Short Take: The Cotton Club

The Cotton Club (1984), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, seems to want to be about anything but The Cotton Club. The legendary Harlem nightclub’s roster of entertainers is awe-inspiring: Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Nicholas Brothers, and many, many others. It was perhaps the center of American music and dance during the Jazz Age. But the film doesn’t build the story around the club and its exclusively African-American performers. The picture is mainly about a romance between an Irish-American cornet player (Richard Gere) and a young gangland moll (Diane Lane). The intrigues of the period’s organized-crime figures account for most of the subplots. This is perhaps the whitest treatment of African-American subject matter in the history of Hollywood. It’s not even very good for what it is. The leads are dull, and the love story is poorly developed. The gangster material is too convoluted to be interesting. As for the African-American dancers and musicians, they are squeezed in around the edges. They're also a mixed bag. Gregory and Maurice Hines have the largest roles, but their tap routines rarely rise above the mediocre. That said, Lonette McKee delivers a fine rendition of the torch song “Ill Wind,” and Honi Coles leads a terrific tap ensemble in a scene set at the Hoofers Club. One may object to Coppola’s handling of those numbers--McKee’s singing is imposed over a montage of gangland killings, and the dancing by Coles and his cohort was unforgivably sliced and diced in the editing room--but the performers still come through. These few worthwhile bits are all this deeply disappointing film has to offer. The large cast also includes Julian Beck, Nicolas Cage, Joe Dallesandro, Laurence Fishburne, Allen Garfield, Jennifer Grey, Fred Gwynne, Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Diane Venora, Gwen Verdon, and Tom Waits. The screenplay is credited to Coppola, William Kennedy, and Mario Puzo. Stephen Goldblatt provided the cinematography. The elegant production design is by Richard Sylbert.

Short Take: Ghostbusters (1984)

Ghostbusters (1984) is one of the two or three most successful comedy films ever produced, but one may find it a letdown. It's more silly than funny, and the cheesy adventure plot may leave one feeling it's strictly for kids. It has a straightforward premise: After three parapsychologists (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis) lose their university research grant, they set up a pest-control business specializing in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. There are enjoyable things in the picture. The heroes' first job, in which they trap a ghost that's menacing a luxury hotel, is a good slapstick set piece. Sigourney Weaver, who plays a cellist whose apartment is haunted, turns in a fine comic performance. She's drily amusing in her early scenes, in which she's constantly fending off unwanted male attention, and she's deliriously funny in her later ones, after the character has been possessed by an ancient demon. Some incidental bits, such as Ray Parker, Jr.'s witty jingle-style theme song, have their charm. But the comic aspects of the script, by Aykroyd and Ramis, are poorly developed. Most of the one-liners feel like throwaways. Potentially funny ideas, such as a 100-foot marshmallow mascot stalking the heroes on Central Park West, aren't shaped into gags. They're just dumped into the proceedings as if the absurdity by itself was hilarious. Several talented performers--Rick Moranis as a nerdy accountant, Annie Potts as the heroes' jaded secretary, William Atherton as a quick-tempered EPA investigator--feel stranded. (Moranis has one good line. During a party scene, the accountant hears a gargoyle roar in the next room, and he asks who brought the dog.) Yet for all one's reservations, it must be acknowledged that many adore the picture. Its box-office success and iconic pop-culture status attest to that. Opinions tend to hinge on how one responds to Bill Murray. If you feel the picture is a strong showcase for his slobby wiseguy persona, you'll love it. If you're indifferent to his presence here, the picture leaves you cold. Ivan Reitman directed.

Short Take: Bizet's Carmen

With Bizet's Carmen, the Italian director Francesco Rosi has put together what is perhaps the definitive film version of Georges Bizet's 1875 opera. The story is fairly homely. Don José, a dutiful career soldier, seems to have his whole life ahead of him. He's respected by his superiors, and he's about to become engaged. Micaëla, his prospective fiancée, is a loyal, responsible woman who has loved him her whole life. But when he meets Carmen, a flirtatious, headstrong factory worker, he's smitten, and he throws it all away for her. Her love proves fleeting, though, and her affections shift to Escamillo, a charismatic toreador. The libretto may seem banal, but Bizet's joyous sense of melody and orchestration made the opera one of the most popular ever written. Rosi's treatment is spectacular. He shot the film on location in Andalusia, and the open-air settings provide a grand stage. He also assembled a first-rate cast. Plácido Domingo, arguably the world's greatest tenor, stars as Don José. Carmen and Micaëla are respectively played by Julia-Migenes Johnson and Faith Esham, two seasoned American sopranos. The celebrated Italian basso Ruggero Raimondi plays Escamillo. It's a wonderful production, and it has its surprises. Domingo and Raimondi are the big-name draws in the cast, but it's the women who dominate the film. Julia Migenes-Johnson is terrific in the title role. She plays Carmen's brazen, taunting sexuality with a hilarious comic edge, and that joy in naughtiness walks hand-in-hand with a fierce willfulness. Her Carmen is a tiny woman, but she takes what she wants, and God help anyone who gets in her way. Her showpiece number, the first act's famous "Habañera," is a saucy delight. And while Migenes-Johnson takes acting honors, Faith Esham is the stand-out in terms of singing. Her third-act solo "Je dis que rien ne m'epouvante [I say nothing frightens me]," has the film's most gorgeously performed vocals. Rosi seems to know it, too. He gives the recording a witty encore: the song repeats as if it was an extended echo through the mountains. The awesome landscape visuals not only enhance the beauty of Esham's singing, they complete it. For all the song's intimacy, it may be the most epic musical moment ever filmed. The picture's behind-the-scenes artisans--including cinematographer Pasqualino de Santis, production designer Enrico Job, and choreographer Antonio Jades--all do superb work. The score was performed by the Orchestre National de France, and conducted by Lorin Maazel. Rosi and Tonino Guerra adapted Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy's 1875 libretto, which was in turn adapted from a 1845 novella by Prosper Merimée.

