UPDATE: The piece that I wrote here was republished by Film.com, where you can now find a slightly amended version (basically, less references to myself). I'm thrilled to have it posted there and I hope you'll be seeing my byline there more regularly soon.
My Gandolfini tribute can be found here.
Showing posts with label Obits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obits. Show all posts
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Monday, August 20, 2012
R.I.P. Tony Scott, 1944-2012
I was devastated last night to read of Tony Scott's suicide in Los Angeles. One of the most exciting filmmakers working in Hollywood today, Scott had been on a hot streak of exquisitely stylish genre movies for years, from 2004's ideologically dubious but aesthetically revolutionary Man on Fire through 2010's exercise in pure cinema, Unstoppable. His late career works resemble abstract paintings, dotted with splotches of color laid over each other with frenetic abandon and interpretative elusiveness. Using handcranked cameras, superimpositions and other techniques nearly as old as the cinema itself, Scott set down a modern blueprint for filmmaking, one that has been imitated but never equalled for its cumulative technical and tonal effect. The Michael Bays of the world have since thrown all their coverage into one hulking mass in an attempt to match Scott's kinetic fury, but they wind up only with incomprehensible messes where he somehow emerges with some of the only auteurist statements of Hollywood blockbuster cinema.
I can think of no other mainstream director so readily capable of reconstructing the nature of memory. His finest two works of the Aughts, Déjà Vu and Domino, are both fractured narratives driven by the skewed perceptions of their leads. In these movies, the overlapping, conflicting, obscuring nature of their recollections ultimately set to work on the present itself, changing the couse of events through sheer force of aesthetic will. So outlandish is Domino that one almost believes it can alter the fate of the real Domino Harvey, who died a few months before the film's release.
To attribute a director's movies to their own mental state is a gross misapplication of auteurist criticism, but part of what makes this death so shocking is the indefatigable optimism of Scott's work. In an age dominated by lazy cynicism and irony, Scott would upend whole narratives to get a happy ending. Most famously, he altered Quentin Tarantino's intended, dark denouement for True Romance to one of hard-won joy, offering as justification only, "I wanted these characters to live." An almost childlike defense, but one also containing the innocence and blunt purity of a child. It is also, frankly, an improvement upon Tarantino's script, turning his hip, nonlinear exercise into something fluid and, as my good blogging friend Andreas (his superb site here) put it on Twitter, "surprisingly lyrical." In retrospect, it might have been Scott's treatment of Tarantino's screenplay, more so than Pulp Fiction, that really showed the power of Tarantino's writing.
So often criticized for favoring style over substance (I do not have the energy to combat that ridiculous uncritical phrase right now), Scott's overwhelming style has run through my thoughts all day. I think of the horrific crashes that dot the giddy cheese of Days of Thunder. The almost lilting approach to the ultraviolence of True Romance, turning its climactic shootout or Patricia Arquette's savage fight for survival against James Gandolfini into fairy tales without losing the repulsiveness of the carnage. The way that subtitles are transformed from a focus-absorbing block of text at the bottom of a screen into an interactive part of the full visual picture in Man on Fire. The breaking of a silo car in Unstoppable, making the frame literally grainy as the contents of the train compartment billow out in a blizzard. The lighting of Keira Knightley's face when she fires a machine gun in the climax of Domino, the bursts of muzzle flash illuminating her anguished, furious face in a series of stuttering freeze frames. The dark tunnel where Travolta's character strands his hostage train car in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, inexplicably soaked in neon colors because why in God's name not. The time-bending car chase in Déjà Vu, almost prescient in anticipating a world of tablets and Google Glass with its multiple screens and images laid over each other in kinetic oblivion. Or, of course, the looming image of Paula Patton in the same film, haunting Denzel Washington's hero as much as Kim Novak torments Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.
These flourishes, and so many more, continue to fly through my mind at the same speed with which Scott threw them on the screen. I still have so many of Scott's films to watch, pre-9/11 works I must see for the first time or revisit and reassess. I had looked forward to that for some time, the chance to catch up with the director I found more exhilarating and, yes, substantive than nearly anyone else operating in the American mainstream. But now each ticked off box on the checklist will bring a tinge of regret, the awareness that I am exhausting my supply of "fresh" Tony Scott experiences, which can never be replenished. I can take some comfort, though, in the knowledge that those same films will surely offset some of that sadness with their inevitable triumphs, of happy endings so shameless that gross implausibility could not dampen their spirit. I can only hope they continue to have that effect.
