George Lucas: A Life

This week’s show isn’t about a film so much as it is about a filmmaker, specifically about a book written about that filmmaker. Not to steal John Augustine’s book review thunder from the very good Lifelines, but this week I want to talk about the excellent biography by Brian Jay Jones called George Lucas: A Life. Everyone knows George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars and co-creator of Indiana Jones, the guy responsible for the joy of the original Star Wars trilogy and the agony of the prequel trilogy. In this zippy but comprehensive telling of the man’s life, Brian Jay Jones lays out the familial, financial, creative, and personal circumstances that led George Lucas to become arguably one of the single-most influential figures in modern film history.

Clocking in at nearly five hundred pages, the book tracks Lucas’s entire life, from his parents establishing their family in pleasant, little Modesto, California before George was ever born all the way to Lucas as a billionaire in his seventies, retired and living the life of a philanthropist.

George Lucas: A Life, is not a hatchet job, by any means. On the contrary, it acknowledges Lucas’s many industry-defining choices that have shaped how movies are shot, distributed, displayed, and marketed. Jones obviously admires Lucas’s work and has respect for the empire (pardon the pun) the man has created. But Jones is also clear-eyed about his subject and isn’t afraid to draw out the themes he sees at work throughout Lucas’s life – specifically, his dissatisfaction with basically everything and his profound need for control.

Jones connects the dots between Lucas adamantly refusing to be part of his dad’s stationary business as a young man, his obsessive work ethic once he found his calling as a filmmaker at USC in the 1960s, his fury and disgust at having his early films altered by bottom-line driven studio executives, and Lucas’s lifelong quest to be completely independent of Hollywood studios or really any kind of restriction from anyone when it came to his films. Lucas was furious when studios removed four minutes apiece from his first two films, THX1138 and American Graffiti. He was just a newbie director and studios had all the power. But later when Star Wars became a worldwide phenomenon, rather than use his newfound fame to bargain for more money up front, George Lucas asked for and got control – most significantly, final editing decisions on his films and control over marketing and merchandising. That early foresight are part of why we have Lucasfilm LTD still producing Star Wars movies forty years later, digital projectors and THX Sound systems in theaters, and Industrial Light and Magic as the foremost special effects company in the world. Lucas’s stubborn insistence that his way, his preferences, his control were superior made him wealthy and remarkably influential.

The book covers many of the events that most Lucas fans already know: his catastrophic car crash as a young man, his student days at USC making “experimental” films, the long series of disasters that accompanied the production of the first Star Wars movie, his partnerships with Coppola and Spielberg, and the financial success but critical failure of the prequel trilogy – and does so in fascinating detail. But the book also covers smaller, lesser known but equally interesting parts of the filmmaker’s life: the acrimony of his divorce from his first wife, the completely unconventional way he chose to produce and sell The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles tv show and how its successful use of digital backgrounds led to making the little seen Radioland Murders. That film was the first in which only partially constructed sets were filled in with digital imagery. It was that early success that eventually convinced Lucas the technology was where it needed to be in order for him to return to the world of Star Wars.

The book concludes with details about the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, Lucas’s marriage to businesswoman Mellody Hobson, and the birth of their first child together, just as Lucas turned 69 years old.

Jones’s prose is clean and his research is impeccable. His book, George Lucas: A Life, is an excellent read for anyone with even a passing interest in the development of modern Hollywood filmmaking as we know it.

Saginaddict

This week, I interviewed a local independent filmmaker who is taking on the subject of drug addiction in Saginaw.

Beauty and the Beast

 It’s no secret Disney has been working hard to both monetize and update its own history over the last several years. It began with a tentative, hey-why-not version of Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton. Even though the movie itself was a murky, CGI-infested Tim Burton film (which ought to be enough to scare off anyone who likes movies that, you know, make sense), it made a lot of money and emboldened Disney to try it again. With each remake, the company tried to update its image of 1950s patriarchy with tales of female empowerment and social enlightenment. Malefecent retconned a witchy villain from 1959 and turned her into a wronged feminist avenger of the 21^st century. Cinderella turned from a mushy, pushover milquetoast to a strong, intelligent lead. Even though it wasn’t a remake per se, Saving Mr. Banks, the sort-of-but-not-really behind the scenes story of making Mary Poppins, gave us a Walt Disney who was vulnerable, avuncular, and kind and completely left out the pop-culture raiding, bloodthirsty capitalist shark side of his personality and business practices.

Up until this point, all remakes and retcons have been practice leading up to Bill Condon’s live-action version of Beauty and the Beast. It’s the first remake of a film from Disney’s modern era and it’s of one of their most beloved works. The 1991 animated version was the second part of a one-two punch that, along with The Little Mermaid, saved Disney animation after its dour and mediocre period during the seventies and eighties. The 1991 version is almost universally beloved for its music, strong characters, and gorgeous hand-drawn animation combined with early CGI.