Short Take: The Killing Fields

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The 1984 film The Killing Fields, set during the 1970s Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia, has great passages. The director, Roland Joffé, working with the superb cinematographer Chris Menges, does an awe-inspiring job of depicting the chaos of the fall of Phnom Penh, the nation’s capital. The images of the country in the years that followed, when the Khmer Rouge turned it into a nationwide reeducation camp and killed between one-third and one-half the citizenry, go beyond the horrific into the hallucinatory. There are moments that invite comparison to Bosch and Doré. The recreation of the story’s setting is a work of visionary imagination, but the story the movie tells doesn’t begin to live up to it. The poorly developed script, credited to Bruce Robinson, focuses on the real-life friendship of New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran (Dr. Haing S. Ngor). The first half follows their time together covering the civil war; the second juxtaposes their experiences afterward, with Schanberg in the U. S., and Dith trapped in Cambodia. One may feel as if the first half-hour of the movie is missing. The camaraderie between Dith and Schanberg seems to come out of nowhere, and Schanberg is portrayed as such an insufferably self-righteous jerk that one can’t understand anybody dealing with him more than they had to. The film also takes an offensively patronizing view of Dith. He is clearly an equal among Schanberg and the other Western journalists, but the picture insists on treating him as their subordinate. And several of the scenes, particularly early on, have no discernible dramatic point. The script does have its moments, particularly in the tense sequence involving the efforts to fake a passport for Dith, but overall it’s shallow and not terribly well thought out. The film is a frustrating mixture of grandeur and ineptitude. The distracting, heavy-handed electronic score is by Mike Oldfield.

Short Take: This Is Spinal Tap

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Director Rob Reiner’s first feature, This Is Spinal Tap (1984), is a near inspired piece of satire. In the guise of a “rockumentary” about a fictional British heavy-metal band, it pillories the AOR (album-oriented rock) music scene of the 1980s. Reiner hilariously lampoons almost everything related to his subject: the crassly squandered musical talent; the ridiculous efforts of the aging members to maintain the Dionysian appeal of their younger days; and the absurdly pretentious flash and gimmickry of both their image and stage performances. (The only thing missing is a swipe at music video.) Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, who play the band members (and who co-wrote the film’s script with Reiner) are just about perfect. Spinal Tap is all but indistinguishable from the period's other dinosaur rock bands. But as on-the-mark as the film is, it has also become dated. The pop-music milieu of the '80s was quite different from what followed in the 1990s and 2000s. A major change was that acts were invariably sidelined before they became embarrassing to people their own age. If the viewer wasn’t there to see the pop-culture environment the film depicts, one may find the picture more than a little silly. Or maybe not: the talent-show world of today makes what the film depicts seem dignified. Reiner appears as the director of the film within the film.

Short Take: Stranger Than Paradise

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The work of Samuel Beckett was the obvious model for Stranger Than Paradise, writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s début feature. Several hallmarks of Beckett’s style are present: the anomic, buffoonish characters; the deadpan comic tone; the nothing-happens atmosphere. The three protagonists are two Hungarian immigrant cousins (John Lurie and Eszter Balint) and the male cousin’s American-born best friend (Richard Edson). The film’s settings are a rathole studio apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a rundown section of Cleveland during the thick of winter, and a cheap seaside motel in the middle of nowhere in Florida. Jarmusch follows the characters as they listlessly idle their way through each locale. What holds the film together is Jarmusch’s style, which is a cinematic equivalent of Beckett’s elegantly minimalist formalism. The material is presented in a series of single-take scenes--shot in black-and-white--that end in blackout, and this gives the picture a pleasant, laconic rhythm. The film is impressive in many respects, but one may find it offensively smug and pejorative. Nearly every scene is about mocking the lower-class protagonists for their lack of social intelligence and their overall dimwittedness. With the inexplicable emphasis on the cousins’ ethnic background, Jarmusch is flirting with outright bigotry. Beckett had the good judgment to strip his characters and settings of any social or cultural context. He turned them into abstractions, which led to his material functioning in strictly allegorical terms. Jarmusch puts that contextualization back in, and it’s a terrible mistake. John Lurie provided the film's score. The cinematography is by Tom DiCillo.