I can think of no other mainstream director so readily capable of reconstructing the nature of memory. His finest two works of the Aughts, Déjà Vu and Domino, are both fractured narratives driven by the skewed perceptions of their leads. In these movies, the overlapping, conflicting, obscuring nature of their recollections ultimately set to work on the present itself, changing the couse of events through sheer force of aesthetic will. So outlandish is Domino that one almost believes it can alter the fate of the real Domino Harvey, who died a few months before the film's release.
To attribute a director's movies to their own mental state is a gross misapplication of auteurist criticism, but part of what makes this death so shocking is the indefatigable optimism of Scott's work. In an age dominated by lazy cynicism and irony, Scott would upend whole narratives to get a happy ending. Most famously, he altered Quentin Tarantino's intended, dark denouement for True Romance to one of hard-won joy, offering as justification only, "I wanted these characters to live." An almost childlike defense, but one also containing the innocence and blunt purity of a child. It is also, frankly, an improvement upon Tarantino's script, turning his hip, nonlinear exercise into something fluid and, as my good blogging friend Andreas (his superb site here) put it on Twitter, "surprisingly lyrical." In retrospect, it might have been Scott's treatment of Tarantino's screenplay, more so than Pulp Fiction, that really showed the power of Tarantino's writing.
So often criticized for favoring style over substance (I do not have the energy to combat that ridiculous uncritical phrase right now), Scott's overwhelming style has run through my thoughts all day. I think of the horrific crashes that dot the giddy cheese of Days of Thunder. The almost lilting approach to the ultraviolence of True Romance, turning its climactic shootout or Patricia Arquette's savage fight for survival against James Gandolfini into fairy tales without losing the repulsiveness of the carnage. The way that subtitles are transformed from a focus-absorbing block of text at the bottom of a screen into an interactive part of the full visual picture in Man on Fire. The breaking of a silo car in Unstoppable, making the frame literally grainy as the contents of the train compartment billow out in a blizzard. The lighting of Keira Knightley's face when she fires a machine gun in the climax of Domino, the bursts of muzzle flash illuminating her anguished, furious face in a series of stuttering freeze frames. The dark tunnel where Travolta's character strands his hostage train car in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, inexplicably soaked in neon colors because why in God's name not. The time-bending car chase in Déjà Vu, almost prescient in anticipating a world of tablets and Google Glass with its multiple screens and images laid over each other in kinetic oblivion. Or, of course, the looming image of Paula Patton in the same film, haunting Denzel Washington's hero as much as Kim Novak torments Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.
These flourishes, and so many more, continue to fly through my mind at the same speed with which Scott threw them on the screen. I still have so many of Scott's films to watch, pre-9/11 works I must see for the first time or revisit and reassess. I had looked forward to that for some time, the chance to catch up with the director I found more exhilarating and, yes, substantive than nearly anyone else operating in the American mainstream. But now each ticked off box on the checklist will bring a tinge of regret, the awareness that I am exhausting my supply of "fresh" Tony Scott experiences, which can never be replenished. I can take some comfort, though, in the knowledge that those same films will surely offset some of that sadness with their inevitable triumphs, of happy endings so shameless that gross implausibility could not dampen their spirit. I can only hope they continue to have that effect.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Pete Postlethwaite, 1946-2011
Like all mourning film fans, I awoke this morning to the terrible news of Pete Postlethwaite's passing.One of my favorite character actors, Postlethwaite will leave a hole that cannot be filled by any ordinary "that guy."
One of the great character actors, Postlethwaite carries a particular resonance in my life, as he was the first supporting player I ever noticed. When I was 7, I watched Dragonheart with a friend, not a film that set my wee mind ablaze even at such a young age, I nevertheless enjoyed but, more than the dragon or any of the action, I was mesmerized by this goofy side character, Brother Gilbert, a monk and aspiring poet who turned up at the oddest times and had the best lines. To this day, I remember giggling like the little brat I was when, during the climactic action scene, Gilbert secreted himself up a tree with a bow and arrow, inadvertently shot a man in the ass and said with hilariously focused glee, "Turn the other cheek, brother!" I was hooked. Who was this loon?
