Watching this film is like watching a steam-powered wooden vibrator. Sure it was cool 100 years ago, but for fuck sake, the splinters! (these things are real btw. They were called “hysteria machines”)

Anyway. This film came out in 1925, so not quite 100 years ago, but boy does it feel old, even older than the other famous Chaplin flicks. I think Chaplin wanted to make a more pensive slow boil of a comedy, which I’m sure seemed really hip back then, but in 2012 it is actually the most boring thing I’ve ever seen.

Why is this the best?

1. Black Comedy

In some ways, The Gold Rush is one of the earliest black comedies. It’s a comedy where a guy dies at the 2 minute mark. There’s a double homicide at 14 minutes (of two police men), then another death at the 25 minute mark. A bulk of the movie tries finding the humor in starving to death. There’s a wonderful scene where Chaplin tries desperately not to be collateral damage in a fight over a shotgun. And that’s not even the depressing part. The movie’s second act is mostly Chaplin having his heart broken. 

2. Special Effects

It can’t really be overlooked that, for the time, the effects in this film were unheard of. The film features a pretty awesome rocking house scene that was surely the “Inception Hallway” of 1925, which now looks a lot like “Babies first after effects project.” Though, I’m quite sure I have no idea how they did it. But then again, I’m not sure how the steam powered dildo machine works either. Doesn’t make me want to use it.

In conclusion, I have a suggestion to make. This film is available, streaming, on Netflix. If you find yourself overcome with the desire to be more cultured and watch this film, do yourself a favor: turn off the audio (unless you really like that ragtime song so much you’d like to hear it seven billion times). Make your own soundtrack playlist. I would suggest “Call your Girlfriend” by Robyn and “Submerged in Boiling Flesh” by Cannibal Corpse for starters, but to each their own I guess. 

And now, without further adieu…

“The Hysteria Machine”

I’m sure you’re all dying to hear about The Gold Rush, but instead I’ve written you  a very true story about my experiences as a robot. Enjoy!

http://willingable.blogspot.com/

While I’m on the subject of dissecting various “Best of” lists I recently wrote an article for another blog about Television. Check it out.

http://punkeinfilm.blogspot.com/2012/03/in-defense-of-procedural.html

Next up: Charlie Chaplin puts his shoe in his mouth, or as I like to call it, “The Mitt Romney.” Oooo topical…

I was born in Nashville Tennessee. That being said, I know almost nothing about it. The one thing I do remember is that everyone, from your waitress to your plummer, had a demo tape in their back pocket. They were ready to sing to you on the spot. They were aching for stardom. It was all very sad.

I guess Altman saw this and found it fascinating because he decided to hire a writer and send her down to Nashville to write him a script about the place. When she came back with a completed product, Altman hired a bunch of actors, threw out the script and had them all just sort of make up their lines on the spot, in typical Altman fashion. The result was a sweeping and startlingly mean un-movie about a strange city where everyone thinks they should be famous. 

Why is This the Best?

1. Parody Without Celebration

There is a long history in this country of parody or ridicule as a means of celebration. The best example (though certainly not the only one) would be the Comedy Central Roast. At these events the comedy community brings in revered icons and celebrates them the only way they know how to, by making fun of them. But a roast is at its core, just that. Making fun. It’s sometimes honest, sometimes a little hurtful, but for the most part it’s all in good fun. Nashville is not in good fun. Nashville is not mocking to celebrate. It is cruel and brutal. It’s funny, but not in a friendly way. It doesn’t want you to like Nashville Tennessee. It wants you to see it, as it is, in all its ridiculousness. 

2. Everyone Sucks at Singing

At first I thought that it was simply my general dislike of country music that made each of the six thousand musical numbers in this movie so hard to watch, but it turns out they purposely made everything sound kind of terrible. Apparently the actors wrote all the songs that appear in Nashville, and in keeping with the mood of the piece wrote them as underhanded parodies of country music in general. But what makes these songs brilliant is how they are only just barely a parody. None of them are overt enough for an SNL sketch. None of them are playful or self deprecating. They are just awful enough to be a jab at country music without being a celebration of country music. 

3. Fame

Fame is the focus of much of this movie, and in the same way that Altman mercilessly skewers country music, he skewers fame just the same. The fact is that a lot of truly awful things happen in this movie. And that’s before someone gets shot. Most of the terrible things that people do to each other and themselves happen because of a desire for fame. The naive waitress who winds up stripping or the emotionally abusive husband or the bottom feeding BBC reporter (who may not actually be a reporter). Everyone wants to be a star and at the end of the day they are all worse for it. They are sad and they are lonely and they are only going to get more sad and more lonely. 

