With Roger Ebert Gone, The Most Influential Movie Critic Today Is: Bosley Crowther

By Lars Trodson

There were four movie reviewers I paid attention to in the 1970s and 80s: Michael Janusonis, because he wrote for my local paper, the Providence Journal; Pauline Kael of The New Yorker and Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. I think the other famous movie reviewers of the time were Gene Shalit and Judith Crist, but they were on a much, much lesser scale than those other four – at least to me. Now there are a million movie reviewers and nobody knows who they are. This may have more to do with the state of movies than the quality of the writing — movies are no longer at the center of our cultural zeitgeist.  Roger Ebert had been around long enough to see the ebb and flow of cinema’s significance, and he, in the end, may have had more influence on American culture than do the actual movies themselves.

It didn't start out that way. Ebert was a self-taught scholar of film, and he wrote abut film with an encyclopedic knowledge of what had come before. He knew his history, and he knew about the people who made the movies.

He was about the last critic of any significance to have actually seen the movies made by the lions of the new cinema when they were first released – Coppola, Scorcese, Woody Allen, Brian DePalma, Speilberg, Monte Hellman and others, as well as European filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertollucci, Truffaut, and Goddard.

He was also working when some of the old masters were still making films: John Huston, Billy Wilder, Kurosawa were busy even in the last stages of their careers. Hell, even Orson Welles was trying to get movies made in the 1970s and 80s.

Now it’s all franchises and tentpoles and we hear about them through fresh-faced kids on the internet who gush breathlessly about them in more of a marketing way than a critical way. This is what is passing for criticism now: marketing ploys.

“The Hunger Games” may be hugely popular, but does anybody remember what was written about it? Can anyone cite a review of “Skyfall” that was referenced or had an impact on how anyone felt about the movie.? Not even the movie critics from The New York Times swayed anybody’s mind on that front. Critics have lost their bite and, in a way, their purpose.

With Ebert now gone, I think the most influential critic today is someone who has long faded in the past, but whose career arc sends chills through anyone reviewing movies on the current scene. That’s Bosley Crowther, the late, lamented reviewer of the Times. Crowther was famously let go from his job after missing the boat on “Bonnie & Clyde” in 1967. He didn't  like it, and the paper thought he was out of touch. It is his ghost that hovers over everyone now, because no one wants to seem past their prime.

Ebert was hired right at the same time Crowther got the boot – and he probably got his job at the Chicago Sun-Times because of his age: Ebert was generationally, at 24, more attuned to what was going on with the young filmmakers than the generation of reviewers that had grown up on John Wayne and John Ford.

Today, when I read the reviews of older white men praising Lena Dunham’s “Girls”, a show I do not get and am probably not supposed to get, you can feel the presence of Crowther in the room. There’s a desperation to stay relevant: I’m not an old white guy! I like “Girls”! When I read the reviews of Peter Travers in Rolling Stone and see how coarse his language has become, I hear Crowther, too. Travers is saying: I can use the language of the young people! Don’t fire me yet!

The result of all this is that you may get a positive review of a movie that the critic actually did not like. Because to say that you didn't like one of the “Twilight” movies is to scream out that you may be past your prime.

Roger Ebert, God bless him, lived a good span, saw many things, and did many interesting things in his life. He seemed to have found love in both his personal life and in his profession. In the end, when he embraced his cancer, he transcended from being someone merely famous to someone approaching heroic.

But with his passing, you may have truly seen the last of any movie critic that mattered, who helped define the movies and how you felt about them. But old Bosley Crowther will live on, hovering over every movie reviewer writing today who wants to stay in the game.

No More Stunt Acting, Please

By Lars Trodson

One of the problems mainstream movies have today is that they often have the production values of an old-style TV movie. I’m talking about straight ahead dramas or comedies  –  not movies that require extraterrestrial landscapes or large-scale detonations. I was reminded of this when I watched “Hope Springs.”

This is a film with two legitimate movie stars and one very popular actor trying to become one: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell. But it looks like it was shot on the back lot of an old studio. There are hardly any other people in the film besides the stars (one very short scene with Elizabeth Shue notwithstanding) and the entire enterprise looks decidedly unlived in.

The reason I bring this up is because the production values here almost  –  I say almost, but not quite  –  diminish the accomplishments of the two stars. Streep and Jones contribute two master performances in what otherwise looks like the setting for a Brady Bunch TV movie. Since there’s no real-ness to the surroundings – nothing that actually looks or feels or moves like the real world behind them – you can almost miss the fact that Streep and Jones are just oozing life. These are two remarkable performances, but because they’re trapped in this airless environment, you might not realize that.