So why remake it? The cynical and probably correct answer is that kids who saw it in the theater with their parents almost 30 years ago are now parents themselves with disposable income and a need to do something on Friday nights. Rather than rereleasing the original on DVD or Bluray for the umpteenth time or issuing more inferior direct-to-disc sequels, Disney doubled down and remade the entire thing with 21^st century actors, technology, and sensibility, so that oldsters like me will go see it out of curiosity and so I’ll pay to take my kids to see it with me. By funneling a 160 million dollar budget and A-list talent in front of and behind the camera, Disney hopes to make old things new – but not too new – just new enough to make a lot of money and create a new generation of fans.

One thing is for sure: when Disney decides to do something, it doesn’t scrimp. The live version is replete with ornate, lavish production design and state of the art special effects. The film stays mostly faithful to the original, adding some backstory for both Belle and the Beast. There are a few new songs, including  “Evermore,” the lovely, Broadway-style showstopper sung by the Beast when Belle leaves to return to her father, which stands up to any other song in the film.

The performances are all first-rate, and while Emma Watson as Belle is the weakest singer in the cast, she’s an effective and compelling actor. The scenes between her and Kevin Kline as her father in particular are funny, sweet, and genuine. Some of the best moments in the film have nothing to do with elaborate sets or songs or CGI creatures – they just feature talented professionals doing what they do best. Another standout is journeyman actor Luke Evans as Gaston. Evans has been around for years it’s likely that this is the role that finally catapults him to stardom.

Despite the mercenary thinking behind its creation, the live action Beauty and the Beast is a good movie and a really pleasurable moviegoing experience. Even the most jaundiced doubter will be hard pressed to resist the joy of the happy ending – mostly because it’s just so frickin’ joyful.

You might as well not resist. Disney wants you and wants your dollars, but at least it will give you a really good movie in return. 

Hell or High Water

After Oscar season, I usually find myself playing catch-up, trying to see some of the acclaimed and nominated films that I missed in theaters. This week, I finally had a chance to see Hell or High Water, the elegiac western noir starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Jeff Bridges. 

 

One convention of film noir is the ambiguous protagonist. Film noir leading characters are never outright heroes nor are they always straight-up villains. They’re usually morally ambiguous people who are a combination of selfishness and greed along with a warped but strong personal code. They’re usually driven by something like greed or revenge but they also have their own sense of wrong or right.  This is absolutely true of Hell or High Water, the story of Toby and Tanner Howard, two Texan brothers whose mother died of a long, lingering illness and left their ranch on the verge of belonging to the unscrupulous Texas Midlands Bank.

Chris Pine plays Toby, the divorced father of two who has always tried to stay on the straight and narrow. Ben Foster is Tanner, the unpredictable, violent brother who has been in and out of prison for years and, as it is revealed, shot and killed their abusive father. Toby is the respectable, law-abiding one and he’s also the smart brother, so he is the one who figures out how to rob several Texas Midlands branches to pay off the debt on the ranch that’s owed to the bank. Toby knows that it’s wrong to hold people at gunpoint and steal money, but in his mind, it is more wrong for a bank to loan money to a dying woman who everyone knew could never pay it back. He isn’t stealing for personal gain, the thrill, or the glory. He’s stealing because he feels the system is rigged against people like him, his mother, and his brother. It’s a bleak crime thriller very much for our times.

Jeff Bridges plays Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton who, along with his partner Alberto Parker is on the brothers’ trail. One subtle but powerful theme throughout the film is brotherhood. We see Toby and Tanner’s familiarity and brusque macho love for each other and we see Marcus and Alberto’s antagonistic, tired tolerance for one another throughout the film. Each pair of men show their affection and devotion to one another in radically different ways, often in ways that don’t seem much like love at all. But for anyone who has brothers, it seems perfectly appropriate.

Marcus and Alberto’s relationship is particularly interesting in that Marcus is casually racist and insulting about Alberto’s Native heritage, and his partner seems like he can barely wait for the older man to retire and leave him alone. But late in the film when Alberto is shot by one of the Howard brothers, Marcus’s grief is palpable and real. It’s the part of his performance that earned Jeff Bridges the Oscar nomination he received, no doubt.

Another convention of film noir is the ambiguous ending. There are rarely, if ever, happy endings in noirs and Hell or High Water is no different. Toby and Marcus face off at the Howard family ranch. Both men have lost loved ones over the course of the film, both are weary but clear eyed about their place in the world and where they stand with one another. Rather than going with the easy Hollywood shootout or the equally easy, let-‘em-off-the-hook unambiguous happy ending, the film’s conclusion leaves the fate of the one remaining Howard brother and the now retired Texas lawman up in the air, the conclusion suspended in the tension between them.

The film shows the financial decay of some of the open, rural spaces in the American west and the personal, inner decay that can happen because of it. There are no heroes in Hell or High Water, but it does suggest that there’s a larger, villainous system at work that can push good people to go bad.