4. Fame, Part 2: Politics

Altman is brilliant in the way he frames politics in this film. From the loud speaker on the bus, shouting rhetoric until the rhetoric becomes white noise, to the political rally at the end. Every step of the way he reminds us that politics is just another avenue of pursuing fame. His fictional politician’s ideas of removing the lawyers from congress seems ridiculous, surely, but is not so far from the kind of rhetoric we actually get in elections. Being that there’s a primary going on right now, I’m sure you’ve seem candidates rolling up their sleeves and telling everyone they’re not like those elite snobs in Washington and how they’re just ‘one of the guys’. It’s fame mongering. It’s a blatant ploy which demonstrates that politics isn’t about your ability to get something done. It’s about your ability to be well-liked.

5. Fame, Part 3: Murder

In 1980, right after John Lennon was killed, Altman was called by a reporter wondering if Altman “felt responsible” for the killing because in his film he portrayed the assassination of a politically affiliated music star. When I first heard this, I was floored by the stupidity. I actually felt a bit faint. Like, I needed to sit down for a moment and catch my breath. I was winded by how unbelievably dumb this question was. But, thankfully, Altman had some interesting things to say about all this. One of his reactions to this absurd question was that an assassination is always about fame. Killing a star is a way of claiming stardom for yourself. Making yourself known. There is certainly a cult of the celebrity killer. There is a weird sort of celebrity market for it. And while Nashville may seem oddly prescient, it really isn’t. Altman was simply commenting on how things were. He was as predictive as he was observant.  

In conclusion, if you like easy blows at obviously bad people, go watch Network. If you like equal part parody and celebration, I have some great episodes or South Park to recommend. Nashville is a movie for those of us that like watching the grape lady howl in totally amusing pain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMS0O3kknvk

Nashville is for those of us who want to laugh at, not with you.

It’s hard for me to say anything about this film I didn’t already say about A Night at the Opera. It’s a Marx Brothers Film. While many critics have spent years analyzing the political content of the film, the fact remains that at its core, it’s just four Jewish guys having a laugh. And boy do they. I would never call this film the best Marx Brother’s film. It’s basically plot-less and spends no effort at all making any case to root for the main characters. It winds up descending into a meaningless hodgepodge of sight gags, with no real conclusion to speak of. But in Duck Soup’s defense, it is the most Marx brothers movie of them all.

Why is this the most?

1. Spit Fire Wit

One advantage of having no real plot to muck up the works is that it speeds up the time until Groucho Marx takes the floor and begins tearing up the place (though not literally, that will come later). While it is awkward to watch as no one seems to take much notice of the complete reaming that he dishes out, it is also gloriously fun to watch. He proceeds to insult a widow’s dead husband, then propose to her, insight a national crisis and call a dancer a cow, all within about 3 minutes, and without any motivation. While he’s amusing as hell, he’s also kind of terrifying in his complete disregard for other people’s emotions. 

Example:

Groucho: Not that I care, but where is your husband?

Teasdale: Why, he’s dead.

Groucho: I bet he’s just using that as an excuse.

Teasdale: I was with him ‘til the very end.

Groucho: No wonder he passed away.

And here’s her reaction to that statement.

You’d never know he just said, literally, the most insulting thing ever.

See, this is the inherent problem with Duck Soup (I was planning on waiting until the end to talk about this, but I’m too impatient). The movie is so crammed full of jokes and gags that there’s hardly any time for anyone to react. Now, I’m not saying I want Mrs. Teasdale to break down and fall into a deep grief coma at the seven-minute-mark, I’m just looking for a little more outrage or it really seems like no one’s listening to Groucho. And if no one’s listening, it doesn’t really matter. 

2. Italian Stereotyping

There’s a ton of it.

3: This Face

Set Face to 10.

4: Harpo Quasi Rape

Don’t piss this guy off or he will dry hump the shit out of your wife.

5: Slapstick

Honestly, the slapstick in this film is exhausting. They cut off people’s hair and clothing, play baseball at the drop of a cigar, fire off guns, glue things to eachother (I’m describing a single scene here). It gets to the point where I started feeling like somehow, The Marx Brothers are some biblical curse, like raining frogs, or rivers of blood. If they show up, the end is nigh.