This movie is supposed to take place in Nebraska and Maine. We never see the landscape in either locale, so it could be anywhere, really. The house interiors, the office interiors, the restaurant interiors and the street exteriors all look like sitcom sets. It all looks like stock photography. These movies are to the real world that McMansions are to real houses.

But in “Hope Springs” – a decidedly bland title, to boot – there are two real people walking through it.

It’s getting redundant for Meryl Streep to get nominated for an Oscar,so in all likelihood she will be passed over next year. That would be a shame. She won her third trophy this year for participating in what I have begun to call “stunt acting” – that is, big actors playing big showy roles based on real people. (Streep won for playing Margaret Thatcher.) The Academy – as I’ve noted in this space before – has become overly fond of handing out Oscars to people who do an excellent job at mimicry. Look at Jamie Foxx or Cate Blanchette or Forrest Whitaker or Philip Seymour Hoffman or Helen Mirren or Sean Penn. These are just a few of the people who have won Hollywood’s biggest award for playing real people. (The list of people nominated for real-life roles is even longer.)

As I said, this is a recent trend. So the idea that Jones and Streep have created two whole people that did not exist before is a remarkable achievement – and it’s even more astonishing given just how familiar these two people are to audiences.

Streep has been a movie star for more than 30 years. She’s as familiar as anyone who has ever been in the movies. And yet here she is, in “Hope Springs”, looking, dare I say it, a little dowdy. She’s quiet, reserved, repressed, unhappy. She walks without grace. Her look and her voice are halting (she speaks in a very quiet mid-western voice.) How can it be that 20 minutes into the movie you are no longer watching Meryl Streep but rather looking at a woman who is trying to figure out her life? Her name is Kay.

Tommy Lee Jones plays her husband Arnold – or Arnie – and he’s a grump. It doesn’t hurt that as Jones has aged he looks more and more like a Muppet, but his face is real and lived-in. When he says little grumpy things that makes his wife laugh you can see what attracted them to each other more than 30 years ago. And the frustration he feels when being asked sensitive questions by their couples therapist, Dr. Feld (Carell), feels unforced. The scene in the movie theater where they try to revive their moribund sex life focuses primarily on Jones’ face, and his acting here alone should be preserved under glass. It’s that classic. It’s amazing, really.

I suppose that many people will feel as though there isn’t enough here to warrant Best Actor nods from the Academy, but I think the emotions they portray have grandeur and scope. The emotions feel very real to me in “Hope Springs”, even if their surroundings do not.

Sexually Confused Cop Triumphs Over Megalomaniacal Newspaper Tycoon

By Lars Trodson

There's been a lot of chatter about "Citizen Kane" being knocked off the No. 1 perch in Sight & Sound's poll of the best movies ever made, a survey the British-based magazine publishes just once a decade.

"Kane" had held the top position for 40 years, unrivaled, but this year Sight & Sound asked a total of 846 critics to arrive at their verdict, a much wider net cast than ever before. While I don't know the demographics, I suspect the end result of this year's poll has as much to do with a lower age of the average reviewer as it does with the films themselves.

Let's face it: a lot of the things in Orson Welles' first film are hopelessly out of date. The film is in black and white. It's about a newspaper tycoon. Newspapers!  And this is a film decidedly lacking in any kind of sex. Oh, sure, Charles Foster Kane gets himself a mistress and even puts her up in a fancy apartment. But there is nothing sexy about Kane - either the man or the movie.

"Vertigo", on the other hand! Wow! The only thing it has on its mind is sex! "Vertigo" -- for all its flaws -- just seems more modern. Charles Foster Kane exhibits old fashioned fits of jealousy. He may even have a screw loose. But James Stewart's Scotty Ferguson is a real head case, as they would have said back in San Francisco in 1958. Man, he's gone.

But what are the virtues and drawbacks of each film?

The Mad Men Of Wall Street Get Wobblier

By Lars Trodson

The 17 Emmy nominations given to “Mad Men” for it’s fifth season is a gift from the television gods. This is a show that has only been around for five short seasons (13 episodes a year) and it derailed almost completely in the middle of the fourth season after a wobbly third. We won’t go into the fifth season here because a lot of you are probably waiting to see it on DVD. I hope the Emmy nods gives a kick to the writers, because they need it.

The second half of the 1960s was bad enough without these people ruining it all over again.

This is not, by the way, a good show to watch on DVD. There’s too much human rot and soullessness to take in all at once. Back-to-back viewings (as I’ve done) also highlight the shows flaws, which primarily have to do with a lack of definition for any of the main characters and a grave inconsistency in tone.

