Category: Film (Page 7 of 15)

So a few weeks ago I broke down and bought the two Robert Altman movies with Cher cameos and did a positive review of The Player.

In comparison to that movie, Pret-a-Porter (or Ready to Wear) has a much more European cast and vibe, complete with 1960s-inspried opening credits. The film didn’t work as well as The Player did in the re-watch however, even after years of my watching Project Runway and Ru Paul shows.

The movie seems to be trying to showcase the cut-throat excitement of the fashion world’s “behind the scenes” and the shallowness of its players. The so-muchness of every performance and scene began to take on a one-note quality that became numbingly boring after a while. The reviews on the DVD claimed the film was “exuberant” but it read instead to me as manic. Mr. Cher Scholar watched most of the movie with me and I ended up receiving a very long and informative lecture in the middle of it on improv and the movie's issues (outlined below). Mr. Cher Scholar was formerly a Chicago improv director. I didn’t even realize before his schooling that the movie was improved!

• The problems of improvisation:  Manic-ness is a common symptom of novice improv, according to Mr. Cher Scholar. When stressed, actors tend to play to that stress. It comes off very un-natural. Another issue with untrained improv actors is their declaring who their character is (again, out of nervousness). This was occurring throughout the movie (ex: . Stephen Rae declaring, “I’m just a simple Irish Country boy”). All telling versus showing. This was compounded by the problem of too many characters who didn’t have enough screen time to really develop a characters, to even attempt a “show.” And improv takes time. Scenes with larger casts already cause more nervousness due to the amped-up energy at play. The scenes that did seem to work were much more quiet and simplified. Mr. Cher Scholar also said it's harder to reveal much about your character when you’re doing scenes depicting only business relationships. What information of depth can occur in a short business conversation? And unfortunately, the majority of this movie was about business relationships and business conversations. The Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins scenes were absolutely painful to watch. According to Mr. Cher Scholar, Roberts sounded like she was reiterating the stage notes she had received. Their lines definitely seemed flat and their performances were both manic.
• The problem of the Altman style of ambient noise:  Mr. Cher Scholar also went into detail about his understanding of Robert Altman’s signature style of having an ambient soundtrack. Apparently Altman likes to shoot scenes in the midst of ambient sound, catching character’s lines in-between sometimes louder noises, characters talking over each other. He said this style demands that you really pay attention or you’ll miss important dialogue. He said McCabe and Mrs. Miller was impossible to watch because, try as you might, you couldn’t hear what any of the main characters were saying and so were lost in most of the movie. Sometimes it works, he said, but in this case this kind of realist soundtrack style, when you add on improvisation, was just a confusing mess.
• The reporter motif with Kim Basinger as southern-accented reporter Kitty Potter sifting through interviews with “super novas and super nobodies:” Basinger's part played more like a cliché than a satire. Instead of a dumb, ambitious and giggling American” it would have been more interesting if they had let her play smart. But I guess that was Lili Taylor’s role as the slovenly reporter from the New York Times. Mr. Cher Scholar also remarked that the reporter device is really hard to play (by design, the character gets no depth) and serves as mostly a functional, exposition devise (telling us who everyone is because the cast is too big for slower reveals). He was amazed at how bad Kim B’s southern accent was considering she is from Georgia.
• What exactly is the story anyway? Linda Hunt, Tracy Ullman and Sally Kellerman play editors of prominent fashion magazines who they spend the movie trying to hire an arrogant trend-setting photographer played by Stephen Rae who claims he came to fame “taking advantage of other people’s insecurities” (which could stand as the major message of the movie). The head of the fashion council is supposedly murdered and these are the major threads of the movie, although they can’t seem to hold it together. Forty minutes in and we still had no idea what the major story was. It never felt like the movie was moving forward. Mr. Cher Scholar used Spinal Tap as a comparison. Fran Dresher’s scene with the band, for example, had a simpler focus, was allowed time to develop, and served to comment on the larger story, the demise of a heavy metal band. Christopher Guest’s improv movies seem to have stronger points to hit in each scene and it all works to push toward the spine story forward. Altman didn’t check in often enough with the spine story and a lot of his scenes seemed superfluous.
• Mr. Cher Scholar was impressed by all the coordination the movie must have demanded with all the scene setups and all the extras in each scene, the sheer cost of the filming on locations. But at the end, he determined the movie was just a mass of entrances where no possible character development could occur, the same scene over and over again for 133 minutes, characters coming in but never going anywhere.
• Many of the small stories were left unresolved. For example, did the three editors come to successful “negotiations” with Milo? We don’t fully know. At the end of the movie, he’s doing a shoot with babies. That seemed inconclusive. 
• Fashion already satirizes itself. How can you top it? Altman didn’t reveal anything new, nothing beyond what you’d expect from these characters. The movie deals with the unsavory alliances and the money issues at fashion houses, the last fashion show is entirely of naked girls as a kind of rebel statement. Kitty Potter tries to make meaning out of this and gives up in frustration. You feel like giving up as well. The movie comes up with only “almost satires.”
• The film deals with many sexualities but is devoid of any sexiness. In fact, it seemed the film was trying for a sexy Pink Panther feel. This failed because the cast was too big and the bad improv work poured cold water on all the potential sexiness.
• The shows within the show didn’t seem exactly Ready to Wear collections but more like haute couture shows.