In conclusion, if you’re the type of guy who drinks grain alcohol, this may be your film. Straight, distilled anarchy. 

Art and guilt tend to go hand in hand. Anyone who is smart, socially conscious and makes a butt load of money doing something as unproductive as pretending be someone else, or singing, or filming someone pretending to be someone else, or writing hateful things about people who film people pretending to be someone else has probably had the nagging feeling that they don’t deserve the amount of money they just made dicking around. And it’s possible at this point that the artist may decide he would like to diminish his guilt by using his powers of dicking around in some productive way that helps change things. Maybe he’ll make a movie about the holocaust, or possibly rape. Somehow, he will convince himself that be talking about shitty things he is in some way abating the shitty things happening, somewhere. He will have convinced himself that he deserves the money he makes by dressing in cool sunglasses and not looking at explosions and all will be right with the world. Or, if you are Preston Sturges, you will somehow convince yourself you deserve your money simply by arguing that what you’re doing has some inherent merit to it. I’m not sure he’s wrong.

So, Sullivan’s Travels came out in 1941 and is a result of the previously mentioned artist’s guilt. The film is about a director who makes escapist comedies, confronted with the idea that maybe he should be making socially conscious films about poverty and hardship. In the end he discovers that said impoverished people with hardships and misery would rather not see their own lives on screen and would much rather see escapist comedies.

Why is this the best?

1. Self awareness

As the film is sort of obviously about the director, Preston Sturges himself, it is relieving to see that the director had the clarity of mind to be aware of how silly his own project was from the get go. I’ll explain. When Chaplin decided to make Modern Times, his idea was akin to observational comedy. He decided he wanted to make people laugh at the very institutions they were slaves as some sort of artistic act of rebellion. On the other hand, Stuges opted to make people laugh at the very train of thought that lead him to make the film they were watching. His moral that making people laugh is a service enough and presenting the world as a cold dark place is never as useful is inevitable from the get go, but the journey there is so absurd and misguided it reads like an indictment. And indictment of himself.

2. Laughter

(also, having a killer Jamie Bamber look-alike)

So, I guess, how important is laughter? I mean, in the grand scheme of things, not in a cliché way, is there any merit in making people laugh with no ulterior motive whatsoever? I’m sure you have your own opinion on the matter and I won’t even bother trying to change your mind, but what I find interesting is whether or not the writer actually believes his own moral. Obviously the journey our hero makes leads the audience to the conclusion that movies should just be escapist joy machines and nothing else, yet the movie itself is not an escapist comedy. The film you are watching is quite grounded in social issues. It is satirical, absurd, and pointed. So what should we take from a film that makes a statement about what purpose movies should serve while, at the same time, not serving that purpose?

I don’t fucking know. Make up your own damn mind.

Before George Lucas was blowing up deathstars and using the force, but after he was escaping from fabulously minimalist underground dystopias, he was really into the 1960s. I consider this foray into nostalgia a set back in an otherwise creatively vibrant career (up until the late 80s that is). But apparently the AFI thinks differently. So now I have to talk about this. The movie was made in 1973 after Coppola dared Lucas to make a film that would have broad commercial appeal. Lucas, a former drag racer, thought he’d make a movie about the good old days when everyone cruised around in their cars all day and occasionally threatened to kill each other.

Why is this the best?

1. Nostalgia!

Before I go into how much I hate this kind of nostalgia, I want to talk about the concept of a “Best of” list. I know it seems like I should have done this earlier, but this movie got me thinking. And better late than never, right? So, why say that one movie is better than another, and how. We could go with facts, like sales which would be the most populist approach and would mean that Spider Man 3 would be somewhere on this list. So we don’t. Or we could go with a Rotten Tomatoes approach where we simply compile and quantify the critical consensus at the time, but of course, the consensus is bound to change as the times change. So instead we just all sit around a vote. It’s just a bunch of people’s opinions that they try to validate with expertise and education. But if it’s all just opinion, why does it matter. Why not just form your own opinion as to what movies you like and don’t and just leave it at that. I like to think of this list differently. I like to think of it as a historical hand book to the history of artistic thinking as it pertained to the moving pictures in the United States over the last one hundred years.