Since then, I've been delighted by him at nearly every turn, no matter how brief his appearances. He recently lit up an already strong cast in The Town with but two scenes that transcended the cops vs. robbers plot to show what real evil looks like. I didn't notice him at first in Inception, playing the dying but still disapproving billionaire father of Cillian Murphy's heir to the corporate throne, but when I did I got the same wash of elation I do whenever I recognized him in a movie.
It was part of the reason I never actively looked for his movies, never surfed IMDb to fill the gaps in the Postlethwaite canon, if you could call a series of roles that usually amounted to no more than a few lines of dialogue and one or two scenes each a "canon." I preferred to meet him as an old friend, randomly running into him on the street, thus preserving that constant delight I got from seeing him. Every time I got to see how he was doing, to briefly exchange pleasantries and move on to a day that suddenly seemed brighter.
Postlethwaite had "unconventional looks," though it's funny how the vast majority of people who have appeared in films since the medium's inception have not lined up with "conventional" beauty. He emerged looking fatherly, as if this man never existed as a youth but simply sprang up from the ground ready to look after children of his own. That paternal charm was double-edged: to take his two most prominent film roles, both of which were fathers, look at the difference between the man in In the Name of the Father and the tyrant of Distant Voices, Still Lives. In the former, he wants to help his son stay out of trouble, only to be used as leverage by outside for condemning the boy. In Terence Davies' anti-nostalgic poem, he captures the vicious, domineering, frightful side of patriarchy, a man who is violent and monstrous yet all the more terrifying before being raggedly, recognizably human. When he pauses while decorating the house for Christmas, a moment that occurs just before and after examples of his horrid abuse, his moment of gentle love, a touch that may have seemed a scripted, hollow moment in any other actor's hands becomes psychological and real.
That was his specialty: no part, no matter how small and even stilted, didn't leap off the page when he embodied it. Take his part as the hunter, Roland, in Steven Spielberg's misguided Jurassic Park sequel: The Lost World: he has killed beasts of all kinds and casually mounted some of the last of endangered species in a parlor, but when he sees the corporatization of animal herding, a cynical amalgamation of breeding and spectacle that outstrips even the most corrupt and abusive zoo, he blanches. It is a moment that makes no sense, the idea of a hunter suddenly leaving behind his ways when the only change in his usual ways is a matter of scale, but the look of utter disgust in his eyes, the dawning self-loathing that accompanies his friend's meaningless death and the capitalistic monetization of a primal impulse makes you feel the wrongness of what happens in that movie far more than Spielberg's overly suggestive camerawork and the speechifying of the good guys.
I'd follow Postlethwaite anywhere, always placing my trust in him but reserving enough wariness to expect his intensity. Sheila O'Malley already has a piece up on the actor that focuses on his devilish scene in The Town, where he sadistically and theatrically carves the thorns off roses while laying out why and how Ben Affleck's character will continue to work for him. It is a keenly acted piece, each thrust of the knife down the stem a punctuation to the mounting horror of his monologue. It's also a clever visualization of what Fergie is actually saying, his pruning of the rose matching up eerily to his descriptions of what he did to Doug's mother and what he'll do to his girlfriend if the disillusioned robber does not carry out his missions. The scene fits perfectly into Affleck's genre mash-up, a deliciously vile and exaggerated moment that taps into the character as totally as Jeremy Renner's own psychological development of his sociopath.
To say that I will miss Postlethwaite is an understatement. I would have loved to see his King Lear on the stage -- I cannot imagine an actor better suited for the role -- and to be left with a series of cameos seems unfitting for a talent that huge. But those performances still exist, some of which I've yet to discover, and I can still stumble upon his work with that same elation that I felt before when his sharp, foreboding but faintly kind face appeared on the screen. Steven Spielberg called him the best actor in the world, to which Pete responded in characteristically British fashion, "I'm sure what Spielberg actually said was, 'The thing about Pete is that he thinks he's the best actor in the world.'" But I have to side with Spielberg: even among the finest of character actors, few could do as much with as little as Pete Postlethwaite. May he rest in peace.
One of the great character actors, Postlethwaite carries a particular resonance in my life, as he was the first supporting player I ever noticed. When I was 7, I watched Dragonheart with a friend, not a film that set my wee mind ablaze even at such a young age, I nevertheless enjoyed but, more than the dragon or any of the action, I was mesmerized by this goofy side character, Brother Gilbert, a monk and aspiring poet who turned up at the oddest times and had the best lines. To this day, I remember giggling like the little brat I was when, during the climactic action scene, Gilbert secreted himself up a tree with a bow and arrow, inadvertently shot a man in the ass and said with hilariously focused glee, "Turn the other cheek, brother!" I was hooked. Who was this loon?