Things I liked:

• The fact that there was a dog in the dog show named “Ladd.”
• The huge cell phones were very funny. 
• Richard E. Grant.
• Some of the fashions were funny: the two candles on the head, the siren light hat.
• Teri Garr made me laugh when she got in a cab and said “Tout les bags!”
•  Sophia Loren talks about doing aerobics. Remember aerobics! How old-fashioned.
• I liked the variety of fashion shows: the street collection (in an abandoned subway, no less), the over-the-top gay collection, the mature European woman collection.
• I loved the song playing during the naked show, “Pretty” by The Cranberries (“You’re so pretty the way you are”). I also liked the closing Grace Jones version of “La Vie en Rose.”

There was a shorter, mostly European, list of “As Themselves” cast members of which Cher and Harry Belafonte were the two I recognized.

Cher’s is seen in two scenes, one arriving to a show (as seen on a TV) and the other being interviewed by Kitty Potter (Basinger). You get a good view of her old necklace arm tattoo. She wears a busty white t-shirt top with a leather-like quilted bustier and pants. She talks about how we can never look like Naomi Campbell or Christy Turlington and how these shows are about “women trying to be beautiful,” calling herself a “victim as much as a perpetrator” when Kitty Potter says, with admiration, "Well, we can’t all look like you either." Cher says it’s not about the clothes on your body but what’s inside that counts.”

This reminded me of when Kitty Potter introduces the photographer Milo and says that for a decade he has “controlled how women think they have to look.”

Cast members who connect to Cher: Linda Hunt won the Best Supporting Oscar we were hoping Cher would win for Silkwood. Teri Garr (of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour) has a very funny part as the co-hort of Danny Aiello who played Johnnie Camereri  in Moonstruck. Sally Kellerman was in the movie Foxes where Cher had a song on the soundtrack, "Bad Love."

Oddly, none of the clothes or hairstyles portrayed on the DVD cover to the right appeared in the movie. And who is that blonde woman?

In 1992 Cher did a cameo for the Robert Altman film The Player. I have always hesitated to buy or review this movie because a) should cameos be included in a star's filmography? Really? and b) I was only 22 when this movie came out and had never lived in Los Angeles so all the cynical references were lost on me.

But since The Player and Altman's other cameo-ridden movie, Ready to Wear, always end up in Cher filmographies and since I'm older and LA-savy now and since the new Cher biography mentioned the trivia that Ret Turner was supposedly Cher's date to the movie, I finally purchased my (used) copies of these two "Cher films."

I'm actually glad I did. I'm better at reading these films now. Did I ever tell you how I became Cher Scholar? After creating the spoof fansite Cher Scholar, a site meant to be a critique of online Cher shrines, I was working at a job in LA and didn't have anything to do for a few weeks. So I started writing off-the-cuff reviews of all of Cher's albums in order to keep away the crushing boredom of the work day. This begot the Cher zines and essays and eventually this blog. Last week in a poetry essay I read a description of a Bob Dylan scholar as a "Dylanologist." In mocking celebrity scholarship, I accidentally became a real one. Anyway, it all led me to nerdy essays and pop culture analysis that ties back into the explicating I used to do in college for literature papers. This is why this post is so nerdy.