So, as a piece of film history, why does America Graffiti matter? Because it represents a specific type of nostalgia. A specific love of the movies, the songs, the styles of dress, the cars. It’s about a time period, and it’s so lovely because the people watching it can join in and love that time period together. And because Lucas chose the teenage life in 1962, a whole hell of a lot of people related to it because the mid forties was the largest boom in the American population, ever. So there were a ton of high schoolers in 1962. But now, we’re here in 2011 and most of us were not in high school in 1962. Why should we care? It’s not as if this movie provides an informative, creative view of the 1960s. It’s not as if it’s even saying anything about the time period at all. It’s just pure unfiltered nostalgia. And nostalgia is a dangerous thing. While it’s all fun and dandy to think of ‘62 as an age of dancing to the bop and muscle cars, it was also a time of racism, inequality, and war. In reality, life in the 1960s sort of sucked if you weren’t a white male. So why celebrate it? Why should we celebrate this glossy celebration of “the good old days” that so obviously blots out everything that doesn’t fit in with its short cited view of history. I don’t think we should. I’m not saying that we should ignore this film, or even condemn it, I just don’t think we should celebrate this kind of thinking that the past was better because we don’t talk about all the ways it sucked. 

In conclusion, I didn’t like this movie very much. I thought the writing was for the most part uninspired and boring. There was one plot line I found very interesting between a thuggish drag racer and a thirteen year old girl, but it was one good plot in a sea of pointless teenage melodrama. I enjoyed it more than, say, an episode of Gossip Girl, but not that much more than an episode of Gossip Girl.

“Life is a Cabaret!”

There is a declarative statement for you. It seems, as it is belted by a startlingly energetic Liza Minnelli, that this is the point, the over all theme of dance legend Bob Fosse’s musical adaptation. But I’m not sure, how. I mean, is she saying “life is a confusing series of events that will make you laugh, cry and always leave you very confused about gender and sexuality,” or maybe “Life is a whole lot of distraction so that you don’t notice the Nazi’s in the audience,” or possibly “life is outrageous in a very general sense.” Or maybe all these things and more. I’m not sure…

Why is this the best?

1. Dancing

Fosse was really damn good at making dance sequences amazing. It was his specialty. So it should be noted that this movie has some killer dance routines. And they do well to compliment the film, demonstrating the outward charm and zeal of the story while also implying a darker more sinister force at work inside us all.

2. Singing

Also, they sing a lot. Not as much as they dance, but they sing. And Liza’s final song, where she so audaciously declares the point of the film, is one of the most bold and heart wrenching musical numbers in film history.

3. That’s it

Besides the awesome singing and dancing, this film lacks the focus to really be anything else. It’s sort of about a love triangle, but only for 45 minutes. There’s a story about persecution and self hatred in there but it’s a sub plot. It’s sort of about the Nazis but not really. This film casually dips it’s foot into a lot of juicy plots rife with drama, but never really spends enough time with these stories to drive them home. The singing and dancing do most of the thematic heavy lifting, and the actors certainly hold their own, but the plot is almost like a first brain storming session where everyone threw new ideas on the board and no one bothered to take any down.

I’ve spent the last two and a half months watching every single pilot in this fall season’s TV lineup. I’m really angry now. So, I find it oddly appropriate that my return to not shitty media is in the form of a movie about television. Network was made at really the height of TV. At that moment that it was so firmly rooted in everyone’s lifestyle, so ingrained in our understanding of relationships and time that it was impossible to imagine life without it, yet it was all new, just in it’s adolescence, so no one knew where it was going. No one could have predicted Keeping Up with the Kardashians for example. Except Paddy Chayefsky. In his bizarre attempt at overblown satire he managed to predict the future of television to a T.

Why is This the Best? (at predicting the future)

1. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

After Network spends 50 minutes brilliantly setting up it’s premise, it quickly launches into a series of monologues that comprise the second half of the film and during which, Chyefsky accurately predicts the future. The first one is delivered by disgruntled news man Howard Beale and goes something like this

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Remind you of anything? Here, I’ll jog your memory.

There you go. The occupy movement shares a lot in common with Beale’s pajama clad rain soaked tirade against american apathy. It possesses all the passion and insistence while also lacking any particular direction. “I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write… All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad!”

At it’s core, the Occupy movement is just a lot of people who don’t know how to solve the problem, but are seriously fucking pissed. And much like Howard Beale they may eventually lead us down a road to real and significant change, or be co-opted for profit, then killed when they become inconvenient. I’d suggest they take a hint from Chyefsky. Any movement with a whole lot of emotion and no direction may find themselves easily pushed in a direction that they didn’t want to go. 

2. “Listen to me: Television is not the truth!”