I know, I know. You’re going to tell me that Don Draper has no character, that even he doesn’t know who he is. Maybe so, but the scene in which a prostitute slaps him during sex came so far out of left field it was almost laughable. What were we supposed to think? That Draper hates himself? Well, almost everything written about his character before showed that he was in fact quite self-satisfied -- even self-loving. This was an act of desperation by a writer that didn’t know where to go. I don’t think old Don has been slapped since.

Who is Peggy Olson anyway? A woman wrestling with her religion, or is she a bohemian wild child who’s not afraid to strip in front of a co-worker whom she obviously dislikes? In real life we can be many things, of course, but the problem here is that this is fiction. We need a center, and Peggy has no center. One minute she’s taking charge, and the next she’s quivering in the corner. Or she’s sleeping with a guy from the bar, or with Duck. That nascent hippy party that she went to in the village was so weirdly staged that it didn’t look too much different than anything Maynard G. Krebs might have gone to.

The only two characters that seemed remotely made of flesh and bone were Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway Harris. But the writers committed an act of murder on Roger Sterling in the fourth season that was so awful that it should go down in the annals of character butchery. Roger is certainly a cad, he’s worse than that. He’s also a drunk. But he also seemed fearless. So when the writers had him hide out in a hotel after the Lucky Strike account dropped him you actually didn’t feel bad for Roger Sterling, you felt bad for the actor, the great John Slattery, who had to have known he was being knifed in the front.

Just as Roger is going through his paroxysms of self-doubt, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) all of sudden decides to sop drinking and become a philosopher. He’s writing down his thoughts in a notebook! Like an artist in a cold garret, punishing himself for his dream.

Nothing about Don Draper seems terribly deep, and I’m afraid that this isn’t helped by the fact that Hamm is an actor of modest talent. I’m being kind. He has about two expressions, one of which is pulling his bottom lip inward as though he’s about to cry. Don Draper musing is not something I want to spend a lot of time listening to.

Thank God for Christina Hendricks, and I don’t mean that in a cheap way. She’s managed to hold on to her dignity, even after marrying that idiot. In the episode where the management team of Sterling Cooper decides to break off on its own, Joan hadn’t been around for a while. When the larcenists realize they don’t know where anything in the office is located, Roger calls Joan.

A few moments later, Joan comes swinging into the office. I actually cheered. But by then I knew the love affair was almost over.

Montgomery Clift: Twelve Minutes of Genius

By Lars Trodson

Montgomery Clift was nominated for four Oscars in a career where he made just 17 films. He didn’t win one. He was up for one Academy Award in what is perhaps his greatest role, as Robert E. Lee Prewitt in “From Here To Eternity”, but he lost out to William Holden in “Stalag 17.” If you have to lose, it might as well be for a good reason, and it’s hard to argue with how the voters went that year.

Clift is not really remembered today. He made too few movies, most of them are melodramatic and in black and white. A disfiguring car accident in 1956 left him a broken man. He was also a tortured gay man in 1950s Hollywood.  Nothing, not even good art, can really atone for a life that seems so unbearable. On screen, Clift always seems a little sad, a little lost. He looks frail, and his voice halts, and his eyes always seem skittish, as though he is casing out the landscape for demons.

He was, in his youth, uncommonly handsome, and his female costars always said that they had a desire to protect him, and to keep him out of harm’s way. His great friend was Elizabeth Taylor, and even her formidable personality and will to live could not ultimately stop Clift from destroying himself.

His last two movies, the John Huston-directed “Freud”, and the completely forgotten “The Defector”, were not memorable or well-received. But, even in his shattered state, Clift had one last moment of greatness.

In “Judgment At Nuremberg” (1961), he played a mentally challenged young man named Rudolph Petersen, a survivor of the concentration camps, who was sterilized by Nazi doctors. The movie is about one of the trials that were held after the war, in Germany, to prosecute Third Reich officials for war crimes.

Clift is on the witness stand, and it’s very hard to separate his performance from reality. He is sweating, and his hands are shaking. He seems unable to sit still. His arms grip the sides of the witness block, as though he is physically trying to hold himself together. His searching eyes seem totally hollowed out, white and frightened. He is fairly calm through the questioning by Widmark, who in this one scene is warm, and caring and gentle. But then the German defense lawyer, played by Maximillian Schell (in an Oscar winning performance) and Clift flails against the questioning with a haunting, plaintive voice about what has happened to him. His arms wave about. Even though he is talking about the sterilization, one can’t wonder if Clift is raging about the car accident that completely changed his life.

“Since that day I am half of what I have ever been,” he shouts at the German defense attorney.