I don't know if you have to live in Los Angeles and hear awful Swimming With Sharks stories about Hollywood movie-making from your friends to get the inside digs the fill up The Player, but the movie starts right away with secretary abuse, ("I want him back here before he arrives!"). There are plenty of dysfunctional throwaways in the movie: posers who don't really watch movies, endless ridiculous movie pitches (Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate), sad digs at writers (the writer desperately stalking/pitching producers in the opening shot turns out to be a famous writer), the fast-paced frenzy of the power players in meetings juxtaposed with the frenzy of the police station (every bit as heated and crass, with Whoppi Goldberg twirling a tampon throughout the scene), disparaging TV stars versus "real" stars, characters who have their most personal conversation in script-eze and who make pissy requests at restaurants. It's humorous to see the world of curly-paper faxes, pre-Windows computers and pre-cell-phones. The movie also questions not only Hollywood posers but outsiders like the love-interest who is a painter and who claims to be above the world of movies: "Life's too short for movies." Turns out even she's not who she purports to be with her existential commentary on art and life, but possibly just a fake like everyone else.

Ironically, it's only the writers who pay to go see the movies here, who still love movies, and who still innocently consider movies to be an art form versus a cut-throat business that it really is.

Even Altman's film-making is meta-commentary on the movie business, his initial tracking shot that happens while the head of security (Fred Ward) drones on about long tracking shots. He keeps foreshadowing doom for the murderous producer/protagonist Griffin Mill. The movie marquee lights go dark when Mill walks under them; we see closeups of ominous horror movie posters, of dead fish, a picture of Alfred Hitchcock with his eyes closed. These turn out to be frustrating and empty foreshadowing.

Altman also subverts the idea of the happy ending as a critique of the happy ending. He hands us a happy ending but he gives it to the bad guy. Our hero is a thief and will he pay for his crime? No he will not, and here we have the movie's sublime irony. When earlier a writer pleads for his movie to be made lacking the typical Hollywood happy ending because that's not reality, Atlman's provides a happy ending for his protagonist/villain that is a "happy ending" but one that sadly still reflecting the harsh reality. Altman is, in effect, saying Hollywood producers get a away with murder. The happy ending is for their point of view, which makes for the realistic sad ending for everyone else.

This would be a distasteful message to hear from practically any other director other than Robert Altman, someone whom many consider an outsider auteur. You can believe he would have had to endure some of the near-murderous aggravations the movie describes.

Because the characters talk in script-eze and because some stars play stars in the movie and some stars play characters, Altman also subverts the idea that you can ever reconcile the fake with the real when dealing in Hollywood "players" since the fictions bleed into their real lives. And any story is always threatened with becoming overwhelmed by the personality attached to it. 

Speaking of which, Cher is in three shots of the film. She appears at the LACMA party wearing a fire-engine red dress (when the invitations specifically call for black and white attire). This is supposed to be seen as typical Cher-style rebelliousness. She shows off her two 1990s-era shoulder tattoos and arrives with the nemesis of Griffin Mill, (played by Tim Robbins), Larry Levy, played by Peter Gallagher. Altman gives Cher the prime spot of sitting next to Griffin Mill in the movie and her only understandable line in the movie is "Well, are we having fun yet?"

Above is the shot of Cher appearing with her date in the film, Peter Gallagher. Next to that is a picture of Ret Turner with Cher in the same dress. This would indicate Cher arrived at the production with Ret Turner.

It's significant that Altman gives Cher such a prominent position in this scene. And that she wears red. Not only is the color shocking for the LACMA party, but it's a shot of color in an otherwise colorless and drab movie, the flat look familiar to many of the movies of the early 1990s. Remember how colorful Scorsese's The End of Innocence seemed to be in 1993?

There is a dullness in all the scenes, sets and characters. This flat lack of color seems very intentional. Even the painter seems drab (seeming and looking) in the story. It's as if Altman is saying Cher is the most colorful thing in Hollywood. And colorful in every sense you can think of: colorful in what she wears and says, colorful as in her attributes as a woman of color and ethnicity, and colorful as in just being an interesting person, as in being not at all dull.

So far from being simply a cameo, Altman's idea of Cher as a Hollywood personality becomes symbolic in the film's critique of Hollywood itself. And in an Altman-approved positive way. Cool beans.

As I was watching the movie, I played the game of "Catching People in the Movie Cher Has Worked With in the Past" (that I know of):

1. Fred Ward (Morgan in Silkwood)
2. Lily Tomlin (Cher show and Georgie Rockwell in Tea with Mussolini)
3. Peter Gallagher ("Vince" Scali in Burlesque)
4. Teri Garr (Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and Cher show)
5. Karen Black (Joanne in Come Back to the Five and Dime)
6. Martin Mull (Cher show) – I missed this cameo but he was in the credits