The second Beale monologue takes place not long after the first and is about the death of an old guard news man, much like Murrow or Cronkite. His death represents the death of real, relevant news gathering. 

“Television is a god-damned circus. Television is an amusement park… We’re in the boredom killing business”

And he really nailed it because now, thirty five years later, we’ve got…

The most popular shows on stations devoted entirely to fair and balanced news gathering are ones in which the hosts are there to entertain you, and not really to inform you. And while they may say that they are providing you with news, they really aren’t. They are providing you with infotainment. And you love it. 

3. “This Mao Tse Tung hour is turning in to one big pain in the ass.”

This third monologue is delivered in segments by the terrifically Harpy-esk Fay Dunnaway during a torrid romantic getaway with a very married William Holden. The monologue is less predictive of an actual event than it is just a wonderful display of the increasingly intimate role television was developing with audiences. So much that during sex she is still talking about television.

4. “I hurt badly”

This monologue is not predictive, but it is really beautiful and adds an honestly human undercurrent to this excessively bizarre film.

5. “Don’t fuck with my distribution costs!”

The single funniest line in this movie is shouted during a contract negotiation which then leads into a completely hysterical tirade during which Laureen Hobbs, who is clearly the analog of Angela Davis, spouts the line “You can blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out you ass!”

The thing that makes this scene so poignant now is that back in 1976, there was no such thing as reality TV as we understand it today. That was a whole decade and a half later. They had no concept that in thirty years the most popular television shows would be shows like “Prison Wives” and “To catch a predator” where real people in real situations were turned into contrived narratives that networks could sell to audiences.

6. “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature Mr. Beale.”

This is most certainly the most brilliant monologue in the entire film. After Beale delivers a rather scathing call to arms against a Saudi buy-out of the TV network, he is called into the CEO’s office where the CEO delivers a hilarious and very true accounting of the way of the world.

“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale”

Again, Chyefsky nails it. And now, it’s more apparent than ever that we are all inextricably bound to one another by money. As our economy tanks so does Europe’s. Our government’s power is dwarfed by that of Exxon and Apple. We are living in an age where nations are becoming increasingly and quite obviously irrelevant.

But there’s one other step to this that Chyefky missed. One way in which we are all becoming connected by a group far more controlling and powerful than money: The internet. I’ll get to that later though.

7. “Everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed.” 

The final monologue I will discuss here is, to me, the most powerful. It’s split up into two different sections and it is the conclusion of the human aspect of the story where a middle aged man realizes that his love affair is a mistake. And while his love affair very much represents the forces of attraction that bind News (represented by aging, classy, refined William Holden) and entertainment television (played by attractive, fast paced, harpy, Fay Dunnaway) it is emotionally felt rather than laughed at or considered as analysis.

“I’m beginning to get scared shitless, because all of a sudden it’s closer to the end than the beginning, and death is suddenly a perceptible thing to me, with definable features.”

It begins as an honest recounting of aging in the face of youth, and an inevitable confrontation with reality, but soon becomes a stalwart condemnation of the thing that was preventing him from facing his reailty.

“You’re television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy.”

It is so much more effective than the other hate filled tirades Chyefsky inserted into his script because you can feel the love that the character feels towards the woman, and the hate he feel towards her at the same time. This brutal evisceration is cathartic in a way but also painful, because it is also Chyefsky’s way of saying that the battle between News and infotainment is already lost. But as Holden says “It’s a happy ending” because he leaves his young fling who has no feelings to return to the hard painful life that he had with his wife: His real life, not the emotionally comatose world of television where life is not felt, simply watched.

In conclusion, Paddy Chyefsky was a pretty gloomy guy. He really thought we were all fucked from every angle. But I will make the claim that the stranglehold that television had over our nation for so many years is lifting due to the advent of the internet.

In Chyefsky’s eyes were all doomed by the consumer based theories of television where everything was about money and its “ebb and flow” but now I can watch every show or movie or porno I want for free because the internet doesn’t give a shit about money, and god bless them. In Network, Holden’s relationship with Dunnaway is cursed by the emotional distance she’s developed through television. The feeling that life is something we watch through a screen, vicariously enjoying, rather than something we experience. Lo and behold the internet give us the great interactive experience where we are all part of the entertainment. The information is completely anarchic in it’s dissemination. The power structure is reversed. The world is connected by the global economy, sure, but day by day, week by week we are becoming increasingly connected by the global community of information, where nations no longer exist and money has no value, only words and pictures.