Since then, I've been delighted by him at nearly every turn, no matter how brief his appearances. He recently lit up an already strong cast in The Town with but two scenes that transcended the cops vs. robbers plot to show what real evil looks like. I didn't notice him at first in Inception, playing the dying but still disapproving billionaire father of Cillian Murphy's heir to the corporate throne, but when I did I got the same wash of elation I do whenever I recognized him in a movie.
It was part of the reason I never actively looked for his movies, never surfed IMDb to fill the gaps in the Postlethwaite canon, if you could call a series of roles that usually amounted to no more than a few lines of dialogue and one or two scenes each a "canon." I preferred to meet him as an old friend, randomly running into him on the street, thus preserving that constant delight I got from seeing him. Every time I got to see how he was doing, to briefly exchange pleasantries and move on to a day that suddenly seemed brighter.
Postlethwaite had "unconventional looks," though it's funny how the vast majority of people who have appeared in films since the medium's inception have not lined up with "conventional" beauty. He emerged looking fatherly, as if this man never existed as a youth but simply sprang up from the ground ready to look after children of his own. That paternal charm was double-edged: to take his two most prominent film roles, both of which were fathers, look at the difference between the man in In the Name of the Father and the tyrant of Distant Voices, Still Lives. In the former, he wants to help his son stay out of trouble, only to be used as leverage by outside for condemning the boy. In Terence Davies' anti-nostalgic poem, he captures the vicious, domineering, frightful side of patriarchy, a man who is violent and monstrous yet all the more terrifying before being raggedly, recognizably human. When he pauses while decorating the house for Christmas, a moment that occurs just before and after examples of his horrid abuse, his moment of gentle love, a touch that may have seemed a scripted, hollow moment in any other actor's hands becomes psychological and real.
That was his specialty: no part, no matter how small and even stilted, didn't leap off the page when he embodied it. Take his part as the hunter, Roland, in Steven Spielberg's misguided Jurassic Park sequel: The Lost World: he has killed beasts of all kinds and casually mounted some of the last of endangered species in a parlor, but when he sees the corporatization of animal herding, a cynical amalgamation of breeding and spectacle that outstrips even the most corrupt and abusive zoo, he blanches. It is a moment that makes no sense, the idea of a hunter suddenly leaving behind his ways when the only change in his usual ways is a matter of scale, but the look of utter disgust in his eyes, the dawning self-loathing that accompanies his friend's meaningless death and the capitalistic monetization of a primal impulse makes you feel the wrongness of what happens in that movie far more than Spielberg's overly suggestive camerawork and the speechifying of the good guys.
I'd follow Postlethwaite anywhere, always placing my trust in him but reserving enough wariness to expect his intensity. Sheila O'Malley already has a piece up on the actor that focuses on his devilish scene in The Town, where he sadistically and theatrically carves the thorns off roses while laying out why and how Ben Affleck's character will continue to work for him. It is a keenly acted piece, each thrust of the knife down the stem a punctuation to the mounting horror of his monologue. It's also a clever visualization of what Fergie is actually saying, his pruning of the rose matching up eerily to his descriptions of what he did to Doug's mother and what he'll do to his girlfriend if the disillusioned robber does not carry out his missions. The scene fits perfectly into Affleck's genre mash-up, a deliciously vile and exaggerated moment that taps into the character as totally as Jeremy Renner's own psychological development of his sociopath.
To say that I will miss Postlethwaite is an understatement. I would have loved to see his King Lear on the stage -- I cannot imagine an actor better suited for the role -- and to be left with a series of cameos seems unfitting for a talent that huge. But those performances still exist, some of which I've yet to discover, and I can still stumble upon his work with that same elation that I felt before when his sharp, foreboding but faintly kind face appeared on the screen. Steven Spielberg called him the best actor in the world, to which Pete responded in characteristically British fashion, "I'm sure what Spielberg actually said was, 'The thing about Pete is that he thinks he's the best actor in the world.'" But I have to side with Spielberg: even among the finest of character actors, few could do as much with as little as Pete Postlethwaite. May he rest in peace.
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