soda and cotton candy?  Yes.  Summer blockbuster movies.  Let’s take, for example, this year’s Iron Man.  The screenplay for this movie might have cost an awful lot - say, $500,000.00?  Maybe.  Who knows, I couldn’t find out how much Jeff Vintar and Stan Lee were paid, or how much Jeffrey Caine was paid for the re-write.  So I guessed high.  And then the budget for the movie is $135,000,000.00.  That is a markup of 27,000%.  Even more than popcorn!  And that is the standard here.  For the most part, summer blockbusters are very thin on script and very large on effects and action and so forth.

And some are even good.  Really, it’s what a director and cast do with a script that makes the movie.  But this markup, I believe, is the real reason these movies are referred to as “popcorn movies”.  Ten cents worth of story and seven dollars worth of flash.  And as the movies move on into sequel after sequel, the markup gets higher and higher.  You might shut your brain off when The Incredible Hulk starts this summer.  You will then go to purchase popcorn, now that your brain is off.  But next year, when you go to the theatre to watch The Incredible Hulk Goes To Anger Management, you may have to shut your brain off before you buy your 15 dollar movie ticket.  And three summers from now when you attend The Incredible Hulk’s Long Slow Painful Stay In Rehab, you may have to shut off the ol’ brain before even watching the trailers.  Of course, by then, movie tickets will be thirty bucks and popcorn will be forty-eight dollars.

The Canadian Conservative government has decided that they are the best judges of art and proper taste.  They are trying to pass a bill called “C10″, a bill that would give them the power to approve or deny tax credits for Canadian artists depending on how they, the government, through a committee, saw that art.  Federal Heritage minister Josee Verner says: 

“We are far from censorship here. We are just putting forward an intention from our government and (from) the former Liberal government just to make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers’ money won’t fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that.”

The change to the Income Tax Act (Bill C-10) would allow Verner, or a government committee, to deny tax credits to productions deemed offensive and “contrary to public policy.” Members of the Canadian film and television industry have criticized the possible amendment for threatening to deplete Canadian production by casting doubt over its financing.  But although that is the immediate concern, in the long run it could be the least of their worries.  Famous Canadian actors and film makers like Sarah Polley have spoken out against this bill because of censorship.  And although Verner may well believe what she says (or maybe not - she is, after all, a politician), there is something amiss here.  This is a government who under Stephen Harper has stated, almost implicitly, their desire to control the media.  They have been closed-mouth in dealing with the media to such a degree that most Canadians don’t really know their policies on anything.  Which, in effect, is an attempt to censor that media.  So if you are willing to practice indirect censorship with newspapers, what is to stop you from practicing direct censorship once the ability falls into your hands.  And if C10 passes, that ability will be squarely within the power of the Tories.

Now, of course you say - I don’t want my tax dollars going toward child pornography or extreme violence!  And of course, you are right.  But when has this been an issue before?  When has a film director approached the government, hat in hand, asking for a grant so he can make his blood-and-guts child porn epic?  And when has he been approved for this grant?  It has never happened.  So why pass a bill to prevent something that has never happened from happening, unless it is the first step toward censorship?  And although it may irritate us that something like the remake of Prom Night gets a tax break in Canada, preventing that isn’t what the bill is designed to do.  The definition of “offensive material” and “material that is contrary to public policy” seems deliberately vague.  What does that mean, really?  Well, the problem is that it could mean anything.  And it won’t prevent making movies that are lousy, but rather those that are edgy and interesting and perhaps designed to provoke.

The latest example is the movie “Young People F***ing”, a movie which caused a lot of controversy when some prominent Conservative employees were offered free tickets to the screening, resulting in at least one firing.  Can you imagine the Conservatives firing someone because they accepted a free ticket to an advance screening of Indiana Jones?  This is why the whole thing smacks of censorship.  The reason these tax breaks for Canadian art exist is that it is in the best interests of Canada to support our homegrown talent.  (It’s also one of the reasons Graham Greene and Gordon Pinsent still get work.)  But this bill will be counter-productive in a big way.  Not only is it a slippery slope toward the government telling us Canadians what we can and can’t watch, and what is suitable for us, but it will also drive film makers out of Canada.