And then he takes out a picture of his mother, who the Nazis claimed was feeble minded and the reason for his sterilization, and he holds the picture forth, at Schell, at the judge (played by Spencer Tracy), at the American prosecuting attorney (played by Richard Widmark), and all the actors seem gentle then, almost overwhelmed at the site of this actor, putting forth everything he's got even though that's not very much.

Clift, in this scene, is almost noble - something that's very rare for any actor to achieve, in almost any role. But here he is playing a small man, a small, helpless man, and all he is asking for is a little dignity, a little humanity, a little compassion - he wanted these things, which shouldn't be so hard to come by. The scene is almost unendurably poignant, made even more so by the reactions of the other actors in the scene.

Clift was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role, and he lost out, for the last time, to George Chakiris from "West Side Story."

Montgomery Clift died, at the age of 45, in 1966. Supposedly he was found lying on his bed, and both of his hands were clenched into fists.

What Happened to "Last Tango In Paris"?

By Lars Trodson

Among the cluster of truly memorable, dynamic and stylistically innovative films released in 1971-72 -- including "Straw Dogs", "The French Connection", "A Clockwork Orange", "The Godfather", "SweetSweetback's Bad Assss Song",  "Carnal Knowledge" and "Shaft" -- none has reached the age of 40 as sadly as "Last Tango In Paris."

It's bad for almost any film to reach middle age. Time is the enemy of most art, but this movie seems particularly wounded and spent. It's images, more than most films, have gotten encrusted by true events, and its style has curdled because of changing attitudes, changing tastes, and because the movie has had more than its share of bad luck.

Part of that bad luck comes in the form of what initially may have seen like a blessing. It's the only movie -- the only one -- that has a print review almost as famous as the movie itself. The review, of course, was written by Pauline Kael, who at the time reigned not only over The New Yorker, but over all other film reviewers.

And there are the stars, Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. Schneider never came close to the notoriety she received from "Last Tango", and for Brando it was the last gasp of greatness. After that, he retreated into cameos and pieces of fluff - which no one can blame him for. He was one artist who had given enough, and it would have been churlish to ask for more. But he also suffered through some devastating personal tragedies at the end of his life. The movie's director, Bernardo Bertolucci, seems almost like the forgotten man now.

"The movie breakthrough has finally come," Kael famously proclaimed on Oct. 28, 1972. The review was reprinted in other publications sometimes in its entirety. When the movie was released it was given an 'X" rating (immediately appropriated by the porn industry, which morphed it into 'XXX.")

Five Times Nick Nolte Was Screwed Out Of An Oscar Nomination

By Lars Trodson

Nick Nolte has been nominated for an Oscar three times, which is as good a reason as any to not judge a career based on sanctioned industry accolades (Paul Newman, God bless him, was nominated nine times!). Nolte was most recently nominated for a movie called "Warrior", which I don't know anything about. I'm not even sure it played up in my neck of the woods.

His Oscar nods came for "The Prince Of Tides" (1991), "Affliction" (1997) and the aforementioned "Warrior" (for Best Supporting Actor, 2011).

Here's five films he should have been nominated for, and at least one for which he should have taken home the prize.

New York Stories, 1989, segment directed by Martin Scorcese. It's extremely hard for actors to do certain things on film, and one of them is to come across as a technically adept painter. In this one, Nolte plays an artist, tagged as a genius, named Lionel Dobie. He moves around the canvas like a true painter, and he's also, of course, utterly convincing as a tortured genius.

Q & A, 1990, directed by Sidney Lumet. Notle plays a psychotic, repressed NYC cop in this underrated, intriguing thriller. Very strange role for Nolte, who is one of the most chameleon-like actors ever. His physique seems to change with certain roles, and in this one he's thick, with slicked-back black hair.

The Thin Red Line, 1998, Terrence Malick. This is the one Nolte should have bagged the big prize for (Best Supporting Actor). Nolte plays Lt. Col. Gordon Tall, and if there ever was a picture of frustrated ambition this is it. In the scene where he's trying to convince his company commander, Capt. Staros (Elias Koteas) to charge up the hill (the film takes place on Gaudalcanal), and his order is refused, Nolte rubs his head and his voice is almost strangled with emotion. It's a beautifully sustained performance, and one that was improbably overlooked by members of the Academy.

The Good Thief, 2003, Neil Jordan. Nolte takes the baroque lines of this compelling little movie and gives them a rhythm all his own. All of a sudden he's not someone from Oklahoma (Nolte was born there), but a hybrid European. He plays a drug-addicted thief, Bob Montagnet, who's got some troubles. This is more of a tone poem than anything
else, and Nolte is its warm heart.

Paris, Je' taime, 2006, segment "Parc Monceau" directed by Alfonso Cuaron. A small gem. Nolte gives a humane, plaintive performance in a short film that has a lovely little twist.