One of the scariest parts of this bill is the part that says the tax credits for these projects, if they are deemed offensive by these arbitrarily defined guidelines, will be pulled after the projects are completed.  That means if a Canadian film maker wants to push boundaries, and make something daring and provocative, he or she must wait until the project is done to see if the rug will be pulled out from under them.  Sure, you’ve made something artistic, but this committee says it’s “contrary to public policy”, whatever that means, and they take from you the money you needed to get this film done in the first place.  So now, you can never make a film again, because you are massively in debt.  And what kind of bank will finance a loan for a project which may well make it to completion and then have everything taken away, to the point where it can no longer be distributed or have the capacity to make any money?

The government should support homegrown artists and talent.  But they should not dictate how.  This would be like the City of Ottawa cutting an ownership group a tax break so they can bring the CFL back to Ottawa.  The new football team comes in, revitalizes a community, brings in great revenue, is run exceptionally well, and generates money for the city.  More money than they would have made through the taxes they waived.  And then, three years in, as the new team is about to embark on it’s first playoff run, the city all of a sudden reverses it’s decision on that tax break, demands the team pay four million dollars in taxes immediately, and basically forces them out of the league.  (A stretch? - I don’t know, it IS Ottawa City Council.)  And why?  Because they didn’t sign Jason Clermont when they had the chance, and they benched Damon Allen down the stretch.  Or maybe because your star linebacker was caught drunk driving.  Or some such thing - By the way, I assume if Ottawa ever has another CFL team, Damon Allen will come out of retirement to be the QB at the age of 57. 

OK, football digressions aside, the point here is that there are already controls in place to prevent truly offensive and heinous movies and TV shows from being made with the help of Canadian tax dollars.  We will not, ever, as taxpayers, be on the hook for child porn.  There is no reason for this bill except to exert one more facet of government control over Canadians.  And if it causes Canadian artists to censor themselves for fear of losing funding, or worse, to be ruined when everything is taken away, or worst of all, leave Canada completely to ply their trade in another country without such dangerous policies, then we, as Canadians, have all lost.

Sydney Pollack, one of the great directors in movie history, passed away yesterday from cancer at the age of 73.  Also a great producer and actor, you can see him on the big screen right now performing in Made of Honor and on DVD giving a fantastic performance in Michael Clayton.  Cynical Cinema pays tribute to Sydney Pollack with a list of his must-watch films.

 1.  The Interpreter (2005) - Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman both give exemplary performances in this espionnage story about a U.N. interpreter (Kidman) who overhears an assassination plot.  The must-see moment:  The scene on the bus, when many of the characters, including a terrorist bomber, come together on the same bus at the same time.  One of the most tense (and intense) moments in recent cinema, worthy of Hitchcock.  Pollack produced and directed this terrific movie.

2.  The Firm (1993) - Say what you will about Tom Cruise (and I will agree with much of what you say), this is one of his finest films, and one of the only decent John Grisham book adaptations.  Also great in this movie are Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ed Harris, Gary Busey and of course Gene Hackman.  That scene between Hackman and Tripplehorn near the end is great.  Pollack produced and directed.

3.  Out of Africa (1985) - Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, both close to their best, in a sweeping epic romance.  Pollack won Best Director for this one, and it also took Best Pictuer honours, among the 11 Oscars for which it was nominated.  David Watkin aids Pollack considerably here with some of the best cinematography you will ever see in a film.

4.  Three Days of the Condor (1975) - Pollack directs this political espionnage thriller which opens with one of the most memorable film openings of all time, as Robert Redford, a CIA operative, returns from lunch to find his entire office assassinated.  An intensely political film, Three Days of the Condor took on the CIA, Watergate, the press and the Pentagon Papers.  Often overlooked, but still a great film.

5.  Jeremiah Johnston (1972) - Robert Redford again, in this Pollack-directed wilderness western.  Many comparisons have been made between this and Dances With Wolves,as Redford is a man alone in the wilderness, befriending the native people in the area, until a horrific final act sees him exact brutal vengeance against the same people, leading to a final moment of questionable redemption.  A magnificent movie.

6.  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) - The movie that put Pollack on the map, he wrote, directed and produced this tale of a bizarre dance marathon gone awry.  Jane Fonda also found her star on the rise with the film, as it put her on the map as an actress as well.  She is terrific as Gloria, a woman who finds the worst in her being brought out by the prospect of $1,500.00 in prize money in this two-month-plus dance marathon.  Strange, but pretty darn good.  Gig Young is terrific too as Rocky, the irritating emcee of the contest.  This was nominated for nine Oscars.

7.  The Way We Were (1973) - More Redford, this time with Barbra Streisand.  Cynical Cinema must admit that this is one we haven’t seen, but from all accounts it is an all-time classic.  Streisand won a Best Actress Oscar.

8.  Tootsie (1982) - Pollack’s tour de force, and his best movie.  Dustin Hoffman gives yet another defining performance as a struggling actor who finds that the best roles are being given to women, and so he dresses up as one in order to land a dream role.  Funny, sharp, and incredibly perceptive, Tootsie was one of the first, and still the best, of it’s kind.  Men dressing up like women for laughs is now commonplace, but usually in movies like Big Momma’s House and Norbit.  Which indicates how great Pollack had to be to prevent this movie from falling into that sinkhole.  Only Mrs. Doubtbfire since then has even come close to capturing the tone and the intelligence of this film.

 Sydney Pollack was the Scotty Bowman of the film world.  Always working with a star-studded cast, just as Bowman always worked with star-studded teams.  And the knock on Bowman has always been that anyone could win with those players.  In movies, not anyone can craft a great movie simply by casting great actors.  Pollack was a genius in that he not only got the best out of those actors, he made sure that they had something to do that could elevate the films from decent to memorable to classic.  On top of that, he was a fantastic actor as well - just look at his incredible performance in last year’s Michael Clayton.  He will be missed.

It has been brought to my attention by a couple of people today that this website can be daunting at first glance.  That is because I have limited computer skills and I don’t know how to make it any easier.  In order to comment on a review, you have to click on the “no comments” link on the bottom.  Or the “1 comment” or “2 comments” or whatever it may be.  Because there is apparently a lot of spam out there, you have to write a word you see in a box next to the comment section.  Although I have that spam filter going, I still somehow get thirty spam messages a day, so I have to approve them.  Your comment will appear within a day of you making it, and I will not refuse to approve any comments.  Even the comments on the Family Ties review that are mean to MacGyver.  They hurt my feelings, and, I’m sure, those of Richard Dean Anderson, but I put ‘em up anyway.  On the right, the audio reviews can be played in mp3 form.  This is the stuff you may have heard on the air, and the stuff you would have heard on the air had it been run.  This is divided into sections alphabetically, and that portion contains all the reviews that are available.  Further sections are as follows:

New Releases - All the releases for the current week that have been reviewed, as well as the previous three weeks.

Movies to watch before you die - Self-explanatory.  Watch all these movies.  Before you die.

Coming up in CHEZ nation - Reviews of the DVDs being given away in CHEZ nation this week, and the days they are available.  So you can decide whether or not you are willing to spend those hard-earned points.  Not all the DVDs that are available in CHEZ nation will be reviewed, because I am not always allowed a copy to see before it is available for a giveaway.

Movies on The Movie Network - I just added this one today.  This is all the movies playing on TMN and MPix for this month that have been reviewed.  Also the movies that will be premiering next month are listed at the top.  Many people tell me that they don’t rent movies and they don’t go to movies, they just pick the ones that are on TV already.  So I have decided to add this section to hopefully help a bit.

Interviews - Exclusive Cynical Cinema interviews with various figures in the film world.  Currently, that consists of just one, with Sharkwater director Rob Stewart.  But hopefully there will be more soon, when I get the time.  And when I can convince people to talk to me.

OK, that’s it.  Oh, one more thing.  At the bottom of this particular post, you will see something that says “Administrative stuff”.  If you click on it, you will see a list of all the administrative stuff that has been posted on this website.  When you see these little places to click at the bottom of the review, the same thing applies.  If there is one that says “drama”, you will be shown a list of all dramas that have been reviewed by Cynical Cinema.  If you click on “garbage”, you will be re-directed to a list of all the garbage.  The fact that the “garbage” tag so often coincides with the “Steven Seagal” tag is just that.  A coincidence.  Don’t read too much into it.